by Fiona Kidman
I watched the New Year’s Eve Parade. The library closed for half an hour. There was a long open verandah down one side of the building, which was reached through glass doors opening on to it. A wide garden edged it, dense with dark lobelia and petunias this year. The librarian sat by the garden and read while the procession was on. She wore a wide sunhat and a cool blue linen dress. She pretended that the parade was not happening. Allowing us to shut was her only concession to our vulgarity. It was pointless to stay open, she remarked each year, the borrowers cannot get through the crowds. She never said that it was because nobody would come.
The procession of floats wound through the streets: Scouts in uniform, small girls in their tutus, pipers and marching girls.
The winner of the waitresses’ derby (the one who had run the course without spilling a drop from her jug) was hoisted on the hotel float, the biggest and most colourful of them all, wreathed all over with green sidings and pink paper blossoms as if spring had had a late flowering.
The Summer Queen was wearing a dazzling organza dress, layer upon layer of material sprinkled with glitter billowing across the back of the float. She wore a sash across her breast, and she waved her arm above her head to us.
‘Well that’s the competition,’ a voice behind me said. Cliff Parker was young then, a little spindly, with wide luminescent eyes and a way of jabbing his head towards you. He was the film projectionist in the theatre which shared the same building as the library.
I realised with a perspicacity that alarmed me that the Summer Queen would indeed be my rival when I paraded as Miss Blue Lake.
If I did.
The crowd pressed against me, reeking of hot dogs and candy floss. A hurdy-gurdy played a tinkling tune.
‘Who told you?’ I said foolishly, although it had become clear that half the town knew. I fancied that even some of the borrowers looked at me in a curious fashion, as if I was not wearing clothes. I stamped books with trembling hands these days.
Cliff was grinning with delight. ‘You might get into the movies,’ he said.
‘I haven’t said I’ll do it.’
‘You’d be mad if you didn’t. Don’t you want to be famous?’
I said I was still thinking about it. He shook his head.
Afterwards I thought about what he had said and wondered what I did want to make of myself. A firm, lightly tanned young matron I supposed, with a toddler walking on reins and another child lying in a pram dressed in fluffy yellow rompers. I would own a house somewhere. I would buy things in the shops.
Or I would be a librarian until I grew old. I would mend books. I would keep the stackroom in order. The skin round my eyes would grow puffy from reading books. Yes, I would read books.
In the afternoon on the day following New Year I went with Smitty and Miles and Bozo and Linda and Sugar to the lake. We had been up until late the night before. We tired easily: of oiling each other’s bodies, of singing little snatches of songs pretend you’re happy when you’re blue, of talking it isn’t very hard to do-o, of each other. They asked me if I was going to be Miss Blue Lake. Frank had rung Sugar in the morning to ask her. Ask her, she had said, meaning me. What’s her phone number, he inquired. She told him that I didn’t have one. She told me I had better make up my mind, because soon Frank might change his. I knew she meant he thought it was queer the way I didn’t have a phone at my house.
She mentioned that everyone was getting sick of me thinking about my decision, as if it were all that important. As the afternoon wore on she and Linda offered opinions to each other on a variety of topics as we lay and toasted in a sultry sun; they didn’t ask mine about any of them.
Night began to fall, the sun dropped hurriedly away, the air seemed to clear, and a delicate half-light closed in. A ruffle of wind passed over the lake, the last water-skiers went home. We shivered, put on jerseys, talked of going to town to buy fish and chips.
Miles and Linda stood up and said they were going for a walk. Sugar said to Smitty why didn’t they, and Bozo and I were left. When he suggested that we go for a walk too I dutifully agreed. Bozo had had his hand on my knee and around my shoulders in the car, which I understood to be a price that must be paid for this passing summer. Linda was engaged; I hadn’t been sure how she paid her dues, now I could see the price tag, though I saw too, as she went away with Miles, that it wasn’t a hardship.
Bush fronds leaned against the place where Bozo led me; pongas with dark curled hearts touched my face. I lay down in the ferns and put my arms around him. He leaned his face on mine, a little furry like the plants.
‘I don’t want to do it,’ I said.
‘Go on, I’ve brought some joeys.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘they affect me.’
‘You don’t want to do it without?’ he muttered.
‘No. I don’t want to do it.’
He rolled on his back, his face agonised. ‘I’ll tell them we did it,’ I said, divining the true cause of his distress.
‘Yeah? Would you?’
‘Yes. I’ll tell them, that it was, you know, it was nice.’
‘You’re a good kid. Yeah. You’re okay,’ he said. We sat smoking Craven A and I heard the bushes crackling. Bozo jumped to his feet, laughing loudly at the sky. A fleck of stars had appeared.
‘We’re through,’ he cried, and Smitty appeared between the trees.
‘All yours,’ he said, and scurried away, leaving me with Smitty, the graceful basketballer with the sinewy body. He lay down beside me.
‘We’re taking turns,’ he said.
I lay still on the hard ground. In the dim light I saw that others had been there before us. A joey, a cigarette pack, some toffee papers. Smitty put his arm around me in a careless gentle embrace. I liked his warmth, his smell, though I knew it was partly of Sugar: maybe I liked the smell of her. Her body was beautiful to oil.
He rolled towards me, his hands travelled over me.
After a while he sighed, moved away. ‘You’ve got a beautiful body,’ he said, ‘really beautiful, you don’t need to show it to anyone.’
‘Honestly?’ I wanted to talk to him about the beauty contest; I thought I was on the point of learning something.
Only Miles came then, because it was his turn.
I saw Sugar on my way to work, after the holiday. Linda’s fiancé was back, she said, and this afternoon she and Linda planned to finish work early and shop for material for the wedding dresses. They’d decided on guipure lace.
I said that was nice, perhaps I would see them later. Not so, Sugar thought, and her face was serious, embarrassed. Linda’s fiancé didn’t approve of me, she said, he’d heard I was cheap. It was a pity, but it wasn’t her fault. She guessed she would see me round sometime.
Stiffly, I mentioned the contest.
‘Oh that,’ she shrugged. ‘It doesn’t really matter.’
‘You asked me. Frank asked me.’
‘I expect they’ll find someone.’
I resolved to ring Frank from the library phone in the tea break that afternoon and tell him I would be Miss Blue Lake.
When I rang he was out for the day.
At the end of the library was a museum. Part of our duties was to take daily turns at dusting the artefacts each morning and to collect money from people who wished to examine the exhibits. Locals who held cards for the library were admitted free; it cost visitors one shilling.
Few people came in the summer, although in the winter tourists sometimes took shelter there for an hour or so. The room was very dark; in its gloom, under the light of bare electric bulbs, long glass cases contained greenstone adzes and hundreds of pieces of kauri gum. The gum had been liquefied then poured into shapes over objects and creatures and left to set. Spiders and bush wetas and the photographs of gum diggers’ dead mothers were entrapped in the dull amber-gold mounds.
I dusted the cases with care. It was easier than shelving books and besides, everything we did in the library was observed by the beautiful
woman in charge. She was quick to record our shortcomings.
On this morning I took longer than usual, though I didn’t know why we should bother with the room at all. We had taken three shillings the day before. I put my hands on one of the cases and stared through the glass. I felt heavy and tired as if I had slept badly, although I couldn’t remember being awake in the night.
‘There is work to be done in the library,’ the librarian said.
‘Yes,’ I said, starting. I made as if to go, but she walked over to me, holding me in her intense blue look.
She looked down into the glass case too. The body of a centipede was stretched before us in a lump of resin. She sighed.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
‘About what?’ I asked foolishly, although I knew at once that she too must have heard about the bathing beauty contest.
She didn’t look at me but continued to gaze at the centipede, captured forever in an ungainly pose.
‘I will not have my staff making themselves ridiculous,’ she said.
I said nothing. I watched dust motes dance in front of the slit windows of the museum where a little morning sun was filtering through.
‘We must improve this room,’ she said, looking around her, as if forced to pay attention for once to the part of the building which least interested her.
‘Yes. Perhaps we could ask the council for a grant,’ I replied.
She nodded and her finely manicured fingers tapped on the glass.
‘You’ll do well enough,’ she said. ‘But not at that. You cannot parade yourself in front of people. You cannot do that.’
‘You’re mad,’ Cliff Parker said, when I told him that evening. ‘Think of the movies.’
Cliff is like that, a person stepped straight out of his own dramas. I suppose we are all the same.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It’s just as well. I can’t water-ski, you know.’
‘Oh well, there must be something you can do,’ he said, with the sort of confidence which has made me remember him. I knew that when I saw him next he would have thought of some other scheme to help me get through life.
‘Oh sure there is,’ I said, and to reassure him, I added, ‘It’s a matter of balance. Water-skiing. I could get on my feet next summer.’
I saw waitresses laughing on the balconies of the hotels, a man from the carnival walked through the street holding a plaster head on a stick. The green trees stooped towards the pavement. An eddy of wind tumbled down Fenton Street and a newspaper lifted on this lazy breeze and wrapped itself with sudden vigour around a lamp post and collapsed again. In the evening the long street was as blue as larkspurs. I stopped in front of a shop window and looked down at a pair of red shoes. Just you wait, I thought.
A Moving Life
AT FIVE O’CLOCK Anita woke up again and, moving very quietly so as not to disturb her husband, she got out of bed and went to the telephone to ring the taped meteorological service. She was due to fly to Auckland at eight-thirty. The ostensible, and to some extent the actual reason for her flight was in order to attend the meeting of a cultural organisation of which she was a national administrator. Anita wanted to be as sure as it was possible that the planes would be flying, that the weather would permit them to take off. Her fear was almost certainly irrational for the previous evening the sky had only been mildly cloudy. But it was an erratic climate where they lived.
The telephone was in the kitchen, but there was an extension beside their bed. When she dialled there would be a small prickling buzz on the bedroom phone. Brian slept more heavily than she did in the mornings, yet she was so afraid that he would be wakened that her hands shook and her clumsiness seemed to echo through the house.
The voice at the other end was bland and reassuring. She had no doubt that it would have conveyed equal reassurance if there were to be gales or thunderstorms. Because she was in love with a man who lived in Auckland she would brave storms, she would make rash and foolish pacts with destiny, if only she was given the chance to try her luck. It was when chance failed her that she despaired. Nobody would ever know the risks she had taken in the name of love, or how foolish some of them had appeared to her when she remembered them later. As she replaced the receiver it occurred to her that fine weather did not necessarily mean the absence of fog, and that on an otherwise perfect day a funnel of vapour might roll off the sea and cover the airport. Where they lived it had been known to happen, sometimes for days on end.
She walked to the window then, cautious so that she would not catch the loose floorboard. Sometimes she had walked on it in the night, making a sound like gunshot. Or so it always seemed. Her life was much preoccupied with how things seemed.
This morning as she bathed and dressed to go to the airport she must seem to Brian as if the event was of little importance. Interesting, yes; fraught with the slight edge of panic which always accompanied either of them when they flew, yes — that too. But not crucial to her wellbeing. No, she must not allow that to show. She was, after all, only flying to Auckland for a short meeting. It would be over in an hour or two, and tonight she would be back here and they would be going out to dinner. Though she couldn’t remember why they had agreed on a week night. Their friends must have better organised lives and a greater resilience to hangovers than she did. Brian pointed out that she didn’t have to get a hangover, that it was not essential to a night out, and that they were falling into some kind of trap that insisted on this ritual suffering. Yet when it came to the point on these occasions, he too would invariably look ill the next morning, his face gleaming with an unnatural pallor while it was still sleek from shaving.
She had said that she could find her own way to the airport, but he would have none of it. He called to her to hurry when she was still halfway through her make-up. Her face stared back at her from the glass, the shadows under her eyes smoky and huge. She had hardly slept at all. Or, again, so it seemed. She had read recently that people who thought they lay awake at nights often did so only for a few minutes or even seconds, believing it to be hours. But that had not been the case last night. She had listened to Brian’s even breathing, the occasional snore as he rolled over, felt his arm flung over her from time to time. He had rolled eight times while she was awake and put his arm around her three times. That was not imagination, or the passage of seconds. That was a long time. The last time he had rolled against her he had had an erection in his sleep. That was when she moved carefully away from him and got up. And she hadn’t slept since then. When she got back into bed he had been asleep again. Almost unnaturally so, as if it were just possible that he was feigning. To test him she had lain along the length of his back and slid her hand down his thigh. He had continued to sleep and she believed that he had not heard her phone call. But she did not sleep again.
Her reddish-brown hair fizzed around her face. She had high bones in her face and she was more gaunt than was generally considered attractive. She wore little make-up as if to emphasise that it didn’t matter whether she was good-looking or not and, being tall, expected few people to analyse her appearance. Anita was a presence, and she was intelligent. It was this which mattered, to show an intelligent face to the world. But this morning the stretched lines and smudges invited more attention to detail. She was still working at it with care when Brian called for the second time. She dragged a comb through the tangle of her hair and gave up. If it was a good flight she could sleep for half an hour on the plane. Which it would be, for the weather was up to its prediction and the sky high and blue beyond the house, now that the day had broken. She wondered how she had managed to be so late when she had been up so early. Yet, oddly, and for no reason that she could explain to herself, she began to put off leaving the house.
‘Is Simon out of bed?’ she called from the bathroom.
‘That’s his problem,’ said Brian.
‘Haven’t you called him?’
‘I thought you had.’
‘I thought you woul
d. You know I’m going away.’
She said ‘going away’ with an inflection, as if she was leaving them for months.
‘I’m tired of running after him as if he were a child,’ Brian said, as she appeared in the sitting room.
He was running his hand over a blue vase, a deep glowing blue pot with a perfect orb in its base. ‘I like this. Where did you say you got it?’
She didn’t reply to that, but said instead, as if speaking of their son, ‘What would you all do without me to run after you?’ She had banged on Simon’s door as she walked through the passage.
‘The others managed all right. In the long run,’ said Brian.
She supposed they had, although their younger daughter was causing them concern at university — perhaps Caroline would get her degree eventually, though they could all agree that it should have happened sooner, and they didn’t like the man the elder one was living with, although Jane continued to behave as if there were nothing wrong and brought him to the house too often, which was almost worse than not seeing her at all.
Simon appeared in the doorway. His face was puffy under a mat of soft down. Anita wanted to touch him then, to cradle him if she could. He had always been the one she most liked to hold. That was how she put it to herself, although what she meant in a secret furtive way, was that he was her favourite child.
‘Hasn’t anyone at school told you to shave yet?’ she heard herself saying waspishly.
He ignored the question. He was good at turning the subject away from himself with a simple refusal to answer. Like her.
‘I’m going away,’ she said.