The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘But you said.’

  ‘I know, I was drunk.’

  Although she had told Philip that he was, it had never occurred to her that in fact, he might have been.

  ‘We get older,’ he had said, ‘the plumbing goes wrong, you know. It was a temporary indisposition. Forgive me,’ he said, contrite. ‘I want to see you again. I’ll come back to New Zealand soon. Just a few more months.’

  ‘No, Alberto. I’ve finished seeing you.’

  ‘There you see, you’re angry with me. Well,’ and his voice rose a note or two. ‘I was angry too. You promised you’d come and you didn’t. I love you, you know, Cushla, always loved you, never should have married Rosemary. Ah.’ His sigh was extravagant. ‘The mistakes we make in our youth.’

  ‘You. You loved me? Oh Albie. Love!’

  She had put the phone down in his ear, and for nights afterwards regretted it, for fear that he would ring her again in the night.

  And her rash itched.

  After a while it went away too.

  ‘Mrs Grayson, syphilis is very rare in this country now. About one in a hundred thousand cases of reported venereal disease turn out to be syphilis here these days.’

  ‘He … he leads a different lifestyle. In another country.’

  ‘He isn’t a male prostitute, is he?’

  ‘Oh but good heavens no … He’s an old friend. I’ve known him for years.’ She pauses. ‘But he has changed,’ she says, reflecting.

  ‘Not gay? Bisexual? We have to consider Aids now.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. I don’t know. You never know now, do you?’

  She saw him at a concert with a girl just before he was due to return to London. He hadn’t seen her. Alberto would always be seen with women. But did that mean he always kept company with them? All the time? She recalls his soft mouth, she tries to think how he had looked at the girl, or whether he had looked around him and eyed young men as well as the girl. But she can’t remember that, although she has a very clear image of the girl herself, at least half Alberto’s and her age, and very pretty. She was also slightly intellectual in her appearance with that superior bred-in-the-bone look which she knew appealed to Alberto (she was thinking of Rosemary). She had felt a passing stab of self pity at the time, followed by relief that it was the girl and not she who would have to deal with Alberto later in the evening.

  ‘I’m sure he isn’t homosexual,’ she tells Dr Gilroy finally.

  ‘Well, we’d better take a look, hadn’t we?’ He indicates the table with its neatly folded rug at the end. ‘Everything off from below the waist.’

  How many times has she performed this ritual? All of her life she seems to have been climbing on to doctors’ tables and submitting to these body searches. First to have diaphragms fitted, then to have her pregnancies checked, and afterwards the six-weekly check-up to make way for Philip again (though they joked about it, as if it were of no account, the long wait while the baby screamed its head off at nights, and Philip walked the floor. I need something to put me back to sleep, he would say, that would be a help; and her wanting to, but afraid because she was also tired, and putting off the check-up), and then, later, the cervical smear tests, and the one that had looked suspicious but had turned out to be nothing, and the examinations for a dislodged uterus, followed by the poking and prodding to decide whether or not she needed a hysterectomy. ‘Who needs a worn out uterus?’ the gynæcologist had said. ‘I do, it’s mine,’ she muttered. ‘They look like old hot waterbottles,’ he’d responded, but he let keep her keep hers all the same, oh the list was endless. They all ended up in the same place though, these examinations, on the table.

  And now here she is on another table being examined for venereal disease.

  Dr Gilroy’s face shines when he has finished his examination. ‘You’ve got a beautiful cervix,’ he says. ‘It’s really very nice.’

  She looks at him, shocked. And even though he is a doctor, he appears to blush. He has paid her a compliment which for a moment she has misunderstood.

  ‘I mean, it’s very healthy,’ he says firmly, and in his most clinical tones. Yet she is touched. He has meant to be kind, and indeed, she senses that in his own way, he has been trying to tell her that he believes her to be above the disgrace of her present situation.

  He takes blood from her arm, several samples of it, for a number of different tests, as he explains to her. She cannot bear to watch the process of extraction, the needle lying in her arm, but she glances surreptitiously at the accumulation of phials with her dull dark blood gleaming in the discreet lighting of the consulting room.

  ‘You must have worked very hard in your profession,’ he says, as he labels another one. ‘To have achieved your position.’ She nods.

  ‘I admire the job you do. It can’t be easy these days.’

  ‘There are problems in teaching,’ she admits. What can she say? She cannot speak of promiscuity or truancy or the perils which beset students. She is no better herself.

  As if reading her thoughts, he says, ‘I think I will call you something else besides your real name on the laboratory sheet. I don’t usually do that, but you may have past pupils there. It would be better. Shall we call you, let’s see, what is your second name, yes Mary, Mary Gray?’

  ‘Thank you.’ Her eyes fill with tears. It is something she has thought of herself, but has not dared to ask for such consideration.

  ‘I’m quite certain that you don’t have any disease, Mary Gray,’ he is saying. ‘Of course I can’t confirm that until I’ve got the results of these tests back, but I wouldn’t give you false hope unless I was sure of what I was saying. I don’t believe you have anything to worry about.’

  Cushla is speechless, unable to voice her thanks any further, as she stumbles towards the door. ‘Why did you leave it so long?’ he says, when her hand is reaching for the door handle, only his is there before hers, opening it for her.

  ‘I was so frightened. You wouldn’t believe …’

  ‘You’re too hard on yourself,’ he says, and the door closes quietly behind her.

  In the street she makes her way to the park, which is full of corrugated concrete waterfalls and small shrubs. Rims of curved perspex surround its perimeter. It is not like a real park at all, but there is afternoon sun and a place to sit amongst other people, each sitting separate from the other, but pushed together anyway, in some contemplation of their condition. Of being alive.

  Cushla thinks of Dr Gilroy and his kindness. How might they have looked at one another in some other place, over a dinner table perhaps, or meeting casually on a beach holiday? She is shocked anew. Dr Gilroy is the last person in the world she ever wishes to meet again, let alone socially.

  And she is dismayed by some other recognition of herself. What she should be sitting there thinking is that she will never, in all her life, stray from the path of virtue again. That she will be forever unswerving in her fidelities and upright within her conscience. For that is what she has promised herself should she receive good news on her visit to the doctor, and that is what she has been given.

  But there are no guarantees, and she knows that it is neither the disastrousness of ageing nor the good office she holds that will save her from herself. Alberto has been an incident, better forgotten, but even he has spoken of love. What if love, in one of its many disguises, were to persuade her again?

  A young man, sitting on the bench opposite, smiles at her. He is fresh-faced, an ordinary and vulnerable-looking young man, who flinches when she averts her eyes. She supposes that the best she can hope for is to be preserved by fear.

  But sun, and the smile, have warmed her, in spite of herself. The afternoon feels like the end of winter. If she cannot forgive herself, she thinks, who else can she ask to do it for her?

  Earthly Shadows

  ‘WHAT SORT OF AN OF IS THAT?’ The tone is ominous.

  ‘It’s existential,’ says Jimmy O’Flaherty in a miserable kind of way. ‘Or a Wallace St
evens kind of an of. A because of kind of an of.’

  Marlon leans back in his chair and looks around the room. Jimmy’s eyes follow his as if inspiration might be lurking, waiting to reveal itself, in one of the corners. He wants to be the first to see it. But it is a plain white box-like office, similar to a hundred or so others in the same building. Two large curling Penguin posters adorn the wall above him, one of Iris Murdoch looking worried, and the other of Paul Theroux bearing an odd resemblance in this pose, to an unlamented Minister of Education in the last Government. On the window sill a poinsettia with yellowing leaves struggles to survive in a pot.

  The producer seems in no hurry to further their brief acquaintance. He reaches out to pick an imaginary thread from his jeans then turns over a sheaf of pages on his desk with the sort of care that suggests there might be something nasty stuck between the pages. Marlon is a small sandy complexioned man with a crew cut. He wears a green striped shirt with a pink scarf around his neck, and beneath denim-clad legs his feet stick out, encased in pink, green and orange diamond-patterned socks and twinkling red shoes. Born plain Norman Jones, he changed his name to Marlon when he discovered, as he says with a reflective smile, that he was just a raging old queen. Though once darlings I was young, he is likely to add, not that he expects to be believed. It is clear, his manner suggests, that he has always been exactly and charmingly the same, and that with luck he will remain so.

  Now he rests his gaze on each of the other four people in the room, returning at last to Jimmy O’Flaherty, the hapless playwright. ‘Radio is an exacting art,’ he says. ‘Yet here before us, we have a play entitled The Shadow of the Earth. How, my pet, can there be a shadow of the earth. There are shadows of trees, there are shadows of houses, there are shadows of us poor mortal human beings, but earth is an ongoing flowing continuity, is it not, that cannot in itself cast shadows. Am I not correct, Fenella?’

  He turns to a large woman who sits far down in her chair opposite him. Her eyes glitter. Her face shines like a hand-painted dinner plate. She loves script conferences. She loves young men who sit like plucked hens in front of her.

  ‘Gross, darling, yes it does sound a little gross,’ she says to Marlon. ‘Of course,’ she says, addressing Jimmy, ‘you must take no notice of me, I have really no part in this at all.’ Fenella comes from that long and honourable tradition of women whose fiancés were killed in the war and have kept broadcasting running ever since from the bowels of control rooms, where their shadows have fallen further over the hierarchy than Jimmy’s earth could ever do. She is also the one person in the world, or broadcasting at least, who remembers Marlon when he was Norman.

  ‘Are you a producer too?’ asks Jimmy, for although they have been introduced, her role in the discussion is so far unclear.

  ‘Fenella will present the panel discussion that follows the play, straight after it goes to air. Fen is the Voice.’

  ‘You mean you’re going to do it?’ says Jimmy, who until this moment has been sure that his play is about to be rejected. He sits very still as if sudden movement might jolt the atmosphere. He has prepared so carefully for this interview, on the face of it could almost rival Marlon himself. He wears a French blue waistcoat under a worn salmon-coloured smoking jacket and he too wears a scarf, a plaid one which hangs all the way to his handmade leather belt with its silver studs. But the hands which hang between his knees are thick and chafed, and he has a slight rough cough, which might be from working on building sites in the cold (he has opted lately for real life experience as part of his apprenticeship for becoming a writer) or from too much smoking. His hand strays to his pocket now, hesitates over his cigarette pack, and drops. He tries to catch Georgie’s eyes. She sits with one leg hanging over the padded vinyl arm of her swivel chair, and appears not to see him. He bites a freckled lip. He thinks she is responsible for him, yet she seems to be doing nothing. He could almost swear she was ignoring him.

  ‘If we do it,’ Marlon corrects himself gently.

  Another voice speaks.

  ‘Hills have shadows. Cliffs have shadows. They’re earth. That what you mean, eh lad?’

  Jimmy O’Flaherty turns his raw Irish face full of Catholic guilt about deceit and honesty, or whether to tell the truth or not, and blurts out no, before he can stop himself, and realises too late that he may lose an ally in the other corner. Though it is the first time he has had a chance to take a proper look at Brian, who he recalls is a talks producer. Presumably in charge of Fenella’s department.

  ‘Oh take no notice of him,’ calls Fenella as if they were across a ballroom from each other, ‘he adores playing devil’s advocate, don’t you, darling?’

  With relief, Jimmy senses that it is not all bad news if he has, indeed, lost Brian. There is a silence which he suspects he is intended to fill. He flicks a glance towards Georgie May, looking for a cue. She is inspecting a scrag of fingernail.

  ‘Georgie May or may not,’ Marlon had said with a leer in his voice when he had invited Jimmy to come in and talk about the script. ‘Like it,’ he had added. ‘She says it’s interesting.’

  ‘I’ll be awfully grateful for a chat,’ Jimmy had said.

  ‘Can’t promise a thing, dear heart, but we must follow our script editor’s advice.’ He was referring to Georgie.

  ‘Don’t you like it then?’ Jimmy had asked, and known straight away that it was a bad question.

  ‘Lovie, I haven’t had an inch of time to actually read it,’ Marlon said, ‘but of course we do produce the odd little play now and then, despite the budget, and we do like to talk to the talent. You know how it is? So we can get acquainted. You do follow me? Well of course you do. Georgie says you’re talent, and well frankly, my angel, there isn’t much around at the moment, so when I’ve got a moment I’ll have a peek at the script and we can talk about it when I see you. Hnnn?’

  ‘Hnnn,’ Jimmy had replied, and hung up on the silence when nothing more happened.

  Now, it appears that he is deserted. While Georgie picks her fingernail, Brian takes off one of his roman sandals and unravels a sock from over his foot. He puts his heel up on the desk and takes a large pair of scissors from out of his lower drawer. It is time for him to attack his nails too. The scissors clunk together like hedge clippers.

  ‘It’s about the earth’s influence over us,’ Jimmy says. ‘How we’re prisoners to the land.’

  Brian bangs his scissors on the desk. ‘Oh. That. You Kiwis, you’re always on about that, aren’t you. The land. I am the salt of the earth blah blah blah. You should come from where I do. We don’t have quarter-acre sections, and privilege. You think you haven’t got class here, but you’re all landed gentry. Some of you just have more of it than others.’

  ‘Ee by goom, and I haven’t got anything, oh God, oh poor me, oh Brian, why do I have to come to your office, I ask myself a thousand times.’ Marlon clutches his head. ‘And put that thing away, that foot, that misshapen toe, it’s like a dog with its cock out for Chrissake.’

  ‘I’ll show you cock.’ Brian throws the scissors down and jumps to his feet, his eyes bulging and a thick vein rising in the side of his throat.

  ‘Oh Brian, you couldn’t,’ says Georgie, speaking at last.

  Brian lays his hand on the scissors again.

  We’re for it now, thinks Jimmy, half rising to disarm him.

  ‘Such angst,’ says Fenella. ‘Do sit down, Brian, and tell the boy what line the panel will be taking.’

  Brian is calmer but does not sit down, as if to prove that he is in charge. He walks up and down the side of the room, tugging savagely at his pointed black beard. He limps slightly in his one bare foot.

  ‘But he cannot tell us what his play is about.’ He jabs a thumb in Jimmy’s direction.

  ‘Tell us what the play is about, cherub.’ Fenella yawns elaborately and in the space between them Jimmy catches a whiff of something rank, like onions. Or gin for breakfast.

  ‘Oh surely not.’ Marlon crosses his knees
and swings away from them holding his head on one side. ‘We don’t have to go into all that. Please, not what it is about.’

  Jimmy stops himself, just in time, from asking Marlon again whether he dislikes the play.

  ‘I really like the old man in it,’ says Fenella, compromising by talking about it herself. ‘The one who wants to keep the land. It’s about a family who’re going to lose their farm,’ she comments to no one in particular.

  Marlon gives an exaggerated squirm. ‘Yes, we know, heart, we know.’

  ‘Well the old man is adorable.’

  ‘But it is not about the old man,’ cries Jimmy.

  Fenella beams triumph. ‘They’ll always start talking sooner or later. I knew you’d tell me,’ she says to Jimmy. She leans over and pats his knee. ‘Everyone tells me things. Just pour it all out to little old me.’ She adopts a listening pose, hand under her chin, head at a girlish angle.

  ‘It’s about the woman. She’s the strong one. The one who runs the farm and finishes up saving it.’

  ‘Oh dear. Oh dear me. Not feminism?’

  ‘Well, it’s based on feminist thinking.’

  ‘My dear boy, you’ll have to play that woman down, she’s not a good role model for mothers. I mean, she has got a child, hasn’t she?’

  ‘But I would have thought. I mean you’re a woman.’ Although it is Georgie May whom Jimmy looks at, rather than Fenella. Georgie stares into middle distance, her eyes appear unfocused.

  Brian has stopped his pacing and stands in front of Fenella, beaming down at her, his fly a few inches away from her nose. She swallows in a perceptible way.

  ‘I sometimes forget what a sensible woman you are,’ he says, rocking backwards and forwards on the balls of his feet. Jimmy notices that the bare one is covered with varicose veins. ‘A woman’s place is in the home.’

  ‘Oh well, Brian,’ Fenella remonstrates, wheeling her chair towards the wall. He follows her. ‘That’s not quite. Not quite what I meant.’ Her voice is faint.