The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories

by Fiona Kidman

  It was summer and they had been skateboarding at the Avalon jump ramp. Across the road the river snaked between the flood banks. They took off their shoes and walked down through the cutting to cool off in the water. The weather was stink-hot over the Valley, the air sultry round the high-rise television studios.

  ‘Camelot,’ he said, looking at the isolated tower on the flat Avalon plain.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Dream factory. We did the American Dream for seventh form English.’

  ‘Are you being smart or something?’ she asked resentfully.

  ‘Nah.’ He knew she was pregnant by then. He knew he’d been dumb. Even his best friend, Corky, had hung up on the phone when he told him. I warned you, Corky had said, before he slammed the receiver down.

  ‘It’s the Goodnight Kiwi building,’ she said, daring him to rabbit on about dreams and the influence of television on the masses.

  As La Jane waded out of the water, she stood on a prickle at the edge. Her big toe was so sore she couldn’t put her shoe back on. Roy had knelt in the grass beside her and squeezed the prickle — We need a needle, she’d cried — Hold still, he said, and, taking her foot in his hands he had lifted it to his mouth and sucked her toe until the prickle was so close to the surface of the skin that he could draw it out with his teeth.

  After that, it felt to him as if they were tied to each other. Only people who love each other could do something like that, La Jane, herself, said in awe. It’s like blood brothers, he’d told her, lightly trying to pass it off, but what she said was true; he believed something had been sealed between them.

  ‘Poor old you,’ he says now, reaching over and touching her arm.

  ‘I’m stuffed,’ she says.

  ‘I know you are, hon. It’s good of your Mum to come over and help out.’

  ‘There.’ Paula beams, happy that her labours are being rewarded. ‘There.’ She strokes the back of her granddaughter’s sleeping head. ‘I’ll just pop her into bed, eh?’

  Duane gets up and holds the door open for her as she carries Victoria through to the bedroom. ‘Fetch her teddy,’ orders Paula, and he follows. Playing mothers and fathers with my kid, Roy thinks. But they’ll be gone soon.

  La Jane begins to clear the table and switches the jug on to make tea. As she passes Roy’s chair she stops and says: ‘What’s pink and wet and lives in a cave?’

  ‘Give up. What is it?’

  She leans down and puts her wet tongue in his ear. He squirms away, laughing. ‘Yuck. Who told you that?’

  ‘Duane.’

  ‘Duane. Did he do that to you?’

  ‘It’s a joke,’ she says. ‘Kids do it.’

  ‘He’s not a kid.’ Duane comes back into the room and Roy turns on him. ‘Did you put your tongue in La Jane’s ear?’

  ‘You’ve got phobias, boy,’ Duane says easily.

  ‘You’re sick,’ says Roy. It disgusts him that a grown man would do this. Duane is nearly forty.

  ‘How do you want your tea, Duane?’ La Jane asks.

  ‘Snow white and one dwarf,’ he says, pasting his bloodless invisible lips back to his ears.

  ‘You were awful,’ La Jane says when they are in bed. ‘You embarrassed me.’ Paula first owned the pink nightie she wears. It is edged with polyester lace round the neck. The straps slide, revealing her breasts, the colour of clover honey.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, for he has something urgent and important he wants to discuss with her. He talks in a low voice so as not to wake Victoria sleeping in her cot crammed between the bed and the wall. ‘Look, about my shoes.’

  Her look says, not that again.

  ‘Can we cut back for a few days? I’ve got to get them fixed.’

  ‘Cut back? D’you know who bought the tea tonight?’

  ‘Of course I know. I told you … Look, I reckon it’s gonna cost around forty dollars to get those shoes fixed.’

  ‘Forty dollars. You can make do with some other shoes. We’ve gotta eat.’

  ‘So I’ve gotta keep my job.’ The shop where Roy works in Wellington deals in home appliances. Roy orders stock between the branches, and keeps the store records. When they are short-handed, which is more often than not because of all the lay-offs since the downturn, he serves in the shop. His boss is called Gordon, a man with a thin suede face who is delighted that the Employment Contracts Act has been introduced and has threatened to cut the lunch hours back to half an hour, or maybe none at all.

  ‘You’re real negative.’ She picks up a strand of her hair and begins to suck it; it looks like damp rope.

  ‘There’s a dress code.’

  ‘Don’t worry so much.’ She rolls on her side away from him, and flicks out the light. In a few minutes her breath rises in short jumpy little snorts. He lies there, thinking what to do. Just after midnight Victoria wakes and begins to cry.

  In the kitchen, Roy prepares a bottle for her.

  I’m twenty-three years plus two weeks old, Roy reminds himself, as he waits for the milk to warm, leaving maybe about fifty-two to fifty-seven years to live. This is a trick he learned from Paula after her husband died. I’ve got one thousand four hundred and sixty days left to live, she would say during the first year that he knew her, reducing the number day by day. That was four four years multiplied by three hundred and sixty-five days, which was the length of time it would take her to put La Jane’s younger sister and brother through high school, at which point, when all the days were used up, she would drink poison and then, she said, ‘youse lot can all take care of yourselves’.

  But when she and Duane got together she clicked out of it just like that. Duane called by on Mondays to pick up her church donations, and then every night. She began singing ‘Jesus is King’ to a tape while she did her housework. Dear Jesus cares for me she said, and whistled. Now, on Friday nights she and Duane go square dancing, which has had a revival in the Hutt.

  The streetlights gleam liquorice on the wet road but only the candyman’s house opposite shows signs of life. It’s months since he smoked any dope, and that was when Corky last visited. It makes him feel lonely, not having mates calling round on a regular basis. But what can he expect? Wives and babies are a different way of life.

  He remembers their brief history, his and Corky and La Jane’s.

  He and Corky are cruising in Corky’s bent Toyota Corona — there’s heaps of girls hanging round out the Hutt, Corky reckoned. He’d done a recce. But when they see La Jane in the bus shelter, Corky says: ‘Don’t do it, Roy. Jeessiss Roy, don’t, you’re too young to die.’

  La Jane in a gym slip with a belt tied round her middle so that the skirt is pulled up to the top of her thighs. Her mouth is a round red lollipop, her blonde hair piled up on top of her head, flowing down round her ears in little curly tendrils.

  ‘That one’s jail bait,’ Corky says.

  But Roy doesn’t listen.

  ‘I’m sixteen,’ La Jane tells him, old enough.

  His own mother cries till she’s sick when he tells her he’s got a schoolgirl up the duff. ‘You don’t have to marry her,’ she says pleading, and patting at him, as if she can draw him back to her. ‘You’ve got bursary, you’re a clever boy, you can do anything, go to uni or tech. We’ll help you with the maintenance.’ Which, in fact, is not possible.

  ‘You’re a dog, Roy Turner,’ says Paula. ‘You know what Turners do, don’t you?’ Although it is not long since her husband dropped dead in a tavern carpark, she still smokes.

  Two steady spirals of smoke pour through her nose. ‘They turn good food into shit. Full of shit, that’s what you are.’

  But it doesn’t seem to matter what she says to him. ‘I love her,’ he tells Paula. He felt so certain.

  Only now he doesn’t know. Now they are old. He is twenty-three and La Jane lying under the duvet in the bedroom is twenty and he can’t believe how so much time has passed, nearly four years, and here he stands, listening to the rain fall and thinking of hi
s past, and inevitably his thoughts turn to the here and now, and to Honor.

  For Roy has a secret in his life. Her name is Honor Martin. She is the manageress of the unisex hair and beauty products salon three down from the shop where he works. It’s called Grate Apple. Honor runs a staff of five and tells him the salon is turning over two hundred grand a year.

  He met her when he went for a hair cut.

  ‘I’ll make you look sharp!’ she said, tilting his head this way and that in her hands.

  She doesn’t wear a brassiere under her smock. Her tits curve upwards, hard like seed pods. He found this out when she was cutting his hair. He wondered if she pulled everyone’s head back against her like that.

  Now he gets his hair cut for free. He’s held her breasts cupped in his hands. She meets him after work on late shopping nights. They stand huddled in doorways, his mouth seeking out hers. Come home with me, she says, urgently. But he doesn’t. He can’t. Adultery is what old men do.

  Sometimes he cries in her arms as police cars pick them out in their headlights. He is confused between desire and guilt, and the need for her both to talk and listen to him. He wants to tell her what’s deep in his heart, and sometimes that includes the way he feels about La Jane and her silences. But that won’t do, he knows. Old men also tell other women how their wives don’t understand them.

  After a while, Honor tells him what party she’s going to on Saturday night, and leaves him with the stain of her lips still on his. He wonders if she thinks of him when she’s at the party. It wouldn’t be cool to ask her.

  At three a.m. Victoria starts to scream again.

  ‘It’s her teeth, she’s cutting doubles,’ La Jane says for the twentieth time, but her eyes are wide and frightened under the bitter yellow light of the naked bulb. Their first baby was stillborn. He is their tragedy, their grief, their growing up. That’s what Paula said. Roy is ashamed but he cannot remember the name they gave that baby, even though they held a funeral for him (it was where Paula first got to know Duane, he was a friend of a friend who had recommended him for a tasteful baby funeral). He knows he has forgotten because he does not want to remember. He thinks it was one of La Jane’s father’s names. He never has the courage to mention this memory loss. It is not enough to explain that he still sees his son’s face. In its softly crumpled shell he’d recognised his flesh and blood, the familiar trace marks of his history. He would know him now, grown and waiting for him.

  But as they don’t mention the baby, his name remains unspoken.

  It took a year to start another one. Paula consulted all sorts of people on their behalf. One of these sages told her that they ought to have sex at full moon and say, ‘When the lip of the moon is over the hill, when the cat is at the edge of the hedge.’ Roy couldn’t confess how the lurking blood-red moon put him off. In the end, Duane prayed over them and put his hand on La Jane’s head, saying, ‘May the good Lord make this woman fruitful.’

  When Victoria was born, La Jane sat up in bed in Hutt Hospital, her mane of hair haloed by the big bunch of chrysanthemums and carnations that he had spent forty-nine dollars on. ‘It’s one thing for me to be La Jane La Blonde Bombshell, but this is different,’ she said.

  He could see her, then, as she saw herself, a teenage sex symbol.

  ‘This should please you, Roy,’ she went on, ‘I want a serious baby — let’s call her Victoria.’

  It is more than a name that she needs, Roy thinks grimly. Victoria has been sickly since the beginning and because of the baby they have lost, La Jane thinks she is going to die every time she cries. The doctor tells them it is nothing organic, the baby is colicky, later, a bad teether. Tonight they have used up all the Bonjela on her gums, and it hasn’t made any difference. At four a.m. La Jane wants to call the doctor.

  ‘Give it another half-hour,’ he tells her, ‘she’s just about through.’ And he’s right. Victoria drops off in the crook of her mother’s arm, and La Jane again follows her child into sleep.

  He eases Victoria out of her clasp and settles her into the cot, then slips, at last, into an uneasy catnap, waking, twitching, and listening.

  He has counted on a fine morning, but the rain continues falling between the houses. The sky is clouded with wet washing. There are one hundred and eight houses in the street circa late 1940s to mid-50s; his is number 87B, the second half of a two-unit building. The houses are placed at different angles and depths on each section, and painted in a variety of colour schemes to make them look different, but there is no disguising the fact that each house is basically the same as the next.

  His shoes lie on the floor where he threw them last night, ordinary shabby black shoes not unlike the ones he wore to school. Three lines of stitching decorate the front of each shoe and another line runs above the sole.

  He has no other shoes that match his grey slacks and flecked sports coat. Honor says how nice if he was more casual but one trendy outfit would cost him a month’s wages. During the lunch hour they look at pleated pants in Vance Vivian’s window. ‘I’ll buy you some,’ she says, half-joking, but he thinks if he said yes she might. Honor owns a credit card. The power it gives her is awesome. It’s awful the way the country’s in a recession, she tells him, but you have to have the power of positive thinking.

  He eats marmalade off a knife, and makes a decision.

  In the bedroom, La Jane still sleeps and it seems to Roy that a small wind passes through her dreaming hair. La Jane’s footwear takes up most of the space in the wardrobe. The stilettos she wore for their wedding tumble out. Canvas sneakers, a pair of kung fus and a bundle of jandals follow, then a pair of white boots not unlike Paula’s, and hardly worn. They cost him two hundred and thirteen dollars and forty-five cents. That he can remember this fact but not the name of Victoria’s dead brother shames him. Overall, a brooding mouldiness emanates from the cupboard.

  At the back, he finds a pair of discarded sandals that actually do date back to school days. This is what he has considered wearing, with socks. If he can stay behind the computer today he might get away with it. But when he sees them he knows it’s impossible and anyway the rain puts them out of the question; his socks will be soaked in five minutes.

  There is nothing for it. He pulls on his Reeboks, and begins to do up the laces.

  ‘Leave me some money, hon,’ says La Jane from the bed, suddenly wide awake.

  He stops in the middle of a double bow, frightened. He has never been frightened of his wife before.

  ‘I told you, we haven’t any,’ he says carefully.

  ‘I saw forty-five dollars in your wallet.’

  ‘I need it for my shoes.’

  She sits up, her face swollen and streaky. ‘You can’t. I’m taking Victoria to the doctor.’

  He tries to explain. ‘Look, if I wear these just for today, I expect Gordon’ll let me get away with it. Two days and he’ll show me the door.’ He holds out his foot. ‘Sandshoes, he’ll say they’re sandshoes.’

  ‘Are you for real? Those are good Reeboks, cost three hundred and fifteen dollars. I don’t have a pair of shoes in my wardrobe cost a fraction of that.’

  He might have known her accounting system was as good as his. ‘Do you know what the stand-down period is for the dole?’ he asks her.

  Victoria stirs and whimpers. She is not like either of them. Her face is dish-shaped like La Jane’s younger sister. Roy wonders if she will be as big a mutt.

  La Jane’s face dissolves. ‘You never done nothing for this kid. If this kid dies.’ She stops, her plump little mouth frozen over the words. ‘Don’t just stand there looking at me,’ she whispers. ‘It wasn’t my fault.’

  He shakes his head and grabs his jacket.

  ‘Don’t expect to find your daughter here when you come back. She’ll be gone, I swear.’

  Outside, the rain has let up. The air is fresh against his face. A retired man he sometimes talks to a few doors along stands at his gate, whistling ‘The Lambeth Walk’. His garden
path is edged with primulas like a line of pink crochet.

  ‘My mother could never grow much of a garden,’ says Roy, stopping. ‘Too windy where we come from.’

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘Wellington,’ says Roy, embarrassed because that is where he is going now, and he has made it sound hundreds of miles away. But it does feel a long way off, like another country.

  In the subway he thinks of a nature programme he saw on television about nearly blind mole rats that live underground, never seeing anything except the sides of the tunnels they live in and their own body waste. But the dim light above illuminates the pastel murals painted on the walls by a work trust. The words TIME WARP written in jagged blue lettering emerge above the figure of a man with a bare pink torso and a muscular arm raised towards the sun which, in turn, is poised over fluffy clouds and a yellow wave, and Roy’s caught on the idea that he’s moving on a wave, part of an inexorable tide of people surging through the subway, up the stairs and on to the platform. In a few minutes he has found a seat on the train.

  Beside him, a woman reads The Dominion. Over her shoulder he reads the headlines, about government backbenchers who want to change the party’s ways and give money to the poor.

  ‘What do you think of Myles and McIntyre?’ the woman asks.

  ‘I guess they’re losers,’ he answers.

  ‘I reckon they’re saints,’ she says, and closes the newspaper.

  Honor buys him a rumbaba at the Matterhorn. She is a skinny redhead with wide Slavic cheekbones. Her long stringy hands are covered with rings.

  ‘You look cool,’ she says, noting his boots.

  ‘Tell that to Gordon, he went right off.’ Anyway, it’s not true. He feels like a dork in his mismatched outfit. At morning tea he has slipped out to DEKA with the shoes and told the guy who operates the shoe repair counter a hard luck story so he’ll fix the shoes today. It’s not far from the truth. Gordon has told him to smarten up his act.