The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘No, I know what you mean.’

  ‘Do you?’ I saw a tiny crease of anxiety developing in her expression, but she righted it.

  ‘We walked all afternoon. Both of us boarded with people in the town, so neither could have entertained the other. It was a lovely spring afternoon, and there were flowers out in the botanical gardens in the centre of town. We stopped, admiring all the plants as if we were veteran gardeners. I particularly liked the Iceland poppies — the colours were so wild — he fancied the roses, and wanted to pick some for me, but I was sure we would get caught, and I’d be disgraced. After a while, we ran out of things to say to each other, and he took my hand and we headed for the lake. Uh-oh, I thought, here we go, this is going to be trouble. But do you know what he did?’

  ‘No,’ I lied, because of course I’d heard the story before.

  ‘He told me the great grey-green greasy Limpopo story about how the elephant got its trunk.’

  ‘The whole story?’

  ‘Yup. Every bit of it.’ She shoved the tray of scones into the oven and shut the door, then turned and leaned against the bench, dusting her hands together to shake off the flour.

  ‘He told us that when we were kids, and it used to take hours.’

  ‘Well, it took hours the way he told it that day. We went and sat by the lake, and he just kept on and on, and when he got to the part where the little elephant asks the snake if he’s seen such a thing as a crocodile in these promiscuous parts, I began to laugh and I couldn’t stop. O Best Beloved, your father said, in a crocodile voice, come hither, and I totally cracked up. I tried to say the great grey-green greasy Limpopo lines along with him, but I was laughing so hard I couldn’t. But at last the crocodile stretched the little elephant’s nose and the story was over. It was getting towards evening and the wind off the lake was cold, and I thought, what next, what next? Well, after a while, he walked me home.’

  ‘Did you think that was weird?’

  ‘I thought it was different. I thought there was maybe something serious going on between us.’

  ‘Oh Mum.’ I burst out laughing. ‘You’re weird too.’

  ‘That’s what I figured.’

  ‘What happened next?’ I really didn’t know, she’d never told me the lot.

  ‘The next Friday night, we went up town. You can’t imagine what Friday night shopping was like then. It was one of the most important nights of the week. We, um, strutted our stuff, you know?’

  ‘Even people like you?’

  ‘Well, I was only a girl really. I mean, everybody just went to town, it was one of the things you had good clothes for, no matter who you were. Your father had arranged to meet me. When I saw him, I couldn’t believe it. He was wearing a red cardigan and a hat.’

  ‘What was wrong with that?’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Everything. The cardigan was so bright. Chaps didn’t wear clothes like that. And young men didn’t wear hats at the time, only old men did.’

  ‘Why did he dress like that?’

  She laughed. ‘He just hadn’t got his student days out of his system. But they weren’t like that in this town. It was Auckland clobber, you know? Well, I looked at him, and he said, are you coming, and I took his arm, and we set off down the street. We hadn’t gone very far before I saw a little group of people standing chatting on the footpath outside the public library which was an important stopping off point on Friday nights for older people. I recognised the group from a distance, it was men from the School Committee — there were no women on the committee, they all had to belong to the Ladies’ Auxiliary. I looked at your father’s hat, and I thought I’d die.’

  ‘But there was nothing disgraceful about him wearing a hat.’

  ‘He looked different.’ She gestured, still helpless after all these years, as she remembered. ‘I thought about wandering off and looking in a shop window and then walking on a bit ahead of him, as if I had sort of not noticed that he hadn’t caught up. Then, as soon as I thought that, I knew that it was decision time. I knew that if I was embarrassed by him then, it would never work. I thought, if I love him, this is it.’

  ‘Had he said he loved you by this stage?’

  ‘No, no, I hadn’t seen him since the great grey-green greasy Limpopo River.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she imitated me.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, I took his arm, and I walked down the street with him, and I smiled at the School Committee and said good evening to them, and he raised his hat, and we kept on walking.’

  ‘And then he said he loved you, and you got married?’

  ‘Not quite like that. He didn’t say anything for ages, but then the Maori Land Court got burned down, and he was just beside himself. Really devastated, you see. Because there were all these old papers and things that no money in the world could have replaced. He took it very personally, the loss of history like that, as if something of himself had been lost. Some of the staff got transferred, and he was one of them, he got sent back to Wellington. It all came to a head. I just went with him.’

  ‘You’re strange, you two,’ I said, and slid off my stool at the table.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

  ‘I dunno. Down town maybe.’

  She put out her hand and touched my cheek. ‘You look pretty today, actually you look beautiful.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Don’t cut your hair any shorter, will you?’

  ‘Mum, give over.’

  ‘You’ll find a nice boy of your own some time.’

  ‘I don’t want …’ I stopped. ‘I’ve got plenty on my plate right now without that,’ I said. ‘I’ve got that many essays to write.’

  ‘What’s troubling you?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, turning away.

  After all that talk, I knew I was being rotten to her but I couldn’t help myself. I picked up my bag in the hallway, and just kept on going out the door. I told myself I’d just been filling in time anyway, because of course I knew all along where I was going. I’m not an aimless sort of person.

  I walked into town, and sat down in Boulcott Street outside St Mary of the Angels where the choir was rehearsing, in their pure high sweet voices. I wanted to cry. Inside my head, a kind of poem was forming. It went: ‘Do not say that fatal word/ beloved, beloved, beloved.’

  I didn’t know where it had come from, and now that it was there I could not think where it was taking me.

  Then I saw Naomi coming. I knew she would; when she finishes her history lecture she usually takes this route down to Willis Street. Her course is different from mine, we don’t usually end up at university at the same time, but we nearly always meet up, without actually saying where we will be.

  She was wearing the same old black gear that she always wore — baggy black sweater and leggings, like a large dark chrysalis, and heavy boots. Her hair is so short you can see her scalp through the yellow bristles. She wears a long earring in one ear and a row of studs above it.

  Naomi had brought me a gift. Her manner was quite offhand when she gave it to me, but I could feel her watching me. It was the mate to the earring she was wearing. I stood there holding it in the palm of my hand. I didn’t particularly like the earring for itself, but I knew that being given it was important. Naomi stood there waiting for something. ‘You’re a cool little creature,’ she had said to me once, in exasperation. I knew that that was how it looked to her because I kept my distance from her when there were people around, so that nobody was ever sure about us. Of course, Naomi is not stupid, and she knew that it was also because I wasn’t sure myself.

  I could have put the earring in my pocket and said I’d put it on later, but I didn’t. I felt around for the pierced hole in my ear.

  ‘Here,’ said Naomi. She reached out and slipped the earring on for me, there in the middle of the street. I kissed the air beside her face, promising more. Then I took her hand in mine and we walked down the street.
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  Nasturtium

  ‘LIFE IS BETTER THAN DEATH. Well at least it is more alive,’ Vree would say, and order a gin.

  Vree had hair like nasturtiums. When Tess went out to meet her she’d be waiting for her somewhere in the street, always in a place where the light struck her amazing shock of hair. It stood out in a shining halo, and it was so full of electricity Tess could feel it bristling in the air between them when they went inside the pub and took off their coats.

  Usually Vree would have her dog Malcolm X with her. He was as dark as a seal. He looked at her all the time with strong intelligent eyes, his body fretful. When she went into the pub he would sit outside and wait for her.

  ‘It’s Vre-ee here,’ she would say when she rang. She was one of those friends who you waited for to ring first, or she was at the beginning. Later, if you loved her, you had to call across spaces.

  Over and again, that’s as far as Tess gets, when she tries to write about Vree. She finds bits of paper torn off the ends of newspapers with notes she has written to herself. They say things like: ‘The resignation with which some women allow themselves to be killed.’ Or: ‘Taking pills.’ Or: ‘The freedom to be a feminist, e.g. Vree/early years ha ha.’ Tess is a writer who has been planning to write Vree’s story for a long time. Maybe it’s a movie script, she thinks, but the producers all want stories about winners these days. The victim era is over, they say. She finds another shred of newsprint with ‘the pain of love’ scribbled on the edge.

  Tess met Vree at an anti-apartheid demonstration. It was difficult going out to demonstrate when the children were small. Her husband believed in most of the causes but he sometimes suspected the motives of those who got involved. ‘What difference will you make?’ he asked, as he prepared to heat yet another tin of spaghetti. ‘Wouldn’t it be more practical solidarity with humanity to cook the dinner, which God knows I wouldn’t mind getting if only I had the time, if only you would give me a few days’ warning and I could arrange to come home early?’

  The marchers assembled as the lights were coming on in the city. They had brought torches to carry in the dark. Everyone was issued with black armbands, as the order went out from the front to march in single file, in total silence; if the going got rough they were to fan straight out across the street, shoulder to shoulder. Vree and her husband walked up and down the line handing out leaflets with the armbands. It was clear they were leaders.

  ‘You’re new, aren’t you?’ she said, stopping beside Tess. Tess was nonplussed by her appearance. She wore tailored slacks, a neat little paisley scarf tucked into a cashmere sweater, and, over that, an elegant dull-green cloth jacket that offset the colour of her hair. This was not her idea of how a revolutionary should look. She felt embarrassed by her own dowdy dressed-down style. Vree fixed her with glittering eyes and seemed about to say something more, when her husband appeared beside her. He was a big burly man with an educated voice. Vree moved on quickly; in her wake, Tess sensed a ripple of unease. The next day Vree rang and asked if she could visit.

  ‘You don’t have to march,’ she said, when she arrived.

  ‘There are heaps of things you can do to help, even if you are at home.’

  She took Tess’s children to the zoo and sang songs with them on the way home.

  ‘May and September,’ said a woman called Una, who knew Vree. Vree’s husband was twice his wife’s age. Instead of children, because they couldn’t have any, they had causes together. His money bought high profiles for issues. Nobody knew how much money he had. He didn’t make the ten richest men in the country, or anything like that, but he had a lot. He had held the key to the locker room since he was born, so it didn’t matter how he spent his money. What he did was eccentric rather than radical. He collected beautiful things, paintings, fine wines, Persian rugs. In their bedroom stood a two-metre-wide wooden opium smoking couch, inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

  Una was his personnel manager, she hired and fired his staff. Nobody could miss her devotion to him. ‘I’m more his age, I understand him,’ she said to Tess. Her grey hair was crisply cut, she wore mohair sweaters and new gold. Seen in the supermarket, choosing beans off the shelf, she didn’t look like a serial wife, but she was. None of her husbands disturbed her constancy to Vree’s husband. ‘He’d never been married before,’ Una said. ‘She trapped him into it, you know.’

  When she delivered boxes of mailout material to Tess, Una stood in the doorway, smoking Ivory filter tips and delicately picking the tip of her tongue. Tess’s job was to put circular letters in envelopes and post them. This was nothing to do with Una, who didn’t believe in causes and always voted National. Delivering the boxes was just an extra she did for Vree’s husband on her way home.

  ‘Vree’s such a bitch,’ she said, on her second visit. ‘D’you know, she gave me a vase for my birthday, and then told me to increase my insurance. So it was Moorcroft, so I know it was expensive.’

  ‘Vree’s kind,’ said Tess, bridling. ‘She sent me flowers for my birthday.’

  ‘Is that all?’ said Una.

  Una talked in clichés. Vree wore a huge square-cut emerald ring, like a character out of one of Joan Didion’s novels. ‘Emeralds bring bad luck,’ Una said. ‘You mark my words, that marriage is doomed.’ Tess thought that Una might fancy the ring.

  Shortly after this, there was a mix-up over the pamphlets. Una delivered a box that wasn’t supposed to go out for another week, and the police got to hear of a demonstration they weren’t meant to, and cancelled it.

  Una appeared at Tess’s house, looking anxious.

  ‘It was Vree’s fault,’ she said, ‘she told me to deliver them.’

  Vree came round, white-faced and drawn. ‘I’m sure I didn’t tell Una to deliver them,’ she said, ‘but if she said I did, I must have. Una’s always right.’

  Vree’s husband rang. ‘Who’s responsible for this mess-up?’ he asked.

  ‘Me, if that’s easiest,’ said Tess.

  There was a pause. ‘I know my wife,’ he said.

  Tess didn’t know what he knew, or thought he knew, about his wife.

  The next time Vree came round, Tess asked her what was going on, although she didn’t tell her what her husband had said. ‘Are you happy, or what?’ she asked.

  Vree was finishing off the children’s soggy Weet-Bix at the bench, CLEAN ME, she wrote on Tess’s smudgy windowpane.

  The abortion debate was at its height. Vree got involved with a group of doctors who were sending women over to Australia for abortions on day return trips. The women flew out to Sydney at six a.m. and got back at midnight. Women from up country had to be billeted overnight at both ends of their journey. Tess took in some women and let them stay at her house. Her children found it hard, strangers coming late at night and weeping in their beds, the bloody sheets.

  ‘It’s unnatural,’ said Una. ‘Just because she couldn’t have children. She’s punishing him.’

  ‘I thought it was him that couldn’t have babies,’ Tess said.

  Una looked uneasy. ‘He pays the bills,’ she said, and changed the subject.

  By then, the children were both at school and Tess had gone to work in a newspaper office. She shared an office with a senior reporter who loathed feminists. Every morning, like a ritual incantation, he said: ‘There won’t be any of that rubbish in the paper if I have anything to do with it.’ Tess wrote articles which she liked to think were anarchical but she learned to be devious about her beliefs.

  She was moving into some deep trouble in her life. One morning, as she was delivering copy to the editor, she met Vree’s husband coming out the door. She had been crying all night.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he said, barring her way.

  Tess was embarrassed. ‘Nothing,’ she said. He didn’t move. ‘I keep screaming at my husband. I don’t mean to start but when I do I can’t stop.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘It’s enough.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is,’
he said, running his hands through his thinning flax-coloured hair. His eyes appeared enlarged and misty behind the strong lenses of his glasses. ‘Would you like a holiday? I could pay for it.’

  No. Thank you, but no,’ Tess stammered.

  ‘You could go to the islands. Why don’t you go to Bali for a week? It’s no trouble.’

  Tess began to cry again, unhinged by this sudden casual kindness. She refused, although she was tempted. She had pride, she told herself. Later, she thought he might see her as a cause. She has no idea whether he ever told Vree of his offer.

  The debate, which had become a war, shifted to Parliament in the form of a bill to liberalise the abortion laws. Tess, Vree, and a dozen or so women from the overseas support group sat in the gallery late one night while the debate raged across the floor of the House. Later, with nothing resolved, they moved on to the office of a politician who supported them. Litre bottles of gin stood around the room. The group was left to camp out in the office while the politician resumed the debate. A quarrel broke out when an opposing member stormed into the office.

  ‘Get out,’ said Vree, opening a passage through the women to where the man stood. He was an elderly jaunty man with a clipped moustache. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning.

  ‘You’re a pack of dykes,’ said the politician.

  ‘If it’s a fight you want,’ said Vree, ‘you’ve already got one. It’s out there in the House, out there in the streets, out where people know what men like you do to women.’

  After he’d gone, amidst jeering and taunts, Vree filled everyone’s glass again. Tess noticed that hers was full before she added the tonic.