by Fiona Kidman
At three o’clock Tess got in her car to drive home. She didn’t know how she ended up where she did, because she couldn’t remember anything of the dark streets, but when she drove out from Parliament grounds, she knows she must have turned left instead of right. As dawn broke, she found herself in the car with the engine running, but no lights on, at a beach twenty kilometres away, over a winding road. She knew how bad her trouble was, and that Vree’s was even worse.
Vree saved her husband’s life. They had a country house up north. One night, when they were on holiday, in the middle of a flood, he had a heart attack. Vree drove him through the night, across flooded rivers, to a hospital.
She stayed, for weeks, in the country town where she had taken him. She wrote to Tess from there: ‘It’s hard for people to understand about us. I know they think he’s a father substitute and it’s true, I’m afraid of my life without him. He gives me space to do the things I want. I think I can change the world, which of course is silly, but at least I can try. It’s hard to change the world without some money, as any politician will tell you, but you don’t have to be corrupt in order to have money. I sit here in the hospital, and outside the trees are dark red and the air is cold and I know that there is the smell of snow around the mountains. It’s there at nights when I walk the dog, and I watch him sleeping and know that I don’t want to do these things alone. I don’t know whether this is good feminist philosophy, but if we cannot find someone to love, what’s the point, why do it, and for whom? When we get back to the city and he is recovered enough, there will be a bypass operation, and then we will both concentrate on more things for ourselves, which is perhaps what has been missing over the past few years. I swear my life is about to change.’
She sat at Tess’s house the day of the bypass. The hours ticked past. Vree said she wouldn’t drink, and Tess had already stopped — well, more or less because true conviction was a slow unfurling of the soul, she had decided, rather than the blinding light of reformation. Tess noticed how Vree’s hands shook.
‘I’m having the light fittings changed,’ Tess said, to pass the time. Vree had an excellent eye for decorating.
‘About time, I never cared for those,’ Vree said.
‘I know, Una told me.’
‘Una? Jesus, Una, the cow. I never told her I didn’t like your light fittings.’
‘Truly?’
‘No, I did not. I wouldn’t tell Una anything.’ Her face looked flat and bleak. ‘Una knows what I think, or what she thinks I think, and then she tells him. Or you. Or anyone who’ll listen. Look, your light fittings are okay.’
‘I want to change them anyway,’ Tess said. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cause trouble.’
‘Do you think he’ll die?’ she asked, her hands restless in her lap.
‘No,’ Tess said, and she didn’t. Vree’s husband was tough. He’d been a hunter and a shooter in his time. He still liked going for tramps on his own.
When the new university year began, Vree enrolled and started studying philosophy and English lit. Her brilliant hair grew down to her shoulders and she swapped linen slacks for jeans, just when Tess was doing the reverse. Neither of them had so much time for causes, although Tess’s husband, lit with an unexpected fire, had discovered the passion of protest. Tess stayed home more often while he went to meetings.
Vree took her husband his breakfast and the morning paper every day before she left for university, and he strolled in later to work than before. He put on a little weight, fed with dainty snacks at morning tea by Una.
Tess and Vree still found time to meet, though not so often. Tess believed her life was on track, and Vree seemed distracted, as if she was bored by other people’s routine. Malcolm X sat outside as before, wagging his tail when Vree emerged from the pub, but he had got old and arthritic in his hind legs.
Once, in the pub, Vree said, ‘Come and look, I want to show you something.’ They went to the women’s lavatories and she lifted her blouse. Evil blue stripes wound their way across her back, the width of a man’s belt. Then she showed Tess her legs. The bruises were fatter and more fully developed around the tops of her thighs, like blue roses which Tess had never liked, turning lavender and milky pink around the edges.
‘Did he really do that?’ Tess asked. She didn’t want to believe this. Vree’s husband had been kind.
Vree looked betrayed and angry, as if she wished she hadn’t shown her. ‘Are you turning into a bitch, Tess?’
‘Why do you stay with him?’
Vree shrugged. ‘You get used to it.’
‘You can’t love him,’ Tess said, when they had ordered another drink.
‘Love, what’s love?’ she said, dropping her head. She was on her fourth gin and it was half past twelve. ‘He’s changed since the bypass. They say it happens. Don’t you see,’ she said, her eyes haggard, ‘he needs someone to look after him.’
Without thinking, Tess said, ‘Let Una.’
Tess went to Europe for several weeks and when she got back she rang Vree. Her voice was hollow and peculiar. ‘I’ve been away,’ she said. ‘I’ve fallen in love with a man called Clicks, and I went away with him.’
‘Clicks?’ Tess said, seizing on the absurd rather than the actual.
‘It’s not his real name, it’s what I call him. Oh, it doesn’t matter, I can’t talk now. I have to go to sleep.’
‘Vree, don’t go,’ Tess said. ‘Tell me what’s happened. It’s morning, why do you have to go to sleep now? Who is Clicks, and what’s been going on?’
‘He’s a student, perpetual, mature.’ She giggled, but the laughter turned to a hiccup. ‘I had to get away because he’d have killed me if I hadn’t.’ Tess guessed she was talking about her husband. ‘He’s got a gun. Clicks and I went up to Auckland to get away, but Una found my number and rang me and said he was going to shoot himself. She said he’d been walking round all day, carrying his gun. I’d left him my ring, you see, so he knew I didn’t mean to come back.’
‘So what happens next? Are you going away again?’
‘I don’t know, I can’t think.’
‘Vree, you’ve been taking something, haven’t you? What are you on?’
‘He says it’s all to do with my drinking. Maybe he’s right. I can’t stop, oh maybe I could, I didn’t touch a drop for two weeks while I was with Clicks. Oh Tess, I love him.’
‘Clicks?’
‘Yes, yes. Oh Tess, do you know what love’s like? Did you know all along?’
‘I think so, yes,’ said Tess.
‘Why didn’t you explain?’
‘I don’t think you can explain it.’
‘I don’t know what to do,’ said Vree.
‘Go away,’ said Tess. ‘Go away quickly, Vree. Shall I come and get you?’
‘Tomorrow, I’ll go tomorrow.’
‘Today,’ said Tess. ‘Can’t you go today?’
Vree’s words were wandery. ‘You don’t understand. When I got back last night, he poured me a gin, and I looked at it, and I thought, oh what the hell, I haven’t finished with him yet, I have to get through this somehow. So I drank it, and then he explained to me how I had to stop drinking and I could only stop if he was there to help me … the doctor gave him some Hemineurin for me.’
‘What the hell’s that?’
‘It makes you throw up if you drink. Or go to sleep. Or something. I’m sleepy now. Look, I can’t talk to you now. I do, really, have to go to sleep.’ Her voice faded to a whisper.
When Tess woke the next morning, Vree was dead. Her husband had shot her through the back of the head while she sat on the end of their bed. Later, in court, he told the judge that she had said terrible things to him, and compared him with Clicks. He had taken the gun, and she had fallen silent. ‘She bowed her head, and then I shot her,’ he said. Of course he wouldn’t have missed, the women said, he’d been a good hunter. One of her teeth was pinned to the floor with the bullet. He smoked a cigarette and called the p
olice.
After the autopsy, Vree’s parents came and took her body away up north to where they lived. All the women who had worked with Vree over the years banded together to travel to the funeral. Tess was going to go with them but she had spent all her money in Europe, and the man she worked with said she couldn’t take time off work when she had only just come back. She was going to go anyway, but she got frightened. She wasn’t frightened of the man she worked with so much, but of all that alignment with collective grief. She hadn’t yet worked out exactly why Vree had died. She thought it might become a cause and she wasn’t ready for that. Besides, her children were grieving for Vree.
At his trial, counsel for Vree’s husband argued that he had been provoked. He was a classy lawyer. Vree’s character grew blacker by the hour. She drank. She smoked dope. She had a lover. She had a dirty mouth. Vree’s husband broke down and cried in the witness box. He had his problems, people said.
But outside the court, feminist placards begged another story. WHO IS ON TRIAL HERE? they asked. DOES PROVOCATION WARRANT THE DEATH PENALTY?
The jury apparently thought so. They found Vree’s husband not guilty of murdering her. He got manslaughter with a recommendation for leniency.
Tess didn’t go to the trial or demonstrate. Instead, she told herself, she wanted to remember Vree the way she was. I want to think about her hair in corners of a dark room, she wrote in her diary. I want to think about it like a burst of nasturtiums in a vase by a window of a room shadowed by trees with dark red leaves. I want to think of it still growing under the earth in her coffin, the way hair and toenails are supposed to go on growing. She lay in bed and cried often. One night she began to drink gin again, and took a knife to bed and put it under her pillow. When she woke up she apologised to her husband. She felt deranged, she said. Vree was the third of their friends to die that year, for one reason or another, all those beautiful afraid people who had gone the way of cancer, and car crashes, those people for whom their thirties were the final straw, when you either got on with life or abdicated from it.
She wasn’t the heroine of the hour.
The heroine of the hour. That phrase came back to her recently. At a writers’ festival, an Irish poet got up and recited a lugubrious poem with a persistent refrain to each verse: ‘And I am the centre of the universe.’ Tess thought it was a lot of money to spend on bringing out an Irishman who thought he was the centre of the universe. Failed heroics. Just think, she said to some young poets she knew, just think what the critics would do to me if I said that I was the centre of the universe. They’d dismember me. She was surprised they didn’t agree — they are of that school of thought that displaces self from the centre — but they liked him, they really did. And it occurred to her that it is necessary to believe, in order to be the centre, the heroine, the life after death.
There was a memorial service for Vree, and Tess was flushed out at last. She wrote a poem for her, and stood up and recited it. The man she worked with tried to have her dismissed for typing it up during work time, but she convinced the editor that she’d done it in her lunch hour. Women made speeches at the service and a group of string players played Vree’s favourite music, and television came and she was a heroine of the hour.
No, she wasn’t. None of them were. All of them had known that Vree was in trouble, and nobody had done anything to save her because, in the end, they were afraid of her husband. They were afraid of his authority, afraid of making trouble, afraid of losing their causes. I did what I could, Tess comforts herself. I have mortgages and regrets, just like everyone else. But hers is a writer’s problem. She has got too close to the action, like a photographer in a war zone, and the edges have become blurred and she can’t stop pressing the shutter on and off.
Una went to see Tess. ‘We must look after him,’ she said, meaning Vree’s husband. Her pinched fifty-plus face was screwed into a little ball of triumph. ‘He was good to you, once, remember?’ Tess wondered how she knew. ‘We must tell the truth about what she was like.’
‘Vree?’ Tess said. She remembered Una lighting a cigarette and handing it to Vree’s husband.
‘Yes, you know what she was like,’ Una said.
It was a useful thing for her to say. ‘Yes,’ Tess said. ‘Yes, I know what Vree was like.’
She tells herself that although she is not the heroine of the hour, she is the voice after the fact, the word she seeks to make true.
If I Should Mourn
FIRST THING I CAN REMEMBER my old man giving me is a black eye when I was six and the last thing is a trip to the dentist to have my teeth pulled. I was sixteen then. Better off without them, Dimmie, he said, save you trouble when you’re old. Real old butcher did it. I bled for a week and pus come up and all sorts, you wouldn’t believe it. Then the old man beggared off, and it took me a year to save for my plate. And then the teeth didn’t fit. I wore them in my courting days, but that was all. This was round the end of the war, and the competition was real tough. Pretty girls everywhere, they’d have taken darn’ near anything some of them. But I met up with Henry, see, and after that looks didn’t matter all that much. I didn’t have much time for looking in mirrors, neither.
Well, what’s this got to do with you, Mister No Name? Plenty. After me and Henry took a walk down the aisle, me with my hat tilted over m’left eye and a little net veil, and the priest said all those holy words, who God hath joined in matrimony, let no man put asunder, and I thought to m’self well, that’s up to you Henry boy, just give me some kids and I’ll be happy. And so I was. Twelve of them in very short time. Clarrie and Mickey, and Lizzie and Maggie, that was for the little princesses you know, and Jimmy and Joey and … well, you don’t want to know all their names, and neither you should. That’s part of the deal, eh, no names either side. No names. All right, then. God was good to me. He gave me plenty of what I wanted. Last one come along 1975.
Yup, that’s how long I kept it up for. Thirty years. Disgusting, they said at the nursing home. Old filth. Somebody ought to tie a knot in her old joker. Catholics. What a mob. That’s what they said. They called me Fur Gums, same’s they call me down at the pub, ‘cause of m’teeth, you see. You can hear it, can’t you? I guess you’d think I wouldn’t miss one or two of those kids, a chap like you.
Well, maybe that’s what you’d have thought, but I reckon, Mr No Name, you’d see my point of view these days.
Mind you, in case I make it sound too easy, too all kind of loving and god-fearing, the truth is there’s been days I could have done without them too. Like, after Henry comes tumbling down off scaffolding and splits his head open wide. The kids gathered round his grave that day, out there at Makara, near the sea, the cemetery sliced out between the hills of broom, and they cried and carried on, you’d have thought some of them were going to jump right in there with Henry, but I stand back, and I tell them, that bitter day, and the sky letting down on us, I say, pull yourselves together. Ain’t none of you’ll look after me as good as your Dad, now show a bit of consideration, it’s me and all that should be bawling my lights out.
After that I’m left with half a dozen or so sprawling around at home, we live in Newtown up back of the Town Belt there, you can get cheap fish on Sundays when they’re cleaning out behind the fish shop. None of them what are left at home got jobs, and some of them bring their brats back home for me to mind, goodness knows where they found some of them, under the gooseberry bush I guess, I tell you what, some days there’ll be twenty thirty kids around about that house, by the time Lizzie and Maggie drop in with their grandchildren. Yup, I’m a great grandmother too. And stuff, stuff all over the place. Where’d you get that stuff, I ask them? Furniture, shopping trolleys, bits of cars, tin cans full of nothing. Can’t leave it alone, any old stuff that’s hanging around, just seems to stick to their fingers. It worries me.
Anyway, this young one, he was bad on stuff. Now look You, well never mind his name, You, I said, I don’t want no more cops around this place. I
’ve had enough cops here to last me a lifetime. You’d have thought he’d have listened, but would he just, he always knew best, that kid, you’d wonder where he got it from.
So one morning he gets up bright and early, and he says, I’m turning over a new leaf, old lady. Oh yes, I say, I’ve heard that one before, what’s this leaf all about, what does she look like? He goes kind of red, and says, yeah, okay okay, so I kind of like this girl, I’m off to make our fortunes.
Okay, I say, you just make sure you’re home in time for tea. He’s seventeen then, coming up eighteen if he was still around. You can see, I had to keep me eye out for him.
Ah shut up, you silly old faggot, he says, and I say, so help me, I wish some days you’d never been born, youse more trouble than you’re worth.
Well that was that. He never come back. Cops come screaming round, sirens on all the way up Adelaide Road. Come on Missus, they say, we’ve got your boy, down at the hospital. Well, it’s just down the road, and I says, is he bad, or shall I come after tea? I mean, you can imagine, after twelve kids, there’s been a few bumps and scratches. But this day, there’s a kind of silence, the sort you see on telly, and I take off my apron and tell them lead me to him.
It’s all over when I get there. Fell off a building when they was after him. Doing a bank, he was. Hadn’t even got to the money when the tellers push their buttons. Let me see him, I say. Sure, Missus, they say, but there’s something real urgent on their minds, more urgent than death. There’s a doctor here to see you, and this man comes out in a white coat and shakes me by the hand. He was my baby, I start to sniffle, thanking him for his politeness. But no, it’s more than that, more than sympathy, and suddenly there I am, the power of life and death. Me, Fur Gums, with something priceless to give.
We would like your boy’s kidney, they say.