by Fiona Kidman
‘Look,’ he said. ‘There, and there.’ The worms glistened in the sun, their long wet bodies fighting to retain their grip in the sand.
The rooms at the Rasa Sayang were all in order. Sebastian did not know why his grandmother needed to check; they had come so often that she was greeted by name as soon as she appeared.
‘There was a mix-up over the room numbers last year,’ she fussed at the desk. ‘Seb, why don’t you go and order us a long cold drink before we go back?’
Sebastian moved off to find a waiter. He guessed that there was something his grandmother did not want him to hear. There was an arrangement to be made, an alteration, something to do with the number of rooms, the way the accommodation was to be shared out. Sebastian felt cold, in spite of the heat. He caught his reflection in a huge wall mirror. Today, his complexion looked glassy.
‘What would you like to do?’ asked his grandmother, when they returned to the E & O. She half-hoped he had nothing special in mind, even though she wanted every instant of him to herself, her fair-headed boy with the luminous hazel eyes. Although she did not like to admit it, jet lag had taken its toll. The first years she came, she had laughed at her family when they said they were tired after the journey, but this year it was different. I am not getting old, she told herself, I am not.
They had already taken trishaw rides into the city and shopped and found a McDonald’s. The day before they had ridden the cable car up into the hills, a favourite treat. Since then, they had been twice to the museum, an old picturesque building, a labyrinth of dim rooms, chiming clocks and the distant persistent coughing of the attendants. Olympia had taken each child there, year by year, introducing them to the museum’s secret corners and marvellous Asian treasures. This year it was Sebastian’s turn, but then it had been his turn the year before. She had run out of grandchildren.
It was taking Sebastian a long time to compose his reply to her question. ‘Nothing,’ he said, finally. ‘I don’t want to do anything.’
‘What a funny child you’re becoming,’ said Olympia.
‘Still, it’s getting late, perhaps there’s nothing left to do today.’ When he did not respond, she said, ‘I’m going to sit by the pool and order a margarita the minute the sun is over the yard arm. Why don’t you get your togs and have a swim?’
‘I might,’ he said.
He wandered back to the sea wall. Birds were scavenging bones from beside the sea, their wings beating in a savage black frenzy. A waiter appeared and flapped his arms.
‘We do not like crows, they bring us bad luck.’ A crow swooped down, pecking at the eyes of a scuttling albino cat with testicles like ping-pong balls.
‘How come your mother is such an old woman?’ the waiter demanded.
‘My mother is not an old woman,’ said Sebastian. ‘She is young and when she arrives she’ll knock the socks off you.’
The waiter looked puzzled, and shook his head.
‘She is yet to come?’
‘Yes,’ said Sebastian. ‘She will come. I know she’ll come.’
‘Ah, yes, I see. Your young mother who knocks socks will come soon.’
Sebastian decided not to answer. Sometimes it was hard to remember what his mother looked like. He captured glimpses of her in his head, her wide cheekbones, a small composed mouth, long hands with strong knuckles. At other times, she had a more voluptuous, creamy presence, which shimmered around him, remembered from other years.
‘Tomorrow they’ll all arrive,’ Olympia was explaining at the pool. ‘Well, most of them, I think. My son and his wife who run the farm for me, they’re on their way now — we never travel together, you understand. It’s a big farm, there has to be someone to run it, whatever happens. They have two grown up daughters now, heaven knows how my budget will stretch to our holiday when they have children, and then there is my daughter and her husband from Auckland, and their two boys and a girl. My daughter, I’m afraid, didn’t marry money, she’d never get a holiday if it wasn’t for this little jaunt. And then, well, there is my other son, Sebastian’s father, and his wife. Yes. Sebastian is an only child, you see.’
‘You’ll be a large party then,’ said the woman beside her, cool, and only as polite as was necessary.
‘Thirteen of us most years.’
‘And this year?’
Olympia sighed. How could her daughter-in-law resist these silky Malaysian afternoons? ‘We’ll see,’ she said. The woman, a cool English blonde with long legs and an even suntan, didn’t appear to notice the reflection in her reply. She had clear eyes and a serious expression; she was reading Remembrance of Things Past and eating mangosteens.
Olympia’s companion looked up as the American she was staying with approached. His skin was tanned almost black, he had a small artfully cut beard and smoked French cigarettes. Olympia guessed he was a writer, he was always taking notes. Ostentatious, she would have said, if called on to describe this habit of his. He wrote on large sheets of paper and waved them around, so that everyone could see what he was doing. No doubt he expected people to know who he was; he had the air of someone who was recognised in other settings. Olympia thought it was a shame about the young woman. She definitely had potential.
‘Did you know Mary Pickford stayed here?’ she said, hoping to keep her attention.
‘So did Serge Voronov,’ said the man.
‘Who was he?’ Olympia asked, as she was meant to.
‘He pioneered monkey gland rejuvenation treatment.’
The couple got into the pool, laughing, and swam up and down for several lengths. Then, at the far end of the pool, where it was deep, they put their arms around each other and the writer began to kiss the woman. They appeared totally oblivious to everyone about them. Olympia could not believe what she saw. The writer’s hands had vanished under the stirring water. Olympia heard the woman’s orgasm, soft, quick, unmistakeable. She looked around quickly. Nobody else had noticed except her grandson, Sebastian, standing still at the water’s edge.
‘There’s a goer,’ said Sebastian, in a bored, adult voice.
The writer climbed out of the pool and picked up his pen and some paper and began to write.
My God, thought Olympia, he is taking notes.
‘You look pale,’ she said to Sebastian, who had put on his swimming togs. ‘I don’t know whether you should swim.’ She wanted to go upstairs and wash her face in the bathroom, which was big enough to dance in, and lie down on one of the huge beds in the bedroom.
‘You said I could,’ said Sebastian.
‘Yes, so I did,’ she said. She knew then that she must watch this child, and see that he swam from one end of the pool to the other without sinking, without failing to surface.
Circling to Your Left
MIRACLES, MIRACLES. Anna was sitting at her desk preparing an interview when the phone call came. Anna works in a radio station, running a magazine programme about lifestyles. She is a personality in her own right and people seek her views on all manner of issues. She feels strong and vital and people say she is a powerful woman, but she has also reached that more private age when her children worry about who will mow her lawns and what will happen to her. The name of her caller was Kathryn Fox, Kathryn spelled with a K and a Y. She was phoning from Auckland, from an insurance company. Anna could see her behind the desk, cool and efficient, with over-sized pads in the shoulders of her severely cut suit, a muted but pretty scarf arranged artfully at the throat of her plain cotton blouse. She could hear her asking claimants the correct spelling of their names, an instinctive precautionary gesture which she carried into her own life — this is exactly who I am, Kathryn with a K and a Y. Mrs, she added, Mrs Kathryn Fox.
‘Yes, Mrs Fox?’ Anna said, preparing to tell her either that she had more life insurance than she could afford, or that she couldn’t spare an opinion on the subject this morning.
‘It’s about my father,’ said Kathryn Fox. ‘I believe you knew him when he was young, before he married my mothe
r. His name was Douglas McNaught.’ Her voice had become less assured, dropping a note, as if she expected a rebuff, but she hurried on. ‘I never thought of you knowing him.’
‘How did you make the connection?’ asked Anna, the interviewer at work.
‘I heard you on radio once and you mentioned Fish Rock. You described a man you had known there, at work in his cowshed. When the cows got stroppy and wouldn’t do what he wanted, he used to yell at them, “I might as well talk to Jesus.”’
‘Lachie McNaught.’ Anna had put down her pen and begun to listen intently.
‘My grandfather. Are you with me?’
‘Yes,’ said Anna, ‘I am.’
‘My father was dying and I had been sent to my grandparents’ farm so that my mother would have more time to nurse him.’ Kathryn Fox’s voice had assumed a relentless quality. ‘I was very small and I sat on the railings of the yard and listened to my grandfather say that every evening one summer. “You might as well talk to Jesus,” he said, and I knew he was talking to more than the cows. I’ve never heard anyone else say that since. Soon afterwards he died, and not long after that, my father died too.’
‘So your father didn’t die on the farm?’
‘He’d been overseas to fight in Malaya,’ Kathryn said. Anna already knew this, but she didn’t interrupt. ‘When he came back he had some jungle illness. He went back to the farm but he was never able to work the way he had before, and he and my mother moved to town.’
Anna hadn’t known this. ‘Did he work again?’
‘He went into the stock and station, and worked there for as long as he could. You did know them, didn’t you? I’m not wrong?’
‘Yes, I did know them,’ said Anna slowly. ‘But I don’t know how I can help you.’ She guessed that her caller would know that she was asking herself whether she really wanted to.
‘Just tell me what my father was like,’ Kathryn Fox said, and Anna liked the way she didn’t sound pleading, just matter of fact, and ready to give information of her own. ‘My mother remarried, she couldn’t see that it mattered. She was very happy with my stepfather, and he was good to my brother and me. “What is there to tell?” she used to say, when I asked her about my father. “He was sick and he died.” Whatever it was that she fancied in him, she’d forgotten. Oh, I don’t mean to embarrass you, I don’t expect you to be able to tell me that, but just something, some of the things he might have said and done. Forgive me, perhaps you don’t remember much about him at all.’
‘He was a gay dog,’ Anna said.
‘Gay?’ she said.
‘It’s what we said.’ Anna recognised the distance between them, between Kathryn’s age and her own, between knowing and not knowing her father. ‘He did a fantastic set of Lancers. Well, we just did a set occasionally at the end of square dancing.’
‘Let me get this straight, you’re telling me my father square danced?’
‘Yes. But not only that. He was a knockout. I mean, he was very good-looking.’
After a silence, Kathryn said, ‘I would never have thought of that. Nobody ever told me he was good-looking.’
Anna thought that now it was Kathryn who was sorry she had rung. She thinks I’m romancing an image for her, Anna thought, or that I don’t remember him at all.
‘Was your mother called Rhoda?’ Anna asked.
‘No.’ Kathryn mentioned a name of a woman Anna had never heard of, who, she said, her father had met in hospital soon after his return from the jungle.
That was the miracle, a chunk of missing history, offered to Anna on a morning when the wind whistled between buildings and the traffic five storeys down was blocked by a blown water main and the tower block next door had been evacuated by a faulty alarm system.
Immediately after Anna left school she went to work in the drapery store at Fish Rock. She pushed her way to the head of a queue of young women who thought it might be fun to work on the main (and only) street for a year or two while they got their glory boxes together. She had turned down the idea of going nursing or teaching. For other women, outside the Presbyterian circle of Fish Rock, there was that other burden of Catholic choice, to be a nun, but that was beyond their experience, a bizarre impenetrable mystery. Who, they asked themselves, in hushed voices, would want to live amongst women?
‘Why do you want to work in the drapery shop?’ Miss Macdonald, the proprietor, asked her. She was a tall, thin woman with hair escaping in wisps from a huge bun. She was proud that she had not cut her hair for twenty years, although no one had ever seen this massive accumulation let loose.
‘I want to earn some money while I decide what to do next,’ Anna said.
‘You mean, until someone comes along and offers to marry you? I don’t want boys hanging around here,’ said Miss Macdonald.
Anna thought it wiser not to tell her prospective employer that she had already been forsaken by Douglas McNaught, although, who knew, he could still turn up again some day.
‘It’ll be hard for my parents if I leave now, just when they’re getting the farm going,’ said Anna instead. ‘I can still help out with the milking at the weekends.’
This appealed to Miss Macdonald, the notion of hard work and thrift, and also that she could hire Anna without committing herself for the long term. ‘You can have a three-month trial, and then we can decide whether we like each other enough for you to stay on,’ she said, when she had thought it over.
This was how Anna came to stand behind the counter of the Fish Rock drapery, counting buttons, selling girdles and crêpe de Chine, ordering whirl bras spiral-stitched to pencil-sharp points, suggesting sewing patterns to young women whom, only a month before, she had sat beside in geography, learning how to do rouleau buttonholes so she could demonstrate them to others, advising Miss Macdonald when they were low on three-ply in the knitting wool section, and all the while breathing in the steady crisp scent of new linen, which still reminds her of buttercups.
Miss Macdonald had hired Anna first and foremost to sweep out the shop and make cups of tea, all of which she did, but when Anna suggested they order cinch belts because she had heard that these were what the girls in town were wearing (and she yearned for one of her own), her employer gave her a long speculative look, ordered half a dozen, and sold out the next day. After that, Miss Macdonald took time out to go to town on a buying expedition and left Anna in charge. When the new stock arrived, turnover increased and so did Anna’s wages.
Fish Rock is a string of shops divided by a main road. The Post Office has closed since the country was re-structured. People go to town for their clothes and the drapery shop has gone. A square white church stands beneath a spreading tree, a museum houses the ghostly unsmiling faces of the village ancestors, the community hall could do with a lick of paint, a monument to the town’s war dead, surrounded by a heavy chain, stands sentinel beside the road. Douglas McNaught’s name is not amongst the dead.
Douglas didn’t fall in battle, and besides, his war was a jungle skirmish, his going a young man’s response to the unanswerable in his life, not to a call to arms sweeping a nation. But his name is written on a headstone in a quiet cemetery near the sea where sand lifts and falls in drifts against the tombs, and dry grasses bend on windy days. Trooper Douglas McNaught, SAS, Malaya. This much Anna knew.
Her parents’ farm was next to the McNaughts. The McNaughts were an old settled family, and the Emerys were newcomers, their land a fraction the size of their neighbours’, neglected and over-run with gorse, except for three rich green river paddocks. Her family had driven into the valley one afternoon in summer near milking. Their cows were crammed in the back of trucks, their udders near bursting point. Gidday, said the men, standing on the edge of the road. Gidday, Anna’s father had said, and gone into the tumbledown shed on the farm to milk.
One of the onlookers followed him. ‘Let’s know if you need any help,’ said the man. This was Douglas. He was a dark, nuggety man with a sinewy throat rising from his black bu
sh singlet. His hair was crinkly beneath the battered grey felt hat he wore. Nests of hair covered his short strong forearms. When he lit a cigarette he balanced it for an instant with a delicate flick between the tip of his tongue and his top lip before drawing it down into his mouth.
Anna’s father managed his farm with care. He’s a dreamy bastard, he farms with a textbook in one hand, and a spade in the other, the neighbours said to each other, but they were interested. He used electric fences to make the grass go further. His butterfat average inched up, higher than the farmers around about. You might as well talk to Jesus, said his neighbour, Lachie McNaught, as try to tell my sons how to do that. Lachie’s voice was without envy. He had enough. His three sons had worked on the land since they left school. Malcolm, the eldest, was married and lived in a house across the paddock from his parents, the second and third boys still lived in the old farmhouse. Alan smiled sleepily at people and worked without saying much. He drinks, Anna’s father told her mother, but he’s harmless. Douglas was referred to as the baby of the family, although he was twenty-eight.
The entrance to the older McNaughts’ house was by way of a verandah bordered with curly wooden fretwork. In the morning it was full of fierce heat and even the geraniums wilted in the scuffed earth beside the path. In the afternoons the dogs slept there.
Inside, it was hard to pick that the McNaughts were well-off. Old newspapers and piles of bills were stacked on the sideboards, and ashtrays were emptied only when they were full. In the sitting room, a shabby suite of brown moquette was arranged around the walls. The walls were decorated with gaudy calendars from the local shops and two ornately framed photographs of Lachie’s parents, formally posing in their best clothes; his mother wore a long dark dress with a high collar. An old piano stood beneath these portraits. The McNaughts played it on Saturday nights when friends came to drink beer and sing. Alan played until he passed out and then Tilly took over. They sang ‘Roll Out the Barrel’, and ‘Comin’ In on a Wing and a Prayer’ and ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain’ when she comes, when she comes, she’ll be wearing pink pyjamas when she comes. Presbyterian they might have been, but they were new people now, they said. They didn’t have truck with the old nonsense. ‘Well,’ said Lachie to Anna’s father, ‘the boys wouldn’t hang around for long if we did, would they?’ Douglas and Alan slept in the same room they had slept in all their lives, in two of three beds arranged dormitory style, across the passage from another room that had once belonged to their sisters.