The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘You gotta knock the bastards out of them trees son, little yella devils, knock ’em out,’ Anna heard one of them say.

  ‘Give you a tenner for that hat, boy,’ said another. Douglas just smiled; in his head he had already moved on. He danced with all the women, young and old. They sang ‘Red River Valley’ — from this valley they say you are going/we will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile …

  The air outside was cool as they headed for home. The moon was new and Anna couldn’t avoid looking at it through the glass. She turned her money over in her pocket and moved closer to Douglas. When he didn’t appear to notice, she put her head on his shoulder. He shifted slightly inside his uniform. A short way up the road he pulled the Buick over, and placed his hand on hers.

  What does one say now, Anna wondered. Nothing much. A kiss is a kiss. That is what they did, not much more. When he pressed her against the seat, she whispered, although there was nobody at all in the wide grassy fields that would see or hear them: ‘Are you going to root me now?’

  ‘No,’ he said, and didn’t stop kissing her. ‘It’s all right, I’m not going to give you a baby yet. I’m going to look after you.’ He drew her tongue into his mouth, coaxing it with the tip of his, that flickering, darting tongue she had watched, hotter and sweeter than she had imagined, clean of cigarettes since his training had begun. He kissed her throat, down the length of her arms to her fingertips, turned her hands over and kissed the palms and back up into the crook of her elbows. He slid her blouse down over her shoulders and drew circles around her nipples with his tongue, and all the time he breathed deeply as if drawing the smell of her body into his. She felt as Rhoda Aukett must have felt. She could smell something familiar, flowery and delicate, her body, like Rhoda’s, blooming under his touch. He opened her legs and laid his face there.

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna.

  ‘No,’ he said, replacing her skirt. ‘No.’

  He switched on the car engine, and reached for her hand. ‘I won’t forget this,’ he said.

  She believed that, too late, he had chosen her over Rhoda.

  Miss Macdonald was pleased with Anna’s progress. She had introduced a new idea into the shop which was working very well. When a new consignment of dresses arrived she appraised each one carefully. Then she made out a list and rang up a number of farmers’ wives. ‘I’ve got just the dress here for you,’ she told each one. ‘Would you like me to send it out on the rural delivery for you to try?’

  This new service surprised and pleased the store’s customers. Not a single dress was returned. Miss Macdonald said to Anna one morning that it would be a good idea for her to go into town with her to do some buying at the warehouse. She would get an old friend who had helped her out in the past to keep the shop open.

  After they had spent the morning amongst rows of dresses, Miss Macdonald sent her off to do some shopping of her own while she settled the bills. Anna could tell that she was still pleased with her.

  Outside she saw Rhoda Aukett. She was walking along the street, her shoulders slightly bowed. She didn’t see Anna as her attention was entirely absorbed by a child, a listless, dreamy-looking boy, perhaps four or five years old. She knew, at once, that it was Rhoda’s child. She could not say how she knew, but there was something about the connection between them, and his look of her, that told her. Anna watched them from a shop doorway, saw the way she turned to him and smiled. Something had worn thin in Rhoda Aukett, but still she smiled, and the child looked back at her with an open trusting face, a face which could still believe that there are reasons for everything and that disappearances are only temporary.

  ‘I saw Rhoda Aukett in town today,’ she told her mother when she got home that evening.

  ‘Did she have her kid with her?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  She looked at Anna, puzzled. ‘Well, Tilly told me. She told everybody when she found out.’ Her mother seemed to have forgotten how recently Anna had crossed over that secret divide between schoolgirl and working woman, and how much might still be hidden from her. All the edges were blurred. Clover Johnson’s parents had found a bit of money, as they put it, and Clover was off to boarding school in town to do a sixth form year and get University Entrance. It seemed to Anna that Clover faced endless childhood, and she was sorry for her.

  What she did not ask her mother, but might have done, was whether Tilly knew that Douglas cried when he told Rhoda that she could not bring her child to the farm.

  One other thing happened before she left the drapery shop. Douglas had been gone for six months when he sent her a postcard. Anna did not know that the jungle had already claimed him. Not to instant death but to the illness which would persist for the rest of his life. She believes now that he did not know how ill he was when he posted the card; she is sure he believed that, back on the farm where the grass grew in broad swathes, and the trees were under control, and the birds were no more dangerous than a circling hawk, he would recover his health.

  His postcard came to the shop, and she guessed that this was another of his small ploys to keep his plans to himself. She guessed, too, that he had had news of her, that she was now truly grown up and doing well, and that nobody thought she was peculiar any longer. His card said, simply, ‘I’m coming home.’

  Anna has come across a phrase that stays with her, about women’s lives: the fraught and endless narrative. Who am I? Where did I come from? How did I arrive at where I am now? She conducts these interviews with herself. They are not all, or even often, about Douglas McNaught, for a great many other things have happened to her since then. But he is part of the narrative.

  Anna knows that postcards are a current metaphor for a shorthand account of life: the picture and a dozen words, and you have it all, and, in a way, this was true of Douglas’s postcard, although there was no picture, and the message was even shorter. But something happened when it came, that even now she cannot altogether explain. Miss Macdonald had collected the mail from the Post Office. Anna was folding a bolt of voile when she brought the card into the shop. Without commenting, she put it down on the counter. Anna read it at a glance. Then she put the material down on the counter and, picking up the card, she walked outside and along the road through the village centre, towards the grassy hills. The narrow valley stretched before her, above her the sky bleached to nothing, around her lay the singing sunlit air of early autumn. She knew she could have this forever, for the rest of her life. Her father might have the son he never had. Two farms would become one profitable enterprise. The bloodlines would run cleanly between them. She wanted to squat against the earth, pushing out the first child. She felt the fragrance rising around her, the smell of her own desire.

  Then she turned round and retraced her steps. She wondered whether his card was a warning to make ready, or whether it was offering her a chance to go. It was one thing to come home when you already knew what lay beyond the valley; it was another thing to stay without the chance of ever leaving. This, too, he might already know. Besides, there was Rhoda Aukett.

  Anna might have told any of this to Kathryn, but she didn’t. She might have told her that if she had been her daughter her name might have been Catherine spelled with a C and an I, or that her name might not have been that at all. Instead, she told her that it is difficult to remember much more because she left the valley so soon after she finished school, when a job in broadcasting came up and she moved south to the city. She had only passed through Fish Rock once or twice since then. She had seen Douglas’s grave and she is sorry about what happened to him. She might, but she did not, tell the daughter that when she rang and said who she was, a shiver like violets shaken before a spring wind had passed through her. She thinks of Kathryn’s father as tenderly as she thinks of any man.

  Old and Constant Friends

  IT WAS THE BLOODIED STUMP of his index finger that caught my eye. The pots arranged on the shelf behind the potter were full of grace and colour. The potter, clay swirling beneath
his hands, did not appear to be in pain, or if he was, his face was a mask of indifference to it. Yet I could see the way he must persevere: that the sensitive finger must often bleed, but, in spite of it, he was driven to his work. I wish I did not always look for signs like this. But that is both my nature and my profession, to seek out the evidence, deduce the facts. There is a flaw in this system of collecting images, of course; a conflict between what appears to be there, and what is really there. The man wishes me to see the beautiful strong pots. I want to show the mutilated hand. Was this his story I wished to tell, or my own?

  I turned away abruptly, glad that I was minus my camera. I walked on along the road lined with golden bamboo and blue gum trees, nearly drowning in the dizzy light of morning. My open sandals scuffed up small clouds of dust as I walked along this familiar back route. Earlier I had seen streams of cars heading into town along the main road. Only one or two came along this dusty road. One slowed down behind me.

  ‘Want a lift,’ called the driver, a cheerful, excited man with a high ruddy complexion and a cowlick. His wife, hair in tailored curls, peered at me from the passenger seat. I could see that she, too, was looking for clues. I didn’t recognise either of them.

  ‘Thanks for the offer, but I’d like to walk,’ I said. ‘It’s such a lovely morning,’ I added, seeing that they felt rebuffed.

  I felt my nakedness then, a feeling of exposure. But I had asked for it. Nobody had forced me to go to the reunion. ‘Leave the past to itself,’ Gregor had told me. Your life’s here with me.’

  Gregor is the man I live with in Paris. He is a restoration architect, greatly in demand. He is not a Frenchman, he comes from Vancouver, but he didn’t want to live in my country (and I’m not sure that I do either, despite the way I miss New Zealand) and I didn’t want to live in his, though I could survive Vancouver’s rain. But I’m not ready to commit myself yet, that sense of settling into the future. Besides, Paris is good for us both. We live in an apartment, or a studio as our friends would have it, up one of those spiralling Parisian staircases surrounded by swirling black railings, dusty stained glass lighting the stairwells. I like the way Gregor’s face is there on the pillow in the mornings, a comfortable figure of a man for me to slide my hands over before I get up and light the gas fire. The little pleat beneath his ribs is still contained. I like the way we wander round in the mornings, our mouths full of warm croissants that he has gone out to buy, and scalding coffee, and look together over that city of spires and cathedrals. It is both homely and exotic in a way that I never imagined my life would be.

  I had to come back; my exhibition had just opened in Auckland. Besides, I cannot survive on foreign images. I read them more slowly, like the French language, which has taken me time. ‘Must you really go?’ Gregor had asked before I left. I knew he was thinking that I might not return, and, far from satisfaction that he would miss me, I felt urgent and panicky, because if I was honest, I wasn’t sure of the answer myself.

  I was supposed to have gone back to Paris the week before. But when the invitation to the reunion arrived at the gallery, forwarded from an old address, it was a coincidence I was unable to resist. In the end, I could not stay away. I still had dreams that had the power of rumour, but as the years passed the evidence seemed as insubstantial, the people of my past like fantastic shadows. Did they ever exist?

  The schoolhouse stood at the end of the road. I arrived as a bell began to ring, the old-fashioned kind with the clapper licking its insides. Already, people were moving towards the small assembly hall. I saw how close we would have to stand beside each other.

  ‘So, you’re Cassie Lomax,’ said a voice beside me, before I had a chance to announce myself at the registration desk. The speaker was a broad-faced man with unfashionable sideburns. He grinned uneasily at me. ‘The famous past pupil.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘not really. I mean, yes, I’m Cassie, but not so famous really.’ I had come wishing to keep myself to myself. I am an unexceptional woman, I believe. I have a lean face now, battered by the outdoors, too much sun in foreign places, eyes that are becoming prematurely hooded. I had put aside my usual denim gear and dark shades, in favour of a calf-length linen skirt, a plain silk shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Although I had enjoyed the recent praise, I make small claims for my craft.

  ‘John Royce, the current school principal. You’re just back from Paris? We do read the newspapers here.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘The exhibition seems to be going well.’

  ‘You’ll have brought your camera for an occasion like this?’

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t.’ I glanced around the sea of faces, the swamp of greying heads. I hoped he would take the hint, see that I was looking for someone.

  ‘I do a bit of photography myself.’

  ‘Really? You have wonderful subjects in children. And in an event like this.’

  ‘That’s true. But we’d have liked you to take some pictures. The artist’s record. Perhaps I could lend you my camera. It’s a very good one.’

  I felt myself growing unkind. ‘Haven’t you hired a photographer?’

  ‘Of course.’ He had begun to stammer. ‘For the formal class photos.’

  ‘Good. I doubt if you could afford me.’ I stopped, appalled at what I had said.

  He turned to leave, as embarrassed by my outburst as I was. I could tell that he wished he hadn’t spoken to me, hadn’t revealed a part of himself to me. A bitch, I read in his eyes, too big for her boots. He would mutter this in a subdued voice to people he met in his rounds of hospitality. They would stare at me, looking for peculiar little Cassandra fFoulkes, the girl with the funny accent, clumsy, angry Cassandra. And already I was trying to explain to them in my head, it’s nothing, it’s a very small success. See, I didn’t bring anything, no camera, just myself.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, hoping to win a reprieve, ‘Has Mr Flavell come?’

  He turned back, relief shining from his damp eager eyes, ready to talk about the longest serving head teacher at Loop School.

  ‘His name’s on the list. Would you like me to find him?’

  But the school bell was ringing again; someone plucked his sleeve. I turned away, disappointed. I could have seen Flavell and left. Instead, I found myself swept along by the press of people in the hall. I heard someone call my name but I couldn’t see who.

  John Royce ascended the stage. He led a prayer.

  Young men and maidens,

  Old men and children,

  Praise the name of the Lord.

  ‘We praise the name of the Lord,’ we responded, our voices a full-throated roar, as if we were in a football stadium.

  ‘Welcome back to the Loop School.’ The Loop. The Loopies, they called us. The Loopies from the school in the loop of the road. It’s what we called ourselves.

  A piano tinkled at the side of the stage, honey-voiced children led the school hymn:

  Just as I am, without one plea

  But that thy blood was shed for me …

  It was a small school, almost lost among trees. On the fourth day at Loop School I wet my pants. I sat at an all-in-one wooden seat and desk with a lift-up lid and a hole for the inkwell.

  As the flood started, I squeezed my legs together but it came anyway. The warm puddle on the floor grew larger and more shameful by the second. By the time the junior school mistress, Mrs Watson, noticed, I had begun to cry. The other children had seen it, too, and were poised on the edge of laughter when Flavell came in. The two teachers stood looking at me with distaste.

  ‘Not toilet trained,’ said Mrs Watson, ‘and seven years old. I wonder what sort of home she comes from.’

  ‘She has knowing eyes,’ the head teacher said. He was young for the job, and hungry for promotion. His sandy hair was already receding but his skin was smooth and boyish.

  ‘A trouble maker perhaps,’ the woman said. She was older, perhaps she had hoped for the head teacher’s job herself, but this was in the days be
fore women had posts like that. ‘May I borrow one of your seniors to clean up?’

  ‘She should do it herself. Oh, it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Send her out.’

  I stayed until break in the playground.

  Cassandra fFoulkes did some poops

  under a cabbage tree.

  A blade of grass

  cut her arse and made her do a pee …

  I ran blindly away from the mocking voices, without purpose or direction, wet bloomers clinging to the inside of my legs, stopping when I came to a belt of pine trees that skirted the school. The trees smelt spicy and inviting. I dropped to the ground, my head between my legs. I am a speckled brown rabbit, I thought. When it is night I’ll eat pine needles from the lower branches of the trees. I sat there for what must have been hours, until I heard a girl’s voice calling me through the clamour of birds and insects.

  I sat very still, my limbs as heavy as lead soldiers, smelling the cold piss in my pants. I was no rabbit. If I was, I could leap into the distance, out of sight. But I was tethered to the ground.

  Marcia, I thought, as I tried to work out who was calling me, mentally sorting through recent introductions. Neat blue-black braids and creamy-white skin, her mouth as red as a little firefly daisy.

  ‘Cassandra fFoulkes, the teacher sez, sure and you gotta come in now.’ Bog Irish, my mother would describe her.

  Something in her voice reassured me. It was fear, like mine. When she stumbled across me, I didn’t look up.

  ‘I’m not coming.’

  ‘Course you are. The bell’s gone and the bus’ll be here in a minute.’ She was older than me by perhaps a year or ten. ‘You’ll get a hiding if you don’t.’