The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘It was Christ,’ I told her, ‘I couldn’t stomach him.’

  ‘You mean, we were Catholics.’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean that.’ I stood in front of the mirror, bending towards it, so that the cheap fluorescent light lit up the lines along my cheekbones. My eyes looked dishonest, even to me. I pulled out my lipstick and began to draw a large red mouth for myself.

  ‘You don’t think you did. Not now. Too liberal, by far. I’ll bet you’re a real little supporter of causes, Cassie.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I am. So what’s your story?’

  Marcia’s voice deepened as she began to imitate a familiar voice. ‘I’ll have to enrol your children, Mrs O’Donnell, there being no convent around here. But just make sure they don’t go round spreading their Papist ways to other children.’

  ‘Flavell.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought you were one of his favourites?’

  ‘I wanted God and Mr Flavell to love me better than any other kid in the world.’

  ‘You never said anything. I thought you’d tell everyone what a baby I was, running home.’

  ‘Well, I just thought, that’s it, she’s found out about us. She’ll tell Flavell we don’t eat meat on Fridays.’

  ‘I’m going back to the motel for a drink,’ I said. ‘Do you want to come, or do you still have some more dancing to do?’

  She hesitated a moment and smiled. I could see she was tired. ‘I’ve had a dance with Don,’ she said. ‘Honour done.’

  ‘You’re better than I am. Although, if it comes to that, he didn’t ask me.’

  ‘I laid him once,’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t?’ I couldn’t contain my fierce distaste.

  ‘A goodbye present at the end of high school. Of course, you’d beggered off then. Goodbye Cassandra clever clogs, off to boarding school.’ I looked over my shoulder, back towards clusters of people round the door, their cigarettes glowing in the dark; and I thought of him being so lucky. Set up, put on his way, the mystery revealed. If she became promiscuous, and I guessed that she did, that would have come later. For Don, an act of uncomplicated generosity.

  Back at the motel, she turned her gin and tonic this way and that, then swallowed it straight down. ‘You know what Flavell did to us, don’t you Cassie?’

  I had to think about that. Us. Before it had always been what he’d done to me.

  ‘He picked us off one by one, and turned us against each other,’ she said. ‘Everyone who was different. Uglies, brown skins, Mickey Doolans like me. Clever people like you. Do you think he’s really at this reunion?’

  ‘Flavell?’ That hadn’t occurred to me. ‘You mean, he’s just a figment of our imaginations?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ she said, slowly.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Why doesn’t he appear? I mean, did he register and then not turn up?’

  ‘Perhaps he’s hiding from us.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. He probably thinks he’s our hero. Shall we cut and run?’

  ‘I’ve promised to judge this competition,’ I said.

  She sighed. ‘Always a good girl at heart.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I said, and stopped.

  ‘All this frigging modesty. You can grab the last sandwich off the plate as quick as the next, I’ll guarantee.’

  ‘Stay a while and talk,’ I said.

  We were still talking, still drinking, when the phone rang.

  ‘The boyfriend,’ she said, her eyes shrewd. We had told each other a good deal by then.

  ‘So, how’s it going?’ Gregor asked.

  ‘Great, it’s going just great,’ I said. ‘How come all my friends are North American these days?’ I laughed, that drunken late night laughter that hadn’t overtaken me in years, and winked at Marcia. ‘Old times. We’ve got a lot to catch up on.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re having a good time.’ His voice was cool.

  ‘Well, of course I am. That’s what I came for.’

  ‘Okay, Cassie. Sure.’

  ‘What have you been doing?’ I said, trying to recover myself. I could see where this was leading, the phone slammed down in the middle of the night. My night, anyway. A few sleepless hours until dawn.

  ‘Nothing much. I saw a couple of exhibitions. Looked at some photographs.’

  ‘Anything interesting?’

  ‘Yeah.’ His voice had become slow and meditative. ‘A retrospective, early stuff I saw this picture of a boot.’

  ‘A boot?’

  ‘Yeah, a boot. A footballer kicking a ball. The ball looks like a kind of a sponge, and just above it there’s a little globe of light.’

  ‘Light. Where does the light come from?’

  ‘It’s a circlet of dust actually, risen from the ball in a millionth of a second, as the foot lands on the ball.’

  I breathed slowly, wanting him to keep on talking. Moments before I had felt angry and cornered. ‘So what is the point?’ I asked.

  ‘What’s the point? I don’t know, Cassie. You tell me.’ He sounded tired and flat, across on the other side of the world.

  ‘I don’t know either. I haven’t seen the picture.’

  ‘Well, there was a caption under the picture. It said, the empty spaces between the thinnest slices of time have been filled. Something like that.’

  ‘Is that what we’re doing? Filling the empty spaces.’

  The silence was so long I almost thought he had hung up on me, if it were not for the faint catch of his breath. ‘I think,’ he said at last, ‘that we’ve got the thinnest slice of time at our disposal. In the order of things.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said. I added, ‘Good night,’ before I put the phone down.

  ‘For Chrissake, honey,’ said Marcia, ‘for Chrissake, that guy’s in love with you.’

  ‘That could be.’

  ‘Old chicks like us can’t pass up our opportunities,’ she said. ‘I mean, really, Cass.’

  ‘Count myself lucky?’

  She sighed. ‘Something like that.’

  When I finished judging the children’s art, I asked John Royce where Flavell was. He wanted to talk about the art work, did I think it had changed much since I was at school, were the forms more vigorous, the colour more free? I said it was hard to remember, that I was sure it was, though perhaps no less diagrammatic, only more frightening, if I was truthful. He wanted me to explain myself, to tell him if I thought they were getting things right, was the school on the right track? Yes, I told him, yes of course. But why, I asked him, why didn’t Flavell judge the competition?

  He shrugged. ‘I believe he hasn’t been well.’

  ‘Hasn’t been well. Ha.’ Marcia was at my shoulder. ‘D’you believe that, Cassie? Eh, what’s he playing at?’ A small crowd began to gather, Dodie and Mihi at its centre.

  ‘Flavell, we’re coming to get you,’ Marcia shouted suddenly. Everyone jumped, a flicker of uncertainty crossing each face. I saw that in a sudden shift in the weather, the sky was clouding over, turning dark and menacing, as if a storm was racing in off the Pacific. In spite of this, the heat was intense, that heavy stultifying humidity that strikes the sub-tropics. I began moving, as if mesmerised, to join these women from my past, linked as we were in a profound untested rage, dammed up since our childhood.

  ‘Flavell,’ I echoed, ‘we’re coming to get you.’

  ‘Ms Lomax … Cassie,’ Royce said, his voice in ruins. ‘Please don’t … spoil things.’

  ‘Flavell,’ I called. ‘Come out wherever you are.’

  And then, we began to march, stamping our feet in imitation of soldiers. FLA-VELL, FLA-VELL, FLA-VELL, we shouted.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Don Thompson appeared, bringing up the rear. ‘Where are y’all off to?’

  ‘Get Flavell.’ I heard my voice, thick and dirty, like phlegm.

  ‘I’ll come.’

  Others joined in the rampage; I didn’t recognise all of them; some older than myself, others younger, spanni
ng twenty years of Flavell’s reign.

  Mihi pointed with a wild wide gesture towards the staffroom window. ‘There.’

  A thin figure stood back from the window, apparently gazing down at the advancing mob. I don’t know how I knew it was him. Something about the way he stood and stared in an unmoving resolute way, as if nothing he could see would disquiet him.

  ‘He’s been here all the time,’ Marcia said. ‘He was hiding.’

  Beside me, I heard Don say: ‘Bastard.’ Then he scooped a rock from the edge of a flowerbed, and flung it in one fluid motion. Glass shattered at our feet.

  We stopped then.

  The rock had missed Flavell. He didn’t appear hurt. He was dressed in a shabby, rust-coloured three-piece suit, an old man trembling on his stick, glaring at us through the damage we had caused. Like children, we began to wonder aloud, one by one, what would happen to us.

  ‘Holy Mother of God,’ said Marcia, ‘if this gets back home, I’ll be out of a job.’

  ‘I’m on probation for drunk driving already’ Don said.

  Mihi and Dodie began to wail. It was as if we had let the genie out of its bottle and now we could not contain its contents.

  Flavell turned away, back to where he had been sneaking lamingtons and chocolate creams. He pushed cake into his mouth with childish greed, a spool of spittle on his chin. I knew then that he hadn’t the faintest idea who we were, or why we were there. He was like any other old man smelling like the skimmings off meat.

  Mihi stood close to me, her eyes still flecked with fear. From her wrist hung a cheap Polaroid camera. I turned and snatched it from her, raised it to my eye. In the silence that had descended, I snapped Flavell’s picture.

  ‘Tell them I did it,’ I said. ‘Tell them, Flavell, that it was Cassandra who did it.’

  A collective sigh rustled through the crowd. If I was looking for approval in their eyes, I didn’t find it. As if the matter was already settled.

  In the background, I heard the voice of John Royce lifted in a desperate closing prayer. ‘Let us give thanks for this weekend of remembrance. Let us rejoice in the days of our youth.’

  I slipped Mihi’s camera into the flax kete lying at her feet, glad to be leaving her a present.

  Here for a season, then above

  O Lamb of God, I come

  I stopped beside the flagpole. Another day came back. On the day of King George the Sixth’s funeral, the school kept two minutes’ silence, all over the country. All over the Commonwealth, as Flavell told us. I was older then. Flavell had begun to have some regard for me; perhaps he admired my survival skills. He had come to think of me as conscientious. I was foolishly grateful, proud to be chosen that day. I stood outside by the flagpole and rang the bell to signal that the silence was beginning, and again when it ended. It seemed like the longest silence in the history of the world. In those two minutes, I found myself wondering what my life would be like. Whether anyone would keep silence when I died. And if they didn’t, would it matter?

  I was, of course, turning towards the future that day, to the grown-up world.

  Rain began to fall over the flowery scented landscape, as I hurried away from Loop School. I started to compose a letter in my head to Gregor: Does this mean, I wrote in my imaginary sky handwriting, that I am grateful to Flavell? No, no, of course not — if I had been really writing, my hands would have been trembling — I have always known that our monsters, all the terrors of our dark and sleepless nights, are only men and women and what we do to each other. For an instant, as in that circlet of dust or light you mentioned last night, I remembered why I take photographs, and why I do what I do. It’s easy to forget.

  But this was an image I would not lose. It would always be available for reference. There are some pictures you carry in your head.

  Like places, perhaps.

  I breathed deeply, smelling the sultry air, heavy with the fragrance of damp honeysuckle and citrus leaves, and walked on.

  Habits of Love

  WHEN SHIRLEY HEARS LARRY putting out the Chinese Checkers she knows he is trying to keep her home for a while longer. They make a plastic tinkle as they fall round in the box. Last time they played she shoved them back any old way. He says she should always put them back in the holes so they’re ready for the next game. He complains that the Monopoly money is not put back in the right denominations.

  ‘Want to be purple or yellow?’ he calls, as if it’s all set that they will play.

  ‘Neither,’ says Shirley, steeling herself. This is what the counsellors have told her, she must have some life of her own. Sometimes, they said, she would feel as if she was being hard, but it was better for Larry in the long run. She wouldn’t be any good to him if she didn’t stand up for herself and have time out. Larry has a terminal illness, heart disease, that the doctors can’t do anything more about. He has had two failed bypasses. It’s only a matter of time, but nobody can tell her how much.

  He sees that she is wearing her uniform for work at the hotel, a peach-pink overall dress with floral print pockets. She is a solid, meaty woman with delicate hands and fingernails covered with clear nail polish, which shows off her fine white cuticles. Her seal-brown hair is piled up in a floppy bun on top of her head.

  ‘You don’t have to be at work for another hour and a half,’ he says.

  ‘I told you I might call in on Trina.’

  He has already put the yellow pegs in their holes. His lower lip trembles. Shirley turns away. She can’t bear to see him like this. None of it seems fair. Larry is fifty-four and hasn’t a hint of grey amongst his thick crinkly hair; its crest looks hard-edged, like he used to be, before this, before his illness. His fisherman’s eyes are still piercingly bright. It’s his cheeks that give his condition away, every capillary shining through the paleness of his skin, like a biology textbook with sections of people revealed without the epidermis.

  ‘Meeting Victor, are we?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ says Shirley.

  ‘Oh, stupid now, is it?’ He continues to put pegs in the holes. He is filling in the whole board, so Shirley guesses he will play all six corners at once. There’s really no point in her playing him. He can thread the lines for zig-zag jumping before she can vacate her corner.

  ‘He went out half an hour ago. It would give you plenty of time. Where would you meet him? Out at the quarry? Should be quiet there this afternoon.’

  ‘It’s Sunday, there’ll be people walking round to Red Rocks.’

  ‘Oh, pardon me, have you somewhere else planned? Sunday, eh? That makes it harder. What about the town belt? Some good tracks around there.’

  ‘I’m not meeting Victor.’

  ‘But you used to.’

  ‘When I was sixteen. Thirty-five years ago.’

  ‘So why did he come back here to live? He’ll marry you when I’m gone.’

  ‘Will he really? And what would Ursula have to say about that?’

  ‘She won’t have any say. He’ll dump her, like his last two wives.’

  ‘That’s his business.’

  ‘Because he was hanging out for you. Just waiting for when you’d be free again.’

  Bevis, their boxer, looks from one to another with hopeful wistful eyes. Larry has recently had to give up even the pretence of walking him, he gets too short of breath. The last time he walked Bevis they got as far as the corner dairy and he had to ask the woman to ring Shirley to come and collect him in the car. They live on a hill. In the early days of his illness they saw that as a good thing, walking up this hill to keep him healthy. Now he talks about shifting to a flat property where it would be easier for him to walk, easier to breathe.

  But that’s not what it’s about. Larry knows his days are numbered. He doesn’t expect to live anywhere else but here on the hill where he can see the water shining in the mornings, the big sea that he used to ride through southerlies and swell, or on clear days when you could see the fish running and the sun shone in peaks on the waves
all around him. There isn’t time to go anywhere else.

  It is Victor Ross who causes him so much grief, now when death is reaching out to squeeze him by the throat. Victor, who courted Shirley when they were in high school. No, it wasn’t like that, they courted each other, she told Larry once. This was when they lived in Napier, and he fished out of there, a man with hard muscles and a quick tongue. Larry had met Shirley in a bar one night, not long after her first marriage broke up, and he was a widower. They told their life stories to each other the same night when they were not exactly drunk but not quite sober either. They walked down the Parade past cheap hotels and on and on past railway cottages, smelled the yellow sulphur mountain that gleamed unearthly green-yellow in the moonlight, outside the chemicals factory.

  ‘I see the moon,’ sang Larry.

  ‘God bless the moon,’ Shirley sang back.

  ‘My first love,’ she told him, ‘a boy called Victor; I’ll never forget him. The boy next door, can you believe, his mother didn’t approve of me. “My Victor will go to uni,” as if it were written in the stars. “You’re a tart, Shirl,” she said when she caught us at it. Me, I’d never had another boy in my life, never looked at one, it was always Victor, Victor from when I was a little kid, the boy I was going to marry. His father was an accountant and mine worked for the Council. I married on the rebound after they shipped him off for his world tour. Sour face, his mother was, looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, those pretty pansy-round eyes that say holier than thou. God was good to me, giving me an accountant, she said once to my mother when they were at the shops. Well, I hear she’s dead now, and God knows where Victor is, though my mother says he’s doing well. As you’d expect.’

  Then Larry said, ‘You’ve got me now.’

  ‘You’re joking,’ Shirley said.

  But he wasn’t, and they’ve had twenty years, and that’s enough to classify as a long and happy life, Shirley thinks. Which was not to say the first years were easy. They lived in his house with the ghost of his first wife, and all the relatives who lived round about took their time getting to know her. Then her mother died and left her and Trina the house in Wellington, and when she said to Larry, let’s go and make a new life, let’s start over, Trina sold out her half of the house to Shirley, and Larry fished Cook Strait with the Italians, and did just as well as he’d done up north.