by Fiona Kidman
‘It wasn’t a new life, at all,’ said Larry, after Victor moved back. It had happened out of the blue, just a year ago. The house across the road where Victor lived as a boy came up for sale, and the next thing they knew, Victor and Ursula had moved in.
‘Mrs Ross would die if she could see those decks Victor’s putting in,’ said Shirley, when first he began to renovate. It fascinated her the way he was transforming the old place. At the weekends he changed from neat blue suits into checked shirts and a little peaked hat with a flap at the back to keep the sun off his neck while he worked. He had become a tall solid man with a moustache. They hadn’t said more than a couple of hullos since the first surprised acknowledgement of each other’s presence, but she couldn’t take her eyes off what was going on. Then Larry said the stuff about it not being a new life, it never was, and they knew already he hadn’t got long to go, and Shirley stopped watching. She doesn’t see how Larry can believe that that old habit of love has persisted into her adult life. She wishes she had never told him about Victor, but it’s too late.
Now Larry does all the watching for her. Their section slopes away from the house, a twenties bungalow with bay windows, not all that different from Victor’s house. Only the road divides them.
‘At least we’re above them, he can’t sneak off without me seeing him,’ Larry says. ‘It’s certainly something to be above.’
‘For every up there’s a down. We’re someone else’s downside, so don’t get too smart,’ said Shirley, and left him to it.
‘I’m sick of this place looking like Ah Loo’s laundry,’ says Trina, shifting napkins around in front of the heater. ‘This is a helluva time for the clothes drier to pack it in.’ It’s hard to believe Trina’s a grandmother. Her daughter Radinka is home for a week with her baby. Trina is scared she’s going to be left with the baby. ‘I wasn’t that shit hot in the motherhood stakes,’ she tells Shirley, as if Shirley didn’t remember. But Radinka is gorgeous, the daughter of an all-in wrestler from a programme they all used to watch on television. He had a huge stomach and a bald head with stripes in the flesh as if he’d been scarred with a meat cleaver. Radinka is eighteen and looks like a brown panther model when she’s not pregnant. Her body is sleek and sways as she walks, and she has a braid of dark hair down to her waist. Radinka’s not in, which is a disappointment. The main purpose of Shirley’s visit was to see her niece and the new baby. Shirley envies Trina her daughter; she and Larry have three sons between them, one of his and two of hers. His son, and one of hers, are on the ferries; the third one, well don’t ask, she says when anybody does, and it grieves her that she doesn’t know his exact whereabouts, he doesn’t write from where he is, but he’ll turn up when he’s done his stretch. It wasn’t serious, she tells herself, just burglary, nothing aggravated.
‘If only someone could tell me how much time Larry has got left,’ Shirley says.
Trina glances at her, her eyes shrewd, and lets her go on.
‘Three months, three years, I could get my head around it if I knew’
‘You want to take a Lucky Dip,’ says Trina, matter of fact. Trina works in the Lotto shop nowadays. She blows up balloons with a little hand pump for the promotions, and wears funny hats when she’s working behind the counter. She says ‘good luck’ every time she hands over a ticket, no matter how long the queue is, and sometimes she says to her regulars, ‘I’ll have one on you if you win, love,’ and when anyone wins bigger than fourth division she says ‘Congratulations!’ in a big loud voice, so that people will come flocking over to see for themselves that people really do win prizes.
‘What good’s a Lucky Dip going to do me?’ asks Shirley.
‘Heaps if you won. Something to look forward to at least.’
‘You think I’m looking forward to him dying?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Maybe he is, perhaps he’s had enough.’ Shirley feels hard tears like peas under her eyelids, and turns away so that Trina won’t see. Lately, she’s been talking herself into believing this, because it makes her feel better about the way she’s had enough. But she can see that it’s a falsehood, Larry doesn’t want to die, not for as long as she is there to play games with him and look at the sea. The phone rings as Trina is putting on the kettle for a cup of instant coffee. It’s Larry, asking for Shirley. As soon as Trina says she’ll pass her over right away Larry seems to lose interest. When Shirley comes to the phone, he says he had forgotten where she put last night’s paper but he’s just seen it sticking out from under the couch.
‘That was an excuse to ring me,’ says Shirley as she replaces the receiver. Her hands are trembling so much she can hardly pick up her coffee. ‘He’s always checking up on me.’
‘So how is Vic the Dick?’
‘You see, you’re like Larry,’ cries Shirley, exasperated. ‘He’s always on about Victor.’
‘Well, Victor was a dickhead,’ Trina says. ‘D’you remember how his mother used to check his lunchbox to see if he’d eaten all his lunch? When he was twelve, for crying out loud?’
‘He was just a kid. He grew up. He played fantastic soccer.’
‘As long as he didn’t get his clothes muddy. He used to say he had a cold when it was raining.’
‘He made the school team.’
‘Yeah. He used to leave you love letters under the soap when he came to visit. Now that was wet. Step into the shower, swoosh swoosh, pick up the soap, scratch scratch, paper in the armpits, purple ink, roses are red violets are blue, give me a clue, Shirley, when will you say I do?’
‘Shut up. He never did.’
‘So why did he come back?’
‘Ask him. Call by and ask him. He might show you the renovations.’
‘Loaded, is he?’
Shirley shrugs. ‘Probably. He’s got a Rover.’
‘Shit, little Victor. I wonder where he got the money from. A couple won first division from our shop the other day, did I tell you? One and a half million dollars. They think I don’t know who they are, but I do. You can tell by the shifty look they give when they walk past the shop. Smirky little smiles, and noses in the air to let you know they don’t need to come in any more. They never missed a week before.’
‘Did they deserve it?’
‘Whoever deserves all that money? It turns people mean. You can see it, they start out with the idea they’ll give it all away, but then they want it for themselves. “It’s actually not much when you think about it,” that’s what some of them say. Imagine. I could use a million or two. I reckon I’d cut half of it out between breakfast and morning tea.’
‘And then you’d give the rest away?’
‘I’d buy Radinka a house.’
‘Where is she?’
‘God knows, Shirl. She’s not out with baby Carl’s father, I’ll tell you that.’ In the next room, Carl is beginning to stir, his whimper rising to a yell. Trina goes through and brings the baby out, smelling of milk and urine. She puts him in Shirley’s arms and hands her a bottle. Shirley is disappointed that Carl doesn’t look like his mother, though she doesn’t say so. He has pale eyes and no hair at all so far.
‘I don’t want her to go on the game, Shirl. Times have changed out there. You can pretty well put sex worker on your tax return these days, and they’ve got a union and all, but there’s a lot of other bad stuff that never used to be there.’
‘Why did you do it, Treen?’
Trina shifts uneasily, pushing a bottle into Carl’s mouth. ‘I just turned a few tricks, nothing much.’
‘It killed our dad.’
‘Thanks a bundle, that’s great for my self-esteem. I liked it, that’s why You know your problem, Shirley, you’re missing your sex life, you ought to deal with it.’
In a way, although she’s decided not to tell Trina, Shirley has dealt with it. In her job at the hotel, she works as a housemaid on evening shifts. Her first task of the evening is to go through the bedrooms turning back the covers and leaving a
flower and a chocolate on the pillows. It was embarrassing work when she first started it. She carries a master key to the rooms. First of all she knocks and, if nobody answers, she lets herself in. Of course some people are so engrossed in what they are doing they don’t hear her knock. ‘I’m sorry I’ll come back later,’ she says, averting her eyes, although she can sense some of them quite like an audience. She has learned to hesitate, half smiling, for these ones, and, looking toward the mirrors, to say gently, ‘I’ll fix the bed for you later.’
One day she knocked on the door of Room 1034 and there had been no reply. Inside, she found a man sitting alone by the window in a pink arm chair, too small for him by far.
‘Hev you time for a drink?’ he asked, and she recognised his accent as Dutch.
‘Perhaps a quick one in the bar, when I’ve finished,’ she said, not intending to do anything of the sort. Management says you should try and get out of these situations without giving offence, although usually she doesn’t tell a lie, and afterwards she wonders about that, how easily this semblance of an arrangement had come to her tongue.
‘You have the most beautiful hands and ankles in the world,’ he said, ‘and I can tell you are a good woman. I apologise to you.’
She remembers the way she blushed and how sincere he had seemed in his embarrassment.
‘Just one. Nine-thirty downstairs.’
Hank has sandy hair and a paunch, but he is a strong older man, a farmer from the south. Lately, he has been having tax problems. He comes to town often to see his accountant. ‘God gave me an accountant. In a roundabout way,’ says Shirley and giggles over her whisky sour, when he tells her this. She can’t explain the joke to him, it feels too personal, and too much like a come-on. Enough people have heard about Victor, her first great love, who certainly isn’t that any more. It’s only other people who won’t let her forget.
‘It’s nothing,’ she said, ‘just something I remembered.’
‘May the memory be green,’ he said, and sipped his drink.
‘That’s beautiful,’ she told him. It felt just right what he had said, and for a moment she almost did tell him about Victor and how she’d loved him so much all those years ago, and how he had come back and spoiled everything for her. It had been a green and beautiful memory the night she told Larry about it, and now it was black and uncontrollable the way it was raging through her life.
‘Hamlet,’ he said. ‘I read much at nights when I was a farm labourer, working for my farm. There was no money, nothing to do but read, read, read. Shakespeare, I thought that is what I should read, what British people read.’
A thinker, oh my God, Shirley thought. Spare me from thinkers, I’ve managed to stay clear of them all my life, though lately Larry had been showing dangerous tendencies in this direction. She’s always feared she might fall for a man who thought.
‘I do nothing but watch television these days,’ he told her, amused. He could see right into her problem. ‘There’s a Clint Eastwood movie on right now. You want to watch it in my room?’
They didn’t, but they did everything else, and she was grateful. She wanted to say dangerous careless words like I love you. She had to lie about a double shift when she got home, and afterwards she was better organised about time and finishing her work quickly so that she could have time with him.
He always asks for the same room.
‘Is Room 1034 occupied?’ Shirley asks the receptionists when she gets in. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, yes or no.
Territorial invasion, they warn if it’s not Hank. Of late, he’s often there. Hank’s wife is furious with him for his tax problems. She has threatened to leave him if he can’t sort them out. Sometimes Shirley and Hank both cry when they tell each other their problems.
She is overcome with relief when she hears he is in tonight.
‘You need a holiday,’ he tells her. ‘Is your husband likely to go into hospital? Can you get away? I could take you to Fiji for a week.’
‘What about your tax problems?’
‘Solved.’
‘You won’t be coming back for a while?’
He puts his fingers across her mouth. ‘Could you come?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t.’
Larry does go into hospital. One evening she came in and found him lying on the bathroom floor; she dialled 111 for the ambulance. For two days it seems as if he will die. Shirley doesn’t go to work. Radinka stays on in town, and Shirley is touched by the way she sits beside her uncle, her baby at the breast. She is a calm and peaceful person to be with, and Shirley is full of hope for her. Surely she is not a person who will turn tricks for a living. On the second afternoon, Shirley slips out for fresh air and a coffee across the road from the hospital, because she’s tired of everything she eats and drinks tasting like a cross between antiseptic and dishwater. When she gets back she sees her neighbour Ursula Ross sitting beside the bed, deep in conversation with Radinka. Larry is comatose. None of them see her.
Ursula is dressed in a navy woollen suit and a white blouse with a chaste collar. They are always the worst, the ones to watch, thinks Shirley, full of a savage wonder at this trespass beside her dying husband’s bed. Pure white collars. Ursula holds her light tan handbag in her lap. Her hair is smartly cut in two upswept wings above her ears.
‘I felt I should come,’ she says to Radinka. ‘Victor says it’s true we hardly know Larry, but when we saw the ambulance take him away again, I said it’s never too late. We’ve joined Neighbourhood Watch you know, and here’s the man next door so ill, and we haven’t even made his acquaintance. Of course, I believe his poor wife knew Victor when they were younger. She keeps herself to herself, well I suppose that’s what trouble does to you.’
That’s me they’re talking about, Shirley marvels to herself, and walks in so that Ursula can get the full picture.
Later that night, Larry opens his eyes and speaks to her in a hoarse whisper.
‘My darling wife,’ he says, ‘you’ve been a great girl. Couldn’t have wished for better.’
‘Me neither, sweetheart,’ she says.
He lapses back into something between sleep and a coma. She guesses this is it, the deathbed scene.
A nurse says, ‘Go home for a bit, Mrs Birchall. Get some rest.’
‘I shouldn’t leave him now,’ says Shirley.
‘I’ll call you if there’s any change.’
Out in the carpark she is swept with desolation. ‘Larry,’ she mutters, ‘oh Gawd, Larry heart.’ A shadow moves near her, a human figure. She doesn’t feel afraid. For a crazy moment she thinks it might be Hank who has somehow tracked her down. Something else wells up, swollen, hot and so strong she is ashamed. It’s desire, she wants him so badly that she would stand against a fence, backed up like an animal if he was there. Her at fifty-one, with Wella-toned hair, all seventy-four kilos of her, she wants a man so badly she can smell it on herself. The shadow moves towards her. It’s Radinka.
‘Can I get a lift with you, Auntie Shirl?’
‘Of course, love. I thought you had your car.’
‘It was nice of the lady from next door to come over,’ says Radinka, when she’s settled.
‘Oh yeah. What did she actually want?’
‘To see Larry’ Radinka’s voice is surprised. Maybe, Shirley thinks, Radinka doesn’t know about her and Victor. There is no reason for Trina to have told her all that old stuff, always said Victor was boring.
‘Auntie Shirl,’ says Radinka. Something urgent about the way she speaks alerts Shirley. ‘You know, you want to watch out.’
‘Me?’ says Shirley, with a careful laugh.
‘People are saying things.’
‘Now look here, young lady, all that business about Victor is nonsense.’
‘Mr Ross? Her old joker?’
‘That woman’s been filling your head up with ideas, hasn’t she? Or is it your mother? Oh, she likes to make trouble, that sister of mine. I can tell you, that was over cen
turies ago. Well, a long time ago.’
Radinka lets her rattle on until she has nothing left to say.
‘No?’ Shirley feels ice round her heart. ‘Who’s been saying what?’
‘Larry’s old mates. Those fishermen, they hear things. You know what those Italians are like, they don’t take shit when it comes to their mates.’
Shirley thinks of the dimly lit corridors at the hotel, the carpets that muffle footsteps, the rooms where life goes on behind doors. She can see that fishermen, on land, might know these things too.
‘And how come you talk to them?’
The girl is silent. Shirley, a woman who, it seems, has three men of her own, feels worse about what Radinka has just told her about herself than she does on her own account. Radinka looks defiantly out the window at the city sliding by.
Larry comes home again. He’s not ready for the big one yet. The days pass. Shirley takes leave from her job, aware that it might not be there for her when she is ready to take it up again. She and Larry play Chinese Checkers and she takes Bevis for walks. It is on one of these walks up the hill that she and Victor finally talk to each other. Although she has shed two kilos in the past weeks she still puffs. She sits on a park bench angled for the view, near the top of the hill. Victor sits down beside her. Shirley tethers Bevis’s leash to the leg of the bench. It’s spring, a trace of snow still lying on the mountains to the south. The two of them sit and look at the sea, that band of water they have both looked over, on and off, since they were children.
‘Did Larry see you leave?’ asks Shirley, as if he would know how Larry feels about him.
‘I went down the front way, through the ngaio trees.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You’re just the same, Shirl.’
‘No I’m not.’ She laughs.