The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘The way we look doesn’t change us.’

  ‘Well, I am different.’ What she is thinking is that, once, he was the only guy she ever wanted. She didn’t understand the number of choices and chances there were in the world. Now she does, and it scares her that she knows so much, but she is relieved as well. She is not going to lie to him and tell him he’s the same. After all, when it comes to marriage, he has changed more often than she has.

  ‘Ursula seems like a good woman,’ she says at last.

  He looks at his big smooth hands. ‘She’s a lovely woman.’

  ‘It was nice of her to visit Larry. She looks like your mother.’

  ‘Really? Well. I must say, it’s the kind of thing my mother would have done. Visiting the sick.’

  ‘But not let you marry me?’

  He hesitates, flustered. ‘It’s been on my conscience. I was not able to articulate my response to that situation at the time.’

  Articulate his response to that situation. Where did he learn to talk like that? What does it mean? He is floundering on, using terms like clarifying his situation, understanding her position, wouldn’t want her to take the wrong meaning from his presence in the neighbourhood. This last she understands.

  ‘You used to put love letters under the soap,’ she says. ‘Written in purple ink.’

  ‘So I did, yes.’ He stands up and she sees that the interview, for this is surely what it is, is over.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve got Ursula,’ she says. ‘It’s good to know when you’ve come home.’

  ‘I hope your husband doesn’t suffer too long,’ he says, stiffly.

  ‘Go back through the ngaio trees,’ she says, and hopes he picks the acid in her voice.

  ‘I told you Larry. You should have listened. He’s just a guy who married his mum. I don’t know why you ever worried about Victor.’

  Shirley sighs when Larry doesn’t reply. Pretending he’s asleep. She knows he’s not, he muttered at Bevis just thirty seconds ago when he walked over near the bed. Bevis is restless tonight, walking round and round the room. Shirley sits at the table by the window, the desk-lamp’s shadow like a giant praying mantis on the wall behind her, as she sets out the board with Chinese Checkers.

  ‘I’ll have a game with you in the morning,’ she tells him. ‘You’ll like that, won’t you?’ She wishes he would say something, anything, because he must know that that part of her life is sorted. You couldn’t get serious about a man like Victor. She expects he has known this all along. All the same, now, now is the time she should tell him the rest of it before someone else does.

  The hairs on Bevis’s neck stand up, a growl between his teeth.

  ‘You be quiet, you,’ she says. ‘We don’t need an audience. You can go outside if you don’t like this.’ The dog flops over, nudging her foot with his nose.

  Larry, she turns it over in her head, the way she will say it. He reminded me of you. I’ve been missing you something awful, all that stuff we had between us. I know you won’t like it much, but no harm done. He was a decent sort of joker. Now I’m ready, if you know what I mean, ready for the next bit. Well, it needs to be said. You never know what’s around the corner. I won’t do anything crazy. I can see how it might bother you, but it’s all right, really it is.

  Shirley stands, pushing Bevis out of the way. It comes to her then, that this is what has troubled Larry all along, that he knew, because this was the thing about her and Larry, they knew each other through and through. How could she have overlooked this? Victor was only ever an excuse.

  But it’s all right now, because it’s out there in the open.

  Well, soon anyway. In the morning, perhaps, when they are sitting face to face across the board. They’re too tired to talk about it now, it’s too late. Her fingers itch to start the game, straying towards a green peg and lifting it out of its corner. No more secrets, Larry.

  She walks to the window, looking out at the night, the houses stretching below her, lights leaking round the closed edges of the blinds. The hills stand out in brilliant silhouette, and there are chasms of stars so vast over the sea that she feels abandoned in space. The sound of Larry’s rough breath travels through her, reaching out beyond. Freedom comes, she says to herself, like a song she knows. This giant starscape threatens to engulf her, and she stands quite still, afraid to breathe in case she misses the beginning of eternity.

  Tell Me the Truth About Love

  1

  ON THIS BLUSTERY FRIDAY AFTERNOON in July, Veronica is able to tell Cam McGuire that she has somewhere else to go after work. She doesn’t need to join her colleagues for their weekly social drinks. Thank God it’s Friday, but not for me.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ says Cam, as they tramp the school’s linoleum-floored corridors. ‘You can tell me, Vronnie, I know what it’s like to be lonely.’

  Vronnie. A name he called her when they were young. Nobody uses this now; it belongs in the seventies’ dustbin along with sideburns and Patty Hearst trials; Veronica wore maxi skirts and platform soles at the time.

  Cam has temporarily rejoined the staff, after an absence of years. He is a thin gingery man, his balding white skull only lightly masked with wisps of red hair. Thick spectacles shroud his light-blue eyes. It is his short-sightedness that has caused him to leave the stage.

  Cam was an eccentric teacher of English when he first came to the school. The kids liked his accent and manic gleeful impersonations. People said he was just too good to stay in teaching. Veronica, who loves teaching, could never see the logic in this. She’s always liked chalk and scratchy blackboards and the smell of big boys and girls in uniform on wet days. Cam can’t wait to be off again when his cataract operation is done. For a while in the eighties he was in a comedy show on television. He carries a cellphone to class to take producers’ calls.

  ‘I’m no stranger to being alone,’ he says. ‘I’ve been through all of this.’

  Well, yes, thinks Veronica, two or three times. She has gathered that Cam is currently unattached. But it is the end of his first marriage she remembers.

  ‘Truly. I’m going to stay with friends in the country.’ It sounds like a Russian novel. She decides not to tell him who she is going to stay with.

  ‘Well, just give me a buzz, sweetheart.’ He says sweetheart in a deep theatrical way. He and Veronica have arrived at the end of the corridor. Cam stops and fumbles in his pocket for a notebook.

  ‘Have you got a pen on you? I’ll give you my number.’ Can he be serious? She sees herself as he must, a thickening teacher of history, with straight toffee-coloured hair streaked with grey, half spectacles perched on the end of her nose.

  And there is the matter of the past. Surely he cannot have forgotten the role she played in his life. But perhaps that is her complication, the long view she brings to everything she sees, to the people who reach out to her. More likely he is just thinking that she is someone who might be available. Still, she can’t help wondering how well, even, does he remember Morag?

  ‘Now you will ring me,’ he fusses, handing her a slip of paper. ‘In the old days, we could talk to each other, you and me.’ That is not how she recalls it, but at least it is an acknowledgement. The world is changing all around him, Veronica thinks, and he hasn’t noticed. It’s like cyberspace hasn’t been invented. That’s what she likes about history, it’s fluid, it changes all the time. Perhaps that’s why she remembers all that detail about their lives and reevaluates it over and again. Some day, she hopes, she will work it all out. Whereas Cam, she suspects, watching him disappear in the direction of the staffroom, is stuck with a notion of them of how they were, youthful and unchanged by the passage of time.

  Colin was a dark rosy-lipped poet with slim hips and a sweet white smile. His study was a shed in the back garden of the house where Veronica still lives. Handsome young men sat around like acolytes and smoked dope with stringy girls in overalls. Veronica got sick of pulling marijuana plants from between the daisy bushes.
The girls talked about menstrual extraction, anger management and recipes for vegetable stew. They walked through the house without knocking. This was Wellington, in the days when poets and artists all round town held salons in squalid houses while their wives cooked on woks over broken gas rings. Veronica and Colin’s house was almost indecent in its newness, a wooden bungalow on the down side of the road in Highbury, but at least they caught a glimpse of the ocean. Colin was getting famous, it was the time when he began to think he was invincible. His photograph was in the papers, usually looking hunky and a little dishevelled and driving a truck, which was what he did for a part-time job. The Listener ran a double-spread feature on him, he often read poems on the Concert Programme in his dark uncultivated voice with its hint of a vee in place of the ‘th’. ‘Real NewZild, but true, a second Baxter, another Glover,’ raved one reviewer; not quite what he wanted to hear, he was hanging out with the Black Mountain poets and he thought it was bad for his image. Women rang him late at night. One of his poems was about a Canadian girl with eyes ‘like burnt coals in the ice’. More like two pissholes in the snow, said Veronica, who had met the girl. But she said it with a laugh, because she did trust him, and because she couldn’t see that anyone could see much in the girl anyway.

  Veronica paid the mortgage but didn’t mind, at least not very much, although she would have liked the garden to herself on Sunday afternoons. ‘My wife, the bank manager’s daughter,’ Colin said with a laugh. ‘I married into the middle classes.’ Veronica hated it when he talked like this. Her father had just an ordinary wage, she explained, nothing grand. Besides, Colins references to money management made her feel bossy and difficult. Colin’s family were farm labourers. ‘Farm labourers never had to worry about mortgages,’ he declared, ‘they never got them.’ The true prole.

  ‘Sometimes I feel like we’re drifting,’ Veronica told Lewis. Lewis was best man at their wedding and their oldest mutual friend. He was a doctor, setting up his first practice. ‘A doctor who can quote Milton, and the Book of Common Prayer,’ Colin said, if asked to describe Lewis. Would you believe it? ‘What hath night to do with sleep,’ was Lewis’s favourite quote when they flatted together in university days. But it went back further than medicine, further than university. Lewis loved words when they were children, living on different sides of the track in the same small town. Perhaps Colin would never have learned anything had it not been for Lewis.

  In the early years of Veronica and Colin’s marriage, Lewis visited every weekend that he wasn’t on duty. Although he rented a beautiful apartment on the Terrace, crammed with treasures from regular travel — old maps, African masks, Asian statues — he often preferred to sleep over on their convertible divan than stay there alone. ‘Lewis is married to us,’ Veronica and Colin half-joked to each other.

  ‘Of course you’re not drifting,’ Lewis said sturdily, that afternoon. He and Veronica were drinking coffee in the kitchen while Colin entertained in the garden. ‘You two are the air each other breathe. C’mon, let’s see what the blighter’s up to.’

  And they walked together down the garden, Veronica pleased to have Lewis at her side as they took their place in the group. Nobody appeared to notice their arrival.

  At some point Lewis’s visits had become less frequent, she can’t remember just when, but perhaps for a while without them noticing. ‘Jealous,’ Colin said, when Veronica mentioned it. ‘He was always jealous of my friends.’ ‘He wasn’t jealous of me,’ Veronica protested. ‘That was different.’ He used a tone of exaggerated patience, as if something obvious was escaping her.

  What Colin said bothered her. It implied an oddness in Lewis, a failing she couldn’t see. I’ll give him a bell and he’ll turn up, you’ll see, was all Colin said, when pressed to explain.

  Colin hated school teachers’ parties. Grown-ups playing party games, he snorted. He accompanied Veronica with bad grace; it was a time when it was still not all right to turn up on your own and say your husband was in bed with a cold. Either he went or you stayed home.

  When Christmas came round, that year she remembers so clearly, there was nothing for it but to ask him. She was due to go on maternity leave, there would be a farewell speech for her. Well, what would she tell them, that he would be there or not? This cost her an effort, because of course it was about what people thought and Colin was fond of saying he didn’t care about that.

  ‘Of course I’ll come,’ he said, putting his arms around her, or as far as her big stomach would allow. ‘Whatever made you think I wouldn’t?’

  This was the party where they met Cam and Morag, newly arrived from Scotland. Cam was due to take up his position in the New Year. You noticed him straight away, dressed in a kilt. He danced with all the staff wives, even Veronica, fox trotting her around the cleared staffroom at arm’s length. He turned games into feats of daring, building a tower of chairs and climbing them, to stand one-legged, his mop of hair an exuberant red flag, at the top of the steeple.

  ‘I dare you,’ he yelled to the other men. And they did it, the young men anyway, so that the party turned reckless and chaotic. When Colin’s turn came, he climbed to the ceiling, wobbled uncertainly before collapsing through space, landing heavily on one foot. ‘Oh shit,’ he gasped, ‘my bloody bloody ankle.’ But he was laughing and it wasn’t broken, only sprained, so that he had to keep it strapped for a month. He would appear at his next reading leaning elegantly on a cane.

  Morag never said a word while her husband was performing all these tricks. She sat frozen in a corner and jumped when Veronica spoke to her, responding in a whispering voice. Veronica thought she looked like a margarine sculpture, bland and slightly off-colour. She was a nurse, her specialty nursing children; she thought she would land a job at the hospital quite easily, she said, when prompted.

  ‘I like children,’ Morag said, gulping and looking away from Veronica’s swollen stomach. A deep blush flooded her impossibly fair skin when she saw that Veronica had noticed. Veronica tried to imagine Morag amongst children’s downy heads, bending over them with a sweet transforming grace. Shy, she decided.

  A crowd, including Cam and Morag, ended up at Colin and Veronica’s. Colin hobbled around playing the host. He and Cam were friends on the spot.

  If Colin went to a party now, he could just get drunk without the games, which was what people usually did, Veronica thinks. Except that, the last time their daughter Katie saw her father, he was drinking straight vegetable juice.

  During summer, Colin showed Cam round and took him for trips in his battered Bedford van. The van was sky-blue with fluffy white clouds that Colin had painted on the doors. The young people had gone away, to follow the sun, or summer jobs. Morag worked at her new job and Veronica awaited the birth of Katie. Cam had Colin’s almost undivided attention, except in the evenings when Colin wrote until late into the night. ‘Vronnie, I’m happy,’ he would say when he came to bed, red-eyed and spent. ‘Cam really understands what I’m going through.’

  ‘So, what are you going through?’

  ‘I’ve got to make some changes. I’ve got to settle into my own voice. It’s all crap, don’t you see, everybody’s talking crap. I’m sick of reading down at the Settlement with all the Freed bunch. It’s time I moved on.’

  ‘I see,’ said Veronica, longing to sleep, thinking her waters might break at any moment, and deny her the luxury. She’d heard variations on this theme before. The poets he knew were old fools and young fools, and women.

  ‘I need to begin again at the beginning.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said, closing her eyes.

  Colin said he was thinking of getting in touch with Sam Hunt, but he heard Hunt did his gigs on his own. He might set himself up in something like that, a tour in the country. Perhaps Cam could go with him and act as his manager, they could do a kind of double act.

  ‘Cam’s got a job.’

  ‘In the holidays, I was thinking.’

  ‘We’ll have a baby then.’

&nb
sp; ‘It’s getting the money together to get started,’ Colin said gloomily, as if she hadn’t spoken.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Veronica said.

  Veronica found it impossible to explain the way she missed Lewis when he wasn’t around. After all, he was Colin’s friend first. But Katie brought him back to them, as if he’d never been away. He was almost fatherly towards Katie, the baby who had arrived in the heat of late summer. He visited at the hospital when she was born, and distracted the staff with advice bordering on instructions. When she went home, he popped in on the way to his surgery, just to see how she was doing. He appeared one Sunday afternoon while Colin was holding court. A look of surprise and disapproval registered on his face as he looked down the garden from the verandah. Veronica could see him waiting for Colin to give a sign that he had seen him. It didn’t come.

  Colin stood reading poems aloud to his audience, one hand clutching a sheaf of scruffy paper, the other combing his wavy black hair from his forehead.

  Cam sat at the edge of the circle beside the daphne bush, for once appearing a little aloof, perhaps because he was older. His hair was held in place by a red and blue bandana, a gingery stubble of beard sprouted on his chin.

  Lewis leaned on the railing, listening to Colin, his face working.

  … and so I came to where

  you slept

  touched the dreaming

  of your face and knew

  your dreams

  were all of me …

  ‘He’s still flogging that,’ Lewis said.

  Colin’s very first published poem. Veronica had been proud when it appeared. ‘It’s for you,’ Colin said, as if she might need reassurance that there was nobody else in his life. People looked at her, knowing she was loved by a poet. Like being the mistress of a king or a president.

  ‘I always liked it,’ she said.

  ‘Of course,’ Lewis said, after a pause. His knuckles were white along the edge of the rail. ‘Of course, so you should. And who’s that guy?’ He was referring to Cam. The way Colin recited the poem, he looked as if he was speaking directly to Cam.