Someone's Wife

by Linda Burgess

  Slowly, slowly, rugby works hard at what is probably by then called rebranding itself and we find ourselves back in the fold, or on the edges of the fold. The Rugby Union, who have now adapted to ladies not just in the kitchen at the aftermatch function, run an annual All Black Reunion. There are two free tickets to a test match as long as you go to the dinner the night before. It’s mostly the oldies who take advantage. There’s a better than average dinner at a posh hotel, and the food is brought to the table by elegant young things in beautifully choreographed lines, and everyone wears black, and between courses we stand in silence to remember All Black number six hundred-and-something or, tragically, one-thousand-and-something, who has gone to the great playing field in the sky. There’s a cripplingly boring speech. We sit at designated tables, with players from our era, and towards the end we mingle. It is so unlike anything else we ever go to that I find myself enjoying it, becoming, even, alarmingly sentimental.

  In Dunedin last month we are mingling like mad. The room is buzzing. I see one of the wives I haven’t seen in decades, and we shout delightedly at each other, remembering our Scottish trip.

  Mingle on. Approaching us is the player whose wife has long ago, it turns out, buggered off, having come to the realisation that she could not, in fact, trust him. He’s ploughing towards Robert. ‘I suppose you’d call yourself a greenie?’ Robert agrees that he would. ‘A total greenie?’ he barks in disbelief. Robert agrees that he is. A minute or two later he’s by me. He’s never warmed to me, not since I suggested to a bunch of ladies that we go to the UK, thereby putting at serious risk that holiest of rules: What goes on tour stays on tour. ‘I suppose you think coal should stay in the ground then?’ He’s old, and damaged, and still angry, and I feel a foolish desire to hug him. I agree, that’s the best place for coal. ‘Oil then? You don’t want oil?’ ‘Be good to do without it,’ I say. ‘So!’ he yells triumphantly, over the racket of people who have in common having once worn the hallowed jersey. The millionaires and the pensioners, the comfortable and the lost. ‘So: How. Will. You. Keep. Your. Self. WARM?’

  I could start talking about wind and sun and water. At the risk of driving him madder, I could use words like carbon footprint. Sustainable. Climate change.

  I could say, Make love, not war! Or, I could just let it rest.

  2.

  THE TRUE

  STORY

  In which I become a middle child

  At five, my older sister rides our mother’s bike to school. Unable to simultaneously reach the seat and the pedals, she frequently slips, jarring herself on the bar. She runs frantically along the gravel road, bike wobbling between her legs, pedals crashing into her calves. Along with knees pitted with gravel, and dented shins, she has a permanently bruised vagina: this century, her teachers would suspect abuse.

  We walk around the block on the top of the fences. However adept we are at balancing, occasionally we do the splits. The horror of the misplaced foot, the brutal hit, the hint of numbness, the pain not coming until there’s been a considerable time to imagine it.

  My older sister starts school in late November; I turn three a week later. For a week I’m home by myself with Mum. This single week is unique. There’s the school holidays, then a few days into the first term we are taken—me sitting sideways on the bar of Dad’s bike, Wendy dubbed by our brother—to see a small round thing wrapped in white held up in a window high above our heads. I’m destined never to be home alone with my mother again; forever fated to be a middle child.

  ‘Tell us about when we were little,’ we plead. Our mother’s a good storyteller, adept at creating tension. We take on a persona. Michael is naughty but loveable. The teacher rips the page out of his writing book because it isn’t neat enough; he’s known it’s coming. In the queue of small boys in shorts made out of their fathers’ old tweed trousers, he’s fermenting. ‘My mother,’ he says, so very brave, ‘is not buying books for you to rip up.’

  He’s on his bike and riding down the forbidden hill, stopping only to lop the heads off the flowers in the school’s garden. After school the teacher appears weeping at our back door. We like the story: boldness and rebellion; pathos; courage and redemption. And our brother noble in defence of our mother.

  Our family’s creation myth: Dad meets Mum playing tennis. She’s selling fur coats in the local department store; he’s been posted there by the Bank of New Zealand. It’s 1938. She’s 19, the prettiest girl in Taumarunui, unofficially engaged to a Catholic. Dad lies about his age: he’s 27 but chops a year or two off. She’s been told by a fortune teller that she won’t marry the dark-haired Irishman she’s currently going out with. A short red-haired man will come into her life, and after two weeks he will write to his mother and tell her he has met the woman he will marry. We get restless when we think about the tall dark handsome one being replaced by our short, ginger-haired father. But we accept the intense romanticism of their story. It takes a long time to feel that the fortune teller might well be thanked for our existence.

  We ask, ‘What else did the fortune teller tell you?’ Something behind her eyes closes. She cannot say.

  I think of my father, writing to his mother to say he has met the girl he will marry. It’s hard to imagine that he has a mother, and that this mother is Granny, 73 by the time I’m born. She has an old-fashioned name: Lilias. She’s photographed in a chair I now have in my bedroom: an obstinate old lady with soft white hair. ‘I feel so cross,’ she says. She has strict rules about grammar and even in her nineties, widowed for decades, she rises at 6 a.m. She has a cold shower, then works in her house and garden all day, stopping at prescribed intervals. She’s a Scot; we know that Scotch only ever refers to whisky. Lavatory not toilet. What not pardon.

  Her collection of books have L. Todd written in them, just like mine. Mum says I’m like Granny Todd. This doesn’t always feel like a compliment. ‘She never got over,’ says my mother, ‘losing her youngest son in the war.’ After this, Dad is her youngest, though you’re too old, at 31, to really be youngest. Half a century later, when my mother walks into my house, which she has visited hundreds of times, she says, ‘Is this Granny Todd’s house?’

  My mother has a photograph album which we pore over. There are tiny black and white photos with crinkly edges. Though small, the images are sharp. Men in black togs that have shoulder straps like girls’ ones are doing headstands or standing on each other’s shoulders in confident pyramids. She has a photo of the whole school, and she points out the boys who will die in the war.

  Seven bold girls are lined up according to height, their hands on the waist of the girl in front. Mum’s in the middle. The captain of the basketball team, with her crisply waved hair, looks like a girl from one of the annuals Mum had when she was a girl. I have her name. Finally, towards the back of the album, we come to Mum and Dad: half of the mixed-doubles tennis team. Dad wears a lucky bugger grin. There’s the wedding photo, Mum in a slinky dress showing her hip bones as sharp as coat-hangers. The dress, kept in tissue paper in a box at the top of the wardrobe, has dozens of tiny covered buttons down the back. Someone has to help her put it on. We can relax. From now on, we can happen.

  After 16 months, there’s Michael. Dad’s posted to Pahīatua: from one cold provincial inland town to another. Michael’s been naughty, and my mother has left him locked in his room, wandering into town in her pretty frock like James James Morrison Morrison’s mother. When she gets back, the neighbour’s there. She’s observed Michael forcing his mattress through his bedroom window, preceded by his sheets and blankets. If he’d been born earlier, he’d have dug his way out of Colditz. Later, my mother would’ve been up in front of Social Welfare.

  Michael is the willing co-conspirator but never really culpable. There’s his friend who has sworn at Michael’s fifth birthday party. Children who swear are wonderful story fodder; even my father uses only ruddy, bugger and bloody in front of children. Michael gets over-excited, and the only way to calm him down is to
thrash him. In the interest of fairness, it’s done in front of the other children. ‘Jesus Christ!’ a small guest says. ‘On his birthday, too!’

  The child is my brother’s friend Harvey Crewe. I don’t believe I made this up, but I no longer have anyone, other than my brother, who was actually there. Last year, reminiscing with Michael at his home in North Yorkshire, I refer to that story. I’ve got it wrong. Harvey Crewe was at the party, but the diminutive foul-mouth was Michael’s best friend Robert.

  Robert is such a disappointing choice. He features in a number of stories in which, a conscience-free daredevil, a miniature bad lot, he entices my brother to engage in bold deeds. They roam all day, two tiny bandits. Harvey Crewe, one of New Zealand’s most famous murder victims, is a much more satisfying protagonist.

  My younger sister is designated the cute one. When I learn that my father-in-law-to-be is the youngest of 10 children, it comes as no surprise. He’s in his late fifties when I meet him, but he has the slightly astonished innocence of someone who has spent a good part of his early years being considered adorable. Tenth of 10, he came after three-in-a-row smitten girls. There are many photos of him, a sturdy Little Lord Fauntleroy in his lace collars. His parents look like elderly early settlers. His oldest brother is already going bald.

  Deborah earns her reputation for cuteness by having blonde curls when her older sisters have straight hair, and she has eyes that are limpid brown pools. Even her physical deformities—she closes her mouth with her top teeth sitting neatly behind her bottom teeth—are considered endearing. It’s the same with her mangling of grammar: her desire for her dottle when tired; her pleas to Carry it when she’s had enough of walking.

  ‘I remember,’ my brother says last year, just after he’s had a phone conversation with Deborah, clearly discussing my prickliness, ‘going into her room to find you belting her in her cot with your doll.’

  I’ve been given this doll to placate me for no longer being the baby, and to nudge me towards developing nurturing instincts. Wendy is given one when I’m born, and instructs it to suck her throat. She’s just two. She’s been sent to Grandma and Grandad in Taumarunui for the duration, and she’s liked feeding the bloody chooks with Grandad. My doll is a skimpy thing staring straight ahead from eyes painted crudely on its plastic face. Mum, wrapped up against a Pahīatua frost, is photographed outdoors cuddling the darling baby; I sit beside them glumly, my doll standing on my knee. Who knows if I’m yet to realise that the doll is a weapon?

  My doll is never warm. I take it into my bed and smother it with cuddles but I cannot make its cold plastic warm.

  My older sister Wendy is also a middle child, but not so tightly placed: six years younger than my brother, and oldest girl. They are from different eras: Michael is born at the beginning of the war, Wendy after it. Wendy is self-sufficient. She can play cricket. She swims strongly and later she can intuitively row. She can pick out tunes on the piano. She lives on frozen peas and bottled peaches; later she adds apples. She’s slightly aloof; we are not allowed to cuddle her. Years later, swimming in the town pool, deep underwater, I take my chance and kiss her on her smooth cheek. She tastes of chlorine. She rears up, enraged.

  The best stories are always about Michael. We know that when one of my mother’s friends looks at Michael in his pram, she says, ‘What a lovely … pram!’

  And we know that when Michael is 18 months old, Dad signs up and goes to war.

  Michael yearns for his father. We hear poignant stories; one or the other of us always seems to be going missing. Michael, aged three, has run away from home, and Mum has sprinted around the town, desperate to find him. He’s in the pub. She finds him in the public bar. He has gone to the big radio and looked behind it. He tells the men in the bar that he’s looking for his father.

  ‘Are you my father?’ he asks men in the street. Then Dad, who has left a toddler, comes home to a leggy five-year-old. ‘Who’s that man?’ asks Michael. I find this agonisingly touching. I love my father so much that when ‘Oh Mein Papa’ comes on the radio, I cry.

  While he’s away, my mother relies on her friends for company, takes a boarder. She says she was faithful to my father, although she implies others she knows weren’t so chaste. It wasn’t for want of invitations, hints the prettiest girl from Taumarunui, circa 1938.

  One day, aged four, I am given the responsibility of looking after Deborah. I have no idea where my parents went. Out. They went Out. I’m told that I’m to look after Deborah, and I’m to stay on our side of the road. Whatever else I do, I’m to stay on our side of the road.

  I look across the road. My friend, a boy, lives over there. I talk myself round in my head. I’m allowed to cross; it’s just Deborah who isn’t. I am old enough.

  I think I remember it. I can see the road in my mind. Wide grass verges, treeless. Cars are almost non-existent. I turn to Deborah, and say, Stay here. I cross the road. I glance back. She’s still there. I wander back just as my parents return from wherever they’ve been. My mother retrieves her bike from Wendy, and hurtles crazily off in various directions. We have no car, so my father runs. Has anyone seen their baby? Who would not want to kidnap someone so adorable? Kidnapping is a big deal. We’re instructed that should our father win the Art Union or, later, the Golden Kiwi, we’re not to tell a soul, as we will be at great risk of being kidnapped.

  I’m blamed. Can I not be trusted to do anything? Hours, possibly weeks pass before my mother, inconsolable, goes into her own bedroom. Under her bed she sees a pair of little red shoes. They have a strap and a tiny button.

  ‘Tell me,’ says my granddaughter. ‘Tell me the one about the red shoes. The little girl in the red shoes. Asleep under the bed.’

  ‘Do you think,’ I say, still justifying my rampant carelessness more than 65 years later, ‘that my mother and father should have left me to look after my baby sister?’ Flora, who will probably be legally required to sit strapped into a booster seat until she’s 15, is aghast.

  Dad has a vege garden. Women do flowers and men do the vegetables. Photos of my mother with a strained, bored face, lips pursed resentfully, holding a colander containing freshly collected vegetables; our father photographed digging in the garden. He has a large black mole in the centre of his chest. Years later I understand that it’s something to do with being in the war. It’s not a mole, it’s on a chain around his neck. It has his number on it. Dad grows the usual stuff. Peas and runner beans and silverbeet, carrots and pumpkins and onions, cauliflower and cabbage, tomatoes and potatoes. Broccoli, avocado, courgettes, aubergines, artichokes, asparagus not in a tin, and dozens of other current staples have yet to be invented.

  Wendy has a friend who’s Michael’s friend’s sister. She too has a wild nature. Wendy has a new doll and her friend asks to hold it. She smashes it to the ground and its head cracks. I have never seen anyone be so bad. More than anything else, our mothers seem embarrassed. Gillian is grabbed roughly by her arm and smacked; led bawling home.

  My friend’s parents own a shop and she has so many toys that some are put away until she’s older. One, a walkietalkie, high in the cupboard for Later, is black. We drag a chair over. I want to touch it, I want to look and look at it. There are brown dolls in New Zealand, but they are always wearing Māori costume so they’re not real dolls, as this black one is pretending to be.

  My mother believes she will not make old bones because her mother didn’t. At 58 my grandmother has a stroke which, for her last five years, will leave her paralysed down one side. Grandma comes to stay for a few days; I find her freakish. Determined to knit, she pokes one needle down the sleeve containing the paralysed arm and manipulates it with the other. I kiss her goodbye and am overwhelmed by my own graciousness.

  But this is later. Now Grandma is only in her early fifties and she knits with both arms fully functional. She makes me a pink cardigan with a white rabbit peeping out of the pocket. It has tiny round glass buttons, semi-globes, each with a flawless pink flower i
nside. I am old enough to know it is perfection. I am already a prisoner of my desire for things to be just right.

  Deborah is also winningly attired in a Grandma-knitted matching white cardigan and leggings, a guarded expression in her large brown eyes. She’s old enough to sit up; she is placed in what has been my highchair. She’s on solids.

  She is eating mashed vegetables. She is covered in them. My mouth waters with longing. My mother has picked whatever is in the garden, boiled it and mashed it with some butter, some milk, some cheese, and perhaps even a touch of marmite. Mashed veges are culinary perfection, and I, a big sister, with a full set of first teeth, and big enough to go to kindergarten, am too old for them.

  3.

  THANK

  GOD WE

  MADE IT

  In which cars enter my life

  Our cousins from Hamilton come all the way to Waitara in their car. We don’t have one yet. There are 11 of us in our combined families and we’re going to New Plymouth, to Pukekura Park, for an outing, so some of us have to go on the bus. I wait on the bus’s step with my hand on the rail while my brother buys the tickets. There’s an ancient Māori man in the front seat; he has long ears, milky eyes and a moko. One hand is on his stick but the other hand moves towards mine, and he is murmuring, and stroking my hand that holds the rail, gently, kindly, stroking my hand.

  The girl next door hasn’t been there long. She’s fostered. We’re squashed into the Ford Anglia: its friendly little grille, its guileless eyes. The car’s been at a farm somewhere, just waiting to die, until someone tells someone who tells Dad that there’s a car in a paddock looking for a home, and the farmer is prepared to throw in a fresh coat of paint. Dad chooses something almost but not quite like British Racing Green. Now it’s waiting for Dad to crank it into action. Mum has just got her licence, and there’s carefully repressed pleasure, as Dad has failed his.