We’re being taken to the beach, our first outing. I go inside to Mum, and I tell her the girl next door wants to come.
Mum’s in her bedroom, pressing her lips together to firm up her lipstick, simultaneously screwing her courage to its sticking place. She says there’s no room.
I have to go back outside and tell the girl next door that Mum has said no.
Michael with his long skinny legs is in the front, and there are four of us jammed across the back. My friend Susan, our next-door neighbour on the other side, is already in place. From my position of privilege on the back seat, I can’t meet the eye of the girl who’s fostered. My father, she sings, a mournful, home-made dirge, My father is a scrap-metal dealer, scrap-metal dealer, scrap-metal dealer …
Mum’s in the driver’s seat, and it’s shoulders back, hands at 10 to 2, head turned to look over her left shoulder, then left foot on clutch, then gear stick down, bump bump, and to the right, tug tug, hand brake off, right foot on accelerator, left foot slowly releasing clutch, and she’s backing carefully across the grass verge and then it’s faultlessly into first gear, and we’re off. By third gear the fostered girl next door is no longer framed by the back window.
Dad, who’s passed his licence second time round, drives us to New Plymouth to see the girl who was so briefly next door in her new home. The scrap-metal dealer’s stout wife has died suddenly. She’s gone to hospital but doesn’t come home, and some kids say she exploded.
That house, says Mum, on our way home. They’re well-to-do, she says. She’ll be fine there.
The empty street, the wide treeless verges. Not many people have cars. The Fletchers behind us do, because their father is a doctor, and doctors get called out any time day or night. He always has a new car, a relatively big one. One day his foot gets jammed on the accelerator and he can’t pull it out and can’t pull it out and then he does and it’s so lucky he does because he’s nearly in the river. Once, in the middle of the night in the long school holidays, he’s called to the house of a boy who has stood on a nail in a paddock where there used to be horses. Dr Fletcher pumps him full of tetanus injections but it’s too late. He’s in my big sister’s class. You’re not meant to die when you’re only in my sister’s class.
My sister starts Intermediate. On her first day, a boy comes up to her and says, ‘Your boyfriend died.’
I’m walking down our street and I’m at the corner where town starts and there’s a car parked on the side of the road. It has a long bonnet and a long boot and above each back light is a jaunty fin. It is completely unlike any other car I’ve seen. I run my hand along its sleekness. I like its name, a jumble of unlikely consonants. Zephyr. It starts with a Z, and words that start with Z are special.
The Ford Prefect is the same age as me. It’s fawn, and unlike the Anglia with its little buckets, the front seat goes right across in a bench so three can sit in the front and the family can travel in comfort. Its gear lever is beside the steering wheel. It starts without a crank. It’s not been painted by a farmer, so you can’t see brushstrokes. Deborah sits between Mum and Dad and she gets up on her knees and watches the three of us in the back. She has learnt that nothing infuriates us more than her smirking. Eyes narrowed and slowly darting, lips in a fixed, wide smile. Stop picking on Deborah, Mum says, and there’s one last perfected smirk and Deborah’s turned around and is snuggling into Mum.
In summer our bare legs stick to the seat: to stand up too quickly is like ripping off a plaster. Mum rests her arm along the top of the seat, and we compete to pleat the soft skin on her elbow.
Michael has a Box Brownie and that’s us at the top of Mount Messenger on a cold, misty day, and Mum’s wearing her coat with the swing back and we’re wearing stripey jerseys that Grandma has knitted for us out of leftover wool and other carefully unravelled jerseys and Dad’s in his sports jacket and he’s rolling-his-own for the rest of the journey and we smile for Michael, hurry-up-we’re-freezing smiles. Then it’s back in the car for our first visit in our own car to Grandma.
Dad smokes in the car and we moan at him to wind down the window but Mum says No, the wind plays havoc with her perm, and she hates the feel of a draught on the back of her neck.
Road works ahead, we sing, each time there’s a sign. Road works ahead. If we drive along a road with trees we say Hotttttt … in the sun, then Cooooold … in the shade. Hot. Cold. Coldhot. Dad’s a cautious driver, and going up hills we look out the little back window to the queue of cars behind us. We’re the leader! We’re the leader!
‘Look at the view,’ Mum says. ‘Girls—look at the view!’
I’m always in the middle because I’m the shortest and Dad can see past me in the rear-vision mirror. Michael and Wendy play ball with my head.
We make a sign and hold it up at the back window. It says ‘Help I’ve been kidnapped!’ People pass us, glancing into our car without apparent interest.
Mum and Dad bicker. Just when it seems to be finished, when whatever they’re bickering about has come to an end, Mum starts it up all over again. Awwww … we all say. Don’t argue! We’re not arguing, they say. We’re having a discussion.
We get the giggles and if it’s the one thing Dad can’t stand, it’s his three daughters giggling. He says it’ll end in tears, and by saying that, he makes sure it does.
We get petrol and the man at the station gives us a whole new stack of Spotto cards. ‘Who won last time?’ he asks. I smirk. Like Deborah. He says, ‘I hope they’ve given you a prize. We sell prizes here,’ he says.
And when we arrive at our destination we always say, Thank God we made it.
Our name’s down at a car dealer’s in Hāwera. You have Overseas Funds if you’re lucky, and if you don’t you wait and wait. Dad’s a manager now and even though Mum still has one glass jar for the bills, and another for the groceries, there must be enough money for a new car.
You have no choice when it comes to the colour. You get what you’re given. One day we drive over to Hāwera and the dealer takes our older Humber as a trade-in and we drive home in our brand-new Humber 80. Blue on the bottom, white on the top. Two-toned, Mum says. What Dad, Rodney Todd (who has pipe-dreams of a red Citroën), likes best is that inside the car door is a label which reads, Made by Todd. What us kids like, what really makes us snigger, is that underneath that is another label: The Rootes Group.
Mum and Dad go into the pub for a drink and leave us in the car. Later there are Garden Bars, where families can go. But not yet. They come out with lemonade and chippies—only recently available in New Zealand—before disappearing back inside. We sit and judge the people going past. We give them a score out of 10 and Michael is ruthless in his judgement. He’s the same when we’re in the car and driving. Dad gets potential points for running people over, and the older they are, or the more handicapped, or even just a bit plain, the higher the score. Our whole family finds this so funny we weep.
My next friend Susan—in each town I am destined to have a best friend called Susan—and I are sitting in the back of our social studies teacher’s car. He has plump white hands with freckled backs and ginger hair on them. We like him okay, but we find his hands repulsive. We shudder when he leans over our desks, checking with his red pen that we’re putting London and Cardiff in the right place on our maps. I don’t know why we’re in his car, but it may be something to do with Susan’s father being the headmaster. He drives us to Waverly, I think, but he tells us, in a way that is designed to show him as young and wild, that if you drive through Whanganui at 40mph you get all the green lights. He leans back when he drives, the seatback reclined, one elbow out the window. The fat freckled ginger-haired left hand drums on the steering wheel with the lightest of touches.
In the back, we slip into our French spy routine, in a language learnt from my brother’s war comics. Gott im Himmel! Achtung, fraulein! Vos is das? Mamselle, we call each other, taking it in turns to be loutish German soldiers who ’ave ways of making us talk—people lik
e us, members of the Maquis, the underground, steadfast in the face of pulled fingernails or the firing squad. We will not tell where we’re hiding the downed English pilot. Only we know he’s in a barn. We are tending his broken leg. We have buried his silk parachute deep among the turnips. It’s a complex game by now, honed on the way home from Guides. Before we pull out of Guides because it’s too boring. Knots, badges for bed-making. No hidden gallant airmen.
One of our other teachers is in charge of the Guides. She has come from England on that special deal that someone in the Education Department thought up when so many of us baby boomers needed teaching. I imagine them looking excitedly at a map, seeing Pātea is on the coast, and envisaging white beaches and palm trees. This teacher is religious, what’s known as High Anglican. She becomes friendly with my mother. One day after school she comes around and tells my mother that she’s met someone, a farmer from Taupō, who’s asked her to marry him. It is so odd seeing a teacher on our sofa. She says, despairingly, ‘He’s a Catholic!’ My mother talks about it with my father at dinner and she says that she’s told my teacher that there’s not that much difference between Catholic and High Anglican. Follow your heart, my mother reports that she’s advised, and I’m impressed. Not only does my mother know the difference between Catholic and High Anglican, but she knows to say Follow your heart, just like someone from the love comics, lent to us by Dad’s teller, that we read in secret, sitting on the back step in the afternoon sun.
Once, when I yawn in class, the teacher who takes Guides says, ‘Put your hand over your mouth. We do not want to see what you had for breakfast.’ At Guides she takes us to the Teachers’ Hostel and teaches us how to make beds with hospital corners. She discusses what we wear to bed. I say that in winter I keep on my singlet to wear under my pyjamas. She is horrified. ‘Your vest?’ she says. ‘You must take off your vest!’ She says she knows my mother, who is a genteel woman. She says I should tell my genteel mother that I shouldn’t ever ever wear my vest to bed.
I don’t tell my flawed mother. I keep wearing my warm singlet under my winceyette pyjamas, even though I know it’s not right.
She does, though, pick me out for the gloss of my shoes. I step forward. I hypocritically accept the compliment. The three things Dad does: makes the top bunk, because Mum can’t reach. Washes the dishes while Mum dries because his hands don’t mind water being really hot. And polishes our shoes. It’s a finite job with obvious results and he loves that. I do, though, ferociously brasso my trefoil.
Our social studies teacher is watching us in his rear-vision mirror and his face shows his delight. We’re pleased that he’s having a good time. Mostly we feel sorry for him. Our class is inclined to riot. Some of the boys are making his life a misery.
We’re in our Humber 80 and driving through The Gorge. We are all afraid of The Gorge with its insubstantial barrier, its vertiginous drop, and its steep hill on the other side, down which stones and even rocks are inclined to slither and tumble without warning. To distract us, and perhaps even himself, Dad has put on our black plastic Beatles wig. He looks more like one of the Marx Brothers than one of the Fab Four. In the back his three daughters are hysterical, as hilarity and humiliation intermingle.
I’m 14, and Michael, home from his job in Wellington, is teaching me to drive. He’s a nervy teacher. I can’t imagine being able to get between the two sides of a bridge, but I keep steering and I do. We are out in the countryside near Pātea when a car passes us and throws up a stone which hits the window. The windscreen shatters. I’ve just pulled over to the left when Michael reaches out and clouts me hard on the side of my head. It’s because he’s seen the painted line by the side of the road and he’s mistaken it for the centre line. He explains that he thought I’d driven over to the wrong side of the road. He wraps his hand in his jumper and punches out the windscreen. And carefully drives home.
In our family, where someone is always blamed, apologies are considered unnecessary.
In Hunterville, where almost everyone else is a sheep farmer, Dad would have loved a Super Snipe. But he makes do with a Morris Oxford, a socially acceptable, solid, comfortable car in which Mum drives over to Marton to pick me up on the afternoons I have play practice. Deborah and I are both going out with local boys, and Deborah’s boyfriend has left school at 15 and is on the wild side. He has a car, and sometimes he and Deborah drive over to Marton to pick me up.
I want the sort of parents you see in Norman Rockwell paintings, or Seventeen magazine. I don’t want my little sister to be bold. I wish Mum and Dad hadn’t given up by their fourth child, and hadn’t stopped setting limits, as Deborah is far too young for a serious boyfriend.
Mum has given me a few more driving lessons, so Deborah’s boyfriend moves into the back seat with Deborah and lets me drive his car home. It’s a dark winter evening and it’s raining, really raining, and I speed along through the bush that lines some of the road between Marton and Hunterville. I haven’t driven in the dark before and I have to remind myself to dip the lights when another car approaches. There’s a solid silver button by my left foot. Click. Click. The windscreen wipers thrash uselessly at the rain and I accelerate into murky corners and part of me thinks, quite calmly, acceptingly, that these might be my last minutes on earth.
4.
THE
EASIER
VERSION
In which I contemplate the accuracy of memory
I wasn’t born on the kitchen table. For years I thought I was. I try to work out the link to the kitchen table, and I think—it’s only extrapolating—that, with my arrival imminent, my mother’s in such unbearable agony that, on the way to her bedroom, she grabs, clutches, pleads with the kitchen table while she’s almost torn asunder.
The Presbyterian church, where we go with our mother, is building a new hall. It’s on the way home from school. When they lay down the foundations there are metal rods sticking up from the concrete: the beginnings of a wall. On the way home from school, we spend some time at the site. We walk along the wall’s foundations. We jump over the rods. Walk. Jump. Walk. It’s a tidy rectangle.
One day when I’m there, a girl slips, just as she’s jumping over the metal bit. The metal bit enters her thigh, goes right through, and comes out the other side. Like the wooden skewer through the round of beef that Mum roasts on Saturday nights.
It goes right through but doesn’t quite pierce her skin, which clings to the rod like tight stockinette. She can’t move. A pinned butterfly.
When I’m older I mention how I will never forget seeing this. My mother says, ‘But you didn’t. You weren’t there. We told you about it,’ she says, ‘to remind you to be careful.’
Like the arm in the wringer. The boy riding down the hill, no-hands. The boy in the cardboard box in the middle of the road. The kids who dug a cave in the sandy bank.
I don’t believe her. She must’ve forgotten. Then I think of a thigh and its bone. And how hard it would be for a metal part to go right through it. But surely I can remember someone coming with a special saw, sawing through the rusty metal rod to free her?
Dad’s father dies before I’m born. Mum’s father dies when I’m about six. He’s called Claus, like Santa. He’s Danish but my mother is teased at school for having a father who’s a Hun. Brenda Nissen fell down pissen. We have a phone in our hall and it’s a toll call which is expensive, and you know your mother is on a toll call because she says, ‘This must be costing you a fortune!’ I don’t remember if she says that this time, but she’s crying, and Dad comes into our bedroom and says, quietly and seriously, ‘Mum’s upset.’ Her father has died.
It’s so odd to think that Mum has a father and a mother. That she still minds enough to cry.
I think of Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Manunui, where I’ve been perhaps twice in my life, as it is so far away, and we don’t have a car, and even if we did there’s Mount Messenger which is so winding that you have to stop for a vomit. If you go by train, you have
to first of all get to New Plymouth. And the train doesn’t arrive in Taumarunui till the depths of the night. And then they’d have to come to Taumarunui to pick us up.
I remember their house, which has a veranda and a front door with a window each side like the houses I draw, and there’s a big window, perhaps a bay, down the left-hand side next to the chimney and this is their sitting room. And this is where Grandpa goes to see what all the racket outside is about, and opens it wide and leans out and an Injun with an enormous feathered headdress rides past on his palomino and kills him with his bow and arrow.
This is the first real person I know who has died. The only other people I know who have died have done it in a movie.
They use convicts to be the Indians in the movies, because if they get killed it doesn’t matter. Which means the cowboys and settlers who die must be convicts too. America, fortunately, has a lot of disposable convicts.
Mum says she hates The Last Post. Hates it. They play it at her father’s funeral, because he’s been a soldier.
Mum has some sad stories about her mother. Violet. Violet Rose Flora Wood. She was born in London. When Violet’s just a little baby, her mother dies. I lie in my top bunk sometimes and look at the blue roses on the wallpaper and spell words in my head, writing them on the wall in my imagination. London London London, I write in my head, looping the word around the roses till it looks really silly. Why would those letters mean that, anyway? Who decides what letters mean what, and what name goes with what thing? Is what I think is blue a different colour from what someone else thinks, and how would we know if it is? And I think about things like my mother’s mother is my grandmother, which makes her mother my great-grandmother. So it’s my great-grandmother who has died when my grandmother, Violet, is a baby. It’s so sad. There’s a poor baby. ‘Who looks after the baby?’ I ask, and my mother says, ‘The baby’s two aunts. Until she’s five and goes to school.’
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