Someone's Wife

  Like the rest of New Zealand, the school’s students are divided on whether the Springboks should have come to New Zealand, and in this class many are, like their parents, pro-tour. A good number of the staff—particularly the nuns and brothers—are of the opinion that the Springboks shouldn’t come. We’ve even started our marches outside the Cathedral, sent on our way with fighting words from Bishop Cullinane. Many of the congregation aren’t so sure. And when challenged by my students, I get tired of explaining why it’s harder than it seems to separate sport from politics when it’s for political reasons that in South Africa rugby is a white man’s game.

  That’s just how it is there, Miss. We shouldn’t tell them how to run their country.

  Period 1, Monday, 27 July 1981. Two days before Charles marries Diana: Prime Minister Muldoon, whose promise to make the Springbok tour happen has helped win him the election, is already on his way to London to attend the royal wedding. Two days after protesters—Auckland’s Father Terry Dibble in the front row—have gone onto the field at Hamilton and stopped a game before it even starts.

  There’s Molesworth Street soon to come. Then Palmerston North’s game, the Wellington branch of COST (Citizens Opposed to the Springbok Tour) coming in with their crash helmets and their megaphones, helicopters constantly slapping angrily overhead, and rain pattering on my silly inappropriate rain hat, and shame shame shame as police with batons, with visors hiding their faces, with their controller pacing carefully behind them, stop us from getting anywhere near the rugby grounds.

  But we still don’t know, on that Monday morning, if the tour could be over.

  Many in my class have probably got tickets to that local game, which they might now not get to go to. I walk into the classroom. The room is silent, a clammy, freezing wall, and I’m alone.

  So this is how hostility feels. If I think of it, even now the outside of my arms go cold. I want to run but I stay. I have to use everything I know about angry disempowered teenagers who sense they’ve had a promised treat taken away from them, and who think that the person who is in front of them has had something to do with it. I use everything I can think of to turn the mood of that room. I work that room as if—and this still feels true—my life depends on it.

  That quiet. That chilling, chilling quiet.

  Over the years the number of ‘religious’ teaching at the school visibly reduces. Some of the men leave the priesthood to marry. A senior brother is suddenly removed to a distant Pacific Island. There are always rumours about those who do leave, and those who don’t but perhaps should. They queue up to borrow The Thorn Birds when we buy it for the school library. There are nuns who seem to be happy to be married to God rather than someone with smelly socks. There’s a romanticism attached to being Someone’s as opposed to someone’s wife. There’s security and companionship and time for reflection that family life doesn’t offer. There’s clearly wistfulness too, though nuns seem less likely to leave their orders than brothers do. I don’t know the statistics. I don’t know, either, if any of the stories of abuse within the church which we learn about daily now resounds with them. I hope not.

  It must be 20 years later, when I’m living in Wellington, that I get the opportunity to become one of the Dominion Post’s three television critics. I take the job very seriously, determined to ignore the dross that’s on television and review programmes as I review literature. A few weeks into the job, I choose to look closely at a documentary on the subject of priests and celibacy. In my review I outline the case presented by the documentary maker, whose central thesis is that celibacy is unnatural and, in this century, a cruel and unusual and unnecessary punishment.

  A few days later the Dom Post forwards my first letter, written in slightly shaky, angry black biro on Croxley lined notepaper. The ire is spread over several pages, and every few lines the (anonymous) writer exhorts me to READ THE BIBLE. Those three words become for me a type of mantra: they sum up a certain kind of person who finds my reviews wanting.

  Months later we’re buying fish and chips in Island Bay, and Sister Claire, who 30 years ago was a very pretty young nun teaching music, comes in. She looks exactly the same: being married to God has suited her. We start to chat, and I tell her we’re in Wellington now, and she says she’s still teaching piano, and there’s a silence, and she asks, cautiously, what about me? Am I still teaching? Or …?

  I say, ‘Actually, I’m a TV critic now. For the Dom Post.’

  And she says, ‘Oh. So that was you.’

  12.

  TEN

  CHRISTMASES

  In which I really do wonder about Christmas

  ONE

  It’s meant to be in winter. From when you’re tiny, when in picture books little rabbits throw snowballs, and when Santa travels in a sleigh, and when scarlet-cheeked girls with hands tucked inside covetable fur muffs sing carols to old folk, you know it’s wrong having it in summer.

  The day before Christmas, Dad goes out to a friend’s farm with someone who has a truck and comes back with a Christmas tree. But it’s not. Christmas trees are a perfect triangle, but this has been a branch before it was sawn off, and it slouches like an awkward teenager who has grown too quickly, rammed in a bucket with Christmas paper sellotaped around it, with its leg held in place by stones and bits of brick, its shoulder against the wall.

  Mum has, in a noncommittal way, got religion. In this town, in this neighbourhood, in this decade, people go to church. So with the exception of Dad, and probably our big brother, we walk to the Presbyterian church. We spend 20 minutes or so in the church itself, which is the boring bit, then all the children troop off to the hall at the back where middle-aged women stick people and animals cut out of felt onto a big felt board and they tell us stories. One is about opening your heart to Jesus and there’s a red felt heart with a door in it. At night I lie in the dark knowing that when that door shuts you die, and I can feel my door inching callously towards closure. At the end of the service, we go back to the church and everybody sings Amen … amen … and then they get to a-a-ha-ha … mennnn … and invariably my big sister Wendy and I are in hysterics.

  The Sunday-school children put on a festive show, directed by my mother, and we dress up in simple gowns made from old sheets with two side-seams run up on Singer sewing machines. A rope tied around our waists, and a tea towel on our heads, and we sing about being away in a manger on a silent holy night. We three kings from Orient are, we sing, and it’s years till I realise that Orientar is not a place. Three of us are singled out for a verse each. Wendy, who’s naturally musical, is one. And me! Myrrh is mine, I sing, its bitter perfume. The director and her cohorts murmur among themselves. The other two Kings will join me in singing my verse.

  There are all six of us then. Mum, Dad, four kids. Michael is tall enough to be leaving school soon, and he has an eye for design and does the tree. Mum has a different hiding place each year for our presents. I search, I search. Grandma always sends me a manicure set. Aunty June sends something because she is Mum’s only sister. Often stationery, which we use for our thank-you letters. Granny doesn’t send us anything. Because she has 25 grandchildren.

  We assist Michael in the decoration of the tree the night before Christmas. Michael and Dad have a tricky relationship. Not only did Dad go off to war when Michael was a toddler and not come back till he was at school, but Michael isn’t sporty. One evening, around tea time, when Michael has been out on his bike, Mum asks him if he’s seen Dad, and Michael says he has, and Dad is down outside the pub on the corner. Bragging and boasting as usual.

  The tree. It’s loitering against the wall of the sitting room. There’s a shoebox full of decorations and best of all is the cardboard boot with glitter stuck on it. Mum brings our presents from where they’re hidden and places them around the tree. We crawl on our hands and knees, checking the ones with our name on them.

  That off-hand weather we have in New Zealand at Christmas. Our myth of sunny beaches. We have to have br
eakfast before we’re allowed to open the presents because there’s always our own little box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates and we mustn’t ruin our appetites. And you’re either the type who eats the peppermint one first, or the type who saves it till last so you can gloat. So. Christmas.

  TWO

  Now we’ve moved towns and we live behind and above the bank. We have a lawn that’s exactly the right size for a tennis court, and beside that lawn there’s an outside wall that has no windows: on the other side of it is the vault. It’s perfect for volleying with my racquet—Mum’s old one—and a tennis ball. I do it for hours. Plonk thunk. Plonk thunk. I master backhand. The vault acts as perfect noise insulation.

  We live behind and above the bank because Dad is a manager. Kids in my new school think the money is ours. The house part has double doors on the street frontage, and at night Dad puts a bolt across them. Not a bolt, a long metal bar which he slots in place to keep out robbers. It reminds me of a blue book we have, Stories from History. There’s the chapter about Bonny Prince Charlie, how after Culloden he hides at Flora McDonald’s place, and in the picture she puts her soft pale arm across to bar the door and on the outside a sword is sliding down between the door and the doorjamb, and her staunch eyes stare heavenwards so she will not see her arm chopped in half. I love that picture.

  When I hear that bar put across, it’s sleep time; they’re on their way. I turn off my pale-green radio, already turned down low just in case. Poetry in motion. Living doll. Bobby’s girl. Up the stairs they come, then into the bathroom for teeth, open my door to check there’s no light from my radio, then down the hall to their room. Thump thump. We say, ‘Mum’s walking on her stumps.’

  We have what TV programmes on houses now describe as an eat-in-family-kitchen. On the wall by the kitchen table, Mum pins a massive map of the world. At last I can stop confusing India and Africa.

  We live in the main street and our town buys Christmas lights to string across its wide treeless blandness. The story is, they’ve come from London. Oxford Street has, apparently, an excess of lights so they’re selling their leftovers. We’re linked by lights to London.

  We get pocket money now, and from about September we start saving a percentage of it to buy Christmas presents. We have five to buy, so at, say, 2/6 a head we need 12/6. We have to save a shilling a week. That 12/6 is a magic amount because it’s what Mum earned for a whole week’s work selling fur coats. Inflation is measured in the price of sweets. Orange squash gums, snifters, are two a penny, and when she was little you got 12 for one penny. Twelve!

  I judge Christmas by the number of books I get. I hope for four, and Mum knows to ask Wendy exactly what I want. Wendy and I are the avid readers, with a string of favourite authors. I suspect Deborah has bought me a book and I’m afraid she won’t know what to choose. So I trap her into admitting that she has, then I manipulate her into showing me what it is. She goes under her bed where her presents are hidden and she shows me a book that I would never dream of reading. When she cries and cries I wish so hard that I hadn’t made her show me.

  Michael gets a ride home with another local boy who’s gone to work in the big smoke. Michael is a terrific mimic. ‘Lucky bugger,’ says his driver, each time they pass a couple walking or driving together. ‘Lucky bugger.’

  Christmas. Michael is in Wellington working for Kirks. Soon he’ll go into advertising at BP but now it’s Kirks’ windows, and he brings home a sizeable print that they’ve used for a display—it’s in a fancy frame and shows leafless trees around an English lake. It’s so posh and Mum and Dad put it in the upstairs sitting room above the fireplace. Dad hates the word posh. (And toilet. And pardon.) The tree is downstairs ready for Michael to decorate; we wouldn’t do it till he got here. Deborah can’t wait. He’s oldest, she’s youngest; there’s adoration. But she’s itchy. She can’t stop itching.

  Chicken pox. We’re all to keep away. Michael stands at her bedroom door, briefly. Forever, in family history: the Christmas that Deborah so longed for Michael to come home. The Christmas she got chicken pox.

  THREE

  Same town. Same bank, but only just: they’re pulling it down to make a new one. The fine old building, Palladian-style like the other two banks in the main street that are facing the same end. Three of the few buildings that give a low flat treeless street some dignity. That line the path to Mount Egmont. But it’s decided they’re earthquake risks. A real bugger to pull down, says the man who demolished it. Heart kauri! They’re building us a four-bedroomed single-storeyed brick house on the place where Dad has had a substantial vegetable garden. Where I sneaked out to pick peas and strawberries. The bank will go into temporary premises while they build a low flat brick one on the old site.

  I will no longer be able to look out my bedroom window to see if the boy I like is out and about. To see if the geography teacher with the freckly hands is staying the night at the flat of the shorthand typing teacher who lives above the bookshop across the road. I will no longer be able to see the sea from the sitting room. The tidal wave will arrive unobserved. Without the horizon there will not be nearly such a good view of the mushroom-shaped cloud.

  I won’t have a sash window, which I have been warned not to lean out of because if I do I’ll be at imminent risk of decapitation at worst and a broken neck if I’m lucky. There’ll be no rickety fire escape to sunbathe on. The nectarine tree, with its abundant fragrant white-fleshed fruit, will have gone.

  Same family, minus one. His last weekend at home, Michael comes into my room to tell me President Kennedy has been shot. Our mother cries, even though she’d actually been a Nixon supporter. Because, she’s explained, he’s made his own way, rather than coming from money. She has come round to Kennedy, but not Jackie, who, my mother believes, is not as pretty as some people seem to think she is.

  We drive down to Wellington and have a look around the boat that is taking Michael to England. Owned and staffed by Greeks. Tiny cabins; four bunks for four strangers. It’s like the war: they stand crammed on the outside decks and throw paper, tightly rolled, to friends and families gathered on the wharf below. The tight balls unfurl to become streamers. That’s him high above us and we wave and wave and he waves and waves back, then we can see him pushing the back of his hand against his mouth and he turns away. And Dad shepherds us grimly back to our car.

  Michael writes that on board he has been taught to dance like a Greek. You don’t hold hands; your sweaty palms are separated by handkerchiefs. We love his letters.

  We do the tree that year. The girls. I am very interested in decoration, I am already planning what my new bedroom will be like. Pink, right down to the lampshades, just like in Seventeen magazine.

  There is going downtown to look forward to. Friday night is a late night and Christmas Eve is a late night as long as it doesn’t fall on a weekend. That year it’s a Tuesday. I’m going downtown with Susan, Annette and Heather. Downtown or uptown? When you live bang in the middle, it’s neither, or depends on which way you walk. We spend hours getting ready, which means rollers all day and your cardigan done up with buttons down the back. It means peppermint kiss lipstick, and it means spitting on a tiny brush and rubbing it along a hard little block and you open your mouth while you put it on your eyelashes because it has been scientifically proven that you cannot put on mascara with your mouth closed.

  My father says he hates peppermint kiss lipstick. It makes me look like a Negress.

  All day it means hoping. There’s a boy who looks so like Bobby Vee. He has left school now because he’s two years older, and he’s got a job at the freezing works, but a white-collar job, not on the chain, because he has his School C. There is a good chance that he will be in town. There’s a good chance that he’ll be at the milkbar, where us girls will buy a Coke each and feel like American girls as we sit in the booth on either side of the Formica table. He plays pinball with ferocious insouciance. Between games he puts money in the jukebox and I have fantasised that
one day when I’m there he’ll put in the money and the disc will come out sideways and settle flat on the turntable and there’ll be a pause as the needle comes down. And it’ll be ‘I Saw Linda Yesterday’.

  If I were bolder, if I hadn’t spent my pocket money on presents for my family, if I didn’t know that girls aren’t meant to chase boys, I’d saunter over to the jukebox and I’d push J8, and the song with his name in it would soar through the milkbar.

  Some of the kids who go to boarding school go past, slightly self-consciously, not of here anymore. And we stop to talk to them because one of them likes Susan, and Heather likes one of them, and one of them sort of used to like me. And Annette has peeled off to be with Neville, who’s already her boyfriend.

  We go into the shops and pretend to look at things. Cubes of gold-foil-wrapped bath salts at the chemist, like the ones I have carefully placed in Christmas paper and put under the tree for Mum. Magazines at the bookshop where Susan once dared me to shoplift a pencil. Up one side and down the other.

  Then the car belonging to the father of the boy I like—I’d know it anywhere, it’s a big beige armadillo of a car— pulls up just outside our bank, and he gets out. I don’t know where to look. I’m not close enough to say hello and there isn’t time anyway because he’s got out, says See ya to his Dad, and he’s crossed the road to the bus stop. It’s Christmas Eve, for God’s sake, and why would anyone who earns a wage spend it in our small town? He’s crossed the road and the bus pulls up. And he’s on his way to Hāwera.

  FOUR

  And now another town. This town’s a village really, but because of a large farming hinterland there’s a sizeable bank. Sheep farmers, not the cow cockies of Taranaki. Which pleases Dad. I’m in the 6th Form so have two years left, and it means going to school by bus instead of pedalling into a head wind. Wendy’s in Wellington now. The locals assume we’ll be sent to Nga Tawa, the girls’ boarding school in Marton. You can take your own pony. But two girls, on a bank manager’s salary?