The migraines had got better, so had the irritability, eventually, and so had my love life. While I’d been playing, it had been what my mum said. Just … sparklers. I’d liked sparklers, and it wasn’t easy to develop a relationship when you were home only half the time and working hard almost every day of the week. Early to bed and early to rise, your diet and your sleep schedule both rigorously controlled. At least that was my excuse.
Now, though? I didn’t think it was just about liking sparklers anymore.
Last night—this morning—whatever—I’d wanted to hit Daisy’s father. I’d wanted both of them to come over that fence, and I’d wanted to deal to them there. I’d wanted to hurt them.
I hadn’t wanted to hurt the dog, though. I hoped that mattered.
Seven years ago, five years ago, I’d have got off the couch at Mum’s question, said something too curt to the person who loved me more than anybody else in the world, and would have headed upstairs, the black rage trying to overtake me. Tonight, I said, “It could be the head.” And when she looked at me and said nothing, I said, “It’s probably the head.”
I got a little dizzy just saying it. That feeling when you can’t exhale enough, because the breath is caught in your chest. More weakness.
“What does the doctor say?” she asked.
“Same as always. That they can’t tell if it’ll happen. That they won’t know for years. Until it’s obvious.”
A long pause as the pink faded to purple outside and we watched it, and I thought we were done.
“How does it help,” she finally said, “for you not to love somebody?”
I had no answer.
20
No Strings
Daisy
The next morning, I borrowed Gray’s phone to make a quick playlist while we ate a breakfast that his mum had risen early to fix for us, poached eggs and toast and sautéed mushrooms and wilted spinach and creamy grilled haloumi, as if she were afraid we’d shrivel up from lack of nourishment otherwise. I wondered if she’d like to adopt me.
As I was choosing our songs, I had a terrible thought and asked Gray, “How’s the head?”
“Head’s all good,” he said, that hint of amusement in his dark eyes. “I shudder to ask why you’re checking.”
“We could need some loud songs,” I said. “Escape music tends to be loud.”
“Ah,” he said. “The Taylor Swift discography.” He didn’t tell me to stop, though, so I kept on choosing.
“I have an idea,” he said, as we finished our eggs. “To get this thing started on the right foot. Call it a ritual.”
I eyed him. “Do I even want to know?”
“Yes. I think you may. It’s about the girls’ clothes. You didn’t like the idea of them having to keep on wearing them.”
“No choice,” I said. “As you pointed out—yours don’t fit.”
“And Heaven knows mine won’t,” Honor said with a laugh. “Nah, tell us the thought, Gray.”
He said, “If you wanted to have a new-start ceremony. We can’t get rid of the dresses now, but we could do the caps and aprons. Leave them behind here, in the mountains. Could feel good. Unless the girls want to keep them.”
“No,” Fruitful said. Forcefully. Gray looked startled, but she went on, “No, we don’t want to keep them. I’m never wearing an apron again. I may be covered in flour and tomato sauce, I may have to wash my clothes every day, but I’m not wearing an apron again.”
Oh, no. I was going to have to talk to her about that. Also about how you could wash your clothes every day, because you’d have more than two dresses.
Gray just nodded, then asked Obedience, “What do you think?” Gently, the way he talked to Obedience.
She said, tentatively as always, “It’s wasteful to get rid of them, though, isn’t it? We could make something else out of them. Handkerchiefs, or muslin bags for jam or cheese.”
“We’re not making jam,” Fruitful said. “Or handkerchiefs. Or cheese.”
“I like jam, though,” Obedience objected. She was a bit rounder than Fruitful. I didn’t know about pizza, but she’d definitely suspected, last night, in some sneaky corner of her mind, that tiramisu was the food of the gods. Witness the fact that she’d eaten her own and half of Fruitful’s.
Fruitful sighed. “You buy jam, Outside. You buy everything. You don’t have to make things anymore.”
Obedience looked stricken, and Honor said, “People do make jam, love. Tastes better if you’ve grown the fruit yourself and it’s that fresh, not that I’ve ever done it. Always sounded too hot, and I’m not much of a gardener anyway. I’d rather go to the shops. Gray would know more about it, though.”
Obedience and Fruitful both looked at Gray. Absolutely doubtfully. He raised his hands and said, “No idea about making jam, sorry.”
I said, “You do not have to recycle your cap and apron. If you need a muslin bag to make jam, we’ll buy a muslin bag. I was going to ask Honor, actually, if we could leave the aprons and caps here, put them in the rubbish. You won’t be needing them again.”
“Good,” Gray said. “Then when you’re ready to leave, go get them. We’ll stop outside and get rid of them.”
It didn’t take us five minutes to get ready. It didn’t take us two. We had nothing. The girls because they owned nothing, and me because I’d lost everything. When I picked up the folded aprons and caps that I’d set on the coffee table, not knowing what I’d do with them, Gray asked, “Ready to go, Fruitful?”
“Yes,” she said, and let him pick her up again, as she’d let him carry her downstairs. She didn’t put an arm around his shoulders, but I thought she wanted to.
Oh, no.
Gray said, “Bring the torch, will you, Daisy? Light my path.”
All of us, including Honor and the brown dog, followed the light out to the back garden, where it picked out a round stone firepit surrounded by semicircular stone benches. “Yes?” Gray asked. “Or no?”
I wanted to say it myself. I forced myself to wait for the girls to do it.
Fruitful said, “Yes.”
Obedience said, “We’re going to burn them?”
“Only if you want to,” Gray said.
She took a breath from the bottom of her lungs and said, “I want to. Please.”
It was an hour before dawn, the same time they’d escaped. The witching hour. Too dark to see the mountains. Too dark to see anything but the light in the kitchen window, the odd yellow rectangle among the houses below, showing where another early riser was starting their day. It was cold out here, none of us girls had jackets, and we were all shivering. Gray set Fruitful on her feet, and I handed her a cap and apron, then did the same for Obedience. After that, I took a step back. This wasn’t my moment.
Fruitful laid her garments in the firepit, and Obedience hesitated a moment, then did the same.
Gray picked up a long cylinder, the kind that held barbecue matches, and asked, “Who wants to light them?”
“We both will,” Fruitful said. “Because they’re ours.” Gray handed over the box, and Fruitful shook out two matches and handed one to her sister.
I was still cold. I had my arms wrapped around myself, but I wouldn’t have been anywhere else as Fruitful struck her match with a rasp and a burst of yellow flame, and then Obedience did the same. They held them up, shining like sparklers in the blackness, and then Obedience lowered hers and touched it to an edge of white muslin.
A flare, and it went up. Fruitful laid her own match to the opposite side, and the yellow flame grew. The white muslin blackened around the edges, then crumpled, and nobody said a word.
The aprons had been big, covering the entire front of the ugly brown dress, and the cotton burned for a good long while, all the way down to gray ash. The flame was warm in the chill, and I held my hands out to it and said, “Gilead used to grab me by the strings at the back and pull me in.”
Something I had confessed to no one, because it had felt shameful. My hel
plessness, and his enjoyment of it. I could feel Fruitful’s gaze on my face, and she said, her voice low, “Me too.”
“Not anymore,” I said.
“No,” she said. “Not anymore.”
Gray
The sun came up as we drove through the Cromwell Gorge.
Somewhere past this next curve, Daisy’s car was in the Clutha. Possibly being pulled along with the current to the sea, or possibly sinking into the mire. If she recognized the spot, she didn’t let on. She just kept singing.
They had good voices. They also had loud voices. For small people, they could project, and if they didn’t understand the words, they had no problem making them up.
I hadn’t had a migraine when we’d started, anyway. The dog was probably back there covering her ears.
To make it worse, some of these songs had a definite disco vibe. When Daisy had played the first one, something about having a new dress, new shoes, and a new attitude, I’d said, “Before your time, isn’t this?” And she’d answered, “I love it. It’s so peppy and positive.”
We’d had “peppy” all the way east, the only break when I’d made a detour to return the farmer’s jacket. After that, we’d had Beyoncé, and, yes, the can’t-wait-to-see-the-back-of-you discography of Taylor Swift. Now, an insistent drumbeat started up, and Daisy turned up the volume and shouted, “This is the best one. Look at the sun coming up. That’s us. That’s our lives. Sing.”
They did. Belting out the chorus, rocking back and forth, clapping their hands overhead on the downbeat like they’d been born with rhythm.
Pretty soon, we were going to have the one about “I Will Survive,” and “Let It Go” couldn’t be far behind. Right now, out of the speakers and sitting right here in my truck, sisters were doing it for themselves. Aretha Franklin, Annie Lennox, and Chastity, Fruitful, and Obedience.
Breaking the locks. Jumping the fence. Burning their white caps and starting again.
No aprons. No strings.
What the hell. I sang along, too.
21
If I Had a Hammer
Gray
I followed Daisy’s directions to get to her flat. It wasn’t hard. We arrived from the south, like always, past sheep-dotted green paddocks and the swell of hills, the calm silver of Lake Waihola on our left, passing the odd oversized house set in the middle of somebody’s lifestyle block, their back-to-the-roots escape from life in the not-very-big city. A gentle land, and a peaceful one.
Fruitful said, “It’s so normal.”
I had to laugh. “You sound disappointed. Were you expecting Sodom and Gomorrah? Sorry, it’s just Dunedin. Heaps of churches, too, you’ll see.”
“There can’t be,” Fruitful said.
“Well, most people don’t go every Sunday,” I said, “so that can comfort you, maybe. And the Uni students, the scarfies, can be pretty outrageous, at least if drinking too much beer, swearing too much, and crowding too many people into a flat for a house party qualifies. Other than that—not much wickedness, I’m afraid. The place was settled by Scots. Very non-outrageous people, Scots.”
“Does everybody wear makeup?” Obedience asked.
“Well, just the girls, normally,” I said.
Silence from the back seat. “And some boys,” I added. “If they want to. No law against it, and it’s not hurting anyone, so why not?”
“They’ll have been told,” Daisy said, “that it’s hurting their souls. Painted women, hard and willful. And nobody’s even mentioned painted boys.”
“Nothing better than a willful woman,” I said. “What does that mean, after all? Just a woman who knows what she wants.”
“Careful,” Daisy said, “or you’ll make their heads explode. Baby steps, Gray.”
“My head’s not going to explode,” Fruitful said. “I’m ready. Obedience may not be, though.”
“I am too,” Obedience said, proving, I guess, that ugly dresses or not, sisters were the same everywhere.
We were entering the city proper now, and everybody got quiet. It wasn’t like it was a forest of skyscrapers, but I guessed if it were the first city you’d ever seen, it could feel that way. I asked Daisy, “What will you do about your car?”
“I’ll have to get a new one,” she said. “A new-to-me one, that is. Once I have a license. Oh, well, can’t be helped. Lucky our new apartment is walking distance to everything. Turn left at Jetty Street, by Vogel Street Kitchen, then left again on Princes Street. You see how central we are?”
They were that. They weren’t exactly in the posh part of town, though. At the moment, we were passing the Salvation Army, with a car-hire place just ahead. I asked, “Where do you work?”
“Otago General,” she said. “Not too far up the road. Also walking distance. We’re zoned for Otago Girls, too, which is brilliant.”
“Wait,” Fruitful said. “The high school is for girls?”
“Yes,” Daisy said. “Park anywhere here, Gray. All for girls.”
“I don’t want to go to a girls’ school, though,” Fruitful said. “That’s the whole point, that we get to be different here.”
“You’ll be different enough,” Daisy said. “You’ll see. And here we are. New home. It doesn’t look like Dorian’s here yet, but he’s coming any minute. He can’t stay, but he couldn’t wait to see you both again.”
She sounded too cheerful to me. I asked, “Where, exactly?”
“Just there. The green building across the road.”
“The boarded-up one?”
“No. How would we live in a boarded-up building? In the other green one next to it. Above the used bookshop, although our flat’s at the back.” She was already climbing out, and so were Fruitful and Obedience. The dog, of course, wanted to, but I still had no lead for her. I was going to have to buy one. Like it or not, the dog was mine.
I climbed out myself and asked, “Mind if I come up for a minute, use the toilet?”
The girls looked as if I’d suggested performing a human sacrifice to bless their new flat. I said, “What, don’t men use the toilet at Mount Zion?”
Neither of them would answer that, not even Fruitful, so Daisy said, “They’re separate. Men and women.”
Why was I not surprised. “Oh,” I said. “So does this mean I use the gutter, or what? Could get me arrested, of course, so …”
“No,” Daisy said. “Of course. Come up.”
It wasn’t actually an emergency. I just wanted to see, and also to write down my phone number for her. It had occurred to me, driving here, that it was the only way I was going to see her again, or to check on the girls. Although the absent Dorian would be there, and he presumably had a phone.
Wait, though. Dorian couldn’t stay? Why not? Had Daisy even asked him to? I was willing to bet the answer was “no.”
Why the hell not, though? Did she have to do everything herself?
I told the dog, “Stay,” thought that I was going to have to stop on my way to the house for supplies for her and that it was going to make me even later back to work, and dismissed it. You did what you had to do.
I crossed the street with Daisy and the girls, letting Daisy support Fruitful, since I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be allowed to carry her this time, not in public view. How was she going to get crutches, though? How was she going to get around on that ankle? The girls garnered a couple of glances from passersby for the shapeless brown dresses, which looked like nothing so much as potato sacks without the aprons to provide some semblance of shape, plus the severely coiled mounds of hair, the lack of makeup, and the truly hideous white trainers. You’d have to go out of your way to find shoes that ugly. They were enormous.
I asked Daisy, “What about your own work?”
“I have today off,” she said. “Two days in a row. Back to work tomorrow afternoon. We’ll have to go around to the end of the street, as the buildings are attached. The entrance is around the back, and—”
She stopped like a cartoon character who’d hit
a wall.
“Wait,” she said. “Oh, no.”
I said, “No keys? I wondered.”
She stared at me. “You wondered? You wondered? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I thought you’d have sussed that out, as tight as your jeans are. Nothing in your pockets, that’s clear. I assumed you’d be meeting the landlord.”
“How could I do that?” Her arm was waving a bit. “When I don’t have my phone or know his number?”
“You’ll know where he lives, though. We could go there. Find him.”
“I don’t know where he lives. I just moved in two weeks ago.”
“Don’t you have paperwork?”
“Yes. In my flat.”
She stared up at the first floor, above us, and I said, “No. You’re not climbing up there.”
“I couldn’t get in here anyway,” she said. “The entrance is around the back, like I said. I could go up the stairs back there, though, then balance on the railing and break the window. If I had a hammer. Or that shovel.” She looked at me speculatively.
Well, no. That wasn’t happening.
Daisy
I was wasting a few seconds wondering how I could have been that dumb when I heard the sound of hurrying feet, and then Dorian was there, coming up from behind us.
“Hi!” he said. “Wow. This is awesome. You’re Fruitful.” The pleasure lit up his dark eyes, and as always, my heart settled a bit at the sight of my gentle twin, the softer half of me. “And you’re Obedience. I haven’t seen you for so long. May I give you a cuddle?”
They looked at each other, confused again, and I said, “He’s asking, because it’s your choice now.”
“Oh,” Fruitful said. “OK, then.” She was tentative for once, but when Dorian hugged her, she hugged back.
My brother wasn’t quite as good a cuddler as Gray. A disloyal thought, but true. He was taller than me, which wasn’t hard, and a bit broader, too, which ditto, but he couldn’t quite wrap you up the way Gray had, back in the car after we’d got the girls out. He couldn’t kiss the top of your head, for example.
Kiwi Strong (New Zealand Ever After Book 3) Page 14