Now, I was heading down from the hills, my legs and arms moving in perfect, if sweaty, rhythm, pushing to keep up with Daisy Chambers, whose dark ponytail bobbed ahead of me. Daisy was barely average height and compactly built, but strong as hell, the way some nurses could be.
We were nearly back to her place when I saw a flash of red-gold across the street and called, “Daise. Hang on.”
She turned, jogged backward with no problem at all, grinned at me, and said, “What’s wrong, pretty boy? Can’t keep up?”
“You know I can’t,” I said. “Kicking my arse, aren’t you. But that’s only the half of it. Somebody I know. Two minutes.”
She jogged across the street with me, and I slowed to a walk and said, “Poppy. Hi. What a surprise.”
She was wearing black leggings again today, with a tunic and cardigan over them this time. The tunic had blue and white stripes and was a wrap thing that crossed over in front. Nursing top, I guessed, which was a weird thing to notice, but there you are, I did. It could be that when you deliver a woman’s baby, there’s a connection. Except that that would be seriously unprofessional, not to mention creepy as hell, so maybe not.
Her hair was in a knot, and her face looked thin, her eyes even bigger than before, her cheekbones and jawline sharper, her eyebrows winged and delicate. Her look was austere. Intelligent. Or possibly she was just losing weight too fast.
I said, “Hi,” again, because she wasn’t saying anything, then took in Hamish, who looked poised to run, like he was balanced on his toes. “Going to school, mate?” I asked him, in one of those Brilliant-Adult moments one has.
“Yes,” he said. “Because I’m in Year One, and this is my first day. But my friend Ian is waiting for me, and we have to walk fast or we’ll be late. You can’t be late for the first day. And maybe my dad will be there. Maybe he just slept too long. If we don’t get there soon, maybe he’ll think I’m not coming, and he’ll leave.”
“Ah,” I said, and glanced at Poppy.
Poppy said, “My grandparents, Bethany and Charlie. You may have met at the wedding. I can’t remember.” Her voice was stiff, her expression closed. “Matiu is the doctor who delivered Isobel.”
I said, “Kia ora. This is my friend Daisy. We’ve been having a run.”
Hamish said, “Mum,” in an imploring sort of way, and Daisy said, “I’ll go along, Matiu, before I freeze. Come in for a coffee when you collect your car, if you like.”
“All right?” I asked. “Want me to see you home?” Well, this was awkward.
“No worries,” she said. “Nearly there. See you later.”
She took off, and Poppy looked at her, then at me, with a sort of blankness in her eyes, then said, “We should catch up.” She started walking, because Hamish was running ahead with the older couple behind him, the grandfather holding Olivia’s hand.
I thought, You should go, mate. What would you possibly be doing here? And, not too surprisingly, didn’t listen to myself. Instead, I walked beside Poppy, pulling on the hoodie that had been tied around my waist. It was chilly now that I wasn’t running.
I was about to ask her something safe, like, “How are you feeling? Stitches healing up all right? How’s the bleeding?” And then realized that inquiring about a woman’s vaginal bleeding and perineal stitching, in a non-medical context, wasn’t actually appropriate, and the other questions that sprang to mind, about her marital status, weren’t much better. I didn’t have a chance to think of a better topic, though, because we were beside a little playground, and ahead of us, another boy in uniform came running up to Hamish.
“I thought you were never coming,” he said. “We waited for ages. My mum and dad both came, because it’s the first day. You can’t be late for real school. We could get detention!”
“We were waiting for my dad,” Hamish said. “He wanted to come, but he couldn’t. There was probably road construction.” He set off with the other boy, and the little girl, Olivia, tore her hand out of her grandfather’s and started to run after her brother. Poppy called to her, and she kept running. I took a few running steps of my own, scooped her up, and said, “Remember me? I was at the hospital when your mummy had the baby.”
“Yes,” Olivia said, struggling to get down, “but I want to go to school, too. I’m big. Hamish said I could go later, but I don’t want to go later. I want to go now.” Her face was square, and there was a set to her jaw that reminded me of her uncle, the soldier. Some gene that had skipped over Poppy and landed right here.
Poppy and the older couple had caught up with us and were looking calmly interested. You could say, “the way elders did,” but it wasn’t really true. People didn’t change much as they aged, I’d found, they just became “more so.” Grumpy people got grumpier, cheerful people got more cheerful, et cetera. Since these people looked like the wise type, like my own Koro, they were probably being wise right now, wondering who the hell I was and why I was holding their great-granddaughter, and probably coming up with a pretty fair idea of the reason, as mad as it would seem to them. About as mad as it seemed to me.
Meanwhile, a couple things were happening. First, I was thinking, Road construction? What the hell? Second, the boys had stopped short at the edge of the school grounds, their body language tentative, clearly awed at the sea of uniform-clad kids milling about, and the other boy’s parents had caught up to them. The mum bent down, her hand on her son’s back, talking to him, and Hamish looked around, searching for somebody. Not hard to guess who. He looked back at his mum, something stricken in his expression, and I thought, Wanker. Wanker, in the sort of furious, frustrated rage I would normally feel for a moment, then let go, except that it wasn’t happening.
When a kid or a woman came in with the wrong kind of bruises, and you asked about it, heard the evasive answer, and made the call? After that, you told yourself, That’s done, then. You let it go like water through your hands, acknowledging the force of it, the heat or the frozen cold of your rage, and then let it drain away, because your part was over.
Some bruises, though, didn’t show on the outside. And this time, I couldn’t let it go.
Olivia squirmed some more, and I decided my most helpful role was to hang onto her, since Poppy appeared to have her hands full once more today, her grandparents had to be well over eighty, this kid had a mind of her own, and she was a solid armful for three years old, surely well past midway on her growth charts. I told her, “You’ll be in kindy soon yourself, I’m guessing. That’s school, eh. You’ll be doing heaps of coloring, learning to swing on the swings.”
“I like drawing best,” she said. “Not coloring. I can draw it myself. I draw kitties, and dogs, and elephants. And I like running. But I like running with Hamish best.”
“That’s good, then,” I said, in another display of rhetorical fireworks. “You’ll be doing that, bringing your drawings home to your mum. And running with the other kids. New friends, eh.”
“Thanks for your help,” Poppy told me. Still stiff. Still holding herself together.
“No worries,” I said. “You’ll want to do family photos, I’m guessing. First day and all. Want me to go? Or stay?” Past time to ask.
In the pushchair, Isobel screwed up her face and started registering a complaint. She was wearing another little hat, a pink one this time, and covered by a blanket, but her face still looked like a flower, if a crumpled one. She squirmed and fussed some more, gearing up to start crying.
“I want to know why you’re here,” Poppy said, rocking the handle of the pushchair back and forth in that way mums did, as if it were instinctive. “And why you didn’t go with your girlfriend. But I’m not asking. I’m ... I’m taking Hamish’s photo. I need to make a big deal of this. I’m ... You can put Olivia down. She’ll want to get into the photos, you’ll see. Could you ... would you look after the baby for a minute, as you’re here? She’s not hungry, at least she’d better not be.”
I ended up holding Isobel, since she’d decided tha
t, yes, it would be a good moment to cry. I tucked her into one arm and snuggled her up tight against the fleece of my hoodie as I shoved the pushchair with the other hand toward the side of the building where the littlies had congregated.
It wouldn’t be everybody’s first day. I knew, vaguely, that kids started school in the term after they turned five. Scarier, maybe, to start when a good half of the other kids had already been through months of ... whatever you learned in Year One. And if your dad hadn’t turned up.
Isobel had stopped crying, at least, as if she liked me holding her, the same way she had before. Or, of course, as if she were simply a baby who liked being held. I said, “Eh, little one. You’ve put on a bit of weight. Growing for your mum, aren’t you.” And felt only slightly foolish. Until she turned her unfocused gaze on me, at which point I started feeling something else.
She was going to have her mum’s eyes, maybe, because surely there was a hint of gold in the blue. She was studying me like she knew me, like she remembered me, and I’d swear that my arms remembered her, too. It couldn’t be, but it was.
Meanwhile, Poppy took a photo of Hamish and the other boy, arms wrapped around each other, looking proud and excited and a wee bit scared to be taking this step. Olivia dashed into frame, her twin red pigtails bobbing at the top of her head like they were as alive as she was, exactly as Poppy had predicted, and I smiled. Hamish put an arm around her, and my heart squeezed a bit, because I’d had a big brother myself, just that good. Twelve years older in my case, a godlike figure, endlessly tolerant. My brother Tane, who’d shown me how to tie my shoes and how to tell my right hand from my left, then how to dribble a basketball, hit a cricket ball, and pass a rugby ball. And who’d explained sex to me.
I tucked Isobel into my shoulder, felt her warm and solid against my sweat-chilled body, and remembered the fascinated, slightly horrified thrill I’d felt that day, and the way I’d lain awake and thought about it that night. Still horrified, but even more excited, because for a boy without sisters, girls had seemed so different. Not like people who’d been born just like boys were, who’d been held by their dads, loved by their mums, and had grown up, eventually, the same way I had. Even though I’d been going to school with them all along, it had felt, that year, like they’d been dropped down from some other planet, and I was seeing them for the first time. Or not seeing them, and how they were different, but wanting to, and ashamed of it.
I must have been ten or eleven, because Tane had already been married and the father of a son, with the impending arrival of another baby just announced. The two of us were sitting in Koro’s battered old boat, and as Tane cast expertly in the direction of the boat’s drift, dropping the soft bait, his touch as smooth as silk, I asked, “Is it nice having sex?” And held my breath. Maybe he wouldn’t tell me. But maybe he would.
He laughed. Sounding easy, like Tane always did. He reeled his line in, and I tried to reel in mine as expertly, and failed. “Yeh, bro,” he said “It’s nice. It’s the best feeling there is.”
“But what’s it ...” I struggled for the words. “What’s it like?”
He told me, and I was speechless.
“And she lets you do all that?” I finally asked.
“Ah,” he said. “That’s the tricky part. Yeh, if she wants it. If she wants you. If you do it right, she’ll like it as much as you do. And if she doesn’t want it, you don’t do it. Easy-peasy.”
“Eddie Robson says, though,” I said, “that girls tell you they don’t want to do it, but usually they don’t mean it, and they do want to do it. How do you know which it is?”
Tane cast his line again and didn’t look at me. That was the good thing about him. He never stared at you while he lectured you, so you didn’t know where to look. He said, “Yeh, nah, bro. He’s wrong about that. You check for the signals, is what it is.”
“Uh ...” I said. “What?”
“If you touch her hand,” he said, “and she pulls her hand away, or maybe moves in closer, then you know which it is. If you go to kiss her, and she pulls back, or she doesn’t. You wait and see. It’s a bit like a dance, eh. You don’t drag your partner round the floor, you go easy. Green light, yellow light, red light. You watch for the traffic signals. Or just ask her. Even easier. Got to be a green light, though, because otherwise, you’re a useless prick, and nobody wants a useless prick.”
“What if she kisses you?” I asked.
He laughed, then hooked a big elbow around my neck and pulled me close. “Aw, yeh, could be. The girls kissing you?”
“Ivory Tupuola did,” I said, feeling stupid and shy. On the other hand, I seriously wanted to know.
“If she kisses you,” he said, “and you like it, kiss her back.” And laughed, the sound big and round and comforting.
Not a bad lesson, really. Big brothers were all right. And things might look different when you had a baby of your own. Tane had made that shift early, but he and June had fit together so easily, right from their high-school days. He’d been born to be a husband and father, I’d always thought. My opposite.
Here in the September chill of Otago, far from the relaxed warmth of the Bay of Plenty, Hamish’s grandparents were doing a photo with him—and Olivia, who got into it once more—and then her grandad took one of Poppy with the two kids. A bell rang, loud amidst the clamor of voices, and the big kids started to scatter. Hamish and his mate froze like a pair of statues, and a young woman with blonde curls, standing beside a door that had Room 3 painted on it, clapped her hands. The little kids formed a crocodile, and Poppy gave Hamish a final cuddle, then an encouraging shove.
The blonde was the teacher, clearly. She was pretty, and my type as well, short and feminine as you please. I noticed it, but at a bit of a distance, because Isobel was doing some newborn snuffling into my shirt, and that was satisfying in an entirely different way.
The crocodile of kids trooped inside, Poppy waving at Hamish one more time. After that, she and her grandparents came back, she took the baby from me and tucked her up in her pushchair, and I wondered again what to do. I was surplus to requirements, or maybe I wasn’t. I felt ten again, stupid and unsure. It wasn’t brilliant.
Green light, yellow light, red light. Poppy wasn’t looking at me, not to mention the fact that she hadn’t rung me, even though the useless prick—Max—wasn’t here and hadn’t seemed expected by anyone but Hamish. Which meant she’d turfed him out, or he’d left on his own. Women with two-week-old babies, though, generally weren’t in Tinder territory, so what had I expected?
Olivia, on the other hand, ran over to me, threw her arms around my legs, and said, “Pick me up.” So I did.
I’d take the next step, and wait to see what happened next.
Much too much complication, but there you go.
8
Everybody Has to Eat
Poppy
I didn’t understand why Matiu was here, and I definitely didn’t understand why having him here felt like a relief.
I wasn’t used to having handsome, charming, muscular doctors dancing attendance on me. Understatement of the year. I hadn’t been in the market for a long time, which was fortunate, because men weren’t exactly lined up around the block, if you know what I mean. Between pregnancy and lactation, I’d been at the mercy of my hormones and a shifting body for, oh, about six years now. It wasn’t that I wasn’t happy about that, because my kids and my work were the best things in my life, and they were very good things, too. No question, though, that allowing my sarong-clad hips to sway as I walked down the beach at a tropical resort, after which I arranged myself in my deck chair in a fetching manner whilst sipping something tall and cool with a tiny paper umbrella and a maraschino cherry stuck into it, ignoring the turning male heads, hadn’t featured heavily in my life. When every drink starts with the word “virgin,” you tie the sarong under the baby bump and over your black maternity tank, and your belly button is a permanent outie, it’s a little hard to feel like a desperately danger
ous siren.
Well, the “desperate” part might be true.
Of course, Matiu was Maori, and his definition of “helpful to family” might be more generous than mine. What was I doing looking a gift horse in the mouth? Here he was, chatting with my grandparents and carrying Olivia, who’d been asking me to pick her up twenty times a day and crying when I wouldn’t. She’d begun climbing into bed with me as well, now that her dad had moved out and my grandparents had moved back home. I knew why she was doing it, but that didn’t make it any easier.
Both of us probably just wanted male companionship. I probably wanted somebody to cover for me when I zoned out, like, for instance, now.
Whoops. I stopped putting one foot in front of the other like a zombie and turned around to check on things. Matiu was still carrying Olivia, who was hanging onto him with her two hands on either side of his face, talking a mile a minute, telling him about her collection of wild animal figures, demanding his attention. My daughter was oddly self-confident.
He caught my eye, smiled, said something to my grandparents, and came up to join me where I was pushing Isobel. She was asleep again. That was the advantage of the pushchair. The disadvantage was that you had to be walking for it to work, and the zombie comparison was more apt every day. Walking with my arms stretched out in front of me, a vacant look on my too-white face, and minimal brain function? Check, check, and check. Isobel also enjoyed being carried around the house. I had a sling for that, but I was also getting frozen shoulder and an aching back.
You see what an irresistible companion I was. Also, when Isobel had cried, back there at the school, I’d started leaking, and the more emotional I’d got about Hamish and school and Max and various other aspects of my life, the more I’d leaked. When I glanced down now, there were huge dark patches showing on the white stripes of my tunic. And Matiu was right beside me. Looking at me.
Stone Cold Kiwi (New Zealand Ever After Book 2) Page 6
