by Fiona Kidman
She turned and walked back towards the town. The sun had dropped away, blood red, followed by the amber light that strikes just before dusk under the mountain; darkness started to settle. She began to be afraid of what she would find, and how she would have to face up to Jim’s anger if he discovered she’d left Neil with Pearl. I went for a walk and I got lost, was the first story that sprang to mind. If he wasn’t home already, might she not gather up Pearl and Neil and take them to the station to catch the train home? To Taumarunui. Only the train wasn’t due for hours and he would find them there on the station. Perhaps they could hide somewhere.
Then she told herself she had imagined everything. That nobody knew. Conrad had had a day off sick, or his roster had been changed. He’d be on the train the next day. By the time she got to the house, she found herself believing this.
Inside, the kerosene lamp had been lit. Pearl was stoking the fire under Norma’s instructions. Norma sat at the table with Neil in her lap, trying to get him to eat some food she’d mashed up for him. There was no sign of Jim.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said to both of them.
‘I didn’t know where you were,’ Pearl said sullenly.
‘The girl came and got me,’ said Norma. ‘Thank goodness. She’s got more brains than I’d have given her credit for.’
‘Has Jim been in?’ Esme asked.
‘Wouldn’t be surprised if he was having a drink or two with his mates.’
‘Jim doesn’t go drinking.’ Which was true. Jim wasn’t a drinking man: it was one of those things that had recommended him to Queenie.
‘Happen he might be now,’ Norma said. She stood up patting the creases in her skirt. ‘You know, Esme, it doesn’t pay to get your meat where you get your bread.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘There was a letter came for you this morning. Seeing you hadn’t been in for the mail I brought it over when Pearl called me. My husband said take it to her, it might be urgent.’
‘Thank you,’ said Esme again, glancing at the envelope. She didn’t recognise the big block letters that spelled her name on the envelope, but she saw the soft glue that held the flap of the envelope in place. She guessed it had been opened.
‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ Norma asked.
Esme crumpled the letter in her hand as if it wasn’t important. ‘Probably a bill. That’s all the mail that ever comes, isn’t it?’ She opened the door and held it ajar, so that Norma had to walk through.
The letter said:
Dear Esme
You don’t know who I am but I think you ought to know that a certain man has been told he will be killed soon unless he takes some action to stop it happening to him he might have an engine run over him it will look like an accident I can promise you but it will happen he has said he will do what he must or rather what he must not. yours a wellwisher.
When Esme’s next boy was born she nearly died. The doctor and nurses at the cottage hospital gave her so much chloroform that if the baby hadn’t killed her coming out sideways, the dose almost did.
Norma came to visit and took a long look at Philip. ‘He might pass,’ she said, in a doubtful voice. Philip had been born with jet black curls and olive skin, nothing like his brother at all.
‘Pass for what?’ asked Esme.
Norma hesitated. ‘A white boy.’
Esme held Philip close to her, remembering the way her mother had taught her to soothe a baby. Already she could tell he was not a placid boy, but every limb seemed so perfect and unblemished she thought he couldn’t be real.
‘What would you like to call him?’ Jim asked.
‘What about Philip?’ she said, tentatively. This was the name of Jim’s father, although of course she had never met him. Jim’s parents had both died that year, the announcement of their deaths coming weeks later by sea mail, in letters edged with black.
‘Yes,’ Jim said, ‘that’s a nice idea. You go ahead and call him that.’ He stroked the baby’s cheek with his forefinger. ‘He’s a throwback this one,’ he said. ‘A right little darkie.’
‘One for Mum,’ Esme said.
Jim smiled and tickled the baby. It wasn’t like Norma said. He’d never come home drunk. He’d never had a word to say about anything that happened. If anything, he seemed more calm, and less willing to find fault with her than he had before.
The year the world went to war, Jim Moffit said I wish I could go (only he couldn’t because he was too old and he was needed for essential services anyway), and Ned, the fifth child of Awhina and Robert McDavitt’s eight children, said I’m going, and learned to sing the Maori Battalion song, and Lawrence Tyree, the film projectionist, said I’m glad I can stay here.
Lawrence had had a hernia operation, which he reckoned would keep him out of the war. He had blond hair and very smooth skin, so much like velvet you would think he had no beard except for a stain of mottled shadow that appeared at the end of the day. He’d come up to the Junction to live just before the war started and ran the picture theatre on Wednesday and Saturday nights.
‘You a shirker?’ asked Ned, on his visit to say goodbye before he left for the war. It was half time at the pictures on Saturday night.
‘I’ll show you my operation scar, if you like.’
‘All right,’ said Ned. ‘I’ll put two bob on it, there’s no scar.’
Everyone squeezed into the foyer to buy lemonade, stood watching as Lawrence began to undo his belt. Someone in the crowd reminded them that there were women and children present.
‘Don’t bother,’ said Ned, ‘we don’t really want to see it, mate.’
Lawrence shrugged and laughed, as if it was their loss, and caught the florin Ned threw him. After that, there wasn’t any more trouble.
‘I wish he had shown us,’ Pearl said to Esme afterwards.
‘You don’t want to talk like that,’ Esme said sharply. ‘People should keep their private parts to themselves.’
So then Pearl asked her, was it true that their mum had shown people her boobs at the races.
‘You don’t want to listen to gossip,’ Esme said. ‘There’s some people have evil tongues and if Jim ever heard you say a thing like that he’d make you wash your mouth out with carbolic soap and water.’
‘Jim couldn’t make me do a thing like that,’ Pearl said, laughing at her. She laughed a lot these days, her lips a big oval round the pushed-up teeth, her tongue darting in the pink cavern of her mouth.
Pearl often stayed at the Junction now. The afternoon Esme had gone away and left her to look after Neil seemed to be forgotten. Neil was due to start school the following year. Philip was a more challenging child, constantly on the go, a child who said No! when he was told to go to bed, and Why? when asked to pick up his toys: a wooden truck Queenie had given him for Christmas, and two guns from his father. Bang bang you’re dead, said Philip, especially to Neil. Esme had her hands full and she was pleased to have Pearl around. At fifteen, Pearl had become helpful and willing. She was seeing a boy called Raymond who was a guard on the railways. He had deep-set eyes and eyelashes like a girl’s. His mother was an Italian from Island Bay, in Wellington.
‘She’s too young to be seeing a boy of eighteen,’ Esme said. She had electricity and the telephone installed now. People rang through with sewing orders, although Queenie had to ring from the post office in Taumarunui to talk to her.
Queenie just sighed on the other end of the line. ‘What the heck, he’ll be called up any day. Reckon you can take better care of her than your dad and me, at our age.’
‘I wish she was still in school,’ Esme said.
‘Oh school. The authorities are rounding up everyone and making them stay in school these days. What’s the point of it? Look at you — it didn’t hurt you, did it? You’ve done pretty well, Esme.’
In the evenings Esme did Pearl’s fine fair hair up in rags for her. She liked running it through her fingers, her time to relax. She was busier than ever. She
’d never had so many sewing orders coming in. All the girls were getting married before their sweethearts went away. She wished she felt happier, but at least it was easier to pretend life was normal.
It gave her a shock one night when Jim said, ‘I wish I could take you back to the Old Dart.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Home. To England. I could show you my place, where I come from.’ They were lying in bed, Jim smoking, with an empty tobacco tin perched on his stomach for an ashtray.
‘For a holiday? Jim, there’s a war on.’
‘Well, I know that. But some day I’d like us to go back and live there. Things would be better.’
‘What things?’ She had thought that he was settled, even though the promotion he hoped for never came. It flashed through her mind that Conrad might be back, that he might be planning to try and see her, and Jim knew about it.
‘Just everything.’
‘Don’t be silly, Jim. We’ve got our home here.’
‘Oh, I don’t suppose you’d want to leave,’ he said with what sounded like a trace of bitterness.
For a day or two she found herself afraid and hopeful all over again about Conrad. There was no way of asking anyone, and no sign of him. On days off, Jim went around in his braces, with grey stubble on his chin. So that was it, England was the pay-off, the price of Philip, and she wasn’t going to give him that.
One morning, she met Lawrence at the butcher’s shop on the corner of Thames Street, when she was choosing calf brains. She had the children with her, because Pearl had left again. First Pearl had gone home to see Queenie, who said she could go down to Wellington to be near Raymond while he was in training at Trentham, and now she’d gone south. Esme was so angry that Queenie had agreed to this, that for the first time in her life, she and her mother were not speaking to each other.
‘I’m going to run the next movie through this afternoon,’ Lawrence said. ‘It’s called A Star is Born. Why don’t you come over for a preview?’
Esme laughed. ‘You’d soon get sick of my kids.’
‘I’ll take them for you if you like,’ the butcher’s wife said. ‘I’ll have finished my accounts by lunchtime.’ Joan Stott was a tiny lively woman who used a cigarette holder. She was considered a snappy dresser, one of Esme’s best customers. Esme had whipped up some dresses for Joan at short notice, when she was going on holiday.
‘Well, if you’re sure.’
‘You could do with a break,’ said Joan. ‘Your eyes are falling out of your head.’
The movie starred Janet Gaynor; it was about a girl called Esther Blodgett who arrived in Hollywood from the sticks, and learned different ways of walking and talking and making herself up, and got a new name and became a star. A big title came up that showed her destination as being ‘the beckoning El Dorado, Metropolis of Make-believe in the California Hills.’ Esme didn’t know why but it made her think of Pearl and she wanted to cry.
The theatre was empty, except for her and Lawrence who came and sat with her once the film was running through the projection machine. He had to duck back to change the reels, but the rest of the time he sat leaning slightly towards her so that their shoulders touched.
‘You like that?’ Lawrence said when it was over. They still sat in the dark.
‘I loved it,’ she sighed.
He leaned closer, breathing against her neck, like a hot gust of wind. When he ran his finger lightly up and down her bare arm, she didn’t stop him.
‘What’s this then?’ said Lawrence, his finger stopping at a point beneath her elbow.
‘What’s what?’
He rubbed his thumb and finger together. ‘It’s something hard.’
‘It’s my needle,’ she said.
‘Your needle?’
She told him then about the way the needle had broken off and how it was still floating about inside her, how it didn’t really hurt, that mostly she’d forgotten all about it, even when she was in the hospital having Philip and should have mentioned it to the doctor. Just sometimes it surfaced in funny places. Perhaps she’d have it taken out if it ever caused any trouble.
‘You could be dead by then,’ Lawrence said.
‘Yes, well, thanks very much.’
‘I could show you my scar if you like.’
‘No doubt you will, whether I like it or not,’ she said. She reached out and touched the raised red mark on his flat milky-white stomach. It reminded her of her children’s stomachs.
When he guided her hand further down, beyond the scar, to his busy entertaining penis, she thought, why not? Well, why not? She liked being able to give something to someone. She’d had a nice afternoon.
At home, she looked in the mirror at her smudged face. ‘You fool,’ she said, and couldn’t help laughing, the ridiculous position she’d put herself in, the awkwardness of seats in movie theatres, the way they sprang up behind you when you shifted.
I should leave, she told herself. It’s time to get out of here.
But not yet.
Her new baby slipped into the world with hardly a murmur, just a stretch and a wriggle when Esme was standing at the back door saying goodbye to Joan Stott who’d been visiting, as if birth was a frivolous occasion, a good story to be told. Esme hardly had time to lie down on the sofa in the front room. Joan cut the umbilical cord with Esme’s pinking shears.
The new baby didn’t look like anybody in particular. She had wide eyes which, when she was older, would assume a slightly staring gaze that alarmed people, as if she was looking too closely at them. Jim seemed pleased to have a daughter.
‘I think I’d like to call her Janet,’ she told Jim, before he had a chance to ask. She’d thought about Esther, but it sounded too like her own name, so she settled for Janet.
Dear Esme wrote Pearl
I’m having a great time here in Wellington. There’s Americans everywhere and their so good to us girls who are entertaining them. I just love the Marines. You should have seen me down Manners Street the other nite wearing one of their caps. Laugh. Me and my friends laughed and laughed. I sing in a club. You see all that singing and stuff in the choir paid off. Give your baby Janet a kiss from me, the one I never saw and tell those little brothers of hers to be good boys and do their homework just like their auntie did (ha ha).
Love from your sister, Pearl
For all her easy delivery, Janet cried a lot. Jim walked her up and down and stayed home some days to help look after the children. He had warnings from management at the railways, and they took him off the tablets and gave him a clerical job at the railway station. His pay was down so Esme took in still more work, although it was wrecking her eyes. She always seemed to have her knuckles in the corners, rubbing her lids raw. Someone had threatened to burn the picture theatre down and Lawrence had taken himself off because some of the servicemen home on leave were throwing rocks on his roof. Norma and her husband moved on, back up to Auckland, which was a relief to Esme. People shifted from this place all the time.
‘I’m sorry we didn’t get to move away from here,’ she said to Jim one evening when she was serving him mince on toast. She was holding her daughter on her hip with one hand while she put his plate on the table with the other. ‘I expect we should have gone anyway.’ She didn’t say ‘after the accident’ although that’s what she was thinking. Any number of accidents, if it came to that. It was hard to fathom how their lives had become so pulled apart. She didn’t feel exactly responsible. Something had started a long way back, before she could in any way decide for herself how things should have been. Back when she was young. Somewhere in the deep sleep of her early life, in a place she didn’t recognise.
‘I don’t want to leave here,’ Jim said, in a mild, alarmed voice. ‘This is where I live.’
Things had shifted between them. Before, she had been the one afraid to leave. Before the Depression was over, before the war started, before the movies. Now she wanted to go, but she couldn’t see how.
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��I thought you’d settle down, now that you’ve got children.’
No more babies, she resolved. She’d take herself more seriously. Another letter had come. It said, like the song, I WONDER WHO’S KISSING HER NOW. She screwed it up and put it in the fire, but her cheeks burned at the memory of it.
That night, she had a dream. She was in the middle of a bush clearing and, all around her, pointing towards her, were giant engines, heaving and grunting. They were driven by men with coal black faces, and they were laughing, their mouths stretched like heads on a coconut shy. She couldn’t recognise any of them but she pleaded with them to let her go. She promised that if they would let her escape she would never mess things up again. Then suddenly the trains and the men were gone and she was alone in the clearing. This abandonment was worse than when the engines were there, because now there was only silence, and the trees, and she couldn’t see what was behind them. Cobwebs caught her clothes when she tried to pass between the trees. When she woke up, she lay in bed panting, trying to brush the threads away from her face.
Later in the war, Esme got a phone call from a woman who ran a boarding house in Hawker Street in Wellington. It was about her sister Pearl who’d been living there. The woman said she thought she should let her know that Pearl was in the hospital in Newtown and she was really sick and it would be as well if Esme could come and see her, because the doctors weren’t that hopeful. Bad pneumonia, the woman said, in a sombre way.
‘I’d better get the train down tonight,’ Esme told Jim.
‘I should go,’ Jim said. ‘You don’t know anything about cities.’
‘I’ve been to Auckland. Anyway, I’ll manage. She’s my sister.’
What she would remember were the flags down Cuba Street, like clothes on a washing line, outside the People’s Palace where she stayed. And all the cars. She counted twenty-five in the street at one time. She looked in the Union Clothing Company for things to take home for Jim and the boys but decided she could make them just as well herself. This was while she still thought she was going back. The men in uniforms who whistled when she passed. The tram that took her out to Newtown to the big red brick hospital with the endless corridors painted yellow-cream and the unrelenting yards of brown linoleum that squeaked when she walked over it.
