A Needle in the Heart

by Fiona Kidman

I laughed so hard I cried, that terrible cracking up sort of laughter, that isn’t about humour; it’s painful and uncontrollable. The others looked at me with concern. When I’d recovered myself, I said abruptly, ‘I’ll ring the hospital.’

  My cellphone wasn’t working when I tried to get through. ‘I’ll phone from the motel when we get back,’ I said.

  Davina said, ‘You needed to do this. What you’ve been doing is too hard on you. You have to stop.’

  The motelier had stayed up for me. ‘I’ve got a message for you,’ he said. ‘Its about a relative of yours. I’m sorry, it’s bad news. She’s not expected to live through the night.’

  ‘I’m away,’ I said to Davina.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said.

  ‘No. No, you won’t. I’m going to sleep at the hospital.’

  ‘Shall I let the organisers know you’re not going to Gisborne tomorrow?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ll let tomorrow take care of itself.’

  I set out into the dark Waikato night.

  Five or six kilometres out of town the emergency petrol light came on. Slowly, and very carefully, I turned and drove back to town. Everything had turned into a terrible slow motion drama.

  The first petrol station I came to was self-service only at that hour of the night. The young man behind the steel grilles wouldn’t come out for me.

  ‘My aunt is dying,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what they all say,’ he replied. He had a cold lunar face with shadows under his eyes. I couldn’t get the bowser to work.

  ‘Please,’ I said, crying and shaking the grille. ‘Please. Flo’s dying.’

  ‘I’m under orders,’ he said.’ He was eating a steaming pie out of a wrapper.

  I said, ‘I won’t hurt you. I gave a talk here tonight.’

  He didn’t even answer me.

  I drove further up the town, further away, in the opposite direction from Flo, but I found another petrol station and was able to fill the car. An hour had passed since I set out. Then I turned the car into a racing boat of a vehicle, opening her out on the long straight roads as if she was under sail with the wind behind her. Was it the wine? Confusion? Terror at not, in the end, being where I had said I would be? Not being there.

  And where have you been?

  I’m here, Flo, I’m here, in the middle of a dark road and my eyes are blinded by tears and I cannot see the familiar landmarks.

  I had missed a vital turn-off and suddenly I was spinning again in the opposite direction from where I was supposed to be going. I reversed, tried to retrace my route, found I’d gone in a loop and was heading towards the nearby city of Hamilton, down the motorway with no off ramp for several kilometres. I came to a roundabout, slowed, understood at last where I was, and set off again. Two hours. The car flying — a hundred and twenty on the clock, a hundred and thirty, a hundred and forty. I remembered Flo ringing me one evening years before, after she had driven her ancient Mini Minor into a ditch somewhere round here. It had floated in the water, rocking gently, until someone pulled her back to safety. The car went again when it was dried out but the council office wouldn’t give Flo her licence when it came up for renewal at the end of the year. ‘You’d think after all those years I worked for them, they’d have had more respect,’ she said at the time. ‘Young whippersnappers.’

  A hundred and sixty. I had never driven this fast before. I started to sing to keep myself awake. During the previous winter I had taught a creative writing class. On the last day, my students had sung a waiata, a song of respect and thanks. I was honoured by them. They sang te aroha, te whakapono, te rangimarie, tatou tatou e and that is what I sang. It means, roughly speaking, in love, in peace, in faith, all of us, all of us. I don’t think she would have liked the song much but somehow I thought that if I sang and sang it, it would sustain me and take me to where she was, and I would, after all, be there. That when she said, ‘And where have you been?’ I would say, I’m here.

  And then I was there, and at the front of the little country hospital, in a pool of light, clustered on the verandah, I saw a knot of women standing, and I knew that I was too late, that it had already happened.

  Pamela came forward to embrace me, and I pushed her away.

  ‘She went at seven minutes after midnight.’ It was twelve fifteen and frost was gathering under the trees outside the hospital.

  I walked down the corridor without looking at any of them. I didn’t say I was sorry that I hadn’t been there.

  ‘I’m here, Flo,’ I said. But she was not going to reply, not ever. My poor old wounded starfish, her hands together, fingers pointed towards me, poor old fish, stranded for good.

  I shouted at her, ‘Why didn’t you wait?’

  I tore some flowers out of a vase and strewed them all around her. When I came through and joined the others somebody said, ‘We’ll get you a cup of tea.’ They looked frightened of me. Even Joy.

  I told them I didn’t want any damn tea and walked out of the hospital and got into the car. Nobody tried to stop me, though I think now they probably should. I drove very slowly as if I was a blind person who’d been allowed out on the road. When I got back to the motel I found I’d locked my keys inside my room. I banged on Davina’s door but she didn’t hear me. It was three o’clock in the morning. I thought I should sleep in the car, but then I thought I was grown-up now, the next in line to die, one of the old people, and I rang the motelier’s emergency bell.

  I left, headed for Gisborne at six o’clock in the morning, and when I got there, I talked again. About writing. About the imagination. Don’t be constrained by the truth, I said.

  Some days after that, we sang ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ at Flo’s funeral, and the next day I flew to Canada.

  The Sylvia Hotel at English Bay in Vancouver. It seemed the most perfect hotel in the world. It was covered with ivy; the interiors had dark old beams and rich stained-glass windows. I slept in a bed of such deep comfort in a large airy room that when I woke up late in the afternoon I was happy and felt free. I walked along to a shopping centre and bought face-mask products from a kind of cosmetics supermarket shop, complete with an open cool bin of products that looked as if they should have been in a delicatessen. I bought a face mask made from shitake mushrooms which I was given in a pottle, resting on ice inside another little container. Elsewhere, I bought an umbrella, a Vancouver newspaper. I went back to the Sylvia Hotel and put the mask on my face. It seemed as if flesh was being drawn to the surface. Afterwards, I felt totally cleansed, as if I was making myself over into a new person. I sat and watched the sea and ate mushrooms stuffed with crabmeat followed by a chicken breast served with ginger and grapefruit.

  On the flight from Calgary, my plane flew into the eye of the sun, its bright glare leaning through the window. I sat beside the young man I’d met up with in Banff. We had reached that state of intimacy that insisted (or he did any way) that we sit together on aeroplanes in order to continue, uninterrupted, with the story of our lives. A seemingly endless narrative. I remember the feeling of being dazzled in the sunlight.

  Flo flew in an aeroplane only once her life, the only time she left New Zealand. She and a group of her friends from the council decided to go for a holiday to Rarotonga. As she went to the departure lounge her foot caught in the escalator and she fell down and knocked her head. She went on with the journey because she was with her friends, but she didn’t like it, didn’t have a good time. Give me good old New Zealand any day, was all she said about it. Fear of falling. One way or another.

  Once, in the town where my parents and I lived when I was young, my mother ran into Wilf Morton. She was standing in the hardware shop in the village where we lived, and she heard a voice asking for a pound of nails. She knew him straight away, she told me, even though his hair was iron grey, and he was standing with his back to her. It was something about the way he spoke, as if asking for a pound of nails was a favour he was doing the shopkeeper.


  I only knew about this meeting at the time because I heard my mother telling my father in a low angry voice that evening. But, later on, I could see it very clearly. I have a photograph of Wilf, which was tucked in an envelope inside one of the recipe books that I salvaged from Flo’s house.

  ‘I said to him, “What are you doing here?”’

  ‘And what did he say?’ my father asked, with unusual animation. He enjoyed stories in which my mother’s family came out worse than he did, not that Wilf Morton had ever been family.

  ‘He lives here,’ my mother spat.

  ‘Oh Gawd, that’s serious,’ my father said.

  ‘On the other side of the inlet.’

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s not so bad. You can keep your eyes skinned when you go to town.’

  ‘Why should I have to cross the road to avoid that man?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ my father said. ‘Did he say what he was up to?’

  ‘He said he was retired.’

  ‘Retired from what?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said my mother. ‘That’s what I said to him — “And what have you retired from, Wilf Morton?” He didn’t answer me, just smirked.’

  I reminded my mother of this once, when we were talking about family matters, and the interminable question of why Flo was like she was. (This surfaced when Flo had been irascible or silent, especially in the days when Helena lived with her.) I’d heard the bones of the story about Wilf leaving Flo from her once before.

  ‘Oh, that Wilf Morton.’ My mother shrugged in the oblique sort of way her family had.

  ‘What made him so dreadful? Apart from leaving her like that.’

  ‘There were some things missing,’ she said.

  ‘You mean he stole things?’

  ‘Something like that.’ They didn’t go into details in that family. A trinket, a farm, a heart — my mother could have meant any of those things. A sense of honour, perhaps; we might think it misplaced nowadays.

  I had been asleep. The young man had kindly placed a pillow against me. I looked down on a tapestry of forests and lakes beginning to cloud with ice. Soon we would be in Winnipeg. The young man had quickened my senses, but I was old enough to know that what seems romantic on the outside can be a substitute for grief, and I was grateful to have gone on in the world long enough to understand that. Later, we would send signals to each other from afar, messages through mutual friends, invitations to book launches that were impossible for the other to attend, things like that, not the conspiracies of the heart that letters and emails involved. I’ve known any number of silver-tongued men, but I think my aunt only knew one.

  I sat in the Sylvia Hotel and watched the sea. Some of this story hadn’t happened then but in a few days it would. The young man I would meet in Banff, he was as dangerous as an elk. He was going to meet up with his wife later in the tour. He was nursing one of those harsh little secrets that men have, the kind that are common enough, but will tear lives apart. I’ve made several generalisations about men here: by and large, I think they’re not bad, which is one of those sweeping assertions that don’t get as much press as the other sort. Let me say here that I thought Theo was as decent and kind a man as it was possible to meet. I knew nothing unpleasant about him, nor have I heard anything since to alter my opinion of him. It was just that he lacked judgment in some aspects of his life, that he was helplessly in love with his wife and that he was undeniably homely.

  You could say people bring it on themselves, but I’m not sure it’s true; one will be absent from a marriage — there in the flesh, but absent in themselves. And then it’s too late. You can tell from looking at some couples, even in photos, that one person’s eyes have slid outside the frame. I have a picture of a group of us writers who went on that tour, and the young man from Banff is there with his wife. On that day, he is in the marriage still (although not for much longer), but his eyes are following the exit signs.

  I came across a quote written by a young Frenchman in the seventeenth century. I’ve kept it for so long I don’t know where I found it. It’s written in my handwriting on a brown scrap of paper, brittle with age:

  L’absence est à l’amour ce qu’est au feu la vent.

  Absence is to love what wind is to fire.

  FAMILIES LIKE OURS

  There was that day in the science laboratory which people always talked about at school reunions, even if they hadn’t been there when the accident took place, the day Lester Cooper blew off his hand with a pipe bomb. His sister Patricia hadn’t started high school at the time but later she was expected to go to science classes in that same room, as if nothing had happened.

  As if her brother’s flesh and blood hadn’t been spread on the walls.

  The room had been painted by then, the same drab institutional light cream it had been before. If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t be able to tell what had gone on. You would simply never know. But when Patricia looked across the room, she saw her brother’s freckled boy’s hand outstretched in the basin where it landed, among the pipettes and petrie dishes. The nails would still be slightly bitten, a piece of sticking plaster on the little finger where he had nicked himself with a chisel at woodwork class, a small wart on a knuckle, fine downy hair covering the back of his hand.

  The accident happened during the lunch hour when the science lab was supposed to be monitored by a prefect, but Clarence Mills got leave to keep a dental appointment in town and forgot to tell someone in charge. Some people would say it was Clarence’s fault; others would blame the school for lack of supervision. But it was Lester who had taken the pipe for the bomb to school, Lester who hammered the end out flat, and he who had emptied the powder out of the leftover fireworks from Guy Fawkes the night before. Lester, with his friends watching, screwed the bolt down on the neck of the pipe, the end of an old tap from the farm. Windows were broken in the explosion, and a boy got his glasses cracked, but Lester was the one who left his hand too long on the bomb and joined in the laughing and cheering at the size of the explosion until he saw his hand sitting on the other side of the room.

  After he came out of hospital, he spent another year at Ramparts District High School, the hook he wore on his stump mostly concealed in his pocket. He learned to write with his left hand. He answered questions when he was called on in class and passed his university entrance examinations, and then he left town.

  ‘Les, you don’t have to go,’ his father, Os Cooper, said. This was one night at dinner when the matter of his leaving was first raised. ‘We can find some things for you to do here on the farm,’ he said. Os was a fair man with broad furry arms and a slight limp which he had brought back from the war. He had been a gunner: he was in the firing line at Tobruk, got hammered by Rommel in the desert, could recite the Battle of Cassino as if it had happened yesterday, and not a quarter of a century earlier.

  ‘Yeah, shear sheep,’ Lester said. He raised his hook for his father to see. They were eating roast lamb and minted peas and new potatoes. His mother had cut up his meat for him before she covered it with gravy, as if by concealing what she’d done, he would believe he’d done it for himself.

  Os said, ‘I bought this farm out of sharemilking. D’you think that was easy? It’s meant for you kids.’ The farm was mostly dairy but Os ran dry stock, sheep and cattle, on the hills. When people stopped him in town and said how sorry they were about the boy, he’d said, over and again, ‘He’s not a bad kid, you know.’ No one argued with him. Most of the men had played around with gelignite or explosives of one kind or another in their lives.

  ‘The old order changeth,’ Lester muttered under his breath, although Patricia who was sitting beside him, heard what he said.

  ‘You can cut out that fancy talk with me, boy,’ Os said.

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘Where will you go?’ his mother said. Vonnie was a skinny woman with small neat wrists and ankles. Her complexion was scrubbed by too much wind and sun and tobacco smoke. On Thursdays, when she went bowl
ing, she wore a white dress and a hat with green canvas stitched on the underside of the brim. When she was putting out Os’s lunch she looked like a grown-up candidate for confirmation. Os said she smoked too many cigarettes but Vonnie said there were plenty who smoked more than forty a day and she had a little way to go to catch them up.

  ‘I’m going to university,’ Lester said. ‘I’ve enrolled to do history and English at Auckland.’

  Patricia still sees the way her father’s face dropped, like a child who has had chocolate snatched away from him, yet knowing at the same time that it had already gone. This is a look she has become familiar with, now that her father is old. At the time, her mother rolled her knife and fork backwards and forwards between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. Patricia thought, then, this is a set-up. Her mother knew about this.

  Os threw his dinner at the wall, not something Patricia had ever seen him do before. He had been a genial friendly man when she was small, a person who liked practical jokes. ‘Get the hell out of here,’ he shouted. ‘Why don’t you just bugger off right now.’

  ‘Okay, I will.’

  ‘You don’t mean that, Os,’ his mother said.

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  Lester stood up then, pushing himself away from the table with his good hand. ‘I’ll be seeing you all,’ he said.

  At the end of Patricia’s first year in high school she said she would like to transfer out of sciences and take sewing and cooking for her options. She was a blonde girl with bright thick hair and big greeny blue eyes, the colour of clear sea in the shallows. You’re a bright enough girl, her teachers said, above average anyway. Don’t you think you’re throwing away your chances? Plenty of time for home-making.

  Patricia had shrugged. ‘I’d like to get on with things,’ she said. These days she thinks she would have been sent to the guidance teacher for trauma counselling, victim support, something like that. There would be someone trained to make connections about her lack of ambition and drive.