A Needle in the Heart

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘I don’t understand the way you’re letting yourself down,’ her best friend, Kaye Swanson, said to her. Kaye was a tall girl who could be sharp and imperious with people, even as a child.

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ Patricia said, surprising herself. ‘I know what I want.’ She could have said she didn’t want to sit in that room where Lester had screamed and screamed, four people holding him down until the ambulance arrived, and where the policeman sent to the scene had thrown up. She didn’t say this, because she was a girl who spared the feelings of others.

  Besides, Patricia and Kaye have spent more than half their lives apart now and Patricia isn’t envious of women with careers. The thing is, she’s done exactly what she liked: living on the farm with Dan and their four children, driving her four-wheel drive along familiar roads each afternoon to pick them up from school when they were small, entertaining their friends as they grew up. Not everything in life is perfect, but then show her a life that is. She misses her older children more than she admits to others, now that, with the exception of their ‘bonus baby’, Benjamin, who came along late, they have all left home. Her father, who is in the local rest home, frustrates her because she can’t make herself understood anymore, and there have been some irreconcilable losses in her life, like that of her mother, and her brother Lester whom she hasn’t seen since she was a girl. Sometimes when she is working in her garden, and looking in the cool dark places between ledges and under hedges where spring bulbs germinate, she finds herself doing sums in her head about how old she was then, and how old he was, and what age he would be now, and is astonished to think that if he is still out there, he will be nearly fifty. There was a case of a New Zealand man with a shadowy past who had had a hand transplanted on to the stump of his arm, a world first that made international headlines. She remembers how she had studied the television pictures, and searched the newspapers looking for clues. Could it be him? But it was not, there was nothing she could see that remotely relates this man to her brother. On other days, she wonders if her father might have hidden something from them, or simply not recognised some scrap of information that would have led them to Lester. She has left it too late to ask him. He had his own way of keeping things to himself, and now he doesn’t know what day it is, and has to be fed because he has forgotten that people need to eat to stay alive.

  All the same, she has survived, she tells herself, alive and whole, and still easy to look at, confident and smiling, a woman people turn to in times of crisis.

  When Patricia and Kaye were children they believed their friendship would never end, despite the differences in their natures (something neither of them analysed then). They did almost everything together. They were in the same class at school, and both belonged to the Gold Epaulettes Marching Team which Patricia’s mother Vonnie coached. Vonnie had been a marching girl too. The girls marched until they were nine and then the club went into recess because the treasurer embezzled the funds and the team couldn’t make the annual tournament. Kaye was midget captain the year they won the trophy. Her height was an advantage, but it drove Vonnie mad trying to contain Kaye’s hair under her cap, when she was dressing the two little girls; fizzy hair the colour of mouse fur that was pulled tightly into a plait, but still stood out in a strange transparent halo where it escaped from its bondage. Patricia was never as keen on marching as Kaye and was secretly pleased they could just hang around together, but Vonnie felt badly about Kaye’s disappointment, especially because, as she said to her friends, the poor kid’s mother, Wilma, is always having a bad period. A permanent monthly, if you asked her. She invited Kaye to stay at the farm, and it became a regular thing, the girls spending the weekends and summer holidays together.

  Kaye stayed at Patricia’s more often than Patricia stayed in town, even though the farmhouse was shabbier and more run down than the Swansons’ place, which was full of couches tightly covered with blue velvet and ruche curtains. The Coopers’ farmhouse was ramshackle and one part of the roof needed replacing so that when it rained hard they had to put buckets out to catch the drips. Os often promised Vonnie that it would get done in the spring, but spring passed into summer and the leaks went away and Vonnie, whose real interests were the bowling club and having a bit of a knees-up at the weekends with her friends — she called them ‘the girls’ too — didn’t seem to mind. There was a piano in the front room and the girls, leathery looking women like Vonnie herself, and their husbands, came out with a couple of flagons of beer, or a keg. Os enjoyed himself too on nights like this when everyone sang and told raucous jokes. People got quite drunk out there on the farm at the weekends. You could see some of them leaning against the cars when they’d had enough, sometimes throwing up. Os used to go out with a few shovelfuls of dirt on Sunday mornings and chuck them over the evidence.

  Nobody took much notice of what Patricia and Kaye did. Before his accident, Lester used to take the girls down some Saturday nights to the river bank where there was a camping ground beyond the outskirts of the farm, on the way out of town, and shine torches on tents, so they could see what people got up to. Not that they ever saw anything interesting, just people getting mad and yelling at them. There was only so far they could go along the bank, because the course of the river changed and abruptly fell away to steep bluffs. At that stage, Lester was a boy who looked as if he would grow into a mirror image of his father, his hair slicked up in a tuft with Brylcreem, the gingery hint of a beard on his chin, although Os said, with real anxiety, now and then, that he was a moody kid and he should get over it. He wasn’t like that when he was a boy.

  The last summer holidays before Lester’s accident, Patricia and Kaye built themselves a house in a honeysuckle hedge. The perfume from the flowers was so sultry and sweet it was like they imagined being drunk, the way Os and Vonnie’s guests got at the weekends. It instilled in them a dizziness and a portent of sin, although, when it came to it, Patricia wonders if either of them ever discovered sin. She is vaguely aware of it as something other people do, but she has done little that she can think of. The two of them, she and Kaye, stumbled around like the nursing bees that hovered over the golden flowers. When Patricia poured them each about half a glass of gin from a bottle in the drinks cabinet — and that is one of the most wicked things she can remember — it tasted acidic, a little dangerous at the back of their throats, but otherwise not as surprising as they had hoped, apparently not altering them in any way. They both wanted to be movie stars when they grew up, and practised acting until they were at least ten or eleven when suddenly they felt too old for dressing up and fooling around in that way. Kaye had grown a whole head taller and got tired of Patricia wanting her to play the man every time. It brought about their first quarrel.

  One afternoon Patricia persuaded her mother to let them dress up in her wedding dress, which was in a box on the top of the wardrobe. The dress was made of guipere lace over taffeta and had some rust marks on the skirt where the pearl tiara had rested on its little metal head band in the box.

  ‘Well, I suppose so,’ Vonnie said doubtfully when Patricia asked her. ‘I put it away hoping for you to wear it some day, dear, but you might have to get a new one of your own.’

  ‘I’ll wear it today and you can take my picture,’ said Patricia. ‘That’ll be my pretend grown-up. You can be the groom, Kaye.’

  Vonnie took a picture of them with the box Brownie. After she had squinted at them for a while and snapped a couple of pictures, she said, ‘Now it’s Kaye’s turn to put the dress on.’ She had seen through the viewfinder that Kaye was looking discontented.

  Kaye pulled the dress over her head and stood there, her face suddenly illuminated. She stood up straight, the way she did when she was a little thing in the marching team, as Vonnie told Os that evening. She took two steps forward, flicking the train behind her.

  ‘Go on,’ Vonnie said to Patricia, ‘take her hand.’

  ‘Who am I?’ said Patricia.

  ‘My husband.’


  ‘Yes, but what’s my name?’

  ‘Lester,’ said Kaye.

  ‘Yee-hah,’ cried Patricia. ‘Kaye loves Lester.’

  ‘No, I do not,’ said Kaye, struggling to get out of the dress. ‘I do not, I do not.’

  2

  Ramparts is a town that’s off the beaten track, well off State Highway One. It’s a place that gets deeply cold in winter. There is a town square and a clock that fell into disrepair but has been restored by a group of enthusiasts. The gardens that edge the square are filled with head-tossing poppies in the spring, a mix of dahlias and snapdragons in late summer. A cenotaph stands by the war memorial hall and beyond that there is a grove of trees that turn deep crimson in autumn. The motto on the war memorial reads, ‘Lest We Forget’. There are two hotels in the main street, an antique shop, most of the main banks, a post office, some pavement cafés and the back entrance to the supermarket car park. The population is two and a half thousand. It is much the same now as it was when Patricia and Kaye were children, although some places have closed down. There used to be a car and tractor sales place near the end of the street but people buy cars in the cities now, and the farmers, too, get their farm equipment from bigger centres. It closed down after Selwyn Swanson sold up in a hurry. There was some shaking of heads over that; the Swansons were big noises in Ramparts for a few years.

  Wilma Swanson was a bank teller in Wellington when she first met her husband, so from the very beginning she knew exactly how much money he had in each of his accounts. In that early life of hers, she was required to be well groomed every day and she never lost the habit. She always wore eye shadow and a discreet touch of rouge and never missed using moisturising cream at night before she went to bed. Selwyn had been surprised on the first night of their honeymoon at her slightly waxy appearance when they went to bed, she in her apricot peau de soie nightdress, he in his blue shortie pyjamas his mother had bought him for the occasion. She had been concerned that he was marrying a girl with a background in what she called commerce, the retail trade as it were, although he had said that it wasn’t quite like working on the front counter of Woolworths. He and his brothers had been left money by their father, a doctor who’d been making money in a city practice for a long time; in a way, it was like one of those fairytale quests where three brothers are each given a sack of gold and told to turn it into ten sacks. Selwyn was already working in the secondhand car dealer business and he could see opportunities. He just had to find the right little town without major competition, and he could live the sweet life forever.

  Wilma had been disappointed with her fate when he spelled it out. She had envisaged a house up in Kelburn, somewhere near the cable car, perhaps even Talavera Terrace, where she could invite the girls she went to school with at Wellington East for lunches and cocktail parties. Selwyn said that it would be just for a little while and she could help with the books, and then there would be no end to the things they could do: private schools for their children, and travel to all parts of the globe, and dresses from Paris.

  Kaye was the couple’s only child, and after her birth, which Wilma described as an unpleasant experience, she gave up on trying. That is, she stopped sex and all that ‘funny stuff’, pretty soon afterwards, except for once a week because Selwyn said he did have his rights. Tuesday was the night set aside for it. Wilma joined the choral society and took charge of flower arrangements at St Peter’s, and pretty soon she was asked to be treasurer, which, as she pointed out to Selwyn, didn’t leave much time for working in his airless little office, and they did have a position to maintain in the town. At first, she thought he could do just fine without her. It meant that she didn’t have to deal with rough men in singlets who came to pay their monthly hire purchase instalments at the office window. Over time, she believed he had come to recognise she was right about this, that a certain fastidiousness set them apart, brought him more respect.

  The showroom was Selwyn’s domain. A long white-walled interior with cool concrete floors painted grey, it was shaped like a warehouse, only with big plate glass windows facing the street. A dozen or more tractors stood in gleaming rows, four abreast on the showroom floor, as sleek as new cars and several times as powerful. Selwyn Swanson was a tall suave man with velvet grey skin pinched round the nose, cool eyes that out stared the distance, and a livery pink mouth. He wore made-to-measure suits that he ordered on trips to Wellington. Some thought he was above himself, a man who owned a tractor sales and service, wearing suits like that in a town like Ramparts, but in fact he never got his hands dirty. He had sales reps in hairy tweed jackets, and mechanics in overalls, who could do all of that.

  When he walked up and down among the giant machines, he would stop and let his fingers trail lovingly across the rims of tyres, or the bonnets that clad the engines, and for a moment a flicker of happiness would illuminate his face.

  The young woman sitting behind the glass reception window kept her head down whenever he glanced her way. She wrote columns of figures in a ledger book, and from time to time opened a cash box and counted out money.

  It was at moments like these that Selwyn was most likely to appear at her side, arriving on noiseless soles. ‘Didn’t they teach you to count at school?’ He pointed down the ledger, jabbing at each ink splotched entry. ‘There, that should be one thousand two hundred pounds and four shillings.’

  Ethel Floyd was one of several young women he had employed in the office, and she was the third from a family of sisters he employed successively until each one of them got married. He expected to employ Floyd girls for years to come. They were even-tempered, he told his wife, and good at figures. Until Ethel came along, and things started to fall apart. He thought Ethel had trouble counting to ten; addition and subtraction could cause hours of heavy sighs and rubbing out of figures.

  ‘Yes, Mr Swanson.’

  ‘What should it be?’

  ‘One thousand two hundred pounds and four shillings.’

  ‘And what have you got there?’

  ‘One thousand one hundred pounds. And four shillings.’

  ‘That’s one hundred pounds less than Os Cooper owes me. I don’t know why I keep you on. Do you?’

  Ethel Floyd raised lazy brown-black eyes towards him. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Actually, I do.’ She smiled at him. Her teeth were small and neat and very even. She wore a short skirt that just skimmed the hem of her panties when she stood up and knee-high white boots. When she went out to do her shopping at lunchtime she put on a brown leather cap pulled over one eye. In the town of Ramparts, she was a rare sight, the kind who drew wolf whistles from carpenters working on the building of the new supermarket.

  ‘Mr Swanson,’ she said, ‘you’re old enough to be my father.’

  The year after Lester left the farm for good was the one when Neil Armstrong and two other astronauts first set foot on the moon. Everyone sat glued to their television sets in the daytime, watching the three men bounce around the barren moonscape, looking like panda bears inside their space suits. Patricia remembers the miracle of it, how the thought of men so far out in space, so beyond the reach of everything earthly, had transformed people, as if their wildest imaginations had new horizons. She can see herself looking out at the night sky and wondering where Lester was, and whether he was as inspired to dream of the impossible, the way she was. The difference between them was that he had succeeded, whereas she would go on doing the same things as others because a sense of order made her happier than most people of her age. Lester had achieved, in that year, a romantic status in her imagination. Her mother had had a couple of letters from which she read out bits, but Patricia noticed she put them away carefully afterwards. The strongest thing she read out was: ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me about the things that are going on in the world?’ And, ‘We are mobilising up here, I can tell you. We don’t want no shitty war.’ She wished she knew what he was making of the moon landing, but she hoped he, too, would be excited and moved.

  There had bee
n other changes since Lester’s accident and departure, imperceptible at first, but there all the same. Kaye was less keen to come out to the farm. Patricia knew that it was not just because Lester had gone, but something to do with Wilma’s sense of propriety, as if she had finally tumbled to the fact that the Coopers and the Swansons were different. Vonnie had hinted at this, because she didn’t want Patricia to think this was something she had done. ‘She manages to turn other people’s misfortune into a scandal,’ she said with a touch more acid in her voice than was usual for her. Still, Kaye asked her over from time to time, but the invitations were increasingly spaced out. Patricia didn’t mind that side of it so much. She didn’t like going to the Swansons much either. There was something about their house that made her uncomfortable. It was hard to describe, but it was a sense of hesitation while meals were eaten in her presence, a silence between the scraping of a fork on a plate and the delivery of food to the mouth. She noticed it most in Mr Swanson, who seemed paralysed by the prospect of chewing, but also in Kaye’s mother. Her throat appeared to swell when she swallowed, and sometimes her eyes watered.

  All the same, she and Kaye had been friends for such a long time, and she believed it wasn’t Kaye’s fault, whatever they thought about her and her family. And Kaye was excited as she was about the moon walk. Her own father, though, was not impressed by the space drama that was taking place, right this very minute. He wore the habitual frown he had had since Lester’s accident. ‘It’s rubbish,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not rubbish,’ Patricia cried, ‘it’s amazing.’

  ‘I tell you, it’s not true. They’re feeding you a bunch of baloney. There’s no little men walking about on the moon.’