by Fiona Kidman
An evening or two later, when everyone was packing up to leave, Jock came to see her. Dixie had already left, without a word to her neighbour. Jessie was at the farm owner’s house, being cosseted and fed blancmange by his wife, the miracle girl who had been saved, one less statistic on a very bad night. Irene would tell herself that, in time, Jessie would forget, that she would not recall having seen what she had, she would not remember that her mother had failed to care for her well enough, although this is something Irene would not forget and it would haunt her all her life.
She was expecting Jock Pawson to come to her. She saw her own body now as a gateway to safety. It surprised her how easy it was, looking at it like this.
2
Clay particles
1963
OVER AND AGAIN, BELINDA REPLAYS scenes that have stayed with her for a lifetime, ones that prickle behind her eyelids just before she wakes, no matter where she is. There’s an ocean at the end of the street where she lives, with a bright dark sea washing against a wall in summer, a sea that turns violent when the wind turns to the south and spume fills the air, a small deserted island lying offshore. Often, in the evenings, Belinda walks to the front gate, and on a good night nothing can hide the sweep of brilliant sunsets that settle over the strait, the saddle of water that lies between this tip of one island and the beginning of the other. On clear days she can see the mountain caps of the far island, shimmering in the distance, gleaming like wedding cakes. Near at hand, fishing boats bob up and down on the water. Early in the mornings the fishermen will swing past the gate to the house where she lives; later they return with their catch. Their voices throb as they pass, sometimes in song, a snatch of Italian, it depends on the weather whether they are happy or not. Belinda’s mother had taught her a rhyme, We’ll weather the weather together, whatever the weather may be, and it’s a refrain that still surfaces on rainy days.
Before the fishermen leave, they collect bait from a red shed that stands on the rocks above the waterline. The stench of the bait on hot days catches you in the back of the throat, although this is something Belinda can’t describe when she writes this scene. She is a film maker and smell cannot happen in the movies, it can only be implied. But if she breathes deeply, it is there, and it is this, perhaps most of all, that brings it all back to her. What happened.
The house where Belinda lives is a wooden bungalow, built close to its neighbour. At night she can hear the sea crashing on the sea wall. There’s a patch of earth at the back of the house that consists of heavy clay soil, where things don’t really grow. Belinda’s mother once planted a rose bush that struggled through the summers, sprouting occasional light maize-coloured blooms. She tried tomatoes, because they grew so well up the road at the Italian houses, but the fruit never ripened. Another year, it was a row of cabbages. She was bent, for a time, on providing the family with fresh healthy vegetables. Near the fenceline stands an incinerator.
Belinda lives with her mother and father, her younger brother and sister, and for a time an older half-sister. It is in this house that she has her last clear memory of her mother, even though she was taken to visit her in hospital in her dying days.
She sees her mother, hair wispy and uneven, head bent over a book, and hears a small exasperated sigh escaping as she closes it, readying herself to prepare a meal. Irene never captured the knack of coping. There was always wet washing hanging over wooden racks, sticky benchtops and a litter of open library books. Irene read books all the time when other women did the ironing or were starting dinner. Dinner was often late, as if Irene really didn’t care much what they ate. Belinda thinks later that her mother just wasn’t hungry, that her taste disappeared as she got sicker.
She remembers, with at times a touch of bitterness, the way Irene favoured her eldest child, the one who came before Belinda, and got away with things she and the other children couldn’t. ‘I’ll tell your father,’ she might say to the three young ones, when the noise of them all shouting and squabbling got too much, only she never did. Their father, Jock, would take his belt to them if he was angry. The fact that their mother didn’t tell him was, Belinda supposes, love of a kind. That, and the distracted hand that brushed her children’s foreheads when they were in bed, and she read to them.
There was a particular moment Belinda will recall, when her mother stood beside her at the gate and they looked out across the sea together, towards the mountains to the south. ‘I met your father over there,’ Irene said. There was something muted and despairing about the way she spoke.
IT WAS AT THE INCINERATOR that Belinda saw Charm the day after Irene died. The woman was burning her mother’s clothes. Charm’s real name was Charmaine but she had always been known as Charm, not Sharm, even though Charmaine sounded like Sharmaine. She had a thin face and fair hair that looked as if it hadn’t been brushed out after having rollers in it, so that the curls stood out like sausages. Her nose was narrow, and her flexible lips formed a circular pout when she smoked a cigarette.
‘I’ve known your dad a long time,’ she said. ‘It’s just as well he’s got old friends to call on at a time like this.’
Belinda hadn’t known that her father had this friend, but then he and her mother didn’t go out a lot. There were the three children to care for: herself and Grant and Janice. One every two years, the first years her parents were married, not to mention Jessie, the one who ran off up north just when her mother needed her.
‘I’ll be bound that girl has had a baby. That’s always why girls go north, you know,’ Charm said, while she was waiting for the flames to die down enough to drop in another load. ‘Although you’re too young to know about things like that. How old are you? Eleven? You want to be careful when you get older.’ She looked with disgust at a burnt oven mitt and some torn stockings as she threw them into the fire. ‘Your mother was no housekeeper, was she?’
‘Mum got tired,’ Belinda said.
Charm checked her over. ‘You’re like her, aren’t you? One of those dark little things that watch you from behind your back. You don’t look much like Grant and Janice. I wonder where your mother found you? You’ll get your periods in a year or so. Then you’ll need to look out for yourself. Won’t you, eh?’
‘I guess so.’ Belinda followed Charm back into the house, hoping she might yet protect her mother’s belongings. But Charm was taking every single thing her mother had ever owned out of a chest of drawers and from the wardrobe: a silky though well-worn dressing gown that had lost its belt years ago, a rope of fake pearls, a handbag, a home-made floral print dress, panties with stretched elastic. Charm picked them up by her fingertips, dumping them in a large hemp sack, preparing to take them to the incinerator, which was burning fiercely with its last consignment of jackets and blouses. She emptied out the make-up drawer, with its shreds of powder and vanishing cream, and threw a tube of red lipstick after them, after trying a little on her own long lips and grimacing.
‘It’s probably got germs. We used to live a couple of doors along from you, me and my husband. Well, he’s dead now — fell down the stairs and knocked his head. He wasn’t much loss, never did an honest day’s work. I collected his insurance money, so that was useful, not that it was enough to cover the mortgage. Your dad was a great help, getting it all sorted out, selling the house. Your mother never made the effort. Well, she was usually pregnant. You were a real screamer as a baby. Thank God I never had kids.’
Charm had come upon a pile of books. She snorted. ‘That was Irene, always had her nose in a book. Thought she was better than the rest of us.’
‘Could I keep some of those?’ Belinda asked. She held a worn copy of The Grapes of Wrath to her chest.
‘What would you do with them? You’ll get enough books at school and, besides, your Aunt Agnes won’t have room for them all.’
‘Are we going to live with Aunt Agnes?’
‘Your father can’t look after you lot. Come on, help me take this stuff to the incinerator.’ She picked
up a pile of novels and a slim book of poems. ‘Trash, if you ask me,’ she said. The books followed the clothes unceremoniously into the bag. Lots of Steinbeck. Out. War and Peace. Out. Check to Your King. A worn copy, well loved. Charm turned it over, wrinkling her nose with distaste. ‘Robin Hyde. That stupid girl who killed herself,’ she muttered, as if to herself. Out, too.
‘You’d better start packing,’ she said. ‘I told you, you’re off to Masterton to live.’
It was news to Belinda that she and Grant and Janice were to be sent away. ‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.
‘Don’t beg, you can always sell matches,’ Charm said. This was one of the innumerable smug sayings that Charm would trot out over the years Belinda knew her. In the kitchen, her father’s sister Agnes was rattling pots and pans, preparing the next meal. People from along the street had brought covered casserole dishes, even though none of them knew the Pawsons all that well. An Italian neighbour from one of the fishing families had brought a large pot of hot pasta swimming in creamy sauce, dotted with mussels. She was dressed in black, her face respectful and sad. The food had been accepted with nods and what passed for smiles from Aunt Agnes, while Charm grimaced behind her back. The pot had since been placed under the sink, covered over with a tea towel. ‘We’ll decide what to do with that later,’ Agnes said. She had put potatoes on the stove to boil.
Belinda didn’t dislike her aunt, but was a little afraid of her. Like Charm, she was a widow, although a much older one. She shaved her upper lip when she remembered, and when she didn’t a dark shadow appeared, just like a man. Her Scots accent had never left her, although she and her brother Jock Pawson had lived in New Zealand more than forty years. She lived alone in a large house in a small town ‘up the line’, as she liked to call it.
Outside in the narrow garden, smoke was curling and spreading between the houses. The afternoon was drawing in. Charm stirred embers in the incinerator, bringing the fire back to life as she hurled Irene’s books into the rising flames. Belinda couldn’t understand why everything that remained of her mother must go, and it shocked her that she was so powerless to stop it happening. In the flames, she imagined she saw her mother’s face, pale, intense, pleading, as though asking to be saved, to keep something of her alive. She saw scraps of paper that carried her older sister Jessie’s handwriting. Charm was still going on about Jessie. ‘She couldn’t even come when her mother needed her. I hear she’s condescended to come to Wellington and grace us with her presence for the funeral. I’ve packed all her stuff up. Her suitcase is in the passage waiting for her.’
Agnes was calling from the house that dinner was ready. And, in that moment, when Charm was distracted by the leaping flames, Belinda remembered that there was something of her mother’s that Charm hadn’t yet discovered. In the drawer of her sewing machine table a box of buttons was stowed, a random collection pulled from discarded clothing. Some must have come from a much earlier time in Irene’s life, for among black fly buttons from Jock’s trousers, and navy ones from his shirts, there were glass buttons that sparkled, pearl ones that might have come from gloves, red, blue and silver buttons, a big copper button and a large hand-made one covered with tiny strips of black woven leather with threads hanging from it. It had a strange rough texture as if it had been left on a stove. Belinda’s mother used to let her count the buttons and make patterns on the floor with them, in the days when she still sat and sewed for them all as best she could. Once, though, she leaned over and plucked the leather button from the floor and put it back in the tin. ‘Not that one,’ she said.
Belinda raced off into the house, without a word of explanation to Charm. She darted up the passageway, past the sitting room where her father, Jock, had sat slumped for days. It was odd to see him huddled in a frayed old jersey and grubby pants. He worked in an office in town, and most days he wore a crumpled suit and a tie. He hated the unions but, right now, he could see the point. At least he knew his rights when it came to a death in the family. He was stirring himself in response to his sister’s call from the kitchen to ‘hurry and eat while the food was hot’.
Belinda kept going. She slid her hand into the drawer and there it was, the tobacco tin box, stamped ‘Riverhead Gold’. She plucked it out, slipping it in her cardigan pocket. As she walked, as smoothly as she could, so the box didn’t rattle, she saw Charm coming towards her. For an instant she panicked, a scene unfolding before her eyes, the woman trying to take the tin from her, her kicking her in the shins or biting her.
But Charm had entered the sitting room. Her father had risen from the chair and now stood leaning his head on his arm against the mantelpiece. Charm’s hand was resting on his, implying there were some intimacy of sorrow that excluded others. The two of them turned as Belinda stood hovering, uncertain of what to do, to explain why she had been walking along the hall of the house she had lived in since she was born. She had the weird feeling that she was a stranger in it now.
There was a distraction in the doorway. Jessie had arrived. Belinda thought, fleetingly, that she and the other children might be saved.
JESSIE WAS NEARLY EIGHT YEARS older than Belinda, a tall angular girl who, in better times, Aunt Agnes had tried to liken to Jock Pawson, as if she might really be his daughter. Likenesses, that’s what these older women talked about, always searching for clues and genealogies, ropes of generations that would bind them to the present and a future they would never see. When she was grown and long gone from this house of sorrow by the sea, Belinda would think back to those conversations in which everyone was likened to every other person they might or might not be related to, and wonder.
The kitchen was full of insults and shouting between Jessie and the older women as the evening wore on. Grant and Janice had been sent to bed. Grant didn’t want to sleep in the same room as his sister Janice, but his father said, ‘You’ll get a thick ear if there’s any more of that.’ These two did resemble Jock, no doubt about that, gingery brown hair and fair skinned, freckled at this stage, which Aunt Agnes said was just like their father when he was a child. Belinda knew Grant’s shameful secret, the reason he didn’t want to sleep in the same room as Janice. He wet his bed more nights than not, especially when his dreams were bad. She knew because, since her mother had fallen ill, it was she who washed his sheets and hid this from his father. Both the little ones had secrets that only she and her mother knew.
Janice was seven and still couldn’t recognise the words in her Janet and John reader. ‘Look, Janice,’ Belinda would say, ‘Janet is jumping. See that word “jump”? Can you say the letters for me? J, it’s a big letter, the same as you put at the beginning of your name.’ But Janice would look at her with a dumb-mutt expression that made Belinda want to shake her. What was the point, she asked herself, when Janice still couldn’t spell her own name anyway?
Charm produced a bottle of sherry. ‘You need strength for tomorrow,’ she said, even though Agnes was disapproving.
The insults were directed at Jessie who, when she had left earlier in the year, had gone to work in a café up north in Rotorua. ‘Or so she says,’ Charm reiterated, and Agnes nodded in agreement.
Agnes added that it had been the day after Jessie’s birthday and, to think, Irene had talked her brother into taking them all out to dinner and paying, the night before.
‘I gave her a present,’ Agnes said. ‘You remember, Jessie, I gave you my special Milford Sound teaspoon from my collection. I found it in your room when I was packing up your stuff. A lot she cares about that, was what I thought. I’ve taken it back.’
Charm said, ‘Jock, you should say something. Don’t just sit there and let this girl take over.’
In fact, Jessie had sat without saying a word up until this point. ‘I don’t know who you are,’ she said now, ‘but I don’t think it’s any of your business.’
‘There, you see what I mean? And a university girl, too, only you threw that all away, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, yes, I suppose I did
,’ Jessie said. Her face was set in harsh lines, as if she were much older.
‘Your name’s been in the papers,’ Jock said. ‘The police are looking for you. A good thing your mother never knew.’
Belinda was piecing together, as much as she could, what had happened. There had been a boating accident on a lake up north. The people who had died or disappeared were people from the café. Jessie had been with them on the night of the accident. There had been a quarrel in the café and the victims of this tragedy had taken to the boat when the weather was rough. Instead of waiting to be interviewed by the police, Jessie had left town straight away. It was nothing she had done, just evidence she might possess, perhaps a witness to what had occurred.
‘That’s what you do,’ Jock said. ‘You just leave when it suits you.’
‘I thought I was supposed to come home,’ Jessie said. ‘Wasn’t that the idea? My mother is dead.’
Jessie walked out of the kitchen to the bedroom, shutting the door behind her. The adults looked around at one another and shrugged their shoulders. Charm was putting on her coat, readying herself to go along the Parade and catch a trolley bus home to what she called ‘her digs’ in Wellington. Jock said he would walk with her. A woman wasn’t safe on the streets these nights.
‘Time you were in bed,’ Agnes said to Belinda. ‘Go on, off you go.’
Belinda had never shared a bedroom with Jessie before, but now that Aunt Agnes was staying over, a mattress had been brought up from the basement.
