by Fiona Kidman
Linda wasn’t certain if Sylvia knew that most of Philip’s weeknights were spent with her, but stayed away from her, just in case.
JANICE MET DARRELL when she was fourteen. He was twenty-two years old and worked for a time on a fishing boat at Island Bay, until he was sacked for being late to work once too often. The boats left very early in the morning, according to the tides, and they couldn’t wait for stragglers. It meant they were a man short at sea. Darrell said it was because the fishermen were a pack of shits, always asking for more from a man than they were willing to pay and he was glad to be out of it. Janice wasn’t sure about this, because the Italians had always been good to her. When she was little and got hidings from Charm, one of the older Italian women would call out to her and invite her in for hot soup, or a piece of thick lemon cake with a syrupy crust on the top. Janice liked the warmth of their kitchens, the colourful rugs, a cross with Jesus suspended from the wall with his arms spread out. The men, when they came in, said ‘Hi, Jan’, as if seeing her there were nothing out of the ordinary, and went about their business. Janice wondered how they knew Charm belted her, because she never cried or made a noise. It was the one strong thing about her, she believed, not to give Charm satisfaction. There were other things in her life that were worse but nobody knew about those, except her father.
She thought the Italians were smart people, but Darrell wasn’t the best decision they had made. Not that she had worked this out yet. What she did know was that, one morning, she found him sitting on the sea wall smoking, when she was on her way to school. The hem of her uniform was down, her shoes unpolished; she knew she must have looked a sight. She rarely glanced in the mirror because she didn’t want to be reminded of what there was to see. She hated the way her cheek hollowed in like a little cave. She can’t help it if she’s plain, Charm said to her Aunt Agnes when she visited from the Wairarapa.
‘Never mind plain,’ Agnes would say. ‘Count it as a blessing, as long as she’s a good girl. If you’d been let down the way I have by her sister, you’d know what I mean.’ This was before Belinda had married the father of their baby boy. Agnes did speak of her a little more kindly after that. ‘Not that I see her,’ she sniffed. ‘She seems to think she’s better than me now she’s married into that family. University and all that. The father only mends roofs — I don’t know where the money comes from.’
Besides, Belinda was the one who had turned out to be attractive, unlike the other Pawson children. Strange, Janice thought, that she and Jessie both had curly hair that turned into corkscrews in the wet, even though their dead mother’s had been dark and wavy, and they had had different fathers. Some throwback, Charm said, as if her mother’s past were bad karma, whatever that was. It was whispered that her grandfather had been a wharfie, and an Irishman to boot. It was Belinda, an ugly duckling of a different mould, who had turned into someone, if not beautiful, at least easy on the eye, just like in stories. Janice wasn’t expecting any miracles of her own.
And Janice was the one Charm described as a dumb mutt. The girls at school were no kinder. In the corridors, between periods, when teachers couldn’t catch them at it, they would say things like Did you know two and two make five?, a dig at her inability to make sense of letters and symbols on the page, and why she was in a special class. Or Someone’s fish is off. Wonder whose it is?, as if she hadn’t changed her sanitary towel, although it could be anybody’s, or just Hi, Lazybones.
When Darrell said ‘Hello, gorgeous’ in a special voice, and swept his hair, short back and sides and long in the middle, heavy with Brylcreem, away from his forehead, Janice thought he must be having her on. She was lying low at the time because she had just seen Charm walking up Brighton Street. Not that she thought Charm would notice her. She was hobbling along, holding one high-heeled shoe in her hand and using her umbrella as a walking stick. Then she leaned over and tucked something in the grass. Janice was sure she was falling over, but she righted herself and moved on. Pissed again, Janice thought, and who cared, except that the night before the house had been empty, except for her and her father, and that thing had happened again. She was sure Charm would have laughed if anyone told her that her presence protected Janice, but in a sense it was true.
Darrell smiled, a crooked smile because half of one tooth was broken.
‘So what are you up to?’ he asked. ‘Want me to carry your books to school?’ He threw up his hands before she could reply. ‘Joke. Spare me from schools.’
‘Me, too,’ Janice said.
‘You want a ciggie?’
‘Sure.’ She had practised smoking Charm’s fags several times and thought she was getting quite good at it. She dragged on her cigarette and blew a long plume of smoke into the sea air, so that it swirled and eddied around their heads.
‘Cool,’ Darrell said. ‘You want to come for a ride? I’ve got my car parked along the road.’
The car was an old streamlined Chevy, painted red and cream, vintage 1950s. There were imitation tiger-skin rugs over the seats, big dice bobbing on strings from the roof between the driver and passenger sides. ‘Where are we going?’ Janice asked.
‘Miles away. You never know, we might drive all day. You game for it?’
‘Yep. So long as you don’t want to muck around, you know what I mean?’
‘Muck about? Oh yeah, that. You might like it.’
‘I don’t,’ Janice said. ‘Anyway, you know I’ve got my pinny pain.’ This was a fact; it had started that morning and she was relieved, the same way she always was. ‘So?’
‘So what?’
‘You still want to take me for a ride?’
‘Get in,’ he said.
So they drove all the way up to Waiouru, nearly two hundred kilometres, State Highway One unpeeling itself before them. Darrell let her pick a station on the car radio and she found what she wanted, the hit parade playing ‘I Did What I Did for Maria’, about a man being executed for shooting the man who killed his wife. When the song was finished, she switched the radio off, and sang a version of it to herself, her voice low and sweet but relentless in pursuit of the tune, I did what I did, I did what I did did did did, until he started drumming on the steering wheel with one fist and laughing like crazy, over and over, the pair of them as mad as rattlesnakes in heat, was how Darrell put it. ‘That’s our song,’ he said, so that she saw that they had some sort of future before them.
They drove on and on, to where they could see the navy blue mountains with their frosting of snow, and the tussock grass feathering against the breeze. He pointed out the road that led to the military camp. For a while he had been in the army, but he didn’t like rules and saluting people, all that rubbish. ‘Yeah, I reckoned it’d be the life for me,’ he said, tapping out another cigarette on the steering wheel. ‘I thought I’d get to tell the new recruits what to do when I’d been in for a bit.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Ah, they kicked me out.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Dunno really. CO picked on me, so I let him have it one day.’
‘Oh yep, I know what that’s like,’ Janice said. ‘I mean I can understand that sort of behaviour. People like that, they’re everywhere.’
He stopped and bought pies and doughnuts. She got out of the car and felt the crisp air, saw purple heather growing on the roadsides, brambles bright with rosehips. ‘I like it here,’ Janice said. She had never felt happier.
On the way back to Wellington, they stopped overnight and slept in the car, parked up in a layby. Darrell didn’t try anything on with her, not that time.
The crazy thing was, nobody reported her missing. It was almost as if Jock and Charm hadn’t noticed. No, perhaps that wasn’t true. Janice reckoned to herself that sooner or later she’d have been reported missing at school and they would have had to do something. In the meantime, Jock would want to keep the police out of it for as long as possible. Neither he nor Charm would want the police sniffing around after her. After th
at, Darrell picked her up most days when school was finished. They slept together sometimes, though he wasn’t pushy about it. She knew quite a lot about sex; she could take it or leave it. There was an inevitability, the price of having a boyfriend. It wasn’t much different to the dark pressure she understood, a similar toss and tip, a heave and it was over. In a grim way, she believed she knew more about her mother’s life than her clever sisters thought they did, or ever could. Nevertheless, she looked at herself in the mirror more often. What she saw couldn’t be all bad if it was enough to catch a grown-up boyfriend of her own. When other girls saw her getting picked up in the Chevy, there was a change in the atmosphere at school. ‘Have you done it with him, Janice?’ they asked her, but she just popped some gum and laughed. Janice Pawson laughing.
Darrell had money off and on. She didn’t ask where it came from. Sometimes he bought her small gifts, a pair of clip-on earrings, some lipstick. At night she lay in bed holding each new gift to her, along with a tooth she kept in a pencil case. It was one of her own milk teeth, which her mother had pulled out for her with a piece of cotton, not long before she went to hospital. The cotton was still tied around it. This was a memory that took her back to her mother, the concentration on her face, Janice her whole focus for those moments, the sharp pain of the tooth being pulled from her gum, something coming apart.
CHARM KNEW THEY HATED HER. She was a stepmother, after all, and stepmothers were supposed to be horrible. She didn’t set out to be. Charm was brought up by a stepmother herself, a wizened shrew with her hair pulled back in a knot, a bitter tongue in her head. Nothing she did was ever good enough. Now she was behaving just the same, and she couldn’t stop herself. What had she wanted when she married Jock Pawson? A roof over her head, she supposed, a man she could walk out with, some children — even if they weren’t her own. None of it had worked out the way she imagined.
She had been married to Jock for going on ten years. When Janice and her older brother Grant were in high school, she took a part-time job cleaning at one of the pubs, four days a week, finishing in mid-afternoon. Friday was her day off. It was at this job that she met a woman called Sandy who became her best friend and introduced her to the crowd at the Duke. At the end of a shift, she and Sandy would sit down in the staff quarters and have a smoke and talk about their lives. ‘If I counted my mistakes, one by one,’ she confided to Sandy, ‘I reckon they’d go back to the day Jock’s wife died. I burned all her stuff. You should have seen the way those kids looked at me.’ She still saw their faces as she tried to erase their mother from their lives, their panic as the flames consumed her belongings in the backyard of their house.
‘You were doing the right thing,’ Sandy said.
‘I thought it was for the best. Best for them not to have to think about her every day. You know what I mean?’
Sandy nodded. ‘I’d have done the same.’
‘I reckoned on giving them a fresh start. I cleaned the house from top to bottom. I shone all the pots and pans in that bloody dirty kitchen, scrubbed the toilets down, washed the filth off the windows. It was a proper pigsty.’ She shivered, remembering the sour smell of neglect and sickness that had permeated the house.
‘They didn’t appreciate it?’
‘No thanks at all.’
‘You don’t want to take it to heart. My kids tell me I ruined their lives all the time. I didn’t, of course. They just do it to make you feel bad.’
But Charm couldn’t explain how she didn’t know what a fresh start meant for the children. She had no models in her head for new beginnings. She had made a life, in her first marriage, with a man who drank too much, until the day he fell down the stairs. People said she pushed him. What she thought was that he had pushed her to drink, in order to keep him company.
‘I thought he’d get over Irene — that was his first wife, you see,’ Charm said. ‘I didn’t think he even liked her very much. We’d had it off a couple of times while she was still alive. He came round to my house after my husband died. A bit of nookie won’t do you any harm, that was what he said, cheer me up a bit.’
‘Well, he was no saint, was he then? He meant it wouldn’t do him any harm.’
‘He reckoned I was a cock-tease. I guess I shouldn’t have done it.’
‘Oh, there’s lots of things we shouldn’t do,’ Sandy reassured her.
‘So it’s like she was nothing to him when she was alive and now she’s a saint. As if she was the great romance.’
‘So he’s gone off the boil?’ Sandy said. ‘Well, you said he was getting on. It happens to lots of blokes when they get old.’
That was when Charm told Sandy what was going on. She hadn’t told anyone, but it was bursting out of her, the need to tell someone, to know the right thing to do.
Sandy sat back, shaking her head. ‘You need to do something,’ she said. ‘I mean, that’s not right.’
Charm wished, afterwards, that she hadn’t told Sandy because now it was hard to face her when she still didn’t do anything. She didn’t know what would become of her when she could no longer live in the house in Brighton Street, but that wasn’t the reason in itself she couldn’t bring herself to do the right thing. This was something she couldn’t explain to her friend, the dread of confrontation that had seemed easy when the children were smaller and she had control in that house. Now she didn’t know which way things would spiral, what Jock would do, what would happen to Janice. And what would be said about her to all the welfare people she suspected might become involved.
What she did say was that Sandy wouldn’t pick there was anything wrong if she were to meet Jock. He was getting on in years and had taken to wearing a good tweed coat in winter, scarf and nice leather gloves, brogues, a trilby hat that he tipped to people when he passed them in the street. He liked his shirts ironed in a certain way. His fingernails were shiny and well trimmed, their white rims spotless. He was sucking the life out of her and taking it into himself. Charm learned by accident, when she found a letter from an insurance company in an old coat of his at the back of his wardrobe, that his late wife Irene had a policy that was paid out on her death. She waited for him to tell her he had money, but he never did.
Not long after they married, he began attending night classes in photography. He met a group of men he referred to as his chums. Some had darkrooms at the back of their houses, or in little sheds tucked away in their gardens. They met at the weekends. A blokes’ world, he said, like the old days down the Coast before the war when he kept an eye on the coal mines. When he and Charm were first together he liked a drink or two. Now he never drank with her. He didn’t bring his chums to meet her, and she didn’t see his photographs either. They were, he said, wildlife photographers. They took pictures of nature and tramped around Red Rocks by the sea on fine days. Nothing that would interest her.
There was just the one girl left at home, although the boy had stayed longer. Charm had stopped laying a hand on Janice, who was big, and strong enough to fight back. In her heart, she knew that the girl hadn’t deserved it, that she’d reaped the blame for the disappointments of Charm’s marriage to her father. Charm remembered Janice at the registry office on the day of the wedding, holding the bouquet while Jock put the ring on Charm’s finger, the only one of the children who would agree, although her little freckled face was puzzled. Jock hadn’t wanted a fuss, but Charm had wanted some kind of ceremony. His sister had come over for the wedding, and the children had stood awkwardly in the plain room where it took place.
The girl regarded her with insolence these days, as if to say, I’m doing your job. Janice knew that she knew.
She found out one night when she came in earlier than expected. There had been a punch-up in the Duke, and the barman had heaved all the patrons out after the police came. She let herself in quietly, not wanting to disturb Jock.
The door of Janice’s room was slightly ajar. Charm heard her say: ‘I’m sick of this. You’ve got a wife.’
Charm
felt her heart freeze.
‘I’ve got two, haven’t I?’ he said.
The girl stifled a noise, either a cry of pain or a sob or both. ‘I’ll tell her,’ Janice said. ‘I’ll tell Charm.’
Charm heard him laugh. ‘A lot of good that’ll do you. She doesn’t care sixpence for you.’
‘You don’t know.’
‘You think anyone would believe her? Anyway, I’d kick her out as quick as look at her.’
‘Then who’d iron your shirts?’
Charm knew she should go in, break up this post-coital conversation, but she was immobilised, as if her feet were stuck to the floor.
His voice was savage then. ‘You would. And I’ll beat the tripe out of you if you tell her. Or anyone else.’
As she heard him move from the bed, Charm slipped off her shoes and retreated down the passage towards the front door, opening it and turning back round, as though she had just walked in. She called out, ‘Hello, I’m home.’
Jock appeared in the doorway of Janice’s room. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Just checking on Jan’s homework.’ As if tucking his shirt in his trousers as he walked out of his daughter’s bedroom were perfectly normal. He looked at her deadpan. ‘Have a good evening, did we?’
In the morning, Charm sat with her head in her hands, elbows on the bleached wooden kitchen table, thinking about the night before. She shivered, lowered her hands, ran the tip of her index finger down a crack at the edge of the table, searching out dirt. That must be it, her and her dirty mind, seeking out muck. She must have imagined it. She must have had more to drink than she realised. But in the harsh light of that and many mornings that followed, she knew she wasn’t wrong, and that it had been happening for a long while.
