by Fiona Kidman
She knew what needed to be done but she still couldn’t. It was easier to head for the Duke, where there was boozy laughter and cigarette smoke and a few yarns, and in the morning, when she woke up in the room where the older girl used to sleep, there was a hangover, and Jock gone to work. If she squeezed her mind shut, she could almost go back to the place where it wasn’t really happening. Like when an earthquake struck, so awful at the time, but so long as you escaped damage or injury, you got over it. Only, in the back of your mind, you were always waiting for another one.
She was thinking about all of this around lunchtime on a Friday, the remains of a cheese sandwich in front of her, the first food of the day she could face, when the phone rang. It was the woman from the school who sent letters to Jock, asking him if he would please, please come in and talk about his daughter.
‘Mrs Pawson? Janice was due in my office half an hour ago,’ Linda Morley said. ‘It appears that she’s staying away from school again.’
‘I’m her stepmother. There’s not much I can do about her.’
‘I see. You’ve no idea where she is, then?’
‘Out with that boy, I expect.’
The teacher sounded surprised. ‘Janice has a boyfriend?’
‘Oh yes. She thinks we don’t know, but she’s a proper little tearaway, that girl. She hangs out with a no-hoper. Darrell, his name’s Darrell.’
‘I don’t suppose you could come in and have a chat with me, could you?’
Charm hesitated. This, after all, might be what she could do. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘all right, then.’
After she had put the phone down, she uncapped the bottle of gin she kept in her room. Hair of the dog — it might help. She rang Sandy and asked her what she should say, because Sandy’s children hadn’t always been saints.
‘Just don’t let her get high and mighty with you,’ Sandy said. ‘They always do.’
‘Okay, thanks.’
‘Charm,’ Sandy said anxiously, on the other end of the line, ‘you haven’t been on the booze, have you? I mean, well, you know, there’s a time and place.’
‘I’m fine,’ Charm said, ‘just fine.’
She dressed herself in a plaid skirt, put on a white blouse with a brooch at the throat that her first husband had bought for her when they got married, and a cardigan. She spent a few moments hesitating over whether a red or a blue one looked more respectable, and settled for the blue.
LINDA HADN’T HAD TIME TO IMAGINE what Janice Pawson’s stepmother might be like. Her day had accelerated as it went along. There was a fight in the school grounds at lunchtime, two girls who acted like mud wrestlers, slinging each other around by the hair. They had been disciplined by their dean, but one of them was hysterical and full of hate. The dean had packed her off to Linda to try and talk sense into her. There was a mother on the phone who thought she knew what was best for her daughter. Mothers usually did, and mostly they were wrong. They thought that what was abnormal was normal and that their children were always right; it was a tiring business trying to talk sense into them. They said things like You haven’t got children of your own, have you Miss Morley? You’ll see it differently then. Or How dare you interfere with the rules we make for our girl? It was tricky stuff, especially the ones who got pregnant and hadn’t told their mothers, and she had to break the news to them that their princesses were fallen angels. The ashen faces and the whimpering, mothers and daughters. So many tears. She’d had one of those before lunch.
Just before Charmaine arrived (Charm, in brackets on the contact form, but Linda couldn’t believe anyone would call themselves that), Philip had rung. ‘We need to talk,’ he said. ‘I’ll meet you at the Pencarrow after school.’ The Pencarrow was a tearoom on Lambton Quay, decked out with fishing nets and shells. Linda thought it kitsch, but Philip liked the date scones.
‘I’m going out,’ she said. ‘TGIF.’ This was a lie, or it was until that moment, it was not what she planned to do at all.
‘You won’t go,’ Philip said, his voice confident.
‘I might,’ she said, and hung up. It might be true after all. Philip might think she was hoping for kind words but, wearing her counsellor’s hat, her intuition told her that he intended to announce that he was going back to Sylvia. He wanted it to happen over date scones where she wouldn’t shout or throw his things into the street, like in the movies, or even cry in an obvious way.
The woman facing her in the chair was in her fifties perhaps, not unattractive in a blowsy way, wisps of blonde hair escaping around her face from under a woollen beret, her lipstick a bit on the thick side. A smell of toothpaste and musky perfume masking alcohol and cigarettes hovered in the air.
‘Jan’s a bit of a loser,’ Charmaine Pawson said, ‘but you know she’s not a bad kid.’
‘She’s hardly ever at school,’ Linda said. ‘You think she’s with a boy?’
‘Well, I thought you people would know,’ Charm said. She sucked in her breath. ‘Myself, I’m a working woman. You don’t expect me to baby-sit a fifteen-year-old, do you?’
‘I don’t really know what to expect,’ Linda said, trying to keep her voice even. She hadn’t realised how tired she was. ‘We need to know that she’s in a safe environment.’
‘What are you getting at? Why wouldn’t it be safe?’
‘I don’t know.’ Ed Carter’s words came back to her. ‘Is there any trouble at home?’ As soon as the words were out, Linda knew she had spoken too soon, that this woman needed time and patience if she was to get to the bottom of things.
‘That’s very rude,’ Charm said. ‘Rude. That is very rude, you know, Miss Morley. I keep a good home. I have treated those children like my own. My own, you understand. What I want to know is why this school can’t teach Janice to read and write proper. Properly.’
From her careful movements and enunciated speech, Linda gathered that Charm was drunk. The whole conversation was pointless.
This was the moment Janice chose to appear at the door. Her face closed. ‘What the fuck?’
‘Language,’ Charm said. ‘You see what I have to put up with.’
‘What’s she doing here?’ Janice said.
‘You were supposed to be here after second period this morning,’ Linda said. ‘That was several hours ago.’
‘Yeah, well, I came to say I’m sorry. I got held up.’
‘That’s thoughtful of you, Janice,’ Linda said. ‘But the school is responsible for you during school time, as Mrs Pawson has just mentioned. So we have to find out what’s happened to you.’ This was a sop for the woman, who was already presenting herself as the problem in Janice’s life. It might not be too late to extract something from her. ‘Janice, tell me, how did you get held up?’
‘I told you, it’ll be that boyfriend of hers,’ Charm said. ‘He’s a grown man and she’s just a kid. He can get had up for that, you know.’
‘Why don’t you just shut up, you stupid bitch.’ Janice’s face was contorted.
‘Enough,’ Linda said, raising her hand in what she hoped was a pacifying motion. ‘We’re here to sort out problems, not to make them. Janice, were you trying to avoid phys ed? I think if we talked to Mr Carter he could sort something out for you.’
‘You just wait until I tell your father,’ said Charm.
‘You can tell him what you like. I’m outta here. Youse can tell him all you like. I’m old enough to leave school. Me and Darrell are heading north, he’s got a construction job up the line.’
‘Don’t talk rough,’ Charm said.
‘You’re under the age of consent,’ Linda said.
‘I’m what?’ Suddenly Janice appeared to be almost laughing.
Linda said, in a patient quiet voice, ‘You’re too young to live with your boyfriend, Janice. You do know that, don’t you?’
Janice had stopped laughing. She spoke across Linda as if she had barely heard her. ‘You’re a liar, Charm, that’s what you are. You keep your nose out of my business. I can te
ll my father a few things about you. Has he caught you hiding the bottles in the grass where you go back for them? She does that you know, Miss. My father won’t let her bring her piss home, so she goes back for it when he’s out. Look at her, three o’clock in the afternoon, and she’s fonged.’
Charm tried to lunge at her, but her feet got tangled in the legs of the chair. ‘You little cow.’
Linda said, ‘I’d like to bring this meeting to a close.’
Janice turned to her stepmother again. ‘You’re jealous.’
Linda saw Charm hesitate.
‘Go on, tell Miss why you’re jealous.’
‘Is there anything you want to tell me, Mrs Pawson?’
The silence lengthened. ‘Jealous? Me jealous of a boy with jug ears? Hardly.’ Charm fumbled for her handbag, tried to muster some dignity as she lurched out the door. The girl watched her go.
‘Janice?’
‘Yes, Miss?’
‘You still want to be a hairdresser? I might be able to get you into a salon in the city. You’d probably have to start with sweeping up after customers. You’d still have to pass some exams. It would be a good incentive for you to overcome your learning difficulties.’
‘I’ll be gone.’
‘We’ll talk about this on Monday.’
‘Miss, you want to know what she’s jealous about?’
‘I think this is between your stepmother and you.’
‘Sure, Miss. Bye now.’ At the door she turned and said, almost under her breath, but just so Linda could hear, ‘I’m a better fuck than her.’
A wave of disgust passed through Linda as the door closed behind the girl. And then, when it was too late, she understood. Trouble at home. Tell her. The girl had laughed when Linda said she was under the age of consent. I’ll tell your father. Tell her. Two women, slugging it out over a man. Forget the boyfriend.
And what had she said? Do you still want to be a hairdresser? In her firm, calm counselling voice. There had been so much truth swirling around the room, offered up to her on a plate, and she had only listened to the lies. She must stop Janice. Linda turned to the window. From where she stood, she saw Janice climbing into a car.
Linda sat and wept. She wept for the girl she didn’t expect to see again, and whom she’d allowed to escape into darkness. She cried, too, for the man who was going home to his wife. Most of all, she was crying over such virtuous patter when she was no better than some she could count in an afternoon.
During the night, Philip would ring and shout down the phone, ‘All right, all right then, you proved your point. I sat and waited for you at the Pencarrow. I saw dozens of women better-looking than you walking down the street. I was just going to tell you I’d get my stuff on Monday. No special reason, except I woke up this morning and thought what am I doing there in your stupid yellow room when I’ve got a nice house and a garden and a wife who puts a decent casserole on the table? Did I tell you that you’re a lousy cook, Linda? Because you are.’
She would turn to Ed Carter in the bed and say that it was nothing. Nothing at all. Old baggage, everyone had it. And she would think that perhaps she would be loved after all, and in the morning she would think that this mightn’t happen. Not yet anyway.
Not long after her night with Ed Carter she will meet a man who will cherish her always, not a genius, just a man who is consistent and solid in his ways. When Linda is in her sixties, and then her seventies, and she has grandchildren, she will think back to the frivolities of her own early life. That day will return now and then like a comic-book ghost, pale, shapeless and mean, a day when she looked evil in the face and did not recognise it. People talk about moments that changed their lives, not always seeing that there are many moments that add up to the time when they are ready for change. But, Linda will think, there is something that defines the moment, something to hold onto and remind yourself that change is possible. She will stop giving out advice, or not in any official sense. Linda is a good listener, her friends will say.
JANICE WILL RIDE IN DARRELL’S CAR, away from Brighton Street, away from the lights in the Italian houses, the fishing boats bobbing in the water. She will wish that she’d had time to say goodbye to the good women wearing black who’d taken her in when she was a child. She won’t look back with any other regrets. They have yet to come.
5
How high the sky
1974
ON WHAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE the best day of his life, Grant Pawson ended upside down in a suburban garden, hanging from his seatbelt, in a Piper Cub aeroplane. Or that’s as far as he can remember because, when he woke up, it was the next day and he was in hospital. An account of his disaster was splashed all over the newspapers, complete with details of how he had called out for his mother in the moments leading up to the crash. None of the journalists covering the incident had managed to discover what his mother had had to say about that. This was because she had been dead for almost ten years. But there are certain scents that will haunt Grant without him exactly knowing why: daphne in bloom, the first spring flowering of damask roses, damp earth, plant fertiliser and hen shit, leaking fuel. And there was some other smell, but in the last drifting seconds of consciousness, he thought, surely not.
He won’t forget, either, the sound of sirens, nor the white fear on the face of the woman whose garden it was. ‘Are you all right?’ she said in a thin reedy voice, when it was obvious that he was not.
In a very short time, two police cars arrived, then an ambulance, followed by fire engines, grinding to a halt outside, a steady stream of men, variously carrying stretchers and hoses. ‘We’ve been following him on the radio,’ the first officer said to Joan Moody, whose house it was. ‘The guys at the control tower knew he was in trouble ten minutes ago. His first solo flight and he freezes at the controls. He’s been up there in the sky yelling blue murder over the radio.’
‘Poor boy, poor boy,’ Joan said. The wing tip of the plane was wedged in the shattered remains of the gazebo her late husband, Dugald, had built for her. As she surveyed the destruction, the plane tilted on her lawn, a boy, or that’s what he seemed, fading away, perhaps dying for all she knew, she covered her mouth with the back of her hand, remembering afternoon teas she and Dugald had shared in the gazebo, during the last days of his life. Three more women appeared from inside the house, a respectable-looking bunch, mostly wearing tweed skirts and scarves knotted at the throats of cashmere sweaters.
One of the police officers cleared his throat, eyeing them curiously. The women were shaken, but there was, too, something furtive about them that was hard to interpret. ‘I told them to stay inside,’ Joan said, as though reading the man’s mind. And indeed, she felt a light-headedness, a hallucinatory quality as though the air had somehow become clearer, and her feet were not attached to the ground. She held onto the birdbath for support. ‘I thought it mightn’t be safe to come out.’
The women stood in a huddle.
‘I guess you ladies have had a nasty shock,’ the policeman said. ‘Go inside and have a sit down if you want to.’
Joan’s friend, Ivy Mason, said that it was probably best if they got along now. They didn’t want to get in the way.
‘No, ladies, please just wait right here,’ the policeman said. ‘I’ll need to take statements from all of you.’
Grant was being examined by an ambulance officer. ‘I reckon I can smell a bit of the old waccy baccy round here,’ the man said.
‘That would explain a lot. Anyway, they’ll sort that out at the hospital. We need to get him out of here.’
‘Help yourselves to a sherry,’ Joan said to her friends. ‘There’s some in the decanter on the dresser. Go on now, I’ll see to this.’
It was Ivy who led the women back inside. One of her nice brogues caught on the edge of the path, causing her to stagger, though she recovered herself just in time. ‘Oh my, I nearly did go arse over kite, didn’t I?’ She chortled as if she’d been really funny.
‘Ivy, sto
p it,’ Joan said. ‘Officer, we had a little wine at lunchtime. We’re all just so upset. It must have gone to Ivy’s head.’ The words seemed to hover above her, like balloons.
Ivy said, ‘We’ll go in and pray for him. Poor lad, what was he doing up in the sky by himself?’
Allan Johnson chose that moment to appear around the side of the house, shoving fronds of unruly hair behind his ears, his mouth loose as he approached Grant. ‘Fucken hell, mate, what’ve you done?’
‘You his mate, are you?’ the police officer said. ‘We need to have a chat with you, too.’
Allan tried to back away. He seemed about to turn and run.
‘Pick him up,’ the officer said.
GRANT MET ALLAN WHEN THEY were working together on the Wellington rubbish trucks. The truck was driven from gate to gate, the two young men hanging onto a bar at the back. At each stop, they rushed up steps to the back doors of the nearest houses, seized a bag of rubbish put out by the householder and sped back to the truck. They ran non-stop, the truck driver urging them to get a move on, hurry up, for Chrissake, we haven’t got all day to hang around here. There was talk that back-door rubbish collection would be cancelled soon, and go kerbside. Men couldn’t be expected to work like this, picking up slops and scraps, often jagged glass that the householder hadn’t bothered to wrap, the detritus of lives. Not all were careless and some left out bags of biscuits and bottles of beer for the men. It was a job, and Grant was accumulating money. He’d had a year working in a hardware store, but the money was peanuts; he was no further ahead and was losing his fitness. True, it nearly killed him when he started on the trucks — the backs of his legs on fire, and never enough hot water at home to wash off the muck. His stepmother made him sluice himself down with a cold hose before he entered the house.
‘You’re a smart little shit, aren’t you?’ Allan said one morning before the run began. ‘I picked it up straight away. Why would you want a job like this?”
