by Fiona Kidman
The letter before her fills her with a sort of weary disgust. It had taken Nick two more years to leave Esme, and he must have known by then that she, Belinda, wouldn’t go back to him. Not ever. Nick was a person who couldn’t leave well alone. He would be an old man now. This is something she finds difficult to imagine. Yet she is shaken.
THE SEARCH FOR THE RECIPE BOOK had stirred up another memory. Her sister’s words, in the prison visiting room where she had had her last proper conversation with her, are a refrain that has haunted her. Janice had suggested they might have different fathers. Was it possible that her dreamy, unwell mother had children fathered with three men, rather than two? Belinda had examined her birth certificate, but Jock Pawson’s name was written there large. His and her mother’s marriage certificate showed their wedding taking place eight months before her birth, something she hadn’t registered until she had subjected the documents to that later scrutiny. It still didn’t seem possible.
She returned to the room where the chest of drawers stood. The room once occupied by her son Peter was stripped bare of any sign of its previous inhabitant. There was a coolness about the room, something Spartan, like Peter himself. He never came back to stay at the house, and she never offered it to others to sleep in. The distance between them was hard to measure. In her heart she suspects that it is something to do with the time they lived apart after he was born. She’s never told him this, and she doesn’t believe Seth has either. It’s there in some secret reserve of her own.
‘I know I was born on the wrong side of the blanket,’ Peter had said once. Such an old-fashioned phrase. She can’t bring herself to tell him how nearly he was brought up by strangers, how at the last moment she had retrieved him. Would it have been better if she had told him? It seems too late now. Peter saved money from the job at the bank, and then, out of the blue one day, announced that he was enrolling at St John’s College in order to become an Anglican minister. No, that wasn’t right, he was a priest. But a priest who could marry. He had been called by God.
When Belinda had asked him why, he’d shaken his head and shrugged. ‘I liked going to church with Nana Maze’ was all he said, implying it was really none of her business.
He had married a parishioner in his first congregation, a young woman from the Philippines. They’d all gone to Manila for the wedding. There, Peter had seemed alive and free, as if overtaken by some hitherto unseen rapture. She has heard the expression ‘God’s thumb print’ and she’s not sure what it means, thinks that it might even be a place, but it occurs to her that Peter might have had the thumb print placed upon him. She believes he is happy. He has two children, who visit once or twice a year, although they don’t stay long. Peter has told them he will pray for her and Seth.
In the bedroom, there’s something she’s searching for, yet she still can’t quite figure what it is, what connections might be made.
HEAVEN HAD GONE WITH THEM to Manila, an unexpected addition to the family. After Janice died, Heaven stayed in the room that Belinda still calls Dylan’s, next to Simone’s. Dylan hadn’t taken his stuff out of the room and Simone hadn’t left home right away, as she had threatened.
It was Janice’s funeral that had brought them together. Patariki had phoned her from the Hokianga after his mother died. ‘The elders say they want her to come home and be with my dad,’ he had said.
‘Aren’t they still angry with your mum?’ Belinda asked.
‘They never were,’ he said. ‘They were just afraid, but they’re not any more.’
Seth was overseas when it happened. Simone said, ‘Mum, you can’t do this on your own. I’m coming with you.’
Then Dylan said he would go, too, and Peter, whether he wanted to or not, saw that it was his duty to come. ‘It’ll be different,’ he said, but Belinda knew that anyway. At the very last minute, Seth arrived after all. He had caught a flight from Los Angeles the night before. So he knew that it mattered.
They had all driven north together, through the little town with railway tracks running down the main street, past abandoned dairy factories, and the meatworks towns, past gum trees and jacaranda in bloom, beyond the ghosts of tractors abandoned in paddocks, and on into the countryside where the seal on the roads ran out into gravel and the bush pushed in, as if ready to swallow up the car.
At the marae, Heaven and Patariki greeted them as they shed their shoes at the door of the meeting house where Janice lay. Her coffin was open and her face was peaceful, her hair arranged around her face to give softness to its contours, a little glitter sprinkled on the collar of her dress. Women wearing wreaths of leaves in their hair sat and fanned Janice’s face.
The ground beside Wiremu’s grave had been opened up to receive her. The women spoke of Wiremu as Janice’s husband. When the coffin was at last lowered into the earth, and keening rose all around her, it occurred to Belinda that her kid sister, who had seemed ordinary and difficult, had brought them to some new knowledge. There was a priest and prayers, yet part of her thought that Peter was right, there was something that spoke of strangeness and difference, and she was moved more deeply than she could have imagined. He surprised her by standing close. She glanced sideways at him and saw a blister of tears on his cheek for this unknown aunt. He made the sign of the cross and moved away.
It was after the tangi that Belinda asked Heaven if this was where she was planning to stay.
‘I guess so,’ the girl said. ‘There’s nowhere else really for me to go.’
‘What will you do?’ Belinda asked.
Heaven seemed nonplussed. ‘I’ll find something,’ she said.
Simone did something surprising then, although, when she thought back on it, Belinda could see that the charged atmosphere of the tangi had transformed them all from their everyday selves. She stepped forward and put her arms around Heaven. ‘Cousin,’ she said. ‘You’re my cuzzie.’
Heaven rested her tear-stained face against her cousin’s shoulder.
Simone said, ‘You can come home with us. Mum and Dad won’t mind.’
‘Really?’ Heaven scanned their faces, gauging their expressions. It occurred to Belinda, then, that she and Seth hadn’t done such a bad job with their kids.
‘I need to stay here for a while,’ Heaven said, ‘be with Mum and my nana and the aunties for a bit.’
‘Give it time,’ Belinda said.
Later, Heaven caught a bus to Auckland, turning up in a taxi at the house in Grey Lynn. Dylan had gone by then, but Simone and Seth seemed to accept her presence as if she had always lived there, as if she fitted.
Heaven took a tourism course while she lived with them. Now she operates her own small company in the north, started with money that Janice had inherited from the faraway Brighton Street house. When she can, she employs her brother Patariki, because it’s hard for him to find work, the way it is for everyone up there. His share of Janice’s money has been put in a trust for the time being. It’s just that he doesn’t want to leave the Hokianga and the marae where he grew up, not yet anyway. She’s not to worry, he’ll find his feet. Dylan emails Heaven pictures of the places where he’s doing archaeological digs. She should run a tour to Greece, he says. Very cheap. Very beautiful. The best. He is in love with a Greek woman called Cosima. He can’t imagine ever coming home, and Belinda can’t imagine that he won’t.
BELINDA CONTINUES TO PROWL AROUND the house. First, though, she tears Nick’s letter into little strips and pours Janola over them so they will bleach. She wraps them in newspaper and puts them in the rubbish.
She is restless and can’t calm herself. It is more than the letter from Nick. She goes back to Peter’s room, and this time she knows what it is that she is looking for. In the drawer sits a small plastic bag which she has been meaning to throw out. It contains the singed leather button and the man’s pipe found in the basement of her early home. They are still wrapped in her handkerchief. She doesn’t understand why she has held onto these items. Perhaps it’s her eye for unusu
al detail, which has been a hallmark of her work. Now she takes them out and places them on the bed. Underneath the bag sits the tobacco tin of buttons, rescued from her mother’s belongings. She gets that out too.
Belinda opens the tin, and there it is, the other button. These things, the buttons and the pipe, have meant something to her mother. As Grant had said to her that day at their old home, they may have belonged to Jessie’s father — or even, she reflects, be a remnant of a grandfather she never knew — but she has no way of knowing. It had shocked her, long ago, to discover from Grant that her grandparents had lived in the same city and they had never known them. Had her mother been so ashamed of her marriage to Jock that she hadn’t returned home? Or had he, for some perverse reason of his own, forbidden it? He seemed to have had a hold over their mother.
That evening, over dinner, she says to Seth, ‘There’s something I’ve never told you. About what Janice said to me. She thought that she and I had different fathers.’
Seth put his fork down carefully. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me,’ he says.
Belinda looks at him in astonishment. ‘You’ve never said.’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘A hunch.’
‘Wishful thinking?’ she says, and laughs. She sees that he’s serious. ‘I’ve got these bits and pieces. It seemed crazy to keep them, but I did.’
Seth listens, nodding his head as she explains how she found the pipe and the buttons, how all her mother’s belongings were destroyed, except these things in the huddled cobwebs under the house.
‘We’ll see if we can get some DNA from it,’ he says. ‘If you’re happy with that?’
Belinda agrees that this is what she would like. It occurs to her that Nick’s letter, shredded in the bin, has been the key to some mystery, that might or might not be solved, but at least she has seen it for what it is. Her mother, like other women, had secrets. She is no different herself.
It’s just that secrets have odd ways of surfacing.
12
The light healer
2013
IT’S ALWAYS THERE, THE IMMENSITY of the sky, and the light of each day. When Joe Higgs is shepherding sheep, he sees light reflected on grass, and on the water of the lakes in the southern landscape where he works, and lying on the mountain snow across the plains. He has been drawn to the sky all his life. It has been so near and yet it eludes him. In the mornings he waits for the first instant, what he has heard described as the green light, the flash between night and day, when dogs begin to bark. He looks towards the sunlight with relief that he’s alive to see it again, or on gloomy days he finds a dark pewter gleam among the clouds. At night he’s overwhelmed by the red ink lights that flame across the horizon. He has seen, too, the Southern Lights, the electrically charged aurora that turns the sky into a blazing green and pink quilt drawn to the magnetism of the earth, into that area in space where the magnetic fields meet solar winds.
It’s white light that fascinates him most of all. He has read a definition of it which says, in effect, that it’s a mixture of lights with differing wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum. But when he looks at a white sky, such as occasionally appears soon after dawn, it is like a white linen sheet on which the history of the world might be written, before it dissolves into an aching tender blue. There have been songs and stories written about white light. He has heard people talk about it in a spiritual sense, too, as a place of purity that the soul enters after death. He is curious to know whether he will experience it and, if he does, whether he will remember it in an afterlife.
Joe lives in a workman’s cottage, a place one might think of as drab were it not for the countryside surrounding it. It is furnished sparsely, with a wooden table that looks like an object a high-school student might have made in a woodworking class; two straight-backed chairs and an easy reclining chair, a book shelf, a computer on a small desk, an aged television set, a single bed with a good-enough mattress. He has bought his own because his back gives him trouble some days. He hopes to stay on this farm for a long time. His gun leans against the laundry tub at the back of the cottage. In the winter he shoots rabbits, a good time to catch them when the grass is sparse and they have to forage longer in the open. Joe shelters behind a beard that has sprouted like a pelt the colour of mouse fur, the hair thick and fine. In his late fifties, he is in better health than when he was a young man.
On his day off, usually taken on a Thursday, he drives his ute into Twizel and changes his library books. It takes him a week to read the four he chooses: one thriller, one book about science, one travel book and a manual about computer technology (he has some trouble keeping up with the rapid changes that occur). At the same time, he chooses four modern novels for Margaret Fraser, the station owner’s wife. She says his choices are always better than the ones she makes for herself. She reads the reviews in the Christchurch paper and the Listener and likes to keep up as best she can, but you can’t read everything, can you, so she depends on him. Once she was a dental nurse at one of the local schools. Her marriage has given her land and money but not a great deal of happiness, he suspects. Fraser’s family has been on the land for six generations. There are ways of doing things that a girl from an Auckland suburb will probably never learn.
Joe has worked on the farm for some years, and Fraser and his wife trust him. After a polite knock, he can go into the kitchen and put her books on the counter, without further ado. Sometimes she makes him a cup of tea and they sit down together and talk about books. And the stars. Margaret likes the night sky. They have this in common, a love of the heavens. Sometimes, he can see that she catches herself in surprise, talking to him the way she does. He thinks she would be in her late forties; the children had all but grown up when he first arrived at the station, a greenhorn who could hardly lift a loaded wheelbarrow, let alone a stranded ewe.
It’s on one of his visits to the library that he sees the poster about the light-healing sessions that will take place in one of the local pubs the following Thursday. The poster isn’t actually in the library, but pinned to a back wall. When he enquires about it, the librarian he speaks to says that it’s not the kind of thing they like to advertise. ‘You know, alternative medicine, it’s not a community activity we support.’
‘I can’t see why not,’ Joe says. ‘It might do somebody good.’
‘Unorthodox practices. They claim to heal people. We’d get into trouble if someone failed to seek proper treatment for an illness.’
It’s on the tip of Joe’s tongue to say that he doesn’t understand why the library stocks books on religion if they won’t advertise light healing. As far as he’s concerned God is alternative medicine. Not that he knows what this healing practice entails, but he has already decided that he’s going to find out. He knows the hotel, not a bad watering hole. Some days on a Thursday he calls in for a cold lemonade before heading home.
He doesn’t plan to tell anyone what he’s up to, but when he delivers her books to Margaret, he can’t help himself. Besides that, he’ll attract attention, driving off into the night without some excuse. It’s not the kind of thing he does. Joe is a man who keeps himself to himself, not one who frequents the pubs. He drinks very little, a glass of pinot noir at the station Christmas party perhaps, which raises an eyebrow or two. Most of the station hands drink a long cooling lager.
‘Perhaps you could tell the boss that I’m going in for a game of chess,’ Joe says. The boss, that’s what he always calls Fraser, preferring not to address him as Mr Fraser, or as Stan, which he has been invited to do. He calls Margaret Mrs Fraser.
‘I wish I could come with you,’ she says, and her voice trembles. She has kept herself in trim. She turns over a book. Her slim hands are worn, her nails unvarnished but manicured. He wants to touch their small white crescent moons. It’s not as if he hasn’t thought about taking her against a red barn wall. It’s a long time since he made love to a woman. From the way she looks at him he knows she wouldn’t mind either, that
her knees would buckle a little and her back arc against the wall. She’d get no tupping from him. He doesn’t plan to get himself killed by Fraser. She’s the kind of woman who would fall in love and go around all dreamy-eyed, and her husband would smell the heat on her.
WHEN THE FOLLOWING THURSDAY COMES around, Joe nearly doesn’t go. He has been to town once that day and the thought of another round trip of forty kilometres or so is unappealing; in the morning he will have to be up at five for a muster. But the morning had been one of those pale white dawns, the sort that lingered, setting him on edge for the day. As he thinks back to the calm, clear morning he knows he won’t be satisfied until he finds out what the light healing is about. He might be healed in some part of himself.
It’s a quiet night in the hotel, just half a dozen patrons standing at the bar in the lower level. There’s an upstairs space with tables. On busy nights, this is where food is served, but the town is so quiet you could drive a flock of sheep down the main street and nobody would notice. He wonders if there’s no light healing after all, but the bartender motions him to the stairs leading to the upper level. In the corner of the deserted area, three men are gathered. One sits facing the other two. They have a contraption pointed at the seated man. It brings to mind those photographers of the past who set up their cameras on tripods and covered their heads with a cloth. The seated man is very still.
Joe sees that this man has a bright white light beamed on his forehead. It is about the size of a two-dollar coin, perhaps a little bigger.
‘Do you mind if I watch?’ he asks.
One of the men behind the machine waves in assent, and Joe takes a seat in the corner. The man looks peaceful, his eyes closed, as though he were receiving the light into his head. Several minutes pass, until the light is switched off. The man opens his eyes as if recovering from a trance. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘I feel better already.’
