by Fiona Kidman
Grant nods at the marmosets. ‘Families,’ he says. ‘They’re families all right. Nice if you’ve got them.’
And then he is gone, walking briskly into the sunlight.
‘I’ll never see him again,’ Jessie says.
‘I’m not sure I will either,’ says Belinda.
‘Why did you lie to him?’
‘Who said I did?’ They have reached the rental car Jessie has hired. Belinda isn’t sure that Jessie should be driving, but she has insisted. She presented her international licence without batting an eyelid when she signed for it. She’s driven all her life, she tells Belinda afterwards, drove all the way through the Khyber Pass from Pakistan to Afghanistan in the 1960s, over the mountains, when she was just starting out as a journo. Those were the days, before the mujahideen. She’d got away with it without wearing a burqa. Ye gods, though, it was a long way down the side of the road, deep ravines below. But beautiful, so beautiful in the mountains. When it’s time to stop driving, she will. That time hasn’t come yet.
Belinda busies herself with levering her leg into the vehicle and finding the catch for her seatbelt. Jessie pulls out and drives straight ahead and up the hill, over the road that leads back to the sea. It seems to Belinda that her sister is driving with reckless abandon, swirling and swooping around the corners.
‘I get it,’ Belinda says. ‘Your life was more exciting than mine.’
‘You seem to have had your fair share of adventures.’ Jessie’s voice is dry.
They crest the hill and begin the run down Sutherland Road that leads to Lyall Bay if they turn left, or back towards Island Bay, if they make a right. To Belinda’s relief, Jessie turns left. She has no wish to go back to Brighton Street. They park and watch the lazy surf, the long line of the beach, the black heads of distant surfers riding the waves.
‘Different lives,’ Belinda says.
‘I think you got the lucky life,’ Jessie says.
‘You do?’ Belinda looks at her, surprised. ‘You left us, Jessie. You left us with Jock and Charm. We were children.’
‘How old are you, Belinda? In your sixties. You’re not a child any more.’
‘They took away everything that was our mother’s. Grant and Janice never got over it.’
‘I know. Look, Belinda, what was I supposed to do?’ For a moment, her voice turns defensive. ‘Besides, I didn’t know Jock would marry Charm.’
‘Do you remember our mother? I should be able to, I was old enough, but I can’t get a handle on her any more. Stupid, I know.’
Jessie’s voice is gentler. ‘I do, yes. Some days, well, you know, when I’m having my treatment, I see her face. She was quiet and dark and read a lot. She was a librarian when she married my father, Andrew Sandle. I remember her as always being a little sad. Although at first she seemed happier when we lived down south, in the tobacco fields.’
‘What do you mean, lived in the tobacco fields? I never heard about that.’
‘Where she met Jock.’ Jessie told her, then, about the summer in the heat, when she and Irene lived the life of casual labourers, in a little hut and where, as a child, she’d been allowed to live wild and free. And then she came back to the pipe, as if some image had been illuminated for her. ‘Tell me about that pipe Grant was talking about. Come on, what did he mean by that?’
So it was Belinda’s turn to explain, about the day that she and Grant had found the items under the house in Brighton Street.
‘The DNA told you something, didn’t it? I could tell by the look on your face,’ Jessie says. ‘Something you didn’t want to tell Grant.’
‘I’m not sure what. It’s possible it belonged to someone who was my father. It seems Jock wasn’t. I didn’t think it was the moment to tell Grant that. Hey Grant, I’m your half-sister. You thought you had sisters? But look, we’re just the remnants, the leftovers from our mother’s life.’ Belinda waited a moment, before going on. ‘Jessie, do you happen to remember a jacket with leather buttons. A man’s jacket, I’d say. Someone who smoked a pipe?’
Jessie shakes her head. She’s starting the car, turning around, preparing to drive back after all. ‘I can’t leave without saying goodbye to the island.’ She drives more carefully now, back along the edge of the sea — Lyall Bay, Houghton Bay, Island Bay. Belinda tells her about the last time she and Grant and Janice saw her mother, how Grant thought that Clean Linen Bay in the hospital was like these bays, without the water. Funny little kid, and now look at him. It’d break your heart, wouldn’t it? ‘You go up to the house if you want,’ Belinda says. ‘I can sit on the sea wall for a bit.’
‘No, I’m done with it, too.’ One or two fishing boats that have stayed behind that day bob in the quiet sea. Tapu te Ranga Island lies in front of them, almost but not quite within swimming distance when they were children, its rocky shore uninviting.
‘There was supposed to be a woman living there in a cave at one stage,’ Jessie remarks. ‘I never found anyone who knew about her. Perhaps it was a myth. But I see the Italians are still here.’
‘They were good to us kids. After you left.’
‘They were good to me, too. Antonio was a nice guy. The night of our mother’s funeral.’ For a moment Jessie stops, appearing to remember something, as if she might tell Belinda, and then decides against it. Her face softens in a way that makes Belinda fleetingly wonder whether Antonio might have been a lover. It’s not for her to ask. It doesn’t seem possible.
‘Well, he was kind,’ Jessie adds, after a momentary silence. It’s the pauses in a conversation that have always fascinated Belinda.
‘Did you ever meet our grandparents?’ Belinda asks.
‘Of course I did. I lived with them until I was six.’
‘We kids didn’t meet them. I never saw them.’
‘They saw you.’
‘When?’
‘More often than you thought.’
Belinda closes her eyes. That trick of hers, to see things in pictures, the flashes of recognition when she least expects them. ‘Mum’s funeral?’
‘Yes. But, later, they watched out for you. Perhaps you never knew.’
‘What will happen, Jessie? When you get back to London? You’ll be on your own.’
‘No, I won’t. Bopha will come. When I need her.’ Jessie glances at her watch. ‘We should be getting back to the airport soon. So, Belinda, were you not going to tell me about these things that you found? And the DNA test?’
‘I’ve been thinking about it. I was waiting for the right moment,’ Belinda says. She sees how tired Jessie has become. She wonders whether they’ll make it back to the airport. Her sister reaches for a bottle of water and drinks deeply.
‘But soon you’ll run out of moments. Tomorrow night I’ll be off.’ She doesn’t need to remind Belinda that the morning will be taken up with her treatment, enough to get her back to London. Jessie’s hand rests on the gear shift. ‘There was a fire at the tobacco fields,’ she says. ‘A night or so before we left. A man died. Not an old man. I think he was a foreigner.’
‘Did he wear a jacket?’
‘It was summer. I can’t remember. It was something our mother wanted me to forget. He used to come to our hut, and she was pleased to see him. Jock was courting her then, if that’s what you could call it. I used to get into trouble a bit and Jock would come over and tell her to keep me in order, or that was his excuse. But this other man used to come when the workers went to town on a Friday night. Yes, I do remember that.’
‘Did you see the fire?’
Jessie gazes out to sea, to the island, to the birds wheeling overhead. She puts her hands on the steering wheel, and grips it tightly.
‘I would have said no if you’d asked me yesterday. I’ve put it out of my mind, the way our mother told me to, for the past sixty or more years. But I see it. I do see the flames. The great arc of electrical fire from the kiln. Bert trying to put it out.’
‘Bert? Was that his name?’
‘It mu
st have been. I’d forgotten. I can’t be sure, but I think he smoked a pipe. I was only little. There might be some account of that fire somewhere. Old newspapers, that sort of thing. It might be worth you doing a search.’
Belinda says nothing. She wonders if she’d been the cause of her mother marrying Jock. It might have been like that. There’s a whole new road to travel, the lives of her brother and sister to fathom, people for whose lives perhaps she is responsible. It’s true, she’s had the lucky life.
‘There was singing. The Maori workers from up north were having a singalong. It was getting cool that evening. In spite of the summer heat, some nights got quite cold out there. Yes, a cold, starry night. I can feel that.’
‘So he might have been wearing a jacket?’
‘He might,’ Jessie agrees.
They sit together in silence. The street behind them winds up the hill to the house they both knew long ago. Jessie reaches over and takes Belinda’s hand in her thin fingers. ‘There’s a poem that Neruda wrote about guilt. He thinks of himself as guilty for having hands yet not having made a broom.’
‘I know that poem,’ Belinda says. ‘He asks what good his life would be if he only watched the stir of grain, and listened to the wind and never gathered straws that were still green on the earth.’
‘But Belinda,’ Jessie says, ‘whatever our mother did, she did, not you or me. You and I, we’ve made a few brooms.’
Songs, poems. The lines we live by, Belinda thinks. Even the lines of television plays, although she’s not sure it’s the moment for this either, any more than it seemed the time to tell Grant about her parentage. But it comes back to her, the last line of the play she had liked so much when she was finding her way towards her life. The mother who says at the end: ‘Somebody hold me’. It’s all anyone can do, she thinks, to hold one another, to make it through to the end, as best they can. Yes, lucky, that’s her. Touched by fire, but still going strong.
Belinda holds her sister’s hand. Tomorrow Jessie will fly off towards the night, across blazing cities and cauldrons of darkness.
She is leaving.
Acknowledgements
I THANK THE FOLLOWING FOR information and support during the writing of this book: Bev Brett, Sharon Crosbie, Judith McCann and Jeremy Salmond. Kate Melzer, Rod Fry and Margaret Woodley provided invaluable research about the Motueka tobacco fields. Ian Kidman makes everything work while I write, and thanks never do him enough justice. Thanks, as ever, to my brilliant editorial team: Harriet Allan, Leanne McGregor and Anna Rogers.
My thanks to the James K. Baxter Trust for permission to quote from Baxter’s poem ‘Breadboard and Knife’ on page 216. The poem referred to on page 221 is ‘Juan’s Song’ by Louise Bogan, and the poem described on page 319 is ‘Guilty’ by Pablo Neruda (1973, translated by John Felstiner).
Two books consulted provided invaluable background reading. They were: The Golden Harvest: A History of Tobacco Growing in New Zealand by Patricia K. O’Shea (Hazard Press, 1997) and Panguru and the City: Kainga Tahi, Kainga Rua by Melissa Matutina Williams (Bridget Williams Books, 2015).
This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to real people living or dead is entirely inadvertent, although you will find a few characters walking through several of my previous novels.
About the Author
FIONA KIDMAN’S WRITING SPANS MORE than fifty years and the publication of over twenty-five books, including novels, short stories, poetry, non-fiction and drama. She has worked also as a librarian, creative-writing teacher, radio producer and media scriptwriter. Her work is published in several languages.
She has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships; in more recent years The Captive Wife was runner-up for the Deutz Medal for Fiction and was joint winner of the Readers’ Choice Award in the 2006 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and her short story collection The Trouble with Fire was shortlisted for both the New Zealand Post Book Awards and the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award.
Fiona was made a Dame (DNZM) in 1998 in recognition of her contribution to literature, and subsequently a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and a Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’honneur (French Legion of Honour).
The New Zealand Listener wrote: ‘In her craft and her storytelling and in her compassionate gutsy tough expression of female experience, she is the best we have.’
Also by Fiona Kidman
Novels
A Breed of Women, 1979
Mandarin Summer, 1981
Paddy’s Puzzle, 1983
The Book of Secrets, 1987
True Stars, 1990
Ricochet Baby, 1996
Songs from the Violet Café, 2003
The Captive Wife, 2005
The Infinite Air, 2013
Short story collections (as author)
Mrs Dixon and Friend, 1982
Unsuitable Friends, 1988
The Foreign Woman, 1993
The House Within, 1997
The Best of Fiona Kidman’s Short Stories, 1998
A Needle in the Heart, 2002
The Trouble with Fire, 2011
Short story collections (as editor)
New Zealand Love Stories: An Oxford Anthology, 1999
The Best New Zealand Fiction 1, 2004
The Best New Zealand Fiction 2, 2005
The Best New Zealand Fiction 3, 2006
Non-fiction
Gone North, 1984
Wellington, 1989
Palm Prints, 1994
At the End of Darwin Road, 2008
Beside the Dark Pool, 2009
Poetry
Honey and Bitters, 1975
On the Tightrope, 1978
Going to the Chathams, 1985
Wakeful Nights, 1991
Where Your Left Hand Rests, 2010
This Change in the Light, 2016
Play
Search for Sister Blue, 1975
Copyright
VINTAGE
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Vintage is an imprint of the Penguin Random House group of companies, whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published by Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2016
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Text © Fiona Kidman, 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Cover design by Kate Barraclough © Penguin Random House New Zealand
Text design by Carla Sy © Penguin Random House New Zealand
Cover illustrations by Skodadad/iStock (woman) and
kamisoka/iStock (film strip)
Author photograph by Robert Cross
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.
eISBN 978–1–77553–891–2
The assistance of Creative New Zealand towards the production of this book is gratefully acknowledged by the publisher.
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