The House Within

by Fiona Kidman

  Anna, with her own red-lipped smile, and fine pointy features, the kind you would pick out in a school photograph in forty or fifty years’ time and still say with absolute certainty, oh yes, there she is, Anna Devine, I remember her. The men tweaked her chin and agreed that Anna was one helluva sweet kid. Their eyes lingered on Lynne Devine’s plump bottom. ‘Just hold on a mo,’ Lynne said, ‘I’ll fit you in a tick’, and everyone laughed, except for the girls’ aunt, who steered them quickly out of the shop.

  ‘Mummy,’ shrieked Anna, pulling back against the aunt’s guiding hand.

  ‘Come and see the parrot. We’ll have iced buns at Farmer’s. Don’t dawdle girls, you’ll miss your treat.’

  Up, up on the lifts, the lift attendant, smiling, a credit to you ma’am, two bonnie lasses, the parrot squawking, the city, row upon row of it below them. Hasten to treats, pleasure will pass you by. This Bethany remembers, perhaps Anna does too.

  When they were eight and seven, Anna became interested in horses. They saw National Velvet at the picture house in Ponsonby. A girl in Anna’s class went to visit her cousins at Greenhithe in the weekends, where they rode horses in green open paddocks. Anna was invited to accompany her friend one weekend. ‘They saddle up,’ said Anna, full of a new language. In her hand she held a piece of rope that she had unravelled at one end. ‘I can make it crack, you just see if I can’t,’ she said, imitating a rider in flight.

  ‘You be the horse and I’ll be the rider,’ Anna said to Bethany. ‘I’ll show you what they do.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ said Bethany.

  ‘You’re jealous. You wanted to ride the horses.’

  This was true. All weekend, while Anna was away, Bethany had tried holding her breath to see if she could make it last until Anna got back. Stop sighing all over the place, Lynne said, you’re just jealous because Anna’s gone riding. She was manicuring her nails, enjoying the silence of just one child. She ate two chocolates and gave Bethany one and smoked a cigarette and gazed out the window and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece.

  ‘I am so not jealous,’ Bethany told Anna.

  ‘Liar. If you weren’t you’d let me show you how we rode the horses,’ said Anna.

  ‘Okay,’ said Bethany. Quarrelling with Anna was no fun. If she were to make up lost ground she would have to enter into the spirit of things. Miss McTavish would approve. That’s it, gels, go to it, she was wont to say.

  Bethany squatted on all fours on the roadside while Anna threw her cardigan over her middle, yanking it into a tight knot. ‘There, giddyup,’ she cried in triumph, swinging her leg over Bethany. She made clucking noises out of the side of her mouth, knocking her knees against Bethany’s ribs, her feet walking clickety click on either side, bouncing on Bethany’s bottom.

  Bethany crawled along the grass verge. ‘Go faster,’ commanded Anna. The paspalum was sticky under Bethany’s hands, her dress smeared with the juice of the seedheads.

  ‘That’s far enough.’

  ‘I want to show you how the horses’ hooves click.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll tell Mummy you wouldn’t play with me.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Go down on the road.’

  So Bethany crawled on the road where the hot tar bled from the freshly gravelled surface. The stones bit deep in her knees and drew blood while Anna’s shoes went click, click, click as she rode, above Bethany’s trembling limbs.

  When Anna had finally ridden until she was satisfied, and Bethany was allowed to stand, Anna stood and looked at her sister — the ruined dress, the blood, the tears dripping down her nose.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, flinging her arms around Bethany. ‘What will we tell Mummy?’

  ‘I’ll tell her I fell over,’ said Bethany. ‘This time.’

  Perhaps that was when things were decided. Clumsy, her mother said, scrubbing the dress fiercely between her hands, and Bethany didn’t say a word. ‘I was going to take your picture this afternoon.’ She did anyway. There it is in the album, Bethany looking away from the camera, Anna pouting.

  ‘I love you, Bethy,’ said Anna before they went to sleep.

  I love you too,’ said Bethany, but she felt a hardness settle in her chest. She remembers lying awake in the dark thinking how the next time Anna did anything like that she would bite her ankle. She would tell, even if nobody believed her. She would leave Anna with the consequences and conscience of telling lies.

  Anna, of course, understood this, without it being said. She sheathed her claws and, though they quarrelled from time to time, Anna developed caution in her dealings with her sister. She knew when the limits were reached. When they looked back on their childhood, they would say they were friends. We were one flesh, Bethany thinks, which is different.

  Bethany remembers all of this, with pain and longing when she thinks of Anna, flicking through this album of their childhood, their childish figures perched in bathing suits beside the sea, holding their mother’s hand as they walk down Queen Street at Christmas time. Or, sitting awkwardly either side of their mother and her new husband Ken, after the wedding, silly giant bows in their hair, clutching pompous fat posies. There, their mother is Mrs Lynne Mawson, relieved of the provocative, difficult name her first husband had bequeathed her.

  ‘Did you know, Mum doesn’t wear pants to bed any more?’ Anna told Bethany.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, everyone does,’ Bethany snapped, her face beetroot. Mrs Mawkish, Anna called her, although it was she who recalled their mother’s death long after Bethany stopped remembering the anniversary. She had died soon after Bethany’s marriage. ‘I don’t see how you could forget,’ Anna said.

  To which Bethany said nothing. She still saw Aunt Vera, a frail, trembling old lady who thought Bethany was her daughter.

  ‘I hated Ken,’ Anna once said, with a fierceness that surprised Bethany, who had ignored Ken when they were children.

  ‘Why?’

  It was an early winter evening. They were drinking mulled wine and eating potato crisps straight out of the bag. It was early in the seventies. They had read The Female Eunuch and Sylvia Plath’s poems. It might be just about enough to get them through, they thought, although as it turned out, it wasn’t. Soon things would be over between them. Anna peeled off her tights, the firelight moving over her smooth naked skin. ‘He was rat shit.’

  Anna had been teaching in the town, gone away and come back. My sister, the high school teacher, Bethany said with pride when Anna came to work there. Anna had a swathe of copper hair, that sprang out from her head like real metal, and the lean raciness of a marathon runner. When Anna had to leave, Bethany stood squarely in front of people who asked after her. ‘She has a temporary position up north,’ she told them.

  Gone up north, that’s what people said. Not to the Bethany Home — she went housekeeping for a family in the country who kept her baby boy afterwards. It was all for the best, Anna said, let’s not give it a thought. This was a saying of Anna’s. When Peter left Bethany, Anna said, ‘Never mind, it was all for the best, he was playing around with another woman anyway.’ Only Bethany has never believed this, about it being for the best — she will protect Anna to the death, but trust is another matter.

  ‘Ken was sick. He looked at me.’

  ‘Was that all?’

  ‘Don’t you understand?’ Anna cast her a withering look, compounded of scorn at Bethany’s naivety and disgust at the memory. ‘It was enough. Don’t you believe me?’

  Oddly enough, this is one of the things Bethany does believe, not because it is fashionable to do so nowadays, but because she can see that there are some things that she has been blind to in her life.

  SOME PHOTOGRAPHS OF Anna are not in the album. Here is one that lies at the bottom of a box of odds and ends that Bethany plans to sort some day — old family documents, ribbons from discarded bouquets, horseshoes, fragments of crystal rock gathered on a holiday, an elbow-length glove studded with pearl
buttons, invitations to twenty-first birthday parties, to weddings of Peter’s and her friends, to kitchen tea parties. Symbols of hope and promise.

  This is a photograph intended to be hidden. It shows Anna close up, startled, with her pretty mouth parted. She is saying something truculent: get off (or fuck off, although they hadn’t started saying that in the fifties, so it was something like that, venomous and frightened in its intent), or leave me, or I didn’t do it. She stands in front of a chemist’s shop, one of those old-fashioned buildings with a small timber framed doorway and a crowded display window beneath leadlights. In the photograph she is fourteen, just a kid, wearing a coat that buttons all the way up to the neck, with a Peter Pan collar ornamented with a star-shaped brooch. If she was that age now she would be wearing a bomber jacket and a stud in her nose. Her purse hangs by a strap over her shoulder. There is something odd about the way she holds her arm.

  Bethany was at home on her own when the chemist came to the door, accompanied by a policeman. She was doing chemistry homework; Bethany liked equations, the balances achieved between matter.

  ‘Where’s your mother?’ asked the policeman.

  ‘At work.’

  The policeman and the chemist stood on the doorstep shaking their heads. Bethany and Anna were too old to need Aunt Vera, who had arthritis and had to change two buses between her house and theirs. They stayed on their own after school.

  ‘Has there been an accident?’ She thought immediately of Anna.

  ‘No,’ said the policeman, ‘but we’ll have to come in and wait for your mother. I’m sorry.’

  Bethany didn’t want to let them in; she was fifteen and a half and had tits as Anna called them (Anna didn’t show outward signs of having any at all). She didn’t like to allow strangers into the house although, now Ken lived with them, she had got used to different people coming and going. She supposed it was about Ken that the policeman and his companion had come. The significance of that response doesn’t occur to her until years later, after Anna had said what she did about their stepfather.

  ‘Shall I make a cup of tea?’ she asked. Flustered.

  ‘No. Thank you.’ The chemist was a tight man, balding, with tufts of hair sprouting above his ears, wearing an overlarge raincoat, the kind you expected flashers to wear in swimming bath toilets. He bent over as if to avoid the intimacy of the close house, the dishes standing on the bench that Bethany was supposed to have cleaned up, Weet-bix crumbs on the table in the middle of the afternoon.

  ‘Yes, please,’ said the policeman, ‘don’t mind if I do.’

  ‘Ken won’t be home till after six,’ said Bethany, filling the hot water jug, experiencing the chemist’s displeasure through the back of her neck; she couldn’t please them both.

  ‘It’s your sister we want to see,’ said the chemist.

  Bethany felt a thick wad of dread collecting in her throat. ‘But you said … not Anna.’ She saw the policeman’s warning glance passed to the chemist.

  ‘It’s just a word,’ he said, like a policeman in a movie, a sandy, broad man nearing retirement, with hands like a butcher. ‘Nothing serious.’

  ‘Maybe not to you,’ said the chemist, glaring. ‘You’ll probably find this one’s in on it too. You should be searching the house while you’re here.’

  ‘What’s my sister done?’ said Bethany, handing the policeman tea in one of her mother’s few posh cups. His hand encased it awkwardly.

  ‘We’re not sure she’s done anything.’

  ‘Is she at the police station?’

  ‘Where would she usually be at this hour of the day?’

  Bethany had to rack her brains. Lately, Anna had been secretive. While Bethany was busy, working for exams, Anna had new friends. So she said. Neither of them brought friends home to the house, an unspoken, long ago rule they had made for themselves. Bethany found herself confused. Perhaps Anna didn’t have new friends. She shifted from one foot to the other, not knowing what to say. The scene had become unreal.

  ‘She’s been shoplifting, that’s what,’ said the chemist, disregarding the policeman.

  ‘That’s not true,’ said Bethany. ‘My sister doesn’t steal.’

  ‘Yes she does, I took her picture.’

  ‘He got us to watch the shop,’ said the policeman, as if he was apologising to Bethany.

  ‘She knew she’d been caught when I took her picture, but she still came back.’ The chemist blew a little ball of spittle across the room. He produced the black and white print of Anna, the photograph she still has, because at the end of the afternoon, after all the trouble, as her mother put it, they left it behind. Bethany supposes they must have had more copies. At the time she had simply taken the photo away and stuffed it in her underwear drawer, not wanting anyone else to see Anna with that look that could kill expression in her eyes. ‘They had to search her.’

  ‘Perhaps we could see your mother at work, after all. Where did you say she worked?’

  ‘No. You mustn’t go there.’ Lynne was the manager of Gold’s Menswear now.

  Bethany was on the verge of tears. She knew what they were saying was true. The way Anna locked herself in her room, the jewellery she had taken to wearing, the flush of perfume that followed her everywhere, even in school uniform.

  ‘IT’S EASY,’ SAID Anna, when Bethany asked her. ‘Look, you just cut the bottom out of your pocket and leave one button open at the front.’ She demonstrated to Bethany the way she walked round, seemingly with her hands in her pockets, while in fact they were free to creep out from the opening in front of her coat and snatch her heart’s desire as she passed the shelves. Although not everything she took she wanted at all. Among the chewing gum and lipstick, the earrings and scent: hairbrushes when she already had two; a toastrack and cutlery from the hardware shop; bottle openers, boxes of matches and cigarettes from the grocer’s (although she hadn’t taken to smoking yet she sold tailor-mades when she could be bothered, at a shilling a cigarette; how rich Anna had become — amazingly, the profits had been deposited in her Post Office account), tins of condensed milk, which she hated; a ball of string, a packet of flower seeds (zinnias, Bethany thinks now, though she can’t be sure; there is something about their harsh African colours that makes her squirm, even now); a bottle of cough mixture.

  ‘We could do it together,’ Anna said, carelessly, as if offering Bethany the key to a fun park.

  ‘No.’

  There had been hysteria and grounding, threats (including one of a hiding from Ken if she ever did it again, a real thrashing on her bare bum, he promised), meetings at school with the headmistress, a visit from the welfare to check on Anna’s home circumstances.

  ‘Are you scared to do it?’ Anna asked. Bethany guessed that the worst had passed for Anna, that you could only be as scared as the first time you were caught.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ Bethany said, not able to explain her own moral outrage, not even to herself. ‘I’m scared for you, I guess,’ she added, although it sounded lame in her ears.

  Anna blinked, sighed. ‘Okay. Then we won’t do it.’

  ‘I don’t want you to do it. Ever, ever, ever.’

  ‘I won’t. I just said.’ Anna opened her eyes wider, as if astonished that Bethany had not understood that ‘we’ had already included both of them in the deal.

  Neither did she. It was as if the excitement was over and it was time to move on to something else. She began to work hard at school; before long her results were being compared with Bethany’s. Bethany Devine will get good results in her exams, the teachers said, not quite out of earshot, but look out for Anna, she’s going to bring credit to the school, see if she doesn’t. Amazing, when you think of her background, probably a scholarship girl. Bethany sees now that Anna had set out to beat her.

  Anna did win a scholarship, she went to university (so did Bethany, the hard way, working in a downtown fish and chips four nights a week, and getting up at dawn to study). When Anna was offered the opportunity to d
o honours she decided against it. Instead, she went to teachers’ training college. You should have gone on, said Bethany, proud of her, but she was pleased nonetheless with the direction of her sister’s career.

  When she came to live in the same town, near Bethany and Peter, she forgot the differences of their childhood. They visited each other, shopped and even partied a little together, although Anna had her friends at the school; Anna baby-sat, came for dinner on Sunday nights, lent Bethany books. You could say that Anna Devine lived for a long time like any other small-town high school teacher, preparing her lessons well, listening to her students with a respect that was returned, going on school camps, drinking wine with her colleagues, and occasionally, Bethany supposed, sleeping with one or other of them as well; teachers she has noticed, are tribal in their habits. Anna has grown up, Bethany said to Peter.

  Then Anna went up north, and Bethany wept for all that was lost, and blamed herself. They could have looked after the baby, she and Peter, she thought. Although she guesses that it couldn’t have happened, she reproaches herself for not having tried. Anna said she didn’t have a clue who the father was, another story Bethany doesn’t believe, the hand stealing out through the coat snatching a morsel. Some married man, though she never figured out which one.

  An incident stands out in her mind. Bethany drove Anna to the bus depot when she was leaving for Auckland one school holidays. Bethany never understood why Anna didn’t drive; a licence was the one test she couldn’t seem to pass. As the bus driver ticked off the names he called out Miss Garland, and Anna answered.

  ‘But that’s not your name,’ exclaimed Bethany when the driver moved on.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Then why is the ticket under that name?’

  ‘I always use a pseud.’ She used a wisecracking, joky kind of voice.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Yes, I do. For people who don’t know me anyway.’