by Pat Rosier
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Chapter 04
College and the third form was the strangeness of long corridors with polished floors and classrooms off to one side, and Miss Ackland, head of English and the library with her old-fashioned rolls of hair and long, droopy skirts. I must have been there before because of my brother and sister but going myself, in my uniform that was too big, like the other 'turds', finding my way around, learning about timetables and changing rooms each period, that was all new and strange. ‘Periods’ startled me at first, at school they meant going from English period in one room to Geography period in another and so on, all in different rooms with different teachers. We had a form room, where everyone went first on days when there was no assembly in the big hall and got notices. Mrs Thomas was my form teacher through the whole four years. She taught English and French and had dark permed hair and dowdy clothes and talked fast, so you could easily miss something in the notices if you didn’t pay attention. I always paid attention.
Kids from different primary schools all came together in this big place. Lots worried about getting into the same form class as their friends. I wanted to get things right, to be okay, to feel part of everything.
I was put in the academic stream, which meant I went to French instead of shorthand and typing like they did in commercial where my sister had been. Home ec was for the really dumb girls, like trades was for the dumb boys. My sister had finished the year before my brother started and I started the year after he finished. I was in 3A and that must have meant I was considered brainy.
Neither my sister or my brother were famous for anything at school, so I didn’t have to deal with teachers expecting me to be like them – for good or bad – though occasionally one would remember them from my surname. I hardly had anything to do with my brother; because he was the only boy he had his own bedroom.
Isobel stopped writing and slammed the book shut. This didn’t get anywhere near what she wanted to be saying to herself. Where was the detached, disconnected, almost-hopeful waiting that had made every interaction, every experience, awkward, incomplete, because she was waiting for the ‘real’ one that never came. What had stopped her attending to what was under her nose? Where was the envy, the yearning, the anguish of not knowing what mattered? Where had her passive acquiescence in those long, boring days, come from? What had happened to the wobblies her mother spoke of that she had — unlike her sister and brother — thrown when she was a baby? How had that early resistance been extinguished? If she had kept pushing back, found something to fight against she might have grown the kind of internal muscle that would have given her a sense of herself. How on earth did she end up in that passive, waiting state? Where did her belief that every other child in every other family was more a part of their family than she was of hers come from?
She looked in the reading notebook again. Here it was, near the end, A. S. Byatt, In The Shadow of the Sun. Anna’s father was a famous writer, she rode horses, even went to boarding school, and still she didn’t take part in her life, not really. What Isobel remembered was her own disbelief, disbelief that a girl with all the interesting things that were in Anna’s life, was as paralysed as she herself had been. And Anna had got pregnant, and that had been a solution of sorts, an ending to the book that had enraged Isobel at the time, enraged and distressed her beyond belief. All she had written in the reading notebook was the title, the author, and ‘Anna is the most hateful character I have ever met!!!!!’ Isobel was surprised at her own lack of appreciation then, in 1968, of why she would have been upset by Anna’s fate. But that was later, she reminded herself, much later. Now she had to get on with writing her earlier life, and never mind if she didn’t write exactly what she wanted. If she just kept going it must do something must explain how – or even why - the rest happened.
I still hated phys ed and especially hated gym and wanted desperately to do things. I didn’t care if I didn’t do them very well, I just wanted to do them and not be mortified but I couldn’t. I didn’t mind the horrible navy bloomers us girls wore because everyone had to wear them. Standing in line I would feel the same as everyone else, until I had to do something, then I was like a cripple and sometimes I wished there was something serious wrong with me like a caliper on my leg or a twisted spine, anything that would make it all right to not be able to do things. I never talked to anyone at home about that. I never talked to anyone at home about anything that went on inside me, those were exactly the things you did not talk about.
But according to family stories I always had plenty to say for myself and was something of a know-it-all, always reading, always asking questions – often awkward ones. That is so far away from how I remember myself, watching and waiting to see if I could figure out what was going on that really mattered and what the rules were for being part of what mattered. Getting the dishes done as soon as possible after a meal mattered a lot to my mother, I knew that. So why did I do so much to get out of doing them? Like sitting in the toilet with a book, or having a bath, or going down the back to the chook run, or sitting on the grass on the far side of the big tree in the middle of the back garden where no-one could see me. My brother, especially, got fed up with me disappearing before the dishes were done which didn’t make sense either as he hardly ever had to do them. My sister called me ‘spoilt brat’ sometimes, but I don’t remember her making a big fuss about the dishes, she just did them with our mother. My father never ever did dishes, he either went back to work or into his shed. So here was all my family seeing me as this smart, lippy, kid and me feeling like a nobody, a nothing, not having any effect on what happened, or didn’t happen, and not knowing what I was supposed to be doing with myself, desperately wanting to know what things were important so I could apply myself to them, doing what I did do half-heartedly – even reading – because I was never sure if it mattered to be doing this or reading that.
The poet on the radio the last Saturday morning had talked about having a headlong approach to life, going at it full tilt, holding nothing back, learning about loving men, taking off into the Pacific to learn about New Zealand’s neighbours. Isobel had never been headlong — wholehearted sometimes, fully engaged even, in more recent years, but never the rushing force of headlong.
Her mind drifted. The Greenstone Door. William Satchell. With a green cover. Probably impossibly racist to her contemporary mind, she could just recall Maori being particularly good at finding the way in the bush, and maybe people being scared of them. She would later find a copy in the library and read the first three chapters standing at the shelf. The prose was wooden, the man recollecting his boyhood self-congratulatory and pompous. Nonetheless, there was respect for both the Maori characters and for Maori in general, which surprised her and she thought of taking it out, but the stilted writing was too awful and she put it back.
Why did I go home for lunch once I started secondary school? It was closer than the primary school, that was one part of it. Was it because I wanted to avoid lunchtimes and not knowing what to do and not wanting to play sport, or was it because my mother said? It was a ten-minute walk each way. By this time my father had a car and drove home for lunch when he was on day shift. Sometimes he would drive past me while I was walking. Very occasionally he would stop and pick me up. More often I would see him drive past without stopping and I never knew whether it was because he didn’t see me on those days or because he and my mother had decided it would be good for me to walk or what. I got to looking back over my shoulder to see if he was coming and wondering all the way if he would stop. Sometimes I never saw the car and he would already be home or get there after I had arrived. Sometimes I left it as late as I could to start walking back in case he would offer me a ride. He didn’t. I do remember feeling that my mother and father had talked about it but they never talked to me and I never asked.
I had started reading my parents’ books. None of them were about people like us, not even a little bit. Some, like A Good Keen Man were set in New Zealand, bu
t not in a small town suburb of state houses like ours.
Damn! she was describing again! She didn’t want to paint pictures, describe things, she wanted to talk about what it was like inside her, find out about herself.
I was wanting to find out about sex. Not about which bits went where and how you got pregnant, I knew that, but about how people behaved with each other, what they did, how they talked, and what the rules were. My brother had brought a girlfriend home a couple of times and my sister a boyfriend once, but they didn’t help. Everyone was so tense and careful and my mother talked all the time about anything and everything and I could tell straight away she didn’t approve of my sister’s boyfriend, and it wasn’t just because he rode a motorbike, it was something about his family not being respectable enough.
Once I heard my parents, my mother really, making noises in the night and at first I thought there must be something wrong, she must be sick, then I realised they were doing it. I remember putting my head under my pillow so I couldn’t hear and being so embarrassed and ashamed of them and so relieved that I had realised what it was before I went to find out what was wrong with my mother. If sex was supposed to be such good fun and so exciting, why did my mother make noises like she was in pain? I asked my sister about it and she said not to be so dumb – again – and to mind my own business because I asked her if she made noises like that when she did it with her boyfriend. She went red down her face and neck so I knew she did and with the boyfriend my mother didn’t approve of and I thought for a moment about telling on her.
So it had to be books. I couldn’t get adult novels out of the library on my card until I was fifteen, and my mother only got books about history and geography. There were some novels in their bookcases so I started reading them. I only remember one, Frances Parkinson Keyes, The River Road. There wasn’t much about sex in it, but I had a funny feeling at one part, just a paragraph or two and wanted to go to the toilet when I read it.
Isobel went back to the library and looked for The River Road. It was out on loan for two weeks in a row. She stopped writing, she had to read the book and she started looking for it in secondhand bookshops. All the novels of Frances Parkinson Keyes must have been cleared from family bookshelves years earlier, because she didn’t find a single title, never mind the one she was looking for, and FPK had written dozens of novels Isobel discovered from the library catalogue. She considered reading a different one but it had to be The River Road. She didn’t reserve it, this was between her and her past, a private investigation, she had to wait until it was in, on the shelf, sitting quietly waiting for her.
On her third visit it was there. The cover was not dull green as she remembered, but dark blue, and covered by a paper jacket with a badly painted picture of a house, a road – of course – a woman and dog sitting on the grass and a man standing, and further covered by library plastic. It was fatter, with thick paper, not fine and slighty shiny as she had expected. But it was The River Road and she quietly got it issued, dropped it into the cloth bag she used to carry library books, and left.
The story was not at all familiar. A sugar plantation in Louisiana, between the world wars, the people all shockingly – now – racist. She read every page, every dreadful word. There was only one short section that could have caused the sexual feeling, and even that was inexplicit, between Cresside and Sylvester, clandestine, unsuitable, overheard and little more than kissing. There must have been more off stage, as it were, Isobel thought, because Cresside got pregnant, and she wondered if she thought that when she first read it and decided she probably didn’t pay any attention to the story then, just skimming through the pages for interesting bits. Romantic –in the worst sense – sexist, racist trash. She could not imagine how it ever got onto her parents’ bookshelf. It must have been an unlikely present from someone. If that was a fair sample of the novels her mother had read no wonder she despised them and preferred ‘real’ history.
Iris had said, ‘Why on earth are you reading that?’ one night in bed, and Isobel had replied, ‘Oh, just some research on the past,’ and Iris hadn’t said any more. Only when she had finished reading The River Road and returned it to the library did Isobel go back to writing in the diary.
My sister and brother were no help to me in finding out about the boy/sex thing. They hardly brought anyone home probably because of our mother disapproving. I remember wondering where the people she thought were all right were, there seemed to be something wrong with everyone, including my sister and brother and I. Except my father. The only even slightly critical comments she made about him were jokey, like he had no idea how clean socks and underwear got to always be in the drawer, he just expected they would be there.
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Chapter 05
When I go to live and work in the city, I will be different. I remember thinking this as I looked out the back window of the car, watching the edges of the town retreating into the distance. An opportunity to start a new life, I thought, where no one knows me and no-one knows what a nothing I am. I can stop stealing and be a good person and find out what my place in the world is, I decided, because I didn’t believe that I was really a pathetic little girl flopping around in a no-count family in a place no-one had heard of.
My special grandiose delusion was standing in front of a huge crowd, swaying them with the force of my words and my character, drawing them away from the bad to the good. Lying in bed at night, trying to warm my cold feet by lying out straight so my blood could circulate more easily to them (who on earth had told me this?) I would hear the roar of the crowd, feel the adulation, be calm and humble, knowing I was doing good. There was no content in this fantasy, just the feeling of the crowd and me the central force of it all, the focus of everyone’s attention and at the end the people around me on the platform – there was always a platform, high above the crowd – gathering around, congratulating me for doing it (what?) again, grateful that I had once again saved everyone from — well, saved them.
Isobel gazed at her reflection in the window for a moment before she got up to pull the curtains against the blustery night. Where had those images come from, the shouting crowds, a platform, or maybe a balcony. Ah, the balcony — newsreels of the royal family at the Saturday afternoon matinee. She went back to her writing.
That trip in the car was to interview the woman at the hostel, for my mother and father to check that it was a suitable place for a seventeen-year-old to go. I remember being surprised that they were taking so much interest. My sister had said in our bedroom just before my mother called me to hurry up, my father was ready to go, something about me being ‘too good for the local shops,’ not like her. I didn’t understand and I didn’t have time to ask, and she wouldn’t have answered with anything I could make sense of anyway.
When we drove to the city my mother always got crabby. She got crabby a lot when we went anywhere in the car, not telling my father how to drive, which she never learnt to do herself, but worrying about finding the way and the state of the road and would our little car make it to the top of even the smallest hill, and were we holding up cars behind us.
Because we didn’t get a car until my mother had saved up the family benefit my father had learnt to drive when he was in his forties and he never got very good at it and my mother had to learn to be his passenger and she wasn’t good at that. I think she liked buses and trains better.
I remember the car exactly. It was two-tone, grey and maroon, a 1936 four-door Morris 8. There was a fold-down carrier on the back for tying the suitcases on when we went to my grandmother’s on holiday. This day the carrier was folded up because there was no suitcase because we were going to the city and back on the same day. My mother hoped my father wouldn’t get one of his headaches and he said he never got them when he wasn’t working.
I don’t remember anything about the city that day. I remember the hostel, but that was from later when I lived there.
Then it was the Sunday for going to live in the city and st
art my new life. I was starting work the next day, at a government office where I had a job as a ‘school leaver’. I don’t remember packing or anything else from the day except the bit of time before I caught the five o’clock bus to the city. The bus left from right near our place, about 100 yards away, so I wouldn’t need a ride. I thought perhaps my mother or my father or both of them would come with me, that was what parents did when their children left home, even if it was only for weekdays. I already had a ticket. My brother didn’t live with us any more, he was away working, and my sister was out. She said she was going out with her girlfriend but I knew she was going to see the unsatisfactory boyfriend. I forget which one it was, but they were always unsatisfactory. She had a job in the haberdashery shop in town.
Isobel laughed out loud. Iris looked up from the book she was reading. The television was playing a game show, muted. Isobel shook her head. Iris looked at her a moment longer and went back to her book. Isobel realised she had forgotten what Iris was reading. Then she remembered why she had laughed. It was the absurdity of writing as though she was explaining something for someone else. Perhaps she did intend to have Iris read it, perhaps she was trying to pre-empt some of her questions. Perhaps.
