by Fiona Kidman
Not that I found anything. I don’t know whether there was water there or not, but while I walked around the place, the twig felt dead in my hands, as lifeless and still as if it were all a silly game. Like Delia and Dr Paul. I wasn’t a miracle child after all.
Word got around of course. My self-importance ebbed away. At school, people fell silent in my presence, as if I were some sort of charlatan to be avoided at all costs. After I’d moved away from a group, I’d hear them starting to talk again. I stopped being Jocelyn’s friend, and she had a birthday party to which I was not invited. I stayed home and watched the settlers’ daughters walking to the party carrying gifts. After the birthday, Jocelyn started talking to me again and I was invited over as if nothing had happened, but I didn’t go.
Frank said I needed a manager and he could have told my parents the conditions weren’t right at that place. If he’d been there, he’d have advised against me going on a tom-fool errand like that.
Annie Pile’s health got worse. Her sister, Petal, came from down south to stay for a while. Early one morning, Viv arrived at our house and introduced Petal.
‘I was the baby of the family,’ Petal said self-deprecatingly. ‘They’d kind of run out of names.’ There were eleven siblings: Annie was number eight, three above Petal, who was a bright-eyed woman in her late twenties. Short, not unshapely, in a heavy-breasted, big-beamed way, she was so different from Annie that it was hard to think of them as related. She had lovely neat ankles beneath her flowered cotton skirt. It was Viv, of course, who had sent for Petal, because somebody had to do something about Annie. Viv knew that Petal was a nurse. She was a single woman, good at her work; the hospital where she worked had agreed to take her back when she’d finished looking after her sister.
The purpose of this second visit from Viv soon emerged. Petal needed someone to help clean up the Piles’ place — it was beyond her on her own, what with having to look after Annie and Jonathan at the same time. With the new baby due any day, she was working against the clock. Naturally, she would pay my mother.
‘I don’t do cleaning work,’ my mother said. I could see her glaring at Viv, as if to say, why can’t you do it? Surely this was charity again, of the worst kind.
‘I told Petal you’d done some housekeeping,’ Viv said, apologetically.
My mother began to shape her refusal, then changed her mind. I guess she was thinking, as my father had before, that the Piles had helped out once. And there was the matter of the well that I had failed to deliver. Perhaps there was something, too, about Petal’s open, friendly smile that my mother liked. She said she’d be right over.
Here is another dinner party. My mother and father and Frank and Petal and me. My mother has cooked chicken in cider, with green capsicums and apples. She has made the cider herself. There is a dessert to follow, light sponge floating on lemon cream.
Kurt has been invited to the meal but has chosen to stay home and play his lonely broken chords of Beethoven, spilling them on the fragrant night air of Alderton City. Annie has gone away, probably for good. Their children, Jonathan and a new and wholesome baby called Derek, are being taken care of by another of the sisters, who will end up keeping them. Soon Kurt will move to Auckland, where he and his wife and children will live under different roofs, but at least they will see each other from time to time, and then, slowly, less and less. My mother will know about all this because Petal will tell her when they meet, which will be often in the years ahead.
Something has been decided before this meal takes place. I don’t know exactly who decided, but an event is all set to happen. Frank and Petal are going away to get married. This dinner is their farewell. At the end of it, my father proposes a toast.
‘To Frank and Petal, good health.’ His voice quavers and, this time, it is he who has the burnish of tears in his eyes.
After Frank and Petal had gone, my mother fell ill for many months. She’d had boils, a sign of overwork and distress and perhaps something lacking in her diet. One erupted on the back of her head and turned into a carbuncle, a boil with several heads. She walked up and down all night, taking my father’s cigarettes and smoking incessantly. Sometimes she tried to lie down, but that was worse than standing, keeping her swollen, poisoned head upright. My father called the doctor, a man known for strong drink and occasional incoherence. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand as if he didn’t believe what he saw, then reached inside his bag and took out a scalpel. Hold still, he told her, and lanced the thing open.
It got worse instead of better. By the time Viv came around and arranged for her to go to hospital, the thing had thirteen heads, each like living putrid creatures with existences of their own. My mother nearly died in the hospital. I went south to live with my aunt for a while. It was not unlike Annie Pile’s situation, only my mother did recover. In time, I went back home, changed and less wayward.
Frank and Petal visited as often as they could. They had four children in quick succession, and there were times when they couldn’t get away from the farm. Frank bought out the farm next door to his family home in Hunterville, and developed a big herd. Later, my parents shifted away from the north and lived closer to them, although that was a matter of chance rather than design. Sometimes they all went away for their holidays together.
There was a particular day I remember, not long before I met my husband. I was working as an advertising copywriter for the radio station in the town where we now lived. There was a lake near our house. My father had a row boat that I used to mess around in some weekends. I had gone on liking the outdoors, even though my head was absorbed with men. I had long since stopped divining water, as if a certain energy in me had been subverted.
I didn’t know that Frank and Petal had come for a visit. I had worked overtime at the station and, afterwards, I cycled straight to the lake, thinking that I would row out a little way, or perhaps along the shoreline. But when I got to the lake, I found that the boat was already in use. My father was rowing Frank vigorously out away from the shore.
It was a calm, golden afternoon, willows trailing in the lake, small fish leaping. There was a tart smell of autumn in the air. I watched the boat and saw my father rest on the oars in a patch of sunlight. He and Frank exchanged some banter. My father’s face wore a look of such sweet peace that it has stayed with me forever.
Late that afternoon, when everyone had returned to the house, they got me to take their photograph together on Frank’s camera. My mother doesn’t look like her old farm self; she has changed and become suburban, in a way she had wanted to be all those years before. She wears a knee-length tweed skirt, a cream Viyella blouse, a jumper and a scarf fixed with a brooch my father gave her one birthday — a little pearl on a spiralling gold wire — and sensible, comfortable shoes. Her hair has grown longer to cover an appalling scar. Petal wears an acrylic powder-blue pantsuit with beige ankle socks and black slip-ons. The men wear jackets, but their shirts are open at the throat. This is more or less how they will go on looking for another thirty or so years, all of them growing stouter except for my father, who will grow thinner and fade away first.
There they are, the four of them: my mother and father and Frank and Petal.
Silver-Tongued
A few years ago, I met a young man who, had I been a younger woman, I might have considered to be romantically inclined towards me. As it was, he was looking for someone to listen to his troubles. He chose me because I had told him a dramatic story in a bar in Banff, about a night when I raced across a darkened countryside in a state of blind panic, totally lost in a place I knew well. Looking for and continually missing the road that would have led me to the side of a woman I loved, who was dying. Although this happened on the other side of the world from Canada, I think he was struck by the immediacy of the way I told the story.
‘You tell this as if it happened quite recently,’ he said.
‘Well, it’s ten days ago now.’
‘Ten days.’ He looked as if
he had been stung, as if something had brushed past that was too close for comfort — all the intimations of mortality that people entertain when they are in some sort of difficulties of their own. I was with a group of writers who had just swum under the stars at an elegant resort spa, where the sudden presence of an uninhibited group was clearly viewed by the other bathers as an intrusion. We were hot and rosy and flushed with steam and the conversations that happen when new friendships are developing. Let’s have a drink, we all said to each other, but by the time we found a bar open we’d all gone off the idea and drank coffee instead, knowing we would keep ourselves awake, but needing to be alert because we had so many revelations to make to each other. Much later in the evening, the young man and I walked back to where we were staying, arm in arm in the starlight, peeling away from the others in the group. He was dark with stealthy fingers that rested on my inner arm. We had been told to watch out for rutting elks that might charge us if they were disturbed. Elks have rights over humans in Banff. They walk down the middle of the streets while motorists wait, and they walk through gardens and backyards.
The previous week, I had been on another tour, back home in New Zealand. In case this sounds like coincidence, I should say that this is how writers earn much of their keep: they go from one place to another, talking about their work to whoever will listen, while booksellers stand behind a little table and exhort the audience to buy books. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Some of the best days of my life have been spent in halls and libraries and rooms set aside in old country pubs, talking to people who love books the way I do. I would go even if it were not a necessity, although, that once, I would rather have just sat with my aunt. I had been sent a message that she was ill and didn’t have long to live.
This was no ordinary aunt, if such a person exists. I mean, she wasn’t someone else’s mother — she had no children of her own — and I’ve often thought of her as another mother of my own. That’s what I would call her when I spoke at her funeral. Of course, I felt the pull of needing to be in two places at once. But I had a new book out and I’d promised my publishers I would go on this tour. And there was a real coincidence, one of those elements of random chance that seem so significant they are like an omen, an instruction in themselves. The tour was of the Waikato, where Flo had lived for most of her life, and where I, from time to time, had lived too. That green heart of dairy country, full of pastel-coloured cows with contemplative eyes. All the venues, except one at the end, were within driving distance of the cottage hospital where my aunt was being nursed. It had been arranged that I would drive a rented car from one place to another, before flying on to the last town. There was a serendipity about all of this, and the idea of calling off the tour didn’t really arise.
I began with a visit to the hospital. As I arrived, I heard Flo’s voice, frail and yet fierce, echoing down the corridor. She cried, Come and get me, come and get me in an incessant high drone. Her cloudy eyes didn’t recognise me straight away, although there was a hint of their old blackness beneath the cataracts.
When she did, she said, more calmly, ‘You’ve come for me then.’
‘I’ve come to see you.’
‘Just to see me?’
‘Hush,’ I said, ‘it’ll be all right. I love you.’
She turned her head the other way. ‘Love. Don’t talk to me about love,’ she said.
I thought then that I had always just been coming and going in my aunt’s life; I was never permanent. Yet, for as long as I could remember, she had been waiting for me. But at least I came back, whenever I could. In those last days before she died, she would wake with a start from bouts of laboured breathing, and I would say ‘I’m here.’
‘I’m here,’ she would mimic, and yet there was something easier about her breathing every time she realised I really was there beside her.
On that first evening, the night nurse said she needed morphine. ‘Personally, I think the pain relief that’s been offered her is too light,’ she said. Every time we tried to turn Flo, she screamed: Please please leave me leave me please leave me.
‘What can we do about it?’ I asked the nurse. I liked this young woman; she was very small and neat in her movements, almost as if she were a dancer, which I later learned she had trained to be until her ankles lost their shape.
‘Get a doctor,’ she said. ‘You’re the next of kin, if you say she needs a doctor, we can call one.’
‘Do it,’ I said.
The doctor, a young Indian man, took one look and then drew me outside and into the corridor. ‘As much as she needs,’ he said, ‘as much as it takes. But you must tell her.’
I went in and sat beside her and said, ‘Flo, can you hear me? The doctor says morphine.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Morphine?’ she breathed, as if being offered a love potion. She must have known its power: she had nursed more than one patient towards their last seductive inhalation.
Only this morphine was neither inhaled nor injected but rather drops placed on her tongue. ‘Bitter,’ said Flo. It reminded me of one of her sayings. ‘Life’s had a few bitter pills, but you get by.’ She slept for a while. When she woke, the morphine had begun to wear off and it was time for her to be turned again.
Please. No, not that.
And then I understood: it was at the height of each turn, the moment before her body pivoted down, that she began to scream and her free arm to flap wildly. When I caught it in my own, it was like a cold old fish flipper. ‘You’re afraid of falling, aren’t you?’ I said.
And she agreed that, yes, she was and that, if I held her hand, she wouldn’t fall. It was much the same as walking over a height: that sense of relinquishing control, fear of abandonment. I suffer from that too.
I said to the nurse, who was called Joy, ‘How long do you think this will take? I mean, I don’t want to see her go on suffering like this.’
Joy gave me a careful, serious scrutiny. ‘Do you mean,’ she said eventually, ‘do people go on with their lives, or keep vigils like our grandmothers did?’
‘Yes, something like that. I want to be here when she needs me.’
‘I think you’re doing the best you can,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell you when it will happen exactly. Death’s no flash in the pan for the old. It needs a lead-up, a preparation time that says it’s done when it’s ready, not when it’s convenient.’
‘Like baking?’
‘I guess that’s a way of looking at it.’
‘That’s Flo,’ I said, ‘she was a terrific cook. You should have tried her orange loaf.’
I saw Joy look at my aunt in a new, less clinical way, as if she could see beyond the helpless creature she had become to someone younger, more vital — a glimpse perhaps of the person I still saw.
‘You should get some rest and do whatever it is you have to do,’ she said.
Early the next morning, as dawn was breaking, I heard Flo again before I saw her, only this time she was singing. Look for the silver lining / Whene’er a cloud appears in the blue / Remember, somewhere, the sun is shining / And so the right thing to do is make it shine for you. Her room looked out on a grove of orange trees; I could see rabbits skipping beneath them.
After I had seen Flo, heard her singing and spoken quietly with her, I drove north to give a lunchtime reading of my work and, when that was over, I drove back again. The colourful Waikato landscape is like a sky banner: it should be trailing itself behind a helicopter. The grass has the shimmer of Thai silk. On good days, like the ones that followed me through most of that week, the buttercup yellow of the sun shines out of an electric-blue sky. Then there’s the way the gardens grow there like tornadoes of colour. But there’s an unpredictability about it, too — the way passing clouds can turn the landscape black, and the night so dark that starlight is not always enough to show the way.
I decided to stay on in the town for as long as I could. I took a room at the edge of the park, overlooking the thermal spa resort. I was struck, just a we
ek or so later, by the way the Earth is connected, when I found myself in another thermal town on the opposite side of the world. This one, near the hospital, used to be the haunt of fashionable people early in the twentieth century. They had built pavilions and a tea kiosk called Cadman House. I have a white china teapot stand, with a picture of the teahouse drawn in worn gold gilt, which I bought for a dollar in a second-hand shop. In the picture, a woman in a long full skirt is playing tennis on a court in front of the kiosk. This was just what Flo would have loved: it was like the beginning of her own life and my mother’s, and their sisters’ as well.
That afternoon, Flo and I talked for almost the last time. Mostly we spoke about old times when I used to come by train from up north, and she’d come to meet me, and also about the time I’d lived with her after I left school, the way I’d driven her crazy when I was a teenager, and how things pass.
‘Through my journey of life, I’ve simply liked to help people,’ she said. And in a way that was true. There was nothing grudging about what she remembered that afternoon.
