True Stars

by Kidman, Fiona

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’ve been listening to Tracey Chapman lately,’ said Toni. ‘You need educating.’

  She put the phone down and looked at Lyle, standing in the doorway.

  ‘Did you tell her?’ he asked. She often felt that her husband listened to her phone calls.

  ‘She didn’t ask.’

  ‘You’d better shift it if you’re going, hadn’t you?’

  The meetings of the Weyville branch of the Labour Party were held in the Presbyterian church hall. A trestle table was set out at the front. The electorate committee sat along the table facing the members. Of late, there had been more committee than audience.

  But this evening, when Rose Kendall arrived, there were at least twenty cars outside, and inside the hall fifty or so people had gathered. She was on the point of being late and tried to walk slowly as if it didn’t matter. She had put on make-up and changed into an off-the-rack emerald green silk shirt with an Eloise label, and a grey linen skirt with boxer pleats. She smiled at everybody and nobody in particular.

  Harry Ryan, the secretary, was already seated behind the table while the chairman, Matt Decker, walked up and down alongside it, doing a head count among the rows.

  Rose pushed her way through a crowd round the kitchen door to deposit her plate of supper sandwiches. Toni was amongst the knot of women setting out cups and food, applying herself to the wrapping of bread around tinned asparagus spears. When Rose caught sight of her small pointed face bent over her task, she thought, absurdly it seemed at that moment, how pretty she was. Her eyes, turned away from Rose now, were blue-ish green and wide-spaced, her dark hair cropped short. Her throat rose out of a crisp cotton blouse; she seemed to work intensely. Rose longed for Toni to look up and speak first. The women were laughing about something.

  After a moment, she said, ‘You didn’t tell me you were coming tonight.’

  ‘I only decided at the last moment.’ Toni sounded defensive.

  ‘What’s the joke?’

  ‘How many men does it take to wallpaper a room?’ asked Toni quickly, lightening up.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Six if you slice them thinly.’ The women laughed, as if for the first time, small hooting noises.

  Matt had come up behind them. ‘That’s all right. How many women does it take to paint a ceiling?’

  Toni groaned. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Three. One to hold the ladder and two to form a support group.’

  While they pretended uneasily that they had stopped laughing, Rose moved away towards Matt, looking for a quiet word. As a rule he appreciated this. She knew it made him feel privy to the news from Wellington, even more because he was deputy editor of the local paper. She and Matt had had many serious and important discussions about nothing in these interludes while the party faithful were gathering. He was a tall bulky man, fleshy and handsome in his way, with thick curly grey hair. He had had his disappointments, which included a continual failure to become the paper’s editor. His critics suggested that this was hardly surprising given his political stance. They accused him of naïvety; this was the country, boy. While he wore his second ranking like a martyr’s badge of honour, others more unkindly promoted the notion that it was his wife’s family ties with the newspaper’s proprietor that kept him in a job at all. A play he once wrote for television had been accepted, only to have the producer change his mind at the last moment; more recently he had been passed over for selection as candidate for the Weyville seat in favour of Kit. It had soured him for a time, especially when Kit surprised everyone and got into Parliament. Now, it seemed, he was easygoing and affable and cooked couscous for dinner parties when his wife let him. Kit told Rose that she should watch him, because sooner or later he would take his feelings out on the world. Yet he exuded decency and discretion, even a slight jaunty courage. She could not believe that he would hurt her or Kit.

  ‘Looking for somebody?’ Matt asked.

  ‘You,’ she said, irritated.

  ‘Oh, well, we’re about to get started.’ He nodded towards the seats.

  Dismissed, she took a place in the front row. Something felt wrong. She looked over towards Harry, who was avoiding her eye. The last time she had seen him he had been standing outside welfare, his rumpled hair still showing the remains of a smart cut. He had blinked uncertainly, as if he couldn’t believe it was him standing there; and she hadn’t been able to either. She had started towards him in the street, and then, looking at his face with its expression of misery, thought better of it. Besides, she didn’t know what to say. She could see it wasn’t her place to say how sorry she was that he was unemployed. Now he sat turning his thick gold wedding band over and over.

  She wished that she hadn’t come. But Kit had told her to go to the meetings whenever she could make them. It was a way of pressing the flesh, a visible reminder that all of them in the Party movement had got this Government together between them, that they had united once with common purpose.

  A group of them made the decision that they would have a new Government as they sat in a roadway in 1981.

  A cold day gleaming with a distant rim of sunlight behind dense grey cumulus. Twenty-two of them, men and women, sat across the roadway north into Weyville, blocking the highway before a football game was due to start. There had been orders out not to bring children. The Springboks were due to start playing football against the local team in half an hour. Spectators headed towards the grounds; so far they had been deflected away from the group of protesters. There were two routes in. The group had decided to block only one entrance in order to make a show of strength together, there being no hope at all, with their numbers, of covering both roads. They were wearing motorcycle crash helmets. They had all heard about Molesworth Street in Wellington, when the police waded into the crowd with batons, breaking open the skulls of women in the front row of the demonstration.

  ‘At least there were a lot of them,’ someone in the group said nervously. Somebody else pointed out the disadvantage of this, the way they were pressed back into the crowd behind, so they couldn’t escape — there was nowhere to run.

  Rose and Kit sat side by side. For a moment Rose wanted to giggle, they looked so silly dressed up like this, as if this were a game in itself. The group caught one another’s eyes, grinned; she was not the only person thinking that. But her stomach rumbled and she remembered what Kit had said, don’t have too much breakfast, just in case you end up hurt, needing an anaesthetic or something. Someone passed a flask of hot coffee. Maybe nothing would happen. She reached for Kit’s hand, his fingers closed around hers. His scarf was wrapped around his beard. At the same time that he held her hand with his free one he rubbed Nick Newbone’s back as if he were a kid; she felt sorry for Nick, he looked so scared. They were all scared in different ways, but Nick was terrified, and although she didn’t like him much it seemed to her that he was much braver because he had come anyway, anticipating the fear before it happened. Hortense, his thin energetic wife, sat beside him but she didn’t seem to notice how scared he was.

  Alongside them, Toni pulled her coat around her and shivered. ‘Will Lyle be very angry?’ Rose asked her. It would be a long time before Lyle seemed to accept Toni’s political activity. Today he had asked her not to come. He was going to the game.

  Toni shrugged and gazed up the road, as if seeking him out. Matt turned and smiled at her, brushed her face. Rose sometimes wondered about them. Matt, and Harry and his new girlfriend Belinda, and Morris Applebloom, had been carrying a banner between them at the front. It read GO HOME BOKS. At the moment it drooped as they waited for action.

  Henare Muru and his mother Wiki handed out sweets. The boiled lollies dissolved down the backs of their throats as they sucked. Rose didn’t know Wiki before the tour began, now she saw her as a friend. She had been to several of their meetings. Her presence formed a bridge with four gang members who had turned up.

  ‘What about a song?’ someone called. ‘Give us a
chant.’

  ‘Amandla-a-a,’ cried Toni, as if driven.

  ‘Amandl-a-a, Ngawhetu, Amandla Amandla,’ they responded, full throat.

  In the distance a car approached travelling fast. It was a big dark car and it did not look as if it was going to stop.

  ‘Hold fast,’ screamed Toni. Her face was contorted, her eyes shining, her mouth pulled back against her teeth.

  Still no police.

  The car ground to a halt just in front of them, brakes squealing. A man sat at the wheel, dressed up in a suit. A large woman wearing an enormous pink and grey hat leapt out on the passenger’s side.

  ‘We’re going to a wedding, not the bloody game. What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘One, two, three, four. We don’t want your racist tour.’

  ‘We’re not going to the bloody game, didn’t you hear us?’

  ‘You would if you bloody could. If you didn’t have a bloody wedding to go to.’ Toni was beside herself.

  ‘Toni, you don’t know that,’ Matt said. He was the only person who could say it to her. Mind you, they all knew she was right.

  The man in the car got out.

  ‘Keep back, this mob’ll do you, Kev,’ screamed the woman. ‘Just see if they dare lay hands on a woman.’

  Rose called out, ‘Mrs Hawker, we’re not going to hurt you.’

  The woman’s eyes singled her out. ‘You. A teacher. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

  ‘Who’s wedding is it?’ Rose asked.

  ‘Mind your own bloody business.’ Mrs Hawker was close to tears, her heavy powdered cheeks quivering.

  ‘Is it Yvonne? Is it your brother’s girl?’

  The hat trembled as she heaved herself across the road towards them, hands up like a boxer’s.

  ‘It’s okay, Mrs Hawker, you can go through,’ Kit called.

  The group parted and Mrs Hawker hesitated, then stumped back to the car. It started up and the car drove through, Mrs Hawker restored to the side of her husband, both of them looking straight ahead, thanking no one.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ Matt asked. ‘You didn’t ask us.’

  ‘Are you here to stop a wedding or a tour?’ Kit responded.

  And the next moment the rugby supporters had broken ranks up ahead of them near the ground and were streaming back towards them, seeing the interference with the Hawkers as a blow against them, uncertain of what had happened. ‘We want the tour, we want the tour.’ Their chants lifted skywards.

  There were more than a hundred in the approaching group; as they closed in bottles began to fly. One of the supporters held a softball bat like a weapon, menacing them.

  ‘Kill, kill, kill the motherfuckers.’ He lifted the bat above his head. A full can of beer sailed past Rose’s head and landed with a dull thunk beside her.

  ‘Where the fuck’s the police?’ muttered Morris. A banker, he had not lived here for long. He was not the kind of person they had expected to turn out with them; they held him in special awe and respect, the courage of it, laying his job on the line like this. He was married to Sarah who had stayed home today because of the children (not just hers and Morris’s — several of the group had left their children with her today); she made the banners for them too. Morris’s face shone with one of his usual close shaves, but there was a film of sweat and fear on his skin now.

  Then the police emerged from behind the garden fence where they had been hidden all the time, almost too late to stop the onslaught, but not quite.

  The supporters were turned back, marched away up the road under police escort. ‘Are they going to arrest the bloke with the bat?’ someone asked.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Kit said and he was right, there were no arrests, only talk between the police and a knot of supporters.

  Still nothing happened. Nearly time for the game to begin. ‘I think we’re a fizzer,’ Harry said. ‘What’s the point, we should have tried to get on to the field.’

  ‘There’s not enough of us.’

  ‘Some people should have come up from the city.’

  In a way that was what they were all thinking, though they understood the need for orchestrated chaos in the cities. And the barbed wire was so thick around the game nobody in their right mind would have believed they could get through today unless there were hundreds of them. Later in the tour there would be crowds of protesters from throughout the country at all the games, but it was still too early for the danger to have sunk in. It was like a dream unfolding.

  A great cheer erupted in the grounds.

  ‘They’ve begun,’ somebody said glumly, ‘Nobody even noticed we were here.’

  ‘We’re a bunch of wets,’ Toni announced. She was strung right out, tension and frustration bringing her close to despair. ‘They’ll say we didn’t care.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said Morris sharply. ‘We do, and we’re here, that’s the point.’

  At that moment a squad of police dressed in riot gear moved down the road towards them, shields up, batons at the ready, cantering along in a half-run with rhythmical, even tread. There was an almost light-hearted note in that steady beat. That was something they would remember.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ said Kit. On either side of her, Rose felt him and Morris leaning towards her, protecting her, but at the same time afraid, holding their hands up to protect themselves too. Kit stood up and was knocked down by the first policeman. She jumped to her feet, throwing herself forward to protect him, taking the full force of the baton on her side.

  Afterwards, lying dazed by the roadside, holding each other, trying to stem the flow of blood from wounds that sprouted above their eyes and over their ears, several of the men holding themselves in the groin where they had been kicked, somebody, it might have been her, or Toni, or Wiki Muru coming round from being knocked out, or maybe just all of them, said it wouldn’t happen again, that they were going to do something, change the Government for a start, if it took them the rest of their lives. They weren’t going to sit down and wait for any more to happen to them, not just like that.

  But you got hit either way.

  Tonight the meeting was business-like, Nick Newbone’s apology was registered which Rose thought ominous. Nick was always there. Nick had served on the committee for years. Of course Hortense was present, but Hortense never missed anything.

  The minutes and financial statement were dealt with in ten minutes, even though the branch’s bank account was overdrawn. The only dissident was Larry Verschoelt, the big Dutchman who had been true blue for as long as anyone could remember but who had crossed over to join them a couple of years back when things were booming. He grew orchids up until last year, when the bottom had dropped out of the market. He had sold his Range Rover and drove a pick-up with a curling bumper sticker that read I love Naomi’s pink cardies. Rose saw that he was drunk. When the figures were read out, demonstrating what everybody already knew, that nobody was giving money to the Party any more, he went up to the table and bent his head down holding his nostril as if he was snorting a line of cocaine.

  Voices called out Sit down Larry, for Chrissake, you’ll get your turn.

  You’ll get your turn. That was when Rose knew that it was all on, for sure. Whatever it was.

  A few minutes later, a motion was put. The mover was a small woman named Denise. She wore open-and-sniff perfume samples and jumpers with glittery thread. ‘Great high-tack, isn’t it?’ Toni said, whenever they discussed Denise. She was compiling a list on her. Denise had bought into Rada before the crash and lost a fortune. Toni had added owning Rada shares and losing them in the crash to her high-tack list, which meant her corresponding list of okay people had become suddenly quite small.

  But for the moment Denise appeared to be fulfilling a role.

  ‘I move that this branch works to amalgamate a march of the unemployed and the rural sectors, presently convened as separate events for next week, into one major march to demonstrate against the policies of the present Government,
thereby making a single massive protest by the Weyville electorate.’

  Rose looked to see whether Matt was laughing. But his head was inclined towards Denise and he was calling for a seconder. There were so many that Harry did not know whose name to write down.

  Rose was surrounded by cheering as the motion was carried. You can’t do that, she thought, you can’t come to meetings of the Party and plan an action against it. That was not the way it worked. You had to go to a different meeting if you wanted to plan a march against the Party. There were unwritten rules in political life and she thought she understood them. Kit had always said, just sit there and be nice, don’t get involved, that’s not your job. Your job is to let them know that we’re still in it together. And this was a rule she understood too. So she sat in silence, although she could feel herself going numb, as if she was protecting herself from some giant pain whose threshold seemed very close.

  She looked for Toni. Toni was grinning hugely. It was that old smile that said, We’re doing something. We’re not just sitting down and taking it.

  Rose knew then that there was no Party any more, not here anyway. She had known it for months. Beside her, an old couple, both with their scalps shining pinkly through their white hair, smiled at each other.

  A young woman with spiky hair, wearing metal-framed glasses, who usually organised the pro-abortion petitions, looked elated. ‘We should take the march all the way to Wellington,’ she cried. The cheering in the room nearly drowned out the end of what she was saying.

  For awhile Rose did not hear what was going on in the room, she sat thinking: Is this what it was all for? And then, Where’s Kit?; and later, What shall I tell him?

  Nobody appeared to be looking at her, though she knew they were all aware of her presence. If she sat very still perhaps they would forget that she was there, or perhaps she would be able to slip away without them noticing. Only she didn’t really believe that.

  Denise was on her feet again, fired up with all the attention.