Huia Short Stories 9

by Anahera Gildea

  He glares at her, and she knows instantly it was not the right answer. His transformation is instant and terrifying. She tries to back-track but it’s too late. ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid Mum,’ he shouts. ‘Why should I uproot myself and the kids? They owe me for fuck’s sake. I owe them nothing. They should be making me an offer. I shouldn’t be running away. What do you know about it up there in your bloody ivory tower? You think it’s easy for me with two kids tied round my neck?’

  Gracie’s heart thumps and bangs in her chest. Her son stands up, knocking over his mug of tea; he doesn’t seem to notice. ‘We need some milk,’ he says. ‘I’ll have to go to the dairy.’ He slams out the door, leaving his mother holding her cup of tea in a hand that trembles so violently, she loses half the contents into the saucer.

  With an effort she gets up and begins to clean the kitchen, washing dishes and clearing the bench. She puts the girls in the bath and washes their hair, making a game of it. She has to kneel, and her knees creak and ache, but she ignores the discomfort and gets on with what has to be done. She notices both girls have bruises on their arms, legs and backs, but when she asks how they got there, they don’t reply. Just hang their heads and pretend they don’t hear. But Gracie knows. And in her heart she is glad they don’t tell her the how and why of it.

  She brushes their hair and puts them into their new clothes, then gives them the colouring books and crayons while she gets dinner ready. She has brought down two large meat pies. She mashes potatoes and cooks some peas. There is no sign of her son, so she sits the girls at the table and they begin their dinner.

  The girls are happy, and chatter between mouthfuls of pie.

  There is a breath of cold air and the smell of the mill wafts through the door. Her son is back, and the devil is with him. Gracie can smell it on his clothes; she can smell it in his hair and on his skin. He doesn’t speak, but sits at the table and gazes around. His eyes are bright, the pupils pinpoints. She sees a line of saliva has dried in the corner of his mouth.

  The girls sit and eat. They don’t look at their father, and they say nothing. Gracie puts a plate in front of him piled with pie, potatoes and peas. He looks at it, then picks up a spoon and shovels it into his mouth as though he hasn’t eaten for a month. He hardly chews, just opens his mouth and gulps it down.

  ‘Good food,’ he says, and some peas fall out of his mouth and roll onto the floor. He continues to feed until his plate is clean, then stands up and goes into the kitchen to finish what’s left.

  He comes back into the room and Gracie sees he’s drinking a can of beer. He sees her looking and slams it on the table. The noise makes the girls jump, and Aroha begins to cry. ‘Shut the hell up,’ snarls her father, and this time punches his fist down. The little girl whimpers and shrinks against her sister.

  ‘Don’t talk like that to the girls,’ says Gracie. She says it quietly, but it wouldn’t matter if she had spoken in a whisper. The devil is alive and well and looking for an excuse to put her in her place.

  ‘Don’t tell me what to do in my own house you old bitch,’ says the devil, and he glares down at her. Gracie says ‘Girls, go to your room.’

  The smell of drugs seeps out. It glistens on his skin and gushes from his mouth. ‘Where did my son go?’ Gracie wonders. ‘Maybe he disappeared years ago and I never noticed until it was too late. Just like the stink of this damned town.’

  ‘Son,’ she says, ‘we need to talk. You’ve got a problem, and if you don’t face up to it, it will destroy you and the girls as well.’ But the man who was her son, and told her she smelled of strawberries, has vanished.

  He hits her. It’s so sudden and unexpected that the shock almost does for her. She falls, hitting her head on the sideboard as she goes down. Her vision blurs, then clears, and she lies on the floor trying to work out why she is on the carpet.

  She looks up and her son is standing over her. This is how it must feel to be in the forest with a grizzly bear, she thinks. Maybe if I pretend to be dead, he’ll leave me alone. But then she remembers her granddaughters and the bruises on their bodies. Anger fills her, and she struggles to her feet. She is almost sixty-eight, and it has been many years since she’s felt the rage flaring through her that she feels now. It crawls up her legs, her belly, into her arms, and flows onto her tongue. She tingles with fury. ‘You hit your mother, you bastard,’ she hisses. ‘You beat your own little girls. You’re not fit to be a father. And you’re not fit to be my son.’

  Gracie isn’t aware of blood flowing down her face or the fact she has three broken ribs. These things she will discover afterwards, when it matters. But not now.

  The monster who lives in her son stands his ground for a second, then turns and blunders out the door, into the night. Gracie gathers up her granddaughters, loads them into the car, starts the engine and begins to drive away. She looks in the rear vision mirror and sees her son standing on the path.

  Gracie’s heart swells in her chest and she breathes out the words that almost kill her. ‘I love you,’ she says.

  Pikorua

  Anahera Gildea

  1

  My mother used to believe that life was malleable; pliant enough that she could take hold of it with both hands and brutalise it till it bent to her will. She wasn’t violent, but was of the temperament that malcontents like to call aggressive (those of a more sanguine nature would have said ambitious), and so Frank Parker boasted her fearlessness without remorse. If her teachers at school had had the balls to write truths on her report cards, Frank’s would have been filled with drama. Instead they perpetrated lies like: Frank will go far if she applies herself; Frank has enormous potential; Frank’s energy makes her a pleasure to teach. You could count on teachers to smooth the surface of what could have been Herculean ripples. If she had been an ugly or spiteful child, or if her parents had been less amicable than Rose and Mihaere Parker (the community all-round do-gooders), they might have read through the drivel and seen the meta-message: Frank is a pain in the arse; Frank never shuts up; Frank is a loose cannon; we don’t know if she’ll make a damn thing of herself, but all any of us can do is hope to god someone takes a punt on her.

  At the intersection of those charmed school years and the looming, grown-up, super adult life (before she met Rātā; before she lost her way; before she understood that ambition is not enough to get you anywhere but heaven), her own, less grandiose assessment of herself more crudely read like dirty newspaper headlines: Frank Shits Pants, Feigning Diarrhoea; Frank Suffers Massive Crisis of Personality; Frank takes Refuge in Bedroom under Guise of Forward Planning. Refuge is a kind term for the self-exclusion that she undertook. She had expected to leave school and barge her way into the future following the obvious signposts that life (with society as its henchman) was obliged to have put out for her. Yet somehow, at the door to her bedroom, a barrier appeared that she could not cross except to eat. It was as if all the words she had built herself up with, over twelve years of school, had overlaid themselves on each other and created an impassible congestion of false praise at her door, closing the portal through which she was supposed to slip and be reborn. Here at the threshold of unlimited promise she was barricaded by fears and insecurities that no bluster could occlude. For two years she was imprisoned, so it’s not suprising that when Rātā appeared (without horse, without armour) and offered to break her out she seemed to give up her dreams as one brushes off dust, and throw herself in with him. To be fair she did hesitate. But only because she wasn’t sure he was honestly proffering the freedom she needed: the freedom she was desperate for, the freedom from the impossible future she had bragged to the world that she would achieve of fame, fortune and travel. Simple desires? No desire is simple when you cannot face the work it will take to get there.

  Rose named my mother Frances after St Francis of Assisi. She considered St Francis to be her own personal patron saint, the one who looked out for the Poor Ladies; or at least that’s how my mother heard it. Not once in her me
mory could she ever recall being called Frances, never claiming territory in any conversation with her friends about their self-righteous mothers calling out to them, hooking into their full names as if they were a verbal pinch on the ear. Everyone called her Frank, and she wore it with pride, straddling gender as if it were a piddly creek. There were no other Franks that she knew of in her generation, so she used it as a label, a single handle, and fancied herself Madonna-ed.

  In Frank’s own mind her name indicated that she was destined for travel, and throughout her childhood she developed an obsession with Europe in honour of her name, littering her walls with pictures of the Eiffel Tower and Saint-Tropez waterfronts shored up by white villas under hot suns. Where others had posters of David Bowie or Michael Praed, Frank had France. Still, outside her real windows grew grass. ‘This is a grass-growing country,’ she wrote in an essay entitled ‘What does the future hold for New Zealand?’ ‘What we grow here is grass. Acres of boring, viral, green death. We need buildings, people, metropol!’ The teacher had been less than impressed, accusing her of not taking the question seriously and of producing a complaint rather than an essay. Yet for her it was truth. Wherever she turned her head: out the front door, the back door, her friend’s door, the school doors, she was overwhelmed by grass; fodder for animals. ‘All of us in New Zealand are being brought up green,’ she gnawed into the ears of her compatriots as often as they would allow. ‘Even our school uniforms are green. Probably every second school uniform in the country is green. We are being raised just like the grass, in order to feed others. We are not even the livestock of the world; we are the feed for the livestock of the world.’ None of her peers took any serious notice; she was gregarious enough that her activism on this count never disadvantaged her socially, and the community standing of her parents ensured her inflammatory rantings were overlooked by everyone else.

  Not one of these certainties, however, prevented the fact that she was stuck looking out the scudded windows of her pseudo-cosmopolitan bedroom at cows in the paddock across the road. Arc de Triomphe, cows, Arc de Triomphe, cows. Flicking her eyes from the wall to the glass as fast as she could never quite made one scene superimpose the other in the seamless blending she wished for. In waves of desolate superstition she was convinced that until she could make those two images merge, her dreams of international airports, unfamiliar summers and foreign exchange would remain dormant.

  In her least discouraged moments, however, Frank’s fingers whipped through the pages of the latest magazine, stopping only when pictures of bright foreign markets and jingly people caught her eye. Under her bed were boxes filled with her favourite images. Page after page of glossy promise were stacked on top of one another, extending across every continent and through a maze of cities. For Frank the world was an exciting labyrinth of experience awaiting her discovery. Right now the only thing differentiating Brazil from Beijing, or Naples from New York, were the layers of dust collecting between each of their images.

  In her intrepid daydreams it was she alone who would travel. An independent and strong woman, fast and tastefully flashy, sweeping through airports and into taxis. Her outfits would match her environment, and she seemed to have a magic-porridge-pot of suitcases that could manifest both saris and snow shoes, at her whim. There was no reality to her imaginings; she never ate unless it was to sample hand-made fare at the request of genuine locals she’d befriended; she never had to grapple with foreign ablutions; and her wallet was replete with bills of all colours and denominations. When school finished her only goal was to acquire the job that would furnish her with the means and lifestyle to achieve her fantasy. But the same intensity that enabled her to claw her way up any mountain of fantasy also caused her to tumble and churn herself into a chasm of despondency and despair.

  During this duo of diffident years, the ineffably Christian Rose and Mihaere skirted her room, trying not to pry, and indulged their foundling’s indecision longer than any biological parents would have. She was their basket-case baby: at least that’s what she liked to call herself. She was never actually dropped off in a basket, and Rose maintained that they had not kept contact with the desperate young couple who had pleaded with her in the street to take their newborn. Rose told the story backwards and forwards so many times that the truth was forever buried under the legend-making. No person except Rose would have pitied the wilting teenagers. And no law would have allowed it if it hadn’t been a small New Zealand town and they hadn’t been Māori. ‘We’ll call it whāngai, eh?’ Rose had stroked the soft brown face of the little girl and considered God to have delivered her an angel. Mihaere, too, cried with gratitude, so he said, at the turn of fortune, and they took their new, screaming baby straight down to the church for an impromptu baptism. Their prayers had been answered in a way they could never have foreseen; further proof of God’s work: taking from them the ability to bear their own children, and gifting them the discarded offspring of another. ‘We never saw them again,’ said Rose. ‘On the official adoption forms they scratched you down as abandoned!’ Rose would scoff at the blatant affront of the Adoption Agency when engaged in the retelling. ‘Abandoned! As if.’ And from down in the rolls of midriff fat, a deep laugh would undulate up and whistle out between the gaps in her teeth, culminating in a persistent cough. Mihaere’s accompanying closed-jaw hiss would make him sound like a snake with hiccups, and together they would whistle and hiss, whistle and hiss, falling about each other in complementary mirth.

  None of Mihaere’s customary laughter came to the door with him when he fronted up to Frank’s citadel of gloom and demanded her seclusion end. There were only a handful of times that Mihaere had been strict with her, and each time she had deserved it. Rose had been giving him the proverbial elbow for weeks before he worked up the fight to reprimand his only daughter.

  ‘Frank. It’s time.’ Mihaere’s first big statement left Frank confused.

  ‘Time for what?’

  ‘It’s time to get a job, my girl. Time to get out of this room.’

  Frank shrugged, inviting disagreement as welcome relief from the tedium of her day-to-day vigil.

  Mihaere’s voice, when it was raised, could flatten most people to the ground with their hands over their ears. ‘You’ve been in here since school finished. You need to get off the bloody dole and get a job. It’s enough.’ He was rising to a crescendo, the adrenalin in Frank’s body rising to match it.

  ‘You need to get out of here and get a job: any bloody job. Your mother and I are not going to support your every whim any more. Do you understand?’

  He had reached his peak, and Frank was standing in front of him, inflated by her own outrage, so that her face was pink and the whites of her eyeballs poked out in angry relief.

  ‘I understand perfectly.’ She released her held breath as she spoke, the words sliding toward him as a strangled threat.

  ‘Don’t you speak to me in that tone of voice, Frank. It’s time you were responsible for yourself, is all.’ Mihaere’s crescendo had begun to dissipate, and his voice was returning to its usual bobbing cadence.

  ‘Well, there’s no need to come in yelling at me. You could have just asked.’ Frank wasn’t as practised at hauling herself back to being civil; nor did she want to. It had been the longest and most confusing period in her life, and somehow this inflammatory moment had ignited an internal flicker that she feared had been extinguished forever. Part of her was certain that she could have petrified in her room on any day of the hundreds that had passed. Any night when Rose or Mihaere came to call her for dinner, they might have found her body, sculpted in cold stone, instead of the ‘only daughter’ they went on about. Frank had even fantasised about it: romantically imagining their regret that they had not helped her more; that they had not intervened earlier.

  ‘You need to start applying properly for work. Go and knock on doors. You need to do something. But I don’t want to push you too much.’ Mihaere was back-pedalling. ‘When you are ready we can sit
down together and make a plan.’

  Frank wanted to launch at him and hit him in the face, the back, the legs, anywhere. Muscles that she hadn’t engaged for anything, except moving from the bed to the TV to the magazines that Rose delivered to her door and back to the bed, were tense, poised and ready.

  ‘OK,’ was all she said.

  Mihaere loitered a bit longer, but there was nothing else.

  My mother had the choice then to refuse her life. To return to her stronghold, barricade the door and allow herself to atrophy toward death. Or to look around her room and adorn herself with her dreams once more and push on. Even that decision was too hard, but she was able to run the tape that she had rehearsed for half her life and walk out to meet fate head-on.

  The closest school for air hostesses was at the NAC in Wellington, and Mihaere, Rose and Frank all sat at the table plotting how she could get there from Greytown.

  ‘You’ll need quite a lot of money.’ Rose was flicking through a brochure. ‘The fees are dear, and then there’s the living costs.’

  They had already been through a list of all the people they could think of who might house her while she did her training. It would take six weeks for the initial stage, and then there would be a three-month probationary period. There was no one suitable. Rose and Mihaere had no relatives to speak of, and none of their friends had the space or the money to take in an extra person.

  ‘I can just go flatting. Get a job as well like everyone else.’

  ‘Oh yeah, that worked well the last couple of years.’ Mihaere was making a joke, but it smarted.

  ‘Well, I could get a loan from the bank. That’s what heaps of people are doing now.’

  ‘Absolutely not.’ Mihaere actually got out of his chair for this pronouncement. ‘I don’t care what everyone else is doing. You don’t get loans. That’ll be the end of you.’

  ‘But once I get through my course I’ll have guaranteed work and be able to pay it back straight away.’