The Last Time We Spoke

by Fiona Sussman

  He soon realised this was not some chance meeting. This was it. There would be no visit.

  ‘Ben, after a pretty positive meeting with Mrs Reid a month back, I’ve had a request come down from Head Office for another visit, from the victim herself this time.’

  Ben was floored. He thought he’d seen the last of the woman. He’d reckoned on restorative justice being one session and one session only. Enough to convince the parole board next time.

  Haslop slipped his hands into his pockets and leant forward, his long body wavering in space. ‘I think something good has been set in motion.’

  Ben wasn’t so sure.

  ‘Are you agreeable to us setting up another meeting?’

  Ben looked down at his feet and kicked at an imaginary dog, then looked up abruptly, straight in Haslop’s eyes. He could play ball if it meant he’d get one step closer to getting out of this place.

  Beyond

  Sometimes it seems as if you are even further away, Benjamin Toroa, than when the wind first brought news of you that mild March night. I have watched the hardening of your heart and I see the way you now navigate the road ahead; you have packed for one.

  I am not surprised. After all, it is the way of many. And I understand some of what brought you to this place, and some of what prison has wrought.

  Which brings me to when many of our own shifted to the city in pursuit of the elusive Pākehā ideal. Slowly our communal Māori way of life collapsed. Iwi and hapū were carved up, quartered and packaged into small, solitary families. Men and women became defined by themselves alone, a tribal identity of little relevance in the concrete, high-rise future. And as individuals – unsupported, uncounselled, unaccountable – they made their way in this chosen world.

  But what good were the skills of a shepherd, hunter, carver or weaver? The urban way demanded different talents, and many of our own found themselves deemed ‘unskilled’ and forced again to find poorly paid jobs in the freezing works, factories, and fisheries – jobs that were the first to go when the economy dipped and dived. Others not even that fortunate were simply added to the swelling girth of the unemployed.

  So you see how a new landscape was being painted for Māori. A blighted one of dislocation and deterioration showcasing poverty in all its splendour.

  And the walls of your cultural kite kept unravelling, until the most important building block of all – the whānau or family – finally fell apart. You were born into this unanchored flux, Benjamin Toroa, with little left to hold you firm once the umbilical cord had been cut.

  Do you see yet where I am headed, boy? Do you follow?

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  CARLA

  Same room. Same chairs. Carla knew the drill. The only difference was that now the hall was full with people; it was a regular visiting day.

  Orange jumpsuits on red chairs, mufti on blue, khaki patrolling the periphery. A child was crying, a woman too. A vending machine stood Out of Order in the corner, a lone packet of ‘sour cream and chives’ crisps wedged in limbo against the glass. A toddler ran round and round his parents while his father stroked his mother’s hand and stared at her breasts. And an Indian mynah swooped and dived through the din.

  There was something about birds in prison; Carla noticed them on every visit. Surely a taunt to the inmates, she thought, as the birds slipped between liberty and incarceration, some even choosing to nest within the crannies of the institution.

  The door at the far end clanged open. A shot of acid refluxed into Carla’s mouth. The surprise of that first moment was always so sharp.

  He was standing in the doorway again: same face, same fingers, same black eyes.

  ‘Your turn, Ben.’

  ‘Fuck, Tate, I’m cool, man. Leave her. Let’s get out of here.’

  ‘What’s wrong, Ben? You just a wannabe?’

  Today those same eyes looked tired.

  The toddler adjacent to them was now bouncing on his father’s knee, the mother on her blue chair, laughing. Carla bit her lip. This was no time for distraction.

  The arrangements for this second meeting were less formal; she and Toroa had successfully calmed the prison staff with their civilities. She could see right through Toroa’s motivations for agreeing to the sessions, but could he see through hers?

  ‘Bet you didn’t think you’d see me back so soon?’ she said, as he sat down.

  The guard stepped back and the noise of the room stepped in.

  ‘Look, lady, I’m real sorry I messed up. Nothing I can do about it now,’ he said, his eyes focused on her forehead. ‘I’ve made my peace with the Lord. You should do the sa—’

  ‘I’ve thought a lot about you lately,’ Carla said, refusing to be in the passenger seat of this conversation, ‘and what I want from you.’ She fixed him with an unflinching gaze. ‘You took things from me by force.’ Her voice was just low enough to be inaudible to the guard. ‘But hey, I’ll stick to the rules. We need to be on an even playing field first before I get what I want from you.’

  Toroa sat back in his chair, hands gripping his thighs, legs spread wide. He threw back his head. Carla wasn’t fooled by this show of nonchalance. His eyes were staying with her.

  ‘There are a few inequalities we first need to rectify.’

  ‘You speaking English, lady?’

  She rolled her lips inwards. ‘What I’m saying is, let’s make the battle fair.’

  ‘Who said anything about a battle? Thought we was doing peace this time round.’

  ‘We had war on your terms four years ago. Now we’ll do it on mine.’ She leant forward. ‘You can’t read.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ he spat out under his breath.

  ‘I’ll teach you.’

  ‘What …?’ His face was a contortion of surprise and stolen anger.

  ‘I will teach you to read. Then we can talk more about pain.’

  Ben pushed his tongue over his top teeth. ‘I don’t need no charity, lady. I did the crime, I’m doing the time.’

  ‘Those phrases roll so easily off your tongue, don’t they? Anyway, I’m not doing it for you … Ben.’ There, she’d actually managed to say his name. She’d used it once before, at an earlier meeting, but it had felt wrong, pairing them too closely. It was easier to think of him in the third person. Language was powerful that way. Choosing between one word and another, how it altered reality. ‘I’m doing this for someone else.’

  He had nowhere left to go. She knew what he wanted out of these meetings, even if the prison staff were blind to his motivations. He was after a free pass to the outside world next time parole came up. Well, he was going to have to sing for his supper. She held that ticket and the power felt good.

  ‘Okay then, Mrs Reid,’ he said, enunciating her name with sneering exaggeration. ‘You teach me to read.’

  Round Two to her.

  The kitchen was covered in a fine film of flour. It had got into and onto everything. Even the images on the TV of a flooded and battered New York were all pixelated and fuzzy; though the white coating did little to lessen the horror of Hurricane Sandy. Carla quickly changed channels, leaving doughy fingerprints on the remote control.

  Then she stood back to appraise her handiwork. How had one person managed to make such a mess? Her nose itched. She rubbed it, leaving a long white scar across her cheek. Scooping up the remaining clump of dough from the bowl, she slapped it onto her floured bench top. One more batch and she’d be ready to cook.

  She rolled the dough in a long thin cylinder, sliced it into inch-sized cubes, then proceeded to roll each cube off a fork, the adept flick of her thumb sending the indented shapes somersaulting across the bench.

  The salted water was bubbling furiously when she tipped the first batch of potato dumplings into the pot. As the small pale spheres rose to the surface, she lifted them out with a slotted spoon and transferred them into a dish already doused with a generous lug of olive oil. Then she repeated the entire process, again and again, until all one hun
dred and eleven gnocchi had been cooked.

  Finally finished, she opened the kitchen window, ushering in a welcome breeze. Half a day to create what had always been Jack’s favourite dish! Mind you, it did look pretty impressive, the pile of glistening golden orbs steeped in a rich bolognaise sauce.

  The lengthy preparation hadn’t blunted her hunger in the least, and Carla dished herself up a big bowlful. She had forgotten the urgency that came with a real appetite, that gnawing mix of anticipation and discomfort. For so long, food had been merely incidental.

  It had all started the night before, when she’d dreamt about preparing gnocchi out on the farm. It was a wonderful dream – the first happy dream in such a long time. But just as she was about to savour her first mouthful, she’d woken up. The disappointment! So the next morning had seen her waiting impatiently outside the Four Square store for Virender to open up. She’d bought potatoes, eggs, flour, a tin of tomatoes, a bulb of garlic, mince, an exorbitantly expensive bottle of extra virgin olive oil, and a dinky bottle of Shiraz, spending more money in ten minutes than she usually did on groceries for a week. On her walk home she also nicked a stem of fresh rosemary from a garden backing onto the reserve.

  Carla had forgotten just how long it took to make the dish. Strangely, though, despite her labours, she wasn’t weary. In fact, for the first time in years, she felt alive. The concentration and creativity of the process had been more therapeutic than any counselling session she’d attended, carrying her beyond the confines of her very small life. It was as if her thoughts, along with the dough, had been kneaded and pummelled and reshaped.

  The gnocchi were perfect, each little pillow of potato melting in her mouth. The potatoes had been just floury enough to yield exactly the right consistency. She smiled as she thought back to the evening Jack’s friends had come over to learn how to make the iconic Italian dish. The boys had added far too much flour to the mashed potato mixture and the end product had been solid, indigestible little bricks.

  She removed the napkin she’d tucked into her collar, undid the top button of her slacks, and sank onto the sofa with a deep, satisfied sigh.

  There was still two-thirds of the dish left. What on earth was she going to do with the rest? Mingyu was away for a fortnight in China, and really, there was no one else. Even if she divided the leftovers into single portions to freeze, there wasn’t enough space in her token freezer. The recipe was for eight – eight substantial eaters. In her other life, willing diners had always miraculously appeared, teenage boys demolishing however much she prepared.

  Then an idea came to her, and ten minutes later she was placing a basket in the footwell of her Citroën. She had triple-wrapped the tub in tinfoil, then wads of newspaper, to keep the dish warm, but still the aroma of garlic and rosemary filled the car. At a red traffic light she leant over and carefully lifted the dishcloth covering her cargo, as if checking on a sleeping baby. No sign of leakage.

  It was a gorgeous day, the winter air thin and silvery. She turned onto the old highway and wove through Albany Village, passing the cafes and car yards, the pub and the park, then down over the narrow bridge and left into The Avenue.

  As she started to climb the hill, a burst of blue and red light filled her rear-view mirror and the screeching wail of a siren pierced her calm. She pulled over to let the patrol car pass. Police cars always managed to tamper with her mood and trigger unwelcome memories.

  To her surprise, the police car pulled over too. Carla cursed. She’d meant to get the Citroën serviced. It was most likely a faulty brake light or a malfunctioning indicator. She switched off the ignition and waited. Hopefully, it wouldn’t take long. She didn’t want the gnocchi getting cold.

  The officer took his time donning his hat and climbing slowly and deliberately out of his car.

  Carla wound down her window. ‘Morning, Officer,’ she said, still bathed in the insouciance of her kitchen exploits. ‘Is something amiss?’

  ‘Is something amiss?’ he said in staged disbelief. ‘You’ve just lost your licence, madam. That’s what’s amiss.’

  A cold sweat swept over Carla. ‘Lost my licence?’ she repeated incredulously. ‘But …’ Policemen were her friends, her confidants. She was the one on the right side of the law.

  ‘What speed are you supposed to do coming out of Albany?’ he demanded.

  ‘Fifty.’

  ‘Correct. Ninety-five is what you were doing. Ninety-five! That’s a six-hundred-dollar fine and suspension of your licence for twenty-eight days. May I see your driver’s licence?’

  In a daze, Carla fumbled in her bag and retrieved her purse. Her hands were shaking and her fingers clumsy as she withdrew the card from its plastic sheath. Tears welled, blurring her vision. She passed it over, a record of happier days smiling back at her.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she began. ‘I can’t believe I was travelling that fast. I’m usually a very responsible driver, Officer. I’m not a criminal. It’s just that I had to get this dish up to the prison and …’ Her tears, now loosened, streamed down her face, arresting any further intelligible speech.

  The cop shifted uneasily, then took her licence and headed back to his car to check on her details. The wait seemed interminable, confusion and humiliation spinning through Carla’s mind. In one moment, her status as ‘good citizen’ had changed. She’d unwittingly crossed the line.

  ‘Look, lady, I feel bad making you so upset.’ The officer was back at her window. ‘I hate to see a woman cry.’ He forced a laugh. ‘It’s usually the boy racers we catch speeding up the Albany hill.’

  ‘No, I understand,’ she stuttered, a second wave of tears spilling. ‘You’re just doing your job.’

  ‘I tell you what – I’ll just make it an eighty-dollar fine and twenty demerit points.’

  ‘So I’m not going to lose my licence?’

  ‘No. But let this be a warning. You want to get to your destination in one piece, don’t you?’

  She nodded, then shot a glance at the basket of food on the floor. ‘Officer, could I interest you in a plate of gnocchi?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Italian dumplings.’

  He gave her a bemused stare.

  Carla flushed. ‘Right then, I’ll be getting along,’ she said hurriedly, and headed off, driving the rest of the way at forty kilometres an hour, and gathering a line of impatient drivers behind her. And by the time she reached the prison, the gnocchi were completely cold.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  CARLA

  Carla agonised for days over how to teach Toroa to read. She knew that so much rested on the first lesson. She would have just one hour to gain his trust, engage and relate to him on a level he understood. Trust. Relate. Engage. Words that were world’s apart from how she felt towards him. That he had robbed her of everything she valued had to be set aside. Her focus was to teach him to read. Her motivation for doing this was still not entirely clear to herself. Perhaps it sprang from a desire to convert something so evil into a more positive energy and thereby give a measure of purpose to her existence. It probably also arose from a more basic desire to reclaim control and not allow Toroa to ‘win’. Words were her fists. And Kevin had sanctioned the initiative. Given his blessing. That was all the directive she needed.

  The challenge became everything, consuming her every moment and importing depth into her one-dimensional days. Like an old cushion filled with new innards, so Carla’s life took on a more robust shape. She borrowed books from the library on innovative ways to teach adults to read, spoke with Haslop about Toroa’s family history, and trawled through newspaper archives for stories of disaffected youths. She read Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors,5 learning something of the horror of domestic violence in an urban Māori family, and Life Is So Good6 by Afro-American George Dawson, the grandson of slaves who’d learnt to read at the age of ninety-eight. Carla bought coloured paper to make flashcards, bars of chocolate for rewards, and a lever arch file, which she labelled TOROA.
She fell asleep with books in her lap and dreamt about alphabet zoos, giant Milky Bars, and pages without print. She trialled teaching techniques on Mingyu, her willing and ever-patient guinea pig, and she read poems to the bathroom mirror, until it was all fogged up and her bath cold.

  Finally, the first lesson was upon her.

  BEN

  He was seated opposite the Reid woman in a small meeting room adjacent to the prison chapel. The authorities had put an oil heater in the room, which was a plus. At least it promised an hour of warmth, if nothing else. In prison, the cold lived permanently in your bones.

  The Reid woman had surprised him by asking the screws to remove his handcuffs. They’d had to get the okay from above, but eventually his hands had been freed. Now she was pulling things out of a large basket. He eyed it suspiciously.

  ‘Did you get the meal I dropped in last month?’ she asked, pulling out a chipped blue bowl and a spoon, and placing it on the table in front of him.

  What was she up to?

  ‘You did or didn’t get it?’ She was persistent; he’d give her that.

  Yes, he had received the tub of cold little balls, but he hadn’t touched them. They’d smelt good, but he wasn’t about to get poisoned or anything. He nodded.

  ‘You know I got a speeding ticket bringing that here.’

  Ben raised an eyebrow.

  ‘An eighty-dollar fine.’

  Was she blaming him?

  She smiled. The wire coiled around his insides gave a little.

  ‘I still can’t believe it. I nearly lost my licence,’ she said, continuing to unpack the wicker basket. ‘Forty kilometres over the limit. Forty-five, actually. It’s no fun seeing those red and blue lights flashing in your rear-view mirror, I can tell you.’

  Ben’s lips twitched, holding onto a grin that wanted to break free.

  ‘Anyway, I hope it was worth it. It used to be …’ She swallowed. ‘It used to be my son’s favourite dish.’