The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘Your eyes are such a lovely shade of brown,’ Honor says, examining him in detail. ‘Pity you haven’t got a tan.’ Her own skin is glossy from the tan clinic. All those artificial rays scare him but he supposes she knows what she’s doing.

  ‘I can’t afford it.’

  ‘Poor baby.’

  ‘I’ve had a hell of a night. Victoria cried for hours.’

  Honor looks distracted. ‘Did you watch the telly?’

  ‘Couldn’t. The wife’s family came to visit.’

  ‘There was a great movie on.’

  ‘I thought you’d be nightclubbing.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about my life, do you?’

  ‘I guess not.’ Something’s distracting him. Probably it’s just lack of sleep, the blackness of the past night perched on his shoulder.

  ‘I don’t go out through the week,’ she says.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’d stay in Saturday nights too, if you were there.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ he says, surprising himself with the irritation in his voice. Last Saturday night she’d gone to a party for a friend going overseas. They’d sat in rows in a make-believe aeroplane while cabin attendants came round and served the drinks. The captain had given a commentary of countries all over the world. The party had ended with a plane smash. He realised that he’d miss these reports from the circuit if Honor stayed home.

  ‘You’re not listening.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, really I am.’

  ‘I’d just watch telly with you,’ she says, with a doggedness that is new.

  It’s on the tip of his tongue to say that that’s what La Jane does too, but there’s a pinprick of light in his brain and it’s growing.

  Honor taps her long fingernails on the table top. ‘It can’t go on like this,’ she says softly.

  ‘Like what?’ In the silence that follows he finds himself thinking, ah Honor, don’t go on. You’re my mate, what’ll I do if I don’t have a mate?

  But then he remembers something. It’s like a voice, maybe like one of Duane and Paula’s voices, he doesn’t know, but it just hits him with such blinding force he grips the table to steady himself. ‘Selby,’ he says. ‘That was it.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The baby’s name. My son. He was called Selby.’ Eagerly, he explains to her how he had forgotten the name. He opens his wallet and jots the name on the back of his last week’s pay slip, in case his memory closes in against him again.

  ‘You shouldn’t dwell on things like that,’ says Honor. ‘It’s unhealthy.’

  ‘There’s a new ad on telly,’ he tells her. ‘There’s this big flock of blue birds fly right up in the middle of the screen. It’s real pretty.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So that’s what it feels like. See, I’ve been feeling so guilty and now I don’t.’

  She gets to her feet without a word, gathering her purse.

  As they walk down the mall, he tries to compose some nice thing to say, but nothing will come.

  ‘I’ll see you soon,’ he says, when they get to the corner.

  Honor shrugs. The choice is his, he supposes. At the beginning of the lunch hour he might have jumped her way, but now he is light-headed with relief, it’s like a benediction, remembering the baby’s name.

  She lifts her shoulder. ‘Goodbye,’ she says.

  ‘Ah shit, Honor. Honor don’t be like that.’ He raises his voice, calling after her down past Cubacade. ‘Honor. Hon-ah.’

  Still, he is certain he has done the right thing. It is Honor who cannot see the way things are.

  Back at the shop, Gordon tells him lunch hours are cut to half.

  Roy walks home, his feet comfortably encased in the familiar leather shoes, his heels ringing against the pavement to the tune of his steady sensible gait. He feels as if he is following an invisible ribbon threaded from one telegraph pole to the next, or a row of pebbles like Hansel and Gretel walking through the forest, that lead him straight back to La Jane. How can I tell ya, how much I lo-ove you? He sings the words in his head, hears himself saying them aloud to her. In his pocket he runs his fingers over a scratch ’n’ sniff perfume sachet he has filched from a magazine at the station newsagent.

  The unit is very quiet. At first he thinks there is nobody home even though the door is unlocked.

  In the bedroom La Jane sits on the bed, dressed as if for an outing, stripping polish from her nails. She smells of acetate and Charlie perfume and chewing gum.

  ‘Hi, been out?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘So how’s your day been?’ he asks. He is struck by uncertainty. There is something wrong. Clothes have been pulled out of drawers.

  La Jane’s movements are slow and deliberate. She studies her outstretched hands before she answers him. They are not a bit like Honor’s; her fingers are short and rather blunt.

  ‘All right,’ she says.

  It’s only then that he notices Victorias cot is empty.

  ‘Where’s the kid?’ He tries to keep the panic out of his voice.

  ‘I told you she’d be gone.’

  ‘She at Paula’s?’

  ‘Nah.’

  Roy breathes deeply. Maybe he’ll just strangle her. For a moment he wonders if La Jane knows of Honor’s existence and is punishing him, but there is something passionless about the way she stares at him.

  ‘Is she at the hospital?’

  ‘Nah, she’s not at the hospital.’

  ‘La Jane, where’s our kid? What have you done with her?’

  La Jane’s eyes are flat and grown-up. ‘Duane’s got her,’ she says. ‘She’s with him.’

  He has to sit down, aware of his knees trembling like a kid’s. Now he sees it all, Victoria on Duane’s knee, Duane’s tongue in La Jane’s ear, La Jane’s clothing on the floor.

  ‘Paula’ll kill you,’ he says. He wouldn’t mind doing it himself, but knows he never could. ‘If you take her bloke.’ Even then, he notices the way it’s Paula’s loss he acknowledges; he cannot begin to consider his own.

  Her smile is sheer triumph. ‘She’ll survive,’ she says.

  He sees then that this defection, all of this, is not about him. It never was.

  Sovereign Mint

  HER FATHER SITS AT THE KITCHEN TABLE. It’s Tuesday, one of those cloudy days that lean heavily out of the sky over the Volcanic Plateau. The ritual, now that he is retired, is to visit her on Tuesdays. Her mother is away all that day, at her part-time job, and he can’t bear it, being left alone for a whole day. On Tuesday mornings he says to his wife: ‘Don’t leave me. I retired so I could spend all my time with you.’

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ her mother says (she tells her daughter this in whispered conversations on the phone), ‘you retired early because everybody in your family died young — or so you say, though how would I know, I never met any of them, they’re all history — and you want some time to put your feet up before you die. Well, go ahead, put your feet up, but don’t expect me to sit around behaving like an old lady, not just yet.’

  The daughter is making mint jelly. She has watched the Galloping Gourmet demonstrate the recipe on the television cookery programme. Everyone in the street is trying out his recipes. Normally she wouldn’t have time to make fiddly things like mint jelly, all that boiling and straining, but on Tuesdays she has to do something or her father will expect her to sit for hours, being still, staring into space with him, contemplating the great unknowns such as death and silence. Her constant movement unnerves him. So she devises projects, projects that will distract them both from the weight of time, that will assert her right to move in her own home.

  Besides, she has a cloud of mint growing at the back door; it is like a weed, pushing up through the cracks in the path, curling over the edge of the wood-box, there is even a tendril of it, fat and pale where it has grown away from the light, pushing up under the kitchen step. She might as well use it.

  She washes out M
armite jars and sterilises them with slow heat in the oven. He starts to sort some coins on to the table, just as she strains the jelly, the tricky part.

  He holds up a shiny penny. ‘Look at that,’ he says, ‘it’s like a new one.’

  ‘It probably is new,’ she says, concentrating hard. The baby will be awake soon and then there will be no time for this inconsequential activity.

  He peers at the date, pushing his glasses back above the bumpy ridge of his thin nose. ‘It’s quite old — 1931. Fancy a penny that old, and it’s so shiny. How could that be?’

  ‘Maybe it’s been in a child’s collection up until now.’ She considers the problem of how to fill such tiny jars. In the cupboard beneath the sink she finds a jug with a thin pointed spout that she has forgotten she owned. She greets her discovery with a little snort of pleasure, it’s ideal. ‘Somebody’s just found their old collection and thrown it out.’

  ‘I think it would have changed colour, even in a drawer,’ he says. ‘Copper does you know, it ages. Perhaps somebody shone it up.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Carefully, she tips the hot green liquid into the jug and begins to pour it into the pots.

  ‘You’d wonder, though, why somebody would go to all the trouble of shining it up and then putting it out for change. With the other money. Don’t you think that’s peculiar?’

  She sighs. Jesus wept, he used to say when he was a young man. Whenever he got impatient, that’s what he used to say. Jesus wept. The shortest sentence in the Bible. The shortest complete sentence in the world. She says it to herself now. Jesus wept.

  ‘Maybe,’ she says, recklessly, ‘it’s a penny diver’s penny.’ When she was younger, she had worked her summer holidays in a restaurant alongside the gates to Whakarewarewa, where busloads of tourists alighted before going on walking tours of sulphur pools and mud geysers. The entrance to the resort was spanned by a bridge over a deep river. Maori children dived from the bridge to retrieve coins thrown to them by tourists, holding them in their mouths, their cheeks stretched like silk pouches, until they were ready to burst. Then they came into the tearooms where it was one of her jobs to hold out a basin of water into which they spat streams of coins. When she had washed the money she counted it out and gave them half-crowns or florins in exchange. Sometimes when she counted the money she found bright shining coins. ‘Why is this one so shiny?’ she had once asked.

  ‘It’s been in there a while, the sulphur has stripped it clean,’ the children told her. She has no idea whether this was a true explanation or not, whether scientifically it stands up, but she thinks this may interest her father. He may even know something about it; he reads a lot.

  But he isn’t listening to her. Her system with the jug works efficiently and she fills the jars one by one with the clear, mint-green, clean-smelling syrup and tells him about the penny divers but he doesn’t listen to a word she is saying.

  ‘It’s like a sovereign,’ he says. ‘That’s what it reminds me of.’

  ‘But it’s not,’ she says, annoyed that she should have dusted off this memory for him, and he’s not interested. She should have known better.

  ‘I had a sovereign once,’ he says dreamily. ‘When I was a child, and there were still sovereigns. My Uncle Abraham gave it to me.’

  ‘Uncle Abraham? You never told me you had an Uncle Abraham.’

  ‘Oh yes, you must have heard me speak of him.’ He is silent for a moment, thinking of something, goodness knows what. It is nearly fifty years since he emigrated. He has never been back to England. He calls it Home. Most of his family died before she was born and what was left of them were wiped out in the Blitz. There is nothing there, just holes in the ground, he has told them, her mother and her, though she is not quite sure how he knows even this, or if it is true. Someone once wrote to him, an old school friend maybe, and now this person has disappeared too.

  ‘Fancy me never knowing about Uncle Abraham.’ The mint jelly looks beautiful, and it is starting to set already, perhaps because the jars are so small. She tries a bit of it off the tip of her finger. It tastes awful, like toothpaste.

  ‘There were three brothers in that family,’ he says. ‘The others were Nathaniel and Isaac.’

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ she says, walking the length of the kitchen. ‘You had an Uncle Abraham, an Uncle Nathaniel, and an Uncle Isaac?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How come you’ve never told me about them before?’

  ‘Of course I’ve told you,’ he says, shifting in his chair. His eyes aren’t meeting hers. She feels tall and cruel, standing there examining him as if he’s under a microscope. She sees all sorts of things about him she hasn’t noticed before.

  ‘They were rich and they gave you gold sovereigns, eh?’

  ‘Just one gold sovereign,’ he says unhappily. ‘Just the once.’

  ‘Tell me about my relatives. Who were they?’ When he doesn’t answer, her voice is fierce, she speaks in a tone she hasn’t heard herself use before. ‘Tell me, who are the ancestors? Who?’

  His smile is enigmatic, sly she thinks. ‘Isn’t it about time you put the kettle on? I’ll have to go soon.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘Your mother’ll be home in a couple of hours. You wouldn’t want a fella to go without a cup of tea.’ As he speaks of her mother, she hears his suppressed excitement.

  ‘Why don’t you leave the shiny penny for Alice?’ she says, as she fills the jug. Alice is her older child. She will be home from school soon.

  But he has already pocketed the coin. He unfolds his coat and beret, ready to put them on the moment he has finished his tea.

  When he is gone, walking very upright down the street, she goes to the bedroom and studies her face in the mirror. The pores of her skin feel strange beneath her fingertips.

  Nobody Else

  SOME PEOPLE CANNOT IMAGINE how their parents ever conceived them. A lot of the kids I went to school with were like that. If they caught their parents making love, it was a big deal the next day. I thought it was embarrassing when they talked about it, and naive as well. I had often heard my parents make love. Their room is next to mine. They may not look passionate to others, I really don’t know, because, the older you get, the more difficult it is to see how your parents stack up against others, but I knew that they were. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other, even when there were people around. That did bother me a bit. My girlfriends said, they’re so sweet, your parents, but I wished they wouldn’t do it.

  When I reached my teens, they became more careful in the bedroom. They knew I knew, though nothing was ever said. Not that it made much difference. There was a sort of a tension in the house, a charged atmosphere in the night. I lay awake and listened to the silence, in the same way that I listened to the wind in the trees outside, or the tide going out in the bay. In the morning, the effect would be the same. You couldn’t see where the wind and water had been, and my parents were no different either. We all ate breakfast exactly the way we had the day before, with my mother urging my sister and me to eat more than we wanted, and my father telling us to hurry.

  What I wanted to know, more than whether they ‘did it’ or not, as the kids at school put it, was why they did it. Why they had ever begun. What made them decide, out of all the other people in the world, that they would spend the rest of their lives as lovers? Why did they love each other? That was the question that really consumed me.

  When I asked my mother about this she would try to tell me. She would describe their courtship. They lived in the provinces then. My mother was a school teacher, my father had come to town to work at the Maori Affairs Department. She said that right from the first moment she had seen him, she knew he was different. He had Maori in his ancestry, and he took his work seriously. He processed valuable old documents about land claims at the Maori Land Court. People liked him, he had an open friendly way about him, although later we would all see the loner’s side to him, too, the way he
liked to hug some things to himself. He is still a bit like that about us and our mother.

  They met at a dance. My mother didn’t tell him until long afterwards that she had seen him in the street, and already felt she knew him. Like any well-brought-up young woman of the sixties she wanted to let him think that he had found her all by himself. It was hard for her in the provinces then, being a teacher. There was very little to do, except go to the pictures or to parties, and hang out at the milk bars, but if you were a teacher people watched what you got up to. You could lose your job if you were seen to behave badly. People even thought you were peculiar if you went to the pictures by yourself. When you arrived in a strange town it was hard to make friends.

  I wondered if my parents had just got together because they were both strangers in town, needing somebody. But she said, no, it wasn’t like that.

  The other morning, I asked her about it again. She gave me a funny look. She was making cheese scones. Lately, she has been doing a lot of baking, making kind of homely food. I don’t know why she bothers half the time. She could go down to the bakery and buy half a dozen scones which are just as good as the ones she makes, and save herself a lot of time; it’s not as if she hasn’t got spare money these days.

  Anyway, she paused with her hands in the dough, like some renaissance peasant woman, and said: ‘You’re a bit old for fairy tales aren’t you?’

  ‘Are they?’ I asked. ‘Is that what they were?’

  ‘You want to hear happy-ever-after stories,’ she said. She knows I’m seeing somebody, but she doesn’t know who, not yet anyway.

  ‘No, I want to know about you.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ She paused, a funny little smile hovering round her mouth, half amusement I think, half sadness that it was all so long ago. ‘We went for a walk on the Sunday afternoon after I had met him. I was keen on him, but I’d had other boyfriends — and he’d had other girlfriends too, lots of them, he’d given two girls the same engagement ring, I can tell you I wouldn’t let a chap get away with that — and I hadn’t worked out how serious things were going to be between us. But I felt that I recognised something in him that was like me. When I had seen him in the street, and not known how to introduce myself, I’d been sort of surprised that he hadn’t seen me straight away. I suppose that sounds silly?’