The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘They’ve got money all right,’ Anna’s father said to her mother. If you knew where to look, it wasn’t hard to see. A racehorse cantered in the front paddocks and two long-finned American cars, shared by parents and sons, stood in a ramshackle garage at the side of the house. Over at Malcolm’s new house, his wife, Noelene, had arranged a cabinet full of crystal decanters and Belleek cream lustre china decorated with shamrocks. She hung lace curtains at the windows.

  The McNaughts and Anna’s parents accepted each other’s differences. Tilly of the overflowing ashtrays and ungathered newspapers kept a scrubbed board and an oven that shone like song. Anna’s father was crazy about the McNaught boys from the start. They made him feel like one of the people, a real farmer. Anna believes that her parents were happy there. Their marriage, which had appeared tired and slender, bloomed in the McNaughts’ benign light.

  As for Anna, the McNaughts put up with her.

  She thinks of it now in those terms, because she can see with hindsight that she was a bumptious, pushy girl with a need to draw attention to herself. She had succeeded at her last school, she resented her new one. The farmers sent their children to boarding school in town if they thought it was worth it, the rest went to Fish Rock High and planned their leaving. Clover Johnston was one of the exceptions who, if anything, was cleverer than Anna but made less of it. She was a modest, handsome girl. Her parents farmed at the far end of the district. Anna and she became friends, but out of school they were separated by distance.

  Tilly was past entertaining teenagers. ‘Why don’t you go and see Noelene?’ she suggested when Anna turned up on her doorstep one afternoon over Easter, looking for company. Tilly’s head was tilted over to one side, and she shook it furiously. ‘I got peroxide down my ear to shift the wax,’ she explained. ‘Makes it fizz, you know. Here, take Noelene this bowl of eggs, it’ll save me a trip.’

  Noelene was going to have a baby. Anna found her in the sitting room embroidering the front of a baby’s night gown. She looked impatient and grown-up when Anna arrived.

  ‘What are you going to call the baby?’ Anna asked, trying to engage her attention.

  ‘I can’t decide,’ said Noelene. ‘Do you like Belinda for a girl and Todd for a boy?’

  ‘Awful,’ said Anna.

  ‘Charmaine?’

  ‘Blah,’ said Anna, preparing to show off. ‘How about you call it Homer if it’s a boy?’

  Noelene looked long suffering. ‘Would you like to hold the ring over my stomach?’

  ‘What for?’ said Anna, backing off.

  ‘To find out whether it’s going to be a girl or a boy. The last time Tilly did it the ring said it was going to be a girl but I reckon it’s moved too low for that, I’m sure it’s a boy.’ She was slipping her wedding ring off as she spoke. She picked up a reel of cotton and snapped off a thread, tying it to the ring.

  ‘What do I do?’ Anna asked, as Noelene lay down on the sofa.

  ‘Well, you hold it over my stomach and see which way the ring goes. If it turns round it’s a girl, up and down it’s a boy. Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And if it stops in the middle it’s a disaster.’ Noelene shivered, pulling up her maternity smock to reveal the vast expanse of her stomach. As she lay there, it looked smooth, white and mountainous, then suddenly an oyster-shaped bulge sprouted on its side.

  ‘See, it’s the baby’s hand,’ said Noelene.

  Anna felt sick.

  ‘Go on, be quick.’

  As Anna picked up the ring, a shadow fell across the door. It was Douglas.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘How’s the son and heir?’ There was something odd in his voice.

  ‘It’s a girl,’ said Anna quickly, ‘and Noelene’s going to call her Guinevere.’

  There was a brief pause. ‘And slowly answered Arthur from the barge,’ Douglas said. In her surprise, Anna nearly dropped the ring.

  ‘It’s a load of shit,’ said Douglas, turning away. Anna didn’t know whether he meant the baby, the ring, or the poem he was quoting from.

  ‘I could have had any of them, you know,’ said Noelene when he had gone. She meant the McNaught brothers.

  ‘Douglas loves dancing, he goes every fortnight,’ said Tilly, through a mouthful of pins. She had taken pity on Anna, who was trying to make a dress from some material sent by her aunt. Anna’s mother was so busy on the farm she didn’t have time to help.

  ‘Where does he dance?’ Anna asked. Public dances were held in the hall but they were few and far between. Most of the girls from school went; they started at fourteen, their maturity tantalisingly close. Anna’s parents wouldn’t hear of her going without them. She had been once.

  ‘Don’t you know about the square dances?’ said Tilly. ‘The club meets in the hall, it’s not an open dance, just about thirty or forty go.’ As soon as she had said it, Anna could see she wished she hadn’t. She gave Anna an odd sideways look as if something had just dawned on her.

  ‘You’re a big girl,’ she said, ‘you’re growing a helluva big girl. You started a box yet?’

  When the Buick next pulled in at the McNaughts’ gate, with Douglas at the wheel, Anna was lying in wait. She shot out from behind the cream stand and offered to open the gate for him.

  ‘What brings this on?’ he said, leaning out the car window after she had pulled the gate shut.

  ‘Please, could you give me a lift to the square dancing?’ she said.

  He sighed, looked out the other window. ‘Sure,’ he said finally. ‘If your parents’ll let you.’

  That was when Anna began to keep company, of a kind, with Douglas McNaught. He was nearly twice her age. It astonishes her now to think that her parents would let her go with him, but she can also see how it was. They weren’t looking at them as two people who might fall in love; they were looking at a kindly trusted grown-up and a child. Nor, for a long time, did Anna think of Douglas as anything other than a means to get her out of the house and down the road. Looking back, she sees herself as truly innocent despite her brashness. What did he think? Who did he see? These are questions Anna has asked herself since.

  Clover, who had several respectable older brothers, was sometimes allowed to go to the dances too. This may have been one of the reasons Anna was permitted to go.

  One day, Clover took her aside with a look of shock on her smooth and pointed face. ‘I’ve heard another word for sex,’ she said. Her cousins had told her the word (her brothers would never have said this to her, they were that kind of family, protective towards the women). Rooting. That was the word.

  They gazed at each other in horror. Pigs rooted in the bush. The connotations were impossibly vulgar, and violent. They knew that sex was a red-hot poker but they couldn’t imagine how they would be burned, or blinded. If that was sex, they didn’t want it. That week, Marie Hicks, the baker’s daughter, said she had been forced into the boot of a car after one of the dances and taken to the cemetery to have sex with three men. Her menstrual blood was offered as a sacrifice to virgin bulls. Clover and Anna were open-mouthed with astonishment.

  When Anna went to the dances, she pitched into the routines, snatching a hand, spun from the waist, moving on to the next partner — older men with red-veined faces, Douglas, one of Clover’s brothers, whoever. They were accompanied by a pianist and a man with an accordion. The caller had slicked-back fair hair and wore a checked shirt with a neckerchief. He clapped his hands and stamped his foot in time to ‘Red River Valley’: Oh we’re off to the next in the valley/and you circle to your left and to your right/and you choose your girl from the valley/oh you choose your Red River girl.

  On the way there and back, Douglas hardly said a word. She didn’t mind, though occasionally she spoke to him. One night, as they drove home between the grassy hills, the moon floated and stopped and started, trickling along the sky.

  ‘The moon is a ghostly galleon,’ Anna said.

  ‘Jesus. Shit,’ he said, his fists
bunching around the steering wheel. He was not prepared to lose himself in poetry a second time, she figured.

  Each time they got to the McNaughts’ gate, opposite the Emerys’ farm, Anna jumped out of the car and opened the gate for him; he swept through without an acknowledgement, and she closed it behind him, watching the car’s progress over the dewy dust of the track. A kind of happiness had descended upon her and the weeks and months that lay between her and the end of school.

  That is, until Rhoda Aukett turned up. One square dance evening, Anna got dressed as usual, and went to wait at the mail box. Douglas didn’t arrive. She went back inside and rang his house. In her head she could hear the phone’s morse code signal ringing in the McNaughts’ kitchen. Three shorts. Tilly answered after what seemed like a long time. ‘Didn’t he tell you he’d be going straight in to the centre after milking?’ she said, but Anna could tell that she was not surprised.

  When she reported that, no, he hadn’t told her, Tilly just said: ‘He must have forgotten, eh?’

  ‘Won’t he be coming back to pick me up?’

  Tilly couldn’t put it off any longer. ‘He’s gone to pick up Rhoda. She’s staying at the hotel. You know about Rhoda, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh yeah, sure, I know about Rhoda.’

  ‘Well, there, that’s all right then.’ Tilly sounded relieved.

  Anna’s mother wandered into the room.

  ‘Douglas running late?’

  ‘A bit. He has to pick up someone called Rhoda.’

  ‘Oh yes, Rhoda,’ she said vaguely. ‘I’ve heard about Rhoda.’ It seemed that everyone had heard about Rhoda.

  ‘I’m to wait along the road,’ Anna said. ‘He’ll be in a hurry when he comes.’ She hurried out the door before her mother could ask any more questions.

  It was a two-mile walk to town. Anna was so angry she didn’t think of getting out her bike. She arrived at the dance just on nine thirty. The women who made the tea sat gossiping in the far corner of the hall. They never danced. Their breasts were encased in shiny satin blouses and they wore full skirts, but they were not there to dance. The supper plates had been arranged near the slide that separated the kitchen from the dance hall. The Zip was coming to the boil. Anna turned off the Zip and filled the urn. The women didn’t notice because they hadn’t heard the whistle. At the end of the round she threw up the shutter, and called, in her loudest voice: ‘Come and get it,’ just the way they did.

  There was a flurry in the corner, and a ripple of surprise amongst the dancers. Anna stood quite still and smiled a broad, careful grin.

  ‘Well,’ said Amy Gatenby. ‘Isn’t she ever just the little helper?’ She said it quite nicely, although it was clear that neither she nor her friends cared for what Anna had done.

  Douglas walked towards her, a woman holding on to his arm. She wore a powder blue crushed velvet dress. Anna knew at once that he loved this dark and creamy creature.

  ‘Hi kid,’ he said, ‘I didn’t expect to see you here.’

  That was when she knew that he had never really seen her.

  He introduced her to Rhoda Aukett, who flashed her a dazzling smile. She didn’t appear to mind when Anna climbed into the back of the car to catch a ride home, though Douglas scowled deeply.

  Douglas had met Rhoda in town at the races, where she was a ticket seller on the tote. She had thrown in her job and come to work as a housemaid at the pub in order to be near him. Little by little, Anna got to know her. She would stay out at the farm at weekends, and Tilly would send her over to borrow a cup of sugar or a packet of cigarettes, just the way Anna’s parents borrowed from them. Her mother guessed Rhoda was twenty-six or twenty-seven. Quite a while to be on the shelf, she said to her husband. Rhoda carried a spicy fragrance about her as if her skin was impregnated with cool, pale rose petals. Her breasts were heavy ovals cupped above her tiny waist.

  Rhoda did most of the talking, in a soft purring rush, a steady stream of comments about herself, Douglas, the McNaughts. Milking was a painful price for being Douglas’s girlfriend, but she had done it when she was a girl and she supposed she would have to get used to doing it again. Men’s and cows’ shit, it was much the same. Anna would be surprised at what she saw at the pub. Anna didn’t know what men were like, oh you’ll never know, you’ll never know, she said, and Anna thought with a sudden chilling fear that she might not and that not knowing might be worse than knowing. The couple who ran the pub were mean with hot water, Rhoda said. Inhaling the spontaneous perfume that surrounded her, Anna wouldn’t have thought so, but Rhoda had three baths a day at the weekends, even though it meant saving the water for Douglas when he came in from the shed. Anna Emery was hard to say, just like Rhoda Aukett, wasn’t it? Not that it would bother her for long, not when she became Rhoda McNaught, and she supposed Anna would get married some day too. How did she get along with Noelene? She wasn’t too sure that Noelene liked her, but there, she was going to get her nose out of joint a bit, having another woman on the property. Noelene had had her baby, a girl called Lorraine. She was probably just afraid that Rhoda would have a boy before her. Did Anna want to have babies when she grew up?

  Almost as suddenly as she had appeared, Rhoda Aukett left. At first Anna didn’t notice that she had gone, for she no longer visited the McNaughts unless she was asked to go on a message. One weekend, though, Douglas came over to use the Emerys’ phone because theirs was out of order. Anna wondered why he hadn’t gone to Malcolm and Noelene’s. Anna heard him tell her father that he would pay for a toll call.

  ‘It’s all right, son,’ her father said, ‘you go right ahead, make as many calls as you want. I know you’ll pay me.’

  Douglas talked for a long time. She heard his voice raised and leaned her head against the door. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ he said, and she could hear him crying. It grieved her that Rhoda could be so unforgiving. She couldn’t imagine anything bad enough for this. It took her a while to realise she had not been to the farm for more than a month. This was no flash point, the quarrel was well established by the time she had got to hear about it.

  ‘She won’t be back,’ Anna’s mother said cryptically. She and her husband looked at each other in a meaningful way.

  Soon after that, Douglas came to the house with a strange, almost sly, gleeful look about him, like a boy who has built a tree house that he is sure nobody will find. Could he have a letter sent here?

  He and Anna’s father went outside and talked. Her father ran his hand through his thinning hair in an anxious way and shook his head once or twice. In the end she saw him reluctantly agree.

  Douglas came in the evenings after milking to check on the arrival of mail. Anna looked out for a letter from Rhoda. She imagined her handwriting as flowing with untidy loops and an exaggerated incline, like a head held in the hand, a playful smile.

  But when the letter came, it was not from Rhoda at all. Anna was there when Douglas picked it up, an official typed envelope sent from Wellington.

  ‘Thanks mate,’ he said to her father. Her father stood awkwardly; it was clear that he wanted to know the contents nearly as much as Douglas. Anna can still see them, the two men standing together, Douglas almost like a son. He turned the letter over in his hands and, for her father’s sake, opened it there and then. He took a deep breath, and handed it over, his eyes alight. They looked at each other with a mixture of excitement and awe.

  ‘They’ve taken you,’ her father said. ‘Oh good man, I knew they would.’

  ‘I’d better tell the old man,’ said Douglas, and bit his lip in an uncharacteristic boyish gesture. He took out a cigarette and placed it in his mouth without the usual flick.

  A few days later, Douglas appeared, wearing uniform. Of course she had learned his secret by then. He had been accepted to join the crack Special Air Service unit as a paratrooper, bound for Malaya to fight the communists. His uniform was olive-green with a browny-green shirt and tie. On his head he wore a maroon beret with a winged dagger, and the
motto ‘Who Dares Wins’.

  Anna couldn’t imagine what the jungle would be like, although now she can. She has stood at the edge of what is now the Malaysian jungle amidst the mingled smells of nutmeg oil and orchids and the lavatory stench of cut durian that can kill a man if it is eaten with alcohol and felt the breath of giant butterfly wings against her face. She has seen a python and a flying frog and spiders that eat birds. Deadly and dangerous and seductive. And as she stood there she has thought of Douglas McNaught.

  He had several leaves from the training camp at Waiouru before he embarked. During the last of these the ailing square dance club held one of its now erratic meetings. Anna had not been for at least six months, not since Rhoda Aukett first came on the scene. Douglas appeared unexpectedly on the Emerys’ doorstep. His official farewell had already taken place, a formal affair with speeches and a special supper on laden trestle tables set out in the hall. Anna’s father, with tears in his eyes, had given him a Waterman pen which he could ill afford. Now, here he was, resplendent in his uniform, on the doorstep.

  ‘Feel like a couple of turns, kid?’ he asked.

  Anna’s mother looked up from the bench where she was working, as if she might, for the first time, say something to stop Anna going, then changed her mind. Instead she pressed her lips together.

  Farewell was in the air. Even though the club was going into recess, there was a bigger turnout than usual. People came up to say goodbye all over again. Old men, wearing baggy greys and tartan shirts, turned up with the helpers and sat against the wall, just watching. At supper time, they pumped Douglas’s hand, their eyes shining, holding his hand longer than they needed.