Leather Wings (16 page)

He is losing track. He remembers screwing the lid and nudging the bottle — warm now, it would do for a hot water bottle — under the ladder. He hadn’t nudged it quite far enough nor screwed it tight, there’s a row of dark drops on the cork tiles. Has Jania been back yet? Has he fainted again? There’s something he needs to remember to tell her, although it might not be important. He has unlatched the door of the cage and the canary is sitting with feathers all fluffed out, white eyed.

She is back. Perhaps very little time has passed after all. She goes to sit crosslegged beside her patient, and another fit of the giggles rises out of her like a string of beads. Wallace sees her laughter bubbling and spilling like broken beads cascading down over the Disney T-shirt on to her grubby trainers. If he could catch one bead.

J
ANIA ISN’T HAPPY
. He hasn’t given her his funny complicit smile for some time now, but she knows he’s awake because every now and then he opens his eyes and talks to her. Sort of. She can’t hear properly, he’s sleepy. He isn’t going to die, she knows that, he said he wouldn’t, but he needs an ambulance, possibly a hospital although he could mend in the spare room at Esther’s. He only fell a short distance, how far could anyone fall in such a little house? She has promised to stay until Daddy and Esther come, but they are taking a long time.

“How long is two days?” she asks him. Well she knows, of course, but she can’t remember what day it is now and when it was he told her they were coming to collect her. She doesn’t want to go back to school but… She has been through all the stuff in the cupboard, the stuff at the back is very dirty, she’s tired of her game. She needs someone to play.

“All right?” His mouth works.

She thinks he has asked a question. “Yes,” she says. Then, “It must be two days? Is it?”

She has heard sounds on the street outside, or not so much heard as felt sounds. Traffic goes by, but not too much, not
murder — “it’s murder on the freeway” — and there must be people but she hasn’t heard their feet on the sidewalk. Today she doesn’t hear anything at all, it’s a bit queer, as if the world’s shut down like a TV channel. Earlier she sneaked a look behind the big filthy blind but the window is so dirty with wire things over it, she can’t see out. Wallace had warned her, “There’s some funny people about, don’t open the door except to me.” Two knocks. Lemon sago. When Esther comes will Jania ask for the password: what’s my favourite pudding? She dips her hand into the bag of raisins and stuffs her mouth full so that she can hardly chew. It’s fun to be greedy, but somehow she doesn’t feel full. She feels a bit sick.

“What’s happened to — bird? Canary?”

“What?” He is talking about Joey and she doesn’t want to tell him what has happened to Joey, his little girl’s present. If she was brave she’d put Joey in a box, but she doesn’t like to touch him, dead feels scary. They had made her look at Mummy in her box and she didn’t want to, they might have made her touch.

Suddenly her hand jumps out and picks up the fern-leaf key-ring off the floor. She holds on to the key so that it bites into her hand, it’s a trick she taught herself, like holding on to a comb. Tight. The prongs make little pin-prick dents in your skin and sometimes the comb breaks but it makes those other things go away. She is holding the key like this but not just to trick those things out of her head, she thinks she might open the door and see if Daddy’s coming.

When she has reached up and fitted the key into its place, she hears a sort of scurrying sound on the street outside, like an animal. This stops her. Then she thinks — it could be them. Perhaps they don’t have the number written down? The door is heavy, it’s a big door for a small place. She pulls it open just a bit and peeps out. Wallace had told her to go to a shop, but she can’t see one — no, he had said round the corner. She won’t go that far. The street seems very empty. She watches for a bit and out of the corner of her eye something moves, something in the window opposite. But no sign of Esther’s car.

She shuts the door again and wishes Wallace could get up and play with her.

T
HE POLICE ARE
stationed in the building across the street, which has been blocked off while traffic is diverted on to the main bus route. A few minutes ago the door to the shop opened a crack. There was no light inside so it was difficult to make out the figure who appeared there for a moment. Constable Miles said she believed it was the child, or
a
child, which doesn’t seem likely. At that point the officers were still moving into position. The detective inspector is behind a parked car now, crouched with his sergeant, who has the loud hailer.

Before he can use it the shop door swings inward again and a little girl steps clearly into the sunlight. She balances on one pale leg, holding the other leg up behind her, and hops. Now on the other foot.

“Wait,” the inspector orders. What are the police waiting for?

The next moment she has turned on her pink and white trainers and the door has shut behind her. She is a transitory performance like a cuckoo at one o’clock.

Upstairs in the building opposite Esther has gasped and called out, “Yes! It’s her! Yes!” She rounds on Constable Miles and begins to castigate her. “W — Why didn’t they grab her? Wh — What’s going on?” Stammering idiotically. As if Wallace has passed his stammer on to her, as if it is infectious.

The policewoman shakes her head. “He might have been behind her. It’ll be all right.”

She smiles. She has buck teeth, Esther notices unkindly.

The sergeant has left his place alongside the stationary vehicle and performed a low crouching run to the doorway; now the inspector has taken up position on the other side. Through the double-glazed windows of the upstairs storage room, Esther sees the officer raise his knuckles and rap soundlessly. His lips move. He is summoning the Rawleigh’s man.

The door opens slowly. Jania. And she seems politely to be inviting them inside.

Esther begins to laugh joltingly, she supposes this is hysteria but she can’t stop. She doesn’t know what has happened exactly, but it doesn’t fit her notion of what is meant to happen on occasions like these. She gasps between draughts of laughter, trying to control her breathing. She wishes she still smoked — in fact, she is convinced it was taking up smoking secretly at thirteen, after her mother first went into the psychiatric hospital, that helped banish the last of her stammer. A cigarette, she needs a cigarette. She can nearly smell tobacco, shutting her eyes and swaying with the thought of it.

Constable Miles’ mobile phone crackles. “… requesting an ambulance.”

Esther stops swaying. “What? What’s happened?”

“It’s all right, we can go over. The little girl seems to be unhurt. She’s asking for you.”

“Well, of course she is!” says Esther, the grandmother, feeling a surge of gratitude, which surges like tears, huge drops of relief, guilt, gratitude, coursing wetly down her cheeks. She mops at her face while she prepares to go to Jania, who is asking for her.

With the buck-toothed policewoman, she crosses the road and her head feels huge, light, inflated with the promises she is making herself. She will become a good grandmother, she will make up for lost time, she will give Jania all the time she can from now on. Time. Now. The words are loaded, laughing at her, they are as inadequate as Esther has been. Certainly she can spend time on Jania but she can’t give Jania time. Time is non-transferable, like a bus pass.

Inside the clock shop it is a murky cave: the light is all collected around the small high back window, which overlooks a ventilation shaft, beyond the steep stairs. The man is lying in the half dark surrounded by litter. Plastic bottles, egg cartons, chocolate wrappers. What a mess. He has cast himself there like another piece of discarded garbage, flawed, broken. His fly is undone and so is one of his shoe laces. The two policemen feel no sympathy for this man and show none. There is a worm of disgust curled in the inspector’s flat face.

When Esther joins them Jania is having some sort of
tantrum, squealing and stamping her foot.

“Don’t do that, you’re hurting him! He needs a hospital!” Stamp.

“He’ll get what he needs.”

“Hold on to her will you, she’s upset.” The calm drumming tone of authority. Police presence hovers incongruously above a child’s toy city, a toy war zone. The atmosphere in the shop is thick with outrage.

“Has he hurt you?”

“
He’s
hurt!” The child catches sight of her grandmother and bounds at her. “Where’s my daddy? He said you’d bring Daddy. What are they doing to him?” She batters fists into Esther’s paisley shirt.

“Don’t worry, darling, they’ll put him in prison for a very long time. Won’t you?” Esther looks to the police inspector to endorse this.

“Don’t talk to
them!
They trod on my houses — and that one hurt him! He hurt him!” Then she goes quiet, she has heard the word prison play back in her head. Her brow puckers. “But it wasn’t a lot of money. He can pay it back. Tell them — we’re going to take him home.”

“That’s the ambulance now.” A siren is whining over the top of Jania’s whine.

“Tell them! Tell them he can come with us!”

It’s embarrassing. Esther can’t believe what she is hearing. She wants to understand but this is crazy. She puts on that low strangled tone Jania has heard once before. “Don’t be silly, Jania. And let go of that thing! What would Grandad think of you?”

Where did that come from? She doesn’t often invoke Rex to support her pronouncements.

The little girl has wedged one foot in the wall and has attached herself to a rung of the ladder stairs. She hangs on grimly, like a tick. “But I promised! I promised we’d take him. Wallace?”

Wallace is either terrified or in great pain. His eyes bulge from his head and he is having more than his usual difficulty in speaking. “P-pixie.”

“I’m his pixie.” The child’s face contorts. “You’re hurting
him!” she accuses the sergeant who is helping the ambulance man lift and transfer him not very gently on to a stretcher. “He could die! People die! Please, don’t …” Her features are breaking up something like the surface of boiling custard. Her candyfloss hair trembles. She takes a deep breath and begins to pulse with sobs. Tears spill out of her eyes and Wallace watches them cascade where only moments ago he was watching bright beads of laughter.

Esther stares. Jania is crying. For a moment it looks unnatural to Esther, as if a dog had suddenly got up on its hind legs and walked. She hasn’t seen her grandchild cry, not since she was a new baby, before her mother took her off to Canada and before the accident locked her into an unchildlike, unnatural self-possession. She is crying like any other little girl; and Esther finds it oddly discomfiting. Why is she crying
now?
Isn’t it too late to cry for her mother, for Prue? Or is that what this is? Delayed grief? She can’t be crying for the broken Rawleigh’s man. That’s not right.

But of course she cries. Why shouldn’t she cry after what she’s been through?
What has she been through? What has she yet to go through?
No, think about that later. Esther finds herself propelled towards the child, snatching at her like something valuable she had forgotten was hers. “Come here, come here.” She hears her voice blurt with emotion and her arms stretch.

There is something else. When distress puckered the little girl’s features, which are unmistakably her father’s, Jania resembled no one so much as her dead mother, Esther’s daughter! Her mouth, her curious eyes, creased up in that so familiar way. She has become Prue. She is Prue crying because her cat had been run over, because she has failed her music exam, because she is saying goodbye to Esther and Rex and travelling to live in Canada. That’s right, Prue had cried at the airport but Esther hadn’t. Prue had expected her mother to cry and she had let Prue down. She was meant to cry. She had wanted to cry, but she couldn’t. Esther was brought up to behave with dignity in public places: put your hand over your mouth when you yawn! Don’t make personal remarks! When they came to take Esther’s mother away into hospital, she had put on her hat and the pearl pin. For whatever reason, Jania
held on tight to her dignity when she lost her mother. Now she and Esther can discard their dignity together; they seem unable to do anything less.

She has her arms about the child, Prue’s child, and Jania doesn’t pull away. She butts Esther in the waist and rumbles grief into her grandmother’s soft ribs. This is what should happen. Tears are natural. Esther strokes and pats and weeps, she is grateful.

But what is Esther comforting Jania
for?
Exactly? What has been happening here in this awful place?

The child’s despair is too terrible. Esther’s scalp begins to crackle with horror. There is no question, something unimaginable and awful — no, something
imaginable
and awful — has occurred in this musty-smelling cave. That bloody man. He’ll pay. There is no question.

Or is this where the questions begin?

Marilyn Duckworth was born in Auckland in 1935, spent a war-time childhood in England and now lives in Wellington. She has published eleven novels, a short story collection and a book of poems. In the sixties a Scholarship in Letters helped her write
A Barbarous
Tongue,
which subsequently won her the Award For Achievement. Her novel
Disorderly Conduct
won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction in 1985, and was shortlisted for the Wattie Award. She has held the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship in Menton, a Fulbright Visiting Writers’ Fellowship, and the Writers’ Fellowship at Victoria University, Wellington. In 1994 she held a summer Writing Fellowship in Hawthornden Castle, Scotland.