The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories (18 page)

I went over to her. She didn't smile. ‘How're you going?' I asked her.

‘Okay. You having a good time then?' She flicked her head in the direction of the others.

‘Yeah, okay.'

‘Hear you're going to be a beauty queen?'

‘Eh? Oh I dunno.'

I offered her a smoke. She took it but she didn't look as if she was enjoymg our conversation.

The others seemed to be just standing around. I can hear those men now, Miles and Bozo anyway. I'll bet they say, that place had atmosphere.

After a while Smitty began to dance with me. He danced as if he was playing basketball. Then the others started dancing, and soon I was with Bozo again.

The summer streets of our small provincial town. It is a city now but when I pass through it I see the same things I saw then, even if some of them are gone. It is a town that has been full of hotels as long as living memory. Prince's Gate still stands but the Grand has gone, an immense, elegant, pale grey
building, now burned to the ground. The Palace was bright pink, it is ‘tidied up' now. The railway station used to be approached by an avenue of trees; now no trains come and the buildings are concrete block afflicted by graffiti.

I watched the New Year's Eve Parade. The library closed for half an hour. There was a long open verandah down one side of the building, which was reached through glass doors opening on to it. A wide garden edged it, dense with dark lobelia and petunias this year. The librarian sat by the garden and read while the procession was on. She wore a wide sunhat and a cool blue linen dress. She pretended that the parade was not happening. Allowing us to shut was her only concession to our vulgarity. It was pointless to stay open, she remarked each year, the borrowers cannot get through the crowds. She never said that it was because nobody would come.

The procession of floats wound through the streets: Scouts in uniform, small girls in their tutus, pipers and marching girls.

The winner of the waitresses' derby (the one who had run the course without spilling a drop from her jug) was hoisted on the hotel float, the biggest and most colourful of them all, wreathed all over with green sidings and pink paper blossoms as if spring had had a late flowering.

The Summer Queen was wearing a dazzling organza dress, layer upon layer of material sprinkled with glitter billowing across the back of the float. She wore a sash across her breast, and she waved her arm above her head to us.

‘Well that's the competition,' a voice behind me said. Cliff Parker was young then, a little spindly, with wide luminescent eyes and a way of jabbing his head towards you. He was the film projectionist in the theatre which shared the same building as the library.

I realised with a perspicacity that alarmed me that the Summer Queen would indeed be my rival when I paraded as Miss Blue Lake.

If I did.

The crowd pressed against me, reeking of hot dogs and candy floss. A hurdy-gurdy played a tinkling tune.

‘Who told you?' I said foolishly, although it had become clear that half the town knew. I fancied that even some of the borrowers looked at me in a curious fashion, as if I was not wearing clothes. I stamped books with
trembling
hands these days.

Cliff was grinning with delight. ‘You might get into the movies,' he said.

‘I haven't said I'll do it.'

‘You'd be mad if you didn't. Don't you want to be famous?'

I said I was still thinking about it. He shook his head.

Afterwards I thought about what he had said and wondered what I did want to make of myself. A firm, lightly tanned young matron I supposed, with a toddler walking on reins and another child lying in a pram dressed in fluffy yellow rompers. I would own a house somewhere. I would buy things in the shops.

Or I would be a librarian until I grew old. I would mend books. I would keep the stackroom in order. The skin round my eyes would grow puffy from reading books. Yes, I would read books.

In the afternoon on the day following New Year I went with Smitty and Miles and Bozo and Linda and Sugar to the lake. We had been up until late the night before. We tired easily: of oiling each other's bodies, of singing little snatches of songs
pretend
you're
happy
when
you're
blue,
of talking
it
isn't
very
hard
to
do-o,
of each other. They asked me if I was going to be Miss Blue Lake. Frank had rung Sugar in the morning to ask her.
Ask
her,
she had said, meaning me. What's her phone number, he inquired. She told him that I didn't have one. She told me I had better make up my mind, because soon Frank might change his. I knew she meant he thought it was queer the way I didn't have a phone at my house.

She mentioned that everyone was getting sick of me thinking about my decision, as if it were
all
that
important.
As the afternoon wore on she and Linda offered opinions to each other on a variety of topics as we lay and toasted in a sultry sun; they didn't ask mine about any of them.

Night began to fall, the sun dropped hurriedly away, the air seemed to clear, and a delicate half-light closed in. A ruffle of wind passed over the lake, the last water-skiers went home. We shivered, put on jerseys, talked of going to town to buy fish and chips.

Miles and Linda stood up and said they were going for a walk. Sugar said to Smitty why didn't they, and Bozo and I were left. When he suggested that we go for a walk too I dutifully agreed. Bozo had had his hand on my knee and around my shoulders in the car, which I understood to be a price that must be paid for this passing summer. Linda was engaged; I hadn't been sure how she paid her dues, now I could see the price tag, though I saw too, as she went away with Miles, that it wasn't a hardship.

Bush fronds leaned against the place where Bozo led me; pongas with dark curled hearts touched my face. I lay down in the ferns and put my arms around him. He leaned his face on mine, a little furry like the plants.

‘I don't want to do it,' I said.

‘Go on, I've brought some joeys.'

‘No,' I said, ‘they affect me.'

‘You don't want to do it without?' he muttered.

‘No. I don't want to do it.'

He rolled on his back, his face agonised. ‘I'll tell them we did it,' I said, divining the true cause of his distress.

‘Yeah? Would you?'

‘Yes. I'll tell them, that it was, you know, it was nice.'

‘You're a good kid. Yeah. You're okay,' he said. We sat smoking Craven A and I heard the bushes crackling. Bozo jumped to his feet, laughing loudly at the sky. A fleck of stars had appeared.

‘We're through,' he cried, and Smitty appeared between the trees.

‘All yours,' he said, and scurried away, leaving me with Smitty, the graceful basketballer with the sinewy body. He lay down beside me.

‘We're taking turns,' he said.

I lay still on the hard ground. In the dim light I saw that others had been there before us. A joey, a cigarette pack, some toffee papers. Smitty put his arm around me in a careless gentle embrace. I liked his warmth, his smell, though I knew it was partly of Sugar: maybe I liked the smell of her. Her body was beautiful to oil.

He rolled towards me, his hands travelled over me.

After a while he sighed, moved away. ‘You've got a beautiful body,' he said, ‘really beautiful, you don't need to show it to anyone.'

‘Honestly?' I wanted to talk to him about the beauty contest; I thought I was on the point of learning something.

Only Miles came then, because it was his turn.

I saw Sugar on my way to work, after the holiday. Linda's fiancé was back, she said, and this afternoon she and Linda planned to finish work early and shop for material for the wedding dresses. They'd decided on guipure lace.

I said that was nice, perhaps I would see them later. Not so, Sugar thought, and her face was serious, embarrassed. Linda's fiancé didn't approve of me, she said, he'd heard I was cheap. It was a pity, but it wasn't her fault. She guessed she would see me round sometime.

Stiffly, I mentioned the contest.

‘Oh that,' she shrugged. ‘It doesn't really matter.'

‘You asked me. Frank asked me.'

‘I expect they'll find someone.'

I resolved to ring Frank from the library phone in the tea break that afternoon and tell him I would be Miss Blue Lake.

When I rang he was out for the day.

At the end of the library was a museum. Part of our duties was to take daily turns at dusting the artefacts each morning and to collect money from people who wished to examine the exhibits. Locals who held cards for the library were admitted free; it cost visitors one shilling.

Few people came in the summer, although in the winter tourists
sometimes
took shelter there for an hour or so. The room was very dark; in its gloom, under the light of bare electric bulbs, long glass cases contained greenstone adzes and hundreds of pieces of kauri gum. The gum had been liquefied then poured into shapes over objects and creatures and left to set. Spiders and bush wetas and the photographs of gum diggers' dead mothers were entrapped in the dull amber-gold mounds.

I dusted the cases with care. It was easier than shelving books and besides, everything we did in the library was observed by the beautiful woman in charge. She was quick to record our shortcomings.

On this morning I took longer than usual, though I didn't know why we should bother with the room at all. We had taken three shillings the day before. I put my hands on one of the cases and stared through the glass. I felt heavy and tired as if I had slept badly, although I couldn't remember being awake in the night.

‘There is work to be done in the library,' the librarian said.

‘Yes,' I said, starting. I made as if to go, but she walked over to me, holding me in her intense blue look.

She looked down into the glass case too. The body of a centipede was stretched before us in a lump of resin. She sighed.

‘What are you going to do?' she asked.

‘About what?' I asked foolishly, although I knew at once that she too must have heard about the bathing beauty contest.

She didn't look at me but continued to gaze at the centipede, captured forever in an ungainly pose.

‘I will not have my staff making themselves ridiculous,' she said.

I said nothing. I watched dust motes dance in front of the slit windows of the museum where a little morning sun was filtering through.

‘We must improve this room,' she said, looking around her, as if forced to pay attention for once to the part of the building which least interested her.

‘Yes. Perhaps we could ask the council for a grant,' I replied.

She nodded and her finely manicured fingers tapped on the glass.

‘You'll do well enough,' she said. ‘But not at that. You cannot parade yourself in front of people. You cannot do that.'

‘You're mad,' Cliff Parker said, when I told him that evening. ‘Think of the movies.'

Cliff is like that, a person stepped straight out of his own dramas. I suppose we are all the same.

‘It's all right,' I said. ‘It's just as well. I can't water-ski, you know.'

‘Oh well, there must be something you can do,' he said, with the sort of confidence which has made me remember him. I knew that when I saw him next he would have thought of some other scheme to help me get through life.

‘Oh sure there is,' I said, and to reassure him, I added, ‘It's a matter of balance. Water-skiing. I could get on my feet next summer.'

I saw waitresses laughing on the balconies of the hotels, a man from the carnival walked through the street holding a plaster head on a stick. The green trees stooped towards the pavement. An eddy of wind tumbled down Fenton Street and a newspaper lifted on this lazy breeze and wrapped itself with sudden vigour around a lamp post and collapsed again. In the evening the long street was as blue as larkspurs. I stopped in front of a shop window and looked down at a pair of red shoes. Just you wait, I thought.

A
T FIVE O
'
CLOCK
Anita woke up again and, moving very quietly so as not to disturb her husband, she got out of bed and went to the telephone to ring the taped meteorological service. She was due to fly to Auckland at eight-thirty. The ostensible, and to some extent the actual reason for her flight was in order to attend the meeting of a cultural organisation of which she was a national administrator. Anita wanted to be as sure as it was possible that the planes would be flying, that the weather would permit them to take off. Her fear was almost certainly irrational for the previous evening the sky had only been mildly cloudy. But it was an erratic climate where they lived.

The telephone was in the kitchen, but there was an extension beside their bed. When she dialled there would be a small prickling buzz on the bedroom phone. Brian slept more heavily than she did in the mornings, yet she was so afraid that he would be wakened that her hands shook and her clumsiness seemed to echo through the house.

The voice at the other end was bland and reassuring. She had no doubt that it would have conveyed equal reassurance if there were to be gales or thunderstorms. Because she was in love with a man who lived in Auckland she would brave storms, she would make rash and foolish pacts with destiny, if only she was given the chance to try her luck. It was when chance failed her that she despaired. Nobody would ever know the risks she had taken in the name of love, or how foolish some of them had appeared to her when she remembered them later. As she replaced the receiver it occurred to her that fine weather did not necessarily mean the absence of fog, and that on an otherwise perfect day a funnel of vapour might roll off the sea and cover the airport. Where they lived it had been known to happen, sometimes for days on end.

She walked to the window then, cautious so that she would not catch the loose floorboard. Sometimes she had walked on it in the night, making a
sound like gunshot. Or so it always seemed. Her life was much preoccupied with how things seemed.

This morning as she bathed and dressed to go to the airport she must seem to Brian as if the event was of little importance. Interesting, yes; fraught with the slight edge of panic which always accompanied either of them when they flew, yes — that too. But not crucial to her wellbeing. No, she must not allow that to show. She was, after all, only flying to Auckland for a short meeting. It would be over in an hour or two, and tonight she would be back here and they would be going out to dinner. Though she couldn't remember why they had agreed on a week night. Their friends must have better organised lives and a greater resilience to hangovers than she did. Brian pointed out that she didn't have to get a hangover, that it was not essential to a night out, and that they were falling into some kind of trap that insisted on this ritual suffering. Yet when it came to the point on these occasions, he too would invariably look ill the next morning, his face gleaming with an unnatural pallor while it was still sleek from shaving.

She had said that she could find her own way to the airport, but he would have none of it. He called to her to hurry when she was still halfway through her make-up. Her face stared back at her from the glass, the shadows under her eyes smoky and huge. She had hardly slept at all. Or, again, so it seemed. She had read recently that people who thought they lay awake at nights often did so only for a few minutes or even seconds, believing it to be hours. But that had not been the case last night. She had listened to Brian's even
breathing
, the occasional snore as he rolled over, felt his arm flung over her from time to time. He had rolled eight times while she was awake and put his arm around her three times. That was not imagination, or the passage of seconds. That was a long time. The last time he had rolled against her he had had an erection in his sleep. That was when she moved carefully away from him and got up. And she hadn't slept since then. When she got back into bed he had been asleep again. Almost unnaturally so, as if it were just possible that he was feigning. To test him she had lain along the length of his back and slid her hand down his thigh. He had continued to sleep and she believed that he had not heard her phone call. But she did not sleep again.

Her reddish-brown hair fizzed around her face. She had high bones in her face and she was more gaunt than was generally considered attractive. She wore little make-up as if to emphasise that it didn't matter whether she was good-looking or not and, being tall, expected few people to analyse her appearance. Anita was a presence, and she was intelligent. It was this which mattered, to show an intelligent face to the world. But this morning the stretched lines and smudges invited more attention to detail. She was still
working at it with care when Brian called for the second time. She dragged a comb through the tangle of her hair and gave up. If it was a good flight she could sleep for half an hour on the plane. Which it would be, for the weather was up to its prediction and the sky high and blue beyond the house, now that the day had broken. She wondered how she had managed to be so late when she had been up so early. Yet, oddly, and for no reason that she could explain to herself, she began to put off leaving the house.

‘Is Simon out of bed?' she called from the bathroom.

‘That's his problem,' said Brian.

‘Haven't you called him?'

‘I thought you had.'

‘I thought you would. You know I'm going away.'

She said ‘going away' with an inflection, as if she was leaving them for months.

‘I'm tired of running after him as if he were a child,' Brian said, as she appeared in the sitting room.

He was running his hand over a blue vase, a deep glowing blue pot with a perfect orb in its base. ‘I like this. Where did you say you got it?'

She didn't reply to that, but said instead, as if speaking of their son, ‘What would you all do without me to run after you?' She had banged on Simon's door as she walked through the passage.

‘The others managed all right. In the long run,' said Brian.

She supposed they had, although their younger daughter was causing them concern at university — perhaps Caroline would get her degree eventually, though they could all agree that it should have happened sooner, and they didn't like the man the elder one was living with, although Jane continued to behave as if there were nothing wrong and brought him to the house too often, which was almost worse than not seeing her at all.

Simon appeared in the doorway. His face was puffy under a mat of soft down. Anita wanted to touch him then, to cradle him if she could. He had always been the one she most liked to hold. That was how she put it to herself, although what she meant in a secret furtive way, was that he was her favourite child.

‘Hasn't anyone at school told you to shave yet?' she heard herself saying waspishly.

He ignored the question. He was good at turning the subject away from himself with a simple refusal to answer. Like her.

‘I'm going away,' she said.

‘Oh yeah, what did you wake me up for?'

‘School. Remember? The house of learning.'

‘I've got study leave. Have you forgotten?'

She had. He had told her the night before, chatty and amiable while she was preparing dinner, the sort of moment she enjoyed with him.

‘I mean …' She faltered. ‘If you don't get up you'll have wasted your day. You won't get any study done.'

He turned on her, shouting. ‘Shove off and leave me alone.' His voice broke on the end of his words, so that they turned to a scream.

Anita picked up her coat and threw it over her arm, reaching for her briefcase. ‘We'd better hurry,' she said to Brian.

‘I've been telling you that for ten minutes.'

‘Where are you going?' Simon asked as she walked out the door.

‘I told you. Have you forgotten?' She closed the door behind her, hating her cheap parting shot.

In the car Brian said, ‘Why don't you start potting again?'

‘I don't have the time,' she said. ‘Anyway, I don't think I'm much good. I don't know that I ever have been.'

‘Does that matter?'

‘It's all very well being in these organisations, and running things, but if you don't do it yourself …' He shrugged.

‘I do a good job. It's a useful way to earn my keep.'

‘Administration. It's not the same as doing it yourself, that's all.'

‘That's rich. Coming from you.' She knew they were close to some kind of quarrel, the kind that she suppressed these days. The sort that on no account she wanted to have before she boarded the plane this morning.

‘That's different. I'm a trained administrator. That's all I know how to do. As you know.'

‘A trained public servant.' She gazed away from him out the window, watching the coastline as they passed it.

‘If you like. But at least I know what I am.'

‘I'm not a trained anything,' she said. ‘I do the best I can. You know what that means, picking up here and there.'

‘You don't know whether you're a good potter or not,' he insisted. ‘You never gave it a fair try. The kiln, your shed, all the equipment, you don't use it any more … You don't have to be the best, do you?'

Her hands, lying in her lap, looked large and heavy knuckled to her. She turned them over, and wondered if they could make things or not. In her head she always could, but when she really tried to do certain things they didn't satisfy her, were never as good as she hoped. Secretly, she knew that it was the best that she wanted, that it was perfection itself that was out of her grasp. Love and art were inextricably twined. They were one and the same.
Their pursuit was a common goal. Somehow she could never get quite near enough.

Brian turned his attention to the traffic, and it was banked up at the intersection. As she glanced at her watch she saw that it was close to check-in.

‘I'll get you there on time. I told you we should have left earlier.' His voice was weary and slanted with anger.

‘I didn't ask you to bring me.'

They continued in silence, Brian accelerating through the traffic at speed now. Outside the terminal building he said, ‘What time am I picking you up?'

‘Don't worry, I'll find my own way home.'

He sighed, clenching his jaw over the need to be held responsible for her. ‘What time are we due at the Corbetts' for dinner, then?'

‘Oh … sevenish, seven-thirty.' As she closed the door she relented. ‘My plane's due at six.' She remembered that Ellen was cooking Italian these days. Brian had never cared for pasta.

In the queue at the check-in counter a television interviewer whom Anita and Brian had met with her husband at a dinner party was arguing with a Government Member of Parliament. The interviewer had sharp yellow hair and was wearing a Stetson with green feathers in the band.

She said, ‘I do love you, you know.'

‘You love power,' the politician said, as if it was a revelation.

‘You say that to me?' Her voice was rising on a dangerous note.

‘Keep your voice down. Please.'

She smiled. She had beautiful glittering teeth. ‘I could bring the
Government
down, you know.'

They moved forward and collected their seat numbers. Anita found they had got the last non-smoking seats.

When she was seated on the plane she realised she was shaking. She strapped herself in and accepted a magazine, starting at once to read an article about de Lorean. The rise and fall of a man. His wife appeared beautiful in her photographs. To say nothing then of the fall of a woman. The pilot announced that due to mechanical fault in the plane they would not take off. In fact, they would actually have to get off the plane and wait for another one to arrive from somewhere else. Or they might have to be re-ticketed on to other flights. The yellow-haired interviewer was crying when they got off the plane. Her mascara was collecting in the otherwise indiscernible folds under her eyes. The sea shone with blinding azure clarity to the side of the runway as they all walked off the tarmac.

It was ten-thirty when the flight took off, which meant that by the time
they landed and she had made her way into town, Anita's meeting would be almost over. She knew that she had no right to be on the plane. Her mind revolved around ways of paying for her own flight and refunding the money for the ticket while at the same time explaining to Brian, or her colleagues, or whoever might care, why she had gone ahead with the flight anyway. At the airport, as she waited, she had been similarly confused. She could not decide whether she should ring the committee and tell them that she was unable to make it to the meeting, so that they were not expecting her in Auckland even though she still intended to go. Then she was afraid that if she did, someone (anyone, Brian, one of the children, her office in town) might ring with messages and find that she had not left — or appeared not to have gone. Or, when she arrived in Auckland, that some disaster might befall the evening flight so that she could not return, and that too would reveal her deceptions. And so on. She had read stories like that. And she had once had a lover who imagined earthquakes when they were in hotel rooms, car accidents when they went on a picnic, and worst, that they might be caught in a street scene by a television camera and shown on the news together to the whole country that night. She had loved him with a passion so intense that she recalled once standing gazing out to sea at dawn and thinking of him and being certain that every day for the rest of her life she would wake thinking of him. Now she remembered that moment more clearly than she could recollect his face.