The Paua Tower (18 page)

Jack dropped the dandelion on the rubbish heap and continued walking back up the garden to the bank. His fingers fiddled with the pounamu fob on the end of his watch chain, an ornament that Amélie had bought him in a shop in Hokitika on that first New Zealand holiday. Jack had read of a legend that said pounamu was a fish in the water but turned to stone on land. Sometimes he
thought that was what had happened to his wife. Amélie belonged in France, not here in New Zealand. He had taken her from her home as a child heedlessly raids a rock pool and had robbed her of something he could neither fathom nor replace.

When Jack opened the door that led to his office he could hear the sound of Amélie laughing upstairs.

I
t was the third time in four days Stella had vomited at
breakfast
. Peg looked out the kitchen window at her daughter coming back up the frosty path from the dunny, her face the colour of flour, and knew immediately what was wrong. The girl was pregnant. Peg was furious. Hadn’t she and Doug done their best to bring Stella up decently, yet no sooner did she have a boyfriend than she got herself into trouble. Vic Cowan had seemed a nice bloke, responsible — mature, too — and now this. Fools, bloody young fools, the pair of them, Peg thought. Well, they’d made their bed and they would certainly lie in it. Vic would marry Stella, she and Doug would see to it, or the girl would just have to suffer the alternative. Wasn’t pleasant, of course, but if she, Peg, a respectable married woman, could find the courage to take the knitting needle to herself then so could a little tart like Stella. There was no way Peg would see the
Morgans disgraced by having an unwed mother in the family.

‘This is an nice how do you do,’ said Peg, wiping her hands on her sacking apron. It was evening, the meal finished and mother and daughter were washing up in the scullery.

‘What?’ said Stella.

‘You know, girl,’ said Peg, with a stony look. ‘You’re not that stupid.’

Stella paused as she wiped the cloth around the rim of a plate.

‘You’re expecting,’ said Peg. ‘That’s what.’

Stella, still holding the plate and cloth, sat down heavily on the broken chair by the back door. The shadowy fear that had confronted her night and day for the past few weeks had suddenly leapt into a spoken reality.

‘Why?’ said Stella. ‘Why do you think that?’

‘Pretty plain from the way you’ve been acting, and now this throwing up at breakfast,’ said Peg. ‘There’s a baby on the way, you can bet your boots on it. And you’d better get that Vic Cowan to marry you darn quick before the whole town knows.’

‘It’s not Vic’s,’ said Stella. ‘We never did anything like that.’

‘Not Vic’s?’ said Peg. ‘So you’ve been playing around with some other joker? Well, whoever it is, you better get married smartly. I’m not having you shame the whole family. Tell this other bloke he’s about to be a father and he’d better face up to his responsibilities.’

‘He wouldn’t marry me,’ said Stella. ‘And I wouldn’t want it.’

‘Should have thought of that before.’ Peg squeezed the
dishcloth
.

‘You don’t understand,’ said Stella. ‘He made me. I didn’t want to.’

‘Who made you?’ said Peg, turning to face her daughter.

‘Mr Maguire,’ said Stella. ‘He forced himself on me. It’s his.’

‘Maguire, the bastard,’ said Peg, her eyes flashing.

Stella started to cry.

‘Stop that,’ ordered Peg. ‘It’s not the end of the world. If what
you say is true, you’d better get down to your boss first thing tomorrow and tell him. He won’t want a scandal. He’ll fix you up somehow. Have it adopted or get rid of it — he’ll know what to do. Give you some money, even.’

‘I want to keep it,’ said Stella, dragging the tip of the tea towel along the floor. ‘It’s my baby.’

‘Keep it?’ said Peg. ‘Not here you won’t. If you want to keep the child you’d better get Vic to marry you and give out it’s his, though what you’d live on beats me.’

‘I couldn’t do that,’ said Stella. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to Vic.’

‘Look here, girl,’ said Peg angrily. ‘It’s not a question of what you want or don’t want or could or couldn’t do. Those things are luxuries that people like us don’t have. I’m telling you, either get rid of this baby or get married, simple as that, or you’ll be out of this house on your ear.’

Stella sat on her bed hugging herself. Peg was right — there was a baby on the way. Even at that moment Stella could feel a strange trickling sensation in her breasts like sand moving through the timer her mother used when she boiled eggs. Stella thought about Vic and how she longed to see him. She wanted to push her head into the folds of his jacket and feel the scratchy hair of the old tweed beneath her face. But Vic would hate her if she told him what had happened, and he would certainly never marry her now.

Then there was Mr Maguire. Stella imagined going into his office, standing beside that rude statue of the naked man. How could she say the words and what would she ask for? That Mr Maguire get someone to do to her what Peg had done, or ask him to pay to send her to another town so her baby could be taken and given away to strangers? Yet if she didn’t ask his help, how was she to live? She’d have to leave work once her stomach started bulging and afterwards who would employ an unmarried mother with a child?

When Stella was little, her older brother George sometimes
played chasing with her. Stella would run laughing and squealing under the clothesline, behind the dunny or along by the tree with the swing. One day George caught her. He picked her up under one arm, carried her to the coal shed and dumped her in there on top of the coal. Then he bolted the door and went away. Stella still remembered the blackness of the place and the grim smell of the coal. She was sure there were creatures in the shed — black-fanged animals with red eyes, and bats with wings like old curtains. She banged and kicked at the door and shouted but George didn’t come back. Stella remembered sitting in the terrifying darkness, sucking on her plaits for comfort until eventually her mother had come and let her out.

She touched the ends of her shorn bob. She thought of how she had thrown the hank of hair into the kitchen range and the speed with which it had disappeared in the flames. She wished she could escape cleanly like that, vanishing into some other place, fast and forever.

Marlborough Avenue was not a street anyone would choose to live in. It backed onto the railway yards at one end and was shaded by the side of the Adelphi cinema and the bulk of a disused dyeworks on the other. The Walshes lived next door to the dyeworks, crammed into rooms that had once been a shop. There were twelve children in the family, ranging from the seventeen-year-old
unemployed
twins Bruce and Len, who hung about the dyeworks smashing what was left of the windows, to the baby Alexander, who was a month old.

Norma Walsh was a very occasional parishioner at St Peter’s, though she was punctilious about insisting on baptism for her children. Her husband, Murray, said to be both a drunkard and a drifter, was seldom at home and seemed only to return to Matauranga to ensure his wife’s frequent pregnancies.

Roland had put off visiting the Walshes because he found contact with the family demoralising, though he’d had a message
from Mrs Walsh over a week before, asking him to call. He had only managed to make the visit this afternoon by permitting himself the luxury of driving.

Roland stopped the car as a clutch of Walsh children erupted from the open door of the house and surged into the street. He picked up his diary off the front seat as the youngsters surrounded the little Austin, pushing grubby faces to the windows and smearing greasy hands on the bodywork, which Roland had only that morning polished with the chamois duster.

‘Hello,’ said Roland, getting out of the car. The children stared in silence. ‘I’m from St Peter’s. I’ve come to see your mother.’

‘Are you God?’ said a little girl wearing a long ragged cardigan that reached to the top of her chilblained legs.

Roland laughed. ‘No, of course not,’ he said.

‘You the bloody vicar?’ said a sulky-looking youth who was leaning against a lamppost smoking.

Roland nodded.

‘I’m Len,’ said the young man.

‘How do you do.’ Roland held out his hand but the gesture was not returned.

‘That’s my brother Bruce over there,’ said Len, motioning with his head across the road to where another youth was sitting in the gutter.

‘So you’ve come about Alexander’s baptism?’ said Mrs Walsh, standing in the doorway holding a baby in her arms. ‘Got a car now, I see — can’t even walk around the corner. All right for some, I’d say.’

Roland blushed and wished he hadn’t brought the car. In the circumstances it had been insensitive and foolish. Very few people in Matauranga had cars, and those who did were seen as
outrageously
privileged and stuck up. Roland smiled as best he could, wished Mrs Walsh a good afternoon and went with her into the house.

Mrs Walsh, wearing an old cotton dress under a man’s singlet,
was a tall woman with a face that looked like a crack in concrete. Roland heard that she took in ironing, though he couldn’t imagine who employed her or how she could survive. The family lived in three rooms. Scrolls of wallpaper fell off the walls in jagged tongues and a leak left a dark stain across much of the ceiling. The room inside the front door was dark as the windows, which had once served the shop, had been painted over. The place smelt of body odour and rotting wood.

‘Clear out, the lot of you, or I’ll tan your hides!’ shouted Mrs Walsh at the children who had followed Roland into the house. ‘Sit down, Vicar,’ she said, gesturing towards the one armchair. Roland sat on it gingerly, having seen a spring pushing out of the seat and hoping he wouldn’t tear his trousers. ‘And this must be Alexander,’ said Roland, looking at the baby. ‘He looks a fine child.’

‘Another mouth to feed,’ said Mrs Walsh laying the baby down among some old jerseys in the butter box that served as a bassinet. ‘Do your best but the babies keep coming.’

‘It must be very difficult for you,’ said Roland, beginning to feel the loss of sensation in his tongue and the side of his face that always preceded a migraine. He wondered how quickly he could make the arrangements for the baptism and leave.

‘Difficult! What would you know about that?’ said Mrs Walsh bitterly.

‘Not much, I suppose,’ said Roland. Outside he could hear the children shouting and a strange rocking noise he didn’t recognise. ‘But it can’t be easy coping with a large family in these hard times.’

‘You can say that again,’ said Mrs Walsh, picking up the baby, who had started to cry, and pushing a beer bottle with a teat into the child’s mouth. ‘It’s all right, Vicar, it’s not booze. Just sugar and water.’

‘If there’s anything we can do at St Peter’s let me know,’ said Roland. ‘Clothes, furniture, things like that.’

‘Don’t like charity,’ said Mrs Walsh. ‘Never did, never will.’

There was a huge crash from the street and the sound of glass splintering and children laughing. Roland and Mrs Walsh rushed to the front door.

Lying on its side in the street was Roland’s car. On the passenger door, which was now facing skyward, Roland could see words scored into the paint. FUCK OFF, he read.

‘Hooligans!’ shouted Roland, catching sight of Len Walsh, who was standing by the overturned car, ostentatiously dusting his hands.

‘You did this?’ Mrs Walsh ran among her children cuffing ears as she went. ‘Young bastards.’

‘Like it?’ said Bruce Walsh at Roland’s elbow.

‘My car!’ stormed Roland, feeling fury enlarge his chest like a Sandow exerciser. ‘You’ve wrecked it!’

‘Going to call the cops, are we, Vicar?’ said Bruce Walsh, taking a puff of his cigarette. ‘Tell them some naughty boys spoilt your toy.’

‘You be quiet or I’ll really take to you,’ said Mrs Walsh, rounding on her son. ‘Off to the industrial school at Burnham, that’s what you two deserve.’

‘Keep your knickers on, Mum,’ said Len Walsh.

‘Put my car back this instant,’ said Roland, endeavouring to remain calm.

‘Come on, Bruce, give us a hand and we’ll get the thing upright before the vicar here wets himself,’ said Len, putting his hands on the car bonnet.

‘I’m very sorry, Mr Crawford,’ said Mrs Walsh. ‘They’re a right pair of larrikins, those two. Need their dad and a fair hiding.’

Roland watched in silence as the two boys pushed the car upright.

‘There you are, Vicar,’ said Bruce Walsh, smiling over a row of rotting front teeth. ‘Good as bloody gold.’

Roland looked at the car. The two windows on the driver’s side
were smashed and there was the hideous writing on the passenger door. He had no idea what the position would be about insurance.

‘Why?’ said Roland, trying to stop his voice shaking with anger. ‘Why did you do it?’

‘Because,’ said Bruce Walsh.

‘Because we bloody felt like it,’ said Len Walsh, spitting a thick gob of phlegm onto the pavement.

Roland drove home with his jacket draped out the window over the offensive words on the door. He considered reporting the matter to the police but a fine or borstal sentence for the twins would neither mend the car or make the Walshes’ family life any easier. He very much doubted it would do much to reform the two lads either. Parking in the motor shed beside the vicarage, he removed his jacket and ran his fingers over the damaged
paintwork
. He thought of how he had come to Matauranga so full of hope, yearning to uphold and support, and this was what the parishioners said in return. ‘Jesus, help me,’ said Roland, but he felt no comforting rush of succour. There was only the gnawing ache in his head and words FUCK OFF rough beneath his hand.

The river was cold. Not cold like the water from the scullery tap when you ran it into the kettle before putting it on the range, or like the draught that came through the bottom of the door when you sat on the dunny, but a different cold, stronger, deeper — a cold that sliced flesh like an insistent blade. Stella, thigh deep in the river, hadn’t expected the water to be so cold. It lapped against her legs, burning and cutting with a frozen lick as she forced herself forward. She had thought it would be easy finding a deep pool but once she waded into the water it was much shallower than she’d expected. The stones on the bottom slipped under her feet as she pushed herself on.

Stella was crying — not loud sobs but silent tears that hastened over her cheeks and onto her hand-me-down overcoat before falling into the river.

‘Sorry,’ she said, talking to herself and to her unborn child. ‘I’m so sorry. It’s not your fault but it has to be. There’s no other way. Don’t cry, don’t cry. I’m here. It’ll be over soon. Please, God, make it all right.’

Stella had spent the preceding night worrying about what she should do. She had taken Vic’s letters out of the shoebox under the bed and read them over and over. Vic had kept writing to her even after she’d told him not to come back and, though she didn’t reply, she repeatedly read the letters. Vic saying how much he loved her, how he couldn’t understand what had happened, how he just wanted her back. Poor Vic, she kept saying to herself. Poor, poor Vic. Stella lay on her bed in her clothes. She wanted to sleep but she couldn’t. She felt so tired and worn out, as if her bones were rotting away. Rest, she told herself, but her mind kept anxiously churning on. She was a heartbreak to Vic, a disgrace to her family and soon to be a failure as a mother, for the more she considered it, the less likely it seemed she could keep the baby. Yet the thought of having the little one ripped away from her was unbearable and Stella unthinkingly clenched her body tight as if this would save the child. She longed for a place of peace and calm where she and the baby could sleep without worry.