A Needle in the Heart (11 page)

‘Don’t speak like that,’ said Flo, looking at me. ‘She’s like a daughter to me.’ I felt her edge her chair protectively towards me.

‘Well, really. I do beg your pardon,’ said the mother-in-law, snorting. She had a lined face like a small old berry, very pale, and dusty with powder.

‘I’ll put your cakes away,’ said Flo. She clattered tins as she got them out of a kitchen cupboard and banged the lids as she shut them. She draped a clean tea towel over the enamel casserole dish she had stood on the bench. From the way her lips were pressed together it was clear Flo wasn’t planning any more conversation.

‘You’re so kind to me,’ her mother-in-law said, in an exaggerated way. ‘What’s in the casserole today?’ You could tell the way she really wanted to know: an old greedy expression glanced across her face.

‘Chicken.’

‘You sure you haven’t put liquor in it? I thought I tasted liquor in the last one you brought.’

‘I wouldn’t waste booze on you.’

‘I thought I smelled it. I go to church you know,’ she said, turning to me.

I nodded, without speaking. I thought that anything I said would be wrong.

‘A pity you don’t have a Frigidaire,’ Flo snapped. ‘This food won’t last five minutes in the heat.’

‘Oh well, who’s a spoilt girl? We know you have the best of everything.’

‘Theo’d buy you one in a flash,’ said Flo. ‘You know you only have to snap your fingers and you can have what you like.’

‘I’m too old to be filling up expensive contraptions like that. Tell that girl to help you more.’

‘We’re getting out of here,’ Flo said ominously. She snatched up her bags and pulled her cardigan off the back of her chair. ‘Come on.’ She indicated the door.

‘Feathers and paint, make a little girl just what she ain’t,’ said the older woman, as we were leaving. ‘I guess she’s better than nothing.’ She slammed the door shut, as if afraid Flo might hit her.

But Flo was staring straight ahead as she marched down the street with me at her heels, and I saw that there were tears glistening in her eyes. ‘I’ve had a few bitter pills in my time,’ she said, as if her jaw was aching, ‘but that really has to be the limit.’

The barren daughter-in-law. The childless woman. I see now how I was her trophy child, her daughter for the moment.

Of course she had wanted children. Once when I was visiting, we chatted about people I’d known in the town.

‘What became of Tommy Harrison?’ I asked. My children were playing in the garden where we could watch them. The sun was melting out of the sky and I thought the children should come in and put on more sunblock but Flo said, ‘Oh leave them, the sun’s good for them,’ the way she said, ‘Oh leave the young people alone, let them smoke,’ though she didn’t herself and I think would have hated it if I did.

‘Tommy Harrison? Oh, he’s around. Full of himself.’

‘I could have told you that.’

‘Well, never mind. I’m glad you didn’t marry him.’

‘Why? You were keen enough at the time.’

‘He didn’t have any children. You might have ended up the same as me.’

‘Oh Flo,’ I said. I didn’t know whether I wanted this
conversation
to go on, but this was the moment she had chosen to tell me. About the missed periods for a month or two, and the heavy swelling of her breasts, all the hope that followed her round and then the stains in her panties, a day of cramps, and it was over every
time. And how this happened, not once, but often — endless
farewells
in the bathroom.

‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘you know, there’ve been a few bitter pills. We were too old, me and Theo. I don’t know what I was thinking of, that he could give me kids. Don’t you think those children of yours should come in out of the sun?’

‘Yes,’ I said, relieved.

She had a sliver of snot on her lip that she wiped away with the back of her hand.

‘Hayfever,’ she said.

Not everything in that house was darkness, but when it came, it fell quickly. In their early years together, Flo and Theo loved the races and dressed up whenever there was a weekend race meeting. This went on for years, until suddenly Flo wanted a change, and they stopped. But they’d decorated their lavatory like one of those joke toilets, with pictures of racehorses, dozens of them, especially of the famous Phar Lap, whose heart, it was discovered when he died, weighed a whole fourteen pounds, as well as with cartoons that reflected their
enthusiastic
support for the right-wing politicians of the day.

And, deep in the house, there was a wide passage with a recess, which was like Flo’s throne room. A low seat made of plaited leather on a carved wooden frame sat beside a highly polished mahogany table. On the table stood three objects: a brass box containing
photographs
of the family, several of me as an infant, and of the farm where she grew up; a swirling cloudy green Crown Devon jug, kept filled with flowers (hydrangeas were her favourite); and the telephone. Flo sat on the low seat and talked on the phone for hours, either to her older sisters, or to her best friend Glad Dean with whom she’d nursed in the tuberculosis sanatorium during the war.

One evening, while I was talking on the phone, I let one of my new silver bracelets rest on the table. When Flo called out, that dinner was ready, I swung around from the table, scraping the bracelet along the surface and leaving a deep gouge behind.

‘You stupid cow,’ Flo shouted at me. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid.’

And then she didn’t speak to me for a week. Theo slunk around the house not speaking either.

As Theo was taking his lunchbox out of Flo’s Frigidaire one morning, I said, ‘I’m sorry, Uncle Theo.’ Flo was taking a bath and the door to the bathroom was firmly closed. Suddenly the big sprawling house seemed too small for the three of us and I had been thinking that if things didn’t improve soon I should probably pack up and go back up north to my parents. I felt joyless and as stupid as Flo had accused me of being. I had thought that Theo liked me living with them but now I felt unwelcome. He gazed through me as if I wasn’t there.

‘About the table. I didn’t mean to do it.’

He shook his head as if to clear it. ‘What about the table?’

‘About the scratch.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He was a bulky man, a bit big around the ears, with a small fold of fat between the base of his head and the beginning of his neck. He put his arm around me with an awkward little squeeze. ‘C’mon little tart, you’re doing all right.’

It was Friday when this happened. In the evening he came home very late.

‘Been at our mother’s, have we?’ Flo said, without looking up from the bench. His dinner was like a mud cake on a plate.

‘No, as a matter a fact, I havven been to Ma’s.’ He walked down the passage towards the bedroom.

I thought she would stay still in the kitchen but she followed him, telling him to speak to her. ‘Well, just say something will you,’ she shouted.

His voice when he answered her was too low to hear, but I heard hers, full of contempt. ‘You’re drunk. Think again.’

Then she said something else I didn’t hear.

‘It’s not my fault,’ he said.

So any number of things could have been going on in that house and the scratch on the table was beginning to seem like the least of them.

Flo kept up her silence for a week. She spoke to neither Theo nor
me, not even pass the butter stuff. Flo would suffer and eat dry bread rather than ask anyone for anything.

Then, as suddenly as all this had started, she was herself again. She resumed the preparation of my favourite foods and was
seemingly
peaceful, at least with me, until I left at the end of the year to go to another job, further south, which my parents had arranged. In the week before my departure, Flo moved back inside herself, although not in the same furious way that she had before. It was more as if she was resigned to something over which, again, she had no control.

Less than a year after I left, Theo complained one morning of not feeling well. He went to the doctor, and discovered he was dying. He fought a brief battle, which hardly seemed like a fight, with a rapid moving cancer that had started in his prostate.

The day after the funeral, Helena, the beautiful, sickly sister, arrived at Flo’s house with all her bags, and said she’d come to stay for a few weeks.

‘You don’t need to, I can manage,’ Flo said.

‘I doubt it,’ Helena said. She stayed for twenty years, until she, too, died. After Theo’s death Flo turned her back on nursing, and took a job in the county office, keeping minutes for all the council meetings. She had talents nobody had ever guessed. In the evenings she went home and cooked Helena’s meals, and although Helena talked in a lively fashion whenever I was there, I never heard Flo speak to her directly.

Once Theo had gone — a builder one day, a man dead and buried a month later — Flo discovered him, as if he’d been the love of her life. I think this was a fiction. A reconstruction. People believe what they want, I told my audiences on that tour. You can say what you like about the boundaries between life and art: people decide what they believe and that’s that.

Which I have supposed is what Flo did, what kept her going, through the years with Helena, and the years beyond that.

Flo’s poor old rotting hulk had a stale smell hovering about it that
no amount of bathing and attention would remove. She breathed in shallow puffs beneath an oxygen mask, not appearing to know us or hear us.

I was due to appear on a panel of writers in the town of Cambridge that night, nearly an hour’s drive away. I was ready to move on. The driving backwards and forwards to the hospital had taken a toll. I spoke in a kind of dream when I stood up in front of an audience. In my head, I knew Flo must die soon, but how long is soon? I was going abroad, and in a day or so there would be nothing for it: I would have to say goodbye. I was to go to Gisborne the next day, the last stage of my journey, and then home.

‘I’ll stay with Flo,’ Pamela said, when I explained the situation. I could see how reproachfully she looked at me. I had changed into clothes more appropriate for an evening gathering: a long dark skirt with a fuchsia-coloured jacket.

‘I might see if I can get a later flight tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay over there tonight, and come back first thing in the morning.’ Putting it off.

I met the group in Cambridge and checked into the room next to Davina Worth, who is a playwright. She writes monologues for solo voice, some of which she performs herself. She’s got clear green eyes and dark hair streaked with grey that falls from a centre parting. She’s a great person to be around, a formidable presence on stage. I began to think I need not have worried: she and the poet who had come as well would be enough in themselves. I saw the way Davina looked at me. ‘What have you been doing to yourself?’

I tried to explain, told her how I might still have to go back to the hospital that night. I’d rung and spoken to Joy, and she’d been noncommittal when I asked her how Flo was.

‘You’d tell me if she got worse, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she agreed.

‘Promise?’

‘I do, yes, I promise.’

‘You’re driving yourself nuts,’ Davina said, when I relayed this
conversation to her. ‘You’re going to Canada next week. Stop doing this to yourself.’

The booksellers sold fifty-seven copies of our books that evening in Cambridge. ‘Well done,’ they said and gave us cheques for our appearance fees.

‘I should go back to the hospital,’ I said.

‘You’re exhausted,’ said Davina. ‘You need to come out with us. When did you last eat?’

She and the poet and I ended up in a café, a reckless kind of place, full of celebrating Cambridge horse breeders having a night out, because someone had sold a horse for a million dollars that day. I can’t remember what I ate, but I drank two glasses of wine and laughed a lot. Davina told us a story about when she’d done some training in Australia for the theatre (she’d decided that she was better at writing for it than acting), and she’d rehearsed Ophelia. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t find her way into the character, which didn’t surprise me. Davina is too much of an extrovert, too thoroughly optimistic about life. ‘I couldn’t get it right. I said to the director, this Englishman with his broad Midlands accent, I said, “Barney, what am I going to do?” And Barnie just threw his hands in the air, and said, “I don’t
know
, perhaps you should think of yourself as a cross between a piece of jasmine and a booterfly.”’

I laughed so hard I cried, that terrible cracking up sort of laughter, that isn’t about humour; it’s painful and uncontrollable. The others looked at me with concern. When I’d recovered myself, I said abruptly, ‘I’ll ring the hospital.’

My cellphone wasn’t working when I tried to get through. ‘I’ll phone from the motel when we get back,’ I said.

Davina said, ‘You needed to do this. What you’ve been doing is too hard on you. You have to stop.’

The motelier had stayed up for me. ‘I’ve got a message for you,’ he said. ‘Its about a relative of yours. I’m sorry, it’s bad news. She’s not expected to live through the night.’

‘I’m away,’ I said to Davina.

‘I’ll come with you,’ she said.

‘No. No, you won’t. I’m going to sleep at the hospital.’

‘Shall I let the organisers know you’re not going to Gisborne tomorrow?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ll let tomorrow take care of itself.’

I set out into the dark Waikato night.

Five or six kilometres out of town the emergency petrol light came on. Slowly, and very carefully, I turned and drove back to town. Everything had turned into a terrible slow motion drama.

The first petrol station I came to was self-service only at that hour of the night. The young man behind the steel grilles wouldn’t come out for me.

‘My aunt is dying,’ I said.

‘That’s what they all say,’ he replied. He had a cold lunar face with shadows under his eyes. I couldn’t get the bowser to work.