A Needle in the Heart (18 page)

‘It’s very important,’ she said, ‘that you do this work for yourself.’

‘What work?’ asked Os. ‘I thought we were here to have a rest.’

‘Well,’ Sadie explained, ‘I mean that you have to think of these things for yourself, I can’t make them up for you.’

‘They have to be true?’

‘You can make things up if you like, Os, but I’m thinking about stories you might like to leave for your families. This is just a starting out point for perhaps recording some special memories that you can hand on to your children.’

‘Mr Cooper. Gunner Cooper, regimental number one two five.’ But his memory had left him behind and he could not finish the number. ‘Mr Cooper will do.’

‘Sure. Fine. Mr Cooper. We can do this another day if you like.’

‘You mean we can all stop?’

‘No. I mean, everyone else who’s interested in doing this can keep going, but you don’t have to, not if you don’t want to.’

‘I’ll do what they do. I do what I’m told.’ Os searched through the crayons and picked up a purple one. Looking from side to side to check what others were doing, he hesitated and wrote in large letters the word D
EATH
. He sat back and stared at what he had written.

‘Who died, Mr Cooper?’ Sadie’s voice was soft and insistent at his elbow.

When he didn’t answer, she said, ‘Your wife? Didn’t she die?’

‘Not wife.’ He chose a black crayon and wrote with angry strokes:

Sadie said, ‘I think we’ve done enough for today, Mr Cooper.’

‘All that bullshit,’ he said, beginning to cry. ‘All that trouble he caused.’

‘It’s nearly time for lunch now.’ She picked up the paper and folded it so that other people couldn’t read it.

When Patricia arrived in the afternoon, she asked, as would become her habit, ‘Is he having a good day?’ This was when the nurse showed her what Os had written. Sadie had said that she felt she ought to give it to someone: she knew a man in his condition could imagine things, and she thought perhaps her style of working with this group was a bit too intense, that perhaps she wouldn’t come back too soon, but there it was, she felt responsible.

Patricia took the piece of paper from her and studied it. ‘Poor old boy,’ she said finally. ‘He’s just so deluded, isn’t he?’

‘It’s so sad,’ the nurse said. ‘It must have really preyed on his mind, losing your brother like that. Young people don’t know what they’re doing to their families. It sounds as if he’d made up his mind to go missing.’

‘Yes,’ Patricia said, thinking about what the lawyer had said to her and Dan. ‘He’s lost, all right. We’ve given up on him coming home.’
When Kaye Swanson drives out of town, Patricia feels as if she has been holding in her breath for a very long time, and that now she can release it.

On her birthday, Dan and Patricia charter a hot air balloon from an out-of-town company to take them for a ride over Ramparts. This is what Patricia has chosen for her gift. Afterwards, the family will join them and they will drink champagne and have breakfast together.

The best time of day for balloon riding is dawn when the air is most still. First the pilot, a short nut-coloured man, releases a black balloon into the air to test the wind. This is the crucial moment, when the decision is made as to whether the flight will proceed.

He tells them it’s all go, and as soon as the balloon is inflated they will be away. The slow filling of the giant blue orb makes a monstrous noise, like the Wall of Death. Patricia has not been prepared for this, only for the perfect silence that has been promised her when she is airborne.

The flame that ignites the gas rushes up in huge sighing gusts and then the balloon rises gently into the air and, with only a frail basket between them and the ground far below, they are hovering high above Ramparts, high above the paddocks, and the farms, and the river. Dan exclaims, wants to point things out to her, but Patricia puts her fingers to her lips to hush him, so that she can experience every moment of this, without distraction. She sees where the river is joined by tributaries and how it rushes headlong to the sea. There is silence then, broken only by the waking cries of birds and the first bark of the dogs as they greet the rising sun.

She doesn’t speak, doesn’t say goodbye, not aloud anyway. From far below she can smell, coming up to meet her, fragrances that she recognises, hadn’t expected to detect this far from the ground: the dazzling scent of a honeysuckle hedge which for a moment makes her think she is going to faint; a bank of old Windrush roses that she planted on the Matheson farm soon after she was married and still a teenager. From here, the bank looks like one
of the tablecloths she threads and stitches, thrown carelessly across the landscape. She inhales the smell of fresh bread from the bakery in town, then she is hit by the sharp malodorous smell of cowshit in the yards. The flames leap up beside her. A swooning hawk flies alongside them. They seem to be racing its shadow on the ground.

She believes she can see pretty well everything that has happened here.

The waiting room outside the High Court is not the kind of place anyone should have to sit around in for hours. Tania thinks she could just get up and go, without waiting to hear a verdict. She’s only a witness when all’s said and done; it’s not as if she’s on trial. But that’s the way it feels. She’d stood up in the witness stand and said, ‘That’s him, that’s the one that did it. He’s the man I went off with that night, but he was just supposed to be giving me a lift home.’ Twelve pairs of eyes watching her from the jury benches. She couldn’t raise her eyes to look at one of those faces. They have all looked at photographs of her body. Perhaps they know her better than she knows herself. Point at him, the lawyer had said, show us the man. And, when she couldn’t raise her arm because it felt as if a lead weight was tying it to the edge of the stand, the judge had repeated it:
Point
. Not nastily, but she could tell he was impatient; it had all gone on long enough. Memory is a fine thing, you own yourself if you’ve got memory, but there were
some things she couldn’t remember; her whole mind had blanked out now about that night. She’d lifted her arm anyway, her own tired dissociated limb, and said, ‘That’s him, that’s the fella. That’s Ruka.’

When she had said it, she’d looked up for him, Mr Blue Satin, the boy man with the shirt that whirled around him like blue cream, but they’d taken him off where she couldn’t see him. So now what am I supposed to do, she wondered. Whose big fat stupid idea is it that I’ve come here?

And now she waits. Among sly little hussies like Dixie who’s supposed to be her friend, and her mother, and Gene, Mr Blue Satin himself, in a dirty waiting room, filled with overflowing ashtrays, and scuffed carpet and magazines that are ten years old and have had all the recipes cut out and the women in the celebrity pics have moustaches drawn on their faces, and rude words scrawled on their crotches.

‘They’ll put the bastard away,’ says Gene confidently. But Tania’s not that sure. She looked up just as she was finishing her evidence, finally dragging her eyes back to her surroundings, and she’d seen something on the faces of a couple of the jurors: a look of shock, or pity. It wasn’t that they didn’t like her — she could pretty well tell — it was just that they just didn’t believe her.

‘They’ll be out to get a rapist,’ Gene says. Tania sees that he is looking at the jury through different eyes. ‘You see if they don’t nail this joker.’ The week before there had been another story all over the papers. A girl left to rot, the way some men take and use children and then discard them. Disposable kids. There’d been street marches and lynch signs, threatening to castrate rapists. Women who were used to staying at home and peeling potatoes were out on the streets, shouting kill, kill, kill.

‘Ah, shut it, Gene,’ says Tania’s mother. Her thick black hair is tied up in a high pony-tail; her features are sculptured like a bone carving. Except when she’s driving her battered Mazda, she’s always got her sunglasses pushed up on top of her head, even when she’s sitting in a court waiting room at night and the jury’s been out for eight hours.

‘It couldn’t have happened at a better time,’ Gene says, smoke
curling out of the side of his mouth. It’s a little trick of his: you can’t see the opening in the corner of his lips where he lets it trickle out. ‘They’re not going to go soft on a joker who goes round attacking women. They’ll bring him down.’

The laundrette is situated down a short side street off the main drag in Newtown, a kind of alleyway, lined nearly all the way down one side with car repair places, quick fix it up and make them go outfits: Automotive Wizards, Rust Repairs, Spray Painting — you can bargain for a price at most of them. There’s a row of terrace houses with green pointy roofs, as if they’ve all been bought by the same landlord. The lawns have been replaced with bark over black
polythene
that’s cracking up and letting the weeds grow through. Round the corner on Constable Street there’s a giant block of flats, and at the other end, as you turn left and go on up towards the zoo, there’s the biggest block of council flats in the city. At night you hear the lions roar and the monkeys scream, and from the flats themselves, the fighting and swearing, the occasional shout in the night, a dozen languages called from one balcony to another and a trainee opera singer at practice. Howls like blues in the night.

Tania likes living there, or she did when she first moved in from the Hutt. You can feel the joint jumping, not like Taita, where she grew up, and where the streets are wide and empty at night, and the houses are spaced out, so that when you talk after dark you hear your own voice echoing. Its a funny thing about these flats in Newtown — you can take a stroll and find yourself in a sweet pretty neighbourhood with magnolias in front of the fences, or go on up the hill and you’re in the town belt with the sea melting beneath you, so it’s like you’ve got everything. But most of all, there’s the life of the city, the pubs and the cafs, the juice of the place running through your veins. There’s shops, and fruit markets and stalls, and crazy people wandering up and down, wearing hand-me-down caftans and beads and turbans, militant For Christ guys on the corners and addicts and brown and black people, and the smell of herbs and spices and Vietnamese mint mixed with backyard hangis
and behind the curtain curries, the whole lot mixed up together.

Tania went to the laundrette the first week after she moved in. You don’t have to be rich to be clean. ‘You’ve got the gift of looks,’ her mother said, ‘just make sure you’re always pressed and spotless and you’ll make your way in this world.’

Tania’s mother feels she’s done all right, despite one of her boys being a permanent truant, and her husband being what’s
generally
described as an absent father. She wears denim overalls with three-quarter legs, faded with the constant assault of cleanliness, and overbright slinky skivvies. Tania dresses in much the same way, except when she’s going out dancing. Then she puts on her best jeans and a red and black beaded top with a fringed hem that swings when she moves her hips. You could say she shares the same taste as her mother, not that she’d admit it for the world.

Pretty well every Tuesday night two sheets and one pillow slip and her three towels and a face flannel with a picture of a teddy bear, and one pair of jeans go into a plastic bag. She chooses Tuesday because she can only get one channel on television and who wants to watch
Coronation Street
, and there’s not much doing in town at the beginning of the week, and anyway she’s skint after the weekend, and pay day’s not until Thursday. Her work is cleaning offices, six o’clock in the morning start, so she doesn’t do too much night life during the week. She’s got computer skills: her teacher at college said she shouldn’t have much trouble getting an office job, and sure enough she works in an office but they don’t seem to be hiring caramel colours on reception at the moment. She did leave some notes out on some desks one night, saying hire me, I’m a nice girl, here’s my phone number, and she got fired from that job. It was just lucky that her mother knew somebody who knew somebody else from another firm who was hiring at the time.

The laundrette’s got big commercial-sized washing machines and a bank of coin-operated green and yellow-fronted Windsor driers. There’s a long formica table with twelve chairs arranged around it where you can sit while you wait for your stuff to go through. She’s sitting there chatting to a Samoan girl who’s doing really well at
university, and reckons that’s what Tania should be doing too, when Mr Blue Satin comes in. He’s a skinny boy, may be one seventy-eight tall, not much more than sixty kilos, with a bit of a swagger, hair oiled like guys in old-fashioned movies — the Fonz or somebody, one of those fifties geeks. She half expects him to start singing or shimmying around the place in his shiny shirt. It’s got three buttons undone and, just as you’d expect, a chain hangs among the half dozen hairs that nestle in the hollow beneath his collarbone. It’s not a fitting shirt: it rides easy on him, tucked in at the waist with a wide silvery buckled belt. By the unguarded light of the laundrette the shirt has a metallic sheen, melting this way and that like mercury in a bottle, and then turning blue again.

Mr Blue Satin carries a bundle of washing all scrunched up and rolled under one arm, nothing to hold it together, and a box of KFC in the other.

Tania watches him loading his stuff into a machine; she can’t help it, he’s a guy who’s kind of compulsive looking. She could see him as a school boy in a classroom, pulling faces behind the teacher and looking straight-faced while everybody else laughed. An antics kind of boy.

The student girl puts her things together. Her stuff’s already dry, but Tania’s guessed that she likes it in here, that it’s quieter than home.

Tania sees that the guy is holding out another blue satin shirt, taken from his washing bundle, wondering what to do next. ‘You shouldn’t put that in with your other things,’ she says.

‘I was wondering about that. The last one I washed came out looking like coloured mince.’

‘You should hand-wash it, like underwear. How many blue shirts have you got?’

‘Three but now one’s not fit to wear. I got Suresh the tailor to do me three all at once to use up his bolt of material. I figured that way I’d always have a clean one.’

He throws his box of fried chicken on the table in front of them. ‘Have some.’

‘I’m off,’ says the student. ‘You want to come over to my place?’

‘My clothes aren’t dry,’ says Tania.

‘You should still come to my house. You can keep your Kenfucky Tries, you,’ she says, addressing Mr Blue Satin. ‘You’re just trouble.’

‘Perhaps I’ll come a bit later,’ says Tania, picking out a piece of chicken. She hasn’t had any dinner, and the hot fatty meat is firing up her tastebuds.

The student lets the door slam shut behind her as she goes out.

‘Bit of a cow. Is she a mate of yours?’

‘I don’t even know her name. She’s doing a major in psychology.’

‘That explains it. Would you wash this shirt for me? I don’t know that I can do it without making a mess of it.’

‘You’ve gotta learn things like that. Two and a bit shirts won’t last long if you don’t know how to wash them.’

‘You could show me how. I’ve got some good shit at my house.’

‘So it’s true what she says.’ Tania indicates the spot where the student had sat. ‘You are trouble?’

‘Don’t tell me you wouldn’t like some good shit. I can tell from the look of you, you’re kind of hungry.’

‘I could just come and show you how to wash your shirt.’

‘Okay, you do that.’

The driers are spinning and humming all around them, while they eat and sit and read a magazine or two, and he presses his knee into hers and she aches at the thought of him, because just lately she’s been a bit lonely, and it’s shit getting up at the crack of dawn five days a week, and really she wants to know why the hell is she doing this, hanging out just to prove a point and live some place else except with her mother and brothers (although there’s the small matter of just a curtain hanging in the bedroom between her and her brother Jason, and the way he pulls his pudding all night long so that she doesn’t get that much sleep when she’s living at home).

In the morning she wakes up in Mr Blue Satin’s bed — she knows now that his name is Gene — and he murmurs in her ear, ‘You taste like plums at the end of summer.’ Nobody’s ever said anything
like that to her before, and she feels a wild and dizzying pleasure, as if she’s found home at last. It’s eight o’ clock and too late to go to work. She drinks a swig of red wine out of a bottle he offers her. The bed is actually a mattress on the floor. The room is like a tip, with CD’s and ashtrays and dirty socks, which he must have forgotten when he went to the laundrette, empty cigarette packs and a used needle, and wrappers from takeaways, and she thinks that when she gets up she’ll tidy up for him.

Around eleven, when she still hasn’t started out on this course of good intentions, a woman opens the bedroom door and stands looking at the pair of them holed up there under the purple duvet. The woman, whose name, Gene says, is Dixie, is around thirty, with red and yellow streaks frosted through her black ringlets. She’s dressed all in black from head to toe, a black leather bodice trimmed with black fur round the neckline, and a long black skirt. On her hands she wears black lace mittens, the fingers cut away to reveal blood-red fingertips.

She’s leaning on the door, looking down at Tania as if she can see her through the bed covers. Gene is on his back, smoking a cigarette not seeming as if he cares. Outside it’s started to rain, the noise on the iron roof so deafening you can hardly hear their voices.

‘Have one for me,’ Dixie says.

‘Is she your girlfriend?’ Tania asks, thinking she’s about to be killed.

‘Nah, she’s looking for money, aren’t you, doll?’

‘I’ve got some for you too,’ Dixie says.

‘Put it on the table. This here is Tania, my nice skinny new
girlfriend
. You want to give her a massage?’

‘Oh Jesus,’ Dixie says, ‘I’m dead beat as it is.’ But she’s started peeling off her gear, throwing her mittens and her skirt into a corner of the room.

‘It’s all right,’ says Tania, rolling over on her stomach. She’s
embarrassed
by Dixie seeing her with nothing on, except the cover.

‘No harm,’ says Dixie, dropping to her knees beside them. ‘C’mon kid, this is my job. Just keep still the way you are.’ Before Tania can do a thing about it, Dixie’s on top of her, squatting above her buttocks,
her fingers digging into her spine, and it’s sheer bliss, the way she pushes into the small of her back, finding pressure points she didn’t know she had. ‘Easy, girl, easy. Now you like that, don’t you?’

Which is true, she likes it as much as anything she and Gene have done. Dixie runs her fingers beneath Tania’s shoulder blades, then shimmies them down her spine, and it’s like a deluge engulfing her, every bit of her body folding out and out, layer upon layer of her, like a big flower showing itself to the sun, even though the rain is torrential, and a trickle of water is seeping into the room around the window frame, and running down the wall near the tip of her nose, and she can tell from the old bleak stains that run side by side with the water that this is no new thing, nothing freshly sprung. When Dixie’s got her in a state of such total relaxation that she’s drifting out into space, Gene sends her off to make coffee for them all and then he comes down on Tania from behind and it’s all right, it really is.