A Needle in the Heart (19 page)

It just seems like Tania and Dixie are meant to be friends. Around ten years separates them in age, but it doesn’t matter, there’s always a lot to tell each other. Dixie tells her about the two men she’d married and how they abandoned her, and now she has a little boy who was her first husband’s but he lives with his stepfather, the second one, and how she’ll sort all that out before long. She’s had some spiritual experiences in her life which have mapped out a path for her. She takes Tania down Cuba Street to have her palm read, and the woman there tells her that she has a long life ahead of her after a period of indecision. There’s a man in her life but he isn’t the one for her.

‘She has her off days,’ Dixie says. ‘You and Gene are milk and honey together.’

Tania tells Dixie about the good marks she’d got in school when she was a little kid and how her brothers had taken the mickey over that. And then with some of the kids in the neighbourhood she’d hung around with, it wasn’t the thing to be smart, and she didn’t believe it anyway. Her mother had got her an apprenticeship in the hairdresser’s but, as she tells Dixie, that sucked — all that smarming around old women with little wisps of hair and their grumbles if she
shampooed too hard or too soft. All of these things, Dixie appears to understand absolutely. Dixie is there for her, too, when she gets into a mess with money.

Tania didn’t quite see how it happened: it was all so gradual you could hardly tell where it started. Except, of course, she lost her cleaning job. It wasn’t there for her when she went in on Monday morning and said she’d been sick as a dog, and the boss asked her why she didn’t let him know. Too sick, she said, I was too sick.

That was tough, the boss said, because he’d had to get someone else in to take her place, and he wasn’t putting off a good worker because she mucked him around. Go to the union, he said, knowing she hadn’t joined.

‘Don’t worry about your job, I’ll look after you,’ Gene said, when she talked to him about it. She thought it was a bit quick the way it all happened — one night she was sitting in the laundrette, and the next one she was living with him. ‘You can stay with me for a while,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to go back to that place.’ As if the flats were only fit for dogs. But still, it was nice, just the two of them living together in a little house, and having nice things, because when you cleared away the mess, it wasn’t such a bad place, and he wasn’t shy about spending money: he bought what he wanted. There was a lounge suite covered with real pale red leather in the sitting room, and a fantastic sound system, and when she said why don’t we get a proper bed, he said well, why not. They bought a king-size at Radford’s and had it delivered the same day; it just about filled the whole bedroom up.

‘I’d better bring my stuff over,’ she said, and that’s when he dropped the first bombshell.

‘I never said anything about bringing your stuff over.’

‘Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do with it?’ It was the first time they’d quarrelled and she could feel it boiling up so quickly it was like a lightning rod had struck them.

‘I didn’t say it was permanent.’ His voice was sullen.

‘You did.’

His voice hooked up a few notches. ‘I did not. When the fuck did
I ever say it was permanent? Who told you that goddam lie, goddam bitch, you lying little sow. Did Dixie put you up to this?’

‘Gene, I’m sorry, I thought …’

‘Don’t think. You hear me? Don’t think, bitch.’

‘Okay, okay, I just don’t have the rent and it’s due now.’

‘Oh, you don’t have the rent. All right, then. Perhaps I can give you a bit of rent.’

‘You don’t need to do that. I’ll go back there tonight. I’ll get an emergency benefit.’

‘You’d be so lucky. Oh shit, Tania, don’t do this to me. You’re like my life to me. You’re the most fantastic girl I ever met. I’ll give you the rent money.’

‘So what are you saying? You want me to stay here or go back there?’

‘Why do you have to make everything so complicated? Eh? Eh? I said do both. Stay here and I’ll pay the rent.’

‘So you’ve got somewhere for me to go when you want to kick me out?’

‘Are you trying to provoke me or what?’

At which point, Tania shut up.

She stays at Gene’s and makes them dinner some nights: he likes fish fingers with chips, and Sara Lee danish for dessert. They eat up town other nights, and meet Dixie when she isn’t working. Dixie gives her some money for tampons and lipstick and a few things like that, because Tania knows somehow she can’t ask Gene for any more than he’s giving her, and Dixie seems to know this without her mentioning it. Gene has a car, a big old restored Chevrolet with fins, painted green and silver. They drive around town together, Tania as good as sitting in his lap, and one Sunday they go over to Eastbourne and have a coffee in the tearooms in the park by the duck pond. ‘This is such shit,’ Gene says, looking around at the fathers playing with their children on the green. ‘I don’t know how people can do crap like this.’

Gene goes out some nights and she understands that this is the time when he works. She thinks he cut a few deals up town but he
doesn’t talk about that, and she thinks it best not to ask. He tells her one day that he’s inherited money. When she asks him who from, he says it’s none of her business.

Then he kicks her out, and that was when she’s in real trouble, because the rent at the flats hasn’t been paid for a month and they say she can’t go back unless she can front up with the money.

‘Can I stay with you for a bit?’ she asks Dixie.

Because she has no bed, no money, no shit, and she feels like hell.

‘We’re a bit crowded,’ Dixie says, which is true. She’s sharing with Jane, who has a forty-two-centimetre bust, and Susie, a Goth girl who’d gone to private school. ‘Why don’t I fix you up with a bit of work?’

‘I don’t know that I could do that,’ says Tania, ‘I haven’t been trained in massage.’

Dixie sighs. ‘Well, you know. It’s not a sports medicine degree we’re talking about here.’

Which Tania knows, she isn’t that silly, but while she has Gene to look after her, she’d thought maybe she could just avoid that.

‘I’ll have a talk to Gene,’ Dixie says.

So Tania, when she’s thought for a bit, asks: ‘How many girls does he have working for him?’

‘Never you mind,’ Dixie replies.

Tania has been back in her old flat three nights when Gene comes knocking on the door. She sees him through the spyhole in the door, pacing up and down, his thumbs hooked under his belt, his blue satin shirt spilling out at the back of his pants, his face white.

Opening the door, as far the chain will reach, she tells him, ‘Go away, arsehole, you’ve got what you want.’

‘I want you to come back to me,’ he says.

Slamming the door shut and turning to lean her back against it. Willing herself not to say anything. Because her mind is made up, she’s been through her time of indecision, and she is going back to the Valley on the first train in the morning. She can take things a day
at a time out there, the air’s fresh and there’s room to breathe.

Gene beating the door with his fists. ‘Let me in, let me in.’ Kicking the door, running against it, so that the place shakes, and people are coming out into the stairwells, shouting to shut up the noise. What did they think they were doing? They’ll call the police. Which is a laugh, because people don’t call the police in this block of flats unless someone is already dead.

So then she lets him in, shivering and crying and putting his arms around her for warmth, because it’s another cold night outside.

‘We’ll pack up your stuff,’ he says. ‘You’re coming back with me.’

‘But why?’ she says, as he throws open the wardrobe door and grabs the beaded top and the wind breaker she hasn’t worn since she met him.

‘Because you’re my girl.’

‘You mean I don’t have to work?’

‘Oh c’mon,’ he says, as they pull the door to the empty flat closed behind them, ‘everybody’s gotta work. You’re my girl, that’s the thing.’

‘No,’ she says, trying to drag herself free, ‘no, I’m not going to work for you. I don’t like that sort of work.’ Which she doesn’t at all. She’s been at it three nights, and she’s done fifteen or so jobs, all sorts — the working men on their way home, the men in business suits, a bunch of rugby players, and one or two of the grubby old fools people like to think are the only ones who really visit people like her.

‘Yes, you are, yes you are, you’re going to be my girl, and we’ll be sweet.’

‘How can I be your girl when there’re these other jokers too?’ They’re in bed, smoking and drinking a smooth red wine, which inches its way down and soothes her, sorts her out, makes her feel unreasonably content.

‘That’s different,’ he says. ‘That’s work. I’m the one you come home to — nobody else, nobody, you understand. You come straight home every night and I’ll be good to you.’

‘Okay.’

‘Just one thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You stay skinny. I like skinny girls. I want to count your ribs every night, okay?’

‘Okay, Gene.’ Which is fine and what she wanted so why is she crying now, lying here, with the wine working its way down her gullet, and the pink light filtering through the shade beside the bed, and more rain falling on the roof the way she likes to hear it?

Someone says they’ve seen Gene up town with a blonde called Moira. It must be Dixie who’s slipped that into the conversation, she can’t think who else would have told her. It’s not what she wants to hear. No shit. Perhaps she didn’t hear it. It rolls around in her head for a week. She doesn’t ask him. He’s in a mood she doesn’t like — scary, rather cold, not answering her when she speaks to him — which tells her it might be true. One day she talks about taking the train out to the Valley to see her mother.

‘No, you just quit it, you just stay at home.’

‘Are you frightened I mightn’t come back?’ she says, which is as daring as she gets. He stubs out his cigarette on the skin beside her navel and because she’s stoned and sick in the stomach, there’s nothing she can do about it. She has to wear a plaster on it for a week and it’s so damn sore she can’t lie on it at night, because that’s the way she likes to sleep, face down, her natural position.

He doesn’t come in until morning for five nights in a row.

Dixie says, ‘How come you never come out for a drink? How about you come with us tonight?’

‘You know I can’t. Gene would kill me.’

‘Strikes me, Gene wouldn’t know about it. I mean, if you really want to know.’

‘No I don’t.’

‘Yes, you do.’

At the pub she meets Ruka, who Dixie says is her cousin. He’s a big man in working clothes, a tree feller with the smell of bark on his skin. An easy friendly voice, an open face that she likes. An untroubled expression, big mouth, big laugh, big white teeth. Big family, Dixie
says, at some point in the evening, which should have told her to be careful, but they’ve drunk so many beers and followed them with so many chasers that one thing’s blurred into the next.

Mr Blue Satin stands in the witness box in front of the old dark wood panelling of the courtroom. His shirt is shimmering like one of those auras around aliens in science fiction movies. His hair is slicked up to a point and falls over to one side in a curl. Against the glare of the lights in the room, his face looks dim and pale and pointed.

‘Tell us what happened?’ the lawyer says.

‘I got a phone call about three in the morning.’

‘Who phoned you?’

‘The witness. Tania.’

‘What is the relationship between you and Tania?’

‘She’s a friend.’

‘Your girlfriend?’

‘No sir. A friend.’

‘Where were you?’

‘I was at a friend’s place.’

‘Another friend’s place.’

‘Yessir.’

‘You seem to have a lot of friends. What time was this?’

‘Three o’clock in the morning.’

‘What did she say to you?’

‘She said some joker had picked up and taken her out to Moa Point and tried to … well, you know.’

‘No, you tell me.’

‘Tried to rape her. She was hysterical, crying her eyes out, you know, really sobbing.’

‘You say he tried to rape her? That’s what she told you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘But he hadn’t succeeded?’

‘That’s what she said. Well, she said he’d had a go and she’d tried to push him away, and then he went to sleep. When he woke up he drove her home.’

‘Did she tell you whether she’d gone with him of her own accord?’

‘Objection, your honour. My learned friend is leading the witness into the realms of hearsay.’

‘Objection upheld.’

‘Very well. What did you do when your friend rang you in distress?’

‘I said I’d pick her up.’

‘Where from?’

‘My house.’

‘Oh, so she was at your house?’

‘She stays over there. She used to. We shared, you know, some of the facilities.’

‘I see, so you hurry from your friend’s house back to your house where your other friend, the witness, Miss X, is waiting for you, and then what do you do?’

‘She tells me what happens and I say, we’ll go out and look for him, you and me. He’s not going to get away with this. She says she’ll know his car if she sees it.’

‘So you think this man might still be driving around town?’

‘Well, he might have been.’

‘How long did you drive around for?’

‘All the next day. Till about three in the afternoon.’

Driving around, not knowing what Gene might do next. Trying to remember exactly what did happen, the night before, because it was like there was a great fog in her mind, a slumbering beast. If she could push it away, get out from under it, she would be able to see. Touring around, cruising from one place to another, places she and Gene’d been to, out to Eastbourne and along the bays, like a farewell trip. Knowing he had the gun under the seat, not knowing who he would decide to use it on, Ruka or her. Wondering, when they stopped for petrol, whether she should run for it, and risk getting gunned down on the spot. Thinking, Ruka will have gone by now, back to wherever it is he comes from, because he has three kids at home. Some time
before the blankness took over, when they were still back at the pub having laughs and drinks, and she was feeling the best she’d done in months, he was saying the missus would be after him if he wasn’t careful. Gene asking, is that his car, does it look like that, what colour was it, don’t tell me you didn’t get the registration, what are you? And Tania getting more and more scared that she might actually see Ruka’s car, and deciding that if they did, she wouldn’t say anything, she’d pretend she hadn’t seen him, because next thing there’d be blood and bodies everywhere and it would all be her fault — if she wasn’t already dead anyway. And if she could just have one chance to get out of this, she might go home to her mum.