A Needle in the Heart (4 page)

Jim wasn’t on the train, but Conrad was.

When she remembers, she thinks how unlikely it was that he would look at her twice. Already she had adopted the ways of an older woman: wore her hair up in a bun, and had taken to cheap glasses because she couldn’t thread a needle without them.

Still, it was she who saw him first. One of the things she liked was that this time she chose him. When he looked down she had already said yes.

‘Could you look after Neil for an hour?’ she asked Norma the next day. She knew what time his train came in. She knew that if she waited on the station he would follow her.

Just like that.

Not, is this all right? Are you sure about this? Nothing of that. Just the two of them on her and Jim’s bed. Her hair falling down around her face, her glasses left behind on the kitchen bench, him carrying her through the house holding her legs around his waist until he could put her down and they could do their business. He had a sweet
oily smell on his skin that she wore on her all that day.

His hands reached up for her cone-shaped breasts when she swung them above him.

‘Steady on,’ he said, ‘I can’t pull out like this.’

‘I’m still feeding the baby. I can’t get pregnant while I’m
breast-feeding
.’

His mouth then, everywhere.

His chest and arms bulged with muscles. On the river ascents when the trains climbed from Waiouru to Tangiwai, through the Junction and on towards Raurimu and the great central plateau of the island, from Taumarunui up to Frankton Junction, he threw three, perhaps four tons of coal through the firehole, placing the fuel from corner to corner along the near end of the grate. His wrists were swivelling steel. The sinewy arms that held her were like a high fence around her body.

She thought, fleetingly, of the needle that wandered around in her body. Somewhere, drifting among her blood, the thick red soup of herself, the needle had moved, perhaps entered her heart.

Norma said she’d have Neil at the same time the day after that, but Esme could see she looked at her oddly. She thought, I look different already.

All through the summer, the geraniums were in a red hot heat around the house, and he kept coming to see her. After the first few days she stopped asking Norma to mind Neil. She put him to bed in his cot and hoped he wouldn’t wake up. In moments when she tried to behave like a normal person — a person who wasn’t frantic with love, a person who mashed potatoes and made gravy and said here you are, here’s your tea, dear, and hung out the washing and snapped the napkins when they were dry — she thought that her son would wake and know what she did.

She stopped going to the post office, didn’t see Norma any more.

Queenie sent word that Pearl was coming to stay. She’d seen Jim at
the Taumarunui station when he’d gone relieving on a job down there, and told him to pass the message on to Esme.

‘She can’t come now,’ Esme cried.

‘I thought you liked having her.’

‘It’s not that I don’t want her to come, of course,’ Esme said
carefully
. ‘It’s just that, well, you know, I’m busy with Neil.’

‘One baby’s not that much work.’

‘Oh, what do you know about housework?’ This was what love did to her, it made her bold and reckless in the way she spoke.

‘There’s no need for that,’ Jim said. For an instant, she expected to be hit. And yet, she thought, he couldn’t do that, not Jim from Birmingham with his good manners and his kindness. Because, even though he wasn’t always happy in himself, and he complained about little things, he never did her any harm. Something about his look silenced her. She thought he must be able to sense the permanent swollen ache between her legs that he only made worse when he touched her.

‘I guess Pearl could come for a few days.’

‘It wouldn’t hurt,’ he said.

The day before Pearl arrived, she wrapped her legs tightly round Conrad’s waist. ‘I love you,’ she said, running her tongue in the inside of his ear.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know that all right.’ He didn’t say I love you back to her but he pulled her in closer to him so that she didn’t know where he began and she left off.

Pearl was nearly thirteen. She had grown bosoms and a head taller since Esme last saw her. She was rounded and plump and her fair hair had spun into ringlets that she wore down round her face. She’d sung in the end of the year concert at school.

‘Would you like me to sing my solo?’ she asked on the first
afternoon
of her visit.

‘Yes, please,’ said Esme fervently. It was twelve thirty. The train was due in at one.

Pearl sang

Early one morning,

just as the sun was rising,

I heard a maid sing in the valley below,

oh don’t deceive me,

oh never leave me …

At any other time such pure clarity would have wrung Esme’s heart but before Pearl had finished singing, she said, absently, ‘Could you mind Neil for me, d’you think? Just for half an hour.’

‘You weren’t listening,’ Pearl cried.

‘Yes, yes I was. Did you get that song off the radio?’

‘I hate you. It’s true what they say about you, isn’t it?’

Esme snatched her wrist and held on to it. ‘What do they say about me? What? You just tell me who says what about me. You hear me.’

‘Nothing,’ said Pearl in a sullen voice. Esme let her arm drop. There was an angry mark where she had twisted Pearl’s delicate flesh. ‘All right then, I’ll look after your rotten baby.’

‘Thank you,’ Esme said, and walked out, shutting the door behind her. She shivered as she hurried to the railway station, wishing she had brought her cardigan. It was autumn now and all week there had been a hint of frost in the morning. In the blue shadow of the mountain, the cold started early. She stood at the station, as she had that first time, only now she felt that people on the platform looked sideways at her, wondering what to expect next. She thought she was like Norma, flicking her head back and forth.

In fact, nothing much happened. The train came and Conrad wasn’t on it, and as soon as she saw that, she understood what she’d known all along: that he wouldn’t be there. She would never see him again. There was no real way of knowing this, just the feeling that things had gone too far and something had to change. She glimpsed her reflection in the murky painted window of the station waiting room, dishevelled and clutching her arms around herself.

Blindly, she turned and walked away from the station and through the town. Past the butcher’s shop where she should be going to buy
some liver and bacon for Jim’s tea, and perhaps a sausage for Pearl who wouldn’t eat liver. On past the greengrocer’s shop where a patient quiet Chinese woman put apples and oranges and spinach in the front window. On beyond the tobacconist’s shop where a group of men looked at her in silence as she hurried on by.

Nobody greeted her. So it was true then. They knew about her, knew why she stood so brazenly, in full sight of everyone, waiting for him.

She set off at a run, along the track beside the Mangawhero, where she used to walk before all this madness began. Further along the stream bed there was a rocky incline that dropped to a pool. She wanted to lie down in the water and let it freeze her, until she dropped like a stone to the bottom. Would Jim think to look for her there? He might, but she hoped that if he did he would simply leave her there. As winter closed in perhaps she would float to the surface and be rolled by boulders and glacial ice further down, out to sea or to one of the great lakes in the centre of the North Island, wherever it was the river went. She didn’t really care.

Nothing like that’s ever going to happen again, she said to herself, and it felt as if she had had an amputation of some kind. She found herself looking at her body as if she could see something missing. But it was all there, all of it. She thought about Neil, home alone with Pearl, and how, after a while, the boy would cry for her. Her breasts were leaking milk; she touched herself where her dress was wet and saw herself alone in the bush, a crazy woman with streaming hair, falling blindly across tree stumps and the dry grass of summer that was dying away as the cold weather set in. The river bubbled over the stones, shining where the water and the falling light touched them. She saw clouds, and bodies and floating, waving arms and the star faces of babies in them. Perhaps Pearl could look after her baby; she would soon get into the way of keeping house, the way Esme had. Then she thought that if that happened, Pearl would be with Jim, and that wouldn’t be right.

She turned and walked back towards the town. The sun had dropped away, blood red, followed by the amber light that strikes just
before dusk under the mountain; darkness started to settle. She began to be afraid of what she would find, and how she would have to face up to Jim’s anger if he discovered she’d left Neil with Pearl. I went for a walk and I got lost, was the first story that sprang to mind. If he wasn’t home already, might she not gather up Pearl and Neil and take them to the station to catch the train home? To Taumarunui. Only the train wasn’t due for hours and he would find them there on the station. Perhaps they could hide somewhere.

Then she told herself she had imagined everything. That nobody knew. Conrad had had a day off sick, or his roster had been changed. He’d be on the train the next day. By the time she got to the house, she found herself believing this.

Inside, the kerosene lamp had been lit. Pearl was stoking the fire under Norma’s instructions. Norma sat at the table with Neil in her lap, trying to get him to eat some food she’d mashed up for him. There was no sign of Jim.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said to both of them.

‘I didn’t know where you were,’ Pearl said sullenly.

‘The girl came and got me,’ said Norma. ‘Thank goodness. She’s got more brains than I’d have given her credit for.’

‘Has Jim been in?’ Esme asked.

‘Wouldn’t be surprised if he was having a drink or two with his mates.’

‘Jim doesn’t go drinking.’ Which was true. Jim wasn’t a drinking man: it was one of those things that had recommended him to Queenie.

‘Happen he might be now,’ Norma said. She stood up patting the creases in her skirt. ‘You know, Esme, it doesn’t pay to get your meat where you get your bread.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘There was a letter came for you this morning. Seeing you hadn’t been in for the mail I brought it over when Pearl called me. My husband said take it to her, it might be urgent.’

‘Thank you,’ said Esme again, glancing at the envelope. She didn’t recognise the big block letters that spelled her name on the envelope,
but she saw the soft glue that held the flap of the envelope in place. She guessed it had been opened.

‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ Norma asked.

Esme crumpled the letter in her hand as if it wasn’t important. ‘Probably a bill. That’s all the mail that ever comes, isn’t it?’ She opened the door and held it ajar, so that Norma had to walk through.

The letter said:

When Esme’s next boy was born she nearly died. The doctor and nurses at the cottage hospital gave her so much chloroform that if the baby hadn’t killed her coming out sideways, the dose almost did.

Norma came to visit and took a long look at Philip. ‘He might pass,’ she said, in a doubtful voice. Philip had been born with jet black curls and olive skin, nothing like his brother at all.

‘Pass for what?’ asked Esme.

Norma hesitated. ‘A white boy.’

Esme held Philip close to her, remembering the way her mother had taught her to soothe a baby. Already she could tell he was not a placid boy, but every limb seemed so perfect and unblemished she thought he couldn’t be real.

‘What would you like to call him?’ Jim asked.

‘What about Philip?’ she said, tentatively. This was the name of Jim’s father, although of course she had never met him. Jim’s parents had both died that year, the announcement of their deaths coming weeks later by sea mail, in letters edged with black.

‘Yes,’ Jim said, ‘that’s a nice idea. You go ahead and call him that.’ He stroked the baby’s cheek with his forefinger. ‘He’s a throwback this one,’ he said. ‘A right little darkie.’

‘One for Mum,’ Esme said.

Jim smiled and tickled the baby. It wasn’t like Norma said. He’d never come home drunk. He’d never had a word to say about anything that happened. If anything, he seemed more calm, and less willing to find fault with her than he had before.

The year the world went to war, Jim Moffit said I wish I could go (only he couldn’t because he was too old and he was needed for essential services anyway), and Ned, the fifth child of Awhina and Robert McDavitt’s eight children, said I’m going, and learned to sing the Maori Battalion song, and Lawrence Tyree, the film projectionist, said I’m glad I can stay here.

Lawrence had had a hernia operation, which he reckoned would keep him out of the war. He had blond hair and very smooth skin, so much like velvet you would think he had no beard except for a stain of mottled shadow that appeared at the end of the day. He’d come up to the Junction to live just before the war started and ran the picture theatre on Wednesday and Saturday nights.

‘You a shirker?’ asked Ned, on his visit to say goodbye before he left for the war. It was half time at the pictures on Saturday night.

‘I’ll show you my operation scar, if you like.’

‘All right,’ said Ned. ‘I’ll put two bob on it, there’s no scar.’

Everyone squeezed into the foyer to buy lemonade, stood watching as Lawrence began to undo his belt. Someone in the crowd reminded them that there were women and children present.