A Needle in the Heart (9 page)

‘I’ll fix it,’ he said. ‘Leave it to me.’

Esme knew he would come. She knew if she waited long enough, lived long enough, that he would come to her. The girl (for that is how she thought of Petra) had her own life. She didn’t begrudge her that at all. She was pleased to get a postcard from her to say thank you for the brooch. I’ll always treasure it, Petra wrote. The postcard showed racks of brightly coloured preserved fruit in jars standing at a roadside in front of a farmhouse. It had been sent from Australia where Petra was on tour. Petra was like her, but she’d got lucky: she’d married the right one, at the beginning. She’d make his life hell, but she wouldn’t leave him.

Esme’s apartment was in the second storey of a block of council flats. She had to climb stairs that were bare and had been pissed on, and she was afraid of some of the young people who hung round there after dark, but the view across rolling country hills was just what she liked to see and she had no great need to go out at night.
Her name was down on the waiting list for a ground-floor place but she didn’t care if it didn’t happen. Anyone stepping inside her door quickly forgot the ascent through the graffiti in the stairwell. She had turned it into a magic cave, the chairs covered with peggy square quilts, the shelves laden with bits and pieces of other peoples’ lives: a silver vase from a farmhouse in Taranaki, a ruby red glass from another, a blue and white ashet from a house where the wife died, a collection of shells that she and Janet and Marlene had collected one holiday at the Mount, pot plants and photographs galore.

‘I can get you somewhere better,’ Philip said, when he came to visit. He had turned up unexpectedly with Jesse and Marigold.

‘I wish you’d given me some warning,’ she said. ‘I’d have liked to have food in for them.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘we’ve sussed out the fish and chip shop. They’re going down the road to get some lunch, aren’t you kids?’

‘You tell them to be careful,’ she said anxiously.

‘Oh, there’s worse places in Wellington,’ he said. ‘They’ll be okay.’

So that they were alone in the flat together.

‘They’re beautiful,’ she said. ‘So handsome and tall for their age. So full of self-confidence.’

‘They take after their mother.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said.

‘About another place for you. I can afford it, you know.’

‘I don’t need another place. I like it here.’

‘You can’t.’ He gestured helplessly.

‘What’s wrong with this?’ She looked around the room and then her eye travelled to the hills beyond the window. It was spring at the time, bare trees in the distance were flushed with sweet unfolding buds. ‘Pretty as a picture. I wish you children would stop nagging me.’

‘Did you ever care for my father?’ he said, his back to her, as if contemplating what she saw outside. She could tell he knew that he sounded banal, even a bit silly. That he couldn’t help himself asking this question, and didn’t know of a better way of putting it. ‘You know, did you love him?’

‘Of course,’ she said quickly. Too quickly. She steadied herself.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I did.’

He passed his hand over his head. His hair was trimmed neatly these days; in the centre of his forehead a triangle of hair grew down to a point, his scalp gleaming on either side.

‘About Pearl.’

‘Well, that was a long time ago,’ she said, holding his gaze. ‘A sister.’ Not my sister, or your sister. But that old needle, the jostling bit of pain. She wondered if he would understand. About the old days, and the magic that wasn’t so mysterious after all, about how Pearl had come into her life when she was still a child herself and nothing had ever healed that — and the way her mother tried to make things all right, but they never could be fixed.

‘What about her?’ he said. ‘You left when she died.’

‘Do you remember her?’ Not answering him.

‘Not really,’ he said.

‘Never mind. Look, that’s her in the photograph with her boyfriend. I think he was killed at the war.’

‘She was pretty.’

‘Pretty enough. A bit flighty. She could sing. You wouldn’t believe how long she could hold a high note.’

‘I see.’ From the way he said it, she wondered what he knew, what he had already worked out for himself. There was a stamping of feet on the stairs leading up to the apartment as his children returned.

After they had all gone, she lay down on the bed, overtaken by a kind of dizziness. It wasn’t new to her. It amazed her that so far she had survived death’s steady rhythm, that she had out-lived so many people. She heard a car start below. Somewhere in her old aching bitten heart, she thought, there he is, there he goes, my clever boy.

He would, she believed, have some secrets of his own.

A few years ago, I met a young man who, had I been a younger woman, I might have considered to be romantically inclined towards me. As it was, he was looking for someone to listen to his troubles. He chose me because I had told him a dramatic story in a bar in Banff, about a night when I raced across a darkened countryside in a state of blind panic, totally lost in a place I knew well, looking for and continually missing the road that would lead me to the side of a woman I loved, who was dying. Although this happened on the other side of the world from Canada, I think he was struck by the
immediacy
of the way I told the story.

‘You tell this as if it happened quite recently,’ he said.

‘Well, it’s ten days ago now.’

‘Ten days.’ He looked as if he’d been stung, as if something had brushed past that was too close for comfort — all the intimations of mortality that people entertain when they are in some sort of
difficulties of their own. I was with a group of writers who had just swum under the stars at an elegant spa resort where the sudden presence of a noisy uninhibited group was clearly viewed by the other bathers as an intrusion. We were hot and rosy and flushed with steam and the conversations that happen when new friendships are developing. Let’s have a drink, we all said to each other, but by the time we found a bar open we’d gone off the idea and drank coffee instead, knowing we would keep ourselves awake, but needing to be alert, because we had so many revelations to make to each other. Much later in the evening, the young man and I walked back to where we were staying, arm in arm in the starlight, peeling away from the others in the group. He was dark with crinkly hair and stealthy fingers that rested on my inner arm. We had been told to watch out for rutting elks which might charge us if they were disturbed. Elks have rights over humans in Banff. They walk down the middle of the streets while motorists wait, and stalk through gardens and backyards.

The previous week, I had been on another tour, back home, in New Zealand. In case this sounds like coincidence, I should say that this is how writers earn much of their keep: they go from one place to another, talking about their work to whoever will listen, while booksellers stand behind a little table and exhort the audience to buy books. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Some of the best days of my life have been spent in halls and libraries and rooms set aside in old country pubs, talking to people who love books the way I do. I would go even if it were not a necessity, although, that once, I would rather have just sat with my aunt. I had been sent a message that she was ill and didn’t have long to live.

This was no ordinary aunt, if such a person exists. I mean, she wasn’t someone else’s mother — she had no children of her own — and I’ve often thought of her as another mother of my own. That’s what I would call her when I spoke at her funeral. Of course, I felt the pull of needing to be in two places at once. But I had a new book out and I’d promised my publishers I would go on this tour. And there was a real coincidence, one of those elements of random chance that
seem so significant they are like an omen, an instruction in
themselves
. The tour was of the Waikato, where Flo had lived for most of her life, and when I, from time to time, had lived too. That green heart of dairy country, full of pastel-coloured cows with contemplative eyes. All the venues, except one at the end, were within driving distance of the cottage hospital where my aunt was being nursed. It had been arranged that I would drive a rented car from one place to another, before flying on to the last town. There was a serendipity about all of this, and the idea of calling off the tour didn’t really arise.

I began with a visit to the hospital. As I arrived, I heard Flo’s voice, frail and yet fierce, echoing down the corridor. She cried
come and get me, come and get
me in an incessant high drone. Her cloudy eyes didn’t recognise me straight away, although there was a hint of their old blackness beneath the cataracts.

When she did, she said, more calmly, ‘You’ve come for me then.’

‘I’ve come to see you.’

‘Just to see me?’

‘Hush,’ I said, ‘it’ll be all right. I love you.’

She turned her head the other way. ‘Love. Don’t talk to me about love,’ she said.

I thought, then, that I had always just been coming and going in my aunt’s life, I was never permanent. Yet for as long as I could remember, she had been waiting for me. But at least I came back, whenever I could. In those last days before she died, she would wake with a start, from bouts of laboured breathing, and I would say ‘I’m here.’

‘I’m here,’ she would mimic, and yet there was something easier about her breathing every time she realised I really was there beside her.

On that first evening, the night nurse said she needed morphine. ‘Personally, I think the pain relief that’s been offered her is too light,’ she said. Every we time we tried to turn Flo, she screamed
please please leave me leave me please leave me
.

‘What can we do about it?’ I asked the nurse. I liked this young woman; she was very small and neat in her movements, almost as if
she was a dancer, which I learned later she had trained to be, until her ankles lost their shape.

‘Get a doctor,’ she said. ‘You’re the next of kin, if you say she needs a doctor we can call one.’

‘Do it,’ I said.

The doctor, a young Indian man, took one look and then drew me outside out into the corridor. ‘As much as she needs,’ he said, ‘as much as it takes. But you must tell her.’

I went in and sat down beside her and said, ‘Flo, can you hear me? The doctor says morphine.’

Her eyes widened. ‘Morphine?’ she breathed, as if being offered a love potion. She must have known its power: she had nursed more than one patient towards their last seductive inhalation.

Only this morphine was neither inhaled nor injected but rather drops placed on her tongue. ‘Bitter,’ said Flo, ‘bitter.’ It reminded me of one of her sayings. ‘Life’s had a few bitter pills,’ she would say, ‘but you get by.’ She slept for a while. When she woke the morphine had begun to wear off and it was time for her to be turned again.

Please. No, not that.

And then I understood: it was at the height of each turn, the moment before her body pivoted down, that she began to scream and her free arm to flap wildly. When I caught it in my own, it was like a cold old fish flipper. ‘You’re afraid of falling, aren’t you?’ I said.

And she agreed that yes she was, and if I held her hand, she wouldn’t fall. It was much the same as walking over a height: that sense of relinquishing control, fear of abandonment. I suffer from that too.

I said to the nurse, who was called Joy, ‘How long do you think this will take? I mean, I don’t want to see her go on suffering like this.’

Joy gave me a careful serious scrutiny. ‘Do you mean,’ she said eventually, ‘do people go on with their lives, or keep vigils like our grandmothers did?’

‘Yes, something like that,’ I said. ‘I want to be here for her when she needs me.’

‘I think you’re doing the best you can,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell you when it will happen exactly. Death’s no flash in the pan for the old. It needs a lead-up, a preparation time, that says it’s done when it’s ready, not when it’s convenient.’

‘Like baking?’

‘I guess that’s a way of looking at it.’

‘That’s Flo,’ I said. ‘She was a terrific cook. You should have tried her orange loaf.’

I saw Joy look at my aunt in a new less clinical way, as if she could see beyond the helpless creature she had become, to someone younger, more vital — a glimpse perhaps, of the person I still saw.

‘You should get some rest and do whatever it is you have to do,’ she said.

Early the next morning, as dawn was breaking, I heard Flo again, before I saw her, only this time she was singing
Look for the silver lining, whene’er a cloud appears in the blue. Remember somewhere, the sun is shining And so the right thing to do is make it shine for you
. Her room looked out on a grove of orange trees; I could see rabbits skipping beneath them.

After I had seen Flo, heard her singing, and spoken quietly with her, I drove north to give a lunchtime reading from my work, and when that was over, I drove back again. The colourful Waikato landscape is like a sky banner: it should be trailing itself behind a helicopter. The grass has a green shimmer like Thai silk. On good days, like the ones that followed me through most of that week, the buttercup yellow of the sun shines out of an electric blue sky. Then there’s the way gardens grow there like tornadoes of colour. But there’s an unpredictability about it, too — the way passing clouds can turn the landscape black, and the night so dark that starlight is not always enough to show the way.

I decided to stay on in the town for as long as I could. I took a room at the edge of the park overlooking the thermal spa resort. I was struck, just a week or so later, by the way the earth is connected, when I found myself in another thermal town on the opposite side of the world. This one, near the hospital, used to be the haunt of fashionable
people early in the twentieth century. They had built pavilions and a tea kiosk called Cadman House. I have a white china teapot stand, with a picture of the teahouse drawn in worn gold gilt, which I bought for a dollar in a secondhand shop. In the picture, a woman in a long full skirt is playing tennis on a court in front of the kiosk. This was just what Flo would have loved: it was like the beginning of her own life and my mother’s, and their sisters as well.

That afternoon, Flo and I talked for almost the last time. Mostly we spoke about old times, times when I was a child and used to come by bus from up north, and she’d come to meet me; the time I’d lived with her after I left school, the way I’d driven her crazy when I was a teenager, and how things pass.

‘Through my journey of life, I’ve simply liked to help people,’ she said. And in a way it was true. There was nothing grudging about what she remembered that afternoon.

‘I should be getting along,’ she said, as if she was visiting me. ‘Theo will be waiting for me.’ She began to knead my thumb between her own and her forefinger with a strong clawing intensity.

‘I reckon it’s time you went to him,’ I said. ‘Forty years. You’ve kept him waiting long enough.’

‘He’ll be there.’

‘What will you say to him?’

‘What time’s the quinella?’ she said, and gave a gentle snicker of pleasure.

Towards five in the evening, something altered: she slipped into unconsciousness and her breathing became shallower; at times I thought she had stopped altogether. I didn’t call anyone because I believed this was it, the moment she had waited for, when I would be with her, and she would simply let go.

Only she didn’t die, she went on living for several more days. In the mornings when I went back, she had begun to shout, wails of grief echoing through the corridors of the small hospital.
Do not go gently into that dark night
I said grimly to myself.

It seemed that it was only the beginning.

What followed for me was a kind of dreamtime, a compulsion to keep going that I still can’t explain. Driving, speaking, coming back again in the middle of the night to be with my aunt. What did I say to people I met? So you want to be a writer. Well, you must learn to live with yourself, however difficult that might be at times, because you’re on your own in this job; you need to make space in your life, settle on your priorities. A writer’s life is not spent in an ivory tower. Learn to accept that real life is full of interruptions. You have children? Yes, of course, many of us do. Write for fifteen minutes a day — it’s better than nothing at all. No, I agree, this is not about craft and style, but it’s about how to survive, which is the best I can tell you right now. Can I guarantee this recipe for success? No, no of course not. Nothing is certain. Forgive me, I have to leave now.

Not all of my vigils were alone. (What had Joy seen in me that made her so sure I would keep watch, as my grandmother might have done?) I got to know others on the staff — Betty and June I remember in particular. They were both capable women; unlike Joy, they nursed part time and worked at home on their farms. They chatted about their lives and families and asked me about what it was like to be well known, to be in the papers. I said that, when it all came down to it, it was pretty much like other people’s lives; certainly, the big important things were, like birth and death. They said, yes, they could see that, and wasn’t it strange how everyone was interested in much the same things. She was so proud of you, they said, looking down at Flo’s inert body. It’s as well she had you.

As well as these nurses, there was my aunt’s neighbour, who had lived close by for several years, a middle-aged woman called Pamela with dark hair swept up in frosted peaks, and beautiful country casual clothes. She organised speakers for the Lyceum Club and was on the local National Party branch committee. I could see why my aunt would have got along with her, although the unease between Pamela and me was palpable. I was the sort of woman she could never trust. I saw her eyeing my appearance and comparing it with her own. Mostly I wore a loose-fitting roll-neck grey pullover made of fine Merino wool, black pants and a gay floating blue and yellow scarf,
which I didn’t change from day to day, because I was travelling light and fast. For my part, there may have been some element of jealousy present, because it was clear that, in some ways, Pamela knew Flo better than I did. She had shopped for her, cut her toenails, intimate things like that. And she’d collected the mail every day for Flo, which meant she knew exactly how often I wrote.

When Flo was conscious, she would stop shouting long enough to look at me with a certain malice.

‘And where have you been?’ she said, each time, glaring through one half-closed eye.

‘I was just out for a while, you knew I’d come.’

‘I’m here,’ she said in her mimicking piping voice.

‘Oooh,’ said Pamela on an indrawn breath, on one of these
afternoons
.