Heartland (5 page)
Authors: Jenny Pattrick
Not an episode that Tracey likes to remember. Since that confrontation, the bitch has made a point of sitting on Donny’s front doorstep, smoking and drinking, radio blaring, and staring down the road at the Virgin’s squat. Tracey has retreated to her back doorstep, out of sight. There are days when she feels like crying. Or moving away again. This place was so perfect before. Quiet. Easy. The baby easy too. Tracey could feel her life settling at last. The old ladies, newly arrived, kept to themselves. Donny used to say the odd word as if she were a real person like everyone else. Vera the same when she came down the road collecting greens for her chooks. No one asked questions. Bloody perfect. And now this noisy bitch whose name, it seems, is Pansy. Pansy!
‘They call her Deadly Nightshade in Ohakune,’ said Vera, and the Virgin laughed. Poison all right.
Donny, stirring eggs at the stove, is blushing heroically, blood rising up that thick neck through his two-day stubble, right up and into the roots of his dark hair.
‘Is it really mine?’ he asks, forgetting the eggs and burning them.
‘You’re burning them,’ says Pansy from the comfort of the couch. She swigs from the bottle.
Donny removes the pan, slides the mess onto two plates. ‘But is it true? My baby?’ He hands her the plate, forks food into his mouth as he stands facing her.
‘Yeah. I guess.’ Pansy smiles at him. She’s making an effort, doesn’t want to muck this up. ‘Yours and mine.’
‘But how do you know? Vera says I should be sure.’
Pansy wants to scream at the big ox, scratch Vera’s eyes out. Interfering bitch. She swigs again. ‘Look, Donny, a woman just knows, right? It’s yours. End of story.’
‘What about Ethan Masefield? What about Tama?’
‘It’s yours, Donny. Aren’t you pleased?’
‘But they were there too.’ Donny’s head is down now,
remembering the others egging him on with rude gestures, Nightshade laughing at him, showing him how, until he couldn’t stop. Even now he can’t be sure he got it right.
Pansy puts down her beer, looks him hard in the eye. ‘Jesus, big boy, relax. If I say it’s yours, it’s yours. You’re going to be a father.’ She manages another smile. ‘Quite soon.’
‘Okay.’ Donny is quiet now, still uncertain, but his hand reaches out and pats the bare mound of Pansy’s stomach. ‘Hey, baby.’
Pansy holds his hand there. So far Donny has been the only person to show any pleasure in nine whole months of despair.
‘So when the pains start,’ she says, a catch in her throat, tears welling, ‘you have to get me into Raetihi Hospital.’
Donny thinks about this. ‘On the bike? It’s not too flash at the moment.’
‘Well, get it up to speed, you idiot. This is important!’ Pansy’s patience has come to an end. She heads off to the only bed, leaving Donny to clean up.
He watches telly for a bit, wondering whether he’s allowed to join her. Whether he wants to.
Pansy Holloway spent the first five years of her life in Ohakune, daughter of the local butcher, Jock Holloway, who was mayor, and Iris Holloway. One cold winter day Iris picked her daughter up from school (reluctantly) and ran off (much more enthusiastically) with a visiting businessman
who promised brighter lights than the dim street lamps of Ohakune. This was in the days before the ski development, a time when the town was definitely sliding downhill. Pansy grew up in Auckland, with mother and lover, a difficult child in an affluent but unhappy household, no other children, a distinct lack of parental love. At sixteen she left home, unmourned and unmissed, found work in a McDonald’s, flatted with a hard-drinking set who introduced her to drugs and sex. Two years later, in trouble with the law, she returned to Ohakune in search of her dad. But Jock had died a year earlier of a heart attack, his house and business sold. Pansy stayed on anyway, happier to be a big bad frog in a small pond than anonymous in Auckland.
Donny was indeed her last resort. When she twigged, too late for an abortion, that a baby was on the way, none of the Ohakune lads would lay claim.
‘Piss off, Nightshade,’ said Ethan Masefield. ‘I’ve got a boyfriend now, didn’t you hear?’
‘No way,’ said Tama. ‘You can’t pin that on me. Think I’m stupid?’
His brother Toa echoed him.
‘Look here,’ said Mr Donnelly at the bottle store, ‘that was a one-off and you know it. You went with that gang of no-hopers all the time. Try Notso. He might be on. His girlfriend just stood him up.’
At eight months, having lost her job at the pub, Pansy took the bus up to Auckland and called on her mother. Iris came to the door, all dolled up; it was her bridge afternoon and the girls were gathered in the lounge. The sight of Pansy, dishevelled,
depressed and heavily pregnant, brought out the worst in her.
‘You’re not coming in like that, you slut,’ she whispered. ‘I told you not to come back until you’d sorted yourself out. I suppose there’s no father?”
‘It’s your grandchild,’ said Pansy, scowling. She had never learned to treat her mother with civility, let alone warmth. Antagonism had become a habit.
‘It is
not
my grandchild,’ hissed Iris, ‘and never will be. It will be born with alcohol or drug poisoning. Or worse. No way you will saddle me with
that
. You get it adopted out.’
‘I need money for the clothes and all that.’
‘Get it adopted, you hear me?’ Iris believed in tough love; her girlfriends agreed it was the only way to go when your children went bad.
Iris went to close the door, but Pansy stuck her foot in the gap and shouted, ‘I need money! At least give me my bus fare, you bitch!’ She was too angry to cry, though close to it.
Iris came back with a hundred dollars in cash, and this time the door slammed.
In the end, it had to be Donny. His empty house was convenient. Pansy never went to see him — down to Whanganui. To the clink. Too many cops around. Just moved in and waited for his return. She knew this would be temporary. One way or another.
A few days after Donny’s return, the Virgin is startled to see Donny standing in her back yard. Her inclination is to duck down below the sink and pretend she’s not there, but the baby is in her cradle on the back porch. She watches, hoping the torn old curtain hides her. Donny stares at her washing line which zig-zags behind the house, cunningly hidden from the road. Today, a collection of her petticoats are flapping in the breeze, along with Sky’s random bits and pieces. The Virgin curses, taking Donny for a pervert, but in fact his attention is more on the baby’s stuff. He seems to be counting the leggings and singlets and naps. She shifts uneasily, willing him to go away. But when he moves quietly towards the sleeping baby, she wrenches the door open and yells at him. ‘Get away! Fuck off, you fucking pervert! Get away from her!’
She barrels into him, knocking him off his feet and into the mud of the yard. Grabs the gardening fork and stands over him, the prongs levelled at his private parts.
‘Hey,’ says Donny mildly, ‘I’m only looking.’
‘Then look somewhere else.’
Donny sits where he is, grinning uncertainly. He doesn’t seem a threat, but the Virgin has only one response when someone approaches the baby. She lowers the fork a little, makes what she hopes is a frightening face and waits for him to leave.
His eyes wander over to the cradle. ‘Is that a carrot box?’
‘Yeah.’ The Virgin is rather proud of the way she has attached curved pieces of wood under a carrot box, nicked from one of the Kingis’ fields, to make Sky’s cradle.
‘Can I see how you did it?’ Donny’s interest is so genuine, so anxious, that she stabs the fork into the ground and lets him get up. He tiptoes to the sleeping baby and looks inside the cradle.
‘Whoo hoo, she’s tiny!’ he whispers.
‘She’s good, she’s normal,’ growls the Virgin. ‘Take a look and then get lost.’ But she’s curious. ‘What sort of set-up does Nightshade have?’
Donny moans. ‘She hasn’t got anything. Nothing. She said I’d have to do that stuff. It’s the father’s job, she said. You reckon that’s right?’
‘It’s her bloody job. She’s a lazy bitch.’
Donny looks at the ground. His big shoulders droop. ‘Don’t talk like that,’ he mutters. ‘Please.’
The Virgin sighs. She’s sick of all this; wants her peace back again. ‘Cut up an old blanket,’ she says. ‘Put some pieces in the carrot box and then the rest over the baby. That’ll do.’
‘What about all this stuff?’ Donny points to the clothes on the line.
The Virgin tells him about the op shop in Ohakune, its bin
full of little baby things. She doesn’t tell him that she pinched half of the clothes when the lady wasn’t looking.
‘Thanks,’ says Donny. ‘I reckon you’re a good mum, eh.’
She scowls to hide the little glow of pride and pleasure.
Donny walks along the clothesline, counting.
‘You’ll need more than that,’ she says. ‘Babies are messy.’
‘Yeah? What about food?’
‘Hey, the mother does that part, don’t let her fool you into thinking something else.’ The Virgin hesitates for a moment, rocks the little wooden cradle gently. ‘Look, none of my business, but if she keeps on drinking and smoking you should maybe get a bottle and some formula.’
‘What?’ Donny looks alarmed. ‘What do you mean?’
But the Virgin has emptied her tiny store of politeness. ‘Oh, fuck off. Go and ask someone else.’ She stands there, hands on hips, face thunderous.
Donny nods; tries, but fails to grin; picks up the bag of potatoes which he had dropped, lays them gently by the sleeping baby, and goes back to his own difficult home.
Over the next week, Donny sleeps on a mattress on the floor in the chilly spare room. In the morning, when Nightshade is still asleep in his bed, he practises his one two three. On Saturday he takes his deep breaths, walks out of the house and wheels his bike on down to George Kingi for advice.
Pansy wakes to an empty house, turns the radio on loud
and makes toast. I could stay on for a while, she thinks. She runs a bath and soaks in it. Out the window she can see the mountain, every peak and snow-patch shining. She pours cold beer down her throat and sings along with the radio.
It could be argued that these are the last happy hours of her life.