Ricochet Baby (8 page)

P
AUL IS IN
the front room watching television when I get back, which is something I hadn’t bargained for. I realise that I have got into the habit of expecting him to be late.

‘I recorded the news,’ he says, pretending not to look at me. I don’t like the edge in his voice. ‘I’ll wind it back if you like.’

I drop down on the couch and kick off my shoes.

‘Paul, what’s the matter with us?’ Earlier, I’d wished for a happy life. I remember that I haven’t seen a black dog all day.

‘You’ve been to the farm, haven’t you?’ he says, ignoring my question. He rewinds the videotape so that everything happens backwards. I see Bernard fleetingly pointing a gun at a helicopter, in reverse, so that it looks as if he’s shooting himself in the foot. ‘You might have told me you were going.’

Suddenly I can’t be bothered explaining how I started my journey to Walnut, that I didn’t know about the circles until I was nearly there. I don’t tell him that I’ve been trapped in a lift cage and almost out of my mind with fear.

T
HE GRASS GREENS
swiftly when unseasonable rain falls during
summer
heat so Edith and Wendy take a break from their ceaseless watering of the garden. Wendy is teaching Edith to make willow baskets. They gather branches from beside the gravelly river and boil them in old coppers that have been lying in the implement shed for years. The two of them are like witches round their
cauldrons
, the smoke curling from the open fires they light, the smell of the hot bark pungent and raw. The sun casts an idyllic pastoral glow over their labours. They wear their straw hats pushed back on their heads but both shun gloves, allowing their hands to become dry and cracked. Wendy’s old, reptilian skin is covered with
perspiration
. She wears Edith’s clothes — blue jeans and a checked cotton shirt that covers her baggy arms. Edith takes a strawberry blonde peach out of a hamper that contains water bottles and lunch.

‘Not for me,’ says Wendy, flinching. ‘The feel of peach skin sets my teeth on edge.’

‘I know what you mean,’ cries Edith, ‘my grandmother was just the same. As for me, it’s the sound of a knife being drawn over paper. I feel as if I’m being sliced to the quick.’

‘Astonishing.’ Wendy leans back, still squatting. She means that it’s astonishing that they understand each other so well. Her mouth and eyes are young, in spite of her skin and her long, tough teeth. She has allowed Edith to trim her hair. When Edith lifted the white mane and weighed it in her hand, Wendy gave a voluptuous sigh. ‘Not too much, Edith. I don’t want to look like mutton dressed up as lamb.’ But her expression was pure pleasure at the human touch of Edith’s hands. Now Wendy wraps her lips around the neck of the water bottle.

‘This is the kind of scene I have dreamed of seeing many times,’ she tells Edith, ‘of walking through a vista of trees and
seeing
the light fall golden and mottled on women working in the landscape, like a painting by Monet. In my wildest dreams, I am coming upon my own self. And here it’s come true. It takes me back to my childhood.’

‘I remember when I was a child,’ Edith tells Wendy, ‘standing near the entrance to the mine at Roa, after I had taken food to my father one morning before he went to work, and the coal mountain was shrouded in a bright silver mist. The brightness came from the sun, and in a few moments, while I was watching it, the mist dissolved and the black point of the mountain emerged in a blaze of light.’

Edith and Wendy are high on their friendship, but now Edith is embarrassed; she doesn’t know why she has told Wendy this apocalyptic story. ‘I haven’t thought of my childhood for years,’ she says. ‘It’s not the kind you brag about round here. It must be you, it’s like having a sister.’

‘You don’t have any?’

‘I did have one, but she died when I was two.’ Edith has brothers who live in coal mining towns down on the West Coast, but she can’t remember when she last saw them. She feels the shadow of her sister across her life, although she has no
recognisable
memory of her. To have a friend like Wendy is to cast the shadow aside, and she supposes this is why the story of the
mountain
has come unbidden to her. Such dizzying pleasure is enchanted and absorbing, and Edith finds herself thinking of little else these days.

But Glass has said several times that there is no reason for Wendy to stay any longer. Who does she think she is, he asks of nobody in particular.

The morning after her collapse, Wendy had sat up in the guest room bed looking like death.

‘I never drink,’ she had gasped, her mouth parched and ugly.

‘I do. It will pass,’ Edith had said drily. It was she who had handed the bottle to Wendy in the first place. Wendy had stayed on in the garden, after the other visitors had left, stacking plates. Help yourself, Edith told her straggling guest, have a drink on me. Bernard had been at the police station, Glass fending off reporters. Somebody had to help Orla bring in the cows, although it was not something Edith would ordinarily do.

During the past month they have led near enough to sober lives, out here in the country. For Edith, that is not the whole truth — old habits die as hard as fleas on a dog — but she feels it is a beginning. She thinks that Glass should find plenty to appreciate in Wendy’s continuing presence, although he doesn’t seem
forthcoming
on the subject.

And if Wendy notes certain things about the household, she does not mention them: the habitual cleaning of the teeth, the
discovery
of a half-full (or half-empty, Wendy is never sure of the
difference
) bottle of gin under a silverbeet row, the telltale network of broken blood vessels in Edith’s cheeks. Once she does say, ‘My late father was something of a drinker, you know.’

Edith does not respond other than to say: ‘How difficult for you.’

‘He used to discuss his situation with Hardy, when they met. Thomas Hardy, you understand, the great novelist, who understood the perils of drink, as outlined in several of his novels about rural life. My father loved novels.’

‘I don’t read much these days. I leave that to my daughter. Life’s complicated enough, without reading books about it.’

‘I’ve learned a great deal about life through my reading,’ Wendy observes.

Not that Wendy seems inclined to read while she is visiting. Instead, in the evenings she and Edith sit and pass the time in
interesting
domestic ways. Wendy is teaching Edith to quill. Their heads close together, they curl tiny strands of paper into patterns on cards. The trim little three-dimensional gardens they create out of paper are so pretty and perfect, replicating areas of Edith’s own
garden
, that Edith is sure she can set Wendy up in business. Wendy smiles; she has tried that. She doesn’t add to the story, simply basks in the room where they sit. It is full of deep-coloured rugs and old, glossy, dark furniture. Wendy runs her finger approvingly over the polished surfaces; it is another discovery, that they both haunt
second
-hand and antique shops. A high, horizontal window does not have curtains; the space is filled with the delicate leaves and setting fruit of a giant plum tree that allows filtered light into the room during the day and makes a flickering moonlit presence on all but the darkest nights. Another evening Wendy suggests they begin embroidering for Edith’s grandchild. Edith looks vague and
hesitant
, as if she has forgotten about the forthcoming baby.

‘Another night, perhaps.’

‘I’d like to meet your daughter.’ Wendy looks through the
family
albums, exclaiming over the children and admiring Roberta’s
wedding
photographs, paying particular attention to Paul. Fine features, she says, but Edith shrugs. ‘I’m sure you’ll meet them.’ Beside their lives here, the long anticipated birth now seems remote and unreal.

For the past month, Roberta hardly seems to have existed, although they talk on the phone once a week. Keep up the fluids, Roberta, remember not to drink alcohol (especially that, but it is unvoiced). When do you think you’ll give up work? I’ve knitted some matinee jackets. My friend is going to embroider them for you — what colours shall we do them? Well, just a friend — you haven’t met her, her name’s Wendy, you’ll have to meet her. Love to Paul, see you soon, oh and I bought a mobile for the spare bedroom the other day — felt animals, lime green and scarlet, with little bells that chime in the breeze. Yes, of course there’ll be room for the baby. What’s got into you Roberta?

Wendy studies her friend. ‘I read somewhere that when friendship is just beginning it’s like love — it wants to have
everything
at once. Colette, I think. Of course my father knew her. Admired her tremendously. What a woman.’

Edith looks puzzled.

‘I mean,’ says Wendy hurriedly, ‘you mustn’t let me come between you and your family. Perhaps it’s time for me to move on.’

‘Of course not. I don’t want you to go,’ says Edith. She stands; it is time to make the tea. Before they go to bed, they drink pale Ceylonese tea with a bitterish tang, accompanied by wafer-thin slices of lemon. Wendy’s sigh of relief is almost audible.

‘Perhaps we’ll go to town at the weekend,’ Edith offers. ‘My daughter still works during the week. Or I could invite them over on Saturday.’

‘That’s the day you’re giving the mulching demonstration,’ Wendy reminds her.

‘Of course, so it is. Well, we’ll see Roberta some other time.

So Wendy wears Edith’s clothes and eats Glass’s food,
growing
healthier looking by the day, if no less odd.

I
F
J
OSH
T
HWAITE
is investigated perhaps he will go broke, maybe his kids will go hungry. His wife might have a nervous breakdown. Josh Thwaite could do himself an injury, or worse. People kill themselves over less than tax.

These things go through my head while I am waiting for Josh Thwaite to come to the phone. It has been answered by a woman, who sounded suspicious when I told her who I was. Well, I can understand that — I am the tax department, after all. Somehow she made it sound personal. I am fast going off the idea of helping Mr Thwaite, but I can’t understand how he could have failed to get the message. I have sent his cheque back to him with a note pointing out the discrepancy. Now it has been returned, unaltered. I am surprised it has got past the sorting system a second time.

‘I thought you might have shifted,’ I say, when he finally picks up the telephone. He sounds young, puzzled.

‘I’m sure I sent it all in.’

‘You did,’ I say, ‘but the cheque was made out for the wrong amount. Look, it’s okay, it happens all the time. I’m sure you didn’t mean to do it.

‘What would be the point?’

‘Well,’ I say, uncomfortably, ‘a lot of people do it. You know, juggle figures. We know the way it is, you stall for time, but it doesn’t work like that, we still charge the penalty.

‘Hey, shit, I never sent nothing back.’

‘We hear stories like this all the time. We realise when people do it on purpose that they’re hoping to get more money in soon, but our officers are very thorough.’

‘Look, I could do you for this. What are you accusing me of?’

‘Nothing,’ I say, as patiently as I can. I wish very much that I had minded my own business; soon I will draw attention to myself in the office. ‘It doesn’t matter, I just wanted to help.’

In the background, the woman who answered the phone yells at him. ‘Tell them to stick their taxes up their arses. It’s them that owe me.’

He says, uncertainly, his voice not properly guarded from the phone, ‘Did you send a letter back to the tax department?’

‘Wait,’ he says to me.

There is total silence. While it lasts, I begin to imagine what these two are like. Josh, I decide, is a more sinister and difficult young man than I had first thought; he is red-necked and brutal and intractable, determined that he is right about everything; he sits in front of television, a beer in his hand, watching violent videos. His wife is a sullen, thick-waisted woman who hits their children with an open hand and changes the sheets once a month. I shudder, trying to imagine a language of love for this couple, and anticipate the self-righteous arguments I am about to have
presented
to me.

What he says, is: ‘Why are you doing this for me?’

‘I don’t know,’ I reply.

‘Have you lost your nerve?’ he asks, as if he knows what it is like.

‘I’ll post the cheque back to you,’ I say. ‘Just make sure it comes back right next time.’

‘What about the penalty?’

‘There’s nothing I can do about that. But hey, you have a nice Christmas.’

‘Happy Christmas to you too,’ he says.

T
HERE WERE DISAPPOINTMENTS
at the beginning, but once the
wedding
date was set, Fay and Milton had found plenty to please them.

‘We’re very liberal, of course,’ Fay said doubtfully to her friends, after Paul first brought Roberta to meet them, ‘but we’re being positive.’ What she meant was that people like Roberta’s
family
, in the country, had a different kind of lifestyle from the Cooksleys. No opera, no nights at the theatre (although Fay has read about the madrigal singers on garden days — that’s theatrical, she has to admit), no cappuccinos. ‘They seem to have known each other for a while, although Paul didn’t let on. Well, best for him to be sure this time, she seems very nice, this Roberta. Students together, she’s an educated young woman.’

Fay Cooksley is small and fair and wears designer label clothes and is never seen without what she describes as her
grooming
in immaculate condition. She tinkles when she walks — her
bracelets, her light laughter, her throwaway comments. Fay teaches English at a polytechnic, although this is not a financial necessity; she is known as a good sort, the life and soul of a party. More than this, she is the woman who generally organises the parties. If there is an occasion where people might be enticed to dress up in funny clothes, or make fools of themselves with idiotic speeches, Fay will ensure that they do it. I’ve got an effervescent kind of personality, I just can’t help myself, Fay sometimes tells people. Fay has told her daughter-in-law Roberta this, and Roberta appears willing to believe her.

‘I’m a person who doesn’t look back,’ Fay said. ‘Let’s get on with life.’ The garden setting for the wedding had charmed them. They could ask as many guests as they liked. Edith was a
wonderful
hostess, although she did leave the wedding party earlier than Fay would have expected. She can still see Edith as she was that day; when Roberta walked into the garden with her father, wearing a simple Grecian gown and flowers in her hair, it was Edith whom Fay watched. Dressed in a burnt orange diaphanous gown that moved with her body, and a cloche hat with feathers sticking straight out behind, she was like a girl from the thirties, and Fay had felt positively vulgar.

But their friends complimented the Cooksleys long
afterwards
, as if it was they who had chosen the venue and made the arrangements. Fay still feels she doesn’t know Roberta very well, although, it has to be said, Roberta does all the right things. She thinks she and her daughter-in-law will become closer after the baby.

All the same, it is mid-morning of Christmas Day and Fay is irritated to find herself being driven by Milton in the direction of Walnut. She had had every intention of putting on Christmas
dinner
, but she has been outmanoeuvred.

‘Oh dear,’ Edith had said, over the phone, ‘but it’s my turn to have Glass’s family over. Oh, don’t be offended if we don’t come, but Glass is so, um, touchy, you could say, about things like that. If we change our minds now, I’d have a war on my hands.’

Fay has been inclined to bring her daughter and her husband into it, but she knows it’s too late to summon them from Auckland. They have their own plans.

‘It’s not as if they come and visit us,’ Fay complains to Milton, in the car.

‘We’ll just have to make a firm arrangement with them for next year,’ says Milton. He is a placatory man with an instinct for survival. ‘I expect it will be pleasant enough today.’

The dining room table is set for fourteen, with a long, snowy cloth and silver and a low arrangement of fresh roses and
gypsophila
from the garden. We’ll soon be roasting in here, Fay thinks to herself, as the temperature soars outside. She can’t imagine why Edith hasn’t set out lunch in the garden.

‘Kill a thirst, mate,’ says Glass, unzipping a beer and
thrusting
it into Milton’s hand. ‘Make yourselves at home.’ He and Paul have been for a walk around the farm, at Paul’s request, so he can see where the circles have been, which doesn’t seem to have pleased Glass.

‘There’s really nothing to see,’ says Paul, to his parents, who had the same thing in mind. ‘Just a sort of fuzzy outline.’

Fay expects to have met everyone before, at the wedding, but there is a stranger among the women around the silver punch bowl, whom she meets after she has kissed Roberta and Paul.

‘This is my friend, Wendy,’ says Edith.

Wendy stretches her hand straight out like a man and shakes Fay’s hand vigorously. ‘I’m so pleased to meet you,’ she says, almost pulling Fay physically towards her. Fay, thinking Wendy is about to kiss her as well, withdraws as far as she can. The woman has a
cultivated
voice, but there is something nervous and excited about her, almost dangerous, Fay thinks. She is dressed rather rakishly in a blue denim jacket and a skirt that is too long for her.

‘I hope you’re enjoying the day so far,’ Wendy says, her voice trembling and high.

‘We went to church first thing.’

‘Oh I thought you would. C of E, I take it?

Fay finds this an odd thing for Wendy to say, but she nods. ‘Anglican, yes. And you, Joan?’ Joan Vance is Glass’s sister, whom Edith surveys with barely disguised dislike. Yet they have interests in common. Joan and Arch are horticulturalists with a property
further
down the road. They supply Edith with her garden
requirements
, and she sends them clients.

‘Press-buts,’ says Edith.

Bernard says, ‘Orla went to midnight mass. Catholic.’ He grins at Joan.

‘Oh, eeny meeny miney mo, churches are all the same.’

And Fay realises that she, of all people, is breaking one of the basic rules of polite talk, and finds herself at a loss as to how to switch the talk away from religion. Even Edith looks surprised by her friend’s behaviour.

‘Time to sit down,’ she says loudly. Edith waves a glass in the direction of the table.

‘Must dash,’ says Wendy, ‘got to earn my keep. You know, help with the dinner.’ She vanishes to the kitchen, accompanied by Orla, the Nichols’ daughter-in-law, whom Fay also thinks is odd.

They shuffle around finding chairs. Place names would have been a help, Fay thinks, pleased to have something to get her teeth into. It is hard to see how they will arrange themselves and, just as she expected, they are all sitting down according to couples. Joan and Arch’s two children are a lumpy pair. Sally looks sullen; she has been seeing a young man with whom she had expected to spend Christmas, but his family haven’t invited her. Her brother, John, looks simple, Fay thinks.

Finally, most of them are seated — the Nichols, the Cooksleys, the Vances, and Wendy. One place is unoccupied.

‘Who’s sitting there, Mum?’ asks Roberta.

Edith looks perplexed. ‘Well, for the life of me I can’t think, dear. I must have set one place too many.’

‘Shall I take it away?’ Roberta asks. ‘Make more room?’

‘You do take up room enough for two,’ cries Joan, and
everyone
laughs. Roberta is flushed and heavy, as if the baby is much closer than its expected arrival date in late February.

Orla and Wendy are bringing out dishes of roast vegetables — kumara and pumpkin and new potatoes — and small green peas, along with the accompaniments, as Orla calls them, the gravy and cranberry sauce, placing them around the table among the sprigs of holly. Real holly.

Now is the moment for Orla to appear with the turkey, so large that it looks more like a pig off a spit. It is garnished with chipolata sausages. Fay makes a mental note of this to describe to her friends.

‘I’m glad it’s your turn, Edith,’ says Joan. ‘Just you wait, girls,’ she says, addressing Sally and Roberta, ‘sooner or later every
housewife
and mother has to cook the Christmas turkey.’

There is a commotion outside, and voices on the verandah.

‘That’s Kaye,’ says Glass. ‘What’s she doing here?’

‘Oh my goodness, so it is,’ says Edith. ‘Well, it’s just as well we hadn’t started. She must have brought Dorothy.’

‘I thought Dorothy was going to Kaye and Frank’s,’ says Glass sharply. Kaye and Frank are another Nichols sister and brother-
in-law
, a couple with whom they never share Christmas.

‘No, I did ask her, I think.’

‘There is a flurry as the men are ordered out to help bring up Dorothy’s wheelchair. Dorothy tries to manoeuvre herself up the steps, but she can’t lift her legs high enough. Eventually, somebody brings her a chair, and Bernard and John lift her, sitting up straight, into the dining room.

‘Well,’ says Edith, when they are all seated again, ‘Fancy that. Happy Christmas, Dorothy. I knew I must have put that place there for somebody, but I’m blowed if I could think who it was.’

This is so calculated an insult that nobody can miss it except, mercifully, Dorothy herself. She is so pleased to be out of her resthome for the day that she doesn’t seem to notice.

‘The stuffing’s made with chestnuts,’ says Edith. She reaches over, picks at a small piece oozing from beneath the parson’s nose and tries it. ‘Mmmm,’ she pronounces, ‘you’ll like this. Pass me the wine, someone, and let’s drink to Christmas.’

Glass, his lips tight, picks up the knife, and begins to carve the turkey.

I
HAVE THIS
image of my family, the last time we were all together for Christmas.

My mother, indifferent and unreachable, sits leaning her head on one hand, thin silver bracelets dangling from her wrist, an empty glass hanging by its stem from her other hand. Michael is there, the brother I love best. My father, in an almost feminine way, is carving pieces of meat with the precision of a surgeon and laying them down so that the slivers fan out against the fine white plates, the same ones that are on the table today. He doesn’t look at my mother or at Michael, who is in disgrace again, lonely and defiant.

‘I won’t come back again,’ he said, that day, and he hasn’t been back since, not even for my wedding. The strange thing is that my father and Michael are not unlike. What would my father have been like if he had not accepted, in the end, the weight of expectations that had been laid on him?

I look around the table and wonder if we are going to make it through today. Beside me, Paul is looking resigned. I see him catch his mother’s eye across the table, and they each raise a brow, in a delicate fashion.

B
ERNARD HAS HAD
little to say. His wife sits down beside him, at last. She is dressed in a white acrylic jersey and pants in honour of the day, but her top is splattered with grease from the turkey. He watches his father carving the bird, his hands itching to help, but he doesn’t dare make the offer.

‘What’s this?’ says his father, and holds up a little bubbling plastic bag on the tip of his knife.

‘Oh my God,’ says Edith, ‘the giblets, how did I forget those?’