A Needle in the Heart (12 page)

‘Please,’ I said, crying and shaking the grille. ‘Please. Flo’s dying.’

‘I’m under orders,’ he said.’ He was eating a steaming pie out of a wrapper.

I said, ‘I won’t hurt you. I gave a talk here tonight.’

He didn’t even answer me.

I drove further up the town, further away, in the opposite
direction
from Flo, but I found another petrol station and was able to fill the car. An hour had passed since I set out. Then I turned the car into a racing boat of a vehicle, opening her out on the long straight roads as if she was under sail with the wind behind her. Was it the wine? Confusion? Terror at not, in the end, being where I had said I would be? Not being there.

And where have you been?

I’m here, Flo, I’m here, in the middle of a dark road and my eyes are blinded by tears and I cannot see the familiar landmarks.

I had missed a vital turn-off and suddenly I was spinning again in the opposite direction from where I was supposed to be going. I reversed, tried to retrace my route, found I’d gone in a loop and was heading towards the nearby city of Hamilton, down the motorway with no off ramp for several kilometres. I came to a roundabout, slowed, understood at last where I was, and set off again. Two hours.
The car flying — a hundred and twenty on the clock, a hundred and thirty, a hundred and forty. I remembered Flo ringing me one evening years before, after she had driven her ancient Mini Minor into a ditch somewhere round here. It had floated in the water, rocking gently, until someone pulled her back to safety. The car went again when it was dried out but the council office wouldn’t give Flo her licence when it came up for renewal at the end of the year. ‘You’d think after all those years I worked for them, they’d have had more respect,’ she said at the time. ‘Young whippersnappers.’

A hundred and sixty. I had never driven this fast before. I started to sing to keep myself awake. During the previous winter I had taught a creative writing class. On the last day, my students had sung a waiata, a song of respect and thanks. I was honoured by them. They sang
te aroha, te whakapono, te rangimarie, tatou tatou e
and that is what I sang. It means, roughly speaking, in love, in peace, in faith, all of us, all of us. I don’t think she would have liked the song much but somehow I thought that if I sang and sang it, it would sustain me and take me to where she was, and I would, after all, be
there
. That when she said, ‘And where have you been?’ I would say,
I’m here
.

And then I was there, and at the front of the little country hospital, in a pool of light, clustered on the verandah, I saw a knot of women standing, and I knew that I was too late, that it had already happened.

Pamela came forward to embrace me, and I pushed her away.

‘She went at seven minutes after midnight.’ It was twelve fifteen and frost was gathering under the trees outside the hospital.

I walked down the corridor without looking at any of them. I didn’t say I was sorry that I hadn’t been there.

‘I’m here, Flo,’ I said. But she was not going to reply, not ever. My poor old wounded starfish, her hands together, fingers pointed towards me, poor old fish, stranded for good.

I shouted at her, ‘Why didn’t you wait?’

I tore some flowers out of a vase and strewed them all around her. When I came through and joined the others somebody said, ‘We’ll get you a cup of tea.’ They looked frightened of me. Even Joy.

I told them I didn’t want any damn tea and walked out of the hospital and got into the car. Nobody tried to stop me, though I think now they probably should. I drove very slowly as if I was a blind person who’d been allowed out on the road. When I got back to the motel I found I’d locked my keys inside my room. I banged on Davina’s door but she didn’t hear me. It was three o’clock in the morning. I thought I should sleep in the car, but then I thought I was grown-up now, the next in line to die, one of the old people, and I rang the motelier’s emergency bell.

I left, headed for Gisborne at six o’clock in the morning, and when I got there, I talked again. About writing. About the
imagination
. Don’t be constrained by the truth, I said.

Some days after that, we sang ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ at Flo’s funeral, and the next day I flew to Canada.

The Sylvia Hotel at English Bay in Vancouver. It seemed the most perfect hotel in the world. It was covered with ivy; the interiors had dark old beams and rich stained-glass windows. I slept in a bed of such deep comfort in a large airy room that when I woke up late in the afternoon I was happy and felt free. I walked along to a shopping centre and bought face-mask products from a kind of cosmetics supermarket shop, complete with an open cool bin of products that looked as if they should have been in a delicatessen. I bought a face mask made from shitake mushrooms which I was given in a pottle, resting on ice inside another little container. Elsewhere, I bought an umbrella, a Vancouver newspaper. I went back to the Sylvia Hotel and put the mask on my face. It seemed as if flesh was being drawn to the surface. Afterwards, I felt totally cleansed, as if I was making myself over into a new person. I sat and watched the sea and ate mushrooms stuffed with crabmeat followed by a chicken breast served with ginger and grapefruit.

On the flight from Calgary, my plane flew into the eye of the sun, its bright glare leaning through the window. I sat beside the young man I’d met up with in Banff. We had reached that state of intimacy
that insisted (or he did any way) that we sit together on aeroplanes in order to continue, uninterrupted, with the story of our lives. A seemingly endless narrative. I remember the feeling of being dazzled in the sunlight.

Flo flew in an aeroplane only once her life, the only time she left New Zealand. She and a group of her friends from the council decided to go for a holiday to Rarotonga. As she went to the
departure
lounge her foot caught in the escalator and she fell down and knocked her head. She went on with the journey because she was with her friends, but she didn’t like it, didn’t have a good time. Give me good old New Zealand any day, was all she said about it. Fear of falling. One way or another.

Once, in the town where my parents and I lived when I was young, my mother ran into Wilf Morton. She was standing in the hardware shop in the village where we lived, and she heard a voice asking for a pound of nails. She knew him straight away, she told me, even though his hair was iron grey, and he was standing with his back to her. It was something about the way he spoke, as if asking for a pound of nails was a favour he was doing the shopkeeper.

I only knew about this meeting at the time because I heard my mother telling my father in a low angry voice that evening. But, later on, I could see it very clearly. I have a photograph of Wilf, which was tucked in an envelope inside one of the recipe books that I salvaged from Flo’s house.

‘I said to him, “What are you doing here?”’

‘And what did he say?’ my father asked, with unusual animation. He enjoyed stories in which my mother’s family came out worse than he did, not that Wilf Morton had ever been family.

‘He lives here,’ my mother spat.

‘Oh Gawd, that’s serious,’ my father said.

‘On the other side of the inlet.’

‘Well, I suppose that’s not so bad. You can keep your eyes skinned when you go to town.’

‘Why should I have to cross the road to avoid that man?’

‘Fair enough,’ my father said. ‘Did he say what he was up to?’

‘He said he was retired.’

‘Retired from what?’

‘Exactly,’ said my mother. ‘That’s what I said to him — “And what have you retired from, Wilf Morton?” He didn’t answer me, just smirked.’

I reminded my mother of this once, when we were talking about family matters, and the interminable question of why Flo was like she was. (This surfaced when Flo had been irascible or silent, especially in the days when Helena lived with her.) I’d heard the bones of the story about Wilf leaving Flo from her once before.

‘Oh, that Wilf Morton.’ My mother shrugged in the oblique sort of way her family had.

‘What made him so dreadful? Apart from leaving her like that.’

‘There were some things missing,’ she said.

‘You mean he stole things?’

‘Something like that.’ They didn’t go into details in that family. A trinket, a farm, a heart — my mother could have meant any of those things. A sense of honour, perhaps; we might think it misplaced nowadays.

I had been asleep. The young man had kindly placed a pillow against me. I looked down on a tapestry of forests and lakes beginning to cloud with ice. Soon we would be in Winnipeg. The young man had quickened my senses, but I was old enough to know that what seems romantic on the outside can be a substitute for grief, and I was grateful to have gone on in the world long enough to understand that. Later, we would send signals to each other from afar, messages through mutual friends, invitations to book launches that were
impossible
for the other to attend, things like that, not the conspiracies of the heart that letters and emails involved. I’ve known any number of silver-tongued men, but I think my aunt only knew one.

I sat in the Sylvia Hotel and watched the sea. Some of this story hadn’t happened then but in a few days it would. The young man I would meet in Banff, he was as dangerous as an elk. He was going to meet up with his wife later in the tour. He was nursing one of those
harsh little secrets that men have, the kind that are common enough, but will tear lives apart. I’ve made several generalisations about men here: by and large, I think they’re not bad, which is one of those sweeping assertions that don’t get as much press as the other sort. Let me say here that I thought Theo was as decent and kind a man as it was possible to meet. I knew nothing unpleasant about him, nor have I heard anything since to alter my opinion of him. It was just that he lacked judgment in some aspects of his life, that he was helplessly in love with his wife and that he was undeniably homely.

You could say people bring it on themselves, but I’m not sure it’s true; one will be absent from a marriage — there in the flesh, but absent in themselves. And then it’s too late. You can tell from looking at some couples, even in photos, that one person’s eyes have slid outside the frame. I have a picture of a group of us writers who went on that tour, and the young man from Banff is there with his wife. On that day, he is in the marriage still (although not for much longer), but his eyes are following the exit signs.

I came across a quote written by a young Frenchman in the
seventeenth
century. I’ve kept it for so long I don’t know where I found it. It’s written in my handwriting on a brown scrap of paper, brittle with age:

L’absence est à l’amour ce qu’est au feu la vent.

Absence is to love what wind is to fire.

There was that day in the science laboratory which people always talked about at school reunions, even if they hadn’t been there when the accident took place, the day Lester Cooper blew off his hand with a pipe bomb. His sister Patricia hadn’t started high school at the time but later she was expected to go to science classes in that same room, as if nothing had happened.

As if her brother’s flesh and blood hadn’t been spread on the walls.

The room had been painted by then, the same drab institutional light cream it had been before. If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t be able to tell what had gone on. You would simply never know. But when Patricia looked across the room, she saw her brother’s freckled boy’s hand outstretched in the basin where it landed, among the pipettes and petrie dishes. The nails would still be slightly bitten, a piece of sticking plaster on the little finger where he had nicked
himself with a chisel at woodwork class, a small wart on a knuckle, fine downy hair covering the back of his hand.

The accident happened during the lunch hour when the science lab was supposed to be monitored by a prefect, but Clarence Mills got leave to keep a dental appointment in town and forgot to tell someone in charge. Some people would say it was Clarence’s fault; others would blame the school for lack of supervision. But it was Lester who had taken the pipe for the bomb to school, Lester who hammered the end out flat, and he who had emptied the powder out of the leftover fireworks from Guy Fawkes the night before. Lester, with his friends watching, screwed the bolt down on the neck of the pipe, the end of an old tap from the farm. Windows were broken in the explosion, and a boy got his glasses cracked, but Lester was the one who left his hand too long on the bomb and joined in the laughing and cheering at the size of the explosion until he saw his hand sitting on the other side of the room.

After he came out of hospital, he spent another year at Ramparts District High School, the hook he wore on his stump mostly concealed in his pocket. He learned to write with his left hand. He answered questions when he was called on in class and passed his university entrance examinations, and then he left town.

‘Les, you don’t have to go,’ his father, Os Cooper, said. This was one night at dinner when the matter of his leaving was first raised. ‘We can find some things for you to do here on the farm,’ he said. Os was a fair man with broad furry arms and a slight limp which he had brought back from the war. He had been a gunner: he was in the firing line at Tobruk, got hammered by Rommel in the desert, could recite the Battle of Cassino as if it had happened yesterday, and not a quarter of a century earlier.

‘Yeah, shear sheep,’ Lester said. He raised his hook for his father to see. They were eating roast lamb and minted peas and new potatoes. His mother had cut up his meat for him before she covered it with gravy, as if by concealing what she’d done, he would believe he’d done it for himself.

Os said, ‘I bought this farm out of sharemilking. D’you think that
was easy? It’s meant for you kids.’ The farm was mostly dairy but Os ran dry stock, sheep and cattle, on the hills. When people stopped him in town and said how sorry they were about the boy, he’d said, over and again, ‘He’s not a bad kid, you know.’ No one argued with him. Most of the men had played around with gelignite or explosives of one kind or another in their lives.

‘The old order changeth,’ Lester muttered under his breath, although Patricia who was sitting beside him, heard what he said.

‘You can cut out that fancy talk with me, boy,’ Os said.

‘Yeah, right.’

‘Where will you go?’ his mother said. Vonnie was a skinny woman with small neat wrists and ankles. Her complexion was scrubbed by too much wind and sun and tobacco smoke. On Thursdays, when she went bowling, she wore a white dress and a hat with green canvas stitched on the underside of the brim. When she was putting out Os’s lunch she looked like a grown-up candidate for confirmation. Os said she smoked too many cigarettes but Vonnie said there were plenty who smoked more than forty a day and she had a little way to go to catch them up.

‘I’m going to university,’ Lester said. ‘I’ve enrolled to do history and English at Auckland.’

Patricia still sees the way her father’s face dropped, like a child who has had chocolate snatched away from him, yet knowing at the same time that it had already gone. This is a look she has become familiar with, now that her father is old. At the time, her mother rolled her knife and fork backwards and forwards between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. Patricia thought, then, this is a set-up. Her mother knew about this.

Os threw his dinner at the wall, not something Patricia had ever seen him do before. He had been a genial friendly man when she was small, a person who liked practical jokes. ‘Get the hell out of here,’ he shouted. ‘Why don’t you just bugger off right now.’

‘Okay, I will.’

‘You don’t mean that, Os,’ his mother said.

‘Yes, I do.’

Lester stood up then, pushing himself away from the table with his good hand. ‘I’ll be seeing you all,’ he said.

At the end of Patricia’s first year in high school she said she would like to transfer out of sciences and take sewing and cooking for her options. She was a blonde girl with bright thick hair and big greeny blue eyes, the colour of clear sea in the shallows. You’re a bright enough girl, her teachers said, above average anyway. Don’t you think you’re throwing away your chances? Plenty of time for home-making.

Patricia had shrugged. ‘I’d like to get on with things,’ she said. These days she thinks she would have been sent to the guidance teacher for trauma counselling, victim support, something like that. There would be someone trained to make connections about her lack of ambition and drive.

‘I don’t understand the way you’re letting yourself down,’ her best friend, Kaye Swanson, said to her. Kaye was a tall girl who could be sharp and imperious with people, even as a child.

‘I’ll be all right,’ Patricia said, surprising herself. ‘I know what I want.’ She could have said she didn’t want to sit in that room where Lester had screamed and screamed, four people holding him down until the ambulance arrived, and where the policeman sent to the scene had thrown up. She didn’t say this, because she was a girl who spared the feelings of others.

Besides, Patricia and Kaye have spent more than half their lives apart now and Patricia isn’t envious of women with careers. The thing is, she’s done exactly what she liked: living on the farm with Dan and their four children, driving her four-wheel drive along familiar roads each afternoon to pick them up from school when they were small, entertaining their friends as they grew up. Not everything in life is perfect, but then show her a life that is. She misses her older children more than she admits to others, now that, with the
exception
of their ‘bonus baby’, Benjamin, who came along late, they have all left home. Her father, who is in the local rest home, frustrates her because she can’t make herself understood anymore, and there have been some irreconcilable losses in her life, like that of her mother,
and her brother Lester whom she hasn’t seen since she was a girl. Sometimes when she is working in her garden, and looking in the cool dark places between ledges and under hedges where spring bulbs germinate, she finds herself doing sums in her head about how old she was then, and how old he was, and what age he would be now, and is astonished to think that if he is still out there, he will be nearly fifty. There was a case of a New Zealand man with a shadowy past who had had a hand transplanted on to the stump of his arm, a world first that made international headlines. She remembers how she had studied the television pictures, and searched the newspapers looking for clues. Could it be him? But it was not, there was nothing she could see that remotely relates this man to her brother. On other days, she wonders if her father might have hidden something from them, or simply not recognised some scrap of information that would have led them to Lester. She has left it too late to ask him. He had his own way of keeping things to himself, and now he doesn’t know what day it is, and has to be fed because he has forgotten that people need to eat to stay alive.

All the same, she has survived, she tells herself, alive and whole, and still easy to look at, confident and smiling, a woman people turn to in times of crisis.

When Patricia and Kaye were children they believed their friendship would never end, despite the differences in their natures (something neither of them analysed then). They did almost everything together. They were in the same class at school, and both belonged to the Gold Epaulettes Marching Team which Patricia’s mother Vonnie coached. Vonnie had been a marching girl too. The girls marched until they were nine and then the club went into recess because the treasurer embezzled the funds and the team couldn’t make the annual
tournament
. Kaye was midget captain the year they won the trophy. Her height was an advantage, but it drove Vonnie mad trying to contain Kaye’s hair under her cap, when she was dressing the two little girls; fizzy hair the colour of mouse fur that was pulled tightly into a plait, but still stood out in a strange transparent halo where it escaped from
its bondage. Patricia was never as keen on marching as Kaye and was secretly pleased they could just hang around together, but Vonnie felt badly about Kaye’s disappointment, especially because, as she said to her friends, the poor kid’s mother, Wilma, is always having a bad period. A permanent monthly, if you asked her. She invited Kaye to stay at the farm, and it became a regular thing, the girls spending the weekends and summer holidays together.

Kaye stayed at Patricia’s more often than Patricia stayed in town, even though the farmhouse was shabbier and more run down than the Swansons’ place, which was full of couches tightly covered with blue velvet and ruche curtains. The Coopers’ farmhouse was ramshackle and one part of the roof needed replacing so that when it rained hard they had to put buckets out to catch the drips. Os often promised Vonnie that it would get done in the spring, but spring passed into summer and the leaks went away and Vonnie, whose real interests were the bowling club and having a bit of a knees-up at the weekends with her friends — she called them ‘the girls’ too — didn’t seem to mind. There was a piano in the front room and the girls, leathery looking women like Vonnie herself, and their husbands, came out with a couple of flagons of beer, or a keg. Os enjoyed himself too on nights like this when everyone sang and told raucous jokes. People got quite drunk out there on the farm at the weekends. You could see some of them leaning against the cars when they’d had enough, sometimes throwing up. Os used to go out with a few shovelfuls of dirt on Sunday mornings and chuck them over the evidence.

Nobody took much notice of what Patricia and Kaye did. Before his accident, Lester used to take the girls down some Saturday nights to the river bank where there was a camping ground beyond the outskirts of the farm, on the way out of town, and shine torches on tents, so they could see what people got up to. Not that they ever saw anything interesting, just people getting mad and yelling at them. There was only so far they could go along the bank, because the course of the river changed and abruptly fell away to steep bluffs. At that stage, Lester was a boy who looked as if he would grow into a mirror image of his father, his hair slicked up in a tuft with Brylcreem,
the gingery hint of a beard on his chin, although Os said, with real anxiety, now and then, that he was a moody kid and he should get over it. He wasn’t like that when he was a boy.

The last summer holidays before Lester’s accident, Patricia and Kaye built themselves a house in a honeysuckle hedge. The perfume from the flowers was so sultry and sweet it was like they imagined being drunk, the way Os and Vonnie’s guests got at the weekends. It instilled in them a dizziness and a portent of sin, although, when it came to it, Patricia wonders if either of them ever discovered sin. She is vaguely aware of it as something other people do, but she has done little that she can think of. The two of them, she and Kaye, stumbled around like the nursing bees that hovered over the golden flowers. When Patricia poured them each about half a glass of gin from a bottle in the drinks cabinet — and that is one of the most wicked things she can remember — it tasted acidic, a little dangerous at the back of their throats, but otherwise not as surprising as they had hoped, apparently not altering them in any way. They both wanted to be movie stars when they grew up, and practised acting until they were at least ten or eleven when suddenly they felt too old for dressing up and fooling around in that way. Kaye had grown a whole head taller and got tired of Patricia wanting her to play the man every time. It brought about their first quarrel.

One afternoon Patricia persuaded her mother to let them dress up in her wedding dress, which was in a box on the top of the wardrobe. The dress was made of guipere lace over taffeta and had some rust marks on the skirt where the pearl tiara had rested on its little metal head band in the box.

‘Well, I suppose so,’ Vonnie said doubtfully when Patricia asked her. ‘I put it away hoping for you to wear it some day, dear, but you might have to get a new one of your own.’

‘I’ll wear it today and you can take my picture,’ said Patricia. ‘That’ll be my pretend grown-up. You can be the groom, Kaye.’

Vonnie took a picture of them with the box Brownie. After she had squinted at them for a while and snapped a couple of pictures, she said, ‘Now it’s Kaye’s turn to put the dress on.’ She had seen through
the viewfinder that Kaye was looking discontented.

Kaye pulled the dress over her head and stood there, her face suddenly illuminated. She stood up straight, the way she did when she was a little thing in the marching team, as Vonnie told Os that evening. She took two steps forward, flicking the train behind her.

‘Go on,’ Vonnie said to Patricia, ‘take her hand.’

‘Who am I?’ said Patricia.