A Needle in the Heart (17 page)

‘She didn’t say nothing. Why do you want to know?’

She gives him an odd quizzical look. ‘No reason,’ she says, finally.

‘Do you know her or something?’

‘Something,’ she agrees. ‘She used to live round here when she was a girl.’

It is no surprise then for Ethel when Kaye walks in the door, rattling the bell as she comes. Ethel takes a long look at her, thin as a crisp, beginning to dry up, a briefcase clutched in one hand, an
overnight
bag in the other. Her hair is like a silver helmet. She wears an olive green silk suit with a matt-finished silver brooch on her lapel. The skirt just skims her knees.

Kaye doesn’t know Ethel straight away.

Ethel says, ‘It’s Ms, is it Kaye? Ms Swanson?’

Kaye glances up then from where she is signing the booking slip, about to make a sharp retort, and stops, her features freezing into an expression of startled recognition. Ethel is a size eighteen these days, but she carries her weight with a hauteur that makes her imposing. Her eyes are still black but they have grown shrewd with time.

‘Back for old times’ sake, are we?’

‘Something like that,’ says Kaye, regaining her composure.

‘I was sad to hear your parents passed away,’ says Ethel. ‘Very sad about that.’

‘Thank you,’ Kaye says.

‘Adam here will bring your milk to the unit, it’s number seven, up the ramp. You can park the car in the space out the front. Adam will show you. You got any kids, Kaye?’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t think so.’ Ethel blows a speck off a manicured pearly pink fingernail.

Kaye is the senior manager in a government department. She expects she will be a CEO, a chief executive officer. She spells out the acronym for Patricia, as if she would be unlikely to know this. They are sitting face to face in the old tearooms. Kaye didn’t know that places like this still existed. It has a floral frieze around the walls and a joky sign up above the counter that says ‘Y
OU
C
AN’T
F
IRE
M
E
D
AMMIT
, S
LAVES
H
AVE TO BE
S
OLD
.’

‘Your job sounds pretty important, Kaye,’ she says. ‘What’s your field?’

‘Public administration.’

‘But don’t you have to specialise in something? I mean, you were a teacher, weren’t you? I thought it might be in education.’

‘Oh, I left that light years ago,’ says Kaye. Patricia sees that her fingers are like threads and the way her glasses perch on the bridge of her spiny nose. She remembers how her hair used to stand out in that light-coloured halo and is surprised at how sleekly it falls now. She touches her own bouncy fair mane of hair and thinks, we are
only forty-five. How can it be that Kaye already looks like a woman of sixty?

‘I got my degree in policy,’ Kaye explains. ‘You can manage anything when you’ve got that behind you. I can’t tell what might come up, right now. Transport, education, the arts — who knows?’

‘I see,’ says Patricia doubtfully. She looks round to see if their tea is coming. When Kaye had rung the night before, she had tried to hide her astonishment. ‘Come out to the farm and have a meal,’ she had said, immediately. ‘Or stay the night. We’ve got oodles of room.’

‘No,’ Kaye had said stiffly, explaining that she was booked into a local motel.

And Patricia had said, ‘Not Ethel’s place?’ It was as good as telling Kaye she knew all the Swansons’ family secrets. So then Patricia had suggested that if they were going to meet, which seemed to be what Kaye was suggesting, they have a meal in town at one of the cafés on the main street.

But Kaye said no to that too. It was only a brief meeting she was suggesting, so if there was somewhere reasonably private they could have a chat, that would be a help. Patricia guessed that, before Kaye walked in and found Ethel Miller sitting behind the reception desk in the Summer Lodge, she might have asked Patricia to meet her there. Not that she would have gone. She thinks Kaye can see that too, that some territory is being established.

‘It’s just that it hasn’t changed,’ she says, her eyes flicking around. Patricia senses she is nervous, but then she feels an unease of her own. She has been tempted to tell Dan about this meeting but something about the way Kaye had spoken to her has cautioned her against this. Being here, buried in the back of the old tearooms feels, if not wicked, certainly challenging. Girls used to have assignments here with boys. Girls like Ethel. Only they would have been girls who met boys their own age, she reminds herself. She imagines that this meeting is about the past.

When their tea arrives, with a plate of brightly coloured cakes, Kaye takes a sip and fiddles with the clasp on her briefcase. Then she opens the lid and peers in. Perhaps she has found an old birth
certificate
,
something like that. But it is a photocopied newspaper clipping she passes over to Patricia, crisp and recent. She clasps her hands in front of her, leans her forehead against them for a moment, before straightening up as Patricia scans the article.

‘The piece about the hook in the river,’ Patricia says. ‘It was in our local paper.’

‘It was run in a side bar of the
Evening Post
, the part about the hook. I went to the library and looked up the original story.’

‘I don’t understand,’ says Patricia. She is thinking about the way Kaye’s family had left town so suddenly, and put managers into the shop, how someone had told her at the time that Kaye had gone to boarding school. She had hated the way Kaye left without saying goodbye to her, although when she looks back it was clear they had stopped being friends by then. It embarrasses her to recall the way she had kept trying to get in touch with her. After the bridesmaid episode, she had chosen to forget Kaye. And yet, when she rang, it had given her an initial shock of pleasure, as if, after all, there was something between them that might be recaptured.

‘Your brother, Lester. He had a hook. Well, someone must have made the connection, surely? You must have.’ Kaye’s colour is very high and she has trouble keeping her voice down.

‘Yes,’ says Patricia patiently. ‘I thought of my brother, and I thought that it had nothing to do with him, or with me.’

‘I can’t believe that,’ Kaye shoots back, regaining some of her composure.

‘And even less with you,’ says Patricia, feeling herself overtaken by an active dislike for the woman.

‘Then I think you should consider what I have to tell you. I saw your brother the day he went missing.’

‘You don’t know what day he went missing. None of us know that.’

‘All right. The last time he was seen in Ramparts. Oh come on, that was well known. Everyone was talking about it. The whole town was in an uproar over Lester and his mates turning up that Anzac Day. I knew what was going on. You don’t have a monopoly on the
rustic history of this place. My father ran a tractor sales and service, for God’s sake.’

‘All right,’ says Patricia. ‘There was an incident. Something happened.’

‘Of course it happened. Now, I’ve got something to tell you.’ She hesitates, choosing her words with care. ‘At that time, my own life wasn’t great — my parents were going through some bad times. I took off in my father’s car early that morning.’

‘You did? We were only fourteen at the time.’

‘Well, I took it anyway. I drove it down to the river bank. I stayed there for a while and then I thought that what I was doing would only make things worse, and I had no idea why I’d gone there. I was down river from the bend by the bridge and I was trying to put the car into reverse when I looked up and I saw, in the distance, your father and your brother.’

‘Yes,’ says Patricia, ‘my father gave him a ride out of town. He told us.’ She feels her flesh creep, wants to stop the other woman talking, force a doughnut into her mouth, anything at all to shut her up.

‘Your father got out of his ute and came round and opened the passenger door and then Lester got out. At first I didn’t recognise him with all that long hair. I thought he was a girl. They stood there for a moment. Your father was waving his arms around and Lester was shaking his head, and then your father pushed him and he fell into the river below.’

‘No,’ says Patricia, ‘none of this happened.’

‘And then,’ Kaye goes on relentlessly, ‘your father got back in the truck and drove towards me. I couldn’t get the car into reverse. He saw me there, and stopped. He asked me what was wrong, what was I doing there, and I said I was in trouble and I didn’t know what to do, and so he put the car in reverse for me and backed it on to the road. He said to me, “Girlie, you could get into trouble doing something like this. You could roll down that bank if you weren’t careful.” He made sure I had my back to the river all the time. I put the accelerator down and drove home very slowly. I was surprised how easy it was. Once I got the hang of it. I drive a lot these days.’ She smiles with
self-deprecation, as if driving is particularly clever, not that she would want to say so. ‘When I got back, I just parked the car in the garage and that was that.’

‘And you never told anyone about this?’

‘I tried to talk to my father about your father, just in a general sort of way, but he said I should keep well away from the Cooper family. He said you were a mad lot. After what I’d seen, I couldn’t help agreeing. Not you, of course, Patricia. We were always friends.’

‘I think you’re crazy,’ Patricia says. ‘Why would you come here and tell me this now, after all these years? It’s monstrous. You’ve got no proof.’

Kaye’s eyes are watery and shining with sincerity. ‘I saw that piece in the paper and I thought you’d want to know what happened to Lester. It’s been on my conscience for years. Don’t think I’m enjoying this.’

‘Somebody would have found him.’

‘If they were looking for him.’ Kaye closes her eyes briefly, pursing her lips, as if all of this is so obvious it doesn’t need saying. ‘Of course he could have been found. But he wasn’t.’

‘So what happens next?’ says Patricia, trying to keep her voice level.

‘Happens? Nothing happens. I don’t want any scandal, believe me, not at this stage of my career.’

‘Your career.’ Patricia can’t stop her lip curling, although at the same time her knees are trembling beneath the table and she has to hold her hands in her lap so that Kaye can’t see them shaking.

‘I guess it’s up to you, really, how you deal with this information.’

‘This is not information,’ said Patricia. She reaches up and brushes a crumb from the table, steadying herself. ‘This is a fabrication. This is something you think you saw, Kaye, but you didn’t.’

‘Then where did the hook come from? Whose was it?’

‘Do you think nobody’s asked me since that thing turned up? Of course they have. And then, when you remind them, they remember, after all, that there have been three men in this town with missing limbs, counting Lester. A man who came back from the war, and
another old chap who lost his hand felling trees. A long time ago. They’re dead and nobody can ask them how many hooks they had or what happened to them.’ Patricia stands, reaching for her purse to pay the bill.

‘Why would I come here and tell you this if it weren’t true?’ Kaye is white and swaying on her feet, fumbling with her briefcase.

‘I’ll tell you why. Because you’ve got nothing better to do. Because your blood’s in this place, and you can’t keep away from it, can’t stop meddling and poking and looking for absurd clues. Take my advice: keep away or you might find more than you want to know.’

Kaye has crumpled, is turning her head this way and that in distress. ‘You always wanted to be the boss of everything.’

Boss. The word has a childish pathetic ring, as if they have moved on to trading insults.

‘And you always liked my brother, but he was mine,’ Patricia says.

This is a cheap shot for which Patricia will later feel deeply ashamed. She is speaking, after all, to a grown woman who was, as she has said herself, only fourteen when all of this happened, or might have happened.

And yet, in an odd sort of way, it seems to make Kaye happy. Her damp sorrowing eyes blaze with an absurd sudden triumph, as if she has won something. That, Patricia supposes, is how it goes, how victories are won and wrested away in Kaye’s world.

The rest home in Ramparts is built on a hill. It looks across a valley full of native bush where birds flit endlessly among the branches of the trees.

In the mornings when he is being given his daily bath, Os Cooper looks around the mirrors with a look of wonder and bafflement. One morning, when he has been dressed in his brown corduroy pants and woollen shirt, with the sleeves rolled up the way he likes them, he stands and straightens himself in front of his reflection and wags his finger at it. ‘I’m going straight,’ he says, ‘What about you?’

Most mornings he shuffles backwards and forwards down the
hallway of the secure unit, with a ceaseless steady tread. In the
afternoon
his frail body collapses in front of the television in the yellow and blue pretty dayroom and watches television.

Just sometimes, on what the nurses describe as his good days, he can be persuaded to join in an activity. Patricia visits twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. Some days he knows her, and others not at all, but he likes her company because she takes him outside the locked wing for walks in the garden, and sometimes for drives. The first thing Patricia asks the staff is whether or not he is having a good day. There are fewer and fewer of these and for this she is grateful. She does not want to see her father dancing around in circles waving scarves. Besides, there was a day when he first went to live in the home that had embarrassed her and the staff.

What happened was this. Someone who described herself as a
storyteller
had come in for an activity session, to help the patients ‘reclaim their lives,’ as she put it. Her name was Sadie and she had long black hair that she wove around in her fingers while she chatted and encouraged them to write things down on big blank unruled sheets of paper. The patients were given coloured crayons which Sadie said would be easier for them to hold, and they could make bold headings for the milestone events in their lives: journeys or marriage or the birth of their children.