A Needle in the Heart (20 page)

‘And all this time, your friend is distressed, and hasn’t had any sleep, and she hasn’t been to the police?’

‘I figured we had to find him before he got away.’

‘We figured we had to find him before he got away.’ This, echoed very slowly, deliberation after every word.

‘Yes. Something like that.’

‘Something like that. So then your friend decided to go to the police?’

‘I told her go to the police. You can’t have people doing that kind of thing.’

Out at Moa Point. Where she’d been the night before. The smell of sewage in the air, because it’s the outfall for the city, or it was back then, before they put the treatment plant in. A scummy brown film among the rocks. Bits of toilet paper. The gun in her back. Gene, taking her out across the rocky outfall, underneath the flight path of the planes coming in to land, the roar in her ears coming and going. The surf. The planes. The ringing sound of fear and the total
light-headedness
she was experiencing.

‘Sit down,’ he says.

‘I’ve gotta get some sleep, Gene. Please take me home.’

His blue satin shirt, like a kid’s dress-up, the violet smudges beneath his eyes, the oily sea behind him.

‘What did you do with him?’

‘Nothing.’

‘He tried it on with you.’

‘Yeah, but nothing happened. He was too drunk to get it up.’

‘I wanted you to be mine.’

‘You can’t own me, Gene.’

‘I do, but that’s not the point.’

‘Then what the fuck is the point?’

‘I told you, I never had a girl who was mine. Who’d do anything for me. Just for me. I really really liked, really fucking loved you, you dumb cow.’

‘I love you too, Gene. Honest.’

‘But you went with this joker.’

‘I go with lots of jokers.’

‘No, you don’t, that’s different. You wanted to go with him. You stayed out late with him.’

‘He just gave me a ride home.’

‘Why didn’t you try and jump out of the car?’

‘I didn’t want to get killed. I was scared.’

‘You could have run away from him when he went to sleep.’

‘He went to sleep on top of me. He was a big fella. Please Gene, this isn’t getting us anywhere.’

‘Prove it. Prove that he forced you. Make me believe it.’

‘What do I have to do?’

‘You know. You
know
.’

‘You mean go to the police?’

‘Yeah, well, he sounds pretty dangerous. You should report an attack.’

‘I can’t go through with that.’

Gene just looks at her, contempt written on his face, as if she’s dirt.

‘So now,’ says the lawyer, flicking his gown behind him with one practised hand, ‘now you’re providing the witness with sympathy and support?’

‘Objection, your honour. That question is not relevant to the facts of the Crown’s case.’

‘Objection upheld.’

‘Thank you, your honour. I have no further questions for this witness.’

He has another fish to dangle in front of the jury. Dixie. Blinking, awake far too early, still a stunning figure in her black gear. Standing up straight, a small half smile hovering round the corners of her carmine mouth, the matching fingernails peeping out from the black lace mittens, the hair gathered over padding to create a high pompadour, the ringlets flowing from beneath a comb.

‘You introduced the first witness to the defendant?’

‘Yeah.’

‘He is your cousin?’

‘Nah.’

‘But that’s what you told the witness?’

‘He was a mate from way back.’

‘When she asked you if it was safe to ride home with him, you told her, yes, it’s all right. Is that true?’

A toss of her head, ‘I didn’t know he was a bad fulla then.’

‘And now you think he is?’

‘Stands to reason, wouldn’t you say, mister?’

‘I’m asking the questions.’

‘Well, we can’t all be wise with hindsight, as the saying goes.’ A triumphant malice at having got the better of her questioner.

‘Well, as you’re so full of aphorisms, wouldn’t you say that perhaps you’re a person who likes two bob each way?’

‘Objection, your honour.’

Tania steals a look at Ruka, the first time she has allowed herself a glance. A muscle is working in the thick column of his throat. As if he is swallowing and swallowing. His eyes are very still.

The jury’s still out. Tania’s mother gets to her feet, restless, knocking a half-empty bottle of soft drink to the floor without noticing what she’s done.

‘I’m going out for a breath of fresh air,’ she says. She and Tania have been so on edge with each other there’s nothing much left for them to say, especially with Gene sitting there preening himself. Tania looks at him, and thinks what a sad person he really is. He thinks he’s done all right in that courtroom, that he cut quite a figure. Now that she sees him in this harsh real place, she sees how much of a fantasy world he lives in, and how little she knows about him — what his life was before, where he came from, whether anyone had cared stink for him. She knows he likes Batman comics and George Michael, and that’s about it.

Her mother’s not hiding her dislike of him, and although Gene doesn’t appear to notice or care, it hasn’t helped the hours to pass, as the jury sits somewhere and considers all their lives and what’s going to happen to them.

When her mother comes back from her walk, she looks
indignant
. ‘That poor woman,’ she says.

‘What poor woman?’ says Tania.

‘His wife. She’s beside herself out there in the other waiting room.’

‘You’re not telling me you spoke to Ruka’s wife? Tell me this isn’t happening.’

‘I certainly did speak to her. I’ve been watching that woman — she’s on her own, too ashamed, I expect, to tell her friends what’s going on. It must be hard, having to get someone to mind the kiddies, and keep it all to herself. The whole thing’s just killing her, you can tell. I said to her, I’m sorry about your trouble, I tried to bring her up right.’

‘You said that about me?’

‘She’s a decent sort of woman. She said, I don’t blame the girl, he shouldn’t have been where he was, he shouldn’t have put himself in that situation. It’s just that he’s innocent. I said to her, but Tania had all these bruises and things, I’ve seen the pictures to prove that. She said to me, well, Ruka didn’t do it, he wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

‘You don’t know anything. You always think you know better than me.’

‘So you tell me what you know, more to the point.’

‘You’re my mother,’ Tania says. ‘You’re supposed to be on my side.’

‘Well, don’t tell me you didn’t want Ruka,’ her mother says. ‘Because I can tell you, I would.’ She looks at Gene with distaste, as if he’s just crawled out from under a stone.

‘Oh, I’m out of here,’ Tania says, picking up her jacket. But then the court attendant says the jury is coming back and so they file into the back of the court, behind Ruka. She knows exactly what the foreman is going to say, and while they’re waiting for him to clear his throat, and steady his voice, she slips noiselessly out again, walks down the corridor and moves into the night.

Waiting for the crash to happen, the earthquake to start toppling things. Feathers of rain touch her skin; soon they turn to bee stings. She thinks if she runs fast enough and far enough away, she will reach open space.

On the drive home from the hospital Annie Pile stared straight through the windscreen, her baby asleep in her arms. She held him as if he was a snake in a basket. The beaten-up light truck rattled and banged over potholes. All around us, the landscape was steeped in dark yellow sunlight, shining between the leaves of trees, trickling through the dry kikuyu grass at the edge of the road, nearly blinding her husband who was driving the truck.

‘I had chloroform when I had my operation,’ I said. I was wedged between Annie and the passenger door. My parents had hitched me a lift home from the hospital. I’d had pneumonia, and then, when I got over that, the doctor said, well, she might as well have her tonsils out now and get it over and done with. The hospital was a long way off, more than twenty miles, and because my parents didn’t have a car, they hadn’t visited me during the three weeks I was in hospital. My mother had started out to walk one day, but the
heat got to her. I was seven, going on eight, at the time.

Nobody in the truck responded, although Annie Pile’s husband passed his hand over his straight chunky hair, as if this in some way signalled an acknowledgment.

‘I read fourteen books while I was in hospital,’ I said. ‘My teacher at the hospital said I’ll probably go up a class when I get back to school.’

‘Make her be quiet, Kurt,’ Annie said to her husband. Her hair, as plain as his, but fairer, was caught with a pin above her ear, like fencing wire over corn silk. Her mottled cheeks had a raw chapped appearance; beneath her eyes it looked as if someone had made thumb prints on her skin.

‘My wife is so tired,’ the man said, with a slight foreign inflection in his voice. ‘From having the baby.’

I thought about stroking the baby’s finger, to see whether that might make the mother happier, but then I decided it wouldn’t work. Instead, I looked out at the lush and surprising landscape as we came to the town. In the hedgerows banana passion-fruit hung in ripe yellow clusters. I leaned my head against the cab window, my brown pigtail pressed against the glass. When I shifted I could feel the imprint of my hair on my cheek, as if my face had been tied to a mooring rope.

When we arrived at the gate of the small farm where I lived, my parents were standing side by side, waiting to welcome me home. My mother was dressed in a pair of dungarees buttoned over a checked blouse. She was a tiny woman, barely five feet, but so thin and
energetic
that she seemed to occupy more space. My father was wearing a tweed jacket and a tie. His English brogues held a reddish tint in their polished surfaces. He was a tall lean man, with hollows in his olive cheeks, eyebrows like inverted tyre tracks and a hawkish nose. He had a suitcase beside him, as if he had just arrived home from a journey of his own.

My mother put her arms around me when I got down from the truck, examining me closely, touching my hair and cheek. ‘Mattie. Darling,’ she murmured. My father inclined his head towards me, his shoulders stiff.

Kurt climbed down from the truck cab and shook hands with my father. ‘A holiday,’ he said. ‘Nice for some.’

‘A few days in Auckland.’

‘Oh well. What did you get up to?’

My father was clearly going to say, mind your own damn business, but remembered just in time that he owed Kurt. ‘I saw a couple of musicals.’ He drew on a cigarette, holding the smoke in his mouth.

‘Gilbert and Sullivan? I heard there was some on.’ Kurt’s lip curled.

My father released a perfect smoke ring into the still air. ‘
Cox and Box
. At least there’s a good laugh or two in it, not all your Mozart and high falutin’ stuff. My cobber and I had a good laugh all right.’

‘Very good. Good for you. We’ll be off then.’

‘Better have a look at this young ’un of yours. A boy, well, there’s something to smile about.’

Annie continued to stare straight ahead of her as if she couldn’t see any of them. Her husband looked at her as at a mystery so large and unfathomable that he was afraid of being caught in it. No, worse than that, that he was inside it but couldn’t yet understand what had trapped him. He was a lot older than Annie Pile, but in that moment he looked like a fledgling sparrow, immensely young and vulnerable. My mother approached the truck.

‘What have you called the baby, Alice?’

‘Jonathan.’

‘A sound name. He can shorten it if he likes. Names are
important
.’ She leaned in the truck to peer at the baby, putting out her hand to move the blanket aside a little. Annie snatched the cover back, so that the baby was hidden from view. My mother flushed and
straightened
. ‘Thank you so very much for bringing Mattie home. I hope she was no bother to you, Alice.’

‘She needs to hold her tongue more,’ Annie said.

‘I expect she was excited about coming home.’ When Annie didn’t reply, she said, ‘Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.’

As the truck drove away, clouds of red dust billowing behind it,
my father glanced down to check that his shoes were not getting dirty. ‘Unfriendly sort of a coot. Pile, my Auntie Fanny. He’s a Jerry, you know, name’s Pilsener. You know how they change their names, those fellows.’

My mother said, ‘Their baby’s a Mongol.’

‘Oh my Lord,’ said my father. ‘Well, too bad about that, eh.’

‘We’re fortunate,’ said my mother and, taking my bag in one hand, she led me, with the other, up the path to our two-roomed cottage with the low ceilings. After a moment’s hesitation, my father followed her, drew abreast of us.

My mother said, contentedly, ‘You’re home.’ She could have been talking to either of us, but I knew her words were directed towards me. For the moment, we were together again, my mother and my father and me.

We have different ways to describe things now. We would say that that baby had Down’s syndrome. We would say that the parents would find joy in their son, regardless. But that was then. Our family was momentarily counting its blessings, on a jewel bright day beneath a Delft blue sky, the gorse pods snapping in the heat. My mother, as you see her in this picture, is so pleased that I am home, and if she is puzzled by my father’s absences, she puts it down to the war, that restlessness men get, and she lets the matter lie.

We moved north after the war. My father had served in the army as a signaller. He was an Englishman who couldn’t make sense of my mother’s relatives, or they didn’t understand him — you could take your pick. He dressed differently and spoke ‘posh’ as my relatives used to say.

‘I can’t stand it here,’ he said, when he came back, meaning the house where my mother and I lived with my grandparents. ‘We need a bit of an adventure.’

‘I don’t want an adventure,’ my mother said. ‘I’ve got money saved for a house of our own. Why don’t you just settle down and get a job like everyone else?’

My father didn’t want that. He’d heard about this place up
north. Some of his cobbers in the army had talked about it, and they couldn’t see themselves settling down in the suburbs.

‘We’ll live off the land,’ he told my mother, his voice passionate in its excitement. ‘You’ll see, this is no nine to five sinecure with nothing to live for except a pension.’

He followed her around for weeks, pleading with her to listen to sense. Then he went away and when he came back, my mother said she’d go. She gave him her Post Office book with all her savings and told him add it to the rehab money from the army. ‘Just go ahead,’ she said, ‘buy a place. I’ll manage.’

My father loved Alderton from the beginning. My mother loathed it. A lot of the people there had come out from China, remnants of the imperial army stationed round Shanghai and Tsientin, at the end of the twenties. They’d emigrated to New Zealand rather than going back to England because they had become used to warmer weather, and they hoped their lives might go on much as they had in China, while they planted fruit trees and lived off the land. There were some disappointments in store: the living was not as cheap as they expected and servants were almost impossible to come by. Some of the
better-off
settlers built big houses; others had to make do with rickety cottages, but they behaved as if they were palaces anyway. You could step through a crooked door frame into a room full of jade treasures; an ornate silk screen would divide the kitchen from the dining room. A bunch of weatherbeaten men and women, getting their hands dirty for the first time, holding parties on the wobbly wooden verandahs of their shacks in the evenings, jitterbugging and drinking gin. They were about as different as you could get anywhere, round then, at the end of the war. Men like my father and Kurt Pile, as unalike as they were, could be as fanciful or neurotic or sad as they wanted to be, and nobody really cared. The settlers had their own world and if you were not part of it you were invisible. My father thought he might be able to join it; my mother thought he was deluding himself.

In the beginning, my parents raised poultry for quick cash but it took them years to get established. They milked a few cows, separating
the cream through their hand rotated Alfa Laval, and fed the whey to pigs. Eventually, they planted citrus and tamarillo orchards, and filled their garden with cantaloupes, aubergines (or eggplants as they were called then) and capsicums, whatever was rare and exotic at the time, like pepinos, with smooth marbled skins and smoky flesh, dragon fruit without the seeds. The trouble was, everything had to be done every day. My mother could accept that, but my father didn’t always want to be there. He went away down south when he was supposed to be milking cows or weeding in the orchard while she found jobs to keep them going. He often spent days writing letters or just reading. He took to nostalgic books about the English countryside, where, it seemed, it was always May, and the larks never stopped singing.

My mother took a job for a while, cooking for one of the army wives. The woman, who was called Gloria, wore silk scarves like headbands, the knot tied at the back, so the ends drifted down her back, and long beads. She held her tailor-mades in an ivory cigarette holder, or, when rations ran out, smoked fat rolled purple lasiandra buds that smelled like Egyptian tobacco as they burned. My mother reported for duty at seven each morning. The cookhouse was at the bottom of the garden of a big house. Gloria had a rope strung from the house to the cookhouse with a bell on my mother’s end. When she pulled once she wanted fresh tea and when the bell rang twice she needed hot toast.

‘If I ring three times, it’s for an emergency,’ Gloria told her friends, with a tinkling laugh. ‘I know cook will rescue me.’

My mother left for work right after she and my father milked the cows. It was supposed to be my father’s job to get me up and send me to school. He simply forgot some days, except to say
stand up straight
,
girl
. A part of him seemed to think he was still in the army, although you wouldn’t have thought so to look at him. On these mornings, his smart clothes were put away in the wardrobe; he dressed in baggy pants, held up by braces. He was a smoker too, wreaths of smoke curling round his head as he read on, regardless of anything but the book propped in front of him.

He didn’t know how I watched this silent life of his. I discovered
what a man’s body looked like when I spied him taking a bath. A curtained window divided the cottage from the lean-to containing a copper for heating water and washing clothes, and a tin bath. Usually we had baths one after another, using the same grey suds to save hot water. One morning, after he had been away for a time, he heated the copper and took an unexpected bath. I raised the curtain and he was rubbing himself dry in the dark room, lit only by a single bulb and the reflection of the flames from the copper fire. When I was a young woman, I saw Oliver Reed in
Women in Love
and I was reminded of my father, that same pale English flesh, the colour of potato flesh. He was long and spindly, his chest slightly concave, and yet in the flickering light I found him mysterious and oddly beautiful.

I learned that my father had an army friend called Frank whom he often used to ring up after my mother left for work.

‘Tolls, please,’ he would say nervously after he had rung the exchange. And then, after a pause, ‘I want to make a collect call.’ He would give the operator a number down south. ‘Eight A, Hunterville.’ I can still hear him say it. Short long in Morse code. After a period of negotiation with someone at the other end, punctuated by silences, I would hear his voice, joyful and light, ‘Frank, my old mate, how
are
you? Just thought I’d ring for a natter.’

At which point, he would suddenly check to see where I was. ‘Hold on a tick, old boy,’ he’d say, looking at me. ‘Shouldn’t you have gone to school?’ Eventually, I got bored with these mornings of idleness and started getting dressed and walking to school on my own although I was late so often that one of the teachers phoned home and, by chance, caught my mother.

‘Why?’ she asked my father, when she had put the phone down. ‘Why can’t you do what you say you will?’

‘Why do you nag?’ His voice had that pleading sound again.

‘How can I live with a man who calls me a nag? Why don’t you just say shrew and be done with it?’

‘Shrew,’ he said, testing the word on his tongue and laughing. She didn’t laugh with him.

Then she said, ‘Look, I know it’s hard coming back from the war.
I know things happened that I can’t understand. Why don’t we just have a rest today and we’ll do the chores together.’

‘What about your job?’

‘Oh that,’ she said airily. ‘I pulled the bell off the string yesterday and dropped it in the river.’

‘You did what? This is some kind of joke.’

‘Not at all.’

‘What will they think of us?’ He put his hand to his forehead.

‘I’ve got no idea,’ she said, and laughed. ‘They asked for something special for afternoon tea, the other day, something sweet and light, chocolate but Oriental, something with a little ginger in it. “All of those things in one dish?” I said. “Well, cook, if you could rustle something up we’ll leave it to you,” said Madam Gloria. So I took everything I could find in the kitchen and mixed it all up together and iced it, and left it to cool, and when it looked right, I cut it into pieces and served it when their guests came. As I was pouring tea, they were all saying things like, isn’t this delicious, and where did you find the recipe, and is this the new cook’s doing. So then she said, “Oh, the woman’s very good at taking instructions, she can follow a recipe, I’ll give her that.”’