A Needle in the Heart (8 page)

There was a wrap party the night Petra’s first movie finished filming. It had been a punishing schedule, up at five each morning, some nights going on until ten. There never seemed enough time to eat and sleep, but all the time in the world to talk. Everyone was someone’s best friend, and sometimes their lover. People told each other outrageous things about themselves that they’d never told anyone else. They made dramas out of their own lives which, whether they were true or not, they knew they would believe from then on. Now suddenly they were all having to say goodbye. Not that it would be truly goodbye because there were only so many movie sets and so many jobs to go round in Wellington. And if there wasn’t a movie there would be a stage play, or a stretch of radio drama, though that was never more than a week’s work at a time. Or a television commercial if you got lucky because that was enough to pay for a few months out of work. Petra had done a couple of those.

Philip, looking across the room at her, could see why they wanted Petra’s face. It had a wild vitality that at this moment seemed unbridled. He had only seen her for a few hours here and there over the previous month because a lot of filming had been taking place out of town. He knew she didn’t want him to be there and, at the same time, that she did, a kind of affirmation that he was part of her life, that he accepted what she did.

At breakfast, the first they had shared since filming began, she had run it past him. ‘D’you think we could get a sitter in?’ she asked, her coffee balanced between the fingers of both hands, elbows on the
table. She had big shadows under her eyes and a trace of make-up at her hairline.

‘We’ve had sitters in about three times a week for the past month. I’ve still got a life to lead, you know.’

‘Okay.’

She had sat there in silence, blowing the top of her coffee.

‘You said …’ she began.

‘Yes,’ he said. Because he didn’t want her to remind him of what he had said, the last time the subject of a wrap party at the theatre had come up. ‘Is there any way I can get caught up in your brilliant orbit?’ he had asked her, and she’d said, ‘Well, come to the fucking party, if that’s what you want.’ He’d finished up staying home, and she hadn’t come back until morning. When things like this happened, he was aware of a queer electricity in the air, something that repelled him and yet attracted him to her, the way it always had. He thought she’d been with other people: it might be a man or a woman. She said on nights when they got drunk together that she wouldn’t mind either, not that she’d do it of course.

‘You’ll come then?’

‘The kids are used to Debbie.’

‘Don’t start on me again.’

‘No, I didn’t mean it like that,’ he said. ‘They really like her.’ Debbie was the girl who had been sitting for them for the past year. It wasn’t as if they were little children any more, twelve and ten, a boy and a girl.

‘You work as hard at doing good as I do at acting,’ she said then.

‘Yes,’ he said, because it was true, and he wanted to agree with her and have him back to himself. His life was full of causes. In those days, young lawyers like himself (he still thought of himself as young) jokingly called themselves storefront lawyers. They believed in helping the poor and giving the underdog a chance. A lot of his clients couldn’t afford to pay him properly. He organised food parcels for their families when they were in jail and saw to it that their children went to school, even if it meant calling round to their houses and banging on the doors until the mothers got out of bed (it was
usually the husbands who were in jail) and dressed the kids while he waited. His luxuriant hair was thinning a little but he still wore it round his collar. He wore suits that were rumpled and he didn’t care. In the lunch breaks from court he and his friends gathered in a café over a bookshop and exchanged case stories.

‘I have to work,’ Petra told her friends. ‘Philip might be a lawyer, but he doesn’t give a damn about money.’

It wasn’t true about needing to work, but it was a fact that he took on cases which seemed unwinnable; that he had an affinity with people who were not particularly attractive but might be innocent. You don’t have to be good looking to be innocent, he said. He suspected that there was a raffish charm to this that she had still not fathomed; it kept them together when other things failed. As for the money, his father-in-law had paid for the house they lived in. They had looked at it just as a fun thing, and dreamed about how they could scratch a deposit together for it. Of course Petra had told her parents when they were up visiting for one of the wedding rehearsals, and that was their present: the title to the house. The house was full of newly delivered furniture and there was a car in the garage. There were things Philip didn’t want, wouldn’t have chosen.

‘I don’t want it,’ he said at the time. ‘I never asked for any of this.’

‘We’ll send it back them,’ said Petra, ‘and you can spend the rest of your life chasing lawsuits for the rich and famous and licking boots. I don’t care, it’s your life.’

‘I thought it was ours,’ he’d said.

‘I can’t change who I am,’ Petra said, ‘any more than you can. That’s my dowry. Anyone who got me would get the same.’

It had taken him some time to get over this, caused a bitterness that he later regretted. One day he’d woken up and thought how unfair he’d been to Petra, how he needed to recover things before it was too late. He had enjoyed the freedom of unexpected wealth. We do our own thing, they told people, we make our own choices. Sometimes it worked and other times it was awful.

He had been nursing a drink for half an hour without speaking
to anyone. ‘For God’s sake, you’re not doing your Heathcliff act, are you,’ she’d said, the last time she went past him to the bathroom. ‘There are heaps of people here for you to talk to.’ He edged closer to the group she was in. Someone said, ‘I’ve got this great idea for a movie. It’s about a black alien in Harlem being chased by two white aliens. It’s a really fantastic idea.’

‘That’s actually such a gross idea,’ said Petra, stabbing the air with her cigarette.

Then an actor called Mel wanted to tell them about the most gross experience of
her
life, which was about going to Indonesia and being felt up by a tame orangutan. ‘He knew I was a woman,’ she said, ‘Honestly, can you imagine having a large shaggy ape with his arms around you getting an erection?’

‘Easily,’ Petra said and everyone laughed.

‘So what’s your weird story, Petra?’ asked Mel.

‘Um.’ Petra took a draw on her cigarette and pondered. Somebody had produced a bottle of cognac which was being passed around. A fire had been lit in the grate using Bleu de Bresse tubs for kindling. Philip felt his stomach turning over as he waited.

‘Philip’s mother has a needle floating around in her body that you can actually feel when it gets into her arm.’

‘Oh yuck. How could that be possible? She’d be dead.’

‘No,’ said Petra, ‘apparently it can happen. I checked it out when Philip told me about it. It’s like bits of shrapnel that soldiers who’ve been shot at might carry inside of them. If it’s blunt and it doesn’t get into a vein a piece of metal can float around in someone’s body for their whole life. It usually builds up a bit of fibroid tissue round it over time.’

‘Couldn’t it go through your heart?’

‘It could but it wouldn’t necessarily kill you — it might just pass through it. Could stuff up your lung though. You can feel it in her arm, can’t you, Philip? You can wriggle it around.’

Philip stood up; he felt his face burning with shame.

‘Haven’t you actually seen it?’ asked Mel.

‘No, I’ve never met the woman.’

‘What? Philip, is this true?’

Petra looked up and saw the space where he’d been standing. ‘I’d better go,’ she said.

Their bed had a big crocheted quilt over it, made with very fine yarn. It had come in the mail after their wedding. Philip said it was old-fashioned, that it wouldn’t fit in with their new furniture and the modern decor. Petra left it in a cupboard for a few years and then brought it out. ‘I like it,’ she said. ‘I want to use it.’

‘That was my mother you were talking about last night,’ Philip said. They were lying under the quilt, around ten o’clock in the morning. The children had made themselves breakfast and switched on television.

‘So what? I mean, Philip, really, so what? I’ve asked you about her often enough and you just turn your back on it.’

‘I told you that. What you said last night. And look at you, making a big drama out of it. A joke.’

‘There are some things I don’t get,’ she said.

‘There are some things I don’t get either.’

‘It’s not fair to our kids. Not knowing anything.’

‘Fairness doesn’t come into it,’ he said, drawing her closer to him. ‘I never knew anything that was fair until I met you.’

‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘Philip, I’m tired. Help me.’

‘What are you tired of?’ he said, ashamed to hear the panic in his voice.

‘Of being directed. Being told what to do.’

‘I don’t tell you what to do.’

‘I didn’t mean you.’

‘Your work? You could stop.’

‘But I don’t want to. Sometimes I just don’t know what you want, that’s all.’

‘I want you to stay with me,’ he said. Simple as that. That was all he wanted.

‘Oh,’ Petra said. ‘That. Well, of course.’

When Uncle Joe died, his son, one of Philip’s first cousins, rang to tell him.

‘Do you want to come to the funeral with me?’ Philip asked Petra.

‘You mean you’ll go?’ There had been other calls like this, over the years, which he had ignored.

‘Yes. We can drive up tonight, stay with your folks.’ He’d come to like her family well enough, had forgiven them for buying him. It could have been worse, he thought sometimes. Much worse. ‘So will you come?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course.’

‘Will she be there?’

‘My mother? I don’t know. Perhaps.’

‘Did you like your Uncle Joe?’ she asked on the drive north.

Philip shrugged. ‘He was a rough bastard, no worse than the rest of them. I’d rather have stayed with him than Mary, but it didn’t work out. Besides, my mother didn’t seem to like me staying there. As if she had the right to choose.’

Petra saw her first, at the other side of the cemetery. ‘Who is that woman? I know her face.’ She was looking at a plump and rolling woman, with pink-framed glasses and tinted hair.

‘That’s her. That’s my mother,’ he said.

‘She was at our wedding.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘Yes, she was. I saw her outside the church.’

Everyone was there. Neil and Leonie; Janet and her husband Darren, a boisterous man who kept shaking hands two or three times whenever he met someone; Marlene, who introduced herself to Petra as her sister-in-law, and her husband, Wayne, and all their children. Philip and Petra had left Jesse and Marigold at home in Wellington with Debbie who was happy to stay over and had asked if her boyfriend could spend the night.

They went back to Joe and Bunty’s place for the wake. There were sponge cakes and sandwiches and cups of tea and beer laid out
for them on the back lawn, under the trees.

‘Is it true you’re a lawyer?’ the cousins kept saying to Philip, in a kind of astonished wonder. ‘Well, we’ll know where to go next time we land ourselves a speeding ticket.’ They laughed awkwardly at their own jokes.

‘Aren’t you on the telly?’ Marlene asked Petra. ‘Where are your children? You haven’t left them at home, surely to goodness?’

And then there was Esme, who came to the edge of the lawn and stood looking at the gathering and turned away.

‘Poor old Mum,’ said Marlene. Petra could feel Philip pulling himself away from the woman. ‘It’s hard for her since Dad’s been gone.’

‘You mean Kevin’s dead?’

Marlene looked at him with loathing. ‘My dad. What’s it to you?’

‘I’m going over to say hullo,’ Petra said to Philip. After a moment, he turned and followed her.

‘Hullo,’ Esme said. ‘I was just going.’

‘So are we,’ said Petra. ‘Can we walk with you?’

On the way home, Philip cried, wiping his face with the back of one hand while he drove. ‘I don’t want to think about her,’ he said.

‘But you do,’ Petra said. ‘You never stop. You never have.’

‘I told you she was a liar,’ Philip said. ‘That’s an old yarn of my grandmother’s about the magician, it’s not her story at all. Something to do with my Auntie Pearl. The one who died. My grandmother told me she had my auntie after the magician had been to town, even though she was old. A kind of a miracle. You see, she takes everything as if its her own.’

‘Yes,’ said Petra. ‘Yes, I see what you mean.’ At the time she was working on another film. Budgets were leaner and filming schedules tighter to save money. As soon as the film was over she had a major role in a television series. She meant to write back to Esme straight away but it took her ages to get round to it. When she did she enclosed pictures of the children. Later, Esme sent her a brooch, a tangled old gold piece of jewellery that needed fixing.

Philip held it in his hand when he saw it, as if weighing it. ‘Funny,’ he said. ‘I never knew she had this. I remember my grandmother wearing it. Well, you are a hit. I’d have thought she’d have given it to Janet.’

‘I must write to her.’