Ricochet Baby (19 page)

‘S
HE MUST BE
quite something, this mother of yours.’

I shrug my shoulders.

‘Did you admire the way she went at things?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Come on now, you’ve just told me all this stuff. She didn’t take things lying down, did she?’

‘Yeah. Well, I’d forgotten about it.’ My voice is rougher, wilder.

‘You just remembered, eh?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How did your father feel about all the changes?’

‘I don’t remember. I want to go now, okay?’

T
HROUGH THE CRUSH
of steaming animal bodies, Glass watches his son at work in the shed, the practised way he changes the cows over, his sure handling of the machinery, as if each action was
second
nature. He works much more quickly than his father these days. Glass hadn’t expected it to be so hard to come back to the shed. It hadn’t been so bad at the end of the season, but now it has begun again, and the cows are coming in so fast he finds it hard to keep up. His joints are full of unusual aches as if he is coming down with something. In the mornings his knees crackle in an alarming way when he bends over to put on his socks. This is it, he thinks, the beginning of age.

The cow he is supposed to be milking shifts uncomfortably; her milk has begun to let down in anticipation, creating a foamy puddle on the floor. He sees Bernard glance at him, and grins as if it’s nothing. He and Bernard have always had this in common, if little else — their love for the warm, leathery flanks of the cows, the flood of their milk, the pulse of the machines. Now he wonders how long it can go on, or why it should. Its not just the work that’s bothering him, it’s the intolerable emptiness of the farm, a sense of loss that permeates every action he takes. It’s there behind his eyes first thing when he wakes, and his heart aches with it when he lies hoping for sleep at nights.

‘Any word of Orla?’ he says, when they are hosing down.

‘She’s doing well enough,’ Bernard says.

‘I wondered if she might be back in time for the beginning of milking.’ Although, clearly, this is not so.

‘We could take on some labour,’ says Bernard.

‘I can manage,’ says Glass.

‘Well, then,’ says Bernard, directing a high-pressure jet on the shed walls.

‘About this baby,’ Glass says. He almost has to shout to make himself heard.

Bernard turns the hose off. ‘What about this baby?’

‘I wondered. Bernard, Nathan ought to be here on the farm.’

‘Yeah, well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you?’

‘If Orla was here.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Perhaps she could help out with the baby until Roberta’s
finished
at the hospital.’ There, he’s said it, but as soon as the words are out he knows he shouldn’t have said them. He has known all along they would be wrong, but still he had to try.

Bernard’s face is bleak. ‘On loan, d’you mean?’

‘Well, never mind.’

‘Listen,’ says Bernard, ‘nut cases like Rob can stay locked up for years, and then they come out and make trouble. You see if I’m not right.’

‘She’s your sister.’ But it’s just something to say.

‘Let’s get something straight,’ says Bernard. ‘Orla’ll come back in her own good time.’

T
HROUGH THE TREES
, he sees Edith, and for once there is no sign of Wendy. Sometimes he feels that their incessant conversation will drive him crazy. Their talk is meaningless to him; when he approaches, they look up with slight irritation, as if he is intruding. Wendy has moved in again like one of those aunts who come for a week and stay forever. There is a worryingly permanent feel about this visit, as if she is more sure of herself than the first time. She makes herself useful in a multitude of ways that are difficult to argue with. Glass sometimes wonders what makes her so different from his sister Dorothy, whom Edith had so summarily dispatched. Several times, lately, he has prepared himself to tell Wendy she must go. As if sensing this, Wendy slips out of sight when Edith is not at hand.

Through the still bare branches of deciduous trees Glass watches Edith dividing up perennials, ready to plant them out in borders for the coming summer. He sees young Edith Murphy, and his eyes mist behind his glasses.

You work backwards, if you dare.

It is 1957, or thereabouts. They have been vague to their
children
about the dates when they met. He, too, has lost sight of the facts.

There is a line of ragged fruit trees along the driveway that have since been replaced. He looks up and sees Edith walking down through the trees towards him, although he is with her too. He’s scared and he doesn’t know how to look his father in the eye.
And yet there is the feeling, as well, of being somehow proud and excited. As if the world were full of surprises and one of them had just caught up with him.

He’d been looking for a true virgin when he met Edith, but he soon found there weren’t many around. There were plenty of girls who said yes after dances at the Walnut community hall, for which he was grateful, but he had more than that in mind. Of the
possible
virgins he did meet, he didn’t care much for what was on offer.

Edith Murphy was different. They met at the Majestic Cabaret when he was down in Wellington to play football one weekend. The night after the game, at which he had scored the team’s only try, he had been out to score again. He remembers the beer, and the dancing that followed, the streamers and balloons that they leapt up to burst with their cigarettes, the excuse-me dance when he was left at a loose end after a team-mate prised him away from the girl he was dancing with, cheek to cheek, just for the hell of it, to remind him he wasn’t the only guy in town.

That’s when he saw her, sitting in a shadow of the room, wearing a blue dress with a sash at the waist, like a kid, and shoes with straps. Straps, for God’s sake.

‘Like a turn?’ he said, as if he was conferring a favour.

When she stood up, she was much taller than she appeared sitting down, and too thin. But she danced as though her blood were on fire, without speaking, barely following him, almost as if she were dancing on her own.

He danced the next two dances with her. When his mates looked over at him, he grinned and shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, a bit of a novelty.

‘Walk you home?’ he asked, when it was over. ‘Unless you live on the other side of town, because I came here on the train, and I’m skint.’

‘Just along the street,’ she said.

She led him up Boulcott Street, past St Mary of the Angels, and he saw her head kind of bob as they passed the church. He could see it then, the Catholic look of her, and he nearly turned around on the spot, but he was holding her hand and he liked the feel of her fingers linked with his. Halfway up the hill that climbs towards The Terrace, she turned off towards the back of the Grand, where a frail wooden bridge over a gully connected the street with the rear of the hotel.

‘I’ve got a room here,’ she said. Christ, he hadn’t thought of her as rich; she looked as if she was on the bones of her arse.

‘I work here,’ she explained, leading him towards the staff quarters.

‘You’d better go now,’ she said, dropping her voice in the
passageway
. ‘I’ll get the sack if they catch you inside the building.’

They had paused by a doorway ‘Is this your room?’ he said, as she slipped a key out of the cloth bag that hung on her wrist.

She nodded, her eyes full of sudden apprehension and a new appraisal of him. He could see that she had never meant him to come as far as this, but she hadn’t wanted to let go any more than he had. Her look turned to terror when he took the key from her hand and slipped it in the lock.

Inside the room, he pushed her against the bed, confident now that she wouldn’t scream. He’d guessed by now that the hotel was her first job. Did he force Edith Murphy? He would say that he didn’t. He would tell himself, even now, that she wanted it.

He still had his trousers on when they started; he remembers with pleasure the resistance he found inside her; with shame, he remembers the blood on his fly he couldn’t hide when he returned to his own hotel, and the rest of the team still up and partying as he walked into the lobby.

‘Guess she had her monthly,’ he said, and laughed.

In the morning, the team climbed on to the train, which was hissing steam down the station, their scarves floating behind them in a dawning southerly wind. He didn’t know why he looked over his shoulder, but when he did she was there, dressed in a thin white jersey and a red skirt, shivering in the wind. He caught the glint of a cross on a gold thread of chain round her neck. He didn’t wave out to her, or let on that he knew her, even though they were
looking
straight at each other. He could sense the trouble of her. All the same, he was touched by her image, like an insubstantial figure in a grainy old movie.

Glass thought he would never see her again — you could say that he prayed he wouldn’t. But he did, one morning in late spring, when he called at the box for the mail after the rural delivery van had passed.

‘Hullo,’ she said, from where she sat by the letter-box, a
suitcase
by her side. Even before she stood up, he could tell that he had been right about the trouble. Her stomach was a bump under her
skimpy dress, the same one she had been wearing at the dance, without the sash.

‘I’ll look after you,’ Glass said, after an awkward silence. ‘You’d better come and meet the family.’ For the first time, he was grateful that his mother was dead.

She nodded and took his hand. They walked up the driveway together, petals scattering down on them from the flowering trees. That was the closest they came to celebration.

‘Those were the trees you tore out,’ Glass says to himself, ‘in that one giant day of bulldozing. You remember, Edith, I never said a word. I understood why, although it wasn’t what I wanted. At least, I think I understood, but my father was dead, and I had stood by you, and I thought it was enough. I thought I didn’t have to give everything up. Not everything.’

He doesn’t think about the day he told her to give up the church, just as his father had done (no, he’s too hard on himself, it wasn’t like that, he had right on his side). And Edith said, carelessly, ‘Oh, it’s not really the church — who cares about the church. I’ve given up God, which could be a problem. We’ll just have to see.’

He’s hoping she will look up and see him. He’ll signal across the space between them — Hi, Edith Murphy, how’s it going — but she works away without seeming to see him, a weather-beaten woman kneeling to trim her end-of-winter garden.

‘Edith, we need to talk,’ he says. He speaks quietly so as not to startle her.

She stands, dusting down her jeans, and he has the
impression
that she has known he was there all the time.

‘I keep meaning to pull it all out,’ she says, gesturing around the garden. ‘I don’t know that it’s worth the effort.’

‘You need peat on that garden,’ he says. ‘Bring things on nicely in the summer, the same as last year.’ He has been sparse with his praise in the past.

‘Wendy persuaded me to leave it a little longer.’

‘Edith, I think we should see the lawyer. I’ve had a letter.’ The envelope has been burning a hole in his pocket for the last two days. ‘The Cooksleys are taking a court order to get permanent
custody
of Nathan.’

‘Well, that was to be expected.’

‘We can’t let them do that.’

‘Can’t we?’

They stand glaring at each other.

‘Let’s get something straight,’ she says, pocketing her pruning secateurs. ‘Why are we doing this? Exactly why are we planning to hang out for Nathan?’

He studies her for a few minutes, looking hard for Edith Murphy. Knock knock, he wants to say, like the kids do, anyone home? He thinks he sees her there, that scared and scary girl.

‘I mean,’ says Edith, ‘do we just want to make him a gift he can’t wait to resist? Like this?’ She sweeps her arm towards the
skyline
beyond the farm.

‘History,’ he says. ‘I don’t care who gets the farm when I’m dead.’

‘Don’t you, Glass?’

‘Not really. The kids can do what they like with it. What about Roberta?’

‘Ah,’ she says, ‘that’s different.’

This is the moment Wendy picks to walk out of the potting shed.

Glass’s face freezes. ‘I thought you were inside.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, with a deprecating smile. ‘I didn’t realise you were still here.’

‘Glass thinks we should be putting up a fight for Nathan,’ says Edith.

‘Edith,’ says Glass, his voice full of warning.

‘Personally,’ says Edith, ‘I think it’s time our daughter pulled her socks up.’

‘You don’t believe that,’ Wendy says.

‘You don’t know what I believe,’ says Edith rudely. ‘You’re both being ridiculous. If the girl had wanted her baby that would be one thing. But you can hardly fight to make her keep it.’

‘It’s not her fault,’ says Wendy.

‘What do you know about it?’

‘Sometimes I think you’re quite narrow,’ their visitor says. It’s as if Glass isn’t present.

He turns and walks slowly between the trees, feeling, again, the bone-aching creak of his knees. It gives him little satisfaction that these women have fallen to quarrelling.

H
E SEES A
small bus, one of those mini-vans, parked near the road. He should have known as soon as he saw them, a bunch of
weird-looking 
jokers with binoculars strung around their necks, and
walk-shorts
and socks
and sandals — you could spot them for crazies, a mile off. But Glass can’t believe he’s seeing right. At first he starts running towards the men, then he slows down and recrosses the paddock, in the direction of the house. He enters by the back door and quietly picks up his gun.

One of the men stands at the front of the group, waving his arms.

‘Do any of you recognise this pictogram?’ he cries out to the others.

Glass had believed the circles long gone. Yet, in the pasture, he sees that the shadow of them, a fuzzy outline of the peculiar
formations
, can still be perceived. Perhaps it is the new seasons regrowth that has thrown them into relief again.

‘Yeah, Norm, if it’s what I think it is. It’s a very exciting find.’

‘I tell you, we’re looking at a Mandelbrot set.’

‘Okay,’ says Glass. ‘You’ve had your fun, you can get on your way now.’

‘Mr Nichols, is it?’