Ricochet Baby (28 page)

The detour carries me past Hawera, and I think about
stopping
to eat, but I can’t stop now. I gun on up through the wide, flat, grass-drenched landscape, through Normanby and Eltham and Ngaere. I drive past the high, white mountain, through more towns and over a long hill.

Wendy is right, as it happens. An obsession is how Sarah will come to describe it, when she talks about it later.

N
OW THEY SIT
in a fur-padded InterCity bus heading north-west. Because she is tired, Wendy is afraid people will offer to help with the child. Nathan wants to crawl through the bus and she hasn’t the strength to hold on to him much longer. She had
forgotten
babies were so strong and so wilful. Perhaps it is because he is a boy.

In the interval between changing buses at the depot in New Plymouth, she almost turns herself and Nathan in. She is surprised that there is nobody there to apprehend her. The child has pulled himself up on a seat and looks around with a calculating eye. He staggers and falls, and crawls again.

S
ARAH HAS GIVEN
me a key to Wendy’s cottage near the camping ground, and careful instructions on how to get there. And at last I am there, finding a huddle of rickety baches squatting on the seafront, a streaming green sea pounding on the rocks, flax bushes stirring before a gathering ocean wind. The wind whistles under the eaves of the tiny, steep-roofed cabin where Wendy once lived. I am full of trepidation as I walk down the rough path towards it.

I am terrified of what I will find. I don’t know what I will do if she is there, nor what I will do if she is not. Outside, wash tubs appear to have served as a garden. A cluster of wild marigolds fill the corner of one, and nasturtiums trail down another in defiance of the salt wind. Shells and driftwood have been placed in a rough boundary around the place. Nobody answers the door, and it is so quiet I know there is nobody even breathing inside. Perhaps this is
not the place, I tell myself; somewhere up the road there is another house just like this, where Wendy will be waiting with Nathan. But the key slides into the lock and turns.

Order of a kind prevails inside, although the cabin is crammed with all manner of strange objects: an old copper,
driftwood
, coils of wire, a hand-driven sewing machine with a storage pouch that bellies beneath it, more pots and pans than one person could need, a plaster bust of Mozart, a faded Pink Panther hanging from the ceiling, a painting signed by McCahon, the blade off a windmill, books standing on top of each other on the floor. A bench with a tin sink and a wooden drawer filled with worn,
bone-handled
cutlery, and no cupboards beneath, runs down one side of the cabin, and, through the clutter can be seen a bunk with a musty but neatly folded pile of blankets.

I sit down, weak around the knees, overwhelmed by the
futility
of my journey. Through the open door, I see the sea. Muddy waves swirl around an ochre-brown rock that looks like a temple, or a flower pot overturned. This is where I’m always ending up, somewhere at the edge of things, on the margins, looking back to where I’ve come from. I’ve never felt more empty, more futile in my ambitions. I am far away and on my own, and I’ve lost Nathan in a void as big as the ocean.

This is where Wendy finds me, late in the afternoon. It is not until later that I find out I have been caught up in something random and incidental, that what has happened to me could have happened to anyone. There is less symmetry than I had supposed.

N
ATHAN, MY BEAUTIFUL
, tousle-headed son, looks right through me at first.

I kneel in front of him. ‘Darling,’ I say, willing him to like me. No, more than that, I am desperate for him to love me, as if my presence is a reward that he should immediately understand. I put my finger on his lips, his nose; I wiggle it and laugh. He stares stonily at me.

‘Perhaps if you were to feed him,’ says Wendy, taking him out of the stroller.

‘You feed him,’ I say, throwing myself down on one of her rickety chairs. ‘Really,’ I say, ‘I should just fuck off and leave you to him, if you want him that badly.’

And then it happens. Nathan, who has been sitting on the floor where I have left him, pulls himself up on the leg of the bunk. Turning and measuring the distance between us, he takes two steps, sits down again and smiles.

‘How long has he been able to walk?’

‘That’s it, his first steps,’ says Wendy.

‘Are you sure?’

She nods, her face alight.

‘Little show-off, you’ve done it for me, haven’t you?’ I exclaim over him.

Nathan repeats his new achievement, this time with three steps. I grab him and hug him and only now he doesn’t pull away from me.

Wendy has a spare camp stretcher that she sleeps on. We go to bed very early and again I sleep well, only it’s more lightly than the night before, because this time Nathan lies beside me, his face pressed against my neck, his fingers clenched in my flesh.

‘Monkey face,’ I murmur when he stirs against me, ‘my little sweet potato,’ and we go back to sleep again, my baby and I. It is hard to believe that I have ever known despair. All the same, I dream, towards morning, that Josh Thwaite is beside us. I
remember
the way he used to ask me about my dreams.

Wendy looks at me over breakfast. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asks.

‘You know what I have to do,’ I say. ‘I won’t tell them where I found him.’

‘But you must.’ She looks alarmed. ‘It would be such a waste.’

‘Wendy …’ I begin.

‘No,’ she says, ‘don’t you see, it doesn’t matter what we say, they’ll never be convinced that we didn’t do it together.’

‘All right, all right then. But we’ll go for a walk first.’

‘You should go quite soon,’ she says, ‘otherwise they’ll find us.’ The camp proprietor is back at the grounds; his absence must have been brief. Soon, she tells me, he will notice her, even if nobody else does.

‘Half an hour.’ I am not ready yet to let Nathan go. I have a hazy idea that this is the day the court hearing is set down for, not that it was ever intended that I be present. I leave Wendy sitting outside her cabin weeding her tubs and planting out seedlings, as if she is going to be there for ever, an unlikely goddess. She gives us a wave as we set off down the beach together.

I carry Nathan for a while, but every now and then he wants to get down and show off again. He stumbles and laughs, turning to be picked up when the going gets rough. The sand turns to unstable dunes, and I carry him on my shoulders. We walk in a
circle
, away from the beach and around the houses, coming to a park of sorts, with a swing and a see-saw. A wooden fence runs past it.

‘Hey,’ I tell Nathan, ‘you don’t know what I can do, do you?’ Climbing up on on the fence rail, I test my weight on it. Shoulder height, it is not as stable as the beam in a gymnasium, but it will do. Squaring my hips, I relax my shoulders, my head held erect. I turn my feet in order to feel the edge of the rail as I traverse it. First I walk backwards and forwards two or three times until I am
certain
my balance is under control. I poise, ready for take-off, my back arching. Then I stretch and somersault backwards through the air. My feet land in perfect position.

‘Nothing to it,’ I tell him.

I
AM SURPRISED
at my competence in dealing with authority again, although once I would have taken it for granted.

‘There is a custody case pending over this child,’ I say to the court registrar, when we have presented ourselves at the courthouse.

‘We’re aware of that,’ he says, turning a fish-eye on me and tapping away at his computer screen.

‘I’m Nathan’s mother. Now just find me a place where I can change and feed him, and leave us in peace, while you sort it all out.’

Sarah comes and she holds Wendy’s hand for as long as they are allowed, before her mother is led away and locked in a cell. I don’t want to be a witness to this.

Nor do I wish to hand Nathan over to frightened, pasty-faced Paul, whose job is on the line because of the scandal and all the time he has taken off work, and Prudence, who looks underweight and ill, but when they come I don’t demur, although it breaks me up all over again to see him go ricocheting off again. But I
am
hopeful
that, because I have found him, and because he doesn’t want to leave me, it won’t be quite the open and shut case they had thought.

I don’t say anything much, just study them with slow
contempt
, and I see that the new person I am frightens both of them. I don’t say goodbye to Nathan, I say, see you soon sweetheart, and kiss him on the forehead and walk away quickly.

S
ARAH
L
ORD TURNS
off the motorway at Tawa, and then left again at the prison gates. She has never been inside a prison before and she doesn’t expect to be stopped at the entrance. It will, she supposes, be like hospital visiting. She carries flowers and a variety of fruit in her basket.

‘You’ll have to leave those outside,’ says the guard.

‘But these are for my mother.’

‘Sorry,’ says the guard, ‘you can get them on the way out.’

The smell of disinfectant and boiled cabbage engulfs her. It is not an odour that masks dirt, simply the despair of women who have reached the end of the line; yet it is thick and congealing. Sarah gags as she waits in the visiting room, the barred doors
closing
behind her. She glances behind her, as if seeking escape.

‘You’re not meant to get out,’ says the guard.

The visiting room is crowded: young women with tattoos on their faces holding hands with men in black leather jackets;
middle
-aged women talking to their children; girls who look as if they have just finished library school. It is impossible to tell the
difference
between murderers and child bashers and thieves. Or
kidnappers
, for that matter. Sarah sits still, with her hands between her knees, until Wendy, dressed in a shapeless green dress, appears at a warder’s side. Her smart haircut has grown out; now the white hair is blunt cut across the bottom and pegged to the side of her head with hair clips, allowed during visiting hour only.

‘Is there somewhere we can talk in private?’ Sarah asks.

Wendy smiles in a distracted way. ‘Nobody’s going to listen to us — they’ve got their own problems to worry about.’

‘How are you?’ says Sarah, when they have found a corner.

‘I’ve got some arthritis but I’m seeing the doctor,’ Wendy replies. ‘Things aren’t too bad. I’m allowed to read. It could be worse. I can’t imagine what my father would think.’

‘Never mind,’ says Sarah, ‘never mind. I’ll get you out of here soon.’

‘Like the Scarlet Pimpernel?’ says Wendy, her eyes gleaming.

‘Oh Mum.’

‘Did I ever tell you that the Baroness Orczy came to stay with us when I was a child? Her real name was Mrs Montagu Barstow, a great friend of the family’s.’

‘I guess she’d have worked out a plot for you, Mum,’ says Sarah.

‘Did you ring Edith?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘And is she going to come?’

‘I don’t know, Mum. She sounded busy.’

Wendy’s eyes cloud. ‘Well, she does lead a busy life.’

‘Mullen,’ calls the guard at the door. ‘Visitor.’

‘That’ll be her now, I expect,’ says Wendy.

But it is Fay Cooksley, pallid and frightened, clutching her Italian leather handbag.

‘Well,’ says Wendy. ‘Goodness me. It’s all right, Mrs Cooksley, they’ve got me, I’m all locked up.’

Sarah looks from one woman to another.

‘Sarah?’ says Fay quietly.

‘That’s me.’ Sarah doesn’t put out her hand. ‘Shall I stay?’ she asks her mother.

‘No, dear. It’s all right.’

‘Well, it doesn’t matter.’ Fay is flummoxed, groping for
appropriate
small talk. ‘I’ll only be a few minutes,’ she tells Sarah.

‘I
DID HAVE
a child before I met Milton,’ Fay explains. ‘A little girl who died soon after birth. The same day Sarah was born, it seems. You were sold bad information, that’s all — the wrong mother of the wrong child.’

‘You don’t need to tell me this,’ says Wendy.

‘Well, of course I don’t. I didn’t need to come here.’ There is a touch of asperity in Fay’s voice. ‘But I wanted to tell someone. I’ve never told anyone, you see, not even my mother.

‘Perhaps the baby didn’t die,’ says Sarah, with sudden
bewilderment
, and something like hope. Wendy glances at her. ‘You hear of things like that.’

‘The baby did die,’ says Fay firmly. ‘I could show you the death certificate.’

‘No,’ says Wendy, ‘I believe you. I knew ages ago, I just didn’t want to believe it. I’m a silly old fool.’

‘I didn’t feel anything for years,’ said Fay. ‘I pretended it didn’t happen. But you don’t forget.’ Her eyes fill with tears.

Wendy regards her with some sympathy — a middle-class woman, a good girl, caught out.

‘I won’t tell anyone.’

‘I don’t expect you will,’ Fay replies. ‘No, I didn’t think you would. But that’s not what I came about. There’s something else.’ She hesitates — ‘I’ve asked my son to work something out with Roberta over Nathan.’

‘Shouldn’t you be telling Roberta that?’

‘She’ll find out. I just wanted you to know. My husband thinks I’m insane.’

‘Roberta’s fighting for Nathan anyway,’ Wendy says.

‘All the same, it might make things easier for her.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Well,’ says Fay, ‘I’d better make tracks. We’ve got a staff do tonight.’

‘Goodbye, Fay.’ Wendy sits very still, her eyes resting on Sarah.