“Play?”
“It’s the main production this year. Mrs. Ashton has cast me as Viola. She spends most of the play dressed up as a boy, and at one point she gets into a sword fight.” Louie shrugged helplessly. “I’ve got two left feet, well three when I get confused, and as for my arms, well, they argue amongst themselves and both hate my legs … I um, I don’t know where to start.”
Willa sighed. “I use foils mostly, I’ve only just started epee. That’s a larger, heavier sword, but…”
“Perfect. When do we starts?”
Even if she’d wanted to, Willa couldn’t get out of it. Her defence against Louie’s honest charm was woeful. She mentally lowered her shields in defeat. “Okay. Saturday afternoon, I’m in a tournament,” she told Louie. “It wouldn’t be hands on for you, but you could watch, get the hang of it. Then maybe I could give you a lesson on the basics.”
Louie gave her a cheeky grin. “Great! And I’ll try not to miss you between now and then.”
“Hey, Louie, I don’t know why I said that. I overreacted.” Willa noticed that despite the bravado, Louie’s neck was bright red again. “In fact,” Willa said, now giving her horse its head and charging with the enemy, “I missed you too.”
The road was already glittery with early frost, and their breaths were like little ghosts. Louie pushed her bike so it tick-ticked beside them. They talked about family. Louie told Willa about Nic who only came home now for washing or food, and about Marietta’s name war. She described her father’s travel agency, the Metal Petal and her mother’s obsession with flow. Willa wondered at such a life. She noticed there was no mention of going to church.
At the back gate of the Duke Judas leapt in greeting and swept Louie’s legs for scents. They kept talking. Willa wanted her to stay, but she wanted her to go, too.
Don’t make me invite you inside.
Louie stayed, apparently unaware, chatting, joking, playing with Judas, until it began to get gloomy and the air pressed low. There was no escaping it.
“It’s cold. Do you want to come in?”
“Thanks.” Louie smiled so charmingly that Willa felt like water.
She led Louie through the carton- and crate-lined storeroom, lurid red hall and upstairs. In the kitchen Willa silently emptied the ashtray of pink smudged cigarette butts into the rubbish and switched on the kettle. Only then did she risk a glance at Louie.
She was tickling Elvis’s green feathered breast with her forefinger. The budgie mouthed her finger in its beak, then bit her, hard. Louie yelled and told him off. “Nice bird,” she said to Willa.
“You’d be cranky too if you were locked in a cage all day.”
“
A Robin Red breast in a cage, puts all Heaven in a rage.
”
There it was. Heaven again. God.
“Milk?”
“And sugar. Is that your father?” She was looking at the wedding photo on the wall.
“Yep.” Willa followed her through to the living room where Louie was looking at the small bookcase of paperbacks.
Go on, say it. What a dump. What a bunch of losers.
But Louie was smiling and pulling out some comics. “Yay, Asterix, my favourite.” She looked up at Willa. “What’s it like living in a pub?”
It was no use. You couldn’t not like Louie. Sprawled in front of the heater, Judas’s chin on her leg, Willa explained how in their hippie days her parents had named their two daughters Bliss and Willa and how she had grown up in pubs amidst country and western music. “It was quite an education,” she said, watching Louie flick through Jolene’s old photo album.
As the long windows turned black they talked about school and their plans—Willa’s to be a chef, Louie’s to be a lawyer. “Sure got the gift of the gab,” Willa laughed, and then thought about the gummed up silence in the car the other night. By the time Louie finally got up to leave, Willa could hardly believe she hadn’t wanted to invite her in.
“Hey, this fencing thing,” said Louie at the door. “What about the horses? Where do they come from?”
Willa looked at her strangely. “Horses? There aren’t any horses.” Then she burst out laughing. “What
are
you thinking of? Jousting, polo, perhaps? Hip hip, jolly good show and all that…”
“Yeah!” laughed Louie, swinging onto her bike. “For all I know you’re Prince Charles’s love child. I mean, swords, please? We’re talking about a very weird sport here.”
“Better not say that in front of the others on Saturday,” said Willa, lifting an eyebrow. “There’s some psychopath material there if you ever saw it.”
Louie watched as Willa walked neatly to the mat. A young man was attaching a wire to her white jacket and Willa pressed her foil delicately against the chest of her opponent to ensure the red light appeared on contact. Both fencers raised their foils to their foreheads, saluting firstly each other and then the judges, and Louie thought of Sir Lancelot saluting Guinevere before spurring his horse and galloping off full tilt, his lance gallantly held horizontal above his shoulder. It was a pity that there were no horses.
They donned their masks—donned being the type of word Louie imagined fencers used all the time—and began to fight. Willas red ponytail happed up and down against her shoulder blades like a fox struggling to be free. Their feet swished and occasionally stamped on the mat, and the foils squeaked and slid off each other repeatedly. Willas opponent, a forty-year-old man, his baldness disguised by the mask, was surprisingly quick and agile, and he heralded each of his serious attacks with a loud series of grunts.
Louie wasn’t sure who was scoring the points, although at each hit the fencers stopped and the judges made it clear. Louie wasn’t sure because something extraordinary had happened to her. It had become obvious to her that she was sitting in a cold gymnasium that smelt of old socks halfway across town from home, amongst the kookiest group of people she had ever met, watching a sixth form girl have a sword fight with a middle-aged man. The air tightened to a drum skin and all Louie could see were Willa’s legs advancing and retreating fast and crab-like, her neat white body moving in purposeful, clean patterns. It was so like Willa, this sport, so right, so singular, so perfectly odd, that Louie felt a strange complete heat well up and fill her from head to toe, and she knew. She knew that there was only one reason she was in this damp smelly gym, she knew that there was only one thing in it that mattered to her, and she knew that it was the one thing that mattered most to her in the whole world.
“I’m in love with that girl,” she said out loud in amazement, because she knew that this was a life-changing thing and life-changing things should be said aloud, should have a moment in time, and a place in the air, some molecular structure to make them real.
I’m in love with that girl,
she heard as it reverberated inside her head. And it was a truth, she realised, as things are which you don’t think, but discover have always existed.
Just then the bout ended. Willa, the victor, took off her mask with her free hand and turned in one movement to where Louie was in the stand, and raised her foil in salute. Louie was already on her feet, the warmth in her body having overflowed into a standing ovation and a magnificent, startling grin that she bestowed regally on her Lancelot.
p.
Afterwards, Louie watched as Willa was presented with a small silver cup, and everyone cheered. There were about fifteen people there, most of whom were men, and many of them quite old. Two of the women were wives who fenced with or against their husbands. Good way to let off a bit of marital aggression, Louie thought. There were three guys from university—a weird spotty politics student called Lucan, a nice spotty physics student called Marcus and one beautiful blonde theology student with an English accent called Christopher. They all seemed keen on Willa.
When the prize-giving was over, and the others disappeared, Willa went to a carton of gear and pulled out clothing for Louie. The jackets came with inside pockets on the chest for plastic cups which Willa, laughing, called boob-protectors. Louie felt her face flush as Willa chose the right size for her, then helped her put it on. She showed Louie how to stand properly on guard, with her left hand held up like a jug handle behind, how to step forward and back, crablike, and how to “lunge” at your opponent. Louie had a tendency to lunge right down onto the ground in front of her where her crab impersonations were at their finest. Standing, Louie kept dragging her left shoulder round and facing front-on instead of side-on. To overcome this she decided to try fighting two ways at once with a foil in each hand. She became very good at the atavistic grunts and French exclamations, and her Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone impersonations up the stairs were impressive, especially since she was taking both parts. Then she pulled Willa out of the gear cupboard and apologised for being a hyperactive student. After nearly an hour Willa said she’d got the hang of the basics and that would do for now. She locked up the gym and they went downtown for a coffee.
Neither was working that night. “It’s Saturday night and there’s nothing happening,” moaned Willa, and Louie wondered if she usually went out to parties with the other fencers. She hated not knowing about Willa’s other life, the life at the pub, the fencing, what she did on Saturday nights.
“Saturday night? It has no meaning,” Louie shrugged. “I’m so used to working, I don’t know what to do with it.”
Spend it with me.
“There’s one thing we could do,” said Willa, scraping out the froth at the bottom of her cappuccino and sucking on the spoon. “But we’d need a car.”
Louie smiled. “I am numero uno daughter. Marietta’s teacher called Mum and Dad into school yesterday. In comparison with little sister I can do no wrong.”
“We-ell … dare truth or promise. Choose dare, go on.”
“Dare.”
“Get the car, and pick me up at seven.”
“A pub? She lives in a pub?” Susi’s eyebrows rose above the stainless steel cooktop. “It doesn’t sound very nice.”
“What does ‘nice’ mean? There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just a live-in job, that’s all.”
“Her father runs it then, does he?”
Louie leaned on the bench and picked at the grated cheese. “No, her mother does. Her father’s dead.”
“Dead? Oh, poor kid.”
“Well, not recently. He died racing trucks, you know, big rigs and that. Years ago. He was American.”
Susi stopped stirring the sauce and looked at Louie for a moment, then resumed. Louie continued talking about Willa, although she was vaguely aware that she was heading towards Burble City.
“Her mother’s name’s Jolene. She and Willa’s dad were country and western singers. Her mum’s from Gore, you know,” Louie invented, thinking that her Southland mother would approve of that, but Susi’s face didn’t alter. Louie tried harder.
“They travelled all around the States singing as Buddy and Jo Apple,” Louie said, filling in the gaps in Willa’s story. “Apple wasn’t their real name, that was their singing name. Then they came to Dunedin and had two kids and bought a country and western bar. But Buddy crashed the
Buffalo,
that was his rig, and died. Willa was only eleven years old. She said her mother hardly ever sings now, and she smokes like a train so her voice is probably shot to bits anyway.” Louie paused, remembering Susi hated smokers. “Willa doesn’t smoke,” she added.
Susi was unimpressed. “I should hope not.”
“No, she’s not what you think, pub and all that. She’s really-stylish—she wears amazing clothes, and winds scarves in her hair and stuff. She’s much better looking than I am.”
“Is she really. Lou,” she said, turning the gas down, “if you can take your mind off the wonderful Willa for a moment, grate me some more cheese to make up for what you’ve eaten, will you.”
Louie bit her lip. “It’s not the ‘wonderful Willa,’” she said, and fossicked in the cupboard for the cheese grater. “She’s just an ordinary Willa, as Willas go, although it’s not a common name is it … I wonder if it’s short for something. God, I hope it’s not Wilhemina.” Susi was staring at her. “Um, what was the question?”
“Here,” said her mother, handing her the grater from the bench. “Well, as far as visiting this Willa person goes, you’ll have to ask your father. I’m taking my car to Bernadette’s for a parish meeting tonight. Surely you can ride your bike that far.”
“No, I can’t. It’s a pain coming back up the hill at night, and it’s got a slow puncture,” she lied.
Her father also objected to the mention of a pub, despite Louie’s insistence that they weren’t going to be drinking.
“We’re not even going to stay there!” Louie blurted out, then rolled her eyes at her stupidity.
“Where are you going then?” demanded her mother.
“I mean, we might not stay there. We might go—I don’t know, Willa had some idea, but she didn’t tell me.”
“Let’s get this straight,” said Tony, looking at her levelly. “You want to borrow my car, you don’t know where you might be going, you’re meeting at a pub and you’re going with a girl we haven’t met.”
“Sounds … the tiniest bit flaky, I’ll give you that. But Dad, we’re probably going to watch television. Honestly, it’s no big deal. If we do anything, it’ll just be a drive to somewhere nice, you know, with a view or something.”
Tony and Susi looked at her suspiciously.
“A view,” repeated Tony.
“Who is he?” Susi folded her arms.
“What?”
“There’s a boy in this. Don’t try and pretend there isn’t, Louie. You’ve spent an hour and a half trying on clothes and used just about all the mousse in the house. You don’t do that when you go out with a girlfriend.”
Louie closed her eyes. She didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.
She screamed.
“Don’t you realise this is the first Saturday night I’ve had free for God knows how long? Every bloody weekend I’m working. Not to mention just about every free evening. And I still manage somehow to get my homework done, to do every assignment and essay they throw at me. You don’t have to drop everything and rush into school to see my teachers. You don’t have to stand over me to make sure I study for exams like you did with Nic. All I’m asking is that you trust me. Why can’t you do that? There is no boy. We’re not planning to do anything stupid. I just wanted to go out tonight and take it as it comes, that’s all.”