Ricochet Baby (26 page)

JOSH DROPS ME
off at the farm gate soon after dawn. Always coming home. My father is walking to the cowshed alone.

‘Shall I come in with you?’ Josh says, although I can tell that he is hoping I will say no.

‘It’s okay,’ I say.

‘When will I see you again?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Are you still shitty with me?’

‘Not really. I guess the answer is when I feel like it.’ I climb down out of the now familiar van. ‘I had a good time,’ I add.

There are no lights on at Bernard’s house. I remember that my father had been heading for the shed on his own the evening before. My parents’ house, when I go inside, is very still. Their bedroom door stands open and I see that my mother is sleeping heavily.

Pulling on jeans and gumboots at the back door, I race over the paddocks to join my father. His look is distant. ‘Where’s Bernard?’ I ask.

‘Buggered off.’

‘You’re joking, Dad.’

‘Every other bugger’s gone off, why shouldn’t Bernard?’

He doesn’t speak while we milk. I’m not very experienced. The boys have always been there to do the milking so I have to really concentrate on what I am doing. But we get through the job together, he and I

‘Thanks,’ he says, when we’re through hosing down the shed. He walks off, without waiting for me. I guess it’s written all over me. Well fucked.

Which is true. I watch his disappearing back, and turn back towards the shed. Is this how far I’ve come? The wooden fence stretches round a territory in which, if I’m not careful, I will be trapped for life. A grazing wind, the remnants of last night’s storm, has curled over the hills and I stand there on my own, wondering what will happen to me, holding my jacket around my middle. I don’t want to let go of what’s happened to me overnight, this
sensation
that’s like flying. At least I am back inside my own skin.

A
N AFTERNOON WHEN
the queues stretch interminably. The checkout operators are wilting and there are not enough packers to go round. Prudence joins the shortest queue, although experience tells her that this is not always the fastest route out of the shop.

For Prudence, supermarket shopping is like an adventure. Once she is inside that hall of food, the aisles buzzing with bargain hunters, she feels truly alive. The Christmas decorations are up already, the speakers relay a carol. Her heart skips a beat, because she feels on top of it all. She smiles at raw-handed men behind the meat counters, selects fruit with a judicious eye, tests items like cheese by the weight in her hand, as well as the colour. Other women chat to her when they see Nathan sitting in the trolley with his legs through the holes. Isn’t he gorgeous, they say. Love the curls. Ten months, that’s amazing, you’d have thought he was older. He really is the cutest thing. Your first, is he?

And Prudence smiles at them, saying yes, he’s my first, he’s good like this all the time. Once or twice Nathan has put his arms up to another woman as if he wants to be picked up, a habit he has just recently acquired, and it embarrasses her, but they don’t seem to notice. So friendly, they say, and pass on, tossing tinned apricots and eggs and cleaning fluid into their trolleys.

The woman ahead of her in the queue turns out to have two hundred and forty-five dollars worth of groceries to be put through and her
EFTPOS
is playing up and the tired woman on the checkout keeps putting up her hand for assistance but nobody comes near. Be patient, Prudence tells herself; Nathan is starting to nod off. She has taken a half-day off to spend with him, which she often does now. When she and Paul have got things sorted out, she will have a brother or sister for Nathan. He won’t be any different from the new baby, she could never love another kid any better than this one.

She is sorry for Nathan’s mother, nutty as a fruitcake, and not very bright, she’s decided. She’s surprised that Paul had turned to Roberta, the last person she would have expected he might choose in her place. You wouldn’t pick his mother’s problems in Nathan,
he’s so well adjusted. She gives him her finger to hold while she reads a magazine. Nathan clings sleepily to her. Behind them, an older woman clucks at him. He puts up his arms for an instant, and then, to Prudence’s relief, he changes his mind, returning his
attention
to her.

The woman looks vaguely familiar; perhaps Prudence has seen her at the shop before. Quite recently even. Her grey hair straggles from a bun, her hands are calloused as if she is used to hard work. But she is fresh-faced and wholesome, the kind of woman you would seek in a nanny. A recipe catches Prudence’s eye. She has been paying attention to new things to cook. Paul has
mentioned
that Roberta was not half bad in the kitchen. She supposes Roberta had to be good at something; she understands she was hopeless in bed. Her eyes light on a recipe for asparagus wrapped in thin omelettes. She has already bought asparagus, but the recipe calls for leeks and fresh ginger, neither of which she has. She is
trying
not to mind the delay, but the troublesome shopper is still
taking
time. The manager has been called to check her card.

The grey-haired woman behind her seems unfazed by the delay. Prudence wonders if she knows there is a ten-item fast queue; she is person who might come from the country.

‘You’ve only got a couple of things,’ Prudence says to her, ‘d’you want to go on ahead?’

‘I’ve got all the time in the world,’ the woman says, with a smile.

‘It doesn’t usually bother me, but I’m starting to get niggly.’

‘All the queues are quite long,’ says the woman. ‘I wouldn’t give up on this one.’

‘Maybe I’ve got time to duck over and grab a couple of things from the vegie department?’ Prudence says. She hasn’t been
meaning
to do this, but the woman seems friendly.

‘Poor girl looks as if she’ll be a while,’ the woman replies, nodding towards the checkout operator. ‘Why don’t you pop over? I’ll keep an eye on the little boy — he won’t mind, will he?’

‘No, he seems to like you, thanks a million.’

‘I’ll just squeeze past your trolley so I’m closer to him,’ says the woman.

And there goes Prudence, bouncing along in her artful,
cheerful
, shopping clothes, her comfortable canvas espadrilles, in the direction of fruit and vegetables. A packer finally appears at the
checkout counter and speeds up the service. The woman wheels Nathan and the groceries alongside the counter.

‘His Mum won’t be a moment,’ says the woman, and picks Nathan up out of the trolley. He squirms with the delight of
freedom
. ‘Come to Granny, sweetheart.’

The operator looks impatiently over her shoulder, trying to decide what to do with Prudence’s laden trolley, grateful that the woman is at least dealing with the child. ‘Next please,’ she says, pushing the groceries aside

The woman’s step is firm and quick as she walks towards the exit.

H
OLMES, TELEVISION JOURNALIST
, is lunching in a restaurant off High Street in Auckland, when his cellphone rings. ‘Haul your arse out, mate,’ says his producer. ‘We’ve got a child abduction on the wire.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘The Wairarapa. Place called Walnut. The chopper’s on
stand-by
, we can take off as soon as we get confirmation.’

‘Blah. What’s the weather like?’

‘Choppy.’

Holmes groans. ‘Any leads?’

‘Only a description of the abductor.’

‘Any ransom?’

‘No, no contact with the family.’

‘So who’ve we got?’

‘Hopefully, the mother. The baby was in a snatch and grab from a Wellington supermarket yesterday afternoon.’

‘What’s the Mum doing in Walnut?’ Holmes is halfway down High Street, on the run.

‘Lives there. Baby was out with hubby’s girlfriend.’

‘Fantastic,’ says the talk host. ‘Sounds like a good story.’

M
ARISE COMES
,
SO
pale since Tamsin’s early Caesarean birth that her face and hair almost merge together. She looks waif-like and frail and has copious supplies of milk. Her face, when she looks at Tamsin, is absorbed and secretive, as if nobody else exists. But she’s here for me, when she shouldn’t be, and Derek is furious that she has come, and I am fussing over her the way she did over me. I bring her a milky cup of tea and freshly cut brown bread
sandwiches
filled with mashed eggs, and this is a good distraction, although somebody, I think it’s my cousin Sally, says in a hushed voice, ‘It’s too bad, her bringing her baby here. How’s Roberta going to feel?’

‘I feel like death,’ I say, ‘but I want Nathan back more than that.’

Grief confers a certain status, as if somehow the bereaved can do and say anything. I remember the time my friend Pamela’s
brother was killed in a riding accident, the way she was no longer responsible for our friendship, how it was all over to me to make sure that she coped with her crisis. Not that this is a death, but it has the same aura around it, the same kind of terror. People are treating me with wary respect.

The phone rings again.

‘If it’s Josh, tell him I’m not here,’ I mouth to Marise who has taken over answering the phone as if it were her job. The police have been to see him and we argued when he last phoned. Nathan is nothing to do with you, I said to him and he had shouted back at me that he is, Nathan is his business too.

But it’s not Josh.

‘It’s television,’ Marise says. ‘The
Holmes
show.’

‘No.’ This is from my father. ‘I’ve had enough television on this place.’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Marise, ‘there’s nobody here wants to talk to you.’ Her eyes widen. ‘Roberta, I’ve got Holmes himself on the line.’

‘Give him to me,’ I say.

‘You can’t,’ shouts Glass.

‘I’ll do anything it takes to find Nathan,’ I say. ‘Yes, it’s Roberta speaking. Am I okay? No, I wouldn’t exactly say that. I want my baby back. Can you help?’

T
HE CHECKOUT OPERATOR
says, ‘The baby’s Mum is called Prudence. She comes in here quite often with him. I think she must live round here somewhere.’

‘She drives a little blue Honda Civic,’ says the young man who packs the groceries. ‘I heard she wasn’t the real Mum.’

‘Oh God, don’t tell anyone. The boss said we’re not to talk about it.’

The packer is alarmed. ‘But I just did. There’s a woman from television out there in aisle number five. She’s chatting to everyone.’

‘I’
M SORRY
, R
OBERTA
,’ Prudence says, and I guess she must be. Her voice is as thick with tears as my own. Two of us have mislaid Nathan.

‘What does Paul say?’

‘He says you must be even crazier than he thought. But I don’t believe that.’

‘He thinks I took Nathan?’

‘Um, well something like that, yes. Look, I’m not supposed to be talking to you, but I’m worried about the
Holmes
show.’

‘They’ve been in touch with you too?’

‘I know they’re after me. We could both just say we’re not interested. I don’t want to go on it, do you?’

‘Too late, Prudence. I’m doing it.’

‘So what are you going to say?’ A shrillness has crept into her voice. ‘I mean, we need to get our stories straight, don’t we?’

‘I don’t know, Prudence,’ I say slowly. Prudence is frightened of what dirt might be thrown up about her and Paul. For a moment, when she first rang, I’d had respect for her, that she would go against Fay and Paul, and Milton and Laura, and call me. Now I am remembering the times when she has held Nathan in her arms, and denied me the warmth of his skin against mine, and his right to know me as his mother.

‘My grandmother always watches that programme. I don’t of course, but, you know, she’s not very well at present,’ Prudence burbles.

I hand the phone to Marise, my hands shaking.

‘Piss off,’ says Marise to Prudence, and puts the phone down.

‘H
AVE WE GOT
a landing spot sorted out?’

‘Yeah,’ says the pilot. He consults his references, listening to instructions though his headphones. The weather is a little gusty, a little dodgy, and the crew is mildly on edge. ‘Hell, I know that place,’ the cameraman says. ‘I reckon we’d better go round again. I got shot up last time I was over that farm. I knew we should have pressed charges.’

‘Nobody’s going to shoot them,’ says Marise, a few minutes later, speaking to television news on the phone. ‘Hey, don’t worry about it, Bernard’s gone to Ireland. Last heard of boarding an Air New Zealand flight bound for Sydney; the international police have already checked him out. Well, no, he’s not actually in Ireland, yet, but the police know he landed in Oz.’

‘More and more weird,’ says Holmes. ‘Watch out for sharp shooters in the hills.’

‘We’re landing on the lawn, alongside the rose garden,’ says the director. ‘Aim for the patch by the gazebo.’

H
OLMES ALREADY
wears make-up when he comes into the house. I hadn’t expected that. He is solicitous but professionally unobtrusive.

‘Just tell me where you’d feel most comfortable talking to me,’ he says. ‘Out in Mum’s garden?’

‘No,’ I say.

‘We got a room ready for Nathan,’ Edith is telling him.

‘Excellent,’ says the director. ‘How would you feel about that?’

‘I don’t want to go in there.’ The room is like a mausoleum in the middle of the house that we all tiptoe around. The door hasn’t been opened since I came here to live.

‘Okay,’ says Holmes, ‘have you got any other suggestions? We just need a glimpse of the wee chap’s personality, something to make the viewers relate to your loss.’

Marise is handing make-up to the director. ‘You don’t have to have it,’ the director says, ‘but a little touch-up might help.’ I know my face looks scrubbed and raw. I’ve got the fading evidence of one of Josh’s love bites on my neck, like a kid. Marise gives me a
sidelong
glance. I haven’t told her that I have been to bed with Josh. She slaps pancake stick over it before the other woman sees. The director looks mildly nettled at this interference, although I am being treated with almost exaggerated care.

‘Any photos of little Nathan?’ asks Holmes.

I have several, one of him taken in the hospital, and another of him at three months, when he was still with me, and one that Paul had sent to the psychiatric unit. I can’t bring myself to look at them. Marise lines the photos up on the table: Nathan with his fists curled up by his sleeping face, Nathan in my arms (I’m glad of that one now, even though I’m ten kilos overweight and my hair looks like straw) outside the house at Ashton Fitchett Drive, Nathan
sitting
up in his high chair banging the tray with a spoon, and
laughing
.

‘All right,’ I say, ‘We’ll do it in the bedroom.’

J
ACK IS AT
soccer practice, and Ellie is visiting a friend, so Sarah Lord eats her meal sitting in front of television.

As the news finishes the face of a young woman comes up on screen. ‘I just want my baby back,’ says the woman, in a ten-second grab, and then there is a tracking shot across a beautiful garden to a farm homestead. Sarah sits bolt upright. She knows the garden, she has met the woman.

‘Tonight,’ says Paul Holmes, ‘we have the case of a young woman who has had her baby stolen, brutally snatched in a
supermarket
.’
The camera pans to a close-up of Roberta’s swollen, unhappy face. There is something desperate about the bruised space beneath her eyes. She has a welt on her throat.

‘No story, tell us what happened.’

Roberta’s eyes are fixed straight ahead. ‘I wasn’t actually with him,’ she says, in a halting voice. ‘He was in a supermarket with … with a friend of my husband’s.’

‘A close friend?’

‘Yes, they’ve known eath other for a long time.’ She goes on to relate the story as it has been told to her, then she describes her baby’s appearance, while the cameras zoom over photographs and cut back to her face, framing her anguish.

‘I’ve been sick, and I haven’t looked after Nathan for a while. But he’s still my baby.’

Holmes speaks gently, on a small rising inflection. ‘This friend of your husband’s, you get along all right with her?’

‘I wouldn’t say that. Paul and I were going to go to court about Nathan this week.’

‘Hmm. So Prudence and Paul want custody of little Nathan, and so do you?’

‘I guess that’s about it.’

‘You see, I’m a bit concerned …’

‘I didn’t take Nathan,’ says Roberta, before he can finish. ‘They’re the ones who had him.’

‘Yes, well all right, they had him, so they’re not the ones who’ve run off with him.’ Holmes cups his chin in one hand, a
pencil
point side out, held like a cigarette between two fingers. A baby mobile hovers in the background.

‘Unless they wanted to hide him from me.’

‘Do you think that’s what happened?’

On national television, Roberta begins to cry. Sarah wishes it would stop, she can’t bear to watch this woman’s pain.

‘No,’ says Roberta, ‘I don’t think they would have done that. But I haven’t got him, and I can’t think why anyone else would want to take him. It just goes to show that Prudence can’t look after him though, doesn’t it?’

‘Tell me about the woman who took him,’ says Holmes.

‘Well, apparently, she was a woman with kind of straggly white hair and an English accent.’

‘And you don’t know anyone like that?’

‘Roberta shakes her head, massaging her cheekbones with her fingertips.

‘Nobody been round, having a bit of a look about the farm or anything like that?’

‘Lots of peoople come here to look at Mum’s garden. I
suppose
there’s Wendy.’

‘Who’s Wendy?’

‘She’s a friend of Mum’s.’

‘No,’ says a voice off-camera. The angle is widened to reveal a woman sitting on a low bed, beside a teddy bear. Sarah knows her, too, even though she looks hunched and blowsy. The last time she saw her, she had been striding through her garden, giving orders. Now her expression is startled and disbelieving.

‘So Wendy looks a bit like this person you’ve described?’ Holmes says, glancing from mother to daughter; Sarah can tell he is treading a fine line.

‘Yes, I guess she does. But, that’s crazy. She wouldn’t do that. At least, I don’t think so.’ Roberta glances sideways at her mother.

‘Where’s Wendy now?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Roberta. ‘Look, I just want Nathan. If
anybody
knows where my little boy is, please, please let me know. I can’t bear this.’ Her shoulders start to shake, there is a soft fadeout to black.

In the studio, Holmes turns to his audience. ‘The very sad case of Roberta Cooksley whose little boy has gone missing,
somewhere
, we don’t know where, don’t know why, one of those
apparently
senseless crimes. And police will be following up new information as it comes to hand. If you have information ring this toll-free number.’ The numbers roll across the screen.

Sarah writes the numbers down, her hands shaking, and sits staring at the television without seeing the rest of the programme. When she thinks about it, she hasn’t actually got any information. She doesn’t know where her mother is. She thought she was at the farm, but Roberta has just said she isn’t.

Ellie comes while she is still sitting there. The
Holmes
show is ending; there is another shot of Roberta’s tear-ravaged face.

‘What happened to her?’ asks Ellie.

‘Somebody took her baby.’

‘Who?’

‘Well, I don’t know. They wouldn’t put it on television if they knew.’ She is thankful Ellie hasn’t come in earlier.

‘Spare a thought for Roberta Cooksley,’ Holmes reminds them, ‘a bereft mother, pleading for the return of her son. Somebody out there has Nathan. If you have any information which might lead police to him, phone now. We all want to find him. Those were our people today, that’s
Holmes
tonight.’

Sarah reaches for the remote control and changes channels. She should get up, go to the telephone. It has taken her such a long time to arrive at this point of equilibrium in her life. The Earl of Maudsley’s silver bird glares from her mantelpiece with a baleful eye.

E
DITH IS SITTING
in the shadows of the barn. Glass has been looking for her.

‘Going somewhere, Mr Nichols?’ the policeman asks, as if it’s not his own property. As if he is a suspect.

‘Just to the barn.’

‘Looking for company?’ The inference is clear.

Edith is propped on the floor with her back to the timber wall, her eyes unfocused, a bottle in her hand. She has been
drinking
neat gin. There is something confusing going on in her brain. She is fighting for her memory. Already, the time of lightness and clear thinking has receded, an interlude she cannot imagine having achieved. She believes that if she could retrieve that clarity for just an instant she could work out the key to a problem.