Ricochet Baby (4 page)

‘Bess the innkeeper’s daughter was brushing her long black hair,’ Paul recites, and plunges his fingers into her thick, crinkly mane. ‘You won’t ever cut your hair, will you? You’ve got beautiful hair.’

‘My hair’s not black,’ says Roberta, wanting to move her head away from the firmness of his grip.

‘And the highwayman came riding, riding up to the old inn door.’ His fingers tighten.

‘I wouldn’t exactly call Sandy a highwayman.’

‘I didn’t know his name was Sandy,’ Paul says. He lets her hair fall. ‘Are you ready to put out the light?’

I
WAIT UNTIL
his breathing seems even before I get up, though I am not sure. Our house is in the upper reaches of Ashton Fitchett Drive in Panorama Heights, a brand-new housing development beneath the experimental wind turbine. The turbine is what has drawn me to this place, the way it turns over and over,
generating
power with the breeze from the sea. Our house is new,
three-bedroomed
, two-storeyed, with pastel walls and blond pine timber, the nails neatly sealed so you can hardly tell they are there, double-glazed windows and deadlocks on the doors. This is what I wanted. Paul wanted to do up an old house in an
established
suburb, the way other young couples do, with a view to
turning it over in a year or two’s time and making some money. But I have lived in old houses all my life; sharemilkers’ cottages that were never cleaned out properly by the last tenants, and later my grandparents’ house which became ours. That house still makes me think of floral carpets and dark passages, although it is so different now. Then there was the student flat, where I met Paul.

‘Actually, I don’t think he’s quite right for you,’ my mother said.

Actually, I didn’t care what my mother thought. I haven’t cared much for a long time. Ours is an excellent match. Sometimes I wonder if we have done as many things together as we should, such as travelling more, before settling down like this. But then I think that a baby will fill up the spaces, and then the next one will come along and so on, until life itself is filled up, because that is what children do for you.

I expect to have more than one child. When I became engaged to Paul, my Aunt Dorothy, on my father’s side, who lives in a resthome, sent me three crocheted milk covers weighted with beads round the edges. Normally I would have expected my mother to say something scornful, such as, ‘Doesn’t she know we’ve got refrigerators?’, especially as the gift was from Aunt Dorothy. But three children, same as me, is what my mother said, quite casually, that’s what that means. I’m more superstitious than I would ever let on to Paul and his parents. It must be the old Irish Catholic past that haunts my mother, haunts me. We try to pretend it isn’t there, all that mystery and repression.

And Paul likes the smell of fresh paint after all. He has taken to the house and planted vegetables behind the trellis fence and built a barbecue out of old bricks. The curly numerals cut from copper on the letter-box are his handiwork. We meet in our
lunch-hours
to choose curtains and floor coverings that blend into our colour scheme of pale turquoise and old rose. The second bedroom is being brought to life with the addition of mobiles hanging from the ceiling, little giraffes, comic characters, brightly coloured numerals. Our baby will have all the right things, the proper
sensory
stimulation, from the outset.

I draw the curtain gently aside. Outside, the moon is
bouncing
over the harbour, huge, luminous and full. The sea is like an immense glittering lake with barely a ruffle on its surface.

I talk to my baby at nights. I’ll love you, I say, I’ll do my very best for you. I can’t promise to get it right, but at least I’ll try. I’ll protect you. My hand lies on his head. He lies perfectly still inside me, and I know he is reassured by what I have told him.

When I first came here, I would have said that nothing goes on in the suburbs at this time of night. But I have begun to pick up on surprising things since my night vigils by the window. There is a youth who stumbles home with a guitar case under his arm; a man, once, who shifted house under cover of darkness; a woman who cries in a steady, rhythmic drone in a house I can never locate. The plaintive sound fills me with grief. In the weekends I watch the faces of women who push prams around the neighbourhood and I can’t pick out anyone who appears to have spent the night in such a persistent state of desperation. Soon, like it or not, I will know all these people, when the baby arrives. Mothers’ groups and play groups and school stretch before me. Does this mean that I will also come to know their secrets, or will they be hidden like those in my parents’ house?

Another of those ripples of dread runs up my spine. I
recognise
it as dread, an old enemy that lurks at my shoulder. It was something I felt when I was still a young and promising gymnast poised on the beam, facing the space between me and the ground. Although I had been taught to fall without hurting myself, there were moments when I was not always convinced by my training and in the end that’s what finished me. One evening, my father came to collect me from practice at the local gymnasium. He stood watching me; I rose on the ball of my foot, holding my head in the classical manner, so that it would move last and arrive first as I completed my turn. And, quite suddenly, I lost the centre of
gravity
. I froze, looking across the room at my father, and knew that I couldn’t go on.

And again, called my coach’s cheerful voice. But there was no again. Couldn’t they see, I wondered, that my body was changing, that I would grow tall and that angles were developing. I’m sure they couldn’t, I’m sure I looked like the cute little thing who’d been doing my stunts for years, but I could feel the changes going on, like an explosion inside me. I could feel my feet growing. I don’t tell people I did gym — they wouldn’t believe me. I’m too big, too lumpy and I have a habit of walking into things when I’m thinking, even though I can see perfectly well.

My father never once said how bad he felt that I didn’t make the nationals. It’s the killer instinct she lacks, my coach told him, the last time we saw him — either you have it or you don’t. My father looked down at his hands, turning the car keys over in his fingers. That’s okay, coach, that’s my girl, he said, as if he were still proud of me. I didn’t believe him.

The baby feels my disquiet and flips over in my womb.

I sing to myself, and to the baby, trying to make my voice soft and quiet. I know I’m in danger of driving Paul crazy, the way I can’t sleep at nights, but he doesn’t understand the way movement has lost control in my body. Some days it feels as if the baby’s head is pushed into my pelvis, other times his toes are in my throat. Still, misery likes company, and although it is not exactly misery I am feeling, I keep needing to talk to Paul about this unaccountable fear, this void over which I am poised. It is no wonder, I suppose, that we fall to quarrelling so easily, the way I keep us both awake at nights.
‘Moon
shadow,’
I sing,
‘moon
shadow,
I’m
being
followed
by
a
moon
shadow …’

‘Getting pneumonia won’t help the baby much,’ Paul says.

Of course, I knew he hadn’t been asleep. And, all of a sudden, I think that the smell of fear in the room is not my own; it is his that has been infecting me, ever since we left the hospital.

I turn to the bed, where his shape, huddled under the duvet, is illuminated by the glow of the moon and the streetlight outside.

‘You don’t want to be in the delivery room when the baby’s born, do you?’

‘Yes, I do.’ He responds so quickly that I know I’m right.

‘You don’t have to,’ I say. ‘I read in an article the other day that it’s a modern fad. May be we’ve all been brainwashed into believing it’s what’s best for us. Some women like privacy when they’re
giving
birth.’

‘Are you saying you don’t want me to be there?’

‘Ann Claude said sometimes women shit themselves and it’s really embarrassing. She told us that while you were out of the room.’ It’s a lie. She didn’t say that. This was something I had read in a magazine.

‘I can cope with shit,’ says Paul. He sounds reassured, as if he can imagine shit and feel good about it.

‘Well, if you should change your mind,’ I say, trying to hide my doubt.

‘Don’t be so bloody silly,’ says Paul.

‘I’m sorry,’ I tell him, which of course I should have said
earlier
in the evening. I slide into bed beside him and fall immediately into a deep and contrite sleep.

I dream. It must have been the man shifting house in the dark the other night that brings it back. My dream is lifted straight from life. We are shifting back to my grandfather’s farm, which now belongs to my father. My brothers and I finish school one
afternoon
; it is a district high school where all the kids go together. Outside, my usually dependable father is waiting at the wheel of the family car, impatient fingers drumming up and down. My mother sits beside him. I remember thinking, something is going to change, nothing will ever be the same again. My brothers are called to hurry along, and I am bundled into the car, to make a rapid
journey
south, through the night, along the Desert Road. My brothers stare with apprehension through the windows of the car. My father stops the car so they can pee under frosty autumn stars, while the wind makes a rushing sound in the telephone lines overhead and over the vast, tussocky, dark land stretching away to the mountains, and for once they do not try to outdo each other in their arc.

I see them by the dim interior light of the car as they stand pointing at the night, two awkward boys in tight serge shorts. When they climb back in the car, we all settle down and are quiet, knowing that this is what is expected of us. Mike, Bernie and Rob, three farm kids in the back seat of a car, going they didn’t know where. My mother’s head is bent before me so that I see the pale nape of her neck, her dark and langorous curls escaping from a scarf tied roughly around her head. This naked neck seems
vulnerable
, as if it is arched for the executioner’s stroke. When she lifts her head I see her profile, the narrow temples, the slender outline of her face, the shadows on her cheeks. She averts her gaze and is lost to me. My mother, my mother, my mother, I say.

It must be towards morning that I have this dream, because when I wake the room is full of pale light, the sea is an unearthly blue streaked with fog, the hills look as if they have been lifted from a Japanese painting and it’s time for work again.

B
Y THE TIME
Glass follows Edith to the kitchen for his first cup of black Rio Gold, she is measuring blueberries in a jug for a muffin bake. Already she has mixed the first cup of flour, four raised
teaspoons
of baking powder, half a cup of sugar and a pinch of salt in a bowl. Edith doesn’t like doubling quantities. It spoils the balance. Today she will show people through her garden, the first of her spring tours. Edith smiles to herself, whisking an egg with oil, and adding the mixture to the bowl, then the blueberries, lightly dusted with flour so they won’t sink during baking.

‘Did you put the chairs under the trees?’ she asks.

‘I was afraid they might blow away.’ Mares’ tails had appeared in the sky the evening before and, once, waking briefly in the night, he had heard wind over the house.

‘Can you do it now?’

Glass thinks about forcibly taking her back to bed. The strength of his desire for her, all things considered, still astonishes him. From time to time, like this morning, he has flashes of her in his mind’s eye as she was when she was young, with long, strong limbs and a boy’s gait. He thought then that she looked like a farmer’s wife, but he was wrong. He can see now that she wore her flesh too lightly, her chin too high. She was uncertain of herself, as might be expected, and perhaps she still is, only you can’t tell any more with Edith. You can’t know what she thinks, you can only watch what she does. If he were to take her back to the bedroom, she would not struggle or accuse him of some obscure violation. Instead, she would sigh with resignation, tighten her mouth and avert her face so slightly that, if he mentioned it, she would say he was imagining things.

On the radio, the forecast promises a sunny day, no wind or rain, just a light nor’-westerly turning to the south by evening. He decides to put the chairs out.

‘It’ll soon come round time for this baby,’ he says. ‘I wonder how Roberta’s keeping.’

Edith’s spoon flies round the bowl, mixing fast so the mixture will be light and elastic. Speed is what counts.

‘Why don’t you ring her?’ she says. Her voice is distant. He sees the tumbler among the mixing bowls. She follows his glance; her hand closes quickly over the glass, and he knows it is going to be one of those days. He hopes that, by nightfall, Edith can still remember this morning.

‘They won’t be up. You know they sleep in in the city.’

‘You don’t like Paul, do you?’ she says, as if he is the one sounding the warning.

‘It’s just a feeling I have sometimes.’

‘You think he’s a city slicker and he looks down on you. You think he’s an educated know-it-all who, when push comes to shove, wouldn’t know a bale of hay from a cow’s backside, so actually you look down on him as well.’

‘I see you’re an expert on me this morning.’

‘Oh no.’ She begins to spoon mixture into the muffin trays. ‘I wouldn’t try that.’ He recognises the old bitterness, but he can’t help needling her.

‘So you think Paul’s all right?’

‘I hardly know him.’

‘What if this were Bernard and Orla’s baby? You’d be racing round there checking up, out doing the milking for her, not baking cakes for strangers.’

Edith turns her response over carefully before answering him. They don’t often talk these days, but she must understand that he expects a reply.

‘It would be easier if it was theirs,’ she says at last. ‘I hate the way they’re disappointed every month when it doesn’t happen. Everyone asking them when they’re going to have one. Or, nowadays, going out of their way not to mention babies. All those tests, the
fertility
drugs and all that stuff. Bernard jacking off in a bottle — can you imagine that? I can’t bear it when I see it’s not going to happen again. I don’t know what to say I don’t even know how to say, “Hi Orla, how are you doing this morning?” because I know she’s going to turn her face away from me, the same as if I was checking her bed for spots.’

‘But that’s not Roberta’s fault.’

‘Of course it’s not. But they might not have a baby, not ever, and then what?’

‘I don’t think we should be less glad about Roberta’s baby because of that,’ he says in the heavy space between them. ‘I’d like to see a kid round the place.’

‘You should be so lucky. It’ll be different, you see. You won’t be able to own Roberta’s baby.’

‘You can’t own anyone’s baby,’ he says, not following her logic.

‘Go on, admit it,’ says Edith, snapping the oven door shut. ‘You’ve got it in for Paul because this baby will live in the city with him, and not out here on the farm. This is your problem too, matey.’

The kitchen feels too hot. He hears himself, flat and mean. ‘You don’t like Paul either.’

And he walks out of the room.

T
HE SKY IS
marbled with a white-green light like the blown glass perfume bottle that stood on his mother’s dressing table. When he took the stopper out he could smell tea roses. If he breathes deeply enough he might just catch their scent now. Above him the last of the moon is a disc like smooth candy. Then the sun lifts clear of the hills and the air is suddenly full of white hot sunlight, and
excitement
quickens in his veins. Another day, new promise, he is going to be a grandfather.

This land has been in Glass’s family for four generations. The farm lies among rolling country burned out of the bush a century or more ago. Glass knows how to breed female animals to their maximum capacity, how to ensure that their fertility cycle
continues
year after year. The farm yields six hundred kilos of milk solids per hectare, high for the Wairarapa. He stands on the crest of the hill, holding his gun at his side. Edith is wrong — this is what
ownership
is about and he is proud of it. In the circle of light that
surrounds
the farm, all the trembling knee-high grass, the beautiful clover and rye, the cocksfoot and timothy lying before him is his. It is rich and luscious and soon it will be ready to cut for hay; it
ripples
and shimmers and billows; it surges with the day’s early light, now purple and lavender in the shadow of a cloud, now flickering green like the feathers of a parrot. There will be a good crop of hay this year.

Glass is a big man who has never let himself run to fat. His fair hair is still thick and springy, neatly thatching his head
although
he is sixty. Running, down his cheek and into the corner of his mouth is an old, deep acne scar, which women find attractive. He has taken to reading glasses only recently. He is a well-spoken man; his mother was old money from up north and you can hear
in his vowels her out-of-Walnut way of talking. If you ask people round about, they will say he is a strong man; if you ask his
brothers
-in-law they will go further, tell you he’s a hard bastard.
Close-mouthed
, they say in the pub and down at the saleyards; understandable, he’s got his troubles. Always, there is that
underlying
admiration — remember, the lad played for Wairarapa Bush.

Below Glass lies his farmhouse, a low white bay villa, formal in its symmetry, with a verandah running around it. Built early in the century, it has been softened and altered over the years, more recently by Edith, but this cannot hide its plain and stalwart
origins
. It looks to him like a ship lost at sea, surrounded by pergolas and gazebos, flowers and shrubs and peacocks on the lawn. Over twenty years his wife has transformed the garden from a staid and structured place to a wild welter of colour, a valley of roses, bearded irises, pentstemons, dianthus, mop-headed trees showering
blossom
, and all divided by curving paths and broad, stone-paved walks. The green tide of grass laps at the fence, a life-raft of roses spilling over the trellises towards it.

Behind him, a group of houses is clustered on the bank of a river edged with willows. They are roofed with tin, thinned by rust, and wooden planked, bare of paint. His father used to take him for walks on the farm when he was a boy. ‘Did you know there’s a white man living in there, boy? Now what would a white man want
living
amongst Maoris? It’ll be women or drink. You watch out, boy, don’t you go visiting down there.’

A car drifts along the road, a narrow strip of seal winding in a curve through the valley that divides the near home paddocks. You never know who will come up this quiet back road these days. On the corner, three white crosses mark the place where a car rolled and killed its occupants some months earlier. The crosses are garlanded with leis made of brilliant gold and purple artificial
flowers
. He wonders what Polynesians were doing driving at a mad pace through this part of the countryside. There was nowhere to go and nobody who knew them, so far as anyone can tell.

In the distance he sees Bernard and Orla, darting in the
shadowy
oasis of the milking shed, hears a dog bark as the first cows are returned to pasture. He can just discern their Friesian coats, like soft, stitched patchwork jumpers on their bodies.

When he left school, Bernard started work on the farm. The farm was to have gone to Glass’s elder son, Michael, but he has a
career in journalism and works in the press gallery in Canberra. He writes funny, tough columns that appear in different newspapers with his photograph over them, and don’t reveal his own politics. His father cannot understand this. When Glass was a baby his mother said it was as clear as glass what he was thinking, and the name stuck. Glass. Through a glass darkly, Edith once said, but that is too poetic, too obscure for him, although he knows she
understands
that the name is not entirely true, that he deceives her and others around him if it suits him. But a man’s politics are something you need to know, if you are to understand him. This is how you tell right from wrong, whether a man is for you or against you.

He doesn’t like Bernard much, which is something he admits to nobody, and only rarely to himself. He tries harder with Bernard than with any of his children. Bernard and Orla have had a good start on the farm. When Orla arrived from Ireland she was pert and tricky and he could have sworn she would have babies. But why Orla, he wonders, acid-tongued, and now disappointed? He hears her across the paddock. ‘Yo yo, get away back,’ Orla calls to the dogs, from afar. The last cows are filing down the race. He hears the distant hiss of high-pressure hoses cleaning down the yard. She and Bernard have almost finished milking and soon she will return to the house.

Hearing her clear, bell-like voice echoing over the paddocks, he knows, with a pain that tightens his gut, that Edith would rather have a Catholic grandchild from Orla. She doesn’t believe that Roberta and Paul are truly married, and although he has known it all along, it is not something he wants to admit to himself. He can see that she has not put aside one moment of their past. He
remembers
with painful clarity the time of his father’s anger. It’s like the banks hiring staff, boy, he had told Glass. No niggers, no queers, no Catholics. You have to learn the hard way, boy, his father had said, when he met Edith, the Catholic girl Glass had made pregnant.

‘We don’t need his money,’ Edith had said, when he gave them the money to go sharemilking, ‘we don’t need anything from him.’ But, not knowing anything else, and because there was a baby coming, he had taken it and gone. He had never seen his father again. Glass believes that what has happened to him has made him more tolerant; this is what he hopes.

He grips his rifle more tightly. The movement startles a
rabbit
, which leaps across his line of vision. Before his aim, the rabbit cartwheels, a tiny bolt of blood exploding in the morning sun.

The rabbit lies close to the perimeter of the far home
paddock
. Glass, setting off to retrieve it, is alerted by a familiar
astringent
smell, both smoky and floral, that puzzles him; it is the scent of crushed or perhaps freshly cut grass. Only as he stands from retrieving the rabbit does Glass’s glance travel further.

This is the moment when he sees the circles. He does not understand how he missed them from the rise. It is as if they just happened, although that cannot be so, they must have come in the night. The pasture has been swirled flat in wide precise circles that overlap at their edges, with neat skewers at their centres. Outside the first circles lie narrower ones, like rows of embroidery on a doily, equally neat and exact in the way they are made.

O
RLA BEGINS BREAKFAST
, but her mind is not on what she is doing. Yesterday a letter came and sooner or later she will have to tell Bernard about it. She picks up the pages from her mother again and sighs. These are not the usual complaints.

My
dear
Orla,
Given
that
you
are
such
a
stubborn
pig-headed
daughter
to
me
,
I
suppose
I
must
think
about
coming
to
New
Zealand,
I
am
an
old
woman
now
and
what
is
one
more
sacrifice
more
or
less
…

Orla lays the letter down. This is what she has desired for so long, but now that it looks as if it might happen she has not the faintest idea how she will cope. It should all have happened years ago. What will her mother think? She tries to see the farm and its occupants through her eyes. Wealth, to her, beyond her wildest dreams. Edith, flitting through her garden, among the pergolas and the roses, a glass poised between her forefinger and thumb, exclaiming at the beauty of the world, sniffing her gin between gulps of flowery air. Her son-in-law down at heel and ugly in his temper. Bernard has his mother’s fondness for drink. At least she is likely to be spared the sight of her husband’s brother, who hardly ever comes to the farm.