The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories (44 page)

‘True,' said Edwin. ‘But you have another history which you've never told me.'

‘So I do, yes. Well, all right then,' said Cora. She began: ‘I met Bim in a fairground at Invercargill. I had landed at Lyttelton aboard a rundown little steamer. The ship had broken down on the Equator. We had been stranded for nearly a week, and food and water had run low. It took some time to recover from that journey.'

‘When would this be?' asked my father.

‘Nineteen twenty-five as I recall. I was twenty-eight, I can tell you that. I thought I had a great experience of life. I was born within the sound of Bow Bells, though you mightn't tell it from my speech. It was a tough life, but I always managed to have a good time — I sang a bit you know, la-la lah.

‘But times were getting hard over there, and I made the mistake of
thinking
it was only happening at home. I looked at the colonies and flipped a coin. New Zealand won, and a cheap berth was available on a ship the following week.

‘On board the ship,' she recounted, ‘I met a couple who were friendly, for which I was grateful, because before the ship was out of sight of land I was sure I had made a dreadful mistake. I began to plan immediately how I would earn my fare to get home; I even thought of abandoning the ship at the first port and trying to make my way from wherever it was we were heading. It must have been Egypt I suppose, we went through Suez. This couple
persuaded
me that without any money anything could happen to me if I were to leave the ship and, in spite of what happened later, I know that in this they were right.'

Nora reached out and topped up the women's glasses from the last bottle of beer and passed it over to the men. She had picked a lapful of flowers and grass and begun to plait them in a circle.

‘They appeared to be a reasonably well-off couple,' Cora continued. ‘Their journey had been their first to England, they told me, and they had saved for it for a long time, determined that when they had what they described as their overseas experience they would do it in style. They explained their presence on the seedy little ship as being the result of a cancelled sailing that they had booked before, and as they had cows coming in for the new season they could not wait for better. Their main hope was that the price of butterfat would hold. They were disappointed, they said, the way the old country was letting down its allies. When there is a war, they said, England remembers us, but when the war is over, we are dumped like so many orphans in a tub. Still,
they had made out, and they thought I would like it where they lived. At the Equator the ship broke down, grinding to a halt one night, and we sat riding it out for five days before repairs were made. I thought the heat would kill me. The couple coped better than I did during those ghastly days and
continued
to spare kindness. So we got to New Zealand, and eventually I started to cheer up. I saw wildfire in the sky, the southern lights.'

‘Aurora australis,' my father said. ‘A rare sight from that position.'

‘That's what I was told. I took it as an omen. The couple I'd met came from the south and when they offered me work on their farm I didn't hesitate to say yes. Certainly, I had nothing better to do. We travelled by train from Christchurch, and I was amazed by the greenness of the country and the animals being driven across the face of the land.

‘But when we arrived at their farm I was disappointed. I was struck by its meanness. I was given a horrible box-like room to sleep in. Their personalities underwent a change and I could see that things were not as they had presented them on the ship. Before long, it was clear that I had been taken on as slave labour by the people I now called Farmer Joe and Mrs Joe. I had no money, and not the slightest idea where to go. In fact, we were miles and miles from anywhere, so I couldn't even plan my escape. I milked cows and it was very hard work, difficult for me to learn, but the pair of them, just returned from their holiday to this godforsaken place, had money in their pockets, however sparsely they lived. They ran a smart car, a large Ford, and went off in it all day. When they returned it was clear they had eaten and drunk well. Wages were promised, but nothing was delivered.

‘About a month passed, and then they said that for a treat we would all go to a fair. It's hard to tell whether they were surprised or not when I turned up for the outing carrying my suitcase. For a moment I thought they would refuse to take me, and I was suddenly quite afraid of the man. In the end they must have decided their number was up, and so they took me, dumping me at the fairground without a word. At once I made my way into the crowd, quickly trying to get away from them. There was a merry-go-round with chipped horses, and a ferris wheel painted scarlet, blue and chrome-yellow, faded as the colours were. Not many people were riding either of them, though crowds had begun to gather. I offered the ferris wheel operator an English shilling that I still had in my purse. After some grumbling he accepted it, and for another shilling he agreed to look after my suitcase.

‘Well, the ferris wheel rode around a few times and then, like the ship, it simply ground to a halt with me poised at its height. From where I sat I could see the province of Southland unfolded before me, and mountains in the distance. The town was full of low and comforting buildings and I didn't feel
so afraid. I thought that if I could get myself into the town I could make my way to a hotel and surely find work of some kind.

‘Then I looked down into the fairground itself. Behind a tent I saw a woman in sequined tights practising fire eating. She dipped her baton into a bowl of methylated spirits that shone like an amethyst in the late spring light, and popped it into her mouth. Just as she lit the match and the fire billowed from between her lips, the couple I had so recently left, appeared. She cowered from them, apparently so terrified that I was afraid she would swallow the fire and explode her lungs. To my astonishment, Farmer Joe began to beat her, while his wife went lookout.

‘I started shouting as loudly as I could, and in a few minutes there were people milling everywhere below. Of course the ferris wheel operator thought I was going to jump. He sweated and struggled to get the motor running.

‘When at last the ferris wheel was lowered and I could step down, people tried to stop me, offering comfort I suppose, but I ran madly towards the tent. Farmer Joe must have seen me coming, because when I got there, there was no sign of the fire eater. But by now I was aware of every movement and every sound and I picked up a whimpering from behind the tent flap. She's in there, I screamed, please, someone must look. And then another man, who I found out later had been watching me from the moment I entered the
fairground
, stepped up and intervened.

‘— Where's the fire eater? he cried. I pointed under the tent flap, and he tore it open so that everyone there could see the beaten woman. He stepped in front of her, trying to shield her from the crowd. Farmer Joe stepped up. — She's mine, he said, she belongs to me. — You mean you're her manager? the stranger said. — No, she's mine, I own her, Bim Dovey. Bim, as I now knew him, grabbed him by the throat. — We'll talk to the police about that.

‘But that was an end to it, as it happened. Farmer Joe melted into the crowd, and Bim helped the woman to her feet. — No charges, said the latter, I don't want to lay any charges. — You should, said Bim, but he understood how it was for her. Farmer Joe was her boss and work was short. He hadn't paid her any money for months either, just like me. He was a fairground operator as well as a farmer. Sometimes I think I could have died out on that rat-hole farm, if it hadn't happened to be fair day. Bim owned a picture theatre and a dance hall and he was out scouting for talent. He offered both of us a job, but the woman said she had no skills except fire eating, which she had learned as a girl. I thought it very sad but she was offended by that, and said it was an art. She supposed she must have aggravated Farmer Joe; she still believed he'd pay her. I went with Bim and the two of us worked that dance hall for years, and I turned a blind eye to his philandering.

‘Then one morning, just like that, he said — let's retire, and I could see that he had had enough of shimmying up and down that dance hall,
gentlemen
take your partner for a two-step, ladies' waltz, supper waltz, oh gentlemen time for the Gay Gordons, and so on and on. As you will understand, he was a kind man.'

‘But he found it dull,' Nora said, in a statement rather than a question. She knew Bim, of course. Once Laura had commented to my father how kind he was to help Nora build her cottage.

‘Oh yes,' said Cora, and the two women looked at each other. Cora raised her glass in Nora's direction. ‘Old habits died hard.'

‘I understand,' murmured Nora.

‘He went on business trips too,' Cora said.

Nora nodded, her smile a trifle ragged. ‘Of course,' she said.

‘It's true, he was a kind man,' Cora mused, and nobody was ever damned with fainter praise.

‘Oh, men,' Nora said, apparently bridling. Then she laughed. Placing the ring of flowers on her head, she said: ‘Oh, I am the Summer Queen.'

All this time, Edwin had sat with his gaze never leaving Cora's face, entranced by her every word. When she and Nora had finished their exchange he gave a little bow. There was, however, a line of sweat above his lip.

‘Your turn, Laura,' said Cora. ‘Now you must tell us your story.'

My mother flinched and looked at my father. He looked away. My heart was in my mouth, waiting for her to begin. She looked so innocent in her print dress, beyond conspiracies and illicit desires. But at that moment, as I sat there with my foot in the stream, a rat appeared beside me. It was large and full-bodied, sleek as raisins, its eyes flickering over the remains of our picnic.

My father saw it too. In an instant he reached my side, gun raised, and before I knew what was happening an explosion ripped the rock beside me. There was a dark writhing flash, a body dropped, the rat's red blood ballooning in the water below. Chips of stone lay in my lap.

‘Jesus,' my father said, sinking down beside me. ‘I never thought, that bullet could have killed you, ricocheting off the rock. Ah Jesus.' He sat rocking on his heels.

I had done nothing, nothing at all. Yet a shadow had been cast. Laura, Nora and Cora were wrapping up the picnic. They folded away the cloth. I remember glaring at them. Suddenly I felt cheated. Give me history, passion, give me the truth, I might have shouted. Or I might have said ‘White rabbits.'

S
HAUN WANTED TO GO
to Vietnam because his brother had left his mind there.

‘It's not like something you can find,' said Joyce. ‘It won't just be sitting under a tree somewhere.'

‘I can find out why he left it there,' said Shaun, his voice grim. He remembered the day he turned five, his first day at school. Evan had been there. When he was teased for having gingerbread men in his lunch, like a baby, Evan had dealt with it. Evan taught him to drive a car, and found him a date for the senior formal. That had been Joyce, with whom he went steady for five years. His brother was best man at their wedding. Then Evan went to fight in Vietnam, and when he came back, he was different.

There had been some letters. In one, Evan wrote about grenades landing around him in the dark. They'd blown his tent away, and then he'd lost his rifle. Man, he wrote, it was scary sitting there in the dark with only my knife in my hand, waiting for some gook to come and finish me off. Just sitting there in the trees, you know. In the next letter he told about how he had been hit in the left elbow by shrapnel. A few pepper frags, was how he described it. His writing was spidery and all over the place because he couldn't hold the paper properly while he wrote. I'll be fine, he said. Should be back in action in no time. Mind you, it's amazing the shock a few little bits of metal can give you. Thought I'd gone off my rocker the first day. She'll be right, mate.

Only it wasn't.

‘It's too late,' said Joyce. ‘There's nothing you can do about it now.'

‘Well, hell, it's a trip,' said Shaun. ‘We've never been out of New Zealand. Donelle can stay at your mother's, for Pete's sake. Donelle was their youngest, the afterthought, they called her.

‘Couldn't we go somewhere nice?' said Joyce. ‘Like Australia, or Tahiti or something?'

‘You're scared, aren't you?' Shaun said. ‘C'mon, Joycie, it's an adventure.'

‘Why don't you go and see what it's like? If it's nice I could go back with you another time.'

But, as the Thai Airbus lurched lower and lower over the paddy fields, coming in towards Ho Chi Minh City, Joyce sat beside him, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. The runway of Tan Son Nhat flashed beneath the lowered wheels. A seemingly endless line of bomb blast shelters and rusted wrecks of old helicopters rushed past them.

‘My God,' said Shaun.

‘Seen enough?' said Joyce.

Shaun didn't look at his wife. He knew he would see a terror so profound that, if he acknowledged it, he would give in and go home. If that were possible, which of course it might not be. Flights in and out of Vietnam were so heavily booked you had to plan months ahead to be sure of a seat.

Shaun's tray table fell open as the plane touched the ground. Glancing down, he saw the toes of Joyce's white plastic shoes curl in towards each other. She hadn't known what to buy for the trip. You can't get anything for summer at this time of the year, she said. Just take the summer gear you've got, he said, we know it'll be hot, at least we know that. In the end she had bought a button-through floral at Farmers, and that was what she was wearing now. She carried a blue acrylic cardigan over her arm. The hostess had stored her woollen coat in the overhead locker. One of her friends had read
somewhere
, maybe in the
Woman's
Weekly,
that it could get cold at nights in the East.

The heat had made Joyce's perm fall out so that her hair hung round her shoulders with a frizz of curl at the end. Shaun wondered, again, why he had insisted that she come. The first night in Bangkok, she had cried when she saw the menu. ‘I can't eat that, Shaun,' she said. I can't I can't I can't.

In the airport a sign said
A VIETNAMESE SMILE IS TOURISTS JOY AND HOPE.
Joyce seemed to feel better for having seen something she could read in English. They hired a taxi into the city, a thirty-year-old Renault with grass growing along the top of the back seat, sharing it with an Englishman and his Australian wife who were going to find somewhere nice and cheap to stay. They had toured all over Asia, well most of it, several times. They had never been here before. The wife had had dengue fever in Chiang Mai one year. Terrible. Fortunately, they had had their own needles with them for the injections. Shaun and Joyce knew about the needles, didn't they? Shaun said that they did, and gave Joyce a warning look.

The taxi hurtled through thousands upon thousands of cyclists. Unlike
Bangkok, which had been so crowded with traffic that the smog blocked out the end of city blocks, Ho Chi Minh City, despite its millions of inhabitants, was almost totally devoid of cars. When the taxi stopped at intersections, the city seemed eerily quiet. The flames of little fires flickered in the streets.

Shaun paid the taxi driver and tipped him in local currency. ‘Do you reckon fifty thousand dongs is enough?' he wondered. He was like a
schoolboy
, ecstatic at the unknown, the immensity of things. ‘We're millionaires,' he had said to Joyce when they changed their money at the airport.

‘American dollar,' the driver said, and held out his hand.

On the pavement a man with no arms or legs flipped his body from side to side next to a begging bowl. The stumps of his shoulders were bleeding from their contact with the street.

The hotel was called The Rex. It had been used as a base by American soldiers. At the desk a sign read ‘The Use of Cards Owned by Americans is Suspended for the Time Being'. The mats in the lifts were changed three times a day. The first one had Good Morning inscribed on it, the second Good Afternoon and the third, Good Evening. The passages were cool and dim, the floors made of checked marble. The large and functional bedrooms contained two beds, some chairs, a television, a carved room divider, a safe with a difficult combination lock, and cane frames for hanging jackets on. ‘That's where the generals hung their uniforms,' Shaun guessed.

Bowls of ripe persimmons and sweet green bananas stood in a bowl on a table. ‘Thank goodness, they'll be safe to eat,' said Joyce, tearing the skin off a banana.

The top of the hotel opened on to a roof garden, such a fantasy land it took Shaun's breath away. All around him topiary deer crouched or stood poised as if for flight. Caged birds sang, and black and gold fish swam lazily in huge tanks ornamented with blue ceramic tiles. A crown, twice as tall as Shaun, and festooned with lights, rotated on a giant stand.

‘This is the life,' he said, and ordered a Heineken. Around them rose the conversation of suited businessmen. Some of them had been on the plane coming in. There were deals going down everywhere. Japanese, German, French deals. Oil. Resources. Here and there an English voice translated the nature of the offers being sought by the bargain hunters. As dusk fell, a cloud of swallows rose over the city, chasing dragonflies.

The next day, Joyce was running a temperature. When she woke up her nose and eyes were streaming, her throat so sore she could hardly speak. Shaun had booked a boat trip up into the Mekong Delta for the day. ‘I reckon Evan
might have been up there, round the delta,' he said, when they were planning the trip.

‘It'll all be different now,' she said.

‘The river'll still be the same. I can see what he saw.' He stopped, started afresh, and then stopped again. ‘Maybe,' was all he said, in the end.

‘You go without me,' she whispered.

‘Aw heck, Joyce.'

‘Go on,' she said. ‘I'll be all right here.' She felt so like dying that it didn't really matter. Eventually, Shaun agreed to go, although, of course, he had meant to, anyway. He put on the towelling hat that he wore to the beach back home, his sunglasses, buckled a money belt under his shirt and slung his camera over his shoulder. ‘I can handle this,' he said. ‘It's a piece of cake, being a tourist.'

‘You just be careful,' Joyce said. ‘They'll see you coming a mile off. They'll rip you off.'

She just wanted him to go. ‘Get me some throat lozenges while you're out,' she called, as he was going out the door. ‘There should be a chemist's shop somewhere around here.' The Rex was right in the heart of the city opposite Ho Chi Minh's statue.

‘Sure thing, I'll ask at the desk,' said Shaun, and he was gone.

Joyce lay on the bed, and imagined him amongst the crowd, a ruddy, boisterous man with a cocky way of walking. You have to learn to get along in life, he often said. You have to learn to take the rough with the smooth. You wouldn't have picked him and Evan for brothers. Evan was tall and verging on pale, with light, bright eyes. She wasn't at all sure that Shaun could manage on his own, despite what he said. At home, he was a petrol station attendant. He had been promoted to floor court manager. Anyone who can deal with those larrikins hooning in there at the weekends, he said, can take care of anything. He knew how to dip the oil stick so that it came out showing half empty, but he was choosy who he did it to, despite what the boss said. No kids with their first car, no old ladies. He remembered what it was like to be young, and one day he would be old as well.

Her eyes watered some more; it wasn't just to do with her cold. This trip represented their savings, and here she was, spending them in a place weirder than she could ever have imagined. Outside, there were beggars and thieves and a rank, sullen river crowded with makeshift boats, and women on their hands and knees, trimming the grass on the footpaths. The scent of death seeped through the seams around the windows. She huddled up with her knees drawn under her chin, shivering in the air-conditioning and blowing her nose.

After a while, she finished her last box of tissues. For an hour she tried to dry her handkerchiefs on the rattling air conditioning, but her efforts were no match for her streaming misery.

Joyce decided that if she could get out into the fresh air, away from the cooling system, she might improve. She looked at the door several times before she plucked up the courage to open it and walk through. In the corridor, housemaids stiffened to attention, inclining their heads as they passed. She entered a Good Morning lift and let it take her to the roof garden.

Hardly anyone was around, except a barman sitting in the shade pulling reflectively on a tiny Ho Chi Minh beard. Joyce sat down at one of the
glass-topped
tables. A Japanese child, aged about four, who had been chain-smoking at the dinner table the night before, followed his mother to the swimming pool, trailing a cigarette between his fingers. He stopped by Joyce and took a thirsty drag at it, blowing smoke in her face.

The barman watched her with apparent indifference while she wondered how to ask for a glass of lemonade. The steamy heat made her feel as if she had had a warm wet blanket thrown over her. Suddenly, she was surrounded. Several Vietnamese girls, she thought they would be barely teenagers,
surrounded
her, giggling and shrieking. They stood so close to her she felt their breath on her face.

‘What are you doing?' one of them asked.

‘Having a holiday,' said Joyce, feeling foolish and frightened. She picked her purse up and placed it in her lap, holding it firmly round the clasp. Of course, she realised that what she was doing was offensive, but they were so close to her and there were so many of them that it was all she could think of. Her passport was in there, and two hundred American dollars, and half a million dongs and a lock of Donelle's baby hair slipped under the plastic cover that held her photograph.

‘How old are you?' one of them asked.

‘Forty-three,' said Joyce.

The girls shrieked with laughter. One of them pinched her arm, feeling a fold of flesh.

‘Forty-three?' She turned and translated the figure to the others.

Joyce, relaxing her grip on the purse, signalled to the barman, the way she had seen other people do when they wanted a drink. She almost poked one of the girls in the eye. The others laughed and mimicked her, poking at each other's eyes. The barman took out a comb and began to slick his black wing of hair over his bony skull.

After a moment, the girls left, laughing and waving. ‘Goodbye,' they said. ‘Goodbye.'

Joyce felt a blush rising up her throat and spreading over her cheeks. It had just occurred to her that the girls had wanted to make friends.

‘You wouldn't believe the orchards and the gardens,' said Shaun. ‘The grapefruit were like pumpkins, and the marigolds were up to my shoulder. You'd have really liked it, love. And the river, it was so wide, it was like setting out to sea in a flat-bottomed boat. Like the owl and the pussycat.' He laughed out loud at his cleverness. ‘We used to say that when we were kids,' he said, more soberly.

The river, and rice paddies mile after mile, Evan had written. It's all right in the daytime, it's just boring looking out at all that water and stuff. But I've got scared of the dark. The gooks sneak up on us, shooting from the other side of the river. I've got ants in my pants and blisters and wet socks. We're heading into tunnel territory tomorrow, fucken little bastards hide
underground
and jump out at you any old how. I've heard they live down there, inside the tunnels, and they've got steel traps and six-foot stakes for us to fall on. Great, isn't it?