Huia Short Stories 10 (23 page)

Eva

Helen Waaka

Eva stood outside my house one night and threw stones at the bedroom window. I knew it was her by the way the stones hit the window, relentlessly, like the beating of a heart. I lay there for a while listening, wanting to get up, but not wanting to. I could be like that sometimes with Eva. Indecisive. But in the end I did get out of bed, pulled the venetians up, wiped a layer of condensation off the glass. There was a fog settling, and Eva was lit up from behind by the hazy orange glow of the streetlight outside our house. I pushed the window open, hooked the lever into its last slot. I could see the outline of her body, how she held herself, stooped and tired-looking, like someone much older than her fifteen years.

‘I'm running away,' she said. I knew by her voice, how quiet it was, the way she seemed to chew her words, that her father had given her another hiding. The hidings were something we shared, a secret that drew us together in the first place. They weren't something the Prudences, the Alices or the Odettes could even begin to understand.

‘I'm going to Plymouth,' she said. ‘Robbie's there. Come with me.' Robbie was Eva's older brother, good-looking but on the wild side, a bit like Eva. They both lacked boundaries, and without boundaries, they experienced life ten times more than anyone else did. Everything was all over the place. Robbie had left home the year before. He'd hit out at his father, defending himself, and no one had seen him since. We'd heard he was living in a flat, somewhere in Plymouth.

I thought about the times Eva and I had spent together. No one else I knew did the things she did, like ride Robbie's horse bareback, with just reins and a bridle. She took me with her once. I'd never been on a horse before, and I clung to her with both arms wrapped tight around her body, my face buried in the man's shirt she wore. I could smell the sun on her back and in her hair, warm and clean as she galloped the horse along the riverbank.

‘Not so tight!' she yelled into the wind. ‘I can't breathe!'

We rode the horse along the banks of the river, strands of her long brown hair flicking across my face, the wind taking my breath away. I squeezed my eyes shut, too scared to look, but once or twice I dared to open them and caught glimpses of the water, a shimmering denim blue, sparks of sunlight dancing across its surface. Eva slowed the horse to a trot, steered it down the sloping grassy banks of the river towards the soft, slate grey sand. She kicked her heels into the horse's chestnut belly and pulled on the reins.

‘Eva!' I yelled. ‘Let me off!'

She laughed, ignoring the fear in my voice. The horse pricked back its ears, hesitated for a moment then plunged forward, taking us both into the icy waters of the river. We rode out until we were up to our thighs in water and the horse started kicking its hooves to swim. She turned towards me.

‘This is the life, baby doll!' she yelled. ‘This is what it's all about!'

I clung to her, petrified, trying to hang on to whatever it was that made the moment so intoxicating.

I hadn't forgotten that feeling, the wildness of it, the recklessness that scared yet at the same time thrilled me. I remembered it now as Eva looked up at me, waiting for an answer.

‘OK,' I said, ‘I'll come.'

‘Saturday,' she replied. ‘Meet me at the park. Two o'clock,' and she disappeared into the night.

On Saturday morning, Mum asked me to hang a load of washing out, and I spent longer than usual, making sure the socks were hung in pairs and the towels and tea towels were pegged in neat, straight rows. In Waitapu's winters the washing hung limp for days. If there was a frost, the clothes froze solid like stiff sheets of cardboard. The fog lingered sometimes until midday, and if the sun did eventually come out, it shone through the mist like a torch with half-charged batteries for an hour or two in the afternoon before the evening cold set in again. Winters were a constant juggle for my mother. Hanging washing out, bringing it in damp to dry around the living room on wooden clotheshorses, then finishing it off draped over the hot water cylinder.

Afterwards, I went into my sister's bedroom. Ruby was sitting cross-legged on her bed eating an apple, her schoolbooks fanned out around her on the bright orange candlewick bedspread.

She looked up at me, took a bite of the apple and turned back to her books.

‘You can have my Elvis records,' I said.

‘Don't you want them?' she said, without taking her eyes off her books.

A lump in my throat stopped me from answering at first, and for a moment I felt torn, but it was in that same single moment I knew I had to go. I felt guilty leaving Ruby, but going with Eva would be my only chance. There was no way I could have done it on my own.

‘No.' I didn't like Elvis's music. I pretended to because everyone else did, but I could never work out what all the fuss was about.

‘Cool. Thanks, Ro.'

I went into my bedroom and started stuffing a paisley duffel bag with clothing. I had no idea what to take. The bag was only big enough for a change of clothes and underwear, but it seemed important to take the poetry book my English teacher, Miss Barritt, had given me. I felt hot tears running down my cheeks and tried ignoring them. I crammed more clothes into the bag, but new tears coming made everything go blurry. I had to stop what I was doing to wipe them away with the cuffs of my jersey. Home had always been unpredictable, but everything about it was familiar, and I was scared. I had no idea what the future held.

‘Did you hang that washing out? Rowena?' My mother's voice was strained, tired from everything that was too much for her – the washing, the cleaning, the cooking, my father. Not only was I leaving Ruby, I was leaving her too.

I went into the bathroom, wiped the tears away with a damp towel and blew my nose on a strip of toilet paper.

‘Rowena?'

‘Yes. Yes. It's out, for God's sake!' I was agitated now, nervous, wanting to leave.

‘Don't speak to me like that, young lady.' Her voice rose above the banging of pots. Mum did her housework in the mornings and drank sherry in the afternoons. On her good days, she prepared the dinner vegetables before lunch and left them soaking in cold water in copper-bottomed pots on the stove.

‘I'm meeting Eva at the park.'

‘Don't be late home,' she replied. ‘Remember what happened last time.'

How could I forget?

We wore maroon rompers to phys-ed at college. No excuses. I tried to avoid wearing them that day, but without a note it was impossible. The red welts criss-crossing my legs and back were slowly turning into dark mottled bruises by then. Mrs Evans, the phys-ed teacher stopped what she was doing when she saw me. She stared at my legs over the rims of her pink-framed glasses, the silver whistle round her neck silent for once. For a moment, I thought she was going to speak, ask me a question perhaps or take me to one side, but in the end she turned away, pushed the whistle into her mouth and blew. Its ear-splitting shriek marked the start of another phys-ed period.

‘Long jump, people, line up over here!' she shouted.

I was ashamed of the marks on my body. I saw them as being my fault. I was the one who was late home, therefore I got what I deserved, but it was the act, too, that made me feel that way. The strap, the noise of it striking, my father yelling, me crying, Ruby sobbing in the background, my mother's pleading. The hidings somehow made us different, inferior. That's why I felt comfortable with Eva. I didn't have to explain a thing.

My mother had finished the vegetables and was outside at the clothesline pegging another load of washing out. Her fingers were red and stiff with the cold. She struggled to push wooden pegs over the doubled hems of billowing white sheets and the edges of heavy, sodden towels.

‘Bye, Mum.'

She stopped what she was doing, a wooden peg clenched between her teeth and looked straight at me. We never said goodbye to each other. Her parting comments were usually orders – ‘Don't be late' or ‘Stay out of trouble', but something felt different this time – it was as if she knew. I started to walk away.

‘Rowena.'

I didn't answer or turn around. I was scared that if I looked at her, I'd change my mind.

‘Don't forget,' she called out, ‘be home in time to mash the spuds for tea.' We always had spuds. Always. Boiled or mashed and sometimes roasted. For my father, a meal wasn't a meal without potatoes.

I sat on a grassy bank at the park waiting for Eva. I found a stick and wrote my sister's name in the dirt. Ruby. The enormity of what we were doing hit me then. We had nowhere to live and hardly any money between us. All we had was a vague idea of where Robbie lived. I felt tears coming again, but this time I wiped them away before they had a chance to fall. I didn't want Eva to see I'd been crying.

She arrived soon after, a bag slung over one shoulder, and was sipping on a bottle of Coke. We walked along the dusty pumice road towards the main turn-off, passing the Coke bottle back and forth, not talking much. The ranges were crystal clear in the winter sun, snow drizzling down their sloping sides like soft white icing. A thin wedge of misty cloud hovered lazily above the peaks and the river spread itself out in front, a sheet of moving, shimmering glass.

Eva and I walked along the main road and stuck our thumbs out. Within minutes a truck laden with logs stopped and the driver offered to take us to the Plymouth turn-off. We looked at each other with stupid grins on our faces, threw our bags up into the cab and climbed in.

The driver worked his way through the gears, manoeuvring the heavy truck away from the kerb. He wore a checked shirt and jeans and his skin was so tanned it looked like bronze leather. White laughter lines fanned out on either side of his sunglasses and when he took them off, his gaze drifted down our bodies and back up again. Another time, I knew Eva would have encouraged him, teasing him, playing with his ego. She was good at that, knowing just how far to go without getting into trouble, but this time she ignored the look, commented on the truck instead and the beautiful winter's day. Before we knew it, he dropped us at the turn-off, heading out of Waitapu.

When she climbed out of the truck, Eva winced and her shirt rode up, exposing the black and yellow bruises across her spine and lower back.

‘Eva,' I said, moving towards her.

‘I'm OK,' she said, pulling her shirt down, tying its ends in a knot at her waist.

We stood on the side of the road at the turn-off and stuck our thumbs out again. When no one stopped, we sat down on the grass verge and waited.

‘I'm going to marry someone rich,' Eva said, lying back and using her bag as a pillow.

‘I'm not going to marry anyone,' I told her. ‘I want to be famous. A singer – like Diana Ross, with a mansion and servants.'

‘The man I'm going to marry will be handsome and rich. Very rich. He'll buy me expensive clothes, jewellery, take me round the world. Wanna come?'

At that moment, lying back on the soft cushion of grass, looking up at the electric blue sky, winter white sunlight surrounding us, anything seemed possible. After a while Eva spoke again.

‘Remember those signals we worked out?' she asked. ‘We might need to use them today.'

Eva was the one who always made the risky decisions. She'd worked out the signals the day we'd planned to meet Robbie at the river. He always had smokes, but the swimming hole where everyone hung out was a fifteen-minute walk along the main road, and I had to be home by five o'clock to help with tea.

‘We'll hitch,' Eva said and she stuck her thumb out, like we'd seen other hitchhikers do. It wasn't long before a black Mini stopped to pick us up. The two men inside looked different from anyone I'd ever seen. They were olive-skinned, with dark hair and deep brown, almost black eyes, but they weren't Māori, because their features were sharper, their chins and noses almost pointed.

When they opened their mouths, I knew they were French. I'
d taken languages for a year in the third form. I recognised a few of the words they were saying but they spoke too quickly for me to understand anything they said. If they could speak any English, they didn't let on. Eva tried to explain how we wanted to be let off by the swimming hole further down the main road, and they nodded as if they understood, but when we approached the turn-off, they drove straight past, ignoring
Eva's protests.

‘Hey, dickhead, we want to get off here,' she said. The man in the passenger seat smiled, pointing ahead. Eva leaned towards me then, cupping her hand in front of my ear.

‘We could be in deep shit here, Ro,' she whispered. ‘We need to work out a code.' Her lips touched my ear lobe as she talked. I could feel her breath, hot and damp inside my ear. ‘If they ask us to do anything dodgy this means “no”, OK?' She rubbed at the bridge of her nose with her forefinger, ‘and if we agree to anything this means “yes”, not that we will,' and she pulled at her right ear lobe. ‘Got it?'

‘I think so,' I whispered back, wishing I was at home with Mum, mashing the spuds.

‘If I do both, it means “not sure, but we'll give it a go”, OK?'

We didn't use the signals that day, because the Frenchmen drove to the petrol station, just past the swimming hole, and let us off.

‘Too dangerous,' the driver said in English. ‘Stop here. Safer.' We walked back towards the river and Eva swore the whole time.

‘Bastards,' she said. ‘Bloody dickheads.' Eva always swore when she was nervous.

We were almost asleep on the side of the road when a car finally stopped, a small rusty beige station wagon. A middle-aged man with glasses sat at the wheel, smoking a cigarette.

‘Hello, girlies,' he said. ‘Going far?' He had one of those mouths with deep creases at the corners that veer downwards, and when he smiled they dipped even further towards his chin. It was hard to know where he was coming from, with his voice all smiley like that but his mouth telling you something different.