Ricochet Baby (29 page)

I
HAVE A
new lawyer now. Her name is Mildred Dombey, a woman who has come to the law in middle life. She and I and Paul sit around a long, oval, highly polished table in Brian Adams’ office. There are oil paintings on the wall and thick shagpile on the floor.

‘We don’t think court battles do anyone any good,’ Adams is saying. ‘Reconciliation of Nathan’s interests seems more
appropriate
.’

‘Quite,’ says Mildred. ‘So we can agree to joint custody?’

‘I think that’s going a bit fast,’ says Adams.

‘Where would Roberta take Nathan when she had him?’ asks Paul.

‘Ask her,’ says Mildred. ‘She’s right here.’

Paul turns to me. ‘So, Roberta,’ he says, when I don’t say anything, ‘where would you take Nathan?’

‘I’ve bought a house,’ I tell him. ‘My very own.’

A
T FIRST IT
hadn’t felt like my own, because my parents had put money into it, and so, for that matter, had Paul — through the money from my settlement that I spent on the deposit. It’s a long, narrow terrace house in Newtown, not the kind of place my father had in mind for me when he offered the money. I am not quite sure, myself, why I chose it, except that the dark hollow of its interior feels like a place I understand.

Built at the turn of the century, its foundations are crumbling and I know it will need all the money I have saved by not buying a smarter house. On either side, just a couple of metres separate me from my neighbours; you could land spit balls on either of them without walking further than the front door. I don’t mind this, only when they are tuned into a different television channel at night. If I lie still, I imagine I can hear them breathing through the walls.

The more I live in it, the more I know it is right.

The back of the house opens on to a courtyard of ragged and badly laid bricks where the sun shines until about lunchtime. When I first move in, I do little more than sit outside making friends with a ginger cat from next door. One day I think that if
some branches of the big silver birch in the yard were cut, the sun would last longer. I go down to the hardware shop and buy a saw. While I am up in the branches, my mother arrives. Edith nods approvingly, without saying anything much.

‘You could put a little seat down there, make a garden round it,’ she ventures.

‘I’m not into all that garden stuff,’ I say. I have visions of being like her.

Not that everything has stayed exactly the same for my
parents
. I see them holding hands with the dry, bony ardour of sexless affection, blindly turning their faces from the past.

‘I said to your father, you and me growing old in the suburbs, don’t see it,’ she had reported to me.

When he said that he was finished with the farm, she had not believed him, or perhaps, that difficult night, she had not really heard him. But he tells her that she can stay there on her own, if she likes, but he is up and off. Once they decide to move there is a lot to be done and the organisation of the shift takes her months. My mother has relaxed her love affair with drink, though perhaps it will come back. I think she has gone back to God, as they say, but we don’t talk about that.

‘I keep meaning to visit Wendy,’ she says.

‘Then why don’t you?’

‘I don’t know what I would say, to tell you the truth.’ And I can see how it is for her, remembering their conversations on the farm, the endless private delights of Wendy’s fantasies and bookish half-truths. It wouldn’t be the same behind bars.

‘No garden,’ she tells Glass, when they buy their new house on the outskirts of town. It is a brick bungalow with a rectangular blue swimming pool. A forsythia grows at the front; Edith has never given garden space to forsythia — a common shade of yellow, she has said in the past.

‘You’ll have to have something,’ Glass says.

‘Then you do it,’ she replies. ‘You just plant out the stuff and keep it weeded, but don’t expect me to do it.’ But, in the spring, Edith talks about putting a bed of cream polyanthus under the
forsythia
to tone it down a bit. And now she is sniffing around in my garden, getting ready to organise me.

As if she is reading my mind, she sits down on the step,
seeming
to let well alone. She scratches in the earth at a crumbling brick,
levering it from its base. I see then what I haven’t noticed before, that there is some kind of design underneath. The next week, when she comes back, she carries a pick, spade and some trowels in the back of her car. Without saying anything, we both set to work, clearing away silt and rubbish, until the pattern becomes clearer: bricks set in an ever-expanding circle. I have found my father’s story about the circles and how he nearly killed a man over them oddly heartening; I mean, that he had made something out of it important enough to tell me. I like the idea of circles exploding from the centre, caught in endless multiplication, but at least erratic, not conforming all the time to the common view of a circle, not meeting expectations. I can live with that.

When I go down the street, I look for the War Woman, but I never see her again. I recall her passionate possession of her child and I think that she was probably wrong. Do people own children? How can I answer that? Nathan is my son, but I relinquished him through a time of terror and despair. A part of me says that children grow and become less and less their parents’ children; another part of me says that we are never free of each other, but bound up in indissoluble strands, in which possession has no place.

On a morning when I can put it off no longer, I pull on a
jersey
and some leggings, wind a cheerful scarf around my neck, and set off along the street, as if I am not going anywhere special. When I get to the hospital, I keep walking up through the grounds, and turn left at a small building. I walk down the corridor, intending only to make an appointment. I can always change my mind.

But his door is open. Dr Q sits at his desk, gazing out the
window
, eating peppermints. He is wearing a dark denim shirt and a hairy brown jacket.

‘Business a bit quiet today,’ I say.

He holds out the bag of peppermints. ‘What kept you so long?’ he says. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’

‘I want to get a job sooner or later,’ I say.

‘Well, I haven’t got one for you.’

‘No, but you’ll find work for me.’

‘Yes,’ he says, pushing his spectacles up on his nose.

‘There’s always work to be done. Why don’t you sit down?’

And then there is Nathan, who comes to me every second weekend at the start. But it has been agreed that the time will increase if things go well between us. I think that they are, though
I am nervous when Paul brings him round to me, and it is worse when I take him back to them. I can almost see Prudence
inspecting
him for dirt. Prudence and Paul have begun their new family in the house that was mine. When Nathan gets older, he will be able to choose whether he lives with me all the time and I feel sure that he will, though that’s a long way off.

One day, Josh Thwaite comes to visit. I make that sound as if it is especially significant, but it is not. Josh calls often. I’ve left Leda, he told me a long time ago.

‘That’s fine,’ I said at the time, ‘if it’s what’s right for you.’

‘So when can I move in?’ he had asked.

‘Later, not just yet.’

‘Don’t you want me?’ he had enquired, in an injured way, although all the evidence was in favour of me wanting him a great deal. He is back fishing, on Italian boats down at Island Bay.

‘When you’re sure you’re sorted out, we can think about it.’ I have experienced some serious grief over Josh Thwaite; I do even now, when he leaves me. But I am not ready for all that
commitment
and routine again, and I want him to be quite sure he knows what he is letting himself in for when he gets me, because, once it’s decided, I don’t plan to let him go.

This day, when he comes, I am working in the back yard,
digging
a little trench to lay stones round the edge of the narrow
garden
. ‘I could build a swing for Nathan,’ he says. ‘I reckon he’d like that.’ He pulls himself up on a branch of the silver birch tree. ‘It’s really strong. Or I could make a frame for it, if you’re worried about the tree.’

‘That sounds like a good idea,’ I tell him.

We stand in my patch of sunlight, watching the sky, and although it’s not in place yet, we both see the swing, flying higher and higher, backwards and forwards, with Nathan holding on.

Fiona Kidman was born in Hawera in 1940. She has worked as a librarian, creative writing lecturer and teacher, producer and critic, but primarily as a writer. To date, she has published sixteen books,
including
novels, poetry, non-fiction, short stories and a play. She has won numerous awards and fellowships, including the New Zealand Book Awards fiction category for
The
Book
of Secrets,
the OBE for services to literature and the New Zealand Scholarship in Letters. She lives in Wellington with her extended family.