The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories (3 page)

We waved and waved until the big gleaming car had disappeared in the dust.

‘There,' my father said. ‘If there's one way I like to spend Christmas, it's helping some lame duck on his way.' I smiled to myself, thinking of Rufus. He put his arm around my mother, and she nodded happily.

While they stood there dispensing charity from the middle of a dusty road, I crept inside. Like children of the war, who all their lives see God as militant man in a soldier's uniform, so, too, as hard-up children do, I saw Father Christmas saving the world, as the rich man at the feast.

Of course I didn't really expect to find money on the mantelpiece, and when I did put my hand on five pounds, it shocked me. I opened my mouth to shout, started to run, and then I saw them walking towards me, faces still alight.

‘What is it Jeannie?' called my father. As I came closer to them, I felt foolish, wanting to throw at their feet good things and treasure, and knowing all the time that they would be hurt by the stranger's gesture, and would give it back to me for my ‘start in the world'. So I slid my hand, holding the starchy note, into my pocket.

‘It was a lovely Christmas,' I said.

But that was a long time ago, and now every Christmas I see lame ducks lurking under big shiny exteriors and wish that I were as good as my parents were, or that my life, like theirs, was simple enough to contain all that I saw.

But instead I flap my wings with futile little gestures and, like Rufus, head off into sunsets which turn to night before I am there.

T
HE MAGNOLIA TREE
towered high above the church hall casting skeleton shadows in the winter, and providing deep green shade in the summer. In the late spring foliage, blooms could just be seen, heavy and exotic, the colour of sour whipped cream.

From where we lay in the coarse kikuyu grass at the end of the school playing fields, we could glimpse the tree. It was November, the air stripped clean ready for a Northland summer, and the sea not far away, sang promise.

There were four of us, Phyllis, Geoff, David and myself, whom they call Magog, though my name is Marguerite. The nickname is apt though, for I have a peculiar mockery of a face, Grock-like, but it's never been the hindrance it should have been.

Geoff smiled at me and I rolled over to hide my face in the scratchy claws of the grass. I adored his pale, ugly face with its receding forehead and stubbly red eyelashes. Perhaps it was because neither of us were beautiful, but I thought he was brilliant too. I was right. Now a well-known surgeon, he is a clever and extraordinary man.

‘What's the matter, Magog?' he said. ‘Is it maths again?'

‘Yes,' I lied.

‘Poor old Mag-nag,' he said, twisting my name still further, so that I ached, because I loved the way he said it so much. Phyllis and David would be smiling indulgently, I knew, even though they liked each other a lot, so I kept my face down and let them think what they like. Phyllis has always been like that, rather cynical, but now a superior sort of woman, who men like because of her brains and her dry intelligent humour, and thin, magazine cover looks. But she never gets involved. Yesterday she came to see me, with a present for my latest baby, and seeing her is what brought me to thinking about all this. I felt a mess when she came, because I was dripping milk through my blouse like a fat animal, but she looked at me intensely over a cup of coffee which
she had brewed for herself in my impossible kitchen, and said through the smoke between us, ‘God you're lucky, Magog. Bloody lucky, bloody lucky, lucky, lucky,' repeating everything as she always had.

‘Why not you?' I said, and she had muttered something which was supposed to be sharp and modern, but didn't quite come off, about always wanting to talk business when she was supposed to be doing bed drill. That about sums Phyllis up though, and neither of us laughed because it was awful for her, us both knowing it was true.

‘You should quit worrying about maths,' said David. This was his way, quieter than the rest of us, and reassuring. He had deep-set eyes and crinkly hair, from his mother, the woman they called ‘the mad Dally'. I never thought of her that way. Once I called on David on a Saturday morning to collect some homework, and she was sitting by the fire, rocking gently, her great bulk heaving and sighing, and her black moustache rippling over a smile every time David turned to speak to her. When he passed by her chair her hands would reach out to touch him, his arm, his hand, his body, with love. A big, broken-hearted Yugoslav who had never been accepted by her husband's solid, third-generation New Zealand people, and rejected by her own. No wonder she loved David.

I sat up and we all stared at each other gloomily. To quit worrying about maths was so clearly ridiculous, despite the soothing nature of David's remark, that we did not bother discussing it.

It was, of course, an unending dilemma for us. No students had ever been so haunted by the desire to pass exams, or so we thought. We were at a district high school which served a small farming community on a northern reach of sea coast. Little talent flowered in Waituna, certainly not academic, nor, to any great extent, pastoral. The area had been established by pioneers whose descendants saw small value in change and, latterly, inadequately financed dreamers had moved in with them, occupying small pockets of land which the others had considered too rough to bother about. David's parents, as I have said, belonged more or less to the first category; mine wholly, and Phyllis's to the second, while Geoff's father ran a wayside store outback, between the village and the next major shopping centre. They had a few cows as well, which Geoff milked before and after school, putting out a billy of cream each day, which annoyed the truck driver and brought little return.

The four of us believed, with the immense satisfaction of the young, that we were special. Although the school had prepared University Entrance
candidates
for many years, no one had ever passed the examination, nor had anyone ever hoped that they would do so. This year, the four of us were thought to be good, and we were nurtured and cherished by our teachers like beings apart.
It was this feeling of being different from the rest of the school which threw us so constantly together. Our conversation became too precious to share with other people, and I think we were passably disagreeable.

But we were also unusually high-spirited, and this was not surprising either. We believed in ourselves, and longing to leave this indifferent countryside, we saw too, within ourselves, the means of our escape.

Each morning we left from homes between the hills, places of love
without
aspiration, sometimes, as with Phyllis's parents, inhabited at first with hope, later with despair. A few of the young people had had the internal resources to leave, a hard-won School Certificate, almost inevitably allowing them to pass thankfully into the shelter of teachers' hostels, where they hung indifferent careers upon this convenient refuge. But University Entrance offered more, the bigger chance, the better prospect, and we thought we had it made. Well, most of the time, unless afflicted by the doubts produced by mathematical formulae or French verbs.

Until the advent of Rad Barclay, that is, who had solved many things.

Take French. Before he came, we had sat in a long room, with an ageing French mistress, a relic of some long-ago girls' school, who made us sing
Claire
de
Lune
each morning before the lesson began. Geoff's and David's voices had broken and Phyllis and I would weep helplessly with uncontrolled laughter, and the old mistress, teaching only to supplement her pension in seaside retirement, would suck her false teeth so that they clattered on her gums. At the beginning of winter she left to tend her geraniums through the cold, and in her place came Rad, bringing with him visions not of a gaunt moon in an echoing room but a France of wine, sun, indelible blue skies and Scott Fitzgerald. Verbs became our catch tunes.

He was always in our thoughts, and when we thought about him he usually appeared, which meant that he was usually with us.

So that while we sat there, looking at each other, he did appear. I lifted my head and saw his trousered leg.

‘What's the matter, Magog?' he asked me, too.

‘Nothing,' I said, hugging my breasts, and my body full of spring fever, and longing and the need for everything to be over and I on my way, yet confused with wanting them all to be with me for always.

‘There is,' said Phyllis. ‘She's worried about maths, and she's mad, mad, mad.'

Rad knelt beside me. ‘Poor Magog,' he said. ‘You want a cloudburst, and much colour, and a palette and easel upon which to express it all, and instead you see rows and rows of figures, and little three-sided boxes, and spotted algebraics. It's not fair.'

This was his appeal to us, a kind of multi-hued way of talking, and a capitalisation of the most obvious parts of our natures. He was very clever.

It didn't seem fair either. As he knelt beside me, he ran his fingers on the ground, his flesh digging through the grass to brittle dirt, scratching his nails against jagged pebbles. His hand looked oddly out of place there, against the earth, he was not of our place, or our origins. He might stand against a curved horizon, and walk on salt-soaked marshland near the sea shore with us; he might go to the sea, and peer at the violet smudges of the islands on the edge of distance, but in doing so, he reminded us rather, that he was not at home here.

He was from the city, a student teacher, which made him very young, maybe not many years older than any of us. His skin was pale sepia, and his lips, warm and full, betrayed his beginnings, or some of them. He hated them bitterly, deeply, believing that to be neither one nor the other, was a sin of parents against children. Yet his Maori ancestry was very slight, and it was to it that he owed his looks. Of all of us it might have been expected that he and David would be the closest, sharing a bond of mixed race. It was not so. David, the quiet one, trusted him less than the rest of us. Well, neither Geoff, nor Phyllis, nor I mistrusted him at all. With our French at his command, and our English splendid but orderly, we had much to thank him for. Teachers had to be versatile at Waituna District High, and so he taught us history as well. We thrived and that pleased the Head, and relieved him, for though bright, and precious in our hopes, we were also a burden on the system.

So we saw a great deal of him, and he, being lonely, turned more and more to us, talking, always talking, full of ideas, and hate too. Hate for systems, hate for tradition and, quickly, hate for the rural class strait-laced little township, trailing through the valley towards the hills where the
farmlands
lay.

It was hot enough to swim at Labour Day that year, and all five of us had gone to the sea. On the sand, by sunlit feathers of the silver spinifex, we lay, and Rad gave us coconut oil to rub on his back, then we rubbed it on each other and the liquid turned to golden globules in the midday sun. Rad talked about girls he had been with, and books he had read which were banned and should not be.

We listened, peeling oranges, sucking the pips, and Geoff flung peel on to the sand. I jumped to retrieve it, and Rad said sharply, ‘Leave it.'

‘Why?' I said, stopping on my knees to look at him. ‘It's untidy here.'

‘I know. Leave it.'

‘It spoils the beach,' I argued.

‘That doesn't matter,' he said, beginning to be angry. ‘It will rot, or the
gulls will take it away. Tonight, tomorrow, a week, it will be gone.'

‘So what?'

‘So you jump up when we sit talking, enjoying ourselves, thinking naughty, naughty, someone is spoiling the view. You expend energy on things that don't matter.'

I had picked up the peel and, wrapping it, placed it back in my bike satchel. He watched me, coldly, and turned on his stomach, away from us, silent. The others looked at me, then him, not knowing which one of us to resent.

That was when it really began, the continual tug between us, between the things that we had been taught to believe did matter, and that which Rad said did not.

As he knelt beside me in the school grounds, splendid in his mustard pants and corduroy jacket, he said, ‘You have to pass maths, Magog. Try, won't you? It's the only way. You must get through them. You'll fly through the rest. You only have to get a thirty per cent pass and the rest of your subjects will carry your average.'

‘If only you taught us maths instead of Tweedledum,' said Phyllis, referring to the headmaster.

‘I'm good but not that much,' Rad said, mocking, with false pride.

‘It's all right. They're not so bad,' I said, for maths seemed to be an indifferent subject to talk about when all I had been doing was loving Geoff.

A cloud of elegantly cool perfume assailed us, and without looking up, we knew that Danny Ferry was on his way. An old man, he ambled towards us, his arms full of magnolia blooms, with petals as wide as our hands. He stopped at the school fence and nodded.

‘It won't be long now,' he said.

We smiled agreement.

‘I'll have a flower for you,' he murmured. ‘Here, take one now,' and he handed us each a magnolia, the boys smiling sheepishly, except Rad, who pretended to look the other way.

We smiled again, understanding. He walked on up the street, to his house with its open door and dim interior.

‘He's a dreadful man,' said Rad, savagely.

‘He is not,' I said, sharply. ‘He's kind and good, and he's never done us harm.'

‘God, you're sentimental, Magog,' he said. ‘You're just a great wet flabby emotional mess. Why don't you try to grow up?'

I threw stones viciously against each other on the ground, trying not to cry.

‘What's so good about him?'

‘He believes in God,' I said childishly. ‘Do you?'

‘Oh for Chrissake —' he started, and grinned at himself. ‘That's not much good is it? He's a lucky old bastard, isn't he then, eh?'

We were silent.

‘Damn you all,' he said. ‘Damn you. Of course it would be good, wouldn't it? Wouldn't it be good to believe in God and pick flowers to give to people, like he does? Sure, I'd like to be like that, oh yes, I would. It would be comfortable, relaxing, oh yes.'

‘I'm sorry, Rad,' I said. ‘Don't be mad at us.'

‘It's all right,' he said.