The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories (49 page)

The usual number of vices, she told me. She had met a gorgeous American, gone to live in the States and had three kids whom she described as beautiful, lingering between the second and third syllables. After the children she'd got her second wind and now she was on to her third husband. Variety was the spice of life. She was in merchant banking, I needed to know.

We had drifted outside as the welcome ended, along with the throng of past pupils.

‘I've done better than most of this lot,' she said, indicating the crowd with a dismissive gesture. Still a hick town as far as she was concerned.

‘How do you know?' a woman's voice challenged.

‘Mihi,' I said as the woman approached. Mihi and, with her, Dodie. The past was coming into focus so quickly I wanted to duck.

‘Hi Cassie,' Mihi said, ‘how're you going? Catching up with the talent?' she said, turning to Marcia.

‘Are you going to take our picture?' enquired Dodie.

‘Not this time. What have you two been up to all these years?' I asked quickly.

Dodie looked embarrassed. ‘Just a grandmother, you know how it is.'

‘No,' I said, because I didn't. My two daughters are wedded to careers in New York and London. Children and personal commitment seem far from their thoughts.

‘We heard about your husband, we're so sad for you,' Mihi said shyly.

Marcia looked indignant. ‘What about your husband? I thought you said you were married.'

‘I'm a widow,' I said. I have kept my husband's name; it is that which appears on my work. I have no reason to consign it to history. ‘Tell me about your families,' I insisted to the two Maori women.

And so they did, Dodie more than Mihi, because Mihi had never learned to speak out the way she should, Dodie explained. But she had a family to be
proud of. All her children had a good education, because their mum worked day and night to help them, that's what Mini had done. And she, Dodie herself, had had some good luck and bad. One of her boys killed in a damn' stupid car accident outside her house, and her husband had drunk his sorrows away. ‘I got a job in the Post Office,' she said, ‘but then it closed down, the way they all did. You're right, Marcia, I reckon it is a hick town, but that's because of the government.' She worked on a pig farm now, mucking out. It was all right. She liked pigs, friendly curious little beggars, she said.

‘Pigs!' snorted Marcia.

They were tall girls and dark, freckles like sunflower seeds on their noses. When they walked with their friends across the playground they fanned out, forming a phalanx like Macedonian infantry. You couldn't walk past them or around them if they didn't want you to. You certainly couldn't walk through them.

There was a day when I hurried to class, and they stood there as if in ranks, facing me. I was about ten at the time.

‘Going somewhere?' Mihi asked.

No, I told her, because I knew that until they were ready I wouldn't be going anywhere.

You must be going somewhere, they said, you can't just be going nowhere.

‘We could go nowhere with you,' Dodie said. ‘Would you like that? Eh? Why not? Hey, she doesn't want us to come with her. Aren't we good enough for you, Cassandra?'

‘Let me past,' I said, rushing at them.

‘Say please, pretty please,' Mihi said, holding my wrist as if it were a stick she would snap in her strong brown hand.

‘Please,' I whispered. ‘Please, Mihi, please let me go into class. Please walk with me.'

‘Perhaps,' she said, flinging my hand away.

When they arrived at the classroom doorway they slid around its edges and appeared to dissolve into their seats. It was as if they had hung their shadows on the cloakroom hooks. But Flavell saw them, he caught us all.

‘So, here's the Maori bug team,' he said, his yellow-brown eyes gleaming. ‘Hands beneath your desks.' Mihi and Dodie's eyes
darted towards each other understanding what was coming next. But I didn't.

‘Bend your heads forward and shake your hair. I want to see what comes out. Ah ha.' He let out a long satisfied sigh. ‘Cooties, eh? Yes, you too, Miss fFoulkes. Wait till we tell your mother about that.'

The next day my head was shaven and bathed with kerosene. The toxic
blue smell of kerosene still makes me nauseous. I was sent to school wearing a scarf tied around my head.
Baldie.
Cassandra's
got
the
cooties
… I walk along the streets of Paris, seeing young men and women with polished skulls, their nose studs glinting in the sunlight, and I have to avert my eyes. Of course I am remembering a time when there was no choice. My mother cried and put her head in her hands in the evenings. I don't recall much of what she and my father said to each other. ‘We should never have come here.' ‘I should never have agreed to it,' are phrases that seem familiar.

One morning my mother pulled the scarf off. ‘Time to get some air on your head, next thing it'll be cradle cap,' she said. My scalp was downy like a baby bird's wing. I see how grotesque my head appeared then. A
photographer's
trick. Look for the ugly. No, I'm hard on myself. I want to find what's beautiful but sometimes I'm exhausted by the search. I've forsaken the naturalism of light and landscape and become a recorder of human foibles. As I grew older, I submitted to that dark driving voice within me, that told me that beauty is not enough. I tell people, those who are interested in the way I've changed, that such a progression merely reflects the personal and the political. Perhaps, in the early years, I was caught between duty and art. An artless explanation in itself. The trouble is, the photographer becomes the judge, in shaping the image of the world. How good, how trustworthy, are these judges? I left my camera behind, because I could not trust myself in my judgement of Flavell.

Dodie was found to be free of insects in her hair after all. I never saw Mihi again. She left school, faded away out of sight.

‘We've seen your picture in the papers,' Dodie said. ‘She's famous, our Cassie.'

‘Famous! So what
do
you
get up to, Cassandra?' Marcia demanded. I could see she was bothered because she had handed her own story over in haste.

‘Photographs, eh?' she said, when I explained. ‘Do you do wedding portraits?'

‘No, I'm sorry.'

‘Pity, I've got a daughter getting married soon. I could fly you to the States.'

‘It's kind of you,' I said. ‘But I do get to the States now and then.'

‘Go on with you. Call in next time you're passing LA. Some snaps of my grandchildren, at least. My son's kids.'

‘I don't think you'd like the snaps I take.'

Her face stiffened. ‘You one of those weirdo photographers? An Arbus? A Mappelthorpe? Ah, you're surprised. Merchant bankers know more than you think. You wouldn't guess half the things we sponsor. Now my bank, we
sponsored a retrospective on American photographers, and I saw a few of those pictures. You look uncomfortable Cassandra. I've hit the nail on the head, haven't I? You're one of those.'

‘I should go,' I said, knowing how foolish that sounded. There was
nowhere
to go. ‘Have any of you seen Flavell?' I asked.

‘Flavell? You after him, Cass?' I knew that Marcia would shorten the name of everybody she came across, now that she was an adult. She was probably called Marcy at the bank. ‘Go on, admit it, you've got a camera. You want to get Flavell.'

This was so close to the truth that for a moment I remembered a shrewd and kinder Marcia than this version.

But Mihi, taking a sudden initiative, distracted her, drawing attention to a man floating at the edge of our conversation. He had a black beard streaked with silver, and wore elegantly casual clothes. But his eyes had a hungry look. ‘Bet you don't know that one,' Mihi said. We all shook our heads. ‘Don Thompson. I met him at registration.'

‘It can't be,' Marcia said, and I could tell that she was shaken. ‘He looks so different.'

Plain was an understatement. Don's face had been pushed out of shape at birth, one ear sticking straight out from his head, the other curled tightly against his skin. Boys weren't allowed to wear their hair long to hide
disfigurements
then, it was straight back and sides, which accentuated every muscle of his unhappy features. His undershot jaw faded away to nothing. He was called The Mascot. The Loopie Mascot.

And this is where Marcia was wrong. I would never have photographed Don Thompson. That has never been my choice. Although for a while, as a child, I thought his difference part of the wider picture, the face of ugliness itself. I can see now that he did what he must in order to survive.

During the weeks when my head was shaven, I developed a well-spring of anger, which spilled into violence. ‘I'll kill you, I'll kill you,' I screamed at my tormentors. Such bitter threats. You can see it now, one of those ‘at risk' children hauled up before a team of counsellors, a danger to others.

Would I have killed them?

Perhaps, if I could, although I left an escape route. ‘Some day I will,' I would add.

Flavell cut across the din one day. ‘Temper is it? Pick her up and stick her in the shed, boys. I won't have that sort of behaviour round here.'

Don Thompson, large and heavy, seized me from behind.

‘Put her away,' Flavell shouted. A half-dozen boys joined in, laughing and
jostling each other to grab a leg or an arm. They carried me unceremoniously to the school gardening shed, dumping me on the earthen floor, amongst the rakes and hoes. The door slammed shut, leaving the darkness in the
windowless
room complete.

I sobbed, believing I was alone. From a corner of my cell, someone spoke. ‘It won't do any good.'

Don Thompson.

Abandoned to my fate, in the company of the monster, I became still.

‘Why are you in here?'

His voice, when he answered, was at once childlike and yet also like that of a wan, older man. ‘I wanted to see someone as frightened as me,' he said.

‘But you can't,' I said. ‘You can't see me.'

‘Yes I can,' he said. ‘I can.'

There was none of that now, except his voice, worn into permanent heaviness. The sides of his head were regular, his mouth full and fleshy above his beard.

‘Didn't recognise me, did you? Well, ha ha, facelifts aren't just for women. A bit radical, don't you think? My wife said I should come to this reunion, she was right.'

‘Why didn't you say who you were?' Marcia asked.

He laughed briefly. ‘I thought I'd hear what you all had to say about me. So are you going to save a dance for me tonight, Marcia?'

And I thought of him when he was twelve or thirteen, the year we all left the Loop, and guessed that Marcia would have been the girl he dreamed about, the one The Mascot would want all his life, and this was his moment.

Under the curved ceiling of the marquee a huge banquet had been set out, a whole spit-roasted pig, dozens of glossy, basted chickens, steaming pans of vegetables, slender ears of corn, green beans, crimson beetroot. The Jubilee Dinner, spelled out in italics on the programme, a country feast.

A conga line snaked past me
ki-ka
racha,
ki
ki
ki
racha
BOOM.
The class of '49, looking as if they were about to collapse in the heat. Women with thick waists in tight evening dresses, mostly black, one or two younger women baring brown shoulders and razor-blade bones. Shelves of lone women like myself standing outside the circle trying to look inconspicuous. It would still be morning in Paris. Soon it would be spring. Gregor would be walking along the edge of the Seine, the wind ripping the pores out of his skin, scarf flying. I wondered what on earth I was doing, alone in this atmosphere of false bonhomie and conversations that went nowhere.

‘Would you like to dance?' John Royce asked at my shoulder.

‘That's nice of you,' I said, ‘but really I'd just like to watch a while.'

‘Your favourite pastime?'

‘A trick of my trade. You say you take photographs. Don't you ever stand still and see what the world has to offer? That's what photographers, any kind of artist, does.'

‘I'm not an artist,' he said, embarrassed. He hesitated. ‘I've got a favour to ask. The children have done a little exhibition for the jubilee, mostly drawings and paintings, a few photographs. I wondered if you'd judge them in the morning. Mr Flavell was going to but it seems that he can't.'

‘So, I'm standing in for Flavell?'

His brown moustache trembled slightly, with fatigue and a touch of impatience, I thought. Nothing to do with my sensibilities at all. Why should they concern him? It must have been hard for him, organising this weekend for strangers. I imagined the nights of planning, the committees set up in this small town to deal with the hordes of people who would descend upon it, each wanting to reclaim it for their own. I guessed how tired he was.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I'll do it.'

‘Ten o' clock.'

‘Ten it is. If you'll excuse me, I think I'll, um … powder my nose.'

I watched his back disappear into the crowd, then turned to wend my way to the back of the marquee.

A woman stood with her back to me, a halter neck supporting a sparkling green dress. ‘What are
you
doing in here, Cassandra fFoulkes?' Marcia said straightening at the washbasin. She didn't turn round. ‘Go away'

‘Excuse me. I pee like everyone else,' I said. We sounded like schoolgirls.

‘Gee I'm sorry, kid,' she said, recovering something of what I supposed was her boardroom manner. ‘I didn't mean to be rude.' Her face, as she turned to me, was sunken. ‘I don't mean shit, Cassandra. Cassie, is it? Take no notice.' A set of false teeth stood on the top of the washstand smiling at me. ‘That damn' sticky chicken, I was just washing it out of my teeth. Well, I can see your teeth are real.' Laughter, instant and uncontrollable, bubbled up inside me. After a furious second, she joined me, in spite of herself.