The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories (52 page)

‘Whoever deserves all that money? It turns people mean. You can see it, they start out with the idea they'll give it all away, but then they want it for themselves. “It's actually not much when you think about it,” that's what some of them say. Imagine. I could use a million or two. I reckon I'd cut half of it out between breakfast and morning tea.'

‘And then you'd give the rest away?'

‘I'd buy Radinka a house.'

‘Where is she?'

‘God knows, Shirl. She's not out with baby Carl's father, I'll tell you that.' In the next room, Carl is beginning to stir, his whimper rising to a yell. Trina goes through and brings the baby out, smelling of milk and urine. She puts him in Shirley's arms and hands her a bottle. Shirley is disappointed that Carl doesn't look like his mother, though she doesn't say so. He has pale eyes and no hair at all so far.

‘I don't want her to go on the game, Shirl. Times have changed out there. You can pretty well put sex worker on your tax return these days, and they've got a union and all, but there's a lot of other bad stuff that never used to be there.'

‘Why did you do it, Treen?'

Trina shifts uneasily, pushing a bottle into Carl's mouth. ‘I just turned a few tricks, nothing much.'

‘It killed our dad.'

‘Thanks a bundle, that's great for my self-esteem. I liked it, that's why You know your problem, Shirley, you're missing your sex life, you ought to deal with it.'

In a way, although she's decided not to tell Trina, Shirley has dealt with it. In her job at the hotel, she works as a housemaid on evening shifts. Her first task of the evening is to go through the bedrooms turning back the covers and leaving a flower and a chocolate on the pillows. It was embarrassing work when she first started it. She carries a master key to the rooms. First of all she knocks and, if nobody answers, she lets herself in. Of course some people are so engrossed in what they are doing they don't hear her knock. ‘I'm sorry I'll come back later,' she says, averting her eyes, although she can sense some of
them quite like an audience. She has learned to hesitate, half smiling, for these ones, and, looking toward the mirrors, to say gently, ‘I'll fix the bed for you later.'

One day she knocked on the door of Room 1034 and there had been no reply. Inside, she found a man sitting alone by the window in a pink arm chair, too small for him by far.

‘Hev you time for a drink?' he asked, and she recognised his accent as Dutch.

‘Perhaps a quick one in the bar, when I've finished,' she said, not intending to do anything of the sort. Management says you should try and get out of these situations without giving offence, although usually she doesn't tell a lie, and afterwards she wonders about that, how easily this semblance of an arrangement had come to her tongue.

‘You have the most beautiful hands and ankles in the world,' he said, ‘and I can tell you are a good woman. I apologise to you.'

She remembers the way she blushed and how sincere he had seemed in his embarrassment.

‘Just one. Nine-thirty downstairs.'

Hank has sandy hair and a paunch, but he is a strong older man, a farmer from the south. Lately, he has been having tax problems. He comes to town often to see his accountant. ‘God gave me an accountant. In a roundabout way,' says Shirley and giggles over her whisky sour, when he tells her this. She can't explain the joke to him, it feels too personal, and too much like a
come-on
. Enough people have heard about Victor, her first great love, who certainly isn't that any more. It's only other people who won't let her forget.

‘It's nothing,' she said, ‘just something I remembered.'

‘May the memory be green,' he said, and sipped his drink.

‘That's beautiful,' she told him. It felt just right what he had said, and for a moment she almost did tell him about Victor and how she'd loved him so much all those years ago, and how he had come back and spoiled everything for her. It had been a green and beautiful memory the night she told Larry about it, and now it was black and uncontrollable the way it was raging through her life.

‘Hamlet,' he said. ‘I read much at nights when I was a farm labourer,
working
for my farm. There was no money, nothing to do but read, read, read. Shakespeare, I thought that is what I should read, what British people read.'

A thinker, oh my God, Shirley thought. Spare me from thinkers, I've managed to stay clear of them all my life, though lately Larry had been showing dangerous tendencies in this direction. She's always feared she might fall for a man who thought.

‘I do nothing but watch television these days,' he told her, amused. He could see right into her problem. ‘There's a Clint Eastwood movie on right now. You want to watch it in my room?'

They didn't, but they did everything else, and she was grateful. She wanted to say dangerous careless words like I love you. She had to lie about a double shift when she got home, and afterwards she was better organised about time and finishing her work quickly so that she could have time with him.

He always asks for the same room.

‘Is Room 1034 occupied?' Shirley asks the receptionists when she gets in. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, yes or no.

Territorial invasion, they warn if it's not Hank. Of late, he's often there. Hank's wife is furious with him for his tax problems. She has threatened to leave him if he can't sort them out. Sometimes Shirley and Hank both cry when they tell each other their problems.

She is overcome with relief when she hears he is in tonight.

‘You need a holiday,' he tells her. ‘Is your husband likely to go into hospital? Can you get away? I could take you to Fiji for a week.'

‘What about your tax problems?'

‘Solved.'

‘You won't be coming back for a while?'

He puts his fingers across her mouth. ‘Could you come?'

‘No,' she says. ‘I couldn't.'

Larry does go into hospital. One evening she came in and found him lying on the bathroom floor; she dialled 111 for the ambulance. For two days it seems as if he will die. Shirley doesn't go to work. Radinka stays on in town, and Shirley is touched by the way she sits beside her uncle, her baby at the breast. She is a calm and peaceful person to be with, and Shirley is full of hope for her. Surely she is not a person who will turn tricks for a living. On the second afternoon, Shirley slips out for fresh air and a coffee across the road from the hospital, because she's tired of everything she eats and drinks tasting like a cross between antiseptic and dishwater. When she gets back she sees her neighbour Ursula Ross sitting beside the bed, deep in conversation with Radinka. Larry is comatose. None of them see her.

Ursula is dressed in a navy woollen suit and a white blouse with a chaste collar. They are always the worst, the ones to watch, thinks Shirley, full of a savage wonder at this trespass beside her dying husband's bed. Pure white collars. Ursula holds her light tan handbag in her lap. Her hair is smartly cut in two upswept wings above her ears.

‘I felt I should come,' she says to Radinka. ‘Victor says it's true we hardly
know Larry, but when we saw the ambulance take him away again, I said it's never too late. We've joined Neighbourhood Watch you know, and here's the man next door so ill, and we haven't even made his acquaintance. Of course, I believe his poor wife knew Victor when they were younger. She keeps herself to herself, well I suppose that's what trouble does to you.'

That's me they're talking about, Shirley marvels to herself, and walks in so that Ursula can get the full picture.

Later that night, Larry opens his eyes and speaks to her in a hoarse whisper.

‘My darling wife,' he says, ‘you've been a great girl. Couldn't have wished for better.'

‘Me neither, sweetheart,' she says.

He lapses back into something between sleep and a coma. She guesses this is it, the deathbed scene.

A nurse says, ‘Go home for a bit, Mrs Birchall. Get some rest.'

‘I shouldn't leave him now,' says Shirley.

‘I'll call you if there's any change.'

Out in the carpark she is swept with desolation. ‘Larry,' she mutters, ‘oh Gawd, Larry heart.' A shadow moves near her, a human figure. She doesn't feel afraid. For a crazy moment she thinks it might be Hank who has
somehow
tracked her down. Something else wells up, swollen, hot and so strong she is ashamed. It's desire, she wants him so badly that she would stand against a fence, backed up like an animal if he was there. Her at fifty-one, with Wella-toned hair, all seventy-four kilos of her, she wants a man so badly she can smell it on herself. The shadow moves towards her. It's Radinka.

‘Can I get a lift with you, Auntie Shirl?'

‘Of course, love. I thought you had your car.'

‘It was nice of the lady from next door to come over,' says Radinka, when she's settled.

‘Oh yeah. What did she actually want?'

‘To see Larry' Radinka's voice is surprised. Maybe, Shirley thinks, Radinka doesn't know about her and Victor. There is no reason for Trina to have told her all that old stuff, always said Victor was boring.

‘Auntie Shirl,' says Radinka. Something urgent about the way she speaks alerts Shirley. ‘You know, you want to watch out.'

‘Me?' says Shirley, with a careful laugh.

‘People are saying things.'

‘Now look here, young lady, all that business about Victor is nonsense.'

‘Mr Ross? Her old joker?'

‘That woman's been filling your head up with ideas, hasn't she? Or is it your mother? Oh, she likes to make trouble, that sister of mine. I can tell you, that was over centuries ago. Well, a long time ago.'

Radinka lets her rattle on until she has nothing left to say.

‘No?' Shirley feels ice round her heart. ‘Who's been saying what?'

‘Larry's old mates. Those fishermen, they hear things. You know what those Italians are like, they don't take shit when it comes to their mates.'

Shirley thinks of the dimly lit corridors at the hotel, the carpets that muffle footsteps, the rooms where life goes on behind doors. She can see that fishermen, on land, might know these things too.

‘And how come you talk to them?'

The girl is silent. Shirley, a woman who, it seems, has three men of her own, feels worse about what Radinka has just told her about herself than she does on her own account. Radinka looks defiantly out the window at the city sliding by.

Larry comes home again. He's not ready for the big one yet. The days pass. Shirley takes leave from her job, aware that it might not be there for her when she is ready to take it up again. She and Larry play Chinese Checkers and she takes Bevis for walks. It is on one of these walks up the hill that she and Victor finally talk to each other. Although she has shed two kilos in the past weeks she still puffs. She sits on a park bench angled for the view, near the top of the hill. Victor sits down beside her. Shirley tethers Bevis's leash to the leg of the bench. It's spring, a trace of snow still lying on the mountains to the south. The two of them sit and look at the sea, that band of water they have both looked over, on and off, since they were children.

‘Did Larry see you leave?' asks Shirley, as if he would know how Larry feels about him.

‘I went down the front way, through the ngaio trees.'

‘Thank you.'

‘You're just the same, Shirl.'

‘No I'm not.' She laughs.

‘The way we look doesn't change us.'

‘Well, I am different.' What she is thinking is that, once, he was the only guy she ever wanted. She didn't understand the number of choices and chances there were in the world. Now she does, and it scares her that she knows so much, but she is relieved as well. She is not going to lie to him and tell him he's the same. After all, when it comes to marriage, he has changed more often than she has.

‘Ursula seems like a good woman,' she says at last.

He looks at his big smooth hands. ‘She's a lovely woman.'

‘It was nice of her to visit Larry. She looks like your mother.'

‘Really? Well. I must say, it's the kind of thing my mother would have done. Visiting the sick.'

‘But not let you marry me?'

He hesitates, flustered. ‘It's been on my conscience. I was not able to articulate my response to that situation at the time.'

Articulate his response to that situation. Where did he learn to talk like that? What does it mean? He is floundering on, using terms like clarifying his situation, understanding her position, wouldn't want her to take the wrong meaning from his presence in the neighbourhood. This last she understands.

‘You used to put love letters under the soap,' she says. ‘Written in purple ink.'

‘So I did, yes.' He stands up and she sees
that the interview, for this is surely what it is, is over.

‘I'm glad you've got Ursula,' she says. ‘It's good to know when you've come home.'

‘I hope your husband doesn't suffer too long,' he says, stiffly.

‘Go back through the ngaio trees,' she says, and hopes he picks the acid in her voice.

‘I told you Larry. You should have listened. He's just a guy who married his mum. I don't know why you ever worried about Victor.'

Shirley sighs when Larry doesn't reply. Pretending he's asleep. She knows he's not, he muttered at Bevis just thirty seconds ago when he walked over near the bed. Bevis is restless tonight, walking round and round the room. Shirley sits at the table by the window, the desk-lamp's shadow like a giant praying mantis on the wall behind her, as she sets out the board with Chinese Checkers.

‘I'll have a game with you in the morning,' she tells him. ‘You'll like that, won't you?' She wishes he would say something, anything, because he must know that that part of her life is sorted. You couldn't get serious about a man like Victor. She expects he has known this all along. All the same, now, now is the time she should tell him the rest of it before someone else does.