The House Within Read online

  THE HOUSE WITHIN

  Fiona Kidman

  FOR LYDIA WEVERS

  At heart it is not without

  complications, which is why

  there are several houses and children

  and any number of marriages

  and the red queen does not lie

  neatly next to the black king but falls

  crooked on a jack

  of the wrong suit

  — Anne French, from ‘All You May Depend On’

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my mother who was the source of most of Bethany’s recipes, and a brilliant cook.

  Earlier versions of some of the stories in The House Within were first published in the following:

  ‘A Strange Delight’ in Landfall, 1972

  ‘Salt Pattern’, ‘Free People’, ‘Single Wing’ and ‘Mrs Dixon and Friend’ in Mrs Dixon and Friend, Heinemann, 1982

  ‘The Prize Ring’ in Unsuitable Friends, Century Hutchinson, 1988

  ‘Furs’ and ‘Damn Wordsworth’ in The Foreign Woman, Vintage, 1993.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for the use of extracts from the listed works:

  Anne French, ‘All You May Depend On’, from All Cretans Are Liars, Auckland University Press, 1987.

  Jean Watson, Standing in the Rain.

  Penguin Books Ltd, ‘Love is …’ by Adrian Henri, reprinted from Mersey Sound, Penguin Modern Poets 10.

  Stainer & Bell Ltd, ‘Lord of the Dance’ by Sydney Carter.

  J. Albert & Son Pty Ltd, ‘Quartermaster’s Stores’ arranged by Aubrey Kennett.

  As ever, the author thanks Victoria Forgie for her research, and Harriet Allan and Anna Rogers for their enthusiasm and skill as editors.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  STEPHEN

  The House Within

  OPEN WOUNDS

  A Strange Delight

  The Salt Pattern

  ANNA’S ALBUM

  1: Pictured In Innocence

  2: Where Were You Last Night?

  3: Words From Anywhere

  MRS DIXON AND FRIEND

  Free People

  Single Wing

  Mrs Dixon and Friend

  The Prize Ring

  Damn Wordsworth

  THE BETHANY CHRONICLES

  Stilettos

  Ironing

  Furs

  Lemon Honey

  A Dangerous Boy 1

  2

  3

  Festive Times

  About the Author

  Copyright

  STEPHEN

  THE HOUSE WITHIN

  I DREAMED OF my father. I dreamed of his flesh. I dreamed of my father’s birth, as if I was with him at the beginning, starting the journey which divided into me. I dreamed of the dark red blood of him. I dreamed I heard the ragged symphony of his voice, his wake-up calls, his ‘good night son’, his incey wincey spider climbing up a wall games, his pleasure and his displeasure.

  I dreamed of the black hair that covered his arms and his chest, the dark fur that clothed him. I dreamed of the white seizure of his teeth play-nibbling my stomach and the marks the same teeth left on my mother’s throat. I dreamed of the smell of him, the faint apple cider scent of his spunk in my parents’ bed.

  I dreamed of my father. I dreamed of his antique presence, the memory of him when he was in my life. When I woke up I would have a wet place on my pillow from where I had been crying in my sleep. In short, I dreamed of him as other children, abandoned by their fathers, dream of a happy return.

  FROM THE BEGINNING of their affair, I hated my mother’s lover Gerald with a bitterness not attributed to children. We are told to be good, to be nice, and people believe if we are told often enough, that is what we will be. Don’t adults remember how they hated? The clear, concentrated, unambiguous hatred of childhood? At nights I lay awake and planned ways I could kill Gerald. I would find an old man who lived in a shack on the edge of town who had a gun hidden under his rotten mattress. He would give it to me in exchange for some small, good tasks I performed for him, perhaps filling his billy from the creek each day.

  Or at night, when he was asleep, I would drug Gerald with a hypodermic syringe that I would steal from the laboratory where my mother worked, or did before all this mess blew up in her face; or we would go for a picnic and my brother, Ritchie, and I would bang him on the head with a brick, like those girls in Christchurch. Only Ritchie wouldn’t do a thing like that. I knew Ritchie was a better person than I was, even though he hated Gerald too. Anyway, Gerald was larger and stronger than both of us put together. He was a tall, heavy-fleshed man with smooth pink skin above a gingery beard, the son of a bishop. Loudly cultivated, very Christ’s College, Gerald knew some tricks. Rat poison in his food was a promising option. But how could I be certain that nobody else would eat the food? I didn’t want my mother to be poisoned. Often, I hated her as well, but not in the same way. I wanted to save her from Gerald; if I could get rid of him, I knew she would be as I remembered her — warm, cuddly and sympathetic when I was unhappy, instead of impatient and deferential to Gerald’s demands for me to behave myself.

  But that was before. After Gerald had gone, it was worse, much worse than I could have believed.

  ONCE, WHEN I was very young, I knew my father came back while I was at school. Our house was in a long, straight street in a suburb not far from the centre of town. An L-shaped house with the kitchen facing the road, it had a window above the bench, so that anyone approaching could often see my mother’s face framed in the glass, slightly bent over her chores. If it were not for that window, you might think there was nobody there, for the front of the house actually faced the back of the section, opening onto a low verandah, hung about with vines. Plum trees stood at the side of the house, so that in some lights it seemed shadowy and obscure, at other times, in sunlight, dappled and colourful. So much light, and the trees, gave grace to what was an ordinary cheap little house of the sixties, much the same shape as the rest in the subdivision.

  My brother and I usually took the back path from the school up to the house, flinging our bags in our room and calling out that we were home. But this day, perhaps for some reason such as swapping marbles with a different boy, I approached the house from the road. My mother’s face was in its frame, and Gerald’s towered above her, so that they looked like one of those old, heavy, wooden-sided pictures with a man standing beside a seated woman. He was home early, and I could see he was angry. So I walked back the way I had come, and doubled along the path. Only instead of calling out, I went quietly in behind them to find out what he was saying to her, wishing I had a knife to stab in his back. She was preparing dinner, standing with her back to him, flipping the skins off potatoes, her face turned away from him.

  ‘You’re making too much of it Gerald,’ she said. ‘I can’t stop Peter coming here if he wants.’ She spoke carelessly, as if what she was saying was unimportant. I wondered why she kept her face averted.

  ‘You could take out an order against him.’

  ‘Why should I do that? It’s not as if he did any harm.’

  ‘You’re upset, that’s bad enough.’

  ‘I’m only upset because you shouted,’ she said. ‘Well, look don’t worry about it, he’s not likely to come back in a hurry, he’s off to live in Australia.’

  ‘Arsehole,’ Gerald said, ‘he’s got no right coming here.’

  ‘He still owns the house,’ said my mother.

  ‘We’ll shift,’ said her lover.

  ‘Where?’ After a silence, she said, ‘Well, come on, Gerald, just where will we go?’

  ‘Ah s
hit, Bethany.’

  I could tell there was a fight in the air, and I thrilled at the prospect. I went looking for my brother Ritchie. ‘They’re going to have a go,’ I told him. He was in the middle of building a Meccano tower block but he stopped right away, and followed me down the passage to listen. Only it didn’t happen. Gerald had gone after their squalling, monkey-faced brat, the ratty little girl with stinking napkins, with the milky soap-sudsy breath that spilled over your shoulder when you held her, which I never did from choice. ‘Learn to hold her like this,’ my mother said, guiding my hand under the baby’s soggy backside. As if I cared. The first day Ritchie had his Cub uniform the baby sicked over his shoulder and nobody would have even noticed if I hadn’t told him.

  It was later that I told him about our father. ‘Australia,’ we said to each other, making a meal of it. ‘Aus-tral-ia.’ Why there? We made plans about how we would run away and find him when we were older. Hijack a plane, perhaps. We wrote letters to him that only occasionally got posted. Our letters mostly went like this:

  Dear Daddy, Thank you for the money and the Matchbox cars you sent for my birthday. The car is bigger than my friend’s car so that is really neat. I hope you are well. For the holidays we are going to camp. Love from your son, Stephen (or Ritchie, our letters were much the same).

  ‘If we wrote and told him we really, really missed him, do you think he’d come back?’ Ritchie asked me.

  We were lying in the dark smoking cigarettes, rolled up fag ends we’d collected from the ashtrays round the house. Remember this and remember that, Dad used to bring us things home after work, and take us to the park. Rabbit rabbit rabbit, like a little kid. Sometimes I thought Ritchie didn’t act his age. It felt as if he was younger than me, not my older brother. And the time we stayed at our Nana’s house, Nana Dixon’s place, that is, and we went out on the river in the boat. He could really row. His arms were strong, weren’t they? Ritchie would have me hooked. In our imaginations our father’s biceps would bulge like an Olympian’s.

  ‘I feel crook,’ Ritchie used to moan, after our smoking in bed sessions. Sometimes he climbed into bed with me and we put our arms around each other, careful not to go to sleep like that because Gerald might catch us and call us sissies. For someone who went on about free love and ‘kicking over the traces’, which is how he referred to his current existence, he couldn’t be bothered much with our own acts of ‘self-individualisation’, a term we got to learn early on.

  My mother found us like that one night, though. I felt as if we had been caught doing wrong. She looked at us a while and then she said, with a catch in her voice, That’s what Anna and I used to do when we were kids. As if she was remembering better times. Or something. You can’t always tell with our mother — she is one of those people like an electric light, bright one moment, dark the next, irresistible when she’s alight. Only I’ve never known how to switch her on and off.

  One night Ritchie said, ‘Perhaps if we were really good, he’d come back.’ This was when we were older, and Gerald had lived with us for some years.

  ‘Pongo,’ I said. ‘Pongo, silly shit, tits.’

  ‘No, seriously. If he heard we were doing okay.’

  ‘He’s married and got a baby,’ I reminded him. ‘He can’t just leave them and come back.’ I pushed away the thought that he had already done just this to us already.

  ‘Well, maybe he could send for us.’

  ‘To live with him?’

  ‘Yeah. Something like that.’ I shivered.

  ‘Leave Mum?’ Ritchie snorted, a more grown-up sound than I gave him credit for. This was scary territory. I didn’t want to leave my mother. I didn’t want to leave her alone with Gerald. Soon she would forget us and love her daughter Abbie, and it would be as if we had never existed. I thought that badness, true evil, would be the better option.

  All the same, Ritchie decided to become a Boy Scout. A Scout’s honour is to be trusted, a Scout is loyal blah blah blah, a Scout is brother to all Scouts, what about me? Instead of talking to me at nights, he chanted rules under his breath. He used his torch to study them, the blankets drawn over his head.

  ‘Now this boy is on to something,’ Gerald beamed, one evening when we were having dinner. Brown rice with bits of vegetables and stuff. Gerald had strong ideas about food. It didn’t taste too bad, the way my mother cooked it, but you got sick of it two or three times a week. And after dinner I’d be starving. There’s plenty of good fruit out in the kitchen, Gerald told me, so virtuous you wanted to throw up. He brought sacks of apples home, strapped on to the back of his little motorbike like a pillion rider. Gerald worked in the local branch of Social Welfare. He sighed and rolled his eyes a lot as he talked to my mother in the kitchen while she was cooking the rice. You wouldn’t believe the way kids suffer, he told her. The things I see down there.

  ‘Now this boy here, he’s in control of his life,’ Gerald said, his gaze intent on Ritchie’s face. Eye contact.

  ‘Yes sir,’ said Ritchie, and I felt the same murderous intention that was becoming part of my life, threatening to choke me. But that was Gerald, the way he could divide people.

  ‘What about you, young man?’ said Gerald, turning to me. ‘When are you going to smarten up your ideas and follow in your brother’s footsteps?’

  ‘I’m too young to be a Scout,’ I said.

  ‘You could be a Cub,’ said Ritchie. The traitor. The greaser. I thought I would keep one of Gerald’s apples until it went rotten and then stick it in the drawer with Ritchie’s freshly pressed uniform.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

  ‘Wouldn’t it help if you joined up?’ asked my Aunt Anna one morning. It was dawn when she said this, straight after an international rugby game which the adults had stayed up all night to watch. I thought Anna the most beautiful of women, more beautiful, in a way, than my mother, though there were things missing, like easy laughter and the same vitality. In her, this liveliness could seem like cruelty, though she was never so to me. She and her new husband, Des, often used to visit, though at first Des wasn’t keen on coming to our place. He had strong ideas about good and evil, and my mother was hardly a virtuous woman, living in sin as she did. Anna he considered a woman saved. Saved by him.

  She was his second wife. Our aunt had been a very free and easy person but she appeared to have undergone some changes since she married him. Sometimes she held her head on one side as if she was listening for something. She and Des had married in curious circumstances when my aunt was down and out. She had gone back to being a high school teacher, and you would never know that there had been any trouble in her life. I heard gossip about her, because my friend Anthony repeated it to me. Anthony and I started school the same day, stayed friends, told each other everything we heard adults say to each other. He was my only friend outside of Ritchie.

  His mother, Jill, just tolerated me hanging around with Anthony, but Anthony was considered a difficult child, sulky and wouldn’t eat, and I made a difference to him. It was odd the way she said things about our family behind their back, my mother included. On the face of it, she was very friendly. Jill was a short woman whose body looked like a well-packed steak, although her face was pale and blurry beneath a cap of frizzy perm. It wasn’t as if she had no faults of her own. I hardly ever went inside Anthony’s house, which was very tidy and expensive, but when I did she was always nagging Anthony and the others about whether their fingernails were clean, and inspecting our pants before we sat down on her furniture. Her voice was martyred and shrill. She used to be a nurse. As far as Des was concerned, I couldn’t see what Anna saw in him. But Anthony put me right. A marriage of convenience, he told me wisely.

  But we were the first in the street to have colour television. Gerald bought it as soon as it came on the market, and we thought, at first, that we were amazingly lucky, that perhaps Gerald wasn’t as mean as we believed. Only, surprise, he hardly ever let us watch it. There were all sorts of rules about when
we could, and it was a first-up punishment, no television, whatever we did, even when we thought we were being well-behaved. It was Gerald’s television, bought so he could watch rugby. His staying up and watching games on the other side of the world in the middle of the night, is what changed Des’s way of looking at things. He and Anna would come over for the night, and the four of them would sit up laughing and talking until the game started. Sometimes Des’s son Lyle would come, and sat up with them, even though he wasn’t much older than Ritchie. A skinny boy with pimples, he had the look of a swot.

  Des was a Welshman, or his parents were, something like that, because he had a Kiwi accent, with a slight speech impediment. He said ‘free’ when he meant ‘three’. We could hear Des barracking for the Welsh team, his feet stamping the floor, as if he was there in the grounds, in the middle of the crowd. As dawn rose, he mixed Black Velvets for them all, champagne mixed with stout — Something I learned in the army, he mumbled when Gerald expressed surprise — and they drank toasts to the winning team, while my mother made dishes of pancakes that they spread with golden syrup. We ate the leftovers of these treats when we got up. We drank the leftover stout and champagne as well. At least we did until Ritchie joined the Scout troop — then it was just me. A Scout has to have respect for himself, and be clean in body and mind, Ritchie said.

  It was after one of these all night sessions that Anna tried to talk me into joining Cubs. ‘There’s no point in trying to be different, Stephen.’

  ‘Why? You’re different.’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  She laughed, a gay little laugh as if I had a great imagination. Only I knew she was lying. Anthony again.

  She was dressed ready for work in a tailored jacket over a scoop-necked blouse that showed her throat and the swell of her breasts, a flowing skirt that fell almost to her ankles. Her breath smelt of booze. Would she be asleep by half past eleven, or yelling at the kids in her class? I wondered what it would be like when I got to high school if she turned out to be my teacher. I had a feeling she might be fierce in the classroom. Whereas my mother often had a languid, rumpled look, Anna was developing a kind of firmness that I didn’t understand.