Preservation Read online

  A serious but also blackly funny short story about old friendships, love and formaldehyde by one of New Zealand’s most distinguished writers.

  Now middle-aged, the one-time teenage rebels live staid, safe lives, while their friend Jan, who had been the good one of their pack, is now locked up in prison. With Jan’s mother just dead, there is no one to organise the funeral except for her two old classmates. They agree to help, but Jan’s request for a special dress for the corpse leads to a moral dilemma.

  Preservation

  A SHORT STORY

  Fiona Kidman

  Contents

  Title Page

  Preservation

  The first chapter from Fiona Kidman’s The Infinite Air, 2013:

  Also by Fiona Kidman

  About the author

  Copyright

  Preservation

  Fiona Kidman

  If you had known us when we were girls, Sabrina thinks, Jan is the last one you would have expected to land up in prison. With a name like hers, Sabrina was bad girl territory, or so people imagined, and for a time they were not entirely wrong. She and Elsa and Jan, always together, a clan of their own that others would have loved to join but never could. They hitched up their gym slips to the edge of their bums, and chewed gum in class and smoked on the boundary fence that divided their girls’ school from the boys’ one next door. Jan was the one who managed to stay out of trouble.

  Yet here Sabrina is, with her hair, wispy and greying, piled up on her head, glasses sliding down her nose, as she scans the newspaper for art-house movies, waiting in the prison car park for Elsa. Her grown-up son has gone away to university, so she and her second husband Daniel have time to devote to their jobs, Sabrina as a policy planner in a government department, Daniel as an engineer. (What policy does Sabrina plan? It varies as she moves around departments, edging up the career ladder. At the moment she is planning trade deals.) They have money and friends and time to live well. Why has she come here, she wonders.

  ‘You don’t have to do this,’ Daniel had said at breakfast. ‘Well, look at the weather.’ Saturday morning is special time for them. A tall man, with riotous curls and an infectious grin, Daniel likes jokes and cult movies and making surprise breakfasts for her at the weekend. Later, they shop together: a ritual. He was disappointed that she ate in haste, distracted and about to go out. ‘It’s not as if you’re in touch with her very often.’

  ‘I do have to go,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to explain.’ She realised that he had never met Jan, understood that he was worried about this expedition of hers.

  Outside, it was a grey April morning and, indeed, the sharp chill of winter had already descended on Wellington. In the night a southerly wind had blown leaves from the copper beech in the garden. The wind had bowled her along the motorway, and now a sleety rain is falling on the asphalt of the parking lot beside her. She shivers and pulls her mohair jacket closer, glancing up at the stark building, the steel bars of the prison. Perhaps Elsa won’t come.

  But even as Sabrina is thinking this, Elsa’s smart yellow Citroën pulls alongside.

  Elsa, like her, has turned out to be respectable, only more matronly. Elsa stays home and minds grandchildren, and cooks endless meals, though, as she says, she does like to keep herself ‘looking nice’. She goes to her hairdresser in the city every other week, and shops in boutiques. It’s quarter of a century since she taught school. I guess I got lucky, she will say whenever they meet. Fortunate to have a husband with a good income, his job as steady as a rock even in a town like this, where for so many people it’s in one office door and out the other. An accountant is worth his weight in … though herself she wouldn’t wear gold, she prefers silver. It’s not that Sabrina sees herself or her life reflected in the way Elsa lives hers now, but there is a history from the days of sleepovers and fat scones and hot chocolate, of ballet practice in tutus, of Girl Guides and music practice, of regular bedtimes and cut lunches, of homework schedules and summer holidays, a history that has traced itself in their own domesticity, however varied it may look on the surface. Their rebellion was temporary, a rite of passage on the way to their grown-up lives. Our mothers will go ape-shit, they had said, and when it happened, they’d move onto something else. Like university, eventually. Their mothers uncrossed their fingers behind their backs.

  Jan was different in almost every way, and Sabrina has wondered since how it took her so long to see this. Jan was simply there. At school she passed exams without seeming to notice what happened in class, or without reading her textbooks. While everyone else was deep in study, Jan would sit as if in a trance. It was only later she revealed what they should have noticed, that she had a photographic memory. All the same, it seemed Jan was part of all that they did, only, looking back, Sabrina sees this wasn’t so. Rather, she was the person who gave them permission to get up to their pranks, the one who listened to them plan their misdemeanours, dared them when their courage faltered and, later, covered their tracks. Sabrina smiles at herself when she uses the phrase ‘gave them permission’, as if she is some latter-day counsellor, a jargon freak like Jan’s mother, Leonie. She was weird, not like other mothers. She and Elsa never said this to Jan, but they knew she thought so, too, noticing how she liked to stay over at her friends’ houses but never asked them back to her place.

  They did meet Leonie once a year while they were in high school. When it was Jan’s birthday, they were summoned to gather at a Chinese restaurant, the same one in Courtenay Place every year. ‘My mother wants you to come,’ Jan would say, her face rigid with embarrassment. They said yes, of course, and thanks, that would be fine. When Jan wasn’t there, they would say ‘Le-Oh-nie, oh my God’ and raise their eyebrows. It was the only time they were unkind to Jan, and she would never know, and, after all, they did turn up. How could they not, because if they didn’t Jan would have to do it on her own.

  Leonie was one of those women who liked to party hard, wore platform shoes and maxis, and talked about women’s liberation. She worked as a reporter, a media-hen she called it, and cackled at herself, her toughness, her fearlessness in tackling the big stories. Each year she would have a different man with her, although the uniform didn’t change much — flared trousers, sideburns. They had names like Eddie and Norm and Ted, and they all worked for one or other of the unions. They smoked over dinner, because you could do that then, and drank red wine, and complained that they couldn’t order spirits.

  The year Jan turned fifteen, Leonie brought along a photograph of Jan as a baby. Jan was blonde and dimpled, and the dimple in one cheek had stayed with her. In the photograph, Leonie had straight hair dangling to her waist, and wore a poncho over a long flowery dress. How we change, she had said, passing the picture around for everyone to admire. That was the sixties, you know. Jan would hunch down in her chair and look as if she wished her mother would die. Jan was dux of the school in her year, the first of them to graduate, the first to get a real job, as a flight attendant it turned out.

  ‘My daughter, a trolley dolly,’ Leonie said to Sabrina when she chanced upon her in the street one day. Her hair was permed in a very big Afro and she wore round spectacles.

  ‘I’m surprised,’ Sabrina said, although she thought anyone as pretty as Jan, and as clever, could do much as she liked.

  ‘She says she doesn’t have to use her brains. It figures — she was always lazy.’

  ‘I’m sure she does,’ Sabrina said, thinking that, after all her talk about women’s liberation, Leonie was being sexist. She, herself, had an appreciation of feminism, now that she went to university and suffered jokes about her name. Her parents had named her after a British pin-up star with enormous breasts. They had done it as a kind of a joke, they told her, shamefaced. Sabrin
a, the pin-up one, had visited the town where her mother grew up, and she’d thought it great that someone got so much attention. They were sorry. They would understand if she changed it; they were only young themselves when they had her. As acts of contrition, they gave her brothers plain staid names. But Sabrina has hung onto her name as if it’s a lucky charm.

  ‘I talked to her about it as a political concept,’ said Leonie of Jan’s job. ‘But she says she hasn’t got time for concepts.’ Leonie was almost spitting the words. ‘I thought you of all people would understand.’ At the time, Sabrina was struggling with political science.

  ‘Sort of,’ she said, and it was the nearest she and Leonie ever came to understanding each other. Afterwards, she wondered about Jan’s trances, and hoped she could deal with emergencies on aeroplanes.

  Jan was the first to get married, too, something she has done only once, and the first to get divorced, although this is something Elsa has never done, and Sabrina believes that she is happy with Daniel and can’t imagine she will repeat separation. Jan never had children. Not her scene, she said once.

  And now Leonie is dead, and Jan is locked up, and there is nobody to see to her mother’s funeral arrangements.

  The car park is filling up as Elsa ducks out of her car in the rain, her expression distraught. ‘Sabby,’ she says, climbing into the passenger seat. Beneath her raincoat her cashmere sweater is tight over her ample breasts; her dark pleated skirt doesn’t conceal that she is getting stout. ‘What on earth is this all about? Did you know Jan was in here? I never saw anything in the paper about Leonie dying.’

  ‘No, but remember Jan’s got a different surname to Leonie. I can’t even remember what it is. Perhaps we’ve missed it.’

  Elsa sighs heavily. ‘How did we ever get in tow with Jan?’

  ‘I think Jan got in tow with us,’ says Sabrina, half laughing at the memory of the way Jan was always at their heels when they first went to high school. By that time, she and Elsa had known each other forever. There was something adoring about the way Jan spoke to them. Sabrina thinks they were flattered. Jan was sensational — the way she looked, the way she came top in everything — and yet she chose them. ‘She was a good mate.’

  ‘I feel awful for her,’ Elsa says in a small miserable voice.

  ‘Well, we’re here now. We can do it, can’t we?’

  ‘I haven’t told Ross,’ says Elsa. Ross is her husband. ‘He wouldn’t like me coming here. Thank God he didn’t pick up the phone when she rang yesterday. I thought it was a hoax at first.’

  Jan had called them both the day before. A recorded message had come on the end of the line, a flat cold man’s voice saying: ‘You are about to receive a phone call from a prison inmate. Press one if you do not wish to receive it, otherwise hold the line. Your call will be recorded and may be used as evidence in court.’ And then there had been a click and a rustle, and Jan’s voice. She had a special dispensation to phone people because of her mother’s death, she explained. As a rule, she had to have people she rang approved of first, but this was different. Besides, she said, there weren’t all that many people she could ring. You know how it is, she had said to Sabrina, in that kind of drifting voice she sometimes used at school when she wasn’t paying attention. Her brother had been brought up by their father, and Lord knows where he is now; they don’t keep in touch. She can’t even let him know that their mother is dead.

  She had pulled herself together, hurrying on to explain that she needed to see Sabrina and Elsa urgently. It was visiting hour the next day; if they could come she’d be grateful, because her mother was a bitch most of the time, as they knew very well, but she couldn’t let her be disposed of without someone in charge. Disposed of, that was the phrase she used. ‘I’m banged up,’ she said and laughed, or that’s how it came across. Because of the circumstances they are allowed a special dispensation to visit at short notice. They will have to carry identification, but their names are already down on the visiting list.

  ‘We’d better get on with it,’ says Sabrina, turning to face the wall of wire fences. ‘Come on, Elsa, they won’t keep us in there.’

  Elsa shivers, adjusts her fine floating navy scarf. It’s decorated with tiny pale tan-coloured elephants; one of her daughters-in-law had bought it for her in London. ‘Click click,’ she says, which is what they used to say, from the times they played knucklebones together.

  It is not getting into the prison that is so hard, though that is bad enough. Somehow they had thought they would be different, that because they were two respectable women hurrying to their friend’s aid, they would be, if not exactly welcomed, at least swept through the doors in a discreet manner. Instead they must stand together in a wire enclosure and speak their names into a microphone, while they wait for what seems a very long time until a gate slides open. There is no sign of human presence until they are inside the doors. They must sign documents, show their drivers’ licences, put all their belongings in a metal cupboard and return the key to an officer behind a grille, walk through a metal detector like the one at the airport, only the guard on the other side who scans them and frisks their pockets is less friendly. Sabrina wants to protect her crotch but is reminded sharply to keep her arms extended level with her shoulders.

  They are instructed to sit on stools attached to tables dotted around the room. The stools are different pastel colours, like toys in a playroom. Families are gathered round the tables, waiting for prisoners to appear. Guards stand in line near a counter. One of them calls Jan’s surname, and a minute or so later she emerges, wearing a baggy fluorescent-orange jumpsuit. Her hair falls in a long single plait down her back and her face is without make-up and more bloated than they remember, but then it’s a while since they met. They reach out to hug her, and for a moment it is allowed, then they must all sit down.

  ‘Bit of a shock, eh?’ says Jan. There is an uncomfortable silence.

  ‘Why?’ says Elsa. ‘Why are you in here?’

  ‘Oh, a bit of fraud, or that’s what they said. It’s all right, I haven’t bottled anyone or done drugs — well, not that anyone’s nailed me for.’ She laughs again, it’s a shock to hear that it sounds just like Leonie’s laughter, deep and smoke-laden. ‘I was doing a computer job. You know, transferring money from one account to another.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ says Elsa.

  ‘Why I did it?’ Jan looks at her squarely. ‘It was easy, Elsa, that’s why.’

  ‘We’re so sorry about your mother,’ Sabrina says.

  ‘Yes, well, it wasn’t what I was expecting. The old whore. It was only last Saturday she was here.’

  ‘She’s been visiting?’

  Jan hesitates. ‘I was her cause. Finally. It pissed her off my whole life that she had to look after me. I guess I was more interesting in here.’

  ‘I’m sure she loved you,’ says Elsa in a helpful, hopeful voice.

  ‘Love. Oh, shut up, Elsa.’ And Jan’s eyes fill with tears. She leans her elbows on the table and pushes her fingers into her temples. ‘I’m not sure we see love in the same light. It’s not something we talked about in school.’

  Elsa looks puzzled, and Sabrina doesn’t know where this is going either.

  ‘We talked about it all the time,’ Elsa says hotly.

  ‘You and Sab talked about boys but it’s not the same thing.’ Jan is crying openly now, her shoulders shaking. ‘Oh shit,’ she says, ‘I didn’t mean to do this. Yes, you could say we made up, even though she left it a bit late. She saw me in here. You know, she saw me.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Sabrina says, ‘really it is.’ Her own ditsy happy mother, who had loved her father and all of them, and had given her a silly name, had died in a hospice more than a decade ago. It’s the only unforgivable thing she ever did to Sabrina’s father, and to Sabrina, too. Sabrina knows what it’s like to wake up in the mornings and feel absence in the air, the mystery of loss that is there like some tangible object, that takes minutes to recognise, th
at has to be quelled before the day begins. She sees the way it is, that Jan has loved the mother she could never please. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Heart. She was a bit out of breath last week. That’s all. Anyway, are you two going to do the honours for me?’

  And then Jan unfolds the plan. Leonie is in a funeral parlour. There hasn’t been a notice in the paper, so first of all they need to see to that, and then she wants her mother to have a proper funeral. There’s a lawyer who has told her there’s money for it. Jan doesn’t know if she’ll be allowed to go or not, but she’s got her fingers crossed. Before the funeral there must be a viewing of her body. Leonie still had old friends and they’ll need to say goodbye. The viewing part is important, something Leonie was in the habit of doing when people died. She liked funerals. For the viewing she must have a nice dress.

  ‘I’m sure she’s got nice clothes in her wardrobe,’ Sabrina says. ‘She always had lots of clothes.’

  ‘You have to get past this lawyer first. Apparently the house is all locked up. Anyway, she’d let herself go, not like the old Leonie. She told me last week her latest hairdresser was so over her. That’s probably what killed her — she’d run out of new hairdressers to try.’

  Jan wants them to go to a particular boutique and pick up a dress that Leonie had told her about on that last visit. It was, as she described it, the most gorgeous dress she’d ever seen: a label dress, black with a puffed skirt and a peacock at the waist, with feathers trailing down the front. The kind of dress she would have loved to wear when she was young, and now never would, or not in this life. Leonie in her true colours, an exhibitionist at heart. All that gear she got togged up in. The fems never really took to her — she was too much of a girl. And a boys’ girl at that. But she will wear it, Jan says fiercely, just this once. She has got one of the guards to phone the shop and ask them to hold the dress. It’s waiting for them to pick up. She is so relieved the dress is still there, but at the price, this is perhaps not surprising.