The Trouble With Fire Read online

  ‘Has your friend got a nicer house than ours?’ her mother asked, in an injured tone that nonetheless expected the worst.

  ‘No,’ Hilary said, and it was true. Despite the couches and refrigerator, and the pull-string toilet, she found Meryl’s house oppressive and dark. Her own house consisted of four square rooms and a lean-to for their iron bath, a washtub and copper. But her mother kept the curtains pulled back to let in sunlight and laid the dinner table every night with heavy linen. When she got married, her sisters had embroidered her new initials in the corners of the napkins and given her bone-handled cutlery. Outside, their market garden stretched in ordered rows with hens scratching at the back door, rather than mud and yelping dogs, and the smell of cow dung in the paddock next to the house, as at Meryl’s place. Hilary didn’t mind Meryl coming at all. But there were things that she had omitted to tell her mother about her friend. About her bosoms. About her age. About her boyfriend. Most of all, she hadn’t told her mother that she had a boyfriend of her own. Not that she was sure she did any longer, but she still thought of Nino in that way.

  There was nothing for it, the invitation had to be issued. Hilary thought Meryl might not want to come, but she was wrong.

  ‘How about next weekend?’ her friend suggested. ‘You’ve got bikes at your house, haven’t you?’

  Hilary agreed that, indeed, she and her parents all owned bicycles.

  ‘Would your mother mind if I borrowed her bike and we went for a ride?’ Meryl asked.

  Hilary had lain awake and worried over how she might entertain Meryl. Now everything seemed unexpectedly simple. ‘Of course she wouldn’t.’

  ‘We won’t tell her where we’re going, though,’ said Meryl, in an anxious voice. ‘She might tell my mother.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To the beach,’ said Meryl. And then it was out. The hostel boys were being taken on a beach picnic that Saturday and would have some free time. Meryl could snatch an hour with Bruce.

  ‘It’s a long way to the beach,’ Hilary said.

  ‘We can do it in no time.’

  Hilary was not so certain. Although tidal rivers snaked towards the town, Alderton sat inland from the sea. The place known as ‘the beach’ was twenty miles further on at another small seaside village. She had been there only half a dozen times, sitting in the back seat of a car owned by a friend of her parents. These outings took a whole day.

  She drew a deep breath. ‘All right then. Okay, so long as you promise not to tell either.’

  ‘About Nino? Course not.’

  The bicycle ride took even longer than Hilary had anticipated. Although it was early spring, it felt like a summer’s day and the sun grew stronger by the minute as the two girls pedalled up and down hills, flying one moment, the next having to get off and walk the bikes. Hours passed. Meryl was worried that she would miss seeing Bruce.

  And then, finally, the sea was before them, silky blue, a skein of white sand twisting along at its edge. They were puffing as they rested their bikes against a tree. And there were the boys from the hostel, playing some kind of running game in the sand. Bruce was still waiting for Meryl. The couple clasped hands and gazed into each other’s eyes. Theatrical, Hilary thought, and was embarrassed.

  ‘Do you want an ice-cream, Hilary?’ Bruce said, his voice dismissive. He waved a ten-shilling note in her direction, and nodded towards a kiosk on the waterfront.

  ‘What flavours?’ she asked, thinking she was to buy for all of them.

  ‘Oh, choose what you want.’ He gestured her away, and she saw that she was not meant to be there. She felt like a small naughty child. Although she knew Meryl must be starving and thirsty, too, she saw that she would go without for the sake of an hour alone with Bruce. ‘Look after the bikes, won’t you, Hilary?’ Meryl called, as if the bikes belonged to her.

  In the end she bought herself an ice-cream and some lemonade to share later with Meryl, and sat down to wait. She wanted to pee, but dared not leave the bikes. She didn’t know what Meryl and Bruce were doing, whether they were going to go all the way, as Meryl’s sister had done when she got pregnant, or whether they just wanted to talk. Meryl would act scandalised when asked, later on. As if once in our family wasn’t enough, and for goodness’ sake, Hilary, she would say, there were people everywhere and Bruce’s housemaster was on the lookout for them. They had just walked. And held hands.

  But they were gone for a long time, and Hilary, sitting alone with the bikes beside the sea, felt a chill in the air, and, looking up, saw that the sun was beginning to slip towards the sea. It was past four o’clock and in an hour or two it would be dark.

  IT WAS JULIUS AND ANTHEA who saved them as they struggled up the first hill on the road home. They had been on a jaunt together. Hilary had not been bothered by the pair for some time. Anthea was quiet on the bus these days, withdrawn and almost sullen, while Julius ignored her altogether. It was as if Hilary’s circle of friends, her success at school, had silenced them into a grudging acceptance. Now Julius got out of the pick-up truck, and he could have been Hilary’s father, he looked so grown up. He was wearing grey slacks and an open-neck shirt. ‘Spot of bother, eh?’ he said, as he slung their bikes on the back of the truck.

  There was no point in arguing, no other way home. Meryl looked flushed and defiant, and Hilary was trying not to show that she had been crying. They clambered onto the tray of the truck with their bikes. Anthea sat in the front, her expression a purring smile, and said nothing, not turning her head to look at them once they were under way. So they rattled along at what seemed an alarming speed, round and round the hills, clutching the edge of the tray, the night rushing past. Hilary decided the safest thing was to lie face down so that she could hold on with both hands and soon Meryl did the same. The wheels were just below their noses, chips of gravel flew up and caught in their hair. The bikes bumped and slithered against them. ‘Stop,’ Meryl screamed, but Julius didn’t hear, or if he did he wasn’t letting on. Hilary closed her eyes as tightly as she could and prayed. When she was older she would cling to aspects of belief because, she thought, she was delivered that night.

  At the turn-off, Julius let them off and unloaded their bikes. ‘Seeing boys, eh?’ he said, in an amused adult voice. ‘I reckon you owe me, Hilary.’

  ‘I was about to send out a search party for you two wicked girls,’ said Hilary’s mother, but it was a joke. She had dinner waiting for them. If she found Meryl surprising she didn’t say so.

  The following afternoon, Meryl’s parents came to pick her up, a great excuse for a Sunday drive, they said. They owned a smart green Wolseley. ‘Our girls are so close,’ Meryl’s mother said, as she sipped tea from one of the best china cups. ‘Though I must say they’re quiet today.’ In fact, a certain coolness had fallen between Hilary and Meryl. As the smart car disappeared along the road, Hilary’s father said, ‘Where there’s muck, there’s brass,’ but her mother pursed her lips. ‘They’re kind,’ she said, as if that was an end to the matter. Hilary thought Meryl’s parents had called by to check what sort of people her parents were, her mother in particular, who sent her daughter to dances in old clothes.

  On Monday, at the bus stop, Hilary said, in a way that she knew sounded pleading and childish, ‘Julius, it wasn’t me, I didn’t meet any boys.’ He was wearing his short pants and school cap again. He gave an aloof smile and didn’t answer.

  ‘Well, well, Hilary,’ said Anthea. ‘Next thing it’ll be Waterfall Road.’ Waterfall Road, known as Lovers’ Lane, ran beside a river near the high school, close to where Meryl lived. Hilary had seen the signpost. Meryl said she would never meet Bruce there, even though it was within walking distance. She didn’t want to make herself look cheap.

  Hilary felt a wave of terror running behind her heels. Anthea and Julius didn’t go to school dances, or have friends, the way other people did. But they knew things, and it occurred to Hilary that as they rode around the countryside together, they gathered up
knowledge. They would know, too, what she did at school, and, yes, about Nino.

  ‘How about you buy us a milkshake after school?’ said Anthea.

  In her pocket, Hilary carried the change from Bruce’s ten shilling note, an amount of money that seemed staggeringly large to have been offered so casually at the weekend. ‘Sure thing,’ she said, as if she was in a movie. ‘And a liquorice strap as well, if you want.’

  ‘The change must have fallen out when we were on the back of the truck,’ she told Meryl later that day. Who was Meryl to argue? They had agreed to make up and be friends again. Bruce’s father sent him a weekly allowance so he probably wouldn’t miss it.

  The money lasted all that week and the next. At Burke’s dairy, it bought jaffas and changing balls, chocolate slabs and peppermints, milkshakes and lemonade, all devoured by Julius and Anthea, and then the money was gone.

  ‘You can charge it up,’ said Anthea.

  ‘My parents would kill me.’

  ‘You get pocket money, don’t you?’

  Hilary agreed that yes, she did. She convinced herself she could wheedle a little extra from her mother, or that she might need an ‘extra’ textbook.

  Julius and Anthea ate their way through her allowance the next week and the week after that, and her money for a school excursion to a visiting theatre troupe: she had to make up an account of it for her mother. At Burke’s the woman behind the till agreed to let Hilary put a little on the slate, but just for a week or two.

  ‘I can’t buy any more,’ she told them.

  Hilary and her parents set off to see Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, about a farming family coping with adversity in the Midwest, but the film reels didn’t arrive in time, and the theatre operator ran Notorious with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. Both her parents were stiff-lipped as they left. There had been more scandal reported about ‘that woman’. She’d had a sprog with that Rossellini fellow, her father said, and both of them still married to other people. Hilary needed wholesome examples. They should never have let her see Bergman in the first place. And so on, before the credits had finished rolling and the lights came up.

  Outside the theatre they met Julius and Anthea as they got into the pick-up. When Anthea saw Hilary with her parents she chanted in a high sing-song voice: ‘Chase me Charlie, I’ve got barley up the leg of my drawers.’ Julius nudged her and they both laughed.

  ‘Cheeky bitch,’ said Hilary’s father, under his breath.

  ‘Hilary, what’s going on?’ said her mother, as they walked home.

  ‘Nothing,’ Hilary said.

  ‘I don’t think you tell the truth any more.’ There was something stricken in her mother’s voice. Hilary was not sure what she knew, but the worst thing she could think of was that Burke’s had mentioned her burgeoning debt.

  ‘Have you a boyfriend?’

  ‘No.’ And it was partly true. She hadn’t had a letter from Nino for weeks, and he hurried when he passed her classroom now. It was many months since she had been held in his embrace at the school dance. Perhaps he had heard about the excursion to the beach. Whichever way she turned, she seemed to be in trouble.

  The woman at Burke’s told her that she had one week to pay or she was going to tell her parents. Hilary had no idea where she was going to find the money.

  Meryl invited her to stay for a weekend, and Hilary was glad to get away from it all. During the week Hilary had seen Nino and he had smiled and waved as of old.

  Dear Hilary, he wrote, sorry, long time since I write to you. We have had bad trouble at the shop, but things are better now. We have to wait for some of the money to come from Wellington. My father afraid it will not come. I work long hours at the shop so my dad do not have to hire someone else. My dad think perhaps I should leave school. Now the money has come. From your friend Nino.

  Dear Nino, she replied, at the weekend I am going to stay in town with Meryl. How about I meet you along Waterfall Road? Do you know where it is? I will be there at three o’clock. I will tell Meryl I am going for a walk.

  I know where Waterfall Road is, he wrote back.

  THAT FRIDAY, HE SAT BY the window next to the quadrangle where he could see her in home economics. He glanced across the space between them and raised his hand, then looked away quickly. Later, she would think that it was a salute of farewell.

  Rain had fallen in the night and throughout the morning a misty drizzle came and went as Hilary walked along Waterfall Road. It was little more than a track, and mud squelched beneath her shoes. She was wearing a pale yellow twin-set that used to be Meryl’s, and a tartan skirt. An oilskin jacket was slung over her arm.

  ‘You can’t go out in this weather,’ said Meryl, ‘you’ll get soaked.’

  Hilary had told Meryl that she had a French exam coming up and she needed to memorise her verbs. Meryl gave her a sceptical look. ‘You can do your homework in the bedroom,’ she said, ‘I won’t interrupt you.’

  ‘I won’t be long,’ Hilary said, ‘truly I won’t.’

  ‘You’re weird. For goodness’ sake then, take a coat.’ Meryl had grabbed the oilskin coat off the rack and thrown it over Hilary’s shoulders.

  She hadn’t protested. She saw what folly it must appear, setting out in this weather, and besides, she and Nino might sit together near the waterfall and talk, and she could spread the oilskin beneath them. She hadn’t thought past this. They would talk, they would be close, the way they were at the dance, meaning that they would touch, hold hands. Perhaps they would kiss, and this is what she hoped. She couldn’t imagine what would happen next, what ought or ought not to take place.

  There were fresh tyre tracks in the mud, but she was past caring and didn’t consider them, not until later as she relived her walk to the river. She heard the rush of the waterfall. The trees were dense and dripping above her. She heard a peculiar sound, like a cat’s miaow.

  ‘Nino,’ she called in a small voice, but her words were carried away against the sound of the water.

  It was the pick-up truck she saw first in the clearing. Then it was a tangle of white limbs on the ground. She didn’t see exactly what was happening, but it was something she wasn’t supposed to see, something she knew was awful. What she would remember most was Julius’s eyes staring straight at her, his arm flung over Anthea’s head to protect her from Hilary’s gaze.

  Sobs caught in her chest as she ran back the way she had come, her lungs fighting for air as if she had fallen under the swollen brown river she had glimpsed in her flight.

  Meryl stood at the end of Waterfall Road. ‘What did he do to you?’ she demanded. ‘What has Nino done to you, you stupid dumb little cow?”

  ‘Nothing. He didn’t touch me. You followed me.’

  ‘Of course I did. Are you crazy, running off after an Eyetie like that? My mother would kill both of us if she knew what you were up to. Are you sure you’re not hurt?’

  ‘He wasn’t there. Nobody was there.’

  ‘Well, what a surprise. So that’s why you’re crying — you’ve been stood up. You’re a kid. I knew it all along. I thought you were a smart kid, but you’re really, really stupid. Just wait until Nino tells people what you had in mind. Waterfall Road. Bad girls go down there.’

  But Nino was not at school the next week, or the one after that. Hilary didn’t have the nerve to ask where he was. She supposed he had gone to work in the fish and chip shop. Life suddenly began to change in other ways. Her parents decided to leave the north, and sold up for a song as soon as their property went on the market. They would say to each other, that was one smart customer — he knew that land would be worth millions one day. But it wasn’t then, it was just enough to buy a house near Auckland, where Hilary’s father would work for a nursery on a regular wage, with regular hours, and Hilary wouldn’t have to spend hours each day going backwards and forwards to school. In a way she was disappointed. Meryl was going to leave school at the end of the year, and she had thought that she could make new friends, that she would g
o on doing well with her French and English, especially English because the grey-haired teacher with the moustache still took an interest in her work, and that some day she would run into Nino again, and whatever misunderstanding had arisen could have been sorted out. Someone had cleared her slate at the dairy a day or so after her walk down Waterfall Road. Julius and Anthea were silent when they saw her.

  ARCHAEOLOGY

  MERYL FANNED OUT PHOTOGRAPHS ON Hilary’s table, pictures of children and grandchildren who looked older than Hilary and Meryl were when they were friends. Wedding photographs, christening pictures, and one of the flowers on Meryl’s mother’s grave.

  When Hilary had admired them, Meryl stood up, saying in a brisk voice, ‘Time to get down to business.’

  ‘Business?’

  ‘If we’re going to do your colours, we need to look at your clothes. Your hair’s nice, by the way. I like the French knot, even if looks a bit retro, but it’s bookish, so it works. We’ll have a look through your wardrobe. In the bedroom?’

  Hilary said, ‘Now look here …’ She thought about texting her husband: I have a stalker in the house, get home as fast as you can. But her visitor was charging along the passage, and it occurred to Hilary that it didn’t matter much, that Meryl was a character, like other people in life, and it was easy to escape life if you wrote fiction. She might as well give in, let it happen. Besides, once, long ago, she had been grateful to Meryl, her grown-up insouciance. She felt a stab of remorse for her own lack of charity. Her wardrobe door was being opened, Meryl’s hands were flicking through her dresses.

  Meryl shook her head sadly. ‘So much black. You know, I went on a trip once to Europe. It was ever so nice, though I wouldn’t want to live over there. When I got back to New Zealand, I walked into the airport and I thought the prime minister must have died, everyone wearing black. You forget how much black we wear. Like widows. I remember Nino’s mother, after the father died, you know?’