Drowned Sprat and Other Stories (18 page)

The house looked locked up, curtains drawn, a blind pulled
over the frosted glass in the door. No smoke came from the chimney, but Debbie supposed that was because it was a renter and the landlord would have had the fireplace boarded up. Craig advised all landlords to do that, for the fire risk. Too bad if the tenants froze their arses off with no money for the power company. They were lucky, Debbie supposed, that their own house was constructed from completely modern and non-flammable materials, should they ever buy another and rent the first one out. That kind of thing was going on at the moment. An Englishman had come out and bought twenty houses in one swoop to rent out to the locals — a latter-day absentee landlord. Wanganui was definitely going ahead.

‘Should we shout things?' one of the mothers asked her.

‘I don't think so,' Debbie said. ‘This is a silent vigil.'

From the tray under the pram she took the banner and unrolled it. She'd brought string, to attach it to the fence. ‘Homicidal Sex Offenders Not Welcome In Our Neighbourhood' it said. Kerry-Anne's sign, ‘Murderers Out!', had been painted in the same fluorescent pink.

Once the banner was properly hooked up and the mothers had stopped standing around in groups chatting to stand in a hushed line, the vigil looked serious and important. It was professionally done, thought Debbie, if you could have a professional vigil. She wondered about the woman inside, whether she'd noticed them yet; whether, if she had, she'd pointed them out to her criminal son.

A passing truck tooted at them, a motorcyclist gave them the victory signal as he zipped by, an old couple seated at the bus stop opposite stared at them with astonishment. Debbie wondered if she should go across and explain to them what they were doing — perhaps they didn't even know Jared Knowles was
in the house, unrestrained by anyone other than his white-trash mother — but just as she took a step out onto the road the bus came along. When it pulled away the couple looked out the windows at her with a hint of fear on their faces, as if she was somehow more closely associated with the target of the vigil than the spirit of the vigil itself. It gave Debbie a start, and she wondered for the first time if she was doing the right thing. She didn't want any of this to reflect on her and Craig.

‘Mrs Former?' It was the photographer, lugging his tripod.

Jared and I are watching them through the nets. They can't see us. We've pulled all the blinds and hooked up blankets and it's like the inside of a cow.

‘That's the one that brought the list.' I point out Debbie Former. ‘The older one.'

Jared nods and I watch his eyes follow her as she takes pride of place in the pose. The photographer is quick — a couple of shots, then he's back in his car and departing.

The women remain, waving in response to toots from supportive drivers.

‘They shouldn't of let me out,' Jared says quietly, his first complete sentence since he got here. He slept for a few hours, but woke suddenly and got up.

‘Mum?' he says. ‘Should they?'

I wish he was still kipping.

‘Mum?'

‘Don't know, son.'

‘Don't know if I should of got out?' His voice is harder.

‘No.'

‘No I shouldn't of?'

‘No I don't know.'

Jared sighs. Some of the women have brought thermos flasks and cups. They sip coffee, eat biscuits.

‘Have a nice fucking picnic, ladies,' mutters Jared, and he turns and leaves the room, his footsteps turning down towards the bathroom. The door slams after him.

I've got time I reckon, if I'm quick.

Down the path I go, so nervous my toe snags twice on the cracks, even though I would know the depth and catch of them in my sleep. A little girl with red hair, a kid about four, sees me coming and tugs on her mother's T-shirt. They all turn and look at me then, and I swear it's like a bunch of old moos staring at me over the fence, giving me their full, doleful attention. Just before the letterbox I pull up.

‘I'm not defending him,' I start, but my voice comes over wavery and thin. I clear my throat, start again. ‘I'm on your side.'

Now the faces look disbelieving. Debbie's upper lip begins to lift into a sneer.

‘Just give us a chance, eh?' But my voice has vanished again and they can't hear me. I feel suddenly exhausted, dry-mouthed after all the hours spent waiting for him to arrive, then sitting while he slept, and all the time smoking, smoking, smoking. I head back up the path and it's when I'm about halfway that they begin to yell out.

‘You shouldn't have taken him back!' the first one bellows, and I'm pretty sure the voice belongs to Debbie.

‘How're you going to stop him?' yells another.

‘Murderers out!' yells another, and several voices join in: ‘Murderers out! Murderers out! Murderers out!'

The first drops of rain fall as I reach the sagging porch and go inside. For a moment or two I listen to it drumming under their voices, thickening on the tin roof. In the kitchen at the end
of the hall I can hear Jared moving about, opening and closing the fridge, the flick and hiss of a tear-tab.

I take a deep breath and go down to him, and as I do I can sense the women on the street begin to move away, not that I can hear them from here. They're doing the right thing: the rain is falling heavily now and I know as well as any mother does that you shouldn't leave your baby out in the weather. If you ever catch yourself at it, if you're doing it by mistake or on purpose, then you should face up to the fact that one day, eventually, you're going to have to make it up to him.

On a Friday evening, mid-December, Mona dragged herself in from shopping for her forty-fourth Christmas to find the local circular lying open on the table.

As luck would have it, Mona had seen her GP recently about a recurring sick-leave issue, so she made an appointment for 7.30
on Monday morning. During the phone call the receptionist had had to shout above the racket of power tools in the background.

‘Oh yes, we’re still very new,’ she yelled. ‘We only opened last week. See you on Monday.’

Instead of present-wrapping, Mona got on with her marking: the Year 10 Mathematics exam, which had to be finished and graded by Wednesday. The untidy numbers jumped before her eyes and it was difficult to concentrate; her mind kept wandering back to the little ad. Did it really mean what she thought it meant? No doubt it would be very expensive. How expensive? She could sell her car, if necessary. They’d still have Rod’s car, she could always bus to work, thousands of people did, why couldn’t she? Surely she could get the money together somehow …

She hardly slept that night or the night after, and continued her marking on Sunday while her teenage girls were off gallumphing their large and muscled bodies around at beach volleyball before they went with friends to watch videos and drink beer all afternoon. The day dragged by until her large and sunburnt husband came home from his weekend away fishing. While she fried up the catch he took a shower, coming out into the kitchen with a towel around him, his back and tubby tum as scarlet as Santa’s suit. He matched the season.

Finally Monday dawned, with Mona up early and full of anticipation, curiosity and relief — a sunny, heady, fairy-tale blast: something she had longed for for years had come true and just in time. This year more than any other, Christmas just seemed too much, too hard, and it took too much of an effort to look into her heart and find out why. It didn’t seem to be anything to do with commercialisation, or hollow rites, not as it had when she was younger. It was something else — something she couldn’t identify: a sense of collapse, of seasonal disaffection,
of wanting it to be early January already with it all over. Or was she just mean-spirited?

While the girls crashed around the kitchen, banging into each other and hooting as they packed their own lunches from an assortment of pre-packaged snacks, Mona called out, ‘See you!’ from the front door, and drove off.

The clinic was in a wealthy suburb where colonial money had built fine, tall, wooden houses in the nineteenth century. On the main road most had been demolished and replaced with new medical centres, clusters of surgeons wielding knives on every part of the human anatomy. Some of them advertised their area of speciality with an illustrated sign — a large foot, an ear, a breast. Mona hadn’t been in this part of town for years. It had a strange kind of medical-carnival feel to it: the coloured words, the lights and shiny new buildings, the signs in all different languages.

ENDYMION CLINIC flashed one of the signs, and she slammed on her brakes without indicating — the car behind her stopping suddenly with a blast on its horn — and lurched down a right-of-way which used to be the driveway, Mona remembered, of a grand, gabled mansion with two turrets and wide verandahs upstairs and down. It was now entirely vanished away. At the front of the old property an orthopaedic clinic stood brand spanking new, though not as new as Endymion, which still had plumbers’ and electricians’ vans parked outside. The van she parked beside had sheets of glass angled against its sides like a beetle with its wings folded.

There was no one else in the woody waiting room, other than the receptionist and a woman with a small leather overnight bag set down at her feet. She looked rich: a blue tailored
jacket, a silver-hued skirt made of fabric as lustrous as the pearls at her throat. As Mona sat down the woman glanced up at her and smiled.

‘Come to have a look around?’

‘That’s right,’ said Mona.

‘Oh, you’ll love it,’ said the woman, closing her magazine. ‘I made the first available appointment for treatment. They’ve got Powell, you know.’

‘Powell?’ She didn’t remember the name from the ad.

‘Face man. Famous. My birthday’s the sixteenth of January, so I’ll be around and about again for the Northern Hemisphere spring. Fifty years old, yes, that’s true, but once again without a wrinkle, half a stone slimmer, gleaming top to toe from twicedaily massages and no memory of the ghastly anniversary. Wonderful, don’t you think, dear?’

Mona nodded.

‘Have you thought what music you’d like? You can choose your own — or foreign-language tapes … but I expect they’ll tell you all about it.’

‘I’m just here for Christmas,’ said Mona, faintly.

The waiting room had begun to fill — several women of varying ages and two nervous-looking men.

A nurse came and led her away up one floor to a leafy atrium. They walked along an open-railed corridor that ran along a windowed exterior wall until they came to a row of rooms on the other side, with a different flower on each door. Mona was
Nasturtium
.

The nurse left her perched on the edge of the bed with the door ajar. After a few minutes a man in a dark business suit arrived.

‘Benjamin France,’ he said, shaking her hand. ‘I’ll just take up five minutes of your time to explain the legal situation.’

He ran through his twenty bullet-points, which could have been neatly summarised in only two: that there was no cover from medical insurance as this was revolutionary therapy, and that she was to sign an affidavit to the effect that she would not initiate litigation should the therapy fail or damage her. Leaving her with the form, he hurried off.

Through the gap in the door Mona watched nurses escort women and the occasional man. There were glimpses of doctors, too, passing with paperwork under their arms.

One came in to see her, with a name badge that simply read ‘Anaesthetist’.

‘You are?’ he asked, taking the chair beside the bed.

‘Here for Christmas,’ she told him. He handed her a photograph.

‘This is the Endymion Room,’ he said, ‘where you will be kept in a medically induced coma for your elected period of time.’

The picture showed a number of high, narrow beds with large plastic bubbles covering them. Beside each bed, inside each clear membrane, was a tall stand that held bottles and sprouted tubes. In a mural on the far wall a beautiful young man sprawled, fast asleep, with a glowing female form bending over him. Endymion, Mona supposed, from the legend. She peered more closely at the beds and noticed that some held pale bodies of varying shapes and sizes, all female, mostly on their backs, some on their fronts.

‘The picture is, of course, posed,’ said the anaesthetist. ‘In the normal course of events the equipment would be in effect.’

‘Pardon?’ said Mona.

‘The feeding and drainage tubes and monitors and so forth.’

‘Oh.’

‘Each individual bubble is kept at the temperature you prefer,
and your weight is carefully graded and adjusted towards your preference. Do you have your letter from your GP?’

‘It’s being emailed through,’ she told him.

‘And have you had a general anaesthetic before? Any problems? Any questions?’

They went through his list and he hurried off, much like the lawyer had, and it was the same with the weight specialist — who talked about an intravenous mix of vitamins and minerals; the psychiatrist — who talked about the seriousness of Mona’s decision and the possible implications of Christmas 2004 never featuring in her memory; and the plastic surgeon — who stood her in front of the mirror and hauled back her jowls.

There was even a physiotherapist who brought along a naked dummy. She lay it on the bed and demonstrated the exercises and massage Mona’s body would enjoy while her absconded mind took its Yuletide vacation. A sound technician consulted her about the variety of music she would prefer to have ebbing into her comatose brain through earplugs.

‘Or would you prefer a subliminal language?’ he asked.

The last consultant was the accountant, who tallied her preferences at $30,879 for ten days with attention from Mr Powell, and $21,011 without it.

Mona’s heart sank. Her car wasn’t worth a quarter of the lowest quote.

Back in the carpark she noticed the time — 11.45 — and realised she’d completely forgotten she was supposed to be going in to work. How had she done that? Her mind must have been so completely taken up with longing to be one of the peaceful ones on the slabs.

On the motorway she put her foot down, heading out to her school, a large co-ed in the city’s west. As she zipped along she
was aware of only two words that kept rising in her mind, and they were Bank Loan. Why not? Other people borrowed to go to the Cooks, or Fiji, to lie in the sun. This was the same, but different.

Skewed across both lanes on the off-ramp was a truck, which Mona didn’t see until it was too late. Her last observation, before she was knocked unconscious, was that the truck was laden with Christmas trees, a neat forest of horizontally stacked pines, now frothing over the edges of the tray and tumbling and flying around the car with the noise of thunder, shattering the windscreen.

She came around in a quiet, cool room and thought at first it was Endymion, but the faces staring down at her belonged to her husband and daughters, and she couldn’t think why they would be here when she’d resolved to keep her whereabouts a secret. There was a variety of transparent tubes conveying liquid to and from her body.

Rod’s face lit up at the dawning consciousness in her eyes. Above his red forehead drooped a Santa hat at a rakish angle. Her nostrils felt scoured, sensitive: there was a strong hoppy smell of meaty beer from him and something sweet and alcopop from the girls.

‘Hello, darling,’ he said. ‘Welcome back.’

‘Hi, Mum,’ said the girls, and she thought they looked a little bewildered, sad even, as they hunched by the bed.

‘It’s Christmas Day, Mum,’ said Jem, whose happy eyes were unaccustomedly teary.

Mona nodded. The tendons of Nic’s strong hand closed around the loose strings of her own.

‘You okay, Mum?’ Nic was saying. ‘You all there now?’

‘Yes, dear,’ said Mona, ‘I think so.’