Infidelities (11 page)

It had taken a second or two to register, another, and then, as she got closer, at the speed she was driving, she
saw it was an animal, wounded? It was leaping and twisting in the middle of the road. As the car rushed past she caught the look in its eye – then swerved, veering suddenly, dangerously out of the lane and off towards the verge, regained, and saw in her rear view mirror that it wasn’t wounded, there was no blood, but something else had it leaping from one side of the central reservation to the other, across the concrete boundary and back.

What was it, the animal? Something terrified, something wrong with it to make it twist and turn like that. Was it wounded, after all? Injured, and in pain? And only a matter of time before some other car behind her going to come upon it, bring it down …

Anna’s own car ran on. For what else could she do? Later, she thought about that a lot. What else could she have done? A main highway after all, the charge of speed at her back, and you could only go in one direction, couldn’t stop, couldn’t slow down even – but still there’d been the feeling of being held, for a second, in an eternity of time, by the look in the animal’s eye, its yellow, yellow eye, that just for a split second had focused on her as she’d swept past …

That feeling comes back on her now.

For as she’d rushed past, with her own heart jumped up at her with the shock of swerving, and the shock of what she’d seen and even so driving on and away, Anna had taken in, at some point, hadn’t she, that there’d been a group of houses, impoverished little new builds, with tiny yards that led out on to the back of the motorway
with poor excuses for windbreaks or sound-breaks put up to protect them from the road, and she had understood then that that’s where it must have got out from, from that cramped little place in which it had been, no doubt, illegally kept …

And was out now, out there on the road. Not knowing what it was doing, how it had got there, where it would go …

That look in its eye …

But still, what could she do?

The thing that springs out at you makes you swerve, be alert to yourself, turn the corner
…

She’d kept going. Saw it getting smaller, smaller in her rear vision mirror. Still twisting, leaping. Back and forth, back and forth. The car picked up speed again and she drove on, and for a few minutes even then did nothing … Then she slowed down, reached for her phone, putting in the redial number without taking her eyes off the road and miraculously got reception, a clear line.

‘Where are you?’

And everything had changed by then. When she replied, answered him.

When she said, ‘Just …’ and heard herself speaking the word. For what was in that ‘Just’? Just … Nothing? That it was only a word, only an answer for him because she had no other language for him then, to describe what had happened.

‘Anna?’

‘Just …’

Or was it that in that one word she came back to words, while the road went by, the trees flicking past … That all she’d needed was just the space to answer him. A word, a ‘just’ … Before she could speak to her husband again.

Whatever it was, before he said, ‘Well come back, for goodness’ sake’, it was like the present had become the past and everything that had brought her to that moment, every thought and feeling, gone.

And she could answer him fully then, ‘I know, I am. I’m on my way.’

And see? How the rest of it, like the story that’s already run, becomes fixed now, how all of this part becomes inevitable like the part that went before? How Neil told her that he would call the police, that she needed to tell him exactly where she was as they would have patrols out and would have someone in the vicinity who could help. That people did it all the time, he said, kept these things as pets and sometimes they escaped, trying to get back, he supposed, to the hills in which they’d once, long ago, in another lifetime, belonged. He told her to take the next exit and get back on the main road headed the other way, that they could be by the second chairlift at eleven, that the boys would be pleased, that they’d been asking at breakfast where she was.

‘What were you thinking?’ he said. ‘Heading off like that? Without telling us?’

‘I don’t know what I was thinking,’ she’d replied.

Which was the truth. ‘She had no idea what she was doing’, remember? The story began that way. Through the morning. Through the night before. The beginning of her leaving, the idea she had of breaking with them all … The whole passage of time commandeered by feelings that were strange to her, unknown. The only certainty, the thing she knows now with a jolt of clearest sense, is that when the car turned the corner that morning and swept past what she’d seen on the road, caught the look of, in its eye, before leaving it forever twisting and turning in her rear vision mirror all those years ago … Was the moment when she herself had broken free.

The tiniest fronds we called newborn. They were bright green and damp, growing up close to each other on the bank and smaller than my little finger, curled up with secrets at their tips though their stems were nearly see-through in the bright summer light. Newborn, see? Not at all bunched up and hard like the big old
ponga
ferns that grew brown quickly and crackled, straight out of my Nanni’s earth. Just ‘newborn’, her word for them. ‘Little babies, still wet in their creases … Feel …’ she said, and she showed me how to poke my fingers into the nub of the leaf, feel the stickiness there that would make the plant grow.

I learned everything from my Nanni then. Before growing up, before getting old. My parents took study leave most summers when I was a child, from the university they taught in, and I’d be sent up north every year to my mother’s mother’s house. And long those days were, filled with idleness and hot weather, swimming in the river at
the bottom of Nanni’s garden or sitting out on her front veranda, watching the freight train pass by across the far paddocks, going down through the middle of the country all the way to the sea. And wild. It all was. Even that train, going off into distance. As the house in its garden was, with its ferns and the tangled bush in the back gully, hiding its river like a cool secret … So different from where I lived in the city with my parents through the rest of the year. For Nanni’s was dark and the rooms in angles, is my memory. There were her bowls of messy flowers on the tables and in the kitchen dishes draining on the board, something cooking on the tops. It struck me like the heat every year I arrived, the great change between the two places I knew as ‘home’. And for the different places, different words. Like ‘newborn’ for a leaf, like ‘come here you skinny and let your old Nanni just eat you’. Different kinds of speaking for different lives, those half sentences of hers with laughs in them that didn’t even finish sometimes, or went into a question. Or the way words got turned into something my Nanni went ahead and did. Her saying just, ‘Who loves you best?’ before picking me up and holding me right in next to her, so I could feel her big body like pillows. ‘Who’s got you now but your old
Puki
, eh?’

She had someone else she loved though, not only me. ‘My Lovely Lady’ is what she called her, Queenie: ‘My dearest, sweetest friend’. She was someone just as old as my old Nanni and so known to her they may as well be sisters, they both told me, ‘underneath the skin’. Queenie lived
in the country, out on the
marae
with her family on land they’d always had there – only she came in. Once a week. Or twice. Sometimes more than that I think she came – it all depended on the lorry her cousin Pete was driving and whether he had to deliver vegetables or pick up goods in town.

‘Pete coming?’ I would hear my grandmother say, down the black phone in the hallway where she stood talking to Queenie most days. And then I heard laughing, and whispering into the big mouthpiece like she was just a little girl. ‘Oh yeah?’ she might answer then and with other ways of talking that my mother really hated. ‘I’m seeing you then tomorrow, you.’ Or, ‘Get yourself in here like I say so, hear me? You move your big behind!’ All sentences like that with nothing in them of the special manners that my parents so believed in. I don’t think they could have realised back then, my parents, how much I heard, how I stood witness to this language through those summers in the way I did. If they had they would have surely stopped my visits all those years when I was small. My mother hating it, if she had known, that Queenie came in.

But she did come though, and she did stay. All that talk down the phone between her and Nanni just a plan for the two of them to get together for as long as they could, drink their cups of tea and sit out on the back step like they would always have more things to say. Sometimes Queenie might be there the whole day and then we had our supper, big tea, we called it, outside too, Pete getting in late after he’d been at the pub and I’d hear the lorry
idling out on the road in the hot night. No manners then either with him yelling for them from out there and hooting the horn. ‘Time to wind up, you two talking women, hey? I’m getting up the road so come on, old
Wahine
! Shift yourself, old girl!’

Queenie was
Wahine
all right. She was full
Maori
and seemed not one bit of her ‘gone over’ – that was my Nanni’s expression for her, for her lovely dark. Not one fleck of white was in her, not a single crazy granny or daddy gone off with a
pakeha
, not one. ‘She’s full, honey,’ Nanni said. ‘My Lady. She’s complete.’ She was
Ngarawhahia
, come from twenty miles out from town and twenty miles a long way in those days on twisty rutted roads that snaked through the yellow hills and back into the native forest behind them. It was like a story to me, to hear about what it was like out there. Nanni and Queenie would sit talking, for hours, it seemed, about the family that lived together with all the babies and the nannies and everyone they knew and it really was like a story, to hear the lovely long names of those people and about their Meeting House that was carved all over and dark inside where they might sleep sometimes, and the place by the kitchens where they dug the
hangi
in, to cook the big lunches and feasts. Even the lorry Pete drove described it, covered thick with dust from the roads and maybe a dog or two dogs on the back, jiggling around with all the leftover vegetables that he sold in town … Like it had been driven out of another place
and time and parked up there in front of Nanni’s. Come straight out of another world.

But Queenie, well. If all this was a story then she was the main character here. And just waiting for me to remember her is what waiting to write down any of this has been like. The way her laugh was louder than any other person I’d ever heard, her face closer. The way she wore men’s jumpers with holes in them over her summer dress, gumboots or bare feet, depending on the weather. How she didn’t care for clothings, that’s what she called them, or sitting quietly because why should she when she had so much to say? And what would be the point of that, anyhow? Of quietness? There’d be enough of quietness, she always said, when she was dead – and going on for ever too. ‘Awful bloody quiet here,’ she sometimes called out to us when she’d just got in, Nanni and me sitting in the kitchen and not even the radio on, no other talking. ‘Gives me the willies, girl,’ she’d say. ‘Come on and let’s get the billie on for tea.’

All this of course like nothing my mother would have ever said or done. And Nanni kept it from my mother too, the way she was with her dear friend. How changed it was in Nanni’s house those times when my mother brought me up at the beginning of summer and came to fetch me again at the end … Because those afternoons, those mornings … Before she drove away again in her smart car … Awful bloody quiet then, for sure. My grandmother had a part to play, I see now, and acted it, during
those brief visits, behaved just like my mother then who never swore or raised her voice or played with words in any of those other ways I knew about from Queenie and Nanni when they were together. Like Nanni herself was different when my mother was around. No ‘eh’ then, or laughing or the
te-henga Maori
. No little jokes or half words, phrases, that might come in. My mother always said that questions should be proper invitations, see? To dialogue and not just crowded in. There were rules about things like that, she said, and not to be broken. ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ and keeping your sentences whole. ‘Finish what you start to say,’ she said. ‘Have phrases that, from the outset, you know will contain within them just the right amount of words for all that you intend to show and to convey.’

Aueee
. Poor girl. My mother. Hope she doesn’t read this now. For the minute she was out the door and gone my Nanni pulled me to her, and held me in, sang one of the old songs you don’t need a mother for, just ancestors, just all the dead. We closed our eyes, both of us, to allow my grandmother’s daughter time to drive away, get down the road, then
Aueee
, Nani said, like lamenting, like a sigh. Half words and lines creeping in again slowly, slowly as the hushed air took form around us, the silence and relief now that we were on our own. ‘Hold on to you, you little,’ Nanni said as she squeezed me, ground her teeth. Then she scrunched up her nose to make a funny face. ‘Who’s got you, eh? And always keep you safe. Let’s call our Lady now, you and me. Let’s get her in.’

Is how it always went, when my mother was gone. First her visit and the strange ways, then the sound of the car driving away, Nanni getting Queenie on the phone and everything all right again, her back with us next day, or the next, and they talked about it sometimes, my mother’s mother and her dear best friend. And sometimes, too, they would also cry. It’s where that kind of talking would lead, Nanni told me later. It’s where it was bound to go. Those days, as the hours went on and their voices got low and the tea sat cold in the pot, the slops in the cups, Nanni would turn away from me and talk so low to her Lovely Lady that I could never hear, was not allowed to. ‘Run away,’ she’d say then. ‘Your big old ears don’t need to listen. Go!’ And I knew it would turn into sadness, when she set me apart from her that way. The stories they told then always made my Nanni cry.

As I say, my parents can’t have known that this was going on. Queenie coming over and the tears, and I always kept it from them easy, the talking and the things I came to learn. Looking back now, I think how my mother must have dreaded those years that I would surely find out sometime just the answer to the secret that she tried so hard to hide. But then, all of us, my grandmother included, were of a family so well used to behaving the way we did that it could only ever be
just-keep-it-in-girl, keep-it-to-yourself
. And there was no one else to look after me, those summers my parents were gone. Until we moved away entire, Nanni was the only one. My mother had a specialisation
for Romance languages and literature and so she needed Europe – ‘It’s part of me’, is what she always said. And my father, who was an historian, could always come follow her into some medieval town or other and make do, he’d find something to amuse himself with there while she was researching her book on unaffiliated sonnets, caesuras in sentences no one had even thought about before.

It’s no wonder, when I think about it, that I stayed a child so long. There was the quiet talking of my parents, their ordered, oblong rooms, a life of universities and of books, with dainty cups and saucers laid out on a tray – set against that other louder, crying time in a place that had my mother’s past in it … Of course it keeps you young, newborn, kind of. With all around you people turning secrets into stories you might never get to tell. I had to wait for the summers to come so that I could learn anything at all, fit the pieces in and watch out for little details, learn from my grandmother in words I could overhear, about my family, my
whenau
, with language and with hearing names of this one or of that one, someone they called
Wharakau
or sometimes Dick. Who was he, anyhow? I tried to figure it. That man they both loved? What was his real name or where was he now? Not asking, though, like children never really do ask, the big questions, if they’re not knowing how the grown ups will act, how they’ll be, when the replies came through. But watching my Nanni’s face instead, when she and Queenie were talking in those sad crying times. Trying to understand. Trying to see.

That’s how I went on, from summer to summer, surrounded by yellow hills, the thwack-thwack of the distant train, the bleating of the sheep. There were the little new fronds growing right up to our front door, green as green. And we were together, my Nanni and me, just sitting or talking or playing, making food, all one kind of known and familiar life – so no need anyway, I told myself, to go asking about the other mixed-up questions. ‘No need, sweetie’ is what Queenie had told me, too, when I tried to ask her once about my mother, why my mother stayed away from her own mother the way she did. And why my Nanni lived so on her own, not really knowing anyone in the village where her own house was or seeing anyone but only Queenie when Quennie came in. Why she spoke the way she did, acted the way she did, so different from my mother, in that language of hers that only her dear Lady understood, half one thing, half another, those words of hers that somehow had a body to them that took you on its lap, took you in.

Queenie would bring something, every week, when she came in and the nights she stayed on we’d all have it for some kind of a big tea. Sweetcorn or a pig’s leg. Pumpkins. Plums from the wild fruit trees that grew up behind her old house behind the
marae
. There they had an old mighty vegetable patch she kept talking about, set behind a
manuka
hedge to shelter it, and fed from all the old water from the wash house and the chickens that ran around there. That was a real garden, Nanni said.
Real Maori
kai
there and none of your
pakeha
little taters and mealy fruits. We should all go there and see it for ourselves. Real gardens, food. With earth around it, rain come down. ‘My dream is one day I’ll take you,’ she said to me, ‘when you’re a big girl, and show you. When you’re grown up, okay. A visit of our own and Queenie and Pete, we’ll all go there together.’

But the years passed, and not as many of them as I like to remember, and I never went, to that place that stayed so far away and was somewhere for stories. Instead Nanni gave Queenie other kinds of food for her to take back there, tins of milk and biscuits that came in sealed wrappers, jars of jam and pickle you bought in the shops. So who was to know that where Queenie came from even existed, if I couldn’t go there, or Nanni, but it was only Queenie who might belong? Who was to believe there was such a home where pigs ran around and then were killed, and people dug a hole in the ground and cooked them there with
kumera
and other vegetables, running crackling with the pig fat under hot, hot stones? Who was to believe that once upon a time a white girl had ever gone out there at all, met a
Maori
boy, and had a baby, fallen, fallen in love?