Kehua! (22 page)

Rita advanced and this time did slap her, quite hard across the face with the back of her hand.

‘It was a cursed day for all of us,’ said Rita, ‘when your slut of a mother moved in down the road. I was mad to take you
in. Everyone said so. Bad blood will out.’

Beverley had quite forgotten, in her preoccupation with her own drama, that Arthur and Rita had their passions too. That so
far as she was concerned she was a bit-part player in their drama. It is easy for children to forget this and for all her
scarlet lipstick, new strutting breasts and bold words she was still a child, and playing with fire.

‘That’s enough,’ Arthur said. ‘Women shouldn’t hit, they can’t hit hard enough.’ Rita started to cry and Beverley was amazed.
She had never seen Rita cry. Once when she was trying to make a mayonnaise and it curdled twice, but that was different.

‘I was the locum,’ said Arthur to Beverley. ‘Your mother came to me with a split eardrum. Her husband had hit her.’

‘Why did he hit her?’ asked Beverley. She was already looking for excuses for her father, though she could not see quite where
she would find them.

‘That’s a funny sort of question,’ said Rita. ‘Well, if you insist on knowing, because she was a bothersome slut and taunted
him. Everyone knew he couldn’t get it up and keep it up for longer than two minutes. When you came along, my, was everyone
surprised. So don’t you go thinking of yourself as anything grand.’ She spoke to Beverley but looked at her husband. The tears
had gone: her eyes were hard and glittering.

‘I felt sorry for her. That was the idea, why she came to me, the sweet little thing, pale and small, little lost girl from
a foreign land. Little Kitchie. She thought she could twist me around her little finger but she soon found otherwise.’

He was speaking now to Beverley, relaxing in his armchair, more beer in his hand; she had her arms crossed over her chest.
She wished she hadn’t put on this ridiculous dress. It was archetypal, elemental, it had set the wrong things off.

‘She was the foreigner, not us,’ said Rita. Arthur took no notice of her. It occurred to Beverley how very little notice Arthur
ever took of Rita.

‘And you know how it is, things develop,’ said Arthur. ‘I was a young man, a bachelor, the girls round there weren’t up to
much. Since you ask so many questions you might as well know. Okay, I was the fellow she wanted to run off with, because she’d
had my baby, and she was fool enough to tell him, so he did her in with the bread knife with which she was making her special
fancy cucumber sandwiches. She even peeled the cucumbers, nice thin slices and all. I had her bum in the air, skirt up over
her head while she went on working. I must say, we used to have some fun, Kitchie and me. Then he was in the room and we had
words, and before I could stop him, he had the knife and the serrated edge, very sharp, along the neck, through the carotid
artery. Not much you can do about that.’

‘Bullshitter,’ said Rita, astonishingly. Arthur ignored her.

‘And the dog leaping and barking its head off. Then he ran out of the house, and the dog followed. I did what I could for
her, but there was no stopping the bleeding. I looked in on you but you were still asleep, so I went after him, heard the
gunshot and found your father dead. Hard to miss with a gun to the head, otherwise he
would have. He even got the dog quite cleanly, though it took three bullets. By the time I got back you were up at Rita’s.
Little bloody footsteps up the road. I felt it was all my fault.’

‘So you were in the room when she died?’ said Rita. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘I’d hardly be fool enough to tell you,’ said Arthur.

‘He should have killed you, not her,’ said Rita. Her hands were clawed, looking like talons.

‘You know how it is,’ said Arthur. ‘We fellows stick together. Pack behaviour, all that. I’d got the bitch, I was top dog,
he recognised that. She went, I didn’t.’

What have I done? thought Beverley. What have I unleashed? These two respectable people, he with his leather elbow patches,
she in her best cardigan, revealed as warring Olympians with the passions of Aeneas and Dido, Jason and Medea, they are overwhelmed
by loss, they are transfigured by hate. I have to get out of here, I have to run, before I do more damage. I will leave bloody
footsteps until the end of time. That was the curse my father laid on me when he took the knife to my mother’s throat. If
he was my father, and not this man here.

‘Was that the reason you married me? To own the child? It was never anything to do with me?’

Rita was pale and gaunt and carved in stone and yet softly massy and greasy grey like a whale. Even the pink cardy did not
help; she had turned into something huge and elemental.

‘You had the farm, I could do with that,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t going to marry you for your looks, was I? But you were a good
enough lay and you’d look after the child. A man’s got to seize his opportunities.’

The good Doctor Jekyll had turned into Mr Hyde, and grown grotesque and vast as his wife: the parents who weren’t parents.
Hyde blending into werewolf under the moon, the friend by day but Dracula by night:
Brief Encounter
on a monster screen with Trevor Howard played by King Kong. You didn’t know who you were or where you are. King Kong picked
up the knife, Kitchie struggled and kicked in the monstrous hands. Perhaps Arthur had done the knifing, run after the fleeing
Walter, killed him with his own gun, faked a suicide.

‘I’ve said too much, have I then, Rita? Got you all hot and bothered?’

He got to his feet and lurched into the kitchen. Was he looking for a knife? Would there be another pool of blood, for Beverley
to splash through in her smart new shiny brown court shoes?

Life would always be the same – the premonition came so hard and fast and clear it made her tremble – or was it the gust of
rage and hate shaking the ground beneath her? This was to be the future, dancing down the Yellow Brick Road in a nightmarish
Land of Oz, where the faster your footwork the better you dodged the pools of blood. You could get quite skilled at it. But
they would always be there. As it had been in the past, so would it be in the future. It was what you were born to.

The dusty yellow road to Rita’s: she was past that now, she must go on and on, further, faster. She could not afford to stop.
She would take the morning bus to Auckland. It left at six-thirty – another terrible part of her said this was a godsend:
they could not object to her going. Her conscience would be clear. She was the innocent one, they the villains: she could
run now to the ends of the earth, to England, to Home, without reproach or blame. Her mother, by dying, had set her free.
Her heart soared, she licked her lips and wondered why, and thought my soul is trying to escape, and set her lips tightly
so it didn’t get out.

‘You did it, didn’t you,’ screeched the whale monster at the shadowy Trevor Howard man, following him out of the room. Smoke
from his pipe curled around him like fog blanketing the land of Mordor. ‘It was you. That cucumber bit is just your vile fantasy.
I know you. You loved her. She wouldn’t leave Walter for you, and you were so angry you took a knife to that sluttish throat
and then went out after that poor man, and shot him and poor Patch. You had no business killing Patch.’

‘Just a dog,’ said Arthur.

Beverley fled the room and didn’t think they even noticed her going. They weren’t her parents anyway: they’d only ever pretended
they were. She would wait until morning and then she would flee. The kehua were flapping their wings and hissing
run, run, run now,
but sherry had dulled her ears.

That night the man who was probably her father came in and sat on the end of her bed. He had never done this before. Beverley
slept naked beneath a sheet – the nights were warm. The section of the verandah where she slept was glassed in, and in the
evenings she would let down a curtain of mosquito netting to keep the insects out. She was lying awake, and saw him approach:
he was wearing his red silk Noël Coward dressing gown and the slippers she had given him on his last birthday. He was smoking.
The netting made his outline wavery until he pushed it aside, but at least he was back to human size. Whatever had possessed
him, and possessed Rita too, had passed.

There was no doubt Arthur was a handsome man. She had always thought so, especially since her visit to the Auckland Library
had stripped him of the father role and reclothed him in the glamour she had granted him when she was small. He seemed sober
enough now. She had heard him and Rita having sex on the old sofa in the kitchen: at least she assumed that was what it was.
She was surprised. It had not seemed part of what went on between them. She had seen a bull covering a cow: an old farmer
had almost forced her to watch and watched her while she watched. She was around thirteen and had been out with her father
on a house call. He’d been in the house with the wife. When her father came out it was still
going on; she’d hoped he would take her away but he stayed to watch too. That just made her cross with him. He should have
protected her but he didn’t. He seemed on the farmer’s side. The cow hadn’t seemed to like it, but what could it do? The bull
was just determined, and twice her size and massive. Beverley had tried to look superior and uninvolved, and had just shrugged
when they asked if she had enjoyed it.

Now there were cries of protest, pleasure, pain from the kitchen – at the end his gaspings, and little mews of contentment
from Rita. It was hard to know what she, Beverley, felt about this: mostly she felt stupid because of her ploy with the lipstick
and the breasts, and infantile because the revelations were surely just part of some fantasy game they played, only this time
they’d involved her, and she was nowhere nearer the truth. What she mainly felt now was left out, excluded when she’d heard
Rita and Arthur pad off, and giggles and murmurs as the bedroom door closed behind them. She’d thought that would be all for
the night.

When he came out to the verandah a couple of hours later she thought Arthur looked like a film star stepped out of the screen,
finely sculpted but very male: the kind, understanding blue eyes, the slightly cruel mouth, the fair arched eyebrows; even
the balding domed forehead suited him. He looked distinguished and intellectual: Leslie Howard playing a university professor.
She had always recognised his good looks, even while she avoided him, especially since her visit to the Auckland Library when
his status as father had somehow changed. It was not going to be incest: he was not her father.

She’d been lying there staring out at her friend the Southern Cross, and thinking about its distant stillness and how unimportant
the affairs of mankind were, and how she must not fall asleep, and planning to get up really early so as to get her few things
together and secretly get the six-thirty ferry to Auckland where she would stay with her friend Babs, and get to Sydney and
thence a cheap fare to London. Migrant ships were flooding into Oz carrying tens of thousands of £10 poms outwards, almost
empty on the return journey, except for ballast like her: runaway girls, anxious to start a new life, or girls out of college
wanting to be where the action was, to put parental disapproval for once and all far, far behind them in the Antipodes. She
wished Arthur had not come in. She did not
want anything to change her mind. She wanted his behaviour, and Rita’s, to be inexcusable.

‘Sorry about all that,’ he said. ‘Sorry to involve you. Things got out of hand. You’ll be headachy in the morning. I brought
you in an aspirin.’

He was holding out a couple of pills. She leant on her elbow, took one from his familiar hand and swallowed it, without water.
She was good at that: her specialty. Her friends admired her for it. He was handing her another one.

‘Doctor’s pills,’ he said.

She took that one too. She realised he could see a patch of her breast when the sheet fell away as she supported herself on
her elbow. She took her time and let it fall away a little more as he looked, then lay virtuously on her back with the sheet
up to her chin.

‘Out of hand. You can say that again,’ she said. ‘It’s my life you’re playing with.’

‘Mine too,’ he said. ‘It’s hard for Rita and me: all the rumours still going the rounds, even up here. I was the mystery lover,
I did the murder, I was your father. Rita was in on it, that sort of thing.’

He moved closer to her, and now sat at waist level. She could feel his body against hers. She should sit up and say she wanted
to be left alone; he would go then. She stayed where she was: an agreeable feeling of sulk and passivity mixed came over her:
exhaustion from emotional shock, the sense of her own slight smooth body so close to his: the flattery of his interest in
her. He was not her father, he was just someone who had married a friend of her mother’s the better to set himself up in the
world. She would go along with fate, see what happened next. Seventeen was too old to be a virgin, never to have been with
a boy, not even kissed a man. And in the morning
she would be gone. In the meantime she wanted his hand on her breast.

‘What really happened?’ she asked. She doubted that she’d get a true answer.

‘No idea,’ he said. ‘No one will ever know. I called by with her medication, found her in a pool of blood, none left in her.
A pile of fancy sandwiches half made – that bit was true, so were your little footprints outside – the bread knife on the
floor. I got the police out from Christchurch, a search party went out after him and found him and the dog in the old quarry.
Rita and I were already courting.’

He was smiling. ‘You and that dress,’ he said, ‘and that lipstick. That was really something. Turns you on, doesn’t it, talk
of blood and death. It does me. But then I had to look after Rita, calm her down, the best way I knew.’

‘You made me drunk,’ she said.