Ricochet Baby (3 page)

‘I did it with a Mr Whippy man,’ says Marise. ‘When he parked in our street after dark.’

‘Marise, you didn’t!’

‘The man from the AA when my car broke down.’

‘You’re lying. Your car never breaks down.’

‘I ran the battery flat. Oh, and there was the man who fixed the washing machine. That seemed like a near thing.’

‘You deserve to get the pox.’ Roberta doesn’t say that other ugly, scary word people use now. She knows how old-fashioned she sounds.

‘It was only a baby I was after.’

‘Why don’t you go on an in vitro programme?’

‘Because I smoke and I’m too old.’

‘You’re like my sister-in-law, Orla, I guess,’ says Roberta, thinking that sympathy is the best way to deal with Marise’s
distress
. ‘She can’t have children either. Well, the doctors say she can, but she can’t. They can’t. Nobody knows why.’

‘How much am I like her? Do we have things in common?’ Marise asks eagerly, hungry for clues to her condition.

‘You’re not remotely like her. She’s so holy nobody except Bernard would ever have got through her filtering system.’

‘Oh.’ Marise is disappointed.

But, Roberta thinks, in lots of ways she really is like Orla, in those moments of despair that you see in their eyes, the resignation, the kind of outer toughness that they hide behind. Orla cloaks her sorrow by seeming not to care any more about how she looks; Marise smokes like a volcano all the time and grizzles about the loss of smokers’ rights. Since smoking in the office has been banned, she spends her spare moments in the smokers’ trough, a concrete fenced area outside the building. She carries a mauve umbrella, hand-painted with pale blue flowers, to keep her silver fall of hair dry while she smokes on wet days.

Orla, on the other hand, neither smokes nor is too old to hope for children. There’s still plenty of time for it to happen, but you can tell that it probably won’t. Orla wears bloomers. Roberta sees them hanging on the clothesline when she’s out at the farm.

‘I need a royal stud, Roberta.’

‘Maybe you’ve had one all along and just didn’t notice.’ Roberta has always liked Marise’s handsome Derek. They look like a magnificent couple.

‘Tell me, do you know when you conceive? I mean, do you come?’

‘This is my first,’ says Roberta.

‘So did you this time?’

‘I don’t know when it happened.’

Marise sits back, white-knuckled, her grey pewter earrings gleaming against her cheekbones. ‘You’d have to know.’

‘I don’t see why. Why should I know a thing like that?’

‘Because you must know when something like that happens to you,’ says Marise. ‘Like shadows on the sun.’

Roberta starts to laugh, in spite of herself. ‘You’re crazy.’

‘Like a blade breaking through an egg.’

She stops laughing because this sounds too sinister, too
troubling
, and she doesn’t want to bear the weight of Marise’s problems. ‘If I don’t know, perhaps it’s not true.’

She turns to her screen, processing a return for Josh Thwaite, spray painter of Wainuiomata. ‘This guy’s tax is for two grand and he’s sent a cheque for eighty-nine dollars — what does he think he’s playing at? Who does he think he’s kidding?’

‘I expect he got it mixed up with his electricity bill. Dump it in the unclean box,’ says Marise.

The unclean box is as hygienic as any other stacked metal tray in their utilitarian open-plan office, mildly refurbished with dim blue carpets and new sets of vertical Venetian blinds. The box gets its name because it holds all the tax returns that have to be
forwarded
for further examination by Revenue Control, when the
person
paying tax has deviated from the correct method of payment. Not a good way to draw attention to yourself. Roberta taps in some numbers. Josh Thwaite averages a turnover in excess of fifty
thousand
dollars a year.

‘Business must be down for Mr Thwaite,’ she comments. ‘He ought to be paying more than this.’

‘Make a note of it,’ says Marise, suddenly efficient. ‘Somebody will pick him up.’

Which, indeed, is quite likely. In the staff canteen, at
morning
tea, Roberta listens to the investigators recounting their exploits. This guy had cash buried in the garden. You wouldn’t believe it, the way they think they can get away with hiding the stuff. Think they can fool us, but we break them, we know when they’ve been picking up cash jobs. We break them.

Roberta glances at Marise and wonders if she has tried a spray painter. What if Josh Thwaite has three kids already and another baby on the way?

He is a marked man. Marise takes a phone call and while she is not looking Roberta plucks the return out of the box and slides it under her computer pad.

‘D
ARLING, YOU WILL
come, won’t you?’ Sarah Lord tries to disguise the anxiety in her voice. Being in love is supposed to be delightful, even if her lover is married to someone else, but it has begun to feel increasingly like grumbling toothache. If she could get through a day without thinking about him, perhaps things would improve. Or if she saw him just once more, she could say goodbye to him properly. But this is an often rehearsed scenario that never
eventuates
. At the last moment, just when she’s preparing herself for grand exits, he mentions a next time, and she doesn’t dare to tempt fate by asking if he really means it. He lives in another town, a man who passes from one place to another in his work, which is collecting rock samples for a university.

The same ordinary, unsurprising dilemma that women like Sarah, who have been abandoned by their husbands, face all the time. The single men who are left are gay and the divorced ones are paying maintenance (including her own husband, but he has just about enough to go round) and love is like living on a railway
station
waiting for late trains.

Her lover’s only son is sick, and he doesn’t know if he will be round her way, after all.

‘But he’ll be all right, won’t he? Nothing serious?’ she says.

‘I can’t talk any longer. My wife will notice the phone bill.’

‘Don’t hang up.’ As if his wife paid the bills, although some women do, like ironing socks and taking out the rubbish. Masochistic.

But he has gone.

Standing beside the phone, Sarah considers her house, a 1930s bungalow. Although it’s shabby, everything in it has been chosen by her, or given to her by her mother. Some of her
belongings
have been rescued from storage: paintings, crowded
bookshelves
, pottery jars, floral pitchers and fat white china hens with their heads on an angle, a chiming clock with an eagle etched on its
face, a weathered piano engraved with fire-eating dragons that her mother used to play. The children, Ellie and Jack, have gone to stay with their father, everything is ready for her lover’s arrival. A free woman, she is alone in her empty house.

She is still standing by the phone, the receiver quiet in its
cradle
, when it begins to ring again. Although Sarah picks it up quickly, her voice is cool and remote; she knows he will have found a way to come. But the caller is her mother, Wendy, whom Sarah calls by her name.

‘I’ve decided to pay you a visit,’ Wendy says.

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Oh no.’ Sarah’s voice grows faint. ‘You can’t.’

‘Why ever not, dear? I thought you’d be pleased to have some company.’

‘Thank you, but it’s not convenient right now. I’ve got a friend coming to stay.’

Her mother’s tone is sturdy but Sarah detects uncertainty. ‘I won’t get in the way, you know me.’

‘You can’t do this to me, Wendy.’ She feels like an axe
murderer
.

Wendy is instantly tremulous. ‘So you don’t want to see me?’

Sarah hesitates. ‘I always want to see you, Wendy,’ she says.

And in a way it’s true, no different from other daughters who love their mothers but just don’t want to see them all the time. But Sarah has been adopted by Wendy, and it seems to her that many politenesses and rituals of kindness must be observed which are absent, in a way, from relationships of nature. Reassurances of love that others take for granted. She is her mother’s only child, her Sarah. Princess, she whispered to her, late at nights, when she thought Sarah was asleep. Often, Sarah feels it is her responsibility to make Wendy feel guiltless about mothering her, to protect her from the opinion of people who refer to mothers like her as
child-snatchers
.

So she is trying to be calm and reasonable, as if she might lull Wendy into doing nothing. But that has never really been possible. In spite of their mutual concern, it is Wendy’s nature, once she has embarked on a scheme, to be an unstoppable force.

‘Can you leave it a few days? There’s something happening in my life right now,’ Sarah tells her.

Wendy sighs, not asking what it is.

‘I’m studying,’ Sarah says, which is true, since she is a
part-time
student taking English the long, hard way. She sees Wendy now, an old woman with rough white curls, wearing a long Indian cotton skirt, amid the incredible clutter of the tumbledown shack she occupies by the sea on the rugged Taranaki coastline. Only this is not strictly correct, at this given moment, because Wendy uses the phone in the camping ground office. There are probably unkempt young men playing pool in the recreation room, the air full of smoke and ragged with their laughter.

‘There’s something I want to talk about,’ says Wendy. ‘I don’t want to leave it till later.’

‘You’re not ill, are you?’

‘No,’ says Wendy, with considerable vigour. ‘But there’s some putting right to be done.’

‘Not that again.’ Sarah guesses, at once, that Wendy is again on the track of her birth parents. ‘It doesn’t matter any more, I don’t have expectations. I guess, it’s just not a problem.’ What her
children
would say. Not a problem. No way, Jose. Get a life, Ma. This is what children say, this is what Sarah says to her mother.

‘Sarah, we could take a garden tour.’ Wheedling now. This is the part Sarah hates — Wendy begging.

But gardening is Wendy’s passion, even if her passion is more imagination than fact. Outside her cottage stand old wash tubs filled with marigolds and flowering sweet peas, protected from the
elements
and drifting sand by lengths of sacking. In her head, she owns parks and gardens as large as country estates. After Mac died, she moved from one to another of his brothers’ houses, treating them as if they were her own. If people called when her brothers-in-law and their wives were out, she would offer to show them the garden, as if it were hers. Do look at my snapdragons, she would say, in even the meanest of the suburban gardens she periodically inhabited. I’m thinking about spraying the roses, that’s if they’re not beyond redemption, or perhaps I’ll just turn them over. Things seem to have gone to pot. She would laugh at her own joke but nobody else did. None of them allow her to stay any more, only Sarah. Wendy hasn’t tried to move in with Sarah, or not until recently, when her daughter has been on her own, as she puts it. But this is coming too close for comfort. My mother is so lonely, Sarah tells her friends and, lately, her lover. I wish I could do more for her.

Wendy is regrouping her energies. ‘Did I tell you about my father’s conservatory in England?’ she asks. ‘The loggia we called it, it had these wonderful high arches. Inside, the earth smelled rich and warm, and outside, jasmine grew up the wall, flourishing in the damp air of spring nights. It was romantic and European, in the
tradition
of Turgenev. My father loved Turgenev, did I ever tell you that? He was a classical kind of man. You would have liked my father, Sarah.’

‘Yes, you’ve told me, Wendy. I wish I’d known him.’

Wendy is resolute and defiant. ‘Actually, I’ve booked a garden tour for both of us. It would do you good to get out for the day.’

‘How do you know what’s good for me?’ Sarah shouts.

Wendy hangs up on Sarah, just as her lover had done. The camp office is closed until the following morning, and by then Wendy will have begun her journey from the coast to connect with the southbound bus.

This is how Sarah comes to be at the bus station the next day, sitting on a vinyl-covered bench, digging her nails into the
putty-coloured
fabric, trying hard not to cry in public. She sees her mother first, recognises something sharply wistful in her face, before she arranges it to meet Sarah. As she climbs down the steps of the bus, Wendy is carrying a large crushed velvet carry-all, with wooden handles. It bulges with all the belongings she has brought. My God, Sarah thinks, my mother is a bag lady.

R
OBERTA RAISES HER
head, astonished by the pile of bodies
surrounding
her. Twenty or so women, looking like beached whales, arranged on mats beside all kinds of men. They breathe in and out, in and out, very slowly, taking deep lungfuls of air, then pant together. Alongside her lies her own husband, Paul Vaughan Cooksley, wearing a look of intense, labouring concentration as he pulls his diaphragm in tight and slowly exhales, huuuh, and the susurration of all their sighs melts together and fill the room like a wave. She tries to imagine weightlessness and the featheriness of flesh that is untouched by sex and its consequences, but it is hard not to think that the point of nature is really to trick human beings, through sensations of delight, into this heaving animal condition.

The instructor, Ann Claude, walks around each mound, observing the couples. She wears lipstick that stays on and Italian shoes. Her shoes are about all they can see of her at the moment. They don’t know whether she has ever had children of her own; she doesn’t let on at pep talk time. Either she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, or she’s holding back some vital information. How much will it hurt, they ask, but she looks impatient and vaguely mysterious. It will hurt, of course, she says, but, no, she can’t say how much. These things are individual.

‘Remember, hubbies,’ she says, and pauses briefly, ‘and
partners
, when you’re in the labour room, you’re there to help the mother relax. Relax. If her lower tummy is sore, it’s best for her to lie on her back, that’s right, roll over, then pull her nightie up, no, during the birth, not now, and lightly stroke your finger tips across her lower abdomen, yes you can practise that, no need to feel embarrassed, we’re all the same here.’

Of course, everyone can see that they are not. But the women on the floor have one thing in common — they are what Roberta’s Presbyterian grandmother would have described as being with child. The men are as different as anybody could imagine; you can tell by their feet, undressed without their shoes. Some wear thick nylon mix work socks with holes, others are clad in fine wool, and all exude, to a greater or lesser degree, the same whiff of bad
bananas. Just by looking along their feet, she can tell what their partner will be like — most of them, anyway. She wishes she didn’t do this analysing and filing of people. Like, well, like an Inland Revenue clerk, if she is truthful. Besides, some of them fool her, like the woman with close-cropped hair, whose partner is another woman dressed in overalls. Or the girl who is rumoured to be
fourteen
, so enormous her thin legs can hardly support her body when she stands up. She comes with her mother.

To Paul and Roberta’s left lies a woman with a taut, satiny throat, beginning to soften and blur beneath her chin. Helen’s clothes are designed to make her look stout and handsome rather than pregnant. Her husband, whose name Roberta never does learn, has bright blue eyes, a heavy moustache, thick, wavy hair streaked with blonde tints, wears a Rolex watch and carries a
cellphone
which he forgets to turn off. When it rings he gives a small apologetic smile but he doesn’t hang up, just excuses himself from the group and walks outside with it clasped to his ear, talking quietly, as if he is in love with it.

One evening Helen had turned to Roberta and said, in a dreamy voice, ‘Did you by any chance happen to see the piece in the paper about the ninety-two-year-old woman who carried a baby inside of her for sixty years?’

Roberta admitted that she had not seen this. How could it possibly be, she asked.

‘It died before birth and calcified inside her. They call it a “stone birth”.’ Helen had said it carefully, so that Roberta would not forget, and then repeated it. Stone birth.

After this, Roberta has tried to act as if the couple were not there. She looks for a different position in the room, but Helen and her
husband
always find a place beside them. Once she found an excuse for them to be late, without telling Paul, because he thinks they are really neat people, but Helen had saved them a place. ‘Helen gives me the shits,’ Roberta tells Paul, but he says ssh, she’ll hear you.

Mr Blue Eyes, as Roberta calls Helen’s husband, is out of the room on a call, when she whispers to her. ‘Did you hear about the woman who left her two children in the car while she looked in the shops?’

‘No,’ Roberta mutters, trying to look as if her breathing is everything. She knows she will hear something horrible. It is worse than she imagines.

‘The car went up in flames, blazing from end to end, and her children were burned. To death.’ Helen’s beautiful fine throat is working. She has a problem, Roberta thinks. Why doesn’t she tell the people on the other side of her?

But she can see why she wouldn’t. The man has
SUCKS
tattooed
on his forehead, and snakes coiled down his arms. His
partner
is a woman with dishevelled hair and a broken tooth. She wears a zipped-up bomber jacket that turns her belly into the shape of a soccer ball. The woman already has children, but it’s the man’s first and she is proud that he wants to know what to do ‘when the time comes’. Sometimes Roberta gets the impression, from the way they look at each other, that these two are crazier about each other than most of the couples in the room. They give her an odd sort of
confidence
, because the woman
does
know what it’s about, and she’s in love and wants more of it, pain and all.

‘Some women shouldn’t be allowed to have children,’ says Helen.

Roberta looks away quickly, smiling at the new couple on the other side of them. The woman is young, although she tries to make herself look older by using heavy foundation and bright
lipstick
. The pair have introduced themselves as Michelle and Sandy. They, too, are an unlikely couple, and Roberta feels that her labelling system is slipping. Sandy is at least thirty, with hair
straggling
over his collar. He has a long, bare upper lip, but beneath his lower one he grows a tiny vee-shaped wisp of hair. He wears a two-piece pink and green patterned outfit that looks like shortie
pyjamas
, and walk socks.

‘All right,’ says Ann Claude. ‘Mother’s going to have a
contraction
now. On to your sides, mothers. Now, pant, pant, blow, pant, pant, blow. Very good. Now, all you dads, glide your hand along her back and massage evenly and slowly, that’s right, another little trial run. She’s having the contraction
now,
okay, and now it’s going off, so glide your hand
away
again.’

On Roberta’s back, Paul’s fingers feel like a bunch of wire spikes.

‘You’re hurting,’ she whispers, but her voice sounds loud. He lets his hand drop. She cannot see his face but she knows she has embarrassed him. She reaches out for his hand, which feels like a surgical glove. Beside them, Michelle giggles. Roberta flicks a glance in her direction, thinking she will meet her eye and stare her down, but Michelle and Sandy’s laughter is private.

‘You’re tickling me,’ Michelle says to Sandy.

‘All right,’ croons Ann Claude, ‘roll over on to the other side now.’

‘I have to take a leak,’ mutters Paul.

‘Can’t it wait?’ Something in the air alarms Roberta. But already Paul has scrambled to his feet and is making his escape. She is left by herself among the monstrous women and their monstrous husbands.

Sandy directs his attention to her. ‘Why did the beetroot blush?’ he murmurs, his eyes flicking over Paul’s empty space.

She pretends she has not heard him.

His voice is insidious, persistent. ‘Go on, give it a go.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Because it saw Mr Green Pea,’ says Sandy, with the
remorseless
insistence of a man who cannot let a joke pass. Roberta readies her label to paste on his file — a person who would crack jokes on his way to the gallows or in the middle of a tax audit. Somebody to watch out for.

Lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, she tells herself how lucky she is. A woman with a job and a husband, and a diamond engagement ring that sits snugly beside her wedding band,
expecting
a planned baby. At twenty-six, she is neither too old nor too young to be having her first child. She has had a scan because she goes to a specialist at her father’s insistence, and specialists like scans; the baby looks fine. It’s got all its fingers and toes, the woman in X-ray had said. She asked Roberta if she wanted to know about the other bits.

Roberta told her, no, she didn’t want to know, and Paul agreed. But she has guessed, from the way the woman spoke, that there was another piece, the mysterious instrument, the little boy’s penis. She has decided not to tell Paul, even though she knows she is right.

At Ann Claude’s command, the group rolls sideways again, and this time she rolls with them, so it is not so obvious she is alone. She is facing Mr Blue Eyes’ back. She closes her eyes so she does not have to watch what he is doing to Helen. With her eyes shut, Roberta feels comfortable and drowsy, suddenly quite sleepy, remembering what it is like to sleep on her own. In her warm womb, her baby floats and somersaults. Ann Claude has put on a soothing tape, and she thinks that it is good that she is not really
on her own, that now she has Paul, whose hands are on her back, stroking gently but firmly, like a professional masseur, kneading deep into the muscles round the base of her spine where it aches.

‘That’s nice,’ she says out loud, forgetting where she is. She hears Michelle’s high whinnying giggle again and opens her eyes in a panic. Sandy has changed places with Michelle on the mat behind her, and it is his hands on her back, and Paul is walking towards them, his face blind with anger.

‘Y
OU MUST HAVE
known,’ Paul says, as he puts the car away in the garage.

‘I was asleep.’

‘I’d only just walked out of the room.’

‘I don’t know why you’re going on at me,’ Roberta says. ‘It didn’t happen to you.’

‘It’s a violation,’ states Paul. They turn the lights on in the house. ‘I should probably call the police.’

The thought flicks through her mind, unbidden, that he is acting as if there has been a burglary. Someone has taken something that belongs to him.

‘It was a joke,’ she says. All she wants now, after the
unpleasantly
quiet drive home, is for the whole thing to be forgotten.

‘Make up your mind. Now it’s funny? Don’t you care that he put his hand on you? Felt you up?’

‘He’d say it was a mistake, an honest mistake.’

‘He couldn’t say that, he was facing your back. His wife was behind him.’

‘Well, he probably would, wouldn’t he? It’s silly, you couldn’t prove anything.’

‘I saw it, Roberta.’ His voice is pained with disappointment. ‘Wouldn’t you do anything if you were raped?’

This truly frightens her. Once, she had served on a jury for a rape trial.

‘I saw what that woman went through,’ she had told friends at a dinner party, one night when they had all been drinking wine too late. ‘And yet we didn’t convict the man because the evidence was faulty. There was a reasonable doubt. I lie awake at nights and think about that young woman. She was younger than me. I picked she was a street walker, or a sex worker of some kind. Like any
other woman, she had the right to say no, and she had gone through all that, for what? For humiliation and more degradation and probably the pay-off of a good hiding from someone because she couldn’t make her story stick.’

They had all looked away and Paul had wished Roberta would be quiet, because his section head was at the dinner, and the wives were clucking their tongues with disapproval. She could tell that they thought she was wrong.

He knows how she feels. What is he on about, she wonders, blurred with tiredness.

‘We’re not talking about rape,’ she says. ‘What we’ve got here is a prank, like a kid pulling his pants down in the playground.’

‘You’re passive, Roberta, that’s what your trouble is.’

‘I didn’t know I had a trouble. You never told me before.’ Though she is not sure about this; when she thinks about it, he may have been hinting for a while. ‘I was asleep,’ she explains again. ‘Well half asleep anyway, thinking about you.’

‘You often see it in the papers. Women in bed next to their husbands, and some joker comes sneaking in and gets into bed with the pair of them and does the wife over. Husband wakes up, wham bam, there goes this joker on top of his missus. Oh, I was just asleep, she says. There must be a lot of women who get fucked when they’re asleep.’

‘You’re sick.’ She is not just angry, but full of revulsion as well. They look at each other, shocked and bewildered. They do not quarrel as a rule, and now they are having this sudden outburst, saying disgusting and appalling things. Roberta has begun to cry and she would give anything not to be in tears. She does not like to give people that satisfaction. She stopped crying about things years ago. Paul shakes his head slowly, trying to clear the bad things he sees.

‘Roberta, honey. What’s the matter with us?’

He puts his arms around her and she is tempted to struggle, but, hating the way they have become instant strangers to each other, she longs more than ever for it be over. She lets him stroke her hair.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, over and over again. ‘Why don’t you have a bath and get into bed? I love you.’

‘It’ll be funny,’ she says, gulping for air. ‘Some day we’ll say, remember that night when the man who wore shortie pyjamas to
ante-natal classes pretended to be you, and I fell for it. I promise we’ll laugh about it.’

He starts to laugh, and soon they roll around, helpless in their mirth, reliving the moment. They touch each other in small,
reassuring
ways.

After she has had her bath and Paul has made her some Milo, Roberta sits on the edge of the bed, brushing her hair over her shoulders, letting the brush linger there, so that it catches the light for him. It’s rough, corrugated hair but it shines with a fractured fire of its own. During the day she braids it into a sophisticated French plait. Roberta doesn’t think of herself as pretty. She’ll be handsome, she heard people tell her mother when she was young, which is a way of avoiding the truth: she has a steep nose and a long chin that rules out prettiness, dark eyes narrowing at the corners, skin which is as firm and smooth as a dish of clover honey. She has a habit of curling her bottom lip over her teeth, trying to make her face look shorter.