The Last Time We Spoke (20 page)

She’d stop at Albany library en route to Paremoremo. An email had arrived notifying her that a book she’d requested –
Grammar 101
– had finally come in. The librarian had recommended it. Carla’s grammar was rusty, and needed some revision, before she attempted to teach it.

Cupping her hands to shut out the morning glare, she peered through the wall of glass. A figure was moving about inside, switching on lights and computers, and readying the room for the day. Four minutes till opening.

The library and courtyard still looked new, standing out against the tired village backdrop. Tree roots had not yet disturbed the concrete pavers, and the powder-coated joinery surrounding the wide-paned windows was still pristine. A life-size bronze rooster balanced in the middle of the courtyard on a tippling chair, the sculpture tidily encased in a square of buxus hedging. Carla stroked the bronze bird, running her fingers over the scalloped feathers and outstretched wings. She pushed her hand hard up against the bird’s open beak. The sharpness was real, the discomfort almost pleasurable. It was a beautiful piece of art, capturing real life so honestly.

Nine o’clock. The library doors swooshed open.

Inside, traces of the librarian’s perfume confused the familiar and comforting smell Carla so relished – that musty, sweet mix of aged bindings, page-trapped air, and old ink.

She collected the book she’d requested and headed out into the morning. With still an hour before she was due at the prison, she headed for the bakery across the way, wooed there by the aroma of freshly ground coffee beans and warm bread.

Carla rarely bought coffee out. For nearly the same price, she could buy a jar of instant at the supermarket, and it would last her a month. Lately, though, she’d become more reckless, challenging the rules she’d prescribed herself.

‘Morning.’ A wrinkly Chinese man peered out from behind a cabinet of sticky buns, Louise slice, and apricot shortcake.

‘A half-strength flat-white please and a Chelsea bun.’

Many businesses were now owned by Asian people. So much had changed over recent years, and not only in Carla’s small life. The very fabric of New Zealand was being rewoven, with more and more foreigners settling in the country. The influx of Chinese people, in particular, had seen a swell of animosity amongst New Zealanders, many resenting the expensive cars and designer clothes flaunted in the face of tough economic times. Carla herself had harboured some prejudice. It was only after meeting Mingyu, her delightful neighbour, that her preconceptions had been split wide open.

With a steaming paper cup in hand, she strolled over to Kell Park and sat down on a bench. With one hand, she paged through the library book. It was just what she was after – simple explanations, bold print, and multiple examples. However, she wouldn’t be showing it to Ben just yet; she had something else planned for the day’s lesson. The time was right.

A lone rooster ventured closer and began scratching in the dust at Carla’s feet. It was a mangy old thing, with dull, moth-eaten
feathers and a scarred crest. Perhaps a remnant of the bantam population that once roamed the park.

Some years back there’d been much debate in the local gazette about the Albany ‘chook problem’. To cull or not to cull? Nearby residents had voiced their frustration over the noise and mess created by the ever-increasing avian population, while media reports highlighted the desperate lengths some ‘fowl-mouthed’ residents had gone to in order to ensure a peaceful night’s sleep. The grisly discovery of a dismembered bird had caused outrage amongst animal lovers, and further fuelled the call to action. At the time Carla couldn’t have envisaged an Albany without chickens. For as long as she could remember, they’d been a part of the landscape – before restaurant, supermarket, house, or highway. In fact, the rooster was a symbol of Albany village and even on its logo, dating back to when it was just paddocks, orchards, and a ramshackle old dairy that served the biggest scoops of hokey-pokey ice cream around.

Carla sighed. Nothing remained the same. To survive meant to adapt.

As the sun stripped back the cloud cover, she found herself bathed in its gentle morning heat. What a ride the past months had been. The prison lessons had progressed at a stuttering and unpredictable pace. Some days she’d return home energised by the advances she and her student had made. Other times she felt despondent and frustrated by Ben’s belligerent and wilful stagnation. Then there was the day he managed to make an instant chocolate pudding on his own by following the simple instructions she’d taped to the back of the box. That was a high point – a glimmer of hope breaking through the cracks in his act. That day had diluted her hatred of him, and her cynicism. For the first time she’d felt as if she was possibly succeeding in her mission.

But her excitement was short-lived, the weeks that followed seeing
him again broody and resistant. And the headway she’d worked so hard to achieve seemed to quickly slip through her fingers.

She continued to take him in meals – risottos, lamb stew, bowls of minestrone – Ben accepting her food more easily than her instruction. The planning and execution of these dishes consumed most of Carla’s waking hours, providing her days with a focus, and her own body with the sustenance and nourishment it had been starved of for so long. With every meal she made, her spirit and body grew stronger.

After some months, though, she realised that the cooking theme had palled, and she was forced to explore new and relevant ways to engage her now twenty-one-year-old pupil.

She thought back to Jack’s schoolboy years, to when he too had shown little interest in reading. With a dearth of books suitable for boys, she’d had to trawl through second-hand bookstores and libraries searching for stories that could compete with catapults, river crossings and tree huts. Now she was similarly determined to keep her student’s interest ignited.

This meant sometimes spending their allocated hour just talking about what was happening in the prison. Over time the stilted question-and-monosyllabic-answer sessions gave way to more spontaneous dialogue, in which Ben permitted her glimpses of his world – what incident had ‘gone down’ in the yard the previous day; which inmate was most likely a ‘nark’. It was a world so foreign to her, and yet at times strangely familiar. She had reared a son, after all, and ‘boys’, whether in prison or out, pale-skinned or brown, were not very different. She still thought of Ben as a boy, even though he was now very much a man. Despite all their interactions, the picture she held in her mind was of the teen she’d met on that March night – the night when time had stopped.

If she felt dubious about their progress, Haslop was ever
encouraging. Staff had noted definite changes in Ben’s behaviour – he had become less aggressive, calmer, more motivated. And while he continued to pretend he was indifferent to the lessons, he apparently got very upset if anything or anyone got in the way of one.

Carla held onto these tenuous threads of hope, paring back her expectations and tempering her impatience. She was committed to success, whatever that was.

They were four months into the lessons, when she started to read aloud to Ben from
Life Is So Good,
about the man who’d learnt to read at the age of ninety-eight. She reserved the last ten minutes of every session for this.

As the story progressed, Carla found that she looked forward to this brief pocket of time, the act of her reading and Ben listening importing a new intimacy between them. She’d chosen the story to demonstrate to Ben that he was not alone in his struggle, and that it was never too late to learn. Yet reading aloud George Dawson’s insights and reflections on the hardships of life, affected Carla deeply too. That this man who’d suffered at the hands of entrenched racism could still be so positive about humanity stirred something deep within her.

Now, she tore off a piece of Chelsea bun and tossed it towards the cockerel. A flurry of dust and feathers erupted. Mynah’s dived, the rooster squawked, and sparrows shot through the mayhem.

She leapt up, spilling her coffee and dropping her bun in the dirt, where it was instantly devoured. Shaken, Carla dabbed pointlessly at the unsightly brown stain on her blouse. She couldn’t possibly go to the prison like that. She’d have to go home and change.

Forty minutes later, she found herself out of breath in the familiar visiting hall. Their usual venue for the lesson, the meeting
room beside the chapel, was unavailable. The authorities had become a lot more relaxed; Ben had proved himself and was no longer considered as much of a risk.

Carla looked around, recognising some of the faces. The big fellow with a facial
moko
was there with his now very pregnant girlfriend. They both smiled in greeting.

10.40 a.m. She smoothed out her linen skirt. Several months back it would have slipped right off her, but with all the cooking and baking she’d been doing, was now quite tight at the waist. Even her shrunken breasts had swelled and pushed out against her grey silk blouse.

10.45 a.m. Ben was late.

It was Tuesday. Usual time. Perhaps he had not been informed of the change in venue. Perhaps he was ill or had been hurt by another inmate. Maybe …

Then with relief she heard the recognisable clang of steel on steel.

Ben walked in.

She gasped. His right arm was in a sling.

‘What – what happened?’

He sat down and fixed her with a stare.

Carla felt strangely awkward. He was probably preoccupied. Had been in a fight. Was … But his eyes. They were
those
eyes – the
shut-up-cunt, fuck-you-bitch
eyes. The eyes she had come to know over the previous six months were gone.

She smiled nervously, her calm evaporating. Suddenly she felt ridiculously overdressed.

‘Your arm. What have you done to your arm, Ben?’

He looked down, as though just reminded of it, then pushed back the white sling. She saw that his hand and part of his forearm were encased in an already grubby cast.

‘This,’ he said in a fierce whisper, ‘is because of you!’ He jerked the triangle of arm threateningly toward her.

She jolted backwards.

‘You,’ he reiterated. ‘Don’t come here no more. You’re getting on my wick!’

Carla sat completely still, the Tupperware container of lemon slice, the books, the other thing, at her feet. All at once she was again trembling on the farm floor.

She pulled herself out of her stupor, hastily gathered her belongings and stood up. She had to get out, hurry back to her flat, put out two sausages for dinner, and then take a nap from one until two-thirty.

The previous night she’d opened the door to the spare room, the hallway light trapping motes of dust in its pale beam. The room smelt of locked-away years and decaying mothballs. A cockroach scuttled under the cupboard door. She’d selected a box from the neatly stacked tower, and slipped a Stanley knife under the cross of masking tape. What would it hold? Lucky dip.

A set of photo albums. Perfectly preserved.

She’d dragged the box into the lounge, where she unpacked it, lining up seven photo albums across the floor. Tentatively, she’d opened the first, a red album with a faded filigree border, and pored over it. Then a hunger had overtaken her and she’d begun turning the pages faster and faster, snapshots of another time knitted haphazardly back into her life like dropped stitches … The kingfisher perched on a branch of the chestnut tree in the Taylors’ Christmas lunch photo … The rowboat moored on the lake edge. It was yellow inside and white out. She’d always thought it was all white. Russell trying to feed his cake to the cat at Jack’s seventh birthday party. Her sister-in-law posing with the Governor General. Mildred actually had quite thick ankles. Carla had never noticed them before.

She’d finally put out the light just after midnight, and slept soundly, without even the rustle of a dream. On her bedside table lay a blue album.

Now, a wave of heat surged through her. Would she never learn? She was cursed. Nothing could ever remain good for long.

She kicked the Tupperware aside, sending it planing across the floor, then curled her fingers around the blue photo album and lifted it up like a placard.

‘Let me tell you what’s getting on my wick, you … you low life, good-for-nothing scum of the earth!’ Her voice plunged into the room, rage wound around each syllable, fury streaked through every word. The big guy and his girlfriend looked up, their faces all surprise. ‘You sit in this cage, as you call it, eating three meals a day, sleeping and exercising and demanding and defecating, while my son,
my son,
has been reduced to a canister of ash, and my husband lies in a box in the ground. You … you bastard! You took them away from me. How dare you!’

The background hum in the visitors’ room evaporated into a gaping silence.

Two guards approached.

Carla ignored them. ‘Look here!’ she screamed at Ben. ‘I said, look here!’ She opened the album and turned it to him. ‘My family are gone because you and your sick mate surfed through a night on drugs, satisfying the animal in you. You complain, poor boy, because the scabies you caught from the prison blankets is itchy and keeps you awake. Oh dear! While I still endure the crops of pus-filled blisters that burn my insides out, a sweet memento left me by your friend. What am I doing bringing you food and teaching you to read? Stupid, stupid woman! Well, good riddance. I hope you rot in hell, you illiterate …’

She got up and strode toward the approaching warders, tripping over
Life is So Good
and ripping the cover.

Carla lifted the book off the trolley, checked the number on the spine, then slotted the classic in beside Frame’s other works.

‘Carla, you haven’t taken a tea break yet,’ Diana, the head librarian, called after her. ‘I brought in a carrot cake for my birthday. You’ll be lucky to still get some.’

The tea room was empty. Carla flicked on the kettle, cut herself a slice of cake from the remaining wedge and sank into a lime-green chair shaped like a pudding bowl.

It had been seven months since her last visit to the prison. So much had happened since the day she’d sped away from the grey monolith, her hands trembling, her tears mixing with outrage. When she’d stopped off at the library to return the book she’d borrowed only that morning, Diana was there behind the desk.

‘That was quick, Mrs Reid. Any good?’

Carla had burst into tears, causing quite a stir and leaving the astonished librarian no option but to usher her to a backroom, away from a gathering of curious eyes. An hour later, and Carla’s story told, Diana was offering her a temporary position assisting at the library.

‘We’re very short-staffed,’ she’d said, running a finger down the
weekly roster. ‘One librarian is away on maternity leave, another on extended sick leave. It’s only for a few months, but should keep you out of mischief and us out of a tight spot.’

Carla was signed on for two mornings a week, but turned up for five. She loved being there, the large windows that invited the outside in; the floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books; the buzz, the energy, the purpose.

Her new colleagues – Diana, Zoe, Bunty, and Paul – were good people, and gradually, Carla dropped her guard, allowing easy friendships to flourish.

She banished Toroa from her mind. Yes, she’d made similar resolutions before, but this time was different. She wondered whether a fatal bond existed between them. Sometimes it felt as if an invisible thread kept them orbiting each other, with ever the promise of another collision.

She had not seen his latest outburst coming. The Geoffreys and Veras would no doubt have said, ‘I told you so!’ and ‘When will you learn?’, reminding her that Ben Toroa was rotten through and through, and beyond redemption. Yet things had been going so well.