The Party Line

An enthralling novel of individual bravery versus silent, collective complicity, set in a vividly drawn farming community in 1970s New Zealand.

On the first of June every year, sharemilkers load their trucks with their families, pets and possessions and crawl along the highways towards new farms, new lives. They’re inching towards that ultimate dream – buying their own land.

Fenward’s always been lucky with its sharemilkers: grateful, grafting folk who understand what’s expected of them. Until now, when grief-stricken lan Baxter and his precocious daughter, Gabrielle, arrive.

Nickie Walker is enchanted by the glamour and worldliness of Gabrielle. Nickie’s mother finds herself in the crossfire of a moral battle she dreads to confront. Each has a story to share.

This is a coming-of-age story for two young girls who hold a mirror up to the place and people they love. It’s a coming-of-age story, too, for a community forced to stare back at the image of a damaged soul.

The question is: who will blink first?

‘Tender, sly, comic and always deeply informed about the ways of the human heart.’

– Dame Fiona Kidman, on
From Under the Overcoat

N
ICOLA
W
ALKER LEAVES THE CITY
at ten, after the motorway clears. She drives to the ruddy brow of the Bombay Hills. Waikato, tinged hazy, fans before her. To the west of the threaded river there are more hills and eventually the sea. To the east, where she is going, bruised clouds bank over the distant Hauraki Plains.

The turnoff to State Highway Two will take her through Maramarua, past decrepit hoardings pleading ADOPT, DON’T ABORT. At Waitakaruru, she’ll drop to the low land. She might turn right soon after, and drive through Ngatea, or she might continue east across the plains, past the corrugated-iron shed where, once, a crazed man cut off the hands of his girlfriend with a sword. Then, over the little arched bridge where the Piako River roils into the Firth of Thames, past the old Kopuarahi cheese factory, towards the mangroved, mucky gape of the Waihou.

From there, a right turn will take her along a rollercoaster road to Paeroa. To St Mary’s Catholic Church, for the funeral of her family’s old sharemilker, Josephine Janssen.

The Josephine of Nicola’s childhood had been an arpeggio accent, weightlifter’s shoulders and a collapsing nest of blonde hair. Josephine’s husband, Hans, was a whippet of a man who never mastered English and floundered in the wake of his wife’s babble.

It’s been twenty years since Nicola saw them. She was thirty-four then. On that day she’d accepted their offer to buy the farm left to her by her parents. They’d met in a lawyer’s office off the main street of Paeroa and signed the paperwork together. The meeting had not been necessary, but in Nicola’s mind the right thing to do.

‘Are you sad, girl?’ Josephine had asked. ‘Saying goodbye to the old place?’

Nicola had flinched at the brittle coarseness of Josephine’s overworked palm as she shook her hand. ‘No,’ she nearly said, until her dead mother Joy whispered in her ear.
If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.

Attending this funeral is also the right thing to do, although Hans will be eighty-something and Nicola is unsure whether they’ll speak at all.

She pulls out now, passing rumbling trucks to her left.

Another hand crosses her line of sight. It belongs to her mother. It’s a blur of pink as it stings Nicola’s face. The cool scrape of the engagement ring, turned inwards, leaves a faint single track across her cheek. The diamond is a solitaire.

Nicola has worn the ring since her mother died. It’s loose on her finger. She spins it with her thumb and blinks into the morning sun.

‘The Dutch always made good sharemilkers. Hardworking and did what they were told. And they never wanted a holiday,’ says the ghostly Joy, beside her. Nicola touches her cheek, feels the tiny ancient scar that, thankfully, is invisible even without make-up. She misses the turnoff she’s been watching for.

‘Why’d you hit me?’ she hears her thirteen-year-old Nickie-self say.

‘Everyone hit their kids back then. Didn’t do any harm. Didn’t do you any harm.’

Nicola switches on the radio, wondering whether, at fifty-four, she has the energy for an imagined argument with her mother.

‘People didn’t hit kids across the face. Backsides, yes. But not across the face, like pouting film stars.’

Her mother mutters.

‘I knew you wouldn’t.’ Nicola taps at the steering wheel, as though playing the piano.

‘Wouldn’t what?’

‘Talk about it. The day you hit me across the face. You never talked about it.’

An exit sign says Pukekawa, which is ‘hill of bitter memories’ in Maori, but for Nicola will always mean 1970, a double murder, bodies — one weighted down — floating in a river, and a baby called Rochelle, abandoned in a cot by her parents’ murderer. The Pukekawa killings are, bizarrely, on the radio news bulletin at the very moment she passes this exit. It’s all to do with the planting of evidence and police corruption.

‘The Janssens got a good deal on our place,’ Joy says. ‘No matter
how hard they worked. I think you might’ve let them have it too cheap.’

Joy has pulled a packet of cigarettes out of the nowhere space she inhabits. She taps one, end over end, on the outside of the box. This was a habit she developed late in life, after Nicola’s father Eugene died. ’Til then, she’d smoked his cigarettes.

Rochelle Crewe is forty-four now, says the person on the radio. She is a new person, with a new identity, and a face no one knows. There hasn’t been a photo of her in the paper, or on the telly, since she was at high school. Reporters know who and where she is, but have allowed her the right to an untainted, unremarkable life.

Nicola thinks that Rochelle Crewe could be anywhere right now. She could be in the car in front, or in an oncoming car, about to take the Pukekawa turnoff, about to visit the farm that made her famous.

There’s another route to Paeroa, one that approaches from the south. The idea of coming in via the back roads suddenly appeals to Nicola. She’s not sure of those roads, she’ll be driving them as a stranger. Listening to the instructions from Tomtom, slowing to look at road signs. Slipping in to town, slipping in to the back pew of the church incognito. Making sure Hans sees that she attended, then slipping away again, for good.

At the mid-May cattle sale, Jack Gilbert told Eugene Walker he was hiring a sharemilker come first of June. ‘Good for you, Jack,’ Eugene said. Other men nearby leaned in to hear more, but Jack was done with talk.

The men went home and told their wives, who laughed like drains. It was to do with the notion of parsimonious Jack Gilbert paying someone else to work his land. Hapless Jack Gilbert, who let his stock go hungry during the winter, refused to spend money on extra feed when his meagre hay supply ran out. The price of wire sent him apoplectic, so he didn’t mend his fences. His hungry cows went searching, wandered onto the road, got hit by vehicles, and died.

‘Is it true, Audrey, that you’re bringing on a milker next month?’

There was a pause at Audrey Gilbert’s end. A pause, and a click, and Joy pictured Jack in his cowshed, hanging off the extension phone, picking at his teeth with a dirty fingernail.

‘Hello, Jack,’ Joy tested, alert for the wheezy evidence of his eavesdropping.

‘Audrey?’ she asked again.

‘Yes.’

A muffled cry. It was Kerry Collins listening, not Jack. No one else on the line had a baby.

‘You can probably guess why I’m ringing, Audrey.’

More silence.

‘Audrey?’

‘No,’ said Audrey. ‘What is it?’

‘Kids? Have your new sharemilkers got school-aged kids?’

‘Yes.’

‘How many, Audrey?’

‘Just the one. That’s what Jack says,’ said Audrey. ‘He says she’s thirteen.’

‘Shame,’ Joy said.

‘But still at primary school. Form Two,’ continued Audrey. ‘She’s been kept back, somewhere along the line, I suppose.’

Joy wondered whether Audrey herself had been kept back, somewhere along the line.

‘Well, that’s good news. Have you spoken to her?’ Joy asked.

‘The girl?’

‘The mother, Audrey. Have you checked with the mother that the girl’s coming to us?’

‘No,’ said Audrey. ‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Would you mind ringing her? Just to check?’

‘She’s dead, the mother. There’s just the two of them. Him and his daughter.’

‘Would you mind checking anyway? Just to be sure?’

‘Alright,’ said Audrey.

‘Oh … and Audrey, just out of interest. What made Jack decide on a sharemilker? After all these years?’

‘I couldn’t tell you, Joy.’

Three clicks, and the conversation was done.

Two weeks later, Joy drove the other school committee wives to the Gilberts’ sharemilker cottage. It was Sunday night, just on six, darkness had settled an hour earlier. Joy hunched forward over the wheel as if to try to outsprint the rain. Evelyn Maxwell was in the front, Ruby Thompson and Ngaire McQuire in the back.

This was the last of their visits to the new families. Cakes and casseroles had been delivered, welcomes effused, tea — buckets of it — sipped, intelligence gathered and collated.

It was a yearly task, and they worked as a team. The mathematics were simple: the number of school-aged sharemilker children leaving the district on the first of June had to be equal to, or less than, the number of children arriving. One child short — just one, they were cutting it
that
fine now — and the education department would send a large lorry and take away the school’s second classroom. A one-classroom school was only ever a pen-pusher’s whim from closure.

They’d just visited the Reynolds’ place, where the news was good. They were expecting to find two children, but one of the two had turned out to be twins. Calculating eyes sparkled as the women exclaimed at the likeness of the two little boys.

‘We could call it a day,’ Ruby said, minutes later, back in the car. ‘Now we’ve got the numbers.’

Joy glanced in the rear-view mirror. Ruby was leaning back, her eyes closed. Ngaire spoke up. ‘I don’t know … how would it look if we missed out just one family? Especially if there’s no mother.’

The others nodded and
hmmd
. The truth was they were all dying to eyeball the poor sod desperate enough to take up a last-minute contract with Jack Gilbert.

Lights blazed from every room of the cottage. The women made for the front of the house.

‘Should’ve saved the corned beef for here,’ Joy whispered, as they waited at the door. ‘Given as it’s already cooked. And that leg of mutton. For their freezer.’

The man was more than six-foot tall, his hair blond, turning grey. It was long, almost to his shoulders, and tucked back behind his ears in a style Joy considered girly. He wore all-in-one khaki overalls with a blue shirt underneath. The overalls hung from his bony shoulders like a suit jacket on a coat hanger. He was the thinnest man Joy had ever seen.

‘Yes?’ he said.

Joy drew a long breath. ‘We’ve just dropped in to say hello, and welcome and—’

‘—to see that you’re okay for everything you need. And to drop off some dinner, because it’s probably the last thing you can be bothered thinking about at the moment,’ finished Evelyn. ‘It’s a vegetable bake.’

The man frowned and ran his hand backwards through his hair. ‘Alright,’ he said.

Joy wasn’t sure what this meant. Whether he wished to know if they, the school committee wives, were alright, or whether he had processed the purpose of the visit and found it to be alright. It just wasn’t clear at all.

Perfume drifted outside. It was coming from somewhere close by. Joy didn’t know much about perfume, she owned just a single bottle of 4711. That had the fragrance of some combination of lemons and turpentine, a scent that was supposed to be ‘alpine’, according to the
Woman’s Weekly
. Joy liked it less than the clean trustworthiness of Sunlight soap. But she knew what this other perfume was. Not the exact name, but the purpose of it. It was whisky and cigarettes, and it got her thinking of women on late-night television — the beautiful, immoral, perpetually sad women of
Peyton Place
— it was that kind of scent.

A head appeared from around the doorway of the room. A girl, made up as a trollop, with a fancy hairdo, rouge, lipstick and long black eyelashes.

‘Hello,’ the girl said. ‘I’m Gabrielle.’

‘Love a duck,’ whispered Ruby.

The rain belted on the tin roof of the porch.

Joy smiled at the girl. ‘Hi, Gabrielle,’ she said evenly. ‘It’s very nice to meet you. My daughter Nickie’s about the same age as you. She’s at Fenward Primary.’

‘Cool,’ said Gabrielle. ‘That’s where I’m going, isn’t it, Dad?’

The man nodded.

‘Well, that’s wonderful,’ Joy said.

Evelyn pushed the dish into the man’s hands. ‘I can call round and pick it up tomorrow, if you like,’ she said. ‘Or later in the week …’

‘Thanks,’ he said. He handed the dish back to Evelyn. ‘But we’re fine.’

‘
Dad
,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Don’t be such a snob. Take it.’ She grinned at Evelyn. ‘He’s a bit shy, sorry.’

The dish passed out of Evelyn’s hands, back to the man. He held it awkwardly in front of him.

‘We’ll leave you to it. You’re busy unpacking, I suppose,’ Joy said. ‘My name’s Joy, by the way. Joy Walker. This is Ruby Thompson, Ngaire McQuire and Evelyn Maxwell. Our husbands are all on the school committee. It’s what we do.’

The man looked puzzled.

‘I mean, this is what we do, once all the new sharemilkers have arrived. Just check everyone’s okay …’ Joy held out her hand, waiting for a handshake. Not the done thing, women shaking hands, but Joy liked the sting of it, the way it confirmed that when it came to the school committee the wives did all the work.

‘Ian Baxter.’

‘We’re not
that
busy. Everything’s unpacked. We’ve got bugger-all left to do,’ chipped in Gabrielle, from behind her father.

‘Goodnight,’ said Ian.

Gabrielle had gone back into the bedroom. Joy heard the girl murmur something to her father.

‘Thanks for the food. Thank you very much,’ he called out, like a chastised child, as he closed the door.

They sat at their desks and waited. Nickie concentrated on cleaning the mud out of the fluff on her slippers that were only a week old but already a disgrace. It was June the fifth, being the first Monday after June the first. June the first was the day that sharemilkers came into the district to start their new jobs.

Nickie’s mother, Joy, called it Gypsy Day. All the sharemilkers’ belongings stacked high on the back of trucks and utes — sofas, fridges, beds, kids, dogs, everything crammed in. If Nickie’s father, Eugene, came up behind one on the road, he slowed right down. He always gave a toot and a friendly wave and asked where they were heading. Then he shouted:
Good luck!

Nickie stopped cleaning her slippers and checked what was happening in the cloakroom, where the new sharemilker kids were waiting. The tops of quite a few heads were being kissed by mothers. She could see only one father out there, and he was kissing no one. Mr Burgess took huge steps towards the door. Nickie watched the new kids move away from him.

‘Come in, come in,’ he shouted at them. ‘Come on now … such a miserable day.’

One of the mothers tried to come in, too, but Mr Burgess put his hand on her shoulder.

‘Probably best if you don’t,’ he said.

‘It’s his first day—’

‘First day for all of them.’

‘I mean, it’s his first day
ever
… he’s five.’

He steered the mother backwards. Backwards with one hand, while he closed the door with the other.

They lined up at the front of the classroom. There was just one girl, she was at the end of the row. She had blonde hair parted down the middle and falling to just above her shoulders. It flicked up outwards at the ends. Nickie had never seen anything so cool. Hair was the sort
of thing she noticed. Hers was tough and black and curly and grew mainly upwards like wire. The only place Nickie had seen hair like the new girl’s was on TV, on
Happen Inn.
Suzanne was her favourite singer and that’s exactly what her hairdo was like — Suzanne’s.

In each tiny earlobe, the sharemilker girl had miniature crosses. This new girl had pierced ears.

Only tarts get their ears pierced
. Her mother had views on everything.

Mr Burgess welcomed the sharemilker kids and introduced the juniors’ teacher, Miss Tremain.

‘Perhaps you’d like to take turns to tell us what your name is, where you’ve come from, the things you like doing and whose farm it is that you’ve come to,’ he said.

Mr Burgess tapped the first boy on the shoulder with the long ruler. The boy looked about eight. His ginger hair was cut in chunks, and black freckles splattered across his face. He said his name was Wayne Bennett and he’d come from down south. He waited then, saying nothing, staring at his shoes. His head jerked back up.

‘The farm we’ve moved to is Maxwells’. The thing I like doing best is feeding out. And hosing the shed down.’

Nickie could tell by his voice he’d done the speech before. He stared at the back wall of the classroom.

It had been raining all morning, and now the rain turned to hailstones. They smashed against the windows. Finally it was the girl’s turn. Mr Burgess, who’d been taking notes, put down his pen and looked at her.

‘My name is Gabrielle Baxter,’ she said. Her voice was soft and buttery, not much more than a whisper. Nickie leaned forward, watching her mouth, listening. Gabrielle Baxter. Nickie murmured it, to see how it sounded out loud. Gabrielle Baxter. It had a delicious flavour.

‘We’re on the Gilbert farm. We came from Silverdale. Near Auckland. My dad’s name is Ian. My mum’s called Bridie but she’s dead.’

Gabrielle Baxter had finished her talk. She looked at Mr Burgess.

‘Do I have to do the other stuff?’ she asked.

‘Pardon?’

‘The other bit. The things I like doing …’

‘Only if you want to, Gabrielle.’

‘No,’ she said.

Nickie looked across at Erin Fraser and Julie Maxwell. They were staring at Gabrielle’s ears and whispering to each other, and Julie was touching her own ears, pulling at invisible earrings. There was a lot of looking going on generally. Nickie turned back to Gabrielle Baxter. Gabrielle’s eyes were roving the room and, when she came to Nickie, Nickie quickly smiled.

By morning tea time, the sleet had stopped. The Form Two girls were on the wooden seats outside their classroom. Gabrielle tucked her Suzanne hair back behind her ears and took the little cross earrings out. Nickie watched as she carefully clipped the tiny silver backs onto the stalks.

‘They’re called butterflies, the back bits,’ she said, handing them to Nickie.

Gabrielle Baxter was all butter voice and butter hair and butterflies. Nickie imagined, just for a crazy moment, licking her butter skin. She let the earrings rest in the palm of her hand. They were the most beautiful things she’d seen.

‘Can I have a look after Nickie, Gabrielle?’ asked Erin, who had managed to wedge herself in between Nickie and Gabrielle.

‘Yeah, but don’t lose them. They were Mum’s.’

Erin took the butterfly back off one of the earrings and was pushing the little stalk hard against her own earlobe. ‘I’m getting my ears pierced,’ she said. ‘For my birthday.’