The Party Line (25 page)

Gabrielle swirled and twirled over to him. She took his hand. ‘Come on, join in. Bridie requests the pleasure of your company for a dance.’ Her voice was high — not screechy but strange all the same, as though she was acting in a play.

Her father stared at her. ‘This wasn’t what I was expecting, Gabrielle.’ His voice was calm and quiet. Neutral, like his face.

Nickie squirmed in her chair. Everything about this party was weird. There was music, and Gabrielle singing as though her dead mother was right there with them. And there was Mr Baxter, who looked like a statue. Nickie was too frightened to look at Mr Baxter’s face, in case he looked back and decided she was to blame for the weirdness. Instead, she focused on his neck. Lines under the skin stretched from his chin to his collarbone; they tightened as he swallowed and blinked.

‘I know, it’s all a surprise.’ Gabrielle grabbed him around the waist and put her other arm out, inviting her father to dance once again.

‘Stop,’ he said.

Gabrielle didn’t seem to hear him.

‘Gabrielle, I said stop. Stop this.’

Mr Baxter pushed Gabrielle away from him — not a huge shove, but strong enough to make her stumble. Her heel popped a red balloon. Nickie jumped, but neither Mr Baxter nor Gabrielle seemed to notice. He was crying. Not sobbing like a girl or anything, but there were shiny lines of tears running down his face. He stepped forward and hugged Gabrielle.

‘She’s not here, Gabrielle. Stop this.’

‘Course she is.’ Gabrielle’s voice was back to normal, but muffled as she cried into Ian’s shoulder.

‘She’s dead, Gabrielle. She’s not here.’

‘She is so here!’ Gabrielle was shouting now, screaming at her father, struggling to pull away from him. ‘Don’t you fucking say she’s dead. It’s her birthday and we’re having a party for her. You’re ruining it.’

Mr Baxter pulled Gabrielle close to him again. His crying hadn’t stopped even though his eyes were closed. Nickie quietly got up, stepped carefully over all the balloons and left.

She felt the pull on her bike carrier, just as she was starting to pedal. She didn’t turn around.

‘Can I tell you a story? About how I knew about the people who help women getting beaten up?’

Neither of them moved or said anything. Nickie sensed that Gabrielle’s grip was still firm on the bike. When Nickie finally turned, her fear disappeared. Gabrielle had been crying as well — the evidence was there, two little mascara streams running down her face.

‘I don’t know,’ Nickie said.

‘It’s not what you’re thinking.’

Nickie didn’t know what she was thinking, other than she wanted to go home.

‘Please. Nickie. Come on. We’ll check out the peat fire and I’ll tell you what happened.’

They walked through the paddocks while Gabrielle talked. She swung her sandals in her hand and jumped to avoid the cowshit. She told Nickie how, at the end of her mum’s sickness, she changed. Not just how she looked, with cancer eating all her muscles and bones
and other bits, but how she was as a person. Her personality, Gabrielle said, turned into someone else.

They were in her mum’s bedroom one afternoon, and her mum accused her dad of hating her. Hating her so much he had poisoned her and that’s how she’d got sick.

‘We laughed at the start,’ said Gabrielle. She was scuffing her feet in the dust that used to be a muddy paddock. ‘Dad and I. We thought Mum was joking with us, lying there in her bed. We thought she’d stop and grin and say
Gotcha there, you two
. That’s what the old Bridie used to say, at the end of her jokes.
Gotcha there.

‘But she wasn’t joking at all. First she sat up and she had this horrible mean look on her face … like her prettiness was rearranged into a witch’s face. So she sat, then she swung her legs over and she stood up. Dad went to hold her — she was too weak to stand on her own by then — but she pushed him away from her. I could see, from the look on Dad’s face, that he was shocked. Shocked at what she was doing, and shocked at the strength of her. It was like she had been tricking us, storing up her energy to be mean.’

The cicadas got louder. Maybe it was just that there was no noise in the big, open paddock, apart from Gabrielle’s quiet voice and the bugs, but it was almost as though the cicadas knew the story already; they were Gabrielle’s orchestra and they changed from loud to soft to loud again as the tale went on.

They were about halfway to the peat fire. The day was getting hotter and Nickie wished she’d grabbed her bottle of Coca Cola off the table before she’d run away.

‘Mum turned around and she grabbed the lamp off her bedside table. It was made of glass, glass and pretend diamonds that were hanging down off it. Like a chandelier in a castle. And then she … she smashed it in Dad’s face. This heavy glass lamp that even I couldn’t lift with two hands. She just picked it up and she didn’t hesitate, she didn’t say a word. She looked at Dad as though he was a stranger and she swung it into his face with all the strength in her bony arms.’

Nickie and Gabrielle stopped walking. With the sun scorching her hair and her skin and the ground underneath, Gabrielle crumpled into
a pile of person on the ground. Her knees were pulled up and her head was buried in her arms and the only sign that she was alive was the twitch of her shoulders as she cried.

A breeze touched Nickie’s skin. In all the time she’d known Gabrielle, this was the first time Gabrielle had broken down. She sat, too, and put her arm across Gabrielle’s shoulders. She didn’t understand how the rescue women came into it, but she would wait. They were both okay to wait, sitting out there in the middle of a dry paddock that was a field of thick green grass in spring and a stinking sloppy mud pool in winter. Nickie watched a cicada bumble up through a crack in the dirt from the centre of the Earth and remembered that they only had a few weeks of life above the ground before they died.

Gabrielle lifted her head. ‘Dad’s face was all cut. There was so much blood that I thought he would die. I thought he’d die before Mum died. He just stood there, saying nothing, doing nothing. Blood everywhere. Then he hugged her. He hugged Mum. That’s when I stopped being scared, I knew it’d be alright.’

‘What happened next?’

‘Mum got back into bed and she went straight to sleep. Like a little baby. A deep deep sleep, she looked so … She went back to looking like Mum again. The real Bridie, the beautiful one. I helped Dad get all the glass out of his face and helped him get all cleaned up.’

‘Did you have to go to hospital?’

‘We should have gone to the hospital, but he wouldn’t. He said it was private stuff and that the cancer had made Mum attack him. The cancer was in her brain, remember. We both knew it wasn’t the real Bridie and you only had to look at her sleeping, afterwards, to know that that was true.’

‘But … weren’t you scared? That it might happen again? Or it might be you next time?’

Gabrielle clambered back to her feet. She dusted off her green dress and flicked a quivering cicada off her arm.

‘I was scared. Until she woke up again and she saw what she’d done to Dad. I could see then that she was so upset, so angry with herself … She was already making plans to stop it happening again. She rang up
a friend in Auckland and a lady came and talked to us — talked to all of us, including Dad. She came with Mum’s doctor and they worked out a plan, a phone number to ring. It belonged to a lady who lived just five minutes away from our house and if anything viol— anything horrible ever started to happen again, and I was on my own, I just had to ring up the number and someone would come.’

They started walking again. Nickie could smell smoke. Up ahead, she saw tiny puffs coming out of the ground. Nearly a week after the fire had been discovered, it was still burning.

‘Wow, that’s so neat,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Like Hell’s leaking.’

‘Did it?’ Nickie asked.

‘Did it what?’

‘Did it ever happen again? Did you ever have to ring the number?’

‘No. She died. The next week, she was dead.’

They tiptoed to the middle of the paddock with the fire and lay down on the ground. The sunshine burned their backs and the warmth from Hell spread through their stomachs and legs and arms and the two heats met in the middle of them.

‘This must be what it feels like to be a toasted sandwich, getting cooked from both sides,’ said Gabrielle.

‘Most probably.’

‘We should have brought a spade. We could have dug down to the flames.’

When the heat became too much, they went down to the river’s edge. They walked along the edge of the water, away from the fire, following the current.

The breeze from earlier had gone. Maybe, if there’d been a breeze, they would have noticed the body sooner. They would have smelled something off and looked up and seen it in the distance. But they walked with their heads down, lost inside their thoughts. Then, they were standing next to a stinking pile of clothes and skin and meat and eels slithering from their feast back into the river.

Joy knelt in the shade, collecting the fruit off the ground. The first of the apples had fallen early. Worms were already making a meal of them.

The clatter of the ute over the cattlestop startled her. She stood too quickly, her hand seeking the tree trunk for support as her head swam, then cleared. A white butterfly flickered against her face. Eyes still closed, she brushed it away.

It was Ian Baxter. Joy drew her forearm across her brow and ran her fingers through her hair. Beads of sweat from her head dampened and cooled her arm.

On the back of the vehicle was a child’s bike. Nickie’s. Joy’s heart tumbled through the cascade of possibilities: accident, something worse …

The ute veered too far left, then right, along the driveway up to the house. Was he drunk? It slowed down as the cat crossed its path, then stalled. The engine caught again and then it lurched forward, reaching a final stop by the house.

Gabrielle was driving. Nickie got out of the passenger side. Joy’s anger turned to fear as she watched the two girls stand quite still, by the truck. Not moving, not talking.

‘We found Mr Gilbert. Down by the river. He’s dead.’ Gabrielle broke the silence with thick, flat words. ‘It looks as though he drowned, maybe.’

‘No … are you sure? Are you sure it’s him?’ Joy looked at Nickie. Her daughter’s face had the vacancy of a sleepwalker.

‘It’s him, definitely, Mum.’

Joy gathered both the girls to her and led them inside to the lounge. They stood side by side, like strangers waiting for a formal invitation to sit down.

‘He was all swollen like a walrus,’ Gabrielle said suddenly. ‘The eels were eating him.’

Bile rose in Joy’s throat. How strange this moment was. Time suspended between two deaths of equal monstrosity — Neville’s and Jack’s.

‘Sit down. I’ll get you a hot drink. Shock …’

They sat, the three of them, on the couch and sipped sweet tea. No one cried. It had been a long time since Joy witnessed trauma — Neville’s death — but she remembered now that it evoked a response both less and greater than crying.

‘Tell me what happened,’ she said some undefined time later.

‘We went for a walk to see the peat fire. We got right down to the water and then we went along the side of the river.’

‘Where was your father, Gabrielle?’

‘At home. Cleaning up after the party.’

‘Party.’ Joy glanced at Nickie, who stared back through her.

‘And,’ said Gabrielle, ‘so we were just walking along and … he was so swollen his clothes were bursting off him. We ran back to get Dad, but he’d gone somewhere, down the farm. We looked around, across the paddocks, but we couldn’t see him. I’ve driven the ute before, I knew I could drive it here.’

‘We didn’t touch him,’ Nickie said. ‘But his eyes were wide open and not blinking and blowflies were on them. Bits of him were missing, Mum.’

Joy picked up the telephone receiver without knowing who she was going to call. Eugene was at the rugby club organising the upcoming training. There was no telephone there. The police? An ambulance?

Audrey. Joy was the person for that job, the only person. She would drive around there and stare down the rabid dogs and put her arm around Audrey and tell her that her life of torment was over and never mind about that strange animal love she’d thought she’d had with Jack Gilbert.

She picked up the car keys, then stopped in the hallway, held her breath and listened. The girls had been silent, but now, as she passed the doorway, Joy thought she heard giggling. She craned to hear what was being said. The giggling stopped, as though the girls knew she was
eavesdropping. She listened to them, they listened to her, and no one said a word.

Eugene whistled as he got out of the truck. ‘Baby Blue’, which meant he was tipsy.

‘Where’re you off to, love?’

‘To the rugby club. To fetch you.’

‘What’s wrong?’ He looked at Ian Baxter’s ute, at the bike on the back, and frowned.

‘It’s Jack Gilbert. He’s … I think he might be dead. The girls found a dead man down by the river. They say it’s Jack. That’s who they think it is.’

‘Jesus … Where are they? The girls?’

‘Inside. They’re in shock, I think. I gave them sweet tea. That’s what you do. Isn’t it?’

‘Ian Baxter’s still here?’

‘No. He’s on the farm somewhere, the girls couldn’t find him. I’ll tell you about that later.’ Joy nodded at the ute. ‘Do we ring the police, Eugene? What do we do?’

Eugene took his hat off and scratched his head. ‘Are you sure it’s Jack?’

‘That’s what the girls said. But I haven’t seen him … He’s in Hamilton, I thought. That’s what Audrey told me.’

‘I’d better go and have a look. I’ll pick Baxter up on the way.’ Eugene started for the house, shaking his head.

‘What are you doing?’ Joy quickly caught up. She grabbed his arm.

‘Ringing him.’

‘Don’t,’ said Joy. ‘Don’t use the phone. Just drive there.’

‘It’s fair to warn him, isn’t it?’

‘Warn him, and tell everyone else.’ Joy took a deep breath. ‘God knows who will be listening, Eugene. Elsie Shanks, for sure, maybe even Audrey—’