Drowned Sprat and Other Stories Read online

  Most evenings for the rest of their holiday they take the walk along the pathway by the sea, and although Sarah looks out for the woman and child, she never sees them again. And when the holiday is over and they’ve taken the plane back to New Zealand, and their tans of privilege have faded; even then, now and again, she finds herself fretting, at odd times of the day, wondering what became of the child, whether the woman succeeded in giving him away, and if the people who took him are giving him love and nourishment, or at the very least treating him kindly. She thinks of him more than she does the lost baby of her own, the son who would now be a young man and who she may have lost anyway, especially if she’d stayed in Australia to raise him, and if he’d grown up to be one of those young tourists partying in the Sari Club on that October night in 2002.

  Box of Stones

  Under this flat, grey sky, on an autumn day in 1980, it suddenly seemed as though he could see the hearts and minds of the girl and boy and those of their generation as clearly as he could see the stones around him, as far as the edges of Birdlings Flat: the tumbledown fishermen’s houses at one fringe, the hard blue jaws of the Pacific at the other. The steely light drained the stones of colour, the colours they would show when the inevitable rain came. Pounded by the surf, the granite ground smooth by millennia of surging tides, they seemed almost monochrome. Nothing bound them together in this one place, yet so distinct were their colours and forms that one of the number would be instantly recognised in the city. ‘That’s a stone from Birdlings Flat,’ would come just as easily from the lips of an observer as could, ‘That’s a youth from the university.’

  The boy, the girl, their homogenous selves. Stones and youths, all of them, bound by uniformity, a lack of courage and compassion.

  They were behind him, still in the car.

  If he had any brains, thought Donald, Kieran would get out, have a walk to clear his head. He should be thinking about the things he said, urged on by that dreadful girl.

  The old man lifted his stick and waved it, once, to get the boy’s attention. In the boot there was a box to fill with stones for the garden. The boy seemed to have forgotten the reason for the trip out.

  He must know, thought Donald, that it is impossible for me to gather the stones myself.

  Watching the old man against the sky, the girl, huddled under the arm of the boy, said, ‘Look at Donald.’

  He was trying to bend, one hand grasping the head of his stick, angled like a summer guy-rope. His beard and band of hair gleamed a dull white in the thundery air.

  In one swift movement the boy shrank away from her, opened the door and was gone.

  ‘Get the box.’ He wouldn’t add a ‘please’. He wasn’t going to beg.

  The boy turned and walked back to the car. Donald forced himself up, a stone trophy in his hand, the blood pumping in his forehead, pushing at his temples. Bile had risen in his throat as he’d pushed himself upright. One of his boots had wedged itself in a nest of stones. He dug in the stick and leaned against it, taking his bulk off the trapped leg.

  Here was the boy, back with the carton. The girl had remained in the car, though she’d stuck her head out the window and said something sharp to the boy as he’d passed. Just the tone of her voice had reached the old man’s ears, the words indistinguishable. It had possibly been only one word, an insult. Women swore a lot these days — words that previously belonged to soldiers. Perhaps women considered themselves to be soldiers; perhaps that was it, he thought, in this muddy, so-called ‘war of the sexes’. After the real war, when he’d worked for The Press, there was more and more of it, not only in the paper itself — cases of sexual harassment, divorce — but also skirmishes among his colleagues. It irked him; it seemed manufactured, something so utterly removed, in his opinion, from the nuts and bolts of real life. Daphne, for instance — she never saw herself as a soldier.

  The boy’s face above the carton was set with cold and sadness. The old man’s heart pulsed with empathy, for a moment feeling the angst of a young man with a difficult girlfriend.

  Get rid of her, he wanted to say. Get rid of that dreadful girl. But numb from waiting for so long in the wind, Donald’s lips parted unwillingly and he said nothing.

  ‘You want me to fill the box?’ the boy asked, holding up a smooth grey oval. A moa’s egg. Donald nodded, looking back towards the car, Japanese, shining, a glow of red between the gunmetal of stone and sky. A plume of cigarette smoke steamed out the window, white, agitated. Normally the spectacle of young women smoking, damaging their beautiful complexions and capacious lungs, distressed him, but in this girl’s case and for Kieran’s sake, he hoped cancer would come early and rapaciously. Stones clunked into the box.

  ‘We’ll make a start on the border today, eh?’ he asked the top of Kieran’s head. ‘For the roses, at the back.’

  ‘If you like,’ the boy answered. Exams were over; it was another three days before he caught the plane north.

  ‘Nothing you have to do this afternoon?’ Donald asked him.

  ‘Nup,’ said the boy.

  ‘What about her?’ he asked.

  ‘Who?’ The boy squinted up at him in the grey, glary light.

  ‘Your friend.’

  ‘Oh, she’ll be all right.’

  ‘I meant …’ Donald gave up. The boy hadn’t understood. Since Daphne left he hadn’t liked having women in his house. The only woman he felt comfortable about letting in was the Home Help, who understood that the door to Daphne’s room was to remain closed. He cleaned that room himself, dusting around her china-doll collection, the dozen or so of them, the blue multitude of their eyes gazing over his shoulder to the empty single girl’s bed. If they had names, he’d never known them. He plumped the scented, heart-shaped, pink lace pillow on her coverlet, gave the tacky knick-knack-cluttered shelves a wipe, around the little men made of shells with their spindly pipe-cleaner arms, the stones with painted-on faces and clothes, the lumpy brown pottery animals. What if Kieran’s girlfriend found her way in there? Her curiosity would be horribly aroused. What questions would she ask? It didn’t bear thinking about. Donald sighed.

  ‘Are you in pain?’ asked the boy. ‘I’ll do this. You go back to the car.’

  ‘I’m perfectly all right.’

  The boy’s denim shoulders tensed, then relaxed. His ‘suit yourself’ hung between them, unspoken, as did the boy’s assumption that not only was Donald old, he was difficult. The stones clunked in. The box was nearly full.

  ‘The girl …’ began Donald.

  ‘Nikki?’ Kieran stood and shoved his hands into his pockets.

  ‘Yes. Is she studying history?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You think so? Don’t you talk about your studies together?’

  ‘A bit. Yes, she’s doing history.’ The boy bent to pick up the box.

  ‘Wait a moment,’ said Donald. ‘There’s no hurry.’

  ‘It’s freezing, Donald.’ Kieran shivered. The older man was warm, with his argyle sweater and tweed jacket. Kieran had dressed for the season it was supposed to be — summer — but the wind was bitter.

  ‘You’re all right,’ said Donald. ‘Is she studying the war?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The boy ran his fingers through his hair. He had the kind of androgynous looks women of his generation adored — heavy eyes with dark, curling lashes; full lips; shining auburn hair to his shoulders; long, sensitive hands. Kieran had always been beautiful, even as a child, Donald remembered. He had never been much interested in children but Kieran had always touched his heart, like a favourite nephew, though they were not related.

  ‘She must be, if she knows about the Dresden raids.’ Donald had turned, was looking out to sea.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Donald. It doesn’t matter.’

  The old man shook his head, though the boy’s concern for him brought a smile to his lips. Of course it mattered. Nothing at this moment mattered so much. It mattered what the boy had said as well — it
wasn’t just the girl. Kieran had thought the same. He’d said so: ‘If there was another war it would be nuclear and I wouldn’t fight.’

  ‘She didn’t mean to upset you,’ Kieran was saying. ‘Let’s go back to the car.’ He heaved the box on his shoulder and set off, leaning slightly to one side. Donald followed, slowly, so that he wouldn’t have to wait with the girl while the box was stowed in the boot.

  ‘Here,’ he said, at the car. ‘You drive.’ He threw the boy the keys. Catching them, Kieran grinned. He enjoyed driving and Donald never hassled him about breaking the speed limit: War Heroes liked speed, and Donald was a War Hero; he’d flown the Lancaster Bombers.

  Donald didn’t want the girl and Kieran side by side in the back seat as they had been on the way out to the Flats, whispering, the girl giggling at his claudicant driving, his damaged foot always too heavy on the accelerator and brake. It wasn’t until he had clumped around to the other side of the Mazda that he noticed the girl had climbed through to the front and was sitting in the passenger seat. She’d been there for some time, judging by the sweet wrappers scattered on her lap — his sweet wrappers, from his supply of barley sugars in the glovebox. Kieran had his arm hooked around her neck and was kissing her, full on the lips. Her orange spiky hair stood straight up, so short Donald could see her scalp in places. He opened the back door and got in. There was less legroom in the back — he’d be lucky if he didn’t get cramp on the way back to Christchurch.

  The girl rested her hand on Kieran’s thigh and the boy drove like a maniac. Donald forced himself to look out the side window and found himself thinking about Daphne. At the beginning she’d displayed her affection for him like that — laid her palm on his thigh whenever they went out driving. He’d scarcely felt it through the scar tissue, the thick, burnt skin; there was just the vague sensation of warmth, an awareness of the weight of her hand lying there, peaceful, trusting. She’d wait patiently while he made his way to her side of the car to open her door; she accepted his courting gifts and billets-doux with the grace and delight of a fifties debutante. She’d loved his manners, his olde worlde courtesy. His stories of the war fascinated her; he hadn’t felt the need to censor the more horrific details as a soldier had to with some women of her mother’s — his own — generation. Twenty-eight years between them, but it hadn’t seemed like much, even with her room being the way it was. Perhaps a psychologist would view her obsessions with dolls and little men made of shells and painted stones as arrested. Donald himself, when pain impelled him to cease his doll dusting and rest a while on her bed, found them a little macabre, especially now she’d gone and left it all with him. Perhaps he should give them all to Nikki, though she didn’t seem the doll type.

  They’d reached the turn-off, where the road went one way towards Akaroa, the other back to Christchurch. Hardly pausing, Kieran swung the car out into the empty road. Donald supposed he’d judged the intersection first. The boy’s reflexes were wired, quick-fire, more so with that hand on his thigh. Daphne could tell a lot about people from their hands. What would she have made of Nikki’s? The one on Kieran’s leg was broad, coarse-skinned, with large, round knuckles. There was something determined — bloody-minded even — about it.

  ‘You okay back there, Donald?’ Kieran asked. Donald could see his mouth moving in the rear-vision mirror, the boy’s white, even teeth, saliva clear as spring water.

  ‘I’m perfectly all right,’ said Donald, for the second time that day. Nikki had twisted in her seat and was looking at him, her eyes narrowed. He supposed she meant to look concerned, but the overall effect was one of antagonism. It was synchronised, like formation flying, the way they both glanced away from each other at exactly the same moment.

  Having slowed enough to take the corner, Kieran opened the car up and ran it smoothly through its gears until the speedo — not that Donald could quite see it — must have read a hundred and ten at least. It was like being in a plane — a modern plane, not one of the Bombers.

  Sometimes he still woke in a sweat, the Rear Gunner’s scream bounding off his quiet suburban walls as he was burnt alive, trapped in his metal cage as they landed, the back of the plane on fire. They couldn’t get him out, that poor bastard in the metal cage, so they shot him. It was because — he’d told Daphne on the first night she’d heard him screaming, when he heard the Rear Gunner still screaming thirty-six years after they’d put him out of his misery — it was because of the way they’d built the planes. The Gunner sat in a kind of mesh enclosure, made of a single, perforated piece of metal bent into a dome. It wasn’t a true mesh, so there were no weak links that might break apart with the heat.

  As they’d dragged Donald from the plane, afire from foot to waist, he’d heard the shot, a single shot through the flames to the frantic, wavering, blackened figure inside. For the men gathered on the dark airstrip, an English dawn breaking behind the flaring plane, that single shot stopped the screaming. For Donald, half-crazed with pain as they rolled him on the tarmac to douse the flames, the screaming went on, night after night, on and on.

  ‘There, there,’ Daphne had said on so many occasions, slipping into bed beside him, holding him, making no demands. She knew, from his burns, that her demands could never be met, even if she’d had them. Sometime during the night she’d depart, light-footed as a night nurse, back down the hall to her innocent room.

  ‘Kieran!’

  Donald opened his eyes to see Nikki gesturing towards him in the back seat.

  ‘Am I going too fast?’ Kieran asked, laughing. ‘You had your eyes closed.’

  ‘I’m a little tired.’ He sounded tetchy, he knew. ‘Not really in the mood for company.’

  ‘We’ll go then, as soon as we get to your place.’ Kieran took Nikki’s hand from his thigh and dropped it in her lap. ‘Sorry, Donald.’

  It was all wrong. The boy was not only apologising for accompanying him to Birdlings Flat when the trip together had been Donald’s idea in the first place, but feeling embarrassed about his girlfriend’s hand. Perhaps it had been a little higher than when first she’d laid it there, but Donald knew the urge to touch all the time, he knew Nikki’s hunger, he knew what it was to be unable to satisfy it.

  ‘Home!’ Kieran zapped the car up the drive and into the garage, a swift, precise manoeuvre that at its abrupt conclusion had all three of them straining at the full extent of their seatbelts, like dogs on leads. Nikki giggled.

  ‘You’re terrible, Kieran,’ she said.

  Donald’s thigh muscle went into a violent cramp. He let out an involuntary moan. Kieran started.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Leg. Cramp.’

  He should have told the boy to park the car in the driveway, then he would only have had to do battle with the branches of the overgrown rhododendron. As it was, in the garage, it was a struggle for Kieran to get him out of the back seat, stand him up and help him to walk the cramp off. By the time they made it outside the girl was there, at the rear of the car, trying to take his other arm. He shook her off. The cramp made him impatient, or honest, or both. Kieran unlocked the front door and they made their way into his quiet hall, the cramp loosening its jaws, and into the living room.

  ‘Do you want to sit down?’ Kieran asked, solemn, concerned. Nikki stood dead centre, staring around. Through his pain, Donald watched her and wondered what she was thinking. Daphne had said he had no idea of colour and design. Everything was beige — the carpet, the walls, the ceiling, the furniture. To Donald they toned in: the colour was what made the room peaceful.

  ‘I’d rather stand for a moment.’ He couldn’t care less what Nikki thought.

  ‘I’ll put the jug on, shall I?’ Kieran disappeared into the kitchen.

  Nikki was looking at him with those narrowed eyes again. It occurred to him that perhaps she was focusing, that it was not concern nor antagonism, but short-sightedness.

  ‘Is there something you can take?’ she asked.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ He
shifted on his stick.

  ‘A pill or something. To help.’

  ‘There are only two remedies for muscular cramp. Walk it off or wait it out.’

  ‘Quinine,’ said the girl. ‘Soldiers suffering from malaria in the war, they were given quinine to help with the cramp.’

  ‘Ah. The war again. You know a lot about it, do you?’

  ‘A bit.’ The girl looked uncomfortable. She shot a glance towards the kitchen. From the clatter of china it seemed Kieran was doing the breakfast dishes. Donald wished he wouldn’t. The Home Help was due at three; she’d run out of things to do.

  ‘You’re studying the war?’ The cramp had almost gone now, he could sit down, but cramps were like earthquakes — they gave out aftershocks. He didn’t want the girl to have to help him up again.

  ‘Not exactly, no,’ she answered slowly. ‘I’m doing a paper called Women and War. How we were affected, you know.’

  ‘“We”? You were never in a war.’

  ‘No, but …’ The girl trailed off, gazing at the kitchen door like a stunned mullet.

  ‘But what?’ Donald persisted. The girl turned her eyes on him. They glittered with health, blue and white.

  ‘But I can still empathise with what woman went through. Rape and so on.’

  Donald raised his eyebrows. ‘It’s women, with an “e”,’ he said tartly, ‘and rape was the least of it.’ He could sit down now. He made his way to the chair. The girl was there before him, extending a tentative hand. He ignored it, and sat heavily.

  ‘That’s not what our lecturer said.’ The girl spoke in a rush. ‘She said that women aren’t remembered for the sacrifices we made, that our names aren’t on the cenotaph. We’re the forgotten casualties of —’

  ‘“She”?’ interrupted Donald. ‘“She’s” a lecturer in history?’

  ‘In the Women’s Studies Department.’ The girl offered no explanation as to what that department was, nor to what faculty it belonged. Kieran came through with three mugs of tea.