True Stars Page 9

  Now she could see that Toni had emerged from the ranks of the second group and was walking slowly down towards Wiki’s. Then both groups stopped and Wiki moved towards Toni.

  ‘It’s all right, Wiki,’ said Toni. ‘It’s just the cockies. The Party’s staying home. They asked me to come and tell you.’

  Symbolism was so easy, too easy, yet Rose knew that if you lived in a town like Weyville, you couldn’t get away from it. There was only a limited number of things you could learn, or people you could know, or even places to go, and after awhile nothing was coincidence, it was simply the inevitable path of things. She wanted to go as far away as she could to find some place where the accumulation of evidence suggested that Weyville was no more than a place in the imagination, or the heart for those that insisted, tucked away for good like her first house, where all the life-changing events, births, partings, love had taken place, but weren’t going to happen again.

  She would take a back road and detour past the marchers, heading south. In the car she slipped a tape in the deck; it was Crystal Gale. Here I go once again/ with my suitcase in my hand/ and I’m ru-unning away down River Road: so sentimental, admit it Rose, downright conservative; so small-town, so tough. So everything.

  The march snaked away to her left as she turned into the detour. The black banners on poles were held aloft, straining against the breeze. Police cars tailed behind, like butterflies drifting in the light.

  5

  The first afternoon Rose was away she detoured out of town, and then drove south, taking the back route round the western edge of Lake Taupo. She did this without thinking about it, realising only later that she was intent on avoiding the march. Then she thought how unnecessary this was, given that the march would take days to cover the ground that was already between her and Weyville. Halfway round the lake where the cliffs drop straight to the water she stopped the car and got out, looking across the lake. She raised her head as the sharp edge of a breeze caught her cheek, tasted winter in the air.

  When she had rounded the lake she was inclined to drive further west. The car was low on petrol and at the next village she pulled into a service station. Half a dozen houses straggled along either side of the road. At their centre stood a general store with tearooms attached, which were entered by a separate door. At first she went into the store, looking for a Moro bar and some fruit, remembering that she had not eaten all day. The apples looked as if they were half-way through the drying process, and two bunches of bananas lying in the bottom of a wooden packing case were green. As she searched out the sweet rack she realised that the store was in the process of shutting down. CLOSING DOWN SALE read a sign above the remains of a haberdashery counter: a tangle of wool, pins, dressmaker’s tapes, some packets of pantyhose, and an ambitious pink nightgown with lace down either side of an intended cleavage. A litter of discarded tins lay at the back of the shop, and single rows of goods were pulled to the fronts of the shelves, just like Mr Gandhi’s shop, only worse. Her foot caught a rusty five-pound flour tin, empty on the floor, and sent it skidding. Nobody came to serve, although somewhere in the distance she heard raised voices.

  Empty-handed, she tried the tearooms, knocking on the counter several times until the voices in the background suddenly stopped and a thin woman, neither young nor old, but who looked as if she had been crying, appeared through the strips of blue and white plastic flyscreen. Looking around her, Rose experienced the sickening sensation that she was responsible for this woman, and for a moment half-expected to be attacked. But as the woman looked through her, Rose remembered that she had already driven well south of Kit’s electorate, and that few people outside of Weyville itself knew or cared what his wife looked like.

  She ordered tea. The sandwiches were curling and the fillings looked diseased. BE WISE, BUY PIES: the sign above the warmer at least looked new, and she recalled with yearning what a treat it had been when Elsie Diamond had allowed her and Katrina to buy pies for their school lunches. She ordered, knowing it would be a mistake, and looked for extra sachets of tomato sauce.

  ‘That’s all we’ve got,’ said the woman, nodding in the direction of the formica tables. The sauce was in large red tomato-shaped squeeze containers, their nozzles encrusted with rimes of blackened sauce.

  Rose took her place alongside a trestle table with a cardboard sign reading ARTS AND CRAFTS FOR SALE tacked above it. Arranged on the table were dried flowers, wooden ornaments adorned with shells, Polly Masters’ pottery (three jugs, two plates and a holder for Marmite jars), frilled covers for toilet rolls, several jars of what first appeared to be bottled fruit but on closer inspection was fibre knotted into strange shapes floating in liquid, grotesquely anatomical — pickled privates, $1.30 a jar, and for a moment the horrid pink things did look like women’s vulvas; pickled stoned, $1.80; pickled bums, $1.30. In spite of herself she began to laugh.

  Then stopped. What hope had once enlivened this place? She could not imagine who would buy these items. Perhaps local people, as jokes to play on one another; or perhaps passers-by shocked out of their complacency would take them home, in turn to shock their friends. Yet these hopes had been in vain, or else nobody had time or money for such frivolity any more. Or maybe time had simply rolled over this place and everybody but these people already knew that these were yesterday’s jokes.

  ‘Who makes them?’ Rose asked, picking up a jar of pickled bums as her tray was delivered to her.

  The woman took the jar and held it, studying it as if it were the first time that she had seen it, returned it to its shelf without replying.

  She picked up the tray when she had deposited the teapot and wiped at Rose’s table with a sponge.

  ‘Do you sell many?’ Rose tried again.

  ‘I don’t do the stocktaking.’ The woman’s voice was final.

  ‘I’ll take a jar,’ Rose said impulsively. She took the bums back; they were obscene, she decided, but not pornographic like the others.

  The two-dollar note Rose proffered lay on the table between them, as the woman approached again.

  ‘Do you want them wrapped?’

  ‘No. They’re fine.’

  ‘A present?’

  ‘Maybe. Are the tearooms closing as well as the shop?’

  ‘Nah. We get trucks past here. We’ll be better off without the shop. Just drags us down.’

  ‘Where will people shop?’

  ‘Buggered if I know. Turangi maybe. Up the junction. Somewhere out there. Where ever they go for their welfare these days. Know what I mean?’

  ‘The post office’s shut?’

  ‘That’s about the size of it. Piss on them, I say.’ She picked up a jar of privates. ‘Piss on this government from a great height I say.’ She put the jar down. ‘I voted for the bastards, you know.’

  ‘I guess a lot of us did,’ said Rose, and out on the plain towards the mountains she heard the wind rising and creaking.

  A truck’s roar interrupted the quiet afternoon and a Ken worth pulled up outside. The woman straightened, touched her hair and went back behind the counter. A man shambled to the flyscreen, his face red and contorted. Across the room, Rose could smell whisky. The woman shoved the man away, spoke sharply into the passage that loomed behind the screen, and resumed her place. As if she had been there all her life. As if there was no other place to go.

  Self-conscious, Rose looked for somewhere to put the jar, perhaps back on the shelf. As if it mattered.

  She sat with the evidence poised in her hand, her face turned away from the door when the driver entered the shop.

  His footsteps paused behind her. ‘Rose Diamond,’ exclaimed a voice. ‘Well gidday.’

  She put the jar down carefully and said without turning round, ‘Ellis Hannen.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ he said, pulling a chair out and turning it back to front so that his legs straddled the back of it. ‘You’ve been out buying antiques, poor old ladies selling up the family silver?’

  ‘Don’t be lik
e that.’

  ‘Okay. Buying up the last shares in the last mill so you can flog it off cheap to the Japs?’

  ‘Ellis, if you’re going to talk like that, go away.’

  He raised his finger towards the woman at the counter; anticipating his order, she was already bearing down on them with hot coffee and two pies. Ellis put down ten dollars and winked at her.

  ‘Darlin’, I’m not going nowhere. This one’s my place. Yeah,’ and he grabbed the woman’s arm for an instant and she didn’t resist, ‘this here’s my baby.’

  He was a dark thickset man with a tanned face full of white false teeth. Rose remembered that he had bad teeth even as a child. But he had very clean whites to his eyes and now, as then, they transformed his face from ordinary to engaging.

  ‘Just touring, then?’ he said, when they were alone. It would be easy for her to leave, she thought, and wondered why she did not. Her legs felt heavy and tired.

  ‘I’m on the run, Ellie,’ she said, making a joke, only it didn’t come out like that.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘No, of course not. I just needed a change.’

  ‘Bit of space, eh. Katrina said you worked pretty hard.’

  ‘Katrina? What’s she been telling you? When did you see her?’

  ‘Hey, take it easy. Couple of months back. I went to a garage sale down the Blake Block one Saturday morning and ran into her.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘You do? Well, jeez, Rose, it’s a good thing you do. But at least, counting Katrina, there’s still two Diamonds that speak to me without me having to hole them up in a tearoom out the back of nowhere.’

  ‘Well that’s one more than speaks to me, Ellie.’

  Ellis Hannen scratched his head. You could mark him down as a type, jocular, not a thinking man, but shrewd, the sort Tom Diamond would have approved of for a son-in-law. Only he wasn’t quite like that either. At school, he’d got warts on his hands and had black pencil spotted all over them for months; he’d kept them in his pockets whenever he could and then got strapped for that. She could still hear him crying, the strap on the warts on a cold morning. Then he got ringworm and had his head shaved and painted and he’d hidden out the back of his parents’ farm where they couldn’t find him for two weeks and Jim Diamond, her brother, took him food all that time and never let on where he was. Ellis got tough after that.

  ‘Yeah, well, Jim’ll get over it I guess.’

  ‘He’d better not leave it too long.’ Rose surveyed the crusts of congealed pie. Ellis had eaten his second one already.

  ‘Bleeding heart liberals,’ Jim Diamond said to his sister when she rang him about Christmas. They hadn’t shared Christmas dinner for years but they always spent time together during its season, usually on Boxing Day, when they had a drink at one or other of their houses and gave gifts to each other’s children. It was always Jim’s or Rose’s house and Katrina and Larissa came to whichever place it was. Basil and Sharna never attended one of these gatherings because by the time they were born Rose and her brother were not speaking.

  ‘What do you think you and that poncey bloke of yours are up to?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said, although she did. She knew all right.

  ‘I went to a football match earlier this year,’ said Jim. ‘In fact I went to several, every one I could get to that the Boks played in the North Island, not that I can say it was so great watching them play up against all that shit. I went to a football game in Weyville, and my bloody sister tried to stop me getting into it.’

  ‘Oh Jim,’ she said, then, ‘it’s Christmas, can’t we talk about it some other time?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay, so what do you want to say about it?’ she asked, feeling the bottom drop out of her stomach, knowing even before he said it that he didn’t want to talk to her at all. He had disapproved of Katrina in the past but she could tell that this was different.

  ‘I went to Auckland and you bombed them from a plane.’

  ‘Jim … I didn’t bomb them.’ Though secretly she was pleased to be included.

  ‘With flour. You bombed them with flour.’

  Her fatal mistake, then, was to laugh at him. When she stopped, he had gone.

  ‘How is my big brother?’ she asked. ‘Has he joined Rotary yet?’

  ‘How did you know?’ Ellis’s surprise was genuine. ‘Mr Big of the trucking world. He owns two to one rigs on the rest of the owners.’

  ‘I miss him,’ she said. ‘Dammit, Ellis, I miss him.’ Her eyes were full of tears and she looked away, hoping he wouldn’t notice. ‘Oh goddammit, Ellis, I miss him.’

  ‘Tell him.’

  ‘It’s gone on too long. Seven years.’

  ‘Yep, maybe.’ He shook his head.

  She wiped her face with the back of her hand. Silently he handed her a clean handkerchief. Ellis had always had clean handkerchiefs.

  ‘Remember that night at the lakefront? That time you danced on the back of the truck?’

  ‘The truck? Oh that. Vaguely.’

  She could see he wanted to talk about the past, about what he thought might have been, but she could have told him never would, no way.

  ‘You were an amazing dancer,’ she said, gathering her car keys, and, defiantly, the pickled bums.

  ‘What about a drink,’ he said, without getting up.

  Then, in the distance they heard a siren, a car travelling fast. Both their heads swivelled. A police car passed at speed, slowed down momentarily outside the tearooms, and Rose experienced a flash of recognition which was so quick that a moment later she could not identify what it was that she had seen.

  ‘I wonder what’s up?’

  ‘Probably just practising. Cops. They speed everywhere these days. They’re all over the place today. I saw that march starting out of Weyville earlier in the day.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rose. ‘So did I.’

  ‘Keep them on their toes. I thought of going.’

  ‘You? You’ve got a job.’

  He looked at her curiously. ‘So I have. About that drink?’

  ‘There’s a pub round here?’

  ‘Of sorts. We can drink in the private bar, they get the odd traveller staying over.’

  ‘I’d better leave it tonight,’ she said, as if hurrying somewhere; implicit, the suggestion that she would return to Weyville.

  For it was nearly dusk, and the wind that had been rising throughout the afternoon had turned bitter.

  She raised her hand to Ellis who was already turning to the woman behind the counter.

  He had given her an idea.

  ‘I stood and looked at her in the doorway,’ Toni was saying, ‘and I thought, y’know, she’s so innocent; Rose doesn’t know a friggin’ thing. You’d think she’d know more, wouldn’t anybody think she’d know more?’

  ‘Neurotic, needs a job, that’s what,’ said Larry Verschoelt thickly. His wife, Nonie, was deep in conversation with Denise Taite about getting ruched blinds made up cheap. Nonie hadn’t had a job since she finished up on Woolworth’s lolly counter twenty years ago, though she called running the women’s share club work. She hadn’t had much ‘work’ since the crash though. Larry had already been drinking home-made stout with Gabby Taite, Denise’s husband, before they came and now he’d drunk four or five of Morris Applebloom’s gin and tonics. Toni tried to avoid his eye, wondered who could possibly have invited the Verschoelts after what had happened with the march, or the Taites, for that matter. A map of Gabby and Denise’s lives had been laid out when they built their house around a bar.

  ‘She has a job; she works damn’ hard at it,’ Toni said, stirring herself in the window seat. Her day seemed to have been endless. She was recapping in her head: Rose, in crisis — it had been imperative to see her this morning before the shit hit the fan and it was all over town that she was going nuts; the march, the confrontation with Wiki — Wiki hadn’t said wanker but she might as well, even though Toni had gi
ven ground. She was still smarting, that had hurt; now this. This party, and she knew she should have stayed home. She relapsed further into the corner and rested her face against the glass.

  ‘Being Kit Kendall’s wife.’ Matt spoke, sounding sour. ‘Larry’s right … for once. Rose was a good teacher.’ Matt’s wife, good dependable Nancy, had stayed home tonight to prepare lessons; she had taught with Rose. ‘Politics wastes too many people,’ he was saying, something she never thought to have heard from him. ‘For instance, there’s some damn’ good doctors in politics, they’d have been more use in their surgeries. Teachers, scientists, all done for. And look what it does to their partners. Nancy’d give Rose a job tomorrow.’

  ‘Nancy!’ Larry yelled. ‘Nancy Reagan, Nancy You-Know-Who-the-Cabinet-Minister’s-wife, and Nancy Decker as well. Aw mate,’ he slapped his own thigh, ‘with wives called Nance who needs enemies?’

  Even Harry Ryan, blinking uncertainly at the end of the table by himself, looked up and laughed. Stopping as quickly as he had begun, he dropped his nose towards his beer again. The puffiness around his eyes suggested that he had been crying, or sleeping badly at nights.

  Matt edged over to Toni. ‘Will Morris throw him out, d’you think?’ he asked quietly, meaning Larry.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Toni said. ‘Does it matter? I give up on that man.’

  ‘You couldn’t stay away, could you?’ said Matt. His eyes had followed her gaze as she watched Sarah Applebloom, the youngest in the room, with her straight ironed-looking black hair and her face like a lily. Alongside her, Morris fixed drinks for the Newbones who had just come in with Mungo Lord. He had driven them over in his new Range Rover; he exuded a faint scent of antiseptic still and looked scrubbed, as if he had just finished operating.

  Hortense chattered to six people at once, and over the top of Nick; at the moment she worked on the paper with Matt. Dressed in a mannishly tailored navy suit with a tight skirt, she punctuated every sentence with gestures. Her fingers were excessively long with very large knuckles. Nick let her talk without interruption. Nowadays, he programmed the computers Lyle Warner sold; he wore dark-rimmed glasses and a red tie with his sports jacket and white shoes. Often he flicked his shoulder-pads, conscious of his dandruff problem. He’d done the computer print-outs for the elections, listing the residents street by street. Kit Kendall said, after the last election, they would have almost certainly have lost it without Nick.