Limestone Read online

  But Grandad lacked the publican’s bonhomie. The teams and the locals and the buses began to bypass him for the greater conviviality of the Georgetown pub further up the road. Grandma added another butt to the ashtray, our mother wiped down the smeared Formica in the big bleak empty bar, and Grandad poured himself another from the top shelf as failure, lovely failure, breathed her sweet familiar seductive melody.

  The year our mother turned sixteen, they sold up and moved to a bleaker place over on the coast and, free at last to choose for herself, she came to live in Oamaru with her older sister.

  Phemie had left twelve years earlier. She’d escaped the bar and the raucous late-night choir practice downstairs and gone to seek God. She could have been a nun, perhaps, but something about the convent reminded her of the family quarters above a bar: the high bare corridors, the narrow bed in the single room. She opted instead for the life of the lay religious: Daughter of Mary, daily attendance at the Mass, a self-imposed roster of good works, her big awkward hands red with chilblains washing the dirty linen of the old and incontinent at the Rosemount Retirement Home, her gawky big maiden body offering up the pain.

  So when her youngest sister arrived at the door of her little bungalow on Greta Street, her pretty blue eyes fierce with the determination not to go home again, ever, Phemie opened her clumsy arms to her.

  ‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Come in. You can stay here as long as you like.’ Though she loved her little bungalow. She loved the solitude she shared only with a ginger tom called Murphy who curled on the bed waiting for her to finish her devotions each night, when he could wriggle down beneath the blankets and warm his owner’s chilly feet, for Phemie left them bare as she knelt to her prayers on icy lino. She slept beneath a thin covering, the cat her sole comfort, warm and purring down in the dark, kneading her cold skin as she lay on her back, arms crossed over empty breasts, waiting for sleep to come and take her. Phemie loved her bare bedroom. She loved her little kitchen where the morning sun fell in a neat rectangle onto the table. She loved the perfection of quiet evenings by the heater after years of confinement with too many brothers and sisters. She had saved every penny to buy this house, going without new winter shoes, eating bread spotted with mould rather than throwing out a single scrap. And now it was hers, with its shiny windows and its front hedge of mingled olearia and honeysuckle that she kept neatly trimmed. She loved it: windows, kitchen, hedge, peaceful solitary room after room.

  So of course it was only to be expected that she would be called upon to offer it up. Here was her little sister on the doorstep with her suitcase. Kath, the beauty of the family, their father’s favourite, the one everyone adored and babied. The one who was much too pretty for her own good, who had no defence against the evils of the world. The innocent.

  ‘Come on in,’ said Phemie. ‘Stay here just as long as you like.’ She gave up her solitude with a sensation that was almost pleasure. She even insisted that Kath take the main bedroom overlooking the street while she moved to the sunroom which she claimed to prefer, even though it was smaller, because it had a view of the garden. Kath accepted her sister’s sacrifice as if it were her due. She hung her dresses and skirts and coat in Phemie’s former wardrobe; she arranged her brush and comb on the dressing table along with a new mirror (Phemie had never bothered with a mirror). And off she went in her cherry-red winter coat the very next day and found a job at the Copper Kettle, arranging sausage rolls in the warmer cabinet, making endless pots of tea, wiping pastry crumbs and coconut shreds from the little round tables.

  That was where our mother met our father. He came in one day, just before Christmas, offering to decorate the front window. We knew about this because we asked. We wanted to hear the story of the time before we had existed, that moment when chance rendered us viable. And sometimes, if she was in a good mood, our mother could be persuaded to tell it: how this little red-haired Irishman had walked in the door with a bag full of paints and brushes. How he was travelling about the country, earning his way by doing a bit of signwriting or painting pictures.

  ‘What sort of pictures?’ we asked, knowing the answer but wanting to hear it all again, over and over.

  Our mother waved her hand. ‘Oh, you know … advertisements.’ A loaf of bread on the wall of a bread shop, that boat on the wall at Aspros’ fish shop: that was one of Mick’s. Sometimes people wanted a proper portrait: their favourite dog or a prize bull or a picture of their children. So Mick would stay a few days and do it for them. The Copper Kettle was the first place he tried in Oamaru, and at first the proprietor wasn’t keen. Not keen at all. Mrs Norris kept a tight rein on the finances. Any door-to-door salespeople who called in touting calendars and the like, didn’t get more than a second of her time. She had them out the door so quick their feet hardly hit the ground. She didn’t believe in wasting money on fancies.

  ‘So what did he say to you?’ we said, knowing the reply by heart.

  ‘Oh, he didn’t take any notice of me at all,’ said our mother. ‘I was making club sandwiches at the time, and Mick just stood there, cocky as you like with his back to me, talking in that voice of his to Mrs Norris, telling her what a charming establishment she had, and that he’d known from the moment he stepped in the door and could smell fresh baking that this was one of the gems of the country and deserved to be known far and wide. It was a real slice of the old world transported to the new, and would she like a Christmas decoration for the front window, no cash up front, she could pay when she had seen the results and if she didn’t like them she was at liberty to pay him nothing at all. He’d be happy to do it just for the cost of a cup of tea and one of those delicious-looking sandwiches the girl over there was making. And that was when he turned and looked at me for the first time.’

  ‘And what happened then?’ we asked, wanting this bit too.

  And sometimes she said, ‘He winked at me. The cheek of him!’

  And sometimes she said, ‘Mrs Norris agreed! I couldn’t believe it. She never let anyone talk her into spending a penny where it didn’t need to be spent. But then he could talk anyone into anything. He could talk the birds from the trees …’

  We liked that. That our father could talk birds from trees. He seemed like someone from a book. But we had to hurry her along here or she became sad, started thinking about how she herself had been talked down from the trees by that lovely voice, and how he’d gone and left her with a nest of three children to raise on her own. A whole other story could begin at that point, veering off toward misery. Whereas we wanted to hear the happy story, about the picture, the one that led inevitably to us.

  ‘So what did he paint?’ we said, nudging her on down that road.

  And sometimes she said, ‘A window with lots of little panes of glass and snow caught in all the corners and robins with wreaths of holly in each square. It was just beautiful. All the regulars loved it and there were people stopping all day to admire it. And for the tables he painted special Christmas menu cards that were so good people asked if they could have them afterward for souvenirs.’

  We had one ourselves. A girl on skates wearing a cherry-red coat, a girl who looked rather like our mother only with longer hair, and on the reverse a list of prices for homemade mince pies and decorated miniature fruit cakes. It remained on display between the chiming clock and the porcelain shepherdess in her lace skirt until the time when our father left and all evidence of his presence was expunged from the room. The card, the drawing of the farmhouse and the donkey that had hung above the dining table, the LPs he had liked listening to. Kenneth McKellar and Mary O’Hara singing about the spinning wheel going slower and slower and S … L … O … W … E … R … till the old woman was fast asleep and the girl was off out the window to meet her young man. But we remembered the card and the farmhouse and the donkey even when they were gone. Where the drawing had hung was a bright rectangle on the wallpaper, and nothing quite fitted the gap left by the card of the young girl skating in her red coat.
/>   So that was how they had met. He had walked in the door and fallen in love with her on the spot, like the gypsy lad in a story meeting the beautiful princess in her high tower. The beautiful girl who had been a lady-in-waiting to the Coronation Carnival Queen in 1953. There was a photo of her in a crinoline of pink tulle and a tiara, waving from a float shaped like a swan with its wings raised, though you could see the wheels of the truck underneath the crêpe-paper feathers and the little gap in its breast for the driver to see through. She was, we thought, much more beautiful than the Carnival Queen. She had deserved to be more than just a lady-in-waiting.

  ‘Then what happened?’ we said, and sometimes she said, ‘He swept me off my feet in a whirlwind romance and we were married six weeks later,’ which was how all such love stories were supposed to end. We presumed a white veil, a satin horseshoe, though we had no actual proof, for we were not a family given to the photographic record. No gilt-framed images of babies in rompers and wedding parties lined up on the steps at the Basilica or pious children in pure First Communion regalia adorned our walls. We didn’t bother with such nonsense. Still, we presumed it: our mother in white satin, our father in a dark suit, a bridesmaid — maybe two, and a best man and a flower girl with a basket of pink rose petals.

  Sometimes when we asked the question she refused to tell the story of the whirlwind courtship, but waved her hand dismissively and got on with thumping the iron over our school shirts, saying, ‘Och, the usual rubbish.’ And that was that.

  When Mick arrived, he too moved into Phemie’s bungalow and Phemie moved out. She shifted to the Gothic fastness of the mental hospital at Seacliff fifty miles away to the south, where she tended the sad shadows in their sagging cardigans in that long-half sleep of drugged derangement. Between shifts she returned to a tiny room in the staff’s accommodation: a room no bigger than a cell, with a high ceiling and bare white walls and no pets allowed. And a staff lounge where the radio chattered and there was the constant crash and bang of other younger nurses coming and going, heading off on their dates in the city, the restlessness of communal living she had left with such relief.

  Alone in the dark, I think about Phemie. I think of her lying in her single bed listening to all that life going on about her in that gloomy castle rearing up all turrets and pinnacles among bare rain-lashed hills. The other nurses think her plain and stern. They call her Sister Mulcahy to her face and Pheeble behind her back, and she knows this but takes no notice. She lies in her bed with no Murphy to warm her cold feet, resisting the impulse to tuck her chilblained hands for comfort between her legs. And she is suffused with a deep and trembling joy that makes her groan out loud. She is overwhelmed by the painful pleasure of self-sacrifice. Her little house, her cat, her garden she has given over entirely to her sister. To Kath and her husband and to the baby who was born nine months to the day after their wedding and the two children who followed at regular intervals thereafter.

  She took a photo of us on her Box Brownie. All of us standing in a row on the back step, squinting into the sun. Me and Maddie and Brian and our mother and our father who had given up the wandering life for true love and found work around town as a signwriter. Everyone was happy.

  Our mother also loved the little bungalow with its shiny windows and criss-crossed curtains so far from the Annandale hotel and kids squabbling like puppies in the family quarters upstairs. She knew her luck, former lady-in-waiting to the Coronation Carnival Queen. It required effort to maintain such perfection. Before setting foot outside the front door she always paused at the long mirror in the hallway to straighten her hair anxiously and tug at her skirt. She lined us up too, and inspected us closely, like a platoon on parade, knocking briskly at our shoulders with the clothes brush, dragging our hair straight, checking for clean fingernails. Even on the street she might stop suddenly for some rapid furtive grooming, dabbing the sleepies from the corners of our eyes with the corner of her hanky which she sucked and twisted to a point.

  Her favourite word of approval was ‘immaculate’. A woman who kept her home immaculate was to be admired. Children whose clothes were immaculate were desirable children.

  In this, she was constantly frustrated. Behind the house lay the vegetable garden. This was our father’s territory and it operated to a less stringent regime than the immaculate front. Couch threaded the rich limestone soil. Chickweed and nettle and soft flannelette mallow thrived among ragged rows of silverbeet and feathery carrots. Our father gardened with sudden spurts of energy interspersed by complete indifference. Once a year in spring he cleared the lot and put in potatoes. He dug trenches and hillocks, and I was allowed to follow, dropping old wrinkly potatoes at exact intervals onto the crest of each little hill. He showed me how to set them so that the new green shoots faced upward to the sky.

  ‘That’s the way,’ he said. ‘Because if you leave them facing down, they’ll grow all the way to China and all them little Chinese girls’ll stop eating their rice and have your potatoes instead.’

  His muddy hand showed me how to set them true, and in a few weeks he’d be proved right, for there would be a row of green sprouts along the hilltops. And before summer was properly come they’d make a tunnel the length of each shaw, deep and dark enough to crawl into and hide. You could lie under the leaves and the purple flowers which you must never eat, for unlike the potatoes that grew under the ground, the flowers that bloomed above were deadly poison, and you wondered at that: that a plant could make a deadly poison and something as good as mashed potatoes, both at the same time. You’d lie there looking up through the leaves at scraps of blue sky, hearing Maddie calling ‘Ready or not!’ and walking round the garden looking for you till she gave up, as she always did, and went off to ride her pony — which wasn’t really a pony, but an old petrol drum she had lain on one side and bridled with a bit of string. And you were left to lie there undisturbed among the potatoes, not minding at all that the game was over, liking the sour-sweet smell of the plants and watching tiny emerald beetles walking upside down on their leaves.

  And at Christmas, nestling beside each wrinkly old mother tuber, there would be a dozen new white potatoes, so tender they didn’t need peeling but simply popped from paper-thin skins glistening with butter and salt.

  When our mother was away — in the hospital, for instance, having Brian — our father cooked us potatoes for our tea. He didn’t bother with saucepans and the elaborate pot-banging rituals that normally accompanied the preparation of meals.

  ‘I’ll show you the best way to cook your dinner,’ he said. And he put the potatoes straight in the sitting-room fire, just tucked them in among the embers where they turned as black as coal and were ready to eat. Not at the table, but sitting on the floor with newspaper over our laps, the black crusts cracking on floury white that we scooped up with a teaspoon as if we were eating boiled eggs. A scoop of white potato, a dab of butter, a sprinkling of salt, our fingers and faces covered in black smudges. And a Crunchie bar for pudding for each of us and a cigarette for Dad, who smoked seated on the sitting-room floor, leaning back against the easy chair.

  ‘And the best part of all,’ he said, crumpling all the newspaper and burnt potato skins into a ball and tossing it on the fire, ‘is the washin’ up.’ The picnic flared and was gone.

  ‘But don’t you go telling your mammy about that kind of washin’ up, will you now, girls,’ he said, blowing a perfect smoke ring.

  Our mother disliked him smoking indoors, said the smell got into the curtains. Dad usually sat outside in the washhouse to smoke, alongside the companionable plop plop plop of his homebrew coming to perfection in a big bucket behind the copper. When our mother returned with a new baby as pale and thin skinned as one of our father’s new potatoes, and we reverted to casseroles and upside-down puddings with cream, eaten properly, seated at the table, we were almost sorry. We lamented potatoes charred black and all you needed for a decent dinner.

  The potato bed was well maintained in orderly rows, b
ut for the rest of it, our father simply didn’t care.

  ‘Ah, sure and nobody sees it but ourselves,’ he said, licking his pencil and circling a dead cert for the 2.30 at Addington. ‘And the grass’ll grow again just as soon as it’s mowed. It’s a waste of time all this mowing, so it is.’ And the door would slam and there would be the knock of his bike as he got it out of the wash-house and he’d be gone, off to the TAB to place his bet, or with his fishing rod down to the breakwater to jig for cod and trevally and chat with the other men in the sun while the garden ran out of control completely.

  Our mother chopped silverbeet for our tea or sliced a carrot — for there were always plenty despite the couch and chickweed — with a tight mouth, conscious of the Powells next door who had won Best Garden two years in a row with a uniform creation of velvety lawns, pruned roses and vegetables properly marshalled behind little regimental sticks with the seed packets attached for easy identification. Yet on both sides of the fence the rich limestone soil yielded vegetables for soup with barley and a mutton knuckle, and casseroles with bacon from Frasers factory, and there was plenty of fruit for bottling and jam. The blackcurrants and raspberries on our side were, if anything, superior, a dense thicket of unpruned branches laden with purple and crimson. And our nectarines, though spotty, bent the branches to the ground, while strawberries formed a thick border of sweet concealed scarlet to unmown grass.