Relief Read online

  Relief

  Relief

  Anna Taylor

  Victoria University Press

  VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Victoria University of Wellington

  PO Box 600 Wellington

  http://www.victoria.ac.nz/vup

  Copyright © Anna Taylor 2009

  First published 2009

  This book is copyright. Apart from

  any fair dealing for the purpose of private study,

  research, criticism or review, as permitted under the

  Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any

  process without the permission of

  the publishers

  National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Taylor, Anna, 1982-

  Relief / Anna Taylor.

  ISBN 978-0-86473-587-4

  I. Title.

  NZ823.3—dc 22

  Published with the assistance of a grant from

  Printed by Printlink, Wellington

  For my mother, Erin,

  with all my love and gratitude

  Contents

  Working Girl 9

  Electricity 33

  Michael’s Fasting for Christmas 55

  Going Under 77

  The Beekeeper 101

  Panic 113

  History 125

  Relief 149

  The Dress 165

  In the Wind 177

  Birds 205

  Working Girl

  In the summer of 1985 Ellie spent most days two houses along, at Mr Fin’s. It was hot that summer, hotter than usual, and everyone in the street kept their sprinklers going, day after day, the long wisps of water moving lazily back and forth across the lawns.

  Ellie got a new bike for Christmas, a two-wheeler, and she rode it down to Jefferson’s corner and back every morning before breakfast. Once, she and her sister went beyond that point, right up the hill past Mr and Mrs Mildenhall’s, and on the way back a man in a clattery car turned around and drove, slowly, right beside them, his bare arm dangling out the open window, a fag puffing in the corner of his mouth.

  ‘I’ll race you,’ Laura hissed. ‘I’ll race you all the way home,’ and even though Ellie was on her old bike then, with trainer wheels on, she knew it wasn’t a game, and pedaled with all her might, the muscles in her legs getting hot, and stretching and stretching, like rubber bands.

  Mr Fin had moved in at the end of 1982, when Ellie was four. His was the second to last section to go in the street. It lay just beyond Mr Ford’s gravelly, snaky driveway, beside the bamboo grove. Ellie could see the bamboo from her bedroom window, and before Mr Fin arrived she went across there sometimes in her gumboots to muck around in the puddles. It was all clay over there, with tufts of scrappy grass by the fenceline, and after a solid night of rain the ground would get slippery—its top layer a silky tan—and she was able to slip and slide all over the place, the mud curling up over the ridged soles of her boots and splattering across her legs.

  Mr Fin knocked on their door two weeks after the SOLD sticker had been pasted over the sign at no. 38. Laura was off school with the mumps that day, and Ellie wasn’t allowed to go to kindy. They were hanging around in the living room, squares of morning sun lying flat on the floor; their Mum was still in her dressing gown, her hair dark and wet from the shower. The knock gave them a fright. Who could it be?

  Ellie went to check.

  Mr Fin stood in the doorway, one shoulder leaning casually against the frame. He filled it all up, blocking the view of the concrete path with its patch of lawn on either side, and the gate leading to the pavement and the road. She blinked up at him.

  ‘Morning miss!’ he said, and extended his hand.

  She didn’t reach out hers. She fiddled with the doorknob.

  ‘Is your Mum home?’

  Ellie didn’t know what to say. She shifted on her feet and breathed very quietly. She thought, Laura would say yes, yes-she-is, wait-a-moment-please. But she couldn’t quite find the words; her tongue felt thick and fat.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he smiled at her, quietly, ‘it’s you who’s the lady of the house, eh?’

  Ellie nodded. That seemed the best thing to do. But it only made Mr Fin laugh.

  ‘Thought so,’ he said. ‘Thought so.’

  And then there was just silence. He cleared his throat.

  ‘Well I’m just over the way there,’ he said, pointing, ‘and I guess you could say I was kind of in the neighbourhood.’ And then he laughed again.

  ‘I should probably just go, your highness,’ he said. ‘That’s probably best.’

  At that moment there was a scuffling sound down the hallway and Ellie’s Mum appeared, dressed, to save the day. She had tied her wet hair back and flashed some lipstick across her mouth.

  He put out his hand to her, and she shook it.

  ‘Me and the missus have been having a good little chat,’ he said. ‘I’m Finley. Thought I should just come on over to introduce myself.’

  Ellie’s Mum smiled brightly. ‘Of course!’ she said. ‘God, excuse the mess!’

  She invited him in for tea.

  Mr Fin wore a satchel of tools slung over his shoulder, and smelt of wood and something stronger too—yeasty bread. His singlet hung low and loose, flapping carelessly under his arms. He strode inside and leaned against the bench. Ellie and Laura could hear the rumble of his voice moving through the walls from the kitchen. Their Mum’s, slightly shrill and tense, was as clear as a bell.

  ‘It’s a lovely neighbourhood,’ she said. ‘You’ll fit in just fine.’

  They went out on the deck.

  Ellie and Laura hung around inside, listening to the clinking of porcelain against porcelain. Splinters of dust, lit up by the sun, did a slow whirly swirl in the air. Laura got out the board games. They settled themselves down.

  On the way back inside, Mr Fin’s knees and his tanned thick thighs nearly walked right into their jigsaw.

  ‘Excuse me-e,’ he exclaimed. ‘Two such dainty little ladies almost blending right on into the carpet.’

  Ellie’s mother laughed. ‘In the middle of the room,’ she said. ‘Right in the way.’

  ‘But how could I ever have missed them,’ he said. ‘Little ladies such as these. And doing a jigsaw of the—’ he squinted— ‘of the . . .’

  ‘Leaning Tower of Pisa,’ Laura said helpfully.

  ‘Leaning Tower of Pisa, no less.’ He crouched down close beside them, so that Ellie had to tuck her chin into her chest and turn her eyes away.

  He swayed there, on his haunches, from side to side.

  ‘Looks like I look,’ he said, ‘when I’ve been running round all night, painting the town. Not that I’d do that now, ma’am.’ He clicked his tongue at Laura and her lumpy neck. ‘No siree.’

  ‘Have you ever seen it?’ Ellie’s mother said. ‘The tower, I mean.’

  Mr Fin tapped his fingers on the ground. He didn’t answer her.

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘would you have a look at this?’ He paused, and raised and dropped his eyebrows several times. ‘What have I got in here?’

  Ellie didn’t look, not directly anyway, but out of the corner of her eyes she saw Mr Fin’s hand reach into his pocket and come out clasping one, and then two, tightly wrapped sweets. They shimmered on his palm like little jewels.

  ‘Say thank you,’ their mother said, and Laura said, thank-you-very-much, but Ellie sat stock still, her feet tucked neatly under herself, and she still didn’t say thank you when he placed the lolly on the floor beside her knee, close enough for her fingers to reach out, slowly, towards the crackly red of its wrapping.

  *

  1985 was the year Ellie was in Mr Slater’s class, and also the year her best friend moved to Australia, every now a
nd then sending home letters covered with thick coloured stamps. Ellie didn’t know any of that yet—what was to come, stuck in that endless summer of sun with nothing to do. A girl called Katie-Ann Small went missing that summer, in a town Ellie had never heard of. She caught a snippet of the news one night, before her parents hurriedly switched it off, showing her—this Katie-Ann—wearing a pink summer dress with a white trim, and smiling so hard it looked like her teeth had nothing to hold them in and could come clattering out of her mouth any minute like a broken string of pearls.

  Someone who didn’t have the right had taken her—that’s what abduction meant, Ellie’s mother said. Laura started carrying nail scissors in her pocket wherever she went. Just in case someone tried to abduct her too.

  Every Sunday, everybody but Mr Fin would mow their lawns. The hum and whir of the mowers would join in with the creaking cicadas and, Ellie’s mother said, it was just about enough to make you go deaf or mad, all that noise. Ellie’s Dad brought the fan from his office home in the weekends, and they set it up in the lounge and took turns standing in front of it, the drum of its arms, going round and round, mixing with the sound in their chests. She liked the way its head moved from side to side as if it were saying no, and she stood closer and closer to it, until her Mum said, ‘Watch out. What if your hair got caught?’ And raised her eyebrows. ‘Imagine that, Ellie.’

  The fan was a silvery grey, with three red buttons, and from that moment on it turned into something beginning with D—for Danger. Ellie didn’t stand close to it any more. She walked through the room as far away from it as she could get. Every Friday, when her Dad appeared in the doorway, the cool metallic of the fan in his arms, she was filled up with its presence, right down to her toes. As he plugged it in, and turned the switch, she could feel herself being drawn towards it, her hair getting caught up, flapping like ribbons, and her body lifting up off the ground, moving towards the clack and the whir, right into the middle of that cold beating wind.

  Mr Fin didn’t mow his lawns on Sunday because he didn’t have any. He didn’t believe in lawns, he told Ellie once. But, really, she thought, it was because he was building his house out the front of his section and living in a one-room shack out the back, and with all the to-ing and fro-ing the lawns just didn’t have a chance—the blades of grass were trampled back in under the clay every time they tried to squeeze their heads through its dry, cracked surface. Mr Fin’s house was taking ages to get built. It was because he was doing it all himself, even the plumbing. It was just a shell, really, looking whole and complete from the outside but all hollowed out when you stepped in the front door. The floor was concrete, covered in shavings of wood, and there were no walls, just beams surrounding the toilets and the bath, a staircase with no rail, a pile of bricks where the fireplace would be. If you squinted your eyes real tight, Mr Fin said, you could almost imagine it, see it, finished. But Ellie couldn’t. She tried once and everything looked just the same, but blurry.

  Next door to Mr Fin were Wayne Hiles and his Indian wife, Jhumpa. They lived in the biggest house in the street, a stucco mansion with a tall wooden door. Jhumpa, Ellie thought, was the prettiest lady she knew. Her hair was thick and black and seemed to stay up, coiled into a fat bun, all by itself. She did not wear a sari like the Indian women Ellie had seen at the gift shop in Main Street, but wore brightly coloured tops threaded with gold, and matching skirts, and shoes that made a pitter-patter sound when she walked. She had gold bangles on one arm, almost reaching right up to her elbow, and rings on every finger. Ellie’s Mum said she didn’t know what Jhumpa was doing with Wayne Hiles—who was not pretty at all—but she thought it could possibly have something to do with the M word. Money.

  They had a goldfish almost as big as Ellie’s head that they fed cake to straight off their plates.

  That summer, Jhumpa began to sing by the open window of her bathroom, for the benefit, everyone thought, of Mr Fin. Laura said it was just because she was happy, because where she came from it was always very hot, and this heat, thick and heavy, reminded her of being at home, and made her want to open her mouth to let the joy out. It was strange, though, how she always started at 9.30, just as Mr Fin was stepping outside in his baggy singlet and grubby shorts and rough working boots. And also how she sang for a good hour or so, long after the steam from her shower had stopped puffing in rolling white clouds out the open window.

  Ellie wondered about India, and why the thought of it—with its thick, sweet drink that Jhumpa had once given her to try, and its oily crackers, round as pancakes—would make anyone want to sing that much.

  *

  In early January, in the afternoons, the tar on the edge of the road began to melt. It was about then that Ellie started going over to Mr Fin’s on a regular basis. Holidays had sort of lost their sheen. Laura was too busy hanging round with her friends to notice her; she suddenly didn’t even want to go for bike rides in the morning, even though Ellie had her new bike with a bell on it. Ellie’s Mum got more and more tired—it was the heat, she said—and she began to lie down a lot on the couch in the living room.

  Mr Fin called out to Ellie on her third lap of the street one morning.

  ‘Ellie H,’ he said. ‘Getting yourself some air?’

  He was surveying his house from the edge of the pavement, a cup of coffee between his hands.

  She was nervous of the brakes, they were so strong she had just about gone over the handlebars, twice, so she didn’t stop, just nodded vigorously and kept going.

  The next day, though, he was out the front again, planting shrubs along the fence-line.

  ‘You’re going to cut a track in the footpath, Ellie H,’ he said, ‘going up and down like that all day. Want a job?’

  Ellie, who didn’t think six-and-a-half-year-olds were things that anybody would ever want to have around, stuck her brakes on and lurched to a halt.

  ‘Yes, please. Thank you,’ she said. Just like her mother had taught her.

  That morning Mr Fin got her to help him with the plants. He dug a hole while she stood beside him, holding a mini tree in her arms, its waxy leaves against her chest. When the hole was ready he pulled on the black plastic wrapper that held the tree’s dirt in. They patted the earth down together.

  ‘Tell me something, Ellie H,’ he said.

  And Ellie, who thought maybe talking was part of her job, told him about Tom Birch, who had something wrong in his chest and had fallen over on the field one day, flat on his face. He’d got out of Jump Rope for Heart, which everyone else had to do, and was allowed to read books instead. She wished that she had something wrong there too.

  Mr Fin laughed.

  ‘What’s your favourite country?’ he said.

  She said she didn’t really know.

  ‘If you had wings—’ he leaned past her for the watering can— ‘where would you fly to, little Miss E? Anywhere in the world.’

  Ellie didn’t know much about the world, or about wings. She’d never even seen an aeroplane apart from on TV. She paused. She thought about Jhumpa.

  ‘Prob-ly India,’ she said.

  ‘India, eh? Like elephants?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Well I’ll tell you what, Ellie H,’ he said. ‘Next time I go off to India, I’ll pop you in my pocket. I’ll take you too.’

  Mr Fin almost had a wife. Almost—because they weren’t married yet, but were going to be, one day. Her name was Mindy Malone and she lived in Jacksonville, America, that’s where she was from. Mr Fin said he was building the house for her, for Mindy. Just like the guy and the Taj Mahal. He took Ellie inside and rifled under his bed, and found an atlas that had a picture of the Taj Mahal in its front. It was pearly white and looked like a castle. She touched it with her fingers. Mr Fin held the page open with his big, hairy hand.

  ‘Inside,’ he said, ‘it’s always cool, even in the heat.’ He gestured towards the open door. ‘Hotter than this, little Miss E.’

  He read out the caption from under
neath. ‘The Taj Mahal is the greatest monument to love,’ it said. ‘Some call it the most romantic building in the world.’

  Mr Fin made a sound of agreement in his throat and flicked forward to the maps.

  The United States of America was big and fat, with lots of different coloured squares and only a thin trim of blue around the corners. He pointed to a tiny dot on its edge.

  ‘Mindy’s right there,’ he said. ‘Right now. Little darlin’.’

  Ellie watched how he moved his head close to the map, as if he could see her, as if he had her pinned firmly under his finger, like a bug. She tried to imagine what his Little Darling would look like, and how small the place she was living in must be, such a tiny dot in such a swamp of land.

  At the back of Mr Fin’s section was a line of tall bamboo trees that curled around the edge of his one-roomed house. They were so thin they swayed in even the lightest breeze, making the long leaves rustle like paper. Ellie had heard somewhere that panda bears ate nothing but bamboo for breakfast lunch and dinner, and that in some places there were whole forests of the stuff and nothing else.

  Mr Fin said that he was going to make a Japanese-style pond, and that once, in a Japanese garden, he had seen a lantern with a flame in it that never went out. He would take Ellie to the pet store one day, he said, to help him choose the fish, once everything was ready. She could name them too, if she wanted.

  *

  Wayne and Jhumpa invited the whole street round for a barbecue. To make the most of the weather, they said.

  Ellie’s Mum said she didn’t want to go.

  ‘What an effort,’ she said. ‘Socialising!’

  Ellie and Laura wore the outfits they had worn on Christmas Day. Laura’s a cream pant suit with dark green polka dots all over, Ellie’s a sky-blue dress with a sailing boat embroidered on the front. She felt like a baby.