OVER AND AGAIN, BELINDA REPLAYS scenes that have stayed with her for a lifetime, ones that prickle behind her eyelids just before she wakes, no matter where she is. There’s an ocean at the end of the street where she lives, with a bright dark sea washing against a wall in summer, a sea that turns violent when the wind turns to the south and spume fills the air, a small deserted island lying offshore. Often, in the evenings, Belinda walks to the front gate, and on a good night nothing can hide the sweep of brilliant sunsets that settle over the strait, the saddle of water that lies between this tip of one island and the beginning of the other. On clear days she can see the mountain caps of the far island, shimmering in the distance, gleaming like wedding cakes. Near at hand, fishing boats bob up and down on the water. Early in the mornings the fishermen will swing past the gate to the house where she lives; later they return with their catch. Their voices throb as they pass, sometimes in song, a snatch of Italian, it depends on the weather whether they are happy or not. Belinda’s mother had taught her a rhyme, We’ll weather the weather together, whatever the weather may be, and it’s a refrain that still surfaces on rainy days.
Before the fishermen leave, they collect bait from a red shed that stands on the rocks above the waterline. The stench of the bait on hot days catches you in the back of the throat, although this is something Belinda can’t describe when she writes this scene. She is a film maker and smell cannot happen in the movies, it can only be implied. But if she breathes deeply, it is there, and it is this, perhaps most of all, that brings it all back to her. What happened.
The house where Belinda lives is a wooden bungalow, built close to its neighbour. At night she can hear the sea crashing on the sea wall. There’s a patch of earth at the back of the house that consists of heavy clay soil, where things don’t really grow. Belinda’s mother once planted a rose bush that struggled through the summers, sprouting occasional light maize-coloured blooms. She tried tomatoes, because they grew so well up the road at the Italian houses, but the fruit never ripened. Another year, it was a row of cabbages. She was bent, for a time, on providing the family with fresh healthy vegetables. Near the fenceline stands an incinerator.
Belinda lives with her mother and father, her younger brother and sister, and for a time an older half-sister. It is in this house that she has her last clear memory of her mother, even though she was taken to visit her in hospital in her dying days.
She sees her mother, hair wispy and uneven, head bent over a book, and hears a small exasperated sigh escaping as she closes it, readying herself to prepare a meal. Irene never captured the knack of coping. There was always wet washing hanging over wooden racks, sticky benchtops and a litter of open library books. Irene read books all the time when other women did the ironing or were starting dinner. Dinner was often late, as if Irene really didn’t care much what they ate. Belinda thinks later that her mother just wasn’t hungry, that her taste disappeared as she got sicker.
She remembers, with at times a touch of bitterness, the way Irene favoured her eldest child, the one who came before Belinda, and got away with things she and the other children couldn’t. ‘I’ll tell your father,’ she might say to the three young ones, when the noise of them all shouting and squabbling got too much, only she never did. Their father, Jock, would take his belt to them if he was angry. The fact that their mother didn’t tell him was, Belinda supposes, love of a kind. That, and the distracted hand that brushed her children’s foreheads when they were in bed, and she read to them.
There was a particular moment Belinda will recall, when her mother stood beside her at the gate and they looked out across the sea together, towards the mountains to the south. ‘I met your father over there,’ Irene said. There was something muted and despairing about the way she spoke.
IT WAS AT THE INCINERATOR that Belinda saw Charm the day after Irene died. The woman was burning her mother’s clothes. Charm’s real name was Charmaine but she had always been known as Charm, not Sharm, even though Charmaine sounded like Sharmaine. She had a thin face and fair hair that looked as if it hadn’t been brushed out after having rollers in it, so that the curls stood out like sausages. Her nose was narrow, and her flexible lips formed a circular pout when she smoked a cigarette.
‘I’ve known your dad a long time,’ she said. ‘It’s just as well he’s got old friends to call on at a time like this.’
Belinda hadn’t known that her father had this friend, but then he and her mother didn’t go out a lot. There were the three children to care for: herself and Grant and Janice. One every two years, the first years her parents were married, not to mention Jessie, the one who ran off up north just when her mother needed her.
‘I’ll be bound that girl has had a baby. That’s always why girls go north, you know,’ Charm said, while she was waiting for the flames to die down enough to drop in another load. ‘Although you’re too young to know about things like that. How old are you? Eleven? You want to be careful when you get older.’ She looked with disgust at a burnt oven mitt and some torn stockings as she threw them into the fire. ‘Your mother was no housekeeper, was she?’
‘Mum got tired,’ Belinda said.
Charm checked her over. ‘You’re like her, aren’t you? One of those dark little things that watch you from behind your back. You don’t look much like Grant and Janice. I wonder where your mother found you? You’ll get your periods in a year or so. Then you’ll need to look out for yourself. Won’t you, eh?’
‘I guess so.’ Belinda followed Charm back into the house, hoping she might yet protect her mother’s belongings. But Charm was taking every single thing her mother had ever owned out of a chest of drawers and from the wardrobe: a silky though well-worn dressing gown that had lost its belt years ago, a rope of fake pearls, a handbag, a home-made floral print dress, panties with stretched elastic. Charm picked them up by her fingertips, dumping them in a large hemp sack, preparing to take them to the incinerator, which was burning fiercely with its last consignment of jackets and blouses. She emptied out the make-up drawer, with its shreds of powder and vanishing cream, and threw a tube of red lipstick after them, after trying a little on her own long lips and grimacing.
‘It’s probably got germs. We used to live a couple of doors along from you, me and my husband. Well, he’s dead now — fell down the stairs and knocked his head. He wasn’t much loss, never did an honest day’s work. I collected his insurance money, so that was useful, not that it was enough to cover the mortgage. Your dad was a great help, getting it all sorted out, selling the house. Your mother never made the effort. Well, she was usually pregnant. You were a real screamer as a baby. Thank God I never had kids.’
Charm had come upon a pile of books. She snorted. ‘That was Irene, always had her nose in a book. Thought she was better than the rest of us.’
‘Could I keep some of those?’ Belinda asked. She held a worn copy of The Grapes of Wrath to her chest.
‘What would you do with them? You’ll get enough books at school and, besides, your Aunt Agnes won’t have room for them all.’
‘Are we going to live with Aunt Agnes?’
‘Your father can’t look after you lot. Come on, help me take this stuff to the incinerator.’ She picked up a pile of novels and a slim book of poems. ‘Trash, if you ask me,’ she said. The books followed the clothes unceremoniously into the bag. Lots of Steinbeck. Out. War and Peace. Out. Check to Your King. A worn copy, well loved. Charm turned it over, wrinkling her nose with distaste. ‘Robin Hyde. That stupid girl who killed herself,’ she muttered, as if to herself. Out, too.
‘You’d better start packing,’ she said. ‘I told you, you’re off to Masterton to live.’
It was news to Belinda that she and Grant and Janice were to be sent away. ‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.
‘Don’t beg, you can always sell matches,’ Charm said. This was one of the innumerable smug sayings that Charm would trot out over the years Belinda knew her. In the kitchen, her father’s sister Agnes was rattling pots and pans, preparing the next meal. People from along the street had brought covered casserole dishes, even though none of them knew the Pawsons all that well. An Italian neighbour from one of the fishing families had brought a large pot of hot pasta swimming in creamy sauce, dotted with mussels. She was dressed in black, her face respectful and sad. The food had been accepted with nods and what passed for smiles from Aunt Agnes, while Charm grimaced behind her back. The pot had since been placed under the sink, covered over with a tea towel. ‘We’ll decide what to do with that later,’ Agnes said. She had put potatoes on the stove to boil.
Belinda didn’t dislike her aunt, but was a little afraid of her. Like Charm, she was a widow, although a much older one. She shaved her upper lip when she remembered, and when she didn’t a dark shadow appeared, just like a man. Her Scots accent had never left her, although she and her brother Jock Pawson had lived in New Zealand more than forty years. She lived alone in a large house in a small town ‘up the line’, as she liked to call it.
Outside in the narrow garden, smoke was curling and spreading between the houses. The afternoon was drawing in. Charm stirred embers in the incinerator, bringing the fire back to life as she hurled Irene’s books into the rising flames. Belinda couldn’t understand why everything that remained of her mother must go, and it shocked her that she was so powerless to stop it happening. In the flames, she imagined she saw her mother’s face, pale, intense, pleading, as though asking to be saved, to keep something of her alive. She saw scraps of paper that carried her older sister Jessie’s handwriting. Charm was still going on about Jessie. ‘She couldn’t even come when her mother needed her. I hear she’s condescended to come to Wellington and grace us with her presence for the funeral. I’ve packed all her stuff up. Her suitcase is in the passage waiting for her.’
Agnes was calling from the house that dinner was ready. And, in that moment, when Charm was distracted by the leaping flames, Belinda remembered that there was something of her mother’s that Charm hadn’t yet discovered. In the drawer of her sewing machine table a box of buttons was stowed, a random collection pulled from discarded clothing. Some must have come from a much earlier time in Irene’s life, for among black fly buttons from Jock’s trousers, and navy ones from his shirts, there were glass buttons that sparkled, pearl ones that might have come from gloves, red, blue and silver buttons, a big copper button and a large hand-made one covered with tiny strips of black woven leather with threads hanging from it. It had a strange rough texture as if it had been left on a stove. Belinda’s mother used to let her count the buttons and make patterns on the floor with them, in the days when she still sat and sewed for them all as best she could. Once, though, she leaned over and plucked the leather button from the floor and put it back in the tin. ‘Not that one,’ she said.
Belinda raced off into the house, without a word of explanation to Charm. She darted up the passageway, past the sitting room where her father, Jock, had sat slumped for days. It was odd to see him huddled in a frayed old jersey and grubby pants. He worked in an office in town, and most days he wore a crumpled suit and a tie. He hated the unions but, right now, he could see the point. At least he knew his rights when it came to a death in the family. He was stirring himself in response to his sister’s call from the kitchen to ‘hurry and eat while the food was hot’.
Belinda kept going. She slid her hand into the drawer and there it was, the tobacco tin box, stamped ‘Riverhead Gold’. She plucked it out, slipping it in her cardigan pocket. As she walked, as smoothly as she could, so the box didn’t rattle, she saw Charm coming towards her. For an instant she panicked, a scene unfolding before her eyes, the woman trying to take the tin from her, her kicking her in the shins or biting her.
But Charm had entered the sitting room. Her father had risen from the chair and now stood leaning his head on his arm against the mantelpiece. Charm’s hand was resting on his, implying there were some intimacy of sorrow that excluded others. The two of them turned as Belinda stood hovering, uncertain of what to do, to explain why she had been walking along the hall of the house she had lived in since she was born. She had the weird feeling that she was a stranger in it now.
There was a distraction in the doorway. Jessie had arrived. Belinda thought, fleetingly, that she and the other children might be saved.
JESSIE WAS NEARLY EIGHT YEARS older than Belinda, a tall angular girl who, in better times, Aunt Agnes had tried to liken to Jock Pawson, as if she might really be his daughter. Likenesses, that’s what these older women talked about, always searching for clues and genealogies, ropes of generations that would bind them to the present and a future they would never see. When she was grown and long gone from this house of sorrow by the sea, Belinda would think back to those conversations in which everyone was likened to every other person they might or might not be related to, and wonder.
The kitchen was full of insults and shouting between Jessie and the older women as the evening wore on. Grant and Janice had been sent to bed. Grant didn’t want to sleep in the same room as his sister Janice, but his father said, ‘You’ll get a thick ear if there’s any more of that.’ These two did resemble Jock, no doubt about that, gingery brown hair and fair skinned, freckled at this stage, which Aunt Agnes said was just like their father when he was a child. Belinda knew Grant’s shameful secret, the reason he didn’t want to sleep in the same room as Janice. He wet his bed more nights than not, especially when his dreams were bad. She knew because, since her mother had fallen ill, it was she who washed his sheets and hid this from his father. Both the little ones had secrets that only she and her mother knew.
Janice was seven and still couldn’t recognise the words in her Janet and John reader. ‘Look, Janice,’ Belinda would say, ‘Janet is jumping. See that word “jump”? Can you say the letters for me? J, it’s a big letter, the same as you put at the beginning of your name.’ But Janice would look at her with a dumb-mutt expression that made Belinda want to shake her. What was the point, she asked herself, when Janice still couldn’t spell her own name anyway?
Charm produced a bottle of sherry. ‘You need strength for tomorrow,’ she said, even though Agnes was disapproving.
The insults were directed at Jessie who, when she had left earlier in the year, had gone to work in a café up north in Rotorua. ‘Or so she says,’ Charm reiterated, and Agnes nodded in agreement.
Agnes added that it had been the day after Jessie’s birthday and, to think, Irene had talked her brother into taking them all out to dinner and paying, the night before.
‘I gave her a present,’ Agnes said. ‘You remember, Jessie, I gave you my special Milford Sound teaspoon from my collection. I found it in your room when I was packing up your stuff. A lot she cares about that, was what I thought. I’ve taken it back.’
Charm said, ‘Jock, you should say something. Don’t just sit there and let this girl take over.’
In fact, Jessie had sat without saying a word up until this point. ‘I don’t know who you are,’ she said now, ‘but I don’t think it’s any of your business.’
‘There, you see what I mean? And a university girl, too, only you threw that all away, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, yes, I suppose I did,’ Jessie said. Her face was set in harsh lines, as if she were much older.
‘Your name’s been in the papers,’ Jock said. ‘The police are looking for you. A good thing your mother never knew.’
Belinda was piecing together, as much as she could, what had happened. There had been a boating accident on a lake up north. The people who had died or disappeared were people from the café. Jessie had been with them on the night of the accident. There had been a quarrel in the café and the victims of this tragedy had taken to the boat when the weather was rough. Instead of waiting to be interviewed by the police, Jessie had left town straight away. It was nothing she had done, just evidence she might possess, perhaps a witness to what had occurred.
‘That’s what you do,’ Jock said. ‘You just leave when it suits you.’
‘I thought I was supposed to come home,’ Jessie said. ‘Wasn’t that the idea? My mother is dead.’
Jessie walked out of the kitchen to the bedroom, shutting the door behind her. The adults looked around at one another and shrugged their shoulders. Charm was putting on her coat, readying herself to go along the Parade and catch a trolley bus home to what she called ‘her digs’ in Wellington. Jock said he would walk with her. A woman wasn’t safe on the streets these nights.
‘Time you were in bed,’ Agnes said to Belinda. ‘Go on, off you go.’
Belinda had never shared a bedroom with Jessie before, but now that Aunt Agnes was staying over, a mattress had been brought up from the basement.
Jessie was sitting on the edge of the bed, her shoulders hunched over. ‘Just tell me what happened, Belinda,’ she said, her voice thick with suppressed tears. ‘You’re the oldest. What happened to Mum?’
‘She was in the hospital. I was only allowed to go once,’ Belinda said. ‘Dad took us on the bus to Newtown.’
Belinda wanted to tell Jessie about the dark tunnels of the corridors, the floors that squeaked, and the wards where the beds seemed jammed together. It had been hard to find where her mother lay. The way Grant had frowned up at the signs, reading them as he went. ‘Why is there a Clean Linen Bay,’ he asked Belinda, ‘when there isn’t any water?’ That was Grant for you, he took things so literally. Where they lived was called Island Bay, and there was Houghton Bay along the road, and Lyall Bay beyond that, and here was Grant finding another one in the hospital corridor, as though their mother might be lying on a curling wave washing her into shore.
Belinda had imagined that her mother would be lying in a bed just like hers at home, but when they found their way to the right cubicle, it was an iron-framed bed, covered with a starched white sheet. Her body so shrunken it hardly made a dent beneath, her lank hair sticking to the pillow. And her mother could no longer speak her name, her mouth struggling to form words but no sound coming out.
‘Did she ask for me?’
Belinda shook her head. It was impossible to explain.
Jessie turned out the light, even though Belinda hadn’t undressed, and Belinda sensed that she had lain down with her back to her. In the dark, she thought she heard Jessie sob, though she couldn’t be sure. Jessie never cried.
‘Were they your best friends, Jessie? The people in the boat?’
Jessie made a muffled noise.
Belinda said, ‘Jessie, can you stay with us?’
There was a silence in the dark room. ‘Shut up and go to sleep,’ Jessie said.
ON THE WAY TO THE BUS STOP, Charm stopped at a lamppost, as if to do up her shoelace under the light. As she straightened up, she ran her hand up Jock’s leg, until she touched his crotch. ‘I think you’ve been missing something, Jock.’
‘Not here, not in the street,’ he said, his voice thick.
‘I can’t see Agnes caring for all those children. Can you, Jock?’
A WIND CAME OFF THE SEA the morning of the funeral. Summer hadn’t hit the city yet. Jock had ordered taxis for them. He didn’t believe in owning cars, not when he could ride a bike to and from work. He told his son to count his pennies under the pillow at nights, so that he would always know how much pocket money he had, and how much of it to save.
First there was a service at St Hilda’s on the Parade. ‘Anglican,’ Aunt Agnes said. ‘If we must.’
‘What was I to do?’ Jock said. ‘She never took to being Presbyterian.’
‘I suppose I can’t hold it against her. I mean, how long is it since you were inside a church, brother? I can tell you, the children will be going to Sunday school when I get my hands on them. And none of this fancy stuff.’
Not that it was fancy at all. The vicar hadn’t known Irene. Grant and Janice didn’t know what to do, whether to sit or stand, and Belinda wasn’t too sure either, although she could follow the service. Charm was sniffling into a handkerchief. She was dressed in a black woollen coat and a green felt hat with a crimson feather like a streak of blood running down its side. When the children looked about to bawl, she grabbed their hands and stood in a proprietary way as if they were really hers. The vicar delivered some short, crisp comments about the love of mothers for their children and how they were sometimes required to answer to God’s higher calling. The twenty-third psalm was delivered, a prayer said. The vicar called on Jock to say a few words if he wished. He shook his head.
Jessie moved towards the front of the church. Jock went to grab her arm, but Jessie pulled away from him. She looked around the small group of Brighton Street neighbours who made up the congregation. Instead of speaking, she walked out.
Walking out, that’s what she does. Belinda heard the words buzzing in her head. When they got outside, Jessie was nowhere to be seen. Charm had let go of the children. Janice, the baby of the family, came over and put her head against Belinda’s waist. She was a tubby little creature, her face tear-stained and frightened. Someone had put a pink bow in her wiry curls; the Fair Isle cardigan that Irene had knitted was buttoned up over her chest. The sleeves were getting short. Belinda put her arm around her. I am eleven, she thought. I need to look after the children. The idea terrified her. No wonder Jessie had run off. Grant stumped along behind them, his face screwed up as tight as a bag of walnuts so that you could hardly see his eyes. His hair was combed into a cow-lick.
When they got to the graveside, among the narrow paths of the Karori cemetery, Jessie was there already, her face still set in its rigid expression. Her mother’s favourite child. Belinda knew this in her heart. But now, Jessie had been joined by an elderly couple, the man bent over almost double, supporting himself on a walking stick. They were helped by a younger man. Belinda didn’t recognise them, but the woman was holding Jessie’s hand and weeping.
The family trooped in silence towards the grave, a shaft of space cut out of the earth, the neighbours acting as pallbearers for Irene’s pine coffin. It was lowered down and down and down, into the clay soil, the wreath Jessie had ordered, without consulting anyone, of sweet peas and late poppies slipping out of sight. Her mother disappearing for good, not just her clothes and books and poems that she read out loud to Belinda, but all of her. The flames of the fire Charm had made in the garden leapt in front of her again, but this time she couldn’t see her mother’s face at all. It was gone. There was just a hole in the ground with a pile of damp earth beside it. A weak sun appeared. The children were instructed to walk around the open grave and throw clods of earth down onto the coffin, to be part of this erasing of her mother. Jessie hesitated before moving to join them. Janice and Grant began to wail, Grant in spite of himself and his determination to act like a big boy. ‘My hands are dirty,’ he said, trying to brush the earth from his clothes. Aunt Agnes grabbed him firmly by the arm. Jock took a handkerchief out of his pocket and passed it over to him.
And then, a surprising thing happened. As the grave digger began to rain down more spadefuls of earth onto the coffin, Jessie took Belinda by the hand. It was just for a moment and when Belinda raised her eyes she couldn’t decide whether Jessie was offering comfort or needed it herself. She looked back to where Jessie had stood with the old people, and they had gone. Jessie offered no explanation as to their presence.
The wake was held in the sitting room in Brighton Street. Charm and Aunt Agnes had arranged for some sausage rolls and sandwiches to be brought in. Charm had ordered beer to be delivered as well, plus a couple more bottles of sherry, although Aunt Agnes said it was not a habit she wanted to be getting into but she supposed they had a duty to the neighbours who had helped out. While they were all nibbling and sipping in the front room, a young man appeared at the door. His mother was wondering if they wouldn’t mind if he picked up her big pot as she was making dinner for the family. Charm and Agnes exchanged frozen looks. The young man was wearing a black waistcoat over a white shirt, as if out of respect for visiting a house bereaved. But the shirt was open at the throat, revealing a gold chain quivering among curly black hair. His complexion was olive, and muscles bulged beneath the soft fabric of his garment.
‘Antonio!’ Jessie exclaimed.
He looked at her, his face intent. ‘Jessie Sandle,’ he said, ‘Jessie, all grown-up.’
‘That’s enough,’ Jock said.
‘We haven’t had time to clean the pot,’ Agnes said, all politeness. ‘Do you mind if one of the children drops it over, perhaps in an hour?’
‘I’ll bring it back in a few minutes,’ said Jessie.
When the door was closed, she glared at Agnes and Charm and said, ‘You didn’t have the guts to tell them you hadn’t eaten their pasta, did you? God, you’re a bunch of plebeians.’
Agnes said, ‘I think she means she’s cleverer than the rest of us. She’ll learn.’
‘I told you, Jock, that girl needs a few good slaps,’ Charm said. ‘Eyeties. Catholics. I’ll bet they need a big pot.’
‘There’s ten of them, or thereabouts,’ Agnes said.
‘That’s Catholics for you,’ Charm said, only she pronounced it ‘Cartholics’, as if it were some kind of joke. ‘They’re putting Jack Kennedy away today, too. There’s another one.’
Jessie could be heard tearing up newspaper, and running taps, disposing of the food, cleaning the pot.
‘We’re lucky we’re not at war with Russia,’ Agnes said darkly. ‘Goodness knows what would have happened next time if someone hadn’t shot him dead. Some things are meant for the best.’
The neighbours were beginning to drift away, unsettled by the appearance of the Italian boy and this loose talk. Some of them worked for the boy’s family, setting out on the fishing boats with them in the early hours of each morning.
Charm began brushing her coat, which lay over the back of one of the chairs. ‘I got dirt on it at the cemetery. It should be dry now.’
‘Clay,’ said Agnes. ‘It sticks like the devil.’
Jock roused himself, as if he had been sleepwalking all day. ‘They made clay corpses in the auld country,’ he said.
‘Jock,’ Agnes said, in a warning older sister’s voice.
‘It’s true, I saw it once when I was a lad. It was what witches did.’ The room had fallen silent. Jock’s voice was slurring with the beer. ‘It was done to get revenge on those who did you harm. You made a figure of the man or woman you didnae like out of clay, and placed it in a stream where the water would run over it. The water wore it away as though it were the flesh of the person you wished gone.’
‘Witchcraft,’ Agnes said. ‘People went to court for things like that.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Jock, ‘if they found out. Otherwise they’d like as not get sick and waste away.’
‘Like Irene,’ said Charm.
Jock looked at Charm with heavy eyes. ‘You’ve got me wrong, I wouldnae do that to the lass.’
Belinda sat very still, in case anyone in the room noticed she was still there. The kitchen had fallen quiet. There was the soft click of the front door being closed as Jessie let herself out.
IN THE MORNING JESSIE TOOK the children on an outing. There was a soft indefinable expression in her eyes. She had come in very late the night before. Belinda half woke when she heard her sister come in, but she was too sleepy to see what time it was. Jessie had been humming under her breath.
‘That’s kind of you,’ Agnes said, surprised. She was ashen-faced with exhaustion. The children’s shrill voices in the sitting room next door all but drowned out their conversation. The two younger children had always been noisy, the sort who people hushed in public. They were beginning to return to their everyday selves.
‘You had a lot to do last night,’ Jessie said, ‘clearing up and all.’
‘No thanks to someone I could spit on from here,’ Charm said. She was smoking a cigarette, her hand clasped around a tea cup. She looked at ease, almost as if the kitchen belonged to her.
‘Well …’ Jessie began.
‘What’s the use of a well if you don’t have water?’ Charm said, cutting past her.
‘Well,’ continued Jessie, as though she hadn’t heard Charm, ‘I thought if I took the children out for the day it would give you a break. We could go to the zoo.’
Agnes heaved a sigh of relief. ‘We thought about sending them back to school today, but their father reckoned that wouldn’t look right. Mind you, he headed off first thing, but then someone has to provide. I’ll give you money for the tickets.’
‘I have some,’ Jessie said. ‘It’s all right. I’ll look after them.’
That was how the day passed, walking from cage to cage, feeding the ducks, gazing at the elephant. They bought lunch from the kiosk, sandwiches and meat pies, and sat on a wooden seat watching the monkey enclosure. Baby animals wound themselves around their mothers’ backs and necks, absurd little grins on their faces as the parent creatures swung through the branches.
‘Kids, I’m leaving tomorrow,’ Jessie said. ‘I’m going away.’
Belinda’s heart clenched itself into a fist in her chest. She should have known. She didn’t ask where Jessie was going.
WHEN BELINDA TRIED TO TELL her father, Jock Pawson, about the way their stepmother treated them, he simply shrugged. They’d been talking rubbish at school, kids always said their stepmothers were monsters. They had food on the table and clean clothes, didn’t they?
Jock led a different kind of life with Charm from the one he’d had with Irene. The house was as neat as a pin, as Charm often pointed out, and dinner was on the table every night at six. As soon as Jock arrived home she opened a flagon of sherry. We deserve some treats at the end of a day’s toil, she would say. Jock sat there, his tie askew over his paunch, looking as if heaven had hit him in the face. There would be a period of animation as Charm warbled and sometimes whistled, then a slide into melancholy between her and Jock, and it would be time for bed for everyone in the house.
Belinda tried showing her father the rope burns on Grant’s wrists where Charm had tied him to a chair because of the wet sheets, and bruises on Janice’s arms where she’d been smacked for not doing her homework. ‘You kids knock around with the wrong sort,’ he said. ‘You want to get decent friends, bring them over.’
There wasn’t much to show for hair pulling, or getting your nose twisted, but there was all of that, too. Janice got head lice and Charm shaved her head and put kerosene on it. When Janice screamed and tried to get away, Charm lit a match and threatened to hold it on Janice’s chemical-smelling head. None of them got school lunches if they answered her back. You couldn’t always tell when you were answering back anyway. Just the way you said please and thank you was enough to set her off some days. Please. Pleased with yourself, are you? Whack. Thank you. Thank you for what? Calling you a liar? I’ll get the belt to you. Janice’s face was a mask these days. Grant started setting the clock and getting up every hour through the night so his sheets would be dry. There were big circles under his eyes. Belinda often thought about Jessie and the way she just left; most days she hated her.
On a summer day when the holidays seemed interminable, because at least when there was school there was somewhere to go, the three of them sat on the sea wall, staring out at the ocean. Sometimes Antonio came along the beach and he always seemed to have toffees in his pocket. He’d come over and offer to share them. Don’t tell Charm, Belinda would warn the children.
Charm went to town that day and left Belinda in charge. Belinda was thirteen by then, and trying to hide from Charm that she had her periods, but she knew that her stepmother had guessed. You can take that insolent look off your face. You might think you’re grown-up but you’re not. You can put your donkey saddles in a bucket in the wash house, but don’t think I’ll be cleaning up behind you. She had said it that morning and Belinda wanted to vanish through a hole in the floor. Her stomach was hurting right now.
‘I wish she was dead,’ Grant said. ‘We could just sneak up and kill her when nobody was looking.’
Janice drummed her heels on the wall. ‘We could all hold her down and smash her head in,’ she said.
‘Well, we can’t,’ Belinda said. But, remembering what she had wished only that morning, she said, ‘We could make her disappear.’
She explained about the clay corpse, how if they made an effigy of Charm they could take her to the beach and let her wash away, and soon she would die. It was like a lucky charm. They all giggled at that. Lucky charm, lucky charm, they chanted.
Irene’s rose bush was in flower, with a burst of unlikely blooms on a plant given up for dead. Belinda thought it was called ‘Peace’, and the showy creamy flowers flushed with pink made her want to laugh, as if things were suddenly on their side.
They dug with furious haste, filling the laundry bucket as fast as they could and taking it to the beach each time it was full. Belinda organised them into a chain, so that one was always digging, taking it in turns to run to the beach and tip the clay at the water’s edge. When she thought they had enough, they all went to the beach and began shaping their corpse. Hurry, Belinda told the children, she’ll be back soon. Besides, soon the tide would turn. If they were to dispose of Charm today they needed to be quick.
‘It’s like plasticine,’ Janice said, as they kneaded the sticky stuff into shape on the wet sand.
Belinda had a sudden thought. ‘Wait,’ she said, ‘I’m going back to the house.’
Grant and Janice jumped up and down. Hurry, it was their turn to shout. But Belinda knew what she was after, it had to be right.
She reappeared in a few minutes, carrying a brown paper bag. ‘Just wait and see,’ she said. ‘It’ll be perfect.’
A loose shape was the best they could achieve, just a head that kept floating away because Belinda said they needed to make sure the water got to Charm’s brain first, then a mound of clay for her body, two wriggly lines where her arms were supposed to go, and then a wave would come before they could put feet on her legs and they ran away, splashing and shouting with laughter. Happiness, the three of them together, bent over with mirth, the first time they could remember since their mother got sick.
And then Belinda produced her master stroke from the paper bag, some buttons from one of Jock’s old overcoats, to plant in a row on the corpse’s chest. (Belinda had saved the special leather one.) Finally she placed Charm’s green hat with the red feather on its head. The three of them danced, holding hands, shrieking into a rising breeze. A wave came and flicked the hat away almost as soon as they had put it on, dragging the clay beneath it out to sea. As they stood back, the waves rushed in and overtook the whole effigy and Charm seemed to dissolve before their eyes.
Belinda looked back to the sea wall. Charm was standing there, in a red dress, a cardigan pulled over her low-slung breasts. There was no knowing how long she had been there.
But she had seen. Belinda knew that she knew.