THEY ALL TRUDGED ON as best they could, of course: Iris and Liam trying to get life back to normal for Billy, as they had once done for Jase. Iris spent the first weeks watching the boy intently for any signs of distress. She walked him to school: there and back. She took his bag for him: there and back. She knelt at his desk to settle him in as he drew peacocks, and bright green-coloured birds, and a wonderfully strange mythical creature with an almond-shaped skull that was part human eye, part bird’s head: the tear-duct corner narrowed like a beak; the lashes tipped like head-feathers. She took extra care to see the teacher before and after school each day; volunteered as parent help on all the outings, helped with the advanced reading group; offered to stay on longer each day, but the teacher smiled, ‘You do more than your share, Iris. I’m sure you’ve got things to be getting on with.’ That was true. Iris had been letting admin for Whipstitch, her small clothing label, slip. At home, the prototype tunic tops and hoodies were made, but she had to get them off to the machinists; there were already orders to fill. All right, she thought. At least I have tried to do one thing to the limits of what’s needed.
Yet there was a fresh sense of danger at large. She wondered if Billy felt it, too, as he had become very quiet. He seemed younger. For ages, his nickname had been Billy-box, shortened from Billybox-the-Chatterbox; his vocabulary was theasaurine, as Liam said: his monologues would wear out the Duracell and the Energizer bunnies. As young as five: ‘Did you know the first dinosaur to be named was the Megalosaurus? And a person who studies on dinosaurs is a palaeontologist. Palaeontologist. Weird. What’s a palaeon? What if a big dinosaur bone came alive and ate you up? You could run and run and climb a tree and throw a match and burn up the dinosaur and if the tree catched on fire you could jump into a lake and if the lake wanted to drown-ded you, first you could build a boat of burn-ded up dinosaur bones. And if …’
Yet now, when they called him Billy-box, it seemed to mean the opposite. Billy with the lid on, closed up. He went through a bout of just about living under the dining table: asking for a blanket to be thrown over it; taking his books and Lego underneath; drawing there; only accepting the solicitous phone calls from his aunt and grandmother if he could stay in his table hut.
‘Isn’t he too big for that?’ Iris’s sister Carrie asked one visit. She blanched at the mere sight of Iris’s frown: it clearly meant Shut up; this is a hard time for him.
One week rolled over into another. They kept things quiet and gentle, no big transitions — Liam agreeing to delay the move down south, trying to do as much as he could at a distance from Steve (setting up the website, marketing, emailing, taking calls on his mobile). Iris could have been researching South Island outlets and machinists for her clothing label, but when she was worried about Billy, logistics at a distance felt like too much hard work. It was far more soothing to work on some alterations for friends; to run up a couple of A-line skirts for Carrie; or to meet up with an acquaintance who wanted to commission not her wedding dress, but her ‘going away’ dress. It was comforting to be in this familiar zone. Relaxing, even, to sketch multiple versions, colour them in, visit a haberdasher, eyes and fingertips drinking in the colours and textures as if she were bread soaking up wine.
With home kept some sort of normal, Billy gradually seemed to adapt and thaw. He lost interest in the table tent. He wanted to go to the zoo every weekend. He wanted in particular to see the birds. He started storing up interesting facts, sometimes writing them down in his spiky, uneven handwriting in a diary. When he tried to copy their cries, Iris found it tolerable, comic, quirky. Even endearing. He was opening up again, taking in the world. If his chirping and trilling was a kind of regression, it seemed so only in the sense you might take a step back for a powerful run up. She joined in, talking as if he were a boy–bird hybrid. ‘Fly off to get your PJs? Okay, Mr Finch. Hip-hop, spit-spot.’ She waited patiently for him to shape-change: from bird, to cat, to astronaut, to stallion: metamorphosis-boy, kaleidoscope mind, life pouring back in, light through a lens.
What had scared her was silent Billy. Billy trembling like the skin of cold water in a knocked glass. Billy retreating to a life under the table; Billy clutching his cousin’s old photo: the one when Jason first visited them, and was holding Billy-just-born. ‘Billy’s red like a baboon’s bum,’ Jase had said, ‘and nearly as ugly. But cute-ugly, eh?’ His own mother, Steffie, had scolded, but Iris thought it was coffee-spittingly funny: considered it the start of her education in raising a son.
Jason was four when Billy was born; Billy was eight when Jason died, so Jason was twelve. Two boys, eight plus four — the senseless maths of grief: what was she measuring? How could the numbers carry the weight of loss?
One day, Billy came home sick from school. When Iris brought him a bucket to have beside him as he lay on the couch, he admitted, ‘I had to say stomach-ache at school. They wouldn’t have understood.’ He pointed, item by item: the windows, chairs, Iris’s library books — New Zealand Gown of the Year; Chanel: The Woman Behind the Legend — the kick-mark on the wall from when Jase broke the no-balls-inside rule; the twist of old pattern-paper and green thread the cat had given up chasing. ‘It’s all sad now.’
Iris hugged him. She cried for Billy crying for Jason, as she’d also cried for Liam crying for Pete: grief was packed inside layers of itself.
Still, that day home sick and tearful seemed to be a turning point. Billy wouldn’t talk about it the next day. After school he even wanted to hang around after the home-time bell; play in the fort and swing from the bars with twin sisters, who tried to teach him cherry drops and apple turnovers.
These after-school stints became regular. Iris didn’t mind, enjoying the chance to catch up now and then with Moira, the mother of the twin girls: an Irish woman who had caught her eye well before they’d talked. She dressed like the young Peggy from Mad Men: Peter Pan collars, or bright scarves knotted at her throat; modest vintage skirts, lots of plaid and checks — not Iris’s colour palette at all, but the tailoring set a flame of envy darting under her ribs before they spoke. Moira was no demure ingénue in real life. Her quick, ribald tongue and no-bullshit attitude to her kids was refreshing. There was the time she admitted outright to Iris, ‘Had enough of ’em. When Sean gets back from Wellington this weekend, I’m gone. I’ll let him have a bit of what he fancies — he’s a pussycat after that — then I’m off to Waiheke for the weekend. Just me, a bottle of wine, and my book. No noise.’
Moira’s breeziness helped Iris not to call out ‘Careful!’ too often as Billy played. Moira rolled her eyes if her girls tripped on the low swing bridge, or tumbled onto the bark chips. ‘Don’t break your neck while your dad’s away. Save it for him!’ She’d pick them up, kiss them with an air of cuff-round-the ear, saying, ‘Back you go. Never see “princess wanted” in the job ads, do you?’
Despite her eye for good tailoring, Moira dressed the twins in — well — anything they liked. No designer wear; more like torn leggings and permanently paint-stained sweaters. ‘Getting them dressed is hard enough without fighting them over their poor taste,’ Moira said, as if exhaling sardonic smoke — though there was no cigarette in sight.
Iris asked what it was like to cope with twins, some strand in her wanting to hear it was heinous — a favourite Moira word — so she wouldn’t feel the ache of not being able to give Billy a companion. She and Liam couldn’t conceive again; Iris was too old, now, for medical assistance, and Liam wouldn’t countenance adoption.
As Moira answered, Billy climbed to the top of the jungle gym, scanning the sky. Then he stood with his thighs pressed against the bars, and leaned forward, his arms spread wide, face tilted to the sun. Her heart flipped on the spot: Billy! But he laughed and cawed; stepped his way down safely.
The pose became a ritual. She began to think of it as Billy’s yoga, saluting the sun before it sank into early winter dusk. They had another ritual, too. Every day, on their walk home after farewelling Moira, when they got to that corner, Iris snatched up Billy’s hand. They balanced on the brink of the curb as if on a diving board; then ran, his arm clutched up to her side. Part of her wished they could blend together completely: a single garment, hidden seams.
All the time, she was waiting. Waiting for the subject of Jason to come up directly: feeling the questions swim under the surface of their intimacy; thinking she should let Billy take the lead. But she didn’t want to push. Didn’t want to seed more feardreams and night-visits; to dwell on it and risk more darkness than there already was.
What if he had a natural acceptance, a healthy, realistic in the midst of life we are in death detachment, and she stained it with her own sadness, the fear that ambushed her daily?
Keep it normal, keep it safe: that was her job. Hardest work she’d ever done; but no reward richer than seeing Billy contented.
She had to try for ‘normal’ against a constant sense of urgency. Was there somewhere they had to be, some due date — her mind cast around asking, What is it, what is it I haven’t done? Whenever they got to night-time, and Billy was tucked up safely in bed, she felt the exhausted relief of making it over some finish line. We made it, she thought. Through another day.
Her small ministrations of worry and love were the stitches that held everything else together as they prepared for a move between islands. Friends laughed or cavilled about the shift. But Liam really wanted out of Auckland and Steve needed Liam on the spot now: it was going to take at least the two of them to cover the clients who wanted a guide; not to mention all the e-work, phone-work, paperwork. There was money from Liam’s redundancy payout. They’d sell their Auckland place, and find something decent in Dunedin: the housing markets still practically different cultures in the north and south.
Yet Iris thought the change followed all too soon after their other upheavals.
‘That’s life,’ Liam argued. ‘Change is the only constant.’
‘You talk like an insurance billboard,’ Iris said.
‘We can’t keep looking back, sweetheart.’ He put an arm around her, rubbed her shoulders; reached down to where he knew there was often a knot under her shoulder blade, from where she hunched as she sketched and cut.
She shifted under the pressure. ‘We’ve barely got through everything else, though.’
The silence he left seemed a small, grey, deliberately lobbed thing. Was he imagining her words weighted with it, so they would sink below notice?
She ploughed on. ‘Pete and Jase. Don’t we need more time to process it all?’
He turned away, pointlessly rearranged fruit in a bowl on the kitchen bench. He chewed at his lip; it reminded her acutely of Jase: So — am I a norphan?
‘It’s not like we’ll forget, Iris. We’ll be taking it with us.’
‘I know, but —’ So much was banked up in that but. She was also wondering how to manage Whipstitch in the new place. Maintaining contacts here would be crucial. But other things bothered her, like how would her outlook change in the southern light, living near the wild coastline? Would her ideas still sell up north if her entire sense of colour and fabric altered?
He shrugged, mouth rueful, which she translated as resigned to life’s shit. Then he said, ‘All of it, Iris — it’s made me see. If I don’t try this now, I never will. I know it’s a risk. Let’s give it a year. I’ll keep my hand in by freelancing now and then. Adventure tourism pieces. For in-flight magazines, travel websites, that kind of thing. Then if things with Steve don’t pan out, I can see what journalism work I can scrape up, or —’ He tried a Darth Vader voice ‘— switch to the dark side. PR, or something.’
He toyed again with an orange: fiddling with its stars’n’stripes sticker. Iris felt a niggle of guilt. Rushing to get through the groceries before Billy had to be collected from school, she hadn’t bought locally. Threw a coal onto global warming by wanting oranges in a New Zealand winter … and so defeated the purpose of trying to go on foot, with her eager-greenie granny-shopping-trolley, the one she toiled with to and fro on days when ecological anxiety jumped onto the back of maternal anxiety. Or was it the other way round? Was it maternal anxiety making her think harder about how to heal the world?
And another thing: when she got the oranges and Billy safely home, he wouldn’t eat them. He wanted nuts and seeds and sugar water. They fought about it for a good long time until she convinced him that oh, woodpeckers, orioles, tui, wax eyes, all kinds of birds everywhere eat oranges …
She wanted straight gin herself after that battle: why did every tiny interaction have to feel like a struggle? Did other mothers have their minds whirling at five hundred kilometres an hour as they weigh up good, bad, healthy, unhealthy, local, global, encouraging selfishness versus treading softly after crisis; the list of angles grew. Did every other mother feel that at some point along the line they’ll make grave mistakes?
Grave mistakes. Her mind slung to a halt, and her focus unravelled further. She had a sharp memory of Jason hoofing through the house as he got ready for school, voice deepened as he imitated his headmaster. ‘Kuds! Kuds! That’s not Our School Stan-duds, kuds! Top button undone? Inappropriutt attachewed, kuds!’ She’d loved his mimicry: it meant he already saw through social follies; was making his own judgements; and felt secure with her and Liam. Had she laughed enough at his high spirits? Had she let him know what an extraordinary triumph he was, really, this joyful boy who could take the mickey, clown about, despite being shunted off to his aunt and uncle? Her mind flicked up an image: Jason’s body flung into the air, a scrawl of limbs. She shook her head as if the scene sent burning cinders into her hair.
‘Iris?’
She’d lost her bearings. Liam tossed the orange back into the bowl, as if impatient with the whole damn concept of fruit. He said, ‘I need to let Steve know a date. We’ll have to put the house on the market and start scouting for rentals.’