… tears at her skin. Stephie pulls back, secateurs tangled in a whippy snarl of Souvenir de la Malmaison as blood bubbles the length of her forearm. ‘Damn,’ she says, then sets to licking herself better. She tastes salty and raw beef. Roses are such savages under all the pastel simper. She has never trusted them, not since Alice’s friend who had been stabbed in the nose by a rose and developed cancer on the site of the wound.
‘Dead within a year,’ said Alice. ‘Just eaten away.’
Her sister was full of such stories of alarm and sudden death, all instructive of the necessity to seize the day, throw caution to the winds, live as if there were no tomorrow. (And look where that had got her: a unit in Mount Roskill next door to a panelbeater, with another in her collection of hopeless men: too dependent or too independent, violent or addictive or feckless or embarrassing or just plain married already.)
Stephie tries to resist the message, but somehow she is always impressed by her sister’s little homilies. This morning, for instance, she carries on, snipping and tying, but inevitably, eventually, gives in. She lays the secateurs aside, goes indoors to the bathroom cabinet, slathers the wound in Savlon. It stings. She likes that. She learned long ago, in childhood, as the iodine was dabbed from the little brown bottle, that that is how things are made all better. You could trust pain.
Then she returns to the roses. There was no time to muck about, not if everything were to be ready by 14 February.
Valentine’s Day.
Could anything be more banal? She ties a whippy sapling so that it will drape as planned around the archway through which Melissa will walk in her white dress.
No. Not a dress. A gown. A Lara Milligan creation in lace, boned corset and full tulle skirt. $3500. Her son is about to marry someone who has spent $3500 on a frock. She had even flown to Sydney for the purchase, along with the gaggle of young women, her ‘girlfriends’, who were to be her bridesmaids: a couple of former flatmates, her sister, and one, Kim, her best friend from school, who has unfortunately somewhat run to fat.
Stephie had overheard Melissa discussing this with Ben one evening when they were visiting and out in the kitchen stacking the dishwasher.
‘I have to ask Kim,’ Melissa was saying. ‘She’d be devastated if I didn’t, but she’s going to have to lose a few kilos. A lot of kilos. I’m going to get her a personal trainer. And I’m going to order her dress in a size twelve so she’s got something to aim for. Either she steps up to the challenge or she doesn’t get to be part of it.’
At her present girth, Kim would ruin the photos. The click of plates. And Ben — her Ben, kind easy-going Ben whose best mate at high school had weighed in at around 100 kilos — grunting in agreement, going along, it seems with this kittenish torment.
Kim made the cut for Sydney, off for the girls’ weekend, teetering with the platoon between shops in ridiculous heels, bubbles on the hotel balcony, voddies in the bar, hunting down The Gown. Back to work on Monday, mission accomplished. Or so Stephie gathered.
Melissa had mentioned the dress when she and Ben came down for Paul’s fiftieth birthday.
‘It’s soooo gorgeous,’ she said. ‘There was so much choice, more than you’d ever get in Auckland, but the minute I saw it, I knew this was The One.’
‘At that price, I’d hope so,’ said Stephie, spearing a Brussels sprout.
‘Oh, Mum,’ said Melissa, laughter tinkling over the table, the good German glasses filled with a sauvignon produced by one of Paul’s colleagues, a former anaesthesiologist who had taken early retirement and now applied his scientific rigour to the production of wine on a river flat in Marlborough. There were flowers and the best china. Enormous white dinner plates where each serving occupied a small redoubt at the centre.
Not that Paul would notice. He sat at the head of the dining table, colleagues, friends, family on either hand: Nick had flown back from Dubai for his father’s birthday, Emma from Auckland, Lyddie from Singapore. Stephie watched him from the opposite end of the table, stolidly chewing beef Wellington, supposedly his favourite, just as lasagne was supposedly Ben’s and Thai salad was hers.
To tell the truth, she was no longer sure if any of those choices was true. Her real favourite, if she were asked to nominate her final meal, if she were on death row in some appalling American prison, togged up in the orange jumpsuit and facing imminent execution, would be buttered toast. And Paul, she suspected, would revert to his origins and nominate baked beans.
And Ben? Who knew? She hadn’t known since he left for uni in Auckland and an existence sustained by beer and two-minute noodles. He and Melissa were certainly very specific about drinks, spending an inordinate amount of time stirring and shaking pre-dinner cocktails composed of spirits and liqueurs bought especially for the occasion. Blue stuff and green stuff and clear stuff so potent that a single glass has left Stephie stone cold sober but with doubts about her ability to stand or move her arms.
But there it was: beef Wellington for Paul. You could be defined forever by some random choice made long ago. Right now, Melissa was smiling in her indulgent fashion at another of her future mother-in-law’s funny little ways: her caution, her stinginess.
‘Ah well,’ she said. ‘It’s once in a lifetime, I suppose.’
‘More likely twice,’ said Stephie, ‘possibly three times, if you check the statistics. Remember Diana? The wedding of the century? The dress? She still ended up in the tunnel. Remember the sea of flowers? I’d hang onto that dress if I were you. You’ll probably get a lot of wear out of it.’
‘And,’ she’d like to add, ‘don’t call me “Mum”. I am not your bloody mother.’ But Ben was looking at her disapprovingly. He placed his hand over Melissa’s on the tabletop, and when Stephie went out to the kitchen to collect the chocolate cake, he followed.
‘Why are you being so rude?’ he hissed. ‘Melissa’s on her own. She doesn’t have family here. They’re all in Taiwan. She deserves our support.’
‘To do what?’ said Stephie. ‘Spend a ridiculous amount of money on a dress?’
‘Her money,’ said Ben. ‘She’s earned it. She works bloody hard.’ Melissa worked in marketing. For Lion Nathan.
‘She sells beer to New Zealanders,’ said Stephie. ‘How hard can that be?’
Once Ben would have thought that was funny, but a new seriousness had swept over her son, along with the stubbled jaw, the shaven head. He didn’t laugh and Stephie stood holding the cake, knowing she was risking it all: future visits, wedding, grandchildren when they came along, as Melissa had promised they would.
‘We both wants heaps of kids,’ she’d said, as she stood chopping tomatoes at the kitchen bench, diamond engagement ring twinkling above the knife. Giving Mum a hand. ‘So don’t worry. You’ll soon be a grandma!’
‘My life’s ambition,’ said Stephie, who was washing a lettuce at the time. The water was icy. Her fingers stung.
She carried in the cake — chocolate, Paul’s favourite. Or so they all supposed. They sang the song. They cut the cake. Speech speech. He rose. He thanked them all: his family, his friends and colleagues, his wife. They drank a toast in the German glasses. To Paul. Happy Birthday!
Then Melissa tapped her fork upon the glass with tiny fingers tipped blood red. She jumped to her feet. ‘I’d just like to take the opportunity to say thank you,’ she said. ‘To you all. I mean, you have all just so welcomed me into this family, made me feel so totally welcome. I always wanted to be part of a big happy family. It was one of the things that drew me to Ben in the first place, wasn’t it?’ She looked down lovingly at Ben’s shaven head. ‘That we were both only children and you just miss out on so much, being raised an only child …’
Stephie surveyed the remains of her slice of birthday cake.
Her son.
Her only child.
The child who burst through the blur that fell over her on the day the police officers arrived, standing on the doorstep, saying something to her, something about Kurt, about an accident, their faces wrinkled with concern, their quiet, considered voices. There had been the blur, and darkness and through the darkness, a sudden vicelike grip that seized her body, and began to squeeze, hard, harder and there were sheets, white sheets, flowering scarlet, and voices and people running and a siren howling or perhaps the howling was her and she was tearing in two, she was being ripped apart as she was carried, swaying, through the dream of a dark city and flashing lights and then, oblivion.
And when she woke, there he was: a tiny wrinkled creature covered in raspberry ripples of blood and creamy unguent, skinny legs pedalling at the unimpeded air, arms waving, hold me, hold me, while the doctors and nurses did something urgent to a part of her body that had become distant, irrelevant, devoid of sensation.
And when she woke again he reappeared in a plastic incubator wearing an absurd little knitted cap like an egg cosy. And she sat close, as close as she could without climbing in beside him, unaware of anything, not eating unless someone said she should: here, you must have something. She felt if she looked away for a single second this tiny creature could give a little fluttering sigh and simply disappear. It could happen. It took all her energy to keep him visible, to make him breathe.
And after a long time, days, nights, she can’t remember, he was released. They opened the plastic box and handed him over to her, dressed in a baggy babygro, newborn size but still too large, like the lambs they used to find in the rain-soaked paddocks of the Taieri when she was a girl, bony bodies inside baggy jerseys of crimped wool stained yellow with afterbirth, and saved, bearing them home to the warmth of a cardboard box lined with a bit of sacking next to the kitchen stove.
She was a hollow shell. Everything within her had been ripped and torn and taken away. No chance whatever of another. But there he was, her son, who now sat there smiling adoringly at this silly girl he planned to marry.
She looked down the long table at Paul, who was looking straight back at her.
He knew her. He knew her life, as she knew him and his life. About Diane and her affairs — four that he knew of, others he suspected but never asked about to be sure. About the difficulties of work, the problems with management, the times he made the wrong call, lost someone. She knew his fears — of putting on weight, of losing his hair, of sudden cardiac arrest at fifty-two, like his father who had collapsed in front of him, with brutal suddenness, in the garden at Hokitika and how he, twelve years old, had tried to hold him up, stop him falling.
She knew him. The way he hummed when preoccupied, a tuneless repetition of ‘Delilah’ for some reason, though he didn’t even like Tom Jones. The feel of his heart against her head, beating. The solid beauty of him as he walked across the bedroom naked, or as he made his way toward her dressed for work in that public place he inhabited with the same ease she felt when she was out in the darkroom in the old laundry at the back of the house, developing film. She had tried to capture it, this beauty, though he didn’t like being photographed. He held his hands up against her camera, pulled a silly face. She had sometimes managed to catch him unawares, just woken from sleep, or walking ahead of her along a beach and he was beautiful then, turning to look straight back at her, through the camera lens.
As now he looked at her, while Melissa talked of meeting Ben.
Paul. The man with whom she was sharing her life. They had not bothered with a wedding. There was no need to stand in front of a whole lot of people, repeating vows that hard experience taught were no more than vague intention. You could have the wedding of the year, kiss upon the balcony before millions, and it still ended in a tunnel, a sea of flowers.
Their agreement had been made on the night when, in the private world of a shared bed, she had told him about Ben’s birth. And he had told her about Diane’s affairs and that was the moment they had said, you. No one else. You.
Melissa had sat down, and Ben laid his hand over her hand, over the diamond solitaire. But Paul was standing up. He was walking around the table. And he was putting his arms about Stephie, he was holding her, kissing her, in front of everyone. His children, his friends and colleagues.
‘Hey,’ he murmured so that only she could hear. ‘All right?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All right.’
And now it is spring and she is clipping and tying the roses, preparing for her son’s wedding. One of the weddings, for there are to be two: one here, one in Taiwan, both requiring months of organisation. She ties Souvenir de la Malmaison to the archway, but one little sapling cane she leaves loose.
It will grow over the next few months. And by Valentine’s Day, it might, just possibly, be long enough and prickly enough to snag on the Lara Milligan …