Loop Tracks

By Sue Orr

It’s 1978: the Auckland abortion clinic has been forced to close and sixteen-year-old Charlie has to fly to Sydney, but the plane is delayed on the tarmac. It’s 2019: Charlie’s tightly contained Wellington life with her grandson Tommy is interrupted by the unexpected intrusions of Tommy’s first girlfriend, Jenna, and the father he has never known, Jim. The year turns, and everything changes again.
Loop Tracks is a major New Zealand novel, written in real time against the progress of the Covid-19 pandemic and the New Zealand General Election and euthanasia referendum in 2020.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781743822265

Sue Orr

Sue Orr is the author of two books of short stories and a previous novel, with shortlistings and awards. Sue teaches creative writing at Victoria University in Wellington, and holds a PhD and M.A. in Creative Writing from that university. Since 2016, she has set up programs and taught creative writing for women in women’s refuges and prisons. She lives in Wellington with her husband, Adrian Orr.

Book preview

Part One

1.

The first time I got on an aeroplane, I was sixteen years old and pregnant. I was on my way to Sydney to have my situation sorted out. It was May 1978 and that was what you had to do if you had enough money for the flight and the procedure. Although they didn’t say procedure, or termination. Not as I recall. They definitely hardly ever said abortion.

If ever you were going to find yourself in a situation, 1978 was the absolute worst time for it. A year earlier, we had our own clinic right here in Auckland. A year earlier, there would have been no applying for foreign currency and waiting days for it to come through to your local bank, all the while becoming anxiously more pregnant. When the Australian dollars did finally arrive (ordered especially for you from the Reserve Bank in Wellington), there would have been no need to skulk around in High Street waiting for the least busy of business hours before sidling up to the bank counter. Signing for them under the beady eye of the teller, inevitably the mother of a person in your class at school. Family holiday, or is it just you going to . . . Australia? Looking at you over the top of her glasses like she knew all the facts. Sydney? When, in fact, no one knew all the facts: not the teller, not the Reserve Bank, not even you. Especially not you.

An equally fortuitous time would have been in late 1979, when the Auckland Medical Aid Centre reopened. That, ideally, would have been a sensible time to become pregnant in the back of a red Vauxhall Victor to a boy you’d notionally fallen in love with. The only significant barrier by late 1979 would have been a wall of rabid protesters screaming your murderous credentials at you as you hung your head low and fought your way through them into the clinic.

So, you started developing a cold on the Monday before the flight – loud sneezing and coughing and the like – and by Wednesday you’d be secretly rubbing your eyes, making them red, making them run in unison with your nose, although the nose wasn’t running, that part was an illusion. By Thursday, no one was surprised when you didn’t turn up at school. Everyone knew you’d been coming down with something. (Though not a baby. It occurred to no one that you might be coming down with one of those.) On Friday, when it was universally assumed you were tucked up in bed with a temperature, you were on the early-morning Pan Am flight to Sydney from Auckland Airport. You’d be sorted out by that evening and back at school on Monday, still feeling not a hundred percent, thanks, but a lot better. Coming right.

Dad was a postman and Mum a small-town librarian. I still don’t know how they scraped the money together, but I see now that the circumstances left them with no alternative. By circumstances, I mean my particular ones, which even by the standards of fallen schoolgirls were vertiginous. You needed extra money for the accommodation in Sydney if you didn’t have someone to stay with over there. I did have someone – my mother’s oldest friend, Heather something. I was going to stay with Heather, who was going to take me to the clinic and pick me up afterwards, and keep an eye on me until she could drop me off at Sydney Airport on Sunday morning for the flight home.

The night before the flight, my mother and I stayed in a motel just a few steps away from the runway. At least, that’s how it felt. I dreamed of staring out the plane window at the necklace of ruby tail lights across the city counterpane below. I’d never been in the air, I don’t know how I knew to dream this. I dreamed, too, of watching enormous engines tumbling from the armpits of jet planes, crashing through the motel roof. Through the bedroom’s glittered ceiling – all the rage in the seventies – and onto my bed, onto me. Entirely missing my mother, snoring fitfully in the other bed.

We’d arrived at the motel after dark, around eight o’clock, I think – we’d eaten dinner before leaving home. ‘May as well, Rhonda,’ my father had said to Mum, unable to look at me. He hadn’t looked at me for weeks. ‘Save having to find something to eat so late in the city.’ I heard the way his words caught in the back of his throat. My mother drove into the motel car park, hunched herself over the steering wheel and squinted through the darkness to find the office. There was nothing to distinguish it from the other parts of the squat, utilitarian breezeblock building except a single bare lightbulb burning strong above the bug-screened door.

It was raining – just a misty drizzle. She inched the car into a space far from the glowing light. There was only one other vehicle in the entire car park, and she parked so close to it I couldn’t open my door to get out.

‘Stay there,’ she said. ‘I’ll go in and sort it out.’ So much sorting to be sorted. The burn of her shame coloured my face as I clicked my door shut again and she walked away.

She returned to the car in silence but her face mirrored mine. There we were, two glowing Lowrys. Yet I was cold. I remember that. I remember the chill of that late-autumn night, the way it soaked my bones.

The room key glinted in the clutch of her fist as she started the car and reversed it out of the space. I tried to guess which unit door might be ours. She swung the car in a wide half circle, then pulled back in just a few spaces further along from our former park.

‘We could have walked.’ I laughed. ‘It’s not even raining that hard.’

‘I’ll unlock the door. You wait here.’ She ignored my cruelty, reaching behind to grab her overnight bag from the back seat before turning to face me. Her eyes were wide and she was wetting her lips with her tongue, again and again, as though slightly mad with thirst. The grossness of this made me feel like hating her. She breathed in sharply, as if to say more, but no words followed. The flush was fading from her cheeks.

The truth of it was, she was frightened of me, of being tainted by me. Of being seen with me at this motel organised for us by the Sisters Overseas Service, the stealthy network of women who had stepped up to organise the trips to Sydney following the closure of the Auckland clinic.

I woke before the five o’clock alarm the next morning, hungry, eyeing the chilly bin in the corner of the room. My mother had packed cereal, milk and bottled peaches. Exactly four teabags, although it wasn’t clear whether she intended to use them all. I usually had Milo; there was no Milo in the bin. But then there was nothing usual about this excursion. From where I was looking, her shame clouded every moment, dictated her every action. Of course she’d packed a breakfast; we’d not eat in public. There was a box full of teabags on the tiny kitchen bench – we would not be using teabags sponsored by the SOS. We would leave no trace of having been here in this underground pit stop.

I slipped out of bed and silently opened the cupboards, seeking out a bowl and spoon. I picked up the entire chilly bin and went into the pale-pink bathroom, closing the door behind me. There, sitting on the lidded toilet bowl, I prepared my breakfast. She appeared at the dark doorway just as I was lifting my second spoonful to my mouth.

‘You can’t have that, Charlie,’ and she stepped forward and snatched the bowl from my lap. The milk spilled over the side, splashed onto the grubby grey tiles at my feet. ‘It says. In the folder. No food, on the day of the . . .’

‘Abortion,’ I said.

While I showered, she dressed and ate all the breakfast. Then she busied herself reading and re-reading papers from the brown folder, her librarian glasses perched on her nose. The effort she went to not to look at me, not to catch my eye, should have broken my heart but all I registered was hunger.

She’d already told me, many times, what would happen inside the terminal. I was to go to the Pan Am check-in counter and seek out a woman wearing a bright-orange cardigan.

‘What if there’s more than one in an orange cardigan?’ I asked.

‘There’ll only be one looking for you,’ she replied.

‘Won’t you be coming inside? With me?’ A tiny pang of fear, just there. I swallowed it away.

‘They say the parking’s terrible at the airport. They say it’s impossible to park nearby.’ My mother turned away from me. ‘I’ll drop you off. You’ll be okay. You just need to walk inside and find the sign.’

She had nothing to go on other than what she’d been told by the woman from the SOS. Neither she nor my father had ever been on an aeroplane. But, even now, it still feels particularly strange – cruel – that she wouldn’t come into the terminal and deliver me safely into the hands of the woman in orange. Was she frightened of seeing someone she knew – some tanned, wealthy person returning all relaxed from an overseas holiday who, spying us across the crowded terminal, might exclaim Rhonda! And Charlie! Where are you two off to? Of course she was. But there was more than fear behind her cruelty towards me that morning. From the very first day that my pregnancy had been confirmed, she and my father had demanded to know the name of the boy. They asked, cajoled, threatened, bribed, pleaded. I didn’t have the words to tell them. Her fury had peaked, troughed and peaked again before flatlining to an obdurate coolness towards me. Refusing to enter the terminal felt to me like her final, pathetic salvo at my silence.

2.

More hunching and squinting over the steering wheel, this time through the maze of signs directing traffic in and out of the airport. She found the drop-off bay and pulled in. We both got out of the car and I took my travel bag from the boot. I was surprised to see her begin to cry – tiny sobs punctuating the sharp breaths of fear she’d practised in the car the night before in the motel parking lot.

‘You’ve got the brown folder, haven’t you. It’s got everything in it. The money . . . and everything. You can’t lose that brown folder.’

I hugged her goodbye. ‘Don’t worry, Mum. I’ll sort things out. Tell Dad. Things have been sorted out.’

I ashamedly declare this now – I was glad to be rid of her pitying, stoic, terrified presence. I was going overseas. To Australia! A place I’d only seen on television. A country with better weather than New Zealand and pet kangaroos called Skippy and cute boys called Sonny who knew how to whistle them to heel. The brown folder and its contents did not interest me. My situation interested me only in the fact that it would be over later that evening. My journey thus far, from the back seat of a Vauxhall to the footpath outside Auckland International Airport, had been asymptotic, inching closer and closer to that boy without reaching romantic touchdown. I stood on that footpath, in the darkness, and watched my mother’s tail lights disappear around the corner. I waved, just in case she was watching in her rear-view mirror.

And there she goes, breathing so sharply she’s in danger of hyperventilating. ‘Coming over all funny’ was her medical terminology for the state that she’d find herself in from time to time when things got a bit too much. So she’s in the driver’s seat, pulling out from the parking space, into the traffic, dreading going home, terrified of what’s ahead. Wondering how a librarian and a postie are going to pay off a loan shark who gave her the money for her daughter’s abortion. She thinks about how she is fifty-five and has never been able to save enough money to go anywhere on a plane.

3.

I lingered in the terminal entrance, taking in the brutal light, the humming spark of heartbreaking farewells and joyous welcomes. The hunger in the motel bathroom was gone. My Pan Am sign glowed above the sea of laughing, crying faces.

There was no woman in an orange cardigan. But near the sign, on a row of seats, a girl sat on her own. She had her feet tucked up on the seat, her knees hunched up hiding her face. In her lap, an open brown folder. Her jet-black hair fell forward in silky tassels, brushing the edges of the folder. There were spare seats on both sides of her. I took one on the end and put my bag at my feet. Then I picked it up again and opened the zip. You can imagine how smart I believed myself to be. My fingers found the edge of my own brown folder tucked carefully deep inside the bag. I lifted the folder to the surface, let its corner poke out the top of the open bag.

It was impossible to tell her age, with her hair and legs forming a fortress around her. She wore tight black jeans and a black tee-shirt with Sid Vicious on it, and I concluded she was probably a punk rocker. I’d only ever seen them on television and read about them in the newspaper, so I didn’t have much to go on. Her arms were thin and china white. Peeking out from one sleeve was a trace of black ink, the edge of a hidden tattoo. I’d never seen a tattoo on a girl my age before. This was 1978, remember, decades before the age of ink. I stared, trying to make out the pattern, wondering again how old she was, what had already happened in her life that was important enough to be etched on her body forever. She looked up and caught me analysing her arm.

‘Sorry.’ I blushed, wondering whether people with tattoos wanted people without tattoos to mention them. I didn’t know the protocol, but if the tattoos were clearly visible, on their public skin as opposed to private, I figured they might. ‘I like your tattoo,’ I tested. ‘Did it hurt much, getting it?’

She grinned at me, revealing dimples to die for and crooked white teeth, and lifted her sleeve up over her bony shoulder. The tattoo revealed itself to be a name. Alex.

‘He was my guy,’ she said. ‘He did the tattoo for me. Alexander. But my arm was too skinny to get all the letters on.’ She pulled the sleeve back down. ‘And yeah, it hurt.’

Was my guy. What did you do about tattoos of ex-boyfriends’ names once you’d broken up with them? Try to go out with someone with the same name? Quite limiting, even if he was called something common like Paul or John. Would Dylan have fitted on my bicep? It was easier, I realised, to get rid of a boy’s baby than to get rid of his name on your skin.

‘He died.’ She’d hitched the sleeve up again and traced the wobbly x with a purple-varnished fingernail. ‘Two years ago. He was out cycling and was hit by a truck.’

The idea of a punk out cycling was different, but really, what would I know?

She looked at me again. ‘I was going to break up with him. I was bored. He never knew that.’

She returned to her folder, flicked the top page over to read its reverse. I looked down at my bag, nudging my own folder with the toe of my Bata Bullet. She was wearing Doc Martens. I felt like a kid. I was a kid. I willed my folder to further reveal itself, re-ignite our conversation.

‘What time’s yours?’ Her nose was still in her paperwork. She didn’t look up. ‘Mine’s two o’clock. I’ll be starving by then.’

What time was mine? I had no idea. My mother had fully controlled my brown folder until that moment. She’d told me to read through it when I got to the airport, then give it to a woman in an orange cardigan. I pulled the folder out of the bag and opened it.

‘Where does it say the time?’

The girl slid across the seats and peered over my shoulder. ‘There. One o’clock. Wanna swap?’ Right on cue, her stomach grumbled.

‘I don’t think we’re allowed,’ I said, selfishly, without any idea whether this was true.

A woman sat down on one of the spare seats in our row. She wore black shoes, black jeans and a shabby black sweatshirt. I wondered whether my mother had missed something in the instructions – that we were supposed to be colour-coded as well. Black for mourning. Or shame. The woman looked maybe forty and worn out by life, her skin wrinkled and rough. Her eyes glistened, and I thought she might have been involved in one of the traumatic farewells I’d just seen – where the person leaving kept waving and waving as they headed off overseas, then stopped at the very final corner in New Zealand and waved back at relatives like this one, and cried some more. She got a soggy hanky out of her jeans pocket and wiped her eyes and put the hanky back. By the time she’d tucked it away, her eyes were wet again.

The punk girl mouthed something at me. Look, her lips said. Her fingers prodded at the front of her tee-shirt, just below the neckline. Her eyes flicked towards the woman. I saw it then. The silver chain around the woman’s neck, and the small glinting cross hanging from it. The girl leaned over towards me and whispered in my ear. ‘SPUC.’ Her eyebrows twitched knowingly about something I didn’t comprehend.

The girl reached inside her bag and found a pen. She drew a little notebook out as well. On an opened page, she wrote Anti-abortion protester. Could be.

I checked out the woman again. She didn’t appear to have the energy to stand up, let alone hoist a placard and shout slogans at us. As if she could read my mind, she slumped back in the seat and closed her eyes.

The girl stood. ‘Excuse me,’ she said to the tired, weepy woman. ‘That seat’s taken.’

The woman opened her eyes and blinked her way back into now. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She lifted herself slowly and moved across to the end of the row.

‘And that one. They’re all taken. You’ll have to go somewhere else, sorry. Over there.’ The girl waved her hand vaguely at the rest of the heaving terminal.

The woman held the girl’s gaze. She fingered the cross. Here we go, I thought, with no idea at all about what might follow.

‘Who else is sitting here? I mean . . .’ The woman looked around. ‘Where are they?’ She crossed her arms and sat back. She didn’t flinch from the punkish stare-down. Her eyes had dried up nicely and her glare was piercing, her pupils black.

‘They’ll be here soon.’ The girl looked at her watch. ‘Any minute. Actually.’ She, too, looked around theatrically. She swung her hair, searching high and low. I found this very unconvincing. It failed to convince the woman as well, which was disappointing. There was no rule about where people could and couldn’t sit in airports, even I knew that. But I’d been on the verge of asking the girl’s name. Getting to know her. ‘And,’ she continued, ‘if you’re one of the God Squad, here to try and stop us going, you can just piss off . . .’

I felt sorry for the woman then. She was a loser, hanging around airports at five in the morning, flashing her crucifix, picking on people like the punk rocker and me. It was thanks to her and her mob that we had to go to Australia in the first place. But still.

I watched as she straightened herself tall in the seat, as she reached for her handbag. I watched as she opened it and pulled out a brown folder. She let the folder sit in her lap for a moment, her hands resting across the top of it. Her hands matched her face: leathery, like a man’s. She didn’t flinch. ‘Why don’t you just sit down, love?’ she said quietly. ‘And give us all some peace.’

Her name was Brenda. She introduced herself to me first, holding out her hand to shake mine. My father used to take my hand to cross the road when I was little. That feeling of thick old safe skin in my palm. He had rested his hand on me only once since my pregnancy had been confirmed. On that day, he stood up silently from the kitchen table and put his quivering hand on my bare shoulder as he left the room. The way it shook gave his touch the feel of sandpaper.

The girl hesitated when Brenda turned to her. I could see her eyeing the cross, weighing things up. Finally, she accepted the greeting. ‘Renee,’ she said curtly. ‘And, sorry. You know . . . about before.’ She glared at the seats accusingly, as though they’d been to blame for feigning their lack of availability.

Renee had a French sound to it, further emphasising the chasm between the girl’s sophistication and my lack of any. Charlie. It felt like a name for a pet. Or a leg cramp. Dad got leg cramps. ‘I’ve got a Charley Horse, Charlie.’ Don’t think about Dad. Renee and Brenda stared at me. ‘Charlotte,’ I said. ‘But people call me Charlie.’

The orange cardigan had a Fair Isle pattern: intricate repetitions of arrows, diamonds, geometric flowers with green leaves and black stems. Much later in my life, someone told me that Fair Isle jumpers were used to identify the corpses of drowned fishermen when they eventually washed to shore off the coasts of Scotland and Ireland. The jumpers lasted a long time, much longer than the bodies inside them. Then, even later, someone else told me that story was rubbish. Urban myth, though it would more correctly have been marine.

Even now, I can picture this orange cardigan and its patterns emerging out of the terminal crowd. The flowers were bright red. But although I recall the wearer of the cardigan was called Margaret, I can’t remember her face. I can’t remember what she looked like, this kind, brave person who turned up at dawn at the airport for maybe the hundredth time and handed out air tickets and talked, quietly, to each of us about what to expect in Sydney.

She spoke to me first. I tried to focus on the wheres and whens, but just a few metres away a family was in meltdown, searching for a lost passport. My empty stomach flip-flopped. I didn’t have a passport. My mother hadn’t even mentioned passports. I gasped this information at Margaret of the orange cardigan.

‘You don’t need one. Not for Australia,’ she said. ‘Thank goodness for that at least.’

I’d assumed she’d be coming with us. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We can’t afford to make the trips too.’

Brenda butted in then, asked Margaret whether that meant she was supposed to look out for Renee and me. Her martyred sigh and the withering look specifically in Renee’s direction made it clear she’d rather not.

‘No,’ Margaret said again. ‘You have yourself to look after. They’ll be okay. They’ve got themselves this far.’

I thought, when she said this, that she might be having a go at Renee and me. About our situations. I checked out her attitude and saw no snarkiness. She was just dealing with her paperwork. Getting on with the job.

The queue in front of the Pam Am counter snaked like an engorged python, families bulging at its middle. I hesitated at the back of it, but Margaret did not. She walked on past – to the far end of the long airline counter. We followed her. The section was unattended, lights switched off, but as we approached a woman appeared from behind a closed door. Strange, I do remember her: her mousy brown hair cropped short like a boy’s, her face an unfortunate yet striking arrangement of thin lips and deep-set eyes surrendering to a beaked nose. The effect overall was eagle-like.

She smiled at Margaret. ‘Just the three?’ she asked.

‘Just three,’ Margaret replied. ‘Together, please. Near the toilets.’

‘Anything else we need to know?’ The Pan Am woman was scribbling on the backs of our tickets. She glanced at each of us, smiling in a way that softened her features.

‘Two for the van, and one will be picked up by a relative,’ Margaret said, resting her hand on my arm. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Charlotte?’

‘I get called Charlie,’ I said. ‘I hate Charlotte. Heather’s not related to me. But yeah, my mother’s friend.’ I must have known the surname back then. The Pan Am woman scribbled that information on the back of my ticket too.

When she’d finished, she passed my papers to me and squeezed my hand. ‘It’ll all be fine, Charlie,’ she said. ‘If there’re any problems when you land, ask for Merle, inside the terminal at our counter. I know she’s working today.’

4.

The smartest of us go for an aisle seat, so we can get up and down as we please and avoid the humiliation of hoisting ourselves, in a type of horsy mounting manoeuvre, over the top of the strangers sitting next to us. We’re not seduced by the privilege of watching endless clouds, or blackness, or an expanse of white aeroplane wing with worryingly shuddery bits attached to it only just. I was in no way smart in 1978, but I got an aisle seat and I was in fact devastated about not being by a window, able to watch the disappearance of New Zealand and the arrival of Australia beneath me. Furthermore, my aisle seat was at the end of the middle row, right at the back of the plane. Not even next to a window, with just two people to lean across to see the view.

Brenda had been the first of us to climb the stairs from the tarmac to