Kissing Shadows

By Renee

Do we ever really know or understand the motives of the ones we love? When Vivvie Caird is faced by the sight of her beautiful, strong-willed mother lying limp and speechless in a hospital bed, she feels empowered to begin unlocking the mystery that is her father's legacy. Vivvie's naïve undertaking soon finds a parallel in her mother's own account of what happened when her husband left home one day, never to return. A family and a court must confront a devastating event that occurred in the midst of the hard times of last century. This fast-paced, page-turning novel takes the reader into an absorbing and moving world of shadowy relationships and intrigue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Huia Publishers
• Release date: Aug 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781869694623

Book preview

One

‘I’m going to tell you a secret.’ Talk to her, they’d said. Talk about things she doesn’t know — tell her things that have been happening. Don’t they realise how dangerous this is? Perhaps not. It’s a bit like talking to the air.

Here goes. Here’s something she doesn’t know. ‘When I was in my first year at high school, I belonged to a very exclusive club. There were only two members — me and Ada Browning. To be eligible you had to have a father who’d killed himself. You remember Ada’s father? Hung himself in the woodshed. I was the president of the club because my father had made the national papers, including Truth. Ada didn’t think that was fair. Don’t see why I should be penalised just because my father lacked get up and go, she’d said.’ Ada was my first real friend but she had some crazy ideas. It was obvious I should be president.

I hadn’t been sure about Ada when I first met her. She’d come up to me and said, ‘My name’s Ada Browning and my father hung himself.’ I could perhaps have accepted that she should introduce herself that way to me but she did it to all the girls in the class. I could tell they thought she was odd. ‘Why do you say that?’ I asked, ‘about your father killing himself?’

‘They’d all realise sooner or later — might as well get it in first.’

The other thing about Ada that I found surprising, even shocking, was that she didn’t care what other girls thought. She didn’t go out of her way to shock them but she didn’t care if she did. It was as though a piece had been missed out of Ada’s character, a piece everyone else had, that part of us which didn’t want to be thought different, the part that didn’t want to be talked about in a certain way, didn’t want to be ridiculed or whispered about. Ada just shrugged when I tried to get her to see that she had to be careful with the things she said or did.

‘Why tell them that your grandmother got your uniform second-hand from a neighbour’s cousin?’

‘Well she did.’

I couldn’t make her see, make her understand, that some things were better kept private. We’re still friends though, good ones, best ones, which just proves that crazy ideas are part of the cement that binds friends together. We started being friends at school, we left school at the same time, started work on the same day and we work in the same printing factory. So it’s just as well we get on.’

The eyes on the bed flickered but that was all. It could be just a tiny movement of no account or it could mean she was listening. ‘She’s much quieter, not so restless, when you’re talking,’ the sister said and the doctor nodded.

I looked at her face on the pillow. It had slackened in some indefinable way. In the middle of her black hair, right in the front, was a drift of white. I’d never noticed it before. Had the blood done that too? A cerebral haemorrhage, they said. I looked it up. Imagined a wave of blood swirling and gushing around inside her head, drowning the .303 rifle, the earthquake, my father’s face and whatever else she had locked in there.

‘Talk to your mother,’ the doctor said, ‘it might help.’

‘I don’t know what to say,’ I told him, ‘we’ve never talked to each other much. Ask Tom.’

‘He did try,’ the sister said, ‘but she became very agitated. She seems to be calmer when it’s you speaking.’

‘I’m not keen, Mum. I tell you that. I’ve never been inside a hospital before. I have no idea what to do, what the rules are, so I’ll do as they say. You and I have never talked. You’ve said words and I’ve said words back — that’s all. You’re not much of a talker, not to me anyway. You hug Tom and Rosa sometimes, and sometimes you all laugh. I used to think about that. Wonder about it. What it would be like to be on the inner. Now I have more of an idea because that’s how it is with Ada after being friends for this long. There’s words passing back and forth all right, but they’re unspoken. There’s some words between you and me that are unspoken but that’s different. Different to me and Ada, that’s for sure. Tell me, Mum, why have you never liked me?’

I look at her in the awful hospital bed with the sides on it and think what the hell is there to say once I’ve asked the question I’ve wanted to ask for years? After the doctor said to talk to her, he looked as though he was going to say something else but then changed his mind. They do that a lot here.

There’s no one else but me and her in the room now. It’s very quiet. Tell her something she doesn’t know, they’d said, surprise her. I lean over. Quite close so no one else can hear. ‘I hate you,’ I say, ‘I hate you. You’re mean and angry and one-eyed and nothing I ever do is right and I hate you. I’m not surprised my father shot himself to get away from you.’

I sit back and watch. Nothing. The face on the pillow stays the same. If you heard me you’re not letting on. You’ve always had eyes in the back of your head, always known what I was up to almost before I did. I’ve never known whether it’s instinct or whether you really do have a little bit of Nanny Parehuia’s gift. Or, I’ve just thought, it’s because you were young once. Now that’s a strange thought. Can’t quite see that.

I look at the face on the pillow. ‘I’m going to open your tin trunk this afternoon. For once in my life, I’m going directly against your orders. I’m going to open the trunk and see what’s inside. Gift or not, there’s a lot about you I don’t know and it’s all in there. I’ve got the key and this afternoon, when I get home from work and Tom and Rosa are with you, I’m going through it. Think on that, Mum.’

The sound of footsteps. Footsteps I know. Nanny. Uncle Frankie must have brought her. She used to walk everywhere, but now she needs help for anywhere away from her little house. Not that she would have walked from Porohiwi to Napier anyway, but once she would have caught the service car, travelled quite happily on her own. I don’t know why she bothers. She can’t talk, and even when she chooses to use the stick, she’s not that steady on her feet. I’ve made up lots of stories about Nanny Parehuia, one of them might be true. Her eyes still burn holes in anyone she looks at. I don’t think mine do that. Not yet anyway. Perhaps you grow into it. Nanny’s given me her eyes, but that’s all. Her words are still lost though, so if my mother gets agitated, the sister’ll just have to put up with it.

‘She was attacked,’ I said when Ada asked me why Nanny couldn’t speak.

‘Attacked?’

‘Some men attacked her and my grandmother, and one of them cut off Nanny’s tongue when she wouldn’t stop yelling.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Ada said. Then she said, ‘What do you mean your grandmother? Who’s Nanny Parehuia then? I thought she was your grandmother.’

‘Nanny’s my great-grandmother. She had her daughter young and then they were attacked and after that the daughter had Mum. So one of those men was Mum’s father.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Ada said again.

I had tried once to get Ada to stop saying Jesus Christ like that but she always forgot. Her grandmother, Mrs Hinny, was the same. I never knew how to take Mrs Hinny. Once when I was in their kitchen and she was mixing a fruit cake, a Christmas cake I think, because I was waiting to have a stir of the mixture. Ada said it was good luck to do that. Mrs Hinny pushed the bowl towards me and held the handle of the wooden spoon until I took it. ‘Now watch you only stir clockwise,’ she said. ‘You start stirring anti-clockwise and it’ll all undo and then where will we be?’ She looked as though she was really giving me good advice, so I believed her. I believed her for about a week and did I feel a fool when I found out that it was Mrs Hinny’s idea of a joke. Luckily I hadn’t repeated it to anyone until I reminded Ada about it and then I saw by the look on her face that I had been an idiot. ‘You must have known she was joking,’ Ada said.

‘She’s an adult.’

‘They like jokes too,’ said Ada.

I didn’t think it was funny, and I started to see where Ada got her odd ideas from.

I wasn’t surprised at Ada’s reaction to the story about Nanny having her tongue cut off. It’s a story I wish I didn’t know. I looked it up. You bleed a lot when your tongue’s cut off but once that’s stopped, it heals quite quickly. I used to wish I’d never heard what happened to Nanny — every time I saw her after I first knew, all I could think of was that blood gushing out. It must have just about choked her. It’s funny, strange, peculiar, knowing such a thing happened to that old woman. Not that she was old when it happened. I make up stories but I’ve never made up anything so horrible. My stories usually change people for the better. I give them happy endings.

‘Philomel,’ Ada said.

‘What does that mean?’

‘You know — the Greek myth.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, although I didn’t. I looked it up. Hell, it was horrible. Philomel’s sister, Procne, was married to King Tereus of Thrace and they had a son, Itys. Tereus decided he wanted Philomel and of course she wasn’t having anything to do with her sister’s husband, so he told her father that Procne was dead. The father said he could have Philomel then, but she wasn’t stupid and she didn’t fancy him anyway, so she still wouldn’t have anything to do with Tereus. So he took her by force and raped her and cut off her tongue and imprisoned her so she couldn’t tell on him. But Philomel was too smart for him. She embroidered the whole story on a piece of cloth and smuggled it to Procne who was beside herself. She went a bit mad: she killed Itys, cut him up, cooked him and gave him to Tereus for his tea. Then after he’d eaten it she told him what she’d done. There was flash of lightning or a thunderbolt or something and the gods took action. They changed Tereus into a hoopoe, Procne into a swallow and Philomel into a nightingale.

That was one time I said Jesus Christ, that was one time I wished I didn’t have this habit of looking everything up. Ada says it’s a good habit. She reckons knowledge is all. She read it somewhere. I thought I’d make up another end to Philomel’s story — no one could cut their child up and feed it to anyone. If ever a story needed a new ending that one did.

‘No wonder your Nanny stares at everyone like she does.’

‘It’s partly the eyes,’ I said, ‘her pāua eyes.’

‘I think they’re beautiful.’ Ada surprised me. ‘I’ve always liked pāua — the colours.’

‘Then I wish you had my eyes and I had yours,’ I said. I didn’t believe her. She was my friend so of course she’d say that. Anyone in their right mind would prefer ordinarycoloured eyes, eyes the same as anyone else’s — blue like Ada’s, or green, brown. I bet that’s what Nanny thought too. Who’d want eyes that were all mixed-up colours? As though someone couldn’t make up their mind what colour to use so they plumped for the lot. Then threw in a silvery shine for good measure.

‘I feel sorry for your mother, coming into the world as the result of that.’

‘Why? Why should it make any difference? She knew it wasn’t her fault. Not much of a father to have, I can see that, but we don’t get asked do we?’

‘Well you’re right there,’ Ada said.

I stood up. I’ve always stood up when Nanny comes in, ever since the time I was reading and didn’t notice. Mum gave me such a clip round the ears they rang for ages; unforgettable lesson. ‘Stand up when your nanny enters the room,’ she’d yelled. I’d stood there snivelling, all snot, tears and hate. It’s a funny thing with Mum and Nanny. If anyone else behaved like Nanny, Mum would really go to town. Nanny slurps her tea, she’s rude, she spits when she doesn’t like something or someone, and she smokes that awful stinking pipe. Then there’s the eyes. I’ve read somewhere that in Hollywood they have little coloured lenses the actresses put over their real eyecolour if they want to change it. If they’re supposed to have blue eyes and they’ve actually been born with brown. I don’t know whether they’ve got them here or not but one of these days I’m going to get some. I don’t know what colour yet, but it won’t be pāua. They won’t be greeny-blue any more, there won’t be that pinkish watery shine on them. They’ll be a plain-out blue or green or brown and when I look at people they won’t stare. Best of all they won’t be Nanny Parehuia’s eyes. No one will know she’s my nanny, no one. I’m glad she doesn’t live too close, I couldn’t stand it. At least, now she’s really old, she doesn’t come to visit so much. I wish Uncle Frankie would put his foot down with Nanny. He doesn’t have to give in to her every whim.

‘When he’s married things’ll change,’ Ada reckoned.

This was a joke. Uncle Frankie and Myra Standon had been going out together forever. She wore a small diamond cluster on the third finger of her left hand so they must be engaged. Never any talk of getting married. Myra looked happy enough. She’s very nice but a bit shy — I’ve never heard her say more than two or three words at a time. Uncle Frankie never had much to say either so I always wondered how they managed when they were on their own.

‘Do you think they sit happily in silence or talk flat out?’ I asked Ada.

‘He seems happy in her company and they smile a lot,’ she said.

‘I tell you what,’ she said, ‘they have this secret. They love Spanish dancing and everyone else thinks they’re too old so they wait till they’re on their own and then they roll back the carpet, put a record on the record player —’

‘Uncle Frankie hasn’t got a record player,’ I said.

‘Yes, he’s got one hidden in the wardrobe,’ Ada said. ‘So they pull all the curtains and Myra gets dressed up in a red dress with frills, she puts on some high heels, grabs some castanets, Uncle Frankie puts on his suit he keeps stashed in the wardrobe behind the record player, puts on a red cummerbund, adds a bit more Brylcreem to his hair, and he switches the record player on. There’s a moment of silence then he clicks his fingers and away they go. Cha cha cha!’ And Ada took up the pose, clicked her fingers and stamped her feet like Cesar Romero. No doubt about it, she’s got better at stories. When I first got her to start she kept thinking she was going to make a mistake. ‘How can you make a mistake?’ I asked her, ‘it’s your story.’

I love Uncle Frankie but he’s too soft with Nanny. Scared of her, I bet. Well I’m not. I stood up though when I heard her footsteps. Older than time, small, shrivelled, light as an autumn leaf and, if you didn’t know her, looking as if she’d easily be blown away. She wore the same black as always, her pipe tucked away in a pocket somewhere. The only colour, her eyes. As always, they looked into my eyes, and there it was. The knowing. It wasn’t fair. She knew things about me but I didn’t know anything about her.

‘She’s been around a while,’ Ada said, ‘she’s learned how to do it. You haven’t.’

‘And I don’t want to,’ I said. I meant it.

‘Hello Nanny,’ I said, good as gold, butter wouldn’t melt. She knows though. She might be dumb but she’s not dumb where it counts. Sometimes I think her lips twitch almost as though she’d like to laugh but I think that’s wishful thinking and Ada agrees.

Then I saw Auntie Whetu. So that’s why Frankie came down in the middle of the week. I liked Whetu but I felt guilty. I hadn’t told her Ada and I were coming to Wellington for a weekend. ‘I don’t want to waste time seeing relatives,’ I told Ada. Before, Auntie Whetu hadn’t visited much, too busy with the boarding house. Even when Auntie Whetu was living in Porohiwi, Mum wouldn’t go there. ‘She wants to see me she can come here,’ she said. Yet I was sure she liked Whetu. Liked her a lot. But she hated Porohiwi more. Now that Mum’s so crook, Whetu’s been here just about every week.

After I hugged her and said how great it was to see her, she wanted to know how Mum was. I said, ‘They told me to talk to Mum, and I’ve been doing that, but I’ll have to get back to work soon.’

Uncle Frankie cleared his throat. Dark and chunky, thick, curly black hair streaked at the top with a broad band of silver, face like an ageing Botticelli angel, hates the hospital and it seems to have an effect on the way he walks and talks. Once he enters the hospital, his stride is exchanged for a kind of sideways shuffle and he tends to shout as though we’re all deaf. ‘She said there’s no change,’ he bawled with a flick of his head. I presumed ‘she’ was Sister.

‘No, there’s no change. I don’t know whether she hears me or not.’ I deliberately kept my voice low just to give him a hint.

He took Nanny’s arm and they shuffled and tapped their way to the bed where Whetu already stood looking down. ‘Hello Kid,’ Whetu said and bent and kissed Mum and there were tears in her eyes.

Frankie shook his head. ‘Not looking too good, girl,’ he yelled. Mum didn’t seem to hear that either. Just as well. I’ve noticed that when someone says to me I don’t look well, I always feel ten times worse and a hundred years older. ‘Frankie here,’ Frankie shouted, ‘and Nanny. And Whetu’s come to see you and Myra sends her love.’ I imagined his voice reverberating around the corridors and the wards and everyone looking up. At least he came to see her. Mrs O’Rourke said that Mr O’Rourke would never set foot in a hospital. ‘Just can’t take it.’ She sounded quite proud of this. According to her, Mr O’Rourke had stood a few yards away from the window at the maternity annexe and bellowed, ‘Good on you Mrs O’Rourke,’ every time she had another son — they had five — but he never came inside. ‘No place for men,’ was his verdict.

Nanny turned away from the bed and looked around and I got a chair and took it to her. She sat. A skinny arm with a bony hand on the end of it touched my arm. Those eyes looked into mine. She gestured at Frankie with her other arm. ‘Uncle Frankie,’ I said.

He said, not turning around, ‘Nanny wants you to come and see Te Ana.’

‘Te Ana?’

‘Her cave.’

‘I have to sit with Mum,’ I said. The arm tightened its grip. ‘They said to,’ I told her.

Whetu said, ‘She’s worried. You need to come. There’s things you need to know before she goes.’

‘Goes where?’ How stupid could I get? ‘Why not you?’ I was going a bit too close to the edge of rudeness so I stopped.

‘She wants you.’ It was as though the fact of Nanny wanting me would make it all clear. And it did. Nanny was used to getting her own way. Not this time, I thought, not this time.

‘I can’t.’

‘You might as well give in — you will in the end.’ This was Frankie, and Whetu nodded agreement.

‘It’s not that,’ I lied. ‘The sister and the doctor both said I had to talk to Mum. By the time I do that and go to work there’s not much time left.’

Nanny’s claw came out again, a finger tapped my arm — I’m here, it said, I’m still here.

‘You’ll come in the end,’ Whetu said.

I remembered. Once I heard Auntie and Mum talking about Te Ana when she was trying to coax Mum to come to Nanny’s for a visit. At first I thought it was a person, but it was a secret place — that much I’d gathered from the half-sentences, silences and Mum’s reaction to the name. Te Ana. The Cave. Not a place she had much time for by the sound of it. A place to stay away from, I’d decided. Now Nanny wanted me to see it. ‘You’ll come in the end,’ Whetu said.

Like hell I decided. This was one time Nanny wouldn’t get her own way.

Two

On the bus back to work I thought about how Ada saved my life. I’d meant what I’d told Mum. I was seriously contemplating following in my father’s footsteps after Mum told me I couldn’t go to high school. I had to go out and get a job, bring in some money so that my brother and sister could go. ‘The high school might give me a scholarship,’ I said, ‘you could go and see the headmistress.’

‘I’m not going to beg,’ she said. And that was that. She’d have begged all right if it had been Tom. So I decided I’d pay her back for once and all and hang myself in the shed. I knew how Mr Browning had done it. He’d thrown a rope over the rafter, got up on a box, looped the rope, caught it with a slip knot and put his neck in the loop. Then he kicked away the stool. Simple. When I asked Ada if she’d ever thought of it she said, of course, doesn’t everyone? Only those with a screw loose followed through on it.

‘What if you wanted to teach someone?’

‘Teach them what? That you were an idiot? A no-hoper? And what satisfaction would there be? You wouldn’t be there to see it. You’d be stone cold out of it. You’re not thinking of it are you?’

Well I thought about that. She was right of course.

‘No,’ I said, ‘of course not.’

‘That’s good,’ she said, ‘we’ve got a fair bit to do before we kick the bucket.’

‘Have we?’

‘Course we have.’

‘Like what?’

‘Travel, dance, all sorts.’

‘Were you angry with your father?’

‘If he hadn’t already been dead, I’d have killed him,’ she said. She looked as though she meant it too. ‘I’d have had to race my gran though,’ she grinned.

The trouble with most kids is that they don’t know what to say to someone whose father’s killed himself. They all wonder whose fault it was. They, or their parents, think it has to be your mother’s fault. So where does that leave you? Alone. They never choose you for games or competitions, they never want to sit next to you, not even if you’re fair-skinned like Ada. It’s like you’ve got some sort of infection, you’re the leper that the man ran in front of shouting, ‘Unclean, unclean.’

When I left primary and went to the high school around the corner for standards five and six, my father was old news. Ada had been living somewhere in the country and doing correspondence school, supervised by her mother. After her father did what he did, and they moved back to live with Ada’s grandmother, Ada was sent to high school and her two sisters to primary. But instead of buttoning her lip about her father, Ada told everyone, and funnily she was never without someone wanting her for a team or to be part of a library group of girls who told each other about the books they read. I didn’t want to join anyway. They told each other about the books so they would know all about them without having to read them. ‘That’s cheating,’ I said to Ada.

‘That’s why I’m not joining,’ she said.

We both got on. Right from the start. Of course we had a big something in common, but the fact that both our fathers had killed themselves needn’t necessarily have meant we’d be friends.

‘We both belong to the race that would have known Joseph,’ Ada said when I asked her what she thought, referring to Anne of Green Gables’ criterion. ‘We’d have been friends anyway.’

‘Would we?’

‘Well think about it.’

She was going to have to leave school and go to work too. Like me, she was the oldest, like me, she was a reader, and, like me, this was the first time she’d had had a good friend. Unlike me, she got on well with her mother, in fact she got on well with most people. I liked Hilda Browning, although she was a bit lazy I thought, always seemed to be lying on the couch while