Playing Friends Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Beryl

  Chapter 2

  Beryl

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Beryl

  Chapter 5

  Beryl

  Chapter 6

  Beryl

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Beryl

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Beryl

  Chapter 12

  Beryl

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Beryl

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Beryl

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Beryl

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Marilyn Duckworth was born in Auckland and spent her childhood in England, but has since lived mainly in Wellington. Her first novel, A Gap in the Spectrum, was published when she was twenty-three; her fifth, Disorderly Conduct (1984), won a New Zealand Book Award and was short-listed for the Wattie. She has held the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship in Menton, a Fulbright Fellowship in the USA and also writing fellowships at Victoria and Auckland universities. In 1996 Leather Wings was short-listed for a Commonwealth Writers' Prize. She has edited a book on writing sisters in New Zealand and holds an OBE for Services to Literature. In 2000 her autobiography, Camping on the Faultline, was published. Her fourteenth novel, Swallowing Diamonds, was released in 2003.

  Playing Friends

  Marilyn Duckworth

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 9781869790912

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.

  A VINTAGE BOOK

  published by

  Random House New Zealand

  18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland, New Zealand

  www.randomhouse.co.nz

  Random House International

  Random House

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road

  London, SW1V 2SA

  United Kingdom

  Random House Australia (Pty) Ltd

  20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney,

  New South Wales 2061, Australia

  Random House South Africa Pty Ltd

  Isle of Houghton

  Corner Boundary Road and Carse O'Gowrie

  Houghton 2198, South Africa

  Random House Publishers India Private Ltd

  301 World Trade Tower, Hotel Intercontinental Grand Complex,

  Barakhamba Lane, New Delhi 110 001, India

  First published 2007

  © 2007 Marilyn Duckworth

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  ISBN: 9781869790912

  Version 1.0

  This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  Design: Elin Bruhn Termannsen

  Cover photograph: Photolibrary

  Cover design: Matthew Trbuhovic

  Author photograph: Anna Macfarlane

  Page 270, quotation from 'High Country Weather' by James K. Baxter, published in

  In Fires of No Return, OUP, 1958, © J. C. Baxter.

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press

  The author gratefully acknowledges her debt to

  Peter and Diane Beatson for the Foxton Fellowship,

  which assisted in the writing of this book.

  There's only one of me, which was puzzling when I tried to pull myself together in 2001, the year New York fell apart. I feel in bits, for some reason, like dropped popcorn or exploded glass. How can the 1950s schoolgirl, only child of aging parents, also be the middle-aged mother of adult children? How can the wife of my first husband possibly have the same DNA as the wife of my second? In bits, you see. Lately I've come to the conclusion I've felt this way all my life. I don't always understand where people are coming from — left or right, underhand or over the top. I can't read faces without my finger tracing and my tongue out. Asperger's Syndrome, I hear you ask? A is a fashionable letter today — Alzheimer's, anorexia, antioxidant, Asperger's — but I don't think so, no. Otherwise how would I have managed up until now, hiding the tricks and angles I've needed to pass in the crowd unchallenged?

  What crowd, you ask. And well you might. For a capital city Wellington has a small population. The school we went to had a stunted roll in the fifties. We? Una and me.

  'If it wasn't for that screw we wouldn't be here, would we? Not together anyway,' she said to me the other day. True. That much was true. As for the rest . . .

  Lies come in a variety of colours. I've told my fair share of white lies, but it wasn't until after the 2001 reunion that I even began to understand how real lying was done, and why.

  I'd been striding to join the other women from my class when a lens fell out of my glasses and I had to go down on my knees, riffling the damp lawn. Ah — gotcha. But the wee screw that held the lens in place resisted arrest and I was left with wonky specs sagging under one eye, an eye that I needed to squeeze shut to get any kind of a spyhole on the world. Damn. And so that was how I looked in the form photo. Lopsided, pale-lipped, peering to see if the photographer was ready to take aim and shoot me. Gotcha. Fifty-nine years of Clarice, that's me. Marmalade hair feathering white peppered cheeks — your classic redhead.

  We laughed over that photograph later when we were unpacking our boxed-up lives in the flat we'd carelessly decided to share. Una could afford to laugh — she wasn't in the shot because she hadn't been in my class. She was two years younger and a class below me all the way through school, but there she was in her own group photograph, smile immaculate, chin tilted to disguise its plumpness, contact lenses tenderly in place.

  'Why didn't you take them off? Silly bitch.'

  'But I wear glasses, don't I?'

  The silly bitch had done it again, told the truth, the easy option. I'd never thought of telling the truth as an affliction before, as laziness pure and simple. But it was.

  True enough that most of my childhood was spent behind correcting lenses. I didn't see it as a handicap. It hadn't stopped me getting invitations to the pictures, to school dances, to the downtown Adams Bruce milkbar in Willis Street. Most of these came my way on the school tram where I'd earned a sort of reputation for sharing homework answers with less clued-up kids. Why not? If you smiled at people you got a smile back, or something like. The boys nudged up against me. One of the tram girls said she envied me my squelchy hair or perhaps it was the ribbons I tied it with. Anyway, no one minded my funny glasses. In the evenings I took these off and wrote cryptic entries against the names in my diary. Dick. Stephen. Rupert. While I slept in my scho
olgirl's pink bedroom they reconfigured themselves as Mr Darcy, Heathcliff, Robin Hood.

  Una hadn't known any of the boys I met in the Adams Bruce milkbar. She was too busy. She spent her lunch hour solemnly swinging a Slazenger, her eye attached to the arc of a flying ball as if it might slip out of her control should she look away. Mad that it mattered so much, but that was Una. By 2001 she had dropped all the balls and didn't seem to give a damn.

  In our day the school roll was limited and the faces above the tartan tie tended to clutter the memory like stamps in an album you could open over and over again. In 2001 at the reunion so many familiar mugshots were flashing at me like junk mail. Even some quite ancient-looking crones wore recognisable features — they might have been in the upper sixth when I was in the third. Could I become a crone in as few as four years' time? Shit. I was only just getting used to being a grown-up. That day I sidled up to Una and peered at the label pinned to her bosom — I always thought of her curves as a bosom — just to be sure. And there she was snatching a sideways squint at my own name tag. We were zoo animals, usefully labelled, but there's a limit to what can be fitted onto two square inches of card. And how many name changes are allowed? I'd had a couple. I remembered Una as the little fat girl who wanted to be a tennis star. I tried to think what memories she might have kept in her head about me. I could see her face collapsed in laughter when I threw up noisily on the house colours in morning assembly. She'd remember that day — and what else?

  The day I lost the screw Una had said, 'I've got a paper clip. Here. That's what Jack Duckworth used to hold his glasses together on Coro Street.'

  Only months after the reunion we were sharing a flat.

  'What screw? Oh, that screw. My bloody glasses. Yeah.'

  'You sound like life's all about screws. I wish,' said Una. 'You might be lucky still.'

  'How many men you seen me with lately?'

  'Okay, no screws. Is this why we're falling apart?'

  'We're not falling apart. Well, I'm not.' I had a vision of myself with paper clips attaching my arms, my hands. I flexed my wrists, checking for carpal tunnel syndrome. 'We don't need men to hold us in place.'

  Una pulled a face. 'Shit no. Well, actually I'm not sure. I don't like being fifty-seven years old and undesirable. It's a bit like losing your bus fare. Okay, so we've got legs but it's not nearly as good as wheels, eh. Men have carried me most of my life.'

  'What are you talking about? You've got a car.'

  'I don't mean that. I don't mean money things.'

  'So what then? Sex?'

  'Fuck sex. I only ever used it to make friends. I thought that was what it was for. It was a nice sort of hobby while it lasted. I miss it.'

  'Una! That's truly shocking. It's called making love, remember.'

  'How much love have you made? Have you counted? Mum told me it was a lonely cruel world but I proved her wrong, didn't I? She used vodka and Valium but all I needed was a razor cut and a Wonderbra. I had it made.'

  I didn't ask where all these friends were now. I saw curvy Una wearing see-through shirts — she called them 'see-mores' — and belted dresses while men queued and fell on her like tin soldiers attacked from behind. Sharing yourself around is a hazardous hobby. I did a bit of it myself before I married. But we're not talking Aids or chlamydia here, we're not talking unwanted pregnancies or morning-after-pill-initiated fatal blood-clots. We're talking love. The worst kind of hazard. Our friends in the sixties had sex as a rule, but some of them insisted on 'making love'. It was a risky choice of words: making love can create a feeling as surely as a TV ad can create a longing for a cream dessert, as surely as a TV film, based on a true story, can create tears. Sniff. There it goes. The predictable human reaction. Right?

  I spared a moment feeling sorry for Una because she minded being undesirable. But was she? She was a bit fat and certainly over-egged in the make-up department but men fuck anything, don't they? She must be missing something else. I knew from school days that her mother was an alcoholic and manic depressive, as we called it then; as for her dad, I remembered her quoting his 'back of my hand' and 'a piece of my mind'. It was the war that made him that way, apparently. There were flying curses and sometimes flying objects. She told me once at playtime, 'Mum's learned to duck.'

  I misheard and thought she was talking about some aspect of dressmaking.

  'You're so stupid!' she told me. 'You don't live in the real world.'

  Beryl

  Beryl was also at the reunion — grey-haired, so nearly invisible of course. Beryl understood the cliché that as you grow older you fade, like a photograph. She was sixty-four. The Beatles thought that was old. No one needed Beryl and no one fed her either. Being fed is what happens to loved pets and Beryl was neither loved nor a pet; what's more, she couldn't afford to buy Jellimeat for even the smallest cat. She did her careful grocery shopping during daylight hours, pulling her wheelie bag — she knew it looked pathetic — to the supermarket that was only a few streets away. She was fading at the edges here in this city-fringe suburb where she had lived, in one house and then another, all her life. The Four Square had become the New World supermarket, the cinemas had gone, and so had Mac's bookshop where she had downed so many cups of tea in the back alcove, snoozing for lazy minutes. The tram rails had been removed years ago. But it was the only place that made sense to her.

  The trams had rattled around Thorndon Quay to stop at the looming Government Buildings, largest wooden edifice in the southern hemisphere. Beryl's tram wore the signal destination 'Newtown Park Zoo'. They teased her about it at school, suggesting she shared a cage with the monkeys and chanting: 'She saw a squashed banana on the road. She one it, she two it, she three it, she four it, she six it, she seven it, she ate it.' While Beryl waited to grow up and marry and miscarry, one child after another, the tramcars rattled and clanged, one tram after another, painted Indian red with lines of gold, past the Creamoata hoarding in busy Adelaide Road — Cream o' the Oat. Porridge is good for growing children, she knew that as a child, but hated it when it glued to her spoon and stuck in her throat. Tramcars with hard, slatted wooden seats swayed past the sweet factory, the hooded shops, the deep hospital steps and the ambulance bay — hold your collar, never holler, never go in there — the motorman's step on the foot-gong, his hand on the swan-necked brake handle, the conductor poised on the back running board. If her tram didn't stop, well, there's always another tram, they told her — it's like boyfriends! — swaggering along the rails, past the cheerful advertising hoarding to her city council stop.

  She had caught a boyfriend, while her school friends were still riding the trams, and married him while they were still flirting in the tram shelters. He would give her a baby. She needed a baby more than any of her friends, for a private reason — a reason she hoped was well forgotten — and for a while it seemed to be going to happen. But then, after — oh, how many years? — the babies no longer swelled before turning back. The promise of knitted bonnets and cloth bassinets no longer swayed along parallel rails to where she waited under the hoarding — not Creamoata now but Ipana toothpaste — still holding out her hand to remind the motorman in his black serge coat, 'I'm here! I'm waiting!' He might as well have held a scythe as the control lever. Day and night she had waited to conceive. At night the Newtown trams were trimmed with blue-red-blue lights. Blue-white-blue turned off at the Ascot cinema on its way up over the hill. The short, crooked street where Beryl had taken up residence with Donald was straight ahead, closer to the zoo terminus. Donald hadn't lived long in Wellington and the zoo was new to him. In the monkey cages, at the chimps' tea-party, the young married couple had seen primate babies, a dull copper colour like old pennies.

  And then in 1964 — the second day of May, coincidentally Donald's birthday — a last, gay tramcar travelled from Thorndon Quay. The last tram in Wellington and the very last in New Zealand, aflare with flags and bunting, black and gold. The mayor was riding that tramcar, an honorary motorman wearin
g a sleek suit, cheered on by the Tramways Band. It's a long way to Tipperary! She had hung out of her bedroom window and heard the muffled clamour. It felt like the end of something important, a cross between a victory parade and a funeral procession. Donald went to the pub and came home at teatime smelling of beer. The next day Beryl recorded her last miscarriage in her diary and gave up sleeping in her husband's bed. After all, there was a spare divan in the unoccupied 'baby's room'.

  Donald no longer needed his weekend job on the trams anyway. He had finished his apprenticeship and began fulltime work as an electrician. From that day he wore coarse striped shirts and was someone else. And so was she. She missed her good-looking tram conductor in his uniform. What Donald missed she didn't bother to find out. She collected paperback romances from the second-hand bookshop where Donald had found her a job, and hid them in her wardrobe.

  She had felt old. She was twenty-five.

  Widowed,' Una had told me, that Saturday at the reunion. 'Silly word, eh? Sounds so old-fashioned. But . . .' She shrugged a sort of demure apology. I thought, She sees widowhood as an honourable condition. We were eating scones, home baked by a committee of Old Girls, and she wiped crumbs of the silly word from the corners of her glossy mouth.

  'Like wife. Can't get more old-fashioned than husband and wife. Oh — sorry.' I remembered I was talking to someone who had presumably been happily married until very recently. 'So how long ago did he . . .?'

  'Last year. Mm. August.' She lowered her head and began to chew on her thumbnail, something I recognised from school days. There was lipstick residue on her fingertip. She had finished the last of her scone.

  'It must be hard living with memories. Is that why you're looking to move?'

  'What? Oh no, nothing like that. We hadn't been in that house very long as it happens. I had to sell the place but it wasn't any sort of a wrench, not really, not compared to . . .' Back to the thumbnail. 'I've been staying with some cousins in Karori since then, but it's getting a bit crowded. Time to move on.'