"By the time the car ran out of petrol it was late afternoon and they were near Te Kaha": a road trip gone wrong
The man and their children were all she had ever wanted. She wore them around her neck and on her fingers. They were the restoration of something that had been broken long ago—especially the daughter, whose birth was experienced by the mother as a sort of return, as some sort of completion and a healing.
Yet the mother often dreamed of driving in a car – the seats ripped and sandy, the windscreen covered in dust, grunge music on the stereo – simply away. The children would be in the back, of course, but the man wouldn’t be there.
The day she left was an ordinary day. Midweek and mild. After Ryan had left for work Ruth told the children that they didn’t need to go to school today, that they were going on a little trip instead. Once she said it out loud, she felt incredibly light and her heart pounded. She felt thin and light and as if there was a quick cold stream rushing through her. She felt exhilarated.
Through a tunnel from her head to her feet coursed water and wind, and every now and again, a fist-sized lump of clay. She felt both very heavy and very light as she made sandwiches and filled several bottles of water and put almonds, apples and bananas in a bag. As she packed together clothes and toiletries, her feet pricked, almost painfully, like they used to after adolescent hyperventilating. When she called for her children, her head rung with their names. Then there was thudding, as if a very strong person held fleshy palms over her ears and clamped her head in time to a loud internal pulse.
Her head kept pulsing as they got in the car. She was going to do it; she was going to do what she had dreamt of so many times: she was leaving. She might fly or sink, she might sprint or collapse, but she was going.
“Where are we going Mum,” demanded Emil. “Is Dad coming?”
“Not today darlings, Dad’s at work.”
“But where are we going?”
“For a drive darlings, just for a little drive.”
*
He thought that he could make her happy, convince her of his love for her by making their home, by cleaning and tidying what she considered to be incessantly. It irritated her. The clean surfaces had become an affront to her, testament to the slovenliness of which she felt they accused her. Not only was her hair a mess, she did not keep the house clean enough, the place screamed at her. She hated him for caring about how the bed was made and for bleaching the shower curtain; for insisting on always having a big bottle of bleach in the house and for cleaning the oven on his day off. She hated him for going down the cleaning agents’ isle of the supermarket. What was wrong with the man? What kind of a man was this? If only he would do something useful, not fucking clean. Nothing he did was right. Everything annoyed her, even, or especially while she knew that the rage against him pre-existed him, surpassed him, was coming from somewhere else, some faraway time and place.
She dreamed of a big man, whose body and mind were made for big actions and thoughts, too bulky for the small details of domesticity, the triggers of cleaning products. She imaged a big hard body that was awkward in rooms, a body built for taking big steps, for loping, not the tight dance required to negotiate a vacuum cleaner, or the horizontal sweep for cleaning windows. She imagined a man who would stand shamelessly relieving himself naked and in full view, like an animal.
Ruth had no idea where they were going, she simply headed South. They hadn’t been down the country in years, not since visiting Rotorua when Mary was a baby barely holding up her head. That had been a dreamy holiday, swimming in the warm Blue Baths in the rain, visiting the coloured mineral pools and the Morepork at Rainbow Springs. Emil had been quite transfixed by the bird,
“He’s looking at us”, he kept whispering, “he’s really looking at us Mum.” And it was true, the bird kept a close eye on them as Ruth held her children by the cage.
He had been a tricky child then. Ever since his sister was born the demands in him grew enormous and years later, when he was around eighteen, Ruth imagined an entirely different sort of man might have grown if she had let him take more of what he wanted as a child, like the great glistening monkey’s tail they had stopped to admire on that walk at the Springs. It was a prize, no doubt about it: hairy and wet (a little obscenely so) and stiff, potent; like a bristling animal. Emil had fixated on it. He had wanted it so passionately. And later she realised that she had underestimated the knife of that desire, the depth of its cut, when she said no so sanctimoniously. She could have let him have it, Ruth later thought, like she could have let a lot of people, including herself, have what they want. Ask and you shall receive, she learned in later life to say and believe. She should have taken his desire seriously and let him have it and then maybe he would not have gone on to see the world as a place full of things gleaming and glinting at him, things he can’t have.
“No,” she’d insisted, in her best firm voice. “Imagine if everyone took one, there would be no ferns left.” Which was ridiculous because not everyone wants to take a fern, and even if they did, even if everyone walking the trail alongside the famous cobalt blue river took one, there were so many, there were plenty!
At the time it didn’t ruin their weekend, although she would often return to that particular walk – one of so many over the years – in her imagination. Would she have let her daughter keep the thing she wanted? She had to admit, yes, she would have.
Somehow it was easier to give to Mary because she didn’t want things so violently. She could take it or leave it so giving in to her didn’t feel dangerous, as if it might set off a terrible chain of events resulting, ultimately in the total degradation of character. Or was it only that Emil was the first child, and so the litmus test for all the family limits? He had the space and attention to allow for every decision to fester into unholy possible outcomes.
The rest of that weekend was committed to collective family memory as a good one.
“That was a good trip”, Ruth and Ryan would smugly say, remembering the mist in the morning, the strange bright blue water on that walk, the hot pools.
The house they stayed in was a funny little box of a house, with ribboned curtains in the windows and a freshly painted sea-green door. It was near Lake Rotoiti. There was an open fire that Ryan kept stoked and an oven in which Ruth roasted the chicken. Outside trees and birds steamed at dawn and lost their outlines in the evening light.
The four of them had been the only people in the pool at the Blue Baths and Ruth had felt like she was in an Ingmar Bergman film, as if they might all start speaking Swedish at any moment. Their voices hung thick in the steam and the concrete and all their little faces were flushed, their eyes shining.
She lunged away from the memory in case its store of intimacy and cohesion weighted this current burst of levity, this fever for ascent, escape. She wanted to get the hell out of here.
*
By the time the car ran out of petrol it was late afternoon and they were near Te Kaha. Ruth hadn’t been down the coast for over twenty years and the children had never been there. That part of the country had always reminded her of Greece, with streaked blue and turquoise water and sharp black rocks stabbing up out of it. The road was mostly empty and the towns poor. There were still children on horseback, sometimes three to an animal, and men carried shotguns as they loped along the gravel roads in gumboots and bare chests.
Ruth hadn’t filled up in Ōpōtiki and now they were out of gas. She stood by the side of the car and waited to wave someone down. They were not far from Te Kaha, about fifteen minutes’ drive, but she didn’t feel like walking all the way back. It was late afternoon and the temperature was dropping. The first car that passed stopped. It was a white Ute and there were three men in it, two in the cabin and one on the back with gear and two dogs.
Yes, they could take them to get some petrol, they were going to their mate’s place and could get some from there. They’d all have to fit on the back of the Ute—Chris wouldn’t mind, the driver reckoned, grinning at the big man in the back who didn’t lift his head to look at them.
The kids didn’t want to get on, and Chris wouldn’t help them up either, but Ruth told them not to be silly and cupped together her hands to make a stirrup and give them a leg up. She was enjoying herself, she loved being down there and on the road and amongst strangers. She liked to think of herself as a country girl at heart and told the driver that she used to live near Ōpōtiki.
“Yeah, I used to live up the coast eh?” Ruth said, speaking and nodding her head in an unusual way, pulling her mouth down at the sides when she said “eh”.
It was all unusual and the kids didn’t like it. Why was their Mum talking like that? Where were they? Was that volcano they’d seen crouching on the water really alive, about to blow up? Where was Dad? They just wanted to be home, playing with lego or watching a movie, not here, out on the road, with three big men dressed in matted swannies, dark brown oilskin coats and big cracked boots. Plus Mary was scared of dogs and now she had to sit on this rusty old truck with two of them panting and staring in her face. She was itchy and homesick. But she could see in her mother’s face that Ruth was in one of those moods where she no longer really heard the children, where she lifted her face far above and away from them and her body tensed, her pace quickened. She was in one of those moods where she might force them on a long walk in the rain, “to get some fresh air”, or make them climb up a steep hill in the midday sun, “because you’ll feel great when you get to the top.” At six, Mary knew enough to know to go along with her mother when she was in one of these distracted faraway moods, so she shut up and found a place on the back of the truck.
Emil was ten and soon enough, sort of interested in the situation. The guy on the back saw him looking around the Ute and kicked away a felted woollen blanket to reveal a pile of six or so shot guns. There was also a big curved steel knife; naked, without a sheath. But it was only after they turned on to a gravel road that Ruth started to doubt herself, when Chris finally looked up at her and slurred,
“Yous shouldn’t really go with guys like us eh. Those fulluhs up there,” he said, jerking his head towards the cabin, “they’re mean bastards eh. I wouldn’t get in an old heap like this with them!” Then he cracked up laughing and Ruth laughed too but she wasn’t feeling it.
They were moving fast now that they had turned inland and it was noisy on the back of the truck. A shadow of sheep moved across a pale green hill. Dirty clouds smudged the sky. She hoped the kids had not heard what the guy had said. Mary had gone into herself and was drawing pictures with a determined little finger tip tracing into a spill of black grease on the floor of the cab. It looked like she was singing away, singing her little world into being. Emil was transfixed by the weapons and the dogs. The dogs were typical, scary smelly things; just what you’d expect. The guy pulled his coat over his head and lit a joint. He crouched down to get out of the wind, accidentally pushing his big boot into Mary, who almost toppled over. The little girl flashed a quick look of alarm at her brother then kept drawing the picture of the butterfly in the oily surface. She had pulled her knees up to her chin and Ruth could see the wet patch on her undies. The mother felt the slow steady prickling, like ice cold water spreading between her shoulder blades and up the back of her neck: panic.
When they got to the house the men unloaded the guns and untied the dogs who ran around like crazy, barking and carrying on. The driver, a small nuggety man, younger than the other two, told Ruth and the kids to wait by the car while he got them some petrol. The other guy still had not lifted his face to Ruth and seemed to be doggedly avoiding her face. The muscles on his forearms were as tense as those in his cheek. He licked his dry lower lip a lot and was sweating a rank oily film. Ruth thought she heard him say to the driver,
“Why you say we’d pick that bitch and her kids up for? Why you do that, when we’ve got all this gear?”
Then she was sure he said “Whadawegonnadowiththemafterwards?”, or maybe she was just paranoid. She could no longer tell; she shouldn’t have had a toke.
Mary stayed by Ruth, not talking, but Emil was following the big man from the back of the truck around. The man was huge. Partly because of his big heavy clothing and his long hair and beard, but also because he really was a big man. He told the boy to come with him and then they disappeared round the back of the house. Suddenly everyone was gone and Ruth and the little girl were left alone standing in front of the house.
The house was in the middle of a paddock and there was a lot of stuff around. There were the ubiquitous rusted out car wreck and stained towels and ripped jeans on the broken washing line. There were the remainder of a vegetable garden, marked off by beer bottles, and a stinking pile of waste in stacked up tires next to the patch. There were the white baiting nets and fishing rods and plastic buckets. By the kennels were coils of heavy rusted chains and bones and cut-down plastic milk containers. There was rubbish everywhere, mostly cans and bottles and cigarette buts and tinfoil but also just household rubbish. It stank and there was nowhere to sit.
Then Ruth heard a gunshot and Emil scream out. She hadn’t heard him scream since he was very young and it was as if someone had stabbed her in the throat when she heard him. She threw Mary on her hip and ran towards where she thought his voice had come from, behind the house, down the hill. Down there was a stand of bush that she hadn’t noticed from the house and she ran into it with her daughter.
“Emil!”, she shouted, “Emmie!!” It was white heat in her head, the fear was sharp and pointed. Her heart sprung blades and pounded, cutting into her from the inside. Her throat grew bloody crusts, her eyes stung. She sprinted. “Emil, baby!!” But she couldn’t hear him anymore, and she was disorientated. His scream ricocheted around, entangling her.
Then Mary said jaggedly in her mother’s ear,
“There he is”, and pointed sweatily to where he was, just in front of them, in the shadow of a Kānuka stand, beaming, holding a rabbit in his hand, its head mauled and bloody.
“Look Mum, I shot it. Chris let me shoot his gun and I actually shot it!”
“Oh!” Ruth exhaled, exhausted. “Oh, you gave me a fright.” She had Mary by the thigh too tight. Chris was grinning now at the skinny woman in her silver slippers.
“You stupid bitch,” he said in a low voice, his face turning, “You stupid little bitch, what the fuck are you doing? Go home. Go the fuck home.”
Next week's short story is "The Fat Boy" by Owen Marshall, taken from his new collection The Author's Cut (Penguin Random House, $36)
