In a Fishbone Church Read online

  ‘Actually, Jonno, I think I’ll go inside for a bit,’ says Christina.

  A man is dabbing at a cream linen couch with a teatowel, trying to remove a red wine stain.

  ‘Salt’s the answer.’

  He looks up. Ah. Yes. Look, I’m terribly sorry, I was wanting to have a bit or a rest and I must have closed my eyes for a second and my glass must have tipped – ’

  ‘I don’t live here,’ says Christina.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You should sprinkle salt on it.’ She steps into the kitchen and opens some cupboards. Olives, dark pickled walnuts, sundried tomatoes. Marinated feta, small precious jars of pesto. Pine nuts. Salt.

  ‘You’re sure about this.’

  ‘It can’t hurt.’

  They both take pinches of salt and scatter them over the stain, slowly covering it.

  ‘Like snow,’ he says.

  ‘I’ve never seen snow up close.’

  He frowns, then says, ‘Yes, I forget where I am.’

  ‘Where do you think you are?’

  ‘I’m Austrian.’

  ‘The hills are alive … ’ sings Christina.

  He stops sprinkling salt. ‘Please. Don’t mention that film.’

  ‘It’s what you’re famous for.’

  ‘How would you feel if I sang “Skippy the Bush Kangaroo” every time I saw you?’

  ‘Tell me,’ says Christina, ‘does it really annoy you when people think you’re German?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Must happen all the time, does it?’

  ‘Especially here.’

  ‘I’m not Australian, you know.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’m a kiwi, mate.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No worries, mate.

  They cover the last of the stain with the last of the salt. Some of it has embedded itself under Christina’s fingernails. It feels like sand.

  ‘There’s a queue, is there?

  ‘Afraid so.’ Christina moves away from the door to let Claudia into the bathroom.

  She squeezes past, brushing a huge vase of lilies, and bangs on the toilet door. ‘What are you doing, bottling it for Africa?’ she yells. The lilies shake on their gilt pedestal.

  Jonno emerges, wiping his mouth on a crumpled piece of toilet paper. He runs his hands under the cold water tap and splashes his face. ‘Hi Chrissie,’ he slurs. ‘So this is where you’ve been hiding.’

  ‘Mind if I go next? I’m busting.’ Claudia steps into the toilet.

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘Pushy bitch,’ says Jonno. ‘Always was.’

  ‘I heard that,’ calls Claudia. ‘Jesus, you could have wiped the seat.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Jonathan says to the door, leaning heavily against it. ‘Shut, up.’ He runs his wet hands over his hair. ‘So Chrissie,’ he says, still leaning, his dampened hair the same colour as the wood, ‘how about we go see what’s happening at the Globe?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I … haven’t tried the steak yet.’

  Claudia opens the door and Jonathan falls inside. She steps over him and peers at herself in the mirror, which is framed in gold papier mâché to look like a sun. There are sun motifs on the hand towel and on the shower curtain, too. Cherubs balance soap dishes and pot pourri. Claudia extracts a lipstick from a fringed purse and reapplies colour to her mouth, pouting at herself in the sun mirror. ‘Lust,’ she says, rubbing her lips together. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Oh … yes,’ says Christina.

  ‘The shade, stupid. It’s called Lust.’

  ‘It suits you.’

  ‘I think so.’ Claudia smiles in the mirror at Christina. ‘Did you know that the average woman consumes one and a half lipsticks in her lifetime?’

  ‘Shut up you boring cow.’ Jonno stumbles into the hall. ‘Chrissie, I’ll be in the garden.’

  Claudia zips her purse shut. ‘He and Andrew were at med school together. God knows why, but Andrew feels obliged to invite him to all his parties.’

  Christina says, ‘Mm,’ and shuts herself in the toilet, hitching up her satin dress.

  ‘You’re the kiwi, aren’t you?’ calls Claudia.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’re getting quite international at Queen Vic.’ Claudia turns on a tap, and raises her voice accordingly. ‘We got an English guy last week, a gastro man, and we’ve got two Pakistanis and an Austrian in Surgery.’ There is a sound of water draining away.

  ‘I met the Austrian, I think, just now,’ shouts Christina. She emerges to find Claudia doubled over, hair almost brushing the deep carpet.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘What?’ says Claudia, straightening, flipping her hair back. She fluffs her fingers through it, adding volume, and Christina recognises the gesture then. She’s done it herself, at home and at parties, in the bathrooms of strangers. And sometimes she’s caught herself mid-flip in the mirror, hair flung out like seaweed.

  ‘Nothing,’ she says. She wonders how Bridget is coping in Germany; if she too misreads familiar gestures.

  ‘So where’ve they put you?’ says Claudia, her fingers an impatient wide-toothed comb, smoothing and teasing.

  ‘O and G.’

  ‘You drew the short straw.’

  ‘I haven’t started yet, Andrew’s just given me the tour. I start next week.’

  ‘You can forget a social life.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know many people yet – ’

  ‘I started in O and G. Every third weekend they make you do a 24-hour shift. I had the flu the first one I did. They gave me a pat on the back and some Sudafed. Only the daytime ones, mind you, so I wouldn’t fall asleep.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘The nurses are pretty good. They make up a bed for you if one of the delivery rooms is free, and you can sleep a few minutes here and there. I never could, though. I was terrified a nurse I didn’t know would come in while I was asleep and shave me and put me in stirrups.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘I’m up in Radiology now. Cruisiest shifts in the place.’ Claudia bares her teeth at her reflection. She removes a strand of meat. ‘That’s where they put you once they’ve got sick of you everywhere else. Get to work with all the old fossils. The bone people, Andrew calls us. He’s a big reader.’

  ‘How did you two meet?’

  Claudia frowns. ‘Work, of course.’

  ‘Oh. Oh I see. I thought – ’

  ‘Me and Andrew?’ She laughs, one loud yelp. ‘He’s a shirtlifter, stupid! God, I mean look at the bathroom!’

  Christina feels the heat creeping up her face. She wants to flee this room filled with suns, but she dries her hands slowly, finger by finger, ignoring the motifs on the sun-patterned towel, trying to dampen their smirks.

  Monsters

  of the

  deep

  It is eleven o’clock on a Monday morning in 1981. On to twenty-eight pitted wooden desks, twenty-eight papers have been distributed, face down. Pencils have been sharpened, biros held up to the light to check levels of ink. Blouses have been untucked, cardigans hung over the backs of wooden chairs; all bags and papers, including scrap paper, have been placed on the floor. The convent hedge rustles in the breeze outside. A bee, misunderstanding glass, thuds against the high classroom windows. They are so high they have to be opened by long pulley cords, and have not been covered with crêpe paper, Christmas trees and stylised stars and crooked nativities like the others. The looped cords sway back and forth.

  Bridget Stilton fingers the Our Lady medal her mother has pinned inside her blouse pocket for luck, and hopes the fact that it has been blessed by the Pope will count for something. That is the thing about her mother, she thinks: she has such faith in her daughters’ abilities that she gives them medals before the exam.

  Bridget’s father is in his office, talking to his foreman on the phone. ‘Well what the hell have you guys been doing for the past two months?’ he is saying. ‘I’m meant to be bringing Burke round for a
building inspection tomorrow week, and he will not be a happy man if there’s no building to inspect!’

  Bridget’s mother says a prayer to Saint Gerard, lighting a squat candle which she keeps on her dressing table and which is hollowed from previous tests, school plays, netball competitions, music exams.

  At Sacred Heart Girls’ College, Bridget’s sister Christina folds down her white ankle socks so she won’t get a tan line, and stretches her legs in the sun.

  Bridget rearranges pens and pencils, a ruler, an eraser.

  ‘All right girls,’ says Mrs Fitzroy, you can turn your papers over now.’

  Who am I? I am an integer between one and 100. I am divisible by four, and –

  Bridget reads through all the questions first, the way Gene instructed her to.

  Make the necessary corrections (if any) to the following sentence: I am going to Scared Heart.

  Around her the other girls are already scribbling away. Bridget reads through to the last question, then begins to write.

  At lunch time, the girls compare their answers.

  ‘What did you put for the capital of Switzerland?’

  ‘No, stupid, it was 1939!’

  ‘Did you do the Samoa one?’

  ‘I’ve failed, I know I’ve failed.’

  Bridget smiles and nods, but she doesn’t say much. She found the exam easy, and finished well ahead of time.

  ‘No!’ groans Jodie Davis. ‘Are you sure? I put Tauranga.’

  The other girls scream with laughter.

  ‘Oh, Jodie,’ they say.

  ‘I’ll die if I don’t get in to Sacred Heart,’ she says, and everyone insists she will have passed easily, and that they only have the exam to make sure no really stupid people apply.

  In the afternoon the class goes over to the church to practice some hymns for a funeral the next day. One of the nuns has died.

  ‘All right, girls,’ says Father Croft, holding up his hands.

  They stop singing.

  ‘I could hardly make out the words of that one,’ he says, running his eyes along the rows. ‘Bridget Stilton, what should this line be?’ He points with his pen at the overhead transparency.

  ‘How great thou art,’ says Bridget.

  ‘How great thou art,’ say Father Croft. ‘Right. That’s what I want to hear. Not “how grey thou are”.’

  The girls laugh. Father Croft is popular; he was in the Napier earthquake and has been known to burst into classrooms and dance in front of the blackboard. When he strolls around the school grounds in the lunch hours, smoking a cigarette, he is always surrounded by a flock of pupils.

  ‘Father Croft, Father Croft,’ they call, holding their cupped hands out to him, and he will smile, and laugh, and maybe let one of them take him by the arm. They follow him over to the presbytery, and if they are lucky he will tap soft cigarette ash into their waiting palms.

  ‘From the beginning,’ he says now, and plays the opening chords on the guitar.

  Bridget is pleased he asked her; although she has followed him round the playground with everyone else, she has never been brave enough to seize his arm the way the other girls, like Jodie Davis, do.

  ‘Well?’ says her mother when Bridget arrives home from school. ‘How was the exam? I said a little prayer for you at eleven o’clock.’

  ‘It was okay.’

  ‘Did you read it all through before you started?’ says Gene that evening.

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  ‘Great,’ says Christina. ‘I suppose this means you’ll be cramping my style next year.’

  ‘I think it’s nice for both of you that you’ll be at the same school,’ says Etta. ‘You can keep each other company.’

  Bridget and Christina eye one another, but neither comments.

  ‘Make sure you get a good look,’ says Christina the next morning. ‘I want details.’

  ‘There won’t be that much to see.’ Bridget pauses. ‘Will there?’

  ‘They always have an open coffin, dummy. Don’t you know anything?’ Christina swings her schoolbag on to her shoulder and rushes out the front door to the bus stop. She only ever carries her bag on one shoulder, although it’s very bad for posture. ‘Only nerds use both straps,’ she tells Bridget. ‘You won’t last long at Sacred Heart.’

  At Sister John’s funeral the Form Two class sits at the back of the church. Some of the girls have lacy handkerchiefs tucked in their cuffs – the more daring have tucked theirs in their waistbands – in the hope of sudden, public grief.

  Bridget has never seen a dead person before; the closest she’s come have been photos of Holocaust victims in Gene’s war books. All through the Mass she studies the space between Sister John and the pews and tries to judge whether or not it is too narrow to let her through without touching the coffin. When she goes up to communion she tries not to look at the body. She stares straight ahead at the golden wheat design on Father Croft’s robes, and sings her consonants very clearly. She places the host on her tongue and tries to keep it from sticking to the roof of her mouth – it is bad manners, says Etta, to have to scrape Jesus off with your fingernail – and she bows her head, preparing to scuttle past Sister John as quickly as possible. The girl in front of her, however, is moving very slowly. Bridget looks up, and sees that the people returning to their seats are slowing down as they pass the coffin. Some are even placing a hand on it. Jodie Davis does. There is no way Bridget can rush past without at least a glance.

  From what she can see, Sister John appears to be a most unusual colour. Greyish. How grey thou are, she thinks, sliding back into her seat, and she giggles. Mrs Fitzroy glances down the row and frowns at her, but Bridget can’t stop laughing now that she has started. She laughs so hard she has to be taken outside by Mrs Fitzroy, and even out on the church porch she can’t stop. Mrs Fitzroy looks worried.

  ‘Sit down, dear,’ she says. ‘Are you feeling all right?’

  ‘Ha! Ha! Hahahaha!’ cackles Bridget.

  ‘Is everything okay at home? Bridget? Do sit down.’

  Mrs Fitzroy presses Bridget into one of the wooden seats.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll feel better in a few minutes,’ she says. ‘Won’t you. It’s just a nervous reaction, that’s all. Sit down.’

  But Bridget doesn’t feel in the least bit nervous. In fact, she feels like she could do anything in the world. She feels like she could fly.

  ‘That is so cool,’ says Christina. ‘Janine said her little sister said you just flipped out right in the middle of Mass. You should do that on Sunday, go on.’

  Bridget blushes. She’s a bit embarrassed now, and some of the other girls have been calling her Weird Bridget.

  The Health Nurse pays her annual visit to Bridget’s class and shows a film called Changing. Rumour has it that she used to be a nun.

  ‘Look at her hair,’ the girls whisper. ‘See how thin it is? That’s from years of wearing a veil. She’ll be bald in a few years.’

  Everyone calls her the Nit Nurse behind her back. She is so softly spoken it always comes as a surprise to Bridget to hear her say words like ‘scabies’ and ‘lice’. She’s already shown the class Changing once, the previous year, when she came and spoke very earnestly about Bodies. She wrote it on the board like that, with a capital B, and all Bridget could think of were the photos of mass graves she had seen in Gene’s books. The bodies of thousands were discovered; victims of Hitler’s insanity Initially bodies were cremated in custom-built ovens, but as numbers increased many were disposed of in vast pits Gold teeth, hair, and sometimes even skin were removed from the bodies The bodies would be found piled at the entrance to the gas chambers when the doors were opened.

  This year, when the film has finished, the Nit Nurse writes I am Special on the board. Several girls snigger.

  ‘Go on, Sima, ask her,’ whispers Jodie Davis. Jodie sits in front of Bridget, and likes to flick her very long hair over the back of her chair. Sometimes it brushes Bridget’s desk. One of Jodie’s biggest dra
wcards is that her hair is long enough for her to sit on. She demonstrates this regularly.

  Sima’s hair is also very long, but she never wears it loose.

  She is new to St Michael’s; her family have just moved to New Zealand.

  ‘Go on,’ hisses Jodie, so Sima puts up her hand and when the Nit Nurse says, ‘Yes?’ she says, ‘What is vagina?’

  A swathe of blonde hair sweeps across Bridget’s exercise book as Jodie tosses her head with laughter. Bridget laughs too.

  ‘That’s an excellent question,’ says the Nit Nurse, and bustles about with overhead transparencies and coloured markers and a biro which she uses as a pointer.

  A week later, letters of acceptance are sent out to parents. Everyone in Bridget’s class gets in; Sacred Heart is a very fair school, as the letter points out. It no longer believes in streaming. Five per cent of its roll is reserved for non-Catholics, and another five per cent for Maori and Pacific Island pupils. This way, the girls receive a very balanced education. Bridget is one of the ones recommended for the French and German options; others, including Jodie Davis, are quietly advised to choose typing.

  ‘And is there anything you’d like to tell me about?’ says Father Croft.

  Bridget quite likes the face-to-face confessions that they have now; the darkened boxes used to scare her, no matter how many times she was told she was just talking to God.

  ‘Ah … I was mean to my sister,’ she says.

  ‘Mm,’ nods Father Croft.

  ‘And I said a swear word.’

  ‘Mmhmm.’

  ‘And I didn’t dry the dishes when it was my turn.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Father Croft.

  ‘And so Mum had to dry them.’

  ‘Aha.’ It is always around this point that Bridget runs out of things to confess. Father Croft sits waiting, eyes closed, a hand at his temple.

  ‘Ah … I changed channels when Dad was in the middle of watching the news.’ This is untrue.

  Father Croft nods. ‘Anything else?’