All the Nice Girls by Barbara Anderson

Author:Barbara Anderson [Barbara Anderson]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-86-473713-7
Publisher: Victoria University Press
Published: 2011-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Mary, Ben told her yawning, was down at the wharf with Bertha. She caught her foot as she climbed out of the car, stumbled on a rubble-filled crack in the concrete. Lime had leached out, transforming the nearby grass strip to brilliant green. She must tell Edward. She blinked, her hand still on the car door. She would not tell Edward. That stage had passed. They were beyond bower-bird exchanges which are not given by the female anyway. He did not know about Rebecca yet. Nor did William. How could he.

Ben was pleased to see her. He was always pleased to see this amiable woman whom he found exciting. He would have shared this thought with Mary—they explored their sexuality and desires with enthusiasm—but he disliked the thought of her reaction. The pause, the disbelief, the sibilant explosive, ‘Soph!’ The laughter.

‘Hi, kitten hips,’ he said, one hand on each to heighten the joke. Sophie kissed him. She liked him. It was just a question of keeping William and Ben from converging too often, of keeping them trundling along their own particular branch lines with an occasional nod in the direction of the opposing track.

‘How’s Arnie?’

‘Great. Great guy. Enjoyed meeting with him.’ He paused, his smile gentle. ‘William know he was in a naval mutiny?’

‘No. Nor did I.’

‘Ask him about it. Come in, come in and see what I’m working on.’ He led her by the hand, side-stepping layered piles of loot fossicked from the Devonport tip: a giant cog wheel from a medieval torture rack, a broken Aztec Gold plank with an interesting knot, the bottom half of a traffic light. ‘You should see the packing shed in Greytown, Ben,’ she said.

‘I look forward to that.’ Six foot four, skinny, courteous and elusive as his past, Ben led the way. His past was elusive merely because he never mentioned it. It had no interest for him, it was over. He had trained as a painter in New York and won a valuable, in fact munificent, Young Artist’s Award. He had been surprised, but not as surprised as his critics felt he should have been. He had seen an article in the National Geographic about New Zealand rain forest, liked the look of Fiordland, and came. He met Mary on the ferry, moved in with her and had not been south of the Coromandel. He would one day. There was plenty of time.

Their bedroom always gave Sophie a slight frisson of unease. It was chaos in action, a pit to fall into, a cave plus midden. Coffee-dregged mugs lay on the floor either side of a mattress on legs. Above was a yellowing sheet of calico printed with a languorous Christ in ecstasy, blue eyes rolled upwards, thorns askew.

‘I wish you’d take that down,’ said Sophie.

‘Yeah, but look,’ Ben waved his arm. In the corner of the room stood an old wicker chair; legs splayed, hocks spavined, it was falling apart. Tendrils of unravelled fibre hung in coils or rolled about the paint-spattered boards trapping dust.

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