The Infinite Air by Fiona Kidman Page B

the street men sang, swore, much as they had done on the nights when Nellie blockaded the doors while Fred was away. Only then there had been John. Jean thought that they might not be safe in this room. She vowed to herself that she would stay awake every night and keep watch over her mother.
    As time wore on, and nothing changed, a terrible dullness, like pain, descended on her. If Nellie noticed she didn’t say anything about it, for they had both sunk into listless bouts of silence. One day, Nellie said, as if coming out of a reverie, ‘I did love him, you know.’ She wasn’t expecting an answer, and Jean had none to offer. She felt hollowed out, as if there was no flesh behind her sleepless eyes. Her mouth was dry and seemed to prickle. In the night, as she lay watching her mother’s solid, unmoving sleep, she thought there were ants crawling across her skin, but when she shone her torch under the blankets there was nothing there.
    Nellie wasn’t really prepared for battle. The bag of money emptied quickly. Jean hadn’t been to school since they left Fred. The second month was nearly at an end, when Fred appeared at the door one day and demanded to be let in. On seeing Jean, he said to Nellie, ‘She needs to be out of this. I’m taking her away.’
    ‘You can’t do that.’ Nellie’s voice was thick, the flat dirty, with dishes piled up around the sink, the floor not swept. There was a stain of egg yolk on her blouse.
    ‘You’re coming with me, young lady,’ Fred said.
    ‘I can’t leave Mother,’ Jean said. ‘I can’t.’
    ‘You will,’ he said, and before long he and Jean were heading for a tram, then down Queen Street to the ferry terminal. Jean had an image of her mother’s face, the beauty washed out of it, not seeming to resist her being taken away. Exits and entrances, like one of John’s school plays.Before long Jean and Fred had boarded a ferry that would take them across the harbour and dispatch them at Birkenhead. ‘You need some sea air,’ he told Jean. ‘This is where people come for their holidays.’
    ‘I don’t want a holiday.’
    ‘Yes, you do.’ He had said little to her as they crossed the water, his big jaw set at a resolute angle. They boarded a bus that drove them on past little shacks and baches painted in different bright colours, and out into countryside that gave way to an expanse of strawberry fields. They were filled with long rows of planted mounds, and even from the bus window, Jean could see the blush of reddening fruit. The house where Fred took his daughter belonged to a strawberry grower and his wife, a comfortable place with heavy armchairs covered with fawn moquette and a piano in the front room, a kauri dining table that seated eight, feather pillows on the beds. In the garden there was an apple tree, and cape gooseberries. A track led to a still, green inlet of the sea. Fred told the couple that his daughter was an invalid who needed fresh milk and red meat, and kindness. The man was a wiry fellow with quick eyes and a slight hunch from bending, impatient to get back to his work. His wife, Belle, into whose care Fred was placing Jean, commented on how pale and thin the child looked, while at the same time admiring the cut of her blue linen dress, her hand reaching out to finger the crocheted white collar, an action Jean disliked. She stepped away.
    Belle seemed an unlikely name for her new guardian. She was a tall, thin woman, her greying fair hair blunt cut beneath her ears, her dress plain and dark. But she had expressive, large-knuckled hands that gestured as she talked, spreading palm up, the pads of her fingertips like odd bleached little moons, clicking finger and thumb when she wanted to make a point. Later, Jean understood that her hands were roughened from her work in the fields. Belle and her husband had children of their own. Fred said that when Jean was well again, it would be advisable for her to go to the school with them. In the meantime, if