03 Magazine: March 08, 2024

70 Magazine | Fiction
places, you listen in, embrace, make the best you can of the
situation. You could be rewarded. You never know what there
might be to intrigue you.
Androgynous. I watched Project Runway All Stars the other
night. You wouldn’t like it and I shouldn’t either: female bodyimage
issues and all that. A group of dress designers compete
with each other to create outfits which are modelled on the
runway by masked insects wearing stilettos, and judged. The
designers are given a theme and two days in which to design
and make. Every so often a mentor comes into the workroom
offering encouragement and advice. He’s like the Wonderland
Rabbit, pale and dapper, in and out. The theme this time was
androgyny. Instead of having just one model to dress, the
designers had to come up with two similar outfits: one for a
female and one for a male.
I enjoyed seeing what they created: dresses for soldiers,
harlequin swap, lace tuxedos, matching street strides
featuring handkerchiefs lolling out of pockets. I liked the street
stride outfits best, but according to the judges they lacked
androgyny so the designer had to pack his scissors and things
and go home.
You and I belong to the era of handkerchiefs. Hankies were
compulsory items when we were at school and were inspected
daily. Ironed and folded four times was how I carried mine in
my gym-dress pocket, not that the ironing and folding were
compulsory, nor did it have to be a real handkerchief. A piece
of ripped rag was permissible.
I felt sorry for the rag-hanky kids and the ones who had
handkerchiefs pinned inside their pockets so they wouldn’t
get lost. I thought they had mean mothers – mean, as in
unkind. The word ‘mean’ can have a different definition these
days. Said with a certain emphasis, it has an almost opposite
interpretation to what we’re used to: very good, excellent,
something special. “That’s a mean haircut.” Or, “How was the
movie?”
“It was mean.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, mean.”
Hankies were given as gifts. Women’s hankies were often
handmade, hemstitched round the edges and embroidered
with flowers in one corner. Stem stitch, back stitch, lazy daisy,
satin stitch, blanket stitch, hem stitch. Why am I telling you all
this? Why? Because remembering can make a sad song bedda.
Handkerchiefs, men’s or women’s, could be bought singly or in
sets of four in flat boxes. I liked the boxes.
You had your own pile of hankies and I had mine, presents
from way back. But one day it occurred to me, after a search
through pockets and bags, that I was down to just a fragile
three. The next time we were in town I went to buy a half
dozen, looked about in what I thought were likely shops –
Farmers, Kmart, the Warehouse – but didn’t find any. I didn’t
want to spend too long shopping as you were waiting in the
car for me. We were to have lunch at Esquires before I took
you to your appointment. In one store when I asked about
handkerchiefs the shop assistant looked surprised. “We don’t
have anything like that,” she said. “Try the pharmacy.”
So, I went across to the pharmacy and saw handkerchiefs,
unpleasant, scratchy-looking dots and stripes packaged in with
rose or lavender soaps and lotions. They looked palliative, or at
least geriatric. I’d never bought handkerchiefs for myself before.
Why start now? I thought. Why should I buy handkerchiefs? As
though I was going to need them. As though inviting crying.
That night I said to you, “I’m nearly out of hankies. Two or
three about to fall to bits. Blow my nose on one of those and
it’d all shoot out the other side.”
“Use mine,” you said. “There’s a whole heap.”
So that’s what I did, that’s what I do. They’re bigger.
They’re bedda.
They’ve all come in. They’ll be making real coffee in the
machine brought all the way from Paekākāriki. They’ll pour
Nutrigrain into bowls for the kids. It’s full of sugar, should be
banned. Manufacturers should be thrown in jail for poisoning
children. Murderers. It makes you wonder who are the real
criminals in this world.
My phone gargles and I reach for it.
cofi? it asks.
yip I reply.
I get up and go for a shower, take my time, put on a pair
of shorts and one of your shirts, a pair of scuffy slippers from
a hotel we stayed in where they give away slippers. One size
fits all. You never wore yours. I return to the bedroom and
make the bed. There’s mooing, barking and meowing going on
out there in the big room. Yoga. Downward-facing dog, cow
pose and all that. Aunty Instructor is giving her instructions in
te reo.
I open the door. Three-legged dogs all over the floor,
the fourth legs, pretending to be missing, are waving in
the air: fat ones, skinny ones, hairy ones, little ones, brown
ones, white ones. There’s barking, woof woof woof, which is
not in the kaupapa, not in the spirit of yoga. Ought to be
composed, serene, calm, peaceful, meditative, breath-controlled.
But the sights and sounds go a long way towards making a sad
song better.
A father is at the table with a baby braced to him by a big
arm. He’s frowning, eating an apple and doing a crossword.
Without looking up he stands, leaving the apple and the
crossword, but keeping the baby and the frown. He makes my
coffee into an All Blacks coffee cup and brings it to the table.
I take the baby, who looks straight into my eyes. Makes a sad
song better.
“What’s ‘Rags to riches’, ten letters?” the father asks. The
yogaists are sitting cross-legged, quiet, eyes closed, or one eye.
Game over. They converge, give me morning greetings; begin
making toast, dishing out porridge. I’m informed that the beach
horse races are on at eleven o’clock. They’re going to make
sandwiches. They’re going to get a feed of mussels off the wharf
piles when the tide goes down. Swim. Fish off the bridge.
Porridge? That makes a sad song better, not a pop or crackle
in sight. You always threw nuts and sultanas in yours. The kids
take their bowls out onto the deck.
“What about Cinderella?” I ask, counting out ten letters on
my fingers.
“That’ll do,” the father says, and writes it in the grid.
I’m going to fix small hooks to my hand line and fish off the
bridge when the tide comes in – after the horse races.
Dude. That’s bedda. Dude. Classy, skinny, snappy, healthy,
striding, laughing, old or not. Sharp shooting, with a bit of sting.
Hey, Dude, don’t be afraid. Except you were never afraid of
anything. Ah, mmm, except of failure. And owls. Just one owl,
the white one in the pine trees a hundred years old.
‘Hey Dude’, from Bird Child & Other Stories by Patricia Grace, Penguin, $60.