Blue Moon
It wasn’t blue, as Delia had been told it would be. Nor were there cacti, at least none that she could make out by the disappointingly golden light of the full moon, which was framed in the black window against which she, in the back seat, was leaning. The moon seemed to be sailing above the car, linked to it by invisible tow ropes. Although as to whether the moon was towing the car or the car was towing the moon, this was impossible to fathom. This so-called desert road was straight for miles and so, for miles, the moon rode steady in the centre of the black frame, and she fixed her eyes on it and concentrated on holding the moon on its thread and trying not to cry.
Her father, in the driving seat, was aiming for small creatures that had wandered out onto the night road and that sat stunned and paralysed in the Vauxhall’s bearing-down head beams. ‘Possum,’ he kept saying, and every so often, with extra satisfaction, or so it seemed to Delia, ‘Bunny!’ He was counting. They were up to nine. Delia was nine. Every time they hit one there was a little bump that Delia could feel shudder up through the chassis, the great NO of a spirit being knocked out of its body, and she hated that she felt each one pass through her like that. Her mother had decided to pretend to sleep. If Delia, who was sitting behind her father, turned her head, she saw her mother’s profile in the moonlight, saw how her closed eyes flickered every time Delia’s father pressed down on the accelerator, and how she flinched, despite herself, with every thump. So Delia turned her face firmly to the moon. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Bunny! Thirteen.
*
She woke. The car was moving much more slowly along a winding road. The moon had vanished. ‘Are we at the desert now?’ she asked, pulling herself upright. The sky was brilliant with stars.
Her mother turned slightly. ‘Oh, Delia. You’re awake.’
They went around several more corners. ‘Look, the lake,’ said her mother.
Delia looked. The lake was close to the road on her mother’s side. It was black, slithery with silver scales.
‘Is this it?’ her father asked. He sounded ordinary. Delia thought perhaps she had dreamed the possums, the bunnies. Then she thought, how could you dream thirteen shudders?
‘I don’t know,’ said her mother, peering into the dark.
‘Well, what number does it say?’
‘It won’t have the number, Brian. There’s an oar next to the gate with Inn Here painted on it.’
They were looking for the bach her mother’s cousin-from-Palmerston-North had let them rent so that they could have a proper holiday, this being, according to Delia’s mother, not only a once in a blue moon opportunity for a break, but also the very last chance before the new baby arrived at Easter and made life too difficult and expensive for holidays. On this very last chance holiday Delia’s mother had promised a bunk bed for Delia, and a rowboat. She’d said she’d teach Delia to row. But she’d also said there’d be a blue moon and a desert.
Delia listened to the to-and-fro of their voices, in cahoots with the surface of the lake, stirred up, slightly agitated, a bit choppy. She felt queasy as they rounded the corners with the lake flicking in and out of view. How deep it was, how black. Here? No, further on I think. No, back probably. Back I think, Brian—no, hang on, that might be the big gum tree with the swing, yes, there’s the swing—keep going, Brian. Oh for heaven’s sake, make up your mind, woman. Which is it, forward or back? I said keep going, Brian. Yes, well, not much choice about that now is there? She thought about the possums on the highway. Why did they come out and just sit there, letting themselves get dazzled?
*
A torch shone in her face. She’d fallen asleep again, and now they were stopped. ‘Wakey wakey,’ said her father. The stars were draped around his shoulders, a canopy for a king.
‘We’re here, Delia.’ He scooped her up—‘you’re getting a bit big for this’—and carried her over a dirt path. Her dangling bare legs reached past his knees. She had her chin on his shoulder and lifted her eyes. Those stars. ‘But the moon wasn’t blue,’ she said to him, and he laughed, a big cracking laugh. She felt foolish, her legs dangling like that, a big girl who hadn’t understood that blue moons were golden. She wriggled free of him, stood a little wonkily, her legs still full of sleep.
The bach was dark inside, and smelled mousey. Her father searched the walls with the torch.
‘He said it was near the door,’ offered her mother’s shape. She wore her maternity dresses long, almost to her ankles, very much against the fashion. All Delia’s friends’ mothers wore very short skirts. Skimpy, her father called them. Skimpy little skirts, he said, and his eyes lit up. ‘Will you get a skimpy little skirt, Mum?’ Delia had asked, and her father had laughed uproariously, as if she’d made a joke. ‘Don’t worry Delia,’ he’d finally said. ‘Your mother doesn’t have the legs for that.’
Outlined over there in the corner of the room, Delia’s mother seemed to have no legs at all. Delia thought of the school bell. It hung in its own special frame just outside the school office. This coming year she would be in Standard 4 and she’d be allowed to ring it when it was her turn to be bell monitor. There was a wooden stool to stand on so you could reach the clapper; at five to three you had to go and ask the office lady for it. You had to say, ‘Good afternoon. I am the bell monitor today. Please may I have the stool?’ It brought Delia out in a sweat to think of having to say this.
Her father half-closed the door to look at the wall behind it. Illuminated in the torchlight was an ancient-looking black power box. ‘I found it,’ he said. When he clunked the big switch, the room burst open, lit by a bare bulb hanging above a red Formica table. Delia’s mother reached behind the green refrigerator. It gave a cough and began to hum. She opened it and white light spilled out. Delia gripped the table for balance. Her mother was a ghost. ‘I’ll make you a Milo,’ said the ghost. ‘Delia, find a cup.’
There were shelves under the bench, disguised by checked curtains strung on plastic-coated wires. Behind the curtains, mice were sitting in the cups. Delia didn’t move.
Her mother was crouched by the fridge with a packet of butter in her hand. She was emptying the chilly bin. Big moths kept arriving through the open door to cluster around the lightbulb. Delia’s father had vanished. Delia hadn’t heard him leave.
‘See if you can find your bunk bed. I need to put these things away before they go off.’ Delia’s mother pointed with the butter. ‘Through there, I would think. And I think you’ll find the toilet through there too. Thank goodness it’s an indoor.’
A flowered curtain hung in the doorway to the invisible rooms behind. Delia recoiled, seeing not roses at first, but puddles of blood. The roses came quite swiftly into focus after that, but it was too late. The blood was first-seen. It would have to be converted anew every time she looked at the curtain. Something with claws scuttled overhead. Her mother was squatting now, pushing at the ham, trying to wedge it between the racks. There had been much talk about how to bring the Christmas ham all the way from Wellington. Both grandmothers knew the right way, and Delia had stood by and watched her bossy grandmother wrap it in two damp tea towels while her quiet grandmother stood by without helping as long as she could bear it, then silently wetted a third tea towel so as to cover the triangles of exposed flesh.
‘Where has your father gone this time? Gone for a walk and a smoke I suppose,’ said Delia’s mother, and then in a low voice, as if only to the butter, ‘Gone to find company. Gone to walk to her place, if he could.’ The ham wouldn’t fit, no matter how she pushed. ‘Get in there, you beggar.’ The green refrigerator shook and rattled. Delia’s mother’s face was contorted with effort. Then she simply let go. The ham fell to the floor with an enormous slapping sound. Her mother stood up and went to lean on the bench. She had her back to Delia, but it was easy to see that she was crying.
The ham had cost a lot of money. Delia crossed the kitchen and picked it up. It was clammy. Her mother’s efforts had made the tea towels peel back at one end. The ham was the colour of stewed rhubarb. She poked a finger into it, took a pinch between finger and thumb, nibbled her pickings. It occurred to her that they could eat it down to size. But it seemed unlikely that her mother would want to eat ham sandwiches in the middle of the night.
‘Did you find your bunk?’ Her mother was making a big effort not to sound as if she was weeping. But she was weeping. Delia stood in the white light of the green refrigerator with the ham in her arms. She peeled off a little more meat and ate it. There was another scurry overhead. Fly spots speckled the ceiling. Fly spots speckled the big dull yellow bulb hanging on its long black flex. Moths flapped in dizzy orbit around the light. Delia looked at her mother, head bent over the sink, shoulders still giving an occasional shudder. The one shoulder that was always higher than the other was hitched up even tighter tonight. She watched the hem of her mother’s dress, floating so perilously close to the under-the-bench curtains. She wished her mother was wearing shoes, and actually specifically the big black clanking supportive pair that usually embarrassed Delia. But her mother’s feet were bare tonight, the heel of her bad leg—the stick-leg one from when Delia’s mother got polio when she was pregnant with Delia—hovering, as always if she didn’t wear her built-up shoe, inches off the floor.
Mice in the cups, mice in the pots and pans. Blood—no, roses—in the doorway. Darkness in the corridor behind. Possums in the ceiling. Possums in the toilet. Possums on the top bunk. Possum possum bunny skimpy little skirt. Delia cradled the ham. She shifted it slightly to ease the weight, folded the tea towels up over the salt-sweet flesh. Her whole body was crackling with effort: listening, watching, holding safe the ham.
‘A cup, Delia,’ said her mother. Her voice was almost steady again.
Delia stepped cautiously across the kitchen. The ham was heavy. As she got closer to where the cups were hiding, the little checked curtains guarding the shelves under the bench twitched. Delia stopped where she was. The overhead bulb was buzzing. She hung onto the ham, and closed her eyes, and waited.
Sue Wootton lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her previously published fiction includes the novel, Strip (Mākaro Press), longlisted in the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She has held the Robert Burns Fellowship, the NZSA Peter and Diane Beatson Fellowship and the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, and is currently the publisher at Otago University Press.