Page 52 of Kiwi Sin
“No,” I said. “You can’t.”
“But you can drive?” he asked.
How could he not know that? Well, Gray’s work crews were all men. Gabriel’s life, maybe, wasn’t so different than it had been at Mount Zion. He worked hard all day, and it was the same kind of work. After work, he went home, also like Mount Zion. The difference was, I guessed, that once he got there, he had to take care of himself. But maybe he liked that.
I didn’t know, because he’d never said. He’d always been quiet, but now, when I saw him at the house, he was silent. He’d been so brave on that day when we’d got Priya out, and he’d talked to me then, but that was different, I guessed.
Of course it was. Men Outside didn’t spend time with teenage girls. It was different.
“Women drive here,” I reminded him.
He turned red again. “I know. I hadn’t seen you doing it, though, so I didn’t think. Sorry.” He shifted where he stood. “I shouldn’t be here anyway. Not with you and Prudence here alone.”
“Priya,” I said.
The red intensified. “Sorry,” he said again. “Priya.”
“Come in,” I repeated, “while I tell her I’m taking you.”
“No,” he said. “I’ll wait out here for you.”
How did Daisy and Poppy and Laila talk to men like it was nothing? How did they walk around with their hair and everything under their clothes so … so visible, and not want to hide?
I couldn’t do this. Icouldn’t.
I said, “Hang on. Just a moment,” and shut the door.
I knew how to drive. I knew how to pretend to be normal, too, the way people were normal here. I was in school. Girls’ school, but still.
I could do this. It was anemergency.I had to.
20
DOWN TO YOU
Gabriel
Oriana was winding her way down the steep, curving Dunedin streets to the hospital, driving competently but not very fast, without speaking to me. Without looking at me at all. I sat beside her, trying not to drip blood. Trying not to be woozy from blood.
I’d put her in a bad position, I realized now. Having to leave the kids alone with her sister, who was just out of Mount Zion and didn’t know anything.
I should’ve done something else. Phoned my dad, probably, once I’d realized Matiu wasn’t home.
I’d been tired, maybe, and careless. Sleep wasn’t always easy. My flatmates were uni students, and their upside-down schedule would put bats to shame. Beyond that, I spent as many waking hours as I could manage working, picking up all the overtime Gray would permit, and I was taking classes as well for my trades certificate. The hours people normally worked here weren’t enough to make a man really tired—eight hours a day and two days off every week, when I was used to ten hours, or even twelve, and not many days off at all—and besides, I needed to save money.
No reason not to work anyway, because when I got home, there were the flatmates, the washing-up, and the green couch. Once I closed my bedroom door, it was just me, and it had never been just me. When I’d moved out of my parents’ room at sixteen, I’d moved straight into the unmarried men’s dormitory to live with my cousins and the rest of them, who might as well be my cousins, I knew them that well.
That wasn’t what I wanted now, though. It wasn’t what I was missing. I didn’t want to joke and laugh and wrestle, or even to be quiet while the others did all that. Somehow, what I missed was what I’d never had. A wife.
I’d be twenty-five next month, and I didn’t want to be alone anymore. I wanted to strip off my clothes the minute I walked through the door and shower off the dirt of the day, because she didn’t like me dirty. I wanted to eat dinner beside her, at a table I’d built for her out of the kind of wood she liked best, sanding the top and legs down until they were like glass, then rubbing in my special brew of linseed oil, varnish, and mineral spirits to bring out the grain. I wanted to listen to music with her on the little speaker I’d bought, the first worldly item I’d ever coveted and purchased just for myself and just for pleasure, and work on some project, something I was fixing for her, building for her, and smell the pretty woman-scent of her while she sat on the couch and knitted or read or …
Or nursed our baby.
I didn’t actually know how married couples spent their time together Outside, other than my glimpses of Drew and Hannah’s life, but that was how I imagined it. If it was something else? Drinking alcohol and dancing and … and whatever else they did? I wouldn’t know how to do that.
All of that was why I’d been putting all my energy, ever since I got here, into getting ahead. I may have walked out of Mount Zion with nothing but my skills, but I could become a foreman myself eventually. I knew what it took, because I’d been watching my dad all my life, ever since he’d married my mum after the farm accident that had killed my father. It was having the knowledge, doing the work, and getting to that spot where the other men followed your orders not from fear, but from respect, because they knew you’d thought it through, and that you’d never ask them to do what you wouldn’t do yourself.
I couldn’t be a man out here, couldn’t marry and have a family and a home, without a good livelihood and money saved, and building was the only way I knew to get it. It was all on you to do, if you wanted it, so there was nothing to do but to get stuck in and do it.
