Katherine Mansfield Sparkling Prose 2024 – Third Place
The window is open a crack only, but it is just enough to make the gauzy curtain flutter. It’s too flimsy to block the light, but somehow the room seems dark despite the fierceness of the midsummer sun. They are at a round table, the three of them. Claire had deliberately saved the seat nearest the door for herself. Father Anslow is by the window. He was already sweating when he arrived, and the listless breeze seems to be no help, a motley, florid blush spreading upwards from his dog-collar to his ruddy cheeks.
Jamie is halfway between them, the shadow from the curtain undulating across his bent face.
“I’m not sure I should stay,” Father Anslow says, the first to break the silence.
“Please do,” Claire says. Her voice comes out as barely more than a whisper, but even so, some of her fear must betray her, because Jamie stops fidgeting with the lace edge of the tablecloth and looks up.
Aren’t skinheads supposed to be tough? Claire thinks erratically. But past the tattoos, Jamie’s closely shaved head seems to highlight every soft curve of his skull, every secret, vulnerable dell. He is twenty-five, she knows, but he could be years younger. Her own son, even, if things had been different.
“Please don’t be scared,” Jamie says . “I – he wouldn’t want you to be scared.”
“I’m sorry,” Claire whispers, “but I don’t understand. The things that happen . . . it can’t be real. Can it?”
Father Anslow makes a tiny movement, the barest shake of his head, but it’s Jamie who answers, his eyes reluctantly flitting between them.
“It’s – it’s not bad though, is it? He’s helping you, like. That’s nice, yeah?”
*
Is it nice? The flowers were first, although she didn’t know it. For weeks she thought it was a new gardener diligently keeping the grave tidy, replenishing penitents’ sad offerings so there were always fresh flowers to greet visitors. And when he denied it, she made up alternative explanations: maybe her father’s old neighbour had taken to visiting, or his estranged sister was assuaging her guilt. Or even a local group, some well-meaning collective of volunteers. But the denials all came, one by one, and she realised: no grave was touched but for his.
“I understand it’s well meant,” Claire says now, “but I need to know when it will stop.” Because it did not end with the flowers.
Her own garden always mysteriously tidy; windows that stay clean beyond all reason; grass that never grows too long, no matter how long Claire leaves the lawnmower dormant. She can be away for weeks – even, once, months at a time – yet no rubbish or debris ever accumulates.
“But why?” Jamie says. “Why would you want it to stop? It’s nice.”
Father Anslow is silent. The sweat has gathered on his forehead, yet he seems reluctant to wipe it away, as if any movement might draw the room’s attention to him. Claire knows what she has told him in the sanctity of the confessional. She doesn’t know what Jamie has said, but whatever it has been, it was enough, because he is the reason Jamie is here.
“It’s . . . a kindness,” Claire concedes, the best she can manage. “But I need to understand it.”
Jamie smiles, almost, half-hearted and sad. “He wants to protect you,” he says, and Claire, beyond any better judgement, finds she believes him.
“From what?”
“The man who hurt you. But – anything, really. But mostly him, I suppose. That’s how it started.”
Claire looks at Father Anslow, but his eyes are fixed on the table and it is clear he will offer no help.
“What man?” she asks at last.
“From the graveyard. You’d done the burial, and you were leaving. An’ I saw him hurt you.”
Claire has a clear memory of the day of her father’s funeral. Or, rather, she has a clear memory of some of it. The smell of daphne decorating the coffin – a favourite of them both, once, then sickening in its pungency. Father Anslow’s face, solemn and creased. Her own fingers digging into her palms to stop the tears. She has no idea how she got from her house to the service, or back again; no idea of the people she spoke to afterward, or the words they said. All the important things happened in the church, and the small graveyard behind it.
“You’d just . . . you’d just finished,” Jamie is telling her now, maybe thinking he is helping. “An’ you walked to the gate. Everyone else had gone. You were going a bit slow, I think, and he pulled your arm. Hard, like. An’ you fell over.”
Did she? She runs the dates in her mind, but she already knows who it must have been. Andrew. She doesn’t remember him manhandling her at the funeral, but she can easily believe that he did. It had happened before that, a few times, and then more, as she struggled to climb out of the fog grief created. She’s a little ashamed of how long it took her to see it for what it was, but she did. She hasn’t thought of Andrew in years.
“He swore at you, I could hear it from the car park. An’ he pulled at you again, rough, to get you up. So that’s how it started, you see. I should’ve – I knew he would’ve helped you.”
Claire has thought about her father a lot as the years have passed, as the strange occurrences have grown and grown. She has even, in whispered confessions to Father Anslow, admitted that she believes these are things could be – not her father, no, yet somehow – attributable to him. She has remembered the hours he spent tending her garden when she was away, the constant stream of tools he would appear with, weekend after weekend, tidying things she hadn’t noticed were overgrown, fixing loose railings and squeaky hinges she had never realised were broken.
Would he have helped her, if he had seen Andrew’s roughness?
He would have scratched his head, perhaps, or made a show of checking his pockets. His gaze would have drifted unnervingly to some distant point beyond the scene before him. Then the radio in the background, with the weekend cricket, or the sensationalist headline of a discarded newspaper, or a glimpse of a neighbour in the road outside – something would have taken his attention away.
“I’m sure anyone would have helped a young woman at a time like that, son,” Father Anslow says, replying to Jamie as if he has not seen the anguish mar Claire’s face. And suddenly they are united, the two of them, strangers until less than half an hour ago, turning on this man who has brought them together.
Claire’s ‘No’ is quiet, but her hands are clenched into knuckle-white fists at the edge of the table and she sees Father Anslow see them. Jamie is loud. His chair scrapes back as if he’s about to stand but he just pushes himself back, away from them both, a short move done aggressively enough that his breath is heavy when he speaks.
“I wanted to help. I bloody tried! I would have – but – ”
His rough gasps drown out the breeze, the distant traffic outside, the hammer of Claire’s own angry pulse. The curtain flutters again but Jamie is fully in the shadow now, and the flickering daylight can’t reach him.
“Why didn’t you?” Father Anslow asks.
“I wanted to.”
“Then why?”
And Jamie looks up, looks directly at her, and Claire is arrested with the memory of that day, fully formed, as clear as if she were there now. She remembers the crunch of gravel as she made herself turn to leave, and the strange feeling as she walked away from the grave, away from the only person left who had known her her whole life. It was as if her limbs no longer worked correctly, or were not quite in sync with her brain; she had to pause before opening the latch on the gate, remembers watching her fumbling fingers as if they were not her own. And she remembers a voice behind her, faintly sarcastic, and her attention wavering from her recalcitrant feet, and then –
She has no memory of pain, strangely, but she can see her hands on the pavement, grazed palms breaking her fall. She remembers Andrew, pulling at her, fingers tight on her bicep. And looking up, and seeing, across the road, a young man – a boy, a teenager, gangly and unkempt –slouched on the car park wall. The illicit cigarette frozen midair. Eyes, too wide, meeting her own.
“You were scared,” she whispers. Because that was what she had felt, that strange truth, walking away from the only world she had ever known. And there it was, all that fear, looking out at her from a stranger’s face.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Jamie says.
“You didn’t have to do anything. It wasn’t your fault. And I was okay, Jamie. You didn’t have to help me.”
“He would have.”
He would have.
He.
*
Flowers on her father’s grave, her yard work always done. He was helping you. He wouldn’t want you to be scared. That’s nice, yeah?
Her father hearing the cricket score from two rooms away, his eyes refusing to see the bruises. Anyone would have helped. Knowing the truth, knowing the weight of grief born twice over.
*
“I tried to make it up,” Jamie says. “I’ve tried – I’ve tried to do what he would.”
‘He would’ve helped me,” Claire says. She says the words carefully, sounding them out, feeling them on her tongue as she felt her feet that day in the graveyard, like a thing beyond herself. She knows they are right when Jamie nods. There is a glimmer of understanding between them now, building across the shadows that still dance with the breeze.
“He’d have saved you. Told that man where to go. Rescued you.”
“And what would have happened next?”
Jamie’s smile is faraway.
*
There are two boys on the wall. Jamie, with his baggy clothes and unwashed hair, watching Claire fall, paralysed by his own fear. And the other boy, next to him, the other Jamie, jumping up and running, crossing the street to right a wrong, unencumbered by doubt. And Claire can see it, the future spiralling out from each of them: the Jamie who acted and the Jamie who froze; the Jamie who helped, and the Jamie who lived in his shadow.
*
“I think it’s time,” Father Anslow says, and though they have never discussed this, Claire nods. They come together across the table easily, clasp hands easily.
“I’m sorry,” Jamie says.
“And I’ll forgive you,” Claire replies, “if you let him go.”
Born in Wellington, Elizabeth Kelsey spent much of her early life in the UK. Having worked for many years as a barrister, she now lives in the Waipara Valley, where she runs her family’s small vineyard and winery. She is an active part of the Hurunui Writers’ Group.