Free A Needle in the Heart by Fiona Kidman

lazy little bastard, but he didn’t have ideas above himself. Not like the other boy. In his eyes Philip was a cocky little prick, needed knocking in to shape. Neil got a job farm labouring when he was fifteen and could leave school. Philip went back to Joe’s for a while and, whenthat didn’t work out, back up to Mary’s. A teacher at the school she sent him to (it was his twelfth school) took a fancy to him and the next thing he was off to boarding school on a scholarship.
    ‘Fancy,’ said Esme, ‘to think my boy’s got brains.’
    ‘They shouldn’t give him ideas. He’s probably a queer,’ Kevin said.
    ‘I wonder where he got them from,’ Esme said dreamily, as if she hadn’t heard him.
    ‘You ought to know, he’s your kid.’
    ‘Yes. Well. So he is.’ Her face closed up, shutting him out. They were living in another farmhouse, out the back of beyond. She didn’t have to work the way she used to, though she still kept her hand in. There was never any trouble between them, except when the subject of Philip came up. After the boy went off to boarding school she sent ten pounds to Mary to give to him every holidays.
    After a bit, Mary wrote and said she’d better send the money straight to the school because Philip was taking his holidays with his new friends. In the long summer holiday he’d gone on a tour of the South Island and walked the Milford Track. In winter, he went skiing with a friend’s family. They were staying in a lodge at Ohakune Junction. Esme laughed out loud when she read that. She didn’t mention it to Kevin, because he wouldn’t have understood about the Junction, and the irony of it all.
    He and Esme and the two girls were happy on their own. They moved closer to town so the girls didn’t have to travel so far on the bus to school. Both of them did secretarial courses afterwards, and then went off on an overseas trip. They sent cards from Rome and Paris and London. Neil, who had grown into a thin-faced man with quiet ways, got married to a girl called Leonie straight after his twenty-first birthday party; they had a son and a daughter, just eleven months between them, so that, before she knew it, Esme was a grandmother.
     
    These were some of the things Esme Pudney thought about while her son was being married. She understood why she sat anonymously at the back of the church. She wished it wasn’t that way, but she didn’tsee how else things could have worked out. Just as the service was ending, while the triumphant march from the church was forming, she tiptoed past the ushers at the back, out into the spring sunshine.
5
    There was a wrap party the night Petra’s first movie finished filming. It had been a punishing schedule, up at five each morning, some nights going on until ten. There never seemed enough time to eat and sleep, but all the time in the world to talk. Everyone was someone’s best friend, and sometimes their lover. People told each other outrageous things about themselves that they’d never told anyone else. They made dramas out of their own lives which, whether they were true or not, they knew they would believe from then on. Now suddenly they were all having to say goodbye. Not that it would be truly goodbye because there were only so many movie sets and so many jobs to go round in Wellington. And if there wasn’t a movie there would be a stage play, or a stretch of radio drama, though that was never more than a week’s work at a time. Or a television commercial if you got lucky because that was enough to pay for a few months out of work. Petra had done a couple of those.
    Philip, looking across the room at her, could see why they wanted Petra’s face. It had a wild vitality that at this moment seemed unbridled. He had only seen her for a few hours here and there over the previous month because a lot of filming had been taking place out of town. He knew she didn’t want him to be there and, at the same time, that she did, a kind of affirmation that he