Free Preservation by Fiona Kidman

Preservation
    Fiona Kidman
    If you had known us when we were girls, Sabrina thinks, Jan is the last one you would have expected to land up in prison. With a name like hers, Sabrina was bad girl territory, or so people imagined, and for a time they were not entirely wrong. She and Elsa and Jan, always together, a clan of their own that others would have loved to join but never could. They hitched up their gym slips to the edge of their bums, and chewed gum in class and smoked on the boundary fence that divided their girls’ school from the boys’ one next door. Jan was the one who managed to stay out of trouble.
    Yet here Sabrina is, with her hair, wispy and greying, piled up on her head, glasses sliding down her nose, as she scans the newspaper for art-house movies, waiting in the prison car parkfor Elsa. Her grown-up son has gone away to university, so she and her second husband Daniel have time to devote to their jobs, Sabrina as a policy planner in a government department, Daniel as an engineer. (What policy does Sabrina plan? It varies as she moves around departments, edging up the career ladder. At the moment she is planning trade deals.) They have money and friends and time to live well. Why has she come here, she wonders.
    ‘You don’t have to do this,’ Daniel had said at breakfast. ‘Well, look at the weather.’ Saturday morning is special time for them. A tall man, with riotous curls and an infectious grin, Daniel likes jokes and cult movies and making surprise breakfasts for her at the weekend. Later, they shop together: a ritual. He was disappointed that she ate in haste, distracted and about to go out. ‘It’s not as if you’re in touch with her very often.’
    ‘I do have to go,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to explain.’ She realised that he had never met Jan, understood that he was worried about this expedition of hers.
    Outside, it was a grey April morning and, indeed, the sharp chill of winter had already descended on Wellington. In the night a southerly wind had blown leaves from the copper beech in the garden. The wind had bowled her along the motorway, and now a sleety rain is falling on the asphalt of the parking lot beside her. She shivers and pulls her mohair jacket closer, glancing up at the stark building, the steel bars of the prison. Perhaps Elsa won’t come.
    But even as Sabrina is thinking this, Elsa’s smart yellow Citroën pulls alongside.
    Elsa, like her, has turned out to be respectable, only more matronly. Elsa stays home and minds grandchildren, and cooks endless meals, though, as she says, she does like to keep herself ‘looking nice’. She goes to her hairdresser in the city every other week, and shops in boutiques. It’s quarter of a century since she taught school. I guess I got lucky, she will say whenever they meet. Fortunate to have a husband with a good income, his jobas steady as a rock even in a town like this, where for so many people it’s in one office door and out the other. An accountant is worth his weight in … though herself she wouldn’t wear gold, she prefers silver. It’s not that Sabrina sees herself or her life reflected in the way Elsa lives hers now, but there is a history from the days of sleepovers and fat scones and hot chocolate, of ballet practice in tutus, of Girl Guides and music practice, of regular bedtimes and cut lunches, of homework schedules and summer holidays, a history that has traced itself in their own domesticity, however varied it may look on the surface. Their rebellion was temporary, a rite of passage on the way to their grown-up lives. Our mothers will go ape-shit, they had said, and when it happened, they’d move onto something else. Like university, eventually. Their mothers uncrossed their fingers behind their backs.
    Jan was different in almost every way, and Sabrina has wondered since how it took her so long to see this. Jan was simply there. At school she passed exams without seeming to notice what happened in class,