The Sister Swap

Anne had the grace to blush. ‘Well—er—the music puts it in a different context,’ she said weakly.

‘Oh, I see. You don’t mind being cursed at, as long as it’s to music.’

She was beginning to get the uncomfortable feeling that this hulking man might be able to run intellectual as well as physical rings around her. She was nervous enough about her move from a tiny rural town to the huge, sprawling city of Auckland and the new life she was embarking on, especially fraught as it was with guilty secrets. She didn’t need any additional undermining of her confidence. Katlin had been bad enough. Her elder sister had deeply impressed on Anne the dire conse- quences of being found out in their deception, at the same time hastily assuring her that the chances of dis- covery were infinitesimal…as long as Anne kept a cool head. Easier said than done.

‘Look, would you mind stating your business—?’

‘I thought I had.’

Anne frowned, her fly-away brows losing their faintly surprised natural arch. ‘You mean about the noise?’ Suddenly the light dawned. ‘Oh, are you from downstairs?’ That would explain the bulging muscles. The men she had seen in the docking bay of the warehouse when she had arrived had been heaving about enormous crates as if they were made of marshmallow. ‘I thought everyone in the warehouse knocked off at four, and anyway, I can’t believe that sound from here would travel—’

‘Not the warehouse. I live in the apartment next door,’ he snapped, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the open door. ‘And, believe me, the sound travels between the two all too well.’

Anne’s mouth dropped open. ‘Next door? But you can’t be.’ Her voice rose accusingly. ‘Nobody said any- thing about there being anyone else living here!’

Quite the reverse, in fact. She had been shown around the sparsely furnished loft atop the warehouse building by a representative from the foundation which had awarded the year-long grant. The man had given Anne the distinct impression that she would be totally alone and undisturbed in her cosy eyrie close to the sprawling city campus of Auckland University. He certainly hadn’t mentioned any surly, beetle-browed neighbour. The fact that she would have no interfering fellow-residents poking their curious noses into her life and work had been the deciding factor in her agreeing to fulfil the conditions of the grant. Now this, when it was too late to back out!

Thank God she had put her foot down over the money that went along with the grant—at least her conscience was clear on that score. Katlin had wanted to give her the majority of the modest monthly pension, but Anne had adamantly refused to accept anything more than direct expenses, of which she kept a very strict account, just in case there were any official questions later. For herself, Anne was using the precious savings that she had accrued over the years from selling eggs, honey and vegetables at the family farm gate.

‘Perhaps they assumed we wouldn’t notice each other,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Fat chance if you intend to run a one-woman disco at all hours of the day and night…’

Anne’s mouth snapped shut to stop herself saying something equally rude. Live and let live was her motto. If they were neighbours then she’d just have to try and make the best of it.

‘Hardly at all hours, since I’ve only just moved in. I was just celebrating, that’s all,’ she said in her normal, soft, conciliatory tones.

The reply she received was bluntly non-conciliatory. ‘Well, celebrate quietly in future. The walls here are paper-thin. And cut out the acrobatics. These floorboards run almost the length of the whole upper floor. Vibrations travel as effectively as noise.’

Anne’s hazel eyes narrowed. ‘Then you’d better get shock-absorbers as well as ear-muffs because I dance to keep fit.’

That led the fierce black gaze to wander down over her huge, baggy, less-than-pure-white T-shirt and calflength purple cotton leggings with the little darned patch on her knee.

‘Fit for what?’ The rag-bag, was the suggestion in his dismissive gaze.

‘To stand up to bullies like you,’ she snapped. ‘Now you’ve performed your neighbourly act of welcome, would you mind shutting the door behind you? And next time don’t come in until you’re invited!’

‘There won’t be a next time. As far as you’re concerned no one else does live in this building, understand?’

Anne blinked. She understood all right. He was insinuating that she might pester him with unwanted attentions …after he had come thrusting his way into her attention! ‘I won’t bother you as long as you don’t bother me!’ she told him. ‘For your information, Mr—Mr whoever-you-are—’

‘Lewis. Hunter Lewis, Miss Tremaine.’ He glared at her as if he expected to be challenged over his name, and she was momentarily side-tracked from her righteous indignation.

‘How do you know who I am?’

‘You’re the Markham Grant.’

That took the wind out of her sails. The private grant scheme was very low-key and had received no publicity beyond a brief announcement in a literary magazine, the aim being to create a totally unpressured environment in which a writer could work. Was it coincidence that he knew of it, or was he in some way connected with the foundation? Her heart sank at the thought.

‘Oh. Are you here on a grant too?’ she asked cautiously.

‘No, I’m not,’ he snapped, as if she had insulted him. ‘And I’m surprised they’re handing them out like lollies to children these days.’ He gave her brightly mismatched outfit another contemptuous study.

‘Whatever happened to the concept of struggle and suffering for the sake of one’s art? If every new writer got provided with a cushy number in his or her creative infanthood we’d have a generation of writers producing work with as much emotional depth as the telephone directory!’

The door had swung shut behind him before Anne could recover from her shock at the scathing attack. Belatedly she rushed over and flung it open again, just in time to see him duck through a door under the short flight of stairs at the end of the corridor which led to a small, flat section of the roof. She had noticed the door previously but had assumed from its battered appearance and narrow dimensions that it was some kind of caretaker’s store-room.

‘Well!’ she exclaimed disgustedly, annoyed that she hadn’t been quick enough to come up with some pithy little comment that would have hurried him on his way. Not that he’d needed any hurrying. He evidently couldn’t get away from her fast enough.

She turned back to survey her new home and was jolted out of her preoccupation by the sound of slow applause.

‘Oh, my gosh!’ She rushed over to the boxes, pushing them apart until she discovered her concealed audience. The applause was slow because every second clap failed to connect, the owner of the hands not quite having the co-ordination to match his enthusiasm.

‘Oh, Ivan, I forgot all about you!’ She snatched up the chubby baby, horrified by her lapse in attention. ‘What did you crawl in there for? Did that nasty man frighten you?’

Ivan’s face crunched up and for one horrifying moment his rumpled, downy black eyebrows and narrowed dark eyes actually resembled those of the obnoxious Hunter Lewis. Ivan even had the same midnightblack hair…

But no—Anne brought her panicked speculations to a screeching halt. He thought Anne was Katlin Tremaine, so he had never met her striking sister. Besides, Katlin said Ivan’s father was Russian. Hunter Lewis might have the temperament of a marauding Cossack but his accents were definitely Kiwi!

The strangely disturbing thought of that hulking brute as the father of her innocent little godson made Anne hug him tightly and he let out a squawk of protest.

‘Sorry. We won’t talk about that bad man. We won’t even think about him, will we? Now, what are we going to unpack next, Ivan? You show me. Point to a box…’

The active assistance of a seven-month-old wasn’t conducive to efficiency and it took a long time for Anne to organise her rather meagre possessions. Since the loft was furnished, albeit rather sparsely, she hadn’t needed to bring much, but she couldn’t have left her books at home and then there was all the considerable paraphernalia required to keep Ivan the Terrible happy, healthy and occupied.

Most of that she took into the small bedroom at the windowless end of the main room and while she was there, assembling, with her usual lack of mechanical genius, the portable baby Easi-cot—’Easy, my foot!’ she grumbled to Ivan as he busily babbled incoherent advice as to how to connect point D with section 2—she was distracted from her task by a sound on the other side of the wall. Music.

She scrambled up over the narrow bed and pressed her ear against the painted surface. Jazz.

‘Well, of all the cheek!’ She was almost tempted to go out and turn her own tape back on, even louder than before, but she had to concede that he didn’t appear to have the volume very high. Then she heard another sound, a very familiar electronic tap-tapping.

‘He’s got a typewriter.’ She looked down at Ivan in consternation. He grinned back, showing all six teeth. ‘Oh, no! Ivan, what if he’s a writer too?’ Overwhelmed with dismay, she slumped beside him on the floor. Ivan began to laugh his piping little shrill and she leapt up again, conscious of those listening walls. ‘No, no, darling—shush!’

Anne tucked Ivan under her arm and scurried back out to the big room, her heart beating like a drum. ‘We mustn’t let the bad man hear you,’ she admonished him, one finger held in front of her lips as she placed him in his high chair in the kitchenette and began to forage in the refrigerator. ‘If there’s one thing crabby old hermits hate more than loud rock music it’s crying babies. So you will be good while we’re here, won’t you, darling?’

Ivan issued a scornful babble at her words, as well he might. The Terrible was Anne’s purely ironic nickname. Ivan was the most friendly, good-natured and wellbehaved baby in the world. In fact, he was enough to make a capable adult feel inferior. Sometimes Anne felt as if he was not really a baby at all, but a computer-generated ideal. He didn’t dribble, he never threw up his food or cried for no apparent reason; he even messed his nappies in the tidiest possible fashion. You could set the clock by his naps and he had slept through the night since he was four weeks old. If it weren’t for the fact that he couldn’t walk or talk for himself Anne would almost feel superfluous to his well-ordered existence!

While Ivan amused himself by painting on a Charlie Chaplin moustache with a disintegrating rusk smothered with his favourite Vegemite spread, Anne whipped them both up an omelette for dinner, adding extra cheese to her own and herbs from the garden pots that her father had carefully packed in a wooden crate with plenty of damp newspaper for the flight north.

She sat on a stool at the breakfast-bar to eat hers, revelling in the peace as she popped the occasional spoonful from Ivan’s bunny-plate into his mouth while he diligently helped out with his fists, chuckling as the mixture squelched out from the bottom of his chubby fist on to his cotton bib.

Back at home mealtimes were always rowdy affairs, with her mother and father and her four brothers always competing to air their cheerful opinions. They were a very close-knit and gregarious family, except for Katlin, who at twenty-eight was the eldest, and had chosen to move off the small, isolated South Island family farm while still in her late teens and live in virtual seclusion in order to write. Ivan’s arrival on the scene had been a cataclysmic upheaval in her solitary life. As usual it had been her more responsible sister who had been left holding the baby…this time literally!

Anne grinned to herself as she mopped up Ivan’s efforts at feeding himself with a damp cloth. A big city and a small baby were hardly what most people would see as a peaceful combination, but for Anne it was the realisation of a dream and she intended to make the most of it. Just a simple thing like having what she wanted for dinner instead of what would sustain gargantuan farm appetites gave her a magnificent sense of independence.

She gave Ivan the bottle of milk which rounded off his meal and then sat him down on the floor to play with his plastic blocks while she dragged the lop-sided cot out of the bedroom and finished assembling it. By the time she managed to attach the wheels correctly Ivan was looking heavy-eyed, and sucking his thumb, a sure indication that he was tired. No doubt his incredibly accurate internal clock had told him it was past his bedtime but, true to type, he wasn’t complaining.

She bathed him in the kitchen sink since the tiny bathroom which opened off the kitchen—obviously for the convenience of the plumber rather than the tenant—only possessed a shower, toilet and small basin, but Ivan didn’t seem to mind. He kicked and splashed merrily, briefly regaining his liveliness, before dozing as she patted him dry and put on his thick night-nappy and stretchy sleep-suit.

He was asleep almost before his head hit the mattress, his hands clutching the fuzzy pink stuffed pig that was his prized possession. She kissed him on his button nose, a flood of tenderness warming her with contentment as she softly sang him his bedtime song and then quietly wheeled the cot through to the bedroom.