Jackie Davis: Breathe

By PENELOPE BIEDER

This first novel by Palmerston North writer Jackie Davis is set in New Plymouth at an unspecified period that feels like the 50s but is probably more recent.

With great clarity it embarks on the bitter-sweet story of a family of four children - three girls and the youngest, a boy called Bertie who is doomed to wear the girls' old dresses.

Their mother is a beautiful dreamer, an aspiring concert pianist who fills the house with classical music and cigarette smoke. She dominates the story, understandably, because it is told by the youngest daughter, a 9-year-old.

Halfway through I realised that our heroine was going to remain 9, although to be fair, there are italicised flash-forwards to adulthood.

While this is risky for a purportedly adult read, Davis makes it work.

There is the dreariness of a long Saturday afternoon when Mother gets dressed up and goes out. She decides on the yellow Crimplene dress and matching coat. There is something menacing in the air as the children are abandoned for long hours. They never ask where she goes.

She simply gets dolled up and is gone, in her pale blue Hillman Minx, along with her matching handbag and soft leather driving gloves. "She laughed like crystal glasses, wound up her window and was gone."

Davis has a gift for seeing the world from a child's viewpoint, dropping just enough chilling information in to keep us reading, and leaving just enough out to validate the child's ignorance and innocence.

The mother is a superb, cruel and complicated creation. While she is adept at bottling fruit and growing flowers, she is happy to leave the four children to forage for Weetbix for tea.

Most of the time she remains in her own self-absorbed world. When she casually announces that their father has phoned, the children gasp collectively, reacting as one. He left when Bertie was born and is a glamorous stranger. "There are no photos of him, no letters, no discussion of him. Nothing. I think my mother swept him up and tipped him out onto newspaper, then rolled him up and put him out in the rubbish when he left."

And when without warning he comes along on their summer holiday to Onaero Holiday Flats, the tension builds admirably.

The world of a highly sensitive child is a magical one - no tiny domestic detail escapes this child's eyes, in the garden or kitchen. She knows that her mother's bright-pink lipstick is called September Rose, her brother's eyelashes are two rows of spider's legs sticking out of his round, fat face.

But this world is also a limiting one for the writer, and Breathe is in danger sometimes of being breathless, a tiny bit claustrophobic: "The fat red pen stood still. It bled into the newspaper. My mother looked up.

"She smiled at me. Her teeth were as white and shiny as newly painted fence pickets. My mother seldom smiled, I realised."

The vulnerability and loneliness of childhood are perfectly drawn and Davis, aged 38, is brave to tackle her first novel from this tricky perspective. It is sad, insightful, clever and funny but in the end somehow a bit small, like its heroine.

Penguin Books

$24.95