Marilyn Duckworth: Swallowing Diamonds

By PENELOPE BIEDER

Poor Bundle, abandoned at birth, and in windswept Wainuiomata, finds herself in various foster homes before she meets Stella Sumpster, a frumpy, kind teacher at a girls' home.

When we first meet Bundle - or Hannah, her real name - she is 28 years old, tiny, stumbling and insecure, and trying to write a novel.

By page two (of Duckworth's story) the novel has been cast aside and, instead, Bundle sets out to find the truth.

"She was beginning to remember. There was all that other stuff, too, packed away, creased and folded and squashed flat along with what went on later in the girls' home, until she slowly woke up, roused herself like a clenched bundle unwrapping, until she stretched and became the cool little person she is now."

Cool is a good word for this novel. Bundle floats in a cool, detached way through other people's lives. Sometimes she almost freezes to the spot.

Sometimes she can only see herself reflected in other people's eyes.

Understandably, she needs to re-evaluate her grim past to move on.

She runs into Dermot, whom she had last seen when she was 12. He had taught her to swallow pins inside pellets of wadding. He said it could be useful if she ever needed to smuggle diamonds.

Sparklers and pins, indeed, become recurring images in Bundle's story, as symbols of the way memory refracts, breaks up, glitters in pinpoints of light just out of conscious reach. Dermot and Bundle see each other again, in an unfocused sort of way. She is thrown when he also casually dates her Newtown flatmate, Pattie.

Duckworth revels in grim details - most of her characters are physically imperfect: "He reminds her of a rather friendly rodent", "Basil's greasy neck glistening, Stella's hair thinning near the crown so that the sun shines through it". Descriptions are ugly, earthy, visceral, sometimes almost repulsive.

More important, though, is the way they behave. In an arbitrary, spontaneous way, Bundle, Dermot and Stella stagger through their lives, making bizarre choices, almost surprised at finding themselves in New England, or Vienna, or Prague, or Island Bay.

While Stella is searching for a life, after at last being brave enough to put her demanding 85-year-old aunt into care, Bundle's search for a home leads her to Arthur, a teenage boy who dresses up in women's clothes every time his father leaves the house.

Written in a spare, understated narrative style, Duckworth's 14th novel risks leaving the reader as detached as the characters from caring about what happens to them. Dangerous territory indeed - like swallowing pins.

That she manages to just avoid this - we do want to know what happens to Bundle - is a tribute to her nervy skill, still as bright as ice after all these years.

* Vintage $26.95

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer.