Lucy Jordan  – A short story by Des Molloy

Lucy Jordan was always thought of as being special … one out of the box.  Her mother had just appeared at the Larkham’s farm at the top of the Waddington Valley.  Heavily pregnant with a pack on her back, Mindy Jordan indicated that she had walked five days through the hills from the coast following voices and the stars.  She asked if she could put up her tent and stay a while.

“I think that this could be a happy place for me.  I’ve been looking for so long, and last night I saw a shooting star and I just knew that this was the way … so I just followed … and here I am.”

Ma Larkham was the matriarch of a cluster of farms at the end of the road bordering the National Park. Her antecedents had been Plymouth Brethren, and whilst Ma and her kin were still seen as an aloof religious commune by the local populace, the reality was that she, her two sons and her daughter were quite secular in outlook. Their collection of four properties was on marginal land necessitating a lot of intervention and seven-day-a-week toil.  They didn’t just ‘farm themselves’ leaving plenty of time for posing in town or cruising into the stock and station agent in an undented, shiny Ford Ranger.  The family worked collectively, buying supplies as though they were even more isolated than they were.  Usually it was Ma who went to town.  Groceries were bought about once every two months, whilst vegetables and meat were produced on the farms.  Some in the local town played a game of ‘spot the Larkham’, so rarely were they seen.

Mindy was clearly in need of succour and Ma had a heart the size of Texas, according to a neighbour a bit down the valley.  Upon learning that Mindy had seemingly no family or roots in New Zealand, Ma settled her in to a disused shearers’ cottage and helped her through to full-term.  A home-birth was not planned, but nature, by way of flooding across the dip at Cameron’s Whare at the crucial time, meant that Lucy Joy Jordan was born at Bailiwick Farm on a crisp Autumn evening.  She was a hefty four kilograms and clearly a long, lanky baby.  Robust and healthy from Day One, she flourished.  Ma still had the Plunket books from her own three children and overlaid Lucy’s progress on the chart of her eldest boy Brian’s.  Lucy was everything that Mindy wasn’t.  Lucy was voracious in her quests for food and life, whilst Mindy appeared to wither with every day and never seemed to embrace the love and laughter of her little one.  Ma knew that there had to be some sort of long-term post-natal depression that Mindy couldn’t shake off. Mindy couldn’t even be persuaded to go to town with Ma on her shopping forays.

“But this is my happy place … I don’t want to go into town.  There’s nothing there for me!  I’ve got the hills, the sounds of the bush, the birds and the river.

The Larkham clan included three littlies, who by default became Lucy’s cousins. Lucy followed them relentlessly about the farms. They were all two or three years older than her but she never understood any difference, because she was abnormally tall and very well-coordinated for her age.  As Lucy grew to school age, Mindy watched on, quite hands-off, letting things just happen organically.  Mindy seemed in a world of her own.  Some days she would help out on the land, others she would just sit in the sun and hum unrecognisable melodies, whilst gently rocking to and fro in a state of casual contentment.  The Larkhams all knew that she wasn’t totally well, and that she’d probably never would be able to live on her own with Lucy, so they just created an umbrella of care.

Unsurprisingly, the children were home-schooled when the time came.  Lucy was only three when her cousins Ben and Tilly started formal education, and four when Dahlia joined them, but there never was a separation … they all learned together, they were a ‘tribe’.  And as Lucy blossomed, Mindy’s mental and physical health waned.  Often her eyes were glazed-over for hours and a gentle half-smile remained in place almost like she was in a state of rigor.  Clearly she was never going to make old bones, and it wasn’t a huge shock when one day it was found that she was no longer breathing.  She had peacefully passed away in the spring sun sitting in her favourite spot facing the river.  Lucy was seven.

Although this was a sad time for Lucy, nothing of note changed.  She just kept her place among the Larkham family.  She’d always happily moved from one family to another as the mood took her … and which of her ‘cousins’ she was feeling particularly close to at the time.  She continued to grow like Topsy and by age ten was taller than cousin Ben who was two years her senior.  Her cousins called her Beanstalk or Beanie after the fable they enjoyed.  Even though home-schooled the Larkhams joined all the kids of the area for the annual sports day.  It was here that the ‘bean pole girl from the hills’ first gained her fame. There was nothing  she couldn’t do, winning all events for her age and gender every year.

For her Year Nine of schooling, Aunt Bronwyn decided that it was time to take a break from the relentless pressure of teaching four kids every day and the Larkham tribe was dispatched to the area school.  This meant a school bus ride twice a day, with more socialising and more adventures.  Formalised schooling brought more opportunity for sport.  Her natural ability was further enhanced by specialised coaching.  In addition to her abilities to excel at running over all distances, smash it at the long jump and high jump … now there was netball and basketball.  These team games brought another level of enjoyment.  There were new skills to conquer and Lucy embraced these challenges with relish. She was given a basketball and she’d ask the bus driver to drop her off with the Jackson brothers at their stop five km from home.  Her first self-instructed skill to learn, was running and dribbling the ball all the way home.  As soon as she could run at full pace the full distance, she imposed restrictions that she would randomly choose.

“All the way with the left hand only!”

“Two right, three left … repeat!”

“Once bounce every five paces!”

“Full speed five each side … stop and spin … through the legs!”

“Eight with the right … sidestep … five left … stop and stutter … go again … Shoot!”

Lucy loved the background pain as she forced herself up Lone Pine Hill at her full capacity, lungs working away to the max, heart pounding.  She then enjoyed the long gentle incline down to the gate to Bailiwick Farm.  This was where she could really stretch out her long legs and fly.  It didn’t matter what the weather was doing, this was Lucy’s time to shine.  The final burst up the farm drive always left her red-faced and laughing … but still ready for her share of the pre-dinner chores.

By the time she was 14 she measured up as 1.800 m and mid-year she passed the 1.830 ‘six feet in the old language”.  By 15 she was 40 mm taller and finally erased Nina Sinkinson’s name from the record books when she easily won the Under 16 Regional Championships 800 m.  Sinkinson had been the region’s star athletics performer twenty five years earlier, going on to get a Bronze Medal in the Commonwealth Games and a fourth at the Olympics.  Suddenly Lucy’s name was on the lips of the sporting cognoscenti, especially when it was leaked that a big city basketball franchise was trying to get her into an academy.

By 17, and in her final year of high school, Lucy was a full 1,900 m tall and a wonderfully co-ordinated stella athlete.  She was now being courted by several sporting codes of both summer and winter sports.  The sports master at college took her aside and quietly explained that world was her oyster and he was sure he could get her a scholarship in the US at any of half a dozen universities.

“High jump, long jump … middle distance track … or basketball.  Take your pick.  West Coast Californian sun or the ancestry and traditions of Boston or New York!”

This was a bit overwhelming for Lucy, who still thought of herself, as just a farm girl from up the valley.  She had no aspirations for the bright lights of cities.  She had only one long-term goal and it was still two decades in the future. In Year 12 she had heard Marianne Faithful singing The Ballad of Lucy Jordan on the radio.  Although Lucy recognised that the song included mental health problems and a slightly-disguised suicide, she adopted it as her song … her anthem that she belted out at full-voice as she ran home each day. She made the words more positive and vowed that one day, she, the girl from the hills of New Zealand’s South Island, really would ride through Paris in a sports car.

‘The morning sun touched lightly on

The eyes of Lucy Jordan

In a green country house bedroom

on a green valley farm

And she lay there 'neath the covers

Dreaming of a thousand lovers

'Til the world turned to orange

And the room went spinning round

‍

At the age of thirty seven

She promised she would get to ride

Through Paris in a sports car

With the warm wind in her hair

So she let the phone keep ringing

And she sat there softly singing

Little nursery rhymes she'd memorized

In her Daddy's easy chair’

‍

Ma Larkham and her offspring were all stolid valley folk.  They liked the solitude, the verdancy, the soothing sounds of the river and the plentiful birdsong.  They couldn’t see the purpose of going halfway round the world to continue an education whilst running and jumping and playing games.  They were grounded ‘local’, small-picture people who admired hard work and the challenge of the seasons.

“You get nothing for nothing!” was Ma’s opinion, and that held sway with the others too. Lucy remained quite mute on the topic and most of the jousting was between the school and the athletics’ club officials who saw Lucy as a once-in-a-lifetime athlete who needed to maximise her potential.  The Larkhams articulated that it looked to them like there was a whole lot of advocates and hangers-on who hungered for reflected glory.

Tiring of the intrusive solicitations, requests and suggestions, Lucy finally sought leave to postpone any US University applications for a year.

“Let me grow up!  I’m just a kid.  I’ve never even been to Christchurch.  I do want to run against the best in the world … but I am too scared to go to America on my own … now.  Who would look after me?  Here, the whole community looks after everyone.  And at Bailiwick farm, it’s like my own cubby.  I come home each day to my safe place ... like a nest.  It was mum’s safe and happy place too.  I’m not easy about leaving it yet”

There was disappointment on the faces of her basketball coach and the sports master, but they conceded gracefully, noting that she’d be ‘good to go’ next year.

It was the summer of 2006, a good one in The Bay.  School was done and dusted. Lucy and her peers took great pleasure in adopting an old song from their parents’ days as their anthem, and bursting into ‘Schools out for summer, schools out forever …’ every time they encountered each other … which in a small town was often.  Like many of her ilk, Lucy got a job in ‘hospo’, waitressing and serving coffee to the thousands of ‘blow-ins’ that the area suffered each summer.  The area’s older residents endured this time with gritted teeth, the young saw it as a frenetic time of fun and adventure.

The season of festivals and gigs had only just begun … a gaggle of girls had come by to get coffee, and be seen at Miranda’s Bar and Grill. Lucy heard her cousin Dahlia leading their corny anthem and at least four other girls joining in.  They were just out of sight for Lucy, and she cringed a bit knowing that they would soon pop up in front of the serving hatch.

“Oh My God!  What have they fed you, Big Boy?  You’ve got to come and meet Beanstalk … you’re made for each other.” Dahlia’s stentorian voice boomed out across the courtyard and within seconds she appeared, dragging a blushing and patently unwilling young man.  Lucy and a tall, tall young man stared at each other in shared embarrassment, shrinking back from the unwanted attention. Lucy later recounted that from the moment their eyes met, she was a goner, her legs hardly supported her, she felt that she probably didn’t take a breath for half a minute … or more.  She felt her face pulsing red.

“Hhh … hello, I’m Matt, Matt Turner.”

“When’s your break Beanie?  Come and sit with us!”

“Only if you want to.” Politely responded Matt.  Lucy now desperately wanted to, but didn’t want to make it too obvious, feeling that her ears were still the colour of the red roses in the front garden at Bailiwick Farm.

“Maybe soon, for five minutes!”

The rest is history.  Matt was a recently-graduated forestry management cadet.  He was as tall as the year he was born in … 1.987 m.  This made them a striking couple, head and shoulders above any crowd and both always smiling.  Dahlia kept telling them to stop looking like the cat that got the cream.  “Look normal.” She would beseech.

There was no more talk of going to America. They wed on the day after Lucy’s 19th birthday and moved onto the Larkham bush block that had been planted by Ma and her husband Bill more than 30 years previously.  The sports masters had asked for “five children please … and they’re all to come through the area high school!”  Not through lack of trying, the years passed but no scion resulted from their coupling.

“It is what it is, we’ve still got each other.

Life went on, with Matt and Lucy slaves to the land. This they didn’t mind.  It was hard physical work, but rewarding.  As they felled the block, they added value to the resulting logs by milling them on site.  The land was marginal for economic tree harvesting.  It was hilly and steep.  To be done efficiently this needed specialised equipment like a skidder, a digger with a Waratah harvesting head, a winch, a grapple, and a loader.  Initially this was beyond their means, but after fifteen years of working as a pair, felling and just using a double-handed chainsaw mill, Matt scaled up.  He got some investment from his dad but mostly the new gear was mortgaged against the four Larkham farms.  This was a long-term family project looking to provide returns for generations to come.

As 2025 approached, plans were made for Lucy and Matt to go to Paris for Lucy’s 37th birthday. Of course with Marianne Faithful’s passing there was renewed interest in her work, resulting in the Ballad of Lucy Jordan becoming a bit of an underground cult song to sing whenever Lucy was around.

October 2024 exploded Lucy’s world.  It was like the golden couple had won a lottery of bad luck.  Every week brought a hammer blow.  Firstly Matt’s father announced that he had split with his wife and needed his investment out of the forestry business.  Log prices had plummeted and the loader motor blew up, necessitating a full replacement.  Sadly, in the middle of the month Ma Larkham died.  It was expected, but still was a very emotional time and Lucy felt the deepest sorrow that she could imagine … at the time.  But on Oct 30th came the full arrow-through-the-heart … the event that destroyed Lucy.  Trying to free an old pine that had twisted as it fell and got caught up, Matt was struck by the trunk as it sprang back after being released.  He was killed instantly.  

The pressure of keeping up turn-over, had resulted in Matt being up in the top gully on his own that day, and Lucy knew in her heart that she should have been there as the second pair of eyes.  This added to her grief and contributed to her complete mental breakdown.  Lucy was now a barely-functioning person.  She struggled to get out of bed and feed herself.  Life was a blur for the next three months.  She had never known anything but sun and light, love and laughter.  Now everything was tinged with shade and shadow … sadness and pain wrought her every hour.

The forestry business imploded, equipment was repossessed, unpaid bills covered the kitchen table.  Matt had been the keystone for the whole operation and without him everything fell down like a house of cards.  Lucy’s mind could only focus on joining Matt.  Without him life was not a life … it was a sentence, a punishment for not being there that day.  Counselling was given, but it seemed like there was no way Lucy could greet the day with anything other than dread … dread that she had awoken and another day stretched before her.  She lacked the courage to do anything about this, knowing that she couldn’t despoil her mother’s happy place, nor put further trauma on those she called her family.

The summer passed into autumn, her birthday was ignored, the Larkhams still at a loss as to how they could bring Lucy back to life, all the while fearing that the winter ahead would be the hardest, darkest time.  On a Wednesday in early June, Dahlia cautiously entered Lucy’s cottage calling softly “Morena Beanie, time for coffee!”  

To her surprise, she found Lucy’s bed empty and made.  “Good girl, and where are you?” she thought to herself … hoping that this was the turning point they’d all been hoping for.  But Lucy was nowhere to be found.  Everything in the cottage was spic and span, dishes put away, cushions plumped up and in place.  The usual sprawl of magazines and books had all been tidied away. The place was immaculate.  Further investigation showed that a few clothes and Lucy’s well-worn day pack were gone.

There was no note, but also no evidence of foul play.  Dahlia rang the local police later in the day and a discreet investigation by them gleaned the information that a Lucy Joy Jordan had passed through Christchurch Airport Customs and departed New Zealand on Air France Flight NZP 853 bound for Paris via Kuala Lumpur.

For Lucy, the succeeding two and a half days passed in a torture of uncomfortable hours in cramped cattle-class aircraft seats and confused periods in airport terminals.  All the while, her focus remained clear … she would soon be with Matt and all the resulting procedures and protocols would be handled by NZ Embassy staff.  She didn’t know the who or the how, she just knew it wouldn’t be her loved ones.  There would be a remoteness that would cushion the pain.

The Eiffel Tower, La dame de fer, was everything she thought it would be … a stunning monument from the nineteenth century, a towering structure of steel pointing to the sky … maybe pointing the way to her Matt.  The entry fee was staggering, but Lucy thought of this as her last payment.  She hadn’t thought that there would be as many people as there were.  She was also alarmed to find safety barriers at every level, and a complete protective enclosure over the top viewing area.  This was the final straw and breaking into tears Lucy slid to the ground and hugged her knees, shuddering with the emotional release.

“Excusez-moi mademoiselle, puis-je vous dire un mot s'il vous plaît?“

An elegant middle-aged woman stood before, offering an encouraging hand to help her to her feet then move with her to a bench seat.

“I’m sorry, I only speak English.” Lucy muttered through her sobs.

“C’est bon, I speak English also.  I am sorry to find you so distraught.  I am ‘oping to bring some ‘appiness into your life.  I followed you across the concours and up all the stairs.  My name is Mimi and I ‘ave a proposal for you.  I ‘ave a model agency for what you might call ‘body parts’.  My top model for derriere shots is ‘finished’ … too old.  You can see my portfolio ‘ere.  We specialise in shoulders, necks, legs and derrieres.  My sister represents feet and hands.  Please look!”

To be polite Lucy wiped away her tears and looked through the proffered portfolio.  There were hundreds of shots of the afore-mentioned body parts from numerous glossy magazines and advertising campaigns.

“So no naked ones?”

“Non, my cousin Amélie does them.  You can do if you want … but not by me.  If I can teach you to walk with a wiggle though, we can do video also.”

Lucy could only laugh at the ludicrousness of this situation.  This was the first time that she had laughed for nine months and once the stopper was out of the bottle there was no putting it back in.

“I come to the other side of the world to join my Matt, and a strange woman comes up to me offering to pay to take photos of my bum?  Old Ma Larkham would laugh her tits off.”  Lucy blanched at her own crass crudity, knowing that Ma would indeed have given her a good ticking off.  This gave rise to a reflective smile and a warm feeling in her heart..

“You ‘ave a cell phone?  I can give you 10,000 Euro now by transfer as a sign of good will, and tomorrow we sign a contract … yes?”

This was so far from forestry work up a valley at the top of the South Island.  Lucy could only shake her head and muse.

“Maybe it is serendipity!  Maybe it is meant to be?  Do you have a sports car?”