by Steve Low
Part of me was too frightened to party again. What would I say? Nonetheless, I knew what had released me from introversion on the night of the buck tooth kiss –alcohol. With my heart beat skipping along like a trapped butterfly in a cage, I took an empty cordial bottle from a low lying dusty draw and with stealth took myself to the living room. Graham’s mahogany liquor cabinet was my target. I turned the miniature indwelling key that opened the door of the spirit compartment. In my great haste to fill the bottle, I had little idea of what was going into the mixture – brandy, sherry, whiskey – all of these and more. Up in my room, I scrutinised the liquid in the light of the window. I could see in the swirl of the fluid, the densities and colours of the competing parts. They seemed to be reluctant bed-fellows, these intoxicant liquors. I unscrewed the cap and sniffed at the rising vapours. Astringent on my nasal mucosa, the inhalation induced a sudden sneeze. Undeterred, I tilted the mouth of the bottle to allow a few drops to roll onto my tongue. Volatile, like a relative of ether, the vapour mixture rose into my nose and stung my eyes. I pressed on, squeezing the volume down in small gulps, my eyes firmly shut. Breathless, I again held the bottle up to the light. The level of liquid was reduced by a third. I took one last pull before replacing the plastic screw top. I took my duffle coat from the wardrobe, slipping the bottle into one of its cavernous pockets. I left my room feeling quite unaffected, wondering whether I had taken in enough fluid. However by the time I had reached the bottom of the staircase, a mild feeling of displacement had occurred. I went and sat with Junot at the kitchen table. We were waiting for Andrei and Marcy to turn up with the car. Junot had his hair loosely tied back in a ponytail. He sat, hands on lap, his head bowed forward slightly. He scarcely seemed aware of my presence. And I was being drawn into a similar trance. My mind had the dimensions of a vortex – all my thoughts being sucked down towards a single agreeable contemplative point.
I was dimly aware of voices, perhaps from the hall. There was Julia’s voice fussing, and a dismissive tone from Isobel. These days Isobel appeared far worldlier than Julia. The sound of a car’s horn was our cue to stumble past a dubious Julia, out into the evening. On the street, a back door of the waiting Zephyr slowly swung open. The three of us piled in.
“He’s not coming is he?” Andrei was looking at me over the back-rest of the front platform seat. He was frowning and appeared irritated.
“Oh just get going. He’s harmless,” Isobel said.
“But what about . . .?” Andrei had turned back to face the windscreen. He was looking at Isobel via the rear vision mirror.
“It’s cool dude,” Junot said. “It’s cool man, you can relax.”
Andrei shrugged his shoulders and shifted the gear stick into first. We rocketed off up the street, travelling a short distance before squealing through a tight U turn. I felt a pulse of fear slither through my gut. Accelerating back the way we had come, the house went by in a blur of lights – a shrinking refuge from the nervy night. We travelled around past the docks to Tahunanui Beach. A side road took us into an area of rolling sand dunes behind the beach-front – a place where the moonlight reflected off the chrome bumpers of partially hidden cars. Here, naive young lovers sought anonymity. We were flung off the narrow tar-seal onto wheel tracks across firm sand. Shortly Andrei executed a handbrake turn and we corkscrewed to a halt. The engine was off and all I could hear was a ticking sound from the motor and the heavy breathing of my associates. Junot produced a brown paper bag, dipping a hand inside to find the green weed that it contained. He rolled a few joints. My alcoholic mixture was now paying a handsome dividend. The interior of the car was slowly rotating around me. I had become the axis of a confined visual world. Whether Andrei still felt resentful of my presence, I had no idea. I didn’t care. I was afloat and unfettered by the feelings of others. They passed around the joints and I sucked away in a desultory manner, my youth and inexperience seemingly irrelevant. I was separated from Isobel across the back seat by the sleepy figure of Junot. I felt totally disengaged from her, as though our close relationship of yesteryear had never happened. In my ethereal state it mattered not. I reasoned that our separation was an integral part of growing older – freedom from ties was gospel in this new age of hippie ideals.
We quit our shadowy haunt, our driver at a new level of toxicity, his accelerator foot pumping and withdrawing while the steering wheel spun effortlessly in his hands. Flying clods of sand sprayed the windows, exploding with a soft popping sound, as the Zephyr took on the dunes at various angles of torque. My memory is vague in regard to our subsequent transit to the party. I don’t recall our arrival either. The resurrected blueprint of the night has its beginning some time later. I am standing in the middle of a small patch of lawn between grey squares of boxed garden. The plants are threadbare, leaveless silhouettes, unmoving in the brittle darkness. There is an unnerving stillness in the night air. Around me I am conscious of the other humans. It is they who seem to be the real plant life. An outside bulb attached to a lean-to porch, highlights a shoulder, a facial profile, a head of flowing hair . . . These people sway, a slow lilt, as if massaged by a gentle breeze. This impression of a listless and eerie landscape exists, despite the violent thrust of music that emanates from an invisible source . . .
Who was it? Black Sabbath? Deep Purple? In my returning consciousness, I became frightened. None of my compatriots were with me. I picked my way over towards a yellow square of light that was perhaps a kitchen window. Here, a group of youths stood on a concrete pad, arguing, laughing. At their feet lay many crates of beer, the infusion of their culture – the substance upon which their evening was based. Immediately I recognised Andrei and he turned to see me. I felt myself conjuring up a smile, a facial movement that died on my lips. He looked at me without showing recognition, turning his back to exclude me – a sixteen year old embarrassment on the loose at his party. I sensed my pupils dilating. I made for the photophobic glare of the kitchen, where I skirted around an inert bikie asleep on the lino. On a bedroom floor, I saw the coloured tresses of Marcy splayed across a threadbare carpet. She was laid on her back, staring without focus at the ceiling, while two figures grappled with her exposed arm at their knees. I watch as one formed a tourniquet with his hands. The other one leaned forward, to palpate the pale skin of the elbow crease, his long knotty hair gently stroking the forearm. I saw the lunge of the needle. It bit into its vein, quivering slightly. The tourniquet man looked up at me. His eyes said nothing – perhaps they saw nothing. I turned quickly, back into the hall where a weak nightlight flickered in the ceiling. And in the next room of my choosing, a free-standing mirror, angled on top of a chest of drawers, redirected my gaze upon the final scene. A pair of white buttocks rose and fell, the black leather trousers lowered to the thigh crease. Isobel’s face was turned towards me, her eyes screwed shut. I recognise the shape of a lower leg, where it emerged from beneath the crumpled eiderdown . . .
I stood on the doorstep hyperventilating. However I had little time to contemplate what I had seen. For there was a curious thumping sound in the night, followed by shouts and screams. Someone yelled ‘V8 boys.’ I could see the confrontation in the driveway, the swinging arms of opposing V8s and bikers. Like Peter Rabbit, I escaped through a vegetable patch, crossing a wire fence into the adjoining property. And as I scrambled away, up some dank Tahunanui road, flashing blue lights came swiftly towards me, a methodical column of lawmen intent on breaking up the party.
Silently I made my way across the suburbs, moving swiftly and fearfully beneath the streetlights. It took an hour to get home – to reach the sanctuary of my childhood bed. My brain, bathed by circulating alcohol, infiltrated by gaseous cannabis, was recycling the new imagery. There was Andrei’s irritation with my presence, the miasmic interior of the car in the sand-dunes, the steel needle entering a woman’s vein, the biker with my sister, the thumping of bodies in angry confrontation, and then, the methodical column of police cars, emerging from the haze of the nig
ht, intent on their business.
In the morning there was anger in the house. Junot was in hospital. The shrill telephone ring in the early hours had been the portent of the humiliating news for Graham. His daughter’s boyfriend, revealed to all as a drugged hippie, was horizontal upon the pristine sheets of Nelson’s hospital. Finding him unconscious on the Tahunanui house floorboards, the police had arranged for his removal to the hospital emergency department. There his stomach was lavaged and an antidote to opiate toxicity administered.
Graham’s anger was undirected. Although Junot was young, he was beyond the scope of Graham’s human experience. Graham’s set of rules didn’t bother Junot, they were merely an item of amusement. There was a serenity about Junot which placed him beyond Graham’s intervention. Of course Isobel should have been in the gun – certainly I could have told Graham a story or two about her escapades. But Graham was soft on Isobel. His way of showing this affectation was his inaction to her crimes. Thus it was I who wore his frustration. There was a holler from behind the bathroom door as I cleaned my mossy teeth. “Who the hell said you could go out last night?” he boomed. I grunted, but didn’t change my brush stroke, methodically completing the task in a protective cloak of denial. Graham was like that. I had factored it in.
Junot didn’t wait around long, once consciousness returned. It wasn’t as though he appeared uncomfortable with his position (a freak in a red-neck’s house). He was above all that. Having his stomach pumped in my father’s hospital was a small part of the journey. Likewise, for now, Isobel was to be a small part of the journey. Pretty soon he was gone and I couldn’t help feeling unsettled at the loss.
In the evening after his departure, I crossed the landing and entered Isobel’s room. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, a poor imitation of the lotus position. Her voice was broken and loosely pitched. She was resolute, but transparently in a state of agitation. I strolled casually across to her open window and peered out at the dimming light on the city hills. I figured that in light of Junot’s departure, she wouldn’t be around for long, and I wanted to pump her for information. She had never quite finished that story of Margo‘s. She seemed pleased when I broached the subject, a distraction I’m sure from the near memory of a gypsy, insouciant and smiling, who had held her like a baby before moving on. It seemed I had been so young when she had told me the first part of the story. Now I felt much older, even though it was actually only a few months later. I had kissed a girl! I had been drunk and smoked cannabis. I was a new man of the world. I was beginning to grasp the origins of adult behaviours. Now I wanted answers for the conduct of the adults in my life.
It was the same line of questioning that Isobel had posed to Margot, on that night in the Dunedin restaurant. According to Isobel, Margo had momentarily seemed miles away, her eyes appearing to be on a different plane from her face, the black pupils indistinguishable from the adjacent shadowed irises. Of course from Margo’s perspective, it was the returning memory of the worst moments of her life. The final confirmation – her best friend locked in embrace with her husband, on the narrow arc of a Marlborough Sounds beach. But for myself, and for Isobel before me, Margo was merely a storyteller. The real victims were our parents.
When Margo arrived pale and breathless beneath the boughs of trees overhanging the beach, she marched straight up to Francis. She was aware of Julia in her peripheral vision – a ghostly inert presence. She would deal with her soon enough. At that moment, Francis was physically compromised. For although he was a little taller than Graham, the latter had the bigger grievance and Graham had both his hands wrapped around Francis’s neck. Struggling for breath, Francis had a fistful of Graham’s shirt-front, the arm extended in a bid to keep the smaller man away. Margo paused just short of the pinioned men, bending to the ground to pick up some object that had caught her eye. Julia would describe it later – a flash of light – as Margo flayed Francis’s face. There was only the single stroke, but the rent that appeared in Francis’s face brought everybody up short. It was several inches long, with an ugly ragged edge. Margo stepped back and stared spellbound at the pulsing wound, the hand holding the stone hanging limp by her side.
“I don’t know what made me do it,” Margo told Isobel. “It wasn’t a deliberate decision. By chance I noticed this rock – it was laden with quartz and had a sharp jagged edge . . .”
The flayed face changed all their actions. Graham removed his choking grip and he too stepped backward – his gaze also transfixed by the wound. The expression on his ruddy face had changed to shock.
Behind her, Margo heard a gasp and the sound of feet running into the forest. Julia had gone and Francis (who had palpated the gaping wound and seen the blood on his fingertips) turned to watch her go. It appeared as though he was about to go after her.
“You stay here – I will go with Julia” The words were sharp and authoritative. Without turning to acknowledge Margo, Graham tramped off into the trees, following Julia up to the road.
“I felt gutted, nauseated – as if I might pass out,” Margo said. “I felt terrible about what I’d done to Francis face. But at the same time I was mad with him, and deeply hurt. She walked away from him, along to one end of the beach, beyond the idle-along and the wind gusts screeching through its rigging. The ferocity of the wind was almost therapeutic. She felt herself calming a little. On the edge of her vision, she could see Francis hadn’t moved. He was still watching her from the shadows. He stayed for about five minutes, perhaps waiting to see if she was going to return and speak with him. Then he limped across to the yacht, raised the urgent sails, and clumsily heaved the lurching boat into the waves.
Margo stayed on the beach, watching the yacht healing and slamming into the white caps. For half an hour, she crouched on the beach sobbing. It had been a terrible day. When she stood up to begin the long climb back up to the road, she really had no idea what she was going back to. The other three would likely arrive before her. What were they all thinking? Who would go with whom? Could she forgive Francis? Forgive Julia? Forgive herself? She took a deep breath and plunged into the beech forest.
Captured by the story, I hadn’t noticed a figure appear in the doorway behind me. Isobel had though. She had been facing the door, had seen it slowly opening. Aware that her voice had faltered, I twisted my head around to locate the source of her disquiet. It was Graham. He was peering down his bulbous nose at us, his eyes looking as though they were about to separate from his face. I could see a thrust of pressure hammering up a temporal artery.
“We don’t talk about this subject,” he said. He was looking at Isobel. Then he looked at me. “We don’t ask questions,” he said. “What’s past is past.” With those inadequate statements he turned and left the room.
In the night I lay on my bed, listening to the creaking walls of the house and the groaning of the pepper tree against Isobel’s window. I was down a bit, nothing overt, merely a trickle of tears descending my face. My thoughts were scanning across the three of them – Isobel, Graham and Julia – the indignation of Graham, the resigned smile of Julia, and the fading away of Isobel. I could feel the last few threads holding Isobel and myself together snapping one by one. There she lay, at least I sensed she was lying, only a few metres away, in the dark of her room. I sensed the light was out, I didn’t know. How I longed for the enclosing arms of the girl of ‘66, the girl in the mountain meadow. But that was years and years ago. Now I knew she was slipping away.
In the morning, I didn’t bother getting up. I lay in a mental torpor, a kind of heavy dark cloak wrapped around me. The future looked bleak. It was a future without Isobel. The raised voices downstairs did not impact on me at all. I had expected the consternation, expected the handwritten note . . . expected Isobel gone.
She had tried to soften the blow. It wasn’t Graham or Julia’s fault she had decided to go. Rather, she had been suffocating in the banality of provincial life. She needed to get back to Dunedin – back to her new friends
and the promise of being understood. And she knew that if she hadn’t slipped away in the night, they would have talked her out of it. Julia would have filled her up with guilt, and she wouldn’t have been able to leave.
I hadn’t seen the note straight away. I’d found it a day or so later, stuffed in a kitchen draw amongst an assortment of cookery books. There was no reference to me in the note, just ‘Dear Mum and Dad.’ I stared at the child like scrawl (she wrote in large neat letters), as though it was still warm on the page.
1972, it was the year of To Our Children’s, Children’s, Children. For a while it was my template, a temporary deviation from the Byrds. It was dark, melancholy, mysterious, and cosmic. My copy was scratched and dusty, producing a great deal of background noise as it rotated on the Phillips turntable. I spent my nights and weekends alone, sitting quietly in the shadows or darkness, my eyes drawn to the window where the distant stars sparkled on the inky black sky. The last track was the killer, Watching and Waiting.
Watching and waiting,
For a friend to play with,
Why have I been here - so alone?
That was it in a nutshell. I simply wallowed in the mire. There was no sign of relief on the horizon – not at least until I left school. I began to dwell on that day, the day I would catch the Newman’s Bus for Dunedin. There was never any doubt about where I would be going. Like Richard before me, I was destined for Selwyn College, the Anglican hostel on Castle Street. Despite the sixties’ youth rebellion, I didn’t wish to run away from this predetermined course. I knew the rebellion would occur there regardless – in Dunedin. I’d be going to the hallowed institution, and there I’d rebel. This meek adherence to one of Graham’s plans was partly due to a recent attack of rampant nostalgia. Richard, the brother who had barely touched me when he was around, out of the blue arose to torment me.
In the silence of the home, in the listless shadows of his dusty room, I trawled through his past, scouring the piles of books and papers for a life about which I knew little. It was his life in Selwyn College I sought. I wanted to relive his days, to meet his acquaintances and friends. In my life Richard was something of a mystery. After completing the three preclinical years in Dunedin, he’d gotten an exchange with a student from the London medical school St Marys. When the exchange year was up though, he didn’t return. He’d performed so well they’d asked him to stay on. Graham’s voice box had been pregnant with pride.
The Selwyn College yearbook had everything I required to fuel my interest. It was a soft covered booklet crammed with events and photographs. I stared in a daze at the men who would have populated my brother’s life – a lump as big as a lemon lodged in my throat. Names came up time and time again. Not Richard Davenport so much. The recurring names were of the shakers and movers - the leaders - the colourful personalities. Their names - I can rattle them off even today. Dave Asher, Peter Hallwright, Tim Treadgold, Tom McEwen . . .
The photographs were all in black and white, which added to the mystique. There was a picture of Asher and Treadgold dressed up as female ballet dancers, one of Hallwright during capping week (his expression suggesting inebriation) lying across the front of the Selwyn College float, and one of Tom McEwen singing lustily at the Winter Ball, his free arm draped around a pretty girl from St Margarets. I imagined one of Richard Davenport, his tie partly unravelled, his hair long and dishevelled, a tankard of beer held aloft in triumph – a brand new free spirit. But there wasn’t such an item. There was a short paragraph in the student catalogue intimating a taciturn character who excelled at rugby. So I relied on the likes of Asher, Hallwright, Treadgold and McEwen to construct a picture of what the possibilities were for a vivid life in Selwyn College.
Like Richard, Hallwright and Treadgold had been top secondary school rugby players. I lapped up their efforts in the big match of the year, the Cameron Shield game against arch rivals Knox College. Hallwright was captain and number 8, Treadgold was at second five eighth and Richard was a lock forward. Treadgold was the game-breaker against Knox, busting the midfield to send Wilson away on the wing. There were two photographs. The first portrayed a melee on a touchline. Hallwright was sprawled on his back, rugby boots held aloft like a dead ant, while nearby stood Asher, wrapped in an Otago University scarf, casually sucking on a large beer bottle. I felt my dermis being needled from inside to out. These guys really lived, those few years ago. Those sublime moments – the pranks, the girls, the camaraderie, the attainment of medical school – all now consigned to history. I wallowed in this past, my throat constricted in its vice, my stomach aching with envy. In the second photograph, two girls from St Margarets hammed it up, cloaked in Selwyn College regalia, puffing cigarettes insolently before the cameraman. Beside them was McEwen, dressed in plus fours and top-hat, ostensibly watching the game in a nonchalant fashion. However, he had one arm extended away, the fingers splayed to cup a breast of one of the girls.
A soundtrack played in my head as I wallowed back in 1966. It was the Byrds of course. I was above all a nostalgian. My absorption in the Byrds had always been retrospective rather than contemporary. I indulged in a sound and era of yesteryear, an era that was well over before I had even begun my fixation. Thus I had Asher and company, cavorting about Dunedin to Chimes of freedom, and Eight miles high.
In that contemplative summer of 72, I emerged one day from Richard’s room, my shoulders limp from hours of morbid self indulgence, I drifted into Lord Mutch’s record parlour to once again scour his second hand bin. My searches in the past had been fruitless. This time though, I had an abrupt awakening, my mid afternoon stupor was evaporated – like a needle exploding a pustule. Like Mr Tambourine Man, the cover was largely black. The ‘Byrds’ logo was in a zany psychedelic print. It was Fifth Dimension, the Byrd’s third long-player. Shaking, I gripped it between two sets of fingers. As always, I brought it up to my face, sniffing the glue impregnated cover. I tipped up the sleeve allowing the disc to slide out. The surfaces were worn and dusty and there was a straight line scratch across the middle third of side two. I didn’t bother to investigate the disc’s performance. I would have paid up for the cover alone.
Lord Mutch was unaffected by the transaction. Behind the counter he pocketed the two dollars-fifty and stifled a yawn. What a contrast! His indifference and the mood of the boy standing before him, a youth in a ferment, a skin showered with a thousand pinpricks, lower limbs taut and restless, poised to stride back at pace to the room where his turntable lay.
I already knew some of the songs, since three of them were on my copy of The Byrds Greatest Hits. And Eight Miles High had been a radio standard in 1966. With these songs already absorbed, it was I See You that gripped me first. It had all the ingredients of Byrdsian power – enough to bring me to my knees – minor key melancholy, one-three and one-five harmonies, twelve string production and counterpoint bass. I played it relentlessly. I swooned before its stellar circumstance. I saw my future only in its terms. It again reinforced my vision – that I too was to be a creator of affecting melody and harmony. I saw them – the rest of humanity – the audience – moved to a state of serenity by my own future creations. It was only a matter of time.
Chapter 9