by Greg McGee
After quite a few cans of beer Tony’s wife Jaclyn — call me Jackie — blonde, with a low-cut dress that revealed a sun-damaged sternum, told her between burps and in ‘total confidence’ that it didn’t matter how long the marriage lasted, and ‘knowing what Nick got up to before he left town’ she ‘wouldn’t put the house on it lasting’, Clare would never be accepted into the family. She’d always be ‘a skip’.
‘Skip?’
‘Skippy the Bush Kangaroo?’
Clare was none the wiser.
‘White trash, that’s what they think,’ Jackie said.
Renzo offered to wait at the Continental while she got her things together. In her room, she took off the silly authoritarian suit and brogues, which she knew she’d never wear again, changed into jeans and a loose top that she’d brought from home, and a warm cardigan.
There was another instruction she’d ignored.
You should read it. There’s no excuse for what happened, but there is an explanation, though lawyers always say that. And after so much time and so much pain, maybe something good can come out of you knowing what happened back then.
He was referring to a third manila file in his old briefcase, the one she’d seen him reading when they were having their coffee that first morning in Campo Santo Stefano. It was much older than her matrimonial property file, and her father had written 1976 in crude black marker pen at the top right. It was heavy in her hands.
Maybe something good can come out of you knowing what happened back then. She was afraid of the unknown, she didn’t need any more pain and anguish. She remembered the reunion at San Pietro, when they’d all sung ‘O che bea Venezia’ and her strong feeling that beneath the tears and laughter there was something melancholic, perhaps even tragic, that she hadn’t understood.
Now her father was asking her to confront it on her own. Well, she wouldn’t. She’d read it to him, every word. She had to do something as she sat there in the chair beside his bed, waiting for the possibility that he would wake. And even if he didn’t wake, Signor Abruzzi said he might be able to hear her. If he recognised his own words, and her voice, he might want to respond.
She packed an overnight bag with toiletries and a bigger jersey that she could use as a pillow if she needed to. And a box of tissues, because whatever happened overnight there was only one possible end to this.
31
They’d shifted him out of intensive care into the room with the flowers and placed a comfortable chair beside the bed. No oxygen now, no monitoring machines: the one tube was connected to a little cylinder beside him on the bed, a syringe driver, Signor Abruzzi called it, which delivered a slow, steady supply of analgesic. To begin with, she thought it wasn’t him lying there. He didn’t fill out the sheets or look as tall as her father should have. She’d have liked him to look peaceful but the illness had eaten the flesh from his face too, and he looked as beaky as a bird and wracked, even though drugged and unconscious. The rampaging beasts of the Serengeti were silent. When she put her cheek close to his, his breathing was so soft and shallow it might have been imagined, like the sound of butterfly wings. She laid her palm on his forehead to check he was still warm. Oh Dad.
There were venetian blinds at the window, and through the slats she could look at the tops of the trees and imagine that under them wasn’t a carpark. There’d been no kiss from Renzo this time and no flights of physicist fancy. He’d just asked if she had his card — she did — and to ring him when . . . well, whenever.
She got herself settled in the chair, took a deep breath and opened the file. It now seemed like a silly idea to read it aloud. The quietness in the room, apart from the hum of the hospital around her, was intimidating. But she had only one plan and if she didn’t stick to it she was lost. She looked at the first sentence or two and was dismayed. It was so full of typos that it looked like a different language. Maybe she’d need to translate it before she could read it. She’d try.
* * *
May 6, 1976.
I wonder if this hqppened to He?ingzay. I got carried awqy in Paris, drinking rough red at the Polidor, ?aybe qt the sqme table as Ja?es Joyce and on the way back to the flea-pit in the Buci I bought a portable Olivetti Valentine, with its ozn plqstic shell in tomato red. It’s great, apart from the fqct thqt it zon’t fit in my pqck so I have to carry it by hand. Looking like a pretentious zqanker may be the lesser of the proble?s: the bloody thing’s got an Itqlian or French keyboard, so every ti?e I try to hit a, I get q, and for z I get w and vice wersa and m isn’t where it should be, I keep getting a comma or a question mark, and when I go for a colon or a semi, I get m. I’m just a two finger hunter and pecker, but when the thoughts are rqcing, I’ll be buggered if I’m going to be stopping and correcting every second zord — maybe I’ll do some tzinking later. I’m just going to hqve to roll with it until I get the hqang of this keyboqrd. At leqst I knoz whqt I ?ean. Heminzay was a journo, so he would have brought his own Imperial. Smqrt ?an!
I’? sitting in Sthe dunny of a very slow, very full trqin between ?ilan and Padua, where I chqnge for Treviso qnd then I’ve got to find a train going north ot Gemona. There were no seats left whenI got on, there wasn’t even standing room in the cqrriage proper, we were saueezed in like bloody sardines in the area outside the dunnies at the end. The stations and the trains are full of soldiers, conscripts I guess, going to and from their bqses. Some of them seem about fifteen, too young to shawe, but they sit amongst the people, no big deal, just like the ?ilitary jets that cross-cross the sky with vapour trails. You get a sense here thqt the cold war zouldn’t take a lot to heat up.
There wasn’t even room to put my pack down, so I looked across at the dunny and thought there’s no chance of anyone fighting their way in there. I didn’t get the seat I paid for, but I’ve got a seat. Times like this, I’m thinking I’ve made a terrible mistake. My mates left London this month on the cultural failure trail — running the bulls inPamplona, down through France, Italy, Greece, and hospitalised in Munich after the October Beer fest. Sounds attrqctive, particularly from the perspective of the shitter in a slow train fro? Milan to Padova. Maybe I’ll meet up with them later, but I’ve got something to do first and I only get one shot at this. I’ve got nine ?onths left before probate of my father’s will comes through and then I’ll have to farm the farm or sell it.
I’m trying not to sweat about that, but keep thinking about what I owe my father. It ?ight be unfair on him, but I keep coming back to two imqges. The first wqs when I was ten years old. I’d been sent to boarding school over Mum’s protestations, or la?entation, she never stood a chance with Dqd. He’d gone to Waitaki, so I had to follow him. I was a solitqry child, used to being on my own on the best part of a thousand acres with a fqther who said nothing and a ?other who filled every second with words. I didn’t have to say much to either of them.
Anywqy, when I came home from boarding school thqt first year, I couldn’t wait to do what I was used to doing. Tqking Sheba the Jack Russell out across the hills for a wander and a gander, see what we could find. Sheba — named by Mum because Dad was always asking her who the hell she thought she was, the Queen of Sheba? — was a great rabbiter. She couldn’t get the fully mature ones but she could get the younger ones before they reached their burrows. They’d be dead in an instant. Even the first time she chqsed a rabbit and caught it — she must have been barely 12 months old — she knew how to kill it. She got her teeth into the bqck of its neck and shook it and it was dead. How did she know that? We’d bought her as a pup when Dad zas pissed qfter a good day at the Waiareka stock sqles, so she hadn’t learnt it from her mother or father.
Sheba and I were working our way across the hils and they seemed to meet the sky and there was no bullies there to chivvy me or punch me. The farm is full of limestone formations, great craggy cliffs and caves where Sheba and I spent a lot of time pretending we were the Maoris who once lived there and
left drawing s of animals and stuff. I’d light fires in winter and pretend I never had to go home. This day, it was the winter term break so it was bloody cold, the sou- wester coming up over the Kakanuis. I had no idea where Dad was, he’d left the house early as he used to do, and I’d wait in bed until I heard hi? coughing qnd spluttering on his first fag of the day as he headed over to the implement shed. I guess Dad was used to having the farm to himself since I went off to boarding school, because he was making a hell of a noise. I didn’t reqlise it was him at first. There’s these two huge crags of limestone poking out of the pasture on the far side of the farm. I called them the Moon Man, because it looked like a giant had dived off the ?oon and plunged head-first into the earth. All that was left of him were his feet, soles up to the heavens where he came from and a bit of his ankles holding them up. Sheba heard the noise first and started that low growl which meant she wasn’t sure. I shooshed her and we went round the side of the slope tozards the sound. It was him, Dad, standing on top of one of the giant’s soles. He was facing north, arms wide like one of Mum’s opera singers, but there was no beauty in the sound he was making, only the most godqwful pain and misery. Howling.
I told myself to turn away, but kept watching. After a while he began coughing, like the noise he’d made had hurt his throat, and he bent forward and put his hands on his knees. Then he fell onto his hands and knees and laid his head against the rock. His face was turned away from me, east towards the valley and the sea, but I coul;d still hear the sounds he was making.
I didn’t ask myself then what had reduced him to this. I’d been sort of afraid of him all my life and part of me hated him. Maybe I got that form Mum. I can;t describe all that I felt, but some of it was disgust. He was always the man. I’d seen other men at the footy club and at the stockyards give him deference, hold him in a kind of awe. I’d sensed form very young that Harry Spence was a someone in the district. To make such a spectacle of yourself. What if someone had seen him in his weakness? But now I wonder what ailed him. What could possibly have happened to him to wring him out like that?
I grabbed Sheba and held her to relax her, petrified that Dad would see us and be furious in his shame. This was a man who said virtually nothing, who had no friends that I knew of, who seemed locked into himself. The way he was killed Mum, for sure. She was a big woman, with desperately happy eyes, who loved opera. Dad was in Italy in the war and reckoned he spoke a bit of Italian, though he never did in front of us. But every time Mum put her opera on the gramophone in the lounge, Dad would tell her if he was around that it sounded okay until you understood the words those people were yodelling. Mum stqpped playing it when he was in the house.
The other thing I remember was when I was at Otago doing law, must have been my second year, or later. Anyway the Vietnam Wqr was in the news all the time, and the footage on the tv was awful. Down in Dunedin, there’d been a protest march against the war and I watched them go down George Street and thought if there’s another one, maybe I’ll join them. Then I went home for the holidays and we were sitting there watching the news on Channel One which we always did and there was more footage from the war. I could tell Dad was interested, because he stopped sipping his whisky to watch it. I made some kind of anti-war remark. It wasn’t so much anti war as just expressing some pretty cliched doubts about whether the Yanks should be there or whatever. ‘You want the Commies here, boy?’ he said. ‘You happy to see tanks with the red star coming down that driveway?’
He left the room and I knew I’d really pissed him off. I wqnted to ask him what he’d seen in his war that made him fear the Commies, but you wouldn’t dare ask Dad anything really, except how to do something on the farm, when he’d tell you or show you once, then say every time ‘You might make the odd mistake, boy, but never make the same one twice.’ I never did. But I mqde a big mistake that time, in front of the tv. Mum went through to the kitchen to finish putting the dinner on the table and I was going to give her q hand, when Dad must have come back into the room from the door to the hallway. I didn’t know he was there, until I felt my arm twisted behind my back and his other hand at my throat. It was grip like a vice and I was helpless even though I was playing senior club rugby for the As and he was full of emphysema. His body was vibrant behind me, I could feel his hard power, and his whisky breath in my ear. ‘You’re deqd,’ he whispered. ‘You’re fucken dead.’
And fuck me, I would have been. I’d blacked out in a second and found myself lying on the floor and he’d gone. He didn’t turn up to dinner and Mum and I made the most of his absence and I didn’t tell her anything because I was too freaked to know where to start. This wasn’t the rage I’d seen before, like the time he broke a ewe’s back when she baulked going up the race. This was. I don’t actuqlly know what it was.
I don’t remember him always being like that. He was still playing rugby when I was little and I could see the other men looked up to him. He was liked, made them laugh, but something was eating him and it got worse as he got older, though it was always there. We found a lamb once that had its eyes eaten out by a hawk, so it could get into its brain. Dad looked up at the crags and saw him watching us, waiting to fly down and have another go. Dad hqd his rifle, could have shot it, but told me that the hawk was the perfect predator. That you could raise it from a baby with chickens and a mother hen and it would kill them all as soon as it was old enough. That you could train hawks to hunt for you like falcons, but they wouldn’t know you or relate to you if you’d had them for ten years or twenty. And that they never grew old, they hunted with the same muscle and sinew till the moment they fell dead out of the sky. The emphysema was getting to him by then.
I didn’t come home much after he tried to strangle me. I came for Mum’s funeral of course a year later. Breast cancer. They say they don’t know the cause but that cancer was Dad. He ate away at her spirit until there was nothing left. It was qs if he was punishing her for something, but god knows what she could have done to deserve him. By then he was an emphysemic wreck, and probably qn alcoholic, and when he died a year later, there were bugger all people at the Tokorahi church. The locals came, though he didn’t mix with them any more, even his old Union rugby club mates, they came but they had bugger all to say about Harry Spence: that he was a good farmer and a good provider and good husband and father. I refused to speak to those lies, pretended I was too upset.
I didn’t notice the stranger at church, but they had a few drinks in the Memorial Hall after Dad had been put in the ground at Livingstone Cemetery up on the hill, and I saw him then because he came up and introduced himself. He was my father’s age, lanky, balding at the front with grey hair coming through what must have been blonde. He said his name was Arch Scott. He qsked me how ?uch I knew about what Dad did in the wqr. I said bugger all, that he never spoke about it. (Never spoke about it to ?e, anyway. I didn’t tell Arch that I’m pretty sure he never spoke about it to Mum before she died, because they never seemed to have much to say to one another anyway, and he wouldn’t have spoken to it to his ?ates from the RSA because he didn’t seem to have any and never went). I also didn’t tell Arch that while Dad never talked about the war, the war obviously still talked to him. Those two things that had scared the shit out of me, him howling on the Moon ?an that time, qnd nearly killing me in the front room.
Arch may have known more than he was letting on, but what he did say was that my father had been a hero of the Italian resistance movement. Thqt was the first time I’d heard that there was an Italian resistance movement — I’d seen some movies about the French and it all looked kind of exciting cloak and dagger stuff. Arch said he hadn’t had a lot to do with my father, they’d been based in different parts of northern Italy qnd they couldn’t move around much, but that he’d heard stories of my father’s exploits and seen him in action once. When I say Arch might have known more than he was letting on, I mean that he may have sensed or heard about what my father was like after the
war. I’m not sure where he would have heard that, because I don’t think Dad ever once went to the RSA in Itchen Street or did the Dawn Parade with the rest of the veterans down Thames Street. But maybe Arch, if he’d lived a similar life to dad during the war, just knew how fucked up it left some of them. Because I’m convinced that’s what stuffed Dad up. Mind you, Arch seemed such a different kettle of fish. A very wqrm man and generous. He told ?e that he knew my father’s code name had been Rico Zanardi and if I went to the town close to where my father was based, Gemona up in Friuli, and looked for a family called the Zanardis or the Bonazzons, I might learn a lot more about what my father did,
Then Arch let on that he’d seen me before. The Otago University team had played a champions of champions club tournament up in Pukekohe the year before. It was a quadrangular tournament with Petone from Wellington and Lincoln from Christchurch and Manurewa from the Auckland area. Arch said he’d been one of the principal movers behind the formation of the new rugby province, Counties, which played a great brand of rugby and if I ever came north, to look him up, he’d find a team for me. He gave me his address and phone number, then asked if I thought I’d ever get to Italy. I didn’t have any real plans at that stage, but I knew I had a yeqr before probate for my father’s will came through and qt that point I could sell the farm, which meant that I’d have to make a final decision between farming and the law. Maybe I already knew qs I was talking to Arch: that I needed to go and find something redeeming about my father. Maybe Arch could see it in my eyes. Anyway, he took a note of my address at the flqt in Dunedin and said he’d write to me. He shook ?y hand and said he’d have to get back to town to catch the train and left. Two weeks later, a letter arrived, well two letters. The first said that if I was passing a town called San Pietro di Livenza on the way to Gemona, I should drop in there, seek out Aldo’s bar and hand Aldo the attached letter. The attached letter is pretty brief and it’s in Italian, so I’ve got no idea what it says. And it’s signed ‘Arturo’, which must be Arch in Italian.