Love, Charlie Mike

by Kate de Goldi

‘Church.’

  ‘—church. The golf club. But how do we know where she would’ve gone with Whateverhisnamewas?’

  ‘We should find out where she and Pops went when they were, you know … courting.’

  ‘But it’s not really about Pops.’

  ‘She might have gone to the same places.’

  ‘The trumpet shall sooooound …’ Dad was hunched over on the floor now, doing The Cat. I stared at him, trying, as I had for some weeks now, to conjure up a similar face and body for our faceless, disembodied, alleged grandfather. But, as usual, I could only ever see Pops in my mind’s eye — small and lithe, like Dad. Dark, heavy browed, beak nosed. Like Dad. Or so I’d always thought.

  ‘We need to do more research,’ said Finn. ‘Ask Mum stuff.’

  ‘Yeah, but subtly.’

  ‘Subtle is my middle name.’

  ‘The biggest worry,’ I said slowly, watching Dad, stock-still now on one leg, his hands together as if in prayer, elbows high, his left foot planted on his right knee, making an elongated sideways triangle of the leg, ‘the biggest deal will be getting the car down the drive. I’m no good at reversing.’

  ‘No worries,’ said Finn, Gavin style. ‘Peeceapiss.’

  Dad was reading a tennis book now, while he maintained the stork position. Playing blind, said the title in white lettering. Fluorescent green tennis balls leaped off the cover towards the startled eye.

  Finn laughed indulgently.

  ‘Tragic,’ I said, no patience at all, imagining holding up one of those bright green balls, taking careful aim, sending it on an unerring trajectory, straight to Bob Callaghan’s bulging family jewels.

  Dear Sonny, I wrote. It’s the usual circus here. For some reason Gran thinks it’s Lent and refuses to eat meat. Mum’s worried about her iron intake and got shitty with me when I suggested it wouldn’t be so bad if Gran withered away through lack of protein. Dad is trying to make us all come to the next Interclub doubles. He’s going to smash the opposition into tiny pieces, apparently. Think I’ll give it a miss.

  You may think the Balkans is crazy but believe me it’s got nothing on 99 Locksley Ave. Speaking of the Balkans I heard a guy on the radio the other day say that just when you think you’ve got it all sorted out, understood all the alignments and factions and ethnic divisions, you hear something new and realise that you basically know nothing. Should I give up on Why Bosnia? I hope you’re okay. I miss you, Love, Charlie Mike XXXX

  ‘What, may I ask, are these?’ said Gran, poking at her dinner with great distaste.

  ‘Mussels,’ said Mum.

  ‘Full of iron,’ said Dad bossily. ‘Eat up.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Gran, ‘Madam does not like mussels.’ She dug round in the tomato sauce with her fingers, picked up a large orange specimen and examined it closely. ‘It is exactly like female genitalia. Revolting.’

  ‘I can’t go on,’ said Dad, pitching forward onto the table in his usual melodramatic way. ‘It’s all very well for you guys to laugh, but think how it feels for a man to hear his own properly uptight mother compare green-lipped mussels to pudenda. It’s not right.’

  ‘Try and see the comedy,’ said Mum, picking out the mussels from Gran’s sauce.

  ‘Tragi-comedy,’ said Dad. He eyed Gran so mournfully I almost felt sorry for him.

  ‘I don’t like eye-tie food,’ grizzled Gran. ‘They’ve all got ghastly breaths, those Italians, stinking of garlic. And they snuggled up to Hitler—’

  ‘Just changing the subject a little,’ said Finn, his mental equipment practically audible, ‘we were trying to remember what number the house at Ferry Road was?’

  ‘I’ll say no to dessert, thank you,’ said Gran, pushing back her chair. ‘Not in Lent.’

  ‘It’s not bloody Lent!’ shouted Dad.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Gran, ‘I don’t know who you are, but I don’t like your tone of voice. Or your language. I shall be in my room. I’m expecting a taxi.’

  ‘Ferry Road?’ said Finn tentatively, after a long silence. ‘What number was it again?’

  ‘Who gives a shit?’ said Dad. He was slumped, whey-faced. Mum reached over and stroked his back.

  ‘Whanau,’ said Finn. ‘Whakapapa.’

  ‘Something to talk about, you know,’ I said, trying to help him, trying not to look at Dad’s stricken, face. ‘With Gran. Common ground.’

  ‘You know,’ said Dad, looking at Mum. ‘It’s so weird when she does that — it’s like I’m twelve again, getting a bollocking. The voice.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mum.

  ‘Don’t think I’m not grateful to you kids,’ said Dad, pushing away his dinner. He stood up. ‘Think I’ll go and have a hit.’

  ‘So?’ said Finn, when the door had closed.

  ‘It was two hundred-and-something, I think,’ said Mum. Her head was in her hands, her voice muffled. ‘250, 252? Opposite the Edmonds factory, anyway.’ She sighed and laughed and sighed again. ‘Deepest Woolston. Not Gran’s style at all.’

  I stalled the car twice in the driveway. But after that, really, I was a credit to my teacher.

  ‘You’re doing ace,’ said Finn generously, as I executed a smooth turn from Avonside Drive into Fitzgerald Avenue. At first I treated the car — a Honda Civic — as if it were unfired clay, ready to crumble, but by the time I’d negotiated the lights down Fitzgerald Ave, nine, all red, and turned into Ferry Road I felt quite sharp. At the Nursery Road intersection I tooted imperiously at a Nissan which failed to move on the green light.

  Gran was delirious with pleasure at being on the road, avec suitcases. She was bright eyed and smiling, sounding quite normal — pointing out trees, garden plants, house styles, all her old preoccupations.

  ‘There’s Lancaster Park!’ she said, stabbing the backseat window. ‘Bert spent the entire summer there. I had to send Bobby down with homemade lemonade — if it was hot — or tea and Madeira cake. Bert was rather partial to my Madeira cake.’

  Bert? My foot came off the pedals with a jolt and the car wavered, coughing.

  ‘Bulls-eye,’ murmured Finn, twirling his earring nervously. ‘Four minutes and they hit pay-dirt.’ His eyes were wide and startled. ‘The road,’ he said. ‘The road.’

  I tried to concentrate on the car and the traffic but my coordination had gone awry.

  ‘I always made lemonade in the summer,’ said Gran, unaware of any driving glitches, wandering happily exactly where we’d led her. Down Memory Lane. ‘So much nicer than the bottled rubbish. I put it in a thermos and Bobby got on his bike and pedalled down to the park with it and delivered it to Bert. He always sat on the Terrace. And he always took egg sandwiches. With salad cream and chives. The salad cream recipe was in the English Countrywoman’s Kitchen—’

  ‘Not the prehistoric cookbook,’ groaned Finn.

  ‘—no use to them, with rationing. It was all marge and ersatz meat and how to preserve eggs.’ She stopped and I signalled left, looked for a space at the kerb.

  ‘I forgot,’ I said, remembering now. ‘They knocked down the Edmonds Factory.’ We stared at the remains of the Edmonds baking powder empire: the well-schooled beds of the Memorial Gardens.

  ‘Good thing, too,’ said Gran. ‘Couldn’t abide that place, all the comings and goings, the smoke, the smells. Couldn’t wait to leave it behind me—’

  ‘Bert,’ mouthed Finn. ‘Ask her about Bert.’

  ‘Edmonds Memorial Gardens,’ read Gran. ‘Well, I must say, he’s done a jolly good job.’

  ‘Who’s done a jolly good job?’ I said, holding up my hand to stop Finn speaking.

  ‘Bert.’

  Of course.

  ‘Poor old Bert,’ she said. ‘He was so upset when we shifted.’ Was her face softer, remembering? Her voice tender? ‘He cried. Great big blobby tears. I nearly cried myself, but I knew it was the best thing. Much better for Bobby.’

  ‘Why didn’t Bert go too?’

  ‘Too far away from work, and he only had a bike. A
nd it was just a business arrangement, let’s face it.’

  ‘Business arrangement?’ I squeaked. He paid her? Finn looked outraged.

  ‘I was really very fond of Bert,’ said Gran, her voice trailing off. ‘Why have you stopped, dear? We’ll be late. Time waits for no man.’

  ‘Look,’ said Finn, pointing across me to the other side of the road. ‘It’s gone too.’

  ‘What’s gone?’ said Gran, frowning, turning her head this way and that. ‘What’s gone? Where’s it gone?’

  There was no longer a two hundred-and-something Ferry Road. Or, to be exact, there was no worn, peeling villa, no broken stone path and diseased standard roses. No sinewy wisteria and red corrugated roof. No magnolia bush and rowan tree. Two hundred-and-something was now a levelled, shaven quarter-acre, a concrete building-in-progress.

  ‘Probably a shop,’ I said, very mournful. My family’s history was being erased, piece by piece, before my eyes.

  ‘Bush-nell Builders,’ read Gran, looking where we were looking. ‘I knew Bushnells. They went to St Peters. They were over—’

  ‘Bert!’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Bert,’ said Gran. Incredible. She’d responded to a normal cue. Finn was holding his breath. I sat very still, feeling distinctly short of air myself. ‘He was a walking Wisden.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You mean, I beg your pardon?’

  Yes Gran, I do, I do, I’ll play it your way, absolutely. ‘I beg your pardon, Wisden?’

  ‘Cricket statistics,’ said Gran. ‘He could spout litanies of cricket statistics — English county, test series, Ashes, on and on like a broken record, drive you to distraction.’

  ‘Bert who?’ I said, risking a direct question. ‘What was his surname again?’

  ‘Willard,’ said Gran, ‘Albert Willard, but Bert to his friends.’

  ‘Albert Willard. Bert Willard,’ muttered Finn, experimentally. ‘Sounds like a cricketer.’ I could hear him thinking: Finn Willard. Bob Willard. Christy Willard …

  ‘He didn’t play. Except in the back yard with Bobby, after work. He was very good to Bobby really, took him to the cricket, helped him with his arithmetic. He was a marvel with numbers, quite extraordinary. Bobby used to ask me how that was. How come? he’d say and I’d say, Just one of those quirks of nature, who knows how the mind works—’

  Indeed.

  ‘—and he was such a handsome boy, too—’

  Boy?

  ‘—thick wavy fair hair and blue, blue eyes—’

  Finn and I exchanged slow, wary glances with our baby-blue eyes.

  ‘You’d never have known just looking at him.’

  ‘What’s that, Gran?’ I said, looking at her in the rear-vision mirror. ‘What wouldn’t you have known?’ This is where she’d lose the plot, the thread, the important bit, I just knew it.

  ‘That he was simple,’ said Gran. The word simple bounced over the seat and banged me on the head.

  ‘Simple?’ I said stupidly.

  ‘Simple,’ said Gran.

  ‘How do you mean simple?’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ said Finn, an hysterical edge to his voice. ‘Not the full quid. Two buns short of a picnic. A few planks loose. A mental. A dumbo, a drongo—’

  ‘Simple,’ said Gran firmly. ‘It’s not nice to use words like that. It’s much kinder to say simple. I always said simple.’

  ‘Oh, brilliant,’ I said, doing a Dad, falling forward, drumming my head in a slow, comforting rhythm on the steering wheel. ‘Absolutely brilliant.’

  ‘No,’ said Finn. ‘Sorry and all that, but it’s the total opposite of brilliant.’

  Chapter Four

  Duncan is at it again, reminding us there are sixteen tunnels and a series of high viaducts as we climb the Waimakariri Gorge. ‘Waimakariri meaning, of course, cold waters,’ he says. Of course, I think, staring beadily at Gran, as I have been for the last fifteen minutes, at the sloppy smudge of Copper Fire (Shiseido, birthday present from Mum) on her old thin lips, the uneven dabs of face powder on her mottled cheeks. How about a quick swim, Gran? In the nice, cold Waimakariri?

  ‘What do you really feel about her?’ Finn asked me once in the summer, after a morning of matchless Gran madness. ‘Other than homicidal, that is?’

  ‘What do you think?’ We were on the verandah watching for Gran who’d gone to visit Jess — the only solo venture we permitted. We were making the most of it, playing Dad’s old Beatles records very loud.

  ‘But you know, when she wasn’t nutty, when you were younger and you used to stay with her and stuff. Didn’t she used to take you to things?’

  ‘The Repertory Theatre,’ I said. ‘Southern Ballet.’

  ‘Yeah, cultural things.’

  ‘She bought me nice dresses. And took me to Ballantynes for afternoon tea. I did like all that. And her. I used to like staying there. She let me try on all her earrings and lipsticks.’ I thought of the big walnut dressing table in Gran’s Fendalton bedroom, the wooden jewellery box and embroidered brush-and-comb set, the bottles of perfume. ‘I used to like the way she smelt, sort of talcum powdery and perfumey. And she had lovely undies and petticoats and things—’

  ‘She had that crystal bowl by the telephone,’ said Finn. ‘And it always had malted barley sugars in it.’

  ‘I used to help her get her Bridge lunches ready. Little triangle sandwiches and lamingtons and those classic salads—’

  ‘—with grated cheese and eggs done with that slicer thing. And the lettuce all shredded.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  We were quiet for a while, thinking about those classic salads.

  ‘You just don’t know stuff when you’re little,’ said Finn. ‘Like, I used to think Jonathan’s father was so funny, but now I realise he’s a fuckwit.’

  ‘Those Bridge ladies,’ I said slowly, searching for the essence of it. ‘They were like Gran. They made a fuss of me, and I liked their nice clothes and hairdos and jewellery. But the stuff they said, I mean, now … well, it’s bad enough her being out to lunch, but—’

  ‘You mean the what’s-wrong-with-apartheid number?’ said Finn. ‘Cushla! There’s a Maori in the house! And poor people have only got themselves to blame.’ He was warming to it. ‘Working mothers are a disgrace. Indians are sly. Greeks smell. The Chinese — what do the Chinese do?’

  ‘You can never tell what they’re thinking. It’s awful,’ I said glumly. ‘But because she’s got dementia, it sort of lets her off the hook. She drives me crazy—’

  ‘But?’ said Finn.

  ‘But.’ I thought for a long time, looking out to the river. ‘Sometimes … Like …’ I sighed. ‘One time I went into her bedroom, with a cup of tea or something. It was night, she was in bed and she had a short-sleeved nightie on — that lemon-coloured one with the ruched shoulders—’

  ‘—ruched?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. She was sort of propped up on her pillows with her hands behind her head, staring into space, like she was thinking, or dreaming. And you could see the underside of her arms and her bare elbows.’

  I stopped, picturing it, Gran’s room with the flowered curtains, the framed photograph of Dad at his graduation, the crucifix above the bed, the television on the trolley at the end of her bed, the stack of gardening books which she never opened now, and Gran herself, in the middle of her three-quarter bed, her hands clasped behind her head.

  ‘Her arms were all white and soft and the way she had them behind her head was sort of, I don’t know, sort of girlish, I suppose. Vulnerable. And she gave me this nice smile and said, “Hello, dear,” and I suddenly remembered how she used to read me The Cow That Fell Into the Canal and make me boiled eggs with hats on and pikelets with golden syrup. And then I remembered that she’d had a hard time with Pops and brought Dad up mostly by herself. And now at the end of her life she’s kind of crazy, etcetera etcetera. I just wanted to cry, or kiss her, or something,’ I said. ‘I felt all loving and tender towards her like I hadn’t for ye
ars.’

  There she was now, at the gate, escorted home by Jess, who carried one of the suitcases. They stood, heads close, talking.

  ‘Course,’ I said, tough again, watching Finn watching Gran wave Jess goodbye, ‘Ninety-nine per cent of the time I just wish she’d croak, leave us in peace.’

  The Waimakariri is sometimes wide and green; sometimes it narrows to a thin stream; but it is always a very long way down. Each time the train emerges from a tunnel, crosses another higher viaduct, the Japanese tourists gasp and oooooh at the length of the drop.

  The Staircase viaduct is the very highest, Duncan tells us. It needs steep fences to protect train traffic from wind. Even so the train shakes and sways as we pass over, and someone in the tour party gives a little shriek.

  Imagine the viaduct breaking open. I see it clearly, the train carriages dropping, higgledy-piggledy, into the cold waters.

  Gran’s life flashes before her eyes, she regains a lucid past and talks quickly, tells me the story of Dad’s paternity. Unfortunately, since we’re plunging to our deaths, the secret dies with us. No, no, the impact and extreme cold kill Gran, but I live, I swim to safety, I’m helicoptered home, I tell Dad the truth. We have a memorial service for Gran and live happily ever after. Sonny comes—

  We hurtle into another tunnel, out again. Duncan indicates the eroding shingle hillside to our left, the sad remnants of a beech forest.

  The elderly remnant in front of me looks cross; she’s listening, purse-lipped and scowly.

  ‘It doesn’t make the diddley-dah sound any more,’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I beg your pardon? What’s diddley dah?’

  ‘It’s what the train should say: Diddley dah, diddley dah, diddley dah. There was a comedy on the radio years ago and the man in it said the train went diddley dah, diddley dah. And I checked, and it did.’

  ‘It didd-ley,’ I say, but she doesn’t get it.

  ‘Typical,’ says Gran.

  Now there are rolling, covered hills, tussock slanting inwards, bowed by centuries of rain and wind.