‘Jesus,’ said Sid. ‘I thought he looked a bit down in the mouth.’
‘Wouldn’t you be?’
‘But, look here, Wally,’ I said, ‘who told you all this?’
‘I heard Marty’s crowd, Jim Fergus and all that lot, talking about it yesterday after the game. And when I was shaving in the bathroom this morning and they didn’t know I was there, I heard Mum telling the old man about it. It was her that told that bit about her not being expected to live.’
We’d got as far as the Civic and turned back by this time and the crowd was getting very thin by now, everybody making for home, feeling much the way I’d been feeling, I expect, that they might as well be in bed as hanging round. Only I didn’t feel like that any more. Things happened, sure enough, and even to people you knew, even to your own family, near enough.
Sid and WaIly kept talking about it all the way back up Tay Street. It was queer the way they seemed to get a sort of pleasure out of discussing it. And what was queerer still was that I liked hearing them talk about it. It must have been partly how old we were and partly the town we lived in. You felt the place wasn’t quite such a dead-alive hole, after all, and you felt you really were grown up when things like that, terrible things but things all the same, happened to people you even knew.
Anyhow, just as we got to the Bank corner, two girls came round it the opposite way and we almost banged into them. While we were dodging around them to let them pass and show what gentlemen we were they cut through between me and Wally and we could hear them giggling as they went on.
‘Sorry,’ Wally called back in an extra-polite voice I hardly recognised, he could put on the gyver so well when he wanted to.
‘Don’t mention it,’ one of the girls said and giggled again.
We stopped at that and Sid made a great show of lighting cigarettes for us while we all had a good dekko back to see what the girls were up to.
‘They’ve stopped in the doorway next the jewellers,’ Wally said. ‘Come on, Sid, here we go. We’re home and dry.’ He was so excited he forgot to pretend I was in on it, too.
The two of them cut back the way we’d come, like a couple of whippets at first and then as they got closer with a sort of elaborate stroll as if they might just as well be walking that way as any other. I followed after them, trying to catch up and yet not to catch up. I knew I ought to have gone away. There was no good just tagging on, being a nuisance. But I kept following, all the same.
‘Hello,’ Wally was saying as I came up to the doorway.
‘Going anywhere?’
‘What’s that got to do with you?’ the girl who had called back to us said.
‘Well,’ Sid said, ‘it’s getting late for girls to be out by themselves with all the roughs there are about this time of night and we thought you might like to have an escort on the way home.’
Sid could always talk well when it came to the pinch, especially if he had Wally with him. I of course couldn’t say a thing, being as nervous as a cat, although I knew already that it didn’t matter much what I did, me being only the spare part.
‘You know what thought did,’ the girl said.
‘Come on, Isobel,’ the other girl said. ‘It’s getting late.’
‘Will you have a cigarette, Isobel?’ Wally said. And he took out his case. It was the one he kept his tailor-mades in, not the one he used for home-rolled ones and butts. In that light you’d have taken it for silver.
‘Don’t mind if I do.’
‘Come on, Isobel,’ the other girl said again.
‘Now, Jean, don’t be an old fusspot. There’s heaps of time really. Why don’t you have a cigarette, too.’
‘That’s right,’ Wally said, and so Jean took one from the case, a bit nervously, I thought.
‘We don’t even know your names, do we, Jean?’ said Isobel when Sid had flourished his lighter for them. You could see them trying to get a look at us while the flame was there. But of course we had our backs to the street-lights and they couldn’t have made out much what we looked like.
‘That’s easy,’ Wally said then. ‘I’ll introduce us. My name’s Wally Radford and this is my friend Sid, Sid Cable. And this is Ned.’
‘He’s a quiet one, isn’t he?’ Isobel gave Jean a nudge and giggled at me.
I tried to think of something very witty to say, the sort of thing that would have come to Wally or Sid in a flash. But I couldn’t think of anything at all and I could feel myself blushing. I hated that Isobel then. It was always the good-looking ones that made me feel most of a fool. The other one, Jean, I didn’t mind so much because I could tell by her way of giggling that she was nervous, too. She wasn’t anything like such a good-looker, though.
There was a bit of a silence then. They were all waiting for me to say something. When I still didn’t say anything I felt them all just give me up. Wally got into the doorway close to Isobel and tried to get his arm round her. She kept fending him off and looking at him and then at Jean in a way that said as plain as a pikestaff: Wait till afterwards when we can get away by ourselves.
Sid was talking a blue streak to Jean so as to give her a chance to get over her shyness, I suppose, and to shut me out of it and make me see I was being the gooseberry, in case I didn’t see it already.
There was nothing to do but leave them to it. I was only holding Wally and Sid back from doing their stuff, hanging round like that.
‘Well, I must be getting along,’ I said.
‘Why don’t you come with us?’ Jean said. Her voice sounded quite scared. But I could tell Sid wasn’t going to get anywhere with her and I wasn’t going to have her use me as an excuse to keep him off and then have him putting the blame on me next day.
‘I’d like to,’ I said, ‘but I live up the other end of the town.’
‘OK, Ned, good night,’ Wally said in an offhand sort of way and Sid said good night too, in the friendly voice he always used when you were doing something he wanted you to do. That was one of the things Sid liked about me, that I always did the expected thing. It wasn’t one of the things I liked about him.
So I set off by myself up towards the Bank corner again, feeling like a motherless foal, as the old man would have said. I thought I’d better give them plenty of time to get clear and so I decided I’d walk a few blocks up Dee Street and back again.
The town clock was pointing to nearly eleven by now. All the crowd that’d been in front of the Majestic was gone and Dee Street was as empty as the tomb except for a bobby standing in the library doorway over the other side, just in case there should be a row at the Greek’s, I expect.
Seeing the Greek’s lighted windows gave me the idea of going in for a feed, after all. But it was pretty late and I couldn’t face going in there all by myself, with the blokes eyeing me and guessing what had happened. So I crossed Esk Street and went straight on up.
But it wasn’t nearly so bad being by yourself when the whole street was empty like that and you didn’t have to wonder what people were thinking about you. I quite liked striding along under the shop verandahs as if I were going nowhere in a hurry and listening to my heels hammer on the asphalt and seeing my reflection pass dark on the windows. It was better feeling miserable by yourself and not having to put up a show any more. Or else the kind of show you put up when there was no one but yourself to watch was more convincing.
‘Hullo, Ned.’
I stopped in my tracks and looked round to see where the voice came from. Then I saw him. He was in the same doorway that the sheila had met her bloke in earlier on. He was standing there, all stiff like a sentry, and in that light you’d have thought his eyes were black they were so dark. A Spaniard, he might have been, with the long sideboards halfway down his cheeks and his straight, thin nose, that had never been broken for all the boxing he’d done.
‘Hullo, Marty,’ I said.
He didn’t say any more, just went on looking at me. I didn’t know quite what to do because it struck me it was probably on
ly the suddenness of seeing someone he knew that had made him call out and probably he wished he hadn’t now. Besides, knowing what I did, I felt uncomfortable.
I went up to him all the same, not knowing how to get away without it looking awkward and as if I’d heard about his trouble and was dodging off so as not to be seen with him.
‘Have a cigarette,’ I said and I produced a packet of ten Capstan.
‘Thanks.’
I lit them for us both and when that was over there I was still stuck and unable to think of anything else to say. The only things that came into my head sounded quite hopeless compared with the things he must have on his mind.
‘All the crowd gone home?’ I said in the end, for lack of anything better.
‘Suppose so,’ he answered and took a puff of the cigarette. Then he added in a voice so savage that it gave me a real fright, ‘Who the hell cares what they’ve done? Pack of bastards.’
I didn’t say anything. I was trying to work out what he meant by that. Had they done the dirty on him and talked to the johns? Or was he just fed up with them?
He gave me a look just then, the first time he’d really looked at me since I stopped.
‘You’ve heard all about it, I suppose?’
That stumped me properly. I didn’t want him to get the idea the whole town was talking about him. Especially as that was what they were probably doing. I was scared of him, too. He’d be a bad bloke to say the wrong thing to.
‘Heard about what?’
‘You know.’ He’d guessed by the time I took to answer.
‘About Dulcie.’
There was no good pretending. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘How is she?’
He didn’t answer but he kept on looking at me in the same queer way that he had been looking at me before. And then, as if he’d been sizing me up, he got down to what was on his mind.
‘Look here, Ned,’ he said. ‘What about doing something for me?’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘What do you want me to do?’ My heart was in my boots because I didn’t know much about the law but I felt sure this was going to be something against it.
‘It’s like this. I can’t ring the hospital to see how she is because the johns are there and they keep asking me my name and they know my voice, too. What about you ringing for me?’
‘All right, Marty,’ I said. ‘But what’ll I say if they ask who I am? If I give my name they might come poking about home trying to find out what I know about it.’
‘Say your name’s Eddie Sharp. That’s a friend of her young brother’s and it’d be quite natural for him to ring. Will you do it?’
‘I’ll just see if I’ve got any pennies.’
We walked back towards the Post Office square. But the john was still in the Library doorway and so I told Marty to go back to the place where I’d met him and wait for me there.
The john gave me that hard look that policemen give you but I went straight past him without giving a sign of how nervous I was. It was being so sorry for Marty that made me able to do it, I think.
‘Southland Hospital,’ a woman’s voice answered when I’d got the number.
‘I want to inquire about a patient, Miss Moore, Miss Dulcie Moore.’
‘Will you hold on, please?’
There was a lot of clicking at the other end and I could hear whispering. Then a man’s voice answered.
‘The patient died an hour ago. Who is that speaking?’
I didn’t answer. I just rang off and came out of the phone box.
How was I going to tell him, I kept asking myself as I went back past the john, hardly noticing him this time.
Marty was standing in the doorway, just as he had been the first time.
‘How was she?’
There was nothing else I could do. I came out with it.
‘She died an hour ago.’
He stood there without saying a thing, just looking at me and yet not seeing me. Then he took a deep breath and his chest came out and he stood even straighter.
‘So that’s how it is,’ he said. ‘She’s dead.’
I didn’t say anything. I just stood there, wishing I was anywhere else in the world.
‘If only I’d known,’ he said. ‘Christ, man. I’d have married her a hundred times, kid and all.’
He stopped. His mind must have been going over and over this ground for days.
He gave a laugh suddenly, such a queer, savage sort of a laugh that I jumped.
‘If it’d been twins, even,’ he said.
I had enough sense not to think that I was meant to laugh at that one.
‘And those bloody johns sitting by the bed.’
‘Did she come to?’ I asked.
‘Yes, she was conscious a lot of the time. But she wouldn’t talk, not Dulcie. Not her. She was all right, Dulcie.’
Then there was silence again. I didn’t know what to do or say. It was getting late. They’d have locked the door at home and there’d be a rumpus if they knew what time it was when I came in. How queer it was: here I was in the middle of something that really mattered and worrying about what my mother would say if she heard me climbing in the window.
All the same I wanted to get home. And then I had to admit to myself it wasn’t really that. It was that I wanted to get away from Marty. I think it must have been the first time I was ever with someone who felt as badly as he was feeling.
‘I remember her,’ I said. ‘She was a stunner to look at.’
‘Wasn’t she?’ Marty said. And the way he said it made the tears come into my eyes.
‘Why don’t you walk my way?’ I asked him. If he did that I could be making towards home and at the same time wouldn’t feel I was ratting on him.
‘No, I’m not going home yet,’ he said.
I shuffled from one foot to the other, wondering what to do next and a bit worried what he would do after I’d gone.
‘We always used to meet here,’ he said. ‘In this doorway.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, look here, Marty, I’ve got to be getting home now.’
‘That’s all right.’
I tried to think of some way of saying how sorry I was. But there was no way of saying it.
‘Good night, Ned,’ he said, and then, as I began to walk away, he called out: ‘Thanks for doing that for me.’
So that’s how it is, I was saying to myself all the way home. That’s the sort of thing that happens once the gloves are off. And by the time I’d got to the front gate and opened it with one hand on the latch to stop it clicking and sat on the front verandah to take my shoes off I think I’d taken it all into myself and begun to wake up to how we only kid ourselves we can tell the good things from the bad things when really they’re so mixed up that half the time we’re thinking one thing, feeling another, and doing something else altogether.
(1949)
J.C. Sturm, ‘For All the Saints’
I hadn’t been working long at the hospital before I noticed Alice. She was the kind of person who stands out right away in any crowd, even in an institution where everyone has to wear a non-descript uniform. At first I thought it was her Maori blood—she was at least halfcaste—but there were several other Maoris on the staff and a few Raratongan girls too, so that colour didn’t really make much difference unless someone started a fight, and even then the important thing was not the kind of person you were but what side you belonged to. I never could make up my mind until it was too late. But to get back to Alice. If it wasn’t colour, I decided, it certainly wasn’t glamour either that made her so notable, far from it, though some might have thought her handsome in a dignified statuesque kind of way. She was a tall heavily-built woman, round about the thirty mark, though it was hard to guess her age, with smooth black hair drawn tightly back into a bun, and a smooth pale olive skin that never showed the slightest trace of make-up. Over the usual blue smock we all had to wear, she wore a long shapeless gown, always spotlessly white, and just showing her lisle stockings and black
button-up shoes. From what I could make out, her work was like her uniform, scrupulously clean and neat, and done quietly and methodically without any fuss or bother, in spite of the first cook who would have hustled an elephant. She was the kind of woman boss who is happiest cracking a stock-whip. But even after I had noted these details about Alice, and the deliberate way she moved about the kitchen, seldom smiling and never joining in the back-chat with the porters, I still wasn’t satisfied. I felt there was something else I couldn’t recognise or understand because I had never met it before, some indefinable quality that made her quite different from the rest of us.
I was a servery-maid in the nurses’ dining-room, and my chores often took me across the corridor to the main kitchen where Alice worked. I made overtures whenever I got the chance, offering to help lift things I knew she could manage quite easily by herself, smiling and nodding, and generally getting in her way. Nice day, I’d say, or going to be hot again, but never a word back did I get. Sometimes she’d respond with a grunt or a smile or a scowl, but most times she would just walk away, or worse still, wait silently for me to move on. This went on for several days, but Alice wouldn’t be hurried; she had her own way of making introductions.
One morning I went as usual to collect several big enamel milk jugs from the freezer outside the kitchen door—this was my first job every day—and I was just reaching for a jug when clump, the heavy door slammed shut behind me. I put the jug down very carefully. Keep still, someone shouted inside me, as every muscle in my body threatened to batter me against the four inches of thickness, don’t move, keep still! I waited till the shouting had stopped, and then I very gingerly approached the barrier and tapped on it timidly like a guilty child outside the headmaster’s office. Are you there? squeaked a voice I didn’t recognise, as though it were using a telephone for the first time. It’s me here, can you hear me? I waited several lifetimes for the answer that didn’t come, then turned away slowly like the lion on the films. Jugs, I thought dully, looking at a wall of them, nice useful harmless things jugs. But at that the whole shelf began to slant and sway drunkenly. I’m at a party, dozens of people around me, talking and laughing and singing and shouting and dancing and stomping to hot boogie woogie. I strained my ears to catch the sound. Drip went a drop of icy water on the concrete in front of me. Now we’re all sitting on the floor round a blazing orange fire, eating steaming savs and drinking hot hot coffee and playing a quiet sort of guessing game. I concentrated on a large wooden box against the far wall. How many pounds of boxes to a butter, no no, how many pounds of—the door swung open slowly behind me, and I crawled back to life and warmth and sanity. Alice was propped up against the kitchen door, tears rolling down her face, and shaking so much with laugher I thought her head would fall off.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 68