Work in Progress

by Paul Thomas

  I said, ‘Thanks,’ although I suspected it wasn’t entirely meant as a compliment.

  ‘But we have a problem, Houston: the average stroke-book buyer won’t appreciate the care and attention that’s gone into it. That added quality, Max, that extra mile — there’s no percentage in it.’

  ‘You mean you can’t use it?’

  ‘Oh, we can use it all right, but at the going rate. Would you feel exploited, Max? Would you feel like a wetback picking oranges for chump change?’

  ‘What’s new? I can’t say you didn’t warn me.’

  ‘No, you can’t. So we have a deal?’

  ‘Well, fuck, I’ve got to have something to show for it.’

  ‘You have, Max — twenty-five hundred US and a harsh but valuable lesson. And, by the way, what the fuck sort of name is Woody Bleek?’

  By the fourth one I was down to fifteen working days and feeling as if I was getting the hang of it. Then my mad dad died.

  Jerome Maxwell Napier died, aged seventy-three, in the institution for the deluded and despairing into which he’d disappeared at ever-shorter intervals during the last eight years of his life.

  Since we’d been in Sydney I’d been over to Auckland for a couple of visits. Outwardly he didn’t look too bad, apart from the deepening grooves in his face that made him look like Samuel Beckett’s melancholic little brother. But talking to him was hard work and sometimes a waste of time because he either couldn’t — or chose not to — keep up his side of the conversation, or wandered off the subject down a private path that no one else could follow.

  My father was a lower-middle-class Englishman, bright enough to get into a grammar school and thence a red-brick university. He was invited to join the staff of an Auckland private school that really preferred Oxbridge men but, failing that, red-brick was better than home-grown. He sailed away from postwar rationing and didn’t return until his post-retirement European tour. He and my mother caught the tail-end of my time in Paris, then spent six months ‘doing’ France, Italy and the UK. Whatever memories it stirred up, he was never quite the same afterwards. Within months of getting home he was institutionalised for the first time.

  He was a wry, diffident man but when the mood took him he could send me and my sister into laughing jags with his repertoire of funny voices and nonsense stories which, I later discovered, owed much to The Goon Show. He seemed more easy-going and slower to censoriousness or anger than my friends’ fathers and, perhaps because I didn’t fear him, I didn’t put him on a pedestal.

  Even during my moody teenage years we boxed along well enough, something he put down to the fact that I didn’t attend the school at which he taught. Those of his colleagues whose sons did inevitably had spiky relationships with them. Said sons’ attitudes were shaped by peer pressure and the gradual realisation that, far from being a worthy object of hero worship, one’s father was actually a mediocrity and perhaps a blowhard or weakling or clown to boot.

  And as I learned when he wrote to me in Paris to tell me that he was retiring, despite spending his entire working life — thirty-seven years — teaching at the same school, he didn’t believe in private education. For all that time he’d kept his socialism — among other things — to himself.

  Flying over for his funeral, numbed by a bottomless glass of vodka and a detached sense of loss, I found myself reliving his fiftieth birthday party. Our birthdays were a month apart (I’d just turned nineteen) and in a fey moment he’d floated the idea of a joint party with the quixotic aim of reducing the generation gap. I ruthlessly scotched the idea, pointing out that my do was already doubling as a celebration of America’s defeat in Vietnam.

  The communists believed in the tide of history and for a time it seemed as if the red tide was going to roll around the world. The decline of the West was there for all to see in a grainy news photo of an overloaded US chopper heaving itself off the roof of the Saigon embassy, like a weary old pheasant flushed from the undergrowth for the last time. Uncle Sam had turned tail, his will broken by haemorrhage on the ground and dissent at home, his high-tech war machine bogged down in paddyfields and nullified by the implacable jungle, his imperial mission routed by Third World revolutionaries.

  We know now that the fall of Saigon was the red tide’s high-water mark. But for my parents’ friends, greying suburbanites with their Cold War mindsets, absolute belief in the domino theory and active memories of those panic-ridden months following Pearl Harbor when the dominoes tumbled — Guam, Wake Island, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines — it unleashed their deepest insecurities, evoking the history that, deep down, they had always feared would repeat itself.

  And while they fretted for their children’s future, imagining New Zealand under the heel of some inhuman Oriental in a Mao jacket, said children mocked their anxieties and raised their glasses to posters of Ho Chi Minh.

  I arrived at my father’s fiftieth just before midnight with a few beers under my belt. Everyone drank and drove in those days. How else were you meant to get around at that hour of night?

  Most of the guests had more on board than I did. They were social drinkers, instinctively suspicious of alcohol and inclined to blame France’s military fiascos and Italy’s perpetual political crisis on the Latins’ wine habit. But it was okay to let one’s hair down on special occasions, and let it down they did.

  In the hall I met a woman of my parents’ generation whom I’d known since primary school. She emerged unsteadily from the toilet, still trying to hoist her slacks over her paunch. She enveloped me in a smothering embrace and asked me personal questions, emphasising each interrogative with a nudge of her breasts. This was a woman whose son had once been my best friend, at whose house I’d often slept over, who’d sent me home in disgrace when I sullenly baulked at macaroni cheese, who gave me a four-piece test-standard cricket ball for my thirteenth birthday.

  In the lounge my mother, a harmless party flirt, was executing bobbysoxer twirls with the next-door neighbour. Some of the other dance-floor moves bordered on the spastic. The deputy headmaster of my father’s school, a lay preacher renowned for his savage virtuosity with the cane, had his shirt open to the navel and was circling his partner as if trying to decide where to bite her. The Dave Clark Five were on the turntable. Piss-weak first-generation Britpop — the Searchers, the Hollies, Gerry and the Pacemakers, early Beatles — was the appropriate soundtrack for this bourgeois bacchanal.

  Some of my father’s colleagues were in a huddle, roaring like morons over a dirty joke, but the man himself was nowhere to be seen. Looking for a beer, I found sister Felicity, sweet little sixteen, backed into a corner of the kitchen by Bob, my father’s bridge partner and a recent grandfather. It was a replay of the mammary attack in the hall: the same age difference, the same salacious interrogation, the same invasive proximity bordering on frottage. Both adults were only a bacardi and Coke away from a shameful bit of history that would have to be rewritten in the morning.

  As sisters went, Felicity was acceptably middle of the road: neither plain Jane nor knockout, neither Miss Goody Two Shoes nor town bike. Unlike some guys I knew, I’d been spared the unsettling pub urinal experience of noticing among the obscene and psychotic graffiti the claim that one’s sister rooted like a rattlesnake or took it up the arse. Occasionally a friend would declare an interest but I discouraged it. Felicity’s tastes were mainstream; she favoured sports stars, wiry, blond, spoilt, supercilious airheads. She thought my friends were freaks who’d take her to movies with subtitles and ply her with dope, and she was right.

  Bob helped himself to a few squirts of Chateau Cardboard Muller-Thurgau as he asked how my studies were going. Without waiting for an answer, he cast a final hot-eyed, dry-lipped glance at Felicity and faded away.

  I put it to her that there was safety in numbers.

  She screwed up her nose as if something stank. ‘You’ve got a one-track mind.’

  ‘I’m obviously not the only one. What was he suggesting — one-
on-one bridge lessons the night his wife goes to cooking class?’

  She smirked, playing along. ‘Actually, he’s just taken up photography; he wants me to pose for him.’

  ‘All in the best possible taste, no doubt?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Who gets to keep the lingerie?’

  That made her shudder. ‘Do you seriously think he’s a dirty old man?’

  ‘He’s pissed,’ I said. ‘It amounts to the same thing.’

  ‘Does that go for Dad as well?’

  ‘Come on. Can you imagine him carrying on like that?’

  ‘No, but I don’t suppose Bob’s kids could either,’ she said. ‘Have you seen Dad?’

  ‘I’ve just got here. Where is he?’

  ‘Last I saw him he was out the back.’

  ‘That’s a strange place to be while your fiftieth birthday party’s in full swing.’

  She shrugged. ‘That’s our Papa.’

  An uncle came into the kitchen arm in arm with a woman who wasn’t an aunt. They didn’t hurriedly disentangle so it was either entirely innocent or they were too drunk to care. Felicity and I exchanged raised eyebrows. I went out to the back veranda, where the birthday boy was sitting on the swing seat, smoking his pipe.

  ‘The son and heir,’ he said. ‘Nice of you to drop in.’

  I sat down beside him. He was undemonstrative in the English way, so he wouldn’t have expected a handshake and would have been alarmed by a hug.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’

  ‘Enjoying a contemplative pipe and a breath of fresh air,’ he said. ‘And don’t bother pointing out the contradiction.’

  ‘A bit bloody anti-social, isn’t it? The gang’s all here to celebrate your fiftieth and you’re skiving off for a smoke.’

  ‘My little milestone was duly acknowledged several hours ago. Since then the evening’s taken on a life of its own.’

  There was a tremendous uproar inside, as if a couple of men had squared off or a woman had started removing her clothes. My father expelled smoke through a sardonic smile.

  ‘It’s still your party.’

  ‘Your mother likes dancing and she’s good at it,’ he said. ‘I don’t and I’m not. Besides, I can’t abide that music. I thought it was rubbish when you and Felicity started listening to it years ago and it’ll take more than a few glasses of sparkling wine to change my mind. Ah, there you are.’ This was addressed to a couple who had emerged from the darkness of the back yard. ‘You know my son Max? Max, this is Peter and Doreen. Peter’s the young lion of the Auckland bridge scene. He’s taught me a thing or two, I can tell you.’

  Peter was a sleek shortarse who looked a decade younger than most of the guests, including Doreen, whom I didn’t know. Depending on your taste and vocabulary she was either plump or Rubenesque, and had probably once been pretty. Now she looked like she’d come straight from a torrid session in the back row of the local cinema. Her hair and lipstick were in disarray and the buttons up the front of her dress were in the wrong buttonholes.

  As they approached, she stumbled and had to grab Peter’s arm to avoid a spill.

  ‘Damn these heels,’ she muttered.

  Doreen bent down to take off her shoes, giving us an eyeful of her breasts that had the same well-exercised flush as her cheeks. She straightened up, giggling at herself and at us. ‘God, I need to pee. I’ll see you boys inside.’

  She came up the steps with her head down, struggling to keep a straight face, but couldn’t resist a swift sideways glance to make sure she had our undivided attention. I don’t know about Dad but whatever she saw on my face triggered another spacey giggle.

  Peter cleared his throat. ‘I’ve just been showing Doreen your hideaway, Jerry,’ he said. ‘Nice little set-up you’ve got there.’

  My parents lived in Epsom, on the Cornwall Park side of Manukau Road. The house was at the front of the section, creating a deep back yard with flower beds, a vegetable garden, a few grapefruit trees and, at the very bottom, a converted garden shed that was, increasingly, my father’s home away from home. He spent a couple of hours a night and entire weekends down there, listening to classical music, re-reading his favourite authors and his bridge and chess books, and attending to schoolmasterly duties that, like a woman’s work, were never quite done.

  Dad stood up to tap his pipe out on the railing. ‘Well, Pierre, as I always say: every man needs a bolt-hole. I suppose we should rejoin the happy throng.’ As Peter went past, my father dropped an avuncular hand on his shoulder. ‘A quick trip to the bathroom might be in order,’ he murmured. ‘I’m no expert in the cosmetics department but it looks to me as if your lady friend and Doreen use different shades of lipstick.’

  Peter turned pinker and scuttled inside. My father looked at me inquiringly. ‘Well, my boy, what do you make of that?’

  ‘A bit bloody cheeky apart from anything else.’

  He nodded. ‘Nip down and open the window, there’s a good lad. I’ve got a pile of marking to do tomorrow and I’d rather the place didn’t reek of minge.’

  When it was all over, when the drunks and sleepyheads had been flushed out of the bedrooms and the die-hards had downed their three or four for the road, Felicity and I sent my parents off to bed and cleaned up.

  As we were doing the dishes I threw Doreen into the conversational mix.

  ‘Dor the Whore.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what Mum calls her,’ she said. ‘Who’d she pounce on tonight?’

  ‘The bridge midget — Peter Someone.’

  ‘Peter Quinn. He’s not a midget. In fact, if I had to sleep with one man who was here tonight …’

  ‘Which you don’t. Let’s get that perfectly clear.’

  ‘No, but let’s say Mum and Dad were kidnapped by a satanic cult who threatened that unless we …’

  ‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘how much piss did you put away tonight?’

  ‘A lot less than you, that’s for sure. And don’t be such a hypocrite; I bet you and your filthy friends play this game all the time. If it meant saving our dear parents from becoming human sacrifices, I’d do it with Peter Quinn. What about you?’

  ‘I’d ring the cops.’

  ‘Gosh, a hypocrite and a spoilsport.’

  ‘Why Dor the Whore?’

  Her face lit up. ‘You would choose her, wouldn’t you? You’re so predictable — go for the trollop every time.’

  ‘Well, this is the thing, Felicity: you keep calling her names without anything to back it up.’

  ‘I’ve heard of short-term memory loss but that’s ridiculous,’ she said. ‘You saw her at it with your own eyes a couple of hours ago.’

  ‘One swallow doesn’t make a summer. Besides, for all you know, she might be in love with Shorty.’

  ‘Yeah, and Shorty might be Piggy Muldoon’s love-child. Anything’s possible.’ She shook her head, signalling that this silliness had gone far enough. ‘Mum won’t go into the sordid details. Actually, she puts on the sourpuss face and changes the subject.’ Felicity raised her eyebrows at me for the second time that night. ‘Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?’

  It was almost afternoon when I woke up in my old bed. There was a note on the kitchen table saying my mother and Felicity had gone for a walk in Cornwall Park. I had something to eat and went down to the shed. Strictly speaking the shed was a no-go area but I considered myself exempt now that I was flatting and my father, I suppose, felt he had to show willing.

  He was lanky, with placid grey eyes and a beaky nose, hence his longstanding school nickname ‘Birdface’. His weekend wear was felt slippers, corduroy trousers that had once been dark green and a sleeveless cricket jersey of unknown origin over a flannel shirt. Chas Harley, who dabbled in the theatre, had expressed an ambition to cast him as Sherlock Holmes. To my mind he looked the part of an otherworldly scion of a once posh, now downwardly mobile family who’d been bilked out of his inheritance and reduced to a shabby genteel existence in the
colonies.

  The walls were covered with scenes of Britannia ruling the waves, the bookshelves untidily crammed with the works of his favourite authors — Wodehouse, Waugh, Greene, De Maupassant, Forester, Simenon, Saki, Kipling. A chessboard was set up in the corner; a thermos of tea was at his elbow; tobacco smoke and Concert Programme violin music hung in the air. As he’d said, this was his bolt-hole, the last retreat of a solitary man who’d begun to withdraw from the world and from his nearest and dearest.

  I asked, ‘What was the atmosphere like first thing?’

  He frowned. ‘Sorry, not with you.’

  ‘The minge factor.’

  ‘Oh, that. Mercifully subdued.’

  ‘So that’s Doreen’s party trick, is it?’

  Realising that this wasn’t the hi and bye leave-taking he would have preferred, he took off his glasses and swung around in his swivel chair. ‘It would be fair to say her reputation precedes her.’

  ‘Dor the Whore?’

  ‘You’ve been talking to your mother.’

  ‘Felicity.’

  ‘Same thing.’

  ‘What’s the story?’

  ‘Why this sudden interest in middle-aged foolishness?’

  ‘Call it prurience.’

  He smiled quizzically. ‘Given that you aspire to being a writer, Max, I thought you might be starting to grapple with the eternal mystery of women.’

  ‘No, just plain old prurience, I’m afraid.’

  ‘There’s a lot of it about,’ he said. ‘Well, the story, such as it is, is hardly original. Two people persuade themselves that they’re in love; they get married. Some time later — it might take two years, it might take ten — it dawns on them that they no longer have the feelings they mistook for love. The marriage deteriorates into a rather grim practical arrangement that doesn’t satisfy their emotional and physical needs so every now and again they go a bit haywire.’

  ‘By going a bit haywire you mean slipping out the back for a quick screw with someone they met half an hour earlier?’