by Gee, Maurice
‘I think it was an accident,’ Mother said.
‘Yes,’ Father said. ‘I don’t think he knew there was a bullet in the gun.’
‘I’m going to take botany,’ I said.
I meant that I would be a mycologist. Meanwhile, what would Gordon be?
‘There’s no need to choose yet. Take your time,’ Father said.
It was already plain he would not be a chemist. At primary school he had come top in every subject, but something derailed him at secondary. He became disconnected from the practical. Nor could he take on board abstractions. I suppose it had to do with puberty, with things already fixed in him – gentility, notions of purity – uniting to divorce him from the new part of himself that made itself known. He was in turmoil, and, to use the cant phrase, in denial. I’ve never been troubled in that way, so I’m in the dark. All he has ever told me was that it took ten years to get himself right, which meant, I think, to understand that sex was not some secret dirty thing but natural, and to get on better terms with his natural self.
He could not take the step to algebra and geometry. He could not understand chemistry. I tried coaching him but his brain refused to function with planes, angles, symbols, formulae, with elements and compounds, even when they changed colour and smoked and smelled. The only reactions his mind could fasten on were human ones, and it’s no surprise that in English he still came top.
Families are factories for neurosis. But I won’t speculate about Gordon. I’ll remember. Our days are multitudinous. If I turn aside from unhappy things, it’s not through fear or cowardice but out of love. There’s a superstition involved: even now I can do him good.
He still ran fast and still played football. I went along to see him play for his school first fifteen. The match took place on the Auckland Grammar School grounds above the prison, where as I stood on the sideline and watched Gordon’s team go down to defeat I imagined I could hear prisoners breaking rocks in the quarry. The game bored me. There was lots of struggling in the mud and Gordon kept out of it. The big fat-muscled boys who competed for the ball reminded me of pigs nose down at a trough. Steam rose off them and the smell of their sweat invaded the sidelines. Late in the game the ball squirted out from a scrum and stopped at Gordon’s feet. By this time he knew what to do. ‘Go, Gordy.’ He made thirty or forty yards before an Auckland Grammar player came at him from the side. Gordon tried to fend him off, but his opponent caught him around the knees and lifted him. Gordon hung in the air for a moment, then his stiffened arm speared at the ground as though trying to drive itself in. I saw it shorten as the joint popped out. The shock sprang between us like electricity and propelled me forwards, one step, two, until my leaden good sense returned.
The coach helped him away as the game continued. ‘My sister?’ Gordon said, looking around. I approached coolly and placed my white fingertips on his unnatural elbow. ‘I don’t think it’s broken, just dislocated,’ Gordon said. I was surprised to see him red-faced not white, and almost merry, but knew him well enough to understand that dislocating an elbow was an achievement. ‘Bad luck, eh? This is my sister, Mr Seed.’
Mr Seed. A sad-looking, clumsy-mannered fellow. Big-boned, soft-faced – attracting hyphenated adjectives – slow-spoken, but decisive in his way. ‘I’m taking him to the hospital. Would you like to come?’
I thanked him. ‘Don’t faint, Gordon.’ The red was fading from his face as shock set in. I helped him into the back seat of Mr Seed’s car. He half reclined, preventing me from getting in beside him. The zambuck had strapped his arm above and below the elbow. I saw how bad the dislocation was, shortening his arm by several inches and pressing white bulbs of bone against the skin. A painful injury but Gordon seemed to think the event a happy one, for he still grinned.
‘I’m sorry to be such a nuisance, Sir.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Ferry,’ Mr Seed said. He settled in the driver’s seat, more aware of me than of Gordon – put off balance by the pretty sister. He apologised for the broken spring in the car seat.
‘I’m all right,’ I said, fitting myself to one side of it, which allowed me to hold Gordon’s hand. It was as damp as a boletus and as cold as the creek. ‘I think we should get him there as fast as we can.’
‘Right,’ said Mr Seed. He was torn between discretion and me, which led to braking one moment and acceleration the next; but we reached the hospital safely and surrendered Gordon to a nurse. She took one look at his elbow and hurried him into a cubicle, where a doctor scarcely more than a boy himself examined him. The nurse fetched a trolley and they wheeled Gordon away down a corridor.
‘It’s a dangerous game. He needs to put on a bit more beef,’ Mr Seed said.
We waited side by side on bony chairs. He told me about his own injuries: torn calf muscles, a dislocated finger that had allowed him for an hour to point around corners (he laughed), and a badly sprained ankle that had left his right foot colder than his left. He still suffered from that. For a moment I thought he was asking me to feel. I understood how badly Mr Seed wanted me. If I had not been worried about Gordon I might have played with him. I knew already that I liked older men, and Mr Seed had a puppyish maturity – I mean a hardening by experience without an understanding of what life was about – that might have entertained me for a while. But I’m speaking with a smarter voice than I possessed at nineteen, and will simply say, Seed’s time wasn’t right.
We talked about chemistry, which he taught. I told him about my interest in native flora, keeping fungi to myself. He hunted for openings until I asked him if he was married. What a blusher he was. He said yes. We talked naturally after that. He went off to telephone his wife and came back with an ice-cream for me. We waited more than two hours on our numbing chairs as more football injuries came in. The young victims seemed so pleased with themselves.
The nurse brought Gordon to us in a wheelchair. He was woozy from an anaesthetic. The dislocation had been so bad the doctor had needed an orderly to help him pull the joint into place, stretching Gordon’s arm to its proper length. We wheeled him to Mr Seed’s car and fitted him in. This time I sat beside him, holding him upright and keeping him warm. His arm was strapped tightly and held in a sling, and no, no, he repeated drunkenly, it didn’t hurt. I called out in Avondale that he was going to be sick but Mr Seed could not stop in time. Gordon vomited between his feet. ‘Sorry. Sorry,’ he mumbled. I wiped his mouth and did not apologise. The stupid Seed had put Gordon in the game so he must put up with the consequences.
We had meant to go to the pictures in town after the game, so Mother and Father were not alarmed by our lateness. But Mother screamed when she saw Mr Seed helping Gordon up the path – her dying-fall, I-knew-it-was-going-to-happen scream, like a seabird.
Gordon tried to break away into the wash-house. ‘Got to wash his car,’ he mumbled.
‘Go inside, Gordon,’ I ordered. ‘I’ll do it.’
While Mother put him on his bed and sponged off his football mud and Father heard about the injury from Mr Seed, I scraped Gordon’s vomit on to a hearth shovel and washed the wet car floor with Lysol on a rag. There, I thought, I’ve disinfected myself from Mr Seed; but that was unfair. It was life that infected me, and curiosity and self-recognition, making me ready for the parts I had to play. And Seed was a pleasant, inconsequential man who tried his best to help Gordon – and impress himself on me. Didn’t work, but I bear him no grudge. He went on to be principal of one of the new secondary schools that sprang up around Auckland in the 60s.
And I went on, and Gordon went on …
That’s too fast.
He dislocated his elbow playing football. I’ve suggested it was a happy event. His self emerged and caused him no bother on that day. Not that he knew it in those terms. But his little pause for thought before action was gone. As well as that, he was a hero – that’s what New Zealand men become when they break their bones in their barbarous game.
Gordon’s elbow stayed too weak for him to play again.
He took up tennis to strengthen it and did quite well, although reluctance overcame him when he found himself in a winning position. He should have been club champion at the Loomis Lawn Tennis Club but gave the game away each time to someone wanting it more.
Father and I agreed that I should work mornings in the shop and do my first two BSc units part-time. I travelled to Auckland by train at first, then changed to the bus, which put me down closer to the university. I saw how Loomis was moving its centre from around the station to the stretch of the Great North Road between the bridges, where the ABC buses came in. A man called Jock Imrie was putting up blocks of shops. The Bank of New Zealand had opened a branch and the Post Office had plans for a new building. It worried me that Father was left in the dying part of town, next door to the billiard rooms. Hudson the Butcher had shifted to the Great North Road.
‘If you don’t go, there’ll be another chemist,’ I said.
‘I will, Alice. I will. I’ve already put a word in with Jock Imrie.’
He was not normally indecisive. It was Grandfather’s sudden interest in the shop that delayed him. ‘Ferry’s’ had been opposite the station since my great-grandfather had opened there in the 1890s. Grandfather wanted it to go on. He’d had a series of small strokes that finished him for bowls. When he tried to hold one of those heavy balls it tipped out of his hand. Coming into the shop was his new game. He sat on a chair in the dispensary and demanded to know what Father was mixing – how much of this, how much of that, and who it was for, and why weren’t the old medicines good enough, and why should the government pay for prescriptions, why should his taxes go for bludgers who should be able to look after themselves? Father confessed to me that it ‘wore him to a frazzle’, but he refused to make Grandfather stay away. He meant, I think, to keep on in the shop until the old man’s interest declined.
‘He’ll live till he’s ninety,’ I said.
Father told me not to be cruel. ‘I sometimes don’t like the way you seem to be going, Alice.’
I can’t remember any other time he was so direct.
I told Grandfather one day that the shop should shift. He stamped his walking-stick on the floor. ‘This is where Loomis is. Right here. Jock Imrie can keep his Great North Road. Those shops of his look like a row of dunnies.’
Father calmed him, worried that his anger would cause another stroke. He drove him home, and Mother went round to make him lunch. Gordon dropped in when he got off the school train, and Father paid a visit each night to see Grandfather into bed. The old bugger – yes, bugger – never spoke a word of thanks.
‘What do you talk about with him?’ I asked Gordon.
‘I don’t. I put on records. The Black Dyke Mills Band. He really loves those things. I like them too. And his comedy records. Do you know, he can laugh? I take one off and he just says, “Next.”’
Grandfather had a stack of records by Scotch and English comedians: sketches, songs, monologues by Max Miller and Stanley Holloway, and Flanagan and Allen. Gordon wound up the old gramophone and put them on, starting always with Grandfather’s favourite – I forget the name and the players, but a man asks his friend how he should propose to the girl he loves, Nausea Bagwash. He must go down on one knee, the friend advises, and say, ‘I have come to press my suit.’ The lover is not very bright. ‘Nausea,’ he cries, ‘I have come to iron my trousers.’
‘It makes him laugh every time,’ Gordon said. ‘But I guess “Brahn Boots” is the one he really likes’ – a sentimental monologue about a man who turns up to his mother’s funeral wearing brown boots. ‘We didn’ know, ’e didn’ say, ’e’d give ’is uvver boots awa-ay. But, brahn boots!’
‘It makes him cry,’ Gordon said.
‘Pull the other one,’ I said. Old men had worn-out eyes always leaking moisture. I wished another stroke on Grandfather, his terminal one. I did not see why we should be serving him while he gave nothing back.
Mother sometimes sent me round to his place on Saturdays when she wanted a rest from making his lunch and putting his dinner ready in the oven. He did not ask for records when I was there. He sat in his armchair in the living-room, which smelled of rotting window frames and mutton fat and him, with the bar heater baking his leather soles, and called me from the kitchen to fill his teacup, pick up the Herald, which he’d dropped out of reach, scratch his back – ‘No, lower down’ – where there was an itch, shift the table closer with his medicine, pull the curtain over to block the sun … I was no sooner out of the room than he called me back: ‘Alice.’ What a bark it was, what a snake-hiss at the end.
‘You can do that yourself, you’re not helpless,’ I said.
The smell of his slippers cooking overpowered the other smells. I warned him they’d catch fire. Then I did not bother, although one of my tasks was to shift the heater back or forward as Grandfather overheated or grew cold. I knew what he was up to, watching me bend, watching me stretch (to free the curtain on the runner or straighten a picture on the wall), getting looks up my skirt and down my blouse.
‘You’ve grown to be a big girl, Alice,’ he said.
‘I bet you’ve got some boyfriends,’ he said.
He had a dozen of these remarks, leading up to me smoothing his lap-rug. A generous granddaughter might have obliged. I don’t have an ounce of generosity of that sort.
I lay awake at night, thinking how easy it would be to pinch some pentobarbitone and falsify the dangerous drugs book. A teaspoon in his mashed potatoes … But the worst I ever did was tip Grandfather’s lamb’s fry and bacon in his lap and leave him to clean up the mess: ‘And don’t complain to Mother or I’ll tell her what you do.’
He must have said something because Mother never sent me back. I wonder if he had tried the same sort of thing with her. The look that passed between us when he died contained not sorrow but relief.
Father found him half in, half out of his chair. His trouser leg was scorching and ready to combust. Another two or three minutes would have done it. Fire would have been a cleaner death than he deserved. But he lay unconscious in hospital for several days. ‘He’s very deep down,’ the doctor said. ‘Speak to him. You can never tell what people hear.’
I had nothing to say.
‘You can hold his hand,’ the nurse said.
I left that to Father and Gordon. They murmured at him and breathed on him. ‘We want you to come back, Dad. Don’t go,’ Father said. He smoothed Grandfather’s hair and massaged his big flat hand that had caressed only bowling balls. Gordon leaned and whispered: ‘Grandpa. Stanley Holloway.’
‘He can’t hear,’ I said.
‘Brahn boots,’ Gordon whispered.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said.
‘I can make him smile. You watch.’ He lowered his head and breathed in Grandfather’s gristly ear: ‘Nausea, I have come to iron my trousers.’ He smiled at me as though from the bottom of a pool. ‘See?’ he breathed.
‘He did not.’
‘Yes, he did. Watch.’ He repeated the stupid line; and there might have been the jumping of a nerve in Grandfather’s cheek. I did not stay to argue; left Gordon reciting there. I could not believe Grandfather might come back to life. It would be as horrible as a squashed beetle twitching its legs. Yet it would not have seemed strange to me if Gordon had worked a miracle. He functioned differently – he turned away (a natural turning) from common feelings into uncommon, where doors might open and good be done. He did not mind seeming ridiculous. I had no idea what he would bring Grandfather back for … but enough of this.
He died that night. Mother and I exchanged our smile. Father was sad but somehow completed. And Gordon sighed as though pleased by a scene in a movie.
I thought, There’ll be some money from the house. I supposed Father would get it but felt some should come to me for my stretching and bending. Father said we should choose something to remember the old man by. ‘No thanks,’ I said. Gordon took half a dozen records but I don’t recall him ever playing them.
&nb
sp; The house went to Grandfather’s sister in Blenheim. So the old man drove his last bowl and knocked us out of the head.
‘Ah well, he must have had his reasons,’ Father said.
Chapter Two
Mrs Imrie was comfortable in her figure but unsatisfied in her life. She came into the shop for lipstick, rouge, face powder, bottles of scent; for Micapon for her migraines and Dr Scholl’s Foot Cream for her feet, which she told me her husband had to massage every night or she’d lie awake with shooting pains in her toes like a shoemaker elf hammering tacks.
‘Look after your feet, dear. That’s the voice of experience.’
She painted and powdered heavily, which I thought a waste with her good skin. She said I could do things with my appearance if I tried, I could be a cover girl; and she picked out lipsticks that suited my colouring and tried to make me put them on in the shop.
‘No, I can’t, Mrs Imrie. I’m allergic. I’ll get a rash.’
‘And look at your hair. I could really do things with that, it’s so fine.’
Jock Imrie had found her when he called for his first wife at a beauty parlour in Auckland. The perm wasn’t finished, so he observed able-bodied Josephine at his leisure as she moved about his wife with her implements. I imagined Mrs Imrie number one watching Jock’s lust take shape in the mirror and a tear rolling down her cheek. Perhaps, though, she was relieved to be quit of him. He was a weaselly man who pointed at things he wanted with his nose.
Mrs Imrie – Josephine – confided in me: ‘He’s so busy at it. Every night.’ She bought her Wife’s Friend pessaries from our shop, asking for me at first, but later on not minding Father.
Josephine moved in with Jock Imrie soon after his wife left, and, wonder of wonders, it was the wife who got sued for adultery. Jock and Josephine married and went off straight away on a world trip, and it was that, I think, the trip, that persuaded Loomis to accept wife number two as respectable. We had loved the scandal, lapped it up, but the judgement we made on Jock was of a tut-tutting kind. He lived in a big two-storeyed house on three acres of ground sloping down to the creek. He drove a Jaguar car and owned racehorses. He was rich. It was no wonder women went after him.