Telling Stories

by Geoff Palmer

  Nor is it one of those flimsy English rags-to-riches, East End-boy-makes-a-million tales that tax neither reading ability nor brainpower with outrageous coincidence piled upon utter claptrap and are seemingly intended to prove that any working-class lad can make good, join the gentry and eventually become Queen.

  Tommy got up at five o'clock every morning and pushed his granddad’s barrow up the Mile End Road to the market. One morning he noticed a handsome motor car broken down on the side of the road. A kindly old grey-haired gentleman was trying to change the car's flat tyre, but without much success.

  'Need an 'and, mate?' asked Tommy.

  'Why thank you, my dear fellow,' said the kindly old grey-haired man looking up from his labours.

  'Blimey!' said Tommy, when he realised that it was the King of England. 'I mean, blimey, your 'ighness.'

  'Oh, no need for formality out here, lad. Call me Terry. And your name is Tommy, unless I'm mistaken.'

  'Cor!' said Tommy. ''ow'd you know that, then?'

  The old man chuckled. 'I often buy my vegetables from your barrow. The best vegetables in all of England, I 'd say. But perhaps you recognise me now ...' And he whipped the crown from his head.

  'Struth!' said Tommy, 'You're the old geezer who I let 'ave them swedes on tick 'cause you never 'ad sixpence on ya! '

  'Precisely!' said the King, clapping him on the shoulder.

  'Cripes!' said Tommy. 'And to think, I never recognised you without your 'at on."

  How they laughed!

  And three weeks later when Tommy finally sold the barrow to put in a successful bid for British Aerospace, his bank manager asked, 'Any creditors?'

  To which Tommy replied, 'Only the King o' bleedin' England!'

  My childhood: the facts. Let me set the scene ...

  Those were the days of six o'clock pub closing, when dairies were the only shops allowed to open at the weekend, when fast food meant fish and chips, when you needed overseas funds to buy a new car and a tearaway was someone who'd light up a Rothmans in the school toilets.

  I spent my formative years on the grubby floor of a hick town dairy. That hick town was Palmerston North — it still is — and I would probably have spent my entire childhood there had it not been for a visit from the Ministry of Narks and Bastards one sunny Sunday afternoon when I was seven. A couple of faceless, graceless nonentities wandered in and bought a packet of fags and some ice-block sticks. The only thing memorable about them was that they wore ties on a Sunday and asked for a written receipt.

  'Probably Mormons,' my dad mused. Palmerston North is so boring that a visit from the Mormons is deemed an event.

  They smiled and left. And a few weeks later a summons arrived. '... wilful breach of section 6, sub-section 2, clauses (a) to (g) of the Shops and Offices Act 1955 and/or regulation 2 of the Shops and Offices Exempted Goods Order 1957, namely the display and subsequent sale of an item marked "Jolly Lolly Ice-Block Sticks" ...'

  Ah, the good old days, when even what you could buy and sell was written into law, when Sunday trading meant Exempted Goods and Goods Deemed To Be Approved Goods. It was neither here nor there that you could buy two dozen ice-blocks and melt or masticate the sticks free yourself. Or that you could buy firewood and go home and cut, shape and carve your own. You could recycle sticky used ones from public bins; you build boats from them and sail them in public parks; you could use them as kindling in council camping grounds; you could stand on a street corner handing them out to minors, magistrates, morons, ministers and matrons; you could do just whatever you liked except sell the damned things!

  Of course my father pleaded ignorance of the law. After all, what small businessman could keep up with all the regulations; the First Schedules, Second Schedules, Amendments, Orders in Council and local by-laws? A situation where seed potatoes were okay, but not cookers. Where spaghetti was a breeze, as long as it was tinned. You could buy a pre-baked, ready-iced cake in a cellophane bag or the butter, sugar, flour, milk and baking powder to do it yourself, but you couldn't buy a packet labelled cake-mix. Bread was kosher, but yeast was out. Icing sugar was far too flippant. Having a birthday and forgot the candles? Sorry. But I can let you have the household variety; a foot long, an inch in diameter, just one'll light up the entire living room. What d'you mean, they'll ruin your cake? Laundry soap? Change your wash day. For the bath? You shouId've said. Nylons? No problem. Pantihose? Get out of here! Toothpicks, let's see ... no, sorry, I've run out of small packets and I can't let you have more than a hundred at a time. Why not? Why not? It's Sunday, for Chrissake, what other reason do you need? I mean, how do I know what you'll do with them once you get 'em out the door, eh? For all I know you could be taking them home and gluing 'em together to make ... to make ... to make ... ice- block sticks!

  My father was fined a three hundred dollars. The shame of it ruined him. He might have made ten cents profit on the sticks. If he'd mugged, robbed or beaten the silly couple senseless he might have received a fifty pound fine and a suspended sentence, but for the wanton flouting of trading laws on the Lord's day they threw the book at him. The couple also bought a packet of cigarettes. But that was all right, smoking on a Sunday was okay because God, gentle Jesus and even Mary were known to pop out and have a quick drag behind the bike sheds after church. (You've probably seen the pictures in your Sunday school Bibles.) But' they didn't go home and make ice-blocks!

  After that, being a good citizen, my father took to the letter of the law. He divided his stock into weekday and Sunday tradables and even taped long lists on the back wall to remind us all what we could and couldn't sell. The shop itself was divided in two with the 'Sunday legals', as he used to call them, in the front half near the counter and the rest to the side, to the left of where the counter ended. Before opening on Sunday mornings he would remove the light bulbs from that end of the shop and stretch a thick rope borderline from the counter to the wall, making our dairy a working model of state regulation. It was chaos.

  Take vegetables. They were Goods Deemed To Be Special Goods and as such could be sold on Saturdays — other than New Year's Day, the Day after New Year's Day, Waitangi Day, Anzac Day, Christmas Day and Boxing Day — between the hours of 8am and noon. But our dairy opened at seven. And from 12.01 on Saturday everything had to be dragged out the back till Monday morning, unless we'd grown them ourselves right there on the premises. The lettuce and tomatoes made a reappearance the following day because they were legal on a Sunday, and frozen, tinned and freeze-dried veges never left the shelves because they were okay any time. And so was fruit.

  So the weekends were full of arguments between my father and his would-be customers.

  'Why can't you sell me them spuds?'

  'Because it's only five to eight.'

  'I can't buy peas because it's two minutes past twelve, yet I've been queuing here for five minutes?'

  'Sorry, stick to frozen ones.'

  'But I want five pounds of sugar, not three. Look, I can see some five pound bags over there.'

  'It's Sunday. You'll have to buy two threes.'

  'I can buy a newspaper but not a magazine or a book?'

  'You're lucky, you couldn't legally buy a paper here before '75.'

  And on and on and on ... Yes, the good old days indeed.

  But it couldn't last. The arguments gradually faded with the custom. No one wants a law lecture when they pop up the road for a pint of milk, or a row over half a cabbage, and it wasn't long before word spread about the nutter in Banks Street Dairy. Besides, it seemed every other dairy in town just carried on as they always had. Perhaps even the Ministry of Narks and Bastards saw how ridiculous the law was and decided to turn a blind eye. Or maybe they just cut back on the overtime.

  My father should have put signs up all round the shop telling about his prosecution. He should have publicised how much of an ass the law really was — and how much it had cost him. He should have worn his conviction like a martyr and played on the powerlessness of pawns in
the face of a mindless bureaucracy. But the poor fool was ashamed of it. He hid it just as he hid the evening papers that carried his name and crime three-quarters of the way through a close-typed paragraph of that week's civil and criminal cases. (He hadn't received a delivery that night, he told his customers and burned the whole consignment in the incinerator.) He even swore the family to secrecy though, at the time, it was something I heard and understood only vaguely. Adult mumbles after bedtime, my ear pressed to the living room door

  So he paid for his crime and went on paying and finally lost his business because he couldn't pay any more. We were evicted on the twenty-first of June, one year to the day after his conviction, when I was still young enough to think that travelling to and fro in a truck to the 'new' house with what was left of our meagre possessions was rather fun.

  So, my childhood: after state persecution my father drank himself to death. End of story. My mother, incidentally, followed him a few years later with the aid of cigarettes, which she could legally, legitimately and rightfully purchase any day of the week.

  Monday, March 30

  I've managed to hit two bad books in a row now. Well, one bad and one abysmal, so awful in fact that I only managed the first fifty pages — and it was supposed to be a best-seller too!

  I abandoned it at lunchtime. The final straw came when Fletcher wandered into the canteen, pushed it back to check the title as he always does and said, 'Hey, something decent at last. That guy's great. Can I borrow it when you're done?'

  'You can have it now,' I said and threw it across the table at him. 'It's terrible.'

  'Yeah? Ta. What's wrong with it?'

  I was about to say it was primary school stuff but managed to keep myself in check since one of the miracles of the primary school system is that they managed to teach Fletcher to read at all.

  'Don't like the style,' I said instead.

  'Bugger the style,' he said. 'What are the birds like?'

  I left him pawing at the mildly lascivious cover and went back to work. I could have wandered up to Cuba Street and looked around the secondhand places for a replacement but it was such a nice day I couldn't bring myself to do it. I always think of rummaging round secondhand book shops as a grey day activity. Otherwise you come out hours later, blinking at the sunlight and feeling guilty for spending all that time inside looking at gloomy shelves. Or at least I do. Anyway, I've still got about half of that box full I bought for ten dollars at a gala day and I'm still determined to try them all.

  Betti came in this afternoon and invited me to a party on Saturday. Actually she caused a bit of an uproar, especially among Fletcher's mob. She really is attractive — she knows it too but pretends she doesn't. She just walked in as though she owned the place, right round the counter, past reception and all the way through to my desk without being challenged by anyone — and she's hardly the sort of person no one notices! There's this kind of guileless, little-girl-lost look that lets her get away with murder at times, but I've noticed a mischievous sparkle now and then and I think she's really a lot smarter than she lets on, even to Stuart. I accepted the invitation — she can be very persuasive — and watched her go, along with all the other guys. Sometimes I have to pinch myself to remind me we're related.

  I caused a bit of a stink this afternoon because I forgot about a special batch of supplementaries Tom gave me last week. They're for a bunch of families who were on TV because they're about to be evicted for not paying their rent. It's the same old story: they didn't know they were entitled to a supplementary benefit because we'd never told them. We'd never told them because the minister's told us to save money and only dish out special benefits to people if they're in dire straits. Naturally, they didn't come to us when they got into difficulties because we've been so cagey and unhelpful in the past so they went straight to a journalist. The result is yet another political storm in a teacup with the minister scoring brownie points by personally intervening to help the families and denouncing his own department who were only acting on his instructions in the first place!

  Anyway, I forgot about them and Tom Coutts went mad because Mr Cotton had asked him specially and he'd given them to me because he thought he could rely on me, etc, etc. ... I let him carry on for five minutes about political fallout and jobs being on the line and then said that I could take them upstairs and get them processed directly. (He doesn't like us doing that because it makes his job irrelevant.)

  'Oh? Could you?' he said, becoming all smarmy. (He's so transparent!) 'You wouldn't mind? And would they? I wouldn't want to tread on anyone's toes up there. And I'd hate them to think we weren't doing our job properly ...'

  I told him it was all right, I knew one of the operators and she'd let me slip them in with another batch, which I did — crisis averted. So now I'm a big hero too — me and the 'minister!

  What's been bugging me, though, is actually forgetting about them. My memory's pretty crappy about most things — birthdays, anniversaries, the names of people I run into in the street, what I had for lunch and what tie I wore yesterday (seriously!) — but I'm usually pretty good with work stuff. Not this time, though. I'll be forgetting where I live next — or where I work (I wish!).

  I guess that's something else that bugged me about those last two books: their perfect recall of childhood days. I know they're only fiction and they're by big-name writers who probably employ teams of researchers to dig up all the details they want, but they irritated me somehow because of their perfect clarity compared with the fuzziness of my own memories.

  What was I like when I was seven years old? What was I like when I was nine? I can remember incidents, feelings, specific events — though even these are like shadowy islands in the mist — but I can't remember me. Stu has some of our early photographs. Some are completely alien, a fuzzy likeness the only indication; some are more familiar — half-remembered surroundings, people, clothes. But still the serious little boy staring back at me from his monochrome world is unknown. What was he like? What was he doing, thinking, feeling?

  There was nothing on TV tonight so I spent the evening tinkering around with one of the Erics I wrote a while ago, the one about one of the few bits of my childhood I do remember — or at least, think I remember. The problem is that it became something of a family legend, even when my parents were alive. I'm there, I'm in it as a bit player, I can see the shop we owned, see the name Spalding's Dairy above the door and remember swinging on the rope cordoning off the other half, but as far as the details are concerned I'm not sure how much is actual memory and how much I've added from all the stories. The mind has a habit of making things fit, irrespective of the facts.

  That's where Eric has it over me. He said something tonight about his childhood being more cogent, and in many ways it is. I mean, honestly, when you read about the ice-block sticks things start falling into place. His attitude to authority, his contempt of bureaucracy, that pervading air of bitter sarcasm and sharp, unpopular observation ... you start to make associations, you begin to feel some of his outrage and start to think, 'I'm beginning to understand why he is the way he is.' But I wonder, is it really that simple? Aren't we being just a little lazy, a little too simplistic, a little too easily swayed? After all, those things really happened to me and I'm not actually like that.

  Valhalla

  I am trapped in suburbia with barbarians. Tonight is one of their ancient pagan rituals of gluttony and excess in which I will be forced to become an unwilling participant. It is not my doing. The appalling Spalding got me into this, he should damn well get me out of it.

  It is late afternoon and I have been banished here to seek my own entertainment away from the frenetic preparations elsewhere. My crime is smashing glasses — a whole tray full of thick-stemmed rented ones — dispatched to the kitchen floor by a misplaced elbow. Not one survived. The whole lot disintegrated into minute, jagged shards that scattered as far as the living room and laundry. I said, 'Whoops, where's the glue?' They didn't find it fun
ny.

  Still, banishment has its benefits, not least of which is escape. I have sought refuge in the study from where one can watch the evening sun paint an orange descent behind a scattering of clouds at the end of the valley. A magnificent view. Such a shame to have confined it within the portals of such a tacky house.

  'Study', I suppose, is a misnomer. My brother has never studied in his life — a fact he'll cheerfully admit to — and it's simply called that since, in this vast, roaming, effortlessly bland building, it simply has to be called something.

  The house as a whole is called Valhalla. There's a plaque to that effect affixed to its frontage. Valhalla, if my memory serves me correctly, was the hall in Odin's palace where dead heroes were received. Personally, I wouldn't receive a dead horse in this place.