by Geoff Palmer
I have let myself indulge in a fantasy about her and I know the cure for that. I began by imagining the courtship, now I'll fantasise the split. It will end with me turning away down a darkened street and walking off into the distance, a sad but resolute figure stepping into the gloom between guttering street lamps as the music rises to a climax and the final credits roll. Or perhaps on the tarmac of Casablanca airport where I'll deliver a few poignant lines and steer her towards that painful parting that we both know is really for the best. One last kiss and goodbye forever.
At least I am conscious of my illusion. Dreams can fade, can crash and burn, and we survive, can pick up the pieces, console ourselves. But what happens when those pieces are themselves mirage? What happens then?
Woz was guilty, sure, but she could understand. Who hasn't been tempted by possessions or the touch of young flesh? ,
She could forgive, she could wait, she could continue, holding fast to some vision of the future. And when he slipped away ... how typical, you couldn't help but laugh! Always alert to any chance; they should have seen it coming. Some day perhaps a cryptic card, a letter, a ticket to exotic lands, a summons to his side ... And consolation even if it never came: a fading dream, new life slowly seeping in to replace the old, time healing and distracting. Perhaps in years to come, 'I wonder what became of him ...'
The cruellest thing I have ever known; the most brutal, fiendish torment ever devised. The four most vile words ever spoken, what Woz said of my mother: 'Which one was she?'
There are emotions beyond tears. There are feelings beyond description or comparison. Just the void left when everything else is sucked away. The falling aircraft in the fateful dive, just praying for the impact.
What else of Woz remained after the death of dreams? A few old gifts and book-pressed flowers to be looked on fondly and stroked with care. Memories. And the thing they'd shared at close of day, sitting on the porch-swing or side by side on the sofa, or slumped across the kitchen table too tired to even go to bed; a cigarette.
And even I, in the precocity of teenage years, realised the importance of the Sunday legal more lethal than an ice-block stick. It was not the thought of you-know or the ingrained images of another documentary that kept me silent. It was the look in her eyes, the downward cast of her face, the loss, the pain, the shadow begging for the crash-and-burn as she drew in deep and tried to hold, like clinging to his memory. At last the exhalation, sometimes, often, shaky, close to tears. Another gasp, another grasp, but nothing can be held forever. And later, on her deathbed — Sunday legals had done quick work, a will too frail to fight — in a miasma of drugs and pain, slipping in and out of consciousness, reality and dreams, she took my hand and clasped it to her, murmuring with a lovely smile, 'Oh Warren, Warren, you silly, silly man. You shouldn't ... You mustn't ... You really cant ...'
Dear Mum. I hope your dreams were sweet.
Magic
I first saw the headlines draped across Harry Purvis's recumbent form as he snoozed in a patch of sun on the landing a floor-and-a-half from my flat in Barchester Towers. 'UPROAR AS KENNEDY QUITS' it proclaimed, and I wouldn't have paused in my ascent had it not been accompanied by a large colour photo that bore a strong resemblance to a certain politician I had rubbished at a recent social outing. I quickly scanned the text then snitched the whole edition and scampered upwards before the spluttering drunkard was fully awakened by the sudden influx of sunlight. .
Barry Kennedy — the Right Man in, apparently, the Wrong Place — had made his final speech, and kicked up a cloud of controversy as he did so. He'd quit, denouncing both his peers and profession, and I read gleefully of what was surely a classic case of my brother backing the wrong horse.
It seemed that yet another increase in MPs' pay had provoked his outburst, causing him to examine his conscience and conclude that he was disillusioned with both politics and the self-serving shenanigans of his contemporaries. 'We call for wage restraints then take another healthy pay rise for ourselves. What are we telling people here? What the hell are we becoming?'
Hear, hear! I muttered.
'I look around at many of my parliamentary colleagues and wonder what happened to the caring representatives of days gone by. This lot are only interested in their careers, getting their faces on TV, getting known and getting re-elected. Election promises are just so many lies to be swept under the carpet.'
I had to admit his words had a certain familiarity to them. Could this be the brief influence of yours truly? I read on.
The venue he'd chosen for his damning remarks was a very public one: delivering the opening speech at a national sports awards dinner. Because the place was crammed with sporting personalities, it was also crammed with journalists and the whole event had been carried live on one of the TV networks. Somehow I'd overlooked it in my list of compelling viewing but, back at my bijou residence, there were enough of the highlights on the TV news that night. In fact Kennedy was still the lead story.
I felt a frisson of familiarity when he spoke about the classless Kiwi society being an enduring myth and more than a touch of déjà vu when he asked how one could judge the bottom-line profit in having a healthy, educated and reasoning populace.
Somewhere there was a whiff of a brother-sized rat and my ill-ease-ometer hit red when a cut- away shot showed some of the guests, amongst them my sister-in-law's admirable cleavage, accompanied by none other than the prime suspect himself. In the circumstances, losing his protégé in such a public manner, I thought Stuart looked remarkably composed. In fact he was beaming.
After the news came an in-depth interview with the man. 'In-depth' for television means two and a half minutes on the same subject, with two of those minutes taken up by an interviewer filling in background that everyone already knows. Nevertheless, Kennedy looked good. He caught the right nuances, the right accentuation, that faint tremor of suppressed emotion when he spoke about a caring and responsible society and even squeezed a smile from his interrogator when he described the political animal as being three rungs lower on the ladder of life than the amoeba. But certain half-familiar phrases kept popping up and there was a slickness, almost a glibness to his style. No sooner was a question asked than he had the answer without recourse to any of those conversational fillers that people invariably use. Almost as if he had been rehearsed.
Then there was the choice of venue and the manner of his announcement. It couldn't have been more public. The emotiveness of his speech had somehow struck a chord and there were editorials calling for him to reconsider. People who a week before were saying 'Who is this guy?' were now proclaiming that we couldn't afford to lose him He'd caused a rift within his own party and there were even calls for him to challenge for the leadership.
Suddenly it was all too much. If I wasn't such a cynic, if I hadn't been at that party, if I hadn't practically written the speech myself, if I hadn't seen that shot of Pid positively beaming in the background, I might have believed it. But not this. I suspected the hand of my brother the shaman showman in it all and it didn't leave me feeling very easy.
• • •
My brother's always been a bit of a showman. As a kid he was mad on magic. Not the carefully practised sleight-of-hand kind, but the presentation of grand illusions involving special props designed to deceive and distract an audience. Stuart went in for spectacle. By the age of ten I'd been disembowelled, sawn in half and had more swords thrust through me than I could have counted.
His equipment, in true Kiwi fashion, was home-made. The saw was real enough but the swords were more like pikes since they were made from sharpened broom handles, and the cabinets and boxes came from packing crates cunningly modified to designs found in musty library books, then sanded and painted to disguise their origins. Perhaps it was the embellishment of these old crates that sparked his later interest in graphic design, for their corners and edges were covered in fanciful scrolls and they bore the legend The Stupendous Spalding along the side. Their appearanc
e belied their humble origins; they looked solid and antique. Another illusion, for their innards were rough and splintery.
The venue was the garage beside the shop with my father's latest automotive bargain moved — invariably pushed — out into the street. Amidst a clutter of greasy engine parts, the corpse of an eviscerated lawnmower and the smell of compost, my brother would direct and oversee the dragging out of his boxes and cabinets from their storage place in the old lean-to chicken coop behind the shed. He directed but never actually took part in this labour, leaving Brian, his other press-ganged helper, and me, both much his junior, to struggle with the awkward shapes and sharp edges and get bellowed at for accidentally knocking his paintwork.
His early audiences were culled from our parents and relations and their unwilling offspring, then neighbours and schoolmates, then, as his taste for the macabre became known, teenaged ghouls from far and wide.
Each show was essentially the same so, to encourage more realism and counter the ho-hums of an audience who'd seen it all before on television, he introduced gore. It was subtle at first: a small plastic bottle of fake blood secured part way down the sawing channel when he cut me in half. The rusty saw would smear slightly and a thin trickle would run down the side of the box. One or two would notice and elbow their friends and you could hear a spreading ripple of gasps above the rasping of the saw. Once, an elderly neighbour made a fool of himself by rushing up and trying to stop the show, fearing something had gone horribly wrong, only to be rebuked by a maniacal stage laugh from Stuart, a particularly forceful saw-thrust and an enhanced accompaniment of bloody splatter. The old chap was still looking pale and shaken long after I'd been restored to wholeness.
From there his reputation spread. The story moved from mouth to mouth around the neighbourhood and soon had the old chap being carted away by ambulance. We had to do three shows one Saturday because the garage wasn't big enough for all the bloodthirsty louts that turned up. The blood was actually corn syrup filched from our father's shelves and mixed with food colouring, the syrupiness giving it a suitably languid quality as it ran and dripped in increasing quantities from Brian's severed head or my own dismemberment.
His act got more and more macabre. In the sawing-in-half — an illusion that actually involves two assistants, one unseen except for his feet — I was demoted to being the ankles because Brian was better at the blood-curdling screams and helpless thrashing as the saw appeared to bite. The corn syrup began disappearing at an alarming rate. My father suspected a gang of shoplifters and was ever more vigilant, while his garage was turned into what might have been mistaken for the set of a horror film, his eldest son raising blood-soaked implements to the appreciation of a ghoulish crowd. Not that I ever saw much, cramped and folded double in the feet-end, sweating, nearly suffocating, listening for my cues, happy, at least, to be out of the limelight.
His coup de grass was the offal. He added a one-inch bead around the edge of the two boxes used for the sawn-in-half illusion and created a clever trapdoor that filled this small compartment with gratis offerings from the local abattoir. During the act he would deliberately draw the saw too far back so the audience would be flicked with little fragments on the down stroke, and, when the halves were fully separated, mangled liver, kidney, heart, lung and intestine would tumble out onto the floor.
It was too much for some. One ghoul's girlfriend fainted during a performance and others rushed out to be sick on the lawn. Of course, this made it even more popular for a while, but soon he once again faced what he'd been trying to avoid in the beginning —— viewer boredom. Apart from doing actual bodily harm to his assistants, he really couldn't go much further. Besides, preparation and cleaning-up times had risen dramatically. The cabinets and boxes had to be hosed down after each performance and they soon started to warp and split from the constant attention. The smell of compost was replaced by quite another odour and the continuing splatter of corn syrup was having an adverse effect on the paintwork, just as its continuing disappearance was adversely affecting our father's sanity. In the end it wasn't censorship that killed my brother's shows but time itself, something even the master magician couldn't conjure with. There were demands for other acts, more variety, but Stu was losing interest. Warped, split, stained and bedraggled, the mechanisms of his magic spent longer and longer periods in the lean-to chicken coop until, when I last glanced at them on the move to the first of our 'new' houses, they looked like the props of some nineteenth-century magician — well used and long forgotten.
Wednesday, May 6
I ran into Julie, the blonde girl from the front flat, in the dairy yesterday evening. I called in for some milk on my way home and ended up buying a newspaper too because there was a big story about Pid's latest protégé on the front page. She's still got her foot in plaster, though she's getting about without a stick now, and I helped her carry a couple of bags of shopping back home. Though it's dearer, she has to get most of her stuff from the dairy at the moment, she said, because it's too far to the supermarket with her foot the way it is. It seems Donny won't demean himself or his precious motorbike with anything as mundane as groceries.
It's a funny world. Though technically we've been living in the same house for about a year now, yesterday was the first time we've met properly and got to know each others names.
She seems a rather nice if somewhat nervous person (and, quite frankly, who wouldn't be in the circumstances!) and thanked me warmly for my assistance. She also apologised for Donny's behaviour the other week when I went to try and help after, in her words, 'I hurt my foot.' It seems the gentleman concerned can be a little irascible at times. (No!) To thank me further she invited in for coffee. Their flat, though sparsely furnished, is surprisingly neat — evidence, I suspect, of her influence — and, given the apparent predilection and general loutishness of her partner, surprisingly middle-class. I expected posters of pop groups, brimming ashtrays, a litter of empty bottles, the smell of incense, heavily curtained windows and a raucous stereo instead of the light, bright, pot-planted interior that greeted me. There were even books, mainly of the romance variety, but books nonetheless.
She's quite a pretty girl, short but petite in her features, well proportioned, with a propensity for high heels and short skirts. Obviously high heels were out of the question with a foot in plaster, which meant she had to stretch a little higher putting her groceries away while the kettle boiled. Since she wouldn't let me help I just sat there talking with her and enjoying the view. A much better perspective than peering from my kitchen window on wash day.
Later we sat at right angles to each other drinking coffee in the lounge, she on the sofa, me in an armchair. She told me about her job in the office of a produce warehouse and I told her about mine, while all the while observing something childlike yet wanton about her; an air of almost-innocence with a dash of seductress. Most women seated in her position would have been tugging unconsciously at the hem of their skirts, but Julie sat back with a kind of knowing indifference to the effect it was having on me. A couple of times she caught me surveying her legs and seemed merely accepting, even complimented, by my presumption. The second or third time I felt it necessary to indicate that my attention had been caught by a nasty bruise on the outside of her thigh and she guilelessly lifted the edge of her skirt even higher to reveal the whole thing.
'Oh ... that.' Only when she spoke did she seem less than sure of herself. 'I ... walked into a desk at work.' Our eyes met again and she didn't need to say anything more.
As I was leaving she said, 'People get the wrong impression of him because of his hair and jacket and stuff, but deep down he's really very nice, you know?' I was struck by the image of her as one of those tiny birds that hang around alligators, picking bits out of their teeth. A risky existence. In a way she's trapped by fiction as much as I am. They both leave bruises, only hers are more tangible.
Marie ambushed me in the tea room this morning. I was in my usual distracted daze — ac
tually I'd been thinking about Julie — and didn't notice her until she sat down beside me. I was still stirring sugar into my tea so I couldn't really make an excuse to go back downstairs.
She started with her usual 'Hi, Steven' but her face didn't reflect the casualness of her tone. Her hair was tied up and she was back in that sombre businesswoman look again — blouse with jacket and matching sensible skirt — as if Monday had been an aberration.
She tried a few casual pleasantries before remarking in an overly offhand manner, 'Actually, I'm glad I bumped into you. I was wondering if you know what's going on.'
I stalled, praying for something to whisk me away. I'd been avoiding her precisely because I knew she'd use me to find out how much other people knew.
'How d'you mean?' I asked.
'Well ... I don't know. It's hard to explain. It feels like ... like ... did you ever stick a silly sign on someone's back when you were at school? You know, "Kick me!" or "I'm an idiot". That sort of thing? It feels like someone's done that to me and no one wants to be the one to tell me it's there. They're nice enough to my face, but as soon as I turn away I get the feeling they're whispering and sniggering.'
'Sounds a bit paranoid to me,' I said.
'That's what I thought at first, that I was just imaging it. But it keeps happening and I can't get over the idea that I'm being singled out for some reason. Like lust now, getting a cup of tea. One of the women behind the counter asked me if I was "that Marie from downstairs". I said yes and she said "I thought it was you" sort of smugly. Thought what was me?'
'Did you ask her?'
'No, well, I couldn't really, there was a queue. But you're right, maybe I should.' She glanced over her shoulder at the servery and seemed on the verge of getting up to go over.