by Fiona Kidman
Clara used to wave and call out hullo to his mother, until one day she said her son was dead, and that was that. Soon afterwards, Clara saw a Yank waiting for her; and then she saw the littlest child waiting outside the factory for his mother on a few occasions but she never turned up. The child would trundle home in the dirty baggy pants that had been handed down to him and a streaky hungry old man’s face. Clara slipped him chocolates a couple of times which was all she could think of to do.
*
Will Janice or Ambrose come this evening? She has worked out a plan and if just one of them comes she believes she can make it work.
In the end it is Ambrose, although she hasn’t really expected him. It is half past five.
‘Ambrose,’ she says, and smiles and moves in the bed, as if she is having a dream.
He steals a little closer, and she is overpowered then by the scent of another armful of roses and early spring flowers which he bears, and they block out all the other powerful forces in the room. She can’t help herself and begins to laugh as he pounces on her, burrowing his hands under the bedclothes, his long bony fingers finding parts of her body that will react irresistibly to his touch, but so very gentle that if she were a butterfly in the bed she would still be intact.
‘You were awake all the time,’ he accuses her.
‘Not all the time, truly. I’ve just this moment woken up.’
‘How’s it been today?’
‘Not so bad.’
He looks at her searchingly. She can never hide the truth from him.
The children below are screaming still.
‘The cough’s been good,’ she says. ‘Only one bad lot.’
‘Because you rested?’
‘I was tired. Yes, you could say that. I haven’t moved much today.’
He is silent. He knows that what she has said is neither good nor bad and there is no response he can make that will comfort her. She knows that he is pleased that she has had some relief from the cough, but it is not really a good sign when she is so lethargic. It has to be one or the other. They both know she is no better.
And he knows her too well, knows also that she is hiding something from him. He waits, watching her. She tries to turn away, but he takes her chin in his hand and turns her back to look at him.
‘What is it eh? Come on, doan’ make me drag it out. Like pulling teeth tryin’ to get things outa you sometimes.’
‘It’s my sister,’ she says at last. ‘My sister Winnie. She’s coming to stay here. I got the letter today. Ma Hollis brought it in.’
7
Clara is filled with the sudden need to be active, frenetically so. She swings her feet on the floor. There is so much to do. She feels that if she doesn’t get moving now she never will. Ambrose watches her anxiously.
‘Hey, who is this sister then?’
‘Winnie. I told you silly, you don’t listen to me.’
‘I forget. I’m so dumb.’ He drawls the last words. His mouth has changed.
‘No you’re not. Don’t hand me that. You’re smarter than I am.’
‘That ain’t no way for a white lady to talk.’
She looks at him, narrowing her eyes the way she’d seen Joan Crawford do it when she was playing things cool, but she isn’t trying to be funny. It is the only way she can stop herself from crying. She hates it when he talks to her like that, there is something of a sneer in it. Right now, she needs, more than anything, for him to understand.
‘Auckland’s full of “ladies” like me. Maybe some of them are smarter than me. Or whatever.’
‘Or whatever,’ he mocks. ‘We are afraid to say it, hey? We still some lady.’
‘You said it first.’
‘Lady. Lady. Afraid to say bad words. Whatever. Shit. What sort of word is that?’
‘All right, I whore.’
‘Better. What do whores do?’
They have never quarrelled like this before. It is a sudden ugly confrontation with both of them going down and neither able to pull back. One more word and she senses that all will be lost between them. She looks at him, bracing herself to say the word that is hard for her, that she is not used to saying though she has said it in passion when she understood what it meant; but it has nothing to do with what they have just been saying to each other. She puts her hands over her face and thinks that it is true, that at last she is going to lose him, after everything. After surviving so many tests and against so many odds. He has watched her fall ill and yet he still seemed to love her. She has said goodbye once to him when he has gone back to the Pacific and never expected to see him again, and he has returned. Not only returned from death, but to her. A war, black and white. A soldier and a prostitute. Illness. There couldn’t be much more. And yet he has continued to come, and now they are on the edge of saying something to each other that they will not be able to mend. She does not know why it is the words they say that matter. In her head, it is not important. It is language such as her friends in the factory and here in the Puzzle use every day, casually, with no special intention to offend, and she has never been shocked. What they, or she for that matter, do is more important, and probably more shocking. But it implies between her and Ambrose a world of meaning and intent. It is not what Winnie would say, or think, or maybe has ever heard. (Even at Frankton Junction? Well perhaps.) That’s it, she supposes, and marvels that within seconds he has placed her in the context of Winnie’s world. Placed her inside Winnie’s head, so that they are against each other.
She edges her fingers apart and looks at him. She can see that he looks as ill as she feels, and knows he is afraid. Relief overwhelms her.
She drops her hands, speaks quietly. ‘You do know who Winnie is, don’t you?’
He looks towards her, and as she has not wounded him as he expected, he nods. ‘She is a white lady,’ he says and there is still some venom in his voice but it is not directed at her.
‘I thought it didn’t matter. That’s what you said.’
‘It always matters,’ he says harshly.
‘She’s not a lady. She’s ordinary.’
He curls his lip. ‘She’ll like this? Us?’
‘No.’
‘You see then.’
‘It’s only because she’s Winnie.’
‘It ain’t,’ he says fiercely, and there is no denying his intensity or the power of his feeling. ‘It is only because it is me.’
He holds her eye. He doesn’t need to say any more. What he says is true. There are a million Winnies and a million Ambroses and it is always because of the Ambroses and not the Winnies.
‘She’s my sister,’ Clara says, and starts to shiver violently.
He comes at once then and puts his arms around her, drawing her feet up onto the bed again and pulling the covers around her.
‘I have to get up,’ she says, resisting feebly.
‘Shush, shush, yes soon pretty baby, soon little girl, little Clara.’
‘Come in beside me.’
‘You need food. You haven’t eaten all day, eh? Eh, tell Ambrose.’
She feels like a baby, but that is how they both like it to be, now that she has come to depend upon him in such a physical sense. Her childishness shuts out what they are really about, it disguises her illness, at least for the moment.
‘It doesn’t matter. Just be beside me. Please.’
He slips off his shoes as he has done some hundreds of times now but not his clothes. When her face is against the rough material of his uniform she says, ‘Will you love me again?’
Those long hands of his with the black knuckles and the pale palms. He holds her by the chin and tilts her face up towards him.
‘Always will, no matter how long.’
But she cannot leave it alone. ‘Will you fuck me again?’ She has said it now, like an offering. The fingers tighten around her chin and he looks deeper into her still.
‘I would surely like that, Clara.’
She can think of nothing to say except hi
s name. ‘Ambrose,’ she whispers.
‘What now?’
‘Nothing. Just Ambrose.’
Ambrose Johnson. She doesn’t know a great deal about him. He says there is nothing much to tell, that he has told her all there is to know. In a way this is probably true. She knows his mother’s and father’s names, Rose and Jacob, and the numbers of brothers and sisters he has, in just the same way as he knows such basic facts about her. She knows that he grew up in Harlem (don’t ever say brought up, he has told her, because that, Clara, would be a lie).
‘What is it like, Ambrose?’ she has asked him.
He has been silent then.
‘Try and tell me.’ She imagines it as exciting and full of life. He says it is not. His eyes with the sepia flecks in their whites narrow when he replies.
Only once has he volunteered any opinion on the place he has come from, and that is when the sewage has jammed the drains in the Puzzle. His nostrils flared at the smell of shit, and he said ‘Harlem,’ exhaled, changed the subject.
Another time, when she urged him to tell her what it was like, he said that it was a bad place for women. He had a sister and the only ways she could make any money were bad. She pleased white men, he said.
Sometimes Clara has wondered if there is a peculiar satisfaction for him having a white woman whom he has met as a prostitute depend upon him; as if the wheel has come full circle. Once, in an evil moment, Biddy has hissed at her, ‘He screws white, baby, he’d kill white too.’
But if it is so, she does not ask. She has too much love for him and there is always the chance that to scratch beneath the surface of what they know will damage them. They have come close enough tonight.
And although she is six years younger than him, she knows how to hold back as well as he does. She wonders what he would tell people about her back in America. She suspects he will never even try. Their history is written in this room.
There is one thing he has said though, and it makes her wonder about him and the kind of man he is. He feels freer in this country than he does in his own. This war will have been a bad thing for black people in a way that is different from other people. They will know, the young men, what it is like to live as free men. There has been an ease in the ignorance which they will no longer have.
She says that New Zealand has no special reputation for being free, that it is a country where it seems to her, and other people think so too, that it is hard to be yourself. But when she says that he looks at her as if she is talking in another tongue. Then she argues that the war can only be a good thing because if they have lived like free men they will make a greater effort to be free when they go home.
He has thought of that. He says that they should be more organised in their anger, that the whole way of thinking must change and that this might be the time that it will happen. Only he becomes uncertain and afraid when they talk like this, and one time he says that he is done for, ruined for anything like that. He had gone away to the Excelsior Hotel up in Parnell and came back after closing time, towards seven o’clock, swaying on his feet. When she asked him why, he said, softly, that it was because he would have to hate people like her, and she had done for him in this respect.
Is that what he wanted, she asked him, a new world fashioned out of hate? She was surprised at herself, what thinking did for you, how far she had come. Well, at least past emerald-green tights.
No, he had said, that was not what he wanted but that was what it would have to be. Until they (the whiteys, he said, when she asked him to explain who ‘they’ were) were afraid of them, they would not begin to comprehend. Or want to try. Once, before New Zealand and the war in the Pacific, he’d thought that making them afraid through hate might be the answer. He doesn’t know any answers any more.
In fact, he says, he has nothing to take back to America except a clean pair of heels and his number and his name, and in his opinion even the last one doesn’t really belong to him.
That is Ambrose. Or as much as she knows. The rest is what she has here in this room, and he is black and very beautiful, angular with bones pressing against the planes of his face like plates, and he is tall, at least six foot three, with a spare hard body.
When she says ‘Ambrose’, she has said just that, Ambrose, everything she knows.
‘Noisy little devils.’ Now that her senses are alerted again the sound of the children fazes her. They sing the same song over and over again, and chant the same old rhymes. There is a group of girls with high piping voices who are still chanting ‘Mairzy doats and dozy doats’ in the crisp and deepening evening. Their voices go through her head.
‘It’s the school holidays,’ she says. ‘They go on and on. It’s time they went back to school.’
‘I’ll bet you used to like them. The holidays. I’ll bet you were the first one out the schoolroom door.’
‘Yes, I did too. It seems like only yesterday since I’d be waiting for them as if my life depended on it.’
‘I reckon it was only yesterday too.’
‘Four years. Left when I was fifteen. No keeping me.’ She begins to cough and he moves to close the window.
‘You don’t want no noise and draughts, eh?’
‘Don’t you get out of this bed, Ambrose. You won’t get back in it, will you?’
He lies staring at the ceiling. ‘How old is your sister’s little girl then?’ For now they have talked about Winnie coming and he has accepted it as a fact, as she has accepted that his fear is real and that his anger is directed not at her, or even at Winnie herself, but rather towards the way that she might possibly alter things between them.
Even as she lies watching him she can feel other things turning over in his head. He is like that, very quick and sharp in his ideas, and once he is onto something he works it through, way beyond her. She is not sure whether his asking about her niece is what he is really thinking, or to cover something else, but she knows better than to question him until he is ready.
‘She’s three years younger than me.’
‘Hey, sixteen. That’s pretty grown-up. Where I come from, that is o-old. Huh? Maybe I should get to meet her.’
‘You wouldn’t like her.’
‘How d’you know that, heh?’
‘She’s a swot. And she’s got thick ankles.’
‘I like smart women. Oh, and I could be very partial to a good solid ankle … Heh, heh, don’t bite me.’ He is doubled up with laughing and it makes her feel powerful that she can do this to him. She longs to sink her teeth into every part of him and she suddenly desires more than anything to hurt him until he screams. But doesn’t.
‘She got something you want?’ he says, when he has stopped laughing.
‘Brains,’ she says carelessly.
‘No. You can do better ’n that.’
‘I dunno. Winnie maybe.’ Her confession surprises her. She hadn’t meant to say that. He regards her soberly.
‘I don’t know,’ she says, tracing her finger round the stitching on the old patchwork quilt that she had brought from home. ‘Honest, I don’t. I mean I don’t know why it’s like that. It’s just that … well, Winnie really is her mother, she just kind of filled in for mine. And she was young, you know?’
‘Your sister. Mmm. I guess so. In Harlem, all mothers are old. Old before you’re born to them.’
‘But so was Mumma.’
‘And what you got that Winnie ain’t?’
‘Eh? Oh that’s easy. I’ve got Mumma.’
It all seems so plain to her that there is nothing to explain. Even though she was too tired to bring her up herself, it is still Clara, her youngest born, that Mumma loves the best, which is not fair because it is Winnie, her first born, who loved her more than any of the rest of them and craves her love the most. Funny old world.
‘She got any more children? This Winnie?’
‘Caroline. She’ll be pretty. And smart. I’m glad she’s only ten, I really am.’
But he is only half li
stening to her. His hands knead her shoulder, and he still stares up at the ceiling, as if what they have been saying is a part of his thoughts but somehow only on the fringe of what is central to them. It is better to wait. Although he is quick he is also impatient. Still, as he lies there thinking she has to try something to penetrate his thoughts. She feels shut out.
‘Ambrose, when d’you think the ship’s going to sail?’
‘I told you little one, they don’t tell us Marines nothing like that.’
‘D’you think it’ll be soon?’ Suddenly she is dreadfully afraid that she has come close to the truth.
‘Could be six months. Could be tomorrow.’ There is a small knot in his silk skin.
‘Would you leave me if it was tomorrow?’
‘I’ve got to go an’ fight for my country don’t I?’
‘What’s the use of fighting?’ she asks, and for the life of her she cannot see that there is any point to it. If it is to bring about coincidences like her meeting Ambrose, or making people better off, like the Americans coming here have done, or anything she can actually relate to the people she knows, then maybe it’s all right. But when she counts the things against it, such as the loss of Reg, and the people who have got their lives all torn to bits, as opposed to the ones who are in easy street now, she can’t make sense of it. As a rule she has no great thoughts about the meaning of life, except, increasingly, perhaps, about her own. But for once she would like it explained to her why they have to put up with things as they are. There is no order or sense to it.
‘You mustn’t say that,’ says Ambrose. ‘We Americans, we fighting for your little country too.’ But it comes out flatly and she is not convinced. She doesn’t think he is either.
‘I’ll die if you leave me,’ she says angrily, and she doesn’t give a damn then about her country or anyone else in it except herself. She goes on dwelling on her own needs and concerns but she cannot help herself. There is so much she wants to understand and if she does not know herself, as a point from which to begin, then where else can she start? She is not sure whether it is her illness that makes her so self-centred in her thoughts or whether this is really the kind of person she is. Either way she believes that she is possibly good at hiding it because people in the Puzzle act as if they like her and not altogether as if they are sorry for her, although that is a part of it, and then she starts thinking that she is cunning as well. It’s hard to like yourself when you are wilting before your own eyes, and she is full of self-reproach.