Paddy's Puzzle

by Fiona Kidman

  But if one of them is intended to reach an end without the other then it is not unreasonable to consider what might have happened. It seems clear that it would have been children, because that’s what happened to most people sooner or later. Surprising how people’s hopes (her own in particular) change. She was older now than in the days when simply to escape was enough. And the escape had been achieved, she supposed. You had to look ahead from one undertaking to the next, and she didn’t want to dance on a tightrope any more.

  So that she could see herself and him in a tidy little house, somewhere on the edge of Auckland, with nappies flapping in the back yard and a baby-sitter on Saturday nights so that they could still go to the cinema or somewhere downtown to eat; some day in the future, when there would be no more rationing, and they could look in the shop windows on the way home; some day when they turned the lights back on, and people could see each other again. They would plan what to do with his next week’s pay, whether it would be spent on something for the children or something new for the neat little house with carpet on the floor.

  And in her imagination she saw them getting home and paying the sitter off and going to a room next to the children’s after they had checked on them together and kissed them and tucked their blankets in; and then lying in on Sunday morning, lazy, till they were awoken by them.

  It is not surprising then, that she wonders what colour those children might be.

  ‘You ain’t going to tell me we started on them?’ he asks.

  ‘No. Of course not.’ She is indignant, but only with surprise, for she hadn’t thought of that. In spite of her dreams that is where her children stay. What he is suggesting she thinks of as impossible, not just because of his care, but because she believes that somehow her body has decided against some things for itself even though there had been a time when it had had different ideas. But that was in another life, and before Ambrose; she doesn’t think it will offer her a second chance. It is too late.

  Besides, it has been a long time since he has been able to touch her, and despite her talk she knows that the desire she feels is really all in her head and it is this that has finally convinced her that what is between them is exceptional. For in this strange wilderness, they have come to the point where they make no more love and it seems that they love each other more.

  ‘Promise?’ He is anxious and she can see that he has forgotten just how long it is. She sees no point in reminding him.

  ‘Cross my heart and wish …’ she trails away. ‘I just wanted to know, honest. You know I’m not going to have children, not ever Ambrose … so, I just wondered.’

  He is prepared to join in the game then. For that is what it is.

  ‘Shee-it then, they be about half and half I guess, but sometimes they turn out more one half that the other.’

  She tries to imagine them, but can’t. It is something she can dwell on afresh when he has gone. For the moment it is enough.

  ‘You call on Janice on your way? Tell her about Winnie?’

  ‘Sure will.’

  ‘We can keep in touch through her. She’ll know when Winnie’s gone.’

  They say goodbye but it doesn’t upset her now. She feels he will still be with her in the room afterwards.

  He says, ‘So long then.’

  ‘Hey,’ she says, calling him back with one last thought.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I wish they were more your half than mine.’

  ‘Now why would you wish that?’

  ‘Scare off Winnie.’

  He laughs at her then. ‘You’re the one that’s scared.’

  ‘I sure am that.’

  The door closes silently behind him. She is left with the heavy smell of force-fed roses, the pan of milk boiling over on the stove, the cold blue light of the gas, and the unsteady yet persistent sound that makes up the life of Paddy’s Puzzle.

  It is then that the difficult day of laboured breathing and intermittent coughing overtakes her. She knows that she has been fighting it off all along, but now that the day appears to be over and done with she can’t fight it any more. The spasms rack, and tear, and shake her apart.

  She staggers to the bathroom and what she had brought up when Ambrose was with her proves now to be only the beginning. The disease in her body is spread across the bathroom; there is blood on the walls, in the cracked hand-basin. The light fragments before her eyes and for the second time that night she believes she will die. The room is full of the presence of Ambrose, but she can’t reach him. She tries to cry out to Ma Hollis through the wall and wonders that she has not heard her. Somewhere, maybe in the passage outside, maybe a thousand miles away, someone is singing a blowsy plaintive melody. A whistle splits the night, the first toms in their green suits are calling. The Puzzle is open for business. She will die alone.

  At last it is over and she is still there, sitting on the edge of the lavatory. Better now. She will be all right. She has got rid of the rubbish in her system. I will be all right, she tells herself aloud. There will be a tomorrow, and a tomorrow and another. I am at the turning point. I am going to get better.

  Homeopathic Vade Mecum: ‘finally all the symptoms are gradually intensified: the dyspnoea becomes very distressing, so that the patient is unable to make any active exertion, or even to read a short paragraph without pausing, the sputa is more purulent; the pus is often expectorated pure, in roundish masses, that remain distinct in the vessel; the disease often spreads to the other organs, as the lymphatic system and the intestinal canal, in which a deposit of tubercle takes place similar to that in the lungs, and which afterwards bursts into the intestines, leaving an ulcer; and thus the alimentary canal is affected, and Diarrhoea produced. The respiratory mucous membrane may also be ulcerated, producing huskiness, and even loss of voice, but more frequently the former, from the thickening and increase in vascularity which it undergoes. It is, therefore, but seldom that the local affection of the lungs alone causes death …

  The mind usually remains bright, often vigorous, and so hopeful that, even amidst this general wreck of the material frame, the patient dreads not the future, and thinks he “would be well but for his Cough”.’

  It is only a book. It is nothing. She should never have borrowed it from Janice. Her mother probably gave in to things too easily. She probably believed what the book said. If you believed everything that’s printed you’d be in a sorry mess. It’s a quaint old-fashioned thing anyway. It’s probably dangerous.

  She takes one last look at it, though she’s read it twenty times before. It will be the last time. She believes that she has done with it.

  ‘Healthy Residence: The position of the house, the prevailing winds, the aspect of the room (of the bedroom especially), the windows, the position of the bed, and the provision for ventilation without draught, should be considered. The climate should be moderately warm, dry, and uniform, to suit the consumptive. A voyage under favourable conditions sometimes wonderfully renews the constitution, if the patient does not suffer from sea-sickness.’

  She laughs out loud.

  Somewhere, as if in answer to her, there is a burst of high quick laughter, out there in the Puzzle. It is a desirable residence. A rat’s face peers at her from the corner of the skirting, and as quickly withdraws. There is a surge of water in her hand basin as the tenants above her release their sink, and some of it splashes over the edge. Not exactly dry, but dry enough. At least, as it sucks out down the plughole, it takes some of the rubbish she has deposited there. A sign that things are better. Yes, tomorrow she will be all right. Come Winnie, come spring. The milk has dried to a thin brown skin on the stove. It slides off easily with a knife.

  8

  May Abbott’s teeth snap shut on a chocolate. It splits and the soft peppermint explodes in her mouth, trickles to the back of her throat. Oh yes. Oh lovely. She loves peppermint chocolates so much she dreams about them. She thinks she pays young Clara too much for them, but she cannot resist. That, and whisky. She
sips first, then takes a long slurping gulp of Johnny Walker, glances surreptitiously about her as if someone might be watching. There is no one there. Peppermint and Scotch, twin fires.

  May looks at her bottle and sees that it is getting low. A part of her hopes that there will be callers tonight, for by tomorrow she could be a little short, but another part of her wishes that it could be a quiet evening.

  But the night is not over. In a way it never is in Paddy’s Puzzle. There is the laughter, the singing and the shouting and sometimes the weeping, going right on through until the dawn.

  And the night goes on in another interminable way all over Auckland, with the solid layer of the blackout sheltering all things and all people, under a thick and solid mantle.

  This is such a night. When Clara has composed herself and eaten her meal, she puts her ear to the wall and listens to the rustling sounds. She wishes for a moment that she could be part of it all again. Sometimes she feels that being in this room is like seeing the world through glass and wonders if that is how she appears to others now. It is as if she is waiting for something though she has no idea what it is. Just to be able to walk out perhaps, as if she owned a share of the night and could be in charge of herself again as she moved through the dark.

  It is almost an artificial night, with all the lights out. But that is not quite true for in the darkness the isthmus lies as it must have done a hundred years ago, before a city had been built, and if she were to put out the light and draw the curtain then the shape of Auckland, its hills and valleys, must stand out as on a moonlit night much as it did long ago. She has walked on the beach under a heavy red moon and looked out to Rangi-toto with the city in blackout behind her. It had been like the beginning of time. But she supposes that that was artificial too, for you can’t turn the clock back and begin things over again, not unless disaster strikes and razes to the ground all that has ever been, in a matter of seconds.

  There are people here now, and they have designed a life with colour and light and sound that belongs to the present. Moving in this muffled vacuum is not reality. But then there is nothing absolute about anything really, because of course they could be razed to the ground right now. Any second it could begin. She supposes that it wouldn’t take the Japs long to demolish Auckland.

  She shivers. She has thought about this often, these winter nights. She has more reason than most to dwell on it. The air-raid warnings come often and when they do everyone is required to evacuate buildings and take to the shelters. The wardens come round checking that everyone is out, the people huddling in the cold, taking sleeping children in their arms, wheeling the old in their wheelchairs, covering up the sick with blankets, while the shrill sirens rend the air.

  Only it is two months now since Clara has been to the shelters. It is difficult to check Paddy’s Puzzle properly and the wardens hate doing it. In fact it is rarely completely evacuated. Although nobody has organised any system there are unspoken agreements for people to take turns at getting out and putting up a reasonable show of a crowd. As no one has any way of checking just how many occupants there are in the Puzzle at any one time, the wardens prefer to make do with this rather than venture in. The main problem is with the Military Police, the ones they call the M.P.’s, from the American base.

  Every now and again they will swoop on the place and make sure that there are no personnel still in bed with their lady friends. It is one of their few legitimate excuses for entering the premises. There are, of course, organised systems of getting them out if a raid from the M.P.’s begins. Ambrose has taken advantage of it in the past. If any marines are hapless enough to get caught, the last sight of them is likely to be as they are thrown into the jeeps and beaten by the M.P.’s batons. Then they are not seen again for a long time, maybe never. If they are going to look for their pleasures it will probably be elsewhere; they will be off the Puzzle for good.

  May goes to the mirror and studies her reflection with care. It has paid off, all the years of caring for that fragile complexion. The way they stay in the sun, these girls. No wonder they look like scrawny old hens with their feathers plucked off by the time they are thirty. No one would guess to look at May that she is seventy. It is not just her vanity that declares this fact. She is always challenging people to guess her age. They are never right. Fifty? Sixty? No? Too old? fifty-five perhaps? She smiles, never tells them. Her ruffled mauve collar stands up pertly around the elegant curve of her chin. That of course is a matter of good fortune. She has to admit that. God gave her a good chin. But it is the difference between a profile and ordinariness. So her mother, the admiral’s wife, always told her. And her father, the admiral himself, was equally pleased that it was so.

  She pours herself another finger of Scotch, looks anxiously at her bounty. It is lower than she thought. Or perhaps had cared to admit to herself. She thinks that she would like some callers after all.

  It has always seemed silly to Clara that the authorities are so set against the Puzzle. There are few places as free and easy and accommodating as this, and those who suffer the treatment meted out to them will probably go off and fall in love or get into steady things that are really hard to break, and if they are married, as lots of them are, then it is going to be worse in the long run. Or that’s that way she looks at it. She wonders, in idle moments, if Ambrose could be married. She would never ask him, and she cannot see that it would be fruitful for him to tell her if he was. Somehow though, she doesn’t think he is. The main thing is that his presence with her makes sense and she has no desire to see him taken in and made prisoner by the police. Being black has its own advantages these dark nights and his movements, which are like those of a cat, mean that he can slide like a shadow into oblivion before the police even have time to get out of their jeeps.

  As for her, she can see no point in moving out to shelters. It is cold out there and if she goes to the trenches under that rusting corrugated iron she will spend the rest of the night sick. She has decided against going again and, as she says to others around her, it’s her business really, now that she has made that decision, and they must not come to see whether she will go with them or not. They must simply assume that she is taking responsibility for herself. Then, if anyone asks them, they can look them in the eye and say they don’t know a thing. ‘You’re all good liars,’ she says. ‘It shouldn’t be difficult for you.’

  Ma Hollis doesn’t like it much, and once or twice she has called in, despite Clara’s warning, but she has threatened to throw a bucket of water over Billy if she doesn’t go away, and she knows what his adenoids will be like if he goes into the shelter in wet clothes. She looks so fierce that Ma believes her, though Clara’s not sure whether she would actually do it. Billy makes her too uneasy; he might just remember the next morning.

  Under the bed she has her bucket of sand, which is supposed to be for putting out fires if the bombs begin to fall; though whether one bucket of sand would do much good is hard to tell. At least the strange concrete construction might contain fire a little. And maybe it would take more than a Japanese bomb to do much damage.

  But when most of them have gone, she sits in bed and waits for the all clear and wonders what it would be like if it caved in on top of her, and what would be the last things she would think about, and whether she would be very afraid. Sometimes she fills the bath with water, which is another thing they are supposed to do, although with the Puzzle’s plumbing problems, it is not always very practicable, and besides she hates putting her arm down into the cold water to pull the plug when it’s over.

  Mostly she is not afraid. She finds this curious because although she doesn’t want to die there is absolutely no resistance in her at this point. She would almost welcome a bomb.

  Tonight, because nothing is happening, she peers out through a tiny chink beneath the curtain. A car is edging down Cleveland Road with its headlights masked off, and she can hear the steady clop of the milkman’s horse. The horse neighs, and as the car inches past
she sees a fine spray of the horse’s hot breath caught for an instant in the pale glimmer cast by the lights. The car is a taxi and it has stopped outside. More soldiers?

  But it looks like a girl, and a familiar one at that, though it is almost impossible to tell in the night.

  The shadows of two men walking together slope up the street, and she hears a nasal voice call out, ‘Ullo Sailor,’ and she knows that she is right. There is only one voice like that, and even though she is imitating someone else, Janice’s voice is, nevertheless, inimitable.

  In a moment she is in the room, breathless, husky, amused, Janice the blonde clown from the factory. The door has been flung open and they are both laughing before she is properly through it, though neither of them really know why. For Clara’s part, probably just relief that she is there.

  Behind Janice, Biddy Chisholm is talking to the soldiers who have followed her in. They sound disagreeable but it is impossible to make out what it is over, and then Janice shuts the door on them.

  ‘What’s it all about?’ Clara asks.

  ‘Dunno. One of them was kicking up about taking Biddy.’

  ‘Oh. It’ll be her black eye, I guess. Wasn’t it one of her regulars?’

  ‘Gawd knows. Hey, why doesn’t Popeye’s cock go rusty?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He keeps it in Olive Oyl.’

  ‘Ah shucks.’

  There is a knock at May’s door, a loud commanding rap. She jumps, spills chocolates and the novel she has been reading to the floor. She is not used to such loud and peremptory approaches. Even before she opens the door she has decided to send the caller away. But there are two of them and the first one has his foot across the threshold before she can refuse. He is a captain and he carries a bottle of whisky. It catches the flickering light of the gas lamp. Twinkles at her.