by Derek Hansen
At lunchtime I discovered my pals had planned another expedition down the drains. The fact was, because of what they’d done to me, only Nigel, Maxie and I had made the run between the two shafts and the others were still up for it. I faked enthusiasm. In truth, I almost pissed myself at the thought of going back down. There was no way I was going to chance it again, at least not until every one of the kids had done the return journey solo with the manhole covers on, and there was little likelihood of that happening. I thought I might hover around the shafts and maybe climb down a few rungs. I’d done a bit more thinking about the essay I intended to write. I’d almost decided to do a story about a U-boat caught on the surface by a long-range aircraft and depth-charged, rather than centre it on the drain and drown a few reckless Catholic kids. If the depth charge broke the sub’s back I imagined the rush of water would be fairly similar to the flood that blew the manhole cover off the drain shaft. I figured a little more research pretending I was in the conning tower when the depth charge exploded wouldn’t go amiss.
First we had to get through the afternoon and Tuesday afternoons were the slowest of the whole week. On Tuesdays we did history and we were stuck in the middle of the Maori Wars. As I recall we were midway through the assault on Gate Pa when we heard the ambulance come screaming down Richmond Road and stop outside the school. The classroom we were in overlooked Brown Street and we couldn’t see back far enough into Richmond Road to find out what was happening. Mr Grainger threatened to strap the next boy who got up to look out the window so we had no choice but to sit tight. It was torture. Something really exciting was happening right outside the school gate and we had to sit and listen to him talk about a bunch of dead Maoris. It only made matters worse when we heard the siren start up again and the ambulance scream off. Who cared about things that happened in the olden days when real-life drama was taking place right under our noses? Our unrest got to Mr Grainger, who made us stay back for an extra twenty minutes after school. He did it out of sheer spite.
By the time we were let out every kid was talking about the old drunk who’d stepped in front of a delivery van and got knocked for six. Some kids in Standard Two were just coming in from phys ed when they heard the bump. They claimed they saw the old bloke flying through the air. They reckoned he landed face first. The van was still parked by the side of the road with a sizable dent in the mudguard and a broken windscreen. The road was still wet where people living nearby had done their best to wash the blood away. We reckoned we could still see traces of red. Every kid I knew was standing around the van trying to picture what had happened when Rod crossed over the road and told me Mum wanted to see me. That was bloody typical! I had a feeling Mum just wanted to let me know about her confrontation with Captain Biggs over my lack of promotion. As far as I was concerned that was history and could wait. It didn’t rate alongside someone being bowled over, blood on the road and a smashed van. I didn’t want to go home just for that.
‘Now,’ said Rod. ‘She wants to see you now.’
My heart sank. I knew immediately Mum didn’t want to talk about Captain Biggs. Rod probably had homework so I’d been singled out to take the laundry up to the laundrette, the very worst thing that could happen. It took nearly half an hour to drag the bag of washing up to Ponsonby Road, an hour in the machines and another half hour to drag the sodden washing home. I couldn’t believe it. The van would probably be towed away before I got back and all the kids would’ve watched what happened except me. To make matters worse, a Maples furniture truck had broken down up by the Church Army and we’d been told a special heavy-duty tow truck that normally recovered broken-down trolley busses was coming to tow it away. That would probably happen while I was up at the laundrette as well. I looked around for Nigel but he was nowhere to be seen. Dad called him The Artful Dodger. He was never around when there was a job to be done.
Mum wasn’t in the shop so I opened up the counter and went through to the living room, desperately trying to conjure up a reason for not going to the laundrette. She was sitting down on the sofa, having her afternoon tea and smoking one of her du Maurier cigarettes. She only allowed herself five cigarettes a day. When she saw me she smiled but it was a funny kind of smile. That should have told me something.
‘Sit down,’ she said and patted the sofa alongside her.
‘Why?’ I said. Either I had to go to the laundrette or I didn’t.
‘I’ve got some bad news.’
‘What?’
‘Sit down.’
I sat. Maybe I was wrong about the laundrette. Maybe she wanted to talk about her confrontation with Captain Biggs after all. I figured it had gone badly and I’d been thrown out of club. The way I was feeling about Captain Biggs that was no big loss.
‘It’s about Mack.’
Mack? What did he have to do with club? I was mystified. Why had Mum dragged me away from the most exciting thing to happen in ages to talk about Mack? Mum looked down at her hands and I noticed they were shaking.
‘Mack’s been run over.’
‘What?’ I couldn’t grasp what she was trying to tell me. People hardly ever got run over and the likelihood of two people being knocked down on the same day smacked of the absurd. I thought she was getting confused. ‘Some old bloke got hit by a van,’ I said. ‘I know that. What’s Mack got to do with it?’
Mum put her arm around me. ‘That was Mack. It was Mack who was hit by the van.’
Have you ever had that sensation when all the air seems to suck out of your lungs and your blood stops flowing? I thought that sort of thing only happened when you died, but it was happening to me. It was Mack who stepped out in front of the van? Mack who the kids had seen flying through the air? It was Mack’s blood we could still see on the road? This revelation begged the big question but I couldn’t say the words.
‘Are you all right?’ Mum hugged me tighter. She was biting her bottom lip. Maybe she was worried I’d react the way I had when she told me my cocker spaniel pup had been run over and killed. I’d run straight out the back door, down Chamberlain Street, right across Grey Lynn Park and out into Williamson Avenue. I would’ve run forever if Mr Gillespie hadn’t stopped me on his way home from work and brought me back. But how could I run when I was struggling to even find the breath to speak? Somehow I managed to get the question out. My voice sounded like someone else’s. It was really weird.
‘Is he dead?’
‘No, but I’m afraid things don’t look too good. He was hit awfully hard. Captain Biggs went with him in the ambulance.’
‘Where?’
‘Auckland Hospital, I suppose.’
‘I’m going to go and see if Captain Biggs is back yet.’
‘He won’t be.’
‘Then I’ll wait up at the Church Army.’
‘All right, but have a cup of tea first. You’re not going anywhere until you’ve had a cup of tea.’ The shop buzzer went, which meant someone had come in. ‘Promise me.’
‘I promise.’
Mum got up and walked back into the shop. I wobbled into the kitchen on jelly legs and poured myself a cup. The tea was stewed and the colour of Dad’s pipe tobacco but I didn’t care. Now that the shock was beginning to wear off it dawned on me that Mack’s accident was probably my fault. Everything came back to the story I’d read to him. Mack wouldn’t have stepped out in front of the van unless he’d been drunk or distracted. And he wouldn’t have been drunk or distracted if I hadn’t read him my story. The logic was irrefutable. As I slumped back down on the sofa guilt settled on me like a shroud. I was still sitting there when Mum came back in.
‘I thought you were going up to wait for Captain Biggs.’
‘Yeah, but I was just trying to work out…’
‘Work out what?’
‘I dunno. What happened, I suppose. Some kids in Standard Two reckoned he just stepped out in front of the van.’
‘Don’t you listen to them!’ Mum raced over and grabbed hold of my arm. Her grip actually
hurt. It was her way of enforcing a point of view or making sure we didn’t let her down. Sometimes she’d grab my arm on the way out to soccer or athletics and she’d say something like, ‘Make sure you win now, you hear?’ If Nigel or I were really sick she’d say, ‘You’re going to be all right, you hear?’ This was before the doctor even came and she really didn’t know. Grabbing my arm was her way of making sure I understood the seriousness of her request. Sometimes she scared me. She scared me now.
‘Don’t listen to what people tell you,’ she said. Her fingers bit deep into my arm. ‘It was an accident, you hear?’
Of course it was an accident. What else could it be? And then the penny dropped. The blood must’ve drained from my face because suddenly Mum was down on her knees in front of me asking if I was all right. If I’d said I was she wouldn’t have believed me. If I said I wasn’t she would’ve fussed over me. So I said nothing. I just closed my eyes to try to shut everything out and buy some time to think. Honestly, when life gets you up against the ropes it doesn’t hold back. The punches just keep coming.
When I finally convinced Mum I was OK, I rode around to Mack’s. I stood there ringing his bell until the next-door neighbour, Mrs Bolger, came out onto her front porch and called me over. I’d heard her in the shop plenty of times complaining about Mack’s drinking but she always kept an eye on him. It was clear she was upset.
‘Has your mother spoken to you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then, son, you know why Mack’s not here.’
Yes, because he tried to kill himself. Putting it into words in my mind still didn’t make it any more believable.
‘I just wanted to make sure.’
‘I’m sorry, son.’ Mrs Bolger waved me away and went back indoors.
I hopped back on my bike and rode up to the Church Army. On the way I tried to work out what sort of deal I could offer God to make sure Mack didn’t die. But somehow it all seemed too serious for the sort of deals that usually applied. Putting out the cushions and the hymnbooks seemed a pretty trivial trade-off for someone’s life, but I hadn’t a clue what else to offer. I wondered if maybe it would add weight if I said a couple of real prayers in the chapel. I thought I might even say a couple for myself. No matter how I tried I couldn’t escape the fact that I had Mack’s blood on my hands.
The door to the chapel was open. I looked around to make sure nobody was watching before I headed for the door. I would’ve died from embarrassment if any of my pals had seen me. I’d never live it down. Just as I reached the door Sister Gloria came out.
Sister Glorious, the girl of my dreams.
Once I wrote an essay about her. I talked about what a wonderful person she was and how easy it was for my pals and me to relate to her because she was closest to our own age. I suppose she would’ve been around nineteen or twenty. I talked about how we all wanted to be the monitor in her Bible classes and how just her presence could raise our spirits. My teacher took the essay at face value and wrote ‘Excellent, very poignant’ in the margin. None of us knew what poignant meant but it didn’t matter. The essay was an in-joke. We couldn’t stop laughing, especially at the bit about raising our spirits. She raised something a whole lot more substantial than our spirits. What I failed to say in the essay—and this is what broke my pals up—was that Sister Gloria was an absolute honey. We called her Sister Glorious and she fuelled our fantasies like no other woman before or since. Every boy who ever attended the Church Army while Sister Glorious was there fell in love with her. She was gorgeous, with honey-coloured hair and the face of an angel, with the most amazingly clear blue eyes, able to melt granite. Honestly, we never stood a chance when those wonderful eyes turned on us. We stammered, stuttered and went weak at the knees. We fought for the right to be monitor in her Bible classes just so we could look at her. While we didn’t doubt she had the best tits in Auckland, Collitt reckoned he’d seen them in all their glory. He bragged he’d been peeping through the knothole in the ladies’ dressing shed down at the beach when Sister Glorious had come in to change after a swim. He reckoned you needed both hands to hold just one of them. I hated him for saying that, really hated him, even though it was more than likely Collitt was just big-noting. Ultimately, whether he’d seen her naked or not didn’t really matter. We didn’t need his confirmation. The Church Army sisters dressed like nurses but not even the drab neck-high uniform could hide what God had given Sister Glorious. Jane Russell would’ve killed for her figure.
If Sister Glorious got a shock finding me on the chapel doorstep, it was nothing compared to the shock I got. For once she wasn’t smiling. Clearly she’d gone into the chapel for the same reason I was heading there, to say prayers for Mack. I couldn’t begin to imagine what her trade-off would’ve been. She was perfect in every way. What did she have left to trade? What could God want from her that He didn’t already have? She was holding a damp handkerchief up to her eyes but tears still streaked her face.
I’m pretty sure it was her job to bring comfort to me but in this instance I wound up comforting her. She grabbed hold of me and hugged me as if I was her teddy bear while she sobbed her heart out. I couldn’t believe it. For the second time that afternoon I couldn’t speak, but for a totally different reason. My head was jammed up against the best tits in Auckland. I could hardly breathe. At any other time I’d have thought it was my lucky day. It would’ve given me something to really brag about later to my pals. But that wasn’t the way things happened. All I could think of was Mack and my role in his accident—if it was an accident. I was so worried about him that nothing else mattered. I couldn’t have summoned up a dirty thought if I tried. So I did what I could to comfort Sister Glorious. I held her and patted her back like I did for the small kids at school when they fell and hurt themselves. I think my teacher would’ve described that moment as poignant, too.
‘Have you heard from Captain Biggs?’ I asked when I managed to pull my head free. Sister Glorious slowly disengaged. I thought she might be self-conscious about hugging me but she treated it as though it was the most natural thing in the world.
‘He rang from the hospital asking me to put a note on the clubhouse door cancelling club.’ She wiped her eyes. Her vulnerability made her look even more adorable but nothing could deflect me from my mission. ‘He said he’s going to stay there for a while.’
‘Did he say how Mack was?’
‘He asked me to pray for him. Mack was being operated on.’
I didn’t like the sound of that but at least Mack was still alive.
‘I think I’ll ride up to the hospital.’
Sister Glorious put both hands on my shoulders, leant down and kissed me. Not on the cheek, not on the forehead but a proper kiss slap bang on the lips.
‘You’re a good boy,’ she said. She kissed me again.
‘I gotta go,’ I mumbled. Did I ever. Blood was rushing to my head and another less savoury part. It’s a funny thing but I’d survived having my head jammed between the best tits in Auckland and being pressed up against her wonderful body. I’d survived the eyes that could melt granite and her gorgeous vulnerability. But I had no defences against her kiss. It awoke the beast and the trouble with boxer shorts is that there’s nowhere for the beast to hide. I spun away, hopped on my bike and pedalled off as quickly as I could, mortally ashamed. Mack had tried to kill himself because of my essay and I was desperate not to think or do anything wrong in case God took revenge for my sins on him. I hoped God would understand I’d done my best and I hadn’t wanted this to happen. I offered up a silent prayer for forgiveness and solemnly promised I would never mention my encounter with Sister Glorious to my pals. That seemed like a pretty fair trade-off to me. I didn’t think I could handle any more guilt.
The lady at the hospital enquiries desk wouldn’t tell me anything. She said she couldn’t because I wasn’t family and I needed to be accompanied by an adult. She wouldn’t even tell me if Mack was still being operated on. She said all this in a tone o
f dismissal as if I had no right to be there. As if I had no connection with Mack or his accident. I spotted the hospital chapel and remembered I still had unfinished business. But what if other people were in there? I inched towards the chapel like a wary cat suspecting the presence of a dog. It occurred to me God might be testing me to see how genuine and desperate I was for Mack to recover. The chapel door opened and two elderly ladies came out supporting each other and dabbing their eyes. I walked past them and took the plunge.
The chapel was tiny. I spotted Captain Biggs immediately. A man and a woman were sitting at the back, heads down, holding hands. Captain Biggs was kneeling in the front row, hands clasped tightly in front of him. I tiptoed over and knelt beside him.
‘How’s Mack?’ I whispered.
They should warn kids about disturbing people who are deep in prayer. I don’t think he’d have got a bigger shock if the hand of God had tapped him on the shoulder. I don’t think he’d have got a bigger shock if he’d been holding the wire when I plugged in my homemade cotton-reel plug. He jerked and cried out like he’d been shot. The lady behind us gave a stifled scream and dropped something onto the floor.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘What are you doing here?’ gasped Captain Biggs.
I turned around to the couple in the back row.
‘Sorry,’ I said again.
The man started to grin and I even got a weak smile from the lady. I love it when people can see the funny side of things. Captain Biggs rose slowly to his feet.
‘Let’s go outside,’ he said to me. ‘Sorry about this,’ he said to the couple.
‘I came to see Mack,’ I said. ‘I’m worried.’