Crime Story

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘God, what a thing to say. Do you think I don’t know?’

  ‘She’s got no one. I think she’s – lost.’

  ‘I know, I know. Worry about Damon. I’ll look after her.’

  ‘What’s wrong with Athol? Where’s he think he’s at?’

  ‘Nowhere new. We should have been Catholics, Howie. Then Athol could have been a monk in a monastery.’

  ‘Talk sense.’ As usual she was going off at tangents, crazy places, and pushing him where he would not go. ‘He’s bloody selfish, that’s what he is. And he’s got no life.’

  She sipped her drink and suddenly looked bored. ‘Howie, it’s years too late for this. Athol and Gordon – it’s all done.’

  ‘Yeah, no-hopers.’

  She laughed. ‘How nice it must be.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To have a set of words. Has-beens. No-hopers. What else? Paper-shufflers. I forget.’

  ‘Why do you always have to get at me?’

  ‘There’s no always, old boy, not for us.’

  ‘Jesus, can’t you say anything straight?’

  Gwen sighed. ‘Well Howie, here we are quarrelling again.’

  ‘I didn’t come to see you anyhow.’

  ‘Let’s not talk. Just have your drink and go.’

  ‘Damon’s coming to Auckland. Why don’t you spend more time with her’ – stabbing his finger upstairs – ‘instead of going to Ulla all the time?’

  ‘It’s not your business.’

  ‘Ulla can’t talk, Olivia said.’

  ‘Be quiet, Howie. Just be quiet.’

  ‘No, you listen – ’

  ‘You can’t come into my house and talk like this.’

  There was such a fierceness in her that he stopped. He felt that she would spring at him, she was nails and teeth.

  ‘You and me, we’re finished,’ he said.

  ‘Are you only just finding that out?’

  Whatever he said she would be a step ahead, moving away. He said, ‘I’m not coming here again.’

  ‘You were never here, Howie, in the first place.’

  See? He laughed. He had to laugh. It grated in his throat. ‘This bloody house is falling down. You’ll be some mad old dame with a string bag.’

  ‘Possibly. But it will be my choice.’

  ‘You’ll be there before you know. That’s how it happens. Don’t come to me.’

  ‘Howie, I promise you I won’t.’

  ‘Can’t we say goodbye decently?’

  ‘I didn’t think sherry would do it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought it was only whisky. Made you teary-eyed.’

  ‘Shit!’ He slammed down his glass and stood up. Tried to think of something to say; but she was watching him upwards, ready for it, and he walked out into the night. Never, he thought, never going back. She’s on her own, the silly bitch, she can do without me. He crashed the gate, heard the iron catch rattle. He walked down the middle of the road. Lights struck him in the face and he angled to the footpath – found some steps, went down through houses to another road. A man lectured a woman, hands on her shoulders, holding her off. Her face was down. He thought she smiled privately but he could not be sure. Another bloody Gwen. Always that secret knowledge they claimed to have. ‘Thank God for Darlene,’ he said.

  He walked down The Terrace and up Lambton Quay to his hotel, passing Kitchener on the way. Mine, he thought, and pictured the wreckers going in. He would put a building up, a mile into the sky.

  ‘See if you can beat that,’ he said.

  Chapter Eight

  Gwen made tea when he had gone. She wiped the table where his sherry had slopped. And now, she thought, I’ve cleaned him out and that’s the end of Howie for good. They had needed this little scene, it marked full stop. You believe that, she told herself.

  She carried a cup upstairs to Olivia. ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘I heard him. He banged the gate.’

  ‘That’s Howie’s style. What did he say to you? Anything?’

  ‘Is Damon going up?’

  The dog snored on the end of her bed. Olivia stirred it with her foot.

  ‘Yes,’ Gwen said.

  ‘How was Mum?’

  ‘No change. She sends her love. She really does, Olivia, you’ve got to believe in it.’

  ‘I do. But what’s … ’ She shrugged.

  ‘What’s the good?’

  ‘I can’t get used to … ’

  The part that’s lying there and not a part? And her not being Ulla in her head any more?

  ‘Things will change. Wait until she’s had a bit more time.’

  ‘It can’t make any difference, can it, though?’

  ‘Not to walking, I’m afraid. But there’s other things.’ Could not think of any. ‘What are you reading?’

  Olivia angled the book.

  ‘It’s a wonderful title. Do you like them?’

  ‘They’re all right. I just get – I’m tired of people hurting all the time.’

  ‘I know. I know.’

  She went downstairs and drank her tea. She locked the house and went to bed, to sleep. There was too much feeling in her – an overload – for wakefulness. It whacked her like a club and she went out. When she woke at two o’clock she thought, I’m not torn apart by this the way the others are. Was that because she had a place to stand and see it from? She could be still, and understand, perhaps, although she was surprised and rebellious and unhappy. Stillness was a gift of age. And the busyness that followed it allowed her to forget. Busyness too was a gift. But how little time it would take up, out of all the time that lay ahead. Her feelings filled her again and she wept into her pillow.

  In the morning she waited until Olivia had gone to school, and Damon had gone, and Athol had driven off in his car. She went next door and opened the house. Butch walked after her, keen, she supposed, to get inside his old home, but she blocked him with her foot and closed the door, ignored his whining. She wanted the place to herself. It was silent and dusty and Athol’s efforts to tidy it left the same impression as clothes wrongly buttoned and hair half brushed. Ulla’s untidiness had been by overflow. One lived in it. Here there was an absence. Athol was absent from it all.

  She went up to the bedroom and drew the curtains back to make some light. Wellington lay in its bowl, with its buildings shining; roofs red and green and cladding polished. The cranes stood long-legged over pits of clay where spikes and webs held the workmen tight. The mountains were unpretentious, lower in the morning than at night; the harbour grey. I like it however it is, Gwen thought. For Ulla though it had never stood facing the right way, or making the right colours – with her sky. ‘I wait for my life to start up, Gwen.’

  She turned away from it and saw the waterbed. Whose idea had that been? Athol’s? Ulla’s? One of them had mentioned it or joked about it perhaps, and neither could get out of it then. But Ulla’s life would not be started up again in there. Sex had been by timetable and was itemised. No wave-motion could alter that – so Ulla had said, working at language. There was nothing Ulla would not say to Gwen, who was her country in a way. Hang on to me, Ulla. Hang on with your eye and tongue, hang on.

  She saw how Athol slept on one side still – on his sea, riding his own waves. Athol would make do without a woman now. It would be, in fact, not making do but finding his shape. In a way he had been without his country too. How impossible, how crippled, how ugly it had been. And how changed now, and turned about – but not to the right place, or even close to it.

  Where was Ulla?

  Oh be still, Gwen told herself.

  She opened the wardrobe and looked at Ulla’s clothes. There was nothing there she would wear again. Shoes? Never again. Ulla’s big boat shoes, her long-boat shoes, and those sandals moulded for her soles, to ease the strain and ease her pain – and take her walking on their German consonants and vowels. Birkenstock. ‘You must try them, Gwen, they are magical.’ But Gwen never had; she kept on with her Eng
lish walkers, and slip-ons for the section and slippers for the house. She held herself tight, not to be guilty about it now. Closed the wardrobe. Did not try the drawers. What was she here for? Photographs.

  She found them in the window seat, under blankets from pre-duvet days. They were in a box named Mushroom Soup, the little album, satin covered, jammed into the bottom. She forced her fingers in, scraping them, and jerked it out. Blood on her nail, blood on the satin – never mind, no injury or spoiling mattered now.

  The baby lay on a rug, dressed all in white. Was that Ulla, that little vegetable with arms and legs? And the child frowning, was that her? Destinies were unimaginable. Ulla, she thought, looking at the pigtails and bony knees and turned-in feet, someone’s going to come and break your neck. Run and hide. Don’t come here. Stay away from here. There’s a man who will marry you and keep you from your place. See him starting to lean, starting his lean away from you, and drawing you after, so you can’t go home.

  She looked at them on beaches, standing beside cars, and on the steps of their first house. Ulla and Athol, equal in height; so they could look, Ulla said, straight in each other’s eyes. Why did she not see the absence in him? Why didn’t she shoulder her pack, get her big boots working, hitch on home? Where was home? Gwen turned back. Snowbound farms and cattle in the barns, and wheat and barley fields in the summer. Berries in the woods. Elk on the roads. Little islands of smooth rock standing a yard above the sea, with pines and silver birch, and a girl fishing. That was one home. There were others. People, school, work, cities. Language. Words that did not have to be turned around and looked at, fitted in. Words you met coming out of yourself. Why did you not see, Ulla, where you belonged? Why did you see magic in his strangeness? It was only difference after all. You were so young.

  White ink on black paper: the dead mother’s hand. ‘Ulla som bebis, 3 månades gammal, på Tallkobben.’ ‘Ulla fishar.’ ‘Kräft fest, 1964, Ulla och Tomas.’ ‘Ulla plochar blåbär.’ ‘Lucia tåg, 1968.’ Ulla so grave, with a crown of candles in her hair. How could she come here from around the world and take bush and beaches, sheep on hills, and Gwen’s son Athol, seriously? ‘Student-examen, 1974.’ With a captain’s hat on her head, with her class, her family, her teachers, all around. Gwen wanted to stop there, close the album, stop it. But here she was with her backpack leaning on her knees, holding a cardboard sign that read: Hokitika. Tallkobben is your language, go home, you silly girl. It was too late. On the Cook Strait ferry she looked long-sighted at the Wellington hills. Over the page: ‘Athol and Ulla, 1976.’ English was the language now, and the hand was hers.

  Gwen closed the album and put it away. She did not want to see the children coming, the family together, and Ulla staring out with her clear gaze. That was when I started loving her; when I saw she had to live where she couldn’t live; when I saw her look away so far, and close up tight inside and not complain. Anyway, there was daily life – we talked and read and walked and laughed and lived the days through and it wasn’t too bad, just that there was a base whose absence Ulla knew. Gwen, in her way, had known it too. Absence of home, absence of love. There were compensations – other sorts of love.

  But what happens now, Ulla? What happens now?

  She put the album in the window seat and closed the lid. Down in the street the postman went by. He left nothing in her box but something that looked like an airmail letter in Athol’s. Gwen went out of the bedroom, outside and down the path, leaving the door open, which let Butch in. The letter was for Mrs Ulla Peet, and was from – Gwen turned it over – Tomas, her brother: Zetterstrom. That nice boy; nice man now, probably. Home in Sweden, bringing up his daughter and son, and bewildered more than anything by a sister with a broken neck. What would he say to her? What could he say? Everything must make a pause for translation now.

  Yet Gwen was hopeful. She held the letter in her hand and felt the strangeness of it, weight and shape. It was like that white ink on black paper. Like those low islands and silver trees. He might know something that could be said.

  He had said – when was it, ’82? – ‘I do not think he loves her properly.’ ‘No,’ Gwen had said. ‘But the children, she says, must grow up here. I do not see why that has to be.’ ‘I do and I don’t,’ Gwen said, and tried to explain. He smiled at her. ‘We must wait and see.’ He went back home and married and had children of his own; and Ulla went back alone when her mother was dying, and said to Gwen, when she returned, ‘It will change now that she has gone.’ She was afraid. Too many years must go by. Sweden might become empty now.

  ‘Go and stay there when the children are old enough. Go and see.’

  ‘Yes, I will.’

  ‘I’ll visit you. I’ll bring a bit of Wellington across.’ But she had been afraid that Ulla would not find her own land any more.

  The dog was sleeping on the carpet where his basket had been. She left him there and went to the storeroom off the laundry. It was dusty-windowed and cobwebbed, with raincoats hanging on nails and worn-out shoes on the floor. Suitcases, a broken ironing board, Ulla’s old pack, were piled in a corner. Beside them, leaning on the wall, were several framed pictures. The one Ulla wanted was furthest in, face in. Gwen took it to the living room, wet a cloth, wiped the dust away. She remembered it: women in a sauna. She looked at the back and found – Ulla’s hand – Badande kullor i bastun. Anders Zorn. A man who had liked his ladies naked. Tomas had brought it to Wellington, a little bit of Sweden, he had said, and she had had it framed and hung it in the bedroom for a while, then in the hall. Athol had objected to it there, so – had she put it in the storeroom, facing the wall?

  Gwen could not like it, even though she saw it was alive. All that broad bottom and pendant breast – there was too much health, steamy and warm. And too much pleasure in it. That startled her. She was not against pleasure. Not against warmth, proximity, lack of shame. She was for it, in fact, although not needing it, not in practice, for herself. But there was, wasn’t there, a man in this, invisible and feeding off these women in some way? She felt him out of the picture, in a door, taking more than his eye entitled him to. She would have said so to Ulla once; they said these things and argued back and forth and disagreed.

  She carried it home between her fingers and thumb, put it on the sideboard, where the shadows dulled it, and propped Tomas Zetterstrom’s letter against the mirror. The letter was more important, she believed, even though Ulla had said, ‘I want to see the women in the sauna again’ – her first request. Gwen made a cup of tea and sat down at the table to write to Tomas: a bulletin. ‘The cut on her face is healing and the bone is knitting, her doctors say.’ Was his English good enough for ‘knitting’? Well, he’d have to use a dictionary. ‘They can’t say much about her spinal column except that, in their language, the lesion is complete. Tomas, it’s certain that she’ll never walk again. New Zealand isn’t kind to Swedes.’ By that she meant the two who had been murdered in the bush – he would understand. ‘We’re not a safe country any longer, it seems – but were we ever? The human story is our story too.’ Stop that, she thought, don’t confuse the boy, just tell him how his sister is. ‘She understands what has happened, I think, and what the future will be like for her. What she doesn’t understand – none of us do – is how one lives through it, from day to day. She asked to see the Anders Zorn picture again, the one you brought out all those years ago, remember it? Women in the sauna, one kneeling in the tub and the other with a dipper full of water. I don’t know why. There’s all that skin, coloured like a peach, and backs and arms and hips – does she want to start her new lesson the hardest way? I don’t want to take it to her.’ Why? she asked. If Ulla wants to know bodies again, by looking at them, before she starts to know there’s nothing there, perhaps she’s right, perhaps her instincts are working for her. Can instincts work in a thing as out of the common way as this?

  Gwen wrote no more. She went upstairs and straightened her bed and shook the dog hairs off Olivia’s duvet. Butch, she
remembered. Let him sleep. Let burglars come into that open house, there was nothing there. She put clothes in the machine – Olivia’s as well as her own – and hung them out when they were spun; then she went back to Athol’s house and did the wash there too, why not? Damon, at least, was in her care, until Howie claimed him. How would he enjoy his taste of luxury? Would it wipe Ulla from his mind? In the meantime his underpants – masculine, although surely he had not much yet to fill the pouch. Strange how men’s underpants made you think of cruelty and thickheadedness.

  That was the sort of thing she might have said to Ulla once – and Ulla, clearheaded, would have replied, ‘Can it be both?’

  And this, Gwen thought, is how I’ll get through the days. I’ll fill one half hour, then fill another. What’s the time now?

  In the afternoon she took Butch for his walk. She remembered – with a shock, always a shock – that sharp-faced boy coming up the road, and she turned away her face as she had done on that day. She tried not to see him and wonder who he was. Was he vicious or had he just been frightened? Was he greedy? Had he been in need? Did he enjoy it, kicking Ulla? Stop, she said. He was out of it, and gone. Had no substance, was not permanent. Why should he have a life? she thought.

  Butch pulled her down the road. He stopped to poop and she watched the clouds in the sky; rolled his pellets into the gutter; climbed the steps.

  ‘How is … Is she … ?’

  ‘Oh, she’s improving. It’s early days.’

  ‘Tell her I … that I send … ’

  ‘Yes, I will. Goodbye.’

  Keep on moving. Butch was good for that. Clever dog. She took him into the village and tied him to the bus-stop seat. A bus went by on the other side, and there was Olivia, hair untidy, tie askew, reading something on her lap – You Are Now Entering the Human Heart – and riding patiently to see her mother. Olivia learning to be patient with hurt. I must, Gwen thought – and stopped. Too much ‘I must’, which put her at the front of things. I must – there again – find another way of saying it. What about ‘behoves’? It behoves me to be calm and still and move myself only as it’s useful to them. What could she do and say that might be useful to Olivia? I’ll do it and say it, she thought. But until she knew she must be silent, must be still. And look after the dog. Olivia appreciated that.