by Gee, Maurice
‘Tell her … ’
‘What?’
‘Tell her I’m coming.’
He waited until he heard her go into her flat. Then he opened the door and looked out. The phone was revolving on the end of its cord. He went to the front door and closed it.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Brent?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you’re still here?’
‘Friday, you said, Mrs Ponder.’
‘Don’t say my name. Friday’s tomorrow.’
‘I’ll go.’
‘Have you bought a ticket?’
‘Yes, I got one,’ he lied.
‘Who with?’
‘What?’
‘What company?’
‘Ah, Air New Zealand.’
‘Go and get it, Brent. Read me the number of the flight.’
He was silent. The hall seemed to tick and sigh and swing like a boat.
‘I’m disappointed in you, Brent.’
‘I got one. I did. But I’ve got to pick it up out at the airport.’
‘Brent, you’d better be gone by tomorrow night.’ She hung up.
He went back to his room and locked the door. She seemed to be pressing against him. He felt her belly, hard, like sacks of wheat. She did not leave him any air to breathe. Panting, he sat on the bed. ‘Stop it, Mrs Ponder,’ he said.
He lay on his back. He rolled to face the wall. ‘Why don’t you let me live with you? Why don’t you?’
Then it was day again, with light coming through the curtains. The doberman whined and barked in the yard. Casey thumped down the hall to work and Mrs Casey sang, making high notes like a radio. The plumbing surrounded him. ‘Go away,’ he wept. He pulled the blankets up and covered his head. Brent, Mrs Ponder said, I’m disappointed in you. She had a platoon of policemen behind her. They wore white helmets and blue shirts. All of them had radios in their hands and they talked messages back and forth: Brent Rosser – Caucasian – fair hair. She seemed to have made him, and dressed him, and stood him up where everyone could see – but she stood, herself, in the mouth of a cave, and she went backwards into it and hid, and only little bits, gleams and eyes, could be seen. ‘Let me come with you, Mrs Ponder,’ he wept.
No, Brent. You fly away to Australia.
It would kill him, he knew, to climb into that bright tube with all those other people.
Leeanne came. She pushed him backwards at the door. She squeaked a pushchair into his room and sat her baby on the floor. He smelled her. He saw lights flashing on a screen. Heard scraping plates. The baby puffed his brown cheeks out and there were smells of shit and butter in the room. Voices on a radio, and something by his head that wrapped him round with kitchen and his mother. He swung his arm and punched it, belted it away.
Money smelled. It had a sour smell and scraped his hands. He stuffed it into her and looked for a knife to cut her off and free himself; saw her wobble out into the hall, saw the brown door wipe her away. He lay on his bed again but too much light came in. He closed the curtains. Still it came. He rolled off the bed and knelt on the floor. The lino was cold on his palms. He laid his cheek on it, and saw a dark space open on his level. It was like the bottom shelf in a cupboard. He slid in until he felt his hip bang on the wall. He put his arms across his chest and held himself tight, with little pads of mattress pressing down. Over the room the television screen danced and played, but only feet were there and no faces. Faces could not see him any more. He reached out and hooked his pillow down. He went to sleep and when he woke the room had turned dark. He slid out and crept across and switched the set off. The last bit of light, the talking face, went away. No one now. No anyone.
He wanted to tell Ponder about this. He wanted to ask if he could stay under the bed now that he had found a place where no one would find him.
Chapter Ten
He looked down from the helicopter and saw the woman pushing her baby through the streets. She was fixed to the pavement, pasted flat: red trousers, white sweatshirt, yellow hair. She slid back under the fuselage and was gone.
‘What do you think, Howie?’
‘It’s not my sort of thing.’
‘Bringing good clientele through those streets, that would be the problem,’ Sanderson said.
‘There’s a view,’ Dorio said, ‘I’ll give you that.’
Howie turned from the window. ‘You saw how the locals would take it. You can’t have people eating, hell, lobster thermidor, with snotty kids howling round outside.’
‘Oh Christ, we’d have that playground out of there,’ Quested said.
The helicopter landed on the wharf. Howie sat a moment in his seat. He felt a little sick from the sliding up of buildings from the sea. ‘I’ll walk back,’ he said to Dorio.
‘Ronnie wants to talk about all this.’
‘You talk to him. Just keep him out of Kitchener, that’s all.’
‘Yeah. Look, Howie, we’ve got to sort that out. This Councillor Waterhouse is for real. He’s on the environment committee, he just about runs it. We rushed that application and it gave him the chance he wanted. You haven’t seen this morning’s paper, have you? He says he’ll stand in front of the bulldozers if he has to.’
‘I’d drive right over the bastard.’
‘Okay, Howie, but it isn’t you in the seat. He’s got support and it’s building up.’
‘They can’t vote again. The contract’s signed.’
‘Sure it is. But a contract can be just a bit of paper. He’s talking about a change in the district plan. And getting Kitchener listed as a heritage building.’
‘No chance.’
‘He can hold us up long enough to get the election over. There’ll be a new Council then, it’s a new ball game.’
Howie did not want to worry about it. His glass tower was fixed in his mind; it was a fact. This Waterhouse character and his mates, they had to have their bit of – what would Gwen say? – posturing? It did not worry him but it made him angry. Everything was ready and he wanted to go. Sitting round made him feel short of air somehow. You had to be moving, doing something, to breathe. Ronnie Quested’s restaurant didn’t qualify. All right, he had a client and he’d done a lot of work on various sites. But sitting people down to eat was girl stuff; it wasn’t the sort of thing Howie could move and push around.
He left Tony Dorio and walked on the waterfront. He lit a cigarette, then threw it away. He still felt sick. A bubble in his chest made him want to belch. All he could get though were little clicks and bad tastes in his mouth. The woman was the trouble. She hadn’t just upset him, she had twisted him inside. So ugly, so shrill, and tears like wattle gum sliding from her eyes. He recognised her as though she had stepped over the worn back step and into the kitchen of the house in Henderson where he had grown up. She told him that the past had hold of him, he was still there. Bullshit, Howie thought, but he couldn’t get away. She was where he came from; and looking at Ronnie Quested and the rest, she was where he would choose to be. He had wanted to go with her, back into the playground, and sit with her talking on a seat, and hold the baby for her, and not go with Ronnie along the hill and talk about a restaurant that would never be built.
‘Ah, bullshit,’ he said.
A woman, passing, looked at him, and hurried a few steps.
Sorry, ma’am. But bullshit all the same. He watched an old wooden scow moored to the piles, and Henderson was as gone as that. As gone as tubby freighters loading wool bales at a wharf. Now they had container ships gliding out like apartment blocks. Why not a restaurant then, in place of half a dozen rusty swings? And people driving up to eat, yeah, lobster thermidor, in place of a foul-mouthed tart pushing her half-caste kid in a second-hand pram. Gwen would call her ‘one of Roger’s children’ probably. But that was bullshit too. It was like blaming history. Things always changed and you couldn’t blame a finance minister who just went with the times, did what he had to, gave the market the chance it would have taken anyway. Th
ere were always people who dropped out the bottom no matter how much you did for them. It wasn’t economics, it was nature. But still he saw the woman leaning over the fence, holding out her baby in her hands, and saw her cry and turn away – God, what was wrong with her, he had offered money – and saw his mother too, walking home with groceries in a string bag and wringing out the sheets by hand over the wash-house tubs.
That was who the woman was, his mother. She had stung him on the wrist, stung like a bee.
Howie sat down on a bench. He thought for a moment he would vomit. All that stuff, that old stuff, was turning inside him and was on the point of rushing out. He put his hands on his knees, held on.
‘You all right, mate?’
‘Yes. Okay.’ Even in his distress he enjoyed ‘mate’.
‘You don’t look so hot.’
‘Short of breath. Be all right soon.’
He sat there for another half hour. He smoked two more cigarettes and flicked the butts into the sea as straight as marbles. It made him feel better and he stood up and walked through the streets to the Glencoul. Buildings, he thought, that’s what I do. The Kitchener is me for the next three years. Then, by God, I’ll do another one. He walked on past the Glen and down Lambton Quay, went into the Druids, up two floors, and found Athol in his office in the gloomy backside of the building.
‘I’d rip this place down.’
‘You probably will one day.’
Howie liked that. ‘Come up to the Glen. Come and have lunch.’
‘I usually just eat something here.’
‘Usually ain’t a word, it’s a bloody yawn. My shout.’
‘Hold on. Cancel that sandwich, Jacqueline.’ Athol put his jacket on. ‘I wanted to talk to you anyway.’
‘Save it for lunch.’ He did not like talking in the street, he liked to watch people, how they hurried, how they rode escalators and shrank to a pair of shoes and vanished into boutiques and offices up there. That was the modern world, and his work was making it. Kitchener: cracked dirty bricks and broken mouldings. But soon it would make way for his tower in the sky, with lifts of people floating up inside the glass walls. Bubbles in a beakerful of oil. Howie smiled.
‘What’s amusing you?’
It was more than amusement, but nothing that Athol would understand. He had his houses and his rents, let him stick to that – rotting piles and blocked drains. Not, Howie conceded, that there was anything wrong with a hands-on way of running things, but it was small. His sons were small. Gwen had sewn their seams up tight. She had locked them in their playpens and they couldn’t get out. That kid in the park, with his snotty face, had a better chance. At least he had a mother who could throw back her head and scream. She had whacked the wallet clean out of his hand. Howie felt the force of it. She got me there, he thought. He ran his finger on the scratch drawn like a biro mark on his wrist.
‘How did you do that?’
‘Scratched myself. Ronnie’s been showing us some sites.’
‘What for?’
‘Some bloody thing he’s got about restaurants. There’s enough eating places in this town.’
‘He’s got Peter Kleber in with him.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You want to watch Kleber, he’s pretty smart.’
‘He’s smooth, that’s all. He won’t stand up and say what he thinks.’
‘Fox is gone.’
‘No loss.’
‘You’ll have him in with you next.’
‘When Fox gets in,’ Howie said, ‘I’ll take Neil Hopkins too.’ They would never understand, his sons, they thought it was all deals and operating, where someone like Gilbert Fox would fit in; where Gordon would fit, the poor little sod.
There’s no largeness in them, he thought, and he grieved for them.
They talked about Damon over lunch and agreed that he needn’t wait for the school year to end, but would fly to Auckland in a week’s time.
‘What does he want to do with himself? What’s he want to be?’
‘At the moment,’ Athol said, ‘junior champion on the trampoline.’
‘Sure. Fair enough. But what’s he good at? What does he want to do with his life?’
‘It’s a bit early for that, isn’t it?’
‘Thirteen. I knew. I knew I was going to put up buildings. Make ’em big.’
‘Damon’s not into that,’ Athol said drily.
‘So what is he into? What’s he like at maths?’
‘Okay, I guess. I got his report. I’ll send it up.’
‘Where was he in class?’
‘About middle.’
That was not a word Howie liked; it meant going nowhere, it meant being the same as everyone else.
‘He’s all right at English. Near the top. And French, I think. Or maybe German.’
‘Jesus, why those?’
‘I don’t know. Ulla wanted him to learn languages.’
‘And your mother, I’ll bet. She’d probably have them doing Latin and Greek.’
‘Olivia does Latin.’
‘I didn’t think they taught it any more.’ There was nothing wrong with the stories though, Nero and all that, Julius Caesar, as long as they didn’t get mixed up with real life. Gwen wanted to mix them up. Some guy who played his lyre and made rocks move. He’d be good for putting buildings up, Howie thought. But then his head – just his head – went floating on the sea, singing songs. Too bloody morbid. And then there was a woman who killed her children to get back at her husband who had ditched her for someone else; and a father who was tricked into eating his son, in a stew. Give me maths any day, Howie thought. He had been good at maths, always, and at technical drawing, and could have been an engineer if he’d stayed at school. But there was no money. He had done better, though, by coming up the hard way. Money didn’t always count.
He remembered the woman, how she’d swung, whacking his wallet into the thistles.
‘I’ve got to go, Dad.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve got to get back. My plumber’s due.’
‘Blocked drains, eh?’
‘That’s right,’ Athol said easily. ‘I’m repiling three houses too. I’ve got to see someone about that.’
Howie looked up at him standing by the chair, with his face smooth and hair smoothed back behind his thin pink ears. He’s got his life worked out, he thought. No wife and no kids any more. A sandwich in the office is all he ever wanted. I’m right to get Damon out of there.
He changed his ticket to an earlier flight and was home in Auckland by late afternoon. Swam in the pool with Darlene; did ten easy lengths at her side. He dived into the deep end and lay alongside the stone looking up at her: bubbles like a string of pearls coming from her mouth; eyes like a little girl frightened of the dark. He wrapped an arm around her and carried her up.
‘Don’t worry, you’ll do it. Don’t try so hard.’
‘It’s just when I remember there isn’t any air. Then I get kind of paralysed.’
‘Leave it now. Tomorrow, eh? Let’s go upstairs.’ She was always ready for that. And he liked it best, having her, when she hadn’t done something right. He seemed to leave his shape pressed into her.
After dinner they made love again, long and slow, and he thought, sixty-six, I should be in The Guiness Book of Records. She held his face in two hands, smiling up at him.
‘Howie Powie.’
‘I reckon I can come soon.’
‘Don’t try so hard,’ she said. So he didn’t try; and came sweet and easy, like running trills on a harp, and drifted off to sleep with Darlene’s long warmth down his side.
In the morning they ate breakfast on the patio. He told her about Damon coming up.
‘Next week?’
‘Yeah, Friday.’
‘That’ll be nice. I’m really looking forward to it, Howie.’
He looked across the lawns at the sea. ‘This is a good place for a kid.’
‘How long will he stay?’
; ‘Dunno. At least till after Christmas.’ He did not know why he could not say, He’s staying for good.
‘You didn’t tell me how his mother is.’
‘Ulla?’
‘If that’s her name.’
‘Of course it’s her name. I don’t know how she is.’
‘But I thought you said that you had lunch with Athol?’
‘The subject didn’t come up, okay? All I know is, Damon might as well be a bloody orphan.’
‘And Olivia.’
‘Yeah, her too. Gwen’s looking after her. I’ll do the boy.’
Darlene cleared the dishes. ‘We’ll try to see he has a good time.’
Howie drank a second cup of coffee. Ulla, he thought, long cool Swede. It bothered him that he hadn’t asked Athol how she was. There’s a space where she used to be, he thought. Long and cool? Not any more. He couldn’t work out what she was. Not a person lying in a bed, because you couldn’t say she was all there. He pulled a face at the double meaning. In her head she was all there – she was too much there; he had seen her across a room and always thought, what’s going on inside her, and had suspected her of judging him. Now, though, she was all brain because the rest of her was cut off. And how could anyone be that, a head on a pillow – like that bloody head floating on the sea?
‘Cold, darling?’ Darlene said, coming up behind him.
‘No.’ He wished sometimes she didn’t pick up on every sneeze and shiver he made.
‘I’ll get a scarf.’
‘I said I’m not cold.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I was thinking, that’s all.’
‘What about?’
He could not say Ulla. ‘Gordon.’
‘Yes, I thought you were. Are you going to go?’
‘I haven’t decided yet.’
‘Poor Gordon.’
‘It’s his own bloody fault.’ Howie could not get his son fixed either: another one with a space where he used to be – except that he was likely to show up and then you were forced to look at him. There was nothing to see. The prosecution should realise it and leave him alone. This morning, though, the judge would say, Guilty. Nothing surer.
‘You should go,’ Darlene said. ‘He’ll be looking for you.’