Crime Story

by Gee, Maurice

  He watched her shadow in her upstairs room – furry, unformed – but he had years of knowledge to find her shape in it: her slanting face, her thin chest, and her schoolgirl arms behind her back, fingers like a typist, doing up her bra. ‘All those years and I never saw you,’ he said, ‘but you kept on asking me to look into your mind.’ Through her eyes, back there, was her mind. All it ever gave him were new words – should and shouldn’t, is and ought. No one won. But was it, in the end, her victory, if he stood out here in the night and remembered, if he found a word of hers – elegiac – to explain? I don’t know, he thought. She can laugh at Olivia growing beans on top of her dog. It evens out. You get tough, Gwen; I’ll be sentimental. It’ll only happen on the night when I lose Kitchener.

  Athol ran out of the dark, like climbing from a pit. ‘Dad’ – panting, hands on knees – ‘have you been at my place?’

  ‘Just walking. Like you run. You didn’t go far.’

  ‘Did you see … did you see … ?’

  ‘Get your breath.’

  ‘Did you see about the police … identifying … ?’

  ‘Yes, I saw.’

  ‘He’s the one who murdered that woman with the spade. And the worst thing – he’s been living in one of my houses.’

  ‘So the paper said.’

  ‘They’ve sealed it. Sealed the room. His sister’s been living there. She’s a solo mother.’

  ‘There’s a lot of them around.’

  ‘I met her.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘They asked if I knew her before. They even thought … ’

  ‘You had something going?’

  ‘It’s crazy. I can’t stand any more of this.’ He opened the gate and went through.

  Another one like Gordon, falling apart. ‘You should have come in with me. You lost your chance, Athol,’ Howie said.

  ‘You haven’t done so well.’

  ‘I’m starting again. Not in this bloody town though. Up in Auckland.’ Athol turned his back. He went up the path.

  ‘With Damon when he’s old enough. I’m keeping him,’ Howie called. He held up his hand with two fingers locked together. ‘Me and Damon, we’re like that.’

  He heard Athol open and close his door.

  They’re not my sons, he thought. How did I get them? He went past the university and down Allenby Terrace. Over there, a block away, the councillors had changed the rules today. He did not look in that direction, or turn his eyes along Lambton Quay. Went up in the lift, past the bar where maybe Ronnie Quested and Gil Fox, and Tony Dorio too, were talking, with their whiskies, with their malts, about shopping malls and PDQ, and how to ease the old man out. Old man, that’s me. But he liked the name. Didn’t it stand for toughness and experience? I’ll start again in Auckland. And I’ll train that boy. He can come in with me. By God I’ll make sure that he doesn’t grow up soft.

  He drank some Johnny Walker.

  The trouble is, I love him. That’s the trouble, Howie thought.

  He flew to Auckland in the morning and drove from the airport to his house on the cliff. The cream-brick fence, mown grass, hibiscus trees coming into flower seemed to be in another country, and Auckland was a new part of the world. The sun shone, the air was warm and still. This is where I’ll stay from now on, I’ll do it here. I’ll show them who Howie Peet is. Howie and Damon, we’re a team.

  He put his car in the garage and keyed himself through doors into the house. White carpets, yellow mats, glass open wide, with the inside and the outside running together. The lawn sloping to the cliff was another carpet. He heard Damon and Darlene in the pool and walked down; patted the naiad’s bottom; picked up a tennis ball and lobbed it into the court. He saw a dance of swimsuits, and bubbles, streaming hair. They were down there in the deep end, the boy turning round her like a shark. I’m home, he told them, come on up.

  They rose together. Their faces broke the surface, flat as plates. They flashed their teeth at each other and Damon shouted, ‘Hey, you got it.’

  They saw Howie. They shone at him.

  ‘Grandpa, she can do it. By herself. She got the stone.’

  Darlene raised her hand and showed it fastened in her palm. They sank, and came up laughing.

  ‘Surprise, Howie. Aren’t we great?’ she cried.

  Part 3

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ulla agreed to go to Auckland. She spent five months in the spinal unit, where Gwen visited her every few weeks. Damon went in the weekends, and Howie made a visit before he had his stroke. After that Darlene took to going in his place, but she and Ulla found almost nothing to talk about so Darlene waited in the car, reading a book, while Damon went in.

  Ulla was a good patient. Everyone was pleased with her. ‘I must not disappoint them,’ she said. She talked about ‘them’, not about herself. With her brace off, her cheek healed, her hair growing longer, her face began to look like Ulla’s again. She allowed Gwen to photograph her and send a print to Tomas. ‘Ulla learning her wheelchair, Spinal Unit, May ’92’, Gwen printed on the back. Would Tomas see the stillness at the back of her smile? In the letter she wrote: ‘She tries very hard, she’s a very good patient, they’re all pleased with her’, but did not say, I’m afraid, Tomas, of what’s going on in her mind. She’s doing it for them not for herself.

  If Gwen had said that to the head nurse or the doctor it would not have surprised them. Nothing a patient thought was new to them. They had made a science of understanding. She was impressed and appalled by the spinal unit. How valuable it was, what marvellous work – but what a foreign country, how invented it seemed. The language spoken there was like Esperanto. Ulla only pretended to know the words. She smiled, cooperated, but kept her own language in her head and spoke to no one in her proper tongue. Gwen was impressed and appalled by her too.

  She had two white scars on her forehead, where the halo brace had been fixed. They were like the lids trapdoor spiders built over their nests. If you lifted them and nothing came out, you might find your way to Sweden. That, Gwen was sure, was where Ulla spent her time. By the cold lakes. In the frozen city. She could not lift her face to the flower-scented breeze that blew in from the islands in the spring, but she widened her eyes, she opened her mouth and tasted it. Is that what you are doing?, Gwen wanted to ask, but was frightened her invasion, however gently made, might bring some glass structure crashing down. Instead she reported, made remarks, made Ulla laugh; and she watched. There was a busyness in Ulla, but it was invisible, like the busyness in a tree: everything still, but roots holding, nutrients passing, sap flowing through the branches into each leaf, and every leaf busily receiving from the sun. Such incessant taking in, such function in each cell. So Ulla’s mind was busy with that still busyness, while her body lay in bed and the muscles wasted.

  Home in Wellington, Gwen studied Sweden. If she could make a part of it her own then maybe she and Ulla would meet there. She borrowed books of photographs – castles, lakes, wheatfields, forests, Stockholm – and read a history of Sweden, where she found to her surprise that it had been a major power once, with armies laying waste to northern Europe and a king as hungry for conquest as any Alexander or Napoleon. That little land! Those nine million people. She had liked them better in longships, sacking churches. And she read novels – Moberg and Lagerlöf and Wästberg – and poetry, when she could find translations, and thrillers (enjoyed Sjöwall and Wahloo), and looked at Pippi Longstocking again. She went to Swedish movies and thought that she might learn the language that way, if there was time.

  But most of all she looked at paintings. She climbed the stairs while Olivia was at school and studied the women in the sauna; saw the way their skin glowed, the gold of them, the soapiness of them, their warmth and blandness, one with a dipper, one kneeling in the tub, but felt their spirit too, a contained fierceness, feminine. The man, the painter, had not intended it, he would have had no knowledge of it. Again she resented him, and one day ventured a remark to Olivia, who laughed and
said, ‘But if no one was looking there wouldn’t be a painting at all. I thought there had to be someone standing in the door.’ Gwen was confused. She wondered if she were growing old. She had congratulated herself all her adult life on her mental largeness, but now found whole areas pinched and small. The women kept on glowing. They kept their warmth and calmness, they radiated invisibly. (And still the unseen man stood in the door.) She wanted to talk with Ulla about it, but never mentioned painting to her at all; tried simply to put her own knowledge on a plane that might intersect with Ulla’s and lie flat with it in the end. She studied the white lakes and blue hills and the night skies filled with summer light – Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, it did not matter. The sea that drank whiteness from the sky, the stream that drank into its depths the brown trees and the snow and drank the viewer into itself too. Aware of the symbolic content – how could she not be? – she yet refused the meaning and asked the paintings simply to work on her as Sweden had worked on Ulla and informed her. If Ulla is going there, she thought, I want to go too.

  Meanwhile there was Ulla’s physical life. Understanding it was impossible. Physiotherapy, the pool, were pleasant no doubt after bed, although there was something kitcheny about the one and foetal about the other. But putting to work muscles that were unattached by consciousness was outside nature, it seemed to Gwen, and she had to admonish herself: you know nothing about it, you’ll never know, so just let the people who do get on with it. Let them manipulate to clear Ulla’s bowel and press her ribs to help her cough and check her skin for sores and dress the split in her natal cleft. All that will be yours soon enough, when she comes home. So get ready for it, get your head ready, or else you’re going to be no use to her. But ‘her’, Ulla? Gwen began to see the body in the bed, even the body in the chair, as not having any part in that identity, even though the face was Ulla’s all right, eyes and mouth and nose and ears and tongue. Ulla saw and heard, Ulla thought. Must she always drag that other part around?

  Turn and lift and lever, rub and roll. ‘I do not even have to cooperate,’ Ulla said. ‘It is like the next stage in evolution.’

  ‘Is she really as calm as that or is she pretending?’ Olivia said.

  ‘A bit of each. She has to pretend.’

  ‘She looks awful.’

  ‘Well, the muscles waste. You can’t hold your stomach in so you get a pot belly. We have to try to … ’ Gwen shrugged.

  ‘I’m talking about her face,’ Olivia said. ‘Where has she gone?’

  ‘We’ll never know. Places, I think, you and I can’t go.’

  ‘She wants to die, doesn’t she?’

  ‘In her situation she looks at all ways, I suppose. It’s not that she doesn’t love everyone still.’

  ‘I’m not talking about love. I can remember that.’

  ‘I can too.’

  ‘If she wants to, I’ll help her, if no one else will.’

  ‘Oh no, Olivia, never say that. You’re much too young.’

  They came down steeply to avoid the wind and sideslipped on to the runway – a Wellington landing – and Gwen thought she would not take Olivia again, there were too many risks. They went home by taxi and lived around the carpenter and the plumber for two more weeks. Gwen had decided to do the painting herself, not to save money but to fill her days. She was quick and clean with brushes and paint, for which she must thank Howie. She had had Ulla’s bedroom/living room – Ulla’s room – lined with pine, tongue and groove, and she put two coats of clear varnish on, trying for a look that might be Swedish. The carpet had been taken up and the floor sanded. A new wood-burning space heater stood angled on a tile hearth in one corner. Ulla would be able to watch the flames. It would be, a little bit, like a sauna room.

  Was all this a mistake? Was it interference?

  Gwen tried to keep her life full of activities so she would have no time for brooding about Ulla. She stopped her yoga classes and began a transcendental meditation course, by mail. The mantra she was given disappointed her – it sounded like a deodorant – so she made up her own, monosyllabic, round and smooth, and managed several times to plummet down behind it, trailing bubbles, into a place where not a thought intruded and the mantra itself floated away like a sea creature and was lost. But mostly she found herself as troubled during meditation as before and after, and she gave it up, promising that she would do it properly one day, not by mail. There was too much to think about and no chance of resting yet.

  Howie was a worry. She had not expected that he would take a place in her life again. ‘It would be a real kindness if you would visit him. Damon would love to see you too,’ Darlene wrote. A stroke, Gwen thought. How appropriate for Howie to be struck down instead of pinched and prodded to his death. But why couldn’t it have been a clean blow, a knockout punch? Why must he sit in a chair, gargling for words that would not come, with his face enraged and purple? It was cruel. She looked back from the lower lawn, where she had strolled with Darlene. Wrapped in his mohair rug, he was like a child with the mumps. He had a dreadful simplicity. A word was all he wanted, but it never came through. Her name? Some single-syllabled declaration – of love, of regret, of pleasure in their lives? She wanted to know. But all he got out were sounds like the death cries in American comics.

  ‘He’s so angry all the time,’ Darlene said. ‘And yet if he could just say what he thinks, just a word or two, it would be enough. He’d be happy.’

  ‘He’s lucky he’s got you,’ Gwen said. Darlene was what her mother would have called ‘a brick’.

  ‘I try to make him happy. But the one he loves is there’ – nodding at Damon on his trampoline. ‘You’ll let him stay, won’t you, please, for as long as Howie … ?’

  ‘It’s up to his parents,’ Gwen said. ‘But I think you can be reasonably certain … ’ She walked down to the cliff edge and looked at the gulf, with its yachts leaning over in the breeze and a container ship, made of blocks, turning in from the channel past North Head. She wondered how far Howie saw. Were his eyes affected? He sat, done up in wrappings, in his chair, a king up there above the shaven lawns, until you came close enough to see he was a cripple. Even from this distance his eyes were blue.

  ‘You’re standing right where it happened,’ Darlene said.

  ‘Here? His stroke?’

  ‘I was playing tennis with Damon and Howie was sitting up there having a whisky. I have to lob a lot, it’s my fault I suppose, but if I don’t I hardly win any points at all.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I hit one and it went right over the wire and over the cliff. We only had two good balls so Damon said he’d get it and before I knew what he was doing he was out of the court and half way down the cliff.’

  ‘Down there?’ Gwen looked with horror at the sea and the rocks.

  ‘I called at him not to go any further but he’s so quick and agile and there’s no danger, I suppose, with a boy as confident as that. Then Howie came. He’d seen it and he ran down the lawn. Oh Gwen, it was horrible. I could tell something had gone wrong. He couldn’t call out or get his breath, he just watched Damon go out of sight – down there, where it bulges out and then cuts underneath. Damon says there’s lots of handholds, but it looked as if he’d fallen. We couldn’t see where he’d gone. Then Howie just – I don’t know – I felt something give way in him and he fell over.’

  Struck down by love, Gwen thought. She looked with tenderness at the figure in the chair. She felt as if he’d had a victory.

  Darlene went on with her story, which finished with Damon climbing back, the tennis ball tucked in his shirt – Gwen could see him, eyes bright, hair upthrust by the wind – and with the ambulance and the hospital. Howie up there now was extraneous – his going on was a long unnecessary part, it unshaped his life. He should have died and not become a gargoyle in a chair, clawing at words he would never say. Gwen was close to weeping for him.

  ‘What’s that scar on his wrist that he rubs all the time?’

  ‘I don’t know. I
asked him once, when it was all festery, and he just smiled and said a woman scratched him. You know Howie.’

  I do, Gwen thought, and I don’t. I never knew he could love so hard it would nearly kill him. Although I thought he might die in the act, on top of this nice woman I never thought I’d call Darlene.

  She cupped his hot cheek – his Muldoon cheek – in her palm. She kissed his brow and went away. Howie, she thought, I loved you once. I thought that you were going to set me free. But the thing I wanted to be free of was my own uncertainty. I didn’t know it then. If I had, we wouldn’t have hurt each other so badly. I would have said no and gone away. You thought I was class and you had to have me. And I thought …

  What had she thought, in those unhappy times when her life had been all gropings out and shrinkings? Two drinks at a party (she who almost never drank and never went to parties) and she had glimpsed a largeness in the strange and loud young man. Wilfully she had turned after him, expecting that sighting, that near-vision, to return, but it never had. She married, expecting it, hoping to turn her life, that she recognised as cramped, turn it free. What a story! She had not been cramped at all, just turning in the narrow part of ways that would open out, and hurting herself there from impatience.

  I might have been anything if I hadn’t married him.

  Again she flew home to Wellington. She prepared for Ulla – another sort of union and one that might demand from her the rest of her life. She had the room furnished with bed, slings, transfer board and wheelchair. Athol paid the bills without complaint. He came through the hedge from time to time and looked at the new room with puzzlement and distaste, but said nothing. Athol had been left far behind. He would never see Ulla again, although he might look in and say hallo. Might manage that. But look at her with understanding? Gwen believed it impossible.