by Gavin Bishop
The old lady looked at the heap of toys. ‘Is that Teddy down there on the gravel?’ She grabbed hold of the torch and pointed it down the steps. ‘What’s he doing out here?’
The boys’ father did not answer for a moment and then said, ‘Old Teddy One-eye? The kids have finished with him.’
‘He’s been in The Trunk?’ she asked. ‘He deserves to be looked after! And don’t call him that awful name!’
The old lady carefully descended the steps and picked me up. She tucked me under one arm and, with her stick in her other hand, climbed back onto the veranda. Walking slowly, almost as if I was asleep and should not be woken, she took me to her bedroom and placed me on top of the sewing machine in front of the window by her bed.
And there I stayed, on my own, in grand isolation. No one dared move me. No one dared touch me. Even after the boys’ grandmother went back to Invercargill, no one came into that room. She had made it quite clear I was special and should be taken care of. She said no more than that.
At the window, propped up, body forward, with my forehead against the glass, I watched with my mismatched eyes as hawks and leaves of yellow chased clouds across the sky. At night, after the wind had swept the sky clear, the Southern Cross once more hung like a crown high above my head. It shone brighter than all the other stars and seemed to promise better things to come. How long that would take, it did not say.
As I wondered about this, a large grey moth struck the window. It fluttered madly against my head, with only the windowpane separating us. Again and again it struck the glass with the force of a powder puff. Was it trying to tell me something? Or trying to remind me of something I should remember? Something from long ago?
I sat undisturbed for many months until one morning the bedroom door opened. Two men in overalls came in. They picked me up and placed me on the windowsill and wrapped the sewing machine in an old eiderdown. Next, they dismantled the bed and wrapped it up in big sheets of strong brown paper and string. The curtains and the rug were folded and put into a cardboard carton. Then it was all carried outside and stacked on the path beside the kitchen table and chairs, the sofa, the console radio, the beds from the other bedrooms and the dreaded Trunk, ready to be taken down the hill and put in a goods van on the train. The family was moving. The boys’ father had a new job in Invercargill.
I sat alone in the spare bedroom. I listened to the hurried farewells as the boys and their mum and dad said goodbye to the Kariannis family. Just as they were about to close the front door, Frankie Gibbs and Mum O’Donnell came across the back paddock. Mum O had a brown paper bag in one hand. She gave the boys’ mum a kiss and said, ‘Here’s some baking for the train.’
Frankie shook Boy’s hand. ‘Might see you in Invergiggle sometime.’
With a lot more ‘Hurry up, you’ll miss the train’ and ‘Goodbye, don’t be a stranger’, the family and friends filed down the veranda steps. The front door closed with a bang and the key turned in the lock with a sharp click. Silence.
I was alone in the empty house.
So was this it? The end? I had been rescued from The Trunk only to be left behind without a family to belong to? Would I never see Boy and BB again? Had they really forgotten me?
The afternoon sun reached the bedroom window. My tattered fur and mended body wrapped in the old blanket stood out sharply in the bright golden light. I could understand why they wouldn’t find me interesting anymore. My eyes didn’t match. My ears were flattened. My paws were patched and my legs had been stitched back on with three different-coloured lengths of wool. I was a wreck, an old toy, something to be thrown away. But they had made me that way. The boys had done this to me! Couldn’t they see I was still a young and handsome bear with sparkling eyes on the inside? The crown in the night sky had told me that.
In the distance I could hear the long drawn-out moan of the train whistle. The 2.30 for Invercargill was about to leave.
Tiny noises filled the house. A tap dripped in the kitchen. The wire from the radio aerial slapped against the outside wall of the living room in the breeze. The lock in the front door clicked. The lock in the front door clicked?! I heard the door swing open and bang against the doorstop. Footsteps came hurrying down the hall, and the boys’ mother appeared in the doorway. She scooped me up and ran out of the house, down the path, through the gate, along the tracks to the train impatiently hissing and puffing steam at the railway station platform.
She climbed up the steep steps into the carriage and found her seat next to her husband.
‘Mamma would never have forgiven us if we left old Teddy One-eye behind,’ she said, slightly out of breath, as she squeezed me into the luggage rack between two suitcases.
The two boys looked at one another. They said nothing.
The train picked up speed as it rattled past the smattering of houses and cribs along the railway line. The sun, lower now, threw the shadow of the train across the matagouri flats. The carriages were a long, bustling snake. The smoke from the engine, a tall, dark plume of ostrich feathers billowing from the top of a sultan’s caravansary.
It was dark when the journey ended. I was carried into the new house, placed in an old brown suitcase with some drawings by Boy and BB, and slid into the top of a wardrobe.
And there I stayed. For seventeen years. Out of sight, forgotten, asleep, hibernating like a flesh-and-blood bear, sometimes dreaming, sometimes remembering, but mainly sleeping.
19
THE WARDROBE YEARS
1955–1972
20
ON THE MOVE AGAIN
THEN, JUST LIKE THAT, without any warning, my suitcase was lifted out of the wardrobe and the lid was opened. Light poured into my black world. I swam up to the surface of the deep pool of sleep and was blinded. Gradually my glass eye adjusted to the brightness, but my button eye was a blur. I recognised Boy’s mother as she leaned over the suitcase and packed a wooden buzzy bee, a knitted black and white cat, and a book of nursery rhymes into the gaps around me. She closed the lid, and I fell against the new toys as the suitcase was lifted and carried out of the room.
I was off. Off to somewhere new. This time the journey was by bus and car. At the other end, the suitcase was opened and Boy peered in. But he was no longer a boy. He was a man, a husband and a new father. He laughed when he saw me. ‘Old Teddy One-eye,’ he said. ‘I should tell BB about this.’ I was excited. But he picked up the buzzy bee, the knitted cat and the book of nursery rhymes. He lifted them out of the suitcase and closed the lid. He had laughed because I was a joke. His mother had sent me to him as a joke. Had they forgotten that their grandmother told them I was special and should be looked after? Had they not seen the crown in the sky hanging over my head at night, saying I was made for greater things?
The boy pushed the suitcase into the bottom of yet another wardrobe. A wardrobe in the baby’s room.
There was no chance of sleeping now. My hibernation had come to an end. If I managed to doze off, the baby would cry to be fed or to be changed or to be picked up. The baby grew. It slept longer at night but it was an early riser.
The baby became a little girl. But then she was joined by another baby. More crying for food, more crying to be changed or picked up. And just when things began to quieten down, a third baby arrived.
Now there were one, two, three little girls. Three little girls to play with me? To take me on an adventure? The kind of adventure that filled me with fur-tingling excitement and teeth-chattering fear? One that would make me feel alive again? In anticipation, I was once more riding out the bumps in Boy’s wheelbarrow and thrilling to a wild escapade in the back of his trike. Yes, I was ready for an adventure with some new children — but these little girls didn’t know I existed.
Then, one rainy afternoon, while rummaging in the wardrobe for a blanket to make a hut, the oldest girl found my suitcase. She dragged it out and opened it. To my delight the girl picked me up and hugged me. Later when she’d made the hut at the end of her bed, she
invited me to afternoon tea. She had a biscuit covered with hundreds and thousands. She broke a little piece off and poked it into my mouth — or where my mouth would have been if it hadn’t been unravelled by her father when he was a boy. She did not seem to mind that my body was a battlefield and my eyes didn’t match. She even introduced me to her little sisters when they woke from their afternoon naps.
That night I was lifted into her bed and the next day I was taken in the car to meet her nanna, her mum’s mum. Only my head poked out of the old cot blanket that I had been wrapped in all those years before. A big safety pin held it closed. There was no fur left on my face and my ears were about to come off. The girl’s grandmother did some running repairs with some thick grey wool.
‘Sorry about the colour,’ she said. ‘But his ears won’t come off now.’
21
NEW LIFE, AGAIN
1979
I NO LONGER LIVED in a suitcase at the bottom of a wardrobe. I was part of a family again. The three little girls who had adopted me lived with their mum and dad, twenty-six dolls, 547 books and five goldfish. Their house on a hill looked over Christchurch to the Southern Alps and to the sea. The old cot blanket I had been wrapped in for over twenty years had been put into the wood-burner. My darned and stitched body was squeezed into a floral doll’s dress. Baby’s booties disguised my patched feet. And although my button eye had not been replaced and my flattened ears were hidden by a bonnet tied under my chin, I could still hear and see everything that was going on.
The girls’ dad, Boy, told the girls my name was Teddy One-eye. I was a boy, a man, a he-bear. But the girls wanted a teddy bear that was a girl. They called me Mrs Teddy. So here I was, on the outside a she-bear with a new life and one glass eye, and on the inside a he-bear with a past life.
I had nothing to complain about, though. Being a girl teddy bear was a small price to pay for the fun I now had. The girls invited me to their tea parties. The other dolls were friendly and chatty, especially the Cabbage Patch Kids. They looked upon me as an elderly aunt who had seen the world. And I got out and about. My days of being tossed into a wheelbarrow or in the tray of a trike were over, but the adventures I had with the three little girls, although quieter and less fearful, were lots of fun. The middle-sized girl had a little backpack for me to ride in, and from high on her back I surveyed the world as if from a crow’s nest. Sometimes her hair blew into my face. It would have tickled my nose if it hadn’t been lying at the bottom of Lake Wakatipu. When she played at a neighbour’s house or took her trike for a ride in the garden, she took me with her. At times the excitement of making a hut or building a castle in the sandpit made the girl forget about me. So there were often hurried searches under the hedge or by the fishpond to find me at bedtime.
At the end of the August holidays it was time for the middle girl to start school. Would she take me with her? I wondered. I watched on the morning of her first day as she got out of bed. She stuffed her nightdress under her pillow, pulled on her new school pinafore and laced up her new school shoes. She ran to the kitchen and came back with her new Womble lunchbox already filled with peanut-butter sandwiches and put it her new school bag. She was ready to go to school.
‘You woke me up! It is only six o’clock!’ growled her older sister. She called to her mother, ‘Mum, she’s awake already!’
Her mother came into the room and saw the middle girl sitting on her bed, already dressed.
‘I told you not to get up so early. It’s only 5.30!’
‘Actually it’s six o’clock, Mum. Your watch. It’s old, remember?’
‘Well, it’s still too early. You’ll be tired before you get to school,’ said her mother. ‘But now you’re up, you’d better come and have some porridge. You can’t go to school on an empty stomach.’
After breakfast the girls helped their dad hang out some washing, then they lay on the floor drawing until it was 8.30 — finally time to leave for school. Boy, their dad, had already gone to his studio.
‘Teeth! Hair! Jackets!’ called their mum from the kitchen.
Two minutes later, the middle girl appeared in the doorway. Her school bag hung from one hand, and her backpack with me in it was in the other.
‘You can’t carry Mrs Teddy as well as your school bag,’ said her mother. ‘She’ll be too heavy for you.’
The girl said nothing. With much struggling she pulled on the backpack, then flipped the school bag over her head so that it hung just behind my back. The girl smiled and slightly raised her eyebrows.
‘Hurry up, we’ll be late!’ shouted her big sister.
The girl followed her out the front door to the footpath that would take them up the hill to school.
‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?’ called their mother.
‘No,’ replied the younger girl. ‘I’ve got heaps of friends at school.’
‘Well, I’ll pick you up at two o’clock. Wait by the gate.’
‘I hope she doesn’t go by her old watch,’ said the older girl quietly.
The New Entrants room echoed with squeals and shouts. It sounded like a sty full of excited piglets. Miss Fallows showed the new children where the toilets were and where they could hang their jackets and bags. I was hung on top of the girl’s bag, which meant I was able to see through a high window into the classroom. Miss Fallows introduced the new children to the rest of the class. Then she wrote their names on strips of paper and placed them in front of each child. With crayons from a big cardboard box in the art cupboard the new children made drawings of themselves beside their names. This took until morning break.
The children pushed into the cloakroom and grabbed some playlunch to eat outside on the steps. The girl lifted me out of the backpack and took me with her.
A new girl sitting next to her said how much she liked my bonnet and dress. I blushed deeply down inside.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Mrs Teddy, but my dad sometimes calls her Teddy One-eye.’
‘Teddy One-eye!’ shouted a big boy who was hanging around nearby. ‘Teddy One-eye, Teddy One-eye! What a stupid name!’
‘Yes, but we don’t call her that,’ said the girl.
‘Hey everyone, did you hear this teddy’s name?’ called the boy. ‘It’s Teddy One-eye!’
Other children gathered around. Some laughed, but others sat beside the girl and told her not to take any notice.
At the end of break the girl put me back into the backpack on her coat hook and tucked her jacket over my head. At lunch time she left me there and took only her lunchbox outside. I could no longer see into the classroom, but during the afternoon I heard the children singing as Miss Fallows played the piano. She read stories and poems from School Journals until it was time for the children who had started that day to go home.
At two o’clock the girl slipped my backpack onto her back. She left her jacket tucked tightly around my head to walk across the playground. On top she slung her school bag with her empty lunchbox and her first reading book inside.
At the gate, a group of mums, dads and grandparents stood waiting to walk their children home. The girl took the jacket off my head. With my glass eye I looked to see if I could find her mum. She hadn’t arrived, so we sat on the grass inside the gate to wait for her. Her antique watch was often slow. We had all got used to it, so we weren’t worried — we knew she would turn up sooner or later. But by ten minutes past two all the new entrants had gone home and we were alone. And that’s when we heard it, a sad kind of whimpering, a crying. It was coming from the other side of the school fence.
The girl jumped up and peered through the railings. At the side of the road was a bus stop, and tied to the wooden seat was a small cocker spaniel. Someone had left him there and he was very unhappy.
‘Elvis, is that you?’ cried the girl. ‘What are you doing there?’
The dog stopped crying and looked around. When he saw the girl, his face beamed.
‘Woof!’ he barked.
‘Woofa, woof, woof!’
‘Where’s your mother? Um, Mrs Partridge, I mean.’
‘Woofa, woof!’
‘Has she forgotten you again?’
Mrs Partridge was well known all over the hill for her forgetfulness. She was either driving into town and then coming home by bus, or going for a walk and leaving her dog somewhere.
‘Well, you can’t stay here. I’ll take you home.’
I didn’t think that was a good idea.
‘Mrs Partridge will find Elvis! You don’t need to worry,’ I shouted silently. But the girl liked adventures as much as I did, and she saw the chance to have a quick adventure with a little bit of excitement and fear before her mother turned up. Mrs Partridge lived only two doors away from the school, and the girl and her family had been to her house many times. She was sure she could take the dog home and be back again before her mum arrived.
With my backpack and her school bag bobbing on her back, she ran out to the bus stop and untied the dog. Elvis jumped to lick her face but the girl ducked. I was not pleased when his tongue slid across the back of my head and left a trail of spit. It reminded me of my adventures with Black Nin in Kingston when Boy was a boy.
‘Woofa, woof!’ The dog tried to run ahead when we turned into Mrs Partridge’s gate. He led us up the drive lined with daffodils to the front door. The girl sprang up the red steps and rang the bell. She waited and rang again. There was no reply. The girl came back down the steps and walked further down the drive, past even more daffodils, to a gate at the side of the house that let us into the back yard. The girl knocked on the back door. Again no one answered.
‘Your mum will be at the school gate by now,’ I tried to remind the girl. And, as if she heard me, she tied the dog to the rotary clothesline. She found his water bowl at the edge of the lawn and filled it from a hose attached to the back of the garage. The girl searched her lunchbox for something for the dog to eat, but there were only crumbs in the lunch paper and a brown apple core. Elvis sniffed the core and went back his water bowl. There was nothing more we could do for the dog. He was home again, he had something to drink and we were sure his owner would be back soon.