Dust hung over the quarry like an ecru veil as the hot summer day wore on. Unlike the rich greenery that surrounded the road Vic had worked on at Punawai, the quarry was dry and monochrome. It was a place of rock and stone and shingle, a landscape devoid of colour. Vic and a dark, shrivelled-looking man called Hodder, both dressed in prison fatigues, were sitting on a plank breaking stones. It was called ‘napping’. The work wasn’t onerous but the boredom was excruciating — tap, tap, tap the little hammers went, over and over. Hodder, who was in prison for having killed a sailor in a pub brawl, seldom spoke and when he did it was to complain or criticise. At first Vic had tried to talk to him but eventually he’d stopped, preferring to whistle music hall songs or snatches of opera.
‘Can’t you bloody shut up?’ said Hodder sourly, dropping a handful of stones into the tin drum as if for emphasis.
‘Sorry it irks you,’ said Vic, hoping that on the next detail he’d get paired with someone he could at least pass the time of day with.
Vic had been sentenced to two years for the manslaughter of Maguire. He had served nearly five months of his sentence and was hoping to get something off for good behaviour. His interference at the substation had never been traced. Looking around the quarry as he continued to tap, he noticed some of the prisoners were shovelling shingle onto a lorry while others were working with the heavy spalling hammers. There was tall and lanky John Nicholson from Punawai, doing six months for allegedly striking a police officer, a charge he denied, and a sprinkling of others Vic knew from the Unemployed Workers’ Association and other organisations, who had also got into trouble during the Matauranga riot. Most, though, were common criminals — safe-breakers, con men, fraudsters, perverts and fighters. Poor bastards, Vic thought, looking at them sweating and panting, each man, even Hodder, with his own little world of hope and fear, and his own pathetic dreams.
In the beginning Vic thought he’d never survive prison; the loneliness of being shut up for hours and hours on end, the dark, evil-smelling menace of the place, the constant fear of violence, the crippled, broken spirit of so many of the men. With Stella and Gilchrist and his other mates in Matauranga, and his mother in Wellington, Vic had letters but no books and few visitors, but things changed. One magic day the warder said, ‘You have a visitor,’ and when Vic got to the visitors’ room there was Stella, radiant as sunshine in the dour hall. He looked at her face, her lips, her eyes, her hair, longer now, and felt so overwhelmed with emotion he could scarcely speak. Every visiting time from then on Stella came. She was the compass point that drew Vic, safe and inexorable, through each dreary day, the promise of happiness in a future yet to come. She also improved Vic’s lot in other ways, persuading Sandy Armstrong and the International Bookshop in Wellington to lend him books: every few weeks the bulky parcels of Upton Sinclair and Jack London and other socialist writers arrived. Vic set himself to learn Pitman’s shorthand and got permission to teach reading to some of the illiterate men among the convicts. The abject horror of his first days in prison began to recede.
The last time Stella visited, Vic had said, ‘I’ve something to tell you.’ He looked through the separating grille into her eyes and their clear ceramic blueness almost made him forget what he intended saying. Seeing Stella so close and yet beyond his touch was an exquisite torture. Vic felt like a bird with a ring around its throat, condemned to catching fish but never swallowing them. ‘I’ve decided that when I get out of here and we’re married, I want to put my name forward as a Labour candidate for the next election,’ he said.
‘You mean stand for Parliament?’ said Stella.
‘Yes,’ said Vic, ‘if they’ll have me. Sandy Armstrong seems to think I’d have a fighting chance of acceptance.’
Before Stella left that day she’d said, ‘And I’ve something to tell you too, a little thing. On Sunday afternoon when you’re out in the exercise yard, listen really hard.’
‘Why? asked Vic.
‘A surprise,’ said Stella, touching her fingers to her mouth and blowing him a kiss.
Roland positioned the wood on the block and swung the axe. The action brought him back to his boyhood, when he used to chop kindling for his parents in return for pocket money. Roland thought of the large two-storey home in Merivale where he’d grown up, and the paved backyard between the building and the detached washhouse where he’d go to split the wood. At the time he’d felt resentful at being expected to do the work. His family had maids and a gardener — why couldn’t they chop the kindling? But his father had insisted that such activity would do his son good. Roland smiled at the recollection: if only his dad were alive and could see him now.
He touched his face, feeling the stubble of several days’ beard growth under his fingers. His father would certainly not approve of that — ‘A gentlemen is never seen without having shaved,’ Bentley Crawford had often said. No matter, thought Roland, I’m no gentleman — certainly not now, dressed like this. His shoes, originally good-quality English brogues, were scuffed to a dusty nothing colour and there was a hole in the middle of the right sole. His trousers, which were now held up with string, had stretched so much around the knees that they ballooned in front of him when he walked. His jacket was stained from where a tin had leaked treacle on him while he was sleeping in a whare down near Te Awamutu, and he’d long since given up wearing any kind of collar. Roland had started off with a felt hat but had lost it over a bank in a high wind, so he wore a cap a sharemilker’s daughter had given him. The front had ripped, with the result that you could see a strip of his hair between brim and crown.
‘Fill these two butter boxes with kindling and I’ll give you a meal,’ the farmer’s wife had said, standing at the back door, hair in curlers and her hands on her hips.
Roland thought longingly of the food. He caught a whiff of the roasting mutton coming from the kitchen and his stomach curled with anticipation and hunger. He had swagged a long way that day and the thought of a generous feed and the promised bed in the hay shed seemed everything he desired.
Since going on the road Roland had noticed how much his wants and his pleasures had altered. A good meal, a dry place to sleep, a sunny morning, a lift in a lorry, a friendly word — tangible immediate things were what now brought contentment. Walking the long shingle roads, climbing over fences or pushing through gorse and bracken, Roland felt himself part of the world in a way he had not known before. He met people — mostly men, young and old — tramping the country looking for work, and they talked to him but not in the respectful way he was used to. They swore and belched and groused, they said what they thought of the churches and the do-gooders, the government and the charities. They confided problems: wife’s left me, another kid on the way, couldn’t take it, won’t live on handouts, just walked out. He and they — men together.
When it rained Roland got wet; when it was sunny and warm he smelt the gorse flowers and the cabbage tree blooms, along with the stench of pigsties and the slurry of cattle farms. At night he looked at the stars and thought about God, and decided that beyond believing in the importance of Jesus’ Golden Rule, he didn’t accept much as true any more. He mused nostalgically about Amélie, how she had come and gone in his life, like weather or a flower. Roland thought of the Frenchwoman with her fortune-teller’s cards and how she said that ultimately all religion, all belief, merged into one. Tarot, Christianity, communism — opposite poles sustaining a single truth. Could be, he reflected, chewing on a blade of grass, then spitting it out. Maybe she was right after all.
Each day Roland walked from farm to farm, offering to do odd jobs in return for a meal and a place to sleep, no different from any other swagger. At times his head ached, some days he felt depressed and desperate, willing to give up. He thought of being under the upturned boat in the hailstorm, famished with no knowing where the next meal was coming from; the time he’d torn his leg on a barbed-wire fence and the wound had festered, throbbing painfully for days on end. Once he’d slept in a church porc
h and, discovered by the vicar, he’d been rudely told to leave and get down to the charitable aid depot if he wanted a meal. Roland had considered drawing attention to the church’s noticeboard, which declared ‘All welcome’, but decided against it. Always he’d gone on.
He put another log on the block and split it. He could feel the muscles in his arm as he delivered the blow and felt pleased by his newly developed strength. He remembered the first job he’d been offered, clearing the bank. I could handle that slasher with ease now, he thought.
The first butter box was almost full of kindling and Roland started filling the second. He thought of Lal in Auckland and his son Peter.
‘A year,’ Roland had said. ‘I’ll come back after a year and we’ll see what we do then.’
‘Why do you think things will be different after a year?’ Lal had asked.
‘They will be,’ Roland had said. Now, with only a few months to go, he knew he had been right. He was not the same person who had set out, though he had no idea who he had become or how he was different.
Roland let the axe fall as he thought of Lal and Peter. He looked forward to seeing both of them again. He now knew he wanted to be a father, wanted to be there to watch his son grow up. Would he and Lal be able to find a way forward together? Perhaps, Roland thought as the blade clove the wood in two, perhaps.
It had rained an hour before, and though the sun was now out, the grass was soft and wet. The young woman in the floral-print dress and felt hat wheeled the pram up the hill, slowing now and again as the wheels bogged into earth. There was no child in the pram, only a gramophone and a handful of records, which joggled and slipped about in their paper covers. Stella, who had left Alison at home with Lal, pushed the records down between the side of the pram and the gramophone before moving on. A little further on she paused, looking across at the grey grimness of the prison building, which stood like a smudged fingermark on the brightness of the afternoon. She wondered how close she could go before the authorities might stop her. There was no one about, but who knew what eyes were watching from the building.
She found a flat piece of ground and put the gramophone down. She wound the handle, put the record on the turntable and let the needle fall. For a moment all she could hear was the scratching sound of the rotating needle, then the thick, rich voice of Nellie Melba rose from the grass and billowed about the hill.
The prison yard was a forlorn place with high walls and little sunlight. On Sunday afternoon the men were permitted to congregate there; they stood about yarning or boasting, or just looking longingly at the square of sky. Vic, who at that moment was trying to snap a broken piece off his thumbnail — the prison authorities would not provide scissors — paused.
‘Listen,’ he said to Nicholson, who was leaning against the wall beside him, ‘I can hear music.’
Nicholson cocked his head to one side. ‘You’re right,’ he said.
‘Melba singing “J’ai perdu mon Eurydice”,’ said Vic recognising the aria as the music, so full of passion, of yearning, of waiting, poured into the afternoon. It sounded like the record he’d known from childhood, though heard in these circumstances made it more touching than ever before.
‘Someone’s got a gramophone over on the hill,’ said Nicholson.
Vic remembered the surprise Stella had promised, and though he’d no idea how she had managed it, he knew she was doing this for him. His heart staggered with tenderness, and the voice of love went on and on.
Andrew Carey tipped his hat back as he stood resting his arms on the gate and looked at the Paua Tower, which was already showing signs of neglect. The smashed rail and banister still hung over the side of the building, partly suspended by broken nails; the wood battered the sides of the tower whenever there was a storm. A temporary barricade had been put at the bottom of the stairs to prevent access, but nothing else had been done since the night Roland and Amélie fell, and the re-opening of the tower had been indefinitely postponed. The walls of the public toilet had been defaced with furious graffiti, vandals had smashed the light with stones, and pieces of the newly restored paua inlay had already dropped out. There was no further money allocated for more subsidised work on the project, Maguire was dead and the council’s attention had moved elsewhere.
Carey looked at the signs of decay and felt a surge of satisfaction. The tower was returning to him; he knew now that he had been wrong to pass it over, and not even the floodlights, when they worked, had been worth the sacrifice. He picked up a shard of shell and looked at it. Rich as taffeta, the swirling rivers of light were as beautiful as always. He thought of his son Melvin, buried beneath a thorn bush on the veldt, and his wife Effie, lying under a marble cross in the Matauranga cemetery. One day, not too far off, Carey thought, I, too, will offer my bones to the land, and the Paua Tower will slide into oblivion. He saw how it would be: the shards of brightness disappearing into the soil, mixing their colour with the earth, and adding a dazzling tincture to the wind.
Author’s Note
The 1930s Depression
The characters and setting of The Paua Tower are of course fictitious, but the major events described all happened, and some of the minor ones as well. New Zealand suffered a serious economic depression in the period, with widespread wage cuts, poverty and unemployment. Nearly 80,000 men were out of work by 1933 and a large number of these were on relief schemes, many enduring the atrocious conditions of up-country work camps. Unemployment pay was inadequate and there were no payments for single women or many Maori. Capitalist entrepreneurs were able to exploit the situation and get subsidised cheap labour, while Happy Days-type carnivals, designed to boost the sluggish economy and cheer people up, were held in some towns and cities.
Anti-eviction protests were not uncommon, and some involved people sitting on possessions to prevent eviction. Riots or disturbances did occur in many of the major New Zealand cities, and the highly unpopular Special Constables were used to assist police in controlling the crowds. The riot described in The Paua Tower is very loosely based on some of the events that took place in Queen Street, Auckland, in April 1932. The turning off of the streetlights is an invention.
Contraceptive advice was seldom available and abortion was illegal, while back-street abortions, or those women performed on themselves, were common. It is known that between 1931–1935, at least 176 New Zealand women died as a result of these procedures; many others were permanently injured.
When the music-loving, unemployed workers’ activist Jim Edwards was in Mount Eden jail, his wife did play the gramophone for him outside the walls, until she was stopped by the authorities.
The Tarot
Tarot cards have been used for hundreds of years as a means of providing counsel and divining the future. They enjoyed considerable popularity in France in the nineteenth century and were taken up by the esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the early twentieth century. This order included many artists and poets, such as W.B. Yeats, among its supporters, and the famous Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot cards, the best known of all Tarot images, were developed by members of this order.
The ideas and symbols depicted on Tarot cards are drawn from a multitude of sources and belief systems. There are many excellent books currently available that explain the origins, significance and ways to read Tarot.
About the Author
Born in Ireland, Coral Atkinson moved to New Zealand as a girl and studied history at the University of Canterbury. She has worked as a secondary school teacher and educational journalist as well as in book publishing; currently she tutors on a publishing course and runs adult education seminars. Her short fiction has been published in New Zealand, Ireland and England. It has won and been shortlisted in several short-story competitions. Her serial story, Cheerio! won one of the two 2005 Christchurch Press Summer Fiction Awards. Coral Atkinson is the author of The Love Apple (Black Swan 2005) and co-author of Recycled People: Forming New Relationships in Mid-life. She has also published various non-fi
ction articles, essays and educational texts.
Copyright
National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Atkinson, C. E. (Coral E.)
The paua tower / by Coral Atkinson.
ISBN-13: 978–1–77553–348–1
ISBN-10: 1–86941–762–3
I. Title
NZ823.3—dc 22
A BLACK SWAN BOOK
published by
Random House New Zealand
18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland, New Zealand
www.randomhouse.co.nz
First published 2006
© 2006 Coral Atkinson
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
ISBN-10: 1 86941 762 3
ISBN-13: 978 1 77553 348 1
Design: Elin Bruhn Termannsen
Cover design: Matthew Trbuhovic
Printed in Australia by Griffin Press
Also by Coral Atkinson
Tomatoes were little known in New Zealand in the late nineteenth century, but those who had encountered the fruit often called it the ‘love apple’ and considered it a symbol of love and lust. Anglo-Irish gentleman photographer Geoffrey Hastings is in danger of confusing the two as he agonises over the past. Huia, the hoydenish, part-Maori sixteen year old, knows just how to use lust for her own ends. The orphan PJ, meanwhile, follows any chance of love wherever it takes him. Like Geoffrey, he arrives in New Zealand from Ireland, but unlike the older man PJ has Fenian sympathies and pines to right the wrongs of his native land. Their shared heritage is one of conflict, but can they forget the past in this new country? The Love Apple is a novel about risk and freedom, desire and love.
The Paua Tower Page 29