by Gee, Maurice
Thank God it’s her not me, Josie thinks. Naked, hideous, male … She feels the gratifications of stillness and possession of herself. The smells of soil and dampness surround her. Far away Belinda practises her guitar. Duncan closes his bedroom door. Like Tom, she lets her mind flow out and fill the house. She would argue that living inside it makes it hers.
We’ve lost Stella somewhere. Let’s say she’s in her room studying. Her scholarship exam is getting close.
Before beginning her French she writes to her sister:
Dear Mandy,
It’s starting to happen so we’d better get ready. He can’t help himself but that’s not the point. And she’s so innocent I can’t believe it. What’s worse, she’s so soft …
Two
* * *
DRY TIMES
10
On her way to visit John, Norma stopped at her parents’ house. The boy wanted to wait in the car. ‘Come on, Duncan, they won’t bite, try and face up to people.’ That was a little unfair as he still had John ahead of him. He climbed out and went inside and let Mrs Schwass pat his face. ‘Poor boy, I do hope it doesn’t hurt too much.’ She gave him a plate of peanut brownies.
Mr Schwass, with a white towel round his head and his stick held rifle-like across his knees, looked like a mad old desert sheikh resting from the sun. ‘One of the few, eh laddie? Spitfire pilot?’
‘No Dad, he wasn’t even born.’
‘No time to bale out, eh? Bad luck.’
‘Has he got Alzheimer’s disease?’ Duncan asked as they drove away.
‘Yes, he has. Where did you find out about that?’
‘My grandma’s got it. Last time Dad went to see her he said, “I suppose you’ll say you don’t know who I am,” and she said, “No, who are you?” ’
Norma laughed. ‘Once Dad said to me, “Are you my mother?” He thinks Mum’s his nurse or one of his girlfriends or a cow. “Get a move on, Gert.” ’
‘Was he a farmer?’
‘All his life. He never went to the war, though you wouldn’t think so. Now he wants to drop atom bombs everywhere. We’re still fighting the Germans and Japanese. Every time he hears a German name he goes “Oink, oink”.’
‘Schwass is German.’
‘He doesn’t think so.’
‘The ridges on the brain shrink and you get fluid in the space between the membranes, that’s the reason. Is the man we’re going to visit old?’
‘He will be to you, not to me.’
She was following an intuition in taking Duncan to John. In the three Saturday visits he had paid her she had not so much built up a picture of him as reduced him to a manageable size. In one way it had been like unwrapping a joke parcel and finding a bent penny or a chicken bone inside. He had a huge amount in his head but nothing in his mind. She left aside the memory feat, which was, she thought, no more than a kind of magnetic adhesion, pins and paper-clips, no credit to him, and had not looked at yet (was afraid of looking) the psychology of it, the flash of agony and flash of sight, and what she sensed must be the dangers of accumulation and not being able to forget. She kept her attention on mental uses and had not found him teachable so far. It was, she believed, a matter of getting him interested. Then perhaps he would differentiate and select, and learn instead of remember, and use instead of store up, and throw out all the things he did not need. But was he, she asked, when all was done, when you got past the victim with his sickness, this weird mechanical ability, and came to the ordinary boy, was he equipped for learning, was he able? She had not answered that question yet.
For the rest of it, she found him likeable. She enjoyed his jokes, admired qualities of silence and abruptness he possessed and found his physical over-emphasis – in turning not just half away but turning his back, in squatting suddenly when he wanted privacy, in swinging his arm (the left, unburned) faster and faster, in a wider arc, when he was angry – found it amusing, and sometimes alarming. She worried about the corresponding emphasis in his head, did it hurt? She wanted to touch his little, melted, yellow-rose ear and the horny spike (surely it could have been removed) on the angle of his jaw, try with her fingers if it was sharp. At times she felt like a tourist, like a voyeur, and felt she was indulging herself. She had always hated saints who kissed sores.
It was time to move the boy out of sole care and introduce him to a second teacher. She hummed with anticipation as she drove along; and was pleased with Duncan. He had fitted one of the bits of information in his head – Alzheimer’s disease – to someone he had come across. He’d made the connection. She wanted to reward him but could only think of childish ways.
‘Would you like an ice-cream, Duncan?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Eat one of those peanut brownies then.’
‘I’m allergic to peanuts.’
‘Really?’ She saw that he had made a joke.
‘I’m getting sick of nuts, Mum puts them in everything. Belinda’s turned vegetarian.’
‘And that means the rest of you have to be?’
‘Not Dad. He keeps on talking about things like tripe and liver just to try and make her feel sick.’
‘Does she? Feel sick?’
‘She keeps on eating. I guess it’s Mum who feels sick. Dad reckons she’s neurotic in her stomach as well as her head.’
‘I wouldn’t say Josie was neurotic.’
‘Everyone is in our house. Except me.’
Was that another joke? It was spoken in a neutral tone. She suspected him of taking cover from her and was disappointed he should think it necessary still.
Duncan had learned that by seeming to shift moods and opinions he could make her resemble a girl. It caused a little flicker in her outline. He enjoyed that not maliciously but because he felt a largeness in himself when it happened.
‘You don’t have to worry about Dad making passes at you.’
‘Oh?’
‘He’s got a new girlfriend. She sells dresses. They go scuba-diving in his boat.’
‘How does Josie take that?’
‘She doesn’t care. She calls her the mermaid. She tells Dad not to stay down too long.’
Mrs Sangster blinked and the car made a sideways hop. He had thought his mother said it in a double kind of way.
‘I practise with Dad’s gear when he’s at work. I stayed down five minutes yesterday.’
‘In the pool?’
‘Yeah. Belinda does it too, he’s teaching her, so she gets the blame for the tanks not being full.’
‘That’s not very fair.’
‘Bel can take it. She’s Dad’s favourite.’
‘Youngest daughters often are.’
‘Did Mum tell you Bel’s got a job? At Golden Hills on Sunday mornings.’
‘I would have thought she’s too young for that.’
‘She told them she was sixteen. Anyway, she’s only washing dishes and serving tea but all the old ladies think she’s a nurse.’ He put his hooked forefinger up and said in a quavery voice, ‘ “Nurse, nurse, you forgot to put sugar in my tea.” Bel loves it when they call her that. There’s one lady there a hundred and three. That means she was born in 1883. And there’s a lady who says, “Here you are again. What do you want? I’ve got nothing for you, go away.” She tries to hit Bel with her walking-stick.’
The car went past berry farms and kiwi fruit orchards enclosed in black mesh windbreaks. It crossed the river, where a shingle scoop was working, and went through fields of young corn and by two potteries with big brown jugs and blue plates standing in the windows. (One of his mother’s friends made little white porcelain jars with red and green and yellow eyes on them and those were the ones Duncan liked, he often turned them round in his head and looked at the eyes looking out.)
‘See those birds over in the paddock?’
‘Sure. They’re plover.’
‘They only arrived in New Zealand recently.’
‘Yeah, like swallows. I found a swallow’s nest under the bri
dge. They build them out of mud.’ He wondered why everyone thought he was loopy about birds. Birds were OK to watch but it seemed you had to get worked up about them and say how beautiful they were. The good thing was how their wings worked and the way their feathers were designed to shift the air and give them lift and momentum. Some of them did up like zip-fasteners. ‘With one wing he swept the water.’ An eagle could weigh ten kilograms yet fly a line as thin as a piece of string and if you drew its curve – on the water, say – the angle of the arc would never vary. That was the sort of thing that interested him, not what colour they were or how they fed their young or if they had one mate all their lives. It would be better if they didn’t have mates and lived alone.
He said, ‘That guy Zeno you told me to look up, he was a nutter.’
‘Oh, why?’
‘All he had to do was look and he’d see Achilles pass the tortoise.’
‘Of course. But you do see the paradox? It’s possible to prove mathematically that a fast thing can never pass a slow one.’
‘A fast car can’t pass a slow one on a bendy road.’
‘Come on Duncan, you know what I mean.’
‘No I don’t. It’s tricks, that’s all. Like that thing with beans under walnut shells.’ He knew it was more than that – had seen that Zeno was both right and wrong, and known there must be proof about the wrong, but he couldn’t find it and gave up trying after a time. He had drifted off to sleep that night with the paradox in his head. He saw it might drive someone mad but he liked the evenness of it. The weight of the idea pressed on the weight of the real thing, the balance was exact, and back and forth they went like a perpetual motion machine. The same sort of thing had happened when he found a Mobius strip in a book Mrs Sangster had lent him. He made one out of paper and tried to see how it was possible. It wasn’t like the paradox, the real thing seemed wrong; but there it was in front of him. He ran his pencil round it, ran his mind: one continuous surface, a band with a single side. It delighted him. He carried a Mobius strip in his head and every now and then zipped through it on a roller coaster ride.
‘It was part of an argument for Zeno,’ Mrs Sangster said. ‘He was trying to prove that Being – that’s everything – can’t be broken up in little bits. Even Aristotle couldn’t prove that he was wrong. You’ve heard of Aristotle?’
‘He was a Greek. He owned some oil-tankers.’
‘I sometimes can’t tell when you’re joking.’
He grinned at her. ‘Aristotle. Greek philosopher. BC 384–322. I like it the way dates go backwards before Christ. Makes you think they started old and grew down into babies.’
The idea of gravestones lifting up and wrinkly old people coming out, wrapped in bits of rotten cloth, with earth dropping off them, made him laugh; but babies crawling back into their mothers was gross, it hurt his head. He frowned and got away from it. ‘This guy we’re going to see, is he a Scot?’
‘Scot?’
‘You know, Scot no friends. Nobody likes him.’
‘I just can’t keep up with the language,’ Mrs Sangster said.
‘I got that one from Bel. She reckons Stella’s a Scot. I’m one too because of my face. I can look at people and make them turn into stone, eh? Like Medusa.’
‘Med-you-sa, not Medussa.’
‘Yeah. I saw her in the pictures. There was this guy Perseus, what a name, he got her by looking in his shield for a mirror. Whacked her head off. I was hoping she’d get him. I liked her best.’
‘I didn’t know they’d made a movie of it.’
‘Then he used her head to kill the sea monster. She was the best thing in it. Her hair was snakes. I’d like to be like her, eh? Pow! Stone.’
There was something benign, though, in his wish. She was almost prepared to say that he looked on humans as a soft species, squashable, a bit like, say, caterpillars, and he handled them with care, put them in a safe place; forgot them. And looked on himself as hard and solitary, free. Non-human or non-caterpillar? that was the question. He must not be allowed to withdraw from the human race.
‘John isn’t a Scot,’ she said as they drove up the valley. ‘He’s just a man who’s happy with his own company.’
‘So what does he want to see us for?’
‘Oh, he likes to see people. He’s not a hermit.’
John was sitting in a canvas chair on his lawn, reading a book and drinking a glass of beer. He wore a sun-visor that gave his face a greenish graveyard tint, made him look ill. When he pulled it off, his long, northern face took a russet hue and his nose gleamed like a misshapen strawberry. Duncan turned half away as though by putting himself side on he might be invisible. ‘Yeah,’ he said to Norma, ‘nice place.’
‘Duncan, this is Mr Toft. John.’
The boy gave him a quick look. ‘Hi.’
‘So you are him, eh, the boy Norma talks to me about? You can learn whole books is what she says.’
‘That’s not the only thing about him,’ Norma protested.
‘And you have these bad burns, yes I see. Do they still hurt?’
‘They itch a bit. Sometimes they ache.’
‘And the doctors, they had you wrapped in tin foil like a loaf of garlic bread?’
‘For a while.’
‘And they robbed you of some skin from your bottom for your hand. Is that fair to your bottom, do you think?’
‘It’s a bit sore sometimes when I sit down.’
‘Does it feel like hand skin now or bottom skin? Perhaps it has some memory of where it belongs.’
‘John, for heaven’s sake, you’ll give him nightmares,’ Norma said.
‘And goes crawling in the night, eh, back to its proper place?’ Duncan said. ‘Hey, that’s neat.’
‘The pair of you are being quite revolting,’ Norma said. She felt some comment of that sort was called for; but, like Duncan, had grown interested. How had John known that the boy would play this game?
‘I’ve got a bit of leg skin on my face.’ He touched his cheek-bone. ‘I guess it feels OK there. It give me a speedy sort of face, eh?’
‘Medical science is mighty clever,’ John said. ‘They can move the skin around, and change over livers and kidneys, and make rubber hearts, or is it plastic? And soon, no doubt, they will graft fast feet on to slow runners and make them win Olympic gold medals.’
‘Stick tails from sharks on swimmers,’ Duncan said.
‘And maybe eagles’ wings on men and women and make them fly. And all this will alter our minds. We will have a great new age.’
‘I have dreams where I fly.’
‘Too near the sun, like Icarus. You know that story?’
Duncan was still a moment. Norma almost felt his mind go click. ‘Yeah, I read it. His old man made him wings but the sun melted the wax. He was dumb.’
‘There are other ways of getting close to the sun.’
Norma moved away. They could be left. ‘I’m going for my walk, John. I won’t be long. Oh, there’s peanut brownies in the car.’
‘Your car runs on peanut brownies, I think.’
‘There’s a car that runs on gas from pig manure,’ Duncan said.
‘We must do away with fuels and aim for telekinesis. Move about with our brains, what do you think?’
She left them talking and climbed the slope through the Gravenstein trees. The apples, green and hard and ready for thinning, made her mind shiver and contract. She pictured it for a moment like a walnut in its shell, unreceptive. She did not care for the sort of fantasizing John and Duncan had fallen into, thought it shallow, possibly damaging, yet liked the ease it created for them. She felt exhausted herself – Duncan had that effect, he kept one alert, but at the end one suffered a collapse from the hard work of it all. Perhaps that was why the springing greens of the orchard failed to refresh her – she was too small and dry, and time rather than place would work a renewal. The long grass swished and tickled round her knees. She bent this way and that like a Balinese dancer, avoiding branc
hes. She splayed her hands, arched her fingers back (wished for long nails), made movements of her forearms on a plane, and slid her head back and forth in the dancer’s way; proceeded several yards through the trees in silken gown and head-dress, making ritual flight from a demon; then laughed at herself, caught in her own kind of fantasizing. But was refreshed, in that quick moment. Wonderful, the mind, its powers of renewal. Perhaps telekinesis too was in human possibility. Not now, of course, or for centuries. But Duncan might be a pioneer, one never knew.
She did not, though, want to think of Duncan. She had thought about him too much in the last few weeks. Her time in the orchard was for herself. She thinned an apple cluster, hoping that she left the right ones on. Trade skills, trade knowledge, even at their most simple, demanded respect, and were an aspect of, well, spirit, what other word? She felt she had been guilty of a minor blasphemy, of taking easily what should be treated with reverence, and wished the apples back on the tree, left there for the hand of one who knew. Then laughed at herself, trilled out amusement. Fantasizing again – investing the mundane with, oh, deep significance. Looking for pathways to a hidden meaning. What a disease it could be. One had to deal firmly with these symptoms or find oneself outside the quotidian, and that was the end of being useful.
Really, she thought, I’d better just find some sunshine and lie down.
She reached a fence with rusty wires and posts furred in lichen. Beyond was a paddock left for hay, then the forest began. How pines darkened a landscape. Even in this stillness, how they stilled. One could imagine … no, she declared, enough of that. No gnomes or trolls or wood-sprites; and no pantheistic transports. Sensuous things only, please, she asked. Grass stroking her legs, sun on her skin, clean air washing out her lungs. Scent of pines. Brittleness of lichen. Valley, mountains, to delight the eye. More than enough.
She climbed the fence, half afraid the rusty wires would snap, and walked up the paddock to the pines. There would be haymaking soon, and one more apple harvest, then the valley would be turned to another use. No need for John to repair fences. His house would be pulled down. Bulldozers would root out his apple trees – loop a chain around them, give a tug, out they’d come like thistles in a garden, and a new crop, little glossy, green, bristling pines would take their place. Aggressive little trees those, invaders, survivors; but she could not work up the hatred for them some of her conservationist friends felt. One had to look on pines as another crop and see that it was kept in its proper bounds.