by Janet Frame
—Who will you tell?
—I’ll tell Dad and then you’ll be given a hiding, and have to fill the coal-bucket while he watches and gives orders. Or I’ll tell mum, but she won’t do anything to hurt you. She’ll warn you and kiss you.
—Or I’ll tell God, and then you’ll be sorry. He’ll write in his book about you, and on resurrection day, in all the crowd, with the people looking and everything, God’ll read out your name from the platform and you’ll have to go up in front of him and be judged, while we watch you, while everybody watches. And it’ll be hot in the crowd, with so many people, and they’ll be selling ice creams and cold drinks as fast as they can make them, but you won’t get any ice creams or cold drinks, fizzy and coloured, or candyfloss either. Or be able to go and see the bearded lady and fat man when it’s interval, and God has tea in the special tent. Yes, Toby Withers, I’ll tell on you.
—What’ll you tell about?
—I’ve forgotten now, but I’ll tell, you see.
And Francie twirled her skirt again and began to rock the cradle, singing, as she rocked,
—Come in you naughty bird, the rain is pouring down.
And Toby turned to Chicks and said,
—Chicks, I shall spend my life in prison if I have no money. Where can I find some money?
Chicks stopped rocking her cradle and came forward to him, and put her arm around his shoulder. Then she withdrew it quickly,
—Toby your neck is greasy, and your hair, too, with that oil, if you are not careful you will get boils on the back of your neck and they will take a long time to heal. You will have to have penicillin, and that may shorten the time. One of the children had boils only last year and I had such difficulty. The doctor said he had never seen a case quite like it in children. It was unique, he said. He had to give the children some kind of special treatment, some drug newer than penicillin, very expensive; but of course we have the money to pay, Tim earning what he does. But the price of things these days is fantastic. You say you want money. You will never find it here. What we used to think of as treasure wasn’t really treasure at all. Ours was a childish outlook, not allowable in an adult who has to adjust himself to a complex society. I’m trying to bring my children up to fit in with things. When in Rome, I say. I am training them to handle money, for money is the most important thing, or almost, in this society. I am glad you realise that money is the treasure. Of course I grant there is the spiritual side of things, love and all that. We try to love our children for a few hours each day, to stabilise them. I advise you, Toby, to take up some kind of profitable business as soon as you can. But I wish–
She fell quiet, not speaking her wish, and looked into the cradle. Toby looked too, and saw Chicks as a little girl, fast asleep, with her eyes closed upon a future dream of a vast world, changing and sucked and warm, like an aniseed ball.
Then he turned to Daphne who was rocking her cradle and crooning something which sounded like,
Sift where and how through a cloud of sky
Brown the green sea in a warm salt pie,
Eat and turn off the sun and die
Cold as a coin in an oven of why.
She stopped singing and rocking and stared past Toby to something beyond him. He looked over his shoulder, afraid, and saw a vaporous and profound drop of nothing.
—Toby, Daphne said. We have dug the pit and he who diggeth the pit shall fall into it; but that is only Francie, the witch who dug fire; and Chicks, Teresa now, has filled the pit with silver and copper and gold and three children and Timothy Harlow, and builds a house over the pit, to live there; and I, Daphne, live unburned in the centre, brought to the confusion of dream; and you, Toby, are there and not there, journeying half-way which is all torment for
The singe on the sleeve is worse than fire
The half-place than the knowing where,
Like seas between to the unhappy sailor.
Poor trafficking child, with no treasure.
Then Toby watched the three of them dancing and rocking the cradles and chanting, and changing from Francie and Daphne and Chicks, to bony women shrieking Aii-aii-aii, louder, with faces now like a clock, luminous, and numbered to twelve, and hair standing up, tingling like a five o’clock alarm. Then silence and dark, and a wavery wobble of a new bird waking up outside in the white pear tree.
23
In the morning he did not remember his dream for like most dreams his memory of it ended with – I dreamt something last night, I don’t know what, it was queer, something about a telescope and a pie, I think it was an apple pie cooking in an oven.
He was saying this at breakfast, over bacon and eggs and fried bread, with the yolk of the egg bleeding over his plate and his mother saying, glancing sideways from dishing out her husband’s breakfast and putting it in the top shelf of the oven to warm, and his slippers on the bottom shelf,
—Oh Toby, I didn’t know I hadn’t cooked it enough.
Toby hadn’t noticed either, till his mother called his attention from his dream to his flowing half-cooked egg; and he scolded in the way he had learned from his father.
—Haven’t I told you before, to leave the egg till it’s wrinkled on top and hard, that I don’t like them runny?
And then, his dream reabsorbing him, he added,
—Yes, something about an apple pie cooking in an oven and I was looking in my Atlas, at the different countries. I think I was on the moon.
—Little wonder, said Amy, this morning’s paper talks of the moon, and visiting there. Shares have gone up for holiday resorts on the moon. That’s what your father says.
Amy Withers did not read the paper herself. She seemed not to have time. Her husband was up in the dumpy and she had settled his breakfast and was nursing the warmed teapot, waiting for the kettle, and conscious through the blue smoke and sizzle of the old day after day despair of not managing and letting the eggs be runny, and forgetting to give the fowls water. Talk of a dream, and the words apple pie and atlas and moon came to her, visiting, like consoling friends in her perpetual bereavement of cooking and muddle; from her own world long stifled, of unreal and might-have-been. She seized the words, apple pie, dream, moon, and with them knitted herself a warm half-minute escape from the forever problem of facing up.
—Toby, she said, that means travel. I think it means much travel for many years. And how strange about apple pie, because Dad brought up some of those fillbaskets from the shed, and I had planned to have apple pie, a real old-fashioned one for tea either tonight or tomorrow night.
She looked suspiciously at Toby.
—You didn’t know I was having apple pie for tea, did you? Nobody told you?
—Have a heart, Mum. And so I’m going to travel many miles in many years.
He looked at his mother with her shrunken dangling breasts and her thin time and child-stolen lap and her fixed expression of agreement and comfort and faith that had settled about her mouth, belied by the fear and loneliness that flowed round and round, at times, in a capture, within her faded blue eyes; and he knew just as he knew that he knew his dream of the corner of the moon but could not utter it, that his mother in her life of cooking and washing and going messages and visiting the sick with flowers and home-made cakes; and sitting on Sunday, saying special grace – Bless this food to our use and us in Thy keeping – or reading the Bible and breaking bread, with her eyes on the invisible Jesus who said, Take. Eat. This is my body.
In all her living Toby knew that his mother, who had never left her native land nor had a holiday from home, had indeed experienced what she foresaw for him,
Much travel in many years,
so that her shoes wore out and her feet bulged over the sides, and her slippers, men’s size, suffered split heels and toes. She had corns, one or two, which she cut at night with a razor-blade, in the steaming bathroom; and flat feet, fallen arches, they were called; and varicose veins as if she had walked her life through Europe and Asia and South Africa and America and
India; when all the time it was in her own backyard and garden of beans and cabbages and carrot seed that never came up for the wind breathed a blow-a-way spell.
—Yes, you will travel, Toby, I’m sure of it. I said you would dream of your future, though I don’t believe the superstition.
—I don’t know if it was my future I dreamt of, Mum; it seemed my past.
His mother smiled.
—They are the same, Toby. It is the same thing with a different name.
But how he hated her when she smiled that apostolic way, as if she were in league with God and time, if there were a god; as if she were a chosen being, which perhaps she was, but it made him angry and guilty to think so, for then should he not clothe her in silk and satin, and give her breakfast in bed, instead of her fetching breakfast for him; and say to her each time she waited upon him,
—Let me do that, mother. You just sit by the fire and rest.
Should he not act this way? And what if, as she grew older, she began to wander, and do strange things and went blind? What should he do? Should he put her in a home, and visit her once a week with oranges and violets or some other flower, perhaps take her for a drive down to see the breakers coming in; or shout her an ice cream if the weather were warm? Or keep her home, employ a nurse to look after her, and have her wandering and tottering everywhere and interfering and taking up time and money that he had slaved for, to make his adult treasure? And about his father, what should he do about his father when he grew older and got deaf as Grandad had been, to be shouted at and explained to; when he quavered and tottered and dribbled and wet his pants and smelt? It was all terrible, Toby thought. He could not face it. He would have his hands full to control the treasure of money that would help him to fit in and know where and why and how.
He did not know, then, what to do, and wondered why he had thought about it all. Because his mother interpreted his dream much travel in many years. And can you not travel, in a dead and suffocating way, merely standing still?
—Toby, there’s a bit more fried bread, if you want it.
—No thanks.
He was a bit of fried bread himself, he fancied, sitting soaked up in his dream.
24
For three months, then, until Christmas, Toby worked to demolish the old Peterkin Hotel. His father helped him, not at first or ever because he wanted to, but because Toby, coming home one night tired and dusty with limestone as if someone had waited in the dark to empty over him a bag of dirty wholemeal flour, said bitterly to his mother,
—Look at Dad there. What do you see?
His mother looked but did not answer. Bob was slumped asleep with his detective novel fallen on the floor and his mouth open, dirty and dark red, like a drain. His bottom teeth were decayed. He ought to have had them seen to.
—Pure laziness, Toby said. While I slave all day trying to earn money to set me up in business. Why can’t he help me from time to time? If I don’t get some money I shall have to sell out my share of the house, and then where will you both go?
—Yes, thought Amy. Then where will we go?
She was used to Toby’s threats but they frightened her, and muddled her, as she tried to think of some place to go, a where that would be the answer to all worries and bickerings, and bring peace. Surely the Bible talks of some place, she thought. Surely the Bible will help, and praying, for we’re not young any more and can’t think so quickly, nor can I walk a few yards now but I have to stop and get my lost breath.
—You wouldn’t sell out, Toby. Not with your mother and father getting old?
—Of course I wouldn’t sell out. Not of my own accord. But I may be forced to, if things go as they are, if that lazy heap doesn’t help me get the building down in time.
—Toby. Your father isn’t a lazy heap. He’s retired. It’s the twilight of his life.
Bob Withers woke up suddenly. He tasted in his mouth and sniffed and picked up the book from the hearthrug. The Strange Murder of Hogden Park. Then,
—What’s going on, he said. What are you arguing about, always arguing about something. And why isn’t the weather on, you know I hate to miss the weather report.
Amy Withers did not say —You would have been asleep and not heard it, but obediently switched the radio on and it sang at them.
When the sun in the morning looks over the hill and kisses the flowers on mocking-bird hill.
—Missed it, said Bob Withers accusingly. Turn it off.
Every day he liked to hear the weather report. He scorned the weather-man, and laughed at him because he spoke with a marble in his mouth, and besides, Bob could tell at a glance whether the next day would be fine or wet; but he felt that nowadays it was the thing to be told, and have everything worked out for you. Hearing the weather report made Bob feel safe, in the otherwise insecure and frightening times that he called, in opposition to the old days, modern times, nowadays, these days.
—Now, he said, who’s to tell if there’ll be a storm or hurricane or the world will break tomorrow into a million pieces? I like to know my future. I’m not altogether superstitious, but I like to know my future, so as to be sure.
—I’m selling out my share, Dad. Unless you can help me with the Peterkin. Surely you can help for a few days at least?
Amy looked from one to the other, supporting both but unable to decide what to say. She fixed a calm hopeful expression on her face, but fear sneaked in and out of her eyes. She was tired. Blessed are the peacemakers, she thought.
—What do you say, Mum?
—Yes, what do you say, Mum?
Amy smiled with her familiar mask of brightness.
—I’ll say it’s time for a cup of tea, a real cup of tea, and one of the coconut cakes I made this afternoon.
Tea? Coconut cakes? Take your pick, Bob would say teasingly as he helped himself from the plate. But he loved coconut cakes.
So Amy settled the dispute, and the next morning Bob went down with Toby in the truck to the Peterkin Hotel.
Bob didn’t know about pulling down buildings and had to be told. Do this, Dad, Toby would say. Do that. And Bob obeyed meekly. It’s funny, he thought, I didn’t realise Toby was grown up and knew things. I always thought, oh I don’t know what I always thought. And he saw a sick little boy with his left eye screwed up and his head twisted over his left shoulder, and crying, Dad, Dad, help me ’cos you know.
And standing on there on the scaffolding high above the people passing in the street, with Toby on one end of the board, hammering and wrenching, and himself at the other end, also hammering, but with the inferior hammer, Toby had the better one with the claw because, after all, it was Toby’s job, and Toby was the craftsman, Bob felt sometimes tired and out of breath, it was when he raised his arms, and giddy, and that was when he looked down at the people walking; but he could not tell Toby about his feelings. And he felt lonely so close up to the sky, not the rewarding and proud loneliness he had felt when driving the train at night across the plains, but an unforgiving and harsh emptiness, as if he had been rejected by earth and sky and must stay forever now in the between gulf, tired and afraid. And from the street, if people looked up as people do, craning their necks and stopping, blocking up the footpath, they saw two dusty and shabbily dressed men, one young, the other old, standing at each end of a paint-smattered plank, turning sometimes to glance at each other, but rarely speaking; as if they played there, had the board been moving, in an enclosure of sky, a grim and aloof game of private see-saw.
Toby enjoyed demolishing the building. The place, he felt, was his possession. He would dismember it and make it pay. He ripped up the floor and found with delight what lay underneath, old newspapers and sixpences and haircombs; teaspoons, and a broken wrist watch; a faded portrait of a woman smiling. And he explored the linings of the walls to find treasure. He thought, I will reduce the place to chaos and out of the neat stacks of timber and glass and blocks of limestone create a new and personal wealth that will be my friend and lover for the re
st of my life. So. The rusty nails and the borer-riddled four-by-two and the kauri beams and the sheets of roofing iron – more than any Fay Chalklin.
In three months, two weeks before Christmas, the building was finished and the place where it had been rooted resembled the socket of a giant wood and stone tooth, a pioneer molar; the place of dark blood to be filled and healed with bright green weed. Perhaps. Or a false tooth? And that it proved to be, shooting up early the following year; a hardware store, an advertisement of its own destruction, with axes and saws and shears and mowers planted behind the receding plate-glass windows. And next door a milk bar was born, clean and white and shining, with sweets in bottles and two kinds of ice cream, plain and chocolate; and a nickelodeon that agreed on payment to sing the latest tunes. And people said, who had lived in Waimaru for many years,
—How the town progresses!
25
The radio began it all first, threatening and remembering. The newspapers followed with their insinuations of panic. The shops repeated the dreadful declaration and warning.
—Not many days to Christmas, they said. Have you posted your cards and parcels? Have you finished Christmas shopping?
The shops in town were made into homes for old men with long white beards and dressing-gowns and gumboots and falsely or not so falsely red noses. The world snowed cottonwool and sprouted tender pine trees and sullen holly leaves; stars fell from heaven and were confusedly followed by numerous magi; in the best shop windows appeared mangers, centrally heated, all awaiting a birth certainly.