The Grass Catcher

by Ian Wedde

  But where memory is neither confident enough to be undeterred when challenged about factual accuracy (I trip therefore I run), nor capable of taking an interest in what might be imagined out of some kind of devoid condition (I lie therefore I think) – when memory fails to generate anything in the space between knowing and imagining, then I’m scared. I’m unable to compose an account of events that I haven’t so much ‘forgotten’ or re-imagined as lost the sense of.

  I felt scared all at once in the midst of bliss that was lapping around me like the murky water of the Waitemata Harbour at the bottom of Hamilton Road, where I was swimming and looking across at the Chelsea Sugar Refinery on Auckland’s North Shore. I wasn’t scared of the memories I was having while floating out there, nor was I scared of what I couldn’t remember (I was confident Dave would). I was scared of a senseless incoherence.

  Never afraid of deep water, I nonetheless swam for shore, as if my old childhood fears of the Gill-man were rising up again from the harbour muck. Back at our new apartment, I phoned my brother and arranged to go over to his place for lunch and a talk.

  Some days later, Dave and I sat outside at the large, hospitable, alfresco table on the patio by his back garden. Through the open French doors to the living room I could see an array of objects and furnishings that had come from our parents’ house, from their travels and various homes. There was a large, inlaid, beaten-copper and brass table-top from Syria hung on the wall; a cumbersome, brass-handled wooden chest-of-drawers and escritoire from Korea; some elaborate silver faux-Empire candlesticks that probably came from Cairo’s French antique quarter; some wooden African curios; the long-stemmed silver opium pipe from Burma that my son Carlos had loved to play with when we visited Linda and Chick’s house at St Heliers after they returned to New Zealand for the last time.

  I’d not wanted to have many of their objects after Linda died, and was happy that most of them were in my brother’s house, along with our mother’s jewellery and other stuff – I’d found the objects oppressive; the memories they embodied crowded a present I wanted to fill up with my own life. But there they were, these prompts to memory, these props and properties, and I was aware of them as Dave and I sat in strong sunlight and drank tea, with the little digital recorder we’d got used to having on the table between us. I didn’t ask him if the objects we could both see out of the corners of our eyes spooked him in any way – if he ever felt crowded in on by memories smuggled into his life by these things that spoke so emphatically of our mother and father and the life they’d chosen to live without their children. Had I done so, I can guess that his humouring gaze would have rested on his over-complicating twin for a tolerant few seconds before he said ‘No’ – with that hint of questioning perplexity I know well. After all, the things had been there in the house for more than twenty years and no one had run screaming from the place or covered the beaten-brass table with a concealing veil.

  I was also looking at my brother’s strong, brown arm and noticing how like our father’s his hands were – capable, broad, the finger-ends slightly spatulate – and that, like mine, they were now the mottled hands of a sixty-five-year-old. He was wearing a baseball cap to keep the sun off his head which, like mine, is barbered very short, with a receded hairline and not much left on top. I felt like saying something like, ‘Shit, we’re getting old!’, but I didn’t. The Linda-and-Chick objects in the adjacent room, and our alligator-skin arms were in any case beginning to play into the line of questions I wanted to engage Dave with. They were about memory, rather than memories, and the panic that had disturbed my bliss out in the harbour a few days previously – the bliss that had come from remembering Dave’s and my arrival in another Auckland summer fifty years earlier, when I was seduced by the warm punnets of strawberries and the colourful plastic bunting of the used-car yards, Dave by the Wild West awnings over shop-fronts, and both of us by the prospect of a home that had our mother and father in it, and the glittering Waitemata Harbour within hopping distance along the baking red scoria footpath.

  Dave and Sue’s two Siamese cats were half-heartedly annoying each other on the lawn – one ran to a gap by the fence and the other pulled up short and then sat licking her shoulder, as if the reality of her sister had been extinguished with the flick of her tail-tip as she bolted. A ticking sound came from the furled awning over the patio, and a similar sound from the corrugated-iron roof of the house – the day was heating up. I could see where Dave, with the kind of attention our father had devoted to his lawns, had re-seeded a bald patch of turf and covered it with some green plastic mesh. The shiny leaves of citrus trees fluttered a little; there was a faintly overripe smell on the breeze, as if loquats were rotting in a neighbour’s garden. It was as though memory was folding the past of our return fifty years ago into this present where Dave poured tea; he waited with a familiar look of amiable patience. We’d been enjoying these talks, even though what they’d occasionally turned up had been troubling – but mostly we hadn’t been all that troubled. Mostly we’d laughed; at worst felt wry.

  Then I asked my brother if he could piece together the sequence of events from the time we’d first arrived in London with Linda and Chick to the time we’d come back to New Zealand five years later; if he could remember our parents’ comings and goings after that. We’d arrived in London off the Arcadia – when did we go down to Somerset? When did we buy the car? When did we go on that holiday around Wales and Scotland – was it before Chick went to Khulna? Or after we’d driven down to meet him in Rome, and before he and Linda both went away? But when did he go? Did Dave remember him going? When did Linda go – did he remember that? Did he remember her coming back when Peggy lost her baby – or did that happen some other time, even before Linda had left? Did he remember how we got the news that our mother and father were back in New Zealand, and wanted us to come there? What did he remember about the school at Bruton? How long were our parents in New Zealand after we joined them, and when did they leave again? When did they come back for a short stay? How long after they came back for good did Chick die?

  I saw him begin to put his excellent memory to work – and then an uncharacteristic expression of perplexity or even bewilderment came over the face that I, with unwavering confidence, have always associated with lucid recall and with an easy, untroubled charm; with the peacefulness of someone content with their situation and how they got there; at ease with memory as the designing agent of that equanimity.

  Like me, he’d encountered a place that consciousness seemed incapable of getting a purchase on; as it had me, this seemed to shock him. Neither of us had been surprised when we couldn’t remember the exact sequences of events that took us from Blenheim to East Pakistan when we were seven – that was a long time ago. But, sitting in the hot Auckland Indian-summer garden and thinking back to our arrival there in that first New Year summer of 1963, we both felt close to that time but couldn’t make it cohere.

  We went back and forth across this territory that our collective memory seemed to have subverted, churned up, sabotaged. We couldn’t make any sense of it. For once, my ficcione weren’t reproved and improved by Dave’s reliability; his facts weren’t incubated in my Keatsian ‘negative capability’. We’d ended up together in a no-man’s-land where neither of us could help the other to get his bearings.

  And it was while we sat there drinking tea and sharing a certain anguish that Dave reminded me he’d been bullied at school in Bruton; that he’d hated the fag system and resented having to make milky instant coffee for ‘his’ prefect in a pot whose bottom was crusted with slimy, burnt milk; that he’d resented having to shine the prick’s shoes; that the bullying had got worse when he reported it to the housemaster, and that he and I had both volunteered to go to a newly built boarding house partly to get away from the prefect and the bullying. There was no more fagging for us at the new house because there was a large quota of new boys; for Dave that was a relief as well. The thought of my sanguine, strong brother being bul
lied shocked me when he mentioned it with his usual lightness and equanimity – it suggested that there may have been a darker side to his experience, one that linked somehow with my image of him writing a postcard in the YHA hostel on Dartmoor.

  Why didn’t I remember any of that? I did, after he’d talked about it. But how shameful to have gone to my brother’s place expecting him to soothe the unease I’d felt – how selfish to have sat waiting for reprieve at his hospitable table, without considering what might have been happening for him during the time that my memory seemed to have become infected.

  No, all had not always been as well as my brother’s sunny disposition had suggested over the years. But on we went. By now we both wanted to. We talked for a couple of hours without straightening out the narrative, but along the way we agreed that neither of us could remember the sequence of events that led up to our parents leaving England, we couldn’t remember when we’d gone on that holiday around Wales and Scotland, and neither of us could remember either our mother’s or our father’s departure. It was as though our entirely separate consciousnesses had failed or shut down at that time; and although Dave could remember the makes of the Vauxhalls Chick bought (first a Wyvern, then a Cresta), and that he’d gone with him to Wincanton on the A303 to London to buy the first of them, neither of us could remember how or why there came to be a second (the Cresta), which had been shipped to Auckland and had met us at Whenuapai when we came home. Nor could either of us plot the moment when our parents did their U-turn and left New Zealand again.

  It was by imagining ourselves getting back into the cars that we attempted to recreate what had happened. Dave was sure the car we travelled around Scotland and Wales in was the Vauxhall Cresta that had replaced the Wyvern that must have been sold when Linda first left for Khulna after we’d had the holiday with Chick in Europe. That’s to say, Chick left England for Khulna, later Linda drove us to Rome in the Wyvern to meet him, then we all drove around Europe. We can’t remember how we got back to England, but presumably in the Wyvern on the Channel ferry. Then Linda left for Khulna – after selling the Wyvern? At some time in the future they must both have come back to England, bought the Cresta, gone with us on the Wales and Scotland tour, and then shipped the car to New Zealand – expecting to return there? But that didn’t happen for several more years. Dave remembered an incident during the Wales leg of the trip when Linda stopped what he was sure was the Cresta at a T-junction to let an articulated truck make a turn ‘from our left across the front of the car – its trailer crabbed and despite Linda’s desperate attempt to get into reverse and back away, the trailer snagged the right wing of the car and dragged it about 45 degrees before releasing it.’ At least Dave remembered this. Neither of us remembered how the bigger story fits together.

  The inanity of this forensic car-brand narrative shut us both up. What was the point? We opened a bottle of wine.

  By checking obvious milestones, we thought we’d worked out that we must have gone to Khulna immediately after sitting the 13+ ‘Common Entrance’ exam that admitted us to the school at Bruton, to which we returned as new boys in the new year of 1960 (I remembered getting my infected ear drained in the infirmary). That may square with my boy-soprano memory, since it’s plausible that my voice began to break around that time. But neither of us can get it to square with any memory whatsoever of either of our parents leaving Somerset.

  We worked out from the visa dates in Dave’s expired passports that we’d gone to Seoul in the New Zealand summer (the Korean winter) of 1963, having arrived back in New Zealand at the beginning of 1962. We worked out that we’d gone for a bike tour up the North Island to Kerikeri with a friend from school, Paul Martin, in the week’s holiday after sitting School Certificate in 1962. It was blisteringly hot, our tyres stuck to the melting tar in the asphalt on the way up the Brynderwyn incline, and Linda was still in the house at St Heliers – she took the black-and-white snap of us lined up with our bikes prior to departure. Chick must have been there too, though neither of us had any memory of him leaving then or subsequently; but he must have done so during our second year back in New Zealand. Dave remembered us going on a farewell trip in the Vauxhall for Linda to say goodbye to her brother Keele in Palmerston North, and he remembered that the car got dinged and had to be panel-beaten before we could drive back to Auckland. We had our driver’s licences by then, and took turns driving the car. But neither of us remembered Linda leaving after that trip.

  I remembered us both spending a winter holiday at our Uncle Keele and Aunty Margaret’s place in Palmerston North: that must have been in mid-1963, after Linda had followed Chick to Korea. We went for early-morning runs in bare feet, having been told it was part of the ‘toughening-up’ training regime for rugby, which I gave up soon after.

  Later, Dave used to go to Palmerston for the holidays, and I began to stay with a friend’s family in Otahuhu. ‘Wan’ Temple taught maths at King’s College and his son Bill was my best friend there, though he was a day-pupil and went home after school. He went on to become a distinguished professor of psychology. The Temples were my surrogate family; after I was told to leave the school, I lived at their house and Bill’s parents were my kindly advocates – Wan negotiated my re-admission to the school for long enough to sit the final Scholarship exam that paid for me to go on to university, which I did the following year after working over the summer with Dave on an orchard near Kurow. Dave went to Canterbury University as an Air Force officer cadet, and we seldom saw each other for a time after that.

  It doesn’t surprise me now to realise that ‘Wan’ probably reminded me of Headmaster Davy at Bruton; he had a regional English accent which explained his nickname ‘Wan’ (that was how he pronounced ‘one’), a gentle, laconic manner, and a disdain for the school’s faux traditions and discipline which he deployed with expressionless passive resistance. He and Bill used to play memory-chess during their standard breakfasts of boiled eggs and toast – they would sit staring at each other across the table, and then whichever one of them had to make a move would speak its code and put another spoonful of breakfast in his mouth.

  Dave and I were remembering all this, telling each other stories we already knew, skirting around the voids of our parents’ departures and the weirdness of our combined memory failures. Dave went on a memory extravaganza as if to compensate for the spooky voids – he remembered that the dormitories at Hazelgrove were named after British battleships such as Hood; he remembered Reg Markwell installing a thumping diesel generator so the lodge could have electricity, and the smell of paraffin lamps before that; he remembered the .303 firing-range at Bisley, and how as cadets we used to stick pennies on the target silhouettes in the hope they’d get hit; he remembered being in the Air Force cadets at Bruton and flying in a Britannia and in a university squadron Chipmunk; he remembered being on the verge of applying for a cadetship with the RAF just before we left England; he remembered that at Guy Fawkes anarchy reigned at Bruton and salvos of rockets were fired at passing trains. It was during this session in his sunlit garden that he remembered the girl who’d called us ‘poor little buggers’ after we first came back to New Zealand was the daughter of an old friend of Chick’s, Lewis Fitch; that she became a psychiatrist with the New Zealand Navy.

  Was he right about all this? He remembered The Seven Samurai when I reminded him. We went back and forth. Throughout the recording of Dave remembering these things, there’s the sound of a bird chattering aggressively in the background, and a gusty wind keeps battering the microphone. Dave’s voice emerges calmly through this intermittent tumult. He remembers that we went for a holiday with Linda and Chick, and with Uncle Keele, Aunty Margaret and our little cousin Jocelyn at Oakura Bay in Northland; this would have been at the end of 1962, during the second summer after arriving from England, and after our bike trip up north with Paul Martin. I remember going to a dance at the beachside hall, and leaving early, crippled with shyness, and being gently mocked by Uncle Keele. Dave remembers
learning to water-ski. I remember sailing back and forth across the bay in a Moth. Though the Moth was a one-person boat, Chick came for a sail and badgered me to sheet in and let her rip. I knew we’d can out, and we did; my father emerged gasping from under the sail once I’d jumped on the centreboard to haul the yacht back up. Later at the bach, Uncle Keele cracked jokes about how I’d almost succeeded in drowning my own father, and how I should try harder next time.

  Then, for the first time since I’d started writing this account, and for the first time since Dave and I had begun to talk about our lives together, I heard my brother say that yes, he’d probably been pretty hacked off around that time after we came back to New Zealand, when Linda and Chick took off again, and that things hadn’t always been so sweet during our time in England for that matter. Nor for that matter had things gone too well after he left school in Auckland; even worse when he didn’t make the grade at officer training.

  His wife Sue walked cheerily into the silence that had fallen over the table where my sanguine brother was looking at the backs of his hands. His happiness has had a lot to do with her, and her amused scepticism of me has had a lot to do with her suspicion that I might be out to taint that happiness – or even, perhaps, poison that well much as I’d once defiled the artesian spring at Francis Street, first with a frog and next with old sump oil, though of course she doesn’t know about that. Dave greeted her affectionately before she could notice anything odd – for a split second I saw image-splinters in which our father was grinning adoringly at his Lindy one moment and in the next gasping for air from under the Moth’s sail – and then he went to get lunch ready.