by Peter Walker
For Liz and Louis
There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke. But you and I—
Dylan, ‘All Along The Watchtower’
Contents
Prologue
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Prologue
One thing was plain – Morgan Tawhai had been expelled from Fairfield Boys High. But why? What did he do? What was the crime that sent him flying at an early age and with no right of appeal from that estimable seat of learning?
The four of them looked at one another. No one really knew what to say. There was Morgan’s elder brother, Lucas, clearly unhappy that the subject had come up. There was FitzGerald, always the diplomat, looking just as unhappy. There was FitzGerald’s new wife, Inga. Inga’s eyes were shining. She had never known Morgan but she was keenly interested, being inquisitive by nature. And there was Radzimierz Radzienwicz who had raised the question in the first place.
Morgan himself was not present, nor would he ever be present, to throw any light on the matter. He had been dead now – it was incredible to think of it – for more than thirty years.
‘Wasn’t it something to do with tennis shoes?’ said Radzimierz Radzienwicz, who, mercifully, had been known since childhood as Race.
‘Tennis shoes?’ said Inga.
‘Sneakers. Plimsolls. What did we call them then? Sandshoes. Didn’t he pinch a pair of sandshoes from someone’s locker?’
A faint rubbery whiff of old scandal and the school corridor came into the room. They were in Lucas’s house by the beach. Race and Inga and FitzGerald had never met Lucas before. They had come down the coast from Auckland on holiday and they called in to see him only after some delay and debate among themselves.
‘Well, you know, Morgan – he was brilliant,’ said FitzGerald who sometimes wished Race could keep his big trap shut. As he remembered it, Morgan hadn’t just taken the shoes from the locker. He had written his name in blue biro on the underside of their tongues. It was that, deemed unforgivable by the school authorities, which propelled him at high speed from Fairfield Boys High, amid no doubt many painful family recriminations.
‘He was always top of the class,’ FitzGerald went on. ‘He just sort of knew more than the rest of us. What is the name of the liquor flowing in the veins of the immortal gods? Only one hand went up.’
‘And?’ said Inga, stretching out a tanned and sandalled foot. Her toenails were lustrous, plum in colour.
‘And what?’ said FitzGerald.
‘The liquid flowing in the veins of the gods,’ said Inga.
‘God,’ said FitzGerald. ‘I mean we were thirteen, fourteen. We’d think how the hell would we know? But Morgan knew.’
‘Yes. But what is it?’ said Inga.
‘Ichor,’ said FitzGerald.
‘Ichor,’ said Lucas and Inga together – Lucas startled there was such a word, and Inga as if just checking.
‘I - c - h - o - r,’ said FitzGerald.
Outside, the waves broke and fanned up the black-bouldered sand. It was a great rainless summer storm. The windows of Lucas’s house were lightly salted, everything beyond them vague as if seen through smoked glass. In a way, naughty, brilliant Morgan had become almost immortal himself. His friends had never forgotten him. They still talked about him when they met, and wondered what had actually happened to him. Here they were, for instance, come to look at his grave, for what that’s ever worth.
‘Shall we go?’ said Lucas, shouldering up from an armchair. They went out into the booming, sunlit gale. The family graveyard was surrounded by a picket of trees about a quarter of a mile across the paddock. They set off, FitzGerald and Inga going on ahead. From a distance, Race noticed Inga’s good ankles, her air of elegance. She might, he thought, have been heading into Harvey Nichols or Bloomingdale’s or some such – so Race framed it – hellhole, but instead there she was crossing the rough grass beyond the shadow of a tall pine that was growing alone in the middle of the field. Under the tree the ground was dusty, bare, ribbed with roots, cobbled with sheep-shit. It was strange, Race thought just then – he caught a faint ammoniacal tang – that he had never noticed the tree when he had been there before, crossing that field in the company of the long-vanished Morgan. He must have just blocked it out, he thought, for after all it was a Norfolk Island pine, and in those days he and his friends disliked the species, the poor Norfolk being so very symmetrical, so neat and regular in brachiation, each one forming a great, green capital ‘A’, that it was much favoured by the authorities who planted it up and down school drives, outside prisons, on the perimeter of sports fields, along beach fronts – on ‘marine parades’ especially, all over Australia and New Zealand – A A A A A A A – on account of those very qualities – neatness, order, regularity – which he and his friends, then aged twenty-one or twenty-two, naturally held in low esteem. Now, decades later, he saw how wrong they had been. It was beautiful, this great green A creaking in the cloudless gale – dark, doughty of trunk, each branch laden with glossed claws of green – a ‘star pine’, cousin of the monkey-puzzle, the hoop pine, living masts of Gondwanaland still growing on long-separated shores of the Pacific.
Race and Lucas walked on beyond the tree’s shadow, and then Race paused for some reason and looked back up at it, and Lucas stopped as well to see what he was looking at.
‘We used to climb that when we were kids,’ said Lucas, squinting into the sun. ‘Morgan and I. We’d climb right to the top and then just jump out.’
‘Jesus, Lucas,’ said Race. ‘It’s a hundred feet high. What did your parents say?’
‘They never knew,’ said Lucas, shaking his head at life. ‘We’d jump off and leap down through the branches all the way to the ground.’
They stood there, looking up.
‘Maybe they did know,’ Lucas said, ‘but just couldn’t watch. We were twelve, fourteen. We were running wild by then. What could they do? We’d climb up there and jump off, or we’d swim out to the lighthouse and climb that and swing from the gantry by our fingertips . . .’
Just then, among the higher boughs, a magpie appeared with his shining badges of white, and then a second swooped around the tree and joined its mate, and at that moment Race not only remembered the very beginning of the story but, as he and Lucas turned and went away across the grass, he felt that he was quite unexpectedly coming to the end of it, the end of the story of Morgan, or at least his version of the story of Morgan whom he had last seen coming fast along the platform of Wellington railway station one Sunday afternoon, coming to say goodbye to Race who was getting on the overnight train, and to tell him that he had in fact slept with the blonde girl the night before, right there in front of the fire after everyone else had left the party, adding that, at the time, the rain was so loud on the roof it sounded like thousands of people clapping.
‘Get out of here,’ said Race, looking past Morgan at the railway clock at the end of the platform, but he was in fact pleased that Morgan had come down on a grey Sunday afternoon to see him off on the train, and then he had climbed on board and gone along to his seat to speak to him through the window, but he never saw Morgan again because, by the time he got to his seat, the train was moving off from the platform and away through the marshalling yards where the signals were – in his memory at least – shining blue above the wilderness of tracks.
Part I
1967
1
When the horns sounded the first time, and the second, and even the third, Race did not know what they were or where they came from. The sound
came blowing in from a mournful distance, from the dark, well beyond the wharves, out in the harbour, out to sea. Race had just left the nightclub alone. At the entrance was a life-size painting of a woman in a feathery gown. She had startled blue eyes and beside her was a column of names, spangled with stars:
Honey Brown
Fanny Hill
Gaye Abandon
Pinky Nightingale
Treasure Chest
Teddy Bare
PLUS PLUS PLUS:
Jewel Box!!!
‘Jewel Box!’ said Race to the startled lady in her gown of thick paint. He paused, looking up and down the street, wondering which way to go home, and then set off towards Civic Square. He had been to a dance earlier that night, and he was drunk – drunk enough anyway not to notice or at least not to care that he was in fancy dress. He was walking in fancy dress on his own through dark and probably drunken streets. His costume, though, was relatively restrained. He had spent the night dancing with Candy, who was dressed as a bee, and haughty Rosie Gudgeon, who’d gone as Madame de Pompadour and wore a powdered wig a foot high. FitzGerald had started out the night as a samurai warrior and at some point had acquired – but from where? – a Minotaur’s head. A kimono-clad Minotaur was still on the nightclub dance-floor, soulfully clutching Madame de Pompadour. Candy, in her bee costume, had vanished. Race didn’t know where she had gone. He left the dingy basement club because he was drunk and because the bee had departed, but he felt quite happy all the same, and he turned left and began to walk home. He was wearing doublet and hose, and a cap with a feather in it, but apart from the white ruff around his neck, and the feather in his cap, he was dressed all in black: in a dark and drunken town his costume was not too different from that of some kid in skinny black jeans. He had just reached Civic Square when the horns began to sound from far away. Race did not recognise them. He had been living in the city a year and a half and had never heard them before. Then, at the fourth or fifth blast, so mournful and solemn, the sea-fog appeared – two billows of fog, eight, nine, ten storeys high – coming up parallel streets from the docks. They reached Civic Square at the same time, they silently turned left and right at the intersections, rolled towards each other, met, and came forward as one. The last thing Race saw before a general blotting-out was a border of red-and-white flowers planted near the council offices. He stood there a moment, pleased for some reason at the sudden evanescence of the prim municipal blooms. Then he walked on. There was no passing traffic, no sign of life or other existence. The only sound was the intermittent rising and falling of the sad fog horn.
Then, a few yards ahead, Race saw someone coming towards him. Even in the fog the figure suggested haste and agitation. It came forward, stopped, bent down, straightened up and darted forward again, and then stood in front of him.
‘Morgan,’ said Race.
They stood a yard apart in the mist.
Morgan looked at Race without any sign of surprise.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Race Radzienwicz.’
‘What are you doing?’ said Race.
‘I’m looking for something,’ said Morgan.
He bent down and examined the pavement at the foot of a parking meter beside them.
‘What?’
‘Something I lost.’
‘You want some help?’ said Race.
‘Possibly.’
Race bent down and looked at the ground as well.
They went to the next meter and repeated the action.
‘It might help,’ Race said, looking into the gutter – he noticed its clean, dry walls – ‘if I knew what I was looking for.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Morgan. ‘If you saw it, you’d know.’
‘How did you lose it?’
‘I put it down,’ said Morgan. ‘Somewhere round here. Somewhere . . . or . . . other.’
He was, Race realised, quite drunk as well. Morgan had also been at the fancy-dress ball at the university, although he had not worn fancy dress. Nor had he gone with a partner. Race had seen him at about midnight, dancing alone, with absorption, right up by the stage, almost under the guitar-necks of the band.
‘It’s not here,’ said Morgan, ‘and I know it’s not down there—’
They had reached the intersection and Morgan stood looking into the mists of Wakefield Street.
‘I didn’t go down Wakefield Street, so I can’t have left them down there, now can I?’
‘Them?’ said Race. ‘I thought it was an it.’
‘It’s an it and a them,’ said Morgan.
‘How can it be?’
‘How can it not be?’ said Morgan. ‘Most things are.’
‘Cut it out,’ said Race.
‘All right,’ said Morgan. ‘It’s jewellery. They are several separate jewels, forming a single item of jewellery.’
‘Jewels!’ said Race. ‘What kind of jewels?’
‘Rubies,’ said Morgan. ‘Or possibly amber.’
‘Where did you get them?’
Morgan didn’t answer.
‘And why leave them in the street?’ said Race.
‘I heard the police coming,’ said Morgan, ‘and so I hid them.’
‘The police?’ said Race.
‘Oh, OK,’ said Morgan, in the tone of a man burdened by many unreasonable demands. ‘First I went to the fancy-dress dance. It was quite a good band, I thought.’
He stood at the corner and sang:
There must be some way out of here
Said the gaoler to the thief
His voice was light and rather hoarse.
‘Joker,’ said Race. ‘It’s joker, not gaoler.’
‘Gaoler’s better,’ said Morgan.
Race screwed up one eye to consider this in the fog – the sacrilege of re-writing Dylan.
‘Then after the dance, I came downtown and went to that dive you go to,’ said Morgan.
‘I don’t go to it,’ said Race. ‘I went to it once in my life, tonight.’
‘I went to your filthy dive,’ said Morgan, ‘and I met some people there who asked me to a party. One was called Pinky, and one was her girlfriend, and one was this beautiful girl called Butterfly. And I went to the party and I was dancing with Butterfly and then I kissed her. Then I left and came down here and broke a shop window and took a ruby necklace.’
‘Oh,’ said Race.
He thought for a while.
‘But, I mean – why?’ he said.
‘Well, I was dancing with Butterfly,’ said Morgan, ‘and she and I went out in the back garden and we kissed. This was a party up on The Terrace and we went out the back, and we kissed and then Butterfly said: “Excuse me. I have to have a pee.” And she went over to the wall and lifted her skirt and she pissed against the wall. Butterfly was a boy! And I thought “Oh, boy! What am I doing here?” and I got out of there. I ran away and I came back downtown and took this necklace.’
‘Oh,’ said Race.
‘Then I heard the police coming,’ said Morgan, ‘so I put it down by a parking meter and walked away. And then I realised it wasn’t the police, it was only a fog horn, and now I can’t remember which parking meter it was.’
‘I see,’ said Race.
He looked at Morgan in the dark, concealing his surprise. He was surprised not only at what he had just been told but that Morgan had told him at all, for after all they were not friends, they had never been friends since the day they met: Race remembered the occasion clearly. He had walked into FitzGerald’s room six months earlier, at the beginning of term, and there were two men prowling round, watching each other like wrestlers before a clinch. One was Adam Griffin, FitzGerald’s new room-mate, whom Race had met once or twice already that week. The other he had never seen before. Griffin started to speak:
They said “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are,”
‘Things as they are,’ said the other, ‘are changed upon the blue guitar.’
‘But play, you must,�
� said Griffin, ‘a tune beyond us, yet ourselves.’
‘A tune upon the blue guitar,’ said the other, ‘of things exactly as they are.’
Race had no idea what they were talking about. He stood leaning on the door-jamb, listening. Griffin was short, fair, stocky, and had a stutter. He fixed you with an imploring blue eye as he stuttered, although now, Race noticed, the stutter had gone. The other man was tall, slim, Maori, wearing a fisherman’s black jersey and needle-cord jeans.
‘The morning still deluged by night,’ said Griffin.
‘The clouds tumultuously bright.’
‘Like light in a mirroring of cliffs—’ said Griffin.
‘Rising up from the sea of ex.’
The sea of ex! Race pretended not to be impressed. And he felt a little envious as well, he had to admit it: at most he and FitzGerald could sing a few lines of ‘Sloop John B’ together – We sailed on the Sloop John B! My grand-daddy and me! – but these two, they had whole poems by heart, it seemed, they could read each other’s minds. He was also beginning to feel some irritation. This was his territory, after all. FitzGerald was his best friend. They had been friends in childhood, and although they then moved to different towns and went to different schools, they had kept up their friendship. Now they were in the same hall: Race regarded Fitzgerald’s room almost as his own. But these two strangers hardly glanced at him when he came in.
‘We shall sleep by night and forget by day,’ said Griffin.
‘Except,’ said the other, ‘the moments when we choose to play—’
Then they both chanted, ‘The imagined pine, the imagined jay!’ and they laughed and swiped hands like basket-players.
‘What was all that about?’ said Race, coming off the door-jamb.
‘All what about?’ said the other man.
‘The guy with a blue guitar,’ said Race.
‘It’s, it’s, it’s—’ said Griffin.