by Peter Walker
‘What are you up to now?’ said Busoni out in the long grass.
‘I’ll go in soon,’ said Race. ‘What about you?’
‘I’ll go in later,’ said Busoni. ‘Just have to get rid of—’
He pointed behind Race and winked.
‘Where’s Panos?’ said Race.
‘Early start. It’s The Merchant of Venice,’ said Busoni. ‘The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the et cetera upon the et cetera.’
He crouched down naked and looked in the grass. All his vertebrae were apparent.
‘What is it?’ said Race.
‘Nothing,’ said Busoni. ‘Snail shell.’
He stood up and closed his eyes towards the sun.
‘I thought it was a dollar,’ he said, eyes closed.
‘The phone box is smashed again,’ he said after a moment.
‘I saw it,’ said Race.
‘Saw it get smashed?’ said Busoni.
‘No. I saw it was smashed, just now.’
‘I saw it get smashed,’ said Busoni. ‘Three in the morning. We were awake. I got up to have a look.’
‘Who was it?’
‘Maori maiden with raven tresses.’
‘Did you say anything?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like, I don’t know, don’t smash the phone box.’
‘You kidding?’ said Busoni. ‘She wasn’t taking no shit from that phone box or anyone else.’
‘I’ll ring them,’ said Race.
‘Good deed for the day,’ said Busoni.
Race went inside and the screen door banged. He left his cup on the table and went down to his room and came back and went into the bathroom. The bathroom was still warm and misty with a fleeting feminine scent. He showered, then went back to his room and dressed. He went down the hall and rang the P&T to report the smashed phone box. There was no sign of Busoni and the girl. He made some more toast and boiled an egg then cleared up his and Busoni’s plates. Then he went back to his room and took his wallet and keys and picked up his satchel. He opened the satchel and looked in. His lecture notes were there. Race stood at the table in the corner of the room just beside the window where the spring shone in and he looked down at the lecture pads. Busoni and the girl came out on the veranda and kissed outside his window. They didn’t see him. Race took his lecture notes out of the satchel and laid them on the table. Busoni came back in the house and the girl went down the steps off the veranda and down steep King Street. Race saw her blonde hair in the sun. He waited a minute or two then took his empty satchel, left the house quietly, and went the other way, up the street to New North Road.
The bus coming from the western suburbs was empty. At Dominion Road, a Samoan woman, slim, handsome, about thirty, got on and came down the aisle.
She stopped and looked down at Race’s foot. His foot was in the aisle.
He withdrew his foot.
‘Fool,’ she said.
She went past and sat at the back. The bus went on to Khyber Pass and Symonds Street. The buds were green on the oaks in the Jewish cemetery and in the high crowns of the oaks below the road in Grafton Gully. The bus turned left into K. Rd. Race pulled the cord and got off. He stood at the corner in the diesel fumes. Yellow buses were labouring up Symonds Street. It was already getting hot. Then the gloom, the dread, hit him again. Christ, he thought. He looked at the traffic in the fumes. Then he remembered the night the Chev broke down – no, not broke down, he thought, FitzGerald stuck it in a ditch. It came to him then very clearly, the sweet darkness of the coast when the Chev crashed. ‘Roddy, come and ballast with me.’ Dinah coming out of the mild wind holding white dog-roses. Suddenly he had an intense wish, like a passion, to be back there again – not a light, not a star or candle for forty miles, east or west, inland or out to sea . . . ‘The coast,’ he thought, ‘the dark, no, unlit, no, the profoundly unlit coast.’ He went down Symonds Street under the avenue. The buds were coming out on all the trees. Dock cranes stood blackly at the bottom of the hill. Far away the island cone of Rangitoto was magnified in the haze. Then Race knew what he was going to do. He went along the avenue and through the campus to the library building. In the lobby he saw Ruru. He was shepherding some girls into the lift.
‘Going up!’ he said. ‘First to ninth.’
No one knew quite how Ruru had appointed himself elevator man in the library building. None of the lifts in the other university blocks had an operator. Ruru. Tiny, ancient, sad boxing-champ eyes trebly pouched, fly-weight champion 1935. A song he wrote in the war had made him famous, but now people had forgotten
Blue smoke goes drifting by,
Into the deep blue sky
‘Going up, son?’ he said to Race. His pork-pie hat was tilted over his eyes.
‘No thanks, Ruru.’
Ruru held the lift. He called Race over with a side-tilt of the hat, one hand on a button to keep the doors from closing.
‘These girls,’ he said to Race. ‘They’re beauties. Belles. That’s why I take the care I do.’
‘You take care of them, Ruru,’ said Race.
‘Belles of the ball,’ said Ruru. ‘That’s the French for it.’
‘You look after them,’ said Race.
‘Someone has to, son,’ said Ruru. He touched Race’s hand with a cool, dry finger. ‘It’s not safe today,’ he said. ‘Not in lifts.’
He gave Race a deep solemn look and ducked back inside. The doors ploughed shut. Race went to the grey steel lockers across the lobby. There was a chair by the window with a plastic woven seat and narrow steel-tube legs. He put his satchel on the green and black plastic weave and caught sight of Panos through the window crossing the lawn below. All the other actors, some of them in costume, went straying over the lawn and into the hall. Race put his satchel in a locker and locked it and crossed the lobby where the descending lift was pinging again, but before the lift door opened he had gone down the stairs and he crossed the lawn where the actors had passed and went in the other direction into the ferny shadow of the admin block and down the spiral stair to the basement. The waiting area was empty. He was sent straight in. The old doctor listened and said nothing. He was huge, obese, old and mighty. The students laughed at him: Bormann, they called him, or even Goering, but they were a little scared of him. He never spoke to them or asked questions. He was huge but his suit was still bulky on him. When he leaned forward to write, his collar yawned. How had he managed that, how had he got there, to be so big and old and incurious in his huge old suit? The lining at the cuff had yellowed. It must be peaceful being an old German, Race thought, you could hardly worry about death having seen so much of it. Bormann – which was unfair, Race thought, he might have been a refugee from the Nazis – leaned forward to write on his pad. Student legs – bejeaned male, bare female calves – flicked past in the ferny oblong window above the doctor’s head. You couldn’t hear their steps. The doctor pushed the paper across the desk without a word. Race took it and went through the empty reception area and up the spiral marble stair. The treads were pink and grey and veined like brain tissue. Race stepped on each one, thinking. At the top of the stairs there was sunlight again and the halls went in four directions. Race stopped. Either way, there was no hurry now. He went through to the back lawn. It was always damp there, the tree-ferns were always in shadow. The grass looked like moss. The clock high above the lawn struck. Race crossed the lawn and looked in at the door of the hall. Panos was on stage with a tall woman. He was in ordinary clothes, she was in a black gown and white collar. Panos declaimed:
‘How many cowards, whose hearts are as false
As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins
The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars?’
In the absence of an audience, his voice went echoing round the hall. Two or three people were sitting in the front row with clipboards in their hands, staring up at the stage. One or two people were alone elsewhere in the body of the hall. Panos saw Race at the do
or and made a little gesture with his hand, a kind of down-patting movement that meant ‘don’t go away’.
‘Ornament is but the guiled shore
To a most dangerous sea, the beauteous scarf
Veiling an Indian beauty—’
‘I still think it’s racist,’ said Panos.
‘The play’s about race, Panos,’ said one of the people in the front row, a woman, or a man with a high-pitched voice. ‘It’s a play about racism. But thank you. For your comments.’
‘If I was an Indian . . .’ said Panos.
‘You’re not Indian,’ said the woman in lawyer’s robes.
‘People,’ said the person in the front row. ‘Panos.’
Race withdrew from the doorway. He folded the doctor’s prescription and put it in his shirt pocket. He touched the folded paper through his shirt, then went back and watched from the door.
‘What find I here?’ said Panos, his voice echoing around the hall. ‘Fair Portia’s counterfeit! What demi-god hath come so near creation? Move these eyes? Or whether riding on the balls of mine—’
‘Yes, yes, I know, it’s all very hilarious,’ said the man or woman in the front row. ‘I hope you’re over it by Wednesday, that’s all. Less than one week, people. Then we’ll be doing this – for – real. All right. Back here two o’clock sharp.’
The actors sort of stood at ease, changing into other selves. Panos jumped off the stage and came up the aisle to Race. He led the way into the vestibule.
‘ “People”,’ he said. ‘I hate it when people say “People” like that. How was that?’
He looked closely into Race’s eyes.
‘Good, good,’ said Race. ‘You’re what’s his name?’
‘Bassanio.’
‘He’s good. He’s OK, Bassanio. Maybe he shouldn’t sort of crouch over those things.’
‘The caskets?’
‘The caskets.’
‘He’s not crouching. He’s thinking.’
‘Good. That’s – good.’
The tall woman in black robes approached them and swept past, talking to another woman in Renaissance costume.
‘She has this phobia,’ she was saying. ‘Hot-water bottle covers. Tea-cosies. Anything like that. It’s a phobic reaction.’
She did not look at Panos as she passed.
‘You’re in love with her, right?’ said Race.
‘Bassanio is.’
‘What about you?’
‘No,’ said Panos. ‘There’s just no chemistry.’
He watched her go across the lawn.
‘Where’s the chemistry?’ he said.
They stood in the vestibule while other cast and crew members went out.
‘I’ll cook tonight,’ said Panos.
‘Good idea,’ said Race.
‘It’s not an idea,’ said Panos. ‘It’s a dire necessity. None of you cook.’
‘I cook.’
‘Busoni doesn’t cook.’
‘He can’t cook.’
‘He doesn’t try.’
‘I try.’
‘Can you grab something, I don’t know, green on the way home?’
‘Green?’
‘Leeks, peas, beans. Leeks would do. Peas. Where’re you going now?’
‘Movies,’ said Race.
‘What movie?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ he said.
‘On your own?’ said Panos.
‘I like the movies on my own.’
Panos was looking at him with his big Greek gaze but he was thinking about Portia and the caskets.
‘What was that about Morgan at school?’ said Race.
‘What at school?’
‘Did you say he was expelled?’
‘He was expelled,’ said Panos.
‘What for?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know why he was expelled?’
‘I don’t. I didn’t know him. I didn’t even like him.’
‘Oh,’ said Race.
‘Why?’ said Panos.
‘I don’t know. I just thought of him just then, getting expelled.’
‘So pick up something green,’ said Panos.
‘I’ll try,’ said Race. He felt bad then. He thought of the big dark dining room at King Street where at night the light bulb never seemed able to beam all the way into the corners. Busoni and his dog on the sofa. Race lifted his hand.
‘I’m off,’ he said.
‘Where you going?’ said Panos.
‘Library, then movies,’ said Race.
He lifted his hand again and went across the lawn into the library and up to the lockers. He took his satchel from the locker and looked down through the window at the lawn. There was no sign of Panos or any of the actors. Race went out the other entrance and through the park to the city. In Queen Street he went into a pharmacy. The girls in the cosmetic section were like beings from another sphere, their lustrous nails, lavender smocks, violet eyeliner, we do not speak your language earthling look. He went past them and handed in the prescription and waited.
After a while the pharmacist darted out from the dispensary and looked at Race over his glasses. ‘One only, at night, as needed, swallow with water,’ he babbled, reading from the label, his brow furrowed as if he had never seen such a thing. Race took the bottle and put it in his satchel and went back through cosmetic space-time, the swivel mirrors, the girls not looking at him, and into the street. He crossed over Queen Street and walked up Victoria Street to the western ridge. It was a part of town he didn’t really know. He went along Nelson Street and into a bar he had been to once before. This was where Race had last seen Bonnie. He had been in there with Busoni and Panos one night when she and her husband walked in. She looked excited, radiant. She was sailing to England that same night on her husband’s ship. She was wearing yellow and had a corsage on her breast. In a way she was very old-fashioned, Race thought. She had seen him and come straight over.
‘Race!’ she said. ‘I want you to meet my husband.’
Race shook the husband’s hand. They had chatted for a while, and even had a drink together, and then the couple left. The ship was sailing at midnight. Race watched them go out the door and thought: ‘I’ll never see her again,’ and then he thought: ‘I don’t even care.’ Yet here he was, back again. What had he come for? The place was empty. There were some empty glasses on the tables. The barman was standing at the bar, his head hunched over the racing paper, fingers outspread on the pages. He did not look up when Race walked in. Race asked for a beer. The barman looked up, only swivelling his eyes. He sighed, then unhunched, went to the beer-tap, poured the beer, took the money and resumed his position over the pages. Race took the beer to a tall table with four tall stools and sat there. There was a sling-shot of rain against the windows, and it stopped, and blue sky went past again amid bruised clouds.
‘Maybe something will happen,’ he thought, ‘and then I won’t do it.’
A young woman came out through a little low door behind the bar.
‘Pick up them glasses,’ said the barman without lifting his head.
‘Pick them up yourself,’ she said. ‘I’m a barmaid not a Mrs Mop.’
She went back through the little door, then she reappeared fast.
‘I told Brian that,’ she said. She was shaking her forefinger. ‘I said, “I’m bar staff, Brian, and I’ll go in the public bar, but I’m not collecting.” ’
She went away again. The barman then muttered the conversation again, wobbling his head as he spoke. ‘I’m bar staff, Brian, but I won’t collect,’ he said.
Race thought of Bonnie. He remembered the day they broke up. She had called him on the phone and asked him to come over in the mid-afternoon. He was pleased and a little puzzled. It was the first time he had ever been there during the day. Bonnie said she wanted to go out for a walk. They went up the street to the park on Mount Victoria and sat on a rock in the grass.
‘He’s coming back,’ she said.
‘Who?’ said Race.
‘You know who,’ she said. She touched his arm. ‘So now we stop seeing each other.’
‘When?’
‘Now, Race.’
The park was just a patch of long grass, unkempt, below the black pines of the town belt. It was a still, dry, cloudy day. Away across the harbour a US carrier lay at anchor, greyer than the rock of ages. Bonnie began to unpeel an orange. She had brought it with her in her bag and took it out. Her fingers, nimble, clever, divided the segments neatly, never breaking the integument.
‘Now?’
‘His ship is back this week. Maybe tomorrow. The letter came today. So we won’t see each other any more.’
She prised off a segment of orange, like a cradle, an eighth of the moon, fat as a baby.
‘Oh, Race, look at you,’ she said. ‘You’ll find someone. A nice-looking boy like you, a student.’
‘She’s lying,’ Race thought. And it was true, he couldn’t see her any more – he couldn’t look at her, only at her fingers, nimble at their work. ‘She’s a liar,’ he thought. ‘I’ll never find anyone else. I found her, and she’s all I want, and she’s said no.’
‘I’m going now,’ she said.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Race.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Home. I’m getting married, Race. He’s my husband to be.’
He couldn’t even remember her walking away. He was alone in the park. Even the peel had gone. She must have scooped it up, the bright curl, as neat and organised as ever. The US carrier had swung on its anchor and was pointing its bow straight at him. And so that was the end, he thought. And when he met her again a year later, by chance, he felt nothing. ‘So it was all an illusion,’ he thought, sitting in the bar on his own. Then he remembered the statue of the queen and the trolley wires curving up the hill in the dusk and something moved in his heart.