Some Here Among Us

by Peter Walker

  ‘I’m Lucas,’ he said. ‘I’m the big brother. You better come in out of this.’

  They went into the house. FitzGerald and Inga were already there, installed in armchairs in the sitting-room. They sent up a sort of high-chinned twinkle as if to say ‘We’re ahead of you here.’ Lucas fussed around, bringing out tea in a teapot, cups and saucers and biscuits, all on a wooden tray with handles of chrome. He was a big, strongly-built, grizzled man. His eyes checked the tray, the biscuits; he was anxious everything should be done as well as if his wife was there. Lucas had just retired, he said. He had taught mathematics for thirty years at the University of New South Wales.

  ‘Your mother was a mathematician,’ said Race.

  ‘You remember that?’ said Lucas.

  ‘I remember Morgan teasing her about it.’

  ‘Did he?’ said Lucas. ‘I would never have dared. But Morgan could get away with murder. He was her favourite. He knew exactly how to get round her.’

  ‘Morgan was – wild,’ said Race suddenly, expansively. He thought of Morgan on the limo roof, Morgan in the fog looking for stolen jewels. He decided not to mention those. ‘Didn’t he get expelled from school?’ he said.

  There was a silence. Race had blundered.

  ‘Something to do with tennis shoes?’ he said. That was so trivial, he thought, who would mind?

  Lucas looked unhappy, all the same. Family honour seemed to be at stake.

  ‘Well, you know,’ said FitzGerald, ‘Morgan was brilliant. He just knew more than the rest of us. What is the name of the liquor that flows in the veins of the immortal gods?’

  The house shook in the gale. You could hear the surf thunder and speak on the beach.

  ‘Just look at your windows,’ said Inga. ‘They’re all salt.’

  ‘I was divorced last year,’ said Lucas, rather humbly, as if that might explain things.

  Inga left the room. After a minute or two she appeared on the veranda with a hose in her hand. She began to sluice down the big panes.

  The men then laughed.

  ‘My wife!’ said FitzGerald, not without some pride.

  Lucas beamed, in order to conceal what he was thinking: ‘My precious tank water!’

  ‘What a nerve,’ thought Race, admiringly.

  ‘There,’ said Inga, coming back into the room. ‘Now you can see yourself think.’

  ‘Would you like to see the grave?’ said Lucas.

  They went out into the booming gale. The sun was hot through the rushing air as they set off across the paddock, FitzGerald and Inga going on ahead. Race noted Inga’s air of elegance as she walked away over the rough turf. Then he smelled an ammoniacal tang and he saw the roots of the big tree, dark-ribbed and polished bare in places, wisps of sheep’s wool caught in wood fissures. He liked exposed tree roots, Race thought, they were a natural form which appealed to him. Then suddenly he stopped. He was struck by a thought. It was odd, he thought, he had never seen the tree before, never noticed it, the 100-foot pine standing alone in the middle of the Tawhai front paddock. He must have looked straight through it on his previous visits, crossing the field first with Morgan on a summer morning long ago and then, within the year, coming back again with a coffin, he must have blotted it from view – a poor old Norfolk pine, the city councillors’ favourite, which by some error of chance or judgement had been pitched there on the Tawhais’ front doorstep. And yet now, walking out beyond the tree’s shadow, he stopped to look back and saw how wrong he had been all those years ago: it was beautiful, this great tree, branches stirring tautly in the cloudless rush, the dark mast beaded with resin, and he thought, ‘Of course, genus Araucaria! The monkey-puzzle, the hoop pine, the Norfolk . . . Straight from the Jurassic.’

  Lucas had stopped and was looking up at the tree as well. He had forgiven Race his faux-pas about the tennis shoes. It was true, Lucas thought, Morgan was wild, in a way they had all run wild –

  ‘We used to climb that when we were kids,’ he said, stretching his head back to look at the very top of the tree. ‘We’d climb right up there and then jump off.’

  ‘Jesus, Lucas,’ said Race.

  ‘Yes, we’d just jump and drop down through the branches to the ground. Or we’d go out to the lighthouse and swing by our fingertips from the balcony. Twelve, fourteen, we were. Our parents? They never knew.’

  At that moment Race felt a kind of cheerfulness, almost a wave of relief: all his life, he thought, he had never been sure what happened to Morgan on the night that he died, but now he thought that whatever had happened it was all right, at least it was all right now, and maybe it was even all right then, and then, still standing there with Lucas beside him, he saw a pair of magpies appear in the upper branches, one after the other, villainous, defiant – you thought of a pair of bouncers caught out in the daylight in their tuxedos – and then Race remembered the first time he had ever seen Morgan, walking round FitzGerald’s room, slinging couplets back and forth with Griffin – The moment when we choose to play/ The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

  ‘That was the start,’ he thought, ‘that was the beginning of the story, for me at any rate, the story of Morgan, and now it’s coming to the end . . .’

  But what was the end? Lucas had turned and walked on after the others. In the distance Race saw a red car come hurtling along the road, a cone of dust rising behind it. It seemed to speed up even more as it approached the gate, then it braked sharply and slewed in the gravel before coming to a stop.

  ‘Candy!’ Race thought at once. ‘She should never be allowed to drive,’ he added, automatically, in his thoughts. ‘Never be permitted behind the wheel of a car.’

  The red car had stopped behind Tolerton’s old Land Rover. Out stepped Candy, and Chadwick, and Tolerton.

  Race stood still in the paddock, then he began to walk back towards the newcomers. The others, FitzGerald and Inga and Lucas, also stopped and turned to watch, but they had gone too far to come all the way back.

  ‘We made it,’ cried Candy, coming through the five-barred gate. ‘I simply couldn’t bear it if you were here and we weren’t.’

  ‘We made it,’ said Chadwick. He was in a lightweight suit, and striped tie. He looked extremely serious and important as if the fate of nations was in his hands.

  ‘You’re here too,’ said Race to Tolerton.

  ‘I had to come,’ said Tolerton. His face was red. ‘Chaddy’s never been here before, and Candy couldn’t remember the way. I was therefore required as navigator.’

  He was still in his dressing-gown, with one bare foot.

  ‘We’re going to see the grave,’ said Race, and they set off again, all of them, Inga, FitzGerald and Lucas some way ahead, and Candy, and Tolerton in his dressing-gown, and Chadwick and Race bringing up the rear. Candy had a walking stick. Tolerton was also on a walking stick. They marched across the grass, those at the rear going into the shadow of the Norfolk pine and out again, in procession, and then, no one knew why, they fell out of step with each other and ended up in single file crossing the big paddock, each with their own thoughts.

  Inga was thinking: ‘I did this. I hope they’re grateful, that’s all. It means frankly nothing to me, but if I hadn’t been here to organise them—’

  FitzGerald was suddenly feeling guilty. ‘Morgan knew I’d slept with Candy,’ he thought. ‘I wonder how. But that was why I gave him the pot that night. I gave it to him and maybe that’s what killed him. Was I to blame for his death?’

  He had never thought of this before and a strange quizzical expression – he could feel it – came to his face.

  Lucas was wondering just what it was that had brought these people here, and what he thought about it. He wasn’t sure that he liked it really, though he didn’t know why. ‘After all, they were his friends,’ he thought. ‘They came and buried him, and I didn’t even know he was dead.’ Lucas had been overseas at the time. ‘And now I see them,’ he thought, ‘I know what he would have been like if he’d lived. My ki
d brother!’ And it felt to him, meeting these strangers, that he had lost Morgan in another way, which he’d never thought of, long ago.

  Candy was looking brave, but she suddenly felt afraid. She remembered a dream she’d had of Morgan after he’d died. He’d come to her angry, accusing, even dangerous. His hands stretched out to her neck. She’d woken in terror. ‘What did I do?’ she thought. ‘Did he hate me for some reason? Or was it that he was in love with me!’ After Morgan died she and Adam almost immediately had begun to fly apart. ‘Was it Morgan who kept us together?’ she now thought. ‘Was it him that I really loved?’ She didn’t know the answer. ‘Did I ruin my life?’ she thought. She went on bravely.

  Tolerton was hobbling along on a stick, in his gown. His foot was now rather painful. It didn’t seem a good idea to be walking on a naked swollen foot over the rough paddock. ‘I should have worn a flip-flop,’ he was thinking. ‘I shouldn’t really be here at all. And not only did I have to come, I had to endure Candy’s driving. She should never be allowed behind the wheel of a car, that woman. Never. Plus – I should have stood up to Rod Orr that night and let Morgan stay on the sofa. What was the problem? Something about a curtain. A curtain! But still – look at this place! It’s completely unchanged!’

  Chadwick wanted to swing round and talk to Race but something inhibited him. ‘I’ve never been here before,’ he was thinking. ‘I wasn’t even at the funeral. We weren’t friends. I didn’t want to be.’

  A secret stirred in him then. He had not wanted to befriend Morgan out of snobbery, even racism. He, Chadwick, black, an outsider, though from exciting California, had felt his star might be dimmed by the other outsider, a Maori boy from the back of beyond. It then struck him that he had been sorry about that for the rest of his life. He had never rid himself of the memory of Morgan with his sign, an arch in red and blue, saying: ALL YOU NEEDIS—

  ‘Hardly a coherent programme for a foreign policy,’ he thought, ‘and yet it mattered at the time. That was an important moment. The people who hated it’ – he thought of the students of Strauss – triply abstracted, mild goggles covering his fiery judgements – ‘got into power and have brought nothing but disaster. I set myself against them all my life. That’s what made me who I am. But Morgan and I were never friends.’

  Race was coming along last. He was thinking about the great tree behind him in the paddock which Lucas and Morgan used to climb as boys, and then he remembered climbing up around and around the trunk of a tree himself, with Morgan climbing above him, right to the top, which was as slender as a whip, the final handhold trembling—

  ‘That was the tree!’ he thought. ‘It was here all along’ – and he remembered waking from the dream in the airless cottage which Panos had never come to, and feeling the heat of the sun on his face at that perilous midnight hour, which had apparently known about the tree there in the paddock, and perhaps had even known about the heat of the sun beating down on them now decades later in the gale, and just then he felt the presence of that rarest form of authority: the authority of a dream.

  The sunlight was magisterial.

  They were now approaching the graveyard. Race couldn’t remember the actual interment. He and the others were the pall-bearers, they must have carried the coffin to this very spot, but of that he had no recollection. And then, at the end of that grey afternoon, they had all gone away, and none of them had ever been back. Race, surprisingly, had then almost immediately forgotten all about Morgan. It was early summer. He was in love. He was in love with Sandra Isbister! Sandra was still, admittedly, with FitzGerald, but when summer came she left him and took up briefly with Panos, then she left Panos and took up with Race. At last, Sandra was in his arms. She was in his bed. This was his summer of love. But it lasted only a few days, a few hours it now seemed, looking back, and then she was off again. It was the beginning of a ten-year pursuit, Race following Sandra around the world. She was in Melbourne, she was in Perth, she was on her way to India. At first, for a few months, Race had remained in Auckland. He was saving for a ticket to India. Everyone else was flying off in different directions. Candy and Adam were still officially planning marriage but they were fighting all the time. FitzGerald was in Benares. Rod Orr was in California. The Gudgeons were in London. It was 1970. The autumn came. It was cold and rainy in Auckland. Race walked the streets of Ponsonby between rain storms. He went to the park, making his plans – India, Sandra – and there, one day in the park, six or seven months after the funeral, he met Morgan Tawhai.

  What are we to make of these illusions – as persistent across history as love or fear – of sightings of the dead? The earth hath bubbles as the water has and these are of them. It was not, in this case, love or fear. He had not thought of Morgan for months. Yet in some way he was not surprised. He sometimes had had a feeling that there was more to come, there was unfinished business between them. And now here was Morgan, in the park. There was a short preliminary, in fact, to his arrival. A flock of sparrows was on the grass – they suddenly all flew up together, on the slant: Race had the impression of a curtain being lifted. And there was Morgan, just visible against grey cloud. Of course, it was not Morgan in the flesh. It was a kind of picture of him, an image, although conscious, autonomous. And he was in trouble, Race could see that at once. He was in great trouble. He was drifting in the wind and Race saw that he was lost, he was moving this way and that, but his eyes were shut and he had no idea where he was, or where he was going, and then Race thought with a kind of dread that Morgan had been blowing this way and that in the dark without knowing where he was for weeks and months until he had come to this place where, so it seemed to Race, they were meant, for a moment, to cross paths. But why? This was the question. It struck him, again with a kind of dread, that there was something he had to do. There was some deed he could perform to save Morgan. But what was it? And then he knew that he wasn’t allowed to know – he had to agree first, and not only that, but the cost would be high: if he did, if he agreed, if he said ‘yes’, the penalty would be very great, not of ardour or exertion, but of shame, ridicule (and that was reason, he thought, now, approaching the graveyard, for that stern, searching gaze that Morgan had directed at him – are you up to the test? – in the dream when they were climbing the tree (so the fearful vivid midnight in the airless cottage had known about that as well, he now thought, had foreseen that test, and had warned him, and then woken him to review the warning in the silence and solitude of the cottage which Panos never visited, had stayed away from, detained by the hairdresser and the beautician solely perhaps in order that Race should receive and review the warning in silence and solitude)) and then there was no more time left to consider. Race had to decide. He could agree or he could refuse. The choice was his. Only moments were left: Morgan, the image of Morgan, autonomous, sightless, was already drifting and fading away, and unless he, Race, accepted the conditions – shame, ridicule – then he would be gone and would wander on in the sightless wind, for ever.

  One by one, everyone had now reached the graveyard and stood outside the picket fence. More introductions were made.

  ‘Just look at that olive tree!’ said Inga. ‘Never have I seen an olive that size in this country.’

  They looked at the tree on the sheep-terraced slope just outside the graveyard.

  ‘My great-uncle brought that back,’ said Lucas. ‘He went away in the First World War and he brought that olive home with him.’

  ‘Shoot or stone?’ said Inga.

  ‘That,’ said Lucas, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Look at the fruit!’ said Inga. ‘Do you harvest them?’

  ‘We don’t,’ said Lucas rather wearily. ‘It’s just not something we got the hang of.’

  ‘What a waste!’ said Inga, and she set her mouth.

  ‘What a scold!’ thought Race.

  FitzGerald laughed at his scold of a bride. Lucas bent and turned on a tap by the fence and washed his hands, then unlatched the gate and the others follo
wed him through.

  The wind was immense, it poured down over the hill, pounced on them, there was an aureole around the sun in the spume-filled air, the leaves of the olive and the pines and pohutukawas on the hill were streaming.

  ‘I could have agreed, or I could have refused,’ thought Race. But there had been a third option as well. ‘I could simply have declined to believe it at all.’ That would have been the easiest, the most ordinary and straightforward – just reject the whole thing – the image of Morgan, the threat, the conditions – as an illusion. And yet suppose . . . suppose . . . it was true. There was Morgan fading now, and blowing away in the grey sky and then there was no more time to consider and so Race – because what else could he do? – accepted the terms, whatever they were, and said ‘yes’.

  At that instant, Morgan’s eyes opened. He saw something – he looked straight across the sky – and Race saw that he saw and he turned to see what he was looking at, and by the time he turned back Morgan had gone: he had gone, fast as a hawk to its prey, as fast as sight, as fast as the lightning that says ‘Here I am!’ – and there above the rooftops outside the park Race imagined another figure, tremendous, triply abstract – he first thought of the judges of the three races of mankind, Rhadamanthus, Minos, Aeacus – but then he thought there was only one, and then this phrase reached him from some far nursery: ‘into the bosom of Abraham’.

  It was there, he thought, Morgan had vanished.

  That was his puzzle as he came last into the graveyard, and closed the gate with the latch. The latch was metal in the shape of a half-moon. He had said ‘yes’. But what was the deed that he must do, and what was the punishment? Ever since, he had been expecting the bill to arrive. But perhaps, he thought now, for the first time, it had. He had said ‘yes’. He had agreed, in other words, to believe. Perhaps that was the deed, and also the penalty: belief itself, poor, much mocked, richly ridiculed belief.