by Gee, Maurice
Inside the gate he stopped and frowned at a child’s wooden truck filled with gravel on the lawn. She must have taken boarders. A teething-ring lay in the dirt. He flicked it away with his toe. You didn’t take boarders who had kids, they knocked a place around and took the value off. I’ll get rid of them, he thought, we’re not a fucking charity, Freda.
He opened the front door and walked in. At once he heard laughter from the kitchen. He thought it was the radio, but a woman’s voice said, ‘Wally, Wally, Wally, who’s my boy?’ He went into the kitchen and saw a fat woman, breasts half bare, kissing a baby on its stomach. A skinny bloke with a red bandanna round his hair put his cup of tea down and said, ‘Who are you?’
‘Who are you, that’s the bloody question,’ David said.
‘You can’t come in here, mate –’
‘It’s him, Sonny. It’s her husband,’ the fat woman cried.
‘Macpherson’s my name. Where’s my wife?’
‘There’s an order out against you. Sonny, ring the police.’
‘Freda,’ David shouted, ‘get in here.’
‘She’s gone, so it’s no use. You clear out.’
‘She doesn’t live here,’ the man said. ‘I live here. I pay the rent and that makes it my house. So fucking piss off mister else I’ll do you.’
‘She rented it to us,’ the woman cried.
‘Go next door,’ the man said. ‘Call the cops.’
The woman put her baby under one arm. She scooped up another child, who had appeared in the door, and ran from the house.
‘Freda,’ David yelled.
‘You don’t listen, do you? She’s gone. And her name’s not Macpherson now, it’s Prentiss. She’s taken her old name. And looking at you, mate, I see why.’
‘Jesus,’ David said, and moved at him.
The man turned, barefooted, wiry-armed. He snatched an iron frying pan from the dishes on the bench. Water slopped out as he lifted it. ‘I’ll knock your fuckin’ head off, you come near me.’ He grinned with crooked teeth, which made his straggly beard jut like a tail. ‘Want to try me?’
‘Okay. Okay,’ David said. ‘So where’s she gone?’
‘How would I know?’
‘You must pay the rent.’
‘To her lawyer. That’s where her mail goes too. Ms Prentiss. Now get out.’
‘When did she go?’
‘Last week. We got this place on a six-month lease. You’re trespassing, mister.’
‘Did she say –’
‘She didn’t say nothing. We didn’t ask. She told us if you showed up we should call the cops. That’s what my partner’s doing now.’
‘Listen –’
‘And I can knock your head off with this thing if I want. Comin’ into my house. Shit, it’s self-defence.’
‘Okay, I’m going. Tell her – no forget it. I’ll find her.’
‘The poor fuckin’ bitch.’
‘What?’
The man lifted the frying pan. ‘Have a go. You’re pretty good handing out black eyes, I hear.’
David went out. He walked down the path, then turned and looked back. Sonny appeared on the porch, with the frying pan in his hand. On either side of him windows shone. David knew that Freda wasn’t in the house, yet if he pressed his hand against the walls they would clatter down and expose her. He went out the gate and saw the letter box on its post, with a letter poking out its mouth. He snatched it and read the name, Freda Prentiss. It drove into him like a nail.
‘Hey,’ Sonny cried, starting down the path.
David put his foot on the letter box and heaved. The sides skewed and the roof unhinged. He seized the box in two hands and wrenched it off its post.
‘Come near me I’ll tear your fuckin’ head off,’ he said to Sonny. He threw the broken box into a flower bed. ‘You tell her I’m her husband and she’s coming back to me.’
He got in his car and drove away. His finger had torn on a screw. Blood, he thought, I’ll give her blood.
He drove out to Richmond, where he stopped at a chemist and bought a packet of bandaids.
‘Accident, Dave? Living life too fast?’ the woman behind the counter said.
‘What?’
‘You’d better let me help you put one on.’
Mary Noyes, the chemist’s wife. He’d met her at a party, where he’d thought she fancied him. Freda had said sure but not to get big-headed, or big anywhere else; you qualified as long as you were married, and all Mary ever did was tease. ‘So calm down, old Randypole. Come on home.’ He shivered as he remembered it. He let the woman wrap a bandaid on his finger.
‘Have you come out to look at your old place?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘He’s expanding. You should have hung on there, Dave. How’s Freda?’
She knew. Everyone knew. He pulled his hand away from her and walked out of the shop, leaving the packet of bandaids on the counter. He walked in the main street and came to the yard, and read the new name painted everywhere: Barlow Motors, LMVD. His name was gone, wiped out, under this new fat red one. The empty section next door was newly paved and cars were being lined up on it now, with Barlow there, hands on hips, sticking out his belly. David stepped back. He did not want anyone seeing him. He felt as if he was starved and naked. Freda had done this to him.
He walked close to walls, back to his car. Too many people knew him in this town. He felt eyes pricking at him and turning away. There were women here Freda had gone to school with, and old boyfriends, and friends of Prentiss, whose name she had taken back. The bastard couldn’t be got at, he was dead. He’d been standing at the back of her all the time they’d been married, and David had wanted to tear him like a picture off the wall, but every time nothing was there, until she put him up in the same place again.
‘Prentiss.’
‘Pardon me?’ a woman passing said.
He got into his car and drove out of town, turning into back streets to avoid the car yard. He went along the Brightwater road past berry farms and cornfields and vegetable stalls. No destination again. He felt empty spaces ahead of him and was almost surprised at Brightwater to find roads going left and right. He turned left and drove into the hills, then chose the Lee River instead of the Wairoa because seal went that way and gravel the other. Pools showed, with glossy surfaces, and others with people swimming in them, and cars came at him, grinning boys at the wheel and girls drying swimsuits out the window. It was a work day yet all these people were here. He was out near the edges and no meaning was left.
A gate, a rutted track, a paddock opening out: he drove in and saw a pool shining through the trees. Rapids ran out by an undercut bank. A man and a woman sunbathed on yellow towels on a shingle fan. David got out of his car and walked on the bank. He strode out, half running. Her hair, black hair, bottle hair. He came to an oil drum spilling rubbish from its top and started down a clay path to the shingle. The woman raised her head and looked at him – flat nose, chinky eyes that stopped him dead. He felt for a moment that Freda had changed her face; and he started again, another step, then took a handhold on a tuft of grass, anchored himself, turned around. He went back to his car and leaned on it as if he had fallen over and climbed to his feet again. In a moment he opened the rear door and found some cans of beer and took a mouthful, fizzy, warm; spat it out. He hurled the can over the trees into the river.
‘Hey, you dumb bastard,’ someone cried.
He got in the car and swung it round. He drove back to Brightwater, where the potter’s showroom on the corner instructed him where to go. He bought a pie and ate it driving west over the long bridge across the Wairoa. He went north to the coast road and turned towards Golden Bay. May was the one who would know. Sisters, they called themselves. Talking dirty in their female language – hormones and bleeding. Sending him out of the room as though he was too young to hear. He turned the memory round and sent it back. He drove through the apple lands to Mapua and Ruby Bay and up the road cut in the blu
ffs above the camping ground. His father’s orchard opened out, with pickers in the trees. David drove past. He had not seen his father since before Freda had left, and would not again until they visited together and he held her by the waist and said, See, she’s come home. No, not that: something more punchy. Old Tugboat Charlie would stand there as though he still had a strap in his hand.
Find her first and hook your fingers in and don’t let go, and then go to him and say, There, you old bastard, you don’t know shit about anything. And if that meant he lost his share of the property, well, he had lost it already, hadn’t he? May’s daughter, turning up from nowhere, worming in, would get the lot.
I’ll contest it, David thought. Alan will contest it. We’re the sons.
Alan Breck Macpherson. David Cluny Macpherson. Sons of Robert, who did not bother with a second name. There was also May. Each of the children had a different mother. Alan and David were legitimate. They were named from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped – but Alan got the best character, Alan Breck, while David got a mixture: David Balfour, who was a little wowser prick, and some fleabitten clan chief, Cluny Macpherson. ‘We descend from him,’ Robert Macpherson claimed, but the boys recognised it as more of their father’s bullshit – although Alan didn’t use words like that. Alan was nine years older and he took little notice of his brother. May was David’s companion. She mothered him as well as she was able after his own mother grew sick and died. David does not thank her for it now. It had moved him further from his father’s notice. He believes there was a place he might have filled, and failing to move in had cost him his inheritance. It was not his father’s love he wanted, or his approval, just a recognition that the line passed down from Robert Macpherson to his sons. He wanted his half share of the money. But May had shifted him across to the illegitimate side. And now her daughter had overturned everything, every rule, and even Alan, lieutenant-colonel retired, was elbowed out. There was nothing fixed any more, or to be certain of – even things David had once thought he was denied.
They grew up on the orchard, the brother who had seemed even less than the half he was and more than nine years older, the tubby freckled sister from the wrong side of the blanket, and David who even now cannot describe himself. One mother was long dead, in Auckland, far away; one had been only short term, a housekeeper, sacked; and the third lay wasting, with no life outside her room, and very little in it, while the father laid about him with his presence and filled the house.
They had to know his quarrels and know that he had always been right. He was offhand about dangers – fogs and storms and reefs and snapping cables. No one had ever doubted his courage. But his judgement – no harbour pilot, no liner captain in gold braid ever told Robert Macpherson what to do. And when he was passed over for the harbour master’s job and they chose an Englishman instead: ‘Packed my bags, walked out of there.’ He bought an orchard in Nelson and stayed a landsman for the rest of his life.
David was confused by that. Had the tugs meant nothing? Hauling the beached trawler off the sand, with an easterly punching hard to roll it on its side, or towing the loaded barge through the breakwater on a shortened cable, with a blizzard pushing behind? All given up because he didn’t get a desk job? David felt thinned out every time he heard the story. Who wanted a father who grew apples when he might have been a tugboat captain? He had come to see Robert Macpherson as swollen in his presented part but with a hollowness behind. And he too, David, was diminished, with a hollow in the back of his head.
When Alan left to go to Duntroon – left in a smiling way that meant he was never coming back – and David was alone with his father, except for May, who did not count, then he was thinned even more and his meagreness was underlined. Robert Macpherson demanded and harangued just as before but was unable to lower his eyes to the smaller boy. David learned that he could edge his way out of the room. The voice in there would fall silent only when it finished everything it had to say.
The seasons passed. The boy (and the girl too) learned how to thin and prune and pick and grade. He stood by an open window watching hail strip blossom from the trees, saw his father stride into it and raise his fists at the sky. Hail beat on his forehead and sent him running for the lean-to shed. David wrapped himself in a window curtain. Warm in there, Arab-like, with only a slit for his eyes, he saw his father punch the wall and throw himself in a circle, then run hunched-up for the house, where he bled across the room and slammed into the bathroom. He thrust his hand under the tap and bellowed with pain. David made another turn inside the curtain, which strained in the pelmet, almost breaking free. He was in a cabin riding out the storm while his father had run his boat on the reef. The hail stopped. Robert Macpherson came out, fist wrapped in a towel, and found the boy and beat him, left-handed. Out in the orchard the ground was white. The trees that had been massed with blossom were turned to grey. Hail lay on the boughs as though children had piled it there in a game. Robert Macpherson dropped his strap and went out again. He walked into his trees, left and right, with no aim; and David, in the window, wiping his face, knew that he hurt less than his father, and was glad.
He and May took the school bus to Mapua. Later they went to Nelson, to the colleges, and David, tall now, almost as tall as his father, and strong and bullocky, although slow on his feet, played lock in the first fifteen. He put the shot and bowled fast, although with no control. He got on well, but could not please his father, and said to himself, I’m leaving soon, stuff the old bugger.
Housekeepers came and went. Robert Macpherson got one or two into his bed but there were no babies and no new marriage. He pestered others until they had to leave. May grew up unnoticed and ran away at seventeen with a picker twice her age, a man with bad teeth and beads in his hair. Like Alan she did not come back. My turn, David said when he finished school. He found work in a bank and stayed for a year, but knew that behind a counter was no place for him and the house he shared in Nelson with school friends no freedom hall, as the others called it, but a set of walls enclosing him. Every place, every event, was an extension of the orchard. He kept his eyes open, kept alert for the better thing that would happen soon. And would have made it happen, would have broken out, gone to Sydney or London or even the States, if one Sunday afternoon, drinking with his mates and their girlfriends in a house above the Maitai River, he had not witnessed an arrest. One of the girls ran in. ‘There’s a crash, they’re chasing him,’ she cried.
He reached the sundeck above the river in time to see the man start his run from the smoking car that lay on its side with its wheels still spinning, half across the footpath, half on someone’s lawn: a skinny man, long-haired, limping through a back yard, holding out an arm that ran with blood, and crossing the river thigh deep. He fought his way through barberry and gorse up the hill to the higher road, and passed the sundeck twenty metres away. David heard him sobbing. Standing by the rail with a beer in his hand, he met the man’s eyes and raised his glass, not in encouragement but to show him what he couldn’t have. ‘Go on, you’ll make it,’ screamed the girls. The two chasing cops were still in the river. David looked up the hill. He saw another policeman waiting there, hands on hips. Saw him push his hat back on his head and smile and wait. That’s me, he thought; and when the torn runner broke on to the road and fell to his knees and rolled on his side, and the policeman reached for him: That’s what I am.
He applied for the police college and was accepted on his second try. For twelve years he was a policeman and he never went home in all that time: never heard from his father or Alan or May. That was how he liked it; families were a waste of time. He wanted nothing except maybe some of his father’s money at the end.
He was happy in his job, happy for a time. He wanted to do well, wanted promotion, but found there were tests he could not pass; not official ones – he was bright enough for paper tests – but ones he was only half aware of and turned to see but could never find. He started to believe that something was kept from him by
the boys up top, some bloody masonic secret that he didn’t qualify to know. Why not ? Why not? He was good at his job, he was a good cop, they could see. Then one day he chased a kid through the city streets – still had the leather jacket he’d nicked trailing in his hand, bloody kid – and trapped him in a stairwell and rammed his arm up his back: heard a bone snap, humerus. Heard the sound again, back at the station, as the sergeant slammed his ruler on the desk; knew that he was done for and he’d never know why. What was wrong with them and wrong with him? He stayed two more years, banging at it, then got out. Said, just like his father, Stuff your job; didn’t look back at the bastards as he went. He looked back at the orchard though; saw money there.
His father financed him into the car yard. It was a business deal and David got him paid out as fast as he could. He wasn’t going to have that face looking over his shoulder a single day longer than he had to. All the same, he kept his eye on the money there. Someone had to have it in the end. He called on the old man three or four times a year, took him a bottle of whisky now and then, and showed him each new girlfriend to let him know he wasn’t deficient in the sex department. Then Heather arrived at the orchard and worked her way in before he saw what was going on. He watched her in a baffled rage at the way his life was pushed off its course again. But tried to stay patient. No one lasted with the old man. She’d do something wrong. He kept his visits up; a bottle of Dimple Haig each time he went out. He could find no other way to state his case.
Except marry Freda. May – he knew May again, it had seemed sensible – brought her across the room and said, ‘My friend, Freda. You can look but keep your hands off, eh.’ He had her that same night. Knew he would as soon as he grinned and saw her eyes dilate. Married her – which he hadn’t seen coming on that night. Took her out to Ruby Bay and let his father see.
She was more than a step in an argument, though. Freda was like coming up for air.