by Ian Wedde
We’re looking at each other across the table, him standing and me still sitting down, with a strange unfamiliar weight like my own body pressing my thighs on the rim of the seat, and Pete’s grin gets stuck in place as the good will drains away from it. At the moment I get up to answer the phone, knowing who it’s going to be, I see what I’ve seen thousands of times in our life together—that Pete likes things to be simple, the way they were a moment ago, for just long enough to get a laugh started. But things never are simple, so he’ll cut a move, and before long will be chasing his laugh into company where talking’s easy and what’s best is always the next punch line, and the Pete who’s in the thick of it will be a character he’s become for the time being, perfectly believable, especially to Pete, but never quite the same as the one before or the next one, the next Pete ‘Bullseye’.
There’s a gap between the moment when Pete’s smile goes stiff and me lifting my own weight away from the edge of the chair that’s more like a space-gap than a time one—a kind of surface, stopped for the moment, in which the details of my husband’s face are clearly printed. For a start there’s the smile, which made my throat feel furry back in the day and was even known to get me wet. Now it’s got the same optimism, but not for as long on any given occasion, and it’s self-conscious about the teeth that used to be its confident come-hitherers. The laugh-lines that used to spread out like ripples in water from the corners of Pete’s mouth have done what such lines do, and deepened into trenches that don’t go away but run down either side of his mouth like crossing-out marks against the smile. Of course his face still has those handsome bones in it, especially the long ones under his chin and the ones that lift his eyes above the flat planes of his rather too-smooth cheeks, but now the cheeks have a boozer’s purple scribblings all over them, and his morning shave often leaves little patches of white missed-that-bit bristle. The scar he got above his left eyebrow from a sprig-raking when he played for the Bay forty years ago has gone a funny purple colour, and stands out under the eyebrow that never quite covered it up and that now grows outwards with long, stiff, curly white hairs. His ears are bigger than they used to be.
His eyes stay on me for a while, still blue in spite of the drink, determined in their way, and the smile stays there for a while too, but then both the gaze and the smile just fade away into his departure, at which point space gives way to time and I’m reaching for the phone before it switches to voice-message.
I have a strange thought in this time-space between the sound of my husband opening the door to go out—doing so quite gently, as if taking care not to disrupt my phone call—and me reaching for the phone. It’s that what I read in those signs written by life on my husband’s face should remain mysterious. I shouldn’t pretend that I know how to read their detail. The world he lives in, and how it’s written all over the face I’ve known for forty-odd years, are still mysteries to me. That’s the way it should be. We should go on being unknown to each other, otherwise there’s nothing to know, and what would be the point of living with someone who’s no more mysterious than the News at Six, on the dot, day after day?
Pete’s car drives off, which is how I think of it, rather than Pete drives off in his car. I hope the silly bugger doesn’t get pissed again and turn the vibrating sorting table into his joke-of-the-night. He will, though. I hope he leaves his car and gets a taxi home, whatever else he does.
In a way he’s like my father, or perhaps that’s just to say he’s like men. Dad didn’t particularly like me, even though he loved me, but he gave me his best shot—as when he collected sand with ‘gold’ in it to take home long after I’d stopped believing it was gold. I never told him I’d stopped believing, and he never behaved as if I had. I think he knew, but it was a routine we kept doing together, like a ritual.
Pete, on the other hand, likes me even if he doesn’t really love me. But who knows.
‘Christ all-bloody mighty, Veronica, where have you been!’
Good question, Sandy, but here I am, holding the phone away from my ear as usual with you.
‘Here I am,’ I say. ‘What’s up?’
Pete’s face, of all faces, should tell a story—for example, the story of the day that started when he had one too many at the golf club yesterday evening and that may extend into two days if he does it again, and of course the story of the life that banks up behind that drink. But his face doesn’t tell stories, it’s just patterns, like the sea in different weather from one day to the next, from one time of day to the next.
‘Vero! Veronica! Are you there?’
Here, there.
You can’t read Pete, there’s no tour guide to his life.
Sandy, however.
‘What’s going on, Vero? Fuck’s sake. Are you okay? Did you listen to my messages? Have you heard?’
‘Heard what?’
Sandy’s breathing is really noisy, there’s a lot of damp air going in and out of him the way it does when he rings from the gym. But he’s not ringing from the gym. This time it just goes on and on, then there’s some rustling noises, he says, ‘Hang on!’ in a funny desperate way, unlike Sandy—so’s the swearing for that matter—and then there’s a clatter, the breathing stops, but he says, ‘Fuck!’ in the distance. Then the breathing’s back and a car door slams.
‘Sorry, dropped the phone paying the taxi, Mick’s dead Vero!’
Sandy’s words are packed in tight and I don’t get them. ‘What?’ I say, trying to prise them apart.
‘I’m just getting a plane down. Mick’s dead. Some girl found him at home, Vero.’
A noise like the breathy wheeze of bus air-brakes, a car horn tooting.
‘He was sitting in front of the TV but it wasn’t even turned on.’
I walk through to the kitchen and sit down at the table. Pete’s chrysanthemums are there in their vase but he didn’t put any water in it.
‘What girl?’ I say. I take the vase over to the sink and turn the tap on to fill it.
‘Vero, for Christ’s sake, what are you doing?’
‘I’m putting water in a vase,’ I say to what becomes a long silence with Sandy’s laboured breathing in it, and the far-off noise of the airport terminal. ‘Sorry, Sandy,’ I say. ‘Just give me a minute.’ I put the phone down and get the vase full, then take it back to the table. Then I retrieve the phone and sit down just as Sandy’s words, Mick’s dead, thump me in the chest.
‘She was returning his coat,’ says Sandy. ‘He’d left it at her place.’ He’s got his calm-and-in-control voice back. ‘There’s nothing fishy about it,’ he says. ‘The girl called the police. Mick just died, Vero.’ He does some of his throat clicks. ‘I’m so sorry. You really loved the mad bugger, didn’t you?’
I can’t get the words organised to talk with, and anyway, all at once I hate the sound of Sandy’s voice being calm and sympathetic.
But then they come. ‘What do you mean, I really loved the mad bugger? Didn’t you, you sanctimonious piece of shit? He was your brother too.’
A pause. Sandy’s breathing has gone away. As if in the far distance are the sounds of business, of crowds, of many voices, some thin tinny music, a public announcements ding-dong.
‘Sorry, Sandy,’ I say. ‘Yes, I did love him. Sorry, I didn’t mean that. What I just said.’
‘Well, good for you, Veronica,’ says my oldest brother, enunciating precisely, ‘because I didn’t. I couldn’t stand him. He was a total arsehole, and he just got worse. So why don’t you get your fat arse down to Wellington first thing in the morning and help me sort all the shit he’s left behind out, sort out all the shit he’s left behind.’
Poor old Sandy, just has to get it right. He hangs up, or whatever you do with cellphones—his makes a thick, wet click—and then I’m left with the soft hiss of my phone where it lies on the table, as if what we’ve just said to each other is being smoothed over or erased, and then some beeps, all those voice-messages that Sandy sent throughout the afternoon. Poor old fucked-
up Micky, he did get worse and worse, and my heart will break soon, partly because I’m not really surprised by the news that he’s died, but now I just need to mark out what I know.
The first voice-message from Sandy must have come about the time I was having lunch with Sophie. Sandy’s emails at work were from last night. So some time between when Sandy got it into his head that Mick was going ‘off the rails’ yesterday, and when the girl found him sitting dead in front of his TV before lunch today, my mad brother, the one who could never get further from the house he grew up in than the end of Oriental Bay, who used to pinch my diet pills and not even bother to lie about it, whose flat, harsh voice was a comfort to me whenever I heard it, which was seldom—some time in that space, probably when everyone else was asleep, Michael Klepka turned himself off, just like the TV he and Dad used to watch movies on together all the time in the year or two before Dad died, and there they sat, not seeing each other.
I go to the fridge and get the bottle of Mission Reserve Chardonnay that Pete’s been careful not to open. Mick didn’t drink wine, he always drank beer, but I don’t, so tough luck, Mick. I pour a good-sized glass of the wine and wonder if it was oaked in a Tonnellerie Père et Fils cask. He’d have enjoyed the story, even though he had no time for the kids.
‘Ah well, Micky,’ I say, as the tears start, how many times is that, my God, what a day. ‘You mad old bugger. At least you’re out of that fucking house at last.’ I lift the glass to my dead brother and find myself toasting the big bunch of dumb, well-meaning dairy-bucket chrysanthemums at head height directly in front of me. ‘You too. Bloody hopeless, the pair of you.’
It’s very good wine, and it’s good to have the cry I couldn’t while I was with Soph in the Nablus, but both the glass of wine and the tears are soon finished. It’s like I’m celebrating something, which is all wrong but doesn’t feel that way.
When I was a kid I loved the way the car’s headlights would make a tunnel in the darkness that we went on and on through, that seemed to open up ahead of us all the way to the concrete back wall of the garage at the red house. On the back wall Dad had painted in big red letters, DON’T STOP! He used to sneak the car slowly towards the back wall until the headlights were almost touching while we kids all shrieked Don’t stop, don’t stop!—but then at the last minute he would. Part of the fun was just doing it over and over, every time we came home. Then, of course, he stopped doing it, because we were older, but the big red letters stayed there, getting stained with mould and the water that leaked down the wall from the shonky terrace above. Once, a couple of years before Dad died, Micky drove the car into the back wall. He was about sixteen, he’d just got his licence. We heard the noise and ran down. The two of them were sitting in the car screaming with laughter and punching at each other.
I go to the hospital cafeteria first, to see if the lovely girl’s there, but she’s not. I explain to the one who is that I owe them for a cup of tea this morning, and the woman looks at me as if I’m crazy, which I probably seem. Then I go to Reception and ask for Nigel’s ward, and the woman there rolls her eyes and says, ‘Not another one!’
I hear the sound of voices and laughter before I get to the two-bed bay where Nigel’s propped up holding court. His white hair’s sticking up in a tuft so he looks like a galah with his beaky nose pointed at the ceiling and a loud cackle coming out of the wide open mouth underneath it. When he sees me he reels back in mock horror.
‘That woman was kissing me when I came to!’ he hisses. ‘And that was: Came. To.’ He glares around the room. ‘Tee-with-just-one-oh, came to my senses.’ Nigel has an assortment of tubes attached to his body, and machines parked next to him. ‘Don’t come near me,’ he says. ‘They went in. I’ve got a brand new stent.’
There are half a dozen of Nigel’s mates parked around the bed, as well as three hospital staff. Pat and Gwyn are there, I can identify their flowers among the assortment in the room—Pat’s is an extravagant boutique arrangement with fern leaves, and Gwyn’s a big assortment of autumn dahlias, salvias, asters and tibouchinas from her garden. It occurs to me I could have brought the chrysanthemums, except that Nigel would have disliked them and said, ‘Oh dear. You shouldn’t have.’ There are a couple more Volunteers, including the vintage-car nut Vincent, who’s got his Art Deco Weekend straw boater on. The bloke who looks after catering at the Mission’s there, he’s known as Soda for some reason, and Nigel’s pal Duds, who goes on foodie tours with him. In the next bed there’s a pretty crook-looking old chap with the hopeful smile of a new chum plastered on his face.
‘Let me introduce you, Veronica,’ says Nigel. ‘You know the riff-raff, but these are the people who pulled me through. This young man is my namesake Nigel, we all call him Nige but don’t try that with me, he’s the Gas Passer or, if you must, the anaesthetist. Thanks to Nige I hardly noticed what they were doing to me. This lovely young thing is Doctor Emanuelle from Venezuela, she does hearts and she’s not really twenty years old. This kind soul is Patty, not to be confused with Pat here, she’s my Florence Nightingale, she can’t wait for you all to go so she can clean me up again. And this distinguished gentleman,’ says Nigel, wincing as he makes a grand gesture towards the new chum in the next bed, ‘is Mr Harvey Bristol, known to his friends as Cream, I believe, who for many years gave good advice to the Port Authority—most of which they ignored, to their shame, isn’t that right, Cream?’
‘Too true,’ says Mr Bristol, and goes back to the smile.
Nigel’s looking at me with eyes that have filled with tears. ‘Come here, sweetheart,’ he says, holding out his arms, one of which has a tube attached to it. We hug, carefully. He’s got a sourish, antiseptic hospital smell, and awful breath, so I plant a kiss on his forehead and accept the chair Dr Emanuelle has pushed towards me. ‘You really did save my life, Veronica. Saved. My. Life! She did, didn’t she? Everyone says you were abso-lutely magnificent.’
‘Yes, she must have been,’ says the too-young cardiologist with an exotic accent. ‘But soon, you will need to rest, Nigel, or we have to do it all over again. Good night, everybody.’
‘Buenas noces, Doctor,’ says Nigel. The foodie tour before last was Spain. ‘Ven a visitarme cuantas veces quiras.’
The young anaesthetist Nige waves at the room and gets halfway out following the sexy Venezuelan laughter before Nigel calls after him, ‘What autumnal precipitation will I soon be as right as, Doctor?’
‘Rain!’ we all shout before the poor guy gets his head around what’s going on.
‘And what is it that I’ll be out of here in, other than a coffin?’
‘No time flat!’ says the young man, quick as a flash.
‘So they don’t call you Nigel for nothing, or rather, sin razón,’ says Nigel. ‘Go on, get out of here, I’ve heard you practising your Spanish on her. This place is a filthy den of lust.’ He looks around at us. ‘My dear friends,’ he says. ‘And I include you, Patty, my angel nurse, and you, sir, my companion in pain. How wonderful life is. Especially when it . . . ?’
‘Goes on,’ we say.
‘And we’re all boxes not of you-know-what but . . . ?’
‘Birds.’
‘And especially when you’ll be what, exactly, in no time at all, darling?’ says Gwyn, an old hand at our game.
The ghost of a smile. Why do we say that?
‘Oh, Gwyneth, my dearest green-fingered one,’ sighs Nigel, falling back against his pillows and closing his eyes. ‘My old self, darling. My old self. Of course that’s what I’ll be, more’s the pity.’
Sandy
‘So—what brings you to the nut house, Professor?’ she said, in that way that fairly fluent German speakers of English have, at once very correct and colloquial, but also odd, so that you can’t quite tell if they’re joking or not. ‘I didn’t know you interested yourself in nuts. I thought your speciality was Plattdeutsch poetry?’ She smiled nicely and politely, and held her hand out for me to shake. ‘I heard your lecture, Profess
or Klepka, it was quite interesting.’
Quite interesting.
Since we were in the Tropische Nutzpflanzen glasshouse at the botanical gardens near the university, I began to assume that humour wasn’t her intention, but then she said, still holding my hand at once politely and a little too long, ‘Unless, that is, you consider Klaus Groth to have been a “nut case”?’
And so it began—the not very good jokes that were flirtatious, not in a sexual way, but as youthful challenges to my sense of my own importance and the importance of the Plattdeutsch poet Klaus Groth, not a very sexy topic, any more than my lecture about him and Johannes Brahms was; but then also in a sexual way, because the jokes were inviting me, a married man of fifty-nine, a scholar, a keynote speaker, to play, to frolic, to be inappropriate.
The young woman’s straight, dark hair was pulled back quite severely behind her ears, and she even looked a little like the local Dahlem film-star legend Brigitte Horney, famous for her singing role in the 1934 classic Love, Death and the Devil, so I let my hand retain its polite hold on hers as I replied that I was more interested in Brigitte Horney than in nuts, but that I seemed to have lost my way. At which point, still holding my hand, she sang the first lines of Hans Fritz Beckmann’s theme lyric from Love, Death and the Devil, ‘So oder ist das Leben’, which had made Brigitte Horney very famous.
‘Perhaps I’ve found her,’ I said, already humiliated by the awfulness of my attempted joke. ‘Such is life.’
‘No,’ she said, letting go of my hand. ‘You’ve found me. Gertrud Schoening. But I am studying film, so I know about this Brigitte.’