by Nixon, Carl
September 28: SJ invited me back to his house tonight after softball practice. Of course we had to go separately. It wasn't like how I imagined it. I thought he'd have heaps of books and stuff like that but he's hardly got any. HE KISSED ME!!!!!! About time. I liked it apart from the way he got a bit rough at the end before I said I had to go. Good that I did leave and not just for the obvious reason. Mum freaked out anyway when I got home because she said anything could have happened to me biking home in the dark. Had another big argument so I'm writing this in my room instead of having dinner. Had some poached eggs and toast at SJ's anyway but Mum doesn't know that. Hope she thinks I'm starving.
P.S. Kissing S was not at all like kissing Phil. Don't know if I should go back.
And then Lucy seemed to lose interest in the diary. October and November were mostly blank. The last entry was on the thirtieth of November, about three weeks before Lucy was murdered and around the time school finished for the year. It was a list of Christmas presents to buy for her family and friends. SJ was not mentioned. Only two were crossed off; a book called The Painted Years for her dad and lavender soap for her mother.
It took Pete just under half an hour to read the entire diary aloud. His last words hung in the air and then drifted away through the cracks in the garage walls. We stood in the quarter-light of the dying torch and listened to Aslan coughing. We looked everywhere but at each other. We did not want to see each other's faces; to see written there our own feelings, which we did not have the experience to pin down with names. We were uncertain if men could even speak to each other of such things. We just stood there lost in our thoughts. In that way our emotions were stillborn in the darkness — unnamed and unembraced.
Eventually three white candles were rummaged up from a box in the corner. They were placed in old tin cans on the bench that had become our shrine to Lucy, and solemnly lit. The diary was carefully arranged so that it sat propped up immediately below the photo of Lucy. The three flames danced in the cross-draughts and in the ebb and flow of our breaths. The flickering light reflected off the glass in the photo frame and off Lucy's trophy. The running girl seemed to move; dipping even lower as she crossed the finishing line, and then springing forward and up in triumph.
It is impossible to say when the first of us slipped out of the garage that evening and it has never been established who was the last. Each of us knew when our time came to leave; to say goodnight to Lucy and to slip silently away. Tug Gardiner was still in his dark cowl. Al Penny's overlarge slippers flip-flopped on the concrete path. Jim Turner reported that, from his room, he could see the candles flickering through the cracks in the garage walls until they burnt out just before dawn.
It would be safe to assume that none of us slept that night. How could we? We lay in our beds wrapped in our thoughts. Who among us did not stare into the hollow space above his bed and, with the white noise of the waves whispering suggestions in his ear, try to put a face to the initials SJ?
SIX
We spent the rest of May going over all aspects of Lucy's life, hoping to shed light on the identity of SJ. None of the guys we had on our photo wall had those initials. There was one person who lived in the area, Steven Jones, but he was nine years old, and what we called in those days a mongol. There were three other Stephens in the South Brighton area and at least another dozen boys whose name started with a hiss and a twist. But we knew we were clutching at straws. It wasn't proof of anything to be called Stephen or Stuart, Jamison or Johnstone.
As we racked our brains, even we couldn't help noticing that the anti-tour movement was growing stronger. It began to dominate the Six O'Clock News and the papers. Someone had the bright idea of telling everyone who was opposed to the tour to leave their taps running. It became commonplace to walk into a public toilet and find all the taps jammed on full, the water swirling away down the basins, the white noise hissing like an angry possum in the small concrete room. Outside taps were also targeted. Everywhere water was left running. We thought it was ridiculous. What did they hope to gain by wasting all that water? We turned taps off when we found them but when we came back again they would be twisted on even harder. After a while we gave up and just ignored them until a background of running water became normal.
One evening the Prime Minister came on the telly to make an announcement about the Springbok tour. His broadcast had been well advertised and people were keen to hear what he had to say. In everyone's homes the sets were on ready to hear the special telecast. Later we heard that a million New Zealanders watched him that night. We knew that our fathers didn't like Muldoon. The man they called Piggy, Piggy Muldoon. They hadn't voted for his National Party, which was the party of farmers and business owners But they still sat on the couch and nodded along with what he said.
'Apartheid — the vast majority of New Zealanders abhor it, like racial discrimination everywhere. But need we hate the South Africans taken one by one? The government will not order the Rugby Union to abandon the tour. The issue now rests with the New Zealand Rugby Union. I say to them, think well before you make your decision.'
Most people down the Spit agreed that this was fair enough. Sport was sport and politics was something else. Muldoon had also made a good point when he said that New Zealanders and South Africans had fought together in the war. Only Jase's dad seemed doubtful. Bill Harbidge rarely drank any more and had lost weight. Jase told us that his dad was punching the bag for half an hour in the garage every evening. He was even cooking dinner for Jase and his sister a few times a week. After Muldoon's broadcast he turned off the television. 'The Rugby Union isn't going to call it off.' He shook his head. 'It's going to be a bloody mess.' The next morning Bill Harbidge got up early, put on his uniform and reported back for work.
The week after that, all the letterboxes on Rocking Horse Road were stuffed with instructions for how to make a Molotov cocktail. The sheets of white A4 paper nestled up to the supermarket flyers and coupon books. The newspaper reported that identical flyers had been appearing in various suburbs of the city over the last week. The police wanted to talk to the people responsible. Anyone with information was urged to come forward. But in the end no one was caught.
We were interested to see it isn't that hard to make a Molotov cocktail. According to the instructions, anyway. You fill up a glass bottle with petrol and then stick a rolled-up rag in the top. Apparently you have to make sure that the rag is pushed down into the petrol before you light it. Otherwise the fuel might not catch when the bottle is thrown.
No one was sure if the instructions were printed by a group who thought Molotov cocktails might be useful in stopping the tour, or being spread by tour supporters who imagined walls of flame holding back those intent on stopping the rugby.
On the evening of the anti-tour march, we all rode our bikes up to Thompson Park to have a look. Even though our parents had forbidden us from going anywhere near, you couldn't have kept us away.
As it turned out, it wasn't the big show that we thought it was going to be. A stage, just a few wooden boxes really, had been set up close to the road where the street lights lit the edge of the park at night. A young woman in a long purple dress was testing the microphone when we arrived. It was after six o'clock and the march was supposed to start at half past but there were only a few dozen people standing around. We examined them closely from the safety of the pine trees. What exactly did a commie look like? Or even more interestingly, a lesbo? Mostly the people milling around were in their twenties, university types. There were a lot of natural wool jerseys on show but apart from that they appeared pretty normal. In the absence of any obvious distinguishing features we agreed that maybe all the women there were lesbians.
For all the Templeton girls' talk they hadn't put in an appearance. Mrs Montgomery was there, though. She'd had the march poster up in her front window for weeks. And there were others. For some reason old Mr Robinson who'd come to the beach that day with his rope, hoping to help a stranded whale, was there
. It was a surprise to see him wearing clothes other than his togs and without a towel hung around his neck. There were a number of older sisters of boys that we knew, girls who had gone off to t-coll or to do nursing. There was also a teacher from school, Mr Jenson. He was only in his second year of teaching and we were aware that he wasn't that much older than the seventh formers. Still, young or not, we were surprised to see a teacher taking part in such an anti-social gathering.
By six forty the crowd had grown to about fifty. The woman in the purple dress stood up on the box and welcomed everyone. She had long black hair tied back in a pony-tail, and the narrow face of a pixie. She kept on glancing toward the edges of the park as though expecting a sudden throng to appear, bursting through the bushes. But no one else showed and eventually she introduced the main speaker as the leader of the southern branch of Halt All Racist Tours. The man from HART had apparently been to South Africa and had met with the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement there at considerable risk to himself. We anticipated a burly figure but when he got up to speak he was small and fragile looking and spoke in a gentle voice. He stood too far back from the microphone. The thin crowd shuffled forward, people cocking their heads to the side to hear, like brown sparrows clustering over a handful of crumbs.
Back near the trees we could not hear anything he said. His speech was entirely lost among the whish of the easterly wind in the branches above us. There was a roar of revved engine and a burst of throbbing music. It was an orange Datsun that sounded as if it had a hole in the exhaust pipe. We vaguely recognised the driver as a guy from up North Brighton. He was nineteen or twenty and a friend of Brent Cox. There was another guy next to him in the passenger seat and at least three more in the back. The driver accelerated the car as he passed the park, gunning the engine and blasting on the horn. There were a few shouts and then the car sped off into the night. The HART guy kept on speaking.
Any thought that the interruption was coincidental vanished when the Datsun returned a couple of minutes later. The tyres squealed beyond the low bushes and there was a puff of white smoke. There was shouting and laughter. The guy from HART still kept on talking but a lot of people in the crowd turned and looked towards the road and we could see them shaking their heads.
The speaker was not dynamic enough to whip up any obvious enthusiasm from the small crowd.
Perhaps sensing that he was losing his audience, he finally announced that the march would begin. A banner was unfurled and the woman in the purple dress took one pole and the speaker the other. It had grown dark while the speeches were going on, in the slow, almost imperceptible way that night seeps into open spaces. When the banner was raised it was hard for us to read what was written on it. Others raised smaller banners and home-made placards. People switched on torches and the march set off out of the park and on to Marine Parade where they swung towards the shopping centre.
To us the whole thing looked pretty ridiculous. Fifty or so people walking slowly behind a banner in the gloom wasn't our idea of a real protest. It was not the raging revolt we had imagined. It was more like a Plunket group out for a stroll. As if sensing that something was missing (five hundred or so more people, perhaps) the woman in the purple dress produced a megaphone. We trailed behind on our bikes and listened to her broadcast slogans into the darkness. She spoke in a hollow voice about the Springbok tour as a sign that New Zealand supported apartheid. 'Stop the tour!' she intoned. She quoted figures about the number of blacks killed by the South African police every year. 'Stop the tour!' A lot of it we only half understood. Some of it we simply didn't believe. 'Stop the tour' she implored the pulled curtains and closed doors of the houses she passed.
The group marched on, in and out of the streetlights, their torches bobbing along in the thickening dark. The voice of the woman with the megaphone called for the people inside their homes to come out and join them. She harangued the front fences and hedges, the white trellises and concrete flamingos. She told them that they had 'nothing to fear, but fear itself' (even we recognised that by using that one she was plagiarising material from another, more popular, movement).
The marchers seemed to be warming up, though. Stop the tour! became a louder chant. Nearly everyone joined in when the woman called for a song. 'We Shall Overcome' rose up, surprisingly beautiful. By the time they approached the Empire the group were well into the second rendition.
All the noise drew the men drinking in the Empire out on to the street. They spilled out of the big front doors, some of them swaying slightly, others with sloppy grins painted on their faces. Their happy beer buzz was blown into tatters when they saw the marchers. They took in the banners and the drip-tailed signs and instinctively knew that they didn't like what they were seeing. In the pale street-light the men could read enough to know that they were being attacked on some fundamental level.
NEW ZEALANDERS UNITED AGAINST APARTHEID
The main banner was a bit wordy and it probably took the half-cut regulars outside the Empire a few rereadings to fully come to terms with it, but the sentiment was plain enough. One marcher was holding a square of white cardboard nailed to a tomato stake. On it was painted, WE DON'T WANT YOUR RACIST TOUR. Another read, RUGBY = RACISM. That particular message was pretty easy to understand and would've gone down like a truck full of wet pig-shit with the blokes at the Empire. We didn't think much of it ourselves.
Tug Gardiner and Jase Harbidge had ridden up past the marchers. They were on the other side of the road from the pub, their feet on the footpath, but they were still sitting on the seats of their bikes. They said later that they could hear the angry growl of the men. Tug said it was a low rumble, like the workings of some old half-forgotten machine as it slowly started up.
'Who do they think . . . stirrers . . . bloody commies coming down here . . . my dad died in the war . . . poofters . . . lefties . . . decent family men who've played . . . still love the game . . . only a game . . . rugby is rugby and politics is something else . . . who the hell do they think they are, calling me racist? . . . bullshitbloodybullshit . . . fuckin dykes and commies stirring things up when they don't have to. Finger pointers. No hopers! Wankers!'
The machine rumbled up through the gears.
The marchers didn't seem to be anticipating any real trouble. We saw the danger long before they did. They were on the footpath on the same side of the road as the Empire and still singing. The pixie-faced woman in the purple dress and the guy from HART were out front still holding the banner. The others followed close behind, four or five abreast, the middle of the march bulging slightly so that some people spilled on to the road.
When they were almost at the hotel the front of the protest met a wall of angry men. All signs of joviality had gone from the faces of the Empire's patrons. They wore granite masks and stood with their arms folded across their chests. The singing faded and the group shuffled to a halt. Without seeming to confer, the line of mostly women at the front of the march moved sideways, off the footpath and on to the road. Silently they skirted the men. No one moved to stop them but the men's dark muttering grew in volume. It turned into sporadic shouts and then jeering. 'We Want Rugby!' Someone yelled. 'We Want Rugby!' Other men picked up the cry and soon it was an openmouthed beery broadside into the passing column of marchers.
A few of the anti-tour protesters, mostly people on the edge of the group, began to return the shouts. There were angry faces on both sides now. But most of the marchers put their heads down, averting their eyes from the wall of men. They moved quickly, clearly intimidated by the glowering, shouting crowd. A few of the younger ones stopped, though they risked getting left behind by the bulk of the march as it flowed around them.
The ones who stopped, no more than half a dozen, faced off against the pro-tour crowd. Only a few metres separated the two groups. There were twenty-five or so from the Empire and they were physically bigger and more intimidating. We knew who we had our money on if things turned nasty. Tiny Wilson was there and he still
played lock for the local club's masters team. Mr Bonniston, the butcher, was in the thick of things too. He was no soft-cock.
The woman in the purple dress was now holding the megaphone at her side and she also stopped to address the men. We didn't hear what she said but there were jeers. She seemed to be speaking to the five or six men directly in front of her. Some dag loudly called out something about dykes and fingers. We heard that clear enough. All the men laughed.
'Piss off home, love. You're not welcome here.' We heard that too.
The guy from HART joined her. He also began to talk to the crowd. There were louder shouts. A guy was a better target than a woman. Within seconds the whole front row was yelling at him. A big guy, six foot with a beer gut hanging over his belt, stepped forward and shoved the HART guy in the chest. He staggered backwards but was caught by the marchers behind him and did not fall. More of the protesters stopped moving forwards. They turned and squared off against the group on the footpath.
The Empire has a long balcony on the street side leading off the upstairs rooms. Something heavy and white thudded to the ground right in the middle of the protest group. There were several screams and the woman in purple dropped the megaphone.
A white cloud enveloped them. For a moment it looked as though a freak weather pattern had brought down a patch of fog over the marchers. Flour. We realised that some joker had thrown a full bag of flour from the balcony. The bag must have been partly open because the contents had spilled out even before it hit the ground. We watched the cloud settle gently on the marchers' clothes and on their hair. They became photo negatives of themselves against the darkness. We looked up and saw that there were about four or five guys up on the balcony. They began to throw other things. Small missiles flew through the air, hit the road and shattered. Now it was eggs. One hit a protester on the shoulder and yolk splattered up over her cheek. She screamed.