by Nixon, Carl
The funeral was held on the lawn out the back of the crematorium on Linwood Ave. It is close enough to the estuary for you to smell the mud at low tide. The place has a smallish lawn surrounded by a low hedge and beds of white roses, which were long before their best on the day. Spring weather is unpredictable and we were lucky it didn't rain. The wind was cold and small white clouds skimmed over the sky. People came rugged up. There weren't that many mourners, not as many as you'd expect for a guy as likeable as Pete. The funeral director obviously hadn't known how many were going to come, and we hadn't been able to tell him, so he'd put out too many of those folding wooden chairs. It was a pity because the empty chairs on the lawn made the group look even smaller, as if a lot of people hadn't bothered to show up.
Pete's father had died ten years earlier and his mother sat in the middle of the front row, small and frail like an old blackbird. Pete's ex-wife sat on the end of the same row although her status as family had definitely been revoked. She was wearing a woolly hat that made her seem Russian, even though she was originally from Timaru. She sat and looked bored and after the service she made a point of not talking to any of us. She didn't hang around to chat. Jim joked that she was out of there before the coffin. On reflection, it was probably lucky that they hadn't had any kids.
At the start of the service the minister welcomed Pete's mother and read out a message from Pete's older brother, Tony. It was an email that said that he was working in the Middle East, on an oil tanker in the Persian Gulf, and couldn't get back in time for the funeral. He knew that Pete would've understood.
Looking around, it was clear to us that we were the sum total of Pete's friends. There were a few of his work colleagues, but no one we recognised, and everyone else was family, elderly uncles and aunts and cousins. We sat on the right-hand side of the aisle, which divided the chairs into two groups. Everyone else chose to sit on the left. Al Penny whispered that if it had been a wedding we would have been the groom's whole family. And a strange family we would have been; a loose formation of uneasy middle-aged guys in cheap black suits, barely managing to disguise our shock. You could smell the fear rising off us over the aroma of our musty jackets. As Matt Templeton kept saying over and over again, 'He was only forty-one, forfucksake.' If the Reaper could come knocking at the wrong address like that, what hope was there for the rest of us? That's what we were all thinking as we listened to the minister welcome everyone to Pete's funeral. It scared us shitless.
Pete's coffin was up the front on a metal gurney and the lid was closed. In the last few weeks the cancer had chewed away at him like a bad infestation of borer. Eventually, he forbade any of us to visit the hospice again. He was on strong painkillers, his conversations moved along no track we could follow, and Pete didn't want anyone to see him like that — not even us. In all honesty, we were relieved. The cancer that had at first melted away his fat, making him look younger, had not stopped. It had carried on feeding until Pete was as wizened as a man three times his age. It's hard to see a friend rendered as a living stick-figure. In the end Pete became death's caricature.
When he said he didn't want us coming around any more we all went together to say our final goodbye. We crammed into the small private room with its view of the hills. Of course Pete talked about Lucy and the case. The last thing that he said as we were going out the door was to call him if we came up with anything new. Nothing did come up. He died four days later.
At his funeral the minister didn't have a lectern, and spoke standing up the front with his notes in his hands. 'We have come together to remember before God the life of Peter John Marshall, to commend him to God's keeping, to commit his body to be cremated, and to comfort those who mourn with our sympathy and with our love, in the hope we share through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.' We were surprised that Pete had chosen to have the full religious service. Apart from when he was a kid and had attended with his family, we had never known him to go to church. Most of us had also gone as kids, and it was amazing how much of the services we could recall. When the time came, the Lord's Prayer tripped from our tongues as easily as our own phone numbers. When we were asked to respond to the minister's words, we knew just how to speak with that distinctive church rhythm. We felt like children who had been raised in a foreign country and could still fall back into the language when the need arose.
We knew the hymns, which, because we were outside, were sung without accompaniment. There was just the minister leading us on in a shaky tenor voice. We sang along with gusto. We were damned if Pete was going to be farewelled with an apologetic murmur.
And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
Once or twice during that particular hymn people swivelled their heads to look at us, nervous smiles stamped on their faces, but the minister didn't seem worried by our braying voices.
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand . . .
After that it was the turn of anyone who wanted to get up and speak. But how do you sum up a friendship you've had your whole life? It didn't seem the right time to be talking about the quest to find Lucy Asher's killer. And so we were left holding a handful of generalities. Those of us who did get up sat down again afraid that we had made Pete sound like every other nice guy whose friends can't quite believe that he's dead.
Out of all of us Roy Moynahan did the best. These days he is a freelance journalist specialising in feature articles, mainly for North and South but occasionally for other publications if the money is good. As a writer Roy knew that the details carried the most weight. He spoke about an incident that happened when Pete was in his early thirties, something that most of us had forgotten.
The story went that Pete had been to the movies in town with the woman he was seeing at the time, shortly after he split from his wife, when he saw a guy being attacked on the street.
'The guy was down on the ground and two blokes were laying into him with their fists, and then their feet. So Pete tells the woman he's with to wait where she is. He pulls out a twenty-dollar note from his wallet and hurries over to the two guys. They stop and turn around, ready to take the fight further afield if they have to. Obviously they're thinking that Pete's a friend of the guy on the ground and that he's going to start swinging. But Pete simply holds out the twenty to the nearest guy and says, "I think you dropped this." Pete asks them if they can remember losing the note. One of the guys is quicker than the other and says, sure, he can remember dropping it, "just over there". He points to the ground in the opposite direction to where Pete has come from. "Fair enough," says Pete and hands over the twenty.
'Meanwhile the guy on the ground has seen which way the wind is blowing. He's staggered up, looking no worse for wear than a guy who's been at the bottom of a ruck, although a pretty vigorous one. Quick as, he's limped away and popped into the nearest bar. The two guys had noticed, of course, but didn't seem to care any more. Whatever their issue with him was, it seemed to have been forgotten. They walked away in the opposite direction, laughing.'
As acts of heroism went it didn't seem much, but we were grateful that Roy had resurrected the story and that he had told it well. It struck a tone for remembering Pete that we thought was about right.
Roy finished with a quote from Robert Louis Stevenson. 'Home is the sailor, home from sea / And the hunter home from the hill.' With the cold easterly blustering across the sky and the scream of the gulls clearly audible, we thought that too was about right. 'Goodbye, Pete,' said Roy. 'I hope you know more than us now.' Most of the other people there looked confused but we knew what Roy was on about. He walked back to his seat which, like ours, had begun to sink into the soft spring grass.
After the ceremony, six of us carried the coffin inside and se
t it down in a mock chapel inside the crematorium. Then we trooped out again, leaving a trail of grass clippings from the damp lawn on the polished wooden floor. There was a final viewing for the immediate family, which, in the absence of Tony, meant his mother.
We stood around in the crematorium's foyer, amid the giant flower arrangements and the soft orchestral music that drifted down on to us from hidden speakers. We talked among ourselves and finished off the last of the sausage rolls and cucumber sandwiches. We knew that at any moment a curtain was going to open behind Pete and the coffin was going to begin its slow journey to the flames. We tried not to think about it.
At first, we didn't recognise the woman who approached Jim. She was no longer skinny but had filled out, as people tend to do in their thirties and forties, although she still had her mother's pale skin and the freckles across the bridge of her nose. Carolyn Asher and Jim each took a glass of juice and went and stood over by the tall windows to talk.
He told us later that she is married now, with three kids, and that her husband is an air-traffic controller out at the airport. Jim showed us a business card. Carolyn owns some type of online company selling merino wool gloves and scarves. Apparently business is good. We agreed with Jim that she looked happy and healthy and all the rest. In fact it had been hard to reconcile our memory of her with the woman standing in the intermittent sunlight coming through the big windows. We had lost track of her when she moved to Auckland at nineteen. By then Carolyn had a police record — she had been heavily into the local drug scene — and the worst reputation of any girl down New Brighton. But, watching her talking to Jim, we had to admit all that was a long time ago. Somehow Carolyn had succeeded in moving on. We wondered how she had done it. What was her secret? When she left, she kissed Jim on the cheek and promised to keep in touch.
We drifted out ourselves soon after. We were almost the last to leave. On the way out we said a final farewell to Pete's mum. She stood by the door looking as though a strong breeze would be enough to knock her over.
When we got back to our homes we couldn't believe that they were unchanged. We've talked about it since and agree that the thing about death that surprises us the most is that, for those who are left behind, the days are essentially unaltered. It seems wrong to eat our dinner at the same table, to brush our teeth with the same brush, to sleep in the same unmade bed as we have always done. There is a disloyalty in the continuation of even mundane tasks. The death of a close friend, and Pete Marshall really was, should be a volcano that blows everything around it apart. But instead, it's a tremor in the night, which barely rattles the cups. It's an earthquake on the other side of a vast ocean, which, if you're not careful, you can sleep right through.
Pete's funeral was on a Thursday. The following weekend there was an All Black test on in the city. A group of us held tickets and, given the price, it seemed silly to waste them. Besides, we didn't feel like hanging around at home, not that week. There was some comfort to be found in each other's company and in the atmosphere of a big game.
It was the second test of the Lions tour and we enjoyed the game, although it won't go down as one of the greatest clashes between the two teams. Since we were teenagers Lancaster Park has been renamed after a corporate sponsor and there is a new stand that rises up on the west side like a sheer wall. It's also true to say that we don't follow rugby like the true believers that we were at fifteen.
These days it's hard to remember just how much stock we put in the game, both the playing and supporting. It seems unbelievable how much it underlined our lives. As we grew up on the Spit, rugby was a natural extension of ourselves, of our fathers, and our neighbours. Rugby has gone professional now and is dominated by the physically superior Maori and Islanders. There are far more games played and the season barely seems to have finished when it is cranked back up. It's hard not to be cynical: not to feel that the game is just another product to be sold and consumed. Rugby is now something for the advertising guys to trade on with carefully packaged appeals to nationalism.
Mark Murray was sitting with us at the Lions game that day. Mark never comes to the games, although he'll sometimes watch them on telly. That day though we had an extra ticket and he'd surprised us all by agreeing to tag along. Mark's wild hair is long gone. It thinned and receded in a sharp V in his late twenties, to the point where he now allows only the shortest stubble to grow. He sat quietly watching the All Blacks and the Lions, not talking, just staring at the field, where the play ebbed and flowed under the brighter-than-bright lights.
We all understand his reluctance to return to the park. We have lived with the way certain places cause the past and the present to bump uncomfortably up against each other. Mark was here at the first test against the Springboks back in August of '81. He had gone to the game with his father. Mark told us later how he saw the first protesters run on to the field from the embankment. They had to run through the narrow corridors left between the rolls of barbed wire that circled the field. Most of them were nabbed by the police and bundled back over the fence but some got through. About twenty people linked arms on the halfway line and waited for the riot police to arrive, batons drawn.
All around Mark the forty-thousand-strong crowd of mostly men began to bay 'Off! Off! Off!' The guy standing right next to Mark was on his feet, his face beetroot red and swollen with yelling. Mark told us later that he thought the guy might burst. 'I'll never forget what he was saying.'
'Kick them! Kick the commie fuckers!'
Someone else, behind, was yelling 'Kill em Kill em! Kill em!' over and over again until his voice was hoarse.
'I felt sick,' Mark told us later. And then he said something that none of us have ever forgotten. 'It was like being inside the mind of whoever killed Lucy.'
Tug Gardiner was there as well, in a different part of the stadium. He was also with his father. He remembers seeing a policeman punch a protester full in the face. The guy walked up to the cop, hands at his side, and the policeman just drew back his fist and dropped him. Later, as the protesters were herded off the field, there was a deadly rain of bottles and cans, many of them full, from the crowd. One anti-tour guy got hit on the head, the brown bottle shattered, and he fell to the ground like a shot steer at the abattoir. The crowd roared its approval as though the All Black winger had just scored in the corner. Tug looked around and saw that his father was laughing.
Those of us who weren't at the game saw the protests on the Six O'Clock News. We watched as the police clashed with the thousands who were throwing themselves in wave after wave at the police defences, trying to get inside the park to stop the game. Blue greatcoats and jabbing batons. Police boots on the wet road. Police lines, riot shields held out front, marching forward into static protesters. Batons smashing down on motorcycle helmets, driven into faces, breaking collar-bones and noses and teeth, shattering eye-sockets. Blood and men and woman of all ages on the ground. It was hard to believe that we were not watching the news from someone else's country. The next day there were pictures in the paper of people lying unconscious on the road. There were black and white images of protesters being led away with broken noses and open wounds on their heads and blood covering their faces.
Over the following weeks we watched the television coverage of all the other games as well. The provincial games in Nelson, Napier, Rotorua, and of course the other two tests in Wellington and Auckland. Through it all we had a growing sense of sadness and unease. We had the feeling that we were witness to something important being broken. It was something we couldn't put a name to but that we had previously taken for granted, and we knew instinctively it could never be fully repaired. As Pete said at the time, 'I suddenly felt like Mum and Dad had told me I was adopted.'
We continued playing and watching rugby after the Springboks returned to South Africa, but something had turned over inside us. Only Jim Turner played beyond high school and then only because his father insisted. Jim's dad still clung to Mr Templeton's belief that if Jim m
anaged to cultivate the right killer instinct then he could go all the way. But after his first season for New Brighton Jim moved away from home and, in the same week, gave away the game for good.
A few days after Pete's funeral, Tug Gardiner got a call from the funeral director. Apparently Mr Marshall had left instructions. His ashes were to go to 'Terrence Gardiner. Do I have the right person?' Tug hadn't been called by his real name in forty years. That was Pete's little joke.
The man from Hayward and Turnbull drove over to Tug's place to personally deliver Pete's ashes. They came in a small, square box that looked like marble but was actually some type of thick plastic. There were no instructions from Pete for what he had wanted done with his ashes, just a standard mention in the will about them being scattered at a place and a time of their recipient's choosing. But that was a no-brainer.
We waited for the weeks to pass. Our lives ticked by after the funeral pretty much unchanged. Every now and then we'd think about the fact that Pete was gone but mostly it felt as though he'd simply decided to take a break and would be rejoining us when he had something new to offer. The days grew longer and the weather eventually warmer, although it was a wet spring. In November the cabbage trees bloomed strongly, just as they had done when we were fifteen. That was supposed to mean a long hot summer. Looking at the halos of white flowers that sprang out from every tree, we couldn't help thinking about Pete's dream, the one where Lucy had looked up at him from beneath the flowering cabbage tree.
Finally the day came. We gathered down on the beach, shortly after dawn, four days before Christmas. The sign warning people about rips and swimming near the channel has long gone. There's a new one further up the beach, closer to the surf club — but despite the constantly shifting sands, we all knew the spot to meet; we could find it blindfolded. The day wasn't going to be as hot as back in 1980, but it was good day nonetheless. There were only a few wisps of high cloud and a gentle on-shore breeze. Jase Harbidge brought along a chillybin of beers and ice, and when we were all there, we cracked the cans open and stood looking at the waves as we drank.