This Mortal Boy

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘They weigh me every day,’ Allwood told Albert when they met in the exercise yard.

  ‘And why would they be doing that every day?’ Albert asked. ‘They want to put meat on your bones?’

  ‘You don’t know, eh? Well, let me tell you how it is. The hangman needs to know the exact weight of the body, so they know how high they need to string you before your neck breaks. You hear that bang every morning? That’s them testing the gallows with a sandbag the same weight as myself, to make sure they’ve got it right.’

  ‘But why every day? I don’t get that.’

  ‘So you don’t know what day it’s going to happen.’

  ‘You mean they don’t tell you?’

  ‘Oh, I think they tell you in the morning. I haven’t had that pleasure yet of being informed.’

  ‘Perhaps it won’t happen,’ Albert had said.

  ‘Ha. You cleanskins, you’re so innocent. Haven’t seen the inside of a prison before. You think they save you at the last minute? Dream on. Mind you, Freddie Foster, they did him in this year, he thought he’d got away with it. He got himself a dose of appendicitis two weeks before he was due. They put him in hospital and took his appendix out and sent him back for the gallows.’

  ‘That’s nuts.’

  ‘Ah well, he got to look up a few nurses’ skirts at the last. Perhaps he thought his luck had changed. None of us think it’ll happen to us. But I can tell you, I’ll be taking one of those screws with me. I plan to kill one of them before they kill me.’

  Not that Allwood succeeded with his plan. They got him. And a good job done, Des said to Paddy. ‘He took a while to go, jerked on the end of the rope for a bit.’ It was the second hanging since Albert had been inside, the third one of the year. The one before Allwood was worse than the others, in terms of the effect it had on the inmates: a young Maori man who had brothers inside at the time. The family of the man stood outside the prison walls, their wailing and sobbing rising in torrents of sound, singing that was strange to Paddy, the brothers inside the walls screaming like wounded animals.

  On this morning, the first day of his trial, it’s come home to him that he might well be hanged for the death of Alan Jacques, or Johnny McBride, or whoever the man thought he was. The realisation seeps through him, at first a ripple like spring rain starting, then a downpour of terrible knowledge. It’s a wonder to him that he hasn’t grasped this reality before. What option had he had but to belt Jacques, and how could he have known that it would turn out the way it has? This steadfast belief had carried him through the first months he’d been held in the prison. He couldn’t see how it could be perceived any other way. And now he isn’t sure. There is a girl who is due to give evidence, and he has no idea what she will say. He thought her a friend but now he knows she is a witness for the prosecution. When he thinks back, the way she might describe the encounter could go either way.

  And what of the girl sitting at the back of the court, what will she make of what this girl has to say? Feckless, he is. The drift of life. Feckless and fuckless. It wasn’t always like that. The girls appeared, those nights in Auckland, one after the other, always willing; they jived and swung, twisting their hips this way and that in the dance halls, and after, there was always an after, they would like as not swing their way to his bed. He doesn’t know anymore what to make of it all, just that it has brought him here. He closes his eyes and sees a dance hall, the girls with their nipped-in waists, whirling floral-patterned dresses flicking out from their knees, or the widgies with their skin-tight skirts that show the cracks in their arses. The Orange Hall in Newton was one of his favourites, a slide and glide place where you pressed your face to a girl’s cheek and asked her for the supper waltz, and then the last dance, and when those were over going on, with a girl at his side, drifting along the street to the Maori Community Centre, another world again, and they would dance till two or three in the morning, the music wild, some familiar, some from a different place that sent them all crazy, steel guitars throbbing, a saxophone trebling its notes. There would be a boil-up and a mug of tea. At the Community Centre it felt easier to be an outsider, because he’d noticed that Maori people in Auckland kept to themselves, except here in their own place. They too might have come from another country. Yet when he was among them they didn’t question who he was, as if him dancing there was the most natural thing.

  He sees himself dancing, his hips rotating, the way he could go on and on and on all night until the morning when he would wake up, spent, a little drunk, the girl he’d met at the Orange beside him, or not, because usually they had to flee home to their parents before dawn. After the ball. It makes him think of his mam. ‘Dear Mother,’ he had written (for he wrote to her in more formal terms than he thought of her), ‘life is a bit of a lark. I’m living with a whole heap of mates here in Auckland. I’m just your same Albert, but I’ve got a pair of dancing shoes. The Teddy boys dress differently from us. Their jackets have wide shoulders and are draped down nearly to their knees, their trousers have very narrow bottoms, and you should see the shine on their shoes. A lot of them are English boys who have come off the ships, they are mostly good sorts, some of them come and stay with me for a night or two when their ships are in port. I have to be a bit careful how many come at once, my landlady is quite strict, but you’ll be glad to hear that.’

  The day in court hasn’t gone how he imagined. The jury took a long time to be sworn in. For much of the day he had sat in the tiny holding cell beneath the courtroom. During a recess he overheard his lawyer, a dark intense man named Oliver Buchanan, talking to his colleague about the kind of jury he was hoping for: a group of men who might still remember what it was like to be young, and not too biased towards the migrants. That’s me, Paddy thought, an immigrant, not one of them, not a Kiwi bloke, as they say. He knew, from what he had been told, that the lawyer can challenge anyone who is called without giving a reason, but he is only allowed four challenges before he has to let the jurors pass. After that he could challenge only if he can show cause. But Paddy got the drift. As he watched the selection take place he saw men with hard eyes, cold stares in his direction, just one or two with a gentler manner, or so he thought. I’ve done my best, Buchanan told his colleague, within his hearing, but it’s still a jury full of old codgers. You know, he added, the sort who believe every word of the Mazengarb Report.

  Paddy wondered if Buchanan thought he wouldn’t know what the Mazengarb Report is. But he does, because he lived on the doorstep of that government-commissioned document which claimed youthful lawlessness and immoral behaviour was sweeping the country. It was all supposed to have started in the Hutt Valley near Wellington, where the first bodgies and widgies hung out, before spreading to Auckland. The Hutt Valley was where he lived just the year before. He has heard it thrashed to bits, the bickering it started.

  It had been late in the day before Paddy reappeared in the dock. The judge seemed like an old man, but then all men over twenty-five look as if they are over the hill. The men on the jury were so close to him he could smell the sweat in their armpits, mingling with the perfume of the girls sitting behind him.

  Albert Lawrence Black. His name hung in the air. You are charged with the murder of Alan Jacques on the twenty-sixth of July 1955. How do you plead? Guilty, or not guilty?

  He’d replied, in the firmest voice he could muster, ‘Not guilty, your Honour’, and they left him standing there for all to see, in his good blue suit and blue-striped tie, while the first of the witnesses for the prosecution was called, a police photographer who took pictures of Ye Olde Barn cafe where, it is claimed, Albert had plunged a knife into the neck of Jacques. The photographer was followed by an architectural draughtsman who had been called to measure the cafe where ‘the incident’ took place. The draughtsman handed over a scroll of paper containing his drawings, to be passed to the judge.

  Albert could describe to them the exact shape of that cafe, but they don’t ask him. He sees it in the swimming light
of a winter evening, a long room with a bar counter along one side, flanked by six high stools where you can sit and drink Bushells coffee, dark liquid poured from a square bottle, topped up with boiling water from the Zip, eat a steak or a hamburger, or a frankfurter, and, across from there, cubicles that fit six at a squeeze, three on either side of a Formica-topped table lit by low-hanging lanterns. The room leads through a latticed wall adorned with flowering pot plants to the jukebox. Albert closes his eyes again, and for a moment the courtroom ceases to exist. He is trying to play a tune on the jukebox, that’s all. He’s been beaten up and his body is sore and his head hurts. His hand is on the button of the Wurlitzer, selecting a song. What he wants to play is Slim Whitman singing ‘Danny Boy’, which will transport him back to Ireland, but someone is stopping him, someone who wants to fight on and deck him again. He is afraid, yes that is it, he is terrified. He opens his eyes and looks at the judge, but he is not allowed to speak. Instead, he must stand there and let them all say what they have to say.

  And that is it for the day. He thought there would be more to it than that, that everything would come out and his lawyer would have jumped up and told the judge what was what. But then, he doesn’t know whether Buchanan really understands what exactly is what, how it had been. The real business will start happening tomorrow.

  After this anti-climax he is back in the paddy wagon being returned to Mount Eden.

  And now here he is, lying on his back, staring at the slivers of light from the grating, back in Belfast again, just like every night now, and it’s summer, the marley season. He — that is, he who was once Albert — and his mates played their marbles everywhere out on the streets. They had bewlers, the big knuckle-dusters, and dinkies, the beautiful glass miniatures prized by them all; shooters, those were the proven ones, chipped and scarred, but they had a history of straight shooting; and then there were the ballies if you could get hold of them, ball bearings that you had to steal to lay hands on.

  Between the Shankill and the Falls area, the Protestant and the Catholic divide, there lay a strip of No Man’s Land that had once been a brick field, the hard clay making it the perfect spot to shoot marleys. Albert’s mother had told him not to go over there, it was too far away from Gay Street that ran off Sandy Row where they lived. He didn’t get it, the reason the Prods and Micks were divided up the way they were. So they went to different schools, and they worshipped at different churches, it was even said they spoke the Our Father in a different way — when he went to St George’s everyone said Our Father that art in heaven, but somebody had told him that the Micks said who art in heaven, as if God were a person you might be able to see, a being like them. Well, that was old shite if ever he’d heard it, because God was a creature in the sky that didn’t let Himself be shown, you just had to believe He was there. His mother did say, on occasion, that they, meaning the Catholics, were heathens who believed that they truly drank the blood of Christ when they took the communion, when she knew all along that it was wine that represented the blood. It was complicated, she said, but there they were living next door to Clodagh who was a Mick through and through and as good a friend as his mam had in the world. It was only round the Twelfth of July when the Orange Parades were in full tilt and all the Protestants marched along Sandy Row with their banners and drums, across the Boyne Bridge, chanting their slogans, and dressed up in suits and bowler hats, that there was a distance between them. His mother would say not to go to Clodagh’s today, she was resting up, but he did anyway, because Clodagh always had a lolly in her apron. She would sigh and roll her eyes. ‘You’re not such a bad wee one for a sally rod, here take this and be on your way.’ Clodagh had had children, it was said, but they’d all died of some fever. It was something you didn’t ask about, not even of your mother.

  But he remembered a particular day when the sun was gleaming like new coppers, something to recall in itself, a true summer day, and the oak leaves seeming to float on air above the strip, and he and his mates, their gang of three, wee Noel and Rory and himself, were playing marleys and he was winning. It would be something good to tell his da, who had come back from the war and was hanging around the house looking sorry for himself and not too interested in his only son. Only living son, that was, because Albert once had a brother, although that was not exactly as he saw it. Wee William had died before he was born, so that when his mam talked about his brother it was a bit like talking about God in the sky, the same shadowy feeling of someone you had to believe in but would never see. Albert wanted to talk to his da about Belgium where he’d been in the fighting, but his father had said to forget it, that was all over now and they’d all best get on with their lives and he better be good to his mam, now that he was a big boy, ten years old. His da and his mam kept going away to the bedroom and not wanting to talk to him, and his mam was acting strange.

  It was this day when the pair of them were off on some secret mission of their own behind closed doors that he and the boys decided nobody would miss them if they took off to the strip to find a spot of their own, the street all around them so filled with games that the marleys were pitching over the circles and knocking out the game of the fellas next door and words spoken between them, a scuffle and a few fists flying.

  Albert had brought his special marble that his da had brought home from the war. It was a Lutz that came out of the pocket of a dead German was all he said, the nearest he’d ever come to talking about the action. You don’t want to play that one, it’s a collector’s piece. He had held it up to the light, so that Albert could see the alternating bands of finely ground copper flakes edged by opaque white strands. If he hadn’t been mad with his father for distracting his mother the way he was, he would have done as he was told that day and left it in the little bowl on the mantelpiece where it was kept. The Lutz was his lucky marble, he decided. By the end of the day it would have knocked out a dozen of the opposition and, its work done, could be safely restored to the bowl.

  At the very moment he flicked it into the circle, a posse of boys, all bigger than them, and none that they knew by sight, came slouching towards them, menace in their eyes. Albert made to gather up the marbles but the boys were on to them and he felt himself freeze with fear. The Lutz glinted in the sun, the copper glowing like molten gold. In a flash it had been gathered into the pocket of the tallest of the marauders.

  ‘It’s mine, gimme,’ Albert said.

  ‘Gimme,’ the boy mocked.

  ‘Please.’ Albert heard himself whimpering. ‘It’s my da’s marble.’ It sounded stupid cry-baby stuff, but the tears were welling up and he couldn’t stop them. ‘I’ll give you a sprassy if you give it me back.’

  ‘A sprassy for a Lutz.’ The biggest boy gave him a push in the head. ‘Six pennies for a good ’un like that. Not on your Nellie. What a laugh. Take yourself off and say your Proddie prayers. Tell your da he’s got a sooka bubba son. And all.’

  When he got home his father was singing away to himself. No, he wasn’t, he and his mother were singing. They sang the chorus of ‘After the ball is over’ which was meant to be a sad song about parted lovers, but they were belting it out as if they were happy

  … aft-er the ball is over, aft-er the break of morn

  after the dancers’ leaving, after the stars are gone,

  … after the ball. Aft-er the ball is over … and on and on, a kind of diddle diddle refrain.

  And because it was another of the old songs they had sung for years and years, even before the war when he was just so high to his da’s waist, they were waiting for him to sing it along with them now. It made him scared many the hopes that have vanished, it sounded like the song was all about him and perhaps his da would hate him forever. But at this moment his father’s face was shiny and happy and Albert didn’t have the heart to tell him what had happened. Instead, he slipped a marble into the bowl on the mantelpiece, a cat’s eye, his very best, and hoped that the loss might go unnoticed.

  CHAPTER 3

&nb
sp; August 1955. Parliament House in Wellington is an Edwardian neo-classical building built of stone, to the right of a Gothic Revival building that houses the General Assembly Library, all spindly towers like a fairy castle. These buildings sit on a hill facing northward. A grassy lawn separates Parliament House from the street and small dilapidated houses belonging to the poor. A long flight of steps with narrow treads lead up to the reception area. Visitors and politicians alike cross a marbled floor laid out in chequered black and white. The ‘tiles’, the Press Gallery call it, the spot where they might catch a politician on the run and force an unguarded comment. From there they ascend to the upper chambers by way of more of the sombre solid steps, or in an ornate old-fashioned lift. The Honourable John Marshall, known to his friends as Jack, a major in wartime, likes to take the steps up to his office in the National Party wing of the building. The Attorney-General is spry in his manner, tall and lean-limbed, his mane of hair silvering, his chin as sleek as a seal’s backside. Marshall is a lawyer and a firm believer in God. Every Sunday morning he will be found worshipping at the Presbyterian church in the city. He has drafted many Bills, legislating for change. It is a matter of pride to him that under his watch the death penalty has been reinstated. It is not known exactly why he is so enthusiastic about killing criminals, although there has been a rumour circulating for years that a relative of his was murdered in Australia. It is just that, perhaps, a rumour. They swirl around the halls of power, whispers and murmurs that can bring a politician down in the bat of an eyelid. Marshall knows better than to allow his private life to spread into the wider world. Virtue has its own rewards, he believes, and it is a virtuous face he presents to the public.