This Mortal Boy

by Fiona Kidman

  As if he had been reading his thoughts, Peter appeared beside him. ‘You coming along to the dance tonight?’

  ‘I can’t dance.’

  ‘Some girl will teach you.’

  As he stood on the edge of the jiving chaos of the dance floor, shy because he was young and didn’t know any English girls, one of them pulled him towards her. He shivered a moment as if an electric current had passed through his body, and his feet found the rhythm of the beat. Dancing came as naturally to him as breathing. The girl wore a tight white blouse and a wide skirt that whirled when he swung her around to the music. Afterwards the pair of them, and a whole bunch of others, went up to the deck and sang along to a guitar a fella had brought to play in the night air. The stars were high in the sky as the ship headed towards the Caribbean Sea and beyond that the Panama Canal. They were singing I don’t want to set the world on fire, harmonising as if they were The Ink Spots, when he kissed the nape of the girl’s neck and felt her breath quickening, starting to kiss him back. ‘Paddy,’ she said, ‘you’re the sweetest kid.’

  ‘My name’s Albert,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, g’won, aren’t all Irishmen called Paddy? You’re going to set the world on fire, babe.’ The next minute she was gone, but that was how it started, his new name, and he liked it, it had an easy ring. He stopped having to explain that he was from Northern Ireland, the divisions within his country, whether he kicked with the left foot or the right, he was just Paddy the Irish guy.

  When he went down below, he found Peter sitting smoking a cigarette in the lounge. It seemed that their lives had turned a corner into a place of luxury and expansiveness. The idea of a new country took hold of him and he imagined limitless possibility.

  ‘You found yourself a girlfriend?’ Peter asked.

  ‘Nah, I think I was too young for her. She did a runner on me.’ But that seemed all right too, because there were so many girls, all as hyped up with excitement as he was, and tomorrow night he would sing along with some other girl at his side.

  Paddy, as everyone on the ship called him and he now thought of himself, had seen pictures of the great skylines of the world. There was London, where he had now spent two nights, and Paris and New York with its skyscrapers. He knew that Wellington was a capital city, and he was expecting more of the same. But as the Captain Cook sailed into the harbour, all he could see was low white houses huddled on hills, a raw new-looking place in comparison to home.

  When they disembarked, he sensed it was a quiet place. Not that there was time to explore. Within an hour or so, he and Peter were despatched on a train to a village called Trentham, way beyond the city limits, part of an area known as the Hutt Valley, a satellite of Wellington, with an Upper and a Lower Hutt. It had just turned out so, that they were to be fellow workers, laying cable for the Post and Telegraph Department. A truck picked them up at the station, driving past military barracks and a racecourse, until they came to a group of small isolated huts set among unrecognisable trees. The very sparseness of their surroundings made Albert, who was now called Paddy, long again for home.

  He hung up his coat and unfolded the two blankets lying on the end of the bed. Then he took his coat down and put it back on again and sat shivering on the side of the bed. It was the middle of October and they had been told that it was spring here in New Zealand. If this was spring, it was a cold one. His longing turned to a deep well of loss, a grief so profound he could hardly breathe.

  There was a knock at the door. Peter stood there, in his hand a mug of tea that steamed against a frosty landscape, a full moon bouncing across the sky. ‘We’ll get out of here when we can,’ he said.

  Something, bird or animal, they couldn’t tell, called honk honk, again and again, out there in the moonlight.

  It wasn’t all bad. In the morning they were taken to a training station, where they were shown a model of the top of a telegraph pole and how to find broken insulators. They looked like white china cups. The two of them were allocated to Clarrie’s gang. ‘I’ve got a couple of pakehas here for you,’ the foreman said. ‘New chums.’ From now on they would be inspecting the telegraph poles, looking for broken insulators, rotten cross-arms and poles that were in any way unsafe. The weather turned fine and warm.

  ‘Scorcher of a day,’ Clarrie would say as one gleaming day of sunlight turned to another.

  ‘Scorcher, my old mucker,’ Peter would mutter to Paddy, mopping his brow, a cigarette clamped between his teeth. ‘Scorcher, all right.’

  They were sent to work amongst pine trees above Wellington Harbour. The trees were so thick, the men could scramble from tree to tree to reach the lines without hauling the extension ladders off the trucks. The clean bristling scent of the pines and the laughter of the others purged Paddy during the daytime at least of what he vaguely understood to be homesickness. In some place in his heart he felt tiredness, and he was too young to have a tired heart.

  ‘What is the creature that goes honk honk in the night?’ Paddy asked Clarrie. He imitated the sound the way he had heard it.

  ‘Morepork, you’ve heard the morepork bird. It’s an owl, a ruru,’ Clarrie said. Clarrie came from up north, a Maori fulla, he described himself, a big man but lithe amongst the tree tops. There were other Maoris in the gang. They whistled a lot and spoke to each other in a language that Paddy and Peter couldn’t understand, but for the most part it seemed good-natured enough.

  ‘Is that what it’s asking for?’ Paddy asked. ‘More pork?’

  Clarrie laughed and the whole gang joined in. ‘Nah, mate, they like a tasty little mouse or a rat. You’re too big to get eaten by a morepork.’

  Still, he couldn’t stop listening to the bird sounding its melancholic haunting notes, as if it were coming for him.

  1954. While the fires burned each year in Belfast, books were being set alight up and down New Zealand. Police moved from one bookshop to another, raiding lending libraries and swooping on little corner dairies that carried a small stock of paperbacks, snatching books and comics along the way. Moral panic had seized the country as word spread of an epidemic of loose behaviour by teenagers. Rose Lewis had heard about this because her neighbours talked about it incessantly, and she was bewildered. It all started with the war, some muttered, when the bloody Yanks moved in and corrupted people’s minds, never mind their role in the Pacific. They brought candy and flattery and jitterbug dances, petting in the back seat of movie theatres and free love. It was all there in the books. The name Mickey Spillane crept into the vocabulary of the young, a novelist who wrote of violence and sex and degradation. In schools, his books were passed surreptitiously, hand to hand, under the cover of desks, tucked under copies of En Route and History for Everyone. It was terrifying. The centre of this storm of delinquency was the Hutt Valley. One only had to look there to know that things had fallen apart: that’s what the newspapers wrote in their editorials and their headlines. There, in the suburbs of the Hutt, teenagers gathered at milk bars, or sat in the back seats of theatres doing lewd things to each other, or were collecting on the edges of the wide, swift river and having carnal knowledge. Carnal. The word had an evil ring to it. It was said that the hospitals for unmarried mothers were filling. There was a black market in condoms, so it was whispered. Condoms were banned for the young, although if you knew the right fruiterer to go to you might just strike it lucky. Nestling behind the bananas and pineapples, the dark plums and the rosy apples, the path to the ripe fruit of love might be realised without consequences. Or even at the pie cart. Hot chips and a frenchie, all for five bob.

  These were the things Rose was hearing, yet it all seemed a world away from her little house provided by the state in Naenae, one of the new suburbs in the Hutt. Her husband had come home from the war long enough to give her three children, two boys and a girl, before he died during an asthma attack. He hadn’t had asthma when he went to the war. She blamed the trenches, the dark winters of the northern hemisphere, rotten rations. There were so many like her
, she tried not to be bitter. She had loved that man. She loved him still. Each day she dressed as if he were about to walk in the door, pretty print dresses and a touch of make-up to highlight the warm blush of her skin, her light auburn hair caught up in a roll, small tendrils escaping around her face. She kept herself in this manner not for any other man but to honour the memory of him. Music was her consolation. The rectangular house overflowing with children, or so it seemed, was home to a piano. When the hurt descended, the black moments when it seemed grief would overwhelm her, she would lay her fingers on the keys and the rooms filled with melodies plucked from her past, when she was a star music pupil in the city.

  And outside she had begun a garden. So many houses had been built in haste, all looking so much alike, she had wondered where to begin when she first came. The bulldozers that had prepared the land for the construction of all these houses to accommodate the hard-up like her had flattened the ground, leaving swathes of bare clay. There was a rawness about the place that had to be overcome. She had mapped out where the paths would run, and laid down grass so the children had space to play, then she turned over a patch of ground where she planted vegetables — potatoes and carrots, beans and silver beet. The flowers would come later. She knew the soil was good because beyond the houses lay market gardens. The boys worked alongside her, clearing the surface clay in wheelbarrows and spreading fertiliser. They were such good boys, she couldn’t imagine they would ever find or make the trouble that was spoken of in hushed voices by her neighbours. The girl, Evelyn, with her curls and her smile, tagged along behind, a three-year-old with her own toy wheelbarrow. She wheeled her dolls, or the kittens, wherever they went in the garden. A stream ran nearby, and it was one of the boys’ jobs to make sure Evelyn didn’t wander off and get caught in its flow. What they did catch were eels, which Rose learned to skin and cook. Her neighbours despised the fish, citing their poisonous blood when raw, but she knew better than that, frying them and serving them with butter sauce.

  The flowerbeds began to take hold, the roses to bloom, the contours of the section to soften. More and more often there were days when Rose could tell herself she was content. One afternoon two young men knocked on her door. At first she couldn’t understand what they said, the accents of Liverpool and Ireland thick on their tongues.

  They were working in the area laying cables. We’re looking for something more like home, they explained, because it wasn’t that comfortable in the Post and Telegraph huts where they were living. Naenae appealed to them, kind of cosy-looking, so they’d knocked on a few doors. Someone along the street had suggested she might put them up for a few nights. Mrs Lewis, she’s kind, the woman had said.

  At first she had laughed. ‘Where on earth does she think I’d put you? I’ve got three kids already.’

  ‘We’d pay our way, give you board money,’ said the one she took to be younger, the one with the Irish accent. ‘We don’t mind bunking in the same room.’ One of the cats slid between his ankles. He leaned down and stroked it.

  She was about to send them on their way. She had a widow’s pension, and had begun to give piano lessons to two or three children in the street for three shillings a lesson — but still she was stretched. The older of her boys was ready for a bike, the second had outgrown his school shoes. And Evelyn really liked sharing her mother’s bedroom when she could get away with it.

  While she was standing there turning the whole unlikely situation over in her mind, the Irish boy began to recite. My aunt Jane has a bell on the door / a white stone step and a clean swept floor / candy apples, hard green peas / conversation lozenges.

  ‘My name’s not Jane,’ she said.

  ‘Neither is it my aunt’s.’

  ‘There are two beds in the sun porch,’ she said, the words sliding out before she could stop them. They looked nice enough lads, she thought.

  ‘I’m Peter,’ the taller one said, holding out his hand.

  ‘My mam calls me little Albert,’ the Irish boy said, and a grin lit up his face. ‘You look just like her, like my mam.’

  ‘But I’m not your mother either.’

  ‘I’m called Paddy out here.’ His jet-black hair was brushed back from his forehead, his skin tanned from working in the outdoors, a clean white shirt buttoned to his throat.

  ‘Just for a few nights, mind you,’ she said. ‘Until you find yourselves somewhere more permanent.’

  After dinner, when they had all helped her clear away and wash the plates, Rose sat down at the piano and began to play, fingering threads of melodies. Behind her, Paddy picked up the words of ‘The World is Waiting for the Sunrise’, and as he began the first line, Dear one, his voice soared, sweet and true. Rose looked at him, and started humming along with him.

  ‘You’re a singer,’ she said. ‘You have the most beautiful voice.’

  ‘Oh well, it’s what we did, my family and all. Song’s cheap.’

  She figured the young men had come to stay for a while.

  CHAPTER 7

  1955. The lawyer for the prosecution is a sleek, fair man named Gerald Timms. He isn’t tall, but he has a way of balancing forward on the arched balls of his feet and pushing his head up and down so that he appears to occupy the space of a much larger man. Beneath his gown he is dressed in a charcoal-grey suit with a snow-white handkerchief in his breast pocket. It is October, just two years since Albert Black came to live in New Zealand, almost to the day.

  A girl stands in the witness box. She is wearing a black suit and a black beret slanted over dark and lustrous hair tumbling past her shoulders. She glances briefly at the man in the dock; their eyes lock for an instant, then she drops hers, straightening herself.

  ‘Miss Zilich,’ Timms began. ‘Will you please tell us your name, address and occupation.’

  ‘My name is Rita Zilich,’ she begins. ‘I’m sixteen years old. I live with my parents in Anglesea Street, Ponsonby. I’m a shorthand typist. I passed my exams with top marks in School Certificate, you know. At my school, that is.’ She turns to a youth seated in the gallery and gives a little wave. He’s dressed in tight black trousers and a red windbreaker that is unzipped all the way down the front, showing a white tee-shirt. He waggles one finger at her

  ‘Miss Zilich,’ the judge says sharply.

  ‘Oh sorry,’ she murmurs, and composes her face into the semblance of great attention.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Miss Zilich,’ Timms says. ‘That’s very good. If you could just tell us about what happened on the night of Monday, July twenty-fifth of this year, it would be a help. You knew the accused?’

  ‘Oh yes, you couldn’t help but notice him. He’s pretty good-looking, if you go in for those kind of looks.’ In spite of herself, she throws a cool appraising glance in the direction of Albert.

  Timms breathes deeply and makes a steeple with his fingers. ‘Very good. I’d like you to tell the court in your own words what happened. How long you knew him, whether you knew the deceased, what occurred on the night in question.’

  ‘I’ve written it all down in shorthand.’

  ‘Just tell the story, Miss Zilich, never mind the notes.’

  Rita flicks her mane of hair back from where it has encroached across her shoulder, and launches into her account, the witness box becoming her stage. ‘I knew the accused for about three months before the twenty-fifth of July. I knew him as Paddy, that was the only name I’d heard. I knew the other guy too, Alan Jacques, only of course that’s not what we called him. He was Johnny McBride. But I’d only known him about, oh, maybe two weeks. I wasn’t keeping company with either of them. Actually, I’d been to the pictures on the night in question. I’d been to see Calamity Jane, you know the one where Doris Day sings “My Secret Love”, it’s an amazing picture. And I’m crazy about the song.’

  ‘Yes, of course. We appreciate your good taste, Miss Zilich. But you went to Ye Olde Barn cafe after you’d been to the pictures?’

  ‘Yes, this was about seven thirty, I suppose.
I didn’t mean to, it was just that I was walking past, planning to go home, and there was a crowd there. Somebody called out, I don’t know whether it was Paddy or Johnny, but I think it was one of them, and said come on over. So I went over, and Paddy said come on up to the house, we’re having a party tonight. I knew where he meant, it was at 105 Wellesley Street. I’d been to a party there before. Well, I thought, why not? I hadn’t arranged to meet Paddy or anything like that, but it sounded like a bit of fun. Actually, Paddy’s girlfriend was in the cafe, now I come to think of it. Bessie Marsh, that is, so obviously I didn’t mean to meet Paddy. I shouldn’t think she’s his girlfriend now, not now he’s gone and stabbed Johnny. He wouldn’t be mine, I can tell you that.’

  ‘So you went on to the party instead of going home?’

  ‘Well. Not exactly.’

  ‘Why not exactly?’

  ‘I’d told my parents I’d be home. Well, they’re not so keen on me going to parties. So I went home, and when they’d gone to bed I hopped out the window and went back to town. This was about quarter past ten.’

  ‘So what happened at the party?’

  ‘Well, Johnny and Paddy were both there, and Bessie, and one of my girlfriends called Stella, and a whole bunch of others, I guess about ten altogether at that stage, mostly guys, you know. Someone was playing a guitar, everything seemed normal. A normal party, that is. You know?’

  ‘We’re happy that you’re enlightening us, Miss Zilich. Please go on.’

  ‘Well, Paddy was sober. And Johnny was sober, is about what I’d say. Then Bessie said she had to go home because she had exams or something early the next day. She’s a student of some kind, I think. She’d gone off to the library after I first saw her. I think Paddy went and collected her later on while I was off seeing my parents.’