This Mortal Boy

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘Misleading them?’

  ‘Um, yes.’

  ‘Never mind.’ Timms appears annoyed with himself.

  ‘Myself, I don’t have to be at work until nine, I’m a secretary at the Council, they have very regular hours. I mean, I wouldn’t start at eight unless I had to, but with my qualifications I can pick and choose. I got eighty-five per cent for typing, you know.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Timms was tapping his fingers on a folder, his eyes willing her to get to the point.

  ‘Well then, I think Paddy must have walked Bessie home, or to a taxi, I don’t really know, but he was gone a while, and when he came back he asked me to sleep with him that night. At first I said no, but then he asked me again, and I said I’d think about it. I was just putting him off, of course, trying to be polite.’

  ‘But he thought you meant it?’

  Rita hesitates, pushing a strand of hair away from her face as it escapes from under the beret. ‘I didn’t want to give offence. I said it in a nice way.’

  ‘And you say the defendant was sober?’

  ‘I’d say so. Well, I didn’t know what he was like when he was drunk.’

  Listening to her, Paddy thinks I can tell you what I’m like when I’m cut. But you wouldn’t want to know. Staggering, that’s what he is. He is back in Trentham and it’s late Friday afternoon. On Fridays the Post and Telegraph gang knocked off early so they could put in a few hours at the pub, a barn of a place, nothing like the pubs at home. They close at six o’clock of the evening, just about the time men are heading for their local back home in Belfast. The trick here in New Zealand is to drink as much beer as you can down in the least possible time. At first Paddy couldn’t bring himself to go in. He’d tasted ale before, just a glass or two with his da at the Sandy Row Arms, a quiet enough place, with low ceilings and carpet underfoot, a handful of men leaning against the bar, telling yarns. Here the bars are long counters, the walls sloped for easy cleaning because men vomit like fountains of spaghetti, the crush of men so dense the service is just the bartender pointing a pistol-shaped spigot at out-held glasses. The beer shoots out a white cuff of foam. The six o’clock swill, he’d heard it called, and looking at men lurching out of the bars he’d found himself disgusted. He shouldn’t be, because his da has come home two sheets to the wind often enough, but somehow this was different. Besides, here in New Zealand he was still an under-age drinker. His shoulders had filled out, his face darkened in the sun, and he’d grown a couple of inches since he landed. He passed for being older, but he still wasn’t legal to enter the pub.

  There came an afternoon, the sky a high bird’s egg blue above the Naenae hills, and their throats as dry as old bones, when the New Zealanders in the gang called him and Peter out. What are you? Wowsers? they asked as they prepared to drop the two of them off at the huts. They had to make a detour to get back to the pub, which all took up time.

  ‘Okay, all right then,’ Peter said on this summer afternoon, ‘we’ll go with you today. Just one drink, mind you.’

  The first beer slid down Paddy’s throat so easily it was like cool lemonade, with about equal an effect, he thought. Peter and he grinned at each other: this was no roaring Guinness, you could drink it like tap water. Phew, they joked, nothing to it, and held their glasses out to the spigot. After the second drink, Paddy felt warm fuzz in his head, his body dissolving. This drinking lark was easy. He found himself telling Peter and anyone who’d listen bad Irish jokes. Any moment he would be singing them all a song. Perhaps he did sing. ‘My Aunt Jane’. Rose liked that one; maybe he sang it to the men or maybe he went home and sang a verse to her, the one that made her and Evelyn, the wee cutie, laugh:

  My aunt Jane she can dance a jig

  Sing a song ’round a sweetie pig.

  Wee red eyes and a cord for a tail,

  Hanging in a bunch from a

  crooked nail.

  Yes, he must have sung that one, because now he remembers everyone laughing and singing along with him.

  He remembers that he and Peter had their arms around each other, holding each other up. ‘My old mucker,’ Peter said, ‘you’re a bit of a laugh all right.’

  My old mucker. His best friend. It felt grand that he had one.

  After that he and Peter went with the men every Friday afternoon, until a day when too many beers slid down too fast. After the fifth or sixth, he lost count of them, the barman called time, meaning they had to be through in fifteen minutes. ‘Drink up,’ someone shouted, ‘time for another round.’ So that was part of the trick too, to order another drink before the pub closes, swallow it down and get another one in, in the last five minutes, because the barman can’t throw you out while you’re still drinking.

  Paddy felt his vision blur, his knees tremble. And then it was over, and he and Peter were holding themselves up on a lamp post outside, and he was singing ‘Danny Boy’ at the top of his voice, and then, just as suddenly, he began to cry. ‘Oh holy shite,’ he said, ‘don’t mind me, it’s my little brother Danny I have in my mind right now.’ Some of the gang were shovelling him and Peter onto the back of the Post and Telegraph truck that had to be returned to the depot, and soon it began to weave its way back towards Trentham. A military band was playing, the brass making yellow noise; soldiers marched down the road, some special parade from the army camp. It reminded him of the Twelfth of July. He tried to stand up on the back of the truck and salute, was pulled back by the ankles just as he was about to topple over the edge.

  ‘So,’ he shouted above the noise of the truck, ‘you heard the one about the Black and Tans?’

  ‘Who are they?’ Clarrie asked.

  ‘Soldiers. Irish soldiers,’ Peter said. He was drunk too, but not as drunk as Paddy.

  ‘British soldiers actually,’ Paddy said. ‘Because you see we’re part of the UK.’

  ‘Nah, Paddy, you’re an Irishman,’ Clarrie said. ‘So go on, what happened?’

  ‘Well you see, there was your man called Murphy, the rain’s pissing down, and the Black and Tans are going to hang him. Murphy says to the hangman, it’s an awful day, wouldn’t you say? And the hangman, he says, wait for it, he says, you’re lucky, Murphy, I’ve got to walk home in it.’

  ‘Oath, that’s a bad story,’ Clarrie said.

  Back at the huts, Paddy threw up in the grass. Peter stopped him collapsing in his vomit. ‘Jesus, Pete,’ Paddy said, ‘do people ever die from getting drunk?’

  ‘You won’t die, Paddy.’

  ‘You promise?’

  ‘Yeah, sure, I won’t let you die.’

  ‘I reckon you’ll last longer than me, Peter. You’ll live longer.’

  ‘That’s drink talking. Stop, Paddy, stop it.’

  ‘Pete,’ Paddy said, ‘I want to go home. I want my mam.’

  In the morning, Peter said, ‘I said we’d get out of here. I reckon it’s time, Paddy.’

  Gallows humour. Bad jokes, they come flooding back to him. That is what he is like when he’s cut, Rita. You don’t know at all.

  So no, he wasn’t particularly drunk that night. What is the girl in the witness stand going to say next? Has he ever wanted to sleep with her? He supposes so. She had a jaunty air about her that night and a come-hither look. He sees the way the eyes of some of the jurymen follow her. Yes, probably most men would get into her knickers if they could. Not him, not anymore.

  He knows the pale girl is not far away. He can almost catch her scent or what he remembers of it, a fragrance like fresh Irish linen airing on a summer’s day.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ Rita Zilich is saying, ‘round about eleven o’clock, Stella and I went to the toilet. You have to go outside and round the house to get to it out the back. We saw Johnny McBride outside the house, he came out after us. I mean, I don’t think he was actually following me, it just so happened that he came out at the same time. Johnny stood there and talked to us for quite a while, and then Stella went inside. Johnny and I stayed outside for about five minutes, and then Pa
ddy came out from the room where they were having the party. He wanted to know what we were doing. We both said we were just talking. He didn’t seem to believe us. Not that he said so in so many words, but you could sort of tell. Well, as a matter of fact, Johnny McBride had kissed me, but that didn’t seem like Paddy’s business.’

  The judge, a man who looks very old indeed to Albert, pushes his spectacles further up the bridge of his nose. At times he looks as if he is being swallowed by his wig. He has a pale, pinched look around his mouth. His tongue hovers around his lower lip as Rita continues.

  ‘Anyway, they began to fight. I was going to go inside but they’d started this fight.’

  ‘Who struck the first blow?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that. I didn’t really see. I didn’t stay and watch the fight. I went inside and told the boys inside to go out and stop it, so they did. Paddy and Johnny didn’t seem too friendly after that. One of them said something about continuing the fight the next day. I don’t know who said that, honestly, I don’t. I saw that Paddy had a cut over his eye. After that he went and lay down on the bed. There was a boy called Mack who’d been trying to break up the fight. Paddy called him over to the bed, and all of a sudden the fighting started up again. I don’t know what that was about. Everybody joined in the fight and it spilled right outside onto the footpath. They were all mixed up in it. Johnny McBride was part of it. So then we tried to get Johnny into one of the boys’ cars, which he did do, and I got in too and so did Stella, but Paddy said I was to get out. I got out. Paddy was pulling at my arm.’

  ‘I see,’ says Timms, ‘so you were resisting. You were being dragged from the car by the accused?’

  Buchanan bounces to his feet. ‘Objection, your Honour. The witness is being led to this conclusion.’

  ‘Objection sustained. Please continue, Miss Zilich. In your own words.’

  ‘Well, it might have been Paddy, or perhaps it was one of his friends, because Paddy was in a pretty bad way at that stage. Perhaps it was his friend Pooch Quintal.’

  ‘Why, what had happened to Paddy? To Albert Black?’

  ‘Prior to me getting in the car, Johnny kicked Paddy in the stomach. That affected him pretty bad. While I was standing by the car, somebody, I think it was Paddy, had a bottle in his hand, and he went for Johnny’s face with the bottle, so Johnny kicked him in the stomach and he doubled up.’

  ‘So Black attacked Alan Jacques with a broken bottle?’

  ‘Objection, your Honour.’

  ‘Objection overruled. Miss Zilich?’

  ‘Well. I’m not sure. It was in somebody’s hand and I presumed it was Paddy’s, because that’s who Johnny kicked.’

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘Everybody went home, and there was just Paddy and me. I told Paddy I wanted to go home, and I started picking up glasses and bottles and things, tidying up the room. I put them in a beer carton, and also I put a knife in the carton. Paddy lay down on one of the two beds in the room. He asked me to pass him a mirror. I got one down off the wall and gave it to him. It was a big mirror. He looked at his face in the mirror and then he threw it on the ground and it broke. I said to him, what’s the matter Paddy? He said he was going to kill Johnny McBride. I told him not to be silly, if he did that he’d go to jail and get hanged, but he said it didn’t matter. He said he’d probably be dead in a year anyway. So I said to him, you’ve just had too much to drink. He asked me to stay the night but I said no, then I asked him to lend me some money for a taxi and he walked me a little way along the street, down towards the Civic where I caught a taxi.’

  ‘But he said he would kill Johnny McBride?’

  ‘Yes, he said that he’d kill Johnny. I didn’t see him again the next day.’

  CHAPTER 8

  Juvenile delinquency, the words spread like a stain through the Hutt Valley, like ink spreading on blotting paper. Elbe’s was a milk bar in the centre of the Hutt. At the weekends, boys wearing leather jackets congregated on motorbikes, young girls flocking to meet them. And if the girls weren’t up to tricks with the motorbike riders, they were with the boys from their school. Or so it was said. Bodgies and widgies, comic books and Mickey Spillane, suggestive American songs on the hit parades. The bodgies wore stovepipe trousers and thick-soled shoes, and hair greased with Brylcreem touching their collars. And coloured socks. Lime green or red or pink, colour manifesting itself after the drab years of the war. The widgies wore their cardigans back to front with the sleeves pushed up to their elbows, one of the sure signs a girl was going off the rails. Or, pedal-pushers, tight three-quarter-length pants, another sign of degradation. The Prime Minister, a craggy, thick-browed man called Sid Holland, had ordered a report be drawn up so that this delinquent behaviour could be stamped out. Some years before, he’d used strong-armed tactics during a waterfront dispute. A man not to be crossed. What he said went. He had a heavy head and prominent sparkling dentures, the people’s man, going by the results on one election night after another. Sex, he made clear (although he preferred the term carnal knowledge), was not something polite people talked about, and young people had no right to get up to it. Young girls needed protecting from themselves. (It wasn’t so bad for boys.) They would never get husbands if they got up to tricks beforehand. If a girl fell pregnant, she got sent away, out of sight, or hastily married in her parents’ front room if the father could be captured. That is, and here voices lowered even further, if the girl knew for sure who the father was. Or if she was even old enough to get married. The morals scandal smouldered up and down the country, but it was the Hutt Valley, with its long, straight rows of plain state houses, beneath the bush-clad hills, beside the wide and swirling river, that was seen as the place where vice had been ignited.

  Oswald Mazengarb was Holland’s friend, a man with a long face not unlike the Prime Minister’s, and they were frequent visitors at each other’s houses. Sid Holland did magic tricks after dinner at the Mazengarb house, disappearing things beneath handkerchiefs, doing shadow play with his hands, it was reported. It was Mazengarb, his God-fearing Baptist friend, whom Holland had called upon to chair a committee of inquiry into the morals of teenagers all over the country. The report that Mazengarb wrote would be spilled into public view, posted to every household in the country, just before the next election. Meantime, the inquiry progressed with revelations that increasingly shocked the older generation and troubled anxious parents. All this was unfolding in the year that Peter and Paddy went to live at Rose’s house.

  Rose had known from the start that she wouldn’t turn away the two young men who arrived on her doorstep. As far as she was concerned, they were there to stay. The children were entranced by them, the boys trying to imitate the way they talked, the little girl Evelyn staring at them with rapt attention, as if she had two fathers rather than none at all. The first few nights Peter and Paddy stayed, they bunked down, as she put it. She couldn’t get her head around calling Paddy by the name Albert; it just wasn’t a name that New Zealanders went in for much these days, one of those names reserved for monuments and parks. When she had sorted her head out about this change in the family’s circumstances, she took down the striped brown and orange curtains in the enclosed sun porch and washed them on a sunny day, watching them blow on her clothesline like tiger lilies, suddenly feeling happier than she had since her husband died. At the back of her linen cupboard she found some unused pillow slips that she had had since her wedding day, waiting for goodness knows what, and it was silly to keep them when they could be put to good use now. Into the wash they went, then she pegged them on the line too, so that the sky seemed to be billowing with colour and extra clouds. Later, down at the second-hand mart, she found a pretty rug that scrubbed up well, and a basket-weave chair. She’d keep her eye out for a second one. When the two beds were made up side by side, the room looked homely and just right.

  While she was picking through the goods at the mart, a woman she knew only slightly, a plump, short woman, one of th
e Naenae crowd who were regulars at the Cosmopolitan Club, or the Cossie, as they called it, came up to her. Rose knew about the Cossie, because she heard it mentioned when she went to parents’ night at the school. The Club had a bar, and cheap meals, and pool tables. It was a place women could go with their husbands, not like the pub, but as she didn’t have a husband it wasn’t a place she could or even wanted to go. Her life was outside of all that. It was the way it had to be.

  The woman, whose name was Sally, said, ‘I see you’ve got some young men, Rose. That should keep you busy.’

  Rose felt herself flush. ‘They’re kids,’ she said. ‘They need somewhere to stay for a bit.’

  ‘Big kids. Teenagers more like it.’

  Rose felt compelled to respond. ‘One of them is,’ she said. She wasn’t the only widow out here in the Valley, but most of the others were war widows, which, strictly speaking, she was not because her husband had died later. For the children’s sake she wanted to avoid a quarrel. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell Sally to mind her own business. Instead she said, knowing it sounded awkward, ‘The older one’s in his twenties.’ Straight away, she saw that this was the wrong thing to have said.

  Sally raised her eyebrows, a smile tweaking the corner of her mouth. ‘Golly, that’s corker, Rose. A real bloke.’

  ‘They’re from the United Kingdom,’ Rose said. ‘Two boys who came on the same boat, they’re mates.’

  ‘I didn’t say a word, Rose,’ Sally said. ‘But you want to keep an eye on them. You know what they’re saying about the kids out here, they’re out of control.’

  ‘Yours might be, I wouldn’t know.’

  As if she hadn’t heard this, Sally circled the forefinger and thumb of her left hand, using the forefinger of her right to poke back and forwards through it. ‘At the pictures, down on the river bank. There’s that big report everyone’s talking about.’