This Mortal Boy

by Fiona Kidman

  In the morning he was gone. An envelope with a week’s board inside sat on her mantelpiece. Peter looked drawn and sad. After a week or more had passed she received a letter with a forwarding address for mail C/- Mr P. Donovan, 105 Wellesley Street, Auckland. For when the immigration authorities came looking for him.

  CHAPTER 9

  At the Station Hotel, the jury gather for their second night. Ken McKenzie is becoming accustomed to this comfortable existence. All the same, he is pleased to be free of the close proximity of his fellow jurors. They have sat all day, shoulders and thighs pressing against each other, watching the parade of the judiciary, as far removed from his own life as they are from those of the accused and the witnesses. The sky outside is a tender addled blue, so that he senses the wind has dropped. He wants to go out in the fresh air and walk to the wharves and watch the ferries and hear the gulls cry. Instead, they must stay in this fancy Art Nouveau palace, with its arched ceilings and decorated bar, pontificating about the evidence they have heard during the day. He thinks it hasn’t gone well for Albert Black.

  As he stands, beer in hand, Jack Cuttance edges over to him. ‘What do you reckon about the girl’s evidence?’

  ‘I don’t know what to make of it,’ Ken says slowly. ‘My old man used to say there are two sides to every story.’

  ‘Hot little number. I reckon her undercut’s dripping.’ Jack gives his butcher’s laugh at his own joke. Ken can hear him in his shop when he is exchanging gossip with customers he knows well, men picking up orders for their wives, young men buying chops and sausages for barbecues on the beach.

  ‘She said she didn’t sleep with him, not all the way.’ Ken is suddenly defensive towards the girl, even though he had thought her too glib, too ready in her evidence. The story that came out had tripped off her tongue too easily for his liking. ‘I reckon she set her cap at young Albert and then changed her mind when she got a better offer.’

  ‘If you call Johnny McBride a better offer. I saw his picture. He looked as if he was missing a couple of teeth.’

  It had been in the papers at the time of the death, the story of it taking three days to verify the identity of the man killed at Ye Olde Barn cafe, a seaman going by the name of Johnny McBride. That, as it turned out, was the name of a character in a novel called The Long Wait by Mickey Spillane. Instead, he was revealed as Alan Jacques. When he died he’d been wearing a bright yellow and red pullover under a sports jacket, narrow trousers and emerald-green socks. A farmer had come from the south to identify him. Not much more than a boy, a child migrant who had been in the country just two years, shipped out to New Zealand with two younger sisters: old to be sent on the scheme, and old enough to be sent on his military training the day he turned eighteen. In the year before he was conscripted, he had worked on the farmer’s land. A bitter little story, Ken thinks. ‘Sounds like he lived in fantasy land,’ he says, for want of anything else.

  ‘So who really did start the fight?’ Cuttance wonders.

  Smooth James Taylor sidles over, gin and tonic in hand. ‘Now lads, what’ll you be having?’

  ‘I’m fine, sir. Thank you,’ Ken says.

  ‘Pretty cut and dried, wouldn’t you say? That girl’s a smart youngster. Mind you, if she were my girl I’d give her a good spanking, hopping out of the window like that.’

  Ken looks out of the hotel window, choosing his words. ‘Well, sir, if she lied to her mother, she could lie to the judge.’

  Taylor looks him up and down. ‘I see. Bush lawyer are you, Mr McKenzie?’ He holds out his hand for Jack Cuttance’s glass.

  Night has closed in around Mount Eden prison. From the outside it is lit in Gothic relief by searchlights fanning the perimeter. Horace Haywood, the superintendent, sits in his office, whisky bottle at his elbow. He pushes it towards Des Ball.

  ‘You reckon it went badly for Black today?’

  Des fills his tumbler. This is how these nights begin, Horace in his cups, looking for solace and company. The hanging of Eric Allwood has affected him, the way all the hangings do. Mount Eden is the only prison in the country where people are hanged these days, strung up on gallows in a corner of the yard, dropped off a makeshift scaffolding into oblivion. Des was present at Allwood’s death, a warder considered to cope well with these occasions. The hangings are not condoned by all. The managers in the justice system are against them. They have been urging prison reform. Rehabilitate, they are saying, send men out better than they came in. But Sid Holland’s government has said let them hang. His strong-armed Minister of Justice, the silver-haired Jack Marshall, has supported him all the way.

  ‘It wasn’t what I expected when I took this job,’ Haywood says. It’s not the first time he has said this to Des. His rise through the ranks of the prison system has been exceptional. For seventeen years he managed a prison quarry in the south. All of a sudden he was plucked from obscurity and given promotion, and as soon as one promotion was conferred another one followed. Now here he was, superintendent of the country’s best-known prison. And barely had his new position registered than the death penalty, dormant for years, was reintroduced.

  It is part of his work to prepare the condemned men for the gallows. To him falls the task of transferring the prisoner from his cell to a holding one in the east wing basement. It is he who pinions the prisoner’s arms and he who fits the hood on arrival at the scaffold gate. It is he, Horace Haywood, who must position the noose tightly around the neck of the condemned; he who must signal to the hangman when it is time for the lever to be released. None of this rests easily with him. Once he had believed in God. For all those years when he had worked close to prisoners in the quarry he had believed — although perhaps he wouldn’t have put it in so many words (but his wife may well have done) — that the light of God shone in every man, that nobody was beyond redemption. Now he is not sure that God is all that interested in what happens to men in prison.

  ‘Doesn’t it bother you?’ he asks again of Des. ‘The hangings. Doesn’t it turn your stomach?’

  Each time, Des says no, it is the way of the law, something that has to be done.

  ‘I don’t want to see another one die,’ Haywood says. ‘It’s politics, you know. It’s the government that wants them put to death.’

  Des hesitates. ‘The Prime Minister believes in taking a strong line.’

  ‘The Prime Minister, oh yes. Him and Mazengarb and slippery Jack, great mates, the lot of them. Gentleman Jack, they call Marshall. Some gentleman. Major John Marshall — you’d have thought he’d seen enough killing on the battlefields to be sick of it. But no, he wants more. I suppose that’s why Sid Holland made him the Attorney-General.’

  ‘I don’t know what to think, sir. I just do my job.’

  ‘Your job? Yes, I suppose so. You do a good job, Ball. I like young Black. Decent manners, a quiet bloke, he doesn’t give us any trouble. I’ve had some long talks with him.’

  This is another thing about Haywood: he is a man who will sit in the cell with a man. It is unusual, but then Haywood is. So is his wife Ettie. An energetic prancing woman, some might call flighty, the way she dances about like a flitting bird. She organises a band within the prison and brings small gifts to the men, puts her arms around them when they cry. Des thinks they are the children she and Horace never had, and it bothers him. They are too close to the men. He has been in the service for twenty years himself; it doesn’t occur to him to like a criminal. At least it’s something he hasn’t thought about. He believes he likes Horace Haywood nonetheless. In the beginning it had suited him that he could provide consolation for this odd, soft-hearted man. It gave him a role in a prison that put him above other guards. But time has passed, and he finds himself drawn to Haywood, sensing something indefinable about his nature that he might draw upon for himself, but it is always just out of reach. At least they can drink together. It’s against the rules, but a bottle of whisky is permissible in the jail when there is a hanging — an excuse that Haywood stretche
s.

  ‘Paddy’s got a bit of lip when it suits him,’ Des says. ‘A bit of a temper.’

  ‘He doesn’t show it to me. He talks of his mother and little brother. Not so much of his father. I gather he was away at the war. Paddy’s been through the Blitz. He remembers it.’

  ‘It doesn’t give him a licence to kill.’

  ‘And what about us? Eh?’ Horace drums his fingers on the desk. ‘What of the priest and all the people who have to witness it? I still see Freddie Foster, fighting for his life on the scaffold.’ Foster had killed someone in a milk bar, a girl he was in love with whom he’d intended to frighten with a gun, only it went off. Or that’s what he said, but the jury didn’t believe him. There had been uproar over that one, pleas for clemency, an unholy row in the newspapers, and his mother coming all the way out from England to plead for his life with Jack Marshall. Not that it made a blind bit of difference. Haywood runs his hand over his head and shudders. When Foster was led up the gallows he went berserk. The hangman poked his fingers in his eyes to keep him still. ‘Allwood made it too easy for us. He died brave.’

  ‘He knew he was in for it, sir. He was a murderer.’

  ‘Well, I can’t say I cared for the man. He did a lot of talk about how he was going to create trouble, but in the end he didn’t. I don’t know, it’s almost easier when there’s a bit of a fuss. It felt like leading a lamb to slaughter. Have you ever watched sheep being led to the kill on the freezing works? No? There is a Judas sheep that leads the way. It’s a big pet wether that trots ahead and the other sheep blindly follow to the place where the trapdoor opens and they fall through it to the killing floor. And then the Judas sheep trots away to the side of the pen where it gets a little treat.’ He bangs his glass down. ‘You know that Black has been seeing the priest?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You know why?’

  ‘He spreads his charms, that lad.’

  ‘Doesn’t it tell you that he’s a man of conscience? He wants to do right by the girl.’

  ‘He hasn’t talked to me about a girl. Black’s life has been full of girls. You have only to look on the witness stand.’

  ‘This one is different. I can tell.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s time to turn in,’ Des says. Drink is making Haywood maudlin. Sooner or later Des must take himself home and face poor battered Marge. The thought of Marge fills him with uncontrollable rage, a desire to punish her for frailty and her illness, and her persistent uncomplaining loyalty. Somehow he must get in his car and weave his way through the back streets of Auckland and sleep off nightmares. At least the children will be in bed. He doesn’t see his children often. That’s Marge, keeping them out of his way. Well, who can blame her? But he does.

  Haywood turns a bleary face in his direction, filling his glass to the brim. ‘You go off. Give our love to Marge. Very fine woman. You and me both, wonderful wives.’

  ‘Sir,’ Des says, ‘Miss Zilich will be cross-examined tomorrow. Perhaps her story won’t hold.’

  Haywood’s face lights up momentarily. ‘Hope then?’

  ‘You should go home, sir.’

  Haywood raises his glass. ‘Sleep here, I think.’ His head slides to one side.

  A boarding house of sorts, or so it was described. Paddy arrived in Auckland after an overnight train journey through the central heart of the country late in January. He had slept little. The train stopped often at sidings and small towns lit by dim lanterns over station platforms, staying a few minutes, then seemingly picking itself up with a long mournful blast of its whistle, hurtling further on into the night. Twice there were stops long enough for the passengers to alight and join a crush of people at a counter where they bought food. He remembers buying a pie and a cup of tea in a thick white cup at one stop, a rock cake and more tea somewhere else. He sat upright in a second-class seat, and in the shadowy darkness of summer he glimpsed canyons of bush and, it seemed to him, desolation. His heart felt as if it would explode with grief. He had left behind the only people in the country who cared about him, the woman who had looked after him as if she were his mother, his friend who had emigrated with him, children who had welcomed his presence, the wee cutie who had danced on his feet.

  Peter had been awake when he left. He was lying under the covers of the bed, smoking a cigarette. Paddy didn’t care for the way Peter smoked in bed, it made his head fuzzy and his eyes ache, but sharing a room was a small price to pay for living in that house.

  ‘Paddy, my old mucker, don’t go,’ Peter said, as Paddy stuffed his duds into his suitcase.

  ‘I have to, mate. I’ve got to get home to Ireland. It’s all right for you.’ He wasn’t sure why he said this, but as he sat on the train bearing him away from his life in Naenae, he thought it was because he got letters from home and Peter didn’t. Putting together the pieces of Peter’s life, it seemed he had been without parents for a long time, although Peter never said what had happened to them. There were places he couldn’t go in his friend’s life. At some point he had had education. He had a future mapped out, and the difference between them was that Peter’s would happen in New Zealand. He would get a good job and marry and have children. They would speak with a different accent from their father’s. They would grow up to give him grandchildren who might have only the vaguest idea of where Liverpool was, and Peter would be content with that. Paddy didn’t see his life like that at all. It belonged in the crowded streets of Belfast with the Black Mountain in the distance and the River Lagan streaming between its banks, and he and his family crossing Boyne Bridge on the day of the Orange Parade. Perhaps he would get a job at the shipbuilding yards now that he was nineteen, going on twenty. Titanic was built in those shipyards, the biggest, grandest ship in the world. Only it had sunk on its maiden voyage. This was how his life felt right now: a grand dream that had no substance at all, a journey into a lost place.

  The tip of Peter’s cigarette had glowed as Paddy turned out the light and walked out. He imagined the child Evelyn getting up in the morning, looking for him at breakfast and, later in the day, waiting for him to be dropped off at the gate by the P & T truck, the dawning realisation that he wouldn’t be back. Not ever, although Evelyn wasn’t to know he planned to leave the country as soon as he could.

  The long day stretched ahead of him with nothing to do except lug his suitcase around, or sit on a park bench watching pigeons fight over food scraps. In the afternoon he went to the Waterloo Hotel, across the road from the railway station, only to be told by the barman that they didn’t serve minors and to take himself off. An unseasonal wind had risen, or perhaps that was the way it always was in Wellington, summer and winter, wind rising on street corners and whirling fish and chip papers around your legs. He would be pleased to be gone. There was nothing for it but to sit the day out at the cavernous railway station. In the late afternoon he glimpsed the Hutt Valley unit preparing to leave. For a moment he considered jumping on it and going back to Naenae; it took all his resolve to remain where he was. He dozed, woke in starts, until it was seven thirty and the Northern Express was snorting and heaving smoke at platform eight, and he was borne away at last.

  Towards morning, as the train slid through Auckland’s suburbs, a man older than him woke after what appeared to be a good night’s sleep, shook his watch and leaned over to ask Paddy for the time. They got talking after that. The man was from Auckland, a school teacher who had spent the summer in Wellington and was now going back for the beginning of the school year.

  ‘No good asking you where to find work,’ Paddy said.

  ‘Oh, there’s always something going. Meat works, digging ditches, depends on how tough you are.’ The new friend had worked over long holidays when he was a student; he knew what was on offer.

  ‘I’ve got to find somewhere to stay first.’

  ‘Yeah, I can fix you up with that. My aunty’s got a boarding house.’ He wrote down an address and a telephone number on a small pad he’d pulled from his pocket. ‘Give
her a bell when you get to the station.’

  He’d taken a taxi from the station, not knowing how far he would have to lug his suitcase. The early-morning air felt soft and warmer than in the south. The car passed up a long main street that the driver told him was Queen Street. There were shops and cafes, not open yet for business but full of possibility. Before the car turned left, he saw an avenue flanked by grand old oak trees. They travelled past a department store with mannequins stylishly attired in the windows, a small hotel called the Albion, a splendid church that looked like ones back in Belfast, climbed a ridge, and there, within walking distance of the main street, the house he was looking for. It was a rambling place, steps leading up to a rickety veranda that ran along the front and both sides of the house.

  Paddy guessed the teacher had been having him on about the landlady being his aunt. The woman, who introduced herself as Gladys Wallace, Mrs Gladys Wallace if he didn’t mind, claimed never to have heard of him. She was a thin older woman with blonde hair, and even this early in the morning she wore a bright slash of lipstick.

  ‘You could be just the person I’m looking for,’ she said. ‘Have a look around.’

  Mystified, he followed her into the house, which seemed oddly empty for a boarding establishment. The front room, above the street, was furnished with a plain table and an upright chair, and three easy chairs with curved wooden arms, the seats upholstered a long time ago with brick-red moquette. This room opened to a cubicle that held two single beds. A radio stood on the shelf above. Four more bedrooms flanked a passageway with blue flocked wallpaper, the doors heavily varnished. One of the rooms was locked. Albert took it to be Gladys’s. The lavatory was outside, like at home, approached through a side door along one of the verandas, back down more steps and along a path.

  ‘So what do you think?’

  ‘Very nice,’ he said.

  ‘Good. You look respectable. I need a caretaker. I have to leave here, you see, for the time being. I’ve got a friend. He’s asked me to go and stay across the harbour and help look after his sick old mum for a while.’ She winked at Paddy then. ‘That’s why there’s nobody here, I let them all go, a bunch of scruffs, not someone I could leave in charge. I’d rather have somebody in the house, mind you, than leave it standing empty. I’d knock a quid off your rent if you kept an eye on the place for a bit. What do you say, lad?’