This Mortal Boy

by Fiona Kidman

  After several days a farmer from the south was tracked down and called on to travel north and identify the dead youth. Yes, he said, when he saw him at the mortuary, that’s him, Alan Jacques.

  The farmer told police he had employed the boy when he first came to New Zealand. He’d been gone about a year. The kid didn’t much like being in the country, and complained about the work. ‘Anyone would think he’d appreciate the country life and the opportunities here,’ the farmer told reporters who had waited outside while he made the identification. ‘I don’t know, he kept saying he wanted to go home, didn’t like milking cows.’

  ‘What about the sisters?’ he was asked.

  ‘I had those girls at the farm the first summer to give them a bit of a holiday. The younger one was pretty useful at haymaking time. I reckon she’d be about thirteen then. The other one was older.’

  ‘Was the boy violent when he was working on the farm?’ a reporter asked.

  ‘Not that I saw. Well, he used to read those books, you know the ones Mazengarb banned. Quite right too, I should have taken them off him, we’re a decent family. Don’t ask me where he got them. He knocked around with a rough crowd in his days off, perhaps they gave them to him. I did hear he got into some scraps when he was in town.’

  ‘Did you ever give him a hiding?’ the reporter asked.

  ‘That’s enough of that. He did all right at my place, he had a bunk in the lean-to. I didn’t take any lip from him. Anyway, he went into the army after he turned eighteen.’

  Perhaps it was the army where he’d learned to fight, the farmer reflected. But how would he know, he hadn’t offered to give him a job on the farm when he came out of the military, and he hadn’t come looking for one. There were plenty more where he came from. All he knew was that the boy lying on the slab in there was Alan Jacques and he had nothing more to say.

  It had been Oliver’s duty to inform Albert Black of his victim’s identity. (It was hard to know what to call him, or either of them. Paddy or Albert? Alan or Johnny? Formal or informal? He felt that he should keep his professional distance, but Paddy seemed to fit best.) He watched the stunned look on Paddy’s face, the growing bewilderment. ‘Why didn’t he tell me?’

  ‘What difference would it have made?’ Oliver asked, trying to conceal a hint of sarcasm.

  ‘Perhaps I could have been a friend to him. He wanted to go home, just like me.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem as if Johnny wanted friends,’ Oliver said, softening a little.

  ‘He was just a lad. Younger than me. I should have known.’

  ‘Known better than to kill him? We could agree on that.’

  Paddy put his head down almost to his knees and wept. ‘I didn’t mean to,’ he said. ‘I meant to frighten him. I thought — oh well, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘You thought what?’

  ‘I thought that I would scare him off, give him a bit of a nick, and maybe I’d serve time and get deported back home. Well, something like that, I wasn’t thinking very clearly. I’m so sorry. Oh, the stupid little shite.’

  Oliver asks his sons if they read Mickey Spillane’s novels. They smile, shrug and tell him it’s kids’ stuff. The older one is doing a degree in English literature. At the moment he is reading the works of Thomas Hardy. Oliver recalls a phrase of Hardy’s. Wasn’t it he who said that For every bad there is a worse?

  Oliver has read The Long Wait and is repelled. It startles him now that someone could identify so closely with the amnesiac anti-hero of Spillane’s novel. He marks a paragraph in the book: One was going to die. One was going to get both arms broken … one was going to get a beating that would leave the marks of the lash striped across the skin for all the years left to live. Was it possible that, like the character at the book’s centre, Alan Jacques had so lost his own sense of identity that he believed in the new one?

  He stays up late re-reading the book with a mounting feeling of self-disgust. In spite of himself, he is compelled to read on. His family lie sleeping as he reads. When he finishes, he steps outside. It is a clear night in the beautiful garden. The stars sparkle with a sharp, edgy brilliance. Stars have always fascinated him, and now at close to midnight he sees the Milky Way trailing its pale radiance across the sky. In the northern hemisphere, summer will have moved into autumn. Oliver cannot imagine wanting to live anywhere else but here in Auckland. He has tried living abroad and it didn’t suit him. But the young men in this tragedy — neither of them wanted to be where they were, and one has already died. His sympathy for Alan Jacques has been aroused, but he sees that it’s possible that what Albert Black has been saying might well be true too, that he was terrified of Alan Jacques, the boy who called himself Johnny McBride.

  If Black saw himself as an outsider, Jacques’ feelings went further than that. The outcast. Someone was going to die and, as it so happened, it was him.

  Horace Haywood knows he should be at home with his wife. Since they transferred north to Mount Eden prison, she has few friends. Instead, she comes to the prison and visits the inmates. She brings them treats, sweets and home baking, and sits talking to them when they are down, as if she were their mother. Their children, because he is in charge of them, the father figure. The circumstances are unusual, he knows that, and the surprised prisoners know it too. Sometimes, when one of the men is particularly unhappy, Ettie will put her arms around him and comfort him. She has tried this comforting approach with Albert Black, but he seems, in some respects, his own man. Black never discusses his crime with other prisoners, nor with the superintendent, and certainly not with the superintendent’s wife. There are days when he sits in his cell and sings to himself, and this is disconcerting in itself. Although Black laughs and exchanges cigarettes with men in the exercise yard, Haywood sees him as standing aloof from what took place on the day Alan Jacques died, almost as if he didn’t believe it happened. It troubles the superintendent. If the man is found guilty and sentenced to death, it will be his duty to supervise his welfare from the time sentence is passed until the execution takes place. And, after that, there is still the family with whom he must communicate and relay the final words, the last moments of a man’s life.

  Neither he nor Ettie enjoy a life beyond the prison walls. Once the killing of a man is done, it’s so easy to encounter his friends and relatives who live in the city. This is unspoken between them, but both he and Ettie know. At least the family of Black, if he is found guilty, live far away where the superintendent won’t have to see them. It is impossible for him to forget the mother of the Englishman, Frederick Foster, who has so recently been in New Zealand to plead for her son’s life, and remained in the city after his death. Not that he blames her, she was a fighter; it angers him that Black is not fighting more, because he can’t fight for him.

  ‘How do you think the case is going?’ he asks Des Ball, pushing the whisky bottle towards him. They will have one more, he thinks, and then he really will be away home. It won’t do for him to stay here another night. That is how chaos and riots begin, the warders slacking on their duty, the men taking advantage.

  ‘The girl was a bit at sixes and sevens on the stand,’ Des says.

  ‘Too early to tell what the jury’s thinking.’

  ‘Buchanan’s going for manslaughter?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘On the grounds of provocation? That’s stretching it a bit, isn’t it? It was going on twenty-four hours since he got a hiding from Jacques. Was he still hankering after the girl?’

  ‘Who knows? He didn’t look at her when she was on the stand, just looked straight ahead.’

  ‘It’s as if he doesn’t understand he could die too. What’s with him, does he want to die? Doesn’t he understand that death is forever? None of us are immortal.’ Haywood’s voice is angry. ‘I’ve watched too many men swing since I’ve been here. You know, I worked in the Paparua prison quarry down south. I worked alongside the men for seventeen years. I never thought I’d be selected for a job lik
e this. I thought the world was as rock solid as the stone in the quarry. I believed God took care of things. Do you believe in God, Ball?’

  ‘Sort of. I was brought up a Catholic, sir.’

  ‘I might have guessed. I watch the priest when we execute men in this prison. He’s a good man, Father Downey, a good man. He makes the sign of the cross and I see how he’s suffering. But I wonder if he really believes God is lifting up this poor sod we’re just cutting down from the gallows, and putting him in some better place. Perhaps you can tell me, Ball? I hope it’s just darkness when my time comes. Perhaps that’s what Black wants too.’

  After a while, broken only by the echoing shouts of men in their cells, Des says, slowly, ‘Black doesn’t want to die. I think he still hopes he’ll be deported.’

  ‘Sent back to Ireland? Well, I hope it stays fine for him.’ Haywood stands, unsteady on his feet again. ‘Got to go home,’ he says. ‘Have to go home to Ettie. Time for an early night.’

  ‘The dinner in the oven. Yeah, I know, tell me about it.

  ’ Haywood looks at his warder with sudden sharpness. ‘You go home too, Des. Go home. Marge all right?’

  ‘Not bad, sir.’

  ‘Children all right?’

  ‘So far as I know, sir. Don’t see them so much. They’re growing fast.’

  ‘You’re a fortunate man, Des, you know that? Fortunate.’

  After the second day of Rita Zilich’s testimony, the jury gathers again at the Station Hotel for drinks in the upstairs lounge bar. James Taylor has a knack for remembering what everyone drinks. Ken McKenzie wants to escape to his room; he still hasn’t accustomed himself to the closeness of the space he and the eleven other jurors occupy. The small room at the courthouse where they take recesses, drink tea, eat lunch together is claustrophobic. The window is a push-up one. The Classics lecturer, whose name is Arthur, has claimed its ledge for himself, perching on its sill, so that he sits slightly above them, and for the most part feigns indifference to the conversations around him, moodily smoking Camels while leaning his head on his fingertips with his free hand. At the hotel, he orders a whisky sour straight up, drinks it quickly, eyeing the door.

  ‘What did we make of the evidence today?’ Taylor says.

  ‘Still say she’s a lovely girl,’ Jack Cuttance says. ‘Smart too, if you ask me, but I wouldn’t trust her.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Neville Johns says, puffing away on his pipe. ‘A bear with a moderately-sized brain, I’d say.’

  Two or three of the men nod in agreement.

  ‘A good typist if what she says is true,’ the accountant offers. ‘I’d probably hire her.’

  ‘So what do you think, young Kenneth?’

  Ken blushes, wishing he’d been passed over.

  The lecturer says, with weary impatience, ‘Mr McKenzie reddens. I’m sure he admires Miss Zilich for attributes beside her typing skills.’

  Ken sits up straight. ‘I think she’s missing some things out of her evidence. That’s what I think.’

  ‘Really? What makes you say that?’ Taylor leans forward, balancing his gin and tonic on one knee.

  ‘I don’t know exactly. It was just the way her eyes looked over to her friends when she was being cross-examined.’

  ‘But surely she was just seeking reassurance? It’s a huge thing for a young lass like that to take the stand,’ Taylor says.

  ‘I think she liked Paddy, Albert Black that is, and now she doesn’t want her boyfriend to know. I don’t think she told the truth about everything, the way it all happened. She made it sound like she was forced to stay with the defendant, but then she told him she couldn’t stay the whole night with him. She had to get back home before her parents found out she was missing.’

  Arthur, despite his languid appearance, has begun to pay attention. ‘But he couldn’t get it up, he had a limp penis. Wouldn’t that be enough to make her want to go home?’

  ‘No, I don’t think it was like that,’ Ken says. As he speaks, he finds himself wanting to piss, just like when he was in school and the teacher wouldn’t stop asking him questions he couldn’t answer. ‘She said she couldn’t stay the night before Paddy couldn’t get an erection. She didn’t know he couldn’t.’ He stops then, sure now he is going to piss himself.

  Jack Cuttance, coming to his rescue, says, ‘Poke her. She didn’t know he couldn’t poke her.’

  Taylor is nodding, looking wise. ‘We’ll have to see what the next witnesses have to say. Well, they hung that chap Foster. It’s a big decision.’

  ‘Hanged,’ the lecturer says. ‘They hanged Frederick Foster. Pictures get hung, people get hanged.’

  Taylor turns away in anger.

  The lecturer has changed his mind about leaving. He goes to the bar and orders himself a second whisky sour. ‘Perhaps you’ve got a point,’ he mutters out of the side of his mouth as he passes Ken. ‘Work in progress. Not that it changes much. I mean, what does it matter who she wanted to fuck? She’s of age, she can fuck who she likes. Or, young Kenneth, are you a good moral boy at heart, a true blue conservative farm boy on the lookout for a virgin? Good luck with that. A knife in the back’s still just that. A severed spinal cord and a whole lot of blood.’

  ‘Black got beaten up.’

  ‘Aha. So you really are sympathetic to the accused?’

  ‘I might have done it myself. If I’d been him.’ He didn’t mean to say this, it just slips out.

  Arthur looks at him in surprise, with a glimmer of dawning respect. ‘Well. That’s big talk. I wouldn’t have thought it.’

  ‘I know how to use a knife. As farm boys do. We learn how to slit an animal’s throat when we have to. Sir.’

  ‘The meaning of life is that it stops then?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Ask Kafka’s pardon. Oh, never mind. We’re all animals. When we’re dead, son, we’re dead. I tend to agree with you. Albert Black shouldn’t swing. Up to us really, isn’t it?’

  CHAPTER 15

  The boy on the witness stand is nervous. The seventeen-year-old wasn’t supposed to be in Auckland the day Alan Jacques died. Stan Cameron told his parents he was going to stay at a friend’s house for a few nights, the same as he often did. He would stay for the weekend and for a few days afterwards. His family live at the top end of Tinakori Road in Wellington, opposite the Botanic Gardens, in a house overlooking the magnolia trees. He is a printing apprentice, working on the morning newspaper; the presses roll into the early hours of the morning. In winter it is a fair walk into town if he misses the bus, what with the wind whipping through the cavernous spaces of the trees in the park. By next summer he hopes to have saved enough money for a bicycle. Instead of the story he told his parents, when work finished and the paper boys were delivering the first edition, he caught a bus to Auckland. In his head, he told himself he could get away with taking a day off work. He would be there and back before anyone knew he had gone. It was just that he longed to see what Auckland looked like.

  He had heard that it was a big place and that things happened there. Nothing happened in Wellington. Nothing. Not that he could find. He hadn’t imagined that this secret excursion of his would land up on the front pages of the very newspaper he worked for. His employers had been generous, or perhaps his mother had been pitiable enough when she went to plead on his behalf for his job once he’d come home. Now he is back in Auckland and almost all of the players of those two nightmare days are present in the room. All except one, and he is dead.

  In Auckland, Stan booked into a rooming house in Symonds Street. He paid ten shillings up front, and found himself sleeping on one side of a double bed with a man on the other. The idea that you might find yourself sharing a bed with another person in cheap digs had never occurred to him, and it made him nervous, finding himself in this situation. The other man appeared young, although he was tall with heavy shoulders. He wore unusual clothes. Stan put out the light before he took off his shirt and trousers and climbed care
fully into bed, clinging to the edge.

  The man said his name was Johnny McBride. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I fancy girls.’

  They slept back to back. Johnny snored off and on, and the boy thought Johnny smelled of booze and sweat. Eventually, he fell into an uneasy sleep. At some time in the night he woke and was sure he heard his companion sob, although his breathing suggested he was still asleep.

  ‘You need a feed,’ Johnny said in the morning, as if it was established that they were friends. ‘I know a place that’s open all night, seven days a week.’

  It was Sunday morning, Ye Olde Barn cafe almost empty, except for a couple of older men reading the Sports Post.

  That was the beginning of a friendship that lasted two days.

  They drank sly grog in a flat in Onehunga. The flat was the home of Ray Hastie, although he said his real name was Rainton; apparently everybody went by this name or that in Auckland. The walls of the flat were decorated with posters of girls wearing bikinis, and there was one daring picture that covered half a wall, creased where it had been folded, of a girl with big breasts and not a stitch on her. Her arse was arched towards the camera’s gaze. Is that your girlfriend? he’d asked Ray, but Ray had just laughed and said you wouldn’t catch him with just one girl, girls were more fun when they were in numbers. Someday he was going to have a house full of them, so that he could look at them all day long.

  The boy had been hankering to try his luck at getting admitted to a pub, something he wouldn’t dare in his hometown. The next day he went with Johnny to the Albert Hotel, where he was served without anyone raising so much as an eyebrow. As the day passed, he guessed he wouldn’t be at work on Tuesday, or perhaps even Wednesday. Already he would have been missed. It would cost him a toll call to ring the newspaper office in Wellington and they would guess it wasn’t true if he said he was sick.