This Mortal Boy

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘I’ll get you,’ Jack says, his teacup rattling in his saucer.

  ‘There you go,’ Frank says, and smiles. ‘You know, if I’d got my hands on them when they were at school, I’d have thrashed the daylights out of the little sods. I’d have straightened them out.’

  It reminds Ken of the woodwork teacher who walloped him when he was at school. He sees the man’s veins standing out on his forehead, his eyes popping as if they were about to burst. Old Crackers the Whacker, they called his teacher, and here he is, cooped up with a man just like that, and it frightens him. Somebody, the night watchman, he thinks, begins to shout at them all to shut up, and the volume of noise goes up in the cramped room so that it feels as if they are angry animals trapped in a cage. There is banging on the door; it is flung open by a court official. They must be silent or they will be stood down from the jury if they cannot contain themselves, they are told. Do they want to force the abandonment of the trial?

  A silence descends, a shuffling of feet, Neville puffing on his pipe with heavy pouf poufs. Arthur, the lecturer, breaks it, saying, ‘We’re told Albert Black’s going to take the stand. Why don’t we leave tearing each other to pieces until the defence has had its say?’ He puts his hand on Ken’s shoulder as they file out.

  And so there he is, the killer on the stand, his hands clenched by his sides, his handsome face, which has been set and stony throughout the unfolding evidence, giving little away as he speaks. His voice seems drained of emotion as he begins.

  ‘I am the accused. I was born in Belfast, North of Ireland. I’m twenty on the sixteenth of July past. When I came to New Zealand, I was eighteen years old.’ He describes how he’d been a caretaker at 105 Wellesley Street West, how he had lived there alone for a time, with the occasional person coming to stay.

  ‘I met Johnny McBride approximately a month before my arrest. I first saw him at Ye Olde Barn,’ he says. ‘He was talking to a girl I knew at that time. He spoke to me then. I can’t remember the exact words, but the effect of the conversation was that he had no place to sleep that night, so I asked him to come up to my place and spend a few nights till he got on his feet. He did that. We got on quite sociable at first. He stayed for about eleven days all told until I said he’d have to find another place to stay because the landlady was coming. I was worried about that because I had no authority to have anybody else in the house. I thought she might think he was paying me board money and I was sticking it in my pocket. He wasn’t paying me board money. Whenever I told him to go he wasn’t very pleased. He suggested he should go out and wait until the landlady went away, and then come back. I wouldn’t have it, so he went. He left his possessions behind. It was a Thursday that he left, in the morning. That was the Thursday before the twenty-sixth of July that he left. I saw McBride on, I think, it was the Friday or Saturday in Queen Street. He saw me but didn’t acknowledge me.’

  It is a long statement that takes nearly an hour. He describes the party, the arrival of Rita and what he calls her come-hither looks at him. The jury hears how he had taken Bessie Marsh down the street to catch her tram.

  But he doesn’t tell them how his heart was breaking when he walked back to the party. Nor does he tell them how he wanted to feel a woman’s skin beneath his touch, to slide his fingers over the soft silk of her body, and that Rita was willing. He does tell them about how he found her kissing Johnny McBride on the veranda, and how Johnny had come at him then.

  ‘I told them if the landlady saw them, there would be a complaint to her. McBride said, “Go on, blow,” — meaning “go away”. I told them what I’d said before, that there might be complaints. The next thing he punched me in the eye. Rita disappeared into the house. When I got the punch I staggered backwards, then forwards; he kicked me in the stomach. I was winded and doubled up. Then he kicked me in the leg, causing me to lose my balance; he kicked me on the left leg, below the knee. I lost my balance and fell on the ground. Up to this stage, I had not landed a blow on him. When I was on the ground he was just aiming his foot back to have another kick and I jumped up, knocking my head against his chin. That only stopped him for a moment. Then we were punching each other round the body, and then two chaps from inside the house came out and separated us. I was doing very poorly in this fight. If it had gone on, I was in no position to defend myself. I wasn’t feeling too well and McBride was using his feet. A couple of chaps from inside the house came out and separated us. We went inside to the kitchen. When we were in the kitchen McBride called me a dirty yellow Irish bastard. One of the crowd suggested we shake hands. I was for it. I would have shaken hands, but he refused. He said he’d come round the next day and finish the fight.’

  As Ken listens to Albert Black recite the story of that evening, he sees it as it happens. Paddy, or Albert (because he can’t get his head around the difference between the two, the man who is accused, and the boy in the fight who everyone in the room knows as Paddy anyway), is describing the scuffles inside the house, how he’d asked for a knife to open the beer and been refused, how McBride had got involved again and again, until Paddy had thrown him out. He closes his eyes when the fights are described, and when the accused comes to the part where he is kicked in the testicles his hands instinctively touch his groin. He opens his eyes, embarrassed, and sees other of the men reacting in the same quick furtive way. Their nuts, their crown jewels, they will say afterwards when they are debating the case, the agony of it, like they couldn’t ever be put back together again.

  Then there is the half-hearted evening that had drifted into morning with the girl Rita. Paddy wasn’t that horny, she’d said, and Ken supposes the kick had left him incapable of sex. Ken has little experience of sex; mostly it has been with girls who work on Karangahape Road, and each time he’s paid he has thought he will never do it again, that somehow he will find himself a real girlfriend. For the most part he just tugs away at himself. Paddy has mentioned his girlfriend, and he wonders what she makes of all this. He looks down the length of the courtroom and sees the pale girl who has sat with her hands in her lap, not looking to left or right, and never towards Rita and her friends. Ken wonders if there are things Paddy isn’t telling the court. He thinks Paddy didn’t much care about Rita, that she had simply been there on a whim for both of them. Didn’t she see that? he wonders. Not that important, just troublesome. And now there is a life at stake.

  Paddy reaches the point where he is about to leave the boarding house the next day and head for the city centre. ‘Just before I left my room, I saw a knife. It was on the top of a carton of rubbish. I put it on the inside of my coat pocket. I did that because of what McBride had said the night before, about coming back the next day and finishing the fight. He’d told me he was twenty-four years old. I’m five feet eight and three-quarters tall, and he stood well above me. I thought my chances in a fight with him were nil. I thought that because he had much more experience than I did, plus he was pretty good at using his feet. I thought, also, that I had already tasted that the night before and it was as much as I could take. I took the knife and put it in my pocket. I intended, if he had me on again and got me on the ground, I was going to use it to protect myself. I’ve only done fighting when I was in school.’ He stops there, takes a deep breath. ‘I haven’t got a taste for it. I was frightened.’

  Ken shivers. It is exactly as if he had spoken these last words.

  Paddy describes the drinks at the hotel, how the barman refused to serve him. He had gone into the hotel with fifteen shillings and eightpence. When he left he had one shilling and eightpence, and he’d shouted the barman twice, so it wasn’t as if he had had that much to drink. He had gone on, he says, to the cafe to meet his girlfriend, with an hour to spare. ‘I had my back turned to the rest of the people who were in the cubicle. I don’t think I spoke to anybody. I ordered a cup of coffee from the waiter. I wanted to play a tune on the jukebox but Jacques came up and stopped me, and called me a dirty yellow bastard, speaking just kind of ordinary. He use
d to stand in a slouch with his shoulders hunched up. His head he used to keep drooped. He was standing that way on this occasion. When he called me a dirty yellow bastard I just said “Go blow.” Then he said he was going to punch me in the eye and that was what he did, a short punch. I didn’t do anything immediately. I was pretty dazed and my senses weren’t working. He walked forward a little, he said, “Come outside” or something like that. I sat down again. He was standing slouched by the jukebox, waiting for me to go ahead. I took the knife out of my pocket as I rose from my seat. I took it out to defend myself when I got outside. I knew I didn’t have much show against him once we were in the street. He was the kind of fella who’d kick you till your guts dropped out or your sides caved in. I wasn’t intending to use the knife inside the cafe, I was just overcome, or something. Maybe it was fright or funk, I don’t know what it was. All I remember is making a lunge at him. I just couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t help myself because I’d lost my head. When I made the lunge I didn’t think anything would happen at the time. I didn’t mean to hurt him so bad.’

  Gerald Timms, the prosecutor, perches one foot, clad in its fine leather shoe, on the edge of the stand. ‘Mr Blck, tell us again what you did after the stabbing?’

  ‘I walked outside. The only thing I can remember is being at a shop on the corner of Wellesley Street.’

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘I just stopped to think.’

  ‘What did you think when you were there?’

  ‘I realised what I had done. I thought it best to go up to the police station.’

  ‘How did you feel?’

  ‘I felt very confused and upset.’

  ‘Why would you feel that?’

  ‘Well, I’d just stabbed a man. I was sorry I’d done it.’

  ‘Did anyone come along and speak to you?’

  ‘I was just turning the corner to go to the police station when Jeff Larsen came along. I’ve always got on well with Jeff. I thought he was kind to come after me. He said he’d seen what happened.’

  ‘Did he say what that was?’

  ‘Well, I took it he saw what I’ve just told you.’

  ‘But your story is different from what the other witnesses told us.’

  ‘I don’t know why they said that. Jeff knew what happened.’

  ‘Really? So what happened next?’

  ‘Jeff said he would come to the police station with me.’

  The events at the party are rehearsed again, the way Paddy had come upon Rita and Johnny embracing on the veranda, the fight that had taken place. It had become almost an incantation, Ken thinks, like a country and western song where the verses tell each chapter of the story but the chorus is a refrain that repeats itself over and again, always coming back to the same point.

  ‘I suggest to you,’ says Timms, ‘that all of this happened because you were annoyed on account of Johnny cutting you out with this girl you had designs on.’

  ‘That’s not correct.’

  ‘But you did have designs on her?’

  ‘I was getting the look. But it wasn’t that important. I wasn’t annoyed at Johnny McBride paying her attention. I didn’t care that much. A fight started, and I got belted and I was very annoyed about that.’

  ‘Later that night, when everyone except Rita Zilich had gone home, you were lying on the bed and muttering to yourself. You were thinking about Johnny McBride?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thinking about this black eye you had?’

  ‘Thinking about everything in general connected with him.’

  ‘You were muttering that you were going to kill Johnny McBride?’

  ‘Yes, I did say that. I didn’t mean it. I just wanted to sort him out.’

  ‘And Rita asked you how you were going to kill him?’

  ‘No, that’s not true.’

  ‘But you heard her give evidence to that effect? You’re nodding, I take it that means yes? And she said you said you were going to strangle or knife him?’

  ‘Incorrect. I never said anything about strangling or knifing Johnny McBride. She’s lying when she says I did.’

  ‘Can you suggest why she’s lying?’

  ‘Perhaps she was very fond of McBride and was playing both ends against the middle.’

  ‘But it’s a very serious thing to say about you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I heard her swear I said it.’

  ‘And you say she’s lying?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What were you going to do when your girlfriend arrived at the cafe?’

  ‘Go to the pictures maybe, or to a dance.’

  ‘Really? Mr Black, you only had one and eightpence in your pocket. That wouldn’t have taken you very far. I don’t think you were there with the intention of meeting her.’

  ‘Objection, your Honour,’ Buchanan says.

  ‘Objection sustained,’ the judge responds.

  ‘I was waiting for her,’ Paddy says. ‘I was waiting.’ His face crumples.

  Buchanan rises to his feet. ‘Your Honour, I’d like to clarify a matter with the defendant.’ The judge looks at his watch. ‘Briefly.’

  Turning to Paddy, Buchanan says, ‘Throw your mind back to the time when McBride passed you in the cafe on his way out. You knew he was going onto the street? Were you afraid he’d attack you on Queen Street?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When he saw you following him out, he turned to go to the door?’

  ‘He headed for the door.’

  ‘Do you say he went ahead of you towards the street door?’

  ‘Yes, that’s as I remember it. So he was in front and I was behind him.’

  ‘And that is where you were when you struck him with the knife?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that what you want us to understand, that you struck him as a measure of protecting yourself against an assault you were afraid of?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Against the assault you thought he was going to commit on you when you both got to the street? You struck him as protection from that?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘And that was the thought in your mind at that time?’

  ‘Yes.’ Paddy’s voice sinks to a whisper. He leans forward, supporting himself against the ornate railing before him. ‘My mind was a blur,’ he says. ‘I’m confused about it all.’

  The judge adjourns until the next day when the closing addresses will be made. The hour of judgment is close.

  This is the last night the jury will meet at the Station Hotel. Tomorrow it will likely be over. If they have come to a verdict, they will go their separate ways. The men loosen their ties. Second and third drinks are being downed. A torpor has infiltrated their conversation as if, in spite of their differences, they have come to a point where they have each other’s measure, almost a camaraderie. Only Arthur and Marcus and Ken are keeping to themselves. Ken still feels tongue-tied in the presence of his fellow jurors and, although he and Arthur have exchanged sympathetic words, it still seems to Ken that the lecturer thinks he is above it all, and presumably above him. He can’t fathom Marcus who, at the beginning of the trial, had been full of smiles but now appears sunk in a brooding inner silence, almost as if he is afraid of something. The Queen Street men remain clustered, people who speak each other’s language, exchanging gossip about family and friends, but tonight even they are becoming expansive. The night watchman had known both the accused and the deceased by sight. James Taylor asks him whether he had not felt compelled to declare this recognition when he was called, but he shrugs it off. The bodgies and widgies are simply part of the life on the street. On reflection, all twelve of them are part of what goes on in the city, aren’t they? There would be no jury at all if they were to exclude one or another amongst them.

  ‘One of those two is telling lies,’ Neville Johns says. ‘The girl or the boy.’

  ‘Both of them, probably,’ the woodwork teacher says. ‘God, I remember a coup
le of kids that used to fuck like rattlesnakes in the playground in the lunch break. They were like a couple of prize fighters, the way the other kids cheered them on. They’d look at you as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths if you spoke to them about it.’

  ‘It’ll be the girl, I expect,’ Wayne, the gasfitter, says. ‘A tart if you ask me. What was she doing out when her parents thought she was at home in her bed?’

  ‘Not that he could get it up,’ the gasfitter says. ‘Pathetic.’

  ‘That’s what Mr Mazengarb was talking about in his report,’ the accountant says. ‘All those bad girls egging boys on. Disgraceful.’

  ‘I don’t think it was about the girl,’ Ken says, clearing his throat. It still feels like an intrusion when he speaks in this gathering, but at least he has found the nerve to say something when it seems sufficiently important.

  ‘So what do you think it was, Mr Wise Guy?’ It’s Frank the woodwork teacher again.

  ‘He was frightened, like he said. I think he was scared and he didn’t have anyone to tell.’

  ‘You’re soft,’ Frank says. ‘He killed a man, he deserves to be punished.’

  Arthur appears suddenly to unwind himself. ‘You’re talking about life and death,’ he says. His interruption silences the group, almost as if a stranger had entered the room. ‘Are you so sure of yourselves that you can honestly decide what he deserves? Are you all so far above reproach that you have the right to make this decision? I’m not sure that I am.’

  Johns tamps his pipe, a twitch at the corner of his mouth. ‘Perhaps we should be lenient. Myself, I’m inclining towards it. He’s but a boy.’ He turns his groomed hands over in his lap, as if considering what they would be like if they had blood on them. ‘There might be a case for manslaughter.’

  There is a benign murmur around the room: not exactly agreement, but an expression of some common feeling that things have gone far enough, that there is still time to draw back from the killing of the boy. It feels as though a lightness has fallen over them, that, while one or two of them remain intransigent, one by one they are shedding themselves of the responsibility for a second death.