This Mortal Boy

by Fiona Kidman

  This is the moment when the barman, who has been absent for a few minutes, walks into the room, a pile of the Auckland Star tucked under his arm. He hands out the newspapers to each of the jury members. The headline shouts its message: GRAND JURY JUDGE SAYS BLACK IS ‘NOT ONE OF OURS’. And there it is, a report on the findings of the Grand Jury that had had Albert Black committed to trial by jury, presided over by the same Mr Justice Finlay in whose presence the trial is now being conducted. In his opinion:

  The offender is not one of ours, except by adoption and apparently comes from the type that we could well be spared in our country. He belongs to a peculiar sect, if you could call it that, or a peculiar association of individuals whose outlook on life differs from the normal. It is unfortunate that we got this undesirable from his homeland. It is a case of an apparently deliberate stabbing in a restaurant in Upper Queen Street, and there seems to be no opening of either provocation or self-defence, or any of the defences usually presented in a case of this kind.

  The judge had said that. Even before the trial began.

  It is there in black and white.

  The morning newspaper, delivered to their bedrooms the next day, carries the same story.

  CHAPTER 17

  Des Ball lays out two steak and kidney pies on plates, and a bottle of tomato sauce, on Horace Haywood’s desk. ‘I got them from the kitchen, cook’s special,’ he says. ‘You better eat something, sir.’

  Haywood has already drunk a third of the bottle of Scotch in front of him.

  ‘Ever occurred to you, Ball, how handy it is to have the kitchen right next door to the gallows? Not so far to take the condemned man’s last meal?’ The kitchen in Mount Eden jail is a vast space filled with gas burners and vats from which food is ladled.

  ‘He hasn’t been condemned yet.’

  ‘But it’s there, the writing on the wall, eh?’ Haywood bangs his fist on the newspaper lying alongside the pies.

  ‘Sir, perhaps the judge has a point. Do we need his kind in the country?’

  ‘You want to see him go down? Don’t you, eh?’

  Des scratches the back of his head. ‘Funny, it’s hard not to like him. But neither can I see past the knife in the back. I reckon this jury’s a weird lot, they look all over the place. They could go for manslaughter.’

  ‘If the judge gives them that option. He’s already laid down the law, even before he heard the evidence. He says there was no provocation. You’ve seen the newspaper.’

  ‘You never know, perhaps he’s heard enough to change his mind,’ Des says, trying to calm the other man down. ‘Sir, Mrs Haywood’s been asking for you, she wants you to go home.’

  Busy, childless Ettie Haywood, who loves the prisoners so much, sitting all alone at home, practising her bouffant hair-do and shortening her skirts. She has rung the prison three times tonight. Haywood won’t pick up the phone, so she has rung what the warders grandly called the reception desk, the place where men are admitted through the stone archways, then measured and weighed, as their world begins to shrink smaller and smaller, until they can’t see themselves or who they are anymore, just shadows of themselves. Ettie’s heart will be breaking. She will know that Horace is on the bottle. She will know that the outlook for Albert Black is bleak. Once, she had patted his hand awkwardly and told him she knew all would be well for a boy like him. Now she won’t be so sure.

  ‘Does Black know?’ Haywood asks.

  ‘We haven’t delivered newspapers. Room service is a bit slow round here.’

  ‘Strange how word gets around this place. Take a drink, man.’ Haywood pushes the bottle towards Des.

  ‘One,’ Des says. The last time he staggered home from one of these sessions, Marge had locked the door on him and he’d had to get a ladder from his garage so he could break the window and undo the catch to enter his own house. Never mind that Marge shouted so loudly he could have sworn the neighbours heard. A light had come on across the road, a curtain lifted, but nobody came.

  Ken McKenzie lies awake in the Station Hotel, his eyes as dry as rusks. His life has been without ambition up until now. He is twenty-seven: time is rushing past him and nothing more important than his own survival has been the height of his achievement. It occurs to him that so far his life has depended on the decisions of others: his father, his siblings, his uncle and aunt, the man he works for at the electrical workshop. At school he did what he was told because keeping out of trouble was the surest way not to display his weaknesses, his uncertain bladder, his lack of cleverness, or so it was said, although he passed his matriculation exams when nobody expected it. A bit of a fluke, jolly good luck, it was said at the time.

  And, when it came to his future, it was his family who decided he should leave the farm, be cast out, as it were. It was his uncle who decided on the work he did. Although he likes his aunt and uncle, quiet people whose children have already left home, and who tolerate him so long as he doesn’t disturb them while they read the evening paper or listen to the news on the radio, he wonders how long it will be before they tell him that it is time for him to have a grown-up life of his own. And then — what he will do next is a mystery he has yet to explore. Perhaps his relatives will tell him, but will it be something he wants to do? Tonight, something has stirred in him. His uncle expects him to phone each evening to let him know if he is doing all right and also, Ken guesses, hoping that he will drop some gem of information about the course of the trial that he and his aunt can polish before passing it on to the neighbours. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, a little tap on the side of the nose.

  But tonight Ken hasn’t phoned. His uncle won’t be able to resist telling him what to do, even though he knows, just as Ken has learned over the past three days, that it is illegal to influence a juror. Still, his uncle might whisper down the phone a little aside, like Go get him, boy. Because Ken knows what his uncle would do were he in this situation. He doesn’t need to be told. The sky, as seen from the window of the lounge bar, had shimmered with spring light that made him think of the sky up north, and then, as night gathered, a layer of cirrostratus cloud had descended over the city, indicating a front. Lights had popped up in the dusk, and he thought that he liked the city well enough to stay, but not as he was, that he needed to change, and he must decide for himself what to do next.

  In the meantime, there is the small matter of a man’s life to be decided. A boy who has lived on the margins. Like him — not that you would think so if you were to look at them side by side. But when it comes to Albert Black, he knows. The judge has spelled it out. Not wanted here.

  There is a quiet tap at the door, almost indiscernible, so that for a moment he thinks he is mistaken, and then it comes again. He climbs out of bed and opens the door a crack. Jack Cuttance stands there, a dressing gown over his flannel pyjamas. He slides into the room quickly as Ken closes the door behind him.

  ‘A bad business,’ he says, taking a packet of cigarettes out of his pyjama pocket and lighting up a Capstan. He draws down a lungful of smoke and pours it back through his nose. ‘Mind if I sit down?’

  ‘They won’t let him off, will they?’

  ‘Guilty as sin, that’s what they’ll say. Maybe he is. The girl says he was planning it.’

  ‘And he says he wasn’t.’

  ‘But who to believe? They expect me to go with them, Taylor and his mates. They reckon I don’t have the brains to think for myself. I can tell it in their eyes. You know, sometimes I look in the eyes of an animal before I kill it. And there’s an instant where I swear it knows. You heard an animal scream when it’s killed?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ken says, ‘I came off a farm.’

  ‘Yeah, I remember you saying that. You’ve been on Black’s side since the beginning. Why is that, I wonder?’

  Ken hesitates before answering. ‘So far as we know, Black’s only made one mistake. In the criminal sense. Don’t we all make mistakes?’

  ‘So tell me about yours.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know
. Nothing criminal.’ Only, from where he is sitting now, his whole life looks like a mistake, a dereliction of duty to the self. ‘Perhaps that’s my problem. I’ve never taken a chance on anything.’

  Before he can elaborate there is another soft knock at the door. It is off the snib and Arthur pushes it open.

  ‘Close it,’ Ken says.

  They look at each other, three unlikely conspirators, sitting in a row along the bed, like blackbirds on a telephone wire, Ken thinks. Arthur wears pyjamas made from silken material and light leather loafers instead of slippers.

  Arthur says, ‘There are just the three of us. The rest will find him guilty.’

  ‘And you don’t think we should?’ Jack says, testing the water. He and Arthur have barely exchanged a dozen words over the course of the trial. ‘I mean, what’s your point of view? If you don’t mind me asking?’

  Arthur suddenly sinks his head into his hands, his elbows on his knees. ‘I can’t tell you,’ he says, his voice hoarse with emotion, ‘how I’ve searched my conscience these last few days. My life, my vocation has been the study of classical literature. I’ve been looking for answers, listened in my head to the words of the philosophers, as if they would guide me in everything I did.’

  ‘So what have they told you?’ Jack asks, his tone quizzical, almost amused.

  ‘Nothing I want to hear. Black killed Jacques, we know that. But if we find him guilty, we as good as put the noose around his neck. If we find him not guilty, we’re denying his actions too.’

  ‘Well,’ says Ken, ‘if we can’t agree, they’ll have to have another trial.’

  ‘True, no majority verdicts here. We abdicate responsibility and hand it on to someone else, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘I think we should try to persuade the others to see our point of view,’ Ken says.

  Jack makes a grunting noise. ‘Frank? Wayne? I don’t think so.’

  ‘When Socrates was put to death,’ Arthur says, as if talking to himself, ‘it was believed he would achieve spiritual immortality, that he would live on in an afterlife. But I cannot believe that.’

  ‘Well, perhaps this Socrates fella wasn’t horsing round with some girl behind his sheila’s back,’ Jack says. ‘I mean, he might have got a better deal.’

  Arthur says, more firmly, as if he is pulling himself together, ‘I cannot believe we’ve earned the right to decide who should live and who should die. I don’t believe in the death sentence. And here I am, being tested by an Irish youth of no particular consequence to stand up and be counted. There are powerful men on this jury, believe me. When this is over, the word will be out: watch this fellow or that fellow, he’s not up to much. They’ll sit at dinner tables where chancellors and professors dine, and they will say a dismissive word that will carry on and over to where it’s meant to be heard.’

  ‘You mean,’ says Jack Cuttance, ‘that you’re afraid for your job if you go against them?’

  ‘Perhaps. Yes, it could happen, I’ve seen the way things go in this town.’

  ‘I doubt they’ll shop for their meat elsewhere if I stand up to them. I do a very good line in smallgoods.’

  ‘It’s easy to joke,’ Arthur says. ‘I’ll stick by my principles.’ He is taking quick shallow breaths as he speaks.

  ‘We should get some sleep,’ Ken says, surprising himself, making a decision to turn the men out.

  When they are gone, it is two o’clock. He lies down and drifts back again into a shallow, uneasy slumber.

  Oliver Buchanan walks through his house, his feet bare, so that he won’t disturb his sleeping family. He looks at his wife, a slant of moonlight falling through a parted curtain across her still face. Her skin is like porcelain, her dark hair fanned across the pillow. Stopping at the doorways of each of his sons’ rooms, he half wishes one of them will wake, so that he might suggest a cup of hot Milo, a piece of toast smothered in Marmite, comfort food they liked when they were children. Neither of them stirs. Perhaps it is as well, for he is the one who needs comfort and it’s not something he can ask of them. He has no wish to burden them with the sorrow of his day, the certainty of calamity in store. Instead, he looks at each sleeping youth and their beauty, a reflection of their mother’s, which astonishes him over and again.

  They remind him of Michelangelo’s studies of youth. His children. Their faces in repose. The whole world ahead of them. How much about their lives does he really know? he wonders. A man thinks he knows his children, but does he really? Young men are expected to be warriors, to be pioneers and soldiers, so brave of heart. He asks only that they are good men. Perhaps not even that, simply that they survive in the world unscathed, without doing harm to others. Once, he would have wished them to follow the law, as he has done, but now he hopes they will not. The law, as it stands at this moment, seems cruel and unjust, a carapace for power and revenge, designed by men who have been to war and can’t let the past go, must hunt down enemies for the rest of their lives.

  This is the first trial Buchanan has participated in where the death penalty is a likely outcome — all the more so since the delivery of the newspapers. He isn’t an unduly religious man but he was brought up in the faith of his mother, a devout Anglican. She asked that at her funeral he read the words of the twenty-third psalm which she loved so much, and the words flood back to him now, even though his mother has been dead ten years or more: Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Will goodness and mercy prevail? He fears the worst. The boy in the dock is a good-looking fellow. Not tall, a point the accused had made himself, a lean fellow but a good chest on him, a keen look in his green deep-set eyes. A mother’s son too. Like all the young men who have gone to the gallows this year. He corrects himself. All the men who have ever gone to them. And thinking about his own sons, who live in the fine, careless rapture of youth and privilege, he sees how their very existence could collapse with one false step, how easily things can go wrong.

  He returns to the table where his papers lie scattered. There is something missing but he can’t find the piece. Something about Larsen and his testimony.

  Paddy knows what the newspapers have reported. Earlier in the day, Ettie Haywood told Edward Horton, the prisoner serving life for the murder of Kitty Cranston. It was the brutality of that murder that led to the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1950. Horton likes reminding his fellow inmates that he escaped the gallows because the penalty wasn’t retrospective. ‘You’re dead fly, aren’t you?’ Paddy said, the first time Horton told him this. Horton looked at him, bewildered. ‘You’re a bit cunning,’ Paddy said. ‘Never mind. Sure it’s the Irish in me and proud of it.’

  Now Horton is in the bowling team that has monthly outings to play on greens beyond the prison walls. There are twelve lifers in the team, and Ettie Haywood makes a point of chatting to them all as they prepare for the trips. She likes to keep them informed of what is going on in the world, it helps them to keep in touch with reality, she says. In fact, she often brings a newspaper with her so that she can read them the headlines. When she saw Horton that day, she had the paper in her basket. He had asked for it: ‘Just a quick skim, Mrs Haywood’ was how he put it. And when, unthinkingly, she put it in his hands, his face lit up with an unpleasant glee.

  ‘They’re after you,’ Horton told Paddy when they met in the exercise yard shortly before lock-up.

  Paddy thinks he mightn’t sleep, but sleep and tobacco are the only drugs available, and sleep is the one he likes the better. It falls on him in deep draughts of unconsciousness when he allows his mind to go blank, to find what he calls the black hole inside his head. When he sleeps he dreams again of Ireland, always Ireland. He is out in the countryside, beyond the city confines. He is on holiday in Ballycastle with his mother and father and wee Daniel. The heather is blooming on Knocklayde Mountain and rustling in drifts all around them; they are at the very tip of Ireland and the sea stretches in front of them.
Look, there’s Scotland that you can see from here, his mother cries, as they wade through the undergrowth. Dragonflies are dancing above them. They are singing, all of them together, the patterns of song that run through their lives:

  The big ship sails on the

  ally-ally-oh

  The ally-ally-oh, the ally-ally-oh

  Oh, the big ship sails on the

  ally-ally-oh

  Just as he will sail away. He is leaving them. He is going far. In his dream he is moving towards the pale face of the girl he could love. He is awake and it is darkness again.

  The night is not yet over for Buchanan. Jeff Larsen has given evidence that echoes that of other witnesses, varying only in that he had followed Black from the cafe after the stabbing and walked him to the police station, where he left him. Well, he was a mate, he’s said in his evidence, he thought someone should see him right. He hadn’t seen what happened in the cafe. That’s what he said.

  Buchanan goes back over a newspaper file and comes to a clipping. There had been more trouble at Ye Olde Barn cafe on the Saturday night following the death of Alan Jacques which involved, as the paper put it, Teddy boys, bodgies and widgies. Jeff Larsen had been there when someone let him know that sugar was being put in the petrol tank of his car. Larsen had rushed to the scene. Some sugar lumps were already in the filler pipe and another ten sitting on the boot of the car. Larsen said he had no idea why anyone would want to sabotage the engine of his vehicle.

  If it were a warning, Larsen had taken it. The next day he disappeared. The police had gone looking for him, for, as it happened, Larsen was on probation. He’d lain low until the police found him just before the trial and bound him over to give evidence. He was hardly the prosecution’s most willing witness. Buchanan rubbed his eyes as the night grew thin, needing to sleep. Larsen’s evidence was the same as that of the other witnesses, and Black didn’t seem to know what his friend had seen. There were blind alleys at every corner. If they had ever liked Albert Black, it seemed that none of them did now.