Ellie & the Shadow Man

by Gee, Maurice

  Ellie and the Shadowman

  Maurice Gee

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Penguin Group (NZ), 2001

  Copyright © Maurice Gee 2001

  The right of Maurice Gee to be identified as the author of this work in terms of section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994 is hereby asserted.

  Digital conversion by Pindar NZ

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  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.

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  ISBN 9781742288031

  Contents

  House 4

  House 4 (continued)

  Between times

  Good Life

  Good Life (continued)

  Between times

  Glenmore Street

  Glenmore Street (continued)

  Between times

  Gethsemane

  Gethsemane (continued)

  Between times

  Tidal Flat

  For Nellie

  House 4

  The overbridge had been for Ellie more than just a way of crossing the lines: it marked a transition from a state of easiness into unease; which was stupid because she was just as bossy and loud – two words she used with some pride of herself – on the school-and-friends side as the home. But there, on the Willowbank, the two-storey house, the swimming pool and tennis court side, she often felt a disturbance in her mind as if something submerged was running against the tide. It was not exactly worry, for she was too sudden and eager for that, but a kind of watchfulness that made her pause inside, even as her voice and her movements went on.

  Just be yourself, then nothing can go wrong, her mother advised; but she didn’t know the things that could happen, in tiny ways, to alter the look in someone’s eyes or shift the angle they stood on as they talked to you. The mothers over the bridge were the worst for that altered stance, the fathers not so bad. They could grin as well as smile, and ease up in their language, and sometimes they gave a lurch or a jut of the chest as though she made a heel-kick inside them. She recognised it instinctively and quietened down.

  Halfway across the bridge she dropped a gob of spit between the railway lines, then looked around quickly to make sure no one had seen. The boys in the third form at Hutt Valley High had claimed that spit would sizzle if you hit the overhead wire, and they told a story about a drunk who peed from the bridge and his cock and balls had been burned off. They had looked hungry using those words and Ellie had understood that she was chosen as the sort of girl you could talk smut to. She had punched the worst of them in the chest so hard he had doubled up and had to hide the tears on his cheeks.

  Her mother had shifted her from Hutt Valley High to Willowbank School when Ellie told her, a move that lost Ellie most of her friends. Paying private school fees trapped Mrs Crowther in two jobs, which made Ellie guilty and beg to be shifted back, although she had come to like Willowbank quite well.

  ‘Ellie’s the sort of girl who can be happy anywhere,’ Mrs Crowther told the hostel matrons.

  That’s not true, Ellie wanted to say, even though it was meant as praise – her mother always praised her and ran down almost everyone else – but she saw why people might agree, and was puzzled by the unhappiness of so many of the girls she knew. They made a virtue of feeling sad; and now and then Ellie wondered if being blonde and blue-eyed and overweight, and being a woman early – too early, one of the matrons said – disqualified her from the feelings girls were supposed to have. Jealousy and envy were two more things she did not feel.

  ‘She’s a jolly sort of girl,’ one of the nicer mothers said, which seemed to deny Ellie any feelings at all and even deny that she had brains in her head, while Ellie knew she was clever and sharp and had two ideas for every one her friends could produce. She could read books that bored them and know why the characters did what they did, even when it took place hundreds of years ago – why they gave each other up even though it meant they would stay lonely all their lives. She could leave the movies understanding why this person had been cruel and that one submissive, instead of thrilled by how gorgeous they looked and how long they had kissed for. She could draw. She could paint. Jolly, indeed.

  ‘A wee bit on the boisterous side,’ another woman said. ‘And a wee bit crude.’

  Boisterous was better, although it had something to do with her size and what the gym mistress called her early development. That meant her breasts. As for crude, those mothers should hear how dirty-mouthed their daughters could be in their Willowbank voices. Sometimes they made Ellie blush.

  Being foul-mouthed was shallow, she thought, wheeling her bicycle down from the bridge. And lying was shallow and made you smaller. It chipped off part of who you were by making the other person less. Ellie had learned that from lying to her mother. She had not felt whole again until she confessed, which she did in a straightforward way so neither of them would get emotional. ‘Thank you for telling me,’ her mother said, and they both felt better; and Ellie felt rounded out again.

  She did not believe she had to protect her mother but stand beside her and not be budged. Mrs Crowther needed support if she was to keep going. Ellie felt no burden and no hands holding tight. Her mother made decisions and had rules Ellie did not like, but kept them separate from her love, which she wore like a skin. (Ellie had tried to paint it as an aura or glow in the parent portrait they had done at school, but could not prevent it from spreading like a rash.)

  She looked back past the railway station at House 4, where she had left her mother in bed with two hotwater bottles and a lemon drink sweetened with honey. One of the other matrons would look in. Ellie had insisted on that. The nurses were in Wellington at a Saturday class so there would be no hard heels on the stairs and no ‘Mairzy Doats’ on the piano. Her mother would have silence, aspros, lemons, a warm bed, a darkened room. I’ve done all that, Ellie thought, satisfied, although the Saturday class was only luck.

  She rode up Oxford Terrace towards Waterloo. There were fewer people on this side of the bridge and more cars, bigger cars: bigger houses, more trees, taller trees. There were shell-strewn drives and flower beds shaped like diamonds and fences made of tortured iron. Lawns mown so close they looked in pain. Blinds that made the windows seem like pages in a notebook, unwritten on, and the houses empty. Ellie preferred the way her side of the valley seemed to teem, although she didn’t alwa
ys like its noise – and none today, for her mother, please. She sometimes said she liked its untidiness better – the peeling paint and weedy paths and hydrangeas out of control – but the truth was she thought of it as a kind of backside. West of the lines was the made-up, combed and dressed side of the valley, while on the east, out beyond Cambridge Terrace, it was as if someone was showing his bum through a hole in his trousers. One day she would like to stand on the overbridge and draw both sides, but give them a twist, and show somehow that that was part of this and this of that. Because, she thought, it’s true, isn’t it, we’re the same – and was overwhelmed by the knowledge she had found, before it just as quickly went away.

  By the time she reached Angela’s house, muddy clouds, wet along the edges, had swelled up over the mountains. A little puffed-up northerly was blowing, too warm for rain. She did not want the day to be cancelled, not before she’d played a couple of matches, not before the fruit salad and cream. It would be terrible to ride home to empty old House 4 before she and Angela had beaten Heather and Sue, before she had been paired with a boy, even if they lost their game. And before she’d eaten some of the chicken sandwiches Angela had promised.

  She watched the clouds anxiously. They lay still, then seemed to shrink like scummy froth on a beach. She turned into Angela’s drive – crackling shells – rode along by flower beds at the side of the house and dismounted at the big double garage, where a car and a yacht on a trailer gleamed like treasures in the gloom. There were no other bikes. She blushed at hers – a man’s bike – and the way she’d had to swing her leg over the bar. Then she was blasé, remembering her mother’s advice. She freed her racket from the carrier and bounced it on her knee.

  ‘Ellie, you’re the first,’ Angela cried. She stood in the glass door as though in a frame, displaying herself – to little effect, Ellie thought (a phrase she’d learned recently, and liked). Angela was bony but smooth, and her attractiveness was in her skin, and in her eyes, which were dark blue, suiting some poetic word: dewy perhaps. Ellie liked Angela up to a point.

  ‘Come and meet Mummy. Come inside,’ Angela said.

  Ellie leaned her racket on the wall. She did not want it in the house where people might see how old it was. The woman in the room was standing back, keeping out of the sun, but was coloured like a fish in a bowl – though upright of course, which made the likeness wrong. Like a seahorse perhaps. Ellie stepped inside and smiled brightly, got her words in first: ‘Hello, Mrs Prime.’

  ‘It’s Ellie, from school. My tennis partner,’ Angela said.

  ‘Hello, Ellie, I’m glad you could come,’ Mrs Prime said. She had a quick-moving smile, like a ripple, like a shiver. It lit nothing up, just moved her mouth. ‘You must be hot after riding. Do sit down. Angela, get your friend a drink.’

  Ellie sat, remembering to keep her knees together. ‘You’ve got a lovely house,’ she said. ‘Lovely garden.’

  ‘Oh, it’s a place to live,’ Mrs Prime said. She had a bendy neck and collarbones whiter than the rest of her skin. Lovely hands, lovely lovely hands, white and fine and rounded and perfectly smooth, and pliant, elastic, as they lit a cigarette. Bits of people, parts of people, sometimes astounded Ellie, noses, mouths, kneecaps, as though they were slumming and should go back where they belonged. Mrs Prime’s hands belonged on a film star or a princess; and Ellie felt sorry for her that she could not live up to them, although she tried. Tried with her voice and her way of posing herself.

  ‘Angela tells me that you live at the YWCA,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, my mother’s a matron there, in the dental nurses’ part. It’s House 4,’ Ellie said.

  ‘That must be interesting.’ She showed no interest but gave a sideways glance, and Ellie knew she was curious about how a hostel matron managed to send her daughter to Willowbank School.

  ‘We have some fun there,’ Ellie said.

  ‘They have peeping Toms,’ Angela said, coming back with a glass of lime cordial.

  ‘Not any more. We haven’t got anyone now.’

  ‘He used to steal scanties off the line,’ Angela said.

  ‘Really, Angela,’ Mrs Prime said.

  ‘He’s caught,’ Ellie said, blushing again. ‘He was only fifteen. He was a loony.’

  ‘He had hundreds of pairs –’

  ‘Angela, it’s not a topic I care for. Have your drink, Ellie. And tell your mother I admire her pluck.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She must work hard.’

  ‘She does. She’s got a day job too. She does the wages at the biscuit factory. I help at the hostel. I take out the linen, stuff like that.’

  ‘Remarkable. Now here are some more of your friends, Angela. I think perhaps you should start playing now.’

  Heather, Sue, roly-poly Barry, tall Rex with the small eyes whom Ellie had met once before at a school dance, where he’d ignored her. Darryl, Catherine, Mattie, Faye. A shy boy called Robert, who whispered and blushed and furtively smoothed the front of his shorts, although there was no bump there that Ellie could see. If her luck went the usual way, he would be her partner.

  The court was at the back of the section and was surfaced with grit that got in your shoes. They played short matches, best of five, boys’ doubles first, then girls’. There was hardly time to get going, Ellie found. She and Angela beat Heather and Sue three love, and Ellie didn’t have a serve, which made her grumpy. Serving was the best part of her game. She could belt her first one down as fast as any of the boys and would have liked to play singles against them, especially Rex – ace him if she could. That would make his little eyes pop open. He had long legs and calves with interesting muscles, fat then thin, long then short, jumpy calves. They were the best part of him, better than his face.

  ‘It’s getting dusty, Daddy. Will you sprinkle please?’ Angela cried.

  Mr Prime fastened a hose to the garden tap. He walked through the girls at the court entrance, holding the nozzle rudely, which had to be unintentional, then signalled Angela to turn on the tap. A drizzle of water wet the gravel. He did not look like a lawyer, more like a coalman, Ellie thought, with black eyebrows joining in the middle and red-splotched cheeks. Were they drinking spots? He undulated the hose like a snake, making the girls squeal as they jumped out of the way.

  ‘Do be careful, Harold,’ Mrs Prime said from her wicker chair. She sat with three mothers by the rock garden, away from the players so as not to interfere. They wore summery dresses and floppy hats.

  This is like the pictures, Ellie thought. It’s like waiting for something bad to happen or someone dangerous to turn up. There should be music.

  ‘Harold, that’s enough. You’ll make it muddy.’

  ‘Right,’ he said, and coiled the hose.

  ‘Thanks, Daddy. Mixed doubles next. It’s me and Rex versus Ellie and Barry,’ Angela cried.

  That was better than the shy boy, Robert, who still seemed worried about his pants. Barry was a hard hitter and Ellie liked that: it was her style. He got around the court fast for a fat pink boy and rushed to the net at the wrong time. His game could be described as impolite – the gym teacher’s word for Ellie’s. She liked the way he hit his smashes straight at Rex’s long legs, ruining the dignified style Rex liked to play. She did not expect they would win, because they made too many mistakes, hit the net, hit beyond the baseline, but she liked the way Barry grinned at her and cried, ‘Hard luck,’ and ‘Ah, not quite,’ when she missed the line by a yard or two.

  ‘Let’s rush them. Go for it, eh?’ he said on the last game. It was two-all. Ellie was serving. She had almost decided to be careful because she’d never beaten Angela before, in singles or in doubles, but she liked his eagerness and said yes; and kept to it, whacking down her second serve as fast as her first, which made Angela cry out, ‘Hey,’ as though shots like that were against the rules. That would teach her for nodding smugly at Rex and creeping up slyly to the net. Ellie put some top-spin on her next serve, something that mostly didn’t work, and m
ade Rex hit a backhand into the umpire’s stand. Then Barry nipped in for a lucky netcord. Suddenly it was forty-love.

  This must be against some sort of rules, Ellie thought. She saw Mrs Prime watching with shaded eyes from under her hat, and Mr Prime hook-fingered at the wire, and someone in a glistening coat walking on the lawn.

  ‘Serve straight at him. Get him in the middle,’ Barry said, meaning somewhere else. Ellie liked his dislike of his friend. She served: a fault.

  Barry ran back from the net. ‘He creeps right up. Do your second hard,’ he whispered.

  ‘I might miss.’

  ‘So what? Have a go.’

  She wondered later how she knew – wondered if it was knowledge – that if she lost the point Rex and Angela would take five in a row and win the match. It was laid down like counting, which nothing could turn aside, and yet she could subtract it by throwing up the ball and hitting hard. She seemed to have seen everything that would follow.

  ‘Double fault,’ said long Rex, sweeping a downward-pointing horn of hair from his forehead.

  ‘Come off it, sonny boy,’ said a voice.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was in by two inches. Do you want me to come and show you the mark.’ The man in the glistening jacket had a widow’s peak as sharp as a pen nib and white hollow hospital cheeks and a white thin nose. He turned his face to Ellie and gave a wink.

  ‘You keep out of it, Hollis,’ Angela said.

  ‘Ask the umpire,’ Hollis said.

  ‘Yes,’ said the shy boy, Robert, sitting where he didn’t want to be, on the umpire’s stand, ‘good serve. Game and match to Barry and Ellie, three-two.’

  ‘We won,’ Barry cried, throwing up his racket and catching it. He shook hands with Ellie.