by Gee, Maurice
These two, Alison and Wendy, were going to a church dance not in a group as they usually did, but separately, each with a boy in a car.
‘Make them park underneath a street lamp,’ Dolores said.
‘Oh ha ha, Dollie’s getting jealous,’ Wendy said.
‘Peter and Tony have both got good morals,’ Alison said. ‘So pipe down, Dollie.’
‘Do you want a tip, Alison?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Don’t eat cabbage before a dance. It’ll give you bloat and he’ll think you’re pregnant.’
‘I’m shifting tables,’ Alison said.
‘Me too.’ Wendy followed her.
‘Why do you have to get them all worked up?’ Ellie asked.
‘They make me sick. Good morals,’ Dolores said.
‘They probably do have, at a church dance.’
‘Sure, Peter and Tony and all the saints. I can’t eat this muck. I’m going to grab the bathroom.’
Ellie sat alone, eating stewed plums and custard, which made her remember the fruit salad she had missed – fruit salad with cream. She wondered if Hollis Prime’s leather jacket was ruined, or would it dry out? Infantile paralysis was polio’s other name. That meant children got it; but Hollis must have been older because it was 1954 when the schools were closed. She remembered doing schoolwork at home, and a girl called Muriel in her class who had caught polio, although not badly. Back at school, no one wanted to share a desk with her. They pretended they could see germs hopping over, and ran to the taps and washed their hands if they had to touch Muriel in folk dancing. Ellie blushed lightly, remembering her part in it. She wondered if Hollis Prime seeming less clean than Angela meant anything.
‘Ellie,’ Mrs McDermott said, stopping at her table, ‘are you going out tonight?’
‘I thought maybe the pictures. Mum will be all right.’
‘Do you think you can do the switchboard seven to eight? I can come along then.’
‘Yes, no trouble.’
‘We won’t tell your mother. She needn’t know.’
‘Yes, that’s fine.’
‘Good girl.’ Mrs McDermott rolled away, smiling because she would have time for the quiet ciggie and glass of gin that were essential to her well-being, she claimed. Ellie liked Mrs McDermott, who could easily get sacked for gin.
She walked along to the switchboard room at seven o’clock and settled in front of the board with a feeling of efficiency and control, brought about by the pins and cords and sleeping lights. She was a pipe or conduit, something electrical that messages passed through. Calls came for women in House 5 and House 7, and she listened long enough to know that they were going on dates, the lucky things.
She had not brought her book because of interruptions. Instead she made pencil drawings in her small sketch pad. She drew Rex going knock-kneed as a tennis ball skidded between his feet. One of the things she thought she might be when she left school was a newspaper cartoonist, or even better someone who drew jokes. She sketched the sad boy Robert holding his tennis racket against the front of his shorts. She had danced with a boy like that at a school dance. He had left her suddenly halfway through a waltz and she’d wondered if she was meant to think it was her fault. If she drew him she would call it: Me and my big troubles. She could not think of words for underneath Robert, he was too sad, but she went back to Rex and made a speech balloon: It’s against the rules. Then she drew Hollis Prime. He was easy. Everything was crooked and sharp: teeth, nose, that little pick-axe of hair called for some reason a widow’s peak. She put him on the stone seat in the rock garden, with his legs wide like scissors, but then was stumped by the crippled one. First thing – was it withered up or swollen? Second – was it the left or the right? It made her impatient with herself. If you drew people, you had to really look. It seemed to mean that she was no good. Worse that that, if she hadn’t looked properly there was no reason for him to look at her.
That’s bull, she thought. The face had Hollis Prime perfectly – sneering, bad tempered, crooked, cruel.
A call came for Dolores: her man friend who drove a Jaguar. He was supposed to be a well-known footy player and spoke as if he was in the All Blacks already: ‘Dolores Wood.’ No ‘please’. ‘Hold the line,’ Ellie intoned. She wished she could tell him that Dolores called him ‘My bloke with the ears’.
‘Get off the line, Ellie,’ Dolores said.
‘Oh, sorry.’
She drew the footy player with quilted ears, then rubbed them out and turned them into real cauliflowers. Save me from the caterpillars, he cried. She wondered if she had the nerve to leave it on Dolores’ pillow.
‘Woburn Hostels,’ she half-sang, professional.
‘Can I speak to Ellie Crowther?’ Angela said.
‘Angela, it’s me. I’m on the switchboard.’
‘Where did you go? We couldn’t find you.’
‘I got locked out, so I went home.’
‘No one locked you out. That’s stupid. Anyway, there’s someone here who wants to talk to you.’
‘Who?’
‘It’s none of my business.’ She gave a little giggle and Ellie could tell how excited she was. ‘Here he is.’
‘Ellie,’ said a voice, ‘it’s Hollis here.’
‘What do you want?’ It was all that came into her head. Nothing else was there.
‘I was rude to you today, so I wanted to say sorry.’
She managed to answer, ‘That’s all right.’ She knew now what the girls at school meant by gooey inside – a sweet sick feeling like being overfed. She found herself pulling a face, but thinking at the same time: I love Hollis Prime.
‘So, what are you doing?’ he said.
‘I’m on the switchboard in the hostels. Till eight o’clock.’
‘The thing is, I thought we could meet. So I can say sorry properly, eh? Can you come out and meet me for a minute?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘If you get off at eight o’clock, what about ten past? By Woburn station. My side.’
‘Yes, all right.’
‘I’ll be in my car.’
‘Car?’
‘It’s a Morrie Minor. See you there.’ He hung up. She guessed it was to stop her saying no – which she began, just began, to want to do.
Mrs McDermott arrived. She wanted to gossip, but Ellie cried, ‘I’ve got to get to the pictures, Mrs McDermott.’ Lie number one.
She ran to House 4 and burst into her mother’s room. Mrs Crowther was on the phone. The call must have come through the moment Ellie had left the switchboard. She was leaning back in her easy chair, smiling and smoking, and looked as if she’d never had a headache in her life, so it must be dumb taxi driver George on the line. She waved Ellie out of the room, leaving loops of smoke in the air. ‘Yes, I’m feeling better. Yes, you can.’
‘Pictures,’ Ellie whispered, and went out. Number two; but she did not feel bad because she hated – no, she despised George, who seemed to think he could get her on side by winking at her, as if that was all he had to do.
She ran to her bedroom. Dolores was gone but the room was thick with smells of her; coloured with her too: broad slashes (her Chinese dressing gown on the bed) and tiny strokes (her lipstick, her eyebrow pencil, her used embroidered hankie which she’d shied at the dirty clothes pile in the corner and missed).
Ellie grabbed her towel and flannel and ran to the bathroom. She washed her face, unbuttoned her blouse, wiped her armpits. She’d shaved them for tennis with Dolores’ razor and they felt like sandpaper, which made her feel experienced, then frightened her. She did not want to be experienced – just, what? Herself.
She hurried back to the bedroom, looked longingly at Dolores’ lipstick, left it there. The ticking alarm clock said eight minutes past eight. She grabbed her jacket from the wardrobe and went out. Half of her was walking to the overbridge, the other half pulled backwards, not wanting to go – and which was real? She’d been out with boys, had even kissed the
m, but this was the first time it hadn’t been a joke.
She saw the Morris Minor from the top of the bridge. It gleamed like a cake of scented soap. She felt that this time she was really crossing over, that the world really was in two halves; then – perhaps it was the familiar drumming of the boards – she found her balance and knew that nothing had to change, that she could just be interested, and that it was absurd – she was far too young – to believe she loved Hollis Prime. She didn’t know Hollis Prime. What a dumbcluck name.
He leaned across and opened the passenger door.
‘Pink’s a funny colour for a car,’ she said.
‘The bloke who had it before me painted it,’ Hollis said.
‘How come you’ve even got a car? Did your father buy it?’ She supposed he could take that as meaning did he buy it to make up for Hollis’s crippled leg. But that didn’t stop her, because suddenly she didn’t like the look of him, which was a relief. He looked sly, and like a liar, and smaller than she’d thought, sitting with his hands on the wheel like a boy playing at driving a racing car.
‘I suppose you get lots of presents?’ she said.
‘Jesus, I don’t think I will say I’m sorry.’
‘It’s immaterial to me. Don’t start the engine.’
‘I didn’t come to sit here.’
‘I’ll get out.’
‘Get out, then.’
She smiled at him, pleased to be quarrelling, and pleased with ‘immaterial’. She felt that a change had occurred when she used the word and that she was old enough to deal with Hollis Prime, order him not to start the car. She had no intention of accepting his invitation to get out.
‘It’s a nice seat. I’m comfortable. I might let you drive as far as Petone beach. As long as we’re back here by half past nine.’
‘Big deal.’
‘That should be enough time for you to apologise.’
Then a set of images eliminated the game. She saw her mother sitting in her room worrying – saw her lighting one cigarette from the butt of another; saw herself sneaking past the door. She heard herself lying. It made her curl inwardly, away from Hollis Prime.
‘This is dumb. I’ve got to go.’
‘No, don’t.’ He put his hand on her arm, a grip without assertiveness but heavy with some need that she connected with his leg. It seemed like naked touching and made her shiver up the length of her arm into her head. Hollis Prime became good-looking again as though a change of light had shifted shadows on his face. It was like turning a corner. It was like a taste, a view, an opened bottle of scent, and she wanted to roll down the neck of his sweater and touch his throat.
‘Do we have to quarrel?’ he said.
‘I don’t suppose so. All right, drive. But I do have to be back by half past nine.’
They drove beside the railway line, where a unit went by behind the trees. Half a second and it was gone, heading for Waterloo and Upper Hutt. She felt the geography of the valley, from the mountains behind her to the harbour in front, making a frame around the car with her inside next to Hollis Prime. She touched his arm.
‘Another leather jacket. How many have you got?’
‘Two.’
‘I like the black one better.’
‘Yeah, so do I, but it got soaked. You’ve got to dry them slowly or they shrink.’
In Petone he stopped at a milkbar and bought two bottles of Coca Cola. People looked at the car because of its colour. Some thought it was stupid, she supposed. Old people hated it – she saw it in their faces; but she loved the soapy sheen of the bonnet and imagined that she looked glamorous, like a blonde, and Hollis in his jacket dangerous.
He parked on the foreshore. ‘Do you want to go for a walk?’
‘No, I like being in here. How old are you really? You don’t have to lie.’
‘Yeah, OK. I’m twenty-two.’
‘I’m fifteen.’
‘Fourteen, you said.’
‘Fifteen in two weeks.’ She tried to close the gap but it stayed dark and sinister. ‘There’s older girls than me.’
‘Hey, we’re out for a drive. You don’t have to worry.’ He had finished his drink and threw the bottle looping, like a knife, into the sand dunes. ‘You look older than fifteen. You look about seventeen.’
That was a lie, unless it meant her breasts. The pleasure she had felt slid away, leaving a space where something that he wanted stayed hidden, yet was plain.
‘Why did you have to get Angela to telephone?’
‘I didn’t know your number otherwise. Angela’s all right.’
‘Now it’ll be all over the school.’
‘What will? A drive in my car and a bottle of coke?’ He grinned with half his mouth. ‘Relax, Ellie. We’ll just talk. How come you live in Woburn Hostels?’
‘It’s my mother’s job. She’s one of the matrons.’
‘Where’s your father?’
‘He’s dead. He was beheaded.’
It made him look at her properly. She felt the same control she’d felt with ‘immaterial’, and kept her father off, kept him at a distance: a shadowy figure, not with or without his head, whom she was grateful to for helping her.
‘Yeah?’ Hollis said. Then, a little primly: ‘Please explain.’
‘I don’t remember him. I was only two.’
‘Was it in the war?’
‘No …’ He moved in close, her father, whom she knew only from his photographs – wedding ones, where he was bruised around the eyes with happiness; dance ones where her mother in hairdo and dress was at the centre and he merely Brylcreem and long knobby hands; and one with Ellie, aged two, on his shoulders. She thought she could remember holding his head between her palms. ‘He couldn’t go to the war because of his leg. He broke it playing football and it didn’t heal right so he walked with a limp. It was too bad for the army even though he wanted to go. Anyway, he died after the war. He could be a railway shunter with his leg.’
‘A shunter?’
‘It happened in the Wellington railway yards. He was on the footplate, and he got off to run ahead and change the points and he tripped over. His leg was weak. The engine went over the top of him. That was my dad.’
She could not remember him. Her strongest memory was of a woman in a hat with a pin that looked as if it went through her scalp as well as her hair saying in a voice meant to be soft, ‘His head was lying there like a ball,’ and someone else saying, ‘Sshh.’ She could not even now, against the evidence of the photographs – his angled brow and springing hair – believe that her father’s head was not smooth and round. It sometimes made her grin at the thought of him.
‘That’s really crook,’ Hollis said.
‘My mother still cries about him,’ she said, and wondered at her compulsion to tell him things that were none of his business. ‘She’s only young. She’s thirty-four. She should be married, that’s what she says. I think she wants more children except me, but sometimes she says I’m her whole life. Then she says, “I shouldn’t have said that, forget it, Ellie.” It’s why she goes out with men who aren’t a patch on my dad.’
Hollis opened a packet of cigarettes. ‘Want one?’
‘No thank you.’
He lit up and flicked the match away. She could tell that he didn’t know what to say; and thought, Well now I’ve done it. I suppose he wanted necking and I’ve told him about my life, and there’s plenty more. She grew sorry for him, stuck with someone he hadn’t bargained for, and she could guess how it made him small in his own mind, as if she’d told him to calm down and start again.
She took a mouthful of coke. ‘So,’ she said, ‘what about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘I’ve told you some of my stuff, so you can tell me yours, about polio’ – because his crippling was the most important thing: where sitting in the rain began, and using floral curtains to dry his face, and wearing leather jackets and driving a pink car. It was where trying to pick up girls who were only fourteen
began.
‘What makes you so damn nosey?’
‘There’s a difference between nosey and interested,’ she said. ‘My dad had a huge funeral. All the railwaymen in Wellington came. But I can’t remember anything about him. Not one thing. I was too young. How old were you when you got your leg?’
‘Eleven.’
‘That’s –?’
‘1947.’
‘Was there an epidemic? I remember 1954.’
‘Yeah, schools got closed. Some people died, because they didn’t have good treatment then, not like now.’
‘What happened to you?’
‘Nothing much. I got carted off. Then I was in a wheelchair. I wore calipers. I’m OK now.’
‘Did it hurt?’
‘Yeah, it hurt. The treatment hurt.’
‘What’s polio?’
‘Are you dumb or something?’
‘Some people die and some just get crippled legs.’
‘That’s the way it goes.’
She saw he was pleased to have found that answer – a movie line. ‘Baby’ would have sounded right at the end of it. If she wanted to be kind to him, she would leave it there, let him win what had somehow turned into a contest; but if she did, it seemed that she would stop liking him because he would have chosen to be small – just his face, just his clothes, just his car – and she wanted to stay on the edge of love and had to have him rounded out for that.
‘What do calipers do? Are they those iron things that go round your leg?’
‘I don’t wear them. Not any more.’
‘What do they do?’
‘Stretch the tendons.’
‘So, does polio make your tendons short?’
‘It wastes the muscles. The tendons stop working. Jesus, Ellie.’
‘Are yours working now? Will they get better than they are?’
‘No, they won’t.’
‘So you’ll always limp?’
‘Sure. Satisfied?’
She finished her coke. The answer was yes. He had made himself almost complete.
‘What causes polio? Is it germs or something?’
‘It’s a virus. They’ve got stuff you drink now. Salk vaccine. Too late for me.’ He put both hands on the wheel and held it tight. ‘You want to know the worst thing? It’s my parents.’