by Gee, Maurice
Memory leaves me with clammy sticks of asparagus and cold gurnard fillets. It interferes with Georgette when I settle in the corner of the sofa to read. It’s like that with me. Loomis builds into an imperative. I must take time away from Dickie Pinker. He can manage for an afternoon. Tomorrow I’ll commandeer the car and drive into the west, towards those hills far away, and find Access Road, where my brothers wait, silent, gruff and dirty, in the little house where I grew up.
two
The houses that I knew are still there, but now others squeeze in beside them. It’s called infill, although infill was a second stage after the gorse and scrub sections on the high side of the street were cleared and planted with spec houses in the fifties. By that time the street had been pushed through Dawson’s farm to meet the Great North Road and was blind no longer. I don’t know when it was sealed and framed in concrete footpaths, but as I drive down the gentle slope my forebrain grows dizzy with possession and my throat aches with loss.
Along at our end, the former railway houses opposite the Beach house sit undisturbed. There are five of them – red roofs, a green roof, a blue roof, weatherboards in pastel shades, except for one (the McEvoy house when I was a girl) in a terminal condition, with rusty iron, curling paint and rotten window frames.
Our house is on the upper side, the better side, with front windows looking out to the Waitakere Ranges – a view that once had a middle ground of farms and orchards and vineyards but now takes in the new metropolis, Waitakere City. There seems to be nowhere the shops and warehouses haven’t gone, and I have learned the trick of nullifying everything that lies out there and recreating, in a kind of ‘let there be’, the green paddocks and round-headed trees and faraway blue bush of my girlhood, when Dad and Mum owned our house and Lionel and Roly were boys with scabby knees and Rowan Beach their knowing sister.
Dad sold the house in 1947. Lionel bought it back in 1983. He lived there alone until Roly joined him as the century was turning. I’ve watched them like a pair of fish in a bowl. I visit them when I can muster the energy and when I calculate that love won’t be overcome by revulsion. Is it love? I don’t know. When I drive out from Takapuna and down past the mangroves to the harbour bridge, I need to be in that state of good humour that tips, by a natural progression, into more of itself and works like a masseur’s palpating fingers, promoting laziness, promoting affection.
I go through Herne Bay and Westmere and get on the motorway at Point Chevalier; scurry north – I’m a scurrying driver, even in Dickie’s giant Volvo – to Lincoln Road, and turn towards Loomis; and good humour survives this roundabout approach because I know that soon I’ll be crossing Loomis Creek, although without a glimpse of its murky water, and climbing the hill past Loomis School. The old four-roomed building, high shouldered, narrow eyed, stands like a pensioner among new-built classrooms in pretty dresses – classrooms with low foreheads, I say – and it brings a hailstorm of memories, never fails, and I say, ‘Ha’ and I say, ‘Yes’ and I say, ‘No’. (‘No,’ with disbelief and embarrassment, ‘did I do that?’)
I’m a dangerous driver the rest of the way up the hill, but there are no lights to negotiate, only a turn across the traffic. I manage it and I’m in Access Road, where school memories flick away like sheets of paper in a storm and I become hard-minded and critical, for this end isn’t mine and has no authenticity. Mine, Access Road, is the other end, and even there it’s only a small part held like a nut in a hard shell: the Beach house with its left-side neighbour, the Meikle house, and the Wiggins on its other side, and the five railway houses over the street. As for the rest, among the infill, and the lost swamp and abandoned orchard and the slopes of gorse tangled like wire, and the two culverts and Kelly’s farm and the draught-horse paddock sloping down to the creek, they are like the fibrous casing that lies around the hard shell of some nuts – but now I’m pushing it too far. There are judgements to be made and anger to be coped with – that shock of anger that someone, thirty years ago, painted our house blue. Our house is white. The Beach house is white, eternally.
The lawns are mown, there’s not a weed in sight. The hedge is clipped, and the clay bank, once carved with roads for Roly’s Dinky toys, is a hanging carpet of groundcover, yellow and green, housing, no doubt, a million insects – lucky things to be living in such comfort there. This is Roly’s work, Roly the gardener.
A nurseryman had owned the property before Lionel bought it back. He had resisted infill, resisted the blandishments of developers, and built two medium-sized glasshouses at the back of the section, where he grew tomatoes, courgettes, melons, and raised seedlings of all sorts. Lionel had no interest in that. Growth made him suspicious, perhaps afraid. He let the section turn into a jungle, which must have increased his fear. Jungle at the front and back; jungle inside the glasshouses, which burst their roofs and pushed out their walls and planted glittering teeth among the dock and thistle and the crazy vegetables busily converting into weeds. So it went on until Roly came. The Beach section grew famous as an eyesore and exemplar of neglect. All that time Lionel stayed inside. He’s inside now, in his room, in his bed.
Roly arrived eight years ago. He walked in, touched nothing in the house, just made himself a place to cook and a place to sleep. He set to work on the section and has done all this: the groundcover, the hedges, the lawns at the front, the multi-leaved, multi-fruited garden running to the macrocarpa hedge at the back, squared along the boundary with the Catholic school. The glasshouses are gone, their wreckage gone. Tons of glass were carted away. There’s a garden shed between a nectarine tree and a peach tree. There’s a compost bin – it’s more: a compost set of apartments where magical transformations take place – a worm farm and drums of liquid manure. Everything is wholesome and clean; decay is clean, putrefaction is turned to use. And the vegetables grow. Do you want to see silverbeet the way silverbeet should be, so glossy green it hurts the eyes; and pumpkins, carrots, potatoes, oh potatoes, kumara …? Roly’s garden takes my breath away. I’m scarcely able to believe that one old man digging with a shovel (he uses a shovel, not a spade), scraping with a hoe, his trousers held up with a cast-off tie, has made all this.
When he had sent the rubbish away in half a dozen truckloads, leaving the old dunny to house his tools, Roly dug the back of the section by hand. The property is a full quarter acre (I can’t do hectares) and that makes the garden an eighth. He turned up a dozen old dumps of cans and bottles, some dating from the Beaches’ first occupation (Roly is a canny chap: he sold the bottles to collectors). Each sod received a whack on the back of its head with the shovel. The soil was friable and soon gave the appearance of a choppy sea at full tide. When the last square inch was turned to his satisfaction, Roly said, ‘Now then,’ like Micky Savage. I had no idea of the labour ‘Now then’ heralded. I went away and left him to it, pleased that he was occupied and that Lionel had his brother to keep an eye on him.
Eight years later, here’s the garden, and here they are, two old men sharing a house, one of them ruling inside and the other absolute monarch of the section.
Lionel rules by negative influence. His bed is jammed against the wall like a bench in a changing shed. There’s no need to look for him anywhere else except the toilet. He won’t accept Roly’s help or mine in freeing him from his blankets and getting him there. Several months ago Roly set up a bell for him to ring. A rope runs on pulleys through the ceiling cavity. The bell hangs over the back door, like the one that signalled playtime at Loomis School, but although Lionel was bell-ringer in standard six and Roly cajoles him with the memory, he refuses to touch the rope dangling by his hand. Roly gives it a jerk now and then. ‘Just testing,’ he says. He’s pleased with his contraption.
He was working in the tomatoes when I arrived. His roadman’s shovel stood upright in the soil with his hat sitting on top – one of those thirties hats creased lengthwise in the crown. I’m surprised there are any left; but if Roly has an image of himself it’s as a workman, and t
he hat fits, although when the sun gets too hot he wears a knotted handkerchief instead.
‘How is he?’ I called.
‘Same,’ Roly said.
‘I’ll make a cup of tea soon.’
‘Ring the bell.’
I stepped inside. Now there’s a journey. I was dizzy again as I walked crookedly through the house, calling ‘Lionel’ to warn him I was coming. I crossed the narrow kitchen, passing the cavity that once housed our old wood range. The rose window bloomed as I entered the sitting room. It made red and green puddles on the floor, where the carpet, worn along a track to Lionel’s bedroom door, raised loops of string to catch my feet.
‘Lionel,’ I said, ‘you’ve got to get some mats before someone breaks his neck.’
Wherever he travels in his mind, there are things that won’t let him go. I had crossed the room and lowered myself into the bedside chair before he was able to free himself. He moved his head 30 degrees on the pillow, opened his eyes wider, 30 degrees, and found me.
‘You,’ he said.
‘Yes, me, Lionel. Me again. I’m your sister and I need to know how you are.’
‘Sister blister,’ he said.
‘That’s not very nice.’
Our conversations go this way. I’m happy as long as words are coming out. Mine rise from affection and sorrow, no matter how worn and formulaic they sound; his from the denizen inhabiting his skull. What is that creature? Why, it’s Lionel of course. Unless you believe in demons taking possession, there’s no way to deny that connection. Here is Lionel; Lionel dying. This is my brother with the scabby knees. He, in that and every subsequent manifestation, is householder, denizen, monarch there, and is subject to himself.
I took out my chapstick and oiled my lips. ‘How are you, Lionel?’
He turned his head away the same distance, closed his eyes, then opened them. It was like changing gears in a car.
‘You don’t need to come,’ he said.
‘I like coming. I want to come.’
Long pause, while my words wound through the half-blocked channels of his consciousness.
Do I fail in love by expressing things so? I’m simply trying to understand. Past and present, good and bad, pain and pleasure, success, failure, obsession, prejudice, and all his acts of commission and omission thicken and spit inside his bony skull. I hear them with a sense beyond normal hearing and know their provenance in his life and mine. Yet there is something I don’t know. I’ve given up hope of discovering it. He’ll never make admissions. Reluctance sets in him like tar. And why shouldn’t it? He’s dying and it takes all his time.
‘Let me help you outside. I’ll put a chair in the sun.’
When he makes no movement, doesn’t even blink his eyes, he’s saying no.
‘It’s a lovely day. You can watch Roly pinching his laterals.’
He whispered something. Was it ‘laterals’? The word had a flavour for him. He closed his eyes on it, and I sat quiet while he did whatever he does with a new idea – processed it. I used the time to map his face, crown to jaw, then went further, to his turkey throat, where the singlet under his pyjama top looped its grey hem round his Adam’s apple. Lionel is growing warts in his hairline and soft little bulbs of aberrant skin on his cheeks. His eyes leak, his nose leaks, while his lips, when he draws them back, as he often does, reveal his beautifully shaped but now discoloured acrylic crowns.
People say you should be able to find the boy in the man. I can’t find Lionel, no matter how hard I try. But shouldn’t I want this person now, the one in the bed, rather than that person there?
After a while he said, ‘You can go away now.’
I replied, ‘Do you remember …?’
That is the way we converse. He orders me out; I sit tight, while retreating from my ambition to know the man, and remind him of things that happened when we were young.
‘Do you remember the fancy-dress concert in the Loomis town hall? You were the king in his counting house, counting out his money. You were wearing your pyjamas, and a dressing gown Mum made from one of Dad’s old shirts. Joan Tribe was the queen, eating bread and honey. You recited on the stage, remember …’
That is the way I go on.
‘Down flew a blackbird and pecked off her nose – that’s Dulcie Fountain’s nose. She was the maid. But who was the blackbird? I can’t remember. Dulcie cried because the elastic sprang back and whacked her in the mouth.’
Lionel never responds. I’m a radio droning news from nowhere.
‘And then you … and then I … then Roly …’ Hearing myself, I understand his deafness. But how else am I to fill half an hour sitting by Lionel’s bed?
Halfway through the fancy-dress concert, he stopped me by turning his head. I’m never sure what his eyes see, not sure that if I bend to look I’ll find myself mirrored there. His focus stops short of other people – of the four he sees: Roly, me, his doctor, his once-a-week carer who washes him. He lifted his hands from the coverlet and mimed – such minimal acting: a flattening of one hand, a finger placed on the palm like a pencil.
‘Pencil? Paper? You want to write?’
I found them on the table by his bed, a biro not a pencil, and a land agent’s gift pad with a prettied-up woman smirking at the bottom of the page (so agents were pestering again). I placed them in Lionel’s hands, half-believing he had a message for me, and watched as he wrote.
One word. Lateral. That was all. Tiny letters, neat and square, made with his drill hand.
Lionel doesn’t shake or twitch. Except for occasional necessary uses, his body doesn’t seem part of him any more. All his life is in his head – in that head ruined by age and illness, which I can’t force into conjunction with dentistry. Lionel bending close to peer into the wet pink cavity of a mouth? Never. No. Yet that was how Lionel, handsome faced, spent his working life. He worked in a practice in Christchurch, then part-owned one in Loomis. He sold his share in 1983 and bought our old Access Road house. He moved in and scarcely came into the open air again.
He held the pad and biro until I took them from his hands.
‘Do you want to go and see Roly’s tomatoes, is that it?’
I knew very well it was not, but conversation is hard to make when it’s so one-sided and I take every opening I can get. I might do better sitting quiet, but that’s even harder.
‘Do you remember Mr Drummond’s tomatoes, when you and Roly raided them and used them in a fight? One of them hit Mr Finn’s car coming up the road. That wasn’t the worst hiding Dad ever gave you. That was the Catholic school.’
Lionel closed his eyes. The meaning is, he’s closing his ears.
‘Go and make Roly a cup of tea,’ he whispered.
‘And one for you? Just a sip? With plenty of milk?’ I pleaded.
A small sideways movement of his head also means no.
I touched his cheek – the only physical comfort I bring – and went into the kitchen, where a fridge not much bigger than a butter box sits on the bench. The milk was full cream, thank heaven. Roly does the shopping every second or third day; walks down the right-of-way by the McEvoy house, crosses the busy road running by the creek, and the wide bridge where once a swing-bridge bounced and swayed, and stalks the aisles in one of the supermarkets in Loomis Mall. I sometimes think he picks at random: instant noodles, chocolate almonds, whole smoked chickens, tomato sauce, bacon, sardines, date scones, flavoured milk. I made his tea with chocolate milk one day, to teach him a lesson. He drank it with no comment.
Our mother worked in this kitchen more than sixty years ago. The lino, old even in her day, has given way to vinyl faked to look like Provençal tiles. The wooden sink bench is replaced with stainless steel, and the electric stove, so exciting when it took the place of our wood stove, has given way to a built-in range with an eye-level oven. The nurseryman did this. Lionel has made no improvements. Roly has none to suggest. He describes the kitchen as ‘pretty flash’.
I carried two mugs of tea into
the garden and put them on the brick table Roly built last summer beside the dunny. There are two chairs: an old sea-grass recliner painted with enamel to preserve it, and a spindly canvas thing that’s going to collapse one day. Roly came, smelling of tomatoes, and took the canvas one. Mum taught her sons to be gentlemen, and in Roly the lesson survives. Item: Roly stands aside at a door to let me through. Item: Roly raises his hat to a lady. I’ve a dozen more examples but that’s enough. He’s formal in his behaviour, he’s clean in his mind, he still believes ladies don’t swear – and if they do they’re ‘hard boiled’. He thinks I’m hard boiled and blames Dickie. He never mentions Dickie or asks about my life in Takapuna, which he describes as ‘an upper-crust place’.
‘I didn’t get anywhere with him,’ I said.
‘Nowhere to get,’ Roly said.
‘There must be. He’s got all sorts of things going on in his head. He writes down words.’
‘And then forgets them.’
‘How do you know?’
Roly cooled his tea with a noisy sucking (a workman, not a gentleman, in his tea-drinking habits). ‘Ever heard him use one?’ he said.
‘That doesn’t mean …’ I did not know what it didn’t mean.
Roly lay back in his chair, making the canvas creak and the bolts groan. He sighed with enjoyment; he grinned at the sun.