by Gee, Maurice
You plunge down into Loomis from Te Atatu Corner, past the square-shouldered school and across the bridge, where new shops began to line the Great North Road shortly before the Beaches moved from Access Road. I went that way no longer, unless to the pictures or a dance. Te Atatu Corner had shops of its own and a bus stop pointing the way I wanted to go: into the city and a life as free as the one Roly set off to find. The bus put me down in Karangahape Road, where I climbed on the Mt Eden tram. A ten-minute ride, then I descended, ladylike, into the teeming street between rows of shops later designated a ‘village’. I walked to the training ground for my future life, the Teachers’ College, and found friendship and contentment there.
Mine is a nature requiring only a modest inflow of happiness. I don’t need it in large gulps; and I can endure times of drought as long as they don’t go on too long. (I think perhaps I’m describing everyone.) The Teachers’ College laid down a water table in me that has lasted my whole life, with ups and downs – but this metaphor is cracking under the strain. Just let me say I had three happy years at Mt Eden – and outside the college, in my second year, I became the official girlfriend of a rugby star.
I found, too, another source of happiness. There was another fresh-flowing stream in me. (There I go again.) In my third year the College approved of my taking Stage One English at the university, and how I drank those studies down. The books, the books! The poetry, the novels, the plays! I’ll get away from liquids and say I ate a three-course meal. I also began writing poetry (although in honesty it was merely verse – except for a line or two, a line or two). Mum loved it. She clutched it to her heart, literally: held one of my efforts, crumpled, smudged with flour, against her apron, and cried, ‘That last line is beautiful.’ Dad said, ‘Very nice, Rowan.’ And it was nice, it was pretty in a watercoloury way – sky with clouds, stream with reflections. I walked along the other side of a wall from poetry, I see that now; but with other people’s – Yeats’s, Keats’s, John Donne’s (my tastes were as various as that) – I jumped the wall; I bounced over like a spring lamb and then walked, serious but fizzing inside, among the words, among the rhymes, tasting and swallowing the beauty and the pain. I drank novels in long draughts and wanted to retire permanently from my world into theirs.
Reading shut Dickie Pinker out of my head for days on end. It gave me a sense of my largeness – look, I can go there, and there, and spread myself out, so many rooms, so many landscapes, so many worlds with people in them – and produced in me twitches of alarm about Dickie. How large he was in so many ways – overweening – but in others how small.
Yet my chief happiness lay in Dickie Pinker. Part of it came from liking him so much – his good humour, his generosity, his surprising gentleness – and part from being attached to him in his career. Dickie owned a Ford Prefect car. He called for me each Saturday, came inside to say hello to Mum and shake Dad’s hand, then we drove to wherever his Suburbs team was playing – Otahuhu, Takapuna, sometimes Eden Park. I watched him sidestep and sell dummies, and as I learned about rugby, came to understand how good he was. I loved the adulation people poured on him and took little sips of it myself when I saw their eyes light on me, the girlfriend. It’s a funny brew; has the taste of nectar but leaves you bad-tempered when the flow runs out – I think even Dickie felt that. The first year I was with him, he was selected for the Auckland team and I had to step back – no room for girlfriends at the higher level. He played in the Junior All Blacks too, and next year, everybody said, it would be the All Blacks, who were short of a good first five-eighths.
He had no summer sport, no cricket, no tennis, and nor did I, so we went to the beach, where he tanned himself almost black, while I tried for a lemonade glow on my pale skin. If I’m to be truthful, our main sport in that long summer was sex. He was a bit slam bang at the beginning, but his instinct was for gentleness and that’s my preference too, in spite of the sensualist residing in me – my mother’s daughter. So we learned to be very good with each other, Dickie and me, me and Dickie, and passed the summer in a subdued blaze of contentment. My worry was getting pregnant, even though, after several tries, I’d found a doctor willing to fit me with a diaphragm. Those things could fail. And Dickie, for all his shortish stature, was exceptionally (I had his word for it) long and thick down there, and once or twice dislodged the wretched thing. I made him wear rubbers after that.
Why am I putting this down? Because that summer was so large and long. It floats in my being like a time capsule, bouncing where it touches and making me sing. Even the worry, the devices, make me sing. I think of that summer as our honeymoon.
A dark moon rose over us when the season changed. Such a complicated mechanism, the knee. There’s a thing deep inside called the cruciate ligament. Playing against Ponsonby, Dickie was tackled from two sides, a hulking forward at his shoulders, a skinny winger hugging his boots, and his knee bent sideways like a rhubarb stalk, almost to the point of snapping. I heard him scream – such a girlish cry. The ligament snapped like frayed string. Then Dickie sat howling silently, and throwing back his head until it seemed his neck ligaments would break too. His season was over. And Dickie was over, the Dickie I knew. He never came back, the footballer or the rowdy, gentle boy.
In the weeks that followed, watching him hobble on sticks, watching him bite the rotten world with his unspoiled teeth, finding him several times weeping silently, I knew that I must marry him soon.
I did that. I married the snarling bugger. Excuse my language. It’s the best way of describing him, the sad, snarling bugger I loved. We set up house in half a house in Avondale and I went on with my probationary teaching year while he worked in his father’s hardware shop. I must be fair to him. His great feast on oysters and pudding was snatched away; and he had even more to endure – pity, which he could not stand, and, amazingly, the contempt of those who looked on the tearing of a ligament as a deficiency in character. Dickie blinked at them and didn’t know what to say. I got rid of them: ‘Get out of my house and don’t come back.’ I felt like saying it to Dickie too at times.
So we went on – and, feeling anger simmer again, I’ll stop. There were good years, bad years, years that mixed the two, and here we are. Choosing how to call the time we’re enjoying now is like the shell game.
The last time I visited my dentist he spent more time at the computer than looking in my mouth. One of my molars had lost a filling (black amalgam, put in when I was a girl) and was, in his words, no longer viable. He would reduce it to a stump and fit a brand-new homemade tooth on top. He looked at me anxiously when he told me the price. Go ahead, I said. He did some drilling, absolutely painless, then entered this and that on the computer, a process that probably requires great skill, while I chatted with his nurse (a pleasant girl wearing braces that I hope she got a discount on). The computer drew up plans for my new tooth, then a machine in the corner, grating unpleasantly, fashioned it from a block of white stuff whose name I forget. Michelangelo should have had one of those. The dentist fixed my molar on the stump with magic glue. All done. I paid on the spot.
Lionel was too early for one of those machines. People who went to him told me he was a good dentist – friendly, patient, soft with his hands, and apologetic on the rare occasions he needed to be. It made me wonder. Friendliness and patience did not come easily to Lionel. Mum had to prompt him to apologise. (Like the time Dad whipped him, after the Catholic school.) Do they teach professional manners at the dental school? For my kind and cruel brother the lesson must have been hard.
There was money from Mum’s legacy to help him through the course. But why a dentist? He was wild, free roaming, undisciplined. How could he choose the confines of the human mouth? Clean fingers and sterilised probes, nit-picking drills – that wasn’t Lionel. I asked him once, carelessly, and he turned white with rage. ‘I’d love to get you in my fucking chair,’ he said.
Dentistry is an honourable trade. It’s useful and highly skilled and isn’t the technology
wonderful? I can imagine youngsters choosing it out of interest. So why do I imagine that Lionel was punishing himself?
He stayed at school until he was eighteen but wasn’t smart enough for medicine, which Mum wanted for him desperately. Law would have been all right, although she didn’t fully trust ‘those men in wigs’, and neither did Dad. Lionel said they were ‘a bunch of bloody sharks’; and I told him if that was the case he would fit in nicely, meaning it, in a back-handed way, as a compliment. He understood and bared his teeth at me: ‘I know where I’m going.’ Mum sighed and accepted it. A dentist was a professional after all. Lionel lifted the Beaches out of the bootmaker class.
He came to dinner with Dickie and me after his course was over and before heading south for his first job. I was still teaching, and Dickie, no longer savage about his lost ‘big chance’, was simply down in the dumps, where he was to slop around for a few years yet.
My brother and my husband, or, to place them in their order of importance, my husband and my brother, had met only half a dozen times. Their dislike of each other was instinctive. Dickie had been king of the sidestep on the field but Lionel’s mental sidestep left him grasping at air. Lionel had the quicker mind and a hungry reading of weakness, while Dickie had his weakness laid out for all to see. But Dickie was immoveable in his centre. A block of stone stood there with Pinker engraved on the side. And I was beginning to detect a resonance, a humming in the air, as if someone (it had to be Dickie himself) had struck it with a mallet and made it sing. With hindsight, I’ll supply the words: I might have missed out on what I wanted, but by God I’m going to make a killing at something else. It was faint at that time, as I said, and several twisting corridors of self-pity had to be laboured through yet.
Lionel isolated the self-pity. He fed commiseration into it. He made Dickie walk across the room and back, and do it again, to see how he limped.
‘My God, that’s bad. You poor bugger. Is that the leg you did your sidestep off?’
‘I could step off both feet,’ Dickie boasted.
‘But your knee just collapses now? Will you always limp?’
‘There’s an operation for it but I can’t play again.’
‘Poor bugger. No All Blacks, eh? Does it hurt?’
‘Aches a bit,’ Dickie said. He was growing suspicious.
‘I meant playing for New Zealand, losing a chance like that. I reckon I’d sit down and cry.’
Dickie said nothing.
‘It’d break your heart,’ Lionel went on.
‘Break your fucking jaw,’ I heard Dickie mutter, and I said, ‘I’m sorry there’s no pudding. But I’ve got some of Mum’s chocolate sponge.’
‘God save me from Mum’s cooking,’ Lionel said. ‘Can we have some coffee?’
The coffee age, just arriving, had not arrived at our house. I made tea and came back in time to hear Lionel say, ‘– spend your life behind a counter.’
‘It’s better than swabbing out people’s mouths,’ Dickie said.
Lionel kept his temper. ‘There’s more to it than that. And more money than selling nails and tacks.’
‘You reckon?’ Dickie said, and I caught the sound of mallet on stone.
‘Hey, though, you don’t have to give up playing sport. You could be an All Black at bowls. Or how about croquet?’
‘What’s your sport? Pulling your pud?’ Dickie said.
Sometimes Lionel went white with anger and sometimes red. It was red this time, which probably meant anger was mixed with embarrassment. I did not wait to see which way the argument went, but put the tea down and said, ‘I’m going for a walk.’
The air outside was beautifully cool after the masculine heat of our dining room. I smiled with relief and said out loud, ‘I don’t care.’
‘Oh, you lovely thing,’ I said to the harbour, cool and white and simple under the moon. I imagined the mangrove trees that lined the creeks humming with pleasure as the tide swelled into them. I said (this time to myself and not to the night): I don’t need to stay with Dickie Pinker. I said: I thought I married a man, not a little boy. ‘Hello Moon,’ I said to the moon, baring my throat to her. Dickie’s latest bite marks were fading and I thought the light might wash the traces away. ‘Can we be friends?’ – holding up my face. Then gunshots sounded on the footpath behind me. Lionel came striding along. I made room for him. He went by with his eyes fixed on where he was going, not shifting even a whisker towards his sister, his past. I watched him turn into the road running down the hill to Avondale.
‘Good luck, Lionel,’ I whispered, and seeing that his escape ended mine, I turned around and walked home to the man, or boy, who was my husband.
six
Dickie suffers from shortness of breath but doesn’t let it get in the way of his morning swim. The cold shocks him. I see rather than hear him gasp as the water reaches what he calls, with not a trace of originality, the family jewels. That’s the point at which he dives and where my anxiety sets in. Will he come up? There’s no fun without a contest, Dickie says. He competes with himself to see how long he can stay under. I picture him down there, breaststroking, frog-kicking along, his belly scraping the sand, and see his eyes bulge like snapper eyes while his lungs strain like boilers in his chest.
Oh, Dickie, stop it, I believe in you.
If I neglect to say it – and I might one day, on purpose – his heart will give one last almighty thump down there and turn on its side for its well-earned eternal rest; and I will wade out sadly and haul my husband back to shore.
I’ve told him this fantasy and he loves it. He surfaces, bald headed and snorting, and sets off for Rangitoto, one hundred strokes of the Australian crawl. How can he swim and count at the same time? I sometimes count too and he’s always right. When he turns and starts to side-stroke back, I relax. Not even a shark will stop him now. I wrap him in his multi-coloured towel and walk him, wheezing, shivering, home, where he stands a long while under a scalding shower, then emerges for the whisky and milk that, by God, he’s earned. I never expected Dickie Pinker to be so much fun …
I don’t swim any more but sometimes I walk in the shallows, holding a sandal in each hand and smacking their soles together when I find a rhyme that’s eluded me – or, more frequently these days, when memory flashes through a door that suddenly, magically, swings open.
Here’s an example: we’re at the pool below the old dam on Loomis Creek. Dad has been swimming across and back, first with me and then with Roly clinging to his shoulders. Lionel doesn’t need that help; he can dog-paddle across by himself. I huddle into my towel, and join him and Mum on the bank. They’re watching a girl and her boyfriend perched on a willow branch above the pool. He pushes her, she slaps him, each trying to make the other fall. The girl stands up and dives, and stays down longer than I can hold my breath. She surfaces and wipes creek water from her eyes. ‘Who says you can’t touch the damn bottom,’ she calls.
‘Mum,’ Lionel whispers, ‘I thought you said ladies don’t swear.’
‘She can’t be a lady then, can she?’ Mum replies.
Is that a good memory? Neutral, I think.
Here’s another: Lionel makes himself an underground hut by the macrocarpa hedge. He digs a hole as deep as his shoulders, then a trench with a curve leading to the hole. He carpets them with coal sacks, and covers the hole with pieces of match-lining dragged home from a house burned down in Station Road. Other shorter bits cover the trench. Then Lionel piles dirt on top and smoothes it with the rake, and says to Dad, ‘I’m going to plant radishes on top for camouflage.’ He wriggles head first into the opening, and is nearly gone when Dad grabs him by the ankle and hauls him out. ‘You’ll suffocate in there. You need an air hole.’
‘No I won’t.’
‘Don’t argue. And dig that trench deeper or you’ll get stuck.’
Lionel, grumbling, snarling, obeys. It takes a weekend to deepen the access trench. Dad finds him a piece of down-pipe and helps him fit it in a corner of the
hut, where it pokes up like a chimney beyond the pumpkin patch. Lionel slides away again.
I’m not allowed in. Nor is Roly. And Lionel tells Clyde Buckley he’s too big. He stays underground for hours on end. He lights a candle down there – I put my nose to the chimney and smell grease; he reads comics and smokes cigarettes made from the butts Mum and Dad squash out in their ashtrays. I smell them too but decide not to tell.
‘If anyone goes in they’re dead because I’ve got booby-traps,’ Lionel says.
It’s enough to keep me out, and Roly too; and Clyde Buckley really is too big.
Late one Saturday Clyde sneaked through the hedge. He blocked Lionel’s entrance with dirt. Then he squatted by the chimney and lit pieces of newspaper with wax matches and poked them down the hole with a stick. He knelt and blew to keep them burning, and stuffed in more.
Dad was on the roof cleaning the gutters. He came round from the front in time to see Clyde Buckley strike a new match. Dad gave a shout. He jumped from the roof into the matchbox town Roly was building on the side lawn. I saw him flash by the living-room window and thought he’d fallen. He rolled like a gymnast and bounced to his feet and started to run. Mum and I jammed in the back door. By the time we had sorted ourselves out, Dad was charging through the potato rows, arms curved like horns, throat bellowing, and Clyde Buckley was bolting for the hedge.
Dad ripped the chimney from the ground. He knelt and yelled into the hole. Lionel’s head broke through the earth five metres away. He shook dirt from his hair. Dad ran and pulled him out a second time.
‘Who was it? Buckley?’ Lionel cried.
‘I don’t want to see that boy on this section again,’ Dad panted.
‘I’ll get him,’ Lionel said, showing his broken-toothed snarl.