by Gee, Maurice
‘You could have suffocated down there.’
‘I’m all right. Where’s my chimney?’
‘You’re not going in that hut again,’ Mum said.
‘It’s my place,’ Lionel said. ‘I’ve got my things inside.’ He knelt and started scraping loose earth away from the entrance.
Mum and Dad let him keep his hut, but when he was in residence she or I would call down the chimney at intervals: ‘Are you all right?’
‘Piss off,’ Lionel answered me. I don’t know what he said to Mum.
The hut came to its end one day when Sourface Kelly was moving his herd of cows from rented pasture at the blind end of Access Road back to his farm. The bull running with cows broke free and ran up our path and across the garden. His front legs smashed through the match-lining roof, and he lay as though sunk in a mudhole, bellowing mournfully and rolling his eyes at the sky. Kelly and his son had to dig him out.
‘That’s the end of it,’ Dad said. ‘You’d be dead if you’d been down there.’
‘Yeah,’ Lionel said. ‘I was finished with it anyway.’
He wasn’t finished with Clyde Buckley. Buckley edged his way back …
• • •
Telephone. Damn!
• • •
She’s all right. Cheryl is going to be all right.
• • •
Rage and fear make my hands shake and send little refluxes of sherry into my mouth. Too much sherry; I’ll put it away. Dickie is off at his club. Nothing stops him. ‘I can’t do her any good sitting here. Are you all right, pet?’ He only calls me pet when he’s feeling guilty.
Her cheek is bruised where the brute punched her. One of her ribs is cracked. But the good side of her face was looking happy as we left, and not from the kisses and the strokings we gave.
There’s a house – vacant possession – in Northcote with Cheryl’s smiling face stapled to the fence. A man telephoned, asking to see it, and they arranged to meet at the address in half an hour. When Cheryl arrived, no one was there. She let herself in to wait for him and to see that everything was neat and clean. An empty house can look like an old whore, Cheryl says. Standing in the kitchen, wiping water stains from the tap, she heard feet padding behind her. A man wearing a hoodie came in from the hall. He saw her soft-leather bag lying on the table the owners had left behind. Cheryl thinks that saved her. She believes he lured her to the house to rape her, but her bag, supine and voluptuous, attracted him more. He grabbed at the handle, but got only one strap. Cheryl, shrieking, dived for the other and jerked him off balance over the table. With her free hand she clawed his face. (‘My brave girl,’ Dickie says, tears in his eyes.) He was a skeleton-handed boy with jittering eyes. As he straightened, his hoodie fell back and she saw grey tattoos climbing his throat. He let go the bag and punched her on the side of her face. Cheryl slid to the floor. She stayed on hands and knees with her head hanging, and he came round the table and kicked her in the ribs.
‘He was going to rape me and then he would have killed me,’ Cheryl says. The boy had conjured a knife from his pocket. (‘A Maori?’ Dickie asks. ‘No, no, he was white. His head was shaved. He had red blotches.’) He pushed her on her back, using his heel, then took a handful of her blouse and slashed it open.
‘One screech and I’ll cut you, bitch.’
The next-door neighbour saved her. He had seen the back-and-forth struggle at the table, and ran out of his kitchen into the yard. He picked up a clod of earth and threw it at the window, where it exploded like a rocket. ‘We’ve called the police,’ he shouted. His wife, on the porch, was talking into a mobile phone. (‘I’ll take him a case of whisky,’ Dickie says.) The boy, the rapist, grabbed Cheryl’s bag and bolted. And before Dickie left for his club the police rang to say they’d made an arrest. ‘Got the bastard,’ Dickie said. ‘I hope they give him one or two from me.’
He leaked tears at the hospital. I remained dry eyed, although my rage and distress equalled his and my love has always been as great. Cheryl, half-drugged, still wanted to talk, even though the swelling in her cheek had reached her mouth. A boy, she told us, with his life already lost. Compassion doesn’t get beyond theory with me, and Dickie has never had much of it. Before we could find a way of disagreeing with her, the good side of her face lit up. A man carrying flowers came into the room. We did not want him there, but as Cheryl plainly did we stepped aside. He laid his flowers in her lap and took her hand.
‘Tom,’ she said, and tears sprang into her eyes.
‘There,’ he said – half of ‘there, there.’ He was constrained by Dickie and me at his back.
Cheryl introduced him – a fellow called Tom Quinney. (Fellow was what I felt then – I withdraw it now and replace it with nice man.) He’s the one she sold an apartment to – the hard-of-hearing one not bothered by traffic noise. (He wears a hearing aid.) My thought was, He’ll never do for Cheryl. My later thought is, Please let it be. In the five minutes before we left, I began to like him. He was gentle, he was firm – I mean, firm in his personality, no shifts, no vibrations, no (I think) accommodating, cushion-sinking softness, but a listening inclination to his head and an interested eye – and, as I mentioned, oh glory be!, gentleness.
‘He’s an ugly-looking bugger,’ Dickie said in the car.
‘I think she’s starting to see beyond appearances.’
Tom Quinney is a tall, sandy-haired man in his fifties. He has a froggy mouth but non-froggy, wise and calculating eyes. His voice has a Southland burr and his hands, perhaps Southland farmer’s hands, were wide and flat-palmed and careful with their pressure when we shook hands. Dickie likes a squeezing match. He tests his man that way. Tom Quinney understood. He gave a little grin and fought an honourable draw.
We left him to his courting and Cheryl in the happy position of being able to present a damaged face, exciting compassion, while the undamaged side stayed beautiful. But it’s no joke. She could have died. All that brimming life cut and crushed; all those rich years ahead never to be. I think I would have become a mad old woman.
Now I sip sherry (just one more glass) and nibble cheese. At his club Dickie prescribes flogging and castration for that boy and his generation. Yet he did not forget to bring me a rose before he left. It’s beautiful, halfway to full blown; it beams at me and molecules its scent across the room.
I love it for a moment and then I can’t – the insensate thing! It’s the boy with the tattooed throat and the jittering eyes who owns movement and intention.
seven
Step through the back door of Lionel’s house and you’re in a graveyard overgrown with weeds. Here is the little triangular shelf across the corner where our Philco radio sat, bringing us the news from London and the adventures of Speed Robinson and Jimmie Allen and The Green Hornet. We listened to the news while eating tea at the kitchen table, knives and forks careful on our plates, lips stitched together while we chewed. Big Ben made his six chimes, then the man with the sort of voice Mum wanted us to have began his nightly conversation with her. Dad nodded his agreement with both. For six years it was war news. Mum was sometimes in tears. The Green Hornet, Lionel’s favourite, came late in the afternoon. He had a car named Black Beauty and a Japanese servant, Kato, and they drove out masked in the night to catch the crooks. Lionel sat on the floor, under the Philco. I see him wedged in the corner, arms around his knees, immoveable as a gravestone, with eyes focused backwards into his head. No one dared speak while Lionel listened.
These days that corner is stacked as high as the shelf with old newspapers and an empty vase with a broken lip sits in the radio’s place.
Lionel is scalier each time I call. He’s like an old lizard in his bed, with lizard claws fastened on the blanket edge. I didn’t try him with memories today. My fear, my indignation, my relief still ran too high.
‘He kicked her, Lionel. He broke her ribs. Then he took a knife …’
It brought him a little bit to life. He understands the meeting of
sharp instruments with flesh. ‘Little bastard. Do I know Cheryl?’ he said.
‘Lionel, you’ve met her hundreds of times. When she was a child I got you to look at her teeth. You called them neat little choppers, remember?’
His interest waned. I chattered on because that’s my job. Cheryl is a subject I can do year by year – happy memories, sad ones – but soon I’m afflicted with a sense of wasting good things and also of debasing my daughter. There’s a smell in Lionel’s room of things that don’t have smell: eyes that don’t see, skin that doesn’t feel. The smell, too, of a mind closed on itself, but turning and twisting with things I can only call things. I timed half an hour on my watch, then made two mugs of tea and carried them into the garden, which bulges and unfurls with summer abundance.
Roly wheels a barrow down to the gate several times a week. Pumpkins, marrows, tomatoes tumble in the bottom, while silverbeet froths over the edge. He lays a neatly lettered sign on top: Help yourself. The neighbours do. On Friday a man comes with a van and Roly loads him up for the Saturday market in Loomis town. They share the proceeds. So my brother supplements his pension.
I told Roly about Cheryl, and that was easier. He expressed no outrage but simply went ‘Tsk, tsk.’ (I think that’s how you spell that little tongued exclamation.) He took off his hat and let the sun beat on his white bald head. Beads of sweat stood there, clear as glass. His hat had drawn a furrow across his forehead, like the join between a red brick and a white. He blew on his tea.
It’s not his fault that he doesn’t know Cheryl. After one visit she has kept clear of Access Road. When I mention my brothers, she wrinkles her nose, meaning: Grotty old men. She’s wrong about Roly: he’s quite clean. I found him once stark naked in the garden, hosing himself free of soap suds from the crown of his head down to his ankles; and I believe he strips to the waist and washes his armpits every night at the kitchen sink. I don’t know why he chooses that over the bathroom basin, where he shaves two or three times a week. Mum was particular about cleanliness.
I completed my account, puffed my indignation, contained my terror, then we sat companionably while the variegated jungle of vegetables spread before us sucked and sipped chlorophyll from the sun. (Have I got my science right? No. Never mind.) But querulousness soon broke through, as it always does at this one of my life’s addresses. With Roly, my plain brother, known backwards and forwards, or so I claim, how can I not ask questions about the other? They’re never new or penetrating, simply defeated. How has Lionel come to be like this?
Roly grunted and squirmed, and tipped tea dregs between his feet.
‘Don’t know,’ he said.
It was such a characteristic response – a characterless response – that my exasperation turned on him.
‘You ran away too. I haven’t forgotten.’
He smiled at me. ‘Is that how you see it?’
‘Well, didn’t you? Just a postcard at Christmas and God knows where the next one was coming from.’
‘I was just doing my thing.’ The idiom came awkwardly from him. He felt it too and frowned, then delivered information as if in apology: ‘I was working as a gardener – parks and botanical gardens, stuff like that. You saw me doing it once.’
‘I remember. You picked fruit too.’
‘I did lots of things. But mainly it was gardening. It’s easy enough. Just go to the council and they send you to the parks guy and you’re in. I was doing that in Dunedin when I met Lionel. He was going past with a gang of his mates.’
‘I never knew that.’
‘I thought he might have told you.’
‘Lionel never got near enough to tell me anything.’
Roly shrugged. ‘I wasn’t in Dunedin very long. Too cold.’
‘What did he say? Did he stop?’
‘He came back after.’
‘By himself?’
‘Yeah, by himself.’ Roly grinned. ‘His mates were a pretty snazzy bunch. But we had a drink in a pub. We did that a couple of times before I went up north. I went to Napier that time, I think.’
‘What did he say? What did Lionel say?’
‘Nothing much.’
‘Oh, Roly.’
‘Well, he didn’t. Lionel never took much notice of me.’
‘Did he have a girl?’
‘I never saw one.’
My curiosity switched tracks. ‘Did you?’
‘Me? No. I’d better get some work done.’
‘Oh, sit down, Roly. Talk to me. You’re like a fish.’ I meant something flapping to return to its element, but had the notion too of the sort of fish that swims away from its river birthplace into the sea and returns home only to die. Roly walked out the gate one morning, in the dawn. This garden he has made is his home, and he’ll stay for the rest of his life. But what happened to him out there over fifty years? If I ask, he says he painted bridges for the Ministry of Works, he worked as a roadman and a construction-site labourer, but mostly he found jobs in gardens for town and borough councils up and down the country. I see his innocent face hanging like the daytime moon above the monotonous jobs of breaking with a pick and dumping with a shovel, of planting and weeding and thinning and pruning, and I want to pluck him down and know him, not let him drift off down the sky.
‘Roly,’ I said, ‘have you ever had a girl?’
‘None of your business, Rowan.’
‘What about that woman in Nelson?’
‘What woman?’
‘When you were in the gardens down there?’
Dickie and I made a southern trip in the seventies in an effort – all my effort – to restore commonality to our marriage. It was no good. I remember fast driving (Dickie’s sport when no other is available), and impatience, and his question: ‘Well, what do we do next?’ We crossed the strait on the ferry and drove (fast) to Nelson and ate in a café by a duck pond, and there, across the water, saw a man pruning roses by a fountain. He took off his hat and splashed water on his face, and I cried – perhaps I screamed – ‘That’s Roly,’ and dashed out, leaving Dickie to pay.
Roly laid down his secateurs and embraced me. His jaw rasped my cheekbone, his sweaty smell enfolded me as strongly as his arms, and when he surrendered me his hand kept a brotherly grip on mine. We sat on a bench and I fired salvos of questions, speeded up by anxiety, for Dickie was circling, looking at his watch, and amusing himself by doing quick draws and firing six-gun shots at the ducks – Dead-Eye Dick.
Roly had been in Nelson for a year. There was puzzlement in his voice at that length of time. He told me he would be leaving soon. Where did he live? A room in town. Did he cook for himself? There’s a kitchen. That’s the sort of answer I got. Yet his hand gripping mine was also an answer. Roly loved me. He loved us still. He was like the trees growing all around, and would behave according to his nature, grow a little each year, keep his roots deep in the soil and stay in his place – while, of course, moving about the country. He would say nothing. And he would keep on loving us. That is more than a tree can do.
‘Roly, you can’t go on living like this,’ I said.
‘Why not?’
I made a string of impatient exclamations but found no answer.
While we talked, a woman circled us. At first I thought she was strolling aimlessly, but in a moment noticed the looks she threw, full of resentment, and said to Roly, ‘Is this a friend of yours?’
‘Annie,’ he said. ‘She has her lunch with me.’
‘Call her over.’
The woman sat down on his other side. I have a nose for people not right in the head. This woman, Annie, did not overlap herself; edges showed, of anxiety and need and greed and anger. She told me that Roly was in the room next door, challenging me to produce a greater closeness than that. I explained that I was his sister and hadn’t seen him for a long time, thinking sister stood me aside from threatening her, but it was the opposite. Annie understood family. Perhaps she was a specialist in it. Roly put his hand on hers, stilling her agitation.
I suspect touching was rare in her life, for she looked with wonderment at his brown hand in her lap.
‘I’m not going anywhere, Annie,’ he said. She had been a pretty woman, and underneath her fading cheeks and lined brow was pretty still, in a blurred and sepia way. She was older than Roly. She had a missing tooth and a nicotine stain in the corner of her mouth, and eyes that, tender on Roly for a moment, made a feral leap at me, then foundered on my solidity. His hand kept hers, although she tugged, and he said, ‘Eat your lunch, Annie. Go on.’
Dickie was wiping duck poo from his shoe. He came towards us over the grass, dragging his foot, but stopped to kick a pine cone. He’ll kick anything that lies in his path, then watch to see if it finds touch.
‘Hi, Roly,’ he said. ‘Long time no see.’
Roly released Annie’s hand and stood up. He shook Dickie’s hand.
‘Who’s your lady friend?’ Dickie said.
That was too much for Annie. She jumped up and ran away – a curious half-walking skip – leaving her lunch in a paper bag on the bench.
‘What did I say?’ Dickie said.
‘She’s not too good with people,’ Roly said. He picked up the bag. ‘I’d better go …’
Roly, leave her, I wanted to say, don’t get trapped in something like that. But I hugged him, I patted him, I watched him walk away, and went with Dickie to the car and sped past the still sea out of Nelson.
‘She looks as though she’s been a couple of time round the block,’ Dickie said.
‘She’s –’ I said, then couldn’t go on. Roly became a medium, presenting me with Annie’s sorrows, and if I opened my mouth again I would weep for her.
Thirty years later, sitting beside my brother in his garden, I wanted to know what those sorrows were.
‘She had a breakdown,’ he said.
‘What sort?’
‘I don’t know. Something went wonky in her head.’
‘Wonky, how?’
He had no answer or, I saw, interest. Wonky was as far as his understanding went. If she had appeared at that instant, stumbling through his bean rows, he would have picked her up and comforted her, loved her in his way – but absence set his interest aside, the way switching off a radio brings silence. Roly was some new order of being. When I appeared, as I had in Nelson, and did these days in Access Road, he loved me instantly, but when I left I became barely a memory, like Annie.