by Gee, Maurice
‘He’s not a bad bloke for a copper,’ Dickie replied.
He cheered up when a girl in a white bathing suit ran up from the sea and vanished into the dark.
‘An apparition. A white rose,’ Dickie said. He’s getting quite good with words.
• • •
It’s lovely autumn weather. Dickie is pruning while I, murmuring ‘Sorry’, neglect my cactuses. He’s more sensible this year, wearing gloves, but still he gets scratches on his wrists. He licks the blood away with a kind of relish. I try to hold him as a talisman, but can’t bring him into the centre of my mind where I’ll find a grasp. Dickie exists in the realm of certainty, and certainty for the moment is abolished. In my new reality there’s only intuitive knowledge …
Which is never wrong. There’s a path that turns aside and leads you miles and miles, while consciousness blinks and time makes a pause, until you’re back in your starting place, where everything has changed its shape …
I knew at Lionel’s gate that the car belonged to Buckley – the way it sat there as if by right. I’ve always liked VWs in spite of their Nazi associations. A people’s car is a nice idea. This was the early sort, before they grew fat. It was the dark green of creek-weed growing on rocks, and had an old white-on-black number plate, LK something, and tyres like a bald head, and half-moons in the dust on its front window. It had a little cross on a plastic chain hanging from its rear-vision mirror, and a gaping pizza box on the passenger seat, with crusts in a pile against the hinge.
Fifty, sixty, more than sixty years ago, Clyde had leaned his balloon-tyred bike on our letterbox. What detail signalled the continuity? One front tyre mounted on the footpath, was that it? The bonnet rounded like his tennis-ball head? Or was it simply that I’d spoken his name to Tom. I’d rubbed the lamp and let the genie out, and it was time for him to park his car at Lionel’s gate?
I ran up the steps but shifted to the lawn as I went by Lionel’s bedroom. The blinds were down, as always, and the latches closed, but I wanted no whisper of me to reach Clyde Buckley. I felt he would put his hand out through the wall and hold me by the back of my neck. The chattering sound on the back lawn was Roly going back and forth with his hand mower.
‘Roly,’ I hissed (no, you can’t hiss a word with no sibilant). ‘Roly,’ I blurted, running at him, ‘is that Clyde Buckley’s car?’
‘Yeah, that’s him.’ He unhooked the catcher and carried grass to the compost bin.
I ran after him. ‘What’s he doing here? When did he come?’
‘Came yesterday. Now he’s back again. He’s visiting.’
‘What’s he want? Why did you let him in?’
Roly emptied the grass clippings and spread them with his hand. He pushed his hat back on his head and rubbed his brow. I saw how old he was for the first time – saw it because he was tired.
‘I didn’t. I made him wait while I asked Lionel. But the bugger – sorry, Rowan – he followed me. He was right behind me when I went in. I didn’t hear.’
‘What did Lionel do?’
‘He didn’t see. Not until Clyde went past and stood by the bed. Then he just said, “Hello, Clyde.” You know what Buckley did? He bent down and kissed him on the forehead.’
‘No.’
‘He did. Then he sat down and held Lionel’s hand.’
‘You let him do that?’
‘How could I stop him? Anyway, Lionel wasn’t worried. He liked it.’
‘He couldn’t have … What did they say?’
‘Nothing. Clyde just sat.’
‘That must be wrong. There’s got to be more. You didn’t see?’
‘No, I didn’t, ’cause I got out. They’ve probably said a lot by now. Yeah.’
‘How long did he stay?’
‘About an hour. That was yesterday. Now he’s back. Look, Rowan, Lionel’s OK. He even got up last night. He walked around the house. You could see it was hurting him, that thing he’s got …’
‘Polymyalgia.’
‘Yeah. But he came right out to the kitchen. He said it was time we cleaned the place up. Like he was telling me to get it done.’
‘And will you?’
‘If that’s what he wants.’ Roly gave a grin. ‘Then he went back to bed.’
‘And Clyde Buckley came back today?’
‘Half an hour ago. He brought a packet of donuts.’
‘I’m going in.’
‘No, don’t. Rowan, he likes it. Lionel, I mean. Buckley’s started something going in him.’
‘Started what?’
‘I don’t know. But he’s not here long. He’s only visiting. Lionel’s all right.’
‘How do you know? Buckley could be doing something to him right now.’
‘No, I’m watching. I won’t let anything happen to Lionel. He looked after me when we were kids and it’s my turn now.’
‘He didn’t look after you.’
‘Yes he did. You don’t know. He stopped big kids picking on me. And you know that time at the Catholic school, when he wrecked it?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I was there. Lionel never told anyone. He took the blame himself. But I got the spade for him when he smashed the window. I was too small to climb in, so I stayed outside and pulled plants out of the garden. There was a brand-new bed of primulas. I pulled them out and Lionel never said.’
I didn’t know what to say, but knew what to do. ‘I’m going in.’
I moved too quickly for him – across the lawn, on to the porch, into the kitchen, where a laugh from Lionel’s bedroom stopped me in my tracks. There’s a braying laugh, a whooping laugh, a chattering laugh, a splashing laugh, many sorts, but I never would have thought a weeping laugh: weeping as though with relief. Clyde Buckley was so dominant in my mind I expected him, and the sound of him, to fill the house, but this was Lionel. Lionel laughing. Then I heard his accompaniment: a series of barks from Buckley, like a dog chained to a shed at the back of a yard. I waited a moment, wanting to know what amused them, but all I heard when they stopped was a creaking chair. So I pulled myself together, pulled my right to possession of my brother tight around me, and went under the drooping lintel into the living room – my living room, Lionel’s – and across the booby-trapped carpet to the bedroom door, where I looked in and saw Clyde Buckley. Saw him in profile, sitting flat-buttocked on the bedside chair.
Although I had moved quietly he knew at once I was there. He put his hands on his knees and levered himself around.
‘Excuse me for not getting up, Rowan. My joints are stiff.’
It’s easy to write a description suggesting that someone has an unclean spirit. I want to do it. Another part of me wants to leave him undescribed. It’s superstitious, but writing him down confers power on him. Perhaps later. For now I’ll just say what we said and did.
His baseball cap was on the bed. He picked it up and fitted it on his head, then raised it to me like a gentleman. It was meant to be comical. His smile was yellow (I’ll allow myself that much), his voice ordinary (not unclean) as he said, ‘It’s nice to see you, Rowan. You’re looking well. But goodness me, where’s all your lovely red hair gone?’
It was hard not to respond. I opened my mouth, almost let words out, then stopped myself and ran my eyes past him.
‘Lionel, are you all right?’
‘Of course he is,’ Clyde Buckley said. ‘I reckon he’s malingering. Lionel, eh, you’re coming for a drive with me, old mate.’
‘No he’s not,’ I said.
‘Hey, Rowan. Just down into town to see the shops. I’ll bring him back.’
‘Lionel’s not well. It hurts him when he gets out of bed.’
‘Everything hurts when you’re growing old. Look at me.’ He patted his hip. ‘Tin hip, this one. And see this finger?’ He held it out. ‘When I bend it, it locks, I can’t straighten it out.’ He curled it – his right index finger – and it stayed that way and seemed to beckon me. He raised the hand and peered through the aperture m
ade by finger and thumb. We looked at each other through a tunnel of years. Then he pulled it straight with a little click. ‘Trigger finger it’s called, like the Wild West. But sure, it hurts. There’s not much doesn’t. We’ve got to keep on smiling, Rowan, or what’s the point? Old Lionel here, me old mate, he tells me he’s been stuck in bed since last winter.’
‘It’s his choice,’ I said.
‘Sure, his choice. Now what’s wrong with me giving him a little treat? Downtown to look at the shops. I tell you, this town has changed. Where’s all the places we used to go? Where’s Cascade Park, eh? How about we see if we can find it and jag some sprats. You can come too, Rowan. Make up for that dance I asked you for, when you turned me down.’
He was going everywhere, I couldn’t keep track, and Lionel lay propped in his pillows listening – listening, it seemed, with his eyes, they were so bright.
I said, ‘You can talk to Lionel as long as you like, but I’m not letting you take him anywhere.’
Clyde Buckley pulled his eyes off me – they stayed genial by some long-learned trick – turned them to Lionel and said, ‘It looks like Rowan rules the roost. She always was the ginger girl.’
‘Mind your business, Rowan. You’ve never offered to take me,’ Lionel said.
‘I try to get you out of bed every time I come.’
Clyde Buckley grinned. ‘Not hard enough, eh? It takes an old mate. Where’s your grundies, Lionel? Can’t take you in your PJs. Where are they, Rowan? Then you can toddle off while I dress him. An old man is not a pretty sight.’
‘There’s stuff in one of those drawers,’ Lionel said.
‘Lionel, listen to me,’ I said. ‘You can’t let someone just walk in and take over your house –’
‘Not doing that,’ Clyde Buckley said.
‘– as though he owns it, and owns you. You’ve got Roly out there and you’ve got me. We’re the ones who care about you, no one else. And this man –’ I looked at him and looked away ‘– what does he want? What’s he after? Do you know about him? Do you know?’
‘Now what’s to know, Rowan?’ Buckley said; and now there was a change in him, as though he had compacted himself and changed his skin to a chitinous shell – and, saying that, I feel I’m playing his game. ‘I’ve lived a quiet life,’ he went on. ‘I’ve never spent a day inside, if that’s what you mean.’
‘We’ve heard all about you.’
He gave a sharp denying nod. ‘Shouldn’t listen to gossip. Shouldn’t listen to lies.’
‘The police don’t think it’s lies.’
But suddenly I was adrift, for after all, what did I know? I felt as if I’d stepped inside with him, out of my life into his, and he had put his hand on me and eased me to a place where he could find me when he wanted.
‘Anyway …’
I was floundering and could see no way to turn. Something moved in me like a chemical change, solid into liquid, into gas, and carried away any comprehension I could have that the person sitting only a finger’s touch away was a murderer.
‘Anyway, Lionel’s not well enough. He can’t go,’ I whispered.
Buckley wouldn’t let me get away. ‘Rowan, that poor little girl’s not down to me.’
‘So you know about her?’
‘Stop it, Rowan,’ Lionel said.
‘No, let her go. I’m used to it. The cops have been dragging me in for twenty-five years. How would you like that? Police on your doorstep for something you never did. Not nice, Rowan. But sure, I know about her, the poor girl. But I never did it. Cross my heart.’
He drew his forefinger one way then the other across his chest, as we had done when we were children. It brought him back – that Clyde Buckley – and allowed me to break free from him. I knew he had murdered the girl.
‘Lionel –’
‘Go away, Rowan. I want to get dressed.’
I almost ran. I tripped on a loop in the carpet, I jarred my shoulder on the door-frame; and, outside, I lunged at Roly, who was standing up from wiping the mower blades, and held him by the biceps, digging my fingers in.
‘Roly, he did it. He killed that girl.’
‘Did he say that?’
‘No, he didn’t. But I know. And Cheryl’s friend was in the police. They know he did.’
‘Take it easy, Rowan –’
‘He’s taking Lionel. Why does he want Lionel?’
‘Listen, Rowan. Sit down.’ He took me to the chair by the old dunny. ‘Now calm down. He can’t hurt Lionel. And Lionel wasn’t in it with him, if that’s what you think. Lionel was in Christchurch. That’s for sure, Rowan.’
‘I know. I know. But why’s he come now? What does he want?’
‘Maybe he’s just a poor lonely old bugger. And maybe he’s sorry.’
‘No he’s not. Not Clyde Buckley.’ Something was wriggling in me like a maggot. It showed its head and I had it: Buckley’s phrase ‘poor little girl’. He’d spoken it with enjoyment. He had tasted her again.
I started to cry. It was the only relief I could find, but no real relief, for my tears were horrified and full of hate.
‘We’ve got to stop him,’ I sobbed.
Roly sat beside me and pulled one of my hands against his thigh so he could hold it. Soon Clyde Buckley and Lionel came out of the house. Lionel was wearing a suit and tie, which Buckley must have helped him with. He looked as if he was starting off on a long trip, except that his face was sick, a dying man’s face. His neck was loose inside the buttoned collar. I saw him magnified as I ran across the lawn. He raised his hand.
‘Go away, Rowan.’
‘Whoopsie, Rowan, watch that step. You’ll skin your pretty knees,’ Clyde Buckley said.
I had, in fact, stumbled and was forced to grab hydrangea stems to right myself. Roly came to my side and put his arm around me, not to hold me steady but to hold me back.
‘Let him go, Rowan.’
So I stood with my younger brother and watched my lost older brother proceed down the path with his childhood friend, who was helpful with his long arms, and solicitous at the car, and easy on the accelerator as they drove away. Access Road was empty. It was as if Clyde Buckley had swept life out of it.
‘Go home, Rowan. I’ll phone you when they come back,’ Roly said.
I went, not because I wanted to but because I could see he did not want tears and memories and conversation but needed to be alone in his garden with his plants. I drove home and had his call almost as soon as I arrived. Buckley and Lionel had stayed away for half an hour, then Buckley had helped his ‘old mate’ back up the path and undressed him and put him to bed. Then he’d gone, not bothering Roly with more than a wave. Lionel was sleeping.
Dickie came home, a little drunk, to be sure, and helped smooth my worries (they’re more than worries) away. Dickie is my antidote to darkness. But it’s more than darkness, isn’t it?
Three days have passed. Clyde Buckley has not been back. I’ll still not write down what he looks like, for fear of bringing him into Access Road again.
eleven
It’s too cold for Dickie to swim any more. Instead he walks with me, sometimes on the beach, sometimes into town. Yesterday we visited his doctor, but as Dickie won’t let me come into the surgery and finds it impossible to remember what he calls ‘medical guff’, I’ve no idea why he’s on stomach pills. ‘Something about my gullet maybe pressing on something else.’ Judging from the way he pushed the pull door going out (even though it’s named) and on the walk home kicked, in order, a beer can, a cigarette packet and a bottle top, he takes his new prescription for a guarantee of health. The bottle top pleased him especially, ricocheting from a shop front and skittering into the gutter. ‘Yes!’ he exclaimed. If he’d been a boxer he’d have raised his hands above his head and danced around the ring.
I’ve told him about Clyde Buckley and it makes him thoughtful. ‘If you want me to fix him,’ he says, although without his usual bravado. He agrees that something sinister is going on, some di
rty play at the bottom of a ruck. ‘It sounds like he’s got poor old Lionel by the balls.’ But oh, it’s worse than that: by some corner of his soul. Yet Buckley has gone – I won’t say home: can a man like that have a home? – puttering up the narrow road to Whangarei, where I pray that illness of some sort will overtake him. Where I hope – I don’t really pray about anything – that death will find him. He seems so strong, though, coarse-fibredly strong.
Now I’ll try to say what Buckley looks like, and not believe he’ll pick up my shiver and start back to Auckland in his green VW. He’s no sensitive, that is plain, yet is somehow sensitive to Lionel – and Lionel to him – by more than an accident of juvenile proximity. What happened, I think, is this: Lionel was a clever small boy, and open to excitement and whatever was new, and open to beauty as well (as most children are). He had his antennae extended into territory where they might have found anything, but found Clyde Buckley. And what was Buckley – where was he pointing? He is an equal mystery. But here I go with my description. I’ll try not to confound physical with moral ugliness.
Several times I’ve mentioned his long arms. It suggests something ape-like. That’s mistaken. It’s bigness rather than length that takes one’s notice – it’s heaviness and muscularity, even though there must be old-age wasting inside his sleeves. Heavy hands; flat fingernails as yellow as cow horn. The pot belly that Tom says features in police files is certainly on show but seems to come from slippage rather than growth. It houses – and this is hysterical, yet it’s how I feel – yards and yards of intestine, doubling back, and gives the impression that hunger and its satisfactions predominate in the man, which is why it’s legitimate for me to mention it. When he takes off his silly cap (the sort youngsters wear back-to-front), his hair is thin, his scalp is white. There are blackheads in his crinkled forehead; there are flakes of dry skin in his eyebrow roots. Nose fat and rounded, and sloping to a point, like the nose of his VW car. Wet mouth. (As a child his lips were sticky. They made a popping sound when he freed them from each other.) I’ve mentioned his round head, his tennis-ball head. That has a neat sound; but the sections don’t meet properly, they’re ridged along the joint, just as all the features I’ve described are loose from each other and don’t seem anchored to the bones underneath. His teeth are yellow – although most old people’s are like that, my dentist has a struggle to keep mine white. He pretends to manners – lifted his cap to me, as I’ve described – but dug a fragment of pizza meat from his gums and studied it on his fingernail before licking it into his mouth.