by Gee, Maurice
This is just a collection of bits, all seen with a prejudiced eye, and with anyone else it’s unfair; but his failure in holding together expresses him. Clyde Buckley was never finished. Some infection got in and stopped the bonding of his parts and stopped his bonding with the rest of us.
I haven’t mentioned his eyes. Small, blue, bright, amused and human. That is a terrible thing about Clyde Buckley.
I dream a lot but usually forget my dreams when I wake. They’re stories, I remember that much, and I’m always the main character, although I’m sometimes in someone else’s skin. I try hard to remember because, except for anxiety dreams, I often wake satisfied, but the narrative thins like wispy clouds in the sky. It dissolves and never comes back. Yet I’m happy all morning because of my dreams.
Last night I had a different sort. It won’t go away. It’s like the shadow that invades the eye as people go blind.
I was walking on a bare path worn in grass. Little muddy pools wet my feet. It was night, no moon, no stars, yet I could see my white hands lighting the way. I was afraid. Darkness and silence wrapped me like a wet cloth. Then, distantly, I heard footsteps padding behind me. I did not look round but started to run. The footsteps ran soft and heavy on the sodden ground. They came closer, until I did not know whether the sounds I heard were feet or breathing. Yet the thing could not see me; it followed the rag of fear I left behind. I saw a little side path plunging down. Banks of wet clay rose on either side. I ran down a short way, then sank on my knees to listen. The footsteps stopped. The breathing kept on. Then the thing, the creature, turned its head – a head I could not see, and the body a non-shape, blotting the night. It looked down the path and grunted, and followed me. I ran. It came closer. I scrambled up the clay bank. On top were swathes of cut scrub. I lay down and pulled them over me and stopped my breathing. The footsteps approached on the path, thumping like a drum. At the bottom of the bank they fell silent. The creature looked around and sniffed. I heard him sniff. Then he took two steps – only two – up the bank. He leaned over me and pulled the scrub away …
I never saw him. Before I could see, I woke up.
Dickie had turned on his lamp. He scrambled from his bed and leaned over me. ‘Boatie, what’s wrong? Are you all right?’
‘Dream,’ I gasped. ‘Oh God, he nearly got me.’ I turned my face against his chest.
‘There, there,’ he said. I never thought I’d hear those words. ‘It’s Dickie, love. It’s only me.’
Later he brought me a glass of whisky and made me drink the foul stuff neat. He had one himself to keep me company. We talked for a while, and I asked him why I remembered this dream when all my others faded as I woke.
‘Comes off a different level,’ Dickie said.
But my explanation is that it’s a Buckley dream. It means Clyde Buckley isn’t finished with us yet.
• • •
I hate going there but I drive over once a week. Although Lionel has gone back to his invalid state, he’s more lively in the part of his mind that turns my questions aside. Sometimes he answers as though for his own information, as though his voice buzzes and prickles inside his head. For the rest of it, when I talk of cups of tea and clean sheets, he’s simply deaf. I wonder if he knows any more what clean sheets are.
I wash them all the same in the machine the previous owner left in the wash-house. It’s an old paddle beater that reminds me of passing time. The rhythm is like footsteps and the creaking wringer like a door. I peg out sheets and pillow slips, shirts, socks, singlets, underpants – I’m Roly’s charwoman too – the way my mother used to, but instead of wooden pegs mine are plastic, purple and green. (The world moves on.) I don’t do ironing, what’s the point? The house, inside and out, is creased and clogged, it’s hairy with dust, and why introduce ironed sheets into that squalor? Folding is enough. Roly’s bedroom has a semblance of order – clothes on a chair, not on the floor – and he’s made an effort in the scullery, but the kitchen and living room remain little better than corridors through junk. I tidy Lionel’s bedroom as far as I can. I pull back his curtains and sweep the floor, where last week I found evidence of mice. I told Roly, and he says he’ll set a trap, but I know he won’t. He’s ruthless with slugs and snails in the garden, but mice are warm-blooded which places them on the human side of nature’s divide. (I think that’s how his mind would work if he thought about it.) I’ve seen cats skulking at the back door. Perhaps they come inside, though I haven’t found any chewed mice yet.
When I get home I take a shower and walk on the beach to breathe clean air.
I can’t understand Roly. Is he starting to sink along with Lionel? Or perhaps it is just that the garden is his house. I can understand him choosing to live there. Clean earth, moving air, plants feasting on the sun, and all the invisible connections he feels in his body and mind. But why can’t he extend himself more in the living room and kitchen? Perhaps his spirit hibernates, falls into some sort of dusty unnatural sleep when each night he comes in from his world outside. I ask him what he and Lionel talk about.
‘Nothing much.’
I ask if Lionel talks about Clyde Buckley.
‘I haven’t said any stuff about him. Buckley’s gone.’
Yes, Buckley has removed himself, his long arms and pot belly, his yellow grin and the Adam’s apple that rose and fell like a stopcock in his throat, but has left himself behind by his act of dominance. He keeps a miasmic presence in Lionel’s room. More than that, he sits in the bedside chair, he holds Lionel’s hand, and I can’t push him out. Clyde Buckley lives with Lionel now.
Even worse, he rides home with me. How I cling to Dickie. He feels it, he likes it, but it worries him. He believes my mind is too much at work (he has always been suspicious of mind) and if I’m not careful I’ll get sick. He has a horror of ‘sick in the head’.
Yesterday Cheryl’s attacker came up in court and the judge remanded him for a psychiatric report. Dickie is furious. The process is likely to take months. Cheryl only hopes they’ll find some way to help the boy. How did we have such a pleasant child? I hope so too, but at times I’m savage to have him locked away, and this is mixed up with Buckley. The truth is that when I say I want Buckley gone, I want him dead, because I think his influence is as strong as life. All day long I invent metaphors: the name Buckley written on a blackboard and my hand with a damp cloth wiping the board clean; Roly in the garden treading a snail under his boot – that sort of thing. It’s a kind of sickness, and I daren’t let Dickie know.
To keep myself busy I’m getting my neglected cactuses in shape. With autumn closing down, there is not much to do. Many of them need re-potting, which I don’t enjoy. I think I’ll get rid of them soon. I feel the need for something simpler to look after, and simpler in their natures and more at home with my mind that doesn’t want to produce prickly little bunched fists and unlikely flowers. I’ll get Griff in to dig some beds, but have no ambition beyond primulas and impatiens, with perhaps some stock and wallflowers for their scent. Dickie will want to grab my cactus space for a barbecue stove, but if that happens I’ll tell him I’ve decided to grow orchids there. The thought of orchids moves me miles away from Clyde Buckley, yet like a stream of dirty water he trickles back by roundabout ways.
Reading gets rid of him for a while. I revisit some of my favourite poems:
Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be …
Snippets float up in my memory:
… the moving waters at their priest-like task …
… a slumber did my spirit steal …
… gather ye rose-buds while ye may …
I’ve enjoyed them for years, renewable sweets I suck to remind myself that disappointments pass and beauty remains. They don’t keep Buckley out for long. Nor does Georgette Heyer. Once she was my guilty pleasure. Now she’s my solace and delight. I step inside her world and close the door – close it on disbelief and political conviction – and live in that free-floating world of masks and duels
and gaming tables and coaches and highwaymen. Suspended disbelief, that’s the thing. Suspended judgement, suspended good sense, outrage put to sleep by story-telling. The farm workers (out of the picture) are starving in hovels on the estates of the charming wastrels rolling dice at the gaming tables in Whites and the silly heiresses dressing for the ball. I don’t care. The peasants can go hang for a little while. The next turn of the plot engages me …
But nothing, nothing, keeps Clyde Buckley away.
… the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
• • •
Clouds hung their bellies over the sea. The water was leaden and the waves slid up the sand like oil. I beat the rain home by several minutes but couldn’t keep it out of the house. The sound on the iron roof was like a train in a tunnel.
The telephone rang and Roly’s voice came winding and crackling along the wire. He sounded old; he sounded a hundred years ago.
‘Rowan, there’s thunder and lightning over here. You’d better not come.’
‘Why not? It’s my day.’
‘There’s water running down the front steps. The roof’s got a leak.’
‘Which room?’
‘Eh? The kitchen. It’s all right. I’ve put a bucket under it.’
‘Get it fixed, Roly. I’ll pay.’
‘OK. But you’d better stay home. It’s hailing now.’ His voice was lost in the roar. Then he said sadly, ‘My garden will be getting knocked to bits.’
‘I’m coming over. Is there any shopping you want done on the way?’
‘I did the shopping. You’ll never get out of the car. You’ll get soaked.’
‘What’s wrong, Roly? Why are you stopping me?’
‘I’m not stopping you. There’s just no need. Lionel won’t talk to you. He won’t talk to me –’
‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it? Tell me, quick.’
‘No, nothing’s happened. I’ve got to go now. There’s another leak …’ And he hung up.
I knew it was Buckley. He had infected us like a disease. There was no getting well from him.
I drove through the storm with the car lights on, the wipers at high speed and the wheels surfing water over the footpaths. As I came into Loomis, the rain stopped and the sky turned blue. It was one of those hour-long Auckland storms that send down buckets of rain and truckloads of hail and then hurry away as though it’s all been a mistake. The gutters were running brown in Access Road but the asphalt was clean. Half an hour would have the surface steaming.
I went into the hollow by the culvert and up the other side to Lionel’s house – our parents’ house, my house – expecting to find Clyde Buckley’s car at the gate. No car was there. A trickle of water ran down a new channel carved by the rain beside the steps. That clay, that yellow clay, was the clay of my childhood. I almost wept at the sight of it.
twelve
Roly was at the kitchen table, reading the morning paper. With rubbish piled around him, with wire-rimmed glasses on his nose and a bucket on the table catching drips from the ceiling, he looked like a character in a TV adaptation of a Dickens novel.
‘You didn’t need to come, Rowan. There’s nothing you can do.’
‘He’s been here, hasn’t he? Clyde Buckley?’
‘Not for long, Rowan. He didn’t stay long. He’s gone back home.’
‘When was he here?’
‘Lunchtime. There’s no harm. He just sat with Lionel for a while. Then he went away.’
‘Back to Whangarei?’
‘That’s what he said.’
‘How’s Lionel?’
‘Sleeping, I think.’
I pulled out a chair and sat down. My heart was thumping as it does in the night when I wake to hear a burglar coughing by the bedroom door. It takes a moment to understand that in the still of 2 a.m. it’s someone passing on the footpath outside. I quietened down. Buckley had gone. But why had he been here, what did he want?
‘How do you know he’s gone back home?’
‘That’s what he said. Back to the winterless north, he said. He left some jam donuts. I threw them out.’
‘Did he say anything else?’
‘No, just, “Old Lionel, he’s a character”, that’s all.’
‘What did he mean?’
‘I don’t know, Rowan. Things don’t always have to mean stuff.’
‘They do. They do. If he comes again, call the police.’
Roly smacked his hand on the table. ‘And tell them what? For God’s sake, Rowan …’ He couldn’t go on.
‘Say what you want to, Roly.’
‘Buckley can’t do us any harm. He’s just being friendly. Maybe he’s lonely. God knows, he was lonely when he was a kid.’
‘Yes? So he cut the heads off baby birds.’
‘Ah, Rowan.’
‘And why did you throw his donuts away?’
‘I don’t …’
‘Don’t what?’
‘I don’t like sweet stuff.’
‘Oh, Roly.’ I took his hand. Tears were wetting my cheeks. ‘Look what he’s doing to us.’
‘He’s gone now. I really think he’s gone.’
‘He’ll never go.’ I released his hand and stood up. ‘I’m going to see Lionel. What will you do?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve looked at the garden. There’s nothing I can do until it dries out. I’ll go on the roof.’
‘Don’t fall off.’
‘It’s rusting through, Rowan. We need a new roof.’
‘I know, I know.’ I took out my tissues and dried my eyes. ‘Let me choose the colour.’
I went through the living room into Lionel’s bedroom. He had pulled his bedclothes under his chin, then freed his arms on the blanket, where his hands lay on their backs with the fingers curled like bird claws. His head was turned not towards the wall in his usual way but towards the door, exposing one white porcelain ear – a fine ear, I thought, a gentleman’s ear. It was out of keeping with his forehead and cheeks, which had their usual soreness. Yet I sensed a change in him. How was it that I knew Lionel was happy at last?
I stopped halfway between the bed and the door. Buckley’s chair stood on an angle where he had pushed it. Its hard little cushion carried the dent of his behind. It was as if Lionel had made a sigh and cancelled the man. This reading came written in the air, out of our past, out of Lionel and me and our difference. In spite of my dissatisfactions and frequent melancholy, brought on by language as often as not, I live in a happy world. Lionel entered the world of the unhappy through an agency outside himself and, I suppose, through readiness and susceptibility. He had no need, no deep need, to reside there. Until the end, he made no great struggle to get out. Yet he had done it. Standing by the bedroom door, I knew.
‘Lionel,’ I whispered, and when he did not wake, would have crept away. But the basement door opened and Roly dragged the ladder out directly beneath Lionel’s head. He gave a cough and clenched his hands and opened his eyes.
I pushed Buckley’s cushion off the chair and sat down. I said hello as though to a man I’d never met.
Lionel blinked at me. It took him a moment to know who I was. Then I saw from the stretching of his lips that I was welcome. It was less a smile than the acceptance of what he had done and where he must go; and at once I was avid to know the before of it, how he had got to this point.
‘Lionel?’ I said – no more than that.
‘Thought you’d come. You can smell old Clyde, can’t you?’ His voice was creaky and needed oiling. His eyes were out of practice in resting on a face.
‘I know he’s been.’
‘Yes, he’s been. What’s that noise?’
‘It’s Roly with the ladder. He’s going on the roof.’
‘What for?’
‘There’s a leak in the kitchen. Didn’t you hear the storm?’
‘I thought it was the world turning over.’ Lionel made a sound I can only call a snigger. He was tasting and swallo
wing self-satisfaction. But it was no more than a passing busyness in his mind. Deeper, he was happy. And deeper again, horrified still.
‘There was hail,’ I said. ‘I could hardly drive in it.’
‘I wonder if it caught Clyde? Are there any of those donuts left?’
‘Roly threw them out.’
A spasm of anger crossed Lionel’s face. ‘They were mine.’
‘I’ll make you some tea soon. I’ll make some toast.’ I was desperate to keep him open, keep him talking. One wrong word would close him down. ‘Lionel,’ I said, ‘has he really gone back to Whangarei or is he –’ I could not find the proper word ‘– waiting around?’
Lionel ran the white edge of his tongue over his lips, tasting donuts perhaps. He turned his head away, denying me as he had for years, and I could think of no way of bringing him back, so made a wild throw with his own words.
‘You were right, I can smell him. I smell him in this room.’ Then I added something of my own: ‘He’s like a swamp.’
Lionel rolled his head back and looked at me. His eyes held a gleam of interest.
‘If you think you know what Clyde’s like, you’re wrong.’
‘What is he like? You can tell me.’
‘Do you want to know? I don’t think you do. What you want to know is what I’m like.’
This was my brother lying in the bed – a strange old man I knew almost nothing of, yet knew deeply by means of love. I could not make out what that love was anchored on.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I want to know that.’
‘You’re nosy, aren’t you, Rowan? You always wanted to see. You got some frights, eh, poking around?’