by Gee, Maurice
‘I saw some things,’ I said.
‘You didn’t see enough.’
I had known that for a long time. ‘Tell me,’ I said.
Lionel stayed silent. His eyes made a number of slow blinks, as if he was considering and saying no, and moving on and saying no again. He seemed to draw away from me a little more each time and close himself into his long silence and refusal.
I became afraid of losing him, and said, ‘Clyde killed a girl. The police know that. They just haven’t got enough evidence.’
He looked at me in a passive way, as if what I had said was a fact as simple as breathing. ‘A girl hitch-hiking,’ he said.
‘Has he told you he did it?’
‘Doesn’t have to. Everyone knows.’
‘Has he talked about it with you? Is that what’s wrong?’
‘Wrong?’ he said.
‘Why you’re like this, Lionel. Why you’ve given your life away.’
‘That’s a dumb way of putting it.’
‘It’s true, isn’t it? Lying in bed like this. How many years? If that’s not giving your life away … But something’s happened, hasn’t it? Something with Clyde.’
Lionel smiled at me. ‘It’s been good to see him,’ he said.
‘Lionel, tell me. It’s my business. You’re my brother, and I love you and I can’t stand seeing you like this. He got hold of you. He twisted you round. He spoiled your life. You can tell me, and we’ll stop him coming here.’
‘You’re a silly girl, Rowan,’ he said.
That seemed true. I was breaking so feebly against him. Yet I was, in a way, pressed up close, and unless I could find the right words, the right question, I would slide away and we’d both be lost again.
I said, ‘Were you in it with him, when he killed that girl?’
The smells in the room: the bad air his lurch of rage released from the blankets; the smell of Buckley. The sound he made was like a cat spitting. Spittle flew from his mouth. He half sat up and made a swipe at me with his further hand, but toppled as his other arm collapsed under him. He lay half on his face.
‘Bitch, Rowan. Bitch. Get out of here.’
I was appalled, which made me want to run; but I was also triumphant, and that was stronger. I remember thinking, I’ve got you now.
I straightened him and settled him in his pillows.
‘I shouldn’t have asked that, Lionel. I know you weren’t.’
‘You don’t know anything,’ he panted.
We sat a while. Roly’s boots bongo-drummed on the roof. He climbed to the chimney, where he whispered, ‘Hello down there. This is God speaking.’ One of Dad’s jokes. It was like a puff of wind stirring rubbish in the next room.
Lionel did not hear. After a while he said, whispering too, ‘I had nothing to do with it.’
‘I know, Lionel. I’m sorry.’
‘But I could have stopped him,’ he said.
‘How could you if you weren’t there?’
‘I wasn’t really,’ he said. ‘Not really there.’
I demanded to know what he meant, thinking he’d found a drain that had to be cleaned out, some delusion rising from their days of running together.
‘I was there another time,’ he said.
I sat as though made of glass. A movement would run hairline cracks through me and I’d fall to pieces. I’m not sure that my heart kept beating.
‘Do you want to know about it, Rowan?’
‘I’m –’ I said, beginning to say that I was not sure, while yes and no darted like fish in my mind.
‘I told Clyde today,’ he went on.
‘Told him what?’ I managed to say.
‘That we had to tell the police what we did.’
• • •
The facts as he went on in his creaking, piping voice – child and young man and dying man together – criss-crossed each other like pick-up-sticks, and the best thing for me now is to lay them in a row, everything neat.
It was the night I met Dickie Pinker. Lionel was home on holiday from dental school. Clyde picked him up in his ramshackle car and they drove to the Orange Hall in town. The dance there was ‘no good’, so they headed back west to the Loomis RSA hall, where Clyde spotted me and asked me to dance. Dickie told him, ‘Shove off.’ I saw Lionel as we left. He had peeled away from Clyde to drink beer with some friends among the parked cars.
Dickie drove me home. I’m part of the story; I put myself in, shivering as I take my place. We sat in the car outside my parents’ house. Necking or petting, it was called. Next time I would ‘go all the way’. How hungrily I wanted that. Down in the town, Clyde Buckley pulled Lionel away from his friends and drove up the hill and turned into Te Atatu Road. Lionel wanted to be dropped off. But Buckley saw the car in front of Mum and Dad’s house, with two heads in it, glued together. He swung his car in a U-turn and headed through the suburbs towards Auckland, hunting now. Clyde Buckley was hunting.
The speedway races were over at Western Springs and the crowds were gone. But driving along the road by the golf course Clyde suddenly braked and started to back.
What? Lionel asked.
Did you see her? Clyde said.
She was beside a bush with her head in her arms. When Clyde stopped the car, she raised her face and Lionel guessed she was about sixteen. He helped her into the back of Clyde’s car and asked where she wanted to go. She said her friends had dumped her and she’d started walking home to Avondale.
Get in with her. You go first, Clyde said.
Lionel would not. The girl stank of vomit. She slumped across the back seat.
Clyde turned the car, but when they reached Avondale he drove straight through. The girl was asleep.
I know a good place, Clyde said.
It was the pine reserve at the back of the Waikumete Cemetery.
She’s too drunk. She doesn’t know what she’s doing, Lionel said.
Go for a walk, Clyde said.
Lionel walked half a mile up the gravel road and then walked back. Clyde was in the car, smoking a cigarette.
Where is she? Lionel said.
In there. He pointed at the trees.
Lionel knew then that Clyde had killed her.
She just stopped breathing, Clyde said. I guess she choked or something.
Lionel had some medical knowledge from his dental course. Clyde struck matches while he tried to revive the girl. She was limp. She was dead. Clyde had stuffed pine needles in her mouth. They grew like bristles. Lionel hooked them out. He tried to make her look like a person again.
I was trying to keep her quiet, Clyde said.
We’ve got to get the police, Lionel said.
Clyde was ready for that. We both did this, you and me.
Not me, Lionel said.
Then something came boring at him, boring through the night, and he understood that what Clyde said was true.
Lionel has carried that knowledge ever since.
Here is how they got rid of the body. (But I must stop saying the body. The girl. She was Elizabeth Gillies, called Betty, who had left Avondale College only a week earlier, when she turned sixteen, and was trialling as a sales assistant in a Queen Street shoe shop.)
They lifted Elizabeth Gillies into the back seat of the car and Clyde drove to an orchard road in Oratia where a packing shed was being built. They loaded a dozen hollow-centred concrete blocks into the car boot, then Clyde scouted round and found a roll of binding twine. They drove to the end of Access Road.
‘No,’ I said, ‘not there.’
‘He was mad,’ Lionel said.
Access Road was sleeping. Clyde crept his car into the hollow where the skeletons of two half-built houses stood against the sky. They dragged Elizabeth Gillies through the scrub and through the culvert, one on each arm. They pulled her down the side of the swamp until it widened into a pool. Lionel went back to the car for the concrete blocks. It took him six trips. Clyde kept the girl in shallow water while he tied a block to each arm,
then each leg. He broke the twine by sawing it on the rough edge of a block. He tied one to her chest by running twine under her armpits and round her throat. The moon went down, but Lionel said it was as though a light only they could see gathered around them. Clyde stripped to his underpants. He dragged Elizabeth Gillies into deep water, where the blocks sank her evenly like a water-logged tree trunk. He kept on diving and surfacing, and each time down there he pulled her deeper along the sloping bottom of the pool until she was, he told Lionel, ten feet down. Lionel did not think the water could be as deep as that. He does not remember Clyde swimming when they were boys. He dog-paddled at Cascade Park, churning the surface behind him with his feet, yet here he was rising, sinking in the ice-cold pool, eyes and teeth white in the starlight. Lionel handed him the remaining blocks one by one, and Clyde walked into the water, shoulders gleaming, head sinking, leaving an uprush of bubbles as he vanished. Deep in the pool, where there was a groove filled with silt, he placed the blocks on Elizabeth Gillies. Each time he came back, Lionel saw that Clyde was enjoying himself.
‘He was having fun,’ Lionel said.
Clyde dried himself with his shirt and singlet and pulled them on. He drove Lionel to Te Atatu Road. Before letting him out, he took his hand. Lionel could not tell whether it was a handshake or an attempt to crush him into submission. He felt his bones grate.
You and me, Lionel, Clyde said.
He pushed Lionel out and drove away.
She has lain there ever since, under her blanket of hollow-stone blocks. She sank deeper into the ooze and silt. Access Road was pushed through the farm to the Great North Road. Houses went up on either side. Some time in the seventies workmen drained the swamp and built a concrete channel for the stream. No one found her. She has settled as deep as it’s possible to go.
Elizabeth Gillies is one of those girls who vanish. We seem to have a lot of them. Does anyone remember her or is she just a file in a storage vault somewhere?
‘She’s alive,’ Lionel said. One of his hands rose slowly to his forehead. ‘I told Clyde that. She’s in here.’
Lionel says she gets more alive every day. The other girl, the hitch-hiker, Mandy Barnes, stands like a ghost at her side.
Roly climbed down from the roof and slid the ladder under the house. I waited for him to come and save me from Lionel, who might climb from his bed on stick-thin legs and crumple me in his hands like a paper bag. I shook off the feeling, and wanted to push him under the blankets and hide him from sight. He had let a girl be murdered. He had walked away up the road while it went on. So Clyde Buckley was right: it wasn’t just Clyde, it was Clyde and Lionel.
I said, ‘You knew he’d do something bad to her. You must have known.’
But I did not keep on and Lionel did not answer. He has held these conversations with himself for sixty years. When Buckley walked in at the end of that time and kissed him on the forehead and sat by his bed, it brought talk and questions to an end.
‘What did you tell him?’ I said.
‘That I was thinking of telling the police.’
‘Thinking?’
Lionel grinned. ‘I didn’t want to scare him too much.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said I didn’t have the guts.’
‘That’s all?’
‘He said I was a character.’
‘That’s what he said to Roly.’
‘And he said he was going back to Whangarei and I could stew in my own juice.’
Roly hadn’t come inside and now I didn’t want him. Lionel had drawn me in and I could not escape.
‘Will you? Will you tell the police?’
‘When I’m ready.’
‘They’ll put you in prison.’
‘Good. That’s good.’
He closed his eyes, this time not to block me out or send me away.
‘Thank you for coming here, Rowan. But you shouldn’t come any more. And Roly should go somewhere else.’
‘Have you told Roly?’
‘You’re the pushy one. I’ll just let him find out.’
‘Listen. Listen, Lionel. Cheryl’s got a friend who was a policeman. I’ll ask him what you should do. He’s had lots of experience—’
‘No.’ His eyes shot open, and he looked at me with his old anger and dislike. ‘Don’t interfere. This is mine. Leave it alone.’
‘I just want to help.’
‘No one can help.’
We sat quiet for a while. Within two minutes of learning about a murder, and my brother’s part in it, I was quiet. Not at peace – how could I be? I might never be at peace again. But quiet with the ending of Lionel’s long sickness and wasting away. Now we paused. But on either side of this moment Elizabeth Gillies lay dead.
‘They looked for her a long time,’ I said.
Lionel nodded.
‘Didn’t someone see her in Sydney?’
‘And other places.’
‘And all the time …’
‘Be quiet, Rowan.’
I obeyed him for as long as I could.
‘How did you let Clyde Buckley get hold of you like that?’
One of his hands, outside the blanket, fell on the other and fastened there. ‘I could give him hidings, then he got bigger than me. He’d do anything. I got stuck on to him and I couldn’t get off.’
‘Like a fly on fly paper,’ I said.
Lionel gave a single laugh. ‘Good enough, Rowan. But I’m off now.’
‘Will he come back?’
‘He’s gone. There’s nothing he can do.’
‘When will you tell?’
‘Soon. We can never fix it for …’ He made a small gesture at Access Road, at the swamp. ‘This is just to fix me and Clyde.’
I heard Roly in the scullery, boiling the kettle. In a moment he called out, ‘Tea’s made.’
‘Don’t let him come in here,’ Lionel said.
‘Will you be all right?’
I wanted to touch him, yet the thought made me recoil. He understood; was preternatural in his reading of me – and, from now on, of everyone and everything. He turned his head away.
‘Get out now, Rowan. You’ve got what you came for. And keep your mouth shut, OK?’
‘Yes,’ I whispered. ‘I will.’
And I mean it. I’ll tell no one. I’ll tell these white pages, that is all.
I sit in bed, propped in my pillows, and watch the words squirm along the lines. They twitch their noses like rats sniffing rotten meat. On and on they go. What more is there to find?
Dickie sleeps in his bed four feet away. His mouth is open, poor thing. He breathes stertorously. There’s a good word. I could jump over to him like Lionel jumping to Roly’s bed in the night. My feet would not even touch the floor.
thirteen
One day. Two days. Nothing happens. When I pick up my biro, my thoughts stay fixed and I can’t make them move.
Dickie knows something is wrong. ‘Something’ is his word. I answer, ‘No, no, Dickie. It’s just everything under the sun.’
What else can I say?
I thought: I’ll try the beach. So I walked there for an hour. The beach as medicine, the cold sand on my soles when I took off my shoes, the clean sky, ‘the moving waters’. It did not work. So here I am back with my white page and my crawling pen and my thoughts like dead lips after a dentist’s injection.
The thing that happened? The thing that will happen? There are two banks of fog enclosing me.
Buckley grew on Lionel like a lateral. When no one pinches them off, they can grow as large as the main stem.
I telephoned Roly. He wanted to talk about his garden. There’s hail damage to his vegetables. But he sees it now as nature having her say – at least I think that’s what he means when he concludes: ‘It’s the sort of thing that happens, isn’t it?’ He’s busy among his bruised plants all day, while Lionel lies in bed – thinking, Roly says, whatever he thinks; although once Roly saw him at the wash-house window, peering at t
he damaged garden.
I asked about the leaking roof. ‘Yeah, we’d better get that fixed,’ he answered vaguely.
He’d taken an hour off to do the shopping. ‘Lionel asked me to buy some donuts,’ he said.
Cheryl popped in for a cup of tea between appointments. She looks on it as proof of her professionalism that she took a buyer to see the house where she was assaulted. The hardest thing was opening the front door, but after that she led her client boldly through the rooms and made a point of praising the kitchen. When I tell Dickie he’ll say, ‘That’s my girl.’
I asked about Tom Quinney. She said, casually, that she was still seeing him, but could not conceal her satisfaction. It makes me nervous. The phrase I would use of her is ‘deeply smitten’ – am I allowed? – and from there one can be deeply hurt, which she’s been before. Concern for Cheryl is good for me. Outside Access Road life goes on. I tell her that I like Tom Quinney very much and that her father likes him too. She frowns at that. At her age, she’s not having her parents interfering, even if it is with approval.
Let me think. Lionel never touched Elizabeth Gillies. Would he have touched her – ‘touched’ is not the right word, but I can’t take the step to the right one – if he had been less fastidious about smells? Why did he walk away up the road? I can see it clearly: the white dust in the moonlight, the black moon-penetrated wall of trees on his left, farm paddocks on his right (I know the territory), the bare-topped hill, where he tells himself that Clyde has had long enough. I can see that far into his mind. Long enough for what? I won’t go as far as I went the day Lionel confessed to me, when I knew that he knew Clyde would hurt the girl. Perhaps he didn’t know. Perhaps …
And what will the police do? Will they rip up the concrete channel and dig deep down, and even then will they find bones? In the end will it rest on a confession, and will they conclude that Lionel is just a mad old man? A sick old man? I think when they hear Clyde Buckley’s name …
• • •
Buckley isn’t finished yet. He’ll come back.
fourteen
It’s over. God, it’s over.
That’s my blood on the page.
fifteen
Now, carefully.