by Gee, Maurice
‘For God’s sake, Julie,’ Kenny whispered.
She made a furious turn and scythed down the stumps with her bat. Then she walked off, eyes hot, leaking tears, while the opposing team made way for her as though she’d scored a hundred.
‘Cooked her goose,’ Kenny said, driving me home. He gnawed his lips. ‘Jesus, Julie,’ thumping his hands on the wheel. He would not come inside but dropped me at the gate. And Julie had, as he’d said, cooked her goose of course. She would never be chosen to play for Wellington again.
And she’ll not, it seems, do law or go in with Kenny. She won’t get her house on the hill or a million dollars in the bank. Ankh tattoos and nose studs and Doc Marten boots are now her way. There’s more than a mistimed stroke responsible for this, more than a temper-flash driving out judgement. I must believe that it connects with things that came before.
And now I have the connection, although I won’t accept it, I refuse.
‘Does she even know what an ankh is?’ I said.
‘Maybe. She’s going to put a scarab on her other shoulder. Or Anubis.’
‘Why him?’
‘Egyptian things are in.’
‘Why not Isis?’
Elizabeth looked at me sharply. As I’ve said, there was broken glass, a cutting edge in her, so far removed from her usual softness that I asked, ‘What, Elizabeth? Is something else wrong?’
‘You didn’t finish your roll.’ She opened the window and threw it on the lawn. ‘Blackberry jam. We’re spoiling those sparrows.’
‘What else did she say?’
Elizabeth sat down and gripped her knees. She seemed to want to twist her kneecaps off ‘She’s been going to a therapist.’
‘What sort? Why?’
‘Trying to get her memories back.’
‘Has she lost them? What sort of memories?’
‘They’ve discovered that Kenny abused her as a child.’
I did not understand. Had he shouted, called her nasty names? He was too easy with her, far too soft for that. Then I heard ‘abused’ in its modern sense.
‘No, that’s impossible,’ I said.
‘Her therapist is a woman who specialises in that sort of thing. It’s called repressed memory syndrome,’ Elizabeth said.
‘I’ve heard of it. Not Kenny, though. It’s out of the question.’
‘I don’t know what to believe. Julie’s sure. She’s sure. She says she remembers.’
‘Nonsense. Repressed memory is a hoax. It’s a modern form of witchcraft. It all goes back to Freud, who was a charlatan. I know. I come from the same town.’
‘Stop being stupid, Dad.’
‘You’re not saying you believe her? The girl’s always been just a bundle of resentments. She has to blame someone because she’s herself.’
‘Be quiet. Let me think.’
‘She’s like a room that’s been locked up too long. Open it and bad smells come out.’
Elizabeth leaned forward and hissed. I was afraid she’d bite me. ‘You know Kenny. He’s always been a weakling.’ It was him she wanted to bite.
‘Not that weak.’
‘And sentimental too. “My girly girl.” Can’t you remember the way he used to stroke her? I thought even then something was wrong.’
‘That’s being a father. That was love.’
‘It was …’ Elizabeth said, and could not find a word.
‘Elizabeth,’ I said, ‘it’s fantasy. Things that bad you don’t forget. What does she claim he did to her?’
Elizabeth shook her head. And perhaps it was her grief and anger and her helplessness, the loss of her usual placid self, that made me turn as though to another window, another view – a betrayal of the mind? a revelation? – and see Kenny and his child: a scene I’ll not describe.
‘God, no,’ I said.
‘What can we do?’
‘Stop her,’ I said. ‘Don’t let her go to the police.’
‘Why not? If it’s what he did? And he probably did. You know it, Dad.’
‘I don’t know it. Why did you tell me this? It spoils everything. I’m going to telephone –’
‘No.’ She held me in my chair: surprising strength. ‘I told you because I thought you’d help, not make things worse.’
‘How can I help?’
And I still say that. What can I do? We cannot stop Julie if what she says is true. And if it’s true, how can we help her? Is it normal in me, isn’t it perverse, that I want to help Kenny even more?
I’ve had time to think about it now. Elizabeth and I ate our meal and she let me help with the washing up, although it’s only stacking the machine. We talked into the night and went to bed when the hour hand started downhill – the first time I’ve been up so late for years. Kenny was only a part of it. We came back to him, could not help coming back, but our grief and fear had found a course to run – the best I can call it is ‘do nothing yet’ – and I told her about my life; I used my past as a kind of slowing-down and stepping-aside device. She received it like a gift, with liveliness and pleasure, and it pained me to see how Kenny put a shadow on her face as he returned.
In the morning – this morning – I played bowls. Now there’s a game Julie might be good at. I wonder if it might hold a cure and get her on her chosen path again.
A cure from delusion or abuse?
I walk down. The road winds with the contour of the hill, turning on the edge of a gorge filled with trees, where, after rain, you can hear the running of a hidden stream. The cuttings on the high side are bright with Cape daisies at this time of year, and huge pines, purple and scaly, bend their arms like old men and make a soft hissing like the sea. High in the trunk of one, where it bifurcates, is a small native tree with shiny leaves, growing as though in a pot. Needles strew the slopes, as slippery as ice, and give way to lawns with rhododendrons at the edge. One day I saw two parakeets, yellow and red, conversing in the branches of a tulip tree. Between my suburb and the city, this magical place. I end my walk with fresh blood in my veins, ready for the live weight of bowls on my palm and their lovely progress on the green.
I play for the bias, for the curve. When I come down to it, past the companionship and the pleasure of winning, that is it: the turning of the bowl on the green. I hold each one a while in my palm, the way one holds the back of a baby’s head, and then with an easy step send it on its way, its built-in imperfection measured to the fraction of an ounce. It rolls, it progresses, as heavy as a mastodon and as smooth as oil, and breaks left or right into the head. I rest on my opponent’s bowl and kiss the jack! Let me have that two or three times in a game and I will go home happy, win or lose.
I play, Dennis once said, with Jewish subtlety. Dennis is a Catholic priest. He’s retired, as much as a priest can be. Clive, who makes up our trio, is a one-handed man, but one hand is sufficient for bowls. He’s a returned soldier – strange to retain that name fifty years after the war – and a socialist and rationalist. Unlike some amputees I’ve seen, he covers his stump. Religion, race, politics, nationality – all four are present in our game. We never speak of them. Dennis’s remark, made long ago, is the closest we have come. He writes letters to the paper. So does Clive. They play another game, or fight a war, in the correspondence columns, and I’m pleased to be out of it. On the green there’s a battle too, but each of us enjoys moments of isolation when the well-played bowl is enough. And we’re saved from gladiatorial confrontation, man on man, by the fact that we play a game called sixes, where each is against the other two. It stops things from getting personal.
Dennis is a flashy fellow. He grins a lot, showing his nicotined teeth. He lays his smoking cigarette down when it’s his turn to play, leaving brown scorch marks, like freckles, on the grass; then sets off, bent-legged, tracking his bowl, and stops halfway, repudiates it with a fling of his arms, comes back hissing and takes his cigarette from Clive, who has picked it up to save the green. Or, now and then, he’ll follow it into the head, high stepping like a sw
amp bird, and cry, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ orgasmically. I’m easier with him than with Clive, who turns his mouth down at his good shots. Perhaps he has learned to smile that way. He grunts when I say, ‘Good bowl, Clive,’ and will not let his eyes meet mine. Yet he’ll pick my bowl up in his hand and, perhaps, clap it to his ribs with his shortened forearm and wipe it clean with his cloth. There is, I think, shy good feeling in it. Now and then I’ll reciprocate, handing his polished bowl to him. ‘Lovely, Clive,’ I say as he runs my shot bowl into the ditch. I don’t say things like that to Dennis. ‘You’re a tinny bugger,’ I tell him – as non-Jewish in my idioms as I can get.
I won this morning. The draw player comes out on top. It was my fourth win in a row and that was too much for Dennis, who had chipped one of his bowls with a drive that jumped out of the ditch and hit the base of the drinking fountain. Clive had finished ahead of him too. We have a lingua franca that gets us through our game and allows our differences to be hidden and even some liking to be expressed, but now and then one of us speaks in his proper tongue. Jewish subtlety, there’s an example.
We locked the mats and jack and scoreboard in the shed and went into the locker room to put our bowls away. ‘The Irish like to come at things head on,’ Dennis said. ‘You won’t find us sneaking in at the side door.’
‘Bowls,’ I said, ‘is mostly about the side door, Dennis. They wouldn’t have weighted these things on one side if they were meant to roll straight.’ But I was pleased with him for speaking out and allowing me to speak out. I thought, He’s a man I could talk to if he’d let me. Not about bowls, which should finish on the green, or about his faith. I would have to say that I think it’s nonsense. How his eyes would light up at the challenge. Dennis has been, in his time, a teaching priest and I would be easy meat for him. I mean just talk easily about whatever subject raises itself, and then perhaps about our different lives, I’d like that. I’d like it with Clive too. How did he lose his hand? Was it the Japanese or the Germans? He takes me for a German, although he knows I’m Jewish.
Dennis must have heard many thousands of confessions. I’d like to ask what men who abuse their daughters have said to him. If Kenny is guilty of it, I want him to confess. I’d be prepared to see him turn Catholic and sit in the box with some nicotined old sinner to get it done.
Usually I call a taxi to take me home. This morning I telephoned Kenny and told him I had to talk to him. I did not mean to talk; I simply needed to look at my son. I felt that the sight of him would tell me yes or no. He came willingly, expecting to hear that I’d sorted out his trouble with Mrs Lloyd and her daughter.
‘Stop here, Kenny,’ I said, as we drove up the hill. There’s a parking bay just past the Waterworks building. It looks over the tops of trees at the harbour. Lovers meet there. They kiss, and perhaps do more, in their cars. Office workers drive up in the lunch hour to read books or listen to music and be alone. I’ve seen a woman crying and one talking fiercely to herself, and a man punch his girlfriend in the face and then drive away with her before I could even think to take his licence number. It seemed a good place to look at Kenny.
‘So, Dad?’ he said, facing me.
‘I won,’ I said.
‘You didn’t ring me for your chauffeur just to tell me that?’
‘I haven’t had a chance to see Mrs Lloyd. I’ve been busy, Kenny.’
He saps my strength. It’s his plumpness does it, as though he has somehow fed on me. It’s the gaining and getting that fills his days. He has built himself a little room and occupies it in his plump white way and he can no longer fit through the door to the outside world. I try not to see him like this. Disappointment, fear too, makes me extravagant. He’s just a greedy man, of limited interests and poor intelligence. He has no curiosity. Kenny cannot wonder. I’ve never seen him stopped in his stride by some strange or beautiful unexpected thing.
Weak, susceptible, poor specimen myself, I looked for some fold about his eye, some fall or contour in his cheek not present before, something new as evidence of his degradation. I half expected a fetid smell – but no, it was only Kenny, pink and plump, blue-eyed, bulbous-eyed, and ready with his juvenile impatience.
‘Shit, Dad, I’m busy. You can’t use me like this.’
‘I wanted to talk to you. It’s about Julie.’
At once he was suspicious. ‘Yes?’ Was he afraid too?
‘She came to see us yesterday. I’m worried about her.’
‘I’m worried too. I’ve been worried about Julie since she was that high’ – demonstrating with his hand. ‘But there’s nothing you can do, Dad. She’s my responsibility, not yours.’
‘What’s happened to her, Kenny? Why this change? I can’t say –’ and almost went on ‘that I’ve ever liked her’, but changed it to ‘that she and I have ever got on –’
‘Not her fault,’ Kenny said.
‘– but now she’s gone right away. She’s turned herself into some sort of outlandish creature.’ This was not what I wanted at all. I wanted, ‘Did you, Kenny? Did you do what she says?’
‘It’s that fucking cricket match,’ he said. ‘She was all right until then. It really knocked the stuffing out of her. I tried…’
‘What, Kenny?’
‘I tried talking with her. Cricket’s not, you know, the end of the world – that sort of thing. But she was already waitressing. And getting in with this feminist mob. I couldn’t believe it when she didn’t go back to varsity. I was frightened she was turning into – one of those.’
‘A lesbian?’
He made a sound with his mouth, as if to spit out something bad. ‘But she’s not. I don’t think she is. She’s got some bloody female therapist though, messing up her head. That’s why she left home. You can’t live with your parents, that’s the dogma. There should be some law so you could prosecute these bitches.’
He seemed to tell me, with his anger, that he was innocent.
‘They’ve got her sticking rings in herself.’
‘Yes, I’ve seen.’
‘She’s got them here.’ He jabbed his nipples with his thumbs.
‘How do you know?’
‘Her mother saw. Do you think I looked?’
The thought of rings in that knob of flesh made me feel sick. And I became convinced of her delusion and that Kenny had not done to her what she claims.
‘You’ve got to hate yourself. It’s mutilation,’ Kenny said.
‘I want to get out now. I need some air. I’ll walk from here.’
‘It was you that started this. Don’t blame me.’
‘I’ll talk to Mrs Lloyd. I’ll telephone her.’
‘Get her off my back. Are you all right? Can you make it home?’
‘I’ll make it.’
Relief was making me dizzy. My son was not a monster after all. I went back down the road and up the path by the Waterworks building. It was steeper than I remembered. Several times my feet slipped on the crumbling earth and I almost tumbled into a gully. I was exhausted by the time I reached home.
Elizabeth was waiting lunch for me.
‘It’s all rot,’ I said, ‘what Julie says. You can put my lunch in my room.’
I showered first, and ate a little, then had a sleep. Afterwards I spoke with Elizabeth and told her what I had found out. Julie’s pierced nipples convinced her too.
So I can write that my son has not abused his daughter.
But how can we cure that poor sick girl?
FIVE
I did not choose this country and nor did it choose me. I arrived by accident, but after the accident came necessity. I am tied. There are bonds I can never break.
I did not like the place at first (and do not always like it now) but it was as far as I could run. If there had been lands further south I’d have gone there. In Auckland I slowed down the headlong rush of mind that had carried me into this new hemisphere. I held myself still and looked around. Sea coasts increase the inlander’s sense of being lost – of being cut off
from the certainties that have sustained him. I was not used to moving waters, not on this scale, or to such intimacies between the elements. It seemed indecent. Neusiedler See was nowhere more than two yards deep. If you tipped out of your boat you would stand in water up to your chin until someone rowed along to save you. And at the Danube there was always an opposite shore, fields, vineyards, houses, trees, a hundred yards away, no matter how the water rushed between. In Auckland the sea and land lapped at each other or they contested.
Willi and I drove in a borrowed car out to a west coast beach called Muriwai, through hills that had no buildings or people on them, and that was bad enough; but at the beach waves as high as houses rolled in half a mile apart. Spray streamed from the tops as they mounted higher. They turned their shoulders into their laps and made the coastline tremble. This went on, I could see, for twenty, thirty miles, into the haze. A beach, they called it. I felt it suck the breath out of me and weaken my blood. Yet there was no disharmony, although water beat and land withstood. And nothing was disproportionate. Only me. I did not want to go there again. So we lay, Willi and I, on the brown beaches of the other coast and I watched him pull young women into his orbit by a combination of boldness and physical charm. Once they were inside he drugged them with his personality. I saw their eyes glaze and their mouths droop open as though they had forgotten how to breathe in the normal way. Several, of course, grew shrill at his outrageousness and got up and stalked away. Others stayed. But I must not make it sound wholesale. They were only two or three. And I was explaining the land, the sea, and the intertwining, the pawing and soft melting, that goes on between them on that coast. People who belong there do not see it. It made me uncomfortable, just a little mindsick in a way. I have lived in Wellington and have learned its severities well enough to be easy there, but I would, I think, always have been uneasy in the north.
We rowed one day, Willi and I and two young women, up a mangrove creek at high tide. Yellow water lapped into the trees; and trees of a larger kind, whose names I had not learned, grew on the banks, overhanging that khaki garden rooted in the mud. I tried to understand that everything was natural, that these were natural forms, belonging here, but half expected some wide-mouthed beast to surface in the tepid water and swallow us all. The women were strange too. They spoke an English I could barely understand, full of strange expressions and loose ends and with a disturbing deadness of intonation. I could not work out who they were. Shop girls? Factory girls? Secretaries? One dark, one fair, one plump, one thin. They were sticky with lipstick on their lips, but were not cheap, I thought, in spite of it. Willi did not go for easy conquests. I tried to understand what went on in their minds.