Live Bodies

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘How long will she be here? How long will it take?’

  ‘Maybe for ever.’

  ‘What I mean is, she can stay as long as she likes.’

  ‘Have you told her that?’

  ‘No. But I will.’

  Her door stays closed today; she’s lying down with, Elizabeth says, PMT. Women are frank about these matters today and although I’d just as soon not hear I suppose I can look on it as family too.

  Julie is sick. She’s very sick. That mental state I did not know I know about now. But she is free of the therapist who led her there, and that’s good news. It was Elizabeth who got her away. She has been busy while I looked somewhere else. Julie goes to a new woman, who works to clear all the septic clutter from her mind, and it will be long. Part of her prescription is my house, my garden, my long view over mountains, which Julie is said to like; and Elizabeth, who is essential. I would like to add, me too, Josef Mandl pottering about. But nobody has suggested it.

  She does not seem all that different to me, except that she’s more patient and more soft. That may be because of her medication. She can still be sharp and sudden and ugly with her tongue. I make her frown with my old-fashionedness, which I see clearly now she’s in the house, although I’ve always tried to move with the times. She exclaims softly, ‘Jeez!’ Once or twice she’s had to get up and leave the room. Does not slam the door though, closes it with a moderate bang.

  ‘You made a good job of the lawn.’

  ‘I would have done it better with a decent mower.’ Then she smiled. ‘I oiled it. If you’ve got a file I’ll sharpen the blades.’

  ‘How much should I pay her?’ I asked Elizabeth.

  ‘Job by job. Some days she won’t want to work. I’ll get some money from Kenny if you like.’

  ‘No. I’ll pay. Did you tell him all of it? What did he say?’

  Elizabeth is changing too. Her blandness is eroded; her efforts to please take a sideways shift and she doesn’t always pull them back.

  ‘I told Kenny not to come here. I told him he can see her in six months, if he’s lucky. If she’s lucky, I should have said.’

  ‘What did he think about …?’

  ‘What would you have thought about something like that?’

  I can’t answer. I can’t imagine. The ‘something’ Kenny was supposed to have done, created by that woman whispering there, grew into multiple rapes of the six-year-old by all his friends and business partners, standing in a circle, taking turns: devil masks on their faces, wives in the shadows, twittering. It was sometimes in a room and sometimes in a garden, and always at night, with candles burning, and Kenny capering, phallus erect, and Priscilla coming with a glass of raspberryade and wiping Julie’s brow with a flannel at the end.

  The woman, her therapist, believed it was true. There is ideology in this. And Julie believed it was true once she had ‘recovered’ it. But she is not to blame. Julie must be held innocent.

  ‘Was I …’ I said, ‘was I …?’

  ‘No you weren’t,’ Elizabeth said. ‘There’s only room for so much. She wouldn’t be here, Dad, if you were one of them.’

  ‘How can she stand it? How can Kenny?’

  ‘I didn’t tell him some of the worst. The only bit of luck we had was getting her away from that wretched woman. Once that stuff is in there it’s hard getting it out, but Helen thinks she’s got a good chance.’

  Helen is Helen Henly, a psychologist. Elizabeth persuaded Julie to her rooms, I don’t know how – and she is a woman good at seeming soft and slow. Julie sinks into her like a feather bed, and although it’s still dicey, she will stay.

  ‘I can see why looking across the harbour might help.’

  ‘Just be friendly with her, Dad. Not too cheerful, not too bright.’

  I play my part adequately. I smile and frown and cogitate and pass harmless opinions. Now and then I disagree with Julie, use a strong expression now and then, but it’s never about anything important – and lack of a subject becomes a strain. Often I can’t do better than just stay quiet. Elizabeth takes up the job of nothing-talk, or she turns on the TV set. They laugh. I laugh. I almost fall off my chair when Mr Bean, in the Queen Mother’s presentation line, finds his finger poking out of his fly. Julie frowns. She wants American sit-coms with smart young people in apartments wisecracking endlessly. I can’t take more than two or three minutes of that – or of the endless advertising. I did not invite these hucksters into my living room but here they are. I pretend I’m tired, I play grandpa needing his bed, and say my goodnights and go to my room, where I turn on the heater and sit like Mrs Lloyd, with my slippers scorching. I try to believe that Julie is better today, she gets a little better every day, even though Elizabeth has told me Helen Henly will not say yes or no. If Julie sharpens the mower blades and laughs at TV and asks for more pudding at dinner, she must be getting better, isn’t that right?

  The sun broke through the clouds this morning and the wind died away. I took a cushion out to the porch and sat on the top step in a pool of warmth. The mountains were dark and the harbour sparkled. The trees on Somes Island turned from black to green and the Cook Strait ferry, heading out, leaned into a curve that would send waves breaking on the reefs and easing between the large island and the small. One can be satisfied by this as if by food. There need not be anything transcendental.

  Julie came out of the house and sat beside me. ‘Have my cushion,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you. I’ve got sharp bones in my arse.’

  So have I these days, although I would express it differently. We talked for a while, I shifting forward and back and from buttock to buttock, and she seeming perfectly comfortable. I asked her how her car was running – remembering too late that it was Kenny’s gift.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I hardly use it except when I’m seeing Helen. I should try to get into town more.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  ‘Well, I don’t want Bonnie grabbing me.’ Bonnie is her former therapist.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘She would, you know. She’d kidnap me. Grab me by the hair.’

  ‘We can’t have that.’

  Julie looked at me sharply. I need to be more careful.

  ‘She was putting some bloody awful muck in my head.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, not wanting to hear; and Julie closed her eyes and turned up her face and worshipped the sun Swedish-style. She leaned back on her arms in her double-jointed way and rested her booted heels three steps down. I took cautious glances at her face: so thin, so sharp. Her hair is growing out on the side that was shaved but she has cut the other to even herself up. Bonnie would have trouble getting a handful to drag her with. I hope she lets it grow long everywhere.

  She opened her eyes and smiled at me. ‘Lovely sun.’

  The mountains lit up as the clouds floated south. Snow from last weekend’s fall gleamed in creases under the tops. I asked Julie if she had had her second tattoo done.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and tugged her loose skivvy off her shoulder.

  I was pleased not to see a beetle. ‘It’s a caduceus,’ I said. ‘You’ve got Greece on one shoulder and Egypt on the other.’ And I could not help showing off – explained the caduceus and the ankh and told her that with these symbols she was bound to get well.

  ‘I thought it was just a stick with snakes around it. I like snakes.’

  ‘Now you know the meaning.’

  ‘Stuff meanings. Why do you always have to know so much?’ Her face began to pucker, her mouth went down. ‘You’ve spoiled them now.’

  I apologised. I tried to pat her, but she gave an electric jump.

  ‘Don’t touch me.’

  She clattered away down the steps, then clumped back to the top against the rail.

  ‘Don’t you ever touch me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Julie.’

  ‘I know there were no masks. And all those men weren’t there. Bonnie made that up. But the rest is true. Mum and Dad. D
on’t you try and make me say it’s not.’

  I sat there in the sun after she had gone. I heard her radio playing in her room – rock music, cheerful enough – and tried to take hope from that. I must creep about the house, move with care and smile like an old man, and try to believe that she has improved. The devil masks are gone, and the circle of men.

  Now there is just Kenny raping her, and Priscilla bringing raspberryade.

  I have a place to go where I can be away from this – but I have been silent (silent in my book) for more than a week because I do not want to retreat to that early time but go there with a recollective mind and hold each thing, when it is found, in a steady light and turn it in my two hands like a vase.

  Elias Canetti (these Jews, these Viennese!) has described his childhood as ‘rich in displacements’. I think of my single displacement, from Vienna to Wellington by way of Somes Island – which seems to me now like the narrow neural pathway things must pass through after a stroke, from one wide place to another. (But Vienna has been displaced too; mine has not been the only shift. Vienna passed through its narrow place in 1938 and found a new location and can never be the same.)

  Canetti, describing a forced move, says that, like the earliest man, he came into being only by an expulsion from Paradise. I too was expelled from my paradise and I came into being in the hard world of the island. I thought, I have had my nose rubbed in this place so I will stay and make it mine. I will stay here and keep what I find. That moment of euphoria – that epiphany – when I looked through the hospital window at the city lit up in the dawn was judgement too, was decision too.

  In the beginning what I found was a room in a back yard and a job sweeping wood-shavings in a draughty shed. But there’s more than that when I turn it round. There’s Wilf’s garden in summer and autumn and spring. There are wigwams made of leaves and bees in pumpkin flowers and tomatoes going through their colour change, green, orange, red. There are butter beans, radishes, rock melons, silver beet; corn whose leaves clatter in the breeze coming pine-scented from Tinakori hill. Wilf throws a cob across potato rows and I jump and catch it over my head, strip its jacket off, pick away the threads of silk and plunge it into boiling water for my lunch. This sweet taste is Wellington. I have found it and it’s mine.

  Then winter comes – so let me turn the tense back from present to past. I had two hard winters in my room. I was used to winters from Somes Island but each one takes you unprepared. I crouched over my heater – first came across the scorching of leather soles there – and wore two pairs of socks and woollen gloves, even in bed. I wrapped my scarf about my ears, pulled my hat down low and walked down Molesworth Street into a southerly sharpened with chips of ice. I climbed with a tarpaulin on to the roof at Barton’s Joinery and tied it over the hole where the storm had torn off a sheet of iron and flung it into a back yard two streets away. The rain, at work and home, deafened me, but I thought, This is their noise, these iron roofs, so it is mine. Wilf brought me cups of tea and bowls of porridge when I had flu, then it was his turn and I did the same, but had to leave him in the day and came home to find him shifted to the hospital with pneumonia. I visited him on Saturdays and told him the winter jobs I had done in his garden. Both of my winters he was in hospital but he came home in the spring and carried on as though he had not almost died.

  Some days I walked out, huddled in my raincoat, exploring the city and the suburbs and the hills. In little parks on plateaux or in valleys I came across rugby, that barbarous game, and stood on the sideline trying to understand the butting of heads, the savage assaults, and the ball that would not bounce true, and thought of Hakoah, the soccer team I had followed for a season in Vienna, and tried to find a connection between that game and this. Could not. Did not want Hakoah anyway, those memories, and so left the rugby players grunting, steaming there, a part of my new home I could not make mine. I walked along to the next ground and watched a hockey match. That was more civilised and more to my taste.

  On a fine Sunday – the sky turned inside out – I walked up to Wadestown by the lower road, explored the long ridge of Tinakori hill, and came down on the high road that turns off at the shops. I leaned on a railing for the view of the harbour, as fresh that day as on some first morning of the world, then looked across a shallow gully of scrub and saw my house. And I’m stopped dead. I stopped on that day, and I stop now, to clear my head, get rid of the dizziness caused by a crossing of time lines. I’ve only to leave my room and walk a hundred yards along the road and I’ll meet him, my young self, Josef Mandl in his second-hand jacket and cracked shoes looking with a silly glazed grin at the house I’m sitting in now.

  Red roof of corrugated iron. Overlapping weatherboards. White concrete chimney. (Barbarous, most Viennese would say; but I like it better than anything Alfred Loos ever built.) I walked on and saw how comfortably it spread on the headland jutting into the road. A wide deep porch took up half the front wall, with bow windows on either side. They looked over a hedge at the top of a bank. I climbed up and grabbed roots and hung one-handed, looking out; and there, where I had known it would be, was Somes Island. The sun flashed mirror signals from a barracks window.

  A woman’s voice called from three feet away, ‘Harold, come quickly. There’s a man in the hedge.’

  I dropped and slid, ending on my knees in the road, yelled, ‘I’m sorry’, and ran away, under the cuttings, above the gorge – and I run out of that uneasy connection with me, which threatened my balance for a while. I came to my room in the lean-to by the garden, where old Wilf, pretending not to work too hard on a Sunday, left his spade upright in the soil and invited me to share a bottle of beer with him. We brought out chairs to enjoy the last ten minutes of the sun. We drank and smoked cigarettes.

  ‘I saw the house I want to buy,’ I said.

  ‘What’s wrong with this place?’ he replied.

  Wilf is almost fifty years dead.

  I ran into Moser in a restaurant in Manners Street where they served a main course of meat and three veg, followed by jam roll or treacle tart. I walked there after working late, up Lambton Quay and Willis Street where the only places open were a greasy spoon or two, and came with a steaming sigh out of the cold into the warmth, took a table by the window, ordered roast mutton with cabbage and potatoes, looked down as I waited into the street – this street in the capital city at seven o’clock on a Wednesday night, with only a tramcar each half hour, and no pedestrians, no life, now that the shops were shut and the pubs closed. Only two cold shufflers in black coats along by the Willis Street corner. I looked at them again. Jews, I thought. How is it they are so unmistakable?

  My meal came. The third veg was a slice of beetroot bleeding into the gravy. I put it on my bread and butter plate, concealed beneath a slice of white bread I would not eat, and transferred my dob of butter to the mashed potatoes, where it melted greasily. I had eaten better on the island, I thought: thicker slices of mutton (when the coal dust was wiped off), fried sausages, lamb’s fry, mince stew. At Pahiatua the Italians had made spaghetti, with a delicious sauce of anything they could get their hands on, and sometimes I bought a leftover bowl of that.

  ‘Josef, it is you,’ Moser said.

  They had hung their coats on the stand inside the door and stood by my table in pre-war suits from Germany. I shook hands with Moser and asked him and his friend to join me at my table. Like me they had come for the warmth rather than the food – for whatever this dismal place could provide of a coffee-house atmosphere.

  Moser was in his thirties, older than me. He was a lugubrious fellow, living at a low temperature. Yet he had done that brave thing on the island, taken his blanket out under the stars and won the Jews their freedom from the Nazis. I was pleased to see him, pleased to see him well, with his cheeks fattened and a pleasant sharpness in his eye.

  ‘I did not know you were in Wellington,’ he said.

  I explained that I lived quietly; went to the pictures on Saturday night for my soci
al life. His friend was an older man, reserved and courteous, who came from Hamburg, where he had been a music teacher. His name was Benjamin Ascher. Moser was his boarder in a little house in Berhampore.

  I saw that Benjamin’s eyes were on my bread, which had a red stain, so I raised it and showed the slice of beetroot underneath and told him it came with the mutton and that he should order something else.

  ‘It is the bread I am frightened of,’ he said.

  They chose shepherd’s pie and had their coupons clipped by a waitress blushing at the old man’s courtesy.

  ‘And a pot of tea, if you please.’

  ‘It’s a cup of tea.’

  ‘A cup then. For two.’

  ‘The coffee’s better. It’s nice and sweet.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss. The tea will do most …’

  ‘Adequately,’ I supplied.

  We smiled at each other as she went away. Coffee in this place was hot water poured on goo that came from a bottle. We talked about good food and how it went hand in hand with art and civilisation – but fell silent, all three, remembering the history of the lands we came from; ate, when their shepherd’s pie came, without much talk. Then Moser asked about Willi and I told him that he worked in a forestry camp.

  Moser made a sour face at ‘camp’. (We spoke in English, not to offend diners at nearby tables – and softly to keep our accents hidden.)

  ‘It is his proper place. He can be the bully there.’ He turned to Benjamin Ascher. ‘Willi Gauss was our big boss on Somes Island.’

  ‘Samuel and Willi never got on,’ I said. ‘They were chalk and cheese.’ Proud of the idiom, I almost went on to claim that Willi was the hero of Somes Island and if he bullied us it was for our own good. He helped us keep our shoulders straight, I almost said, but heard Roy Cooksley, the insurance man, in that, so I said lamely, ‘Willi was my friend. And so was Samuel, of course.’