Gith

by Else, Chris

  None of the teachers seemed to care that much. Maybe they took the Old Man's view that a little hardship was good for you and that I ought to learn to stick up for myself. Maybe they just didn't like me. Whatever the reason, I finished up miserable, with next to no friends or confidence in myself. I was useless at the schoolwork and on the sports field. The only thing that kept me going was the long weekends and the holidays, when I could go home and work on the Austin. I got the engine running real sweet in the end but I never fixed the transmission.

  At seventeen, after just managing to scrape through School Cert, I gave up on school and went off to polytech in Palmerston North to do a Certificate in Automotive Engineering. The Old Man liked the idea and helped me out with money, at least to start off with. He figured it was the one chance of me doing something with myself. By that stage we were getting on pretty well. He'd given up on the belt a year or so before and started to talk to me like an adult. I remember the time when I knew he wasn't going to hit me any more. I'd done something to piss him off, which wasn't hard, and he'd lost his cool like he usually did. I could see his feelings building to have a go at me. Suddenly he stopped and stared at me like he was seeing me for the first time. Then he yelled a bit more and that was it. It felt real weird, like I'd grown up in just that second.

  ***

  MONTY DROPPED BY with his ute on Thursday.

  'Thought we'd see you before now,' I said.

  'Yeah, well. Something came up.'

  He opened the bonnet and the three of us stood and listened to the motor.

  'It's turned gutless on me,' he said.

  'The diesels on these were always gutless,' I told him. 'Seriously, you should let me look out for you. A Hilux or something.'

  'Seriously, I can't afford it. The bank's got me by the short and curlies. Go talk to Frank. Which is what I gotta do right now.' Frank MacKey was the local accountant.

  'How long will you be?'

  'Dunno. Sounds a bit bloody dire though. An hour maybe?'

  'We'll see what we can do.'

  'Good on you, mate.'

  I had a thought. 'You want to leave Sam here?'

  'Is that okay?' He looked pleased.

  'Sure. No problem.'

  Gith went round to the back of the ute. Sam gave a whine when he saw her and stuck his head over the side. She pulled on his ears and put her face close to his. He licked her. She wiped her cheek with the back of her wrist.

  'True love,' Monty said, and laughed. Gith joined in.

  I hopped into the ute and ran it into the workshop. Monty waved and walked away. We left Sam tied in the back.

  Ten minutes later Faye Ingrest turned up wanting a warrant for her Honda. Faye and Simon ran the local pub, the Te Kohuna Arms. Faye is a friendly, bubbly sort of person who likes to think well of everybody. She is in her fifties, with perky blue eyes and a cap of silver-grey hair. She got straight into talking about Anneke Hesse. I walked her away from the workshop doorway so Gith wouldn't hear, and told her what I knew.

  'That makes sense,' she said. 'They're looking at vehicles from Katawai to Tapanahu. Basingstoke, too.'

  'Vans?' I asked.

  'Don't know. Stationwagons, for sure. They're interviewing owners and drivers. The man in charge told me. Inspector Ryan. Really nice guy. Really good advertisement for the police, you know?'

  'When did you talk to him?'

  'This morning. They were here again about eight o'clock. Must get up awfully early. Four cars and a van thing, like an ambulance.'

  'A van?' I asked. 'They arresting somebody?'

  'Simon says it's forensics. But if it is, that means they've got a suspect, wouldn't you say?'

  'Don't know. Could be.'

  'Somebody said that guy Cleat was top of their list. You know anything about that?'

  'No,' I said, 'but it'd be logical, wouldn't it?'

  'You know him?'

  'Not really.'

  'He comes into the bar occasionally but Simon usually lets him know he's not welcome. Weird. He gives me the creeps, actually. I mean, he's such a wet-looking character.'

  'Wasn't he on drugs or something?' I said.

  'That's right.' She looked at me and then she gave a shrug. 'Ah, well. You know, it's a terrible thing to say but it's not all bad. They're going to be around here for a while. They're talking about setting up an operations centre in the community hall. I mean, it has to be good for business. We're already doing lunches.'

  'Well, I guess that's right.'

  'It's an ill wind and so on. Although I feel really bad saying that. I keep thinking about that poor girl. And her poor parents all the way over there in Europe. I mean, Alison's sometimes said she'll hitch-hike up here from Massey for the weekend.' She gave a shudder. 'And you've got your girl, too. You must worry.'

  'Yes,' I said. She was saying that it was extra risky for Gith, which was true, I guess. As Faye said, it was terrible to think about.

  I took Faye's car through the warrant and it passed fine. I have to say my mind wasn't on the job though. I kept thinking about the cops and how they only seemed to be looking for wagons and that maybe Gith was wrong. Was I dumb to believe her when nobody else seemed to? If I didn't know Gith at all and I had to choose between her story and Mavis Blake's, who would I believe? The problem was, I did know Gith. I knew her better than anyone, and if I couldn't stick up for her, what the hell was she going to do?

  I started making a mental list of the white vans I knew. Bill Piata, the local plumber had one, and so did the sparky, Trevor Bittington. Trevor's was a Mitsubishi, too. Then there was Julian and Susie Smeele, who ran Bank Antiques. And the local rugby club, except that one had seats in it — more of a bus than a van. I could think of one or two farmers as well, although, as the Old Man had said, it would be a useless type of vehicle on most farms.

  I parked Faye's Honda in the yard. It had some mud splashes down the side so I washed it down. Then I went into the shop to call her and tell it was ready. Gith was still working on Monty's ute.

  The names of van owners kept going round in my head. I grabbed a pen and a pad and sat down in the back room to make a list. There were ten names on it when I finished. I stared at it for a while. What the hell was I going to do with it? There was no real reason to think that any of these blokes had got Anneke. Also, there would be vans in the district that I didn't know about. Like if you worked in Katawai, the next town south, you wouldn't bother much with our place either for your gas or your repairs. And Gith hadn't really known the driver so maybe he wasn't a local anyway. How many white vans were there in Katawai or Basingstoke or Tapanahu? I felt a bit dumb and hopeless. What was I going to do? Start my own bloody investigation?

  I screwed the paper into a ball and went to throw it into the rubbish bin. Something stopped me. Instead, I smoothed it out again and pinned it on the corkboard near the back room door.

  ***

  I MET TWO important people in my time at polytech. The first was Steve Winston. The second was Michelle.

  Steve was the son of a local garage owner and car dealer. He was training himself up to join the family business but what he really cared about was saloon car racing. We quickly became good mates. I'm not sure why, except that we were even madder about cars than most of the other jokers in the course, and plus — surprise, surprise — I turned out to have the makings of a good mechanic. I don't know if it was all that fiddling about I'd done with the Austin but I pretty soon found I was near the top of the class. For the first time in my life.

  At the end of the first year Steve and I started working our apprenticeships for Steve's dad and hatching plans for our big venture. We got hold of a V8 and tuned it up, took it out to Manfeild for some practice circuits and then into a few production model races. Steve turned out to be a bloody good driver and he won more than he lost, despite the fact that no way did we have the best car. Next thing was, he tackled his old man, talked him into being our sponsor, and Team Winston was born. We had more
money now, and more time, because we were getting paid to work on the racing machine. Steve's dad hired a top-notch mechanic to work with us and pretty soon we were winning some of the first-grade races. Everybody was happy. The company was getting promotion. Steve and I were doing what we liked best and we were learning heaps.

  It amazes me now that Michelle and I ever got together.

  Right from the start it was clear that we went about things in totally different ways. Michelle was into money and success — wanted to own a business with some style. She was doing a hairdressing course but the last thing she wanted was to be a hairdresser for the rest of her life. She was going to own a salon, a chain of salons. She was going to make a million dollars. That's what she said anyway.

  I think there were two reasons we went for one another. The first was the easy one. She was good-looking and I, if not a Dan Carter, was at least part of something that she thought was exciting and glamorous. To be honest, I think she was more keen on Steve but he had a full-time girl called Julie- Anne so Michelle settled for me as next best. The second reason was a bit harder to figure. Michelle and I had grown up with the same family thing: both of us feeling on the outer and both of us in the shadow of somebody else. In her case it was her sister, Sophie. There was a fifteen-year gap between them and I think Michelle always felt that she had been a mistake, that her parents never really wanted her. On top of that, Sophie was good at everything. She had been brilliant at school, had got married to a professor and was now head of English at a college in Wellington. Michelle didn't have Sophie's brains for the academic stuff and, like me, she felt second rate trailing behind all that success. That's where the likeness ended though. Michelle finished up with a drive to succeed with whatever tools she had, while I was rock bottom on the drive front. I liked fixing things and tinkering with them and that was about it.

  For a while everything was sweet. Steve and Julie-Anne and Michelle and I hung out together. The girls would act like groupies, coming down to the workshop and talking and posing while the boys pulled the car apart and reassembled it. Race day they would be there, keeping well out of the way unless they were needed as gophers, and cheering like mad every time Steve made a circuit. It was a good life and it went on for nearly four years. Steve and I were fully qualified mechanics by then, and Michelle was working in a salon in Broadway and building up a classy clientele, the sort she'd always hoped for.

  I have no idea why I asked her to marry me and even less why she said yes. I guess it was one of those times when we had been talking about how we felt as kids and it suddenly seemed that we shared something deep and meaningful. Once we'd made up our minds, we just went for it. In Michelle's view, it wasn't trendy to have an old-style wedding in a church so we did something in the park. There was no family there, just a few friends and a celebrant who read some kind of poetry. We were twenty-two years old. We had flowers in our hair.

  It was after that things started to go wrong. Steve took an off in a practice lap. He wasn't badly knocked around but he was in a neck-brace for six weeks. The car was pretty much stuffed except for the engine and gear box, and Steve was never the same afterwards. It was like everything had lost its gloss. Within a few months he and Julie-Anne split up. My guess is that he didn't see them following in our footsteps down the aisle, whereas Julie-Anne did. If Michelle had any regrets seeing that Steve was now available she didn't show them. She wanted to move to Wellington, where there was more opportunity. She'd rather have a salon there than in Palmy, she said, and I could set up my own business too. If I wanted.

  ***

  I MADE A mistake talking to Pansy Cleat. Somehow she got it into her head that I was going to give Billy a job. He turned up later that Thursday, on foot. I'd just finished serving a customer when he shuffled up to the shop doorway and hovered there, trying to make up his mind if he should be in or out.

  'Yes?' I said.

  He looked over his shoulder like he was scared somebody was going to jump him. Then he looked back at me, took a step forward.

  'Gidday,' he said. 'Mr McUrran. Sir.' He was a skinny bloke, wearing clothes that were too big for him: a pair of baggy jeans, a shirt that might once have been white, a brownish nylon jacket. He was younger than me but he was kind of haggard. He had straight brown hair like his mother's, and the same sort of thin, caved-in face. His eyes were different though. They were big and brown and looked like he was going to start blubbing any second.

  'My name's Billy Cleat,' he said, staring somewhere around my left shoulder.

  'I know,' I said. 'Hi.'

  'My mum said you might give me a job. Sir.'

  Piss off, I wanted to say, but it was hard with those damp brown eyes. I felt I had to let him down gently. 'You any good with cars?' I figured I knew the answer, given the state of Pansy's Honda.

  'Aw, yeah?'

  'What've you done? Experience and so on.'

  He looked down at the floor and did a little shuffle with his feet. Then he looked at me straight, just for a second. It was a helpless look, like he was begging me for something. I figured I had to put him out of his misery.

  'We don't have anything right now,' I said.

  'Oh.' Then suddenly his eyes shifted. A blue Peugeot had drawn up on the forecourt and a young woman was getting out of it. She was slim and blonde and wearing a pink blouse and close-fitting black pants. An out-of-towner. Billy was staring at her with his mouth open. Slowly, the tip of his tongue drew a circle over his lips.

  'We don't have anything right now,' I said again, louder this time. 'Okay?'

  He nodded. 'Sure, sure.' He looked at me like he was scared.

  I moved round the counter and out towards the door. The woman was standing by the car waiting to be served.

  'So bugger off,' I told him over my shoulder.

  Did she hear me? No. I smiled at her and she smiled back. I could feel Billy behind me shuffling away from us. She looked at him and then at me.

  'Fill it up, please.'

  'Yes, ma'am.'

  She turned away from me and looked out over the road towards the bus shelter and the trees on the boundary of the Domain.

  I set the pump going and then started to wash the Peugeot's windscreen. I could still see Billy. He was down by Kath and Len's place now, moving with a half-sideways kind of walk like he was fighting through a crowd. I felt weird watching him go. Part of me felt sorry for him. He seemed so hurt and bashed around. On the other hand, I sure as hell didn't want him anywhere near Gith. Or any other woman I knew, for that matter.

  3

  BY THE TIME Monty got back, Gith had finished with the ute.

  'What did you do to it?' I asked her.

  'Withgat,' she said. It sounded kind of like 'waistcoat' but I knew what she meant.

  'Wastegate on the turbo,' I told Monty. 'Stuck in open.' Gith nodded. 'If it'd been stuck in closed you could have had serious trouble. Blow your whole engine, that can.'

  'Yeah. I know.'

  I charged him thirty bucks. Mate's rates.

  'You on for a beer later?' he asked me. Monty's wife had left him a couple of years back and these days he spent most of his evenings in the pub.

  'Not sure. Maybe. A few things to do here first.'

  'Thanks for this.' He winked at Gith.

  'Take it for a run before you thank us,' I said.

  We usually closed at six, so from about five-thirty it was packing-up time. We tidied the workshop and rolled Jack Henare's Cortina further in so we could shut the doors. The car had been with us since the day before, waiting for a clutch plate to come over from Parts-4-U. Jack was an easy-going sort of bloke but I could see him getting a bit pissed off if something didn't happen soon. I called up to see what the story was and got shunted around between the supplier and the courier so I gave them both a bollocking. Then I went into the shop and cashed up, locked the money in our floor safe, which was in a cupboard off the back room.

  Gith was drinking a mug of tea and staring at the
list I'd pinned to the corkboard. She looked at me, wanting to know what it was.

  'Van owners,' I said.

  She reached up pulled the pin out, took the list to the table. The pen and pad were still there from the time we talked to those two cops. Gith bent over the list with the pen in her hand. Slowly, she started to cross names out. There were three left when she'd finished: Rick Parline, Colin George and 'the bloke in Ramp Street'.

  'You know all the others?'

  'Gith.'

  'Could be anybody, anywhere,' I said. 'Could be somebody who never comes in here.'

  'Na-narg.' She made a waving move with her right hand.

  'He does come in here?'

  'Gith.'

  'But you don't know his name?'

  'Narg.'

  'He gets repairs done?'

  'Narg.'

  'Just gas, then.'

  'Gith.'

  'How often?'

  She shrugged. Don't know.

  'Every week?'

  'Nar.'

  'Every month.'

  'Nar.' She made her so-so move. Maybe not.

  'He doesn't buy all his gas from us, then.'

  'Nar.'

  Right, I thought. The three blokes on the list all fit that description.

  Gith had the pen and paper again and was drawing. A face.

  The same cartoon face she'd done for the two cops. It looked like this.

  It meant nothing to me. It certainly didn't remind me of any of the blokes on the list, but I didn't like to say so. I knew how upset she could get if she wasn't getting through.

  'That's good,' I said.

  She looked at me. She didn't believe me, I could tell. And suddenly she was waving me away, making flapping moves with the back of her hand like the tail of a fish.

  'Go,' she said. 'Go.'

  'What?' I didn't get it.