by Alan Duff
Six o’clock and Jube growling at Sonny to slow down cos there wasn’t no more bread to buy any more jugs. The permanent drunks around them in their intended states, and throwing punches at invisible ghosts of their forever haunting; flubbed out on their feet, hardly able to stand but somehow managing to; breaking out in weird cries that seemed to source from deeper than even their tormented hells of souls. And their two observers falling into their own gloom.
The laughter, even the encrazed laughter from the brain-addled, more and more sounded like a happiness that the out-of-town pair didn’t have. A drizzle started visible through the grimy window that looked over the carpark, where Jube’s dirty undercoat-grey monster was parked like some terrible guard creature waiting for its master. And more and more people coming in, but a lot of them workers in workers’ clothes and good honest thirsts, and something else enviable about them too. Outside, the drizzle’d quickly turned to steady rain. The pair were down to their last inch of beer in each glass, and staring at it or at the rain shrouding Jube’s V8 monster.
Jube grabbed for the smokes, Oh jeezus, not the fucking smokes too; there’s five left. Though he lit one regardless, and so too did Sonny. And a moment of eye glance between them had the uneven number remaining in the packet a separate determination on the part of each.
The patronage, who were Jube’s scum of earlier, were no longer that; in fact, they took on an air of security that the pair were without. If only for the fact that they appeared to have money enough to see the drinking process to its intended end: oblivion. Not to mention no shortage of smokes. As well, it seemed they had the emotional security of having their own kind to talk to, tell lies to, exaggerate to, laugh with, toast, throw ever-expansive arms around each other. Again, another whole point of the drinking process: to break free.
And it didn’t fit. Wasn’t right. That they, the out-of-town duo, come to town with their big dreams of criminal teaming, city-to-city A Team of burglars, they who supposedly had the greater freedom and therefore the greater scope, should feel inferior to a barful of alcoholics and enslaved workers. That’s it! Jube’s fist thumped on the table. We are out of fucking here. Fuck Pete. Fuck this whole town. It sucks. Marching toward the door, scattering drinkers as he did, Get outta my fucking way.
In Jube’s car being driven at high speed in the city confines, though not much traffic left of city workers heading for suburban homes. Hey, that’s the Beehive, man. Where the PM his-self works. Fuck the PM. Only PM I’m interested in is Pall Mall smokes, Jube fluking the joke. Nor did he laugh. Speaking of smokes, who’s having the last one? Sonny not answering, looking out his window.
Sonny?
Yeow?
Where’s that last smoke?
Man, it musta smoked itself all up – hahahaha. Though Jube didn’t echo the laughter. Just scowled; told Sonny, You’ll keep. And try the ashtray. But Sonny shook his head. Man, you and I both smoke em right down to the filter. Take a look anyway. Sonny did so. Nope. Sorting through the pile of filters, ash and matches, and not a butt worth smoking. Jeezuz fucking chrise.
Jube drove them aimlessly. They ended up out the other side of the city, which the shop signs said was Oriental Bay. Jube mumbling that it didn’t remind him of nothin Oriental, just another New Zealand bay. Where’s the Chink food shops? Rain driven at an angle by the wind. Up a hill off to the right – sea was on Sonny’s side, the left – and the houses looked very robbable, so Jube’s mood picking up a little. Tanight, bro, we’re back here tanight. Eyeing the houses hungrily. And so was Sonny, though his mind as much on the food that might be in the fridge, and hoping the people were smokers, which wasn’t very often when you hit a posh home. Not even ashtrays in most ofem.
Yep. Jube turned around up the top of a long, winding climb. This’ll do the boys tonight, my lil man. Back down the hill. We’ll wait it out someplace we don’t get reminded of smokes. And food too, man. And food.
Down the bottom of the hill, turn right. May as well follow the sea, eh Sonny? Round a sharp bend, Jube on the wrong side, a near miss with a car, hitting its horn at Jube and he giving the fingers back. Pulling his arm back in, It’s wet outside, Sonny, hahaha.
Sea beside churned up by the wind. Out of the sea loomed a figure on a sailboard. Heyyy! thas us, Son. That’s us, at this lone dude in a brightly coloured wetsuit riding his board over a boiling sea. Man alive! Sonny in admiration. And Jube grinning the same. Man triumphing over the elements, Sonny thinking as Jube slowed right down. Till he felt the different movement. Then it didn’t seem possible.
Not with how they were feeling. Not when out of their gloom had come that apparition riding the waves, belted along by the wind, and so both had taken hope from the sight. Even with being broke, hungry, out of smokes, you’d still taken hope. So it didn’t seem right – it was an incomprehensible wrong and yet it fitted all the same – that you should be chugging to a halt with Sonny looking at Jube staring at the gauge that was reading E for empty of petrol.
And so far from home.
Two drenched lurkers in a city park, waiting for night to fall and a chance to come by.
Sonny, shivering with cold, dreading the embarrassment, the shame of being caught in this position by some happenstance cop, or a sharp-eyed John Citizen; crouched, uncomfortably, behind shrubbery with back exposed to the rolling openness of tree-studded parkland.
Stationed opposite, Jube, across the small chasm of bank divide; and below meandered a path, partly illuminated by spillover light from nearby lamps. Of the kind you see in spooky old English movies, with mist or rain shrouding the scene, the pending scene.
Smells of earth and flower and leaf everywhere. City hardly a few minutes away, though you wouldn’t think so with the quiet; only the thrum of rain. The path crossed every once in a while by late-evening hurriers under umbrella, or huddled into raincoat; unknowingly watched by two desperadoes gone of the warmth of their mobile home. And no money to get it going again; it’d been drunk and then pissed, urinated against just another stainless-steel urinal in just another lowdown bar with fellow flotsam. But it’ll be a piece a piss, Sonny, Jube’s words echoing in his mind as the rain ran off his face in rivers. Soon as it’s dark, I’ll pick the mark, then I give you a raised-arm signal and you only signal back if it ain’t cool. It’ll be as easy as that, bud, I promise you.
But Jube’s promise that Pete and his boys’d be in the bar was what had them now here in the first place – cos all the bread’d got spent hanging around on a hope, a notion, a criminal wank notion. (Fuck him.) A cinch he said it was gonna be. That was back then, when they were walking their dejected states into town, when their desperate destinies’d seemed twinned. Back then, it was an abstract. Just another Jube half-mad idea: I know! Find a park and mug someone. Mug someone? You kidding? The hell I’m kidding. Never been more serious. But why can’t we do a house? No getaway vehicle, remember, Sonny? No getaway vehicle with the park neither. Don’t need one. Run across the park’s what we do after the biz. And anyone following’ll have to the same, right? Don’t worry, Sonny, it’ll be a breeze.
Yeah, a breeze, a cinch, a piece of piss, an easy-meat bowl-over – fuckin crook-breezy confidence that had nothin’ – ever – to do with how things actually turned out. Story of our lives. We fuck up.
Sonny miserable in his muscle-cramping position. You leave the bizzo side to me, cuz – Oh, Jube was so sure of himself at every new turn of sudden impulsive idea he got: Just leave it to me, Sonny my main lil man. Calling a man that cos it made him feel bigger. First dude I see looks worth taking I’ll be onim like one a them big cats.
And now, Big Cat calling from across the way, Hey bro! Saves having a shower, eh? His chuckle no less hideous for the rain part muffling it.
Two lurkers in a city park.
Came the sound of whistling – whistling? Then out of the rain, down there on the eerily lit footpath, a figure striding beneath a big umbrella that exploded in bright colours even in the sheeted wet. W
histling in this? Sonny stared down at the figure, his step-out of dark-trousered leg, his whistling in sharp time to his walk. (Man, to be in his head, eh?) As Whistler marched as quickly out of view as he’d come; and Sonny betting the guy’d be going home to a real nice wife, full of positivism like her hubby: How’s your day been, darling? Oh just fine, thank you, and yours? Oh, you know, mustn’t complain. Life’s too short. That sort of exchange. Kissing each other hello: mmmm-uh! And a mirrored wink for the laters to come. Then the kids, falling over themselves to greet the father. Hey, Dad! Hey, Dad! Guess what? Guess what! (I seen it on the tv. At the movies sometimes. Ya only have to watch Cosby to know that some people they do live really happy lives, even when they’re having their downers. Stability. It’s the stability they got that people like me don’t have, that’s what it is. (Is it? How would I know?) Things get sorted out. Problems, big and small, they get resolved. And sure it’s only a tv family of actors – but it’s still based on sumpin, ain’t it? Like, if the acted situation exists, then so can the reality, can’t it? Oh God, I don’t know …)
Staring into the rain-filled space where’d strode the Whistler. Man, I bet he fucks her tonight. Probably why he’s got sumpin to whistle about. I would too I had a real nice someone to go home to. Rain, hail or snow, too. Not for Mr Whistler some picked-up slut from barlife sleazeville, or at a party where the sleaze moved their activities to; a sheila who chews gum or smokes a fag while you’re trying to reach her, find that sumpin special of womanhood a dude like you needs to find or it’s all fucking meaningless, it may as well be a sheep from a paddock, a piece of meat that ya hump in and out of till you’re spent. You wanna show her your specialness of tender concern, your depth of unnerstaning, you ain’t no Jube McCall wanting only to shove her down on your meat as he calls it.
Nope, none of this type for you, Mr Whistler, you and yours’ll be loving, and journeying the depths of each other, I know ya will. Not like a Tavi moll who’s all wrong timing and harsh kisses and untender touch. And talking like that Lyn of Tawa on the tv: Sunnee, didja like me straightaway when ya firz saw me? Or you’ll be inside her and she’ll wanna know what kinda car do ya drive, Sunnee? Is it fast? Is it a Vee-ate? So yeah, Mr Whistler, not for you dying inside her because of sumping she said that was not near of the moment.
Ya wouldn’t unnerstan, Mr and Mrs, that our girls, our women, are basic functions of crude back motive, of: What’s it worth if I let you have your way, Sunnee? Of dry twat and hard-kissing lips. Not for your Mrs Whistler to fail to reach your partner; it, love, is a refined process for you both. It is part of the great reflection of having class and breeding, and a little bit of money probably helps too, though it ain’t necessary, not on its own. (I’ve read it somewhere … Oh, I know: was a book, that’s right. I was only young, a teenager – Jesus, it was borstal. Borstal. And I was doing solitary. Just sixteen and doing solitary.)
Insolence to an officer, that’s what the charge was. Seven days in the Digger on number two diet. Teenagers, mere teenagers, and they were throwing us into cells for periods of solitary confinement, and on specified diets according to the gravity of the crime. Number one was cold potatoes, glass of milk, piece of bread for three meals a day three days on end, full normal rations on the fourth, then back to another regime of number one. It was assumed to be civilised. Number two was dripping to spread on the bread, and porridge for breakfast, soup and bread and dripping spread for lunch, spuds, bread and milk for tea.
They woke you up each morning, the six separated cells of you, at five thirty. A warning bang on your steel door, you had five minutes to get your bed made up in the required bedroll formation. You were unlocked separately to take your bedding to an empty cell, or if occupied, out behind the steel-grille entry door; and you collected it again, under escort, at nine at night. (When I was just sixteen.)
On your second day, two officers came to your cell: one stood at the door, the other ordered you to your feet. Name! Mahia. Bang. He punched you on the chest – Sir. Sir. You gonna be insolent to an officer again. No, sir. Oooofff, a piledriver again in the gut. You fell on the concrete floor. He ordered you, GET UP! You did. His pal at the door smirked at you: I don’t think this one’ll be back here again. They left. You heard the process being repeated in muffled form next door. You thought you wanted to die, at only sixteen, but mainly because they took away your right to reply. Explain yourself.
That afternoon they returned. And you backed into a corner, wondering why they hadn’t had enough. But it was an offer. Of two cigarettes if you’d donate blood. They’d also let you have a longer shower tonight as well. You got taken out into the main wing, and it was like seeing it again: it was a big space of landings two high, and steel stairs and echoing screw footsteps and inmates behind cell doors yelling out occasional obscenities.
There were these guys in white coats who smiled at you and were very gentle as you sat on a chair and they put this thing around your arm, which they pumped up. You thought of the two smokes this was going to be rewarded with, and were struck by the kindness of their manner. Too soon it was over, part of you was dark red in a plastic container and a screw was taking you back to your cell, over a lino floor polished over and over by some teenage set of designated cleaners meant to be training for rehabilitation, but really they were learning to be adult forms of what they were then – criminals.
Back in your cell the screw gave you your two smokes and a piece of striker and only one match. Then he left you. So you tremblingly lit the smoke, fearing you’d blow it and have the smokes but no means of igniting. You lit the other off the first and you felt sick halfway through smoking the second. And you felt you’d been cheated.
On the third day they made a mistake: they let you have a choice from a selection of books, most of them insulting nursery-rhyme stuff deliberately chosen by Mr Stone, the unhappy screw on day duty in charge of the Digger. He thought it was really funny just grabbing any old books from, Sonny presumed, the borstal library, except what would it be doing with nursery-rhyme books in a place with young men? But it was a mistake all the same, because Sonny lucked onto a book that from page one put an end to the sentence. An end. They’d fucked up. They’d unknowingly released him with five hundred and sixty pages of freedom. So when the nights came with bedding return Sonny was disappointed. And so the seven-day sentence ended just half an hour after he’d read the last page of the book. And he was still soaring free with its characters and southern American settings and voice twangs and Yank peculiarisms when Mr Stone opened his cell door and told him it was over and I better not be seeing you again.
All them years ago like yesterday. And what’d a man come to? This? Is this what he amounted to?
The rain came down harder. Buckets of the stuff, endless buckets; pelting so hard it stung a man’s scalp, the backs of his hands. Could have been a reminder, in symbolic form, of being assailed by the fists of his fellow prison inmates the first sentence he did, and first met Jube; belted up for being the thinker type, no other reason on earth. For simply having a mind that was curious. (Oh fuckem all, the boobheads of the world.) He tried to tell em he was one of them, he was no threat, and even when he put it to em that if he was so brainy as they said, what the hell was he doing inside, they didn’t hear.
They did not hear.
A woman appeared below, she wore a purple plastic raincoat with a hood that was up, and big yellow buttons blurred in the downpour. She disappeared where Jube’s side of the bank turned to rock formation. But very soon came another, her arrival being announced by the sharp ring of heel on pathway, clik-clik-clik-clik. When across from Sonny rose the apparition that had to be Jube; yet it couldn’t be, it was too real, too crazy, and anyway where was his signal? Nor did his plan at any stage mention a woman being the victim.
But training had Sonny shooting a look over his shoulder for the all-clear, scanning the almost-dark park, then it hit him that the attack was about to take place and that it was a woman. He buri
ed his face in his hands, but that didn’t work so he pulled them away. And the figure below was three parts across Sonny’s framed vision. And the figure opposite – (Jeezuz!) Well, he was flailing. His arms were clawing the air. Then a leg shot out at an awkward angle, then it – the figure that had to be Jube, as unbelievable as it was – flipped entirely. Man, his big spoon feet just went out from under him.
Then down he tumbled, as the unsuspecting woman clik-clik-clikked her way out of sight, though Sonny didn’t have his eyes on her but on Jube. Him sliding down the slope all arms and legs, and then an audible thunk followed by a stifled groan as he hit the pathway. Smack dab on his bum. And the would-be victim gone. Just Jube there, sat on his dumb white arse with hands behind supporting him. And Sonny holding back his laughter for all he could.
Rain falling.
Jube scrambling to his feet, shaking himself. Looking up at Sonny’s position, Sonny?
Sonny.
Sonny! The fuck are ya? Sonny? Jube staring up at the bushes. Then behind him. Back Sonny’s way again, Sonny! hissing it out. Then he turned and scrambled back up the slope, slipping and sliding in his haste. A few moments to catch his breath. Sonny? Lighter-toned this time. And Sonny stretching the moment. SONNY! For fuck’s sake, man, the fuck are ya?
Yeow?
Sonny? That you? Where the fuck ya been?
For a crap, man. Couldn’t hold off any longer. Wha’s up?
How long you been crapping?
Oh, bout five – hey, I didn’t exactly time it, man. Everything alright?
Sure is. But let me know next time will ya? I mighta been doing the bizzo. So what’d ya use for paper – leaves? Hahaha!
Yeow, leaves, brother. But Jube?
Yep?
You think I woulda been better sliding down the bank on my arse?