by Alan Duff
Sound of throats being cleared, then the doors opening and this priesty-looking dude gesturing come, come inside to the warmth (and something else). (The camera) moving inside, sound of heavy thudding of doors closing behind. A deathly quiet, figure of Jesus with down-slumped head and outstretched arms pinned to his cross (and only his, since he gave a cross meaning when no other victim nailed or strung to it did), more coughing, people moving up the aisle, past decoated and hatless worshippers, staring ahead. Silence.
Then massed voices, men and women, in short opening. Then a powerful bass voice breaking out as his large form came closer till he was a face on screen, with mouth set in brief silence as his backing choir did a sequence. (Haunting … it’s so haunting … and yet it’s a church service?) Back came the guy, his voice filling the room his image was screening in. He climbed his powerful voice to the high notes and so the room reverberated, and Sonny’s mouth opened and made faint imitatory sounds, but so faint even he couldn’t hear them, nor did he desire to. He didn’t know he was doing it; that his mouth was open and moving mutely in a kind of hurt awe. Hurt that his life had not known this, that his upbringing (my fuckin raising, you dog parents) didn’t tell him nothin about this kind of side to the world, that it was there, available, on video tape, tv, record, cd, tape, that it was there all this damn time and no-one’d told him.
No-one’d said, Hey, Sonny, catch this, man, it’s this music, Russian music, I think, called Slavonic Liturgy, and it’s sung by a choir of exquisite blend of tone and note contrast of high women and deep male and lots in between, and it’s led, you better believe, by this big fulla, eh, and he has this most unbelievable voice that shudders the walls he’s screening in, and breaks the watcher out in goose-pimples, all over goosies, man, with the power and passion of his foreign-languaged delivery. But that’s alright, the foreign words; it don’t madda, Sonny, what maddahs is you, bro, and your experiencing it for the first time; even though this ain’t the first time, it’s about the fiftieth.
You know it off by heart Sonny, we know that, but it’s as if you’ve been your whole life deprived. Or why else would it have you tingling and goose-bumping and stomach-aching all over? And why else’d it have you all over with the familiars, the familiars of knowing this, of having heard it somewhere but the only somewhere could be the back of your mind, maybe your dreaming mind, can’t say, nothin to refer to, no reference point, just this terrible and beautiful at the same time achingness of feeling you and the music, you and the entire concept of music and sole male lead ringing out his notes of personal triumph. Come over with the familiars of this being an emotional reunion with, funny thing, yaself; like you and yaself’d never quite got it on till now; like you and yaself were two different people who knew each other but not well enough to know that they were one and the same thing, but now brought together by this music. By him. Boris, the label on the tape read, and so did the credits at the end, but which a man’d hardly ever seen because he was reduced, every time, to tears bubbling out of him, like a spring, not the dark-shed waters of pain ya can’t rid yaself of, but a spring.
And Sonny’s mouth stayed open, but now and then sung along with a now-familiar melody, with made-up words but as close he could get to the original: Boshayyy – BOSHAYYYYaayyy – the word its own downward progression of notes that’d he’d finally perfected in imitating in style but not substance. (Haha, not substance, cuz. Could never match Boris there.) Though it was good and satisfying to be able to use his voice in such a new way, hear it echoed, as though the television screen version was himself, in accomplished form of that latent potential practised and practised and trained up to this perfection and power (oh, man, I’m come over in goosies again) as the singer surged to new heights of note reach then fell away to an aching semi-sob of phrase ending.
Sonny knew about phrasing in music, half the jail inmates in the country know, it’s in their blood, Maori blood most of em, of having music and emotion and ya life in a wasted heap in some prison cell, slumped (like Jesus, except we don’t die for no noble cause, let alone all of mankind. We just die, have died, are dying in our hearts …) on a bunk listening to the radio, some pop station, hearing the songs so clearly, and knowing your cellmate so well you ain’t scared to talk about phrasing with him and you discover he’s just the same of ear, of unnerstanning. He digs where you’re coming from and you dig him, so why can’t it always be like this between you and cellmate instead of the wedge that comes between you and your intimate private exchanges of maybe, quite possibly, even unnerstanning life itself? Or certainly a part of the musical aspect of it. (Aspect, see. It’s to do with aspects, is life. But it needs someone, or something of your raising to point out the aspects, the diversity of them, what they can do to you that years and years of incarceration don’t and can’t, and yet so many of them in here could be awakened to emselves by just this very experience – But hold up a minute this is getting to another good part.)
Of women taking the choir lead, and Boris now and then in seeming reply, as though they were asking him something and he was replying. Then he, Boris, taking completely over, but only for a goose-pimpling moment of note reverberation, when the peeling walls seeming to shudder, tremble at the force and beauty of sung and hung note.
(Oh God oh God, what is it, what is it of me, of man, of life, of all life but this life too, that a man, this man, has to go out and steal himself – Yes, himself; steal himself. Break into someone’s home in accidental search of himself. What’d I do? Wha’d I do that gave me the mamma that couldn’t cope with life so drowned it in drink, and the father who was the same except his losing state he spat at, threw drunken punches at, he cursed it and is probably still cursing it, life, his life, that he didn’t deserve what it did to him and he did to it. What’d I do, what’d I do, God, that life gave me this beginning and the growing up inevitable outcome that the same life, the same country, the exact same citizenry rights gave Mrs Harland.
The music became sweeter, the women taking over and singing in a chant-like churchy way that had Sonny lifting his head and half closing his eyes in a pious manner, only half knowing he was doing so, with puckered lips and supplicating hands up at chest level. (Now listen to this) at men suddenly taking the choir lead, and one voice just discernible above his pals of, Sonny figured, a middle note range; for maybe a couple of minutes before they died away and then came Boris. (Man. Boris. BO-RIS.) With just the male choir humming in the background as he, the male lead, made careful song statements, like someone arguing a case in a musical court. Up and down the scale of tone advocacy, in and out the gaps of verbal opening. The women coming in quietly in the background and –
Now Boris dropping; a plea for mercy. (For me, Sonny, his client. Ask for mercy on my rotten soul, Boris.) Now the choir joining in his plea (on my behalf). Sonny sad and smiling through a film of tears at that. (For me? For lil ole me?) Tapping a forefinger on his shirted chest. And the choir singing Hallelujah, hallelujah. Back to Boris putting in final mitigation to God (to the jury of my mind, my life’s jury sat in judgment on me), to the world, on Sonny Mahia’s behalf a simple plea: Let me grow to what I shall. No more. But no less neither. Juss let me grow, through this, by this, in standing here like some child discovering the world for the first time, as if surrounded by the mirrors of my dreams, what I have perceived in my dreaming mind, that state of being not quite asleep, entering the territory where instruments trumpet your arrival (at yourself, at the point within man, maybe all men; no, not all men or Jube’d be in that too) to this, uh, place. Yeh, place. Location in your mind, your soul therefore, where meaning articulates itself and God don’t exist so much as this kind of god in yaself, but not one who needs bowing down before, just this sense of great place journeyed and reached in your mind.
In your mind. (And does everything else then follow? By and by, does it follow?)
Spreading his arms in keeping with the spreading of voice from the main singer. A brief pause. Then Boris back wi
th a kind of trembling announcement, a series of them, like a monk at a monastery, like some religious dude calling from the turnip-top spires of a Middle Eastern country. Like much of man and his pious belief was encapsulated in that final stream of announcements – pronouncements. Sonny standing ramrod straight. Boris calling from the hilltops the church spires the mountains the very heavens. Sonny’s arms outstretched and raised to the ceiling, it could be the heavens it was the heavens. And his face, his cheeks and neck and too his arms, broken out in goose-pimples. The choir taking hold of the ending, the impetus, the launching Boris had given it and lofting emselves into glory to God and god and no gods and a mere human god standing with upraised arms and bumpy skin and heart and bone and neuron workings. As bells tolled. And voices shook the church walls. And bells tolled. And tolled and tolled, jingajingajing, jingajingajing, as one man cried. (Let me be.)
12
Jube woke, reached for his smokes, hahahaha, as he always did of the last few weeks, head registering that he had a hangover – so what’s new, hahahaha – lit the smoke, lay there appreciating it as he went over his mind the previous day. (Oh, that’s right, that mad bird. I fucked her.) Broke him out in grinning. He concentrated his mind on the event so to get best appreciation of the body he’d possessed; felt annoyed with himself that he hadn’t thought to switch the interior light on in the car just to get a look at her, at her box, her piece of snatch, object of every man’s dreams (yeah, even him, master pillar of society fucking lawyer with his Penthouses and them weird porno drawings that I got sick of looking at cos they ain’t as porn as I thought, sumpin loving, almost, about em, and who the fuck’s on this earth for that – HAHAHA!) so dammit. He smiled: But she was sumpin else in the sack, even if I did find myself (surprisingly) smacking her around. Dunno what came over me. Musta been the way she just put up no fight, and a beautiful thing like her? Her fault, not mine, for being so easy.
So he lay there and smirked for a bit over that and then he thought about his money, as usual, and how good it was to be rich – oh, and plus that gear out in the spare room, and he hadn’t forgotten Sonny clouting on half the equipment, though that was cool, Sonny’d have to give em up in time. Then, ping, like that it went in his head as if someone had shot a pool ball across the flat of his mind when he wasn’t expecting it. He reached for his trousers at the side of the bed, at the same time a shaft of light, a sunbeam found itself on his bed through the slit of just-parted curtains above him. And he smiled at that, thinking it was an omen. A good one of course. Out he came with the cash from his right pocket; always the right pocket, never anywhere else, creature of certain habits that he was.
Wha’s this? Looking with surprise at the amount he had. Can’t be. At the three fifties, a twenty, a five and some shrapnel. Felt his face redden with close to despair that he might’ve dropped it, or been robbed while he was drunk and out of it on dope. He tried the back pocket. Nope. The other back one. The left front one. The same right pocket again. Nothin. He threw the blankets off (there weren’t any sheets, too much bother) got out of bed. On his feet, his fully clothed feet cept for the cowboy boots, the ones’t were new not so long ago but had long lost their shine and their novelty. Just boots now. That he put smelly-socked feet into when he woke and as often as not didn’t bother to take a shower cos it was wasting good drinking time (hahahaha).
He stood there scratching his stubbled chin, over scar tissue that’d formed from the beating in Wellington, reminding him for a distracting moment that he had a long memory and that they’d keep, the black arseholes did it to him, and Sonny, I spose, if you could call his a beating, was more just a couple of punches then they let him off cos he was a darkie like they were. But they’d keep.
Now, where would I have hidden the rest of it? Looking around him, annoyed that he had a hangover because it was spoiling things, had him in a mean mood when normally he’d been waking the opposite. And to think last night, too, he’d fucked a sheila more beautiful than any he’d fucked before; far more beautiful. He hoped she was okay, he didn’t mean to hurt her, not badly, just a few slaps to show her she was a slut when she didn’t have to be, and maybe a man was thinking he was slapping her out of her – what’d she call it again? Maniac – or was it manic? – depression, that’s it – maybe a man thought he was slapping her out of that? He shrugged. It didn’t matter. He’d got his rocks off, that was the main thing. The only thing, in fact. Now where’s my fucking bread? I used to have thousands. What if I’ve blown it?
The thought near took his legs out from under him. He bent down to tear up the loose lino floor covering, and immediately his face flushed and his head registered a sharp pain. He stood up. Felt dizzy. Lit another cigarette off the one going in the tin-can ashtray. Mmm-uh, that was better. Back to the lino again, he hauled up a sheet to the sight of nothing but wooden boards smeared in glue with fibres stuck to them. Nothing. And it felt like someone’d hit him.
He kicked the bed over to get at the next sheet of lino. Nothin. Fuck. Now where? He ground his cigarette out on the floor before letting the sheet drop back in place; gut with that sick feeling – and it wasn’t the hangover – like the same when you know the judge is gonna give it you, that he’s had enough of your constant reoffending, your lies in the stand, your not guilty pleas. Sick. Cos an inevitability was gonna happen.
He felt like stabbing someone in those moments. The image of his Croc Dundee knife in his car boot came to mind. Standing there, wanting to plunge some cunt, as he tried to think where he’d put the bulk of the money, and that awful feeling in his gut spread. Oh jeezuz, but of course, he grabbed at the blankets, threw them on the floor and hefted the mattress up, chuckling to himself for forgetting his hideaway, blaming it on the hangover, and too much celebrating being a success (for once in my life) and far too much dope; it was turning his brain. (Maybe why I hit the girl last night?)
Mattress one of them kapok jobs that absorbed the dampness of the bedroom, the whole fucking house, which’d have to have an Indian landlord; it just couldn’t be an ordinary, decent white, oh no, has to be a black bastard from Bombay, Jube supposed, with the cheek to charge rent for this pisshole, as he plunged his hand down a carefully made slit at the join so even a thief couldn’t find it, felt around in the kapok, arm shoved in to the limit, arcing his feel as he moved slowly back out. That sinking feeling again. Of having blown it. Of all that fucking bread, all them golden opportunities to finally turn his life around. He could’ve bought half a k of good shit and doubled his investment in a few days, more’n doubled it; coulda done it again – and had a good time while he was at it, selling to different dudes he knew in bars everywhere, on the circuit, even out in South Auckland there’s plenty of dope money out there even with the high unemployment, cos dopeheads, man, they find the bread – and before a man knew it he woulda been worth thousands. Instead … (Oh God) he put a hand to his hammering forehead and groaned. As the process of alternatives rushed in to fill the gap, ease the pain.
Sonny. That’s who Jube thought of first. I’ll borrow from him then go straight out and buy some wholesale bulk dope, fuck messing up like this again. Anyway, Sonny owes me: was me who picked that house, he only wanted to beat off home with his whipped tail between his legs, and even when we were in there he didn’t want to know anything about it. Yeah. Jube fast rationalising.
I can borrow, what, a grand? He’ll have a grand left, might even have two, I ain’t seenim in the Tavi, not once since we struck it rich. Ain’t hardly seen the lil brown jerk fullstop, just pass him in the passage, Hey, Sonny, how ya doing? You studying or sumpin? Whyn’t you come down to the Tavi and drink with the boys for a change? That sorta thing, but Sonny not interested and Jube’d not bothered since Sonny was like that; more and more, even before the big burg score, Sonny’d been acting stranger and stranger. Stir-crazy, that’s what Jube was convinced it was with Sonny. I seen it happen to plenty of dudes: the years inside just up and get to em out of the blue.
&nb
sp; Shit, he must have fifteen hundred left anyrate. I’ll borrow the lot and go buy, what? Should be able to get it for two ton, two and a half, so what’s that divided into fifteen hundred? seven and a half. I’d easy get three fifty retail – nah, more’n that for good head. Four. Four hundred easy. So what’s that times seven and a half? licking his finger and doing the calculation on the gathered dust on his chest of drawers. Came to three grand exactly. Had him grinning, at the irony of it, of this three grand and a half near replicated with this new scheme, it was just like conjuring up money again, and wondering why he hadn’t been doing this, dealing in dope, before. Then he remembered it was a capital problem before: no capital to start off with, story of every crim’s life. I hold back on paying Sonny’s bread back I can buy three gs’ worth and turn it into six – six? Hey, six grand, man, from just a borrowed fifteen hundred start. Smiling broadly because the idea, the plan was so simple it couldn’t possibly miss.
Hey! he remembered another source of money. His own money. The accumulated unemployment benefits paid into his PostBank account, minus the black arsehole landlord’s automatic rent payment, Jube’s half of it, though most of that was made up by the rental supplement the dumb government mugs paid. And he began laughing. Because it added up to around a grand. Oh well, in that case, he lit up a cigarette and puffed expansively on it. The feeling in his gut gone in the instant. Even the headache was only half as bad.