The Antipodeans

by Greg McGee

  Win finished chopping the wood while Peta made a pot of tea in the kitchen. ‘It was fun, Joe,’ she said, ‘but he’s the boy’s father.’

  She didn’t need to say any more. Peta and Win were married and had a child. Joe could look out the window at father and son and see the family circle was complete. He and Peta had been making do with each other, being kind, giving comfort. That was something. That was enough.

  They all sat on the back steps and slurped their tea. Win, unusually, asked Joe about his scar. When Joe said El Mreir, Win said he’d been with 28th Maori Battalion. The freight carried by those few words between them was almost insupportable. Win shook Joe’s hand again, eyes brimming, called him brother.

  It struck Joe as he walked away into the Huntly dusk that they’d all been making do since the war, making do with their jobs and lives while their souls tried to catch up with what had happened to them in those few years of cataclysm. Win away in the forests trying to work it out, Joe in the mine, both trying to reconcile who they’d been before the war with who they were now, to find some way of carrying what they knew. Win had come home to his family.

  By the time he got back to his hut in the single men’s quarters, Joe knew it was time to go. The new decade was upon them, the new half-century. It was time to put the old one behind them, time to expect something more than making do. That was what the watersiders wanted too. This wasn’t Italy, mired in centuries-old divisions. New Zealand was an almost empty canvas: they could paint whatever pictures they wanted on it.

  67

  Is that how he’d ended up in Auckland that autumn? Had he been giving Peta time to reconstitute her family, or had he been wanting to get out of the mine anyway and the strike forced his hand? He could no longer remember, but Robert hadn’t objected to his going, so he might have wanted to give his daughter and her husband a chance to make a go of it. State of mind was harder to remember than actual events but he thought he could recall being full of hope when he went north.

  Peta had given him the address of a friend who might be able to put him up while he found some cheap accommodation, so he’d walked east to west across the city from the railway station, parallel to the port, down into the valley of Queen Street, up over the hill and down again into Freemans Bay.

  At first he’d been impressed with what he’d seen — the grandness of the railway station’s entrance fringed with columns of nascent phoenix palms, the flowery orderliness and old trees of Albert Park and the curving corrugated iron shop verandahs of the Victorian buildings in and around Queen Street. But by the time he’d climbed the hill to Hobson Street and begun descending into the valley behind, the stone had turned to wood, most of it blistered or unpainted, some of it so weathered and gnarled it was pulling the nails from the frames, leaving gaping holes into dank interiors. Many of the windows were broken. It was an overcast day with a cool southerly, a precursor to winter. These places already looked freezing.

  He found Daisy Purdue’s address, a tidy enough bungalow next door to a ramshackle villa that became a double storey at the back as it fell down the slope. He wouldn’t have picked Daisy as a friend of Peta’s. Where Peta was a big woman, relaxed and open, Daisy was a thin twig of twitching nerves. Where Peta never wore make-up, Daisy painted it on, even though her skin was like Peta’s, brown satin. The common ground they had was generosity. Daisy offered him the sofa until he could get on his feet, much to the displeasure of the man who appeared to be her lover. Ted had hair so Brylcreemed it glinted like a helmet.

  ‘Make sure it’s just till you get on your feet,’ said Ted.

  ‘It’s a bad time,’ whispered Daisy to Joe, but didn’t say why.

  Joe was sure Ted had been drinking, though he was dressed in a spivvy suit and had arrived after dark in a shiny car. Daisy, her hair in curlers, cooked them dinner of sausages and mash and peas, which Ted didn’t much like, then she went off to work, her blonded hair waved down on one side of her face, high heels, glitzy dress, looking, Joe thought, like a film star. Leaving Joe to Ted.

  Living in Huntly surrounded by miners, Joe hadn’t had much idea how the country perceived the striking wharfies until Ted ‘put him right’ about them and ‘the rest of the fucking commie rabble who went out with them’.

  Ted wanted to know where Joe stood, who he was, where he was from, what he was doing in Auckland. When Joe told him he’d been a miner but had come here to find different work, Ted considered that for a moment then said, ‘Good on you.’

  Looking for some connection, Joe had asked him who he’d been with in the war. Ted said he’d driven engines. ‘Trains,’ said Ted. ‘I was exempted. But I’m well out of that: railways are dead money.’

  Then he fell asleep on the sofa so Joe wrapped himself in his coat and went out and sat on the verandah. He looked out on the ramshackle villa next door and watched the comings and goings. After an hour or so, he thought he could make an educated guess about how many people lived there. About thirty, he reckoned. Many of them were young children, still running about barefoot in the darkness, constantly wiping snotty noses and runny eyes on dirty shirt sleeves or holey jerseys. There were at least two babies inside: he could hear one crying and one had what sounded like whooping cough. And an elderly couple settled down to sleep on the verandah, wrapping themselves in canvas and sackcloth. It wasn’t the only house like that Joe had seen in the neighbourhood, just the closest.

  After a couple of hours, Joe saw Daisy’s bedroom light switch on, then off, and crept inside to make his bed on the sofa. Sometime before dawn he started at a hand on the door and saw Daisy tiptoeing past him, holding her high heels. He heard muffled conversation between her and Ted, then silence.

  Ted had warned Joe not to make a row first thing, that he didn’t need to get to the car-yard until mid-morning and Daisy usually got up mid-afternoon. Come morning, Joe didn’t risk shaving or even making himself a cup of tea, simply cleared his stuff off the sofa, packed it away and let himself out the front door.

  It was a fine clear autumn day as he climbed the hill to Ponsonby Road, which ran along the top of the ridge. The trams were still running, though some of the rails were already being lifted. He bought a Herald at Three Lamps and read the front page, then found a bench to sit on and went through the situations vacant. One job caught his eye, and it was close by, a sawmill and timber yard. As he walked down the hill to the yard nestling below the ridge, he could see, further west, corrugated iron roofs glinting up hill and down dale until they were lost in the green of the far hills.

  At the entrance to the timber yard, a man walked him across to the manager’s office past men in leather aprons pushing logs into huge revolving saws. Men at the other end pushed them back the other way while a conveyor belt took the off-cuts away, hovered over by a couple of men who pulled out the awkward lengths that might catch and block the belt. ‘That’s what you’ll be doing,’ the man yelled over the scream of the saws.

  Joe didn’t know if he could cope with the noise but he needn’t have worried. When he joined a group of sorry-looking men in front of the manager’s office, the first thing the manager said was, ‘No strikers or my job’s on the line.’ Fully two-thirds of the group turned and walked back the way they’d come, Joe among them. There was no camaraderie in shame and the men quickly went their separate ways.

  * * *

  Joe bought a pint of milk and a loaf of bread and took it back to Daisy’s house. Ted was gone so he had the place to himself. He made a cup of tea and a piece of toast and was careful to spread the butter and jam thinly.

  During the afternoon, Daisy appeared from the bedroom, blonde hair straggled and sticking out like clumps of flax, blue shadows under her eyes. ‘I have to drink,’ she said. ‘I can’t do it sober.’

  Joe made her a cuppa and she wrapped her dressing gown around herself and sat out on the verandah in the late afternoon sun. ‘Be winter soon,’ she said, shiv
ering. Joe brought out his coat and she snuggled into that. ‘Peta said you were a sweet man and to look after you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry about Ted.’

  Joe said that he and Ted were fine and that he’d soon be on his feet and gone.

  Daisy saw right through that one. ‘What will you do? This strike won’t end any time soon, will it? They’re blacking anyone associated with it.’

  That night Ted brought someone home with him, a ‘drinking buddy’ he said by way of introduction. The stranger was dressed in a suit and tie, overhung by several chins. Joe had a strong feeling that he’d seen him before, that somewhere underneath that recent flesh was a face he knew. But the man gave no indication that he recognised Joe as he asked him quite aggressively what he thought was going to happen to the strikers. Before Joe could declare his ignorance the man said, ‘Let me tell you what’s going to happen.

  ‘This is war to the death, make no mistake. These striking wharfies don’t know the half of it yet: they’ll be set upon by the police if they try to protest and if the police aren’t up to flaying their hides, the government will send in the troops and the specials, like they did in 1913. There’ll be blood on the streets. Any wharfies who stick to their guns will be blacklisted and will never work on the wharves again. They’ll be pariahs wherever they go and there’ll be no way back for them anywhere in this country.’

  Joe said nothing, which the man took as encouragement. ‘The waterfront is going to need a new labour force,’ he said. ‘Whoever signs up now to go to work on the wharves will be looked after, mark my words. You could be farting through silk.’

  Still Joe said nothing, trying to remember where he’d seen this man’s face before. He thought it might have been the war. Had they shared the fatal charge on El Mreir? Had he been in PG 57?

  ‘Let me know,’ the man said, rising. ‘I could get you in on the ground floor.’

  It was when he reached out to shake Joe’s hand, and his shirt cuff rode up, and Joe saw the expensive watch on his wrist, that he knew. This was the man who’d offered Harry food for his watch when they’d arrived at the prison camp at Bari. The cookhouse wallah Harry had almost strangled.

  * * *

  Next morning, Joe rose before Ted and crept out past a different shiny car and climbed the hill to the Ponsonby Ridge. He found a discarded newspaper on the tram stop, intending to have another look at the jobs. He never got past the headline: ‘Rail Bridge Damaged By Explosives. Saboteurs At Work In Huntly District’. The article detailed an attempt to destroy the railway bridge at Mahuta in the dead of night. Joe knew the bridge well: it took the coal from the open cast and underground mines back across to the main trunk line.

  Alongside the headline was another column, headed ‘Fiendish Act A Warning of Danger’. Sid Holland was quoted extensively. ‘This diabolical act of sabotage will bring home to the people of New Zealand perhaps better than any warning I can give what dangers beset our country and the depth to which its enemies will descend to achieve their ends. I can think of nothing more fiendish or hideous . . .’

  What words would the prime minister use if the country had suffered one iota of the damage Joe had seen in Italy? It was ‘an infamous act of terrorism’ perpetrated by an enemy that Joe had never seen but must have been all around him in Huntly. ‘This is part and parcel of a desperate cold war that has come to our shores, in which life and limb are constantly in danger . . . the enemy is already within the gate . . .’ The paper said it was May Day tomorrow, an international workers’ holiday.

  Joe didn’t bother with the situations vacant. He walked back to Daisy’s. Ted’s shiny car was gone. He made himself a cup of tea and a piece of toast and sat out on the verandah.

  Down where the boards of the porch swept under the abutment, several pairs of unblinking black eyes were watching him eat. He’d lived with rats all his life, at Devil’s Bridge, the flour mill at Ngapara, the Veneto. He still remembered the rat looking at him after he, Charlie and Harry had eaten the chicken Harry had killed. But that had been in a shack out in the fields and he’d seen plenty more in such places, where animals lived or food was stored. In Freemans Bay rats lived where people ate and slept, where children played, and scurried openly across yards in the middle of the day.

  * * *

  That night, Ted came home drunk again after the six o’clock swill and castigated the fucking commie terrorist coal miners who had blown up the railway bridge at Huntly. Joe excused himself as soon as Daisy went off to work and waited on the verandah for Ted to fall asleep.

  An ambulance came, no siren, and a small form was carried out of the house next door. Joe hadn’t heard the whooping cough for a while and the little bundle the St John nurse carried away made no sound. He saw a black van stop further up the street but thought nothing of it. Its headlights were turned off, but no one got out.

  He was halfway between wake and sleep, not sure whether he was remembering or dreaming Donatella’s eyes. She was telling him she was worried that an SS lieutenant on the Orvenco road bridge had noticed her comings and goings and was watching her. Joe had told Bepi about Donatella’s fears and Bepi got a message to all their relations and friends around Gemona and Osoppo that if the Nazis came and asked about Donatella they were to say that, yes, they were expecting her at any time. Joe had wondered then, and still did, if the SS lieutenant was simply struck by her beauty. Donatella didn’t look like a film star, she didn’t look anything like Daisy, but she had something that drew the eyes of men.

  Nothing had come of the SS lieutenant’s interest but Joe had found it reassuring that even though by then she was Harry’s lover she had brought her fears to him, not Harry. He’d often asked himself why. Whether she’d talked to him about her fears because she could sense the fear in him, or because fear was an emotion unknown to Harry, or whether there were some things deep in her heart that she felt safe sharing with Joe and no one else. He liked to think maybe that was it.

  He was back there, somewhere in the Veneto in the last days of the war, not in his cave because there was a door, when he felt rather than heard a hand trying to turn the latch.

  By the time the shoulder forced the door in, Joe was behind it with the iron poker in his hand. He stepped back half a pace as a black uniformed shape burst through, off balance, and smashed the poker down on the helmeted head. Before he could turn to swing at anyone else, he was hit from the side and splayed on the floor under several heavy men in black uniforms.

  One of them grabbed a clump of his hair and twisted his head around. ‘Is your name Joseph Lamont?’ he yelled.

  Joe was still confused about where he was. Should he give out any information? Who would he endanger if he did?

  A fist smashed his temple right above the scar and he slumped.

  68

  It wasn’t San Sabba; the walls were concrete block not red brick. He felt groggy when he came round, but he knew that much. Part of his scar had been restitched. The men in black uniforms were New Zealand policemen in midnight blue. They took him from the cell where he’d woken up to an interview room with two chairs, a desk and no windows. There was a plainclothes detective there, mid-thirties, in braces and shirtsleeves and a much older overweight sergeant with a wooden baton. Neither identified himself or said why Joe was there.

  ‘G’day Joe,’ said the detective. ‘You know that treason still carries the death penalty?’

  ‘No,’ said Joe.

  ‘Hanging by the neck until you’re dead,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘You should be aware,’ continued the detective, ‘that an act of terrorism like this could be construed as treason. A treacherous act against the country’s national interest.’

  Joe couldn’t think of a response to that.

  ‘Tell us what you know about the Huntly bridge.’

  ‘I read in the paper that it was blown up,’ said Joe.

  ‘Dynamited,’
confirmed the detective. ‘The politicians are furious. Rabid dogs. They want blood.’

  Joe just nodded, unsure what he was supposed to contribute. The detective had the kind of face you would be happy to trust, square and open, and eyes that appeared to smile as he looked at Joe expectantly.

  ‘It’s also true, is it not, that you’re the treasurer of the Huntly branch of the coal miner’s union that’s struck in support of the wharfies?’

  ‘I was, yes,’ said Joe.

  ‘Commie scum,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘And that you left Huntly three days ago under a cloud?’

  ‘What cloud?’ asked Joe.

  ‘Why did you leave Huntly?’

  ‘To come to Auckland. I wanted a change.’

  ‘Not to cover your tracks?’

  ‘What tracks?’

  The detective sat down opposite Joe and leaned across the table. ‘Tell me exactly where you were last night.’

  ‘Where you found me?’ asked Joe.

  ‘The night before,’ clarified the detective.

  Joe told him he was in the same place, asleep on the sofa at Daisy Purdue’s house in Freemans Bay.

  ‘She’s a working girl, isn’t she?’

  ‘She works,’ said Joe. ‘In a club in town.’

  ‘Then she wouldn’t have been there at night, would she?’

  ‘Her man Ted was there.’

  ‘We’ve spoken to him. He says he fell asleep early, can’t vouch for whether you were there after that or not.’

  ‘I was still there in the morning.’

  ‘He says he didn’t see you in the morning.’

  ‘That’s true,’ conceded Joe. ‘But Daisy saw me on the sofa when she came in from work.’

  ‘So she says. But she’s a prostitute and she’s also a friend of Robert Laing’s daughter, isn’t she?’