by Ian Wedde
But her tone was a little mocking. He didn’t really know what to make of her remark, as usual.
They didn’t talk about her father. He was a silence in which their mama’s eyes, also very blue, seemed not to blink for a while. But once Catha had told him what Mama had told her about it. That wasn’t going to happen to her, Catha said. And you behave yourself!
But didn’t she want to marry a good man and have children?
But what was the hurry? And where were the good men?
What about Miss Vicky’s brother Mister Kelly?
Catha tipped her head on one side and gave him a look.
She’d end up being the last apple on the tree, the one with wrinkles and cracks.
Rather that than fall into the grinning mouth of the first fool that came along!
But now she was teaching. Didn’t she like the little children? Didn’t she want to have some? And what was all this talk about going to the university college? What was the use of that?
It was when she laughed in her Catha way that he knew she had him by the neck and would soon shake the truth out of him.
Ah! So that was it!
Yes. And why not? Of course he would like to have some kiddies one day. What was the matter with that?
But then he went out quickly to split the kindling. That was Freddy’s job, but he hadn’t done it. If he stayed inside any longer Catha would find the lever to open what he saw when he closed his eyes. The magic of Ettie and the way her smile trembled because she tried too hard to control it. And now he was a man, after all. He was earning money and had learned his skills. One day he would be a father. He knew what was real and what was not. The jarring in his forearm when he struck the anvil. How it became the shape of the thought of it. How the thought became the thing. How the thing that was real in the world had begun as magic.
There was an owl somewhere up the hill a little way. Some big soft moths arrived and flew at the lantern. There was the small tree whose white trumpets had a strong sweet smell at night. As usual there were some noisy drunks down the end of the street. What would it be like to be in a quiet place in the country? Their house was too small now that Mama and Catha were sharing a room, while he was in with Freddy. He could picture himself in a place cleared of trees except for an orchard. There was smoke coming from the chimney of his house. He was holding one child in the crook of his arm, and another by her hand. Yes, that one was a daughter, she had her doll, and their big old dog was lying at her feet. The little one was a boy, he was holding an apple. Was there already a tree with apples? How long had he been there?
Catha and Mama were sitting by the fire when he came back in with kindling for the box.
So Freddy wasn’t home yet? It was time he learned to do his share. They both mollycoddled him! What was he up to, out at night? He gave the fire a poke to stir it up and put a shovel of coal on it. Were they waiting for Freddy fly-by-night to have their supper?
Mama was laughing. Well now, just listen to him! My big man!
But Catha was waving a letter. She’d been waiting for Mama to come home from Mrs Sanderson’s – and by the way, how much longer was she going to go on running to and fro to that place? Because, look!
It was a letter from the university college. Because she’d done excellently in her matriculation she’d been offered a scholarship. Next year or perhaps the year after she could go there. She could go to the university.
Catha got up and did a little dance, waving her letter.
Mama’s lips were making the shape of the word excellently. But she was looking at his expression.
Why the fish-face, she wanted to know.
Of course he couldn’t answer that it was she who had urged Catha to do it, the matriculation, and it had been she who tried to dissuade him from going to the smithy so soon.
But he had to say it. Had he not also done excellently at the smithy?
Oh, he should not look so jealous like that, she scolded him. He should be proud of his sister. She herself had met his father Wolf in a house that made her feel ignorant at first. No one should feel like that! And his father had believed so. But it was not just about book-learning!
She reached up to pull his face down for a kiss. And then she fetched out the bottle of brandy from the cupboard where she kept her sewing things.
‘Prost!’
The blue-and-white brooch at her throat made a skip as she swallowed her brandy. It was an oval shape with a fine chain rim. On a blue base was a white picture of two little naked people under a tree. A dog had its front feet up against the trunk of the tree as if it was chasing something. When he was little she used to take it off and give it to him to look at.
What was the dog chasing, he’d ask?
That was for him to find out.
And were they in a forest with wild animals? And perhaps one had climbed up the tree?
One day perhaps he’d be able to tell her.
But didn’t Mama know?
It was better for him to find out for himself. Perhaps he would have a dream about it. Or perhaps one day he would go to the place in the picture. What did he think?
Now he could still picture the place in the brooch when he closed his eyes. But of course it was still just in the brooch. Though perhaps one of the little people was Ettie and the other one was him. Perhaps they had taken their clothes off. And that was their dog, and their orchard tree.
He gave Catha a kiss and said he was proud of his sister. He could feel her own pride in the warmth of her cheek against his lips.
Then Freddy came in. The drunks at the end of the street had annoyed him. His sullen expression said that he expected to be scolded, but no one did that.
Then they had fish soup from the pot on the stove. Mama had made it with some big fish heads from the snapper Papa Hein’s old Maori friends had brought round.
They hadn’t forgotten him after all these years. The carrots and potatoes in the soup came from Vicky. It was good to live in a place where people cared about each other. What did Freddy think? And what did he think of his big sister’s news about the university college?
Freddy looked across the table at her. His little smile had some parsley in it. He licked it off his teeth.
Perhaps the university college would make Catha want to leave the place where people cared about each other. Didn’t Mama do that once herself, when she was about the same age as Catha?
He had that little smile, did Freddy. Now Mama had one too.
‘Oh, Freddy,’ she said. ‘Don’t be too clever too soon.’
Then, to make up for not chopping the kindling, he took the dishes away to wash. When they went to bed he turned his back and went to sleep. So they didn’t talk about what was happening.
Beth and Frank
Brought out of the ghosty shadows of the downstairs storage shelves, the carton labelled ‘Treasures’ had a forlorn appearance – yellowed, cobwebby, dusty – and the cardboard gave off a vaguely thymey smell, as if haunted by an aromatic former life – as what? All these neglected years barricaded behind Noel’s Brumberger film cases. She’d vacuumed off the dust and cobwebs downstairs, and now up in the daylight she gave the thing a good wipe and then pulled the brittle masking tape from the folded-over seal on the top. There were various large manila envelopes much as she remembered them, each one identified by her girly-swottish labels. Qualifications, Birth Certificates, Dad’s Letters (written after he left Elke for the woman she described as ‘the flutterer’ because of her way with her eyelashes), and a set of beautiful hand-coloured Italian postcards from Dad’s time there during the war, labelled noncommittally as Italian Postcards.
Frank’s postcards, not in an envelope, were just held together in batches by thick perished rubber bands that had pretty much decomposed and stuck to the cards. She picked the remains of the bands off (why ‘perished’?) and there they were, about ten years’ worth, maybe four or five a year? – and just as she’d remembered them, the girls in modest 1960s biki
nis on a beach (she’d have been about twelve?), the one with the joke about premature ejaculation (fifteen?), a surfer cutting back off a monstrous curling wave with Frank’s arrow and the word ‘Me!’ added (sixteen?), then the one of a strange vaguely reptilian armoured creature with a snout and Frank’s handwritten scrawl across it, ‘Joh Bjelke-Petersen’.
That one was to do with the 1971 Springbok tour to Australia and the anti-apartheid demonstrations, and Frank’s note on the back wasn’t a joke. Instead it described in short sharp sentences what the police had done to demonstrators in Brisbane. He’d been there and got bashed by the cops. The curt intelligence of his note pushed his joker self aside. It read like a message to her: ‘Get this.’ She’d have been eighteen and Frank twenty-eight. He already had a pack of kids. He’d signed off, ‘Party’s over’, and that was the last card she got. Had he meant their party, the game he’d gone on playing with his little Kiwi cousin, or the fun of his life in Queensland? Or just the illusion that life could hop forward from joke to joke? Or had there been a crisis in his life that cut him off? His marriage before Helen?
It was a nice sunny day, so she took her unwilling tears out to the deck and sat there having a mop-up and a glass of water. Had she written to him after the Bjelke-Petersen postcard? What was almost sadder than his ‘Party’s over’ was her inability to remember the shape or substance of the time after that postcard, as if the childhood thing with Frank had simply done its dash and she hadn’t really even noticed when the postcards stopped.
The thing was, though, she’d kept them. They were in the ‘Treasures’ box along with her mother Elke’s favourite bits of dreadful old yellowed lace that had come from Great-great-grandmother Josephina, a blue-and-white Wedgwood-type brooch ditto, a strange grey Astrakhan hat that her dad had brought back from one of his overseas jobs, and a pair of brass doorknobs, provenance unknown. Among other things. She’d have taped the box shut and labelled it when she and Noel came to the house twenty years ago. Joe was just turning twenty and had canned out of uni and gone to Japan with his girlfriend Sakura. He sent photos of them making joined-up snow angels at a resort out of Tokyo where they were instructing kids, or so he’d said. They ended up running a bar in Roppongi, then Sakura dumped him and took off to Copenhagen with a banker. It was about then that he went off the rails.
There was nothing from Joe in the ‘Treasures’ box, obviously, it was sealed before he took off, and she didn’t have the photos of snow angels or the Roppongi bar, only what remained in her head. What wasn’t in her head was what if anything happened in the time and space between her and Frank from 1971 until his email via the reunion mailing list some forty years later. But what was there, like the pressure of a headache coming on, was an insistence that something should have been, and was, but got lost.
‘Dear Beth, remember me?’ his email had read. ‘I used to chuck you in the river down the Kaitieke. Are you coming to this reunion thing? If you are, then I will too. Your long lost Second-ed Cousin Frank.’
And then there he’d been, tall, stringy, with a weather-leathered face and a mop of dishevelled white hair. He was just a bit stooped. He had a glass of wine in his hand that he was waving precariously as he talked to a younger man whose shoulders seemed to have been drawn up a bit defensively. She saw him recognise her over the defensive man’s shoulder at the same time as she recognised him. Then he’d just walked straight towards her from the abandoned conversation as the bloke half-turned to see where he’d gone.
‘Jesus fucking Christ. It’s Beth.’
But of course their up-to-date photo-thumbnails had been included in the reunion attachment. Otherwise, who knows?
But of course she knew she’d have recognised him without the photo.
But of course she also recognised him from the photo.
So what had happened in the space between those two? What was in that space between the Frank she’d have recognised and the Frank she did recognise? What was it that had been in that space that had gone, if it had gone? And if it hadn’t gone, the memory, or whatever it was called – and if it had gone then of course you couldn’t call it a memory anymore! – then where was it in this person she was, this Beth? And if there never had been a memory in the first place, then why did it seem to matter so much it had made her cry?
Her loud arrgh of annoyance frightened the lovely yellow-beaked blackbird that was often her companion in the tree by the deck or down on the lawn probing with alert intelligence for worms. The bird flew off decisively.
‘Sorry, mate,’ she said. Perhaps she meant that for bloody old Frank as well, though it had been he who’d picked up the loose end of the maze-thread and found his way back to the time when he’d sent her those silly postcards, and then the last one that wasn’t.
When Joe came over for a meal with the boys a couple of days later, she tried to explain the uncomfortable sense of a gap between what she remembered and what she thought she should have remembered, and the sad feeling that she’d lost not just some part of an old friend but also some part of herself in the gap.
They’d finished off the pineapple he’d brought for dessert and the boys were squabbling over who should do what over at the dishwasher.
Joe wasn’t drinking but he didn’t care if she did. She poured herself another glass of the Aussie shiraz that was on special at New World. He was looking at her with a Joe grin, almost but not quite mocking.
‘Probably Alzheimer’s,’ he said. ‘Or booze.’ He paused for effect. ‘Or both.’
But of course it was neither.
Then he made an announcement. Next time they came around he’d bring his new friend. Her name was Frankie, but his ma shouldn’t allow that to confuse her in her mind any more than she already was with the weird old Frank thing.
And what did Frankie do, she asked, feeling a tiny pang at Joe’s lippy tone.
He leaned forward with a conspiratorial expression. ‘She gets on top,’ he said.
In the morning she was up early and went for a good brisk walk down along the Cox’s Bay creek. Out in the bay the sailing boats were all lying on their sides on the low-tide mud. There was a sluggish flow of murky water from the creek, with a cargo of green mangrove pods and plastic junk. The breeze was nice, a mixture of low-tide pong and fresh breeze off the Gulf.
The youthful and wannabe-youthful women in matching black tights and caps ran past her towards unknowable goals. She had a strong black coffee and a poppy seed roll with jam at the German bakery. She made a point of always speaking German with the Bavarian proprietor and his wife, or the young women who seemed to change regularly – they were probably exchange students – and she almost believed that this amounted to a certain kind of appropriate intimacy or at least courtesy, but of course all it did was confirm her as cosmopolitan or pretentious or both. However, it was nice to feel the different shape of the language in her mouth, and to encounter the friendly correctness of the staff. They all got dressed up Bavarian-style for Oktoberfest, the young women in fetching Dirndls and the plump owner in Lederhosen. Then she took her fresh sourdough loaf homewards past the stream of commuter cars and checked her postbox on the way.
There was a yellow card in it that said she had a parcel to collect that was too big for the box.
It was from Frank, with extravagant and unnecessary stamps. They had John Gerrard Keulemans’ lovely paintings of Christmas Island birds on them, and she knew straight away that they were telling her to come over and visit. She put the parcel with its enticing stamps on top of the rubbish bin in the postbox annex, and leaned there for a moment with her eyes shut, because the pictures of birds had tumbled simply into the space that had made her sad a few days ago, and that had made Joe get a bit satirical last night.
Then she carried the parcel past the guy who camped out by the bank ATM with his placard that read, ‘Got nowhere to go. Spare a coin.’ She dropped her change from the bakery into his plastic cup and said, ‘Good luck mate.’ The thought that she’d c
ontributed to his fund for going nowhere cheered or amused her briefly as usual, and then she was home.
There was a very brief note from Frank on top of the bundled notebooks in the package. It read: ‘This is all very sad and a bit shocking but also wonderful. I think we’d both have liked to know Frederick. Your great-granduncle and my granduncle or great-uncle if I’ve got the wiring diagram right. Father must have been the Wenczel immortalised on Josephina’s headstone in the charming rustic Raurimu cemetery we visited on the memorable never-to-be-forgotten day when we unwisely took the lid off our Pandora’s Box. Now I can’t help thinking what Ruth was going to do with all this, and of course I’ll die wondering. Book your ticket, we’ll go and look at some beautiful birds.’
The first little notebook was a Whitcombe and Tombs ‘New Zealand Pocket Diary for 1898’. It was covered in scuffed black leather with a fold-over tongue that would once have slotted into a loop, since torn off. There was a little sheath for a miniature pencil inside the front flap. There were advertisements for a Handbook of New Zealand Gardening and for Edison’s Mimeograph on the front two pages, and after the title page there were six pages covering the phases of the moon, with rates of postage and stamp duties along the bottom of the pages, and then several pages showing telegraphic rates, N.Z. Railways passenger fares, a page listing members of the Royal Family, an N.Z. Government Directory, and a national population count (census April 1891) showing Wellington at 97,876, and total including the Chatham Islands and the Kermadec Islands, and including ‘Chinese and Half-Castes, of 626,830’.
The page with the Edison’s Mimeograph advertisement had Frederick’s signature on it. The signature had bold, experimental flourishes, and was followed by the line ‘Age 15 and “Growing in Wisdom and Stature”’ – a biblical quote? – and a date: 15/1/98. How much use would fifteen-year-old Frederick have had for the informative matter at the front of his diary? The first entry on Saturday 15th of January 1898 read, ‘Went to Baths. Birth of my diary. Bought it for 3/-. No more events in the life of this famous man “what’s goin’ to be” will be lost to posterity. Cricket match B. Barr & self agst J Barr W. Wedde & A Scoular. Defeated. Average match Two top scores 19 & 16.’ The entry for the following Sunday read, ‘Baths. Stayed home all day. Read Persival, Kearne, Marrayat.’
