by Maurice Gee
‘They were written to me, weren’t they? Kate this, Kate that. Anyhow, I’ve got a right to see what people say about me. Especially when they want to start licking me.’ That had an ugliness I did not admire. But her wildness pleased me, and I said, ‘Read away. I don’t mind.’
‘I will. And you’re wrong about me wanting to write your life. I wouldn’t waste my time. So you can forget about saying no.’
She took something from me with that. It was as though she whisked away a meal I’d been about to enjoy. I’d changed my mind. I was going to let her. I was eager for her to; eager, rather, for the collaboration. Now I’ll have to carry on myself. And yes, if I can manage it, that’s best. The girl is really very ignorant.
‘What,’ I said, ‘was this project, then? Or were you only looking for a cheap place to stay?’
‘I earn my keep. Looking after you.’
‘I’m not complaining, Kate. I want to know.’
She pricked her finger. ‘Shit!’ And looked at me. ‘Shite. If that’s OK.’ She stuck it in her mouth, and mumbled round it, blood smearing her lip, ‘I’m writing grandma’s life.’
‘I’m not sure she’d want you doing that.’ There’s a measured response. There’s a comment screwed down like a lid on jealousy and rage. I closed my eyes. The bed lifted me as Kate stood up. How much did she guess of it? How much, Kate? My burst of rage that you should choose Kitty ahead of me?
I’ve tried to be cerebral. I’ve tried to work always with my brain, be rational. Understand why before I act, and if I can’t know ends at least know means. Not just in my work but in that part of my life supposed to be private. But the visceral leaps up like a baboon, screams with rage. I chatter, gnash my teeth, roll back my lips, and sometimes weep. I display my scarlet arse at the bars and beat my chest. I piss on all the faces looking at me.
Is this the finish of it? Am I done for? Is cerebration over, my mind’s journey, and liver and intestines rule my life?
If I don’t get out I’ll piss the bed.
‘Yes, go on, write it down,’ she says. ‘It’s good therapy.’
I don’t do it for that. I do it to keep my mind alive; and in the end I’ll achieve some measure. I’ll be clear and simple, tell the truth, I’ll hold it like a pebble in my hand.
Kate is good for me. We’ve reached an understanding. I fell out of bed and the thump brought her running and she found me there on hands and knees, leaking like a tap with a split washer. She cleaned me up and put me back and even washed my face. Then she took out the mat and hosed it down.
‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ (and I am); but then she sat on the bed and talked to me and wanted to know if I’m upset about her writing Kitty’s life.
‘I don’t think you’ll get it finished,’ I said.
‘Maybe not. I’ll give it a good try, though. I’ve got a lot of her old papers, you know. National Archives wanted them but I said they’d have to wait, she gave them to me.’
That seemed a strange thing for Kitty to do; but when I said as much Kate explained that Kitty was trying to help her with her thesis on the New Zealand Labour Party. That’s abandoned and now the life takes its place. If I know Kit she wouldn’t want anyone poking round in there. Her private life. The public part is another matter, but I told Kate it’s well enough known already.
‘I’m doing it all,’ she said. ‘What she was in public and in private. And I’ll need your help. You’re the only one left who knew her when she was a girl.’
I nearly said Phil Dockery was alive. But I’ve had Phil eighty years, and had enough of him and don’t want him sitting by my bed. I think he never saw a woman whole, with any thickness, and what could he say about Kitty, dimensions without number? So I shut my mouth and agreed with Kate there was only me. But told her I didn’t want to go raking over the past.
‘You don’t mind raking up Irene Lomax. All that garbage. She was a small-town failure, don’t you see? I’ve got letters from her to grandma.’
I kept my cool, as she’d probably say. I’ve stepped on to a plateau and Kate can’t touch me there. I only wondered that she was so aggressive. Has she known too many failures, and what sort? She’d be furious if I told her I think she needs a man.
In the end I agreed to tell her what I know. And I said she could stay here rent-free, but didn’t have to look after me. I’d get a nurse.
‘No,’ she said, ‘no bloody nurses.’ Does she hate women? ‘It’s better if I pay my way. But don’t get the idea I do it because I like it. Or you either. It’s a bargain, OK?’
‘Don’t you like me, Kate?’
‘I’ll tell you when it’s all over.’
As I said, she’s good for me. She keeps me sparking. When it’s over I’ll tell her if I like her.
I mentioned that her typewriter disturbed me. ‘Well that’s too bad, I’ve got to use it.’ She brought me some cotton-wool for my ears.
11
Phil Dockery has been. Kate telephoned and told him I was sick and asked him round. It was her scheme to get the two of us remembering Kitty.
I wondered why she brought me fresh pyjamas and combed my hair. Fresh pyjamas for Flea-bag Phil! When I heard his voice in the kitchen I mussed my hair. It’s like gravel running through a hopper, but has a kind of boom in it too, a hollowness at the sentence end, a whump like a sack of wheat dropped from a dray. ‘Whoit’ is gone, exists only in my memory. I’m willing to bet he can’t remember it. Somewhere along the line he noticed how people spoke where he wanted to be; so put that roundness in his voice and covered its makeshift nature with a whump! That’s quite a feat. I admire him for it. I speak with the standard flatness myself – except on stage, when I can be anyone you like.
In he came, following his chest. I’m one of two or three who know he’s got a pacemaker inserted there. ‘Gidday, Noel.’ He can still do that. ‘How are you mate? Off colour, eh? Got the bot?’ He came and shook my hand, but the frailness of it startled him and he dropped it fast and ruffled my already spiky hair.
Kate brought in a kitchen chair and he sat. ‘You didn’t tell me about your nursey, boy. I’d hop in bed myself if I had one like her.’
Kate gave a snaky grin. She went back to the kitchen to make tea. Phil lifted one knee over the other. He was not as spry as he pretended. I asked him how the cogs and wheels were behaving and he gave his chest a thump, but held it back a little at the end. ‘My Woolworth’s ticker? Have to keep it oiled, Noel.’ He winked. ‘Needs a shot of Scotch now and then. No, seriously, it’s a great piece of engineering.’
‘So you’re keeping well?’
‘Good as gold. I walk down to the club every night. Play a couple of frames of snooker. Indoor bowls, maybe. Have a snifter. Walk back home. See this.’ He pointed at a white mark on his forehead. I put on my reading glasses and saw it was a scar, with stitch marks at the sides. It was like a zip-fastener and I felt if you unzipped Phil and looked inside you’d find only two or three circuits open, but hear the crackle, see the flash, of his dozen thoughts, all quick and heavy with himself. He told me he’d got a skinful at the club – beat the city treasurer at snooker – and couldn’t remember walking home. The first thing he remembered was standing inside at the top of the stairs and reaching back to switch off the staircase light. Then somehow his feet got tangled up (Kate, at the door, snorted at that) and he fell down the stairs. ‘Complete bloody somersault, Noel.’ He crashed through the plate glass window on the landing and fell another six feet into the porch and ended up in the cactuses, out cold, pumping blood. The woman in the downstairs flat thought he was dead. But she called an ambulance, and they carted him off and sewed him up, and kept him a day for observation, and the following night…
‘Don’t tell me, I know. You were back at the club playing snooker.’
He grinned at me but was a little anxious. If he’s vulnerable to judgement it’s been mine. Not that he’ll admit it. Never. No. He doesn’t give a damn for anyone, that’s the princip
le that rules his life. I could disprove it – what about his voice, for a start? – but I don’t want to cause Phil any pain. In fact, as he grinned at me, all I wanted was to make him happy.
‘You’ll never learn, Phil.’
‘Fell from the middle of the bloody house right outside, Noel. Ended up with the potted plants, potted myself. And I didn’t have any pretty nurse to pick me up.’ He turned to Kate, but she went back to her kettle in the kitchen.
‘Does she ever smile?’
‘Only at feminist jokes.’
‘One of those, eh?’ He lowered his voice. ‘You know the cure for that, Noel? A length.’ He jabbed with his forefinger. Phil’s good at dirt. Sometimes he’s close to poetic. I told him I didn’t have one left and he said he’d be happy to stand in. We sniggered like two schoolboys in the bikeshed. But he confessed that with his pacemaker sex was out. He’d done a deal with his doctor, keep one vice and give up one and he’d kept his Scotch. ‘In moderation.’ He winked.
As we talked I thought how we’d beaten the averages. I read them in the paper yesterday and we’ve both had a bonus of thirteen years. So we’re doing our bit, Phil and I, to confound statistics. (Although all they’ll do is move up a step.) Irene did her bit as well, dying seven years short. Kitty was the only conformist, rebel Kitty, seventy-five. The men are left, the women dead. There’s confusion, there’s a turnaround.
In spite of his slowed-down legs, Phil looks good for plenty more years. His scar stands bone-white on his ruddy forehead. He tells me he’s out fishing in his boat when he goes to Long Tom’s, and in town he swims by the yachtclub when the tide is right. Never goes to the beach. ‘Hell, Noel, I made an agreement with my doc. I’d be jumping on those topless sheilas out there.’ Yes, he’ll make ninety, ninety-five. As long as he watches himself with Kate. She heard that last bit, coming in with tea, and looked set to deal with him like the wasps she murders on my window pane.
We talked about Kitty for her. Phil Dockery’s world is different from mine and he knows how every last thing in it works. He knows how men talk to each other in every situation touching money, he knows how deals are made and how they’re broken and when to move and when to sit still and take a loss, and turn a loss to his advantage. He knows about laughter and how to put a face on and how to speak straight, and crooked too, I guess; and all about goodfellowship and toughness. He knows this, he knows that, male stuff, money stuff. I can’t be bothered with that world of narrow boundaries. I won’t list the things he doesn’t know.
He knows nothing about Kitty but pretends to know the lot. It made me amused and angry by turns. All he remembers are things she said and did. He remembers other things she didn’t do. I suppose I should give him the licence I give myself. Kate has accused me of inventing most of the stuff in my notebooks. You can’t remember that, exactly what you said, and they, and she, you’re making it up. I defend myself by saying it all seems right to me, and quote Tup Ogier at her – ‘When we don’t know the facts we’re entitled to invent’ – but it does seem right, I believe it; and I’ve no doubt Phil believes the things he remembers. Like, ‘Kitty was the first girl I ever kissed.’ He never kissed her.
I know that because Melva Dyer and June Truelove put it round the school – Flea-bag Phil under the bridge with Kitty Papps – and Kitty told me it was a lie. I said to Phil, ‘When was that? Where?’ ‘Under the footbridge.’ He remembers the story and the years make it true. It would come out true under a lie-detector. He jerked his thumb at me and said to Kate, ‘He thinks his sister was too good for me.’ I didn’t deny it. He enjoys being Phil Dockery from the Port.
We reminisced, if that’s the word, and let Kate plug in her tape-recorder. But she’s going to be confused. There were plenty of facts we both agreed on – that Kitty jumped a class, for instance, and caught up with us in standard six, that she asked questions endlessly in class, that her great friend was Irene Lomax and the pair of them saved Mrs Le Grice in Girlies Hole. But even when we agreed our memories – how shall I put it? – reflected different lights. Have you ever seen a rock crystal, Kate? That’s limpid quartz, quartz in its purest and most transparent form. Let it stand for Kitty. Now take Phil and me as the two planes of the dihedral summit. We’re like that in all things, at right angles, even in our shared memories; and Kitty can be crystal clear to me, and to him, yet we’ll face out from her differently. So when he says, ‘She used to poke her fingers in Miss Montez’s eyes,’ he means she was doing what other girls would not dare, but I know she was feeling the hollowness inside. Just like me.
I think, Kate, that you’ll agree with Phil. A lady Cabinet Minister who kissed boys under the bridge and poked her fingers for a dare into a skeleton’s eyes, that’s most appealing. I’d choose her.
12
All the same, you want my Kitty Papps, Kitty Hughes. In good time. First I’ll give you my Phil Dockery.
His mother died of TB when he was nine and his father, a shipping clerk, sank into alcoholism and became a rag and bottle man, pushing a cart that made a glassy chatter in the streets. A sister in Hokitika took the four youngest children, but Phil stayed with his father and I remember him – and maybe it’s true and maybe not, but at least it’s as good as kissing under bridges – a boy with bare feet and scabby knees and snotty nose running from our house with an armful of rags, and Les Dockery, the father, standing by the cart drinking from a bottle, and banging the cork in with his fist, and wiping his mouth with his sleeve. The scene doesn’t go on from there, but a part of it – the words under the picture, shall we say? – is that my knees weren’t scabby and I had a handkerchief for my nose, and a father who didn’t drink, so maybe some adult, invisible now, was giving lessons. Not my mother. She was censorious of those who were up not down.
Phil and his father lived in a street of derelict houses by the port and shifted from one to the other as the Harbour Board pulled them down. Like all town boys I went fishing at the wharves and I had a short-cut through Phil’s street. There were picket fences rotting in the weeds. There were porches with the planking stripped off and doors with their panels knocked out and broken roof-slates sliding in the gutters. I saw a rat almost as big as a cat, grinning in the doorway of a house as though he’d just paid off his mortgage.
Phil earned money running errands, delivering parcels. I spotted him now and then darting among the drays and lorries or pinching a ride on the back of a horse tram. I saw him on Saturday afternoons when I went down to the Saltwater baths, my togs neatly rolled up in a towel. He didn’t have a penny for the baths. He swam in his baggy pants round the piles of the coal wharf – where the yacht club is, where he swims now, still breaking the rules.
Then Tup Ogier found him, thought he had a worthwhile brain up there. You know all that. Les Dockery pulled himself together, enough to get away to the war, and Phil boarded with us for two months, then went to live with Tup and his new wife, Lotte Reinbold.
We were friends, Phil and I. Had to be. Hadn’t we caught Edgar Le Grice, the Jessop fire-raiser? Our names were in the paper – mine first, that was fitting – and in the big-city papers as well. Having Phil in our house though was more than I was ready for. His manners weren’t bad. He learned quickly. A word from Mum was enough. Just as he had held himself still at the bakehouse he held himself still in our family. I’d sooner have had him licking his plate or wiping his nose on the tea towels. I felt that Phil, with eyes quick, arms held in, with voice polite, was stealing from me.
My father thought he wasn’t a bad chap, but Dad thought that about everybody . He said one day that if Tom Ogier changed his mind it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have the boy live here. Now I was robbed. I’d had a vital organ ripped out and bled all down my legs and stood in a sticky puddle on the floor; and was cured by the turning-down of Mum’s mouth. She didn’t want him. Her true centre was on me, which she proved by saying, ‘I don’t think that would be fair to Noel.’
‘I thought he was Noel’s mate?’ Dad loo
ked at me.
‘Yes,’ I said, with heart pumping hard and all my blood back inside again, ‘but when I go to College I think I’ll need a desk where his bed is.’ I put an earnest light in my eyes. Remember, Kate, I was an actor; and many’s the time I’ve had to act my pants off.
‘Ah,’ Dad said, ‘ah yes. Well, I suppose it’ll be nice not to wipe the lavatory seat all the time. Now don’t you say I said that, Noel. I wouldn’t want to hurt him for the world.’
How I laughed inside. How roosters crowed in me – doodle-doo! I stood on tip-toes and beat my wings. That night I listened to him sleeping in the bed where my desk would be. Something in his nose made a sticky sound, flaps of tissue coming together and pulling apart. I aimed along my finger and shot him dead. I felt almost fond of Phil Dockery.
Kitty – here’s something for you – liked to hear him swearing. She seemed to feel that being tough was his proper function. And now comes a hard part, I’ll have to think.
I’ve said already Phil was a man. Kitty knew it. She was a being full of interests. It was as if things presented themselves and asked to be known and Kitty’s task was to hold them still and turn them round; but the larger part of her study was intelligent not simply curious. Does that make her seem cold? She was never cold. How shall I put it? She did not keep the things she collected on a shelf. The increase was not only mental but sympathetic. Coldness came much later in her life.
Now Phil, fresh in his manhood, was of great interest to her. He was of some interest to me too. He showed me his penis erect and it confirmed my poor opinion of myself. I would not show him mine, even though, under my bedclothes, it was doing its best. He measured with his ruler: seven inches. I refused to measure and became moral in defence and threatened to tell Tup Ogier, which frightened him. Now and then we talked a bit of dirt about girls. He was careful never to mention Kitty; but we both agreed we’d like to do it to Irene Lomax.
