Prowlers

by Maurice Gee

  I asked her once about her degree. She did political science, I knew that much already. And sociology, as I’d expected. She also did philosophy a while; and when I asked her why, replied why not? There seemed to be some promise in that and I settled down to enjoy myself, but found her dreadfully ignorant; as she found me. I did not want her modern stuff, and my ancients she categorized as ‘a pack of wankers’. She’d heard of Plato’s cave but hadn’t bothered to understand it, and when I explained, found it laughable, and, she declared, bloody indecent, people chained in caves, just about what you’d expect from a pack of slave-keepers frightened of looking at ‘real issues’. I’ve no liking for the shadow-shapes myself and was pleased to hear Kate going on, but couldn’t agree that what Plato and his pals really needed was a session in the kitchen washing dishes. And there we got to it: feminism. That is where Kate really lives.

  I have nothing to say about it. I agree, I agree, injustices abound, cruelties, stupidities, are present everywhere. I agree about the waste, the dreadful waste, and that it’s more than time, etcetera. I admit it, we men are ratbags and have centuries of criminal stupidity behind us. And more. And more. But I just don’t want to talk about it. And I deny, most strongly, that I’m a rapist. The cheek of that! And how they deny the single thing, these idealists.

  My God, Kate, I don’t like your mind.

  She read Kitty’s editorial, breathing through her nose.

  ‘There is more to life than success and pleasure,’ Kitty wrote. ‘As we go out into the world we would do well to remember this, and keep duty always in our sight, and never surrender our ideals. Above all must we remember, we are women, and womanhood means duty. It means service. We must lead good lives. We must make our longings reasonable, and our ambitions modest, and strive not for success, not for pleasure, but for the best and noblest in life; and be the type of “good, heroic womanhood” the poet writes of. The sphere of activity calling most of us is domestic, and goodness and heroism are no less present there than in the world. We must be good heroic wives and mothers.’

  Rage and disappointment. There are tears in Kate’s eyes now. I tried to explain that Kitty played games, and went through phases, and loved roles and opposing roles and change and variety, and chased approval, and liked to shock; and was a complicated being. On her last day at school, I said, she vaselined the headmistress’s door handle. But growth and change seem to be outside Kate’s understanding. She can’t tolerate inconsistencies; and so she will never write Kitty’s life. Or if she does, it won’t be Kitty.

  16

  I never thought I’d visit Long Tom’s again. Kate rang Phil and arranged it; or, as she says, jacked it up. He came for us in the silver-grey Austin Princess that used to be the mayor’s car; that Kitty looked so stately in, and hated. The man who breeds his horses was the driver. Phil is not supposed to drive any more, but breaks that rule up at Long Tom’s.

  Kate tucked my mohair rug round my knees, then got in front with the driver; being democratic, or perhaps just getting away from the Old Goat, as she calls Phil. I wonder what my name is.

  Town is busy still, with young back-packers coming in at the bus station. I saw a maple leaf on a pack, and the red cross on white, and the yellow cross on blue, and of course the stars and stripes. People will declare their origins and loyalties. In every car window there’s a sticker for some radio station or pop group or sporting code; or some brand of beer or for Jesus. And we’re becoming passionate, we demand our rights. Gay rights, women’s rights, Maori rights, rights to play rugby with whom we want. I’m glad I don’t live in this time. I’m just passing through to somewhere else.

  We waited outside an accountant’s office while Phil went in to do some business. He keeps his stubby finger in the pie. Kate got out of the car and talked with a woman sitting at a little table outside the Trusteebank. She put her name on a sheet of paper and I admired the line of her hip and thigh.

  ‘What was that?’ I asked, when she came back.

  ‘A petition against having milk in cartons.’

  Just for a moment I felt dizzy. I could not see how milk had got into the world of great events. The driver, Peacock, snorted but held his peace; and Kate explained, but I did not listen. Phil came back, and stopped to sign, and said, ‘Pretty girl. I couldn’t turn her down.’ Then we drove out of town, and through the apple lands that owe so much to me, and round the inlet, through the pine forest, through Stallards, and came to Long Tom’s.

  When Phil bought the property he found the name changed to something English – I don’t remember, Chelmsford or Chugwell, something like that. Now I remember: Worlebury Hill. ‘Some bloody name from Pongolia.’ He had it off the gate in no time and Long Tom’s in its place in wrought-iron cursive script. But he shows no interest in Long Tom. The past doesn’t interest him at all. He did not buy the property because he’d wanted it once: he wanted it now.

  The road goes down the hill through scrub and crosses a wooden bridge and runs on a causeway over the small piece of swamp that’s left. Then you go through paddocks cleared from the bush. His mares and yearlings, lovely things, amble and frisk on the green grass. Breeding is just a hobby with him, but of course he makes it pay. His English stallion Thundercloud (no prejudice against Pongolian horses) earns him four thousand dollars every time he serves a mare.

  The house is low-slung, Californian style. That’s what he says. It’s just a house to me, with too much money spent on it; and far too big for an old divorcee, bachelor – neither word is right for Phil. He only spends a few months there in the summer anyway, and odd weekends. All the same, I was impressed, I was seduced. Deep-pile carpets, leather armchairs, have that effect on me. They made Kate disapproving, made her grim, and she drew herself in as though somehow she might pick up germs. Her nose was up a little for bad smells. And there was a smell, the smell of money.

  We had cold duck and cold white wine for lunch. Delicious. As my passions cool I seem to be getting my senses back – taste and smell. They removed themselves for a good many years. My hearing was dulled too, eyesight dulled. Everything was thinned and lost its edge and was set further off from me. My senses somehow failed to find an object, and bad temper, choler, filled their place. Now, a little bit, they’re coming back. Is it Kate doing this for me?

  I drank a glass of wine too much and told Phil I’d earned it, the wine industry owed me plenty. Tried to tell the story, but he was bored: wanted to flirt with Kate and possibly sit her on his knee. He simply had no notion of how impossible that was; and, with too much drink in me, I found him a little sad. I wanted to tell her to be nice to him. She wanted to give him a piece of her mind. As for Phil, I suppose what he wanted was to make everyone happy; especially himself.

  I dozed in a chair after lunch, half listening to them talk about Kitty. That was Kate’s reason for coming. She wanted to know about their disagreement over the subdivision of Le Grice’s farm. Kitty was mayor of Jessop then and wanted it for a park, but Phil cut it up for building sections. He won. But they had, as he said, ‘a bar-room brawl’. I stopped listening, this was old stuff, and Kitty as mayor and Phil as developer were people I’d never had much time for. Too much ego, too much greed, in both of them. I had a cat-nap, and woke to see Kate and Phil standing at the window, where it seems he’d taken her by the plump of her arm to show her some people across the valley. She freed herself and he gave a shrug of annoyance; and I thought, Be careful Kate or you’ll walk home. That was how he treated unwilling girls.

  ‘Jesus freaks,’ he said, his face brick-red, and the bit of surgical sewing white on his brow. His anger was not all at Kate. I saw people working in a triangular garden chopped out of the bush on the side of the hill. ‘I’ve offered Stewie Biggers double what it’s worth for that bit of land. But his son’s one of them, married some God-bothering female from up north. And now old Stewie gets out there himself. Hoeing spuds. Singing hymns. I used to go over there and we’d knock back a quart of Scotch in a night.
Now he says the Lord doesn’t want him to. “What bloody lord is that?” I said to him. “We’re the lords round here mate, you and me.” But all he can do is say tut-tut. And he prays for me. So he reckons. The bloody cheek.’

  Kate laughed. And I gave a snigger, which he heard. ‘Not funny, Noel. I’ve put a lot of money into this land. And now I’ve got this bunch of loonies next door.’

  The people in the garden were too far away to see properly. Phil brought his binoculars but I didn’t bother with them. What was there to see – a dozen men and women working like coolies in the sun? They were too high up the ridge for horticulture. I told Phil not to worry, if they were trying to make a living from the garden they’d go broke, but he said that was only part of it, they had acres under cultivation in the valley next door, Stewie Biggers’ place, and were putting in kiwi fruit. ‘They don’t mind hard work, I’ll say that for them.’ What annoyed him was the shacks they lived in – did they remind him of the row of houses at the port? – and their bit of garden in his view, and especially their presence on ‘my beach’.

  ‘You don’t own it,’ Kate said.

  ‘I was here first. Do you know what else they wanted? Came over here and asked. They wanted my creek for baptizing.’

  Kate laughed. She doesn’t laugh much. She showed the whole pink cavern of her mouth. Now and then modern times delight her, she gets quite drunk on craziness. And nothing would do but meeting these people. We watched her walk away up the green fields.

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’ Phil grumbled.

  I told him Kate didn’t like being pawed; and that Kitty had told me once Phil had more arms than an octopus. That put him back in his good humour. He offered me a ride in his boat.

  We drove down to the shed in a four-wheel-drive contraption – Jeep we used to call them but they’re all Japanese now – that rattled my bones. Long Tom’s house was gone, no trace of it, just a tangle of lupins over the ground, and a giant collapsing fig tree, covered with purple figs, at the edge of the swamp. I did not remember it. The fruit and huge green leaves and passages to its interior delighted me and I would have been happy to stop there, but Phil was all for fast boats and the sea. We rattled on. The shed is on the inlet at the back of the dunes, with a jetty giving ten feet of water at high tide. It was three-quarter then, with water creeping into the middle reaches of the swamp – in fact, it’s salt marsh. A pair of white-faced herons, a pair of pied stilts, an army of pied oyster-catchers, were feeding.

  And again I would have liked to stay. To see an oyster-catcher snipping the hinge of a pipi is a lesson in the use of tools. They’re neater than lab technicians. And a heron, stepping high and holding still; absolute attention; then spearing in the shallows with her beak, a perfect line, not straight I swear but following the curve of the Earth. She works in millimetres, micro-seconds. I feel a kinship with those birds; will be one if I’m offered a choice. Or albatross. Or shag on a sandbar, in a river mouth.

  Phil called me back from the jetty end. ‘Get your arse in gear.’ He keeps up with the lingo very well. We decided I’d better not try to climb into the boat from the jetty so I mounted in the shed and Phil opened the doors and winched me down the rails into the sea. I felt I was being unveiled rather than launched, sitting up like Jacky, but the feeling of buoyancy under my feet made me want to sing. Phil, of course, has an expensive boat: red and yellow fibreglass, a speedster, a real fizz-boat, with a floral plastic awning over the cabin and stainless-steel fittings everywhere. He jumped in from the jetty – yes, he jumped, how does he do it? – and peeled off his shirt, showing me the scars on his chest, and put on a captain’s hat, and prodded a button and we were off. Our speed pressed me back in my seat as though I were a spaceman heading for the moon. The oyster-catchers shot off like a flight of missiles but we overtook them and I could have caught one in my hand. ‘Ha!’ Phil yelled, and skimmed us along the back of the dune and through the creek-mouth where Kitty had waded and out into the sparkling open sea.

  The island stood up high, covered with bush; and nothing like a scone, I thought now. It was just an island in the sea, beautiful. Our speed though, wild approach, hairy approach – Phil did arabesques – spoiled my enjoyment. Round the back, he was content to putter. We went in close to the rocks and saw how they plunged down into the sea. Strange things happen to me where land and water meet in this way. There’s a cold sudden rinsing out in my skull, the water touches me inside my head; goes bouncing down the white bones of my spine. I want to sink, I want to be lost, I want to breathe that element, be washed empty, be washed clean, and discover ultimate mysteries. It all comes and goes in a breath, and leaves me frightened.

  ‘Feeling OK? Seasick?’ Phil said.

  I asked him to keep on going slow. We puttered round the island in a circle. The Poms, he said, had tried to give it a name, Steep Holme. He wasn’t having any of that. There was some Maori name too, wai or wiri or paku some bloody thing, he’d forgotten. But the guys on the fishing trawlers called it Bucket Island, and that was good enough for him. A tourist launch went by, full of Americans, judging from the voices over the sea. They were pleased to find two old natives in a young man’s boat, one of them in a captain’s hat and not much else, and with a foot-long cigar in his teeth. They got busy with their cameras and zoom lenses. Phil stood up and held his cigar in front of his shorts like a penis. ‘Cut it out, Phil,’ I said. But I admired him.

  ‘Bloody Yanks,’ he said. ‘They think they own the bloody world.’ (Phil owns it.)

  We made another circuit of the island and then took off for the open sea. We scratched our mark on its sheet of tin, and five miles out Phil let the boat sink forward on her nose, and clipped his rod together and started fishing. The bait stank like nothing on earth but all he said was that it was ripe. He hummed a tune as he fished. He tapped cigar ash into the sea. But the heat in the boat, and the stink, made me queasy. I took my jacket off and unbuttoned my shirt down to the waist.

  ‘There’s a shot of Scotch in the locker there.’ I did not want any but handed him the flask and he lobbed his butt away and took a swig: playing Blackbeard. My admiration had not survived my queasiness but I did not complain, for Phil, even at eighty, looks for victories over me. Instead I took the photograph from my jacket: Ogiers and Dockerys and Pappses at Long Tom’s.

  ‘Ha,’ he said, ‘when was that taken?’

  It didn’t interest him. He gave it back and I put it away.

  ‘I reckon old Lotte was the best looker in that bunch. It was all for show though, not for use. Poor old Tup, he was on short rations, poor old bugger.’

  ‘What did she die of? I was away.’

  ‘Diabetes.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘She went into a coma. She wouldn’t stay off the cakes, the silly old cow. Show me that photo.’

  I gave it back to him.

  ‘How did the old man get there? I don’t remember him.’

  ‘He came in your dinghy. Who did he talk to all the time, Phil?’

  He gave me the photo and reeled in his line to put fresh (?) bait on. The turn of our conversation didn’t please him and he lit another cigar before answering. ‘Wasn’t God, if that’s what you’re thinking. Or the devil.’

  That surprised me. I would have thought concepts of that sort quite beyond Phil. I mean, his concerns were material, and outside things he could touch and own were only things he could taste, enjoy, or put together, break into bits; and transcendental beings were a joke.

  He said, ‘It was only names. People. Places.’ He gave a flick of his wrist and sent the line thirty metres over the sea. The weight made a satisfied plop and Phil seemed to think it marked the end of our conversation. It wasn’t enough. Les Dockery had come alive for me. For a moment I almost felt we might pull him up, dark and full of weight and open-eyed and making no struggle, from deep in the sea.

  ‘Do you mean he named his friends? His dead cobbers? From the war?’

  Ph
il sighed. It was strange to hear. It struck me as unnatural – like a dog mewing, a cat barking. ‘I’ve never talked about my old man.’

  ‘What names?’

  ‘People he’d known. Not just in the war. All his life. Places he’d been. Streets he’d lived in. Even pubs. Even horses he’d backed. He was going over his life. So he wouldn’t lose it. So he wouldn’t die. Do you know the best thing I could ever give him? A new name. One he’d forgotten. I used to lie awake in bed trying to think of one. But I never could. Well, maybe I got one or two. I got Edgar Le Grice. He’d forgotten Le Grice.’

  ‘What happened when he came to the end?’

  ‘He’d start again. Back at the beginning. Remember how he used to stand holding on to something?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘That was when he’d ended. He was getting ready to start again. He never went past the war.’

  ‘He asked me what the beach was called.’

  Phil turned and looked at me. ‘Yeah, that’s right. He used to say Long Tom’s. The poor old bugger. I suppose that was a real day out for him.’ He felt a bite and reeled in his line but the fish was gone. ‘The bloody trawlers come in here. They string a net between them and sweep it out like a vacuum cleaner. Nothing left.’ He threw the bait overboard and as we left gulls were battling for it.