Prowlers

by Maurice Gee

  We drove into the reserve, crossed a ford, parked in a clearing, and I trudged off like an infant at the beach. I collected samples of litter from various trees – the idea being to correlate alkalinity to field observations of the fertility of the soil types – and came back with my buckets and spade and found, as I’d expected, Phil and Rhona gone. I searched. Gum-booted, I burst through scrub, phantasmagoric couplings in my mind; and came on them sitting on a boulder in the river, Phil smoking a cigarette and blowing smoke rings, and Rhona with her arms clasped round her knees and her eyes fixed on the moving water. He flicked his butt away and spoke to her and she shook her head. He reached across and made a little mock punch on her jaw; then pointed at me watching from the bank. Rhona looked up. It’s a curious illusion: I seemed to see down tunnels into her head and see a kind of blue immensity, and I believe Rhona surrendered then to nothingness. Phil stood up and yawned. He took Rhona’s hand and pulled her to her feet. He helped her across stepping-stones; and, at the bank, made me the present of her hand; and I pulled her across the yard of water and held her for a moment in my arm. I laughed. Rhona laughed.

  Phil said, ‘I’ve had enough of this nature stuff. I feel like I’m in a bloody poem. Let’s go home.’

  He dropped me at the Lomax and drove Rhona home. I was round there that night, and she agreed to marry me. So I took on the job of non-existent Rhona and her monstrous mum, and worked very hard for the next five years.

  24

  Still reading, Kate? I know you are. You sneak in here at night and find my book dead-centre on the desk. You don’t have to go tippy-toes or get the Sundown Kid to put Three-in-one on the door hinge. I leave my notebook out for you to find. I want your opinion. Do you think it will ever see print, my cheating memoir? Do these honest scribblings entertain you?

  Give me a line of criticism. Cross out adjectives if you like. You’ll upset my judgements but I don’t mind; you’ll get an inkling, maybe, of things I avoid. If you’re patient you may glimpse things that evade me.

  But don’t interfere with my nouns. My nouns are the truth that I find.

  I don’t need you to tell me that I’m tired. I know I’m tired. Why shouldn’t I be at eighty-two? Tiredness is not a problem to me. In fact I like it. I can make a meal of tiredness or take it like a mug of Ovaltine. It satisfies me. You’re not a problem either, you and Shane, though I wish you wouldn’t take me for a fool, with your smirk and snicker. I can work out what a cunning linguist is. And I don’t care what you do up there in your room. Just get him to use that Three-in-one on the bed.

  Do you mean that my writing is tired? Yes, I agree. There’s a stretch I’ve got to cross and standing here and looking at it brings a weakness in my chest. I feel my stringy heart in there and it doesn’t seem to have any blood to pump. It stretches like a nest of rubber bands. I want to write about happy things. I want to tell jokes. My mother-in-law, Doris Clews, hid her port wine under her bed in a chamber-pot. No Kate, not the bottle in the pot, she tipped it in, and fooled us for months. It’s an act of cunning that makes me breathless. That old monster, how I admire her. She reached down in the small hours with her tumbler and topped up. And how Rhona screamed when she drew out the pot. Rhona crouched in a corner, screaming.

  I started that as a funny story. Things go wrong. I could tell you, Kate, about the time Fred Gooch’s flies escaped and we had to evacuate the building. Or about his borer house – how he waited and waited for them to breed and they wouldn’t oblige. John Dye went out to give an opinion and told poor Fred the whole of his colony was male. I could spin that out for several pages. Shall I try? Or Manifold drunk day after day on Baxter’s Lung Preserver, warbling ‘Dressed in your gown of blue brocade’ in his office and activating cultures by blasting away with his Boer War revolver. Lomax stories. I’ve got buckets of them. Unzip your tape recorder, Kate. They’re yarns that won’t go off in a wrong direction. The trouble is I can’t be bothered writing them down.

  I finished with the Lomax months ago. And Dockery and Irene Lomax bore me. Tell me some more about Kitty Hughes. Or Rhona if you like, but don’t upset yourself.

  I don’t smirk. I don’t snicker.

  Kate.

  Thank you, Kate. A sign. No, you don’t. Your expressions of amusement are frank. I was just giving you a nip with my fingernails. Shane’s a bit of a smirker though.

  Kitty Hughes? She was frank in everything. Let me think. ‘By God, Pam, I’ll give you a thick ear.’ She said that to your mother when she brought home a bad school report. And she was famous for saying, ‘If the Honourable Member for Fendalton doesn’t withdraw that remark I’ll come across the floor and give him a belt on the lug.’ But you’ll know that episode. Ersatz earthiness. She prepared the ground for that sort of thing the way Churchill is said to have prepared for his witty sayings. Kitty was an old phoney, did you know? All the same, she was a genuine girl.

  I don’t go in for paradoxes. Kitty Hughes was a complex being. And there’s a mystery in her I’ve never solved and never will. Kitty was dark and light, still and turbulent, sweet and sour. She was loud and violent, she was quiet. A thick ear for Pam, right enough, and for the boys when they played up; but when they had scarlet fever or the mumps the care they got came from some deep source of love in her. You think I’m being sentimental, don’t you? You’ll say, maternal feeling, that’s nothing to write home about – and probably you’ll ask what Des was doing? I’ll tell you. He was reading by the stove. He was sitting with his feet in the oven drying his socks and waiting for his slice of bread and jam and cup of tea. No matter what those kids had, mumps or chicken pox or impetigo, Kitty always looked after Des. He got his jam spread thick, and three spoons of sugar in his tea, and a second cup; and she came and took the dishes away and stoked the stove and tied a woollen scarf round his neck. But – there’s a mystery. She was rough. And was it the roughness of love, or something else? I thought sometimes she’d like to string him up to a rafter with that scarf.

  I never managed to look inside their marriage. Did your mother ever talk about it? Perhaps you can tell me what went on there. I know he hit Kitty now and then. I saw her with a fat lip and black eye. I’m not going to offer the opinion that she liked it, women like it. You’d probably beat me up if I said that. She hated it; and she hated him from time to time. She matched him assault for assault, with her tongue. And now and then she hit back with her fists. I was round there one day and found him nursing his jaw. It was one of the few times I’ve seen Des happy. ‘She got me with a beauty,’ he tried to grin. ‘Ten Ton Tony would have been proud of it.’ After that he called her Tony Galento. (A boxer, Kate, a fat Italian; and the name wasn’t inappropriate. Kitty was growing into a heavyweight.)

  But what went on? What really went on? She’d never hear a word against Des Hughes. Assaults on him, and I tried them now and then – have I said I detested him? – she took as assaults upon herself. And I’ll say this: that well-matched, mismatched pair, more than any couple I’ve known, had an identity. He made her, she made him. They generated increase, kept going a creation of themself, continuous. Yet this won’t do – for there came a time when she was large and round and Des sucked dry, Des Hughes done for. There was nothing distressing in it (especially for me); it seemed, somehow, part of their bargain.

  I’m clutching at shadows. You probably know more than I do, Kate. Here’s a day, for what it’s worth. It’s a Labour Party picnic down on the park at Girlies Hole. The date, March or April, 1938. Jessop has a Labour MP now, lugubrious Bernie Molloy with the bushy hair and honest boots; Bernie from the Back-bench, he came to be called. Des is right-hand man – left-hand, he says, illustrating his role: phrase-maker, ammo supplier. Des isn’t a brickie any more, he’s a sick man and does some part-time clerical work for the local branch. He’s at the picnic to enjoy himself, Kitty says, and she tries to keep him out of Molloy’s way.

  I’m there too, with Rhona, my wife. Can I change tense? I want to step back and get
the racket of kids out of my ears, and the smell of orangeade and donkeys and dung out of my nose. Getting at a distance, that’s something I can do for Rhona too. She doesn’t – did not want to be at the picnic, and she put herself in another place and passed like a Tibetan through our day.

  I wasn’t a Labour man, though I voted for Molloy in 1935, and Kitty for as long as she stood. I was at the picnic to be among people. That, for myself. For Rhona, to give her Kitty’s company. Kitty was good with Rhona. She found ways through to her. And Rhona softened Kitty. A kind of edulcoration took place and Kitty forgot to sting and bite. On the day of the picnic though, I could not bring them together. Kitty had her children and Des to occupy her, and was loud and frolicsome, athletic – she tucked up her dress and won the women’s dash in a rhinocerean gallop – and Rhona, as if puffed on by a breeze, shifted into one of her private worlds. I knew it by a softness on her mouth, and tiny smile, and by a widening of her eyes. She was blind, seeing other things. So I fixed her arm in mine and we strolled about – I strolled, she floated – and I was able to watch the picnic even though I could not join in.

  The children were swimming in the river. Your mother, Kate, was like a trout in the water, she was lovely, she was quick, she made a flash of white and pink and brown in the green deeps, and came up open-eyed, bursting up into the sunny day. Shifting a little, smiling myself, I mistook her for the child, Kitty. Your uncles, the boys, a rowdy pair, might have been Phil Dockery and me. They came up begging to me, slippery as fish, and I gave them a florin for fizzy drinks. Pam looked at Rhona, inquisitive, and touched her arm as though trying something out. Then she ran off with the boys to the drink stall; and I glanced at Rhona sideways and saw a little frown on her face. She touched the drops of water Pam had left and gave a shiver, and dabbed them off her skin with a handkerchief. Then, dry, untouched, resumed her dreaming. I took her up from the river, past the coconut shies and the donkey rides, and watched – I watched – the lolly scramble, and admired my ruthless nephews and niece. I thought it inappropriate though that training in capitalism, gaining and getting, should take place at a socialist picnic, and wished that I could make the observation to my wife. I’d keep it for Des Hughes when I found him. I enjoyed setting traps for Des. I’d acquired a taste for his contempt of me. A bit like Kitty, I was increased by Des.

  We watched the tug-of-war, sixty people on a piece of mooring rope from the wharves. Town and Port strained against each other and no side won until Kitty changed her allegiance and ran to join her husband on the Port team. I watched her with bewilderment, distaste – her skirt tucked up, teeth bared, fore-arms bulging. Kitty! Kitty! She looked Neanderthal. She had black sweat patches in her armpits. One heave from her and the townies went skidding on the grass. They dug in their heels but it did no good. Kitty dragged them, grunting, sweating, past honest Bernie Molloy, who brought down his arm, ‘Port the winner’; and the Port team fell in a tangle on the ground. Kitty waved her fat legs in the air. Des lay panting off to one side, spread out like a star-fish on the grass. His hair was a splash of fire, his face was white. After a while she came and hauled him up by his shirt and brushed him down.

  That was our day at the Labour Party picnic. But before I stop, one more thing. Enough was never enough with Kitty Hughes; though it’s not her fault. Blame me if you like, always looking for significance. All the same, it happened, though not quite as neatly as I’ll describe. We went past the greasy pole, Rhona and I, arm in arm; and there they were again, Kitty and Des. She was everywhere. Do you know what a greasy pole is? I don’t know whether you have them any more but they were very popular in my day. You sit on a log mounted high on trestles and try to knock each other off with sugar bags filled with straw. Young fellows used it mostly, but it was more fun with husbands and wives.

  If it were an art form you might say it reached perfection with Des and Kitty that day. Skinny Des, made of trellis slats, with paper face and fiery hair; and Kitty in her red dress, black in her armpits, hair unpinned – she lost some votes that day, some of those Labour wives never forgave her – they straddled the pole and whacked each other with swollen sacks. His arm was going round like a propeller, dust puffed from her shoulders with every hit, and bits of straw swarmed like yellow bees about her head. She held on, clamped the pole in her white thighs and locked her ankles. She worked her arm in weighty scything sweeps and knocked him inch by inch to one side. Des bent in the middle. She seemed to fracture him. Her teeth were fierce. She looked as if she’d stretch her neck and bite him on the throat; and his mouth made a woeful O. Down he fell and lay with limbs askew on the mattressed hay beneath the pole. Kitty, not yet done, threw her sack and hit him in the face. She unlocked her legs and put her hands on her hips, and sat there grinning, white-toothed, at the world. Kitty Victrix. There, Kate. Significance. I told you.

  But this is not, for me, a Kitty story. This is a story about my wife. While Kitty slugged, and Des tipped slowly over, Rhona must have let go my arm and walked with backward steps away from me, until stopped in her retreat by a fence. There she stood, watching Kitty on the greasy pole, and making little whimpers and moans. I looked for her and found her, with lips drawn tight and the palms of her hands flattened on the fence. I went to her and helped her away, and no one saw.

  That’s not much, I hear you say. It was a great deal. It was an end for Rhona. She saw a kind of murder. She had confirmation of what she couldn’t any longer know.

  In a little while she went back inside, to one of her worlds – don’t ask me, don’t ask me, I don’t know – and never came outside again.

  25

  Thanks, that’s useful about Kitty Hughes and Des. You’re being selective though, and not very fair. I thought you liked your sister.

  Rhinoceros makes rhinocerotic not rhinocerean. As far as I know they don’t gallop either.

  What was wrong with Rhona? You don’t say.

  Kate.

  26

  I do say. I’ve told you. Stupid bitch! Do you think you can work life out like a sum? This and this and this gives that and that? All right, I know, I said that’s what I meant to do, but I’m not a fool, it can’t be done. I was skiting. I’ve told you what I know, and that’s enough.

  We had no children. You’ll want to know whose fault that was. Mine, through no moral or conjugal dereliction. None of the half dozen women I’ve had affairs with was ever troubled by a pregnancy, although they – and I – were careless enough to make a tribe of babies. And Rhona could conceive, I know that, for her mother told me once about her miscarrying and waking in her bed – being lucky to wake (perhaps unlucky) – with her buttocks in a pool of blood. You asked for it, Kate, and you’re going to get it. She wouldn’t tell me who the father was but I know, and you can guess. I was, and am, the sterile one, and if you want to make something of it go ahead. But you’re probably more interested in sex than procreation.

  That’s too bad, because I’m going to tell you nothing. I’ll tell you it stopped after a while, when she was sick – our euphemism for mentally disturbed. (That’s not to say mad, mad came later.) She never liked me kissing her and said once moustaches must have germs, but when I shaved mine off she still didn’t like it.

  Do you want me to confess I failed her? All right, all right. She looked at me sometimes – what times were those? the dinner table, the fireside chair, the beach, any time – and I saw a pleading in her eyes: Make me forget him. I was not man enough. I could only be gentle or furious, could only say, Be still, it’s going to be all right, you wait and see, I love you, Rhona, I’m here love; and touch her with my hands that felt like dead leaves I suppose – or slap her in the face with accusations. Later on her plea was not make me forget, but don’t let it come close, don’t let it get me. Those are the words I find for the look she gave. I couldn’t save her.

  And of course I’m guilty, and wear guilt like a mole or wart. It’s irrational. I’m not guilty of anything, I just won’t buy it. But there’s th
is thing I wear. It doesn’t trouble me, there’s no sting or itch, but now and then I see it and it makes a huge invasion, takes the whole of me, and I stop in my tracks and utter – howl, obscenity – and it’s social embarrassment brings me back, or if I’m alone it’s the stretching of my face, I start it on its travels, I send it round the villains that I know – Dracula, Kaiser Bill. I call that rubbering, and though it makes me loony it gets me back on balance. You’ve seen me doing it, Kate, you caught me once, and if you stay long enough you’ll hear me howl, ‘Baarstid!’

  So she went. She took little steps and was thinned in her being as she withdrew. It’s my guess she learned techniques of shifting her consciousness. A kind of tinkering went on, she altered things; but when she came back it was alarming. She woke not from but into bad dreams, and gathered strength and did not stop but flung herself back to her safe place. At last she simply peeped at the real world through some crack or rent in her own. She had glimpses. And one of those, on her last day, set her seeking me. I knew she’d seen, seen me. Yes, I knew. Perhaps she’d spent sufficient time in there and was getting ready to come out.