by Maurice Gee
Shane is bringing home more than five hundred dollars a week. He’s as pleased with himself as a stone-age hunter bringing meat. He slapped fifty dollars on the table in front of me. ‘That’s for all that booze of yours I’m drinking.’ ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘you’ve paid for that by painting my house.’ He wouldn’t listen. Two or three nights a week he brings home a cauliflower or cabbage from the commune over the hill, or a side-car full of pine cones gathered in the forest. We have fires that roar in the chimney and we sit three in a row on the sofa drinking hot toddies and watching TV. Shane prefers American shows and Kate British, but they’re considerate, they have little competitions in self-sacrifice; and Kate will watch The A-Team, giving from time to time an ambiguous snort, and Shane will watch Minder, and be disappointed in the number of fights. Everything is too noisy for me and I go to bed.
We listen to Kate’s records in the day. And he takes his Walkman off to work and listens there.
She’s not in love. She’s not alone. If I were religious I’d pray for her. As it is, I cross my fingers now and then.
He’s not her first man, not by a long chalk. She won’t say how many, I’d think badly of her. I don’t believe that means she was promiscuous but that her standards have been high. None of her men have measured up so she’s tried the next. What is it then she’s finding in Shane? Does she sense, along with me, that he’s waiting for something? Is it what he will become she’s going to love? I don’t think she realizes he’s scared.
‘What would your mother think of him, Kate?’
‘She’d like him. Dad’s the one who’s a snob.’
Pam married out of the Labour party into the National. That’s a way of putting it. Kate, probably because of her dad, has come back to base. At university she was in a mixed flat and ‘got serious’ with one of the boys. ‘He was so damn good-looking he should have been framed.’ But she quickly found there was nothing to him. ‘You could poke a hole in him with your finger and look at the view out the other side.’ Now he’s ‘a poncing little lawyer’. Then she ‘got in pretty deep’ with a journalist. Her language is a mixture of violence and cliché. I’m sorry I started her off on her men because they make her ‘lose her cool’. This journalist was ‘a wanker’. She took him to visit Kitty in the nursing home and he started ‘greasing up to her’. Wanted to be in politics himself and thought Kitty might be worth having on his side. She saw through him, ‘chewed him up and spat him out’.
‘I seemed to fall for lightweights,’ Kate said; and went on to describe a couple more.
I can see Shane’s attraction. Whatever his shortcomings, he’s no lightweight. No one will poke a hole in him.
He comes to sit beside me on the sofa and I bob like a dinghy on a wave.
‘How much do you weigh, Shane?’
‘Ninety-two.’
I convert that to imperial. ‘Fifteen stone.’ That’s more than two of me. He could sit me on his shoulder like a parrot and I could squawk his thoughts for him. That would make no demand on my vocabulary; but there’s more than squawk in what he says. Words connect with experience, no gap between. So when he says, ‘I’m buggered’, there’s sweat, there’s aching muscle, in the word.
I ask about his life before he came to Jessop. He’s had ten jobs in the seven years since he left school. The worst of them: scalder and plucker in a poultry abattoir. Then he thinks a bit. No, he decides, that wasn’t the worst. He started in a clothing factory humping bolts of cloth – dogsbody, everybody’s boy. It wasn’t the hard work he minded. He liked running round, having plenty to do. The bad thing was the women and the game they played with him.
‘Oh, Shane,’ said Miss Callendar in the office, ‘run down to the cutting room and ask Mrs Bracey for the Fallopian tubes.’ (Kate snorts and Shane says heavily. ‘You think it’s funny, eh?’) He asks for them and Mrs Bracey hunts and shakes her head. She sends him to the machine shop and the forewoman sends him down to stores. From there he traipses back to the office. ‘Nobody knows where they are, Miss Callendar,’ he says. ‘Oh Shane, they’ve got to be somewhere. Ask again.’ They ran him round all afternoon, couldn’t have had more fun sticking pins in him. The next day he had a new name. ‘Tubes, clear this stuff out. Pronto, Tubes.’
Shane went down to the library that night and looked up Fallopian tubes in a dictionary. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘I should have known. We did biology at school.’ He didn’t go to the factory next morning but went to a by-products plant where they made fertilizer and pig food. A mate of his worked there. Shane came away with a sack of ‘specials’. See him grin now, what a grin of delight. He spills them out for me on the sofa: sheep’s feet, fish heads, chicken entrails, feathers, bits of hide, dead kittens from the SPCA. My stomach makes a heave at the naming. He empties the sack on Miss Callendar’s desk. She screams as though she’s stabbed with a Bowie knife. ‘I found the Fallopian tubes, Miss Callendar.’
Kate has gone pale. ‘Just like you,’ she says. ‘Overkill.’
‘I was getting even. It’s no worse than what they did to me.
I agree with Shane. But I’m not surprised to hear they ran him in. It was his first conviction. He has two more for disorderly conduct – fighting in pubs.
‘Do you like fighting?’
‘No, I lose my temper. My mind goes kind of red. I nearly tore one joker’s head right off. Lucky they stopped me. I’ve got it sorted out now.’ He does not believe it and the deception makes him blink. ‘It’s bloody ancient history. Give us a tinnie, Kate.’
‘What was your best job?’ I help him away from the subject of his rage; for I see rage as a primal condition, and see he’s afflicted with connections to a state most of us have managed the step away from – though it chases us, it follows after – and he’s afraid. (And I’m disturbed. Let’s have optimistic talk.)
‘Ah,’ he says, ‘my last one. Before I came up here. That was a good one. Wish I still had it.’
He worked in a scrap-battery yard, picking up batteries in a truck, maybe five hundred a day. He brought them back and unloaded and stacked them, then pulled on rubber gear so the acid wouldn’t get to his skin, and smashed them one by one with a cleaver for the lead. He liked that part, the smashing. Eleven cents a battery, ‘And,’ Shane boasts, ‘I could do a truck in an afternoon. The pitch ones, not the plastic, that’s hard yakker.’
‘Why did you leave?’
‘Had to. My lead level got too high. Up to nine. The Health Department pressured the boss.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘you know how lead can affect you –’
‘It softens your brain,’ Kate says, cross still about the sack of entrails. Shane makes a Quasimodo face and lunges at her. He knows he’s scored a victory over women that will last. They have a bit of a scuffle and a kiss and sit hand on thigh, hand on thigh, looking smug; and I discourse on lead (IV) oxide, PbO2, and describe the symptoms of plumbism – wrist drop, lead colic – and Shane lets me look for a lead line on his gums (good gums, good teeth, the boy has); and I go on from there to the match girls and phossy jaw; then my chemists in their little rooms, the Curies with radiation sores on their hands, Davy sniffing ‘nitrous air’, and so on. It’s nice to know an interesting subject. People listen.
‘He’s a clever little geezer,’ Shane tells Kate.
34
She’s planning Kitty’s life again. This time she’s being systematic, making a chart in many colours – green for childhood, blue for married life, red for politics. Little tributaries flow in, other lives run parallel – orange, purple, yellow, black. I’m yellow. I can hardly see myself. ‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘it was the only colour left.’ Here and there an arrow comes darting in from the margins. They are named for non-political friends. And enemies. I don’t know most of them but Phil is there. And Irene Lomax. Irene has a coloured line during Kitty’s girlhood but it stops in 1925. She comes back as an arrow in ’41, the year Des died, and her colour runs from there until her death. I’m glad she’s purple.
I’m glad she comes back and comes as friend.
‘She wrote to Grandma when Grandpa died.’ Kate fetched the letter – the papers are filed in shoeboxes now – and let me read:
Dear Kitty,
I’m so sorry. Please believe me. I know you think I’m a waste of time but we were friends. If I can help, if you want to talk, please come and see me.
Love,
Irene.
She did not write to me when Rhona died. That death should have softened her. She didn’t write. She wrote to Kitty when her husband died. Their friendship started up again, and Kate wants to know how important it was. She’s anxious to find non-political Kitty.
I told Kate the story of Des Hughes’ death. I happened in the winter of 1941. Des wasn’t well – but of course he was never well. He spent his days by the kitchen stove, in a cane chair with a flattened cushion, with a hotwater bottle in his lap. He fed in lumps of tea-tree and made the fire roar. When it died down he’d put his feet on the oven door. In spite of this he could not stay warm. The last time I saw him, several days before he died, Kitty had him wrapped in an eiderdown and had draped her overcoat on his head. The stove door was open and firelight played on his face, making it look painted on the wall at the end of a cave. I said hello and asked how he was – foolish question. He did not bother to look at me but read his newspaper, and once he cut a news item out with a pair of scissors. He was still, Kitty said, collecting ammunition for Bernie Molloy.
Kitty asked me to go after ten minutes. Their lavatory was at the back of the section behind a hedge and she would not let him go there but made him use a pot in the bathroom. He would not do that while I was about. I left without saying goodbye. He wouldn’t have answered. I was curious to know – I’m curious still – whether, under that coat, his hair was flame-red and springing up.
I don’t know what his final rage was about. Kitty never told me. The wind was dropping chimneys that night. I lost a sheet of iron from my garage roof. Hail had fallen in the afternoon and lay unmelted on my window-sills.
Des flung off his eiderdown. The scissors went clattering on the floor. He threw a lump of tea-tree at his wife and struck at her back-handed when she came at him. Brown slippers. Striped pyjamas, blue and white. His red hair was flaming like a torch. (She didn’t tell me this but it must be so.) Rage gave him the strength to run. By the time she’d pulled her oilskin on he was gone.
Kitty searched the streets down by the port. She went past the gasworks and along the tidal creek to the reclamation. Then she turned back and went up the hill. The wind was dying down and rain fell straight and thick and icy. She found Des in the park on top of the hill. There’s a band rotunda there but he hadn’t sheltered. He sat in the open, on a bench. Like Les Dockery, he was on a bench. He could not move, or speak, or see who it was lifting him. By then, of course, though he was alive he’d killed himself.
Kitty half-carried, half-dragged him home. She peeled him naked and put him in a bath that stung her hands, but when she lifted him out his skin was as cold as a stone from a creek. She wrapped him in blankets and put him in bed. Although his eyes were open and he made sounds with his mouth she did not believe he saw or spoke.
The doctor came, and the ambulance, but there was no bringing Des Hughes back. He died in hospital the next day, and Kitty kept herself dry-eyed at the funeral and nodded sharp and hard at Bernie Molloy’s praise of him.
‘And that’s all she told you?’
Not as much as that, I used my imagination. Kitty didn’t tell me much at all. Kate’s suspicious. She thinks I’m keeping something back, but what I’m doing is not allowing myself to invent too much. Invent is wrong, imagine it should be. I think I could have said how Kitty felt; but she didn’t tell me, so I won’t.
‘Well,’ Kate said – there’s calculation in her, what does she know? – ‘it’s going to be a hard chapter to write.’
It’s going to be a hard book to write. I’m starting to believe Kate can do it. She’s like Kitty in so many ways.
35
Now I’m there. I can’t put it off, even though it makes the shape all wrong. Two deaths in a row. That puts an ugly bulge in my story. It weakens the structure all round. One’s enough. Save the other for later.
Story? Structure? I’m not playing that sort of game. All I’m doing is remembering and putting down. What does it matter how it’s shaped. Let’s have three deaths. Let me put down that my father died. 1942. Without any fuss. And Kitty cried at his funeral; and I did not keep dry eyes myself.
It was my second trip from Wellington that month. First came Rhona’s funeral. I’d sailed out from Jessop on the ferry and had just sat down in my new office, my important job, when the message came. Back I sailed. And two weeks later did the same for Dad.
Kitty cried for Rhona too. Did you ever see her drop a tear, Kate? I’ll bet you didn’t. A tough old biddy, that’s the opinion. Iron pants. Battle axe. One reporter forgot her sex and called her the Labour party’s rogue elephant. And it has to be said that she rolled along like an elephant. Elephantine? Elephanterotic? Certainly not. Kitty, in her prime, was genderless.
You see what this is? Evasive action. I should have a stance I can take – but I don’t. No position. It gets me differently every time. Rhona’s death.
Wasn’t there something Kate wanted to know? Irene and Kitty. They were friends again before Rhona died.
36
She was on the phone the moment I mentioned him. I thought she’d ask to visit him at his house but she invited him here, the last thing I want. It seems he does his work in the morning and goes out walking in the afternoon. He would be happy to come round.
I’d seen him several times on the river bank, throwing sticks for a huge Alsatian, and I called to Kate, ‘Tell him not to bring his dog.’ Thinking about it made my scrotum shrink. I was too late, she was hanging up, and half an hour later there he was, crossing the bridge in the drizzle, with the beast at his side. Its shoulders almost came up to his waist.
‘It’s not coming in the house, Kate. You tell him.’
It seems I have no rights here. It’s the size of a timberwolf and it lay by his feet with its jaws on the mat, frowning like a judge and keeping its eyes on every move I made. It’s a male, Prince – no imagination – the third dog he’s had since Irene died.
‘A nice old fellow,’ Kate said, patting its head.
Royce grinned at me – yes, grinned, the boy with the furtive smile. ‘He’s not related to Queenie, Noel.’ Noel, at last. And a joke. Confident as he moves into old age.
‘He’s the same breed. I don’t trust that breed. You saw that case last week?’ A man in Porirua with lumps torn out of his arms and one of his legs bitten to the bone. Dreadful phrase, bitten to the bone. I shivered as I looked at Prince.
Royce put his foot on the animal’s back. ‘There. How’s that?’
Not much better. He has the body of an elderly dachshund and a pointy terrier face. Did he really think he could control the beast? Yet I remembered him hauling Queenie off and putting his bleeding hands on my car door. He’s not a person to be categorized. His dimensions shift as you watch.
Kate made tea and fed the dog a chocolate biscuit, which took its attention away from me. She made some chat about NZ art, sounding both easy and ignorant, and Royce, greedy at his biscuits and sugared tea – ‘have some tea with your sugar,’ my mother would have said – made polite affirmatives, and seemed to me equally ignorant. Finally he said, ‘I don’t look much at other people’s work. I haven’t heard of some of these people.’
‘Oh well,’ Kate said, and laughed. She was pleased to have that out of the way. ‘What I wanted to ask about was Kitty Hughes. She was best friends with your sister, wasn’t she?’
‘Twice,’ Royce said.
Kate grinned, but her teeth looked sharp. She was, I think, offended on Kitty’s behalf. ‘I was wondering if there were any letters. From Kitty I mean. To Irene. Irene wrote to Kitty, I know.’<
br />
Royce took another biscuit. ‘Heaps,’ he said. ‘Kitty wrote all the time. Almost once a week. From Wellington, you know, when she was over there in parliament. Big fat letters. Irene used to read bits out to me. She used to let her hair down with Irene.’
‘Yes?’ Kate cried.
‘Some of the people I’d heard of. Nash, I’d heard of. And Sid Holland. Some of it was ripe. Girls together, you know. Irene used to like a bit of smut.’
‘So did Kitty,’ I said.
‘Can I read them? For my book? I’m writing Kitty Hughes’ life.’
‘Read them?’ Crumbs dropped from his lips and he cupped a hand to catch them in his lap.
‘If you like I won’t say who they were to.’
‘But I haven’t got them any more. I burned them all. When Irene died.’ He saw from Kate’s expression that he’d done something terrible. Kate, indeed, looked as if she was punched in the stomach. Her mouth dropped open, her cheeks went white, then started to mottle. ‘Shit!’ she whispered.
‘Have I done something wrong? I read some of them and I never thought –’
‘You fucking twerp.’
‘Kate,’ I said, ‘watch your language.’
Prince rose to his feet, with spiky neck, and rumbled at her.
‘He’s burned Kitty’s letters.’
‘They belonged to him.’
‘They did not. They belonged to…’
‘You?’
‘No. But…’ Too down-to-earth a girl to say mankind, posterity.
Royce put his hand on Prince’s back and forced him down. He’d recovered himself and made some happy munches on his biscuit. ‘Well, it’s done. Fait accompli. Lie still, Prince. I burned lots of stuff. Christmas cards. Invitations. I thought I was doing Kitty a favour. As a matter of fact, I remember her telling Irene to make sure they were burned. And Irene said she’d use them for blackmail. They trusted each other. I had to do what Irene would have done.’
