Prowlers

by Maurice Gee

  Free gifts, free gifts.

  She says, ‘Don’t you think the composer deserves some credit too?’ But Irene doesn’t interest her, Ruth doesn’t interest her. She’s got a bad case of tunnel vision. Only Kitty. Like some stone figure in a desert, eh Kate, a colossal wreck, all alone? That’s Shelley again. ‘Ozymandias’. Read it.

  Kitty wasn’t huge, she says, she was middle-sized. She had a good figure. Why do you try to make out she was a whale? You hate her, don’t you? It’s because you’re all shrivelled up. And all this stuff about her sweating, Kate says. You’ve put that in three times. Everybody sweats. Why keep on about it? Can’t you say some good things about her? What about her eyes? Her voice?

  OK, lovely eyes, lovely voice. Do you want me to say it three times?

  Kate, I put down the things that strike me. Nothing’s unfair. I’ve said I’ve got a face like a chimpanzee. And Phil has yellow teeth and purple cheeks. I loved Ruth but I’ve told you she looked like a frog. Do I have to tell lies? Do I have to put things in the order you want? I loved Kitty too. Can’t you see it?

  What she’s done – what you’ve done, my Kate – after all my heroic defence, is lead the enemy round to take me in the rear.

  ‘How did Rhona die?’ That’s your question.

  Red-hot pokers stand against the white garden wall. Explosive. Acacias, clouds of yellow, overflow the curve of the riverbank. Our winter colours. Bare European trees are printed on the green hill like the map of a river system. That’s not bad, but I had a bit of trouble with number there. And I should have mentioned that they’re grey.

  What is happening in the world? The Greenpeace boat is sunk in Auckland. The All Blacks are not going to South Africa. (Kate jubilant.) A politician punches five reporters. In America President Reagan has had a benign lump removed. I hope he doesn’t turn out to have needed it. Locally, nothing. Nothing at all. Forty thousand people get on with their lives.

  Phil rang. We had a chat. He’s OK. Shane’s a bloody good worker, he says. Archie Penfold’s nurse phoned to say they’re holding a ‘flu shot for me. I’m in the group at risk. I told her to give it to someone else. Kate has dosed me up with snail-egg pills – Bacillinum/ influenzinum. I wish I could see Archie’s face when he hears that.

  Why don’t you give me calendula, Kate? That’s supposed to open old wounds.

  Rhona, eh? You think I should face up to things and not leave any holes in case I fall in one and don’t climb out. Do you see me in the bottom, curled up like Piet Verryt on his bed? No chance of that. I need to attend.

  Since you insist, I’ll fill in the hole. It’s no big thing. You’re not Ephialtes after all. See, I remember his name. Tup didn’t let me get away with being just a scientist.

  I visited Rhona on the Sunday that I left. Then I took the ferry, as I’ve said. She seemed her normal self. Unfortunate choice of words. She seemed herself. It was one of those afternoons with limitless sky – the sky no roof, the eye-beam shooting out past invisible galaxies and going on forever; with the curious effect that one feels comfortable being finite and not in any state of awe. Well, I felt it, I felt happy. I was sure of my limits and my abilities, and I was about to be free. What Rhona felt I do not know. She was no sky-watcher but let her eye travel in a line across the sea – apparently without limit too. Its meeting with the sky was lost in shimmer. Jessop, in the west, in the sunshine, was a town made of coloured paper and glass, with a window here and there shining like a torch and blinding us.

  I watched her face as I told her I was going away. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d seen grief – told her doctor perhaps, asked the nurses to keep an eye on her. But she showed no concern. I did not think she understood. Just for a moment something moved in her eye.

  I can’t measure the state of her consciousness. I can’t say anything about it.

  Notice how this account proceeds in negatives. ‘I can’t.’ ‘I did not.’ ‘I don’t know.’ I’m evading questions no one has asked. ‘Speak up,’ the judge says. Am I in the dock?

  She ate a bag of chocolate roughs. Chocolates were impossible to get. She ate them, every one, but didn’t gobble as mad people are supposed to do; consumed them like a lady. The shadow in her eye was puzzlement. She had the means to identify me and foresee changes in her state. Perhaps she could still wish and wonder and connect herself with my world. It wasn’t only that place she was in. With her arm in mine, her hand spread like a starfish on my sleeve, we walked on the lawns at Soddy’s Point. This was no automatic perambulation. We varied it. We? I felt small pressures from her arm. She preferred this path to that. Rhona was able to prefer. I wonder if in the end she would have come back. Her state, I said a moment ago. Was it our state? Is that how she saw it still, our lives? I claimed somewhere to love her, but that was solitary. I no longer thought of our lives.

  We stood on the cliff and looked at Jessop. We sat on a bench and she ate the last chocolate rough. I popped the paper bag and made her laugh. Then we went back to the hospital, I kissed her cheek, I patted her, and said I would try to come at Christmas; and off I went and picked up my bags and caught the ferry.

  How did Rhona look that day? Youngish. Clean. Pretty.

  Damn you, Kate. This is like climbing a mountain. My lungs hurt and my knees hurt and it feels as if that bloody dog has her teeth in my ribs. I can’t keep my mind on things if I can’t get enough air.

  Now. This is what Rhona did. She followed my car down the road. Several people saw her. That is why the search was made towards the entrance and along the road into town. Instead of going that way she must have turned into the trees and walked back to the end of the peninsula. She sat in the sand at the foot of the cliff. They found a hollow there, with her crumpled handkerchief nearby. My opinion is, she watched the tide go out and the mudflats turn pink in the setting sun. Then she began to walk over that polished dancing-floor to Jessop – the faery city where, perhaps, the bad things were all done. The mud is firmed with sand for a quarter mile. You sink down to your ankles. She went a long way before she reached a place where it was soft. There she sank in. To her knees, to her hips. The more you struggle the deeper you go. When they found her mud was up to her chest.

  Perhaps she called out. No one heard. In the night the tide came back and drowned her.

  I can’t breathe. There are knives in my chest. Jesus that hurts.

  41

  July 16. He has Bornholm disease. I’ve never heard of it. Nothing to worry about the doctor says, as long as he has proper medication and decent care. With a look down his nose.

  Thanks Noel for what you’ve given me. I know I’m a bully but I can’t help it. I’ll be around for a while. We’ll get by.

  K.

  42

  Did Archie really say it was nothing to worry about? I think it’s time I changed my doctor. It nearly killed me. It hurt me worse than any sickness I’ve known. I say that in a scientific spirit. No complaints.

  Bornholm disease (Devil’s grippe, epidemic pleurodynia). An infectious disease of sudden onset, produced by a Coxsackie virus, marked by knifelike pains in the chest or abdomen.

  Why Bornholm? I asked Kate. Who was he? She did some research in my books and came up with the answer: Bornholm is an island in the Baltic Sea. The virus was first identified there in 1947. That’s fine. I like to know the facts. But Devil’s grippe is the name I’ll use. By God it gripped and squeezed me, head and chest and bowels. It ran red-hot needles into me. And then six weeks of coughing little coughs, night and day. My muscles burned and ached with it and it wore my flesh away. I’m skin and bone. I’m dry sticks and worn hide, an old canoe. In that frail craft I’ve sailed through to September.

  What have I done? Listened to the radio. You can hear the news fourteen times a day, more if you try. The same news, different names, different places. I’ve listened to lots of programmes with jokes. People with English voices being witty, bringing it off now and then. I mustn’t laugh, it hurts me. Lots of
songs I never thought I’d hear again. Oh no John, no John, no John, no. It passes the time. I’ve heard some serious stuff as well, social problems, but find myself wondering mostly at the language. ‘Like’ it seems has taken the place of ‘as if’. ‘Less’ tips ‘fewer’ out. Less pedestrians, less immigrants – and it looks like it’s going to be another bad year for the farming sector. ‘There’s dry rot in the timber,’ I tell Kate. She laughs and calls me fusspot. As long as people get the drift, she says. And then sits down and tries to write her book!

  I know how I want to die: spontaneous combustion. I’ve got to that part in Bleak House. A yellow nauseous liquor, greasy soot. The cinders of a small charred broken log. That’s all that’s left – all Dickens left. What a pity he didn’t describe Krook going up. On the other hand, he left it to us; and I suppose an incandescence in the mind, then oblivion. Most attractive. The log can sputter on as long as it likes.

  Is it time for the next number, Kate? Forty-three? I didn’t do it, she’s the one. Likes everything in little blocks.

  43

  But it does help one change gear. And she’s picked up my gear changes well. Kate, it seems we’re in this together. Is there anything you’d like to say at this point. No? All right.

  ‘I’ve been half in half out of consciousness. It hasn’t stopped me knowing how things are. Phantom beings, voices – but now and then a signal from the real world. That white ghost is Kate, see the sudden redness in her eyes. And that, that’s Shane, that wail; voice in anger what it really is.

  Shane packed up and left us. No, I’ll try again, he didn’t pack, just rode off on his motorbike in the clothes he was wearing. Kate has all his gear in cardboard boxes in the spare room, hundreds of dollars worth of stuff, but she doesn’t think he’ll come for it. She’s even got his veil and cowboy hat. That will be useful if the wasps come back.

  She still sleeps in the waterbed. Unsentimental Kate. She cries in there. And curses too. Throws heavy things at the wall. I heard something break a moment ago.

  How it happened, as far as I know. Let’s go back to the time before the Devil gripped me. Shane was still out there at Long Tom’s. The painting job was done but Phil had taken him on as a general hand and put him to fencing. Shane could turn his hand to anything. And Kate, though she was watchful, seemed pleased. There were better places to work than a rich man’s stud farm, but she agreed that these days you had to take whatever job was offered. So Shane rode off in the dawn, like a cowboy, and was home again soon after dark and I looked forward to his coming and the glass of whisky I drank with him (sometimes he tipped his into his beer), and his yarns about life at Long Tom’s. Phil was out there two or three days a week. Not long now and mares would be arriving to foal and then Thundercloud would be on the job. ‘What a job, screwing for money,’ Shane said. The horse he was sorry for was a little fellow called the teaser who got the mares primed up before the stallion was brought in. ‘The poor little bugger, he never gets it in.’ ‘Do shut up, Shane,’ Kate said.

  That’s how we were for a while. Hard winds, cold nights, old-fashioned stew, and a hot toddy before bed. Shane and Kate grinning at each other and exchanging good-natured abuse. I enjoyed it but didn’t believe in it. Loose edges showed all the time. Shane and Kate did not fit together. You know it, Kate. You’ve admitted it. All the same, they tried, they behaved carefully and showed consideration for each other. Before long it was unnatural.

  In the shrunken days of winter it began. He stayed after work for a ‘noggin’ with Phil. Once or twice he ran Phil back to Jessop in his sidecar and stayed for a ‘snifter’ at his flat. He used Phil’s language, and that indicates his nervousness. Kate was frosty. Cold nights, those.

  ‘The poor old bugger’s lonely,’ Shane said.

  ‘When they pick you up for drunken driving don’t come snivelling to me,’ Kate replied.

  Then the Devil had me in his grip. Kate won’t tell me all that happened so I’ve had to guess a thing or two. Shane started spending nights out there. He phoned to say it was too wet to ride home. I must say that seems reasonable to me. It’s a long way to come on a motorbike, in wind and sleet, especially when home has stopped being home. Don’t be angry, Kate, you know it’s true. You made me face up to Rhona’s death, I’ll make you see this. You and Shane had come to the end of your time.

  He and Phil got drunk together and had baked beans at midnight and T-bone steaks for breakfast at midday. Shane did not come home three nights in a row. Kate sat on the end of my bed with her eyes gleaming.

  ‘Kate! ’

  She felt my brow. ‘Your fever’s gone.’

  ‘Where’s Shane?’

  ‘At Long Tom’s. With that old man. Go to sleep.’

  And she was here with this old man. Perhaps she thought, If we get out, if we go away…No, Kate, the old men aren’t to blame. Going away would only have put if off a little longer.

  The night Shane walked out things went like this: he came in late from Phil’s place, Kate was sitting up, I was asleep, and coughing, coughing, melting my flesh away. I heard shouts but they became part of my nightmare. Shane was under the weather of course and as he walked into the kitchen he put his dark glasses on. Kate knocked them off with a swipe. ‘Don’t you hide your bloody eyes from me.’ A good deal of yelling followed, and for me cries of rage became cries of pain, howls of tortured beings, whispers, moans. It was horrible. My apprehensions, transformations, seem correct to me.

  ‘You think you’ve got me in some sort of bloody prison here.’ The logical thing was to chop it down. He started that: ran out to the shed, seized the axe, attacked one of the piles of my sundeck. There’s a huge bite taken out. But four hits were all Kate let him have. She ran down the steps into range of the axe and struck him on the run with stiffened arms, bowled him down the bank through the wet fennel, saved my house. (In my dream I felt it tremble.) The fence bulged like a fishing net and sprang several fasteners from a post. Shane must have had a pattern of wire printed on his back. Roaring like a bear, he ploughed up through the fennel. Kate, meanwhile, had found the axe. She heaved it away over his head. Another bit of my property into the river. I’m not complaining, but it does seem to happen all the time.

  She ran back up the steps. He caught her in the porch and knocked her down. Murder? Almost. What stopped him? He reached for her. It was time for strangling, for squeezing her until she was dead. She was not going to let him do it and was climbing up to fight. But she didn’t stop him, he stopped himself. Kate admits it. He pushed his breath out with a great explosion. Huh! That helped carry some of his rage away. He looked at his hands and gave a shout. His eyes were mad and terrified. Kate says he was terrified of himself. He punched the wall. A great smear of blood was there in the morning. Then, doubled up and weeping with pain, he ran away. She heard his motorbike start and go down the hill, and saw it enter, vanish from, the light on the bridge. That is the last she saw of Shane.

  ‘Gone,’ she said in the morning, ‘and good riddance.’

  ‘Out to Phil’s?’

  ‘Where else? Eat that, I didn’t cook it for nothing.’

  I ate three spoonfuls of the stuff (hate porridge). And this morning ask, ‘Is Shane coming back?’

  ‘No, he’s not.’ She meant me to understand she would not have him.

  ‘Does he want to?’ A hard question for Kate. But she’s not a person who runs away. She took a moment, answered square: ‘Shane and I were finished. That was it.’ Tears sprang in her eyes. She turned her back so I should not see.

  Kate tells me to change gear again. She’s in a dry condition, saying nasty things about my guesswork. She doesn’t, she says, cry in her room. Nor does she throw things at the wall. The crash I heard was her dropping a plate and that was in the other direction, out in the kitchen. I’m going soft in the head, she reckons. She wants me to leave her alone.

  Kate, I am not losing my wits. All right, my ears played a trick on me. If you say it was a plate it was a plat
e. But I see, I hear, and most of the time I understand. Ways have become different, that’s all. Now and then I don’t get things right. See how you manage at eighty-four, when loud and violent people come pushing up behind. I’m astonished sometimes that I do so well.

  As for changing gear, I don’t want to go back where you want me. Why should I grind up that hill? I like it where I am, going fast.

  Shane is not at Phil’s. He never went there: walked out on his drinking mate, abandoned his tools. Phil is sour about it. These young buggers are all the same. Do them a favour, they kick you in the teeth. I try to add another dimension to it. Cowboys always ride away in the end. Sameness starts to make them die. The new range beckons. Shane was a cowboy, I said.

  Like Kate, Phil reckons I’m soft in the head.

  ‘Things always go wrong for me,’ she claims. By things she means her affairs with men. She makes a list. It seems she’s been involved – not in love – with two married men, two mental defectives (the lawyer and the journalist), and a fellow who turned out to be a poofter. Disposes of each of them with an ugly word or a cheap one-liner. She’d like to deal with herself in the same way – tries it but takes it back. She’s got too much good sense; and won’t go the way of self-pity either. I find it interesting that she doesn’t cheapen Shane. She’ll mention him and say, as though choosing the word, ‘It was good.’

  She says, ‘I don’t regret it. No, I don’t.’

  My belief is that she was in love and I don’t think she’ll get over it by being Anglo-Saxon.

  Sorry, Kate. I know that will make you cross. I’ll put a new number down if you like.

  44

  In the Old Chemistry a menstruum was a solvent – ‘to extract,’ I think it goes, ‘the virtues of ingredients by infusion or decoction’. The belief was that the moon influenced the preparation of dissolvents. Well, I’m solvent for my past, a menstruum, influenced by moons, and I hope I’ve extracted a virtue or two. (Active quality or power; energy, strength, potency.) The trouble is I don’t want to go on. I don’t believe there’s much left worth looking at. I’ll fall to playing games, dressing up, spreading jam – as in menstruum above. I started that to keep out of Kate’s way.