by Maurice Gee
There had been boundary changes, a suburb of state houses bitten off. ‘Jesus,’ Kitty said, ‘that’s my freezing workers gone.’ She felt it like the loss of a limb and made yells of pain in parliament. Then she settled down to win. She ran her usual style of campaign: Kitty on the cathedral steps flourishing a stethoscope at the lunch-time crowd – ‘They use these things to listen to their money in the bank.’ And Kitty banging tomato sauce on her pie in the works canteen, and helping dry the dishes afterwards. She worked hard, loved her work, and people loved her; but she lost.
I drove down to the hall at half past nine and found a dozen people drinking tea and nibbling cakes. An old man with a broom was sweeping round them. ‘If you’re chasing Mrs Hughes she’s took orf.’
I drove to the port, where Kitty still lived in the same old house. Some of her party workers were sitting on the porch waiting for her. They had tried the places she might be.
I drove away to one they didn’t know. Her red Ford Prefect stood in the street. The light in Irene’s bedroom was on and a shadow I took for Kitty moved back and forth. That was all right, she had someone. I went home and listened to more results and went to bed. I had shifted to my house above the river but hadn’t yet propped living-room and sundeck over the bank. I lay in bed and listened to the busy river run and celebratory horns toot in the town. ‘Poor old Kit’ – that was the only valediction I could manage.
I was asleep when she banged on the door. I thought my house was tumbling into the river, and sprang from my bed and knocked myself silly on the wardrobe door. I was staunching blood with a handkerchief and seeing double and trembling with shock as I let Kitty in.
She switched on lights and strode about my house. ‘Put the kettle on, I need some tea.’ I managed that with one hand, and poured myself a whisky. Kitty had given up alcohol because of her stomach, but poisoned herself with sludgy tea and heaped spoons of sugar. ‘Jesus,’ she said, looking at what I brought her. She tipped it down the sink and sloshed the pot and poured a new cup, black as tar. ‘You heard the result, I suppose.’
‘Yes,’ I said, and told her I was sorry. But there were special votes to come so she had a chance.
‘Don’t be bloody wet,’ Kitty said. She hissed. ‘They were laughing at me down there. They’ve been waiting for this.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said.
‘What would you know? They hate me. I saw it in their eyes.’
‘They love you, Kit. You’re mother and favourite child rolled into one. You’re Auntie Kitty. This was against the government. It was boundaries.’
‘Someone yelled, “You fat silly cow, you’ve been asking for it.” ’
‘There’s always someone like that. One of the Bog boys.’
She grunted and swallowed tea and shoved out her cup. ‘Pour me another. And where were you? I thought at least my brother would turn up.’
I told her I had come and found her gone, and tracked her to Irene’s where I felt I’d be in the way.
‘Bloody Irene. Useless bitch.’
I asked what the matter was.
‘I don’t know. Sick, she says. She’s playing bloody ladies again. Hasn’t got enough to do, that’s what’s wrong with her.’ She went to the window and looked at the town. I brought her tea across but she didn’t take it. Lit windows, dim streets, pale grass verges, car lights moving on the black hill over the port: Kitty ground her teeth at Jessop.
‘I’d love a bloody earthquake right now.’ Then her body quaked and she was crying. I put her tea on the window sill and led her to the sofa and sat her down. I put my arm around her and let her cry. I’ve said she never cried, or rarely cried, but this was grief of another order. Kitty wept part of her life away. Her tears made a puddle in my collar bone and ran down my chest into my navel. I felt the warm liquid wriggling in and knew our blood union was intact and no one but I could comfort her. She cried herself out. Then she took my handkerchief and blew her nose and went away to the lavatory. I got a tea-towel and dried my chest.
Kitty came back, looking at the blood on the handkerchief. ‘Noel, your head. God, I’m selfish.’ She sponged the cut with cotton wool and put a plaster on. Then she had more tea and I had whisky and we talked the night away. She told me wicked things about MPs. She told me tricks she used to get her way. We talked about our parents and she phlogisticated. She told me what a fool I was to buy a birds-nest house on a precipice but said she wished she had a place like it. ‘Then I could look at Jessop. Bloody town.’
We had another look at it.
‘I’m not finished with it yet, Noel. Not by a long chalk.’
‘What will you do? Stand again next time?’
‘You bet I will. It’s my bloody seat after all. But I’ve just thought, I might stand for Council. Keep my hand in.’
‘Good idea.’ Anything that kept her bouncing, kept her making positive noises about herself, was a good idea. I walked up to the gate with her. The sky was lightening over the hills and Jessop looked misty and fragile. ‘The fools, they’ve got to do without me now.’
She drove away, and I pulled the plaster off – hate things sticking to my skin – and went to bed and slept until the afternoon, when Kitty woke me with a phone call.
‘Noel, they were still on my porch when I got home. Two or three of them. They want me, Noel. They still want me.’
‘I told you that.’
‘So, do you know what I’m going to do. Why be a tuppenny councillor? I’ll run for mayor.’
47
And she did, and won two elections easily and was unopposed in a third. Jessop’s Auntie Kitty – ‘Just come and bang on my door, I’m always home.’ Now and then she rode in the Austin Princess, but she kept her Ford Prefect and that’s how people remember her: a fat lady buzzing about in a little red car, and putting one meaty leg out and projecting her bum, then turning, arms akimbo, heavyweight wrestler: ‘What’s the problem?’ Kate will say I’m doing it again, making Kitty grotesque. No Kate, I’m stylizing her, I’m trying to find the shape she made in people’s minds.
She didn’t try to win back her parliamentary seat. ‘No fear. I get more done in half a day than I managed in fourteen years in that place.’ One of the things she did was support me on the Lomax Trust Board. Under the terms of the Act the mayor and the local MP and the bishop and the Chairmen of the County Council and the Harbour Board were ex-officio members. Kitty was on the board for twenty-three years. She knew as much about the Lomax as I did.
I got through the meetings by treating them as a sporting event. Well, I thought, I lost that one but maybe I’ll win the next. In fact those men did not want me in their little club. Scientists, one told me, haven’t got a clue about money. ‘The average test-tube wallah,’ he said, ‘isn’t worth two bob. You mix a bit of this with a bit of that and shake it up and if it changes colour, wowee, science. Keep it in your lab, Dr Papps. What we’re here for in this room is to maximize Alfred Lomax’s investment.’ A government appointee, that fellow. Women weren’t worth two bob either, in his book. But Kitty and I won a round or two. She soft-soaped the bishop on to her side, and shifted a couple over by argument, and a couple by terror. They were terrified she would become even less of a lady and ‘darn it’ and ‘what in tarnation’ turn into something worse. But sometimes all she had to do was show how things really were.
An example. She was new on the Board, on as MP, and I was not director yet and still doing trials on pakihi land. ‘Kitty,’ I said, ‘those stupid mugs, they want to stop my work. They say I’m getting nowhere. But I’m right on the edge of it. It’s sulphur, that’s the answer, even though it’s molybdenum deficiency.’
‘Tell them.’
‘I’ve got no access. I tell John Dye till I’m blue in the face. I put in reports. But he’s an entomologist, he can’t make them understand.’
Kitty thought about it. ‘Have you got something we can show them? Have you got some grass growing where there wasn’t any before?’
&n
bsp; ‘I’m getting grass over my ankles,’ I said. ‘But they won’t drive sixty miles to see.’
‘Leave that to Kitty.’
Within a week she had them in cars and over the hill and had mince pies and cups of thermos tea spread on my grass; with photos of how the land had been. They sat cross-legged and munched and sipped (and burped politely), and passed the photos round, pulling out handfuls of good green grass.
‘Remarkable. I wouldn’t have believed it. Sulphur, you say?’
Then they strolled about and scared the fat lambs, and the bishop talked of God and the others of profits, and half a dozen happy men they were. But Kitty and I walked to the top of the hill – she could tramp in those days, her legs had not swollen up – and looked at the swamp on the other side, full of red water and sphagnum moss, and Kitty said, ‘I like this better. Unreconstructed.’
‘That’s a funny word for a politician.’
‘Is that all you think I am, Noel?’
She moved into mystery when she forced me to consider her; she brought a jolt of fear, and love too, in my chest. Now and then it was so strong it got my head as well, threatened consciousness. I had to hold on, keep myself in place, and defend observed reality with mundane thoughts. I looked at the swamp, saw what she meant; but thought of reclamation, looked for uses – and it was a suggestion of mine, some years later, that led to the use of dried moss as bedding for orchids. Big business now, big sales to Japan. I’ve done as much as anyone – mundane thoughts – to turn this South Pacific wilderness into the giant dairy farm and sheep run and slaughter-house of today. First the settlers and soldiers, raw encounter, gaining and getting, then politicians rationalizing theft, then men like me with our improvements. I’m not ashamed, I’m not proud either. That is the way it was. Who comes after? I can’t identify them properly. The entrepreneurs and the urban peasants. Kate and Shane come from a different world, I know that much. Big city world, city apprehensions. They don’t have much of the loot but they understand it. I never will, and don’t want to.
Phil Dockery understands. It’s a world he helped to make and lives in happily. That putting up, money and buildings both, ‘developing’; and that ripping down, and ‘ripping off’, as Kate would say. We have gangsters, and Wall Street men, smart-money men, and footpads, hunting packs, and there are fights in the streets, with real knives. And the original owners are acting up. They want back what was theirs and I don’t blame them. I really don’t blame anyone. Except myself, at times, and not very hard, for not understanding it and being glad to be past it all.
Ah well, Kitty and I exchanged a thought or two and came on down and put our reconstructed board members in their cars and sent them home over the hill to Jessop. We followed slowly in mine, up from the pakihi lands, up from the swamps. At the top of the hill we turned off the highway and drove ten miles on marble chips and dirt, with sink holes and limestone on either side, and walked in a beech forest for two miles, in a dry creek bed, with rhino heads, dragon backs, with frozen waves and licking tongues and blind eyes and talons all about, and ferns, and weed-topped pools like putting greens, and a bush robin too, that kept us company – elf-country Kate would recognize from her books – and came to Harkin’s Hole, the biggest hole, that drops from its theatre of cliffs, eight hundred feet straight down to the new stream running in place of the dry. We crept on broken boulders by the mouth, went four-footed, sat holding on, feeling the pull of gravity; of desire. I want that fall and dark and oblivion; terror, peace. Terror, then nothing, which lies beyond peace and cannot be imagined or spoken of. The hole does this to me. Kitty felt it too. I saw her shiver. There’s no exaggeration in all this. Do you know Harkin’s Hole? You could drop a battleship down.
We read a plaque fixed on the wall beyond the boulders, memorial to a caver killed the year before. I threw in a broken stone, we waited a long time: tiny click, tiny echo.
‘Come on, Noel,’ Kitty said, ‘we’ll get out of here.’ We crept away.
Now the scientist in me wants it explained, but I’m not metaphysician or psychologist and can’t oblige. It simply seems to me that the mind – and here were two – at certain promptings enters the realm of supra-knowledge where rational enquiry does not hold; is out of phase with the realities of the place (if place it is), and speculation compromised by impurities we bring with us – so one finds the things one is conditioned for; or can, on the other hand, refuse to find and simply travel there without hoping for knowledge to carry home. Comes out with memories though – but treated as data they become compromised in turn. You see the problem? There are no names we can agree on.
Yet Kitty and I stayed in a kind of agreement as we drove home. We sat in my car on the harbour front and ate fish and chips, watching the sun sink into the sea. She placed her hand on mine as it went down…then gave a pat, wiped salty mouth: ‘Yup, we’ve got ’em. Easy meat.’
Who was that? It took a moment. Ah, the board.
I dropped her off, went home; and still that coldness, dread and desire, was on my skin, and I lay cold and stiff on my bed; and in the small hours piled blankets on and made myself warm; put it all aside until this day, when it comes back unaltered by the years. But I’m not, as I said, philosopher or guess-man…
On that other matter, she was right. They let me get on with my work.
Head-on clash, reasonable persuasion: Kitty was happy with either. And she loved being underhand. The Lomax started charging for advice in the sixties. Alfred Lomax’s money wouldn’t stretch. We began a consultancy service and had two or three of the staff share their time between that and research. One young man put up a fight – Tim McMinn. He felt demeaned to be charging a dollar every time he uttered a mouthful of words. When orchardists came in he said to them, ‘I can’t tell you that without charging you. Go home and ring me up tonight.’ It got back to the board. ‘Fire him,’ they demanded, with red faces and bulging eyes. I was not going to do that. Tim McMinn was a good scientist. ‘He’s feeling cross, let him work it out.’ ‘Fire him.’ They huffed and puffed about loyalty and making an example and Kitty it was who got the thing deferred for a month. Then, when it came up, she said to Victor Richards, the Harbour Board chairman, ‘How’s your home brew getting on, Vic?’ ‘Eh? What?’
‘Five point eight per cent, I hear. That’s pretty strong.’ She smiled at Vic with her blunt square teeth and the fellow went white. His offence was no more than a peccadillo; sufficient for Kitty all the same. Vic, she told us, had brought a bottle of his home brewed beer to the lab and got one of the chemists to test it for alcoholic content. It had happened in working hours and Vic hadn’t offered to pay. That didn’t seem much different from Tim McMinn’s offence. Later, when everyone was exhausted with argument, she smiled and said that as we couldn’t agree the public would have to judge. She meant that she would talk to the press.
Tim McMinn kept his job.
I said to her, ‘Thanks, Kitty. What a storm in a teacup.’
‘No such thing. That boy McMinn’s got a wife and children. I wasn’t going to see him rail-roaded out by a gang of National Party toughs. You tell him though, tell him to watch his step. I can’t do it twice.’
She knew her limits more and more. She was growing old and her body was letting her down. After Irene died she came to me. I began to understand that I was her only friend. And, with me, Kitty rediscovered her gentleness. Did you know, Kate, that we had a kind of summer together? If we had not been brother and sister it would have been an affair. In a way it was an affair for it was full of delights and discoveries, of support and silence and company, and it had beginning and end. I was conscious of it and never oppressed but always easy, even when I saw it coming to its close.
She sold the little house where she’d lived with Des and raised her children and been our MP and no-nonsense mayor, and came to live with me up on the hill, over the river. I had been one year retired and my house had sprouted cheekily, living-room and sundeck on stilts. Kitty and I while
d away weekends in the sun, watching the river roll and children play. ‘See,’ I would say, pointing at a cat on the sewer pipe, his private crossing, or a white-faced heron spearing silver-bellies; or, looking up, two hang-gliders balancing over the hill. Brakes screeched and a car ended up facing the wrong way on the valley road. ‘My God, I’m going to do something about the speed limit there. Make a note of it, Noel.’ I bought a pair of binoculars and she watched her town. We saw cricket and hockey matches and pipe band displays and vintage car rallies and cycle races and runaway horses and car smashes and a house burn down and a motorbike gang with police car trailing and scrub fires on the hills and pink vapour trails in the sunset as jumbo jets headed west to Australia; and joggers dawn and dusk and in the lunch hour. And the postman bitten by a dog. We watched the monstrous DB hotel go up and saw its neon sign in the night, winking on and off behind the cathedral.
We had a grandstand view of the flood of ’73. Kitty was ill that week but she struggled out of bed and stood at the window, wrapped in scarves and dressing gown, and watched the rain and lightning, and black logs race like battleships down the river. They rammed and sank the sewer pipe. Young willows bent, and struggled up, and bent again, were gone. Kitty lumbered to the phone. ‘You’ll need sandbags in Dougan Street. It’s going over.’ Trucks arrived and men in yellow slickers built a wall but water lapped the top and poured over in a street-long fall. It ran into back yards and floated firewood out of sheds. It topped the letter-boxes, it filled porches and garages and cars and spread slicks of oil into bean-rows. On the other side of the river a woman waded lawns up to her chest and saved a terrier drowning on its chain. Sheds were swept away, greenhouses crashed. Below my house the weight of the river beat on the cliff. I became frightened that we’d be undermined. ‘Kitty,’ I said, ‘we’ll have to get out.’
