by Gee, Maurice
I straightened the quilt and blankets and fluffed up the pillow, putting off the betrayal I was bound to commit. I went downstairs for my bag and put it on the bed. I centred my nightie on the pillow, knowing he’d make me sleep up here and lay out his sleeping bag downstairs. Settling in gave me substance and seemed to give me rights. I opened his drawers, looking for more of my brother’s life, believing that if it had gone wrong I was hunting for clues to put it right. I half-expected unpaid bills, and hoped for packets of Durex, but all I found, apart from letters from my parents and me, were some poems with half the lines crossed out and a pornographic cartoon: The office party after someone put Spanish Fly in the fruit punch. It made me laugh. Such busy people. I put it back carefully where I’d found it, and read my letters to him to see if I wrote well. Their tone shocked me. What right had I to lecture and bully him? I had thought I was expressing love and care but was marking my dominance. I felt a little sick at being revealed and went downstairs and washed his dirty dishes, partly in apology, partly as a penance. Then I walked down Willis Street, hunting for a grocer’s and a butcher’s shop. I had promised to have dinner ready when he came home.
I’m not a good cook but frying chops and boiling potatoes – mashing them with chopped onion, my idea of haute cuisine – suited my bossy contrition. I could not find a tablecloth but used two clean tea towels instead, and set the table, everything square. His little two-plate stove worked very well. The chops sizzled, with their tails curled in, while tinned peas simmered in their pot. I’d seldom been so eager to surprise. He had said he would be home just after six o’clock. I timed things to perfection. What I hadn’t done was cook for three.
‘Come in Cyril,’ I heard Gordon say. The gate closed like cymbals. ‘I’ll introduce you to my sister,’ he said. Then he was in the room, hugging me, while his friend stood on the doorstep. In that moment Gordon became utterly strange to me, while my love overflowed. I wanted to reverse the moment, put my brother safe at my back, reduce him to infancy and grow him again, after pushing Cyril, the creature, out and slamming the door. Forty years on, I can find only ‘creature’ for him. I know his name: Cyril Handy. He was fifty-one. He had a wife in another town and two married daughters. If someone took the trouble, a life could be laid out. It won’t be me. He’s confined to one place and a single year.
Gordon loosened his embrace and held me with an arm across my shoulders: ‘Alice, this is my friend Cyril. He’s come for tea.’
‘Gordon,’ I said, ‘I’ve only made enough …’
‘I can go, Gordy,’ the man said. ‘I don’t want to cause no trouble. You feed him, missy. Don’t bother about me.’
‘Hey, no, I invited you. We’ll make it go round,’ Gordon said. He looked in the frying pan. ‘Four chops. That’s enough. And I’ve got some eggs.’ He opened a cupboard. ‘You can crack three eggs in there, Alice, easy eh? Sit down, Cyril. Take off your coat. We’ll have a beer.’
‘I could manage a beer. That’ll be a treat. With your permission, missy, then I’ll be gone.’
He took off his hat but not his coat, and sat at the table. Gordon opened the cupboard under the sink for a bottle of beer.
‘Alice?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
I climbed the ladder and stood in the dark in the upstairs room, trembling, controlling myself. The creature, Cyril, stood (and smelt and sounded) in my head. He was a big man shrunken to middle size. Collapses, subsidences, nasty pools and pits and rubbish heaps existed inside him. I am overdoing it because I overdid it then. Keeping to his outside: dirt ingrained in his forehead, pores open in his nose, fingernails thickened to yellow horn – oh, let me get description out of the way with etc. etc. and admit that I could not have taken all this detail in at a glance. I remember Cyril Handy – his rancid smell, his crusted grime – from sitting at table with him for an hour. His three stained teeth and yellow gums. He and Gordon got through two bottles of beer each. Gordon ate two chops. Cyril Handy offered me his, trying to scrape it with his fork on to my plate.
‘Swap it with your egg, Alice,’ Gordon said. ‘Good mashed potatoes, Cyril, eh? Good kai.’ Where had he got ‘kai’ from?
Cyril refused my egg. He was wary of me, ingratiating. Halfway through the meal he went outside to the lavatory. We heard him pissing, like water dribbling over a lip of moss into a pool.
‘Poor old bugger,’ Gordon said.
‘What do you think you’re doing, Gordon? What are you trying to prove?’
‘He’s just an alkie I met. I try to help him.’
‘You can’t help people like that. They don’t want to be helped. Where do you meet alkies, anyway?’
‘One of the guys in the pub is in AA. He only drinks sarsaparilla. He knows lots of them. He introduced me.’
‘You’re going up in the world then? All this one wants is money for booze, I’ll bet.’
‘So I give him some. But I thought if I could make him eat …’
‘Rubbish. A mouthful of egg and potato. How much money do you give him?’
‘None of your business. Now shut up, he’s coming.’
‘I can’t stand the smell, Gordon. You’d do better to give him a bath than try to feed him.’
‘I think I’ll be on me way,’ Cyril Handy said. ‘Thanks for that spot of dinner, missy. It’s a treat having a bite to eat with friends. Friendship makes the world go round, eh Gordy? Conviviality, some people call it. If I can just get me hat …’ He picked it up from behind his chair. He was speaking with his body, with hesitations, and Gordon heard.
‘Yeah, Cyril, OK. It’s good to see you, mate. Hey, before you go …’ He ran up the ladder to his bedroom and I heard him opening a drawer.
‘He’s a first-rate feller, young Gordon,’ Cyril Handy said.
‘How much does he give you?’ I said.
‘It isn’t money changes hands, except for a bob or two. It’s him and me bein’ friends.’
‘Leave him alone,’ I hissed. Gordon was clattering down.
‘Cyril, I thought you might know someone who’d like this.’ He gave him the pornographic card, keeping it turned away from me.
Cyril Handy looked at it and chuckled. He shot a glance at me. ‘I can maybe get a bob or two for that. You want some, Gordy? Your share?’
‘No, you keep it. Here, in case you’re short, for a cup of tea.’
I heard the chink of coins. Cyril Handy pocketed them with the card. He made his thanks – fulsome, gummy – and went away, leaving his meatworks smell.
I said to Gordon: ‘That makes you feel better, I suppose?’
‘No. What’s the matter, Alice? What’s with you?’
‘Is giving him dirty pictures part of it? Are you in that trade?’
‘No, I’m not. What makes you think you can look in my drawers?’
‘I was looking for a place to put my nightie,’ I said.
‘Yeah, well … There’s a guy who knows the guy who draws that stuff. I took it because I thought Cyril could make a bit of money.’
‘He’s filthy and he’s hopeless and he stinks. And you’ll end up like him, wait and see.’
Gordon looked at me hard. He looked in faces, sometimes in a sidelong way, for what he could find, and had told me once that what he saw in mine made him feel that everything was OK – ‘I mean everything.’ Now I thought he might burst out with anger and make denials; but soon I saw that he was measuring me. It made me almost shriek with my own denial. I was not to be known. I was the one who would know him.
He gave a little shrug, a sigh.
‘It’s stupid quarrelling. Thanks for cooking tea. Mum’s mashed potatoes and onions, eh? Any pudding?’
‘No.’
‘You’ve hardly eaten anything. Have Cyril’s chop.’
‘I certainly will not.’
‘I will then.’ He picked it up from the plate.
‘Gordon,’ I shrieked, ‘he was touching it with his fork.’
‘So I’ll get his germs. You should see what I have to touch at the hospital.’ He bit into the meaty part of the chop.
I burst out crying – something I hadn’t done for years. I pushed past him and ran for the ladder and clattered up. Face down on his bed, face in my nightie, I let all my anger and disappointment out. Gordon and Cyril Handy ran together – kept on morphing, is that the term? – and I kept wrenching them apart and denying that Gordon was in danger. He was simply being stupid, stupid, stupid. He was playing games. But the stink from Handy’s body and clothes had risen through the hole in the floor and poisoned the room.
I heard Gordon run water and start the dishes and felt his invitation to climb down the ladder and take a tea towel and stand with him sharing the job as we had done when we were children. I refused. I opened the one window in the room and tried to get Cyril Handy out. It’s clear to me now that I had fallen into a kind of hysteria, from my idea of self- and Ferry-worth and my love for Gordon, but I seemed rational to myself at the time.
My storm subsided. The night air of Wellington blew in. I got up and closed the window and lay on my back listening to Gordon boil a kettle and make tea. I knew what he would yell before he yelled it: ‘No sugar, Alice?’
‘No,’ I called.
His head appeared and lay like a ball on the floor. ‘Come and grab this.’ He lifted a brimming mug, and I took it to the bed while he climbed down for his own. I turned on the light and made a place for him beside me.
‘Good luck,’ he said, and we clinked mugs, then sat quietly sipping for a while. He touched my face. ‘You need a flannel.’
‘I’ll have a shower soon. If it works.’
‘Sure, everything works. It’s the best place I’ve had. I wouldn’t mind staying here till I die.’
‘No, you’ll have a big house on a hill. With a view. And a wife. I’ll let you choose the number of children.’
‘Two,’ he said. ‘Two’s best. There was a patient last week talk-ing about her kids. I asked her how many she had and she said sixteen.’
‘The people you meet. How many Cyril Handys do you know?’
‘Maybe four. Yeah, four. I just have a bit of a chinwag with them. That’s all.’
‘And give them money.’
‘Yeah, not much.’ He grinned. ‘For a cup of tea.’
‘And they buy beer?’
‘Cheap sherry mostly. So what? It’s their choice.’
‘Choice is long gone, isn’t it?’
‘No. Some of them go to AA. Cyril used to go. What have you got against him, Alice, apart from he stinks?’
‘He’s a waste of time.’
‘Dad wouldn’t have thought so.’
That stopped me for a moment, but I said: ‘Father was sort of crazy. He still is. Did you know he goes and cuts Mrs Imrie’s lawns? She’s not Mrs Imrie any more. Mrs – something.’
‘Does Mum know?’
‘Probably. I think she thinks Mrs Imrie’s like a disease.’ Cyril Handy, I wanted to say, is a disease.
‘She is, kind of, for Dad,’ Gordon said.
‘All he does is cut the grass. That suits him better than going to bed with her.’
‘He makes love to her lawnmower,’ Gordon said.
We laughed at our father, admiring him. Then Gordon asked about Tom, the latest of my married men. I told him it was over and I was finished with men that much older than myself.
‘I suppose it was … there’s always something more to find out. Things have happened to them – you know, marriage and kids. They aren’t so unreal as all those others. You turn corners in them and you find something new. But then, you go round the last corner and nothing’s there. They’re just as empty and muscle-bound as the young ones.’
‘God, Alice, what am I going to do with you?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. I told him I was seeing a new man, a schoolteacher in his first year at the college.
‘How old?’
‘None of your business. Richard Ayres,’ I said, enjoying the name, saying it aloud for the first time, although it carried an edge of illegitimacy, for Richie and I had only half-begun and no one knew about us yet. It was better that way, he had said, until … and I guessed he had a girl to let down. I did not think it would be lightly. Richie was not that sort of man.
‘Remember that kid Ayres at school? We used to call him Ook,’ Gordon said.
‘Don’t you dare.’
‘Does this guy – is he for real, Alice?’
‘I don’t know. I think so. I hope so.’
I realised how much I hoped, and understood how helpless I was. I conceded that I was in love and at once felt a premonition of pain that made me gasp and clutch my side.
‘What? What, Alice?’
‘Nothing.’ And that seemed right, for it went away, slid in behind the pleasure I felt in loving Richie and my expectation of more than the little – although it had seemed a lot – I had already had of him.
‘The funny thing is, he’s quite ugly.’
‘At least he won’t be up himself.’
No, I almost said, that’s not true. ‘He’s got fat lips.’ And I might have added: a big nose with a bend in it, and one nostril’s bigger than the other. ‘But his eyes are …’
‘Yeah, what?’
‘They see where he’s going.’ I would not say any more than that. I wasn’t sure Richie’s eyes saw me. ‘Anyway, we haven’t started properly yet. What about you? Have you got a girl?’ I looked around his bedroom. ‘I don’t see any sign of her.’
‘There’s someone I’m interested in,’ he said off-handedly. ‘But she’s never been here.’
‘Slow coach,’ I said.
‘I won’t be shooting all over the place like you.’
‘I am not. I’ve stopped anyway. What’s her name? What does she do?’
‘No names.’ He looked for something wooden, then touched the frame of the bed. ‘It’s getting stuffy in here. Let’s go for a walk.’
‘All right. I just need the toilet.’
‘So do I. Me first.’ He saw my surprise, and shrugged. ‘I need to wipe it. Cyril always piddles on the seat.’
‘And you let him come here?’
‘He’s only got half a brain left, Alice. There’s a lobe missing. So …’
He climbed down the ladder and I followed with the mugs – rinsed them, trembling with revulsion. Then I used the toilet, putting layers of paper on the seat. It needed ten minutes of walking for us to regain our ease. He took me up Willis Street into the Aro Valley, then up a steep road and down – plunging down – a street with impossible bends, and back to the valley floor again. After that he said we’d earned a coffee. We walked as far as Dixon Street to a coffee shop called Man Friday and sat for an hour over single cups. Gordon talked with people he knew, while I kept antennae out for his girl. I did not like the people he introduced me to. They were either highfalutin or half-baked and none of them, as far as I could tell, had a serious job; but I admired Gordon’s ease with them. Walking home, I asked who they were.
‘Dunno. I hardly know them.’ He waved at a couple across the street, and I saw that he had found a kind of home. It made me pleased for him, although I did not want him settling into it too deeply.
I used the shower and put on my nightie and went to bed.
‘Gordon,’ I said, when he came up the ladder for his sleeping bag, ‘don’t sleep down there. There’s plenty of room.’ I scrunched the mattress over, freeing a strip of the bed for him. The base was made of hardboard with holes bored in it. ‘It’s better than lying on the floor.’
Although the light was dim I saw him blush.
‘Don’t be dumb, Gordon, I’m your sister. Just lie down.’
He fussed a bit, positioning the sleeping bag, then found his ease: fetched a cushion from downstairs, changed into his pyjamas – such washboard ribs and stretched-out muscles in his legs – and wriggled into the bag.
‘Not much bloody room,’ he grumbled.
We talked again. He told me hospital stories and I told him about my work. The cushion was too hard, so he put it on the floor and we shared the pillow, and went to sleep with our heads joined at the sides like Siamese twins.
In the night I must have slipped down, for I woke and found my head off the pillow and Gordon’s breath dampening my hair. I stepped over him and sat in a chair, worrying about his life, until I grew cold. I slid back into my blankets.
‘All right?’ he mumbled.
‘Yes. All right.’
Towards morning he had a wet dream. I woke to hear the end of it, then knew from his sudden stillness that he had woken too. I heard him whisper, ‘Shit. Shit,’ and pretended I was asleep. With furtive movements he cleaned himself.
I wished a girl for Gordon who would lie in my place. I wished I could be that girl myself.
On Saturday morning we walked on Tinakori Hill, where I scouted for fungi, showing off. Who else could I be silly with? I broke open rotten logs, using my hands like spades. ‘Saprophytism,’ I said, and other words, until he cried: ‘For God’s sake find me a toadstool. I need to sit down.’
‘No, look. Look,’ I cried, ‘here’s Boletus granulatus. Slippery Jack. God, that’s lovely. Isn’t that lovely? See how it’s symbiotic with the pines.’ I told him how much I missed forest mycology – ‘Although the work I’m doing now on black spot is important.’ We walked on paths cut like ledges in the hill and he let me chatter.
When I think of my times with Gordon it’s there I go most often, and although I was skiting and puffing myself and ‘girling’ as though I were sixteen instead of thirty, and now and then he brought me down with clever remarks, I think of it as pure, our pure time. I dream of paths made slippery with needles. Arthritic trees, purple-trunked and heavily green, stoop and peer. A boy and girl, brother and sister, amble by. They pause, they cry out, high-voiced, disputatious and at one. Shafts of sunlight plunge into gullies. The air is still, although the wind sighs overhead. ‘Gordon,’ I call. ‘Hey, Alice,’ he replies.
