by Gee, Maurice
Neville troubled Mother. He was not only older than me, he was older than her. ‘We’re only friends,’ I think I said, and he must have said the same. She never believed it. She came to think my sickness had something to do with the unnaturalness of ‘liking’ an old man.
‘I don’t “like” him,’ I said. ‘Mother, go away.’
When I gained sufficient strength to move from pleading with her to ordering, she obeyed: went back across the strait to Father. By that time she had told me what happened at Gordon’s place. I shifted side on to it and would not look. It fell into pits of unknowing, dug by the force I’ve already mentioned (benign, and, I must acknowledge now, part of me), and stayed there while I got well from Richie Ayres.
Here are some of the things that took place on the night of the murder, reconstructed from Mother’s account and from information I collected later on:
Gordon agreed to work until the night-shift porter arrived. He caught Marlene going off work and told her he would not be able to see her that night.
‘Why don’t I go to your place and wait?’ Marlene said.
‘I’ll have to send you home in a taxi,’ he said.
‘I might stay all night. Now you’re blushing.’ She stood on tip-toes and kissed his cheek. It’s my guess she meant to tell him she was pregnant. He would have been pleased: that’s more than a guess.
Marlene walked home from work and ate dinner, then put on her pretty clothes and applied her make-up. She told her mother she was going to the pictures. Her parents worried about Marlene: she had been unwell and seemed too carefree suddenly.
‘Where?’ her mother asked.
‘Oh, the Roxy,’ Marlene said.
‘Who with?’
‘Some girls from work. They might ask me to stay the night.’
She walked from Mt Victoria and arrived at Gordon’s place about half-past eight. The dark yard made her nervous but she carried a pocket torch for the key in the pile of bricks. She shone it along the path to his door, then over his broken motorbike by the lavatory and along the foot of the wall to the yellow bricks. (‘Gordon says she always sings that “Follow the Yellow Brick Road”,’ Mother said. ‘He wrote us letters about her. He’s serious.’)
Marlene put her finger in the hole and hooked out the key, then shone the torch on the door again. Something dark and long, without a shape, lay hard against the building on the other side. She turned the torch on it and cried out. A man was sleeping there with his face turned to the sky. Marlene ran to the gate. She pulled it open and let it bang behind her. (Gordon had fitted it with a spring.) The footpath was empty but cars going by in Willis Street made her less afraid. She supposed some drunk had stumbled in and gone to sleep, and after a moment she worked up courage to open the gate and shine the torch again.
‘Hey, you,’ Marlene said.
‘This is private property,’ she said.
She thought she might go close and poke him with her toe. First she propped the gate open with a stick Gordon had broken from a tree. She kept the torch on the man’s face as she approached, and halfway there saw who it was.
‘Mr Handy, are you all right?’ Marlene said.
She went a step closer. ‘Mr Handy, wake up please.’
She wanted him out of the yard before Gordon arrived and felt in her pocket for a florin she could give him. Then she wondered why she could not hear breathing, and she walked the last steps quickly and peered into his face. His eyelids were half open, showing only whites. His mouth had a yellow tongue curled at the back. Marlene put down her torch and tried to feel his pulse but a dirty bandage around his palm put her off. His other arm was jammed against the wall. She put her hand inside his overcoat to feel his heart. Her fingers paddled in blood lying pooled in the incurving bones of his chest.
Marlene looked at her hand by torchlight. She ran out the gate and screamed: ‘Help me. Help.’
A man in the street asked what was wrong.
‘There’s a dead man in there,’ Marlene cried.
‘There’s blood on you. Jesus, I’m getting out,’ he said.
Marlene ran to the corner. ‘A dead man,’ she cried to people walking by.
‘Where?’
‘Inside that gate. I’ve got to find Gordon.’
She ran across Willis Street and down Ghuznee Street, trying to reach him at the hospital. In Taranaki Street she tripped and fell, and stayed, panting, weeping, on her knees. People stopped to help. They saw blood smeared on her snow-white blouse. Someone called the police.
Things grow confused. Marlene keeps repeating that she must go to the hospital. She tells the constable who arrives that there’s a dead man in a yard in Ghuznee Street. He takes her to the station, where the sergeant calls a doctor. I don’t know all the ins and outs. Several people venture into Gordon’s yard and peer at the body. By the time the men who investigate murders arrive they know about the woman with blood on her clothes. Shortly after ten o’clock, Gordon runs up the street. They don’t need him to identify the body. Cyril Handy the vagrant has been in and out of the cells for fifteen years.
But other questioning goes on and on. They ask him, they ask her … What is Handy doing in Gordon’s yard? How does he know him, how well does Marlene know him, and what was she doing there anyway? Hundreds of questions, but always coming back to: What about the blood, Marlene? Where did you put the knife?
The doctor put a stop to it and Marlene’s parents helped her from her chair to take her home. Gordon passed by in the corridor. She tried to run to him, and they called each other’s names, but Marlene’s father blocked the door while policemen hustled Gordon into another room.
They never saw each other again. There’s no hollow sound in those words: they’re sharp and hard. Using them, I see Marlene’s face as I saw it when she came to me, smiling, in the dancehall: her happy cheeks and plump mouth and eyes as blue as a baby’s rattle, and behind all this I see, and sometimes seem to hold in the palms of my hands, her hurt mind. I hold Gordon too …
‘He can’t get over her. He can’t seem to get her out of his head,’ Mother complained.
I turned my face to the wall. ‘Go away,’ I said.
I’ll finish with the Cyril Handy case. Gordon was never a suspect. He had been at the hospital from eight o’clock in the morning until more than half an hour after the body was found.
The police were not able to question Marlene again. She lapsed from her hysteria into silence. No one could bring her out. She stopped saying even Gordon’s name. But several people had seen her walking from Mt Victoria to Ghuznee Street. She had often gone with Gordon to the Man Friday coffee shop in Dixon Street. Friends there had run out and stopped her as she walked by. They talked for several minutes. Marlene was happy; she was ‘chirruping’, one of them said.
According to the pathologist, Handy had probably died while Marlene was at dinner, on the other side of Wellington, more than a mile away.
The killer has never been found. The crime does not get into books of unsolved murders. It’s not dramatic enough or puzzling enough, and Handy is unimportant. There are girls who hitchhiked and were never seen again. There’s a caretaker blown up with a bomb and a drug dealer shot in the head and burnt in his car. Who is Cyril Handy?
And who is Marlene Wilkinson, who is Gordon Ferry? They are wiped out from public consciousness too.
Chapter Six
Adrian is nervous about inviting his new girl home. I don’t blame him, after the last. That was Tessa – now, I’m pleased to say, past tense. I make the judgement without animus. They grated against each other. None of their intimacies, of word and touch, were convincing. It was, I think, simply a matter of going through the motions. (In these days of free behaviour there’s just as much expected of the young as there was of us, in a different way, fifty years ago.) They grated even in their music.
I went to another concert; enjoyed it less but enjoyed Adrian more: his cleverness, the way his left hand ran up and down the neck
of his instrument, as quick as a spider, while his right plucked and beat out lovely deep-throated sounds. The double bass sometimes looks dropsical, and Adrian, so tall and thin behind it, seems to massage strength into it with one hand and draw contentment out with the other. There’s something medical too in the wires that snake away – from drums and guitars as well as the bass. It seems you can’t make music today (Adrian’s sort) without electronic help.
When he asked my opinion of the singer, I said: ‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Sure.’
‘Awful,’ I said.
Adrian has tell-tale cheeks, tell-tale eyes. He blushed and flashed. ‘That’s balls, Alice. You don’t know zilch.’
‘Well, it’s such hard singing. Such a hard voice. And she’s flat. She’s out of tune.’
‘Tune,’ he sneered. ‘It’s jazz singing, it isn’t pop.’
‘Perhaps it’s just the acoustics there. I didn’t like it, Adrian. But she’s pretty, if that’s what you want me to say.’
I asked her name but he was offended and would not tell me. All the same, he brought her home several weeks later, for practice, not for a meal, and she was such a sweet, eager thing – no hardness in her – that I felt a skein of grief and guilt twisting inside me all through our meeting. Not that she looked like Marlene, not in the least. A tall girl, brown-eyed, all her bones on show. She was breathless with me and I could not imagine where the hardness in her singing came from. With Adrian, though, she was bossy, flinty at times; and he with her. I saw they liked each other in the way young people do, but would strike too many sparks to stay comfortable beyond a week or two.
Let them go, I thought, they’ll get to the end.
She sang her tuneless songs in his room, while he played unamplified. They stopped and started, repeated things, and shouted at each other now and then, sometimes good-humouredly, sometimes not.
I caught Adrian in the kitchen before I went to bed. ‘I don’t mind if she stays the night.’
‘You mean it?’ he said.
‘Yes, I do. It’s your room, Adrian, and your friend. I live at the other end of the house.’
Tessa lasted longer than I’d predicted. She came and went, and I grew bored with her. She, I’m afraid, grew bored with Adrian. He was serious about his music and demanded the same of her. So: quarrels. She wanted more movies, more clubbing, more fun. She screamed at him, from his room, that he was ‘so fucking intense’.
‘She’s gone,’ he said to me one day.
‘Where?’
‘Given up her course. Gone home. You were right, she couldn’t sing.’ He tapped his head. ‘She didn’t have it up here.’ Then he almost put his hand on his heart – or here – but decided he wasn’t sure of what he meant.
Now there’s Bets – a no-nonsense shortening of Elizabeth. Adrian got over his nervousness and brought her home. Bets is a different kettle of fish. I won’t call her a girl. This woman knows who she is and what she wants.
I don’t like it that she’s six years older than Adrian. I don’t like the echo it sounds. I don’t like it that she wears op-shop clothes and rings in her eyebrows and a stud in her nose. I said: ‘Don’t those things hurt?’ and she replied: ‘I wouldn’t wear them if they did. I’m not silly.’
‘Are you doing a music course too?’
‘No, I’m not.’ She was keeping it open whether to like me or not.
Adrian frowned at what was going on. ‘Bets is at the Learning Connexion,’ he said.
‘Oh?’ I said.
‘The art school out at Island Bay.’
‘Ah yes, I’ve heard of it.’ Heard it described as a school for dropouts and failures. ‘What sort of painting do you do?’
Adrian again: ‘She’s a conceptual artist. She does installations.’
Washing machines get installed. Television aerials, I thought. ‘So, found objects? That sort of thing? Do you go to the tip?’
‘There’s a bit more to it than that,’ Bets said.
I don’t hold it against her that she’s plain. I hold it against her that she reminds me of me. She’s too direct – upfront, in Adrian’s language. Two of us doesn’t make for comfort. Our difference is: she says the first thing into her head, I say it after a pause for calculation.
‘Where’s the toilet, Adie? I need to pee,’ she said.
‘Where did you find her?’ I asked when she had gone.
‘Lay off, Alice. Just give her a chance.’
‘I don’t want her staying the night.’
‘She wouldn’t want to. Now shut up, here she comes.’
I believe the woman hadn’t washed her hands. She has, though, a healthy look, a kind of animal clean-ness. She’s as tall as Tessa but well filled out. Nice body, very (I imagine) holdable. Her plain-ness is in her face, which is broad and somewhat slabby. The angles don’t meet properly. Eyes clear and straight, upfront and to the point. She shouldn’t wear her hair tied at the sides in that childish way. Yellow hair that Mrs Imrie would have been able to do things with. The stud set in the flange of her nose looks like a pimple.
I got the impression that alongside speaking out she was studying me, turning me round, perhaps with the part of her mind that makes her do art. She wants to put me in an installation.
‘So why have you got two names, Ferry and Kite?’
‘One’s for my work, and I loved my work, I was good at it. The other’s for my husband. I loved him too.’
‘What’s so special about mushrooms? Can you spend your whole life looking at them?’
I don’t bend to silliness of that sort. ‘If you challenge me on fungi, Bets, I’ll tie you in knots so tight you’ll never get out.’
‘Yeah, Bets, can it,’ Adrian said.
The woman grinned. ‘All right, tell me,’ she said.
Her clear eyes and quick smile and nods of interest make her seem uncritical, but inside, I’ve come to see, she processes like mad. I like putting my working self in front of people. It’s like pulling documents up on a screen, having this part, then that part of my life returned to me. It’s like having colours flash into being one by one, red, yellow, green, blue, until the spectrum is complete and there’s an Alice Ferry rainbow in the sky. I feel so pleased with myself. And I think, as I talked, that Bets, with a reservation or two, began to like me. She certainly liked to hear about a woman succeeding in a man’s world; clapped her hands when I described how I’d ‘fronted up’ to Doctor Staines and told him to keep his paws off my research, and his name off my papers, or I’d tell the world how little he really knew about black spot.
I didn’t stay long at the Harvey after that. Neville and I went to Auckland, where I worked for the DSIR again, in limnology as well as mycology. I lectured in the botany department at the university and if I’d joined full time would have been HOD before I retired. But I liked fieldwork too much for that, and lab work too, and prying deeply. Creeks go on and on, winding to the sea, and lakes spread out, and some are alive like animals in their natural state and some are dying in a kind of captivity. I followed them and sampled them, I plodded around their edges, and came back to my little room with my tray of tubes and discovered what was killing them. Several times I was an enemy of the people, as in that play. Poor half-dead Loomis creek had a pig farmer to thank for its condition. I had to trace the infection up a side-creek. The farmer pointed a rifle at me and found himself in court.
‘A pig himself,’ Bets said.
‘But I didn’t give up on fungi. I always loved them best.’ I showed her my two books on the subject.
‘That’s not a good cover,’ she said, tapping it.
And that’s a nasty dress you’re wearing, I could have said. Restrained myself because I was happy. It came from two sources equally: Alice at her work, a creature I am able to admire; and Neville at home, growing old and keeping young, and keeping Alice company.
I did not tell Bets about Neville. He’s not for sharing. Neville is mine.
I retu
rned to the Harvey with a sharp-cut profile and a lying full face. I tried to let nothing of my reduction show, but my work-mates knew more about me on some levels than I did. They knew when to pat me with a cheerful word and when to step away to some just-remembered task on the other side of the room. Doctor Staines would have liked to get rid of me but could find no excuse. I lifted myself into each day – made up in a week or two the six weeks I’d had off – and kept my work moving, its focus exact. Professionally I was sharp and hard. What I had to manage outside the Harvey was to step this plain person out of the mirror and turn her into me again.
There was no large way of doing it. When I came home I sank into apathy. Yet food had to be cooked, clothes washed, my body washed. I managed it, and each task – clipping my nails, brushing my hair – raised me a tiny step towards my former self. I sat in the living-room or at the kitchen table and went back through my working day, replaying each thing I’d done and word I’d said. It was like cells multiplying. As I grew, Richie Ayres shrank until he was no more than bothersome – sharply bothersome at times. I had to endure some years of having him fastened on me like a leech, but in the end I shook him off – ‘Get out of my life’ – and squashed him under my foot. There’s a bloodstain on the carpet. Chemwash doesn’t get it out … Enough of this. I’m playing a bit with Richie and that’s part of the stain.
While this was going on – there’s a huge ‘meanwhile’, a huge dark planet, circling my life – Father and Mother kept me informed about Gordon. His condition was similar to mine, except that as I worked my way back to my centre he went out to his edge, and somewhere beyond. Marlene’s parents threatened him with the police if he did not stop pestering them. Marlene had shifted, they said. She did not want to see him any more. He left letters for her in their box, saying that he knew they were lying. He waylaid her friends until they grew frightened of him – and, of course, they had no idea where she was. ‘Australia,’ Marlene’s father shouted from his front porch, ‘and she’s not coming back. Now get out of here. I’m phoning for the police.’
