by Gee, Maurice
‘Dad – ’
‘Don’t start to whine.’ Forty what? Forty-two and he hadn’t learned to take his lumps.
‘Dad, I can’t go to prison. It’ll … ’ Was he going to say ‘kill me’? He hadn’t got the guts to use big words. ‘Ruin me’ was what he would say. ‘It’ll stuff me up. It’ll be the end. I won’t survive.’
In what way? Howie thought. Suddenly he was moved by Gordon. Won’t survive in what way, son? What was the part that was going to die? Was it something Gwen had put in him? Or something Gordon reckoned he, his father, had done? Some bad dad thing? He could not tell whether Gordon had found some hardness in himself or had simply uncovered a new layer of softness. (Soft in the mouth, soft around the middle, soft ear lobes that bent like supplicating hands, and soft small feet and soft toes – Howie remembered counting them, this little piggy – cramped up white and tight in black shoes and nylon socks. He had told Gordon several times, ‘Don’t come here in uniform,’ but Gordon wouldn’t get out of his suit and tie because he seemed to lose himself and get even softer. He was loose in colours, loose in loose shirts; his throat, even his throat, seemed to collapse.)
‘Listen, Gordy.’ He didn’t want money. He didn’t want advice. He wanted Howie to go round there and punch the prosecutor on the jaw. ‘There’s nothing I can do. They’ve got you and there’s no way they’re going to let you go. I can’t even stand close to you – because I’ve got my own deal and I can’t let your thing rub off on mine. You shouldn’t even be round here tonight. But stuff that, eh, no one tells us we can’t talk to each other, because I’m your dad. But as far as the rest of it goes, listen’ – wisdom now – ‘you’ve got to take it, you’ve got to go in and take your lumps, and come out smiling on the other side, because if you don’t,’ yeah, wisdom from Dad, ‘you’re no good any more. You’re no good to yourself any more. You’re finished, boy. And you don’t finish yet, not at forty. You keep on. Because there’s nothing else you can bloody do.’ And there wasn’t. He had said everything Gordon needed to know. ‘And when you come out, you pick yourself up and get on with it.’ Yes, that was something, that was something else. ‘Now have a drink and get out of here and let me get upstairs to my wife. And, Gordy, don’t come back. Don’t come back again, unless it’s just to say, “Gidday, Dad”.’
He poured his son a Scotch and meant him to knock it back in a single gulp. But Gordon only turned himself side on. ‘It’s easy for you,’ darting a look that caught a gleam of red from the chandeliers. He had turned away so he would not seem responsible.
‘Easy?’ Howie answered. He was in a sudden rage but would not twist and vanish in the way his son did. ‘Do you want to know how I started out?’ Told it straight – the ravelled jersey and bare feet and bed with holes rusted in the wire, and two of them in it, top and tail, his brother’s feet digging under his chin all night long. And no sheets. No underpants. Dripping instead of butter on the bread … until Gordon said, ‘That’s not what I’m talking about.’
Howie would not stop. ‘I dragged you and Athol and your mother on my back. No one helped me. I did it by myself. And I kept my nose clean. I could have taken short cuts, short cuts is easy – you think I didn’t see them doing it. Half of them from King’s College, in their poncy voices. I’m just the chippy from out west, I’m just good for banging in the nails. Well, I showed them, and I kept it straight, I kept it honest, and in the end they were coming to me. Hopkins and his mob.’ He had cooled down. Because they were not the enemy; they were only men he moved amongst, whose rules he obeyed when he had to, men he climbed over, doing things in his way while doing it in theirs. There was no enemy, there was just yourself in a contest with yourself – and Gordon would never understand.
‘Ah what the hell, you’ve heard it all before, drink up your whisky and go home.’
The phone had been ringing and he held it at his side while he gulped his own drink. ‘Yeah, who is it?’
‘Dad? It’s Athol. Bad news, Dad.’
‘You too?’
‘A burglar got in this afternoon and he pushed Ulla down the steps. She’s in hospital with a broken neck. It looks as if she might be paralysed.’
‘From a broken neck. Can they say paralysed as quick as that?’
‘They think it’s … They’re talking about, I don’t know, complete lesion maybe, whatever that is. But it means she might be a quadriplegic. They’ve got a whole lot more tests to do.’
‘How are the kids? How’s Damon?’
‘They’re okay. They haven’t been allowed to see her yet. It’s in the fourth vertebra and that means she might lose everything.’
‘Stuck in a bed, you mean, for the rest of her life?’
‘It might be that.’
‘But Jesus, she’s only thirty-six.’
‘At the moment they’re trying just to keep her alive. It’s her breathing up there, the fourth vertebra. Everything just cuts off. I got in to see her and she looks as if she’s dead.’
Tell them to let her die, Howie wanted to say.
Gordon was at his shoulder, listening. ‘Gordon’s here, you’d better tell him.’ He thrust the phone at Gordon and went across to pour another drink. But it was air not whisky he wanted. Nothing could be worse, stuck on a bed. Your body lying there like a sack, full of what? Full of nothing. And alive only in your head and no way to touch it, no way to touch your eyes and mouth.
He went outside and felt the tiles sting his feet with cold. Poor bloody Ulla, poor little bitch. But he had no sense of her, only of himself. There was a rolling, a dislocation, in his hips, like a socket loose. Shit, he said, don’t go soft on me.
He straightened himself up. He walked straight on the grass. The naiad glimmered at him. He put his fingers on her spine but she was made without vertebrae, her neck covered by a loop of hair. He turned away. Ulla, who rhymed with fuller: it was a name he could not say and he had blamed her for having it. Her voice came to him, more English than the English, as though she had been asked to read the news. ‘Oh,’ removing her tanned arm, which he had laid his palm on, ‘that is because of the pigment in my skin.’ Where did a Swede get a word like that? And why couldn’t he touch his son’s new girlfriend on the arm? But she had always drawn away. He had never known her, never liked her, and had thought Athol a fool to marry a woman who looked round to the other side of the world, looked back home. You can’t be happy, Howie thought, except in your own land.
His eyes filled with tears for Ulla. He was pleased by that.
‘Dad.’ Gordon advanced over the lawn. ‘That’s awful, bloody awful, isn’t it?’
Howie grunted.
‘My God, we have bad luck in this family.’
Yours isn’t bad luck, yours is greed, Howie thought. ‘Go home, son. Phone me up tomorrow.’
‘I’d string up the bastard who did that.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Go home.’
He took him through the house and put him out the door, closed it and locked it and turned out the yard lights, the gate lights, the porch. He switched on the alarms – stupid bloody things, always going off when they didn’t need to, it would be better to have a dog – and used the bathroom, cleaned his teeth. Ulla, he thought, six-foot Swede, cold as ice – except that she was not cold to anyone else. Gwen and she talking, talking, mixing bread together and going out on walks and going out to movies where you had to read the screen; and Gwen telling him, Oh go and see James Bond then; and in James Bond you saw girls who looked like Ulla looked, but who behaved like a woman should. He felt his neck, he traced the vertebrae down his back, then reversed his arm and tried to come from below but felt a stab in his shoulder where the doctor said bursitis and wanted to pump it full of muck … He could feel things, feel his shoulder, feel his legs. Ulla could not. She wouldn’t go long-striding down the road or leap up the front steps three at a time. He tried to get her, tried to make her more than just a picture, but she wouldn’t come, and he realised that she had never smiled at him.
‘Hollo, Howard,’ Ulla said from across the room.
So now she was helpless, now she would know … But Howie put that aside almost with disgust. He wanted to do something – cure her, lift her up – and get past her coldness at last. He saw Ulla look at him and smile. That was all he wanted. He wanted to help.
Women were people you helped. That was why, with most of them, he never had any trouble.
Howie washed his feet in the handbasin. He could still lift his leg up, even though it made a grating in his hip. He changed the water and rinsed the flannel, making it as hot as in an aeroplane, and washed his anus and private parts. Darlene had asked him to do that, for hygiene she said, and he played along. Usually it started to get him ready. Not tonight. He wouldn’t tonight. Not after news like that. He wouldn’t for Ulla.
Howie went into the bedroom, where the bed was like a raft floating on the sea, and like the sea itself with its duvets all in waves. Darlene’s was peach – she called it peach – and blue and brown (which was chocolate), and his was green and purple, which he did not feel were colours for a man, but Darlene said yes they were, all that had changed. So okay, it was the bedroom, she could run things there – and sleep curled up, hugging herself, and snore like a rustling in dry leaves, which was female enough, and with the bit of coarseness that he liked. He put his clothes on a chair and was proud of himself for sleeping naked. Not many men my age – but cancelled age from that, and got under his duvet and waited for her to slide at him with a long puff of warm air, knowing he would tell her, Not tonight, even though he knew that now he wanted her after all.
‘Howie – mmm,’ she murmured, and here it came, the sweet and sweaty air and her body heating him down his side. Her damp cheek and mouth filled the curve of his neck. Darlene was Ulla’s age. Exactly.
He thought, We’ll have Damon up. I’ll buy a trampoline.
‘Howie Powie,’ Darlene said as her hand grew full, ‘you’re a real phenomena.’
He did not correct her – had not known himself until Gwen had used it once, in the singular, about some flash of lightning or cloud in the sky, some Gwen bloody thing.
Howie groaned. ‘You get on top’ – although he did not let her as often as she’d like.
‘Sure, Howie, you bet. All right?’
‘That’s good.’ He kept his hands on her back, wanting to feel her spine.
‘I’m going to buy a trampoline,’ he said, which made her laugh.
What he liked most about Darlene, he made her laugh.
Gordon lived in Herne Bay. He leased an apartment with a view across the harbour to the Chelsea Sugar Works. Soon he would have to give it up and live somewhere cheaper. He would have to sell his car, and then what would it be, a second-hand Toyota? Nobody knew how broke he was. He would have to sack his lawyer and apply for legal aid. He would have to get a flat in Grey Lynn. He sometimes saw himself as one of those men who rented one-room sheds at the back of gardens and cooked on an electric ring and came up the yard and across the porch to use the toilet and came in once a week for a bath. It struck him with terror when he thought of it and he went blind for a moment and did not know where he was. They washed their underpants in a plastic basin and laid them out to dry on the window sill. They dug in the garden to save a few dollars on the rent.
Gordon couldn’t work out how he had arrived where he was. He knew where he was, knew exactly, although he turned away and turned away. He remembered a time when he was doing nicely. But from Lupercal onwards nothing held still for him to see. What he couldn’t remember was ‘why’. He knew ‘what’ and ‘how’ all right but ‘why’ escaped in a way that tipped him sideways and left him feeling seasick, like on his father’s damn launch in a swell.
Had he been in this condition, sick air-bubble in his chest, eyes seeing blurred, all that time? Was it what his mother might call a moral displacement, hanging there with feet not touching the ground, never quite finding anything solid under them?
He felt light-headed in the car. He felt as if the car was floating too.
Why didn’t I see that it was going to fall apart? Dad, fuck him, told me. Why didn’t I see they were all crooks? I’m not a crook but I’m going to jail anyway.
It never got more complicated than that. Gordon was a simple man. He was not a bad man. He was kind to people, he was generous, and when he had heard of Ulla lying in hospital with a broken neck he had been filled with horror at what he took to be the evil of the burglar’s attack. He knew that with Lupercal he had been stupid; he had been greedy. But nothing he had done could ever be called evil. Moral corruption, the lawyer said. Men who are greedy to the marrow of their bones. It was wrong to allow people to get up there in public and say that – about me, Gordon thought, about me. He made it sound as though I’m going rotten; Jesus, he made it sound as though I smell.
The Audi swerved softly, floated off line, and Gordon could not understand the arrow pointing at him; then he pulled left and was safe. He had better park the car and sit still. Or take it down the harbour and drive in.
No, he thought. No. No! That was an idea to punish people with and make them grieve. Now he saw dark water and felt it closing over his head. ‘No,’ he said.
He stopped the car. Where was he? Everything was suddenly tipped on an angle. He felt sick in a different way. He was terrified.
Get out of here, he thought, and wrenched the Audi into gear and butted his way among cars released from a traffic light. He went at their pace and did not like it when they opened out. He got in close behind one and saw a fluffy dice suspended in the rear window, and a fisted hand with a smoke in it, burning above kissing heads. A sticker said: Plumbers do it with a wrench. The driver reached up and angled his mirror to kill the light. Gordon dropped back. He turned away and crawled in suburban streets and thought, They’re all in their houses and I’m out here; and had another vision of dark water. Where can I go?
He drove into Broadway and up Khyber Pass Road and had no place ahead except his flat. Trees and gravestones. Roads that fell away, down out of bright lights into the dark. He stopped around a corner and backed up; beckoned a woman smoking by a wall.
‘Do you want to go for a drive?’
She sneered at him. ‘You bloody mad or something? I don’t go for drives.’
‘How much?’
‘Depends what for.’
She might be Indian, she might be Lebanese. Her lipstick was black in the dead light and her eyes were black.
‘I don’t know, I’ll have to think.’
‘My friend’s seen your face, Mac, and she’s got your number.’
‘Yes, okay.’ He saw her friend standing in a doorway. ‘As long as she forgets it later on.’
‘Sure, we can forget.’ The woman got in the passenger seat. ‘Where to?’
‘Just down the street. We’ll park somewhere.’
‘You’re fucking mad, mister. I don’t do cars.’
‘Just a hand. A hand job. Fifty dollars.’
Hand, he thought, driving where she showed him; as long as it was somebody else’s, not his own. His own was wrong, his own was solitary and corrupt.
A dark place between trees that grew out of asphalt in the street. Strong scents in the car. This is a person, he thought, and this is something happening to me.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Jilly. What’s yours?’
‘Nev.’ Which was not a lie.
‘Okay, Nev. A hand is what you get. Money up front.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
She had borstal tats on her finger backs and a triangle of dots in the web between her finger and thumb. He saw her work, half clumsy, not very good, but it didn’t matter. Someone called Jilly, in a place between trees, in a street.
He gave her his handkerchief.
‘That’s an easy fifty bucks,’ meaning to be friendly.
‘You don’t like it, too bad. You don’t get any more.’
‘I don’t want any more
. Okay, thanks.’
‘You better drive me back. Here’s dangerous.’
‘It’s only five minutes to K Road. Here, take a taxi.’ He gave her another five dollars. ‘Hey,’ when she was out of the car, ‘drop this in a rubbish tin.’ He held out his handkerchief.
‘Get rid of your own mess.’
He dropped it in the gutter beside the car, where some woman would find it and wash it, he supposed. Silk handkerchief, embroidered G.N.P. – which used to make him happy once, before Lupercal.
Chapter Four
Gwen found four nails and a hammer in the shed and a square of brown board as hard as iron in the glasshouse. The cat had abused his privileges for the last time. She had found him on the bench chewing her steak, and had screeched at him and chased him out, then hurled the ruined steak at the tunnel in the hedge where he had vanished. Now she would hammer his private entrance up, and leave the glasshouse open – let him sleep there; and if he howled in the night she would turn the hose on him. He knew the rules. She told herself that she was growing tough.
She held the board in place with her foot and hit the first nail, but it snapped a corner off like a malt biscuit and she thought, What would Howie do? He’d drill a hole. Back in the shed she put the piece of board in the clamp and drilled four holes, shifting it round; then, getting clever, chose smaller nails, the sort called brads, and went back to the cat-door for a second try. Howie improved my vocabulary, she thought with surprise; and she wondered who would win if each made a list of words they had taught the other. ‘Brads’: one to him. ‘Say peetza, Howie, you can’t say pizzer’: one to her. And ‘moderation’ and ‘common decency’ for her. ‘Self-interest’ for Howie. She’d show the cat what self-interest was, with brads and hammer and hardboard – thank you, Howie. Say thank you Howie, don’t just grunt.
She closed the cat door, nailed it up, and that was that, another relationship adjusted. Another relationship minimised; which from her point of view, in the present case, meant improved. Now she’d have a slice of toast and packet-soup for tea. She hadn’t wanted steak anyway.
