by Gee, Maurice
‘Don’t, Des, he’s sick.’
‘Stuff him. I want him out. Hey you in there, you don’t open up I’m calling the cops to bust the door.’
When they were gone and the sounds were dead he knew what to do and where to go. Ponder had kept a place for him. He had put her where no one would find her and now it was the time to be with her. His arm floated ahead of him and carried him along.
Out of the room, out of the house. He turned in the dark streets; he crept along and did not feel his feet touch the ground. A white cat went with him, rubbing his legs. He crossed the road and it curled away. He smiled at the way things left no trace. Yellow eyes: gone. Walls, doors: gone. Only him, invisible. He made no connections and felt no pain. When he climbed her wall and fell into the timber there was only the far-off rattle of planks. He walked over the place where Ponder had soaked into the ground. It was as cold as footpaths. He smiled and sank his shoulders to the height of stoves. Red hair, he remembered. Candy bars. The line of freezers gleamed in light that seemed to come from nowhere. He laid his face on them, one by one, and opened a long door lying on its side. It had a lovely silence, oil and air and water, and waited like an eyelid to come down. Brent stepped inside.
‘Now I’m all right.’
He slid along the cold floor until he was stretched out; then he eased the roof down, bending his arm, and heard at last its soft excluding click.
He let his breath out. He breathed in deep again. He was safe.
‘Ponder,’ he said, and went to sleep.
Chapter Twelve
It would progress to spiritual guidance before long. Gwen would drop out at that point. Abandon the proposed still centre for the flux of experience, for the uncoordinated, the multitudinous, where she must pass her useful life. In the meantime she would lie between the acned boy and the man with the whispering thighs and concentrate on her pelvic tilt. ‘This is a t’riffic exercise for the stomach muscles,’ the instructor said. ‘It also helps with bowel and bladder control and you mustn’t be embarrassed if you break wind downwards while you’re doing it.’
Howie would like that, ‘break wind downwards’. I should save it for him, Gwen thought, even though I don’t want to know about such things and never have. I’m here as a penance for too much intellectual pride and puritan withdrawal, stuck between a boy with bad teeth, and bad face too, poor dear, and a man who arrives in leather trousers and combs his locks in every window he can find, listening to a woman, a Kilbirnie housewife, surely, who says ‘reely’ and ‘t’riffic’ and even ‘reely t’riffic’, and hurting my spine on this hard floor. I want to go. Before she moves on to ‘inner peece’. I don’t believe in it, no matter how pronounced. I don’t believe I’ll ever cure my pride.
Olivia had decided not to come. It made her feel silly, she said after attending once. Gwen excused her. This was a course for lame ducks, not the healthy young. Grief and shock would not be cured by the pelvic tilt, or sleeping on a mat at the end of it. Time would cure, days would cure. Breakfast lunch and tea and school and friends and riding on the bus and walking on the footpath, buying milk shakes and fish and chips, as far as it was possible would cure. Inner peace would be attained through living. That, at least, Gwen told herself, is how it seems to me, although I’m sixty-four and waiting still.
She relaxed her toes, her feet, her ankles, obeyed the Kilbirnie voice up through her body into her head, where it instructed no activity: she slept a while. Then rolled her mat and set off into the night, feeling – it made her smile – peaceful all through. Organic peace. How long would it last? How long before that sort of questioning destroyed it? She walked by the cable car, which peered at her over the top of the hill.
With no way of working from her toes up to her head, would Ulla be able to achieve this sort of peace?
So it was gone. Ulla became a destroying angel; Ulla swooped. This is my life now, Gwen thought – but it mustn’t be Olivia’s.
Her son Athol ran towards her, gleaming in the half light. She recognised his thinker’s head. It was still hard for her to accept that he kept only figures there. Arthur Miller head. Stead head. He should have been turning artistic or at least contentious thoughts. And he should have Ulla there as a fellow human, even if she had ceased to be his wife.
He made his clockwork approach. His glasses showed the emptiness of his head. No, be fair, she said, why should he be what you couldn’t be? Poet, scientist, politician, shaker of the world, however small the movement, into some new and better shape. Light had failed to strike in her womb or in her kitchen and she had bred ordinary men. Smaller even than their father, who had large ambitions and energy to match and an inventiveness that operated like a heart or lung. Gordon and Athol, it seemed to her, were equipped with aptitudes, no more than that.
‘Hallo, Mum. Where’ve you been?’
‘Yoga class.’
‘Huh.’
‘Yes, huh. What do you think about, Athol, when you’re running?’
‘All sorts of things.’
‘Really? Tell me.’
‘Ah, lay off. I’ve got to go.’
‘I’m serious. I want to know what goes on inside you. Don’t you think I’ve got the right?’
He looked at his watch. He cancelled her. Ran off down the footpath on his new expensive soles. His heels bounced up and down, left and right, like rubber balls. What a mother I’ve turned into, Gwen thought. I drive my sons away into the night. Once I wanted to hug them against me so tight … She walked on. The wind was damp and the clouds were low. Will I get my calmness back if I unroll my mat and work upwards from my toes again? I’ll lie in the middle of the road and the cars will drive around me carefully and the drivers will look down and say, There’s someone who has found inner peace, let’s all try that. I’ll do it one day, right here on the crossing. I’ll change the world.
Then she grinned hard, to free herself. Games. Worse than games: a form of self-abuse that made her shiver with disgust. She walked home, stepping sharp, making a clatter, and called from the back porch, ‘Olivia? You there? I’m going next door to have a word with Damon.’
Through the hedge. Tackle things. Keep on facing up.
‘Damon. So you’re off tomorrow. How do you feel about that?’
‘All right.’
‘Those things I washed for you got dry. You need some new underpants, tell Howie.’
She could not decide if he had been crying. She touched his head, then touched his face and put her arms around him. He let himself be held but would not soften, and broke away with a sudden flexing of his arms. ‘I’m all right.’
‘I know you are.’
‘I just want to know if Mum’s all right.’
‘Well, she’s not, you know that – ’
‘I know – ’
‘ – but inside her head I think she’s getting it sorted out. She wants you to be where you’ll be happy. You can help her by being happy, Damon.’ She heard how stupid it sounded, but could not think of anything else that she might have said. ‘I bet you’ll find a trampoline up there. Probably the best, if I know Howie.’ But didn’t she insult the boy with this? Say that bouncing up and down was the important thing? He wanted forward movement: what to do? and possibly even: what’s the meaning of it? What is love?
‘She hasn’t forgotten you, Damon. It’s just that this is just about the worst shock a person can ever have and she’s got to find a place to go, inside her head, where she can be safe for a while. And sure of things until she learns how to carry on. It doesn’t leave room for anything else. She’s gone back to where she grew up. To Sweden, I mean. Further than that, in a way. She’s kind of mixing herself into it. I think it’s necessary, for a time. But it doesn’t leave a place for you and Olivia much. When she comes out the other side … ’ She touched the boy again. He drew away.
‘She’ll never walk though.’
‘It doesn’t seem so. Unless a miracle … ’
He made an angry moveme
nt, rejecting miracles. ‘So she’ll never be the same.’
‘Her mind will be the same.’
‘No it won’t.’ He was instructing her. ‘You know things with your spine, your spine comes first.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘No one told me. I just know.’
‘Well, someone said’ – no good naming foreign names just now – ‘that the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades and we should worship the spine and the way it tingles, but no one’s ever proved you can’t do it all in your head. The spine’s a kind of fossil, I think, and sensation isn’t anything until it’s known up here.’ She touched her head. ‘Anyway, artistic delight is only part of it.’
‘I wasn’t talking about that,’ Damon said. He could not say what he was talking about. ‘It’s like she’s been turned into something else.’
‘And you want her back?’
‘Yes.’ He might cry now. ‘But she’s not coming. So I want to know, is she all right where she is?’
She watched him with a kind of astonishment, a huge respect. She had thought his physical life left no room for other movement, but he had understood more quickly than anyone else.
‘Yes, she’s all right. But she needs time, and quietness, and space for all the things that are going on. That’s why she’s glad you’re going somewhere you’ll be happy. You like your grandpa, don’t you?’
‘He’s all right.’
‘It’s not that Ulla doesn’t want you with her – ’
‘The doctor said I should go and sit with her all the time – me and Liv – and talk to her and touch her face.’
‘I think he’s wrong.’
‘Yeah, he’s wrong. I don’t mind going up to Auckland. It’s no hassle.’
‘Your father – ’
‘I don’t care about him. He’s a jerk.’
‘Oh, Damon.’
‘All I want from him is his money.’
‘Damon, don’t.’
He looked at her fiercely. ‘You better look after Liv. She’s got to be all right.’
‘I will. Yes. I will.’
‘That’s good then.’ He turned to the suitcase on his bed. ‘Thanks for the washing.’
‘I’ll write to you, Damon. I’ll tell you how she is. Olivia too. We must all keep in touch – and not be broken up.’ But she seemed to be twittering. She kissed him. She hugged him for a moment. She went home. Her house that had given her enormous pleasure once was now a shell. She could not feel its spaces any more but felt Olivia, upstairs in her room, like a soft kernel that would grow or die. Damon, it seemed to her, was doing both. He would become hugely strong, and misshapen, and terrible. Olivia was different. She would not toughen and deform, but would stop where she was and go nowhere, or would step across the thing that blocked her path and carry on in some ordinary way. She waited for a sign, but it might never come.
Whatever I say, it can be wrong, Gwen thought. Perhaps, though, it isn’t up to me. And Damon too – perhaps one day there’ll be a sign for him. Why can’t Athol make a sign?
She put the kettle on and called upstairs to Olivia, then went up for an answer and found the girl sitting on her bed with her headset on, listening to music. The sound came distantly, as though from a dancehall half a suburb away. The awful nostalgia in far-off music, the instant stinging in the eyes; she blinked her way past. Mimed tea-drinking in the door. Olivia smiled, from a distance even greater than the music, it seemed, and shook her head. Butch, warming her feet like a rug, showed a canine accidentally. The smell of him! She must be deadened to it, smell-deaf. Her immaturity made Gwen shiver with fright. She closed the door softly and went downstairs and drank her tea in the darkened living room, looking at the city in its unconvincing light. They circled like a family of planets, never touched – she, Athol, Damon, Olivia. What was it they turned about? Ulla? Was it Ulla? And what was she? Shall we fall into Ulla and be consumed; is that the only way to touch?
Olivia came downstairs and took the dog outside to pee. She looked in on her way back. ‘Goodnight, Grandma.’ Observing forms, they kept proximity – and needed it, if they were ever to put a head on each other’s shoulder again.
‘Goodnight, love. Sleep well.’
‘You too.’
The dog clicked up behind her. Mounted step by step like an old man. The pipes hummed, the toilet flushed. She was in bed – and did sleep well. Whenever Gwen looked in, she and her dog were spread out on their backs like two exhausted runners. There was nothing to exhaust her in her day – nothing physical, but there must be constant movement, pushing and pulling, in her head.
Gwen went to bed and lay awake. She heard Athol climb on to his porch and turn the key in his front door. She heard him pull his bedroom window shut; lock himself in his room alone. The newspapers had lost interest in him. They were full of Gilbert Fox and his resignation, but Athol had no place any more, which must satisfy him. Man in the shadows – no, that implied invisible pressures put on, and Athol would have none of it, of influence and the pulling of strings. Man in the crowd was better, taking his satisfactions in his head. How he must dislike ‘Peet’, which Howie had in the papers half a dozen times a week, and Gordon would tomorrow when they locked him away. ‘Peet’ was currency for buying and selling: it was true coin or false. Gwen herself spent the name each day, many times. It would not surprise her if Athol changed it one day to Smith or Brown and stepped outside the world of daily exchange. He would move with the crowd, in perfect isolation, for the rest of his life.
She wanted, in her narrow bed, to talk about this, and she almost wept with loneliness. ‘Howie, oh Howie.’ It was not love, it was a need for closeness, and he was the only one she knew. No matter if she despised him. All those things she despised were familiar and she was able to hold them intimately. It was a kind of love – yes it was, she was able to see. She did not want him back – would not have him in the same city if she could help – except for moments like this. She felt it pass, and was relieved. She played with Howie cruelly for a while, then thought about him sensibly. His love for Damon was selfish, but useful for all that; it need not be dangerous.
How would the new wife feel? That was the question. This Darlene – a ‘reely’-sayer, too, given her background – how would Damon fit in with her?
She went out to the airport and kissed Damon goodbye, then rode back to town in her son’s car.
‘He’ll be all right. He’s one tough kid,’ Athol said.
‘You know he’s gone up there for good? Howie won’t let him come back.’
‘I know.’
‘Who do you think you are, Athol? I mean in relation to him?’
He did not reply and she let it go. She said, ‘Ulla will come and live with me when she comes home. It has to be downstairs so I’m going to convert the dining room. You’ll have to pay for that.’
‘All right.’
‘It’s going to cost a lot.’
‘I said all right.’
‘I want to spend some money too on Olivia’s room.’
‘Whatever you say, Mum.’
‘And when Ulla comes home we’ll need a nurse.’
‘You think I only care about money, but I don’t. Money doesn’t bother me at all.’
‘Do you know how much a nurse will cost?’
‘A lot, I suppose. I want to pay for Ulla.’
‘You do?’
‘Because there’s nothing else I can do for her.’
‘Or the children?’
‘Yes, them too.’
It was a confession. She glimpsed something in it that might be courage, then it was gone and all she could see was lack and failure and selfishness.
‘Put me down here, Athol. There’s no need to take me all the way home.’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘You’ll want to get to work. I need a walk.’
She climbed The Terrace and went through the university, and cleaned her house and worked in the garden un
der clouds that brushed her on the cheeks as they went by. In the afternoon she took Butch for his walk, and bought an early Post and saw that her son Gordon was sentenced to eighteen months in jail. It was a shorter time than he had expected, but he had shown ‘no emotion’ on hearing it. The others had got longer. Gordon’s failure to run with the big boys brought him a benefit at last. She was pleased, although if she let herself go onwards a little way she would cry for him and wring her hands here in the street. She bullied the dog home and locked him on the section and set off on her daily visit to the hospital. Afternoons were the time when Ulla seemed at her best – if that phrase were permissible. She talked more and smiled now and then in the afternoon.
‘How are you, dear?’
‘Don’t call me dear. Call me Ulla, please.’
‘I usually do. You’re lucky to have such a lovely name.’ Although sometimes she could not say it because it was so strange. But perhaps that was just the long walk through the corridors and the bed that was a machine. Naming should bring her back and into touch.
‘Did Damon go?’
‘Yes, he’s off. On the plane.’ Another danger: to baby-talk her. She had almost said ‘on the hairy-buzzer’. ‘I’ll write to him when I get home so he’ll get a letter nice and quick.’ She hesitated. ‘Would you like to write? I can copy it down.’
‘Not today.’
‘Can I read to you?’
‘No. Just sit.’
Gwen leaned over Ulla and looked at her face. She touched her lightly – butterfly touch. ‘Your scar is healing. It’s not going to show very much.’
‘It was a clean cut,’ Ulla said.
‘Have they done any more tests? On your spine, I mean?’
‘They do things all the time. There is a great science of it, it seems.’
‘And?’
‘What do they find out, you mean? Behind all their smiles is long faces. There is nothing good.’
‘Do they say anything about how long you’ll stay?’
‘Not to me. It’s you they’ll tell. You are next of kin.’
‘Do you want to go to Auckland? To the spinal unit? It’s early, I know.’
