The Name on the Door is Not Mine

by C. K. Stead

  Rugby in those days was going through a static phase: there were too many scrums and lineouts and, compared to the professional era, scores tended to be low. It was often grim grinding muddy rain-soaked stuff, and you had to wait, shivering, for those moments when the back line got it out, fast and without a fumble or a forward pass, to a speedster on the wing who scored in the corner; or for a big man on the scale of Don (‘the Boot’) Clarke to put it between the posts from fifty-five yards. This was a good match and our team won; but I remember little about it except that I was sitting silent between my silent Dad and my silent former school-mate who had killed his beloved Rose and asked me to help him dispose of her body. On the way home we bought fish and chips.

  Days passed and I didn’t see Mike and heard nothing about Rose. Then there was an item in the paper that she was missing and ‘fears were held for her safety’. Her little blue Morris Minor had been found abandoned on a street in Hamilton. It was said she’d been ill and was thought to have gone there to visit family, but no one in that town had seen her. Her bank account was untouched.

  The police visited me and I had my first intimation that it wasn’t going to go well for Mike. They were suspicious by now, and perhaps already believed he’d killed her. There was the evidence of the neighbour who thought she’d heard a cry for help. Mike had not taken Rose to a doctor or a hospital. He told them she’d been ill but recovered quickly. He said the neighbour’s impression that there was blood on his sleeve was wrong. The last he’d seen of Rose was when she’d set off in her car to visit relatives in Hamilton.

  It was true she had an uncle, aunt and cousins in that town, but they hadn’t seen her recently, nor heard from her.

  I said I had nothing to tell them except how much Mike loved Rose. ‘He wouldn’t have killed her,’ I said. ‘He loved her too much.’ They were the dangerous ones, the detective said—the ‘madly in love’ ones. They were often killers.

  The cops went away for a while, then came back with more questions. They’d talked to the boyfriend, who said he thought Mike was dangerous and that Rose had been frightened of him. What did I think?

  They knew I had a boat.

  Soon they were suggesting there’d been a murder, that I had helped get rid of the body and possibly driven the car to Hamilton and left it there. They began to threaten. They cited the case of George Cecil Horry, convicted of murder even though the body had never been found. They had a witness in Hamilton who would say she’d seen someone, a stranger to the district who fitted my description, same age, height and hair colour, ‘acting suspiciously’ in the same street and around the same time the car was found. They would put forward their version of the murder. I would be part of their story and the jury would believe them. I would be convicted as an accessory at least, possibly as one of two murderers.

  There were two of them of course, one bullying and threatening, the other begging me to be sensible and save myself. The fact that I’d seen the movies they had seen and knew they were playing ‘good cop, bad cop’ didn’t make it any easier to remain silent.

  I talked to Dad, told him what had happened, and he panicked. ‘Tell them the truth or I will.’ He got me a lawyer and soon there was an agreement reached with the police. I had, after all, refused to help the killer, even though he was an old friend. If I would tell them what I knew, make a statement and give evidence at the trial, it was unlikely I would be charged with a crime.

  Mike was already under arrest when what was left of poor Rose floated up towards the surface of the Waikato River, close to the Fairfield Bridge. It was only a mile or two from where the car had been abandoned. Mike pleaded not guilty. I gave my evidence, which turned out to be crucial because he’d said to me ‘I’ve killed Rose’—the one and only time he ever admitted it. That, together with the neighbour’s evidence, the boyfriend’s, and police and pathology reports, was enough. Mike said nothing throughout the trial. He’d said to me, ‘It was an accident,’ and his lawyer wanted to know what kind of accident so he could make a case for a verdict of manslaughter—but Mike wouldn’t help. He seemed to have set his face against everything and everyone, as if we were all interfering in something that was private, belonging only to himself and Rose. The fact that he hadn’t called emergency services, that he’d wanted me to help him get rid of the body, that he’d got rid of it himself—all that went against him. His lawyer made what he could of very little, and the jury didn’t take long to return a verdict. He got a life sentence. Hanging had been abolished by then, and non-parole periods were not as severe as they’ve since become. There was a good chance if he behaved himself he would be out in ten or twelve years. I got on with my life.

  Over the next decade I married, had two children, discovered books and took courses. I was still a fisherman, but my life followed a pattern like rugby itself—it grew more interesting, faster paced, more wide ranging and professional in every way. Once I wrote a Christmas letter to Mike and offered to visit, but there was no reply. I supposed he bore a grudge—that wouldn’t be surprising. On the other hand he might have recognised by now that I hadn’t had much choice, and that he could never have got away with his crime. But I had no way of knowing how he thought about me.

  Just occasionally I would have reason to drive past the grim grey stone walls of Mt Eden prison, built in Victorian times like a warning to the world, with conspicuous black iron bars and battlements, and I would imagine him in there, bored, cold probably, restless, longing for action and for love. Now and then there was an escape, and I would hope it was Mike, and imagine hiding him, helping him get away, even though I knew it would be better if he sat tight and planned for life after an authorised release. I was going to write saying I could offer him work when he was freed, but the idea made my wife nervous and she was against it. ‘In any case,’ she said, ‘you don’t know what his parole conditions will be.’ Twice I sent him books I thought might interest him. I got no acknowledgement.

  Ten years passed, twelve. As someone involved in his conviction I had certain rights to information. I was told he’d taken up painting in prison and had even been coached by one of our best-known painters, who used to make prison visits and spoke highly of his talent. This didn’t surprise me. At school Mike had always been awful at English, hopeless at maths, but brilliant in the art room.

  Otherwise his prison behaviour was described as ‘normal’. He’d been a reasonably docile inmate, not a trouble-maker, but his release had been delayed because he was still refusing to acknowledge responsibility for Rose’s death. That made the parole board fearful he might act violently again. There was some anxiety in particular because he’d suggested in one interview that the person who had given the most damning evidence against him might have been the real killer. It was probably the kind of black joke he was capable of, but it hardly served him well if he hoped for release.

  The authorities didn’t give it any credence, but they felt it had to be reported to the police and investigated. The police came and talked to me about it. They were apologetic. For the moment Mike would remain behind bars.

  In the end, after about sixteen years, he was released, but because of the board’s anxieties the parole conditions were strict. His father was now a widower and had retired back to where he came from, a small town on the east coast of the South Island under the shadow of the Southern Alps. It was a beautiful remote dreamy place, with seabirds, seal colonies, whales offshore and high cliffs looking over stony beaches that roared as the waves rolled in and rattled like laughter as they sucked back. Mike was required to live with his father, report twice a week to the local police, and not go further than thirty miles north or south of the town without permission. Thirty miles either way got you nowhere. There was no other town to visit, nowhere to go. The gossip was that he had settled into this new life, accepting its limitations, and getting on with his painting, which had become an obsession, his only raison d’être. It was reported in the papers he was preparing a show for a small gal
lery down there.

  And then, after just a couple of years of freedom, with the show ready to go up on the walls, he went missing. His father’s car, which Mike drove, was found half submerged at the bottom of one of those cliffs. The doors were wide open, big waves washing through. There was a hunt for a body. None was found; but the seas there are so wild at times it could have been swept out on currents that surge around the peninsula, in which case it would never be recovered.

  There were some who believed he must have faked his own death, and the police were said to be ‘keeping an open mind’. The police mind was still ‘open’ seven years later when the court officially declared him dead. And that was when his father, his sole heir and by now a very old man, arranged for the planned show of the paintings to go ahead. It was called True Love, Mike’s own title, and I felt I had to see it.

  I flew down for the show and stayed overnight. It had received a lot of media attention, but by the time I got there the interest had subsided. I spent an hour of one afternoon with those paintings, but there were still a lot of people coming to see them so I returned next morning when it was quieter. There were thirty-seven (the magic number) all of Rose—‘Rose 1’, ‘Rose 2’, ‘Rose 3’, all the way to 37—Rose from many angles, in every part of the house, wearing anything from evening clothes to jeans to nothing at all, and with the full range of expressions from reflective inwardness to eager animation. He must have kept perfect (together, I suppose, with a few photographs) his recollection not only of her face and form but of that crummy little house on the edge of Grafton Gully where she had briefly lived with him and where he’d killed her.

  The attention Mike had given to the backgrounds was almost as intense and particular as the attention to Rose herself. It was as if the place, scheduled at the time for demolition, and long since vanished under the motorway that now sweeps down the gully towards the port, had been his paradiso. Everything looked marvellous, not because the objects—chairs, tables and rugs, mugs, plates and vases, the black phone on the wall with its circle of numbers, the bath on its shell-shaped feet, the WC with its chain and china handle, the untidy bedroom with its ancient chest of drawers, its unmade bed on which flowery dresses and a guitar lay casually dropped—were all beautiful, elegant, finely crafted, but because they were real, and of their time, which meant (because that was what was fashionable then) before their time. This was the house, ‘a 1960s hippie house’ I would have said, as I remembered it; or rather, as the paintings brought it back to me. It was Rose’s style—the flowery ankle-length dresses, the long hair, the smell of incense and the talk of Hermann Hesse and Kahlil Gibran. And in each painting, awake, asleep, reclining, walking, reading, cooking, turning away, looking back, looking out, taking a bath, there was the face or the figure of Rose—authentic, irreplaceable, admired and adored.

  At first viewing they were wonderful; but on the second visit I began to have misgivings, and to react in ways that were contradictory. Being ‘taken back’ in time, by sights or sounds, or (often with surprising intensity) by a smell, can be exhilarating; and these paintings ‘took me back’—so keenly! But I began to ask myself what was missing—and the answer was nothing, and everything! There was no weapon, no blood, no dead body. There was no truck with the yellow tarp. There was no Mike either, smoking roll-your-owns—no guilty party, and no guilt. It was like the silence he had maintained all these years, which had left us all imagining such a range of scenarios but not knowing what had happened. There was only the house, and Rose. All the rest was gone, replaced by what: art? illusion? the poetry of fact?

  The last painting was called ‘Rose 37’ but in this one she was absent. It was that kitchen. There was a back door, a short step down into a tiny yard with a patch of grass and a washing line, and beyond that the green wilderness of Grafton Gully, full of a tangled mix of native and exotic trees, flowering vines and creepers. In that final picture the door is open wide. You can see the old gas stove, the sink bench with a draining board and gas califont, a pewter-looking kettle and a china teapot, an ironing board, a rail with hand- and tea-towels. The door so open to the wilderness seems to say that someone has just stepped outside and, like Captain Oates, ‘may be gone some time’. It is Rose, absent at last, gone for good.

  The paintings were a statement—they said something. I’d told the police Mike loved Rose and would not have killed her, and that was what he was saying, through these pictures, which seemed to me beautiful because they were so real.

  They were a story, not true because radically incomplete, but creating their own reality.

  I listened to a distinguished chap talking about them to an intelligent-looking younger woman. ‘They can’t have been done in prison,’ he told her. ‘Too detailed. Must have been done down here, since his release.’

  ‘What about memory?’ I asked, poking my nose in—but he didn’t seem to mind. Just shook his head and said again, full of confidence, ‘Too detailed. He’s one of these hyper-realists who have to work from a model and a scene.’

  As they drifted away from me I heard her ask were they any good, did he think?

  The chap laughed. It was a civilised chortle, not a guffaw. ‘He had talent all right. No doubt about it. But he was uneducated.’

  I thought of asking whether I could buy one, but there was no one to ask. These two were just visitors and for the moment there was no one at the desk. And when I thought about it I didn’t want that either. Whichever one I chose would really need all the rest; and I could imagine getting used to it, and then being troubled by a sense of all that it left unsaid.

  There was a book in which visitors could make comments. ‘Lovely,’ someone had written. ‘That’s all very well,’ said the next, ‘but think what he did to her!’ A third declared that the killer had ‘paid the price for his crime’. A fourth added ‘If he was the killer!!’

  The knowledgeable older chap and the young woman just signed their names and were leaving when she ducked back and scribbled, ‘Most interesting. Thanks!’

  Now the room was empty. I took up the biro. I felt disturbed by these reminders—and troubled that I couldn’t think of anything that seemed right or appropriate to put in the book.

  ‘Nice work, Mike,’ I wrote; and then, just in case he, or his ghost, was hiding somewhere, watching me: ‘Sorry I couldn’t help.’

  Sex in America

  THIS IS THE MOMENT when he relaxes. He thinks he may only have learned it recently—learned it consciously—and even now it doesn’t always happen. It’s when all the anxiety goes, and all the effort. He is no longer worrying whether he is pleasing her, whether she wants more or less, slower or faster, where they are going, when they will arrive. All of that deliberateness collapses and dissolves into this sense of the pleasure of it, body and mind that have become one, bathed in it, irradiated. There is nothing else he wants in the world, only this moment when he can stop like a rower resting on his oars, gliding between banks, listening, looking.

  He is now that part—exclusively has become—‘it’. Hooked in hard. Locked by her at base. Anchored. That’s where his sense of himself is clearest. No boundary: himself as part of her; herself as part of him.

  But no—not exclusively. Not quite. Isn’t he also two eyes turning sideways to see the nameless couple on the big hotel bed in the big hotel mirror—recognising the self that is not-self, the voyeur taking private note of it, remembering.

  He meets her eyes in the mirror, half answers her half-smile, her eyes looking, then rolling back as he moves slowly down and out, up and in, back into the lock.

  She is small and perfect, laid out there on the sheets, one neat leg thrown wide and hanging off the bed. He likes that image which makes him look so large, over her, in her.

  If they were talking about this moment rather than living it—if they should talk about it afterwards—he might say to her, naïve, laid open and made innocent by the pleasure of it, that he wonders whether fucking is like this for many, or most, or f
ew. Why should there be so many shadows over the landscape, so many storms, so much violence? Why is the human world not full of benign and stupid sex-junkies, high and happy on their drug?

  But they have not talked in that way; not in words; only in the language of skin and hair, textures, moistures, groans and sighs.

  When, two days ago, he was woken in her apartment by her climbing over him, getting out of the bed, trying not to wake him, saying, ‘Reste, mon ami. Bouge pas’—because she had to go to work while he, the visitor, did not—he was not able to remember her name. While she was in the shower he scrabbled through her pocketbook to find it; and then didn’t at once recognise it—Catherine Demas—because she pronounces it in French: to his Anglo-ear, ‘Cutreen’.

  ‘Cutreen.’ He said it, lying there in her bed, the first morning after the first night, a cable car clanking by on the hill—trying to live it as if he, who has never been to Paris except in his mind, were Henry Miller, and she some magic woman from Quiet Days in Clichy.

  That first night there was more of the anxiety, the effort, the need to prove something (this was, in his brother Greg’s phrase, sex in America!); less of the pleasure. Or rather, the pleasure was in the excitement—because it was happening to him; because he was doing it, and well.

  She has thrown her head sideways and is shuddering—once, a moment later a second time. These shudders are what she told him last night were her ‘leetle comings’. ‘Ze beeg one’ she likes to save up, hold off …

  He responds to something, moves as she seems to require, and wonders how this can be, how it works, that already, like long-established dancing partners, some intuitive monitor in each feels what it makes the other feel—and responds.