by Fiona Kidman
Grant explained how he wanted to get into the air force, and that he took a train north every weekend, for weekly flying lessons. He could get them cheaper up the line.
Allan nodded his head wisely. ‘Yeah, good luck, mate. I reckon fair enough. You know, I thought you might be a right wanker when you turned up. Tell the truth, I didn’t reckon they’d give you a job. But you’re bloody good, mate. You reckon on being a pilot then?’
Grant nodded. He didn’t say that he just missed a university scholarship when he left school a year or so ago. He had put that behind him. ‘I want to get into the air force. I’m going to volunteer. What about you?’
‘You won’t catch me volunteering. Best thing Norman Kirk ever did was getting rid of conscription. He’ll go down in history for that. Who wants to fight in wars?’
Grant was uncomfortable. The Labour government had come in on a promise of making military training voluntary, rather than on a ballot. There’d been talk about this at home. That’s what you got with these left-wing outfits, his father said. So far as Grant could tell, his father hadn’t been to war. When asked, he’d muttered about being a man between the wars: too young for one, too old for the next. Besides, he’d had important work to do on the home front, overseeing coal mines. They couldn’t have done without me, he told his son, and that was all he had to say about it. As for Kirk, he was too tied up with the unions. Golden years, he said, bloody golden years we’ve had, and Kirk’ll sell us all down the drain.
‘I reckon it’s the life for me,’ Grant said. ‘Anyway, I plan to be an officer. I reckon if I can fly a plane, it’ll be a start.’
‘I’ve done boot camp, already,’ Allan said, his face darkening.
Grant wasn’t sure what Allan meant by this. His new friend didn’t seem anxious to explain.
Sooner or later, Grant’s father said he should go to university anyway, be a lawyer, something like that, make a pile of money by the time he was fifty and retire. Who’d want to be like him, Jock Pawson said. Slaved all my bloody life, and for what? His son thought to mention, but didn’t, that Charm failed to live up to her name, had kept Jock slaving because of all the money she spent on horses and booze, and going out with women she described as her girlfriends.
Jock said, in a temper once, that he’d met her sort before, and he thought he’d been in for a bit more than this when he married her. Where Jock had met women like Charm before, Grant had no idea. His father didn’t talk about his past, or his first wife. It had all started out roses with Charm and the old man, but it hadn’t lasted. Grant couldn’t wait to get out of the house near the sea but, until the expensive flying lessons were complete, he felt impecunious and stranded. It was hard to tell who disgusted him more, his father or his stepmother. His stepmother, who had become slatternly, seemed the obvious choice, but there were things about his father that Grant couldn’t bring himself to think about. They didn’t happen, he told himself, when the thoughts sneaked up on him in idle moments. In the evenings, on week nights, he got out of the house and went to the pictures. He liked that. He could lose himself for a bit. Night after night, just queuing up, taking his ticket, sitting in the dark, watching the movie and slouching off home when everyone had gone to bed. It was hard to wake up some mornings in time for his early start to work, but it was worth it, not having to stay in.
Allan said, ‘You reckon I could come up and watch you fly?’
At first Grant was inclined to say no. He wasn’t used to having friends.
‘Think about it, mate,’ Allan said. He’d collected up a couple of dozen beers on the run that day. They were supposed to share them with the driver, but Allan had dumped some behind a warehouse. Later, when the run was over, he’d come back for them. ‘Come round to my place. We can knock these back, have a smoke or something.’
He inhabited a room of slime and torn curtains. There were three other men, all a little older than Allan, living in the run-down house. It was great they had their own place, Allan said.
When Grant looked startled, Allan said, ‘Boys’ home, that’s where I grew up. I tell you, this place is a palace, man. These are my mates. They looked after me, eh.’
The men’s names were Willie, Snort and Ripper, or that’s how Allan introduced them. They had stubble on their chins, rough tattoos on their arms. Snort had one on his forehead of a word that looked like ‘Fuct’, written vertically. There was also a girl, who sat motionless in a corner. While Grant was there, she stared ahead of her with seemingly blank eyes. Grant understood that if she was to be introduced, then he had to wait until one of the men decided on it. Her hair was stacked up in a black bird’s nest arrangement on top of her head. Her face was very pale and her lips were painted white. Only her slate-coloured eyes, cool and hostile, rimmed with black kohl, provided colour in her face. He didn’t dare to stare at her. The introduction didn’t happen.
Ripper checked Grant over. He’d worn a clean shirt with freshly pressed jeans. In spite of the filth of his job, and Charm’s cold showers, Grant had cultivated an early fastidiousness about his person. When he got inside in the evenings, he boiled a jug of hot water and took it to the bathroom where he scrubbed under his fingernails, behind his ears and knees, as if trying to clean something from beneath the skin itself.
‘Who’s this fancy little arsehole, anyway?’
‘He’s all right,’ Allan said. ‘He’s meaner than he seems.’
‘Doesn’t look it. You sure he’s not spying on us?’
‘Nah, he’s a mate.’ He passed Grant a rolled joint. ‘C’mon, just because he’s smart doesn’t make him a bad bugger. Eh, Grantie?’
‘How did you end up in a boys’ home?’ Grant asked.
‘Oh yeah, well, see my ol’ man used to beat up on the old lady, always pissed. He had me pinching fags for him when I was a kid. They reckoned I was neglected. Well, yeah, I was, but it was worse in the home, eh guys?’
They talked among themselves: about getting their heads punched in by the staff and by each other, swung around by the hair, the solitary confinement, taking it up the arse.
‘My stepmother used to beat the tripe out of me,’ Grant said. ‘She’s a real bitch.’
‘Your stepmother? Didn’t you punch her back?’
‘No,’ Grant said, recognising a mistake. The men were looking at him as though he were a dead rat. ‘Well, my dad had a leather strap.’
‘You still living at home?’ Ripper asked, incredulous.
When Grant didn’t reply, Snort said, ‘He’s a little fairy. Stays at home with a sheila who beats him up and a daddy with a big strap. I reckon we could show you a thing or two, faggot.’
‘That was when I was a kid,’ Grant said. ‘I’m just staying until I’m in the military.’ A pincer movement had developed around him. Allan looked stricken.
‘Just until I’m in the military,’ his tormentors said. ‘Oh yeah. What are we going to do to him, boys? Shall we smash the crap out of him?’
‘Quit it,’ Allan said. Out of the corner of his eye, Grant thought he saw the woman’s head swivel and turn in his direction. There was just enough pause for him to shoot out the door and run. Footsteps followed for a few minutes as he ran harder and faster. In his last year at school, he’d won the fifteen hundred metres; they weren’t to know that. He heard the heaving grunts of a man who had run out of strength. The footsteps fell away. A sense of exhilaration flooded through him. The stars seemed to be racing above.
In the morning he wondered whether to turn up for work or not. He had more or less made up his mind that he’d hand in his notice. He went in anyway. At the depot, he smelled the muck of the trucks, a stench never quite removed, despite sluicing at the end of the shifts. The sight of Allan’s bulky frame made him hesitate. Allan turned round, his face bruised and swollen.
‘Yeah, good on you, mate, you got away,’ Allan said, and it took Grant a moment to register that the other youth was friendly, not taking the piss. He figured the black eye Allan s
ported was on his account. ‘So how about it, I go up the line with you on Saturday and watch your flying lesson?’
Grant couldn’t see how he could refuse. Even as he was buying his ticket at the station, he still hoped Allan wouldn’t turn up, but turned around in the queue and he was there. ‘I brought some grub,’ he said, holding up a paper bag of sandwiches.
It became a regular thing. Grant still had three lessons to go before his first solo. Allan had a plan of his own. He told Grant, in a hesitant almost shy manner, that he was going after an apprenticeship in the public works. What had happened to him in the past (and yes, he’d done time as a youth offender for a burglary, he wasn’t proud of it), he reckoned he could still come out all right. If it was good enough for the prime minister to leave school early and be a boiler-maker, he could make something of himself, too. Allan reckoned Norman Kirk was an inspiration.
‘I’m all for Big Norm,’ he’d say. Big Norm. Big in every way, a large man with a generous heart, that’s what people said. Allan reckoned Norm’d change things for people like him.
As they hurtled through the tunnels beneath the mountain range and rushed through the countryside, trees turning red in the advancing autumn, past herds of pansy-eyed cows, the stacks of dairy factory buildings in little towns, Grant saw himself changing, viewing the world from new angles. He had thought Allan a bit of a half-wit, but it occurred to him now that they weren’t so different: two outsiders, a couple of loners in a fraught world, drawn together. It was embarrassing to realise that Allan saw him, too, as a role model. Little did Allan know what his life was really like, even though he had tried to explain it on the night of his visit. He knew Allan was waiting for a return invitation, but he didn’t take people to meet Jock and Charm. He would have liked Allan to have met Janice, but it was too late for that. She was a dumb kid, with her wonky face, but he missed her, the last anchor to what passed as home. She’d gone off with some bloke, he’d been told, and, in this, his sisters seemed to be much of a kind.
THE HIGH-WINGED PIPER SUPER CUB Grant was learning to fly had a body painted yellow, with red wings and cowl — a regular little dragon of a machine. It had a top speed of a hundred and eighty-five kilometres an hour. There were two seats, one for Bob, his instructor, and one for him. Bob was a lean fellow, tanned and muscular, with a crew-cut, mid-forties perhaps. Grant supposed he was good-looking. Women waited for him at the end of the lessons, not always the same woman, although they treated Bob with similar mellow affection, raising their cheeks to accept his kisses. On the last lesson before his first solo, after he and Bob climbed out of the plane, they found one of these women chatting to Allan, laughing over some private joke. Allan was still a rough-looking bastard, but he’d cleaned himself up over the past weeks, his long hair clean and curling behind his ears, the stubble of feathery beard shaved, at the weekends anyway. He had big shoulders, and it gave Grant a jolt to see that women might find him attractive. Although Grant was nineteen, he hadn’t regarded girls in this way. Desire of any kind was yet to touch him. He could only look in on those who professed love for each other and wonder.
Bob seemed none too friendly when he saw this banter going on between Allan and the woman. She was younger than Bob, a blonde with big white teeth and shiny gums that showed when she smiled. Her lipstick appeared part of her soft mobile mouth. Grant saw she was wearing a wedding ring, but he didn’t think she was Bob’s wife.
‘Your mate’s doing pretty well,’ Bob said to Allan. ‘I reckon he’ll be through next week.’
‘I plan to keep flying,’ Grant said. ‘Get some more hours up.’
‘Sure,’ Bob shrugged and Grant wondered if he’d had enough of him. He told himself he was imagining it. At school, the counsellor he was ordered to see told him that his withdrawn nature was due to his mother’s death. That, and his instinct to reject people’s good intentions, as if he could control others by leaving them before they could leave him. He didn’t believe this. The counsellor was an arsehole, spouting jargon. He had to keep telling himself this.
‘Are you going to bring Lothario with you next week?’ Bob said, and it was on the tip of Grant’s tongue to say that no, he wanted to do his solo on his own with no distractions, but one look at Allan’s animated expression told him that he couldn’t do that. The counsellor’s smarmy, comforting face loomed before him.
‘You bet,’ Grant said. ‘Allan’s waiting for me to get my passenger’s licence, aren’t you, mate?’
All the same, he wondered what Allan and the blonde, whose name was Mandy, had been talking about that made them so happy. Almost as if they had a secret. ‘Cool chick,’ Allan said, after Bob and Mandy had left.
Grant had an uneasy feeling that Mandy would be there the following week. Not that it really mattered; Bob would be on the ground, and he would be up in the sky, alone.
The following Saturday was overcast when they left Wellington, a hint of thunder in the air. Grant worried that the flight might be cancelled. Before he left home, he phoned Bob to check that the flight was still on. Bob’s sleepy, grumpy voice answered. ‘Didn’t you go to bed last night?’ he said. ‘The weather’s okay here. Have you got cold feet?’
A woman’s voice, not Mandy’s, said, ‘Who is it?’
‘Some kid wants to do his solo today.’ Bob’s voice was muffled, but not enough that Grant couldn’t hear.
‘Can’t you put him off? We’re supposed to be going to your mother’s today.’ Grant guessed that it was Bob’s wife.
‘Nah. I need to get it over and done with.’ Taking his hand away from the phone, he said, ‘Just get your arse over here, mate. I’ll worry about the weather.’
So he was right. Bob had had a gutsful of him. For a moment, Grant thought about giving it away. He admired Bob, did his every bidding. He had thought himself a star, just like Bob told him. He paused at his bedroom door before packing up the last of his gear, then turned back. For years he’d kept a secret talisman, one that he hid at the back of his bookshelf, still filled with old textbooks he knew Charm wouldn’t touch in her housekeeping, which had become desultory. The object filled him with both longing and repulsion, a terrible fascination. When he’d had exams at school, or run a race, he would touch it beforehand in a secret furtive manner, to bring him luck. The mangy brown fur collar had been his mother’s, rescued from the bonfire of her belongings that Charm had made. He slipped the collar into his jacket pocket.
Mandy was there waiting. She flicked her hair from her face and wished Grant well. First, he and Bob would do some circuits and then, all going well, Bob would land the plane and hand over to Grant.
‘Nicely done,’ Bob said, when they were on the ground. He seemed to mean it, although he appeared in a hurry to get the flight over. Grant guessed he didn’t want to leave Allan and Mandy alone for too long.
‘All righty, then, it’s all yours. Now just remember, don’t go over five thousand feet. You got that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good lad. What else?’
‘Keep an eye on my instruments, watch out for other aircraft.’
‘You got it. Remember your radio procedures. If you get into trouble, let us know. I’ll be in the control tower.’
And just like that, Grant was soaring into the sky, higher and higher, and it all belonged to him, the great space he had been searching for in his life since he was a child. Or was it that the space was already there, and at last he could contemplate it on his own? He reached in and touched the fox fur in his pocket.
And it came flooding back to him, the thing he wasn’t supposed to remember, the thing that had happened the night after his mother died. His vague strange mother with her head always in a book, the awful food she cooked, the way she let him and his sisters bang on the table with the handles of their knives and forks and shout when their father wasn’t there. He remembered green strands of boiled cabbage, stuff they ate because they were hungry and that was what she gave them. But there was, too, the gentlene
ss with which she placed her hand on his head every night, as he pulled the covers up, a sense she gave him of his life mattering. And the way she washed his wet sheets on bad nights and didn’t tell Jock, though he knew his father had worked it out.
He peed his bed the night she died. The next night, after the bonfire, his father said, ‘You’d better get into bed with me.’ All the other beds in the house were full. ‘If you wet it, I’ll take the strap to you.’
THE SKY, WHICH WAS OVERCAST, despite Bob’s assurances about the weather, now filled with clouds that tumbled towards him. He should have been able to see the sea in the distance, but he couldn’t. Had he let the plane drift outside the range of the circuit he was supposed to follow? A misty rain was developing. But still his mind was playing back some old reel of memory and he couldn’t stop it.
GRANT WAS AWAKE WHEN HIS FATHER finally slid into bed beside him. Jock had gone out to walk Charm to her bus. He was gone a long time. Grant lay fighting sleep, so that he could control his bladder, curling himself into as small a ball as he could make himself, his mother’s fur collar clutched against his chest. He sensed his father’s bony frame, pouched with sagging flesh, his heavy breathing. His father reached over, telling him to keep still, for God’s sake. Then his hand brushed the fur collar, and hesitated. What happened next was so quick, Grant had come to believe it never happened. But it did, and now, up here in the sky and the altimeter climbing, he knew that it was true.
His father’s hand had moved among the fur, he had groaned, touched first himself, then Grant’s penis, rubbing it up and down in his hand, until it stood up like a little prick of asparagus. Grant gave a howl of anguish, and his father’s voice at his ear said, ‘Shut up, shut up, will you. For Chrissake, shut up.’
He had let go of his son, and rolled over in the bed. Sometime in the night they had both gone to sleep. In the morning the bed was wet, and his father viewed the evidence without speaking. But Grant didn’t get the strap.
