The Crime of Huey Dunstan

by James Mcneish

  Fifteen years later I still have that impression. As I sit here in front of my computer, I feel that something must have happened to make a person like that stand out and be luminous. Just as something must have happened to make me conscious of possessing his touch all these years later. I still have it, that touch. For, as the poet says:

  Oh, I have pressed the fingers of great poets,

  leaders of men, fair women, but no hand

  has ever been so exquisitely shaped

  nor had touched mine with such thrill of kinship.

  CODA

  THE OTHER DAY I came across a letter from a woman living in Antwerp who had read a paper I wrote for a Dutch journal, Psychology Today. She said she was one of the twelve jurors who acquitted Huey at his second trial. Her letter ended, “I never wanted to let him off but got talked roundby the others. I still think he was lying. If I’d had my way, I would have hanged the bastard.”

  She left me feeling in much the same case as Tolkien who after the spectacular success of his fairy story, The Lord of the Rings, received a savage letter from a correspondent crying out that Frodo should have been executed as a traitor. “Believe me,” Tolkien wrote to a friend, “it was not until I read this that I had myself any idea how ‘topical’ such a situation might appear.” In the same way I had no idea when I began to write Huey’s story that it might have any sort of universal application, underlining a thorn of child-abuse allegations in which the fear of devil worship and the persecution of witches belonging to the dark ages would be revived in my lifetime. Of course Huey’s case which has a happy ending is unusual. It bucks the trend. We assume at the outset that his memory will be shown to have been fabricated. And it is not fabricated. For all that, ancient impulses still hover about our courtrooms, and while we no longer burn witches at the stake or return verdicts of homicide against mischievous or inanimate objects said to be possessed by the Devil, like haystacks and locomotives, we still incline to usurp the judge and, deep down, prefer to consign honest beings like Huey Dunstan to the execution squad.

  I wonder if the woman who wrote to me from Antwerp was the one in the dining room that night who Albert said was bawling her eyes out. I still mistrust those in whom the urge to punish is strong.

  Huey was released after a few months. Acquitted of murder, he still had to serve out his time on the lesser charge of manslaughter. He’s married now I gather with two small children—and, yes, is running a small tree-pruning business with his father somewhere up country. At least he was, when I last heard from Lawrence.

  I don’t hear much from Lawrence these days. Having won an acquittal for murder and established a legal precedent—a number of law schools I’m told now teach from the case—Lawrence made a further appeal and sought to demonstrate that Huey’s actions, being involuntary, justified a complete acquittal. This appeal failed. Personally I think the appellate judges didn’t want to face up to it. Lawrence wrote to me afterwards, disgusted, saying he intended to go to the Privy Council for a definitive ruling “as to whether people can be criminally responsible for acts over which they have no control”. But Lawrence’s life then changed. He made the mistake of standing for the mayoralty in Cornford a second time, and becoming elected. He has since been re-elected and is now involved in Mayors for Peace International. He travels all over the world.

  Lisbeth and I carry on much as before. I celebrated my eighty-second birthday last month by getting a new passport and attending a conference on refugee trauma in Taiwan. Lisbeth still goes to the hospice and I stumble out to study the miseries of the world as best I can.

  So in the end everything turned out well, in a manner of speaking. There is a dictum that people will forgive you anything except the help you have given them. It may be true although as Lisbeth says it’s not true of the father—“He turned the boy in, abandoned him—a terrible thing to do. But then he felt ashamed and rallied the family to try to save him. He never gave up on the boy.”

  Lawrence wrote to me once, “His face in my mind remains a driver in my antipathy towards racial and poverty discrimination.” There is a parable here somewhere, if only I could find it.

  Certainly the father’s gratitude was enormous. I am less sure about Huey. I mean I’m puzzled about the way he kept going on about “the trouble I’ve caused”. Try as I might I can’t get to the bottom of what he meant that time about honesty being “the loneliest word in the dictionary”. Maybe it was just a form of politeness made him say he regretted these things. (Politeness isn’t the right word.) I don’t know what Conrad would have made of it.

  I said at the beginning that Joseph Conrad was brought up with a silver spoon. Wrong. When Joseph was five his father was sent into exile and Joseph subsequently ran away to sea, much as I did. Now why am I talking about him again? I know. When Conrad was twenty-one he got into trouble and tried to commit suicide, just like Huey. Somehow Conrad and his personal problems, what he had to overcome as a young man, bring Huey even closer to me. They’re the same colour, orange, a warm glinting orange. I can bring the colour up almost at will, whenever I like, and it is never dark. I hope I won’t be thought sentimental when I say that I miss Huey. It’s a fact. I do.

  I still dream about him sometimes, though not I have to say about my mother. That’s the thing. That is the thing! When the case ended the dreams about my mother stopped completely. Talk about gratitude. Huey doesn’t owe me a penny, not a blind cent. It’s the other way round. Thanks to him, I seem finally to have found closure, a kind of redemption in my mother’s house.

  I worry sometimes that I may have stolen the limelight, taking credit that is due to others—a nurse and a psychiatrist who were the first to notice Huey’s distress and have barely been mentioned, an anonymous citizen who sat with Huey in prison and took food to his family in the boot of his car, even, dare I say it, the Crown prosecutor who for all his retributive zeal took Lawrence at his word and instructed the police to find the abuser. They are the heroes of this tale. And of course Lawrence.

  Now I have a confession to make. Please don’t ask me if I invented the hinge scene, when Huey broke down in hospital and told me everything. I have sleepless nights over this, imagining myself accused of putting words in his mouth that weren’t his. For while it may be true that the words were already there, imprisoned and waiting to be set free, it is also true in a metaphorical sense that I invented them.

  In 1967 I attended a lecture at Harvard given by the blind Argentinian poet, Jorge Luis Borges, in which he said that Plato was the dramatist who invented Socrates, even as the four evangelists invented Jesus. So you could say (but please don’t tell the Court of Appeal!) that I am the man who invented Huey Dunstan.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Many books have been written on the subject of buried memory; most of them I have not read. Two books have helped me while writing this novel: Victims of Memory by Mark Pendergrast and A City Possessed by Lynley Hood. Also, on the subject of blindness, John Hull’s wonderful memoir, Touching the Rock.

  I am profoundly grateful for the help of a number of professionals, two of whom have allowed me to pick their brains mercilessly over the years, besides several friends. I hope they will forgive me for not naming them, in order to protect those who are still living. I am also indebted to my agent Michael Gifkins, my two editors, Harriet Allan in New Zealand and Jane Pearson in Australia, and especially my wife Helen for her sight of blindness and her love, as always.

  JAMES MCNEISH IS a novelist, playwright and biographer. He was born in Auckland in 1931 and travelled the world as a young man—working as a deckhand on a Norwegian freighter, in the theatre in London and as a documentary-maker and journalist for the BBC, the Guardian and the Observer. He has written some twenty-five books, including a biography of Danilo Dolci, the anti-Mafia reformer with whom he worked in Sicily, and has received a number of awards and fellowships. James McNeish lives with his wife in Wellington. The Crime of Huey Dunstan is his ninth novel.

 
; BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Tavern in the Town

  Fire Under the Ashes

  Mackenzie

  The Mackenzie Affair

  Larks in a Paradise

  The Rocking Cave

  1895

  The Mouse Man

  The Glass Zoo

  As for the Godwits

  Art of the Pacific

  Belonging

  Joy

  Walking on my Feet

  Ahnungslos in Berlin

  Lovelock

  Penelope’s Island

  The Man from Nowhere & Other Prose

  My Name is Paradiso

  Mr Halliday & the Circus Master

  The Mask of Sanity

  An Albatross Too Many

  Dance of the Peacocks

  The Sixth Man

  A VINTAGE BOOK published by Random House New Zealand, 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland, New Zealand

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  First published 2010

  © 2010 James McNeish

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  ISBN 978 1 86979 315 9

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