by Gee, Maurice
Les pretended for a while that she was just one of a whole crowd of sheilas chasing him, but he picked her up at the dance one Saturday night and stopped pretending after that. They’d been going together for three or four months by the time the lockout started.
When Eileen came to our house Mum always said, ‘How’s your mother now?’
‘She’s all right, Mrs Dye. She’s getting better.’
That wasn’t true. Mrs Collymore was always worse; but she had her daughters looking after her, so Mum didn’t need to get involved. Sometimes a priest or nuns went into the house. Mum frowned when she saw them in the street, but she did that with anyone religious, Presbyterians, Anglicans, the lot. About Mrs Collymore, she said, ‘I think she’s more sorry than sick, with that husband of hers.’
One afternoon a shower of rain burst from the sky and Mum ran out to save her washing. Suddenly Teresa was at her side, helping unpeg. She ran with armfuls of sheets into the kitchen. Mum gave her a piece of cake and a glass of milk and I found Teresa eating and drinking at the table when I came in. Mum was folding sheets and towels, chatting with her.
‘You’re all wet, Dinky,’ Teresa said.
‘Austin,’ Mum corrected her.
‘Some of us call him Morris eight,’ Teresa said. ‘It’s beaut cake, Mrs Dye.’
‘Have another piece.’
‘Ta.’
‘She’s a bit saucy, that one,’ Mum said when she had gone.
But I had seen Teresa for the first time, although I’d been aware of her for most of my life. I liked the way she grinned, although her teeth were crooked like Eileen’s, and liked the way she hadn’t been scared of Mum. She was growing breasts too—like Eileen’s. I noticed them under her school blouse. So I went along willingly to Collymores’ after that, with Dad’s bets, one to eight, written out on a sheet of paper.
‘Swallow it if you meet the cops,’ Les said.
I went to the Collymores’ back door, which was always open, and handed the paper to one of the girls. Frank sat at the kitchen table, taking bets on the phone and writing them in a school exercise book, but he always had time to wink at me and joke about Dad’s no-hoper nags. There were Jesus pictures and bleeding hearts on the walls, which made Mum hiss when I told her. There was an open door into the lounge and sometimes I’d glimpse one of the girls helping Mrs Collymore out of the bedroom. She groaned as she walked. She wore red slippers with yellow pompoms. The calves of her legs were wasted away, making her shins as sharp as angle iron. The girls kept her long grey hair combed and tied in a ribbon.
If it was a sunny day I lounged against the truck that didn’t go, waiting for Teresa to come out. We sat in the cab and talked—conversations that sometimes annoyed her.
‘What’s it like getting taught by nuns?’
‘None of your business.’
‘Mum says they’ve got wasted lives.’
‘Your Mum’s mad. And so are you.’
But most of the time we talked about nothing at all, or we sat with our bare legs touching, as if by accident. I told her limericks I had made up and she tried to work out better rhymes.
A skinny young fellow called Bike
Grew legs far too long for his trike.
He said, ‘It’s not fair
The way people stare.
I think I might go out on strike.’
Now and then we walked in Frank Collymore’s shed, through the junk he bought and forgot to sell—bed ends, toilet cisterns, tin trunks, grinding wheels. There were scales, siphons, glue pots, dentist drills, seagrass chairs.
‘Take some if you want,’ Teresa said. She gave me a box of valves for my bike. Then she stood between two chests of drawers and showed me how she could make her arms levitate.
We were in the shed one day when her brothers ran in.
‘Teresa, it’s Mum.’
She threw a frightened look at me and was gone. I waited at the truck and saw the girls dimly in the bedroom, scrumming and breaking up around their mother’s bed. One of them came out and said, ‘Go home, Austin.’ So I went, and told Mum Mrs Collymore was sick.
‘She’s always sick.’
‘I think it’s serious this time.’
And so it was. An ambulance took Mrs Collymore to the hospital. We couldn’t see who was inside with her, the priest or Frank or one of the girls, but there were no more bets that Saturday.
Mrs Pike stopped Mum in the street and told her there was no need for anyone to get sick, all they needed was a healthy diet of greens and fruit—and nuts too, plenty of nuts. That would cure Mrs Collymore. And her girls wouldn’t be so pasty-faced.
‘Look at Bike,’ I cried. ‘He’s as skinny as a rake. Anyway, Eileen’s not pasty-faced. Nor’s Teresa.’
‘Keep your hands off Eileen,’ Les said. ‘She’s too hot for you.’
Mrs Collymore died on Wednesday. Her funeral was held in the church beside the school. The Collymores drove by our place in two taxis. I gave Teresa a sort of skimpy wave, meaning I was sorry, but she didn’t see. I climbed the pine tree at the back of our section and watched people going into the church, heard some distant singing, and saw the hearse drive away with the taxis and half a dozen cars following. I wondered how different Teresa would be when she came back and what I was meant to say to her.
She was sitting on our front steps on the Monday after the funeral, dressed the same, looking the same, and eating a buttered scone Mum had brought out for her.
‘Gidday, Dinks.’
I said quickly, to get it over, ‘I’m sorry about your Mum.’
‘That’s all right.’ She shrugged, then grinned. ‘I got the last scone. None for you.’
I was shocked. I’d expected a sad look, and thought she’d cry maybe. But I was relieved as well. I’d been afraid she’d tell me that her mother was in heaven.
‘I waved. You didn’t see,’ I said. ‘When you drove past.’
Teresa sighed. She picked up her school bag. ‘Gotta go, Dinky. It’s my turn for cooking the tea.’
‘Teresa,’ I said. ‘You’ve got a bit of butter on your mouth.’
She wiped it off. ‘How’s that?’
‘Good.’
‘Thanks, Dinky. See you tomorrow.’
I watched her go, feeling both happy and sad. We’d got past her mother’s death all right, but I thought I should have found something to say, more than just sorry, and she should have found something too.
I wondered how soon it would be all right to ask her to go to the pictures with me.
Chapter 4
Barnsky and Hillovitch
One Sunday night a car crept quietly up our street. Dad pulled aside the curtains and watched it idling at our gate. Les was at the bank, where it was his turn to be on guard.
‘It’s all right, Lil,’ Dad said, and beckoned me.
I followed him down the path. A man in a gangster hat got out of the car.
‘Who’s that?’ he asked, with a suspicious nod at me.
‘Take it easy, Wilf, it’s only my boy. He knows what’s what.’
‘He bloody better,’ the man said.
‘He’s OK. He’s a good boy. Have you got them?’
The man opened the boot of the car and lifted out a leather case. Dad handed it to me. It was heavier than I had expected and I nearly dropped it. The man swore.
‘Take it up to the house, Ossie. Try and be careful,’ Dad said.
I’d worked out what it was by the time I got there: a typewriter, heavy as a bomb, ticking like a bomb. I put it on the kitchen table and Mum took the lid off and sighed: ‘What a brute.’
We heard the car drive away, then Dad shifting gear in the printery. After a short while he came up. ‘All ready, Lil?’
‘I suppose.’ She had been a secretary once and a champion typist. The state of the old machine angered her. ‘It’s filthy,’ she said. ‘And look how worn the keys are.’
‘We’ll have to do our best. The Gestetner’s OK.’ But Dad was fro
wning too. He was a master printer and hated stencilling machines. He put a parcel on the table and went under the house to fetch some cleaning fluid for Mum. They cleaned the typewriter. Dad did repairs with a tiny screwdriver.
‘That’s all I can do, Lil.’ He pulled a wad of handwritten paper from his pocket. ‘He gave me this. Can you get it finished tonight?’
‘I suppose so,’ she snapped. The secrecy and danger were wearing her down. She opened the parcel, which contained stencils, and set to work.
‘What is it, Mum?’
‘So-called poetry. Someone’s idea.’
‘ “Sid’s Trip to the Moon”,’ I read. I knew who Sid was. ‘Who’s the Black Prince? Who’s Lord Scabaxter?’
‘Stupid men.’ Her fingers rattled.
‘And the Tame Parrot?’
‘Go and do your homework.’
‘ “They’re all communists, the Parrot screamed.” ’
‘Now. Before I lose my temper.’
I went to my room and did maths for a while, then read Zane Grey. I wished I were guarding the bank with Les. Later on I heard the Gestetner machine turning and turning in Dad’s hideout under the house. The wharfies only wanted churned-out copies now. Dad hated it—‘office girl’s work’—but kept on because he hated Sid Holland’s government more.
He was red-eyed in the morning and so was Mum. She was snappier than ever, but tiredness made Dad kinder and he tapped me with his knuckle on my jaw.
‘Keep your lip buttoned, Ossie.’
‘I don’t know why we gave the boy a name,’ Mum said.
‘Yes, I will.’
Dad went off to work, with his Gladstone bag bulging. I made my own lunch to help Mum but at the last moment found a button missing from my shirt.
‘Why didn’t you say something sooner?’
‘I just found out.’
‘I’m not a servant,’ she said, and had to turn away to hide the tears in her eyes. She rattled around in her sewing tin longer than she had to, then sewed the button on with a stab or two. Bit the cotton thread like a snapping dog. For a moment I thought she would bite me. But when I was going out the door she called my name and followed me and kissed my cheek.
‘I’m sorry, Austin. It’s only because I’m so tired.’
‘It’s OK, Mum.’ I knew that tiredness wasn’t the only reason; she was bad-tempered because she was afraid.
Teresa was waiting at the gate. My school was in Loomis but she went to a Catholic girls’ school in Auckland. We walked down to the train. She had a button missing as well. The two elder Collymore girls had left home. Their house was going to pot, my mother said.
Teresa saw where I was looking. ‘Yeah, I know. They’ll send me to the sewing room. And I bet they give me some lines.’
‘Why didn’t you fix it?’
‘Because I was doing breakfast, that’s why. And the boys’ lunch. So shut up about it.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Eileen never does anything. She’s too busy putting on her make-up.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Her lipstick gets all over Les’ hankies.’
Teresa snickered. She shifted into her good moods just as quick as her bad.
‘Does your mum know they’re going out?’
‘She found out last week.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She told him to watch his step. She told him he was only 18.’
‘And us Collymores aren’t good enough.’
‘She didn’t say that.’
‘I bet she thought it, though. And about us being Catholics.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘She knows about you and me being friends.’
‘We’re not 18.’
We reached the station, which was a relief. I knew a lot more about my brother and her sister than she knew and if she’d asked me straight I might have blurted it out.
That night Mum wasn’t so frazzled. She hummed around the kitchen, cooking tea. The typewriter was hidden in a cupboard in the wash-house.
‘Oh, bother,’ she said.
‘What, Mum?’
‘I must be going mad. Of all the things to run out of. Salt. Run across and borrow some from Mrs Pike. Take a cup.’
I crossed the road and went around to the back of the Pikes’ house. Mr Pike was in his shed by the greenhouse, making wreaths. There must have been a funeral next day. I went on to the porch and peered in at the door. Mrs Pike was sitting, just sitting, looking away at something that was maybe on the inside of her head. I watched her shiny loopy face, then tapped on the door.
‘Mrs Pike.’
‘Oh Austin, you gave me a fright.’
‘Mum says can she borrow a bit of salt.’
‘What does she want it for?’
‘I don’t know. Probably the cabbage.’
‘But, Austin.’ She rose and came to me. She almost ran. ‘Doesn’t she know you must never put salt in vegetables? It’s one of the worst things you can do.’
I couldn’t say anything to that.
‘It takes all the goodness out. You can almost hear the vegies crying. You know salt is a poison, don’t you?’
‘We use it all the time.’
‘I’ll talk to her. I’ll have a talk. Austin, you must promise me, never eat salt.’
‘All right,’ I said.
‘And sugar too. Sugar is even worse. You must eat honey.’
‘Yes, Mrs Pike.’ I backed away before she could get started on meat; and realised I’d have to go all the way to Collymores’ for salt. But Mr Pike caught me in the yard.
‘Austin, do you know who’s putting leaflets in my letter-box?’
‘No. We get them too. All the time.’
‘They’re communist lies,’ he said. ‘I’ve taken mine to the police.’ I’d never thought he was a man who cared about anything much—hard to imagine him trampling on his kite and letting his budgies fly away. I don’t even think he liked his flowers, the way he bent and snapped them to fit the wire frames for the wreaths. Mr Pike had black damp hairs inside his nose. They picked up dust from somewhere and turned white. Maybe they picked up pollen from the flowers. Like Bike, he was a bit of a joke. But here he was, swollen-faced and ready to pounce on me.
‘You don’t read them, do you boy? They’ll pervert your mind. They’re rotten stuff.’
‘No, I don’t read them,’ I said.
‘Burn them. Or take them to the police. Do you know three things I hate?’
He waited, burning-eyed, until I said, ‘No.’
‘A communist, a rat, and a communist.’
‘Ha,’ I said.
‘I’d put them up against a wall and shoot them. Starting with Mister Barnes and Mister Hill.’ (They were the leaders of the wharfies.)
‘I’d send them to Russia. Barnsky and Hillovitch,’ he said.
‘Ha, ha.’
I retreated; and Mr Pike cried after me, ‘Watch out for whoever’s putting this garbage in our boxes. Come and tell me. I’ll soon fix him.’
Two Pikes in one visit—and I didn’t get away without the third, for Bike was coming in the gate.
‘Gidday, Dinky.’
‘I’m Ossie now.’
‘Wait and I’ll show you something,’ he said.
I hadn’t joined his Joan Leslie fan club. Nor had Les, or anyone. Bike was president and secretary and fan. A club of one. He took a photo from his briefcase—that smiley plump-faced actress again.
‘I’ve worked out who she looks like. Go on. Pick.’
I shrugged. ‘Lots of girls.’
‘There’s only one in Loomis who looks like her. As pretty as her.’
He’s nuts, I thought; and found it hard to believe that this was the same Bike I saw in the bank, standing behind the counter, counting five pound notes so fast they turned into a blur. He smiled in the bank like an adult: ‘It’s a nice day, madam. Thank you, sir.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I give up.’
‘Eileen Collymore,’ he grinned at me. ‘Sh
e’s the same.’
‘No.’
‘You bet.’
‘Nope. She’s going out with my brother. I know her better than you.’
‘She’ll get sick of him,’ he said. ‘You wait and see. I guess I’m falling in love with her.’
‘Oh yeah?’ I said. ‘Have you told her that?’
‘I left a Joan Leslie photo on the counter at the milkbar.’
‘With something written on it?’
‘Not yet. I’m only starting.’
‘Don’t go too fast.’ I walked away.
‘Dinky,’ he called. ‘Don’t tell Les. I don’t want him getting upset.’
‘You’re the one who’ll get upset. He’ll bash you.’
I went along the road and borrowed salt from Teresa.
‘What took you so long?’ Mum said.
I told her about Mrs Pike. Because she was in a better mood she only laughed. Later on I told her and Dad about Mr Pike—Hillovitch and Barnsky and taking leaflets to the police. They didn’t laugh about that.
Les came in. I said nothing about Bike.
Chapter 5
Teresa
The newspapers couldn’t print letters against the government. It would be breaking the new law. They couldn’t say police were raiding depots the unionists had set up to feed their families. Instead they printed speeches by politicians calling the wharfies greedy loafers and wild beasts, calling them savage and filthy and foul. They needed a good clout with a baton, one shipowner said. Dad could take all that—and the wharfies’ pamphlets said things just as bad about the politicians and the scabs and the police.
But when a government minister called Goosman, talking about unions and communists, came out and said, ‘Hitler talked right’, my poor dad almost cried.
‘What did I go over there and fight for?’ he said.
He was sitting at the table and Mum came and pressed his head into her breast, the way Mrs Redknapp had done with Mr Redknapp.
‘I’ll pinch the bank revolver and shoot old Sid,’ Les said.
Dad got free of Mum and smacked his palms on the table. He glared at Les.
‘Don’t you talk about shooting in my house. I’ve seen men shot. It’s not a game. You end up dead.’
‘OK. Sorry,’ Les said. ‘I’m going up to my place. Cheers.’ He went out.
