by Gee, Maurice
Shelley was drying herself. ‘You stink of sweat.’
‘You stink of fish.’ She put out her arm to block the flick of Shelley’s towel. ‘Only kidding. Hey, Shell,’ stripping off her T-shirt, ‘Lexie put the word on me today.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Asked me to go and see his goats.’ She stood one-legged, getting off her jeans. ‘He’s screwing Duffie, that’s for sure, but I think I might be next on his list.’
‘You better not let Dad hear you say that.’
‘I’m not dumb.’ She stepped into the shower. ‘Lex quit today. Pure Muir was sniffing round like he was going to load us all in his ute and take us with him.’
‘Don’t you go there, Hayley.’
‘I might. I can look after myself.’
‘Hayley, listen. For Christ’s sake listen. Turn that fucking water off and listen. You start sharing it round you’ll end up on the meat market, same as me. Are you listening? You stick to guys your own age. And make it one, for God’s sake. And the right bloody one or else you’re meat. You’ll end up with a bastard like Neil who wants all his mates to have a share. You listening, Hayley? Get that bloody dumb look off your face.’
‘Neil’s in prison.’
‘He’ll be back. He’s coming out.’
‘Dad won’t let him come here.’
‘So what? He just has to let me know where he is.’
‘You don’t have to go.’
‘Don’t I? He’ll kick the shit out of me if I don’t do what he wants.’
‘You could go away. You could go to Aussie. Auntie Beth’s.’ But she saw from the way Shelley looked at her and turned away that she could not; she did not want to.
‘Lex wouldn’t be like Neil.’
‘Jesus Christ, Hayley, he’s old. He must be forty. What do you think he’s after, eh?’ – jabbing her finger at Hayley’s crotch. ‘You said it yourself. And you can’t handle that, you’re only fourteen. OK, OK. But he won’t just screw you, he’ll screw you up. Hayley, don’t go. Please. OK?’ – talking low and hard under Bruce Springsteen. ‘Stick to Barry or Gary, whoever it is. And you better be careful too. If you go down the chute like me and Wayne it’s the finish of Dad.’
‘I don’t do much. I don’t do much, Shell.’
‘You do more than I used to do.’
‘Shell, why can’t you go? Auntie Beth’s OK. There’s better jobs in Melbourne.’ Tears started rolling down her face. ‘He’s such a dick.’ She tried to laugh to stop herself crying. ‘He’s even got zits.’
Tears were coming from Shelley’s eyes too. She shook her head; shook it hard, with gritted teeth.
‘Get a move on, you two,’ their father yelled, ‘the flounder’s on.’
‘Coming, Dad.’
‘Last one gets the midget.’
‘You don’t really smell of fish, Shell.’
‘Yes I do. And you stink of sweat. So get washed. And remember, eh, ’cause I probably won’t say all that again.’
Hayley got back into her jeans and put a clean T-shirt on. She dried her hair for five minutes with Shelley’s blow drier and got to the table as her father served the meal.
‘The late Miss Birtles. Where’s your leathers?’
‘Took ’em off. Me and Mrs Sangster made a deal. I can wear them at matches.’
‘That lady should be in parliament. Eat up, Joanie. I’ll get the bones out.’ He stripped the flesh off his wife’s flounder and dropped the skeleton in the waste. ‘Eat a bit of spud with it. Make you nice and fat.’
‘Yes, Ken.’ Mrs Birtles ate several mouthfuls of mashed potato; then some fish, then her peas, to please him. She drank a glass of beer and said, ‘Not too much,’ as he poured a glass for the girls. Her show of awareness was unusual. They tried to say and do things that might keep it alive. Shelley gave her more peas from the pot. Ken said Mrs Ward, a woman she had played tennis with, had asked after her and was looking forward to seeing her back at the club. But Mrs Birtles drifted far away and ate no more; spoke again only when he pushed away his plate, ‘Thank you, Joanie.’ She smiled with pleasure: ‘I think we’ll have a tin of fruit, don’t you?’
Shelley opened peaches and they ate them with ice-cream and chocolate hail. Then Hayley and Shelley washed the dishes, while their father watched the TV news and their mother sat by his side and opened her third pack of cigarettes for the day. (Her cigarettes cost forty dollars a week.) He held her hand, said, ‘Look Joanie, that’s quite interesting. Unbelievable what people do.’ He had to be alert and switch channels fast. There was a lot of fire and people burning on the news.
The Birtleses sat watching until late. Hayley skipped her homework and Shelley decided not to go to her girlfriend’s place. At the end of the evening Ken Birtles took his wife’s curlers out and took her to bed. He came back to his daughters while she had her cry. There was something about the end of the day that brought Wayne back.
Shelley said, ‘She can’t go on like this. Nor can you.’
Hayley leaned her head on his shoulder.
He held their hands and said, ‘It’s a great life, kids, if you don’t weaken.’
9
The distance between the Birtles’s house in Spargo Street, Duckham Square, and the ‘toasty warm’ Round house above the river and golf course in Coppermine Valley can be measured socially. I won’t attempt it; will drive you through Saxton instead. First though, a bit of history.
Saxton was a Wakefield town. A vertical slice of old England was meant to take root there. When the settlers came ashore in 1841 they marked out sites for a jail and a courthouse, a magistrate’s house, a church and a school. Agriculture and commerce did not need marking out.
The town had bad times but good times followed, social distinctions became blurred, Saxton grew into an egalitarian New Zealand town. There are people here descended from first-ship settlers and, in the minds of some, a Saxton aristocracy, but most of our citizens are not impressed by such things. Climate, topography, hard work and ambition and greed and commercial chance determined the town’s shape more than social theory and distinctions.
The gap between rich and poor is widening again but that isn’t peculiar to Saxton.
Geography has been a determining factor. Hills and sea cut us off from other places. We’re not on a direct route except to smaller towns. The nearest city is forty minutes by air but if you go by car and ferry you must travel all day. Some people like this. A visiting Classics professor said that Saxton reminded him of a Greek city-state. He said, jokingly, that it should secede from New Zealand and was kind enough to suggest Athens not Sparta as a model.
Fishing, timber, horticulture, pip-fruit sustain us. One mustn’t forget tourism. American and continental English are heard in the streets. Japanese honeymooners ask locals to photograph them on the cathedral steps – focus and timing pre-set. Dutch and Swedish travellers pick apples in the season. Saxton is remote, but the world passes through.
Things you may be shown or come across: the cathedral, which gave us the status of city when in fact we were still a town (we still are a town); the art gallery, founded by a bishop and bearing his name (it is funded, not too willingly, by the city council, and has recently been enlarged in a style most people, though not Tom Round, find very tasteful); Queens Gardens (Victoria was the queen) and the duckpond, lying just away from the town’s main street (beautiful roses, filthy pond where ducks wait out the shooting season, squabbling for bits of bread lunching shop-assistants throw); Founders Park, where a pioneer town has been set up, using old buildings saved from demolition; the waterfront drive, named for, opened by, the present queen. The list could go on but there’s no need. There’s nothing here that simply must be seen, though one or two things are unique: a plaque marking the field where the first rugby match in New Zealand was played; a hill known as the Centre of New Zealand; a boulder bank enclosing mudflats and the port. It’s a geological phenomenon found nowhere else in the world. (That, at least, is
what we are told.) And there are three or four lovely wooden churches.
Saxton is comfortable for the visitor. There’s a Quality Inn and plenty of hotels and motels and boarding houses, and three camping grounds, one at the beach, and a youth hostel and several private hostels. The sunshine hours are the highest in New Zealand. You can swim at the beach or in the rivers (the rivers now, those out of town, can make you feel in a world new-born), or go north into the maritime park and find yellow beaches, clean blue sea, tramping tracks through unspoiled bush (the world new-born again), or south to the lakes and ski-fields. You can fish for trout. You can visit the potters and weavers and print-makers and silversmiths and glass-blowers (Saxton attracts them), and set off round the vineyards on the wine trail and pick your own tree-ripened apples and peaches. You might easily decide Saxton is a place free from troubles.
Look harder.
Stay around a while and keep your eyes open. Walk in the back streets. Go up river if you prefer. Only a hundred yards past the Arts Society ladies sketching willows and toi-toi by the footbridge you’ll find a concrete bridge with ‘Donovan Sux’ spray-painted on a pier – Donovan is our mayor. In a dark cave underneath, kids are sniffing solvents from plastic bags. There are street-kids squatting in an empty corner-dairy by Duckham Square. That house-truck at the swimming hole – rather picturesque, with the young woman sitting on the step breast-feeding her baby and the man with the carburettor spread out on a sack, and shirts and towels and underpants drying on the grass – is there because there’s nowhere else to go. Police will move it on before long. And while we’re up the river, and speaking of police, that helicopter rattling your teeth is making a marijuana sweep. Back in town school’s out and schoolboys and girls are smoking the stuff while their older siblings, unemployed, are drinking in the pubs.
Let’s not worry about time of day. That drunk fellow who falls over by the streetlamp and takes five minutes climbing to his feet is a Russian sailor from a tuna boat. He’s lost his liquor-store bag of whisky and gin and his two pairs of jeans and his Lada parts. He won’t make it back to his ship. Local goons (one of them’s a mate of Neil Chote) roll him in an alley and kick him senseless. He’ll be three months in hospital and then will be flown home and will never really understand what happened to him in Saxton.
Go down to the courthouse on a Tuesday. Sit in the waiting room with the butt-scorched floor, with young fellows in boots and broken sneakers and jeans and bush singlets and leather jackets, listen to them speak, listen to the girls, with their nicotine-stained fingers and red-rimmed eyes. It’s not the same language used by those lawyers who go by – young fellows, young women too. See how they dress. You can illustrate a two nations argument here. What are the charges when the accused, those in here, those brought in from the cells, face the judge? Cultivating cannabis. Possession for supply. Driving with excess breath alcohol, blood alcohol. They’ve pissed in a doorway, punched the neighbour or the de facto, kicked in the window of a menswear store. They’ve stolen from a container lorry parked up for the night. Threatened a constable with numchukkas. Threatened a chemist with a knife and got away with a pocketful of prescription drugs. They’ve kicked a Russian sailor half to death. They’re mill-hands, knife-hands, labourers, bushmen, fish-splitters, sickness beneficiaries, solo mothers, unemployed. The judge sentences them to prison or periodic detention, puts them under supervision, orders reparation. He fines them and disqualifies them (the shop manager too, the estate agent, the retired shoe salesman). Every Tuesday there’s a new batch. Shelley Birtles has passed through (theft of a chequebook and a credit card). Shelley is under six months’ supervision.
Meanwhile, in plush offices – no, that won’t do. But Saxton does have what John Toft calls its ‘little millionaires and clever bankrupts’. No, he says, New Zealand doesn’t belong to the big foreign boys, not yet. It’s the little guy who’s got it, inflation millionaires, there are more than a dozen in this town, mostly land agents. They buy and sell, buy and sell, and produce nothing along the way. (John gets angry.) They take the money and other people take the debt. You try and buy a bit of land at the edge of town, for a fair price, you can’t do it. They own it all, these fat fellows, these little boys. You don’t believe me? Look at the registration of properties. They sit there waiting for the value – ah, not the value, the price – to rise. (But the spirit goes out of John, he seems to die one of his little deaths. Says to Norma, ‘Don’t ask me, ask your friend Tom Round. He plays their little game with them.’)
We’ve moved away from history and seem to be back with the Rounds, so let’s do without that drive I mentioned and stay with them. It’s half past seven. They have their dinner later than the Birtleses.
Josie and Belinda and Stella and Duncan are eating millet and tofu patties and vegetables marinaded in lemon juice, honey and ginger and stir-fried in oil. Belinda had her last meat meal on Saturday night and is a vegetarian now. Josie sees no reason not to go along with this. She has several recipe books from her own vegetarian days, and makes a tasty meal as a gesture of support but is irritated by the time it takes to prepare and makes sure Belinda knows about it. Tom Round has a steak. Tom is not playing.
‘You’ll grow slant eyes on that stuff,’ he says.
‘That thing you’re eating was cut off the body of a dead animal,’ Belinda retorts.
‘It would hardly be a live one.’ Stella.
‘In some recipes,’ Tom, ‘they boil geese alive to improve the flavour.’
‘Da-ad!’
‘They boil crayfish that way. You’re not cutting crayfish out of your diet, I’ll bet.’
‘This conversation has gone far enough,’ Josie says. She is not certain where Belinda’s soft places are or how far her publicized toughness extends, but believes there’s an unease in the child, expressing itself in an attachment to causes – loud attachment – while leaving its true object unrevealed. Josie has found it difficult to know her daughters – oh, knows all the technical and theoretical stuff, doctrinal too, but can’t compress it into a Mandy, Stella, Belinda shape. Is Belinda troubled by an awareness of pain and death (when does that come? Josie must look in Gesell and Ilg), or is it something more mundane and personal? What, apart from Duncan, could worry her to such an extent that cracks and flaws begin to appear in the (Josie hunts for an adjective) splendid persona the girl has created – a work of art – and lead one to these speculations? Apart from Duncan? Josie seizes on that. The attachment between Belinda and him, two-way traffic, is lovely to see, but doesn’t he, doesn’t his accident, and Wayne Birtles’s death, take one beyond the personal to those universals, pain and death? So … Josie is confused. She’s not quite sure where she has arrived. Does any of this have a connection with Bel, wolfing millet patties, here and now?
She looks at her daughter with an admiring but cold eye. Not pretty. Definitely not. Mandy and Stell are the pretty ones – Mandy with her heart-shaped face (true, though it’s straight out of Barbara Cartland) and Stella with a longer more thoroughbred countenance and a pink and white porcelain skin. Belinda has a square-built face that has a lived-in look. (Josie likes that phrase – cliché or not it’s from a better class of fiction.) Her cheek-bones have the Tom Round corbel structure and her eyes the Round Mongolian slant, but her mouth and chin are Josie, pure Josie, built to signal defiance of others’ will. She eats her vegetarian meal in defiance of her father – but in his blood-savouring way.
‘It better not be vegetarian pudding,’ Tom jokes.
‘Feeble, Dad,’ Belinda says.
‘There’s no pudding.’ Josie enjoys the squirt of anger in his eyes. She likes to put him out of control.
‘Elementary. Look at the cutlery,’ Stella says.
‘Why not?’
‘Because the meal took so long to prepare. I’ve got other things to do with my time.’
‘Sure, sit on a flax mat saying Om Mani Padme Hum, Down from heaven and up my bum.’
‘It’s not humm i
t’s hoom.’
‘Fair enough, up my boom.’
‘I’ll open a tin of fruit,’ Stella says.
‘And ice-cream,’ Tom shouts as she goes to the pantry. Then, being angry, can look at Duncan. ‘And how do you like leeks and lentils?’
‘There’s no leeks and lentils. It’s millet and tofu,’ Josie says.
‘It won’t put lead in his pencil, that’s for sure.’
‘I like it,’ Duncan says. ‘It tastes like nuts.’
Tom makes some monkey jabber and scratches his armpits.
‘You’re no good, Dad.’ Belinda shows him how and he appreciates the tightening of her T-shirt on her breasts. He has often said that daughters are a floor show. He’s also said (only to Josie, in the bedroom) that having Duncan round is like a long-running horror movie. Josie is ashamed of having agreed, although it was a bit of post-coital easy deception, spoken in a time of mellowness. Now, when the whole of their marriage is post-coital, she wants to cry, ‘How dare you speak of him like that! How dare you con me into saying yes! ’
Stella brings lichees to the table and Tom says, ‘Sheep’s eyes. Monkey balls.’
‘Shut up, Tom.’
‘Do we have to have this Chinkee stuff? What happened to good old honest Wattie peaches?’ Suddenly he gives her a mock leer and Josie blushes; it has been part of their sexual play for Tom, feeling her ready, to say ‘Wattie peaches’. She’s annoyed at the interest it rouses in her now. ‘Food doesn’t have nationality,’ she says sharply. ‘And there’s nothing very honest about sugared fruit. Bring some ice-cream, Stella. We can’t eat it alone.’
In spite of his manufactured disapproval Tom eats the lichees with pleasure. He likes shape and texture in his mouth, and resistance that suddenly goes soft, and there’s a pleasing tartness in the taste. He says to Belinda, ‘How did your Amnesty stall go?’
