My turn to laugh.
‘So, look at me.’
We look at each other for about ten seconds, until our server interprets the silence as her cue to return. Maddie orders a glass of pinot, then turns back to me. ‘Might as well get a bottle, if that works for you?’
‘I’m more of a Shiraz drinker.’
‘Welcome home. We’ll have a bottle of Ata Rangi. Pinot.’
She was confident at school. In my memory, I’d linked it to her looks. But I’d forgotten she was in the top class—we both were. Strictly ranked into eight levels, and then seated in order of six-weekly exam results. I sat in the second row: I spent most of the year looking at the back of her head. We had conversations, but she was always in control. Déjà vu.
I think I’m doing better now. At least I’m not worried about turning red, and with any luck the ‘look at me’ exercise has worked as well for her as it has for me. But we’re well into a platter of Bluff oysters—‘You have to have some of these but they won’t go with the pinot; I’ll order a couple of glasses of Sav Blanc’—and I’ve established that she’s a clinical psychologist rather than a medico before she gives me an opening to take centre stage.
‘What made you decide to become a lawyer?’
‘You remember Mrs Crick?’
‘Of course. In Standard One. She was probably the best teacher I had.’
‘You’re kidding me. I suppose it was different if you were a girl. You remember Smithy?’
‘No.’
‘The little kid. Always in trouble.’
‘Sorry. I don’t remember many of the boys. All I can remember about you is how you used to get picked on.’
I’d forgotten about that. I’d had a minor speech impediment which I’d grown out of. Wound the wagged wocks, the wagged wascal wan. It was the reason I was relegated to second in the public speaking competition, so it wouldn’t have entirely disappeared by the time I tried to make an impression on Maddie a couple of years later.
I’ve told the Smithy story many times, but this is the first time I’ve had a listener who was there. Seven- or eight-year-old Maddie in the second row of the class, sitting next to Fat Susan. It’s probably better that she doesn’t remember Smithy, and, by implication, the incident, or we’d be arguing about the minutiae.
Even so, I’m conscious of the details, self-conscious that I’ll get some aspect of the setting wrong. But it’s a moving story, and at the end I feel myself trembling. Lindy Chamberlain. Rubin Carter. Alan Turing. Their stories leave me feeling the same way. That visceral response to injustice I felt for the first time as a seven-year-old is why I became a lawyer.
Maddie looks up from her glass. She has been hiding her reaction from me and is not giving anything away now. She waits for me to continue. I suspect she’s slipped into her professional persona, and the last thing I want to do is play the role of patient. So I wait too.
She sips her wine, then breaks the silence. ‘It’s a compelling story. You’re a good storyteller.’
‘Goes with the territory. You don’t remember it, then?’
‘Not at all. My memory’s not that good for things that didn’t change my life. You really think it changed yours?’
‘I think you just made the argument yourself. If it wasn’t important, why would I have remembered it? Don’t we all have these moments, these turning points, where our lives take a new direction?’
She laughs. ‘In movies. I think you were on the road to being a lawyer before you spoke out for Smithy.’
‘Before? I thought you were going to say it came later.’
‘You’re proud about speaking up for him. That’s what lawyers do. But you didn’t like Smithy as a person, did you?’
‘I didn’t have a problem with him.’
‘But no arm around the shoulder; are you okay, buddy; come round to my place?’
‘I should have bought him lunch, right?’ Maddie laughs at my feeble joke. ‘Lawyers can’t choose their clients. I guess it’s the same for you. I’d have thought that going into bat for someone I didn’t like was more creditable than doing it because he was my mate.’
‘And getting strapped for it. Unfairly. Gross miscarriage of justice.’
‘Exactly.’
Maddie sits back, smiling. ‘You want to know what I think?’
‘Of course.’
‘I think your getting punished was a much bigger deal than anything that happened to some kid you didn’t like.’
I’ve told the story so many times, without analysing it with adult eyes. Maddie’s almost certainly right. Probably plenty of people have reached the same conclusion without pointing it out to me.
‘I guess advocacy for the downtrodden is a more attractive motivation than unfocused anger.’
‘I’m sure your clients don’t care which it is, as long as you’re there for them now. And for what it’s worth, I don’t think a seven-year-old’s anger would have been enough.’
‘I thought we’d already decided that it wasn’t why I became a lawyer.’
‘I mean enough for you to have held on to this story.’
‘So why do you think I’ve remembered it?’
‘I get paid for doing this, you know. Maybe after a few months of therapy, I could help you work it out.’
‘Take a shot at it. You’ve been doing well so far.’
She shakes her head. ‘You drink dessert wine?’
‘Love it.’
‘Me too. I’m going to shout you something that’ll knock your socks off. Assuming you’d like me to knock your socks off.’
‘Do your worst.’
‘But seven-year-olds aren’t allowed to drink.’
The server comes with dessert menus and Maddie asks for the wine list. I’ve eaten the entire main course without paying attention to it, absorbed in something that happened fifty years ago that my companion has no recollection of and that, on reflection, probably has zero to do with who I am now. Time to sum up and move on.
‘Sorry, for whatever reason this story has hung around. I thought it’d be interesting to see if you remembered it the way I did, but you’ve done something more useful than that. Unless you want the equivalent in legal advice, the socks-off wine is on me.’
Maddie smiles and leans back. ‘I do some work with people who’ve been abused as children. Every psychologist does. And almost always, when you explore the abuse, there’s an element of guilt, of shame. Seldom justified, but unresolved. I suspect that’s one of the things that makes memories persist.’
A half-bottle of sticky arrives and I have some thinking time while Maddie goes through the tasting routine.
‘Maybe I didn’t speak up as courageously as I remember. Maybe I let him down. Making up for that, learning to do it properly, might be my real motivation.’
‘Maybe. But it’s not about the facts of what happened when we were seven. It’s the stories we tell ourselves in the present that matter.’
‘Except we can’t change the past. What happened, happened.’
‘It’s how you choose to remember it.’
‘True, but it happened. I might be wrong on some details, and maybe I’ve embellished a bit, but not the basic facts.’
‘You think your memory is that reliable?’
‘For this, yes.’
She sips her wine. I know a dramatic pause when I see it.
‘Fat Susan, as you refer to her fifty years later, was my closest friend. She did have a weight problem, and it wasn’t helped by being called Fat Susan. In her thirties she went on a crazy diet and started doing triathlons. She had a heart attack. All of which, I guess, is as much an outcome of childhood trauma as your career.’
Shit. ‘I’m sorry. Did…’
‘No, she didn’t die. I talked to her on the phone for about an hour last night. But she was never in Mrs Crick’s class.’
There are things you remember, and things you know. Without the latter, where are your foundations? And this I know: Susa
n shopped Smithy to Mrs Crick. I can see her, sitting next to Pamela. I can see her standing up, dobbing Smithy in; I can see her bawling her apology. Like it was yesterday. Susan was in Mrs Crick’s class.
I’m not surprised Maddie’s got it wrong. I only remember because of what happened to Smithy.
‘I’ll grant you all your interpretations. And I’m sorry about the Fat Susan thing. But—’
‘Relax. I wasn’t going to say anything. I’m just pointing out the fallibility of memory. You must get it in your work all the time.’
‘I do. But it’s mainly clients who have a good reason to forget.’ Mainly. Once or twice I’ve gone looking for a pithy phrase that I remember from a judgment and found it’s not there. It’s disconcerting, but… I can see Susan.
‘She skipped Standard One,’ says Maddie. We didn’t meet till Standard Two.’
I pull out my phone.
‘Forget it,’ she says. ‘Try the wine.’
‘You think you might be wrong?’
‘Like I said, the only story that matters is the one you tell now.’
‘It’ll only take a minute.’
The class photo is not on the website. I go to the 1960s alumni list and start checking the ‘memories’ postings. I know I’m being anti-social but I want to put it to bed. Eventually, Maddie gets out her own phone and we spend the rest of the meal surfing the web for evidence. I pick up the bill and we go our separate ways.
I have a friend—had a friend—a confirmed atheist, who was in a near-fatal motorbike accident. As he lay semi-conscious, he felt Jesus take his hand. And has been a believer ever since. No amount of logical argument will shake the human instinct to privilege personal experience over evidence.
Even after Maddie texted me an image of Standard One, 1963, with no sign of Susan, and a second of the class below us, with Susan unmistakable in the front row, I didn’t believe it.
III
Behind most bad decisions lies anger. My client had every reason to be angry with the institution that had abused him as a child, and with the courts that had declined to convict the perpetrator. Against my professional advice, he had pursued the matter as a civil claim for damages, where the burden of proof was less onerous, and I had negotiated a path around the statute of limitations.
I believed his story. Even the judge, I’m sure, had believed it. My primary school experiences of corporal punishment faded into something akin to first-world problems in the light of what had been visited upon Francis Spence. If, as Maddie Perfect would have it, anger had driven me to my chosen profession, then he had more than enough motivation to pursue his grievance to the end of his finances. And it gave me some personal satisfaction to take on a school that had failed to protect its students.
But now, in the face of substantial legal costs, I had talked some sense into Mr Spence. He would settle for a public apology and a sum for damages that would be more attractive to both parties than pursuing the matter in court. I was confident our offer would form the basis of a settlement and arranged to meet with the lawyers for the notoriously wealthy private school. The perpetrator, in the meantime, had died, and the school would doubtless deflect as much of the blame as possible onto him.
I had met a few times with Emily Burfoot, who represented the school, at a café located between our offices. But as I sat with my espresso, a short, overweight man in a very good suit walked up to my table, pulled back a chair and sat down.
‘Sorry, Emily’s on leave.’ He stuck his hand out and articulated his name as though it meant something.
‘Robert Smith.’ He shook my hand firmly and slowly and let the words sink in. They made no impression. He had to add, ‘We were at Te Paka Primary School for a year together. I don’t suppose you remember.’
‘Jesus. Smithy.’
He laughed, dryly. ‘No one’s called me that since 1963. And I’m not giving you permission to start again now. It’s Robert to you.’ He grinned. ‘Or Wobert.’
I had the sense of a memory beginning its long journey towards my consciousness, heralded by a vague sense of uneasiness. Since the dinner in Wellington, I had reached an accommodation with the indisputable evidence that Fat Susan could have played no role in the events of 1963. Maddie had said that she didn’t remember the boys; similarly I found I could recall just three or four of the girls, and those only because they had continued to intermediate school with me. Susan had stood out because of her weight and matching moniker. My mind had apparently attached an image of her to whichever unmemorable girl had actually done the deed. There was only one person likely to be able to recall her name now, and he was sitting opposite me.
‘You’ve done well,’ I said.
His expression suggested he hadn’t missed the implication. ‘If you’re using 1963 as your baseline, you’d be right. It was a pretty ugly year. My mother had cancer… You want to get business out of the way before we talk about the good old days?’
‘Let’s do that.’
‘It won’t take long. My client’s instructions are not to settle. The teacher didn’t do it and they think it would be morally indefensible to besmirch his good name. Needless to say, an apology’s out of the question.’
‘If they’re hoping to scare my client away, I have to say they’re wrong. He’s adamant…’
Smithy leaned back in the chair, hands behind his head. I couldn’t see anything of the small barefooted boy of six or seven. The freckles had gone. So had the sandy hair. There was just the short stature.
‘Of course he’s adamant. I imagine he genuinely believes it happened. And that this specific teacher was the perpetrator. How old was he?’
‘Eight.’
‘That was the last incident. He’s not even sure about that. Seven.’
‘I’m not going to convince him he’s mistaken.’ Any more than I was going to persuade my friend that he hadn’t seen Jesus.
Smithy smiled. ‘You’d have to trust the memory of adults ahead of a seven-year-old.’
I smiled back. He wasn’t being serious. ‘Except for minor matters of honesty and jeopardy. The eight-year-old had no reason to lie.’
‘Well, then, that’s that. We’ve both done our best. If people want to spend their money on lawyers against their best advice, we’re obliged to take it.’ He must have seen my expression, my involuntary shake of the head. ‘Oh, come on.’
‘No, I’m not disagreeing. It just sits oddly with my memories of you, to see you on the side of institutional power.’
He laughed, loudly enough that people looked, but it was forced. ‘And you? You don’t think it’s a bit odd for you to be defending the victim—the alleged victim?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It’s all right. I’m over it. You’re probably part of the reason I’m here today, in this job, so in some perverse way I owe you.’
‘You lost me at “perverse”.’
‘You don’t remember? All right, that is disappointing. You don’t remember the day Raewyn forgot her lunch?’
‘Like it was yesterday.’
‘Well, good then. I’m not a vengeful sort of guy, not any more. I’m just interested. As a student of human idiocy. What motivated you? Some sort of brownie point? Teacher’s pet? You didn’t have to put your hand up.’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
Smithy affected a squeaky child’s voice. ‘I saw Smithy stealing Waewyn’s lunch.’ He expelled a long breath through pursed lips. Then he smiled, broadly.
‘I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed it when Raewyn’s mum came in to class the next day and you got three on the hand from Mrs Crick, God bless her. And you wetting yourself in front of the class.’
Cigarettes and a Blue-eyed Doll
Susannah Petty
Smoking indoors was common, then. Almost without thought, ashtrays were placed on dining tables, side tables, coffee tables and phone tables, and cigarette packets—golden and brown, red and white—were left lying next t
o the fruit bowl, on top of the TV and by the record player, ready to grab whenever needed, which seemed to be often in our house. But it wasn’t a cigarette that started the fire, my mother insists.
‘It was Colin and his ruddy chip pan,’ she says. ‘God knows what your Aunty Ruth was doing with that man. But still, sometimes life throws you a bad apple, as your Gran used to say.’
The fire must have spread to Grandma’s well-wiped laminate, chewing through the plastic flour and sugar canisters and latching onto the crisp tea towels before anyone noticed. By the time Mr Chamberlain from next door dashed upstairs to wake me from my makeshift bed in Grandma’s spare room, the fire was raging while outside on the pavement a huddle had formed around my mother and aunty, staring at the growing destruction.
‘We can laugh about it now, but at the time it was dreadful,’ she says without smiling.
To me the event felt a little like fireworks night, everyone standing about in pyjamas, waiting for the next big bang. Held aloft by Mr Chamberlain, I watched my mother and Aunty Ruth in their nighties, bending into each other against the cold wind to light their cigarettes then straightening together to face the flames coming out the front windows. My mother seemed to be shaking and maybe even moaning, though it was hard for me to tell from where I was.
I didn’t see Colin as the person to blame. He does appear in some of our family photos as a skinny and scrubby sort of guy, though I thought of him as fun, the kind of adult who would laugh if you burped and flip you sideways anytime you asked. He did like to cook chips, the Birds Eye kind, but I seem to remember we had finished dinner long before the fire started. At times I’ve wanted to say that it was Grandpa who started ‘the whole mess’, as my mother describes this part of our life. He had a heart attack when my mother was a girl and died right beside Grandma. My mother never recovered.
‘I can still see Mum walking through our front door with Dad’s coat on her arm,’ my mother says. ‘She looked so pale.’
Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 13, Issue 2 Page 2
