It’ll all be out, everyone knowing and they’ll be blaming him. He’s heard the way the ladies talk about such things, an early baby, with their heads nodding and their faces alight with the knowing. The men as well. A shottie. That’s what they’ll say, his cobbers, grinning and winking, digging their elbows into his ribs. He’s heard even his dad lowering his voice, saying it to Mother and her shaking her head. All hushed up it is, a shotgun affair.
But then isn’t he getting what he always wanted? When he was a little lad he’d say it to his mother, I’m marrying Pansy, and she’d laugh at him. But it’s not the right way because, despite what he’s hoped for, he knows if it wasn’t for this, him marrying Pansy was more of a hope he had than a certainty. The truth of it is she’s cleverer by far than him and now her ma’s dead she might’ve gone off and made something different for herself.
Despite giving his word, he could still walk away from it. But he’s seen what’s happened to girls who couldn’t get their lads to do what was right and marry them. They’d be away visiting their aunties and when they came back, their waists were thicker and their eyes empty. Damaged goods. No decent man would take on damaged goods. They’d end up going from man to man, used and sad, or like Nellie Barstock, one of the big girls when he was a little one at school, who ended up married to Lennie Barstock after his first wife died and there were his five kids to look after. They say around town he treats her like she’s nothing.
If he doesn’t marry Pansy, there’s nobody for her to turn to. Besides, he’s got his dad’s voice in his head, Once a man gives his word he doesn’t go back on it. He has to do it.
He’s on afternoon shifts just now so he gets up early morning, makes a pot of tea, toasts a slab of yesterday’s bread over the open flame on the range and he’s down at the station for the early train.
What’s Clem Bright up to off to Grey six o’clock in the morning?
He’d worked out, lying awake most of the night, the best way of going about it. He needed someone who could tell him what needed to be done and that needed to be someone outside Blackball away from all the eyes and the nattering. So here he is now, stood like a fool outside the Greymouth courthouse long before it’s even open; he hadn’t thought about the place not opening up until eight.
He wants to get it over and done with but there’s nothing for it but to wait. He walks to the wharf and stands with the wind blustering directly onto his face, looking at the waves churning up further beyond the dock. There’s a strong smell down here like dead fish.
It’s a hard, grey day with this wind and the sun muffled in cloud and the seagulls screaming and sailing down to the sea, their cruel beaks at the ready. It’s like it was the day he came here with Otto for a lark, the day they had to walk all the way back to Blackball. He stands closer by the wharf looking down at the ships.
It’d been Otto’s idea. ‘We’re going to Greymouth.’ He had that cocky, excited look, his mouth a straight line and his eyes sparking devilment.
‘How’re we going to get there?’
‘We’ll ride over to Ngahere and get a train. Come on.’
They knew where they could catch one of the coal bins before it snaked too far up to be reached. They’d seen other boys doing it; they were older boys, though, and he was afraid. He followed Otto so they were almost at the mine but far away enough that they couldn’t be seen. They were crouching down and then Otto was yelling at him, come on, come on! and he was running, jumping, grabbing on to the side of the bin and hauling himself up and tumbling in. And there they were, the two of them perched on top of the coal, with the aerial rope-way climbing higher and higher, leaning over the side seeing the town spread below them and it was all hills and bush with them swinging above it all and then they were lurching down, we have to jump now or we’ll cop it, Otto said.
They were starting to come down and he’d looked over the side, it was still quite a way, and he’d climbed out, then hung by his hands, come on! come on! He closed his eyes and let go and when he landed he tripped and fell over and twisted his ankle. It was so sore he yelped but Otto hauled him up, you’ll be all right, come on now.
They sneaked around the back at Ngahere railway station looking for a train ready to go. Otto ran across the lines and Clem was trying to keep up but his ankle was hurting him and he was half-running, half-limping. He put his hand up and Otto hoisted him into a wagon, home and free. Otto’s eyes were glittering.
They got out just before Greymouth when the train slowed down, almost to a stop. They thumped the coal dust off each other. Otto had money: he held out what he had in the palm of his hand, a whole half crown and a sixpence and two pennies. They stopped at a shop and he bought a meat pie for each of them and an ice-cream cone. They gazed up at the fancy buildings in the town, the Post Office with the high clock tower, the Town Hall, the row after row of shops, they stared at the ladies in their fancy hats carrying parcels and the horses and carts and the automobiles. They walked through Dixon Park and sat on the rotunda and they followed the Grey River down to the wharf and looked at the boats.
When the town clock chimed five they went to the railway station. There was a train ready to leave, the bell was clanging and the cry for all aboard ringing along the platform. They watched as a man with a large moustache, dressed in a suit and a waistcoat with a gold watch-chain, shook the hand of a small boy wearing a black and white striped jacket and a matching tie and boater. The boy was crying.
‘None of that, now.’ The man held open the door and the boy climbed up into the carriage. ‘Cheerio, old son.’
What they hadn’t thought of was there was no train back that afternoon. It took them three hours of walking, running, laughing, stopping for a breath. Clem’s ankle was throbbing but in the cold with their breaths pluming out in front of them in the dark and in all that excitement of telling what they would never tell in the light of day he hardly felt it.
Otto told about Lizzie Daniels and Mickey Ruddle from the big class kissing behind the trees at school and how they’d had the strap for it but Clem had an even better story of how he saw Tilly Matthews and Tom White with their arms tight around each other and their faces red lying close against each other up in the bush and how Tom had run after Clem and said there’d be trouble for him if he told. But Otto had the best story. ‘I saw Klara in the bath. She has hair.’
That took a bit of thinking about, he was quiet trying to work that one out but then Otto gave a great bellow of laughter and started pointing. ‘Down there. Hair down there, you great oaf. On her fanny.’
He knew more than him even then, Otto did. Otto always knew more. Clem left him at the end of the street and as he went off he heard him call out after him, his voice, filled with laughter, booming out loud and fruity, filling the night like the man’s had filled the station, ‘Cheerio, old son.’
‘Cheerio,’ he called back. ‘Cheerio.’
Mother was in the kitchen as he slunk in out of the dark, her face pale and stretched tight with the worry. He wanted to make it right with her. He’d had such a day and he wanted to tell her about it, make her laugh. He wanted to see in her eyes that she was seeing all that he’d seen.
‘Where’ve you been? Where, Clem? I’ve been down at the river looking for you and at the tailings. I’ve been half out of my mind with worry.’
That boy will lead you into trouble, my lad, don’t tell me he won’t.
He looks closer at the ship down beneath him as he sees a bloke come up, light a smoke. He looks up at Clem, gives him a wave. What would it be like setting off, never settling anywhere, and every place you stopped different from the other?
‘We could get on one of those,’ Otto had said, pointing. ‘We could get jobs.’
Otto wasn’t serious, was he? His eyes were lighting up like they did when he had some plan up his sleeve. It wasn’t good to go against Otto when he got like that. He’d make you
feel weak and stupid. He might call you girlie.
‘Come on. We’ll sail the seven seas, my lad.’
‘We’re only thirteen. They’d never give us jobs.’ He sounded feeble, he knew it.
‘Who’s going to know that? We could pass for fifteen.’
‘We d-d-don’t . . . we haven’t got any clothes or m-money.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’ Otto’s voice was rising. ‘They’ll give us what we need, overalls and that. And we don’t need money. We’ll be earning our own money, my boy.’
Clem had looked back down into the ship then as well but out of fear rather than any kind of longing. Couldn’t Otto see for himself how daft his idea was? They might be big for their ages but did he really think they could get away with it, them in their short pants? And couldn’t Otto see how lonely and bitter it could be for them on that ship way out there with the wind and the waves coming up and nothing underneath or above them but the ocean and the sky?
Otto was reckless, he’d do anything without thinking properly about it. What if the captain of this ship was a slave trader like the ones Clem had read about, who took boys away and made them work for nothing then sold them? He thought of his mother at home in the kitchen looking out for him, perhaps for ever, and he had that scared, uneasy feeling in his stomach he got when he knew something might go badly wrong.
‘It’ll be an adventure,’ Otto was saying. ‘You and me exploring the whole world.’
He had to say no and get Otto away before they were kidnapped. Perhaps next year when they were fourteen and it could be planned properly with Mother and Dad knowing and saying goodbye. He could see it, him and Otto sharing a cabin, sleeping in bunk beds and getting off at ports all around the world. Otto came from Germany so they could go there and to England which Clem’s gran called Home though she’d never been.
‘This is our home, Mum,’ Dad had said once to her, slamming his hand on the table, not loud but sharp enough. ‘All this talk of Home, like England was good to people like us. Well, if it was, why did we come here?’
Otto’d been at the edge of the wharf talking too much to see where he was going and he’d slipped backwards and if Clem hadn’t grabbed his arm he’d have pitched into the sea. One of the men on the ship had looked up and shouted at them, ‘Get out of it before I come up there and kick your arses!’
They’d run then. They’d been scared but then they started to laugh, kick your arses, kick your arses. Otto hadn’t said anything more about sailing the seven seas, there were other things to do, an ice cream and a pie and cheeking the birds inside the aviary in the botanic gardens.
The long walk home in the dark.
He could get on a ship right now; he’s old enough, he could just go down there onto one of them ships, sign up and be away and out of it all, sail the seven seas, my boy. He looks at his watch: it’s near eight o’clock and he walks back towards the courthouse.
19
He waits for her, opposite Smithsons, and she sees him as she comes out and crosses the street towards him. Does she look pleased he’s there? Well, it’s hard to tell what Pansy thinks at the best of times, could be seeing him has freed her from any worry he might’ve changed his mind but she’d never say. Any road, it’s more than likely she just expected he would. He’s always been dependable. She knows that about him. But is that enough for her? Is it enough for him knowing it’s what she likes about him?
They stand out of the light as he tells her, ‘I’ve been to Greymouth to the courthouse.’
One decisive tip of her chin. ‘When can we do it, then?’
‘It’s not so easy as that,’ he says. He fishes inside his shirt pocket and takes out the forms they’d given him and spreads them out nearer the light so she can see. ‘Look here, you have to fill this in then have your daddy sign for his agreement. I’m all right for that, see, I’ve filled my part in already and signed it, but you’re under age.’
He’s proud of getting it filled in so she can see he means it, but she doesn’t say anything about that, just brushes it aside. ‘They won’t know.’ He can tell from her voice she’s impatient with him. ‘They won’t tell how old I am by looking at me.’
‘You have to show your birth certificate,’ he says. ‘They’ll know from that.’
‘There must be ways around it.’
She swipes with her hand at the papers and from the way she’s looking, you’d think this was his fault there are forms to fill in and certificates to show, that he’s stupid and has it all wrong. He’s doing all this for her, isn’t he? By God, he’s being played for a mug. She’s playing on his softness for her; he knows it and she knows it as well. ‘You have to d-do it. It’s the way it has to b-be.’
‘All right,’ she says. She takes the forms out of his hand and tucks them into the bodice of her dress. ‘I’ll get them done. We can do it tomorrow, then.’
‘We can’t do it tomorrow. After I take the papers back to the courthouse we have to wait three days so it’ll have to be next week. You need to fill in the papers and get your birth certificate and give it to me and then I’ll have to go back to l-lodge them, like they said.’
Lodge. It’s the sort of word that catches up in his throat, hostile and queer, the kind of word makes a man feel he’s tangled up in something he doesn’t want.
‘You’ll go back in the morning?’
‘I can’t. Not tomorrow.’
‘I’ll do it myself, then. You’ve filled out everything have you? What about your birth certificate?’
He’d had to go through Dad’s desk to get it. He’d taken it out of the soft brown envelope with his father’s writing on the front. Birth certificates. Clement Michael, Alice Margaret, Jean Clarissa. What will they think, Mother and Dad, of him going through things that are private and stealing them away without a word? To say naught of skulking off to get himself wed? He thinks of the wedding portrait they have up in pride of place and how Gran still talks of the day they had, who was there and the band playing and the dancing after.
‘It doesn’t have to be like this,’ he says. ‘We could do it proper, like.’
‘Proper?’
‘At the church and the hall after, for a dance and that. We’d have to do it quick, but—’
She’s staring at him, cold and angry, ‘If Daddy gets one sniff of this, Clem Bright, he’ll beat the hell out of me and I’ll be on the next train off to the nuns.’
‘He has to sign the papers.’
‘That’s my lookout.’
‘He’d come around. He’ll have to know sometime.’
‘He’ll know when it’s all done legal and there’s nothing for him to do about it. I’ll get the papers in tomorrow and we’ll do it Tuesday then.’
He eats his dinner. It’s mutton, boiled up so tender you hardly need a knife to cut it and with onion gravy; usually it’s his favourite but it’s sticking in his throat. He’s trying to make out he’s enjoying it. Mother has her eye on him and he wants to tell her what’s worrying him, like always, like the time Otto told him he should take Billy Devlin’s marbles out of his desk because he’d won them off the others and was bragging about it but then Clem had felt that bad about it he couldn’t sleep thou shalt not steal and he’d gone out to the kitchen and told Mother. He’d taken the marbles over to the Devlins’ before school and even though Mrs Devlin had gone crook at him he’d felt better.
But that was nothing. He’d only been a little lad, though he still remembers how he felt when he told Mother and she didn’t growl, just listened before she told him what he must do. The way she always has.
Perhaps if he tells her she’d just take Pansy in and he wouldn’t have to marry her. Mother likes Pansy well enough, she’s been in and out of their house since they were little kids; it’s only because of her being a left-footer she doesn’t want them together. If Mother knew Dan Williams would beat Pansy and
send her away she would surely take her in.
Dad wouldn’t be in favour of it. The lass has got herself into trouble and she can get herself right back out of it. But that’d be only wind and bluster and it wouldn’t last. If he could convince Mother that she was the right one to stick by Pansy and give her help, Dad’d come around. That was the way it worked in their house: Dad flaring up, Mother quietly doing things her own way.
It is on the tip of his tongue to tell her. He doesn’t want to get married; he hasn’t been anywhere other than Blackball. Not that he’d think of living anywhere else, but he could have gone to Christchurch for a look, even gone up to the other island before he settled down. Now he’ll never see anything nor go anywhere. There’ll never be the money for it, not with a wife and a baby to look after and a house to save for.
‘Son, you’ve been chewing on that bit of meat for the last ten minutes. What’s up with you?’
He glares at her. ‘It’s tough is what it is.’
‘Mine wasn’t.’
She’s frowning and she’s turned away from him. Now he’s done it: no point in trying to get her on his side now. Mother doesn’t like for anyone to be running down her cooking. He shovels more meat onto his fork and puts it into his mouth.
Anyway, Mother would never take Pansy in. Stupid even to think of it. His mother’s a good woman, a Christian woman: he knows well enough what she thinks of any girl who gives herself to a man before she’s married. Despite it being Pansy and all the pity she’d have for her, she’d never take in such a girl. It wouldn’t be right, Alice and Jeanie in a house with a single girl in the family way.
There’s nothing for it but to marry her and it has to stay a secret.
Getting out may clear his head. He goes out into the dark and walks along the street then down the track into the bush. He breathes in hard; the air is thick with wet and coal, but it’s better than the stuffy kitchen and Mother watching him. His grandma always says, You can tell what that one’s thinking just by looking at him.
Through the Lonesome Dark Page 15
