Some Here Among Us

by Peter Walker

  ALL YOU NEED

  The letters were purple and blue, and edged with red. Race enjoyed doing this: he felt as if he was not only outlining but slipping in among the trees of an interesting new wood. A few days before, in London, the Beatles had sat in front of TV cameras in the studio in Abbey Road and sung the single word ‘love’ nine times over and then, sang it seventy more times in various strophes. Within minutes, the song was known around the world. It was the first live international TV hook-up. In the eighteenth century a young man like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, composing a song in Geneva, would be amazed to hear it being sung on a street corner across the lake only ten days later. ‘All You Need Is Love’ leapt three oceans in half a second. The satellites which broadcast it were each fixed in one spot high above the earth, although in fact they tended to wander about a bit, pushed this way and that by the infinitesimal pressure of sunlight and faint irregularities in the earth’s gravitational field. They were built by the same company as the bombers which, that year, were pounding Vietnam back to the stone-age. ‘All You Need Is Love’ rang down through the exosphere. Making the arch of blue and purple letters, which also reminded him of the trunks of a wood on a hill, Race slightly miscalculated the space. He had to run the last two words together:

  ALL YOU NEEDIS

  He then dipped the brush in the red and wrote below the arch:

  LOVE

  and edged the letters with maroon.

  ‘How’s that?’ he said, sitting back on his heels.

  ‘It’s fine, it’s great, we’re late,’ said Candy. She picked up the sign and thrust it at Morgan. Morgan took it and said nothing. Chadwick, the Californian, who had just come back to the room for a coat, saw the sign in Morgan’s hand.

  ‘Oh, yeah – that should do the trick,’ he said, jeering slightly, pushing his fist through his coat sleeve. ‘That should stop the Pentagon in its tracks. Love, love, love!’

  ‘The town of Abdera,’ said Morgan, looking at Chadwick as if he was very far away, ‘was the vilest place in all of Thrace. What with poison and assassinations, there was no going there by day. It was worse at night. But one day the play Andromeda was put on and the whole town was delighted with it, especially the speech “O love, love, prince of gods and men.” ’

  ‘Jesus, Morgan,’ said Chadwick, looking offended.

  ‘In every street, in every house, that was all that was heard: “O love, love – prince of gods and men,” ’ said Morgan. ‘The whole city caught fire like the heart of one man and opened itself to—’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ said Chadwick. He turned to Race appealing for support. But there was no time; they were late – Candy and Race were already going out the door, Morgan followed, and Chadwick came out last; they clattered down the stairs to the basement and through an outer door which led to a shortcut to the park, and crossed the park in the rain which was still as fine as mist, and then joined the march which had just begun to wind down Salamanca Road towards the city.

  ‘So what was that all about?’ said Chadwick, coming up alongside Race a few minutes later. ‘“The town of Abdera was the vilest place in all of Thrace.” I mean, don’t you think that was just a little weird?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Race.

  ‘I think it was,’ said Chadwick. He touched Race’s forearm confidentially. ‘I think it was definitely weird,’ he said, ‘and I think he is definitely weird.’

  Chadwick usually had a fantastic Californian geniality to him, as if all problems could be dissolved with a little blast of sunlight, but now he had taken against Morgan. He had been outplayed. He wanted Race to join forces with him. But Race had no desire to join forces against Morgan. In the first place, Morgan was already almost a loner, which meant, in Race’s view, you didn’t gang up on him. Secondly, though, and more important, he showed no sign of caring or even noticing if all the forces in the universe were against him. This gave him the air of someone with a valuable secret. ‘He knows something,’ Race had come to think. ‘He knows something we don’t. I wonder what it is.’ Chadwick read some of this in Race’s expression. He gave up and danced backwards a few yards to join the Gudgeon sisters. The procession reached The Terrace; chants began to echo among the office blocks. The rain began to fall more heavily. High above the street the windows were crowded with office workers watching the march. They looked down on the marchers angrily, as if allowed up from their desks for a minute or two only on that condition. The police had just deciphered FitzGerald’s sign and dashed into the crowd to seize it. FitzGerald resisted. There was a scuffle. FitzGerald disappeared, somehow with an air of triumph, into a paddy-wagon. The rain-cloud darkened overhead as the crowd reached parliament. It was then just on noon. Inside the building the talks with the Americans had been going on for two hours. The prime minister suggested an adjournment for lunch. He led his guests through the building and, passing the windows, he stopped to give his guests a view of the demonstration outside. He was pleased at the size of the crowd. He had no desire to send more troops to Vietnam. He could plead public dislike of the war. Just at that moment, as he and the envoys stopped to look at the crowd and the rain-cloud came in low over the city, someone turned on the lights and the crowd saw the little golden lamps of chandeliers come twinkling on deep in the parliament building and three grey-headed men looking down from a tall window. There was a sort of mumble, a baying, a booing: someone shouted something about guns and butter. A man leapt over the barricade and swerved past the police guard towards the steps of parliament, which were wide and impressive as befits a public building, but also unusually steep. He began to run up this cliff of stairs, but his progress was slower than he expected. Two plain-clothes men went after him but they were slow as well. All three toiled towards the great front door like figures in a dream. Then one of the policemen made a dive and caught the man by the ankles. At the same time, a fight had broken out further west near the cathedral, where pro-war demonstrators began to scuffle with the Trotskyites. The police made a charge. There was a dipping and swirling of placards like gunwales. ALL YOU NEEDIS rose briefly then fell from view. The prime minister and his visitors turned and went away to their lunch. And quite suddenly the flurries came to an end as if a gust of wind passed over a body of water and left it calm again – the Trots and the pro-war crowd stopped fighting, the workers on the cathedral scaffolding stopped cheering them on, the man on the steps and the police running after him had vanished as if they had never existed, and the gulls settled down again, folding their wings comfortably on the marble heads and the up-flung hands of various statues. Chadwick appeared by Race’s side.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘The old bores are starting.’

  An old man with a clear, ruddy complexion and a noble expression had unfolded a little aluminium step-ladder in front of the crowd and he sprang up the first three steps.

  ‘Comwades!’ he shouted, twirling his hand up like Lenin.

  Chadwick and Race went away down the grassy slope towards the Cenotaph. And there was Tolerton as well, zipping past in his expensive tweed jacket. He saw Race and Chadwick and came over.

  ‘I think that calls for a drink,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind a little anti-war rioting, no less than the next man. But spare me the dialectic.’

  And there was Candy Dabchek as well; she was alone and looking around in all directions. She saw the others and came to join them.

  ‘Where’s Adam?’ said Candy. ‘Where’s Morgan? Where’s FitzGerald?’

  There was a discriminating furrow on her brow, as if those present were all very well, but she was used to the best. Candy’s family was rich. Her father had a chain of ‘fashion’ stores – discount, mainly, in poorer suburbs – and wealth gave her a sense of entitlement. She had thick pale hair and big dark eyes, which sometimes looked alarmed, sometimes accusing. None of her features would have amounted to much on their own but she had decided that she was going to be beautiful and so she was – that was the impression she gave. She was beauti
ful, and determined, and somewhat sly as well: Griffin had met her one fine day coming out of FitzGerald’s bedroom. It was about eleven in the morning and she was in tears at the time. He comforted her, he made her a cup of tea. FitzGerald had the reputation as the heartless Casanova of the group. Candy always denied later that she had slept with FitzGerald, although she had, and in point of fact she continued to do so occasionally after she became Griffin’s girlfriend. Morgan, who watched closely over his friend, suspected it, but said nothing as he had no evidence. Griffin sensed Morgan’s protective posture but if anything he resented it. He felt their relative positions had reversed. He had a girlfriend now, he had no need of Morgan’s protection. Still they formed a trio, Candy and Adam and Morgan, though at times there was a certain silence in the bonds between them, and Adam’s stutter did not go away. Candy filled in the silence with her chatter. Just then she caught sight of a coloured arch – ALL YOU NEEDIS – coming down the hill among the crowd.

  ‘There they are,’ she said. ‘Oh, there you are, where on earth did you get to? I was hunting everywhere. What about Fitzgerald, do you think they’ll charge him?’ She chattered on as they left the Cenotaph and walked around to Cable Car Lane to catch the cable-car up to Kelburn again, stopping on the way for fish and chips and then a drink in a pub, leaving behind their placards in a rubbish bin outside the pub like umbrellas in a stand. The cable-cars going up the hill were all crowded with people coming from the demonstration. With lectures cancelled or boycotted, everything looked and felt different. You thought of the stage direction in another part of the wood. When they arrived at Kelburn, someone was playing music across the park and suddenly it was an early winter evening, the sky turning slightly pink. Tolerton had bought some wine in town, and as they came out of the station they turned and went away to the right. That in itself felt – what? – revolutionary. Up until then, any of their group getting off the cable-car at Kelburn automatically turned to the left and went round to the dormitory, or straight across the park to the student cafe, the libraries, lecture rooms. No one ever took the other direction to the botanic gardens at the top of the hill. What was there for them? Flowers, lawns, a wood from which sometimes at night you could hear owls calling. And yet this time and for no clear reason and without even any discussion they turned right and drifted up the hill, past the old observatory and the upper lawn and into the manuka wood above the rose gardens, Tolerton holding a wine bottle by the neck, Candy, Adam in a long paisley scarf, the Gudgeon sisters, Rod Orr, Chadwick and Race, and Morgan bringing up the rear.

  Race had a vague idea that they were under Chadwick’s generalship. Chadwick was from Los Angeles. He was black as well, which added to his authority, though no one could have said exactly why. He was quite well-off; his father was a wealthy dentist. Chadwick had been sent out to New Zealand when his parents decided that the US was a dangerous country for a young black man, even one whose father was a wealthy orthodontist, to grow up in. What safer place than distant New Zealand? He had been at school in Pasadena. Pasadena! At dusk in Pasadena, according to Chadwick, you could see not one, or two, but three great rivers of headlights and tail lights, the tail lights all glowing red, stretching away in different directions into the LA penumbrae. It sounded like the future, it was the future – rivers of red tail lights flowing away to the horizon. Chadwick had been at school in Pasadena during the Cuban crisis.

  ‘We really thought we were going to die,’ he told Race. ‘We were at school and the air-raid sirens went off. It was only a drill, but what did we know? Nuclear war was looming and then the sirens start. We’re under our desks! Then someone saw these missile silos opening on the hill-tops. We didn’t even know they were there! And everyone started running around screaming, “It’s really happening!”’

  Race liked this story. He saw the kids under the desks, and he thought of the desks in the American school system – thin, plywood veneer, maybe kidney-shaped? And he liked the way that Chadwick did the kids running round screaming: he put both of his hands in front of him and waved them like Mickey Mouse, his eyes and mouth opened wide.

  ‘And all for what?’ said Chadwick. ‘Cuba, obviously, but what was the real reason? Economic theory. Who should own the means of production? Nuclear Armageddon – maybe the end of the world – over that. Thanks, guys.’

  Chadwick looked into Race’s eyes with his clear grey gaze.

  ‘We were fourteen then,’ he said, ‘and now we’re twenty, and we’re not going to let ’em do it again. Fuck them. That’s what’s happening now. All the rest of it – the long hair and sex and drugs and all – they’re just bonus extras, you know, thrown in for fun.’

  They were coming through the manuka wood into the Dell where, in summer, Shakespeare was put on – Midsummer Night’s Dream, Two Gentlemen of Verona – but now the Dell was cold and dark. Chadwick and Race followed the others down the slope and then along the gravelled path at the side of the rose gardens. The rose gardens were also cold and in shadow, but the fountain was playing and the roses were in bloom. There were some people walking around, bending here and there to sniff at a flower, their hands behind their backs.

  ‘That’s what they do,’ said Race. ‘They put their hands behind their backs to show they’re not going to steal the roses. But all it shows is that they’ve thought of stealing them. It shows they have mens rea, a guilty mind.’

  He had picked up this phrase from Tolerton and Rod Orr who were law students.

  ‘No. You haven’t grasped it at all,’ said Chadwick, who was also a law student and who disapproved of Race’s use of legal terminology. Race was studying biology. ‘In any case, it’s nothing to do with your state of mind,’ Chadwick said. ‘When you’re bending over you keep your balance better with your hands behind your back.’

  He stopped and bowed deeply over a rose, his hands behind his back like a royal male, to prove the point. Then they walked on. Ahead of them on the path was a long black car with government plates. Race glanced in as he went past. Three Asian men in suits were in the back. All three were gazing impassively at the rose gardens through the closed window. Race guessed they were official visitors who had been sent on a tour of the city’s sights. The chauffeur, a little turkey-cock of a man, ex-army by the look of him, wearing a red tie and black blazer, stared straight ahead with an angry expression. Race and Chadwick walked past, and then they paused at the end of the drive where a set of stairs led up to another lawn.

  ‘I didn’t mean that about the drugs,’ said Chadwick. ‘The drugs are important. LSD is real important. Did you know that LSD was synthesised the same month that nuclear fission was achieved in another lab five thousand miles away? Call that a coincidence? I don’t think so.’

  ‘So what do you think?’ said Race.

  ‘I think it was sent,’ said Chadwick, and he stopped to look into Race’s eyes, his pleasing way of adding emphasis to a declaration. They stood at the bottom of the steps to consider the matter. Morgan, who had fallen behind the rest of the party, was drifting along the gravel drive on his own. He came up behind the long black car and then without apparently taking thought or even increasing his pace, he vaulted onto the boot of the car and then onto the roof, and took a few steps forward and then stopped.

  Four heads, three Asian and one turkey-cock, jerked upward as one. Disbelief was written on their faces. There were footsteps above them! Morgan stood there peacefully for a moment, outlined against the hillside woods. Then he walked forward, stepped down on the hood and back to the ground, and continued along the gravel drive. No one spoke. No one else moved, not even the angry-looking chauffeur. Chadwick and Race were half-screened by the branches of a tree at the foot of the steps and Morgan had not seen them watching. He had leapt on the car solely to suit his own requirements and he still did not appear to notice their presence as he came along the path and nor did Race and Chadwick speak a word to each other, but they both turned quickly and went up the steps so as not to be seen as Morgan came a
long.

  4

  ‘It says here,’ said Race, rolling up a magazine and, reasonably enough, he thought, under the circumstances, swiping FitzGerald on the back of the head with it, ‘it says that every era has its own blind spots. What do you think? What would you say ours are?’

  FitzGerald, at the wheel of the car, said nothing. His eyes were fixed on the way ahead. They were driving on an unsealed country road. A cone of dust rose behind them, filling the rear window. All the roadside foliage was laden with dust, which gave the landscape a wild, slovenly air.

  ‘The question doesn’t make any sense,’ said Rosie Gudgeon, who was in the front seat between Race and FitzGerald. ‘If we knew what our blind spots were, then we wouldn’t be blind to them, would we?’

  ‘But that’s why they change,’ said Race. ‘One day people realise the blind spot is there and then they do something about it. That’s history.’

  The car was an old Chevrolet sedan. The cracked leather bench-seats gave off the dry, dusty smell of ancient summers and old barns. There was still a cobweb in the back window. Race and FitzGerald had bought the car off the side of the road for $100 a week earlier. The vendor was a white man in his mid-fifties who seemed to be on the point of rage. A sprightly green oak shaded the transaction. Race lifted the hood and looked at the engine, then walked round the car and looked at the tyres, but he really knew nothing about mechanics, and the middle-aged vendor knew he knew nothing, which only added to his irritation. They handed over the $100 and drove away into the summer. It was ten days before Christmas. Now in the car seven days later were Race and FitzGerald and the Gudgeon sisters – tall, confident Rosie and short, sweet-natured Dinah – and Rod Orr, and Panos Carroll, one of FitzGerald’s school-friends who had come up from the South Island to join them on the road trip. They were driving around the wild coast between Opotiki and Gisborne. The dust rose up behind them, the long white road stretched ahead. ‘Bang!’ went the stones on the chassis. ‘Bang! bang! bang!’ The goblins of summer were rapping from below. ‘Freedom!’ they were saying. ‘Sea! Sunburn! Nakedness!’