Some Here Among Us

by Peter Walker

‘OK,’ said Toby. ‘It’s OK.’

  A look of fear, and of woe, filled Bernard’s eyes.

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ he said. ‘Reuben.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ said Toby.

  He took Bernard’s hand – weighty, thin-skinned, dramatically blotched – amazed at the heavy costs of time.

  Merle came back in the room with the glass jug of water, now full, and put it on the glassed top of the bedside locker. Toby let go of Bernard’s hand. Merle put on her hat, then called: ‘Romulus’. Romulus came into the room with his book open. Chadwick followed him in and picked up his newspaper.

  ‘Say goodbye to him,’ said Merle to Romulus, pointing at Bernard.

  ‘Goodbye,’ said Romulus.

  Bernard seemed to be asleep. Romulus jiggled Bernard’s uninjured foot under the blanket. Merle smacked the back of Romulus’s head without force. Bernard opened his eyes a little and looked at the ceiling. Then he crooked his head on the pillow and looked at Romulus.

  ‘Goodbye,’ said Romulus.

  ‘Goodbye, old man,’ said Bernard.

  He sat up a little more and gazed round at them in mild puzzlement.

  ‘You’ve all had – plenty of, of, of – what you need?’ he said.

  ‘Plenty,’ said Toby.

  ‘Very good,’ said Bernard. His gaze wandered the room.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Look!’

  He pointed at the shining wall beyond the end of the bed. They all looked at the shining plaster.

  ‘Egypt!’ said Bernard.

  Romulus’s eyes started.

  ‘No, Grandpa,’ Toby said. ‘Egypt’s not here. Egypt’s at home at Barleycorn Street.’

  Bernard gazed at Toby. There was a long pause.

  ‘Of course Egypt is not here,’ said Bernard. ‘Egypt is a cat. And this is, I believe, the University Hospital.’

  Part III

  1969

  1

  They were going up the hill fast, in the dark, Adam and Candy and Morgan and Race Radzienwicz. It was raining so hard you couldn’t talk, you could only laugh. It was raining with a kind of passion. They were running, and laughing – what did the rain mean by this passion, what on earth did rain want? It was as if it was in a rage or trying to make copies of itself. They ran across Willis Street through the sluicing headlights and under the neon signs of the Hotel St George, and then up Boulcott Street, water sliding in scallops down the steep black pavement. Race had almost forgotten that he was going to miss Chadwick’s wedding the next morning. Chadwick was the first of the gang to get married. The night before, Race had caught the train from Auckland. A plane, with the whole wedding party on board, was leaving Wellington at ten-thirty the following day. But at six that morning, sitting in the second-class carriage, Race was woken by a sudden stillness and silence: the train had stopped. The sun was not up yet but he could see the faint green of a field in the early light. Then an announcement was made: there was a slip on the line further south.

  Away across the fields stood a factory with the word F e l t e x painted on the roof. On the other side of the carriage was a muddy lane with a long queue of cows standing at a gate. After a while the sun came up and for a moment burnished the brick walls of the factory as if to say: ‘There . . . eternity.’ The cows began to move forward with an air of matronly leisure.

  ‘I’m going to miss the plane!’ thought Race. ‘I’m going to miss Chadwick’s wedding.’

  At seven-thirty the train moved off, but very slowly, through dew-spangled meadows. It stopped again, lengthily, in a field outside Levin, and again at Foxton station, and in a siding at Otaki. It seemed to Race that the powers-that-be knew all about the wedding and had decided he should miss it. But then at nine-thirty the train set off at speed, racing southward – Paraparaumu, Paekakariki – ‘Paekakariki/ Where the girls are cheeky,’ said an old man with a white cloth cap across the aisle – Plimmerton, Porirua flashed past – dales and tunnels vanished behind them, mud-flats and flag-staffs and rock-girt seas. At quarter past ten, they emerged from the last tunnel and swooped round the harbour. Across the water planes were lifting off and setting down in the rookery of the airport. At exactly ten-thirty Race walked out of Wellington station with his bag in his hand. There were no more flights to Queenstown that day. Everyone, Race thought, was going to Chadwick’s wedding. They were all on the ten-thirty flight – Chadwick and his bride-to-be, FitzGerald, the best man, the Gudgeon sisters, Rod Orr, Lane Tolerton, all the rest of them. This was Race’s first trip back since he had moved to Auckland and now he felt all alone in the place.

  He stood there under the sandstone pillars feeling hapless, like a man in a cartoon, but what exactly was the joke? Haplessness is the joke, he thought. He took his bag back and checked it at the left-luggage then came out of the station again and walked into the city. He went to several record stores and bookshops and then to a coffee bar and ordered coffee and a roll and read the Dominion. Then he walked up to Cuba Street and went to a second coffee bar and re-read the morning paper. ‘Something will happen,’ he told himself.

  At two o’clock his mother, passing in a bus, saw her son standing at the corner of Willis Street and Manners Street. He was looking in a shop window, immersed in study of the contents – pipes, cigars, speciality tobacco. She went up Brooklyn hill on the bus and walked from the bus stop to the house and let herself in and went into the kitchen and sat down on one of the old bentwood chairs she had inherited from her father, and burst into tears.

  ‘He’s in town and hasn’t even rung us!’ she thought.

  She went to the phone to call her husband, but then stopped. He had a busy surgery and didn’t like to be disturbed by home-life dramas. In any case, he himself, at the age of twenty-two, a Polish prisoner of war, had escaped from a camp in the Ukraine and walked all the way to freedom across a mountain range into Persia. The tribulations which his wife offered for his consideration sometimes made him roar with laughter.

  ‘Oh well,’ she thought. ‘After all, he’s only twenty-one.’ She was thinking of Race but she also saw her husband crossing a mountain pass in 1941 – she saw the ice and the Persian sunlight around him – and she began to feel more cheerful. She went to the piano and sat down to play. She plunged her hands on the keyboard and sang:

  Down at the end of lone-ly street

  At heart-break hotel.

  Just then Race, down in town, remembered Adam and Candy and Morgan. Had they gone to Chadwick’s wedding? Had they flown off to Queenstown with everyone else? It occurred to him that they might not have: he hadn’t heard their names in any lists mentioned in the preliminary arrangements. It occurred to him as well that Chadwick and those three were not very close – that Chadwick and Morgan, especially, had never hit it off. Perhaps it was hard for them, he thought, to make friends, the only two non-whites in a white crowd. Maybe they thought it would look ridiculous, an alliance based on skin colour. ‘I’m only guessing,’ he thought, but he decided to walk up the hill to see. Light rain was falling in town, but then it stopped and then started again. An hour later, he stood at the foot of a retaining wall of rain-stained concrete which rose forty feet above the pavement. Inset in the wall was a zig-zag path. Race had only a rough idea of the address. He had heard it but never written it down. He stood and looked at the wall. The rain stains were dramatic, like the graphs of profit and loss. He took the zig-zag path. It led up to a little hamlet of letter boxes in a grove of trees. Higher up, above the trees, he could see the gables of four or five houses. Asphalt paths led off in different directions. Which one to take? The mailboxes were numbered but the paths were not. Is there a guiding instinct which helps the young find one another in their momentous task, to make love and perpetuate the species? He chose the middle path and went up through the trees. The path led up around the side of a house to a small concrete yard. The back door was open. He stepped into a kitchen. No one was there, but the room was warm and smelled of recent frying. He walked through the kitchen i
nto a larger room. There was Candy on her hands and knees on the carpet.

  She looked up at him with her great eyes. For a moment he thought she was in some kind of travail or danger and that she must be pleased to see him.

  ‘Don’t move!’ she said. She spoke sharply though in a mumble. There were pins between her lips.

  ‘Don’t mumble,’ said Race. He felt hurt at her greeting, the first he had had from any human being all that day.

  Candy took the pins from her mouth.

  ‘Sorry, dear heart,’ she said. ‘I’m making this dress, and I really don’t have a clue what I’m doing. Walking on my pattern won’t help.’

  Race looked down at his feet. He was standing among flimsy sheets of grey paper marked with blue lines.

  ‘You make your own clothes!’ he said.

  ‘I’m trying to.’

  ‘I thought you’d get your clothes from Mary-Lou.’

  Mary-Lou was the name of the chain of stores Candy’s father owned.

  ‘Mary-Lou!’ said Candy. ‘I would wear something from Mary-Lou! No one in their right mind would wear clothes from Mary-Lou.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Race humbly. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘So hideous,’ said Candy, thinking of the pale mannequins in the windows of the Mary-Lou outlets, who had sent her to the best schools.

  Race stood there unsure of what to do next. A pretty girl he had never seen before came out of the next room. She and Race looked at each other. Candy was suddenly struck by a thought.

  ‘Quick!’ she said. ‘Morgan just left. He’s going to the movies. You must have seen him on the path.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Race.

  ‘You must have,’ said Candy. ‘He just left. Go!’

  The other girl laughed, apparently at Candy’s tone of command and Race’s air of indecision.

  ‘Go!’ said Candy again. ‘You’ll catch him if you run.’

  Race turned and left the house; he went back down through the trees and down the zig-zag and across the street and along the avenue in the direction of the cable-car terminus. Not far ahead he caught sight of Morgan’s black hat. The rain had stopped and just then the sun came out under the cloud-eaves in the west, and lit up one side of the boles of the old avenue trees, pohutukawas and planes, as stout as wine-vats or wheat-sacks. Race tapped Morgan on the shoulder. Morgan spun around and stared at him.

  ‘Where did you spring from?’ he said.

  ‘I’ve been at your place.’

  ‘You couldn’t have.’

  ‘We must have missed each other on the path.’

  ‘That’s not physically possible,’ said Morgan.

  ‘I know,’ said Race.

  ‘I’m in a hurry,’ said Morgan.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Movies.’

  ‘What are we going to see?’

  ‘Whatever’s on at the Lido.’

  They took the shortcut to Glasgow Street, went through the campus, past the graveyard knoll with its Celtic cross, down the steep, pine-rooted asphalt track to Salamanca Road and then leapt the Allenby Terrace stairs two at a time and arrived in the heart of town.

  ‘Look at that,’ said Morgan, coming into the foyer of the Lido. ‘I had a bet with Candy you could get to the movies in twenty-five minutes and you can.’

  ‘We won,’ said Race. He looked at the poster. It was for a Bergman film. ‘Wild Strawberries,’ Race said. ‘We’d better go to the pub.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Morgan. ‘I’ve proved that it can be done. There’s no need to actually go doing it.’

  They went to the pub next door. At six, Morgan phoned the others. At seven Candy and Adam arrived. Race had never been out with the trio before and found he was enjoying himself. Adam’s stutter was bad at first but then dwindled away. Candy linked her arms with both Adam and Morgan as if she could hold all three together for ever. Morgan began to tell a long story about Flaubert in Egypt – he had been reading Flaubert’s Letters from Egypt – and how Flaubert, visiting a Turkish bath in Cairo or somewhere and lying there in the dim hot dripping echoing room, felt this incredible melancholy, and how he, Morgan, always felt the same melancholy just at the point of getting into a hot bath – ‘lowering in’, he said. Adam then said that he too felt that same melancholy, and Race was about to say that he – although he was not sure what the end of the sentence would be but he was sure he had something to say but Candy interrupted and said that it was complete balls – that was the expression she used – and that getting into a hot bath was one of the least melancholy things that you could do especially on a winter’s day at about, say, seven-thirty in the evening and you’d come in and it was freezing cold outside and preferably raining and you weren’t going out that night but staying in and then you had a long hot bath, and if anyone wanted to join you—. Then she stopped and laughed, and Morgan stopped for a moment too and looked at her. He thought of FitzGerald slipping up the zig-zag path on a winter’s evening. He had not seen him there but he thought of it anyway. He went on to say that Flaubert, when he climbed one of the pyramids—

  ‘Oh, still in Egypt, are we?’ said Candy.

  ‘Still in Egypt,’ said Morgan evenly.

  —he found that the top was white with eagle-droppings, with the shit of eagles—

  ‘That’s important,’ said Race.

  ‘I know,’ said Morgan.

  ‘Why is it important?’ said Race.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Morgan.

  ‘No one else has ever mentioned it,’ said Race.

  ‘That’s why it’s important,’ said Morgan, and at that moment they were both pleased with each other and Morgan felt as if he had momentarily slipped the gravitational pull of Adam and Candy, that for the first time for a year or two he was no longer just the third member of a trio, always circling the other two at a distance, often not even visible like one of those bodies in space which scientists can detect, although not by telescope. At ten o’clock when the pub closed they went to the door and saw the rain slashing down on the street, violent, passionate, as if serving aces.

  ‘How’re we going to get out of this?’ said Candy.

  ‘Taxi,’ said Morgan.

  ‘No money,’ said Candy, who was careful with money.

  ‘You can come with me,’ said Race.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m going to stay at Rod Orr’s,’ said Race.

  ‘Will Rod Orr mind?’

  Race thought of Rod Orr arriving on the road-trip in the summer.

  ‘He’d better not mind,’ said Race.

  They ran out into the deluge. It was raining so hard you had to laugh. At the top of Boulcott, they turned and went down the hill again towards parliament, then into Silver Lane and climbed the steps to the house where Rod Orr lived. The clouds scudding over the town were filled with the urban glow; everything below was lit up as if by X-ray – the flights of steps, the running figures, the house above.

  ‘How do we get in?’ said Candy when they reached the top of the steps.

  ‘We break in,’ said Race.

  ‘Are you sure Rod won’t mind?’ said Candy.

  ‘He’ll never know,’ said Race.

  There was a wild gust of wind and the big cabbage-tree beside the veranda tossed its head. Someone stepped out of the shadow. Candy gave a scream.

  ‘Christ,’ said Race to the figure. ‘You gave me a fright.’

  ‘Lord love us,’ said Candy. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘This is Salmond Burns,’ said Race. ‘I thought you were in England.’

  ‘Scotland,’ said Burns.

  He stood in the rain-cloud glow, looking sheepish.

  ‘Are you really called Salmond Burns?’ said Candy.

  Salmond Burns nodded, with his eyes shut.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ said Race.

  At school Salmond Burns had been the speedy winger, the sprint champ, the golden boy. What was he doing standing in the shadow
of Rod Orr’s veranda in a rain storm?

  ‘I came to town to see this girl,’ said Salmond. ‘But she shut the door on me. She laughed in my face,’ he added, deciding to reveal what until a moment before he had planned always to hide – the extent of his humiliation.

  ‘Then I drove round but I couldn’t find anyone and I thought of Rod Orr. So I came here. Then it started pouring down so I just waited here. I didn’t know what else to do. Race! I never thought you’d be here. Thank God for that!’

  Race was unused to the role of saviour. ‘Wait,’ he said. He went to the window and pushed at the splintery wooden frame with his fingers. The window went up shakily on a single sash cord. Race swung his leg over the sill and went into the room and disappeared. A light came on through the mottled glass of the front door, and Race reappeared.

  ‘Yes?’ he said, opening the door a little.

  They crowded in past him.

  ‘Are you sure Rod Orr won’t mind?’ said Candy.

  ‘Rod Orr will be honoured,’ said Race.

  ‘I adore Rod,’ said Candy, superstitiously. She had an idea that Rod Orr, five hundred miles away at Chadwick’s wedding, might be able to see them walking around his house at that moment.

  ‘Look at Rod’s wine,’ Adam called out from the dining room. He began to read out labels. ‘Chateau Talbot. Côte de Beaune. Meursault. Nuits-Saint-Georges.’

  ‘Rod is into wine,’ said Candy. ‘He’s got a part-time job as a waiter at Le Normandie so now he’s really into wine.’

  ‘Let’s have a drink,’ said Adam, picking up a bottle.

  ‘No!’ said Candy. ‘Not his good wine. Open some plonk.’

  They opened a red that looked more humble and went into the sitting-room. Race closed the window where the rain was coming in on the gale. The sitting-room had a red carpet and a faded red velvet sofa and red and yellow curtains with a jaunty pattern of musical instruments – oboes, clarinets – in yellow thread. There were some pot plants on the coffee table and a vine growing up a trellis on the wall.

  ‘Oh, how lovely,’ said Candy, sinking onto the sofa. ‘Shall we light a fire? It’s horrible out there. Did you notice how horrible it was tonight? Did you notice the atmosphere? All those men.’