by Peter Walker
The double doors to the street opened. The rain slung at the windows again, and the girls who came through the door screamed, rain lashing their bare legs. They clattered in.
‘Ladies,’ said the barman, pushing himself back on his finger-tips to survey them. They ordered rums and coke and went away to the lounge area and sat at a low table. One of them crossed her legs then moved her head to one side to look at them.
‘Tarts,’ said the barman without looking up, hunched over the racing paper. Then he looked over at Race, his pupils hard black rings in a blue field. A clock struck somewhere down in town, but Race wasn’t sure he had heard the first chime so he couldn’t be sure of the total. But he knew nothing would happen now and that now he didn’t want it to. He stood off his stool and picked up the satchel and went to the doors. The wood around the doorplates was darkened by touch and scarred densely as a palm-print. He pushed the brass plate and went out.
He walked back through town and up through the park and the campus again; the rain came down briefly, and Race went on further up the hill and arrived at the apartment building where he and Panos and Busoni had lived a few months earlier. He let himself in through the street door and stood there, listening. There was a radio on in one of the ground-floor flats.
He unlocked another door in the foyer and went up the stairs quietly to their old apartment. No one had been in there, as far as he could see, since they had left. The rooms were bare apart from a mattress left behind when they moved out.
He took the mattress into the sitting-room and put it on the floor in one corner, then stood there for a minute or so. Then he went back to his old bedroom and stood looking, listening to the radio downstairs. There was a marble on the floor by the wall. He picked it up and took it to the middle of the room and laid it down. It rolled away and touched the wall. Click. That was why the building had been vacated. The whole block, four storeys of apartments, was on a lean. It was slated for demolition and the site would be turned into a car-park. Race went back into the sitting-room. The leaves of the gum tree that grew right past the window ticked against the pane. Race stood there. He was thinking about the tenants of the ground-floor flat. Of course they hadn’t moved out, he thought, Eloise and Ken. Eloise was a fighter. She would give battle to the evicting powers. Eloise was only twenty-five but she had the manner, and the clothes, and the weight, the solid round calves, of a matron. She was wealthy as well. She flew to Sydney to see Fonteyn and Nureyev – ‘darling Rudi’ she called him – and once a month a black car came to pick her up and off she went to court in a black suit and a wide-brimmed hat. It was some tremendous court-case about a family trust and raggedy cousins with their hands out. Of course Eloise was still downstairs, Race thought, she’d be giving the developers merry hell. As for Ken with his thick gleaming glasses that concealed his eyes, he did whatever Eloise said.
Race went quietly to the top of the stairs and looked down at the mottled-glass door at the bottom. Had he locked that or not? He didn’t want Eloise or Ken coming up to see who was there. The late sun struck through the door and coloured the stair-carpet a rich ruby red. It was almost five o’clock. He went back and picked up his satchel and went into the kitchenette and opened the bottle. This was easy now, it was easier and easier. ‘Finally,’ he thought. Finally meaning at last and finally meaning finally. He saw that the small window above the stove was broken. Did we do that, he thought, or the wind? He began to take the pills, one by one. There was no glass or cup in the kitchen. He drank the pills down with tapwater cupped in his hand. Then it was done. Jazz was playing on the downstairs radio. Ken with his black-rimmed glasses was a jazz buff.
So this is it, thought Race. Five in the afternoon. Jazz, and a red carpet . . . At five in the afternoon, his father said, on a signal, the whole city of Warsaw burst out in gunfire. From every house, every window, every door. The uprising had begun!
But then Race felt bad and he didn’t want to think about his father. Or his mother. Or Panos and the greens. Leeks will do, said Panos, peas will do. He thought of the dark dining room where the light never made it into the corners and he felt bad about dinner. But it couldn’t be helped, he thought, this had to be done, and he saw the darkness where the Chev broke down, the lovely, lightless, starless dark.
He went and lay on the mattress and thought ‘the dark, no, the unlit, no, the profoundly unlit coast,’ and then Ruru ‘It’s not safe nowadays, son, not in lifts,’ and he almost felt like laughing and then he felt the cold. An icy sunset wind was coming in from the broken window in the kitchen.
‘That could be a problem,’ he thought. Though not much of a problem. Or rather, not much of a problem for very long. But then for a long time it was, and he lay there and, apart from everything else, he was aware of the cold.
Then the darkness came, and for a long time he was aware of nothing.
When Race woke Panos was standing in the sitting-room doorway, staring down at him with his black Greek gaze. There was daylight in the room. There were other people behind Panos; Panos seemed angry.
‘I’ve been all over the place looking for you,’ he said.
The other two – Eloise and Ken – said nothing. They were looking down at Race on the mattress with puzzled expressions. Panos was still standing in the doorway in front of them. He gazed around the room but did not step in.
‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘You stay here the night?’
‘Yes,’ said Race.
‘No bus money?’
‘No,’ said Race. He wondered where the pill bottle was.
‘You could have walked,’ said Panos.
He stepped into the room. He was looking puzzled too, but lofty and bitter at the same time, as if forced into an ignominious role.
‘We tried to find you,’ he said. ‘Busoni and me. Last night we went everywhere, bars, pubs . . .’
‘Why?’ said Race.
‘There was a phone call for you,’ said Panos. ‘We waited round for hours then we came out to look for you.’
‘Why?’ said Race.
Panos looked down at him, still angry.
‘Morgan Tawhai’s dead,’ he said.
5
‘May I? Excuse me. May I?’
‘Sure,’ said Race.
‘Sorry—’
‘No, sure—’
Race half stood and leaned back, and tucked in his chin as well as if that would further reduce his presence, while the man beside him stood and leaned across in front of him and snapped a picture through the window.
‘Beautiful thing, that,’ he said, sitting down again heavily. ‘Pratt and Whitney.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Race. He looked out at the aircraft engine. It seemed fine to him. A fragment of blinding sunlight was dancing on the casing. Beyond lay the high blue horizon of the Bay of Plenty.
‘Rex,’ his neighbour said. He shook Race’s hand. He had a great freckled heavy hand. He lifted it and sent it diving into Race’s hand as if it were a plane.
‘Nineteen thirty-five,’ he said; ‘1935 this plane went into production and she’s still going strong! She was in the Berlin airlift.’
‘This plane?’ said Race.
‘This model.’
‘Oh, this model.’
‘Hundreds of tons of meat and butter they flew in every day, right over the heads of the Russians.’
‘Oh, I’ve read about that,’ said Race.
‘The old DC3, eh!’ said Rex, laughing and shaking his head as though it was his own doing. ‘Coffee!’ he said. ‘Eleven tons of coffee a day. That’s what Berlin drank every day.’
Race saw a giant named Berlin drinking eleven tons of coffee at a wooden table. Rex was the mayor of Whakatane, he said. He was flying back from a mayoral conference in Auckland.
‘There are several mayors on this flight,’ he said. ‘And I’m taking ’em all fishing. That’s the mayor of Rotorua over there, and that’s the mayor of Palmerston, and that chump down there – he’s the mayor o
f Whangarei.’
The mayor of Whangarei heard his name; he half-turned his head, then he realised who was speaking and turned back again. Directly below them, below the plane, miles and miles of mountainous forest were gently lit by the afternoon sun as if a great secret was being disclosed. This was early on a Monday afternoon, two days after Race had woken to see Panos standing in the doorway, staring down at him on the bare mattress.
‘He’s dead?’ Race said.
‘He’s dead,’ said Panos. ‘He fell. He fell off a wall or something. They found him on the footpath but he died in hospital yesterday. FitzGerald rang last night to tell you.’
Panos’s gaze was moving round the room, from the mattress to the satchel to the broken window in the little kitchen, trying to work something out.
‘We waited for you and then we went out and looked all over the place,’ he said. ‘We went to the Kiwi, we went to the Albion, we went to the Shakespeare, we went to the Roma . . .’
Then Race cried, shed tears briefly under Panos’s indignant eye, because of what Panos had said and because he himself had woken in the world again, and because he was glad he had. Eloise came into the room behind Panos.
‘You are coming downstairs with us and you are going to have breakfast,’ she said.
She was a big woman, stout-limbed, soft-palmed. She took Race’s hand in her small soft palm. Race stood up. The others stood back a little, in doubtful respect for the bereaved. Out the window, the trees were still leafless as if the whole notion of spring arriving the day before was an error. The woods across the valley in the Domain were the colour of an old wood-stack; above them the pillared museum stood on the crest of the hill, massive, certain, memorious, with its gloomy inscription: The Whole Earth Is a Sepulchre for Famous Men. Race went downstairs with Panos and Eloise and Ken. Then Panos went away and Race slept on the sofa in the downstairs flat for a few hours. Then Eloise drove him home in Ken’s car and he fell asleep again and he slept for the rest of the day and all night until the Sunday.
When he got up and went down to the kitchen on Sunday morning, Panos and Busoni said nothing about the matter. He felt their puzzlement. What had he been up to? Why had he stayed out all night that night, of all nights? He said nothing. He didn’t know himself. That afternoon the house was very quiet. Everyone stayed in their rooms. Race went out for a walk alone in the grey afternoon. He walked to Dominion Road and then decided to walk the whole length of it, three or four miles out to suburbs he had not seen before. What had happened, he wondered. He couldn’t even re-create the mood he had been in two days earlier. ‘Only two days ago,’ he thought. ‘And now I’m alive and Morgan’s dead, and here I am on Dominion Road.’
A few months before, there had been a proposal to use Dominion Road, the longest straight thoroughfare in the city, as a model of the solar system. The sun would be marked by a brass plaque at one end and all the planets set in brass in the pavement along the way. But the plan had been vetoed by the local shopkeepers – they could not see how it would increase turnover. As he walked along, Race kept thinking about it. What size, for instance, should the sun be, at one end of a street four miles long, in other words in a solar system eight miles in diameter? A dinner plate? A cartwheel? And what about the Earth, what size should that be – a saucer, or a thimble, or an apple pip? And where should the thimble or apple pip be placed? By the carpet warehouse at the second intersection – or much further out, by the shop selling papers on the corner of Valley Road? Race walked half a mile or so and suddenly thought of Morgan at the fancy-dress ball, dancing alone, right up by the stage under the guitar necks.
‘Maybe he knew!’ Race thought.
He stopped on the footpath. He saw Morgan in his old cord jacket and needle-cord jeans, dancing to ‘All Along The Watchtower’. What were the words? He couldn’t remember exactly. Time was short? The hour was getting late? Time was running out?
‘He knew what was going to happen!’ Race thought. ‘Of course, he didn’t know he knew but some part of him, that he didn’t know, knew he was going to die.’
‘Morgan Tawhai!’ he said aloud.
No one heard him. He was on the corner of Valley Road by the shop selling Sunday papers and milk and flowers. There were stocks and chrysanthemums in plastic buckets on the rain-darkened asphalt outside.
‘Maybe that’s what I loved about him,’ Race thought. ‘He was always keeping his appointment.’
He kept walking until he reached the far end of Dominion Road and then went down a side street or two just to see what was out there, well past Neptune and Uranus, at the end of the solar system. Then the rain began to fall, he looked at the little pastel houses in the rain, and wished he had a girlfriend to go and visit out there, in the region of Pluto so to speak, and then he turned, walked back in light rain the whole way, and packed a bag to fly to Morgan’s funeral in the morning.
‘One plane every thirty seconds,’ said Rex. ‘Meat, butter, coffee. Fish! They had to build another airport to take the traffic. There was an old radio tower in the way and the Russians wouldn’t take it down, so the French rolled up and blew it to bits. The Russians went crazy. “How could you have done this?” the Russian general yelled to the French general. “With dynamite, my dear colleague, with dynamite.” ’
Rex shook with laughter.
‘With dynamite!’ he said. ‘My dear colleague.’
He pointed past Race to the window. They were now flying out over the sea.
‘May I?’ he said again.
‘Oh, sure,’ said Race, flattening himself against the seat. Rex rose to his feet with his camera in his hand but the air-hostess saw him and sprang down the aisle.
‘Seat belts on,’ she said. ‘We’re coming in to land.’
Rex shrank back looking shamed. To be reprimanded by this girl! The hostess sat down herself, young, stern, incorruptible. The plane wiggled in the air and shuddered. Race could see breakers below with a timber-coloured backwash, then a narrow grey beach and there was the grass runway rushing up. A rabbit or hare went dashing into the unmown grass beside the mown. Then they were all out of the plane and walking across to the terminal. It was just a small-town airport sleeping in the sunshine. And there were FitzGerald and Tolerton waiting for him behind a cyclone fence.
They greeted one another with solemn expressions. Was he all right? Were they all right? But, then, suddenly translated hundreds of miles into the sunshine, into the spring, high spirits broke out.
‘We’re staying by the beach,’ said FitzGerald. ‘We’re in a “family hotel”. You should see this joint.’
‘There was an old woman who lived in a shoe, with so many children – that’s us,’ said Tolerton. ‘And she doesn’t have a clue, actually. Mrs Brisco is her name. No “e”.’
‘No smoking,’ said FitzGerald.
‘No smoking, no drinking, no gambling, no dancin’,’ said Tolerton. ‘Dancin’ – dancin’.’
Tolerton did a soft-shoe shuffle outside the terminal.
‘Where’s Morgan?’ said Race.
Morgan! They had momentarily forgotten Morgan, exactly as if he was still alive.
Morgan’s body was in a little church across town; he would be there overnight before they took him home.
They caught a cab from the rank outside the terminal. In the taxi, Tolerton became serious.
‘It’s bad,’ he said.
‘What?’ said Race.
‘Things are bad,’ said Tolerton. ‘There’s a fuss. They found drugs in a jacket pocket or something. Where he got drugs from, I do not know.’
‘The cops are overjoyed,’ said FitzGerald. ‘They think they’re in New York.’
‘What happened?’ said Race.
‘Human Sanity left him asleep on a path,’ said FitzGerald.
‘Is he here?’
‘God, no,’ said FitzGerald.
‘Well, it was hardly his fault,’ said Tolerton. ‘You know what Morgan was like when he was drunk. Falling ov
er everywhere.’
‘If he’d fallen asleep on the footpath – fine,’ said FitzGerald. ‘But this clown leads him up a forty-foot cliff, then leaves him to sleep it off.’
‘Well, I just don’t know,’ said Tolerton uneasily.
‘He might as well have left him unconscious in the middle of the road,’ said FitzGerald.
‘That’s hardly fair,’ said Tolerton.
‘On the white line in the middle of the road,’ said FitzGerald.
There was silence as the taxi drove through town.
‘Here’s the beach,’ said Tolerton. ‘There’s our hotel. Oh – there’s our landlady at the window!’
‘Hello, Mrs Brisco,’ said FitzGerald, looking up from the taxi. ‘We love you, mad as a hatter though you are.’
They went into the hotel and met old Mrs Brisco with her apron and her dark-flecked chin in the gloom of the hall. Race dropped his bag upstairs and they went out again, across the road to the beach, FitzGerald talking all the time as they crossed the sand.
‘There’s about ten of us,’ he said, ‘someone called Lily, and Tubby Rawlinson who flatted with Morgan for a while, and his girlfriend. And Sandra Isbister, she’s here – she got to know Morgan quite well in the last month or two, she was telling me she met him at a nightclub and looked at him and just knew something was going to happen but I don’t know about that – and of course Candy and Adam – poor old Griffin, he hasn’t uttered a word for two days I don’t think – it was his birthday on Friday, you can imagine what sort of day that was: Morgan died at five and Adam had to identify the body and then Mrs Tawhai arrived – how she got there in that time, I don’t know, she must have flown bodily through the ether – and she turned on him, on all of us really. It was all our fault. Drinking. Leading Morgan astray. But, you know, it was her son lying there dead, and so no one said a word, and then the paper got hold of the story about the drugs and then the police decided there had been foul play. Hey. Hey! Hey.’
