by Gee, Maurice
‘My brother? No, he’s gone.’
‘Good riddance.’ Christine was almost always sharp behind her placid face, but was easy this morning, and self-admiring. She wanted to be thanked again, and maybe congratulated. Her kick must give her pleasure still, no matter where it had landed.
‘It’s just as well you hauled me off. I’d have done some damage.’
‘Yes. You were impressive.’
Christine took her glasses off. ‘Look, I didn’t notice till last night. There’s a chip in the lens. Down in the corner.’
‘Oh, Christine. Get it fixed. Send the bill to me.’
‘I might.’ She put the glasses on. ‘It doesn’t bother me. As long as I got a good one in. Has he got a bruise?’
‘I don’t know. Evan has.’
‘He shouldn’t have got in the way. Your brother’s the guy who’s married to that woman Freda, eh?’
‘Yes.’
‘The one who came across here with a black eye?’
‘Yes, that’s him.’
‘I should have kicked him harder. I should prosecute him.’
‘Don’t, Christine, please.’ Was this what the woman wanted? Little servings of humility? But I’m not asking for David, I’m asking for Evan and me.
She drove back to Inlet Arts, put the groceries in the house and went across to the pottery.
‘I’ve done the shopping.’
‘Good,’ he said, not looking up from his work.
‘I met Christine in there. She’s full of herself. She wanted me to say how great she’d been.’
‘Did you?’
‘A bit. Is it still sore?’
‘A bruise, that’s all. A bit lower down and I’d have been wrecked.’ He smiled at her and she relaxed.
‘I’m sorry about last night. I just couldn’t, with him in the next room.’
‘Hey, hey.’ He stood up and put his arms around her. ‘You and me don’t have to say we’re sorry for things like that.’
They were the same height, eyes on a level – no lifting up or bending down. Their shapes though did not match. She was round and he was square. Through his shirt she felt the quilted hair on his shoulders. An hairy man. She had always liked that better than smooth. And liked square in a torso better than those long deltoids and backs shaped like a cobra’s hood – magazine men. Evan was a one-off.
‘We can lock the gate if you like and spend the morning in bed.’
‘So it’s like that?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Winter sports. No can do. Not in the season.’
She reached down and felt him, but took her hand away when he began to thicken. She pressed with her fingers on the place where Christine had kicked him.
‘Ow,’ he said. ‘What did Freda have to say?’
‘Nothing much. I told her not to work down by the road.’
‘That’s some brother you’ve got. You know he’s dangerous?’
‘I know.’
‘If I was Freda I’d take off for Sydney.’
‘Why should the woman run away?’
‘Yeah. Still …’
‘It’s like saying we shouldn’t go out at night.’
‘I know. But what do you do? Lock him up?’
‘Yes, if he won’t leave her alone.’
‘He’s mates with the police, they won’t touch him. Is he still living on his capital?’
‘As far as I know.’
‘It won’t last for ever. He’s like a bee in a bottle, May. He’s got nowhere to go. Ah, customers.’
‘Sightseers, I’ll bet.’
‘They nearly caught me with a lump in me trous.’ He patted himself down. ‘Okay?’
‘Mister Smooth.’
May sat down to work but let her hands lie for a moment on the bench. Her agitation did not come from Evan, she was aware of calmness there. But why hadn’t she told him that her father was sick and that Heather wanted her to visit him? Evan would accept it, no trouble. The trouble came from herself.
• • •
Her name was not taken from the book. She read it to find out what made it so special, and enjoyed the running around and the narrow escapes, but liked the walking in the hills and the heather even more. She was pleased that Alan Breck had a pockmarked face. She admired him more for that than for swordfighting. But women had no place in the story – even David Balfour’s mother had no place – except for the innkeeper’s daughter who ferried Alan and David across the Firth from Limekilns to the Lothian shore. She landed them and rowed away into the night, and Alan said at last, ‘It is a very fine lass.’ May, helping David, had seen herself as unthanked like that, and without a name, and she whispered Alan Breck’s words to herself as she mothered him, and sometimes repeats them today as she rows on the inlet.
She grew up afraid of her father (and is afraid of him still). He seldom noticed her, but when he did he had a way of taking her jaw and slanting up her face. He lifted so hard that she mounted on her toes. ‘A real mother wouldn’t have left her daughter in a bus stop.’ May wondered what was meant by ‘real mother’. She had no idea how one of those was meant to behave. David’s had been no help to him. She also wondered what a real father would be like.
She has few memories up to the age of five. Piecing things together, she knows that her mother was Robert Macpherson’s housekeeper. She must have fallen pregnant after just a month or two (‘fallen’ seems the proper word to May), and her time on the orchard lasted only half a year. Robert Macpherson found a wife and paid his housekeeper off. ‘She wasn’t hard done by. She left here with a packet of money.’ May was born in Wellington. She remembers a roof torn off by the wind and tiles crashing down outside her window. There are women who gave her cake and women who smacked her. They have no faces, only teeth and hair. Her mother has no face but is a belted raincoat and shoes that clack on concrete steps as she carries May up and down. She smells of facepowder and drycleaner and BO.
Then May sits in the waiting room at Newmans in Nelson. She is wearing new shoes that make an echo of her mother’s. A suitcase with a strap around it leans against her knees. ‘Wait there like a good girl. Your father will pick you up.’ Her mother goes out the door but turns and hurries back. ‘If you have to do wees, ask the lady at the desk.’ She goes out and gets on a bus. May seems to remember that she made a little goodbye kiss on her fingertips as it pulled out.
Robert Macpherson leans over her. That is something May will not forget. He puts his hand under her chin and lifts her face. He breathes on her, a zoo smell that she later learns is pipe. His fingers are as rough as a nutmeg grater. May cries and he lets her go and runs into the street. He believes her mother is watching from a doorway somewhere and he comes back and asks where she is hiding. May is able to say that she went on the bus. She remembers her instructions and takes a letter from her pocket. He tears it – reads, and whispers a word that May, trying years later to recall (trying now), believes was ‘Bitch’. Years later too she reads the letter. ‘I’ve tried to look after her but I can’t. Her birthday is February the 9th. Her name is Clare.’ There is no signature. May does not know her mother’s name, although she remembers a man in a shop picking up something white and squishy that she thought was a towel: ‘Tripe, fresh in, Mrs Taylor.’ Until she read the letter, taking it from a drawer in her father’s desk a few days before running away, she had forgotten that she used to be Clare. Sometimes she considers changing back but has not been able to care sufficiently.
She does not think by choice of her time on the orchard but finds this or that part often in her mind. Those thirteen years have moulded into her things she will never get rid of. A habit of distrust. A habit of withdrawal. Sullenness. Submissiveness. Ferocity. Self-loathing. She thinks of them as impedimenta, although they no longer get in her way. Self-loathing? She likes herself pretty well these days and she thinks with wonder of the time when, twelve years old, she painted her face and arms with duck shit at the pond: goblin smears, an
d mouths and eyes. No one thing had led to it, as far as she remembers, just little bits of loathing pressed into her by her father’s thumb. She felt natural once it was laid on, and happy to recognise herself. Many years later, swimming with Evan in the Aorere, in a pool that curved like glass, magnifying pebbles on its floor, she took clean water in her palms and washed the last of that filth away.
May crosses self-loathing out. She crosses out submissiveness, and won’t allow sullenness to be written large. She is gruff more than sullen, a different thing. As for ferocity, it’s no impediment, except when her aim is bad, which happens now and then. She mostly hits with words, but has punched or slapped several times: punched Heather’s father, Artie with the smelly mouth, breaking two of his teeth off at the gum. She left the commune next day on the boat and never went back or saw him again. And she slapped Heather so hard on the face that it stung her hand, the day Heather told her she was leaving for Sydney. That was bad aim. She did not see Heather for three years; and the slap has not gone away. Heather never speaks of it but touches her cheek unconsciously when she is with May.
I saved her from the magpies, May remembers. How sensible she had been and how simple the remedy; yet she thinks of it as daring and inventive. They were living with Freda in a house in Ngaio. Freda had ferried them across town in a taxi after tracking them down in Newtown in a room with rotting floorboards and a ceiling furred with mould. They were coughing, sneezing, weeping, mother and child. ‘Come on,’ Freda said, ‘you’re not staying here.’ She shared the house in Ngaio with another nurse. May and Heather moved into the spare room. May cooked and house-cleaned instead of paying rent, and Heather, six years old, started at the local school. She played in a park at the back of house, where there were slides and swings and a seesaw.
The magpies, a pair of them, came home regularly to a giant macrocarpa tree on the edge of the park. It was too dark and spiky to see into, but perhaps they had a nest in there and were raising young. They dived and swooped, complaining, at the children in the playground. ‘Ugly things,’ Freda said, but May liked them. She threw out crusts of bread when the park was empty and watched them chase the sparrows away. The sparrows were cosy and fluffed-up – greedy too. The magpies ruled. Strong, beady, flashing black and white, they asked for nothing, they simply took. May did not try to make friends but thought they might recognise her at some call – not the chortling they used to wake her in the morning, but a scream outside the range of normal hearing. She wanted one as a familiar.
Heather came in crying. ‘Those nasty birds are chasing me.’
‘They don’t like you near their tree,’ May said.
‘But why are they only chasing me?’
‘Nonsense, dear. They won’t hurt. Just wave your arms, they’ll fly away.’
Next afternoon she watched from the window. Eight or nine children and several mothers were in the playground. Heather used the seesaw with a girl she’d met at school. The magpies posed high in their tree, on a branch pointing like a finger. She thought afterwards that she saw them take their aim. They dived like German aeroplanes, in an ugly curve, and May screamed as Heather rose to meet them on the seesaw. The lower one struck at her and Heather fell on the grass. May ran out. All she could think was that the bird had taken Heather’s eyes.
‘She’s all right, it’s just a scratch,’ one of the mothers said.
There was blood in Heather’s hair. May carried her inside and sponged the shallow wound with disinfectant. ‘It’s only me. They only chase me,’ Heather wept. May believed her now.
‘I’ll phone the council,’ Freda said that night. ‘I’ll make them send someone out and shoot those bloody things.’
‘No,’ May said, touching the luminous hair Heather had inherited from Artie. She had seen how it would attract among the mouse and brown of the other children. For a moment she had seemed to sit high in the tree while the fascinating point of light moved up and down. ‘All we have to do is cover her.’
The next afternoon she pulled a grey knitted cap over Heather’s hair, tucking in the ends. Then she took her into the park. The child was frightened and did not want to go, but May said, ‘Mummy will be there. Would you like a seesaw with me?’
She watched the birds as she and Heather rose and fell. They sat in the tree and took no notice. May wanted to pull off Heather’s cap, experiment. She wished her own hair were that white-blonde. Presently the birds flew off on an expedition.
‘There,’ May said, ‘you’re safe now. As long as you wear your magic hat.’
But grey, she knew, was no magic colour and it sometimes seemed to her that in making Heather safe she had reduced her.
They stayed only four months in Ngaio. The other nurse complained about May’s sulkiness and bad temper. ‘She goes or I go,’ she said. May and Heather moved to Berhampore; to Newtown; to Mt Cook; back to Newtown – and to Doug, and Gary, and Vince. She saved Heather again – from Vince; bolted to Auckland and shared with Freda there, Freda unmarried still, back from nursing overseas. It had lasted three years, until the slap.
Then she was in Golden Bay, living in her shack. She began to paint – mad, spiky paintings, full of teeth. The magpies were sometimes present, standing in their tree, but she had enough good sense not to distort them. They were birds, black and beady, dangerous. She let them be.
Then came Evan Yates.
When she painted the water tank she left magpies off.
The weight of apples on the trees oppressed her. If they fell simultaneously the hills would tremble. And all the boughs springing up would release so much energy that Robert Macpherson’s orchard – Ben Alder Orchard – could be used to light a small town.
May crawled the car in to avoid raising dust. Pickers were in the Royal Gala trees by the cliff, where last season’s Dutchman had amused himself by lobbing apples at caravans down in the camping ground. He was, of course, an illegal picker and Heather had had to smuggle him away before the Motueka constable arrived. This year backpackers were banned at Ben Alder, she was using locals even though she had to pay them at the legal rate. May saw them in the trees, on their ladders, with arms flashing in the laden branches. Here and there a face shone, a shock of hair stood higher than the crown of a tree. May looked for Freda as she went by but could not find her. If she was picking by the cliff she would have been able to see David’s car underneath her as it wound down to Ruby Bay – and bomb it with apples if she chose. David was not the sole active partner in that marriage, although he was the more dangerous one.
May stopped the car to let a tractor with a bin of Galas go by. She followed it to the packing shed and saw women busy inside – more flashing arms. Heather came out to watch the tractor unload. She was wearing a head scarf – out of contrariness, May believed. People often took her for a Brethren and watched their language until they heard her swear. She saw May and pointed sharp, ordering her to the house. She ran the packing shed like a factory floor and tolerated no outsiders. ‘Yes, dear,’ May said, but sat in the car a moment, watching this martinet who had been a white weepy child oppressed by birds. Heather had her thick ankles from May, who must have them from her own mother – Taylor ankles. And her crooked teeth, Taylor teeth. There were none among the Macphersons as far as she knew. Heather’s crowded mouth was a judgement. A real mother, May always felt, would have scraped up money for orthodontic treatment somehow.
Heather came striding at the car, heavy-legged, and nothing like a Brethren in her shorts. ‘You can’t park there. Go up to the house.’
‘I just thought I’d say hello, Heather. David didn’t call in by any chance?’
‘Who?’
‘David. Your uncle. He was passing.’
‘What would he stop here for?’
‘To see Dad, perhaps. If he’s sick.’
‘No one’s been.’
‘Good. I’ll go and look at him. Oh, I’ll want a word with Freda before I go. She’s down in the Galas I suppose.’
‘A
s long as you don’t get in her way.’
‘It won’t take long. I’ll pick a few apples, dear, to keep her numbers up.’
Heather laughed impatiently and went back to the shed. See, I came, just like you wanted, May thought. She would pay for the slap until she died. But she wouldn’t let her own little barbs and sarcasms go – must have them to keep the balance right when she travelled to the family side of the hill.
She parked in the yard beside the house, which had the same effect on her as all those tonnes of apples. The old weatherboard building she had grown up in was gone, and this brick and tile fortress had risen in its place. Perhaps it owed something to Robert Macpherson’s ancestral memories – castles, keeps, stone cottages, although the colour was wrong. But a heaviness was achieved in the squat walls and rigid corners. May felt that New Zealand houses should be made of wood and in the end should tumble down. Robert Macpherson’s was for ever. And surely it was too big for two – the man of ninety-one and the woman in her twenties. What did they do in there, in all those rooms, when their day’s work was done? She did not believe in conversations between them.
From the front porch May looked out over apple trees – apples in every direction. The sea stretched beyond them in the north and mountains circled round on the other sides. That was some relief. Robert Macpherson did not have everything in control. She went inside, crossed the barren living room with its dead floral carpet and furniture-shop paintings – he had bought a set of four: beach, mountain, river, lake – and looked into the sunroom. The old man had commandeered it as his bedroom so that he might look across the orchard. May had no doubt that he had watched her arrive and would be ready with a hard word or two.
‘Hello, Dad,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry you’re not well,’ and then took in his altered face: hollows she had not seen before, bones she had not seen. ‘Dad?’ Heather had said nothing about this. She had not warned May that Robert Macpherson was dying. ‘You really are sick. Heather didn’t tell me.’ But underneath the shifting, repositioning, in her mind she felt a fierce, long-awaited pleasure. It made a seething in her blood; it carried her across the room to stand by his bed before it sank away, leaving her unsteady.
