by Gee, Maurice
‘You just got here.’
‘You don’t seem to want me, David. So I’ll be on my way. I’m not going to talk about Dad’s property.’
‘Don’t then.’ David opened his beer and drank. ‘But I guess there’s not much point in you staying. You and me wouldn’t agree on much.’
‘I don’t think we would.’
‘So piss off then. Tell the old man I’ll be out.’
‘What?’
‘I’ll come and see him. He’s sick, isn’t he? So I’ll make a visit. Hold his hand.’
‘You can’t talk to him about a will.’
‘Who says I can’t?’
‘He’s not well enough.’
‘Yeah? He’s well enough for you. How do I know you haven’t got the orchard all sewn up?’
‘You don’t believe me. I don’t want it.’
‘We’ll see. I’ll be out tomorrow. I suppose there’s someone looking after him?’
‘Yes. A nurse.’ Alan picked his glass up from the table and emptied it. ‘Tomorrow’s all right. It’s her day off.’
Freda, David thought, my God, it’s her. He had an extra sense of her, he knew. The soldier had tried to hide her but had put her in his hands and what he did next was all laid down. I could sort this prick out now. I could go and get her. But he was confirmed in everything he chose, he was licensed again, and it did not matter, fast or slow. He would follow the soldier and see him and Freda together – find out what had been going on. She’s out there and she can’t get away.
‘How long are you staying?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. The end of the week.’
‘You got a job to go back to?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wife and kids? All that?’
‘No.’
‘No wife? Couldn’t you get one?’
‘It’s hard to keep track of you. You don’t know where you’re going,’ the soldier said.
‘I know all right. You’ll see. Tell the old man I’ll be out.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Like I said.’
‘I’ll get him ready. I’ll see you then.’
‘Sure, brother. Thanks for visiting, eh. All the best.’
The soldier left. There was no need to follow him, no hurry. David sat at the table and finished his beer. When he stood up he could smell himself and did not like it. He wanted to be clean for getting her. He went to the bathroom and showered and brushed his teeth, then laid out a clean shirt and socks. Clean underpants. Alan should have been the one who left his smell behind. He looked at himself in the wardrobe mirror and saw how thick his chest was, and his arms, he could break that soldier. His belly was starting to spread though and his cock looked shrunken, it looked old. He pulled on his underpants. It would be big enough soon enough, when he needed it.
He put on jeans and sneakers, threw a jacket in the car, and put on his baseball cap, which he had worn like a kid, back to front, to make her laugh. But he was through with clowning. It gave him sudden enormous enjoyment that he was coming for her and she did not know; that he was moving up the way someone’s death moved up and stood behind and the person kept on as though she had for ever. He would reach out and put his hand on her.
Ninety ks an hour, with his window open and his elbow on the sill: he ambled along. Freda, you’ll be all right, but you’ve got to learn a lesson, sorry, dear. He did not know what he would do with the soldier – break his arms, stamp on his throat? – trying to keep a man from his wife. David felt his body thicken up. ‘I’ve got a right to this,’ he said. Then he saw Alan, not where he was meant to be, back at the orchard, but good enough, behaving as though he had all day: walking to his car from the wine shop at Seifried’s with a bottle in his hand. David understood at once – a bottle for Freda. He liked that. The bastard fancied her.
He turned into the road to Rabbit Island, made a U turn, pulled up off the shoulder and waited until the Camry went past. He let it get almost to the end of the straight before moving out and following. The rod connecting them was in place, elastic and unbreakable. He felt he could take his foot off the accelerator and he would be pulled along.
They went around the inlet and David let the soldier go from sight up the hill. He did not want to rush things but meant to give them time to get in position before he came. Drive past the orchard, turn back, come in slow. He read the sign, Ben Alder Orchard, and looked up the drive. And the bastard was there, the soldier was there, where he wasn’t meant to be, standing by his car and looking back. David accelerated, watching in his mirror, and saw Alan lean out at the side of the road and stare after him, with his hand shading his face from the sun. Okay, okay, David thought, change the plan. Get where you can watch them; play it cool. Maybe he didn’t see who it was.
He turned up Marriages Road and drove fast along the five-k loop through the hills; came out again in Ruby Bay. He had circled them; he had them cornered. He drove along the beach front and into the camping ground, where he parked facing inland, under trees by the bottom of the cliff. Now he was deep down and he could surface; come up and they would never know. He put on his jacket and strung his binoculars round his neck. Trees hid him as he climbed to the road. He stood well back in the trunks, his head on the level of the seal, and watched cars flash by; a bus; a loaded truck easing down in low gear from the packhouse. When the road was empty he crossed and pushed into the scrub at the foot of the big cliff. It was gorse and broom, which he broke through, and came to native growth and rested there. The cliff was less steep than he remembered. He could not find where his path had been, but it did not matter; he could go up in the tree trunks, they were steps, and the branches would hide him from the camp and the beach.
He climbed on an angle equalling the downward slope of the road – enjoyed the evenness of things, the way they worked out as if by rule. There were few large trees; most were no thicker than his arm. He put his foot, each time, in the crotch they made with the ground, and went up steadily. It was less a cliff here than a slope, and no risk of falling or being seen. He broke into a sweat and laboured in his breathing but was pleased that his body answered him. Resting was a weakness; he meant to reach the top without a break. The binoculars, banging on his chest, made moving awkward, so he zipped up his jacket to hold them tight. I’ve earned a smoke when I get to the top, he thought – but no, cancelled it: he would not have one, not until he had them in sight.
The slope became a cliff again as it reached higher. Scrub came down to meet the trees. David came to a bare place and had to lose height as he worked along. It seemed he might come out in a neighbouring orchard. But the thought of turning back filled him with rage: if he had to, he would go in by the gate and straight up the drive and get her in the house, get him too, one in each hand, and beat their fucking heads on the wall.
He stopped and squatted but it strained his thighs so he put his legs one on each side of a small tree and had a smoke. Sweat was running on his face, dripping from his nose. It fell on the cigarette and hissed. ‘They’ll pay,’ he said. ‘By Christ they’ll pay.’
The tree was hurting him in his crotch. He ground out the cigarette on the trunk and pushed himself upright, looking for a way. Went a further step, and saw at once a path laid out for him. A slip had scooped a piece from the cliff edge, neat as a spoon, and he made his way across it, holding on to new-grown broom, and went back, more easily, on a higher angle, and pulled himself into the scrub on top, burrowed in and lay down on his stomach and was there. He was filled with elation: he was there. He pushed himself up and went on hands and knees, butting the foliage with his head, breaking through. It scratched his face. He did not mind. He broke out onto trampled bracken, with picked apple trees in front and pines on his right and a road of grass running between. It seemed to him he’d come into a world he had created with his climb. ‘Now I’m the one who says how things will be.’ His voice had a sound he had never heard before. Again he knew it did not matter how fast things happened o
r how slow.
He walked on the trampled grass beside the apple trees. This part of the orchard had been planted since he left. The pines though were the same, on their fist of land above the cliff. He went into them and passed through, crossing the flat place, darker now, where May and her boyfriend had fucked; looked back from the other side and saw her clenched-up face and his white bum, and laughed at them. He picked up a cone and threw it skidding across the needles, and went on. The main part of the orchard threw light into the pines; strips of it fell like planks painted in colours, rust and yellow and green. He sat down with his back to a trunk, several trees back, and lit a smoke. Then he unzipped his jacket, took out the binoculars and focused them on the house.
At once he saw her: Freda, his wife. She sat in a chair side-on to the window, sipping tea from a mug and listening to someone – the soldier, it had to be, out of sight. Her ponytail gave a flick as she shook her head. He did not like her in a ponytail; had told her to get it cut and styled properly. He smiled at it, not minding now that she built her betrayals up. Everything would be paid for in the end. He felt a hunger for betrayal; it was part of the new world he was in. He smoked and watched her; watched the soldier too as he walked into sight and stood at the window looking out. They went into the sunroom and talked down to someone in a bed. It must be the old man. David could not see him. He saw the pickers leave in their cars, saw Heather walk to the house, and the sun go down. He went to the back of the shed and had a drink of water from a tap. Back in the pines he smelled himself, heavy, sour. He did not mind, it was him.
In the dusk Freda walked out to the patio. The soldier followed. They looked at the sunset over the mountains. She put her hand lightly on his arm and rose on her toes and kissed his cheek. Up, down, like a ballet dancer. David knew that step and kiss, it meant I’ll see you soon. He watched her go down the steps and walk in the drive; vanish; reappear; open the door of the pickers’ cottage and go inside. A light went on, the door closed.
The soldier had watched too – had waited for the closing of the door. He touched his cheek; folded one of his ears and rubbed behind it. Then he went into the house.
David smoked another cigarette. He rehearsed how he would reach out and hold her. She liked that sort of thing, being locked inside. He would feel her ribs, elastic at first but brittle beyond that, and her heart beating under them. He knew how much he loved her when he felt her heart. But the more he loved her the more he knew she had to be punished. An idea was coming what the punishment would be. First he had to have the full betrayal.
The soldier came out of the house with his bottle of wine. He walked to the cottage and knocked on the door. She opened it. She had changed into a dress. She had taken out her ponytail and brushed her hair. David saw the gleam of an earring as it swung. The soldier followed her inside.
David sat waiting. He lay down for a while, then got up and walked to the cottage and stood outside. The curtain on the window was glowing with light. He heard the sound of plates and cutlery. Voices talked but made only a murmur, no words. David yawned. His smell had drifted on the air like smoke. He withdrew. He did not want them knowing him. Not yet. He went back past the packing shed into the pines and sat down by the tree – his tree. He smoked his last cigarette, cupping the red tip in his hands.
In the house the sunroom light went out. Heather arranged cushions in Freda’s chair. She read the newspaper. Soon she went to the bathroom, then to the room where she must sleep. It was on the back side of the house, but light from her window spread into the trees and brought apples forward, curved like cheeks. He went down quietly, padding in the road, and picked one and brought it back and ate it in the pines. Her light went out.
David zipped his jacket tight. A breeze rustled the orchard and made the pine grove sigh. Far away, deep down, where he had come from, the sea made a whisper on the beach. He waited for the end of the betrayal but the cottage spread its green glow on the road. He stood up and pissed at the back of his tree, splashing the trunk, and smelled the chemicals of urine, sharp as knives, then picked up pine needles and cleaned his hands. No moisture, none in the ground. Pine trees sucked the soil dry like no other tree. A pick-axe would be needed to go deep.
He made a cushion for himself and sat down again, but was only there a moment when the cottage door opened and the soldier came out. He stood in a fuzzy glow and stretched, then became a shadow as the light went out. A second figure, Freda, closed the door. She walked in the drive with him, carrying what? David got out the binoculars but they were not night glasses and he could not see. Alan and Freda went from sight. He pointed the binoculars at the house, waiting for them. A little hum of expectation started in his throat. They were about to be revealed. He saw them cross the patio and the soldier open the sliding door. He went inside and flicked a switch and Freda was caught: Freda, coloured, in her dress, with bedding in her bare arms and her floral toilet bag on top.
‘Freddie,’ David whispered, ‘you’ve done it now.’ Again he felt the jolt, the sideways shift. It took him to a place he already knew.
He saw them in the room. The soldier pulled the curtains shut. The bathroom light went on, then a light in another room at the back of the house. David waited. He felt tears on his face and did not know for a moment what they were. He wiped them, cooled his cheeks with them.
One by one the lights went out. The house was dark, but was alive – had subtle movements in it and a pale luminosity in the roof. David stood up and dropped the glasses on his chest. He walked by the packing shed and along the drive past the cottage. He opened the gate, went out, shut it behind him, and walked under the sign and down the road, with the cliff on his right and the sea on his left. He found his car in the camping ground.
He drove to Nelson. The road had no corners and no hills. He was filled with a new bleak painful happiness. What he would do was laid out, each step like a new scene in a movie. He saw how it went ahead, moving fast and slow, but always at the same speed, to complete itself.
He saw the end.
ALAN
Prayer was not demand, or bargaining, or coercion, nor was it invocation, either magical or spiritual. He experienced it in a smaller scale, as conversation, muted by his temperament, undemanding, friendly but not intimate, as though with someone in a chair set on an angle from his own, and conducted in the dark, so that one never saw who was there. No voice came in reply; only the silence of attention, which was His way of speaking, Alan knew.
Sometimes he asked, but more often he simply made suggestions. And now and then, when he prayed lying in bed at night, an exchange was made, an understanding reached, that for a moment he believed was sacramental. He had a sense of God in the world that rarely came to him in the day, when it was the idea of the Son, the one perfect man, His perfect love, that sustained him – and his knowledge that once He was here in that shape. He did not try to worry these two, these states of knowledge and of faith, together. In his life they looked after themselves, and wider than that he was not equipped to go – had no desire to go.
The word he most disliked was supplication. In his relationship with God supplication had no place, was not the thing at all. Perhaps it was pride that made him unwilling to beg. He would not bother God with requests for himself, but would deny self. He could not see that as prideful or sinful. It did not damage him, and damaged no one else. All he wanted was the ability to work in the narrow place where one was free to do better or do worse, and sufficient knowledge to make the choice. That was what he asked, that was enough. And happiness for others: he was foolish enough to ask for that – do more than suggest.
It had not brought him close to people, had not made him a worker. He stood off and could not speak to them, and could not repair the damage he had done. Self still had the larger part of his life and knocked his good intentions to one side; turned his faith into a private thing, kept behind doors. He saw how small and mean he was. The trip south brought it home to him.
‘Lor
d,’ he whispered, ‘make me a better man. And let me help them now. Keep me from hurting them any more.’ That was supplication. He would surrender, to that extent, his dislike of it.
He turned on to his side. The sofa bed that he and Freda had opened out was too short for him, so he lay diagonally, which upset the arrangement of springs and pressed a bar into his hip. He would do better lying on his back, but he had never been able to sleep that way. Did he want to sleep? Had he finished praying? Although he had kept at it longer than was usual, he had gained no sense of God tonight. The fault lay with him; too many things intruded, small worries, small desires, and took the simplicity away – that condition of being naked in one’s mind that one had to reach before His attention was engaged.
A wind had risen outside and was causing a small persistent rattle in the door. He got up, making the springs twang, and found the newspaper on the arm of the easy chair. He tore a piece off, folded it, wedged it in a crack and stopped the rattle; was pleased with himself and felt that he would sleep now, but was no sooner back in bed than his father called out.
‘Noeline,’ he called.
Alan went to the sunroom door, which was propped open with a slipper, and looked in. The long windows made the room lighter than the lounge, and he made out his father’s bed centred on the wall and his head dark on the pillow.
‘Who’s that?’ the old man said.
‘It’s me. Alan.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Nothing. You were calling out. Can I get you anything?’
‘What did I say?’
‘Noeline. Her name.’
‘She locked the door.’
‘Shall I call Heather?’
‘Help me out. I need the dunny.’
‘No you don’t, old feller,’ Heather’s voice said. She pushed by Alan and turned on the night light. The room became white, yellow, brown, and Heather, with her silver hair in a plait and a summer dressing gown open at the front and thick brown legs and bare feet, bare arms, pale eyes, snaggle teeth, was nightmarish in the sudden light. He wondered if he should trust her with his father.
