by Gee, Maurice
‘I’m staying here. I’m not getting out.’
He reached again and opened her door. ‘Out,’ he said.
‘We can talk here.’
‘Silly bitch.’ He broke her fingers from the wheel and put his foot on her and heaved her out; walked round the bonnet of the wagon; watched her stumble to her feet. He pulled her into the car lights where he could see her better.
‘Here we are, Freda.’ He felt in his pocket and took the earrings out. ‘Put these on.’
‘What … What for?’
‘Just do it, Freda,’
Fumbling, she put them on and dropped her hands to her sides.
‘That’s good, now you look nice.’
‘Don’t kill me, David.’
He smiled. ‘You and the soldier, eh. My brother.’
‘What? That’s …’
‘No one runs away from me, Freda. And does that.’
‘Nothing … it … nothing. I swear, David.’
‘Come on. We’re going up here.’
‘No, I’m not going. I’m going home.’
He pulled her along a dozen steps, then dropped her and she fell to the ground.
‘Get up, Freda. You can walk.’
‘No,’ she moaned.
‘I want you to see the graves. One for you and one for him. I’m going back for him after you.’
She spoke no more. She got to her feet and walked back unsteadily into the car lights. He shot her when she was halfway there, aiming just below the bottom reach of her hair; and lost her for a moment as she fell; then saw her on her hands and knees in the light. Her arms collapsed. She rolled on her side. He ejected the spent shell, reloaded, and walked to her. She was making little grunts and staring on ground level straight ahead. Her fingers opened and closed.
He shifted her hair with the muzzle of the gun and shot her again, in the head. Her legs jerked out, her body spasmed. Then she lay still. The ease of killing her amazed him. He would have liked more to do.
His legs grew weak then and he sat down. He breathed deeply, then heard someone laughing and was shocked. It was him. Next one, he thought, can’t stop yet. He got up from the ground and put the rifle in the car. Began to see pictures again. No need for the spade, he would cover her later. And the soldier had to see. He would not shoot the soldier until he had shown him Freda in her grave.
He picked up one of her arms and dragged her along the firebreak. Using his torch he found the blaze on the tree. He dragged her over pine needles and broken branches to the graves. Stepped down into hers and walked along it and felt her flop in as he stepped out. He knelt and turned her on her back, then smoothed her dressing gown on her thighs. He pushed her hair back to show the earrings. When he shone the torch he was pleased with her. Her eyes were open, she still looked afraid.
‘You deserved it, Freddie. Doing that to me.’
He turned and left her. Driving back to the orchard, seeing the next part open up, he tried to stop his killing of her from breaking in, but could not. He hummed with pleasure, felt it vibrate in him. He had done it easily, like a killer, like a man. Now it was the soldier’s turn. Pictures of his death took turns with Freda’s death.
He reached the coast road and turned towards Ruby Bay. Remembered to look at his watch. It was twelve minutes to one. He kept his lights dipped to show a short length of road and stay in a capsule, insulated, warm, and feel it move like coming out of space towards the soldier at the end of it. He saw himself at the cottage door and the soldier waking from his bunk; then the ride to the forest, and looking down at Freda in her grave. He heard the shot, smelled powder, and saw the soldier shrink in size. A second shot for him too: make it even. He and Freda lay like dolls in the hollowed ground. He covered them with clay, with earth, with needles, with branches, and left them there and went home.
David drove down the long hill towards Mapua and turned towards Ruby Bay. The store was dark. The party had finished on the beach. In the camp the tents and caravans and camper vans showed here and there a luminous panel, a yellow door. He passed the entrance with a kind of affection. The place was inside the boundaries of his world, it had served him well. He was tempted to blow his horn as he went by.
He drove up the hill at an easy speed, no hurry, came round the corner, and saw at one side the sign reading Ben Alder Orchard – and ahead, on the open road, a cop car moving away from him, with its roof light flashing. He had started his turn into the drive and did not know whether to carry on or brake. He could not understand where the car had come from. It had not been ahead of him on the road. He stopped halfway through the gate. Then, over the rise, in the trees, he saw a glow of light where darkness should have been. The cops had been at the house. Their car made a U-turn and started back. He felt headlights burn his face.
Everything turned over. He was hanging head down in space. Then he righted himself and understood what he must do. Plunged the Silverado along the white dust drive. He went through the S-bend and saw the patio wall spring at him. All of them, he thought. All three. I’ll do a clean sweep. He grabbed the rifle and jumped out of the wagon. Reloaded. The soldier appeared in the door. Light from the room reddened his ears.
David raised the rifle and aimed at his face, then lowered it to go underneath the patio rail. He shot the soldier and saw him step backwards into the room. He ran up the steps. The blue light of the cop car was speeding through the trees. He ejected the spent shell, put another cartridge in and closed the bolt. Went into the house. Find them quick.
The soldier was sitting on the floor with his back resting on the sofa. His hands lay palm up on the carpet, his head turned slowly, and his eyes were dark and enlarged. David saw where the bullet had struck him in the chest – a red splash, black in the centre. Bullseye, he thought. He raised the rifle to give him the finishing shot, but was aware of his father in the sunroom door. Tugboat first, he thought, and swung the rifle there.
Something struck him, hard and heavy. The gun went off. He slammed against the wall with the fat girl fastened on him. He tried to hit her with the barrel but she held on. He saw her face blazing. It flashed like strobe lights as they spun. Her hands dragged him to the floor and he was rolling with her and trying to pull free and club her with the stock but she was glued on him, he felt all the hard bones in her fat. Then other people had him, he felt their weight and the woodenness of their hands. His shoulders tore and made him scream as they forced his arms back. He lay still. It was over then.
Voices. The fat girl panting.
‘Easy, lady. Stand over there. Look after him.’
He saw his father holding the door jamb. The fat girl came from one side and put her arms around him. David twisted. He saw the red wound, the upturned hands, the soldier’s empty eyes looking through him. Nowhere eyes.
David laughed, with his chin resting on the carpet.
‘Gotcha, bro. You’re dead,’ he said.
Epilogue
MAY AND ALAN AT WHARARIKI BEACH
In April the weather turned bad and it stayed that way, showery and windy and colder than was usual, until the end of the month. May called for Alan at the hospital and drove him over the hill to Golden Bay. They stopped at the orchard on the way and picked up a case of tree-ripened Granny Smiths. The nurse, a young woman from Southland (they could tell from what May called her Presbyterian r’s), let them in singly to see Robert.
Heather came down from the shed as they were leaving. She was working alone there, sorting late apples for the local market.
‘Did he recognise you?’
‘He was sleeping,’ Alan said.
‘He opened his eyes but I don’t think he saw me,’ May said.
‘They still want to come and get his statement. I’m not letting them past the door.’
‘They don’t need his statement,’ May said. She kissed Heather, accepting with amusement her turned cheek, and got in the car. ‘Are they letting you take enough money from the account?’
‘I�
�ve got enough.’
They stopped in Riwaka to rest, and again in Takaka, and reached Woods Inlet early in the afternoon. May wanted Alan to go straight to bed but he sat for a while in the sitting room, looking across the inlet, where the tide was running out.
‘A fine day at last,’ May said.
‘Have you bought a new dinghy?’
‘Yes. I’ll take you for a row tomorrow.’
The settlement shone like a toytown and the sea was silver-white, aluminium foil, with cloud shadows swallowing fishing boats. Alan felt like breathing deeply for the first time since he had been shot. Evan came in and shook his hand. Talking with this broad man, Alan felt his own lightness: all his bones porous, feather-light. If you dropped me in the sea I’d float like a bit of pumice, he thought. Evan would live there like a fish. Yet he felt natural, felt himself returning to life, and he drew air into his lungs, where at last it stayed without making him cough.
‘May tells me Corporal Smith has gone.’
‘Yes, with Sally. She said there was too much gossip here.’
‘That’s my fault, telling you who she was.’
‘How old she was. That’s what she was getting at. Don’t worry about it.’
‘We’re taking an apprentice,’ May said. ‘We were getting rid of Sally anyway.’ She remembered that Freda had once offered herself as an apprentice. There had been a bit of joke in most things Freda had proposed. ‘Lie down now,’ she said to Alan.
He took off his jacket and shoes and lay on the bed, and when he woke late in the afternoon took a moment to recognise May standing by the window.
‘I’m like Dad,’ he said.
‘You look a bit like him. I suppose I must be like my mother.’
‘You’ve got Dad’s forehead. And his jaw.’
May crossed the room and sat on the bed. ‘I looked in his box and found an envelope with her name written on it. It was empty.’
‘He sent her twenty dollars. But she’s not alive now,’ Alan said.
‘I know. I asked him. Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I would have, but there was too much going on.’
‘Yes. Well, I was never going to go hunting for her. He said there was another letter saying I’d gone bad.’
‘Yes. I took it,’ Alan said. ‘I burned it, with Freda. In the restaurant.’ He told her what the letter had said.
‘The poor old lady,’ May said. She smiled at Alan. ‘Don’t worry. My life has gone on way past that.’
She went back to the kitchen and her preparations for tea and saw Evan busy too, in the pottery. He would work until he was called. He’s the one who gave me back my past, she thought. Not Alan really. And my mother could never have done it. He doesn’t take the pain away but he makes it manageable. I’d have been like a huhu grub in a rotten log.
She looked at the showroom, the plates and the vases and the paintings on the walls. It was like a cave filled with treasure, and the new glass made a sheet of water closing the entrance. She could not forget Junior Mott, knobby as a starved man in his joints, dancing among the broken vases. Sometimes he seemed bad and sometimes sad, but he was never tragic or evil. She had got by Junior Mott all right; and Evan was finding his way past. They would not be shifted from this place. But she thought that she might go up one day and paint a magpie on the water tank.
The next morning she and Alan climbed the steps and sat in the sun with the tank at their backs. The pond was noisy with ducks that had taken refuge from the shooting season.
‘They loved all the rain,’ May said.
‘I can see your dinghy shining.’
‘Yes. I’m doing a tile painting of me crossing the inlet. Tile painting is my new thing.’
‘Your beach one is still in the boot of my car. I showed Freda.’
‘She told me.’
‘She liked it.’
‘So she should. Look, Alan. See the land agent’s sign on the Otways’ lawn. They’re moving too. Remember George Otway? The man with the wife who beat him up? She’s happy now. She’s radiant.’
‘Where are they going?’
‘Khandallah. In Wellington. He told me she’d die here but he wouldn’t die there.’
‘Is he sure?’
‘No, he’s not. But he said she’s his wife and he made a promise to look after her.’ She believed some part of George Otway would die, but wondered too if some part of him would come to life. He had seemed, last time they spoke, inexpressive, shrunken, but alive in some darkly contented way, as if he had contracted on to an unknown core. She wondered if he had found a way of loving. He would not express it so. And looking at Alan, she thought he had a way of loving too, strange to her, inexplicable.
She pointed out the spit, almost black in the washed air. ‘Would you like to go there?’
‘No. I’d like to go to Wharariki beach.’
‘That’s a bit of a walk. I’ll have to get you fatter.’
She fed him and cared for him and drove him to Takaka for check-ups with the doctor. Several times they rowed on the inlet in her new dinghy. He took the oars in the still water and managed without straining the wound in his chest.
‘Is Evan all right?’ he said. ‘He seems quieter.’
‘He’s ashamed of himself for calling the police when Junior Mott smashed our showroom up. I didn’t tell you.’ She described it. ‘Evan had to call them. It was right at the time. Now, he’s not sure. He wouldn’t do it now.’
She saw Alan turn that over – ‘right at the time’ – and disagree. It was shifting, perhaps shifty, and he needed absolutes, while she would be unhappy without invention. Yet they could look at each other face to face. The dinghy was very good for that.
They stopped beside the jetty and he took a turn at the oars. He rowed with short strokes, keeping close to the shore, and brought them to the mudflats, where she tied the dinghy to its waratah. As they walked up to the house she asked him when he would be going back to Auckland.
‘Next week sometime. I’ll ring and make a booking.’
‘And leave your car?’
‘I’ll have to come down for the hearing. I’ll drive back after that.’
‘What will you do in Auckland?’
‘My old job for a while. Then’ – he smiled at her – ‘something you won’t approve of. I’m going to see if I can train for the ministry.’
‘Be a priest?’
‘Yes.’
‘But aren’t you …’
‘Too old? No. They like getting people like me.’
‘So they should. I don’t disapprove.’
‘But you don’t understand?’
‘No. I’ll try. I’ll still let you in the house.’
‘It’s nice to be welcome,’ he said.
They went to Wharariki beach the day before he left. He had almost got his strength back. They walked across a paddock, where sheep jumped and skittered as they came up silently, and across the long dunes by the creek.
‘We’ve got it to ourselves,’ May said. ‘Do you need a rest?’
‘A little while.’
They sat on the sand. It was half tide and the inner island joined the beach. The two outer ones were locked together and would not separate till they walked south. A few black-backed gulls dipped and rose in the wind and oystercatchers stood at intervals, territorial. Metre-high waves thumped the sand; hissed up, rustled back, sliding into the sea with an undercutting motion that May felt echoed in herself, a gain, a loss. She lay back on her elbows. ‘You need to go down there to see the arches,’ she said.
‘I’ve got them in your painting.’
‘A cheap copy. Did Freda really like it?’
He looked at her sideways and smiled, not with any freedom but admiring the way she went ahead, her artlessness.
‘Yes.’
‘Were you going to be … would it have gone anywhere?’
He thought about that, making a shake and then a nod of his head. He picked up sand and trickled it away
.
‘I think I might have wanted to marry her. Perhaps not.’
‘That’s probably the way she felt about you.’
He grinned. ‘Is that a bit of feminism?’
‘A bit. She’d had enough of marriage. Look what it did to her.’
‘That was personal. David killed her.’
She agreed. Strongly agreed. They would not argue.
‘I go over that night,’ he said. ‘I did the wrong things. I heard his car go, it woke me up, and I knew straight away what it was.’
‘Yes?’
‘Desk soldier, that’s what I am.’
‘More than that.’
‘I should have followed instead of going up to the house and calling the police and all that. If I’d got out there on the road I might have caught them.’
A fantasy, she thought, but with some reality in it. He had been confused and slow. He might have followed, saved her; or died. David had turned fantasy into reality that night, so why not Alan? He would, she thought, have been ready to die.
‘Come on, let’s walk. I’ll show you the arches.’
The oystercatchers flew away screeching, and circled back and landed on their spot, each one. Her last visit to Wharariki had been made with Freda – Freda with a swollen mouth and a broken tooth – and how could it have been as recent as February? ‘Drop dead,’ Freda had said to the birds; and of the seals basking on the rocks above the kelp: ‘They’re like slugs.’ She had come to tell May that her marriage was ‘a write-off’, and May had brought her here to – how had she thought of it, wash her clean and start her on a new way perhaps? For a while it had not seemed to work. Freda saw a monkey profile in one cliff and Muldoon, full faced, in the next. And when an archway opened up and legs of stone stood slanting in the sea, it was, she said, like a tired old elephant leaning on a wall. May had not seen monkey or Muldoon but saw the worn-out elephant and did not like having it imposed on her. She was sorry she had brought Freda here. Then Freda had pointed at the islands: ‘I’d like to swim out there.’
‘A German tourist tried last year. They had to rescue him in a helicopter.’
‘I’m going for a short one anyway.’ And she had stripped her clothes off and run into the waves and splashed and dived, and had come out bent and gasping but with a grin on her damaged mouth. She ran up the sand with her arms crossed on her chest and her skin as white as china clay.
