What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?

by Alan Duff

  Well, next thing he was in the bathroom, looking at himself in the mirror. And asking himself what it was he saw, without knowing why he was doing this having never done anything, not even a thought, like this before. Jake, what do you see? Couldn’t tell himself he was looking for beauty, couldn’t tell himself he was looking for sign, or proof, or absence of its existence inside him. The looking he’d done inside himself was on that question, of did he rape his daughter when he was drunk and just couldn’t remember it or didn’t want to remember. What he’d come up with was, there had never been a time in his life of not remembering a major incident no matter when he had been drunk out of his skull. When a man was in more sober recall the important, the big, the disastrous, the violent things, always wrote themselves up on the blackboard of his mind. Always. Like a teacher starting the lesson with a list of the bad things he’d done so the blackboard never had an empty week. (But was never the name Grace there. But never.) But what he’d found there, inside himself, was the truth, some tiny bright burning of himself that he could hold onto and keep him strong enough to withstand the wrong people thought of him until the light became, as it had now, bigger. Not that it declared a man innocent in people’s minds, nor gave him back his standing; it was just a strength to keep going and make another of himself even if he didn’t know such a process was happening. Nor even now that it had happened. (I feel the same, more or less.) But looking at himself in the mirror he thought, just for a moment, that he saw more. (Ah, but then Jake The Muss Heke you haven’t been shown how to look at yourself.)

  Those days living like a tramp in the park, and the days afterward of life’s everyday needs proving to be huge, confusing decisions, of not knowing how to go about getting a State rental, of filling out a form for a job, even shopping for groceries, or ironing, washing clothes; it was like growing up, and not all over again but for the first time. At what, thirty-six?. Shit. (Shit.)

  When the knocking on the door from Rita came he kept standing there before the mirror, as if there wasn’t too much of this (the story) to go before he’d be covered in light glorious light. (Not long to go, Jakey.)

  But anyway she was the one who finished it off, after first she expressed delight at seeing the flowers he shyly inclined his head at in grinning hint. Oh Ja-key, she’d said. Aren’t you a funny one. I wondered about that vase the last time I was here. And when he told her he’d filled it for the very first time she got a bit teary eyed and hugged him. Just hugged him. Then he went and got the wine cask, left over from her last visit and remembered the instructions of how to set up the (cute li’l) tap, and tapped it into a wine glass he’d bought specially for her that time. He cracked another can. Had got a squeeze of toothpaste in his mouth while he was in the bathroom so she’d not smell he’d been drinking beforehand. He put a record on his stereo he’d bought second-hand, thinking next he was going to buy a CD player, but this’d do, some Dusty Springfield, white woman who sang like a black woman, and asked Rita, Wanna dance? And she told him, Ask me again, Jakey. And he didn’t ask why she wanted him to, he just asked again: Would you like a dance, Ri? Oh yes! she said as if he’d asked for the first time. And up she got. From the sofa he had the blanket over, well he had a blanket over both them, but she had the flash one with the crisscross patterns. And they danced.

  To the bed where he’d bought his first ever sheets, straight out of their wrapping onto the bed. Next time he was gonna get one a them proper covers, a bedspread. In the newly sheeted bed she was all her best controlling self: Easy now, baby Nice ’n’ slow. We got all night. You’re like a stallion, honey. Ooo yes, big and strong and so fucking handsome (what the Hindu said, without the fucken), but just hold yourself, alright? And he joked, Hold my horses ya mean? Yeah, tha’s what Ri means, honey. Hold your horses till you hear the call.

  And it was the best loving he’d made, even better than the best with Beth (oh Bethy) even though they’d done it good. You have to have the other person (meaning me) in the right frame of mind too for it to, uh, be so, uh, complete like this. Her moaning as she came was like Dusty’s bes’ singing in his mind, his pounding heart, his surging loins, which the sweet melody moanin’ was calling to him same time, you come on now, Jakey. You let go of that stallion steed in yourself. And how she did open herself like giving and taking (potential life seed) birth of him at the same time. How she did that.

  She finished in leaving him with the parting, troubling words like Mr Patel did, around midnight; he was going hunting in the morning, with his new purchased rifle (after the cops did a check on me for criminal convictions and I was surprised I didn’t come up even though I hadn’t been to court, I just thought with all those fights I had, cupla hundred, they must show up somewhere. But I was clean, which made me feel cleaner than I felt before that, and they gave me my firearms licence and it had my name on it which pleased me, it was like a statement that I was actually worth something, that whatever I’d done wasn’t so bad it was on their records — but it’s bad enough, Jake Heke. You better be knowing that — I went to the bank and got the money and bought a second-hand 30-06, what the Douglas brothers advised me to buy. My own gun. Like having my own woman.) Even though it’d been, well, a wonderful night, a word he’d used for the first time; just before she got in her car and he out under the moonlight, a half moon up there, which reminded him of spotlighting for deer, saying goodnight, thanks for a — but he had said the word, wonderful, only in his (silly proud) mind — good night, Ri, she’d said: You’re a good man, Jakey. A good man. (Why thank you.) If only you thought about your kids, if only you mentioned them, if only you just now and again wondered after them, I’d — why I’d seriously consider living with you, I would. Which is what he’d asked her tonight, after the loving as they basked in that nice silence of tingling skin, emptied loins but fulfilled hearts, the very soul. Now he had his answer, or his reason why.

  She — her words — were just disappearing red eyes in the night, left him standing there, under the streetlight now not the moon, the moon had removed him from its pale glow, it was just streetlight, and a man feeling like everything of meaning got lost, got taken, snatched away from him even when he was trying. Even when he was really trying. The beam of truth’s light on the matter of his children just did not reach him. (A man has to learn these things, don’t he? Like a man who is loved in his childhood grows up to be, at worst, a person capable of loving in his manhood, even a failed manhood. Isn’t that how it must work?)

  He found sleep still grinding his teeth and tears yet again welling up in his eyes. And he dreamed of children who were strangers to him. And they weren’t with that unified humming of the unforgettable dream. Sound they made was crying. With him, the dream figure, quite unable to know what to do how to do, it was like being asked to build a building when you didn’t know how to hold the hammer. Even when another voice (sounded like Beth) was whispering to him in the dream, Just pick up the hammer and start. He just couldn’t hear it could (poor) Jake Heke. Every male growing-up figure, every male friend he had, had more or less mirrored his standards, his values. That was why he couldn’t hear even the best (my own) intentioned voice.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  HE WOKE UP from a dream of him in a roaring mean-machine gang car painted undercoat grey with black smears (cos they make it look tougher), smelling of the bruthas body stink, even in a dream, and himself firing out the back window, like he shoulda been able to get himself to do, at a whole army of Brown Shits — to arguing down the passage, when he hadn’t got to shooting Jimmy Bad Horse and, now he was awake and with the real world, probably never would. (I failed. I woulda fought with the man, fists, no hol’s barred. But soon’s I put the gun in my hand I lost it. My courage fell outta me like my guts’d spilled.) Arguing between a man and woman. Not that arguing was a new experience, here or anywhere else ’cept those few years living with Charlie Bennett.

  Looked straight out at the night from his sheeted bed — he’d bought them thinking if h
is mother ever heard he was sleeping sheetless when she hated sheetless, from Jake, and anyway it wasn’t very clean, she’d be the one doin’ the shooting; the night was clear, with stars, yeah man, and that immediate voiceless yet great echoing claiming of all men’s (irrelevant) souls, even angry, now much troubled, young men like him. Maybe especially like him. He contemplated stars and claiming and inner questions for a moment before the arguing voices made claim again on his awoken ears. (Fuck them. Man never gets any sleep round here.)

  Yeah, and fuck you, too, mista! — Phlatt! Say that again, bitch. (No, don’t say it.) Whyn’t she jus’ shuddup? Alright I will: Go fuck yaself. Ya hear? Do what you want, think it worries me? Man, it don’t even hurt me.

  Abe could picture her li’l thin frame standing up to Ape, bettin’ she’d haver shades on even at this early morn hour; admir-in’er but thinking she was a fool to be standin’ up to Ape’s manhood cos he was gonna find out what did hurter, seein’s it weren’t slaps. So he braced himself for what was to come. Old memories, childhood ones, came trickling back the opposite of the trickle of sleep that comes ovah a man. This was a waking, as sharp as sleep is sweetly (usually) dull. As keen as a cold wind coming off the lake, or the forested hills in winter of his imagining since he’d never been out there. (Ain’t been nowhere. None of us have. Ain’t goin’ nowhere neither. None of us are. In this house or even outside it. We just sit, waitin’ for a bus that ain’t gonna come.)

  Of his ole man and ole lady and her, Beth (my mum), saying to Jake (The Arsehole): You go ’head, mista. Do your fucken worst, mista. That’s what she used to say, calledim mista, like Tarns was sneeringly calling her man, Apeman. Heard her now: You go right ahead, mista. But I still ain’t backin’ down to you. I — Bang! Ape’s fist and Abe’s memory went off like a shot. (You fucken arsehole cunt …) Thinking he might just up and do sumpthin’ about this. But then again, his courage not back to normal yet.

  He started shaking instead. Same time his own old memories were making a claim on him, of being a kid huddled on the bed, the bottom bunk, and Nig going back and forth to listen to progress on their father beating up Mum, back to the frightened kids (you’d a thought we’d’e got used to it) and giving each his or her turn of comforting (strong) arms and half-whispering voice (’cept I don’t remember what he used to say. What could he have said that would take away what was happening, what could he say to have us believe that the world could be and was a better place?) If Nig wasn’t there then it was Grace who dished out the comforts, to Huata and Polly she did, like it was her got the house back in order if Mum was too beaten or herself too drunk and uncaring to do it, cos Jake sure as hell never cleaned up the mess, the chaos of his causing. He didn’t remember what Grace used to say either, her memory had a kind of veil over it, he remembered only her last few years.

  That sound wasn’t a slap it was a punch. He knew punches when he heard ’em, so did most kids he knew (ask them). Now it was like God or sumpthin’ had asked him a question of was he with fear of this now he was older in its listening witness? (Yeah. I am, man. I am. It hurts and disturbs me jus’ the same.) So then he hated his father for what he’d done to their growing-up witness. But then he got the thought: What if Jake’s growing up had been that? Wouldn’t he, like, grow up and do the same? So where does it end? No, fuckim. No excuse. Someone’s gotta break the pattern, the cycle. (I wouldn’t hit a woman. Even if I wanted to, my mother’d kill me.) Alright, so it was like these questions and half answers were from God, so where is He now in this HQ hell at deepest (dark) hour of Sunday (churchgoers to come) morning? Where is He?

  Abe got up. Tarns gave a shortened scream as he was pullin’ on his black-leather pants. He stopped; like listening to a song he knew well, off by (broken) heart: bang! Uuh — knew that line, too: she was cutting her cry short to deny the bastard satisfaction. Just like his mother’d done. Fuck you, Ape! Aloud, as he dived into his black jumper, same colour as the night, but not as black as the throbbing like the arrival of some terrible presence was just now come. Like something in the process of the inhabitants of this night, down that hallway, had made a (dark) decision.

  Ooooff-mmm! sound of air punched out of a person — that person. The li’l patched-up member carrying all lowly women’s sadness. The li’l sexless, broken-hearted, infected gangie bitch with only a much-fucked body to offer as sign, gesture, of her impossible friendship when even half a decent man would see sex was the las’ thing she was offering, it wasn’t even love she wanted. Li’l thing jus’ wanted her life back. For it to start again, afresh, anew. With highways and byways she could choose to go down. (When she offered me to go to bed it was just her fucked-up unnerstanding, of man and men that she’d figured out from the cave she lived in iner mind; that men firstly wanted the deal to have sex in it; which is why she took, allowed, resigned to grunting, glassy-eyed cock insertion, times countless, of men and man their selfish terrible singular need (wants) uses and abuses taking ’emselves out on her (poor lil’) body, never assuming she had a soul.)

  Whack! of the li’l body now bein’ punched, that had to be in her face, but still she cut short her cry to show the cunt pain didn’t hurt her, her hurt’d already, long ago, been done (oh Tarns, Tarns …), Abe Heke trembling. Abe Heke (fuck the Blackie name) betrayed by himself, down to a reduced state of not being able to go to her rescue.

  So his mind went through another change, of asking why didn’t she jus’ say sorry, why didn’t she jus’ shut her mouth and then it’ll stop, she should know a man is a man in our world, specially in a gang, it’s all (he thinks and therefore is) he’s got. It was the world each of them’d come from before here, of woman, women gotta lie down, trap shut, to a man’s manhood, to his PRIDE (when where’s the PRIDE in smashing up a woman? Where’s the pride in that?) As Abe lay on top of his bed pretending the beating was going past him.

  Then another change: mind suddenly snapped awake, or the curtains yanked across, as clear as that star-filled night out the window, every li’l pinprick, stab, wink, burst ’n’ spread of separate light, of separate entities of heavenly bodies in space was like a person’s — this person’s — (universe) mind; the thoughts that’d made him, unmade him, shaped him, warped him, disfigured, sculpted — same thing. Same thing. (Same fucken thing, stars in space and memory grooves bein’ pinpricks, stabs, winks, bursts ’n’ spreads: isa same thing. And-so-is-what-is-happening-down-that-passageway: it’s the same thing.) It’s life turned, made into ugly, disfigured shaping, acting out itself. Trying to break free of its ill-cast mould.

  He could hear it, that presence, as though a ghostly soft whoosh of quietly arriving air come in and settled in a corner. So he waited in terror for what wasn’t the same, since what he was hearin’, what was coming to his ears, what was dark and came with now a certain smell (like a low slut’s sex) like something gone rotten, something beyond life even as he, Abe Heke, had known it and nor would his father, not even Jake, as the boot went in, and in and in. And he standing on the same shuddering, sympathetic (to the sound, the vibrations) floorboards she, Tania, was on, and then … footsteps, a voice’t said, Shut the fuck up, woman. Kicker again, Ape, she won’t shut it. He didn’t shout his words, the prez. He just said them, but in a tone. Of last warning.

  (HIS FACE, LOOK atim, isa p’ture of Man, all men, or mosta the men I knew. Oh, but not Nig Heke, I never liked a man so much, if only he hadn’t fucked it with Horse, if only Jake his ole man hadn’t made a fool outta Horse in a crowded pub, then Nig’d still be alive and I wouldn’t’ve put myself on the block for all the fullas t’ fuck me in showing my disappointment in Nig — or so I had been told — letting The Family down. But his making up for his disgrace (or so we thought it was) by being one of the gunmen in the shootout with, well, this gang, which is why I joined it cos of Jimmy Bad Horse setting up Nig to lose his life and me being Nig’s girl, his one an’ only, tricked into thinking badly ofim, he’d still be alive now (alive-alive-oh. But what’s alive, Nig? Y
ou must know that bedda now. What’s alive, man? Is this alive?) And his li’l bro, Abe down the passage there prob’ly out to it not hearin’ this; a nice kid, though dunno about the name change to Blackie, it’s what my man Ape did, and now look what he’s doin’, I think he’ll kill me (so what’s bein’ killed? What is there to be afraid of?)

  Changing his name from a Heke? The — the respec’ that name had, like or hate the man, when he was Jake The Muss Heke. Oo, even I got damp thinking ofim. Only utha man I got that for was his son, Nig. Mus’ be I like the Hekes.

  Lookit this man’s face: it’s a mask they pull out from behind their backs, their real self, then they start beating up the woman (me. If woman is what I am. And somehow I don’t think I ever made it to one. Un-made, that’s how it happened for me.) Bang! Now shuddup. No, I won’t shuddup. Bang! Funny thing, they don’t hurt, not really. Ya get used to ’em the blows. Ya even feel kind of superior, yeah. Ya fucken deaf, mista? I said, you go t’ fucken hell. Ya hear? (Course he hears, why he’s jus’ hit me again — ohh! — Now that one did hurt.) Ya cunt! I’m a cunt, he says. So-are-you!

  Walk up toim, can’t hardly see out my lef’ eye: Happy now, mista? Wan’ anutha whack? Gwon, have anutha one, on the house, callit Tarns’ chrissie prezzie. (Ohhhhh!) Now I’m on the floor, the dirty, unwashed boards seen a million los’ footsteps on the stumbling way to bed, sheetless beds, seenem in every stoned, drunk, pilled state, but yet kinda clear-headed about ’emselves, their true state, the hell they know they’re livin’ in when they thought bein’ here was sposed to end that, they know every night of their life that no madda how much dope and piss and pills are down and inhaled it don’t change the life made ’em, brought ’em here. I’m on the floor now lookin’ atis feet. Well, his boots: Hey! That’s goin’ a bit far ain’t it? Even for you, a fucken ape from the fucken jungle! Gotta mouthful of my own teeth.