by Tanya Moir
For twenty years I pictured her Alan as a bully — cumbersome and mean, tight-eyed and spittle-crusted. Now he looks up at me from my mother’s school magazines, a violin of a boy, dark-haired and taut, the sort to merit a movie star’s name. In the class photograph of 1959, he and Maggie stand at opposite ends of the same row.
And there he is again in 1960, one row back, just over her right shoulder. He must be taller now — or perhaps poor Maggie’s shrunk after her dipping. They’re standing close enough to touch, and I could be imagining things, but it seems to me they both look a little nervous. How can he still be there, after what he did? Was he not expelled, the pushy bully-boy, the slim film-star assassin?
It’s too late to ask Maggie now. Alan Stokes is the only one left who knows. Maybe I should graffiti his wall. What did you do to my mother?
Could it be that sharp-tongued Maggie — hunter-outer of sins, caster of light upon old transgressions — let Alan Stokes get away with almost-murder? Could it be she didn’t dob him in?
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. That was all very well for Holmes. A lot of things were impossible then. So few are now. Turn your back for just a second, and they change.
In another few months, for instance, I’ll be able to come and go from the island whenever I choose. Dion the real estate agent was wrong. Maybe, given time, we all are.
It’s taken almost a year, but I’ve found a builder for the jetty. Ex-army, jungle-trained, uncowed by a bit of tidal mud, my mangroves and mosquitoes. He and his mate are out there now, up to their knees in it, struggling with poles and string.
Back in the early seventies, the reform school tried to build a causeway to the island. It foundered in outrage and quicksand and debt and, along with one of the contractors, never resurfaced. There was talk of a swing bridge in ’94, when the island belonged to the Shining Spirit Church — they even got as far as acquiring a site on the other side. But in the end, the yacht club won their appeal (with a little help from a lobby group begun by the president’s wife called Friends of the Mangroves. That was before the motorway came through, and they built the Greenhaven Causeway.)
When I came to buy the island, the agent was quite upfront. ‘You’ll never connect to the mainland,’ he told me the first time I called, ‘if that’s what you have in mind.’
It wasn’t — far from it — but still, the knowledge was helpful in driving down the price.
The island had been on old Dion’s books for five years at this point, and it was clear he thought taking me out there a waste of his time. If I hadn’t been a fellow agent, he might not have bothered at all. As it was, he said he’d have to get back to me. He didn’t for nearly a fortnight.
‘I could take you over next Monday,’ he allowed, finally returning my third call. ‘High tide’s at nine. We can take the dinghy at half-eight, or start wading about two-thirty.’
He’d caught me as I tried to cross Queen Street against the lights, balancing Smith & Caughey’s bags with the phone pressed to my ear. Stuck between two buses, I imagined gliding across green water into the arms of the mangroves, leafy fingers dipping seductively into a sun-shot sea. Exotic bird calls. Bogart and Bacall.
I played hard to get. ‘Two-thirty, then.’
I wanted to see the island at her worst, her knobbly, stinky feet exposed. I wanted to see what she stood on.
Dion sighed. ‘Bring your gumboots, then. And wear old clothes. Waders, if you’ve got them.’
I met him at the wharf. It must have been school holidays, because he brought his kids. ‘The wife’s got yoga,’ he explained.
The four of us set off in single file across the mud, picking our way over and around the reef, among dead supermarket bags and sea-dulled glass and weedy, rusting metal. A journey so familiar to me now. It’s hard to remember how it was that first day, when all was strange and new. A little like trying to recall the loss of your virginity — at the time, you’re so concerned with getting the mechanics right you don’t have time to process the sensation.
I know I was nervous. I remember looking out for the markers sunk by long-departed disciples of the Shining Spirit — lumps of concrete silted and slimed and half-submerged, indistinct from the killer sand.
I remember the fat slap of our boots. The crunch of snail shells. One of Dion’s girls sinking suddenly up to her knees. Crying, because her sister said she’d drown, and because her father couldn’t pull out one of her red gumboots.
Reaching, after half an hour, the thick green steps below the boatshed. The hollow ring of wood and wire above the rush of traffic on the causeway. The embrace of solid ground. My first step onto the island.
The house still hidden, then, in a tangle of trees, shrubbery radiating from unseen verandahs, decades of work, of promise and thrift and neglect. And there, at the garden’s edge, the parasitic mangroves nibbling away at its old hide.
We took the overgrown path, a ribbon of mud and leaf litter up through the straggle of oak and laurel, the rhododendron walk, the exhausted orchard. Blackbirds rustling in the leaves. The girls running ahead, sticks held up in front of their faces to break the spans of the spiders’ webs. And then, at last, the house, slumped amid magnolia trees, its windows boarded up, its tin roof grey with lichen. A grande dame fallen upon hard times.
‘We can’t be long,’ Dion warned me, key in hand, ‘or we’ll miss the tide.’
He needn’t have worried — I didn’t really need to be shown inside. Even as he fumbled with the padlocked bolt, I was shifting capital, regearing loans. I knew that I would take the island.
The next time, I went alone, by boat. I shared a good bottle of wine with my house, wrestled lilac from my garden. I forgot to watch the time.
When I returned to the boatshed, the dinghy was high and dry. It took more strength than I thought I had, back then, to push it out across the sticky mud in pursuit of the falling tide. There was a point at which I believe I fell on the back-board and cried like an eight-year-old. Frustrated and frightened and exhausted. Missing, too, a gumboot. Back at the apartment, I had to soak my feet in the bath for an hour to get the mud out of my toenails.
Now my builders are coming back, climbing up the boatshed steps with rather less spring than when they descended. They’re spattered with grey from head to toe — they look as if they’ve been concreting already. They can’t get home for another hour yet.
I should probably go down and offer them a beer.
TWO
I wonder, sometimes, if my mother loved Alan Stokes. It might explain a lot. It might explain my father. The solid unmusical mass of him, weaving towards her through the crowd at Helen McIntyre’s twenty-first, carrying a cheese log.
The next boy to come within shoving distance of Maggie Biggs. My father, as ever, undeterred by hostile prospects.
They’re married within a year. Next, of course, comes me.
It’s fashionable these days to speculate upon the moment of one’s own conception. I don’t wish to disappoint, but I can’t imagine it was pretty. To be good at sex, a man requires a degree of detachment — a certain fastidiousness, a sensitive little cruelty. My father did not have this. There was nothing delicate about him. He ran at life like Hector the neighbours’ labrador — you always felt you had to keep your guard up or he might knock you over.
I give you, therefore, a warm summer’s night in 1969. A tangle of damp poly-cotton sheets. My imminent father aquiver with joy. Maggie pinned to the bed. Thirty seconds later, the neighbours breathe sighs of relief, and I am washing towards existence on an involuntary shudder of revulsion. My poor mother once again misunderstood.
A few minutes more, and presto! Here I am. The sticky product of old-brain intransigence, the union of two hypothalami in a blind incognitive quest. So much about me already decided beyond change. I will develop Will Biggs’ eyes and sprout Babs Harding’s hair. I am predisposed — or not — to family afflictions. Cancer, hea
rt disease, obesity, addiction. Up and down my newly conjoined alleles, busy genes are counting stitches, casting on. Let’s hope they’re concentrating.
My parents, now gummed together in more ways than one, lie back. The hormones swirl. Already, Maggie’s feeling nauseous. My father, suddenly attentive to her needs, pulls up the sheet. He has a name, of course. It’s Roger.
Roger John Galbraith. You’d think I would remember more about him. There were the swimming lessons, of course. But I was mostly too busy not drowning to pay him much attention. For years, it was the water between us — his face disappearing with the high fluorescent lights — that I recalled most clearly.
But of late, he’s been coming back to me more, drifting in on a mix of fresh sweat and grass and two-stroke oil, the idling of an old straight-six, the hot acid scent of the greenhouse. There was a morning not so long ago when I saw his wiry, square-muscled legs sticking out of my own boxer shorts, could see the steady Stubbied trundle of them following the mower. It was worrying, to say the least — since then I’ve taken to wearing long pyjamas.
Perhaps it’s something to do with being over forty. The first steps on the downhill road, the none-too-slow descent back into childhood. Perhaps that’s what I’ll be left with, when all else is gone — the scent of seventies summers, of boxes of Britannicas, of chlorine and my father. It’s entirely possible that I’m the only person left in the world who remembers him at all.
Back in 1969, Roger Galbraith is a travelling salesman. In years to come, he’ll dabble in vacuum cleaners, cough syrup and encyclopaedias, but right now it’s life insurance policies. The hard way, door to door. He’s actually quite good.
It’s tough on the road, but in his mild and hopeful heart he carries the salesman’s fire. When one door shuts, the next must open. Sometimes — more often than not — there’ll be tea and baking on the other side.
He crosses every threshold with a heralding angel’s zeal. He proffers oil for troubled waters, answers to the dark what-ifs that trample muddy-booted through the lonely housewife’s mind. The spectres of car crash and coronary. The knock on the door. The dinner poignant in the oven, never to be claimed. He sells them a promise. You’d be all right. The kids would be okay.
How much better it feels to have a plan! He helps them to think through the practicalities, work out the unthinkable sums. He’s a listener, my father. The women adore him. (Apart from Maggie, of course, who doesn’t approve of fear, and prefers to keep calamity close to her chest.)
With all the evening calls and the travelling, he isn’t home much, which is just what Maggie expects of a husband. Roger himself, near-orphan that he is, sent to boarding school at the age of six, has fewer preconceptions of the role. He’s providing well, which seems a good start. He buys flowers for his wife, kisses her hello and goodbye, sometimes takes her dancing. If more is required, then surely somebody will tell him.
While my father spreads the good word up State Highway 6, my mother is not idle. Not for her the solitary wait, duster in hand, for doorbells and disaster. She has a job of her own — quite a good one, in fact, as a journalist for the Oreti Reporter. Maggie is paying into a pension fund, and is co-signed on the mortgage.
She’s worked her way up from the lowest grade of cadet, and she no longer has to cover the junior netball games at eight on Saturday mornings. She gets the big stuff now, like the new tea kiosk in Queens Park, and the Women’s Institute show — she even fills in, sometimes, on the Reporter’s pièce de résistance, a handicrafts column called ‘Dear Dinah’.
Let’s join her for a moment now, alone on the couch on a Friday night, her swollen ankles up, knitting a pair of bootees (unisex green — Maggie was never one to take chances). By the thorough light of a hundred-watt bulb, it appears a peaceful scene — the second-hand suite made nice with a crocheted rug, the fire safe behind its guard, ‘Four Strong Winds’ on the radio — but while my mother’s busy needles click, something inside her is growing.
It’s not just me. I’m coming along well enough, hatching functions by the day. But there’s something else in here as well, something felted and dark, less sure of its own pattern. My tender synapses are intrigued. What is it we’re making?
The next morning Maggie takes us to visit Nanny Biggs, who seizes the opportunity to pour us all a gin and lemonade. That accomplished, the excitement of our visit palls. She has no interest in the shiny yellow baby book that Maggie has brought to show her.
(In another few months there’ll be a photograph of my grandmother inside it, holding newborn me in her arms with an expression bordering on horror. A sagging woman, straggle-browed and baggy-eyed, a muddle of Instamatic greys, her dark roots showing. She’s only forty-eight, but she might as well be a hundred. Sarah Biggs has let herself go, as they used to say in those days. Growing up, I always thought it sounded rather pleasant. Now I’m approaching that age myself I understand a little better. Sarah is drifting like a rogue weather balloon, still going round and round with the earth, but no longer to any purpose.)
The yellow baby book sets out a number of demands. Dutiful Maggie has come for help with page two — naming the curly pink and blue leaves of Baby’s Family Tree.
Her mother doesn’t give her much. A corned beef sandwich. Sarah’s mother’s maiden name.
Maggie crunches away, down the old pink seashell path that had, to a girl fresh off the Southern Cross, seemed so exotic. A dead end now. As we drive through the neat and empty streets we feel a wave of something black. Perhaps it’s indigestion.
On a thin September day in ’69, nominally spring, Maggie gives birth to me. It’s a crushing experience for us both. I form no memory of it at all — a result, no doubt, of millennia of natural selection. After all, if we were forced to carry the weight of such trauma with us, where would we go from here?
It’s fair to assume that Maggie’s recall is hazy as well, thanks to exhaustion and pethidine, but I can’t say for sure. We’re not as close as we were. From here on in, I’ll never really know what’s going on inside my mother. Indeed, I don’t see her again for a while.
Eventually, of course, the hospital has to discharge us. Outside we teeter, Maggie and I, back together again on a kerb between tulip beds and an ocean-swept grey sky.
Wide, flat days pass. My baby book is not filled out. The Plunket nurse is worried. There’s talk of Maggie needing a little holiday up north, at some kind of stone-fruit farm. Roger puts his foot down.
‘She’s just tired,’ he says. ‘She needs time off from the baby.’
He goes to see Nanny Biggs. Poor struggling Sarah. What’s she to say? It’s twenty years too late for the truth.
I am given my mother’s old room. In it, my grandmother and I regard each other as best we can, cautionary tales that we are, blurry lines to past and future. There’s too much between us for closeness.
I start to cry. Sarah consults her watch, then shuts the door. She means to come back, no doubt, but lately she’s been getting really quite forgetful.
An hour or so later, salvation arrives. It is in the unlikely form of William Biggs, who is having more than his usual difficulty in sleeping between night shifts. Bleary and desperate, he picks me up. It’s better than nothing. I stop crying.
William’s requirements of me, and mine of him, are generously low. Silence, and a heartbeat. What do we feel? Gratitude. Relief. Let’s call it love, why don’t we?
THREE
The builders sank the first piles for the jetty today. There’s a heron sitting on one of them already. Now the tide is in, they’re just three lonely posts sticking out of the sea, green timber soaking to black. Too late, I worry how it may seem, my straight-planked convenience, the inviting length of it, sturdy and square as a welcome mat. It might send out the wrong message.
Four years ago, visitors used to flock here. Electricians and plumbers were ferried back and forth on a constant stream of complaint. A week after I took possession, Gillian declared a team-building
day and brought out the whole office. Friends, lumbered with wine and flowers and kids, trekked through the mud. Some even came to help. For a while, Paul and Andy came over every fine weekend to give design advice and hack away at the garden. Sally and I spent days making pyres of Shining Spirit leftovers, scrubbing down walls and skirting boards, evicting thin translucent spiders from high corners.
But one visit was enough for most. The island’s novelty waned with the temperature, and the first winter whittled callers down to a stubborn few. It takes forethought — an effort of will — to reach me here, guarded by the ebb and flow of my green moat from whim and chance acquaintance.
Sally still makes it over now and then. She came for lunch last week, on a still, blue-water day, the harbour slow and sparkling. We drank, finally, the good bottle of champagne Dion sent me when I moved in. His card was still attached, his smiling face next to the banner Thinking of Selling? Underneath he’d written ‘Don’t call me’.
Of course, if I’d fully understood how much work the house was going to be, I might never have started. A measure of ignorance, I’ve come to see, is essential to achievement. It was my first experience of an old timber building — traditionally, the Hardings have chosen to shelter themselves behind walls made of sterner stuff. (London brick, for two centuries, replaced latterly by Summerhill stone, crushed seashell aggregate and, no doubt, a sprinkling of asbestos.)
But I was charmed by those peeling weatherboards. Their lightness. A house that might float, if the sea ever rose to claim her. Of course, half the boards were rotten. And beneath was framing soft as the forest floor, piles eager to reunite themselves with the soil, where their cells might transpire again as magnolia and Norfolk pine, Black Doris plum and mangrove.
Instead, they inhaled my money — consuming, if not quite an arm and a leg, then surely six digits of my net worth as it stood back then. By the time we’d finished, they’d swallowed not only the cash reserves allotted to them, but the equity in a mixed-use site in Freemans Bay and two townhouses in Newton.
