by Ian Wedde
And considered from another perspective I’m tempted to say yes, I can too, now that you mention it. I can hear the tiny burning Bibles under there. After all, the dude wasn’t asking if there could be thousands of tiny burning Bibles under the ground, only if I could hear them (if they were there). And if by thousands of tiny burning Bibles I’m to understand doubt, that accelerant to the incineration of rational belief, then yes. Yes, I can hear that sound—indeed I’m standing outside the very temple of doubt as we speak. And Nancy’s words come back to mind: ‘Believed. What does she think she is, a Catholic?’
My path is lit by them, the burning Bibles.
‘Thanks, dude,’ I say, and give him the whole packet. He’s lucky but he’s just made me luckier.
Inside, I put five grand on a Final Touch, Xanadu and Burgundy trifecta for the Trentham Telegraph this afternoon. The sound of thousands of tiny burning Bibles. Maestro grazing the sweet grass of his home paddock, out of the running, no chance. It’s got nothing to do with belief. Burn it. Cauterise it. Burn the Bibles. That peptide rush of certainty. When in doubt, don’t.
Wonton Phil’s looking at me funny. He stops yabbering into the cellphone mike hanging around his neck. ‘What you got, Micky?’ The one lank strand of hair he has left is plastered athwart his pale, perspiring skull. It’s like a signpost pointing ninety degrees away from where he’s looking—he should pay more attention to it.
‘Benefit of the doubt,’ I say.
Wonton doesn’t get it. Trentham, 5.45 p.m. start—I’ll be celebrating at The Honeysuckle by teatime.
Time to stretch the legs.
Habit, routine, groove, call it what you like, my daily walk around Oriental Bay is both always the same and always different. In fact what’s the same about it is that it’s always different. That’s because Oriental Bay never realigns itself overnight so the city’s on my right going north. No, the fountain’s impersonation of a whale spouting always has the city’s glass towers flashing beyond it to the west. The bulk of Mount Victoria has always been at my right shoulder as I set off heading north, and my father was always, always keeping stride at my left shoulder—Marty preferred that side, the one nearest the water. If I ever tried to change places with him he’d outmanoeuvre me, feinting in front of me then ducking behind and crossing sides between the sea wall and a park bench so I couldn’t defend against his move without bashing my knees. Then he’d speed up and come out beyond the bench, on my left (or on my right coming back again, heading south).
‘Oh no you don’t!’
Time to strrretch the legs.
Marty still spoke such phrases with self-satisfied precision, as if pleased with himself for having learned to master the vernacular.
Once, in the house he designed or, as some whispered, copied from Farkas Molnár—the one that’s shoving its blocky coloured squares and rectangles into my head as I strrretch my legs at speed around Oriental Bay—he cheerfully invited Sandy to climb up on top of the grand piano. Veronica and I were watching. It was ‘family activities time’ in the big downstairs living room. We were taking turns doing ‘crazy things’. Sandy stood up on top of the piano with a smile of terror and triumph on his face, because this was completely forbidden, to climb on the piano, you couldn’t even open it and muck around with the keys, you had to practise when it is your turn. But there Sandy stood, torn between triumph at our expense and terror at the transgression he’d been commandeered into. And below him stood Marty, stretching out his long thin arms.
‘Now, Sandy, chump to Daddy!’
This was an exciting game.
Sandy jumped while looking at Veronica and me with that weird grin on his face, and our father, whom his friends called Marty, whose proper name was Martin, who was called Marty most of the time, stepped aside and let Sandy crash to the floor.
‘Never trrrust anybody!’
He said this in the gloating tone that was the mark of his confident ability to speak in the ordinary vernacular. Then everybody, including Vero and me, but not Marty, began to scream. Our mother was screaming too though she never seemed to be there until the moment of crisis. Marty stood with his long, thin, black-hairy shanks wide apart as if still braced to catch the child he’d told to jump, and ignored our mother’s screams, even though she was calling him a fucking bastard. Or rather he just stared the screams down. She was holding Sandy who wasn’t really hurt but who was clinging to her with his gulping face in her neck and his legs refusing to unbend, as if the floor was covered in poisonous snakes or was a bottomless pond or, at that moment, had become his father’s arms. Which he’d folded while the family stopped screaming, because Marty had begun to laugh. Should we join in? Our mother didn’t think so—she carried Sandy, clinging to her front like a marsupial, from the room.
‘Well, then,’ said our father, still chuckling, ‘that didn’t go down very well.’
Yes, what’s the same about stretching my legs around Oriental Bay is the geography where I’m doing it and the fact that I am as usual stretching them, and what’s not the same is what doing this makes me think about, which is different most days. It’s even more different than usual today because I haven’t thought about my father and the famous piano-chumping incident for years, and haven’t had ringing dully in my ears the fatuous tone of Marty’s joke, ‘That didn’t go down very well.’
Did I know it was a joke at the time when I was perhaps only five, a year younger than Sandy and one older than Vero? I must have. I couldn’t have. I’m making it up. The tinny sound of Marty’s joke goes round and round in my head as I reach Point Jerningham, rotate the city to my right and head back along the Parade. The joke sounds too much like one of mine. But then maybe that’s why I remember it. I am my father’s son. There’s some of Martin Klepka in me.
The sun is coming out, little kids are riding little bikes through the puddles, the usual self-absorbed, irritated-looking runners are dodging past them. Everything is the same. But I can’t dislodge from my mind the image of Marty’s impervious smile, his dark-hairy shanks, and my retreating mother’s back with Sandy’s legs wrapped around her bottom, trying not to touch the floor, or not to be not caught again, and back to my father’s laughter where he stood with folded arms and skinny legs wide apart, staring at Vero and me until we joined in, until he had us both ‘in fits’. Then he walked out of the room. This marked the end of ‘family activities time’.
I stop outside Freyberg Pool. Sandy used to come here—he was pedantic about fitness even before his voice broke. A smell of health emanates from the place, nuanced by chlorine. People flushed post-swim are ordering freshly squeezed juices and vegetables from the kiosk at the front. I saw Sandy once pretending not to see Marty and me strrretching our legs. He was sucking on a straw. And there they are again, Sandy’s abject legs clinging to the still youthful shape of my mother’s backside as she carts him out of range of his father’s scornful laughter. Marty’s gaze has settled on me, not on Veronica, who already bores him.
I was Marty’s favourite. He was sarcastic to Sandy and bored by Vero. But he liked playing strrretching the legs harbour-side tag with me. On the occasion of Sandy’s crash from the grand piano Marty’s grin rewarded me by transforming both his and my satisfaction into open-mouthed laughter. How we laughed. Of course I didn’t understand why at the time but I do now—clenching my resolve around the page two newspaper feature on the house I call home. My pasture.
It’s mine. It’s mine and Marty’s. Who gives a shit if it’s a Farkas Molnár knockoff. Along with all Martin Klepka’s knockoff Marcel Breuer chairs that still adorn the culturally distinct living quarters of the capital city’s mandarin class.
‘Some things just don’t go out of fashion, especially in the provinces,’ Marty confided to his favourite son when I was almost old enough to appreciate the joke. Just don’t expect me to treat the old fraud’s products with the same reverence as the clients who made him rich.
One last thing about that moment at the
grand piano when I first saw where my father’s favour lay. It was the pattern of my mother’s dress where bawling Sandy’s heels gripped her bum. Because it was summer she was wearing a light cotton dress. It had a symmetrical pattern on it of simple woodblock ziggurats in rather bleached-out teal. This too probably came around the world with Martin Klepka after the Bauhaus Berlin was closed down by stormtroopers in 1933. Marty’s disdained child Sandy was pressing his father’s successful ripoff textile against his mother’s pelvic architecture, which was minimal as you’d expect in the wife of a high modernist, while staring with an expression of appalled hatred at his younger brother Mick’s complicit laughter and his father’s derision.
Yes I feel sorry for Sandy. I’m human. But the memory that’s made today’s leg-stretch different from others has made me feel lucky. It’s given me an ego stiffy. I’m liking it.
‘Chump to Daddy!’
The old prick wouldn’t have caught me either but we’d have understood each other, perhaps. Whereas bawling Sandy didn’t and Vero couldn’t. Never did and never could, respectively. How the cookie crumbles, as our father might have said, with that hint of pedantic smugness.
Never trrrust anybody!
Our father almost never talked about his past. He told me that he had no brothers or sisters, I should count myself lucky. To have a couple. Even if they’re not, you know. We were up on scaffolding, repainting the south wall of the house. Marty had splashes of red paint on his face. At first I thought he meant his brothers and sisters had been killed in the war but that’s not what he said. About a year later he told me his mother and father had given him money to get out of Germany. He was twenty-seven and went to Spain. It was summer again and we were up on the flat roof this time, laying down new bitumen. I’d asked him how he got here but his answer seemed to be about why his mother and father hadn’t.
A couple of years later when he was giving me a driving lesson he told me about being incarcerated as a ‘hostile alien’ on Somes Island ‘with a bunch of Nazis’. The joke was that being Jewish made him a hostile alien among the Nazis of Somes Island, but the real meaning of the joke was ‘Never trrrust anybody’. He turned mistrust into an operational virtue. He was serious about it which was probably why he played it for laughs. Once when a couple of nicely suited Mormon missionaries were spotted approaching the house he opened the door wearing nothing but a World War One German helmet with a spike on top and with a hard-on below. The latter was justly famous.
‘They won’t be back!’
He never spoke of the German Ashkenazim and the family’s Polish connection. We heard bits and pieces about these from our mother who was neither German nor Jewish, nor Polish for that matter. But she wouldn’t talk about it if Marty was around because it wasn’t worth the anger. She told us he left his family behind after the Berlin Bauhaus was raided in 1933. All he ever said about the place was that it was ‘an empty telephone factory’. I don’t know what he meant—not, anyway, that it was an empty telephone factory, even if it was. He enjoyed talking in riddles, they were like taunts. Later on we all knew about the designs he took with him from ‘the empty telephone factory’, because of what he was doing, churning out the stuff that made Sandy purse his connoisseur lips and Vero wet herself.
It’s always seemed to me that the knockoff Breuer chairs, the insolently inclined lamps, the simple geometrical fabric patterns, the landscaped gardens and wooden decks opening from glass walls were piled up by Martin Klepka’s furious energy into a kind of archly tasteful barricade between himself and whatever might have happened to his mother and father in 1938, when the Polish Jews were deported from Germany and we all know what happened after that. But then I don’t know that and my father was never going to tell me. It was forbidden to talk about it, whatever in fact ‘it’ was. No that’s not true, it was never talked about regardless, because Marty’s way of staring at you across the table was completely terrifying. When we were kids we used to call it ‘the look’.
‘It’s always seemed to me’ isn’t true either. The ‘always’ begins when I was old enough to stop being scared of ‘the look’ and began to see that Marty wanted me to be the one who’d occupy the future he was knocking himself out to shore up. The future he couldn’t have himself because no matter how hard he tried he was always teetering on the edge of a pit or had just overshot the brink and was pedalling furiously at the air like one of those cartoon characters before they drop.
But if Sandy and Vero ever ask me nicely why I’ve got rid of so much of the stuff in that house they think is also theirs, then I might tell them that it wasn’t for the gelt—one word from Marty’s past that he uttered, albeit with a sardonic spit at the end, although the gelt came in handy. It was because the money I made didn’t get in the way of the terrible ghosts that Marty’s barricade of high-value manufactured goods was trying to keep out. They could come in as often as they liked as far as I was concerned, the ghosts. They could hoo-hoo around the empty rooms looking for their absconded son, because their son had long ago sunk with all his rage and guilt into the old swamp of the earth where everything turns into shit first and nothing at all next.
Sports Bar coming into view. I love the intelligence of the body. My throat starting to swallow without me having to think ‘thirst’.
And the other ghost, Agnes? That was her Scottish grandmother’s name. She liked telling us about all that. Often she’d begin a story but then stop. Sometimes she’d start a story halfway through. It was as though the stories were on repeat spools in her mind and she cut in and out of them. Her father was Italian, he used to fish out of Island Bay. He drowned somewhere over in the Karori Rip when she was a baby. He was probably drunk, said Agnes, as if to innoculate us against his condition, though she never knew him. That’s where Veronica’s name comes from, the Italian. Sandy’s really Alistair, that’s the Scottish connection. And Mick? That would be Michael wouldn’t it, the ‘Who is like God?’ guy, the only trace left by Marty who remained unsheeted from any family narrative as far as I can tell, fine by me. But there it is.
It does no harm to suggest that my mother’s red hair was Celtic but that the crazy bouncing tangle of it, which her hands were always tucking and patting into submission, was from Venice. She promised she’d take us all there. One day. Sandy knows better than to tell me he got there all by himself, and Vero once started to skite to me about her Italian trip with her daughter, but stopped.
Sometimes what my mother’s hands were tucking back into place wasn’t her hair but her thoughts. I knew that was what she was doing when she then sat very still and her eyes were not-quite-focused on something between her and the world. Her eyes were shiny and very nearly black but when she was doing that looking-at-nowhere thing they seemed to film over and her eyelids drooped.
All this shit coming back. If I could get my hands around Sandy’s scrawny neck I’d choke the tongue out of his head.
The School is halfway down a pre-lunch jug when I come into the Sports Bar. The first thing I see is a copy of today’s newspaper on the table. It’s not open to the page with the weird red house on it but I know that it will have been. The three of them put their glasses down—what were they toasting?—and look at me.
There’s no way I’m going to tell them the story about Sandy jumping off the grand piano, though this is the one that’s jostling for track advantage with the memory of my mother Agnes’s fingers busy in the thicket of her hair, tucking thoughts back in there.
‘Where have you been-been-een?’
Of course the question’s a joke. Ratchet knows I’ve been stretching my legs. But then I am late today. He sees my eyes lift to the TV where the TAB odds are clicking over, and he’s not fooled when I look away as if I’m not interested.
‘I’ve been exercising my mind,’ I say.
Even that first abstemious swallow of beer pulls the hair-trigger that waits between throat and gut. The shot propels me to the bar where I get another jug and five nips of the Irish
that Nancy prefers.
‘Jesus Christ-Christ-ist,’ says Ratchet. ‘What are we marking the passing of today-day-ay?’ No one comments on him rearranging the coasters and the nip glasses until he achieves a satisfactory symmetry. Then he blinks three times and downs his nip. Three more blinks. You have to wait until he’s run the sequence otherwise he has to start all over again. The collar and sleeves of his jacket are closed tight, his pants are tucked into his socks, his hair is plastered flat with goo, and the remarkable intelligence in there bounces off the walls. ‘Another big win-win-in,’ he says, flattening the question into a taunt.
I ignore it.
There’s also Frank, the only one of us who goes back to work after lunch, and Geordie, who’s watching the thin end of an inheritance approach at a steady speed. Frank dresses in an old but good quality suit and is never without a tie closing the border where his silverback body hair meets his shave line. Geordie wears shorts in all weather. He used to run with Scottish Harriers and his skinny legs are all veins and gristle but his knees gave out. Sometimes, that’s usually, Nancy joins us from the dining room for a quick Irish.
Here she comes now. Clearly there’s something magnetic in the atmosphere.
‘How are we, boys?’ She accepts the whiskey I nudge towards her and keeps her eyes on me.
‘Mick was late,’ says Frank. ‘We think he’s probably hiding something. Meanwhile CPI’s up, we were discussing the opportunity costs of our respective dwellings. Or, in my case, my wife’s dwelling.’
