by Gee, Maurice
‘How’s that, kid? Nice and straight?’
Colin’s thumbs had swollen and turned the colour of plums. They had started throbbing and his face where the fat man had hit him was throbbing too. ‘Yes,’ he said, trying to keep the sobs out of his voice.
‘A man’s got to keep himself clean and tidy. My mother taught me that. I hope Maisie Poultice teaches you. Clean fingernails? Brush your teeth? That sort of thing?’
‘Yes, she does.’
‘What’s the matter, kid?’
‘My thumbs are hurting.’
‘Let’s see. Yeah. You know what will happen? They’ll start going bad and they’ll drop off.’
Tears ran on Colin’s face. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘untie me.’
The fat man smiled. He winked. ‘Okay, kid. I like “please”. You gotta learn these things. Life’s a school of hard knocks, they say.’ He took his razor from the pouch and laid its sharp edge on the string, and just the weight of it, it seemed, parted the thread.
‘What do you say?’
‘Thank you,’ Colin whispered.
‘Okay. Now sit there while I think what to do.’
Colin did not like the sound of that. All he wanted was to go home. His face hurt and his thumbs hurt, but inside he ached even more at the way he had caved in to the man. He wanted to go into his room and close the door and pull the curtains shut and get into his bed and never come out. He knew he would never feel brave again. All his father’s talk of standing up to people and punching clean was nonsense when someone was bigger and faster than you; when he could look at you and make your skin go cold …
‘Don’t start blubbing again.’
‘No. I won’t.’ Tears rolled down his cheeks all the same. They wet the chocolate round his mouth and brought back its taste.
‘I don’t like kids with dirty faces,’ the fat man said.
‘No, sorry,’ Colin said. He rubbed it with his sleeve.
‘You’re making it worse.’
‘I can’t help it.’
‘Waterworks, eh?’ He watched Colin a moment. Then he gave a smile that sent the scar by his mouth curling up his cheek. He took his razor strop and hooked it over a nail in the four by two. He held it taut and started stropping his razor. ‘Always look after your tools, kid. That’s a lesson to learn.’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you call your teacher at school?’
‘Sir.’
‘So?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Okay. Now take that soap and go down to the pool and wash your face. Then come back here.’
Colin did as he was told. He heard the razor slapping on the strop. He knelt by the pool, took water in his hands, splashed it on his face and washed the chocolate and the tears away. Then he soaped his hands and washed again, stinging his eyes. He had to do exactly what the fat man said. Or else … He listened. The razor made its slip-slap sound. Which meant … Colin looked across the pool. He could slide in, swim quietly, then up the bank on the other side, across the bottom paddocks of Cottons’ farm, and be in the main street, at the police station, in ten minutes. He listened. Slap went the strop. The fat man started whistling quietly.
Colin could not go. He could not swim, or climb, or run. His muscles would not work. If he put one foot in the water, somehow the fat man would know, he would reach out …
Colin felt more tears slide on his nose. He washed them away. He rinsed his mouth with water and swallowed some. Then he went back to the hut.
The man grinned at him. The scar curled. It was like a worm living in his cheek. ‘Here,’ he said, and threw his towel at Colin, ‘dry your face. And don’t go wiping your nose on it. Use this.’ He handed Colin a square of torn newspaper. Colin blew his nose and crumpled the paper and put it in his pocket. He dried his face.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
The fat man put his razor and strop away. He packed his belongings in his bag. Then he hung the towel to dry from the nail where the strop had been.
‘You still owe me, kid.’
‘Yes.’
He took his jacket from the ferns and shook it out and put it on. It made him look even bigger. He took a tie from the pocket and knotted it round his neck. Then he put his hat on, careful not to disarrange his hair, and flicked the back brim up with his fingernail and turned the front one down on an angle. Now he looked like a gangster. Maybe he wanted that. Colin wondered if he had a gun.
‘How do I look?’
‘Good.’
‘Always keep your clothes clean, kid. A man gets judged by his clothes. I wouldn’t be seen dead with you if we were in town.’
‘No. I’m sorry.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘Yes. Sir.’
‘Okay. Come on.’
‘Where to?’
‘No questions, kid. You and me are going to do a job.’ The worm in his cheek curled again. ‘Then, if you do it right, I might let you go home.’
Chapter 2
Sovereigns
Loomis was a small town in those days. It had a main street, called Station Road because the railway station was built there, and a town hall, a dozen shops, five churches and a boarding house that had been a pub before the western districts went dry. The Great North Road cut past the town at its eastern edge, running twelve miles to Auckland one way and a hundred miles to Whangarei the other. Mangrove creeks at the head of the harbour divided the farmland into tongues. On the inland side were hills and deep valleys and freshwater creeks like the one where Colin Potter met Herbert Muskie. A few dirt and gravel roads ran into the ranges and down the other side to the blacksand beaches of the west coast.
Colin had never been to the beaches because his father had no car. He did all his swimming in the creeks. He had not been to Auckland more than half a dozen times. Loomis was his world and it had to be big enough for him. He went to school there, he went to the pictures in the town hall (when he could scrounge a few pennies from his mother) and he played football on the town domain, where the concrete cricket pitch was covered with a layer of sawdust for the rugby season. A rugby club working bee brought it in truckloads from Muskie’s mill. Colin’s father was always part of that, although his playing days were over (and his boxing days). Clyde Muskie let them use his truck and sometimes put half a dozen bottles of beer in the cab. He tried to be popular, Clyde Muskie, but nobody liked him very much.
The Muskies had been an important family once, but nobody was important now, not in Loomis. Most people were broke and most of the men were on relief. Shops were boarded up in Station Road. Mrs Muskie owned most of them, but now she only got rent from the grocer and the butcher. The only one of her businesses still going was the sawmill, and that was on its last legs, not only because times were bad but because Clyde Muskie ran it and he, the local men said, couldn’t run water from a tap.
There had been eight Muskies once, now there were two. There had been Mr and Mrs, he a little weaselly man, sharp and bald and as mean as mud, and she big and muscly, not fat but heavy and slow, and red in the face and wheezy in her breath, and even meaner than the man she called ‘my hubby’. She counted the shillings in her purse, letting no one see, and gave a little squeaky sob as she squeezed them out. She looked unhealthy, Mrs Muskie, as though she would drop dead one day in the street, but he was the one who dropped, and not in the street, in his office, with invoices looping from his hands as he fell; and she was still alive, wheezing harder, and fat not muscly now, and still sniffing at the coins in her purse.
She and Clyde were the Muskies left. The four daughters – Olive, Constance, Dora, Maude – were married and gone. They didn’t come to Loomis to see their mother, and who could blame them? And the youngest child, the boy, he was gone too, no one knew where. It was thirteen years since anyone had seen him. Nobody remembered him much, except that he was fat. He used his fat, the returned men said, to get out of the army. He didn’t show his face in Loomis after the men came home from the war.
Mrs Muskie lived in Millbrook Road, in the only two-storeyed house ever built in Loomis. She lived alone, in one room and the kitchen, although there were twelve rooms in the house. She was too old and unwell to keep the garden tidy, or scrub and clean, but she wouldn’t hire a man to cut the grass or a woman for the washing and the ironing. Some people said she was too tight-fisted; others that she didn’t have any money left. No one knew how she managed; but her clothes smelled of mould and her shoes were cracked and her leather gloves were split across the knuckles (she always wore gloves, and always a merry widow hat twenty years out of date, with its felt turned green and its decorations, except for one bunch of dried flowers, lost). You got whiffs of sweat from her when you were close – not that you got close if you could help it. Her false teeth clacked. She took them out as she walked home from the shops and wrapped them in a tattered hanky, one that had belonged to her husband, people said. Nothing of his had ever been thrown out.
She walked to town every day, along Millbrook Road, over the bridge, past the jam factory (closed since the start of the Depression), and past the station to the butcher’s and the grocer’s for her half-pound of mince, which was the only meat that she could eat (her teeth were for show), and her bread and potatoes and whatever else she needed – a bit of cheese or sugar or soap (not much soap). Only one or two of the other old ladies in Loomis spoke to her, and not for long. Younger people let her go by without a word, except for little kids who followed her now and then, calling names – Mrs Mustpee was their favourite – but she took no notice of them and they gave up before long. There wasn’t any fun to be had from her.
So she came and went, into town at half-past two every weekday (extra mince on Friday to see her through); a quarter-hour of shopping; then up on to the station platform for a ten-minute rest on one of the seats, with her shopping kit, a cut-down sugar sack with sewn-on handles, sitting beside her; and home again when the Auckland train had come in, past Ah Lap’s, where she never went in, and past the side street leading to the mill. She never looked at the mill, although she owned it. She payed as little attention to the screeching saws as the screeching kids.
You could set your watch by Mrs Muskie – if you had a watch.
‘What train was that, kid?’ the fat man asked.
‘What?’
‘The train that blew its whistle while you were scoffing my chocolate.’
‘I think,’ Colin said, ‘the ten-past two.’
‘You think?’
‘I know is what I mean. Yes, it was.’
‘Sure about that, eh kid? We don’t want no mistakes.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘You put me wrong, you see, it’s going to make me very unhappy.’
‘No, sir. Yes, sir. It was the ten-past two.’
‘That means it’s time for you and me to take a walk.’
‘Where to?’
‘No questions, kid. Speak when spoken to. Do they still teach that at school.’
‘Yes.’
‘What else?’
‘Sir.’
‘Dumb kid. What else they teach? Sit up straight?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘Sir.’
‘Jeez, you want me to belt you?’
‘Eyes front, fold your arms, everybody quiet,’ Colin babbled.
‘Folded fingers? Left thumb over right?’
‘That’s Mr Edgar.’
The fat man paused with his rucksack halfway on his back. ‘So he’s still there? Edgar’s still there?’
‘He’s my teacher. In my class.’
‘Standard six?’
‘Five and six.’
‘I thought they would have pensioned him off by now. He got his strap?’
‘White leather,’ Colin said.
‘With a bit of tin between, like in a sandwich?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Yes, like anything.’
‘I got that strap every day for a year,’ the fat man said. He looked at his hand. ‘You want to know why?’
Colin didn’t but he said yes.
‘Because I farted. Only, you want to know something, it wasn’t me. My old lady brought me up to know better than that. It was really Pottsie and his mates. Silent like. They got real good at it. And old Itchy, he’d say – You still call him Itchy?’
‘Yes.’
‘What would he say, kid? You tell me.’
Colin swallowed. ‘Which boy made an odour?’
‘Yeah, that’s it.’ The fat man laughed delightedly. ‘It’s great when things don’t change, eh? It makes you feel like home. Old Itchy, if he finds you’ve got your right thumb over your left, does he still whack it with his ruler?’
‘Yes.’
The fat man sucked the knuckle of his thumb. ‘Does he still say, “Look me in the eye, boy, when I talk to you.”?’
‘Yes.’
‘And grabs you by the hair to make you do it.’
‘Yes.’
‘And wipes his fingers with his handkerchief after? Yeah? So he doesn’t change. Ain’t that nice? Loomis doesn’t change. Old Pottsie, he’d say, or one of his mates, “Please, sir, it came from over there, I heard it, sir”, and he’d point at me. I reckon it was a game they played, Itchy and Pottsie, every day. You do that, do you, with the fat boy?’
‘We haven’t got a fat boy,’ Colin said.
‘What, no fat boy? A school can’t get by without a fat boy. I’m disappointed in you, kid.’
‘It’s not my fault,’ Colin managed to say. He started to cry again.
‘That’s right, kid, have a cry. I cried too, every day for a year. Pottsie liked it. Itchy liked it too. It made them feel good. Good to have a blubber in the class, especially if he’s made of blubber, eh? You could be the fat boy, you’d make a good one. What a shame you’re skinny like your old man.’
‘He’s not skinny. My dad’s not skinny.’
‘What, he’s put some blubber on, has he?’
‘If he was here …’
The fat man looked at him. ‘What? Go on, finish it. What do you reckon your old man would do?’
‘He was a boxer,’ Colin snuffled.
‘Yeah?’
‘He won the Auckland championship, for welterweight.’
‘Welterweight? Well, ain’t that peachy?’ the fat man said. ‘Let’s have a nice clean fight and break clean from the clinches. You want to know what I was doing while Pottsie danced around the ring poking out his left? I drove trucks full of bootleg hooch across the ice from Canada to Detroit. I seen a man – you want to know? – we wrapped chains round his legs and dropped him down a hole in the ice. One night, up there. And I seen a truck go down with its lights still shining, right down to the bottom before they went out. On Lake Eyrie. That coulda been me. I’ll tell you, kid, after Loomis school I learned not to cry. So if you think your old man would stand a chance with me, you go home and tell him where I’m at. You want to do that?’
‘No,’ Colin sniffed.
‘So you want to keep your old man in one piece? Ain’t that nice? I wish I had a young feller like you.’
‘Can I go?’ Colin managed to say.
‘No you can’t. We got work to do.’ The fat man settled his rucksack on his back. His eyes flicked round the hut, making sure everything was tidy. ‘Okay, come on. You keep in behind. And speak when spoken to from now on, eh, remember your lessons.’
‘Yes.’
‘Sir.’
‘Sir.’
They went along the side of the creek, in the fern and bush, the fat man leading. He was twice as wide as Colin, or three times, but he slid through the fronds without a sound, with his gangster hat on his head. He did not look round, but Colin knew that if he tried to sneak away there’d be a tug on the invisible rope that linked them, and the man would turn and pull him in and then … He could not think. He could only be terrified. The fat man had come up out of the ground, as though he had
been sleeping there, buried for years, waiting for something to wake him – or come up from the deep pools of the creek, dripping slime …
Far away, up in the sun, a woman called her child, but Colin could not make out the name. It was a sound from a world he could not get back to. He was in a nightmare, but the man was real. A car drummed on the wooden bridge joining Dobson Street and Millbrook Road. The bridge was on another level, and no way for Colin to get there.
‘Stop here, kid,’ the fat man said. He lifted a ponga frond with his hand. ‘See the bridge?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay. Now keep quiet and watch.’
The planks underneath were furred with moss. The piles rose from a sea of undergrowth. But the grey rails looked warm in the sun. Cicadas on the timber droned their song. And the sky was blue above, without a cloud. Colin thought that if they went on to the bridge, he might find the courage to run.
‘Here she comes,’ the fat man said. He let his breath out with a sound that might have been a laugh. ‘Jeez, that hat.’
Mrs Muskie came on to the bridge. She moved in her beetle crawl, and was as dark as a beetle too. The cicadas stopped their droning.
‘Know who that is?’ the fat man asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Who, then?’
‘Mrs Muskie.’
‘Who’s she?’
‘An old lady.’
‘Jeez, kid, you want me to belt you?’
Colin flinched. He expected the blow. ‘She lives in Millbrook Road. She owns the shops.’
‘Yeah, go on.’
‘And the mill. Some people say she’s rich and some say she’s got no money left.’
‘Yeah, they would. Where’s she going, kid? I been watching her two days.’
‘Into town, to do her shopping.’
‘What’s she do then?’
‘She sits on the station.’
The fat man turned his head sharply. ‘Why the station?’
‘Waiting, people say.’
‘What for?’
‘I don’t know. They say for her son, who went away. My mum says it’s for her daughters though, to come and visit.’
