Just Relations

by Rodney Hall

  Bill and Tony shook their heads so it might be thought they were sceptical about the unknown singer.

  – An I thought I knew everythin, Uncle chuckled derisively. Wouldn’t have been much more than a month back. If you wasn’t so damn lazy, your generation, you might of heard it too. He took out a crumpled handkerchief, pulling the stuck creases apart. When he was ready he plunged his nose in and blew violently. Satisfied, he tucked the stiff handkerchief away again. Well, he said to their silence. Well, I might go and treat myself to a leak if you’ll look after the beer. He waded through air heavy with Rememberings and plunged out the door and round the back to the lavatory outhouse.

  The cow uttered her one penetrating hoot and at last fell silent.

  – Bronumburnringunderruminyum, muttered Jasper behind the bar savagely controlling some latent outburst.

  – A man could easy hate this place, Billy repeated himself.

  – True enough, Tony agreed with a grateful smile.

  The door slammed open and there stood a woman luminous with desperation. Jasper made use of the diversion to steal another tot of whisky from himself.

  – What is it? Billy asked.

  – This is the new person at Lang’s, Tony introduced her being so pleased Bill had covered for him about the singing; also pleased in a more unexpected way which scarcely bore analysis.

  Gasping for breath, Vivien told what she had seen, the Chinese woman, the truck with its flat tyre, the car climbing up the pass.

  – Mercy Ping, Jasper declared in a normal voice.

  Billy Swan caught hold of the woman’s arm and propelled her back out into the street demanding to know if she was a nurse, forced her to a trot, made her run with him, run hard, the two of them belting down towards Brinsmeads’.

  – No. But I’ve. Done some. First aid.

  – Good enough let’s hope, he found words to reassure her, then raced ahead. By the time she caught up he was already on a battered motorcycle kicking the engine into life. Vivien knew what he expected and climbed on, just as the surprised enquiring face of Elaine McTaggart, young Fred’s mother, appeared round the corner of the welder’s shed. The face filled with complex assessments. Elaine leaving the wives’ tea-meeting had walked up in the nick of time to catch that woman running, no less, to climb on behind the Swan boy as if she had a right. Billy let in the clutch and they roared away, an unexplained gap remaining where they had been, Vivien having to hug him round the waist to save herself being jolted off. She knew what he expected; not just concerning her pillion-riding. As he swung the bike into the first curve she tightened her hold on him, her palms flat against his flat, hard stomach. And he felt her envelop him. His head diamond-sharp with purpose, driving them both beyond safety, his body already heavy with its own designs. The bike swayed elegantly as a sailing-boat; Vivien was abandoned to it, let herself go, this was so easy, the roaring seemed to come from the rocks above, or now from inside herself she vibrated so strongly. Or else she and he were the silent rushing core of life, the axis of unmeaning matter. What purpose could be greater than theirs as rescuers? Once he turned his head as if he might shout something to her, but didn’t. She responded with a slight pressure of her hands. So they roared on, abandoned to intimacy. Though she felt guilty in the emergency, her fingers crept about with tiny trespassings. The machine blared inappropriate appetites for all to hear. Cliff faces folded back at their approach, turning aside ridges, aeons, simple as pages. Far below, pictures of a farmhouse could be glimpsed, a small triangular dam, a clump of trees, half a dozen sheep, a black bull trotting across a paddock, a crow planing the ground. They bounced and rattled along the dirt road, they banked round a long curve which seemed to lead them burrowing right into the mountain … and suddenly clear to where a man stood on the road ahead, outlined against the midday sky. Parked as far to one side as safety would allow, a car cooled, with a dog’s head stuck out of the window. They drew up, scattering pebbles, the rich tune of the cycle throttled back.

  – You bloody hooligan, yelled the man. At that speed …

  Billy swung his machine expertly on to the gravel verge and parked it in against the rockface.

  – Where? Vivien asked the man, a gap eating her insides.

  – You bloody fool, the man swore and she realized he was near weeping.

  They saw the missing guidepost. The stranger in his city suit turned his back on them and went across, peering down. At a couple of bounds Billy was there too. In her mind Vivien relived the sight of that Chinese face lined by the compassion of years, her feverish concentration on the rutted track, tiny hands at work wrestling with the steering wheel as if it were a beast with contrary intentions. She was looking straight down the cliff at a wide ledge, perhaps one hundred feet below, where the upside-down chassis of the truck lay, one of its wheels still turning obediently.

  – I saw her face, the city man confessed, speaking as if hypnotized. Then collected his nerves and controlled himself. He succeeded in putting on a public manner to shut off their intrusion.

  The wrecked truck had the character of completeness, nothing to do with motion or happening. Only that one wheel offered a clue to any continuity. Otherwise this utterly alien thing (the never-seen, mud-caked, sunlit underside of a chassis) lay rectangular and final: the immobile past-tense flat on a shelf which had once been a bullock track hewn out of the mountainside by hand. Not even any dust hanging in the air. Simply a fixed object, in the present but already finished. And you knew it without thinking. The wheel thought for you; signalled messages raw and forbidden. Too late for pain.

  – Was there a collision? Billy asked feeling the question itself dignified and a formality. But he didn’t wait for an answer, the emptiness too much to bear. In fact he was following Vivien who lowered herself against the cliff, already below the lip of the roadway, groping for footholds, her shoe working this way and that, selecting, testing. She was reassuring herself too, the chunkiness of the rock more secure than she might have feared, the broken granite surface. Bill was beside her now, a little reckless in his determination not to let his sex down, not to be outdone in such a physical matter as rock-climbing. And asking himself who would act like this? How did she know what to do? She could climb, you saw that straight off.

  – Should I come too? asked the man above with a display of indecision.

  – No trouble, she called back angrily between breaths.

  Billy glanced at her face, her concentration on the need to climb well, she wasn’t wasting time looking down, nothing less than complete control needed, he admired her then for feeling nervous and not showing it. He moved easily on the rockface of his country, accustomed to the feel. But, much as he wished to guide her, some important rule of tact told him not to. Together and in silence they crawled down towards the truck. For the duration, the world comprised handholds and footholds, cracks, grit, the occasional bush treacherously easy to grasp. There was a sense in which they wrestled with the land … and in doing so, with each other. Vivien wished she had taken her cardigan off, but it was too late. She acknowledged that her knees were grazed though no pain could be felt in them. The rockface grew above them till the watcher was hidden from view. Trickles of water issued from seams. Periodically he or she dislodged a lump of rock, hearing it rattle and thud down; once quite a heavy one definitely clunked against the truck body (so that they glanced at each other with a shameful intimacy). Then they came to a diagonal ledge wide enough to sit on. Vivien’s legs were shaking and she recalled that she’d been tired already before the emergency, having walked down to Mum Collins’s and halfway back up the hill. They rested briefly, squatting at the rim of vast spaces. She forgot to control her breathing and let it come in grateful gulps. Billy watched her covertly, unexpectedly aware that she and Tony knew each other, that this was the woman Tony avoided talking about.

  – You don’t know who I am, said Billy with a lopsided smile, as inappropriate as it was strained.

  – Do you mean?
How can I trust you? Do you mean? What if you? Tried to push me off? she flung her furious mirthless joke at him.

  – Yes, he replied to her astonishment. That’s what I mean. His lopsided smile grew more pronounced, leaving one side of his face painfully serious.

  – I’ve no breath. For rubbish like that. Acutely disappointed in him, she stood, ready to go on. She could see the man above them again and waved with a perfunctory flap of the hand.

  – Careful… a voice came drifting down.

  But the worst was over. They completed the rest of the climb in less than half the time, antagonism between them. Billy who was ashamed of himself and puzzled, scrambled on ahead and leapt the final part. He ran to the truck. The cab was completely flattened. No one could be in there. He looked around, believing Mrs Ping must have been thrown clear. No sign of the body. But how far could she be thrown? Distance, he knew, being inexplicable in a motor accident. Or, for one mad lapse of hope, he believed she must be alive. He looked back up the cliff, expecting her to be clinging there. Then he was watching Vivien raking at the dirt where the door might have been, a waste of time. He was hearing her choked cry. He was beside her in fact. In a clump of grass lay a woman’s hand chopped off at the wrist, where it issued a tiny blot of blood.

  – Mrs Ping Mrs Ping, shouted Billy, the anguish suddenly clear and inescapable, wildly heaving at the dead vehicle, rocking it on its uncertain axis, his lungs thick with death in the stink of spilled petrol: that shimmering spirit hovering above the metal. Wait a minute, he gasped, the effort taking away his voice as he got his shoulder under the edge of the tailboard, just managing to ease the weight of the little truck and tip it slightly sideways.

  – No use, Vivien wailed.

  – Can’t you see?

  – No use! she shouted hysterically. Let it go.

  – But if I… crouch down this way… oh.

  He could no longer hold the weight and lowered the truck to its resting position. Rubbed his shoulder, foolish with his Oh, foolish and flat.

  – Poor lady Mrs Ping, Vivien breathed the words in horror at what she’d glimpsed. They squatted in the dust together, child-like, companionable at last. Till with a hacking cough Bill was surprised to find his stomach knotting, himself leaning forward retching. Covered his face with his hands. Yet it was she, this unknown woman, who had seen what was there, who would carry for the rest of her life the knowledge of that smashed body, the grotesque random attachment of an arm and a leg to the pulp of bloody meat.

  – Mrs Ping, she whispered through her tears, learning the name as if the name might of itself rescue some dignity.

  – Can I help …, came the faint contemptible voice above. It drew the two of them closer.

  – But no one like this, Bill said not making sense as he reached out and picked up the hand. In his rough fingers it appeared icy and so frail. She used to hold my hand, he explained. Hers was bigger than mine then, I remember that.

  Vivien watched fascinated because she caught him stroking the fingers lightly. You couldn’t hope to divine his real thoughts. You wouldn’t want to.

  – She must have been opening the door, Vivien spoke quickly to prevent herself daring to look again at what he was doing.

  – Is it the blood? he asked, examining the crushed wrist and then replacing Mrs Ping’s hand where it now belonged among the grass. We don’t understand do we?

  – Not much.

  – Everyone knew Mrs Ping. And then he nodded as if he’d been asked to reaffirm the fact.

  – Listen, she said.

  There was nothing. Billy felt the ache in his shoulder and contemplated the truck, hardly able to believe he had found strength to tilt it even so little. The stench made him ill. Then a single blowfly came circling in, droning, homing on blood.

  – Her cow was dying, he said. They listened to the silence and the fly some more. The blowfly settled and they could hear the voice above talking syllables, incidental to the new void.

  Vivien felt desperately thirsty, the air swayed heavy with petrol fumes. Her grazed knees began paining. Billy the priest was without the right phrase: somehow his ignorance had escaped detection so far. And even now the dignity of his bearing protected him, even God awaited his voice, the correct formula, before accepting the dead woman’s soul. But he had not learnt: the secret never given him apparently. Yet today? So he pronounced his benediction haltingly as if hearing the words for the first time as he spoke them, as his lips recognized them by their shape.

  – Our news, stay, queer then it, in no mean, a damn, any, down the face, wreck, we … um … (He was carrying some terrible burden for the inarticulate of earth.) Being, he sang. Addict us (achieving the gesture of reverence he’d never been taught). Queer vanity, he sang. Not many, too many, do not eyes? (and he saw the truck). Wreck! we aim simply, turn home. Billy took Vivien’s arm as he had at the hotel and continued in his ordinary voice.

  – Her cow was Alice. She loved Alice. Each of her cows, and his intonation rose almost to singing again. Dies Iris dies Alice, he began to explain. So the vet … but lost any sense of vocation. He slapped the pockets of his leather jacket in a gesture of emptiness and she forgave him what he had done on the cliff face. They were mourners who paid their respects in their different ways.

  Then they began creeping back up under the weight of knowledge, to report what they knew.

  – You’d better come with me, the car driver decided, meaning except Billy, meaning Vivien, and shut her in.

  Billy shrugged, slighted, and roared away ahead. Who was it had done all that could be done anyway? He was angry with the woman, whatever her name was, angry with her particularly. Was she too stuck up to go back on the bike? Hadn’t she come with him? Hadn’t he been good enough then? Hadn’t he felt her hands on him? His front tyre reeled the road in, pulling the town towards him.

  – I’ll bet, I’ll bet, he was muttering between clenched teeth, furiously kicking the bike through the gears. He watched them in his round mirror; the blue Ford nosing up into the curves, impersonal and closed. Who could know what was being said in there or how that fellow might be smiling at her, serious and confidential, shaken and smiling with fright? Bill Swan cut a semicircle in the dirt outside Brinsmeads’, parked his bike as usual by the war memorial. He stood, slightly stiff in the legs, perhaps even trembling if he’d admitted it. Let the foreigner do the talking. He watched the two of them step out of their privacy.

  Felicia Brinsmead was already at the door.

  – Yes, she said when all three had gathered on the footpath but before they’d had a chance to speak. It’s a sad day. Mercy Ping dead under her lorry.

  Vivien looked sharply at her, for how could she have known? Then noted that Billy didn’t appear surprised.

  – We do still have the telephone I suppose? Miss Brinsmead waved the stranger into the shop and the house without mirrors beyond. My brother will show you, but once you reach the police on the line it takes them an hour to get here as a rule. She shook her head till the bundle of hair swung heavily. Well Billy, she continued. You’ll have some memories of Mrs Ping?

  He looked away, nodding.

  – The bad part, she concentrated. Was the hand. The door did shut on it. Still she’ll have been pleased all in all, considering. The way it happened.

  – What way did it happen? Billy confronted her savagely.

  – I mean she didn’t smash into him, her face assuming the eighth of its fifteen expressions, the exact middle, the neutral one.

  – It was almost like, Vivien said. It was almost as if she …

  – Yes, Miss Brinsmead interrupted, having no patience with gentility. I’d surmise, my dear, she steered over the edge on purpose. To save involving him, him in there. Isn’t that it? Mercy Ping saw things that way all her life, avoiding collisions, taking the easy way if it could be thought of as virtuous.

  This filled Billy with helpless rage; it sounded so convincing. And Miss Brinsmead fixed him with her live
ly stare, eyes snapping alert, as clear as saying Now if I can know all this without being told, can it be supposed I do not know why you were here this morning asking for gelignite? He faced up to her but with no lie ready. His breath came quickly. His secret. As long as she didn’t guess his secret. The simple need to swallow grew intense; it might look like a gulp and be interpreted. Out of the question. The old lady pursued her line:

  – Mrs Ping made a necessity of virtue! Neither of them smiled at this repartee, few people bother to retain the least command of elegant wit, as can be demonstrated any day of the week. Doubtless, she added, this was thought advantageous to her profession.

  – What was she then? asked Vivien at last, saving Billy from scrutiny, her eyes swimming in tears.

  – The schoolmistress, dear. She taught all our children until the school closed down. And then most of the young men went away. Why? you ask. Because otherwise they’d never be free to run their own lives, their fathers wouldn’t let them, fathers being what they generally are. You see Vivien, we’re pretty tough in these parts, the old ones live a long time and keep a tight rein on their farms. But sons want to inherit while they’re still able to make the most of the work. There’s the problem for you. Last year for instance a couple of brothers inherited their place after working for their father all their lives.

  – How old were they then?

  – Eighty-one and seventy-nine as I recall.

  Footsteps could be heard creaking across the shop floor and the voice of the car driver, who emerged accompanied by the patriarch Brinsmead.

  – … and I should be most interested to hear them.