Ellie & the Shadow Man

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t mind being crippled. It’s no big deal. But Mum thinks I’m spoiled. Like a bloody bike, you know, that’s got a buckled wheel. She doesn’t want me any more.’

  ‘She doesn’t say that.’

  ‘She doesn’t need to. She used to be all over me when I was a kid, but now she doesn’t even like touching me. She’s always telling me to wash my hands. She went along to school after it happened. Dad told me, so it’s true. She accused them of letting me play with dirty kids. You know, germs.’ He held out his hands. ‘Polio is working class, not for Primes. Even though I was at Scots College, in the prep.’

  Ellie swallowed. It was getting close to too much, even though it made him flash with colours somehow.

  ‘Your dad’s all right, isn’t he?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, he’s all right. He’s just unhappy. He wants to get away and he can’t.’

  ‘From your mother?’

  ‘Yeah, from her. But Primes don’t get divorced. Not when they’re partners in Endacott Prime.’

  ‘Is that lawyers?’

  ‘Yeah. My grandad started it with old Endacott. I’m supposed to go there.’

  ‘Are you at the university?’ Ellie said, surprised. ‘Are you being a lawyer?’

  ‘Maybe. What dad wants to do is build a yacht and sail it solo round the world. The solo bit is the bit he likes.’

  ‘He’s got a yacht.’

  ‘That’s just a mullety. It wouldn’t get him out past Barretts Reef.’

  Ellie shrugged. She wasn’t interested in Mr Prime. I’m sitting in a car with a lawyer, she thought. That was unreal, because of how young he was, and how he was dressed, and his crippled leg, and because it meant his head must be full of stuff, laws and rules, that couldn’t possibly be there. He had seemed no older than her, talking about polio.

  ‘Is there a sort of apprenticeship for lawyers?’

  ‘I do clerking. I’ve got another three years for my LL.B.’

  She saw him draw back from the conversation, saw a shift in his eyes as he decided that what he’d said recommended him. He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray.

  ‘Ellie,’ he said, and took her hand.

  ‘No, don’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I came for just a drive.’

  His edging close and touching her moved him away. She tapped her empty coke bottle on his hand. ‘What do I do with this?’

  In answer, he grabbed it. He put his arm out the window and threw the bottle into the dark. A fracture, a splintering, came from behind the dune.

  ‘Hey, it must have hit my one. Pretty good, eh?’

  ‘Fluke,’ she said. She opened her door.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To find them. You can’t leave broken glass lying on a beach.’

  ‘Ah, come off it.’

  Ellie peered at him. It amazed her how small and bent he could become. ‘You seem like fifteen not twenty-two.’

  ‘A bit of broken glass,’ he complained.

  ‘Kids play here, don’t they? Did you hear about the broken glass someone hid in the sandpit in a playground?’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’ She walked away.

  ‘Hey, wait on.’ He turned on the car lights. ‘That better?’

  She went over the top of a sandy rise into a hollow so heavily shadowed she thought it was water. Hollis limped behind her, lit up at first, then dark.

  ‘Have you got a torch?’ she said.

  ‘I’ve got my matches.’ He tried striking one, but the wind blew it out. ‘Shelter me.’ He got a match going, cupped in his hands; released the flame long enough to catch a glint of bottles on the sand. The wind, coming up the beach, full of damp, made the flame flicker and shrink, but Ellie had the bottles sorted out. She crouched by them.

  ‘Strike another one.’

  ‘They’ve got a guy who picks up all the rubbish. Just leave it to him.’

  ‘Down here,’ she said. ‘Where I can see.’

  One of the bottles was unbroken but the other lay in pieces, some so tiny they looked like crushed ice. She picked up the large ones and stacked them on her palm.

  ‘Leave the rest,’ he said.

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Leave them, I said. Jesus, Ellie.’

  ‘Don’t swear. Keep the match close.’

  She smelled his breath: cigarettes. She smelled the cow-dung odour of his jacket. The car lights shone over the top of the sand dune like a sunrise. Everything was strange, and she liked it, even the sticky blood on her fingertips. She burrowed under the tiny bits of glass and picked them up on a layer of sand.

  ‘We can leave the bottle.’

  ‘You’re not getting in my car with that stuff,’ he said.

  ‘There’ll be a rubbish tin somewhere. I’ll go along to the wharf.’

  She went past his car on to the footpath and walked along to Petone wharf. The sea broke with muffled thumps on the beach, and the running waves hissed. No stars in the sky, even down harbour over the Eastbourne hills. Wellington glowed far away. It trembled and was alive. She wondered how she would paint all this: the dim wharf like thigh bones, the lighted street, two pedestrians, two parked vans looking as sticky as lollies spat out, and Hollis creeping after her in his car with his white face pasted on the windscreen. You would show the mountains by the weight of paint and Somes Island by using its three lights. Oh yes, she thought, carrying knives of glass in her palms, feeling bee-stings in her fingertips. She was on some sort of edge and a whole new view would open out – and yet she was here in the thick of something: Hollis Prime, his car, his intentions; her need not to let him, her need to be back with her mother in House 4.

  ‘Come on, Ellie, for God’s sake,’ he said.

  ‘Wait on.’ She was filled with her picture, which broke up when she emptied the glass into a rubbish tin. It made a clatter, with a ringing aftersound. She wiped damp sand from her hands on to her skirt, then realised she had marked it with blood. ‘Damn.’

  Hollis Prime blew his car horn. She climbed in, slammed the door. ‘I’ve got blood on my dress.’

  ‘I told you not to pick the stuff up.’

  ‘At least no one’s going to get cut feet.’ She wanted him to acknowledge what she’d done, not just to please her but to show he understood. The rightness of it set up a humming in her mind, as though she’d answered perfectly in a test at school. He was like a snag in a creek, with the water running easily around him – a hook, a finger, immovable.

  ‘Can we go back now?’

  ‘It’s not even nine o’clock.’

  ‘My mother will be wondering where I am.’

  ‘Does she keep tabs on you like a kid?’

  Ellie smiled at him. ‘Well, I’m not twenty-two.’

  ‘Bloody fourteen. I should have my head read.’

  ‘Yes, you should. If you want girls to do it with, there must be plenty, I suppose.’

  It silenced him, although he kept on throwing looks at her as he drove.

  ‘I’d end up in prison with you,’ he said.

  She found this exciting but sad. She wasn’t going to let him touch her, not even to kiss, and could feel how he wanted to, and feel a wanting in herself. Everything that followed would be easy. She wondered if when they got back where it was safe, by Woburn station, it would be all right to have just some necking there. He was interesting and good-looking and had a way of lop-siding his face as though his crippling had an effect up there. And he was twenty-two, so he would know how. She found herself wanting to be touched; she felt how delicious it would be, and so much stranger, so much more out of this world, than when she touched herself, which happened too often now. And yet he was all wrong, cut off by rules and by her instinct saying no.

  They drove beside the railway line and came to Woburn station, where he parked in the shadow of a tree. Ellie grinned, remembering Dolores’ advice: Always make your boyfriend p
ark underneath a street lamp.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You can tell Angela we had a drive and that’s all.’

  ‘Hey, you don’t have to go yet. Sit and talk a while.’

  She felt as if their ages were reversed: that he was fourteen and she was teaching him; and it amused her, and made her sad, that only half an hour ago she had believed she was in love.

  ‘I’ve got Dollie’s rules.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You don’t kiss on the first date.’

  ‘Who’s Dollie?’

  ‘My room mate.’

  ‘Tell her to keep her sticky beak out.’

  He took her hand, and she allowed it but said, ‘You should go for girls your own age.’

  ‘Ah, come on, Ellie.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know what you are, don’t you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A cock-tease.’

  ‘Don’t you talk to me like that.’ She looked at his contracting, pointed face. ‘Are you sure you’re twenty-two?’

  Yet she was excited by the word. Her hand had jerked away and she wanted to put it back.

  ‘It’s because of my leg, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘Your leg’s not important. I would have come out with you again but I won’t now.’ She felt like crying. ‘You should get an older girl.’

  He surprised her by sighing and turning away. He put his hands on the steering wheel, stared into the long road leading to Waterloo station. ‘Yeah, OK,’ he said, not in agreement but telling himself, it seemed to her, that he’d missed what he had wanted and could stop.

  ‘Thanks for telling me about your dad,’ he said.

  ‘That’s all right. Yours too. He should build his yacht and sail away.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’

  ‘And your mother should get a job. Mine’s got two.’

  ‘You really like giving advice, don’t you?’

  ‘Why not?’

  He took out his cigarettes and lit one, watching a unit pull into the station.

  ‘What I reckoned was, I’d get your bra undone tonight.’

  ‘Is that all you’re after? I thought you might like me.’

  ‘I do. Sure I do.’

  ‘Did you say to Angela about the bra?’

  ‘Jesus, I don’t tell my sister stuff like that.’

  ‘You’d better not. Anyway, I’m going.’

  She got out of the car and looked across the roof. Dolores was walking up the ramp to the overbridge.

  ‘Hey, Dolores,’ Ellie yelled. She leaned into the car. ‘Blow your horn.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Go on, quick.’

  He pressed the horn. Dolores looked around. Her face seemed white, her tan coat white and her hair inky black. She looked as if she was on a ship sailing away.

  Ellie waved. ‘Over here.’

  ‘Who is it?’ Hollis said.

  ‘Dolores. My room mate. She’s supposed to be out with her boyfriend. He’s Bevan Yates, the footy player.’

  ‘Is she the one with Dollie’s rules?’

  ‘Don’t say I said that.’

  Dolores came down the ramp, clack clack in her heels.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I went for a drive. I thought you were going out with Bevan.’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ Dolores said. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Hollis Prime. He’s a friend of mine.’

  Dolores looked at him hard – and Ellie saw him as though he had an outline inked around him: crooked, sneaky, selfish, somehow unclean in his tinny car. It seemed a judgement on her that he was like that and she said, ‘He’s the brother of a girl at school.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Dolores said.

  ‘We went to Petone for a coke.’

  ‘Did you? Why’s he dumping you here?’

  ‘That’s what she wanted,’ Hollis said.

  Dolores grinned nastily. Her clothes seemed to crackle and her skin glitter. ‘Well I’ve got news for you, buster, you’re driving us home.’ She opened the back door of the car and got in.

  ‘Hey,’ said Hollis.

  ‘Climb in,’ Dolores said to Ellie.

  ‘It’s only a couple of hundred yards.’

  ‘A gentleman always drives you to the door.’ She relaxed in the back seat, but said, ‘They’re mingy cars, these. Have you got a smoke?’

  Hollis could not find a come-back. He took out his cigarettes, tapped one halfway out and offered it.

  ‘Thanks,’ Dolores said. She waited for a light.

  Ellie got in the car. She would rather have walked but something was going on and she wanted to see, and maybe stop it. She wished she smoked.

  Hollis struck a match and lit Dolores’ cigarette. It’s like the pictures, Ellie thought: his cupped hands, Dolores’ cheeks reflecting while her eyes stayed in the dark, and the cigarette coming to life.

  Dolores sat back. ‘You know where we live,’ she said, instructing him.

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ Hollis started the car and made a U-turn.

  ‘Nice drive?’ Dolores said brightly to Ellie.

  ‘Yes, all right.’

  ‘I’ve had a lousy night. I can’t wait to get to bed.’

  Hollis drove across the railway lines.

  ‘It’s round there,’ Ellie said. ‘House 4. You don’t have to go right to the door.’

  ‘Yes he does,’ Dolores said.

  ‘Stop here. Stop, I said.’

  ‘Make up your minds,’ Hollis said. He stopped the car at the entrance to Hawkins Street.

  ‘Thank you,’ Ellie said. ‘Thanks for the coke.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Hollis said, watching Dolores in the rear-vision mirror.

  ‘You can take me right to the door,’ Dolores said. She smiled at Ellie. ‘See you in a minute.’

  Ellie closed the door. She knew half of what was happening – and would think years later how moments gained or lost, delays, hesitations, words spoken in the wrong way, could be instruments for changing lives, and how her own life had changed that night, and Dolores’, and Hollis’s too. The chunk of the closing door, the pink car moving away, were sound and image of that broken step and of forward motion regained.

  Dolores got out of the car and waited for Ellie at the House 4 gate. Hollis drove away.

  ‘Never let them sell you short,’ Dolores said.

  ‘No.’

  Inside she stopped at her mother’s door. She put in her head and smiled at her, smiled at George, who was sipping tea and eating broken biscuits Mrs Crowther had brought home from the factory.

  ‘Hello, Mr Brownlee. Mum, I’m going to bed.’

  George put down his cup and made a comic salute. For the first time she saw how shy he was – winks and salutes, both uncertain, both shy. After Hollis Prime he was suddenly nice; but she still could not see how her mother could like him seriously.

  ‘Have you got a kiss for me?’ Mrs Crowther said. She was not false like this when she and Ellie were alone. ‘Had a nice night, dear?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ Ellie said. She kissed her mother’s cheek, which had a lovely coolness and a powder taste.

  ‘Off to bed, then.’

  She wondered if her mother would smooch with George when they said goodnight. How could she with a man who had ridges in his skull and a line of hair on his throat where his shaving stopped? It was off-putting. Worse than off-putting, it was gross.

  She went to her bedroom. Dolores was sitting on her bed, rolling down her stockings.

  ‘I’ll have an early night for once,’ she said.

  ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘Do you know where he tried to take me? His flat.’

  ‘Didn’t you know?’

  ‘I certainly did not. He had a bottle of Pimms all ready and waiting. I took one look and said, “No chance, Bevan,” and I left.’

  ‘What’s Pimms?’

  ‘A leg opener. So they think.’

  ‘What if he was g
oing to propose?’

  ‘I’d never marry a clown like that. All I liked was his car. The first night I went out with him he asked me what it felt like getting seen with someone famous.’

  ‘He’s not.’

  ‘He thinks he is. Anyway, goodbye Bevan. I was mad at first but now I feel really good.’

  Ellie found her sketchpad and tore out Bevan’s picture. ‘I did that for you.’

  ‘Is it Bevan? God, it is. That’s really him. I’ll post it to him, can I? What right has he got to think I’m that sort of girl?’

  Ellie went to the bathroom, then got into bed. Dolores, wrapped in her dragons, sat leaning on her pillows, reading a magazine.

  She’s beautiful, Ellie thought. Everything is easy for her. It isn’t fair – her hair, her mouth, her eyes and her long legs, with ankles you could hold in your hands: none of it fair. Hollis Prime had shifted like a train switching points.

  It enraged her in flashes, then left her detached, pleased that she didn’t have to bother any more. Going out with him would have meant doing it, and then she’d get pregnant – it always happened. The baby would be adopted and she’d end up as a waitress in a greasy spoon – that happened too. She was going to be much better than a waitress. As well as that, Hollis Prime had insulted her. She felt the flash of rage again, remembering it.

  ‘You couldn’t have, anyway. It’s your period.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Got in bed with Bevan.’

  ‘Do you think I would have, Ellie? God, I couldn’t touch the sort of ears he’s got. And he belches and doesn’t even say pardon. How old is that guy Hollis, do you know?’

  ‘Twenty-two.’

  ‘That means he’s only after one thing.’

  ‘He didn’t succeed.’

  ‘It’s a pity he’s good-looking. He looks like James Dean.’

  ‘James Dean doesn’t limp.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hollis Prime limps. He’s had polio. You get that from not washing your hands.’

  ‘Did he have it bad? I mean, how much?’

  ‘Like he’s got a club foot. It would be easy running away from him.’ She smiled at Dolores to show it was advice.

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘He’s learning to be a lawyer, so he says. I’m going to sleep. Please don’t keep the light on too long.’