by Gee, Maurice
‘No,’ she said, ‘just get him out.’
‘I could charge her,’ Boggsie said.
‘Don’t be bloody wet,’ Jim said. ‘You think I don’t know you’re smoking dope out in your truck? I’ll put your weights up, boy, quick as bloody looking.’
Boggsie wiped his mouth, leaving a smear of blood on his arm. ‘You owe me wages.’
‘You get in your truck, and fast. I’ll bring out what I owe. It’s more than you’re worth.’
Boggsie looked around – Mike, Janice, Fiona – then moved his head jerkily, avoiding eyes. ‘I’ll get you,’ he said to Ellie. He went into the men’s bunk room for his sleeping bag.
‘Ellie, hey-ey, come here,’ Mike said. He tried to put his arms around her.
She jerked away: ‘Don’t touch me.’
She went into the yard, shied away from Boggsie’s truck as though it was a person, and went up the drive beside the hedge. She wanted to follow the road, walk hard and far, but did not know which direction Boggsie would take. She half-ran under the pines towards Fan and Audrey’s house.
The truck came up Jim’s drive, bouncing as Boggsie picked up speed. He blared his horn at Dorrie Barchard standing by the hedge, turned his lights on at the road and drove away, slamming through the gears, towards Mapua. Ellie could have turned back then and taken the road herself but wanted to follow the path beneath the pines and make it go on and on until she grew calm.
Fan and Audrey’s gate turned her aside. She climbed the fence into the sheep paddock and walked down to a patch of dried-out swamp. The sheep galloped twenty yards and stopped, almost invisible in the dusk. Black muzzles, glinting nostrils, glinting eyes: more wild-seeming than white sheep. She walked through rushes, climbed a hill, then a barred gate, and swished through long grass as dry and light as feathers. She came to the fence at the back of Audrey’s garden. Far away, Mike called ‘Ellie’ three times. She found it a strange name, coming so distantly: a primitive sound. She lay down in the grass, watched the sky darken and the stars come out. They multiplied, and she forgot Boggsie; eliminated him when he came back; lost Mike and the orchard in the immensities that opened up. She felt her heartbeat slow and her breathing almost stop. Boggsie doesn’t matter, she thought. She could scarcely remember who he was.
Later she slid through bottom wires into the garden. The goat stood up and rattled his chain. Ellie smelt his rancid stink. She sat on the lawn cross-legged, out of his reach, and folded her hands. Her knuckles stung where Boggsie’s teeth had torn them. She ignored them and watched the house as though it were as distant as the stars. Light spread from open windows across the veranda and faded among the nearer trees. Ellie felt she was breathing cold black air, clean in spite of the goat, that came from the ground the way light came from the stars. She almost laughed: such a physical thing, touching air. It made her feel that Boggsie was some dirty bit of phlegm you could cough up and spit out.
Audrey worked in the kitchen, drying dishes, stacking them. Fan seemed to be watching television. Ellie heard her call, ‘Aud, come and see.’ Audrey left the kitchen for the lounge. A window framed her leaning sideways to the screen. She laughed and said something to Fan, then went back to her work. Fan crossed in front of the window and switched off the set. She put her hands on the bunched curtains and looked outside, halved by a silhouetted branch, then slid left from the frame in her multi-coloured dress. Ellie thought she would not care to be like these women. They seemed to be merely going on. It was as if nothing lay behind the plane she saw them on.
The chooks in the fowlhouse exploded, beating their wings, then subsided. Audrey opened the back door and peered out.
‘No one there.’ She closed the door.
Ellie stood up quietly and walked down the lawn and around the side of the house. She opened the front gate and went under the pine trees to the road, then down Jim’s drive to the pickers’ hut.
I don’t need people, she thought; and the next moment, I need them, I do. Like breathing the black air, it made her want to laugh.
Mike was playing Patience at the table.
‘Hey Ellie, where’d you get to? I was calling,’ he said.
‘I went for a walk.’
‘Boggsie’s gone. What a bastard he turned into, eh?’
Ellie went to the sink and washed her hand, wincing as the water stung.
‘Let me,’ Mike said.
‘I can do it.’ She dried her hand, found bandaids in the cupboard and stuck them on.
‘You could get rabies,’ Mike said.
‘Yeah,’ she said.
‘Mad dog.’
‘I don’t want to talk about him.’
‘Sure. I understand. There’s room in with me if you get nervous. Ellie? Eh?’
Ellie drank some water.
‘Give it up, Mike. I’m not interested.’
Yet she felt sorry for him and touched his shoulder lightly as she went to her room: ‘Another time.’
She meant another life, and hoped he had understood.
She heard him strumming softly through the wall as she went to sleep, a soothing invasive patient sound that settled her and helped her drift away. She had thought she would not trust the hut any more, but it was safe.
Jim took on a Dutch backpacker in Boggsie’s place. He was a morose boy who tried to live off apples to save money. He got diarrhoea and left after a week, but the Reds and the Goldens were almost done. Janice and Fiona left soon after, with more pledges of friendship than Ellie thought were called for. She and Mike stayed on for the Sturmers and Granny Smiths.
They took turns cooking. Mike, who had been happy frying chops and sausages, bought a wok. He cooked meals of rice and vegetables with diced lamb and pork and soy sauce, playing Chinaman at the stove, a French waiter serving, then Harold Steptoe pouring wine into beer glasses. Ellie had never known a man work so hard at seduction.
She did not enjoy picking the Granny Smiths as much as the Red and Golden Delicious. She thought of them as apples that had missed a step somewhere and not grown up. Their green made the orchard monotonous. Ellie wondered what job she would do when they were picked. She didn’t want library work. Books on shelves were like apples on trees, not something you could work at all your life.
Helping Mike wash up, she began to wonder if sharing with a man – not necessarily marrying him – might provide a way of finding things. That was what she was after. She had no idea what they might be. And why should she have to have a man around for that? For something that would – Ellie struggled – open her up? To some sort of danger, perhaps? To getting something done, some sort of work? Mike would be no good; he would be in the way, if she ever found out where she wanted to go. He opened a bottle of beer from the fridge. Inadequate, superfluous: words she hated using for someone she felt so friendly towards; and she had to stop herself from touching his hand as she took her glass. Sex with him would be like sex with a teenager. There would be nothing to talk about afterwards.
One drizzly morning when they could not pick he went into Nelson without inviting her.
‘Well thanks for nothing,’ Ellie said as he drove away. She put on her parka and walked down the road to Ruby Bay. The tide was out and little ruined castles of sand stood on the stretch between the water and the shore. Were they made by some creature in the sand or by the action of the tide? She wished she had her pad with her to make an illustration. She walked past the camping ground, where housetrucks reminded her of Boggsie. What would it be like with a mind like his – living in that sort of ugliness? And what would it be like being Mike – simple, suggestible, hungry, generous? She found it hard to believe that he couldn’t see further than he seemed to, and felt a kind of bitter frustration that she too could not see into a place that opened out.
She walked beneath the cliffs for half an hour, then turned back. The ragged little castles were drying out. She broke one open but could not find anything inside – no living creature. The drizzle started again, making the bay ghos
tly and the pine island lying across the inlet insubstantial. It turned from black to grey, then almost vanished, and she found herself thinking of her father. Who was keeping him alive? She might be the only one. He must be changed utterly for her mother, with George and three children in between; he might be no more real than a man she had shared a seat with on a bus or train. Only Ellie kept him unchanged, from sitting on his shoulders and holding his head. Amazingly she felt the warmth of his brow in her palms, the warmth of his neck between her thighs. She held up her hands, stared at them, and was connected with her mother as well, scolding her to hang on tight or she would fall off. Impossible to know how they had arrived. From hands warmed in her parka pockets?
It did not matter. She had looked through a door and found her parents, and she wondered if other moments could be recaptured like this; if she could make her life and carry it, study it whenever she chose. Would it help her look ahead and know which way to go? The next step might be natural and plain.
Her elation lasted as she walked up the hill. Audrey and Fan stopped their car and offered her a ride.
‘I’m out for a walk,’ she cried.
‘Come for some more books when you want to,’ Audrey said.
They drove on. No dust today. There was a rainbow in the sky.
She wrote to her mother, promising to visit her when picking finished.
Mike came back late in the afternoon, bringing a jar of purple wine. He frowned and pursed his lips, then turned away, starting to grin.
‘I’m no bloody good at pretending. Are you ready?’
‘What for?’
He spun back, spreading his arms, baring his teeth. ‘Da da!’
‘My God, you had them done,’ Ellie said.
‘These are only temporary. I go back for the real ones next week.’
‘What is it? A plate?’
‘Nope. They’re capped. They won’t fall out.’
Ellie hugged him. She kissed his mouth, which tasted of dentist and beer.
‘So, do I get my picture drawn?’
‘I hope you did it for more than that.’
‘Yeah, I did.’
She felt him getting hard so she broke away and uncapped the wine. They toasted his new teeth, then she got her pad and tried to draw him; and when it wouldn’t work – his features flattened instead of taking shape – turned it into a caricature, gave him rabbit teeth.
‘I reckon I’m better-looking than that. Sign it, eh?’
She signed: Ellie Crowther. It made her serious. Ellie was her, taking easy steps that might be hard to retrace.
‘I’ll cook,’ she said, although it was his turn.
She made spaghetti and they drank wine. She found herself thinking almost hungrily of sex – remembered her old phrase, delicious love-making. From several of her men she had learned to call it fucking but kept her own description for private use, which surely was illogical. Ellie was confused. She did not know what it would be with Mike. Perhaps whether they washed up first, and showered, and started slowly would decide.
She put the plates on the bench, languid with indecision, then washed her hands under the cold tap and was brisk and sure.
‘All right, come on.’
She chose her own room – would never go in with him where Boggsie had been.
‘Have you got any condoms?’
‘Yeah, sure.’ He had them in his pocket.
‘God Mike, they’re old. They look perished.’
‘No, they’re not. Hold on, I’ve got some more.’ He ran to his room and back. ‘These are OK. I had a girlfriend once who put pinholes in all my frenchies when she left.’
‘Shut up, Mike. Just get in bed.’
So it was fucking; but later in the night it became love-making, almost; and was almost delicious too. It was a pity he stayed so eager when he should slow down; but she said, ‘Slow, slower, Mike, it’s not a race,’ and it worked quite well: a pity he would talk but could not talk. He wanted to boast and be told how good he was. She liked to have men look in her eyes, and he could not but turned away and clenched his jaw and then collapsed. Knowing him would be easy, like peeling a mandarin. It might be just as well to leave it fucking most of the time.
‘Most of the time’ made her think again. She could if she wanted make it only one night – for his teeth. Ellie sniggered.
‘What?’ he said. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
‘If you think I can’t get it up again I can.’
‘Oh, I’m sure you can. Let me help … Now do that to me. The same for me.’
He didn’t know a lot about giving pleasure but provided it by accident.
‘Slow down now. We can go a long time.’
‘Tell me what the record is. I’ll break it.’
‘Shut up, Mike. Don’t talk.’
He told her that she made a lot of noise when she came.
‘Don’t you like it?’
‘Sure I do. Most sheilas don’t is all I mean.’
‘What’s this “most sheilas”? I’m Ellie. I’m me.’
‘Yeah, I’m sorry.’
She forgave him because he had understood. But later on she said, ‘I’m not sleeping two in this sort of bed. You can get in one of the others or go back to your own.’
‘Which one was Fiona’s? That’ll bring me on.’
He thought this sort of remark was intimate. Amazement stopped her from being angry. All the same she made him go back to his own room.
‘Mike,’ she said as he went out the door, ‘you needn’t think you can come in here every night. OK?’
‘I bet you can’t stop yourself. Hey, hey, joke. I love you, Ellie.’
So she saw no reason not to spend her time making love – every night, fucking, making love. They did it in the apple trees once while Jim was at the shed. His virility delighted her, but his eagerness was boyish and pleased her less. She felt that she owed it to good sense to stop soon and was happy that the season was almost finished. He did not say he loved her again but she waited for it, waiting to say, No, Mike, no.
When there were only two days left Jim gave them Wednesday as a bonus. They set off early to drive to Golden Bay. They might go up Farewell Spit, Mike said, since she was talking about farewell.
‘No I’m not. But I’ve got to do something. We’ll have the Sturmers done by Friday lunch time.’
‘Come with me. We’ll hit the road.’
‘I don’t want to hit the road.’
‘Have you ever read Kerouac?’
‘I thought he was a silly little boy.’
She could have said the same about Mike: lovely body, slab sided, with joints that intrigued her, working parts running as though on oil, and washboard ribs where her knuckles played, and tight snaky skin, dark in the hollows and pale across the bone – but the clever head of a silly boy. She wanted to make their difference plain, if she could find a way that wouldn’t hurt him – and make it plainer to herself, otherwise she might stay drunk on sex and not have any other life. She must get back in control.
They stopped at the lookout on the Takaka side of the hill. The drop into the valley hollowed her – sudden, deep, arbitrary. There was no reason for this place, but a kind of recognition in her fingertips, which wanted to slide on it and feel the shape. It was full of sunlight, brimming with sun, and smooth with paddocks, but the hills were raw, their folding unfinished. She remembered that someone had painted the Takaka valley, perhaps from where she was standing: put day on one side and night on the other, and got – she remembered – the moulding and the folds and, somehow, fear. She could understand fear; she felt it herself.
‘Good place, eh?’ Mike said.
‘Yes.’
‘We go through Takaka, then along the coast. We’ll drop in on some mates of mine, down past Collingwood.’
‘I thought you said Farewell Spit.’
‘Too far.’
They drove down the valley, through the busy town, over the rive
r and along a dipping road half a mile from the sea. Ellie found the countryside scrubby and dull after the deep indented valley back there. She did not want to meet Mike’s friends. He would try to show her off.
At Collingwood they turned south down the Aorere. More scrubby farms, but the hills were closing in and the bush crept low. It was another valley where you might be afraid. They went through Bainham, a hall and a church and a post office store, and down towards the Heaphy Track. The road was metalled. Hot dust smoked behind them, dirtying the blackberry and gorse. She wondered what sort of friends Mike would have down here – Black Mountain people, Sawney Bean in his cave?
He turned off the road. ‘Open the gate.’
She jumped out, unhooked it and swung it back, seeing green paddocks through a fringe of trees. Mike drove inside and she climbed back in. The paddock opened out like a lake. They drove across it on a rutted road, through another wall of trees to a second paddock enclosed like the first. It seemed to Ellie secret and removed, as if her coming on it made it hers.
‘I built that,’ Mike said, pointing at an A-frame house.
A man and a woman were sitting on the porch, brown torsos gleaming in the sun. A child crawled on the grass away from them, as if setting out across the paddock. Mike blew his horn. The man raised his hand in a slow salute.
‘That’s Terry and Glenys and their sprog,’ Mike said. ‘See the old farmhouse over there? There’s two more couples.’
‘What are they, hippies?’
‘I dunno. Does it matter?’
‘Is it a commune?’
‘Ask Terry. He’s the boss.’ He stopped the car. ‘Gidday, Terry. Gidday, Glen. Like my teeth?’
The woman gave an unfocused smile. She hitched her hibiscus-flowered sarong further up her thighs. Terry raised his hand again, like a Red Indian. Ellie almost expected him to greet them with ‘How!’ He was a small, bushy-bearded man, muscular in his chest and arms, which were tanned as though with nugget and smeared with paint from the child, who was sitting naked on the grass, bull’s-eyed in yellow round her navel and striped with red across her chest.
Mike picked her up and held her at arm’s length. ‘Pow!’ he said and put her down. ‘This is Ellie. She’s my apple-picking mate. Hey, we should have brought some apples, eh?’
