by Gee, Maurice
‘Leave him,’ he said. ‘Hold his hand.’
‘Anyone can do that. I’m his sister.’
‘Sister blister.’
‘He said that.’
‘It’s the only joke he knows.’
‘Stupid.’
‘I thought it was pretty good.’
Roly took more long swallows from his mug. When the tea was finished he poked his index finger inside and dug muddy sugar from the bottom. His habits don’t bother me. All I want is for him to keep going: work in his garden, look after Lionel, be contented. It’s his easiness and contentment that make him likeable. But here’s a strange thing. I spent more time with Roly than Lionel when we were young, yet fewer memories attach to him. I liked him more and like him more today. Why then do I hold on to Lionel? Why do I love him even as I shrink from him?
‘Has the doctor been?’
‘He doesn’t like home visits. He reckons Lionel should go to his rooms.’
‘That’s absurd. He can’t.’
‘He could if he wanted to. There’s nothing wrong with him, Rowan. Only in his head.’
‘There’s polymyalgia.’
‘That won’t kill him, it’ll only hurt.’
‘Is he taking his pills – what are they, Prednisone?’
Roly dug the last sugar out of his mug. He sucked his finger, yellow from pinching laterals.
‘He puts them in his pyjama pocket, then flushes them down the toilet.’
‘Why? You’ve got to stop him doing that.’
‘Not me. A man’s got a right. Lionel wants to feel what he’s got.’
‘But polymyalgia is like … Roly, it hurts.’
‘That’s what he wants. He wants to hurt.’
‘This is mad. I’m telling the doctor.’
‘Won’t do any good. Anyway, the doctor’s not a bad guy. I reckon he thinks if Lionel wants to die it’s his own business.’
‘No doctor can think that. It’s against their oath.’
Roly laughed. ‘It’d be a great world if it was simple like that.’
‘Is he eating? Is Lionel eating?’
‘He likes smoked chicken. Doesn’t spit it out.’
‘What about greens?’ I waved at the silverbeet leaping from the soil.
‘Doesn’t go for them. Take it easy, Ro. He’s in there dying. He’ll have his reasons. Leave him alone.’
‘There’s nothing he’s got that will kill him.’
Roly sighed. He tapped his head. ‘He’s got what’s in here.’
‘And what’s that? What is it?’
‘Nothing he’ll ever tell us about. Now give it a bone. Things are pretty smooth here –’
‘Smooth!’
The worst Roly ever gets is ruffled. He was close to it, but laughed instead, with a rueful patience. ‘Nice cup of tea. Now I’ve got to get my watering started. And you need to beat the four o’clock traffic.’
That is Roly. When he wants to get rid of me, he tells me to beat the traffic – four o’clock, five o’clock, whatever time it is. Roly doesn’t own a car.
I washed the mugs in the kitchen, then looked at Lionel again. His hands lay outside the blanket, facing each other like crabs. I picked one of them up and kissed it, because he hates me kissing his face.
‘You must take your pills, Lionel. You must.’ I put his hand back in its position. ‘I’ll come again in two or three days. I expect to see you looking better by then.’
Roly met me in the yard with two plastic bags of vegetables, silverbeet and a lettuce in one, carrots and radishes in the other.
‘Lovely,’ I said. ‘But I can’t use them all, Roly.’
‘Give them away,’ he said.
I drove home, beating the four o’clock traffic, and caught Dickie leaving for his club.
Dickie is a huge relief to me. He brings me back into the world.
three
My father, Fred Beach, was a bootmaker. He caught the early train at Loomis station and travelled to Mt Eden where he worked at a bench in a factory. He had no ambitions to rise higher or to start out on his own. Mum pointed out to him several times that Loomis had no boot repairer. Dad wouldn’t listen. He slid back and forth in his groove. Habit was the oil. His eyes began to jump with fright if Mum kept on at him too long.
Mum brought four hundred and nineteen pounds into the marriage (the sum was family lore), enough to buy the house with some left over. We sat there through the Depression and survived with no rent to pay; then Dad was back on his train, to Mum’s disgust. He whistled walking off in the dawn, and whistled coming home. Life was bloody hard but also pretty good. That was the lesson we took from Dad.
From Mum we took sugar, spice and everything nice. We took long views out to where beauty might be found, as well as the habit of examining closer things, things overlooked, where secrets hidden from the common herd might be uncovered. Mum gave an impression of simplicity because she was pure in thought and deed, and because she was superior, which was a plain state although mysterious. Where did she come from? A good Christchurch family where her dad was headmaster of a school and her mother drank tea and visited, and her sisters had married well, that was where. We saw these storied folk being nice to each other like a family in the pictures, sitting down to dinner, patting the dog, pecking each other goodnight on the cheek, plain as day. The mystery was how it connected with us. I thought, I’ll find a door and step through when I’m grown up. I thought, One day I’ll take Mum back home.
I don’t think she regretted what she had lost. It was real; she identified it, and bred small selected pieces into her children’s behaviour – good manners, quiet voices, little observances of precedence and obligation, a ceremony of goodnight when we went to bed: things I remember and practise inside myself even as I leave them neglected in word and deed.
She had, she told us, been a rebel, but not in a way that might upset her parents. They did not object to her writing poems and posting them off to the newspaper. She carried out rebellions in her head and planned to slide away, causing no ripple, when the time came, leaving her parents comfortable and unperturbed on the shore. They had other ideas, which they put forward in the shape of a man. ‘And he had quite nice eyes,’ Mum used to say, ‘but he didn’t have a single idea in his head.’ That did not surprise her – her father had none either, although he had opinions. What she objected to even more in the suitor was that he was fat under his chin and had fat hands. My mother did not understand herself, but there’s no doubt she was a sensualist, and for carnal pleasure she required a straight, tall, big-boned man. She could not love any other sort. Along came my father. He too had not a single thought in this head, but for the time of their courtship and nuptials, and for a short while after, it did not matter.
How flowery I’m getting. Courtship. Nuptials. The Christchurch suitor had conducted a courtship (bunches of violets in his fat hands). When it was over, Mum visited an Auckland aunt to enjoy her relief at being quit of him, and there, on a beach (where else in our subtropical city?), met Dad quietly showing off his muscles and his tan. ‘Quietly’ has importance here. Loudness would have been inexcusable. Poor Dad. His quietness was really a kind of passiveness, hiding his confusion about every next moment in his life. Mum took it for sincerity. She took his difference from her as an opportunity for adventure, and loved, loved with carnal excitement, his long back, wide shoulders, big hands, muscular legs; his shy, sincere, handsome countenance; and gave herself happily to their future. I won’t speculate about what they did and where, just remark that Lionel was born several months too soon.
Mum must have felt she had a mouldable lump of clay – Dad, I mean, not the baby. But he put his uncertainties aside like a package he had not known where to lay down. A wife, a child, a house taught him, inside a year, who he was. He was breadwinner, bootmaker, catcher of the morning train and weekend digger in the garden. He was painter of our roof cherry red and our walls icy white. He dug steps down to the road and concreted
them. He strung a clothes-line across the back lawn, long enough for sheets and towels and a dozen nappies. How do I know these things? Mum described them with loving care. She hoped for him. She described them with an edge of bitterness too, as though he were a stallion, glossy and beautiful, that had, all the same, lost the race.
Lionel, Rowan, Roland: she chose our names. She meant us to have every advantage. There would be no Bettys or Toms among the Beaches, and no more Freds. (She was Isobel and heaven help anyone who called her Izzy.) So we wore our names to school, where we found a Digby and a Cyril, a Winsome and a Jonquil and a Dulcie. Several of them were ridiculed; and Roly was called Roly-poly now and then. But Lionel was as savage as a fighting dog and as quick to strike as a cat, and nobody took the risk of making fun of him. I could run and scratch and shriek, and Lionel taught me to punch with the knuckle of my middle finger out. As well as that, I was sharp with my tongue so I was high up among the girls who ruled the playground. If the boys teased me, it was because I was pretty and had red hair.
Lionel and Roland were sandy; they had what Mum called man’s hair. Mine was rich and full of light, and had a soft unassertive wave. ‘Princess hair,’ she said, brushing it. She worked hard to make me feel it was special, and after a complaining time when I wanted dark or fair, I began to carry my head as though I wore a crown. But stately didn’t suit me, stately was a bore. There was a song on the radio at that time:
There were ten pretty girls at the village school …
Four were blondes and five brunettes
And one was a saucy little redhead.
I loved ‘saucy’. It became my word, so strong and convincing I simply removed myself with a sideways turn when Lionel tipped tomato sauce on his plate and inquired if anyone else wanted a bit of Rowan. He also teased me with the last lines of the song, which had all the time been less about the pretty girls than the boy who loved them:
At twenty-one he wedded
The saucy little redhead.
That part didn’t interest me. Saucy was my position, and I took a stance and acquired movements – hip out, then round on my heel and away – and an expression, something between a grin and a simper, that fitted with it. I had a set of sounds too, from giggle to shriek. All this, when I remembered. That wasn’t often. I was too busy being unaware and natural, which I mean as praise of myself.
Dad managed the boys. Because his father whipped him, he whipped Lionel and Roly, but not often and not too hard. It was called ‘a good hiding’, and although Mum pulled me out to the back lawn and covered her ears and made me cover mine, she agreed a lesson of that sort was right for boys. What was right for me was a smack with the back of the hearth brush on my bare bottom, and Mum gave that – while Dad uttered whimpers of distress. He might go out in the dusk and smack his razor strop against the tank stand to bring the boys running; he might, when they had been especially bad, unfold his pocket knife and cut a willow switch from the hedge; he might come home bloody-mouthed from a fight with a fellow worker in the factory yard – but Dad was what is known these days as a softie. He believed in moderation and, even more, in kindness. He was deferential to women, almost chivalric with them. Somewhere in his private thoughts they rode side-saddle on white ponies with chaplets of flowers in their hair. Smacking my bare bottom broke a code.
• • •
Lionel’s wildness could not have been genetic. Nor could upbringing have been the cause. In a way, my brother felt the call of the wild.
Our house sat in the middle of a territory. Behind it, through the hedge and past a triangle of waste land, was the Catholic school, with a church for the Loomis faithful and a convent for the nuns. Kelly’s farm lay alongside, its back paddocks fenced off from the scrub acre next to our house. Beyond the farm was Burke’s orchard, falling into dereliction. A narrow weed-infested creek ran through it, then lost itself in two acres of wiry gorse before reaching the culvert under Access Road. Remembering the culvert, I tell myself, Go through. There’s ankle-deep silt and rotting vegetation and maybe eels inside, but if you walk on the curve of the pipe you can sometimes reach the other side dry-footed. The world is an O, then it’s a swamp with brown water and sharp rushes and old willow trees that lay out squishy mats of fibrous root – red, like my hair. The swamp widens and gets dangerous. It can suck you down. The last of you anyone will see is hands clutching air. Turn away from it; climb through more gorse into another orchard – this one abandoned, its trees smothered in honeysuckle shaped like wigwams. Here and there a branch pokes out with a withered apple on it. The creek, the big creek, lies beyond – an arrangement of shallows and sharp rapids and deep pools. You can reach it by ploughing through the orchard, but a better way is through the draught-horse paddock at the far end of the railway houses. That is Lionel’s way. The creek marks the edge of his territory.
It wasn’t mine. I explored it, but from the outside. I hid in the pine trees by the Catholic playing field and watched the nuns walk by, fiddling with the beads around their necks. I went into Burke’s orchard and pinched apples, and several times crossed Access Road underground, through the culvert. I burrowed in the haystacks on Kelly’s farm. But although I was afraid, I was only playing. My brother knew his territory in a different way. Why else would he have come back?
And unless there was in him a welling up of fear and exultation and hatred – and love, perhaps, but leave that out for the moment – how else explain the things he did? Lionel fell off a branch that bent over the creek and broke his arm on a shallow rock. He cut his foot to the bone on a broken bottle hooligans had left by the swimming hole, and ran home through the dusk leaving a trail of blood. But these are childhood happenings. I too had my share of pain and blood. I mean something else when I say fear.
The sky was full of black clouds and dark was coming early. Dad went out and cracked his strop, and Roly scuttled in. He had no idea where Lionel was. Mum said, ‘That boy.’ Dad said, ‘I’ll take the skin off his back.’ But after ten minutes they began to worry. Mum stood on the back step and called, ‘Ly – oh – nel.’ Dad, at the back of section, barked, ‘Ly-nill.’ I felt their anxiety thicken into fear, but it seemed to me they were looking the wrong way. I went nervously down the path to the front steps and peered back and forth along Access Road. Two flickers of white showed in the sticky darkness, and I knew – instant recognition – that they were Lionel’s bare legs as he climbed through the fence in the draught-horse paddock.
‘Lynill,’ I squeaked, then ran up the path to Mum: ‘He’s coming.’
We waited in the back yard and heard the slap of bare feet on Dad’s new concrete path. Lionel burst round the corner, slid through us, eel quick, and was gone into the house. We found him curled up, sobbing, on his bed.
‘What is it, Lionel? Are you hurt?’ Mum cried. She sat on the bed, then lay down and put her arms around him.
‘Was it Clyde?’ Roly said.
Lionel kept on sobbing. Mum freed an arm and shooed us away, but we stood in the doorway, all of us fearful and needing to know.
‘Lionel, darling, tell me,’ she said.
He swelled, collapsed – deep inhalations, then bursts of expelled air that must, I felt, leave his body little more than dry bones in Mum’s arms.
‘It was – it was …’
‘What, Lionel?’
‘It was dark down there.’ He began to cry, which returned him to normal and washed my fear away. Dad gave a grunt and returned to the kitchen.
‘Where, Lionel? In the trees? Was someone bothering you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’
‘Did you hurt yourself?’
‘No. Just dark. It was – dark.’
He spoke as if she must understand and, when she did not, fell to grizzling like a kettle. Although he made no movement, I felt him turn away from her and confine himself.
If I had been his comforter I would have known what to say. I would have said, Where was it, Lionel? In the air? In the shadows? In the w
ater? And he would have understood.
Down-creek from the Millbrook swimming hole, after a long shallow stretch, the trees closed in, the water darkened from green to black as the bottom fell away. This was Lionel’s pool for silverbellies and tommycod. Something stirred in the trees that night, something floated up from deep in the water. A cold hand touched him on the neck.
I’ll have no truck with animism or forest gods but will go along with imagination peopling the dark. Lionel took a step too far. Perhaps with the aid of a movement or a sound, and with a movement in his head, the opening of a door that might have led him nowhere at another time, he created a presence – that’s my amateur view. If we had been churchy, he might have glimpsed Satan. I’ll leave it there – leave him grizzling on his bed, safe (or so it seemed) in Mum’s arms.
Although he was nine and a hardy boy, night fears began to torment him. He heard the creaking of a wardrobe door. He heard feet whispering on the path outside his window, and something swallowing and scratching the wall, and he rose on his pillow and cried, ‘Mum, Dad,’ into the dark. Lionel and Roly shared a narrow room Dad had constructed by enclosing the front porch. The built-in beds were two feet wide and the gap between them little more. When no one answered Lionel’s call, he took to jumping blindly to Roly’s bed, where he snuggled down beside his six-year-old brother, taking the inside place by the wall. Several times Roly tipped out on the floor. Mum and Dad gave in. They put a camp stretcher in their room – ‘Only for one night, Lionel, you’re not going to sleep here for ever.’
Half-waking in the small hours and hearing sounds, Lionel threw his blankets off and jumped for Roly’s bed. I heard the thump from my room as he crashed into the wooden rail at the end of the double bed – heard Mum’s shriek and Lionel’s howl. He bruised his forehead, skinned his nose, broke a tooth. I found it the next day, an incisor, as I crawled hunting under the bed, and offered it to Lionel who, bandaged and plastered, was dozing contentedly on the living-room couch. ‘Stick it up your nose,’ he said.
