by Gee, Maurice
What happened next? I don’t know. That jump in the night brings memory to a close. I do know that Lionel wore a gapped smile until, as a student, he had a false tooth fitted at the Otago dental school.
Exultation, hatred, I mentioned them. About the former, I can’t be precise. Shining eyes and flushed cheeks and shouts of joy that seemed to have no correlative. He came in from his outside world bursting with self – self, perhaps, is the correlative. There was a glow on him, a glow in him, expressed in a voice too loud, movements too violent and, it sometimes seemed, an invisible flame forking from his mouth; and it needed Mum’s sharpest voice and Dad’s hand slapping the table to turn these things inward, into stillness. Then Lionel would sit smouldering with his residue of joy.
It troubled Mum and pleased her in equal parts. Her puritanism rose from a natural severity of mind. She made no allowance for ease unless it filled the pause for another leap. The goal was no more than doing good – which has a disappointing sound. Lionel, stepping into her kitchen from places she would never go, troubled her as a Chinaman might have, coming through the door.
His dark moods were easier to understand. She put them down to ‘growing pains’. Growth spurts, which she also watched for in Roly and me, drew off nourishment that might have gone to the brain. They enfeebled the spirits and led to moping and the sulks. Lionel, down in the dumps, was like an old dog skulking in the back of its kennel. Mum drew him out with treats and endearments, but although he might accept a biscuit or a glass of fizz, he stayed balanced on the edge of withdrawal, and she, wanting reciprocal love, could tip him back into himself with a wrong gesture or word. She tapped his shoulder in passing, and he looked sideways at the spot and shrugged off her touch as though it were a beetle. And if, caution lost, she ruffled his hair and said, ‘How’s my fine little man?’ he shrieked with rage and ran outside, slamming the door.
We had stormy days. I locked myself in my bedroom to get away, and Lionel, crawling under the house, scratched on the floorboards: ‘I’m gunna bore a hole and suck you down.’ His threats mounted like spadefuls of earth. I imagined him frying me in a tin lid the way he fried silverbellies at the creek, but I never told Mum and Dad, because he whispered, ‘I’ll get you in the night if you pimp.’ And I loved Lionel. He was bold and mysterious and he knew. He would fight anyone who said bad things about his sister. When he was sunny, I felt his warmth on my skin.
Although he showed no interest in music, Mum was determined he should learn. She bought an old piano with yellow keys and peeling veneer and paid for music lessons from the nuns, but it was soon clear that Lionel had no aptitude. Wooden fingers, leaden ears – poor Lionel. Soon, holding those fingers out, he showed her red weals on their backs. The teaching nun punished his mistakes with the edge of her ruler. Mum found it both cruel and unnatural. Her love of music was genuine, although she knew not the first thing about it. Liquid notes, voluminous soarings, sad fallings-away – those were her music, in which she found, by some alchemy or transmutation, lessons in love and endeavour and sacrifice. That those women in black, women with wasted lives (her words), should damage perfection with a ruler’s edge, filled her with outrage and disgust, and she went to the school and told the head nun so. Lionel’s musical education came to an end. And Mum’s grievance against the nuns grew into an obsession. So I blame her …
At five o’clock in the winter dusk, in his tenth year, Lionel crept through the macrocarpa hedge, through the wattle grove and past the two gravel courts where the Holy Cross Tennis Club played its weekend matches, and came to the school. The caretaker stored his tools in a cupboard at the back of the shelter shed. Lionel took a spade and smashed the window glass in the lower classroom. He put his arm through the hole and unlatched the window, then fetched a box from the cupboard and used it as a stool to climb inside. It took courage in the thickening dusk and creaking silence. I hear him gulping, whimpering perhaps, as he parts shadows and edges them away. He empties the drawers in the teacher’s table, makes a pile of dusters and chalk boxes and books, and pours a bottle of ink over it. He slinks about the room, tipping inkwells on desks. Some he splashes on the books inside. He strips down maps and charts and posters from the walls – Jesus with a bleeding heart? – and tears them into pieces. Lionel is a cat; he has teeth and claws and yellow eyes. A pity that, at the end, he turns into a dog – peeing on the teacher’s chair.
Constable Norton was a Catholic. He found the culprit with God’s help. A big man, red faced and meaty handed, he entered our house by the front door.
‘So this is the young scallywag.’
Mum took Roly and me into the kitchen, so I don’t know what else he said.
‘Will they put him in prison?’
‘Kids don’t go,’ Roly said.
‘Shush.’ Mum was listening at the door.
‘They’ll give him the cat and nine tails,’ Roly said.
I started to cry.
‘Shush,’ Mum hissed. She was ready to rush into the sitting room and fight the Catholics to save her son.
But Constable Norton didn’t flog Lionel or give him more than a telling off. Dad flogged him instead, when the constable was gone.
I’m getting carried away – tears in my eyes – so let me change that. Dad gave him a whipping. Instead of a willow stick he used his leather belt from the wardrobe. Mum took Roly and me up past the dunny into the garden so we wouldn’t hear the hits and hear Lionel howl. She made us put our fingers in our ears. She bit her lips until they bled. I believe that sentence when I read it in books. Mum wiped blood from her mouth.
I don’t know how much Dad payed to fix the damage – two or three weeks’ wages perhaps. Lionel had a day off school with iodine on his legs.
When Roly and I got home, Mum took all three of us up to the back of the section.
‘From now on this is the boundary. You never go through the hedge, any of you. Do you promise?’
‘Yes, Mum,’ we said.
‘And if you ever see any nuns …’ She did not finish.
That night Lionel, prompted by Mum, sidled up to Dad’s shoulder as he sat by the kitchen stove.
‘Dad, I just want to say I’m sorry.’
Dad patted him. ‘It’s all right, son. It’s all forgotten.’
I know Lionel’s expressions. He would not forget.
A perfect end to this story would be that Lionel became a Catholic when he grew up, but he did not. Nor did Roly, nor did I.
four
Summer rain brushes our suburb, leaving Dickie’s roses bedewed. He dips his face in the petals, then wipes his wet cheeks with a handkerchief. Dickie is hunting for a perfect bloom, which he’ll snip with his secateurs and carry inside to me. There’ll be no tumble of words: roses silence him. He’ll simply hold it out, a gift needing no explanation, and as long as I can keep myself confined in the marriage suite of our present days I’ll take my pleasure of the perfect thing, its tenderness and colour – always red – and the grasp its central petals keep on the secret within. I’ll fetch a vase and place Dickie’s rose on the mantelpiece, and all through the day, coming and going, I’ll accept his gift – and yet, after each flush of pleasure, I’ll find uncurling in my brain that dreadful poem:
O Rose thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy …
I really can’t put down the last two lines. ‘Dreadful’ is not a word I choose lightly. I’m overflowing with dread.
But Dickie is outside that purview. Look at him now, breathless and intent – scarred and breathless and intent – confined within a moment that fills him to his fingertips and stretches as wide as the world.
He’s in the fours semi-final at his bowling club. The greens will dry out in the sun and he’ll head off in his whites as soon as he has watched me envase my rose. It’s not a big tournament, just ‘something to keep us ol
d fellers amused’. Dickie plays lead. He likes that better than skip. He can lay a perfect platform and ‘if the buggers foul it up that’s their look-out’. How quotable he is, even when he says nothing original. Unlike my mother, I never wanted a man with thoughts in his head.
• • •
I went out in the afternoon to do my bit of shopping: milk, tomatoes, hummus and four slices of ham off the bone (three for Dickie, one for me). We’ll eat a cold dinner and drink a bottle of pinot gris. On my way home, lugging my green bag to save the world from plastic, I slipped through the bowling club gate and sat on a bench to watch my husband at play. He polishes his bowl with a yellow cloth, as careful with it as with his roses, and sends it on its syrupy roll along the grass. I love the way those heavy balls slow down but keep turning over, like thoughts before sleep; how they seem mistaken, wide of the mark (that chaste little kitty, not caring who takes her in the end), and then haul themselves in as though the magnetic and geographical poles change places and find, impossibly, a dozen degrees of angle and two more turns, and kiss, or is it rub, their object of desire, which shifts a centimetre or two while keeping secure that caress on her cheek. Dickie can make it happen. I saw him work the magic with his first bowl and felt my blood quicken along with his. It did not matter that the opposing lead knocked his bowl away, or that his second plopped into the ditch. Dickie had had his moment and increased himself. Perhaps he had added some extra minutes to his life – or subtracted them. No matter which. The moment was the thing and I carried my share of it away, my green bag lighter.
Lightness is an old friend, almost forgotten. The first time I danced with Dickie I was lifted up. In spite of my quickness, I’m not a good dancer. It’s a matter of rhythm. Nothing moves in me, so I feel as if my feet are plugging through sticky mud like that between the mangroves and the tide-line where Loomis Creek meets the sea at the head of the harbour.
It was a muddy dance in the RSA hall. Insinuating oily boys, emboldened by the beer they went out to their cars to drink, rolled their knobby loins over my tummy at every turn. Loud insinuation, if that’s possible; back-and-forth commentary between the clown you were dancing with and his Brylcreemed cobbers at the door. I’m being unfair, but that’s the measure of my discontent. I was not seeking anything impossible, just more than ‘leg over’, something more than ‘turning it up’. I was looking for love – and who is not? – and wanting a boy who did not wear toughness like a rubbery skin; who might shed his false persona at a word I would find, and offer in return some word of his own.
It makes me smile. I look up from my writing and see myself in the window pane, bending my lips. It’s not in derision or with superior knowledge. I have learned nothing and I’m lost. My smile at myself says, Come back to me, I never meant to let you go.
I’d had enough of those Loomis boys. If I work at it now I can tell them apart and even gather half a dozen names, but mostly they arrange themselves in my mind like nine-pins and I clatter them into oblivion. I went to the cloakroom for my coat. A wintry wind blew outside and I had a long trudge up the hill. The Beaches were no longer in Access Road but had shifted to a grander house in Te Atatu Road, with views across the harbour to the Chelsea Sugar Works and Rangitoto frowning beyond. Going home alone from the dance didn’t bother me. I felt upright and pale and pure as I emerged from the cloakroom in my belted coat. I tied a scarf over my hair.
‘Hey, don’t put out the light,’ Dickie Pinker said.
I knew that boy emerging from the midwinter dark. I saw that at twenty-one – quick arithmetic – he had shed the ugly certainties I had observed across the divide separating a second-year nobody from the First Fifteen rugby star. Our school was Avondale College; I travelled there from Te Atatu Corner on the bus. Dickie Pinker vanished from it at the end of that year, and I heard no more of him until his name and photograph showed up in the Herald sporting pages: scoring machine, future All Black. So the gap was still there, widened now by my revised requirements in a man
I was nineteen. I was a virgin. No one was having me cheaply. More than smart words were needed to untie the strings that held me tight. More than a cheeky grin, more than photographs in the Herald. Yet when Dickie Pinker smiled at me from the hall doorway, my heart turned over. You find that phrase in romantic novels, although I’m not sure Georgette uses it. The words sound right and physiologically there’s a lurch. The blood races. On that Saturday night my face turned scarlet, which I like to avoid with my red hair.
I went back to the cloakroom, took off my head scarf and coat, and cooled my cheeks at the basin. I fluffed up my hair and patted it down. I danced with Dickie Pinker, moving with lightness and grace. And Dickie? He was blunted. We were equals in affecting each other.
He had come to our Loomis dance from Avondale with one of his Suburbs Rugby Football Club mates. Stardom had lifted him above club rivalries, and he was in no danger in Loomis. There was a ring of influence around him, which he was aware of and confused a little by. He behaved with assurance on a ground of uncertainty. His simplicity, his glamour were two sides of a coin. I was not immune to the heads side, but the other (can’t call it ‘tails’), with confusion caught in it like a fish in a net, attracted me more. Although I knew he could have what he wanted, including me, my feeling for him as we danced was protective.
‘I remember you from school,’ I said.
‘Yeah? I remember you.’
‘Liar.’
I won’t carry on with our inanities, although they’re cemented in my mind. I don’t really need to put Dickie and Rowan in review. Ask for any primal event, ask for any landmark, I’ll unroll the scroll, I’ll parrot the exchanges. I’m more concerned with what other people were doing, and there I’m mostly in the dark. What was Lionel doing that night (he was at the dance), and what was Clyde Buckley doing?
Clyde Buckley. There’s a name. There’s a face and a set of behaviours. I can’t remember my first sight of him: Clyde was always there, throwing Lionel’s sheath knife at a cardboard box with Tojo drawn in crayons on the side, reading comics with him on the front steps, eating stolen apples in the scrub next door. The list goes on. Yet Clyde was not an Access Road boy; he came from a railway house on the far side of the creek, where the road climbed towards the jam factory and Loomis town. His father was a linesman, his mother a hump-shouldered woman with ankles always bandaged because of a skin disease. There were three older brothers and a sister, all gone and, as far as I could tell, forgotten.
Clyde fastened himself on Lionel as an out-of-school friend. At school he was solitary, while Lionel ran with the gang that ruled the playground. But every afternoon, soon after three o’clock, Clyde Buckley was somewhere about our section, with Lionel gravitating towards him. By some reversal, perhaps by no more than a pressure of will, outside school, even in places Lionel had made for himself – his hidey-hole under the house, behind the chimney base, his mudslide on the bank by the culvert – Clyde was the one who made the moves. When I see them running, it’s Clyde in the lead, not because he’s faster but because he knows the way. He hasn’t yet told Lionel what it is. Lionel follows because he needs to know.
Clyde was a large-bodied boy, thick rather than fat. He was short in his limbs, as though they had stopped growing while his body kept on, but large in his face, where his skin was at the full stretch of its elasticity. He kept himself side-on when talking, and spoke no more than he needed to, and then not well, with a thickened tongue. His eyes shone as though coated with oil, but seemed not to see, unless it was something going on in his head.
I kept away from Clyde, giving his bad smell as my reason.
‘Yeah,’ Lionel said, ‘they’ve got their bath filled up with coal.’
I’m not going to waste time on Clyde Buckley. I’ve got better memories. When we shifted to Te Atatu Road he was gone from our lives. I passed him now and then in town, but he turned his head away, which was fine. I had no wish to say hello. Now and then he showed up at the town-hall
pictures or a dance, but he had never approached me until the night I met Dickie Pinker.
Dickie kept at my side between dances. We had slipped together into an enclosure of ease, warmer than the surrounding air, where every word we spoke – simple, silly words – had the sound of truth. I found my partner the way pieces of a jigsaw puzzle fit together: this goes with that, the picture builds. We danced a foxtrot, then a waltz, and were sitting out the third dance when Clyde Buckley came from somewhere unseen and stood at my side, with his heavy lower leg touching my calf.
‘Can I have this dance?’ he said in his thick-tongued voice.
I was dismayed. I did not want Dickie Pinker thinking that this ugly sweat-smelling boy – I’ll change that ‘boy’; Clyde was a man of twenty-two or thereabouts – had a connection with me or any knowledge of who I was.
Without looking at him I shook my head.
‘Rowan?’ he said.
Dickie Pinker leaned forward. His forearm on the back of my chair fell warm against my neck.
‘Shove off, buddy. She said no.’
Most boys would have said ‘mate’. I thought ‘buddy’ marvellous. It lifted me out of Loomis into the world of romance. Clyde turned and plodded through the couples moving on to the floor. With a sideways glance and a little sigh of relief, I saw him go out of the hall – and here is a strange thing: I never saw Clyde Buckley again. I’ve had no glimpse of him since that night almost sixty years ago. Mind you, I was not in Loomis very much. My life opened out; I freed my limbs. Together Dickie and I untied the knots that bound me – knots of misinformed expectation, of romantic illusion, of snobbery and puritanism and many more – and Dickie, soon enough (although not that night), was able to crack the best joke of his life: ‘Rowan my boat’.
But I can’t leave Clyde Buckley yet, if I’m to be honest. He lived over the creek from us by the jam factory for most of my girlhood, and has marked me with memories like welts on my skin. They don’t bother me, they don’t itch, but now and then I notice them and they wriggle like worms. Yet I’m innocent, I swear.
