by Gee, Maurice
‘What happened to her?’ I said, trying him.
‘She went away. Some guy turned up. I think he was her husband.’
‘Did you fight him?’ I joked.
‘Come off it, Rowan.’
‘And what about Lionel in Dunedin, in the pub? I know why you ran away, but what about him? Did he tell you?’
Roly scrubbed his boot over the place where he’d tipped his tea dregs.
‘I thought you’d know.’
‘Mum, you mean? You’re wrong. He loved Mum. They were like that.’ I knitted my fingers together.
‘It wasn’t her. It wasn’t Dad,’ he said.
‘Who then? Me?’
‘No, Rowan. Everyone loves you.’
He wasn’t often sarcastic. I put aside my hurt.
‘Tell me, Roly.’
‘He just wanted to get out of Auckland. As far as he could.’
‘Dunedin?’
‘He should have gone to Aussie. That might have worked.’
‘Worked how? What are you talking about?’
‘Ah, heck.’ (Roly doesn’t swear but uses a little battery of outdated exclamations.) He stood up and went to the hose, turned it a quarter on and drank from it. Sitting beside me again, he said, ‘When people tell you stuff, are you meant to pass it on?’
‘Yes, you are, when it’s family.’
‘Yeah. OK. He was getting as far as he could from Clyde Buckley.’
‘Buckley? Is that what he told you?’
‘He said Clyde was – loony, I guess. He did stuff that was mad.’
‘Like what?’
‘Dunno. Lionel didn’t say. But Clyde and him used to – I don’t know what it was.’
‘Are you saying they were gay, doing those sorts of things?’
‘No – I don’t know. Getting inside each other’s heads. So Lionel went to dental school to get away.’
‘But he used to see Clyde when he came home. They were always together.’
‘Maybe. I wasn’t here.’
‘As soon as Lionel turned up, Clyde was on the phone. Lionel never looked like he was running away.’
‘How did he look?’
I thought about it. Buzzing, I thought. Buzzing and hard and in abeyance. On holiday in a place with corners to be turned.
‘Like Clyde and he were best mates,’ I said. ‘There wasn’t any running away. But when he started work in Christchurch he stopped coming. Mum had to go down there and see him.’
‘Well –’ Roly shrugged. ‘I reckon they picked up girls and got in fights and drank booze. Maybe they did some stuff with drugs, I don’t know. There were hardly any drugs around back then. Maybe they set fires or beat people up. Lionel said it was like walking through mud – he got drunk once and told me that. He said he was doing things he never wanted to do. But he just switched off when he got back to Dunedin. The last time I saw him down there, he told me he was never going back to Loomis again. He was graduating – don’t know when it was, the end of that year? Maybe the next. He was going to get a job somewhere down south. You wouldn’t want to know the names he called Loomis.’
‘I’m not shockable, Roly.’
‘All right. Shithole. Sorry. And that wasn’t the worst.’
‘I see … He came, though. I saw him at the dance where I met Dickie. Clyde was there too.’
‘Yeah, well.’ That’s Roly’s way of saying he’s said enough. But I didn’t want to let it go.
‘Clyde left Loomis, didn’t he? Where did he go? Not down south?’
‘Whangarei. I spotted him once when I was up that way. I went past a factory door and he was in the storeroom, wearing one of those grey coats. He had a tie on too. He must have been a storeman, I guess. I took off the other way. I didn’t want to see him.’
‘Did he stay there?’
‘Yeah, he did.’
‘How do you know?’
Like every account Roly embarks on, it was simple – simple words, simple progressions of fact. Peeling them back, I’m sickened; I’m exposed in my supposition that life can be an easy sleep. I’m like a naked pupa in the ground, turned into the light by somebody’s shovel.
Had I heard of Mandy Barnes? Roly asked. I’d forgotten her name, but when he reminded me, the girl with the sign reading Tauranga or bust, I remembered: a hitch-hiker in the late 1960s. Someone picked Mandy Barnes up and she was never seen again. The police investigation went on, the search from the turnoff at the bottom of the Bombay Hills right through to Tauranga went on month after month.
Motorists had seen her; they’d seen a green car stopping, seen a black car, seen a truck … It was that sort of case. Poor sad girl – she makes me cry – lying dead in a ditch somewhere, or in a swamp or a muddy river. The police had a suspect, the man in the black car. They knew it was him, but they couldn’t find enough evidence and had to let him go. Nobody was ever arrested.
‘The man in the black car was Clyde,’ Roly said. ‘His mother lived in Paeroa. He was on his way from Whangarei to see her.’
‘How do you know?’
‘You hear these things. Anyway, his name’s in one of those books about murders that haven’t been solved. The police used to watch him all the time. They probably still do.’
‘But you’re not saying that Lionel …?’
‘No, not him. He lived in Christchurch.’
‘Yes, yes. And he came up soon afterwards to live with Mum.’
It was like having a rotten tooth pulled out. The thing was gone – relief that rocked the mind back and forth before it settled, although a bleeding hole was left: his connection, our connection, with a man who had killed a girl.
‘Is Clyde Buckley still alive?’
‘I don’t know.’ Roly looked at his hands as though reminding himself of the planting and weeding they had done. ‘I hope not.’
It was no casual remark. He seemed to be saying that Clyde Buckley was outside nature.
‘I can look him up,’ I said.
‘Don’t do that.’ He was alarmed.
‘No, I mean at the library. I don’t mean see him.’
And when I left Roly, after holding him and feeling the knots of bone in his spine and the roughness of his cheek, and looking in at Lionel and saying his name and getting in response a tortoise-like half turn of his head, that’s what I did: stopped at the Takapuna Library where I found Buckley, C in the Northland phone book, and then Buckley, Clyde Malcolm, rtd in the electoral roll. So he was still alive. I felt as if I’d found a jar of preserves with mould on it at the back of a cupboard. There was no other Buckley at his address. Not married, then, or she’s dead. Clyde was like a hole in the ground, with nothing living near it, not a blade of grass. No spider. No slug. Nothing wants to go near Clyde Buckley.
Leave him, I thought, close the book.
I slapped the pages of the roll together and fitted it back on the shelf.
eight
Dickie is a treadmill failure. It’s almost as bad as missing the All Blacks.
I noticed several weeks ago that his Australian crawl was heavy armed and the stroke slower. When he came out, he stood with his hands on his knees. I draped his towel over him like a stable hand, although he’s a back-paddock Clydesdale these days, and he said, ‘Can’t get my breath.’ He also felt tightness in his chest.
I bullied him. I’m good at it, I don’t stop until I get my way – so off he went to his GP, and then to the chest pain clinic for a treadmill test. Dickie would show them. He’d run a mile on the damned thing if they wanted him to.
I sat in the waiting room and he came out after half an hour, half the man who went in but spoiling for a fight all the same. There’s no shortage of blood reaching his ego.
‘I told you I didn’t need you here,’ he said.
His strained face, his poor pinched mouth, his uncertain step as he turned in a circle to find the water cooler brought me hurrying to his side. He shook off my hand.
‘I can do it.’
He shuffled with his plastic cup to the nearest seat.
‘What did they say, Dickie? What happened?’
‘They started too fast. I wasn’t ready.’
He swallowed and choked, and when he’d got his breath back said, ‘I want another shot at it.’
‘How long did you do?’
‘Four minutes, twenty-seven seconds. That’s about what a girl would do.’ ‘Girl’ is a very bad word.
Soon a nurse led him to the cardiologist’s room. She asked me if I’d like to come, but Dickie said no, so I sat for another half-hour, refusing to feel useless. I’ve put that behind me. I was cross that I hadn’t brought my Georgette Heyer with me.
Dickie came back breathing normally. I know that bright-eyed look of intensity and anticipated triumph. The test match is all set to start, and Dickie is first five-eighths so he’ll run the show, make the passes, set up the tries, kick the conversions. OK ref, let’s get started, he says.
First off there’ll be an angiogram and if that shows a build-up of plaque the doctor will pump up a balloon in the artery or put in a stent, which is, as far as I can understand it, a metal tube expanding into a web. He doesn’t expect to find damage to the aortal valve, but who knows? A name for what Dickie might have – he needs a name to focus his aggression on: angina. But not yet, is what I say. Shortness of breath, tightness in the chest: all you are is a treadmill failure, Dickie Pinker. Try to drink a little bit less.
We go about our lives. Dickie swims (not so far out), he goes to his club, he aims his rose gun at the roses and brings me a small perfect bloom: ‘There you are, love.’ I’m grateful for the whole of it, for our even days – and for Cheryl’s silence with her new man. I don’t want to meet him again for fear of finding imperfections.
It’s two weeks until Dickie’s angiogram, which will be paid for by medical insurance. It would have been four months otherwise. He could have pretended indifference, but the tightness scares him, I see it in his eyes (where’s ‘what the hell’ gone?), and I’m afraid too. So it’s, ‘Why not let the buggers pay? They’ve screwed plenty out of us.’ Jumping the queue has never bothered him.
Memory: the heart gives an extra beat and the graph draws a peak. You can’t choose, you can’t fake, you can’t improve the story. Correction: you can do all three of those things and fool everyone except yourself.
Dickie worked for his father in a hardware shop in Avondale. I wanted him out of there, away from that old man (let’s do some adjectives: open-pored, hairy-eared, wet-mouthed, sour-minded) who had Dickie nailed to the floor, an exhibit turning yellow and gathering dust: My son who could have been an All Black. I was part of Stan Pinker’s disappointment. I was snooty, I couldn’t cook, I left the room when he told his spotty jokes. Worse: I had taken Dickie’s mind off the game. That was what caused his injury.
Dickie worked the nails free. He stepped out from behind the counter. I’d not known he had been so busy in his mind. The tide slipped out; a new tide rolled in. He worked in menswear for a while – a step up from hammers and screwdrivers and garden tools. He met different people and we started going to different parties, where I saw him glint with approval at my voice and check every now and then the expensive perm he’d bought me. He fetched me a Pimm’s, stopping to talk and laugh and nod his head as he came back across the room, and I thought: What a handsome man. I had a suspicion his limp grew worse in company, reminding people of who he had (nearly) been.
I handed him his whisky and he gave me the Pimm’s.
‘Rowan,’ he said softly, ‘see that joker over by the chicken legs.’
I looked and saw a jolly man with grease on his chin.
‘Yes.’
‘He’s a millionaire.’
‘Well, good for him.’
Dickie smiled happily. ‘He makes tennis rackets and cricket bats, stuff like that. Imports them too. He’s a nice guy. Not stuck up. I sold him that shirt.’
‘It’s too tight on him.’
‘Yeah, I know, but he wanted it that size. Dunno why. A millionaire, eh?’
‘Jolly good.’
I was beginning to understand that I didn’t like these parties, because there was so much talk and no talk at all. I did not like having permed hair.
Ten minutes later, Dickie nudged me. ‘See that joker coming in from the balcony? He’s a millionaire too.’
So I learned Dickie’s new ambition.
‘What from?’
‘Eh? Fish. Doesn’t matter what from.’
Dickie made his money – our money – in paper. He borrowed from his father and went in with a sharp young fellow called Ron Stock. Stock & Pinker, Paper Products: paper in reams, paper in pads, in exercise books, in single sheets; paper napkins, toilet paper, paper hats, paper streamers, wrapping paper, Christmas cards; Stock & Pinker cards for every anniversary Dickie and Ron were able to dream up. They’d have made paper motor cars if it had been possible. And pretty paper girlfriends for the private enjoyment of clever young new-minted millionaires.
It was hard not to enjoy Dickie’s pleasure and delight. It was hard not to admire the energy he poured into his work, the hours he put in, the travelling, the driving through the night, the flight connections made and the meetings that ended in new deals. Dickie dummied, he sidestepped, he ran for the line and dotted down between the posts.
I watched for a while. Then I turned my back and walked away to save myself. He wanted me to be what I couldn’t be, the person he described as ‘my wife’. He was doing his job, and wife was mine. I must wear smart clothes; I must have my hair done, and my nails, and learn make-up, and have his friends to dinner and not laugh so loud. There was no need to learn cooking: we could get someone in to look after that.
Not laugh so loud? Dickie was losing himself. I had not seen it properly until he said that. I’d been seeing him as a caricature and getting enjoyment from it, of a fragile kind, while building my worried notion of superior worth. Now I saw the danger he was in.
I pleaded with him. ‘Dickie, we’ve got Cheryl, isn’t she enough? Dickie, don’t throw our marriage away.’ And much more – all of which he shook his head at angrily. Dickie had made himself a new set of needs, and mine seemed to match none of them. Even Cheryl was invisible to him, except in the half-hours he was able to find for her.
I exaggerate. There were holidays, but Dickie was either blank eyed, calculating paper enlargements of himself, or else he was larger than life to fill in the time.
I missed him. I grieved for him. But also I was hard. Cheryl’s future equipped me with an iron stare, and my illness taught me the need for iron choices in dangerous times.
In the beginning I’d had miscarriages. Then Cheryl came. I’ve never kept a photo album but display pictures in my head: Cheryl in her bassinette, Cheryl on her tummy on a rug, Cheryl at the wave’s edge stepping back from the foam, Cheryl screwing her fists into her eyes the way tired babies do, as if trying to force them back into her head. All those and more, many more. I have no presence except as the air surrounding her. Dickie appears now and then.
Our second baby, five years after Cheryl, was stillborn. Dickie blubbered and I held him tight. His loud grief matched the silent end of part of my life. I refuse now to think about that child. Dickie insisted we call him Leon. Leon lived his whole life inside my body, and my body grieved for many years. But it was long ago and the pain is diffused, and I call the stabs of ageing in my feet and knees and ribs Leon pains. It’s not possible to stay pure. Humour is a ramshackle cart, carrying me away from loss.
Several years after that, I lost all future babies. I’m not going to dwell on it. There are two words I hate: fistula, hysterectomy. I’ve written them down, that’s enough. I saw my husband’s incomprehension, so kept the details to myself, as he wished. He patted me a lot. He said, ‘Does it hurt?’ He said, ‘Poor Rowan.’ He said, ‘How long before you can come back to me?’ – meaning sex. In my heart I said, Never. I did not hate Dickie, did not even dislike
him; he simply failed to register most of the time. I saw how his mind arranged the facts: things had gone wrong in the female part of my body so it was up to me to deal with them in the female part of my mind. He would have described that as ‘fair’. (By God, he had his work to do and it took everything out of him.) All right, fair, I agreed. And fair that he should become paper thin to me.
So I freed myself from my marriage while continuing to share house, time, money, entertainments with Dickie; share Cheryl too, when he could fit her in. I became scrawny in my emotions (except for Cheryl) and physically scrawny as well, and pale skinned (no make-up) and bushy haired (no perm). I had no fat on me, body or mind, but was aware somewhere in my midriff of a hollow shaped like a pudding bowl, and shiny like a bowl or like overstretched skin, where an affective part had been removed.
I was no wife to Dickie for many years, poor man. I don’t think divorce ever entered his head. Embedded in his notion of manhood was loyalty, and at the centre of loyalty the magic name: my wife. Dickie began growing up when he was able to use those words. They gave him a different kind of weight than rugby had promised, the kind adults feel. But these are things I cannot put my hand on easily. All I’ll say is that breaking ‘man and wife’ apart would stab splinters into Dickie’s idea of himself.
He was deeply hurt. He believed he gave me everything I could want. It bewildered him and made him savage that I turned away, and it gave him the right to turn away from me and follow the instructions of his blood. Simply put, Dickie had women. I don’t blame him in the least.
That time seems like dirty water splashed on the floor. Although it has dried, a stain is left, with edges but no recognisable shape. I step around it carefully when I notice, but mostly tread across unaware.
Dickie’s women were less important than the loss of the friendly connections we used to have. I spoke with the longest-serving of them once, a pleasant-looking woman, over-painted but not by much, and was surprised to find her bitter and shrill. She could not understand why Dickie would not leave me. I told her I didn’t mind her having him but what she’d get would never be more than half.
