Access Road

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘Oh, but fifty. Lionel, did you get my present?’

  ‘Sure. Very nice. Thank you, Mum.’ He hurried on, concealing that he hadn’t unwrapped it. ‘Tell you what, I’ll cancel some appointments, I’ll come up and see you, maybe next week. How would that be?’

  ‘Oh, Lionel, wonderful. That would be wonderful. We’ll have a party for you here.’

  ‘No, no parties. Just you and me. I’ll rent a car and take you on some drives.’

  ‘That would be wonderful. We could drive along the Scenic Drive. Lionel, Rowan’s here. I’ll put her on.’

  ‘No, no, just tell her hello. Is pea-brain with her – what’s his name?’

  ‘No, Richard isn’t here.’ She smiled at me, pretending Lionel had said something nice. I drifted into the kitchen and sat at the table. I was pleased with Lionel. Mum would be happy for a while.

  I drove out and had lunch with them while he was visiting, and found him friendly, even affectionate, and younger-looking, fresher-looking than I’d expected. I’d thought he would show some sort of desiccation. His eyes, so used to peering, seemed to take in whole persons, especially Mum, and his voice had none of the sharp-filed edge it had on the phone. He was wiry in his wrists and, I imagined, inside his clothes, and quick with his movements in a flicking way, although he slowed down when close to Mum, as though she exercised a restraining force. Her doubts and worries were gone, if only for the duration. She was, in fact, tired with happiness.

  After lunch she lay on her bed for a nap. Lionel and I walked down the hill into Loomis. I had to slow him down, and he told me that he worked out in a gym and had run several half marathons.

  ‘You never told us.’

  He looked surprised. ‘I didn’t think you’d be interested. You look pretty fit yourself.’

  We talked inconsequentially until I asked about Roly.

  ‘Good old Roly. He keeps in touch,’ Lionel said.

  ‘That’s more than he does with me. Where is he now?’

  ‘Somewhere in Wellington last time I heard. I’ll know when I get a phone call.’

  ‘He phones?’

  ‘Sure. We talk. We’re brothers, Rowan. Hey, I’m sorry, you’re our sister too.’ He touched my shoulder. ‘But you’ve got – Dick.’

  The pause annoyed me. ‘Why haven’t you got someone? You could have a wife.’

  He contracted his shoulders – I remember it like the sliding of oiled plates in a machine, one over the other, consolidating its strength.

  ‘No need, Rowan,’ he said in his clicking voice.

  ‘Of course there’s a need …’

  ‘Sure. I pay. There are some nice clean gentlemen’s clubs in Christchurch. They even have back doors if you don’t want anyone seeing.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m glad you get some pleasure.’

  ‘But, you know –’ he suddenly grinned: beautiful teeth ‘– working out at the gym is pretty good too.’ The grin didn’t reach his eyes. He closed them, but not before I’d seen something lost, and angry too, and – is it possible? – a narrative as well, Lionel’s life, which I had no time to grasp before he snapped his head away and cried, ‘Hey, Access Road. Let’s not go down.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Ancient history, Rowan. Let’s look at the school.’

  ‘That’s ancient history, too.’

  ‘Maybe. But I had a pretty good time there.’

  So we looked at the school, ambled in the playgrounds, without any throb of emotion. A teacher put her head out a window and asked what we wanted. I explained that we’d gone there as children, but although polite she was unimpressed. We went away, walked down the rest of the hill and peered from the bridge at the shrunken creek, then climbed back to Te Atatu Road, where I handed Lionel over to Mum and drove home with part of my worry lifted away but a snaky feeling under my heart. I could not believe in him. What was the story he had given me no time to read?

  He flew to Christchurch the next day, and a week later Mum phoned excitedly: ‘Rowan, I’ve just had a call from Lionel. He wants to come up and live with me.’

  My first thought was, That’s mad. My next was, He wants to lie down, he’s had enough.

  ‘You mean for good?’ although there was no mistaking it.

  ‘There’s part of a practice he can buy in Loomis. He had a look at it when he was here. I didn’t know.’

  Lionel working neatly, ticking things off. I began to feel he had it in his nature to change; alter the seating arrangements in himself, put this stiff but comfortable chair in a different corner where it would catch a little more sun, and sit up straight in it with his hands on his knees and smile at the person across the room where there had been no person for twenty years or more.

  He needs her, I thought, and he’ll be careful. I did not want him using Mum and hurting her. I overlooked that he might come to love her.

  On the night she phoned me, she said wistfully, ‘He might find some nice woman up here,’ but after he’d lived with her a while Mum stopped hoping for that. She wanted Lionel for herself. I’ve no doubt he found another gentlemen’s club and paid a visit when the need was urgent, but for almost twenty years he sat at home with her, the pair of them in a kind of cream and honey stasis. Sometimes it was nice to see; sometimes it made me sick. This was the way Victorian spinsters lived with Papa. There was nothing wrong with it – a home, a hearth, two lonely people keeping each other company – but little right for the one weighted down with a life unlived.

  After several years Lionel confounded me by buying a piano, taking up the lessons he had started as a boy and playing tunes with scarcely a note wrong. (He was good at Handel’s Largo.) He took Mum to concerts; he taught her to drink wine; he made her happy, and was happy too – yet sometimes he made me think of a dog that has been beaten and found a new home where there’s food and affection, almost enough to cancel fear.

  Food there was. Mum learned to cook. No more lamb’s fry baked into paving stones. No more cabbage boiled to a yellow sludge. For the first time since she had left school she studied, even though it was only recipe books. All the things she had turned away from in her married life, sometimes with horror, appeared on her table: olives, oysters, paté, sour cream, smelly cheese. She cooked Italian, Swedish, French; she baked whole fish; she baked bread and muffins and Eccles cakes and puddings of every sort. My mother whose sole treat for her children had been date roll was able in her old age to make a perfect crème brûlée.

  Lionel lost his edges. Food was only a part of it. Love and care, admiration, moulded him like hands; habits and routines enfolded him. He sat on the sofa smiling like a cat. Cat now? I said dog before, and hints of a dog that had been starved and beaten remained in the turning of his eye, showing too much white, in a fawning laugh like the wagging of a tail. But mostly he was still and contented. He and Mum read books together; he drove her into Auckland to the pictures and took her to dinner in restaurants. At home they became devotees of Coronation Street and talked about the characters like people from next door. Several times, hearing Lionel say Ken or Deirdre, I found myself thinking, Good, he’s making friends, until Mum replied, ‘She’s getting wrinkles. They should use more make-up on her.’

  Roly made half a dozen visits but stayed only a night or two before vanishing back into postcard land. Mum seemed happy to let him go. She waved from the door, and Roly walked off almost in the way he had left as a boy. I wished he would visit me, but all he did was telephone to say hello. I put my phone down once, and rushed across and caught him in the hallway as he shouldered his duffel bag. So I got a hug.

  ‘Roly’s such a good boy,’ Mum said. ‘I just wish he’d made more of himself.’

  It seemed to me that Roly had made a great deal: a man who was contented and knew who he was.

  I telephoned him when he was living in Te Kuiti. ‘Roly,’ I said. ‘I’m coming to see you. Book me in at a hotel.’

  ‘No need,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a mattress.’

/>   I drove down not knowing why, except that it was time to fix him in my mind after a gap of more than three years; and indeed I did not know him for a moment, with his balding head and mottled beard. He was a handyman, an elementary fix-it man for the town council, nailing broken railings and unblocking drains. He lived in a tiny council flat, where my mattress proved to be no more than that. (I’d thought he meant bed. What’s that figure of speech we learned at school? I’ve looked it up: synecdoche, part for the whole.) He laid the yellow leaking thing between two chairs in the living room and slid a cushion into a pillowslip and gave me two blankets, depriving himself of one. This, after a dinner which we walked out to buy: two meat pies from a dairy. It was just as well I’d brought a bag of muffins from Mum.

  We watched TV on a tiny set – it might even have been black and white – then I slept badly, tormented by lumps in the mattress and Roly’s snoring from his bedroom. Weetbix for breakfast, then Roly went off to work and I drove home, resting every hour or so and once snoozing with the seat reclined. I was happy. I was pleased with this Roly who was solid set, steady eyed, scar handed, loud in his laugh, slurping with his tea (all sorts of attributes he had), after the careful brother who lived with Mum.

  • • •

  Recently I came across a cartoon in a book, showing a sad, plain woman with haunted eyes curled up against a headstone in a cemetery. The caption read: Mother loved me but she died. A cruel cartoon in which I saw Lionel.

  It’s not the whole story of course. They watched television until half-past nine that night, then Lionel switched off the set. Mum had not been feeling well. He put out his hands to haul her to her feet, but she said, ‘I’ll just sit a minute longer.’ Then she sneezed loudly, widened her eyes with (Lionel said) a kind of astonishment, and fell sideways on the sofa. These tiny explosions in the head that wipe out a world. Mum never regained consciousness but died in hospital next day.

  Lionel held himself together at the funeral and for several years after. He stayed on in the house. Mum, always fair, had left third shares to Roly and me. Lionel bought us out. He lived alone. He had no need for a brother or sister. He did not bother to tell us when he sold his practice in Loomis. He did not tell us that he’d bought the house in Access Road.

  ten

  Dickie’s angiogram showed ‘arteries like an All Black forward’. That was a clever thing for the doctor to say. Dickie glowed with satisfaction as the orderly trolleyed him back to bed. ‘Beat the buggers,’ he told me, meaning that he’d beaten his poor old heart.

  He wanted to go straight home, get to the club, tell his tale, but the blood-thinning medication he takes to ward off strokes made him bleed through the hole the angiogram tube had made in his groin. The nurse let him walk to the toilet instead of using a bottle and, coming back, the front of his gown was suddenly sprayed with red. Fright and enjoyment: which did he feel more? He loved the colour of his blood. He liked it when the nurse spent ten minutes pressing her clenched fist in his groin. He chatted with her, bluff and brave, while I sat in the corner, cancelled out.

  What is wrong with him then? Why the breathlessness? The doctor thinks maybe something gastric and has given him pills. I think old age and stupidity. Dickie lied on the hospital form. Alongside the question about alcohol intake he wrote moderate.

  He has a purple bruise from his groin down to his knee. He made me photograph it. I might give it to him, framed, on his next birthday.

  We had Cheryl and Tom to dinner to celebrate. Cheryl’s bruise has gone and her loose teeth have set in her gums. There’s still some pain from her cracked rib. The boy who attacked her is remanded in custody, and she hopes they’ll give him drug counselling while he’s inside, and psychological counselling and, ‘Oh God, some lessons in decent behaviour.’

  Tom laughed and said, ‘Of course they won’t.’

  It turns out Tom was a policeman, starting as a constable in Invercargill, where he was born, and working his way into criminal investigation, where he rose to the rank of detective inspector. In his early fifties, just a year or two ago, he perfed – a word I had to have explained. His wife was dead, his parents dead, his children married. A health scare (he was okay now, he winked at Cheryl) made him think about where he was going. To Nelson, he decided, to the sun. But he lasted less than a year there. He’d spent his life in provincial cities, why move to another? Nelson, he said, was walking by the river feeding the ducks. Cutting stale bread into cubes one morning, he thought, Do I want to spend the rest of my life doing this? He sold his apartment, got in his car, crossed the strait on the ferry and headed north. He would try our biggest city and see if size would jolt him on to a new path.

  ‘It seems to be working,’ he grinned.

  I wondered what he did for money – the apartment Cheryl had sold him wasn’t cheap – but didn’t ask. Later in the evening, in the sitting room with coffee, he mentioned that he’d got a half-share from the sale of the farm where he’d grown up. So that’s Tom: a very nice man, and he’ll do for Cheryl. She thinks so too.

  I asked him cheekily if he’d been a good policeman.

  ‘Sure, I was good,’ he said. ‘I knew my job.’

  ‘Did you catch any murderers?’ Dickie said.

  ‘I worked on one or two homicides, yeah.’

  ‘Oh, don’t tell us,’ Cheryl said.

  ‘Did you ever hear of a man called Clyde Buckley?’ I don’t understand how I came to ask.

  Tom looked at me with interest – with a change in the density of colour in his eyes. ‘That was Whangarei. I’ve heard of him. He’s still POI.’ Another explanation needed: person of interest.

  He asked me how I’d heard of Buckley, but I drew back. I felt as if I’d let cold air into the room and taken the warmth off this man I wanted for my daughter.

  ‘More coffee anyone?’ I said.

  ‘Have you met the guy?’ Tom said.

  ‘Not for more than fifty years. Don’t talk about him.’

  ‘You knew him when you were a kid?’

  ‘No. Yes. He lived two streets away. But he was older. I never knew him.’

  ‘Who is he? What did he do?’ Cheryl asked.

  ‘Killed a girl,’ Tom said. ‘At least we think he did. She was hitch-hiking down on the Hauraki Plains. Someone saw her getting picked up in a Morris Oxford. The driver was putting her pack in the boot. He was a guy with a pot belly and long arms.’ Tom laughed, ‘Some description.’ But to me long arms was horribly accurate. ‘Some car, too. You know how many Morris Oxfords they had back then? And maybe it was blue and maybe black.’

  ‘So how did you get on to the guy?’ Dickie said.

  ‘Not me, I was in Timaru. They got him, but they couldn’t make a case, not enough to stand up anyway. The file’s still there. They have a look every year or two.’

  ‘Like Mona Blades and Jennifer Beard,’ Dickie said.

  ‘Yeah, like them. Except the guy we liked for Jennifer Beard died a couple of years ago. I worked on that one.’

  ‘So how did they finger Buckley?’ (Dickie likes using words like ‘finger’ but usually gets the meaning wrong. Tom grinned at him. They’re going to get on.)

  ‘They couldn’t find a car and they couldn’t find a body. They dragged every creek and drainage ditch on the plains. Then after three months a farmer pulled her body out of a swamp over by Raglan.’

  ‘I remember that one,’ Dickie said. ‘Some kid had a photo of a car down at the beach. One of them was …’

  ‘A black Morris Oxford. They could just read the licence plate. So up to Whangarei and this guy Buckley –’ Tom laughed ‘– a man with a pot belly and long arms.’

  ‘So why didn’t you lock the bastard up?’

  ‘They tried hard enough, but they couldn’t make a case that the legal boys would buy. Buckley didn’t have the car any more. He sold it to a kid who ran it into a creek. By the time they pulled it out …’ Tom shrugged. ‘Lucky Mr Buckley. He said he never picked up hitch-hikers. Couldn�
�t shake him on that. And no positive ID, so –’ Tom spread his hands ‘– no case. It was close, though. They bring him in and ask him questions now and then, keep the bugger jumping, but he’s got his story off pat. He doesn’t change a word …’ Tom looked at me. ‘What was he like as a kid?’

  I told him about Clyde Buckley trying to suffocate Lionel in his underground hut.

  ‘A psychopath. Yeah, psychopath,’ Dickie said. ‘I hope you gave him a bloody good thumping while you had him.’

  Tom only grinned at him, a little less friendly now.

  ‘Getting him into court was what mattered. If it had been my case – well, wouldn’t have made any difference. The guys on the job, they couldn’t get that last little bit.’

  ‘So what do they think happened? What’s the theory?’ Dickie said.

  Tom glanced at me, then at Cheryl. ‘You want to know?’

  ‘I do,’ Dickie said.

  Tom shrugged. ‘It goes like this. He drove into a side road and did whatever he did. Then he put her body in the boot with her pack and drove to Paeroa and spent the night with his mother.’

  ‘With the girl still in the boot?’ Cheryl cried.

  ‘That’s what they think. When they asked him why he went across to Raglan next day, he said he’d had enough of his mother and he still had a couple of days off work so – why not? I guess he was looking for a place to put her. And her pack. He still had that.’

  ‘In a swamp?’ Dickie said.

  ‘Yeah. In a swamp. Then he spent the night, or was it two? The motel had the records. If they’d found the body sooner, he was gone. But he drove back to Whangarei, he sold his car and got his story straight if he needed it, and that’s where it is. He’s not short of something up here.’ Tom tapped his head.

  ‘What about—’ Dickie began, but Cheryl broke in: ‘Dad, I don’t want to hear any more. I want to have a walk on the beach and get some air.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Tom said.

  Dickie was keen to join them, but I changed into slacks to give them a start. He walked beside me, grumbling.

  ‘I like Tom,’ I said, trying to wipe out all I’d heard of Buckley.