by Gee, Maurice
Cheryl wants to see the house and do a valuation.
No, I say, and she doesn’t argue. She’s moving in with Tom Quinney this weekend. Oh dear and three cheers.
The police have questioned us many times. For a while it seemed they would charge Roly with something! How absurd. I think they’ve let it go now. They’re pleased to have the book closed on Clyde Buckley, as one of them put it, but they can’t understand why he killed Lionel.
I say, It goes right back with those two. And with our family as well. My father used to chase him away, and I suppose he brooded on it and decided to get even and kill us all.
It’s the best I can do.
Dickie, do you think I’m right not to tell them about Elizabeth Gillies? I don’t want concrete cutters screaming over her head. I want her to lie undisturbed, with her mild pod eyelids.
We held Lionel’s funeral yesterday. It was family only. Roly wants to tip the ashes in his garden. It sounds gruesome to me, but Roly says simply, I think he’d like to be there.
Dickie and I walk on the beach, hand in hand and rather slowly. Dickie is chastened. He had no idea life could be like that. (Tell me if I’m wrong, Dickie.) It’s too cold for bare feet. Thin waves edge up the sand and melt away. I hunt for rhymes. Wave, cave. Sky, belie.
Find, end. That’s a half-rhyme. At my age I think I’m allowed.
About the author
Maurice Gee is one of New Zealand’s best known writers, for both adults and children. He has won a number of literary awards, including the Wattie Award, the Deutz Medal for Fiction and the New Zealand Fiction Award. He has also won the New Zealand Children’s Book of the Year Award. In 2003 he received an inaugural New Zealand Icon Award and in 2004 he received a Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.
Maurice Gee’s novels include the Plumb trilogy, Going West, Prowlers, Live Bodies and The Scornful Moon. He has also written a number of children’s novels, the most recent being Salt and Gool.
Maurice lives in Nelson with his wife Margareta, and has two daughters and a son.
