A Jest of God

  James is waiting for her in the hall. It seems a little cruel to keep him there, after all the others have gone, waiting and wondering what we’re saying in here. But I couldn’t talk to her in his presence.

  I find I can’t call her Grace. But to say Mrs. Doherty would be silly. I won’t be able to address her directly at all.

  “These absences of James –” my voice sounds distant, cold, a robot’s mechanical voice or someone reading from a printed form, “they’ve been causing some concern to us.”

  “Why?” she asks, as though innocently.

  Why? Listen to the woman. She wouldn’t care, I suppose, whether he ever got a scrap of education or not. He could grow up illiterate – it would make no difference to her. If ever he decides he doesn’t want to follow his father in the garage business, she’ll stare at him with total blankness. If he’s in a silver ship that one day lands on the moon, she’ll write him off sorrowfully as a boy who didn’t turn out well. Unless he gets in the papers or on TV for it. Then she would know it was all right to be approving. How shall I handle this?

  “I’ll have to tell you frankly. On two occasions, when he was supposed to be sick, he was seen in the valley. I’m sure you didn’t know. Perhaps you were out, and –”

  I have to allow her to save face, I suppose, although that is not my inclination. I don’t want to look at her, but when I do, I see that her mild placid eyes are in a fever.

  “Of course I knew!” she cries. “What do you take me for, Rachel?”

  I’m so startled I don’t know what to say. I must be gaping at her foolishly.

  “Who saw him?” she asks fiercely. “If I may be so bold as to enquire.”

  “I don’t know that I ought to –”

  “Well, in that case,” she says scathingly, “it must’ve been Mrs. Siddley. She spends half her time wandering around down there with her little camp stool and that jazzy easel of hers. I’d like to see the inside of her house. I bet it’s a pigsty. You know as well as I do, Rachel, that she –”

  She breaks off, glances at me, and then looks frightened.

  “I didn’t mean to say that.” Her voice sounds subdued and discouraged, but then she speaks defiantly again. “If she’d only looked a little closer those two afternoons, she’d have seen I was with James.”

  My first reaction is that she is lying, to pardon him. But when I scrutinize her face, it seems to me she isn’t lying after all.

  “But – why? If he was well, why wasn’t he at school?”

  “He’d had this bad tonsillitis,” Grace says. “The weather was so warm and fine, on those two days, and he was much better, but still not quite himself. I thought it would do him more good than school, just those few times, to go out around the river, that’s all.”

  Her look is defensive now, and yet insistent, trying to explain.

  “He’s only seven, Rachel, and he’s a clever kid. I mean, I think he’s quite clever. And yet if he’s sent to school too soon after being sick, and he isn’t feeling up to much, it only makes him cranky. I don’t see how he can learn anything then. I hate him to miss days like that, but then I wonder if it wouldn’t be worse to set him against school? I don’t want that. I want him to go on, as far as he –”

  I cannot hear her any longer. I cannot listen as she elaborates. How could I not have known it of her, the way she feels, her determination and her hesitance? The way she cares about him.

  “Listen, it’s all right, Grace. Now that I know what happened, it’s quite all right. I wouldn’t even have brought it up, if I’d known.”

  The door creaks open a crack, and James’s blue eye peers in.

  “Okay, honey, you can come in now,” she says. “We’re just going.”

  He comes in and stands beside her, and she brushes his russet hair away from his forehead, as she’s been doing for years, no doubt. She has the right to touch him, at least sometimes. She puts an arm around his shoulders, and he squirms away, frowning. She smiles, not unpleased that he wants to be his own and on his own.

  “Well, that’s all okay, then, Rachel?”

  Her voice is filled with capability. She gains strength from his presence. This is what happens. I’ve seen it with my sister. They think they are making a shelter for their children, but actually it is the children who are making a shelter for them. They don’t know.

  As she goes out with him, I wonder if James has told her he got the strap. He couldn’t have. She would have mentioned it. Why didn’t he tell? Didn’t he know how unfair it was? Or did he know only too well?

  I’m tired, tired, tired. And this wretched headache won’t go. I promised Mother we would go to a movie tonight, but I don’t feel up to it. I think I’ll postpone it. I’ll take two aspirins and go straight to bed.

  Some days it seems more difficult to be patient. There are times when they could riot, or shriek with twenty-six voices simultaneously, and I wouldn’t be upset. Other times, the slightest thing will be enough to set me off. I must try to be more equable. It’s the only way – it’s only right. But some days the slightest snick of a door latch, the slightest sign of scrabbling, will set my teeth on edge. This morning is one such day. I don’t know what’s the matter. Just that they seem to make so much noise.

  Just – noise. The scraping of their feet on the floor. The juggling of books from inside the desk to outside – such an easy procedure – how can it be so complicated for them? The trading of crayons back and forth, someone having a more exotic colour than someone else. The whispering that grows to a hissed largeness until finally in justice I cannot ignore it but have to deal somehow with it, nicely and reasonably, not doing as probably any distracted parent would be bound to do, shouting Shut up! Just shut up. Please.

  “Peter, have you finished your arithmetic?”

  Stoic silence. No reply.

  “James – are you finished?”

  Without warning, he puts his elbows protectively over the page. No speech. No explanation. Only this indrawing of his arms over the paper.

  “Let me see.”

  As soon as I’ve said it, I know it was mistaken, the last thing I ought to have laid claim to. But now I can’t turn back.

  “Let me see how far you’ve got.”

  This is all wrong, and I know it. He doesn’t intend to let me see, and I’m intruding and ought to approach him in another way, cool, unheated.

  But his uncombed and untidied sorrel hair, and his self-protected face which seems to warn everyone away – there is something I cannot bear here.

  There. I’ve pushed aside his arms, not with my hands, but with the ruler I’m holding. At first he offers no resistance. His elbows go slack, allowing themselves to be shoved across the desk surface. Then he changes his mind and his finger ends curl around the page, determined I should not see.

  What’s there? What has he done instead of simple subtraction? A caricature? An unendurable portrait? He looks at me with a sly gopher-like idiocy, all innocent nothingness – see, I’m too dumb to have anything here worth looking at. The cunning nonentity of his face. Is this necessary? Does he feel this is necessary with me?

  He does not give a damn. He hates me. I am the enemy. God damn, what is this child hiding?

  He won’t give in. All right. I’ll have to wrench it from him. What right has he? If he despises me, I must go on anyway. What is being hidden from me?

  I must not tear his page, though. As I put my hand on it, his hand clamps down, firm, absolute. What is he doing? Why does he fight me so? Then he looks at me. His eyes are extremely blue, not the translucent blue of water or sky, but the assertive and untransparent blue of copper sulphate, opaque, not to be seen through. I do not know at all what is going on in those eyes.

  “Have you finished your subtraction questions, James?”

  No voice. I cannot get any response. He holds everything very still within himself. He will not let me see. He does not intend that I should ever see.

  Crack!

  Wha
t is it? What’s happened?

  The ruler. From his nose, the thin blood river traces its course down to his mouth. I can’t have. I can’t have done it. Slowly, because a reason for all things must be found, I take the unresisting page between my fingers and force myself to look at it.

  No pictures. No obscene caricatures. Only – two sums completed, out of ten, and those two done incorrectly. That’s all.

  He has what we used to call a nosebleed. It won’t stop. His blood won’t stop.

  “James, put your head back. It will stop then.”

  I cannot say I’m sorry. Not in front of them all, twenty-six beings, all eyes. If I do say this, how shall I appear tomorrow? Cut down, diminished, undermined, very little left. If I do not say it, though, there’s enough gossip for a month or more, to friends and fathers and lovingly listening mothers – you know what Miss Cameron went and did? Did she? And to James, space venturer, first man on the moon?

  He is not crying. Maybe I knew I could rely on that. He has dug out from some obscure and unnoticed pocket a tardy handkerchief, never seen before. With it, he is mopping away the scarlet from his face, not dramatically, but very simply and practically, as though this were the only thing to be considered at the moment, to wipe the stained confusion away.

  If I could put my hands upon him, lightly, and comfort him. If I could say something. It is not for me to say or do anything. How can one retrieve anything at all? Is it always past the appointed hour?

  James – I’m sorry. But I haven’t spoken the words aloud.

  James puts his handkerchief away. His nose has stopped bleeding. The others are looking at me. Everyone within our gates will hear before nightfall. The only thing I can do now is to bring it off as though I meant it to occur, as though I were at least half justified. If I capitulate, they will fall upon me like falcons.

  “All right, James. Get on with it. See if you can get through the next few.”

  I hear my voice, controlled. I don’t know what I could ever say to him, to make up for what I’ve done. I don’t think I could ever say anything which might make him forget.

  The day does end, of course. Am I walking home unusually slowly? I feel as though I were. Summer holidays will begin in another two weeks. This year’s children will be gone then, and gradually will turn into barely recognized faces, no connection left, only hello sometimes on the street. There will be new ones, and I will have to learn their names and faces, their quirks and their responses.

  I am trying to recall when I last hit a child. I cannot remember. It was not all that long ago – a year, perhaps. Yet now I cannot remember, cannot put a face and name to it, or a reason. In a year or two, will I have locked today away in some junkbox, never to be found among all the other scraps and trifles?

  When did I, the last time, and who was it, and why? I must be able to remember. Why can’t I?

  Now don’t start thinking your memory is failing, Rachel. That isn’t so. I can’t be expected to remember everything.

  Two weeks. Not very long to make a peace. Not half long enough. Probably that is all he will remember of me, that one instant, the thin wooden stick across his face. “I had a teacher once who hit me so hard my nose bled, no kidding.” And listeners – friends or lovers or his own children – will express astonishment that such acts were allowed in those barbaric old days.

  I must stop at the Regal Café and get some cigarettes. I don’t smoke much any more. It is foolhardy to take chances with one’s health, after all. But I do enjoy a cigarette after meals, and sometimes if I have a bad night, I may get up and smoke a couple – never in bed, no matter how wakeful I am. People have set fire to themselves that way.

  The café is crowded with slick leather-jacketed youngsters. Behind the counter Lee Toy stands, his centuries-old face not showing at all what he may think of these kids. He has been here ever since I was a child, and he seemed old then. Now he is dried and brittle and brown like the shell of a lichee nut, and he has two younger men in partnership, nephews, perhaps. They could be sons, and I wouldn’t know. He has spent most of his life here, but in a kind of secrecy, living alone in the rooms above the café. My father told me once that Lee Toy’s wife was still in China, still alive and living on the money he sent, but unable to come here, first because of our laws and then because of theirs. Maybe she is there yet, the woman he has not seen for more than forty years.

  Beside the Coca-Cola poster on the wall there hangs a painting, long and narrow like an unrolled scroll, done on grey silk – a mountain, and on the slope a solitary and splendidly plumaged tiger.

  I have to walk through the tight knot of teenagers. They don’t make way or part ranks. They remain clustered around the jukebox, boys with their arms around their girls, and the girls, also, each with their arms around some boy. Have I taught any of them, years ago? I don’t want to look directly at them to see who is recognizable and who is not.

  They take up all the space. A person can hardly squeeze inside the door. They’re everywhere. I wish I hadn’t come in. I don’t like having to shove past them, having to endure the confident dismissal of their eyes.

  At last I’ve got my cigarettes. As I’m reaching out for the change, I find myself glancing sideways and looking into the face of a girl. Lipstick a whitish pink like salve, softly shining skin with virtually no powder, and then everything lavished on the eyes – bluegreen like the sea, underneath, and greenblue lids above, with the lashes thickly black. She is staring at me. What do those plain eyes in their jewelled setting see? I don’t want to know. It doesn’t concern me, what she thinks. Why should it? What does it matter? Who does she think she is?

  “Hello, Miss Cameron.”

  “Oh – hello.” I don’t know her. Whoever she once was – that’s long gone. Some child I was drawn to, perhaps and may have shown it, and she remembers and can’t forgive it, for she detests now and would like to kill forever the little girl who believed it was really something if the teacher was pleased with the work she’d done.

  I must get out of here.

  Japonica Street. The days are longer now, and the light lasts into the evening, but Hector Jonas has turned on the neon sign. Japonica Funeral Chapel. It winks and beckons, and as I walk up the petunia-edged path, I see all at once how laughable it is, to live here, how funny lots of people must think it, how amusing, how hilarious.

  Oh stop. It’s a house. It’s decent. Mother wouldn’t feel at home anywhere else. You’d think she would want to leave but she doesn’t. She always let on to my father that she didn’t enjoy living here. She used to say “Your father’s so attached to this place,” and then sigh delicately. But if he had been able to move anywhere, I don’t suppose she would have gone.

  He really was attached to it, though. He had come here and settled in as soon as he got home from the First War. He must have been very young then. He never talked about that time in France, and when the Armistice Day parades were held, he never would go. Mother used to say, “Everyone goes, Niall – it looks so peculiar, for you not to.” He would agree to nearly anything, for quiet, but not to that. He would stay downstairs that day, with the silent company if there happened to be anyone in residence waiting burial, or else alone, and he wouldn’t come upstairs all that night, either, being unable to move sufficiently, I guess. What could have happened to him, all those years ago, to make him that way? When the Second World War came, the Cameron Highlanders marched through the streets of Manawaka on their way off, because so many of the town boys were in that regiment. I was a child, and excited at it, because they bore our name. I came back and pounded on the door of his establishment, the only time I ever remember doing that. “Dad – come and see – they’ve got pipers, and they’re playing ‘The March of the Cameron Men.’” He stood in the doorway, his face showing no feeling at all. “Yes, I expect they are, Rachel. It has a fine sound, the lies the pipes tell. You run away, now, there’s a good girl.” That’s all.

  “You’re late this evening, de
ar,” Mother says.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What’s the matter, Rachel? Aren’t you feeling well?”

  “I’m all right. A bit of a headache, that’s all. How are you?”

  “Oh, just fine, really. I had that miserable pain again this afternoon, but I lay down on the chesterfield for an hour, and it’s almost gone now.”

  “You shouldn’t be up. You go and lie down again now. I’ll see to dinner.”

  “No, truly, I’m fine now, dear. A little tired, but that’s nothing serious. I’ll take it easy, though. I know I must, although it’s not easy for me, having always been so active. I just hope you’re not coming down with ’flu. I don’t like these headaches you’ve been getting. Have you got a temperature?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Let me feel your forehead. You’re a bit warm, I’d say.”

  “I’m all right, Mother, for goodness’ sake. You go and lie down now. Please.”

  “Well, I will then, dear, if you’re quite sure you’re all right. You haven’t got an upset stomach, have you?”

  “No, no. My stomach is perfectly all right. It’s just a bit of a headache. I’ll take a two-twenty-two.”

  “Yes, you be sure to do that, dear. You don’t take enough care of yourself, Rachel. It doesn’t do to take chances with your health. If you do, you’ll pay for it when you’re older.”

  When I’m older. She speaks as though I were about twelve. What a strangely pendulum life I have, fluctuating in age between extremes, hardly knowing myself whether I am too young or too old.

  At dinner she eats well. She seems all right. What is the matter with me? Do I doubt her pain? At times I do, and then again at other times it causes a panic in me, and I wonder what I’d do here, by myself.

  “You know the Stewart girl, Rachel?”

  “Cassie? The one who works at Barnes’ Hardware?”

  “That’s the one. I only heard today. You know she’s been away?”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Well, she has been. It’s dreadful for her mother, a nice woman, nothing to write home about, but quite a nice woman, Mrs. Stewart, I’ve always thought. The girl isn’t married and no one even in prospect, so I gather.”