She counted out the money on the table. She had enough, clearly more than she had thought, because she appeared to be relieved. ‘Now is the real surprise,’ she said, and we started towards the beach.
The sea breeze was on the way out and the leaves in the trees along the esplanade had stopped rustling. It was growing dark, and sure enough the storm clouds were bunched inland over the ranges.
‘I feel like dancing,’ my mother announced. She looked at me, then burst out laughing. We walked briskly. The music from the roller-skating rink grew louder, and my mother pulled the sides of her cardigan to cover her chest. We could hear Cadillac Jack trying to hustle the crowd onto the rink. He spoke in rhyming couplets, so my mother said, and word had it he was brother of a famous American DJ. My mother always said it was worth believing anything so long as it wasn’t harmful. So little happened around here, anyway.
My mother fussed over the skates like they were vegetables from the cheap bin.
She glided out onto the rink. She did a lap. Her lips were pursed, kind of hard-looking without lipstick. She usually wore lipstick when she went out. Her eyes were concentrated, as if trying to find a way back to some partially lost feeling. She came down off the high shoulder at the beach end and overtook a bunch of kids from the high school. You could easily be fooled, but if you forgot the rest of her and watched the skates you saw she was in complete control.
The third or fourth lap she came soaring down and picked me off the rail. ‘Push off your toes, Charlie. Push. Push. You’re much too stiff.’
She glided out ahead, and started to do a goose-step, holding one skate out front about knee height and alternating with the other. She came past the crowd and turned the heads on half-a-dozen cowboys. Her face glowed. She knew what she had done. She took off her white cardigan and tied it about her waist. Some of the slower skaters moved out of her way and found the sides as she barrelled down the straight past the hotdog stand. Cadillac, inside his glass dome, let go a ginormous hoooeeee. My mother went into a speed crouch and shot up high on the end bend.
Just short of the cowboys, a guy in black jeans and a bush shirt tied at the throat with a length of string pushed off the wall. There were twenty metres in which to decide whether she would go around him. He held his hand out like a ballroom dancer. My mother dug in the toe of her back skate. The stranger’s hand collected her around the waist; she spun around once, then again, this time under her own steam to show she enjoyed it.
They pushed off together, the cowboy holding her hand, and my mother bothered by a strand of damp hair that kept falling across her face.
I had stopped trying to skate. I leant against the rail in front of some spectators. I was wondering where my father was right at this moment. What he was doing. And what kind of person the Australian woman might be getting to know. I suppose I had taken over my mother’s thoughts for the time being—caretaking while she skated.
My mother and her partner seemed none the wiser that a lot of attention was on them. The people behind me had begun to mutter. Something about the ‘prison escaper’. Cadillac had gone quiet.
At the town end of the rink they rose together up the shoulder; the escaper hoisted my mother into the air. She threw her head back and used one leg to clamp his shoulder; the other leg she clasped behind the knee and held it straight out in front. In this formation they swept down off the bend. By the hotdog stand some of the pub crowd began to clap. I caught a glimpse of the escaper’s face: it appeared caught halfway between a big loony grin and serious concern.
‘I thought he had gone bush forever and a day,’ a voice said behind me.
Somebody else said he had slipped out of the bush this morning. ‘Robbie Hale seen him sniffing on the edge of town at daybreak.’
This time, as the skaters came barrelling down the straight before the crowd, my mother threw her head all the way back until her skates were over the escaper’s head, which brought a gasp from the crowd. Then she brought her skates overtop, as if she was doing a backward roll. Over she went until her skates touched the rink. The escaper reached between his legs and drew her through until my mother was the lead skater. She turned to face him now, and he lifted her so she had her legs splayed either side of him and they were joined at the waist. People had stopped talking and were just staring. My mother’s head was tossed back and she held on to the escaper’s shoulders. She started to move up and down with her hips. Neither of them seemed concerned about skate speed. The escaper managed to steer them both up the end shoulder to see them down the straight. On the far side of the rink they moved through the pool of light from the overhead lamps, into shadows, then light again. My mother’s face turned a fluorescent colour; now the escaper’s head fell back. They were locked together in another movement that had nothing to do with skating.
I heard Cadillac come on over the PA to get more skaters onto the rink. But no one was listening. And there was no heart in the message, because Cadillac did not repeat it.
What happened next had nothing to do with Cadillac, or the crowd looking on. From the esplanade a police siren could be heard. The escaper’s head turned a fraction. I believe it was the only intervention he would have heeded. He and my mother had come almost to a standstill in a shadow at the end of the rink. Some of the crowd had moved there to get a better look. The sirens were close now. My mother was lowered onto her skates. She and the escaper stood straight and near to each other, like lovers in a park.
He kissed her once—on the cheek. Then he split. He pushed off and was nearly in a speed crouch when he passed me.
I heard someone bitch that the escaper hadn’t returned his skates. ‘Typical,’ from someone else.
He leapt the turnstile for the esplanade and skated through the first set of lights. One violation after another, cast behind like discarded clothing.
My mother was buttoning her cardigan, as if it was the most important thing in the world. Her cheeks were still flushed. She knew I was nearby, but she looked up in her own good time. She said, ‘You enjoying yourself, Charlie? Not too much, I hope, because I feel like going home now.’
The drunks near the hotdog stand called out things, but she took no notice. ‘Look at that, Charlie,’ she said, and very deliberately she pointed over the heads of the cowboys, to a fairly ordinary sunset.
While we were getting out of our skates Cadillac came out of his glass dome. I had never actually seen him. He had a pointed beard—like the famous record-spinner—but he only just cleared the top of my head. He looked frightened, and in a quiet voice I never imagined might be his he said the police had sent through word that they wished to speak with my mother.
He mentioned the man being an escaper, and my mother, still cool as a cucumber, said, ‘What, you mean that nice young man?’
Two blocks away from the skating rink she permitted herself to say something, and I realised she was shaking like a leaf.
‘I feel like singing,’ she said to the trees. Then she stole a quick look at me. ‘Charlie, you’re not angry with me. Are you, Charlie? Don’t be. I haven’t skated like that for years.’
We came to our street and from here we should have been able to see the house lights. The car wasn’t in the driveway, and I worried that it would have some effect. But she didn’t appear to notice. Or, if she did, she didn’t care. At the door she said she thought she might have a bath. As it happened we pushed through to the living room, where her eyes went straight to the torn quarters of the photograph. She crossed her arms, and thought.
‘Charlie,’ she said. ‘Go get that glue from the top of the fridge. Let’s not disappoint your father.’
amateur nights
one
Naturally they want to know how it all started. They observe that I was once a raindrop.
‘Yes, briefly.’
‘And let’s see, you were once a sheep?’ They push their glasses’ frames another notch down their noses and look up. This is an invitation for me to back down and reveal m
y lighter, frivolous side.
Instead I say, ‘Mary.’ That’s who I was seeing at the time.
‘And you’ve been a sparrow, a knife and fork, Henry Ford? A wood pigeon? You know,’ they say, ‘there are people out there who believe you are a danger to yourself. I mean, really, a sparrow?’
Of course I’m being provocative. After all—a knife and fork, and Henry Ford for god’s sake. Though when they mention the sparrow I usually try to explain. ‘It’s not what you think. Everything is a tight fit and light all at once. A bit like being high.’
Each interview is like every other one. My interrogators come here as doubters and pretty soon they are hunched forward on the edge of their seats saying, ‘No, really?’ and ‘Would you mind telling us a war story?’
Of course it is not my war story, you understand. But it goes like this.
I am a GI and I have just burst in to Hitler’s bunker. He is not dead. He is alive. I repeat—alive. He is looking up the barrel of my gun. Black eyes. Moustache. He is saying, ‘I will give you chewing gum. Do you like Juicy Fruit? No, let me guess. P.K? Arrowmint?’ I’m thinking, Nobody is going to believe this, and, He’s the guy who killed the Jews. I find myself reaching for the Arrowmint when, thank goodness, Sergeant Hawk bursts in with a hand grenade in each hand. Hawk always knows what to do in these situations.
‘Blow the fucker, boy,’ he says.
Then, years later. This is still the same story. Only now I am seventy-three years old. I have grandchildren, and whenever Hitler comes on TV, I want to say, ‘There’s the guy who tried to give me a piece of gum.’ I don’t though. Lord, no. I keep my trap shut, because the last thing I want is to give them an excuse to run me out to the old people’s home. Hitler is on TV again, but I don’t say anything, and it is the most God-awful frustrating thing in the world.
The magazine writers have usually done their homework. And, although I expect their question, I still don’t have a convincing response.
They note that I was once a writer.
Up to now I have been a wise old head; now they see an embarrassed shopkeeper before them. They sense they have scored a point and sit back in their chairs chewing their pencil ends.
I never thought I would become a shopkeeper. I had my heart set on a different club altogether. Balzac. Dickens. I grew up reading their books, and from the moment I first held a pencil I was trying to circle bits of the world and colour them in. I dreamt of contributing wonderful lives, superior lives. There was a time in my life when I would gladly have given up everything to bring another Pickwick into the world, or to register perfectly the colour and taste of love and revenge.
For a number of years I toiled away at my stories. But did anyone ever read them? The question was too terrifying to ponder for long. In moments of clear-headedness, though, I saw my efforts as cast-off matter, simply as proof of industry—at best, proof of a lonely discourse between me and the flickering screen. I began to blame the book, the thing itself. I developed conspiracy theories—but best I don’t go into these. Suffice to say I was ready to explore other possibilities.
I decided to take my characters out into the world—let them loose on a larger population. I took my impersonations to the pub—the Arms, the Cricketers, the Coachman. A distinctly unliterary audience: bodies swollen with piss and wind, firing questions back at President Kennedy’s driver and Henry Ford. It’s funny what works where—Kennedy at the Arms but not the Coachman, my knife-and-fork act at the Post but not the Bond. Whereas Sergeant Hawk and Hitler’s bunker go down well just about anywhere. The old soldiers come up to me afterwards and want to buy me a pint.
two
I think it was the Arms where Neil Owen collared me. I didn’t notice him until the end of the evening. He stood by himself at a distance, without a drink in his hand. Sober too, which gave him a certain distinction. He waited until the old soldiers dispersed before coming forward.
I suppose he was in his late thirties, perhaps a little older, though still with a country boy’s eyes—and shy, that much was clear. He’d patiently waited to get my attention and now he had it he didn’t know what to do with it. ‘I enjoyed the show,’ he said. I thanked him and turned to leave. ‘Actually, I’ve come to ask for your help.’ I stopped and when I turned around he offered his hand. ‘Neil,’ he said. ‘Neil Owen.’
‘We’ll sit down, eh, Neil, and you can tell me what this is about.’
It was difficult for him to spit it out. He released his story—a bit at a time. It seems Neil’s wife had developed an alternative world for herself. An imaginative world. A private kingdom with high walls that prevented him seeing over. This was better than I might have expected, more rewarding than listening to the war stories of old soldiers with their flies undone and the corners of their lips cracking open with spittle.
So far so good. Neil spoke about their market garden venture and I imagined a flat bit of dirt with big puffy clouds rolling over the top. He said, ‘We spend a good deal of time alone with our thoughts. Until recently I would have been the first to say that where Judith goes with her thoughts is her own affair. Until very recently, that is.’ He looked up with hurt eyes. ‘My wife is in love with a fellow over in Russia.’ He watched me, gauging the effect of his words.
I nodded. ‘Go on,’ I said.
‘She dreams about Russia constantly. She spends half her time there. One time when Judith was there, she was raped, then this other fellow picked her up and took her home. As far as I know she’s still with him. I don’t know for sure: she’s clammed up recently. I’m pretty sure. Well, more than sure.’ He paused there and released a big breath. He looked up at the ceiling then back at me. ‘You’re the first person I’ve told this to. By the way, I lied before. This isn’t the first time I caught your act. I wasn’t sure, you see, so I had to come again …’
We talked for the next hour. He went back to the beginning and described his wife’s obsession with things Russian. It had started innocently enough over the winter with her reading a pile of Russian novelists. At first she tried to involve him—reading aloud to share a sentence she felt he might warm to. Gradually, over time, the shelves lengthened with Russian novels and soon she began to dream of Russia. At night Russia was vividly real, unbelievably real. In the mornings she encouraged Neil to put on a ski mask and stand out in the orchard to grasp the texture of Russia. She has told him it is grey with lovely swatches of eye shadow, reds, blues and lighter tones. He put on the ski mask to humour his wife and thought nothing of it.
Then one night his wife lurched awake. Her pyjama top was wet through. Her face was covered in a filmy sweat. He watched his wife’s fingers collect and uncollect. Then her eyes spilt open.
‘Neil?’ she asked.
‘I’m here,’ he said, and instantly her face relaxed.
She lay back in bed and closed her eyes. ‘My god,’ she said.
He leant across and placed his hand on her thumping chest. Then, for the next twenty minutes or so, Neil was the policeman taking down notes as Judith reported back her Russian experience.
Up to now, Russia had been a sunny place—without any dark clefts. But on this night she arrives to a murderous atmosphere rolling through a Jewish neighbourhood. People are fleeing by her. Windowpanes burst onto the street. There are shouts, screams, the whinnying of horses driven into tight spaces. Mattresses have been dragged outdoors and slashed. White feathers lie all over the street. Wading through them is a proud but mute woman: she holds her blouse wide to show the world where her chest has been treated like tree bark for her attacker to carve his initials. An old man staggers out a doorway carrying his bearded head in his hands, blood fountaining out an open neck.
Still, Judith is at the safe remove of the tourist. She is there but not really there. She is wondering where to go next when an older woman takes hold of her elbow and guides her through a cottage to a courtyard. The woman seems to know what to do and when she pauses to gather up a lost kitten Judith is reassured b
y her composure. They climb a ladder to a loft where they arrange themselves face-down on the floorboards. After a few minutes the ghastly violence sweeps underneath them for another street.
Judith paused there, and Neil, thinking it was the end of her account, got up to make them both a cup of tea.
Judith didn’t sleep that night. She fidgeted beside Neil until he too lay looking up into the dark—the two of them kept awake by events in Russia.
A day passed. Judith was planting tomatoes. Burying the trowel and pulling the earth to one side, inserting the plant. Neil walked over to his little farm machine, crouched behind her to stroke her bare arms. He said to her, ‘Judith, can we go back to the other night, that moment you are in the loft …’
She paused from the trowelling, allowing her thoughts to catch up with the request. Then she stood up and looked him squarely in the eye. ‘Just remember,’ she said, ‘you were the one who asked.’
Back to the loft they go. At the sound of the glass breaking in another neighbourhood, she and the other woman raise their heads and look at each other, as if to ask, ‘Is it safe?’ Judith, for one, has had enough. She wants to get out of Russia and return to the Wairarapa. In the loft, the righteous indignation of the tourist has been fermenting inside her. Now, she thinks, if she stands up to the window she will see the gummy hills of home. She is utterly convinced. And when the other woman hisses at her to stay down, Judith smiles confidently in the knowledge of what she knows.
As she approaches the window, Russia comes bounding back into view. Apparently there is no way out. She is the marooned tourist everyone has read about and fears themselves becoming—trapped behind unfriendly borders without a passport, without a visa, without the language to negotiate. Down in the street she sees the Moldavians wiping their bloody knives. At that moment the kitten miaows and a boy of about ten looks up. Briefly, their respective worlds teeter and shift, and then the boy’s eyes begin to narrow and Judith distils his thoughts—his father has promised to reward his alertness with a toy. Her life is about to be traded for a toy soldier. Slowly, the boy raises his finger. One by one, the Moldavians withdraw from their conversation and look up. After a brief consultation, a number of them start for the loft; she can hear them coming up the ladder, their knives and hammers banging against the wood.