Blindsight Page 13

  All this time she was in Christchurch living with an aunt. I don’t know when her minders discovered she was pregnant. I don’t know whether giving up the baby was her idea. My guess is that she was incapable of judgement by that time.

  Australia. It had the ring of truth. Gordon had turned his life to searching for Marlene, and that huge country with its dry desert heart … I’m speculating. He wrote to Mother and Father, saying little more than: I’m in Sydney now, I’m in Brisbane, in Melbourne. They had a letter from as far away as Perth. I don’t believe he was searching by that time. He was letting Marlene’s loss – and something else, something else – settle in his heart and drain away the possibility of ‘other people’.

  He stopped writing after Perth. Guessing again, I say that someone in Wellington told him Marlene had killed herself. So he had nobody left. Marlene dead. Handy dead. His sister Alice lost and gone as surely as Marlene.

  Although it probably did not matter where he lived after that, he made his way back to Wellington and began his life on the streets. He became a familiar figure, growing older, shabbier, more bent, remote from voices and gestures aimed at him. I’ve spoken with people who said that for several years he wore a suit but when it fell to pieces he took his clothes out of charity bins. Others say that he sometimes smiled and said hello. That must have been in the early days, in the sixties perhaps, when he told the president’s men that he ate scones. Later on he kept his eyes down, seeing no more than the pavement, seeing shoes and whatever occupied his mind.

  He wasn’t known as Gordon. His name was Cyril.

  And I knew none of this. When I thought of him I pictured Paddington, Kings Cross, the Harbour Bridge, Bondi Beach, with Gordon – how shall I put it? – sloping along, minding his business, and working quietly at finding his way back to us. For many years I believed he would come.

  Lecturing at a conference in Sydney in 1974, I looked for his face in the audience. If I had seen him I would have rushed down from the podium. ‘Gordon, Gordon,’ I was ready to cry. That night I went out from my hotel in the central city and walked along Oxford Street, miles and miles, as far as Bondi Junction, and back on the other side, looking into restaurants and side streets, into buses passing by, and looking for tin shacks like his one in Ghuznee Street. Back at my hotel, I stepped into the warmth and quiet of the foyer, and knew that I must not do that sort of thing again. I telephoned Neville in Auckland – it was after midnight back there – and told him I had given up Gordon. I told him Gordon was wherever he was, doing whatever he did, and I’d leave him there, and Neville said: ‘He’s like a fish in the sea. Don’t try and catch him any more. Think of porpoises, Alice. Or sprats if you like, with a silver flash. Think of him being where he belongs.’ It was helpful advice, although without the magic he intended.

  Meanwhile Gordon was in Wellington. Gordon was not Gordon any more.

  Neville was Neville right to the end. He was the whole man in my life. All the others have bits dropping off, more each time I remember them; and I have to fit Richie together like Frankenstein’s monster to understand his effect on me. There’s a sense in which I’m a made thing too, in which my mental health is fictile. It’s like a jar Neville turned on a wheel and shaped with his hands.

  At one o’clock I sat on a bench in the Harvey grounds. Once again I had forgotten to cut my lunch. Neville came out and sat beside me. He rattled a brown paper bag under my nose.

  ‘Sandwich?’ he said.

  I took one. ‘God, Neville, they’re awful,’ I said.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Marmite on stale bread. I haven’t had one of these for twenty years.’

  ‘Good healthy tucker. Eat up.’

  The Marmite burned my tongue and the bread scoured my mouth. I ate complaining.

  He said: ‘I’ve got a spare bedroom if you want. Nice big room. You could put in a desk. You might want to sew new curtains. I don’t know.’

  ‘I can’t sew.’

  ‘You can have the sunroom as a sitting-room. You wouldn’t have to see much of me. I don’t want your stockings drying in the bathroom though.’

  ‘People would say I was your mistress,’ I said.

  ‘Do we give a brass razoo what people say?’

  I was his lodger for a year, then his mistress – no, lover, I prefer that – then his wife. We slipped away one afternoon and married in the registry office, with a clerk as witness. I said we should go for a drink, then back to work, but Neville drove out of town instead and we walked the length of Rabbit Island beach, I with my stockings off and skirt tucked up and he with his trouser bottoms rolled. Each wave carried thousands of tiny tuatua up the sand. Their shells were almost transparent, half the size of my thumbnail. They poked out their tongues and burrowed in, were gone in a second, millions of tiny lives under the sand. Neville had known they would be coming ashore. It made a perfect wedding day. As for bridal white, my feet in the waves were washed as white as snow.

  Our living together had been a scandal to some, and our marriage proved to others that I had not recovered my wits. We did not give a brass razoo or a tinker’s cuss. I have never been more simply contented than with Neville. Contentment became my peak of happiness. To hell with ecstasy: it’s over-rated; it’s chocolate fudge. Makes you fat, then collapses your cells until your outside sags and your inside turns to sludge. Contentment with Neville kept me active, kept me lean. I had to run to keep up with him, then learn to sit quiet, holding hands, at the end of the day. I felt as if I owned all my bones, all the flesh on them and the blood in me, down to the busy capillaries in the ends of my toes. Mind and body were alive, both up and jumping; our love-making was friendly and good, and sleep a renewal for the day to come. The image our lives in Nelson conjours up is of a clinker-built dinghy with a skinny-shanked outboard motor puttering at the back. It noses into reeds and the shingly mouths of creeks, where Neville and I nearly tip out in our eagerness to uncover, to see. Then it lifts its snout and speeds to the opposite shore – the old motor beating the water like eggs – where we sit on a pebble beach, beside a driftwood fire, and talk over what we have found. Neville and I: unglamorous, busy, secure. We were well matched.

  He was vain about the number of names he could call himself: soil chemist, zoologist, lepidopterist, and more. The one he was proudest of was coleopterist, and among the coleoptera, weevils were the ones he liked best. Their long noses, made for pushing in, appealed to him. Once or twice we collaborated, most notably on beetles that carry fungal spores, but his important work had been done years before – on pine weevils (the timber industry has cause to thank him) and an Australian termite that attacked telegraph poles and wharf piles. What else? The flax-infesting weevil, the gorse seed weevil, Fuller’s rose weevil, the apple seed chalcidoid wasp, codling moth, the wheat-sheath miner, parasites for slaters and earwigs – all these in his work for the Harvey and the DSIR, while at home, in his back garden, in his kumara bed, he carried out experiments on the breeding habits of the yellow admiral butterfly. Inside, in every space, he kept his collection of shells, one of the largest in New Zealand (Neville as taxonomic conchologist was unrivalled). In a workroom off the kitchen he mounted specimens of whatever walked or flew or swam. When I moved in he was scraping frog bones and wiring them into skeletons, using a twist drill he had made from a darning needle flattened at the point and bevelled on the edges.

  In Auckland he took up what he called his new position – free spirit – although I told him he had been that all his life. When I went out on fieldwork he came as my unpaid assistant, although our positions often seemed reversed. He knew as much about fungi and algae as I in the end.

  This scrawny, leathery, slightly mad old man. His eyes of brightest blue. His mind that probed like a weevil’s snout. Good science, he told me once, brought the imagination into agreement with reality – a long journey most of the time, and one that both refined and intoxicated. At secondary school our English teacher read us a poem – I
don’t remember the title or the author – that had a man in it who had fed on honeydew. I have seen Neville do that many times, standing by a black beech tree, sipping translucent droplets with the tip of his tongue, then turning with ‘flashing eyes and floating hair’ (another bit from the poem) to beat off wasps competing for them. I tasted honeydew once or twice, but did not make a habit of it because it was excreta from scale insects under the bark. Neville said excreta was just a word, and anyway, no matter what end it came out of, sweetness was a gift from God (in whom, by the way, he did not believe). ‘Weave a circle round him thrice and close your eyes with holy dread’ – another bit. I never did that. He invited me inside and I went happily, and count my years with him the best of my life.

  We bought a house on the Scenic Drive, along from Titirangi. Auckland lay spread out at our feet. My mother and father lived down there in a weatherboard bungalow overlooking a mangrove creek. We dropped down the hill road like a stone into a puddle. Loomis, a suburb now, lay off to the west. We bypassed New Lynn, where years before our family had driven to the flicks at the Delta, Pt Chevalier where the loonies had been kept, and the zoo where animals less dangerous than mad people had paced and glared in their cages, and came to Meola creek and Earl and Merry Ferry. Their only way of coping with Neville was by good manners. They retreated into cups of tea and slices of fruit cake. He signalled me, spiking up his hair, when he couldn’t take any more, and I said: ‘Neville wants to have a look at the mangroves,’ and he said: ‘See if I can find any crocodiles,’ and Mother always said, when he was gone: ‘Are you sure you’re all right, Alice?’ I told them I was, and did not ask if they were. They would have said yes, and believed it too, although Father was still practising his vice. He was husband to Mother and gardener to Mrs Imrie, now Mrs Weeks, ‘helping her out’. Trevor Weeks trained horses at the Avondale racecourse. Although he came home to eat and sleep, he had left Mrs Imrie – I can’t help calling her that – years before. He worked his horses in the morning and spent his afternoons in the pub, and in a number of what his wife called ‘widowy beds’. His horses ran last almost as if he trained them for it, yet a string of one-horse owners kept his stables full: failed bookies, suburban grocers, factory storemen, mates who had been brickies all their lives and had always dreamed of owning a horse. (That pair shifted their gelding and won a race, Father showed me in the Herald – how they grinned!)

  Weeks treated Mrs Imrie badly. She had bruises to powder, all over again. Father grew moist-eyed at her plight. Every two or three weeks he loaded his mower and clippers in the boot of his car and drove out to Avondale to tidy her section. ‘Trimming her edges,’ Mother said drily when I stopped by. There was no stress, no jealousy, in my parents’ house; they had reached a marvellous understanding. He would never leave her, he loved her best, while she wanted only to be unfussed and have his company when she needed it. To maintain her position she allowed him to ‘exercise his compassion’, as Neville put it. I wanted to know if Mrs Imrie still wore a housecoat and mules.

  I did not look in my letterbox for a letter from Gordon, but when I visited Mother and Father could not prevent myself from feeling in theirs before going inside. At some point Mother would say: ‘Have you heard from Gordon?’ – say it casually, as though letters from him were a regular event. When I said no, Father would nod his head and say in a voice pitched a little higher than usual: ‘He’ll be in touch.’

  ‘When he’s ready,’ Mother would say. They succeeded each other as though performing a litany.

  I held myself as sharp as a blade, but lost my edge as the years went by, until I wondered what I would do if I spotted him somewhere. Rush forward and crush him in my arms? Watch from behind a potted fern? Sneak away? I tried various figures and formulae to explain our condition, his and mine: we were two particles affecting each other in a quantum way – action at a distance, it is called. That helped for a while; but I needed to know where he was and what speed he was travelling and whether he was particle or wave. It’s a conceit that lost its efficacy as it grew old. Then I thought of myself as a cracked tooth that did not affect my biting and chewing, but now and then some cold or hot thing, Gordon, touched the nerve … I’m only reminded of it because I have a tooth like that now. Neville’s sprat flashing in the sea was, as I have said, useful for a while. I changed the sprat to a salmon to give it weight.

  Gordon never got in touch. My parents died without hearing from him. The same will happen to me, but I know why.

  Mother went first: a mini-explosion in her brain. How lucky she was. Father took longer and suffered more. I tried to get Mrs Imrie – a widow by that time, with a surprising amount of money that sly Weeks had salted away – to lend a hand in caring for him, but she told me she was no good at that sort of thing. ‘I’ll pop in and see him now and then. Does he like chocolates? You know, in all these years I’ve never found out.’ She came once, sat for twenty minutes with her painted fingernails pricking the back of his hand, and I didn’t see her again until the funeral.

  I’m shuffling twenty years like playing cards. Work and home and family, illness and growing old, deception, remorse, forgetfulness – I lay them down, but always play Neville as my trump card. He became frail, his joints malfunctioned, his eyes began to darken, but he never once blamed his body or saw it as other than himself. His skin was his boundary. Mind, he insisted, went that far. Poor circulation was a kind of forgetting. He sent his mind down to his frozen feet to find out what was going on. Liver marks on his hands? He found out why. Aging became his study and, in a way, his entertainment. ‘See –’ he would show me, sliding and compressing the skin on the backs of his hands – ‘I can make new territory. Ridges and gullies and mountain ranges. It’s terra incognita, love. We could set out to conquer the West. And watch if I push the other way. A different land. You could hide from a posse doing that. Slip into a different universe.’

  He had to stop fine work because of his eyes. One night, just before his pancreatic cancer was diagnosed, a car in front of ours on the Scenic Drive knocked over a possum. I got out and carried the body to Neville. He felt its bones all over and found them unbroken, so we took it home. The next day he skinned and gutted it, then spent several days scraping its bones. He dried and articulated them, then wired and glued them in a crouching position. It was his last piece of work. When I left Auckland I gave the skeleton to a school. His other things – shells and all – went to a museum.

  He was moderately friendly to his cancer but never granted it more than outsider status. He called it the lodger. It killed him in only four months. His doctor found secondaries, and several days later Neville whispered to me: ‘The lodger has taken over the house so I’m moving out of doors.’ He died soon afterwards, midway between Mother and Father.

  I had looked for Gordon at Mother’s funeral. I did not look for him at Neville’s. He had no place.

  Now the card with Father’s face on it. He was a robust old man, although weak in his mind. I wanted him to die mowing Mrs Imrie’s lawn. That would have been appropriate. But he too went from cancer, and I won’t go into it. It took longer than Neville’s and wasted him from twelve stone to six, from a man with a big, kindly visage to a huge-eyed monkey or spectre-faced lemur – with, thank God, its understanding drugged. I sat with him as he died quietly.

  I wanted Gordon at Father’s funeral. I looked for him in the crematorium chapel and later outside on the paths, thinking perhaps I might see him striding away. I would not have run after him, but I fantasised that he would turn and wave before going on among the graves. But only Mrs Imrie was there, on a wooden bench, smoking a cigarette in a holder. I said goodbye to the half dozen people who had come, and sat with her.

  ‘I didn’t come inside, dear, because I would have cried and there’s nowhere to fix my make-up.’

  She told me Father had been a sweetie, her favourite man, then changed it to second favourite. The thing that was wrong with him was he had no oomph. I did not go into
that, but asked about the man waiting in her car. He looked like a bruiser. Mrs Imrie would score some more black eyes.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘someone to keep me company. Don’t stay too long a widow, Alice. Although, come to think of it, some of them …’

  We chatted about Loomis, leaving out her second-favourite man. Imrie had married two more wives: got rid of the first – adultery again – then found himself ruled by the second. You saw them at the races, Mrs Imrie said, with Jock always half a step behind. The wife held out her hand without looking and he put whatever she needed into it. ‘I smile at him but I don’t think he knows who I am. Or really who he is any more. Poor Jock.’

  The fat-necked man in the car flicked ash out the window. I looked at Mrs Imrie’s crinkled chest and strawberry mouth. He was thirty years younger, and I might have found a way of warning her if I had not remembered Neville and me. Not that one could compare – yet she had bright eyes and a youthful readiness.

  She said: ‘I always liked your little brother. He was nice.’

  ‘You knew him?’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes. Walking with his schoolbag. He helped me once when I broke the heel off my shoe. He walked me home. I had my arm right round a pretty boy. I think he got a wee bit excited. I might have asked him in if he’d been older.’

  ‘I wish you had.’

  ‘Other times – I mean with other boys … But I mustn’t be naughty. That’s why I was so upset when I saw him.’