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  How old was I? Eight? Nine? It’s a movie show without credits, and a black screen at the start and end. Pine trees. There’s no hush like pine hush. I’m at the little creek running through the grove by the Catholic playing field. Although it is Sunday, no nuns walk on the path. My game is to cover the water with a pine-needle mat. Roly is with me. He builds a needle mountain and tries to crawl inside. That’s scene one. Now here comes Clyde Buckley: scene two. He carries a bird’s nest like a salad bowl and shows us six naked baby birds inside. They seem to be sleeping, although one opens its beak in a half-hearted way. I stroke their heads with my fingertip. They stir but don’t open their spoon-shaped eyes.

  ‘What are you going to do with them?’ Roly asks.

  ‘Show you,’ Clyde says.

  I’ll be quick. He found a stick and fitted it over the creek at its narrowest part, little more than a metre. He took a reel of cotton (black cotton) from his pocket – Clyde was prepared – and hung the baby birds on the stick by their necks. They dangled over the water like naked murderers. Clyde took half a razor blade from his shirt pocket and went along the row cutting off heads. One by one the bodies plopped into the water.

  There, that’s done. As usual, I want to be sick.

  There’s a scene that shows me running home. Only me. In real life Roly ran after me, yelling, ‘Rowan, wait.’ Did I, did he, tell Mum? Did she go after Clyde? I don’t know. There’s nothing at the start or the end. A thing I can’t hide from, though, is that I watched until the last cut was made and the last body sank through my pine-needle mat. So how can I say I’m innocent?

  How I long for Dickie to come home.

  • • •

  I grew up without an idea of sin but with ‘naughty’ emplaced in my mind. What a kind word by comparison, and kind, too, the smack on the back of the hand that went with it. These days I drift in the shoal of ‘cruelty’ and ‘iniquity’. I gasp for air and grasp at innocence. But what is that? I’m over-brimming now with the self I chose to be.

  Let me move aside from that imagery and be quick.

  It is the year of the baby birds and perhaps a year before Lionel’s raid on the Catholic school. He leads me by the hand, which I don’t like. I shake myself free. We’re in Kelly’s farm, among the haystacks. My legs prickle with heat rash and I want to go home, but Lionel has promised me sixpence if I come as far as Burke’s orchard. There, in the bottom corner, Clyde Buckley waits.

  ‘OK, once,’ Lionel says.

  ‘All right,’ Clyde Buckley says in his thick voice.

  Lionel turns to me. ‘Go on,’ he orders.

  It had seemed a small thing, but the fog of difference enclosing Clyde made it large – so I said no, and backed away and turned to run.

  Lionel grabbed my arm.

  ‘No quitting,’ he said. ‘Come on, it’s easy. Just do it quick. You don’t have to pull them down all the way.’ He held me facing Clyde, and lifted the front of my dress. ‘Else no sixpence.’

  Sixpence meant things beyond my reach – a custard pie, a big ice cream, bags of sherbet – so I turned my head away from Clyde, made myself absent, hooked my finger in my pants and pulled the leg across, letting Clyde see. He had time to bend down and breathe – I felt his wet breath on me – then I let the elastic go and jerked my dress free from Lionel’s hand.

  ‘That’s not a real look,’ Clyde said.

  ‘Too bad. It’s all,’ Lionel said.

  ‘Hey –’ But he was blunted by what he had seen.

  I turned and ran, with Lionel yelling after me: ‘You better not tell, Rowan.’

  ‘Sixpence then,’ I cried back – and didn’t tell, have told no one to this day – and he paid me. It doesn’t seem a dreadful sin. Clyde Buckley is dreadful, and Lionel too, in a more sophisticated way, but not me. The girl part of me I’d let Clyde see was just a part, although it was dirty in two ways. I didn’t know more than a whisper about the second, and wasn’t curious; but it was what Clyde Buckley was after, I knew that. So I felt sick, and eager for my sixpence to make me better. I didn’t blame Lionel. All he was after was the money, and that was all right. He got, he boasted to me in a whisper, half a crown, which Clyde had stolen from his mother’s purse – Clyde boasting too, to make himself victor.

  That’s number two of my short films of innocence, which yet raises a welt on my mind. Why the confusion? I can only say, Because my life cannot be broken into bits and viewed that way. Yet I must try.

  So here’s a third. I don’t play an active part in it, but it answered my need to know and it played a part in me. I wish the agent had been different.

  Let me see: I creep in the culvert. The water barely trickles, so it’s summer. I’m able to keep my feet dry. My carefulness, my creeping, mean I’m a spy. My age? Eleven? My knowledge is that Lionel has moved somewhere I can’t go, and what he finds makes him feral, coarse, hungry and satisfied. All I am is hot.

  I watch him framed in the culvert mouth. He’s a round picture on a wall. A flash like electricity outlines him as he steps into the sun. He turns side-on and I close my eyes to be invisible if he looks back. When I open them, Lionel is gone. I start to hurry, careless of the sludge. If I lose him I am bloodless and locked for ever in this cave.

  The swamp runs widening for fifty yards. I follow Lionel’s oozing steps until I come to willow trees and water. Voices there. Lionel’s voice. Clyde Buckley’s voice. I make no sense of what they’re saying and, from my hiding place, very little sense of what I see. Those things poking from their unbuttoned flies are penises, I’m sure of that. I’ve glimpsed, I’ve even seen Lionel’s and Roly’s many times, just as now and then, by accident, they’ve seen me. These parts of us must be covered, although they’re nothing to get upset about. But these huge things Lionel and Clyde hold, are they penises? They look as big as my arm. And when they stop stroking and rubbing and put them together like crossed swords to see whose is bigger – it’s Clyde’s, by a long way – I find myself choking with a kind of grief. It’s not true, what I’ve been told. I had pictured penises growing as long as butter beans and no fatter, but these, especially Clyde’s, are huge and thick and blunt and cruel, and have fat red bits on the end.

  Now and then I’ve tried to find an adjective for erect penises – not that I’ve seen many: three in fact, Lionel’s and Clyde’s on that day, and Dickie’s of course. Three. Believe it or not. But I’ve seen the thing in books and tried for a word – and now I have it. Overweening. If I fit it into that episode in the willow trees, it satisfies my need for control of what I see.

  I won’t stay now for the rest of it, although I stayed then – the renewed rubbing and what Clyde called the shooting off – but creep away and slop through the culvert again, then stand up straight and run through Kelly’s paddocks and burst into the kitchen and into the bathroom, where I wash my hands as though they have been the busy ones, and wash my face as though it’s my mind.

  There’s nothing to be excited about. It became a small thing as I grew older. I suppose I can say I was innocent. It will do. But ‘overweening’ – that’s the word. How clever of me to find it.

  five

  Here is a strange thing about my brothers: Lionel has an outline and Roly is smudged. I can be kinder to my younger brother than that: Roly stands in the dappled shade.

  Because Avondale College didn’t open until 1945, Lionel went to Mt Albert Grammar. His schooling gets away from me. Roly joined me at Avondale where I passed everything with high marks. Roly failed. He was in a technical form, doing woodwork and metalwork. As a practical boy he should have done well, but school and Roly never fitted. The air was unbreathable in a classroom. He forgot what his hands should do. He forgot language. Because he joked and smiled and woke up with a start, his classmates liked him. So did several of the teachers. Others caned him. Roly did not seem to care. It was as if caning stood in the natural order of things.

  There was nothing wrong with my brother. There were, there are, more things righ
t than the world with its systems will accommodate. One teacher rapped him on the head with his knuckles: ‘Born without a brain, eh, Beach? Solid bone in there.’ Oh no, Mr Teacher, more things than you could ever know. He had his dreaming; he had his making – dreaming of real things, not phantoms or fulfilments; making things in his mind and then joining mind with hands and building a pine-needle mountain to wriggle inside.

  I have to admit there was no long-term purpose. Roly did not see beyond his fingertips or feel out tomorrow with his mind. But he knew from the moment he could run a wobbly furrow through the soil with his finger and sprinkle radish seeds in it that plants require their whole season to grow.

  Our mother made no bones about her disappointment in Roly. Dad loved him best. In memory, his hand rests on Roly’s shoulder, his fist, loosely curled, bangs him on top of his head. They talk to each other in monosyllables. In the garden Dad points and Roly brings him what he needs – a bucketful of compost, his knife to cut the seed potatoes. The sun comes out from behind a cloud. Roly digs the handkerchief out of Dad’s pocket and knots the corners and hands it to him, and Dad stops digging to fit it on his head.

  On Saturdays Roly sits on the bar of Dad’s bike and they ride off to watch the football on Loomis domain. They go eel fishing in the creek. And Dad spends hours with Roly building a canoe from corrugated iron; then they build a better one when Roly sinks the first in the rapids below the swing bridge. So, love, uncomplicated, flowing two ways – I’m tempted to write like honey, and yes, I will – it flowed like honey.

  Mum’s love was of a different sort. She spent hours helping Roly with his schoolwork. Sitting at the kitchen table, with her finger directing his pencil, and sometimes with her arm around him, she became convinced he understood. Long division: he could do it. Spelling: he could remember that ‘i’ came before ‘e’ except after ‘c’. She helped him with the technical drawing that was part of his woodwork course. But he could never be quick enough for her. She felt a kind of shame in having a child who was ‘slow’, and in the end she jumped from her chair and flung herself away. ‘You’re not trying, Roland. I don’t know how I came to have such a stupid boy.’ Then Roly sat at the table, grinning to himself. I think he grinned to stop himself from crying.

  Lionel protected him the way he protected me. It was a form of self-expression. He also released his cruelty on him. ‘A pinch and a punch for the first of the month,’ he said on every first of the month. His projecting middle knuckle raised an egg-sized lump on Roly’s forearm. (He did the same, more softly, to me, but I punched back: ‘A pinch and a punch for the first of the month, and no returns. You forgot that.’ I dug my fingernails into my pinch and my middle knuckle into his breastbone.)

  Roly cried when Lionel hurt him, although he never cried at school. He was an easy laugher too. He laughed every time Lionel said cow juice instead of milk and cackle-berries instead of eggs. When Roly started using Lionel’s jokes, Lionel stopped. His dumb small brother devalued them. ‘Yum, yum pig’s bum makes good chewing gum.’ He said it no more. He stopped his raucous chant: ‘Once aboard the lugger and the girl is mine.’ Then Roly, with no one to copy, fell silent too.

  Silence is what I remember best about him. He chattered as a small boy; he mimicked and joked and interjected when he was older; but in his teens he rarely opened his mouth. Looking at his years, I see that his wrapping up of himself came with puberty. I’ve mentioned Lionel’s in its most obvious (overweening) manifestation, but Roly gave no evidence of that sort. There was body hair and secrecy and silence and the deepening of his voice, but perhaps its plainest expression was his stepping away from Lionel. He was shorter than his older brother but more muscular. If Lionel came at him with a physical threat, Roly would simply hold him and push him away. With me he became more distant and courteous. He gave our difference its due. It was not entirely something he had learned from Mum, but came equally from the intertwined ways we had travelled and his apprehension of their untangling now. I caught him looking at me as though working me out, and felt like a page in a book with Roly’s finger moving along the lines. He wondered who I was. He acknowledged the strangeness of a sister.

  Roly turned fifteen, and although Mum disagreed, and fought her case, Dad insisted there was no point in his staying at school. His love for Roly gave him the strength to overrule her. He would find Roly a job in the shoemaking factory. Oh no, never! Mum would blockade the station before letting Roly climb on that morning train. They finally agreed on a bricklaying apprenticeship. But Roly, it turned out, had no feeling for bricks: too slow with his hands, too imprecise with his eye. He took labouring jobs in vineyards and worked the picking season in orchards. For a while he was at the freezing works at Westfield – which meant climbing on two trains – and later at the city markets, humping fruit and vegetables around. He claimed to like it, and looked blankly at me when I said, ‘Lifting, carrying, putting down’; and even more blankly when, repairing my nastiness, ‘It gives you time to think about things.’

  Then, at eighteen, Roly upsticks (Lionel’s word for the event) and was gone. We were in our Te Atatu Road house by that time, a move beyond Mum and Dad’s expectations, made possible by a legacy on Mum’s father’s death. She had thought herself written out of his will, but no, there it was, her one-third – enough for a better house, and enough to educate her children. Now, Roland, I hear her inward cry, now you can have a second chance.

  He withstood her pressure for a year and then he bolted. I had more than a feeling it would happen. I had evidence: his rucksack planted behind a hydrangea bush by the gate. I opened it, of course: a work shirt, work trousers (he left his best clothes behind, which I found significant), underclothes, socks, sandshoes (which, in fact, were his best shoes), a tin plate (brand new), and a knife, fork and spoon taken from our cutlery drawer. There was also a Zane Grey novel with a page turned down (it took him a month to finish a book, even a Western).

  It wasn’t late, but his bedroom light was off. I knocked softly on the door and went in.

  ‘You forgot your toothbrush and you should take some handkerchiefs.’

  He rose from the pillow. Light from a street lamp yellowed one side of his face.

  ‘Don’t tell, Rowan.’

  ‘I won’t. Where are you going?’

  ‘I’ll hitch-hike for a while. Then I’ll get a job on an orchard.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I dunno. Where I find one, I guess.’

  The gilded half of his face was smiling quietly. I thought, He’s only got half a brain.

  ‘How about money?’

  ‘I’ve saved up.’

  ‘Will you write to them?’

  ‘I was going to put a note in the letterbox, but you can tell them now, eh? Not till tomorrow night.’

  ‘Not on your life. Mum’ll kill me.’

  ‘OK.’ He never argued.

  ‘Are you coming back ever?’

  ‘Sometimes, I guess.’

  ‘Come at Christmas, Roly. For Dad.’

  ‘OK, I suppose.’

  I felt I was picking things off the top of his mind and not reaching deeper inside.

  ‘Write to them a bit. Just a note will do.’

  ‘OK,’ again.

  I longed to give advice but couldn’t find any, so I kissed him on the forehead and went to my room. Waking in the morning, I heard him in the kitchen, moving in his usual way – quiet with his Weetbix, quiet with his cup of tea – and heard the murmur of Mum’s voice as she came from her bedroom to see him off. I knelt at my window and watched my brother go. I pinched the curtains under my chin, framing my face, with the half-romantic notion of giving Roly an image to remember; but he pulled his rucksack from the hydrangea bush, closed the gate quietly and walked away without looking back; and I knew that for him leaving home was no big thing, it was his next step.

  When she found his note, Mum had no one to burst her storm on. She was in her still and dangerous state when I arrived home.
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br />   ‘Did you know about Roland?’

  ‘No. What’s happened?’ I said.

  ‘Read that.’

  Dear Mum and Dad, he wrote, I’m heading down south to look for a job. I’ll write at Christmas. Love, Roly. P.S. Thanks for everything.

  ‘Christmas,’ Mum said. ‘We’ve just had Christmas. He’ll write in a year. And what a lovely afterthought. Thanks for everything. If he only knew …’

  ‘He’ll be all right, Mum. He’s eighteen.’

  ‘You knew. I bet you knew.’

  ‘No, no,’ I lied.

  Mum sat down at the table and gave a big farewell sob. She covered her face. I made a cup of tea.

  ‘I phoned Constable Norton – the fat fool,’ she said.

  ‘Mum, they can’t—’

  ‘I know they can’t. He asked how old Roland was and when I said eighteen … What can Roland do? He’s got no skills. What sort of job can he find?’

  ‘Picking fruit.’

  ‘Picking fruit,’ Mum spat. ‘After eighteen years of trying with him – picking fruit.’ She plucked a banana from the bowl and threw it backhanded across the room, where it bounced off the wall and sat grinning on a chair.

  ‘Not bananas, we don’t grow those,’ I said.

  ‘You knew. The pair of you. Thank God for Lionel.’

  When Dad came home and read the note he sighed and sat down in the chair Mum had left pushed out at the table.

  ‘So,’ he said.

  ‘Is that all you can say?’

  ‘Well, Isobel, he’s eighteen –’

  ‘What’s so magical about that age?’

  ‘– and he’s old enough to make his own decisions.’

  ‘See what he says. See it.’ She nailed the note to the table with her finger. ‘“Thanks for everything.” Isn’t that nice?’

  But Dad read the postscript differently. He saw that Roly meant ‘every thing’ – their love and care and attention – every thing in his ordinary and magical eighteen years. The postscript was the best gift Dad ever had. Lionel found Roly’s note in his wallet when the police handed it to him after Dad died.