Blindsight Page 6

  ‘So you’ve got a brother Gordon then, OK?’

  ‘My family is no business of yours.’

  I’ve seldom been so weak in a declaration. One part of my mind was asking: Adrian, did he say? I wanted to hug him, then sit him at my table and feed him carrot cake. He was – I believed it, I throbbed with belief – Gordon’s grandson. It had sometimes crossed my mind that the girl would get herself pregnant. And here, in my kitchen, was a person coming down from him. But other parts – I was fragmented – cried no. I could not handle closeness; I had done without it since my husband Neville died, and even he had taken no share of Gordon. How dared this boy claim to be a part? I would not allow it; and must not let Gordon be hurt. Must keep him locked away for his sake more than mine. Did he have a ‘sake’? I had to believe in it, although it might be no more than an evenness in the flow of his days.

  ‘Gordon wasn’t as tall as this. And he had fair hair.’ I’m an easy liar; say the first thing into my head, then follow it up, knowing how facts strung together can confuse. Never stop at one. Don’t stop at two. ‘And crooked teeth. He never had a mouth full of choppers like this. He liked girls with dark hair too, not blondes. She looks a bit silly, does your Marl. A bit of a dolly bird. My brother liked serious girls.’

  The boy flushed. I wondered if he might be dangerous.

  ‘I don’t mean to insult your grandma.’

  ‘You can’t any more. She’s dead.’

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry. Well, grandparents grow old. Was she special to you? Were you close?’

  That was as gentle as I could be. I’ve never seen the tragedy in old people dying – although Marlene, whom I’d met once, and been clutched on the forearm by, would not have been much over sixty if she were still alive.

  ‘She died when she was twenty,’ Adrian said. ‘She killed herself.’

  Her palm had been warm and damp. It left a patch on my arm that cooled as it dried. She had smelled of cheap perfume and dance-hall sweat. It was as if I deflected Adrian’s blow through touch and smell. Perhaps, with my mind reeling, those senses defended me. They were not enough.

  ‘Oh,’ I said: a disembodied sound. It echoed in a hollow deep within me.

  Adrian sat me down on a kitchen chair. He ran a glass of water, which I drank in three gulps. Then I was able to say: ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Did you know her?’

  ‘We met once. For just a minute or two.’

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘In a dance hall. It was called the Majestic Cabaret. We said hello, that’s all. Gordon was in the toilet. I went home when he came back. I don’t think she was his girlfriend then. Just someone he’d asked out.’

  ‘She was later on though? His girlfriend?’

  ‘Yes, she was.’

  ‘How come you never met her again?’

  ‘I lived in Nelson. I was only across here for the weekend and I never came back.’

  ‘Did he tell you about her in letters?’

  ‘I don’t remember. I don’t keep letters, so don’t ask.’ I was recovering and meant to say no more, but had to explain: ‘I didn’t know she was dead. As far as I knew, they broke up. There wasn’t anything special going on.’

  ‘Except my dad.’

  ‘Are you sure of that? I mean …’

  ‘She was sleeping round? No way.’

  ‘I don’t want to offend you, but so long after is there any way to tell?’

  ‘Sure. Let me ask my grandpa. Tell me where he is.’

  He said ‘grandpa’ with such certainty, nailing Gordon down. I had no word to match it, but answered as I had to, with false honesty: ‘Gordon would have told me if she was pregnant. He would have married her, he believed in things like that.’

  ‘So let me ask him. It can’t do any harm.’

  ‘It’s not possible,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’

  I looked into his young eyes and said the first thing, confident I would find whatever else was needed: ‘Gordon died a long time ago. He died not long after – what’s her name, Marl?’

  Adrian’s face contracted. It was not that openness went out; excitement, expectation went out. I felt the pain of it and looked away, then made a little moan at what I was doing. He took it for grief and managed to say: ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.’ He shrugged in apology. ‘But … If you don’t feel like telling me now, can I come back?’

  ‘How it happened? Is that what you want to know?’

  ‘It’s just, shit, I feel cut off. Him being dead, I mean. So, anything …’

  ‘It was a motorbike. He rode it too fast.’

  ‘Motorbike?’

  ‘Gordon always wanted one. He kept it in his front yard. It didn’t always go.’ How I can lie! ‘But when it did, he took it out for spins. You didn’t have to wear a helmet then. A helmet might have saved him.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He was going too fast round a corner and he hit a tram. But no –’ I did not want blood, I was starting to see him – ‘he didn’t end up under the wheels. It was instantaneous.’

  Adrian was silent. ‘Where was it?’

  ‘Coming down the hill from Brooklyn.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘1962.’ The year I married Neville: it’s always the first that comes to mind.

  ‘That’s more than twenty years before I was born.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘Dad must have been only two.’

  He was lifting heavy weights out of the past, and growing dizzy with the strain.

  ‘Sit down. I’ll get you another drink.’ I fetched the juice packet and filled his glass. ‘What were you hoping for? What did you want to find out?’

  ‘My father got adopted as soon as he was born. His parents, adoptive parents – well, my grandma – she didn’t tell him until he got his cancer. I dunno, maybe she thought it would help. It could just as easy have knocked the bottom out of him.’

  ‘But it didn’t?’

  ‘It got him going. He started trying to find who his real parents were. Grandma didn’t know. But my dad was a persistent guy and he tracked down Marlene all right. Got her name. But finding she was dead, that really knocked him.’

  ‘What about your mother?’

  ‘They’re divorced.’

  I said I was sorry, but in fact I was fascinated. It was as if he was taking photos on an instant camera and pulling them out and showing me.

  ‘Were divorced, I mean. Dad had liver cancer. It killed him pretty quick. Well, two years, that seemed quick. But one of the things he said was, “Try and find him, Adie. Tell him hello from me.”’

  ‘You can’t now,’ I said, and patted his arm. I gave myself a tick for putting Gordon out of his reach.

  ‘Where’s he buried? I’d like to see his grave.’

  ‘No, you can’t,’ I said. ‘He was cremated. We took the ashes to Loomis – that’s where he grew up – and scattered them along the edge of the creek. It’s sentimental, I suppose, but Gordon would have liked it.’ I’ll come to believe this, I thought. ‘Look, Adrian, all this must be a shock. Would you like to stay for lunch? I was getting ready to have it when you came. Then I can tell you what Gordon was like as a boy. He was good at football. Do you play that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, tell me about yourself. It’s not every day one gets a new relative.’

  ‘One thing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why did you say it wasn’t him when you saw the photo?’

  ‘Because,’ I said – and suddenly I was crying; keeping on with my lie to Adrian, but telling a truth I’d never said out loud before – ‘because I didn’t want him back, not so suddenly. Because I love him more than anyone in my life.’

  Tears ran down my cheeks. I blocked them with my hands.

  ‘I’ve never loved anyone else, not in that way.’

  Adrian is taller than Gordon by a centimetre or two, although Gordon topped six feet
before he began to stoop. He’s light-boned and meagrely fleshed and sometimes when I look at him the word emaciated comes to mind. I reject it because there’s no hint of wasting away; rather he seems to fill himself daylong, by enquiry, curiosity, by the openness of his senses and his mind. In appearance he’s a scarecrow: has put his hair in dreadlocks since coming to live with me. He takes no care of his clothes. He doesn’t wash as frequently as I’d like. He eats like a horse. I’m bothered by his long neck, housing muscles, tendons, arteries, bone, passages for air and food and water, while joining head to heart, intelligence to motion – such a fragile duct for all that function. I worry about his mind, his happiness. Adrian’s future has a way of consuming my past. His course can be altered by what I reveal.

  When I asked about his job he said he was a barista and told me it’s harder than it looks. I’ve stopped in Cuba Street several times and watched him at work behind his throat-clearing machine – a kind of race, a kind of dance, a trade, I suppose. The café is not the sort I go into. Perhaps wrongly, I feel I wouldn’t be welcome in my silver hair and expensive clothes. It’s called Outscape. The walls are painted with space girls and alien creatures in fantastic landscapes. Adrian looks at home there. One must strip the walls, still the noise, alter surfaces, but also strip, still, alter oneself to find the young – find who they are, meet on our common ground, which is, of course, as wide as our essential being. But that’s no task for me. My task is smaller.

  He has a huge stringed instrument: a double bass. It beats like a heart, sometimes doing just enough to keep alive, at other times excited by love or lust or hunger or its own capabilities. Adrian plays his instrument well. He tells me the bass – such an impressive beast – can’t stand alone for very long. Its job, he says, is more like stitching, even when it beats hard and fast. It fastens things together: the sort of instrument, I think, Gordon might have chosen.

  Adrian borrowed my car to shift his belongings from his ‘squat’ in Newtown to my house. I did not ask if he had a driver’s licence. It’s a time for trusting.

  ‘What on earth,’ I exclaimed when he carried the monstrous thing – swollen, polished, hollowed out, domineering, lovely – through the gate.

  ‘Told you I played music,’ he grinned. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep it over at Massey most of the time.’

  He is studying jazz part-time at the conservatorium. I went to a lunchtime concert and heard him at his stitching, delicate with his fingers, strong with his hands, up and down the strings of his double bass. Several times he played solo and people clapped, as they had for saxophone and drum solos. I could not tell whether these bits were improvised, earning applause for invention as well as skill, or whether someone had thought the notes out first. I enjoyed the concert, although some of it was too loud. It set up movements in my breathing and my blood that were quite new. There’s a lot of communication in this music. It’s big statement most of the time but aesthetic probings go on. Yet Adrian stayed private, it seemed. Stern-faced, he played for himself. It disappointed me. I asked him why he didn’t show some emotion, and he said: ‘You don’t know what I’m like inside.’ That’s all he’ll say. He doesn’t want to talk about his music. It’s another of the things that fill him – the most satisfying perhaps, yet it seems to cause linguistic impoverishment. I’ll abide by his wish. A kind of language comes from his room when he brings his double bass home and practises half the night. There’s strictness, effort, discipline and a happy freedom at the end.

  I don’t see much of him, with his job and his studies. He puts his board money on the kitchen table. I don’t want board and every now and then I leave it there. We have a struggle, but I need the table clear so he wins in the end. When I asked him if he had a student loan he told me politely it was none of my business. So I’ve started a savings account at my bank. The board money goes there and he’ll get it when he leaves. My present. I don’t think he’ll put it back on the table.

  Writing that makes me frown. But I don’t kid myself. When he has exhausted his interest in having an old lady interested in him – in having that outmoded thing, a great-aunt – Adrian will find another place to stay. I haven’t seen signs of it yet, but the time will come. Meanwhile I behave as liking and generosity dictate. These parcels of good feeling are wrapped in guilt.

  On those nights when he tells me he’ll be home I cook winter stews or roast a chicken and introduce Adrian to wine. It slows him down, makes him less talkative for a while, sends him after things he doesn’t always want to say. I see him pause, then make a half-blind step over his reluctance. He’s not sure how much he’s going to reveal. There’s the bullying he suffered at school. It wasn’t as bad as some kids got because although he didn’t play sport he could belt out easy pop tunes on the school piano. Then he and a couple of friends formed a group and played even easier rock and roll. Adrian became popular. But he got out of there – out of the town – as soon as he could. What town? Whakatane. He had nothing against the place, in fact he liked it, but after his father died there was talk of him going to live with his mother in Hamilton and he wasn’t having a bar of that. So he enrolled for the jazz course at the Massey Wellington campus.

  ‘And here I am.’

  ‘Tell me about your father.’

  ‘Yeah, Dad. He was OK. Dad was good.’

  It must be my cast of mind: I thought he meant morally good. Before I could stop myself, I said: ‘So was Gordon.’ Then I understood what he had meant: good guy, good fellow. I said quickly: ‘How long were you and he alone? When your mother left?’

  ‘I was thirteen. Hey, my thirteenth birthday, lucky thirteen. She stayed for that. Pretty thoughtful, eh? Then she moved in with the guy next door. His wife had run out on him. Mum moved in. They’d had something going, everybody knew. So Mum was our next-door neighbour for a while. Then they moved to Hamilton. Good riddance.’

  ‘What did your father do?’

  ‘He worked in the board mills.’

  Another misunderstanding. I meant how did this man, Rodney Moore, behave when his wife left him for the man next door? But I let it lie, even though I wanted more of Gordon’s son: his life, his behaviour, his appearance. I wanted to stand him between Gordon and Adrian and mark in the passing of the genes.

  ‘When he got his cancer –’ Adrian stopped.

  ‘Three years ago?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘When did he die?’

  ‘December, year before last. Just before Christmas.’

  ‘Don’t talk about it if you don’t want to. Have you got a photo?’

  He went to his bedroom, came back with a photograph, put it down in front of me and returned to his chair.

  The man was surf-casting but had turned to grin at the camera. He was wearing shorts and a football jersey and was thicker-legged and -bodied than his father or his son. I saw my father. He had Earl Ferry’s brow and chin, and the same sort of hesitancy in his eye. His open, friendly grin should have belied it – but no, I saw that liquidness, that uncertainty pushed into flux by the varieties and shifts of life that Father had exhibited even as he moved into action headlong. I kept my head down and studied Rodney Moore, feeling my father’s presence and my own cryptogamous connection.

  ‘Where was it taken?’

  ‘Up the beach, looks like. That’s Whale Island there.’

  ‘Did he catch any fish?’

  ‘Don’t know. He must have been about – yeah, twenty-five. Mum must have taken it.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me what she was like?’

  ‘Parties. Booze. Getting it on.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘With men. She hated being home. She hated the kitchen. Fair enough. But the guy next door was a beery slob.’

  ‘And your father – he was …?’

  ‘Kinda quiet. Mum liked music though, I’ll give her that.’ He was seeing connections but not wanting to go far.

  ‘You’re quiet too.’

  ‘No, I l
ike noise.’

  ‘You’re a quiet boy.’

  It’s there in him like a pool lying in a cave: the sort of quietness Gordon had when his fevers and busy-ness were done.

  I asked him – these are several occasions, different dinners – asked about his father’s need to know who his birth parents were.

  ‘My grandma kinda blurted it out. She didn’t know she was going to say it till she did.’

  ‘She’s the crotchety old dame?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s her. Does stuff for you, then spends the rest of the day growling about it.’

  Rodney Moore had laughed and said: ‘What a time to tell me.’ He said, too, that his adoptive parents were his real mum and dad.

  ‘I reckon he felt he had to say that,’ Adrian said. ‘I guess he meant it too, but you could see he was gone. He was filling in all sorts of things. Stuff that suddenly made sense – like why he was big and dark and they were grey and skinny. My grandma, she’s got poppy-out eyes, like one of those dogs, you know, a chihuahua. She’s built like one too.’ Adrian thought for a moment. ‘But also why they didn’t fit. Like, seeing how things were and people were, and even if red was red and something round was really round.’ He folded his fingers into each other. ‘They could never be like that.’

  ‘Who looked after him with his cancer?’

  ‘Me. Not all the time. He used to go into hospital. The nurse came quite a lot. And Grandma used to come down from Tauranga. That’s where they shifted. She made a production out of it but she came. Stayed a week or two, went back. She was OK.’

  I tried to picture this life. My husband Neville had pancreatic cancer (adenocarcinoma). I kept on working and we paid for daily care, then it was the hospice at the end. Adrian’s life with his dying father, his quotidian, his nocturnal tasks, seemed to have no edge of endurance, blunted or sharp, rather the lumpiness of good times and bad times succeeding each other. No day, sometimes no week, no month, was like the one that went before.

  ‘What we did when he was sick was try and find out stuff about his mother. Grandma couldn’t tell him much, just that she was a nurse. You wouldn’t believe what Grandma said to the adoption people: she didn’t want a baby from some halfwit girl. So they told her she was from a good family and a nurse.’ Adrian laughed. ‘It turned out to be wrong. She was a nurse aid.’