Blindsight Page 7

  In my day it was impossible to find out who your birth mother was. It’s easier now. You’re put in touch, or given a name, or shown what’s on the record. So Rodney Moore found out about Marlene Wilkinson: occupation, nurse aid; age, nineteen. The record did not say she died at twenty. It did not say who her baby’s father was.

  I asked about the photograph taken at the party. Adrian was getting to it. Rodney Moore – I must say just Rodney – traced Marlene’s parents – ‘Yeah, to the graveyard. They were dead.’ – then found an older sister, who wrote that Marlene had ‘suffered a brief illness’ and died shortly after her baby was born. She knew nothing about the baby’s father and asked not to be contacted again.

  ‘Dad had a bad time for a while. Went really down. He was getting a lot of pain and they had him on morphine. But it was her being dead that got him worst. So I wrote to the sister again and told her Dad really needed to know what Marlene was like, that sort of thing. She sent the party photo and said that was the end of it. She said Gordy might be the father, she’d never met him, she didn’t know. Please would we leave her alone. So we did for a while. Dad perked up. He was still going down, you know, he was like a skeleton. Have you ever seen someone like that?’

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘He got the idea of asking this Barb, the one they were at the party for. He’d switched to finding Gordy now he knew Marlene was dead. Jeez, I’m glad he didn’t know about the motorbike.’

  I almost asked, What motorbike? Felt heat in my cheeks and water in my eyes as I remembered. Adrian, far away, seeing me perhaps as only a shadow, picked up no sign of my distress.

  ‘So I wrote to the sister again. Dad couldn’t write, he couldn’t get his hand to make the letters any more. I promised her this would be the last, if she’d only tell us who Barb was. Someone Marlene worked with? Some friend she had at school? If she could tell us that, we’d leave her alone. And this sister wrote back. Barb was Barbara Lisk. She was nurse aiding with Marlene at the hospital. That was all. Now keep your promise, leave me alone.’

  I pictured them, the dying man, the skinny, sad-faced boy, sending out pleas and feelers from their country town, each with a little hook at the end, trying to reel in Gordon – while Gordon was far away and never to be found. I would keep him safe. Adrian, though, had a flickering presence: enemy one moment, Gordon’s grandson the next. I wanted him settled, easy in his mind, his way ahead uncomplicated by duty and love. He had loved (and still loved, unbrokenly) his father. His face contracted with it, then opened into a kind of innocence.

  ‘Lisk is an unusual name,’ I said.

  ‘There was only one in the Wellington phone book. So I rang. He was her dad. Jesus, the job I had trying to make him understand. He sounded about a hundred and he was deaf. But I got an address in the end. She was Barbara Poletti and she lived in Melbourne. The old guy hadn’t seen her in years. He said if I was writing, tell her it was time she came home.’

  ‘Did he know Marlene?’

  ‘Never heard of her. I think he hardly knew his own name. He asked me if I knew a good shoe-repair shop because one of his was getting a hole. Someone should be looking after him.’

  ‘They probably are. You found her, I take it? This Poletti woman?’

  ‘The old guy didn’t have a phone number for her. Well, he had it but he’d lost it somewhere. But I tried the Melbourne phone book and got her first shot. Jesus, could she talk, she never stopped and I was racking up a phone bill. But I didn’t mind because it was all about Marlene. Dad was listening on the cordless. We had to tell her Marlene was dead. She didn’t know that. The party was for her taking off overseas, but she never got further than Oz and never wrote. She didn’t know Marlene had got pregnant.’

  Barbara Poletti on her friend Marlene sounds like a motorcar salesman. I mean used cars. There’s something wrong with Marlene but Barbara Poletti hides it. Concentrates instead on her prettiness, her lovely curls and lovely figure and her blue blue eyes, film-star eyes. That is overdoing it. I know what Marlene looked like. She was a nice-looking girl and, as I said, she had the quality of sweetness. That sort of thing can be cloying after a while.

  ‘She used to sing the new pop songs,’ Barbara Poletti said. “Dungaree Doll”, remember that? And when she was sad – and that wasn’t often – “Goin’ down to lonesome town to cry my troubles away”. They were all the rage, those two, in 1959.’

  She polished Marlene until she shone. Adrian knew straight off something was wrong. Forty years had gone by. You don’t keep memories of someone you haven’t seen for that long unless they’re cemented in by more than a pretty face and pop songs. Some defect, some scar, some tragedy. The woman, in her chatter, was hiding it. She hid nothing about Gordon.

  ‘Oh, him. I thought he was a goof. He was a big tall gangly boy, a complete no-hoper. He was ten years older than her too. But Marlene was potty about him. I could never work it out. Gordy this and Gordy that, and what he thinks and what he says, like, you know, pronouncements from heaven or something like that.’

  Adrian, with three glasses of wine in him, becomes a mimic and a raconteur. My anger at the Poletti woman grew as he went on. I recognised nothing in her account except Gordon’s tallness.

  She told Adrian his name: Gordon Ferry. His job: porter at Wellington Hospital. She said: ‘I suppose if she had a baby Gordon has got to be the father. I knew they were busy doing it. There’d be no one else. We weren’t like these modern girls, sleeping round. And we didn’t know much about taking precautions either. Poor wee Marl.’

  She said Gordon had taken advantage of her. He had abused his position, because … a long pause here … ‘I might as well tell you. It can’t do any harm after all these years. While she was nurse aiding he never took any notice of her. But then she went into Ward 10. As a patient, I mean. He was right on to her then.’

  Adrian asked her what Ward 10 was.

  ‘It’s the psychiatric ward.’

  I said, at once: ‘Gordon would be trying to help.’

  Barbara Poletti’s judgement made not the slightest dent in my certainty. Someone in a psychiatric ward, pretty girl or not – Gordon would take notice of that. He lent her books and gave her chocolates and bought the lipstick and eye make-up she wanted from the chemist – the Poletti woman admitted it, but went on to say: ‘I can still see him smarming. Big long lanky thing that he was. You could see how he wanted to get her – well, I won’t say where. I hope I’m not offending anyone, but he was a creepy individual.’

  Adrian, pausing for another gulp of wine, recollected himself: ‘Dad didn’t like it. He told her Gordon Ferry was his father. He had enough left to make a joke. He said he wanted a second opinion.’

  ‘I would have given him one. All Gordon ever wanted was to help someone.’

  ‘But he got in bed with her in the end.’

  ‘It’s natural. Are you trying to judge him for that?’

  ‘I’m not judging him.’

  Marlene Wilkinson was in Ward 10 after trying to kill herself with Aspros. She had, Barbara Poletti said, an unstable personality. ‘She wasn’t mad. Don’t get that idea. She just went up and down. So far up, so far down. And she was pathologically thin-skinned. The tiniest thing would hurt her. If you said – oh, “Your lipstick’s crooked, Marlene,” it was like slapping her in the face. I suppose you’ve got to say that she seemed happy with Gordon Ferry. Gordy this, Gordy that, like I said. And she loved it when he looked after her, big lanky thing. It brought out all her sweetness. She was such a sweet-natured thing. Remembering her makes me want to cry.’

  Where Gordon lived, who his family were? She had no knowledge of that. She had the impression he came from out of town. Marlene said he had a stuck-up sister living in Nelson.

  ‘That’s you,’ Adrian said, grinning. ‘I thought you were stuck-up too, first time we met. “Get a drink of water from the tap”: how about that?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered.

  ‘Hey, I didn�
�t mean to upset you.’

  I covered my eyes to hide my tears: Adrian, through Barbara Poletti, had given Gordon back to me. I saw him long-legged, gangling – although it was uncertainty that caused his clumsiness; saw him holding Marlene by the hand. Gordon wasn’t after anything. He wasn’t looking for kisses and sex, perhaps not even companionship. Everything that followed Ward 10 came from ‘looking after’.

  I dried my eyes with a paper napkin. ‘She’s wrong about Gordon. She’s utterly and completely wrong.’

  ‘So tell me about him.’

  ‘Another time.’ I did not want to share. ‘Go on. What did you do? How did you find the stuck-up sister?’

  He put it off for nursing his father. There was no room for Marlene and Gordon in Rodney Moore’s last days. Then Adrian shifted to Wellington. ‘I wouldn’t have kept on with it except he asked me to. It was pretty near the last thing he said. I wasn’t looking forward to it. I didn’t like the sound of Gordon after la Poletti. But I didn’t go too much on her either. It was fifty-fifty.’

  ‘You were prepared to give my brother a chance?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, trying to see what my sarcasm meant. (Recovered equilibrium, that’s all.) ‘I was just going to say to him, “My dad says hello,” and leave it at that. I wasn’t going to do the grandson bit. Trouble was, though, I couldn’t find him.’

  There was no G. Ferry in the telephone book. So he started at ‘A’ and I came first. My snooty voice said: ‘Alice Ferry and Alice Kite can’t take your call. Please leave a message.’ He didn’t bother. Tried the Wellington electoral rolls. No Gordon Ferry. Tried the Auckland ones and the Nelson one, all the while settling into his six-person squat, taking his lessons and lectures, making endless long blacks and flat whites. It was getting to be too much, but before he put his search aside he made one more attempt on Marlene’s sister.

  ‘I did the same I did with you, just knocked on her door. When I told her who I was she screamed at me. It was like I was sticking a knife in her. She said: “She killed herself. Is that what you want to know? She swallowed pills and serves her right. She was better dead, shaming us.”⌘’

  Adrian looked at me, his eyes swimming. ‘Can you believe she said that?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘It was all on the doorstep. I never got inside the way I did with you. Shit, I’m glad I never went in her house.’ He rubbed his hand over his eyes. ‘The only good thing was, Dad never knew.’

  He turned away from her slammed door and caught the train from Ngaio station back to Wellington. The gorge on one side, with the creek glinting here and there, deep down, then the tunnels one by one made an end of Marlene as a person to know, while keeping her hidden, in place; but coming into the city, rolling through the yards, opened up Gordon again. Adrian promised his father he would try searching again as soon as he had more time.

  ‘Then,’ he said, ‘I had a bit of luck. One of the girls in the flat works in a library. She said to try the electoral roll for the year I wanted. That was 1959, right? And there he was. Gordon Ferry. In Ghuznee Street.’

  ‘Number 112A,’ I said.

  Again it was almost too much for me. There are several reasons but I’ll stick to the one I’m able to face: that corrugated-iron shack Gordon called ‘my place’. It was twenty yards up Ghuznee Street from the intersection with Willis Street, and stood at the back of a gravel and weed yard behind a tin fence with a door you opened by reaching through and working a catch inside. The damp brick walls of taller buildings pressed at the side and back, jamming it deep in a cave. A place to go mad in, I thought, when I opened the door in the fence. But Gordon put his youth off there; he put himself together.

  It had two rooms, one up, one down. The lavatory was outside,✓at one end. Must I open doors in myself; see the downstairs kitchen / living-room, twelve feet long and not much more than six feet wide; see the coir matting on the floor, the milkbar stool with chrome flaking from its legs, the bentwood chairs pinched from rubbish piled outside a house on The Terrace, the table from a junk shop, the prints – Van Gogh, Seurat – fixed on the walls with drawing pins? Gordon’s dented kettle? Gordon’s frying pan? His soap-shaker on the window sill with a piece of yellow soap locked inside? These things exist in a room hollowed out in my mind.

  I was in Gordon’s ‘place’ only twice. There’s another room for the second time. I won’t go there.

  Steps went up to a hole in the ceiling. You climbed them like a ladder to the bedroom, which had a shower cubicle above the outside lavatory to share the plumbing. A built-in bed ran across the other end. It had a kapok mattress and army blankets and a junk-shop patchwork quilt. When Gordon lay down to sleep he touched the back wall with the top of his head and the front one with his stretched-out toes. A Modigliani nude was pinned where he could see it. Modigliani was daring in 1959. I wonder if Gordon took it down the first time he invited Marlene upstairs.

  Rodney Moore had his beginning in the bed on a night (perhaps afternoon) between my first and second visits. I hope the lovers experienced ecstasy. Gordon had problems, he confessed to me once. With Marlene I hope they went away.

  ‘I tried to find the place,’ Adrian said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s gone.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I didn’t expect to find him but I thought there might be a house.’

  Instead there’s the motorway exit from The Terrace tunnel. Trucks and cars belch and fume through the space my brother occupied.

  ‘Was it a shock?’

  ‘Yeah, kind of. It seemed like I might fill in a bit of Gordy if I could see where he lived – you know, where I guess he took Marlene. Like hitting middle C on the piano, right? “Ding”, they were here. But God, the traffic never stops.’

  ‘Progress,’ I said, but might have chosen a different word. Whenever I drive through the tunnel I feel a weight of grief that will not shift until I’m in another part of town.

  Adrian mooched back to his Newtown flat. He told the father living, and dying, in his head: OK, I tried. The year passed. He spent his free time as young people do. I can guess the facts but not unravel the mystery. Then his flatmate, the librarian, said: ‘Is this one of your Ferrys?’ She’d remembered the name for almost a year (she must like him). It was in a book called Women in Science in Aotearoa, a compilation of short biographies. Alice Ferry, Mycologist, gets half a dozen pages.

  I told the interviewer: ‘No, my private life is private, let’s just stick to black spot, shall we?’ She was persistent, wanting the human side. I said: ‘I’m not sure I have one,’ and then, annoyed at my flippancy and afraid it hid some difficult truth, gave her bits of my girlhood in Loomis: school mainly, chemist shop later on. ‘So,’ she said, ‘you spent all your childhood in one town. In one house?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Mother and Father and me. And my brother Gordon.’ I could not leave him out; it would have been denying him, and would confirm, perhaps, that I had no human side. She asked no questions but kept him in my chapter – just his name. No one but I, finding it there, knew the way to make him whole.

  ‘You’re pretty good at what you do. Mushrooms and stuff,’ Adrian said. ‘I looked you up in Who’s Who. Doctor Ferry, eh?’

  If I had left out Gordon I need not have told the lie that he was dead. But then I might never have known Adrian.

  ‘Your address was the same as the one in the phone book. A. M. Ferry. So up I came.’

  ‘He might have been another Gordon. It’s not an unusual name. Nor is Ferry.’

  ‘Nope. I knew. Soon as you opened the door. You look the same as him – in the photo, I mean.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘Same nose.’

  ‘I’m an old lady.’

  ‘Same eyes.’

  I had told Adrian that I keep no photographs. He’s a gullible boy, although I’ve begun to think it comes from honesty. There’s no deception in his nature; he finds it hard to understand that others lie and cheat. I went to my bedro
om and pulled out the shoebox I keep on the wardrobe floor; put it on the bed, took out the dozen packets lying inside. Family photographs kept like this – in faded Kodak envelopes, in shoeboxes, on wardrobe floors – live differently from named and dated ones arranged in albums. There’s a sadness in them, a weight of knowledge not shared and secrets kept. These people have lives to live, but their lives are over. They smile through a fog of years, yet with a terrible intimacy.

  Gordon’s smile? It was my own. I scattered the photographs from their envelopes, paved the duvet with them, looking for one that might deny it – but nose, eyes, mouth, chin, forehead, happy look, thoughtful look, wide grin, uncertain smile were all related, all from the same set of genes, in the boy and girl. But, I told myself, he’s dark, I’m fair. And look inside us. See what’s inside. Then you’ll know how different we are. None of the photos was of that penetrating kind. I chose one at random and took it back to Adrian in the dining-room. He had helped himself to more wine.

  ‘You’d better go easy on that. Gordon drank too much.’

  ‘Yeah? Dad hardly touched it. I guess I’m OK.’

  ‘Here.’ I thrust the photograph at him. ‘I kept this.’

  A capping photo: Gordon in his Bachelor’s gown and a hood fringed with rabbit fur. He’s pleased with himself, and why not? Getting your degree meant something in those days. I hug his arm like a girlfriend. I’m pleased with him too. There were times when he had wanted to run away from study, uttering the adolescent cry: ‘It’s got nothing to do with real life.’ We had kept him at it, Mother and Father praising and pressing gently, big sister in the role of bully. I didn’t enjoy it; it made me scornful of him, and more than once I snarled: ‘God, when will you grow up?’ I told him he had to get his meal ticket, then he could worry about real life. Now, with Gordon capped, I hugged his arm. He smiled convincingly at the camera.

  ‘When was this?’