Blindsight Page 8

‘1954.’

  ‘He got a degree?’

  ‘Just a BA. He was at training college by the time this was taken. Then he went teaching. He was at Warkworth District High School, teaching English and history. But they made him take phys ed. Commercial practice too and he didn’t even know how to write a cheque.’

  ‘So what was he doing as a hospital porter?’

  ‘He hated teaching. He couldn’t keep discipline. The only time he caned a boy he had to rush into the storeroom and be sick. He said the kids loved it. They nicknamed him Chunder after that.’

  ‘The poor bastard,’ Adrian said.

  ‘Yes. Poor bastard. So he quit. He came to Wellington and got a job at the hospital. He wanted “real life” and that was it. But see how different we are. He’s dark, I’m fair.’

  ‘Same nose and eyes though. And you’re grinning the same way.’ He looked again; chose a safe word: ‘You were good-looking.’

  ‘It’s Gordon you’re supposed to be looking at.’

  ‘He’s OK too. I guess I can see why Marlene went for him. And then, Jesus, she tops herself and he goes under a tram.’ Tears in his eyes. It’s more than the wine. The Ferrys and their descendants are an emotional lot. ‘Why did you tell me you didn’t have any photos?’

  ‘I wanted to keep something for myself. But if you like … Have a look in my bedroom. There’s more on the bed.’

  I cleared the table, stacked the dishwasher, put the wine away. Then I waited in the living-room, in the dark, watching the luminous sea. Gordon was close, around on the town side of the hill, with another of his lost days done, another of his nights settling in. I wondered if the place where he lay down made the almost verbal welcome his shack in Ghuznee Street had made. He had told me it said hello. Was there some shadow, some whisper of that word as he returned to his ‘place’ tonight? I hoped so. I prayed so. I prayed for warmth and comfort for my brother.

  ‘You’ve got whole bloody stacks of them,’ Adrian said, coming in. He reached back and switched on the light. ‘You tell some porkies, don’t you Alice?’ He had a dozen photos in his hand.

  ‘Bring them here. Let me see.’

  We sat at the coffee table. He dealt the photographs like playing cards.

  ‘There’s none of Marlene.’

  ‘He didn’t send me any.’

  ‘What about the Ghuznee Street place?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And the motorbike? There’s none of that. What sort was it?’

  ‘I’m no good at motorbikes. Gordon didn’t have a camera anyway. Most of these were taken by my father. This is him. That’s my mother. Your great-grandparents.’

  ‘He looks like Dad.’

  ‘Yes, likenesses.’ I tapped my grandfather on the head. ‘Let’s hope you haven’t inherited anything from him.’

  ‘My – what? Great-great-grandad?’

  ‘He was mean and cantankerous and utterly selfish. My father loved him all the same.’

  ‘You and Gordon are always together.’

  ‘That’s the way Father liked it. We should have been twins.’

  ‘So tell me about him. What was it like? You and him.’

  I began: bloodless memories at first, full-blooded ones soon enough. Somewhere in the course of them I sent Adrian to the kitchen to make coffee. It gave us respite, me from letting out, almost from that physiological thing, letting down (which I’ve never experienced); him from ingesting. He had begun to look red and fat. Drinking coffee slowed me, settled me, and seemed to do the same for him.

  He said: ‘You’re a good describer, Alice.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I was there. But you know, when he left Warkworth, after the teaching fiasco, something ended. We shifted – all of us, I mean – on our bearings. In another way, I felt something snap. And I wanted it to. I’d been waiting for it. I wanted Gordon to get out.’

  ‘And he did?’

  ‘Yes, he did. I’ve got nothing to tell you about Wellington. About Marlene. Any of that. I was living my own life, you’ve got to remember. And Gordon had his. I visited once. And we wrote a few letters. But,’ I lied, ‘it was gone. That –’ I tapped a photograph – ‘arm-hugging stuff. And the way he bends his head at me. All gone. Thank God. I really hope he and Marlene had some good times.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Adrian said, imagining. Then: ‘Well, thanks. That was great.’ He grinned at me. ‘Auntie Alice.’

  ‘You can stop that. I won’t answer to that name.’

  ‘But I wish …’

  He wanted more. I wondered if it was for himself or if, somehow, he was feeding information to his father.

  I said: ‘Adrian, that’s all. I’ve told you everything.’

  ‘Yeah, OK,’ he said.

  ‘Give me those photos. I’m going to bed. You can sit up if you like.’

  He watched television. I wish I could switch to another channel like that.

  I put the photographs in their packets, the packets in their box, the box in the wardrobe behind my shoes. I pulled the curtains wide to let in the night and lay in bed trying to make wideness, stillness and the familiar sliding loss of the day put me to sleep; but my mind refused. Words were spoken, figures moved, events kept their colour and their darkness – all those things I had kept from Adrian. My brother Gordon walked down Molesworth Street, not knowing me.

  I heard the boy use the bathroom. He closed his bedroom door. I wished he would go away, out of my house.

  Chapter Four

  I broke my ankle boulder-hopping in a West Coast creek. I dislocated my shoulder on a shingle-slide. These accidents happened at work. A lecturer at university had tried to divert me into zoology because, he said, botany required days in the bush and sleeping in tents and that wasn’t suitable for girls. I took no notice of him – and joined the university tramping club – but I wasn’t interested in mountain tops and shingle-slides, or in tents and what went on inside them; I had my sights set on ‘odiferous herbs and fungous fruits of the earth’. More prosaically, I had chosen my work.

  Work grew into my fibres. Work became the equivalent of food. Laid up with my injuries, I felt that I had gone without breakfast, lunch and tea. My hands, my able hands, grew white and thin. My brain was crying out: Feed me. There’s a cliché about the two things you need in life: a loving relationship and a satisfying job. I’d reverse the order, even though I’ve not had both in equal amounts. I’ve been in love and would have said, at the height of it, this is the very best thing; but looking back I’m forced to declare that identifying verticillium wilt or mosaic virus or black root rot, and finding out what to do about them – and about a dozen other things, black spot in apples, ‘cloud’ in tomatoes – have left a deeper mark on me. Tramping through peat bogs, lying on a duckshooter’s punt in rushes in a freshwater lake, collecting algae – these come back more vividly than friendship, love and sex. Am I deficient? Is it perverse? I shrug the answers away. I’m Alice Ferry. I remember best the things that most deeply satisfied me. I say this to place myself square. I don’t need to mark down my happiness; just leave it where it belongs, at the core of me. Other things, whirling in their orbits, demand attention.

  As Doctor Ferry, back from two years of study in England, I joined the staff of the Harvey Institute in Nelson. There’s a lot of rouseabouting work in mycology and, at a place like the Harvey, little chance of working only in your own field. So I collected bugs and phytoplankton; I helped set up an arboretum and a herbarium; I helped with soil surveys, with our rain and sunshine gauges, a dozen things, none of which worried me as long as I got fair time in the orchards and tobacco fields and hop fields. I wrote and published papers and won myself elbow-room; I won respect. I don’t mean to tell the story of my working days, but find myself compelled to record that I was a scientist and was good at my job. I’ll say now how the rest of it went on.

  But not how it went with my men. There’s my work and my private life, and there’s Gordon. My brother and I circle each other like binary stars.
We’re together and apart. My boyfriends – men friends, to be exact – made no gravitational pull. I amused Gordon with them – the tobacco grower, the land agent, the engineer, the lawyer. Married men except for the last, all forty-fiveish. None of them was desperate. I had a nose for desperation and kept away from it. I wanted quiet fun and relaxation and what these days is called good sex. It did not take up much of my time.

  Gordon broadened himself too deliberately. Spots of puritanism remained. He told me to marry the lawyer. ‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘I’d be Alice Ellis.’ Later on, when we’d both had too much of the flagon wine he’d learned to drink, he confessed that he’d only been to bed once with a girl and the thing had been a fiasco. His word, fiasco. ‘I get too excited,’ he said, meaning, I think, he was too quick.

  ‘I had a man like that,’ I said. ‘I had to stop him thinking. Sex in the head is in the wrong place. Just be happy doing it. Just have fun.’

  We never spoke about it again but I’ve an idea he improved. There were several girls between his first one and Marlene. He put their names in letters and said they were nice but never told me how he got on with them in bed. We never drank cheap red wine again.

  Our letters went back and forth between Auckland and Wellington, England and Wellington, Nelson and Wellington. When I told Adrian I had visited Gordon only once, I meant in his Ghuznee Street shack. There were other times. He lived in Thorndon, close under Tinakori Hill, and in Berhampore, before his place in Ghuznee Street. I travelled down on the Limited from Auckland when I was at the DSIR, and across on the ferry from Nelson, from the Harvey. Five, perhaps six visits. Once he put me in a boarding house but the other times he gave me his bed and slept in his sleeping bag on the floor. He rented poky bedsits with landladies who didn’t seem to care if I was his sister or not. All they demanded was no noise.

  We talked about our parents and how we didn’t want to be like them, rubbing along, being friends, putting each other first. I wanted my freedom, always, for ever, and main say – that was my term, main say – in every decision affecting me, from where I worked and what my work should be, to when to turn the light out in bed at night; from whom I lived with, and when and where, to when he should get out of my life. ‘And close the gate after you,’ I said. Gordon laughed. He wanted love. We had friendly fights on the subject. ‘No such thing,’ I declared, meaning the meaning he ascribed to it. Later, as he slept on the floor, I worried about him: sentimental still and wanting some unreal combination of servitude and grand passion. I understood how badly he could be hurt and I wished he would find some tough little girl, not too nice, who would teach him sex and human love and its limitations, and set him free. I comforted myself with reminders that he was freer than he had been the last time I stayed in Wellington; that my visits untied knots in him and faced him another degree or two towards what I described as reality. It seems odd to me now – worse than odd, stupidly blind – that I never put the weight of my love for Gordon into my debates with myself about the place of love in human affairs.

  His first job in Wellington was with Commercial Cleaners, polishing linoleum floors in department stores, cleaning windows in Lambton Quay on mornings when southerlies carried sleet and hail, and the water in his bucket grew a film of ice and his cleaning rags, torn from old pyjama tops and underpants, wrapped themselves around his hands like eels from Loomis creek. He didn’t mind. It was experience. He liked standing on ledges three storeys up. He liked fighting his polishing machine through deserted aisles. (I’m quoting from memory, from his letters.) His workmates named him the Professor because he always carried a book. ‘Poetry?’ one of them asked, looking over his shoulder. ‘Yes,’ Gordon said, ‘but it’s about a cockroach and a cat.’ They don’t really like me much, he wrote, but I like them OK, they’re good blokes. I know a lot of stuff they don’t know, but they think I’m pretty simple all the same.

  He went drinking with them at knocking-off time. It was harder at first than working with them all day, but he knew about football and pretended to know about sex, so he soon got by. Drinking fast enough was the difficult thing. ‘Come on, Professor, sink that stuff.’ They wanted to get another round in before six o’clock.

  He went to movies and plays and poetry readings, and found a pub where writers drank. He told me their names but I hadn’t heard of them, and when he sent me a poetry book one of them had written I told him it was silly stuff, one dimension short. And so it was – the poor fellow couldn’t see round corners. Gordon was trying to write poetry himself. I advised him to give it up. (It’s called tough love these days.) I told him he had a good brain and it wasn’t too late to be anything he liked, anything useful. How about a lawyer or a doctor? Gordon, don’t lose your chance, I said. Be a civil servant if you like. With your degree you’d soon get promoted. You can’t clean windows all your life.

  After a year he took a job as a hospital porter. That was where he really found himself. Gordon loved that work: the people, sick people, the changing faces; emergencies, with ambulances sliding into the basement and trolleys cornering in corridors; then bossy ward sisters and busy nurses; and patients recovering, patients dying. He didn’t mind the dying. He found it natural. He found a way – it’s like a tidal shift – of emptying out death’s significance and filling himself with the fact of it. Significance leads to meaning, and that’s false. The fact opens compassion, pity, call it what you will, and lets one know what can be done and what can’t. It brings a kind of ease. At Wellington Hospital Gordon overtook his years.

  I wish I’d kept his letters. The wards and corridors came alive, the people breathed. Sickness and cure, sickness and death. Trolleys to the kitchen, lunch and dinner out to the wards, dirty linen down to the laundry and instruments to the autoclave. He carries a warm dish to pathology. Inside is a woman’s right breast. He changes the oxygen bottle for a frightened girl in a tent; she mouths either thank you or don’t go. A labourer broken on a building site dies before Gordon’s trolley reaches theatre. There’s a twenty-stone man who needs turning every four hours. Three porters are rostered for the job: here we go, one, two, three. They hold him while a nurse changes his sheets, and ‘Bastards, bastards,’ whimpers the man. His skin exudes a grease that coats the porters’ hands and can be scraped off with the fingernails. It’s part of the job, Gordon says. We have to use plenty of soap. He’s not getting hardened. He’s open to whatever occurs.

  One day he and Mac – a big guy, beefy, red-faced – are called to Ward 14 to lift Mr Watson, who has fallen out of bed. ‘Lazy bloody nurses,’ Mac says, ambling, big-buttocked, in the corridor. He gets his complaint out of the way because the ward sister will be too tough for him. She’s a powerful woman, Gordon says. ‘In there,’ she says, ‘and be quick about it.’ Mr Watson is lying beside his bed, his gown, like a confirmation dress, rucked at his waist and his chimpanzee legs drawn up at the knees. He hugs his arms. His bright black eyes fasten on Gordon. Mr Watson is smeared with his own faeces. Mac bends down and snarls into his face: ‘You filthy old bastard.’ They lift him. Mr Watson is dying of cancer. He weighs four stone. It’s like lifting sticks of kindling wood, Gordon writes. Mac throws his end of Mr Watson on the bed and stalks out, but Gordon puts his part down carefully. The man lies skewed. Gordon straightens him and says: ‘OK now?’ He wants to say more than that but can’t find words. He can’t leave the man lying in his own dirt – a foetus with knowledge in his eyes – so takes a hem of the gown and tries to wipe him clean. A nurse comes in with a basin of hot water. ‘What are you doing? Get out of here.’ Gordon gets. And that’s all he writes to me – what he saw, what he did. The facts of it. He goes to a bathroom and washes his hands.

  The next day he collects a morgue trolley – ‘with a lid like those dishes where you carry in the roast’ – and takes Mr Watson from Ward 14 to the morgue. A nurse walks with him – the same nurse, friendly now. It’s her job to sign the body in. They lift Mr Watson, clean-sheeted, still warm, on to a table, where the nurs
e uncovers his face and tightens the cloth binding his jaw. His eyelids, closed over his eyes, are too young for his face. The nurse pats his hair into place.

  Gordon turns away and sees the naked body of a child on a neighbouring table.

  The facts of it.

  He worked more than four years at Wellington Hospital and shifted from Berhampore to his place in Ghuznee Street early in 1959. I came to see the charm of it – the seedy charm – but had to fight my sense of oppression at being locked in by an iron fence and brick walls.

  I paid a two-day visit, lumping my weekend bag up Willis Street and following his instructions for finding the key in the stack of bricks against the wall: ‘Two bricks along from the left, three rows down, there’s an edge broken off, you can poke your fingers in and hook it out. Don’t be scared, there’s no spider.’ I let myself in and explored.

  Oh Gordon, Gordon, I thought. I could not see where he was going. A few bits of furniture, faded dusty curtains. A bent hearth shovel and a balding broom. Although they had a homely look, they frightened me instead of comforting me. Gordon’s likeness was here; his correlative. His considered, his natural, his happy coming down, his settling into himself, were marked in squalor: in curling lino, dented kettle, unravelling mat. I pushed a corner straight with my toe, then mounted the ladder to his second room.

  The walls were painted red. Someone had tried to make a love-nest but Gordon, I saw, used it for reading and sleeping. A single mattress and army blankets lay skew-whiff on the three-quarter bed, with a granny quilt kicked into a pile at the foot. The Modigliani nude seemed fastened to the wall for art’s sake; was contemplative rather than ‘take me’, as though she might step down, naked it’s true, and share his reading. What was he reading? Sartre. Camus. Kerouac. Colin Wilson. I can’t imagine he enjoyed them. Books from which he took more comfort, I am sure, filled a bookcase screwed to the wall above his desk. He had science fiction and thrillers mixed with his old Dickens and Thomas Hardy; and poetry by people I had barely heard of in those days: Dylan Thomas and George Barker and John Donne. He was all over the place. Reading was for pleasure, not getting a degree. His books cheered me up after his downstairs room and down-and-out bed.