This Mortal Boy Page 12

  ‘Mate, you’re going to have to push off,’ Paddy said.

  ‘You telling me to leave?’

  ‘I’ll get thrown out if the landlady catches you here.’

  Johnny swept the plates off the table with his arm and stood up, leaning over Paddy as they smashed. ‘And what about me, punk? Where am I supposed to sleep?’

  ‘I told you it was just until you got yourself sorted. You’ve done nothing about it, have you?’

  Johnny stood, wiping his nose. ‘I’ve got a cold,’ he said, his voice sullen. ‘Do you expect me to sleep under a bridge in my condition?’

  Paddy was about to say that he might think about staying with the girl he was so friendly with, but he shut his mouth. He’d heard Johnny’s guttural shouts of enjoyment in the night. Plus, Johnny seemed to be spreading his germs as well as his charms.

  Paddy could feel a cold coming on. His throat was sore and his head ached.

  Johnny’s face was full of menace. ‘Another night then. Just one more, okay?’

  Later, in the afternoon, Paddy walked into the living room and found Johnny cutting his toenails with a knife. ‘That’s bloody disgusting, you manky git,’ he said.

  ‘You going to fetch me a manicure set, darling?’ Johnny said, spitting the insult in the air. He crooked his little finger above the knife.

  Paddy sat down opposite him. ‘This isn’t getting us anywhere,’ he said. ‘That’s a damn big knife.’

  ‘I always carry a knife, don’t you?’

  ‘I carried one for a bit in Belfast, yes. My da carried one too. But Belfast is different. I reckon the cops catch you carrying a knife here, you’re in trouble.’ The cops. The words fell from his tongue; he was beginning to sound like a New Zealander. Or an American gangster, like the way McBride talked.

  ‘You need a knife in a fight.’

  ‘I don’t like to fight. I only did that in school.’

  ‘Well, I fight, nothing yellow about me. I carry a knife and I use my feet. When you get a person on the ground you keep him there. I’ve done a bit of prize fighting, bare-knuckle stuff, and earned a decent purse or two. Yeah, I’m not a good man to cross, kiddo. Matter of fact, I like a bit of a rumble. I’ve never lost a fight yet. See, I don’t like people, I reckon most people are better off dead. If they get in my way that’s where they’ll be.’

  ‘Yeah, well maybe we should go and have a pint,’ Paddy said, hoping to break the impasse. Johnny was scaring him now, working himself up with spittle in the corner of his mouth. He could see the devil was in Johnny.

  ‘I was in the army,’ Johnny said, as if he hadn’t heard him. ‘The military cops put me in the slammer when I fought, but they never got the better of me.’

  ‘When were you in the army?’ Paddy asked. It was something that preyed on his mind. Rose told him before he left Naenae that if immigration caught up with him he’d be punished for breaking his bond and sent off to the army on his birthday, when he came twenty, the date just passed the week before — a fact he thought best to keep to himself.

  ‘Oh, years ago,’ Johnny said, offhand now. ‘Well, we might as well have that drink you were talking about.’

  They finished up drinking at the Albert and both of them were drunk when they turned up at Ye Olde Barn that evening. Paddy looked for Bessie, because some evenings she studied in the library and once or twice she had come along to the cafe to meet him, but it wasn’t a place she liked. The first time she’d come she’d been wearing a dress she’d made herself, pink cotton embroidered with daisies, with her cardigan over it. He saw girls looking sideways and raising their finely plucked eyebrows at each other. She wasn’t one of them. If Bessie had her way, they would go down the road to Somervell’s milk bar because she liked creaming sodas made with sarsaparilla, or that’s what she said. He thought it was because she didn’t like the girls at the cafe.

  ‘Don’t you mind that a fella killed his girl in here?’ he asked her the first time they went to Somervell’s. It was where Frederick Foster, the Englishman, had shot his girlfriend. The story was all over the newspapers, and it was just weeks after he and Bessie had got back together that the man had been hanged.

  ‘He said it was an accident.’ Still she shivered. ‘His poor mother, she came out here to try and save him. It shouldn’t be.’ He thought then that she had a tender heart.

  Paddy yearned to bring Bessie to Wellesley Street again, but while Johnny McBride was there he wouldn’t do that, the place squalid and smelling of rancid fat, and Johnny’s toenails on the floor, wet cigarette butts in the ashtrays. It was like nobody ever taught him how to live a decent sort of life. But Paddy wasn’t going to clean up after him. Nor was he having Bessie slumming it.

  The flu hit him next. Paddy stayed in bed, dosing himself on aspirin. He heard Johnny come and go but he didn’t have the energy to argue with him or the strength to confront him. The fever made him dream. His mother appeared beside him, holding a cool compress; he waited for it to descend on his forehead, but when he woke there was nobody there. He slept again and dreamt he was walking through late-autumn leaves in Antrim with a cold wind whipping his face, and, later again the same night, he was on a holiday one spring, the only holiday they ever took as a family, with his mam and his da and little Daniel at Ballycastle, looking towards the streaming headland, his feet surrounded by wild flowers. Daniel held his hand and looked up at him, his freckled face full of trust that his brother Albert would never leave him.

  He woke again, sweat streaming off him, and got up to walk through the house to the lavatory out the back. It was quiet and the air dead still, and he thought Johnny McBride had gone, but when he looked through the open door of the room the other man had been occupying he saw his suitcase was still in the middle of the room, his skivvies strewn around. He opened the outside door, and the scent of flowers that had assailed him in his dreams rose up to meet him. A daphne bush stood in a patch of earth beside the house, the fragrance overwhelming. It reminded him of Rose’s garden.

  The fever left him. He felt cool and cleansed, though his legs still wobbled beneath him. After that, he slept again for several hours, this time without dreaming. In the morning, he decided he was well enough to look for work again. He picked up three days of cleaning at the yacht club, making sure not to make eye contact with any of the women. He didn’t see the woman he’d poked in the washroom. When he was paid, he told himself he would really save this time and put money aside towards the trip home. Perhaps he would go and see his parents and Daniel and all, and come back. Bessie would wait for him. It confused him to think about this; he was in a muddle and he knew he needed more time to recover from the flu. Something had to change, but right now he couldn’t see what to do. Before he met Bessie he’d been wondering if he would be better off back in Naenae living with Rose. But now he thought there was no turning back, and besides the law would catch up with him, as Rose had predicted. Things could only get better if he resolved the problem of Johnny McBride. It was a place to start.

  That evening Gladys Wallace, the landlady, phoned again. She would return at the end of the week, on Thursday to be exact, at around three o’clock. She hoped she would find everything spick and span. Her neighbours, who she talked to pretty well every week, had told her that although things seemed quiet at her address they had seen a few people coming and going. ‘You know what I said, Paddy, no sub-letting.’ He wondered if this was a veiled hint that she knew more than she was letting on.

  ‘You’ve got to get out. Don’t you have a ship to go to?’ he said to Johnny.

  Johnny said that right now he wasn’t going anywhere. ‘Look,’ he said, trying an affable tone for a change, ‘the landlady’s not going to stay here, is she?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘Nah, she’ll go back to her bloke and you’ll have the place to yourself again. Why don’t I just clear out while she’s here, and then come back?’

  ‘Friggin’ no.’ Paddy felt his temper boiling. He
swore at Johnny then, shouting, ‘Fuck away off. I mean it, I’ll call the fucking cops on you.’

  Johnny’s lip curled. ‘You won’t call the cops on me. You’ve got too much to hide.’

  ‘Get out, gob-shite, get — take your stuff and shove off.’

  ‘Go blow,’ Johnny said, standing with his fists in the air as if he were going to throw punches. Then, quite suddenly, he dropped his fists and walked out. His suitcase stayed in the bedroom.

  Paddy thought he would be back, and was afraid. Johnny McBride, the other Johnny McBride, who lived in pulp fiction, wanted to kill people who stood in his way.

  In the night his spine tingled with terror.

  CHAPTER 12

  Rose and Peter and the children knew the date of Paddy’s birthday and sent presents, carefully addressed to Mr P. Donovan. The children had chosen after-shave lotion, and Ned, the older boy, wrote in an accompanying note: ‘Peter says you’re old enough to shave now, ha ha.’ Peter’s gift was a new razor, a sleek steel one with a handle that fitted perfectly in his hand. They must have had a conversation about his whiskers, he thought. Because his beard was so dark his chin always had a bluish tinge by evening. If he was going out he would shave twice a day. Rose sent a wooden box that contained jars of homemade marmalade, a pullover she had knitted, and a book called East of Eden which was the latest novel by her favourite writer, John Steinbeck. ‘It’s a big book, Paddy,’ she wrote, ‘and you might not have time to read it straight away but here’s hoping that someday you will find it as enjoyable as I did. It’s about good and evil, and country places, like out here in Naenae with the market gardens all around, and it starts with a character who is a young Irish immigrant, just like you.’

  That wasn’t what his father would have said. He imagined his sharp reprimand, reminding Rose that his son was an Ulsterman. The pullover was made from soft green and brown flecked wool with a knobbly texture. When he was sick he put it on for extra warmth and thought again that he shouldn’t have left them. He shouldn’t have left anywhere.

  His mother’s parcel arrived after the birthday, and he had wondered if she had forgotten, but it was forwarded on from Rose’s address so she must have posted it months earlier on a very slow boat. The mail was a problem for him. He hadn’t had the nerve to tell his mother that he went under a different name here in Auckland. Just send it to the Post Office, Mam, with the name Albert, c/- of Mr Donovan, he had written to her. Mr Donovan and he lived at the same address. The parcel contained a white shirt, not one he would have chosen, a little stiff-collared and formal for the life he led now. He thought that it was something she couldn’t afford.

  She wrote: ‘To think that I have a son out of his teens now, a man of twenty years. I will never forget the first moment I saw your bonny wee face, I could have sworn you smiled at me the moment you were born. What it is for a mother to fall in love with her child. Or a father, for that matter, and it is a pleasure I hope someday you will have. Of course next year will be your true coming of age, the big twenty-first. I don’t suppose we will see you for that grand occasion, but your da and I are saving for something special when it comes round. We have in mind a good watch. Well my dear son, I expect you will celebrate this milestone of two decades of life with all the friends you are making in New Zealand. Be sure and have a happy day and all.’

  It was this letter from his mother that got him thinking. Now that Mrs Wallace was coming back, it might be time for him to move on. Or that is what he could tell Johnny McBride, if he turned up. Johnny’s suitcase was still in the room and clothes strewn around, his possessions a dead giveaway, even if Paddy packed up the stuff himself and hid them in a wardrobe. She would be bound to find them. In the front room Johnny’s toenails lay on the carpet, in the kitchen ants ran over uneaten food and scummy dishes from the boarder’s last meal. In the toilet, out at the back of the house, there was a dried spill of vomit. Paddy began a ferocious round of cleaning. He was moving out, that was his story. Perhaps he would leave anyway, he was yet to decide. If he could find a smaller, nicer place that would be more suitable for Bessie to visit, he might see more of her. It might really be goodbye to 105 Wellesley Street.

  In the meantime, he could celebrate his recent birthday and have friends around, and Bessie might come if he asked her in advance. As soon as the idea took hold of him, it seemed like a festival of treats. There would be music and they would dance.

  He sat down and wrote to his mother: ‘Thanks a bundle for the shirt Mam, I’ll look real sharp in that. I’m doing very well here, fortunate to have had a great place to live these last few months, although I’m thinking of moving on soon. Mr Donovan will probably shift with me, he and I will set up somewhere together. I’ve got lots of friends and plenty of work to be had. Well, who knows whether I will get back to the old Dart any time soon. That is what British people here call the home country. Some people just speak of home, which I do in my heart, and others call it “the mother country”, although the citizens of New Zealand seem very independent in their spirit and for how long will us immigrants think of ourselves as separate from them is hard to say. Anyway, now that I’m twenty I’m starting to think about settling down in this country, looking towards a steady way of life. I’ve met a really nice girl but perhaps I will tell you more about her another time, this is a different girl from the last one I told you about, I really like her. Your always loving son.’ He failed to mention that he had just nine pounds left over from his last job.

  It took him a while to get through to Bessie. The matron allowed calls only at certain times. He wondered if Bessie had been avoiding him, but there were exams coming up and the last time they had spoken she said she was studying hard. This was a disappointment, for he imagined they might have gone to the zoo over the weekend, now that the weather had fined up, but she had been adamant that she could not see him then.

  ‘Can you ask for a night out?’ he said, when they finally spoke. ‘Stay at your grannie’s? They wouldn’t mind that, would they? Sure c’mon, girl.’

  After a silence, she said, ‘I need to see you, Paddy.’

  ‘You’ll stay the night?’

  ‘They don’t give us leave except at the weekend, you know that.’

  ‘Not even with Grannie?’ He drew circles with his finger round the telephone while he spoke. He could see her perfect face that made him think of Grace Kelly. She was, he supposed, too good for him, he had figured this from the beginning.

  ‘I don’t think so, no.’

  ‘But you’ll come to the party? Bessie, it’s my birthday and all. Well, it was, but you know, I had the flu and that.’

  ‘I didn’t know it was your birthday.’

  ‘I was twenty last week. You don’t need to buy me a present. Well, ha ha, I don’t expect you would anyway, just bring yourself, that would be a fine present. How about I come and meet you at around eight o’clock at Ye Olde Barn?’

  And she said yes, yes she would see him there, but she doubted she could get a late pass, as it was a weeknight, and perhaps she would just have some coffee after they’d had a chat, they would have to see how things went. He found this conversation mysterious, but then Bessie had been that from the start. But she was going to come, and as a last part of his preparations he tidied out the side room where he slept and made it up with clean sheets, smoothing the bed cover, plumping the pillows.

  On Tuesday afternoon he found Rainton Hastie, or Ray as they called him, and Ted Quintal, and Henry, the Englishman who had stayed with him at Wellesley Street, drinking in the Albert. There was Jeff Larsen, who hung out with them from time to time. He’d come from Rotorua, a town he left to get away from playing rugby, which his father wanted him to keep playing after he left school. Well, that wasn’t for him. Paddy liked him, a bloke with a laugh or two up his sleeve. He was a freckle-faced man, twenty-two or thereabouts, trailing a couple of convictions for burglary. He’d been in Borstal but he’d steer clear of that in future, he could tell you that. It
was a mug’s game. He could give hot tips on the races. And there was Lloyd Sinclair, who they called Cookie and looked just a wee fella, a bit young to hang out with; he was another child immigrant, and Henry was keeping an eye on him. Paddy had hardly got the word out that he was having a party than Ray was organising it, as if it were his own gig. Ray was one of the flamboyant blokes, a permanent partygoer if you believed half of what he said. He was wearing a floral shirt under a blue jacket, and white shoes with heels. ‘We’ll get Pooch on the guitar. We can hire a steel guitar at the Maori Community Centre. We’ll buy some beer.’ Pooch was Ted’s brother.

  ‘A bottle of gin for the girls,’ Paddy said. Afterwards, he thought it should have been Pimm’s, that’s what girls drank, not so alcoholic. His mother liked a gin and tonic on the odd occasion she let her hair down, not that she’d have admitted it if you asked her. He’d seen his da bring home a bottle on her birthday and she’d had a quarter of a tumbler, and then, when she thought he and Daniel weren’t looking, she’d whisper to his da that perhaps another one might not go astray. It was gin he bought anyway, and Ray bought two dozen beer. Ray said they ought to go along to Ye Olde Barn and find some girls. As they were preparing to leave, Johnny McBride walked in. He saw Paddy and turned his back. He was accompanied by a youth so baby-faced it seemed impossible that he would be served at the bar, but he was.

  ‘He’s not invited,’ Paddy said. If Johnny heard, he didn’t let on. Paddy was overcome with sudden panic. ‘We can’t have too many people,’ he said, ‘we’ll have to keep the noise down. The neighbours, they’ll tell my landlady.’

  ‘Too late, my old son,’ Ray said, ‘we’ve bought the booze. You’re on.’

  Henry followed them to the door. ‘I’m supposed to be putting out to sea tonight. I won’t be coming to the party,’ he said.

  ‘Not to worry, some other time.’

  Henry said, ‘Paddy, you want to be careful of that guy.’ He nodded towards Johnny, who was hunched at the bar with his head down.