This Mortal Boy Page 14

  He stood outside Rocklands Hall, breathing in the scent of magnolia, the slim tree branches trembling above him in the darkness. The blank windows gave nothing away about the occupants. The time before, when he had been to call for her, he had glimpsed the magnificent staircase, the elegant chandelier that hung in the entrance hall. Long ago it had been a grand country residence. A fine rain began to fall and he shuddered in the cold. He had walked so quickly, so heedlessly through the night he hadn’t noticed it before. The walk had for the moment made him oblivious of the pain he still felt in his groin, as if something were numbed there. After standing for ten minutes or perhaps longer, for time seemed meaningless now, he turned and began to walk back to town. The pain had returned, his chest full of phlegm so that his breathing came in ragged gasps as he stumbled one foot after another. The distance he had travelled in an hour or so earlier in the night now stretched before him like a far journey. The streetlights were dulled braziers in the misty rain, but he could barely remember the way he’d come.

  As he lurched on, everything that had become vile and pointless in his life assailed him. He could not blame Bessie, nor Rita, and for the moment he wouldn’t blame himself. In all of heaven’s way, there was nothing more pitiful than the unforgiven. This was something his mother had once said to him. He could never forgive Johnny McBride for the events of the night. His mind was clouded with things that must and must not happen again. He must somehow see Bessie; he had to believe that she would come to him in the evening to follow, and that she would do the forgiving. He must contrive never to see Johnny McBride again. His hate was so fierce it carried him on further than he thought he could go, but with his hatred there was fear. He saw again the knife that McBride had shown him at the boarding house. At last he collapsed onto a bench at a tram stop. The rain had stopped but he was drenched through. Dawn was breaking, the clouds parting, sullen bonfires of light falling between them. The first tram of the day trundled towards him and stopped. He boarded it and rode back into the city. There was a stirring in the streets, a beggar uncurling himself from a shop doorway, the smell of bread from a bakery; a girl took her high-heeled shoes off outside the Albion Hotel and gave him a weary disinterested glance, business done for the night. He handed her half a crown and walked on.

  He approached the house, and his fear re-ignited. In his haste to leave, he hadn’t locked the door. Johnny might have returned. Very softly, he slid the latch open. When he was inside and saw that the front room was empty, he placed his back against the wall and sidled along towards the passage like a man in an Alfred Hitchcock picture. Each room was empty. There was nobody breathing in the house except him. He stripped off his wet clothes and slipped naked between the sheets and slept. Again, his mother came to him in a dream. She was trying to tell him something but he couldn’t hear what it was. Something about buildings being on fire, flames lighting up St Anne’s Cathedral. It is the Blitz all over again, and somehow he has lost sight of her as bomb after bomb shrieks through the air. He has been so terrified he can’t move, and when he looks up he sees that she has gone on ahead and he is supposed to be following. A man beside him drags him down to the ground and another bomb comes. A woman on fire runs past him and he thinks it is his mother. He is hiding behind a wall as the bomb explodes. Bricks fall and loose mortar showers him. The smell of burning is everywhere, like paper held over a gas flame, like petrol, like meat. He doesn’t know how long he stays there. Then she is running back to him. Albert, she is crying, Albert, I thought I’d lost you. Oh God, dear God, how could I lose my son, Lord forgive me. It was the Easter Tuesday Raid and she was behaving as if he were the risen Christ. Perhaps none of that is exactly how it happened. He had an idea his mother had put him in a closet, and the shelter had come later. Never mind, he had heard the stories, everyone told stories of what they had seen in the shelters. There was fire; he knows he saw fire.

  When he woke, several hours had passed. He could hear rain on the tin roof as the red dawn had predicted. It was another Tuesday and any day now the landlady would come. He reached up and turned the radio on, and felt himself slowly coming to life, although he felt so ill all he wanted to do was lie in bed.

  He must clean the house, he must clean himself, his body, his clothes, the inside of his head if that were possible. He looked in the jar where he kept his money. There was fifteen shillings and eightpence, all the money he had in the world. The whole idea of a party had been nonsense. Tomorrow he’d have to find work again. Perhaps that was what his mother was telling him, that he must work hard and save one hundred and twenty pounds to take him home to Ireland, where she would care for him and keep him safe from harm.

  Before he did anything else, he must speak to the girl. He rang the number at Rocklands Hall, and asked to leave a message for Bessie Marsh. There was a long pause. He gathered that the phone had been put down, and in the distance the voice of the woman who answered the phone called to someone. The brisk voice of the matron came on.

  ‘Who’s calling, please?’

  ‘Albert Black,’ he answered, and already he knew that something was wrong. ‘I want to speak to Bessie Marsh.’

  ‘Miss Marsh doesn’t live here anymore.’

  ‘You must be mistaken,’ he said. ‘Bessie lived here last night, I saw her off on the Epsom tram.’

  ‘Miss Marsh left the residence this morning.’

  ‘No,’ he shouted. ‘You’re lying. She wasn’t late.’

  ‘Mr Black, I’ve nothing more to say to you.’

  ‘Where has she gone then?’

  The phone clicked and the line went dead.

  He felt himself trembling as he replaced the receiver. Some dull chime echoed in his head, but he couldn’t make sense of it. Whatever had happened he must trust that Bessie would meet him tonight at the cafe. If she didn’t come, he would go to her grandmother’s house the next day. She would be there, or her grandmother, whom he had still to meet, would know where she was.

  When he had finished cleaning the house, he dressed in a fresh blue linen shirt, his good brown jacket and dark trousers. His eye was swollen larger than the night before and the colour of grape hyacinths, but at least he felt respectable. In Queen Street he would get his hair cut, tired as he was of licking it back into a duck’s tail with grease. He would be a regular bloke again. At the door, he hesitated. The night before he had watched Rita throw the kitchen knife in the carton where she’d collected the beer bottles. The carton stood near the front door, ready for him to put out for collection. Somewhere, nearby, Johnny might be waiting to pounce, and the ache in his balls flared again. On impulse, he reached into the carton and the knife was still there, as he remembered. He took it out and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket.

  After he had been to the barber, and seen his hair emerge in a luxuriant dark crest, his hollow stomach reminded him that twenty-four hours had passed since he had eaten. At the Continental Cafe, in Victoria Street West, he stopped and ordered a meal of steak and chips. The food lay uneasily in his stomach. He still had hours to pass until the time when he hoped to meet Bessie. A shifty sea wind was blowing rain in his face. Opposite the cafe stood the Royal Hotel, a comfortable large establishment with a tidy bar, a place not frequented by the Ye Olde Barn crowd. It seemed as good a place as the next to pass some time. He could be on his own. He liked to drink alone. In the Royal he wouldn’t have to go over the events of the night before. He figured that he was unlikely to encounter Johnny McBride.

  He drank a beer, and ordered one for the barman. He needed to make it last, to keep some money for himself if he were to take Bessie out. Nor did he want to be drunk when he met her. His head throbbed and he felt his stomach churn. He ordered a second drink, hoping the fizz would make him belch. The barman was eyeing him up with an unfriendly look. ‘Another one for yourself,’ Paddy said, trying to buy favour. The second beer had dislodged the contents of his stomach. He made it just in time to the toilets where everything came up, a foul chun
der, the sound of his vomiting loud enough to be heard next door in the bar.

  When he emerged, the barman shook his head. ‘That’s enough for today,’ he said. ‘You’re cut, man.’

  The bar was filling with workers finishing their day before the pub shut at six. A crush was mounting all around him.

  ‘I’m all right, it’s just that I’ve been crook,’ Paddy said. ‘I’ve had my spew, I’ll be fine.’

  ‘I reckon you’re too young to be drinking in this bar,’ the barman said. ‘Or any bar. I could call the cops.’ It was the first time his age had been questioned since he’d gone to live in Auckland. In the Albert, nobody really cared whether he went into the pub or not.

  Out in the street, Paddy turned over the money that was left. One shilling in sixpenny pieces, and eight pence. And it wasn’t all right. There was nothing for it but to make his way to Ye Olde Barn and wait it out for the next hour until Bessie arrived.

  It was not until he sat down that he saw Johnny through the archway. Johnny walked past and he could swear their eyes locked. The two of them, staring each other out. If he ran, he thought Johnny would follow him. If he stayed, there was safety in numbers. The Quintal brothers were there, and Jeff Larsen, a whole crowd of them, and over on the other side a crowd of Teddy boys in their finery, but he didn’t take all of them in. He was watching Johnny set himself in the last cubicle. The room was swirling with smoke. He walked to the jukebox and took out one of the sixpences, slipped it in the slot, choosing ‘Danny Boy’. As he waited to hear Whitman’s opening notes, Johnny walked towards the jukebox, his hand flicking forward and pressing the button that said ‘Press to change program’, overriding Paddy’s choice on the Wurlitzer.

  ‘Danny Boy. What sort of shit is that? Sissy yellow Irish junk.’ The space in the cafe filled with the sound of ‘Earth Angel’, the singer imploring a woman, his earth angel, to be his, his darling dear … Johnny laughed.

  ‘Go blow,’ Paddy said.

  Johnny overrode the song again, and his sixpence was lost.

  ‘Come outside,’ Johnny said.

  Paddy walked back and sat down beside the Quintal brothers. Johnny had called him a dirty yellow Irish bastard, had smashed him in the face. Is it now, when did it happen? Yesterday or today? Is it now, is it then, is it happening this minute? His head spun, and the walls seemed to cave in around him, the steadily rising rhythm of the angel bouncing back and forth across the narrowing walls. Johnny McBride still stood at the jukebox, hands on either side of it, head down, slouching his shoulders forward.

  ‘My eye,’ Paddy said, speaking to no one in particular as he touched his face.

  Then suddenly everything seemed clearer and he knew what to do.

  The air had a pure, singing quality that shut out the sounds around him, his head light.

  CHAPTER 14

  Oliver Buchanan sits with his elbows on his polished dining-room table, staring into space. Papers are strewn around, his brief lies open before him.

  ‘So. Did it go any better today?’ His wife stands hovering with table mats in her hand, waiting to lay the places.

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘You don’t sound sure.’ She is a taller woman than he had expected to marry, slim and dark, half Italian. They met in London when he was travelling as a young man. She was, at that time, studying at the Royal School of Music; this was before the war. Although she still plays the piano, she stopped yearning to perform in concerts when the war came, or perhaps she never did: it was her mother’s idea that she be a famous pianist. She dreamed that her daughter would light up the world. Besides, they had small children at the outbreak of the war and Oliver said that there were safer places than London. Like New Zealand. It seems to Oliver that whatever she touches she makes beautiful and that she succeeds very well in lighting up his world. The room where he sits is gently illuminated, the walls hung with paintings from Italy, and also those bought in galleries in Auckland: Woollaston’s blue landscapes of the West Coast, one of Frank Gross’s moody inner cityscapes, a Frances Hodgkins that his wife loves of an artist sitting alone at a table. Outside, through the white French doors, lies the spring garden bursting with irises and cream-throated freesias. The house is filled with their scent.

  ‘Are the boys in for dinner?’ he asks, without moving to collect up his papers.

  ‘They are.’ She hesitates, her hand moving to the back of his neck and resting lightly there. ‘What is it, Oliver?’

  ‘I cross-examined the prosecution’s star witness today. Rita. One of the girls with name suppression.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She’s just a kid. I gave her a hard time. I made her cry.’

  His wife sits down. ‘I see. But you need to get to the truth.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I did.’

  ‘She’d been keeping bad company, yes? Is this the girl who climbed out the window to go to the party?’

  The trial is so sensational that her friends tried wheedling details from her at their morning-coffee gathering earlier in the day. Oliver always says he doesn’t like to bring his work home with him, or not in the sense of burdening her with the details of what it entails. But the weight of this trial is making him withdraw from her and yet he needs her close to him.

  ‘She’d have been better staying at home that night, that’s for sure,’ he says. ‘Her parents’ hearts will be broken. She’s not stupid, she’s smart and pretty and sixteen and believes that nothing will touch her, that she’s right about everything.’

  ‘Oliver, does it matter? This man, Albert Black, he stabbed a man in cold blood. Surely there’s nothing more to be said?’

  ‘It’s what happened before he stabbed Jacques that interests me.’

  ‘So one thing led to another, you think?’

  ‘Something like that.’ As he speaks, their sons burst into the room, fencing helmets and swords in their hands, flushed and laughing at some joke between them. One is twenty-two, the other nineteen. They are taller than both Oliver and his wife, tousle-headed dark young men with caterpillar eyebrows like his own. Both of them joined the university fencing club when they began their studies.

  ‘Dinner in twenty minutes, boys,’ their mother calls when they finish greeting each other. They always kiss her lightly on the cheek, both sides, the European way.

  Oliver begins collecting up his papers, leaving the table clear. ‘You see,’ he says, ‘you call them boys. Your children, bearing swords.’

  She begins to put the place mats in order. ‘Albert Black is a boy with a mother, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So was Alan Jacques.’

  ‘Who abandoned him long ago.’

  ‘Poor boy,’ she says. ‘But there are sisters, aren’t there?’

  ‘So I believe.’

  ‘A father?’

  ‘He came back from the war and moved in with a bus conductress. There were a whole lot of children, so he put them all in a home. This boy and a couple of his sisters were shipped out here. I’ve heard that one of the ones back in England died just before Jacques was killed.’

  ‘It’s a terrible story,’ she says. ‘Did the girls go to their brother’s funeral?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Things aren’t working out well for them. Or so I’m told.’ Their sons are distracting Oliver. The older one does a mock feint towards his brother with his sword, even though it is sheathed. ‘En garde!’ he cries.

  ‘That’s enough!’ Oliver finds himself shouting. ‘Stop it this minute.’

  His wife looks at him, startled. But she thinks she sees it all. ‘Perhaps that, all of that, has something to do with this whole mess,’ she says. ‘The dead boy had troubles of his own.’

  It had taken several days for the police to identify the dead man. Everyone who was interviewed, including the accused, had provided the name of Johnny McBride, although the newspapers respectfully called him John McBride, as if his mother would have known better than to ca
ll him Johnny. Laurie Corrington, the cook at Ye Olde Barn cafe, was one of those who assured the police that this was his name, and repeated his claim to pretty well every reporter in town. Laurie had been bending over the grill at the front of the cafe when what he described as ‘the incident’ took place. He knew Johnny, he said. He often came in for a feed. Nice chap, he said, always said hullo to him. Bit of a rough diamond, but no worse than the others. Said he was hoping to go to sea and work his passage to England.

  ‘I turned round just at that moment when it happened. Johnny got up and sauntered over to the jukebox. I saw a man get up from one of the cubicles and stand behind Johnny. Yes, it was Paddy all right. Suddenly Johnny staggered and fell back. At first I thought Paddy had hit Johnny and I hopped along the counter to put a stop to things. We don’t like violence in the cafe. Then I saw the blood. I had a white apron on. It was splattered with blood.’

  Laurie had dashed to the door and run down the street, his blood-stained white apron flapping around his knees. He ran as far as Victoria Street, yelling for a policeman. There he found two constables. They had dashed with Laurie back to the cafe, one losing his helmet on the way, not stopping to pick it up.

  The ambulance came. ‘Mr McBride was still conscious at that time,’ Laurie said. ‘The knife was still sticking out of his neck where he’d been stabbed. The boys rolled him over from where he fell, but you know his pulse was very weak, you could tell that he was going. Poor devil,’ he said, ‘he’d just had to move out of his digs. He had a suitcase with him, everything he owned. Somebody said there’d been a fight over one of the girls, well, you never know, do you? Anyway, it was me that called the ambulance, yes sir, you do what you can.’

  In the suitcases the police found information at odds with who Johnny McBride was supposed to be. Instead of identification for McBride, they found papers belonging to a person called Alan Jacques, just nineteen years of age, not twenty-four, a child migrant who had arrived two years earlier. He’d almost grown up when he left England, hardly a child, barely a man, but when his two sisters were shipped off to New Zealand he’d been sent along with them. In one of the suitcases the police found a number of banned books by the American crime writer, Mickey Spillane. One of them was called The Long Wait. The central character was called Johnny McBride.