Some Here Among Us (19 page)

‘I’ll just take a look,’ he thought, ‘and then – bed.’ There was a low fence in the way. He felt sad still, and careless, and daring. He thought of Lucas, his brother, jumping from the top of the tree.

Morgan climbed the little fence and stepped out.

At that moment he saw the top of the streetlight below – a dirty grey helmet – and he felt nothing underfoot and a bolt of dread and disbelief went through him.

‘I was only at the zig!’ he thought.

4

It was late when Race woke the next morning. He could tell from the silence. The reef-rumble of commuter traffic from New North Road had subsided. It must be after nine. And spring had arrived – he could tell that as well, almost before he opened his eyes. The spring had come in the night, high, warm, unseen. He lay listening for sounds in the house. Nothing. They must have already gone in, Panos and Busoni. He got out of bed and went over to the window and lifted the blind. Yes, there it was: you could see spring had come just from the look of the sky. A flock of little clouds floated above the factory roofs like lambs straying across a field. Broken glass glinted on the grass verge across the street. The panels of the phone-booth had been smashed. The receiver dangled from a metal-spiralled cord. The smell of new-baked bread came from the Tip-Top factory on New North Road. Suddenly Race felt a deep, shocking kind of gloom.
Christ
, he thought, where did that come from? And it stayed with him – a savage black gloom – no, not black, he thought. He saw the blue sky and the green grass and the glass glint in the verge and those were its colours. Maybe it was the spring itself, he thought, the idea of spring in the back streets that depressed him. He stood at the window and felt it turn away and sink into the depths. He went to the wardrobe and put on a shirt and pants and went down the hall to the kitchen. ‘House to myself,’ he said aloud, but when he came down to the kitchen there was Busoni standing at the bench. Busoni was naked. He liked running round the place naked.

‘You still here?’ Busoni said. ‘I thought you had lectures at nine.’

‘I slept in,’ said Race.

‘Toast?’

‘Toast,’ said Race.

‘Coffee?’

‘Coffee.’

‘Jews want coffee, Jews want toast,’ said Busoni.

‘How exactly do you mean?’ said Race.

‘This waitress I know,’ said Busoni. ‘She goes round chewing her gum and says: “D’youse want coffee? D’youse want toast?” ’

‘They want coffee,’ said Race.

‘And are you in fact Jewish?’

‘I have Jewish antecedents. But they jumped ship, our lot. One became a bishop.’

‘A
bishop
in the family tree,’ said Busoni, rolling his eyes upwards.

‘Can I still have coffee?’

‘I am preparing your coffee,’ said Busoni.

The toaster popped. Busoni went to the old glass-doored wooden cupboard and peered in.

‘Hello, little pot of Communist jam!’ he said. ‘Are you all there is to go on my toast this morning?’

‘Communist?’ said Race.

Busoni held up the jar like Yorick’s skull.

‘This here is Commie red-cherry jam from Poland, Poland,’ he said.

He put the jam down on the table. The smell of newly baked bread came in a waft through the screen door.

‘Hey, hey!’ said Busoni. ‘It’s spring!’

He slapped his upper belly with both hands like a bongo drummer. Then he poured the coffee and swung a cup across the table to Race. He buttered his toast and put cherry jam on it then went out the screen door into the back garden. The screen door banged. The grass was very long. No one had done any gardening out there for years. Race went out the screen door and it banged again. He stood on the back porch with his coffee. Busoni walked away holding two pieces of toast, one in each hand, coffee mug hooked on an index finger. His dog was leaping by his thigh. Busoni held both his arms out wide.

‘Down, sir,
down
!’ Busoni said. His voice was charged with happiness. A blonde girl walked fast through the dining room behind Race and went into the bathroom. Busoni had a series of girls through his room. Sometimes you heard their screams: they had encountered Busoni’s rats, Radio and Television, which were not even white rats from a shop but wild brown baby rats Busoni had found in a nest in the back garden and taken in and trained, and which lived in his room, in the pocket of an old tweed overcoat, and which arrived questing on his pillows in the depths of night. Busoni was an acting student with Panos. Race watched him in the sunlight like someone in a photo – his waitresses, his dog, his rats, his clean shoulder-blades. Then Race felt the shock again – this time a dreary bleakness. It’s the spring, he thought. It must be that. Spring arriving in a grimy city . . .

‘What are you up to now?’ said Busoni out in the long grass.

‘I’ll go in soon,’ said Race. ‘What about you?’

‘I’ll go in later,’ said Busoni. ‘Just have to get rid of—’

He pointed behind Race and winked.

‘Where’s Panos?’ said Race.

‘Early start. It’s
The Merchant of Venice
,’ said Busoni. ‘The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the et cetera upon the et cetera.’

He crouched down naked and looked in the grass. All his vertebrae were apparent.

‘What is it?’ said Race.

‘Nothing,’ said Busoni. ‘Snail shell.’

He stood up and closed his eyes towards the sun.

‘I thought it was a dollar,’ he said, eyes closed.

‘The phone box is smashed again,’ he said after a moment.

‘I saw it,’ said Race.

‘Saw it get smashed?’ said Busoni.

‘No. I saw it was smashed, just now.’

‘I saw it get smashed,’ said Busoni. ‘Three in the morning. We were awake. I got up to have a look.’

‘Who was it?’

‘Maori maiden with raven tresses.’

‘Did you say anything?’

‘Like what?’

‘Like, I don’t know, don’t smash the phone box.’

‘You kidding?’ said Busoni. ‘She wasn’t taking no shit from that phone box or anyone else.’

‘I’ll ring them,’ said Race.

‘Good deed for the day,’ said Busoni.

Race went inside and the screen door banged. He left his cup on the table and went down to his room and came back and went into the bathroom. The bathroom was still warm and misty with a fleeting feminine scent. He showered, then went back to his room and dressed. He went down the hall and rang the P&T to report the smashed phone box. There was no sign of Busoni and the girl. He made some more toast and boiled an egg then cleared up his and Busoni’s plates. Then he went back to his room and took his wallet and keys and picked up his satchel. He opened the satchel and looked in. His lecture notes were there. Race stood at the table in the corner of the room just beside the window where the spring shone in and he looked down at the lecture pads. Busoni and the girl came out on the veranda and kissed outside his window. They didn’t see him. Race took his lecture notes out of the satchel and laid them on the table. Busoni came back in the house and the girl went down the steps off the veranda and down steep King Street. Race saw her blonde hair in the sun. He waited a minute or two then took his empty satchel, left the house quietly, and went the other way, up the street to New North Road.

The bus coming from the western suburbs was empty. At Dominion Road, a Samoan woman, slim, handsome, about thirty, got on and came down the aisle.

She stopped and looked down at Race’s foot. His foot was in the aisle.

He withdrew his foot.

‘Fool,’ she said.

She went past and sat at the back. The bus went on to Khyber Pass and Symonds Street. The buds were green on the oaks in the Jewish cemetery and in the high crowns of the oaks below the road in Grafton Gully. The bus turned left into K. Rd. Race pulled the cord and got off. He stood at the corner in the diesel fumes. Yellow buses were labouring up Symonds Street. It was already getting hot. Then the gloom, the dread, hit him again.
Christ
, he thought. He looked at the traffic in the fumes. Then he remembered the night the Chev broke down – no, not broke down, he thought, FitzGerald stuck it in a ditch. It came to him then very clearly, the sweet darkness of the coast when the Chev crashed. ‘
Roddy, come and ballast with me
.’ Dinah coming out of the mild wind holding white dog-roses. Suddenly he had an intense wish, like a passion, to be back there again – not a light, not a star or candle for forty miles, east or west, inland or out to sea . . . ‘
The coast
,’ he thought, ‘
the dark,
no,
unlit,
no,
the
profoundly
unlit coast
.’ He went down Symonds Street under the avenue. The buds were coming out on all the trees. Dock cranes stood blackly at the bottom of the hill. Far away the island cone of Rangitoto was magnified in the haze. Then Race knew what he was going to do. He went along the avenue and through the campus to the library building. In the lobby he saw Ruru. He was shepherding some girls into the lift.

‘Going
up
!’ he said. ‘First to ninth.’

No one knew quite how Ruru had appointed himself elevator man in the library building. None of the lifts in the other university blocks had an operator.
Ruru
. Tiny, ancient, sad boxing-champ eyes trebly pouched, fly-weight champion 1935. A song he wrote in the war had made him famous, but now people had forgotten

Blue smoke goes drifting by,

Into the deep blue sky

‘Going up, son?’ he said to Race. His pork-pie hat was tilted over his eyes.

‘No thanks, Ruru.’

Ruru held the lift. He called Race over with a side-tilt of the hat, one hand on a button to keep the doors from closing.

‘These girls,’ he said to Race. ‘They’re beauties. Belles. That’s why I take the care I do.’

‘You take care of them, Ruru,’ said Race.

‘Belles of the ball,’ said Ruru. ‘That’s the French for it.’

‘You look after them,’ said Race.

‘Someone has to, son,’ said Ruru. He touched Race’s hand with a cool, dry finger. ‘It’s not safe today,’ he said. ‘Not in lifts.’

He gave Race a deep solemn look and ducked back inside. The doors ploughed shut. Race went to the grey steel lockers across the lobby. There was a chair by the window with a plastic woven seat and narrow steel-tube legs. He put his satchel on the green and black plastic weave and caught sight of Panos through the window crossing the lawn below. All the other actors, some of them in costume, went straying over the lawn and into the hall. Race put his satchel in a locker and locked it and crossed the lobby where the descending lift was pinging again, but before the lift door opened he had gone down the stairs and he crossed the lawn where the actors had passed and went in the other direction into the ferny shadow of the admin block and down the spiral stair to the basement. The waiting area was empty. He was sent straight in. The old doctor listened and said nothing. He was huge, obese, old and mighty. The students laughed at him: Bormann, they called him, or even Goering, but they were a little scared of him. He never spoke to them or asked questions. He was huge but his suit was still bulky on him. When he leaned forward to write, his collar yawned. How had he managed that, how had he got there, to be so big and old and incurious in his huge old suit? The lining at the cuff had yellowed. It must be peaceful being an old German, Race thought, you could hardly worry about death having seen so much of it. Bormann – which was unfair, Race thought, he might have been a refugee from the Nazis – leaned forward to write on his pad. Student legs – bejeaned male, bare female calves – flicked past in the ferny oblong window above the doctor’s head. You couldn’t hear their steps. The doctor pushed the paper across the desk without a word. Race took it and went through the empty reception area and up the spiral marble stair. The treads were pink and grey and veined like brain tissue. Race stepped on each one, thinking. At the top of the stairs there was sunlight again and the halls went in four directions. Race stopped. Either way, there was no hurry now. He went through to the back lawn. It was always damp there, the tree-ferns were always in shadow. The grass looked like moss. The clock high above the lawn struck. Race crossed the lawn and looked in at the door of the hall. Panos was on stage with a tall woman. He was in ordinary clothes, she was in a black gown and white collar. Panos declaimed:

‘
How many cowards, whose hearts are as false

As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins

The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars?
’

In the absence of an audience, his voice went echoing round the hall. Two or three people were sitting in the front row with clipboards in their hands, staring up at the stage. One or two people were alone elsewhere in the body of the hall. Panos saw Race at the door and made a little gesture with his hand, a kind of down-patting movement that meant ‘don’t go away’.