Some Here Among Us (22 page)

‘Here’s the beach,’ said Tolerton. ‘There’s our hotel. Oh – there’s our landlady at the window!’

‘Hello, Mrs Brisco,’ said FitzGerald, looking up from the taxi. ‘We love you, mad as a hatter though you are.’

They went into the hotel and met old Mrs Brisco with her apron and her dark-flecked chin in the gloom of the hall. Race dropped his bag upstairs and they went out again, across the road to the beach, FitzGerald talking all the time as they crossed the sand.

‘There’s about ten of us,’ he said, ‘someone called Lily, and Tubby Rawlinson who flatted with Morgan for a while, and his girlfriend. And Sandra Isbister, she’s here – she got to know Morgan quite well in the last month or two, she was telling me she met him at a nightclub and looked at him and just
knew
something was going to happen but I don’t know about that – and of course Candy and Adam – poor old Griffin, he hasn’t uttered a word for two days I don’t think – it was his birthday on Friday, you can imagine what sort of day that was: Morgan died at five and Adam had to identify the body and then Mrs Tawhai arrived – how she got there in that time, I don’t know, she must have flown bodily through the ether – and she turned on him, on all of us really. It was all our fault. Drinking. Leading Morgan astray. But, you know, it was her son lying there dead, and so no one said a word, and then the paper got hold of the story about the drugs and then the police decided there had been foul play. Hey. Hey!
Hey
.’

He called out to a little group of people away down the beach and Candy and Adam turned and waited for them. Candy looked at Race with her great eyes and said nothing and Griffin looked at him and said nothing either, his eyes red-rimmed and aggrieved. Then in the distance Race saw the girl he had seen helping Candy make a dress one day. ‘The famous Sandra Isbister,’ he thought. ‘She’s not as pretty as I remember.’

They walked down the beach away from the town. Race kept an eye on Sandra Isbister. ‘She’s quite ordinary looking really,’ he thought, ‘even quite plain.’ Her brown hair was in an urchin cut; she had no make-up. She was wearing a simple cotton green and white dress. She walked along looking rather solemn and unsure of herself as if she did not really think she belonged there. Far across the bay lay another country of folded hills and gullies, tiny roofs, patches of bush. Everything there looked infinitely peaceful and innocent there, as if nothing bad had ever happened, no law had ever been broken, no one had ever died. Then an onshore breeze sprang up and the waves came pouring into the bay, rushing forward like the winged sandals of the wind that was driving them on, and Race felt happiness sweep over him as if they had travelled hundreds of miles that day not because of Morgan and death but to meet by the shore – he noticed Sandra Isbister had a kind of gaiety to her walk, as if, although she felt the solemnity of the occasion, the way her foot fell, the way her calf turned, she could not help being light-hearted – as the waves came pouring landward, in the sun, in the spring.

They turned and walked back towards the town. At the town end of the beach was a long breakwater of black rocks. They climbed up and walked along beside a railway track that led out to sea. The rails were rusty but apparently still in use, for wagons stood along them. The deep green water was slapping at the rocks. FitzGerald stepped behind a wagon and took out some marijuana.

‘No!’ said Tolerton. ‘Not here. Not now.’

He spoke so sternly that FitzGerald grinned and looked unsure of himself which was rare for him.

‘Why not?’ he said.

‘Well, I can think of a dozen reasons,’ said Tolerton. ‘Not least there’s this: here we are in this one-horse town, bringing back a body, and you think everyone’s not watching us like hawks?’

‘But they can’t see through cast iron,’ said FitzGerald, and he rapped the rust-coloured side of the wagon.

‘Oh, you do whatever you like,’ said Tolerton, and he marched away on his long thin legs in the direction of the town. There was no one else in sight. Candy and Adam had come onto the breakwater and they sat on the rocks down by the slapping green sea. They were keeping to themselves. Candy put her arm over Adam’s shoulder and looked fully into his face. FitzGerald and Race and Sandra Isbister walked on. There were some Maoris fishing at the end of the breakwater: you could see the glint of their rod-tips in the sun before you saw them. A man of thirty-five or forty with a long, sparse, red moustache was standing on a pointed rock; an older couple wearing woollen jerseys were sitting below him. The woman’s feet were bare. Some newly caught fish were in a puddle of seawater. The older man, still sitting down, reeled his line in.

The hook was bare.

‘Might as well pack up and go and buy
fish
’n’chips,’ he said, stressing the word
fish
and looking shyly up at the visitors.

‘But you’ve got a good haul there,’ said FitzGerald, looking at the fish in the seawater puddle.

‘Oh, them,’ said the man disparagingly, as if it was only good form to say so. His wife smiled, but slowly one of her bare feet curled: she was embarrassed by the newcomers. The younger man did not once look at them. He baited his hooks with intense concentration and then climbed further up on the black honeycombed rock and, with a very grave expression, his mouth downturned under his moustache of sparse red hairs, he cast out. The line went sailing out far over the water and the sinker fell into the green sea with an audible ‘
plop
’.

6

That night, old Mrs Brisco insisted on strict segregation of the sexes. The boys were on the upper floor, in an attic dormitory. She herself stood guard on the landing below. The girls shared twin rooms on the second floor. Mrs Brisco demonstrated that all the locks and keys to the rooms worked and made the girls promise to lock their doors, but finally she had had to go downstairs and get some sleep and her guests then came and went as they pleased. Adam departed to Candy’s room for the night. And since Candy was sharing with Sandra, Sandra came up to sleep in Adam’s bed in the men’s attic dormitory where they talked and laughed until after midnight. FitzGerald gallantly attempted to join her but was refused permission. He pretended to be dismayed and complained a little, but it was a narrow bed in a dormitory, and he was not really sorry, and his honour was satisfied.

‘Where’s Rod Orr?’ said Race in the dark. He had suddenly noticed his absence.

‘Rod’s not coming,’ said FitzGerald.

‘I guess he never liked Morgan much,’ said Race.

‘It’s not that,’ said FitzGerald. ‘He probably feels guilty.’

‘Why should he feel guilty?’

‘Morgan wanted to stay the night – and he should have stayed the night – but Rod said no.’

‘Why did he say no?’ said Race.

‘Who knows? God knows. Something about a curtain,’ said FitzGerald. ‘But if he’d stayed on the sofa he wouldn’t have died, and I guess Rod feels guilty.’

‘Rod doesn’t feel guilty at all,’ said Sandra Isbister, from the dark. ‘He says Morgan committed suicide. He says he jumped.’

‘Jumped!’ said Race.

‘Or he was pushed,’ said Sandra. ‘He says there was a lovers’ quarrel and he jumped or he was pushed.’

‘A lovers’ quarrel?’ said FitzGerald. ‘With Human Sanity!’

‘Rod Orr would say that,’ said Race. ‘Rod has sex on the brain.’

‘Everyone has sex on the brain, to some degree,’ said Tolerton.

‘That’s not where I have it,’ said FitzGerald.

‘You,’ said Tolerton. ‘You’d have sex anywhere. At bus stops. In shop windows. In the forks of trees.’

‘Sex in the forks of trees!’ said Sandra Isbister, but this time she spoke rather sleepily, which made the others laugh, as if she had sped away into the borderlands of sleep but then, hearing the phrase from afar, had to come all the way back. And even when they all began to drop off, there was a ripple of laughter still in the room, but they were really only happy at being there together in the Brisco Family Hotel, under the sloping attic roof, and there was an odd sense of safety and contentment, and sadness as well, as if the final night, the last hours, of childhood were just then coming to their end.

And in the morning the mood was quite different. Everything was hurried and urgent; no one spoke much and they did everything quietly as if not to disturb other guests, yet there was no one else in the place except for Mrs Brisco who was downstairs making breakfast. You could smell bacon and toast to the very top of the house. It was still dark outside. Then the sky began to colour, but the lights stayed on inside all the same. There was a sense of getting ready to go on parade. They had to be at the church by six-thirty. The boys, the young men, were to be pall-bearers, and as pall-bearers they would be the guests of honour. They were bringing Morgan home. But Morgan was
dead
. They were bringing back a dead body. And were they not the culprits? They felt important and guilty and yet innocent at the same time, and about to undergo rigorous inspection.

Apart from Lane Tolerton, who had just started working as a law-clerk, none of the males had worn a suit and tie or formal black shoes, it seemed, for ages.

‘Fitzy, have you got any—?’

‘What?’

‘I can’t think of its name,’ said Race.

‘Whisky?’

‘No.’

‘Personal magnetism?’

‘No.’

‘What then?’

‘
Nugget
. Shoe polish.’

‘I
thought
you were going to say Nugget.’

‘Why didn’t you say so?’

‘I couldn’t think of the name.’

‘Have you got any?’

‘No.’

‘I have,’ said Tolerton.

On the second floor, the girls were dressing soberly. There was only one mirror in the shared bathroom and they put on their lipstick together without smiling or even imagining a smile. When they went downstairs they ate hardly any of the scrambled eggs and burnt bacon and burnt toast Mrs Brisco had prepared. Outside, it was startlingly cold. Mrs Brisco put the hall light on and the veranda light as well as they went out in the half-light to the taxis. At the church a crowd was waiting even though there was to be no ceremony, merely lifting and carrying the coffin out to the hearse before departure. This was done. The pall-bearers were watched intently – Morgan’s friends, all white, all six of them – as they came out of the little weatherboard church and carried the coffin down a concrete ramp and across to the verge. Then suddenly the sun was up and shot its beams on the frosty grass and on the puffing exhausts of the cars and the chrome door-handles of the hearse and on the flowers inside on the coffin-lid, and then off they went, the whole cortege, heading out of town. Candy and Griffin were in the first car behind the hearse. In the absence, as yet, of any family members, they had the role of chief mourners. In the car behind were Race, FitzGerald, Tolerton and Sandra Isbister. They were being driven by one of Morgan’s cousins – a distant cousin, he admitted, even very distant – ‘I wouldn’t have known him if I saw him in the street.’ His name was Gideon. He was wearing a rumpled grey suit, and a red sweater under his jacket because of the frost, but soon, when the sun was up, the car became too warm.

Gideon began to mop his brow. He wanted to take off his jacket but that, it turned out, was not possible.

‘I can’t stop the car,’ said Gideon.

‘Why not?’ said FitzGerald.

‘Those other buggers will pass me,’ he said.

He hadn’t meant it as a joke but everyone laughed and the mood, once again, became quite ordinary and cheerful. They had left the town behind and were on the coast, passing hoardings with pictures of beach property for sale, and then the real beaches themselves, cold breakers purling on the clean sand. Gideon was a wool-classer, he said. He was thirty-five, separated, father of two – he declared his whole station in life in a minute. He liked to go fishing, he said. He had been fishing everywhere along this coast – there off the rocks, and away out there, and just around that point – although whenever he could he went out by boat.

‘My great-grandfather used to fish off this coast,’ said Tolerton. ‘One year he lost his signet ring overboard. It was a very valuable ring. But he came back the next summer and caught a big snapper at exactly the same spot and took it back to the hotel. Well – you can imagine everyone’s amazement when the cook cut the fish open and the ring
wasn’t
inside.’

Everyone laughed at this, except Gideon who shook his head and said: ‘You students!’ He had a plump, round face with numerous black dots like pebbles dashed over it. A few miles on he glanced out the corner of his eye at Sandra who was in the front seat beside him. He asked if she would mind if he smoked.

‘Of course not,’ said Sandra. ‘I might have one too.’

‘Oh, well!’ said Gideon. ‘You can light mine for me.’

She lit a cigarette using the lighter on the dashboard and passed it across, a little lipstick on the filter. She lit one for herself and then, on impulse, leaned forward again and pressed the knob of the dashboard radio.

When the train left the station

There was two lights on behind