Right forefinger into cord ring, pull down, that’s it, release the shade, rat-ta-tat-tat-rat as it rolls up to the top of the bathroom window. Immediately, Michael is bathed in white sunshine. The window is like a live TV screen illuminating every pore of him as he stands at the sink, dressed only in his pyjama shorts, gazing up over the hedge, which he’d helped his father plant three years before, and over the roofs of the neighbouring houses at Maungawhau now drenched with egg-yellow light. Not Mt Eden, his father whispers. Mau-nga-whau. Say it. Mau-nga-whau. Michael mouths it, spelling each letter in his throat. The shadows of large clouds clamber up and over the mountains. 7.30 am. Faint smell of piss, mildew and wet towels. He reaches up, undoes the latch and pushes the window out. The crisp morning air wraps its arms around his chest, while he continues gazing up at the mountain.
Whenever his father was home – and it was now nine months, two weeks and three days since his last visit – Michael observed and learned his father’s routines and the tunes he whistled as part of those. Each day it started at 6.30 am when his father woke and went to the bathroom for what he referred to, jokingly, as his ‘ablutions’. Michael would sit on the edge of the bathtub and watch.
Michael pulls his toothbrush out of the holder on the wall, puts mint Dickens, his favourite toothpaste, on it, cups a handful of water to his mouth and starts brushing. Just like he’s seen his father doing so often.
As he brushes, with the icy mint tingling on his tongue, he whistles, in his head, his father’s toothbrushing song:
Maungawhau, listen to my song.
Maungawhau, listen to my song.
What do you think of a man
who’s never known the blues? …
He once again feels his father’s first whistling in his left ear. Warm and ticklish lips and breath. The first real memory of his father: that long quivering note whistled breathlessly into his ear and down into his depths until he was that eternal sound. When he grew to know other sounds, that one extended note reminded him of a train whistle, far away, in the night, a long drawn-out breath being sucked back by an unknown destination. That was also the theme he identified with certain people, creatures, places and situations. For instance, whenever he heard and saw whales on TV that was the sound which gripped him. When he was sad – and he tried not to be, ever – his father’s first whistle embraced him. Every time he and his mother visited Uncle David at the hospital – Uncle David had been sick for years of an ailment his mother avoided naming for him – and he watched his emaciated uncle’s slow breathing, while his mother talked and talked, his father’s note was acutely long in his hearing, quivering like the tail of the angry scorpion he’d seen in a James Bond movie. On still, rainless evenings, Maungawhau whistled that note over their city of black glass too. So did lions in the zoo. So did the live mussels which his father loved eating raw in drawn-out slurps. So did abandoned buildings and bikes and boats; and the dirty, scrawny, derelict alkies who congregated every evening in their church hall for hot soups and bread and a bed for the night. So did Mt Eden Reordinarination Centre not far from their home. One night on their way home from the movies, and he was sitting between his parents as they drove past the prison, his mother said, ‘It must be awful in there.’ The grey stone walls glistened, like Darth Vader’s mask, in the harsh glare of the security lights. He waited for his father to comment. His father stared ahead. When Michael glanced at the high-security centre, it sang that first note his father had breathed into his head.
… Maungawhau, I’ve known you all my life
but you don’t care what happens to me.
Maungawhau, did you know
Crumpy now sells Toyota pick-ups? …
His father returned to them once a year, as far back as that first whistled note. As Michael had grown up, his father’s absences had lengthened into that theme too …
Michael drops his toothbrush into the hole in the plastic holder. Looks up again at Maungawhau as he washes his hands. His father’s eight-second ablution tune, a happier lilting, starts:
Baby, baby, don’ya luv me?
Baby, baby, yar drive me crazy.
Baby, baby, yar drive me crazy …
He splashes large handfuls of cold water against his face. (Just like his dad.) Some of the water splatters onto the floor. He dries his face with fierce wipes of the towel. Then, holding the bathmat under the toes of his right foot, he dries the floor with round looping movements of his leg. Again imitating his father.
He opens the medicine cabinet. His father’s silver razor, in the glass in the cabinet, looks so lonely. He takes it out, takes the blade out of it, tightens it again, and, imagining a rich lather on his face, starts shaving. Looking into the mirror. And whistling:
… Baby, baby, Ah luv yar true.
Baby, baby, why can’t yar be true?
My heart aches and aches for you …
Every time the blade is leaden with cream, he washes it under the tap.
He glances up at the mountain. The paddocks, terraces and trees are now a darker green. Around the apex on the summit move groups of tourists, stick figures at that distance. About once a month he walked his mother up through the paddocks and scatter of cowshit (which ponged) to the summit. He hated doing it but his mother needed the exercise. They had to rest every hundred yards or so because she was so unfit. And three times out of every four climbs, they found busloads of Japanese tourists at the summit. He liked them because they seemed so together, so in a group; he liked their intense chatter and attention as they photographed the city and one another. Once, a grey-haired couple, who barely came up to his shoulder, asked his mother to take their picture with their camera. The couple stood, arms around each other, at the edge of the mouth of the dead volcano, with the immense sky and city and Waitemata Harbour and the Gulf as their backdrop. His mother took two photos. The man bowed thank you, afterwards. His wife smiled; her mouth was full of gold teeth. Another time, while his mother sat on the steps, trying to regain her breath – ‘My heart, oh my heart!’ she kept saying to him – he went over to the southern edge of the summit and looked down over the suburbs as they spilled away to Manukau Harbour and the white haze. As the wind cooled his sweat, he started whistling ‘On Top of Old Smoky’, which his father had taught him three years previously. The whole southern sprawl of the city listened, so did the orange horizon and the Waitakere Range to the southwest.
… On top of old Smoky
all covered with snow,
I lost my true lover …
He was into the third line when he heard two whistlers beside him. Two Japanese youths, in what looked like naval uniforms, smiled at him. He nodded and whistled louder. They whistled with him. Theirs was a rich powerful chorus that burst up into the high-doming heavens. The other tourists watched. When they finished, their audience applauded. He glanced at his mother. She was on her feet, clapping too. He looked at his two friends. They bowed; he bowed back, and then hurried to his mother.
‘One day, I’m going to Japan,’ he said as they strolled down the mountain, on the one-way road.
‘They eat strange food,’ she said.
‘How’s your heart?’
Grinning, she put an arm round his shoulders. ‘Fit and well,’ she replied.
After washing his father’s razor, he dries it with his towel and returns it to the glass. Then, delicately, he pats some of his father’s George Eliot aftershave into his face. The bathroom is immediately alive with the scent. The neighbours are up; he can hear the couple in the back flat arguing. The sizzling of bacon being fried is loud from the front flat. They had little to do with their neighbours or anyone else who wasn’t family the way his mother defined that: related by blood or loyalty, obligation and life-long friendship.
He straightens his father’s gear in the medicine cabinet; cleans the sink with a wet facecloth.
… Sunday is the rest we need
after a week of sweat and misery.
Sunday’s for lyin’ in and waitin’
for your son to cook ya bacon and tea …
He’s careful not to wake his mother as he tiptoes up the corridor past her bedroom …
Extract from ‘The Don’ts of Whistling’.