… was Min who found it. Midwinter, damp and grey, the river a ribbon of low-hanging fog. And there it was, half-buried beneath periwinkle, its walls dimpled with damp rot under a cloak of ivy. A leafless vine entangled the front porch, ornamented with the fluffy seed heads of old man’s beard and fallen leaf lay knee-deep on the path between overhanging branches and the whole place reeked of damp and decay, cat pee and desolation.
Perfect.
Min stood in the overgrown garden, jeans soaked to the knees. She’d regret that later: flares took absolutely ages to dry. Beneath her sodden boots lay bricks and broken glass. Beer bottles littered the porch, and someone had set a fire at the foot of the steps where a half-burned wirewove rusted over charred wood and a shabby sofa and armchairs slumped either side in a parody of three-piece gentility. She stood, in uncertain territory. Maybe some old hermit still inhabited the house, an unpredictable type, savage with unexpected visitors?
In her hand she held the leaflets: Uncle Sam in his stars-and-stripes hat wanted YOU, except that Pete has redrawn his head as a skull and his pointing finger as skeletal bone. MOBILISE AGAINST WAR! The plan was to gather in Victoria Square before marching through the central city. She had pinned one leaflet to a suburban library notice board, put three in church foyers, asked to place one in the window of a dairy whose owner had said yes, and one in the window of a butcher’s who had said no without looking up from sawing a rack of lamb chops. And now she was tramping the suburban streets, posting the remainder in letterboxes. A man in a singlet and Stubbies, despite the cold, was in a driveway, peering into the upraised bonnet of a Holden.
‘Hoy,’ he called. ‘Hoy! You!’ She turned. He stood on the footpath, the leaflet in his upraised fist. ‘Here’s what I’m going to do with this!’ And he made an elaborate mime of wiping his bum. ‘Now fuck off! And take your rubbish with you!’ The balled-up leaflet landed between them and rolled into the gutter.
Min walked on. Don’t enter into argument. Look straight ahead. Keep moving. She posted more leaflets but a little more quickly than before, with that uneasy prickling at the back of the neck that signalled that she might be under scrutiny.
And that was when she found it. A letterbox, stuffed to bursting with sodden newsletters and unattended mail, a rickety gate drooping from a broken padlock, a copper nameplate green with verdigris: Villa Bella. And beside it, tacked to the gatepost, a faded For Sale sign. And beyond the gate, the damp dark path, the green tunnel …
She had always liked such places. It was something to do with childhood, with The Secret Garden which she had received as a prize for regular attendance at Sunday school. Her parents had no time for reading. There was only a Bible, in Dutch. And an atlas. And suddenly, miraculously, The Secret Garden, with its robin and crocuses and the peevish sickly children made well by growing things.
She glanced over her shoulder. The Holden was revving away. No one was paying attention. She pushed her way through the gate and up the overgrown path, and the house rose before her, wreathed in wisps of fog like one of those Mayan temples rising from the Yucatan jungle. A big villa with bay windows and a kind of pointed medieval turret at one corner. She stood before it in a sudden silence. Among the trees and shrubs, the Holden faded to a distant throb, the entire city to a faint persistent hum. She could have been standing miles away, out in the country.
The front door was ajar, so she knocked, twice, called tentatively, ‘Hello?’, on account of the hermit, and when there was no response, no shaggy madman with a shotgun, she stepped into the hall.
Panels of coloured glass around the door cast a pale pastel glow over walls festooned with swags of scrim and paper, which swayed like banners in a castle chamber. On either side, tall doors opened onto cramped arrangements of cubicles and kitchenettes, crudely partitioned, but if you looked up you could see that these had been carved from much larger, grander rooms with plaster ceiling borders of fruit and flowers. The big bay windows had been smashed and the carpet crunched underfoot with broken glass and dry leaves, while all around was the startled scurry of myriad small lives interrupted as she walked about. In one room, french doors stood half open to a side verandah, where an immense creeper had cast aside any pretence of garden ornament to become the jungle strangler it had always been at heart. Writhing limbs twisted around verandah posts and skinny tentacles waved for a grip. At one end of the verandah more plants jostled in the remains of a conservatory and there were those distant wraiths who always hover in such places: the lady in a white dress, plucking a gardenia; a gentleman in suit and high collar considering a rare plant. Formal people in formal clothes doing formal things.
At the other end of the verandah a staircase led up to the turret, which was also broken and abandoned and completely perfect. More rooms lined the dark hallway all the way back to a bathroom with a yellowed tub perched on clawed feet and a lavatory whose bowl was filthy but ornamented with pink roses. The kitchen was gloomy and through the broken floorboards there were glimpses of bare earth. The back garden was a tangle of plants and tumbledown sheds of indeterminate purpose: heaps of sheds, heaps of rooms, space for everyone, for Mack’s band, and her loom and Pete’s studio, for meetings and rehearsals and maybe a proper printing machine and a darkroom, a communal garden, a kitchen for shared meals, all of them abandoning the cramped flats and the looming spectre of the life lived behind suburban fences from which they had all, in their various ways, made their escape.
Her friends. Met at parties in crowded flats, beer bottles clanking in coat pockets and some dubious punch in the washing machine bowl for the girls. At meetings and demonstrations, or in classes at the university or across a sticky table at some cafeteria, or simply sitting on the riverbank in Hagley Park one spring afternoon. Like Liz, who sat among the daffodils arguing with an earnest anthropology student that ‘man’ was not a neutral term. It didn’t mean the same as ‘people’ or ‘humans’. ‘I mean, it’s not neutral, is it?’ she said, ripping a daffodil in shreds. ‘Nobody ever says, “Man breastfeeds his young.” Or “Man gives birth vaginally.” Min had never heard the word ‘vagina’ said out loud before. Her mother always used the term ‘down there’.
And Pete, who had designed a poster for a production of Antigone for which Min had been the costume mistress, sewing dozens of identical white shifts, splattered with cosmetic blood. There is no more deadly peril than disobedience … Antigone confronting Creon and the power of the state. Lysistrata and her mates refusing to sleep with men until they stopped the war. The shifts got a lot of use that year.
And Steve, who had walked beside her in an anti-Vietnam demonstration and given her a hand to control an unwieldy banner. Hey Hey LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?
And Mack, whom she first noticed sitting cross-legged in a ratty flat above the takeaway on Riccarton Road playing some song about his mama not ’lowin’ him to stay out all nigh’ long. He had been going out with her flatmate, but one night as she was sitting on the verandah roof having a cigarette, he climbed out the window and sat beside her. ‘You’re gorgeous,’ he said. ‘You, too,’ she said.
Simple, but effective.
Her friends. People who said things she’d never heard before. Who made her laugh unguardedly, happily. Who made her feel like herself at last, rather than that weird Dutch kid.
And here it was: a place where they could live together, all of them under a single roof. A single, slightly leaky roof, to judge from the stains on the ceiling, but that was a detail Min chose to ignore as she walked about. She said yes, instead. Yes to the house and the big beautiful rooms, yes to the tangled garden, yes to the hallway and the turret which she intended, though it must of course be a communal decision, to claim as her own. (Herself in flowing muslin at her loom in the tower above the treetops, like Tennyson: the Lady of Shalott, tirra lirra by the river.) Yes to the flowery lav and the tumbledown sheds, yes yes yes.
The owner lived in Whangarei, a difficult woman, said the agent, demanding a high price for what was in effect a demolition property.
‘Oh no!’ said Min. ‘Not demolition!’
‘You’re going to live in that?’ said the agent, who was about to move into a nice new architecturally designed townhouse with an angular roofline, central heating and porthole windows. Morpeth Mews. Within walking distance of an equally contemporary village of boutique clothing shops, delicatessen and European-style bakery. A hint of a sweet colonial past, but no more. One could have entirely too much of the past. One could have too much weatherboard and rot and an open fire struggling to heat a 14-foot stud.
But this young couple seemed keen. She supposed a couple, though you couldn’t always tell. His hair was long, straggling over the collar of a coat that in the heat of her office was beginning to smell distinctly of goat. He sprawled with his long legs on one of her office chairs, with a kind of louche insolence she did not entirely like, his eyes barely visible behind lemon-tinted spectacles. The jeans were skinny and had big silver buttons at the fly and she couldn’t help glancing at them and the curve they struggled to contain, and of course he had noticed. She had the uncomfortable feeling that he might be laughing at her, behind those lenses. The girl was a mouse by comparison, pretty and pale in kneeboots and fur coat. (Min had decided it didn’t count if the animals had died before you were born.) They sat side by side on the other side of the agent’s desk, looking eager. There were others involved, in some kind of communal arrangement the agent imagined would involve complicated sex and copious amounts of marijuana, but for the moment these two signatures would do.
The owner was driving a hard bargain: $12,000, she said over the telephone. She lived up north and had not visited in years, had absolutely no idea of the state the place was in, was completely unrealistic, asking twice what it was worth, but $12,000 or no sale. She would rather see the house rot into the ground than let it go for less. After two years on the market and no maintenance for decades before that.
Min listened as the vision faded. The big cleared rooms, the studios, the garden, her turret in the treetops. They had made an offer, all chipping in as much as they could: $500 from Steve who had a job that year at the Botanic Gardens, $1000 from Pete who had sold his car, the entire bequest left to Min by her Auntie Eve who had married a GI during the war and gone to live in Wisconsin, $2500 from Mack, and $1000 from Liz, who had a scholarship, was doing law and drafted a proper contract that used phrases they had never before encountered, such as ‘tenants in common’. That’s what they were now: tenants in common, who between them had managed to raise $7000, which the agent said was reasonable.
The owner up north said no. Not even close.
But what was this? Mack was saying $8000. The owner was saying $12,000. Mack was saying $10,000. The owner was saying $12,000. And then Mack was saying, ‘Ah, to hell with it: $12,000,’ and it was done. Mack was standing up as if this were an everyday occurrence. He was shaking hands with the agent and he was turning to Min, completely as his ease, saying to her silent question, ‘It’s cool. No hassle.’ And there they were signing an agreement. She glanced down at Mack’s signature as she added her own. Richard Fraser Treadwell McClintock. She’d never known his name before. He was just Mack. Slinky. Elusive.
And then they were leaving the office and the house was theirs. As they walked up Manchester Street she said, ‘Where did that come from?’ But Mack simply shrugged. Richard Fraser Treadwell McClintock. ‘It’s just money.’ Was he planning on selling something? His bike? Did he have more — a lot more — of the black he had brought back from Kabul last summer? Was there some other source? She was aware suddenly that she knew nothing whatever about him. He was always evasive. ‘Here and there,’ he said, if anyone asked where he came from. And he said it with such indifference that it would have seemed uncool to press the matter further. He walked with a loose loping stride, owned a single pair of boots scuffed and intricately tooled, rode a temperamental Triumph that required constant tinkering, carried with him from flat to flat his guitar and a single soap carton containing a collection of blues albums of great rarity, which he played on a painstakingly assembled stereo system: Denon turntable, Bang and Olufsen amp, Wharfedale speakers. And that was it.
Just money.
Min thought of her parents’ careful accumulation of wealth: ‘Money doesn’t grow on my back,’ her father said. (He was a man of many sayings.) Het geld groeit niet op mijn rug. And her mother anxiously complied: plain meals, nothing bought on tick, nothing thrown out or wasted, rolls of wool carefully unravelled for reknitting, bundles of rubber bands stored in the kitchen drawer, paper bags folded and saved, rugs stitched from braided rags so that you could find the remains of your summer skirt, your brother’s grey school shorts and the old kitchen curtains woven into the mat by the back door. All this restraint in the name of paying off a brick and tile in Nelson before retirement to a bach in the Sounds where her mother could put her feet up at last and her father could spend the remainder of his life fishing. Penny by penny. Dollar by dollar. We moeten goed op die kleintjes letten. Look after the little things, the pennies … Just money.
But here they are, her friends, all equal, all together in this purchase, gathered at the gate to the Villa Bella, which they have rechristened, after much argument, Lothlorien. Pete has painted the name on the gate. The sun is out after days of rain and they are filing up the overgrown path from the van laden with bags and cartons. And the house rises before them, no longer clad in drab winter leaf, but newborn. Sprays of yellow banksia wave above the chimney pots. The side verandah is disappearing under a curtain of purple wisteria. There’s plum blossom and golden kowhai and tiny blue flowers among broken glass and smashed brick.
Back in the van there are more leaflets that must be delivered later. There is to be an action on Armistice Day.
Remember the Victims of Fascist Aggression in Vietnam! will be laid down among the RSA’s wreaths at the cenotaph.
Yes. Remember My Lai. The bodies flung in a ditch, women and children for the most part, randomly killed but counted with that weird military exactness: 504.
Remember Agnew. Winging his way into the country with his cosmonaut at his side as evidence of American superiority, rulers of earth, sea and the universe. Remember the melee of security men and Holyoake, primped and oiled, prancing up the steps while the crowd rioted at his back. Remember the gleam of his little pointed shoes, so delighted to be dancing attendance.
Remember the marches. The thousands gathered on streets and squares. Remember the headlocks and scuffles and arrests, the thunk of the baton on bone, the knee to the balls, the fist to the jugular.
Remember the marches here and in America where the guardsmen had truly gone all the way and opened fire. Remember the girl at Kent State kneeling by the boy who lay face down by her side and the way her mouth stretched in that wide silent scream you could hear all the way over here.
Remember all that.
Remember the leaflets.
Remember, too, a curtain of purple flowers around an open …