Maurice Gee

Buried Treasure, Old Bones

Her escape in the seventh winter took the form of an art class. It cost her fifteen dollars and the amount of preparation that might have gone into the birth of a child. Her mother’s hurt was selfish — no less so for being an habitual response. For all that, it had to be handled gently. The old lady’s physical pain made anything else impossible. So Janet agreed the selfishness was her own.

‘But it’s only for two hours, mother. Two hours out of a whole week. Is it so very bad of me? I’ll paint you some pretty pictures.’

‘You’ll paint messes and you know it. You’ve never had the slightest bit of talent.’

‘I may have some, who knows? I may turn out to be another Grandma Moses.’

‘Who’s that? Grandma who? All right, I know. I’m not senile. Ugly stuff. A child could do better. If you wanted to do something useful you’d enrol in a cooking class.’

‘I don’t want to do something useful. Just something for myself.’

‘Yes, I thought that was it.’ From hurt to anger to pleasure in scoring points. Janet patted the deformed hand and felt an ache of sympathy in her own.

‘I have to go now. David’s home so you won’t be alone. You’re not in pain, are you?’

‘I’m always in pain.’

‘But no more than usual? You don’t need anything?’

‘Knock me out. Forget me.’

‘Now, mother.’

‘Off you go, Janet, you’ll miss your pleasure.’

Janet closed the door softly. She had managed this most critical part with skill and would have been disturbed not to feel a small amount of guilt. She went upstairs, knocked at David’s door and put her head in.’

‘I’m off now.’

‘Where? Oh, your sketching. You won’t be late, I hope.’

‘Ten o’clock.’

‘That late?’

‘You’ll manage.’

‘What do I do if …?’ He nodded at the downstairs rooms.

‘She’s all right. She’s in a bit of pain but she shouldn’t need anything.’

‘How can you be sure of that?’

‘I’ve been doing this for seven years, that’s how. Go down and see her in half an hour. If she does need something they’re in the drawer on the right. She’ll tell you which ones.’

He nodded his head distractedly. ‘I’ve got this marking to finish. I think it’s a bit poor your clearing off.’

‘Yes, David. Goodnight.’

‘It’s not that I begrudge you—’

‘You can lock up. I’ve got my key.’

‘Well … enjoy yourself. If you must. I’d drive you but I’ve got these …’ He waved at the papers.

‘I’d just as soon walk.’

Downstairs she collected her brand-new folder with the half-dozen sheets of drawing paper inside and her box of three pencils, sharpened with her father’s German knife, and let herself out into the night.

The mountain turned slowly on her left as she walked. Its beetle shape crawled behind the houses. She had climbed it many times as a girl, chased cattle on its slopes and, a little later, walked on its paths hand in hand with her hair-oiled boyfriends. In a car on that mountain she had made her first surrender, and walked crying afterwards down the path from the crater to the town. At the cattle trough by the fence she had tried to wash her bloodstained pants, her first lacy pair, and left them floating to tell their story — womanhood attained. Seven years ago, thirty-five, unmarried and not even mildly troubled by it, she had strolled up the path again and found it so little changed she had looked in the trough for the pants with no sense of being ridiculous. The boy had later played cricket for New Zealand and come to manage a liquor business. She was glad she had not married him.

The one thing marriage might have done was save her from the job of nursing her mother. Sooner her mother, she thought, than that satisfied liquor-king. She had met him in the street several years ago and with her best chilly nod had denied his mention of allowing her only the part of her life that had crossed his own.

She walked up a long path by a playing field and there beyond the tennis pavilion was the mountain again. Extinct for twenty thousand years. A pity. A small eruption — no lives must be lost — was a thing she wished for.

But now she lengthened her stride and hurried between the rows of trees to the school. It would not do to be late on the first night. The secret might lie in the tutor’s first words.

But no, he was disappointing: a nervous boy. Clearly he was paying his way through art school. She felt no need to be charitable and made up her mind to ignore him, go her own way. There was at least a live model provided. And soon this man’s face had her in a spell. His leather jacket, whose folds the tutor was so enamoured of, failed to interest her, she marked it with a dozen strokes; but his face, its shaping, the grid of suffering, grid of brutality — these she allowed to mesmerise her.

Her pencil though had insufficient skill. Where she had wanted bitterness round the eyes she found she had cunning, and the mouth simply turned ugly — an eel mouth, a gob. But she had not failed in something more important: by some fluke, some lucky line, she had caught the child behind the man, the eager boy about to be disappointed, the innocent whom life would brutalise. She laid her pencil down and looked at him with interest and compassion.

He winked at her. One of his eyes closed knowingly, in a reptilian way. At once her cheeks grew hot. No need for words: he placed her in his scheme — the spinster playing at art, the ageing virgin who hadn’t woken up to it that what she really wanted wasn’t sketching. She was furious with herself for blushing. She would get up in a moment and tell this man that some of the things she’d done would curl his hair. He grinned at her confusion. His mouth was full of stained and crooked teeth and the sight allowed her to win back her calm. He really should see a dentist. She fancied she could smell the stink of his breath: caries, beer, tobacco. Let him look at what he couldn’t have. Coolly she opened her father’s German knife and sharpened her pencil.

The man stood up from his chair, hitched up his jeans and took out a cigarette, ignoring squeaks of protest from the class.

‘Mr Collins,’ the tutor cried.

‘I only got paid for an hour.’ He walked between the tables and looked at Janet’s drawing. ‘Not bad, lady.’ She smelled the sweaty leather of his jacket as he leaned down and put his hands on the table. ‘But I wouldn’t say I’m as ugly as that.’

More, she wanted to say — because it was true: something to do with rage and loss — but she gazed at him, snooty, teacherish. ‘Do you mind not leaning over me.’

He nodded, and grinned in a tough way she guessed was copied from somewhere, then lit his cigarette, taking his time. He flicked the dead match so it pinged on the fluorescent tube. That, she thought, was more luck than aim. He slouched to the door: an urban, a poolroom slouch she had seen in the movies but never in real life. Wasn’t he on the old side for that sort of thing? She felt sorry for him. It wasn’t until she put her pencils away that she missed her knife.

She was first out of the classroom. Walking along the drive past the football field while the cars of her fellow students rolled privately by, she told herself she must look on the incident as an adventure, something that put spice into the night. The knife had no monetary value, and as for sentimental — she was too much of a realist for that. But she couldn’t help being angry. She had been such an easy mark, he had robbed her so easily, and this gave her the feeling that after all something of value was taken from her.

As she passed the children’s playground she head the dry squeaking of iron joints. A man was sitting on a swing, pushing himself backwards and forwards with scuffing kicks. His cigarette lit his face in a ghoulish way. She felt an almost liquid spurt of fear. Then she knew him — the leather jacket, the narrow head. She turned and went towards him.

‘I’ll have my knife back, please.’

He sat still. She saw his eyes gleam with amusement. ‘Now Janet, what makes you think I’ve got your little knife?’

‘How do you know my name? You waited here for me.’ He drew on his cigarette, enjoying himself. His mouth smiled in a parody of boyishness. ‘I thought I might walk home with you. It wouldn’t be the first time.’

She knew him — and understood why she had seen the face of a boy in her portrait. But a lifting, a pleasure, came into her mind, and with it fear at the dissolution of time.

‘You’re Austin. Austin … I don’t remember your second name but you were in my class at primary school.’ She laughed and went to him, holding out her hand for him to shake. He rose and ground his cigarette under his shoe. His hand was weaker than she had expected. She had expected a workman’s hand but this was softly padded — a lawyer’s hand or priest’s. He had, she remembered, always been near the top of their class, always within a place or two of her. And his life became a mystery, a tunnel with no opening, only at the end a gesticulating child. She felt she would weep at the sadness and terror of it.

‘Collins,’ she cried. ‘Austin Collins. You were Jack in Jack and the Beanstalk.’

He smiled and his crooked teeth gleamed. ‘And you were the hen that laid the golden eggs.’ He made it suggestive and she saw she would have to handle this in a colder way. She felt the pain of drawing herself in; yet in a moment, watching his yellow, sharp nose, his eel mouth, felt herself struck again by the hollow deforming years between boy and man. He had carried her under his arm, grunting with effort. His feathered hat had tumbled from his head while she, dressed as a hen, had squawked, Master, master, a naughty boy is stealing me away.

She said, ‘I would like to have my knife back, Austin. It belonged to my father.’

‘It belonged to my father,’ he mimicked. ‘What a fucking bourgeois attitude.’

She shifted him to another part of her mind. People who tried to shock were boring and she did not fit him in quite there, but a little way off with the dodos, those who clung for identity to beliefs they should have grown out of. He was seedy, misplaced, not shocking. She hungered to fill in the years.

‘I haven’t heard that word since I was at university.’

‘Fucking?’

‘Bourgeois. It was used by students who couldn’t pass their exams.’

‘I never sat any. I had better things to do.’

‘Of course. Now, I’m going this way. You can walk with me if you like.’

‘Do you think you own the path?’

‘I’d like you to walk with me. You can tell me what you’ve been doing. Or shall I tell you?’

‘You tell me.’ He made her wait while he lit a new cigarette. Then he slouched at her side, his hands in his pockets and his eyes narrowed against the smoke.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I live at home with my mother. She’s got arthritis and I look after her.’

‘It figures.’

‘Perhaps it does. But it’s not the only thing I’ve done.’

‘What have you done, Janet? Ever slept with a man?’

‘Of course. Several.’

‘Ever gone down on a man?’

‘You do try hard. It doesn’t shock me, you know. It just makes me feel sorry for you.’ Obscenity, it seemed, was his only trick. She felt thoroughly in command. ‘Is sex the only interest you’ve got? Can’t we talk about something else? What did you do after you left school?’

‘I went to borstal.’

‘What for?’

‘Converting cars.’

‘And after that?’

‘Prison.’

‘Yes?’

‘For flying kites.’

‘Forging cheques?’

‘If you like. Strictly for mugs. I went on the old in-and-out game after that.’

His slang, she thought, was dated. ‘Women, you mean? You lived off women?’

‘Shocks you, doesn’t it? I screwed old dames whose husbands couldn’t get it up. There was a guy who ran a stable.’

‘It sounds squalid to me.’

He grinned. ‘It was a way of getting a quid. I’ve done worse.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘I’ll let you in on a secret, Janet. I got my practice at school. I was screwing half the dames in standard six. They didn’t call me Sticky because I ate jelly beans. I used to line them up behind the shelter shed, poke ’em one by one.’

‘Nonsense.’ She was surprised at her amusement; and made uncertain by the memory that at school he had been known as Sticky Collins. She had thought it had something to do with uncleanness. He was said to have fleas, and she had noticed, hen cackling under his arm, that he smelled as if he needed a bath.

‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘I was even screwing the headmaster’s wife.’

‘The headmaster didn’t have a wife.’

‘There was some old sheila there. Not so old either. They sent me over with a message and I found her on this blanket on the back lawn—’

‘I really don’t want to hear your sexual exploits. Haven’t you done anything else? How do you earn your living? Apart from modelling for art classes?’

‘I’ve got a few things going. This cobber of mine, he’s an Aussie, we’re going to open a strip club.’

‘Where?’

‘We’re looking for premises.’

They crossed the road by the picture theatre and turned into a street lined with shorn plane trees, whose blunt arthritic branches gave her their reminder home was near.

‘I don’t remember you walking home with me when we were at school.’

‘I did once. You told me you’d show me your twat if I carried your bag.’

‘That’s another lie. If you can’t stop this sort of thing I’ll walk by myself.’ It was the ugly word she objected to. The memory — the fantasy — had a simple shape that appealed to her.

She heard herself ask, ‘And did I? Show you?’

The leather jacket bunched a little more, sending a smelly waft across her face. ‘Nah,’ said Austin Collins. ‘Your old man was home. He said he’d kick my arse if I came round there.’

‘I don’t remember.’ But she was convinced. She had not been a good little girl (had shown herself to a friend of David’s for threepence). And her father, in a rage, had talked like that.

In a hardy no-nonsense way she had always regarded her life as a journey to nowhere, but now events and places began to come back with a shape, a charge of emotion, that made each a station on the way. She gripped them in a kind of desperation, not able to hope it would last. They had things to tell her. She felt her eyes fill with tears at the dark wash-house behind the house, the boiling copper and wooden tubs. The child working the wringer from a stool, holding the grip two-handed while her mother fed steaming clothes into the rollers, was not someone she saw but someone she was. The child was her — and the moment was a stopping place in her life, a belonging, a treasure.

So that Austin Collins should not see her emotion she began to talk fast: told him her father was dead now, he had been a man of violent temper and one day his heart had stopped and his face grown purple in a terminal rage and he had fallen dead in front of his fire. That her mother had arthritis very badly, had a plastic hip and gold injected in her veins, but now was almost always in pain and could not leave her bed. And David, her brother David — did Austin remember him? — had never married. He was a schoolteacher and lived in the upstairs flat.

‘Rupert? I remember him, sure. He’s teaching little boys? Jesus!’

‘What do you mean?’ though she knew — and she almost wept again to hear for the first time in thirty years the name the toughs had given her brother at school.

Austin Collins laughed. ‘That’s like giving an alkie a job in a brewery.’

‘No, you’re wrong—’

‘Listen lady, he was queer as a coot. You can’t change that. Once a poof, always a poof. I’ve been around.’

‘He’s a homosexual, I know. But not a practising one — it makes him sound like a doctor, doesn’t it?’

‘He told you that? You swallowed that yarn?’

‘It was a decision, and I admire him for it. He gave up sex the way people give up drinking or smoking. He’s a strong person. I know it doesn’t change his nature.’

‘Gawd, how wet can you get?’

She smiled. He was wrong, but that was his problem. She did not feel threatened. She was grateful to him for acting as catalyst.

‘This is my gate. Will you come in for a cup of tea?’

‘Say, I remember this. The trees are bigger.’

‘Be quiet past the window. I don’t want Mother to wake.’

She opened the front door and led him into the living-room. ‘Now, sit down. I’ll put the kettle on.’

‘Don’t you have anything stronger, Janet?’

‘Of course. Whisky? Gin?’

‘Whisky’ll do.’ He flopped down in a chair and spread his legs. ‘Some place. Very fancy.’

‘I’m pleased you like it.’ It was sad, she thought, that he had resumed his tough act — that the room should set him countering its good taste with ugliness. At the gate, faced with the trees, he had been real.

‘There you are.’

‘Thanks, Janet. — Well, don’t stop. You were telling me all about yourself.’

‘Was I?’ She had strung a few facts together. Her self had been elsewhere, in her memories. She let them go. In the room, her place, she had confidence: they would come back when she needed them. She was still grateful to Austin Collins and would rather have had him talk than talk herself. She wanted to make him a gift and hoped that listening might do. But he lolled there in her father’s chair, staring boldly; seemed to believe he was putting compulsion on her. So she talked, reserving herself. A woman with her experience need not be nervous.

‘I was a teacher too. I think I can say I was good at my job. At least the children liked me and that’s a test. I used to produce the school play. One year we did a revue. We wrote it ourselves. Not Jack and the Beanstalk.’

‘Where was all this?’

‘Dunedin. I wanted to be a long way from Auckland.’

He got up and poured another whisky. ‘Is that where you went to bed with all these blokes you were talking about?’

‘I didn’t talk about anything of the sort.’

‘So you made it up. That’s what I thought.’

She smiled. ‘You don’t understand privacy, do you?’

I fell in love with a married man, she told herself; and for once did not respond, ‘How banal’, and give that internal brassy laugh that was so convincing. I gave him dinner once a week. We drank a bottle of wine and went to bed. I loved him. I did things with him his wife wouldn’t do. And for almost a year that made him think he loved me. I let him go. I gave him back to her. And I thought I was going to die — give up living.

Midwinter. She walked up Māori Hill in the snow and stood outside his house. The clocks in the town struck two — a sound bruised into faintness by the snow. She looked at the sleeping house within whose walls he lay beside the wife he respected, who tolerated him. Then she turned towards the town. She wanted to die. She would walk into the green belt and lie down in the snow. But her feet took her down the curving road, she walked without sound along the edge of her death. The barest thought would turn her into it, a car, a horn would turn her into it.

The snow stopped as she entered the street where she lived. White roofs shone in the light of yellow lamps. The clocks chimed another hour.

She knew her moment for escape had passed. She knew even (what had been impossible an instant before) that she would be happy after a time.

Austin Collins was grinning. ‘Weepies, Janet? Got you below the belt, did I?’

She shook her head, smiling at him. ‘Austin, I think you’ve been good for me. But you’d better go now.’

‘Think you can kick me out, eh?’

‘I don’t want to kick you out but it’s getting late. Mother wakes two or three times in the night.’

‘You know, I can’t figure you out. You get me down here and pump me full of whisky—’

‘It was tea I offered you.’

‘You sit here in the middle of all this—’ he waved his arm — ‘bourgeois crap and you play these little games with yourself and all the time you know what it is you want.’

‘Where did you get that word, Austin? It’s got no meaning any more.’

‘Listen lady, you think you know it all. You got no brains or you wouldn’t be stuck here like this. I’ve been around. I’ve mixed with people. I was shacked up once with a dame that was a professor. A real bloody professor up at the university. She even wrote poetry.’ He poured more whisky into his glass. ‘She wrote one about me once. You want to know what it was called?’

‘No.’

‘Toffee apple. That’s what she thought it was once I’d showed her how.’

She was still not alarmed. She felt certain of herself, strong enough to push him out the door with an act of her mind. Yet there was a hurt in him she felt bound to assuage. He meant to go to bed with her, and meant to be paid. The first would be too great an expense. She could though let him have a plumage display. He seemed to need it, even without the sequel. But she felt a sourness rising in her mind at the thought of more boasting. Perhaps it would be enough to give him money. Then she could go to bed. She was very tired; her mind close to its pre-sleep phase, sliding without direction over those parts of her life turned up by this meeting — buried treasure? old bones?

‘You can have that drink but then you’re going. I’ve got my mother to think about.’

Before he could make an answer David came in. He stood inside the door in slippers and dressing-gown; adolescent, she thought, the moral boy demanding explanations. She had seen him in this attitude all through her girlhood: in corners of the garden, at the head of stairs; once even — where had it been? — reflected in water.

She smiled and shook her head. ‘It’s all right, David. There’s nothing to worry about. My friend’s just going.’

But Austin Collins advanced towards the door. He changed his glass to his other hand. ‘Rupert,’ he cried, grinning. ‘My old chum.’

David took a step back. He pretended not to see the offered hand. His face had gone pale and little pink blotches stood on his cheeks. His mouth opened and shut — his fishy look. The name, she thought, that name. It had caused him tears of shame all through his boyhood. She rose and went towards him.

‘It’s all right. You go to bed.’ His strength depended on planning, on decisions made in advance. The unexpected turned him womanish. He brushed her hand off.

‘Who is he, Janet? I don’t think you should have brought him here.’

Austin Collins enjoyed this. He smiled greedily. ‘Rupert, is that any way to talk? You always wanted to hold my hand at school.’

‘He’s Austin Collins, David. He was ahead of you.’

‘In Janet’s class. I used to bash you up, Rupe. Give you the old Chinese burn.’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Sure you do. We were buddies. I used to do you favours. Don’t you remember, me and Tuck Roberts stuck a rubber up your bum?’

But David had had enough time. She admired the way he drew himself together. ‘Bullies are hard to forget.’

‘You enjoyed it.’

‘No. But it doesn’t matter. It was your defeat.’

‘How come, Rupert? You’re too clever for me.’

David moved into the hall. ‘Get rid of him, Janet. You’ll find him wanting money.’

She felt an admiration for him that turned into love. It had torn her, this love, when she was a girl. She had fought her way into the circle — Collins, Roberts, Whittle, Gill — and stood there screaming her rage, swinging her bag by its strap at the jeering faces, while David, bleeding, tried to climb inside her. She had never known greater shame or love.

She touched him lightly on the chest and closed the door. She walked across the room to Austin Collins. ‘Quickly, Austin. Finish it. And don’t come near me, please. I don’t like you.’

‘Queers are fair game.’

‘How much money do you want?’ She opened the writing-desk drawer and took out her cheque book. ‘Twenty, will that be enough?’ She looked at him as though it were simply business, and saw the shift in his eyes as he put one plan aside and took up another.

‘Well now, Janet, I didn’t ask for money. But if you can see your way to helping me out …’

She had a sense of his life that chilled her. David had made himself, on the ground of what he was — seen it and done what he had to do: crippled himself. It did not matter if the way was wrong — he had shaped what had been left to him to shape. But this man, who had done everything, had done nothing. She went very cold, very still.

‘I can give you twenty dollars, no more.’

‘Look, Janet—’ he put his drink down to make his point — ‘I’m having a bit of a rough spin. One or two things have gone wrong. But I’ve got plans. I’m a bit of a thinker, see, and I’ve got this thing set up. If I can get to Wellington and get it off the ground—’

‘Your strip club?’

He had forgotten. ‘It’s a thing I worked out with a cobber of mine. We can get the agency for some magazines.’

‘Pornographic ones?’

‘No, no, nothing like that. This is sort of — specialised. Nothing you’d be interested in. But we’ve got this offer and we’ve got to be quick.’

‘How much does it cost to get down there?’

‘Well—’ his eyes were shifting, darting, he could not read her — ‘say a couple of hundred?’

‘No, Austin. I’ll give you fifty dollars. That will get the fare and leave some over. You’ll have to buy your magazines yourself.’

She wrote the cheque.

‘Before I give you this I want my knife.’

His hand dived into his pocket. ‘Sure, Janet. That was just for laughs.’ He held it out and she took it and laid it on the desk.

‘Here’s your cheque. Goodnight, Austin. I’m glad we met.’

‘Sure. O.K.’ He took the cheque and read it. ‘I reckon this could be bigger. You can’t tell me with a house like this—’

‘Goodnight, Austin.’

‘We were getting on pretty well. What went wrong, eh?’

‘I don’t like the way you spoke to my brother.’

‘Well if that’s all it is I’ll tell him I’m sorry.’ He moved to the door.

‘No,’ she cried. And then said quietly, ‘I can stop that cheque.’

‘You wouldn’t do that.’

‘Not if you leave now.’ She had, she saw, caught him very neatly. His face had gone red, but already he was opening the door. Words broke from him. As she led him up the hall and lit the porch, and showed him out, and finally closed the door (his narrow face and eel mouth, his jacket, his thin hair), he seemed to speak in two tongues, sharp and oily. ‘Janet, I’m grateful, I really am. Life’s had me by the balls. You’ve done a lot. It figures, is all I say. Kicking me out. You don’t know what you want, you rich old dames. No offence.’

She gave him a moment to reach the gate, then turned the light off.

In the living-room she put the knife away. She took Austin’s glass to the kitchen and washed it. Then she looked at her mother.

The old lady was sleeping, her face coloured a ghostly blue by the night-light. Janet found a shawl and covered her hands. She read the note David had left on the table. One red pill at eight fifty-four. She was grateful. Her own sleep might last until five o’clock.

She changed quickly and got into her bed. The light from the open door of her mother’s room pleased her. The darkness should be coloured tonight. She felt sorry for Austin Collins, waiting for his bus, but it was not a sorrow bringing guilt. She grew angry at the man’s assumption that she was hiding from life. How easily people took that idea simply because a woman was single and forty. Was life supposed to take place only in bedrooms? Didn’t nursing an old lady count and helping her face her death? And for that matter, working in the garden, going to art class? Her winter escape. No, not escape, winter response. Last year it was yoga; and before that antiques; weaving; indoor bowls. Perhaps they were less interesting than sex, but she’d had that too. Several men, she had told Austin Collins. Actually it was nine. A poor score by modern standards. Perhaps next year instead of housie or transcendental meditation … She almost giggled. Toffee apple! It was outrageous enough to be true.

Her hands moved down. But no. Not tonight. Not after that grubby, recreant male.

She rolled on to her side. Images floated in her mind. Proust (David’s novelist) had said the only true paradises are the ones we have lost. Her memories might not be paradises but they were gardens in which she belonged, unweeded though they might be, and so they gave pleasure or ease, and at the very least a pain that was welcome because its shape was known. She thanked Austin for helping her to that.

Closer to sleep. She curled up against the snow as she walked down Māori Hill. The clocks struck and yellow light lay on the roofs of the houses. Moonlit water in the cattle trough. She left them floating. And the girl on the stool watched steaming towels rise like coloured snakes from the grey water. David was crying in the summer house. Austin Collins chopped the beanstalk down.