Horse

A Novel

A Ghost in Trousers

Timothy Harold Glass woke slowly from a dream of crocodiles. The jabber of starlings under the spouting, outside the window of his upstairs room, did not make him happy. Neither did the Sunday morning sun, already high above the old-maid bluegums, stabbing uncomfortably close to his pillow. Timothy Harold Glass had a whisky hangover. He had learnt the day before that he had failed his first-year examinations in Latin, French and Psychology, and gained a poor pass in English. His mother would want to talk about it.

There had been more than crocodiles in the dream. It had begun with him striding above the town on enormous stilts, in danger of freezing in the acrid air. Then he had stood wool-gathering in the second bench of the Lower Oliver lecture-room, while Miss Gallon, the yellow-faced and spectacled French lecturer, said sarcastically, ‘Now we will have the pleasure of hearing Mr Glass translate for us.’ When he had looked down at the copy of Merimée’s Carmen open in his hand, all its pages had been blank. And later he had been trying to make love to Fern, his medical student girlfriend, on a big bed in the middle of the private bar of the Bowling Green. Fern had objected. ‘No, Horse, not here! Not with everyone looking.’ Fern called him Horse, partly because she liked horses, and partly because he usually trod on her feet when he tried to dance with her; and the name had spread among his other friends. Then a man whose face he couldn’t quite see had come and ledpage 530 her away into another room. And the dream had ended with him swimming up a muddy river among crocodiles.

He could hear the clanking of a bucket in the kitchen at the bottom of the stairs. His father would be there, taking out a small drayload of lettuce leaves, soaked bread, meat bones, potato peelings and tea leaves to the gorged hens on the other side of the double section. If he had only had to explain things to his father, life would be a lot easier.

‘Where were you last night, Timothy?’

‘I went to a party and got a bit drunk.’

‘Ah-ah.’ The bucket would be hoisted over the wire netting. The bread and lettuce would explode on the dry ground of the hen run, splattering his father’s worn grey trousers. Then the Old Man would straighten up, his eyes on the scrabbling hens, and clear his throat –

And as I cam by Crochallan
I cannily keekit ben,
Rattlin, roarin Willie
Was sitting at yon boord-en,
Sitting at yon boord-en
And amang guid companie;
Rattlin, roarin Willie,
Ye’re welcome hame to me!

His father habitually quoted Burns in times of crisis. It gave Horse the same sense of comfort that he had had as a small child, crouched under his father’s knees, and looking into the glow of a manuka fire.

‘Timothy, your mother says you’ve not been doing too well in your work at the University.’

‘I don’t like it there. It reminds me of a cemetery. I’d rather be shifting round from job to job and trying to write.’

‘I can’t quite see you a college man, myself. They gang in stirks and come out asses. . . . Do you know what a stirk is?’

‘No.’ Horse knew well enough; but he knew too that the Old Man enjoyed expounding the text.

‘A stirk’s a steer. A bullock.’ His father’s eye would light up with the joy of the Scotsman commenting obliquely on the facts of life. ‘The varsity men are nothing but educated bullocks. That’s what Burns thought about it.’ Then his face would lengthen into the mask of the peacemaker. ‘All the same, your mother went to Cambridge. It did her no harm. You’ve got to try and understand her, Timothy. She wants to see you do well. And there’s the money to be considered. A man’s got to work at something. I earned half-a-crown a week when I started ploughing for old Runciman. I was twelve years old, six years younger than you, and I wasn’t tall enough to reach up to the horse’spage 531 neck to buckle the harness myself. I had to stand on a stool to slip the bit in their mouth. You’ve got better chances than I had. We don’t want to push you into something you’ve set your mind against. But it’s early days yet. . . .’

That conversation would not take place. Instead the battle would be fought out in his mother’s bedroom, behind drawn blinds. She had already guessed about Fern. Probably she had worked it out from the stains on his underwear. The kind of man she wanted him to be would never have had the guts to move in on Fern. She would have all the good reasons on her side. Money, virtue, common sense. Even God. Horse had no clear idea of God, but he suspected that God and his mother were uncomfortably like each other. It seemed more than likely that God intended him to be a stirk. He had made the frame for it so exactly. The grey-green monotonous hills, the tombstone clouds, and the endless sad wash of waves on the Otago beaches. A dry Book of Genesis where He wrote all the questions and answers. And Fern would never appear in that Book, except perhaps as Lilith, the demoness who tempted Adam.

A monotonous buzzing sounded from a web above the sun-faded curtains in the corner of the room. It died away to a shrill sporadic whine as the small hairy poison-fangs bit home in the rind of a fly. Horse curled up like a foetus in the sheets damp with the booze sweat of the night before. He closed his eyes, and his hand moved down to his crutch, groping for the key to unconsciousness. The image of Fern rose before his mind’s eye – her firm bum, her breasts, the yellow-brown hair that hung down to her waist when she unplaited it, and those other hidden parts he valued more than the rest put together. Her face remained unassembled; though he could visualise with an effort the hard blue eyes and clear-cut mouth. Horse found it hard to remember faces.

Then resolutely he drew his hand back. A boy might do that; a man of eighteen, Fern’s lover, couldn’t. In one movement he woke up entirely, threw off the bedclothes, and jumped out on the floor. He was naked, for he had been too drunk to look for his pyjamas when he had crept into bed at one o’clock that morning. His slacks and shirt and black polo-neck jersey lay tangled where he had dropped them.

While he dressed Horse looked through the half-open window at the dead township. The sea lay grumbling on the rocks. Some early cars from town wound their way on to the treeless Domain. Later children would grub in the sand there and fathers and mothers would sit in a Sunday coma under the grooved banks. A few young men would take their girls into the lupins that grew along the sandhills, to lay down their overcoats and bang them in peace, absorbing the healing influences of the sea and soil. Not Horse. He would paddle a canoe up river and sit on the branch of an old willow and make a bad poem about God. The whisky dregs rose to his head. You’d better have it out with her now, he thought, while you’re still half-pissed.

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He shaved slowly in the narrow bathroom at the bottom of the stairs. His twin and incubus, Timothy Harold Glass, with beeswings under his eyes, pursed a weak mouth and stared back at him from the loony mirror. Pud-puller! he whispered bitterly to his reflection. A sniper’s rifle cracked soundlessly from outer space. Two bullets passed through the bathroom wall, above the cistern that never worked, entered his cranium and emerged through his mangled jawbone. It was a cold day for the funeral. His father and mother stood by the graveside bewildered, while the clods fell on the varnished mahogany lid. His mother wore a navy-blue coat-and-skirt with white ruffles at the neck.

‘Why did he do it?’

‘Nobody knows. He was a strange boy. If he’d lived he might have been a great writer. The doctors think he must have had some secret worry.’

‘We never knew. We thought he was happy with us.’

Pine needles fell on the raw gash of graveyard clay. A high shrill music sounded above the wandering clouds. Six feet underground a young man’s bones lay quiet until the ending of the world.

Having attended his own funeral, Horse moved gingerly through the house on stockinged feet. The slow chirr and clang of the black-and-gold mantelpiece clock began as he entered the dining room. The clock sounded like a tired man who had just made it. The time was a quarter to nine. Newspapers and travel magazines lay piled on all the chairs. The sofa was buried under an avalanche of them.

He paused at the door of his mother’s bedroom. The whisky had faded again, leaving him dull and giddy. He could hear the crackle of the morning newspaper from inside the room, and her small sounds of movement under the bedclothes. She would be lying back with her glasses on, soaking up the mass bombing of Germany. His mother had lived for two years in Germany as a girl; and now she sent regular food parcels to German civilians. Every block-buster that the Yanks dropped smashed another piece of her youth, that remembered idyll of Moselle wines and young men in climbing boots and alpine flowers. At that moment Horse felt grateful to the Yanks. They would divert her attention from his own enormities.

He stiffened his muscles and edged the door open. His mother put down the paper and gave him a searching, anxious look over her glasses. The room had a dry smell of sun-baked books and talcum powder. As he drew near the bed, she lifted her face to be kissed, a face whose power lay in its capacity to be hurt, framed in grey hair and a pink nylon bed-jacket. His stomach sank like a stone in a bog. Horse and his mother loved each other. The misunderstanding between them, more profound than any communication, stretched right back to the cotton wool and enemas and foreskin-clipping doctors of a Karitane nursing home. Bending over the pillow, he received the sacramental kiss, dry and cool and faintly sweet as apples kept in a loft. The danger of collapse intopage 533 a dutiful son was now at its greatest. He retreated to the end of the bed and gripped the U-shaped wooden barricade in both hands.

The Americans have bombed Ulm,’ she said. ‘They’ve damaged the cathedral.’

‘That’s bad,’ said Horse.

While his mother angrily re-edited the history of Eastern Europe, Horse shifted his mind into neutral. After five minutes she paused for breath.

‘Mother, I’ve decided not to go back to varsity next year.’

Horse, the redhot stovesitter, the boy with the glass belly, had hurled the grenade. Timothy Harold, the good son, stood to one side with his hands over his ears, blinking and frozen. Stopped in midstride, his mother said nothing. When she finally spoke, it was in a very mild tone, as if to a child of six who had soiled his underpants.

‘Don’t be silly, Timothy!’ I can understand you being disappointed at the exam results. I was very disappointed too. It’s partly my fault for not making sure that you worked regularly at home. I think it would be better if you took three subjects next year. You’ll have to really concentrate this time. And I think you should stop drinking altogether. You’re far too young to start that kind of thing. I’d often wondered where the money I put in the bank for your books was going to –.’

‘I’m not going back.’

‘Why on earth not?’ His mother’s voice became shriller. ‘You’ve never talked like this before. It would be absurd to let all your education go down the drain –.’

‘I want to write.’

‘Write, then! I’ve nothing against your writing. You can go to University and write as well.’ Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were burning. This was the climax he had feared. If he began to argue, he would be lost. On open ground her cavalry would cut his forces to smithereens.

‘I need to sort things out.’

‘Nonsense! Utter nonsense! You just want to spend your time at drunken parties. You’re turning into a hobo, Timothy. Where were you last night?’

‘At Tony’s place.’

‘At Tony’s place. I thought so. And I suppose you were as drunk as a pig.’ ‘Pigs don’t drink.’

‘I don’t care what pigs do. It’s Tony who’s the cause of all this nonsense. He’s helping you to ruin your life.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with Tony.’ The palms of Horse’s hands were wet on the varnish of the bed-rail. He knew that she knew that Tony was a queer. ‘Nothing wrong?’ She laughed with a shrill neigh. ‘You must think I’m blind as a bat. You’ve got no standards, any of you. When we did wrong, we knew it was wrong, and tried to put it right again. But the people you know are just a pack of dirty little animals. Tony and Fern and the lot of them. Andpage 534 now you’re becoming like them.’

‘I’m sorry, Mother. A man’s got to choose his own friends. I’m not going back to varsity. I’ll get a job instead.’

‘Well, you can go to Hell in your own way then. You’re mad! Quite mad!’ She shouted these words at the top of her voice, then sank back exhausted on the pillow and glared at him from a reddened mask.

‘I’m sorry,’ Horse said again. He felt a sharp twinge of sympathy for her and an impulse to put his arm round her shoulders and comfort her. But it would be no use. That way lay surrender. He walked numbly through the house, and down the shaky verandah steps, his own face burning. He felt as if he were treading on thick wads of kapok.

The sky had clouded and a few drops of rain were falling. His father was digging round the roots of an apple tree alongside the house. He wore a mackintosh draped over his shoulders, his oldest hat, and thigh-deep gumboots. As Horse came out of the house, he straightened his back and raised one hand as if to beckon to him. But Horse hurried down the lawn. He pushed through the gap in the hawthorn hedge at the place where the outflow from the septic tank had made the ground boggy.

The Old Man must have heard her shouting, he thought. He remembered how his father had had to dig up the septic tank after the MacLennans had rented the house in the holidays. It was blocked by about fifty condoms that looked just like tomato skins. Now, whenever the MacLennans were mentioned, the Old Man was accustomed to refer obliquely to this mystery.

He crossed the gravel road below the house, climbed through a wire fence, and ran zig-zag down the steep hill paddock to the river. He crouched as he ran. Suddenly he remembered running up the road in the same crouching position at the age of seven. He and Billy Turner had set fire to the Ramsay’s gorse hedge. They had not meant to set fire to it; but the flame had spread from another gorse bush, creeping along the dry grass, and the hedge had gone up in a roar of sparks and black smoke. He had spent the rest of the afternoon hidden under an empty house beside the bowling green, inhaling the smell of dog-dirt and guilt, and had come up the road again at dusk. Mrs Turner, leaning on her gate, had seen him pass thirty yards away, and shouted bitterly, ‘If I was your mother, I’d tan your backside for you! I’d skin you alive!’ He did not remember the long post-mortem in the sitting room at home as clearly as the magnificent and horrifying moment when the hedge had gone up in flames, a pillar of thunder licking towards the soft womb of the clouds.

It was only when Horse was right out of sight of the house, sitting on the bare earth under one of McArthur’s gum trees, that he realised he was shaking all over. He burst into tears and gripped the huge smooth bole of the tree as if it were a human body. When the spasm had passed he stood up and lit a cigarette. Sheep were grazing on the slope of the hill above him.

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A hundred yards away the river ran brown and sluggish under gorse-pods, cutting the earth away from under the edge of the cattle-flats. He had sailed flax-stick boats on it often enough, and gaffed eels among the weeds with a fish-hook nailed to a stick, and hauled canoes across the muddy shallows. The sight and sound of it calmed him now as it had always done. He was aware of the pressure of the leather belt he wore, cutting his waist, the sharp salty taste of the cigarette, the movement of his muscles, the warmth of the sun on his neck and the back of his hand as it sailed out again from behind a cloud. At that moment it seemed as if Timothy Harold Glass, the ghost in trousers, had dissolved into thin air, and only Horse was left alive.

The Mills of God

The fourth heat of the afternoon was just over. They had been half-inch rounds, the kind that Horse liked least. They shot out from the rolls like red-hot snakes. Horse had been taking his turn on the narrow gut of flooring between the small rolls and the boiler house, grabbing each one with the tongs as it came from the rolls, and hauling it across the grooved and polished floor that made his boots smoke. The old boilerman watched him from a window in the boilerhouse wall. He could sit down there all day, the easy job he needed because his vertebrae were welded solidly together. He had told Horse correctly that if he dropped one of the rounds, it would probably strike the edge of a floor plate and drive itself clean through his clothes and guts or else whip round his neck like a lunatic python.

Horse rested low against the bench in the smithy and watched Charlie, the blacksmith’s helper, hammer out one half of what would eventually be a new pair of tongs. Charlie weighed something over twenty stone. His belly prevented him from bending over the anvil, and his apron could have been used as a small horse-cover. He raised the hammer slowly to shoulder height, then let if fall by its own weight – crack! – then slowly up, and – crack! – down again. His huge brandy-swollen face was hardly capable of expression; but his small blue eye was charged with an experienced sadness.

Between five and six the night before, Horse had had the pleasure of sinking fifteen handles at the Green Island pub. Gandhi, the bald rollsman, had held up his first beer to the light and examined it carefully. ‘Cow piss!’ he had said. ‘The old boys up in the marble orchard would give their eyeteeth for this. But they won’t be getting any.’ Then he had downed it and ordered another one while the radio blared out the race results from Wingatui.

Horse had found that the residue of one night’s beer could easily be sweated out the next morning. At the mills each man was drenched continually in sweat, except for the men in the stacking yards and the boilerman and the polished clerks in the office and old Voss who owned the place. Dead Loss Voss, a scraggy man who wandered like a camel from the office to the furnacespage 536 to the ‘plate’, with a worried look, as if he were afraid someone might take home a hundred-weight of railway iron inside his jacket. Yet Horse had found him pleasant. Horse worked nine days a fortnight instead of ten. This was because payday came every second Thursday, and each time it came Horse experienced an urge to spend the next day boozing. Old Voss complained but did not sack him. Today was Thursday and a payday.

The iron was gradually taking shape on Charlie’s anvil. Each time it grew cold he replaced it in the hot coke bed of the forge furnace.

‘Have a smoke, Charlie,’ said Horse. He extended a damp packet of Capstans.

With the same exaggerated slowness that belonged to all his movements, Charlie took the cigarette, placed it in his mouth, removed the half-shaped iron from the embers, lit his smoke with the reddening metal, and replaced it. ‘What did you do before you had this job?’ Horse asked. ‘Were you always

a blacksmith?’ he knew that Charlie had spent most of his life at sea. This vast human sack had been agile once and sharp as a needle. It carried the memories of typhoons and bazaars and brawls and drinking bouts and the flesh of a thousand women asleep in its net of nerves.

‘He’s not a blacksmith’s arsehole,’ said a voice from the door. Gandhi came in, mopping his arms with a sweat-rag. ‘He’s an old brown-hatter. Watch out, Tim. He’ll be up you like a rat up a drainpipe.’ Gandhi grasped Charlie from behind, fastened his hands under his middle, and strained to lift him from the floor, making sucking noises with his tongue. ‘An eight-pound snooker, I’d say. Or else a barracuda.’

Charlie’s face broke into a calm smile like the wind on a summer sea. ‘Look at him! He loves it!’ shouted Gandhi. ‘He’s waiting for his turn in the barrel.’

Charlie detached Gandhi’s hands. ‘I’ve seen things you wouldn’t read about, Tim boy,’ he said. ‘I’ve killed whales and I’ve killed men too. I killed a man with a bottle in Calcutta. He tried to get hold of a girl I wanted. But there’s no sense in it.’

‘All you ever killed was a quart of Hennessey’s,’ said Gandhi.

‘I’ve seen things nobody else could tell you,’ said Charlie. ‘But he’s right.’ He nodded to Gandhi. ‘The brandy’s got me. The doctor said if I didn’t lay off it I’d be dead in a year. On Saturday I saw a cat burning in the kitchen stove. They’ll take me up on the hill soon and shovel the clods over me. Then I’ll be happy again.’

‘You old loony,’ said Gandhi. ‘A man can’t be happy dead.’

‘You wouldn’t know,’ said Charlie. ‘You’ve not lived long enough yet.’ He threw his butt on the glowing coke and pulled out the iron. As he did this, there came a shout from outside the forge.

‘Come on! Get shifting!’ It was Voss’s brother, the foreman, announcing the beginning of the next heat.

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Horse stepped out with Gandhi into the open shed. There were no walls to the sheds of the mills. The afternoon sunlight streamed through the props and girders, making squares and triangles on the uneven steel-plated floor. A breeze blew down the neck of Horse’s wet flannel shirt. He accepted the attention gratefully.

A man danced on the balls of his feet from the furnaces, gripping in long clawed tongs a hundredweight cube of white-hot steel that blazed and dripped slag. The tongs were suspended by a chain from an overhead pulley. He dropped the cube with a thud by the rolls. Gandhi had tied his sweat-rag round his neck. He seized the cube with his own tongs and levered it under the first roller.

‘Here it comes,’ he shouted. ‘Seagull shit!’

The rolls shuddered and water hissed on the blackening scaling mass of white steel as it squeezed rumbling through. The second rollsman, old Voss’s nephew, caught it on the other side.

‘It’s your turn on the trolley, mate.’ Peter stood at Horse’s elbow with the two-wheeled trolley. Horse caught hold of its single handle. Rivulets of sweat were pouring down Peter’s moon-white face. ‘Be in,’ he said. ‘We should be off early today. We’ll be in the Grand by half-past four.’

Peter had jumped ship in Dunedin and somehow dodged the cops. He had been working on the ‘plate’ for a month now. He and Horse worked easily together; more easily than either of them did with Ivan, the thin dark mournful Irish Catholic soak with whom Peter was lodging. Peter had explained the situation to Horse in a few words.

‘The bastard has me there because I pay for his booze. He’s a dreary clod. I’ve never seen him smile yet. A real Kiwi.’ Then he looked at Horse sideways, remembering that he too was a member of the same tribe. “Not that there aren’t some good Kiwis. But this bastard never pays a round. And he can’t talk about anything but the pains he gets in his guts. His old woman likes me though. One of these days I’ll wake up with my throat cut.’

They were sitting on a board in the lunch hour. The rolls were quiet and sparrows flew in and out of the shed to pick up crumbs. Horse crumbled a sandwich and threw it to them. He couldn’t eat much on the job. With the heat and the hard yacker it seemed to stick in his gullet.

‘You could get married,’ he said. ‘Not to her but to someone else. You could settle down here.’

‘That’ll be the day. I’ve got a wife in Bristol.’ ‘Don’t you want to get back to her?’

‘I can’t go back. The cops would grab me. One day after I’d cleaned up a bottle of rum I climbed into the backyard of a shop. An old Jew owned it. He used to sell radios and sports goods. Well, I headed off up the street with a radio on my back – that was all right, but I was half-boozed, and I kept on coming back. I couldn’t have sold the radios anyway. When I called in aboutpage 538 the ninth time, he was waiting for me with a gun. He wasn’t much of a shot though. He just grazed me on the arm.’

Peter bared his shoulder and showed Horse a long white scar. ‘I got away all right, but he had the cops after me. So I signed on board a ship the same day that was going to the Argentine. I reckon the cops are still waiting. The only thing I’m worried about is the Old Lady.’

‘Your wife?’

‘Talk sense, mate. The Old Lady. My mother. She’ll be wondering what happened to me. She used to pray for me every night. And when I’d come home boozed she’d throw everything at me but the sideboard. She tried to bring me up right, but I was always letting her down.’ Then his eye brightened. ‘On the Howard Castle there was a cabin boy of sixteen. An orphan. He’d never had a chance. I reckon that boy loved me. He looked after me better than a woman. It’s different at sea, mate. You’d be about the same build as him.’

He had given Horse a speculative look; and Horse had felt a familiar sinking of the bowels. In Peter’s company the world turned round on a solid hub. But he had no wish to take the place of the cabin boy. He remembered the amateur psychiatrist at varsity who had offered to cure him of the booze habit by hypnotism, and when he thought that Horse was in the hypnotic trance, had kept on murmuring, ‘You are my wife; you are my wife.’ And then he remembered the dream he had had, in which he lay in a ship’s bunk with Fern, and Fern had turned into Peter, amorous and stubbled, with a whisky glint in his eye. This dream had depressed Horse greatly.

The steel thundered out from the last roller, black but still glowing. He ran the trolley in close and caught it as it fell. Leaning back from the biting heat, he juggled the trolley on to the ‘plate’ and slid the fat steel bar off beside the saw. The man at the saw knocked the bar into place and swung a lever over. There was a prolonged shriek of tormented metal and a fountain spray of sparks shot up towards the rafters of the shed. Horse moved into the shelter of the structure that held the saw, but a few sparks fell on his head and stung his scalp. Peter gripped the square-sawn end of the bar with his tongs and hauled it up to the ‘plate’, his boots slipping on the shiny surface.

The saw shrieked again. Peter dragged the bar to the middle of the ‘plate’. There Ivan and Brian attacked the bar with mallets. A spurt of flame and smoke burst from the wooden mallet-heads each time they struck the steel. When they had hammered it straight, they shoved it across the cooling- bars with iron pushers that resembled hoes. Brian sat down in the earth pit alongside the cooling-bars and mopped his face. He looked as if he were going to fall apart.

Horse had fallen out with Brian. A week earlier the rolls had jammed, and the men who worked on the ‘plate’ had gone into the storage shed to play cards among the wool bales. Some of the rollsmen had joined thempage 539 there. The bales were stacked nearly as high as the roof. Gandhi had hoisted back a couple of bales in the top layer and arranged them to make a hideout where they would be hidden from old Voss’s sight. And Horse had run the cutter down to the pub to bring back three gallon jars of beer. They had sat all afternoon in the sack-walled, wool-smelling hide-out and played poker for shillings. Brian had stayed out of the game. He perched instead on the edge of the mountain of bales and gazed at a private vision of an office desk loaded with in-trays and out-trays, with two telephones and himself behind it, and white-bloused secretaries scurrying like mice.

A card slipped down between two bales. ‘You get it, lad,’ said Gandhi to Brian. ‘You’re as skinny as a weasel. It won’t be any trouble to you.’

‘No,’ Brian had answered stiffly.

‘What’s wrong? Nobody’s asking you to play. I just want you to fish up the jack of diamonds.’

‘I don’t believe in gambling.’

‘You don’t believe in gambling. Or in drinking. What about sheilas? You need a good sheila to fix you up. I could put you on to old Rosie in Mosgiel.’ ‘Leave the boy alone,’ said a grey-headed rollsman. ‘It’s not his fault. His

old man’s always banging the Bible.’

‘Banging the Bishop more likely,’ Gandhi muttered. He climbed down among the wool bales and extricated the card from a ledge of a crevasse. The game started again in silence. Later on Horse had cornered Brian.

‘Why did you treat Gandhi like that?’ he asked.

‘I’m not going to help people break the Ten Commandments,’ said Brian. ‘You know the kind of language they use. When I hear a dirty word I always think of Jesus. He didn’t swear or drink or go with women.’

‘He did drink. He turned water into wine.’

‘It was non-alcoholic wine. Grape juice. You’re just as bad as they are. I’ve heard you talking to that English sailor. Do you ever pray?

‘I pray to the Devil sometimes,’ said Horse. ‘This was only partly true. Horse had composed a long poem, an imitation of Baudelaire, to Lucifer the Earth-Spirit, who would help him to stay alive and hang on to Fern.

‘What do you say to him?’

‘I just say – ‘Bring me some money; bring me a woman; bring me a bottle of plonk . . .’.

‘You’ve got the mind of an animal,’ said Brian bitterly. ‘I’ve met your father and mother too. They’re good people. Not like these ones here.’

‘You can go and stuff yourself,’ Horse had replied. Since that time he and Brian had not spoken to each other; though Brian’s look of aggrieving angel of judgment followed Horse now as he trundled the trolley back to the rolls.

Another bar was coming through. The tormented bellowing of the machine, the hiss of the water-jets on slippery white-hot metal, Horse’s own aching sweating body, the calluses on his hands where blisters had split andpage 540 hardened again, the mills and everyone in them, seemed to him the body of the world itself, tortured and changing in some process of long purgation. He was glad to be where he was. He himself was the iron in the rolls. The unshaped selves inside him were beginning to shift and uncoil like bracken shoots in their sleep.

The Name and the Game 1

By five o’clock Horse was propping up the wall of the side bar of the Grand. He had left his dungarees in the shower room at the mills, and wore instead the grey slacks and black polo-neck jersey and gabardine overcoat in which he commonly lived and slept. Peter was at the bar with Ivan, and Horse could hear Ivan’s monotonous voice reciting the saga of his urinary tract: ‘. . . and when the bloody quacks opened up my bladder they took out three stones as big as nuggets. I’ve got them in a bottle at home. I couldn’t piss properly for a month afterwards. They reckoned I was lucky to be alive. I’ve always had trouble with my water, Pete. Ever since I was a kid. The old man used to give me a hiding every day for wetting the bed. But I’ll say this for him, he made sure we never missed going to Mass on Sunday. He’d drag us out of bed by the ear, and I used to get the hiding after I came back again. A good belting never does a kid any harm though, Pete. It puts the fear of Christ into them. . . .’

Peter in his tight blue suit rested his elbows on the bar and stared into his empty handle. ‘It’s your shout, mate,’ he said.

‘By gum, you’re right,’ said Ivan. He rummaged in his pocket, brought out a shilling, looked at it, and put it back again. ‘Look, Pete, I don’t want to open the pay pocket till I get home. You know the way it is, Pete. You’re single. But it sweetens Mollie up a bit if I just give her the packet.’

‘Sure, sure,’ said Peter sourly. He put a pound on the bar and turned to Horse. ‘Drink up.’

Horse swallowed the dregs of his handle and placed it on the puddled bar ‘Make it half-and-half,’ he said.

‘Good on you,’ said Peter. ‘Stout’s a food. Back home they put an egg in it. It’ll put a shine on your knob.’

The grey-haired barman refilled the handles and gave Peter his change. Peter passed it on to Ivan. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘That’ll keep your old woman quiet.’ Ivan pocketed it without a word.

Horse could feel the grog blossoming in his veins. Bull’s blood, he thought; that’s what I need. He swallowed the beer-and-stout in two long draughts and put a ten-bob note on the bar

‘Rum and cloves,’ he said. ‘Have a rum, Peter.’

‘That’s it. Rum,’ said Peter. ‘We’ll take a bottle with us.’

page 541

By half-past five the rum sang like a choir of birds in Horse’s cranium. When the counter lunch came in he ate five saveloys and burnt his fingers on the hot red greasy skins. Peter told him privately how his ship had sailed from Sierra Leone without him. He had lain for a month in a native hut visited by pubescent girls who supplied him with home comfort and African beer. He had grown tired of it and signed aboard another ship.

‘I had the dingbats for a while,’ he said. After I jumped off the Howard Castle. The Old Man logged me half my pay for getting drunk in port. But he couldn’t say I wasn’t up to the job. I’m not just a deckhand. I’m an A.B.’ – Horse reflected that A.B. was the same as B.A. spelt backwards – ‘I can steer by the compass and splice a steel cable. Well, when I had the dingbats there was a bloody great Negro’s face an inch away from me all the time. It must have been bad grog.’

On the wall above the sweating barman the hands of the clock shifted. A scrum of drinkers had packed the room. Suddenly an electric buzzer bellowed.

‘Time, gentlemen,’ droned the barman. ‘Finish your drinks, please.’

Peter passed a final rum to Horse above the heads of a trainer, a jockey and a retired policeman. ‘It’s a double-header,’ he said. ‘One for the road.’

Horse drank the rum at a gulp. There were no cloves in it, and it fell to his stomach like a hot lead weight. The crowd was beginning to straggle grizzling out of the bar. He found himself alone on the pavement, confronting a Maori who had seated himself on a full beer carton outside a tobacconist’s window. The Maori was shaped like a pyramid. Huge and seal-like, his body spread out and down from a square close-cropped head and expressionless features. Horse saw him as a stone kumara god, the true master of life.

‘You are my brother,’ he said.

The Maori looked at him. He removed a half-smoked cigarette from his mouth and threw it into the gutter. Then he rose slowly. His hands were as large as fire-shovels.

‘I am not your brother,’ he said in precise English. ‘My brother lives at Kaitaia.’ He gripped Horse’s left shoulder. A violent pain exploded in Horse’s collar-bone and his legs buckled.

Peter and Ivan came out of the bottle store. Ivan carried two bottles wrapped in brown paper. Peter’s hat was tilted back on his head. He was carrying a carton under each arm.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Peter. He caught the Maori’s wrist. The Maori let go of Horse and gave Peter a push that sent him staggering into the tobacconist’s doorway.

‘Your cobber’s a bloody queer,’ said the Maori. His eyes were hard and glinting. ‘He needs a good kick on the arse.’

Peter stacked the cartons, wiped his mouth with one hand, and began to shape up to the Maori. Ivan stepped between them. ‘Take it easy, Pete, take it easy,’ he said. He turned to the Maori. ‘You remember me, Joe? I’ve lost a fewpage 542 quid up at your place. On the board. On Saturday. Remember, eh?’ ‘Your cobber reckons I’m his brother,’ said the Maori.

‘He’s too pissed to know what he’s saying. We’ll look after him O.K.’ ‘You’d better. He’s not right in the head.’ The Maori tapped his own

forehead. ‘You can tell him his mouth’s too big. I don’t want any pakeha telling me I’m his brother.’

‘Ok, Joe, O.K. We’ll look after him.’

In the air of Rattray Street Horse unfroze again. The buildings were warrens full of dark burrows from which butter-thighed girls, web-footed hags, boys on bicycles, men with iron moustaches, the whole stumbling dying hoping despairing menagerie of the unbelievable town burst upon him like a landslide. I was lucky I didn’t get a clout on the ear, he thought. The imagined pile-driving fist of the Maori had knocked a hole in his private world. He held one of the cartons like a baby, but it threatened to slip through his fingers with every step. Ivan steered him with an arm round his shoulders. Then, as a taxi swept the three of them and the grog into the unknown evening, his stomach grew uneasy, and he sank like a man in a lift down, down towards the centre of the earth. He knew he was going to spew soon. He shut his eyes and thought of lighthouses, mountains, Fern, God, rivers running over shingle, anything that would keep the rum inside him.

The taxi stopped. Still holding the carton like a lifebelt, he lurched up some broken steps, round a corner, into a small yard, and through a kitchen door. He saw a stove, a table, an almanac, and the astonished sulky face of a young woman in a green dress who was feeding a baby in a high chair. Then he was doubled over, with the hard rim of a bath against his belly, spewing up the whole world. As he plunged into ringing black space he could feel Ivan’s arm, like that of an expert nurse, holding him steady round the chest, and hear his voice saying, ‘Easy, boy, easy. Take it easy.’

2

When Horse woke again he was lying in the dark. At first he thought he was in bed at home. A pillow was under his head and an overcoat covered him. He stirred cautiously. His shoulder was stiff and numb, and his body felt weak and light, like a half-empty sack of spuds. His shoes were still on his feet, but unlaced. A murmur of voices and a trickle of light came from beyond the door. Slowly the memory of the botched beginning of the evening returned to him. He levered himself from the bed, laced his shoes, hung the overcoat on his arm, and walked out.

Ivan and Peter were playing cards at the kitchen table. There were some shillings in a saucer. A bottle of rum stood three-quarters empty.

Ivan looked round. ‘Hullo, boy. We thought you were dead. Mollie nearly rang the doctor. She thought the bath was full of blood. It’s lucky I knewpage 543 you’d been hoeing into the saveloys.’

‘I’m all right,’ said Horse. There were black patches of nothing hiding half of what he looked at; but what he saw he liked. He laid his coat on the sofa and sat down beside it. ‘Thanks for looking after me.’

‘Don’t worry about that. I used to get sick on the booze myself for years. It was the rum that did it. Have a beer.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Ivan pulled a bottle from the carton under the table, jerked the top off it with his teeth, and handed it foaming to Horse. ‘You’ll find a glass in the cupboard. I learnt that trick in the Army. Don’t try it though. You’ll break your teeth unless you’ve got the knack.’

Horse found a glass. He poured a beer and drank it.

‘Go on. Get stuck in. You’ll need it. Don’t worry about us. We’re sticking to the rum.’

Horse became aware of a desert inside him which had been dry since the beginning of the world. He was grateful to Ivan for recognising his exact condition.

‘Mollie’s gone to bed with a headache. You can put up here tonight. If you don’t mind sleeping on the sofa.’

‘Thanks.’ Horse refilled his glass.

The rum seemed to have made Peter feel unhappy. Since Horse’s entry he had been brooding in his chair. Now he turned his red-rimmed gaze on Ivan. ‘You should have let me take a poke at that Maori bastard,’ he announced.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Ivan.

‘You should have let me take a poke at him. I don’t let any black bugger push me around. Or any Doolan either.’

Ivan ignored the challenge. ‘We’re all the same in the dark. Joe’s done me some good turns. He runs a crown-and-anchor game down in McLagan Street.’

‘You should have let me take a poke at him.’

‘It’s on tonight. It’ll be going till about three in the morning.’ Peter accepted the diversion. ‘What’s the time now?’

Ivan looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘It’s getting on for ten. You want to have a crack at it?’

Peter nodded. ‘Sometimes I’m lucky on the board. I always bet on the hook. I’d rather do that than play for peanuts.’

‘OK. I might put a couple of dollars on.’ Ivan turned to Horse. ‘You want to come with us?’

‘You bet.’ The thirst had gone underground like a peat fire. Horse’s head was steady now and the evening still young.

Ambling down the path with two full bottles swinging against his legs in the pockets of his overcoat. Horse was able to take stock of the surroundings he had not noticed at the time of the taxi ride. The shapes of rickety housespage 544 propped themselves against the hill as if to avoid sliding into the street. The single slabs of concrete that made up the steps of the path were cracked and broken, and one or two of them swayed under his tread. A wild moon hung over the harbour and the town, inhuman among the hurrying clouds, coming from nowhere and going nowhere, the horned Diana of sex and death. Trees murmured harshly on the hills of the town, sheltering hedgehogs and drunks and those late lovers who frotted among burrs in the long grass beside the cable car. The lights of Anderson’s Bay glittered steadily, each point of light indicating a suburban hutch where people talked and yawned and killed time, afraid of the graveyard night outside their windows. But Horse preferred the night to the day.

He cracked another bottle by placing a penny on the edge of the brick wall that fenced in somebody’s garden and knocking the cap off with his fist. The beer sprayed out on his coat.

‘Have a drink, Ivan. A drink, Peter.’

‘The rum will do me,’ said Ivan. Horse and Peter shared the bottle, not wiping the neck between each other’s drinking.

‘I need a hose,’ said Horse. He unlatched his fly and watered the base of a hydrangea bush. In the spring that bush would surprise its owner with Horse- coloured flowers.

In McLagan Street there were few lights on. They climbed a flight of wooden steps to a house where the blinds were drawn. A low babble of voices came from inside. Ivan knocked gently at a side door. There was a sound of footsteps, and the door opened a few inches.

‘It’s me. Ivan. With two cobbers. We’d like to have a go on the board.’

The door opened wider. Horse could see a swarthy woman in a dress that looked like a worn-out flour sack. ‘All right. You can come in. We had the johns here on Monday. Joe had to give them thirty quid to get them to go away again.’ She caught sight of Horse.

‘He’s a bit young, isn’t he?’

‘He’s a cousin of mine,’ said Ivan. ‘Down from Alexandra for a day or two. He’s been working on the dredge.’

‘All right. He can come in this time. But another time don’t bring him. The young ones can cause trouble.’

Horse followed Ivan and Peter down a passage where the wallpaper sprouted faded climbing roses. They entered a small smoke-filled room with a table in the centre. It was nearly as crowded as the bar of the Grand had been. A number of middle-aged men and two sagging girls crowded under an unshaded light and grunted disappointment or approval. Joe the kumara god sat behind the soiled and coloured canvas squares. He rattled three dice in a leather cup.

‘Come on. Place your bets. The board’s not covered yet.’

A short-legged man put two pound notes on the diamond. One of the girlspage 545 leant over him and threw a half-crown on the hook. But it rolled over the edge of the anchor square to the red crown.

‘The hook or the crown, lady?’

‘Leave it on the crown,’ she said. ‘It might be lucky.’

‘That’s right. You might break the bank.’ The kumara god laughed. He lifted his grey bullet head and caught sight of the three newcomers. ‘Hullo. Here comes my pakeha brother from Invercargill.’ Horse blushed. Several peopled turned and looked in his direction. ‘Well, his money’s as good as mine. Step up, boy. Place your bet.’

The kumara god rattled the dice again. Horse shelled out a note at random from his hip pocket and put it on the spade. Only when he saw its blue colour did he realise it was a fiver. But it was too late to take it back.

‘The big money, eh? Place your bets, gentlemen. Place your bets.’

All six squares were quickly covered with notes and silver. The kumara god rattled the dice quickly and lifted the cup. The upper surfaces of the rounded ivory cubes showed a crown, an anchor and a diamond.

‘The name and the game and a diamond.’ His tattooed arms swept up the silver and notes, including Horse’s fiver, from the squares that carried the heart, the spade and the club sign. He doubled the money on the winning squares. ‘You’re lucky today, Shorty. Will you leave it on for the next throw?’

‘No. That’ll do me.’ The short-legged man removed his four pounds, pocketed them and retreated. Among the winners only the girl left her money on the crown.

‘Let it stay, Joe,’ she said.

Horse’s brain was numb. The spade’s bound to come up soon, he thought. He laid a pound on the spade square. The others placed their bets. The dice rattled.

‘Three crowns.’

The kumara god swept the board clear except for the crown square. There Horse’s pound replaced the girl’s five shillings. ‘You’re lucky, lady.’

‘Leave it,’ she said.

Horse decided to double up. He put two pound on the spade. He was now six quid down. If three spades came up, he could quit even.

‘Two crowns and a heart.’

The girl smiled as she took three crumpled notes from the crown square.

Horse calculated that he had lost eight pounds. It was plain that the crown was having a lucky run. If he put a fiver on the crown, and one crown came up, he would be only three quid down. If two crowns came up, he would be two quid to the good. More than the price of a bottle of gin. If three crowns came up again, he would be seven quid to the good. He took his money from his hip-pocket and examined it. There was a fiver and a ten-bob note.

Ivan touched his arm. ‘You don’t have to bet with notes.’

Horse shrugged him off. His throat was dry, his ears ringing, and hispage 546 mind was made up. He put the fiver on the crown. The kumara god looked up at him with a faint smile as he rattled the dice. ‘Big money, eh, boy?’ he said again. Then he lifted the cup. ‘Three spades. Hard luck, man.’ He gathered in the money, including Horse’s second fiver.

Horse reflected bitterly that if he had stayed on the spade he would now have twenty quid. He had lost thirteen quid in less than five minutes. He saw in this event the morose intervention of the wowser’s God.

Peter moved in to the table and began to bet determinedly on the hook, doubling up in florins. Horse and Ivan stood back. ‘You struck it solid there,’ said Ivan. ‘I don’t blame you for trying to shift to the crown. But Joe’s got the odds on his side.’

Horse said nothing.

‘You may think I’m a bit of a drongo,’ said Ivan surprisingly. ‘Letting that big Pommy bastard horn in on me and Mollie. Well, I know what I’m doing.’

‘It’s your business.’

‘Not just my business. A man’s got to keep himself square with other people.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s easy to get it wrong,’ said Ivan. ‘Now, I’m a Doolan. What do you think is the main thing the Church has got?’

Horse began to throw off his gambling stupor. ‘There is an old man in Rome who leads his people home,’ he said.

‘That’s poetry. I used to know all of Eskimo Nell. . . . . No. The Pope’s the Pope. I don’t think about him myself. The one thing that holds the Church together is that she knows what a man is. A man’s a crocodile.’

‘Women don’t think that way.’

‘You can say that again. A woman’s full of ideas about herself. Mollie’s still young. She reads all these women’s magazines – True Confessions; How-I-Got-Shanked-by-the-Boss’s-Son. If I turfed that Pongo bastard out of the house she’d go with him. And then she’d be a crocodile all right. She’d get away from the Church, and after he’d ditched her she’d take up Christian Science or something and get the idea she was growing wings. The poor bitch would end up in Hell.’

‘I’m not a Doolan, Ivan.’

‘I know you’re not. But if you’re ever looking for a Church, don’t by-pass the one with the big stone steps and the line twenty yards long outside the confession box. It’s the only one where they know that a man’s a crocodile.’

Horse did not relish this instruction in moral theology. He was prepared to shout from a roof-top, if necessary, that he was a crocodile but he did not believe that Fern was one. But he was slowly becoming aware of a different Ivan. Ivan was at the same time himself and believed. It had not been possible in the world Horse grew up in.

The three men left the house in McLagan Street together. Peter had lostpage 547 three pounds ten and Ivan had won thirty-six bob, each betting in florins. When they sat down in the kitchen again Ivan was in a particularly good humour.

‘We’ll clean up the rum,’ he said. ‘Take it slow this time, boy, and you’ll be all right.’

Peter set out the glasses. As Ivan’s star brightened his own seemed to grow darker. ‘I still reckon you should have let me take a poke at that Maori bastard,’ he said.

‘Don’t let it spoil your drinking,’ said Ivan. ‘Do you know the story about the bloke that was tearing one off with his cobber’s wife?’

‘No,’ said Peter suspiciously.

‘This bloke,’ said Ivan, staring at his rum, ‘went round to his cobber’s place to tear one off. And he found her there and his cobber in bed, dead drunk in the same room. They’d got twin beds, you see. Well, first of all he had a bit. And then he got worried that his cobber might be pulling a fast one. So he tiptoed over to have a look if he was really asleep. And the first thing he saw was a great fat arse sticking out from under the bedclothes. So he bent down’ – Ivan imitated the movement – ‘and he pulled out a hair, just to make sure. And the old man gave a grunt and rolled over. So the bloke went back and had another bit. But then he got worried again. So he went along again and pulled out another hair. And this happened five or six times. And the very last time the old man sat up in bed and looked at him, and said – ‘You know, Alec, I don’t mind you shagging my wife. But I bloody well object to you using my arse as a scoreboard.

Ivan laughed loudly at his own story; but Peter did not. He looked much like an eel that finds itself floundering on a dry bank. And Horse could see that Ivan’s tactics might work in the end. He had the wisdom of the crocodile and the patience of that unique animal, whose strength is in its jaws and its tail. Horse consumed slightly more than his share of the second bottle of rum before he fell asleep on the sofa.

The Quick and the Dead 1

The next morning, when Horse clambered up to daylight from his burrow, he was far from happy. Impaled on a bamboo stake in a schist-rock desert under the merciless sun of a hangover conscience he did not dare to make a movement of mind or body in case his bowels should burst open, his brain explode, and the walls of the kitchen fall in on him. He knew that he, Timothy Harold Glass, had poisoned the tribal wells. And to him, lying speechless, there came a strange procession. Old men in tartan kilts with bagpipes under their arms, housewives with faces as long as their aprons, the dead and livingpage 548 burghers of Dunedin accompanied by their apple-cheeked women and their subnormal Sunday-loving children. His mother and Old Voss led them. They halted and gazed at the humped mutilated shape of one who had offended against God and the brotherhood.

‘I wanted to treat him right,’ said Old Voss. ‘I tried to be a second father to him. But he’s a waster. He’ll never do any good.’

‘He lacks the capacity for love,’ said his mother, her face reddened and averted.

‘He has rejected Jesus,’ said Brian, who now wore his collar back to front. ‘He is a vile drunkard,’ groaned an emaciated widow, her tattered lace shawl smeared with cat manure. ‘He drank a pint of milk from my doorstep while passing intoxicated at five in the morning. Then he urinated in the

bottle and left it there. My cat and I have both been poisoned.’

‘He was looking at the hole in my knickers,’ said a girl of eight, ‘when I was swinging in the park. I knew he was a bad man.’

‘He is a constitutional psychopath,’ said Professor Wardle of the Practical Psychology Department.

‘He’s a sexual maniac,’ grieved Fern, who had joined the accusers. He tried to make me do it three times when I had my period.’

‘He’s a gutless wonder,’ muttered Joe the kumara god. ‘He doesn’t even know how to bet properly.’

A shower sprinkled the kitchen window. Horse’s right leg muscle, maltreated by rum, swelled agonisingly like a cricket ball. He twisted on the sofa and banged it flat again with his fist. A regular thudding noise came from the yard where the wind was slamming the washhouse door. At this sad moment Horse raised his eyes and saw a deeply consoling vision.

A Japanese girl, plump in a filmy kimono, smiled at him from the greengrocer’s calendar above the range. The sun rose behind her across a vague sea, and a spray of cherry blossom hid her most intimate charms. There was no shadow of accusation in her gaze. Like the mirrors hung in a Shinto temple, her eyes reflected the secret purity that exists in the soul of every believer. I am eternal, she murmured. I am the living heart of the world. Cherry blossoms began to fall like snow from the spaces behind the clouds. They covered the mica desert. And the accusers, ravaged by the Horse demon, melted away one by one. Horse fell back into easy sleep and did not wake till Ivan came in the door.

‘Wake up, brother,’ he said. ‘How’s the head?’

‘Fair enough,’ said Horse. This was true. He had often felt worse. ‘Going to the mills today?’

Horse hesitated. After the disastrous defeat at the crown-and-anchor board he would need money; but the mills would not pay out again for a fortnight. He decided to bludge what he could in town. And Fern would certainly be home on a Friday afternoon. Swotting. ‘No,’ he said at last.

page 549

‘O.K. You’re single; I’m married. Pete’s not going either. He said he wants to meet you in the Grand at five. He’s got something up his sleeve. Watch out for the bastard. He could get you into trouble.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ve got him well sorted out.’

‘O.K.’ Ivan was dressed for the road. He carried a tin lunch-case. Suddenly he grinned, a singularly pleasant grin that showed a double row of stained teeth. He reached into his inside pocket, pulled out a pound note, and offered it to Horse. ‘Here. You might be needing this. You can pay me back next payday.’

‘Won’t it leave you short?’ Horse was reluctant to take a loan from a married man.

‘I’ve got a few quid stacked away. Here, take it.’ Horse took the pound.

‘You’ll find a razor in the bathroom,’ said Ivan. ‘Don’t cut your throat. You’re too young for that.’ He grinned again. ‘Mollie and the kids won’t be up for a while. It’s a holiday for them. I’d head off and get a feed in town, if I were you. Mollie won’t be in a good mood when she gets up. She was sore about you spewing in the bath.’

‘O.K.’ Horse realised that he had been lying down while Ivan was standing. He rolled back his overcoat and blanket and stood up clumsily. ‘Thanks a lot.’

‘Good luck.’ Ivan went out the kitchen door.

Horse shaved carefully with Ivan’s razor. Fern would not appreciate a hangover stubble when he called to distract her from her labours. He whistled as he shaved. The day had begun well. He thought that he should say a word to Pete before going; but when he crept down the passage and opened the second bedroom door – the first one had shown him two children, both fair- haired, apparently still asleep – he saw heaving bedclothes, the determined bare shoulders of Peter, and Mollie’s face, no longer sulky, with eyes closed, relaxed in the glowing archetypal mask of a woman enjoying a good bang. They did not notice him. He inched the door shut, walked quickly back to the kitchen, out through the yard, and down the path to the street.

The sun was pouring down light and heat on the wooden hives of the town. The ruffled harbour glittered white and blue. A skein of side-streets led Horse down to the top of London Street. Here was a church on his right which he knew to be Catholic on account of its gloomy utilitarian squareness. Horse remembered the gist of Ivan’s injunctions. Brusquely he ran up the stone steps. In the porch he hesitated, looking at the holy water stoups, which resembled bird-baths to his eyes. Not knowing what to do about these, he dipped his hand in one and rubbed the water on his forehead. Then he entered.

Horse had not been in a Doolan church before. The mixture of gloom and brightness surprised him. A relief round the walls showed Jesus carrying his cross with several other people. Horse had always thought subconsciously of Jesus as a man alone; but here he was all but submerged in a crowd ofpage 550 women and torturers with hammers. A red light flickered at the far end of the church near the altar. That end seems quieter than this, thought Horse. He wondered at the light, but walked quietly up the side of the church till he reached a chapel which contained a statue of the Blessed Virgin, dressed in white and blue and gold, holding the Child in her arms. Some kind of brass arrangement was there for holding lighted candles. An old woman of the kind that Horse had often seen emerging from bottle-stores with a full shopping bag was kneeling in a pew. She did not move when Horse passed her. Maybe she’s dead, he thought. Then he saw her lips moving and her fingers stroking a chain of brown beads.

He took a candle guiltily from the pile, lit it from one already burning, and stuck it in a holder. Then he put a shilling in the slot of the brass box, knelt down, and prayed. Unbaptised, uninstructed, Horse’s prayer to the Blessed Virgin was admirably simple. Help me. I’m a bloody fool, he prayed silently. Then, thinking of Ivan, he added – And help Ivan too. And Peter and Mollie and Fern and Tony and Mother and the Old Man. . . . The litany of names petered out after a minute, and Horse took fright. Something in the downward gaze of the Virgin, more absolute and incomprehensible than that of the girl in the kimono in the kitchen calendar, made him rise again and go quickly from the church, like a bather hurrying from deep water to the manageable shallows. The sunlight in the street was a relief after the dark quietness he had come from.

The need for money was uppermost in his mind. Ivan’s quid would get him three feeds of steak and eggs at the Silver Grille. But there was grog to be considered, and also other secondary matters – condoms and taxi fares, for example. Tony would have the kale. But he did not like putting the bite on Tony.

Horse did not mind living off the land. A natural hobo, he had often scrounged the quarter-smoked lipstick-reddened cigarettes from the sand- trays in the foyer of the Regent picture theatre, when the need for tobacco was absolute, split them open, and rolled them again with the burnt end toward his mouth. But he already owed Tony a tenner. Still, Tony was the one person who had never tried to dress him down. If he followed his regular habit, he would be in the Bowling Green between nine and ten.

Horse entered the lounge bar of the Bowling Green shortly after nine. It was empty except for a middle-aged barman polishing glasses. He shifted along the counter to meet Horse.

‘A long beer, Fitz,’ said Horse. ‘And put a dash of soda in it. My guts are crook; or at least they should be. I’ve not had a feed as yet today.’

The barman served him and took the money. ‘On the table,’ he said. ‘Take a look. If you get stuck into that lot, you won’t need any more for a week.’

On a table in the corner of the room Horse found the funeral meats of the day before – a black pudding, slices of cold mutton, and a hunk of blue-page 551veined cheese. ‘By God, you’re right, Fitz,’ he said. ‘I’m set for the day.’

While Horse sat upon the bench and loaded up on this pilgrim’s diet, using his fingers and a knife supplied by the barman, he thought about the part that the Bowling Green played in his life. Ever since he had climbed the wall to get grog for a dance, a gloomy and celibate fresher, it had been his thieves’ kitchen, bombshelter and home from home. Old Grady, the smooth tubby publican, hated students; but since fifty per cent of his custom came from them, he had to keep his trap shut. He and his bone-china wife took turns to visit the Seacliff mental hospital for a booze cure. Horse had once heard him open out, late at night, on whisky and crème de menthe. Unforgettably he had flayed the varsity population for an hour, dwelling in turn on their sex habits, their conversation, their clothing, their small spending power, and their tendency to vomit freely. But the next day he had served at the hatch with his usual polite waiter’s smile.

At the Bowling Green Horse had polished his glass belly and become a druid. The news that the human race is not vertebrate but crustacean had first reached him here. Born by good luck under the sign of the Crab, he had sunned himself in this deep rock pool, while the big surf crashed beyond, wearing a protective seaweed foliage of anecdote and moving sideways with his nippers waving. Here he had learnt the basic obscene metaphors by which the human spirit expresses and conceals its tenderness, its grief, and its longing to return to the Garden of Eden. The Bowling Green had been helpful. If it ever came to a toss-up between Fern and it he would have to think twice.

Absorbed in this meditation Horse did not notice that he now had company. A low growl, the snap of enormous teeth, and a slice of sausage disappeared from his fingers. The fingers were grazed but unhurt.

‘Hell!’ said Horse. ‘Take your mongrel out of here, Daniel.’

‘Hannibal loves black pudding,’ said the owner of the dog, a plump youth with curly dark hair and a burning eye. ‘You should have offered him some. Are you having a beer with us?’

‘Does Hannibal drink?’

‘Not alcoholic liquor.’ Daniel set up two beers on the bar. ‘Dogs are wiser than men, you know. I think Hannibal is the reincarnation of somebody very wise. Somebody like Socrates.’

‘In that case,’ said Horse, ‘he’s not wiser than a man. He’s just a wise man inside the skin of a mongrel.’

Hannibal growled softly. In a sitting posture his head reached higher than Daniel’s middle. Horse reflected that he looked like a cross between a St Bernard and a kangaroo, though this fusion was anatomically unlikely.

‘He knows what you’re saying. Not you calling him a mongrel. He’s too wise to take notice of stupid remarks. It’s your being logical he objects to. Logic means the death of poetry. Hannibal understands my poetry. I read it to him often at night. Last night I read him a poem about a seagull. Whenpage 552 I look at the squalor all around me’ – Daniel gestured towards the barman, who was sitting with his glasses on reading Hard Times in a paperback – ‘when I look around me, and then look inside me, I know that poetry’s the only thing that can save the world.’

‘When I look at you and that dog,’ said Horse, ‘the question I ask myself is – ‘Who’s up who? Are you up the dog or is the dog up you?’

Daniel’s face reddened. ‘You see everything in terms of sex. I don’t know how a sensitive person like Fern Mitchell ever got tangled up with a man like you. She’s like a Greek goddess. Statuesque. I read her a long poem of mine at a party at the Adamses. She said she liked poetry better than anything else.’

‘I know what she was thinking,’ said Horse. ‘She was wondering if anybody there would give her a good bang.’

‘You’ve got a dirty mind.’

Horse was feeling the strain. ‘While we’re on the subject of Fern,’ he said – ‘who took her to the Adamses? Who was she with? Was it Monty Cresswell?’

‘No. It was Jock Saunders.’

Horse’s beer tasted like soap. Jock Saunders was a tough active ram, a dental student with a car and a flat. No doubt he had been banging Fern daily in the peace of his Royal Terrace flat, between gin-and-limes, while Horse sweated over hot iron at the mills. Fern had mentioned several times that she would have preferred Horse to get a flat in town. He felt grief at having bounced Daniel. Was it more ludicrous to love a dog than to love a woman?

‘I’m sorry, Daniel,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have said that about you and Hannibal.’

Hannibal doesn’t mind. He’s used to being misunderstood.’

A small, scraggy man came in the door of the bar. He wore a brown suit patched with leather at the elbows, and ill-fitting. His cheeks were wrinkled like a rune and his hair receded from both temples. But the eye was a mild bright blue.

‘Tony, you old bugger,’ said Horse.

Hannibal growled stridently. ‘He doesn’t like you,’ said Daniel to Tony. ‘I don’t like him,’ said Tony. ‘Not that I wish him any harm.’ He ordered

a gin and squash.

‘When Hannibal doesn’t like someone,’ explained Daniel, ‘there’s always a reason for it. I don’t think it’s good for them to stay.

‘Bye-bye then dear,’ said Tony. Daniel flushed and left the bar, leading Hannibal by a leather mooring-hawser. Hannibal seemed loath to go. ‘A clear case of demoniacal possession,’ said Tony, moving up alongside Horse. ‘Which is the man and which is the dog?’

‘He’s not too bad really.’

‘My mother used to say that animals always resemble their owners. An old Irish biddy. I believe I’m very like her. But a great deal more shop-soiled. Do you want a drink? Or has love destroyed your digestive powers?’

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‘Not yet,’ said Horse. ‘I’ll have another beer.’

Tony ordered and obtained the beer. ‘Your friend is rather like a camel,’ he said. ‘Not that I mind.’

‘Tony,’ said Horse. ‘I’m broke.’

‘If you weren’t broke,’ said Tony, ‘you wouldn’t be so glad to see me. Being broke is a very human ailment. How much do you need?’

‘A fiver would be enough.’ Horse was as red as Daniel had been.

‘I can manage eight pounds.’ Tony counted the money out on the bar. ‘But don’t make it an excuse for not calling on me. Preferably not with your girlfriend.’ Horse winced. ‘There are friends and friends,’ said Tony softly. ‘Your mother thinks I’m corrupting you. As one old woman to another, I could tell her that nobody was ever corrupted by having a place to lie down in.’

2

The tenets of the Horse religion were simple and experimental. Horse himself had never set them down. But if he had, an archaeologist from Alpha Centauri – a star with a Horse name – might have uncovered in the year 3045 from under the scrub-covered ruins of Dunedin a sealed silver box; and opening it, would have found a handwritten manuscript expressing these intuitive conclusions –

• 1. Horse existed. He existed independently of any educative process which had been employed by others, since his birth, to improve on the very raw material. Brains, heart and ballocks, a travelling cyclone of desires and memories, he had sprung from the incomprehensible earth and would not return to it willingly.
• 2. Surrounding Horse, not made by him, existed the sky, the earth, the sea, and other less clearly defined creatures, serenely melancholy, neither glad nor sorry that Horse existed. Yet Horse’s happiness depended on an intimate contact with this world of substance. This contact could be achieved only by simple acts – eating, drinking, walking, talking, swearing, working, banging – and not by any system of ideas. So at one blow, with the jawbone of an ass, Horse broke the heads of the varsity philosophers.
• 3. By contact with the world of substance Horse had access to a sacred power. He was ignorant where it came from; and he attributed it by hypothesis to Lucifer the Earth-Spirit, since the God he had heard of was a God of ideas. This power adhered to particular places and particular people. In his childhood Horse had experienced its manifestation on certain cliff- faces and on the banks of creeks, especially where flax or toe-toe bushes grew freely. His father conveyed it strongly, by the capable strength of his hands, and by the smell of burnt gum-leaves he often carried on his person. As the primitive paradise of childhood fell apart, Horse had been led by meditationpage 554 and example to look for the signs of this power in women.
• 4. A woman who carried this power in its fullness was in a sense a goddess. Sex, seen merely as the fitting together of nut and bolt, did not interest Horse greatly. But when it occurred as the central act of the Horse religion, in conjunction with the goddess, sex conferred the same power on the unbeliever. It led him through a low doorway to the only earthly paradise.
• 5. There were good bangs and poor bangs, just as there were good poems and poor poems. The bang and the poem were closely related, as the roots of a plant are related to its fruit. One example of the good bang should be enough to illuminate this central point of doctrine.
• Fern and Horse had explored on a breezy Saturday the beaches beyond St Clair. They found an abandoned gun-emplacement on a point of rock that was isolated by the waves at high tide. It was low tide when they came there. Fern climbed the hundred-foot rusty ladder ahead of Horse. Throughout that ascent her round buttocks moved rhythmically under her print dress before his upward gaze. When they reached the iron eyrie there was nothing to be seen but the earth, the sea, the sky, and a wall on which someone had written – ‘Alex and Norman came here with two women.’ Horse did not require this reminder; and Fern too was in the mood. They coupled on the concrete floor beside the corroded cables. It was the hour of the hawk, not the hour of the dove. While the waves chiselled at the rocks below, the mythical identification with all things living was achieved. Horse did not use a condom. When they came back to the beach, Fern had said – ‘It’s a bit hard on a girl to have no mattress’ – and Horse found and presented to her a phallus-shaped stone, encircled by a white ridge of quartz, which she now kept among her heirlooms. He had visited the holy place several times since then, alone, and each time had received the germinal image of a new poem.
• 6. The enemies of the Horse religion were the Dead. In Horse’s estimation they were more powerful than the living. He had first recognised their paralysing power, that of the octopus and the giant ray, when his grandmother died. He was then five years old. He knew that her body had been lowered into a hole in the ground; and somehow that vigorous old lady, a donor of licorice allsorts, became transformed into a malignant ghost who made sucking noises out of Mr Colquhoun’s ditch as Horse dodged by at night. The Dead struck through hangover, bad weather, inexplicable swellings in the mouth or groin, and letters in the post. Horse was deeply aware of their presence in his parents’ house on wet Sundays when the curtains flapped sluggishly and the fire smoked and his head grew thick, and there was nothing to do but sit downstairs and read or go upstairs and masturbate with the blue-covered Encyclopedia Britannica open at the article on Reproduction.

The Dead fell into two categories. There were those who had enjoyed having a bang while they were alive, or would have if they had had the chance. With these green-boned ancestors Horse communed when he was onpage 555 the grog, sheltered by the black vine of Dionysus-Hades. He would have had no fear at all of the ghost of Lucrezia Borgia.

The second category, however, were the more numerous – those who had been glad to die because it was purer than life, masters of the snowflake and the grey asphodel. Their brownish photographs and spidery handwritten letters were piled in the thirty-five sacks his parents preserved in the room behind the stairs. They had enjoyed the dullest parts of Virgil. They had travelled round the world and noticed only the scenery; they had begotten children without joy; and they retained their hold over the living by the injunctions of newspaper leaders, advertisements against bad breath, Travel Bureaus and varsity lecture rooms. A good bang made them shake with anger in their tidy shrouds.

Horse left the Bowling Green at two o’clock. He had benefited from his two-hour session with Tony, drinking little and talking much. Tony remained himself, however wintry the spiritual climate; and he had endured with flinching Horse’s most recent poem –

Stormy the western sky. The wild ducks flying over
Carry a world of sorrow with their wings;
And the new stars remind me of my lover
Though she in her heart cares little for these things.

If I were a bird like those that in the skies are thronging
I would cross the desert now to where she lies
And kiss her mouth then and tell her of my longing
And watch the dawn break within her quiet eyes. (Uncollected)

Horse repeated these lines as a charm against the Dead as he came in sight of the sparrow-haunted clock tower of the University. A group of chooks in bell-like skirts and yellow jerseys or Girls’ College blazers were sitting on the sloping lawn above the Leith Stream, nattering or swotting. Apart from them, on the edge of the concrete retaining wall, crouched Daniel and Hannibal. Daniel was dropping twigs into the water, and Hannibal stared wisely at the circular ripples. They did not look up as Horse went by.

Soon he was outside Fern’s flat. The venetian blinds were down but the slats were open. Through them he could see the back of Fern’s head visible above her enormous sofa. She would be swotting there with her knees drawn up, eating apples. Till she got the skitters. If he was lucky she would be ripe for an erotic revolt against her oppressors.

Yet the sense of an invisible barrier kept him loitering on the pavement. Fern was dedicated to the world of ladders and ideas; and he by comparison was only an aimless barfly. Each time he embraced her he felt that his term of office had already nearly expired. She had been growing more abstractedpage 556 as the end-of-year exams approached. The last time Horse had called at her flat, with a bottle of sherry and sex on his mind, she had told him that her ovulation was very painful and had advised him to stop drinking and take up rugby. Horse’s intuitive radar equipment flashed the message that somebody else had been consoling her. Perhaps even Monty, the house surgeon whom he had displaced in her affections. For some months after this had happened, Monty had followed him and Fern round with baggy pants and a suicidal glare; and for a while Horse had unwillingly shared her with him. Fern explained to Horse that Monty was a friend of her family’s. He had taken her in tow as soon as she hit Dunedin, a long-haired Southland demi-virgin, and though she didn’t exactly care for him, it was a matter of principle that she should sleep with him. Fern was never prepared to yield an inch on a matter of principle. Now Horse had begun slowly to sympathise with Monty.

Fern was a child of that monolithic structure which has shaped the conscience of the modern New Zealander: the Church of the Extreme Left. Her father had been the militant secretary of a Southland timber workers’ union. From Winnie the Pooh she graduated to Bertrand Russell and Kropotkin. Fern had never had any personal interest in politics; she accepted the socialist and rationalist classics much as the average Catholic child accepts the papal encyclicals – they were there; they showed the way the world worked; one did not question them. She solved her ethical problems by classifying human thoughts and actions into two categories – nice and messy. Money and sex and friendship were nice. Poverty and celibacy and quarrels were messy. Abortions were messy too; but not as messy as having an illegitimate child. The existence of a God or a devil would have been too messy for words.

Fern’s sexual education had begun at the age of seven, when a Plymouth Brother uncle, the only religious member of the family, had deflowered her in a gardening shed. A wise child, she conjectured that though defloration was messy, telling her parents about it would be much messier. As a result she had avoided the trauma that might have sprung from an intricate post-mortem on the event. It had left her only with a reinforced dislike of religious people. The only verbal instruction she had received regarding sex was a remark made by her mother the month before she went to varsity, when they were washing up dishes together – ‘I’m not advising you to go out and have sexual intercourse with anyone, Fern; but if you do, use Bellamy’s pessaries. I always use them myself.’ This put the whole problem on a non-messy basis. Monty was also able to eradicate Fern’s maidenly qualms, a week after she arrived at the varsity, by saying – ‘You’ll be here for six years, Fern. People can get in a bloody mess if they don’t have their sex life in order.’ And it was Monty’s despairing and human effort to poison himself with mercury tablets which had finally alienated Fern. ‘Suicides are very selfish,’ she had said to Horse. ‘They leave all the mess for other people to clean up.’

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Because of her training Horse had the feeling, when in tune with Fern, of being on the edge of a vast subconscious area, more primitive and impenetrable than the psyche of any Sea Dyak. Her name was suitable. Perhaps some vague hankering after forbidden spiritual knowledge had influenced her mother in choosing it. Like a fern below a waterfall at the middle of the Southland rain forest, she flourished in total ignorance of the laws of her own being, prudent, modest, obedient to lawful authority, fed by secret streams and the grey light that filtered down to her through rationalist branches. She was a godsend to a man who wanted a perfect bang.

This afternoon, going in at the gate, Horse remembered the first time he had banged Fern. After a long and gruelling bash, having nowhere else to go, he had settled himself for the night in a bus station broom-cupboard. There he had lapsed into coma, wedged upright among the brooms; there he had wakened numb at five on a frosty morning. He had crawled out of shelter, his clothes dusty with old whitewash, and the winter of the town and the winter of a year’s unwilling celibacy had crushed him between their double millstones. Then he had thought of Fern, warm in her single bed. Horse had visited Fern twice before, sitting and making small-talk. Each time an attempt to come to a clinch had led to her pushing him firmly away with a strained smile. But that morning he had known he was on the real plank above the sharks, the unforgiving and iron-jawed Dead. So he had wandered up Castle Street while the morning birds jangled above him, and shoved up Fern’s window and climbed in, not caring whether she rang the cops or the fire brigade.

‘Who’s that?’ she had asked from the shadows.

‘It’s me. Timothy. I’m psychologically damned.’ Then he had unbuckled his belt, kicked off his shoes, and dropped his whitened trousers on the floor. When he had clambered in beside her, he found for the first time in his life the gates of that paradise from which runs the great river Euphrates. After a short palaver, Fern, warm and milky from sleep, had embraced him. The thorns of betrayal that stuff the pillows of older lovers were absent; if Fern experienced them, she did not mention it.

He knocked quietly on the door of the flat and waited. After a while Fern opened the door. She was wearing a red dressing-gown. Her golden-brown hair hung like a rippling carpet to her waist.

‘Oh, it’s you, Horse.’ ‘Yes.’

‘You can come in. But don’t make a noise. Mrs Whitaker’s being very difficult.’

Like many-eyed Argus, the monster who guarded the sacred heifer Io, Fern’s landlady lived through the wall and knew everything that went on. Horse had never met her. But whenever he visited Fern he felt her presence like the weight of an old stable blanket. Twice widowed, she had succumbed to the domination of the Dead, and lived like a Haitian female zombie,page 558 exhumed regularly from its comfortable grave to labour and dig the grey soil. She disliked anyone having a bang anywhere.

Fern seated Horse on a tall padded chair. The stretcher bed was unmade. Open textbooks lay on the table, surrounded by human fingerbones and Japanese teacups and apple cores. ‘I’ve been swotting,’ said Fern unnecessarily. ‘Professor Mac said he’s not sure he can give me terms.’

‘Bugger terms!’ The room depressed Horse. The mention of Professor Mac depressed him too, for it showed that Fern’s mind was fixed in an ascetic groove. Her deepest anxieties centred on that trim moustached father figure. Horse leant forward on his perch and grabbed her hand. It lay passively in his own. He pushed his fingers between hers till they spread out in a fan, and rubbed her palm with his thumb.

Fern jerked her hand away. ‘You’ve been drinking.’ ‘A few beers with Tony. I was feeling crook.’

‘I’d feel crook if I spent half my life in the pub. I wish you’d take up a sport. Jock plays tennis.’

‘Bugger Jock! He’s never read a book in his life.’ Even as he spoke Horse knew the weakness of the criticism. Jock’s illiteracy probably attracted Fern. She liked men to be single-minded and confident, making their way in the world.

‘At least he doesn’t come round to see a girl half-drunk.’

‘I tell you I’m not drunk. The amount I’ve had couldn’t make a fly drunk.’ ‘You smell of beer anyway.’

Horse saw his chances of an afternoon spent in banging Fern dwindle to zero. He decided on assault. Levering himself from the chair, he dropped to his knees in a praying posture and gripped Fern by the buttocks. He then nuzzled the disputed area, burying his face in the cloth of her dressing-gown. In a minute or so Fern’s hands slid down and stroked him below the ears.

‘Good dog,’ said Fern. ‘Poor doggie. Is he hungry? Doggie say bow-wow.’ ‘Horse responded with a sharp dog-like bark. He nuzzled her more briskly. When he stood up he could see that Fern’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes slightly glazed. His heart grew light. He kissed her, and they fell into a long clinch on the sofa. He slid his hand under the top fold of her dressing-gown.

‘Not here, Horse. She’ll be listening.’

He sat up and combed his hair back with his fingers. ‘We’ll go to Tony’s,’ he said. ‘Tony won’t be home. He said he’d be in the billiard room till six.’

Half an hour later Fern and Horse scrambled through a broken fence into the small backyard of Tony’s flat. A japonica bush shot out a few green twigs from the cat-fertilised soil. An oil drum incinerator stood just inside the fence. Horse hunted for the key, first under the door mat, then on top of the cistern in the outdoor lavatory.

‘I can’t find it,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to break in.’

‘Will Tony mind?’

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‘I don’t think so. If he does, he’ll just have to.’

He embraced Fern standing, to make sure she did not emerge from the erotic coma. Fern thrust her tongue into his mouth. ‘Be quick, Horse!’ she said, when he disengaged himself.

Horse hoisted himself painfully through a large open fanlight, his shoes scraping on the paint of the kitchen wall. His trouser pocket caught and tore as he wriggled through. He landed with a crash on the sink bench inside. Then he unlatched the door, and Fern entered, carrying the bottle of beer he had left outside.

‘It looks messy,’ said Fern, gazing round the kitchen junkyard, where empty whisky cases rubbed shoulders with painted canvas screens. Tony had at times done some stage designing.

‘Upstairs,’ said Horse. He led her into the passage and up the wooden spiral stair to Tony’s sleeping quarters. Here island mats hung on the walls and bronze jugs stood on platforms. The window commanded a fine view of the fire-escape of the Ballachulish Hotel. Horse was not interested in the view. A broad divan lay in the alcove, at floor level, covered by heavy rugs. Tony invariably referred to it as ‘the seducery’.

‘Do you want a beer?’ asked Horse. ‘No. Not now. Do you?’

‘No.’

Fern sat on the edge of the divan and unfastened her corduroy pants, the heels of her shoes clacking on the floorboards as she did so. Horse kissed her on the neck.

‘Don’t be slow, Horse, Get undressed, you oaf.’

Both were naked under the rugs. Horse ran his hands over that endlessly remarkable body, and rubbed her nipple between finger and thumb. Fern groaned immediately he mounted her. The fire and water of the first bang astonished him. Later on he lay on his side, his iron fresh from the rolls, and saw the sparks of a forest of rockets dropping slowly into a dark sea. The ghosts of eighteen never-to-be-born children gazed sadly down on him from the beams of the roof.

‘It makes a girl feel grateful,’ murmured Fern.

These words refreshed Horse. He explored her anatomy, and in twenty minutes they had begun the second bang. Horse wandered among the curtained foliage of a rain forest, peered into the darkness of limestone caves, and came upon a high bare lake where silver-bellied eels swam over clean shingle. He died in this lake, then floated to its surface and drifted on its pliant waves.

‘You don’t think I’m too sexy, do you?’ asked Fern. Her forehead was wet, her lips very red, though she wore no lipstick, and she smiled at him sleepily as if from the bottom of a well.

‘No,’ said Horse. He propped himself on his elbows and looked down atpage 560 her. ‘Fern, would you marry me?’ The words struck his own ears like the clash of a gong.

‘Hell, no’ – Fern sat hastily up in bed. She wore the expression of a swimmer startled by a shark. ‘I mean, I’m sorry, but it couldn’t possibly work. I mean, it’s nice to be proposed to, but it would be terribly messy. We don’t really know each other.’

‘No,’ said Horse. He reflected that Fern was probably dead right. He knew very little of what went on behind that warm Venusian mask. And what she knew of him would hardly encourage her to want him as a husband. A poet and a foggy barfly. His only recommendation would be that he was tolerably good in bed. Yet he found it hard to endure the knowledge that Fern would one day leave him.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Fern again. ‘Dear Horse. It was nice of you to say it. You make me feel an abandoned woman.’

‘I think I’ll have a beer,’ said Horse. He climbed out from under the rugs, uncapped the bottle, and drank from it, sitting naked on the bed. Then he lit a cigarette.

‘Don’t be cross,’ said Fern. ‘You could give a girl a drink.’

Horse found a glass and poured her a beer. He lit her cigarette for her, then lay down beside her again. Fern took charge of the third bang, as a consolation prize to Horse for having rejected his proposal of marriage. Like Thetis on a dolphin, or a child riding a log across a lagoon, she rode her prostrate Horse to final victory. The brown-walled tent of her hair surrounded Horse, and her face, a few inches above his own, glowed with the nimbus of the goddess. When the thunderhead descended on them both, and lightning struck at his loins and head, Horse heard the graves open. His ancestors emerged, tears falling on their mossy beards, their rotted members whole again. Blessed be the light that dies, they cried in Gaelic. And with blinding X-ray vision, he saw the mad on their asylum pillows, the crimmos in their monasteries of pain, the destitute on park benches, the prim girls afraid of their goatish lovers, the old women waiting in fly-specked sculleries for the burgling touch of the Black Angel, gazing and stumbling with bottomless joy and sorrow towards the light they had never known, the rekindled torch of Eden. Then he fell, away from Fern and that light, into the darkness behind the fixed stars.

When he and Fern sat down together, an hour later, in the Bon Ami milkbar, Horse had premonitions of grief to come. Anyone looking at Fern would have supposed her to be an impregnable varsity virgin who valued only campfire outings with the S.C.M. Her hair coiled neatly on her head, her sensible shoes tucked under the hospital-green bench, sipping her sweet and oily coffee, the only goddess she now resembled was Pallas Athene, patroness of schoolteachers.

‘When will I see you again?’ he asked.

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‘I don’t know. There’s a writer from Auckland who’s going to talk at the Literary Club. Grummet, I think his name is. You should be interested. He’s a poet. I might see you there.’ She paused ‘There’s going to be a party afterwards.’

Fern spoke a trifle irritably. Horse understood that in her mind the events of the afternoon had been ruled off, and the page turned over. She had guessed that the third bang meant to Horse what the sudden finding of an untouched moa hunter camp would to a devoted anthropologist. Horse had had his reward. And she could now return to her swot books and Professor Mac without the hindering pressure of sexual frustration.

‘All right,’ said Horse. ‘When are they holding it?’ ‘Next Saturday. Not tomorrow. The Saturday after.’

Horse reflected gloomily that this implied that Fern wished to remain celibate for the next eight days. In that time anything could happen. Jock Saunders might plant his climber’s flag on the Mons Veneris; if he had not already done so.

‘O.K.,’ he said heavily. ‘I’ll call on you.’ He would have liked to have added – ‘in the afternoon’ – but Fern’s expression of a schoolmistress unwillingly pestered by a debauchee held back the words on his lips.

‘That will be nice.’ She looked at her watch. ‘It’s nearly five o’clock. I’ll have to go home and work.’

‘O.K.’ he stubbed out his fag in the saucer. ‘I’ve got to meet someone at five.’

‘Tony?’

‘No. A sailor chap I work with.’

‘I think you should go to bed early. You look worn out.’ ‘I might and I mightn’t.’

‘Fern frowned a little. ‘You couldn’t bear to miss the chance of a beer, could you?’

‘Let’s not argue.’

‘I was just expressing an opinion.’

Horse would have liked to have said ‘Don’t tell me off; I can’t stand it’ but the words, as usual, were not the right ones. They finished their coffee and rose together in silence. Horse watched Fern retreating down the old canyon of the street, a rational soldier on the march, and a stranger again.

Breaking and Entering 1

Peter was well lit by the time Horse arrived in the Grand. ‘That crown-and- anchor game was a dead loss, mate,’ he said. ‘Where did you get to? I’ve been here since one.’

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‘I went round and saw a dame.’ Horse hoisted his first glass of beer gratefully. After the session with Fern he needed it to fill his hollow legs.

‘You’ll die on the nest one day,’ said Peter. ‘That bloody moll up the road just about killed me. She tore the skin off my back with her nails.’

Horse felt unwilling to speak of Fern and Mollie as sisters ‘This one’s very quiet,’ he said. ‘Just like a kid in some ways.’

‘The quiet ones are the killers. My missus in England nearly finished me off. She was a quiet one.’

‘How did she do that?’

‘She put those pills in my beer. Antabuse. The first pint I swallowed I thought the roof had fallen in.’

‘Did it work?’

‘It worked all right. I gave her a couple of shiners.’ ‘What did you want to see me about?’

Peter glanced round him at the gathering crowd. ‘Come over here, mate,’ he said. ‘Over in the corner. You never know when there’s somebody listening.’ They shifted their glasses to the window-sill at the bar corner. Peter leant close to Horse. ‘I’ve got a job on, mate. I need some help.’

Horse did not understand him. ‘What job? Scrub-cutting?’

‘Don’t be wet behind the ears. I mean a real job. Cracking a peter.’ ‘A peter?’

‘Can’t you talk English? A safe. A peter. It’s the same thing.’ Peter spoke impatiently.

Horse felt the cold breath of danger. He remembered Ivan’s remarks about Peter. ‘Where is it?’ he asked.

‘Quiet, mate, Don’t let the whole bar know.’ Peter put his arm round his shoulders and breathed in his ear. ‘Down on the wharves. A boot factory. I worked there for a couple of days after I’d jumped off the Howard Castle.’ He grinned. ‘You’ve got to be bright, mate. I had a look round the office; I sneaked in there in the lunch hour. I know how to get at the peter.’

‘Couldn’t you do the job on your own?’

‘Sure thing.’ Peter drew back his arm. His face shut like a door. ‘If you’re scared you’ll land in clink. But there’s nothing to it. I thought you might be able to use a few quid.’

Horse reflected on his financial situation. If he got, say, thirty quid out of the job, he could pay Tony back the eighteen he owed him and have twelve quid left for spending. And he had no wish to fall out with Peter. ‘O.K.,’ he said. ‘What time and where?’

Peter’s booze-veined eye brightened. ‘That’s the boy! I thought you’d be in on it. What we get at the mills, it’s just chickenfeed.’ He leant close again. ‘Half-past one tonight. Outside the wharf pub. I’ll be there. Have a rum, mate!’ He pounded Horse between the shoulders.

They drank together till closing time. Peter then headed back to Ivan’spage 563 place, while Horse collected a carton in the bottle store. He had decided to visit Tony.

2

A light was on in the ground floor of the house behind the Ballachulish. When Horse knocked Tony opened the door immediately. Horse was carrying the carton under one arm and a bundle of fish and chips in the other.

‘Come in, stranger,’ said Tony.

They sat down at the clear end of the kitchen table. Tony provided two plates and a bottle of tomato sauce. When they had finished their meal Horse tore open the carton. They drank for a while in silence.

‘I’m a bastard for mentioning it,’ said Tony, ‘but I think you’ve cracked the sink.’ He gazed at Horse without reproof. ‘In future I’ll leave the key in a flower pot. Under the japonica.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘I might want to.’ Tony leant forward and pressed Horse’s knee. ‘You can’t very well fornicate on the cable car.’

Horse froze. Tony had never made a pass before.

Tony drew back his right hand and slapped it with his left. ‘Lie down,’ he said to it. ‘You’ve got no sense.’ Then, to Horse – ‘Some would say I was aiding and abetting you. They’d be wise, of course. But I’m too old to weigh the pros and cons. You can come to the flat whenever I’m out of it.’

‘You don’t like Fern,’ said Horse.

‘I neither like her nor dislike her. She is not a friend of mine. I think she regards me as a dangerous monster. Possibly pitiable. I don’t object to pity. In this case, though, it comes from lack of knowledge. Non-culpable. She had never had occasion to know. But few women are charitable towards their sisters with balls.’

‘How do you square it out?’ Horse asked. ‘With yourself, I mean.’ Horse had wakened on many mornings in the seducery to find Tony beside him, on the broad of his back, staring into the half-light and thumbing his rosary beads. When Horse spoke of it, Tony replied that they kept his hands occupied.

‘Being camp?’ said Tony. ‘You don’t have to be queasy about it.’ He sighed. ‘I knew it would come up sooner or later. Now I’ll have to explain the facts of life to you.’ He set his beer down. ‘I have no authority to instruct.’

‘I’m sorry. I –.’

‘Don’t be sorry. The enquiry is an intelligent one.’ He gave Horse a cigarette, took one himself, and lit them both. Then he lay back in his chair and blew smoke at the ceiling. ‘I must get the facts in order. First there is God.’

‘God?’ Horse felt that the mention of God was hardly suitable.

‘God. I do not know Him but I believe in Him. It seems that He has made some men with the nature and habits of women. I don’t quarrel with it. I usedpage 564 to, and it took me half-way round the bend.’

‘Did you ever try having a bang? With a woman?’

‘Yes. It was very unpleasant. I had to imagine she was a young man. Poor dear. She found out about me and turfed me out. I think she must have sprinkled the sheets with Jeyes Fluid afterwards.’

‘What about the Church?’

‘The Church does not permit sodomy. There are a great many things the Church will not condone. Despair is one of them. When I was in my teens I went to a priest and told him I thought I was already damned. The Jansenist heresy. I used to haunt the bathing sheds. To admire the boys undressing.’

‘What did he say about it?’

‘He told me I was up a gum tree. He said that a man’s temperament was only partly of his own making. He mentioned David and Jonathan. The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places. How are the mighty fallen. He warned me against the two extremes – bending myself in a hoop, and taking other people’s view of me as the right one; or else just raising my hands and sinking under water. He said that for me a homosexual temptation was equivalent to another man’s being tempted to sleep with a woman. The Church does not permit fornication either.’

This explosion annoyed the puritan in Horse. ‘You’ve got it pretty easy then,’ he said. ‘Everything running on rails.’

‘Not easy. There is such a thing as love, my dear. When I was in my thirties I fell for a Yugoslav ski champion. A magnificent creature. I left the Church and followed him like a trained bitch. When he left me, for a younger man I wrote an anonymous letter to the police. Many would regard it as a highly meritorious act.’

Horse was silent.

‘He got three years,’ said Tony. ‘If I go to Hell, it will be for doing that.’ ‘You believe in Hell?’

‘I believe in personal responsibility. If you add God to that, Hell does not seem unlikely. His own place, as they said about Judas, who also betrayed a friend.’

‘A friend wants me to help him burgle a factory,’ said Horse.

Tony sat up with a jerk. ‘Tut! Tut!’ he said slowly. ‘You do choose some peculiar friends.’

‘He’s a sailor.’

‘A very irresponsible tribe. Is he camp?’

‘Not exactly. He used to sleep with a cabin boy on board the Howard Castle.’ ‘Situational,’ said Tony. He reflected. ‘When is the burglary planned for?’ ‘Tonight. At half-past one.’

‘I see. I take it you want to use this place as a base. I must warn you I don’t approve of burglars.’

‘No. I thought you mightn’t.’

page 565

‘But I don’t approve of myself either. Burglars are very compulsive people. Do you feel you have to?’

‘Not exactly. But I have promised.’

‘You’ll need some sleep then. I’ll stay up till you come home.’ ‘I’m not tired.’

‘Have another beer then. I wish I had your resilience.’ Tony cracked two bottles and passed one to Horse.

‘Tony,’ said Horse after a silence. ‘Do you think I’m camp?’ There seemed nobody more likely to have the right answer.

Tony laughed till his false teeth were bare to the gums. ‘Not you, boy,’ he said when the spasm had subsided. Not you. What made you think you might be?’

Horse recounted his homosexual dreams.

‘That proves nothing,’ said Tony. ‘It would make everyone a queer if it did. It just means you’ve got a subconscious mind. There’s only one test I know of.’

‘What’s that?’

‘If you regularly get a hard on in the company of men, then you’re camp all right. It’s not a fault; but it’s a fact. If you hardly ever do except in the company of women, then you’re hetero. God help you either way.’

‘Haven’t you ever thought I was camp?’

‘If I thought it, I’d never sleep in the same bed with you. No. I’ve sometimes thought you might be an alcoholic. The cross of sin, they call it.’

‘Sin?’

‘You keep on doing something you don’t want to. It’s the hardest cross. You get no kudos for it. Have you ever made a Glasgow cocktail?’

‘No.’

‘You stick a gas-jet in a glass of milk and let it bubble for twenty minutes. An uncle of mine used to do that. When you get to that stage, there’s no doubt, you’re alcoholic.’

Horse yawned.

‘You must get some sleep,’ said Tony. ‘Remember, you’ve got a friend to meet. You can take a bath if you like. There’s clean pyjamas on the chair beside the bed.’

Bathed and relaxed, Horse fell asleep alone under the rugs that had covered him and Fern five hours before. He could smell her special odour faintly in the darkness.

3

Horse was wakened again by someone shaking his shoulder gently. ‘Get up,’ said Tony’s voice. ‘Rise and shine. Remember, you’ve got to go out burglaring.’ Horse sat up. Tony had set a cup of hot coffee and some biscuits on the chair beside the bed. The sleep had cured Horse’s depression. And he feltpage 566 resting on him like feathers the extraordinary sense of safety which always came to him at Tony’s place. He had no wish to go out into the burgling darkness.

‘It’s a hell of a night,’ he said, dipping biscuits in the coffee and eating them.

‘Why not leave it? Your friend’s probably taking you for a ride. Not that I blame him.’

‘Is there any beer left?’

‘There’s three bottles in the carton. I do hope you’re not becoming a soak. I’ll have to say an extra decade for you in the morning.’

Horse finished the coffee, dressed himself, and went downstairs. He drank two of the three remaining bottles by himself, for Tony had said he would prefer to remain on coffee. But he was near enough to dead sober when he stepped out into the street. He moved in the great belly of the whale and found it comfortable there. Booze or no booze, Fern or no Fern, life or death, he did not care at all. The night air brushed his cheeks damply. Overhead vague changes of light and darkness indicated the passage of clouds. The street lights glittered in this deserted underworld. As he came to the bottom of Rattray Street he saw a cop shining his torch in shop doorways.

Horse smiled at him. He felt no fear. The john hop could not see into the crannies of his criminal brain. ‘Good night,’ he said.

‘Good night, lad. You’re out late.’

‘I’m heading off home. I’ve been to a party.’ ‘Where do you live?’

‘In Castle Street.’ Horse alone knew that he lived nowhere.

‘Well, you’re sober. I can’t run you in, can I?’ The cop grinned sourly at his own joke.

‘Not tonight. I’ve got work to do tomorrow.’ ‘Saturday?’

‘Yes. I work in the Milk Department.’ ‘Well, good night, lad. Stay out of trouble.’ ‘You bet.’

Horse crossed the road, a respectable lad with a job on a milk run, going home to his verandah bedroom where a football cup stood on a napkin beside the mirror. The lit-up dial of the Exchange clock told him it was twenty past one. He walked quickly along the edge of the Queen’s Gardens where the floodlit war memorial pointed a dead phallus at the stony heavens. The boys in khaki would not come back. They had left their fiancées for good, to be banged by drunk Yanks in the tubular concrete air-raid shelters. Horse had once seen a gigantic Marine stagger on to the lawn, scattering the blue-coated pigeons, on an afternoon when the wind blew straight from the South Pole, and bare the mat of curly black hair on his chest to that wind, and bellow to the shocked town – ‘Here it is, girls! Come and get it!’ But now the Fleet hadpage 567 gone; and the big Yank was dead, knifed by an Aussie cane-cutter in a brawl in a bar on the way to Guadalcanal.

Horse crossed the railway lines. His heart thumped as Peter’s stocky shape separated itself from the wall of the wharf pub to meet him. The harbour smell, old rope and oil and sacking and salt water, entered Horse’s nostrils. It smelt of endless possibility.

Peter was nervy and preoccupied. ‘I thought you mightn’t be coming, mate. Did you see any sign of the cops?’

‘I saw one at the bottom of Rattray Street. I told him I worked in the Milk Department.’

‘Never tell a cop anything. Those bastards can get you. They put it all down in a book.’

Through unlit streets, past yards full of timber and rusty dredge buckets, and flaking houses where wharfies and railwaymen drowsed or banged the night away while their children whimpered in the next room, they came to the high fence of the boot factory.

‘I’ll nip over first,’ said Peter. He took off his coat. Swift as an ape he climbed the hinges of the double gate and folded the coat over the three strands of barbed wire at the top. Then he swung his leg over and dropped to the ground on the other side. ‘Come on, mate. Pull your finger out,’ he whispered through the bars.

Horse climbed more awkwardly. While detaching Peter’s coat he cut the palm of his hand on a prong of wire. Nursing the hand and the coat he descended slowly to the dark yard. ‘I’ve ripped my hand,’ he said.

‘You’re a mug. You might get blood poisoning. Well, let’s get going. You follow me.’

He followed Peter to a pile of girders beside the wall of an engine shed. Carefully they heaped them higher till it was possible to climb up to the roof. The dull clang of iron on iron struck Horse’s ears more loudly than a kettledrum. The harbour breeze no longer comforted him. He expected to see at any moment twenty black-booted cops with torches rush in on the yard. Peter grunted but seemed to have no fear.

‘We’ll be up soon, mate. There should be a skylight open somewhere.’ They climbed to the roof of the engine shed, and from there to the glass-

panelled roof of the factory itself. Moving along the safe ridges, crouching, they came to a half-open skylight.

‘That’s the one. They prop it open to air the storage room.’ Peter raised the skylight to its full extent and shoved the hoop of notched iron into place. ‘I reckon that’ll hold her. You go down first.’

Horse lowered himself into the vacant pit, gripping the edge of the window frame. It creaked but carried his weight. His feet swung above the chasm. He saw the dim bulk of a high cupboard and launched himself on to its dusty top. There he crouched and waited.

page 568

‘How’s it going?’

‘I’m on top of a cupboard.’ ‘Good on you. That’s the style.’

Peter’s heavy body joined him. ‘We’re over the pig’s back,’ he said. ‘There should be a ladder down there. But we’ll have to jump. Try to land on the boots. Otherwise you’ll break your bloody neck,’ He gathered himself and flew into space. There was a loud grinding crunch as he landed, and a series of swear words. Then – ‘She’s O.K. No bones broken.’ His voice floated up to Horse. Get a move on, mate.’

Horse jumped with all his strength. He landed on tiers of cardboard and felt them give under him. Then he rolled to the floor, surrounded by invisible tissue paper and shoes. There was enough light to see Peter standing by the door. He had produced a small pocket torch with a needle light.

‘I didn’t want to use this before. The cops might have seen it.’

They walked past rows of unmoving machines to the glass-walled office. When Horse entered he found Peter already squatting by the safe. He was pulling on woollen gloves. ‘No prints,’ he said. He shone the torch on the lock and juggled with the combination. Horse looked round the office. The light of a street lamp showed a raised desk and four stools. A tin of Milo and a packet of chocolate biscuits, partly eaten, stood on the sink bench.

Peter had begun to slap the lock with the heel of his hand. Then he stood up. ‘It’s no go. I’ll need a crowbar.’

It was Horse who found a crowbar leaning against the wall behind one of the machines. They returned to the office. Horse had begun to sweat. He judged that they had been in the factory more than an hour. The cops would know of their whereabouts by telepathic communication.

In a crystal-clear vision he saw his father standing sadly at the back of the courtroom, his gardening hat in his hand, while the magistrate scratched his haemorrhoids and passed sentence on Horse.

‘Remanded to the Supreme Court. A very serious case of burglary.’

‘We never knew he’d do a thing like that,’ said Mrs Faulkner, the grocer’s wife, clucking loudly under her bird’s-nest hat. ‘But I’m not surprised. It only shows they should have taken the belt to him when he was a brat.’

Peter meanwhile was heaving on the crowbar. ‘Here, give us a hand,’ he roared softly. ‘She’s beginning to shift.’

Horse lent his weight and tugged at the crowbar. There was a loud splintering noise and the safe door flew ajar.

‘That’s the style. We’ve done it!’ Peter’s face shone with sweat and jubilation. He pounded Horse on the back, and then dived down to the open safe. He removed a ledger, a ten-shilling note, and finally a crumpled pair of silk stockings. ‘Bugger it!’ he said. ‘The bloody peter’s empty.’

They rummaged through the office drawers and found nothing but pens and stationery. Eventually Peter kept the ten-shilling note and handed Horsepage 569 the silk stockings and a book of stamps. You might want to write a letter,’ he said. ‘You can give the stockings to your girlfriend.’

It was hard going on the return journey through the skylight. There were no ladders to be found, and they piled boots on boots to reach the cupboard top. Horse tucked a pair of galoshes inside his jersey. They might just do for Tony. In the yard outside a violent urge to defecate overcame him. Having no paper, he wiped himself with the silk stockings and left them in a corner of the yard.

When they reached the railway crossing, and Peter had silently left him, Horse felt the renewed bite of anxiety. He had worn no gloves. His hand had bled on the book of stamps, and very likely on everything else he had touched inside the factory. The cops would make a laboratory test and work it out by algebra.

‘That blood belongs to Timothy Harold Glass. A rogue and a vagabond.’ ‘Yes, we know him by the colour of his dung,’ said another analyst, holding up the ravished stockings. And the cop he had yarned to in Rattray Street added his evidence – ‘I saw a young man with a big nose and red ears.

He had a mole on the side of his neck. I knew he was a criminal by the way his hands trembled.’

‘My stockings!’ the office girl wept. ‘Oh, the brute. My only pair of good stockings!’

Weighed down by remorse he dropped the book of stamps through a grating in front of the railway station. When he came to Tony’s door the sky was brightening. Tony let him in.

‘How did it go? Have you brought back a diamond necklace?’

It was only then that Horse remembered the galoshes. He pulled them out from under his jersey. ‘That’s all I’ve got,’ he said.

Tony grinned. ‘Stolen goods,’ he said. ‘Let me try them on.’

The galoshes were the size of small fishing-boats. The next day Horse burned them in the incinerator in Tony’s yard.

Bulls and Cows

Horse arrived late at Mr Grummet’s lecture. He had rectified his money losses by a three quid place bet on a trotter called Sandpiper at Forbury Park. The horse was owned and trained by Gandhi’s brother-in-law, and Gandhi had emphasised that it would only run for a place.

‘Merv’s trying him out,’ he said. ‘If he gives him his head at Forbury he won’t pay out much of a divvy at Auckland in October. But he’s a sure thing for a place. Put a fiver on the bastard.’

Horse had spent a hard Saturday at Forbury. Between the races he drank pony beers, watery in taste, at the bar behind the stand. He lost heavily on the first three races, going by his own hunches, and when Sandpiper’s race,page 570 the fourth on the programme, came up, he had only three pounds ten in his pocket. Biting the dust, but putting his faith in Gandhi, Horse the hardened punter took his place again in the queue of the tote. He bought three one- pound place tickets, and was reassured when the odds went up to see that someone else was betting heavily on the same horse for a place.

The tote closed. The balloon went up. The light low sulky flew round the course. Sandpiper, the outsider, came third by a nose. And Horse collected twenty-two pounds ten shillings and some silver for his three quid bet. He then experienced the mainly aesthetic pleasure of betting on that great pacer, Highland Fling, and seeing the small grey horse move steadily up like a railway train from the back of the field to win by half a furlong. Highland Fling paid only twenty-four shillings for a pound and nineteen and six for a place bet. The Jockey Club, not the punters, was the richer by it.

He left the course, his veins full of grog and water, while torn tickets blew round him like a snow-storm and the blue-jowled hangdog losing punters gazed grimly at the ground. On the tram to town he heard one happier punter explain to a neighbour his private method of selection.

‘I study the Turf Digest and Bet Bets and the tips in the Star. And then I stick a pin through the race book. And then I put a list on the garage door and throw darts at it. And then I let the Old Woman pick them by the names she likes the sound of. She always strikes a good outsider.’

Gandhi, his pockets stuffed with blue money, insisted on shouting seven dog’s-noses for Horse in the bar of the Shamrock. When Horse eventually reached Fern’s flat the bird had already flown. He returned wearily to pay his debts to Tony and share a meal of oysters, steak, onions, eggs and chips, with him at the Silver Grille. Now he entered the mock-Gothic archway that led into the varsity enclosure. Here Jock Saunders had once hung for six hours in a beer crate, suspended by a rope from the window above the arch, for riding a motor bike without a silencer on the grey asphalt paths. The memory of that event lightened Horse’s gloom. He peered at the glass-covered baize of the notice-board on the wall of the arch, and read with difficulty –

English: A passes

Adams, Judith
Amberley, Horace Norman
Bates, Ophelia Doris . . .

The swots, thought Horse sourly, the prunes and the prisms, who knew the date of publication of every folio of Romeo and Juliet, and rejoiced in the operations of Grimm’s Law. They would go on to be High School teachers and wear thick woollen stockings in winter. He remembered Ophelia Bates, a tall girl with glasses, who had complained to the Executive about his habit ofpage 571 snoring off on the table of Critic, the varsity rag. He pushed open the swing doors that led towards the cafeteria. The modulations of someone’s voice, like a foghorn under water, reached him through the closed door beyond. Grummet was already on the go.

Cautiously he opened the cafeteria door. The room was nearly full. Horse slid into a pew at the very back. A woman with cropped black hair and wooden beads round her neck shifted over with a bad grace to make room for him. Horse recognised her as Zoe Virtue, the lanky spouse of Gordon Virtue the varsity librarian. Whenever she met Horse she rattled her beads and questioned him earnestly about his poems. Horse had rejected three separate invitations to a literary evening at the Virtues’ place, where Zoe queened it with coffee and salted peanuts and readings of T.S. Eliot.

Horse crossed and uncrossed his legs mournfully. He could see Fern’s crown of plaits three rows from the front and beside her the reddish turnip jowls of Jock Saunders. The enemy had entered the gates. I am a burglar, said Horse to himself hopefully, but no spark rose in his blood to support the statement. He was no berserker, only a scrambler over midnight roofs. If it came to a brawl Jock could beat him up with one hand tied behind his back. The choice lay with Fern; and it seemed she had already made it.

‘– but shall we go to the grave on all fours? Citizens of Colonus, a man is a walking bundle of tripes, yet he is capable of knowledge.’

Horse saw with peeled eyes a strange figure at the other end of the room, swaying on its feet, its back to the dead coke fire. A man in his fifties, paunched and stooping, with a yellow tie like a noose tugged open below the neck of an unbuttoned shirt. The man looked as if he had just climbed out of bed and put on his clothes in the dark. His face was purple and gnome-like. Horse recognised with sudden joy that Mr Grummet was nearly dead drunk.

‘I myself am blind!’ Mr Grummet gripped the table and stared at it. ‘I am Oedipus, the King of many-gated Thebes. This slab of wood, or it may be stone, is, I believe, the doorstep of the goddesses who send us dreams of damnation, the powerful Eumenides. I, Oedipus, alone may sit upon it.’ Mr Grummet lurched round the table and seated himself on the front of it. He stared at the audience. His eyes were pillar-box red. Jack Cavendish, the Literary Club secretary, sat close behind the table, his face buried in his hands, as if he were praying for Mr Grummet to die.

‘Citizens of Colonus,’ said Mr Grummet softly, ‘I will not split hairs with you. By the mercy of God, I am drunk tonight. You had hoped perhaps to hear words spoken about the development of the arts in New Zealand. I am glad to disappoint you. The arts do not exist. The foul water does not run clear. The New Zealand you imagine does not exist. Your world, the creation of the schoolmaster, the accountant and the bureaucrat, is a golem, a clay man made by magical illusion to turn the mills of death. The true world is thepage 572 body of Adam, one man in all, a child grieving outside the gates of paradise. You will see him if you look at our neighbour’s face.

‘Citizens of Colonus, knowledge comes rarely even to those who walk on two legs instead of four. Recently, after litigation, my third wife left me. In a hotel at Coromandel a Latvian waitress applied ointment to my lacerations. These are the words I set down to celebrate the occasion. She suffered from hernia and she had flat feet.’

Mr Grummet descended from the table and pulled a soiled envelope from the inside pocket of his coat. He proceeded to read from it hoarsely –

The stringy brown tobacco that I roll
Is flesh of a kind, the flesh of a bush

With comfort in its burning. Lady, the whole
Wide world knocks in the touch of flesh,

Snake-juice, tobacco, or your fingers at
3 a.m. leading me erect

To what is most your own. Moonlight
Smokes like a fuse, and after the human act

What devils grasp us? I’d not wish
On you that pitted mirror-face behind

Your bird-mask, tangled hair, I cradle on
A scorched urn of bone and the arm of a man.

‘It is, if you like, a poem about the female pudenda. The house of death,’ said Mr Grummet. ‘That is the phrase the Maoris used for it. Life can be difficult. One has to get down low. Down low.’ Mr Grummet smiled sadly, drooped his head, coughed, crumpled, and sat on the floor.

There was no clapping. A loud buzz of talk began in the audience. Jack Cavendish lifted his head painfully from his hands and rose to his feet. ‘I must apologise,’ he said. He stood at attention with his eyes riveted to a poster on the opposite wall that advertised sunny Nelson apples; he looked like a man on the gallows. ‘We had no idea. Our visiting speaker is obviously unwell. I can only ask – ’.

The members of the audience were rising. Horse pushed his way to the front. He brushed past Fern, who smiled a small chilly smile, as if from the metal wall of a departing inter-island ferry to an unregretted and elderly relative on the wharf below. Among the crush Zoe Virtue was hobnobbing with Miss Gallon.

page 573

‘I call it disgusting,’ said Miss Gallon shrilly. ‘The man was quite plainly intoxicated. He had nothing to say at all that made sense. He may be insane, of course.’

‘You’re quite right,’ said Zoe. ‘Poor Gordon will be so disappointed. He takes these things to heart, you know. I couldn’t understand a word he said myself. But didn’t you feel there was something – well, Dionysiac about it!’

‘I couldn’t agree less,’ said Miss Gallon. ‘I’m not blind or deaf. I came here to listen to a lecture on poetry. Not to hear somebody discuss the details of his squalid private life in public. It will encourage the worst elements among the students –’.

Mr Grummet was still sitting on the floor in what seemed to be a yoga posture. Jack Cavendish was trying feebly to tug him to his feet. Horse drew near them with the deeply reverent joy of a Hindu who encounters, after searching vainly through a hundred burrows and ashrams, the guru who was born to be his teacher, sitting naked among the open crematoria of Benares, his ribs furrowed, his hair clotted, his eyes rolled upwards towards the centre of his forehead – but alive, alive! He wanted to lay his money, his useless bag of poems, his heart and liver at Mr Grummet’s feet.

‘Leave him alone, you bloody clot!” he said to Jack Cavendish. ‘He’s got more brains in his arse than you’ve got in your head.’

Jack retreated. Tenderly Horse bent down, put Mr Grummet’s left arm around his neck and his right arm around Mr Grummet’s waist. He then heaved upwards. As he took Mr Grummet’s full weight the prophet’s legs straightened. ‘You’re a bloody good cobber, Basil,’ murmured Mr Grummet. Horse was happy to be included, though under a false name, among the number of the great man’s disciples.

Gordon Virtue arrived briskly. A failed parson who now believed in culture and preached the gospel of inter-racial communication to Adult Education classes. He wore a malarial twitch as a badge of honour after three months of cultural reconstruction in the swamps of Thailand. ‘Good man, Glass,’ he said. ‘You’ve got the right idea. A Samaritan, eh? Our friend should really be under the doctor. A brilliant mind going to pieces.’

Horse would have liked to plug him. Just one good clout on the high anthill dome where the thoughts moved in chain-gang order. But the prophet was heavy. ‘You take the other arm, Mr Virtue,’ he said politely. ‘I’ll steer him.’ Soon a small fleet of cars moved round the harbour and up winding roads to Virtue Castle. Gordon and Zoe had engaged an Estonian architect to build them a habitable box of metal and glass under the brow of a hill that commanded a view of the Heads. This nightmare edifice had cost nine thousand pounds. Many of the Church of the Extreme Left regarded it as a shrine. ‘Zoe and I have bourgeois tastes,’ Gordon said humorously to his visitors. ‘We like our comforts. But the day’s coming when every worker will have a home like ours.’ The house stood on concrete stilts. Its furniture waspage 574 severely functional. No chair-seat was more than five inches high, and the bathroom was tiled in black with a mosaic of fishes on the floor. In solitary grandeur three Braque prints dominated the living-room-cum-kitchen. The view was undoubtedly magnificent. Anyone who stood at the kitchen sink had the illusion of being in the open air. The Virtues had no children.

Horse found himself at the head of the procession, in the back of Gordon Virtue’s car, with his arm round Mr Grummet’s slumbering shoulders. Zoe sat in front. Throughout the journey she talked rapidly.

‘. . . I always say to Gordon that we need more intellectual life in Dunedin. Some kind of stimulus, I mean. That’s why we started our Thursday Evening Group. I’m sure you’d be interested, Mr Grummet. A pity you’re only going to be with us for two days. I’d rather hoped you might have been able to doss with us – very simple and homely, I know, and perhaps you’re more attached to the fleshpots than we are – but it did seem strange to me that you’d chosen the Prince of Wales. I believe a great many horsey people go there – jockeys and bookmakers and so on – it hardly seems to me it would provide you with an intellectual atmosphere. Of course we live very quietly. But I think we can understand the Dionysiac spirit. I mean, an artist must express himself. You’d have had a perfect view of Mount Cargill from the patio. I would have liked to just leave you there for an hour or two, and let you gather inspiration. I was only saying to Moira . . .’.

Half an hour later a group of about thirty people were assembled in the Virtues’ habitable glass barn. Miss Gallon and several of her friends had declined an invitation to the party. Jack Cavendish, recovered, was nibbling at the fruit punch Zoe had provided. It was made by mixing eight bottles of cider, a bottle of bad sherry, a bottle of gin, and a number of cans of fruit juice in a large plastic bucket. It tasted like hot fruit salad; and five glasses would stun a bullock. Mr Grummet had declined the mixture and settled down to a diet of gin and water.

As president of the Students’ Union – an office he had recently risen to on account of his fine sports record – Jock Saunders was present; and with him, Fern. She had removed her lambswool overcoat, and after three heavy doses of punch, was entertaining a small group of males in an alcove. Gloomily Horse heard her singing her favourite number –

I wish I were a fascinating bitch,
I’d never be poor, I’d always be rich.
Now and again I’d take a holiday
For which my clients all would pay.

Her face flushed and innocent, her limbs moving in an impromptu solo dance, she gallivanted in a separate orbit, as remote from Horse as Arcturus.

After twenty minutes of unrewarding prospector’s work on Mr Grummetpage 575 Zoe shifted on to discuss abnormal psychology with Professor Wardle. For the moment Horse and the prophet, like two gannets on a rock, shared the same solitude on the back-breaking blue-and-red divan. Unwisely Horse had poured himself a beer-glass full of punch.

‘I must thank you,’ said the prophet. ‘I believe you helped me out of that rat-infested dungeon. One could have been eaten alive.’

‘You were magnificent. It was the best talk I’ve ever heard.’

‘It was shit. We must get drunk together some time. These porcupines with their glass quills. They frighten me. How did they all get here?’

‘I think they use them to walk on.’

‘You’ve struck it. Just like a sea egg. What’s your name?’

‘Horse.’

‘Excellent. My name is John.’

‘You said it was Oedipus.’

‘From the bottom of a well the stars are visible. In daylight. Who you are depends on where you are.’

‘Why do they talk the way they do?’

‘To convince themselves they exist. The load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs. Chesterton. The Grey Wolf of Rome. Her milk is bitter but medicinal.’

‘I don’t know anything about that.’

‘You will. I can’t. Women. Either Christ or the death goddess.’ ‘I would have said the love goddess.’

‘The death goddess. The sacred earth. Maui entered her gate. It closed upon him.’

‘You can write,’ said Horse softly.

‘The ejaculation of the dying. For the country of death is the heart’s size and the star of the lost the shape of the eyes.’

‘Is that all?’

‘The fire consumes itself. The heart is broken by its own evil.’ ‘What after that?’

‘Mercy. The gift of one beggar to another.’ ‘I love you. You are my friend.’

‘Yes.’ Mr Grummet touched his glass to Horse’s and drained it. He then pointed with the empty glass towards Fern. ‘Who is that child?’

‘She’s my girlfriend; or at least. . . . Her name is Fern Mitchell.’ ‘You must introduce me. She appears to exist.’

Mr Grummet rose to his feet and lumbered towards the group in the alcove. Horse followed him. Fern had finished her dance and was sitting on a cushion on the floor. Mr Grummet lowered himself to the carpet beside her. He did not wait for the introduction. He gripped Fern’s hand in his own puffy talon. ‘I am an expert palmist,’ he said. ‘Would you let me read your hand?’ Jock Saunders had moved rapidly from the other side of the room; but he was toopage 576 late. Grummet had gained the outer gate of the citadel. Fern favoured him with a little-girl smile, that of a child to a merry uncle.

‘If you like,’ she said. ‘I don’t really believe in it.’

Mr Grummet opened her hand, pressed its cushions, and drew a finger gently along the lines. ‘You are a practical girl,’ he said. ‘You’ve worked out where you’re going to. Some kind of social work.’

Fern pursed her mouth. ‘It sounds like a school-marm. I won’t tell you anything. Go on.’

Mr Grummet drew the tips of his fingers lightly across her wrist. ‘Healthy, moderately wealthy, but given to fits of depression,’ he said. ‘If I were a doctor I would recommend laughter, flowers, not caring what other people think.’

‘I’m going to be a doctor.’

‘I’d be glad to be your first patient. An old wound is opening. Just here.’ He touched himself below the chestbone. ‘A dance with you would cure it.’

‘It might make it worse.’ Fern was now laughing.

‘I’m entirely ready to run that risk.’ He stood up and drew her to her feet. Horse and Jock both watched, bitten by the adder of jealousy, while Mr Grummet steered Fern to the centre of the floor. The dance was not graceful. Fern had put her arms round Mr Grummet’s neck, and Mr Grummet appeared to be carrying her on an invisible tray. Zoe Virtue and several of the guests were gazing at this sight in baffled horror when Mr Grummet opened the door of the room and led Fern out by the hand. There was complete silence for a moment. Horse could hear the night wind sighing among the cables that braced the globular aluminium roof. Jock Saunders walked rapidly to the door, hesitated, turned on his heel, and marched to the electric wall heater, where he stood, glass in hand, a soldier in burning Pompeii, obedient to the rules of the game. Looking at that honest bulldog stance Horse remembered Hannibal in the pub and found it almost possible to regard him as a comrade. He too was a beggar at the gate. The goddess and the guru had left them both standing. Horse knew that Jock, longing to hit Mr Grummet with a flying rugby tackle and bury his shattered bones under a gorse bush (‘We fought it out man to man’), was deterred only by the certain knowledge of Fern’s iceberg withdrawal (‘A girl doesn’t like being snarled over like a bone, Jock.’).

Zoe was the first to speak. ‘Well! I do think that occupational therapy can play a great part in the rehabilitation of the insane, Professor. I’m quite sure that Japanese rock gardens could be used. A friend of mine came back from Japan with some marvellous ideas. And then there’s flower arrangement . . . .’

An hour later Horse had had it. Eight beer glasses of Zoe’s punch had endowed him briefly with the mental processes of Te Rauparaha. He strode through rustling flax bushes to the door, grasping a bottle like a taiaha. Outside the door he found himself in a dark cupboard-like passage. The sound of giggles and a thin slab of light came from under another door. He shoved it open, and stood inside the bathroom.

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The bathroom, floored with non-porous rubber, was the second largest room in the house. Upon a mosaic of geometrical fish the Olympians were at play. Fern, on her hands and knees, her hair unfastened round her face and hanging to the floor, was mooing gently like a cow. Mr Grummet, in his shirt-sleeves, his trousers partly off, was also on his hands and knees. The noise he made was a soft melancholy roar. From time to time he and Fern approached each other from opposite ends of the room. They touched their heads together most peacefully and rubbed flanks, mooing and roaring. Occasionally Mr Grummet tried to bite Fern on the ear or the rump; but the scene was not an erotic one. It was extraordinarily innocent. The couple had, it seemed, regained the knowledge of Adam and Eve, who understood the language of beasts before the Fall.

Hearing the door open, Fern lifted her hair back from her eyes. ‘Oh, it’s you, Horse,’ she said with a giggle. ‘We’re playing bulls and cows. It was John’s idea. Isn’t it lovely? You can join in if you like.’

Mr Grummet’s rump, clothed in woollen underpants, presented itself less than a yard from Horse’s feet. The guru was still roaring, and prancing a little, as he began another circuit of the room. Horse wrestled with an all- but-overwhelming impulse to boot the prophet with all his strength on the backside. Slowly he subdued it. Grummet the merciful; Grummet the blind; Grummet the wounded, the true bard, tormented by the gods; Grummet the wise – he had a right to this holy relaxation. In a sense he and Fern belonged to each other. Horse was the real intruder. He lowered his foot, already lifted for sacrilegious assault, and retreated on tiptoe, closing the door behind him.

Horse sat down again in an empty chair behind Zoe, still overpowered by the sight he had just seen. He recharged his glass with punch. Gradually, like the drone of a mason-fly, Zoe’s monologue began to penetrate his skull – ‘I mean, we’ve got to have standards, haven’t we? We can’t all go around wearing flowers in our hair and copulating under bushes. I can’t help feeling that a great deal of modern writing is escapist. I’d like to read something about the ordinary people. People like us. Not that I object to sex in its proper place. . . .’

She laughed bitterly. Though Horse did not know it, Zoe Virtue was a desperate woman. She had been reared as a cloudy Methodist; but Gordon Virtue, removing her faith and her virginity simultaneously, had converted her to the austere dogmatism of the Extreme Left. She had no doubt whatever that in less than forty years she would be dead for good. Life had thinned out remarkably for her in the past five years. An attempt to help Gordon in his Adult Education work had failed acrimoniously; and the Thursday Evening Group was a last-ditch retreat attended only by women like herself who found themselves with too much time on their hands and hoped vaguely that culture would fill the breach. The Church of the Extreme Left had taught her that marriage without a satisfactory sex life was unacceptable. She knewpage 578 that Gordon was having an affair with one of his library assistants, a blond divorcee. He had long ceased to visit her in her separate bedroom. But she feared a showdown more than the successive bells of jealously, for she had no guarantee that Gordon would not pack up his traps and leave her in their monstrous eyrie alone. She had attempted suicide twice, by Nembutal and wrist-cutting, at times and in places where Gordon was able to rescue and resuscitate her. Her psychiatrist had suggested that an infantile fixation on her dead father was the cause of her insomniac anguish. When Mr Grummet left the room with Fern, she could happily have sprinkled petrol on both of them and set fire to them; for she had dreamt that Mr Grummet would provide her with Platonic consolations. In a vision she had seen herself seated at his feet on the patio, discussing Byron’s Don Juan, while he admired her sensitive profile. Fern and the blond divorcee were the same person in Zoe’s subconscious menagerie. Men only wanted sex; and even then, not the cultured sex that Zoe felt she could have given them. She had begun to despair.

Horse knew nothing of this. He heard only the endless flow of twaddle that fell from her prominent orange lips. It occurred to him that she might be a zombie, like Fern’s landlady, a sexless and soulless body kept in motion by the angry Dead. Fuddled with punch he gazed at her bony goosefleshed back, exposed in a long V almost to her buttocks by her stylish evening frock. Is she dead or alive? he asked himself. He leant forward and slowly stubbed out his cigarette somewhat to the right of her spine.

For a second there was no result. Then Zoe catapulted with a shriek into Jack Cavendish’s unready arms. ‘Oh, you bastard!’ she shouted.

Jack imagined that he was the person addressed. ‘For God’s sake,’ he protested. ‘I never touched you.’

‘Not you, you bloody fool!’ wailed Zoe. ‘Somebody burnt me on the back!’ Horse was suddenly seized by the shirt-collar and dragged to his feet, his bucket-shaped chair falling on its side with a clatter. Jock Saunders had found his man at last. Horse and Mr Grummet were, to his mind, two heads on one

intellectual pansy viper.

‘It was this crawling bastard!’ he shouted. ‘He did it. I saw him. He’s a bloody maniac. He’s not fit for the company of any decent woman. I’m going to settle the bugger.’

A sledgehammer blow struck Horse on the jawbone. As he fell back, in the moment before night descended on his eyes, he saw Fern standing, tidy now and surprised-looking in the open doorway.

The Lion’s Cage

When Horse was delivered at his door by taxi early on Sunday morning Tony did not show much surprise. He fed the wounded soldier black coffee and bathed his swollen jaw and cut cheekbone. A good mother, he asked fewpage 579 questions and put Horse to bed with a hot water bottle.

On Sunday Horse wakened under a cloud. The events of the night before were not fully clear to him, but one thing was glaringly apparent – he owed Zoe Virtue a mountainous apology. The effect of two different kinds of punch – Zoe’s and Jock’s made him long for a patch of chickweed and a tombstone with a grey carved angel on it, where the birds could settle and conduct lives less complicated than his own; but there was a work of reparation to be done before he expired. After a barber’s breakfast – the dry retches, a bottle of beer and a cigarette – Horse went to a phone box and dialled Zoe’s number. When he got through, a glum male voice replied.

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s Timothy Glass.’

‘I don’t know what you’re ringing for. I suppose you want to apologise. Some things are better left alone, Mr Glass.’

‘Could I speak to Mrs Virtue?’

‘I’ll be most surprised if she’s able or willing to talk to you. Your behaviour last night almost brought on a nervous breakdown.’

‘I’d just like to tell her I’m sorry.’

‘Well, I’ll get her. If she’ll come. I’d like you to know, Mr Glass, we did think of calling the police.’

‘I know. I mean, I know what you mean. I want to tell her I’m sorry.’ ‘All right then. Hang on a minute.’

Horse waited. This was the death cell. Soon the parson would read a few prayers, and they would tie a bandage over his eyes, and he would go down feet first.

‘Is that you, Mr Glass – Timothy?’ It was Zoe’s voice, a little chilly but unhysterical.

‘Yes. I want to say I’m sorry.’

‘I must say it surprised me. You mustn’t go round burning people with cigarettes, Timothy. It’s not done.’ Her voice was warmer now. ‘It made me feel you were trying to work something out. Of course it was a terrible thing to do. But I feel we can’t just leave it at that. I’d like to have a little talk with you some time. About life. I think I might even be able to help you.’

God! thought Horse. He saw a different trapdoor and noose. The noose of culture and the trapdoor of a queasy friendship. ‘I don’t think it would do any good, Mrs Virtue,’ he said.

‘You can call me Zoe. No, Timothy, some things have to be thrashed out. A little quiet talk. Gordon has to go to Balclutha today. Another of his talks to farmers’ wives.’ Her voice hardened again. ‘You must come up today, Timothy. I’ll expect you for lunch.’

Both feet already in the bog. Horse struggled feebly. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Virtue – I mean, Zoe. It’s awfully nice of you. But I’ve got to see a bloke today –’. There was no bloke for Horse to see; and Zoe detected this from the tone ofpage 580 her captive’s voice.

‘Don’t be shy, Timothy! I’m not really an ogress. And you did burn me rather badly. I’ve had to cover the place with Elastoplast. I’ll expect you about twelve o’clock.’ The receiver clicked at the other end, and Horse was left to meditate on the results of a life of crime.

He arrived by taxi at Virtue Castle a little after twelve. He had spent the morning with Tony in the Shamrock, fighting a king-sized hangover and watching the grey Sunday-drinkers emerge from the holes of the town like bees from a smoked hive.

‘Don’t blame yourself,’ said Tony. ‘You really are a masochist, my dear. Anyone who drinks punch at a party is signing their own death warrant. I remember one frightful night in Remuera. . . .’

Zoe came down the rock garden steps to meet him. She was wearing black skin-tight slacks, green sandals which exposed her red taloned toe-nails, and a frilly flowered shirt. ‘You are a dear, Timothy,’ she said. ‘I know it must have taken courage. Real guts. I mean, after last night. Come up on the patio. Our little feast of reconciliation. Do you like crayfish?’

‘Yes,’ said Horse.

‘I’m so glad. We’ll have a simple meal together. And just talk.’

Horse sat down awkwardly in one of the bucket-shaped chairs on the patio. The wind whistled between the table-legs. But the spread was a reasonable one. Crayfish and goo and lettuce and thin buttered slices of rye bread. He balanced his plate between his knees. Zoe’s mannish and somewhat weather-beaten face turned towards him with a warmth that froze him.

‘Our little tête-à-tête,’ she said. ‘You’re a bad boy, you know. We were so disappointed that you never turned up at our Thursday Evening Group.’

Horse was having difficulty with the crayfish and lettuce. The goo was inclined to spread. He licked his chops nervously.

‘We had hoped you would read us some of your verse. I’ve clipped out all the pieces you’ve had published in Critic. Very strong, I felt. I do love to see a new talent shooting up. Fresh out of the smithy. How do you get your inspiration?’

Horse thought of Fern and the gun-emplacement. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I suppose it just happens.’

‘The wind bloweth where it listeth,’ said Zoe. ‘What’s the last thing you’ve hammered out? Say it to me, Timothy. I want to hear it from your own lips.’

Horse’s last poem, a satire on the University administration, had included a number of four-letter words. He decided that Zoe would like better another one he had made about crossing the Straits on a wild night.

‘It’s a bit like Whitman,’ he said apologetically.

‘Say it to me. Please.’ Zoe folded her hands and gazed at the glittering roof- bubble of Virtue Castle.

Horse put his plate on the table and concentrated. He had never felt less like orating –

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Out from the bar two decks below, and the drunken soldiers,
Their lined faces dark
With forgotten murders in wars of the heart and mind,
I climbed to the rail, pushed past rope and canvas,
And felt under my feet
The slow heave and subsidence, the sure beat of the vessel;
And very fresh the salt wind blew on my eyes and mouth,
And very old the stormy moon hung upon utter darkness –
A violent image, frozen in violence, she must have seemed to those seafaring canoes!
What shores were these? what chasm
Under the born and dying?
What justifying and ignorance of pain?

He paused in his droning to gather breath. In actual fact he had been very seasick on the one occasion when he had crossed the Straits.

‘Lovely,’ said Zoe. She interpreted the pause as an indication that the poem had ended. ‘What ignorance of pain? . . . I often feel like that, Timothy. As if nobody really cared. I think I’m a poet too. . . .’

Zoe felt that her labours in the paddock of culture were at last bearing fruit. The poem was not vulgar; and it had the kind of liturgical sound, a church noise, which she liked in the recordings of T.S. Eliot, possibly because it brought back nuances of her religious childhood. She had no idea what the poem was about; in fact it did not occur to her that it should be about anything. She hoped that Timothy had noticed her profile. He was a louche boy, but really sensitive underneath.

Horse realised that he would not have to finish reciting the poem. This took a weight off his mind, for it was a long one, and some of the later stanzas referred very directly to Fern.

Zoe rose to her feet and clapped her hands. ‘Now for another treat!’ she cried. ‘I’ll take the remains into the kitchen. You bring in the chairs and table, Timothy, there’s a dear!’

She shifted the fodder and Horse shifted the furniture. When the job was done, and Zoe had brewed some coffee, she produced the special treat. It was a Dvorák long-playing record.

‘Music!’ cried Zoe. She put the record on the player and adjusted the arm. ‘Just sit down and listen. Let’s be comfy.’ She arranged several cushions on the floor and beckoned to Horse. ‘Sit down, Timothy. Don’t look so worried! Just be your own natural self.’

Horse sat down stiffly beside Zoe. The noises that reached him from the radiogram were hard to bear. An endless succession of melancholy twangs and thuds. It so happened that Horse was tone-deaf. As the minutes rolled by his boredom increased to genuine anguish. It burned in the pit of hispage 582 stomach, already inflamed by crayfish and the night’s carousal. His jaw had begun to ache again. Perhaps Jock had shattered the fibula nerve. He shifted clumsily, and his hand rested for an instant on Zoe’s jutting hipbone. Hastily he removed it. But to his horror his wrist was seized in a firm grip and his hand replaced in position.

‘You’re very shy, aren’t you, Timothy?’ said Zoe.

Zoe had interpreted the cigarette incident in her own way. Either Timothy Glass was completely insane, or else he had conceived a boyishly romantic yet violently sensual love for her, which he could only express symbolically. The second alternative seemed the most likely one. After all, she had her own mature charm – and what could be more Freudian, more like a phallus than a lighted cigarette? Zoe had never acquired a lover, though the heroines of the books she read were constantly doing so. No one had turned up who looked in the slightest degree eligible; and besides, she did love Gordon. But Gordon had betrayed her; and the joy of being loved by a young man, a budding poet, even if his ears did stick out so, refreshed her greatly, like rain falling in Death Valley. Timothy deserved a reward. She would not let her scruples or his timidity stand between them. Indirectly she would be furthering the arts.

Horse’s view of the situation was a different one, yet it seemed likely to lead him to the same physical conclusion. He felt strongly that he and Zoe were two Emperor penguins perched on a dung-spattered ledge of the Antarctic ice-cap. Communication had been impossible from the start. Yet their physical propinquity was undeniable. A rudimentary sense of chivalry had begun to stir in Horse. Zoe had had a hard life. Anyone married to Gordon Virtue, unless made of zinc and leather, would go crackers in the end. She had fed him, Horse, and forgiven his hideous boorishness of the previous night. If she wanted a good bang, then it was his plain duty to give it to her. Who was he, anyway, to count himself superior to Zoe? With a bag over her head and her voice-box out of commission, Zoe Virtue could be approached and mounted. Gordon had apparently done it; why not Horse? Horse the punter; Horse the burglar; Horse the adulterer. The progression was logical enough. Yet he longed with all his heart for the peace of the Shamrock, sinking another handle with Tony. He remembered Tony’s best story of the morning – ‘. . . so the landgirl came back in the evening, and the farmer says to her, “Where the hell have you been all day? All I told you to do was take the cow to the bull.” And the landgirl says to him, “It’s all very well for you, you’ve had plenty of practice. But I’m new at the work. It took me twelve hours to get that blasted cow to lie down on her back.”’

The Dvorák record gave one last tuneless wail, the arm swung back and the disc continued to revolve with a thudding sound. Horse began to rise to switch it off, but Zoe gripped his arm and held him.

‘Not now, Timothy,’ she said softly. ‘Just leave it.’

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He found himself staring down at the brick-red face of the afflicted woman. Her large orange lips rose to meet his own – like a gas ring, thought Horse, then rebuked himself for his lack of chivalry. He found the contact unpleasant and stifling. He had no physical reaction other than a feeling of nausea and weakness, as if the blood were being drained from his veins. The fear of impotence rose to torment him. It would be the last straw if he couldn’t do the job.

Horse braced himself for appropriate action. He put his hand under Zoe’s shirt. She winced, and he withdrew it hurriedly. ‘It’s still sore where you burnt me,’ she murmured.

Ten minutes later Horse and Zoe were in bed together. Horse did his best to give Zoe a good bang. His own mind and body were numb, as at the dentist’s after anaesthesia. The only serious obstacle was the unusual largeness of Zoe’s private anatomy. Horse felt like a boatman entering the Roxburgh Gorge in a canvas canoe. After the act they lay quietly side by side. The wind whined outside the window. Dismasted he lay in the dead centre of the cyclone. I’ll have to let her down gently, he thought.

But Zoe was the first to speak. ‘If I gassed myself my lungs would bleed,’ she said in a small, clear voice. She had often considered gas; though only in fantasy, for the fittings of Virtue Castle were all-electric. In the post-coital trance it seemed natural to her to open to her bedroom companion the inmost chamber of her mind where the true Zoe screamed soundlessly night and day. The effect on Horse was spectacular. He shot from the bed, as if ejected from the pilot seat of a plane going down in flames, and stood, clad only in his shirt, on the foam-rubber mat, wide awake and trembling.

‘What’s wrong, darling?’ said Zoe. She sat up in bed.

Horse reflected in the middle of his horror that the true Zoe was the one he had to be decent to. She at least was more real than the nattering party ghost. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I had a bad dream.’

‘Silly boy! Come back to bed. You’ll get cold there.’

Unwillingly Horse lowered himself back again into the jaws of the grave. With a damp hand Zoe pushed his hair back from his forehead. ‘Do you really love me, Timothy?’ she asked. ‘I couldn’t bear it if you didn’t.’

Horse tried for a compromise. ‘You’re another human being,’ he said. ‘That’s not what I said. Do you love me?’

Horse remained silent. He did not want to lie. The long pallid body beside him, neuter rather than female, seemed that of some fellow-inhabitant of a tomb. But he felt a dragging pity for Zoe. Stretched out on this ancient and famous rack, he replied slowly, ‘I don’t know.’

‘That’s hardly an answer.’ Then, very swiftly – ‘Who are you thinking about?’

‘Fern.’ He spoke truthfully without thinking.

‘Fern? You mean bracken.’ She laughed. ‘You do have a literary mind.’

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Then Zoe remembered she had asked who, not what. ‘Fern!’ she screamed. ‘You mean Fern Mitchell – that filthy little harlot!’

Zoe’s language was biblical. But she had assumed the mask of a pre- biblical personage. A gale of rage and despair was sweeping through her. The pupils of her eyes grew huge and black; her teeth were bared in a snarl to the gum-line; her face was purple and the veins of her forehead swollen; her red- varnished fingers were raised like talons. It even seemed to the horrified Horse that her short black hair stuck out round her head in rigid spokes. It needed only a chain of skulls round her neck, and Zoe would have become Kali, the death-goddess whose face dismays equally the child in the dark, the man on the grog, the Prime Minister and the lavatory attendant.

‘You bastard! Oh you bastard!’ Zoe shouted. At this moment, to her eyes, Horse was not Timothy Harold Glass alone, but every man on the face of the globe, including Gordon and Mr Grummet and the scholarly father who had carried her on his shoulders when she was little and later left her and her mother for a younger woman. She lunged at Horse, who leapt from the bed, tangled in a blanket, and seized his trousers and ran. A glass ashtray exploded on the wall beside his head. But Zoe did not follow him into the living-room. He dressed himself warily with an eye on the bedroom door. The sound of rending sobs came from beyond the wall. He tiptoed in to get his shoes and socks and jersey. Zoe lay face downward on the bed, almost naked, and weeping as if she were about to vomit. Loaded with guilt, Horse touched her gently on the shoulder.

‘I’m sorry, Zoe,’ he said.

Zoe lifted the same mask of rage and sorrow, shiny with tears. ‘Get out! Get out!’ she screamed. ‘Oh you bastard! You filthy bastard!’

Retreating through the living-room Horse noticed that the disc of the radiogram was still spinning and thudding. He switched it off before he went.

The Pay-Off

Zoe Virtue was not an untruthful woman. But she was still a woman, and she had to find an interpretation of what had occurred between her and Horse which would allow her to retain her self-esteem and sanity. After a day and a half of cruel struggle she found this interpretation; and the conclusion she arrived at impelled her to obtain Fern’s address and write a letter to her. As a result, when Horse next visited Fern’s flat he did not receive a warm welcome.

‘Let’s go round to Tony’s,’ he suggested.

‘I do not intend to go to Tony’s or anywhere with you.’

‘Why? Just because I got drunk and burnt someone with a cigarette –’. ‘You’re really very stupid, Horse. People get to find out about things. Zoe

Virtue has written me a letter. Would you like to read it?’

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Horse flushed scarlet. ‘Yes. All right,’ he said. Fern opened a textbook and took out a page of blue linen notepaper. She handed it to Horse to read. ‘A girl doesn’t want to get a letter like this about somebody she knows.’ The letter smelt faintly of soap, and the handwriting bold, though jagged.

‘Dear Fern,’ Zoe had written, ‘I think I may call you Fern because I am writing to you about somebody we both care for. As a woman you will understand why. I am worried about Timothy Glass. You were present at the party on Saturday, and I must thank you, my dear, for helping us to entertain Mr Grummet, who might otherwise have been difficult. As you know, Harold burnt me severely with a cigarette. I realised the poor boy was very intoxicated and blamed myself for letting it happen; and I felt dreadfully sorry that your other friend, coming to my rescue, felt obliged to strike him. On Sunday I got in touch with Timothy and invited him to lunch. Again I made a serious mistake. My husband was not at home, and Timothy attempted to assault me sexually. I managed to fend him off, but the whole matter weighs heavily on my conscience. I feel that Timothy needs psychiatric help. It is such a delicate matter that only someone who knows him really well could make the suggestion. I feel that you, with your medical training and your close friendship with Timothy, are the person to do it. I would do it myself but Timothy’s peculiarly aggressive attachment to me would, I fear, prevent my advice from having any positive effect.

‘Please excuse my frankness. I have only written this letter because I feel that poor Timothy can be helped and should be helped.’

She had signed the letter, ‘Your sincere friend, Zoe Virtue.’ ‘Well?’ said Fern.

‘I never tried to rape her.’

‘I find the whole thing disgusting,’ said Fern. ‘People don’t have to get involved in a mess like that. Not unless they want to.’

‘You did all right for yourself with Mr Grummet.’

‘I don’t see that there’s any comparison. She’s old enough to be your mother.’

‘Hell!’ shouted Horse. ‘Do you want it in writing? I didn’t rape the bitch. She more or less dragged me to bed with her.’

‘Don’t swear at me, Horse. It’s disgusting whatever way you look at it. It’s not just this thing anyway. I think you drink far, far too much. It’s beginning to affect your brain.’

‘OK. I may be nuts. But I love you.’

‘You’ve got a very peculiar way of showing it then. I’m not blaming you, Horse. I’m still fond of you in a way. But living with you would be the most horrible mess I could imagine. As a matter of fact I’ve made up my mind to marry Jock. We’ve arranged it for October. I’m sorry to tell you about it this way.’

‘Well, he’s got money.’

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‘You’ve got no right to talk about it like that. He loves me, and he knows how to show it, and he doesn’t get into messes.’ Fern opened a drawer and removed, from among shells and beads and several certificates for expert horse-riding, the stone phallus Horse had given her. ‘You’d better take this.’

‘Thanks,’ said Horse. He put the phallus in his overcoat pocket. ‘Goodbye, Fern.’

‘Goodbye.’

As he passed over the Leith Stream bridge, on his way from Fern’s flat to the Bowling Green, Horse gazed speculatively at the water frothing over the weirs. He pulled the phallus from his pocket, looked at it, kissed it goodbye, and tossed it into the middle of a whirlpool. It sank immediately.

At the Bowling Green Horse had the pleasure of seeing John Grummet again. The great man was still drinking gin and water. He recognised Horse.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Phar Lap himself. I’m glad to meet you.’ He shook hands. ‘My girlfriend has just given me the bum’s rush,’ said Horse.

‘They all do. They all do. It leaves a space behind.’ ‘I’m not happy about it.’ Horse ordered a beer. ‘Nobody ever is.’

‘I thought you were back in Auckland.’

‘No. Gordon Virtue persuaded me to stay for a week. He’s jacked up some lectures for me to give down south.’

Horse was silent.

‘He tells me you tried to rape his wife.’

Horse gave his own account of the saga of Virtue Castle.

‘That sounds more like it,’ said Mr Grummet. ‘You can’t really blame her. That’s the way they bring them up. Honesty is a difficult virtue. You ought to leave that kind alone.’

‘You said it was Christ or the death goddess.’ ‘Did I? One doesn’t like to be quoted.’ ‘Where do you go if you don’t want either?’

‘Up country,’ said Mr Grummet. ‘Have you ever been in the Matukituki Valley?’

‘No.’

‘The entrance is called Hell’s Gate. But inside there is a series of river flats. A peaceful place.

Ice cold and clear
The water from the mitred mountain.
The black mare of rock
Neighs to the sky stallion. [‘At Raspberry Hut’, CP 236]

‘That’s really all I know about it.’

‘You’ve been there?’

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‘Yes. With some people who wanted to make a film. The film was no good. But I saw some cattle being driven across the river. A big herd, with the men standing by on their horses. The river water is very cold. One calf got separated from its mother. It was too young to swim, though it tried. It got to its feet several times, but the river water swept it away. Down among the boulders. The men couldn’t do anything about it. It floated when it was dead.’

‘Yes,’ said Horse slowly.

‘It is difficult to avoid being swept away. No one is old enough. One really needs a mother.’

‘I can’t find one,’ said Horse. ‘Except Tony perhaps.’

‘Tony?’

‘He’s a friend of mine. A queer.’

‘Ah, yes. Queers make good mothers. For a while.’

‘I prayed to the Blessed Virgin once.’

‘You’re lucky to be able to. Keep on doing it.’

‘God never seems to be quite real.’

‘One knows Him by His absence perhaps. I distrust piety. It leads to self- dislike. Do you know the story of the Turkish Beggar?’

‘No.’

‘It has often consoled me. This old beggar had been bludging off the inhabitants of a certain town in Turkey for a number of years. They got sick of him. So they loaded him on to a camel and took him out fifty miles into the desert. They put him down and they said to him, “Man, if you ever show your face within twenty miles of town again, you’ll be a shot duck.” And then they rode off on their camels and left him.

‘Well, this old bludger looked around him. There was nothing but thorn bushes and snakes and a few camel bones as far as the eye could see. And he thought, “There’s nobody to bludge on here.” And then he thought, “Who haven’t I bludged on yet?” And then he thought, “There’s only Allah left.” So he got down on his benders in the sand and raised his hands to heaven.

‘“Oh Lord,” he said, “I am a poor man. I have no money at all. Other men have money. They have many piastres. They have gold and silver in large wooden boxes. But I have nothing. O Lord, why is it so?

‘“Oh Lord, I am a poor man. Other men have women. They have big harems full of women, brown and white and black and yellow. I have no woman at all. Not even one little call-girl to keep me company. O Lord, why is it so?

‘“Oh Lord, I am a poor man. Other men have houses. They have roofs over their heads and they sleep in bed on sheets of good linen. I have no roof. I have only the bare ground to sleep on. O Lord, why is it so? Tell me why, O Lord!”

‘And when the old beggar had finished his prayer there was a great clap of thunder. And the sky opened from east to west. And Allah looked downpage 588 from paradise. He looked for a long time at that old beggar. And then he said, “Because you’re a cunt!” And then the sky closed again.’

After telling the story of the Turkish beggar, for Horse’s instruction, Mr Grummet became abusive to the barman. And Horse, having drunk at the holy fountain, felt it was time to go. He spent the afternoon with Tony at the Shamrock but was not able to get a spark up. That night he had several unusual dreams.

In the first dream he was sitting on one end of a bed and Fern was sitting on the other. He tried to approach her and embrace her. But she changed into a demoness with a black face whose eyes spouted flame. The demoness said to him, ‘You must love me with a Christian love.’ This surprised Horse, since Fern had never been a Christian. He retreated to his own end of the bed, and she became Fern again. In the sequel to this dream he was leading Fern by a halter, in the shape of a small brown heifer, to hand her over to Mr Grummet, who was wearing the clothes of a farmer.

In the second dream he was standing in a high place, behind a concrete parapet, above a gully of rocks and thorns. He saw Zoe Virtue walking along this gully. She wore a dark dressing-gown from which a long silk tassel swung to the ground. As he watched, he could see that there were lions among the rocks, moving like shadows among the shadows. He shouted to Zoe to warn her. Zoe turned her head and looked up at him, and at the same moment Horse became aware that Gordon Virtue was standing beside him. The expression on Zoe’s face was one of harsh stony anger towards both him and Gordon. She began to walk on down the gully, away from them, and Horse could see that the lions were following her. One great beast had begun to play with the tassel of her gown. Horse knew that the lions would devour her soon. He felt intense grief and a longing to help her. But he knew in the dream that the gap between the parapet and the gully was too wide to be crossed.

In the third dream he and Peter were being hunted by the cops. The chase continued for hours through many backyards and alleys. Then the cops captured them and took them to a building which resembled a cellar or the cavernous crypt of a church. When Horse looked round at the circle of cops, he saw that they were extremely ugly men with tough stubbled faces, but with the confidence possessed by those who represent a crude justice. Peter sat on the floor of the crypt beside him, curled up, his eyes shut and his head resting on his raised knees, in a pre-natal posture that showed his habitual attitude to life.

Horse, however, raised his own head, and saw on the wall of the crypt three whitish transparent tiles side by side. The tiles to the left and the right were dull and blank, but the middle one had a light behind it. It kept flashing on and off, like an advertisement or an air beacon, illuminating in bold black letters the name of Jesus. Horse looked down at the floorpage 589 beside the wall and saw there were naked footprints sunk in the stone, as if someone had walked there carrying an intolerable weight. Each footprint was filled with blood. He was torn between a strong desire to see where the footprints led to, and an equally strong fear of what he might find there. With an effort he stood up and left Peter and the cops and followed the footprints under a roof that came down lower and lower. Beyond the last footprint, where roof and floor met, lay a small filthy bloodstained bundle. He knew that it was the wrapped-up body of a foetus, his and Fern’s child who had been aborted, and which he had entirely forgotten until now. And obscurely he realised that his child was the innocent victim who had bought him life and freedom.

From this last dream Horse woke up sweating and bewildered. But the sound of Tony’s quiet breathing reassured him. He fell asleep again and had no dreams.

1958-1962 (280)