Everyman

Everyman

Paul Maunder

Te Puawai Publishing

PO Box 2 Blackball New Zealand

Copyright 2019 by Paul Maunder

Distributed by Smashwords

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

Part One

The Land is Before You

‘All human forms identified, living, going forth, and returning, wearied, into

the planetary lives of years, days and hours, reposing and then awakening

in the life of immortality…’

William Blake, Jerusalem

i.

The campervan park was a country affair, five kilometres from the small stop-over town on the bank of the Buller River. The recently planted trees were growing and after a difficult beginning, business was picking up. As Malcolm pushed his bike along the gravel driveway to the office, he realized that, at his age, there were a discreet number of words left. A middle aged woman exited a house bus to attend to him. Did he need to find words for her greying hair, her body which had become a solid mass from shoulder to thigh? She wore black track-suit pants pulled over her distended belly and a voluminous T shirt which shrouded her copious breasts. Her nose was the colour of a drinker, but her lips were generous. Was he wasting words? She pointed to a nearby kowhai tree as the spot to pitch his tent.

‘Where’ve you come from?’

‘Reefton.’

‘Not bad. I wouldn’t get to the gate.’

‘My last trip I suspect. My legs aren’t what they used to be.’

‘Going far?’

‘Picton.’

‘You’re brave.’

Chat. He parked his bike and she returned to her bus. A useful life for a middle-aged woman: tending to travellers, watching television and quaffing a wine. A discreet number of words. At eighty one he was nearing the end of his life.

The fuss of the tent had become simpler with repetition, followed by the air mattress, the sleeping bag, the panniers, the sand flies hovering…A campervan idled in and a stolid muscular man stepped out, looked at him without acknowledgement and made his way to the toilet block. He walked like a man who did things with his hands, operated within systems, a man who didn’t waste words. His skinny wife stared through the windscreen at the blue sky, fluffy clouds dancing across the wind.

Malcolm crawled into his tent and rested his skull on the bag of clothes. He heard the man come back, the click of a campervan door, a muffle of words, more clicks as doors opened. Through the mesh of the tent he saw the couple extracting fishing rods and collapsible chairs and making their way to the river. The woman stepped lightly over the ground.

A motorcyclist with a passenger announced his presence with a muffled throbbing and stopped under a tree. The man pulled off his helmet and stared around while the woman pulled her pony tail out of the back of her jacket. The man bent down to check the engine, then, satisfied, stood up again.

Men. He’d always had trouble with straightforward, practical men. He lay back. His son had been diagnosed with depression, was on stress leave from the school he ran. His son’s partner had asked him to come and provide some support. He was very worried. In this age of decadence, with a lunatic in charge of America, it was time to tell his son the story of the male side of the family. That could be of help. That was the best use of the discreet number of words left to him. He’d been right when he said to the woman that this would be his last trip. The will to push up a hill was running out.

Trucks roared along the main road, huge covered-in affairs, or car transporters, or logging trucks or those bearing a digger or bulldozer. Once a small house had rolled past, fronted by an SUV with flashing lights.

His father’s story. He slept for a moment, before waking. His father’s story. Begin there. He needed to make a recording. He didn’t have the energy to write it down. The supply of written words was, he suspected, even more limited. The roof of the tent was speckled with the bodies of dead sand flies and mosquitoes. When he climbed in each night he would spend five minutes killing, before settling to sleep.

He pushed the button on his cell phone and it powered up. He found the record app and propped the instrument against the side of the tent. After a career in radio the act held no fear. The red light showed but he waited, listening to a bird fluttering in the tree above the tent, before he began.

‘I have to start with my mother. Men begin from women. That rib stuff is patriarchal nonsense. When I knew I was adopted–the birth certificate revealed the fact–and when I wrote away and was given my mother’s name and place of birth, it was easy enough to visit the rural community and track down an old family who remembered the Cottles and from there to find an aunt and make contact.

I was welcomed into the suburban house on the hills above Wellington, a northerly blowing, the planes flying overhead as they took off from the city. My aunt was a middle-aged woman with a good hairdresser and a still neat body in tailored slacks and merino top. Her husband had the red face of many Scots. There was a small table extracted from a cluster of small tables on which to put my cup and a plate with a biscuit and piece of fruit cake. A discreet crucifix hung on the wall, together with a landscape and a print of a ship in a storm.

You look like my father, she said. I’m so glad you got in touch. I could see her pleasure in my genetic resemblance. She wiped a tear from beneath her eye with a forefinger, a delicate gesture.

She then told me her sister’s story: of her getting pregnant, of my father disappearing, of her adopting the baby, of subsequent mental illness, of commitment to the mental hospital, of her running away, never to be found. Is she alive? I am sure she isn’t. She ran off into the hills. It was winter. She was lightly clad. A southerly was on its way. Her body was never found.

My aunt gave me a photo of a handsome girl. She had been sensitive it seemed. Other worldly. Or simply a country lass betrayed. But I’ve told you about this. It is a story that can become obsessive with its absences, its hovering Catholic angels and judgmental God.

Has he a name? I asked her.

Your father?

Yes.

He was called Buddy, but his real name was Graham.

Surname?

She shook her head. We never met him. He was working on a farm along the road. Johanssen’s. He was just a young bloke. Depression years. Life was tough. Probably working for his keep. No one knew where he came from. There were a lot of drifters.

She poured more tea. Her husband had been silent, but now he spoke. The war was almost a relief. Something more definite. You knew who the enemy were. It was a strange statement.

My aunt continued. Your mother had to stay home during the pregnancy. Then she went to a place run by some nuns. But people knew. They always know. It was hard for her when she came back. She needed to go to the city where she could be anonymous. But she wasn’t a city girl. She had no hardness. Too gentle. Too soft in a way.

Penetrable? I suggested.

She looked at me oddly, before nodding. I knew the type. A woman a man can bury himself in, make what he wants of her. At the same time a puzzle.’

Malcolm paused the recording. The trucks continued to rumble, the tourist buses to pass. He felt heavy. Melancholic. This story always had that effect. He crawled out of the tent, taking his cell phone with him, and followed the track to the river. As he stepped down the bank, he could see through the trees the campervan couple standing at a spot where a rocky cliff forced the river to sharply veer. There was a deep, agitated pool against the grey cliff, on the surface of which they flicked their coloured flies. The river was a force, gathering strength as it swept the land to the distant sea. He walked through the beech trees to a gentler spot, where a tributary had formed because of a build-up of gravel. There was a mix of smells, sheep from the next paddock, decaying matter, the sharp smell of wet rocks. He sat on a broken tree which had been flung to the side in a flood and pondered the light on the surface of the water. For a moment the wind increased in intensity, then died again. The water flowed intently.

He continued the recording.

‘At a later date they took me to the cemetery of the country town which services the farming area where my mother had been brought up. We walked along the paths to my grandparents’ grave and my aunt showed me a plaque which she’d had made and which had then been attached to the concrete. It simply stated my mother’s name and date of birth.

They gave her shock treatment, my aunt said. She didn’t like it.

You were still living at home?

Yes. We’d visit her. She scared me. She’d become lost.

Her husband put his arm around her. They had the feeling of a couple who lived routine lives as a way of surviving. In feudal times they would have been surrounded by custom, extended family and church… in this colony of individual agendas they had to tread carefully.

Or am I making this up, retrospectively? As a twenty year old did I have this awareness? I didn’t cry. I don’t know how I felt about this familial mess that I had been extracted from. But my conception was the cause of madness and a body rotting in the wilderness.

How’d your parents take it? I asked.

They prayed of course, my aunt said, but it was like it was in their bloodstream, their cells. Especially Dad. He never recovered. Then the war.

It was a violent time, said my uncle. Always news of someone who’d been killed. Having to kill.

I was really aware of him for the first time. You served?

Airforce. Bomber.

He had probably murdered thousands of people.

I wonder how God allows the suffering. I know there’s an explanation but I can never accept it, my aunt said.

It was suddenly unbearable, standing in that cemetery, aware of the underground streets of bones, each with their story. What did it have to do with me? This life I had so far led? I was impatient to leave. We returned to the car to go back to the city.

Sorry, my aunt said. You probably didn’t want to know all this. You were imagining finding your mother alive and happily married with some half brothers and sisters to get to know.

I remained silent in the back seat of the Hillman Minx. Did I have a sense of a series of betrayals, before and after my conception? Betrayals that resonated through the fabric of this small town and the surrounding countryside, betrayals that went back to the founding of the colony? Or once again, is that a pretence, hindsight projected onto the past?

As I stare at the water rushing past, a pair of fantails fluttering in the branches of a willow, I feel my mother succumbing to the natural world, alone, insufficiently clothed, becoming hypothermic, brain playing tricks. Perhaps she saw my father appearing through the mist. Did she ever think of me? Or did they spirit me away without showing me to the young woman lying flat on her back after the ordeal of childbirth, exhausted from having given birth to absence.’

Malcolm switched off the recorder, feeling upset and angry. It was an anger which would never be resolved. He clambered back up the hill. The couple were a splodge of colour against the bank as they continued to flick their rods. Playing with absence. Mesmerised.

As the camper vans arrived after the day’s journey, the ground was filling up. A young couple stretched and smiled at him. German or French. A comprehensive rig of bus and small car sprawled across one corner with the retired couple sitting outside in deck chairs. Malcolm felt hungry and decided on an early meal. He unzipped his tent, grabbed the food pannier and walked to the kitchen. Preparation of the freeze-dried stroganoff was as simple as opening the bag, adding a cup of boiling water, sealing the bag and waiting ten minutes. A plump couple in a corner were engrossed in their cell phone screens. There was a selection of magazines on the table beneath the television: trucks, modified cars, house and garden… and some books. He picked one up. It told, it seemed, of the high life of Hollywood stars. He skimmed the first page, but it was banal. He tried instead a spy novel, but it was similarly mundane. He tried to imagine someone writing such books, sketching a plot and characters before churning out the words. Wasting words. A crime. The thumbs of the young couple were busy as they replied to emails or tweets. A similar waste. The echo chamber of the digital net.

His meal was ready. He opened the bag and stirred, before sitting and eating the largely satisfactory meal. A middle aged woman from one of the campervans opened the door, stared into the room, presumably checking it for cleanliness. A fussy woman with a wart on her chin and tales of woe. More wasted words. The trucks continued along the highway.

After he’d eaten, he sat outside on one of the recliner chairs with a cup of tea and switched on his recorder. It was still warm and there was no one about.

‘I forgot about it. I didn’t want this tale of despair, of betrayal, of death, hanging over my life. It was the sixties, our generation were freer, immersed in possibility. Depressions, wars, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, were caused by uptight men with too much power; men with a grudge. I was busy starting my career in broadcasting: newsroom, then reading the news, beginning to do interviews… interesting and rewarding on the whole. I met your mother and we bought a house, settled into marriage, socialized with friends, smoked a little dope. I would occasionally go and see my aunt.

And then one evening she rang and asked me to come and visit. There was a different tone in her voice. Your mother accompanied me. It was a southerly so the airplanes were coming into land rather than taking off. My uncle was not well. He’d had a heart episode, sat in his chair looking grey and old. But I hadn’t been called because of that.

After she’d given us tea, my aunt handed me a copy of the Australian Women’s Weekly. She had it open at a page which was headed: My life with an alcoholic father. I scanned the melodramatic words and looked at the photo of the father in question with an anxious feeling.

It’s about Buddy, my aunt said. I’m certain. See the resemblance. I picked it up in the doctor’s waiting room. Same hair, same nose, same lips.

I read it more closely now. Her father was a Kiwi, the writer stated, young during the depression, went to war, came back, married, had a child but took to the drink. The marriage fell apart, but this daughter stuck by him. He’d told her he’d run away from a pregnant girl as a young man. It had haunted him. Now, unwell from the booze and the smokes, he was living near his daughter in Queensland. Her childhood spent tending to her father had been tough on her but she’d pulled through thanks to a part Aborigine she’d fallen in with. They’d both been saved by a preacher and now were members of the local charismatic church. She was waiting for her father to have a similar epiphany.

I handed the magazine to your mother and waved my hands in dismissal. She studied the photo. It’s him.

I shrugged. Even if it is…

We sat in silence and my uncle belched, squeezed his eyes tight, then yawned. He wasn’t going to last.

You should get in touch, your mother said to me.

How?

Write to the magazine. They’ll pass it on.

My aunt gave me an especially tight hug before we drove down the hill in silence, the magazine sitting on the dashboard.

That night, as we lay in bed, the southerly picked up strength and started to hum. We lived on the hills above the strait. I was still silent, aggrieved at this intrusion into my life. Your mother reached out and stroked my face. So? she said.

What’s the point?

If you don’t, it’ll always be there.

A lot of things are always there. History for example. I had done my degree in the subject.

Family history is a bit different, she suggested.

How?

More intimate, surely?

If you’ve got a grandmother gassed by the Nazis, how is it different?

It was an interesting issue, whether family dramas and history were different in kind. From one perspective the Wars of the Roses were family dramas of kings and queens. Even Hitler was created by a family drama. But this led to either history being the story of elites, the common people suffering the consequences; or to psycho-analytic functioning being the basic motivator of all things.

She reached out and