Remember Me (10 page)

How could I refuse? Dad belonged to a Masonic Lodge and often went out at nights leaving Mum with little to do but plough through the ironing, read a book or listen to the radio while she knitted.
Drama of Medicine
was about to start and quite often I listened to it with her.
She enjoyed the company and I loved having her all to myself. I would’ve preferred bed but you can’t always have what you want. I stayed in the kitchen making tea until things settled down inside my head. I didn’t want my humiliation to show. It was far too early to talk about it without bringing on tears.

‘How’d you go?’ she asked when I carried out the tea. She was sitting on the sofa reading the
Australian Women’s Weekly
. ‘Did Captain Biggs make you vice-captain tonight or is he going to do it next week?’

This was typical of Mum. Nothing slipped by her radar. I don’t know, maybe all mothers are the same. I thought I’d managed to look nonchalant as though I didn’t have a care in the world. Clearly my nonchalance needed working on. My bottom lip began to tremble and Mum got that concerned look on her face that couldn’t be denied. What could I do but bare my humiliation?

‘He made Bobby Holterman vice-captain,’ I said.

‘What?’ said Mum. Her surprise was matched by indignation. ‘Bobby Holterman? You told me you had seniority.’

‘I do.’

‘So why weren’t you made vice-captain?’ Mum sat bolt upright. Concern had been replaced by a thunderous look that promised trouble. Mum was adamant we were a cut above the rest and to even hint otherwise was heresy. She expected us to deliver on her expectations and to be rewarded accordingly. Whenever I came home from soccer
her first question was always ‘Well, did you win?’ This was followed by ‘How many goals did you score?’ Nigel and I were always expected to win and to score. Rod was just expected to win because he played fullback and fullbacks usually only scored own-goals. If we got beaten it was always ‘Why did you let the other team win?’ We couldn’t lose without it somehow being our fault, a failure on our part. When I came home from fishing it was never ‘Catch anything?’ but ‘What did you catch?’ She managed to look more disgusted than disappointed when I failed to provide.

Mum’s ambitions were centred on us but it wasn’t selfish ambition. It was fuelled by love. Mum’s fierce love propelled us to perform wherever competition was involved. We had to win at athletics, win at cricket, win, win, win, no matter what. Winning proclaimed us above the pack and was a point of family pride. When I once asked Rod why we had to win all the time he said winning was the only thing our family could afford. At the time I thought it was just a funny line, another example of his dry wit, but in truth it summed us up perfectly. Without success we had nothing.

Drama of Medicine
might have been playing on the radio but it was nothing compared to the drama building up in our lounge.

‘I’m going to have a word with Captain Biggs,’ Mum said. ‘First thing tomorrow. I’m not going to stand for it.’

‘No, Mum, don’t,’ I said, although I knew I had no chance of dissuading her. People talk about the calm in the
eye of hurricanes but there was no evidence of calm in Mum’s eyes and plenty of evidence of the impending storm. When Captain Biggs decided to bypass me for promotion he’d committed a grievous error; he’d done the unthinkable, the absolutely, totally unforgivable. He’d affronted family pride. I don’t think he had a clue what he’d let himself in for.

Strangely enough this didn’t cheer me up. I knew what Mum was like when she had a bee in her bonnet and I still thought Mr Holterman was probably to blame rather than Captain Biggs. As I said earlier, I liked Captain Biggs. Eric’s parents thought enough of him to make him godfather to Eric, Maxie and all five of their sisters. He christened them all one Sunday in a job lot. Captain Biggs was special. I liked him more than Mack and that was saying something. The last thing I wanted was Mum going up to the Church Army and bawling him out.

Rodney and Nigel came home and got the third degree from Mum. Rod was as mystified as I was. It has to be said that until that evening we had no complaints about Captain Biggs. He was nothing if not fair, which made his actions all the harder to understand. Rod said he also felt embarrassed and slighted when Bobby was made vice-captain.

Nigel on the other hand couldn’t have cared less. He had no wish to be made vice-captain or captain and there was no chance of that happening anyway. Not only were his shoes a disgrace, he could never remember The Creed.
As often as not he’d worn a hole in his pants and, as Mum used to say, you could grow potatoes under his fingernails. Neither Eric nor Maxie wanted to be vice-captains either. They didn’t want to lead or be in a position of telling other kids what to do. A lot of my pals were like that and didn’t want to be leaders or have authority. Maybe it was a Kiwi thing. Nigel never understood why anybody would want to be vice-captain. If you were vice-captain or captain you were charged with the responsibility of helping Captain Biggs maintain order and discipline when the name of the game was seeing how much mischief you could get away with. It seemed natural that Rod was a captain because of his role as de facto parent but Nigel could never understand why I’d want the job. We had our own word for goody-goodies who crawled to authority back in those days—
greaser
. That’s what Nigel called me.

Mum gave Nigel a clip over the ear for not standing up for me. She was also disappointed in Rod for not having had it out with Captain Biggs then and there. That was what big brothers were for. Mum and Rod went to bed blaming Captain Biggs for their anger. Nigel went to bed blaming me for his burning ear. I went to bed blaming Mack and Mr Holterman for ruining my life, convinced life was unfair, we’d lose the knockout final and Mack was doomed to bear the burden of his disgrace to the day they laid him in his grave.

Secret tears flowed but, in this instance, nobody could say they weren’t justified.

Sister Gloria is the most popular of all the Sisters at the Church Army. She is closest to our age and laughs at the same things we laugh at. All of my pals want to be the monitor in her Bible classes because of her personality. She is just nice to be around.

A
N EXTRACT FROM
‘T
HE
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I M
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Bobby’s promotion was big news up until morning playtime. After that I don’t think anybody even mentioned it. I have to say I was a terrific sport about it. I was extremely gracious, while all the time plotting revenge on Captain Biggs. Yes, some time before falling asleep I’d decided to go over to the dark side and join Nigel, Maxie and the rougher kids like Graham Collitt in making trouble.

If Nigel was mischief, Collitt was genuine trouble. There was only one gang in our neighbourhood that ever amounted to much and Collitt was at the head of it.
Somehow he sounded tougher being called by his surname rather than by his Christian name. None of us ever called him Graham and it’s a fair bet we would’ve copped a thump from him if we did. I copped more than enough thumps from him as it was for being ‘a little Pommy smart arse’. That was one of the nicer things he called me. Collitt was two years ahead of me in Standard 5B. We reckoned B stood for brainless. From time to time Collitt also made Captain Biggs’s life a misery.

Some months earlier Captain Biggs had partitioned off one corner of the clubhouse to make a mini shop. His big idea was to raise money by selling sweets and chocolate bars. Just how he intended to raise money by selling sweets to kids who had no money was beyond me, but you have to give him points for trying. He built a small door into the side of the mini shop and installed a heavy Yale lock. The front of the shop had a hatch that was raised to reveal the counter. Captain Biggs opened the hatch by unlocking a padlock. This might sound like a lot of locks for a tiny excuse for a shop that sold only sweets and chocolate bars but Captain Biggs was under no illusions as to the true nature of some of the kids he was dealing with, Graham Collitt especially. As it happened he made two mistakes.

Captain Biggs always lectured us on trust and responsibility and liked to back his words with actions. For example, Eric and I were often asked to tally up the money in the collection plate after the Sunday service.
We weren’t the only ones asked and I have to say his trust was never misplaced. Mind you, none of us would have dared steal from the collection. That would’ve been stealing from God and the consequences of that were too terrible to even think about. After a month of having our little shop, Captain Biggs decided to trust Steve Cooper, one of the older boys, with the door key. Steve was a nice kid but soft and a bit slow. Nigel liked to say he knitted with only one needle. He was hopeless at sport and a liability in any games and maybe Captain Biggs thought the responsibility might do something for his self-esteem. He could hardly have made a worse choice.

As soon as Captain Biggs was behind the counter, Collitt and a couple of his cronies nailed Steve Cooper, took the key off him and locked Captain Biggs in. They then raced around to the hatch and pulled it closed. This was the captain’s second mistake. The padlock was always left open on the hasp when the hatch was up. Poor Captain Biggs knew immediately what was about to happen and used all his strength to try to keep the hatch open. But one adult can’t hold back a baying pack of hooligans and he was soon locked in, but not before Nigel, Maxie and some others seized the opportunity to knock all the chocolate bars on the counter onto the floor. Forget any lolly scrambles you’ve ever seen. The frenzy that followed would’ve done justice to a feeding school of piranha. Anyone who’d managed to grab even a single chocolate bar quickly made off into the night.

Rod, Ronnie Cammell and I chased Collitt for the key and finally got it back. When we let Captain Biggs out of the mini shop he looked crushed. Beaten, defeated, betrayed but, above all, crushed. He could hardly speak to us. Any chance of the shop ever turning a profit had also disappeared out into the night and probably a large proportion of whatever stipend the Church Army gave him. I knew how shops worked and guessed most of the chocolate bars and sweets were on credit to be paid back from sales. I felt really sorry for Captain Biggs.

But that was then. Before going to sleep I decided that if it happened again I wouldn’t go chasing Collitt to get the key back. No chance. I’d throw all my weight against the hatch and make sure I got my share of the chocolate bars. Furthermore, when kids used rubber bands to fire paperclips at Captain Biggs in church while he was kneeling and had his back to us, I wasn’t going to try to stop them. I no longer wanted to be captain or vicecaptain of blue squad. Damned if I’d help keep order. If Captain Biggs couldn’t show loyalty to me, damned if I’d show any back. Just so God would also know my displeasure I fell asleep dreaming of Sister Glorious in the nude, despite all the earlier, solemn promises to the contrary.

At lunchtime I discovered my pals had planned another expedition down the drains. The fact was, because of what they’d done to me, only Nigel, Maxie and I had made the run between the two shafts and the
others were still up for it. I faked enthusiasm. In truth, I almost pissed myself at the thought of going back down. There was no way I was going to chance it again, at least not until every one of the kids had done the return journey solo with the manhole covers on, and there was little likelihood of that happening. I thought I might hover around the shafts and maybe climb down a few rungs. I’d done a bit more thinking about the essay I intended to write. I’d almost decided to do a story about a U-boat caught on the surface by a long-range aircraft and depth-charged, rather than centre it on the drain and drown a few reckless Catholic kids. If the depth charge broke the sub’s back I imagined the rush of water would be fairly similar to the flood that blew the manhole cover off the drain shaft. I figured a little more research pretending I was in the conning tower when the depth charge exploded wouldn’t go amiss.

First we had to get through the afternoon and Tuesday afternoons were the slowest of the whole week. On Tuesdays we did history and we were stuck in the middle of the Maori Wars. As I recall we were midway through the assault on Gate Pa when we heard the ambulance come screaming down Richmond Road and stop outside the school. The classroom we were in overlooked Brown Street and we couldn’t see back far enough into Richmond Road to find out what was happening. Mr Grainger threatened to strap the next boy who got up to look out the window so we had no choice but to sit tight. It was
torture. Something really exciting was happening right outside the school gate and we had to sit and listen to him talk about a bunch of dead Maoris. It only made matters worse when we heard the siren start up again and the ambulance scream off. Who cared about things that happened in the olden days when real-life drama was taking place right under our noses? Our unrest got to Mr Grainger, who made us stay back for an extra twenty minutes after school. He did it out of sheer spite.

By the time we were let out every kid was talking about the old drunk who’d stepped in front of a delivery van and got knocked for six. Some kids in Standard Two were just coming in from phys ed when they heard the bump. They claimed they saw the old bloke flying through the air. They reckoned he landed face first. The van was still parked by the side of the road with a sizable dent in the mudguard and a broken windscreen. The road was still wet where people living nearby had done their best to wash the blood away. We reckoned we could still see traces of red. Every kid I knew was standing around the van trying to picture what had happened when Rod crossed over the road and told me Mum wanted to see me. That was bloody typical! I had a feeling Mum just wanted to let me know about her confrontation with Captain Biggs over my lack of promotion. As far as I was concerned that was history and could wait. It didn’t rate alongside someone being bowled over, blood on the road and a smashed van. I didn’t want to go home just for that.

‘Now,’ said Rod. ‘She wants to see you now.’

My heart sank. I knew immediately Mum didn’t want to talk about Captain Biggs. Rod probably had homework so I’d been singled out to take the laundry up to the laundrette, the very worst thing that could happen. It took nearly half an hour to drag the bag of washing up to Ponsonby Road, an hour in the machines and another half hour to drag the sodden washing home. I couldn’t believe it. The van would probably be towed away before I got back and all the kids would’ve watched what happened except me. To make matters worse, a Maples furniture truck had broken down up by the Church Army and we’d been told a special heavy-duty tow truck that normally recovered broken-down trolley busses was coming to tow it away. That would probably happen while I was up at the laundrette as well. I looked around for Nigel but he was nowhere to be seen. Dad called him The Artful Dodger. He was never around when there was a job to be done.

Mum wasn’t in the shop so I opened up the counter and went through to the living room, desperately trying to conjure up a reason for not going to the laundrette. She was sitting down on the sofa, having her afternoon tea and smoking one of her du Maurier cigarettes. She only allowed herself five cigarettes a day. When she saw me she smiled but it was a funny kind of smile. That should have told me something.

‘Sit down,’ she said and patted the sofa alongside her.

‘Why?’ I said. Either I had to go to the laundrette or I didn’t.

‘I’ve got some bad news.’

‘What?’

‘Sit down.’

I sat. Maybe I was wrong about the laundrette. Maybe she wanted to talk about her confrontation with Captain Biggs after all. I figured it had gone badly and I’d been thrown out of club. The way I was feeling about Captain Biggs that was no big loss.

‘It’s about Mack.’

Mack? What did he have to do with club? I was mystified. Why had Mum dragged me away from the most exciting thing to happen in ages to talk about Mack? Mum looked down at her hands and I noticed they were shaking.

‘Mack’s been run over.’

‘What?’ I couldn’t grasp what she was trying to tell me. People hardly ever got run over and the likelihood of two people being knocked down on the same day smacked of the absurd. I thought she was getting confused. ‘Some old bloke got hit by a van,’ I said. ‘I know that. What’s Mack got to do with it?’

Mum put her arm around me. ‘That was Mack. It was Mack who was hit by the van.’

Have you ever had that sensation when all the air seems to suck out of your lungs and your blood stops flowing? I thought that sort of thing only happened
when you died, but it was happening to me. It was Mack who stepped out in front of the van? Mack who the kids had seen flying through the air? It was Mack’s blood we could still see on the road? This revelation begged the big question but I couldn’t say the words.

‘Are you all right?’ Mum hugged me tighter. She was biting her bottom lip. Maybe she was worried I’d react the way I had when she told me my cocker spaniel pup had been run over and killed. I’d run straight out the back door, down Chamberlain Street, right across Grey Lynn Park and out into Williamson Avenue. I would’ve run forever if Mr Gillespie hadn’t stopped me on his way home from work and brought me back. But how could I run when I was struggling to even find the breath to speak? Somehow I managed to get the question out. My voice sounded like someone else’s. It was really weird.

‘Is he dead?’

‘No, but I’m afraid things don’t look too good. He was hit awfully hard. Captain Biggs went with him in the ambulance.’

‘Where?’

‘Auckland Hospital, I suppose.’

‘I’m going to go and see if Captain Biggs is back yet.’

‘He won’t be.’

‘Then I’ll wait up at the Church Army.’

‘All right, but have a cup of tea first. You’re not going anywhere until you’ve had a cup of tea.’ The shop buzzer went, which meant someone had come in. ‘Promise me.’

‘I promise.’

Mum got up and walked back into the shop. I wobbled into the kitchen on jelly legs and poured myself a cup. The tea was stewed and the colour of Dad’s pipe tobacco but I didn’t care. Now that the shock was beginning to wear off it dawned on me that Mack’s accident was probably my fault. Everything came back to the story I’d read to him. Mack wouldn’t have stepped out in front of the van unless he’d been drunk or distracted. And he wouldn’t have been drunk or distracted if I hadn’t read him my story. The logic was irrefutable. As I slumped back down on the sofa guilt settled on me like a shroud. I was still sitting there when Mum came back in.

‘I thought you were going up to wait for Captain Biggs.’

‘Yeah, but I was just trying to work out…’

‘Work out what?’

‘I dunno. What happened, I suppose. Some kids in Standard Two reckoned he just stepped out in front of the van.’

‘Don’t you listen to them!’ Mum raced over and grabbed hold of my arm. Her grip actually hurt. It was her way of enforcing a point of view or making sure we didn’t let her down. Sometimes she’d grab my arm on the way out to soccer or athletics and she’d say something like, ‘Make sure you win now, you hear?’ If Nigel or I were really sick she’d say, ‘You’re going to be all right, you hear?’ This was before the doctor even came and she
really didn’t know. Grabbing my arm was her way of making sure I understood the seriousness of her request. Sometimes she scared me. She scared me now.

‘Don’t listen to what people tell you,’ she said. Her fingers bit deep into my arm. ‘It was an accident, you hear?’

Of course it was an accident. What else could it be? And then the penny dropped. The blood must’ve drained from my face because suddenly Mum was down on her knees in front of me asking if I was all right. If I’d said I was she wouldn’t have believed me. If I said I wasn’t she would’ve fussed over me. So I said nothing. I just closed my eyes to try to shut everything out and buy some time to think. Honestly, when life gets you up against the ropes it doesn’t hold back. The punches just keep coming.