Owls Do Cry (19 page)

So she said goodbye and kept waving her lace hanky in case Toby looked back to see, but he didn’t look because that would have meant putting his head out of the window and having it sliced off, and travelling the rest of the way with no head. He sat watching the steam rise to the outside of the carriage windows, and through the steam he peered at the leafless and sodden paddocks with their broken-down fences and tottering half-hinged gates; at the patches of swamp and flax; the lidded haystacks; a few sheep, early-shorn, looking woe-begone, their wool peeled and whittled; and white as coconut; and three magpies flew up from near the train and Toby, seeing their evil beaks, knew that magpies pick the eyes out of children, even through carriage windows; so he thought,

—I’ll hide in the lavatory until the magpies pass.

So he went down the aisle, saying excuse me whenever he bumped into anyone, and, opening the carriage door,
was almost whirled away with the roar of going; and he felt afraid and opened the door which said —Gentlemen’s Toilet.

And he looked down at the lavatory and watched the ground rushing past, the gravel and bits of green that would mean dock or dandelion; and he thought, wondering, It will drop all along the railway lines, in the middle, and men will come with shovels and shovel it up. Next time I shall look on the railway line and find out for myself. We will all look. What will Francie be doing now, and Chicks and Daphne? Oh, Oh, what if they find my very secret alone hut in the pine trees!

After he had finished he had a drink of water out of a paper cup that he folded to make, and he threw that down to watch it drop. And then he thought The magpies will be gone; and opened the door into the rush and thunder of go-it go-it go-it de-light-ed-ly de-light-ed-ly the Lim-it-ed; and found his way to his seat in the corner; again saying excuse me to anyone he bumped into, though not smiling because they were strangers and criminals with bags of lollies in their pockets, to offer him before they carried out their plans of kidnapping.

And sometimes as he sat watching the world travel, and the rivers, and bridges, he remembered his mother waving goodbye to him and telling him the list of not-tos, and he thought, What if I am going away and will never see her again? What if this is really a way of selling me, by sending me for a holiday in the northern city, to be taken away on a foreign boat. And he remembered the boats he had seen sometimes on the wharves, the red and yellow and white
boats, with flags flying; and water coming in a rude way out of the sides of the boats; and the sea nudging the sides; and men walking about with telescopes in their hands, and crying out Heave-ho, Heave-ho.

But that thought was just to tease him for he knew his mother would be waiting when he came back, and his sisters too, and they would say —Did you have any fits?

And he knew that Mrs Robinson over the road would ask after him for he remembered her saying,

—Fancy Mrs Withers letting her boy go for a holiday by himself, him with his fits.

They met him in Wellington, Uncle and Aunty. They took him on a train where the doors shut without being touched, as if they were told to; to their house where Uncle said the surrounding hills were

—Second growth bush, my boy.

There was a dead tree in the backyard and a rope clothesline and a garage with a tin roof; and everywhere you looked from the backyard you saw houses and people’s washing and coal-boxes through the fence; and you heard people speaking to each other and people coughing; and the air above the house was empty and cold, with no traffic of birds. And Toby’s cousin played the organ, the boy cousin, and was religious, with hymns, and the girl cousin said grace at the table, with no warning, so that Toby had begun to eat, and his uncle frowned at him. And they took him for the day to the Gardens first, through the hothouse, treading over the hoses and touching giant pink flowers that were labelled in foreign language on a piece of wood, tied up, so they could not escape; and every flower in the hothouse and
fern in the fernery was there to be looked at, and what a crowd of people walking up and down and looking, turning their heads and saying,

—That’s a lovely colour,

or

—I like that shade, it’s like Mag’s dress, only deeper,

or

—You can get that colour now, in that stuff you don’t have to iron,

or

—What lovely flowers! They just make you realize, don’t they?

All the people turning their heads backwards and forwards like dolls.

So Toby spent the day looking, next at the Sound Shell, where bands played, and then at the Zoo where the polar bear wore an old yellow fur coat, and his eyes were runny and red as if he had a cold. All the animals seemed to have sore eyes as if they had been looking too much in the daylight, and Toby wondered if perhaps his aunt and uncle and his two cousins and himself had red eyes with all their looking, and he said to his cousin,

—Are my eyes red?

—Don’t be silly, she said. Your eyes are only red when you’ve been crying or something like that.

And then Uncle, who was interested in history, took them to watch the tuatara. They stood half an hour waiting for it to move, but it seemed to be asleep, and the house where it lived was stuffy, and the girl cousin wanted to go to the lavatory, and so did everybody but nobody had liked
to say. So they went down under the monument, the women in the women’s side and Toby and his boy cousin and his uncle in the men’s side. The floor was stone and covered with a slimy green moss. There was a tap that kept dripping and could not be turned off. And there was a small window that couldn’t be seen through; it was broken and patched with wire-netting, and Uncle said it had been smashed by juvenile delinquents, there were many of them, he said, in the city.

Toby asked what they looked like, and what language they spoke, and if they dressed like people, and did they live in burrows or what. And Uncle said, with the same voice he had used for saying,

—Second-growth bush, my boy.

—You are ignorant as yet, Toby. The city is a terrible place.

So he walked all night, carrying his suitcase and overcoat, up and down the streets of the city they called a jungle. At first when he arrived there, he saw few people – a policeman walking along trying the door-handles of shops; motor-cyclists with leather jackets and goggles, crowded outside a milk-bar; a woman, Chicks, tall and dark and pale with the colour washed from her face and her eyes tired, standing outside the Post Office in front of the letterboxes with their obscene and magnified mouths. And Toby thought of the story about the soul flying from the body, and then, from everyone who passed he watched their soul fly out and into the letterbox, and them walk away spiritless and unknowing. And he saw a little boy who looked up at him fearfully, thinking,

That man has a bag of lollies in his pocket for me, and a mask made of black silk, and a ray gun, and a space-ship parked quite close, invisible, ready to kidnap me to the
moon or Mars. And the child backed, terrified, when Toby addressed him,

—Hello, little man, are you lost?

Then it was the dead and wet and street-shining time before the pictures finished, and there was a tall man wearing a black silk coat as wet and shining as the street, and he was walking from nowhere to nowhere. He was a hotel night porter on his way to work, to spread out his newspapers in the hotel pantry, and empty the shoe polish and brushes from the box onto the paper, and carry the shoes from outside the doors, remembering which, to be polished, with his pale immune hand hid for two or three half-minutes within each bulged and empty nest of leather; to climb inside the lift, then, with the gates shutting their iron teeth behind him; and sit in the safe shut box, on a wooden stool, to wait and be rung for, all night, till the boiling of the first egg in the morning for the early breakfasts, and the flipping under the door of the first newspaper; and the cook arriving for duty and peeling up her sleeve and saying

—I have red elbows. Look, I have red elbows.

All evening Toby walked the streets. And the people of the city who had been held inside theatres and halls by some kind of elastic, corseted there, came flying out, burst and undone, upon the footpath at ten or eleven o’clock; lying down and picking themselves up in one movement so that their falling seemed more of a dream; scurrying then for trams and buses and ferries, the women fatted and furred, with baskets of fruit, cherries or grapes hanging from their ears; the men escorting, rich and prosperous, but not all; nor all of the women with a garden in their face.

Toby watched the same tall and pale woman walk near him, and he said,

—Chicks.

She stopped and said,

—I’d choose a better name if I were you, otherwise nothing doing.

—Teresa, then, said Toby. Only it’s just my sister.

—What an exciting relation. Are you waiting for her?

—No. I found her dead and I don’t know what to do.

—Call the police or the doctor, and wipe away all fingerprints from your eyes.

—My mother died not long ago.

The girl, Marjorie, thought, Oh what a little country boy with his bag and raincoat, come up to the city from the farm, to see the sights and be shown the places, scared and wanting his mother and sister. She smiled to herself. And I’m the same. Dressed for my part and speaking tough since I worked at the factory.

She thought, I’ll have to do the work, and said

—Come for fish and chips, in here, and we can talk.

And she led Toby into the restaurant and they sat at a small table covered with glass, and underneath the glass two paper doilies stained with equal parts of Worcester and tomato sauce. And they ordered fish and chips and coffee for two, and a crimson waitress put before them, after twenty minutes, two narrow slices of bread, two balls of butter printed with a fancy pattern and two plates of fish and chips; also two cups of coffee that looked, Marjorie said, the colour of the Waikato in flood.

And then she said,

—I work in a factory, you know, making stockings. I started off at the woollen mills, and then went to the chocolate factory but it made me fat, so now I’m at stockings. When I’ve enough nylons for my box I’m going to work at Eudora Underwear.

She leaned forward to Toby, cupping her hand over her mouth to make sure no one else heard her whisper,

—I’m going blind. Can you tell I’m going blind? Next year, or the year after I shall tap with a white stick and make baskets.

And Toby, standing by himself, or walking along the streets, looking in the shopwindows at the radios and washing machines and carpets and jewels and books and clothes and toys, and the unspeaking lonely shadows of people, saw the girl, Marjorie or Fay or Chicks or whatever had been her name, walking arm in arm with a sailor; and he thought, I wonder. What if I had spoken to her? What if I had spoken to her. He saw them vanish in the dark.

And then he remembered, from his dreaming, that on his return from this holiday in the city, his mother would not be at the station to meet him, to ask if he had taken any fits, and remembered to give his ticket to the guard, and not got out at the wrong station or put his head out of the window, or spoken to strangers; and he was glad he had not spoken to the pale dark girl, for his mother was not long in the grave, she was locked up under the earth, and she could never bear to be locked, even in clothes or cheap beads tight about her neck, and would unbutton the top of her dress and unclasp the beads, more easily to breathe and be free.

August the Something

Really, I never seem to know the date since I began my new diary after I lost the old one. I cannot understand what happened to it. Tim teases me and says he has it hidden and reads it and enjoys it; but I know he is merely teasing me. I remember it was after Toby left that I lost it, and Toby left so suddenly, why the children could have been burned to death that night and us been in the
Evening Star
as an example of parents who leave their children alone at night. And I don’t know whatever Toby did to the sitting room carpet, for it is spoiled for always, the mess he made of it.

We go south next month. I cannot contain my excitement, nor can the children, who have asked and asked about the house and I have answered and answered their questions till I am tired.

—Where is it, Mummy?

—Where mummy used to live when she was a little girl.

—But
where
?

—On an old rubbish dump.

(I like to give accurate answers to the children’s questions)

—What’s a rubbish dump?

—It’s the sort of place where all kinds of nasty things are put, that nobody wants.

—Do they put children there?

—No, child. Anyway, it’s filled in and you shan’t see it.

—You mean it can’t come up as a ghost because our house is on top, like putting the cork in a bottle and holding it tight?

Later

I read this page to Tim, and he is amused at the children’s questions. Dear Tim.

By the way, I believe they are going to perform some kind of operation on Daphne, to make her normal.

And now I must read a chapter from my book,
Cry the Beloved Country
, which describes the negro question in South Africa.

DAPHNE

There is a place in the south called Arrowtown where the light is frozen pale gold upon a street of poplars whose leaves are pale gold for ever, ready to fall, yet never falling; nor do the trees move; nor the clouds, heliotrope to snow like the berries
acmena flora bunda
from their twig of sky. And the houses there are blurred like smoke shaped from a yellow and blue fire; the people scarved and cloaked with yellow and blue cloud. And if you listen, in that street, you hear nothing, nor do the people there move, nor can you ever walk there unless you break the glass and climb through, bleeding, a crazed myopic figure, to the picture hanging upon the wall of the dayroom where Daphne lives.

The picture is called, ARROWTOWN IN AUTUMN, WITH THE REMARKABLES.