deep south 2013
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dsj fiction
The Followers
In the 70s, when I was a teenager in Christchurch, there was this guy—a stocky, bushy- haired man of indeterminable age—who used to stride the streets downtown, discussing this and that with himself. If you caught his eye, it was intense. Where he had come from? Was the incessant walking a new phase for him? Had he only recently moved to our city, been pacing it out elsewhere? Was he here temporarily? Had he been kicked out of another town? Although he was not particularly unkempt we would fantasise that he slept out, under a suitable grove of trees in the Gardens. Perhaps he was from Sunnyside. I don't think the half-way houses of today existed back then, although I seem to recall that the City Mission and the Salvation Army, and maybe St Vincent de Paul, had a few beds and did a Monday lunch? Gave out clothes? Probably though, we nodded knowingly, he lived with his Mother. She would have a canary and a shifty old cat. “Don't forget you're to go to the butchers today, dear—get that mince for Timmy.”
He wore faded brown corduroy pants and a black first-mates jacket domed up to the neck. His face was reddened from exposure and perhaps also from all the huffing and puffing. At first we assumed he was going somewhere in an extra hurry, but we would spot him half hour later going in the opposite direction and then he would unexpectedly stalk passed the library, then he'd be striding over the Bridge of Remembrance. And it became apparent to us that for all his earnestness he wasn't going anywhere except round and about, hands in pockets. No shopping bag or backpack.
His mood varied. There were days his head would be a little bowed and he would shoot looks sideways. A cheery smile flashed out on other days along with, and this was quite neat, a compliment to people he encountered, total strangers. “You look good!” he'd shout out to some tweed-suited old lady. Or, “way to go!,” at a dude in jeans and leather jacket. A grey-suited businessman might receive: “Excellent! Excellent!” We enjoyed the various responses, open puzzlement being the most common one—a ga-ga pause as they beheld the initiative of this decidedly unusual soul. Some enjoyed a private superior chuckle while others were genuinely complimented and carried on into a sunnier day. Thus we dubbed him Pleaser.
He did shop on occasion. I'd see him down at our supermarket, more often than not hear him first, his tenor loud and hearty: “I'm in the right place!” he'd be braying at a stack of egg cartons. Then round at the cheese: “Oh yes indeedy, in you go!”
But my story is not so much about this guy as it is my once neighbour and friend still, Scarf. His real name was Bradley, which didn't sit quite right but, as he was seldom without a long slithery one around his neck, Scarf did. He moved in next door with Sylvia, his graceful, beautiful-but-deserted Mother, when I was 13 and he was 15, in the days when such ages did not command the material and emotional servitude now so common.
Several shades classier than the average rent-dweller on our street I was surprised at his letterbox friendliness and casual invite to come and hang out in his room. Evidently I should come and get to know his records before they drove me insane. And indeed of an eve I had already heard the pulse and jangle coming from his bedroom. Sounds I would learn to discern and thrill to: Jefferson Airplane, Frank Zappa, Cream, and Pentangle.
I myself had been slowly plodding down silent steps towards a dank and private isolation. No pimples or weight problems, no boyfriend hoo-haa. Just anxious as all hell. A nervous wreck. I even had a period where my shoulders did this weird uncontrollable twitch. I was pretty sure every plane flying overhead was going to crash and that any car an acquaintance climbed into was absolutely going to hit a power pole in a matter of minutes. Why was I thus? Nature or nurture? That my Mother, standing in the kitchen, fore-finger raised, face inches from mine, would on occasion snarl at me phrases such as:
“They say you need friends—well, I don't need any!” could have had a lot or very little to do with my nervous tic. The jury is still out. She would also, bless her, wake me up in the early morning hours because there was significant star and planet activity going on, whispering urgently at 3am: “Are you awake? Come on!” and coax me out of bed to follow her through dewy grass to stand in the middle of a paddock or park and stare up into the embroidered black sky. I have to say to this day I do love our stars; for they remain still, way out there...in an environment apparently able to be summed-up with ludicrous simplicity: space.
In certain respects my life and Scarf's life paralleled remarkably. We'd both been living in the country and had now moved to town; we'd both watched our parents put their marriage through the grinder and had lost our fathers to wanderlust and irresponsible daydreams. Talking about the latter we would faithfully echo our mothers' respective tongues, rattling off proof as to the thoughtlessness of our Dads, sighing maturely as to their uselessness etc. But while our mothers' gripes and fears were indeed well founded we knew that our fathers' pursuit of an eternal summer called to us, strummed a fat chord within. We too, in the earlier years at least, had wanted perpetual indulgence. To be endlessly tree-climbing, swimming, to be crouching round a camp-fire feeding sticks into it, to be giggling in a pup-tent 'til all hours, king-sized slab of chocolate well-gnawed. However, these much loved sunny and loose days had departed for us both with our fathers. Scarf's mother, a city girl at heart, did not miss the riverside excursions one dot. Mine did. My Ma didn't have a car and nor could she drive. And while Scarf's mother did not possess a car she did, I believe, have a license. However she mainly called upon one of the good-looking, and noticeably younger than her, men who were available to transport and accompany her wither she desired.
Scarf and I figured out that one year, one Christmas, down Central, our families would have been camped pretty damn near one another and that our fathers would probably have met at the local pub. Oh, these fathers of ours! They got around with their shirts off, plastic sandals on feet, bodies tanned, faces handsome, whistling fearlessly while gathering firewood. Sausages would be fried in a blackened pan, huge chunks of bread sawed off the Sunday loaf, a brew of billy-tea stewing on the side. Later, when feeling the heat, they would dive with grace and abandon from the shaggy river bank into shiny soft depths. Dried-off and wet hair combed back they would settle into their grassy spot, long legs stretched out, toes wiggling with happiness, pouring a beer from the flagon that had been kept cool in the shallows. A snigger of bliss and then the sighed: “this is the bloody life...” Folding the sheets of the Sunday Sports pages back onto themselves so as it could be held with one hand, another sip of beer, another harsh little laugh confirming the good luck.
But they were bad men these fathers of ours, which was awkward because we liked to do some of the same things they did.
San Francisco had been home for Scarf's father some years now while mine was in Australia, going bush when he could.
Scarf partook in after-school bourbon quite often. It had been his old man's poison. He offered it freely to me, so I drank a little too, grimace-free after a while. There was no sexual tension between us. Within the first five minutes this was somehow established and that's how it stayed. Of course back then Gay wasn't Out There as it is today. It never entered my head he was “homosexual” (a word half-whispered, half-sneered back then, well, in my family, anyway). Of course, that he was intriguing, that he was different from anyone I'd ever met was not simply due to his sexual orientation. There are boring gays as there are boring heterosexuals, after all. He was a very particular person, unique. How he looked and how he talked. You could say he was chatty but his chat sliced into the heart of things. The wonderful, striking phrases, which fell from his quite small mouth, did at times have a studied air but did not ring as contrived. He was genuinely fascinated and fascinating. Seldom did he indulge in gossip or slagging-off but if he did it was riveting, a study in human complexity.
His smile was somewhat puckish and he smiled a lot. He had dimples and soft, straight strawberry hair and wonderfully amazed airmail-blue eyes. Odd eyes. Innocent but not. For they could be sad, which was a shock the first time...Seeing him miserable and staring down at the carpet, not moving at all. He would usually put on King Crimson's Court of the Crimson King and we would not talk. The fabulously gloomy music would hover and pulse, oozing it's way into us.
Inertness was rare for Scarf, however. Usually his shoulders were forever jiggling, his willowy arms lazing around the backs of chairs, a hand shooting up to pull at his hair, foot tapping away to the babble of his strange little voice and husky laugh. I suppose he was quite highly strung and yet most times he made me feel really good, he made me laugh, he was easy to be with and you felt he cared, that he saw into things without being self- righteous or dogmatic. Yet he did hold some very firm opinions.
He declared he was bursting with potential. The outrageous, almost grotesque mimicking he sometimes did reinforced this, somehow. Photos of his artistic heroes adorned his walls. “Flowers every one,” he said, “some in bud, some in bloom.” Also on his wall was a list of books. When I said as much, he corrected me: “literature, sugarplum.” The list kept growing. A biography of some writer would steer him on to new wonders. On occasion he read out a paragraph or two. He opened up that world to me.
I'd gotten used to his “come in if you're interesting” when I knocked on his bedroom door. I certainly knocked because one of the few times he got peeved with me was when I'd barged in and found him squirming on his bed...But even then his anger rapidly melted into giggling, mischievous glint in his eye, so that my embarrassment was transformed and I was part of some mutual conspiracy.
Within five minutes of my arrival he would be host—a cup of milo or the triumphant producing of a bottle of Bourbon. Regards the latter some older friend got it for him and I think Scarf also topped-up from his mother's drink cabinet. I would contribute a large bottle of coke when I could. But some evenings we had milo. I don't know how much he drank on his own. And I don't which of the men who pulled up in their flash cars and strolled with cool nonchalance up the skinny path were his mother's friends or his. That he did not hangout with fellow school pupils was not, I'm sure, due to any social inability on his behalf; he simply chose not to. Scarf and his mother were sophisticated in ways I had not before been privy to: exhibition openings, lunches, even book launches. If they were not being whisked off courtesy of some suave-suited Romeo, Scarf would escort his beautiful mother. The taxi would pull up on our drab little street and down the path they would waltz. Off they would disappear. Son and mother. Yet I never quizzed my friend. He would throw a few comments—this had been a bore or that had been altogether rather remarkable—and I was intrigued but did not, perhaps, wish to reveal the extent of my ignorance. I was somewhat in awe of them and at times wondered why on earth he bothered with me.
He had my mother wrapped around his cute little finger. I would sense her willingness for me to go have a bath or whatever so as she could get her own one-to-one time with him. His pop-ins to our place tended to be pre-tea. Scarf liked to hang out in the kitchen, perched at the table while mum prepared food. He showed mum how to julienne carrots. And he had an efficient method of cubing onions. I sometimes wondered if he offered to do the latter just so as he could do his crying scene which was loud and melodramatic, interspersed with choking laughter. My mother would join in and this rather annoyed me. And she drank up his nail-on-the-head sympathy—sad sack stuff concerning the terrible weather or that damn grumpy new bus driver on our route. Scarf could wax eloquent about anything: “What I particularly dislike concerning our dire new man, and you may not agree with me on this, is his altogether remarkable ability for...” My mother lapped it up.
I never accompanied Scarf and his mother on their evening excursions but he and I sometimes went out on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. We'd trek into the library or the movies; sometimes whack a tennis ball around on the Hagley Park courts. Once or twice we happened upon guys from his school. They would utter some smart-arse comment and pass-on. Mostly though we walked through the Gardens, enticed by it's enchanting nooks and crannies and it is there where, one pleasant spring day, the aforesaid weirdo—a term used freely in those days—comes once again into the picture. Staggering down the steps from the McDougall gallery, recovering from a bout of uncontrollable laughter, we aimed for the cork tree. ”An impressive fellow” was how we referred to it. We spotted Pleaser across the sweeping lawn just beyond our tree and with a snap of his fingers Scarf suggested that we follow him. I tend to be slow in responding to unexpected suggestions, I need time to absorb and assess whereas Scarf was impulsive, spontaneous. This lethargy of mine would irritate him and his trick was to sort of hypnotize me with fast verbal pressure come on come on come on come one, yes yes yes! Like a series of rapid taps on your forehead and so you said yes to make it stop. So I agreed to follow our bushy-headed man. How close could we get to him without him realizing? We trailed him at about five or six metres, quite close. He took a hard left, ducks scattering under his conducting arms. Onwards and over the bridge, “ha!” to a father and his young son in a paddleboat on the Avon below. Soon he was breezing by blossom trees, his blue beanie bobbing against a backdrop of pink. He was laughing now, hooting. “What do you reckon,” Scarf said, “the bank rotunda or up alongside the river?” The rotunda we figured and the rotunda it was, honoured with a salute 'n all. “It's like he's drunk, really,” Scarf mused. “Let's walk past him, one on either side, and see if we can smell it.”
I couldn't smell alcohol and neither could Scarf. Amidst the green and yellow of daffodils we glided for an eternal moment beside him, our eyes staring fixedly ahead, mouths a tight line of control. He was muttering, he was muttering street names to himself, streets no where near our current location: “Purchas St and Churchill St, Purchas St, London St, Perth St, that's right then.” And then “ha!” as he felt us alongside and then as we overtook him: “and they're off!” And we were: our faces contorting with the struggle to keep them straight, simultaneously increasing our fast stroll. Out of earshot finally we could share wide eyes and grins, wicked children that we were.
“Whats with the streets!” Scarf shrieked. “Merivale Lane, Innes Road! Longfellow St, Austin St!”
“Go, Pleaser!”
We found a coven of bushes to disappear amongst until he passed by. Then we followed him up Hagley Ave, lurking further back now that he'd made our acquaintance. He kept up his thumping great pace, doffing his hat to two freshly permed elderly women. “Ten out of ten!” a uniformed schoolboy was awarded.
“I used to wear a uniform,” Scarf mused. He still did in fact, as was the case for myself.
“So did I,” I confided.
“Very sexy things.”
“Just the caper.”
“No, really—I really think they are.”
And as was often the case, I couldn't tell if he was kidding or not. Not to worry, as here came a nun.
“What will he say?!” Scarf gasped.
We hushed our steps and strained our ears but there was no need to as the whole world must have heard his “sing out to Jesus!” We danced around, my face was beginning to hurt from all the stupid grins.
“Where's he going?” I begged.
“Nowhere probably. Just walking. I wonder if he sleeps well and what does he dream?”
“And just where does he live? I hope he really does live with his Mum, like we thought.” Scarf's face suggested maybe we were wrong, that maybe life was not a bowl of cherries for our man. “What would you do then?” I asked him, more quietly, “if you had to live, like, outside?”
He considered this a moment or two. I watched his face. His handsome features shifted from consternation to wistfulness to stoney-eyed seriousness.
“Buddy-up with another homeless person,” he said at last, very decisively. And then, after a husky chuckle, “someone to make the unrealness real. Because if two of you were doing it together its removes the oddness, you'd fall into the world of it easier, forget that you been something else easier. I imagine I'll experience it one day, being a vagrant...I'll also experience the fabulously wealthy life too. I may not be super rich myself but I'll be around it, invited into it. Rich, tasteful bastards, who love having me around, because of me being an extremely talented and compelling photographer. (Scarf dabbled with, what seemed to my naive litmus brain, curiously excellent results). I'll be the sort who receives gushing praise and vicious condemnation. One or the other, which is always preferable to lukewarm. Lukewarmness is a lingering disease of the middle class predicament, an invisible veil lowered over people, so that they do this tiny, tiny little repetitive dance their whole sad, tinny life.”
“Aren't you middle-class?”
“Don't I know it! My license to ponder and ponder over my 'emotional rights,' endless luxurious quibbling over piddly loose-ends, oh, woe is me. The least you could do, girl, is be much more attentive to my moods and needs, it's not so much to ask that you...oh, he's going to cross the road."
We waited until he'd hiked over Deans Ave and then followed suit. He was off to the right, heading towards the Fendalton Road corner.
You had to interrupt Scarf sometimes or he'd prattle on, playing some role or other. So I'd start it, a game we played:
“Fawcett.”
“Tap.”
“Ketchup.”
“Tomato sauce—sidewalk.”
“Footpath—diaper.”
“Nappy.”
“Jelly.”
“Jam—biscuits.”
“Biscuits? Oh...Scones!”
“Vace.”
“Vase—he's turning off.”
We increased our speed, ceasing conversation as we narrowed the gap. By now we were right round where the Chateau on the Park stands, still, having sustained only 'superficial damage' in the quakes. Before that the Chateau Regency poked its flashy nose in the air but at the time of this story it had not yet been built, wooden villas and workman's cottages occupying most of the block. Pleaser was zipping on, getting closer to the Deans/ Harper/Fendalton intersection. On the Deans Ave side there was a particular area, from the corner and stretching quite a way back along, a large sprawling, untended property, its dwellings long gone. It has since seen another generation of upmarket homes erected on it, plus in 1986 Girls' High took the place of the old Riccarton Flour Mill, gutted by fire in 1971. Right now though long dry grass was in abundance, punctuated by patches of blackened oil-stained dirt. Over to one side of this barren mess was a grove of large well-established trees, the standard variety planted by the early English colonials—oak, chestnut, silver birch. Spring had waved its hand over each so they were blushing sweet greens. It was there in amongst those lovely trees that Scarf and I ascertained that not allthe dwellings of the colonials had in fact disappeared. Through the leafy curtain we spotted a decrepit two-storied, pious-looking thing, ransacked by time.
“That's where he headed!” Scarf grinned. “He must have gone inside!”
Creeping up to where our man had apparently been absorbed into the house, we saw that a good portion of the place was relatively intact. The porch floor was somewhat collapsed in but the door was partly open, jammed, the top hinge off. Scarf stepped carefully over the caved-in boards to peer in. “There's a staircase. It looks okay.”
Joining him I saw the staircase indeed looked mountable—just. It beckoned. He must have gone up there, we figured and as if in answer to us a series of orders all at once rang out from above. Orders being issued with great firmness. Was it his voice? We pulled faces at each other and began to tip-toe up the stairs, eyes excited now because it was definitely turning into a Famous Five type adventure.
The voice shot out again and now we could make out the words: “I've told you before!” he bellowed harshly; “you're not to do it again!” Scarf darted a look back over his shoulder at me. “Arrrghh,” he mouthed, “it is him!” If there was a poor sod on the receiving end of these accusations we heard no resistance. Reaching the top of the stairs and peeping round the door frame we were in for two surprises: the room was not that of an empty derelict house but 'furnished' with props, as if a movie set or the meeting place for some elite sect. There was a long table covered in a rich red cloth, and black material draped two walls. The three-pronged candelabras at either end of the table with their long white unlit candles added a further sense of ceremony to the whole scene. The second surprise we probably should have guessed, really: Pleaser was in fact alone. This vicious voice was coming out of him, a tone we had not previously associated with him at all and it was disturbing. He was pacing around, pointing and wagging a finger, coming out with that phrase “I've told you before!” again and again, his face dark and mean.
“Whoa!” Scarf whispered. I pulled on his arm and we backed out a bit.
“That table!”
“I know!”
“Okay!” Pleaser yelled out, making us both jump and clutch at one another. “Did I say you could have that?” icy and bitter.
Hands clamped over mouths, we scuttled off into a room on the other side of the landing, a dark dead room, cold and musty. We could still hear him loud and clear: “Put it back! Put it back now!” We choked behind our hands, it was horrible and hilarious.
“And those candlesticks,” Scarf managed to get out at last. “It's like some dream,” he decided, apparently very pleased with our luck.
But nothing much more happened. Pleaser just carried on booming out more cruel demands. It started to get cold and it didn't appear that some excitingly strange group of worshippers were going to turn up or that some play was to be rehearsed or whatever, so we simply left old Pleaser to it.
For various reasons we didn't get back to the house for over a week and when we did finally creep up those stairs again, all the props had vanished. I said if I had been on my own both times I would have wondered if I'd imagined it all. Scarf chuckled and then stared at me with mouth half-open, eyes all dreamy.
“We'll never know what was going on...I mean, bugger me, it could have been Satanism or something! Ooooh!,” he shivered. “Old Pleaser doesn't seem quite so amusing now!”
But as to whether Pleaser was in on the set-up, the table and candles, was doubtful. He had probably just happened upon it the same as us. And how many times he had been there and for how long that room had been transformed with such mysterious decor we were never to know.
Scarf's father paid for him to go over and visit him in San Francisco the next holidays. I was envious but glad for him. He sent me a postcard of the inevitable cable car with instructions as to how not to behave in Haight-Ashbury. But the day I received this much- awaited correspondence was the day Scarf's mother was found dead from an overdose of sleeping pills and before I knew it Scarf was getting out of a taxi looking like he was made of melting wax. His shadowy father was with him so I stayed half-hidden behind the curtain at our window, watching them wade through the gloom towards the silent house. Dread and tiredness was so plainly visible in their plodding limbs, defeat in the dropped shoulders. When I went over later he was in his room, the light out, lying on his bed, his coat still on. He'd been crying.
“I could have helped her,” he whimpered in a husky voice. “She was always worried about things. I finish school soon and I don't want to go to university or anything—I'd be working.” And he turned and sobbed into the pillow.
She had been drifting away though, his mother. It used to be a glass of wine while preparing tea and then it was a gin before cooking tea and then it was, “God, life today has challenged beyond the call of duty—I need a drink!” Eventually she was simply padding over to the cabinet every so often in the course of the afternoon and you just got used to it. It was what she did. She was not a bad drunk. She did repeat herself, ask the same questions today and tomorrow and sometimes, while you were attempting to hold her glassy-eyed attention with some hollow-sounding report or apparent personal interest, she would just let her eyes drop to your collar or buttons and blankly sigh and glide off out of the room, as though completing the steps to some velvety dance. A beautiful female version of Scarf, she usually wore her fair hair swept up, her neck lovely and long. She was my idea of chic, the closest I'd ever come to it.
“Well, she made sure of it this time.” Marcus, her sometimes escort and a tall handsome Heathcliff of a man, said after the funeral, unintentionally informing me that she'd tried before.
With a well meaning, but vivaciously ignorant, fifteen year olds notion of compassion I wanted to get to the core of my friend's terrible situation, to truly share it with him as much as possible. With this, my best friend's stunned, punched-in heart however, I could not locate any inroads. Sympathy seemed a cliche, analysis cold, and reassurance flippant. The latter I tried by suggesting that anyway she would be at peace now. Scarf reached over to click his lamp on then efficiently retrieved the standard bottle of bourbon 'hidden' in his bedside cupboard. With a weary, somewhat testy tone, he stated that if there was such a thing as the soul and that soul had not managed to mature enough spiritually to be at peace with reality it would, being the same soul in or out of a body, be just as immature or miserable after disposing of its human carcass. Or, if indeed there was no such thing as a soul and all individuality ceased with the demise of a human body then yes, that would be peace but hardly a consolation as the peace would not be appreciated, would it.
All I could do was hold his hand and he let me, for he was an affectionate boy with the sunniest of smiles. Before this. Now I could hardly believe he would smile again. She was humiliated, he said, by our recent lower style of living, you know...it was the be-all and end-all for her—being classy and being seen to be classy. And charming.
“Well,” I said, “my Mum's a bit like that.”
“No,” Scarf said, “your Mum wants to make the best of what she's got whereas my Mother wants...wanted more than she had always. Ever since I was tiny she'd be pointing out cars or coats or dinner-sets, saying 'oh yes Bradley.' Things were the most important. And, unfortunately, those things did not need to be beautiful to behold—although some happened to be. No, they just needed to say money.”
He looked sickened by his own words but he continued, injecting more of a sneer into his tone. It was like, he said, she longed to be rich and haughty, to clack out across laminated showrooms, hurriedly selecting a wickedly expensive dress before being whisked off by some perfectly attired Adonis who dropped in on his way to a business conference in Hawai'i, taking it all in her brilliant stride, it all being regular to her life but oh, a little tiresome…
He fell silent and stared fixedly at the handle of his dressing table. Then he heaved out more thoughts: “weird that whole thing of wanting to appear breezy and forthright. Like we want to appear so used to everything, used to being here on Earth. Don't you think that's it?” He shared his cried-out puffy blue eyes with me, entreating me. “That whole thing of not showing our actual feelings,” he said, "feelings like excitement? Childish pleasure, you know, like yay! I love this new jacket as against Buster Keaton faced it's-timeless-and- won't-date crap.”
A week later there he was dejectedly sorting his things into rubbish-versus-useful piles, finding it compelling that various objects he had cherished could so easily be plopped onto the rubbish pile. A faded pink and brown fragment of a 1940s cup found on a stony beach; a lost or discarded page from a letter some child had written to Arnold Schwarzenegger; and a striped woollen jersey he'd worn and evidently adored as a toddler.
“I won't really miss them, I mean they only bring tiny moments of pleasure a couple of times a year, if that,” he assured himself.
I reached for the cup fragment and placed it preciously in the palm of my hand, stroking its smoothness and loving its faded, somehow patient, colour.
“You keep it,” he said, “and this too.” He quickly located a photo of himself aged about four, standing on his father's knee, smiling his sweet mischievous smile, dimpled cheek pressed up to his father's handsome and somewhat scheming face. Scarf knew he was going to live with his father no longer as a cute little boy but as a young man, pretty much responsible for himself, for his own social life and his own creative pursuits, and in a city unknown to him. A whole other country bustling with its own people. His father, of course, had a routine established in San Francisco: friends, work, a lover. Scarf thought he would try for a photography school there, that he might turn the hobby he had up until now only half-heartedly dabbled with really into something, that he might really devote himself to using the camera to capture life as he saw it. “It's actually a real strong urge,” he confessed abruptly, “to make people understand what I feel.”
“To share it?” I asked, figuring this was the positive angle.
“To merge,” he countered, mysteriously.
This was surely a complete turn-around to what he had previously said about dying? Regardless, I opened myself to consideration. His current personal tragedy allowed it.
“We all want to,” he said, “merge...you're standing there and I'm standing here and the same sun shines on both of us but we cast our own shadows because we are separate. And we can't stand it—not non-stop. Maybe that's why, ultimately, she did it, my mother? She couldn't stand it...Of course, individuality means uniqueness and it's to be celebrated blah blah, but it's like peering down a telescope at a flea circus and the isolation can get to be just too much.”
He turned to his opened drawers from which clothes spilled out to join a multi-coloured jumble of shirts and jerseys on the floor. “Oh, look at them all,” he whined, “like guts everywhere.”
“Oh, Scarf,” I murmured.
“I always thought I'd do it, not her,” he said, his voice now gone stony flat.
“Why?” I asked, wanting to hug him.
He crouched to the clothes, pushing his hair out of his eyes, silent a moment. “Don't you ever feel like you're watching a circus?” he said then. Did he mean crazies? Like Pleaser?
“Like anyone—like everything,” he explained. “I mean, like its wonderful and absurd but sometimes it's just too much. It's so constant and packed and meaningless. I don't mean there's no meaning but we can't ever really know, can we? Because were just this little bit of it. But maybe there's some kind of essence inside us or running through us, or something, so anyway, the only thing to do is to just participate. Jump into the bubbles.”
He sighed hard. “Snap, crackle and pop!” he said with alarming viciousness. He poked at an old buttercup-yellow shirt, one of my favourites of his. I couldn't grasp what he was saying and I felt he was under so much terrible strain that he was losing it. I'd heard him muse over cosmic possibilities, but this was really in earnest. When he'd been depressed other times he'd talk about nervousness and tiredness and boredom and how he didn't know what to do about it, but this was different.
He kneeled down on the floor and sat back on his haunches to fold the shirt. “Actually,” he announced, “I can remember when it all turned into a farce, when I suddenly saw human endeavour as being nothing more than filling in time. It was like a veil fell away from in front of my eyes! Amazing!” He pushed his hair away again and then flopped his hand down onto his thigh. “Mother and I were on a Sunday drive, we'd been to Birdling's Flat, walked on the beach, looked at stones, you know...On the way back we stopped at the shop, that tea place—The Black Tulip? She probably wanted cigarettes and I would've wanted an ice cream. I was waiting at the counter and I looked around the place and there was this woman, this forty-something woman, the lone patron sitting at one of the tables with her cup of tea and little cakes. Gingham tablecloths. She had her back to me. She sipped her tea and then put the cup down and lifted up a little cake to her face and—I just wanted to roar with laughter! Her back and her shoulders, the chair, the teapot, all the other tables all set up and ready...The whole place!” Scarf turned to me with a radiant grin. “It was like suddenly I actually saw that all the humans on earth were visitors and all in various states of, well, not shock but a kind of dazedness. Like little wind-up toys. She's gone chug-chug from her clean dinky kitchen in some suburb all the way out to The Black Tulip and now she was sitting quietly and obediently, back straight, looking out across half a dozen checkered table-cloths,” he spluttered here with laughter “drinking a cup of tea that the man behind the counter had bustled about and made!"
He was getting hysterical. I smiled an amused looking smile to hide the fear his choking laughter was sending up my spine.
Scarf spluttered on. “And all the while the little cars went chugging on passed!” He wiped at his streaming eyes before shrieking: “All the drivers were so dead-pan!”
I lay in bed that night hoping he was sleeping all right. He'd been looking so tired. I couldn't imagine him fitting in over in San Francisco but then I knew nothing about San Francisco except for it being hilly with cable cars going up and down. I drifted off to my own sleep visualising Scarf and myself riding on one, pressing our faces against the window, and being stupid. Anyway, I'm going over there this year. I've been saving for ages and finally I can go visit. In his letters he just sounds like Scarf to me although he's called Brad now. I have to admit certain aspects of his personality have blossomed dramatically and something he wrote in his last letter did make me wonder if his appearance is actually pretty eccentric or curious these days. He said that cutting through the park recently on his way to his local library he had had the distinct impression a couple of kids were following him.
Jay Clarkson has regularly had poems posted by Phantom Billstickers around NZ, the US, Berlin, St. Petersburg and Barcelona. In 2012, she was part of a team of eight New Zealand poets who performed at the Saatchi & Saatchi venue in New York. A excerpt from her novella, Turn of the Key, recently appeared in Landfall.
