Living As a Moon (14 page)

Ian said he hadn’t, and Nick went on to explain about some of the rules behind what might seem an anything goes arrangement to outsiders: about establishing adult status of callers, about never revealing details of location or identification, about never agreeing to meet personally with callers, about not making emotional attachments and never asking for extra money, or favours, about strict confidentiality. ‘We’re in the business of therapy, that’s what it is,’ said Nick, who was a very easy talker. ‘People get a sense of release, of relaxation, from the social restrictions on conversation between the sexes in everyday life. Just a couple of weeks ago a guy who’s responsibile for forty-three female staff told one of our women that if it wasn’t for her he reckoned he’d be in police custody. There you are, you see. Therapy.’

Ian knew that Nick wasn’t talking just to explain the sex chat line business, but as a way of sussing him out. After fifteen minutes or so, Nick came round to business. He said that most callers were men wanting to talk to women, of course, but there was a demand the other way around. He said Ian’s voice had possibilities, had a certain timbre, and the suggestion of rough trade without threat. He asked if Ian had ever done any singing, and was pleased with himself to be proved right.

‘It’s all in the voice, see. Not so much what you say — Jesus, there’s only so many parts, practices and positions, aren’t there — but how you say it. Particularly with the women. Women are especially sensitive to a wooing voice. Basically they just want to be wanted.’ Nick talked about that, about the approaches and language he’d found most effective himself. Maybe with a few pointers Ian could be given a chance, he said. Maybe he could be a professional sportsman, say, seeing he had that background, or the owner of a fishing boat.

‘I couldn’t work at home at all,’ said Ian. Nick said most of the women did, but he did have booths in the other room, so that needn’t be a problem. ‘Officially I’d be doing that polling and survey stuff you talked about,’ said Ian.

‘Sure,’ said Nick, ‘but early days yet. We’d have to give you a trial and see how you went. People think it’s easy, but it’s not.’

That’s how Ian started as a pollster at Eureka Communications. Noleen was chuffed with his initiative. ‘Good on you,’ she said. ‘Just don’t ring people right on teatime. That’s bloody irritating, that is, to be rung right when you’re getting the meal and asked about your banking habits, or how many times you’ve had a tropical holiday in the last year. Yeah, right, I tell them. What is it you ring about?’

‘Politics mainly,’ said Ian, ‘and it’s all later at night when people have settled. I quiz them a bit about their positions on the issues and what would make things better in their lives. How they’d like to see themselves in the future — stuff like that.’

‘Someone’s got to do it, I suppose, and at least you’re sitting down.’

He started with one night a week, eight to ten, sitting at Eureka in a booth soundproofed with Pink Batts and unpainted chipboard. There was a sheet on the wall with twenty-three of Nick’s rules of engagement typed on it. Ian became Russell, who’d played league in Aussie for the Bulldogs and was skipper of an orange roughy boat. Most of the calls were far less hard core than he expected: a good many were from curiosity only, and often he could hear smothered laughter from other women in the background. Nick’s main advice was a parody of the mantra of real estate agents — compliment, compliment, compliment. Above all the women wanted to be flattered, to be the centre of smooth-talking male attention, even at $3.99 a minute. The number of regulars grew as time went on. He judged by their voices and conversation that most of those were older women. Two said they were widows, and one he worked out was a prominent lawyer. Conversations were risqué rather than pornographic, often surprisingly confessional on the caller’s part. Everyone likes to be flattered, to be wanted. Ian didn’t despise the need, or abuse it: he tried to give fair measure without shame on either side. It gave him insight, even sympathy, into the world of women.

‘I must say you’re a bit of natural,’ Nick told him, ‘and you seem to have a knack of avoiding the pitfalls. Guys more often than the women end up making dates with callers, and that can come to all sorts of grief.’ He gave Ian a greater share of the $3.99, and Ian could work most nights he wanted. Some weeks he made $350 or more. Noleen was thrilled with his success, and showed it by being particularly supportive. She took a lot of trouble with their meals — Ian just loved a roast, or a rack of lamb — and washed his footy gear with cheerful care.

‘I’m proud of you,’ she said. ‘Jesus, we’re just forging ahead,’

‘Yeah, well don’t tell everybody, or they’ll be all be down there at Eureka Communications asking to do it.’

‘I never thought there’d be such a good business in phone surveys and selling. You never know, do you.’

‘It’s the convenience of it,’ said Ian. ‘People get used to doing everything with computers, or phones. Nick reckons that in twenty years there’ll hardly be anything on the roads except freight vehicles, because people will be doing their work and recreation all without leaving the house.’

After five months Noleen arranged a meeting with a loans and mortgage officer at their bank. It was a piece of cake, she told Frieda later. She and Ian had three income streams between them, and a minimum deposit. They were lent money to buy a villa several blocks back from the beach, and two months after they moved in, Noleen was pregnant. It suited her: she became less concerned with the lifestyle of those better off than herself, and more thankful for her own situation.

Ian continued in good standing at Eureka Communications, and could pretty much work the hours he chose. He thought a time might come when he left his job at Central City and set up for himself in a workshop specialising in customised suspensions, which had become quite the thing with the petrol heads, but he didn’t say anything to Noleen, or Mr Menzies, about that. He didn’t want to get ahead of himself and come a cropper. Once he’d got on top of the mortgage, though, he promised himself.

They had a boy, and called him Thomas. Ian was there at the birth and a bit rocked by it all, but tried not to show it. He felt an instant love for the little guy. Tears of relief and joy from Noleen, enthusiasm from friends and both sets of grandparents. Frieda brought a three foot-high blue monkey, and said she was determined to get married herself. ‘I wish your lovely man had a brother,’ she told Noleen.

Frieda was there at the hospital on the second day, as Noleen and Ian prepared to return home. The blonde nurse came to say goodbye, and as she went away, Noleen said she was the one who’d said she liked Ian’s voice. ‘Said you had a cute, masculine voice,’ Noleen said.

‘Well, he has too,’ said Frieda. ‘All that singing you used to do, I suppose.’ Ian just laughed and took one of the cases and stood in the corridor.

‘He can sing to the baby then, can’t he,’ said Noleen, ‘but not any nurses.’

‘No, but seriously, you’re dead lucky with Ian,’ persisted Frieda.

‘I will say he’s been bloody good over the house and baby, but don’t you say so and give him a big head. We talk a lot more about stuff now. He seems more switched on and understanding about women’s things than he used to be. We share a lot more stuff now, and he’s really chuffed about the baby. We’re closer somehow. I could’ve done a bloody sight worse I have to say.’

‘He wouldn’t touch another woman I reckon,’ said Frieda.

Ian couldn’t hear them, but even if he’d been able to, he could have said with a clear conscience that he’d never touched another woman since marrying Noleen. A guy had to take his responsibilities seriously, set his mind to getting ahead and coming right for the sake of his family.

Even the most plebeian of families has some jewel in its history: a grandmother whose early talents surpassed those of Baron Rutherford when they were primary kids together in Brightwater; a Pitcairn cousin related to Fletcher Christian; an ancestor who fought as a fusilier at the Battle of Waterloo, losing an eye, but retaining a brass button to pass on; a Viennese landlady who tended Ludwig van Beethoven in his deafness.

My neighbours in Palmerston North could trace themselves in unbroken line to a Dutch paymaster who came to England after the crowning of William and Mary in 1689. Ted Gilley, who was custodian at the Foundation for the Blind, had the middle name Unpeas, which the eldest male of the Gilley family had been given for so long that everyone had forgotten the provenance of it. Noleen Browne told me that her great-great-grandmother was frightened in pregnancy by a carriage horse, and the child was born with a chestnut mane all the way down its neck. Hec Liddey, who played senior rugby with me, claimed that on his Maori side he was descended from Tuhawaiki, the Bloody Jack who beat Te Rauparaha. Certainly, no one liked to take Hec on when his temper was up.

My family has one touch of richness in its tradition. My grandfather was a Welshman who came out to New Zealand for the Better Life of the colonial dream. An ex-insurance agent and foundry worker, he was served up a bush farm in the Hokianga that gradually broke him, and then reverted to its natural state. Perhaps that experience made him all the more devoted to the story of our lost birthright.

Our late eighteenth century family had owned a colliery in south Wales we were told. In the retelling of the story my father often felt obliged to point out, with a scrupulousness which enhanced credibility, that coal mines then were not the huge concerns of later years, and often privately owned. A colliery nevertheless; a basis for family industrial strength over generations to come. Howell was the one son of three who developed a fine, early Victorian conscience about the treatment of miners in the family firm, and when fierce argument with his father and brothers failed to achieve better conditions, he repudiated his stake in the business and moved to Middlesbrough where heavy industry was booming. All of which is part explanation for a later Welshman with a Yorkshire accent hopelessly felling bush in the Hokianga.

The touch that I best remember my own father dwelling on, was that for Howell’s lifetime his profit share was religiously put aside for him year by year, and he as religiously refused it. My father’s tone was a mixture of wistfulness, resignation and quiet Methodist pride at an exercise of principle at the expense of us all. He often talked of Howell and Gladstone in conjunction, so that when I was a boy I thought they were known to each other, and only gradually realised that the thing in common was their rectitude.

Youth has little patience with nostalgia, and apart from a brief selfish reflection that I would have preferred Howell to have been less rigorously moral and more concerned for his progeny, I didn’t care for family history. My father, though, had it close to his thoughts, perhaps because of the struggle he remembered in early years. As young men he and his brothers had worked on the roads in the Depression, and he hated to see a light on in an empty room.

I suspect that, in his more indulgent moments, he imagined some rock-solid Swansea dynasty willing to make amends: saw himself gravely accepting his due as Howell’s heir. Money would have been welcome, but even more a scarred shield from the time of Owen Glendower, with the family crest inlaid: three boars rampant on a gold field perhaps. Despite the Depression, my father had a streak of bookish romanticism.

As an adult I became more interested in the sense of personal history, and in my turn passed on to my wife and children the saga of Howell, with a self-righteous stress on the theme of sacrifice. It wasn’t until I was in my late forties that I had the inclination to begin research on my family background, and I expected to recover the full Howell saga from the mists of family folklore. Instead I destroyed that sustaining belief, for our Howell was listed in an early census as a fifteen-year-old miner at Blaenavon, South Wales, and his father as a bit carpenter in the ironworks there. He shifted to Middlesbrough sure enough, and signed his wedding certificate soon after with a cross: hardly an indication that he was a member of gentry descended from the Princes of Powys.

There must be something that began the petty legend, a brother who stayed behind and prospered perhaps, or a determination during a Welshman’s courting to enhance the family’s social standing. I regret having found poor Howell out, though the claims were not necessarily his own.

I never told my father. Several times before his death I heard him again tell the story of our lost birthright. It had an almost biblical fitness and balance: a story that had accompanied our family for generations, and embodied a good many precepts.

‘I believe,’ my father would say, ‘that at the end of every year the family set aside that portion of the colliery’s considerable profit due to Howell, and that each year for the rest of his life he refused to accept it because of the abominable working conditions for the men they employed.’ I dare say Howell knew those conditions well. ‘Had it not been for his stand on principle, we wouldn’t be in this country today,’ my father would say.

I haven’t written off the story altogether. Maybe more intensive research will show a sound basis for its persistence, and anyway, belief has always been more powerful than actuality. Howell certainly existed, and made the break from Wales that led first to Yorkshire, and in time, for some of his descendants, to this country, carrying in their imagination at least, some honour of lineage.

Rather than diminish Howell, I have decided for the future to increase his stature and significance, partly in memory of my father, partly because the family is short on impressive ancestral achievement. I shall weave in claims for an imposing physical presence, an evangelical crusade in the tenements of industrial Middlesbrough, and a misplaced deed of transfer recording his donation of the signet ring from the line of the Princes of Powys now displayed in the historical gallery at Harlech. Every family needs a hero.

I have a blank concerning my entry into the Palliser Centre, and little recollection of the desperate weeks before, which made attendance essential. My conscious history there begins with an interview with Dr Austen. Academics always assess an office, for it reflects not just something of personality, but of the incumbent’s position within the hierarchy of the institution. More generally, it speaks of the corporate body itself: the function, the largess and the degree to which staff are valued. Dr Austen’s second-floor room was small and the furniture nondescript, but the one large window overlooked a neat lawn with an oblong garden of staked, yellow roses. Better a small office with such a prospect, than a large one above the kitchens with a view of pig barrels, lavatory louvres, a heap of discarded heating radiators and a shed for ride-on mowers.

Dr Austen talked to me about the aberrant behaviour induced by alcohol, and the physical damage of prolonged abuse. I could still pull out of it, he said, without irreparable harm. I must have met with him before, but that’s my first clear recollection of us together: sitting in the small room with the shadow of the building stretching towards the roses, and Raymond Austen moving side to side a little on his swivel chair as he talked. He had a benevolent face the colour of mild cheese, and a pronounced furrow below his nose on his upper lip, like a well-formed miniature roof tile. I wondered what I looked like to him, and assumed an expression that I hoped was as amiable as his own. ‘Are you feeling okay?’ he said.

He told me he didn’t believe in being prescriptive, that he wanted to lay out the options available to me and let me take responsibility for a choice of treatment. ‘As in so many things,’ he said, ‘a lot of the success you achieve comes from the personal conviction that you will achieve success. But you know all that, I’m sure.’

He was right, of course, both in the proposition and my acceptance of it, but one of the effects of alcoholism is inattention, and as he went on to discuss programmes, I was distracted by figures on the lawn, in a sunlit patch between the shadow and the rose plot. Two thin, middle-aged men, and the bald one was leaning forward, talking to the other, patting his upper arm for emphasis, and the other man was responding with bursts of laughter loud enough to be heard faintly in Raymond Austen’s office. Talk, pat, laugh, talk, pat, laugh, talk, pat, laugh: the pattern was duplicated so faithfully that for a moment I feared I had suffered some brain default that registered as repetition, but then I realised that, despite the counsellor’s similarly repeated swivelling, his speech had a normal progression. He was talking of the methods coming into vogue in America for treatment of what is termed competent alcoholics. Middle-class people, achievers, people with a stake in their societies.

‘There’s a recent Johns Hopkins paper on how the bar has been raised in terms of what we regard as achievement. It’s titled “Alcoholism and worthlessness in times of affluence”. Excellent, excellent,’ said Raymond. ‘I must remember to let you see it. Two generations ago, to be able to provide for one’s family was a sufficient source of self-respect and justification for existence. Food on the table and pride withal. The grace said before eating was an endorsement of that. Gone, you see. All gone. Now such basic provision is taken for granted by educated people in countries like ours, and so much more is expected. You’ve got to excel, be in advance of your peers, above all gain some celebrity status within your field at least. Competence is failure; the norm is failure; lack of distinction is failure.’

Beside the roses the bald man still recounted his anecdotes, and his companion responded with laughter, but the touching had stopped, and they began to walk slowly over the green lawn. Soon they passed out of the view framed by the office window, and there was just the grass, the shadow line on it and the yellow blooms to be seen. Only when neither of them was visible did it occur to me that the laughing man reminded me of my father: very tall, and generous in response to the efforts of others to entertain him.

Raymond Austen’s enthusiasm for his profession was admirable, and his familiarity with contemporary medical literature reassuring for a patient, but I had so often been on his side of the desk that I knew that his explanations were as much for his benefit as for mine. How many times in discussion of a thesis had I taken the opportunity to live again some visit to an antiquity, or lay out the ideas for a journal paper I was considering. And when the graduate students left, I would have little memory at all of their own views, but feel a spike of renewed interest for my own.

How salutary to be a patient, an inmate, to be the recipient of treatment, to have the inferior role, when you aren’t accustomed to it. Once you pass beyond wounded vanity, there is such valuable understanding gained. To be kept waiting outside the official door, to have your own conversation brusquely interrupted, or patronised, to be reprimanded by the cleaning woman for stains on your locker, and by the under-gardener for picking a tulip, to be ignored by young women, and surpassed as a raconteur in the therapy group by an unemployed country and western singer of no education whatsoever. To realise how ordinary a person you are, once the trappings of a profession are removed: to undergo submission.

‘We are learning all the time,’ Raymond said. ‘Certainly accusation has no place in modern treatment. I myself see social change as equally important to effective pharmaceutical intervention, but there’s no silver bullet, of course. Ah, no silver bullet.’ He was free of extravagant affectation, though he did have a small hourglass in a wooden frame on his desk, like an egg-timer, and would reverse it to begin an interview, and run a finger down the pronounced indentation in his lip. He began to explain to me what he had to offer in the absence of the silver bullet, while I imagined the jocund swirl of brandy in a globed glass.

After lunch that same day there was a group therapy session. It was held in the far end of the dining hall because the carpet of the dayroom was being professionally cleaned, and the television lounge was being used for choir practice. Notice was given of choir practices many times, but during the weeks I was there I heard no singing, and no recitals were given. Maybe it was a euphemism for something more closely related to elusive health.

Aromas of mince, pasta and washing detergent still drifted in the air of the dining room as we gathered some of the wooden chairs to form a circle. The clothes we wore, our body language, were deliberately casual, but there was nevertheless an air of mild anticipation. Personal revelations were sometimes made, aspirations and failures revealed that were of interest to others, skirmishes for personal ascendancy in the netherworld of our pitiful society.

Eugene Dodd convened the session, and began as usual by asking new arrivals to briefly introduce themselves. One was a young man with very thin, tattooed arms and a vestigial goatee beard. Lloyd. ‘My search is for the redeemer,’ he said. ‘We’ll never be free of the drink until we have a greater salvation.’

‘This may be the place,’ said Eugene firmly.

‘Let it be so,’ said Lloyd. ‘Amen.’

‘There’s religious blokes, ministers, who’ll visit if you want them,’ said Roseanne. She wore slipper boots, and had a left cheek tic if other people talked too much.

‘Let’s put that on one side for just the moment,’ suggested Eugene. I heard that he’d originally been hired as office manager, but gradually moved into areas of treatment, where there were always shortages. ‘Also this afternoon we welcome Caroline,’ he said. Eugene wasn’t a highly intelligent person, but had authentic compassion for others that survived a flow of needy and recalcitrant personalities. It was humbling to realise my own inadequacies by comparison, and simultaneously irritating to suffer his trite commentary.

‘Nuffin would’ve stopped me if only I could’ve been able to learn another language,’ said Caroline. ‘I was going with a friend to teach in Korea if only I could’ve picked up the lingo quicker. She done very well for herself and I was left here with nuffin really.’

‘How often drink sabotages our ambitions. You’ll find all sorts of talents here, Carol.’

‘It’s Caroline.’

‘Sorry. Caroline. You’ll find all sorts of abilities here, Caroline,’ said Eugene. ‘Many of the brightest people fall into the arms of drink.’

‘It’s scientifically documented,’ said Roseanne. Sometimes her tic was like an exaggerated wink, more often just a fleeting tremor.

‘It’s an easy way out,’ said Bobby. ‘That’s what it is, whether you’re bright, thick as two planks or nutty as squirrel turd. And it always works, doesn’t it, more’s the pity.’

‘More’s the pity,’ echoed Roseanne.

‘Down, down you go,’ said Eugene.

‘The slippery slope,’ said Bobby, who always sat with his thighs splayed to accommodate a beer gut.

‘In the end I rung up the help line,’ said Caroline. ‘The guy I was living with got shitty, but you know, don’t you, when you need to turn your life around.’

‘God reaches out,’ said Lloyd.

‘You’ve come to a turning point,’ affirmed Eugene.

‘There’s a hell of a smell of mince or something in here,’ said Roseanne.

‘I can’t smell nuffin like that,’ said Caroline. ‘I had my nose broken twice in domestics and now everyfing smells like milk gone off.’

‘We are in the dining room after all,’ I said.

‘Who pulled your chain?’ said Bobby.

‘Now, Bobby,’ said Eugene in a tone of both admonition and reasonableness. ‘You know the rules of group discussion.’

‘Do unto others, Christian charity, people in glasshouses, Jesus is always listening,’ said Lloyd.

‘Well, those things may well apply as well,’ agreed Eugene.

‘I just seem to make bad choices in my men,’ said Caroline. ‘I mean you don’t like to be lonely, do you, but it’s no fun getting biffed all the time either. I won’t fucking put up with it.’

‘Now, Caroline. Rules of discussion re language,’ said Eugene, and Roseanne gave a dramatic twitch because she had been out of the conversation for so long. She started to speak, but Caroline overrode her.

‘If only I could’ve got to Korea with a language with my friend Amber, everyfing would’ve been okay,’ she said.

‘Today,’ said Eugene firmly, wanting to bring the group ‘on task,’ as he termed it, ‘I thought we would talk about our parents. Share some of the influences of conditioning — causal links, prejudice, respect and so on.’

So we embarked upon our topic. I contributed nods and brief phatic noises; I inhaled the persistent and sad odours of the dining room, while keeping my thoughts to myself.

My mother and father were both similar and yet distinct. I realise now that both of them were studies in disappointment, but dealt with that quite differently.

Brian had wanted to be a doctor, but couldn’t maintain his grades and finally became an industrial chemist in the paint manufacturing business. He was a considerable success there. So much so that that he outgrew practical science and ascended into administration. He was offered promotions to Australia, but turned them down and became a keen mobile home traveller. He started with a Volkswagen campervan and ended, after successively larger vehicles, with a house truck so big that the driveway had to be enlarged to provide parking space. He christened it Eden, and the name was scrolled professionally in gold metallic paint on both front doors. At the rear end of Eden was a special rack for a 50cc moped.

Dad provided the height in the family. He was six foot three and thin with it. He tended to stoop towards people in conversation, which gave an erroneous impression of condescension. Travel and drink were means of assuaging his professional disappointment, and he was happiest when the two combined to give him a double hit.

My mother was called Eve, and was undisturbed by the references that this provoked. When in a light humour, she sometimes called my father Adam, and he would call her the apple of his eye. Eve liked to tell of her first meeting with my father at a disco party in Lower Hutt. They had gone with other partners who became besotted with each other and disappeared together quite early in the night. Brian and Eve were the rejects who attempted to maintain their self-esteem by dancing with great animation and finding favour with each other. She said he was a temporary convenience who became a habit; he said that, apart from the besotted girl, she had the loveliest hair in the world.

Eve was a geography and history teacher, but saw her true calling as poetry. She did university extension classes, attended festival readings and published in small booklets co-operatively funded by their authors. She said that teaching prevented her from achieving literary success, that it drew from the same emotional and intellectual wells as her writing, but my father’s income was enough to support the family if she’d wished to give up teaching. My mother had a very pleasant face, but steadily put on weight until she became one of those stately women who seem to glide on castors like theatrical scenery.

My father was a jovial man, skilled at superficial acquaintanceship. He could hold up his end in conversation with anybody, and told me that often on their travels he would strike up transient friendships while my mother remained inside the mobile home reading Elizabeth Bishop or Lauris Edmond. Like most school teachers, Eve had for so long confronted resentful ignorance that she assumed it universal. ‘Dear God,’ she would say, ‘just to have some time to oneself.’

Maybe that’s why she, as well as Brian, seemed happy to spend an increasing amount of life in the mobile homes, despite their differences. Movement and change gave my parents the illusion of progress, I think, and shielded them from the disappointments of not being a doctor, or a poet. Life on the road may well have protected them a little too, from the burden of an alcoholic son.

I rarely saw them during their retirement. My visits then were almost always to their empty house, where I would air the rooms, check appliances, collect the mail and carry out perfunctory tasks in the section. It was unusual to find my parents at home. Rather I’d receive the odd text, or phone call, from Blueskin Bay, Motueka, or Rawene in the Hokianga. And when they were in residence they seemed to be incessantly unloading their lives from the mobile home, or stocking it again. Finally they expanded their peripatetic lifestyle overseas and would fly to Vancouver, Cairns or Helsinki and hire mobile homes there for extended wanderings.