The Good Ol' Days

Yet another short story... This one I wrote around October or November 2013. I should say something about it. It is set in 1981 during the Springbok Rugby tour of New Zealand (I was two years old at the time). Because there should was a sporting boycott on South Africa, New Zealand anti-apartheid protestors took to the streets and sportsgrounds to agitate and otherwise to try to prevent the tour going ahead. This is the context of the story

I shold also say something else about it. In my stories I can be subtle, perhaps oversubtle. This story is also concerned with lead pollution, with the fact that in the later half of the last century there was very probably widespread brain damage associated with lead in paint and petrol. This theme is so subtle that it can be easily missed. If you are interested in the lead epidemic of the twentieth century, check out "Lead: America's Real Criminal Element" on Mother Jones or listen to the song "Gaskrankinstation" by the Headless Chickens, a great New Zealand Band from the 'eighties and 'nineties.

The Good Ol’ Days

The paint was fraying from the banister. Terry picked at it while he waited for Kathy to arrive and thought about the general decrepitude of the house – the peeling wallpaper, the empty beer bottles scattered across the floor of the lounge, the dishes gathering mould in the sink. The hot water cylinder was broken. Terry’s flatmate Brian had asked the landlord to do something about it; the landlord – a fervent Tour supporter who thought the protesters were all hippies and had burst capillaries all over his nose - had looked around pointedly, thrust out his chin and asked sarcastically if they wanted to go to the tenancy tribunal. Terry thought about all this while he stood on the deck and waited for Kathy to arrive with the car. He had a headache, a dull pounding behind his forehead. He didn’t think it could be withdrawal. You couldn’t get addicted to heroin if you’ve only tried it once.

            Headlights swept across the garden, picking up the bamboo and then Terry, standing in his leather jacket and black jeans on the veranda. Terry was skinny to the point of emaciation and emanated a kind of sickly, wasted aura. There was a Sex Pistols sticker on his jacket but that was Terry – always five years behind the times. When Kathy stopped the car, he ran around the back to get in. As he ran, he caught a whiff of exhaust from the idling car, a sweet smell that he’d associated with petrol stations ever since childhood and which he had always quite liked. He arrived at the side door, opened it and climbed in the passenger seat.

            The stray thought, “It hurts!” passed through his brain.

             “Have you got everything?” asked Kathy.

            “I think so.”

            “Good. Let’s go!” she said. And then screamed for no reason.

            Kathy was twenty-two, the same age as Terry. They had met a year ago at a Ban the Bomb march on Queen Street, found that they had a couple of mutual acquaintances and had started hanging out on an weekly basis. Neither one of them enjoyed very many friends and their alliance was partly based on convenience, partly on desperation. Terry looked sidelong at her. Ordinarily Kathy would be listening to the current top ten but tonight she had the radio tuned to the news. Kathy was wearing a denim jacket, a short leather skirt and had her hair gelled up in spikes. Terry often entertained romantic thoughts about Kathy, and frequently lusted after her in his private moments, but the times he had made sexual advances towards her – an arm around her shoulders walking away from a gig, a hand on her knee when they were sitting at his place listening to a Clash record – she would flinch and shift away. Seriously, he thought she might be frigid. Still he continued to hang on and hope. Tonight, he knew, though, would be the same as any other night they went into town: an aimless drifting from bar to bar interspersed by jugs of cheap piss and conversations about politics until one or both of them would have to excuse themselves and go vomit in the bathroom.

            The car flew through the night on rain-slicked streets. It was very cold.

            “Are you going to watch the wedding?” asked Kathy.

            “Probably not. All this Royal bullshit makes me nauseous. People bowing and scraping to a bunch of rich inbred tossers in fancy clothes. The fact that we’re still ruled over by a Queen is ridiculous. It’s just stupid.”

            “I’m going to watch it,” said Kathy firmly. “I want to see what Diana is wearing. Even if the monarchy is an obsolete institution and an historical anachronism.  I hear that they’re planning to honeymoon in Gibraltar.”

            The news muttered away in the background. Apparently there had been a riot or something in Wellington, a street battle between anti-apartheid demonstrators and the police, but Terry found it difficult to concentrate on the report as a consequence of his headache. He decided to wait until tomorrow and read about it in the paper.

            When the man had come over the other night, the three of them – Terry, the man and Brian– had sat around the lounge for a while and made small talk. The man was a paid-up member of the Communist party and expressed strong opinions on a number of subjects. They’d talked about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and exchanged theories about why the CIA might have assassinated Norman Kirk. Terry had picked at the yellow foam spilling from a tear in the sofa and watched a mosquito buzzing between the corner of the room and the bare light bulb in the centre of the ceiling; the whole vibe felt slightly awkward and forced. There they were, the three of them, going through the motions of pretending the man was there on a social visit when really they all knew he was a dealer come to negotiate a business transaction. Eventually though he’d come to the point. I’ve a special sale going, he said, for virgin users who want a good time.

            “Shit,” said Kathy suddenly.

            “What?”

            “I think I’ve left my purse behind. Can you check the back seat for me?”

            Terry turned and rummaged around the back.

            “No. It’s not there.”

            “Shit. We’d better go home so I can get it.” Kathy indicated and executed a sharp u-turn.

            Kathy lived with her elderly aunt in a state house in Kohimaramara. The aunt had taken her in during the spring of the year before when Kathy’s mother had committed suicide, an overdose of sleeping pills. The front curtains of the house were open and light spilled into the garden. Terry suggested he wait in the car while Kathy recovered her purse.

            “You might as well come in,” said Kathy. “You can say hello to my aunt.”

            Kathy opened the front door – it was unlocked – and Terry followed her gingerly into the house. In the sitting room, Terry saw, the aunt was hosting a small gathering, a man and woman as old as she was. The three old people were sitting on sofas around a small table, on which sat a plate of wine biscuits, balancing china cups full of tea in their knees. When she saw Kathy, the aunt’s creased face lifted in a smile that exposed the gold fillings in her incisors.

            “Kathy! You’re back early!”

            “I’m just here to pick up my purse. I left it behind.”

            “We’re not staying long,” said Terry quickly.

            “That’s fine, dear! Don’t mind us.”

            “I’ll go get it from my room,” said Kathy.

            Kathy often saw auras, especially in the months since her mother had committed suicide. Walking to and from her job at the garments factory, the people she passed seemed surrounded by radioactive clouds, shifting prismatic halos in blue or yellow shot through with vermilion and magenta. For some reason, she related these auras to health. She seemed able to see how healthy people were. But more and more these days, the people she saw when she walked seemed sick; it was as though a great pall of illness hung over the city, a fog of sickness compounded of beer fumes, car exhaust, ignorance and stupidity. It seemed to her that the illness was spreading. The world was broken and nobody was prepared to fix it.

            “I’ll just be a minute,” she said.

            “Why don’t you sit down?” said the aunt to Terry. “Albert, Anne, this is Terry, a friend of Kathy’s. Terry, these are my old friends Albert and Anne Galbraith.”

            “Say hello to Terry!” said Anne loudly to her husband. Albert grunted inarticulately.

            “You can do better than that, Albert!” She leaned forward confidentially. “Poor darling had a stroke last year. He hasn’t been quite the same since.”

            Now that Terry had opportunity to look at him properly, he could see that one side of Albert’s face seemed to sag in such a way that, even though he was obviously trying to smile in an amiable way, the effect was as though an unseen puppeteer was lifting one corner of his mouth with an invisible string. Terry perched uncomfortably on an armrest and looked around. He’d never liked Kathy’s aunt’s house. To him the place always seemed to have a kind of antiseptic quality, a feel and smell he associated with rest homes and hospitals. As always the air in the house carried a hint of boiled cabbage; he could just about taste it. He massaged his forehead as if he could knuckle away the headache.

            “Do any of you know anything about some kind of incident in Wellington?” he asked tentatively. “Some kind of riot or…”

            The aunt batted aside his question.

            “We’ve been talking about the Royal wedding! We’re all quite obsessed by it. It’s so heartening to think of that nice young man Charles finally getting married. And to such a sweet looking girl too! A kindergarten teacher…”

            “It’s like a fairy tale,” said Anne. “That’s what it’s like.”

            “I think it’s wonderful. You know, there are some people who think we should get rid of the royal family. But I think they’re just ungrateful. We’re British after all. Personally…” The aunt paused for effect. “Personally I’ve always found it such a consolation imagining Elizabeth and Phillip up there. Looking down over us. Such a reassurance.”

            “It’s what we fought the War for,” said Anne briefly. “Albert got gassed during the War. In Greece. They say they didn’t use gas but really they did. Didn’t they Albert?”

            Albert grunted once more, presumably in confirmation.

            Terry rubbed his forehead again. The stray thought, “It hurts!” passed through his brain.

            “Excuse me,” he said. “Do you mind if I use the bathroom?”

            “Of course not Terry.”

            Terry stood and walked out of the living room into the corridor. On the door to the bathroom hung a yellowing calendar showing bucolic scenes of lambs frolicking in lush English pastures. Terry opened the door and went inside; the medicine cabinet was on his left going in. After Terry had urinated, he pulled ajar the door of the cabinet and started furtively rummaging through the contents. He felt a little guilty about ransacking the aunt’s mediation without her permission but what he wanted, what he really needed, was something to kill the pain in his head. The inventory of the cabinet was a glossary on the ailments of the old - in addition to band-aids, bandages and disinfectant, he found cough syrup for bronchitis, cream for lumbago, antacids for indigestion, pills for gout and constipation and even a bottle of cod-liver oil that had obviously not been touched for years as the lid was crusted shut - but what he couldn’t find, in fact, was any analgesic stronger than Aspirin. Did the aunt never get a migraine or a head cold? At last he decided to take an Aspirin, washing it down with a glass of cloudy water from the tap, and returned to the sitting room. The pounding in his head felt stronger than ever.

            The aunt and her friends were still talking about the War.

            “Do you remember the rationing?” said Anne. “I remember how hard it was to find a tub of butter. And you couldn’t get a leg of lamb for love nor money.”

            “I remember when the Americans would drop anchor in the harbour and the sailors would come into town on shore leave,” said the aunt. “Such strapping, fit young men all done up in their uniforms! They would come to the dances when the big bands played. You know, there was one of them took a fancy to me but, of course, I was stepping out with George at the time. I look back at myself and I think ‘what a silly young girl’.” The aunt laughed a little partly out of embarrassment and partly out of remembered lasciviousness. “But of course that’s the story of youth. Missed opportunities.”

            If Terry were to be honest with himself, he would have to admit that most of his political attitudes had been shaped by a desire to impress Kathy. Even when he had attended the Ban the Bomb rally, that time they had first met, it had been more because Brian had persuaded him that it would be a cool thing to do rather than out of any deep solidarity with the cause of nuclear disarmament. It was Brian who had introduced him to the punky looking girl with the anti-Muldoon placard. Since then Terry had become much more politically active and had even started showing up to Union meetings that he had no particular interest in but which he made sure he told Kathy about afterwards. He had joined the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and started volunteering at the City Mission. He had even become a vegetarian for her sake. It seemed like a lot of effort to go to for a girl who was probably frigid.

            “Have you any idea why Kathy is taking so long?” he asked the aunt.

            “Of course, Charles has served in the military himself,” said the aunt to Anne, ignoring him. “He’s a Commander in the Royal Navy. I shouldn’t be surprised if he attends the ceremony in his naval uniform. Don’t you think that would be splendid?”

            “I’m not so interested in what Charles wears,” replied Anne. “It’s what Diana wears that I want to see. I want to see her dress.”

What with his headache, Terry found it difficult to remain patient with all this talk. After all, why should anyone care what the hell some stupid posh bitch wore to her wedding? It was all beside the point. Perhaps, Terry thought, this was what hell was like: an eternity spent trapped with a bunch of old women gossiping about upcoming Royal nuptials in a small room smelling of linemen and boiled cabbage.

“I’m just going to see what’s keeping her,” he told the aunt.

After he and Brian had shot up, they had lain on the floor of the lounge for a while. Terry had felt fantastic, as though he was levitating.  After he’d lain there for a while, he’d decided, for some reason, to have a shower. The hot water felt fantastic and he had suddenly developed the strong impression, while standing in the shower, strangely but not unpleasantly, that the top of his skull had lifted off his head and was floating six inches above his exposed brain. He felt fantastic and wanted only to feel this way forever. He tilted his head back to allow the water to rain into his mouth. And then screamed for no reason. That was the night the hot water cylinder broke.

            When Terry arrived at Kathy’s room, he found the door ajar. He pushed it open. The light was off so he fumbled for the light switch and switched it on. Kathy, he saw, was lying, fully dressed, with her face down in a pillow, in bed.

            “Kathy, are you alright? What are you doing in bed?”

            “I was looking for my purse and I couldn’t find it and so I thought… I’d just lie down for a moment…”

            “You couldn’t find your purse? Look, it’s right here – behind the door.”

            Kathy didn’t answer. Terry moved across the room and kneeled by the bed.

            “What’s wrong, Kathy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look,” he said. “If you don’t want to go out tonight anymore, that’s all right. I’ll uh… I’ll find my own way home…”

            Kathy turned her head to look at him. He saw that her face was streaked with tears. She was very beautiful.

            “Terry, do you think things will ever get better?”

            Terry hesitated. He didn’t know what to say.

            “Yeah, well,” he said at last. “I’m sure things aren’t going to be this way forever, I mean…” He lifted his hands, helplessly, giving up. “I mean, I really don’t know.”

            From that night on and for the rest of the tour, after the events at Molesworth Street, the protestors took to wearing helmets to protect their heads from the nightsticks of the police.