The Grass Catcher Read online

  Aggie stayed put in Marlborough, though. She married her first husband, Fred Cox, in 1904 – he died a few months later, and is buried in the graveyard at Tua Marina – and married my grandfather Bertie Horne in 1906; she lived most of her life in the house I was brought up in, at 32 Francis Street, Blenheim. As the first woman to drive a motor car over the Whangamoa, Aggie might have gone a lot further if she’d had the chance. She saved up and took my mother Linda for a cruise around the Pacific islands to make up for stopping her schooling and putting her to work in the hair salon she ran – I have a small Samoan tapa cloth Linda brought back.

  Recently, when word got out that I’d been writing this book, I received a letter from a woman called Barbara Matthews. She remembered getting her hair done in ‘that small town where nothing seemed to happen’, where she lived from 1930 to 1948. She was taken by her mother to the hair salon ‘in Girlings’. Reading Mrs Matthews’ kind letter, and her reference to ‘those old Wither Hills that seemed to enclose you’, I felt the confinement of the place as well in her description of the small salon ‘in one corner of the shop’. Mrs Matthews remembered my mother as being ‘quite beautiful – tall and elegant, with lovely dark hair’.

  Through the lens of Mrs Matthews’ letter I locate that image of Linda in the small shop, the circumscribed history, the crowding hills, the bounded constituency of Wairau – and I think I understand her restlessness. I want to feel it. But then Mrs Matthews also remembered that ‘there was a lot of music in that little town’, and that there were productions at His Majesty’s Theatre, in which my mother and father may well have been involved. In the end, though, Mrs Matthews ‘became restless and just longed to leave that small town’. She became a librarian at the National Library in Wellington. My mother’s own small-town blues drove her further away than that.

  I too have the wandering gene – am restless, keen to go – when I can afford to travel, or when I can dress travel in the convenient camouflage of research – for example, into what it means to be at home, to leave it, to come back again. And so does my twin brother Dave, though in a different form. Dave and his wife Sue are often on the road, or on bikes, or tramping, or holidaying in various parts of the world – they send back snapshots of themselves on remote mountaintops, in deserts or floating down exotic rivers. They are usually grinning broadly, and in congenial company. Unlike me, they don’t bother to camouflage the fact they’re having fun by claiming to be doing anything more than travelling for the sake of it. In this they resemble our mother and father.

  The day I finally stopped dithering and sat down to begin work on this restless project was the day Jack left and his giant ancestor arrived. I had to find a place where all the coming and going stopped for a moment. It was then that I knew, or decided, where that stopping-and-starting-place is – a place I didn’t visit or revisit during the road trips of 2004, but a place I have kept revisiting one way or another all my life.

  I also recognised something that should have been obvious long before this: I’ve seldom written about anything else but coming and going from home. My first novel, Dick Seddon’s Great Dive, was about a character trying to retrace his steps towards belonging somewhere. The next, Symmes Hole, had three characters all trying to get, or find, home. In Survival Arts, Salvation is trying to find a home for his army-surplus M24 Chaffee tank (but really himself), and the book’s other characters are all bewildered by the question of where they fit in. The Viewing Platform is a satire about the institutional culture of national home-building. In Chinese Opera, the gangster Little Frank is literally dying to recover the memory of when he was at home in love. The all-at-sea food and restaurant critic in The Catastrophe hopes, hopelessly, that he can at last make himself meaningfully at home in the homeless world of the Palestinian diaspora. I wrote about my wandering sons (and their ghostly, footloose ancestors) in The Commonplace Odes.

  4.5 To my sons

  Home’s where you’re always going, it’s the place you’ve just

  Left, where your father takes all the photographs

  In the unfinished dwelling of the tribe. Tomorrow when it rains

  He’ll fix the roof, dinner’s over and music

  Still follows you into the street as night falls

  Across the face of the brooding, neighbourhood hillside.

  Hair falls across the faces of young

  Musicians. They’re dancing, their paws are running and running

  In the dream chase, their hearts are broken and they cross

  The world for love and then they come home

  Again, these flâneurs – they have eaten the meats of strange

  Lands and heard the call to prayer startle

  Doves from the battlements of seaside resorts where the gasoline

  Was cheaper than at home. They’ve been where bear hunters

  In the cold mountains make toys in the off-season.

  They bring the toys back for us to look at.

  There’s a painted doll that fits inside another,

  And so on, until the story disappears. The tall

  Stories of the tall boys. They come back

  Like their great-great-grandfathers before them, lacquer-

  Ware in their sea chests, blue plates with unicorns

  On the back, postcards of copulating gods,

  T-shirts in languages not yet spoken,

  An amulet, a faraway look. It’s great to be home

  Again, say our wandering sons, as they wave goodbye.

  Thinking about all this, I feel myself being drawn as if by an undertow towards a specific time and location in my childhood. My second cousin Paul, who sent the item about the giant Maria Wedde, also sent a DVD copy of home movies shot in the late 1940s and early ’50s by his Granny Vesey. Included is a tiny clip of Dave and I aged about four or five and dressed in white satin pageboy outfits at the wedding of Paul’s mother, our beautiful grown-up cousin Norma. The little pageboys look tired and bewildered. The smaller one with the sculpted cowlick is screwing one fist into his eye and gazing with longing at an escape route. The other twin holds his ground – he seems anxious to make sense of where he is, rather than of where he might go.

  The old movie clip immediately reminds me of a black-and-white photograph in which we hold up the train of Cousin Norma’s sumptuous wedding dress. Here, our bewilderment is replaced by function, the distressing real-time of the movie by a split second of smiling certainty. Dave looks to be doing the heavy lifting; his cowlicked twin is rather more attentive to the photo opportunity.

  And from this image – the two of us side by side, holding up the satiny shimmer of the train – I am towed away to shimmering sea. In another black-and-white photograph, taken about the same time, Dave and I are on the pebbly beach at Waikawa Bay in the Marlborough Sounds, probably at the bach my father and mother helped Bertie Horne build before we were born. I have no memory whatsoever of Norma’s wedding, only the displaced, smell- and taste-free one of the photograph. I can’t feel the weight of her sumptuous train – not because my brother’s doing all the work, but because the moment of the image is without substance. But looking at the next snapshot I can feel the weight of the large, gutted fish, half our height, which Dave and I are holding up between us against a backdrop of ruffled, shining sea and bare, burned-off hills across the bay. I can smell the fish, which is also the smell of my father’s forearms glittering with fish scales and of fish guts slithering from the bloodstained gutting board into the sea; and I can smell the popping Venus-necklace seaweed on the beach, the clay-stained water of the creek where it ran out into the bay, the bush-mould smell of the water where it was dammed further back, the smell of the long-drop dunny with its mason-fly nests of pale clay, the musty smell of the bunks we slept in on thin, lumpy squabs, the smoky wood-fire range burning manuka, fish frying on it in a heavy black pan, the fabulous aroma of the timber smokehouse up the back.

  I can taste the fried fish, and especially the little garfish we had for b
reakfast after netting them at night with a Tilley lamp over the stern of the dinghy; and I can feel the weight of the big fish Dave and I are holding in the photograph – but the sensation of that weight has been displaced into the exciting, quivering weight of fish being pulled up on a hand-line. This would have happened later, when we were old enough to go out fishing in what had been Grandfather Horne’s heavy clinker dinghy with its smoky outboard motor and its gunwales notched from years of cod lines being run across them. Those fishing trips, and others in larger launches, took us out to the kelpy reefs and deep sea-floor chasms where the tides run strongly in the narrows towards Tory Channel.

  And it’s out there, against a backdrop memory of shining, ruffled sea, and what I vividly recall of my earliest sensations, that I find the one place I can never leave and yet always return to – a kind of paradoxical eddy, at once turbulent and fixed, a whirlpool that my family ancestors seem to swirl around in, and a centre from which I go on measuring my distance from my first home-in-myself when I was separate from my mother and also from the brother who took the weight of our cousin’s bridal train, and who held the other end of the manuka stick from which the big fish hung on its knotted length of flax, its weight pulling us towards each other even as we strained to stay apart by lifting the trophy we held up between us.

  1.4 To My Twin Brother

  There are some things I still need to know:

  How can I talk to you when we have forgotten our language?

  Where can we meet now that our mother is long dead?

  How can I bring you gifts when you

  Are bringing me gifts? How could our father

  Be in the picture when he was always taking it? What

  Is this we hold up between us – is it a trophy,

  Did we compete for it, is it alive or dead? And how can

  My sons speak to your daughters

  When they have never learned our language? Where

  Can they meet now that their fathers have no place

  To meet? How can they share what they have when they have

  Nothing in common? And what is this they hold

  Up between them? Is it their grandmother’s wedding band,

  That gateway through which their fathers entered

  Life, through which their grandfather left it?

  Why are you left-handed while I am right-handed?

  Why did you have daughters while I had sons?

  Which of us could have been the other’s sister?

  And what is this we hold up between us?

  Is it perhaps a mirror? Or a moon trail

  On the placid ocean where the reflections of our mother and father

  Are not disturbed, sitting under Royal palms

  On the Picton foreshore, tinkle of jazz from the ferry,

  Sons unborn, cheek by cheek under Gemini?

  Once again, I surprise myself by remembering that I’ve thought about this before, but glancingly, so that the page of The Commonplace Odes on which that poem is written gives way quickly to the next one, on which ‘To Donna’s Young Dogs’ ends with a plea:

  Seat me

  Again at tables loaded with hope, in the baffling

  Milieu of the tribe, in its dwelling that cannot be finished,

  In a persistent shower of light like sawdust – your doggy

  Boys running home through rain to be towelled.

  There are two more photographs I’ve found while preparing to write this. Neither seemed until now to have any bearing on that diagram of counterweighted attraction and repulsion, the effort of self-identification captured by the images of heavy fish and bridal train. In one, I’m aged about eight and doing most of the holding up, this time of a dead snake hanging perpendicular between me and a boy called Billy McKenzie, a Scots kid who lived in the same place as us up the Karnaphuli River in East Pakistan in the early 1950s. Billy’s grip of the snake is wincing at best – a forefinger and thumb touching it at waist height. I, on the other hand, although wearing an expression of disgust, have hoisted the thing aloft. At very least, the occasion seemed to demand triumph, an appropriate gesture for the camera.

  In the other photograph I’m unaware of being looked at – or don’t care. Skinny, bearded, smoking a cigarette and staring off into some distance or other, I seem uninterested in two of my kids, Carlos and Conrad, and their friend Brandon. There’s no display of triumph, no mugging to the camera, and certainly no sign of the symbolic happy-family enactments that would later fill my photo albums. In the indifferent photograph, the kids and I are on the foredeck of the launch that had suddenly appeared one morning in the remote Queen Charlotte Sound bay where I’d been holed up alone for weeks, finishing off my novel Symmes Hole. My wife then, Rose, had had enough, or was worried, or both, and she came over with the kids to take me home.

  As luck would have it, I’d just finished the book, much of which was set in the Sounds around the whaling station at Arapawa Island on Tory Channel. That might be one explanation for my haggard indifference. Another might be my marooned diet of whatever fish I’d been able to catch, and cress from the creek. But the most likely one has to do with that attraction and repulsion that seems to characterise the wanderer’s feelings about home – the place you long for and long to leave; the place in which you long to immerse your identity in the tribe’s, and from which you long to be free and alone with your freedom.

  That day, returning to the ferry terminal from the western side of the Sounds, we’d have passed under the steep, rocky flank of Allport Island. I have a vivid childhood summer memory of puttering in the clinker dinghy around the Snout that separates Waikawa Bay from the harbour at Picton, and of my father tying the boat to a tree root so he could clamber up and fetch my mother a branch of crimson pohutukawa flowers. Chick, as he was known to family and friends, adored Linda – he called her Lindy. As a young man he’d bashed his face on an underwater rock after accepting a dare to dive from the crosstree of a yacht sailing in the Sounds. The damage wasn’t great but he concealed some twisting of his top lip under a jaunty moustache. The effect when he smiled was sometimes slightly unnerving – no more so than when he smiled admiringly at my mother. In many photographs of Chick gazing at Lindy across the wine glasses of dinner tables, his tipsy, adoring smile has a slightly lecherous lift to one side. She was strikingly beautiful – the family album contains many photographs of Linda as a young woman on boats in the Sounds, often surrounded by salty-looking men, the crookedly grinning Chick among them. All of them are smoking, and in some pictures my mother is wearing the heavy ivory bracelet that I would later become obsessed with.

  My mother’s vivacious beauty was clearly legendary in that region. After the publication of Symmes Hole, only days after Linda died in November 1986, I met an elderly Maori man known as Uncle Arthur, whose Waikawa Bay whanau was connected to the descendants of James ‘Worser’ Heberley, the hapless whaler hero of my novel. Uncle Arthur worked as a messenger at Parliament buildings, and after our first encounter on the occasion of the book launch we sometimes met for a beer at De Brett’s on Lambton Quay near Parliament.

  ‘Your mother was a very beautiful young woman,’ he informed me carefully. What was left politely unspoken was that he’d been besotted with her, though only a boy at the time.

  A sad phantom comes part-way into view at this stage in my hesitant return to Dieffenbach Point – the place I know I have to get back to in order to leave again on this journey home. My maternal grandfather, Herbert Stacey Horne, known as Bertie, was born in Blenheim in 1877. Among the many memories Uncle Arthur had of my mother at Waikawa Bay, the most central was of helping to launch Bertie’s heavy clinker dinghy down the beach on the mainland side of the bay – the same dinghy whose wet, cod-line-grooved gunwales were central to my childhood world. The help was needed not just because the boat was heavy but because what I came to know as our family bach was built on the Snout peninsula, across the bay from the road and the boatsheds, on land provided to Bertie
Horne by Uncle Arthur’s hapu. Uncle Arthur’s help was also needed because Bertie had only one arm. According to my mother, he’d lost the other one as the result of an accident at a farm-equipment trade show where he’d volunteered to demonstrate a new harvesting machine. One coat sleeve got caught in the conveyor, and his left arm was dragged through the sprockets.

  Why is my grandfather Bertie Horne a sad phantom? One reason is the ever-present moral of the harvester story as told by my mother. Bertie was an alcoholic, and she says he was drunk when he volunteered to demonstrate the harvester. Linda adored her father who, like his son, my Uncle Keele, was blessed with an anarchic sense of humour; as a child, however, she had also been terrified when he appeared covered in blood after yet again falling off his bicycle on his way home from the pub. She had a fear that one or another of her twins would inherit Bertie’s alcoholic gene. It was certainly her heavy smoking that killed my mother, and from time to time when she worried that I might be showing signs of inheriting the alcoholic Bertie gene we’d make a pact – Linda would knock off smoking if I’d moderate my drinking. On a couple of occasions when I stayed at her house after Chick died, we surprised each other at dead of night, she having a furtive smoke and me getting an insomniac’s shot from the liquor cabinet.

  Bertie Horne’s a sad phantom for another reason. On my mother’s death certificate her father’s Christian name is left blank. It was Dave who had to look after the official records in Auckland after our mother’s funeral, and like me he had little or no knowledge or memory of our maternal grandfather. We were apparently presented to him as babies while he was an invalid in bed at the house in Francis Street, but of course I don’t remember that. In one of only two pictures I’ve ever seen of him, he’s sitting on the front step of the house, next to the river-boulder balustrade he built, his stump arm tucked inside a pinned-up shirtsleeve, a durrie stuck to his bottom lip. Linda told me he’d been in constant pain from the botched amputation of his mangled arm but that he’d managed it with medication, had stopped drinking and had spent much of his time out at Waikawa Bay. Though there’s no evidence to support my hunch, a medical historian I talked to about Bertie agreed that he’d quite probably been put on a maintenance dosage of morphine by a friendly family doctor – not so uncommon in small-town New Zealand in the 1930s and ’40s – which would explain why he was able to knock off the booze.