Access Road by Maurice Gee

Only Dickie could fall from the geographical centre of the house and end up in the cactus garden. I was in bed reading Georgette Heyer when I heard him come in the front door and pant his way upwards. He stopped at the top of the stairs to heave a sigh, then his feet drummed backwards and the landing window exploded. I ran down in my nightie, put my head through the hole he'd made and saw him lying cruciﬁed in the upturned pots.

'You fool, Dickie, you've done it now,' I cried.

Blood shone like toffee on his face, and his drinker's belly seemed deﬂated. Yet he opened one eye and tried to smile: 'Care to join me?'

'Oh, shut up,' I said; and said it again, after struggling with the door and picking barefooted through knives of glass and toads of cactus.

He was rolling his head as though searching for something: 'Somebody shifted the top step.'

He's not accident-prone, he's a boozer. And he's not stupid, just extravagant. Later, after I'd pulled on my coat and slippers and ferried him to the hospital and had him handed back to me, stitched as neatly as a torn shirt, and he had downed a snort 'to settle his nerves' – but he's nerveless, Dickie – and we were lying in our beds (Georgette trodden under his hoof), he fell to boasting, making a story of it, as I'd known he would.

'Leaned back for the light switch, Boatie, and tangled me feet and did two whole somersaults before I hit the landing. I must've bounced like a tennis ball straight through the bloody glass, how about that? Then six foot down on to the cactus shelves, broke me fall and you know what? There's not a prickle in me. I'm too tough.'

'Just thirty-nine stitches,' I said. 'Now be quiet and go to sleep. No, stay in your own bed. I'll punch you if you come near me.'

He groaned and fell back, and I said, 'Serves you right.' He had bruised his hip and grazed his elbows, and had a glass-cut shaped like a smile in his calf.

I shook one of my precious Zopiclone into his palm and let him wash it down with whisky, which I shouldn't have, but what the hell. He's seventy-nine, I'm seventy-eight. We've agreed on it: What the hell!

'Thank you, Boatie,' he said meekly.

I'd better explain that name. I'm Rowan Pinker, née Rowan Beach, and when we were young, many years ago, and Dickie was making love to me, he used to joke that he was Rowan his boat – hence Boatie, by degrees. It was a name I wore with secret delight; then for years I hated it and banned it from our vocabulary. Now I quite like it on occasions.

'Go to sleep, Dickie. You've done enough for one night.'

I wrapped a towel around his pillow to soak up the blood. It looked like a butcher's apron in the morning. And rumpled old Dickie could hardly move. He was one purple bruise, and he deserved it.

I let him lie a while, let him inch his way to the toilet and back; then propped him up and brought him breakfast on a tray. I could have given him muesli – 'fowl mash' – but softened sufﬁciently for porridge, cream, brown sugar and a dob of strawberry jam, and gave him his favourite compliment: 'You stupid old git.' When he had ﬁnished I carried in, like a surprise in my clenched hand, Cartia, Lipex, Betaloc, and waited to make sure he swallowed them.

I don't want Dickie dead yet. I want to go ﬁrst. 'What the hell!' is the starter's call in a race. He hears it too – and yet I ask, how does all this jokiness and toughness sit with love? He doesn't ask the question; he's having too much fun – but I think of his tenderness and care when I'm sick: putting cold ﬂannels on my brow, tucking me in and kissing me goodnight. I do the same for him, and sponge his wounds and change his mucky dressings. It's love of a sort, our invention, behind which no anxiety lurks – although I'd better speak just for myself. It hasn't got the freshness and delight of our ﬁrst years, but ease and humour in their place, and a wonderful absence of the bitterness in me and cruelty in him that made a wasteland of our middle years.

I won't go there, and when I do, if I must, I won't hang around.

In the meantime, Cheryl came. She wanted to laugh and wanted to cry, and studied him with leaking eyes that soon needed repairing. She threw off her linen jacket to stop blood getting on it, and knelt like Mary Magdalene and took him in her arms. When she detached there was red on her blouse. She pulled the cloth away from her skin, making a sound of disgust, then hugged him again. Such love! I get no look in, although the dear girl – dear woman of ﬁfty – lies at the centre of my heart.

I did not want a Cheryl, but agreed, to save her from worse – candyﬂoss names, euphonic horrors, were coming in. I wanted Helen. Dickie won the ﬁght and our daughter grew up satisﬁed with her pretty name. Now she's a much-loved stranger, intimately known and not understood. Busy-busy with her job, and busy with an activity she calls dating, pronouncing that juvenile term with assurance. Divorced from her husband, dislocated (her term) from several partners, still she tries. She's full of experience and not in the least surprised by failing love, but cries like a teenager at betrayal. At the moment she's without a live-in partner and so has time for Dickie and me, and for trans-Tasman interference in her sons' lives. (Rufus is in Sydney and Simon in Perth, where he has ambitions to get even further away.)

When Dickie started boasting about his fall – practising the story he'd tell at his club – and Cheryl responded with cross exclamations and grins of delight, I excused myself and phoned our handyman to clean up the glass. I pulled on my gardening gloves and stepped among the wreckage – scimitars and sheets of ice and diamonds and tears – picking up my cactus plants and lining them up along the patio wall. I don't much like cactuses. They're a test. Can I make these things that hate me reward my perseverance with a ﬂower? Can I coax out beauty from those spines and ﬁsts? And cactuses are part of my conversation – call it a game – with Dickie, who's a rose man.

Roses ambushed him. When we bought this house, they were in possession and we made ready to pull them out, but spring came along and the buds burst out, delighting us with their complexity, simplicity, colours, perfume, their tenderness and boldness and profusion. Mine, I said. I wanted them. Mine, said Dickie, more slowly and with puzzlement, but with a rounder view soon reinforced by knowledge. He knows aphids, he knows black spot – he carries a rose gun – and mulching and pruning, all those things. Roses are not a test with him as cactuses are with me, they're a contest. He plays fair and steady all season – plays hard too, against what he calls the best defensive system in nature – and wins with an array of perfect blooms. Dickie sheds blood for his roses. He won't wear gardening gloves, likes to give the thorns a crack at him. They jag and scratch his hands and arms and sometimes his face; they fester and sting; but Dickie earns another unfolding. I've seen him hold a full-blown rose in his hands like a child's face. He buries his torn cheeks in the petals and drinks the perfume. It's a consummation.

These are some of the things that make me put up with Dickie Pinker; and putting-up-with, at my time of life, is only a nudge away from love.

But roses don't come ﬁrst in his life. Cheryl and I come ﬁrst; it's a dead heat. Then comes his club. Then bowls. Then rugby. Rufus and Simon don't make the list – they're a generation too far. He's not even interested in what they're doing, and when he senses failure in this sends them presents of money. I'm sure they prefer it to Dickie's attention.

My brothers, Lionel and Roly, come nowhere. But I'll leave Lionel and Roly for later on.

Griff, our handyman, arrived (Dickie gets on ﬁrst-name terms with everyone who knocks). He cleaned up the broken glass and set up my cactus stands again, then phoned a glazier. Dickie had Cheryl call Griff upstairs for a wee nip, which she made sure was 'wee', and watered down too. She and I walked on the beach. The tide lay half out. A spring breeze rippled the sea and brought up goose bumps on Cheryl's arms, which she folded on her chest to hide her bloodstained blouse. She was wearing shoes awkward for sand-walking, so we found a place to sit on a stone wall.

'Don't you let him go to the club,' she said.

'Do you really think I can stop him?'

'You should put your foot down, Mum. I would. I'd . . .' Dickie, his intransigence, was too strong in her mind for the sentence to go anywhere. She lit a cigarette instead, and stubbed it out after a puff because she's given up.

'He could have been killed.'

I did not say what I thought: that heart attack or stroke could whack him like a hammer any day. Observed instead that all of us can be killed at any old time – to which she answered angrily, 'Oh, Mum.'Then, re-hearing my remark, shot a look at me and held it steady: 'Are you all right?'

'Yes, I'm ﬁne.' No health worries to speak of, no death worries, just intermittent stress, which is no stress at all, and sleepless nights, and brothers and a husband, and a daughter whose unhappiness makes me unhappy. She's happy now, though, because there's a new man in the ofﬁng. She sold him an apartment, after warning him of trafﬁc noise, which she wasn't obliged to do. He's a little deaf, so it doesn't matter; and he appreciates her honesty. He has asked her in for drinks – my pretty, hopeful, sweet-smelling daughter. I hope . . . Those words, those stops, make a diagram of where I'm at.

We scurried back along the beach in front of the rising wind. Dickie and Griff were on their second Black.

(Dickie has two drinks: Johnny Walker Black Label, and a malt with an unpronounceable name for special occasions. Both are ugly brews as far as I'm concerned. I sip sherry, very dry.) I sent our handyman away with what my mother would have called a ﬂea in his ear. I sent Cheryl away, after lending her a blouse so her bloodstains wouldn't scare the rich American she was showing a cliff-top house to in Torbay.

Dickie was tired, he was groggy, he was hurting. I put him to sleep with Panadeine and told the glazier to be as quiet as he could. Then I lay down on the chaise longue in the lounge, and slept a little and dreamed unpleasantly. I'm dogged by anxiety dreams, and this time there was a long way to go and no time left and I was still in my nightie. Then I was in the car, which was rolling backwards down a hill towards the sea no matter how hard I stood on the brake. I woke with a start and found the sun on my face, and my foot – the brake foot – numb, and heard Dickie calling my name. He had been dreaming too. His dream was that I'd left him.

'Fat chance,' I said, stroking the half-dozen hairs off his brow.

So the day went on, and the next, and the next. I've put aside 'What the hell' until his stitches are out.

His friends came in and he entertained them. They drank cups of tea – even that loosely tied parcel of appetites, Ron Stock. Dickie improved his story. His number of stitches grew. I found the process interesting. His was a drunkard's fall. Looseness, mental as well as physical, saved him, but he inserted quickness and intention – a shoulder at the glass to drive the falling blades away, a forearm guarding his throat to save his jugular. What would he invent next? I'm reminded that he played rugby for Auckland – I used to watch him – and that he was 'nearly an All Black'. (The number of 'nearly' All Blacks I've met!) I'm familiar with the stories of his best tries, the men he beat with a change of pace or a dummy, his dive for the corner; and now he's diving into the cactus garden. That's all right. But I won't let Ron Stock get away with his smug assumption that he knows Dickie better than I. They were business partners, no more than that. I ordered him out when I caught him tipping whisky from his monogrammed hipﬂask into Dickie's tea; and might have bumped him accidentally at the top of the stairs if the painter hadn't been busy with an undercoat on the new window surrounds.

This afternoon, after a week in which 'What the hell' has been on hold, Dickie is at his club again. His stitches don't come out for another few days, and I'm anxious for that – anxious for a return to our non-anxiety. I haven't enjoyed holding him in check. But I was pleased to see him stop in the rose garden as he left and wipe out a colony of aphids with his thumb. Yellow-thumbed, he was off up the road without a backward glance – dear Dickie Pinker, whom I loved once, and almost hated once, and now almost love again. I watched him out of sight, then walked on the beach – ﬁrm sand, small waves, a pale inverted sky. I reached the far end and strode home happy. A cup of tea, a clean page: I attempted a poem, which curled up and died on line two for want of a rhyme. Never mind. Poetry is written by poets and most of them don't bother with rhyming any more. I wish I understood that. I once rhymed Pinker with stinker. I rhymed Dick with prick. And the boys at Loomis School mis-rhymed Beach with bitch: 'Rowan Beach is a skinny bitch.' I was thin in those days (I'm lean now). I had legs like a racehorse and won all the running races at the school sports.

Memories serve me better than poetry.

For my dinner I fried gurnard ﬁllets in butter and boiled the ﬁrst asparagus of the season. I ate off a tray, watching the TV news, and saw policemen dressed like storm-troopers throw tear-gas canisters through the window of a house in Loomis. It was not my brothers' house, not their street (my street). It would take more than tear gas to get Lionel out of bed. But two old men living together like Lionel and Roly might very well stage a 'domestic incident'.

I put my tray aside and telephoned them, but as usual nobody answered. Lionel won't, and Roly is in the garden as long as the light lasts, which now we're into daylight saving is close to eight o'clock. I don't worry about them. I've stopped that. When I think of them, it's fondly, as a rule, and then I become retrogressive, deeply retrogressive, and so much enjoy it that sometimes hours will go by before I spring back into Takapuna, Dickie, and dishes in the sink and the vacuuming to be done. Where have I been? What have I seen?

A muddy street, a clay bank, a little weatherboard house with a leadlight window in the front wall. The evening sun strikes through a rose with blood-red petals and pea-green leaves and makes opposing handprints on my bedroom door. Out in the twilight Roly carves a mountain road in the clay bank and drives his Dinky car along it. Lionel throws his sheath knife at a piece of cardboard tacked to the pine tree in the top corner of the section. He takes no notice of our mother calling him. Dad gets his razor strop from the bathroom and whacks it on the tank stand – a crack like a gunshot that brings Lionel skulking in with his knife in its sheath. Roly hears it too and comes running. Both have muddy feet, and our mother sends them into the wash-house to sit in the tubs and get every bit of mud out from between their toes before she'll allow them in the kitchen. Lionel has stubbed his big toe. The ﬂap of skin opens like a cupboard door. She paints it with iodine, which makes him yelp, and bandages it with a strip of rag torn off a shirt. Then we sit down to eat – and what meal shall I choose? A mincemeat stew with boiled cabbage and boiled potatoes? I hated it then and love the memory now: the grey mince, the soggy cabbage like a pale green cowpat, the potatoes like cakes of soap. And yet, like my brothers, I gobbled it, and mightn't it be closer to the truth to say that I hate it now and loved it then? I was no soft, superior girl. I came in hungry after climbing trees and crawling through culverts and throwing Lionel's sheath knife at the pine tree when he'd let me. I made it stick in a few times. I can't remember ever refusing food. My favourite was a beef stew made from rag-end meat – lots of fat – and, if we were lucky, a doughboy on top. How did I stay skinny after that? There were sausages fried and sausages curried and sausages baked in a batter pie. There was rice pudding and sago pudding and custard. Bread pudding too, I didn't mind that. We ate cheap food and plenty of vegetables – silverbeet, curly kale, runner beans, butter beans out of Dad's garden . . . How memory drifts from people to things and back again, and on to events, and out to places, out to landscapes – the faraway hills – and lifts away layers of inconsequence and melts the years to nothing like the morning sun with a fog . . .

Memory leaves me with clammy sticks of asparagus and cold gurnard fillets. It interferes with Georgette when I settle in the corner of the sofa to read. It's like that with me. Loomis builds into an imperative. I must take time away from Dickie Pinker. He can manage for an afternoon. Tomorrow I'll commandeer the car and drive into the west, towards those hills far away, and ﬁnd Access Road, where my brothers wait, silent, gruff and dirty, in the little house where I grew up.

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