I have a problem. I remember things that cannot have happened in a place that seems unlikely to exist. How to explain this? And the best place to start? I suppose that’s the problem with any story.
We were finishing tea when there was this almighty bang that could only be a car crash and that close by. The we being my former workmate Ken, his wife Cheryl, their two kids, and me. I was staying with them while doing a short course further up the line at Heretaunga. At that time they were living on the main Hutt Road. I’ve lost track of them since.
Three houses down, a chap on a motorbike had come out of a side street at some ridiculous speed and ploughed into the side of a small car. The car had been spun round to face the opposite way and its side was stove in just in front of the back seat. Both car and bike were write-offs but the elderly women in the car’s front seats were unhurt although, naturally, shaken.
The motor-cyclist was not so lucky. He lay there with his limbs at impossible angles. A goner apparently. Ken rushed back to ring the ambulance—this was pre-cellphone days—and returned with a blanket to cover the man. There was nothing else that we could do. Just keep him warm until the ambulance arrived and give the gawkers something less to look at. We knew better than to move him. His helmet was smashed but the tinted visor had somehow remained intact and I didn’t realise then that he was someone that I knew. Peter Curtis. We hadn’t met in fifteen years. Not since school.
Peter and I grew up in Kaihu. There wasn’t much there then and I understand that there is even less now. But once, before our time, it was a lively town with dance halls, a couple of blacksmiths, and quite a number of other businesses. All of them strung out along the railway line which was then a private line. I only know this because a certain ancient lady had insisted on pointing out to me exactly where each one had stood. She was harking back to the kauri days of course. That ancient was Mrs. Goddard. Among us kids, it was reckoned that she’d jumped out of the first canoe and beat the Maoris ashore. I wish now that I’d paid her more attention but you know how it is.
When we were little, the town still had a butcher’s shop and a grocer’s both opening onto the railway platform itself. Everything else was long gone. Then, first the butcher closed down and later the grocer moved out to the main highway. Before he moved, the government of the day closed and lifted the line. It was losing fifty pounds a day.
We still had a sawmill cutting radiata pine. That’s where our dads worked. There wasn’t much else around. There was a hotel to keep the dads happy. And we had a Catholic Church, they were strong there in those days, and Peter was a tyke. But so what?
Our school had only two rooms. Some people think that education has to suffer in a country school. Not so! We had a married couple and the senior girls took turns in looking after their baby over at the school house. An inspector would have been horrified but nobody seems to have lost out. They were good teachers, interested in everything, particularly in world affairs. The whole knowledge thing just seems to have rubbed off on us.
And what did we do outside school? What didn’t we do? We fished, made dams, built secret huts, raided orchards, threw mud at cars on the highway—and ran like hell.
And somehow, we always managed to get home in time for tea. I can’t help feeling sorry for city kids with their plastic and piping adventure-playgrounds. We had real life. Though of course there was a downside. We had chores that the townie kids don’t have, chopping the wood for instance, feeding the chooks and the calves.
The accident made Peter a permanent semi-invalid but it was to be many years before I knew that. The accident was mentioned in the next morning’s Dominion, we looked for it, but since no death had occurred no name was given. So I had no reason to visit him in hospital. Remember that I hadn’t seen his face.
To jump forward a few years. I moved to a new job in West Auckland and was staying with relatives until I found a place of my own. Window shopping for houses in the windows of Real Estate Agents was disheartening. Auckland prices are astronomical although one can only wonder why anyone wants to live there. I had and have little choice. The money from the house in Wellsford was hardly going to cover more than the deposit.
What finally lured me through an agent’s door I do not know. The man who limped forward to greet me, all smiles as one would expect, was strangely assembled and yet I thought, “I know this bloke.” You know how it is sometimes when it won’t quite come to you. He knew me immediately though. It was Peter. We might have the technology today but he was far from being the six million dollar man. “Motorbike accident,” he explained. “Back when I was young and silly. But by working hard I’ve managed to get over the young part.” I guessed that that was his standard joke. Further conversation established that his accident was ’that’ accident.
He could probably have lived off the government with those injuries but that’s not Peter. He sells property and he’s good at it, wins awards. He dismisses this ability by saying that it’s just that everybody feels sorry for him. “And what are you looking for,” he asked. “Something that’s dirt cheap.” He laughed. “This is Auckland my son. Not Neverland.”
But he did have something that might interest me, something that he was interested in himself, two flats tucked in behind a block of shops, very private. They needed a bit of work and were going cheap. Except that for some reason they were not going. He had thought of living in one himself, doing the other up and putting in a tenant to pay the mortgage. With our combined capital, we probably wouldn’t need a mortgage.
So that’s how we came to be living in adjoining flats. Peter has never married and I was married for a while some years ago but that’s something that I’d rather not go into. We are not in each others’s pockets. He has his life and I have mine. We might not catch each other for a week at a time but every so often the phone goes,”Are ya doin’ anythin’?” We have a few beers, play Cribbage, Gin Rummy, watch the footy. If he’s having some of his recurring pain, I’ll go over and sit with him and do what little I can to help.
Naturally, our mutual past cropped up and it’s here that the trouble began. Somehow we seem to have shared two pasts both of them equally real. I refuse to believe that we go through an endless cycle of lives so these two pasts have to be part of our present life and this cannot be. Yet I have no difficulty in accepting it. Peter accepts it too.
It sort of burst in on us. We were watching a Super 12 match and there was this bad tackle that had one of the players limping off. “Sister Maria Augusta,” said Peter and he was right. It was her walk exactly, something that we used to snigger at. Her hip was the problem and we were being cruel although, in truth, we were scared of her.
There is this other valley and this other small town, Rizo, in which we also lived as boys. It climbs up and perches above a narrow valley floor. I have no idea where it might be. The name appears in no gazeteer. We were entirely insular, a world to ourselves. We considered ourselves to be no part of any nation. Anger still festered from a previous generation which saw some of our young men taken by force to fight in a war that did not concern us. They did not return.
The houses there are old, stone built, with white-washed stucco and red tiles of our local clay. The streets are cobbled and narrow. We are inter-related and poor without really knowing it. Above the town, the land rises steeply with rocky outcrops and every accessible part is planted with vines and olives. The vines are supported by a crazy mesh of long fallen olive branches. There is little other timber available. Any forests that might once have existed would have been razed at least a thousand years ago.
One way in which Rizo and Kaihu are alike in our boyhood is in having a railway passing through although there could be no comparison between the two sets of rail. Our Rizo railway was extremely light and narrow-gauge. Memory suggests two-foot gauge which would point to its contractor being a British company. The line had only the one small saddle-tank loco and very little rolling stock. The train travelled up and down from the port twice a week to service our own and a number of other small towns. Its arrival was always an event. It had a passenger coach but that appears to have been little used except by commercial agents from firms at the port.
We had a mayor and town council although Father Gaspari tended to have the final say in most things. It was natural to defer to him. He represented The Holy Mother Church, came from the world outside, and was the only one in our town with any pretention to a higher education. We children were taught by the Carthusian Sisters and our education was very basic, geared mostly to the preservation of The church with the priesthood being constantly held up as something to be aspired to, ’the highest possible calling’, ‘an honour to one’s family’.
Can you believe that I once saw myself becoming a priest? Both Pieta (Peter) and I were altar boys and I am sure that we looked angelic. That is, apart from any facial bruises that our mothers couldn’t hide. Like most boys we got into plenty of scraps. We also stole fruit, mostly melons, grapes, and tomatoes, (in Kaihu it was plums and apples) and sometimes a led donkey would jump and kick when a stone hit its rump. An act of God surely. There’d be not a boy in sight.
A psychologist would probably call this a shared delusion, a delusion that Peter and I have fed, and there are certainly any number of cases to back their argument. In some cases the madness has involved large crowds. As to the apparent reality of these memories they would probably explain this as being the seeming verity that a story can come to have for its author. But I cannot buy that. Somehow, Rizo had been lurking, complete, needing only a twitch of the curtain to stand revealed. Like any other town it is a complex entity beyond my own invention. Ask for anything that could have come within my young cognizance and you will have it immediately.
So I have a seamless self, provable from birth, who has never seen the inside of a Catholic church and also claim an unprovable self who is a lapsed Catholic and as a child learned his catechism by rote. But it begs the question of how I can confidently repeat that catechism , the questions and the responses, repeat the prayers. Perhaps a rosary in my hand might convince you. And I know that I am word perfect even though they are words that I do not now understand.
But understand them or not, they are constantly on my lips and their familiarity is strangely comforting.