‘They’ve found some of Reggie Kingsley’s things,’ my mother said to Gladys.
Mid-winter sunshine was slanting through the venetian blinds and across the sofa and the velvet cushion embroidered with VISIT FRIENDLY FIJI in sparkling sequins. My mother inhaled on a du Maurier. On exhaling, she added, ‘Yes, his bankbook in Pukekura Park, and his jacket with a letter in it at Ngamotu Beach. How can a young man just go missing?’
My mother looked at me. I couldn’t tell if she were imparting caution or sadness at imagining Reggie in trouble. That he had just vanished for over a week, had not sent a message, nothing, was to me as vast and mysterious as the ocean’s roar in an empty seashell.
Danger lurked in Reggie’s disappearance. My thoughts jumped to the novel under the crystal lampshade on my mother’s bedside table. It had beckoned me with its cover of a voluptuous white woman in a pink bodice with a black male slave standing above her, its title, Southern Heat, in the colour of blood. I’d lain on my bed and rushed through the pages about the muscular man—slave on mistress, cream-coloured breasts, the ebony tool ‘magnificent in its manhood’, the ever-lurking dangers, the crescendo, the tragic end.
The way my mother’s eyes were looking at me made me think about the white woman in the pink bodice and the way things ended for her. And what happened to the African slave was unbearable.
‘Everything is such a mystery these days,’ my mother said.
I pictured Reggie when he had entered my bedroom that night some weeks earlier as I lay in bed reading a novel: him leaning down, whispering, ‘kissy, kissy’, his glossy lips rounded, the mascara thickening his eyelashes. Now he had been missing for eight days and my feelings of unease heightened. The thought of so many tragic endings merged in my head. I felt as if I were simultaneously in Alabama where slaves were brutalised, and in Pukekura Park where magpies squawked in giant macrocarpa, and at Ngamotu Beach where merchant sailors wandered about and drank and bashed each other up. ‘But Pukekura Park and Ngamotu Beach are miles apart,’ said Gladys, placing a teacup on the tray, her knotted finger with its long yellow nail poking through the delicate handle.
He had just vanished for over a week, had not sent a message, nothing.
I heard Father O’Brian shout from the pulpit in his Irish accent, Repent your sins, for you are at peril of death at any moment! We were Catholics, at least my mother was. My father had converted in order to marry her, then refused to be a part of what he said was a lot of nonsense. Saint Joseph’s Catholic Church, with its faded wood facade and corrugated iron roof tarnished over the decades, was on our street. The hydrangeas surrounding it floated cloud-like, their white, scentless blooms innocent of the sensuality that the priests preached about at Mass. And every second Sunday I was there as altar boy, looking up at the pulpit as a priest admonished the worshippers, his words a litany of fear and trembling.
Gladys was short, plump and powdered. She reminded me of the dwarf lady holding a sceptre and wearing a royal velveteen gown and tinsel crown at the New Plymouth Queen’s Hall when the Amazing Ambrozy Polish Circus had visited. Crowds had swarmed to see the dwarf lady in the regal outfit, the Polish jugglers, and a mangy orange lion with a fake arm in its mouth. Looking up at my mother, who was much taller, Gladys said, ‘It’s a curious thing that a bachelor like Reggie would be alone in a park and at a beach at night.’ Gladys’s powdered wrinkles were highlighted as the sunlight moved across her face. She raised her thick eyebrows. ‘Pukekura Park and Ngamotu Beach are miles apart and he doesn’t have a car. A single man on a park bench waiting for what? Alone at the beach? You know what people think about that.’
My mother was a social smoker, as she called it. I watched her draw in as Gladys retreated across the living room, holding the tray, tiptoeing on account of her arthritis.
I asked my mother as she exhaled, her head back, her long neck like the ballerina in the white tutu in the painting hanging above the record player, ‘Why is Reggie missing?’
‘Miss, missing, mustn’t, musing. What a confusing language English is, which is why your Nana can never get it right,’ she said. ‘Mister, misses, masses, muses, Moses, smothers. Arabic has none of that ambiguity.’
She patted her beehive and laughed and turned to the record player and with her long fingers, marcasite bracelet dangling at her wrist, she clicked the bakelite arm. The second the needle hit the shining black disc—which always made me think of spinning galaxies—that voice wailed, and my mother said, ‘I should have been a famous Greek opera singer and not a hotel proprietress in New Plymouth.’ She looked about, as if at everything she did not possess that the diva did: the yacht, the jewels, the glamorous friends, and said, ‘Everything is about language, Godfrey, how we think and say things.’
I liked Reggie a lot even if he was small and bony and minced and used lip gloss and hairspray and wore a white satin shirt and a floppy bow tie. I imagined him waving his feather duster at the bottles in the lounge bar as I ran my palm across our new living-room sofa—I liked the way it made my hand feel, like when I’d touched my father’s cheeks when I was younger. In my head I said, Uncut moquette. Uncut moquette.
I liked Reggie a lot even if he was small and bony and minced and used lip gloss and hairspray.
Gladys returned from the hotel kitchen, pushing open the door into our private living room as if it were a cell door, or the entry to a furnace. I wanted to shout, ‘Ladies shouldn’t have men’s eyebrows and you shouldn’t wear old slippers at work.’ I was sure she didn’t have arthritis and fibbed just to be able to wear what she said were her ‘comforters’. She glanced at me with that same look as when I asked for something that she had to concede to because I was the son of the hotel proprietors.
She said to my mother in a voice filled with sugar, sickly, like the treacle she poured over the steamed pudding as it cooled on the hotel kitchen benchtop, ‘You reap what you sow. You get what you deserve.’
I was trying to put two and two together about how that might be related to Reggie’s disappearance. But what I saw was the black slave being murdered and the white woman screaming. Reggie was still missing after eight days, and Gladys Harris was saying things about him that quivered in my mind.
From the spinning disc, Maria Callas cried, ‘Avanti! Avanti! Miracolo! Miracolo!’
I imagined I was an opera star on stage at the New Plymouth Operatic Society with the chorus supporting my mellifluous vocals. I was next to the great star, my arms outstretched, the joy at my greatness overwhelming. I suddenly understood my mother wanting to be famous and different from what she was. I looked at the ceiling as if up there I could escape that disquieting feeling, but what I saw was the dangling strip of sticky paper on which two flies were struggling. I told myself flies were just flies and I was a tenor on stage with Maria Callas who had Cleopatra eyes like my mother’s. Maria burst through a velvet curtain, threw up her arms, and sang even more spectacularly. Facing the slanting light from the venetian blinds I heard myself burst forth with ‘Avanti! Miracolo!’
Gladys said, ‘Father O’Brian said certain acts are mortal sins in themselves and you know what that means in relation to Reggie Kingsley.’
She replaced the dirty ashtray with a clean crystal one that sparkled in the sunlight, reminding me of the murder weapon in Even the Rich Must Die, a detective novel set in Boston. The book, from the New Plymouth Public Library, had smelled of scent as if the previous reader had sprayed it or had been so heavily perfumed that the smell—of dying jonquils—had been absorbed into the pages. I saw Gladys with her head bashed in with the ashtray and a dagger in her chest, which is how the victim, a red-haired Bostonian heiress, had been finished off in her hotel suite.
‘Reggie is a very different sort of character, no wonder he went missing,’ said Gladys. The wrinkles above her upper lip moved as she spoke, sallow and fleshy, like tripe. She stood in her apron and faded dress and fluffy slippers, her diamante-framed glasses flashing sunlight, and looked up at my mother.
My mother plucked the arm from the record, silencing Maria Callas. She said in that voice she used on guests she felt had unjustly complained about the accommodation, ‘Father O’Brian shouldn’t repeat what he hears in confession. That in itself is a mortal sin.’
I looked from my mother to Gladys to the ballerina above the record player and ran my hand across the uncut moquette and asked myself, ‘How would Gladys have spoken to Father O’Brian when she’s not even a Catholic?’ I saw the detective in the Boston novel look at me and wink. Even the Rich Must Die had been filled with contradictions, rich people, poor, black people, white, anger, love, and sex leading to death. I’d pondered for weeks trying to work out what it was all about. The detective had become a friend in my mind, and I saw him often, nodding, cajoling, looking for evidence.
I looked back up at the two struggling flies and wondered why my mother allowed that one piece of ugliness in her living room when everything else she tried to make so tasteful. But everything was this way or that, not quite one thing or the other, a contradiction, irony our teacher, Brother Petronius, would call it. It was sort of tied up with the moments when I seemed to be on a cloud far away, or I was submerged in water. I could never adequately explain that feeling to my mother or father when they asked, ‘Godfrey, what is it?’
This is an extract from The Birds Began to Sing by Jeffrey Buchanan (Text), available now at your local independent bookseller.
