Remember Me (7 page)

My father is a toolmaker by trade. Because he can fix most things that break or go wrong, we rarely have to call upon tradesmen. One day Dad tried to fix a burst pipe under the bathroom floor and, to use his words, made a right mess of it. The next day Mum called in a plumber and it is a good thing she did. What the plumber taught me that day later saved my life. He didn’t teach me how to fix pipes or anything like that. Instead he taught me something much more important. He taught me how to make coins disappear into thin air.

A
N EXTRACT FROM A THRIFT ESSAY
, ‘H
OW
M
Y
M
ONEY
S
AVED
M
Y
L
IFE
’

Nigel slunk home as furtively as a rat to its hole. It was almost comical. Mum collared him as he tried to sneak into the bedroom. He jumped a mile. He thought I’d blabbed and automatically raised his arms to protect
himself from the onslaught. Mum never held back when she boxed your ears. They stung for ages. When I grew older I was stunned to discover Mum was only five foot five inches tall and slight. Let me tell you, she boxed divisions above her weight.

‘Wash your hands and set four places for dinner,’ she said.

Nigel’s jaw dropped open and he turned to look at me, stunned by the double blessing. He knew instantly I hadn’t said anything to Mum and, furthermore, he’d been granted a stay of execution. Incredibly, we’d both forgotten it was Friday and Dad never came home until at least nine-thirty on Fridays. Shops stayed open on Fridays until nine o’clock.

I think it was Hitler or one of his henchmen who claimed the English were a nation of shopkeepers. They could’ve held my parents up as evidence. Both my mother and father ran shops. My father was a toolmaker by trade but a shopkeeper by inclination. He loved being his own boss, but more than anything he loved dealing with the public. He ran a newsagency on New North Road about three miles away from where we lived. My pals thought we were rich because we had two shops but, let me tell you, neither shop returned much after paying the rent on one and the mortgage on the other. There again, toolmakers didn’t make much either and Dad always claimed he did better as a shopkeeper. His shop also stayed open until nine on Friday nights and Nigel
was grateful for the reprieve. But that’s all he thought it was. He avoided looking at me all through dinner.

Rod had made dinner and Mum was busy in the shop. This left Nigel and me no choice but to do the dishes. Nigel offered to wash up, which was a first.

‘Are you still going to tell Dad?’ he asked once we were alone.

He and I had heaps of arguments and fights but we played together a lot more than we fought. I hated it when we weren’t friends. Little brothers always want the respect of older brothers.

‘What’s it worth to you if I don’t?’

Nigel seized on this glimmer of hope, the implication that I might let him off the hook.

‘What do you want?’

‘What are you offering?’

‘Buy you something.’

‘What?’

‘What do you want?’

‘What are you offering?’

Negotiations between kids are always banal.

‘An iceblock?’ Iceblocks cost fourpence.

‘Nah,’ I said. ‘A Topsy.’A Topsy was a chocolate-coated ice cream on a stick. It cost sixpence. Sixpence was half our weekly pocket money.

‘OK, a Topsy,’ said Nigel.

‘When?’

‘As soon as we finish the dishes.’

‘OK.’

‘Can you lend me the money?’

Nigel never had any money. We both got a shilling pocket money each week and Nigel spent his as soon as he got it. Eric and Maxie were as bad. I was the only one who ever tried to make it last through the week. I never lent money to Nigel because he never paid me back. He started laughing and I couldn’t help joining in. He knew I wasn’t going to tell Dad.

‘You should’ve seen your face when we let you out,’ he said.

‘You should’ve seen yours when I said I’d tell Dad.’

‘You were pissing yourself.’

‘So were you. At least I’m the only one who’s gone through the drain on his own. And I’ve done it twice. With the manhole covers on. I did it alone. When you did it you were holding hands with Maxie.’ Holding hands with Maxie. The claim was outrageous but perfect. It turned the tables.

We raced straight down Chamberlain Street to Eric and Maxie’s after we’d tidied up so we could let them know they were off the hook. To see Eric’s face you would’ve thought Santa had walked in the door. Of course Maxie wasn’t there but we knew where to find him. It took all our powers of persuasion to coax him out from under the clubhouse. His cheeks were streaked with tears and his nose was running. We pretended not to notice.

Nowadays people complain that time passes too
quickly. It didn’t back then. Every day had its dramas. Friends could become eternal enemies after school but there was still time to become friends again before bedtime. It was the same with beltings. Once you’d been thrashed and said sorry, it was all over. Dad could belt me on Friday night and drive me to soccer on Saturday morning at eight o’clock. Saturday was a clean sheet and Friday was history. That was one of the great things about those days. I honestly believed that was the way the whole world worked and would always work.

That night when I went to bed I was keen to start thinking about my essay. Bedtime is the perfect time. Sometimes in that twilight immediately before dropping off, thoughts and dreams overlap. Dreams don’t have the boundaries and disciplines of thought and are free to fly off into fantasy. The commingling of both can be magical. Often the thought-dreams that would so intrigue me were gone by morning but that didn’t make the process any less enjoyable or worthwhile. Some vestige always remained which would come back to me later and inspire a twist in my tale. But this night, no matter how hard I tried, my essay just wouldn’t lock in. I threw the Catholic kids into the mix and even tried the stricken U-boat scenario. Nothing worked. Mack kept intruding.

Poor old Mack.

I felt as guilty as sin for letting him down. I wished I’d had the courage and the gumption to get off my bike when I saw Captain Biggs coming out of Mack’s front
door. With the Captain there, nobody would’ve thought the less of me if I’d stopped. In fact, I’d probably have collected Brownie points. I could’ve gone in to see Mack, commiserate with him and let him know I hadn’t told anybody his secret. In my sleepy, woolly-minded way I thought that if Mack knew his secret was safe his problems would go away and he’d stop belting the bottle.

It’s a funny thing. I couldn’t think about the story I wanted to write but I had no trouble at all thinking about Mack’s. Once again Mack’s encounter with the U-boat rolled through my mind and again I looked for ways of reinterpreting it. I have to say I was pretty good at reinterpreting things. During the course of the evening hanging around with my pals, the whole business in the drain had taken on a note of bravado. I was the only one who’d done the return trip in the drain and I’d done it solo. Never mind the circumstances, never mind that I’d been pissing myself every single step of the way. Somehow we’d parlayed my paralysing fear into raw courage. My pals were complicit in this, so relieved I hadn’t told Dad they would’ve agreed with any interpretation. They were happy to go along with the illusion of my ‘raw courage’ just as they lapped up my comment about Nigel and Maxie holding hands.

Adept as I’d become at bending the truth, I had no luck with Mack. Everything came back to the fact that he’d done the wrong thing by putting his promise to the enemy above his duty. That made him a traitor no matter
how I looked at it. Even worse, I suddenly understood that this was how Mack saw himself, no matter how he looked at it. Mack saw himself as a traitor. The realisation was like an arrow through my heart. No wonder he was drinking.

As I lay on my bed in the dark I knew beyond any doubt that I was the only one who could help him. But how? To help Mack I needed help myself. And to get help I had to break my promise and tell someone. It was the same problem I’d faced the night before but it was now more urgent. Who could I tell? Who could I trust? Who could I tell who wouldn’t broadcast Mack’s failure to the world? Once again I ran through the usual suspects and rejected them. As I tottered on the brink of sleep it occurred to me that there was a possibility I’d overlooked. Bobby Holterman’s dad.

Yes!

Bobby Holterman’s dad was a distinct possibility. I hadn’t considered him before because every kid for miles around was scared of him, including me. I’d overheard my mother refer to him as a tyrant. But he had a quality everyone else lacked. I knew for a fact he could keep a secret. There in that wonderful twilight zone between sleep and consciousness Bobby Holterman’s dad seemed the answer to a small boy’s prayer.

Bobby Holterman’s dad was a source of both wonder and fear. The Holtermans lived in Norfolk Street, three streets
down from us on the other side of Richmond Road. The house needed a lick of paint but so did many others. Bobby was a fringe pal, someone who joined in our games at school but didn’t figure in them much after school or at weekends. He wasn’t allowed. The only other times I saw him were on club nights. There didn’t seem to be a lot of joy in his household nor too many pennies to spare. If he’d been born in Cumberland rather than Auckland I think he’d have been one of the kids wearing worn shoes in the snow.

Bobby Holterman’s dad was a legend because his Lancaster bomber had been shot down over Germany and he’d spent two years in a prisoner of war camp. That was right up there with an encounter with a U-boat. But Bobby’s dad wouldn’t talk about it. Not likely. Not to his family. Not to Captain Biggs. Not to anyone and definitely not to us. We’d grilled Bobby endlessly to no avail. Mr Holterman seemed the ideal person to confide in. It was an easy conclusion to draw that if he could keep secrets about himself he could keep secrets about Mack.

The war had cost Bobby’s father dearly. Somewhere along the way, getting shot down, baling out or on landing, his left leg had suffered fearful damage. Later in the camp it had been amputated. Bobby’s dad had sailed to England around the beginning of the war to join the RAF. All he’d ever wanted to be was a pilot and there was little opportunity to become one in New Zealand.

I’d only ever been around to Bobby’s place a handful
of times and it was usually to see a plastic model plane he’d built or a new toy he’d been given for his birthday. Bobby’s toys never looked used. We played with them but I had to be careful. Bobby warned me and so did his mother. He played in fear, scared of what his dad might do if he broke anything. I have to say Bobby’s mother never made me feel particularly welcome. On hot days she might offer me a glass of cordial but never really did anything that might extend my visit. She always had a worried look about her and when she spoke it was usually only to tell us to be quiet, even though we hardly made any noise. In that household the biggest crime anyone could commit was to wake Bobby’s dad. Bobby’s dad didn’t need much of an excuse to fly off the handle and his rage was fearsome. The first time I heard him go off I dropped the Sherman tank I was playing with and bolted out the door. I even left my treasured Triang jeeps behind. Bobby had to bring them to school the next day to give them back.

I can only guess why Bobby’s dad was the way he was. His hopes and dreams had gone down with his Lancaster. He’d lost all prospect of a peacetime career flying planes the day he lost his leg. The compensation would’ve been meagre. I know his war pension was all they had to live on, and that would’ve amounted to next to nothing. He was also probably in pain a lot of the time. Bobby told me once that his dad was up all hours of the night. I know he’d tried a few artificial legs but hardly ever wore
them because they caused ulcers. Instead he’d hobbled about on crutches with one leg of his trousers pinned up. The disparity between the optimism of the eager young man who’d set off for England and the bitterness of the man who returned could hardly have been greater.

Somehow I’d got the impression that Mr Holterman, who didn’t seem to like anyone much, liked me for some reason. In those days the belief persisted that if you were prepared to like someone they’d like you back. It was a belief fostered at school and in church and sounded fine in principle. One time I’d taken a model of a Fairey Gannet I’d built out of balsa and tissue paper around to Bobby’s for its test flight. (I normally did this in Eric’s backyard but we’d had another argument.) The plane had a propeller, which was powered by a rubber band running the length of the fuselage. Bobby’s backyard was narrow but twice the length of most yards. It seemed the ideal place for a test flight, albeit at half power. I’d spent six weeks building and painting the Gannet so I was pretty apprehensive. The instant it left my hand it banked left and went into a steep dive, only saved from destruction by landing in a patch of parsley. I don’t know what stunned me most, the crash or the sudden burst of laughter from the back veranda. It was Bobby’s dad. I’d never heard him laugh before. I’d seen him smile once or twice during our excruciatingly bad concerts at the Church Army Hall when the rest of the audience had been doubled over by our ineptness, but he’d never actually laughed.

‘Bring it here, son,’ he said. I took him the Gannet even though I was scared of him. It seemed the safest course of action. He told Bobby to go and fetch a razorblade and some of his modelling glue. He altered the setting of the flaps on the trailing edge of the wings and also adjusted the setting of the rudder. He took his time and studied his handiwork as he went. I sat at his feet in awe. Here was a Lancaster pilot working on my Fairey Gannet. It was like having Stirling Moss drop by to tune Dad’s old ’34 Chev. I noticed Bobby’s mum peeking out at us through the kitchen window and I could see she was smiling as well. It was a big day for smiles.

‘Give that a go,’ Bobby’s dad said eventually.

‘Thanks, Mr Holterman,’ I said. I wound the propeller as fast as I could.