The Crime of Huey Dunstan (9 page)

There are two sorts of memory. One is whole, the other fragmentary. Mine is the first sort. I remember a trial I attended in Wellington. It was my first appearance in court after I went blind. I was asked by the Crown to examine a senior civil servant accused of fiddling his expenses. I prepared a report, and was so nervous I memorised the thing whole, fourteen pages, and just presented it in court from memory. (I never did it again. A procedure was introduced whereby the judge, told of my disability, would allow someone else to read out my report for me.)

Then there’s the other sort of memory, the recall of a phrase or fragment that has lain buried in the subconscious and returns unbidden when a deeper layer has been activated and you are doing something inconsequential
like scratching your neck or tieing your shoelaces. That is the sort Lisbeth has.

“
Hunch
,” she said, coming back to the study a few minutes after leaving it with, as I realised, her bifocals on and a copy of Webster’s encyclopedia in her hands. “In 1849—I know I’m interrupting again but it might just be relevant. Webster says, In 1849 the word ‘hunch’ was first used to mean a push or a nudge towards a solution. And—Got that? And by 1865, when the celebrated London detective Jonathan Whicher had his ‘magnificent hunch’ in connection with the Road Hill Murder mystery, the word was in common parlance. Are you listening?

“Oh well—” She closed the encyclopedia with a sigh. “Just a thought, Charlie.”

“Thank you. Very good,” I said. “Do you mind closing the door when you go out?”

That was on Friday, the day before the seminar at the Friends’ Settlement. A day or so after I returned from Wanganui, I came into the living room to find Lisbeth on the telephone, laughing in the beguiling way that she has. “
Shlom beit.
Exactly,” I overheard her say, and guessed whom she was talking to. I went into the kitchen and put the jug on. After a few minutes she appeared.

“Know what Miriam says about you? Charlie, please don’t walk away when I’m talking.”

“What does Miriam say about me? I’ve made some tea. It’s there if you want a cup.”

“No, thanks, not now. She says you’re a bolter. You’re like the man in the book by Julian Barnes who rings for a taxi, then, when it comes, says no thanks, you’ve changed your mind. ‘Tell him to
follow his hunch
,’ Miriam says. What I’ve been saying to you all along. Hunch. Hunch. Hunch.”

“Water under the bridge, darling. I told you, I’ve moved on.”

“You’re kidding. You don’t kid me. You were up again last night, walking about. You
were
. You went into the study and shut the door. You were listening to those transcripts.”

“Darling, I am trying to put together my memoirs.”

“So you say. When did you last have a proper night’s sleep? Charlie, you may be prepared to go on like this, I’m not. What’s important?
Shlom beit.
Miriam’s right. This thing impacts on me too. She’s thinking of my well-being, not just yours. Why are you so agitated? Are you frightened of being proved wrong? That’s what it is, you know. You can say I’m interfering if you like. But isn’t it time you went and talked to him? Nobody else will if you won’t. I don’t mean the father. The boy.”

“Impossible. Lawrence would never—No. It’s quite unethical. That
would
be interfering.”

“Anyone can visit him, surely? I don’t see anything unethical about it.”

“Anyway it’s not on. You’re forgetting, he’s in Auckland.”

“All the more reason for going to see him. I don’t
imagine his social calendar is very full at the moment. I’ll drive you.”

“You won’t.”

“I’ve got a free week.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yes. Really.”

“But you hate driving long distances.”

“Rabbits,” she said.

LISBETH AND I have a private code. When you have been married to someone for a long time you develop a kind of shorthand that seems to grow from the baffling intimacy of human behaviour, or misbehaviour, and it’s rather nice, though maddening to others who may feel left out. Not long ago we had some friends in to lunch. I was bringing in the crêpes from the kitchen (crêpes flambées, it’s my party piece) when Lisbeth suddenly called out, “Enchantress!” Like that. All conversation at the table stopped dead, but I knew immediately what she was saying. She had got the answer to a clue that had defeated us both in the Saturday crossword (“She is very good at spelling”). So there you go. Hence “rabbits”, another little number that came into being in the course of our marriage.

This needs explaining.

Years ago when we lived in one of the bays on the other side of the harbour we had a fire in a garden shed which spread to my adjoining study. I lost everything, al my knick-knacks, my brass monkeys, personal computer, audio tapes, reference material, dictaphones…These were the days before memory sticks and screen readers were invented and the expression “print-handicapped” meant to the sightless exactly what it said. Everything was destroyed. My loss was considerable. In effect I lost my memory. I didn’t realise how serious it was or how depressed I had become until I began seeing colours.

I lost my central vision and became permanently blind in 1976, some eight years after Lisbeth and I were married, when I was nearly fifty. It happened after a bout of pneumonia. At the start of the week I could read and at the end of the week I couldn’t. The degeneration of the retina had reached the macula, which is the central signpost for visual discrimination. Before the pneumonia, I had managed more or less normally with binocular vision; after it, my central vision disappeared. It happened in a week. I could still get a few blurry outlines but gradually in the succeeding months any discriminatory vision I had left over from the pneumonia faded, and my sight vanished completely. Normally I don’t see colours, nor do I see black. What I see is roughly what you see if you are in an aircraft looking out of the window into cloud. If there is bright sunshine the cloud lightens, and if it is dark it darkens. I don’t see
black but instead a multitude of pinpoints of flickering lights which keep changing like a kaleidoscope. I may get a colour
texture
, if I am, say, jet-lagged. It may go from lettuce green to lime green to blue or dark red, even purple. Similarly with fatigue, if I am tired or anxious. Or depressed. When I’m depressed, I get colours of purple. I don’t like purple hues and I put them aside. That’s the thing. I can bring in colours and usher them out again. I can engender lime greens or the colour yellow, and play tricks with them like Mondrian. I can do this sitting down or if I’m holding a conversation with someone or playing the piano. But I don’t like visual distortions of this kind, so I put them aside. Only on this occasion, when my study burned down, the distortions persisted. They refused to go away.

The colours went from blue to red to magenta to cyanide blue, like a blue dye, then purple, a highly saturated purple, almost black, and it stayed that way. The purple persisted. I became irritable and short-tempered. I threw tantrums. I smashed things. I smashed my favourite drinking mug with the willow tree pattern. I threw it out of the window. Couldn’t work, couldn’t sleep. I was consumed by self-pity, and I took it out on Lisbeth.

One day I received a phone call from Dr Astor, the Director of Psychological Services at the Department of Health. Bill Astor was an old mate from my days in the Prison Service. “Ches, we need someone to go to Fiji,” he said. There had been a hurricane; hundreds of people left
homeless and eight dead; they needed someone to set up a trauma counselling service. He said, “Can you go?”

Of course I could. I dropped what I was doing and was on a plane to Suva within thirty-six hours. In the ensuing weeks I returned to Fiji twice more. I don’t know how much I was able to help the Fijians but I made a lot of friends and at a kava ceremony when I was leaving I was presented with a garland containing a
tabua
, a whale’s tooth—a great honour for a foreigner, I am told. After that, the dark hues in my field of non-vision went away and my depression lifted. Only later did I learn that the Fiji assignment had been laid on at Lisbeth’s instigation.

I said to her, “You mean you rang up Bill Astor and suggested it? You
engineered
it?”

“I had to do something,” she said. “It was an emergency. You were in trouble. I was frightened you might do something silly. Bill said it was a bit unusual, a bit dire, but he’d see what he could do. And he did. Well, I had to do something to get you down the hole.”

“What hole? I was already in a hole, if you remember, a very purple hole.”

“Not that hole, the rabbit hole. You’ve forgotten your Lewis Carroll. I mean the hole Alice fell down when she was chasing the White Rabbit. Remember? That’s how her adventures began.”

Ever since that time if I get into a corner or start to lose it she has only to say the word “rabbits”, and I spring to attention. It sounds silly. We have this little private joke
between us.
Shlom beit
, by the way, means “peace in the home”.

I still had my doubts about the wisdom of going to see Huey without Lawrence’s blessing. I hesitated to suggest it, fearing a rejection. As it happened, the next night he telephoned.

“Ches,” he said. “An odd thing has happened. Do you remember Huey’s uncle at the trial? Uncle Jacob. Huey calls him his little uncle. He’s not much older than Huey. Never mind. A couple of days ago he walked into my chambers and said, ‘It happened to me too’.”

Something clicked inside my brain. I heard Lawrence say, “Hello. Are you still there?”

“Yes. I’m listening.”

“Ches, I was thinking. You could be right after all.”

“Lawrence. Excuse me. Would you say that again very slowly. A man walked into your rooms—”

“Uncle Jacob. Not a very prepossessing sort of bloke. He was a witness for the Crown, he didn’t say very much. Afterwards, as he was stepping down, Huey spoke to me and said, ‘Talk to him. He knows something.’ But the guy vanished and I forgot about it.”

“I see. Until yesterday.”

“Yes. I was busy with a client. By the time I’d finished, the uncle was leaving. He wouldn’t wait. All he said was, ‘I came to say it happened to me too.’”

“Like that?”

“Like that.”

“Nothing else?”

“Ches, it’s obvious. What else can it mean?”

“Tell me again, Lawrence.”

“Aren’t you excited? I thought you’d be excited.”

I asked Lawrence to repeat the words Huey spoke to him in court at the trial. My ears were tingling.

“…It must have been the day the juror fainted. Ches, are you there?”

“What were you saying?”

“I said I remembered about it afterwards in the robing room, but by then Uncle Jacob had gone. Hello?”

“I’m here.”

“You’re not saying very much.”

“I’m thinking. I’m thinking that now you have remembered, Lawrence. You have remembered to tell me that four months ago Huey said to you, ‘Talk to this chap, he knows something.’ And you forgot.”

“I’m sorry. You sound a bit pissed off. Ches, I wanted to ask you something. Are you very busy just now?”

“I’m always busy. I’m writing my memoirs. My gums are swollen. I have to get a new hearing aid. Now Lisbeth wants to go off in the car somewhere, only I don’t see the point really if the appeal is off. Actually I have a question for you.”

“Who said the appeal is off?”

“You did. The last time we met you said—”

“I wouldn’t worry about that.”

“I thought there was some statutory time limit on these things. You mean it isn’t too late?” Lawrence made a sucking sound with his lips.

“It’s never too late. You had a question, Ches.”

“Yes. We were thinking of driving up north to Auckland. If we did, would it be in order for me to go and see him? Huey, I mean.”

“I knew you’d ask,” Lawrence said.

HALF WAY UP the North Island, driving to Paremoremo, Lisbeth said, “I hope this isn’t going to be another wild goose chase.” I mumbled something in reply. I was lost in thought, trying to recall a dream. A man had come up to me and taken my hand. His hand was damp. I was sitting on a wooden bench inside a tent or marquee, on a marae or some other meeting ground. People were milling about, calling to one another. I could say that the man came out of nowhere but when you are blind and a voice suddenly addresses you, a hand suddenly grabs you, nowhere is everywhere, everyone is temporal, people are in motion, they come and go, nothing stands still, and you could be anywhere, or everywhere, and the only reason for knowing where you are is past experience. It must have been raining
because the ground underfoot was soggy and his hand, as I say, was damp. The man had a strong odour. He greeted me but when I turned to say, “Who are you?” and strike up a conversation, he was no longer there.

We had been driving for about three hours and were entering a small town, I think Hunterville. “It’s funny,” I said. Lisbeth slowed down, and accelerated again. She is a good driver, a little anxious perhaps as late learners often are. She had learned to drive in her forties.

“It’s funny.”

“What is?”

“The power of dreams. I was thinking about what Lawrence said. I swear I dreamed it.”

“What? When?”

“A couple of months ago. A man came up to me in a crowd and said something and then vanished. I can’t remember his words, but they were powerful. I mean, the suggestion they left behind. I’m thinking, there’s a kind of energy about dreams and half-remembered thoughts you wake up with that turn out to be premonitions of things to come. They’re more powerful than any facts could ever be. You probably wouldn’t believe it in a novel. In a modern novel.”

“You mean you dreamed what Lawrence said the uncle said, ‘It happened to me too’? I don’t find that strange. I’m sure your psyche doesn’t. But now I think about it, it seems a long way to go to Paremoremo to talk to Huey if that’s all we have to go on. It’s a bit flimsy.”

“I’m glad you said ‘we’. You’ve forgotten your own contribution: what the mother said. It’s not that flimsy. Mind if I get some air?” I slid the sunroof back and opened the passenger window on my side. The noise and smells of the countryside flooded in. The fresh cow dung of the Mangaweka countryside! Delicious. I closed the window again. “Lawrence is a bastard,” I said. “Know what he said to me? He said Uncle Jacob turning up like that was his first real indication that Huey wasn’t lying.”

“Well. What’s wrong with that?”

“I was shocked. I said to Lawrence, ‘You mean all this time you’ve been
doubting
him?’ ‘It helps to be sure,’ Lawrence said. I was genuinely shocked.”

Lisbeth was laughing to herself. She swerved taking a corner.

“Steady on,” I said. “What are you giggling about?”

“Fancy being shocked by that. Darling, he’s a lawyer! Sorry, I’ll slow down. Is that better?” She reached across and squeezed my hand. “Underneath you’re still a romantic.”

We reached Hamilton in the late afternoon and I went on to Auckland the next morning by bus. I left Lisbeth with friends in Lake Crescent where we spent the night. It was many years since I had been to Paremoremo. Situated in rolling countryside north of Auckland, the prison was one of the first electric-locking cathedrals in Christendom; it had been built to stop Houdinis in their tracks, or tricks, a hymn to the chartists of maximum security. But it struck me rather as “a monument to the vindictiveness
of a retarded and over-protective society” (so I wrote in an English journal when the prison first opened). It was not a wise statement for a newly recruited member of the Prisons Department to make, and it nearly cost me my job. Still, in 1968 I was young and gaffe-happy and as a crusading Quaker, as I imagined myself to be, made no secret of my views. I told my boss in Wellington that I had no reason to love those in whom the urge to punish was greater than the love of their fellow Christians, a conceit that I hold to this day. But now, waiting in the visitors’ area for Inmate No. 763 to be brought in, and learning that he was enrolled in a computer-training program on arboriculture, I wondered if some things perhaps were not changing for the better.

“Bright lad,” said the guard who accompanied me into what appeared a large open space that clanged and echoed and secreted sharp odours. “He’s probably in the gym.” The guard went away. Ten minutes later he returned. “D’you mind waiting a bit longer, sir? We’re a bit busy this morning.”

I had arrived by appointment, having written ahead and then telephoned before leaving Hamilton. I was trying to identify the smell. I remembered a radio news item Lisbeth had heard: there had been a riot in which the inmates of C Block had holed up their guards and burned all the mattresses. A smell reminiscent of singed flesh clung to the place. I felt uneasy. I stood up and began to pace up and down. I seemed to be the only visitor. I had been
uneasy, I realised, ever since learning that Huey had been transferred from Cornford.

A voice said, “I’m afraid there’s been a mistake, professor. Could you come back next week?” It was a different guard this time.

“What’s happened?”

“I think next week, sir, should be all right. If you wouldn’t mind. I’ll see you out.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said, “till you tell me what has happened.”

“Best to give us a bell first, sir. I’ve written the extension down for you.

“Rules,” he added. He was an older man. I sensed an admonitory finger pressed to his lips and caught a north country accent. He was a Limey, probably Newcastle.

“Listen, chum. I was manning a quarter-deck when you was just a twinkle in your Da’s eye. Where is he?”

“I’ve called you a cab, sir.” The guard pressed another piece of paper into my hand. “Give this to the driver.” An hour and a half later I was standing by Huey’s bedside at Middlemore Hospital.

The bed was screened off. He was in an open ward. I couldn’t speak to him yet, the nurse said. She guided me to a chair at the foot of the bed where there was a policeman on duty. We shook hands. “Do I know you, sir? I believe I do.” The police officer claimed to know me from a previous incarnation, presumably the Prisons Department. He was
doing a crossword puzzle. Presently I heard a screen being moved by the bed. A smell like gypsum paste assailed me. A few moments later the screen was moved again. A male voice spoke in my ear and announced itself as belonging to the house surgeon.

“We’ve had to pin the bone. Surgery was necessary. If you can wait till lunch time, professor, you’ll be able to see him.”

They brought us lunch on a tray. The policeman ate my spuds and I ate his carrots. By the time we’d finished we were chatting amicably; he had almost completed his crossword and I had worked out roughly what had happened at Paremoremo.

It seemed that Lawrence had been sending Huey books to read. First books, then a transistor radio. Huey had arrived a rookie, with no idea of what to expect. At first he had been able to insulate himself from the gangs, but before long he was being preyed on—favours for sex, favours for cigarettes, for a pen, a pair of bootlaces, favours to be allowed to queue in order to make a telephone call. He was allowed to keep the books but not the radio. Then a televison set arrived from Lawrence. A couple of days later two hoods accosted Huey in his cell and demanded the TV set. Huey refused to give it up. In the cell was a fixed bed with a concrete plinth running round it. One of them got Huey down with his forearm spread out on the plinth, the other one stamped on it, breaking the arm in two places.

He was admitted to hospital during the night. The surgeon who operated cut open the arm, intending to plate it on the inside; but in the theatre Huey vomited, unable to tolerate the anaesthetic; he had to be taken out and made to fast and brought back for a second operation. He was woozy still from the anaesthetic, the nurse said.

It was nearly three in the afternoon when the screens were taken away and we were finally able to talk. “Remember me?” I said.

“Yeah, sure. They told me. Sorry I can’t shake your paw, prof.”

As a result of the double break, they had had to pin the bone, Huey said. The right forearm was now fixed on the outside, with a rigid back-slab and pins above and below the breaks. The smell of gypsum was still strong but when I leaned forward to catch what he was saying, the particular odour of him I remembered from our first meeting returned—a faint aroma of vinegar. He talked in his light elfin voice about the operation and said his father and mother might be coming to see him; I asked about the computer course he was taking and when we had done with that there was an awkward silence.

“By the way, I’m left-handed,” I said. “So we can shake after al.” He took my outstretched hand in his left hand but dropped it quickly. The mistrust and pathological resistance to being touched that I had read into what the mother said, was still there. His palm felt clammy. I had hoped to be able to introduce his Uncle Jacob into the conversation, but it
was hopeless. There was bustle and noise. Someone was listening to a race commentary. I had forgotten how public public wards could be. The policeman was sitting there. I heard him say: “Excuse me.”

“Not now,” I said.

“Excuse me, sir.”

Sharper now. It wasn’t the policeman, it was the house surgeon. He brushed past me. I heard him speak to Huey and to someone else. I heard the policeman say, “I’ll let them know, doctor.” Then he went away.

“They’re keeping me another night,” Huey said to me. There was a risk of infection, I gathered, and a danger of swelling or damage to the nerves.

I said, “In that case, I’ll see if I can come back in the morning.”

I stood up, then sat down again. “Huey, do you remember a man called Sparrow?”

“He was the prosecutor, wasn’t he? I remember. He gave you a hard time, prof.”

“Yes, he did. Remember what the judge called him?”

“Nope.”

“He called him Starling. He made a mistake.”

“Oh shit. Did he?”

“One day I’ll tell you about Starling.” I leaned forward. “Huey, before I go. There’s a chance that your counsel might be able to appeal against your conviction, it’s only a chance you understand. Don’t read anything into it at this stage. But how would you feel about that?”

“You mean—? Don’t know. I never thought about it.”

“Well, think now.”

“I’m with you.”

“Well,” I said. “
Well?
”

“Well great, prof.”

“You’re not in a church, Huey. You don’t have to whisper. How would you feel about it?”

“Yeah, great. GREAT. Big time.”

“OK. Now I’l tel you about Starling. He was a notorious English judge.” And I told him the anecdote about the foreman of the jury refusing to convict William Penn, the Quaker, and Judge Starling saying that if he didn’t, he would cut off his nose.

“So you can thank your stars, Huey, that you’re not living in the seventeenth century.”

“You mean even if we lose the appeal, prof, I get to keep my snout?”

“Yes.” I laughed out loud. Huey laughed. He had a high girlish laugh. We laughed together. On top of the anguish, on top of all the lunacy, there flickered this little sanity between us.