1
Number Six is a small house, in a quiet street. Two rows of working-men’s cottages, marching down a hill. Each one has a small front yard and a picket fence close to the road.
Sometimes the latch on the front gate of Number Six doesn’t slot back into place and then the wind catches it and it bangs incessantly. It drives Mrs Hansen across the road to distraction. She’s tried to talk to Mr Doyle about it, but he doesn’t give her the impression of being a useful man. She suspects he’s a drinker. And there’s no talking to the wife. Mrs Doyle is an odd, flighty little thing, with her lace gloves and whispery voice.
On April 16, 1932, Mrs Hansen watches Mrs Doyle and her son, George, leave the house. Mrs Doyle is carrying a shopping bag and the boy is wearing his school satchel, which is odd. It’s a Saturday for one thing and, for another, there’s been all that trouble in town. Nobody in their right mind should be out and about. The boy kicks the gate shut behind him and Mrs Hansen presses her lips into an invisible line. The gate immediately bounces open and she knows that bloody thing is going to bang all day. There’s something smug and unlikeable about that boy. If you ask her, he’s spoiled rotten.
It’s the mother’s fault. Mrs Doyle fusses over him, always going on about how clever he is and dressing him up like a little lord. No good ever comes of praising a child like that. It’s why the boy thinks he’s better than everyone else. And he’s a liar. He’d told her Peter that Mr Doyle is a journalist for the Auckland Star, and that they’re going to buy a motor car. According to Mrs Patterson in Number Eight, the Doyles haven’t paid the butcher for two months. They aren’t buying a motor car anytime soon, that’s for sure.
Mrs Hansen isn’t going to stand for that banging gate today. She has one of her headaches and Mrs Jackson next door has a new baby. Marching across the street, she slams the gate back into place and then notices Mr Doyle’s bike propped against the side of the house. If his bike is there, then so is he. He has no excuse for not fixing that damned latch. She opens the gate again and climbs the steps to the front door. There’s no answer when she knocks, so she marches down the side path to the back of the house. He isn’t going to hide from her.
She stops abruptly when she rounds the corner of the house and sees the back yard. The lawn hasn’t been mown for weeks and nearly everything in the vegetable garden has either died or gone to seed. The only exception is a monstrous tree of silverbeet, collapsing sideways under its own weight. The neglect is one thing but the rest of it makes no sense whatsoever. Shreds of old, yellowed wallpaper are strewn across the lawn and snagged on the branches of the feijoa tree. There are pieces dotted like grotesque flowers amidst the dead plants and a soggy pile mouldering by the back door. There’s something not right about the mess and disorder. Mrs Hansen shivers and takes a step backwards, colliding with the corner of the house and letting out a small screech.
It occurs to her, then, that she hasn’t seen Mr Doyle in weeks.
2
Number Six isn’t going to be their house forever. One day they’ll live in a bigger house, in a better part of town. They’ll have a gate that shuts properly and a motor car and neighbours who are polite. Not nosey, rude ones like Mrs Hansen in Number Nine.
George tells everyone that his father is a journalist for the Auckland Star, although it isn’t really true. He does work for the Auckland Star, but he’s a linotype operator. It’s probably an important job. George doesn’t really understand what it is. His father always has ink on his hands and carries a smell of metal. He’s smart enough to be a journalist though. He could be one if he wanted to.
His mother is just a mother. She used to be quite good at things like cooking and cleaning. She was always wiping things and tidying things away so you couldn’t find them, like his model cars and his Dad’s beer glass. Now she just sits in her chair by the wireless. She sits there for hours, even when the wireless isn’t on. Sometimes she forgets to make his tea, and he has to go down the road to Aunty Nell’s for something to eat. The house is full of things his mother has started and never finished. The wallpaper is half-peeled off his bedroom walls and murky water is stagnating in a bucket in the kitchen, the scrubbing brush lying beside it, on the floor. It’s his mother’s fault that his father has gone. If she was better at keeping house, he might have stayed.
Today she’s made him get dressed for school but it’s a Saturday. He shows her on the calendar. Saturday, April 16, 1932. She looks but doesn’t say anything. She carves a thick slice from the loaf and makes him toast. There’s no butter, so he has dripping, and she sits across the table from him, but she doesn’t eat anything. She has a cup of tea, lifting it to her lips as it as if it’s poison, taking small, reluctant sips.
When they leave the house, his mother is wearing her good winter coat and carrying a large bag. It’s a warm day, even though its overcast—a thick lid of grey cloud is pressing and close overhead. His mother looks out of place. People are going to stare at her. They walk down the road, past nosey Mrs Hansen watching from her window, and turn left, heading up towards the shops.
“Where are we going?” he asks. She doesn’t answer, so he asks again, raising his voice the way his father does, aiming for the firm tone he uses.
“Into town.” The street is quiet—just the sound of birdsong in the trees on the berm and the tap of their shoes on the footpath—but George barely catches her reply. Her voice isn’t much more than a whisper.
George has no idea why they might be going into town at the weekend. He wonders if he should ask. Sometimes it’s better not to. Anyway, he wouldn’t mind a ride on the tram, so he trails behind her and focuses on stepping on the dry, autumn leaves that are starting to drop from the trees. They crunch under his feet, fragmenting and turning into dust on the pavement.
At the shops, his mother stops and takes out her purse. She counts out coins into the palm of her hand, murmuring to herself as she does so, and they wait for the tram at the stop near the church. There’s hardly anyone around—just a few people walking by and a horse and dray rumbling slowly up the road. In the distance, he sees a man on a bike and his heart leaps until he remembers that this father’s bike is still at home, leaning against the house. It can’t be him.
The tram is nearly empty when it arrives. His mother takes a seat in the middle, her bag perched on her knees. She clutches the handles tightly and tells him to sit down when he kneels on the seat so he can see out the window.
“I’m just looking,” he says.
“He’ll see.”
George sighs, but he sits down. He doesn’t know who will see. There’s no one else in the carriage. He wishes his father would come back. She’s not like this when he’s around.
At the next stop, a man swings himself into the tram and sits down in the seat opposite them. He’s wearing a strip of white cloth around his upper arm, over the sleeve of his jacket. It looks like it’s been torn from a bed sheet and George stares, wondering what it’s for. Usually arm bands are black, for when someone dies.
The man is young with gingery-coloured hair visible under his cap. He smiles at George and says good morning to his mother. She nods her head but doesn’t speak. She tightens her grip on the bag, the fine bones and sinews of her hands straining against her skin. Birds’ claws, George thinks.
“Bit quieter out there today,” the young man says. “Looks like things have calmed down a bit.”
His mother won’t look at him, but she nods again, one brief down and up of her head.
“What happened?” George asks.
“There’s been riots. The unemployed blokes. They smashed in all the windows on Queen Street, attacked the coppers, looted the shops. Didn’t you hear about it? It’s been in all the papers.”
“My dad works for the Auckland Star,” George says.
“Well, you know all about it then, I’m sure.”
George doesn’t want to admit that he doesn’t know anything. It sounds like something you should know about it. He glances at his mother to see if she knows. They haven’t had a newspaper since his father left, but maybe she’s heard about it on the wireless. She’s staring at her hands and whispering something to herself. George hopes the man doesn’t notice, but he knows that he has. There’s a frown on the man’s face, and then he turns away and stares out the window.
The tram rumbles down Ponsonby Road, and the man doesn’t talk to them again. He gets out at Karangahape Road, in front of a shop with a broken window and a smashed up chair lying on the footpath outside. George kneels on the seat, ignoring his mother, and takes in the mess. It looks like there’s been a war. They move slowly past shops with broken or boarded-up windows, their contents strewn all over the street. There’s a kind of awesomeness to the rage and destruction, and he can feel it still there in the dark holes where the windows should be and the broken things on the ground. He wonders what it’s like to let your anger loose—to let it unravel from a small, solid knot until it whirls out and smashes everything around you.
The men with white armbands are everywhere—guarding the shops, sweeping up glass and debris and hammering boards over windows—trying to return the world to order.
It’s disappointing when the tram comes to a stop at the bottom of the hill and his mother hurries them quickly down the steps and into the street. He wasn’t sure if she’d noticed what was going on, but she scurries away as if she’s frightened. George cranes his neck, trying to see back up Queen Street. He’s not frightened. If he was older, he’d be back there, wearing a white armband, being part of the excitement.
He’s not sure where his mother is going, until she turns the corner and heads towards the train station. He’s been there before, and he lets out a long sigh. It usually means they’re going to see his grandmother and he’ll be sitting still for hours while the train clatters its way down the length of the island. He’s done it too often to be excited by it.
George expects his mother to go to the ticket office, but she goes straight to the platform. They sit on a bench and she does nothing. She sits, draped in her too thick coat, her bag on her knees, staring into space. He moves down the bench, so it doesn’t look like they’re together. For a while, he watches a train preparing to depart on the other platform. When it leaves, he pulls his book out of his satchel and concentrates on the story until he forgets where he is.
3
Lewis Morton has seen the woman in the winter coat before. He leans against the platform wall, watching her from under the brim of his hat, trying to place her. She’s a tiny little thing. The boy sitting near her on the bench is almost the same height. For some reason, Lewis associates her with the newspaper, but he knows she doesn’t work there. Perhaps he’s interviewed her before. He’s done his share of reporting about church committee meetings and cake stalls.
He yawns and covers his mouth with his forearm. He’d finished work at two in the morning, and it was three before he finally made it home and into bed.
It was just luck that he was in town last night when it all kicked off again. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he was drawn there by the shimmer of anger and outrage that still hovered in the streets after Thursday’s riots. It had been there all day—taking shape as the injured and arrested were slowly released from hospitals and jail cells. Perhaps he’d hung around in town because he was waiting for it to roar back into life. Perhaps he’d wanted it to. They had a point, those rioting men. If you hadn’t been laid off already, you were waiting for it to happen.
There are whispers of more cuts coming at the newspaper. In the first round, a few months ago, it was mainly the backroom staff that were let go. The typists and clerks. The linotype operators. This time, they’ll probably cut back on the reporters as well. If he’s one of them, they’ll have no wage coming into the house. His father has already lost his job.
Mrs Doyle.
The name comes to him out of the blue, pushed forward in a memory of men trudging out of the building, their last pay packets in their pockets, their personal belongings in paper bags and cardboard boxes. The woman on the bench is the wife of Harry Doyle, who he’d last seen in that line of men walking away down Shortland Street. Lewis had liked Doyle. He was always up for a beer at the pub—a good man for a story and a song. The wife, it was rumoured, was a bit odd. She’d always seemed pleasant enough to him—a bit timid and shy—but you never knew.
Lewis looks her way again. She’s staring into space, unmoving. She’s not looking at the train that has just pulled in or watching the people slowly filling the platform. It’s a little unnerving to have such a point of stillness in all that motion. The boy has moved further down the bench, away from her, and is absorbed in a book. He has the look of Doyle and Lewis thinks that this must be their son. The distance between the woman and the boy hadn’t made it immediately obvious that they were together.
They seem out of place at the station, on this subdued day, with its morning-after atmosphere. Lewis remembers someone saying that Doyle has left Auckland and that the marriage is over. There was mention that he’d gone to one of the work camps, and Lewis wonders how Mrs Doyle is making ends meet. It’s hard to imagine that a man would abandon his family at a time like this, even if the wife is a bit strange. Perhaps it isn’t true. People say a lot of things these days. The world has taken on a mean edge.
Lewis glances at the station clock. He’s waiting for his sister to arrive on the train from Henderson, and it’s already 10 minutes late. A call for passengers to board the train to Wellington sounds through the tannoy and he watches as people begin to move forward, filing onto the carriages. It isn’t a big crowd. The train looks like it will only be half full. When he looks back to the bench, Mrs Doyle is standing up. She steps forward, her movements slow and aimless, as if she’s not quite sure what she’s doing. Or perhaps she’s just dragged down by her heavy coat and bag. She wanders along the platform towards the furthest carriage without looking at the boy. The boy makes no movement. He’s absorbed in his book and doesn’t notice her leave.
Lewis looks back and forwards between the bench and the woman moving towards the steps of the carriage, as if there’s a band stretching out that will eventually propel them back towards each other. He waits for her to call out to the boy or for the boy to look up and run after her. But she boards the train, the carriage doors slam shut and the final whistle blows. He must have got it wrong. The boy must be with someone else.
The train begins to pull away, a skirt of steam billowing out as the wheels begin to move. In a few moments, it’s picked up speed, settling into its rhythm as it heads out of the station. Only a few people remain on the platform. There’s an older couple who are still waving and a few others, like Lewis, who are waiting for the next train. In the middle of them, the boy closes his book and looks up.