When it was over, Fred stared at the television. ‘Is she really dead?’ he asked.
Betty put her hand on his shoulder. He looked at me and up at her. ‘That’s not her, is it?’
Betty took his hand. ‘Time to go.’
She decided we would take a drive past the old house in Tawa on the way to the railway station. As we got closer, Fred began to breathe heavily. His head dropped forward for a moment. Then he waved his arms as if hitting at unseen bugs. Ruth started to cry. Betty pulled over. She indicated that we should get out. As Fred fiddled to undo his seat belt, she locked the car, trapping him inside.
‘He’s having a turn,’ she said. ‘Can you knock on a door and get someone to call you a taxi?’
Fred pressed his face against the window, his eyes glazed. He pounded on the glass, screaming at us to get away, to leave him alone, to let him out.
Betty dabbed at her eyes. ‘He gets violent,’ she said. ‘Thinks he’s back in the prisoner-of-war camp.’ She showed me a bruise on her arm, another the shape of a shoe on her leg. ‘He was always gentle. He doesn’t mean it. He thinks I’m a guard in the camp. He tries to escape, to get away from me.’
It had started a few months before when she woke one night to find him gone. The police brought him back an hour later, his pyjamas muddy, his eyes still wild with confusion.
‘An ambulance,’ I suggested. Betty shook her head. ‘He’ll calm down soon. I’ll call his doctor when we get home, he’ll give him a sedative. It always works.’
A woman came out of a house and asked if we needed help. Fred was still yelling, banging his fists on the console and the roof of the car. I caught a few words: Jap bastards, mongrels. ‘I’ve called the police,’ the woman said. ‘I didn’t know what else to do. I thought the baby might get hurt.’
The police arrived and Betty placed her hand on the window. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said to Fred as he continued to scream obscenities.
Betty explained to the policeman that her husband needed a doctor. She asked him to retrieve my suitcase from the boot. She called me his granddaughter, and asked if they could drive me and Ruth to the railway station.
I waited with her until the medics arrived. He’d calmed down by then. When they opened the door, he dropped his head and let them help him out and into the ambulance. He hunched his shoulders, his eyes glazed as if he did not recognise us.
Betty reassured me he would be fine. They’d forgotten his pills with all the excitement. And the lack of sleep. She hugged me and told me he loved me.
‘Will you tell me more about what happened when I was born?’ I asked. She agreed to write, and drove off, following the ambulance.
My grandfather, Frederick William Sumner, died in a locked ward at the psychiatric hospital a few months after I met him. ‘Nothing wrong with him,’ Betty told me later. ‘He just turned his face to the wall and willed himself to die.’
12
Wondering where the lions are
Walking into Wellington Railway Station, I felt as if I’d arrived in another country. People moved with purpose beneath vaulted ceilings. Without a glance, they strode over the large compass tiled into the floor. I stood to one side and watched them, longing to be part of all that forward motion.
I called Mavis and Max from a phone box. Mavis’s voice was full of surprise.
‘I’ll get Dad,’ she said. We’d never had a conversation without his presence. On the phone, he would pick up the extension. There were no shared intimacies unless he was part of it. No mother–daughter secrets. We’d never once been for lunch or shopping or any outing that did not involve the two of them.
I kept the conversation short. I was in Wellington to meet someone and could I stay the night?
It was rush hour on the train to Upper Hutt. The wind came up, flinging the sea over the tracks that ran along the margin of the harbour. Fresh rain pitted the surface of the water. I wondered if Fred had gone home, or if they’d kept him in hospital. I thought of the sun-drenched images from the VHS. I wanted to walk the pathways above that calm and distant sea. I longed for arid hills. For a dry and sapless heat to smother the damp.
We waited as Upper Hutt Station emptied of people. The car park was soon deserted. Late sun crept across the litter and oil stains. I had no idea how I would explain things to them.
It was not that I had no right to find my family, it was that they did not recognise I had one. My desires did not exist because there was no framework for them to exist within.
I needed to put Ruth down and stretch my body. Mavis and Max arrived late. He always drove. He had allowed her only recently to get her licence. ‘Cricket?’ I asked. I knew from experience they were late because he’d been listening to cricket on the radio. He could not miss a second. Mavis inclined her head. An acknowledgement and a warning.
We drove without speaking to their stucco home at the end of a cul-de-sac in the middle of a seventies subdivision. The air pressure was dropping, the storm from Wellington circling Totara Park.
Mavis and Max did not ask questions. If they
