‘That is sad.’ Privately, I thought forty years was plenty of time.
‘Thank you, my dear. I’d better get back into his room now. Time is precious. I’ll call you if there’s any news, okay?’
I knew she meant news of his death. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, again.
‘Thank you, you are a good girl. Bye now.’ Her voice trembled before she hung up.
I had handled that conversation well. Even though I am a woman and not a girl. I felt a little moment of triumph that I could tell Tina about next month. Empathy! I had felt it and expressed it.
30
Peter, 1982
On 2nd April 1980, Dad and I left England. We were able to sail from Dover to Calais as foot passengers and then to Genoa in Italy, but then there came the horrific, months-long voyage from there to Port Said in Egypt, through the Suez Canal to Colombo and then to Singapore, and to Sydney, and finally to Auckland, sometimes hidden away on freighter or cargo ships thanks to generous bribes and sometimes as regular foot passengers. Dad seemed to enjoy the expedition, ‘seeing the world’ he said, but I was scared and/or sick all the time. I hid in whatever cabin we were allocated, and rarely went on deck.
By the time we arrived in New Zealand, Dad had a full moustache and beard. He never shaved again, though he kept his beard neatly trimmed, ‘like Sigmund Freud’ he said. He also wore thick-rimmed glasses thereafter with clear lenses. Only people who knew him well would recognize him as Conor Geary, and I was the only person who knew him well.
We stayed in a small, rented house in Auckland for two months. Dad had changed the name on his dental certificates to James Armstrong and had registered with the New Zealand Dental Association under that name with some letter he had been able to forge from the Irish Dental Board. He had to take some kind of exam too, but he passed it easily.
Then we moved to Wellington and Dad got locum dentist work. He picked up the local accent quickly and urged me to do the same. It was harder for me, though, as I didn’t see too many people.
The biggest change was that I was no longer a secret. Dad was proud to introduce me to people we met. Although he sometimes had to explain my disease, he played it down, later telling me that he didn’t want people pitying me. But I began to talk with other people for the first time. It was very difficult. I never knew what to say.
Dad told our sob story about the poor dead mum and wife. This elicited sympathy and congratulations to my father for raising me alone.
We were invited to another dentist’s family home for lunch. I wore the hat and gloves, and Dad did the usual explanation of my rare condition, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Dad’s colleague’s wife and daughters. Girls a little older than me, who behaved completely normally. Their mum was normal too. She had baked a cake and roasted a chicken and she made her daughters show off their hand-knitted sweaters. I said little. Dad explained that I was shy as I’d had to be homeschooled in Ireland.
Afterwards, at home, I expressed my admiration for the mother and daughters. Dad looked at me strangely and then said that it was time to move on, to set up his own practice.
We moved to Rotorua, a cheap place to buy property. It was 1982 and I was fourteen years old. The whole place smelled of rotten eggs because of the hydrogen sulphide that hovered above the thermal water. Our house was on a back road three miles outside town. There was a small, ramshackle house next door, but apart from that, our nearest neighbour was miles away. Logging trucks passed our house fairly regularly, but there was almost no other traffic.
There were two bedrooms, a functional kitchen and a long dark sitting room, with a separate barn ten yards back from the house. The house was made of wood, and nothing like as grand as our house back in Ireland with its cultivated garden, wide driveway and stone pillars. Dad said it was an adventure, starting again. Neither of us believed it. He drove in and out to his new office every day. He had bought it from the widow of a recently deceased dentist. He had a young receptionist called Danny. I met him infrequently. I think he thought there was something wrong with me mentally, because I was unable to chat with him. I was desperate to socialize, but my inarticulation made it hard. When I said it to Dad, he warned me off interacting with other people. They could kill me without even meaning to, he said.
During the long days while he was at work, I explored our new territory. Our land wasn’t fenced at the back, and it was three weeks before I discovered that there were natural hot springs about two miles back under a sharp cliff edge. I was nervous about testing my skin in such water, but when I told Dad, he was as excited as I was. We set off on a cold May day and swam in the hot rock pool before cooling off in the cold-water lake beside it. This was so much better than the beach back in Ireland. The water had no detrimental effect on my skin. Dad and I often went there at the weekends after that, summer and winter.
On the property adjoining ours, there was a boy who looked a few years older than me. He drove his own truck. I was fascinated. I could see him from my window and, when Dad was at work, I would spend time hanging around the adjoining fence, eager for some communication. As far as I could see, he lived with his mother. They went out early in the morning and he would come home in the afternoon, and then she would be dropped off around 9 p.m., later at the weekends. When he came home from school, he booted a rugby ball around his yard and tended to chickens I could hear from a coop on the other side of his property.
I watched my neighbour and concluded there was something gentle about him. He was poor, judging by his clothing and home, but I could hear him speak to his mother. And he was respectful of her. She seemed old. I then wondered if she was his grandmother.
Now that I was older, I was beginning to question the way Dad spoke about women. New Zealand had been the first country in the world to give women voting rights, a fact that enraged Dad when I told him. When I talked about the old lady next door, he closed his eyes until I stopped speaking of her. There were certain subjects that were off limits to Dad and that was how he expressed it. He shut his eyes to shut down the subject.
I wondered about my mother and sister in the room next door, years previously. I remembered kicking her pregnant belly. That could not have been right, even though Dad had encouraged me. If he was right about everything, why were we living with new histories and new names on the other side of the world?
Yet, my mother must have been the problem. He was my dad, he looked after me, he never raised his hand to me. I had seen evidence of my mother’s madness and aggression. I had once asked him when my sister was a baby why he didn’t take her and leave her on the church steps, but he said it was an act of charity to let her stay with Denise. ‘She is all she has,’ he said. ‘I’m not so cruel that I would separate them. It was bad enough when I took you from her, I couldn’t do it to her again.’ Dad obviously had a kind heart.
31
Sally
Mark phoned me a few days after the cafe incident. I reminded him that I had asked him a question before Caroline’s interruption.
‘Why are you so interested in me?’
‘Well, it’s sort of complicated, but I would like to be your friend, to look out for you. I don’t feel sorry for you, but I don’t want to give the wrong impression either.’
‘What’s complicated about that?’ I voiced my suspicion. ‘Are you a journalist?’
‘God no, I’m an accountant, and I’m new to town. I find you fascinating, your history. Did I do something or say something?’
