This Mortal Boy E-Book

Fiona Kidman

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 431

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'The offender is not one of ours. It is unfortunate that we got this undesirable from his homeland.'Auckland, October 1955. If young Paddy Black sings to himself he can almost see himself back home in Belfast. Yet, less than two years after sailing across the globe in search of a better life, here he stands in a prison cell awaiting trial for murder. He pulled a knife at the jukebox that night, but should his actions lead him to the gallows? As his desperate mother waits on, Paddy must face a judge and jury unlikely to favour an outsider, as a wave of moral panic sweeps the island nation.Fiona Kidman's powerful novel explores the controversial topic of the death penalty with characteristic empathy and a probing eye for injustice.

Leseprobe

Dame Fiona Kidman OBE, Légion d’honneur, is one of New Zealand’s foremost contemporary writers. A novelist, short story writer and poet, she is the author of more than 30 books. She has worked as a librarian, radio producer and critic, and as a scriptwriter for radio, television and film. She lives in Wellington.

Praise for All Day at the Movies:

‘All Day at the Movies proves that Kidman is a masterful storyteller’ The Lady

‘A universal and honest book’ San Francisco Book Review

‘A truly gifted writer. She explores the subtleties of human interaction and family with a deft and insightful hand’ Trip Fiction

Praise for Songs from the Violet Café:

‘Kidman, a poet, is a beautiful writer’ The Times

‘Readers are in good hands; like all Kidman’s writing, it is engaging and captivating’ The Lady

‘Absorbing and fearlessly written’ Caroline Wallace, author of The Finding of Martha Lost

‘A subtle, intensely wrought novel of echoes and shadows falling across decades and continents’ Janet Todd, author of A Man of Genius

Praise for The Infinite Air:

‘A sweeping saga of a fascinating life and an entertaining insight into the early days of aviation’ Historical Novel Society

‘A thrilling tale of adventure and heartbreak – Kidman has triumphantly brought this inspirational heroine to life’ The Lady

‘It’s a given that Kidman couldn’t produce a poor paragraph if she tried to and this is a narrative that – I have to say it – takes wing’ New Zealand Herald

‘A fascinating read’ Red Magazine

‘Gripping’ Woman’s Own

Also by Fiona Kidman

Novels

A Breed of Women, 1979

Mandarin Summer, 1981

Paddy’s Puzzle, 1983

The Book of Secrets, 1987

True Stars, 1990

Ricochet Baby, 1996

Songs from the Violet Café, 2003

The Captive Wife, 2005

The Infinite Air, 2013

All Day at the Movies, 2016

Short story collections (as author)

Mrs Dixon and Friend, 1982

Unsuitable Friends, 1988

The Foreign Woman, 1993

The House Within, 1997

The Best of Fiona Kidman’s Short Stories, 1998

A Needle in the Heart, 2002

The Trouble with Fire, 2011

Short story collections (as editor)

New Zealand Love Stories: An Oxford Anthology, 1999

The Best New Zealand Fiction 1, 2004

The Best New Zealand Fiction 2, 2005

The Best New Zealand Fiction 3, 2006

Non-fiction

Gone North, 1984

Wellington, 1989

Palm Prints, 1994

At the End of Darwin Road, 2008

Beside the Dark Pool, 2009

Poetry

Honey and Bitters, 1975

On the Tightrope, 1978

Going to the Chathams, 1985

Wakeful Nights, 1991

Where Your Left Hand Rests, 2010

This Change in the Light, 2016

Play

Search for Sister Blue, 1975

This Mortal Boy

FIONA KIDMAN

This Mortal Boy

FIONA KIDMAN

Pushkin Press

A Gallic Book

Copyright © Fiona Kidman, 2018

Fiona Kidman has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work

First published by Penguin Random House New Zealand Ltd.

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Gallic Books, 59 Ebury Street, London, SW1W 0NZ

This book is copyright under the Berne ConventionNo reproduction without permissionAll rights reserved

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781805334378

Typeset in Fournier MT by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

Printed in the UK by CPI (CR0 4YY)

For Ian,who believed in this bookandfor E.H.,the daughter of Albert Black

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Reading Group Guide

Chapter 1

October 1955. If Albert Black sings to himself he can almost see himself back home in Belfast, the place where he came from. He begins it as a low hum in his head, but words start tumbling out louder and louder I am a wee falorie man, a rattling roving Irishman. He’s not sure what falorie means, but his da has told him he thinks it’s about sorrow, which at this very moment he is feeling. A falorie man is harmless, just likes a bit of mischief, his da had said. Shut up, Paddy, a voice shouts, and other voices start clamouring in unison, Shut the shite up, Paddy. I can do all that ever you can, he sings. Shut up, not really meaning it for him, it’s just something to scream about when men are locked in stone cells behind steel doors, they shout and they scream day and night and their voices are the one thing they have, their voices that the warders can’t control. I can do all that ever you can for I am a wee falorie man. The trains that run past the west wing of the prison have been rattling all night, first the express that runs down south, then the goods trains, their long banshee wails trailing behind them. The morning train passes and he raises his voice louder and louder to drown it out. I’m a rattling roving Irishman like it’s a yodel now.

‘No you’re not,’ the man in the next cell calls, ‘you’re a no good ten-pound Pom, why don’t you go back where you came from?’

That’s me, Paddy thinks, as he straightens his clothes out as neat as he can, for there are no mirrors in this cell. Neither fish nor fowl as far as these men are concerned. He speaks like an Irishman, he calls himself an Irishman, but he’s from that No Man’s Land that calls itself the United Kingdom. But it’s there, Sandy Row, Belfast, the street crowded with shops and life and people going about their business. He’s no culchie. There are said to be one hundred and twenty-seven shops in the Row, although he’s never counted them. The corner shop with all the items of groceries his mam buys to make their tea, the rag shop, the barber’s shop, the pubs where his da spent money they didn’t have. There’s the picture theatre and the butcher and the sweet shop and the stall that sells double-decker candy apples with coconut on top. Funny how you can go from one place to another in the blink of an eye. There’s the chance, in the situation he now finds himself, he could be sent to the gallows. He sees himself standing on a platform, the audience waiting for the last act of the play. The platform will actually be a trapdoor. He will be fit and well, standing up straight, the next minute he’ll be down the way, dropped from one level to the next, in a different state, that of the dead. That’s what he’ll be doing, going from one world to another, his past and his future all rolled into one. All the people in this play will still be alive, but he might not. Who is to know what will happen next?

He allows himself a pace or two back and forth, puts his eye to the slit in the door. The cell, around ten feet by six, consists of a slatted steel bed screwed to the floor, covered by a mattress of canvas and straw that still stinks from the piss of the last man who slept on it; a bench with three shelves where he keeps his notepaper and a book, the cigarettes his friend Peter in the south has sent to him; a bucket to shit in that is due to be taken away, but the man who collects it is always late, as if the task that lies before him must be delayed for as long as possible.

And sure enough, as he sets his eye to the aperture, there’s an officer coming, the one called Des, a skinny little man with an out-thrust jaw, keys dangling in his hand. He lets Albert pass through the door, hands him his tie. They haven’t given it to him in the cell in case he strings himself up. He’s not ready for that, not yet. He fumbles a Windsor knot as he is hurried towards the outside world.

‘Good luck, Paddy,’ someone calls from the floor above, the rancour gone.

The Supreme Court in Auckland has a high arched dome made of timber, with splendid curved windows on either side of the room. It’s said to have been built in the design of Warwick Castle but, handsome as it is, which part of that sprawling edifice it’s meant to represent is hard to discern. There is no moat and no tower, although the courtroom is illuminated by a grand chandelier with royal decoration on its rim, like the edge of a crown. Behind the judge’s bench hang the flags of the United Kingdom on the left-hand side, and on the right that of the 58th Regiment, presented in 1845 to the inhabitants of Auckland. It says so there on the flag. The dock stands in the centre of the room, almost close enough for the accused to reach out and touch the jurors seated in padded red leather chairs; the jurors sit face to face with the Press Gallery on the other side. There are chairs behind the dock where the public may sit, and above that a mezzanine floor where there is more space for the audience. It’s called the Ladies’ Balcony, although lately women have been admitted to the main gallery. The whole court is crammed with spectators craning their necks as the moment approaches for the accused to appear. On this day, the lower gallery is brimming with brightly dressed girls, their faces vivid with dark lipstick and blue eye shadow.

The jury has been sworn in and taken their places. Some of them are returned servicemen, others have missed the war because they were too young or too old. The foreman is called James Taylor, a bank manager, dressed in an immaculately pressed charcoal suit, a snow-white shirt and a handkerchief in his breast pocket, his tie striped gold and navy with a crest on it; he sits alongside Neville Johns, a man described as a company director, whose tie appears to bear the same crest, his face shaved smooth as satin. The two men seem to lean towards each other, although it may be that the proximity of Jack Cuttance, a butcher, sitting next to them, is drawing them closer. Jack’s thick hands grip the rail in front of him. Beside him sits Ken McKenzie, the youngest on the jury by perhaps twenty-five years, his face bleached with anxiety so that the scars of healed pimples stand out. Then there is an accountant, a tiny man with large black-rimmed spectacles, whose fedora has such a wide hard brim it almost engulfs his face when he puts it on. Next there is a gasfitter with a hard mouth that curls with contempt, as if he had already judged the evidence he is about to hear; a shop assistant who sells men’s wear at an upmarket shop in High Street, better dressed in his way than the businessmen, but different, his pale-grey suit jacket slim around his hips, and perhaps the youngest above Ken McKenzie; then a night watchman who has warned them he might have trouble staying awake during the day as he tends to doze off. He and the ticket seller who works shifts at the Civic Theatre along the road have nodded their recognition, as has another man who describes his occupation as a product distributor, which sounds very fancy but turns out to mean he is a grocer. A university lecturer who teaches Classics and wears not a suit but a hairy brown jacket and a tweedy-looking tie, and a high-school woodwork teacher called Frank complete the jury. So that is the lot of them: James, Neville, Jack, Ken, Leonard (not Len, please), Wayne, Marcus, Norman, Rex, Roy, Arthur, Frank. The twelve good men and true. Not all of them will invite the others to call them by their first names. Ken McKenzie will call several of them sir when he addresses them.

They glance sideways at the accused as they are seated, and then look straight ahead. After the swearing in, a recess is called where they will get to know each other over morning tea and biscuits. The defendant disappears down a hole in the floor, descending narrow stairs to a holding cell, like a rehearsal for the gallows.

This jury is not the first to have passed judgment on Albert Black, for already he has been indicted by a Grand Jury, a collection of worthy citizens who meet on a regular basis and decide whether a case should go forward to a full trial. The accused does not meet with them, nor are the public admitted, although the press is present. The Grand Jury make their decision in private and offer a recommendation to the judge. There has been no doubt in their minds that Albert Black should confront the full force of the law.

The head of Albert Black, who is also known as Paddy Black, or even as Paddy Donovan when he wants to fool a wee doll into thinking he is someone else, or yet again when he wants to escape the immigration department, rises again through the trapdoor as he ascends, a warder close behind him. Albert is emerging inch by inch, his black hair that is thick and wavy, his green Irish eyes and skin like milk. The jailer, Des Ball, acts as if he would like to have a cattle prod to poke him along, while at the same time he is revelling in a day outside the prison walls. In the blacked-out paddy wagon that has transported them the short distance from the prison to the Supreme Court he’d said, lighting a cigarette without offering one to his charge, shackled as he is by a chain to his leg, ‘It’s a grand day out there, Paddy my lad. Bet you’d like to be taking a turn or two down Queen Street right now. A nice milkshake at Somervell’s, or a rare steak at Ye Olde Barn, that’s your favourite trick or treat, isn’t it now? Ah yes, remind me now, you don’t like people to stand in your way, do you lad? I’m glad not to be standing in front of you, with a knife in the back, that’s your speciality, a bit of blood on the floor, never mind the raspberry fizz.’

The Irish boy has said nothing. The moment is upon him as he enters the room head first and all eyes swivel towards him. It’s an up-and-down world all right. His trial for the murder of Alan Jacques, the man who called himself Johnny McBride, is about to begin in earnest.

Right at the back of the court sits a pale girl, and he turns his head towards her before he faces the judge. He senses rather than sees her. But she is there.

It’s raining, but then it’s often lashing down in Belfast. Kathleen sits on a bentwood chair, her hands folded in her lap as she looks out over the slate roofs shining in the wet. A notepad lies on the gate-leg table in front of her, but she can’t take up the pen to write in it. There are words swirling through her head. Words like my darling boy, my bonnie wee lad, you will come to no harm, your mother is here waiting to embrace you on your return.

It’s a plain room, furnished mostly with remnants from her mother’s house. She keeps it clean, but mould festers on the walls up where she can’t reach it, even standing on the chair. There is a sofa with wooden arms and a squab covered in a slip made from ends of blue and lemon patterned linen that looked awful nice when it was new, she always thinks. The material was on a small discount from the factory where she works. Perhaps she will get round to making a new cover someday, because her husband and the boys have spilled tea and baked beans over the years. Stains she can’t remove; the indelible stains of a life lived within these walls. An armchair and her mother’s treadle sewing machine stand in the corner; she has patched many a shirt on that machine. It is what they have; her dowry. It is more than many people round here have to show.

The door opens and her husband comes in. He smells of acrid tar from mending roads, and of dampness from working in the weather. He looks at her and shrugs.

‘Dinner not on?’ he says.

‘I’ll fry up some of last night’s taters,’ she says, ‘and a couple of eggs. Clodagh’s niece brought some in from the country. There was more than enough for her to use up.’

‘There’s no good moping,’ he says, shifting his bag off his shoulder. ‘It’ll come to nothing.’

‘Our boy’s due in the dock. Our Albert. What’s not to mope about?’

‘It’ll have been a mistake. You’ll see, they’ll sort it out over there in New Zealand.’

But it’s three months now since they received the telegram with the terrible news.

He sees the look on her face. ‘Worse things have happened.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like the Blitz you’re always reminding me about. Have you forgotten now?’

Kathleen shivers, pulls her cardigan around her more tightly, tucks a frond of her dark hair behind her ear. The fire is low on the hearth. ‘The boy was with me then. Not in New Zealand.’ Remembering how it was, the explosions and the fire raids, the people dying or already dead all about their street, the way she had put Albert on a shelf in the closet and held the door shut against him, leaning her body in with all her might, hoping not to be thrown off her feet when the next blast came. He was barely six at the time, still small enough to put in a cupboard and keep him safe. Later she had to take him to the air-raid shelters, but by that time the bombing was over, even though the planes flew low overhead at nights.

‘You weren’t here then,’ she says, her voice flat.

‘No, you’re right, I wasn’t here then.’ He speaks in a slow way you could take or leave as sarcasm. ‘We all have to answer to the Big Fella sooner or later, don’t we now?’

So yes, here was her husband who hadn’t been conscripted but had gone to the war all the same because it was his duty, the way he saw it, far away on foreign battlefields, while she and their son hid in cupboards and their world fell down around their ears. Even though his grandfather had been killed at the Somme, like those tens of thousands of young Belfast men who had died in the ditches, it was the way it was, to go and fight for what you believed to be right. Never mind that he, himself, had not been so right since he’d come back.

‘I’m sorry, Bert,’ she says. Their son, the middle one, born between the one who died and the little one in the next room writing his homework, bears the same name as his father, so they are Albert and Bert just to keep them apart. ‘You’ve done what you can.’

She stands and he puts his arms, smelling of tar and sweat, around her, and she rests her head against him, remembering that this was why she, who was once Kathleen McKay, married Bert Black. Through the good times and, now, for the desperate bad. ‘I’m at my wits’ end. If only I was there with him,’ she says. But they have been through all that and it has been to no avail.

‘Why did we let him go, Kathleen?’ he says, his voice a muffled sob, and now she is the one comforting him. ‘We’ve been up against it since the beginning, that government and all.’

‘I’ve got a few ideas,’ she says, and because she is the strong one these days, he listens.

Chapter 2

Mount Eden is a charming suburb. That is how its residents would describe it, and they’re right. An extinct volcanic mountain stands at its heart. A mountain road where tourists take scenic tours winds up its side. There are any number of notable buildings to be pointed out, including a residence of the Governor-General, pretty villas and gardens filled with lush trees and roses and dahlias and other pretty flowers, for all things botanical grow well in this area. Tens of thousands of people flock through this leafy suburb every year to watch rugby and other sporting fixtures at the famous Eden Park, the biggest gladiatorial arena of its kind in the country. So it is unfortunate, the residents are inclined to say, that the first thing people are likely to think of, when they hear the words Mount Eden, is Mount Eden jail. It was built to imitate Dartmoor Prison in England, a dark Victorian edifice made from bluestone rock quarried by the prisoners who would live within its walls. Mount Eden jail is surrounded by high stone walls topped with barbed wire, so that the residents can’t see what lies behind, neither the walk up the stairs to the heavy doors that clang shut behind a sentenced man, nor inside the prison. It is, if they could see the interior, built on a radial system, the wings built around the central atrium, emerging on several levels with bridges connecting them.

There are always lights on in the passageways of the prison, a dull fluorescent glow that seeps through the Judas holes in the doors, so that even in the deepness of night it isn’t possible to be relieved by the forgiving darkness. And even when a degree of stillness falls over the inmates of Mount Eden prison towards midnight, there are still howls that ring through its walls at unexpected moments, bad dreams, sudden rages, the footsteps of warders on the echoing floors. The rock walls of the cells create spaces freezing in winter and like ovens in the summer.

Paddy lies awake, his head aching, longing for some shuteye. The noise is louder than usual. For the past week things have been more subdued, they always are in the days following a hanging. But then the momentum gathers again as if the pent-up rage of those who have survived were being released into the spaces of the night, men banging on cell doors, someone howling like a wolf, and another replying yap yap yap like a dog. He had known Allwood, the man they hanged just a few days ago. The prisoners are not supposed to know when a hanging takes place but they always do. You can’t miss the sound of the steel gallows being erected. They call it the Meccano set. A few tricks have been tried to distract the men from the event. One night they were sent to the pictures so they wouldn’t hear the clank and rattle of the chains that bound the man’s feet as he was dragged along the corridors. There had been a near riot after that, the realisation that they had sat there, laughing their heads off at some silly slick American comedy, while a man was being killed just along the corridor. The authorities are getting smarter than that, but they can’t hide what’s going on. The convicts know when the weigh-ins begin.

‘They weigh me every day,’ Allwood told Albert when they met in the exercise yard.

‘And why would they be doing that every day?’ Albert asked. ‘They want to put meat on your bones?’

‘You don’t know, eh? Well, let me tell you how it is. The hangman needs to know the exact weight of the body, so they know how high they need to string you before your neck breaks. You hear that bang every morning? That’s them testing the gallows with a sandbag the same weight as myself, to make sure they’ve got it right.’

‘But why every day? I don’t get that.’

‘So you don’t know what day it’s going to happen.’

‘You mean they don’t tell you?’

‘Oh, I think they tell you in the morning. I haven’t had that pleasure yet of being informed.’

‘Perhaps it won’t happen,’ Albert had said.

‘Ha. You cleanskins, you’re so innocent. Haven’t seen the inside of a prison before. You think they save you at the last minute? Dream on. Mind you, Freddie Foster, they did him in this year, he thought he’d got away with it. He got himself a dose of appendicitis two weeks before he was due. They put him in hospital and took his appendix out and sent him back for the gallows.’

‘That’s nuts.’

‘Ah well, he got to look up a few nurses’ skirts at the last. Perhaps he thought his luck had changed. None of us think it’ll happen to us. But I can tell you, I’ll be taking one of those screws with me. I plan to kill one of them before they kill me.’

Not that Allwood succeeded with his plan. They got him. And a good job done, Des said to Paddy. ‘He took a while to go, jerked on the end of the rope for a bit.’ It was the second hanging since Albert had been inside, the third one of the year. The one before Allwood was worse than the others, in terms of the effect it had on the inmates: a young Maori man who had brothers inside at the time. The family of the man stood outside the prison walls, their wailing and sobbing rising in torrents of sound, singing that was strange to Paddy, the brothers inside the walls screaming like wounded animals.

On this morning, the first day of his trial, it’s come home to him that he might well be hanged for the death of Alan Jacques, or Johnny McBride, or whoever the man thought he was. The realisation seeps through him, at first a ripple like spring rain starting, then a downpour of terrible knowledge. It’s a wonder to him that he hasn’t grasped this reality before. What option had he had but to belt Jacques, and how could he have known that it would turn out the way it has? This steadfast belief had carried him through the first months he’d been held in the prison. He couldn’t see how it could be perceived any other way. And now he isn’t sure. There is a girl who is due to give evidence, and he has no idea what she will say. He thought her a friend but now he knows she is a witness for the prosecution. When he thinks back, the way she might describe the encounter could go either way.

And what of the girl sitting at the back of the court, what will she make of what this girl has to say? Feckless, he is. The drift of life. Feckless and fuckless. It wasn’t always like that. The girls appeared, those nights in Auckland, one after the other, always willing; they jived and swung, twisting their hips this way and that in the dance halls, and after, there was always an after, they would like as not swing their way to his bed. He doesn’t know anymore what to make of it all, just that it has brought him here. He closes his eyes and sees a dance hall, the girls with their nipped-in waists, whirling floral-patterned dresses flicking out from their knees, or the widgies with their skin-tight skirts that show the cracks in their arses. The Orange Hall in Newton was one of his favourites, a slide and glide place where you pressed your face to a girl’s cheek and asked her for the supper waltz, and then the last dance, and when those were over going on, with a girl at his side, drifting along the street to the Maori Community Centre, another world again, and they would dance till two or three in the morning, the music wild, some familiar, some from a different place that sent them all crazy, steel guitars throbbing, a saxophone trebling its notes. There would be a boil-up and a mug of tea. At the Community Centre it felt easier to be an outsider, because he’d noticed that Maori people in Auckland kept to themselves, except here in their own place. They too might have come from another country. Yet when he was among them they didn’t question who he was, as if him dancing there was the most natural thing.

He sees himself dancing, his hips rotating, the way he could go on and on and on all night until the morning when he would wake up, spent, a little drunk, the girl he’d met at the Orange beside him, or not, because usually they had to flee home to their parents before dawn. After the ball. It makes him think of his mam. ‘Dear Mother,’ he had written (for he wrote to her in more formal terms than he thought of her), ‘life is a bit of a lark. I’m living with a whole heap of mates here in Auckland. I’m just your same Albert, but I’ve got a pair of dancing shoes. The Teddy boys dress differently from us. Their jackets have wide shoulders and are draped down nearly to their knees, their trousers have very narrow bottoms, and you should see the shine on their shoes. A lot of them are English boys who have come off the ships, they are mostly good sorts, some of them come and stay with me for a night or two when their ships are in port. I have to be a bit careful how many come at once, my landlady is quite strict, but you’ll be glad to hear that.’

The day in court hasn’t gone how he imagined. The jury took a long time to be sworn in. For much of the day he had sat in the tiny holding cell beneath the courtroom. During a recess he overheard his lawyer, a dark, intense man named Oliver Buchanan, talking to his colleague about the kind of jury he was hoping for: a group of men who might still remember what it was like to be young, and not too biased towards the migrants. That’s me, Paddy thought, an immigrant, not one of them, not a Kiwi bloke, as they say. He knew, from what he had been told, that the lawyer can challenge anyone who is called without giving a reason, but he is only allowed four challenges before he has to let the jurors pass. After that he could challenge only if he can show cause. But Paddy got the drift. As he watched the selection take place he saw men with hard eyes, cold stares in his direction, just one or two with a gentler manner, or so he thought. I’ve done my best, Buchanan told his colleague, within his hearing, but it’s still a jury full of old codgers. You know, he added, the sort who believe every word of the Mazengarb Report.

Paddy wondered if Buchanan thought he wouldn’t know what the Mazengarb Report is. But he does, because he lived on the doorstep of that government-commissioned document which claimed youthful lawlessness and immoral behaviour was sweeping the country. It was all supposed to have started in the Hutt Valley near Wellington, where the first bodgies and widgies hung out, before spreading to Auckland. The Hutt Valley was where he lived just the year before. He has heard it thrashed to bits, the bickering it started.

It had been late in the day before Paddy reappeared in the dock. The judge seemed like an old man, but then all men over twenty-five look as if they are over the hill. The men on the jury were so close to him he could smell the sweat in their armpits, mingling with the perfume of the girls sitting behind him.

Albert Lawrence Black. His name hung in the air. You are charged with the murder of Alan Jacques on the twenty-sixth of July 1955. How do you plead? Guilty, or not guilty?

He’d replied, in the firmest voice he could muster, ‘Not guilty, your Honour’, and they left him standing there for all to see, in his good blue suit and blue-striped tie, while the first of the witnesses for the prosecution was called, a police photographer who took pictures of Ye Olde Barn cafe where, it is claimed, Albert had plunged a knife into the neck of Jacques. The photographer was followed by an architectural draughtsman who had been called to measure the cafe where ‘the incident’ took place. The draughtsman handed over a scroll of paper containing his drawings, to be passed to the judge.

Albert could describe to them the exact shape of that cafe, but they don’t ask him. He sees it in the swimming light of a winter evening, a long room with a bar counter along one side, flanked by six high stools where you can sit and drink Bushells coffee, dark liquid poured from a square bottle, topped up with boiling water from the Zip, eat a steak or a hamburger, or a frankfurter, and, across from there, cubicles that fit six at a squeeze, three on either side of a Formica-topped table lit by low-hanging lanterns. The room leads through a latticed wall adorned with flowering pot plants to the jukebox. Albert closes his eyes again, and for a moment the courtroom ceases to exist. He is trying to play a tune on the jukebox, that’s all. He’s been beaten up and his body is sore and his head hurts. His hand is on the button of the Wurlitzer, selecting a song. What he wants to play is Slim Whitman singing ‘Danny Boy’, which will transport him back to Ireland, but someone is stopping him, someone who wants to fight on and deck him again. He is afraid – yes that is it – he is terrified. He opens his eyes and looks at the judge, but he is not allowed to speak. Instead, he must stand there and let them all say what they have to say.

And that is it for the day. He thought there would be more to it than that, that everything would come out and his lawyer would have jumped up and told the judge what was what. But then, he doesn’t know whether Buchanan really understands what exactly is what, how it had been. The real business will start happening tomorrow.

After this anti-climax he is back in the paddy wagon being returned to Mount Eden.

And now here he is, lying on his back, staring at the slivers of light from the grating, back in Belfast again, just like every night now, and it’s summer, the marley season. He — that is, he who was once Albert — and his mates played their marbles everywhere out on the streets. They had bewlers, the big knuckle-dusters, and dinkies, the beautiful glass miniatures prized by them all; shooters, those were the proven ones, chipped and scarred, but they had a history of straight shooting; and then there were the ballies if you could get hold of them, ball bearings that you had to steal to lay hands on.

Between the Shankill and the Falls area, the Protestant and the Catholic divide, there lay a strip of No Man’s Land that had once been a brick field, the hard clay making it the perfect spot to shoot marleys. Albert’s mother had told him not to go over there, it was too far away from Gay Street that ran off Sandy Row where they lived. He didn’t get it, the reason the Prods and Micks were divided up the way they were. So they went to different schools, and they worshipped at different churches, it was even said they spoke the Our Father in a different way — when he went to St George’s everyone said Our Father that art in heaven, but somebody had told him that the Micks said who art in heaven, as if God were a person you might be able to see, a being like them. Well, that was old shite if ever he’d heard it, because God was a creature in the sky that didn’t let Himself be shown, you just had to believe He was there. His mother did say, on occasion, that they, meaning the Catholics, were heathens who believed that they truly drank the blood of Christ when they took the communion, when she knew all along that it was wine that represented the blood. It was complicated, she said, but there they were living next door to Clodagh who was a Mick through and through and as good a friend as his mam had in the world. It was only round the Twelfth of July when the Orange Parades were in full tilt and all the Protestants marched along Sandy Row with their banners and drums, across the Boyne Bridge, chanting their slogans, and dressed up in suits and bowler hats, that there was a distance between them. His mother would say not to go to Clodagh’s today, she was resting up, but he did anyway, because Clodagh always had a lolly in her apron. She would sigh and roll her eyes. ‘You’re not such a bad wee one for a sally rod, here take this and be on your way.’ Clodagh had had children, it was said, but they’d all died of some fever. It was something you didn’t ask about, not even of your mother.

But he remembered a particular day when the sun was gleaming like new coppers, something to recall in itself, a true summer day, and the oak leaves seeming to float on air above the strip, and he and his mates, their gang of three, wee Noel and Rory and himself, were playing marleys and he was winning. It would be something good to tell his da, who had come back from the war and was hanging around the house looking sorry for himself and not too interested in his only son. Only living son, that was, because Albert once had a brother, although that was not exactly as he saw it. Wee William had died before he was born, so that when his mam talked about his brother it was a bit like talking about God in the sky, the same shadowy feeling of someone you had to believe in but would never see. Albert wanted to talk to his da about Belgium where he’d been in the fighting, but his father had said to forget it, that was all over now and they’d all best get on with their lives and he better be good to his mam, now that he was a big boy, ten years old. His da and his mam kept going away to the bedroom and not wanting to talk to him, and his mam was acting strange.

It was this day when the pair of them were off on some secret mission of their own behind closed doors that he and the boys decided nobody would miss them if they took off to the strip to find a spot of their own, the street all around them so filled with games that the marleys were pitching over the circles and knocking out the game of the fellas next door and words spoken between them, a scuffle and a few fists flying.

Albert had brought his special marble that his da had brought home from the war. It was a Lutz that came out of the pocket of a dead German was all he said, the nearest he’d ever come to talking about the action. You don’t want to play that one, it’s a collector’s piece. He had held it up to the light, so that Albert could see the alternating bands of finely ground copper flakes edged by opaque white strands. If he hadn’t been mad with his father for distracting his mother the way he was, he would have done as he was told that day and left it in the little bowl on the mantelpiece where it was kept. The Lutz was his lucky marble, he decided. By the end of the day it would have knocked out a dozen of the opposition and, its work done, could be safely restored to the bowl.

At the very moment he flicked it into the circle, a posse of boys, all bigger than them, and none that they knew by sight, came slouching towards them, menace in their eyes. Albert made to gather up the marbles but the boys were on to them and he felt himself freeze with fear. The Lutz glinted in the sun, the copper glowing like molten gold. In a flash it had been gathered into the pocket of the tallest of the marauders.

‘It’s mine, gimme,’ Albert said.

‘Gimme,’ the boy mocked.

‘Please.’ Albert heard himself whimpering. ‘It’s my da’s marble.’ It sounded stupid cry-baby stuff, but the tears were welling up and he couldn’t stop them. ‘I’ll give you a sprassy if you give it me back.’

‘A sprassy for a Lutz.’ The biggest boy gave him a push in the head. ‘Six pennies for a good ’un like that. Not on your Nellie. What a laugh. Take yourself off and say your Proddie prayers. Tell your da he’s got a sooka bubba son. And all.’

When he got home his father was singing away to himself. No, he wasn’t, he and his mother were singing. They sang the chorus of ‘After the ball is over’ which was meant to be a sad song about parted lovers, but they were belting it out as if they were happy

… aft-er the ball is over, aft-er the break of morn

after the dancers’ leaving, after the stars are gone,

… after the ball. Aft-er the ball is over … and on and on, a kind of diddle diddle refrain.

And because it was another of the old songs they had sung for years and years, even before the war when he was just so high to his da’s waist, they were waiting for him to sing it along with them now. It made him scared many the hopes that have vanished, it sounded like the song was all about him and perhaps his da would hate him forever. But at this moment his father’s face was shiny and happy and Albert didn’t have the heart to tell him what had happened. Instead, he slipped a marble into the bowl on the mantelpiece, a cat’s eye, his very best, and hoped that the loss might go unnoticed.

Chapter 3

August 1955. Parliament House in Wellington is an Edwardian neo-classical building built of stone, to the right of a Gothic Revival building that houses the General Assembly Library, all spindly towers like a fairy castle. These buildings sit on a hill facing northward. A grassy lawn separates Parliament House from the street and small dilapidated houses belonging to the poor. A long flight of steps with narrow treads lead up to the reception area. Visitors and politicians alike cross a marbled floor laid out in chequered black and white. The ‘tiles’, the Press Gallery call it, the spot where they might catch a politician on the run and force an unguarded comment. From there they ascend to the upper chambers by way of more of the sombre solid steps, or in an ornate old-fashioned lift. The Honourable John Marshall, known to his friends as Jack, a major in wartime, likes to take the steps up to his office in the National Party wing of the building. The Attorney-General is spry in his manner, tall and lean-limbed, his mane of hair silvering, his chin as sleek as a seal’s backside. Marshall is a lawyer and a firm believer in God. Every Sunday morning he will be found worshipping at the Presbyterian church in the city. He has drafted many Bills, legislating for change. It is a matter of pride to him that under his watch the death penalty has been reinstated. It is not known exactly why he is so enthusiastic about killing criminals, although there has been a rumour circulating for years that a relative of his was murdered in Australia. It is just that, perhaps; a rumour. They swirl around the halls of power, whispers and murmurs that can bring a politician down in the bat of an eyelid. Marshall knows better than to allow his private life to spread into the wider world. Virtue has its own rewards, he believes, and it is a virtuous face he presents to the public.

On the morning of August the fifth, he had received a letter from the New Zealand High Commissioner in London, Clifton Webb. It was an urgent communication, in which Webb outlined an approach he had just received from a Mr Woods, the secretary of the office of the Government of Northern Ireland’s agent in London. He had come expressly at the request of Mr Warnock, the Attorney-General in Belfast, asking about legal assistance for Albert Lawrence Black, accused of a murder in Auckland. It seemed that Black’s parents lived in his constituency. The mother was clearly in an agitated state.

The telegram had come late in the day when Kathleen was returning home from work at the Jennymount Mill. In the distance, she saw the telegram boy lean his bike against the fence, and for a moment she thought, perhaps Albert is about to spring a surprise on us and come home. But the instant the boy turned around she guessed from the look on his face that it was something awful. Her hand flew to her mouth. It was from a government official on the far side of the world. Regret to advise. Like people got when men died at war.

At first she thought, as she read it, it must be some sort of mistake, that his name had got mixed up with that of someone else. The boy on the bike pedalled away as fast as he could, not wanting to be caught up in the drama, knowing when people broke down and wailed and cried. She wasn’t going to do that, not here in the street where people knew that a telegram meant something momentous had happened. But her hand had flown to her mouth in an exclamation of horror.

She let herself into the house and re-read the pencilled message. Someone was dead all right. But not her son. Albert was in prison. There was a number to ring, only she didn’t have a phone. Soon the post office would be closed. She had to wait for Bert to come home. Oh, she didn’t know what to do. The front room was full of late-summer afternoon light, shadows of evening poking themselves through the window. Like cobwebs. Like some strange dust settling in the air. She could hardly breathe. She clung to the table to stop herself falling in a faint.

When Bert finally did arrive it was too late to make the call that night. Her husband had been full of rage, striding around the house. ‘The crazy little shite, what’s he done?’ he shouted, and slammed his fist beside his plate so that his dinner fell off. Not that they wanted to eat. And there was Daniel to consider. He had been sent upstairs. Because Kathleen had said, when she had time to draw breath, that as it surely could not be true, they should keep it to themselves and not go upsetting everybody with this news, not even Daniel. As for her and Bert, they would hear more about it in the morning when they got to phone the authorities in New Zealand. Bert had gone off out, cursing under his breath, just when she needed him most, and she knew that when he came in it would be late, and he would have taken drink.

It would be down to her, she thought. She had yet to work out a plan for what to do, but straight away she decided that if there was a shred of truth in the contents of the telegram she would fly to her boy’s side, she must be there with him, make the authorities understand what a good son he was, and a sweet-natured brother, and, oh, that there was no better young man than Albert.

Very early in the morning she and Bert made their way to the police station, where they explained their plight and got permission to make a phone call. They couldn’t think of anywhere else to go where there might be a telephone they could use at that hour. The post office didn’t open until later, too late in the day to ring a government department in New Zealand. Day and night were back to front on opposite sides of the world. It took a long time to find someone to talk to in New Zealand, where people were packing up to go home from their jobs. Kathleen was put from one department to another and at last she got to speak to the superintendent of the jail where they were holding Albert, and it became clear that the telegram’s truth was there in its words. Albert was arrested on the charge of murder.

‘It can’t be right,’ Kathleen said to the man on the other end. ‘He wouldn’t do a thing like that. He must have been provoked something terrible. Or he was in danger. That must have been it.’

‘I can’t say, Mrs Black. I’m sorry. It will be up to the courts to decide how it happened. Have you got a message you’d like passed on to your son?’ The man, who said his name was Horace Haywood, sounded kind, even sympathetic in an odd sort of way. That was a start.

‘Just tell him, oh, I’m sorry, I’m having a few tears here and all, you understand. Just tell him that I love him and that I’m planning to fly to New Zealand.’ A grand plan, indeed, but she could be there in less than a week, not a month.

‘And how do you plan to get the money for a trip away to New Zealand?’ Bert said, back outside on the street. All of the housekeeping money for the week had been handed over to pay for the phone calls. There wasn’t a penny left, and here she was talking a hundred pounds or more.

‘Perhaps you could ask that mother of yours,’ Kathleen said. She saw his hands begin to tremble. Time to back off. His mother had never been keen on her, and as for his father, who had wanted to turn their son into a British gentleman, they hardly spoke from the day she met him until he died. He couldn’t forgive his son for marrying one of the girls off his factory floor, not even when his factory was bombed out in the Blitz and he wasn’t an owner anymore.