Free Between My Father and the King by Janet Frame Page B

And thank you. I’ll miss the loco very much. On behalf of Mrs Firman and myself . . .’ Why, public speaking was fun, everybody listening respectfully no matter what you said. I’ll take it more slowly as befits a retired person, there’s no need to be in a cold sweat over retiring, I’ll open my mouth more, the way they told us at school. Here’s power.
    Gregory wasn’t a snail any more, he was a bird ready to pounce, with no need of a red velvet house.
    I am powerful.
    Ah, but look at the drab hall, the paint peeling off the walls and they’ve tried to camouflage it with frilled streamers gaudy and crisscross dug from the Christmas decoration box. Camouflage of glory. But I am powerful: there’s my son Charlie, I can control him. None of my folk are going to carry on like runaway engines hauling carriages they never dreamed were there to disaster. Norma dragged our name in the dust with her appearance in court that time, it’s a wonder I can bear to think of it, but it’s in my mind with all the decorations and the china and the thought of Lil at home with her feet up and the thought of the taxi I’ll get;Pat Cullen who keeps greyhounds so thin you can see their ribs; and then the thought of Norma again with her education and dead languages. One day when she came home from school she looked new, unfolded. She rubbed her finger along the side of the door, pressing it hard, if it had been a paper door her finger would have poked through. She half sang, ‘Dad.’
    â€˜Well.’ I was busy with my sheets at the moment and didn’t want to be interrupted in the adding up. I prided myself, I always have, on my timesheets.
    â€˜Well?’
    â€˜What are you? I mean what are you to put down on paper?’
    â€˜Well of all the . . .’
    â€˜Nancy Smith’s father’s an insurance agent, Noni’s is a doctor and she goes riding with riding boots on. Tomorrow I’ve got to fill in a form to say what my father is. Joan’s is a baker. What will I put for you?’
    Well here I am at a farewell and my mind’s running a different way as if I were on two tracks at once and only one train travelling. I stopped doing my sheets, and staring at Norma staring at me, I didn’t say, ‘Say engine driver, I’m an engine driver.’ I thought, be blowed riding boots and baches at the bay, but I said as if I were announcing royalty, ‘Locomotive engineer.’ Flash. Very flash the way words can disguise and cheat and yet be truthful. Norma smiled, happily, ‘Gosh, Dad, I’m proud of you.’ But I knew it wasn’t me she was proud of, it was the words locomotive engineer, the way they sounded. If I had said engine driver she would have shrivelled, being a schoolgirl and not understanding things or maybe beginning to understand things, how doctors’ daughters have ponies and weekend baches and bakers’ daughters fresh puffy butterfly cakes in their lunch. And the daughter of a locomotive engineer? In spite of the words, a shabby uniform too small at the top and no dancing class with the high-school boys on Saturdays, and a mother and father who think that Shelley was thefounder of the penny postage though it’s twopence now and going up soon to threepence whether Shelley was a poet or a postman.
    But again they’re staring. I scarcely know what I’m thinking and saying, but I’ve said thank you, my wife is indisposed.
    Thank you for everything.
    Now the taxi.
    Before Greg went down the steps of the hall to Pat Cullen, Pat on time as always, though he did charge sixpence more than the Blue Band, the boss and his wife approached him, and Greg, his mind in a confusion of railway lines and cocky young cleaners and cotton waste soggy soggy with oil, saw what seemed like the whole world in china and gravy boats and railway lines, and people’s lives in a railway, stopping at the right or wrong station,