This wasn’t something they taught you at flight school.
‘Lamarr,’ I muttered, ‘you owe me one.’
The nightmare, however, had only just begun. Pooch was waiting beside the Bentley, and although Aunt Lulu picked him up she refused to get in the car.
‘Please, Aunt Lulu, let’s get going.’
She saw a big ute booming down the road. It must have belonged to pig hunters — it had spotlights for night work and a huge dead porker across the bonnet.
Before I could stop her Aunt Lulu made a run for it. ‘Help! Help!’ she screamed.
The ute screeched to a halt.
Aunt Lulu tottered towards it. ‘Oh, thank you,’ she told the three burly men inside, who looked as if they ate four sides of pork each for breakfast, dinner and tea. ‘There’s a strange man, he stole my Bentley, he’s after my body and my pearls, and he’s held me captive all morning.’
Well, what would you do if a little old lady carrying a small dog stopped you in the middle of the road and told you she’d been kidnapped?
‘Look, I can explain,’ I bleated, wearing my best smile, as they advanced on me.
Pity I wasn’t wearing a captain’s cap and jacket with epaulettes. The last thing I saw was somebody’s fist in my face and I went down.
EIGHT
I woke up in the Opotiki police station. I was lying on a small couch being attended to by a doctor. In the back, a nurse with a nametag that read ‘Simpson’ was looking after Aunt Lulu.
Three somewhat shamefaced pig hunters were sitting in a corner.
‘Listen, mate,’ one of them said, ‘sorry we hit you, eh.’
‘Oh, that’s okay,’ I answered.
‘You don’t want to press charges?’ the police constable asked. I suspected he’d been trying to arrest these blokes for some other misdemeanour, probably to do with an illegal marijuana plantation.
‘No, it’s really not their fault. Is my Aunt Lulu all right?’
‘Nurse Simpson has given her some medication,’ the constable said. ‘She actually remembers your aunt from a television panel show she was on, answering questions live.’
‘I’ve been a fan of Lulu’s for years.’ Nurse Simpson’s tone was reverent. ‘She and the other ladies on Roses and Your Thorns. Your aunt was marvellous.’
‘We found her medical details in the glove box,’ the constable added. ‘Hopefully the medication will last until you get to … Tauranga, is it? If you like, Nurse Simpson will be glad to go along with you.’
I considered the offer seriously. The adoration would keep Aunt Lulu safe in fantasyland but … ‘No, it’s okay,’ I replied. ‘Just … what is her condition?’
‘Don’t you know?’ Nurse Simpson asked, startled. ‘Your aunt has dementia. She caused quite a few incidents at the rest home.’
She went through Aunt Lulu’s misdemeanours.
At first I was alarmed because they appeared so wilfuclass="underline" Aunt Lulu believing the rest home was called Tara and belonged to her; Aunt Lulu accusing the matron of being a wicked aunt who was keeping her there under false pretences; Aunt Lulu telling the staff they were Nazis and trying to get to the airport to escape them.
Then it dawned on me. Most of her misdemeanours were based on the movie scenarios we’d acted out so often. ‘Gosh, anybody would think she was an axe murderer,’ I muttered.
What she’d really done was to go to Hollywood heaven.
Aunt Lulu was released back into my care. Before we left Opotiki, she posed for a few photographs and gave Nurse Simpson a shaky autograph.
I stopped the car at a petrol station to fill up and then said, ‘Let’s find a restaurant and have some lunch, eh, Aunt Lulu?’
‘I’m sorry, William,’ she said when we were seated. ‘For a moment there, I just didn’t remember who you were. Old age, nephew, it’s not much fun.’ She touched my cheek tenderly. ‘I’m so glad you’re not still the same uptight little prick you were when you were younger.’
‘None of those years was wasted, Aunt Lulu,’ I answered. ‘Something finally rubbed off on me, eh?’
She gave a gasp of grief and huge tears began to spill from her eyes and down every crack and crevice in her face.
‘Aunt Lulu, you’ll spoil your make-up.’
That stopped her fast. ‘Oh, my public,’ she said. ‘They must never see what we stars are like in the daylight.’
She was worrying about her appearance? I’d wondered why people in the restaurant were looking at me strangely.
It wasn’t until later that I saw the shiner.
NINE
The daylight was fading as I drove from Opotiki to Whakatane and then along the beautiful stretch of coast road to Tauranga.
I was in a mellow, nostalgic mood. At that moment, there was no better place to be than in the Bentley, driving my aunt to her son, while the sun was going down.
I suddenly remembered Lamarr’s emergency kit. I reached into the glove box and found the tapes of old movie songs to which, during all our long trips in the Bentley, we — Lamarr, Viveca, Yolanda, me and even Uncle Gardner — would sing along.
I put the first tape on, a Victor Young standard, and Aunt Lulu gave a shiver of delight and began to join in:
When I fall in love, it will be forever,
or I’ll never fall in love …
Her voice had been a beautiful lyric soprano. Over the years, afflicted by cigarettes, it had descended and was now a splendid basso profondo.
It had always been in the cards that Lamarr would join the Harrington family business but, when his father was kicked out of the firm — I can just imagining the board muttering about the ‘bad blood’ in that side of the family what with Gardner going troppo and Lamarr going gay — he had to rethink.
For a while he flirted with a number of careers. Of course they were all in the entertainment business. He tried acting and had a mild success in Boys in the Band where he was playing to type, but roles as heterosexual heroes were simply beyond him. Nevertheless he felt New York and the Great White Way beckoning and decided, when he was twenty-two, to try his luck in the Big Apple. He landed at the airport, told the taxi driver, ‘Take me to Times Square.’ When he arrived he struck his best pose, flung open his coat (it was freezing) and roared, ‘I’m hee-rrr-eee!’
Alas stardom was on holiday, so he upped sticks and flew to Los Angeles, where he hung out in West Hollywood. There, he found his own kind of adoration along Sunset Boulevard.
By that time I was flying for Qantas. I remember one time being in Los Angeles on stopover and I got a telephone call from Lamarr, who decided to come on by.
Now, the thing about Lamarr was that he slept during the day and only came alive at night. He took one look at my single hotel room and immediately pronounced, ‘Where’s your bed? You can’t possibly sleep on the floor,’ and checked us into the Hollywood Hilton.
Fortunately for Lamarr, he had actually turned out to be a hunk like his dad. Even so, he was a hunk who looked somehow askew. You know, you looked at him and you thought, Handsome as. Then he moved and you thought, Huh? Maybe it was the slight sway, or the all-knowing preen, or the combinations of colour: blue jeans, orange shirt, purple socks. So first of all, girls would look — and then shut off. And then their boyfriends would look — and nod, ‘Uh huh.’
We went out to some cowboy bars that he knew about and frequented, all of them gay. He didn’t mind being pawed and petted, but he could see I was uncomfortable. ‘Cousin William,’ he said, ‘this is not your scene. But thank you for trying. We’ll always be there for each other, though, won’t we?’