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Chapter Two: Sovereigns The narrative pauses to give some background information about Loomis and its wealthiest family, the Muskies. Loomis in the 1930s is a small country town about twelve miles from Auckland, with one main street called Station Road, a town hall, a closed jam factory, a dozen shops, five churches and a failing sawmill. The Great North Road from Auckland is on its east flank, and on the other side unsealed roads lead over the hills to the black beaches on the west coast, which Colin has never visited as his father has no car. On the Waitemata harbour side of the town, the farms are split up by mangrove creeks, while inland there are hills and fresh water creeks like the one where Colin meets the fat man. Most of the inhabitants are broke, the men on relief, and many of the businesses closed down. The Muskies used to be the wealthiest and most important family in town, most of which they owned, but now they might be as poor as everyone else, and there are only two left - the unpopular and ineffectual Clyde, who mismanages the family sawmill, and old Mrs Muskie. The father is dead, the four married daughters never visit their mother, and the youngest son Herbert, who is only vaguely remembered as a fat boy at school, left town thirteen years earlier, perhaps not wanting to face the servicemen returning from the Great War in which he himself did not fight. Mrs Muskie is a large, fat, unhealthy-looking, smelly old recluse, whom scarcely anybody talks to, and whom even the children have given up tormenting. She lives alone in Loomis’s largest home - a twelve-room, two-storied house on Millbrook Road, which has now become neglected and run down, perhaps because of the old woman’s poverty, perhaps because of her miserliness. Wearing worn-out clothes and a mildewed, out-ofdate Merry Widow hat, the old woman wheezes her way into town each day at half past two to do her meagre shopping, then sit for a while on the railway station platform until the Auckland train has come and gone. You could set your watch by Mrs Muskie - if you had one. The narrative now resumes, as the fat man asks Colin the time of the train that whistled during the chocolate incident. When the boy tells him it was the 2.10, he makes sure Colin has got the time right: “We don’t want no mistakes”. He then quizzes Colin about the disciplinarian martinet ‘Itchy’ Edgar, who used to teach the fat man as a boy, and is still form master for Standards Five and Six. The teacher used to strap him every day for allegedly ‘making an odour’ in class, though probably knowing the real culprits were Pottsie and his mates, with whom Edgar was sharing a cruel game at the fat boy’s expense. The man feigns delight in discovering that nothing has changed at Loomis school since his day “It makes you feel like home” - and reveals that the teacher and Colin’s father made him blubber every day of the school year. He says it is good to have a blubber in the class, asks if Colin and his friends play similar games with the current fat boy, expresses disappointment when the boy says they don’t have one, and says Colin himself would make a good one. The boy tries to rebel by threatening what Dad would do if he were there now, boasting of the Auckland welterweight championship he had won. The fat man replies that while Pottsie was dancing around the ring, poking out his left, he himself was running hootch across a frozen lake between Canada and Detroit, and had once dropped a man in chains through the ice. Colin’s father wouldn’t stand a chance against him – but he is welcome to fetch him if he wants to. The snivelling boy declines the invitation, and is congratulated for wanting to keep his old man in one piece. Now it’s time to be on the move from the hut, although the man won’t tell Colin where they are going. The boy desperately wants to run away, but feels he is held by an invisible rope. He is terrified and cannot think. The fat man has come out from the ground as though he has been buried for years waiting for something to wake him, or come up from the deep pools of the creek, dripping with slime. They go along through the undergrowth beside the creek till they reach the bridge leading from Millbrook Road to the outskirts of town. Mrs Muskie is seen making her way across the bridge like a slow, black beetle, and the man gets Colin to describe what she will do in town. He shows particular interest in her daily wait on the station platform for the Auckland train, a wait which some people say is for her daughters, but Maisie Potter thinks is for her long-missing youngest son. Once the old woman is gone, Colin is told they are now going to pay a visit to the Muskie house. They cross the creek, which Colin slips into at one point, and arrive at the back of the Muskie property. The creek and its bank have been used by Mrs Muskie down the years as a rubbish dump, which is now infested with rats and smells unpleasantly of rot. The fastidious fat man holds a handkerchief to his nose and says he hates smells. When Colin defends Mrs Muskie on account of her age, the man says there shouldn’t be old people – “they should lie down and die”. They go up to the house through a jungle of blackberries, brambles and thistles. As the sinister worm writhes threateningly in his cheek, the man forces the reluctant Colin to climb up a tree and get into the house through an open upstairs window. He goes through a neglected bedroom, and opens a door onto a landing, where he is awestruck by the beauty of a rainbow-coloured stained glass window. Its lilies, roses, hills and the sun are picked out in red, blue, yellow and green. Going downstairs, he manages to open a window and let the nightmare figure of the fat man into the dust and cobwebs of the house, which apparently he intends to rob. Halfway up the stairs, the man pauses in front of the stained glass window, which has a magnificent rose at its centre, and reverently removes his hat, his face banded with colour. He tells the boy that you never forget a thing like that. You could be in a room ten thousand miles away, and the memory could come back and make you cry. He then dismisses his own sentimentality, and goes into the bedroom where Colin had broken in, and where the man claims the old woman’s jewels are hidden. He sneers at the dilapidated room, wondering aloud how people can live like this: “I would have said an old lady would be clean. This must’ve been a nice house once. Look how she’s let it go”. He plays games with Colin, forcing him to search the room, and promising he can have anything valuable he finds, while obviously knowing where the real hiding place is. After the boy gives up, the man stands up from the commode on which he has been sitting, and reveals a chamber pot inside it filled with jewels. He dismisses most of these as glass, but burrows down to retrieve a tobacco tin filled with golden sovereigns, which he stows in his rucksack. He has got what he came for. They return the way they came along the creek to the pool where they first met. Colin is now allowed to go home, but only after he has been warned not to mention their meeting to anyone. If the boy even whispers about him, the fat man will come for him. To bind them further in complicity, the man forces a shilling on Colin as payment for being an accomplice in the crime they jointly committed: if the man is caught, the boy will go to prison with him. As a final warning, the fat man gives him a ‘Chinese burn’, painfully twisting the skin on his arm, as Pottsie used to do to the school fat boy – “And I can do much worse”. Colin runs home, desperately wanting to throw the shilling from him, but not daring to. Chapter Three: Memories or Cash Herbert Muskie has taken up residence in Colin Potter’s mind. Although he can be kept at bay by daily distractions and the passage of time, he continues to haunt the boy with memories of his razor, his terrible speed, the strength in his hand, the writhing scar in his cheek, the angry eyes, and his unnerving monologues. Colin tries unsuccessfully to give his guiltily earned shilling to his mother, then spends it on the movies, which are ruined by the imagined presence of the fat man. If he had known the man’s name was Herbert Muskie at that time, his shame about helping to steal Mrs Muskie’s sovereigns would probably have been even greater. He plies his mother with questions about what he has learned about the old days from his tormentor, pretending he got the information from his forgetful grandfather, but only gleans that she doesn’t like her school nickname ‘Poultice’, thinks there are better things in life than being ‘tough’, and never watched her husband boxing as she disapproves of men punching one another. For his part, although Colin admires his father’s boxing prowess, he secretly doesn’t really enjoy the sparring sessions they sometimes have, as he doesn’t like getting hurt. Throughout their conversation, Mum alternates between smiling and snapping at him, as she does with her husband, as though she cannot bring herself to show how much she loves them. The talk of boxing leads Colin to remember the day when Dad had been away earning relief money at a work camp, and an unsavoury, cross-eyed trader had come round in his absence and offered to buy all Laurie’s boxing cups. Despite Colin’s shocked protests, and despite Maisie’s obvious loathing of the dealer, she agrees with his glib maxim that cash is better than memories, and sells her husband’s treasures. Laurie was deeply hurt at the time, but the cups are no longer mentioned. The cash is now all spent and they still have to eat bread pudding for breakfast. The only solid thing they got out of the sale was a second-hand bike Laurie now uses to follow the Muskie timber truck with his tool kit, in the hope of picking up casual work.