Halloween in the Antipodes
by Laura Solomon.
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Adults in New Zealand in the 1980s didn’t believe in Halloween. They seemed neither to understand nor to appreciate the cultural invasion that their children welcomed with such open arms. They were in denial. But Sheryl and I had faced up to the truth; the United States was cool, New Zealand was embarrassing. What did we have going for us other than sheep and rugby? Peter Jackson had not yet put us on the map; we had not yet become Middle Earth, we were still the end of it – the arse end. When I looked on my brother Kane’s blow-up globe, I saw that we were right at the bottom of the world, next stop Antarctica. The Artic, of course, was at the top.
“Why can’t it be the other way round?” I had asked my brother when I had first examined the globe. “Don’t be daft,” he said. “If you did that then America would be in the bottom half of the world and that wouldn’t make any sense.”
He didn’t mention China or Russia or Canada or Europe and how they would feel about being relegated to the lower half of the atlas; only America, by which he meant North America, the United States.
“Cops of the world,” said Dad, sipping his local beer.
He had been listening from the next room. But he didn’t know anything.
America seemed to have all the good stuff. Take, for instance, the national symbol – in both cases, coincidentally, a bird. The United States had the eagle, fierce, defiant, beady-eyed, soaring high through friendly skies. We had the kiwi, a flightless, nocturnal creature, cursed with an over-sized proboscis, with which it snuffled around in the dirt, looking for grubs. Surely it didn’t bode well. Japan, I was told one day at school, had the rising sun; symbol of hope and of some unspecified future promise.
“Which country has the setting sun?” I asked that night at home.
I was full of annoying questions.
“No country,” said my father. “Go run round in the backyard.”
I never seemed to get enough answers.
Sheryl and I knew what to do. If we couldn’t be American, we would pretend to be. We read Nancy Drew and Archie comics, watched endless reruns of Little House on the Prairie and made appalling stabs at the accent. We listened to Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers. My favourite song was The Gambler; I knew all the words. Sheryl was in love with Magnum P.I. Kane, an avid reader of history books, had tried to talk to us about the Munroe Doctrine, the New Deal, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Martin Luther King, Vietnam, the Cold War, but we didn’t care about all of that. We wanted the culture, not the history. Happy Days, not Watergate. And then there was Halloween. This particular custom was considered to be one of our favourite country’s finer points; we would appropriate it, make it ours. A week before October the thirty-first, we decided that, come that date, we would haunt the neighbourhood, taking from the locals what sweets or, rather, candy we could. I didn’t really know what would be involved; I had vague ideas about pumpkins and ghouls. Sheryl filled me in on the finer points.
“Basically,” she said, “you go round knocking on doors dressed up as something scary and making vague threats and they give you stuff. Candy. And what you say is ‘trick or treat?’ It’s a question, you know. You give them the choice.”
“Cool,” I said.
The idea of getting something for nothing held a lot of appeal. My father said that Halloween was Yankee garbage.
“Actually,” said Kane, when he heard us talking, “Halloween is derived from the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain which took place when the year changed from light to dark, and winter began to descend. At this time, the spirits of the dead were supposedly able to enter the world. The townspeople baked food all day and, when night fell, they dressed up and tried to resemble the dead, hoping to fool the spirits into thinking that they were just like them, on their side. They would leave food on the edge of the town, praying that, if they satisfied the ghosts, they would be left in peace.”
“Fascinating,” said Sheryl, snapping her bubble gum at him.
But Kane wasn’t finished.
“Carving pumpkins into jack-o'lanterns is another Halloween custom that originated in Ireland. A legend grew up about a man named Jack who was so stingy, so much of a miser, that he was not allowed into heaven when he died. He couldn't enter hell either because he had played jokes on the devil. So, with nowhere else to go, Jack was condemned to walk the earth with his lantern until Judgment Day. The Irish people carved scary faces out of turnips, beets or potatoes representing "Jack of the Lantern,” and when they brought their customs to the United States, they carved faces on pumpkins because, in the autumn, pumpkins were plentiful.” “Right little encyclopaedia, your brother. Go on then, smart arse, what sort of jokes did he play on the devil?” Kane shrugged.
“I dunno,” he said. “It’s just a myth.”
“Don’t worry about him,” I said. “Come on, let’s go outside.”
I didn’t want to be like my brother; all brains and no friends. I led Sheryl out to the garden, where we sat on a wooden bench and discussed our planned activity.
“What shall I dress up as?” I asked, looking to her, as usual, for guidance.
Sheryl was a leader; I was a follower, shy, a geek. My chief achievement to date had been teaching myself how to read and walk at the same time (ninety percent of the eyes on the page, ten percent of vision scanning the sidewalk for approaching humans, dogs, lampposts) and I walked to and from school each day reading and trying to pretend that I didn’t really exist. I hated school. I was myopic but refused to wear my glasses, choosing instead to linger in my own blurred dimension. I knew I had something to hide, but I never really knew what it was. I had the feeling that I harboured some terrible, unspecified secret. If the other kids found out what it was, they would crucify me.
“You can be a vampire,” said Sheryl. “The unquiet dead. Roaming the land, slaking your thirst.”
It sounded good to me. We stole some plastic fangs and fake blood off her younger brother. Sheryl herself had decided to go as Casper the Friendly Ghost; we’d seen the movie together that summer. She donned a white sheet into which we sliced a couple of eye holes. We rehearsed our routine, a sort of good ghoul, bad ghoul thing; she would wave her sheet about a bit and ask ‘trick or treat?’ as politely as she could and, if our chosen victim seemed hesitant, I would start in with the fangs and the snarling. I liked the fact that I was the bad one; for us, it was a reversal of roles.
We were opposites, Sheryl and I. She was a bad-arse and I was frighteningly good, no trouble to anyone. My family, with its healthy living and its non-spanking policy, and its long talks around the dinner table every evening was boring, dull. We had no dramas, no fuming arguments. Nobody smoked, nobody drank. My parents were frugal; they had married young and money was tight. We grew all our own fruit and vegetables. Our curtains were made from sheets. Sheryl’s parents weren’t necessarily any wealthier, just freer with the cash. They had a trampoline, a colour TV, a soft-drink machine - all powerful lures for a young girl who came from a family where such luxuries were considered frivolous. My mother would pick fresh veges from our garden and whip us up a stir-fry. Sheryl’s Mum would give her ten bucks and tell her to go get herself fish and chips for dinner and to bring back a packet of Rothmans. I didn’t really know her father. He wasn’t her real Dad anyway, she said, just a step-Dad. She didn’t know who her biological father was; she’d never met him. Her step-father wasn’t home often but, in his own way, he made his presence felt. One day I went round to their house and Sheryl’s mother had her arm in a cast. “What happened to your Mum?” I asked.
“She fell off a ladder,” came the reply. “She’s clumsy, like me.”
Sheryl’s clumsiness was legendary. She often sported a number of dark bruises, blooming under her skin like the devil’s roses.
On another occasion, her mother was vomiting in the backyard when I arrived. A strong sweet stench hung in the air, like the perfume of those roses that I had seen.
“What happened to your Mum?”
“Food poisoning.”
Although I had a vague feeling that something wasn’t quite right in this household, it was many years before I realised what was taking place, when everyone turned their eyes away, when nobody looked; the drinking, the all too frequent walking into doors. The terror that Sheryl must have suffered in silence.
Sheryl was always daring me to do things I would not have found the courage to do on my own. She was fond of flaunting rules. For instance, I was only allowed to cross busy New North Road at the traffic lights up by the Mt Albert shopping centre. It was Sheryl who made me cross the road much further down, by her house – the road was so busy you could never get to the other side in one go, you always had to run to the middle and stand there with the cars speeding by on either side of you, waiting for a gap that would let you complete your crossing. The railway tracks were also on our way home. Sheryl didn’t like to cross the tracks when it was safe. She would stand ten metres down from the designated crossing area, wait until the barrier went down and the bells started jangling and you could see the train approaching, and then she would sprint across at the last minute, right in front of the train. She liked to look death in the eye; it was how she got her kicks. Then there was the episode in the attic.
Sheryl lived in a similar style of house to mine; a 1920s wooden bungalow with big high ceilings, a roomy basement, a spacious attic. Solid wooden beams ran the length of the attic; between the beams was thin, relatively flimsy, plaster board which couldn’t take much weight. In our attic, Dad had laid stronger planks from beam to beam in order that he could store boxes up there; unused crockery, his boyhood stamp collection, old photographs. My brother and I were sometimes allowed up there with my father. Walk on the beams, he would say, walk on the beams. Remember June.
The phrase ‘Remember June’ was a code. The previous June, Kane and I had been up there with Dad, who was doing some work on the wiring. My mother had been having afternoon tea with two of her friends in the living room below. Kane, awkward in his adolescent body, which seemed to change from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute, had slipped off the beam he had been balancing on, gone crashing through the fibreboard and landed right in the middle of the living room floor. My mother’s friends had got an awful fright, seeing my brother drop down from above in such a startling manner. Dad and I had nearly died laughing, but Kane and I both learnt the lesson well. Walk on the beams.
So I wasn’t scared when Sheryl invited me up into her attic. Nobody else was home; we put a ladder up and scaled it rung by rung.
“Follow me,” she said and, as always, I did.
Foot after steady foot we picked our way across to a brick structure that I failed to recognise as the chimney. Sheryl held two screwdrivers in her hand and showed me where she had been chipping away at the mortar. She had already created several small holes. She’d obviously been up here alone before, hiding or hanging out.
“It’s really a job for two,” she said, and she handed me a screwdriver.
We sat down on one of the beams and got to work, chipping away. Chip, chip, chip. The mortar seemed to fall away easily, it was satisfying work. I didn’t think of it as vandalism; for me it was just a way to pass an otherwise uneventful afternoon. And, of course, it was a way to please Sheryl, to keep her happy. I didn’t have many other friends; she was a twisted sort of a lifeline between me and total social ostracism.
Our activities may have pleased Sheryl, but they didn’t please her family. The next time that they lit a fire the smoke flooded their entire attic. Luckily, the hatch that served as a gateway to the attic had been closed at the time, or they would have been smoked alive, like bees in a hive. Her dad had to pay a brickie to come round and repair the damage that had been done. They couldn’t, for the life of them, figure out what had happened. Pigeons with razor sharp beaks, a cat with killer claws, mortar-chewing rats? “It’s not as if mortar rots,” Sheryl’s mother had said.
But we were never caught and we never confessed. Nobody knew that it had been us that had caused the ‘flood’ - us with our screwdrivers and our chip, chip, chipping.
The big night rolled around. I had convinced my mother to let me use her old Singer sewing machine in order to sew my own cloak. She had an electric sewing machine as well, but I wasn’t allowed near that, she was afraid I would floor the pedal, lose control, sew my fingers, stitch myself to the fabric. The Singer, also, was not without its dangers, but at least, if it got me, it would be a slower sort of stab - she knew I would stop pedalling the minute I pierced myself; I wasn’t a masochist. I bought a cheap piece of black fabric from a local store. I didn’t have a pattern, I free-styled it, chopped a vague, cape-like shape, pinned and stitched it. I used bright red thread; although I searched all the drawers in my mother’s sewing room, we appeared to have run out of black. I did prick my finger, towards the end, when I was getting a little too sure of myself as I finished off the hem; a light puncturing of the skin, a tiny globule of blood which I smeared across the cloak. I stashed the garment I had made in the back of the wardrobe until the hour when it would be needed. When the time drew nigh, I wrapped my mantle about my shoulders and headed out into the night.
A-haunting we will go. Sheryl briefed me before we set out for the evening.
“No apples,” she said. “We don’t accept apples.”
She’d heard about people in the States putting razor blades inside. She drew a chalk circle on the ground and told me to step inside.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“Protection, stupid. Don’t you know anything?”
She slung a black bag over her shoulder, a sack that we hoped would soon be filled with loot. We struck out, as thick as thieves, one of us cloaked in black, the other dressed in white. The fake fangs cut into my gums.
Sheryl’s street ran up the side of a hill; we started at the top and worked our way down. They weren’t really prepared for us. No carved pumpkins graced windowsills to signify that goodies waited inside. Indeed, we had more than a few problems getting through to the locals. Nobody seemed to know what we were on about or, if they did, they feigned ignorance. The first door we knocked upon was opened by an elderly gentleman wearing a tweed jacket with corduroy patches on the elbows. I could hear The Goon Show playing on a radio in some other room of the house. Sheryl had positioned herself in the middle of the doorway. I was off to the side; my plastic fangs and I were waiting in the wings.
“Trick or treat?” said Sheryl.
“Eh?”
“Trick or treat?”
“What do you mean, dear?”
I stuck one fang out over my lower lip, just to let him know that it was there, in case it was needed; a vague, meaningless threat.
“I mean,” said Sheryl, putting one hand on her hip. “That you have to give us a treat, else we play a trick.” “Eh? A tree? I have to give you a tree?”
“No, a trea-t,” said Sheryl, spitting out the last consonant.
“What kind of tree? I don’t have many small ones, dear. Mostly just oaks and wattles and they’ve been growing on this property for decades. Their roots are ever so deep. Nothing I could dig up, dear, nothing I could dig up.”
Sheryl changed tack.
“You have to give us something good - chocolate, mints, jellybeans, cash,” she patiently explained. “Else we’ll do something bad.”
Our victim grew suddenly indignant.
“Goodness. Haven’t children changed since my day. It used to be ‘seen and not heard’. Now it’s ‘gimme or else.’ Well I never, well I never. The impudence of it. I mean, really. Hilda! Come and get rid of these brats, would you?”
He shuffled off down the hallway and his wife appeared at the door with a fly swat in her right hand. She surveyed us as if with disdain.
“Go on, shoo,” she said. “Go on. Get out of it. Scat.”
She went at Sheryl with the fly swat, batting her about the ears. Sheryl screeched and backed down the steps. The two of us retreated to the street.
“We need to do something,” said Sheryl. “Play a trick. Get revenge.”
“What kind of trick?”
My imagination hadn’t stretched that far. Sheryl whipped a black marker pen out of her pocket.
“You write on their door,” she said. “That’s what you do.”
“What do we write?”
Sheryl thought for a bit.
“Misers,” she said. “Let’s write misers, like what your brother said about Jack.”
“Ok,” I said. “You do it, I’ll watch.”
“No you do it,” she said, handing me the pen. “Go on. You need to prove yourself.”
She didn’t say to whom.
“Quick, before they come back to the door.”
What could I do? I didn’t want to lose face; I needed her approval. My hand was shaking so much I could hardly grip the pen. I climbed the porch steps and stood quaking before the door. Misers, I wrote, as quickly as I could, then shoved the cap back on the pen and sprinted across the street, where I hid behind a large oak and waited for Sheryl. She had taken a carton of eggs from her bag and was hurling them at the door, one by one, all six of them. They dripped and broke and slid down the wood. The broken shells lay on the doorstep like the fragments of somebody’s mind. I was surprised by this outburst; I hadn’t even known she’d had the eggs in her black sack. After egging the miser’s door, Sheryl ran across the road and joined me. We crouched there for a while, two rioting spirits, hiding behind a tree. From where we were, peering out through the leaves, we could see the word that I had written. My handwriting, terrible at the best of times, had all its flaws intensified by the size of my script. Sheryl said that the ‘s’ looked almost like a ‘y’.
We didn’t quit. The deaf man had been an unfortunate start, we reasoned. The evening would pick up from here. We did a number of streets, we knocked for several blocks. But the people who could hear us properly weren’t much better then the deaf man. Nobody seemed to know what Halloween was; they weren’t used to spooks knocking on their doors and making demands. They were unequipped to deal with it. They didn’t even fake being scared; they just looked confused, mystified, pissed off that we had interrupted their evening. It took the wind out of our sails, having to explain to everyone the nature of our expedition. You give us nice stuff, or else we get nasty. After working most of the neighbourhood we totalled up our bounty; we had gleaned two small chocolate bars, a packet of wine gums and a can of peaches with the label peeling off. This wasn’t the kind of reception we had been anticipating. I’d pictured the neighbours coming to the door with generous handfuls of sweets, maybe a cake or two, possibly a pavlova. That’s what would have happened in America; why were we being punished just because New Zealanders were too clueless to figure out what was going on? Nobody had even tried to guess who we were beneath our masks. They just didn’t seem to be buying it. We sat down together on the sidewalk, our feet in the gutter. “I wish we lived in California,” said Sheryl.
“Me too.”
“Do you think, when I’m older, that maybe Tom Selleck might want to marry me?”
“Probably,” I said. “No reason why not. You could go live in Hawaii. That’d be cool.”
“Yea. Married to Tom Selleck and learning to surf. That’s how I’d like my life to work out.”
Sheryl surveyed our pathetic collection.
“Shall we give up and go home?” she asked.
“Yea,” I said. “Let’s call it a day. Or a night. Whatever.”
My family moved cities; we always seemed to be moving. Sheryl and I wrote once or twice, and then we lost touch. I didn’t hear of her again until many years later, when I was at university, studying entomology and, walking down the dormitory corridor one evening, I bumped into a girl who’d been to school with us.
“Hey,” I said, after we’d made the usual preliminary chit-chat (I had, by this time, learnt how to fake social skills). “What ever happened to Sheryl? Do you remember her?”
“Sheryl Longely?”
“Yea, Sheryl Longely.”
Was that her surname? I could barely remember it myself.
“She ran away from home when she was thirteen. Became a street kid. Then a hooker. Guy from our old school said he saw her on Karangahape Road one night, flashing her sorry wares. Poor soul. Wretched.” So, she had put herself up for sale. It was no great surprise. I remembered the bruises, the alcohol, the shadowy, absent step-father. I recalled the night that we had played at being two hungry spirits, prowling the hood, hoping for the gift of sugar and receiving, in its place, a cultural gap, misunderstanding. I thought also of poor Jack, unable to break into either heaven or hell, doomed to walk the earth for thousands of years, waiting for Judgement Day, when he could find his way home.
©2007 By Laura Solomon