by Steve Low
There was both ecstasy and sadness when the time came for me to board the Newman’s Bus. To leave behind Graham (the retro-path), to quit the confinement of my school days – these things filled my mind with hope. However standing there before me, her slight frame saddled with grief, was the enigma of Julia. I clutched her like one would hold a desolate child. Her head was nestled into the shelter of my neck, her breath warm on my prickling skin. I felt shot full of guilt, as much for leaving her (to deal with him alone), but also for not getting to the crux of her problem, when there had been a chance. I had never managed to pick up the threads of Margo’s story. Once Isobel had disappeared from view, I could barely deal with my own evolving life, let alone try to understand the root cause of someone else’s dilemma.
Yet as I held Julia in the final clasp, the engine of the bus idling in that ‘just about to leave‘ fashion, I was acutely aware of her as a person, someone shaped by history – her own history – not merely a mother, or someone unable to throw off the shackles of an overbearing husband.
The time had come. I turned away from them and mounted the steps. I stopped to wave at the entrance before quickly going inside. I lumbered along the centre aisle, the heady scent of the laundered interior sharp enough to make my eyes water. I found my seat, and looked out at them again, through the thick tinted window. She was back beside him, her white handkerchief held up to her bloodshot eyes. There were no comforting arms from the surgeon. I didn’t try to look directly at Julia’s face, fearing a grief of my own would arise to consume me. Instead, I gazed down at her legs. She had beautiful legs, thin and perfectly shaped. I contemplated those lower limbs, a familiar tumescence in my throat, wondering if it might have been a tragedy that a beautiful person had been wasted on an insensitive fool. Someone decent would have really loved Julia, - really loved – to the point of obsession. Like I myself would love someone.
The bus was pulling away, the door closing with a hiss of compressed air. I was jerked back to the present, to the frantically waving handkerchief of the mother, and to the almost military salute of the father. Julia’s face went sliding past the window, back behind the bus and out of my view. In seconds we were on the street and the interior was flooded with streaming sunshine. Hardy St, Trafalgar St, Bridge St – they were all going by, flying out of my life.
Although I was suppressing grief, I was soon able to dull my connections with the immediate past. There was a sense of relief that the stress of departure was behind me. I was able to dwell on the prospect of a future – music, love, friendship – a career? And all those parental restrictions . . . gone!
The hostel was austere from the outside – three stories of weathered brick – two separate blocks forming an L-shape that enclosed a grass courtyard circumscribed by concrete paths. Off one corner of this rectangle, a short pathway led to a dull grey Church of England. Struggling under a heavy backpack, I left the street and lurched through the tunnel entrance. As I did so, a clutch of water-bombs came arching downward towards me from above. I was ambushed from two sides, there being several strategically placed windows aloft. I was hit on both flanks and twice on the left shoulder. I laughed and dashed for cover.
The foyer of the building was of grey rough cast, rent by a stained glass window. The floor had cracked yellow tiles, while above hung a central chandelier. I knocked on a plain yellow door. Painted on it, in faded black letters, were the words ‘The Warden.’
Minutes later, I stalked down a long back corridor in the west wing to find my room. The Warden had been very affable and apologetic about my wet welcome. However his friendliness couldn’t disguise the Spartan nature of his buildings. I had to remind myself that I was entering the very establishment I had revered during my nostalgia binges over the preceding years. I took a deep breath and paused in my tread. These were the corridors of Asher, Hallwright, Treadgold, McEwen . . . and of course Richard.
My room had an iron bedstead and a scored wooden desk, set upon faded green linoleum. It was old linoleum, lifting in the corners and along the seams, leaving some ragged scars. The external windows looked westward, over the gables of the church roof to the tree lined hill suburbs above George Street. It was a view I would get to know well in the coming months. I’d always been a watcher of horizons – as if there was some magical place just out of sight beyond the curvature.
Dunedin weather was so often on the brink of turning bad. There would be a grey wash above – pregnant with rain – or maybe transiently unloading, raking the suburbs with a smattering of wind blown droplets. The scene was akin to a movie retrieved from some pre-war archive – everything in black and white and shades of grey.
Unpacking my bag I felt a heavy air of expectation. I hadn’t met anyone yet, but I could sense that out beyond my door, there were people waiting. People like Asher, Hallwright, Treadgold and McEwen . . . their 1974 equivalents.
Of course Isobel was somewhere in the city, yet I suppressed the very thought of her. I felt estranged from her. I wasn’t inclined to use her as a prop. I would take the opportunity to break free from her hold on my past.
I had scarcely begun to hang up my clothes when there was a pounding at the door. With heart tapping, I went and opened up. There on the threshold, stood a round faced youth wearing a sports jacket and tie. It was Earle Williams, a contemporary of mine from Nelson College. Although it was a comfort to see a familiar face, I wasn’t sure about taking on a figure from the past. Straight away I sensed he might destroy my prospects of something new – that the Asher equivalent of today might see a Nelson duo as impenetrable. It had been easy to get on with Earle at school. Everybody did. He was everybody’s friend. He had been different from the bulk of his peer-group. Whereas most of us had been cynical and negative – firmly anti-establishment, Earle had been quite the opposite. He had made the most of things. Thus he had been a little out of step with the rebellious late sixties. However it was now 1974 and conventional behaviour was more acceptable. From a wealthy family, he was never short of money – that probably helped buttress his congenial manner. There he was, his handshake firm, his round face bloated with a smile of anticipation, announcing it was time for high tea. There was just the two of us from Nelson. “We’d better team up and take them on,” he said.
On Sunday, it was customary to wear a jacket and tie to the dining room. I scurried around; unearthing the corduroy jacket and striped tie Julia had bought me. We sauntered down the corridor, discussing our prospective careers. I was supposedly aiming for medical school – he was doing a commerce degree. Like fathers, like sons. The inevitability of the father and son thing depressed me.
Over the ensuing weeks, I remained unsure about my association with Earle. We hadn’t been close mates at school, so why were we now? It all seemed highly circumstantial. But Earle talked to me as though I was the greatest guy in the world – as though he knew that deep within me, there was an effusive, non judgemental, tolerant person ready to bust out – some happy go lucky individual with plenty to say. However, I was still mired in 60s philosophy. Capitalism was dying. The future was free love, environmentalism, music and getting high. However, in the immediate future, there was this Selwyn College phenomenon to get to grips with.
All the guys in the hostel were of similar ilk – derived from the ‘good’ New Zealand schools. Spirits ran high. You really had to be on your guard as the pranksters went about their business. Water-bombs and firecrackers abounded. There was an established punishment ritual for those who stepped out of line (the ‘crimes’ were usually contrived), consisting of emersion in an outside bath filled with freezing water.
Things were particularly feisty during ‘initiation’ week. One particular evening, all the first years were herded into a common room, while the seniors muscled around outside, drinking beer and shouting insults through the windows. Eventually they came and got one of us, a slight fellow named Joe. He put up fierce resistance as they stripped him down. However they soon got control and dunked him in the bath. For
the occasion, the bath water was tainted by a mixture of sloppy mud and green slime. After he had been held under for a few seconds, they scooped him out and carried him across towards the windows of our common room. Soon his pale backside was jammed against the window. Inside, we were transfixed by the view of his flattened anus. There was much nervous laughter. Who or what was going to be next?
But most of this pre-initiation stuff was bluster, merely meant to scare. In the end, the initiation ceremony proper was merely a dowsing with a slop of chicken heads and fish tails, whilst gnawing on a stale bun, blind-folded and immobilised by a hand tie. Despite the stench, I felt good. Here we were, burgeoning Ashers and Treadgolds, poised and ready for glory.
Earle was a real hit with the girls. He looked ok, but really it was all down to communication skill. In contrast, I communicated with my facial capillaries – I became a vermillion sunset whenever a female came anywhere near. One evening we had a combined dinner out with St. Margaret’s College, a hostel for students derived from ‘good’ girl’s schools. We travelled for many miles up the North-East Valley in a caravan of buses, trapped in low gear ratio by the incline. This pedestrian journey enabled the majority aboard our bus to indulge in a campaign of self inebriation. I wondered what was happening on the St. Margaret’s buses. Perhaps they were getting soused as well. The thought of them all about to be released was quite a worry.
I was spinning out of control on arrival, having drunk everything I could get my hands on over the final part of the trip. Thus I don’t recall anything about the meal. My memory is only of the later part of the evening, when I came to be leaning against a balustrade, trading limited discourse with a girl named Eleanor. We were like two autumn leaves caught in a side eddy of a flooding river. While all the action was in the mainstream, there were these two individuals sequestered to the one side, unable to cope with the general melee, forced into faltering conversation.
Although there were more silences than words, I wasn’t too uncomfortable with the situation (being awash with alcohol). I was able to observe Eleanor in an almost clinical fashion. The electric lights exaggerated her pallor while her stick like arms and delicate fingers stuck indelibly in my mind.
She was a long way from home. Her family were sheep farmers from near Eketahuna in the North Island. As was the case for me, it was a family tradition for her to be educated in Dunedin. She was starting a science degree, but with no clear objective at the end of it. She was not coping with being in Dunedin – she was disabled by constant homesickness. I was in love straight away, reeled in by her apparent delicacy. Everything about her was frail – from her stunted skeletal frame to her fly-away brown hair, bobbed around a waif’s face with its slim upturned nose and cute dimpled retracted chin.
Eventually I lost sight of her in the drunken melee – she must have gotten the first bus back to town. Despite her not having shown the slightest interest in me, during the subsequent days, I lay on my bed constantly craving her. And she came to further fuel my desire with her continued array of lukewarm responses.
My initial foray to get her was a bleak affair. Saturated by anxiety, I jerked my way around to St. Margarets (not long after the night we had met) to see her. She appeared at the entrance way, looking irked, but nevertheless sounding resigned to the intrusion. She was clearly half expecting it. She took me to a corner of an adjacent common room. The light was muted, perhaps to hide us from the prying eyes of her contemporaries. There, I tried to pay her a compliment, revealing readily my growing obsession with her and the emaciated look. The words came out in a stuttering flow, the phrases mangled, the words poorly sounded. She recoiled from this advance of mine; looking right and left as though she wanted to run for the door. My further attempts to find an area of commonality came to nothing and I lurched away, back to my hostel, my mood in tune with the desolate evening sky.
Earle came to the rescue. Effortlessly he was infiltrating the various sub-strata of university life – whatever he had an inclination to go for. To extract some girls from St Margarets for an evening out was a simple exercise for him. And the real coup – he managed to get Eleanor included. The group congregated at the bridge over the Leith. Without looking directly I could sense her presence, like an aura before a headache. As we sauntered into town, I hovered about the periphery of the throng, conscious of my previous rebuff. I pretended to be disinterested. Occasionally I’d get a glimpse of her, walking between taller girls. She didn’t once look around – a bad sign. In the movie theatre, I was careful to note where she sat, and took myself to the opposite end of the row.
Later in a city bar, Earle was in an effusive state, as we lounged on a long sofa. We drank quickly, for we were all under-age and there was always the prospect of the police arriving and throwing everyone out. Earle had no problem getting around the barman. He was now sporting a droopy moustache which made him look a bit older. “Enjoy the movie Eleanor?” he said. She sat down beside him and my torso jumped as if touched by defibrillator paddles. He engaged her in easy conversation for a while then stood up. “I’ll leave you guys to it. I’d better find Garbo.”
“Who’s Garbo?” Eleanor asked me, staring at Earle’s receding back.
I had electricity in my spine. She was talking to me, and (at last) in a reasonably friendly tone. “Garbo? Oh that’s his current girl. She’s at Unicol.” We talked on, myself in a lather of sweat, sitting bolt upright on the edge of the seat. She was unusually benign, lying back into a corner of the sofa, babbling on in a curiously relaxed manner.
On the ramble back to the hostel, under the soft glow of the street-lamps, she took my free hand. “Thank you for taking an interest in me,” she said. “I’m sorry if I was such a sourpuss.” I was puzzled. Why was she alluding to everything in the past tense?
At the street corner parting, I hovered for a few minutes, hoping for something more. And it happened – from the gaggle of departing girls, she appeared again, pacing back towards me. And her lips were soft, fluctuant – her breath kind of smoky, even though she didn’t touch cigarettes. The shock of her scent, the power of the close contact, triggered a new wave of desire and need. I needed her to be mine, to kiss and to squeeze, to possess and to love. But as I was being so consumed, she broke from my grasp, running away back towards the pack.
I wasn’t bothered by her departure. I was floating in the euphoria of the breakthrough. The dark sky seemed to be lifting and I was growing to fill the space. It was only a hundred metres to the hostel. They were a great hundred metres – a hundred metres of rapture.
The next day, I left it until midday to phone her – not wishing to appear desperate. The woman’s voice was slightly mocking as she told me – as if I was the only one in the world who didn’t know. “No, no, no,” she said, her voice injected with middle age. “Eleanor left this morning. She’s gone back to her family in Eketahuna.”
My voice became husky and I needed her to repeat the news.
“Yes that’s what I said,” she continued. “Didn’t you know? She’s given up on her university studies. She’s gone home to mum.”
On a typical Sunday morning, there was quiet in the streets. The sky would be leaden – a feeling of not quite rain. I would gaze up at the distant Mount Cargill, enveloped in strengthening clouds, the billowing cumulonimbus evolving through a series of bleak colours – black, brown and grey. On those desolate days, it was a comfort to know that rain was coming. The slumbering students would wake to find their day circumscribed. They would be reduced to a somnolent vigil behind water-streaked window panes, watching the run of the weather. It brought them down to my level.
Usually on such a Sunday, I would scurry along Castle Street to the Queen’s Gardens. There I would leave the path and climb onto a grassy knoll, stalking amongst the clumps of bush, like a Spitfire fighter pilot using puffs of cloud for cover. I carried her with me, her image growing in my belly like a cancer. For though she’d only graced me with a brief parting kiss, a benevole
nt pressing with soft and fluctuant lips, her essence had entered me and taken root.
From the top of the knoll I could see a broader canvas, taking in the city centre and the surrounding hill suburbs. Eastward lay the silver waters of Otago Harbour. Even from a kilometre away, I could sense the movement there, the rhythm of the swirl – the streaming of foam and weed into lines. I could smell it, the odour of rust, of fish scales and green slime on a pillar – all left to transiently respire or oxidise in the grey air above the ebbing tide.
In the north it is warmer. The fields are luxuriant – a deep green. The years have been good to the farmers who settled there many generations before. There is old money, and plenty of time to savour the slow change of seasons beyond the veranda rail. I imagined her, thin and tender, floating along the corridor of a large farm house, wearing a sleeveless top, white and pressed, and a wrap-around skirt ending just above her knees. I saw her as bony, the ivory of her knee caps under-painting the flesh coloured surface. And yes, she was a failure, since she hadn’t manage to break from the family‘s gravitational field. She was sucked back to those rolling fields, like an injured aeroplane, its fuel line shot to bits – drawn inevitably to earth.
I saw her mother as stately, warm, and concerned. She understood that there was no hurry – that life is long, with plenty of time to learn the ropes. Better to be a child for one more year, to grow a little more, than to burn in a far flung city. And Daddy – he always made Eleanor a star, didn’t he? He could buy her a good car, something reliable, to drive to the nearby University in Palmerston North, only forty-five minutes away. She could come home again at night, to watch through the windows, the shadows of telegraph poles lengthening across the fields, as they would have done year after year. In the kitchen a pot would be simmering, and she might turn away from the window to reduce the gas flame. She might hear her mother behind her, searching a cupboard for paprika.
I would arise then, unable to bear the images for one moment longer. She would be growing in my throat, expanding in my head, ballooning in my chest. I had to move quickly, as if to escape from myself. Convulsed in self pity, I would descend the slopes, running from copse to copse (the fighter pilot at war again) hiding my streaming face from the quizzical look of strangers.
In the final hundred metres, I would gather myself together, to be prepared for entry into the looming hostel. The quadrangle would be deserted, apart from a few limp individuals bearing hangovers, slipping anonymously away on unknown errands. And I, on the cusp of a great social institution, the University, would turn away from it all, to waste another day in a solitary fever dream.
I wrote to her, a drone of self pity, interspersed with lines of verse – songs I had written for her. I posted it on just such a Sunday morning as I have described. And within the envelope were all my hopes and dreams. For a few hesitant seconds I clasped it between thumb and forefinger, my pulse riding up a few notches. For I knew that once I let it go, the letter would drop away through the trap, to become irretrievable, its revealing contents set to become an embarrassment – cringe-worthy – something from which she would certainly retreat with that look of horror I had seen before. After I finally let it go, I looked up and down the street, feeling conspicuous and ridiculous.
For a few days, I was gathered into a streak of optimism, a hopeful comet scoring the night sky. By now she would know the extent of my feeling for her – that after she had journeyed away, there had remained in Dunedin City a fractured heart, a tormented soul, a yearning spirit. Maybe she would too become affected – once she understood – doesn’t love sometimes incite a counter love? She, who couldn’t bear to stay in this southern retreat, would realise who she had left behind – someone whose very existence was based on the vision of her body in full expression.
The days turned into weeks. Five weeks. When it arrived, I was getting to a point of acceptance that I had lost her. But there it was, retrieved from behind the stretched lattice of elastic that held the mail against the felt covered green backboard. Although I had never seen her writing before, I knew in an instant it must be her. The address was written in a neat italic script –the pen strokes soft and fine.
If time could stand still! If I could walk the pathway across to my wing again and again, the letter delicately held between fingers and thumb. For during that walk there was hope, anticipation, possibilities . . . There was still a chance that it wasn’t only I whose chest was rent, twisted and inflamed.
I gazed at the script, my stomach hollowing with disappointment. I had felt so much pain for all those weeks – a sensory cripple. Yet why should I expect her to feel the same? I would have preferred her to come right out and say it ‘I’m sorry, but for you I feel absolutely nothing’. Instead she implied that my letter had merely been a bland ramble from an acquaintance. There was no acknowledgement of the angst I had poured onto my pages. Her tone was mildly apologetic – for not sticking it out in Dunedin, ‘like the rest of you‘. The use of the plural annoyed me. Clearly I was lumped in with a whole group. Apparently it was insignificant that it was I who had written to her and not one of the others. There was a brief description of what she was doing, a polite thank-you for the note, and at the end an invitation to call by, ‘if ever you are up this way.’ I laughed without mirth. As though I might be up near Eketahuna and suddenly remember! Oh Yes. Eleanor lives around here somewhere. I must call in.
I was seriously wounded, but not quite dead. Perhaps she hadn’t understood my letter. Did she not realise? This was love. I resolved to use the telephone. Yes, I’d speak to her in real time. I’d make sure she knew. And I’d hear her voice. I’d hear her voice!
There was a coin phone in the lobby, right beside the mail board. It took several days before I managed to make the connection. I had approached the phone like a timid zebra approaches a waterhole patrolled by lions. For a start the lobby had to be empty. I didn’t want an eavesdropper hanging onto my words. And I had to overcome the nausea, the flushing, the beating heart and the writhing colon. When finally I did it, I connected with a deep male voice. Quickly, in a Sertorius gasp I asked for Eleanor.
“Who did you say it was?” the man asked with a plummy accent.
Gerry Davenport.
The man, her father I presume, disappeared to look for her. I could hear his footfalls receding along wooden floorboards, perhaps a hallway with a high ceiling. In my mind I could picture this cool dark passage leading to a kitchen full of strong sunlight. Outside there were rolling grassy fields, stretching away to a horizon of low slung hills beneath puffs of snow white cumulus.
I could hear her coming. Her footsteps were light and fast. Her greeting was pleasant but tainted with an edge of annoyance. There were many silences. Having made the connection, I was left exposed. I couldn’t just blurt it out – ‘I love you‘. So how was I to convey my feeling? In the end I didn’t have to.
“I’m flattered by your interest,” she said suddenly. “But I think you should know. I’m engaged to be married to a young farmer. I’m getting married in June.”
I stumbled over the courtyard, reaching out for my room. The pavement rolled under my staggering form, its cracks and clinging weeds always to be remembered.
Returned to reality by my failure, I found myself a solitary figure. While I had been floundering about, my head full of dreams (a waif’s face and stick like limbs), amongst the others friendships had been formed and girlfriends had been taken. I found myself on the outside of these alliances, a remote figure with nothing to say, and no direction on which to hang my hat. So much then, for this modern day Asher. Earle remained in touch with me. He had watched me succumb, bemused by the apparent waste of a life, the futile giving of all to some distant and unrewarding figure. But he was busy, too occupied to lend me much of a hand.
These were perfect conditions for a fixation to flourish. I’d been trawling the Dunedin second hand shops for the records I needed to complete my Byrds collection. It was a fruitles
s endeavour since the later records had had moderate sales and were now out of print. Whenever I plucked up courage to ask the retailer, they’d look at me strangely. What an unusual request! The Byrds! Weren’t they just one hit wonders from 65? However, one of them was in the know, a bearded musician on Stuart St. He looked at me critically. “Sweetheart of the Rodeo?” he said, his face lighting up. “Yeah, that was kind of radical for its time – but I haven’t seen that come through here in a long, long time.” Out of the blue, CBS brought out a compilation, a double album called History of the Byrds. I was in a main street shop, flicking through the B section. There it was, a pale green cover with a side-profile shot of some latter day Byrds. My beaten down spirit threatened to awaken as I flipped it over and read the track listing. Here at last, some of the questions raised by those mystery years would be answered.
Anxious to put a melody with each new song title, I half walked, half ran my way back to the hostel. In the still-life interior of my room, I plundered that snapshot of a musical legacy – songs that had not felt the touch of a stylus for many years. And I went on and built my whole year around the tracks, playing them over and over, like a lonely fishwife with a neurosis. I wrote down all the words on loose-leaf paper, later to sing them in a cracked strident voice, staring over the church roof to the skyline, the missing harmonies playing along in my head.
One song captured me in its embrace for months – for years! Lady Friend. It had never been released on an album before. It had been an unsuccessful single in 67. It was the ultimate three minute package of jangling guitars and vocal intervals – thirds, fifths, suspended fourths . . . How those intervals could touch me. The guitars seemed to chime like bells. And the words, were so simple, yet dealing with a feeling I knew oh so well.
Here it comes again
It’s going to happen to me
Here it comes she’s going to say goodbye
She’s going to say
She’s going away
And I will have to live without her and survive.
On the surface, hardly earth shattering. But to a lacerated heart, encapsulated within the music . . . I knew what it was. It was devastation and her name was Eleanor. The want, the need, the hurt. . . At least the writer had been with his girl. Me, I’d desired someone but had never gotten to find out how she felt. How did it feel to be wrapped around Eleanor? Lying on a bed? Would I never know?
I thrashed History of the Byrds for months. My hostel-mates glanced at me and looked away. Who could relate to this gaunt somnolent youth with his head wreathed in outdated music? Lady Friend was blasted through my open doorway time after time. It was like a propaganda show – Radio Free Davenport – but I didn’t win any converts.
That open doorway . . . Was it my means to communicate? To let the others know that the gaunt somnolent youth was capable of running deep. It was as if the music conveyed all my injuries – Eleanor – and my hopes as well . . . The hope of something vital.
Isobel! I had tried to make my way without her, to establish my own life in that southern city. Occasionally I had been tempted to go and seek her out, but each time I would manage to resist it, to try once more on my own. Eventually I had to concede that my Dunedin sojourn was failing miserably. I set out to find her.
It was yet again a Sunday morning, following a particularly solitary Saturday night. I had her address from one of Julia’s letters. I knocked on the loose hinged front door of a dilapidated lean-to shack. A lethargic bohemian led me to her empty room. “She’s gone away to Europe,” he said with a wan smile.
“What? for a holiday?”
“No,” he said. “For good.”
Garbo was giving me the sideways look. I’d catch her glancing across at me while whispering Earle’s ear, her mouth turned down at the corners, one eyebrow elevated. And they would laugh. Garbo was sanguine, confident and loud, all backed up by a drawling southern accent. She had Earle fast tracked into the University high-life. There was no room for an emotional cripple in her plans. Less and less did his cheerful round face appear at my door. Life was meant for living, not to be merely dreamed about.
I was truly confined to my inner self. In my mind the only way out of the rut was to write music – music so good that ‘they’ would all have to sit up and take notice of me – an aloof but rich and famous musician. I had long given up my studies in zoology, chemistry and mathematics. I attended lectures sporadically, sitting bemused in the second from the back row. I was thinking, ‘this isn’t for me, I’m beyond all this.’
My life in the hostel contrasted markedly with the imaginary life I had created for Asher, Hallwright, Treadgold, McEwen . . . Was it imaginary? Perhaps one of them, two of them even, had been slumped in a cell like room, their heads filled with doom and gloom? But I had seen the photo-montages in the yearbooks. Beaming faces at the winter ball, belly-laughter at the rugby, tankards of beer held aloft, pretty women standing close by. I was nothing like them. Clearly I was meant for a different pathway through life.
Despite being locked into a creation dream, my guitar playing and song writing were not progressing. I was driven to play Byrdsian chords with the same characteristic drone. It was all part of the neurosis, feeding a myopic pleasure centre. E minor (add D and G), A minor (add D and G), G major (add D and G). There was song after song with the same affect, the subject matter always consistent – all about loss, (Eleanor). They all failed to progress beyond a morbid drone.
Then I became ill. It crept up on me slowly. At first it was merely a tiredness, unnoticeable inside a listless persona. Changes came insidiously. My chest was beginning to heave after walking up a staircase. In the mornings I was bathed in sweat, my lower limbs trembling as I dropped them off the bedside onto freezing linoleum. I stopped attending the dining room, preferring to lie across my bed, sipping metallic tap water. By the time Earle finally appeared, I was wheezing at rest, my cough a dog’s bark – a productive gunshot, firing viscous yellow and green sputum into woody paper tissues.
His face was transformed in a matter of seconds, and I was humbled by this show of feeling. He was almost tearful as he ran away, his footfalls heavy in the resonant corridor. I heard the door bang shut at the far end of the long passage, leaving me to the moribund atmosphere of infected exhalations and the sound of my crackling lung bases as they expanded and contracted in the silence.
The doctor breathed heavily through his beard, his tweed coat falling across my fiery skin, as he auscultated the front of my chest. I heard him whistle, a rapid indrawing of breath that signalled the extent of the pathology. “You’ve contracted pneumonia son,” he concluded. Under Earle’s incredulous gaze, he loaded two syringes with urine coloured antibiotic, to sequentially plunge each into an exposed buttock. I bit onto a thumb, my face seeking the folds of the kapok pillow.
People came in droves. First there was the Warden and the cook. I was to be confined to my room, my meals to come up on wiped down wooden trays. After this initial foray, sheepish young men, pricked by conscience, appeared in my room. All the modern-day Ashers, Hallwrights, Treadgolds and McEwans. Suddenly I was somebody. At last I had something to hang my hat on. Pneumonia! And they talked to me, these young men whose effervescent faces would soon grace the pages of the next yearbook. They stood by my bed on the green linoleum, a multitude of firm jaws, their words conciliatory, their body language revealing the self confidence that came with their success - in the classroom, on the rugby fields, with the girls. Here I was, an unexpected part of their day – a pneumonic Byrd fanatic.
Despite of my parlous physical state, I had never felt so good. I was part of something after all. Part of the institution. They’d be talking about me across the tablecloths in the dining-room. The Byrd-man has pneumonia. The jingle-jangle man has succumbed. He never did dress properly for the cold. Those paper thin paisley shirts!
The disease couldn’t last forever. It began to ebb away, and so did the guests. I stumbled to my feet, like a sun-drunk
peasant after a prolonged siesta. I walked out into the insipid sunlight – it was the first day of spring. I had been laid low for weeks. I had no hope of making medical school now. I wandered aimlessly along a footpath, towards the Queen’s Gardens. In the distance, Mt Cargill marked the horizon, the most faraway visible landmark to the North. Transiently I conjured up a meadow, a warming summer sun bathing desiccated grass. In the nose a peaty smell of moss. Nearby, insects hovered; ascending, descending, lateralising. Close to me a teenage girl, an engaging smile . . . Abruptly I longed to be gone, to leave Dunedin behind. The city and its University had promised so much, but yielded nothing. I had been a total failure. The culture of the Ashers, the Hallwrights, the Treadgolds, the McEwans – seemingly it wasn’t for me. I hadn’t even been to a rugby game. I hadn’t attended the mid-Winter ball. I hadn’t dated a girl from St Margarets. I hadn’t dropped to the ground clutching my belly, derailed by laughter. It was too late for all that now. I had painted myself into a corner.
Perhaps sensing my plight, Earle organised an evening out, a table for four at La Scala. We were fully mobile – his father had sent him a car, a brand new Honda Civic. It was an odd feeling, driving down the streets that we had only previously known on foot. We pulled up outside University College to pick up the girls – Garbo and one of her friends. Earle went in to get them while I sat amongst the scent of new upholstery and polished panels. I thought about Garbo and her friend. My stomach turned and sweat broke out between my shoulder blades. How to deal with them?
When Garbo and Jacinta got in the car they looked at me and laughed. “Sorry Gerry,” Garbo said. “You just look so wasted.” It grew into that kind of infectious laughter that never quite goes away. I’ve even had it myself. The laughter would subside into uneasy silence before inevitably erupting again. Earl said, “They’re laughing at us mate,” but I knew it was only directed at me.
The restaurant was lit up like a ship in port. We were escorted to a side room, a solitary table for four. There was no surrounding milieu of people to become immersed in. There was only us – one stark foursome. The waiter wore a tuxedo with a gleaming white shirt and tie – easy meat for the double act of Garbo and Jacinta. Their paroxysms of mirth continued throughout the meal. I tried to enter the conversation but my phrases emerged in a jumble. My voice sounded overly loud and hoarse. My efforts seemed to be more fuel for the laughter fire. Thus it felt like a granting of mercy when it was finally all over.
We were invited to Garbo’s room for a night cap. Looking bored, Jacinta disappeared, perhaps in search of more exciting company, leaving me to watch Earl and Garbo roll about the room, talking themselves up with sexual innuendo. I intimated to Earl that I was going to walk back to the hostel. “Don’t be stupid mate,” he said. “I’ll come now as well. We’ll drive.”
I stared out the side window at the buildings flashing by – lecture theatres, the student union, student flats, laboratories . . . There were groups of students on the streets, singing and arguing – occasionally gesticulating at the car. I was tired of watching other people live. After we’d parked the car, we walked together towards the back gate. I felt a shot of anger pulse through my veins and I shouldered Earl into a gate post. He gave a faint gasp as he came to a halt, a quick expulsion of breath in the quiet of the night. I didn’t look back, striding across the courtyard to seek the anonymity of the interior. I surveyed the room, a montage of shadows and street light, an angular bedstead and a high backed chair jammed against a desk – a musty, dank and cold enclosure. I went to the window and stared at the night. My chest was heavy, my jaw clenched. I turned back into the room. I went to the cupboard and opened it. I looked down at the suitcase. It was covered in dust.
BOOK 2
Chapter 1
