Going West

by Gee, Maurice

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Going West

  Maurice Gee has long been considered one of New Zealand’s finest writers. He has written more than 30 books for adults and young adults and has won numerous literary awards, including the UK’s James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, the Wattie Award, the Deutz Medal for Fiction, the New Zealand Fiction Award and the New Zealand Children’s Book of the Year Award.

  Going West

  MAURICE GEE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Acknowledgement

  Jack Skeat’s Notebook: 1

  Looking at Him

  On the Map, in the Marriage

  Notebook: 2

  Going West

  Notebook: 3

  Notebook: 4

  Notebook: 5

  Escaping from the Barbecue

  Notebook: 6

  Notebook: 7

  Notebook: 8

  Visiting with the Second Voice

  Notebook: 9

  Notebook: 10

  Three Visitors and a Dwarf

  Notebook: 11

  Notebook: 12

  Notebook: 13

  Jo and Georgy

  Notebook: 14

  Notebook: 15

  Rex and Ralph Murdoch and Margot and Sal (and Harry and Jack)

  Acknowledgement

  This novel was written with the assistance of a scholarship from the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand.

  Jack Skeat’s Notebook: 1

  He was born at New Lynn in 1930, with Amalgamated on one side and Crum on the other, and died in 1988, out past Tiri in the Hauraki Gulf. He was the author of nine books of poetry and a small amount of fugitive and occasional verse. He had two wives, two daughters and two sons; but his first wife (who is mistaken) told me once, ‘He never married.’

  How comfortable it would be to leave him to his memoirist, Elfin John, who sees ‘a running fire of brilliance’ over him. We need all the brilliance we can get. John fills his book with jokes, occasions, parties, bon mots. Even I, the other John (the Jack), say something smart now and then. The poet falls over on a flight of steps and bleeds into the cup of his hands. ‘Does anybody happen to have a wafer?’ Jack Skeat asks.

  We don’t need any more of that sort of thing. I know jokes the Elf can’t tell because he wasn’t there – he wasn’t there most of the time – but I’m not going to put them in unless they do more than raise a laugh.

  Born 1930, died 1988. Those years contain him, and contain much of me. Is that why I take on this task? I want to write my own life, not his? I’m tired of being a satellite, author of one bad book? I want my magnitude observed?

  Jack and Rex made a binary; and if I was a dark star, well, I had more weight. (You see now why my book was bad. Never mind. When I get down to it this stuff will go out.)

  Notes, comparisons: We were both born in 1930, he in New Lynn by the brickworks and I in rural parts, west and north: a small town in the orchards. My father was a solicitor with a good country practice and my mother a lawyer’s daughter, who passed her life in social isolation. No one in our town, not the vicar’s wife, not the schoolteacher’s daughter, was good enough. She locked herself in our garden, behind our gate, and never went out, and never let in anyone who might attempt to know her. As for my friends: The butcher’s son! The engine driver’s son!’ I must keep boys of that sort out on the footpath.

  I must keep Rex out there. His father was a brickie. A hooligan, a boxer, a better on racehorses. He taught me how to lead with my left and cross with my right. I stood beside him while we peed in a hedge and the amount that came out of him would have filled a bucket. I wondered how he had ever managed to get his wife. She would have been good enough (almost) for my mother if she had not married him.

  Les Petley’s wife. Rex’s mother. For one night she was my mother too. Clever, sad, graceful, beautiful. The adjectives tumble out like bubbles from a pipe but all they do is float around her head.

  Wasted. There’s one that doesn’t float.

  Leave her. Leave Lila Petley for later on.

  Territories, places. West of Auckland, out towards the ranges. Purple evening hills with a sunset like an open wound. We both knew that margin to our world, Rex from New Lynn, I from Loomis.

  I must beware of false weight and too much primary colour; and of the pastel shadings of nostalgia. My verse – my early verse, before I chose cleverness as a better way – was disfigured and denatured by pink and blue, a wash, and bloody red and midnight black. I’ll have, I’ll try to have, none of that. (And not have too much cleverness either – open wound!) Rex was never troubled in that way. He seemed to have no mess in his head, none of the human mess simmering and stewing in me. Large plain movements Rex had, a tilting and intersecting of planes. Or was that later? And before? In any case, simplicity and largeness. Mess in abundance, though, in his daily life.

  Westward the ranges. Naked beaches on the other side; mile-long combers crashing in. Auckland city lay in the east; opulence and commerce, bright lights, sin. Rex was put out once to find that I too weighed those places in that way.

  We had a north-south axis as well, but that comes later.

  From Loomis to Auckland there were three ways:

  1) The green and yellow ABC buses, straining up the white concrete road to the edge of town – where farms opened out, with a long view over the harbour, past Pt. Chevalier and the sugarworks, to Rangitoto pale and uneasy in the distance. (What a lot of weight that island, that mountain, has to bear. The city’s claim to greatness often seems to rest on it.) The road ran down Waikumete Hill, with acres of grey gravestones and white crosses on the right, and over the little hump at the bottom, and up the equal hill on the other side. Oh the plunge into the valley in the ramshackle bus. Was it death (those thousand grinning skulls underground) or was it sex? The twin slopes opened out like thighs, with a little hump there, pubic mount. (It will be said that I steal this from a Petley poem but, for the record, I pointed out the likeness to him and he dressed it up.)

  Then New Lynn and the brickworks, Amalgamated and Crum: black open sheds stacked with orange pipes, chimneys with iron ladders up their sides, and once in twenty years a steeplejack on top. We crossed the Whau creek – mud and mangroves – where country ended and the suburbs began. Avondale, the racecourse, and Pt. Chev., the asylum. You might see loonies walking in the grounds. (‘Not loonies, Jack,’ Lila Petley said, ‘people who are mentally ill.’) Past the golf course and the zoo and Western Springs stadium where the midget cars raced on Saturday nights (Frank ‘Satan’ Brewer), and up another hill into Grey Lynn, and there the city proper, Karangahape Road along the ridge. Then a plunge down Pitt Street to the wharves and terminus and a glimpse of Queen Street as you went by. That was my most frequent way. Forty minutes from the Loomis orchards to white liners sailing from the bottom of the street. Queen of streets. And forty years and more from that time to this and still the excitement comes on me.

  The question is, of course, how did Rex Petley feel about it?

  2) By train. From Loomis station the track ran straight for several miles, with straggly town on one side – Ah Lap’s grocery where you could buy Chinese ginger in jars, the Scout Hall, the Anglican Church, the jam factory – and vineyards and farms on the other. Then the line began to curve and the impression one had was of worming into Auckland. It went up inclines and through cuttings, and you saw a grey fringe of cemetery overlapping the hill, and the lumpy end of the ranges on the other side. New Lynn, round the back of the shops, across the front of Amalgamated. The house where Rex Petley lived until he was eight stood hard against the line and I think I saw him once before I knew him, sitting cross-legged on a pile of sleepers, watching as the train eased through a railway gang
. Rex with hanging adenoidal mouth. That can’t be right. Perhaps he was yawning. I envied him his place on the warm stack of logs.

  Once across the spindly bridge there was no creeping, you stabbed like a knife. Avondale, Mt. Albert, houses tumbling one against the other, iron roofs in a frayed quilt of reds and greens; and Morningside, Kingsland, with Eden Park mown like a lawn waiting for the big match Saturday; then the prison, an English castle, with the quarry where the prisoners broke stones, and Auckland Grammar standing above, its Kublai Khan buildings in the sun and boys in navy-blue kicking footballs high. What happened when a football went into the quarry? Newmarket Tunnel, with men’s cigarettes in the dark, and kids making ghost yells, and the smell of sulphur – and once in there, the big kids said, a Seddon Tech boy rooted his sheila and they both had their pants pulled up and were sitting as though nothing had happened by the time the train came out the other end.

  At Auckland station the ramps made you run and the echoing big hall threatened you and you felt that you might travel up or down instead of along, by slanting, sliding ways or by the plucking of a Hand, and hear a big final Voice. The dusty straggling walk along to Queen Street ended that.

  The bus had the cumulative magic of the known, the train odd bits of drama and a back view of things. The third way was the one I liked best.

  3) Tram. You got off the bus in front of the undertaker’s in Avondale and walked back twenty yards to Rosebank Road, where the red and yellow car hummed softly at the bottom of the hill. But always I felt danger: those shining grooves and bacon-slicer wheels. Peril is a better word. The motorman released the rope, manoeuvred the whippy pole, set the grooved wheel on the overhead wire. He took his place in the box in front (the tramcar had two fronts and two backs), woke the lovely throbbing underfoot, eased the lever round, and we were off, grinding up the single track and lurching through the curve on the Y. When the seats filled up you gave yours to a lady and stood on the platform with the road rushing by at the bottom of the steps. You leaned out when the pole broke loose and watched sparks flash and heard them spit as the motorman eased the wheel back on to the wire. High speed along the flat into Mt. Albert, with a grinding and hissing from the wheels and a swaying in the car that was barely in control. Up the hill through Kingsland, along Symonds Street, past Grafton Bridge where the suicides jumped into the cemetery in the gully, along Karangahape Road, and then the stomach-lurching right-angle turn and the dive down Queen Street, past the town hall and the Crazy House and the Civic, to John Courts and Smith and Caughey and Milne and Choyce. Off at the zone there and through the traffic, the city’s heart. That was why I liked the trams, they set you down in the middle of things. (And while I remember the zones, those narrow concrete islands in the street, Rex used them in his poem ‘Passing Through’ and some readers have failed to understand zone as an actual thing. It’s the safe place between the slicing wheels and the butting cars, but not a place one can stand about in. By the time he has finished with it, of course, it comes to mean any number of things.)

  Why do I do this? Why start? I have no need of discovery. Isn’t that what I am leading to? Not simply memory but the ordering that is a kind of invention? Looking at things I haven’t known is likely to prove fatal to me. Danger. DANGER! Here I am, sixty, retired with a sigh of relief, fresh and ready for the rest of my life. The things I’ll do: I’ll read, I’ll sport, I’ll travel, I’ll drink two glasses instead of one and maybe I’ll even smoke cigars. All that waiting for me – and what do I do? I shine my torch back into the dark. Stupid bugger! Don’t go there.

  On the other hand I’ll have a great time. That sort of great time one has in battles and affairs. One’s at risk and terrified and alive. And if I come out minus a limb or with some part broken or diseased? I really don’t want that. I want no trouble; and I can’t stand pain. I want to be happy, I want some slow-paced fun. I’ve always said there’s ten good years in there, sixty to seventy, and that’s where I’ll take my reward. I want to go to Greece again, not back to Loomis. I want the Castalian spring, the hill of Kronos. I want Tuscany, the Danube, the Dordogne, I’ve dreamed of them. Is my way to that – this? Must I run the gauntlet? And maybe plunge off a cliff at the end? And never reach that great old ruined Europe I’ve promised myself?

  Rex is saying to me, ‘Why go there, mate? Everything you need is right here.’ That is his true authentic voice.

  I’m not going to do his childhood. All I’ll do is make a chronology, a catalogue. The dates, the places, the people, the circumstances. And nothing circumstantial as evidence. No evidence, in fact. I won’t even quote verse, although I’m in a better position than most to say what he invented and what connects with his experience. I can guess too, better than Elfin John, at all the things that lie between. But I won’t do that. Rex hated biographical raking around in his lines. I’ll say what I know, that’s all, and let him speak for himself.

  ‘The deepest springs of his poetry.’ That’s where John Dobbie claims to go in his first chapters, and he gives us a sensitive small boy, full of pure responses to leaf and cloud and bumblebee and bubbling stew etc. Would you like to know all the things the Elf has him ‘nakedly handle with his lovely mind’? page 11. Here goes: a broken bottle in the grass; baby eels wriggling in the slime; skeletons of spiders in their webs; bent-pin fish-hooks; steaming woollen socks above the stove; blackbirds breaking snails out of their shells; sparrows mating; wetas in the dunny; slaters; Maori-bugs, their stink; a naked swagger in the waterfall; ice in the horse trough; used frenchies under the bridge; clean washing on the line; the tea-tree prop; Dinky-toy roads carved in the bank; the doughboy; boiled cabbage; date roll; bread-and-milk; the News from London; BB guns.

  John could go on but he won’t. These things are ‘gateways into innocence’. I think they’re images in poems. As for their significance, who couldn’t make a similar list? Getting them into poems, that’s the hard thing. And John, to his credit, knows that. But he will go on about ‘the creative mystery’. He’s better later on when he tells jokes.

  Rex, indeed, was a sensitive boy. I’ve seen him pick a flower up from the pavement and put it in the shade under a tree. I’ve also seen him throw grasshoppers into a spider web; and rescue some of them just in time. As for those used frenchies, he washed them out and blew them up and knotted their ends and floated them on Loomis Creek. We bombarded them with green apples. Great fun. John, they’re ‘the Armada with swollen sails’; not the flax-stick boats with paper sails we made. The poem doesn’t say what you think. There’s a sub-text reading sexual disgust.

  I’m the one who knows and I won’t tell.

  Dates and places. 1938. Loomis school. The new boy says, ‘Rex Petley, Miss.’ I’m jealous of his name. My own is sissy and ridiculous. John Skeat. I try to make my school friends call me Jack.

  Rex. Wrecks. And it means king. Petley though is sissy. Mother’s pet. Teacher’s pet. It will make a useful weapon if I need one.

  I’m not going to keep on like this. Tomorrow I’ll turn up different things. And the next day something else. Rex as milk monitor. School bellringer. It’s like watching soup in a pot – here’s a pea rising, here’s a bit of carrot, here’s some leek. If I’m to do it I need to be governed by an idea, something that will enable me to select. So: poet. But which comes first, the poet or the man? And both, of course, are prefigured in the boy. ‘In the lost childhood of Judas’ etc. I’m happy to leave that game to someone else. I want the spiritual two-backed beast, Rex/John. We both of us, didn’t we, strove to see last things? (I don’t mean the Four.) And both of us believed that in this world of appearances the proper task of poet and of man was to find those things one could fix with a Name. And both of us (Jack Skeat early, Rex Petley late) gave it up.

  That is to simplify. But it does provide me with an idea. And it gives me a place to stand.

  Image: two amoebas vainly trying to swallow each other up. I’m not sure I don’t prefer dark star.

  The healt
hy working of many of my parts is gone for ever. There’s nothing to be gained from complaining. Mirrored in a shop window, I’m pleased with what I see. Desiccated follicles, all right, my hair falls out, but I wash what’s left of it with Johnson’s Baby Shampoo and it keeps some body and stirs nicely in a breeze. At sixty I have to be pleased with that. I stride along, I’m boyish. Who’s to know the circulation in my right foot is poor, making it colder than the left? It’s not important when I walk. It only bothers me at night but I warm it up by covering it with my left calf. Heat transfer, I like the economy, using one part to bring another up to scratch. The trick can be used to cure mental ailments too. That almost feverish nocturnal activity of the mind is treated with images of sea and yellow beaches. I put myself to sleep on yellow beaches. The warm sea lifts me up and floats me out.

  Mind has never caused me too much trouble. I keep control even when pressures are extreme. I’ve raged and screamed with jealousy and frustrated ambition – who escapes? – and have thought myself not capable of loving – a condition that made me wordy and declarative for a time (only to myself) and made me think of suicide too. But in all this I sat on my shoulder watching me, and I (which I?) was never lost, in any place either dark or open to bright light. I’ve always had myself watching me. I watch in orgasm. True. In all explosions there’s a small still place and my tiny other self is there. Perhaps I’m mad. Perhaps, on the other hand, I’m sane, and that is why.

  Rex may have been mad at the end. He never had, I think, a watching self.

  I meant to keep Rex out of this discussion.

  Looking at Him

  Jack Skeat cannot keep Rex Petley out. Even his stratagem of counting his ailments is bound to fail. For all his boasting about control and the little Jack who sits on his shoulder he cannot free himself from Rex. It’s clever of him too – he is a very clever man – to rush headlong at the problem. By that I mean write Rex’s life. Or if not life then memoir of his friend. I hope he manages. I hope it works. While we wait for that an objective look at the man may be of interest. His appearance (and decay) will serve as a starting point.