Going West

by Gee, Maurice

  But Jack won’t give it up, he’s wedded to it. He will escape, even if it’s in his own bed, with Harry sent away for the night; even if he has to creep into his hole under the stairs and uncork his bottle silently. A note thumb-tacked on the door while she colours berries in her room …

  They have been members of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society for nine years. With her it’s philosophical. She doesn’t know how personal it has become for Jack. He wants to live long, and means to die when he is no longer in command. Why shouldn’t he anticipate it as a pleasure? He cannot understand how such a simple thing brings so many worries. Logistical, medical. Where to get the stuff? ‘Terminal cocktail’: he doesn’t have a clue what it may be and the term conceals his ignorance. But how much time is left for jokes? Jack is sixty.

  One day he’ll have to go and ask. Does nine years membership entitle him? How will they know he does not want it for a murder?

  Perhaps his mother smells his obsession on him. Perhaps she is demanding her own death.

  He shifts the Eccles cakes to her pillow and goes into the corridor, where he takes the long way round, rubber-stepping like a male nurse. Rooms flash by, with women in barred beds – hollow-templed, hollow-cheeked – and men propped in pillows, sleeping open-mouthed, with their big hands on the coverlet. Why do the old men stay in their rooms? Have they had enough of women? There’s too much nakedness in the dayroom. The men are clothed in reticence and patience while the crazy women squabble on.

  He hears one yelling from the toilets. ‘Help me, I’ve been kidnapped.’

  ‘I haven’t had any dinner for three days,’ another cries. He goes in and peels her a banana. She plays with it and makes it ooze between her fingers. Jack finds a towel and tries to wipe her clean but she puts her shoulder up and plasters squashed banana on the wall. Then she smears her arms with it and smiles delightedly. Should Jack call a nurse or get out before one comes? He doesn’t know who will be punished, or how.

  ‘I’ll find a nurse for you’ – but there are none in the corridor, and when he finds a wardsmaid, bottom jutting from the laundry store, and tells her there’s a lady in Room 9 with a squashed banana, the girl laughs and walks the other way. ‘You should see some of the things they squash.’

  Toughness is a way of getting by. He does not think it will do for him. He cannot face his own death without stars and dreaming; cheese and wine.

  His mother is drinking tea in the dayroom. She’s smaller now she does not have to sit up straight for him. If he approaches she will spit out her cake and empty her teacup on the floor. Jack goes away. He reaches high and punches the code that opens the door; and nods at the speed he does it with. When he can’t dial numbers, when he can’t remember who’s who in a book, then will be the time he’ll have to worry. Then will be the time to get in his car and head for – wherever. Before they take his licence away. Before his knees and hips give out. Before he can’t remember any more he’s planned his death.

  The wind and sun restore belief in it and he is able to forget. He blows on his horn as he drives away. It means goodbye to his mother but he hopes the other old ladies will think it is for them. He feels free and generous. He feels that he has faced her maturely and done the little bit that he can do.

  He drives to the top of Mt. Eden.

  So here he is standing on a hill. If he can’t make it to Duppa the crater in this one will do. Half a million people all about but here is a place where he can lie alone and see a fringe of trees and the sky – and perhaps, as he fades, a city face that looks down and does not get involved.

  There are Japanese tourists in the crater. They slide on the grass as they scramble out, shrieking like birds. He approves of them; of their unbreakable foreignness. It gives him a stance to take, on top of his own hill. They pass, they click their cameras, they get in their bus and drive away; and here Jack Skeat stands, where he belongs.

  The other cones rise to shoulder height: Mt. Wellington, Mt. Albert, One Tree Hill. Several smaller ones come up to his waist. Over the water North Head and Mt. Victoria squat back to back and Rangitoto, silver-grey, rises from its glittering moat. Crenellated, Jack thinks; but the word comes out of other histories. The shape of Rangitoto, anyway, is so familiar that he has no need for adjectives. Let it be. And while you’re about it, get rid of moat.

  Harry is over there, under the eye set in her ceiling, working in her two dimensional world. Harry is set at an angle. She’ll come out, they will stand face to face, but not today. He lets her go and turns to the west. Another harbour glitters, five miles from the one at his back. Mud and mangrove creeks reach into the city from two sides. It would be easy to make them meet. Then ships could steam through Panmure and Otahuhu and two hundred miles would be saved.

  Jack moves his finger. It is done. The Pacific Ocean meets the Tasman Sea. He is impressed. Only a true Aucklander can do that.

  What he is doing: he is keeping his uneasiness at bay.

  Black lands. Navy-blue. Earth-brown. Clay-yellow. Ochrous. Brack-enish. Brackish. Creek-green. These are words he chooses for his west. That west out there that makes him uneasy because it is where he grew up and where a part of him still belongs. He wants to leave no parts lying around.

  Down again, along, through, into. Here is Loomis under the hills. A glass and tile front, traffic lights and carparks and people. He wants the town of empty dusty streets and broken hedges. It’s in behind and a long way back. He drives down the shopping streets and turns left into industry and commerce – where once a little square-built jam factory had stood – and passes through a district of panel-beating shops and coal and firewood yards and boarded-up stores until, at a straggly line, Loomis is residential. It’s Polynesian too, and he drives carefully. There was only one Maori at Loomis school when he was there. Now, he has read in the Herald, a third of the pupils are Maoris and Islanders. Women in muu-muus talk on a lawn. Youths with dread-locked hair stand around a stripped-down motorbike. He’s anxious that they shouldn’t notice him. They are foreign, he is foreign – who owns the point of view? He sees how his presence in this street, his clothes, his car, his language, speech, habits of mind, can only provoke. Is there any part of Loomis he can claim as his own? And backwards-claiming – what can it signify in the Loomis-1990 world? He feels that he is doing something vaguely indecent.

  He drives on all the same, and goes down a hill into a neighbour-hood that seems pakeha. Across a concrete bridge where once a wooden … Along the road, beside the creek where once … Unseemly word; ‘once’ prevents, doesn’t it, good mental health? Yet it creates a country, it’s a territory in his brain. Jack declares his right to go there.

  He parks, he locks his car, he tries to find his old swimming hole. The creek is opened up. It’s as if someone has forced two hands into the gorge and pulled it wide. The creek lies in the sun. It never did that except at midday. But it’s dirtier and meaner. That is natural. The water in the hole is yellow-green. It has a rotting vegetation smell in place of the eel smell lie remembers. There’s nothing for him here, no folding together of now with memory. Jack sneezes once and turns away. He climbs back to the roadside and finds two youths looking at his car. They must have come down from the houses over the street. One wears a league jersey and the other a cotton T-shirt with the arms torn off. League is threat. Torn off is threat. Jeans. Boots. Shaven heads. Beer cans that gurgle in unison.

  ‘Lost something, mate?’

  ‘No, no, I’m just looking around.’

  ‘Good idea to lock your car round here.’

  They have seen him do it. Jack blushes, half in fright. ‘It’s just a habit.’

  ‘Good idea. Might get your stereo knocked off, eh?’

  ‘Ha ha ha,’ the other laughs.

  ‘I was looking at the creek,’ Jack says. ‘I grew up in a house along the road. I used to swim in the pool down there.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Fifty years ago.’

  They cannot comprehend fifty
years. All the same they soften. They have drunk enough beer to make them sentimental. ‘I had a raft there. When I was a kid.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We piled the rocks up, eh? We made a real big pool.’

  ‘It’s a good creek,’ the other says. ‘I learned to swim down there.’

  ‘So did I,’ Jack says, although it’s a lie. He learned to swim at Cascade Park. ‘There were great big eels.’

  Their eyes swing on to him. It’s plain the eels have gone. He had better be careful not to make his creek better than theirs. But he’s moved to find they have a creek at all. He is moved that it’s still alive.

  ‘It’s deeper than I remember.’ Another lie, but a gift to them.

  ‘She’s deep, all right. There’s a pool up there you can’t touch the bottom. I used to try.’ The league jersey youth turns away. He’s as moved as Jack.

  ‘Have a beer, mate,’ the other says.

  ‘I’d better not. I’m driving.’ He’s envious of someone diving deep in his creek and wants to ask the young man what he found down there. He stamps his foot on the road. ‘When I lived here this was all gravel and dust.’

  ‘Musta been a long time ago.’ They are not interested in the road. They walk to the creek edge and look at the water. ‘Good creek.’

  ‘Thanks for talking to me.’

  ‘No sweat.’

  ‘I’d better get along the road and see my old house.’

  ‘Remember to keep your car locked.’

  ‘Ha ha ha.’

  Nice boys, he thinks as he drives away. He wants to keep them simple; doesn’t want to look at their lives. That way they don’t interfere but share the creek. He goes around two bends and finds a grassed area where there had been a field of gorse. He never penetrated it and never came to the creek that way. Now he can walk down and stand on the rocks by the water and make out a bike frame and bottles in the mud. He can turn and run his eye up the slope and over the road and get a partial view of the house he had lived in for the first twenty years of his life.

  Partial because although the row of pine trees is cut down two new houses stand where the summer-house and the rose garden used to be. He sees the old front porch and door framed between decramastic roofs and hardiplank walls. The curving drive is gone – where is the curve, where is the contour, that stand for the times he got away? Running down the drive, leaning on the curve, bent him out of her world into his. Now there is a right-of-way between wire fences, running from the road to the door. There would have been no escape on that narrow way.

  Jack sneezes four times. (It’s nowhere near his record of nineteen, brought on by the smell of animals in the Wellington zoo.) He blows his nose on tissues and wads them in a ball, which he fires at a cairn of stones on the far bank, and hits it square. That gives him the confidence to look at the house again. It was built in 1927 for the newlyweds and the mortgage was paid off in 1947, several weeks before Walter Skeat made his fatal dismount from the train. They had their twentieth wedding anniversary there, though no one celebrated or even mentioned it. Dorothy Skeat – had anyone ever called her Dot? – stayed on in the house until the mid sixties, when she sold it for a very nice price and bought a home unit in Epsom. Jack had last seen the house as she moved out: four-square and substantial at the end of its white-shell drive.

  Now, the letterboxes say, it is divided into flats. 126A, B, C, D. How can four families, even four couples, fit in there? Another question – what made the Skeats think they needed so much space? Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, two living-rooms, a dining-room, a study, for three people? It only started to make sense when you understood that each of those three people lived alone.

  Jack and Rex sneak up on Mrs Skeat where she sits in the summer house drinking tea. She is the white squaw and they are Indian braves, bare to the waist, with seagull feathers fixed in elastic round their heads. Jack carries a bamboo bow with an arrow on the string. Rex has a tomahawk ready in his hand.

  Nine-year-old boys rustle and whisper when they creep. These two make no noise. Rex’s tomahawk is real. He ground the edge in his father’s workshop. One way or another, he will take the white squaw’s scalp. As for Jack, he is ready for his mother to die. Putting an arrow in her throat transforms them into love.

  He sneezes again, four times.

  And Mrs Skeat saves herself by speaking. ‘Why can’t I be dead? I want to die.’

  His first thought is she’s practising lines to use on his father. ‘I want to. I want to’ – and now he knows she’s speaking to herself. He puts his hand on Rex’s arm and jerks his head, let’s go – making one of his feathers fall out. Rex obeys. His face gives nothing away.

  Behind the house he says, ‘What do you reckon she meant?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I’ve got to go anyway.’ And he goes. They both know that talking to yourself means you are mad. But they learn more than that. Jack learns his mother’s desperation, her other face, and although he never sees it again he knows it’s there, behind her mask. And Rex – does his silence, from that day on, mean pity or contempt? Or has he carried something else away? Does he get the thing he needs and not have to come back for more?

  John Dobbie says: ‘It is strange that Rex Petley’s idea of “real class” seems to go no further than a summer-house and a rose garden and a lady in a wide-brimmed hat, drinking tea. Where did he find these properties? Perhaps in some movie. It certainly could not have existed in the Loomis of his youth …’

  Jack’s eyes and nose are streaming. His tissues can barely keep pace. Atchoo! Atchoo! A woman cycling past cries, ‘Bless you.’ He is grateful. As often as not Harry will say, ‘For God’s sake go in the other room.’ His marriage sometimes seems to him an intricate device of honesties and concealments. But the whole of his parents’ was concealment.

  He does not want to think about it any more. Coming to Loomis is a mistake. And how does Rex Petley get in? Jack shakes him from the fabric like a cockroach. He gets a litter-bag from the car and picks up the tissues he has dropped. The one over the creek will have to stay, although he feels guilty about it now. All the same, if anybody’s germs belong in Loomis his do.

  He drives back to Auckland by way of Waikumete. Less pine reserve, more graves. And down, up, down, up – no mistake, it’s sexual. Young men do get some things right.

  His sneezing stops, his sinuses settle down, but Harry can see he’s had an attack.

  ‘Was it your mother?’

  ‘I think it’s the disinfectant they use.’

  ‘How was she?’

  ‘Mad, as usual.’

  ‘Why do you bother going there?’

  ‘She enjoys it. It’s like a thriller. You know, the murderer arrives but she’s too smart. Think of the adventure she’s having.’

  ‘Where else did you go?’

  ‘Drove around. Looked in the shops.’ Loomis concealed.

  Loomis is before Harry’s time.

  Notebook: 3

  Rex wrote no autobiographical pieces. Although he stands hidden ‘in many a poem’ (the Elf’s favourite phrase), when you locate him he’s fully clothed and rarely front on. But Dobbie is clever enough to recognize that the images of small town, country school, kitchen, workshop, creek the early poems are full of make a kind of autobiography. He points them out, makes sure we understand that this is no imaginary country, then lets the poems speak for themselves. That is sensible. The corrections I would make, though large in number, bring no significant change to the reading. All right, the armada on the creek, the woman on the bridge, one day perhaps I’ll point out those, but it’s of no importance that the chestnut tree in the school grounds overhung the dental clinic not the boys’ lavatory or that Mr Warren not Miss Hoyle was our teacher in standard four.

  Future biographers must consult me. I’ll satisfy myself that their idea of Rex is not inflated before I tell them what I know. No ‘burning eyes’, please; no ‘eagle-like clarity of gaze’. It’s true that he gave
the impression of being bright-eyed. His rather heavy face – heavy in the chin, heavy (one might almost say fat) in the nose – seemed to shed some of its bulk when he became interested in some person or thing or event: an effect of the liveliness in his eyes. And then – I’ll concede this to ‘the making of the poet’ – a look of stupidity would take its place. (I’ve seen his father boot him in the backside – ‘Wake up, stupid.’) His eyes turned dull as some process went on in his mind: the cementing, I would guess, of a new thing into place. All his brightness had gone inside Is that too romantic? I’m determined not to overvalue Rex.

  ‘There is a multitude of Petley stories,’ says the Elf, ‘and some must be taken with a grain of salt. But one who knew him better than most was the minor poet and future National Archivist, John Skeat. His importance as “best friend” in the poet’s youth cannot be overlooked; although, inevitably, Skeat trailed behind – indeed, who would not have? They met in 1938 when Les Petley, spiralling downwards in those difficult times, shifted his growing family westwards from New Lynn to the depressed little town of Loomis under the ranges. The friendship began at Loomis school, matured on the creek that meanders through the town – school, town, creek, that fertile ground of future images – and continued, on and off, for the rest of Petley’s life. Unfortunately I have not been able to consult as freely as – would have liked with John Skeat …’

  You wanted to dress Rex up, that is why. I made you behave sensibly. And you punished me by trailing me behind, and calling me a minor poet too. I’m no poet, that’s inaccurate. I was a versifier for a time. Now I’m the keeper of certain memories and I’ll let them out as I see fit.

  Rex Petley, as a boy, was open, attractive, ordinary. He was good with his hands. He built flax-stick galleons, he sharpened tomahawks, with an instinctive knowledge of form and proportion, of when to press down, with how much weight, and how, at what angle, to touch one thing against another for the transfer of energy. These abilities must have helped him when he wrote. His poems are neatly made and are full of balanced energies. One can join the poet with the boy by more than Loomis images. But I prefer simply to state the facts.