by Gee, Maurice
He was the oldest child in a family of eight. There was a stillborn daughter too; and a cousin, a boy, lived with the Petley’s for a time. Rex always had a bed to himself. His next two siblings were girls, they had to share, and perhaps that helped make Melva a loud and robust girl and Dulcie secretive. (Perhaps not.) Rex loved his brothers and sisters, of that I’m sure, for a largeness came on him when he was in their company. He seemed to gather them in by a sudden increase in himself, the way a drop of water creeps at smaller ones and swallows them. His brothers and sisters made him serene.
His mother and he had a more difficult love. She did not strain at improving him, she just kept up a soft relentless pressure. Even her liveliness was part of it. She gave him little calculating looks to see if he had been increased. It seemed strange to me that a mother should talk with her son in such an eager way.
Lila Petley took a batch of scones from her oven. She put them on the kitchen table on a wire tray, tapped one with her finger, smiled at their shape, and covered them with a holey tea-towel. ‘So who does your Mr Warren say is better than Paul Robeson?’
‘Someone called Jeeley. It’s spelt like giggly. Tenors are better than baritones, he says.’
‘Perhaps he doesn’t like negroes.’ She gave him a look.
‘He says they can sprint fast because they’ve got long legs for running away.’
‘Perhaps he’s frightened, Rex. Of people who are better at things than him.’
‘He says women shouldn’t be allowed out of their kitchens.’
‘Does he now? What do you think?’
‘You’ve got to get out, Mum. You’ve got to hang the washing on the line.’
She gave the sidelong look again. ‘Cheeky! And keep your hands away from those scones.’
‘Just one, eh? I like them hot.’
‘No.’ She guarded them, eyes bright. He ducked, he feinted, she shrieked, he yelled, they wrestled. Embarrassed, I sidled round the doorpost on to the porch. There were giggles, laughs, scuffles, inside, and Rex came out with two buttered scones and gave me one.
There’s nothing ‘difficult’ in this; but it seems to me that Lila Petley was trying all the time, even when she was being simple, even when she appeared to forget herself. Was she consciously making Rex? Later on, when he was a man, she had a way of speaking dismissively of him, but that might have been because her job was done.
There were difficulties of another sort with the father. When Les Petley was angry he hit. When he was disappointed he kicked gates open and slammed doors. He groaned, he shouted, he lit rubbish fires in his garden and threw old boxes on from yards away. He kicked the heads off thistles, he beat the mats on the washing line until it collapsed, he lined up beer bottles and threw half bricks at them, or dropped them in the creek and bombed them from the swing-bridge as they floated under – Rex and I joined him in that. When he was happy he ruffled hair. He threw his children up to the ceiling and caught them as they came down and swung them between his legs. He dislocated Melva’s shoulder doing that. He hugged and kissed his children. He even kissed Rex.
Les Petley was a dangerous man. His rages and his love could injure one. The first time I saw him he was digging in his garden. I knew from the way he thrust his spade in and beat clods with the back of it I should not go near. My new friend Rex and I were passing a football back and forth on the lawn. Then we did droppies over the washing line. I understood the need for care. The ball must not go on the garden. Rex understood better than I; but Rex was flirting. He needed to go right to the edge. The ball slid off his foot, spun out of my reach, bounced on the edge of the lawn and ran across the digging into the plants. It snapped a pumpkin flower off its stalk.
Les Petley, breaking earth with his hands, did not stand up. He monkey-scrambled to the plant with a readiness, an inhuman speed, that transformed my world. I was suddenly in a savage place. ‘I’ll – get – you.’
It started as speech but ended in a roar. He ripped out a tomato stake, swung it so the plant attached to it went flying over the tankstand, and charged at us. I thought he was coming for me and I screeched and flung my arms to save my face, but he went past, brushing me so that my whole side seemed to burn, and went for Rex. Rex did not wait. He had been beaten with razor-strops and belts and willow sticks but not yet with a tomato stake. Perhaps he thought Les meant to spear him. Rex ran. He went down the path at the side of the house, rattled across the front lawn among dried-out hydrangeas, jumped the front fence, just out of Les Petley’s reach, and made for the bridge. He must have seen at once that his father would cut him off for he made a sudden turn, gave a screech like mine, and ran for the manuka at the far side of the turning bay. Maybe he meant to climb them, or break through the gorse around their trunks and reach the paddock; but once more he had no time. He turned and went head first, slick as a weasel, into the drain that carried storm-water to the creek. His white soles vanished down the hole. His father whacked at them as they disappeared.
Now it changes. This must have been the pattern of Les Petley’s life. Games with Melva; Melva’s joint goes out. Murder Rex with a stick; then save his life and carry him inside in your arms.
He flung himself down. He reached into the drain to drag Rex out. ‘You wait, you little bugger.’
Rex said, ‘Dad.’ A muffled voice.
It turned Les Petley round. It changed his world as suddenly as he had changed mine.
‘Dad, I’m stuck.’
‘Wait on, son.’ He reached in again. He strained until his face, hard against the edge of the pipe, went plum-red. His mouth gaped and I saw his molars. He told us later on that he had touched Rex’s sole with his fingertips. ‘Christ, I could’ve tickled him, but I couldn’t grab hold.’
‘Dad, I’m scared. Dad. Dad.’
‘Don’t move, Rex. Don’t make any noise, just stay where you are.’
‘Dad.’
‘Quiet, son. You’ll use up all your air.’
He ran back to the house. He was over the front fence like a negro and round the back. I thought he had gone for help and I kneeled down and said into the drain, ‘He’s getting the police.’ saw the soles of Rex’s feet like cardboard cutouts. The pipe was not much over a foot wide. I don’t think, with my shoulders, I could have gone in, but long thin Rex had weaseled in all right. He had got stuck where the drain bent to the creek. I thought if I could wriggle along and take hold of his ankles Les Petley could use me like a rope to pull him out; and I started to suggest it as he ran back. He knocked me aside. He had his spade, caked with garden soil, and he flung himself flat again and yelled, ‘Lie still, Rex,’ before attacking the clay around the drain.
I have never seen a man in such a frenzy. He was like a competitor in a coal-shovelling race. Lila Petley had run out from her kitchen. Melva and Dulcie, Austin, Gareth, Verna, Joy, and the youngest girl, always known as Tweet (names I did not learn until later on), came from their scattered places in the house and on the section as though sucked by a force to the mouth of the drain. Joy and Tweet howled. Lila Petley, in her apron, with her face as white as flour and her mouth a black stretched O, held them glued to her, one on each side, as Les Petley dug.
A spadeful of clods hit me in the ribs and made me hop back from the family. Les had half a yard of yellow clay to break and fling aside. The pipe, from Crum brickworks, had flared lips, it made a hungry mouth, and when we saw its glossy skin uncovered in the earth we understood how far out of our world Rex had gone. Melva raised her head and howled louder than Joy and Tweet. The family swayed in unison, left to right and back again, in a wind of grief I could not feel.
Les Petley put his cheek on the ground. ‘Rex? All right? I’m coming now.’
‘Da-ad,’ the pipe breathed.
He lifted the spade over his head. I heard a rush of air into his lungs. Down came the blade on the body of the pipe. Chips sprang out and cut my face. I shrieked and touched and pulled bloody fingers away. Two stitches from the doctor later on, a
nd hard words from my father to the Petleys – but no one took any notice then. He struck again and the pipe caved in. Lumps of it rattled in its interior. Les Petley hooked them out, one red hand like a bulldozer blade; and struck and hooked again, until we saw, unbelievable, the twin neat soles of Rex’s feet. Lila Petley threw her children off and rushed at them. She hooked her fingers on his ankle bones. Husband and wife together, they pulled Rex out. He seemed to stretch, worm-like, and I hear a pop as he comes free. They rolled him on to his back and looked down – all the Petleys – at his drowned face and cemented eyes. ‘Rex. Rex.’ They all said Rex. He opened his eyes but did not see. Their pupils shrank. Their irises reflected the sky. He drew a long coming-back-to-life amazing breath. Les Petley lifted him and Lila hugged his head and they walked inside. The older children ran to open the gate and the younger ones came behind holding whatever parts of their mother and father they could get.
I felt my cheek, I saw my blood again and I ran home, thinking it might recommend me to my parents. But that’s another story …
When I saw the Petleys next day Les winked at me. ‘He’s a bit of a tiger, your old man,’ and Lila touched my cheek and gave me a cookie. They let me come to their house although my father had forbidden it. They included me in the rescue and nodded their heads as I explained how Les could have used me as a rope. ‘You know, that might have worked.’ He took me out on the lawn and showed me how to lead with my left and cross with my right, and reckoned I would make a better boxer than Rex. I saw that he did not believe it though. He taught Rex punches he never taught me.
*
Les did not go to the war but those years were violent ones for him. He spent some time on Manpower, building gun emplacements (this when the Japanese came in) and barracks and garages and equipment stores, and he worked for a while helping erect a US naval hospital. Almost every week he was in a fight. He needed to show he was not afraid.
He was in prison for a month for hitting an army officer who spoke to him as though he were ‘some bloody hick private. I showed the bastard. He was spittin’ bits of teeth out like confetti.’ Another time he fought an American sailor, a Golden Gloves champion, on a piece of wasteland in Freemans Bay, and ‘flattened the black bastard’, although his own face was cut up fairly badly in that fight.
John Dobbie sees all this as ‘gladiatorial’. Les Petley is ‘a raging bull of a man whose combative instincts were passed on, in more acceptable forms, to his eldest son’. He allows Les no mental life. He’s condescending about the Zane Grey novels he read; portrays that taste as an addiction, like beer and tobacco, and knows nothing (so I mustn’t blame him) of the Wild West games we played in the scrub patch at the back of the house and down the steep banks of the creek. All the Petleys, Lila too, joined in. I had to play the villain, chasing the girls (to do what?). Les and Rex hunted me and shot me and my speciality became falling down dead in spectacular ways. We used wooden clothes pegs, jammed together, for six-shooters.
I captured Dulcie once and tied her hands with twine and hid her in a tea-tree patch at the edge of the creek. I had become a reader of Zane Grey too, although I could not take the books home, and I knew that when the villain got the girl he tore her blouse off and a blush mounted over her breasts – or was it spread downwards from her throat, I can’t remember. Anyway, the hero always got there in time and beat the villain to the draw and wrapped a covering blanket round the girl. I knew all that. So, I think, did Dulcie, although she was only nine. She smiled at me shyly, and I blushed. Her rescuers were close but she whispered, ‘Quiet.’
‘Jes’ keep yore trap shut, wooman,’ I replied, very tough; and Les and Rex and Melva, who would not play the girl, came bursting through the tea-tree and beat me to the draw, and I rolled down the bank into the creek. My most spectacular death yet. It made me very popular with Les.
As villain and outsider I could not help introducing sex into the game. Rex saw it. ‘You better not try anything with my sisters,’ he warned.
‘Course not.’ I substituted death for my other longings, which were not very strong in any case – were curiosity more than desire.
Les rescued Lila from me one day – we chatted about schoolwork as we waited – said, ‘Gotcha, girl,’ and picked her up and carried her inside over his shoulder. The bedroom curtains whizzed across. Melva and Dulcie grinned at each other. Rex went off to the bridge and dropped stones in, and I went home. I thought I would not go to the Petleys’ house any more. But I was back in the afternoon, couldn’t keep away, and there was Lila working at her stove and Les sawing firewood with Rex at the back of the section. They had a record for getting through a log and Melva counted seconds – ‘One, Buckingham Palace, two, Buckingham Palace, three, Buckingham Palace, four’ – as they tried to break it. No one seemed concerned by what had happened. Parents doing that! I could not forget, I have never forgotten. And Lila, in her kitchen, sweetly humming, her china-white ears showing through her hair; while Les sweated at his log and blew his nose into the grass.
I went home again. I said to my father (with his pipe), ‘I suppose only some people know what being good is.’ He agreed. ‘You have to work at being good and keep your feet out of muddy streams.’ Dad was little help to me on that occasion. I’ll confess to loving Lila, in a confused way, and believing myself finer than Les. He seemed a Zane Grey villain most of the time. How could someone pure, like Lila, go with him?
He took up football again, although he was forty, and was sent off for kicking the referee. I could note down a hundred things like that: finishing off a run-over dog with his crowbar – ‘Someone had to bloody do it’ – falling off his bike drunk and being led home by Joy and Tweet – a hundred things: swimming underwater at Cascade Park, across and back, all the way; carrying two bags of cement, one on each shoulder, along a narrow scaffold two storeys high – but then I’d seem to agree with the Elf that Les Petley had no mental life. He (the Elf) is not malicious or even judgemental. He is, in fact, benign, and then evasive. He wants Les to be a character so that he can be put aside. He does not really want to talk about him. ‘Beginnings are a puzzle,’ says the Elf, ‘and what one owes one’s parents can rarely be determined in cases like this.’ I’m forced to agree, but I can’t allow Les to be dismissed.
Putting things together was his passion. He worked with his tongue. out, then he ate his lower lip. After the war he did very well as a bricklayer, he even employed two or three men. He added a bedroom to the house, he renovated the kitchen, he put in hot water and a flush lavatory. ‘The happiest day of my life,’ Lila said. He built a workshop at the top of the slope by the creek and bought the little Willys truck Rex borrowed for dances at Pt. Chev. and Milford and Swanson. Often when Rex arrived home Les would still be working at his inventions.
They were never fine things, but they were not crude. He made a hoist for lifting bricks and mortar. It was powered by a US Army surplus electric motor and I saw it working on several jobs in the main street of Loomis when the new shops were going up. One day he dismantled it and fitted the motor to his latest invention, a machine for making concrete blocks. It powered a vibrator that settled wet concrete in moulds. ‘This is going to make us rich,’ Les boasted. But first he had to make it perfect. Perfection was the better part. The block machine, too long for the workshop, lay in the yard, with one end against the fence and the other overhung by Lila’s washing, while Les worked on it in the late afternoon. At night the children took turns standing by with a torch. If its beam wavered Les would roar; and when he had got some part right he would hug them.
Rex, and sometimes I, mixed concrete in a mixer turned by hand and poured it into a barrow and wheeled it to Les, who tipped it neatly into the moulds. They lay end to end, and in a later model side by side, on a chassis floating on springs. The vibrator was geared for a slow beginning but soon built up a fine turn of speed, and Les ran along with a bucket and trowel, topping up the moulds as the concrete settled. In a factory machines would do
that, he explained. When the concrete was set he stood at one end of the machine, with Rex and Lila or one of the girls at the other, and swung the chassis on its hinges and laid a neat line of blocks on the grass. I felt they should be steaming, they looked so much like loaves. All the Petley children clapped.
Les made a second chassis for hollow blocks, then patented his machine and took it, broken into parts, round the concrete manufacturers – Humes and Winstones and smaller firms. He demonstrated it in a dozen places.
Was I the only one who knew Les would never be rich? Rex believed he would be. He believed the Petleys would live in a house with a swimming pool. But I was not in the family and I knew that Les would always ride home drunk on his bike and Lila peg washing on the line.
The big companies were not interested. They were getting mass production going on their own. The smaller had no money to put up. Les’s machine lay rusting in the grass. For a while he talked of setting up his own factory but he did not have the money either, and nor did he have the interest. He wanted to invent and make a killing and live well – he wanted, Rex told me once, to own a good jumper and win the Great Northern Steeplechase. But I saw him at work in the torchlight, with his tongue out, and I’m sure he wanted, just as much, to build perfect machines.
One day he dragged his block-moulder to the bank and tipped it into the creek and bits of it are probably there today. He made nothing on that scale again. He built an extension ladder but there was nothing new in its mechanism. When he was retired – and still in the little house in the blind road with Lila – he turned a bit of extra cash by making wooden toys. They were solid and were put together well, but Les Petley’s spirit was not in them.
