by Gee, Maurice
Rex dropped two of his second-year subjects and took a job as a postman. John Dobbie is accurate about his financial hardships and his struggle to educate himself. He let his credit-pass money go – it wasn’t much – and gave up his plan of being a teacher. What would he be? He did not know, he wasn’t worried. He might stay a postman all his life. ‘The mail must go through.’
Dogs caused him trouble on his walk. He carried a two-foot length of reinforcing steel in a cloth scabbard on the side of his bag and was in trouble once for smashing a bull terrier’s leg. ‘It was him or me, Jack. The bastard was going to have me.’ He was elated by the speed and effectiveness of his blow. Rex enjoyed violence, he believed in confrontation between the world and Petleys. Perhaps his length of steel set the balance right in some way after Joy. The supervisor confiscated it so Rex stocked up on dead light bulbs, which he smashed on the pavement to scare advancing dogs. But he hankered after his steel club and pinched it from the supervisor’s desk after a while. ‘You should have heard that bloody thing squealing.’ He threw back his head and made the noise of a terrier in pain. I gritted my teeth and covered my ears. ‘You think that’s something, Jack? Wait until I catch up with an Alsatian.’
His exaggerated hatreds began at this time – dogs and the people who own them, bureaucrats, army officers, club-joiners, Christians, people with unearned incomes, people who talk too much, radio announcers, film actors, music-lovers (music played no part in his life). Bus drivers and tram conductors too. All this was a tightening of the wall around Petleys. I could still pass through but he wouldn’t let me in very far. If his mother or sisters touched me – they were a family for touching – he would frown and get busy; rattle the cups away to the scullery. ‘Come on, Jack, time we got moving,’ and we’d head for the Loomis pictures or drive off in the Willys to a dance. He made his sisters furious by running their boyfriends down – and nearly ran down Melva’s in the truck one night; tipped him off his bike into the gorse. ‘Get yourself a light, you stupid bugger,’ he yelled. ‘Just about had him,’ he said to me.
John Dobbie accuses me of running away from Rex’s ‘fight’ with the bus driver. ‘John Skeat quickly absented himself.’ I could probably sue him for that. I was there almost until the end. It wasn’t a fight either, John. Nor was there ‘a principle involved’. You try too hard to turn him into a hero. Stupidity, irrationality, ego-strutting, weakness, in both the squabblers made me walk away. And Rex was tuppence short on his fare not just a penny. ‘His strong sense of justice was called into play.’ What rubbish! I will say though that he stood up straight. He looked noble even though his ear lobes turned red. The driver was a small man, hungry as a stoat. I think I would have backed him if the ‘fight’ had turned to blows.
‘Loomis,’ Rex said, tumbling coins into the tray.
‘Tuppence short.’
‘That’s all I’ve got.’
‘This isn’t a charity, sonny. Off you get.’
‘I’ll pay,’ I said, leaning round Rex and dropping a threepenny bit into the tray. Rex snared it, quick-fingered, before it could lie down. He flicked it backwards past my face and it ran into the gutter.
‘Is tuppence so important to you, sonny?’ he asked the driver.
I went back down the steps and found my threepence and leaned round Rex again and put it in the tray. This time the driver was quicker. He slid it with his finger over the edge. ‘I want the money from this joker here.’
I won’t go through the stages of escalation; simply note that Rex cried: ‘I’m going to teach him people are more important than money.’ (This is the Elf’s ‘principle’.) He marched down the bus and sat in the middle of the back seat, a prime place for keeping up the struggle. The driver made his declaration too: ‘This bus doesn’t move until you’re off.’ And there they sat, while the passengers got angry and took sides. I absented myself. I walked down to the ferry buildings and watched the boats and caught a late bus home. Rex asked me angrily next day: ‘Where the hell did you get to?’ – and must have told someone of my defection for it to reach John Dobbie’s ears; but I’m happy with my behaviour. It was a fair piece of criticism. I’m only sorry that I wasn’t there to see Rex resisting passively as two constables carried him off the bus. He was fined ten pounds and got a ticking off from the magistrate. As far as I know he’s our only poet with a record.
It wasn’t the ticking off that changed his ways. I suspect he recognized absurdity; and the Beezer helped. It cooled him down – wind in his face, rain in his face. The white road zipping back under the wheel carried his rage into the past. He had a rested look in his eyes when he took his goggles off after a spin.
The BSA motorbike was his final word to tram conductors and bus drivers. It worried Lila sick, she believed he would kill himself, but the rest of the family loved it and ‘the Beezer’ became an essential part of their lives. Remember ‘Love Objects’, John? It’s a clever poem, although it’s only a list. The cumulative energy, the longing, the enjoyment; and not a single adjective around. You don’t know how he does it, no one does (I don’t), so you worry away about ‘referents’. And once you’re ‘quite in the dark’ about a meaning. I give you ‘the Beezer’, no charge. He bought it second hand (although it was probably fifth or sixth) and coughed it home and spread all its parts out on the lawn and when he fitted them together it ran like a dream.
We learned Auckland on the Beezer. I sat on the pillion seat like a girlfriend but kept my hands behind me like a man. We rode north as far as Warkworth and Leigh and south to the Waikato heads. We went to the hot springs at Parakai and along the Whangaparaoa Peninsula to the army base (where Rex had some hard things to say about what he called ‘the military mind’). French Bay, Green Bay, and the following Sunday down the other coast through Miranda to Ngatea, and I formed the impression I still hold of the Auckland isthmus drowning in mud. A little rise in temperature and we will have crocodiles basking in the mangroves.
We drove thirty miles up Muriwai beach, with the dunes on one side and slow green rollers, half a mile apart, on the other. Rex wound the Beezer up and we seemed to run on a mat of air. The wind got in my cheeks and blew my face up like a soccer ball. It whipped my chewing gum away. If we’d hit a patch of soft sand the bike would have stood on its nose and somersaulted and we’d have bounced along the beach and crackled with the breaking of our bones. ‘You’ve been a hundred miles an hour,’ Rex told me when we stopped.
Westwards became our direction. I fight the urge to become adjectival. The coast out there crushes language flat. South of Muriwai is Anawhata. Then Bethells Beach, Piha, Karekare, Whatipu. That says enough for me and it’s enough for Rex, although if you look at his poems you’ll find words that mean the same. We came at a walking pace down the twisting roads, with the Beezer ticking and creaking, and an expectation in our minds of sea and cliff and sand – movement overturning on itself, height leaning in and leaning out, the body overturning, the mind starting to fall – desire, revelation, perhaps death. This becomes far too explicit. Rex can do this sort of thing without coming out. (See ‘Bethells Beach’, see ‘Comber’.) We lay on the hot black sand and body surfed in the waves, and went out several times in winter and stood as close to the surf as we dared and climbed on the rocks and asked the seventh wave to take us. Once we swam, midwinter, all alone at Bethells, naked in the waves that overtopped us like walls and we came out like old bait, with the blood washed out of us, and trembled and stood bent long after we had pulled our clothes on. Our wrinkled hands could not tie our bootlaces up.
He took his sisters there, one by one, and would have taken Lila but she refused to ride on the bike. A kind of fatalism came on her when he was driven home one night skinned from his wrists to his elbows after a fall. Lumps of skin were nipped from his kneecaps and his ribs. I talked with Lila at the gate. ‘I can’t do any more, Jack. I can’t care any more or I’ll go mad.’ She kept on caring, of course, but damped down her ways of expressing it, and went a l
ittle mad in a self-denying way.
Rex took me riding on the Scenic Drive, Swanson to Titirangi and halfway back, the night before I caught the Limited to Wellington. We stopped at the lookout and Auckland lay spread flat, winking its lights. ‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘Wellington’ (which I had never seen), ‘I must be mad.’
‘What does your old lady say?’
‘She wants me to be a lawyer. Even doctors aren’t good enough.’
‘It’s only a year, eh. Then you can come back.’
‘If I come back I’ve got to live with her.’
‘Who says?’
‘Wellington’s the only way I’ll ever get away.’
He lit a cigarette and flicked the match away – down to Loomis, under the hills. ‘I’m leaving home too. I’m getting a room in town.’
‘Why?’
‘Time is.’ He grinned. ‘I’m not going to stay too long like you.’
‘You’ve got more than I have,’ I said bitterly.
‘That’s just the way it turned out.’
We plunged down Forest Hill Road into Loomis. I was drunk with leaning over when we reached my gate. Light-headedness, and falling locked together, enclosed in our hard cell of light, made me say, ‘I know how you feel, Rex.’
‘Yeah?’
‘My father and your sister, eh? It happened to us both.’
‘Shut up, Jack.’ His words came easily. But I had seen a pulse, a contraction, in his eyes, more than the street lamp could have made. He was enraged at my claim for equality; and then he was calm and put me off, tapping with his gloved fist on my shoulder. ‘Take it easy down there. Keep in touch.’ He pulled his goggles on and rode away.
It was six months before I saw Rex Petley again.
Escaping from the Barbecue
Alice Wilkey is sixty. She asks her friends and family to help her celebrate. Harry and Jack do not know why they are invited. Harry has not laid eyes on Alice for twenty years. Jack has kept in touch, visiting her several times on archival trips to Auckland. He finds afternoon tea with her a bit like tea with the Queen but he hangs on from a sense of uncompleted business. He is surprised on her trellised path by the smell of steaks. A barbecue is not like Alice at all. He takes his tie off and puts it in his pocket.
‘Harriet Edwards,’ Alice smiles. Though unemphatic it’s political. They greet each other by touching cheeks, Alice bending down and Harry rising on her toes. ‘And Jack.’ She takes both his hands and lets him decide not to kiss her.
‘Happy birthday,’ Jack says. ‘Harry brought a present. From us both.’
It’s a Bellringer and Edwards, in paperback, and Harry apologizes for seeming to blow her own trumpet. ‘It was Jack’s idea.’
‘Better than chocolates,’ Jack says. ‘It looks as if you like ferns anyway.’
‘I like their modesty.’ (Which makes him blink.) ‘Thank you both. Now come and meet some people. And I do apologize for all this chops and sausages and alfresco business. It’s really for the youngsters. We older ones are going to sit inside.’
Jack does not like being classed as an older one. If he had known about a barbecue and swimming he would have brought his togs along and dived off the board. Looking at the youngsters, he holds his stomach in and pulls his shoulders back.
‘That’s my grand-niece, Veronica. The other one is an exchange student from Denmark, at her school. I’m afraid we had to tell her not to sunbathe with her top off.’
‘It gets Leon excited,’ Stephen Wilkey says. ‘Hello, Jack. Nice you could come. Is this your wife?’
‘It does nothing of the sort. It makes him cross. It’s bad for him to get upset.’
Stephen winks at Jack and shakes hands with Harry. Jack likes Alice’s husband, he feels easy with him, and understands why Alice chose him after Rex. He has few appetites but is inquisitive and amused. (Demanding though, decisive, in business, Jack has heard.) That must be restful for Alice. She had little rest with Rex.
They climb steps to a stone-paved patio where children are sitting on iron chairs round a table, eating cake and drinking through straws. ‘Grandchildren,’ Alice says. ‘Not all of them are mine.’
Jack tries to identify those who are, for they are Rex Petley’s, but he doesn’t know what features to look for. Noses and mouths change, eyes change too, with growing up. Ears should stay the same. He looks for ears. Alice guesses what he is up to but is wrong about his method.
‘See, on the far side. There’s no mistaking that forehead is there?’ (Alice says forehead the English way.)
‘Brain box,’ Stephen adds. (He had once been chased half the length of a street by Rex, but he bears no malice.)
Jack can’t see it. The boy has a dome, with none of Rex’s squaring off. ‘The little girl with the ponytail?’ he murmurs. ‘Around the eyes?’ – concealing that her ears, over-large, give her away.
‘Good heavens no, she’s a ring-in,’ Alice laughs, ‘a neighbour’s child. There’s Simon’ – the boy with the ‘forrid’ – ‘and Luke and Amanda. And Peter and Terry and Cathy and Rex by the pool. There are plenty of Petley genes around, though I must say I’m just as pleased about the Pittaway ones.’
Jack looks at the youngsters by the pool but is confused by running and splashing and flopping down. A boy seems to have Rex’s length of leg and his knotty joints; a girl – poor child – his nose; but, on the evidence of the neighbour’s child, Jack is likely to be wrong. He gives it up and watches the Danish girl. She has ease of movement, physical charm. Her mind is probably in better order too, judging from the adult way she looks back at him. That does not mean she has a better mind. He’s prepared to back the Petley genes, which may be gawky now but will come on strongly before long.
‘Which one is Rex?’
‘There. The boy on the board. Fiona’s oldest.’
It is the long-limbed boy. His dive breaks into angles and water sprays as far as the flower beds. One of his great-aunts died under water, Jack remembers, but he finds the connection strained. He smiles at the boy when he comes up and meets, for a moment, Rex Petley’s young dismissive eye. That connection comes with the straightness of a blow. Jack turns away and walks to the end of the patio. Below him, on the lawn, men work about the barbecue and carry plates of food to women sitting in the rock garden. These are the sons and daughters (and the sons- and daughters-in-law) of the Pittaway girls. Features have set into more or less permanent shape – they’ll last through middle life – and he does not have to work hard to see Rex in Fiona as she turns up her face: that strength of bone, rounded and scaled down to a feminine shape.
‘Jack, how are you? Come on down.’
‘I’ve been ordered inside with the oldies.’ But he stays grinning at her. ‘How’s it going? How’s the counselling?’ – knowing he is liked, and liking her again, instantly. Once he had not known whether he wanted Fiona for his son, David, or himself.
‘Better grab a steak, there’s not much left,’ says a man in an apron that surely does not have the approval of the Pittaway girls: hairy-fingered male hands grab female breasts from behind.
‘There’s ham and chicken inside,’ Alice says from the door. (Harry has gone in.) ‘And a friend of yours,’ she adds, with a meaningful look.
Jack knows who it will be. ‘I think I’ll have some steak first.’ He pretends not to see her annoyance and goes down narrow steps at the side of the house; kisses Fiona. Her hand takes him on the curve of his shoulder and holds him close and he catches her elusive hot-metal smell that he had learned one night in his car, parked on the sea front at Island Bay, many years ago; when she had told him about her parents’ marriage and why she could not stand being with them any more. Other things had happened on that night, kisses more than friendly, but he had argued himself into reverse, quoting their ages and his wife at home; and they had been distant for a while after that. She was, he had realized, not nearly so excited as he. And she had been barely eighteen.
‘What have you been doing? I t
hought you would have come to visit me.’
‘I would have. I’ve been getting Harry set up. Skylights in the ceiling, that sort of thing.’
‘How is Harry?’
‘She’s fine. She’s doing another book.’
‘With the campanologist still?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘And the children?’
‘They both live overseas. David’s in Geneva. He’s married to a Swiss woman years older than him.’
‘Is that bad?’
‘It wouldn’t be if she didn’t try to scare us off. Jill’s OK. She did a nanny course and she’s in Switzerland too. They see each other.’
‘You sound as if you don’t like nanny courses.’
‘I can think of more important jobs.’
‘Poor Jack, still tangled up with right and wrong.’
She introduces him to her husband. Jack is pleased it’s not the man in the funny apron. Eating steak, he listens while Tom Pringle talks about his work as a Justice Department psychologist, and then hears Fiona on marriage counselling. They have the patience of mechanics but no high expectations of success. Is that what cements them? – for they are close, they run together. A perfect seamless couple. Familiarity with lives gone wrong makes them hold fast to what they have – is that a fair summing-up, leaving all their complications out?
‘You still go off in dreams, Jack.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Leaving out their affections too? ’ Which is Martin and Rob? That’s Martin with the bald spot, isn’t it?’
