by Gee, Maurice
‘And Dad’s big ears. Don’t mention Dad.’
‘It’s still like that?’
‘I’m afraid so. Rob’s OK. We’re talking about you, Rob.’
He comes across with a glass of beer, and a sausage in his other hand. Rex Petley watered down, walking in a pigeon-toed way. Rex with his voice gone furry and his manner uncertain. ‘Can’t shake hands. Ha! It’s good to see you, Jack.’ He had once played Thomas Cup badminton, but could not foot it with the Indonesians. Rob had none of his father’s pouncing quickness …
Jack cries enough. He sees that this is close to being diseased, introducing a dead man at the party and using him to measure his offspring by. He stops trying to stare Rob down, he blinks his eyes and chats about nothing; eats his steak – tender and bleeding and delicious – and after a while sidesteps off to look at the view. He had not realized they were so close to the edge of a cliff. A camellia hedge makes a barrier but he sees how children could slide through – have slid already judging from earth worn smooth between the trunks. Risk is part of childhood, cliffs and creeks; but a little bit of wire-netting … Jack stops himself again. He doesn’t like his reflex of foreseeing sudden death. His father and Joy Petley had set it off all those years ago. But he should be able to control himself now; accept a percentage of deaths. He opens a gate (child-proofed) in the hedge and walks with a forward stoop to the cliff edge. Unagitated sea down there, making perfunctory foam on the rocks. He smiles at the words he controls his danger with, but moves back several steps all the same.
‘Don’t jump, it’s not so bad,’ Fiona says.
‘I’ll fall if you sneak up like that.’
They look at the view together but when he uses that word – view – Fiona says it gets in the way. This is the place she lives in, not looks at, and admiration isn’t the right response. ‘I hate seeing Rangitoto on postcards.’ She steps to the edge and looks down. ‘There used to be a path down there but part of it’s fallen in. I wonder if I could get down now.’
He cannot stop his hand. He nips her blouse in his finger and thumb, and feels her shoulder blade underneath.
‘Joke,’ she grins. ‘I’m too young to die.’
He understands he loves her, but it’s easily contained and will not operate when he’s away. It must show in his eyes for she stops her grin. She steps back from the edge and kisses him quickly on the mouth, then gives a little push on his chest to move away. ‘We should have done it in the car that night. That was the time.’
‘No,’ he begins. He must let her know that all he does is love her. There is no need to possess. But Jack, who can put things exactly, cannot find the words for this. It’s too simple and will take too much explaining.
‘It’s under control.’
‘Keep it that way. I think Tom could get very jealous.’ She seems to have just discovered it, and looks surprised. ‘He might throw us both off the cliff.’
‘Psychologists don’t behave like that.’
Fiona shivers, then she laughs. She takes his arm and walks with him back to the gate. They lean on the outside looking in, with the sun striking their backs and barbecue smells drifting by; and Harry and John Dobbie smiling at them from the patio.
‘I don’t really care for that little man,’ Fiona says.
Jack salutes him casually. ‘Nor do I.’
‘He was round here like a ferret as soon as Dad was dead. You could almost see him salivating.’
‘Your mother didn’t give him much.’
‘She played the poet’s wife. She’s good at that. You know Dad’s still the biggest thing that happened to her? He’s the biggest thing that happened to Stephen too. But you’re right. He wanted the inside stuff and Mum just gave him the party line.’
‘I didn’t see your name in the acknowledgements.’
‘Or Martin’s or Rob’s. We’ve got an agreement. No talkee. People like John Dobbie are grave robbers. I’d tell you.’ She angles her hand and taps him on the wrist. ‘Dad told me once he warned you off his sisters.’
‘I wasn’t after them. He was wrong.’
‘Is he the reason you couldn’t make love to me?’
‘It’s a long time, Fiona. Let’s leave it, eh?’
She turns her back on the house. ‘You told me once Harry was switched off. Is she switched off now?’
Harry is laughing. He cannot pick her sound out from the party. Her distance from him stretches and he’s on a road that bends away, and bends again, like in a dream. He wants to reach her. She’ll turn with cool acceptance and she will help him out. ‘We’re all right. I’d better go and save her from the Elf.’ Marriages are more interesting than affairs.
He ushers Fiona through the gate. Tom Pringle hooks her arm. Jack leaves her there and climbs the steps to the patio. He shakes hands with John Dobbie and admires the high polish of the man. He keeps himself so perfectly that hours must be taken up with grooming. He is five foot three but his silver hair gives him several inches. His pouter-pigeon chest increases him too.
‘John.’
‘Jack.’
Harry smiles into her hand.
‘Sorry I couldn’t get to your launching. I had a rather nasty sinus attack.’
‘That’s bad luck.’
‘But it looks good. It’s a nice book to handle.’
‘Yes?’
‘I like the cover photo. That’s real Rex.’ He is not going to say he likes the contents of the book.
‘I found it in the Turnbull. Uncatalogued,’ John Dobbie says. ‘He looks like a despatch rider, don’t you think? Until I found it no one knew he rode a motorbike.’
‘I knew. I used to go for rides on the back.’
‘Oh?’
‘It’s a pity his knee hides the name.’
‘Yes? What was it?’
‘An old BSA 1936. The Petleys used to call it the Beezer.’
John Dobbie blinks. Two little spots of red show on his cheeks. ‘Of course,’ he says, ‘dredging up the facts can go too far. One needs, I think, to stand a good way off.’
‘Sure. That’s why I didn’t bother you. I’ve got all sorts of stuff like that, but I think Rex liked a bit of mystery.’
‘His sisters didn’t say they called it the Beezer.’
‘You saw them, did you? How are they?’
‘The oldest one drinks too much, I can tell you that. I’m afraid she got sentimental. She wasn’t much use.’
‘Did you get to see Tweet?’
‘Yes.’ The Elf is quick to show he knows the name. ‘All she wanted to do was talk about Rex getting hidings.’
‘He did get plenty.’
‘Frankly the sisters were disappointing. And I’m not sure the brothers can even read.’
Jack is the one under attack. He is sorry that he started this game and would apologize if he could find a way. The Elf can be hurt and is capable of sharp little punches in return. He has not got his range yet and Jack would like to stop him before he does. Surrender would cost him nothing, but he will not do it in front of Harry.
‘What was Tweet’s real name, did you find out?’ He knows the answer, it’s in the book – and he realizes, too late, that now the Elf will think he has not read it.
‘Myra,’ Harry says brightly. ‘It’s in chapter one.’ She gives a sly grin. Harry had got no further than chapter one. (She did look in the index though, to see if she was there.)
‘With a name like that,’ the Elf says, ‘it’s no wonder they called her Tweet.’
‘Wasn’t it a family name?’ Jack murmurs
‘A maternal grandmother.’ The Elf shows off, talking of Petley forebears in England and Australia. He knows much more than Jack about this. ‘One of them may have been a bare-knuckle fighter. I suppose the father’s violence comes from there.’
‘Yes, maybe.’
‘And he married a woman who was a prostitute for a couple of years. I thought of putting that in an appendix.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
/>
‘I’m keeping it for the full biography.’ He flashes his teeth. ‘Alice has given me the go ahead.’
‘Alice was only the first wife. What about Margot?’
‘I think, you know, she was just a mistress. There were several of those.’
‘He married her.’
‘Yes, in the end. That was just to give the child a name.’
‘So this full biography – you’ve started work on it?’
‘I’m getting ready. It’s a huge job, four or five years at least. The memoir will fill the gap nicely until then.’
‘Well, you can put the Beezer in.’
‘The memoir, you know, was really a preliminary sketch. I just wanted to get the feel of Rex.’ He is fully restored and he glitters away, eyes and teeth, and polishes his fingernails on his lapel. Behind him Alice watches from a window. Jack wonders if she set him up for the Elf, and set her children up as well.
‘Now,’ John Dobbie says, ‘the real job starts. Alice is going to let me use the papers. She wasn’t very cooperative at first, but she liked the way I handled some of the more delicate stuff, you know, in the memoir.’
‘And you want me too?’
‘Well, Jack’ – the Elf laughs – ‘you’re a great repository. This thing of mine will be definitive. I don’t think you can afford to be left out.’
‘How do you know I’m not writing my own book?’
‘Ah Jack, you can’t do Rex. Not without Alice. She’s got a whole mountain of papers in there.’
‘I can do a memoir though, like yours.’
‘Rita Bullen said the same. I don’t think Rex will support an industry. Major poet though he undoubtedly was.’
‘Was Rita Bullen one of the mistresses?’ Harry asks. She is giving Jack time to collect himself.
‘That’d be telling,’ the Elf says. ‘I’ve got to keep some secrets.’ He smiles. ‘You knew him too, didn’t you? I remember you at that party.’
‘I never took much notice of Rex Petley. His poetry seems overblown to me.’
‘Surely not the mid-career work? And the early stuff?’
Harry sighs. ‘Poetry and I don’t get along. And what I read I like hard and clean.’
‘Well, hard and clean – that describes Petley exactly.’ The Elf recites a stanza.
‘Jesus!’ says Martin Petley, walking by.
But Jack feels a prickling on his skin. The Elf does it well, and chooses well. There is the creek, and if not hard and clean then deep, dark, mysterious, exact. He wants to recite a stanza too but Harry stops him with a frown.
‘I think that creek did Rex some damage.’
‘Well, his sister drowned there,’ says the Elf.
‘No,’ Jacks says, ‘the other one. The creek on the other side of town.’
‘That can’t be right.’
‘Good heavens, does it matter?’ Harry asks.
‘Yes, it does.’ He goes into the house. Alice Wilkey beckons him but he turns the other way, down a passage. ‘Toilet?’ he asks a child, lying with her legs up the wall, reading a comic called – can that be right? – Strontium Dog.
‘Along there.’
He finds the door ajar; and Leon Pittaway at the louvre window, peering at something through a crack. His head swivels round. ‘I was here first.’
‘Are you all right?’ He’s wedged between the wall and the pan, leaning off balance. A bottle of lavatory cleaner drips green blood from the cistern to the floor. Jack sets it upright.
‘I could charge money for this,’ Leon grins.
There’s nothing left of his patrician loftiness. Age has ruined his face: rolled down his lower eyelids, made yellow bowls of his cheeks. Generic face, it lies on pillows everywhere. Yet Leon puts some life in it. ‘Saw me,’ he cackles. ‘Little bitches.’
Jack slides into the gap on the other side. Veronica and the Danish girl are sunning themselves on a private lawn at the back of the house. Veronica is angry but the Dane is cool. She makes a bored face at Jack and does not hurry putting on her bra. She leans back on her arms and turns her face to the sun.
Jack mouths ‘Sorry’, trying to show he’s not a peeping Tom. The girl is beautiful and there’s no harm in looking, but it shouldn’t be done from a lavatory window.
‘Come on, Professor Pittaway.’ He lifts the old man back on balance, but skids on the green liquid and they do a foxtrot turn in front of the pan. It gives Jack a tearing pain in his Achilles tendon; and Leon stamps his stick down on his toe. ‘I hate you bloody poofters,’ he says.
Jack sits him on the seat and backs away. ‘Wait there.’ He goes down the passage, steps over the child, and finds Martin Petley in the kitchen, lifting six-packs from the fridge.
‘I think Professor Pittaway’s in trouble in the toilet.’
‘That’s all I need.’ Martin looks at Jack with dislike and pushes by him into the hall. ‘Beat it you,’ he says to the child, who takes no notice.
The lavatory door is locked. ‘Come on out, Leon. What was he doing?’
‘Spying on the girls through the window. He spilled the lavatory cleaner on the floor.’
‘And now he’s probably jacking off. Open up, Leon.’ He bangs the door. ‘Hey Leon, there’s some sausage rolls left. I’ve got one here.’ He turns to Jack. ‘No point in you hanging round.’
‘Well –’
‘There’s a dunny off the wash-house if that’s what you want.’
Jack is pleased to get away. He uses the outside toilet, then goes down wooden steps into a yard surrounded by bougainvillaea in bloom. It’s like being put down in Tahiti. The over-weening purple, its super-abundance, threatens him and he advances quickly, through and out; turns a corner, finds the girls on their patch of lawn.
‘We don’t like being spied on,’ Veronica says. She’s a pouty prickly girl and her dislike does not bother him; but he’s hurt by the way the Dane turns her head away.
‘I’m sure you don’t.’ There’s no point in explaining, he sees how he would grin, ingratiate, and earn more scorn, so he steps by, eyes front, making for a wrought-iron gate that seems to open on to a side street. Out, away, escape the barbecue, with its literary elves and mad old men and disturbing younger generations. He crosses the road and hurts his Achilles tendon again, going down a grass verge on to a footpath. Best to shuffle for a while like an old man; but Leon persuades him against that – a face so dry and fractured that one hears crepitations. And the pink wetness of eye and mouth: pink is the colour of health – see Veronica’s milk-drinking mouth – but in Leon it is what remains when red is soaked out and washed away.
Jack does not stride but achieves an uneven lope, decelerated. He does not know where he is going in this street of barbered lawns and sweet-orange trees. There’s a white Mercedes on a tiled drive. There’s a woman kneeling on a cushion, asking her roses to say ah. ‘Burglar beware’ the gate post says. Perhaps he should put on his tie. But when he takes it out he seems like a strangler and he stuffs it quickly back in his pocket.
Once around the block. Then he can drink another glass of beer and eat a sausage, and hook his arm, Tom Pringle-like, round Harry and drive home. He does not want to go inside the house. He does not want Alice Petley in her room of books; or her tame literary man; or the sanitized Life. But nor, for the moment, does he want the true past. Last time he visited Alice she had horrified him by pulling a rusty-stapled pamphlet from her shelves and asking him to autograph it. He had believed First Fruits long dead, and had stepped away with his hands held up in denial. But Alice lassoed him, led him to a chair, opened the thing at its title page, fitted a pen between his fingers and thumb.
He does not want to be in the same room as that signed copy.
The houses change from exclusive to desirable but the neighbour-hood retains a grammar zone air. Large not small Japanese cars shine in the driveways. He turns right and the gulf lies ahead, inviting him to step down and walk across a tin floor to the inner islands. The view – no, that
is banned – the prospect satisfies his desire to travel out and away. It’s enough to do that with the eye. But a path with a motorbike barrier at the mouth angles down beneath pohutukawa. He favours his sore leg; and is jealous for Wellington that the descent is made in a back and forth way. That sort of dropping down is for the southern city. He finds a little beach between promontories, with houses set hard against the cliff. A path of pot-holed seal runs above the sand and he sets off along it for the further headland. Cliffs and rocks, meetings of land and sea, always attract him. He likes the change of element, which makes him feel he’s close to knowledge and a source – although he’s then dissatisfied not to find his way on from there. The cliffs are tame here though, and the sea is tame. Auckland-in-the-east has never invited exploration, even with Rangitoto sitting bare at the harbour mouth. One has to go west to the big cliffs and big sea for that.
Jack sees someone he knows. ‘Hello,’ he says. The man nods curtly and carries on watering his plants; and Jack walks on blushing. Television actor, elementary mistake. The fellow grins and prances in half a dozen ads and was a caning teacher in a witless comedy. Jack rubs his face, getting his foolishness away. He picks up a Coca-Cola can and places it neatly against a picket fence. A man in a dinghy, nosing in to shore, says, ‘Gidday, Skeatsie.’
Jack stops. He leaves the path and walks down the sand. ‘Skeatsie’ puts them way back and he’s not sure he wants to go there. He’s disturbed, too, not to recognize someone who has known him at once. The man has grinning teeth in a sun-browned face. He steps into the water and heaves the wooden dinghy one-handed on to the sand. ‘Got you beaten, eh?’ Bare legs, tattered shorts; and a welt of scar tissue down the side of his neck, opening like a fan on his chest. There’s a puckered nipple at the rim.
Jack looks into the man’s face and makes his eyes go keen. But it’s the scar that tells him. Rex had put that ‘pink hand’ in a poem.
‘Tony,’ he says. ‘Tony Jameson.’
‘Long time, Skeatsie.’ They shake hands.
‘Forty years, I guess. Almost.’ He matches Tony Jameson’s laconic style, although ‘almost’ is Skeatian. The time is thirty-eight years.
