by Gee, Maurice
Tony reaches in the dinghy and takes out a box of cross-wound lines, with silver hooks safe in the cord. He stands with it under his arm as they fill each other in on what they have done. Jack draws his head back now and then from the smell of bait.
‘Archives, eh? That’s papers and stuff. I heard you were some big wheel down there.’
‘Not so big.’ He laughs modestly. ‘How about you?’
‘Done everything. Kinleith. Kawerau. I was on an oyster boat out of the Bluff for a while. Hard yakker, mate, but bloody good money.’ Jack finds oyster boats difficult to believe for the pretty boy who got the girls. He’s not pretty now – nose off centre, scaly head where his combed hair used to be; and the scar.
‘Then I had a concrete-laying business for a while. How about you? You retired?’
‘Yes.’ It seems like a confession of failure. Tony says, ‘Not me. I gotta keep on working or I’ll curl up and die.’
‘What do you do?’
‘Collect garden rubbish. “Greensack”, that’s me. Two days a week. The rest of the time I make trellises. In the back yard there. Not a bad lurk.’
‘That’s your place?’ A cottage with white walls and blue windowsills.
‘Yeah. I sold that bit of land my old man had at Oratia. I couldn’t have got in here otherwise. It’s Round Table country, man. The rates are something fearful. We make out.’
‘We?’
‘Me and Pip. I got married again. It didn’t take the first time, nobody’s fault. How about you? Wife and kids?’
‘Yes. Two children. Grown up and gone.’
‘Come and meet the wife. Have a beer.’
‘No, I can’t.’ He’s pleased with this Tony Jameson, the man and his boat and his wife, after the girl-chasing youth and the boiling water. ‘I’m at a barbecue up the hill. At Rex Petley’s first wife. She’s sixty.’
‘That Alice sheila? He divorced her.’
‘No, she divorced him, that’s the way it was.’
‘I met her once. You’d have thought I was the night-man. I had to meet Rex in the pub after that. Show ‘im me scar.’
‘He put it in a poem.’
‘Cheeky bugger, he sent me a copy. Pip liked him OK though. See him on the telly, with all this book prize shit, she reckoned he was still a hooligan. Alice lives up there, eh?’
‘Mrs Wilkey.’
Tony’s eyes go click. ‘That Wilkey?’
‘Yes.’
‘Big money, eh?’
‘There’s a fellow up there writing Rex’s life. He’d probably like to have a look at your scar.’
‘How much will he pay?’ Tony grins; then waves the joke aside. ‘Margot was the one I liked. There wasn’t any bullshit. I still go out and see her. She makes a fair sort of red wine.’ He bangs the dinghy with his foot. ‘She gave me Rex’s boat.’
Jack’s mind drums like the dinghy. ‘This one?’
‘Yep.’
‘I thought it sank.’
‘The police launch found it, towed it in. She was swamped. Imagine an old pro like Rex getting caught.’
‘A lot of people die out there.’
‘Yeah, whole families.’ He touches it with his toe again. ‘Good little boat. Margot didn’t need it. I’ve got to watch the weather though, she’s no good when the waves get up.’
Jack looks at the spindly outboard on the back. ‘Is that the same motor?’
‘Yeah. It goes all right. I make sure I take a pair of oars though. Want a ride?’
‘No thanks.’ He wants to step back from the dinghy. He wants to get away from it.
The bait smell is the smell of Rex’s death.
Notebook: 6
1 forget which writer became convinced of ‘the implanted crookedness of things’. It sounds like all writers to me; or like anyone who sees things straight.
From Auckland to Wellington was falling down a chute. One rattled down, bruised by the Limited, and came through the tunnel with aching joints and unwilling eyes and an ugly taste in the mouth. The Limited subtracted intelligence, and smoke and itch and shifting edge and downwards motion seemed the whole of life. Then out of the tunnel and Wellington burst like a bomb. It opened like a flower, was lit up like a room, explained itself exactly, became the capital. Wellington convinced me, for a while, of the straightness of things. It never became, in forty years, my home. I was an outsider, and some of the magic comes from there; the enduring strangeness comes from there. But I had a sense of growing up, of doing the adult thing I had not believed in for Jack Skeat. At last my life has started, I said.
The implanted crookedness came back, but Wellington kept itself free.
Auckland was never like that. Auckland was home.
1953. I was a primary colour and I used myself in combinations, all of them new. There’s either a great deal to say or nothing at all. I hold these notes strictly to their subject or I let them follow their nose, which will it be? Rex came down, and I can bring him now, but is it Rex I want to write about? Don’t I want to write about me?
I can say, he turned up on my doorstep late at night, soaked to the skin, stunned and stupid with cold – almost hypothermic, in fact -and I rubbed the grinning zombie down and got the girl out of my bed and put him in and poured hot drinks in him, and called a taxi for Brenda, but the last word is the one that interests me. She had a name, she wasn’t just ‘the girl’, and I damage myself in calling her that; she was Brenda Littlejohn and I cared more for her than for Rex. It does not matter that we made love only once. Her boyfriend was at Cambridge and before he left the modern fellow gave her a packet of condoms to emphasize he had no property rights; which offended her so deeply that she used them – only once. I worked this out later, getting over my rejection, and I’ll admit I might be wrong. Her beauty over-excited me – it’s no fun being beautiful – and I was too quick. That might have been a factor. But we had an interesting talk, waiting to try again, and I would have done the second one right; except that Rex banged on my door. And Brenda told me, next day, that she had decided to be faithful to Ben. They married, but it didn’t last, and I lost track of her. She was, for many years, in the game men play, the best looking one of the ones I’ve had, although I worried about the style of having, did it count? But good looks and having fall into minor places and Brenda, what I know of her, is the point of writing this down.
She convinces me that I should confine myself to Rex.
He had hitchhiked down, coming a roundabout way through Taranaki to see a girl who worked as a journalist in Hawera. His last ride, from Foxton to the bottom of the Ngauranga Gorge, was on the tray of a truck. He climbed down so frozen he could barely stand, and walked along the shorefront to Thorndon and somehow found my three-roomed flat in Tinakori Road. Icy rain slanted into him all the way.
‘You bloody moron,’ I said, rubbing him down, ‘don’t you know this is Wellington?’ I spiked his hair up straight and moulded his frozen skull and felt the limitations of what he carried in that squared-off container. Rex was short of common sense. Sandshoes and shorts and a football jersey, in August in a Wellington southerly. Numb-lipped and thick-tongued, he said he was sorry to take my bed. I was more than sorry to let him have it. On the other hand I felt a certain pleasure. Real life, crookedness, was confirmed. Also, I was shown to have a past.
I kept the gas fire on and lay in my sleeping bag in front of it and listened to him wheeze and snort and shiver through the night. Perhaps pneumonia was setting in and Rex would die in my bed. I grieved for him in a long dark dream, then both of us were savaged by dogs, and we climbed a tree that slowly bent and offered us. Blood poured out like water from a tap … I woke to hear Rex saying, ‘I’m bloody frozen, Skeatsie. Have you got another blanket?’ It was four o’clock so I laid my sleeping bag over him and made a cup of tea, favouring my back where the worst bites had been, and we talked until morning. He had finished with university, he told me, and finished with getting stuff from books. Life was going to be at firs
t hand now. As a programme this was not original. I told him we all got it first hand, whether we wanted to or not, there was no escape; and books, I said – the new librarian – didn’t stand outside life but were a part of it. Don’t insult all those dead writers, save it for the live ones, I said. Rex laughed. ‘Looks like you’ve learned a thing or two, Skeatsie. Who was your girlfriend last night?’
I would not tell him. I asked about his parents and his sisters and got him back to what he meant to do.
‘See the world.’
‘That’s hardly Wellington.’
‘It’ll do for a start. Is it OK if I stay for a couple of nights? Till I get a job and a bit of money?’
What had gone wrong up there, some woman trouble, some post office trouble? I asked. But he denied anything was wrong. It was time to branch out, that was all, and why not start with Jack in Wellington? I was pleased, although I did not believe him and told him so.
‘I can’t keep still, Skeatsie,’ he said.
He had a great capacity for stillness, as I’ve said; for suspending movement, both intelligent and physical, while some new thing was planted in his brain. I took his complaint to mean that things were changing in his family. And when I asked about them again he was caught between his need to speak and the aggressive privacy I knew; so he advanced and then retreated, he began confessions and cancelled them with a rough movement of his hands.
Melva married the boy Rex had tipped into the gorse. A February wedding, just after I left for Wellington; and a June baby. ‘She wanted me to hold it, but I couldn’t. It made me feel – I don’t know …’ No rough gesture this time but a curious shrinking in his face. It was not the baby’s earliness that upset him, but the baby. He found himself unwilling – unable – to open a door admitting it. His closed world had no room for new generations.
‘Dulcie got engaged last week. And Mum’s gone clucky, Skeatsie. I used to be able to talk to her.’
He had to leave in order to retain what he had. Coming to Wellington was self-preservation. In Wellington he kept still -although we rushed around to pubs and parties – and froze into shape, cemented in place, that perfect construct I have named ‘the Petleys’. (‘Petley’ will do.) It became the template of his moral and emotional world, and left his intelligence free, up to a point. The ways in which it was enough, and then not enough, can be read in his poetry, if you know the language. For a while, because of it, there was nothing he could not look straight at, with a clear eye. Nothing, out in the world, was too much for Rex Petley.
I left him eating breakfast and went off to Library School, where my fellow student Brenda Littlejohn told me her decision. She was kind, which made me savage, and I replied she was a bloody coward – pleasing her more with this than I had in bed. In the afternoon we sat a cataloguing test, which I began intending to fail. The library trade was, quite suddenly, for second-raters. But taking up my Sears List of Subject Headings, which cuts the cloth of life and knowledge into neat little strips, I passed into countries of impossible relevance. ETHICS, I found, and then found HELL. Found JUSTICE, JOY AND SORROW, FUTURE LIFE. HONESTY, DUTY, SEXUAL ETHICS, BEHAVIOUR: everything was personal and adapted to me. FUTURE LIFE was not after death but how I would conduct myself tomorrow. HELL might be tomorrow too. LATI-TUDE: I knew I must not give myself too much. So I passed the test. And going out, smiled wisely at Brenda Littlejohn – which shows that HONESTY had some way yet to go. In fact my BEHAVIOUR was not much improved. I was, though, open to improvement, if not sure exactly where to find it.
SEX: I did without it, of necessity, for a while. I concentrated on FRIENDSHIP instead.
Rex had bought beer and steak, and some warmer clothes. ‘I’ve got a job as a hospital porter, starting in the morning.’ (That was how it was with jobs in those days.) He would ferry new patients to the wards, and from the wards to X-ray and theatre etc; and take the food trolleys out, collect the dirty laundry, turn patients too heavy for the nurses; change the oxygen; and now and then deliver bodies to the morgue.
He had the sort of job I would like.
‘I thought you said all life was first hand, Skeatsie.’
‘Yes, but for a couple of months -’
‘I got the last vacancy.’
He did not want me there; possibly because he had decided to live with me. ‘There’s some filthy rooms around. Cockroaches like bloody Sherman tanks.’ In the second-hand shop where he had bought his clothes he had also found a horse-hair mattress and a camp stretcher with a fractured leg. We splinted it and bound it with wire and Rex was my fellow tenant until Christmas. I let him have the sleeping bag and one of my pillows and he lay rigid on the narrow bed with his arms crossed on his chest like a crusader. Mutterings and groans and heavy breathing. Although he claimed not to dream I think he had whole zoos of night creatures in his head. Sometimes he laughed. Sometimes he seemed not to breathe. Dead silence. In the dark nights I came to think that he was dead. I rose on my elbows and strained my ears; I sat with my eiderdown turned back and my feet on the floor; I crept close and leaned over him. His eyes gleamed like fish in a pool. ‘Are you going to kiss me or cut my throat?’
‘Jesus Rex, I thought you were dead.’
‘I was thinking.’
I scuttled back to bed.
‘I like to think at night. There’s nothing gets in the way.’
‘There’s monsters in the night.’
‘Not for me. It’s like dominoes.’
But when he slept again I heard groans and sighs and only the sleeping bag and the narrow bed kept him from ending the night in the shape of a St Andrew’s cross.
He brought me a cup of morning tea and left porridge bubbling on the stove. Good housekeeping came from his mother. He folded his bed and mattress every morning, he cleaned the bath after using it, and he dusted in high places I had never thought to look. It offended me that Rex believed I did not wash enough. I answered sharply that – didn’t wear second-hand clothes; but he showed me they were barely used – look at the cloth – and lectured me on the immorality of waste, which was catching me on my own ground. So I shut up; and I washed again as frequently as my mother had taught me. I took up Rex’s practice of striking a match after using the lavatory. I still do that. You’ll find an old saucer of dead matches in there.
Our kitchen was big enough for one and I soon stayed out. Where did he learn to cook? Men cook today – they even do quiches, sauces, salads and desserts – but you’ve no idea how rare it was to even stir the stew in 1953. Rex, I think, tasted things in his head before he mixed them. I’m in the dark here. If I’m shown how to make a plain thing I can do it, but I don’t dare add even a pinch of salt. I can follow a recipe. But making things up, experimenting! Is that why he was a poet and I’m not?
One or two of his pieces for children are recipes in disguise. The best known, ‘Porridge’, was written as I watched. Is there any New Zealand child who has not had it read to him (or her)? ‘Her’ should be the pronoun, for Wells ‘Porridge: for Wells’ – was a girl. This is another thing I know that John Dobbie doesn’t – ‘the mysterious Wells, undoubtedly a child, probably a girl-child, but who?’ Margot, John, who became his wife. ‘He met Margot Stiles, a smallholder, in the mid seventies and married her in 1979, several years after the birth of their child.’ I won’t comment on ‘smallholder’ (where did you get the word?), but ‘mid seventies’, you are out by twenty years. She was our landlady’s daughter in Tinakori Road and was nine years old when he wrote ‘Porridge’ for her. You’ll have to go to Margot, John, you can’t leave her out. Her Rex is the most important of all.
‘Margot from Wells Fargo,’ he said to the sandy overweight child at our door. Zane Grey must answer for the name. She was pleased with it though, after Rex had explained, and answered to Wells willingly. There are no more poems to Wells, and none to Margot; but then, there are none to Alice either.
I am not good with children. I change my voice for them and smile too much and pret
end to interests I don’t have. Some behave as though I’m touching them indecently. I was good – well, not too bad – with my own, but I’ve learned to turn away from other people’s. I’d sooner offend the parents, for I like children. I watch them from the corner of my eye. That can seem suspicious too.
Margot did not like me when she was a child; and does not seem to like me very much now. I think she loved Rex from the start. She brought her homework in and he helped her with it: full stops, capital letters, addition, multiplication, things she really didn’t need help with at all. They did the work together, for the fun of it; for the game they played of pretending not to know and getting wrong answers that were better than the right.
Overweight Margot. Freckled Margot with the crooked teeth (that were never put straight). Wriggly, screechy Margot. I soon found our flat – it was really just a bed-sitter at the back of a house, with a bathroom and a kitchenette attached – found it too small and I looked forward to the hour, increasingly delayed, when Mrs Stiles would bang on the permanently-locked connecting door and do her own screech: ‘Margot, time for bed.’
‘Nice kid,’ Rex said, when she had gone.
‘Does she have to come in every night?’
‘Yes, she does. She’s close to something pretty nasty, Jack, and we’ll never get her out if she goes in.’
I did not know what he was talking about. The child was all bounce and flop, all puppy-play and loud unformed response. Something nasty? Where? What?
‘Have you had a good look at that bastard who lives with her mother?’
‘Sidgy?’
‘Little Sidge.’
‘He drinks too much but that’s no crime. Are you trying to say …?’ Indeed he was, and I did not question it. I might be less observant than Rex but I was just as quick in understanding.
‘Did she tell you?’
‘She didn’t need to. All you do is watch the two of them.’
‘Have you told Mrs Stiles?’
