by Gee, Maurice
‘There’s no point. Sidgy’s what she’s got and she’s not going to risk letting him go. What she’d do is give the kid a hiding.’
‘Yes, she would.’
‘I’ll have a talk with Sidgy, that’s the way.’
‘Yes.’ Even though he might be dangerous. He was fat-faced and round-headed, with over-fine unhealthy cat-like hair and a grinny mouth. There were things to make you uncertain in his face. And his body, though small, seemed to have large stores of energy. He had short arms and legs with the muscles bunched-up hard, more complicated than muscles were meant to be. His sleeves were rolled up tight into his armpits.
‘I’ll come too.’
‘No need. What I reckon is, he’s probably done this sort of thing before. So if he knows someone’s on to him…’
‘Can’t we tell the police?’
‘They’d start asking Margot questions. She doesn’t even know it’s happening yet. I’ll tell him to keep his hands off, OK? With any luck he won’t stay around.’
‘He’ll go and do the same somewhere else.’
Rex had one of his spells of stillness. ‘Maybe I’ll just have to cut his balls off.’ He did this sort of tough talking now and then and I was never sure it was an act, even though he put on a James Cagney voice. Sidgy though was more like James Cagney than Rex was.
I told him to be careful. In fact, I was terrified. My imagination went to work on Sidgy, equipping him with cat-feet, butcher knives, and a malevolence and cunning that, in the small hours, reduced our superiorities (they weren’t only moral) to nothing at all. Coming through the yard, climbing the concrete steps beside the house, I kept away from shadows and took the corners wide.
But our superiorities worked well enough. ‘The slimy little bastard,’ Rex said.
‘What happened?’
‘He loves her like a daughter. I tell you what though Jack, he wasn’t surprised. He couldn’t keep his indignation going. Lots of little sneaky looks, trying to work me out.’
‘He probably thinks you want her for yourself.’
‘Jesus, I never thought of that. Anyway, now he knows, so he’s not going to try it again. He reckons keeping Francie happy is a fulltime job. He wanted to shake hands at the end.’
‘Did you?’
‘Sure Jack, it’s experience.’
The next night he wrote that bubbly jingle about porridge, sitting with Margot cross-legged on the mat by the heater, on a page unstapled from her exercise book.
‘Mum always forgets the salt.’
Rex put that in.
‘Write “to Wells”.’
He wrote ‘for Wells’.
‘Now it’s mine.’
But when she had gone (‘Margot!’ Her mother, jackal-voiced, ruined her name) he took a notebook from his bag and copied the poem from memory, in the italic script he was teaching himself. He made improvements.
‘How long have you been writing again?’
‘A couple of months. Influence of Wellington,’ he grinned.
The notebook was half full – you can see it (full) today in the Alexander Turnbull Library, where Alice deposited the drafts and manuscripts (she would not let the letters and the personal papers go) – and was three-quarters by the time I was able to sneak a look. I was looking for myself, for praise of me, however indirect, for signs that I was valuable to Rex, and looking, too, I have to admit, for his falling short. I was not ready for him to succeed where I had failed. But I did not find myself, except in a note – ‘Jack’s unwilling jaw’ – and I found little falling short: found Rex Petley, found the poet. Not all the pieces succeed all the way and only two find a place in his Selected Poems. ‘Porridge’ is one. The other – it hollowed me out when I came on it, and made the hairs prickle on my neck – is ‘First Visit to the Morgue’. You remember, he wheels the trolley in and takes off the lid and lifts the corpse, warty and ugly, on to a table – the jelly looseness of the limbs – and arranges it, and the nurse borrows Rex’s comb and combs the dead hair, and it’s only when he turns to leave that he sees, through a connecting door, the perfect child laid out ready on a post-mortem slab. It works, God how it works. There’s nothing else. Nothing is needed. I read it and I groaned, ‘No.’ This was followed by a flash of joy. Rex was a poet.
I told him so when he came home. For a moment he was close to striking me. He grabbed the notebook from the table, where I had left it, and rammed it hard in his duffel bag, and might have walked out then. But he stood measuring my rights, and found them sufficient. ‘You’re a cheeky bastard, Skeat. You bloody wait until you’re asked next time.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry. But that’s a marvellous poem. You’ve got to get that published.’
‘I don’t want it published. Not yet.’
‘Merv Soper would take it.’
‘Shut up, Skeatsie. See what I bought?’ He picked it up from the floor, a black woollen overcoat with black shiny buttons. When he put it on its flared skirt almost reached his ankles.
‘You’re not going to wear it?’
‘Good cloth. You feel.’
‘You look like Jack the Ripper.’
‘Who cares how I look? At least I’ll stay warm.’ He grinned at me. ‘Second-hand, Skeatsie. Only five bob.’
‘I’ll walk on the other side of the road.’
Rita Bullen called it his rhyming cape, but that was in the following year when she discovered he was a poet. John Dobbie has a bit of fun, meant to be affectionate, with Rex as poseur. ‘His poet’s coat.’ I’ll go on record as saying that he wore it to stay warm. As soon as winter was gone (in Wellington it keeps coming back) he left it hanging behind the door.
I was his friend, with private knowledge of who he was. I didn’t walk on the other side of the road but went along, matching steps with him, at his side. I grinned to myself in the company of minors and poseurs, and waited for him to come out. He was in no hurry.
‘Rex is the only poet here,’ I said, drunk.
‘Sure,’ he said, frowning, ‘I write dirty limericks,’ and turned it away. In his coat he looked as if that’s exactly what he would do. ‘You shut up about me,’ he said, walking home.
‘You’ve got to get those published, Rex. You’ve got to.’
‘When I’m ready.’
He had written ‘Cancer Patient’ and ‘Ward 10’. And yes, he had done it, picked the naked dry-stick man up from the floor, looked in his bright terrified eyes, put him carefully on his bed, wiped the shit off him – it is not made up. He had smuggled lipstick to the mad girl in Ward 10 and let her for a moment put his hand on her breast. It’s all true but it wouldn’t matter. The Elf – I’m tired of him and this is the last time I’ll describe how he is wrong – concludes that the girl is Andra, because the poem is ‘for Andra’ and she spent time in Ward 10. He has done a bit of detective work and is right about ‘this lovely troubled Estonian girl’ but wrong in suggesting that she and Rex were lovers in the winter of 1953. I wanted to be her lover and I missed, then Rex came along and was her friend.
I see them at a party, in a hallway, she standing close and talking up, while her fingers twist the buttons of his coat. She seems to stand under his curve, like someone in a rock shelter keeping out of the rain. Easy for people to conclude that they were lovers. Or they’re on the path out the back, in the half-light. She holds his lapels and wipes her face across and back, getting rid of tears. Rex jerks his head, sending me away.
When Margot went home Andra came in. I could not call the place my own. Yet I could not object for her grief was like something offered on the palm of her hand. Not everyone responded. Some people said that she whined. There was, too, a lot of anti-Americanism around, McCarthy was at his worst – most powerful – and hatred of the Russians was unfashionable, at least in the circles we moved in. Hungary was three years up ahead. Estonia? We did not even know where it was. I found it hard to understand how she could grieve so deeply for a country that seemed made up to me.
�
��That little Ruritanian,’ Rita Bullen called her. Rita and Rex were lovers – but not yet, and it was only for a month. Lovers? No, they went to bed. Before that, though, Andra had made her two withdrawals from the world.
‘Where is she?’
‘In Ward 10.’
‘What happened?’
He looked at me as though it were none of my business, but when I cried, ‘She’s my friend too,’ he told me that she’d swallowed every pill she could lay her hands on; washed them down with milk; but had been found in time and pumped out and locked up in Ward 10.
‘In time,’ he said.
‘You sound as if you want her to die.’
‘She’s dying anyway. She hasn’t got a chance.’
I did not believe it. I thought he was romanticizing her. If she really wanted to kill herself she’d do it in a place where no one would find her. I still think that. I think he didn’t read Andra right. And I think he loved her, in a way; a love that had, as part of it, acceptance of her death. There was something of the lurker in the shadows in Rex.
We watched her sail away on the Wanganella to her fellow Estonians in Sydney. We waved from the wharf, Rex did a scarecrow dance, and Andra smiled down prettily from the rail. She was on her way to another attempt. No one found her. Rex was in London by then. I see him keeping quiet, with his new friends. He turns away and wipes his hand across his eyes: I won’t test the fiction, let it stand.
I would have given her a plainer sort of love, much faultier. I sometimes believe I could have saved her.
In December we had northerlies. I don’t like that wind. A southerly comes from the Pole, bringing icy rain and sometimes snow, and cutting to the bone, numbing the bone. You bend into a southerly and fight back. It’s an honest wind, the true Wellington wind. The northerly comes behind your back and punches you. It pushes you this way and that and puts a knee in your groin. It doesn’t even make you decently cold and won’t bring its rain in honest loads, but wets you and then, hypocritically, dries you out. It seems to have no source and no direction. Thumps the house, and leaves it still, then gives a sneaky heave and seems to push it out of square. All my days in Wellington I hated the northerly. In Tinakori Road it found a leak in our kitchenette and dripped discoloured water into a basin, through Rex’s last weekend, day and night, off and on.
We visited Rita Bullen on Sunday afternoon and he told her he was leaving for Christchurch the next day. He made no attempt to soften it and just for an instant she looked as if he’d kneed her in the groin. But Rita is no softy, for all her displays of super-sensitivity. That’s a game. Rita expects to be hurt and she does not make a fuss about it; even in poems; especially in poems. There’s a very funny recent piece, ‘Rough Trade’, and I’m sure the man is Rex, although he wasn’t quite as muscular as that. She’s a great old backwards-looker, and not too inaccurate some of the time. Rita fights back.
We drank sherry and she drank too much, but it made her harsh not maudlin and she showed us ‘callow boys’ the door. Rex grinned all the way home. ‘She’s a bloody good poet, old Rita.’ (She was thirty-six at the time.)
‘Have you showed her any of your stuff?’
‘Nope.’
‘It’d be a bit tough for her.’
‘Her stuff’s pretty tough.’
We walked along in a break from the rain, with his coat crow-flapping about him. I asked him why he was heading south, what was there – colder places, smaller cities, that was all?
‘Just for a look. I’ll be back home for Christmas.’
‘Here?’
‘Auckland. Loomis town. You going up?’
‘God no.’
‘And then, in February, I’ve got a ticket for London. On the Castel Felice.’
‘What?’
‘An eight berth cabin below the water line. The Castle of Happiness.’
‘Let me come too.’
‘No, you stay here Jack, this is the place for you.’ He patted me. And what can I say, I was comforted, I felt my solidity and worth. It seemed to me I had the better part. Was that his doing? Was it the sherry? Or just a lull in the wind?
‘This town suits you.’ I knew it was true. It was a town for clean bones and moral certitudes. It was platonic. Singapore, he said, as we walked along, Aden, Suez. In the grey streets I wanted none of them. It lasted only five minutes; and I grew loud in envy and declarations of coming too. But there was no desire in it. Tinakori Road seemed full of promise.
He had tried a Wellington poem, he said, but it wouldn’t work. Leave them to Rita. She had some new ones that were great, they got Wellington the way no one else had managed – the houses and the hills, the crazy steps and zigzags, the crooked roads with treasure at the end (in Rita’s case a mouth to be kissed). ‘Not for me.’ He didn’t like the way the valleys wouldn’t let you out, or the way things narrowed under the hills and left you with nowhere to go. ‘They push you in the harbour. You end up walking on a slant.’
His not liking Wellington made it all the more mine. It was a place he would never have, and I would have.
Margot was sitting on our doorstep. ‘Mum and him are doing it.’
‘Tea and biscuits, Wells. Come on, you make it.’
She put the kettle on and laid out cups and sugar and milk and emptied the basin of water into the sink.
‘Why do you have to go?’
‘I’ve got to see the world, Wells. How can I know that you’re the best unless I go and look at all the others?’
‘Are you going to help them with their sums?’
‘You’re the only one I help with sums.’
‘They’ll be grown up. You’ll marry them.’
‘You can’t marry more than one, it’s bigamy.’
Their nonsense would not flow. She wanted him to see her pain, which was older than her years. Everything she said came out with an ugly childishness.
A door banged in the other part of the house. ‘That’s him going.’
‘Without his tea.’
‘I hope a car knocks him over.’
‘I’ll buy a car one day, Wells, we’ll knock him over together.’
‘You won’t.’
‘Wait and see.’
‘You won’t.’
‘Pour the tea, it’s going cold.’
‘She won’t get up for hours now.’
‘Stay and eat with us then. Beans on toast.’
‘Ugh!’
‘Pancakes and golden syrup.’
‘Yeah.’ She had a smile that showed all her crooked teeth and made her innocent and beautiful.
We had pancakes and syrup, Rex cooking round the drip. Then they knelt on the floor and played knuckle-bones. She beat him although he tried to win. Real bones were best, he said, and the vertebrae of a small dog best of all. He told her how his sisters had dug up their fox-terrier to make a set. ‘You’re pretty good, Wells. You would have given Tweet a run.’ It was the only time I heard him speak about his family to an outsider.
‘Margot,’ shouted Francie. (They don’t broadcast wool auctions any more but if you’ve heard one of those wool buyers, that’s her voice.)
‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Big smile, Wells.’
She tried. ‘Will you write me letters?’
‘I’ll send you postcards. Ruined castles, how’s that?’
‘And the king?’
‘Kings, queens, princesses, trained fleas, you name it.’
‘Trained fleas.’
‘Good choice. Shake hands, Wells, or is it a kiss you want?’
‘Both.’
They shook hands gravely and kissed on the lips and she went to the door; where she turned and looked at him.
‘Sidgy says wait until you’ve gone.’
It had stopped raining. In the silence a drop fell in the basin, plink!
‘What do you think he meant by that?’
Her eyes slid away. ‘I don’t know. Give me some hidings I suppose.’ But her sliding eyes had t
old the truth. She knew what Sidgy meant, she knew even better than Sidgy knew. Some part of it had happened before and she had put it out of her mind. Now it came back.
We’ve got to keep her here, I thought. But I was not in the conversation, I was not even in the room.
‘Don’t worry, he won’t touch you, Wells.’ He went to her and tapped her cheek. ‘No hidings.’
They spoke in private, deeply: in tongues.
‘Promise?’ she said.
‘I promise.’
She sighed. It seemed to me she almost went to sleep by the door. Rex opened it and put his hands on her shoulders and walked her out and sent her away.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I said, ‘what do we do?’
‘The dishes for a start. I’ll wash, you dry.’
‘I’m serious.’
‘So am I. Keep out of it, eh.’
I badgered him, got angry; but kept quiet in the end when I realized that I was trying to give myself a place in the event. Moral place. And what event? I didn’t really want to know.
When we’d done the dishes he looked at the leak. ‘I’m buggered if I’m going to sleep another night with that.’
‘I’m giving notice tomorrow. I’m leaving this place.’
‘Good idea.’ He got the broom and a yardstick and a wooden spoon and lashed them together and jammed the contraption between the ceiling and the sink, making a track for the water to run down.
‘My old man couldn’t improve on that.’ His family were present on that night.
‘What are you going to do about Sidgy, Rex?’
‘Dunno.’ His voice went flat, his eyes were flat. ‘I’ll see him in the morning. I reckon I’ll have an early night.’
We both had an early night. Wind thumped the house, rain started up again, but Rex’s anti-drip device allowed me some sleep. Feet seemed to pad on the lino. Doors seemed to open and close and draughts move down the walls and up from trapdoors opening in the floor. Haunted nights come with the northerly, I was getting used to them, and I burrowed in my blankets and tried to sleep. Woke with a lurch into the dark.
‘Rex?’
‘That bloody drip started again. I had to get up and fix it.’
‘What time is it?’
‘How would I know? Go to sleep.’ He got back in his bed. I heard the canvas creak. ‘Fucking Wellington.’
