Going West

by Gee, Maurice

  I made no answer. I heard him fit his back and buttocks into the mattress and cross his arms and breathe hard as though clearing bad air from his lungs. Why did I think that, bad air? Why was I so fully awake?

  ‘Hear that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘People talking.’

  People shouting. Someone ran up the concrete steps beside the house and banged on our door.

  ‘Your turn,’ he said.

  It was Francie, in her nightgown, with her wet hair plastered on her skull. ‘Sidgy,’ she shouted. She ran away and ran back. ‘Sidgy’s fallen down. Come and help.’

  We went out and found him at the bottom of the steps. Two men knelt beside him: rain on spectacles, rain on an oilskin, beating hard. They held a fibrolite letterbox lid to shelter Sidgy’s face.

  ‘Don’t move him,’ as I bent down to see.

  Blood thinned by water. Sidgy’s nose and mouth scraped raw by the ragged concrete.

  ‘Get some blankets. Get a pillow.’ Someone had gone to phone for an ambulance. I ran up the steps and ripped a blanket from my bed and pulled my coat from behind the door, and took Rex’s too and flung it at him where he stood holding Francie back.

  ‘Right down the steps,’ a neighbour said.

  ‘Dumb bastard,’ said another, ‘stopping for a piss on a night like this.’

  I saw what he meant: a gaping fly, a yellow penis. No one had been willing to put it away, but now they could hide it with my blanket. I had not brought a pillow so they eased a folded jacket under his head.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ Francie sobbed. I can’t remember any other time when she was quiet. Rex put his coat around her, then lifted it to shelter her head, and she stood like a little fat grieving prioress. He bared his teeth at me. He wanted someone to take her off his hands, and soon a woman came out with an umbrella and pulled her under it and held her tight.

  ‘My fault.’

  ‘Hush, love.’

  We knew what she meant. On his pub nights, which were most nights, and on Sundays when he went to his after-hours place, she would not let him use the lavatory, he splashed the floor. So he stood at the top of the steps and pissed in the arum lilies before going inside. He believed he did it quietly but Rex and I heard his urine drumming on the wall. It was one of the reasons I wanted to shift.

  ‘Where’s Margot?’

  He turned and looked at the house and I saw her there high up at the sitting-room window, with a yellow bulb behind her shining like the sun. I could not see the expression on her face. Perhaps I just imagine that she smiled.

  Sidgy lost his footing, the coroner said. He went head first down those fifteen steps and suffered this and that, and that proved fatal. No witnesses. He had a word or two to say about the dangers of drink. Rex was gone by then and I was in my new flat. He got his coat back and I got my blanket.

  ‘Bye, Rex, keep in touch,’ I said at the ferry.

  ‘I will.’ He looked flatly at me and I looked flatly back. I hid my horror and my admiration.

  His coat was wet already when I snatched it from the door.

  Does my silence make me an accessory?

  Notebook: 7

  I am always careful on stairs. I slide my hand on the banister and if there isn’t one I count to help my concentration. When I see young people leaping down as nimble as goats, back-chatting one another, hands in pockets, humming tunes, I’m tempted to stop them and point out the danger. I’ve known two men who died on steps so my nervousness is understandable. I don’t like people walking behind me, coming down. I always stop and let them go past.

  Wellington has flights that should be closed. There’s one in Ngaio slimed by overhanging trees, with treads that slope downwards and risers of unequal height. It saved four minutes on the walk to the station so I went that way, never though without a sense of risk. But I was young and bounced down hand in hand with my new wife, and never fell. I must not exaggerate the dangers or let myself be thought a wimp. It is not a common death. In fact I know of only Merv and Sidgy, and Sidgy was pushed.

  But the eye is lifted up or dragged down in that city. One stands at the top of a flight like standing on a cliff and sees little figures, saucer faces, down below, or one looks up and sees long torsos shrinking into flat worlds; and life is always up or down. Getting there, in Wellington, requires risk and strain.

  When I opened Landfall I felt as if I’d been pushed down a flight of steps. There he was: ‘Seven Hospital Poems: Rex Petley.’ ‘First Visit to the Morgue’, ‘Ward 10’, ‘Cancer Patient’, and the rest: ‘Barium Meal’, ‘Autoclave’, ‘DOA’, ‘Trolley Race’. (Later he added ‘Fractures’, ‘The Dying Politician’, ‘Little Nurses’, ‘Oxygen’, to make that sequence of eleven everybody knows and Rita Bullen claims he never improved on.)

  He had gone south to see Charles Brasch and lay the poems in his hands. We know about the visit from the letter Brasch wrote him later on, that John Dobbie got his hands on and reproduces almost in full. (‘Lay the poems in his hands’ is pure Elf, it has the reverential tone that ‘the oeuvre’ and Brasch and Landfall and anyone judged ‘major’ will bring out. There’s a curious self-abasement in Dobbie. He forgives Brasch for turning down his poems.)

  I am putting off my hurt. Rex should have told me. He wrote the poems in my bed-sitter and should have told me where he was going and, later on, that Brasch had liked them. I felt myself tumble headlong down. Then I leafed through, one to seven, desperate to see ‘for Jack’ on one of them. That would save me. That would put me at his side for the world to see – but there was nothing: only ‘for Andra’ on ‘Ward 10’. And there was never to be ‘for Jack’, or ‘for’ anyone again. Only Wells and Andra got poems from Rex and they were people he passed by and knew only for a month or two -although, as I’ve said, Wells came back. And none of his books has a dedication. There’s not even the usual ‘for my parents’ on the first. That should make me feel a little better – but the hospital poems are part mine, I insist. He should have known.

  His biographical note said: ‘A young Auckland poet at present living in London’. I saw how right, how just, that was – free from boasting, free from modesty. It made me blush with shame at my First Fruits posturing. Others were having trouble too. Rita Bullen telephoned me at work.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘He wouldn’t let me, Rita. He didn’t want anyone to know.’

  Have I said that once or twice, by now, I’d been in Rita’s bed? I’m not going to say how we got on. She doesn’t say. I’m not rough trade and I didn’t hurt her so my passing in the night (it was afternoon though, she did not want her young men hanging round after dark) is not recorded in verse. But Rex, damn and blast him (Rita’s oath), spoiled that too. She never asked me back after his hospital seven came out. And she did not forgive me for laughing at her decision that they had been written in the several weeks of their affair. She was sensible enough not to make the claim again, although I’ve heard she hinted here and there (Rita was quite a poet-starter, started off two or three, I’ve heard). She doesn’t change her opinion that those Landfall poems are the best he ever wrote.

  I sent my praise, concealed my hurt, and he replied on cards. I don’t know how he lived in London. John Dobbie tells us but I don’t trust him. The young poet in the drab and dirty 1954 metropolis, drinking in pubs, going down to the dole office in a gang of ‘young antipodeans’ for the weekly handout (yes, the British gave out money to colonials for a while), and partying on rotten-hulled houseboats, and making paper darts of poems and flying them off Battersea Bridge (I don’t believe that one, I’ve read it before, about someone else), and finding the place where John Keats lived and reciting the Chapman’s Homer sonnet there (don’t believe that either) – the Elf puts it all in; but I remember Rex saying, ‘Jesus Jack, I just say the first bloody thing that comes into my head.’ There’s no documentation of his London year. There are just a few odd things he told journalists now and then. I have not been
able to find a single reference to his time in England in his poems, and nor has the Elf, although he tries harder. Once he mentions swans, but we have those, and lockgates once, and Guinness, and he uses the unlikely adjective ‘serpentine’ – but who cares anyway, I certainly don’t. It’s much more interesting that he went to Spain and saw the Goyas in the Prado. Goya was his hero all his life.

  He posted me a card from Madrid – ‘The Execution of the Defenders, 1808’ – ‘Have a look at this, Jack. Who needs words? Good wine here. Good olives. Come on over.’ It was one of the few invitations he ever made me.

  This is chatter, this is gossip, I’ll stop. He passed out of my life for another year – no more cards. When I took Harry to Loomis to meet my mother (my biro is struck with paralysis at that) I ran into Lila in the street and found that he had been back in Auckland since May and was living in Devonport and working at the Chelsea sugarworks.

  ‘Don’t be offended, Jack. He doesn’t see anyone very much.’

  Falling down steps, I almost did it again, but Harry was there to hold my hand. Before we visit Rex we’ll visit her, we’ll visit me. I’m tired of putting him in the centre all the time.

  1 saw her first as I walked down steps. There were two young women side by side, sunning themselves, and I have to say (and Harry knows it) that I noticed my future wife second. If I go for closer honesty, then I barely noticed her at all. (She doesn’t know that.)

  I had taken a bed-sitter in Kelburn, just past the string of shops now called ‘the village’; towards the bridge over Glenmore Street and close to the steps where Merv Soper was to die. I walked down town each morning to my work in the public library: along Upland Road, up the steps, down the steps, into Central Terrace, and down the dizzy flight to Glasgow Street, through the university, across The Terrace, and down, always down, the paths and steps of Allenby Terrace. That last plunge was (still is) a grotty back way, past the windows of half-furnished rooms, past rotting aerial ways into kitchens, and the sharp right turn where if you chose to go straight on and make a running jump you would land on the roof of Saint Mary of the Angels. Allenby Terrace, with students springing up, gazelling down: that is where I saw Harry second.

  It was a Saturday afternoon. I was on my way to a cricket match at the Basin Reserve – walking all the way because I did not really care for cricket all that much. Late March, 1955. I wanted to pick my life up and run with it somewhere. Nothing would quite end and nothing begin. Don’t mistake me, there’s no angst. I was beginning to be uncomfortable with my mediocrity. To buoy my spirits up I whistled myself down. I whistle well, with good mobility in my lips and tongue. I can, if you want them, do bird calls. (I do the tui with a glottal stop.) But I was whistling something gypsy from Dvořák on that day.

  Valmai Dunn was sitting (with her friend) on a lean-to roof level with the top of the wooden fence. It covered the kitchen of the flat she shared with four other students (Harry was one). Valmai: offered on a tray. Her back was to the second-storey wall, her face was slanting to the sun, her hands rested on the closed book in her lap, her skirt was pulled up to bare her legs (her long long legs), and her toes played piano as I came down. Her eyes were closed. (Harry, at her side, was, I think, watching me.)

  Her loveliness (Valmai’s) took my breath away; it dried my mouth. Dvořák fell silent; and Valmai’s toes fell still. She opened her eyes with a frown. They fixed on me, they penetrated, sliced into my skull. Then I had to pass below the wall.

  I could not let that ice-blue gaze be cut off from me. So I smacked the steps with my rubber soles. I flicked the Penguin from my pocket into the gutter. I cried out sharply, thumped the wooden fence with my palm. (A piece of rotten wood sprang from the top.) Then I sat groaning, with my hands wrapped around my ankle and my torso bending with the pain.

  They took their time coming out. A man who had seen my performance went by with a curious smile. Then the wooden door scraped on the path and Valmai, with her skirt down, edged out.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘1 think I’ve sprained my ankle.’

  From the way she bit her lip and looked back through the gate I should have seen I would get nowhere.

  ‘Harry,’ she said.

  There were thumps on the wall. The gate jerked open another foot. I expected a tanned giant to appear but a little glittery dark girl walked out. She looked at me measuringly and I turned away. ‘I’ll be all right,’ I gritted at Valmai.

  ‘You’d better come in, I suppose.’ I let her help me up, which she did slack-handedly, while the other girl went ahead and opened the kitchen door.

  ‘What do you do for sprains? A bucket of hot water or something?’ Valmai said.

  I took off my shoe and sock and lowered my foot on to the lino. ‘Ow,’ I said. ‘I’m Jack. Hallo.’

  ‘I’m Valmai. That’s Harry.’

  ‘What are you, students? Besides nurses?’

  Harry gave a grunt of annoyance. She left the room. And Valmai, beautiful, lethargic, and already uninteresting – desirable though, like cake – fetched a basin of warm water and put a towel and bandage in my lap.

  ‘It isn’t swollen,’ she accused, when I took my foot out.

  ‘It will be by tonight. You wait and see. I’m lucky I didn’t break my ankle.’

  I was looking for Harry to come back, because that was where interest lay; and I would have to get on with her while going about an elementary task with the lovely Valmai. (So I think of her, and thought of her then, almost instantly – formulaic language, making her less than she was; and I must apologize, and resist ‘poor Valmai’ too; ‘poor’ because she was not happy, never was, and because she died of cancer in her thirties. I wonder who she really was; and I regret the chance I missed to know her. It has been that way all my life, I stop off at exteriors.)

  Valmai watched while I bandaged my ankle. She made no move to help, although she put her finger on the knot while I tied; and she did not put the kettle on.

  ‘What subjects are you doing?’

  ‘English and history and French.’

  ‘I did those. I did my degree in Auckland.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘I work at the public library now.’ The male librarian seldom rouses much interest in a woman; not by naming his trade. ‘I’m a poet too. A bit of a poet. I see you’re reading Wordsworth.’

  ‘We have to.’

  She shocked me with her lack of enthusiasm; the narrowness of the mental space she seemed to occupy. So I went back to exteriors, I watched her move, which she did with no energy but some grace, and I looked for animation in her face but saw only beautiful modelling there. (I was never to see that flash of blue in her eyes again. It was almost impossible to startle Valmai. She did not want anyone to find out who she was.)

  I put on my shoe and thanked her, and said I would come back and say thanks properly one day; and I went into the yard, and there was Harry on the kitchen roof; plump and plain and sharp-eyed, measuring me.

  ‘How did you get on?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘With Valmai? How did it go?’

  ‘She gave me a bandage.’

  Harry grinned. ‘For your sore ankle. Don’t forget to limp.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You left it too long before you bumped the wall.’

  ‘No,’ I said; and then gave up. ‘Are you going to tell her?’

  ‘I’ll just watch. It might be fun.’

  ‘Can I come up and sit in the sun for a while?’

  ‘You’ll dent the roof.’

  ‘No I won’t, I’ll stand on the joists.’

  She did not know what joists were and I explained as I climbed the bank and balanced my way across the plank that served as a bridge. I sat with my back to the wall on a cushion with Valmai’s dent in it.

  ‘Where did you learn all that?’

  ‘I worked as a carpenter’s labourer in my holidays.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In Auc
kland.’

  ‘I’m from Auckland too.’ She turned her sharp eyes on me and I saw (perhaps saw later, I’m fooling myself if I claim to be accurate and truthful in all this) – I saw a willed aggressiveness, a willed projecting of herself, that hid her desire to be still and quiet and know her natural shape. (Yes, that sort of understanding must have come later.) We sat in the sun and talked about Auckland, her part, the North Shore, my part, Loomis, and agreed that we missed mud and mangroves, sub-tropical rain, summer humidity, still days – this in the middle of a hot still Wellington afternoon – red volcanic soil, city beaches, flat land, ferries, Queen Street, orchards and vineyards and Dalmatians, Muriwai and Piha, yachts and Rangitoto and the gulf; and although I began to argue for Wellington then I could not produce a list coming near to that. She would not allow Wellington any attractions at all. The harbour, which I had come to love – ‘It’s so dramatic’ – she called a puddle; and the city, which I loved too – ‘A real city, not just a glorified main street’ – was ‘all scrunched up, the hills are squashing it. I hate the hills’.

  ‘What about the mountains?’ waving my hands at the Orongorongos, resting in the sun like a herd of elephants.

  ‘They’re all right. They’re good. They make you think the city shouldn’t be there at all.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it should be. It’s the wrong place for a city, that’s why I like it.’

  ‘I’m going back to Auckland one day.’

  1 knew that I would not let her go.

  ‘I’ve never seen before how like a romance it is – one of those teenage things my daughter Jill read for a while (and I leafed through to find out where she was). He fakes an accident to meet the lovely blonde and meets instead the quiet little friend. (It’s called, I believe, ‘the cute meet’.) I can’t find an adult component; but it led soon enough to adult things – if that’s the word for marriage, babies, and a life together.

  But I must say, first, who she was. I’d found out ‘Harriet’ with a question, straight off, but it sounded like some husband-hunter in Jane Austen, she said, and she didn’t let anyone use it. Her father was a dentist who had joined his brother in practice in Palmerston North several years before – so Harry lost Auckland. Her parents would not help her through university unless she stayed within visiting distance of home, so here she was, in her last year of a BA, stuck in Wellington.