by Gee, Maurice
‘I liked the hospital poems,’ I said when he came out.
‘Yeah, you wrote.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were back?’
He poured a glass of beer for Harry.
‘I dunno, Jack. I was sorting out a few things. I was busy.’ He grinned with the side of his mouth. It was either false – Harry said false – or honest. I say honest. It settled me down and I was at ease with Rex again. I understood that he would move all the time, and reposition; and that he would alter but be the same for me; that I was unshiftable, I was in his life, although he might ignore me most of the time. I was part of ‘Petleys’, and nothing would change. I wanted, though, to find out what had happened to bring him here -bring him into his curious state.
A wooden-bodied Bradford van stood on the side of the lawn. One of those that rot away by hedges, under trees. Rusty in its metal parts, eaten in its wood, with most of its green paint flaked away. I was afraid Rex might end up like that.
‘Want to go down the beach? Want a ride?’
‘Yes,’ said Harry.
‘Don’t tell me that thing goes?’
‘Sure it goes. Drink up. We’ll go to Takapuna.’
Harry rode with him in the front. I sat on his folded net among his fishing lines. Neither of them talked and I was too much assaulted by the thump and slew of the van and the smell of fish to make conversation. We parked down the road from the Mon Desir – a modest place in those days in spite of its name – and Harry walked off quickly to find the house she had grown up in, leaving me to follow with Rex.
‘She’s kind of sudden, isn’t she?’ he said.
I was jealous of his finding a word I’d been looking for. Harry was, is, will ever be, sudden – although I have other words for her too. It seemed that Rex had reached down and found it with no trouble; and there Harry was, exact and true. (But he did not know her complications. I was coming to know those.)
The tide was low and the water far away, silver and calm. We walked on the hard sand, watching her. She had an eager lean, as though she were on something’s trail and set to grab it, and I saw, I almost felt, the blow when it fell. She broke her step, slowed, then ran, and stopped and turned around, looking for me. Her mouth made a silent screech, and I understood the house was no longer there.
‘Knocked it down, I’ll bet,’ Rex said. He was quick.
‘It’s gone,’ Harry said. Her face was white and shocked. But another thing about Harry, she will not be comforted. (Nor does she want apologies, she will not take ‘sorry’.) She had looked for me, that was enough. I did not touch or hold her as we came up.
‘Which one was it?’
‘There.’ Brick and tile and wrought iron, in place of weather-boards and sash-hung windows and a tin roof that storms roared on louder than the waves on the beach. We had exchanged childhoods, I knew the importance of what she had lost. Later I would argue that it was not lost.
‘It’s Dad’s fault,’ Harry said.
‘Suburbia at the beach,’ Rex said, and she looked at him dismissively.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ and left us there. Ten yards away she hooked her sandals off and changed direction for the water, and when she reached it tucked up her skirt and waded knee-deep towards the south end of the beach. She never once, that I saw, turned to look at the new brick house.
‘You going to marry her?’ Rex said.
‘Yes, I am.’
‘I reckon you’ll have an interesting time.’
‘Yes.’ I watched her slow down and felt her gradual easiness and was easy myself. ‘How about you? Any ladies?’
‘No.’
‘How about England?’
‘Sure, there’s girls, there’s always girls.’
‘England though? How did you like that?’
‘Not much. There’s nothing we need there.’
I laughed. ‘That’s most of our history gone, like that.’
Rex laughed too. ‘What I mean, there’s too much stuff, all you need is your own bit.’ He looked at Harry, far off, as though it were something she might know. But he seemed to feel he had said enough, for he changed direction down the sand. ‘Wonder what the water’s like.’ I followed. I did not say what was in my mind, that he seemed to be keeping clear of his own bit, which was Loomis. He went in to his thighs, keeping a distance between us, and surged along. I took off my shoes and rolled my trousers up and paddled like an Englishman at Blackpool. ‘Cold,’ I yelled.
‘You get used to it.’ He came out and stripped off his shirt and shorts and threw them to me. I caught them inches clear of the water. He ran high-footed in his underpants, then threw himself forward and swam straight out, heading, it seemed, for Rangitoto. He had a powerful stroke and must have been fit for he went a quarter of a mile, and I thought: He’s mad enough, it is Rangitoto.
Harry came back. ‘How far’s he going?’
‘God knows.’
‘He’ll get drowned if he’s not careful. I’m going to Thorne’s Bay, I won’t be long.’
‘Where’s that?’ I did not want her to go. I thought it was time for us to be together again.
‘Round there. Round the rocks. It isn’t far.’ She saw my unwillingness and smiled. ‘You can come, leave his clothes.’ But she was being kind, and was not ready for me, so I said, ‘I’d better wait. We’ll catch you up.’
Rex turned and started swimming back. Although he was coming towards me and Harry moving away I seemed to stay equally distant from them both. Their singleness put them out of reach – the girl (the woman) I had thought to possess intimately, by intense communication, mental and physical, over six months, and the man (friend) learned over almost twenty years. Each was wrapped in self, impenetrable; and that knowledge was suddenly the defining edge of me – it elated me. For a moment interest in them seemed enough.
She put her sandals on to walk over the reef to Thorne’s Bay, and went from sight. Rex swam towards me, head sleeked by sun and water, arms making a crescent advance; an insect-jawed eating of the space between us. He came at me, utterly strange; and stood up and lolloped in, too familiar suddenly to be interesting. He dried himself with his shirt and pulled it on; pulled his shorts on over the underpants that sagged with a weight of water in the crotch, showing hairy parts that were out of keeping, too adult.
‘Where’s she gone now?’
‘Thorne’s Bay.’
‘What for?’
I could have given half a dozen answers but gave none. My sense of loyalty was engaged. Also, I wanted to be private from Rex. I found no need to explain Harry, or ‘us’, and that gave me a feeling of great stability. We went across the black volcanic rocks. (Harry told us, on the way back, that the reef was a lava flow.) I asked Rex about London, Spain, the sugarworks, and why he did not go to Loomis any more, and must have seemed merely inquisitive; but swimming had opened him and made him less remote.
‘I do go. I was over there a couple of weeks ago.’
‘It’s not enough for your mother.’
‘She’s all right. All she’s interested in is the babies. There’s no need to go out there any more.’
He was not, he said, writing any poems about Loomis. That, it turns out, isn’t true. His notebooks show attempts and failures by the dozen. But he cannot look in at that place yet. He has other ground, there are good poems from that time, but there’s no facing Loomis and ‘Petleys’ from the positions he can take. He can’t be still, he can’t be steady. Rex has a Loomis obsession, but not a subject yet; and when it becomes a subject it is savagely exclusive. Room for me – I’m a little annexe – but no room for those who marry in and for the babies, and no time after the death of Joy.
It’s intellectual as well as emotional. He would not have got there without his intelligence. And it does not stop at poetry. The working out is in his life as well – but getting those two things apart is too big a job for me. They’re locked in ways too intricate to unpick and have such a multiplicity of particu
lars that any will I have to start is soon reduced to impotence. All I can do is repeat: he rolls those particularities into a ball and beats it flat and studies the surface, and goes on to make his poetry. In some easiness at last he moves into the long middle part of his life.
I asked, with some delicacy, how he felt about Sidgy. (How do you ask your best friend if he has committed murder?) ‘Do you think about Wellington?’ I said.
He was readier for that than for questions about Loomis. ‘Sure I do. What do you think?’
‘Has anybody ever asked?’
‘Why should they?’
‘Do you keep in touch with Margot?’
He shrugged. ‘Cards. Why not?’
‘And what about Sidgy? Did he have any value, do you think?’
‘How the hell can I know that? How can I know about value? I dream about the little bugger sometimes.’
That’s – let me count – five questions from me and five from him, and only at the end a bit of information. There’s no very great readiness there. We walked along a strip of sand and climbed another reef.
‘Your overcoat was wet when I got it from the door.’
‘Yeah, I know. I had to wait a long time. There wasn’t much shelter.’ Then more information. ‘I’ll always see him going down those steps. It was like flying.’
‘Yes?’
‘The second time his head hit, it made a different sound, so I knew it was smashed. It was softer, Jack.’
That was more than I wanted. It had the hard focus of some of his poetry: as if the only way to discover is to state, and let feeling follow on from there.
‘Let’s shut up about it, eh? – Have you still got your coat?’
‘I left it in England.’ He shivered. ‘You need those bloody things over there. And Wellington. There’s your girlfriend.’
‘She’s Harry.’
‘Yeah, Harry. What’s she found?’
We approached through the rocks. She was kneeling where they cluster and reach high and seemed to be looking at herself in a pool. She cupped water in her hands and splashed it on her face, then shook herself and sent drops flying everywhere. She grinned at us as we came up.
‘Fresh. You can drink it if you like.’
‘It can’t be fresh.’
‘Go on, try it.’
I scooped into the pool and sipped the water. ‘That’s impossible.’
‘It’s running,’ Rex said. ‘It’s a spring.’
‘There’s half a dozen. It’s seepage through the lava from Lake Pupuke. It seeps under the road and under the houses.’
‘And comes out here?’ Rex was kneeling. He took water in his hands and tasted it. ‘Bloody amazing.’ He washed his face.
‘Pupuke’s a maar,’ Harry said. ‘It’ s a single big explosion and fresh water filled the crater.’ She smiled at me. I saw how she liked impressing Rex, and also how she did it for me. She stood up and took my hand and pointed out to sea. ‘There are springs out there too. You find them when you’re swimming under water. It feels like a fish under your foot. And when you get down close the sand is dancing.’
Rex stood up and faced out. I hadn’t seen his dopey-looking stillness for years. So Harry made him a gift, and it finds a place in his poem ‘Memory’: grains of sand lift and dance, fresh water turns invisibly in the salt, making an upward pressure on the face and a clean taste in the mouth. No meaning is ascribed. The reader will find it for himself.
It’s one of his better poems. It makes me angry that it’s not ‘for Harry’.
Visiting with the Second Voice
Jack Skeat’s recent entries are a confession then? He makes it clear that he took part in a murder. His role is not as minor as he’d like it to be. Written down, the memory frightens him. Is there a statute of limitations on murder? There’s no limiting the horror of the act. No limiting of responsibility.
He wants to know more about Sidgy. Writes his full name down: Cyril Reginald Morley. He wants to fill in that life too. Wants to know Sidgy’s intentions about Margot. And how he got that way and if his life was as ugly as it seemed. How it seemed to him. And wants to know what Sidgy felt as he flew down the steps. The things there are to discover about a person are endless: would judgement remain possible if everything were known? If not, where does it leave him, with his ingrained belief in a moral basis for behaviour – in a morality defining us as human, in a way? He will lose a good part of his life if he is not able to pass judgement.
He passes judgement on himself with ‘Cyril Reginald Morley’.
Jack keeps two sets of books: those and these. He writes in the morning when Harry, upstairs, is at work: those in Olympic 1B5 exercise books, in black biro, these in blue in Warwick 1B5. Blue seems to flow more easily. On the other hand, he prefers the back cover of the Olympic, where cartoons and text teach water survival: three people cling to an upturned dinghy, a boy clings to a log, a boy and a girl to a chillibin – all looking woeful but all safe. On the back of the Warwick there are only measurement tables.
He’s interested in how long it takes to fill a page. Sometimes it takes a few minutes, sometimes a morning. Does taking time get him nearer to the truth? Does scratching out, second attempt, improve accuracy or does it move him further off from things that are painful? Closer definition does not always lead to the meaning of an event, or to an understanding of Rex, and of himself. There’s a struggle going on between lost content and survival; but it may be that survival of another kind depends on getting where he shouldn’t go.
Guessing can be useful as a way of breaking in, but too much invention isn’t allowed. Where does imagination stop and invention start? He could not even attempt the thing without imagination. And he could not do it, could not carry on, if he was forbidden to leave out. Leaving out, it seems to him, is part of imagining.
He could not do it, either, without his second voice. There’s a ragged emptiness between then and now and he stands differently on that side from this.
His mother has had a stroke that leaves her with very little right side awareness. Only half the world is left, and it is left. They have put her in a new room with the door, the visitor’s chair, her bedside cabinet, in the half that is now her whole. Unfortunately the window is on the right, so the world out there does not exist.
As a side effect (he means no pun) her paranoia is cured. That part in which John Skeat and Harriet were demons is closed down. Jack prefers to see it as banged out – it’s a black ball on the table and an accidental red has cannoned it into a side pocket. Mrs Skeat becomes a sweet old lady.
He holds her hand while he talks to her. The Maori nurses, she tells him, are nice, they are almost like New Zealanders. The food is nice. Everything is nice. It amazes him. Nice is a word she has never used in this sense – she’s one of the few people he has heard use it correctly – and the concept one he would have thought her unfamiliar with. Lovely, she says when she doesn’t say nice. They’ve cut her hair, leaving it two inches long all over. She looks like a wrinkled little man; she is tired and brave and patient. Jack is confused. He has never known this person. Has she been there all the time? Is she the companion of the lady talking to herself in the summer-house?
She even laughs, and when she laughs she wets herself. He hears the trickle of urine under her blankets. ‘Ooh, the water,’ she says, but she’s not uncomfortable because she wears kanga pants now. Sometimes she sings, or tries to sing, in a sugar-candy little-girl voice. She knows many tunes and some first lines, and lines from the middle or the end, and sings them sweetly and tries to hum the rest.
‘Oh Danny boy, the lights, the lights …’
‘Are burning,’ Jack suggests.
‘Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy …’
‘That’s good. Your voice is good.’
She watches him, or seems to. Perhaps she’s watching something in her head.
‘Show me the way to go home …’
‘I’m tired …’
‘I’m tired
and I want to go to bed …’
‘I had a little drink …’
‘Show me the way to go home …’
Is she singing or trying to tell him something?
‘Quiet down there,’ Mrs Donald in the other bed cries. (The new room is double.) The matron looks in and straightens her. ‘Get your filthy hands off me.’ Mrs Donald.
‘All right over there?’ the matron asks.
‘Yes thanks.’
‘Ooh hallo,’ Mrs Skeat trills, and gets a smile in return. ‘That’s one of the owners. They’re the ones who sell us the fish.’
‘What fish, Mum?’
‘The fish … the fish …’
‘Did you have fish for lunch?’
‘No-o.’
So it goes on, but it’s easier now. It’s easier and harder: he cannot go away. He cannot take refuge in the injustice done to him. He has to see a mother here. She says it’s lovely to see him and he believes it, but who does she think he is now? He feels unreal. Where has the poisoner gone? The poisoner had more substance than the loving son. But at other times he’s grateful, he thinks it’s nice, to be holding hands with a little old lady who may not be exactly sure who he is but who seems to love him all the same. And now and then he gets a double beat of his heart, a physical and a psychic kick, and he swells with emotion: this is my mother. He wants the knowledge while it lasts but when it goes away is pleased to be rid of it. He resents it. The ease with which she takes him back after sixty years of denial … what is it? Monstrous! Can he tell the little old lady, the little old monster, she gave away her right to hold his hand long ago?
Harry comes in. She has waited in the car and comes to fetch him at the end. She cannot play the game of smiles and pats but will stand and say, ‘Hallo, how are you?’ and ‘That’s good.’ (Not ‘that’s nice’.)
‘Ooh. It’s …’
‘Harriet, Mum.’
‘It’s Mrs …’ Starts to laugh at her failure to find the name, and wets herself.
