by Gee, Maurice
Rex left Alice sleeping and called softly at our door: ‘Jack. Jack.’
I thought his voice was beside my ear.
‘It’s him,’ Harry said. Had she been awake?
‘Bugger him.’
‘Jack.’
‘You’d better go.’
‘What does he want?’
‘Go and find out.’
I opened the door and slipped out, keeping my bedroom private. He was dressed.
‘Sorry, mate.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I can’t get to sleep. I thought you might feel like a walk.’
‘What’s the time?’
‘I dunno. Three o’clock or something. I’m off in the morning. It’s not a bloody visit at all.’
I went back into the bedroom. Harry knew how tightly we were bound. ‘Put on something warm.’
The lumpy northerly was waking the trees and letting them rest and waking them to frenzy again. Something in their heads seemed driving them insane. They resented us walking under them on the asphalt paths. I tried that out on Rex but he said, ‘Lay off, Jack, I get enough of that sort of thing at home.’ We went down through the gardens and by the begonia house and through the cemetery to The Terrace, which was a street in those days, not a canyon.
‘Where to?’
‘I don’t know. It’s your town.’
I felt easy, in command, and I led him (at his side, seven league steps) down Boulcott Street, past St Mary’s, across Perrett’s Corner by the George, along Manners Street and Courtenay Place, pleased with my deserted town that blew grit in our eyes and flipped pie bags in the air and boomed its iron verandas, and then ached with quiet, under speeding clouds that tipped the buildings sideways. I took him into Oriental Bay, where the waves smashed themselves on the sea wall and the wind drove spray in our faces. Petone over the harbour showed half a dozen lights, like a fishing fleet riding out a storm. Rex wiped his face. He found the plaster on his nose and ripped it off and threw it in the sea.
‘Jesus Jack, I can’t just get up and walk out on her.’
‘If that’s the way you feel I think you’d better.’ But I heard my glibness and decided to keep quiet. We squatted behind the wall and lit cigarettes.
‘Why did you marry her?’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘I’ve got Harry.’
‘Yeah mate, sorry. You’ve done all right.’
He threw his half-smoked cigarette over the wall but the wind blew it back and ran it, trailing sparks, across the road. He stood up and faced the sea. The cut on his nose was bleeding. He felt the moisture, tasted it to see what it was.
‘I guess I got careless.’ Did he mean Alice or his fall on the steps? ‘I got greedy.’ It was Alice. He laughed. ‘There’s a lot of things there it’s nice to have.’
‘Harry says you seem to have grown younger.’
He looked at me sharply. Harry would be told to mind her own business. But after a while he said, ‘I guess I got free entry to the cake shop.’
I told him Alice had to be a bit more than that. I said I liked her.
‘Yeah, she’s all right, she’s likeable, under it all. I can hurt her, Jack. I can crumple her up like a paper bag.’
‘You can’t do that.’
‘She depends on me. You ever had anyone in love … Yeah, Harry. But I’ve got to do it her way, she tries to run me. She wants me to write novels. Bloody novels. And then we’ll go to London and I’ll be some sort of big wheel over there.’
‘I don’t see you as a novelist.’
‘Of course I’m not. Jack, I can’t write poems any more. Alice is doing better than me.’
‘It’ll come back.’
‘You know what I am. I’m part of bloody Pittaways now.’
I tried to find ways of telling him he was not. I said that Loomis was pre-Pittaway. I said that there was no harm in taking a rest from it, and anyway inside his mind there must be a place … and he said, yeah, yeah, he knew all that; but when you lost a part of yourself it was gone for good. The idiom, the boyish phrase, convinced me that Rex was still there. My agitation started to die down.
‘I don’t go on your father-in-law much.’
‘The bloody old prick. I can handle him.’
‘What about this Dobbie joker?’
‘Yeah, him too, the little greaser. I wrote a poem about him squatting on the dunny ceiling watching us shit. Alice made me tear it up. Can’t say I blame her.’
‘What’s he up to?’
‘I dunno. He’s one of those blokes, he can be a big man as long as he comes second.’
I grinned at the way I had anticipated him. ‘It’ll all come right. You wait and see.’
‘I’m getting a job when we get back.’
‘What as?’
‘Anything. I might be a postie again. I might go back to the sugarworks.’
‘Alice won’t like that, will she?’
‘She’s going to have to like it. First thing Jack, I’m going to shave this beard off. In the morning.’
‘Not in my house, please.’
‘Bloody piker.’
We went back along the wharves and climbed the iron gates by the station. The wind flung Rex’s scarf up like an arm and then let it trail down his back. We walked up Hill Street to Tinakori Road. The narrow-shouldered houses were drawn up against the hill.
‘Do Francie and Margot still live there?’
‘They’ve gone up to the Hawke’s Bay. Francie got married.’
‘How’s Margot?’
‘She’s OK. I haven’t heard for a while. I think she doesn’t need me any more.’
We stood over the road and looked at the house.
‘If you got a crowbar you could tip it into the street.’ He wiped his cheeks; but the wind in Wellington does that, blows moisture from your eyes across your face. ‘You know the worst thing? He was still pissing. I should have let him finish, Jack.’
I could feel no regret for Sidgy. I still felt an awed respect for Rex. He had seen what must be done. (And had he seen what must be done when the time came for him to die? I must be quiet. I must not speak in that voice when I write in black.)
‘Come on, we’ve got wives in bed.’
‘I’ll swap you, Skeatsie.’ It was not crude and not belittling. He simply meant that Alice was his mistake. He meant, I think, that he had wronged them both, him and her, and knew that he must hurt them both in repairing it.
‘Harry wouldn’t have you,’ I said.
‘And Alice wouldn’t have you either, mate.’
The wind was dying, as it does towards morning. We plunged into the gardens, taking the low path by the creek. Although the sky was lightening, down in the gully dark held on. It had a spongy quality and the air seemed as if it might become too thick to breathe.
‘I wouldn’t want to come here by myself,’ Rex said.
The gravel whispered. We felt our way round corners and crossed a faintly-drumming wooden bridge. Further on I slowed him, pressing with my hand. ‘There might be glow-worms.’
The little colony shone privately.
‘Quiet,’ I whispered, ‘or they’ll go out.’
We stood and watched. Far off, a car went up to Northland, changing gears. A shuddering in the trees recorded a gust of wind.
‘I wish we’d had some of those in Loomis,’ Rex said.
It’s the only time I heard him wish. I scuffed my foot on the path and the worms switched off. We climbed the hill into the light. It was like swimming up from the bottom of a pool. We ran on the paths and Rex did one of his scarecrow dances. The hills over the harbour shuffled up a step.
‘You’ll be in Auckland tonight,’ I said, satisfied with what I had.
‘Yeah, thank God.’ His mind went there; went south. ‘Caxton’s doing my book. That’s why I went down.’
‘When? Congratulations. What’s it called?’ Not telling me earlier was a sign that he was well and that his troubles would pass. I
knew without him saying that he hadn’t told John Dobbie.
‘Hospitals. I nearly called it Bedpans. Pretty tame.’
‘It’s all right. It doesn’t puff it up.’
‘First Fruits.’
‘Yeah,’ (I borrowed his ‘yeah’) ‘tinned apricots.’
‘It might be the best one I’ll ever do.’
‘Bullshit,’ I said.
‘Merv asked me for some poems last night.’
‘Send him some. It wouldn’t hurt.’
‘I told him he’d have to take some of Alice’s too.’
‘Jesus Rex, you can’t do that.’
‘No.’
‘You’ll have to send him something now.’
‘Jimminy Skeat. OK, I will. Poor old Alice.’
We ran home and made our wives strong tea and heard each other through the wall waking them up. Harry cooked breakfast and we got ready for work. Leon, not subject to anything so boring as an arrangement, drove up late. Just before he arrived, Rita telephoned to say Merv Soper was dead.
‘This bloody town,’ Rex said. ‘It’ll kill us all.’ He did not blame himself, and why should he?
But here’s what I think. Merv came to the party, probably as publisher of Rita’s new young man, and no one talked to him, in the usual way. Rita gave him whisky and left him alone, Jack Skeat nodded from across the room, Leon let his eyes brush past and did not know him (the man had refused to publish his wife), and Rex insulted him, carelessly – another party for the Serpent, at the end of which he sat on a bench in the garden and heard Barton Rymer playing his flute and let the music shift him from a place he had stayed in too long. That is it. I’ve only worked it out in describing that night. I heard Merv open and close the gate. He followed Harry and me along the path to Upland Road, and turned the other way, and a while later, when he reached the steps to Glenmore Street, he let the wind push him through another gate …
Well all right, I’ll leave it there. I’ve no proof. As I’ve said, I know three people who died from falling, my father, and Sidgy, and Merv. Each of them fell in a different way.
Merv’s death is the one I’m closest to.
Notebook: 10
I waited for news that he had left her but heard instead that Fiona was born. ‘Well mate, we’re in the deep end now,’ he wrote on the card. There were never any poems about fatherhood. ‘Deep End’ though is one of his better pieces. Specific as ever, it’s the memory of a visit to the Olympic pool in Newmarket, but it means fatherhood to me because of the card. He chose it as the title poem of his second book – which also (at last) contained the first of the Loomis poems. I have said enough about those. I’m disappointed he never managed a poem about Fiona. Every child should have one, if the father happens to be, well, even a versifier. Rex pleases and disappoints me still and it sometimes seems that all I have to do is get on the phone.
I was on the phone to him when David was born, and later on with Jill, and on the second occasion heard that Rex and Alice had a second child too – no time wasted. ‘I’ll race you, Jack. First to three.’ I was offended and he laughed at me. ‘It’s fun mate, it’s no bloody mystical happening.’
‘How’s Alice?’
‘Bearing up,’ and laughed at his pun. ‘She hasn’t told me yet but I think there’s another one in there.’
I don’t care for that sort of humour. I very nearly put down the phone. Instead I asked him what he was doing for a living.
‘I’m a fisherman.’
I thought he meant that he had gone back to netting flounder and catching kahawai off the rocks, which would mean Leon Pittaway was paying the bills; but, in fact, he was on wages, on a boat that worked in the Hauraki Gulf, catching snapper; and he stayed there for three years, and loved it, and only left when he tore half his index finger off in a pulley – that comes later.
‘Alice can’t stand the smell. Fish smells sexy though, don’t you reckon?’ I understood that Alice could hear and that Loomis set the rules. You’ll find some phrases in the Elf about the ‘quiet courage’ of poets’ wives. Unlike Rex, he is not specific. I daresay he’ll spell it out in the biography. They lived in Mt. Eden, off Balmoral Road. Rex had a little car and drove away each morning in the dark, leaving Alice and her babies in the asphalt suburbs. I certainly don’t quarrel with ‘courage’. I wonder though how quiet she was. I can’t believe that ‘Pittaway’ found no way of fighting back. I heard a door slam after Rex made his remark about fish. It got him off the phone -‘Someone at the door, Jack. Got to go’ – and I was more sure than ever that the marriage would not last. How they had complicated it with babies though. It seemed to me, and seems still, that writing poetry does not exempt one from duty. (Harry laughed and patted my cheek when I said that.)
He turned up in Wellington again with his half finger. I stared at the stumpy thing wrapped in its bandage. He seemed in some primitive condition – Viking, Mongol warrior – and ready for a sudden homicide, some joyful skull-splitting with an axe. He still had his beard, now untrimmed. His corduroys were bald and stuck with fish scales here and there. The smell of fish invaded my tidy room of manuscripts. Stop changing shape, I wanted to say.
‘Knock off for the day. Come and have a beer.’
In those casual times I could obey. We went into the public bar at De Bretts and I drank slowly while he drank fast, telling me about his job (which he intended going back to) and his car laid up in Bulls with a broken axle. ‘I think it’s a write-off. I might ring up and tell them to keep it.’
‘How’s Alice?’
‘She’s back in Wonderland. Ma and Pa. I’ll tell you Jack, Alice is a good woman but she had her expectations wrong. I put the signs up in neon lights but she wouldn’t read. Now she’s having a bad time.’
‘With three babies.’
‘Sure. But the Pittaways make a nice soft landing place. You know the worst thing I did to her?’ He poked his bandaged finger in the air. ‘A mutilated hand is working class.’
‘She knows where you come from.’
‘She’s censored it out.’ He drank some beer. ‘It bloody hurt getting that ripped off.’
‘It’s your typing finger.’
‘Yeah, that too. I owe it to her and the bloody world to be a poet. Now,’ he grinned, ‘I can’t even hold a pen. It’s the perfect answer.’
I became a little nervous of him. He was making moves I could not keep track of. I could not try this new Rex against the old ones in my collection, or against the ur-Rex each of them looked back to. As student, as postman, as hospital porter and sugarworks labourer, he rose out of Loomis naturally. I was not troubled by him, although anxious for him now and then. As a literary man trying out life with the Pittaways, he had also been recognizable. That was ‘passing through’, ‘Petley’ behaviour. Now where was he? I could not see connecting lines. Minus half a finger? Other subtractions had been made, and additions too, and unless I became familiar with them Rex would get away from me as surely as he’d got away from Alice. I had my own things to do and did not particularly want him as a job; but a stance had been taken, an interest declared – so that shared boyhood came to seem – and both of us were in danger if we failed to carry on. I did not put it that way in De Bretts. It came to seem a simple thing of duty and affections. We ought not let each other go – I am sure Rex felt it; and that he too heard in ‘ought’ meanings apart from obligation.
By this you’ll understand that we got drunk. (But drunk does not invalidate – or validate either. Drunk is simply useful in opening jammed doors, although it can’t be used more than once.) We were almost in a fight because of Rex’s beard. You wore one at your peril in those days. Men shouted ‘Professor’ across the street and a certain type of woman looked at you with disgust. The young fellows in De Bretts accused us of being poofters but when Rex unwound from the bar to his full height and they saw his lopped finger they backed off. He would have punched with that fist, and torn his stitches out – and I would have punched with my
archivist’s hands, and broken them possibly, and felt good about it; but seeing them turn and mumble off was enough.
Taxi home. And Harry was pleased with me in some obscure way, but not pleased to see Rex, which she showed by absenting herself in his embrace. He would not have tried embracing her if he had not been drunk. She asked after Alice but not the children. Harry was not interested in children (although interested in her own; interest, in fact, over-rode her other feelings, except that now and then a mothering lust came over her and she bewildered them with attentions: perhaps I’ll go into that later, perhaps not). Alice was a puzzle to her. She wanted to identify the woman behind the manners. How did Alice behave domestically? But Rex could not hear her questions; coldness was all he registered.
‘I’d better find somewhere else to stay.’
‘No, it’s all right. It’s me she’s mad at.’
‘I’ll make the spare bed up after tea,’ Harry called from the kitchen. ‘Rex, do you eat lambs fry?’
‘Yeah, love it. Hate the bloody stuff,’ he whispered at me.
‘You’ll eat it and like it. There’s always a price to pay.’
‘Don’t stop drinking on my account,’ she called.
‘I can go to Rita’s.’
‘Laurie Sefton’s moved in. You can hear old Barton on his flute from here.’
‘Rex, if you want to have a shower before tea …’
‘Do I have to?’ he whispered.
‘It might be best.’
‘Does she mean I stink?’
‘Let’s just say there’s a fishy aroma. Did you bring any clothes?’
‘My bag! I left it in the pub.’
I started to laugh.
‘It’s got my notebooks in it.’
‘I’ll get the car.’
‘No you won’t,’ Harry said from the door.
‘His bag’s in the pub. It’s got his poems.’
‘He’ll have to write some new ones then, won’t he?’ – with a nastiness insufficiently masked.
I started for the door.
‘Not while you’re drunk. Stay and finish the children. I’ll take him.’
‘God, Jack.’ He was frightened of her and frightened for his poems.
