The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature

by Jane Stafford

  If you just laughed at him, or if you said yes you’d like to go to bed with him, you would be out on the pavement in five minutes, because Gomeo only wants the big drama, nothing real. I explained all this to Julian and he looked relieved but then he said he was sorry because now there wasn’t any excuse to invite me to his bed-sitter after I finished work. When I looked at his face I could see he meant just what he said so I asked him did he have to have an excuse.

  And thinking of Julian’s face reminds me I ought to say something about his appearance because reading about him in the papers will have given you a wrong picture of him. It’s well known there’s only one photograph of Julian, the one taken by a schoolgirl with a box camera just before he took off. His face is slightly obscured by the crash helmet he’s just going to put on and the camera hasn’t been properly focused. So all the local Annigonis have got to work and done what they call impressions of him and I can tell you quite honestly the more praise the picture gets the less it looks like Julian. They all dress him up in tidy clothes and cut his hair short and some of them have even put him in a suit and tie and stuck his hair down with Brylcreem. Well if it’s important to you that your local hero should look like a young army officer I’m sorry but the fact is when I first knew Julian he was one of the most disreputable looking men I had seen. His clothes never seemed to fit or match and he never went near a barber. Every now and then he would reach round to the back and sides of his head and snip off bits of hair with a pair of scissors but that was all. I think he had given up shaving altogether at the time but he didn’t have the kind of growth to make a beard so he was what you might call half way between clean-shaven and bearded. He wore a rather tattered raincoat done right up to the neck, and at midnight when I finished work and he took me to a teen club under the street where you could twist and stomp he kept it on and buttoned up until I began to wonder whether he had a shirt underneath.

  I hadn’t turned eighteen then but I was older than most of the others in the teen club and Julian was probably twenty-two or three so I felt embarrassed especially because Julian looked such a clown. When we arrived we sat at a table and didn’t dance until one of the kids called out Hey Jesus can’t you dance? and several others laughed and jeered. Julian laughed too and clapped in a spastic kind of way and looked all round like a maniac as if he couldn’t see who they were jeering at and then he got up without me and drifted backwards into the middle of the dancers and began to jerk and twist and stamp and roll in time to the music. Julian could certainly dance and in no time they had all stopped and made a circle round him clapping and shouting and urging him on until the sweat was pouring off him. He had to break out of the circle and make his way back to our table waving one hand behind him while they all shouted for more.

  After that we drank coffee and danced and talked but you couldn’t have much of a conversation above the noise of electric guitars and when we came out at 2 a.m. I felt wide awake and not very keen to go back to my bed-sitter. Julian said I should come to his and I went. We walked up Grey’s Avenue under the trees and then between two buildings and through an alley that came out at the back of the house where Julian had a room. I followed him up a narrow outside stairway right to the top of the building and through French doors off a creaky veranda. He threw up a sash window and we sat getting our breath back looking out over a cluster of old wooden houses like the one we were in and the new modern buildings beyond and the harbour and the bridge. Julian said the nice thing about coming back to Auckland after being away was the old wooden houses. I had thought that was what people coming back complained about, a town where nothing looked solid, but Julian said it was as if people lived in lanterns. He liked the harbour too and the bridge and everything he looked at and I found that unusual because the people who came into Gomeo’s were forever arguing about which buildings in Auckland were any good and which were not and nobody was ever enthusiastic about anything, least of all those like Julian who had been away overseas.

  Julian said he liked living right in the busy part of the city and he liked to be up high. He had worked as a window cleaner on the AMP building in Sydney and as a waiter in the Penn Top of the Statler Hilton in New York. And before coming back to Auckland he had driven a glass elevator that ran up and down the face of a hotel at the top of Nob Hill in San Francisco looking out over the harbour and the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay. He said that was the best job he had ever had and he was willing to make a career of it but they made the elevator automatic to save the expense of an operator. Julian offered to run it for nothing and live off whatever tips he could get from sightseers, and when the hotel managers refused he still spent hours of every day going up and down as a member of the public until it was decided he was making a nuisance of himself and he was told not to come into the building again. A week or so later when he tried to slip in wearing dark glasses someone called the police and Julian decided it was time to leave San Francisco.

  We sat without any light drinking and talking or rather Julian talking and me listening and I remember being surprised when I noticed the wine bottle was half empty and I could see the colour of the heavy velvet cloth it stood on was not black but dark red. It had got light and still I didn’t feel tired. Julian said he would make us some breakfast and while he cut bread and toasted it I had a chance to look around at his things, and especially at a big old desk that had taken my eye. It was half way down the room facing one wall and it was covered with a strange collection of letters, newspaper clippings, stationery, bottles of ink of all different colours and makes, every kind of pen from a quill to a Parker, and three typewriters. Pinned to the wall above the desk there was a huge chart, but before I could begin to read it Julian saw me looking at it and called me over to help him make the breakfast.

  I got to know that chart well later on because it was the nerve centre of what Julian called his Subvert the Press Campaign. On it were the names and addresses of all the people Julian had invented to write letters to the editor, then a series of numbers which showed the colour of ink each one used, the type of notepaper, and the kind of pen—or t1, t2, or t3 if one of the typewriters was used; then examples of their scripts and signatures and details about their opinions and prejudices. Each name had stars beside it to show the number of letters published, and the letters themselves hung in bulldog clips at the end of each horizontal section. It had come to Julian that a newspaper really prefers letters signed with pseudonyms because it can pick and choose among them and print the opinions it likes but within reason it has to print all the signed letters that come in. So the idea of his Subvert the Press Campaign was very very gradually to introduce a whole new group of letter writers who all signed their names. They had to be all different types and live in different parts of town so the paper wouldn’t suspect what was going on; but as Julian explained to me later, once he had established his group he could concentrate them suddenly on one issue and create a controversy. He called them his Secret Weapon because he said only a small group of people reads the editorials but everyone reads the correspondence columns.

  But when it was put to the test and Julian decided to bring the Government down (I think it was over the cancellation of the Lyttelton scaffolding factory and the issue of extra import licences) the Secret Weapon misfired. He sent letter after letter, not only to the Herald and the Star but all over the country and soon there was a raging controversy. But he wrote his letters in a sort of daze, almost as if voices were telling him what to write, and what each letter said seemed to depend on the person supposed to be writing it instead of depending on what Julian himself really wanted to say. In the end his letter writers said as many different things as it was possible to say about the cancellation of the contract and when Parliament assembled for the special debate not only the Opposition members but the Government ones as well were armed with clippings of letters Julian had written. That was a great disappointment for Julian. He lost faith in his Secret Weapon and when I tried to get him going agai
n he said what was the use of secretly taking over the correspondence column of a newspaper if when you succeeded it looked exactly the same as it looked before.

  But it wasn’t until I knew Julian well that he let me into the secret about his letters. That first morning he called me away to help with the breakfast before I had got more than a quick glance over the desk and when I thought about the chart afterwards all I could guess was that he might be the ringleader of a secret society of anarchists, or even a criminal.

  We sat at the big sash window eating breakfast and watching the sun hitting off the water on to the white weatherboards and listening to pop songs and the ads on 1ZB. Julian sang some of the hits and we did some twisting and while the ads were on we finished off the wine. Julian told me the Seraphs were his favourite pop singers and that was weeks before anyone else was talking about them or voting them on to the Top Twenty. I often thought about that when Julian got to be famous and the Seraphs were at the top of the Hit Parade with ‘Harp’s in Heaven Now’. And when the NZBC banned the song because they said it wasn’t a fitting tribute to the national hero I felt like writing some letters to the editor myself.

  It must have been eleven o’clock before I left to go home that morning and I left in a bad temper partly because I hadn’t had any sleep I suppose but partly because Julian had stretched out on his divan and gone to sleep and left me to find my own way out. He hadn’t said goodbye or anything about seeing me again and when I thought about it I didn’t even know his second name and he didn’t know mine.

  I slept all that afternoon and had a ravioli at Gomeo’s before starting work and I spent a miserable evening watching out for Julian to come in. It wasn’t that I had any romantic feelings about him, the sort I might have had in those days about one of those good looking boys in elastic sided boots and tapered trousers. But I had a picture fixed in my head of Julian with his straggly hair and mottled blue eyes going up and up in that glass elevator like a saint on a cloud, and I kept looking for him to come into Gomeo’s as if it would be almost a relief to see just the ordinary Julian instead of the Julian in my head.

  He didn’t come of course because he was busy writing his letters to the newspapers, but I wasn’t to know that. The next day was Sunday and I spent the afternoon wandering around the lower slopes of the Domain among the trees—in fact it must have been somewhere near where they’ve built the Interdenominational Harp Memorial Chapel. I was feeling angry with Julian and I started to think I might get back at him by ringing the police and telling them he was a dangerous communist. I probaby would have done it too but I didn’t know his address exactly and I only knew his Christian name.

  I still go for walks down there, with Christopher in the pram, and sometimes I sit inside the chapel and look out at the trees through all that tinted glass. People who come into Gomeo’s say it’s bad architecture but I like it whatever kind of architecture it is and sometimes I think I can get some idea in there of how Julian felt in the glass elevator. I’ve had a special interest in the chapel right from the start because Vega belongs to the Open Pentecostal Baptists and her church contributed a lot of money to the building. She told me about all the fighting that went on at first and how the Anglicans tried to get the Catholics in because of the Ecumenical thing. She said they nearly succeeded but then a Catholic priest testified to having seen Julian cross himself shortly before he put on his wings and the Catholics decided to put up a memorial of their own. Vega said it was nonsense, Julian Harp couldn’t have been a Catholic, and I agreed with her because I know he wasn’t anything except that he used to call himself a High Church Agnostic and an occasional Zen Buddy. Of course Vega was really pleased to have the Catholics out of the scheme and so were a lot of other people even though it meant raising a lot more money. Vega said it was better raising extra money than having the Catholics smelling out the place with incense.

  It must have been nearly a week went by before Julian came into Gomeo’s again and when I saw what a scraggy looking thing he was I wondered why I had given him a second thought. I ignored him quite successfully for half an hour but when he asked me to come to his bed-sitter after I finished work I went and the next night he came to mine and before long it seemed uneconomical paying two rents. We more or less agreed we would take a flat together but weeks passed and Julian did nothing about it. By now he had told me about his Subvert the Press Campaign and I knew how busy he was so I decided to find us a flat myself and surprise him with it. I answered probably twenty ads before I got one at Herne Bay at a good rent with a fridge and the bathroom shared with only one other couple. I paid a week’s rent in advance and when Julian came into Gomeo’s and asked for a spaghetti I brought him a clean plate with the key on it wrapped in a note giving the address of the flat and saying if Mr Julian Harp would go to the above address he would find his new home and in the fridge a special shrimp salad all for him. I watched him from behind the espresso machine. Instead of looking pleased he frowned and screwed up the note and called me over and said he wanted a spaghetti. I didn’t know what to do so I brought him what he asked for and he ate it and went out. When I finished work I went to his bed-sitter to explain about the flat. He wouldn’t even go with me to look at it because he said anywhere you had to take a bus to get to was the suburbs and he wasn’t going to live in the suburbs.

  I decided I wouldn’t have anything more to do with him. I knew he was friendly with a Rarotongan girl who was a stripper in a place in Karangahape Road and I thought he was possibly just amusing himself with me while she did a three-month sentence she had got for obscene exposure. A few days later when he came into Gomeo’s and said he had found a flat in Grafton for us I brought him a plate of spaghetti he hadn’t asked for and when I finished work I went out by the back door of the shop and left him waiting for me at the front. The next evening and the next I refused even to talk to him. I was quite determined. But then he stopped coming to Gomeo’s and began to send me letters, not letters from him but from his people who wrote to the newspapers. Every letter looked different from the one before and told me something different. Some told me Julian Harp ought to be hanged or flogged and I was right to have nothing to do with him. Others said he was basically good but he needed my help if he was going to be reformed. One said there was nothing wrong with him, it was only his mind that was disordered. One told me in strictest confidence that J. Harp was too good for this world and would shortly depart for another. They were really quite funny in a way that made it silly to stay angry about the flat, so when he had run through his whole list of letter writers I went round to his place and knocked and when he came to the door I said I had come to sing the Candy Roll Blues with him. It wasn’t long after that we took the little two-storeyed house in Kendall Road, the one I’m in now with Christopher and Vega.

  The first few months we spent there Julian wasn’t easy to live with. He liked the house well enough and especially the look of it from the outside. He used to cross the street sometimes early in the morning and sit on a little canvas stool and stare at the house. He said if you looked long enough you would see all the dead people who had once lived there going about doing the things they had always done. But I soon discovered he was missing the view he had from his bed-sitter of the city and the harbour, and if I woke and he wasn’t down in the street he was most likely getting the view from the steps in front of the museum. I used to walk up there often to call him for breakfast or lunch and I would find him standing on the steps above the cenotaph staring down at the ships and the cranes or more often straight out across the water beyond the North Shore and the Gulf and Rangitoto.

  We had lots of arguments during those first couple of months. I used to lose my temper and walk up and down the kitchen shouting every mean thing I could think of until I ran out of breath and if I was still angry I would throw things at him. Julian couldn’t talk nearly as fast but he didn’t waste words like I did, every one was barbed, so we came out pretty nearly even. But Julian caused most o
f the fights and I used to make him admit that. It was because he didn’t have anything better to do. His Subvert the Press Campaign had ended in a way he hadn’t meant it should and now there didn’t seem to be anything especially needing to be done. He took a job for a while as an orderly in the hospital because the money he had brought back from America was beginning to run out but when they put him on duty in the morgue he left because he said he didn’t like seeing the soles of people’s feet.

  It was Anzac Day the year before his flight that Julian first thought of making himself a set of wings. In the morning there were the usual parades, and the servicemen and bands marched up Kendall Road on their way to the cenotaph. Julian wasn’t patriotic. He couldn’t remember any more about the war than I can. But he liked crowds and noise so he tied our tablecloth to the broom handle and waved it out of the upstairs window over the marchers until a man with shiny black shoes and a lot of medals on a square suit stopped and shouted what did he think he was up to waving a red flag over the Anzac parade. Julian said it wasn’t a red flag it was a tablecloth and that made the man angrier. He shouted and shook his fist and a crowd gathered. When the Governor-General’s car arrived on its way to the cenotaph it was held up at the corner. By this time Julian was making a speech from the window. He was leaning out so far I could only see the bottom half of him and I couldn’t hear much of what he was saying but I did hear him shout:

  Shoot if you must this old grey head

  But spare my tablecloth she said.

  Then the police arrived and began clearing a path for the Governor-General’s Rolls and I persuaded Julian to come in and close the window.

  By now he was in a mood for Anzac celebrations and we followed the crowd up to the cenotaph and listened to the speeches and sang the hymns. After the service we wandered about in the Domain. Julian kept chanting Gallipoli, EI Alamein, Minqar Qaim, Tobruk, Cassino and all the other places the Governor-General had talked about in his speech until I got sick of hearing them and I turned up my transistor to drown him out. He wandered away from me across the football fields and kept frightening a flock of seagulls into the air every time they came down. When he came back to where I was sitting he was quiet and rather solemn. We walked on and it was then we came to the place where the workmen are putting in the statue and right on that spot Julian stopped and stared in front of him and began slowly waving one arm up and down at his side. I asked him what was the matter and he said quick come and have a look at this and he ran down the slope and lay flat on his stomach on one of those park benches that have no backs and began flapping his arms. When I got down to the bench he asked me did his arms look anything like a bird’s wings. I said no but when he asked me why I couldn’t think of the answer. Then he turned over on his back and began flapping his arms again and asked me did they look anything like a bird’s wings now. At first I said no but when I looked properly I had to admit they did. His forearms were moving up and down almost parallel with his body and the part of his arms from the shoulders to the elbows stayed out at right angles from him. So I said yes they did look more like a bird’s wings now because a bird’s wings bent forward to the elbows and then back along the body and that was why his arms hadn’t looked like wings when he lay on his stomach. As soon as I said that he jumped up and kissed me on both cheeks and said I was a bright girl, I had seen the point, he would have to fly upside down.