by Gee, Maurice
‘No, me.’ I shrugged. ‘It’s not important. There’s other things I want to do.’
She asked what those might be and I could not answer. It was true I hungered for a way that I might follow with a sense of being right, but I glimpsed, I almost tasted, an adulteration there; of propriety, of comfortableness, of being safe, of being gratified. And I knew how much I had wanted to write good poems, how much I had wanted to recognize things and describe them; and I knew my inadequacy. I seemed crippled to myself. For a moment I talked nonsense to Lila Petley, using words I had earned no right to; and she was disappointed in me. My disappointment in myself – no, my sense of being bereaved, of having lost part of myself – overwhelmed me. I began to cry. So I was the mad one on the bridge and mine were now the cheeks that shone with tears.
Lila Petley knew how to handle it. She dropped her cigarette in the creek and put her arms around me and let me cry.
She must have comforted Rex in that way when he was a child. I had never had it (and I never had it again). I snivelled and sobbed and Lila put her mouth on my hair and rocked me and made soothing sounds. I wonder now how close she came to making love with me. My tears wet her breasts, her loose hair fell on my cheek -and she was naked underneath her nightie, and was naked in her feelings too. Love-making would have been a natural step; the planks would have made a lively bed. But I did not even think of it. I had no nature in me and I saw her as old. I moved away and she released her arms; perhaps it was the other way round. In any case, we stopped our touching. I wiped my face with my handkerchief, while she reached backwards for her tobacco and rolled a new cigarette.
‘Want one?’ She handed me the tin. I gave her my handkerchief to dry the wet patch I had left on her and then gave her my jacket, which she said thank you for and pulled on over her cotton nightie. ‘Warm,’ she said. ‘It’s funny finding other people warm.’
I dropped my flaming match into the creek. ‘I’m sorry I cried. It’s nothing to cry about.’
‘It must have been or you wouldn’t have.’
‘I don’t think I’ll set up goals any more.’
‘Be like Rex. Just recognize the place you’re going to.’
‘Where’s that?’ I must have sounded resentful to find him ahead of me again for she touched my arm and said, ‘Oh, Rex’s place. You’ll have to ask him. I don’t think it’s where you’d want to be.’ There’s nothing wrong, she seemed to say, in being Jack Skeat – as long as you recognize Jack Skeat. I tried to show her I had done that, by talking about my need to find a meaning and point a way; and Lila was polite, she listened and said, ‘I hope you do it, Jack.’
‘I will.’ But unconditional statements float in space and sometimes one doesn’t know which way is up and which is down. ‘You were crying too,’ I said, to catch hold of her and steady myself.
‘Yes.’
‘What about?’ I came right way up and seemed her equal in experience. ‘You said old tears.’
‘Oh, people dress things up. In words, you know. I was just crying because of things I haven’t done. It’s fairly common. It happens all the time.’
‘Out here? On the bridge?’
‘I spend a lot of time here. When everyone’s asleep. I love the bridge.’
My own attempts at remembering employ dreaming and passivity; evasions, side-stepping, a circular approach; and various tricks of association. But this is all by way of getting there. When one is inside and engaged, when one is lost, then violence and tenderness take over. You run towards your discovery, you punch with fist and knee, and you spring back with a cry of shame or disappointment or despair or fright. You ram holes in events, you twist and stretch and let them snap into wrinkled shapes. You knock bits off, you try to fix bits on, forcing matter into places already occupied. And you stare blindly into multicoloured light; or stare with a comprehending sight at figures with a bit of colour here and none there, with a shining cheekbone, with a crooked tooth, with a high turned shoulder, with a red wet eye – all denatured by your understanding. You are there. You’re central there. It’s your tooth that is crooked. It’s your eye that is wet. And that convincing cry of shame that meets the event, flashing back in time, is your own, and the edge of despair on it comes from your knowledge that you’ll never get away.
Then, of course, there is tenderness. Thank God for it. How could we go on if we were not tender to ourselves? We long to lift up the girl or boy, and wash his face for him and brush his hair, and send him out, propel him with a firm hand on his back towards the consummation that he missed; correct his mistake; bend his mind from error, from its shrinking and its over-eagerness, and help him be present and exact – and how one comes, all the time, on the fact of the matter standing in the way. But tenderness is not only wishful, tenderness is ointment for the wound. One spreads it on and soothes for a moment what soon goes back to being incurable. Momentary victories of love, as real as hand or eye or mouth.
Lila was tender to herself. Perhaps I was the agent for that. She was, I would guess, most often violent as she sat on the bridge while her family slept.
The facts of it are ordinary, I won’t go into them except to say that she was the girl who, in her eagerness for love, married a man overflowing and bursting with life who wanted only renewable daily gratifications. A common story. These women (these men too) travel down a long road. They stand and watch themselves going away. Motion is jerky, like a movie stopped at every tenth frame; and at every stop their size is reduced. Longing does not die, it never quite dies, but it can turn ugly or turn sour; can turn them into martyrs, drunks, bullies, invalids; into public figures; it can kill them early or prolong their lives. It drove Lila Petley to her bridge. She was lucky. The creek, flowing under, flowing on, answered some of her need.
She gave me her life as a present. There’s a magic element in this. And though it’s only seeming it will do, will more than do – it has lasted all my life. If I were forced to explain I’d say, she offered me herself like a quartered apple and she has been whole for me ever since. No fragmentation, no breaks. I fit her together easily, the unifying agents are her love and pain. Girl; wife; mother – and a fourth, unnameable; a fourth thing that she might have been.
All lives have this part. I generalize easily, moving from Lila Petley to that knowledge as though it’s the shortest of steps. I hear her common story and witness her common pain. Any one of the stilled frames will do to set an easy progress in motion that carries me to: That’s the way it is – as unstrained, as natural, as breathing. Girl in her school uniform, standing in front of the art shop window where her Plasticine model of a witch and her cat are on display; woman at her washtub, a bar of yellow soap in her hands, while her husband makes a crown of soapy froth on her hair; and now he’s drunk, ah yes, and now he’s been fighting, and he comes around the doorpost, out of the night, with a grin on his bloodstained mouth; and the children hug and kiss, and they cry and fight, and they get their measles and whooping cough, and they get their hidings – and it goes on, until Lila Petley is a woman on a bridge, crying in the night for the Lila that she might have been. This is not, remember, the whole of her, this small hours self. But it’s the whole of her while it lasts.
We smoked more cigarettes and she dropped a flaring match into the creek and we listened to the water to see if it had rhythm in its flow. She said that she could feel the cold on her bare soles.
‘What’s the time, Jack?’
I angled my watch into the light. ‘Half past two.’
‘Golly,’ she said, climbing to her feet.
My jacket stored her bloodwarmth. I crossed to the far side of the bridge as she went back. Our steps made a fractured bounce and threw us off balance and I heard her half bad-tempered laugh. She had had enough and wanted her bed, and so did I. I ran along the path by the swamp and padded in the white dust of the road and up the silent lawn by our shell drive – leapt a cannonball shrub – and let myself in at our back door.
‘John?’ My mother’s
voice from her room at the top of the stairs.
‘Yes.’
That was all. Her light went on as she looked at the time, and went off sharp. She had armed herself but would wait until morning to challenge me.
I lay in bed and held Lila Petley in my hands.
My mother too had a life like that. So did I. I shivered in my cold sheets at the knowledge.
Addendum: In one of Rex’s unpublished poems, unearthed by the Elf, a woman sits at midnight on a bridge. She smokes a cigarette and drops a lighted match into the water. The poem is called ‘Woman’ and it isn’t very good. It looks for a subject it can’t find. There’s a warp in it of half-formed accusations of betrayal.
Betrayal of whom? By whom?
The woman is alone. She wears a man’s jacket round her shoulders, which manages simply to be odd.
Going West
He’s aware that it’s wider now than a search for Rex. Many figures have a place in the tapestry. What they are up to he can’t tell. But it’s likely to stretch around the room; with Rex and Jack appearing all the time. Rex and Jack up to many tricks. Not all their tricks. Accuracy, strict inclusiveness, makes him yawn.
Jack is aware he wants to win. Flights of arrows, severed limbs; he will use his cunning and his strength. Charity and kindness may very well turn into weapons too. And how valuable will truth turn out to be? Truth, as a weapon, will change shape.
He takes a rest from it and finds that the ordinary day makes his tapestry fade. He’s grateful and wants never to go back. Harry works as long as the good light lasts, with her metronome head turning from her sample to her brush and back again. The shadow-less world on her page makes him sad.
‘It’s not like that, you know.’
‘Go away, can’t you see I’m busy.’
‘Take a rest. Come for a drive.’
‘No, Jack. Go and dig in the garden.’
He carries up toast and anchovies and a mug of instant soup for her lunch. With an ‘ooh’ of fright she lifts them further from her work. The tiniest mark will ruin it. He thinks of her, unfairly, as outside time, just a perfect eye and hand, inhuman. Her little smile and thank you do not bring her back. They could be for anyone.
Jack eats by himself in the kitchen. He goes upstairs and takes her plate and mug and washes up, and drives to Mt. Eden to visit his mother. Across the bridge, along by the marina, up the fly-over, down the motorway – he makes these passages by preposition, relating himself by a new angle to each new world – and comes to the back of the mountain and the women sitting round the room. He passes into it through a valve and is assailed by odours of leakage and decay. He’s ready for them, pushes them aside, and smiles toothily as he steps up to his mother. She is ready too, how quick she is for a woman whose mind is gone, and she draws away from his hand.
‘So it is the devil. I thought it was the devil coming.’
‘No Mum, it’s me. It’s John.’
‘Don’t touch me. You’ve got poison on your hands.’
‘No, see, they’re clean. Clean fingernails. I brought some Eccles cakes for you.’
‘So you want to poison me with Eccles cakes now.’
‘I don’t want to poison you, Mum.’
Why does he keep on trying? His cakes and fruit and flowers have been sprayed, injected, dusted, with Flytox and Slug’em. There are pellets of strychnine thumb-pressed into his scones to look like dates. Rat poison, arsenic: her poisons are traditional. She covers her mouth so he cannot slip them on her tongue.
‘Harry sends her love, Mum.’
‘Did she bake those? Take them back and make her eat them.’
‘I bought them at a shop in Takapuna.’
‘How much do you pay them to poison me?’
He has read enough on paranoia in the aged to know that the family, the children – a son will do if no daughters are available – are the ones usually chosen as the paranoid pseudo-community; in other words, the plotters. Sometimes he thinks hatred, fear, courage, counter-attack, are a game she plays; but knows in his heart that they are real. He’s impressed by her dignity. He sometimes feels that when she dies the police will find arsenic hidden in his house. But he wants to love her, and now and then he comes close to it. The emotion gets lost in sentimentality. Would he turn her into a little smiling white-haired lady waiting to die? ‘Eccles cakes. How kind you are to me.’ He doesn’t want it. But he doesn’t want this accuser either. Tall in her chair. Strong in her arms. See the way hatred makes her eyes clear.
‘I’ll put them in your room.’ He always does that. The nurses say she eats them greedily, not knowing any longer who they come from.
The corridors seem rubberized, her room is like a rubberized extension. He puts the cakes on the cabinet by her bed. Last week’s chrysanthemums stand in pale good health beside the ragged trio, Roget, Concise Oxford, Pears (1965), held in lacquered bookends from her own mother’s house. Although she never opens them all she wants to know is held in there. She wants plain information and plain words. He doesn’t ask where her bible has gone.
Jack straightens the coverlet on her bed. He sniffs the room. She’s sometimes incontinent, after her stroke – that little stroke that warns of a bigger one (the stone-breaker’s hammer poised above her head) – and yes, the smell underlies floor-polish, vase-water, laundry soap from down the corridor. Her father and mother, in oval wooden frames, seem to smell it too; and Jack says, ‘It’ll do you bloody good’; then remembers that they lived old, and died on rubber sheets in a home. He draws his breath in sharply. Will it happen to him? Is loss of bladder and bowel control locked in his genes?
Standing by her bed, he runs through his escape plan. When the time comes, when the signal is unmistakable – he’s unsure of what it will be – he’ll say goodbye to Harry (she will outlive him not just because women do, or because she is six years younger, but because her appetite for full shares and her belief in justice are stronger than his) – say goodbye and kiss her, put forty years into a simple kiss, and say he’s driving north for a break, but she’ll see the south in his eyes and will understand. Not stop him though. That, by then, will be the agreement. He’ll go down the island at a careful pace and cross on the ferry from Wellington (a look at old haunts there, will that be a part of it?). In Picton he’ll turn west; follow the curving tarseal, purr up the saddles, and in the Graham Valley he’ll wait until no cars are in sight, and make his brave and sneaky left-hand turn into the pines; drive on needles on the forest roads; then on tracks, with grass and gorse and bracken scouring the chassis; and stop by the little cress-choked stream (have a nibble of cress) at the foot of Mt. Duppa.
He will park the car carefully. It is Harry’s now. Up he’ll go on the zigzag track, and there’ll be last pleasures all the way – of limestone, moss, honeydew, bush robin; the pleasure of putting one foot before the other, professionally; of touching the old, damp, indifferent trees; of sucking a last barley sugar and drinking from his water-bottle filled at the last stream. He comes to the top. Huge land. Huge sky. The bare-headed mountain welcomes him, and although it is only three thousand feet it’s his Everest, climbed solo and without oxygen.
There’s a little basin with a grass floor in the boulders. Standing in it, he can see the long wooded ridge to the Doubles and the Dun. South and east the Richmond Range, Richmond and Fishtail, with the Kaikouras rising behind. And north and east the Pelorus, the Rai Valley and the Sounds. Swing west – the Arthur Range, the Owen, with the sea making bites into the land. Jack completes the circle. When he lies down the rocks lean inwards and close it off; angled blocks, warm in the sun.
He found the place ten years ago with Harry. They ate their lunch and dozed for an hour, and when he woke, full of life and drifting easily, he said to her, ‘This would be a good place to die.’ ‘Shhh,’ she said, and touched his mouth with her forefinger; dozed again.
Jack Skeat does not abandon discoveries.
He will put his daypack on the grass. He’ll
sit on a boulder and watch the sun go down. He’ll eat, keep it simple, bread and cheese (Esrom though, his favourite) and olives, and perhaps one slice of smoked salmon, and drink the last of his water, or maybe just a sip of white wine, and then he’ll relieve himself in the trees because he doesn’t want to make a mess in his sleeping bag. He’ll tidy up. He’ll take his boots off. (What about his socks? Should he save some water and wash his feet?) Whatever his last thoughts are he’ll think those. Then he’ll gulp his terminal cocktail, a single swallow, ‘Skol!’, and climb into his bag and zip himself up to the chin. He’ll keep his eyes open and watch the stars. Presently Jack Skeat will die.
It’s most attractive, but he can shoot it full of holes. There are moral ones, and medical, and even aesthetic. To begin with, who will find him? It might be a child. Jack sees him – her? – running eagerly on the mountain top, full of achievement, mind open wide; and there he is, corpse in a sleeping bag. He hears her screaming, sees a wound go slashing across … Or, if that’s too much of a chance, and too much terror, just to spoil someone’s day, mark with death someone’s happy climb, he does not want that. A note left at the car, under the wiper like a parking ticket … but suppose some fit young man … and runs up the mountain … helicopters him, they pump him out …
Being found, being dragged back, these are problems, clearly. Some deep cave is called for, where he’ll never be found. But caves are not to his taste. He wants a hilltop and the sky; and he has considered the hills above Ngaio in Wellington, along from the television mast. Lie in a sleeping bag and drink his cocktail there, with the city on one side and the Ohariu Valley rolling away – sheep and horses grazing and magpies chortling in the dusk. Some early morning whisper-jet pilot will be the one … Flight ZK14 to Control … a body on the hills west of Kaukau … There’s a nice impersonality in that. No child will scream.
But magpies, won’t they peck out his dead eyes? They’ll shred his lips and ear lobes before the pilot sees. And wild pigs on Mt. Duppa … He cannot think of it. And then there is not being found. If no one comes up that road and he lies for weeks … Leave a letter with his lawyer, to be opened at a specified time? Complications!