Going West

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘Go on, she can drive.’

  I stayed and ‘finished’ the children – David at the kitchen table, Jill in her high chair. I sobered myself up and put them to bed. I floured the lambs fry and laid it ready for the pan. Then I sat and waited, and they did not come. I stood on the front porch and listened for the car; imagined assaults and accidents. imagined them running away together, up and over the Rimutakas into the Wairarapa. Harry’s dislike was a pretence. My best friend had run off with my wife. I ran up to the gate and looked each way – and ran back to the phone and didn’t know who to call. My life was overturned. Then, seeing the peeled potatoes and the meat, I put stupidity aside. I sat in my chair and folded my fingers. I had better believe that Harry meant what she said or Rex would overrun me in my marriage and ruin it.

  I heard the car – a cheerful toot – and climbed to the road again. Harry, grinning, beautifully coloured-up and sharpened-up, came swinging from the garage in her small-woman stride. ‘Got it,’ she said, and gave me a hug. ‘We had to go to Naenae and then back to town.’

  Rex came from the garage. ‘By God she can drive.’ Fresh blood showed on his bandage. He held up his bag. ‘I’m not sure it’s worth it.’

  ‘Now I deserve a drink,’ Harry said. She poured a glass of sherry, while Rex lowered himself into a chair and nursed his hand.

  ‘Sore?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let me look. How did it happen?’

  ‘I had to grab this bastard by the collar -’

  ‘He tackled him. You should have been there, Jack. We were great.’

  I fetched scissors and a fresh bandage and doctored him while Harry sat complacently sipping sherry. His blind finger made me wince. The loss of the nail seemed a worse mutilation than the loss of two joints. I sponged away the leaking blood and freed the popped stitch, which made him hiss and stiffen his legs.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Go ahead. I deserve some pain.’

  ‘You’ll have to get a new stitch put in.’

  ‘Not tonight. Bandage it up.’

  ‘We had to chase him all the way to Naenae,’ Harry said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The man who took the bag.’

  ‘Pot-bellied bloke,’ Rex said.

  ‘We saw him getting into a taxi by De Bretts. He was halfway along the Hutt Road before I got close. We just thought we’d follow and stop him when he got out. But we lost him when the taxi turned up a street in Naenae. Then Rex saw him outside a house. He tackled him when he tried to run.’

  ‘Shit,’ Rex said as I wound the bandage on.

  ‘But the poems weren’t in the bag.’ I had never seen her so gleeful. ‘Only a pair of trousers and a shirt. He left the dirty clothes and the notebooks in the taxi.’

  ‘So you didn’t get them?’

  ‘Yes we did. We went back to town, to the taxi depot. They called up the driver and he’d put all the stuff in a rubbish tin by the station.’

  ‘Don’t tell me -’

  ‘Yes we did. I did. I even got his dirty underpants.’

  1 looked at her delighted face. ‘You’ll have to come more often, Rex. What was in the notebooks?’

  ‘Just some stuff.’

  ‘Worth going through rubbish tins for?’

  In fact they contained some of his best Loomis poems, as well as the first half dozen of the Work Songs – and Harry does not even get a dedication there. I handled the notebooks several years ago and found a greasy stain on the cover of one. Fish and chips from the rubbish tin? Nobody outside us three – two now – knows the story of that near loss. Though surely he kept his new poems in his head. I kept every line – every ‘Oh’ and exclamation mark – of First Fruits while I was putting it together. But there, I’m not a poet. Poets are forgetful. And ungenerous.

  I’ll ask Harry some time if she’d like to sell her story to the Elf. He’s intrigued by Work Songs – wrong about it too. ‘Plebeian sojourn’ – what a phrase. It needed no stepping down for Rex to go where his father had been all his working life. He did not take manual jobs and haul nets on a fishing boat to collect material for poems. He lived his life, he went his ways, out of complexities of need and his poetry rose from where he happened to be. ‘Poet’ though, that condition? – it’s too hard. His poetry, in some way, may have needed his behaviour. I’ll leave it to the Elf to sort that out, he’ll find a way (which will probably be wrong).

  ‘Ring Alice. Tell her you’re here,’ Harry said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I will.’ She had spare energy to use.

  ‘I’ll go somewhere else if you do.’

  ‘Keep out of it, Harry.’

  ‘Go and put the dinner on, is that what you mean? I hope you did some onions for the liver.’

  ‘If you’ve been going through rubbish tins shouldn’t you have a bath?’

  ‘Don’t start quarrelling over me,’ Rex said.

  ‘Whatever went wrong, I’m on her side. She’s got three children, don’t forget. And so have you.’

  ‘You think like you drive. We’re having a break. I haven’t said I’m not going back.’

  ‘So it’s your decision?’

  ‘It’s nobody’s decision. We’ll just let it turn out, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh ho, the lazy way. In the meantime you get drunk and lose your poems while she stays home and washes the naps.’

  ‘Jesus!’ he said. I felt sorry for him. ‘Have you got any Aspros?’ His face had gone grey and I think he was close to passing out. I was sorry for Harry too. Some buried part of her was jolted free and, it seemed to me, was hurting her. But she leaned sideways to see his face and went off to the bathroom and came back with Panadeine. ‘These are best. Don’t take them all.’

  ‘Lay off him, Harry.’

  ‘OK. I’ll get back to the kitchen where I belong.’ She smiled through the servery, hamming sweetness. ‘Call me if you need any more driving.’

  He stayed three nights with us and on the third Alice came knocking at our door. She seemed to me more beautiful than ever – more bones, interesting declivities, in her face. Knowledge in the place of satisfaction. She was, though, perfectly presented: not just any fisherman’s wife.

  ‘Is he here?’

  ‘Yes, he is. He’s out at the moment. But he’s here.’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  I showed her into the living-room, where Harry embraced her with great warmth. (I smelt Alice’s perfume on her cheeks that night.)

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He’s round at Rita Bullen’s, he shouldn’t be long. Put Alice’s bag in the bedroom, Jack.’

  I lugged it away – even when pursuing a runaway husband Alice was not one to travel light – but left it on the stripped bed, not the one Rex was sleeping in. I did not know exactly where I stood.

  A little of my story must find a place. I was entering the long middle portion of my life that can be described as prohibitive. I had been active morally; more ‘don’t than ‘don’t in the way I went about things. Nothing went wrong dramatically – fear began to creep in, that is all. I suppose it has to do with uncertainty, my long apprenticeship in drawing back. Arms at sides, feet together – there’s some certainty in that. One offers a cheek to be kissed. But a cheek alone is not enough. Nakedness must be offered too. Vulnerabilities must be exposed. And death is seen then, standing by at the side of love.

  It was more than I could handle. I became afraid. More and more I found myself taking care; and from this grew a Skeatian code of ‘don’t’. I went inside and closed a door behind me.

  This, with some propriety, becomes self-exposure. It is also an over-statement of the case. Harry still loved me. I became afraid that she would stop. Instead of trying harder – which probably wouldn’t have worked anyway – I did less and less, drew my arms in closer to my sides so that she would find nothing to take exception to. But there was no salvation there. She loved me a little less each day: when she found that I had started knott
ing my shoelaces double; when she heard me tell David to stop behaving like a four-year-old. He was four at the time. Her pleasure in seeing me come home drunk is not, as I have called it, obscure.

  Now here I was wanting to interfere in Rex’s marriage. I saw where his duty lay. He should go back to Auckland and take up his role, honour his contract, as husband and father. Yet I wanted him to be free. Loomis was my possession too, Loomis put a roundness on me, unpinched my mind. Harry was no enemy of it. I cannot untangle the knot, but I believe that creek and town and Petleys made it possible for me to come out and meet her now and then. Alice, though, was the enemy of Loomis in Rex. Nonsense, I argued with myself, there’s plenty of good verse gets written in the kitchen; the back garden; the marriage bed. There’s a chance that Alice will make him human and wash away the blood. But this, I saw, would diminish him. It would destroy him. Alice would break the artefact of his childhood and whatever Rex might write after that would have no animation, no privacy. He understood. That was why the fishing boat and the labouring jobs. It even explained his lopped-off finger.

  I calmed down, I smiled to myself (although I left the suitcase where it was). Rex knew the danger. Rex would not be hurt. He might go back with Alice, but would not go back in the way she wanted. He would stay married and stay free. I trusted him to keep Loomis safe – and approved of him, in the same breath, for carrying out his duties as a husband.

  But with beings as large and complicated as Alice and Rex one cannot stay in a fixed position. I was no sooner back in the living-room than Alice was dominant again. She would wash him in Persil and hang him out to dry.

  ‘I’ll look at the kids,’ I said; but closed the door softly after kissing them and went out the back door and up to the footpath and slid along underneath the trees to Upland Road. I whistled to drive my sneakiness away. Rex answered from the steps to Central Terrace. I put my fingers in my mouth and gave the ear-splitter we’d used up and down Loomis Creek. He echoed it, although without the shrillness I had achieved.

  ‘You were never any good at that.’

  ‘Wrong hand, Jack. Had to use my left.’

  ‘Alice is here.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He smiled calmly. ‘I didn’t think she’d be long.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Go home, I guess.’

  ‘You can stay with us as long as you like.’

  ‘Thanks. But I’ve got to go. I’ve been missing her.’

  ‘I suppose Harry must have rung her up.’

  He shook his head. ‘She knew where I was. She goes home to Daddy, I just head for Jack.’

  ‘Any time.’ I nearly wept with love. (It came and went, all my life, along with other feelings – but never so strongly as this.)

  ‘It lasts fifteen rounds, Jack. This is just round two.’

  Alice stood up when we came in. They looked at each other without smiling. Then she raised her arms and they embraced. The meeting could not help seeming rather badly acted.

  ‘Sneaky sod,’ Harry said to me in the kitchen. She was pleased with me again. Our contest over Rex and Alice’s marriage was one of the things that brought us together. We made tea and took it in and went off to bed. I woke hours later to hear them making love. The duet was more restrained that night. Perhaps they were just getting older.

  He must have had to keep his finger out of the way.

  Three Visitors and a Dwarf

  There is no pain, only discomfort, which stops when they take the catheter out. Then it’s just a holiday, with visits from his wife.

  She’s fascinated by the technology: a resectoscope inserted through the penis, the spongy collar round the urethra trimmed with a cutting current. It must take such fine strokes, like shading in the hidden parts of a flower.

  Jack is pleased that he interests her. There’s a sparkle in Harry, a flick of eye and finger, that he has not seen for years. He does not mind being weakened if it restores her. He wonders if anyone has told her that when they resume ‘marital relations’ his performance will be ‘only marginally impaired’. Why have all his doctors, here and in Wellington, told him that without being asked? He can’t remember showing anxiety. And Harry will not be anxious, merely interested, in her way. Orgasm without ejaculation. Jack will have a scientific value.

  Although his sexual parts are interfered with he thinks very little about sex. He tries not to think about micturition, although it comes frequently to mind. Blood in the toilet bowl unsettles him. He does not like the mixing of vital and waste fluids. Some essential barrier must be thinned. What if a rupture takes place, an appalling inrush …? He moves with care, starts nothing suddenly.

  Harry is fascinated by the elderly progress of his hand to his water glass. ‘You’re like one of those South American sloths.’

  He sees himself hanging upside down from a branch. How pleasant it would be to have one’s natural movements proceed at that pace. Thought, care, anxiety slowed down? Curiosity creeping like treacle. What happened on that day – out in the boat – on the gulf …? How …? Why …? Answers lying motionless as one creeps slowly over them.

  ‘That boy across in the corner bed had a gangrenous appendix. He thought he was going to die.’

  ‘He looks fit enough from here.’

  ‘The old man next to him is dying. He’s going home this afternoon. He’s got marvellous hands.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Big long bones. They look as if they could hold the world.’

  ‘You’re not going to get religion in here?’

  ‘The chaplain left a pamphlet. See. A rose. They’ve got good symbols.’

  ‘Roses belong to everyone.’

  ‘The best things in life are free.’ He half sings it and laughs, which stabs him above his pubic bone. ‘That thing they scraped out of me looked like a rose. You should do anatomical drawings.’

  ‘I like subjects that stay still. Oh, I brought you …’ Slides into her bag and lifts out a bundle in a napkin. Unwraps it on the blanket. Broad bean pods, glossy, immature, each one knobbled like a spine. She cracks one open – how quick her fingers are – and shows him the tender beans in their beds of satin. ‘Hold out your hand.’ Thumbs them one by one on to his palm. He eats them like jelly beans. Sweet and bitter, they wash his mouth. They take all the stickiness out of his mind; and he loves his wife. He’s sharp and clean and definite.

  ‘How’s your work?’

  ‘Nearly done. A couple more days.’

  ‘You’ll be finished by the time I get home.’

  ‘It fitted in nicely. Jo’s going to be late, as usual.’

  ‘You should team up with someone else.’ Then thinks, No, you can’t just dump her like a sack of rubbish; and is pleased when Harry says, ‘I couldn’t do that. She needs me, Jack. It isn’t just work with her, you know.’

  ‘I know. It’s a problem. I guess we’ve got her for keeps.’

  She is pleased that he includes himself. Opens another bean pod. ‘Aren’t they beautiful. Like pearls.’

  ‘I grow good beans.’

  ‘You do. I’m sorry they hung weights on your penis.’

  ‘No, they didn’t.’ He laughs and hurts himself again. ‘The weights just held the water bag in place. I had a bag of water inflated …’ He explains and sees her sparkle at the cleverness. It makes him proud of his operation. He feels as though he’s done it himself.

  She puts the beans in his cabinet, drops the empty pods in the waste. ‘I went to see your mother.’ Grimaces. ‘Two hospitals in one day.’

  ‘How was she?’

  ‘A bit of paranoia coming back. Not for us. For the Asian nurses. She thinks she’s been kidnapped to Singapore. And the swords. God, the swords.’

  ‘What swords?’

  ‘They had a troop of Scottish dancers in. Can you imagine? All the old ladies in their chairs and these girls in kilts hopping over swords. Your mother thought they’d come to murder her. Who’s Georgina?’

  ‘Geor
gina?’

  ‘She thinks the woman in the other bed is someone called that. All the Scottish girls were her daughters, I think.’

  ‘Georgina’s daughters?’

  ‘You’d better get well, Jack. I don’t want to go back there again.’

  ‘No, don’t. Has Alice phoned?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about John Dobbie?’

  ‘Not him either.’

  He asks her to telephone John. For the first time in his life he wants a visit from the Elf.

  ‘I thought you couldn’t stand him.’

  ‘I can’t. But if he’s going to do the book I’d better see he gets it right. I’m not going to tell him everything.’ There’s very little he will say, in fact. ‘I might tell him how you saved the notebooks, remember?’

  ‘You’ll have to say he was running away from Alice. She won’t like that.’

  ‘It’s not her book.’

  ‘What does it matter, anyhow, that old stuff? No one’s going to sort that marriage out.’

  ‘I won’t say much.’

  ‘Let her be – what do they call it, dressed in white?’

  ‘His muse. She wasn’t that. Nor was Margot.’

  ‘Who cares? It’s nobody’s business any more.’ He’d better leave me out.’

  Jack gets out of bed, sloth-like, waits for a stab, and walks up the corridor and back with his wife. Her thin arm, hooked in his, holds him up. She smiles at him, enjoying his weakness and her strength. No one is going to sort out this marriage either – least of all him. And it’s definitely no one else’s business. The sister in her office thinks that they are Mr and Mrs Skeat passing by, but they’re a good deal more than that.

  Harry tucks him in and fills his water glass. She kisses him on the mouth and goes away. A flick of her skirt at the door, rubber steps in duet with the dinner trolley. Usually she kisses him on the forehead. Usually, when they walk, she goes along half a step in front – and sometimes makes a two-footed jump on to the kerb. Once it had embarrassed him. Now he hopes that she will jump, or take one of her long elastic steps, into the lift. She will go clickety-clack on the door to make it hurry.