Going West

by Gee, Maurice

  Jack shivers. Not just story. He seems to see the dwarf in himself, and feel the track, the metal itch, of a fastener from his forehead to his shrunken penis. He lets Fiona talk on – go for nouns and verbs and bend them crooked. She’ll get there; arrive at a place she’ll recognize; she will find out what to do. He thinks she may recognize the dwarf and come to like him. Look how he’s shaken up her comfortable life. He thinks perhaps she’ll start to look for unsuspected things in herself. Unzip herself.

  And isn’t that what he is doing too? His retirement work? Pulling himself open from his brainbox to the soles of his feet and finding out what’s hidden by the pink exterior.

  Did Rex do something like that, out in his boat?

  Jack has given himself an added task. It is strange. Unwelcome.

  He had thought he knew the dwarf in Rex already.

  Notebook: 11

  Moa Park. Lila’s birthday, 1964. How did I get there?

  There’s a long middle journey and few large events on the way. My father used to tell me: ‘The happy man lives in the Land of Steady Habits.’ I came to believe in the wisdom of this. (For many years I thought he had invented the name but found out it belonged to Connecticut, where moral rectitude was bred in the bone.) I tried to turn my marriage into that place. Safety lay there. I made a little world like Rex’s one that I’ve called ‘Petley’. The difference is that his imagination was set free, the place generated poetry, while I, in my Land of Steady Habits, wrapped myself so tightly up that no light was able to escape. I was free from pain and danger and believed that Harry and David and Jill, locked up with me there, were also free.

  This is not my story. I won’t describe how I struggled out – part way out, there’s a claw fixed in my ankle yet – but at those points along the way where I intersected with Rex I’ll indicate what my position was – and that way of putting it gives a good idea of Jack Skeat in 1964.

  My place at the picnic was outside. I did not want to be there. I did not want to be in Auckland, which had become dangerous; and I was not surprised that it spawned this fry of Petleys. They had crawled up from the mud; they had webbed feet and a slimy skin and were from mouth to anus a simple tube, ingesting, excreting, non-stop. (The only children I could accept were my own.) There were – there must have been – twenty grandchildren there. Of Lila and Les’s eight only Tweet (and Joy) had failed to multiply.

  I was welcome. Lila kissed me and Les pumped my forearm as though trying to dislocate my elbow. Melva, a widowed mother of five – her husband, Scahill, had been knocked off his bike, fatally this time – hugged me as though I were a God-sent replacement.

  I was more welcome at Moa Park than in my mother’s house.

  *

  There, again, at the door, she offered me her cheek while her body arched away from contact. She was selling the property and had written to say that I might have ‘some memento of your father if you wish’. She would send it down – but I, with my instinct for neatness, had travelled up for a final look at the house, for a final sleep in my narrow bed. Even before she opened the door I began to wish I hadn’t come.

  My bedroom, stripped of all sign of me except the bed, drove me into a corner, where I wanted to sit down and hide my head. I had no place to occupy and felt reduced, as though by some process of skinning and drying. I had slept in the room on my visit with Harry -and she in a spare room, miles away – but had not been concerned with numbering then, or weighing parts.

  ‘When you’ve washed I’ll take you to your father’s study.’

  One washed after travelling, it was ordained. In the bathroom a ball of soap made from ends and slivers seemed to hold the meaning of my mother’s life – but not my own. It was no better in my father’s study. The room had not been used since his death. She had not turned it into a shrine, nothing like that, but had simply closed the door and turned the key. Now there was a grating in the lock and she had to rise a little on her toes to force it open. Daylight rinsed out the room but a puff of dead air in my mouth made me want to clear my throat and spit.

  She crossed to the windows and opened the curtains. ‘There’s very little here, but take what you want.’ She horrified me – horrifies me still. In any room that has not been entered for twenty years one cannot simply walk in and pull the curtains back and walk out again without looking round, without turning the head, however briefly, towards the desk or chair or the pictures on the walls. It’s inhuman. I realized how badly my mother had been damaged and wanted my dry father to explain. But he could not – cannot. So I’ll add ‘hurt’. There must have been hurt as well as damage.

  She left me and went to some other part of the house and I stood like a lost boy in the room where my father had smoked his pipe and delivered his cramped-up homilies. The ebony desk, with its leather surface mummified and lifting at the edges, the wooden chair angled to the right, holding its high arms in a shrug, the glass bookcases empty of books – empty of the bones, polished stones, trophies, souvenirs, the old postcards and letters, the ashtrays and paper-weights other non-book-reading men might have filled them with – made me shiver. Could my father’s life have been so empty? How could one die and leave only a dead room behind? A dead wife?

  I hunted for his pipes as though I might save Walter Skeat with them. They lay in the top left hand drawer, stems criss-crossed like Pick-up-sticks. Their bowls were narrow and scraped clean, no trace of ash, their mouthpieces discoloured from sucking. One had teeth marks bitten in. Perhaps it was a cheaper pipe – or had he clamped his teeth in a moment of high feeling? All were straight stemmed and wooden bowled: no eccentricity in material or shape. Strong emotion seemed unlikely too. He had, I recalled, smoked a mild blend. A leather pouch, with click-buttons instead of a zip, lay at the back of the drawer. I felt a wad of tobacco in the corner and thought perhaps a little of its aroma would be kept, but when I emptied it on my palm it was lifeless – no moisture, no colour, no smell. I closed the drawer. If my father had left false teeth, a hair-piece, an appendix in a bottle, I would have taken them. But it seemed to me that his pipes were instruments for jabbing at life with and keeping it at bay.

  The pictures on the walls: two of them, framed photographs of coaches and horse teams and ladies in Merry Widow hats being helped by coachmen up the steps. He had probably bought them at a junk shop or snaffled them when some tourist office was closed, because a room must have something hanging on the walls. Snaffled – one of his rare joky words. A word might be all I would find to carry away.

  I found his Gladstone bag in a cupboard by the bookshelves. The leather at the hinges creaked and split as I forced it open, releasing an aroma the tobacco had lacked. Inside were three books held in a perished rubber band. They surprised me: two by John Buchan, one by Sapper. My father, to my knowledge, only read the newspaper. I had brought home books by Buchan and Sapper – and found their English heroes less convincing than Buck Duane and Brazos Keene. Dad, although he had picked them up – it was part of his job to know what his son was reading – had only tapped their covers and nodded his head. He recognized them as British stuff but showed no interest in reading them. Years later he was, it seemed, a fan of Bulldog Drummond and Richard Hannay – or had he brought the books home for me? I rejected that. He had never brought me anything except at the proper times, why should he have started on the day of his death? I looked at them to see if they might be first editions and came across the name ‘G. Feist’ written on the fly leaf. My father had a friend he borrowed from! It was like learning that he jumped from moving trains. Or perhaps – yes, yes – he had bought them, like the pictures, in a second-hand shop. The mystery was why they were alone in his bag. But wouldn’t my mother have sent his business papers to his office?

  I put them back. I carried off the only other book in the room, a Webster’s International Dictionary, 1907, and I have it still, six kilograms – no, thirteen pounds as it was my father’s. When I got it home I discovered how he passed his time, sitting i
n his study smoking his pipe. He read the dictionary and marked words on a scale of plus to minus five. There’s nothing systematic in his progress, he didn’t start at ‘aam’ and work on through – never graded aam at all in fact – but opened the pages at random and marked the words that struck him, that’s my guess. It was more than a game. Why does ‘pawky’ earn plus five? And why ‘love’ minus two? With love perhaps he was being clever. But why give cunning and slyness such high marks? Unless he marked the word for its sound? He marked for sound now and then. ‘Paxwax’ on the same page gets plus one. But plus five (+5) is excessive for pawky. Remember that my father was a moralist.

  Here are some of his words, in no order, pp.852–3: lily-livered, —3; light-footed, +5; ligustrin, −2; Lilliputian, −3; like-minded, —5 +3; lightsome, +3; likerous —3; liliaceous, +5.

  I can’t work this out. Is it a commentary or was he trying to write his life? Now and then he underlined a particular meaning. For ‘Lilliputian’ it is not ‘the diminutive race described in Swift’ he is marking but ‘a person or thing of very small size’. For ‘liliaceous’ it’s ‘like the blossom of a lily in general form’. And for ‘ligustrin’ it’s not the chemical substance that gets the mark but the ‘bitter principle’ it’s extracted from. There are too many contradictions, yet my father was not one to be pulled in opposing ways. If he gave 'like-minded’ both plus three and minus five he must have been applying it to more than one person – correction, one couple or company. (One has to be alert.) Perhaps he meant himself and my mother, then himself and me. But who was ‘lily-livered’, and why? ‘Lilliputian’, ‘lightsome’ – which is used of women, isn’t it? – and ‘likerous’? Perhaps he marked likerous for sound.

  Words that have two marks make it almost certain that he had people in mind, or situations. As for ‘bitter principle’, it must apply to his marriage. ‘Principle’ (p.1138); the meaning ‘fundamental substance or energy’ is the one underlined. He marks it twice, plus and minus five.

  ‘Light-footed’ makes me glad. He must have loved his Friday jump from the moving train.

  I learned none of this on my visit. I left the Webster’s lying on the floor beside my bag and walked around the section, looked in the summer house, looked in the toolshed, where I found the tools thinner in the blade but sharp and clean. My mother had hired a man to keep the section straight, but fired (dismissed) him when he left the spade out overnight. She used schoolboys after that and found them ‘more amenable and cheaper’.

  I said to her at dinner: ‘Who was G. Feist?’

  ‘It’s not a name I know.’

  ‘It’s written on some books in his Gladstone bag.’

  ‘I saw them. They’re not books I had any interest in.’

  ‘What went wrong between you and Dad?’ My voice had a starved sound and seemed to plead rather than question.

  She stopped her small-mouthed chewing, looked at me with still eyes, laid down her knife and fork; she swallowed. She patted her dry mouth with a serviette.

  ‘You have no licence to ask me questions.’

  Anger would have pleased me. I had thought there might be outrage or denial. But my mother informed me that I had no licence. She did not say I had no right. It was not even a principle. She picked up her knife and fork and went on with her meal. When I think of it I wonder why I did not take her by the shoulders and try to shake some natural feeling into her. I can see her head flinging back and forth, out of time. Or I could have jumped up from the table and left the house. A son require a licence! And she, the wife, the mother, she hears for the first time the question that splits her open and shows her huge sick part and all she does is dab her lips and fork a piece of carrot into her mouth. But perhaps she had another room in her head, behind her face, where she sat, like my father in his study, and asked the question, answered it – and wished herself dead? She could not be confined to this woman at the table.

  ‘More water?’ Poured some in my glass.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She offered, perhaps, an apology? I cannot say. With my mother I’m not able to trust myself. All I can say is I had to put my serviette (must say table napkin) to my eyes. In a little while I offered to stay in Auckland and help her shift but she said she had hired a firm for that and I must go on Sunday as I’d planned; and I agreed, I must go home.

  Getting through Sunday was difficult. I walked into Loomis and bought a paper and read it on the back lawn, avoiding the summer-house. Distantly I heard the front door bell but thought it must be someone come to talk about the shift. I wasn’t prepared for Rex when he appeared round the side of the house.

  ‘Gidday, Skeatsie.’ How wrong the greeting sounded. It belonged in other places, other times.

  ‘Rex. Who told you I was here?’

  ‘Sniffed you out. You can’t come to Loomis and keep away from me.’

  He was wearing shorts and sandals and an unbuttoned shirt. The sun had been at him, colouring and oiling his long muscles and solid joints. He looked as if he could pick me up and carry me away under his arm. He squatted and shook hands and kept a little springing in his knees. Dulcie had seen me walking home with my paper, so Rex had jumped in his car and come to get me. It was Lila’s birthday and they were all at Moa Park having a picnic.

  ‘No –’

  ‘Mum’d never forgive you. She’s fifty-five. Hey, the old man’s sixty-three, how about that?’

  ‘No, I can’t.’

  ‘I cleared it with your old lady. She’s OK.’ He widened his eyes. ‘She calls me Mr Petley. It’s like we’ve never met.’

  ‘No one’s met my mother.’ Harry was the only other one I would say that to. I folded the paper and took it inside, I told her I would be home by mid-afternoon (did I say ‘home’?), and I drove with Rex to Moa Park. And there they were, as he had promised; more Petleys than I could handle.

  ‘Man, can we breed,’ standing by the car. A girl in a blue pinafore dress ran to him and he hoisted her, looped her in his arms, glued her for a moment to his front, then spun her to face me in two hands. ‘This one’s mine. Fiona. Fee.’

  I saw nothing of Petley, nothing of Rex; she was smooth and glossy and delicately made. She was a scaled-down Alice and I saw why she would run from the barefoot Petleys, in her party dress, in her white shoes. ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘I had to get Jack. Say hallo to Jack. He’s my ole mate.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have.’

  ‘Hallo, Fiona.’

  The girl would not answer, she squirmed to turn around, she wanted him. He put her down and she leaned into his waist and hooked her fingers in the band of his shorts.

  ‘Have they been ganging up on you? Tell me which ones and I’ll dong some heads.’ But he freed himself and took me to Lila and flopped down on his elbow at her side. He wasn’t at ease – hard in his movements, grating in his words, with a kind of brutal defensiveness. He was fleshy and loud – made, made-up, for an occasion.

  I gave Lila my news – dressed up my life for her, told her how settled and contented I was and how I went ahead at my work. None of it lies. Melva, Dulcie, Austin, Gareth, Verna were all there (Tweet was overseas), with two husbands and two wives and an offspring horde. The adults sat on rugs under the trees, drinking beer, while the children homed in, or went shooting out, the older ones to the creek and the kiosk, the younger to the nearby swings and slides. They seemed to come back by affective attraction, collect their pats and kisses, clutch their lollies and cherry cake, hold up a nose to be wiped, and then be repelled by an adult force (benign). A diagram of their shooting off would be like a batsman’s century. The getting up and sitting down, the panting in and screeching out, the sliding of faces across my vision, the rolling on to an elbow and rolling back, the gobbling of lumps of cake and the slap and splash of beer and sentences half finished and pet names called out, made me dizzy. I did not know what was going on. The hugs, the ruffled hair; mock insult, friendly punch; the filled nappie by the birthday ham; re
d throat, floppy breast, missing pre-molar; and Les and Lila like the hub of a wheel, Les and Lila radiating. This was a family all right, but I longed for the quietness and stillness of mine.

  Lila confused me; and disappointed, even as I sat admiring her. Once she had made Plasticine maidens with plaited hair; had cried for lost Lilas on the bridge. Now here she was red-faced and meaty-armed, screaming with laughter as Les amused a baby with his false teeth. When the child got them in its fist and dragged them dripping from his mouth, she fell over backwards, delight had so exhausted her.

  Rex became easier. He was quick-eyed and didn’t miss a thing, and although he didn’t laugh he grinned. He winked at me. We took the child, Fiona, to the seesaws and I asked him what he was writing. She sat on one end and he levered her up and sat on the other, kept the movement going, up and down, elastic-legged. ‘Nothing much. Words are getting bloody hard to find.’

  ‘I thought it got easier the older you got.’

  ‘Bad verse is easy. Always was.’

  ‘Higher, Daddy,’ Fiona cried.

  He made the board bump on the tyre and nearly shot her over the handlebar. ‘Ow, ow,’ she cried. I lifted her down.

  ‘I hurt my thumbs.’ At eight she was too large for cuddling so he hoisted her on to his shoulders and massaged her thumbs and soon she stopped dropping tears in his hair and sat looking happily about as we walked along the river bank. He told me he was writing two poems, side by side, a domestic one – trying to be a husband – and a (he hesitates) ‘a kind of confessional thing’. He made no gloss on that. Neither was getting very far. ‘I don’t know, the real thing keeps sliding out of sight. I can’t seem to get hold of it. So I just write something to show I can still do it. “Something” comes out not too bad at times.’ (And of course there is a poem of that name, though I’m not sure it’s anything he referred to on that day. It has a lovely surface and is very popular but try and find out what it means and it slides away. It’s a clever piece of self-criticism, in my view.)