by Gee, Maurice
We met Les coming out of the lavatory. ‘I used to be a bloody sluicing hose, now I drip like a tap.’
Fiona bent forward and looked at Rex upside down. He evaded her by crossing his eyes, then pulling her forward and flipping her on to her feet. That got them past Les. She climbed Rex to have it done again.
‘She’s Alice’s proxy,’ he said as she ran about, but I saw how he loved the girl. He told me he had taken a job as a proof reader at the Star, not for the money, there was no shortage of that now that Celia Pittaway had died (the Elf will no doubt tell the tale of that complicated inheritance), but because he had to have some reason for being with people. He could easily go bush, he said, even though he knew that by himself he would go mad. I was unused to confession from Rex and wanted to pat him on the shoulder. I was embarrassed by the affection I felt, and I said, You’ll never go mad while you’ve got a safety valve.’ I meant his poetry. ‘I’m the one who’ll end up in Carrington.’ Madness in Rex would be a breaking out, it would end in expression and leave him clean, himself again – if it came at all – while in me … Why was I thinking of madness for me? Why the image of dark branches turning towards a centre and tangling about some pale thing there?
‘You all right, Skeatsie?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t look so hot.’
‘I’m having a hard weekend with my mother.’
He asked about Harry and the children and I told him, told him evenly, and pulled myself together. I recovered my certainties.
‘You still don’t want to teach the world how to behave?’
‘Not any more. I just want to keep my family safe.’
‘What from? Jesus, stupid question. I don’t know how anyone gets through a single day.’
I knew. One gets through by vigilance, care, foresight, knowledge, rules. Neither of us, on that day, mentioned love, although we felt, I believe, an odd sort of love for one another.
He said, ‘Look at her’ – Fiona, fifty yards ahead, watching cousins paddling canoes in a side creek – ‘one day something’s going to pick her up and break her in half, and what do we do?’ He meant ‘I’ not ‘we’. There was no one he could bowl down a flight of steps. He did not mention love but loved the girl.
We reached the side creek and I saw how it was that Petleys drowned: four children in two canoes, the youngest no more than six years old, rocking, splashing, barging, in muddy water ten feet deep even at half tide, and no adults anywhere in sight.
Fiona looked at Rex appealingly. ‘You want a ride? Get your shoes and dress off.’ She could not do that. She wanted Rex to order the other children out and let her paddle by herself.
‘They won’t bite.’
‘Daddy, pie-ease.’ She Aliced him and he gave way.
‘Who do they belong to?’ he shouted at the children.
‘Mine. My father,’ one of the girls said.
‘Well, bring ‘em in. I’m going to have a turn.’
‘We’re using them,’ said the older boy.
‘Quit answering back, Scahill, bring ‘em in.’
But these were Petleys, these were tough kids.
‘Come and get us.’
‘Chuck Fee-only in, see if she floats.’
‘Cheeky young buggers,’ Rex grinned. ‘Want a ride, Jack?’
‘Not me.’
He fished in his back pocket and pulled out a pound note. ‘Here you are, five bob each. I’ll hire them for half an hour.’
The children talked that over, safe in mid-creek, and it was the older boy who persuaded them. ‘Only half an hour,’ said the girl who owned the canoes. ‘And don’t lose the paddles or we’ll bash her.’
‘Button your lip.’ He gave her the pound note and the older boy yelled at them as they ran to the kiosk: ‘Five bob of that’s mine. You save it, Charlene.’ He was torn between his instinct to be where the money was and his need to see what Rex would do.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Clear out, we don’t want you.’
‘Are you going down the creek?’
‘Yep, and you can’t come, so don’t ask. Get in, Fee. Don’t mind your dress. That one’s yours, Jack.’
‘It’s covered in mud.’
‘You didn’t use to mind mud. Get your shoes off. Roll up your trousers.’
He had a hard sparkle in his eyes. It was not Fiona’s ride any more, it was his and mine. The boy touched my arm. ‘I’ll come in yours. I can paddle so you won’t get wet.’ He was, I guessed, Melva’s oldest – the child in the pushchair, clutching for balance with his hands – but I asked his name and he answered, ‘Tod.’ He had a bit of young Rex in him – less height, but the same skinny, knobble-jointed limbs; less openness in his face, and a lightness in his skull bones compared with Rex’s squared-off block; but a little of that innocence that made one want, and not want, to hurt.
‘All right. Jump in.’ I took off my shoes and rolled up my trousers. Rex had his canoe half in the water, with Fiona in front. He climbed in and pushed off from the bank, and frowned when he looked back and saw Tod in mine.
‘I don’t want to hear you open your mouth.’
‘Yes,’ Tod said. I took the paddle from him and nosed out of the side creek and set off downriver. He seemed content to sit in the cockpit and stay out of sight. Rex paddled with hungry sweeps. He knew where he wanted to go. But I did not want too much of recapturing. Boys in canoes on the muddy creek, between the mangroves, racing each other to the next bend – that was then, we were grown up now; and what’s more I had a wet behind. Soon, though, I began to enjoy myself. The banks of mud rose with a beautiful curve from the water. They were pocked with crab holes in which the flick of withdrawal showed, swifter than the blink of an eye. If you looked ahead, along the curve, below the mangrove jungle, you were riding between glossy limbs, woman thighs. I wonder if Rex felt it too; and if we’d felt it all those years ago in our tin canoes.
‘Your uncle and I came down here when we were boys,’ I said to Tod.
‘Yes,’ he answered; a clipped sound. He had no interest in me but enjoyed himself in his own way, perhaps with some fantasy of Redskins in canoes, if boys still went for that sort of thing.
The water was khaki-green, as thick as serge. I paddled faster to catch up with Rex, who took it as a challenge and tried to stay ahead. I only caught him in the end because Tod knelt and sculled with his hands. I handed him the paddle then and slumped forward, panting, and Rex said mockingly, ‘You’re not fit, Skeatsie.’ His chopped-off finger shone like a blind eye. How different he was from me in spite of what we shared. Our canoes turned slowly, touching bows.
‘Up there,’ Fiona said, pointing at the mouth of a side creek.
‘No, down. It opens out. You might see the sea.’
I wondered if he remembered that the way she had pointed narrowed into the fresh-water creek where Joy had drowned. We paddled on but the sea was further off than he had thought, so he ran the bow of his canoe on to a mudbank and let Fiona climb out. She pulled off her shoes and dress – no reluctance now – and climbed in her singlet and pants (a patch of muddy water on the seat) up the bank to the top and stood six feet taller than us, which pleased her tremendously. ‘There’s miles and miles of it,’ she screeched. ‘I can feel crabs with my toes.’ They did not frighten her. ‘I’m down to my knees.’
‘I’m going too,’ Tod said, and gave me the paddle. Fiona pelted him with mud as he glogged up the bank – and what came next? Mud wrestling until they were coated from head to foot and only their eyes and teeth flashed out. Then they made mud chutes and slid down the bank into the water, while Rex and I watched from the canoes.
‘Head first,’ he called to Fiona. He was straddling the stern of his canoe, legs in the water, bow up high. ‘Not you,’ at Tod, ‘her first’; and down the chute she came, slick as an eel, and plunged out of sight with a kick of her feet, and climbed up his leg on the far side of the canoe.
‘I’m going to try
that. Coming, Skeatsie?’
‘No thanks.’ I held his canoe and back-paddled with my hand against the tide and watched him climb and slide and wear his chute deeper; come out with sopping shorts and scramble up four-footed, racing Fiona. The boy, although he slid too, might as well not have been there.
‘These crabs are cutting me to bits,’ he yelled, and showed his chest and belly marked with vertical red lines. Fiona was scratched too. She raised her singlet and showed him. I tried to persuade them to stop, but they were drunk with it and kept on climbing and sliding, until I started to be afraid the girl would not surface in the water.
‘Cut it out, Rex, you’re going to drown her.’
He took no fright but waited for her to come up: ‘OK chicken, that’s enough.’
‘One more.’
‘Only one. Your mother’s going to kill me for those scratches.’
‘She’s exhausted, Rex.’
‘Sure, but at least she’s had some fun.’
He pulled the canoe to the bank and helped her in. She flopped, she was drunk with sun and mud and being submerged. Rex looked at her anxiously.
‘We’ll go home, eh?’
‘Yes.’ She would have lain down and slept if she had not been in the canoe.
Tod travelled back in the mangroves, keeping pace with us as we paddled against the tide. He slid and wriggled, flashing brown, he splashed in the leaves and angled his body through the branches, keeping up a Tarzan yell, until Rex shouted, ‘Shut that bloody racket.’ Tod was quiet then and tracked us silently.
I saw how Rex would not forgive the boy for breaking ‘Petley’ – and saw as we landed that Tod could not understand why he was disliked. Full of life, shining with it, yet he was subdued, and sent frowning glances at Rex, until I gave him half a crown, ‘That’s for paddling me.’ Then he ran away to get ‘the rest of my dough’.
Rex carried his sleeping daughter back to Lila’s picnic.
‘I’d better get her home, Mum, we can’t stay.’
‘What’s happened to her?’
‘Swimming. She’s all right. She’s tired, that’s all.’ And although his sisters crowded round and hissed at her scratches, he stayed impassive. He laid her on the back seat of the car. ‘Jump in, Jack. Happy birthday, Mum.’ We drove away.
I made him put me down outside the park. I was anxious for him to get Fiona home to her mother.
‘See you, Rex. Thanks, eh.’
‘Don’t slam the door.’ He looked at Fiona, curled up under her damp dress on the seat. ‘She’ll be all right.’
I nodded.
‘One thing, she’ll remember it.’ He drove away, and we did not meet again for many years.
I met Fiona before I met him.
Notebook: 12
He came knocking on my door at close to midnight, in the rain, but we had moved from that house several months before. The new owners, culture wekas, recognized him and drew him in. They gave him a bath and a bed; told us about it by telephone next day, right down to the new cake of soap and the hot-water bottle. In the morning he was gone, after breakfast, who knows where? No word, no letter, to me. How nice he was, the woman said, how he made them laugh. Fancy him not wanting porridge though.
I saw him next on television, sailor instead of poet. He was the owner of one of half a dozen launches smashed in a storm. It was broken to matchwood, he said – as flat in his language as anyone else.
‘Look how long his hair is.’
‘He seems quite comfortable,’ Harry said.
I read his two books of those middle years and thought them unadventurous and tired, although they had an evenness that pleased me. There was nothing about mudfights but much about kitchen and, with a strange politeness, about bed. About marriage. Some reviewers said about love, but they’re mistaken. There are poems about children, and fathers too, and a painful equivocal love shows through there.
I wrote to him and told him I had enjoyed his books and said I approved of his new way of standing back. Poems at a low temperature, I think I said. He didn’t answer, but later on sent a note to Harry saying he liked her Henry Hedgehog drawings, he liked the way the little bugger grinned on only one side of his mouth. There was a PS: ‘How’s ole Jack? Tell him to keep out his left.’
I did that but never used my right. No, correction: buying the house in Central Terrace was a risky thing. Harry worked hard on me, she persuaded me. I did not want to do up an old house, I was hopeless with a hammer and a paint brush, I said. ‘I’m not,’ she replied. ‘You can lift and carry anyway. Jack, I want it. I’ll go by myself if you won’t come.’ Persuasion! And Harry kept herself busy there for the next five years, Harry was a dynamo. She generated energy but no warmth, none for me. I don’t blame her. Enough warmth for David and Jill; and made up with her carelessness for my anxieties. Harry saved us, saved herself. That is not for putting down here. But I must. I must tell some of it or there’s a hole and no way of getting to the other side. I can’t send only part of me to meet Rex when we meet again.
Quick and simple, bare outline. She would have gone. Not to Central Terrace, she could not have afforded it, but somewhere else. With the children.
Why?
Because I tied my shoelaces with a double knot. Because I said, ‘Stop acting like a four-year-old.’ Because I darted at Jill with a cloth every time I saw a smear of food on her face. Because I cleaned my teeth with salt and would not learn to use an electric razor. Because I closed the curtains when she changed even though nobody, nobody, could see. Because. Because I was afraid and started teaching nervousness and shrinking to my children. I said, though not out loud, that dogs were waiting to bite them, fire to burn, water to drown, cliffs to lure them to the edge. Men to … people to … life … Unless you stepped back and did not risk it. Don’t do that! Be careful!
Don’t try. That was it. Harry saw me start to make our children tiny. She saw me shrink and dry them. Dehydration. And while I was about it, saw me try to teach them what to do. When it wasn’t a case of ‘must not’ it was ‘must’. Behaviour was never neutral. Harry said, ‘Why do they always look at you before they do anything?’
‘What rubbish.’
‘We’ve got kids who hesitate all the time. They never just get up and do.’
‘I’ve tried to show them what’s right and wrong.’
‘Where did you learn it? How do you know?’
I knew, I might have answered, in my bones. I knew (and here I would have puffed my chest) from my sense of other people. As soon as there were two there was right and wrong. Two made murder. Two made love. Love, Harry would have scoffed, what do you know about that? I knew she would accuse me, that is why I mumbled off in another direction. To myself I declared that I loved abundantly, and that love assaulted me in every waking hour – but I did not want to defend these propositions. I did not want particularity. Pain lay in that direction. Terror.
I was terrified for my children – of all the usual things. And terrified that they would grow without a moral sense. It never made me violent. I never struck David and Jillian, never once, or shouted at them; but nor did I hug them, devour them; tumble, roll, throw them at the ceiling and catch them inches from the floor. I kissed them lightly and touched them on the head. I pointed things out. When someone offered them a cake or lolly they would half put out a hand then look at me and I would nod my head, yes, all right. Or I would say, ‘The other children haven’t had a second one yet.’ I was marvellously even. I was a marvel of evenness.
I chose straight (and strait again), denying crooked.
Meanwhile Harry … if only we could have kept the carefreeness of the night when we first made love. But wouldn’t that be the common cry? We were not unique.
She kept me busy with the old house in Central Terrace. She kept a hold on me and did not let me slip too far away. I might be a monster of some sort now if it hadn’t been for stripping and sanding and puttying and painting; for tearing down wallpaper and scrim and fil
ling the skip; fixing gib board, plastering. My neatness and carefulness made me good at some things. My wallpaper hangs perfectly.
We were able to save the panelling and the tiled fireplace in the sitting-room but in the bedrooms had to gib. One afternoon I went into David’s room to sand the plaster and found Harry drawing on the wall. She was using a hard pencil and making such delicate marks I thought she was writing. But as I watched a twig appeared, with a praying mantis on it, holding a fly in its jointed arms.
‘That’s a bit gruesome, isn’t it?’
She printed ‘Dinner’ underneath. ‘Would you sooner have butterflies?’
‘Yes, I would.’
‘Butterflies get eaten too.’ She drew one for me though, settling on a rose. ‘For Jack’ she wrote. She drew a caterpillar munching a leaf. Whatever her mood at the start, she was growing pleased with herself.
‘A snail,’ I said.
She drew one; then a stick insect.
‘They’re marvellous.’ She sometimes drew frowns and smiles in letters to her friends but nothing like this. The tea-tree jack had a pent-up stillness. The fly, although it buzzed, had given up hope. If you touched the snail’s eye it would retract.
Ten years of marriage and I had not known that she could draw.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘You never asked.’ That has always struck me as the most unfair of rejoinders. She used it fairly often at the time, in all sorts of ways. I was losing her, she was going private. Although she drew the snail and tea-tree jack when I requested, her parted lips expressed her privacy. She travelled down her arm, through her fingers and her pencil, into the fragments of a world on the wall, while I could only watch and admire.
‘It’s a pity to paper them over,’ I said.
‘Well, don’t.’
She drew ferns, lilies, ants; a sparrow bathing in the dust. She drew wasps on an apple core. I went into Jill’s room and sanded the plaster and while I worked, coating myself with dust, I had the idea of papering the children’s walls white and asking Harry to paint pictures on them. I would, of course, want the right of censorship – no insects eating insects, no caterpillars munching at one end and excreting from the other. I thought of flowers and butterflies and birds. How comforting to go to sleep with a mother’s pictures all around.