Going West

by Gee, Maurice

  Then he was drowned out there, past Tiri.

  And how did that happen, Jack wonders, what went wrong?

  But I don’t wonder, not here. He wrote but never published, and Margot has not published his work of those last years. I don’t even know whether she kept it or destroyed it.

  I’m the only one who knows he didn’t stop. (His ‘maybe’ meant ‘yes’, I have no doubt.) Alice does not know. John Dobbie does not know. I can’t think of any reason to tell them. The poems are from that micro-climate. I can’t be an archivist there.

  We walked down to my rental car, parked by his shack. He fetched me some peppers from his stall. Margot raised a finger in goodbye. I thought of her turning away, in the lighted window, while Sidgy lay dead in the rain. I thought of Sidgy flying down the steps, with an arc of urine trailing behind. It seemed to me the murder was behind us now. We need not think of Sidgy any more. I almost sighed. I had not known how much he stayed with me.

  Jo and Georgy

  He learns to pee again. He exercises his pelvic floor. He writes three chapters in his notebook. While all this is going on Jo Bellringer dies. He discovers the truth about his father. Jack congratulates himself that he stayed calm and managed to keep on with his work.

  He does not need to hide behind this voice any more but keeps it to make discoveries. It puts his pulse rate up and makes him lively. He’s able to invent himself more. He eats better in the third person and present tense and he doesn’t sneeze as much. Memory is not so important. Involvement is important. Consciousness too; and behaviour. (Memory is oil in the works.) ‘He’ not ‘I’ stands ‘now’ up straight and stops it slouching about. Everything gets a fair chance.

  Harry says, ‘1 wish you’d get out from under the stairs. It’s unhealthy.’

  ‘I’m fitter now than I’ve ever been.’ He almost says he’s like a sluicing hose but his waterworks no longer amuse her.

  ‘Use my room if you must keep writing. I don’t need it for a while.’

  She is in the garden mornings. Her drawings are with the publisher (and Jo has sent her text in at last). He thinks of asking her to illustrate his notebooks. She would find things he has missed. She would put a different look on people’s faces. One more time he’ll go back there, and perhaps invite her along. In the meantime, blue biro, Olympic 1B5 …

  Harry becomes his helpmate for a while. (Helpmeet, he finds, is incorrect.) The eye in the ceiling has nothing to see. She brings him cups of tea and makes a cooked lunch instead of ramming bread in the toaster. Several times each morning she taps on his door and puts her head in. ‘I’m walking down to the shops, Jack. Is there anything you want?’ ‘I’m putting some cabbages in. Is it too early, do you think?’ When she had been busy he did not interrupt. He found his way around the garden alone. But he smiles, he’s pleased she needs him. If now and then he loses a word there are plenty of other words to take its place.

  He writes about his father’s dictionary and turns the pages looking for minus and plus. ‘L’ is a good choice. ‘Likerous’, ‘liliaceous’ are full of suggestion and won’t keep still. Several weeks later he comes to Beth and she is plain. He knows what he should have done with her.

  Harry taps. ‘Jo’s still not answering her phone.’

  ‘Shall we go and have a look this afternoon?’

  ‘I rang Sarah Cook’ (their publisher) ‘and she hasn’t heard. I would like to go if you don’t mind.’

  Harry drives, and smiles at him, she is pleased to be out. Jack likes it too: the hump-backed bridge, the city squatting in the sun. The roads bend this way and that and make him feel that he and Harry have travelled a long way and have further ways to go. He is coming to like Auckland again, not just for Loomis. There’s a humpiness in its spreading out that makes interesting bends and twists. It can’t match Wellington for swoop and dive and exhilaration but it doesn’t punish with vertigo. A carbohydrate city, short on vitamins, but pulpy and greasy and comfortable. When he’s finished writing he’ll grow fat.

  They stop at Jo Bellringer’s gate and he knows at once that something is wrong. Jo is an organized person. She would not go away without stopping her paper and mail.

  ‘Jack?’ Harry says.

  ‘Her car’s not in the garage,’ which has the hollowed-out look that makes them so forlorn. ‘At least it means she’s not in the house.’

  ‘Unless it’s stolen.’

  They have the same thought (confess it later): rapist, strangler, driving away in his victim’s car. Jack knocks on the door and rings the bell. They look in the windows, shading the glass. It’s no Marie Celeste. There’s no food waiting to be eaten and no lights on. The bed – it’s hard to tell with duvets – seems to be made. Jack hunts for a key while Harry takes the mail from the box and collects the papers.

  ‘Tuesday morning. That’s four days. I’m going to ask next door.’

  The woman has been watching. She fixes the safety chain as they approach.

  ‘We’re friends of Ms Bellringer,’ Harry explains through the gap.

  ‘Ms’ makes the woman tighten her lips. She has not seen Miss Bellringer, she says, for several days. She drove away on Monday afternoon. ‘I didn’t realize she hadn’t come back.’

  ‘Will you look after her mail?’

  ‘I’d sooner not, if something’s wrong.’

  ‘Can we use your phone then? We’d better tell the police.’

  ‘I’d sooner not be involved at all.’

  They drive to the shopping centre and find a card phone, then hunt for a shop selling cards. The police are polite and ask them to wait at the address. They wait for an hour and a half.

  ‘I’m going,’ Jack says.

  ‘No, they’ll come.’

  ‘You’d think that bitch next door would make us a cup of tea.’

  ‘Don’t get cross. Something’s wrong with Jo.’

  ‘Has she been depressed?’

  ‘She always is when we finish a book.’

  ‘She wouldn’t do anything before it comes out.’

  Harry finds chewing-gum in the glove box and gives him some. Later on she gets out and sits on Jo’s fence while he listens to ‘My Music’ on the radio. He would like Harry to listen. These are not the sort of jokes – they’re puns and verbal turns – that can be told later on. He feels he’s getting something good that she refuses to share. Jo has probably gone off the way Harry herself used to go. She’s down the Wanganui in a canoe or holed up in a farmhouse with a girlfriend somewhere.

  He apologizes. He apologizes to them both. He turns the radio off and sits on the fence and makes up happy scenarios until she tells him, ‘Do be quiet.’ The police car arrives at a crawl and a young constable climbs out with a house-agent smile. He knows what to do: hunts for a key, looks in the windows, finds the oldest paper – brings himself up level with them. Jack tells him the woman next door seems rather keen to help and the constable, Young is his name, marches off there. While he’s away a man crosses the street and shows them a house key hanging behind a calendar in the garage.

  ‘Good place,’ he grins. The calendar is nine years old.

  They call the policeman and go into the house: dishes washed, bed made, nothing out of order. A jigsaw puzzle – four thousand pieces, the box-lid says – lies quarter finished on the dining-room table. Young takes their names, asks about relatives and friends, says these things usually have a simple explanation. He fits a piece of sailing ship into the puzzle. Keeps the key.

  ‘I’m worried, Jack.’

  ‘Me too.’ He’s worried about Harry. She seems to be grieving for Jo. Does she have special knowledge? Their minds have been bonded for many years.

  Jack drives home carefully. Harry sits beside him with her hands in her lap. He reaches out and taps them to make them lie still.

  He sees for the first time that her hands are growing old.

  His mother laughs at everything he says. ‘You’re so funny. I don’t remember you making me laugh when you w
ere a boy.’

  She is not supposed to use words like remember, even to complain that she can’t. Memory, as a concept, is meant to be beyond her, but she won’t obey the rules.

  ‘You were such a stern little boy.’

  She is not making it up and is not mistaken. What she can’t remember, or won’t remember, is her part.

  Lightning flashes. Rain snarls across the window. The hospital is like a liner riding through a storm. Mrs Brockie, in the other bed (Mrs Donald died a month ago), yelps with fright and her visitor (daughter, by her face) winks at Jack. He bends his mouth, avoiding complicity. They’ll be there soon enough themselves and should prepare for Duppa.

  ‘Is that the train?’

  ‘It’s thunder, Mum. Did you see the lightning?’

  ‘Walter got down before it stopped.’

  He’s proud of her. Connections are meant to be too hard. And he’s pleased – he’s delighted – that she does not disapprove. His father gets a nod from her at last.

  ‘Do you remember him?’

  ‘What a funny question.’

  ‘I do. I often think about him.’

  ‘So you should. You don’t look like him. He was very handsome. She looks more like him than you do.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Her over there with Georgina.’

  He looks around, looks back. ‘Georgina?’

  ‘They wouldn’t let her bring her sword. I don’t think she wants to kill me now.’

  ‘Sshh, Mum.’

  ‘She looks like Walter.’

  ‘It’s Mrs Brockie’s daughter. There’s no Georgina, Mum.’

  ‘We talk about him all the time, how kind he was.’

  She closes her eyes and seems to sleep, and he takes her hand.

  ‘Your mother thinks I’m somebody else,’ Mrs Brockie’s daughter says.

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry.’

  ‘They all do that. Don’t you, Mum? She thinks you’re the doctor and you never look at her. It makes her cross.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What does she mean about a sword all the time?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘She thinks her husband and my mother, isn’t it rich? That makes him your father, I suppose.’

  Mrs Skeat shivers. Her hand tightens and her fingers creak. Is she dreaming? Are the Scottish dancers chasing her? Or perhaps there’s another blockage, a t.i.e. They happen all the time now, warning of bigger things to come. She opens her eyes.

  ‘Take your umbrella if it’s wet.’

  ‘Yes, I will.’

  ‘And put on your – put on …’

  ‘Galoshes?’

  She smiles and runs her thumb along his knuckles; then looks at him sharply. ‘You’re not Walter.’

  ‘No, I’m John.’

  ‘Why do you say you’re Walter if you’re John?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘There’s no good comes …’

  He is shaken by the message she receives through her hand. How can he believe it? He never once saw them holding hands. He never saw them touch or pat or stroke or kiss at all. There’s no good comes from lying, perhaps she meant to say; but can she, in her condition, lie?

  Let her sleep. Let her hold Walter’s hand again.

  Mrs Brockie’s daughter stops at the foot of the bed. ‘It’s nice your mother talks to her even if she can’t answer back.’

  He smiles and nods.

  ‘Her name is Elsie though, not Georgina.’

  ‘I’ll tell her.’

  ‘Your father must have been a bit of a dag.’

  ‘No, no. All that’s imagination too.’ Go away, he wants to say. Senile parents don’t form a bond.

  ‘She made me show Mum his letter the other day.’

  ‘What letter?’

  ‘From Georgy. In her box. I wouldn’t mind getting a letter like that.’

  ‘Ah,’ Jack says, sounding vague. Inside he is hideously quick; fits pieces into place with a flick and a picture lies, slanting from left to right, as flat as a glazed tile, on his mind. Walter Skeat and Georgy embrace. The Gladstone bag sits by Walter’s feet. His hat is tilted back (James Joyce style) so the brim lies on her raised Edwardian hair – why Edwardian? Pipey mouth devours a soft pink mouth (Bullen style). It almost makes Jack retch with excitement and disgust.

  ‘Ta-ta.’ Mrs Brockie’s daughter.

  ‘Ugh!’ His mother, in her sleep.

  He swallows. He slows himself down in order to discover with maturity. The brooches in the box beside Roget are quality pieces (no beads, no bangles, that was not her style, and nor were rings, which cluttered up the hands; and somehow dirtied them, she seemed to say). They’re pearly and filigreed but weigh the letter down. Why has he not seen it? Where has she kept it until now?

  King George stamp. White envelope gone yellow; addressed to the office; and marked rather shyly: ‘Personal’. The lady has a delicate hand; but – he unfolds the paper – she makes a bold start:

  Walt my love,

  Why did you leave without a kiss? I’ve dreamed of kissing you at the door. How proper you suddenly became in the hall. Does the world outside threaten you? Don’t think of the world, think of the room and us two in it and our love. I will wait next Friday. We needn’t go near that other place. Come to me here.

  Our room, Walt. Dear Walt. Our bed.

  Nothing can go wrong any more.

  Your Georgy

  He reads the date: the day his father died. She must have written it when he had gone; was writing it perhaps, while he rode to Loomis on the train. Did she post it in a corner box as Walter Skeat misjudged his leap and ran with smacking soles on the station platform? On Monday it would have been delivered to his office. ‘Personal’: someone there had passed it on to Dorothy Skeat.

  There’s too much to take in. His neatness won’t function any more. The slanted hat, the Edwardian lady, zoom away. He’s left with pieces that won’t fit. A woman, Georgy. A man, adulterer – Walter Skeat. A wronged wife in her summer house; a son in his room. Was there a baby? Was there only one time and did it frighten him? Did it make him leap from the train too soon?

  What made him leap on those other days? Some other woman, in ‘that other place’?

  Betrayal turns him into a judge. He’s revolted by his father suddenly: to poke with his pipe and weave his web of do and don’t and knot his son at the wrists and ankles, while all the time he jumps from trains and walks free himself. While he has women. Jack has to say it: ‘While he lives and I don’t live.’

  His father should have taken him there; or given him some hint there was a way.

  He’ll look up ‘hypocrisy’, he’ll look up ‘lies’, and see what plus or minus they score. As for the rest, ‘likerous’, ‘liliaceous’, they are not a mystery any more. He’ll look up ‘fornication’ and ‘adultery’. His father fornicated on Friday afternoons. With a liliaceous lady. And came home to ask about their day and nod with another sort of satisfaction that it had progressed so uneventfully.

  Jack takes out his pocket notebook and slips the matchstick pencil from its spine. He copies the letter with a steady hand. But ‘Georgy’ is illicit; it is genteel and sexy and familiar and strange. He signs it fast to get it down and out of the way. The looping ‘g’ and looping ‘y’ almost make a circle, with ‘e’ and ‘o’ – what does ‘eo’ mean? – paired inside. The lady should have Greeked them and put a row of kisses.

  Jack slides the notebook flat against his heart. The letter rattles into place underneath the brooches. What should he do next? He smooths an inch-long wisp of hair from his mother’s brow. He takes her hand and holds it again.

  She does not wake. Her fingers tighten. And under her smooth eyelids – so young, so much like bean pods – her eyes move about. Perhaps she dreams of Walter Skeat.

  He sees that at last his mother is doing well.

  The storm has gone out past Rangitoto. It makes a shadow there, twinned with the Coromandel’s hump. Jack drives to
the station. He finds, to his surprise, that a train still goes out west.

  ‘Harry. Listen. I won’t be home for lunch. I’m going on a train ride. Yes, it’s to do with Rex. No, not Loomis. I’m going to Mt. Albert to have a look at our school.’ Lies. Lies.

  He eats a pie and drinks a carton of juice. The straw, concertinad at the bend, looks like a piece of intestine. The world is changing too fast and he responds with grotesqueries. But the train, in spite of its diesel engine, comes from vanished times and almost makes him forget where he is going. It’s mostly goods, with a single passenger carriage, and although everything is different – upholstery, panelling, windows – it’s the same. The grit is gone, the sulphur’s gone, the luggage racks you could hammock in, but the squalor is in place and he is blindly happy for a moment. Rex would understand. There had been some truth, after all, in his lies to Harry.

  They pass Carlaw Park, they go through the tunnel, and there is no time, he sees, for even a rudimentary act of love, especially in that time of buttoned flies – although Seddon Tech boys were brutal and quick. Newmarket. Kingsland. He creeps up on Mt. Albert, reversing his father’s line of approach. Ah, the lies. He had not even gone to Auckland on those afternoons. Had he got off at this station too before the train pulled up?

  Jack asks his way; goes down the hill and along towards Fowlds Park; then has to turn left and cross the line he has travelled on. He lays his palm on the rail to feel if it is warm and would leave a ten cent piece to be flattened out if a woman was not watching from the other footpath. His father had brought him home a flattened penny once. It seemed out of character, but is in character now. It might have been done on this stretch of line.

  He crosses the road to the woman. ‘I’m looking for Verona Avenue.’

  She points. He goes. A 1920s street of bungalows with an Italian city name; romantic name for Walter Skeat and his lightsome lady. Principle, bitter or not, must have been hard to keep in mind in this sunny hollow. Was it sunny on the day his father died?