Going West Read online

  Jack is of middle height but some people believe him tall because he stands so straight. As a boy he slumped (and moped – puberty turns some boys into zombies) until his mother threatened to have a board fixed to his shoulders to hold them back. She believed in straight shoulders, a firm handshake, and looking people straight in the eye. These things signalled inner health as well as good breeding. Jack was terrified of his mother. He knew she would have the board fixed if he did not stand straight – so back went his shoulders and they’ve stayed back ever since. And although he has always made a point of questioning popular wisdom – did she know it was popular? – he believes uncritically in the hand, the eyes, the shoulders.

  He does not believe in good looks, they’re accidental. He has an undistinguished face: there’s too much here, too little there, too much nose and forehead, too little mouth and chin, to make it pleasing in a conventional way. Too little bone under the eye. And too many teeth – that’s the impression – in too little space. I’d like to say, ‘Ah, but you do notice his eyes.’ It’s true, you notice them, but if you’re a man and you’re meeting him for the first time the reason is because they won’t back down, they hold yours longer than is natural. He learned his mother’s lesson too well. Jack Skeat will not drop his eyes for fear of being taken for a weakling.

  It’s a pity about this willed boldness because when he forgets he has a range of thoughtful and tender expressions that many people find attractive. His anger is attractive too. Sometimes it verges on the comic, which he’s not bothered by – not bothered for long. He would like to be able to frighten people but knows he would hate it after a while and would apologize in the end. He works his anger out in imaginary witty sharp exchanges and scores complete momentous victories and picks his victims up and dusts them down when it’s all over.

  These eyes: green, uncertain, innocent. Surprised, uncomprehending, even though Jack Skeat believes that all the crimes and cruelties we can imagine have somewhere been committed, or will be. He cannot understand; will not accept; and remakes our human nature in an, oh, momentous exchange. This gives him lines of painful concentration round his eyes. It has made him interesting, for a time, to several women. It decides people, as they get to know him, that he’s not so undistinguished after all, not so plain.

  He has a stringy neck and a sharp Adam’s apple. Emotion makes him swallow and the little elevator moves to the bottom floor and up again. ‘I know when you want me,’ his wife said. ‘I don’t listen to what you’re saying, I watch your throat.’ He tried not to swallow after that, but sometimes found it useful to invite her in that way.

  He likes his wide shoulders. When he was a young man he practised spreading them and fancied that from the back his torso had a cobra shape. He felt venomous, desirable, dangerous. He kept his arms locked in front when putting on that display, which helped conceal the smallness of his hands.

  There’s a pompadourish roundness in his middle parts. (Pompadour, he knows, has to do with hair, but somehow the word has attached itself elsewhere.) Chest above, legs below, they’re masculine enough, there’s jut and edge, a muscular containment, nothing slack. But he sometimes feels less than masculine physically, and suspects a genetic betrayal. It’s too trivial to worry about, but enough to provoke a compensatory swagger now and then: another betrayal.

  Jack is not the self-doubting person this account begins to make him seem. He has a strong sense of his own worth and a good many victories, both private and professional, to his credit. If he plays them over, in detail, it’s for pleasure, not to reassure himself. But he does know he might have done better and when he’s tired is inclined to berate himself. Chances lost cause him aches not unlike those in his joints. (Hips, shoulders, elbows, finger joints trouble him. A test has shown the presence in his blood of the antigen for ankylosing spondylitis. He’s older than most people are when they get that disease but he won’t escape – so he believes. It’s a likely answer to his wish to be exceptional.)

  Joint, articulation, point of transfer: Jack has trouble. (It’s his mind I’m talking about now.) Either the angle is too sharp or there’s a dislocation and the message, memory packet, is stripped of significance or falls back and is lost. It worries him more than he admits to his wife. He admitted to her, several years ago, that he thought he was getting a brain tumour. The left side of his head had a way of going numb. She touched him with her fingers, each side of his head, cool and firm. ‘Jack, you’ve got a dent along here. You silly man, your glasses are too tight.’ He wears his glasses looser today, the dent is gone, the left side of his head feels fine. But inside, what is happening there? No touch, no ‘silly man’, will cure that. Recent things – names, meetings, bits of news, addresses – get lost and won’t come back. He no longer says, ‘I read a marvellous book the other day,’ until he has the title and the author’s name in place. On the phone last week he could not remember the name of his street. For a hideous moment he was lost in the universe. Then it came. ‘Sorry about that. Dropped the phone. Deane Street. Forty-one. You’ll have to give the gate a boot, it sticks.’

  There’s a dreadful name he knows but refuses to say. He read an article that claimed water might help. He drinks six or seven pints a day. (Pints beat litres, miles beat kilometres, into his head. He sometimes calls a ten cent coin a shilling.) It doesn’t do his bladder any good because, down at that end, his prostate is enlarged. (This time he’s early.) He turns with relief from brain to prostate. Peeing, flicking, dribbling out another teaspoonful, he grows furious about waiting lists. Fifteen months he’s been on his and now that he has shifted to Auckland has probably gone to the back of the queue again. He has no medical insurance, doesn’t believe in it, he has paid his taxes all his life and taxes can look after him now. He could find, if he had to, the three thousand dollars for a private op – but he won’t. He’d rather get up five times a night, and pee like a woman for the last bit, than pay for something owed him by the state. His wife calls him a miser and hints that he’s afraid, and sleeps in a separate room so she won’t be woken all the time, but on this issue Jack won’t budge. No! End of discussion.

  He suffers from allergic rhinitis. Attacks are brought on by changes in temperature and, possibly, house dust, and, possibly, apples. One day he means to take some tests. In the meantime he keeps putting garments on and taking them off and closing windows for the draught and staying out of the way when his wife shakes the mats. He does his share of the housework – cleans the toilet every Saturday morning, scrubbing on his knees, virtuous – but he won’t do anything that raises dust. Now and then he swears off apples but they’re his favourite fruit and he soon goes back, especially when the Cox’s Orange are ripe although he suspects that these acidy ones also bring a rash up on his chest. He treats that with a herbal cream and tries to clear his sinuses with drops and inhalations. They don’t work too well and during his attacks he wakes in the morning with his mouth like a vacuum cleaner bag. His worst fear, his private nightmare, is being gagged by a burglar and not being able to breathe. He’ll fight knives and sawn-off shotguns before submitting to a gag. Now that he’s in Auckland, in the muggy heat, he’s afraid his rhinitis will get worse. There are more burglars in Auckland too.

  His mental health, he claims, is good (leaving that brain trouble, which is physical, out of it), and his willingness to examine his moral health helps it stand straight. Many people are not aware that there is such a thing as moral health. Too close an examination doesn’t do it any good though. Jack, retreating, uses the ugly metaphor ‘picking at scabs’. He would like to deny responsibility for the damage he did other people when he was young but he won’t take that easy way. If Kurt Waldheim can be called to account after forty years – not that Jack has anything like that to answer for – and the line of responsibility traced back, then those who believe it legitimate must submit to their own private trial. Jack does. ‘I’m guilty. I did it.’ But none of his offences is chargeable and there’s no sensible way
of punishment now. Embarrassment punishes, but it annoys him too and obscures the point of tracing back. After a while he leaves his past alone but has a sense of having tried and sometimes of having done well. As for today – he does not think he damages other people today.

  In religion he’s a humanist and he is stern-minded in his belief. There’s a roundness in humanism he enjoys. Natural man is trying to get out, increase his claim, and Jack will allow some of that; but not too much. He’s not ashamed of the animal in our nature (finds it human) but insists that mind is more characteristic. Mind, he explains, arguing at the door with Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, doesn’t it excite you? Think of where we’ve come from. Out of the slime. And where we’re going. ‘God’ encloses things so much. I’m an explorer. He is ashamed afterwards – ashamed of his overdramatic claim and of his failure to find arguments. He can do better than that. But even when he sits down to think he finds he can’t. Nevertheless, as surely as any Christian, Jack Skeat knows.

  Atheist? He won’t wear the label. It’s a way of sneaking God in. Original sin? He won’t buy it, it revolts him. Divine? He finds the idea unpleasant. Saviour? What a human defeat. And so on. Evil, though, brings him up short. There are things he can’t find any other word for. How he wishes he had a better mind and was able to do some exploring there. Sometimes he confuses evil with madness and finds it hard to separate the two. Evil, isn’t it willed? And madness? well … He does not like this blurring of edges, and thinks defensively, It’s religious territory, I’m not going to lose my self-respect, I’ve been there once. But there’s no temptation to go back.

  He’s not being strictly truthful in saying he was there. More than bodily presence is required. I was just a bum on a seat, Jack explains. As soon as he was able to break free from his mother he got out. She was, in any case, not much more present in church than he. Jack believes he has a spiritual life, there’s no other way to explain the workings of his conscience, but spirit is a human possession and is therefore, so to speak, in the canon. Spirit never touched his mother at all. She was in church for propriety’s sake.

  Now Jack’s out of it and finds his way without a guide and he does feel like an explorer at times. He sometimes feels in danger because of his mental weakness. Things lie all about to pick up and examine but one has to be able to hold them first and he drops them all the time. Calling out their names won’t bring them back. He tries. Freedom, he says. Spirit. Conscience. Good. And evil of course. They slide beyond his reach. It’s easier, more comfortable, to think about death. That has an effect impossible not to see. Bodies rot. Death is a fact. It has a way of leading on to life though. Where has life gone? What’s the spark? And consciousness, where is that?

  Although he’s not equipped for this Jack is desperate to understand. At other times the mystery elates him. Death, he knows, will get him in the end. Then he’ll understand. Or not. The idea of oblivion can excite him.

  He’s elated by the inescapability of death.

  On the Map, in the Marriage

  Neither has the sense of having come home but each is contented and feels about the new house, this will do. It would not have satisfied them once. Jack had promised himself a house by the sea – ‘It’s not just a view I need, I need to hear the waves’ – and Harry had wanted a 1910 villa to do up. They had once made an offer on a villa in Worser Bay where the salt spray in southerlies would rattle like hail on the window-panes – it rattled on the day they inspected the house, the trees thrashed, wind boomed in the ceilings – but someone else saw it and offered more. Harry shed tears over that and said it was like losing a baby. Now, thirty years later, they’re contented with a house built in purple brick, two storeyed, semidetached, on the sunny suburban slope behind Castor Bay. The gulf waters are calm, the yachts stand straighter. Rangitoto slumps in the middle of the view.

  Harry, who has never been Harriet, is Auckland born and Auckland raised. Thirty years in Wellington have modified her view of her home town but not weakened her attachment, ‘blood attachment’, to the place. She is rarely extravagant in her language – makes a thing of being neat and cool – but lets herself boil over now and then on the subject of belonging in a place. ‘Roots,’ Harry says, without a blush. The house and suburban Castor Bay, they are not home, but the city on the isthmus, and the wild west coast out there, and the blue gulf in her view, and the beaches and the mangroves and the mud – Harry belongs.

  Jack Skeat is pleased for her and full of sympathetic recognitions. He starts to feel that he too has come home. It is not second-hand, it’s strongly felt, it belongs to Jack. But his view is complicated by his overstrong sense of his wife. He watches her, he loves her, but uncertainties prevent an easy view of everything he sees that she sees too. When she gazes out there is it the candyfloss clouds that make her touch her lips with her tongue or is it Rangitoto waiting to explode? Does Harry taste sugar or destruction? Jack would like to know. After thirty years she puzzles and excites him. He wants to see with her eyes and wants her to see with his, believing there’s a union they haven’t known and are capable of; more capable than they have ever been, for their fineness in unspoken understanding improves, even though much of their congruency is lost. They do not even age at the same rate. Nor do they both still have a career.

  Harry has claimed the upstairs sitting-room as her studio and is happily at work there on her part of the new book – an unnecessary book in Jack Skeat’s view – she and Jo Bellringer are putting together. (With a girlishness that embarrasses Jack, and makes him suspect some dark concealment at other times, they call each other Ms Pictures and Ms Print.) Jack agreed to the ripping-up of the carpet and the cork-tiling of the floor; to the stripping of the wallpaper and painting in matt white of the walls; to the fitting of a skylight in the roof to bring alive the south-facing room. Harry’s new eye outstares the sun and the sun’s eye watches over her patient building (happy building) of stems and leaves and petals for Bellringer and Edwards: Weeds and Wild Flowers of New Zealand. He has told them to reverse it. Wild flowers and weeds should be the order. That’s elementary psychology. Harry agrees but Jo Bellringer, on the principle of chief (and female) begetter, will not agree. Jack also feels that the author order should be reversed, Harry’s part being much the more important. Her skills, her art, her sensibilities, bring alive the mere botanical knowledge Jo possesses. But Jack keeps quiet. The alphabet is on Jo’s side, along with precedent. There have been three Bellringer and Edwards books already.

  He finds it inhuman that his wife’s collaborator should be so indifferent to him. There’s no injured vanity in his dislike of the woman, it’s philosophical. All things human require notice.

  He works in a tiny windowless hole under the stairs. ‘Hole’ makes no judgement on the place. He likes the feeling of being enclosed. The slope of the ceiling, which he duplicates in his torso as he leans at his work, puts a weight on him like moral compulsion. Jack explores, backwards, inwardly, and will describe exactly what he finds. Nevertheless it’s something less than inclusiveness he attempts. He will choose to go up or down and left or right. He’s not going to breathe rarefied air or advance in caves where he has to wriggle and slide. He’s not afraid of guessing or invention and will probably attempt some of each – is not afraid of ugly things he’ll come on in that way – but he wants to avoid cleverness, which is a way of holding at a distance. Jack wants to see close, Jack wants the truth. He would like it to be significant truth.

  Already he discovers that pomposity is his vice.

  The doorbell rings and it’s Jo Bellringer. ‘Hi,’ Jack says – one of several modern idioms he’s mastered – and stands aside, pointing at the stairs.

  ‘Nice day, Jack,’ Jo says, lumping by. Her remark is enormously negative – it negates him – but Jack no longer tumbles down the hole she digs for him.

  ‘Lovely,’ he says, standing his ground. She is lovely in her heaviness. He loves her round forty-year-old buttocks, never still. He wants to
take them in two hands and feel in them her mounting of the stairs. He loves her chest, her red and tanned sun-tormented chest and her bean-bag breasts and her sun-scorched hair and her round eyes – they never blink – across whose surfaces he moves but does not move. Of all the women he can’t have Jo is the one he wants the most. It’s lust after an object. She turns him into nothing so he has no compunction about turning her into that. Jack does not want to make himself alive for Jo. It has got to the point where that would spoil things.

  He points her at Harry and watches her out of sight, then goes back under the stairs feeling neither diminished nor unhealthy. He hears Jo call his wife’s masculine name. They are, he thinks, a thoroughly ambiguous pair. And now that Jo is Harrying Harry there, and throwing her botanical weight around, and laying her blunt finger down on drawings too delicate for naming, Jack, in his hole, begins to find his human weight withdraw. It’s a familiar consequence of lusting after Jo. Victory is hers, every time. Now he feels he must admit to being a little sick. In this one area. It’s very specialized, very narrow, and does not affect his overall health.

  He spends an hour writing; and some time thinking, some time dreaming. There’s a fuzzy edge between the two. He feels an attenuation there, a state of new being that can’t be held, but he stays long enough to feel his understanding thrown like a blanket -no, thinner than a blanket, a sheet – over all things human. It’s spurious, of course, he realizes that almost at once, but the state is interesting and would repay study by someone with the knowledge and the skills. They would have to take into account that until a few months ago Jack was a busy and important man. He had a staff of fifty-four and a budget of 9 million, he reported to a Minister of the Crown. The larger study would have to be retirement – the loss of habits and habitat; loss of importance, narrowing of the self. One becomes, Jack thinks, a man in a hole under the stairs, occupied with internal workings.