Some Time Ago

I had been looking for a job for ten days. At the time I was living on my own in a shack beside a garage behind an old boarding-house in a suburb of Christchurch. A little dog-kennel of a place with a stretcher, a gas-ring, a chest-of-drawers and a ripped gas-light on a pipe from the ceiling. Sometimes I wanted to plug up the door and turn on the gas without lighting it; but other times, especially on a fine morning, you could see hundreds of wax-eyes swinging on the sow-thistle heads outside. It was only eight bob a week, and that meant freedom as I saw it then, to work or not to work, to come home as late as I liked, to put into words the shape of the world inside me (thoughpage 241 I never managed that) and of course to get drunk. There was a girl who came to see me, but I don’t think she liked the place as well as I did.

The job I’d been in before had lasted three days. It was a job grinding brass taps. You wore gloves, but the brass dust and the emery wheel wore through the gloves and they didn’t supply new ones just for the asking. I had been drinking a lot the week before I took the job on, and the cold weather and the brass dust made me feel worse instead of better. So when the foreman said I was bloody useless, perhaps he was in the right for once. All the same, it wasn’t the kind of job anyone would stay at long.

The money from that job kept me going for a couple of days. And when it was gone, the milkman still left two bottles at the door of the shack every morning. I would sleep till the early afternoon. It was very quiet in the afternoon, almost as if the world had ended and everyone else had died. Every day I’d pour the milk, pure and white and cold, into a grimy glass I’d pinched from a pub somewhere, and gulp it down, and go out into the hardworking city afternoon to look for another job. But no one needed a young man with stubble and overcoat and a look of not belonging – not the gasworks, nor the wet timber yard, nor the boot factory that only employed girls, and least of all the Employment Bureau. So I bought an apple and went into Hagley Park to look at the swans. A lot of things worried me then that wouldn’t worry me now in the same way – God, and sex, and the old men like broken- down horses who polished brass taps and sat in a corner of the pub saying nothing, and the high pale clouds over the park trees. It seemed to me the world couldn’t go on the way it was going. There was a secret switch, almost within reach of anyone’s hand, that would change the raw, tangled lives in a moment to real love and wild creative joy. The park trees promised it. The swans ruffled their feathers on the slaty, ruffled water.

I could have got a meal at a friend’s house, or borrowed a pound. But I didn’t. It was one thing to borrow money for drinking, when everyone was drinking – ‘Could you lend me half a dollar, Tom? I’ve not got enough for the round’ – but it was different to bring private hunger to someone else’s table. So the distance widened, a gap between me and the substantial world, and a dark wind was blowing there that scattered every wish like the sheets of newspaper in the street outside the theatre foyer where I picked up quarter- smoked women’s cigarette butts, tinged with lipstick, undid them, and rolled them again with the burnt end towards my mouth. A great lethargy, like the first wave of a rising tide, rose over me. It would have been easy to stay all afternoon on the sagging stretcher under the grey blanket, and sleep and wake and sleep again till the wax-eyes flew in the window with seeds to drop on my breast.

One day I stood at the door of The Shades, that vaguely unrespectable cellar in the centre of Christchurch, where dead men trapped with climbing rats watch the strong waters creep over their bootsoles. A man of thirty in apage 242 blue wrinkled suit touched my elbow.

‘Lend us a quid, mate. I’ll give it back to you tomorrow. Hell, I’ve got to have it for a feed and a taxi tonight. There’s a dame I’ve got to see at New Brighton. Her old man’s got plenty of money, but I’ll have to be in sweet with her to lay my hands on it. I can’t go out there with nothing in my pocket. You know me, mate . . .’.

I knew him. He had stayed with me a day and a night, and left while I was away at work, taking with him my best suit and all the books he could carry. The veined eyes, full of secrets no one would want to buy, went begging in the seamed baggy face – for money, for mercy, for anything but an honest answer. A sailor who had skipped his boat, with a wife in Scotland and another in Auckland.

I pulled out the pennies I kept to rattle, and showed them to him on the palm of my hand. He looked for a moment, and swore, and dived up the street. In his place leapt a little man, the original advertisement for Michelin tyres, squat and predatory, with brown rubber eyes and his hands deep in his overcoat.

‘What did that man give you? I know, so don’t try to dodge out of it.’ ‘He didn’t give me anything. He asked me for a loan.’

‘Don’t come at that one. I know. We’ve got our eye on him. How did you come to meet him?’

‘We met in a pub once.’ ‘Nice friends you have.’

He turned his gelatine eye on my coat and shoes.

‘Why don’t you dress decently? Have a shave? Brush your shoes? Where do you work anyway?’

‘I worked on The Press for a while. I’m looking for another job now.’ ‘You’re not looking far then. You don’t find jobs in a pub. We don’t like

your sort in this town. We know how to deal with them . . .’.

The patter of insults continued for some minutes. He was waiting for me to show fight, or use a four-letter word, so that he could take me in charge. At last, disappointed, he moved away, mincing through the crowd, spruce watchdog of the Public Good; once a detective always on the outer.

The anger from that meeting was like a hormone injection. The next morning I found a job as a hotel porter.

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