Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

3

3

‘I’ll see you at the Riggerstring,’ she said. Her voice put out the Presbyterian moon, one-eyed in a blowing sky, and answered back the railway station clock that had just struck twice. We were holding hands in a cat-smelling narrow alley beside the milk depot, in the desert before cockcrow, when the real town was tucked down in bed and only drunks and spooning lovers coughed on park seats or clinched in the tubular concrete air raid shelters under Queen Victoria’s statue in grubby icing sugar. A warm wind was blowing down the Northeast Valley and Venus winked a thousand miles off in her western bed, rising from the South American waves to tell the world that she had never had a lover.

She tugged away from my hand; then pressed close again. I kissed her against the wet brick wall. My other hand was in the pocket of her lambswool overcoat. She was a spring chicken, a trout waiting to be tickled, the King of China’s daughter and the cave of the forty thieves. Once I thought I had learnt the Open Sesame, but every day I found I had unlearnt it again. Perhaps that was why I couldn’t stay away from her and counted the hours by her coming and going. She rode continually in my mind like night-haired Venus making a home of the sky.

‘Let’s go on up to my room,’ I said. ‘Nobody will see us come in. You can get away early in the morning.’

‘No, not now,’ she said. ‘It’s too late. You never count on a girl wanting to make up her own mind, do you? But you can take me home after the Riggerstring.’

The Riggerstring was on the annual Boat Club Ball, a real hooley, the best and the worst hop of the year. It was held in a boat-house on the waterfront. Mining students bellowed in the cloakroom while the couples lunged above their heads. The dead marines rolled down the stairs or spun from the top windows to plop in the salt sober harbour. The year before the police had had to be called in.

‘I’ll be there,’ I promised. We said goodbye twice running. I heard the click of her shoes fading. And I climbed the gulf of the streets, up towards Maori Hill where the birds in the bush belt still talked together in code at half past two, and pushed the heavy slow door open, and trudged upstairs, and turned the key in the lock of the airless cupboard I rented for thirty bob a week and undressed in the dark. Then four angels nailed me into my coffin and plunged me to the bottom of the Dead Sea, where I lay all night in despair, unable to shout, with a cloth over my mouth, knowing that the page 231 Riggerstring had gone by without me, and she had gone home instead with a whiskered red-haired student who called me Snow, driving in a slow taxi and laughing at his whispered stories, and telling no one when his hand rose under her skirt. But in the morning I climbed from the grave like Antaeus. The sun was lovely over the kitchen garden where an old pensioner who lived in a room below the stairs used to grow parsley and runner beans. I lay in bed with my shirt on, reading A Dominie’s Log by A.S. Neill. It told me that the stiff-muscled fathers had ruled too long. I asked my private god to be good to Neill. The air bloomed with the conspiracy of the spring-heeled sons. The psychiatrist’s clinic led by a winding stair to the lovebeds of Eden and a new earth and sky.

At noon I walked down the sixty-eight steps to the back of the Town Hall. The town knew me, the heir to Adam’s lost fortune whom the lawyers had given up hope of finding. And I knew the town. It opened its brass-buttoned coat for me to hide inside. Robert Burns, two hundred years dry on his tree stump above the Octagon, was waiting for the traffic to stop so that he could step down to the Oban Hotel, bang on the bar and order a bucket of gin and Harpic. At any moment now, a young man in a sailor’s jersey, a sheaf of bad poems in his trouser pocket, would sprint up the street and ask me for the quid I had owed him since Easter. We would share our debts, eat eggs and steak at the Silver Grille, and drink portergaffs till sundown at the slide of the Bowling Green Hotel, talking about sex and socialism. But the clock struck twelve, scattering pigeons over the sun-roofed town. They roosted again on Robert Burns, clucking and dropping their dung on his ploughman’s collar. And out of a corner bookshop, where he had been mooching all morning like Jonah waiting for the gourd to grow, came Jack Galbraith. His father knew my father. He was a lanky mining student a year younger with myself, with pimples and a bad breath and no hope in the world.

‘Where’re you going?’

‘For a feed. At the Silver Grille.’

‘I’m feeling crook. I reckon I’ll do the same.’

The fathers climbed back on their wooden horses. The world’s leaf withered on its stalk. A mineral age was reborn. In the narrow cubicle of the hash-shop, over oysters and bitter coffee, he confided that he could not work. The sore red-rimmed eyes in the freckled face gazed round the shop as if it were a permanent cage. ‘Dad reckons if I don’t pass this bloody exam, he won’t let me go on. It’s no use trying. I’ve not got a show.’

‘You don’t want to worry too much, mate. Tell him to go and jump in the creek. Get a job on the wharf at Port Chalmers. You could knock out twelve quid a week there.’

‘It’s no bloody good, Jim. You don’t know what they’re like. They keep on telling me I’ve got to pull my finger out. I don’t worry so much about Dad. I don’t think he really gives a bugger what I do. It’s Mum that worries me. She’s page 232 got a bad heart and it gets worse when anything goes wrong. She’ll just about die if I don’t get this exam.’

‘Well, why don’t you get stuck in then? The clods who get through haven’t got any more brains than you have.’

The raw eyes came closer and the bad breath hit me in a wave. ‘God, I try to swot but I can’t. Every time I pick up a book I start thinking about girls. Girls all the time. Without their clothes on. It’s driving me crazy. You do all right for yourself. I’ve seen you with that blond sheila . . .’. His voice meandered on, charged with the grief of the unwilling celibate. He had been to a lot of parties, but didn’t seem to latch on. Each time he would take a poke at someone and end up in the street. ‘If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s a bloody pansy,’ he said. ‘I always plug them before they can lay a hand on me. When I land one they go out like a light.’ He spoke with deep satisfaction.

That afternoon we drank at the City Hotel. Jack would have preferred the Prince of Wales, because they cleaned the brass pumps more often, but I had celebrated my twenty-first birthday there by crawling in the door on my hands and knees, dead sober, and barking at the ulcerous Scots barman. He heaved me out on the street. I had returned with a young policeman, whom I told that I had been refused a drink though I was over age, and left them wrangling at the bar.

The afternoon swam by, with sunlight mapping the floorboards, while Russell Clark’s dancing moujik levitated furiously above the door. Even Jack grew pleasanter. An old web-footed soak trod water at his elbow, with long stories about gold on the West Coast, and Jack, with the beer inside him, basked in the old man’s gentle soft-soaping – ‘I can tell you’re a scholar; but there’s things you can’t learn out of books . . .’.

The clock spun slowly. At six o’clock we bought a dozen of beer and a bottle of ready-mixed Diesel cocktail. The wind was cold now outside the pub. Among the railway men and clerks on the rolling pavement I felt I was only a parasite, a useless limb of society, who drank all day while other men were working. But the harbour lights glittering over the water comforted me with the promise of the Riggerstring. With a huge parcel of fish and chips we knocked at the door of my closest friend. His house was one condemned already by the City Council, and its upstairs window commanded a fine view of the fire escape at the back of the Oban Hotel. Wally had decorated the interior with hanging island mats and shells and polished driftwood. According to him the house had been a sailors’ knocking shop in the whaling days. Their drunk ghosts still lumbered on the stairs, and the beds would shake at one in the morning with remembered earthquakes. Wally had no fixed profession. He worked by day in a tinsmith’s shop, but found a Taoist satisfaction in growing cactuses and painting heavy nudes. A discarded master-piece of a blue woman pouring water from a red stone jar hung inside the lavatory door.

page 233

When Wally opened the door Jack offered at once to punch him in the snout; but almost immediately he fell asleep in the sitting-room with his head on the carton of beer. We opened the Diesel cocktail and drank it along with the fish and chips, from thick flower-pot handles. The Riggerstring rose again in my mind like a whale under ice. I woke Jack and fed him the last of the fish and chips. We filled our pockets with beer. We found a taxi in the lighted Octagon, and rode out to the Riggerstring, two Africans coming to convert the missionaries.

The hall was blazing with music. A man in a dress suit stopped us at the door. ‘Where are your tickets?’ he said. I recognised him. He was an elderly medical student with a liking for Mozart and cherry brandy. He had befriended me as a lamb among the Philistines, and told me often his own harsh history as a pub-owner’s son and a lapsed Roman Catholic. In hangover I sat in his room, at a table cluttered with finger-bones, and listened unhappily to endless long-playing records.

‘You know me, Ivan,’ I said.

‘You’re all right. But your cobber’s as full as a boot.’

‘I’ll look after him. I’ll see he doesn’t get into any trouble.’

‘Well, I’ll take your word for it.’ He motioned us towards the cloakroom. There the mining-students drank and bellowed and sang Ten Green Bottles. Jack sank out of sight among them like a porpoise into its shoal. I climbed the stair to the crowded dancing-floor.

There the spruce, wise boys spun like planets. And with them their accompanying moons, the soft girls and the hard girls, the quiet girls and the loud girls, in print and satin and silk and taffeta, like flowers drifting on the high tide of the music. This was the closed heaven; and outside, the twisted streets, the empty seaways, the moon-troubled harbour and the sighing pits of purgatory. She swung there too, in her orbit, on the arm of the red-whiskered enemy. She saw me standing in the stagline, nodded, smiled and raised her hand a little from his shoulder. Then the cocktail rose and exploded in my head. I stumbled down the stairs, and out to the disused ground behind the hall where the moon was freezing the night grass, and vomited until the harbouring dark rose over me.

I woke with someone shaking my shoulder. It was Ivan. ‘Come and get your cobber,’ he said. ‘He’s raising hell in the cloakroom. You’ll have to get him out of here before the cops come.’

‘What’s the time?’ I said.

‘Two o’clock.’

I stood up like a zombie and walked woodenly to the hall. Sea bells rang in the holes in my head, but the walls of the night were firm around me. The lights of a mausoleum-to-be glittered on the hills beyond the harbour. I was stone cold sober. The Riggerstring had hauled its mastodon length to a standstill without me, leaving a small army of dead marines, several living page 234 bodies stretched out on the pier, a heaviness in the mind and an echo of music in the air. In the cloakroom three mining students held Jack. A fourth sat on the floor weeping, blood streaming from a cut above his eye and his broken glasses in his hand. Jack swayed forward as I came in the door. His lank hair hung down over his eyes, and he tugged furiously against the grip of his admonishers, Galbraith alone against the berserkers.

‘I want a fair fight!’ he shouted. ‘There’s no real men here. You’re just a bloody lot of pansies.’ Then he caught sight of me. ‘Good old Jimmy! You’ll fight me, won’t you? You’re a man all right. You don’t let your cobbers down.’

‘I don’t want a fight,’ I said. ‘Hell, you’d knock me down with one clout, Jack. We’ll have to get out of here smartly. Somebody told me the cops are coming. Your old man won’t like it if he has to bail you out in the morning. We’ll get on out of here and have some more grog at home.’

His face brightened. Two of the warders let go of his arms, but the third, a stout youth with a moustache and a sweaty face, scowled and held on. ‘No, you don’t,’ he said. ‘You wait till the cops come. Old Fred’s going to have you up for assault.’ His eyes glistened with righteous indignation. Jack pushed him suddenly in the waistcoat and sent him sprawling against the wall. I seized Jack’s arm and dragged him out the door before the moustache could retaliate.

‘You’ve had a few too many,’ I said. ‘What you need is a bit of fresh air. I reckon that’s the cops’ car coming now.’ A javelin of light shot round the bend in the road. We stepped behind the corner of the hall. But then by the blue glow on the roof we could see it was a taxi. Two people moved from the shadows of the pier to meet it, a man and a woman, their faces blank in the glare of the lights. The man was Red Whiskers; and she was the woman. I walked across in front of the taxi. She turned in surprise, and when she saw me she moved away a little from Red Whiskers’ side.

‘Where on earth have you been?’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking for you half the night.’

‘I was a bit tired. I had a lie down.’

‘That’s hardly an explanation. I think you’d better go home to bed. Jeff has been very helpful. He’s going to take me home. I’ll probably see you some time later on.’ She smiled stiffly and began to climb into the back of the taxi. Red Whiskers followed her. The taxi door slammed. I caught a glimpse of them as the car began to move, she leaning far back from the window, her face a blur, her body clasped by the hateful arm. My mind went after the retreating car, as it shifted beyond sight and sound into the live heart of the night.

With high forehead and full mouth, with doves about her feet, small-breasted and wide-thighed, her hair a bright cloud at her shoulders, Venus trod swiftly over the wooded slopes on yielding air. The blind earth kindled. Bull and heifer, stag and hind, all beasts and birds coupled in her path, each page 235 according to its species, so strong was the influence of the goddess. To the hut of Anchises she came, entering to the fume of woodsmoke, and lay that night in his arms on a rough sheepskin. There the Trojan shepherd drank from her embracing limbs the medicine of immortality, bitter to men. For he grew old, chewing the cud of knowledge, and when he wished for death the earth barred its gates against him. But she lived on, without remorse, for her nature was not subject to decay.

By the time we reached the railway tracks, where a white light shone down from a signal tower, Jack had grown maudlin. His arm was heavy round my shoulders and his feet tripped on the clinkers. ‘You’re a good sort, Jimmy. You wouldn’t let a cobber down. It’s a great thing for a man to know that he’s got a real cobber. You and me, Jimmy, we make a good pair.’ And clambering on through the acrid haze of the railway yards I seemed to see a vast tragic meaning in his babble. This was my real place, outside the living centre of the world, among the deadbeats and the half-men, not tall enough to try, going on for ever and ever across the gritty clinkers of the ashpit.

And not long ago I stood again in the bush belt above the town where I came to life and died again. The night before I had come down by plane from Wellington to talk about Why Writers Stop Writing to the kind of people who are the main cause of it. I had stepped out of the dead belly of the thunder-bird to a stubble field and the sight of familiar raw scrub hills. And the next day for hours on end I wandered through streets where the frost stood like fur on the sunless pavements, through iron-branched parks and pubs like morgues where no one walked or talked but the bird-voiced smiling strangers. The hot, live, ringing town had gone as if it had never been, with girls in overcoats and boys in corduroys, the night’s manna and the day’s longing. The old bludgeoned core of knowledge under my singlet woke and winced again.

What happened to that stupid sad young man? I asked the clock ruled spires and the grey plumed station. Who put Lysol in his rum and cloves? Who killed cock robin with his drumming heart and his head full of feathers? Time, said the Town Hall clock, the four-faced master of the windy year. Sin, said the First Church spire, needling up to the vague Otago heaven of tombstone clouds. But the Leith Stream, the last and only woman in the world, lulling the dead sky in her arms, sighing under bridge and over weir down to the flat crab-wet harbour, had nothing at all to say.