Black lands. Navy-blue. Earth-brown. Clay-yellow. Ochrous. Brackenish. Brackish. Creek-green. These are words he chooses for his west. That west out there that makes him uneasy because it is where he grew up and where a part of him still belongs. He wants to leave no parts lying around.
Down again, along, through, into. Here is Loomis under the hills. A glass and tile front, traffic lights and carparks and people. He wants the town of empty dusty streets and broken hedges. It’s in behind and a long way back. He drives down the shopping streets and turns left into industry and commerce – where once a little square-built jam factory had stood – and passes through a district of panel-beating shops and coal and firewood yards and boarded-up stores until, at a straggly line, Loomis is residential. It’s Polynesian too, and he drives carefully. There was only one Maori at Loomis school when he was there. Now, he has read in the Herald, a third of the pupils are Maoris and Islanders. Women in muu-muus talk on a lawn. Youths with dread-locked hair stand around a stripped-down motorbike. He’s anxious that they shouldn’t notice him. They are foreign, he is foreign – who owns the point of view? He sees how his presence in this street, his clothes, his car, his language, speech, habits of mind, can only provoke. Is there any part of Loomis he can claim as his own? And backwards-claiming – what can it signify in the Loomis-1990 world? He feels that he is doing something vaguely indecent.
He drives on all the same, and goes down a hill into a neighbourhood that seems pakeha. Across a concrete bridge where once a wooden… Along the road, beside the creek where once… Unseemly word; ‘once’ prevents, doesn’t it, good mental health? Yet it creates a country, it’s a territory in his brain. Jack declares his right to go there.
He parks, he locks his car, he tries to find his old swimming hole. The creek is opened up. It’s as if someone has forced two hands into the gorge and pulled it wide. The creek lies in the sun. It never did that except at midday. But it’s dirtier and meaner. That is natural. The water in the hole is yellow-green. It has a rotting vegetation smell in place of the eel smell he remembers. There’s nothing for him here, no folding together of now with memory. Jack sneezes once and turns away. He climbs back to the roadside and finds two youths looking at his car. They must have come down from the houses over the street. One wears a league jersey and the other a cotton T-shirt with the arms torn off. League is threat. Torn off is threat. Jeans. Boots. Shaven heads. Beer cans that gurgle in unison.
‘Lost something, mate?’
‘No, no, I’m just looking around.’
‘Good idea to lock your car round here.’
They have seen him do it. Jack blushes, half in fright. ‘It’s just a habit.’
‘Good idea. Might get your stereo knocked off, eh?’
‘Ha ha ha,’ the other laughs.
‘I was looking at the creek,’ Jack says. ‘I grew up in a house along the road. I used to swim in the pool down there.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Fifty years ago.’
They cannot comprehend fifty years. All the same they soften. They have drunk enough beer to make them sentimental. ‘I had a raft there. When I was a kid.’
‘Yes?’
‘We piled the rocks up, eh? We made a real big pool.’
‘It’s a good creek,’ the other says. ‘I learned to swim down there.’
‘So did I,’ Jack says, although it’s a lie. He learned to swim at Cascade Park. ‘There were great big eels.’
Their eyes swing on to him. It’s plain the eels have gone. He had better be careful not to make his creek better than theirs. But he’s moved to find they have a creek at all. He is moved that it’s still alive.
‘It’s deeper than I remember.’ Another lie, but a gift to them.
‘She’s deep, all right. There’s a pool up there you can’t touch the bottom. I used to try.’ The league jersey youth turns away. He’s as moved as Jack.
‘Have a beer, mate,’ the other says.
‘I’d better not. I’m driving.’ He’s envious of someone diving deep in his creek and wants to ask the young man what he found down there. He stamps his foot on the road. ‘When I lived here this was all gravel and dust.’
‘Musta been a long time ago.’ They are not interested in the road. They walk to the creek edge and look at the water. ‘Good creek.’
‘Thanks for talking to me.’
‘No sweat.’
‘I’d better get along the road and see my old house.’
‘Remember to keep your car locked.’
‘Ha ha ha.’
Nice boys, he thinks as he drives away. He wants to keep them simple; doesn’t want to look at their lives. That way they don’t interfere but share the creek. He goes around two bends and finds a grassed area where there had been a field of gorse. He never penetrated it and never came to the creek that way. Now he can walk down and stand on the rocks by the water and make out a bike frame and bottles in the mud. He can turn and run his eye up the slope and over the road and get a partial view of the house he had lived in for the first twenty years of his life.
Partial because although the row of pine trees is cut down two new houses stand where the summer-house and the rose garden used to be. He sees the old front porch and door framed between decramastic roofs and hardiplank walls. The curving drive is gone – where is the curve, where is the contour, that stand for the times he got away? Running down the drive, leaning on the curve, bent him out of her world into his. Now there is a right-of-way between wire fences, running from the road to the door. There would have been no escape on that narrow way.
Jack sneezes four times. (It’s nowhere near his record of nineteen, brought on by the smell of animals in the Wellington zoo.) He blows his nose on tissues and wads them into a ball, which he fires at a cairn of stones on the far bank, and hits it square. That gives him the confidence to look at the house again. It was built in 1927 for the newlyweds and the mortgage was paid off in 1947, several weeks before Walter Skeat made his fatal dismount from the train. They had their twentieth wedding anniversary there, though no one celebrated or even mentioned it. Dorothy Skeat – had anyone ever called her Dot? – stayed on in the house until the mid sixties, when she sold it for a very nice price and bought a home unit in Epsom. Jack had last seen the house as she moved out: four-square and substantial at the end of its white-shell drive.
Now, the letterboxes say, it is divided into flats. 126A, B, C, D. How can four families, even four couples, fit in there? Another question – what made the Skeats think they needed so much space? Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, two living-rooms, a dining-room, a study, for three people? It only started to make sense when you understood that each of those three people lived alone.
From Going West.