The Name on the Door is Not Mine Read online

  It had all taken time and our departure had been delayed. In the final minutes before we began to taxi out for take-off I checked my laptop again. There was a new message from Mahina. It read:

  ‘I told the Bad Voice that Peter Preston said it should go away. The Bad Voice said “I am Peter Preston.”’

  She’d signed it ‘Matariki’.

  A fitting tribute

  To Barry Humphries

  I DON’T ASK YOU to believe me when I say I knew Julian Harp but I ask you to give me a hearing because in every detail the story I am going to tell is gospel true. I’ve tried to tell it before. After Julian’s flight I even got a reporter along to the house and he wrote me up as ‘just another hysterical young woman claiming to have known the National Hero’. That was a year ago or more and I haven’t mentioned Julian Harp since.

  What reason can a person have for telling a story that she knows won’t be believed? I have two: a cross-grained magistrate and a statue. You might have heard about the case in Auckland in which a woman, a shopkeeper in court for trading without a licence, happened to say in evidence that Julian Harp had once come into her shop and bought one of those periscopes short people use for seeing over the heads of a crowd. The magistrate asked her to please keep calm and stick to the truth. Then he called for a psychiatrist’s report because he said she was obviously a born liar. Next day, which happened to be the anniversary of Julian’s flight, he sentenced her to a month in jail and the Herald published an editorial saying no one knew Julian Harp. Julian Harp knew no one. A privileged few watched his moment of glory; but he died as he had lived, a Man Alone …

  Of course if the woman hadn’t mentioned Julian Harp she might have got away with a fine. But she insisted she remembered his name because he asked her to keep the periscope aside until he had money to pay for it. And she said he wore his hair down around his shoulders. That was unthinkable.

  When I read about that case I knew what no one else could know, that the woman was telling the truth. But it was the statue that really persuaded me it was time I tried to write down the facts. I was walking in the Domain pushing my baby Christopher in his pram. Some workmen were digging on the slope among those trees between the main gates and the pavilion and what pulled me up was that they were working right on the spot where Julian first got the idea for his wings. Then a truck arrived with a winch and a great slab of polished granite and in no time all the workmen were round it swearing at one another and pulling and pushing at the chains until the stone was lowered into the hole. I thought why do they want a great ugly slab of graveyard stone there of all places? I didn’t know I had asked it aloud, but one of the workmen turned and said it was for the new statue. The statue was to go on top of it. What new statue? The statue of Julian Harp of course. The one donated by the Bank of New Zealand. The statue of Julian Harp! You can imagine how I felt. I sat down on a bench and took Christopher out of his pram and rocked him backwards and forward and thought how extraordinary! Miraculous! That after all the arguments in the newspapers about a site, not to mention the wrangling about whether the statue should be modern or old-fashioned, they had at last landed it by accident plonk on the spot where Julian thought of his solution to the problem of engineless flight.

  I sat there rocking my baby while he held on to my nose with one hand and hit me around the head with the other, and all the time I was thinking, I might even have been saying it aloud, what have I got to lose? I must tell someone. If they laugh at me, too bad. At least I will have tried. And besides, I owe it to Christopher to let everyone know the solemn truth that he is the son of Julian Harp. By the time I had wheeled the pram back through the Domain I was ready to start by telling Vega but when I saw her there in the kitchen cutting up beans for dinner and looking all straggly and cross I knew I oughtn’t to tell anyone until I had the whole story sorted out in my head and perhaps written down.

  I should explain before I go any further that Vega is a sort of awful necessity in my life. Before Christopher was born I had to give up work and I didn’t know how I was going to pay the rent. I wanted to stay on in the house I lived in with Julian, because although everyone says he is dead no one knows for certain that he is. I wasn’t planning to sit around expecting him, but I had to keep in mind that if he did come back the house would be the only place he would know to look for me. The house and Gomeo’s coffee bar. So when someone advertised in the Auckland Star that she was a respectable middle-aged clerk wanting board, I took her in; and now there are the three of us, Christopher and Vega and me, sharing the little two-storeyed wooden house with three rooms upstairs and two down that sits a yard from the footpath in Kendall Road on the eastern edge of the Domain. Vega isn’t a great companion or anything. She hasn’t much to say—except in her sleep; and then although she goes on for hours at a time it isn’t in English or any other language. But when I was ready to start work again at Gomeo’s I discovered I had been lucky to find her. I needed someone in the house at night to watch over Christopher, and when I mentioned it to Vega she said in her flat voice I could stop worrying about it because hadn’t I noticed she never went out at night. She was afraid of the dark! Then she told me she was named after a star we don’t often see in the southern hemisphere, and she made a noise that sounded like a laugh and said had I ever heard of a star going out at night.

  All the time I was feeding Christopher that evening after seeing the workmen in the Domain I kept thinking about the statue and how wrong it would be if no one ever knew that Julian had a son. So when Christopher was asleep and I was helping Vega serve the dinner I asked her whether she thought Julian Harp might have had a family. She said no. I asked her what she thought would happen if someone claimed to be the mother of Julian’s child. She said she didn’t know, but she did know there was a good deal too much money being spent on a statue that made him look like nothing she’d ever seen and that kind of sculpture was a pretty disgusting way to honour a man who had given his life. I said but leaving aside the statue what would she think if a girl in Auckland claimed to be the mother of his child? Vega said she thought some of the little minxes had claimed that already, out for all they could get, but she didn’t think Julian Harp would have been the marrying kind. She said she imagined him like Lawrence of Arabia, married to an idea. When I said I hadn’t mentioned marriage but only paternity she said there was no need to be obscene.

  I gave up at that and I didn’t have time to think about Julian for the rest of the evening until it was quite late and something happened at the coffee bar that made me remember my first meeting with him. I was bending over one of the tables when Gomeo came out of the kitchen and put his hand on my buttocks and said in a sort of stage whisper you could hear all over the shop that tonight he’d gotta have me or that’s the end. The sack. Finish. I said nothing and went to wipe down another table but he followed me and said in the same whisper well was it yes or no. So I swung round and said no, no, no—and each time I said it I pushed the wet cloth in his face until he backed all the way into the kitchen. By now the people in the shop were waiting to hear me get the sack but Gomeo only said one day I would really make him mad and my God that would be the finish of us both.

  You might wonder why that should remind me of Julian. It’s because Gomeo threatens to sack me and for the same reason nearly every time there’s a full moon, and it was after one of his more spectacular performances I first talked to Julian. Julian was in the shop and like everyone else he took it all seriously and thought I had lost my job. So when I had finished pushing Gomeo back into the kitchen where he belongs Julian asked could he help me find a new job and he said he would even be willing to hit Gomeo for me if I thought it would help. I had to explain that Gomeo isn’t quite one hundred per cent and he doesn’t mean what he says. But you have to pretend he means it and fight him off. If you just laughed at him, or if you said yes you’d like to go to bed with him, you would be out on the pavement in five minutes because Gomeo only wants the big drama, nothin
g real. I explained all this to Julian and he looked relieved but then he said he was sorry because now there wasn’t any excuse to invite me to his bedsitter after I had finished work. When I looked at his face I could see he meant just what he said so I asked him did he have to have an excuse.

  And thinking of Julian’s face reminds me I ought to say something about his appearance because reading about him in the papers will have given you a wrong picture of him. It’s well known there’s only one photograph of Julian, the one taken by a schoolgirl with a box camera just before he took off. His face is slightly obscured by the crash helmet he’s just going to put on and the camera hasn’t been properly focused. So all the local Annigonis have got to work and done what they call impressions of him and I can tell you quite honestly the more praise the picture gets the less it looks like Julian. They all dress him up in tidy clothes and cut his hair short and some of them have even put him in a suit and tie and stuck his hair down with Brylcreem. Well if it’s important to you that your local hero should look like a young army officer I’m sorry but the fact is when I first knew Julian he was one of the most disreputable-looking men I had seen. His clothes never seemed to fit or match and he never went near a barber. Every now and then he would reach round to the back and sides of his head and snip off bits of hair with a pair of scissors but that was all. I think he had given up shaving altogether at the time but he didn’t have the kind of growth to make a beard so he was what you might call halfway between clean-shaven and bearded. He wore a rather tattered raincoat done right up to the neck, and at midnight when I finished work and he took me to a teen club under the street where you could twist and stomp he kept it on and buttoned up until I began to wonder whether he had a shirt underneath.

  I hadn’t turned eighteen then but I was older than most of the others in the teen club and Julian was probably twenty-two or -three so I felt embarrassed especially because Julian looked such a clown. When we arrived we sat at a table and didn’t dance until one of the kids called out Hey Jesus can’t you dance? and several others laughed and jeered. Julian laughed too and clapped in a spastic kind of way and looked all round like a maniac as if he couldn’t see who they were jeering at and then he got up without me and drifted backwards into the middle of the dancers and began to jerk and twist and stamp and roll in time to the music. Julian could certainly dance and in no time they had all stopped and made a circle round him clapping and shouting and urging him on until the sweat was pouring off him. He had to break out of the circle and make his way back to our table waving one hand behind him while they all shouted for more.

  After that we drank coffee and danced and talked but you couldn’t have much of a conversation above the noise of the electric guitars and when we came out at 2 a.m. I felt wide awake and not very keen to go back to my bedsitter. Julian said I should come to his and I went. We walked up Greys Avenue under the trees and then between two buildings and through an alley that came out at the back of the house where Julian had a room. I followed him up a narrow outside stairway right to the top of the building and through French doors off a creaky veranda. He threw up a sash window and we sat getting our breath back looking out over a cluster of old wooden houses like the one we were in and the new modern buildings beyond and the harbour and the bridge. Julian said the nice thing about coming back to Auckland after being away was the old wooden houses. I had thought that was what people coming back complained about, a town where nothing looked solid, but Julian said it was as if people lived in lanterns. He liked the harbour too and the bridge and everything he looked at and I found that unusual because the people who came into Gomeo’s were for ever arguing about which buildings in Auckland were any good and which were not and nobody was ever enthusiastic about anything, least of all those like Julian who had been away overseas.

  Julian said he liked living right in the busy part of the city and he liked to be up high. He had worked as a window cleaner on the AMP building in Sydney and as a waiter in the Penn Top of the Statler Hilton in New York. And before coming back to Auckland he had driven a glass elevator that ran up and down the face of a hotel at the top of Nob Hill in San Francisco looking out over the harbour and the Golden Gate Bridge and the bay. He said that was the best job he had ever had and he was willing to make a career of it but they made the elevator automatic to save the expense of an operator. Julian offered to run it for nothing and live off whatever tips he could get from sightseers, and when the hotel managers refused he still spent hours of every day going up and down as a member of the public until it was decided he was making a nuisance of himself and he was told not to come into the building again. A week or so later when he tried to slip in wearing dark glasses someone called the police and Julian decided it was time to leave San Francisco.

  We sat without any light drinking and talking or Julian talking and me listening and I remember being surprised when I noticed the wine bottle was half empty and I could see the colour of the heavy velvet cloth it stood on was not black but dark red. It had got light and still I didn’t feel tired. Julian said he would make us some breakfast and while he cut bread and toasted it I had a chance to look around his things, and especially at a big old desk that had taken my eye. It was halfway down the room facing one wall and it was covered with a strange collection of letters, newspaper clippings, stationery, bottles of ink of all different colours and makes, every kind of pen from a quill to a Parker, and three typewriters. Pinned to the wall above the desk there was a huge chart, but before I could begin to read it Julian saw me looking at it and called me over to help him make the breakfast.

  I got to know that chart well later on because it was the nerve centre of what Julian called his Subvert the Press Campaign. On it were the names and addresses of all the people Julian had invented to write letters to the editor, then a series of numbers which showed the colour of ink each one used, the type of notepaper, and the kind of pen—or t1, t2, t3 if one of the typewriters was used—then examples of their scripts and signatures and details about their opinions and prejudices. Each name had stars beside it to show the number of letters published, and the letters themselves hung in bulldog clips at the end of each horizontal section. It had come to Julian that a newspaper really prefers letters signed with pseudonyms because it can pick and choose among them and print the opinions it likes but within reason it has to print all the signed letters that come in. So the idea of his Subvert the Press Campaign was very very gradually to introduce a whole new group of letter writers who all signed their names. They had to be all different types and live in different parts of town so the paper wouldn’t suspect what was going on; but as Julian explained to me later, once he had established his group he could concentrate them suddenly on one issue and create a controversy. He called them his Secret Weapon because he said only a small group of people reads the editorials but everyone reads the correspondence columns.

  But when it was put to the test and Julian decided to bring the government down (I think it was over the cancellation of the Lyttelton scaffolding factory and the issue of extra import licences) the Secret Weapon misfired. He sent letter after letter, not only to the Herald and the Star but all over the country and soon there was a raging controversy. But he wrote his letters in a sort of daze, almost as if voices were telling him what to write, and what each letter said seemed to depend on the person supposed to be writing it instead of depending on what Julian himself really wanted to say. In the end his letter writers said as many different things as it was possible to say about the cancellation of the contract and when Parliament assembled for the special debate not only the Opposition members but the Government ones as well were armed with clippings of letters Julian had written. That was a great disappointment for Julian. He lost faith in his Secret Weapon and when I tried to get him going again he said what was the use of secretly taking over the correspondence column of a newspaper if when you succeeded it looked exactly the same as it looked before.

  But it wasn’t until I kne
w Julian well that he let me into the secret of his letters. That first morning he called me away to help with the breakfast before I had got more than a quick glance over the desk and when I thought about the chart afterwards all I could guess was that he might be the ringleader of a secret society of anarchists, or even a criminal.

  We sat at the big sash window eating breakfast and watching the sun hitting off the water on to the white weatherboards and listening to pop songs and the ads on 1ZB. Julian sang some of the hits and we did some twisting and while the ads were on we finished off the wine. Julian told me the Seraphs were his favourite pop singers and that was weeks before anyone else was talking about them or voting them on to the Top Twenty. I often thought about that when Julian got to be famous and the Seraphs were at the top of the Hit Parade with ‘Harp’s in Heaven Now’. And when the NZBC banned the song because they said it wasn’t a fitting tribute to the national hero I felt like writing some letters to the editor myself.

  It must have been eleven o’clock before I left to go home that morning and I left in a bad temper partly because I hadn’t had any sleep I suppose but partly because Julian had stretched out on his divan and gone to sleep and left me to find my own way out. He hadn’t said goodbye or anything about seeing me again and when I thought about it I didn’t even know his second name and he didn’t know mine.

  I slept all that afternoon and had a ravioli at Gomeo’s before starting work and I spent a miserable evening watching out for Julian to come in. It wasn’t that I had any romantic feelings about him, the sort I might have had in those days about one of those good-looking boys in elastic-sided boots and tapered trousers. But I had a picture fixed in my head of Julian with his straggly hair and mottled blue eyes going up and up in that glass elevator like a saint on a cloud, and I kept looking for him to come into Gomeo’s as if it would be almost a relief to see just the ordinary Julian instead of the Julian in my head.