The Name on the Door is Not Mine Read online

  He didn’t come of course because he was busy writing his letters to the newspapers, but I wasn’t to know that. The next day was Sunday and I spent the afternoon wandering around the lower slopes of the Domain among the trees—in fact it must have been somewhere near where they’ve built the Interdenominational Harp Memorial Chapel. I was feeling angry with Julian and I started to think I might get back at him by ringing the police and telling them he was a dangerous communist. I probably would have done it too but I didn’t know his address exactly and I only knew his Christian name.

  I still go for walks down there, with Christopher in the pram, and sometimes I sit inside the chapel and look out at the trees through all that tinted glass. People who come into Gomeo’s say it’s bad architecture but I like it whatever kind of architecture it is and sometimes I think I can get some idea in there of how Julian felt in the glass elevator. I’ve had a special interest in the chapel right from the start because Vega belongs to the Open Pentecostal Baptists and her church contributed a lot of money to the building. She told me about all the fighting that went on at first and how the Anglicans tried to get the Catholics in because of the Ecumenical thing. She said they nearly succeeded but then a Catholic priest testified to having seen Julian cross himself shortly before he put on his wings and the Catholics decided to put up a memorial of their own. Vega said it was nonsense, Julian Harp couldn’t have been a Catholic and I agreed with her because I know he wasn’t anything except that he used to call himself a High Church Agnostic and an occasional Zen Buddy. Of course Vega was really pleased to have the Catholics out of the scheme and so were a lot of other people even though it meant raising a lot more money. Vega said it was better raising extra money than having the Catholics smelling out the place with incense.

  It must have been nearly a week went by before Julian came into Gomeo’s again and when I saw what a scraggy-looking thing he was I wondered why I had given him a second thought. I ignored him quite successfully for half an hour but when he asked me to come to his bedsitter after I finished work I went and the next night he came to mine and before long it seemed uneconomical paying two rents. We more or less agreed we would take a flat together but weeks passed and Julian did nothing about it. By now he had told me about his Subvert the Press Campaign and I knew how busy he was so I decided to find us a flat myself and surprise him with it. I answered probably twenty ads before I got one in Herne Bay at a good rent with a fridge and the bathroom shared with only one other couple. I paid a week’s rent in advance and when Julian came into Gomeo’s and asked for a spaghetti I brought him a clean plate with the key on it wrapped in a note giving the address of the flat and saying if Mr Julian Harp would go to the above address he would find his new home and in the fridge a special shrimp salad all for him. I watched him from behind the espresso machine. Instead of looking pleased he frowned and screwed up the note and called me over and said he wanted a spaghetti. I didn’t know what to do so I brought him what he asked for and he ate it and went out. When I finished work I went to his bedsitter to explain about the flat. He wouldn’t even go with me to look at it because he said anywhere you had to take a bus to get to was the suburbs and he wasn’t going to live in the suburbs.

  I decided I wouldn’t have anything more to do with him. I knew he was friendly with a Rarotongan girl who was a stripper in a place in Karangahape Road and I thought he was possibly just amusing himself with me while she did a three-month sentence she had got for obscene exposure. A few days later when he came into Gomeo’s and said he had found a flat in Grafton for us I brought him a plate of spaghetti he hadn’t asked for and when I finished work I went out by the back door of the shop and left him waiting for me at the front. The next evening and the next I refused even to talk to him. I was quite determined. But then he stopped coming to Gomeo’s and began to send me letters, not letters from him but from his people who wrote to the newspapers. Every letter looked different from the one before and told me something different. Some told me Julian Harp ought be hanged or flogged and I was right to have nothing to do with him. Others said he was basically good but he needed my help if he was going to be reformed. One said there was nothing wrong with him, it was only his mind that was disordered. One told me in strictest confidence that J. Harp was too good for this world and would shortly depart for another. They were really quite funny in a way that made it silly to stay angry about the flat, so when he had run through his whole list of letter writers I went round to his place and knocked and when he came to the door I said I had come to sing the Candy Roll Blues with him. It wasn’t long after that we took the little two-storeyed house in Kendall Road, the one I’m in now with Christopher and Vega.

  The first few months we spent there Julian wasn’t easy to live with. He liked the house well enough and especially the look of it from outside. He used to cross the street sometimes early in the morning and sit on a little canvas stool and stare at the house. He said if you looked long enough you would see all the dead people who had once lived there going about doing the things they had always done. But I soon discovered he was missing the view he had from his bedsitter of the city and the harbour, and if I woke and he wasn’t down in the street he was most likely getting the view from the steps in front of the museum. I used to walk up there often to call him for breakfast or lunch and I would find him standing on the steps above the cenotaph staring down at the ships and the cranes or more often straight out across the water beyond the North Shore and the gulf and Rangitoto.

  We had lots of arguments during those first couple of months. I used to lose my temper and walk up and down the kitchen shouting every mean thing I could think of until I ran out of breath and if I was still angry I would throw things at him. Julian couldn’t talk nearly as fast but he didn’t waste words like I did, every one was barbed, so we came out pretty nearly even. But Julian caused most of the fights and I used to make him admit that. It was because he didn’t have anything better to do. His Subvert the Press Campaign had ended in a way he hadn’t meant it should and now there didn’t seem to be anything especially needing to be done. He took a job for a while as an orderly in the hospital because the money he had brought back from America was beginning to run out but when they put him on duty in the morgue he left because he said he didn’t like seeing the soles of people’s feet.

  It was Anzac Day the year before his flight that Julian first thought of making himself a set of wings. In the morning there were the usual parades, and the servicemen and bands marched up Kendall Road on their way to the cenotaph. Julian wasn’t patriotic. He couldn’t remember any more about the war than I can. But he liked crowds and noise so he tied our tablecloth to the broom handle and waved it out of the upstairs window over the marchers until a man with shiny black shoes and a lot of medals on a square suit stopped and shouted what did he think he was up to waving a red flag over the Anzac parade. Julian said it wasn’t a red flag it was a tablecloth and that made the man angrier. He shouted and shook his fist and a crowd gathered. When the Governor-general’s car arrived on its way to the cenotaph it was held up at the corner. By this time Julian was making a speech from the window. He was leaning out so far I could only see the bottom half of him and I couldn’t hear much of what he was saying but I did hear him shout:

  Shoot if you must this old grey head

  But spare my tablecloth she said.

  Then the police arrived and began clearing a path for the Governor-general’s Rolls and I persuaded Julian to come in and close the window.

  By now he was in a mood for Anzac celebrations and we followed the crowd up to the cenotaph and listened to the speeches and sang the hymns. After the service we wandered about in the Domain. Julian kept chanting El Alamein, Minqar Qaim, Tobruk, Cassino and all the other places the Governor-general had talked about in his speech until I got sick of hearing them and I turned up my transistor to drown him out. He wandered away from me across the football fields and kept frightening a flock of seagulls into the air
every time they came down. When he came back to where I was sitting he was quiet and rather solemn. We walked on and it was then we came to the place where the workmen are putting in the statue and right on that spot Julian stopped and stared in front of him and began slowly waving one arm up and down at his side. I asked him what was the matter and he said quick come and have a look at this and he ran down the slope and lay flat on his stomach on one of those park benches that have no backs and began flapping his arms. When I got down to the bench he asked me did his arms look anything like a bird’s wings. I said no but when he asked me why I couldn’t think of the answer. Then he turned over on his back and began flapping his arms again and asked me did they look anything like a bird’s wings now. At first I said no but when I looked properly I had to admit they did. His forearms were moving up and down almost parallel with his body and the part of his arms from the shoulders to the elbows stayed out at right angles from him. So I said yes they did look more like a bird’s wings now because a bird’s wings bent forward to the elbows and then back along the body and that was why his arms hadn’t looked like wings when he lay on his stomach. As soon as I said that he jumped up and kissed me on both cheeks and said I was a bright girl, I had seen the point, he would have to fly upside down.

  It wasn’t long before I began to notice sketches of wings lying about the house and soon there were little models in balsa wood and paper. One of the things that annoys me every time I read about Julian’s flight is that it’s not treated as a proper scientific achievement. People talk as if he flew by magic or just willed himself to stay in the air. They seem to think if no one in human history, not even Leonardo da Vinci, could make wings that would carry a man, Julian Harp can’t have been human or his flight must have been a miracle. And now Vega tells me there’s a new sect called the Harpists and they believe Julian wasn’t a man but an angel sent down as a sign that God has chosen New Zealand for the Second Coming. I’ve even wondered whether Vega doesn’t half believe what the Harpists say and it won’t surprise me at all if she leaves the Open Pentecostals and joins them.

  Gradually I learned a lot about the wings because designing them and building the six or seven sets he did before he got what he wanted spread over all that winter and most of the following summer, and once Julian had admitted what he was doing he was willing to explain all the stages to me. I don’t suppose I understood properly very much of what he told me because I haven’t a scientific sort of brain but I do remember the number 1.17 which has something to do with the amount of extra energy you needed to get a heavier weight into the air. And also .75 which I think proved that animals as big as man could fly if they used their energy properly but animals that weighed more than 350 pounds, like cows and horses, couldn’t, not even in theory. But the main thing I remember, because Julian said it so often, is that everyone who had tried to fly, including Leonardo da Vinci, had made problems instead of solving them by adding unnecessarily to the weight they had to get into the air. The solution to the problem Julian used to say was not to build yourself a machine. It was simply to make yourself wings and use them like a bird. But you could only do that by making your arm approximate to the structure of a bird’s wing—that was what he said—and that meant flying upside down. Once you imagined yourself flying upside down it became obvious your legs were no longer legs but the bird’s tail, and that meant the gap between the legs had to be filled in by a triangle of fabric. In theory your legs ought then to grow out of the middle of your back, about where your kidneys are, and that of course was one of Julian’s biggest problems—how he was to take off lying flat on his back.

  But his first problem and it was the one that nearly made him give up the whole project was finding the right materials for the framework. He must have experimented with twenty different kinds of wood and I was for ever cleaning up shavings off the floor, but they were all either too brittle or too heavy or too inflexible. Then I think he got interested in a composition that was used to make frames for people’s glasses but you would have needed to be a millionaire to pay for it in large amounts. It was the same with half a dozen other materials, they were light enough and strong enough but too expensive.

  By the middle of that winter Julian was ready to give up and go to work. It was certainly difficult the two of us living off what I earned at Gomeo’s and paying the rent but Julian was so happy working on his wings even when he was in despair about them I said he must keep going at least until he had given his theory a proper trial. It was about this time he decided nothing but the most expensive materials would do and he wasted weeks thinking up schemes to make money instead of thinking how to make his wings.

  It must have been early June or July he hit on a solution. He had gone to Sir Robert Kerridge’s office, the millionaire who has a big new building in Queen Street, and offered to take off from the building as a publicity stunt if Kerridge Odeon would put up the money for making the wings, but he hadn’t got very far because the typists and clerks mistook him for a student and he was shown out of the building without seeing Sir Robert. It had begun to rain heavily and Julian had no coat and no bus fare and he walked all the way back to Kendall Road that day with nothing to keep him dry but a battered old umbrella with a broken catch and a matchstick wedged in it to keep it open. When he got home he couldn’t get the match out and he had to leave the umbrella outside in our little concrete yard. He was standing at the kitchen window staring out and I didn’t ask him about his idea of taking off from the Kerridge building because I could see it hadn’t been a success when suddenly the match must have come out and the umbrella sprang shut so fast it took off and landed on the other side of our six-foot paling fence. I could see Julian was very angry by now because he walked slowly into the neighbour’s yard and back with the umbrella and slowly into the shed and out again with the axe and quite deliberately with the rain pouring down on his back he chopped the umbrella to pieces. I went into the other room to give him time to cool off, and when I came back ten minutes or so later he was sitting quite still on one of our kitchen chairs with the water running off him into pools on the floor and held up in front of him between the thumb and the forefinger of his right hand was a single steel strut from the framework of the umbrella. He seemed to be smiling at it and talking to it and even I could see what a perfect answer it was, light, thin, strong, flexible, with even an extra strut hinged to the main one.

  Julian was impatient now to get on but he needed a lot of umbrellas because his wings were to be large and working by trial and error a lot of struts would be wasted. We couldn’t afford to buy umbrellas and in two days searching around rubbish tips he found only three, all of them damaged by rust. The next morning he was gone when I woke and when I walked up to the museum steps where he was standing staring out across the harbour he said we would have to steal every umbrella we could lay our hands on. So that afternoon and every afternoon it rained during the next few weeks I left Julian at home working and I went to some place like the post office or the museum or the art gallery and came away with somebody’s umbrella. It was easy enough when Julian wanted women’s umbrellas but when he wanted the heavier struts I always felt nervous walking away with a man’s. Occasionally there were umbrellas left at Gomeo’s in the evenings and I took these home as well. Soon the spare room upstairs, the one Vega sleeps in now, was crammed with all kinds and I got expert at following a person carrying the particular make Julian needed and waiting until a chance came to steal it. I still have a special feeling about umbrellas and sometimes even now I steal one just because it reminds me of how exciting it was when Julian was getting near to finishing his final set of wings. I even stole one at the Town Hall on the night of the National Orchestra concert when that poet read the ode the government commissioned him to write about Julian and the orchestra played a piece called ‘Tone Poem: J … H …’ by a local composer.

  I should mention that all the time this was going on Julian was in strict training for his flight. I used to tell h
im he was overdoing it and that he didn’t need to train so hard, because to be honest I always felt embarrassed in the afternoons sitting on the bank watching him panting around the Domain track in sandshoes and baggy white shorts while Halberg and Snell and all those other Auckland Olympic champions went flying past him. But Julian insisted that success didn’t only depend on making a set of wings that would work. It depended on having enough stamina left to keep using them after the first big effort of getting into the air. The flight he said would be like running a mile straight after a 220-yard sprint and that was what he used to do during his track training. He had put himself on a modified Lydiard schedule and apart from the sharpening-up work on the track he kept up a steady fifty miles’ jogging a week. There were also special arm exercises for strength and coordination and he spent at least ten minutes morning and evening lying flat on his back on the ironing board flapping his arms and holding a ten-ounce sinker in each hand. Julian was no athlete but he was determined and after six months in training he began to get the scrawny haggard look Lydiard world champions get when they reach a peak. It wasn’t any surprise to me when he timed himself over the half mile and found he was running within a second of the New Zealand women’s record.

  By now the framework for the final set of wings was built and ready to be covered with fabric and there were only a few struts still to be welded into the back and leg supports. Julian had bought a periscope too and attached it to the crash helmet so he could hold his position steady, flat on his back, and still see ahead in the direction of his flight. Everything seemed to be accounted for except there was still no answer to the problem of how he was to take off lying on his back. He needed a run to get started but he could hardly run backwards and jump into the air. He considered jumping off something but that seemed unnecessarily dangerous and besides he thought it would be important to hold his horizontal position right from the start and that meant a smooth take-off not a wild jump.