Dear Neil Roberts by Airini Beautrais

Author:Airini Beautrais
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Victoria University Press

Out the window

‘I’m trying to moderate my radical thoughts,’ says my friend Jonah,

as he boils a kettle on a hotplate, in a corner of his workshop.

The workshop, in a massive warehouse, features hanging tricycles,

miles of inner tubes, scores of every bike part imaginable

sorted into shelving. There is a smell of grease and rubber;

the toilet, Jonah stresses, when I ask if I can take my boy there,

is a men’s workshop toilet. It’s a bit like a mechanic’s garage,

without the semi-naked women, or the awful music.

Jonah is eating a lunch of silverbeet and baked beans;

late, wolfed, non-gourmet. We are drinking a pleasant kind

of herbal tea. I am sinking into a chair, probably dumpstered.

We are talking about the past, and people we have known.

Here I am, with my blond-haired child,

with my rounded belly, in my hand a set of car keys –

the remote-locking kind, which I never would have imagined.

It has been a while since I did anything subversive

with a can of spraypaint, with a billboard, with a naked human body,

with anything. But I’ve known Jonah since the days

when I did. I wonder out loud, what it would be like

if you kept living the same life you lived at twenty-one.

I know some people I’d like to turn out like,

and others I wouldn’t. Jonah is thinking back to his rock days.

A lone creative type, lost in Masterton,

he met up with boys from Upper Hutt College,

played in a band with three of them. All went nuts, he reckons.

All the boys from that school, of that age.

One of them, Jonah tells me, ‘Basically, the voices told him

to go out the window.’ And he listened.

‘He said one of the most interesting things I’ve ever heard

anyone say,’ Jonah adds. ‘He said, all these people are waiting

for the apocalypse, but the thing is, it’s already happened.

This is hell. We are living in hell.

I’d never thought of it like that.’

‘Neither have I,’ I say. But I can understand,

or remember, more like, what the world

can look like through those goggles.

Sure, it’s frightening, from some angles, getting older;

but what a relief – touch wood, grip vinyl –

to be here, still, a pleasant pointlessness

we have allowed ourselves.

Lukas and I go for a walk up Durie Hill tower,

and look out over the city, the river and its steamboat,

Wairere House square and stolid on the bank

like an ugly pagoda.

All the way down, I carry them both; the one who can walk

and the unborn one. Under every concrete step

names are scrawled in pencil;

a hundred-odd years of self-commemoration.

We lie on the grass; the shellrock monument towers behind us,

memorial to the young, whose shells foreign soil absorbed.

In the warmth of the wall, I look at the embedded fossils

and think some more about the dead.

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