'I think we all remember moments when we caught adults – usually our own parents – acting in ways we couldn’t understand.' An incident in Northland where kid world and adult world collide.
I’m 30 and increasingly meeting up with old friends involves meeting them as parents. Gone are the days of sitting at a cafe comparing romantic misdemeanours. Attention is newly divided. There is the kid conversation: enthusiasm for toys, for difficult-to-follow anecdotes, and, depending on their age, for spit bubbles. Over the top of that is the adult conversation, the snatches of ‘catch-up’ about work, family, or often about the trials of parenthood itself.
Kids grow up ignoring this counter-theme of adult conversation. It just isn’t interesting. What even is a mortgage anyway? But as they – as we – grow up, we slowly filter out the grown-ups less and less. As we ourselves become adults, what once seemed only interesting to them also gradually becomes interesting to us.
In the poem "Jim Nevis" in my new collection A Lack of Good Sons, I wanted to create one of those in-between moments when kid world and adult world collide.
I think we all remember moments when we caught adults – usually our own parents – acting in ways we couldn’t understand. If and when confronted to account for their behaviour, we had the dawning suspicion that we were getting the kid-friendly explanation rather than the actual explanation.
You come to understand that your parents are lying to you. Not maliciously. But because the truth is in a language you can’t yet comprehend – a language that they know will confuse you even more than knowing that you’re being misled.
These moments are usually about relationships, sex, maybe money. I remember pestering my Dad at an embarrassingly late age to finally come clean and tell me once and for all whether Santa was real. I wanted desperately to believe he was, but certain inconsistencies were becoming apparent. I must have been particularly insistent and annoying that day because eventually my Dad turned to me, tone dropping down to serious, and said:
"Alright, Jake. If you really want, I’ll tell you the truth. But first have a think. Do you really want to know?"
Silenced by this change, I stopped. The answer was finally within my reach, but did I actually want it? I thought hard. I guess I weighed up the value of the truth and the joy of the fiction. I guess I knew the truth but took responsibility for my own deception.
I said, "No."
And kid world was home a little bit longer.
Jim Nevis
It was after Holmes had started,
so it would have been gone seven,
past my bedtime.
I stood on the window frame,
toes hooked like a monkey’s,
hands on the glass, looking through
the tropical Northland downpour
for something to witness.
That night, I found it.
Bored of the bush, I turned my head,
pushed my other cheek to the cool glass.
My eyes floated over the gravel road,
dilapidated barns, cotton buds of sheep.
Then I saw it. I didn’t understand
what it was. Then I sort of did.
Jim, the farmer, Jim Nevis, stood on the grass,
naked in his black gumboots,
just there in front of his house.
His pale body was shocking,
like the inside of an oyster.
He was facing away from me.
I could see his sagging bottom,
his hairy back. He turned around.
I wanted to hide but I was frozen.
My stomach felt like it did
when I walked to the bathroom
in the black country night.
His chest hair ran down like seaweed,
the type that stank up the beach.
I stared and stared. Was my heart
knocking too loudly on the glass?
Were my parents seeing this?
His penis was a pale fish bone.
This alone was mystery enough
to get on with, but, when he walked back
to his house and climbed onto his deck,
he kicked off his gumboots.
And I realised
he hadn’t really been naked before.
I got down from the window
because I felt so strange.
I thought I knew it all,
but here was a book just legible enough
for me to realise how little I could read.
I agonised for a week
about whether to tell.
I said the word ‘naked’ to myself
under my duvet, louder and louder
until I was so scared by my own daring,
I held a hand over my mouth.
Mum wheedled it out of me in the truck.
She threw her head back and laughed.
‘Honey,’ she said, stroking my hair, ‘oh, honey.’
She thought for a moment and said:
‘You used to do that when you were little, too.’
She smiled and started the engine.
That was it.
I sat silent, thinking.
I knew this was different. Jim Nevis wasn’t little.
What he’d done had meant something. A Lack of Good Sons by Jake Arthur (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $25) is available in bookstores nationwide.
