The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature

by Jane Stafford

  Tug, sitting quietly in a corner when visitors called, would absorb details of gossip and extract undercurrents and innuendo real or imagined. These he would later fashion for his own entertainment.

  ‘What do you feel about thingee?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sarah?’

  ‘I like her. Why?’

  ‘You see the way she looks at you?’

  ‘You imagine it.’

  ‘What if she does fancy you? Just imagine these are her fingers.’

  ‘No, Tug.’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘No. It’s an invasion of people’s privacy.’

  ‘Pretend. Doesn’t harm anyone. I’ll pretend you’re someone else.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Then you pretend. Would you like me to be Hugh?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t fancy him. I only fancy you.’

  ‘Sarah’s got lovely big tits. You could hold them in your hands. You could do that for me?’

  She closed her eyes and nibbled at Tug’s hard little nipples wanting to please him. ‘Sarah,’ she murmured up at him, holding back a giggle with difficulty. His fingers trailed across her thighs, shy like a stranger’s and his hair spread over her face, long like Sarah’s. In her mind she made Tug’s nipples large and soft and could feel a fullness growing around them. Tug’s exploring fingers took on an unfamiliar delicacy. ‘Sarah,’ she whispered effusively.

  There was no clap of thunder, the mirror did not topple from the wall and Sarah, next time they met gave her no knowing glance of reproach. A whole new avenue of entertainment had opened up for them. Tug was so good at inventing games. Sometimes, though, Liz would look at her friends and wonder how they would feel if they knew all the uses they served.

  ‘How high d’you reckon Porter’s hill is?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Guess. Just guess.’

  ‘I don’t wanta guess. I don’t care how high it is.’

  ‘D’you reckon it’s over a thousand feet?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘But what would you say it is? Over a thousand?’

  ‘All right. Yes. I’ll say that.’

  ‘It’s not.’ A triumphant grin. ‘If I shout, how long would it take for my voice to reach Pete’s place?’

  ‘It wouldn’t.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. But if it did? How long does it take noise to travel, say a mile?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’

  ‘No, love, I wouldn’t.’ How wearying facts became as you got older and information more and more irrelevant. Ideas, too? Why was he so young? That was the unbridgeable gap. The radio always played tormentingly loud—she did not object to the music, but ears grow fragile and the brain forms little nervous knots like barbed wire. Things he could not understand. You grow out of the desire to live large.

  Just as Liz was beginning to despair over the way they were eating into her precious capital, Luke told them of a farmer needing scrub-cutters.

  ‘Would he take me?’

  Luke looked doubtful. ‘Give it a try.’

  The farmer had no doubts. ‘You couldn’t hack it, lady. I’ll take the young feller, though. Seven-thirty Monday. On the dot.’

  Tug drove off Monday morning like a condemned man. The early stillness of the morning promised a day of stifling heat. ‘Luke’ll be there,’ she consoled him, ‘so you’ll know someone.’ She half expected him to be home by midmorning. Stuff that for a joke! You go and do it if you think it’s so okay.

  But he stuck it. By the end of the first week the blisters on his palms had turned to callouses but his body still protested. He would come home sullen with resentment at the old woman who condemned him to the unnatural agonies of slashing gorse and manuka in blistering heat on a disguised cliff-face. He would come home, eat and go to bed to sleep until she woke him next morning. That seemed in itself a rebuke.

  ‘He’ll get used to it,’ said Luke calling around one night after tea, looking in at Tug’s sleeping head. Luke was a man of optimism and enthusiasms. ‘He told them at work he’s twenty-three. How old is he?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘When I was seventeen,’ Luke eased himself astride a kitchen chair, tipping it forward till it rested against the table, ‘I was in my second-year sixth. I wanted to get a job, bum around a bit, my father wanted me to go to university. He’s a magistrate. Was—he’s retired now. He and my mother bickered all the time, I wanted to get away, go flatting. But he vetoed that too and I never had the guts to disobey him. He insisted I was too young to get a job, too young to leave home.

  ‘One afternoon I bunked school and went along to court to see him in action. No, I can’t have bunked school, it must’ve been holidays. Anyway there was a guy my age—Maori or Samoan maybe—up for breaking and entering. He’d gone into a house and eaten a loaf of bread and some cold sausages. He spoke for himself, didn’t have a lawyer. He said he couldn’t get a job and he was hungry.

  ‘My father went into this great tirade about how this kid was a burden on the community and how he should be responsible for his own support and not a burden and all that tra la. Fined him a hundred dollars.

  ‘I brought it up at dinner that night. Said it seemed a little inconsistent, considering.’

  ‘What’d he say?’

  Half of Luke’s mouth smiled. ‘Said it was remarks like that proved my immaturity.’

  Luke and Jenny, Sarah, Hugh and John. They were the core of Liz’s new friends. Luke had dropped out of university towards the end of a science degree. He was a gardener and handyman and casual labourer. His wife, Jenny, screen printed T-shirts with stylised nursery rhyme characters. They had two young children.

  Sarah made macrame plant hangers and macrame screens and crocheted bags. Hugh worked on a fishing boat and had poems published in literary magazines. They had five children but the oldest two had been fathered by John.

  John was a potter. He lived and worked in a small bach behind Sarah and Hugh’s large old house, having moved there several months before when he returned from travels. The arrangement impressed Liz who saw in it possible alternatives for herself and Tug. She was also impressed by the creativity of her friends and determined that she too would learn to make things as soon as she managed to sort out just where her talents lay.

  But before she had decided on her special aptitude she was offered a job. The crafts men and women of Wai Bay had formed themselves into an association and arranged to lease a small shop in Titoki for the display and sale of their wares. Jenny was to man the shop two days a week, Liz for three days. It would scarcely provide her with a living, but it would help. Things were falling into place just as they all had promised her.

  The Magic Mushroom (Wai Bay Crafts Inc) didn’t attract an immediate onslaught of custom. Jenny’s carefully understated window display and Martyn’s elves and mannikins capering around the margin of the window were a three-day wonder for Titoki residents as they passed from the garage on one side of the Mushroom to the hardware store on the other side.

  But Christmas was close and city people with more adventurous tastes and holiday pay-cheques would soon be swarming up the coast. Crafts Inc was unreservedly optimistic.

  In the meantime Liz sat proudly among the evidence of her friends’ versatility and initiative. She watched the population of Titoki pass by, made coffee for members of Crafts Inc who called in to pass the time, and wrote letters.

  Dear Ailleen, I still can’t really believe this place, it’s so good. I’m sure you’d love it here. I can’t believe how things seem to just work out with no effort. I’ve no regrets about bringing Tug, though of course as you said there’s got to be an ending sometime, and that will be the big hurdle. Still, in the meantime everything seems hopeful and possible ….

  Dear Lua, Don’t know if this will ever find you. Billy wrote to Tug that you were in Rolleston but may b
e shifted somewhere else. He didn’t say how long you got? Is it very awful? I guess they read your letters first. (Hello, warden, how’s things?) You maybe know Tug and I came up North, we live at a place called Wai Bay. Tug’s working as a scrub-cutter, doesn’t like it much, you can imagine. Are you okay? Is there anything we can send you? Write and let me know, okay?

  Dear Mother, I’m afraid this letter may come as a shock to you. You see your letters are still being forwarded to me by the Post Office but actually I left Maling Drive months and months ago. Ken and I aren’t together any more and Michael’s with Ken.

  She screwed that one up and burned it slowly in the ashtray. Why go over all that now? Besides her mother owed her a letter; just before they shifted Liz had mailed off an aerogramme fiction of continuing domestic tranquillity, almost expecting the Post Office to indignantly return it, so blatant was the deception.

  Dear Michael, Please reply, love. This is the third letter, and I do love to hear from you. Since I missed seeing you in Wellington I’ve been worried that something’s happened. I’m putting in a note for your Dad. Just send me a couple of lines so I know you’re okay, then I’ll write a big long letter.

  Dear Ken, What’s happening down there? Your mother seemed evasive, and I haven’t heard from Michael. I think I’m entitled to know. Of course I may be worrying about nothing, but I’d appreciate some communication.

  On the long drive up (the magnificently long drive up—for Liz and Tug, enclosed in that motorised bubble between past and future, away from responsibilities, comparisons and obligations, had been childishly, wildly happy) they had called at Ken’s address. It had taken them an hour of wrong turnings and street-map consultations to find the place and then, at six on a Thursday evening, there was no one home. She had peered into the nearest window and recognised the bedroom suite. So he hadn’t sold it!

  Tug had been keen to head north at once but at her insistence they’d booked into a shabby-looking motel a few blocks down the street. Motels were to become a source of entertainment. ‘Mr and Mrs Morton’ they would say and watch the motelier’s face. Then in the privacy of their unit they would giggle together. Being travellers made them inviolable.

  That evening they drove back to Ken’s house and found it still empty. And the following morning, the same. Reluctantly Liz rang her in-laws from a phone box. She had called them Mum and Dad, what to call them now?

  Mrs Harvey answered. He would be off to work already, driving sedately in the big car with its official monogram.

  She pressed the A button. ‘It’s Liz.’

  ‘Oh.’ Not a word but a small popping sound. The elegant manicured nails would have been tossed dramatically against the long silver hair. At eight o’clock the hair would be already brushed and folded beneath a tortoiseshell comb.

  ‘I’m in Wellington. Passing through. I wanted to see Michael but the house is empty.’

  ‘Yes Elizabeth. Well you see ….’ She was flustered. The hands would now have fluttered down to comfort the vast compressed bosom. ‘Ken’s … well he’s just out of town for a few days. Nothing important.’ It wasn’t in her nature to be deceptive, the discomfort showed.

  ‘Is Michael with you then?’

  ‘No, dear, he’s not.’

  ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘Yes, yes. He’s fine. But he’s staying with some friend and I don’t know how to contact them. Ken didn’t say. How long will you be here?’

  ‘I can’t really wait.’

  ‘Then I’ll tell them to get in touch with you. I know Ken was intending to. And Michael is well.’ She was herself again now. Her voice had the sweet, bright lilt of one who cultivates small talk as an art form. ‘Would you like to come round for coffee?’

  ‘I would, but I really must get on the road.’ She wanted to say sorry, I liked you, we shouldn’t be like this, but wasn’t able to. When she had hung up she consoled herself that Amy Harvey would be adept at understanding what wasn’t said for she had to do it every day.

  (1982)

  Barbara Anderson, ‘Commitment’

  David is obsessed by sex. Terri is not obsessed by sex, nor indeed by anything. She wishes to be obsessed by something. Committed. She wishes to stand up and be counted because commitment is all and she is not committed and bugger it.

  Terri drains her coffee mug and replaces it on the Berber in our living room. She leans back defiant and uncommitted in the bean chair. She hits the chair angrily with the flat of her hand but the beans have nowhere to go. Terri’s beauty is angular, she moves well, each action flowing from the one before. Her legs arrange themselves with grace, the angles sharp, flat kneecaps obvious beneath flesh smooth and brown as an egg. Her hair is black and hangs forward but she can flick it back in one sweeping swing and does so. Now she hooks a strand behind her right ear and glares at me.

  —You’re not committed she says.

  In fact I am. Totally. So recently it is still contained.

  She changes tack slightly.—It’s because women have been brought up to please she says.

  —Balls. I stand up, not sinuously. I roll out of my bean chair onto my knees and more or less take it from there.

  Once upright I head for the divider of the open plan kitchen. I slam a teaspoon of Greggs in each mug and fill it from the saucepan on the stove because the kettle is still waiting to be picked up. I watch the boiling water swirl the instant into brown sludge bubbles, then move with caution back through the beached toys and hand her a mug with a large red S snaking up it.

  Terri puts it down in silence, pulls a cigarette from the packet outlined on the front of her shirt, leaps up and bangs a frisking hand quickly over herself, one, two and behind searching for her Bic lighter. She finds it and flops down knowing the amorphous shape of the bean bag will yield to receive her.

  —We are conditioned from birth! She says, wide-eyed as though she has just found this tablet new carved.—Fed myths. Maternal instinct for example. We have to get rid of these myths!

  —Okay. I am bored with Terri’s conversation and consider her statement tactless in the extreme. I stare out the picture window and count the telephone wires, a process I have found soothing since childhood when, trapped in the dentist’s chair owing to thin enamel, I counted the wires as they shimmered and danced beyond the window distorted by the moving air above the gas flame on Mr Falner’s round glass table. Sixteen there were.

  —Do you want this baby? demands Terri. Twelve. Terri is leaning forward for emphasis, her elbows denting the thighs below her brief shorts.

  —Yes I say.

  —There you are see! Terri’s finger jabs through the exhaled smoke.—You won’t admit it. Why shouldn’t you say you don’t want it?

  I maintain my bloated dignity.

  —We’ve only got two I mutter.

  —How will you manage without your salary? What about the mortgage?

  —Oh shut up I say.

  Terri regroups.—And you’re so hopeless at it she says.

  My face flames. I might burst.—We’ve got to love one another! I shout.

  Terri and David are our best friends, a situation forced on us in a sense, though not entirely, by the fact that we are neighbours and David and Sam are colleagues. We know each other very well. They know as I do that Sam scratches himself when agitated. We have camped together, swum naked, so each man knows which garment each women gropes for first when dressing. By common consent these intimacies lie buried.

  Sam is an amiable man and for this I am grateful being diminished and muddled by anger at a personal level. He loves children. I mean all children. He is a better student than I am of the anthropology of children, of their nature, chants, rituals, taboos.

  —This old man he played one, he played knick knack on my drum, he bellows as the Cortina spins along the motorway, its radial tyres shooting the water sideways into splayed fountains. Tom and Mick yabber in the back. Predatory as wekas they dispute Leggo pieces. Sam attempts diversion.

&n
bsp; —Look! Look Kids! He yells.—The wipers are conducting! He turns them faster. This old man hots up to hysteria.

  —This old man he plays one he plays ….

  —Just watch the road I moan.

  —I am watching the road. I am driving.

  The snarls in the back have gone underground.

  —Let’s all sing I cry.

  —And he played upon a ladle, a ladle, a ladle, I hoot in imitation of the fruity baritone.—And his name was Aiken Drum.

  But Tom has achieved the piece. Mick bounces on buttocks stiffened by rage. He roars.

  I went to Sunday School as a child. We assembled for instruction in the Church Hall. With Miss Harty. Her tongue was purple because she licked her biro, her gentleness a balm. Each attendance was enhanced by the award of a card depicting a text. Love thy Neighbour was particularly attractive. Wreathed with forget-me-nots two dismembered hands clasped each other in eternal amity. My mother also stressed the virtues of neighbourliness.—Don’t touch the coconut bumblebees she told my eager hand.—They’re for Mrs Esdale. No no not the sponge. That’s for someone else.

  An Englishman and his wife rented the cottage next to Uncle Fred’s bach one summer. My mother placed six downy peaches on their sharp leaves and handed me the willow pattern.—Run in with these to Mr and Mrs Ormondsley. I trailed across the paspalum bearing gifts and knocked on the weathered door. It jerked open as Mrs Ormondsley tugged. A puff of rouge had slipped on one cheek.—These are for you I mumbled.—Oh she said in embarrassed surprise, pale hands reaching to receive.—How kind. Thank you. I turned to skid home. As the door closed I heard her husband’s booming bittern cry.—Good God. Are the natives being friendly?

  It is Saturday evening and David and Terri have arrived with two sixpacks. We sit on the deck and I hope Mick will not appear trailing his piece of blanket and wanning a dring.

  David and Sam are discussing their colleague Charles who also lectures at the medical school. They don’t like him.

  —The bastard’s got legs on his stomach from crawling. Count the times you’ve seen him at it! Just count up! says David, flinging himself back in the director’s chair with force.