You twist back in your seat to face front again. And your bloody shit damn sister’s eating her icecream slowly, tiny baby bites so she’ll have heaps left when you’re finished and she can gloat about it. You don’t really care because you feel sick anyway, icecream and peaches and marmite and lettuce sandwich and a hard boiled egg all churning round inside. The heat outside. The road, starting to wind now over a hill. You think you might chuck. You tell your mum you have a headache. She goes Tch and sighs. Close your eyes she says. You do and it makes the swinging of the car worse. Rolling back and forward, swinging, going up and down over dips and little bumpy bits. Mum, you say, Mum. She turns and looks at you. She’s green, says your sister. She’s all green. Your mum reaches her hand back and squeezes your knee. You’ll be alright, she says. Not long now. How long, how lo-ong says your sister. Shhh says your mum, looking in the glove box for something. She hands you a barley sugar. Suck this.
Dad, says your sister, Dad, do A for horses. He doesn’t hear her. Your mother nudges him. She murmurs something. He glances quickly round at you and your sister. He smiles. A for ’orses, he says slowly, B for mutton … You join in. C for yourself, D for dumb. You know this game. Your dad knows it from when he was a little boy. Most of the things in it are from the olden days. From that time when your dad was running round in shorts and playing marbles and the war was on. The marbles are still at your Gran’s place. G for police. I for Novello. L for leather. That’s a good one, getting to hear your Dad say ‘hell’ even though he’s not really saying it. O for the wings of a dove. You look up in the sky and see a hawk circling. They swoop down and eat the eyes out of baby lambs. At your castle you keep them tame and they carry messages for you. Z for breezes, your dad says, and your sister says Again again. But your mum starts singing her favourite car song, in her low and whispery voice. I know—a dark—secluded place—a place—where no one knows your face—a glass—of wine—a fast embrace—it’s called—Hernando’s hideaway. You image the room, lit with low yellow light and filled with Spanish music. Ladies like on the back of your playing cards, with big spotty dresses on, frills and flowers in their hair. Just knock—three times—and whisper low—that you—and I—were sent by Joe. You will be free—to gaze at me and talk—of—lo-ove. Your mum goes to that place. Well she did before you were born maybe. She spent nights in Hernando’s Hideaway, smoking cigarettes with a man in a hat and dancing to castanets. Your mother sings, looking every now and then at her reflection in the window. There’s a funny twist to her mouth when the song is over.
I want a barley sugar, says your sister, I want one too. Grow up, you say. Yours is gone and you don’t feel sick any more. You glare at her. Your mum passes a barley sugar over to her. See, I got one, she says to you. Grow up, you say again. She pretends she can’t hear you. The car goes over a really big bump. Your sister yelps. I swallowed mine Mum, I swallowed mine. Shhh, says your mother. You mimic your sister under your breath. You make your voice whiny and high. I thwallowed mine. Shut up, she says. Thut up, you say. Stop it, she says. Thtop it. Mum, she says. Mu-um. Make her stop. Make her thtop. Shut your face. Thut your fathe. You can see your mother in the front with her sunglasses on and her eyes shut, humming. Your dad is frowning at the road. Your sister pinches your leg. You slap her hand. Ow, she says. Ow, you echo. She tries to dead-arm you. You rap her knee with your knuckles. She scratches your hand. You grab her wrist and say Want a chinese burn? She tries to pull away but you are stronger than her. Do you? No. Say please. No. Say please most beautiful sister. You start to twist the skin a little bit. She looks as if she might start bawling. You don’t like the way you feel. You feel like a big fat giant. You throw her wrist back into her lap. Crybaby, you say, turning to the window again. She sits and rubs her wrist for a minute. Then she leans over and pinches your arm really hard. You let her do it. If you two don’t stop you can get out here, says your dad. You roll your eyes. Dick, you whisper. You glance at your sister. He’s a dick, you whisper to her. She giggles. You rub your arm. He eats turds for breakfast, you say. Big fat smelly ones. She giggles again. You say, What’s red and gets smaller and smaller and smaller? What? she says. A baby combing its hair with a potato peeler, you say. She laughs even though you can tell she doesn’t really get it. Hey mum and dad, listen to this. What’s red and gets smaller and smaller and smaller? What dear, says your mother. A baby combing its hair with a potato peeler. You and your sister force big laughs out, ha ha ha. Oh that’s dreadful, says your mother. Really.
It’s so hot in the car. Even with the window open it’s boiling. You’re driving past dry brown paddocks. Cows look at you when you go past. Sheep don’t. You wonder if black sheep know they’re different. Sheep look nice from far off but when you get close up they smell of dags and things. Their wool looks soft but it’s not really. It’s greasy and thick. You drive past a sign that says One Way Jesus. Dumb. That doesn’t even make sense. You feel sleepy. There’s nowhere comfortable to put your head. You curl up as little as you can and close your eyes, listen to the car engine, the wheels on the road.
When you wake up your legs have got pins and needles. You were dribbling, says your sister. Was not, you say, wiping the wet seat, grumpy from sleep. So thirsty. The countryside smells. Silage is what it’s called. And there’s bits of paddocks covered with black plastic that’s held down by old tyres. You wish you could read your book in the car without feeling sick. In your book the countryside is full of robins and pussywillow and little stone cottages. Ramshackle. There’s a twinkly old farmer, and winding lanes and streams and primroses. The car bounces again and your stomach lurches. The road’s bumpy and dusty, loose shingle. You must be getting closer to the camping ground. There’s that funny red clay you never see anywhere else. In your book the kids have boarding school and tuck boxes. They eat sandwiches with the crusts cut off them. Pony club and gymkhanas. At the camping ground last year, they had a horse race along the beach on New Year’s Day. You imagine winning it this year, the kid’s race, miles ahead of everyone on your beautiful white horse that lives at the castle. And at the end of the race everyone just about falls over because you say the magic words to your horse and it starts to fly. It’s got wings and you can fly as far as you like, high above the beach, over the bush and the hills and into another world where there are stone cottages and pussywillow and winding magic lanes.
You close your eyes again. Somewhere out of your dreams the car stops. Are we there? you say, stretching your neck. It’s cooler now and the sun’s not so bright. Soon, says your mum. Dad’s getting fish and chips. Can I have L&P? you say. Go in and ask him. You open the door and almost fall out. Your feet feel strange on the ground. Put your jandals on, says your mother. You slip them on and stand swaying a bit outside the car. Your legs are all wobbly. You see your dad in the fish and chip shop. It’s bright inside and you blink. You ask your dad if you can have L&P. He says yes. You lean against his leg. He puts his arm round your shoulder. The fish and chip shop smells of hot fat and sausages. You look out the glass door to the car. Your mother’s leaning against it smoking a cigarette and looking down the road. Your sister’s got her feet up on the seat and her knees up to her chin, sucking her thumb. You feel grown up. There’s a purple electric light along the back wall. What’s that dad? It’s for killing flies, he says. They fly into it and get electrocuted. That’s dreadful, you say. Really. The fish and chip shop man hands you a potato fritter in a white paper bag with see-through spots of grease on it. The fat fish and chip shop lady comes in through the plastic curtain strips that hang in the doorway to the other room. Long drive? she asks your father. We came from Wellington, he says, and she nods, waves fat fingers at you. The man shakes salt on everything and wraps it in newspaper and gives it to your dad.
The four of you sit in the car as it’s getting dark, eating your fish and chips. There’s flies in there, you tell your sister, pointing to her chips. Are not, she says. Your fingers are salty. The car smells of food. You let your sis
ter have a drink of your L&P. We’ll be pitching the tent in the dark again, your mum says to your dad. Don’t worry, you say, I can put it up by myself. You’ll do telepathy on it and it will all go in the right place. You look out the window at the dirty street and think of your big stone castle. Even though you’re sitting in the car with your mum and your dad and your sister you feel as if you’re all alone.
You take everyone’s fish and chip paper to the rubbish bin across the road. A black dog runs past. You forgot.
(1996)
Damien Wilkins, from The Miserables
In the final weeks of high school, Healey and some friends had gone to a barbecue at the house of a girl whose mother lived in Eastbourne. They scarcely knew the girl, but such was the mood of those last weeks—a kind of sentimental attachment had sprung up for even those things which throughout the five years of schooling had seemed unbearable—that the girl, on seeing this group of boys, uninvited, in her mother’s backyard, greeted them as old friends, or at least as fellow sufferers with whom she had gone through a particularly bitter campaign. She ran to them and actually hooked her arms through theirs, leading them towards the barbecue and forcing plates on them. ‘Fill up, fill up,’ she said, before running off. Healey knew her as part of a set of girls who would weep at college rugby games and in whose eyes his own failure to follow through on what was strictly moderate sporting promise had caused him to become invisible; she had exchanged perhaps five sentences with him in five years and most of these had been in mild hostility.
There was one girl at the barbecue, however, whose quota of sentences—although really no larger than that of the girl who had greeted them as old friends—was not a true indication of what Healey, at least, had come to think of as their relationship and whom he placed a little above all the others. Healey had known the girl, he supposed, for years, but only in the way he had known countless others with whom he had shared high-school classrooms—as faces, names, as bodies that changed without notice. It was odd, then, but as he stood in the backyard on a warm evening occasionally interrupted by brief showers of rain—the rain padding lightly into the sandy grass, gently dousing the barbecue, the smell of fat from the chops on the grill mixing with the whiff of the nearby sea, releasing into the air the odours of salt, tomato sauce, damp wood, wet sand—and he looked around at these figures with whom he had spent so many hours, days, years, confined in rooms smelling closely of sweat, socks, wool, chalk, he found that he could recognise them only with the greatest difficulty.
He saw, now that they were out of uniform—often the source of complaints by so-called liberal parents and their children because, they said, uniforms denied individuality and cramped personal style—everyone looked the same. Finally in their own clothes, he suddenly thought, they might have been anyone. And they moved quickly across the background, as it were, like extras, while in the foreground, he believed, he was only truly seeing the girl whom he had often dreamed of having beside him and who was now talking to a group nearby about how pretty it was coming across from the city on the new ferry.
‘It really felt like the olden days,’ she said. ‘All the lights. Like when Katherine Mansfield used to take the the steamer across the harbour to come here for holidays. Of course, she wasn’t Mansfield then,’ the girl corrected herself, ‘she was Kathleen Beauchamp, and a pain in the neck, and her father, Harold B., was Chairman of the Bank of New Zealand and all naughty Kathie wanted to do was to go back to London and start living. Stuff this country, she thought. Couldn’t stand it.’ The girl laughed—an odd yelp which came from the back of her throat. It was the kind of thing, Healey imagined, a child might cultivate, having been told it was cute, and, keeping on with it until she’s grown-up, find that it was then too late, that she is now helpless against a sound which only embarrasses her friends, who whisper about the unfortunate flaw in her make-up, though by this time she herself no longer realises what it is she’s doing. She went on: ‘The Beauchamp cottage used to sit on land quite close to here. I think they’re putting up a plaque or something. Mum’s involved in it.’
When she said ‘Mum’, the girl had rolled her eyes so that everyone should know she was using the word ironically; she was proud of her mother, but not too proud. Healey, listening in, couldn’t imagine a time when he would be able to mention his mother in front of so many people and get away with it.
He had been noticing the girl only in the last months, although he didn’t think of this as a sentimental attachment of the type which had caused the others to mistakenly see those around them as old friends. Rather, he believed he was at last seeing her for herself and, recognising her as someone who would soon be lost to him, he felt a pressure to record clearly how she appeared from moment to moment. Despite the affectations, he discovered he liked the speeches she gave, the oddly loose pedantry. He was interested also in the weird laugh which, at the point when she thought herself most clever and powerful, dragged her down, he thought, to a level almost of freakishness. He wasn’t sure whether she knew as much as she hinted at knowing, but her hinting was so richly suggestive, almost a form of knowledge in itself, that no one really questioned it. (Occasionally, though, he noted, across her face, a worried look, as if it had been ‘a near thing’ and she had almost been caught out. Yet this only increased her attractiveness.) In class, because of her voice, she was often called on to read aloud, and although he thought her renderings too precious in that speech-lessons manner she at least didn’t stumble on words and maul the sense, as did most of those who were singled out.
Her name was Karen, pronounced—after being plain, short-vowelled Karen for four years of high school—now, in the fifth and final year, with a long a, which she insisted on so vehemently that whenever someone said it wrongly the affectation was quickly obscured by the performance it had engendered, making the difficulty of the long a seem simply part of the drama of her personality, her Karen-ness. After a time no one could get it wrong; the transformation was fixed in everyone’s mind. How could she have been the other Karen? Healey at first resisted the change, but finally decided he admired the power that lay behind it—the impulse towards self-definition. And in the muted evening light he also discovered he admired the shading which sketched her pear-shaped calf muscles and ran a strong line up her neck, the sinews of which surprised him with their soft elastic.
In the few sentences they had spoken to each other over the years, Healey knew that he had never managed to give himself away, as he sometimes imagined himself doing while whispering to a girl in the half-light of bedrooms, and now, when he believed this was perhaps his last chance to do so, he struggled to come up with a topic under whose cover he might show to Karen this true self he had been keeping in reserve. They had nothing in common. The only thing he could think of to talk about was her laugh and the abandonment by her friends at its peak. But he didn’t trust himself to explain this to her without giving offence. He had already caused one girl at the barbecue to tell him, without provocation, that he was the type of person who—but she’d been unable to finish the statement because someone had come up to them, forcing her to leave Healey with a look of undisguised hatred. The girl had been chatting up a friend of his when the friend had made some excuse and walked off, so the girl was left standing beside Healey. When the friend had been there, she’d been polite and interested; she had even laughed at something Healey had said. When they were alone she had rounded on him and used the phrase your type, which made him for a moment almost physically ill.
The only thing he could possibly talk about with Karen was Katherine Mansfield. What had she thought about the play? There had been a class trip into town the previous week to see a one-woman show based on the diaries of the writer. Healey now went through the play in his head, working out an opinion he could present. This was a difficulty. He never had an opinion about something which he had not worked up beforehand, fashioning it with lengthy care. Then, if his breathing was good, he might give his opinion as if he w
ere formulating it while he spoke. He did not lack spontaneity, but he believed that an unconsidered response was not to be confused with what one really felt, which was to be arrived at only after long deliberation. It distressed him that he thought this way, and he often attributed the almost complete lack of girlfriends among his group to their refuge in long-distance thinking and their total inability to say what they really thought or felt about anything at any given time. Perhaps this was what the girl had meant by your type.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 126