In his mind he saw the actress as Mansfield sitting at a desk, composing sentences out loud, then flinging pages into the air, falling over and writhing on the floor, hugging her knees to her chest. When she got up she was calm. ‘At the Bay,’ she wrote aloud, ‘I am never bored! And this, given my youthfulness, my terrible youthfulness, is nothing short of a miracle.’ The actress smoothed her dress, brushed at her cardigan, and returned to the chair and the desk. ‘The reason I am never bored here,’ she went on ‘is because I never feel safe at the Bay. Not like the others. Not like my father, who has safety sewn into his pin-stripe suit like a name-tag. God, that numbs me! But, oh, how the sea, the sky, the dark hills—they do frighten me into life! They whisper to me, anything can happen!’ At this point, the actress looked up and, it seemed, stared directly at Healey sitting in the audience, but he also saw that she was looking through him in that trained way. ‘And I, Kathleen, am ready!’ Then she’d leaped up again, spun herself around the edge of the stage, her arms flying out so that, sitting in the front row, he felt the push of air against his eyes and could have almost bitten the fingers of the actress as they came past. It had occurred to him to nip at her then, not to prove to himself that she really existed and thus to destroy what the teacher had been constantly telling them was ‘the illusion of the theatre’, but rather to prove to her that he existed and that she could not look through him in that way any longer.
Healey had been restless the entire performance, focused for one moment, then losing it the next, working up his opinion of the first act while the second was in progress. He dreaded most being asked by the woman teacher on the way home in the minibus what he had thought of the production and, surrounded on one side by the hills and on the other by the sea, not being able to respond with anything but weak-sounding noises of approval.
The thing about one-person plays, he had been thinking in the half-darkness of the theatre, was that they tried to make an audience forget that. They try to make you see a crowd, he said to himself. All the effort is directed towards alleviating the longing an audience has for someone else, another character, to push onto the stage and finally engage in conversation the one person whose voice has become like a drill. To divert this wish, he noticed, the one person will use all reaches of the stage, just as the gymnast must touch all four corners of the mat in the course of a floor exercise, imitating a crowd. But at the centre there must be stillness. There must be arrested motion. (There must be a girl and her calves set against the anonymous flux of her classmates.) And here it was. He had lost sight of all the women of this one-woman show—just as all the bodies of the gymnast are lost at the peak of the velocity of their tumbling and attain an impossible single suspension—so that, in the very midst of the actress’s rushing and declaiming from all parts of the stage, something was frozen for him and he was left with one perfect frame of Katherine Mansfield, as durable as a blink—just as now, at the barbecue, the girl had laughed and been abandoned by everyone but him. At that still point in the play, chiming in agreement when the words came out from the half-light, Healey almost said aloud, ‘I’m ready!’, feeling himself lift dangerously off his seat then come down again just in time.
[…]
While he was thinking about the actress looking through him, the girl he had imagined having beside him now suggested to the group he had sidled up to that they should all climb the path behind the property from where, she had heard, they could look out on the whole area. Healey had found himself, still carrying his can of beer, tagging along on the end of this party, as if he were naturally included in the activities of a group which for five years he had laughed at. Among their number were several long-term couples who had encouraged each other in the business of being ‘born again’, renouncing alcohol, sex, and swearing, and signalling their disapproval of most aspects of high school life by withdrawing into each other’s company. Here they found support from seeing reflected the same looks of dreamy incomprehension and censure with which they greeted the world.
Karen was not, strictly speaking, part of this group. She was retained by the couples, rather, as a kind of mascot, a ‘wild spirit’ whom they hoped one day to tame, but also whom they secretly enjoyed having along, since she provided the group with just that touch of the unrespectable that, for all their piety, Healey believed, they still craved; it was present in their ‘spontaneous’ decision to accompany Karen on her ‘mad’ expedition, and he could hear it in their constant giggling as they set off up the hillside.
As he climbed the steps, which were lit by small lamps planted in the ground every few yards, he wondered how, at the tail, he could manage somehow to make it through the line of born-again couples to be walking just behind Karen at the head, from where he would begin to talk about Katherine Mansfield, thereby revealing himself as someone she might one day walk alongside. After a short time, however, there were no more lights, and the couples started tripping on the steps and banging into one another. Now the giggling had become hysterical. The pace of the ascent slowed until Healey was forced to stop altogether while those in front found a way up. ‘My night vision,’ someone called out. ‘My night vision is hopeless! I’ve lost a lens. Where are you all?’
The couple immediately in front of Healey had, apparently, fallen on top of each other, and he heard the girl whispering that she wasn’t going any further on the path, which she now believed to be evil. As he stepped around the couple in the dark the girl screamed, but clearly they had lost contact with the main party, since all that came in response was the sound of distant laughter. Healey could see virtually nothing ahead of him, but he had found the measure of the steps in his stride and was making good time. He paused to drink the last of his beer, tossing the can far into the bush.
Higher up, he stood on someone’s hand. Now there was sobbing. ‘Who’s there?’ a male voice said. ‘Who is it?’ He pushed past more couples, some of them leaping at his touch from the path into the bush, giving him the not unpleasant sensation of clearing a way. In none of the voices, however, did he recognise Karen, so he carried on still further at the same unvarying pace.
Then he did hear something familiar, though it seemed to be coming from off the path. Healey stopped and listened. It was the same odd kind of yelp he had heard at the barbecue, the same sound which had caused all her friends to abandon Karen for that moment, leaving only Healey to recognise and accept her for what she was. This was what had earned him the right to join their expedition. And how necessary his presence now seemed, since all her so-called friends had fallen by the way, whereas he alone stood ready to do anything for her. Without thinking, he pushed his legs out in the same long stride, although not up the path this time but off the path in the direction of the noise which was calling to him.
As he fell, rolling through the bush on the side of the path, he thought of landing in the water which would be the colour of peacocks in the year 1907, a date he remembered from the play. He would enter the sea close to the beach on which the girl, recently returned to the ‘wild country’ from boarding school in Harley Street, London, was taking the afternoon summer sun. She is lying face down. She has no boots or stockings on. Her pink dress has ridden up over the backs of her knees, which are off-white, like paper. (The legs he sees are not those of the famous writer except perhaps by accident. They belong, of course, to Karen. Healey recognises the tight, pretty bulbs of the calves, spotted with freckles.) A panama hat with a large red bow covers her head and the back of her neck. A parasol gives shade. She is thinking of her million lives—she doesn’t have just one—and how she must get on with it, somehow! I’m ready, she says into the sand. But for now, she thinks, I will lie here just a little longer by the water the colour of peacocks.
Opening his eyes, he found he was lying face down in a pile of leaves from which came the powerful smell of decaying vegetation. He was having difficulty breathing and was forced to turn his head to take in clean air, as if swimming in the compost. This wasn’t easy,
since occasionally a light gusting of equally polluted air was blown into his mouth from above, so that he found he had to spit as well as inhale. It was only after several minutes that Healey realised someone was above him and that this blowing was coming from a body, causing him to say aloud: ‘I’m being breathed on!’
He turned his head further around and one small, yellow eye stared back, close enough for Healey to see the muck floating over the liqueous cornea, reminding him of the flecks in an egg. A flick of the head above him and a second eye just like the first looked down, unblinking. Beneath these fevered, dripping eyes appeared a pair of pink nostrils crystalled with fine snot and then a mouth set in a half-smile over thin cords of saliva, which were falling down a muddied wool front, attaching its chin to its hoof.
The sheep sighed into Healey’s face.
‘Hey, hey,’ he whispered into its eye. ‘There, there,’ he said to the other eye, stretching the vowel sounds until they shook slightly. The sheep had caught itself in a barbed wire fence—which was what had halted Healey’s own fall—its head and front legs were through, but the wire had disappeared into the thick fleece around its middle, stranding the sheep’s rear. There were pellets all around, and none looked fresh. Even in the rain—which had almost stopped—they had not been softened but gleamed like shiny black pebbles. The sheep had shat itself dry.
Healey knew little about sheep. When his uncle had been alive, Healey had visited his aunt May’s farm and chased the lambs his cousins kept as pets. After a bad run of frosts, when the men had to work through meals to clear the carcasses, his cousin had driven down to the back paddocks with the Sunday roast. Healey, along with the other younger cousins, had been in the back of the truck with a plate balanced on each knee, trying not to lose them. ‘Let the peas run with the gravy, that’s okay,’ his aunt had told him. ‘And if a potato goes, just dust it off and put it back on. They won’t know.’ When they arrived, all the roast potatoes had to be collected from the end of the truck.
Now he showed the animal his hand, turning his palm out, and slowly began to lift himself from the ground, always keeping his open palm in front of the sheep’s eyes. Thirteen years later, in the bar of the ferry, he would remember this moment when the American turned his palms out as if to say he had nothing to hide. ‘Hey, hey,’ Healey was saying. Calming noises. ‘Hoo, hoo, hoo.’ Softly, Healey bleated. But as the hand got nearer, the sheep started tossing its head from side to side and bucking violently against the barbed wire, its front hooves kicking up leaves and dirt, deepening the furrows, which had been its work over however many hours, days, perhaps, the fence had refused to give. Healey lowered his hand.
In its terror, the sheep had twisted itself so that the back half of its body was parallel to the fence, its rear hooves now within grabbing distance. It was staring ahead, turning regularly to check on Healey, who had pulled himself into a crouch alongside the fence, just behind the animal. He could see the back of the sheep, the dags fouling the wool, the flanks twitching. They stayed like this for several minutes, almost, Healey thought, like old friends. Then the sheep was absolutely still—posed—the constant shuffling of its back hooves ceased, with not even the constricted rise of its breathing discernible. It looked straight ahead. It had lost interest in Healey. It had had enough. And seeing the sheep set itself stiff in resignation, Healey had the sudden desire not simply to escape, as had been his first thought, believing that the animal might, somehow, hurt him, but rather to help it from the predicament which he now felt shamed them both in the eyes of the wild spirit hovering somewhere on the path above.
He took a quick breath and tackled the animal. He still remembered how to do this from the rugby days when he had not yet become invisible to the set of girls who now regarded him as a type. He thrust both his arms between the wire of the fence and grabbed the hindquarters, bundling them in his hold, scooping them off the ground and pulling. Away they came, the whole package suddenly hugged to his chest. The weight, however, was a surprise; it caught him off balance and he was tipped forward onto his knees. It then struck him that although he had watched the sheep closely, looked into its eyes, listened to its pitiful noises, seen its excrement, he had not understood until this moment that the animal was really a living thing. Even though he had, in a sense, been drawn to the animal and had gone out of his way on its account, or at least on account of the cries, which he had believed were Karen’s, he now understood that he had really thought only of himself and never considered the animal, nor the couple he had stepped on, nor even Karen, as anything but an object to which he might or might not pay attention.
The powerful muscles of the sheep’s legs were alive, they thrashed against him, the hooves kicking in his hands, clubbing his ribs. Healey’s head and shoulders were now on the wrong side of the wire, his face pressed deep into the sheep’s side—a suffocating warmth in there—the barbs cutting into his shirt collar. He was winded, about to let go, but manoeuvring himself into a sitting position, his school shoes braced against the fence for support, he gave one final heave. The sheep screamed—a ghostly, quavering soprano—and Healey screamed, too, as they both came flying back through the wire. When they landed, the sheep’s belly covered his face. He was breathing in a thick pile rug. Wool was in his mouth, in his nose. Its fibres woven hard into his cheeks. He could feel himself sinking, as if beneath a team’s-worth of water-logged jerseys. He freed an arm and, swinging a fist where he thought the animal’s head would be, he punched the sheep as hard as he could, crying out as he swung: ‘On its stupid snout!’
He was sickened, triumphantly repelled. It felt as if he was pushing his hand through honeycomb, hearing the dreadful crunch of its sticky, delicate lattice-work caving in, his knuckles instantly hot and coated. The sheep’s bleat was altered, it was lower, a querulous note introduced. Neither of them could quite believe it. Healey had broken the sheep’s nose.
It sat on his face awhile longer, stunned, then the sheep bolted, hopping over Healey’s prone body with surprising elan, a pert little shake of its dirty, woollen rump, and, baaing peevishly, kicked on up towards the path. Healey watched it slipping, finding traction, falling back, before leaping out of sight.
Then he began hearing the voices of the couples above him on the path, among which he thought he made out Karen’s.
‘Oh, look,’ someone was saying, ‘it’s been hurt—the poor thing has been hurt.’
Healey closed his eyes. In that moment he believed they had found him—that he was being attended to, that hands were being laid upon his body.
‘All gather round,’ Karen was saying. ‘Don’t alarm it. We’re moving in slowly now. Now we’re going to lift our arms quite gently, like that, and now we’re closing them, oh, so slowly, around you. There.’
Healey opened his eyes. There was no one over him. He crawled up the bank towards the sound of the voices and stopped where he could make out several sets of bare legs, lost among which were those pear-shaped calves. From the dense centre of this human circle came the softened cries of animal satisfaction and, Healey believed, even smugness.
While crouching in the bush, waiting for his classmates to finish the business of revival and return to the barbecue, Healey thought about lying face-up on his bed on those weekends when he had decided to sleep through the daylight hours and when he could hear people moving around the house and going about their business as if it were a normal day. In the time he imagined himself falling asleep, the path was again quiet.
(1993)
Damien Wilkins, ‘The Prodigals’
Don’t let your parents sell
the house. They weren’t children
there.
Threaten to marry and bring
the brood around adoring and
brilliant. That place they’re considering
in town it’s too small with no room for the
pyjama parties, the overnighters and
emergencies. Summon some
accident. Disa
ster is nicely
expansive. Find an outdoorsy
woman to go visiting with and coach
her in compliments. My, but this is
freedom! Call on the land agent and
while he’s asleep pour out your
poison.
Failing this, one night creep around
the side by the glossy-leafed
bushes and the old washing machine
your cousin never collected because
he went mad and slip through your
window. Now stand in the hallway
your bare feet in the light from the
white keys of the piano your sisters
gave up on and listen. People are being
murdered in their beds. The children
are making love to themselves with
furious fists, pillows. It’s unforgivable
how things have slipped in the time
you’ve been in jail.
(1993)
Fiona Farrell, from The Skinny Louie Book
The Queen was coming. Maura stood with her mother and father down by the railway crossing at the very end of the route. She would have preferred to be in the Park suffering torments of jealousy while some other little girl with perfect curls and a perfect dress handed the Queen a posy while performing a perfect curtsey, but they’d been late and this was the closest they could get.
Dad hadn’t wanted to come at all. ‘Load of poppycock,’ he’d said. ‘Mrs Windsor and that chinless cretin she married riding along waving at the peasants and mad Sid and the rest of them bringing up the rear kowtowing for all they’re worth. Lot of nonsense.’
‘I think she’s pretty,’ said Maura who had a gold Visit medal pinned to her best frock and a scrapbook of pictures cut from Sunny Stories in her bedroom: The Little Princesses at Play with the Royal Corgies on the Lawn at Balmoral, The Little Princesses in their Playhouse which had a proper upstairs and wasn’t just a made-over pig pen with ripped sheets for curtains. ‘Miss Croad says the Queen has a peaches and cream complexion.’
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 127