by Lloyd Jones
One night I am woken by shouting in the TV room. Unusually it is Dad’s voice, now Mum’s hand-wringing whine and groan, now both, and I am expecting to hear the man from the shed, but instead what I hear is Pen sobbing, followed by feet marching down the hall. The front door slams with such violence my night-light briefly goes out before flickering back on.
The wounded air of the night lasted until breakfast, where I found Pen sitting at the kitchen table with Jimmy Mack. Jimmy smiled at me. A quick disapproving look from my sister removed the smile. And Jimmy settled for nodding down at the table. Pen’s hair was wet. She looked as though she had been made to stand in a cold shower for twelve hours. She glanced up at me in the doorway then back at her bitten nails. She bit off some more. She flicked it off her fingertips and glanced up again. Seeing I was still there (I wasn’t going to leave without my breakfast), she said through her fingers, I’m pregnant. Jimmy’s face lit up again. He beamed at me across the kitchen and then seemed to remember the moratorium placed on all smiles and happiness and quickly fitted on his earnest school-leaver’s face, of a year back, which I suppose was the best he could come up with to go with the stunning fact that he was going to be a father.
Again things happened without warning. I came home from school one day to find my sister’s room bare. The bed was made, the sheets and blanket perfectly spread in a way that particular bed had never known. The carefully folded back part seemed to define the terminal sense of the room.
There was hardly anything that Pen didn’t take with her to the motor camp.
Now we would stop by there on our way to the beach. My sister would be sitting barefoot on the steps of the caravan smiling wanly back at the world. We’d get out of the car, doors flying open, bounding cheerfulness in all directions. We were putting on a brave face. It was a hot and tiny caravan I stepped inside. It was shocking to see how my sister’s world had shrunk to a small porthole view of the other caravans standing in a line, the long grass bursting up around the wheelhouse of each. It was clear. My sister’s life had been put on hold.
I was glad to get back in the car and on our way. I was relieved to be driving away from the uncomfortable fact of her stalled life. The sky grew larger in the side windows of the car. From under the wheels came the popping sound of shells. A row of seagulls traced a line of roofs. The houses appeared to sway towards and away from the sea. The soft decay of the beach spread inland. Soon the windblown gardens petered out to sand and burnt lawn. The windows were thick with sea breath. The immensity of the sky mocked the idea of the houses. Why so much concrete in the drive? Why bother with the flower vase halfway along the window ledge? Yet on the way home it was possible to see these same houses quite differently. No longer were these weatherboards the tail end of our neighbourhood of well-maintained brick, but a continuation of the spin drift of the beach; they were another shelf on the shoreline.
We pulled in to the car park. Where we liked to walk was now covered in gloating tide. We got out anyway. That part was never in doubt. But it wasn’t the same, restricted as we were to a narrow strip much higher up the beach, an area we usually passed up, and so close to the parked cars we could hear the tinny sound of their radios and the creak of heavy doors. Up here was a stew of beer cans, cigarette butts and weeds. Dad bent down to pocket a coin. He’d notice something like that but not the sand. Mum had fallen silent. Perhaps it was the thought of my sister in the caravan with Jimmy Mack. Jimmy had recently started his builder’s apprenticeship. Jimmy’s old man was a successful builder. It seemed the thing to do. Jimmy was going to build them a house one day.
I imagine these things preoccupied Mum as well as her own pregnancy and the man in the back shed. I would say the same went for Dad. There were days when he looked like he was single-handedly labouring under the effort to carry the entire world. His gaze slipped right off the face of the sea. If I looked closely I could see that his grey eyes weren’t gazing at anything. That he was taking instruction deep from within and I had an idea he was wondering what to do about the man in the shed. The obvious thing was to show him the door. To kick him out on his pants. If it came to fisticuffs I was in no doubt who would win. Not that I seriously thought it would come to that but whenever I tried to think of something for Dad to do, of some means to take some pleasure, it always came down to a physical option. It was just as obvious that Mum was responsible for him staying on.
I have an idea—and again it is never said aloud—that the man in the shed will stay until his baby is born. And then what? Who could say? No one ever did.
On my sandbar I am able to think about these things more dispassionately. I have found a landscape that corresponds with something deep inside of myself but which I still don’t fully understand. I can think about my parents without ever thinking their problems involve myself. Mum’s behaviour, for example. I can come home to find her almost coltish, her eyes shining like a drunk’s as she turns from the kitchen sink to find it is just me coming through the back door. Other times she is withdrawn and moody. And I’ll come home to find her lying on the couch in the TV room, the TV off, her eyes tilted up at the clouds in the windows.
It is as though our lives are all in a state of drift. This is what waiting meant. You waited. That’s what the man in the shed was sentenced to as well. Hours and hours of this idleness. Waiting for something to happen. Watched only by the dog, whose kennel Dad has shifted into the backyard. That’s her snout lying in the grass; her watchful eyes are the only things that move.
In March the sea is two degrees warmer than at any other time of the year. By then the weather has settled into a predictable range. People are able to make plans. Mum went to the beach every day to pursue her ocean swimming. She’d found a place to put my sister’s pregnancy, and possibly Dad and myself. She wasn’t as overwhelmed as she had been just a few weeks earlier because she’d found she could just swim away from all of that. The man from the shed always went with her. They are always back by the time Dad gets home. On the clothes line, I’ve noticed, only Mum’s togs are ever pegged up.
This particular afternoon is one out of the box. Blue skies with a late incandescent blaze that has everyone driving to the beach. When I get home Mum’s togs aren’t on the line and neither is she in the house. I have an idea she is in the shed. For ten minutes I stare out the window until the dog comes out of her kennel, walks in a small tired circle then returns to the dark of the kennel.
A few minutes later Dad shows up at the side of the house. I see him looking at the clothes line. Next thing he is inside the house shouting for me to pack the fishing gear.
By the time we get there the car park is full and we have to park back along the sea wall. At the edge of the tide a crowd of swimmers stand like sun-dazed cattle. Near the sand spit seagulls wheel and dive at the sea. Dad is busy getting the fishing gear out of the boot, so he doesn’t see Mum sink into the tide like someone crouching behind the bushes. She pushes off, head down, her quiet feet behind her. I wonder then if she’s seen us. And, if she has, this new feeling I have is an unpleasant one. Stroking into her wake is the man from the shed. Those are his long legs and black togs. I have an idea they’ve spent the whole day down here. Dad locks the car. His blue work shirt, I notice, is patched with sweat. We climb the wall and drop down onto the sand and hotfoot it to the water’s edge. Towards the point the fishermen are lined up on the sea side of the estuary. Some are familiar faces; some of them are known to Dad. I wonder if they know his story, his quiet anguish. I wonder because whenever we come near their eyes head out to sea.
I drop behind a step in order to sneak another look back at the swimmers. They have just left the first raft. I know Mum by her slow and methodical style. The sea parts and continues to part. Into this smooth water swims the man from the shed. Nothing about their swimming suggests gambolling joy. It is steadfast and mindful of form—to my mind a lower register of contentment. You could get the same from painting a fence.
An old Chine
se guy with a steel rod calmly reels in two fish at a time. There must be a dozen fish squirming and bending around his feet. He hasn’t taken the time to stick and bleed them. There are still more to be caught.
Every third stroke Mum lays her head on one side to breathe. On the beach side she might have seen the fishermen wading out to the fish, and, beyond them, the sunlit windscreens. What she can’t see is the direction taken by the spooked fish. Already the water is cutting up near her and the man from the shed. The faces of the fishermen, including Dad’s, are tight with fear of the fish moving beyond the reach of their casts. I stand by Dad trying not to look at the purpling colour of his face or take personally his frosted eyes. So, he’s seen her—that much is clear. In fact he looks to be on the brink of reaching down to pick up a rock to throw at her. He could always say he threw it to warn her of the kingies heading in her direction. The kingies are the fish causing the panic.
A whole line of us follows the disturbed water towards the rafts. Men with surfcasters, some of them twelve feet long, some with lures beaten out of dessert and soup spoons to look like the flashing scales of a fish. We advance into the tide, a line of us, up to where it laps at our crotches and we cast our home-styled lures to land in the frothing water.
All at once, rods bend and reels screech. By the dozen we are reeling in fat kahawai, big muscled fish that we walk backwards with and heave up onto the wet sand. Some of the fishermen quickly dig a hole in the sand and throw their catch into a soapy basin of water.
I happen to be inspecting a kingie someone has been lucky to hook when I look up to see everyone’s eyes on a fisherman standing next to Dad. He is leaning back to get a sense of the weight of the catch. Some of the other fishermen have switched their attention to what he has on the end of his line. Everyone is waiting for the fish to break the surface so we can get a look at him. We follow the taut line dripping with light and we make searching glances to see where the sea might rip next. A large fish will usually show itself. But this fish is not behaving in the expected way. It does not come and go and there is no slack line to reel in. The same weight on the line is maintained, and the reel methodically clicks over. The fisherman tries switching the rod from his right to left hand, and now, to my surprise, he hands his rod to Dad. Dad hands his rod over in exchange. As they do so the stranger imparts some information on the breaking strain of his line. Now Dad wades into deeper water; he’s up to his waist and that’s when I see, along with the rest of the beach, that he is slowly reeling in Mum.
She is making some effort to help. It is clearly difficult for her. I have an idea she is hooked in the region of her back, which would account for her awkward crabbing movement. As Dad reels he walks towards her—reeling and walking, up to his chest now, and for her part Mum appears to be doing her best to work with Dad, coming to the pain as they did from different directions. I notice the disturbed water moving away. Some fishermen set off after it, but a number have stayed back to watch Dad and, I suppose, to see what will happen next.
It being mid-tide he’s able to wade nearly halfway out to the raft, where he shifts the rod to his left hand and reaches his more powerful welder’s arm around the front of Mum and scoops her out of the sea. He gets her into the shallows and that’s where he hands the rod back to the fisherman. Taking great care he sits Mum down on the sand. She looks up but does not appear to see me. She’s crying out to Dad to do something. To, please, please, get the thing out of her. Her shoulders are raised and her buttocks pushed out. I can see what she is trying to do. Fish do the same. They bend and arch as the hook is removed. Mum is trying to loosen the skin around the hook. I wonder if anyone else has noticed her stomach. It’s large and resistant to the moment. It’s as though it shouldn’t be here, has separate business of its own to attend to. Dad glances up, sees me and waves me closer. He gets me to kneel down beside Mum. He gives me the instructions. I am to open her mouth and stick my forearm in.
He was so calm and matter of fact that I followed the instruction. He said it would probably hurt but not as much as it will your mum, remember that. And I did. He grabbed the skin around the hook and bunched it up. It gave him something to work with and had the effect of isolating the hooked-flesh part of Mum from the rest of her. When the moment came Mum made a muffled sound like that of someone trying to breathe through a pillow—then she spat my forearm out and swore loudly, a word I didn’t know she had in her. That alone brought a smile to Dad’s face. With a fat grin he held up the lure and a number crowded around for a closer look; one or two clapped. The man whose rod had hooked Mum patted Dad on the shoulder. Just beneath Mum’s right shoulder you could see where the hook had embedded. A watery trickle of blood oozed down her back. I was inspecting the tooth marks over my forearm—Jesus, I was thinking, she’s actually broken the skin. I was dying to show someone my own injury. I was looking up for a sympathetic face when I remembered the man from the shed. I found him treading water halfway between the raft and the beach. How far away he seemed right then at that moment—almost, I felt, as if having taken this pause to see what was happening at the beach he might now drop his head back in the water and swim away out of our lives.
We drove home together. Mum, Dad and me. No one mentioned Mum’s car. Hours later it was parked in the drive.
The next morning I came into the kitchen to find Mum at the table drinking tea and watching Dad eat his breakfast. I almost got away but she heard me. She closed a hand over the opening of her dressing-gown and swung around in her chair. She wanted to show me something. She pulled her dressing-gown off her shoulder to show her wound beneath the right shoulder blade. Then she asked to see my arm. She inspected the tooth marks then handed back my arm and thanked me. She said how brave I’d been to put up with that and not say a word. I didn’t hear a whimper, she said. She asked Dad if he’d heard anything and he shook his head down at his plate of eggs. Nope, not a thing, he said.
Six weeks later beneath a screaming blue sky I trail after Dad along the coastal hilltops with the wind tearing at our faces and our eyes streaming. The same wind hares through the long grass. Pathways open up wherever the eye pitches next. Seagulls are blown sideways over the fence and farm gate, down beneath the gorse into ravines of shadow. Only a hawk holds its course.
We are looking for a place to bury a baby. I caught a glimpse of him after Dad pulled him off Mum and after he wiped the blood away. The baby is at home lying in a bed of cotton wool. A tiny wee thing—a boy, I noticed—curled up with spina bifida. Poor little bugger. That’s his name at this point. Years later I will discover a different name on the death certificate. For now though he is poor little bugger. Dad is looking for a place to bury him and I’ve come along to help. Without saying as much we know the perfect place. It’ll be where no one will notice a shovel scar left on the tops.
With the premature birth and death of poor little bugger I thought the man in the shed would leave our lives. But he didn’t, and he showed no sign of going, and things began to slip back to how they were before.
Dad decided I would go and stay with Pen while he sorted out the ‘mess’ at home. School had started but that didn’t seem to make any difference. His mind was made up. He drove me to the motor camp, as far as the white traffic bar at the entrance, and I was bundled out. He gave me some money to give to my sister, plus a cake on a plate covered with a tea towel that Mum said she wanted back. A face came to the window of the office. When he saw who it was he waved me through. Along with the cake I carried my school bag with my toothbrush, underwear, a change of clothes and a sleeping bag.
There was a brilliant sky. The air smelt of dry heat and dog shit. Just about everything about the camp felt wrong. It was too good a day to be in a place such as this. I wished I was at the beach. The fine smell was from the soap factory across the golf course that backed on to the motor camp. I arrived at the caravan section. Most of them were shut up and their windows looked stale. The door to my sister’s caravan was open. The radio was
playing a Bee Gees song. My sister sat on the step with her nose in a magazine. She was unhealthily pale. Her legs were pink and white and under-exercised. Once upon a time she’d have been at the beach turning heads. But she no longer seemed to be of that world. She’d come out of another formed by plastic laminations and stainless-steel sinks and stale air. I poked my head inside. There was the table and the narrow beds where I guessed she and Jimmy slept. I was wondering where I was supposed to sleep when she pointed to the next caravan along, the one I’d stared at on previous occasions wondering who in this world of a sane mind would choose to live there.