The Man in the Shed

by Lloyd Jones

  At least an hour has passed. There has been no sign of Mikhail. It seems a long time since the lamps in the bedroom went out, and all this time Neil has stood shivering in his bare feet. Now he makes his move.

  As he expected, the door off the courtyard has been left open, and Neil creeps through the house to the bedroom. He has decided he will wake Judith and explain everything in full. She needs to hear an impartial voice in order to understand properly what has happened to her—the doctor’s sly manipulation of her memory and his scheming from the outset when he scraped her off the road and brought her home to be his mistress.

  But in the bedroom Neil has second thoughts. If he wakes her, is there any guarantee that she will see the right person? What if she only recognises the bedraggled tramp whom she scorns and detests? There is another way. He would never have thought of it but for Mikhail’s nightgown and nightcap slung over the back of a chair.

  Quietly he changes his rags for the doctor’s bedclothes. The nightshirt is tight around the shoulders and there is a loud tear when Neil reaches up to place the doctor’s nightcap on his head. Judith stirs, and Neil holds his position—an arm raised above his head—until her breathing resumes its normal pattern. Then he moves to the doctor’s side of the bed.

  The bed feels strangely unaccommodating and an anecdote from another invasion comes to Neil’s mind. He recalls the surprise of the French at finding Moscow abandoned—this is something I had described to him—their tiptoeing about the Kremlin apartments, watched by a caged bird, the clocks tick-tocking, while they tried on Russian shoes and stretched out on their beds, tossing fitfully to make a narrow ravine in a mattress where there already existed a valley. Neil finds he has the opposite problem. The doctor has left only a shallow and narrow impression upon the mattress.

  Later, Neil wondered what it was that woke Judith. What was she responding to? Was it this primal act of invasiveness—or was it a feeling of difference?

  There is none of the desperate eagerness which he had witnessed between Judith and Mikhail. Rather, she stirs contentedly, like a sunbather. From the depths of sleep a smile rises on her face, and her hand reaches for the doctor’s nightshirt. She must have smelt Mikhail on him. Neil finds himself smiling at how easy it is. So easy. Criminally easy. Nothing more enters into it, not guilt, or doubt, just this—as Judith receives him, that everything is so wonderfully familiar, it is back to old times.

  eight

  A drunk staggers up the wrong path, into the wrong house, through the wrong door and into the wrong bed. And what happens? The woman drowsily commences making love to the man she assumes is her partner.

  Lawyers say it’s not nearly as uncommon as you might think. The legal questions tend to probe the area of awareness, ‘the quality of the act’, and, of course, the response of the perpetrator once the alarm is raised. Did he go on breathlessly to the end, doggedly pursuing his satisfaction? Or did he sit up, confused, embarrassed, apologetic, at a loss for words, then quickly dress and lace up his shoes?

  Neil watches his wife’s thoughts come and go in order—surprise, betrayal, disgust. She closes her eyes, thinking perhaps it is another dream, but when she opens them again, Neil is still there.

  She sits up in bed and snatches at the bedding, dragging it around herself. Then she snaps at him to hand her the pillow. The moment seems to be full of embarrassing transitions until Judith’s disgust takes full hold. She demands to know what he is smiling at—just what the hell is there to smile at?

  ‘Raisa …’ he starts to say. Something to do with Judith’s gathering the bedding around her reminds him of Raisa bundling the washing in her arms. ‘The primrose?’ he says, hoping everything can be referred back to Mikhail’s neighbourhood. He repeats what she had said to Raisa: ‘Spread the sheets over the primrose.’

  But none of it makes any sense. Judith doesn’t appear to remember. She looks at him without comprehension. She shakes her head and falls back in bed, still with the bedding wrapped around her. She tells him she’s heard all she wants to for now. He can switch off the light on his way out. Whatever he has to say for himself can wait until morning.

  Neil lies awake the rest of the night pondering the whole messy business. He would have said whatever it took to make things right again, but when he thinks of what the explanation amounts to—the past months spent on Russian drills, my involvement, Masha Venyukova, my next-door neighbour, this fleshing-out of an imaginary landscape in order to pursue his wife—the invasion gathers more heft, and so, come morning, he finds he has nothing to say.

  Neil turned up at my door later that afternoon, an air of bereavement about him.

  ‘Judith’s gone,’ he said. She’d packed a bag and caught a bus to Napier. She planned to stay with her parents until Neil ‘got himself together’. ‘I can’t believe she’s gone.’

  ‘Only temporarily,’ I boldly assured him. ‘She’ll be back.’

  But he answered this with a gloomy look. ‘She took the wedding photographs.’

  She must have experienced a change of heart. Maybe she spoke to someone with a nose for the legal angle in this mess, because a week later a policeman arrived at Neil’s door. This is how I came to public notice, as a witness in Mrs Owen’s charge of rape against her husband.

  Neil turned up to a preliminary hearing in a shiny suit. He engaged a lawyer who was prepared to argue that Neil thought he was in Russia at the time. This is when the newspapers became interested and the whole thing ended up at my door.

  I became something of a celebrity. ‘Dream-Maker’. That’s how my name got about. There were television appearances, radio interviews. I got wild calls in the middle of the night, slurred voices that spoke of errant partners running off with waiters and rodeo riders to distant corners of the globe. Argentina to Tennessee. And what could I do to lead them into the dreamscape of their smitten husbands and wives?

  Judith looked around at the circus she had created and decided she had had enough. She dropped the charges. On the morning of our last day in court, we bumped into each other and she asked if we could have a private chat. One of the interview rooms wasn’t being used, so we went in there. I suppose she was Neil’s age—thirty-eight, -nine, thereabouts. She had the same manner as Neil, which I mistook for shyness. She glanced downwards, but then when she spoke, like Neil, she was direct and to the point.

  She said, ‘My counsel will be here in a few minutes, so I’ll do the talking, shall I?’ She smiled, half in apology I suspect, because she began by saying that Neil was one of the most unimaginative men she had ever met. ‘You must be a very clever man.’

  ‘Well, Neil was a good student,’ I said.

  She didn’t respond to that. She said, ‘You probably want to know why Russia, Mikhail. I’m not even sure I know the full answer. But I do know this. When you work the land, you learn to study it very carefully. You know every clod of dirt, every new shoot. And you know everything there is to know about one another—Neil and me. Neil’s tired love-making. I don’t know if I should mention that.’

  I coughed and looked away.

  ‘No. Probably I shouldn’t.’ She fumbled in her bag for a cigarette. I lit a match for her, and she continued. ‘Mikhail isn’t anything to write home about, but it’s enough that he’s different. Attentive, wildly possessive, oh, heavens, yes.’ She thrilled to that, wriggling in her white coat. She laughed. ‘All those roses and gifts, bathing me, dancing at night in the garden. You think you’ll never fall for it …

  ‘Anyway. Russia.’ She blew a smoke ring up to the ceiling. ‘Russia was my room at the end of the hall. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that expression. It’s something my father used to say to us girls: “Your mother’s in the room at the end of the hall”—which was code for saying she was out of bounds. That room was like another country which she kept secret from us kids.

  ‘Once I asked to see inside it, and she said, “There’s nothing to see.” She opened the door to a bare room. She put a fing
er to her lips, then she said, “Can you hear it?”

  “Hear what?” I asked. Well, I couldn’t hear anything.

  “Hear the waterfall,” she said. “Close your eyes. Listen. Now can you hear?”

  “Yes,” I said—even though I couldn’t. But I was ten and I thought I was supposed to hear the waterfall like I was supposed to know how to spell universe and that Peking was the capital of China. I didn’t want to disappoint her.

  ‘Now of course I know what she was talking about. I understand now. If there was a waterfall, then you can bet there was a pond. I think of my mother in one of her summer dresses, picnicking with one of the farmers from the tennis club.’

  There were voices in the hall outside.

  Judith looked up and continued. ‘I didn’t believe Neil when he told me about finding his way to Mikhail’s.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘And now … I don’t know, except for this. I’ll ask you to keep your imagination to yourself in the future. It can be a dangerous thing when you spread it around.’

  nine

  Two years have flown by since the Owens were together in Russia. They have shared memories; they have private memories. They have agreed that what went on in Mikhail’s bedroom should stay behind a closed door.

  As you might expect, their memories are starting to fragment. Sometimes Judith will see a flower or inhale a scent that in a blink takes her right back to Mikhail’s garden. She remembers the lime-washed walls and the way the trees enclosed the cottage. She often finds herself thinking about the stillness of stone walls—like the eyes of dead cows piled one upon the other. Or Neil will see something on TV—a BBC travelogue down the Volga—and a dirt road recalls the strada he ran down with Raisa in pursuit, or—and this happened recently—he rang to say a funny little fellow from Inland Revenue had turned up to audit their GST returns, and Neil said he couldn’t stop smiling at the man’s round glasses and shining forehead, thinking of Moldavia.

  The Old Country, as they’ve come to call it. ‘My little bird … My golubchik …’ The Owens joke among themselves. ‘And one for my pet golubchik,’ Neil will say when pouring a glass of wine for Judith.

  But there are other times, like at fundraising dances for the local play centre (the Owens have a pair of daughters now), after dancing with the mad, grinning plumber and tolerating the bank clerk pushing his groin into her, that Judith misses Mikhail, and recalls a night in Kishinev when he expertly made use of the entire garden and they danced on air for hours. Or on those days when rain has completely obscured the view out the window and there is nothing to do but stand before it with folded arms, her thoughts wander back to Russia. She remembers when Mikhail bathed her and how he renamed her landscape.

  She also remembers what it is to fall out of love and into love, and how, sometimes, the two things can happen concurrently, like departure and arrival, or the shifting status of two countries called ‘home’.

  LLOYD JONES was born in New Zealand in 1955. His best-known works include Mister Pip, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, The Book of Fame, winner of numerous literary awards, Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance, Choo Woo, Biografi and Paint Your Wife.