Beth was in her kitchen, looking out at the storm. The house backed onto a reserve. The trees were tossing in the wind, and the rain lashed down. It was hot and steamy. At the table little Caro was making a potion. She put in detergent, flour, instant coffee, sugar, salt, pepper.
Per had gone to his studio, two doors along. He had been in a rage on the way home. She’d talked about Jenny and it had irritated him. She had felt him wincing and withdrawing. They had all four grandchildren in the back of the car, and only Bennie might have noticed that Per’s silence and her talk stood for something. Me banging my head against a brick wall, she thought. Me kicking down his door.
Caro added tea leaves and Ajax to her mixture. She broke a glass.
‘Careful,’ Beth said calmly.
She picked up the broken pieces. The other grandchildren were downstairs. She had invited all four to stay the night.
It was sad about Jenny. She wanted to talk about it, have the odd luxurious cry. Per knew this, and reacted with cold contempt, as though she were a frivolous tourist traipsing through his private battlefield. What would he say? ‘Be sad if you like. I’m not stopping you. You don’t need me.’
Now he was alone, locked in his studio. He would never tell her what he really felt. He was hypersensitive, difficult. It was unfair … Beth missed her younger daughter Marie. But she was far away, in London.
‘I want to cook it,’ Caro begged. ‘Please.’ She wrapped her arms around her grandmother’s waist.
Sighing, Beth poured the mixture into a cake tin. She opened the oven.
‘We’ll turn the heat up really high,’ she said, sliding in the tin.
Caro nodded. ‘We’ll feed it to people,’ she whispered. ‘Make them go funny.’
They sat together at the table, and soon the mixture began to heat up, sending a pungent, unpleasant stink out into the reserve.
Late in the evening, when the storm was at its height, the lights went out. Per walked through the house, trying switches. He went outside. The power was out all along the street. He remembered he’d left a window open in his studio. He felt for his keys, closed the door behind him and ran two houses along. He worked in the top half of this second house, and rented out the bottom storey, which was converted into a flat. He went to the window and looked out at the reserve. As far as he could see beyond the park the city was in darkness. The wind roared, sighed, howled in the big trees. When Jenny was dying he had sat at the bedside and listened to the terrible, harsh gasps, and he had closed his eyes and silently begged it to stop. Please, please stop suffering, die. He’d wanted to block his ears, to put a pillow over her face, and he’d sat, stony-faced and listened, in agony. At some point he’d stood at the window and seen, far away, a ship sailing out past the islands towards the open sea. He’d walked out of the room. The doctor was by the nurses’ station. Per said, ‘She tried to commit suicide last year. She was brave, it was her choice. They brought her round. Why?’ And the doctor, a young man, looked at him with tired, intelligent eyes and said, ‘She hasn’t got long.’
Per stood in the dark. He saw her aged thirteen, coming up the street. Vivid, pretty. Slamming the gate, hurrying, angry about something. Sun on the garden, on the dry stone wall. Late summer. The smell of cut grass. Her dress. Her hands. She frowned and shouted over her shoulder at him, and ran off up the path.
He felt a crushing weight, his chest froze, and a sense of horror came over him. He sank down and sat on the floor in the dark, his hands over his face.
Images ran through his mind. The Reverend Matiu, an Anglican vicar, but still cleaving to the Maori way, talking to the body, never leaving it alone. Strange. It’s good to have respect. But to stroke the body and converse with it, to pretend that it can hear? I could have pulled its hair, I could have pissed on it, what difference would it make? The damage is done. Her grandchildren believed she was in heaven. But there’s no God, he thought. Matiu’s church, all churches, are an intellectual slum. We come from dust and return to dust. There’s nothing — no door — behind the sky. She bored me, irritated me, filled me with guilt. She married a simpleton; I had an intellectual life. But in the dying, emptying face I saw something, felt it, raged against it. The destruction of part of myself.
He walked slowly back to the house. Beth came up from the lower floor carrying a torch. They lit candles and sat in the living room, watching the white flashes lighting up the trees. The candle flames made shadows on the walls.
Per put two candles on the side table so he could read. He rearranged them, trying to get the best light. She watched him angrily. That’s how he is, she thought. He works. He reads. Life goes on. It’s as if nothing had happened. It’s unbearable.
She threw her book aside. ‘How can you read?’
He said stiffly, ‘I’ll get another candle.’
She turned to him, imploring. ‘Say something. Please.’ She put her arms around him, squeezing him tight, begging him to understand how she felt.
He sat silent, looking over her head, into the black shapes beyond the glass.
Everything was quiet and still. At 4am the wind had died. The rain had stopped. Per and Beth were asleep, but downstairs the children sat in a circle round a lit candle, dividing a horde of sweets.
Caro didn’t like the strange shadows leaping on the walls. She moved closer to Paul. There were three green lollipops, and one yellow. Yellow was much nicer.
‘Don’t touch,’ commanded Antonia, and Caro whipped her hand away.
They listened. Bennie pulled back the curtain. In the reserve the trees were still, and there was a streak of pale light, like a seam, in the black sky. Antonia counted out the sweets, arranging them in piles. Bennie watched her ironically.
‘You’re such a control freak, Antonia,’ he said.
They were silent again. Caro kneeled up on Bennie’s bed, looking out the window.
‘Let’s go out there,’ she whispered.
‘It’s wet,’ he said kindly.
But Antonia sat up and snapped her fingers. ‘Good idea.’
Caro tried to look solemn, and beamed. ‘Really? Shall we?’ she said loudly. They shushed her.
Antonia crept upstairs. She took two more candles, Per’s biggest umbrella and a box of matches. They put on their clothes.
The lock on the back door was stiff and creaked loudly. They would have to climb out the window. Bennie eased the window open and climbed down the trellis. They got Caro onto the windowsill and dropped her down to him. She landed awkwardly, knocking him over. He put his hand over her mouth.
Antonia threw down the supplies, and she and Paul slid down and dropped onto the grass.
‘How are we going to get back in?’ Paul asked.
Caro stared at the dark trees, which could have been hiding something unseen and terrible. Everything looked different. She tried to make out shapes and outlines but the trees looked to her like huge figures, their arms outstretched, bending towards her. Above the reserve the sky was dark, streaked here and there with stray gleams of light. All around was the rustling and gurgling of water in the drenched grass, and far away a sighing roar, as if they could hear the last of the storm passing out of the city and whirling away, over the dark countryside and out to sea. There were so many sounds, and yet everything was so still, it seemed that the park was holding itself in check, waiting.
‘There might be a homeless person,’ Antonia said.
There was a sudden rustling in the trees and a series of harsh, coughing barks. They moved close together. They knew it was a possum, but it was such an eerie sound they felt unnerved, until Paul darted forward and hurled a stick. The possum went quiet. They heard it crashing about in the branches, heavy and ungainly.
Caro looked at the sky and saw that the grey seam had grown wider, that a pearly light was coming from it. Inside that opening was the daytime. It was still dark, but the trees were no longer so black and monstrous, and as she watched, a fine, delicate rim of pink appeared on the edge of
the clouds. There was a squall of wind and the trees heaved, sighed, subsided.
They walked through the park, away from the houses. Antonia knelt down and lit the candles, setting them carefully on the path. They sat beside her and she put the umbrella up over them. They huddled in the circle of flickering light. There was a long dreamy silence. They watched the light turning gradually from dark to grey, and soon the colours of the trees and flowers began to show, and there were sparkles of light in the drenched grass. A bright patch gleamed at the edge of a roof and a streak of light came over the corrugated iron and shone on the trees. The clouds had frayed in places and there were pale spots that might soon become blue sky. They listened to a rat scuttling in the bushes, a car starting up in the street, the possum again, further away, making its harsh purr. A bird flew up and wheeled away, cheeping indignantly. Another beam of light crossed the grass, a twig cracked, a second bird started.
Caro looked at the seam in the sky with the daytime inside it. She’d never been outside in the night before. It was beautiful, mysterious, solemn. The darkness changed the shape of things and the dawn changed them back. When I grow up I will go out every night, she thought. And she saw a grey cat sitting on the path, watching her with unblinking eyes. It walked across the park, picking its way delicately through the wet stalks, its fur covered with tiny diamonds of dew.
First thing in the morning, Saturday, Larry went to visit his friend. They boiled up and consumed his stolen prize. Then he went home to work in his garden, a long, steep section that he and Raine had terraced and cultivated. He had made a bird table, and he watched as the sparrows and blackbirds squabbled and hopped and pecked. The garden was full of life. He moved through it, his head pleasantly buzzing. The sun was hot on his back; he was dazzled in the bright light. He had cut down a small dead tree and was chopping it into pieces in order to carry it down the hill and load it on a trailer. He was enormously strong. The dead wood splintered, chips flew around him. Words came into his head and seemed to hang there, glowing, like paintings in a dark room. Yellowhammer. Kingfisher. Blackbird. The leaves shone, the palms were yellow, buttery. The air was full of tiny insects that scattered, regrouped, streamed through the brightness. Chop. Chop. The air flew apart, whirled to the sound of his axe. He worked fast, singing parts of songs.
When the tree was all in pieces he stopped and looked up. At the top of the hill, a few feet away from him, a man was watching him. He stood against the blue sky, moving slightly. He was all in black. His clothes were so black that they seemed to Larry to be an absence of matter, as if the shape of a man had been cut out of the blue sky, revealing a void behind. Larry stared, gripping his axe. He lifted it slightly. The man made a gesture: careless, scornful, as if to say that nothing could touch him. Then he came slowly down the path.
Larry dropped the axe and backed away. He blinked. The man had gone.
He went inside and locked himself in the bathroom. He looked at himself in the mirror. His pupils were large and dark. He sat on the edge of the bath. After a while, he had a shower.
He walked into the sitting room. Raine was talking to his mother on the phone. She clapped down the receiver and said, ‘I’ve got to finish the wedding dress. You pick the children up.’
The wedding dress, commissioned by an old friend from school, was spread over the dining table. The table and floor were cluttered with paper and material and scissors and pins. The material was buttery, slippery, shimmery. It seemed to Larry to have a kind of rippling life in it; if he moved his head it looked like a stream of liquid running over the table and onto the floor of the sunny room. His wife stood with a piece of material over her arm, the sun behind her, lit up like a saint.
He went out and stood in the street and stared at the leaves, the patterns they made, light on dark. He looked at the hard blue sky, the atoms dancing in it. Raine opened the window and shouted from upstairs, ‘Take them to the park. And get something for dinner.’
Larry waved vaguely and got in the car. The steering wheel was hot. He enjoyed the acceleration as he shot away from the kerb. After last night’s storm the city was fresh and glittering, the sky blue, every outline sharp, with the photographic clarity of a perfect Auckland summer day. Mount Eden was wearing a shimmering halo of paler light. Larry drove and the air parted in front of him, silvery, liquid. He shot through it, as quick as a fish.
Bennie let him into his parents’ house. He looked warily around for his father, but Per liked to spend Saturday afternoons in his studio. His mother got up slowly. The children milled around her, Caro with her vivid little face, like a troll. They were a cluster of trolls, gnomes, in a warm cave. Antonia did something with a roll of tin foil; he stared at the trail of silver it left in the air.
They were saying things.
‘We went out in the dark. We had to knock on the door to get back in. They got a surprise. We made a cake. Look.’
Cake. A funny word.
His daughter gnome. Snaky blonde hair. His elder son, the light on his spectacles, so you couldn’t see his eyes. Silver-eye. Wax-eye. Peeping at him from behind the opaque glasses. And the air, the way it parted as he came forward, the weight of the air, not silvery in here but warm and blurred.
She handed him a cup. Steam curled and slipped through the light. Careful, he thought. It was harder to keep steady in here.
He crossed to the kitchen and looked out at the trees. There was a trench of dark shadow beneath them. He listened to the drops of sound the tuis made, cluck, click, scratch, a pause, then a ‘plonk’, like a stone falling into water. Rosellas flew from tree to tree, flashing their bright reds and greens and yellows.
The trolls ran in and out, leaving scatterings of disturbed sound. His mother said something. He sipped his coffee, rigged up a smile then struggled to get rid of it. He turned its full beam on Paul, who looked disconcerted and ducked his head.
Larry put the cup down, but it hit the edge of the sink and cracked. He stood over his children, fighting down the smile. ‘Off we go.’
At the door he wondered whether anyone had noticed the cracked cup. ‘The air can be very … heavy,’ he observed quietly.
He swooped out to the car, hoping this would cover it.
‘Where are we going?’ Bennie asked.
‘Killing time,’ he told them. He thought about this phrase. It chimed in his head.
Killing time.
He drove them to the top of Mount Eden. They got out and looked over the suburbs. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ he said. There were puffy clouds in the west; from them the sun shot down beams of light, what the Maoris called the ropes of Maui. He pointed. The children looked obediently, shading their eyes. They lay in the grass watching the clouds move in. The wind blew in the white flowers. Above them, on the ridge, busloads of tourists chattered, smoked and clicked cameras.
The drive down the winding mountain road was exhilarating. He stopped and bought ice creams. But when they got home he’d forgotten about the supermarket. Raine shouted and complained. He watched her from across the room. She snapped and sparkled. The air flew away from her, sensitive to sound. After a while she went out to buy groceries, taking Paul and Bennie with her. He was left alone with Antonia. She turned on the television.
Six dressmaker’s dummies lived in an apartment. Three male, three female. They talked; in answer, from somewhere unseen, came waves of laughter. The dummies tossed manes of blow-dried hair. Their mouths opened and closed. Their voices were nasal: quack quack quack. The laughter came blowing back, first a trickle, then a gust, then a real shriek. He listened to the quacking and laughing, and he became aware that Antonia, sitting on the floor in front of him, was part of the pattern; she leaned back and kicked her feet and squeak squeak, drew her elbows into her sides and giggled into her cupped hands.
He got up. He pointed the remote control and pressed the red button. There was a dry click. The dummies disappeared.
Antonia flew at him, grabbing for the remote, whining, cajol
ing. She made noises: ‘Aw. Aw.’ He held her off. Fantail. Silver-eye. Tui. She was as light as a bird.
She stopped trying to grab the remote. She stood up. Her eyes filled. She stared at him with her liquid eyes: a lost look. ‘Why are you smiling?’
She ran away upstairs. Her bedroom door slammed.
He followed her, light-heartedly tiptoeing up the stairs. He stood outside her door, listening. He knocked softly. Silence. He knocked again. He could sense her in there, frozen, like a little animal. He went on knocking for a while, until he forgot why he was doing it. He laid the TV remote outside her door, went downstairs and outside. He saw there were some weeds. He began pulling them out, kneeling on the concrete path, absorbed.
NYMPH
When Simon Lampton saw Viola Myers in the street for the first time in two years, he couldn’t help himself. He gave her such a foul look that his whole face contorted.
Viola, who had been regarding him in a cool and neutral fashion, sharpened up. She looked suddenly interested. Later, he would remember this change in her expression. It was as if he’d dropped his shield and she saw it, and somehow she was engaged. Activated.
Simon got to his office and sat down at his desk. He looked at his hands. A line of yellow sunshine came into the room and played on the photo of Karen. He thought about the incident with Viola and his father. It still gave him pain.
For years the old man, Aaron Harris, had caused so much trouble that Simon had frequently wished him dead. They never spoke except when Aaron rang drunk, and raved until Simon hung up.
Once, on the way to work, he had seen his father’s car parked on a patch of waste ground near the city. Later when he was driving home it was still there, and it had come to him that the old man was inside it, dead. He’d stopped the car on the side of the road, surprising himself with the strength of his feeling. Grief and pity, sudden shaming tears. But later still, when he drove slowly back, the car was gone, and his feelings closed over, leaving him cold. He caught glimpses of Aaron every now and then, the old man making his way through the city, conducting his presumably shady affairs. Aaron existed in a parallel universe, and as Simon moved through his own world a connection would open, and he would blink at the sight of the old man cruising along the street in his battered car, cutting across him, the familiar profile set in a leer of mad, scarecrow defiance, shrieking off round a corner with a taunting parp on the horn and a foul blast of phantom exhaust.
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