Transported
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
About the Author
Dedication
Acknowledgements
RAT UP A DRAINPIPE
SAID SHEREE
WHEN SHE CAME WALKING
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, WITH FRIES
WIN A DAY WITH MIKHAIL GORBACHEV!
THE NEW NEIGHBOURS
SISTERS
NOT WANTED ON VOYAGE
JIM CLARK
ALARM
THE WADESTOWN SHORE
FILLING THE ISLES
HOMESTAY
THE VISIT OF M. FOUCAULT TO HIS BROTHER WAYNE
BORGES AND I
MEASURELESS TO MAN
THE SEEING
AFTER THE WAR
BEST PRACTICE
ROBINSON IN LOVE
GOING UNDER
MORNING ON VOLKOV
THE ROYAL TOUR
QUEEN OF THE SNOWS
GOING TO THE PEOPLE
COLD STORAGE
BOOKS IN THE TREES
Transported
SHORT STORIES
Tim Jones
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
ISBN 978 1869792251
Version 1.0
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The assistance of Creative New Zealand is gratefully acknowledged by the publishers.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
National Library of New Zealand
A VINTAGE BOOK
published by
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First published 2008
© 2008 Tim Jones
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
ISBN: 978 1869792251
Version 1.0
This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Design: Kate Barraclough
Cover illustration: 'Castaway Bardo' by Maryrose Crook
Cover design: Kate Yiakmis
Author photo: Sonali Mukherji
Tim Jones has published two volumes of poetry, a novel, and one earlier collection of short stories. He is a writer, editor, web content manager, husband, father, political activist, and lover of cricket, music, and many other fine things. He lives in Wellington.
Many of the stories in this collection benefited from comments from members of the various writers' groups I've belonged to. So, with thanks for all the helpful suggestions they have made and the encouragement they have given, I'd like to dedicate this book to the members of the Writers' Intensive Care Group (Dunedin), the Phoenix Writers' SIG (Wellington), and the Writing Crew (Wellington).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I'd like to thank publisher Harriet Allan and editor Claire Gummer for their support, expertise and encouragement; the Random House production team for turning the edited manuscript into the book you hold in your hands; and my partner Kay and son Gareth for putting up with my many quirks (not all of which I can blame on being a writer). I would also like to acknowledge the magazines and anthologies that first published a number of the stories in this collection. Bernard Gadd, who passed away recently, edited the anthologies in which my first two published stories appeared: my particular thanks go to him.
The stories listed below have been previously published as follows:
'Rat up a Drainpipe', Boys' Own Stories: Short Stories by New Zealand Men, ed. Graeme Lay (Tandem Press, 2000)
'When She Came Walking', Strange Horizons (24 September 2001)
'A Short History of the Twentieth Century, with Fries', Flashquake Volume 4, Issue 1(Fall 2004)
'Win a Day with Mikhail Gorbachev!', Full Unit Hookup (Summer 2002), republished in Best New Zealand Fiction 4, ed. Fiona Farrell (Vintage, 2007)
'Sisters', JAAM 17 (May, 2002)
'Not Wanted on Voyage', Bravado 1 (November 2003)
'Alarm', Bravado 5 (November 2005)
'Homestay', Strange Horizons (31 January 2005)
'The Visit of M. Foucault to His Brother Wayne', published as 'The Visit', JAAM 24 (2006)
'Borges and I', Winedark Sea 1 (2000), republished in Turbine 1 (October 2001)
'After the War', Scheherazade 26 (2004)
'Morning on Volkov', Nanonights, ed. Yvonne Eve Walus (Pipers' Ash, 2000)
'The Royal Tour', JAAM 24 (2006)
'Queen of the Snows', 100 New Zealand Short Short Stories 4, ed. Graeme Lay (Tandem Press, 2000)
'Going to the People', published as 'Statesman', I Have Seen the Future, ed. Bernard Gadd (Longman Paul, 1986)
'Books in the Trees', Turbine (2002).
RAT UP A DRAINPIPE
It was cold down by the harbour in the early morning, and the new chum shivered as he waited for the Parramatta ferry. He found a Thomas Cook's and then a breakfast bar. 'You're a Kiwi, aren't you?' said the woman at the counter. 'Say "fush and chups".'
He wanted a croissant and a coffee, but he said fush and chups for her anyway, and smiled at her witty reply. He took the food outside and sat out of the wind at a little metal table, shading his eyes as the sun winked off the salt cellar. A shadow fell across him. 'Mind if I join you?' asked the shadow, and he pulled his coffee towards him in assent. She was as tall as a tanalised fencepost, as lovely as a jacaranda in spring, with swimmer's shoulders and dancer's hips. Her name was Zoe. His name was Dean.
He didn't see her again till he was on the ferry, watching the finest harbourside real estate in the world slide by. She was with her boyfriend, a stockman from Dubbo way who was taking her back to meet his father, his beautiful but troubled mother, his tall clean-limbed sisters. The stockman knew his sisters would be reserved at first, perhaps even hostile; but as the seasons turned they would warm to Zoe, welcoming her into the family, sharing their most treasured secrets and their tough, practical outdoors clothing. Then the stockman would see that his mother's heart was eased, and ride with his bride across acres turned emerald by love.
Into the head of the harbour flows the Parramatta River, heavy and greasy, slipping by like a raw oyster down a gullet. The ferry nosed up it slowly, the captain keeping a weather eye out for crocodiles that might drag unwary passengers down to a cruel death. Dean was glad when they reached the jetty, and fortified himself with lunch before heading off to the bus station.
It rained
all the way to Canberra, and even a stop in Goulburn did little to ease the monotony. Looking at his map as they crested the final rise, he was surprised to see that he was still a long way from the desert.
The people of Australia, embarrassed by their capital, had brushed it under a carpet of trees. By the shores of Lake Burley Griffin he lay down to rest, convinced that the real Canberra was submerged in the lake, its bells still to be heard on clear summer evenings.
A noise woke him. There had been an explosion, and fragments of a building were sailing over the lake. Some landed short, in the water; some overshot him and crashed through the treetops; one found his range. When he came to, he was surrounded by a circle of anxious onlookers going through his wallet for clues.
'Mate, he's a Kiwi!'
A weatherbeaten face, bending towards him. 'Mate, are you okay? Can you say "fush and chups"? Mate?' He closed his eyes and slipped away.
Leaf-dappled sunlight slanted through the hospital windows. He lay back and listened to the conversations of the policy advisers and archivists who occupied the neighbouring beds. They said George Gregan and a few of the blokes from the ACT Brumbies were visiting the kids' ward tomorrow to cheer the little buggers up. I could do with cheering up, he thought, and asked the nurse to bring him some books. He read The Fatal Shore, The Songlines, and For the Term of His Natural Life. They were all about Australia.
The spell in hospital blew out the schedule a bit, and there were some problems with the travel insurance. When they released him, he lit out north by west, hitching rides on road trains and cattle trucks, eking out his remaining funds on sausages and chips, egg and chips, sausages egg and chips. He grew bloated with grease and inanition.
'You're a Kiwi?' asked his latest truckdriver. He nodded, dreading what was to come.
'You'd know all about the GST, then?'
Twenty minutes later, he had found his station in life. He got the driver to drop him off at a farmers' pub in Parkes, bought a bloke a beer, and started asking around. He spent that evening sorting out five boxes of receipts, invoices, docking rings, dockets, odd bits of wire and stock feed catalogues. By 2am he had separated out everything that wasn't directly relevant, and after a few hours' sleep he was hard at work again, with calculator in one hand and the Australian Tax Office's chirpy The GST and You booklet in the other. It took a few calls to the Tax Reform Infoline, where All Our Operators were often Attending To Other Clients, but as the family settled for dinner around the big communal table he ticked the last box, totalled the last totals, and received their awestruck thanks.
He spent several weeks in the district, moving from one farm to another, till one night a few blokes from a local accounting firm cornered him in the pub and explained, with the aid of two broken bottles and a chair leg, that they had been suffering a business downturn that might be attributable to his activities. They recommended that he be out of Parkes by sun-up.
Nothing daunted, he hit the road again, working his way up to Dubbo through the foothills of the mountains. The accounting life was good to him; all the lifting boxes and totting up columns of figures were doing wonders for his muscles, and the weeks on the road were giving him a tan and the weatherbeaten complexion of a man who'd seen much but wasn't telling.
He saw Zoe while he was trying out a new Akubra. She had come into town with the boyfriend's sisters, but he could see at once that it hadn't gone to plan, that the hidden depths she had hoped to plumb in her boyfriend were drained and empty, that the family was close-mouthed and suspicious. The boyfriend's mother had all but accused her of wanting to marry into the family's money and fritter it away on new dresses and DVDs. Yet, without really meaning to, she had moved from girlfriend to fiancée, and now they were all getting at her: name a date, name a date, why don't you name a date?
He trailed around behind them until the conversation turned to the GST — 'If we don't have to pay it on food, why should we have to pay it on clothes?', then walked up, as casual as you please, and said he was a Kiwi, and could he help? It was simplicity itself to move from the GST on clothing to GST in general, from GST in general to the state of the farm's accounts in particular, to make the happy discovery that she had taken on responsibility for them, to offer his help and have it accepted.
Perhaps he meant to have it go no further than that. It began as a strictly commercial relationship, terms strictly cash, and during accounts receivables, petty cash, and reconciliations, they kept to business. But something in the melancholy business of depreciation must have touched her soul, for she threw down her personal organiser, turned to him with a shudder, and said, 'I can't go on.'
'Weary eyes?'
'A weary heart.'
Dean's heart became a barque adrift on the flood of her tears. Then they made love atop a shifting pile of old bank statements, after which they rattled through the depreciation in no time.
Stolen moments: a dilapidated hut at the far end of the property, the back of the ute after a quick trip to town. The accounts had been in a mess, but there was a limit to how long the recovery process could be drawn out, and he was getting some odd looks from the boyfriend.
'I'll be leaving on Saturday, then,' he told them, having told her in private.
'Tell you what, mate,' said the patriarch, pressing a cold one into his hand, 'why not stay till Sunday? We're a man short for the cricket team. Do you bat or bowl?'
He suggested Zoe could do it instead, but was told this was serious stuff: there was no room for sheilas in country cricket. What the hell, he thought. One more chance to stick it to these Aussies.
Things weren't looking too good when he came in. Four for 38, chasing 247. He'd bowled a few overs of his nondescript medium pace and even picked up a wicket, but he hoped his batting wasn't as rusty as his bowling. His partner was Zoe's fiancé, who played like he made love, if what Zoe told him was true. 'You just run the singles, mate, and I'll do the slogging,' he was told when he came to the wicket.
For a time, it worked well. They put on ten, then twenty, then fifty, of which he had eight. He had got used to the sledging by now — 'Say fush and chups, ya Kiwi barstard!' — and was even making limited eye contact with his batting partner. Then it happened: a push to mid-on, clearly no run there; looking up to see his partner halfway down the wicket; a cry of 'No'; the bails whipped off before his partner could regain his ground.
'Sorry, mate!'
No reply.
He was out shortly afterwards — a tired shot to a ball he should have left alone — and there was a stony silence when he returned to the pavilion. When he went for a piss, they were waiting for him. Evidently Zoe had been confiding in some girl she knew, whose boyfriend was the team's wicketkeeper — and wicketkeepers talk all day, and all night too.
After they beat the shit out of him, they slung his bag in the dust and told him to pick it up and start walking. He limped away till he was out of sight, then doubled back and borrowed the farm ute, leaving the keys in the ignition — this was the country, after all. He drove to the medical centre in town, said he'd had a fall. 'Funny sort of fall,' the doctor said, but didn't take it further. Nothing was broken.
Zoe had pleaded a headache and stayed behind at the farm. He left the ute behind a tree and walked the last kilometre, found her in the kitchen, said he'd be moving on, said goodbye for good. Then he felt like a drongo, and told her he loved her, and maybe if he got back to Kiwiland he'd send her a card, and she should always remember GST didn't apply to exports. They smiled, remembering, then she said she'd had enough of this shitty family and this shitty town and if she was ready in five minutes could he drive her to the bus depot? So the last he saw of her was a wave from the window of a bus bound for Sydney.
He didn't want the cops after him, so he parked the ute outside Grace Bros, dropped the keys off at the lost property office, and set off walking. He took only roads going inland, and within a week he had passed through Broken Hill, crossed the Barrier Range, and reached the edge of the
desert. As he walked on, the sun drove the words from his head, so that he saw only shapes, angles, and shadows, and had no idea what they meant. At night, the words returned, and with them the hope that some tribe would take him up and initiate him into their secrets, so that he could move through this land with the ease and confidence that had always eluded him in his own. He had been wondering where the first people were ever since he arrived, but he was no closer to knowing.
It was very cold at night, and very hot in the day. One day, near noon, he stumbled and fell into a shallow gully. As the sun westered, the rim of the gully shaded him, and he revived. There was water there, just under the earth; he drank it and staggered to his feet.
He was feeling hungry by the time he reached the road, but there was no food in his pack or pockets. He was contemplating what to do about this when two blokes in a Kingswood told him to hop in.
'Jim,' said Jim, and Don said, 'Don.'
'Mates, gidday.' His command of language had returned as soon as he climbed in the car.
'Jeez, mate,' said Jim, 'you look a bit knackered. Want a drink?'
'Thanks, mate.' He drank deep, and then followed their example and tossed the can out the window, where, over millennia, it decomposed and added its minerals to the thin soil. Long before then, of course, the dregs of the beer had dried and been carried off by ants. Nothing is wasted in the end.
SAID SHEREE
Sheree and Miranda met at a party. Each left with the other on her mind.
Several weeks later, the Mexican Ambassador, a keen patron of the arts, held a reception. Miranda, ranked as a Tier Two poet for funding purposes, saw Sheree across the room. Miranda made a beeline for her — only to realise that Sheree was with a group of Tier Ones. Embarrassed, Miranda backed away.
That would have been that; but, a little to the north and far beneath their feet, Gaia shifted in her sleep. Poets and patrons alike rushed for doorways and crush-proof spaces. Sheree and Miranda found themselves pressed together against an antimacassar. Their mutual awkwardness was obliterated by fear. 'You're beautiful,' said Sheree. Miranda, plain and tall, was swept away.