Drowned Sprat and Other Stories

by Stephanie Johnson

  But your husband wasn’t listening.

  ‘Fantastic — nearly blew the top of my head off — can’t figure out how you did it, what exactly you were —’

  ‘No! Stop! We don’t know where it’s come from!’ you interrupted, shouting at the children, who had fetched a knife and were cutting large slices — ‘I’ve got to go.’ Meanwhile the oldest child was holding the cake to his nose, sniffing — ‘There’s nothing wrong with it’ — and biting, chewing, swallowing.

  You stopped the other two children from ingesting any of the dangerous cake and watched the older one for adverse affects. There were none. You oversaw homework, piano practice. Your husband came home and was unusually demonstrative. You cleared away, and got ready to go out.

  ‘What movie are you seeing?’ asked your husband. ‘Will Tania meet you there?’

  You gave the prepared answers and we drove away, not far. You climbed a dry, wooden fire escape hung with ivy, and made love with a particular man, for the fifth time, which was no surprise to me. That’s why I’m here — because of him.

  I waited outside, pleased that I’d dabbed a little of my distracting perfume on your throat and wrists before you’d turned off the ignition. As you’d got out you sniffed at the air a little, less than you had in the bedroom, because your mind was full of anticipation. I fell asleep — or at least suspended the peculiar molecules of my being in the closed atmosphere of your car — until you returned, every cell thrumming, and drove us home.

  The next evening you returned home to a beef and red wine casserole bubbling on the stove and all the washing done and folded. Your husband said it was the best thing you’d ever cooked and made another puzzling reference to your anatomy — not your tongue this time but your derrière which, until last night — he whispered in your ear on returning his plate to the kitchen — he’d never known could be so accommodating.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ you asked, but your husband only gave you a licentious wink before he went to his study to put in a couple of hours of paperwork. After the children were in bed you longed to ring your lover. You hadn’t mentioned the cake to him. Or the perfume. Now there was the casserole and the laundry. It was all too much.

  And you did ring him, after ten o’clock, from the gloom of the garden, sitting on the swing, hoping your husband wouldn’t pick up the phone inside the house. You could see him illuminated in the study window at his desk — you could perhaps watch him and make sure he didn’t make a sudden lunge to make a call — but it was hard to concentrate on dialling your lover while watching your husband. I managed to effect three wrong numbers, and you did one of your own, but you were determined and finally got through, to discover he was with someone and couldn’t talk.

  If only you had let me spare you the agony.

  That night you woke in the dark to a leaden exhaustion and chilled through to the marrow, as if you hadn’t been asleep at all but climbing hand-over-hand the icy south face of a mountain. You opened your eyes to my shadow astride your husband, my ghostly tush in congress with his fleshly rod, the wraith of me thrashing in spectral ecstasy.

  ‘Who are you?’ you asked aloud, sitting up.

  ‘I’m the Spirit of Absolution,’ I told you, but I don’t think you heard me because you were shouting —

  ‘Get away from our bed!’ And your husband, groping for the switch, flooded the room with light.

  ‘Wha — wha — what?’ went your husband, sleepy dirt in his eyes and saliva strung from top lip to lower in silvery strands.

  ‘There was a woman here,’ you started. ‘A young woman in our bed … she was on top of you, she was —’

  ‘You’re working too hard. Or missing some vitamins. Go back to sleep,’ he said, and turned off the light again with a heavy sigh.

  The third night I made porterhouse steak for your husband, curry of fish for you and roast chicken for the children: everybody’s favourites. When you tried to tell your husband that the meals were not prepared by your own hands, you were so alarmed you could hardly shape your words. You stuttered, which is most unlike you, who are usually so emphatic and precise.

  ‘What’s wrong with you,’ said your husband, without an upward inflection, as if he didn’t expect an answer. ‘All this false modesty.’

  The fourth day I carved a giant ice swan as a centrepiece for the table; the fifth I wove a tapestry, full of concupiscent satyrs and obliging nymphs, to cover the bedroom wall. On the sixth I prepared for your next visit to your lover, but your husband was already suspicious the night of the swan.

  ‘How’d you get time to do that?’ he asked, and when he saw the tapestry he said, ‘That’s tacky — but I quite like it. How much was it? Your tastes have changed …’ And he looked at you with a little more curiosity than usual.

  On the sixth night he wondered only at your bloodshot eyes and what was for dinner. It was as if you’d already got so used to me, in the space of a week, that you took me for granted. I hadn’t been near the kitchen, of course. I’d spent the day beside your lover, listening to his phone calls, watching him work. Sells real estate, doesn’t he? A real terrier, isn’t he? Though in essence he’s not a bad man, your lover, even taking into account his string of married women.

  You sobbed in the bathroom while your husband went up the road for takeaways and the children watched television. It was inevitable, you told yourself. Pull yourself together; don’t ever do it again.

  And I don’t believe you will.

  The tapestry was gone from the wall by the time you came out, and all my misty perfumes were back in the vanity case. I slipped away out the door as your husband came in, flew across town and zipped up a wooden fire escape, dry as tinder, hung with ivy. His flat is disgraceful, his fridge empty, his ashtrays overflowing, his conscience burdened and soiled.

  He doesn’t know I’m here yet. He ignores me, much as he negated you. But I’m not worried, not yet. I wash his sheets, pick hair out of the plug, never let the Scotch bottle fall below half full, make sure there’s milk for his tea. There are no other demands on my time; I’m a free agent.

  I can absolve all the guilt in the world. Tonight in the mirror I will let him see me: my young boy’s narrow body, newly manifested, and the blue flash of my innocent eyes.

  Fable

  The house was finished. Any fool could see that it was: you only had to look up from the flats and there it was on the point of the bluff, a finished house in the colonial style, tall and white with a wide verandah and green-gabled roof.

  The builder had kept pretty much to himself and now that it was finished — or so people said it was — he was less in evidence than ever. Before that, before he finished the house, he used to come down the loose metal-chip road in his truck to the town and park in the wide, empty carpark outside Mann Brothers Building Supplies. Billy Mann and whichever of his brothers were around, if any, would help him load up the wooden floor joists and joinery, or white plastic weatherboards, or shining aluminium window frames, or sheets of green roofing iron. Once or twice the little truck — which suffered badly from rust, living as it did surrounded on all sides by the sea — was loaded down with bricks for the chimneys and verandah posts. On these occasions it would crawl slowly home along the bluff road, up and down the two low hills that rose like knuckles on the finger of land, its tray low on the springs, gears graunching.

  ‘It’s a ka pai house he’s building up there, all right,’ said the Mann brothers and the hundred or so other people left living in the town. Truth be told, the Mann brothers didn’t want the house ever to be finished. It was all that was keeping them in business, which was sad, because the brothers had thought four years ago that they had a bright and prosperous future. That was when the Maori Investment Board gave Tikiruru the grant. During the many hui out on the marae there was talk of a golf course, a five-star hotel, a cinema complex and a games parlour and Billy thought he was doing well by getting in first with the building supplies. But the money was gone
— vanished, melted away — and nobody knew where. In Wellington the few MPs who were thick-skinned enough to be oblivious to accusations of racism tried to instigate an enquiry, but even that had vaporized, their initial fury overcome by an amnesiac torpor and apathy, eerie and swift in effect.

  Now it was a good day for Billy when a farmer’s wife came in for a roll of wallpaper, or the Tikiruru Takeaways needed a tin of paint to spruce up their sign on the main road, or a kuia needed a new washer for a tap. Before the construction on the now-finished house began there were weeks when Billy, his square hands on the wide counter, sold only a packet of nails, and it seemed business had returned to its somnolent state. Billy’s wife packed up the kids and some household effects and left for Auckland, for a better life, but Billy wasn’t sure he wanted to give up, not just yet. He had a feeling things were going to improve.

  One sunny winter morning, as he sat on the back step of Mann Brothers Building Supplies with his lonely mug of tea, Billy lifted his eyes from the sea. He’d been contemplating locking up and going fishing — there were gulls and gannets working off the bluff — when something near the finished house caught his attention. Rising above the pohutukawas, which wound around the cliff face and fenceline, was another roof. It was smaller than the finished one, but the same colour, pitch and gable. A garage built with the leftovers, thought Billy, to put the orange truck in. He took a sip of his cooling tea and squinted: there on the smaller roof was the builder himself, his shirt off and astride the gable, a brown and rectangular object taking shape before him. A chimney.

  You don’t put a chimney on a garage, thought Billy, just as a cloud uncovered the sun and set a tiny dormer window flaring. Nor does a garage require a dormer window. Fishing plans forgotten, Billy set off on foot along the beach to where the hill dropped down to a valley, to a spot where you could take a sheep path along the point.

  As he walked Billy puffed a little, the old rugby injury in his left knee ached and he longed for the days before his wife left, when he could have driven along the metal road. But she had taken the car. Further on, where the sea chomped and hissed at the rocks ten metres below in a vertical drop, he thought how strange it was that he still didn’t know the builder’s name. The man had always paid cash, so there were no order forms or invoices to fill out. He never went to the marae or the near-deserted church, or to the pub on Route 1 next to Tikiruru Takeaways. He kept himself a man apart. Billy turned his eyes away from the drop — in the days when there were sheep here, quite often one of their number would fall to the rocks. One wrong step and he could too …

  There was something old fashioned about the builder, thought Billy as he went along the narrow dirt path, one foot directly in front of the other. Something in his manner reminded him of his own grandfather, now dead. The builder always called him Mr Mann and thanked him for his trouble; he even doffed his hat. His accent, now — it was a kind of non-accent, with all the clarity and lucidity of water. Billy couldn’t place it, or even the man’s race. He wasn’t from around here, he knew for sure, and he probably wasn’t Maori — though there was no telling these days.

  At the gate, which stood ajar, its lower corner lifted to the grass mound between the wheel ruts, he paused for a breather and turned around to survey the rise of the hill beside him. Something about it gave him a start and it took him a moment or two to work out what it was. The gorse. It was gathered together in a collar around the crest of the hill, in a kind of hedge, contained and low-growing, like a row of ornamental shrubs. All the farms here and around were covered in gorse, great rampant spiky clumps turning whole hillsides yellow in the summer. How had the builder made his gorse behave like that? Billy wondered, turning and passing through the gate. He would make a point of asking him.

  It’s never a good idea to call out to a man on a roof — you could startle him — so Billy continued in his soft jandal tread along the now-level road to the house. The trees the man had planted — poplars, cypress, gums and oak and others that Billy didn’t recognise — had grown faster than you would have expected; some of them looked as though they’d been in the ground twice as long as they had been. You could forget which country you were in up here, thought Billy; you could be anywhere.

  The builder wasn’t up on the roof at all. He was sitting on the verandah of the finished house, a little table at his elbow, and on it was a tall frosted brown bottle of beer and two glasses. He had his shirt off still and Billy, as he came up the low steps to shake his hand, couldn’t help noticing the builder’s chest hair: thick, brown and glossy. It was more like the hair off a head, or an animal, he thought. The builder must have felt his eyes on it because he coloured slightly and turned away to pick up his shirt from the other chair. He put it on.

  ‘Nice to have a visitor,’ he said, gesturing at the chair for Billy to sit down, which Billy did gratefully.

  ‘Did you see me coming from the roof?’ asked Billy, accepting a glass.

  ‘Eh?’ The builder looked momentarily startled, as if he might deny he’d been on the roof at all, but he went on, ‘Yes — yes. I saw you coming.’

  ‘The other roof, I mean. The little roof.’ Billy rubbed at his knee, which pained him.

  ‘Oh yes. The little roof.’ The builder took a sip of beer, slow and careful, as if he was worried he’d spill it, or misdirect it down the wrong tube and choke. He made a strange bobbing motion with his head and Billy wondered if he always drank like that. He’d never seen him drink before.

  ‘What is it?’ Billy persisted. ‘I didn’t know you were planning on building another place.’

  ‘It’s, um … well, I don’t know what you’d call it,’ the builder said. ‘Is there a name for it?’

  Billy looked at the smaller building, which stood directly in front of them. It was almost a complete copy of the finished house, even to the verandahs, but on a smaller scale, as if it was a playhouse for a rich man’s child.

  ‘A sleep-out?’ he asked.

  The builder looked startled again and then he laughed, a sudden, breathy laugh mixed with dry, dental clicks.

  ‘That’s good!’ he said. ‘Very good. A sleep-out — yes, that’s what it is.’

  ‘It’ll block your view,’ observed Billy, ‘from your downstairs, anyway.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the builder neutrally, as if he didn’t care much for views.

  ‘Mind if I take a look inside the finished house?’ asked Billy, standing up, his glass drained.

  ‘Suit yourself. There’s nothing much to see.’

  Billy was already at the door, turning the handle, which offered enough resistance to compel him to lean his considerable weight against it. Perhaps it had swollen in the rain, he thought, then recalled that the winter so far had been a dry one. It opened, finally, with the creak of ancient hinges — which, had he paused to think about it, Billy would’ve found as curious as the collar of gorse to the west of the house.

  The room he stepped into was vast, empty and, because of the verandah awnings shading the light, gloomy. At first, while his eyes adjusted, Billy thought the looming grey shape against the far wall was a sofa, until he perceived, with a slight chill down his spine, that it was thick roll of dust, a century’s worth at least, rolled into a giant oblong under the smeary window. There was no furniture at all, the walls raw gib and the floor uncovered particle board. The room darkened again and Billy turned to see the shape of the builder, silhouetted against the bright daylight. A strong smell pervaded the room, as if animals had been kept in here, or winter feed.

  ‘This is the sitting room?’ he asked.

  The builder nodded, the rapid bobbing motion again.

  ‘What’s through there?’ Billy pointed towards a closed door on his left and the builder’s shoulders lifted and dropped in a shrug.

  ‘Another room, I think,’ he said. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve come in here.’

  ‘But —’ Billy started to say that it can’t have been that long, that the house had only been
finished for a couple of months. But something made him leave the remark unspoken; a threat rose from the man at the door, more powerful than words. Come away. It was a command. Come away before you are hurt.

  The builder stepped aside to let Billy pass.

  ‘It was good to see you,’ he said as Billy drew level with him. It was a dismissal.

  ‘Yes,’ said Billy uncertainly. He wondered now if he should have drunk the beer — if the brew had been safe, or normal — but now, here he was at the gate, with no recollection of having got that far. It annoyed him — he’d wanted to look in the windows of the sleep-out, to see if that building had the trimmings you’d expect: bunks, a cupboard, maybe a kitchenette.

  The beer wasn’t poisoned, although as Billy had to admit as he stepped inside Mann Brothers Building Supplies on return from his long walk, he was very tired. He sat down on the armchair he kept behind the counter and fell into a deep sleep, from which, on waking, his visit to the finished house paled and blurred into the memory of dream.

  Winter, such as it was this far north, passed quickly and spring arrived with the temperatures of midsummer. Billy’s youngest brother Mack arrived with his family and they set up their caravan in the paddock behind Mann Brothers Building Supplies for a holiday by the sea. From time to time, ever since that difficult-to-remember day, Billy had cast a wary eye up to the bluff. From the flats the collar of gorse showed only as a fine black line and the trees had grown so thick and fast around the finished house and its miniature that only a corner of green roof was visible.

  On New Year’s Eve Billy’s brother wanted some action; he was restless and argumentative. After he’d quarrelled with his wife and she’d taken herself off to bed, Mack smoked a joint and drank on, filling Billy’s glass as frequently as he filled his own.

  ‘Let’s go up there — I want to see what kind of spread he’s got,’ Mack said, reeling slightly, his arm a dark, wavering pointer in the moonlight. Billy shook his head.