Drowned Sprat and Other Stories

by Stephanie Johnson

Nativity with Endymion

  On a Friday evening, mid-December, Mona dragged herself in from shopping for her forty-fourth Christmas to find the local circular lying open on the table.

  CAN’T STAND CHRISTMAS?

  read the title, then:

  Our team of qualified anaesthetists, weight specialists,

  psychiatrists and plastic surgeons await your

  Yuletide Time-out. Phone for an appointment.

  General Practitioner’s recent full physical required.

  AVOIDANCE THERAPY INC

  Endymion Clinic

  Remuera Road

  As luck would have it, Mona had seen her GP recently about a recurring sick-leave issue, so she made an appointment for 7.30 on Monday morning. During the phone call the receptionist had had to shout above the racket of power tools in the background.

  ‘Oh yes, we’re still very new,’ she yelled. ‘We only opened last week. See you on Monday.’

  Instead of present-wrapping, Mona got on with her marking: the Year 10 Mathematics exam, which had to be finished and graded by Wednesday. The untidy numbers jumped before her eyes and it was difficult to concentrate; her mind kept wandering back to the little ad. Did it really mean what she thought it meant? No doubt it would be very expensive. How expensive? She could sell her car, if necessary. They’d still have Rod’s car, she could always bus to work, thousands of people did, why couldn’t she? Surely she could get the money together somehow …

  She hardly slept that night or the night after, and continued her marking on Sunday while her teenage girls were off gallumphing their large and muscled bodies around at beach volleyball before they went with friends to watch videos and drink beer all afternoon. The day dragged by until her large and sunburnt husband came home from his weekend away fishing. While she fried up the catch he took a shower, coming out into the kitchen with a towel around him, his back and tubby tum as scarlet as Santa’s suit. He matched the season.

  Finally Monday dawned, with Mona up early and full of anticipation, curiosity and relief — a sunny, heady, fairy-tale blast: something she had longed for for years had come true and just in time. This year more than any other, Christmas just seemed too much, too hard, and it took too much of an effort to look into her heart and find out why. It didn’t seem to be anything to do with commercialisation, or hollow rites, not as it had when she was younger. It was something else — something she couldn’t identify: a sense of collapse, of seasonal disaffection, of wanting it to be early January already with it all over. Or was she just mean-spirited?

  While the girls crashed around the kitchen, banging into each other and hooting as they packed their own lunches from an assortment of pre-packaged snacks, Mona called out, ‘See you!’ from the front door, and drove off.

  The clinic was in a wealthy suburb where colonial money had built fine, tall, wooden houses in the nineteenth century. On the main road most had been demolished and replaced with new medical centres, clusters of surgeons wielding knives on every part of the human anatomy. Some of them advertised their area of speciality with an illustrated sign — a large foot, an ear, a breast. Mona hadn’t been in this part of town for years. It had a strange kind of medical-carnival feel to it: the coloured words, the lights and shiny new buildings, the signs in all different languages.

  ENDYMION CLINIC flashed one of the signs, and she slammed on her brakes without indicating — the car behind her stopping suddenly with a blast on its horn — and lurched down a right-of-way which used to be the driveway, Mona remembered, of a grand, gabled mansion with two turrets and wide verandahs upstairs and down. It was now entirely vanished away. At the front of the old property an orthopaedic clinic stood brand spanking new, though not as new as Endymion, which still had plumbers’ and electricians’ vans parked outside. The van she parked beside had sheets of glass angled against its sides like a beetle with its wings folded.

  There was no one else in the woody waiting room, other than the receptionist and a woman with a small leather overnight bag set down at her feet. She looked rich: a blue tailored jacket, a silver-hued skirt made of fabric as lustrous as the pearls at her throat. As Mona sat down the woman glanced up at her and smiled.

  ‘Come to have a look around?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mona.

  ‘Oh, you’ll love it,’ said the woman, closing her magazine. ‘I made the first available appointment for treatment. They’ve got Powell, you know.’

  ‘Powell?’ She didn’t remember the name from the ad.

  ‘Face man. Famous. My birthday’s the sixteenth of January, so I’ll be around and about again for the Northern Hemisphere spring. Fifty years old, yes, that’s true, but once again without a wrinkle, half a stone slimmer, gleaming top to toe from twicedaily massages and no memory of the ghastly anniversary. Wonderful, don’t you think, dear?’

  Mona nodded.

  ‘Have you thought what music you’d like? You can choose your own — or foreign-language tapes … but I expect they’ll tell you all about it.’

  ‘I’m just here for Christmas,’ said Mona, faintly.

  The waiting room had begun to fill — several women of varying ages and two nervous-looking men.

  A nurse came and led her away up one floor to a leafy atrium. They walked along an open-railed corridor that ran along a windowed exterior wall until they came to a row of rooms on the other side, with a different flower on each door. Mona was Nasturtium.

  The nurse left her perched on the edge of the bed with the door ajar. After a few minutes a man in a dark business suit arrived.

  ‘Benjamin France,’ he said, shaking her hand. ‘I’ll just take up five minutes of your time to explain the legal situation.’

  He ran through his twenty bullet-points, which could have been neatly summarised in only two: that there was no cover from medical insurance as this was revolutionary therapy, and that she was to sign an affidavit to the effect that she would not initiate litigation should the therapy fail or damage her. Leaving her with the form, he hurried off.

  Through the gap in the door Mona watched nurses escort women and the occasional man. There were glimpses of doctors, too, passing with paperwork under their arms.

  One came in to see her, with a name badge that simply read ‘Anaesthetist’.

  ‘You are?’ he asked, taking the chair beside the bed.

  ‘Here for Christmas,’ she told him. He handed her a photograph.

  ‘This is the Endymion Room,’ he said, ‘where you will be kept in a medically induced coma for your elected period of time.’

  The picture showed a number of high, narrow beds with large plastic bubbles covering them. Beside each bed, inside each clear membrane, was a tall stand that held bottles and sprouted tubes. In a mural on the far wall a beautiful young man sprawled, fast asleep, with a glowing female form bending over him. Endymion, Mona supposed, from the legend. She peered more closely at the beds and noticed that some held pale bodies of varying shapes and sizes, all female, mostly on their backs, some on their fronts.

  ‘The picture is, of course, posed,’ said the anaesthetist. ‘In the normal course of events the equipment would be in effect.’

  ‘Pardon?’ said Mona.

  ‘The feeding and drainage tubes and monitors and so forth.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Each individual bubble is kept at the temperature you prefer, and your weight is carefully graded and adjusted towards your preference. Do you have your letter from your GP?’

  ‘It’s being emailed through,’ she told him.

  ‘And have you had a general anaesthetic before? Any problems? Any questions?’

  They went through his list and he hurried off, much like the lawyer had, and it was the same with the weight specialist — who talked about an intravenous mix of vitamins and minerals; the psychiatrist — who talked about the seriousness of Mona’s decision and the possible implications of Christmas 2004 never featuring in her memory; and the plastic surgeon — who stood her
in front of the mirror and hauled back her jowls.

  There was even a physiotherapist who brought along a naked dummy. She lay it on the bed and demonstrated the exercises and massage Mona’s body would enjoy while her absconded mind took its Yuletide vacation. A sound technician consulted her about the variety of music she would prefer to have ebbing into her comatose brain through earplugs.

  ‘Or would you prefer a subliminal language?’ he asked.

  The last consultant was the accountant, who tallied her preferences at $30,879 for ten days with attention from Mr Powell, and $21,011 without it.

  Mona’s heart sank. Her car wasn’t worth a quarter of the lowest quote.

  Back in the carpark she noticed the time — 11.45 — and realised she’d completely forgotten she was supposed to be going in to work. How had she done that? Her mind must have been so completely taken up with longing to be one of the peaceful ones on the slabs.

  On the motorway she put her foot down, heading out to her school, a large co-ed in the city’s west. As she zipped along she was aware of only two words that kept rising in her mind, and they were Bank Loan. Why not? Other people borrowed to go to the Cooks, or Fiji, to lie in the sun. This was the same, but different.

  Skewed across both lanes on the off-ramp was a truck, which Mona didn’t see until it was too late. Her last observation, before she was knocked unconscious, was that the truck was laden with Christmas trees, a neat forest of horizontally stacked pines, now frothing over the edges of the tray and tumbling and flying around the car with the noise of thunder, shattering the windscreen.

  She came around in a quiet, cool room and thought at first it was Endymion, but the faces staring down at her belonged to her husband and daughters, and she couldn’t think why they would be here when she’d resolved to keep her whereabouts a secret. There was a variety of transparent tubes conveying liquid to and from her body.

  Rod’s face lit up at the dawning consciousness in her eyes. Above his red forehead drooped a Santa hat at a rakish angle. Her nostrils felt scoured, sensitive: there was a strong hoppy smell of meaty beer from him and something sweet and alcopop from the girls.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ he said. ‘Welcome back.’

  ‘Hi, Mum,’ said the girls, and she thought they looked a little bewildered, sad even, as they hunched by the bed.

  ‘It’s Christmas Day, Mum,’ said Jem, whose happy eyes were unaccustomedly teary.

  Mona nodded. The tendons of Nic’s strong hand closed around the loose strings of her own.

  ‘You okay, Mum?’ Nic was saying. ‘You all there now?’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said Mona, ‘I think so.’

  Three Times a Week

  Within a month of arriving they’d bought a house. A love-nest, Renee called it, optimistically. It was a cottage of the type that abounded in the city’s inner suburbs: fully renovated, around a century old, flat-fronted, its bull-nose verandah frilled with wooden lace. Renee planted a vigorous climbing rose and by the end of the summer it had wound a family of multi-labial heads around the plump knees of the verandah posts. The flowers were heavily scented, pale yellow. Renee had spent most of her time in the garden, composting, laying out lettuces, beans, tomatoes, and preparing in the tiny front yard a rich, dark, circular bed for the sapling she told him was a kowhai. It would have yellow flowers next spring, she said, around the time of her thirtieth birthday.

  A year later, a week after the big party, while they stood side by side at the granite bench with its double sink, she showed him a picture of a kowhai bloom on her tea towel, a birthday gift from one of her little nieces. Her blonde head glowed yellow in the glass above the sink, the glass of the window that gave out onto their backyard, a scoop of dark before the lights of the neighbours’ windows.

  ‘See —’ She held the cloth up and took hold of his arm. He felt her body press up against him, her breath on his cheek. Beneath the bubbles his fingers groped for the potscrub. ‘Pretty, eh?’

  She smelt of soap from her post-gardening soak, from the scene of her first disappointment of the day. When he’d taken her in a glass of wine she’d looked up at him with that teasing, playful glint in her eye, the soft smile below it. ‘Thanks, honeybun,’ she’d said, and reached out for him, her bubble-coated arm fluffy as a mink coat. He’d given her a tiny smile before hurrying out of the room.

  Now he kept his fingers firmly underwater, a fleet of ten hot, fleshy submarines. Renee lifted her face and kissed him once on his jaw before stepping away to apply herself, energetically, to the forks. She was only showing affection, he told himself — she wouldn’t approach him a second time in one day, not any more.

  After the dishes they went through to the living room with its ratty furniture, all brown-shellacked wood inherited from Renee’s aunt. Renee thought the chairs were antiques, but they rather reminded Alistair of the furniture at his Cambridge college — Downing, which was one of the poorest. He’d said as much to a guest at Renee’s party, one of the girls from his office. Like him, she was in programming, but several rungs below him.

  ‘I didn’t know they had a university down there,’ she said. ‘There’s so many of them now,’ and he realised she meant the place south of Hamilton. Couldn’t she hear his English accent? Perhaps it was because Renee had returned home with one as well, though she had always been a rounded-vowel kind of girl. In New Zealand, she’d explained to him soon after they met, she was probably almost upper class. ‘We have a class system too,’ she’d said, almost defensively. ‘We’d be up there somewhere, with my father’s prominence, where we live, what we own, all our old money.’

  While his wife reclined on the sofa, Alistair took an armchair and felt the cracks in the leather squabs push fine ridges into his thin summer shorts. Renee pointed the remote and brought up an English drama, all horsey women in pearls, and lay back, yawning, her head tilted on the pillow. Alistair took his eyes off her and let them wander over the varnished fireplace surround with its ugly mauve imitation-Victorian tiles.

  ‘We love television because television is a world where television doesn’t exist,’ he said.

  ‘Eh?’ Renee had folded her hands over her tummy. They were tanned a milky brown, as smooth and shiny as her fine blue sweater. The pale blue and brown were matching hues.

  ‘A quote — I read it somewhere. An American said it.’

  ‘We don’t have to have it on if you don’t want it.’ Renee’s voice was soft. She hit the mute button.

  On the mantelpiece was a pink cardboard hatbox full of pink and white flowers. When you looked into the hatbox from above, the pink flowers curved into two digits on a white background — 30. A blue and green photograph protruded to one side.

  It wasn’t a photograph, though. It was a card. His card. Which did have a photograph on the front: a salt-misted image of a wild, roaring beach, the white surf, the black sand, a helicopter shot. In the shop he’d thought it was potent, masculine.

  ‘What’s that doing out here?’ He stood, picked it up. ‘This is private.’ He’d given it to her in the bedroom on the day, with an amber necklace and a cup of tea. Hadn’t she sat it up on her bedside table after she’d hooked the beads around her throat? He’d thought it would stay there.

  ‘I put all my cards up there before the party,’ Renee was telling him. ‘Don’t worry. Your one was behind Mum’s flowers. That’s how come I missed it when I put the others away.’

  That’s how come, he thought irritably. Amazing that a girl with all her advantages had never made anything of her life. Then the breath caught in his throat. ‘Did you say “before the party”?’

  ‘Yes. Mmm.’ She sounded a little anxious now. She was thinking it through.

  ‘So anyone could’ve picked it up and read it?’

  She said nothing, but she sat up, swung her legs around to face him. He took the photograph between thumb and forefinger and, as he did so, had a champagne-hazed recollection of James and Rachel and someone else looking at him strangel
y as he handed around a plate of food. They were standing by the mantelpiece. Had they read it?

  ‘It was behind Mum’s flowers,’ Renee said again, as if the flowers were a magic talisman against the invasion of their privacy. He opened the card, read his own handwriting: Dearest Ren, not just a birthday wish but a faithful promise to make love to you three times a week. Your loving husband, Bear. There was no chance that any prying guest would have doubted the card’s author because of his foolish inclusion of ‘husband’. If only he’d just put ‘Bear’, her private name for him, a kind of rhyming endearment of Alistair, then the card’s origins would’ve been blurred. They might’ve thought she was having an illicit affair, which would have been preferable. Good God. Was he really that kind of man? One who would prefer their friends suspected Renee of adultery than know his deadening truth?

  He held the card and watched his wife, who turned her flushed face away from him. The amber beads glowed around her neck. The biggest bead, at the front, nestled into the bow of her throat, had an insect trapped in its ancient resin. As if she sensed him looking at it, Renee brought her hand to the bead, rolled it gently in her fingers. Her throat was one of her erogenous zones, she’d told him once — she liked him to lick and kiss her there. Perhaps the lolling bead was giving her pleasure. He couldn’t help the way he was. If it was winter and they had lit the fire, he would have thrown the card into it.

  Renee went to bed some time before him and when he followed she was asleep, the lights off, even though he’d made a point of slipping in while she was in the bathroom to turn on his bedside lamp.

  He lay in the darkness, seething. She knew he could only get to sleep if he read first. Why had she turned it off? It would have been a small act of kindness on her part to have left it on. Monday tomorrow, he told himself. A rapid-fire early-morning coffee at the bench while he made himself an unappealing sandwich for lunch, pre-ordered by his overwhelming mortgage. No panini in a nearby café for him. Turning his head on the pillow to warm a suddenly chilled ear, he pictured himself shaving in the laundry, a small mirror propped on the tub taps, so that he didn’t have to shave in the bathroom and wipe mist from the mirror while Ren chattered and showered beside him.