Drowned Sprat and Other Stories

by Stephanie Johnson

  Perhaps I should get some help, he thought, pulling the sheets around his shoulders. Renee shifted from her side to her front, to sleep in that strange splayed way she had, one leg in hurdling position, the other ramrod straight, her head twisted. God knows there were enough places advertising help. Sex For Life, read the ad in the Herald. There were shelves of books on sexual dysfunction in the health sections of bookshops, websites devoted to it, therapists who specialised in curing it. Three times a week, he’d promised her after the last bout of tears and rage.

  ‘You’re only thirty-four years old,’ she’d sobbed. ‘What’s the matter with you? You make me feel dirty; you make me feel as if I’m a sex-fiend or a pervert or something.’

  ‘I don’t make you feel anything,’ he’d said, then slammed off to the corner dairy to buy a packet of fags, which is what she’d made him do. The card, on her birthday a week later, was an attempt to mend things.

  Now, another whole week had passed and he’d managed it — what, once? On Wednesday night. Afterwards Renee had murmured something and he’d asked her to repeat it. ‘Thank you,’ she’d said, in a small, sad voice, and he’d wanted to push her away in sudden rage. But he hadn’t. He’d held her in his arms and wanted to cry. ‘I’m just the way I am,’ he’d said. There had only been two girlfriends before Renee and both associations were brief. Once he’d gone with a man who picked him up in a London bar but that had interested him even less. He felt nothing — neither pleasure nor revulsion. Eros didn’t thrive in everyone, he believed; its absence was not necessarily due to past trauma or repression. To live without Eros was a way of being, painless and calm. A relationship complicated things. Just his luck, then, to have been born in an era where sexual prowess was prized above all else — and thanks to a new generation of drugs he wouldn’t be safe from it, even when he was old and grey.

  Renee turned to face him and slipped an arm around him, drew him close. ‘Cold,’ she murmured, and he thought she’d surfaced, that she’d want to talk, but after a moment her breath came again, regular and slow. Her encompassing arm, warm and soft around his ribs, gave a gentle squeeze, released, squeezed again. Why did she love him so much? he wondered. He should never have come to New Zealand, should never have let her talk him into the marriage of convenience so that she could extend her stay in London. The marriage had become just that. A marriage. Even in sleep her body was demonstrative.

  He turned to face her and kissed her on the cheek. Perhaps they should have a baby. Perhaps that would help. His best mate in England had complained about how the nookie had dried up after the birth of his child. He pictured Renee holding a baby in her arms, a fuzz-headed, wobble-necked newborn. The image came to him as swiftly as if it were a memory, as if he’d already seen it in reality, like an icon of the Madonna. A child would solve a lot of problems; they were generally cuddly creatures. Renee could cuddle the child. He could make it happen, he could plant his own garden. He kissed her again, gently, until she stirred and woke.

  In the morning, when he left, late, for work, with Ren singing behind him in the shower, he noticed that the little kowhai tree had blossomed. This year it was covered in heavy, pendulous trumpets in a deep, triumphant gold.

  Drowned Sprat

  ‘I’m just a gigolo for married women,’ he told his fifth glass plaintively, and whichever of his old mates had bent their ear to him over the music. Had either of them? He looked around the table. There had been a boastful conversation earlier about literature — the sort of talk he usually enjoyed — but he hadn’t partaken of it, had only half listened and wondered idly if Glen’s contribution was dredged deep from Contemp. Poetry 101, or if he’d read any Pound in the twenty years since he graduated. Himself, he never went to university. He’d gone out as court reporter for a small-town rag, and learned fast about human nature at its most base, duplicitous and unintentionally amusing.

  The duo, a silver-haired pianist and a big-voiced handsome woman, moved away to the bar to take a break.

  ‘He was a fucking fascist, anyway,’ Glen said now, out of the silence.

  They hadn’t heard him, then — they were still on the last topic.

  ‘Everyone was a fascist then.’ Tom leaned his narrow elbows in a slick of beer.

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘Like most of the middle class in the thirties. They had a taste for it. Fascist principles, anti-Semitism and all that shit.’

  ‘Fascist principles,’ repeated Glen. ‘You’re talking crap as usual. What do you know about fascism? Define it.’ His plump, square fingers rolled a smoke.

  The musician had gone back to the piano already, standing over it with a glass in his left hand. With the other, he picked out a riff that wasn’t loud enough to drown out their talk, which was unfortunate, thought Maurice. He wanted to drift quietly around in his own head, take a placid, circuitous route to the dark house of inebriation. He went to the bar for another round.

  The last woman had been prescient, he could see that now. ‘You’re taking revenge,’ she’d said. She’d also said a lot of other things that had seemed more alarming at the time. ‘I don’t sleep with men I don’t love.’ ‘Do you think I’m falling in love with you?’ ‘I wish I could stay.’ ‘Who are you avenging?’

  He wanted to scream at her now for taking up room in his thoughts; he wanted to scream at her to fuck off out of his head. She was stopping him from getting properly drunk.

  ‘Put it on my tab,’ he said to the barman.

  She would lie in his arms, flushed and only just still beautiful. She was at the tail-end of her beauty, he’d considered at the time — he’d just caught it. He’d seen photographs of her for years, pictures published in newspapers and magazines since her first major role, when she was still in her twenties. She’d played a troubled totty in a 1980s soap, not that he ever watched it. He’d followed her international career, though — it was difficult not to. She’d had a lot of media coverage for not much action. And here she was back in New Zealand, and in love with him. He considered she was making an error of judgement.

  ‘You’d never look twice at me,’ he said to her once. ‘Someone like you — with someone like me.’

  He put the glasses down: beer for himself and for Glen, juice for Tom, who was newly remarried and addressing his alcohol problem. Maurice had never thought that would happen. He felt abandoned to the alien twin causes of sobriety and domesticity. At the wedding reception Tom’s teenage daughter had found him puking into the agapanthus that edged the carpark.

  ‘I feel a bit sick too,’ she told him, standing so close he could smell her perfume over the stench of his up-ended guts. Issey Miyake. The prescient one had worn that. You learned a lot about perfume from certain kinds of women: perfume was something — yet another something — women were territorial about. He’d made some mistakes in the past impressing different women with his scent recognition. They immediately wanted to know how he knew, how he did it.

  Tom’s daughter had rubbed his bony back while he wished she’d go away.

  ‘Poor old Maurice,’ she’d said. ‘You’ve got so thin. When are you going to get married again? I’ve still got the pictures, you know, even though you’re probably not supposed to, you know, keep pictures from marriages that didn’t last — prob’ly bad luck …’

  She’d prattled on for a while but he hadn’t listened, his mind instead being taken up with an image of her in her role as flower-girl at his wedding eight years earlier, when she was still an innocent child, not this solicitous, yabbering young woman.

  ‘How’s Livvie?’ he asked Tom suddenly, taking the third-tolast cigarette from his packet.

  ‘Fine, I think. Haven’t seen her for a while. She’s been at her mother’s.’

  He’d said the daughter’s name when he’d meant to say the new wife’s, which was suddenly slipping away from him in a fog of beer and exhaustion. And hunger. When had he last eaten anything? He grabbed at Tom’s wife’s name half-heartedly. Did it begin with
S?

  Tom was looking at his watch and he hadn’t touched his juice. Surely his mate wouldn’t abandon him yet, leave him here with Glen when it was hours before he would want to go to bed, probably alone, unless he went further up Ponsonby Road to a bar that women frequented more than they did this one. Packs of single thirty-somethings lurked about SPQR, their children at home tucked up in bed, babysitters dozing in front of the TV. A miasma of desperation hung around them; every instinct warned him away from them. Why didn’t more women go out drinking alone? he wondered. He pictured one now, conjured her onto a stool by the bar, long legs crossed, a wedding ring glinting on her finger. He gave her glossy black hair, heavily lidded eyes, a full mouth …

  She wouldn’t look twice at him, a woman like that. Not unless she’d watched his series, the one that went to air in the middle of last year: Back Page, a black and sexy drama set in a newspaper office. If she knew that Back Page was his baby, then she might be curious. People had imagined all sorts of things from the show — they’d imagined him to be warm, romantic, funny, searingly intelligent.

  Tom was standing, shrugging on his jacket.

  ‘See ya, mate,’ he was saying. ‘Got to pick Shona up.’

  And he was gone, passing under the cut-out faux clouds in the high blue ceiling, down the soggy-carpeted stairs to the lit mall below. Glen pursed his fat lips and blew through them in that infuriating way he had. He waggled his eyebrows and Maurice managed to expose his teeth in a rictus of a smile. He had no idea what Glen meant — he supposed he was implying some kind of solidarity. There they were, two single, early-middle-aged guys, 7.07 pm on a spring Friday and nowhere to go.

  ‘Just off for a slash,’ said Glen, and he got up, pushing his belly ahead of him through the men at the bar.

  He’d walk down to the water. He’d walk down to the tank farm. He lit up his second-to-last fag and got out of there before Glen came back.

  Halfway down College Hill his legs threatened to give out under him, his knees like jelly. What he’d thought at first was his own clammy sweat sitting like a row of dead frogs on his brow turned out to be the beginning of rain, a fine mist of it barely visible in the headlights of passing cars. He shivered in his light jacket, stuck his fag in his mouth to free his hands to tuck in his T-shirt.

  ‘Gigolo,’ said his uneven footsteps on the steep path. ‘Gi go lo, gi go lo, gi go lo.’

  He dodged the traffic across Victoria Street into the darkening park. He’d told the actress he wouldn’t do it again — he would indulge in intellectual pursuits, keep to himself. That was after she’d told him that her husband had found out, that he’d left her, that her two children were bereft. She’d probably expected him to say something else, something more sympathetic. Did she expect him to take the blame for what had happened? Why should he? He’d been honest, relatively, from the start. I’m in love with someone else, he’d told her, with another married woman who wouldn’t leave her husband. I’m still in love with her. I will always be in love with her.

  At first she hadn’t minded. She’d even laughed when he told her his heart was a drowned sprat. She’d enjoyed the metaphor. Then she began to talk about reviving it, hauling it up from its murky depths and exposing it to the air. She said it was easy to love, that she loved lots of people, that there was no big mystery, that it wasn’t the rare thing he thought it was. She gave him a bad case of the bends.

  On the other side of the park he had to wait to get across Fanshawe Street, which was clogged with traffic waiting to get onto the Harbour Bridge. He shifted from one foot to the other like a jogger, while the wind that swirled around the concrete columns of the flyover cut into his ribs and flung icy drops of water into the back of his neck. It was an arctic spring, even this far north. Maybe he should go away for a while — just for a few days — go somewhere in the South Pacific and warm his bones on a white-hot beach; be waited on by large, kind, brown women, from whom he’d be safe. They wouldn’t fancy him — he was too narrow and bloodless. He would pursue intellectual matters flat on his back, or possibly with another small tourist who happened to be in the same resort and happy to play.

  The lights had changed and he’d nearly missed his crossing; he sprinted across the road, his stomach roiling. A nauticalthemed restaurant flung misshapen portholes of light across the path. Inside, a waiter in a striped shirt bent to a table of early diners, holding a match to a candle.

  Past the chandlers, offices and dinghy shops he went, towards the gleaming tanks at the point. At the end of the row of low-rise buildings the night opened up around him into yards and truck bays and a smell of fish and salt and engine oil forced into his chest like an embolism. He slowed down and breathed deeply through his mouth, the cold air making his teeth ache. The rain had eased off; there were a few stars. He thought perhaps the temperature had dropped; it grew colder with every step towards the water.

  He was among the tanks on the point now; they lifted into the dark — cool monoliths of white, ladders curled at their sides. There was one car parked at the safety railing by the sea, its windows steamed up. For a moment he imagined knocking on its window, just so he could see their faces. He wanted to see love in their faces; it would still be there when they turned away from each other perhaps, if he surprised them before they sensed he was there. Was it love, going on in the car? Maybe it was just a transaction, a simple exercise in getting it rocking gently, as it was, on its springs.

  He put his back to it, leaned over the railing and looked into the water, pressing his empty stomach into the rough wood. When he was younger, and he got like this — what was it, depressed? — he’d think about suicide: chucking himself off bridges, filling himself with pills, taking a sweet slide to oblivion. Now he knew where the barrier was and he hid behind it; he didn’t let those thoughts progress. That was middle age: a knowledge that every day would be pretty much the same, a preparedness for that.

  He heaved a sigh, hoisted himself over the white bars and sat down on the narrow stone ledge above the tide. Traffic roared on the Harbour Bridge high on his left, louder on the westerly wind, and the soles of his scummy shoes skimmed choppy waves. He brought his knees up, hugged them close. It was true, what he’d told the actress and a few others besides. He was still in love with the other woman; he needed to be. It afforded him a fecund melancholy that fuelled him through life and in and out of endless liaisons with other men’s women; it enabled him to preserve his solitude and keep at bay a crippling guilt about the failure of his own marriage. If the sprat-drowner changed her mind and wanted him back, he’d reject her. That was a given, a certainty.

  A party yacht motored by, sails furled, lifting and falling in the chop. The cabin lights showed silhouettes of men and women sheltering from the weather. Only one couple stood on the deck, wrapped around each other, their faces joined. God, they were behind him and in front of him: there was no escape from people wanting attachment. The car was really rocking now — he could hear it creaking, but kept his face averted. There might be a naked arm flung up, the sole of a foot pressed against the windscreen: whatever, he wouldn’t be witness to it. Who were they anyway — teenagers, adulterers, the affianced? He hoped they would live to regret it.

  He put the last cigarette in his gob, screwed up the packet and chucked it into the water. It bobbed around, a small luminescent square, the frill of silver gleaming in the street-light. He watched it for a few moments, while he tried to light up. It vanished in the same instant he decided the flame would only catch if he stood and put his back to the wind.

  The car was quite still and one of its doors was opening. A tousled young man was climbing out, straightening his shirt, buttoning his trousers. He and Maurice each pretended the other didn’t exist, though Maurice passed close by him to begin his homeward walk. As he drew level, the man leaned into the car and said something to the lover inside. It was a man’s voice that answered.

  ‘You’re beautiful, you know that, Mr Collins?’

 
Two blokes, then. The man leaning into the car had a gold band on his wedding finger.

  Highly Combustible read a sign on the wire fence on the next block. Danger. No Naked Flames. No Entry.

  Maurice sucked hard on his smoke, tipped his head to the top of the tallest tower where a single star punctured the sky for a moment before it was obliterated by a scudding cloud, itself invisible against the dark.

  The woman who stayed with her husband, the woman he loved, told him: You gave us what we needed, you gave us a spark.

  A spark.

  He’d give them spark.

  While he looked around for a stone he sucked hard on what was left of his cigarette, careful to leave a centimetre or so still to burn. From his pocket he took a hair elastic, a tragically preserved trophy from the heartbreaker who’d always tied her hair back before they made love, as if she was cooking and not wanting to shed into the soup. It stretched around the stone twice, securing the cigarette, and then it was only a case of lobbing it as high and far as he could, over the fence. Before he turned to leave, he waited to hear it land and it seemed to him the click of stone on concrete came from high above his head, from the top of the middle-sized tank.

  The nautical restaurant was full, the traffic was thin, the park oozed danger and the gradient of College Hill threatened to rise up and smack him in the face. His breath rasped in his chest; he had the strangest sensation that the pores in his back had opened, ready for the boom, which he knew would never come. The tethered cigarette, his tiny bomb, would have been extinguished by the rain, which was now falling thick and fast, obscuring even the other side of the road. Outside what used to be the Gluepot he waited for a cab, drenched and shivering. When he got home, he decided, he would finish the half bottle of Jim Beam he’d hidden from himself in a cupboard. He would not answer the phone, he would take a new packet of fags from the carton, he would lie on his sofa and sleep.