by Greg McGee
‘Tell Ellie,’ she says, ‘that I love her garden. My garden. She’s kept it just as it was. My Abraham Darby rose is in flower. I can still smell it.’
‘She’ll think I’m losing my faculties.’
‘Are you?’
Admit nothing! Cover with a joke. ‘I can’t remember.’ My tremolo gives me away.
She studies me seriously. ‘What if you forget you’ve got a pistol?’
‘I won’t risk waiting for a last moment of insight.’
I retrieve a big joint, freshly rolled, from the top drawer of the roll-top kauri that’s full of everything I need.
‘That won’t help,’ she says. ‘I’m surprised you still smoke.’
I thought I’d lit up before in front of her, but clearly not. ‘Ellie disapproves.’
‘Of course she does. She saw her smoking mother die of breast cancer.’
I tell her I don’t care any more. I search for a light, and out of habit, or nervous twitch, ask her if she’s got a match.
‘If I had a match for you I’d start a circus.’
‘Ha ha.’
‘It’s one of yours.’
‘Groucho Marx’s, actually.’
‘Whatever. Like you, it hasn’t aged well.’
‘Have I not?’ I turn and trap myself long-shot in the en-suite mirror. I see a portly shape with a full head of hair haloing my skull like an emeritus professor, I like to think. Carol isn’t finished with me.
‘When you were thirty,’ she says, ‘it was the new twenty. Forty was the new thirty. Time’s finally caught up and passed you, Den. Your seventy is the new eighty.’
‘Eighty?’
‘At least you got a chance at it.’
I’m so completely at a loss that she takes pity on me, I think. She comes very close, so close I swear I can smell her perfume, Chanel, as always. Her hair falls past me, over me. My favourite position was her on top, with her hair enveloping me, her lips on mine, our tongues entwined, the world shut out. I can sense her hair, but not feel it. I try to kiss her lips but they’re not corporeal. And yet. She breathes on my joint, I swear, and the end glows with sudden heat. When I draw on it, the smoke and chemicals hit the back of my throat. I hold it there and stare into her dirt-brown eyes.
‘This joint is real,’ I tell her, still trying to hold it in. ‘You’re not. How does that work?’
I can’t hold it in any longer and exhale. She becomes a circling wreath of smoke and disappears.
***
MARIJUANA takes the edge off my anxiety about the forthcoming celebration. I used to love being the centre of attention, now I quail at the prospect – even, or particularly, of my family. I think I knew even before Carol died that she was the beating heart of us. When she was gone, we became thrashing limbs looking for connection and direction.
I look out at the inner harbour, a salt river full of traffic and interest, magnified if necessary by my Konuspot 80, waiting patiently on its tripod. Directly across the water at the Chelsea wharf, the plimsoll of the sugar freighter from Queensland lifts, bow first then stern, as the augur relentlessly sucks the raw crystals into the refinery. Earlier, when the sun was still glancing off the water, there were ferries, water taxis, evening after-work yacht races, upright paddlers, kayakers, and the occasional jet-boat giving the tourists a thrill with a 360 wake-whirl. A sense of life going on, at a comfortable remove. I may not be an active part of it any more, but I’ve liked knowing it’s there.
One of the best things about my kingdom by the sea is that I have no neighbours. Well, of course I have people living adjacent, but none I have to engage with. There’s a primary school to the south, the back boundary, and on weekdays I can measure my day by the arrival of children and parents clogging the end of my shingle driveway, and by the raucous joy of the children at morning interval. At precisely 10.45 the nuns’ hospice further up the hill asserts itself with bells summoning the sisters for matins or whatever, and I break for a cup of espresso from the Rocket, a relic of the old Flame production office kitchen. The school kids wake me from my midday nap with their afternoon break, then just before three, the armada of parental black SUVs returns to whisk them away.
The other boundaries are obfuscated by mature trees and a dense wall of pseudopanax between. I can see nothing of the neighbours’ backyards to the north as I look over them to the sea, and even to the west, where there are three storeys of concrete-block apartments, I see only the lights of the windows at night, glimpsed through the foliage like a montage of small television screens, and hear phantom chords from a Spanish guitar, or lines from a play being rehearsed into meaninglessness, or babies crying. Very occasionally I hear voices raised in anger, male and female, in a language I don’t recognise. They stay at a ghostly remove, my neighbours: thankfully there’s no prospect of awkward small talk, or of any social intercourse at all.
Marijuana also burns the bleach from old eyes. I can see Will having an evening dip, ploughing up and down the pool, bifurcating the blue. Ellie and I haven’t braved the water yet – it’s still carrying too much winter – but Will has always been warmed by an inner fire. He has an audience, a woman in a yellow floral dress and matching enormous brimmed sunhat, sitting primly on the end of a lounger. Can that be Claudia? If it is, where are the children, my two grandchildren, Kristin, the five-year-old, and . . . the toddler, the boy. I seem to remember something about them being separated, Will and Claudia. I could be wrong. I do remember asking her when they announced their engagement, ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ She didn’t appreciate it at the time, but she might now. Unless I’m projecting, thinking wishfully. But I don’t want that for Kristin and whatshisname, I don’t wish that on them.
‘You’ve been at it again,’ she says, sniffing the air as she enters behind me. ‘You’re a terrible old degenerate.’
Ellie’s smiling. She fusses over me, buttoning up my button-downs. ‘Why do they make the holes so small?’
‘As the bishop said to the actress.’
‘In his dreams. Now,’ she says, ‘a warning. Will is here with a new friend.’
‘I saw. Of the female persuasion.’
‘He is separated.’
‘What about the kids?’
‘You can ask him. Glasses?’
I look around hopelessly. The truth is I need my glasses to find my glasses. Ellie produces them. I put them on, peer about. ‘My watch. I have a special app on my iPhone which will locate–’
‘Dad, you’re wearing it.’
I look at my treacherous wrist. Can I really have done that?
‘Easily done,’ she says. Did I unknowingly articulate that last thought? ‘And Jackson’s disappeared, no idea where. I don’t want to get him into trouble, but I’ll have to ring his case officer.’
I try to reassure her, ask her to give Jackson the benefit of the doubt. I wax eloquent in Jackson’s defence, that he’s a good kid, the best foster we’ve had, that there’s something about him, a sense of humility and respect for his elders that I can’t recall having at his age.
She asks me if I’m okay. I wonder why she thinks I’m not. Does she think I’m not? I can’t ask.
Ellie’s the fag-end of Generation X, a demographic I used to know a lot about. I studied it in a predatory way, like a lion sizing up a herd of antelope. Too late to be a slacker, Ellie nevertheless adopted most of the accoutrements: the sexless flannel shirts and camo trou, the anti-establishment attitude, the endless sameness of the garage band riffs and relentless jangling faux naif of Flying Nun, but never the cynicism or the cigarettes. She was a non-conformist anti-capitalist, and I was always proud of her, even when she was deeply embarrassed by having a father who made TV commercials to sell crap. She had a healthy disrespect for authority, but was never nihilistic. She wanted to live a long, healthy life. And, always, always, do good. She dres
ses differently these days – today, as most days, like a card-carrying Greenie, which she is – in khaki culottes and flat sandals, but is otherwise much the same as the teenager I remember from the nineties. Or think I remember.
‘Remember our secret sign, okay?’
It’s so secret I have no idea what she’s talking about. Ellie is holding one finger up.
‘Means we’ve heard this story before, change tack gracefully.’
I nod. ‘Change tack gracefully.’
Ellie holds two fingers up. ‘Means we’ve heard this story or joke more than once before. Bail immediately.’
I swallow my bile, try to nod. What new stories or jokes would I have at my age? Clearly what I need is a new audience. Ellie isn’t finished.
‘I’ll stay in your eye-line, so just give me a quick glance when you start on one of your monologues.’
‘Mum says to tell you,’ I say, desperate to change the subject, ‘that she loves the way you’ve kept her garden, she can smell the scent of the Abraham Darby.’
‘You’ve been talking to her again?’
I may have leapt from the frying pan into the fire, but I plunge on in my asbestos suit. ‘I can’t just ignore her.’
‘Does she talk back?’
‘Of course she bloody talks back – your mother always had a lot to say.’
Ellie looks at me curiously. It’s not a look I recognise. Is it new, or have I forgotten it?
‘Dad,’ she says, ‘I can tell it’s real for you, and if it gives you some comfort, fine. But it’s not something you should share, okay?’
Because if I do, they’ll all think I’m losing it. I get it. ‘Message understood. I’ll have a pee and be right down.’
Ellie goes. I wander towards the en-suite and catch myself in long-shot again. I still look okay, I think. From a distance. It’s the close-ups that don’t work any more.
The default expression on my face has always been a smile. I might have been worried, anxious, preoccupied or feeling neutral or nothing at all, but I looked happy. It’s always been my biggest asset. Until recently, when my smile seems to be getting lost in other crinkles. I’ve noticed that my beatific visage may be sending out different signals in old age: the bafflement of dotage, the harmless bewilderment of the elderly duffer. Like most writers – which is what I essentially consider myself to be, despite spending most of my career directing and co-producing – I’m a natural catastrophist, but an upbeat one. My glass was never half empty, always full to brimming, but threatening at any moment to explode in my face. I grew up down south, in a spare, wondrous landscape stretched across an alpine fault. At primary school, we were taught about earthquakes and practised diving under our desks as, in our imaginations, the earth rocked. We knew, as New Zealanders, that nothing was permanent: that we lived on the flotsam and jetsam of molten magma.
***
I EDGE myself down the stairs and along the polished wooden floor of the hallway, from which Ellie has removed the carpets after I tripped on one of Carol’s favourite Persians and fell, shearing a knee cartilage. Heart kauri from the 1920s those floorboards, golden syrup yellow, full of knots. Those knots date it as precisely as carbon. Before that, the sawmillers threw away wood like this, thought it was blemished. A hundred next year, this house, more than a quarter of a century older than me. In better nick too, its joints still straight and strong. The softness of those floorboards looked after me – if I’d fallen on concrete, I’d have needed a new knee. My knee may have lost some muscle memory, but the cartilage within it has full recall and it gives me a dig just for old times’ sake. It knows I can’t neutralise it with anti-inflamms like I used to. They play havoc with my ulcer, a result of all those years using Voltaren as a hangover cure.
I limp along the hallway to the big room, heading across to the french doors, which open out onto the deck. In late afternoon, the dying westerly sun refracts off the pool, sending light dancing across the plastered ceiling of my favourite downstairs room. The huge sofas in American maple covered in Belgian linen, bought by Carol in flusher times, are big enough to stretch out and sleep on. In winter, the early afternoon sun is so low it bathes the sofa nearest the doors in warmth, making it a great place for an afternoon nap. I still haven’t read every book in the glass-fronted bookcase along the wall, and I would happily choose one right now and curl up with it on the sofa, rather than continue with my veneration. Celebration doesn’t come easily to our culture: we’re better at heavy irony and even heavier drinking. Being in the same space for too long seems to have a corrosive effect on my family’s paper-thin scars over old wounds. But it’s too late now, and I walk on, trying not to limp, telling myself not to precipitate any conflict. Let others cast the first stone.
As I step onto the deck, I see Ellie in the kitchen loading plates onto the sills of the Whitney windows that open out onto the deck. The table is already chokka – ham on the bone, cold chicken, potato salad, green salads, bottles of dressing and sauce. One end has a cluster of bottles like skittles, champagne and wine and beer, ringed with glasses and flutes. I told Ellie not to spend more than twenty dollars on any bottle of wine, because my palate’s no longer worthy of it. She said we couldn’t afford to pay any more anyway. There are a lot of bottles and glasses. It seems like overkill just for us. I wonder who’s coming that I don’t know about. I don’t like surprises.
Will is out of the pool, in profile, adjusting the cock in his Speedos to best effect for the woman on the lounger. Who is not Claudia. I hear a grab of conversation as I approach: ‘a bit of maintenance’ from him and ‘good bones, though’ from her. This will surely be Will talking about himself – he’s looking fit, carrying less weight than I remember. It’s interesting looking at your middle-aged children, trying to read the clues as to which genes went where. Carol is right about Will, our eldest: he’s more me than her, physically at least. My sturdiness, but not so heavy, taller and my thick once-black hair, with blue eyes that always take me by surprise. My fault? What can Carol have meant by that?
The woman who isn’t Claudia sees me and gives a subtle heads-up to Will, whose expression when he turns is shadowed by something too fleeting for me to decipher. I’m still chasing it when he smiles, blue eyes shining. My blue-eyed boy.
‘Rocket Man!’ Still wet, he draws me into a considerate semi-man-hug.
It’s important I don’t rise to the Rocket Man bait, give him any opportunity to sing the ditty, ‘Give yourself a lift/Take off with Rocket’, tell the story of how I made my fortune with a TV commercial for a sugar drink that made our children obese, reduce me to claiming ignorance, making me look both pathetic and rapacious. I take a breath, look over his shoulder at the woman in the yellow dress and hat and limit myself to telling her that I’d prefer he call me Den in front of strangers.
‘This is my friend, Georgina,’ says Will, releasing me.
‘Georgie,’ she corrects him.
They can’t have known each other long, then. I shake her hand. She has a thin, austere sexuality about her, about as far from Claudia’s dark buxom earthiness as it would be possible to get. ‘How’s Claudia?’
‘Seems all right.’
‘I was expecting the children. You said you had them weekends.’
‘Not every weekend. I’ve got to have a life.’
‘Clearly.’ I’m peeved. This is supposed to be a family occasion, with all the tiers. And in truth, I prefer my grandchildren, particularly Kristin, to my children. Perhaps because they can’t answer back yet, particularly whatshisname, the boy . . . The other thing that marijuana does, after it eases the anxiety, is make me paranoid.
‘I won’t be staying long, Mr Sparks,’ says Georgie.
‘Den, please. I wasn’t trying to be rude–’
‘You should see him when he tries!’ Will is still smiling, but under sufferance.
I confess to Georgie tha
t I’m still adjusting to Will’s change of marital circumstances.
‘It’s been months, Den.’
‘Easy come, easy go, these days, I suppose.’
‘I had your upstanding example before me.’
‘I never left Carol–’
‘No you rubbed her face in it and–’
‘Will! Enough!’ Ellie has arrived, thankfully, with flutes of champagne. We’re too alike, Will and I: every exchange seems testy, exposing the fragile crust of our civility.
I hate champagne. Those infernal bubbles. I get drunker quicker and the hangover begins before I’ve even started pontificating and slurring. But it’s my birthday, what can I say? ‘Thank you, Ellie.’
Will also wants champagne. Georgie asks directions to the loo. Ellie ushers her towards the house, leaving Will and me standing awkwardly beside the pool. Over Will’s shoulder, I watch Georgie walk towards the french doors, the surprising jiggle of her slim arse. I have the thought that if I was younger . . . but mercifully it passes quickly. I’m actually relieved that I’m no longer a captive of my reptilian sexual urges. I can’t be the first old bastard to have had that thought: I must have read it somewhere. I sometimes wonder if there can possibly be an original thought that hasn’t already been thunk, after thousands of years of sentient beings. The odds against an original thought still roaming free out there must be astronomical. Can I be the first person to think of that, for instance?
I consider myself a writer, yes, but there are writers and writers. No one would accuse me of having poetry in my soul. Copywriter says it all really – I wouldn’t dream of claiming originality for anything I ever wrote. That wasn’t what I did. At my best I tried to mainstream the zeitgeist, create some newish take on what already existed out there. Watch other people’s behaviour, use other people’s thoughts, remix old ingredients to look like some new alchemy. Incremental modification is what the best of us do. Did. Always with the same aim. Commodification.
Until the zeitgeist began failing me. I can remember the exact moment it struck me. My D-list celebrity got me a free ticket to a preview screening of the first Lord of the Rings film, just after the turn of the century. True, Carol had died not long before, so I wasn’t at my most optimistic. I stayed for the duration because I hadn’t paid for my ticket and didn’t feel I could walk out. So I sat there for what seemed like several weeks, long past any appreciation of the stunning scenery, wishing for it to end – the surprisingly unsurprising confrontations with monsters, the hugely contrived set-piece battles with entirely predictable outcomes, the endless portentous exposition. It seemed like the end of drama and beginning of spectacle, and when eventually I was released into the foyer, I asked Branko and the group of minor celebs with me, ‘Who on earth would pay money to watch that?’