‘Really?’ Jed says, moving his body away from her very slightly. He doesn’t ask her any questions about what she plays, and she gets the hint and moves away, pulling at her poor silly poodle’s lead.
Once she’s out of earshot, Jed says, ‘Anyway, what were you saying before?’
‘I almost don’t want to ask you for anything after that.’ Think for a moment that I might be grateful to have a reason to bottle out completely, but then remember: Class, this is a high-profile school project, so let’s make it good.
‘Go on,’ Jed says. ‘It’s different with you.’
Register this with something quite close to happiness. ‘Okay. It’s just that we’re doing this project where we have to interview people about how they got started on different kinds of careers and I was wondering if I could interview you?’
‘About growing peppers?’
‘I didn’t know you did that. I guess we could talk about that, but I was thinking—’
He smiles. Was playing me. ‘You meant the band.’
‘Right.’
He scratches the back of his head. ‘It’s just for a school project, right? Not for anything else?’
‘Yes. It’s for our class display on Careers Day, that’s all. What else are you thinking about?’
‘Nothing,’ he says.
Am burning with the strain of trying to talk to him like we’re just a couple of everyday, regular people. Repeat: ‘It’s just for a school project.’
‘Do you want to do it now?’ he asks. ‘Do you have your pen and paper on you?’
‘Actually, better than that. I’ve checked out a digital recorder from the resource room. It’s in my pocket. Do you have the time now?’ Surge of nervousness rises up.
‘Okay, but shall we go somewhere, away from all my fans?’ he smirks.
She’s still just across, staring at us. ‘Where?’
‘Well, I once built a hut up in that bush, way back. I bet I could still find it.’
Look up at the dense, secret-holding bush further up the hill. Once went up there for half a day on a trip in primary school to identify different types of trees and look for kauri snails. Later on a rumour started going around school that a gang member pointed a gun at a boy one weekend because he’d stumbled onto their plot. Even though nobody could ever say which boy, that bush became a place that girls should stay away from. ‘Okay.’
‘We’ll need to walk down this way and cross the creek at the footbridge,’ Jed says, and touches his hand on my back for a moment, in a guiding, family sort of way, as if he’s used to herding people. Brings on an instant desire to get lost inside the bush for days. Days and days, with Jed as my champion. On the trek up through dirt paths, the dogs sniff around the bases of the trees, tails wagging, as if they’re on a search and rescue mission. At one point they both put their paws against a tree-trunk and start barking their heads off. ‘Can probably smell a possum,’ Jed says. Stare up at the top of the tree, but can’t see anything. It’s nearly impossible to get the dogs away. Jed picks up his stepmother’s dog, and I have to drag Rochester, still whimpering. Sandals are not the best footwear for this, and am forced to stop a couple of times to remove some dirt and twigs from the base, but the whole trek is beginning to feel like an intrepid adventure, a bear hunt, a quest, the pursuit of the Source.
When we finally get to the place, it isn’t much of a hut. Just a few nikaus growing close together in a circle, their dancing, mingling fronds providing an almost perfect roof. There’s still a bunch of sticks tied crossways with flax in one part of it, but that’s about it apart from an old weathered board tied to a trunk with some words scratched into it: The Factory.
‘Why’s it called that?’ I ask.
‘Ever heard of Andy Warhol?’
Shrug.
‘Never mind.’ He waves his hand in a welcome gesture. ‘Here we are – the abandoned old den of iniquity,’ he says, and then he makes a jokey ha ha haa like a pretend-scary horror-movie narrator.
Part Two
A dinner party
It’s one of those lovely late-summer evenings, nice enough to dine at the old kauri long table on the side-porch. While Jed is stringing up some lights and brushing away the spiders that have set themselves up in the corners of the porch roof, you’re making yourself busy in the kitchen, rinsing out the inside of squid bodies and preparing a marinade for the ceviche.
Handling that slimy, quivering rawness, you’re already worried about whether you’ll achieve the required tenderness, and are regretting your choice of menu. The degree of risk. This might have been a good night to ease the tension on yourself by serving up something that would come from the kitchen to the table more confidently than these untested recipes laid out before you. Inviting a restaurant chef over for dinner has ignited some sort of foolhardy ambition, though there might be other reasons you are in a vaguely competitive mood.
When your brother rang to say he’d be in town for a couple of days – a conference on extending the marine reserve in the Kermadecs – it seemed like a good opportunity to invite Evie over from next door again. She was meant to come last week but she rang on the day to cancel – something about her cousin having a baby. You’d been feeling the need to acquaint yourself better with Jed’s new friend, but it seemed like it might be awkward to have Evie over on her own. You appear to feel you need a buffer where she is concerned. Having someone else here might also have a moderating effect on your brother, who can be very fixated conversationally.
Just as you are trying to de-vein the prawns’ tails to add to the ceviche, worried that you’ve left it too late for the marinade to absorb properly, Jaspar, having developed a habit of favouring his good foot, comes hopping into the kitchen.
‘Mum, you know perverts?’ he asks, his fringe flopping sweetly across his forehead. His questions have become more searching lately. Yesterday he asked you to explain psychosis.
‘Perverts? I hope I don’t know any.’
A prawn slips between your fingers and lands with an ugly wet plop on the wooden floor. As you bend down to retrieve it, Jaspar asks, ‘It’s just … Dad’s not one, is he?’
‘What? No. Why would you ask a silly thing like that?’ He doesn’t answer but hops away on his good foot. You know you should go after him, because a person needs to be paying attention when their kid is asking questions about perverts, but you smell burning and turn to see smoke rising off the seeds you’re supposed to be ‘lightly toasting’. Why hadn’t you just got Jed to chuck some steaks on the barbecue and been all laughing and cheerful about your lack of kitchen competency, instead of trying to arm yourself up with stupid, complicated recipes from Cuisine.
Ivan arrives early, announcing himself as the hopelessly preoccupied egghead he has become – with his new, untrimmed beard and a corduroy jacket that another generation would be buying in a vintage shop, but which he wears without irony. Under his arm is a gift, a framed photograph of a jellyfish that an associate of his took with an underwater camera. It’s curiously beautiful.
‘Gosh, it looks like a bizarre alien ship floating dreamily through a universe.’
‘Nematocysts,’ he announces, pointing at the frilly, trailing tendrils, ‘is the name for the poison-injecting arrows on the tentacles that they use to shoot an immobilising toxin into their prey.’
You look into his face and wish you could catch a trace of a smile, just a glimmer of humorous self-recognition. ‘Jaspar will love knowing that,’ you say, and you resolve to hang the photo in his room, perhaps behind the door where you won’t have to look at it and be reminded of a childhood spent resenting the way the bedroom next to yours reeked of smelly, decayed creatures your brother had brought to the surface, and that bubbler in his fish tank that used to drone through the wall all night.
‘Why don’t you go out and watch the sunset,’ you suggest. ‘Jed will make you a drink while I just finish off this prep.’
Ivan casts a doubtful glance around the kitchen –
he knows more about microbial pathogens than could ever make for easy living – before wandering off towards the balcony.
Evie arrives, just as the sun is starting to sink behind the tops of the oak trees, with a Tarte Tatin for dessert. Her speciality, she says.
You try to exclaim over it but somehow you can’t seem to get much warmth to your expression as you tell her how delicious it looks and how talented she must be. For some reason you get the idea that she is having a similar struggle as she in turn says how wonderful the kitchen smells with such gorgeous aromas and can she help?
Insisting everything is under control, you urge Evie to join the others on the balcony. In reality it’s more than you can bear to have her see how nearly this meal, this feast that you so dearly want to be perfect, is sliding into awful inedibility.
When you finally find a moment to join the others for a gin and tonic, you think that either Evie is a good actress or she is genuinely engrossed in Ivan’s talk about the boat trip he went on to the Ross Sea for the conservation dredge thing a few years ago. After a while it’s possible to see why Jed has become friends with her – if that’s what it is. She has an entirely empathetic, unfussy demeanour, and turns her curiosity on to the person she is talking to with such force that they might quickly begin to feel the desire to offer up something of value. Watching her interact with Ivan, you can see there’s a genuine whole-heartedness about her.
When the two of you chat for a bit about the history of the house, and about Evie’s son Dylan who was invited but unable to come, you find yourself struggling not to appear quite so taut and unrelaxed. But there is something else, too. You don’t know if you are imagining it, but whenever Evie’s friendliness is directed at you, there does seem to be something almost like reluctance lurking underneath it.
Jed is sitting nearby, sipping his drink, drifting away into his own thoughts, half there, half not. When you were first married, you’d see him adopt that dreamy expression at parties and used to wonder if he was hearing things that other, more ordinary mortals were not taking in. There was the feeling that something was going on, that he was bringing something unique together inside his head. Did the sound of wine glasses clinking, you used to wonder, have a pitch and rhythm that was turning a switch for him? Were spoken phrases constantly being overturned in there, examined for their memorable hooks?
Back then the possibilities arising from his talent were everything. In those days you could always forgive him a little abstraction, a little mental drift, if that was taking him to a place of inspiration from which a viable song might emerge. Nowadays you’re more inclined to regard such behaviour as an annoying, wilful remoteness. You nudge him with your foot to bring him back to the present, pointing to the nearly empty drinks to remind him that you can’t be expected to do everything. By the time you’re heading back to the kitchen, he’s re-inhabited himself and is being quite funny about the time his band were touring around the South Island and stopped for a break at the shoreline somewhere near Kaikoura and ended up getting chased back to the van by a fat, barking sea lion.
You down a couple of slugs of tequila as you plate up the Lime and Tequila Ceviche with Avocado Cream, and can feel the disappointed gaze of the critic come raining down on you. A scathing commentary points out that the presentation is amateur and pretentious, that the avocado cream probably shouldn’t be tingeing on the brownish side, and no attempt to arrange the garnish prettily can hide that it is all quite unappetising.
It doesn’t look quite so bad, laid down on the rustic surface of the wooden table, under the flattering orange glow of the setting sun. Evie compliments the imaginative combo. ‘Tequila and seafood. I never would have thought of it.’
The taste isn’t great, but nobody says so, and in what might have been a slightly reaching attempt for something else to talk about, Evie turns to Jed and says, ‘So have you completed that song now?’
He glances sheepishly in your direction before saying, ‘Not yet.’
‘Another new song, darling?’ you say, as casually as you can manage.
‘It’s wonderful,’ Evie offers. ‘Have you not heard it?’
It’s possible this wasn’t intended as a slight provocation. ‘So that’s what you’ve been up to in the shed?’ you say to Jed, the words accidentally falling out of your mouth with a sharpness to the tone. ‘Let’s all hear it now then.’
‘Yay, a new song,’ Jaspar exclaims.
‘Wonderful,’ Ivan agrees warmly. He’s hardly touched his entrée. Is the eating of seafood some kind of professional sacrilege to him? You can’t remember it ever coming up before. Perhaps it’s just that you’d been heavy-handed on the tequila. It had been a tad overpowering.
‘I’m still working on it. Another time,’ Jed says, and he begins picking up the entrée plates to take back to the kitchen.
You knew he’d been recording in that old shed for years now, but you’d never asked to hear any of it because you’d thought it was more an archive of himself than anything serious. Occasionally other people came and went, other musicians, playing around in that boys’ clubroom. Is he showing that stuff around now?
It’s been a long time, and he’s let it go, you suppose, that soul-searing disappointment. How he’d thought his second album better than his first – more innate, more melodic and much more original. How he’d thought he was doing something quite fresh at the time, inviting listeners into an intimate experience, opening himself up, creating what he thought was a great piece of confessional art. And afterwards the feeling of being misunderstood. Nobody, he was forced to conclude eventually, ever really got it.
But actually, why couldn’t he have shared this new song with you first? Is it just that he’s in need of a certain kind of encouragement? Not you, the intimate witness to the entire unfolding of it all, but somebody who isn’t holding any kind of reservation?
Back in the kitchen the ground peppercorn and seed rub dusted on to the outside of the venison medallions is starting to burn in the pan. The recipe said it should ‘smoke and sear’, but this much? This is all probably quite far from the kind of thing they serve up in Evie’s restaurant back wherever it is she popped up from.
When something is finished it begins again, you see? said this morning’s text. You still don’t know his real name, so he flashes up as Brando. And you’ve been trying to remember all through dinner – is that a line from the movie? Maybe in the tango club near the end? And what is the meaning of this, after what happened? Another ironic cruelty? Or an apology? A sobered-up attempt at a different kind of opening? Why doesn’t he just stop? His motives aren’t clear, but you want to feel only one thing. Contrition. You need the tension of that contrition to keep yourself in check.
Opening the oven door to test the sage potatoes, you realise you’ve accidentally turned the switch to grill. They are now burnt on top and almost raw on the bottom. You slam the door and reach for the tequila, glugging some down straight from the bottle, then decide to serve the meat with just the witloof salad. Who would know?
Bluffing games
At some stage during the second course we all began to play a word game, or perhaps it could have been called a personality test. The diverting nature of it was a relief, as I’d been feeling the pressure of holding up the conversation all night.
Jed had been a little distant when I first arrived, so I understood that this invitation to dinner might not have been his idea. I’d tried to be careful not to appear too familiar but had obviously already made a blunder, bringing up his recording.
On first meeting Lauren, I had been slightly, or perhaps even completely, intimidated. She appeared to be everything I was not – strong sense of entitlement about her, graceful, tall and undeniably striking, expensive clothes, tasteful house, everything hinting at a brainy artiness. In fact, she wore her intelligence on her skin, so that the first thought you had when meeting her was that she was very smart. Also perhaps a bit controlled. The kind of woman who could make a p
erson uncomfortable, because if they made a mistake in conversation, or in their actions, it might be quietly noted and stored. Around her, anything that was said or done, even in jest, especially in jest, might have consequences. I felt as if I was meeting my opposite. And perhaps I was. I was meeting, most likely, the woman who could walk straight past a suffering old man in the street.
The dinner game that Lauren’s brother introduced over a conversation lag during the second course was to come up with the one exact word that described yourself. It was harder than it first seemed, and immediately put everybody into an introspective mood. Given that it potentially required quite an acute skill to distil a person’s essence down to one word, it was a surprising suggestion from Ivan, who didn’t seem the self-considering sort. Over pre-dinner drinks I’d felt obliged to make an effort to get to know him, and had asked him about his work. He’d launched off about his job as a marine biologist, the highlight being a survey trip down to the Ross Sea, which I’d at first found quite fascinating, although eventually he began to lose me in the details. They had dredged up, according to him, 30,000 specimens with at least five fish that were completely new to science – unidentified, unnamed, never-been-seen-before deep-sea creatures that had developed extraordinary ways to live in the cold, the dark and the deep. ‘How exciting,’ I said. ‘There must have been a feeling of thrill on board that boat.’
He answered as if he had barely noticed, and told me instead all about the equipment – the multi-beam swath system that provided acoustic something-or-rather data for each sampling. The word that immediately popped up over his head when he first suggested the game was unsayable, and so I left it up to the others to struggle around with it.
‘You’ve obviously thought about this, so what word would you come up with for yourself?’ Lauren said to Ivan.
‘Perhaps something like scientist?’ he suggested.
In the Neighbourhood of Fame Page 13