by Ian Wedde
What did she say?
Crunch of broken glass, smell of beer. I sweep the glass up thinking, movie? Then I decide, fuck channel. Then I re-decide movie. Then I mop the floor with a lemon scent. It’s got to be Hitchcock. Fragments of glass glint in the sink. I chase them down the plughole. When Vero was little she believed the sparkle in sand at the beach was gold—you just had to take some home, you’d be rich. My hands under hot water tell me how cold the rest of me is. Hitchcock, Rear Window. That moment when you’re inside Jeff’s body and the window’s his eyes. The whole world’s out there. Each bit in its own little screen. In the mirror I’m putting a dry shirt on, back in the big room I’m turning on Marty’s famous rectangular radiators, pure gold. Gelt. That look on NB’s face. ‘You want me to come live in that stupid house?’
This is the life.
Rear Window, 1954. One of Marty’s favourites.
Stewart and Kelly. ‘Big schvantz.’ Marty’s grin. I found out what he meant later.
Miss Lonelyhearts, Miss Torso, the loony songwriter playing the same tune over and over, the newlyweds pulling the blind up and down, the woman on the fire escape.
I organise a smoke on a bit of foil. I hold my hand out to watch the fingers shake. Then I get the Bic going. And a beer. The fuck channel. Big-arsed sheila taking it from behind. No good.
Rear Window.
The voice on the radio. ‘Men, are you over forty? When you wake up in the morning, do you feel tired and rundown? Do you have that listless feeling?’
Always loved that bit.
Jeff trains his telescopic lens on Miss Torso.
Jeff trains the lens on the Theobalds having their argument.
Switch to the big-arsed sheila.
Switch back to Lisa: I’m not much on rear window ethics.
The big-arsed sheila, now she’s giving herself a hand.
No good. Turn the TV off.
I get the last cake of chocolate and another beer.
Marty hated La-Z-Boys. Mine’s a Dallas Power Recliner.
There’s Marty on the grey screen, stuffing his face with chocolate and then tipping his recliner back. He looks older than I remember. I remember him filling the picnic hamper with glittery sand for Vero.
‘We take the gold home, darlink!’
I remember him mowing the lawn at the back wearing a lampshade on his head. The housekeeper’s little boy’s sitting in the sun, watching. He’s clapping and shrieking. Sometimes Marty let him push.
‘You bastard,’ Marty says on the screen. His face is lined and tired, with white bristles. It’s me, out the rear window, in the mirror, I know, I know that. But it’s him.
‘What did that girl say?’ he asks me.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t hear her.’
‘I don’t know, Marty,’ I say, seeing myself say it. ‘I couldn’t hear her.’
Veronica
Can the sea have a different sound in winter? In summer it sounds blue, but now it sounds kind of grey-blue. Also, the seagulls along the Esplanade sound different too, more like winter, squawky and a bit bored, kind of overcast with arguments.
What you’re going to say sometimes gets itself ready first as a thought, then as words, and then comes out as speech. Half the time what comes out as speech doesn’t sound much like what you thought.
But it’s true, the waves on the beach beyond the Promenade sound grey-blue—they have a darkish sound.
‘Do you think sounds have colour?’
Nigel gives me a peeved look with pursed lips and even does a wee tut tut. He’s a lovely man but he doesn’t like to be interrupted. Mind you, he’s not the only man I know who prefers to hold the megaphone. In between sucking big breaths into his walking rhythm, he’s been going on and on about the new chef out at Mission. Apparently the Polenta Pasticciata alla Milanese is gorgeous and as good as anything you’d get in ‘Milaano’ with a long ‘aa’. But, but!—if you’re going to drink yourself to death you might as well do it in Hawke’s Bay, right girls?
It’s true the subject of drinking yourself to death anywhere isn’t dear to my heart, but I didn’t mean to be rude. Pat gives me a pert little ‘Thanks!’ look over Nigel’s shoulder. She’s going great guns. You’d hardly know we were into the full-bore block along by the Aquarium. Mind you, not an ounce on her, though the recent chin-job’s left her looking a bit stretched around the chops.
On the other side of me Gwyn’s not talking. All her reserves are for the next kilometre and then the chatty wind-down home. She’s been a Volunteer the longest of us all, but she’s packing it in before next Art Deco Weekend. She reckons there’s only so many times you can listen to know-it-all Yanks from Miami, ‘Art Deco capital of the wurrrld’. Or the ones from Santa Barbara who get it mixed up with Spanish Mission and you can’t tell them. Besides which last year she got the Residential and the Garden Awards—she can retire ‘job-well-done’, and well deserved too. Her place is a sight for sore eyes.
But then she surprises us all. ‘Synaesthesia,’ she gasps. There’s a film of sweat shining on her face and her tongue does a quick top-lip-wipe to get some of it. Nigel’s head whips round and he opens his mouth as if to say something, but Gwyn gets in first. She’s really working to keep the pace up. Walking next to her, I’m aware of the heat she’s generating, you’d expect steam, there are big wet patches across the small of her back. ‘It’s when . . .’
‘It’s when,’ starts Nigel.
‘. . . it’s when,’ gasp, breathe, ‘you experience one sense . . .’
‘Oh shit,’ says Nigel.
‘. . . in terms of another, like . . .’
Nigel’s stopped and is looking at his left arm.
‘. . . like saying a loud colour.’
‘Fuck,’ says Nigel, and sinks to his knees on the footpath. ‘Oh fuck.’ His face has gone a funny puce colour. We’ve all stopped, and he’s looking at us with his mouth open. Then his purple tongue comes out, he heaves in a huge rasping breath and falls on his face.
A whole lot of seagulls take off all at once, squawking like mad as if Nigel’s frightened them, and just as I’m getting down on my knees beside him I see a rubbernecking driver in a white Mercedes do a giant swerve to miss a girl in a red puffer parka on the pedestrian crossing and a man on the footpath walk into a lamp-post outside the dairy because he was looking over at us too—he lets out an embarrassed bark of laughter.
Then everything seems to click back into place. Gwyn’s got Nigel flipped on his side, but he’s not breathing so we get him on his back and I start CPR. It’s part of the Volunteer induction course though I’ve only ever practised on other Volunteers, with facecloths over their mouths. They teach us how to deal with chewing gum, a frequent choking hazard with the older Yanks. Pat’s on her cellphone, I hear her giving the location very precisely and clearly: ‘A—quar—i—um.’ I have an inappropriate thought as I get my mouth over Nigel’s and huff and puff into him before going back to the chest-pushing, which we Volunteers always practised to the rhythm of the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive, push push push push, stayin’ alive! The inappropriate thought is that Nigel must have had a big feed of that Polenta Pasticciata alla Milanese pretty recently with more than a few glasses of the Mission Reserve Syrah, knowing him, and I hope he doesn’t throw up.
Even when she’s next to a dying or possibly dead man and calling an ambulance on her cellphone, Pat’s got the knack of standing just right with the knuckles of her left hand on her stuck-out hip.
Push push push push, stayin’ alive!
Puffing, covering nose and mouth.
There’s a small crowd, including the girl in the red parka. I can see the same expression on all their faces as I come up for another chest-push. It’s a mixture of horror and curiosity.
‘It’s okay, thanks,’ says Pat, as if responding to an offer of help. ‘Unless anyone’s a doctor?’ she adds as an afterthought.
Then all at once something happens inside Nigel’s body,
like a tremor or a flinch inside him, and we get him on his side just as he burps out a big blob of dark stuff and then takes a massive breath. The red puffer girl comes forward and offers her parka.
‘You need to keep him warm,’ she says, and Pat says, ‘Thanks, sweetie,’ as if she’s directing things.
Gwyn and I have a little tug of war to get the parka over Nigel. I’m trying to cover his legs but Gwyn’s going for his top half. It ends up in the middle. Nigel’s elderly shanks are sticking out from underneath—they’re still tanned from his Italian foodie tour, and his face should be too, except that it’s gone a nasty pale-khaki colour. Gwyn’s got Nigel’s head on her big thighs, which looks comfy.
Nigel seems to be staring at us but it’s not clear if he’s seeing anything. He’s trying to hold his chest but can’t get past the puffer jacket. Then he says ‘Shit’ in a funny, weak little voice, so unlike his normal one that Gwyn lets out a hoot of laughter, then covers her mouth. But it catches on—the rest of us can’t help ourselves. Some of the watching crowd join in too, but most of them have begun to wander off. Pat’s laugh is a kind of haw haw, which she lets go full volume for a while with her head chucked back, then shuts it down suddenly. I’m the last to stop—I think it’s the relief—and Nigel’s looking at me with what could be an annoyed expression, or just pain. The ambulance siren is closing in from the southern end of the Parade and the gulls, which had settled, all take off again with a great squawking.
‘How are you, Nigel,’ says Pat, getting down on one knee like a sprinter.
‘Stupid bitch,’ whispers Nigel, and closes his eyes.
Then the St John’s guys are checking Nigel out and getting him on a stretcher with a blanket. The grey sound of the sea comes back now that the fuss has died down a bit, along with the smell of waves, a bit greyish too. One of the ambulance guys has the reddest beard I’ve ever seen, and the best teeth inside it. He keeps smiling at Nigel, who can’t see him because he’s got his eyes shut.
‘Probably choked on his dinner,’ suggests Pat, as if a bit miffed by what Nigel said to her.
‘Heart attack, looks like,’ says the smiling one. ‘You ladies were brilliant. Saved your friend’s life, I’d say.’ He holds up the red puffer jacket. ‘Whose is this?’ The girl steps forward and claims it. She’d only had a tee-shirt on under it and her slender arms crossed over her chest are all goose-bumpy. ‘Thank you, dear,’ says the ambulance guy with the beard, and a wonderful blotchy pink blush rises all the way up the girl’s neck and into her face.
‘Let’s get a move on,’ says the other medic, who’s got one of those shaved heads that men are going in for these days. Penis heads we call them among ourselves. Of course poor old Nigel’s going all the way to Hastings, and now they’re even knocking the Napier hospital down, shame on them.
‘I’m going with him,’ I say. ‘Someone’ll have to help with the details.’
Something strange has started to happen since we all had our laugh.
‘Are you sure?’ say Pat and Gwyn more or less in unison, meaning thank goodness.
I see them striding into the homeward leg as we do a u-turn and head for the Hastings highway. They’re going flat out with their faces towards each other, talking at once. Their hair flounces up and down as if synchronised—push push push push!
All around them everything looks just the same as it was, but it’s not.
It’s well over forty years since Dad died, and I wouldn’t have thought about him all that much since—maybe a bit for the first few years but not once my life got under way. We weren’t the closest. But now, back he comes, thanks to Nigel. I was only sixteen when he had his heart attack. He was mowing the grass at the back of our place the neat way he did, and acting the goat in one way or another, wearing an apron but nothing else so his skinny bum or lack of it was exposed, or one of Mum’s summer frocks or something silly on his head. It was always a performance. When we were all little, it was for us and we loved it, but later we found it stupid, his show-offy performances, so he stopped. But he started doing them again when the housekeeper came on Saturdays with her little boy. Her name was Pam and his was Sam. We called them Sampan and thought we were clever. Sandy started it—he had a huge row with Dad who called him a smart-arsed little shit. Can’t argue with that. When the kid was really small he sat in his pushchair and clapped. Later on he’d sit on the edge of the deck and make weird crowing noises. We all knew he wasn’t quite right, but Pam who did the house always brought him. When he was big enough to hold the stem of the mower’s handle, Dad sometimes let him push too. He’d stagger forward between those long, hairy legs, screaming.
Before Sam arrived, Pam did the house on Fridays. But then it switched to weekends so we could mind Sam while his mum cleaned—it was just part of the family routine. Or maybe it was because of the performances.
When Dad had his heart attack he just went straight down on the lawn and never moved again. I was sitting with the boy, who let out a shriek of laughter at Dad’s new trick. I remember Mum running out of the house in her styley underwear—she’d been getting changed after her nap. I haven’t thought about this for years and years. With her clothes on she always looked chic, but without them she just looked little and thin. She was yelling at us to call the ambulance. Mick came out on the deck and then ran back inside to do it. Then he ran back out and jumped down to the lawn. Mum had turned Dad over, and she and Mick were on opposite sides of him. The neighbours with the overlooking balcony had been having loud lunch with clinky glasses and they were all standing there gawping down, drinks in hand. Mick screamed, ‘What the fuck are you looking at!’ He was sobbing, but Mum seemed quite calm, she was holding Dad’s head. Pam came and grabbed the little boy and took him inside. He’d been laughing and clapping, but I heard him yelling inside the house. They’d gone by the time the ambulance arrived. Dad was dead, anyway. From the deck you could see where his neat lines of mowing stopped about a third of the way through the job—the dark stripes that went across in one direction, and the pale ones in the other. Dad’s old wooden-handled push-mower was halfway along one of the dark stripes, and after the ambulance people took him away the mower just stayed there for a couple of days, with its handle sticking up. It looked a bit like Dad—skinny and practical, but also weird, a ghost. The gawking lunch neighbours had gone inside and shut their French doors, so the place was deserted, except for the mower standing up out there on its neat pattern. There was that nice smell of freshly mown grass, but as well the pooey pong of Sam, who’d filled his pants again.
‘Friend of yours?’ says the bearded ambulance driver, and Nigel’s eyes open a little bit. They’d given him a shot of something, but he’s not one to miss the conversation if it’s about him.
‘A very dear old friend,’ I say, with my hand on Nigel’s bony ankle. ‘A special one.’ I’d like to think it’s a smile that twists Nigel’s lips but it’s more likely the pain in his chest. ‘It’s too bad we have to go all the way over to Hastings,’ I say.
The ambulance guy’s keeping an eye on Nigel, but he shows his teeth to me for a moment. ‘Why?’ he asks. The marvellous teeth are not necessarily smiling, it’s the framing effect of his beard that makes them stand out the way they do. ‘Do you think the old heap was worth keeping? He, I mean it, hasn’t been any use for the better part of twenty years.’
I beg your pardon?
Then he turns back to Nigel, whose eyes have begun to flick between me and the medic. I realise that Red Beard recognises the former Director of the Art Deco Trust, so why would he want to start a smart-aleck conversation now, in his ambulance?
And, old heap? Looking at Nigel?
And why does it always have to be the better part?
I know my face has gone red, but I don’t say anything. Even though the Napier hospital was built in 1969, and had nothing to do with the Art Deco Trust, Nigel was always in the news about it.
‘Some things just go past their use-by date, don’t you re
ckon?’ says Red Beard. He’s looking at Nigel, so it’s hard to tell who he’s talking to, or about, Nigel or me. I can’t believe what I’m hearing.
I can imagine that Nigel’s getting the full benefit of those teeth, the beard. I give his ankle a squeeze, just to mean don’t pay any attention, use-by date?—but then I see his mouth make one of those twisty shapes, I swear he’s looking straight at me, and it’s a Nigel smile this time all right.
‘What is it that some things always just go past?’ he whispers, and winks. It’s an old game we play, from one of Nigel’s favourites, Flann O’Brien’s ‘Catechism of Clichés’.
‘Their use-by date,’ I say, and Red Beard’s face whips round to look at me. The smile is there, but now I know it isn’t. Nigel was never a supporter of the hospital as a heritage site, he thought the building was an utter shocker. He only stood up for it because he thought there should be a hospital there, on the hill, close to the airport. It was freehold land, the city owned it, therefore the people of Napier did.
‘Don’t give rich pricks the view!’ he’d yell at public meetings.
‘My father was an architect,’ I say, and Nigel rolls his eyes. I’m just trying to shift the conversation somewhere else more or less relevant but not so argumentative or distressing for Nigel. Then I add, ‘Martin Klepka,’ out of respect I suppose.
‘Is that right?’ Red Beard’s smiling as if he’s interested. He’s looking straight at me now. ‘A modern one?’ he says, with even more of his teeth showing.
I can feel the heat in the roots of my hair. I can also see that bloody old Nigel’s even enjoying this. He gives his head a little rock from side to side, as if to say, Go on!
‘Depends what you mean by modern,’ I say, well-briefed modern/moderne/modernist cultural heritage Volunteer to the fore.