by Anne Kennedy
Even as I prepare to leave Mandy’s, I have no idea what I am going to do with my fridge while I’m away in Antarctica, not to mention after I get back and am scanning the Flatmates Wanted. This scenario makes me the teensiest bit downhearted. I stand in front of the fridge, surveying its cool green flank and racking my brains, and I take a big breath (the snug dress is making me light-headed). It occurs to me that Miles might store the fridge at the apartment on a temporary basis seeing as we’re still good friends, and especially seeing as I should by rights be part-owner of said apartment. Surely I should be due the space of a fridge for a few weeks? I wonder also if Mandy might relent and let me leave the fridge in her living room where it has been no trouble at all, but, given what happened when I plugged it in the day before, I don’t really think so. I’m certain there’s something wrong with the power box. Well, there is now, but I absolutely refute that it had anything to do with my fridge. It doesn’t even use that much electricity. While I’m mulling over my dilemma, I suction open the fridge door. The shelves are empty save for one lone document, and in that moment the sway of the fridge rocking on its unstable feet causes the wodge that is The Ice Shelf to slide out and onto the floor in a soft flurry, like snow.
The sight of the pretty fan of pages on Mandy’s dusky pink rug pulls at my heartstrings. We’ve been through a lot, my manuscript and me, over the last rather tumultuous year. I know what you’re thinking, Reader—why do I even have a manuscript at this point? Surely The Ice Shelf will be the product of my trip to Antarctica? The truth is, my imagination has been running overtime even before I set foot on the icy football fields. I haven’t been able to stop the sentences from pouring out of me like a renewable resource—make that a non-renewable resource, because The Ice Shelf is obviously a one-off. I can hear a few bleats of surprise from those of you who don’t know much about the nature of creativity. You’re asking, What about research? Wasn’t I meant to go down to Antarctica first? Wasn’t that the whole point? That I would be like the past recipients of the Antarctica Residency, the Bill Manhires, the Anne Nobles, the Gareth Farrs? Hurtle down to Antarctica, check out the whiteness and the yellow-eyed penguins, take notes in shorthand (or a few photos, in Anne’s case; some noises in Gareth’s), come back to Enzed, and *then* make a work of art? Which would happen to be a book in my case because I am the writer. But you’re forgetting one thing, quite an important thing with a capital I. The Imagination. The sheer power of *What If?* Those words, those little guys signifying the big idea, made me surge ahead with my novel.
Rest assured, at this point I’m not under any illusions about the completeness or otherwise of The Ice Shelf. Far from the manuscript being finished, far from my trip being redundant, I’m going to Antarctica to do something crucial: to chase concrete significant detail. Once I’ve seen the way light jumps off the ice with the sun low on the horizon, tasted matchlessly cold air, felt the numbness of frozen hands, and heard the crack of a huge ice shelf falling into the sea and the whimper of a baby polar bear separated from its mother—make that the ‘arp’ of a seal pup, because yes, I know there are no polar bears on the Southern Polar Cap—The Ice Shelf will leap off the page.
Doubtless I will come back with a whole lot more thank yous to add to these Acknowledgements. For instance, the people who are there with me—the artists with whom I will go to Antarctica, the staff, the scientists; I will even, perhaps, without sounding too pompous I hope, want to thank the landscape, the ice. I’m open to the possibility that something profound could confront me down there, as I look out into white nothingness, as I perhaps lie down on a vast frozen white sheet and the little cold space inside me becomes accustomed to the cold. Is that possible? I don’t know, but I do know the ice will be momentous. The frozen landscape may do—or appear to do—something transformative with time. Time will be frozen. Everything will be stopped. To be honest, I am a little afraid.
As I stand on Mandy’s rug looking down at the pages scattered at my feet, I pause. Although it’s getting on for twenty past five and high time I left for the awards ceremony where I will be honoured with my prize and people will applaud, I find that I am literally incapable of putting the baubles of success before art. I kneel and tenderly scoop the leaves of The Ice Shelf into my lap. I begin to flip fondly though the elegant, double-spaced pages I know so well.
But at this point something else distracts me. In the process of my scooping I notice a small hole in the pink rug. I am a little abashed because it looks like a cigarette hole and I’m hoping that I’m not responsible. Just the night before, there’d been a bit of a to-do about some minor scorching, and I’m anxious not to be the perpetrator of any outstanding burn issues. Tentatively, I insert my finger in the hole. The perimeter is singed black and feels crisp to the touch. I push through to the carpet underneath but it has gone, and the underlay has gone. My heart flutters while my finger continues on into nothingness—through the place where floorboards should be and into the ceiling of the flat below. I push on and on, and soon my whole hand is swallowed. It feels hot, very hot. I pull my hand out quickly and crouch down to peer into the hole. It seems that where the downstairs flat should be is fiery chaos and I think I hear a soundbite of a great multitude of people wailing.
I sit up and shake myself. My mind is leading me a merry dance, no doubt because I’ve had much going in my life over the past several months. But things are distinctly looking up. To summarise:
1. My settlement with Miles, although not pretty, is at least resolved.
2. My ten months at Mandy’s are coming to a natural end.
3. The night of the awards ceremony stretches excitingly ahead.
4. It is the eve of my prestigious journey to Antarctica.
5. I have stopped thinking about the little warmth that is now cold.
I’m poised at a junction, some paths ending, others beginning. My heart literally leaps. I feel cleansed and joyful and I also remember my digital community of fellow writers. Is it this charged state I am in that compels me to see with new eyes the manuscript that has been my intimate friend all year? I don’t know, but I do know that creativity is fickle. It turns corners, does somersaults, goes its own way, and it certainly doesn’t sit around waiting for the right moment to do so. Then and there on the rug, with the fanned pages of The Ice Shelf, brilliant white in the glowing post-storm light, I remember Clancy’s advice to me, that the manuscript was too *too*. I decide she meant it is flabby, but I may have unwittingly soaked up a self-deprecating manner from Miles over the last almost-three years. Maybe I could rate a mention in Cinema of Unease after all. Rather than flabby, my novel is a bit discursive around the edges. But truth be told, I’m also slightly worried I may be unleashing something. Without further ado—all dressed up in a posh frock and finishing the last dregs of my vodka and orange which I’d forgotten about during the smartphone fiasco—I decide to carry out some judicious edits on The Ice Shelf to make room for the concrete significant details that I will acquire in Antarctica like extra luggage. I suppose this process is not especially new to me. I’ve always been the kind of writer who lets her work see the light of day only when it has been rigorously drafted. I’m probably too much of a perfectionist for my own good, and that’s why I don’t have the publication record of some people I could mention who fling things into the world half baked. And although it may seem a shame—a tragedy even—to cut bits out of The Ice Shelf, the artist in me knows it will be towards a greater good. As a writer, one needs to be a Libertarian of the page, lopping words that do not earn their keep, like so many homeless and disabled people. Not that I am like that politically, I hasten to add!
I whip out the pages that concern the protagonist finding that she has outgrown her boyfriend because she’s been developing as a person whereas he has stayed still, even slid backwards, and she has embraced a new life of freedom and creativity. Pages 1–12, gone. I stuff them into the foot-operated rubbish bin in the kitchen, pushing them well down undernea
th polystyrene meat trays and plastic yoghurt cartons because actually, I’m a bit shy about my writing and I wouldn’t want Mandy to discover my rejects.
While I’m in the kitchen, I remember that the previous night I’d put Mandy’s one pair of heels (she doesn’t get out much) in the freezer. Like the dress, they were a little on the small side, so I’d employed a stretching technique I found on the internet, namely to fill a Ziploc bag with water, feed it into the shoe and leave it to expand overnight in the freezer. I retrieve the shoes from the freezer and wriggle my feet into them like Cinderella #2. They’re not too bad.
I still haven’t solved the problem of where to stay tonight, or what to do with the fridge for that matter. As things stand, I have no choice but to take it with me, odd as it may seem to wheel a fridge through town, but I’ve no doubt a solution will present itself shortly; I have friends dotted about the place, and I’m confident that in the course of the evening—best scenario, on the way to the Antarctica Awards—one of them, most likely Francie in Aro Valley, will agree to house my fridge temporarily. As a last resort there’s always Linda Dent, a really excellent friend who’d do anything for me. She lives in Island Bay so quite a trek tugging my handcart, and I hope it won’t come to that, but at least the journey out there is reasonably flat, nothing compared with the cantilevering that’s gone on vis-à-vis Mandy’s fire escape and the Southeast Ridge of the fifties apartment. Suffice to say, I know I won’t have too much trouble finding a short-stay for my beloved green appliance. I wheel my handcart out from where it’s been propped against the fridge and announce to the room that I’m going to hell in a handcart, even though I’m going to the cold, but Antarctica is getting less cold all the time, and perhaps in the future there *will* be a little man with a pitchfork down there, in a hot, muddy Inferno, and my metaphor will resound prophetically. Manoeuvring the fridge onto the handcart takes some effort, but finally I manage to tip the big green chunk to a 35-degree angle and reverse it from its ten-month tenure in front of the TV (there were never any good programmes on anyway). I award myself a little rest, my arms crossed over the cart handle like a roadworker on their shovel. From this position I notice the copy of Frankenstein that I hurled across the room back in about April is facedown where the fridge was. I recoil, reliving in a rush the horror of the monster and monstress, or at least the *idea* of her—it’s a long story. But after a moment my heart calms down and my palms dry off, and I realise I don’t need these feelings anymore, and actually, over the last few months, I’ve moved on from all that. I pick up the paperback, blow away some dust-bunnies and a couple of dead daddy longlegs and put it on the coffee table.
The lightning has stopped, the rain has cleared, and all that’s left of the storm is grey clouds shredding over the western hills. I decide to stuff my regular khaki jacket into the sunroom drawers—it doesn’t look good with the red dress, and I’ll only be out and about for a couple of hours. By mid-evening I’ll be snug as a bug at a friend’s house for the night. And tomorrow—Antarctica-wear! I shoulder my hold-all (the dress makes a farting sound somewhere under the sleeve where something separates, but it’s not too bad), and grasp my cart. Complete with my laptop bag containing my laptop and my slimmed-down manuscript, I manoeuvre out of Mandy’s door for the last time. I spend the next twenty minutes bumping my fridge very cautiously down the fire escape, having one or two teetering close calls (especially in the heels) when steps give way, but I make it.
As I journey down, I can’t help but recall the reverse trip I made, ten months earlier, coming up the hill with the fridge. But more importantly, it reminds me that I have deep and heartfelt thanks to make to Mandy vis-à-vis the Tortuous Sex Night and beyond, as you will see.
As things turned out, I am of course deeply, *deeply* indebted to Miles and Dorothy for all that ensued following the evening of docudrama described above because once I’d escaped the shackles of the relationship, once I was *fancy free* (to quote Janet Frame’s little friend), I embarked on what became a truly halcyon period of my life. In the short-term, however, being unceremoniously ejected from the apartment, I stood on the pavement that night ten months ago and considered my options.
To provide some setting: the weather conditions were not just windy but gale-force. (Wellington.) My scarf remained horizontal, like that of the Petit Prince; conversely, my spirits sank. I have to admit that on being newly single, I was flummoxed. Some people finding themselves in such a situation would simply trot off home to Mummy and Daddy where a childhood bedroom would be waiting, a frilly bed made up with an electric blanket turned on excitedly by Mummy after the phone call in anticipation of arrival, and with stuffed toys from long ago, Bimpy and Eeyore among them, still lining the pelmet. If, however, you happen to have parents who are more interested in art and substances, they may not have provided stability and continuity for you in that way. You probably do not have a twee childhood bedroom to return to every time things go awry. You are exceedingly grateful for this state of affairs because otherwise you would be a smug, self-satisfied prat. But you can’t suppress the pang of despair that rises up when you realise that, having been dispatched from the apartment, you have nowhere to go but up Majoribanks Street to Mandy’s flat.
I turned on my heel and began my toiling ascent of Majoribanks Street, stopping for breath several times. If anyone had cared to look out their window they would’ve seen a person apparently devolving—yours truly, loping up the gradient between the wooden villas, bowed down by my hold-all and my troubles, which I can tell you on that night seemed very great. But it was one o’clock in the morning, and I doubt if anyone was watching me in the throes of my devolution. In the liminal space between the fifties apartment and Mandy’s flat, I was perhaps more alone than I’d ever been in my life, and that’s saying something. The journey seemed to take hours and to suck me into an abyss in which anything was possible. But in fact, within ten minutes I was standing in Mandy’s cracked concrete yard, exhausted but beginning to recover my good humour which had not, I’m pleased to report, strayed very far. Mandy rents the top floor of a villa, a rickety specimen, makeshift, carved up into flats, so not quite as luxurious as the fifties apartment. But did I care? Not a bit. As I stood there, breathing hard, I noticed a handcart tucked along the side of the villa, cocked outside another flat, and I filed that information for future reference. Gathering the last watts of my energy, I scaled the steps of the glorified wooden fire escape, hanging on tight in the wind, and was soon knocking on the glass door.
Eventually Mandy appeared, blinking in her mousy polar-fleece dressing gown. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said—as if there could be any doubt. She opened up, and I limped through into the living room and dumped my hold-all with relief. Mandy was looking at me as if I’d stepped out of The Woman in White (which springs to mind), and I had to beg her for a drink, which I wouldn’t normally do to *anyone*, but these were extraordinary circumstances. I mean, I’d just a few minutes ago broken up with the love of my life. I guess, to give her her due, Mandy wouldn’t understand that because she is not exactly relationship material. A certain frumpiness, that’s all.
Mandy didn’t have much of a drinks cabinet, but I remembered a wine-dark trifle she’d made for her Book Club Christmas party, which I was invited to even though I didn’t belong to Book Club (long story), so I knew there must be something in the house, a fact proven by a recce to the kitchen. Drinking a rather sticky sherry while sitting cross-legged on the pink rug, I poured out the sorry tale of the evening—the turgid sex scene, the defamatory name-calling and my eventual stately exit. Mandy was so shocked by all this (she really is a sweetie, sheltered and naïve) that I had to literally ask if I could stay. She agreed of course, and I mentioned how it would be preferable for me to have her bedroom rather than the porch because of my allergies. I should add that Mandy had been advertising her porch on Trade Me for weeks but hadn’t managed to rent it despite a succession of deadpan (I imagine) interviews. I suppose Mandy isn�
�t cool enough to attract a big awesome houseful of interesting flatmates. Lucky for me! Right now, fresh from a broken relationship, I couldn’t have cared less that it was just Mandy and me; despite everything, I’ve always held her in the highest esteem. As I snuggled into bed, listening to the cyclone rattling the windows of the porch but feeling cosy in the bedroom, I thanked her from the bottom of my heart, and I do so again in these pages. Thank you, Mandy! I can almost hear her desultory, ‘You’re welcome.’
On my second night at Mandy’s, a Saturday, I suggested something to her as we ate our vegetarian stir-fry in front of the TV. Mandy liked to watch the news, and then reruns of BBC mini-series about self-satisfied middle-class white English couples and their tragic but humorous existential travails. They were up to episode something, but I had a better plan for the late-late show. Mandy wasn’t too keen, but after my pointing out the ethical rightness of it, she agreed to help. One of the things I love about Mandy is that she’s open to anything. At around eleven, while Mandy crashed around doing the dishes, I dialled the fifties apartment on her smartphone (she had more minutes than me). There was no answer.
‘Bingo!’ I called to Mandy.
‘Really?’ said Mandy meekly from the doorway, her hands like two starfish in red rubber gloves.
‘Are you joking!’ I said. I informed Mandy that this was an incredible stroke of luck. We might’ve gone on night after night waiting for Miles and Dorothy to be out. I had a routine all practised in the eventuality of either of them answering the phone, to do with wrong numbers, thick accents and random security checks, but none of it was necessary; we’d scored a hole in one. It also probably meant they weren’t having sex, unless they were going at it in the back of a car or in the bathroom at some party, but that was unlikely given Miles’s endearing sense of propriety and Dorothy’s staidness. I did briefly entertain the idea that they were so busy porking in the apartment they couldn’t come to the phone, but that also seemed off the radar. The more likely scenario was that sex had worn off for them licketty split, as I’d predicted. I didn’t mention this analysis to Mandy, as she doesn’t really get the whole sex thing. A certain purse-lipped prudishness.