by Anne Kennedy
Someone pokes their head into the shadows, and the late daylight winks through his earlobes. It’s none other than our slim-hipped waiter. He asks, with enormous passive-aggression, working his lips, whether he can help me. I tell him I don’t think so, unless he’s a good line editor. He does the corkscrew gesture—the dickhead!—and retreats. Gathering my manuscript, I shuffle back through the fur lips into the real world.
What do I discover? Our table is now populated by young suits quaffing drinks and spraying food. The artists with whom I will go to Antarctica have disappeared. I check around the bar to make sure they haven’t for some reason moved tables, but they are nowhere to be seen. When I pass our erstwhile table on the way out, one of the suits calls out to me cheerily, as if it’s the best news he’s had all day, ‘You just missed them by a minute.’ Thanks a bunch, I reply. Doubtless the artists have gone on ahead to the restaurant. I toddle outside and retrieve my fridge. The only problem is I don’t know which restaurant we’ve chosen. I’m not sure what to do. It’s eight-ish, and the thought that I don’t know where I’m going to spend the night looms. But something will turn up. It always does. It won’t be long till I’ve found the restaurant containing the artists with whom I will go to Antarctica in the vast metropolis of Wellington, and then the night will improve. Bolstered by that thought, I set off down Molesworth Street.
The weather has deteriorated, with squally gusts bringing rain. I’m a little cold in Mandy’s light summer dress, especially with the hole in the side-seam, which is perhaps a little bit gaping now, and I’m regretting leaving my military jacket behind. I pause and unzip my hold-all, which is bursting at the seams. I’d had no idea what to pack, and Training Day hadn’t helped. Would the interiors at Antarctica be air-conditioned like American houses, in which case I’d need only a summer dress and a few T-shirts and skirts, despite it being sub-zero outside? Or would it be like New Zealand houses, colder inside than out, in which case I’d need thermals, woolly jerseys, bed socks and a hot-water bottle? I’ve erred on the side of caution and packed a bit of everything.
I shelter in the entrance to the High Court and burrow down into my hold-all and find a singlet and a long-sleeved undershirt. At the same time, I come across my smartphone in its bed of rice, which I realise weighs a tonne, and I decide to give it all up as a bad job. I bin it—good shot!—in the receptacle on the street. It’s amazing how material possessions fade into insignificance when one is going to Antarctica. Checking that there are no passersby, I quickly unzip the red dress and bung both singlet and shirt underneath. The dress splits on the other side when I elbow it back on, but I can’t mind, there’s too much going on. When I’m done, the black ribbed sleeves and high neck poke out, but I don’t care. For good measure, I pull on a black fleece hoodie and zip it up to the neck.
I box on down Molesworth Street in the fierce wind and squalls of rain, shouldering my bag like a gym bunny without the adrenaline, tugging my fridge and managing the heels as best I can. I’m looking forward to getting to the bottom of the hill and under the verandahs of Lambton Quay. In the meantime, I happen to pass the very building where, not long ago, I consulted a lawyer about Miles and my separation, only to be confronted with bad news: the 364 days. Once upon a time, the very sight of this building and the memory of the tight chambers within would’ve been guaranteed to make me morose. But because of my new frame of mind, my decision to be thankful, I find my chest swelling with gratitude. I actually have a big thank you to make regarding the draconian statutes book of New Zealand, without which I’m sure I would never have written The Ice Shelf.
As I trot past, I remember the day I rocked up the lawyer’s office, ready to sign on the dotted line. I confess that the phrase ‘take him to the cleaners’ was doing the rounds of my mind, but I didn’t really mean it. A fair and equitable settlement, going halves on everything except the fridge, was what I was hoping for. That’s the way it should work. But the Property (Relationships) Act 1976 had other ideas.
The truth is, on that afternoon in the lawyer’s office, once my migraine medication had kicked in and begun to offset the headache brought on by the barrister’s tie, I learned some very shocking news. I had left the apartment one day too early. Auē! Miles and I had been together for one day less than the legal definition of a civil union according to the Property (Relationships) Act 1976, that is one day less than three years (even though one of those years had been a leap year); ∴ we had never been a couple in the eyes of the law. This piece of legislation, no doubt rushed through Parliament in the dead of night by a clutch of Family First members, went like so: one day you wake up and you are entitled to half of a very nice modernist apartment in Mount Victoria with a view over the harbour; the building’s stucco swirls are painted vanilla like Tip-Top ice cream, the neighbours have interesting jobs at Radio New Zealand and Deluxe Café and the Embassy Theatre, and the bars of Courtenay Place are only a hop, skip and jump away. Now backtrack to the night before and prepare yourself for a startlingly different scenario. You are standing out on the street in the wind under the whooping telephone lines. You wobble a little on the steep gradient and clutch your carpet bag, or its contemporary equivalent, the much less mythologised hold-all which contains all your worldly possessions. You own not so much as a teal-coloured kitchen tile of the fifties apartment. You have absolutely no idea where you will go.
Lambton Quay is strangely desolate tonight. The wind is something shocking, peppered with rain, and I cower-walk under the verandahs, trembling like a Tickle Me Elmo despite my layers of underwear beneath Mandy’s thin red dress. It occurs to me that in the absence of another coat, I could put on my Antarctic jacket, so I pause in a shop doorway and haul the down jacket out of my bag. I’m soon enveloped in a fusty-smelling hothouse. While I’m figuring out the multiple zips, a middle-aged couple struggle by, the woman clinging to the man, and they look at me oddly, as if I might eat them. I am tempted to snarl, a strange reaction I know, and I can’t fathom where it comes from, but I refrain and they move on. I give up on the zips and concentrate instead on doing up the copious domes on the jacket. It’s while I am thus occupied that I realise I am right outside a restaurant—and that sitting at a table in the window are none other than the artists with whom I will go to Antarctica. I peer between the menus taped on the glass and as far as I can see the artists are laughing and carrying on and clinking beers. It looks like they’re just settling in, so good timing. Without further ado I angle my fridge (and myself; now that I am bundled for Antarctica, I am not so portable) through the doors and find myself in a lovely Malaysian restaurant with pink tablecloths and delicious aromas.
But I have something to report that makes me rather glum. No sooner have I negotiated the doors than the artists with whom I will go to Antarctica rise up from their table and disappear at a run through some back exit. There in the middle of the restaurant, a bit hot from my Antarctic jacket, I slump next to my fridge. It hits me that it was not a misunderstanding that occasioned the artists with whom I will go to Antarctica to leave me in the Backbencher. And once again, they have indicated in no uncertain terms their preference for avoiding me.
Feeling the teensiest bit down, I continue along the graceful curve of Lambton Quay (curved because it was the beach before they tipped a hillside into the harbour to *re*claim land). All is desolate, it being the CBD, and people going home to their cosy beds. I begin to wonder if I might prevail on Mandy to let me stay one more night after all. In the foamy, wind-filled dark, I stop outside Parsons Bookshop. My feet are killing me—blistered heels, cramped toes—and I can’t go a step further. Almost as if by poltergeist, my high heels somersault one after the other through the air and into the gutter. I must’ve kicked them off, but some vital interior life-force has propelled me and I’m not responsible anymore. It’s the ache. With the same involuntary energy, I tear open my hold-all and pull out a pair of thick woollen socks and the snow boots. When I wriggle into them, they feel like milk by com
parison with the heels. My audible sigh is taken by the wind. No doubt I look weird, in my dress, padded jacket and boots, but I don’t care. There’s no one around anyway. I’m reduced in some way, and boosted in another. Why do we do what we do? It all goes, in the end, anyway.
As I head off, I glance back at the shoes in the gutter. I can’t take them to Antarctica with me. I can’t take them back to Mandy’s. They look lonely, and I feel sorry for them, but necessity rules. When everything is stripped away, that is all we will care about. In the end, I do what is easiest. I edit the shoes, leaving them by the side of the road.
At this juncture, I think it’s appropriate to thank a *real* editor, someone who was instrumental in my securing the Antarctica Residency. I would never have been a contender for the Residency had it not been for the fact that the amazing Tree Murphy took a punt on my first little book. Under no circumstances do I take its coming into the world for granted—the doors it opened for me, the scores it settled with certain people. So, to Theresa ‘Tree’ Murphy, publisher of my first little effort, the roman à clef / autobiographical novella Utter and Terrible Destruction which appeared from Chook Books in 2009, albeit without a spine—thank you, from the very bottom of my heart. Even though my book doesn’t have a spine, it has sold better than anyone could’ve imagined by the dismal publicity budget that was allocated to it.
Here I have a little story to share about the nature of my debt to Tree Murphy and Chook Books. The publisher–writer relationship really goes beyond the professional and becomes one of friendship, no matter how complex. Tree Murphy and Chook Books are the kind of outfit that great literature is built on. Risk-taking, flying in the face of convention. We’re talking Shakespeare and Co., we’re talking the Spiral Collective, who first published the bone people. Of course I don’t rank myself in this league of heavyweights, I hasten to add, but I’m privileged to have had the fine support of Chook Books, no matter how small that support was compared with what they gave the other titles on their list—including the enormous flop of a poetry anthology which almost broke them and which I won’t name here, because it wasn’t anyone’s fault except the publisher’s and the editor’s—and to have been part of this innovative and exciting venture.
After I’d sent my manuscript to Chook Books and Tree Murphy had grudgingly (although in retrospect that was all part of the gritty, back-and-forth, highfalutin, intellectual sparring that goes on between a writer and her publisher) accepted it for publication two years hence if she could get an Arts New Zealand grant, if not I would be shelling out, I burst on to a certain scene. I was, for instance, at the launch of Dean Cuntface’s *then* new book at Blondini’s. I can’t remember the title, but I listened to some long speeches, drank some free wine and encountered a gathering of semi-interesting writer-publisher types. After the launch proper, the proceedings removed to the Matterhorn.
I found myself squeezed in at a table between two L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, identifiable by, respectively, his black polo and her billowy silk top. The atmosphere was soft-lit and humming and the drinks were flying (there was a bar tab for an hour, which one needed to make sure one took advantage of) and so was the conversation, as you might imagine: a stimulating mix of off-the-cuff reviews of the latest poetry collections, novels and literary journals—the most cutting-edge one, according to all those present, seemed to be Ika—and insight into who was sleeping with whom in the literary community. I felt, as the writer of a book even though it didn’t have a spine, absolutely in my element.
Across the table was a blond, long-fringed boy of about twenty-five who looked bashful but was nevertheless making eyes at me. I’m sure I wasn’t misreading his fluttery attentions. I was wearing my black top with the stringy straps and the big floppy bow which drags the front downwards in a seemingly arbitrary way, but it is not arbitrary. (Some people’s writings could be described thus, by the way.) Also, he was probably noticing the lively nature of the conversation in my little huddle. My neighbours either side obviously had not read Emily Post. They talked rather rudely across me, but I do have some manners, and I made it my business to engage fully in the banter. I mean, who hasn’t read Mythologies? Who hasn’t had a prickly one-night stand on Mount Victoria? I kept coming back, however, to the fizzingly electric eye contact with the long-fringed boy across the table. Eventually, when the two persons flanking me had relocated to the bar to continue their conversation, as if I could care less, the long-fringed boy walked around to my side of the table. For a literary person, he walked like a cowboy. It sent a shiver down my spine.
We talked and laughed. He was hilarious, and I was. Turned out he didn’t actually write books, or write about them, or publish them, or promote them; he just read them. He would be one of the plus-or-minus three percent of readers at the Borich Festival. You do need people like that. He had a job in Government or something, I don’t know what. And he was lovely. He had an agile face, an Adam’s apple that travelled up and down his neck in a strangely alluring fashion which I couldn’t keep my eyes off. He was a wee bit metrosexual, a type I don’t usually go for, but at this point in my life I was over, well, not exactly *rough trade* but philandering bullies, as you will understand. I was drawn to the long-fringed boy’s scooped-neck T-shirt, his soft leather jacket, his careful canvas shoes, his perfume. He was so funny and kind and huggable. Suffice to say, at the end of the night I found myself sitting on his couch drinking nightcaps, and then lying in his bed. If you understand the power of love and believe that it can come upon you suddenly, that it can hit you over the head from across a bar table, then you’ll be able to imagine my feelings. At this point, I thought I was in love. I was imagining the life we would have together. We would have a measured, productive, deeply content existence in our happy home. I really needed this. I wanted it. It’s true, I think, that you reach out for what you need, and I needed the levelling influence of the long-fringed boy. I’d reveal his name, but I consider it not politic.
I would like to thank the long-fringed boy for telling me that his two-year relationship with Tree Murphy of Chook Books was over. If I had known that they were engaged at that point, I would not have given way to my intense feelings and climbed into his bed in the rickety but charming Newtown flat and spent all night with the streetlight shining in on us. As it turned out, I have deep gratitude to Long Fringe for withholding this information, or should I say lying through his teeth, because nothing matches a complicated love life for giving grist to a writer’s mill. There is nothing like heartache, remorse, regret and shame for adding zest to a writer’s oeuvre. A little research (‘The Horrifying Love Lives of Famous Authors’ on flavorwire.com) will reveal that many of the world’s great writers had adventurous sexual track records and bouts of unrequited romance. Not that I claim the status of greatness for myself, I hasten to add. No, I leave that to writers of enormous stature, such as Dame Bev Hollis. Who on second thoughts has a blameless history of monogamy. But a trawl through the lives of the greats—Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Byron, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, need I go on?—will show that many of them were experimental, and many of them had the wool pulled over their eyes in the way that Long Fringe blinded me, having me wear a veritable scratchy balaclava of deceit.
The truth is, we didn’t end up doing very much, Long Fringe and me. He wasn’t really into sex in a big way. We groped each other and kissed a bit, although he had a funny taste which I kept puzzling over and that no doubt put me off my stride. He seemed to be off whatever stride he’d ever had. I might’ve almost come at one point, but I didn’t, and he didn’t. But still, I’d fallen for him and he’d tricked me, so that gave us a certain bond. It was enough to ruin a segment of my life, not so much leaving a hole in my heart or tears spilt—that would’ve been preferable—as leaving my book, Utter and Terrible Destruction, which needed to be placed face-outwards on display tables because of its lack of spine, with its shoulder to the wall, as I later discovered on my tours of
bookshops. Since, of course, it being Wellington, someone had spied me disappearing through the door of the Newton flat and had snitched to Tree and, being herself engaged to Long Fringe although I hadn’t been made cognisant of this, she intimated that she was not pleased. Over the phone she wished aloud that she had never laid eyes on my manuscript let alone published it and vowed she would make it her business to ensure my book was as invisible as possible in any bookshop that had the misfortune to stock it, and subsequently she carried out this threat with a single-minded efficiency. Just like that, our writer–publisher relationship, with all its ups and downs, good and bad but nevertheless vibrant, was over.
So thanks *very* much to the long-fringed boy. Without his bare-faced lies, I would very probably have sold more books. I might’ve appeared on the Nielsen Bestsellers List for a week or two and got some traction from that—publicity, reviews, a writing grant, the opportunity to write more books, a contract with a proper publisher; in short, a life as a writer. By that stage, of course, I would’ve been in grave danger. My brow sweats even now as I recall what an extremely lucky escape I had from popularity, and I want to take the opportunity to extend my enormous thanks to Long Fringe for his far-reaching act of utter deceit, without which I would not be the writer I am today.
Walking much more easily now in my snow boots (perhaps a little heavy for Lambton Quay), I decide to look for an internet café where I can catch up on social media. I find a convenience store that advertises internet—although to get in I have to fight my way past a group of teenagers begging; from their preppy clothes and the mock-desperate way they’re going about their panhandling, they seem like middle-class kids who need the train fare home to Noa Valley because they’ve spent all their money on weed. I brush past their jokey pleading and head through the bright café, which is set out in a utilitarian fashion, as if by kids playing shop. At the back is a red curtain with a homemade paper sign with a hollow red arrow pointing to ‘the Internet’. In a brisk transaction, the young attendant, a boy with a buzzcut, very new jeans and a pink button-down shirt, accepts my four dollars for half an hour. He tries to stop me taking my fridge into the computer room, and we have a bit of a back-and-forth dialogue about it. In the end I agree to leave it outside the computer room as long as it’s in eyeshot. The nice young man is just a little bit condescending in telling me that he doesn’t think anyone is going to steal my fridge. I beg to differ, but oh well. I go behind the curtain.