by Anne Kennedy
*
Reader, I have something to tell which is not really a thank you, but I would nevertheless like to relate it in these Acknowledgements. As I’ve mentioned, Mandy put me up from the day in late February when I arrived under unfortunate circumstances, right through until the very night of the Antarctica Awards ceremony (thank you, Mandy). All in all, staying with Mandy was excellent, and I was very lucky (thank you, Mandy).
But one afternoon in July, I was mooching about with, truth be told, nothing much to do. Hail was pelting against the French doors in a grotesque display, even by Wellington standards. Earlier, I’d ducked down to the liquor store and had a pretty riveting convo with the assistant about Hiroshima Mon Amour, but had luckily got home before the downpour. I was just settling down on the couch with a vodka and orange—a bit premature, but the dark clouds made it seem later—when I noticed, still on the coffee table, the copy of Frankenstein. I hesitated, then picked it up.
I’m quite thick-skinned, as you’ve no doubt ascertained, Reader, but I have to confess, when Cook Blub came up with the general consensus that I’d invented some kind of monster in The Ice Shelf, I was shocked. I know it’s pathetic, especially as the Cook Blub members don’t know crap about fiction, as outlined above, but all the same, even after several months, I couldn’t get the notion out of my head. Indeed, the idea had festered (perhaps like its own monster, but not really!). On that stormy winter’s day, something drew me to a certain brink and I looked over into what might be, but probably wasn’t, an abyss.
I began to flick through the fat, fluffy-edged edition of Frankenstein. You know, it wasn’t so bad. There was Victor Frankenstein, clearly a brainy young man with high aspirations, pursuing his studies in science. He had a story to tell, but who doesn’t? So far so good. I fixed myself another vodka and curled up on the couch.
I read that Frankenstein’s monster complained of being lonely and wanted another monster to be his friend. Trying to be obliging even though the monster had wreaked a fair bit of havoc (including committing the murder for which Justine Moritz was hanged, which I remembered from the discussion at Cook Blub), Frankenstein-the-scientist started creating a fresh monster—a monstress, to be precise, as if from the rib of the first monster. But as tales of the original monster’s antics reached Frankenstein-the-scientist, he realised that if there was a monster and a monstress and they became friends, in fact grew to love each other, or even if they didn’t love each other but liked each other in that way, or even if they didn’t like each other much but they both just happened to be there, that would mean little monsters, and the little monsters would have monsters, and in the end the monsters, because there were so many of them and they were well, monstrous, would ruin everything. Faced with this realisation, Frankenstein-the-scientist reneges on the deal, refusing to create a monstress, and Frankenstein-the-monster is so upset he retaliates by killing Frankenstein-the-scientist’s bride, Elizabeth, on their wedding night.
I was starting to find all this a little shocking, it’s true. My instinct to avoid Frankenstein had probably been right. But it was too late now; I was embroiled. I pressed on—skim-reading because it was so appalling, so I might’ve missed a few bits. But I didn’t miss the episode about how Frankenstein-the-monster, angry at being denied his monstress, treks over the ice to flee Frankenstein-the-scientist, and how Frankenstein-the-scientist chases him, down the nights and down the days, because even without little monsters, even with just one monster, he is worried about the damage he could do. But although he searches and searches, Frankenstein-the-scientist cannot find Frankenstein-the-monster on the white expanse, and he despairs. It seems his very knowledge of science, his inquiry—in essence, his great brain—was responsible for unleashing the monster, like a genie let out of a bottle, a black widow spider released from a box of Australian grapes into New Zealand, like ice sheets melting into the sea. As he traipses over the ice, Frankenstein-the-scientist knows he has sealed his fate; he has created his own destiny.
Breathing hard, doing my count-to-twenty routine then fixing another drink, I gave myself a break from the relentless story and flicked back through the book. I was doing okay. *What abyss, Janice?* I said to myself. Then I noticed something shocking, something which even to recall makes me break into a cold sweat. At the end of Chapter II, I tripped over the following words: ‘Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed by utter and terrible destruction.’
Although I was lying on the couch, I nearly fell off it, such was my state of stupefaction and confusion. Yes, *utter and terrible destruction*, the very title of my roman à clef.
It had been lurking there all the time, but I hadn’t known.
Perhaps I did know. Perhaps I had ignored evidence.
Unable to go any further, I threw Frankenstein across the room. It landed wedged in behind the fridge, its fat grey pages open like a miniature, ever-silent accordion. To calm my nerves, I found a novel on Mandy’s bookshelf whose title I can’t remember by someone I can’t remember about a female character I can’t remember except that she goes to Italy and buys a pink villa, plants herbs, cooks excellent pasta dishes, meets some very nice villagers and eventually a nice man and lives happily ever after. I read it and was temporarily soothed.
To return to the evening of the Antarctica Awards—this already hectic night seems to grow more hectic by the hour. Leaving Eric’s, I decide I am not going to tough out the Mount Street Cemetery again, so I take the long way down; I stomp along beside the solid pale bungalow-style houses whose leadlights twinkle under the streetlights and exude an air of people who pay for their grown-up children to get an education instead of making them work in the Glass Menagerie. I hate them.
From some way away I see my fridge poking its smooth flank cutely out from behind the bus shelter where I stowed it. As I get closer, I experience a fast-forward of memories—my days as the solitary ‘Annie’ figure of Annie and Moon, the exciting afternoon I bought the fridge with my compensation money from the Glass Menagerie, the evening Mandy and I uplifted said fridge from the apartment in an hilarious sequence of events. Spurred on by this jumble of virtual memento mori, I hurry towards the shelter and am soon reunited with my special appliance. I reach up to brush leaves tenderly from its satin top.
We’re on the road again, my fridge and I, heading instinctively downtown like a couple of penguins towards the ocean. I’m sure I even waddle a bit, such is the weight of my dear fridge on its cart, my Antarctic hold-all, and the not inconsiderable weight of my laptop bag. At six in the morning I need to be at the airport to catch my domestic flight to Christchurch, so it makes sense to head east. Whichever route I take, we face quite a hike, and my cart arm *is* sore. When I happen to see people running towards the yawning entrance to the cable car as if this is their last transport out of hell, I hurry too, joggling along with my bags and my green charge.
I’d thought it would be too late for the cable car to be running, public transport in Wellington usually favouring an early night, but they seem to have put on an extra service for some kind of Christmas do that has just wrapped up in the Botanical Gardens. Merry people, half seas over and wearing Santa hats, are pouring out of the garden gates and onto the eyrie-like cable car platform. Snippets of drunken Jingle Bells float on the night air. I join the melee, although I suppose it’s to be expected that there is the teensy problem of how to get my fridge onto the cable car. Sure enough, I see the driver in his black coat with a red paperback tucked under his arm, eyeing me suspiciously as he scurries along the platform like a KGB agent. I slow my gait and pretend to be interested only in the panoramic view over Wellington city rather than appearing to have any ambition vis-à-vis boarding the wine-dark cable car. Once the driver is secured in his little driving cubicle—his head bent over what I imagine is a Steven King novel, Misery perhaps—I push through the crowd and mind the gap, wrangling my trolley over it. In a trice I have my fridge positioned in the space just inside the carriage doors.
I congratulate myself on my success in boarding at all, which seems to signal a pleasant change. I’d been starting to get a phobia about just missing out on things at the eleventh hour—dinner with the artists with whom I would go to Antarctica, and of course the prime example, the apartment. Indeed, as I see from someone’s wrist-watch that is jammed up next to my face, it is one minute to midnight.
The carriage is a bit of a squash, if truth be told—standing room only—and rather Gothic. I am held in place by the merrymakers, who now swing from overhead straps as if dead. No hope of venturing further inside and perching on one of the oxblood seats. An initial jolt like an electric shock and the hoot of a whistle indicates our journey has begun. As we sway downhill, sharp objects in people’s pockets spike me, and the smell of sweat, beer and farting is ubiquitous. I weather the frowns of my fellow passengers; in a paramount example of Cinema of Unease, no one voices their opinion about me and my fridge verbally, only via dark looks. No matter. As we cruise sedately down the incline, I am lulled by the motion of the carriage and the comforting thought of the long trek I am being saved in riding the cable car. My breathing is slow and deep, going right to the bottom of my lungs, as if I’m stepping out of the sea. I feel serene, not trussed by anxious thoughts of my fridge or the night ahead or what I will do when I get back from Antarctica. As we emerge from the first tunnel, I smile, gaze out over the slatted buildings and noirish folds of the city and find myself, despite the adverse conditions in the carriage, mulling over The Ice Shelf. An edit rears its head. I feel compelled to execute it then and there, lest I forget.
I manage to remove my manuscript from my laptop bag without bending my elbows, quite a feat, but holding the pages down low, jammed against my body and with fellow commuters pushing and shoving, I can see just enough to remove a piece of the text in which the protagonist begins to feel that life is, in a way, futile, that she has just been created randomly by some kink in the universe and perhaps even just for the universe to get a kick out of her. At the same time, she has a job replacing stickers on objects, basically lying, and that is what she feels about her whole life; that it’s a lie. I screw this section up and have no choice but to let it drop on to the cable car floor. The novel is immediately lighter, better.
In fact, it is very light indeed. To my enormous surprise, I realise that I am clutching in my fist the very last page of The Ice Shelf.
But I have no time to contemplate the thoroughness of my edit. Perhaps I have my guard down due to my unaccustomed calm, I don’t know, but I am not prepared for what happens when the cable car steampunks into the first stop at Salamanca Road. As I am mashed against the doors, hold-all over one shoulder, laptop bag over the other, fridge wedged against the wall, the cable car doors suddenly open, noisily and speedily like a nuclear fission. I’m hurled out onto the platform and as I fly, my laptop bag is flung off my shoulder. I hardly know what’s happening, it’s all so fast, but once I have steadied myself, there’s nothing I can do but watch my bag spin across the tiles, sail out into the air and twist and turn in a graceful slow-motion somersault, down, down into the darkness.
I stand numbly on the platform, contemplating this terrible development. The doors to the cable car hiss closed, then, and the carriage continues its Thunderbirds-speed descent with my fridge still inside.
This critical juncture seems as good a place as any to pause to consider, once again, the notion of thankfulness. At this point I have to report a small dent in my optimism. The thing is, it makes no sense to be optimistic *or* pessimistic because we don’t know the outcome of anything. Earlier tonight, this long night of the awards, I had no idea how my evening was going to unfold. I didn’t know whether things would get better or worse. But because I’m human and, I’m the first to admit, not mindful enough, I feel a little puncture in my heart. And as I write these Acknowledgments, I’m aware of a wound in the fabric of my gratefulness which I hope will not transfer itself or in any way dampen the genuineness of my thanks to you all. Because, as I’ve already said, I could not have written what’s left of this manuscript without you, and I am humbled by that thought.
As the tail light of the cable car disappears into the next tunnel on the incline, I feel the teensiest bit downhearted contemplating my options. My laptop and bag have been taken by the night in the most chilling way, and I’m facing the fact I will never see them again. On the other hand, my fridge will still be in one piece. The cable car people will likely not be very pleased to discover it at the final stop, but it is just a matter of me collecting it from the terminal. The journey down to Lambton Quay is a winding loop through the city. There’s a reason Wellington has a cable car—the hills are so steep that many of them cannot be scaled on foot. But I’m buoyed by my own stoicism. After stuffing the last page of my manuscript—and I have been quite a ruthless editor—into my Antarctica hold-all, I set off down the dark, pitching zigzag that leads to Salamanca Road. Imagine my surprise when, on the first zig, I spy, poking out from the cable car tracks that soar just over my head, the black rectangle that is my laptop bag!
I race back up to the platform, praying—well, as I don’t believe in God I content myself with hoping like hell—that my laptop has not suffered too much of a knock. The fact it has only fallen a short way seems like the most incredible, serendipitous stroke of luck. All I need to do is crawl a little way out onto the cable car flyover, being careful not to touch the tracks, which are electrified, then scoop up my bag and retreat. It doesn’t seem like a Herculean task.
From the platform, I peer down the slope. Compared with the station, the incline falls away into darkness. I must confess to being nervous as I feel my way into nothingness, shuffling like an opium addict. But soon my eyes grow accustomed to the light and I see, in the low, ambient city light, that I’ve reached the place where the flyover leaps out from the hillside and down to the next contour, where a station is wedged among a jumble of steps. I devolve and begin to crawl out onto the suspension. The ground is rather shingly, the carriageway not as wide as it seemed when I surveyed it from the zigzag below. There is just a little wriggle room either side of the track. I wriggle along. Fortunately the last cable car trip of the night has already happened—I was on it!—so I won’t have to contend with any oncoming carriages. Thank goodness for small mercies. But then I look down. The flyover is the height of, say, a fifteen-storey building. Way below, the motorway is strobey with late-night traffic. A mouthful of bile shoots up from my stomach.
Clinging to the verge, I tell myself, Janice, you can do it, in the same tone I summoned when I applied for the Antarctica Residency. Why Fucking Not, Janice? I inch forward. My mantra is not having the effect I hoped for, not on the scale of an arts council application. To be honest, for all my personal pep-talk, I am beginning to wish I’d never set out on this journey. My hands are sweating, my knees are scraped, I can barely see, and I swoon dizzily every time I so much as peek down at the surging motorway. I keep going only because *not keeping going* means facing the prospect of turning around and going back, and I don’t know how I am going to do that. Also, my laptop bag is no more than two metres away, very close to the edge. Janice, I say, somewhat weakly now, keep going, Janice! Thank your lucky stars! I feel the uncertain shroud of Cinema of Unease settle over me.
At this point, I take a breather and *do* happen to glance up at the stars. The night is now clear and a pointillist scatter of the stronger heavenly bodies, those that can assert themselves over the city lights, twinkle. They are beautiful. With my head thrown back, I remember looking at the stars with Sorrell on nights when we delivered rubbish bags to obscure points of the city, often on high, winding roads which engendered a sense of vertigo, both real and metaphorical. There on the flyover, teetering above the motorway, probably not the best position I’ve ever been in in my life, I thank Sorrell. I thank her then, and I thank her now in these Acknowledgements, for bequeathing me the ‘Risk, risk anything’ attitude. I recognise that not many other people
I’ve encountered in my life would have the gall, the balls (if I may be so boy-centric) to go after their recalcitrant laptop like a shepherd goes after her (his) lost sheep.
The realisation of how lucky I’ve been with my role models empowers me, and I surge forward the last couple of metres, caring nothing for my knees, my hands, for the fifty-metre drop to the motorway. With cars streaking like neon fish below, feeling dizzy as hell, I army-crawl the last metre to where my laptop in its bag rests on the edge of the flyover. I sigh with relief that I’ll be reunited with the digital iterations of my novel, not to mention my hardware. I reach out and the tips of my fingers make contact with the cool vinyl of the bag—my beloved concertina, my personal Limbo—and I just about have it in my grasp. But at that moment, a huge gust of wind spirals up from the foment of air between the flyover and the motorway. I feel the vinyl recede from my fingers and my laptop bag is flipped over the edge.
For a moment I lie still, my head on the gravel, abject, like a priest giving himself over to a life of paedophilia. I don’t want to, but I drag myself forward and peer over the edge of the flyover. I look down and see that the laptop and the bag have parted company. The bag is still zeroing down on the wind. And on the slick motorway, bits of metal spray out like sparks from under the wheels of speeding cars. That was my laptop.
I have to say, a tiny hopeful thought, even then, goes through my mind that this is not the end, that I could scoop up the pieces, dodging cars, and that a computer geek with a beard and baggy jeans working out of a prefab on a disused site might reassemble those pieces lovingly. But it’s just a thought.