by Anne Kennedy
I’m tired but I have to keep going, I have no choice. I put one foot in front of the other and soon I’m in Courtenay Place, which happens to be in the general direction of the apartment. The nightclubs are still reasonably busy. I pause outside one bar to rest for a moment. A knot of intensely angular people look at me through the gold lettering on the window, and I consider going in on the off-chance that someone will buy me a drink, or even that there’s some antipasti or equivalent left unattended. But the thought of it depresses me, and I continue along the now slightly rubbishy street. An electric stream of people—black clothes, fluorescent teeth, bright blue hair and some red—parts around me like a school of tropical fish. The atmosphere is crazed, hilarious, a little dangerous. Breathing hard, I move inshore, away from the main flow towards the doorways of bars, bumping into knots of people spilling out to smoke on the street. A face or two, three, looms momentarily in mock puzzlement at my fridge. And another and another, and people arch out of the way of me coming through with my fridge on its cart.
In fact, they’re laughing, and I realise they are laughing with me. This cheers me up. I smile back at all the people. I start to feel a connection with them, with the Courtenay Place crowd. It occurs to me that, in general, people are great, aren’t they? Give people an unusual situation and they’ll come to the party. Unless they’re a psychopath, or perhaps a sociopath. If there was a catastrophe right at this moment, an earthquake perhaps, or if the methane from the ocean rose up and devoured us, I would join hands with these people, the revellers, and we would look at each other, really look, and talk, and although we’d only just met, we would go down together feeling a sense of commonality. Something expands in my chest at this realisation. I’m thankful to belong to the human race, even to be living on this knife-edge. One day we’ll all go, one day it will be over; but we will have been together, which will make meaning of the end. And I think of all the endings I’ve had, leaving houses, schools, people—and how, no matter how emotion flowers up, there is always a moment when it’s all over. It’s the thought that we will die and will leave everyone we know behind that makes us care passionately about the moment and care nothing for the future. And, in those minutes, moving along Courtenay Place, I understand what it is to not give a fuck.
At the Taj Mahal (once a public toilet on a traffic island, now a bar) I pause and look up the long scoop of Majoribanks Street that hazes into the distance. Away from the clubs, the people and the smoke, the fresh air has cleared my head. I turn my attention to where I’m going to spend the night. There is a certain fifties apartment that should be half mine, or at least it should be a quarter mine, or one bedroom should be mine, or the space where the couch is in the living room should be mine, or one night on the couch should be mine, and would be but for one lousy day, one arbitrary day in the scheme of the universe.
I set off up the hill, tugging my fridge. Having had no luck finding anyone to look after the appliance in question, I’m thinking I’ll let Miles and Dorothy have it back temporarily until I’m settled again after my trip to Antarctica, seeing as Dorothy wanted it so much in the first place. Well, let her have it. And the whole fucking apartment. Let craziness rule. It *does* seem quite surreal. The villas either side of Majoribanks Street look all cardboardy, like a stage set, as if they’re about to fall on me. As I trudge, I recall the trip I first made up this street with the fridge, the night Mandy and I moved it from the apartment to the safety of her flat, and I chuckle at the thought of the rescue—how we go out on a limb to preserve what’s ours, to hold tight before it’s too late.
I arrive at the apartments and park my fridge in the courtyard next to the garages. On second thoughts, worried someone might steal it, I grab the cart and begin my bumping assent of the Southeast Ridge, eight flights of steps. This takes a huge effort and I stop frequently to rest. Finally, I’m on the landing, breathing hard, the cold air scorching my nostrils. I summon my energy and begin skimming along the balcony, trying not to knock over peg baskets and potplants this time, but I do upset a few. The night is dark, the lights dim, and despite knowing this like the back of my hand I lose count of the doors. When I hear a certain clunk and look down at a familiar cactus rolling like a grenade, I know I’m at the right apartment.
I knock on the door. After a litany of unbolting, Dorothy opens up. She’s in her dressing gown, hair askew, skin sallowly makeupless—looking, in a nutshell, dreadful. She seems a little shocked to see me and the fridge. Her neck twitches like that of a sparrow. I explain right away that I just need to stay for the one night. I hasten to add that they—she and her hubby, who happens to be my ex-partner-in-crime, Miles—can have the fridge back, for a while.
I don’t think this account behoves Dorothy particularly well, and I’ve wrestled with my conscience about telling it, but in the end I think it’s important for posterity to set this down. Dorothy turns into a screaming banshee. You’d think she *wasn’t* now married to my former partner; you’d think she *wasn’t* currently clocking up points, only a matter of time, towards part-ownership of the fifties apartment (which even matches her outfits) under the terms of the Property (Relationships) Act 1976. In between all the yelling and screaming, I get the impression that my request to stay the night has been turned down. I start to beg, and I hear little whimpers of my pleading whenever Dorothy draws breath between screams. She is staunch—gosh, she is so un-Cinema of Unease. She slams the door in my face and my vision is filled with the moonlit blue.
I stand on the doorstep of the apartment where I lived for two years and 364 days. The thought of taking my fridge back down eight flights of steps right now is too much, and although I know I have to do it at some point, I decide I’ll have a little rest before contemplating my next move. I’m exhausted, no doubt from my long evening of editing, walking and thinking, not to mention attending the awards ceremony. And, really, in the scheme of things, there’s no hurry. Did you know, Reader, that despite global warming, the universe is actually slowly cooling, the sun dying out after its Big Bang quite some time ago? Eventually, nothing will matter. In the end, we’ll all be gone and all creation will be gone. I sink down on the balcony, just for a few minutes. Curled up against the cold, the thought crosses my mind that I’ll just spend the night here. Although the concrete is rough and damp, there are worse things. I rock back and forth to soothe myself. From down below comes the sound of a cat yowling, and there’s the subtle tick and crack of the building existing. I could almost drop off to sleep.
And here I’ve remembered what I was going to thank Miles for, so if you’ll bear with me. It’s an important thank you, a big debt, so I must rectify that now, although I probably don’t need to go into too much detail. It’s to do with things falling apart, which they can do in life, inevitably. And I will say that the atmosphere had become tense. The apartment, which had been an awesome place up until a certain point, felt cold. I remember times of wandering around town feeling that I didn’t want to go home. That is not a nice feeling. It means you have no home. Also, I’m not proud to say that I was drinking quite a bit. Miles had stopped, which I found insufferable. There’s nothing worse than a reformed anything. Of course, I don’t blame Miles. He had that terrible, uptight, Noa Valley upbringing, which was behind a lot of this—even the things in the apartment seemed part of it. His grandmother’s furniture, his father’s chairman-of-the-board desk—all were tainted.
The fight that happened the night before Sago Pudding Night involved all of the furniture in the apartment and all the things in the apartment. Somehow the things were all involved. They watched, they jeered. They were not innocent; they were hateful. The heavy, leather-topped desk in the study was especially hateful. Everything we’d thought would make us comfortable had ruined us. The fact is, Miles suddenly went grotesque. The things I’d liked about him before—his big square head, his close-to-the-ground strength—now seemed ugly and despicable. And everything I liked about me—my comfortable plumpness—felt gory and d
isgusting. Even the wind seemed malevolent; not as strong as usual (we were in that strange subtropical phase) but whirling occasionally, out of the blue, against the windows. And the lines we said—Miles with his string of qualifiers which he couldn’t put aside, and I couldn’t bear, and I don’t know what my words were, but his words and mine fit together like wrestlers, locked and destructive.
He did manage to say, without any qualification, ‘You are a murderer.’
And I argued ferociously, because it was true.
We raged, red and scary. I was even scared of myself. He was the monster, and I was the monstress. Sex released this in us, and now it had taken over, taken over sex, talk, our minutes day to day, everything.
The things that could create life destroyed us. And the wanting to be comfortable ruined us. It is all a horrible paradox.
And at the end we used up our love. It plumed into the air like smoke and disappeared, and now it’s gone.
I want to thank Miles from the bottom of my heart, but I find I still can’t remember for what.
I realise I’ve drifted off a bit, lying here on the balcony of the apartment building, and I’m brought around by the furious pop of the little kitchen window being forced outwards. Dorothy’s voice edges through. She yells that she’ll call the police. I open one eye like a dog. I’m getting used to Dorothy.
I half sit up, pricking the palm of one hand on a cactus, and when I recover from that, I murmur once again that they can have the fridge. And I mean it. They can keep it, for all I care. Dorothy’s visage fills the window like a mask. She gestures at her phone, rather threateningly in my opinion. I don’t need to be told four times. I gather my things and begin the long, bumpy, dangerous descent of the Southeast Ridge to the street, sucking from my hand the elemental taste of blood.
In the courtyard, I’m beginning to crumble from exhaustion. My muscles are trembling and my feet feel like lead. There’s no one about. In the shelter of the garages, I hunker down on the concrete tiles, which are gritty as a foreshore from windborne dirt. My teeth are chattering. I turn my jacket collar (and it’s quite a collar) up against the wind; it’s summer, but this is Wellington. Not knowing what else to do, I lay my fridge down on its side with the door open on the ground like a patio. I slide out the wire shelves and stack them on top of the fridge—actually the *side* of the fridge; the world has gone topsy-turvy, and nothing means what is used to mean. Maybe it never did. Thus arranged, the fridge is like a little bach, a summer house. I climb inside and coil inwards like a foetus. Sheltered from the wind, I’m immediately warmer. I yank up the door. The few stars I can see over the top of the apartment building disappear as the seal hisses shut, and I am plunged into darkness. Inside the cocoon of the fridge—which should be cold but is tepid, which should be white but in the darkness is pitch black—I am soothed. I decide to lie for a while in this haven, to recover from my eventful evening, to warm up, to rest a little, and then I will continue on my journey. When I get up, I’ll decide what to do my fridge. Something will materialise, I have no doubt. There will be a solution. But in the meantime, I put that thought on a train on my distant horizon.
The warm dark becomes more and more pleasant. I breathe deeply and feel the tension in my muscles flee like so many lemmings. It’s strange to be lying there, because this was the strange thought that had entered my head about Antarctica, that I would lie in the cold and make it warm. As I remember this, I unwind even more. The idea of getting up is becoming more and more remote. I could stay here all night. It’s probably very late—I’m losing track of time. I’m lightheaded, but mostly incredibly relaxed and floppy. For the first time since I set off from Mandy’s at five thirty the previous evening, I feel no urgency. In fact, it’s the first time since I left the apartment on the 29th of February that I’ve felt so calm. No, for the first time since I passed Theory of Creative Writing, for the first time since I was dismissed from the Glass Menagerie, for the first time since I moved into the apartment, since I met Miles, since I left Hoki Aroha, since I stood on the hill at night with Sorrell looking at the Southern Cross. I’ve never felt so relaxed in all my life.
I begin to drift off, properly this time—I really am exhausted—and to enter the tag-end of a dream that began before I was aware I was dreaming. Perhaps the dream started hours ago, I don’t know, I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting on a vast frozen steppe in my lumpy padded jacket, and in my mittened fists I’m holding, as best I can, big wooden knitting needles and from one of the needles hangs a long piece of shiny, rumpled, scarf-shaped snow, but I realise I’m not knitting anymore, the snow has slid off the needles and I’m pulling it undone in enormous yardarms of coldness; I’m undoing it. I’m undoing snow. At the same time, I know I’m not really on the steppe, I’m koru-ed up in a little knot inside the dark fridge, and when I get out of the dream it occurs to me I should open the fridge door to get some air because it’s quite stuffy. I try to push the door open, but as I do, I hear the makeshift lock that I attached so many months ago click home. I push again, but my arms are pathetically boneless, like flippers against the weight, and the door stays solidly shut. There’s a sense of impossibility, of being pitted against an inanimate object that is bigger than me, that outsmarts me. I make one almighty attempt at hurling myself, half rolling, against it, but it’s useless. I don’t have the strength. I sink back and lie in a huddle for a moment. And I find it doesn’t matter anyway, because I prefer to go back to my knitting or my unknitting. I leave my struggle behind and I sink deeper and deeper into the warming, unravelling cold.
A gash of blinding light opens up before me; surely the sun is coming up on another day. I shade my eyes from the glare, and when I get used to it I realise what has happened. A vast piece of ice has cracked off from the main ice shelf and has floated away. I think I see a polar bear cub, the cutest creature on Earth, tumble from the shelf into the gap with a splash. The furry bundle bobs desperately in the water and for a moment it seems it will succeed in hauling itself back onto the shelf, but it doesn’t, it sinks back down into the water and disappears and that is the last I see of it.
A face is peering at me. It takes me an indeterminate period, perhaps a few minutes, or a long time, to register that this is not the hairy, snout-nosed face of a polar bear, I’m in the wrong hemisphere, and maybe in the wrong dream. This is a human face, a male face, cheekboned, pale, messy, intense like an Egon Schiele drawing. He’s saying something but I can’t make it out because of the roar of something in the background, like stage effects and which I figure out is the wind. I’m coming to. I remember first that I’m me, I’m Janice and I live on Earth. I remember that I’m curled in my fridge and that the fridge, if I could see its colour clearly under the blanding streetlight, is green. When the man speaks again, I feel a gust of his breath, foul as compost. He’s spitting, ‘Here you are, here you are,’ over and over, and I realise he’s crazy. I struggle out of the fridge and sit in a bundle, the wind slamming me. The man crouches in a theatrical gesture of concern. His clothes are so dirty they’ve gone to oilcloth, and for some reason I would like to mend the L-shaped rips in his gunmetal coat. He’s reciting, ‘I saved you, I saved you,’ over and over.
Right then, on the concrete, under siege from the saviour, I remember my lost manuscript, and I’m seized with panic. I knew this before, of course, but the realisation grips me now like delayed shock: The Ice Shelf has gone. My economical, edited version, with all of the bad bits cut out like overripe fruit—it’s gone; my full digital version is gone. Tears spring into my eyes. I shrug off, violently like an earthquake, the man’s smelly tender finger from my cheek.
It’s gone. It’s all gone.
One thing you might have discovered about me as you’ve read these Acknowledgements is that I’m quite tough. It goes with the territory of being thankful. I’m a glass-half-full kind of person, I know that appreciating what one has gives one resilience. Sitting there beside my green-on-the-outside-white-on-the-ins
ide bach, it occurs to me that the edits I so casually discarded might not be gone forever. My thoughts scramble back to the various points in the evening when I tossed away bits of the story, here, there and everywhere—in a drain, in a toilet, in a vase. What was I thinking?! And although these were the parts that, in my wisdom, I’d decided at the time were better expunged, they are still *story*, and I realise now that they were precious. With my heart clobbering my ribs as if to be let out, I struggle up from my ersatz holiday home and fight my way past the smell and aura of the man, who leaps aside, a bit crestfallen to tell the truth, but I simply have no time for thanks. There’s nothing for it. I resolve to retrace my steps and try to find the pages I have abandoned in the course of the evening.
Of course, there’s the risk I’ll run myself late for the plane (I estimate it’s around two o’clock) and will end up having to make a mad, stressful dash for the airport, maybe even having to hitchhike. (No money for a taxi, alas.) But, on weighing it up, I think the risk of cutting it fine is worth it. What am I even *going* to Antarctica for, if it isn’t to write this damn book? If I find my edits, then I’ll have something; I’ll have a version of the story, the bits I’d thought excess but now that I have nothing else, will be everything, will mean everything.
Like a polar bear falling off a melting ice floe (and I don’t think, under the circumstances, I’m being too fanciful here), I leave the fifties apartment for the very last time.
With my fridge in tow and my hold-all shouldered, I jog all the way back down town, waggling like a fish. By Courtney Place I’m already saw-breathed with tiredness. I slow to a walk as I pass soporific bars (the patrons have thinned dramatically) and further on to the apocalyptic mouths of empty shopping arcades. Rather than retracing my steps, I plan to search in geographical order all the places I did an edit. That will be much more economical—and I allow myself a snigger at this irony. Of course I know there’s not a lot of hope in finding my discarded edits, but surely there’s a sliver of a chance, and I have to give it a try. I have nothing else.