The Ice Shelf: An Eco-Comedy

by Anne Kennedy

  The dark, heavy-framed windows of the Backbencher blink square-eyed like a nerd as I approach. The establishment is closed, as predicted. Beside the heavy door layered with generations of tacky paint, I angle my fridge so it won’t careen down the hill and visor my hands on the glass just in case there’s anyone in there, kitchen staff tidying up, a cleaner; you never know. Not a sausage. In the frosted reddish light seen through my palm-viewer, the grotesque papier-mâché caricatures on the walls leer down with their shadowy eyesockets. I can make out the coat rack at the entrance to Narnia, except it’s not Narnia anymore, all the coats have gone but for one forgotten jacket swinging limply in some kind of breeze offered up by the space. The moony flagstones beneath have been swept bare. I peer some more, trying to will my edit to materialise where I dropped it under the rack, but it’s not going to happen and I sigh and accept the fact that I’ll never remember what the protagonist went through in the Theory of Creative Writing class she was let into at one minute to midnight.

  Ah well, it was always a long shot. I have many more opportunities to retrieve my edits, so I remain in reasonably good spirits as I head up Bowen Street. The four-lane slope, usually jam-packed and barping with horns, is ghostly; supermarket bags tumble like the seeds of a swan plant. I plough on up the hill in the gale, my clothes horizontal à la Petit Prince. The National Library will be closed, but I can’t let it rest; I’m on a mission. Anything is worth a try, isn’t it?

  On the broad steps of the library (having parked my fridge on the street where I figure it’ll be safe for a minute or two), I recall how I blithely screwed up, like there was no tomorrow, a key moment from The Ice Shelf to do with the young protagonist’s adventures at a commune. It breaks my heart somewhat to visualise the ball of paper, intricate like a skull, tumbling downwards as if in a certain Eisenstein film, and I know it’s hopeless, and indeed the Odessa-looking landscape is spectacularly empty of paper balls. There goes the section in which the protagonist is sexually abused by a stoned person in a commune, catches Hepatitis A and is held responsible for accepting the court summons which spells the end of the commune, even though no one told her not to accept any packets from strangers who come knocking at the door.

  But, lo and behold, as I emerge near the scary glass doors (they somehow make you aware of the damage they could do), I almost bump into a security guard rattling an orchestra of keys. He’s mostly stomach, his polyester orb set like a giant black pearl between the wings of a bomber jacket. I’m pleased to see him. As I stumble through my story, his face takes on a series of sceptical maroon-coloured twists, but I keep going and somewhere along the line he seems to take pity on me; I find myself talking to his back as he manipulates the keys, escorts me inside and tells me over his shoulder in a strangely fluting voice that this needs to be snappy.

  We cross the huge, empty polished wood floor. Trotting behind the guard’s squeaking clodhoppers, I tell him I need to check the bathroom and we divert upstairs immediately. In the doorway to the Ladies, the guard turns his purple face away decently from the newly flickering strobe and chinks his keys, which I interpret as some kind of stopwatch. I’m quick. I dash in and am reunited with the tiles, the sealed quality, the subliminal drip going on somewhere. I know there’s no future in the cubicle where I flushed and flushed, but I check anyway, peering into the bowel of toilet number three, hoping for an episode about the protagonist’s sojourn with a stepfather and a puppet, but there’s just the faint stench of urine and mould.

  On the landing, I tell the security guard about the Chinese vase, not feeling hopeful, but his cheeks spring up like frog’s legs and he’s smirking; it seems he’s beginning to think this is a lark. Puffing and farting, he leads me up the stairs. I don’t need any more encouragement. I follow close on his heels. When I spy the red vase standing like a little saint in the far corner of the Kōwhai Reception Room, my heart leaps. Surely my edit will be inside. I skate across the hardwood floor and squint into the china throat as if with a monocle. Yes! At the bottom, my screwed-up edit is nestled like a carved ivory ball. I feed my arm into the vessel, but although I’m plunged right up to the shoulder, my fingertips wriggle into nothingness.

  The guard is yapping into his phone now, tromping back and forth across the doorway as if he’s in an art-house film. I don’t wait for another invitation. I lay the vase down gingerly on its side—it crunches on the floor very slightly—and peer inside. The paper seems stuck on the bottom; I suspect chewing gum. I roll the vase back and forth and look inside again, but *no change* (like the I Ching). I’m determined I’m going to retrieve the edit, which if I remember rightly concerns love.

  The guard continues to cross the doorway and talk into his phone, his voice travelling up the register. It seems there’s a drama going on. While he’s otherwise engaged, I brace myself and wrap my arms around the vase—the crazed surface is rough and slippery, and when I try to heft it, it’s as heavy as an eight-year-old. I upend it gingerly, its bottom near my face, and give it a tentative shake. Craning around the vase’s horizon, I see that nothing has come out. I shake it again and again, and I create an imaginary place mid-air where each convulsion stops because there’s nothing else but make-believe to rail against. Six or seven almighty shakes, but on the last one (it would be), the vase slips from my grasp and wallops the floor. I glance at the guard, but he’s on a roll. The vase lies on the hardwood, split in two neat yin-and-yang shapes.

  My heart thumps madly, and I’ve almost forgotten why I’m here. I grab my poor screwed-up paper ball from one side of the vase. My assessment was right—it was stuck to the bottom with chewing gum. I unfold it feverishly to see which bit I’d thought so little of to edit out during the awards speeches. But this paper is not about love.

  It is some kind of schedule—oh, the irony—it’s a programme for the Prime Minister’s Awards for the Arts. The list of recipients, literary stars, success stories with happy childhoods behind them—this alone makes me depressed, but more so, I’m gutted that this is not my text.

  I’m quite distressed and my hands are shaking, but I know I have to get out of here in short order. I skid out onto the landing where I almost bump into the guard as he pockets his phone and hurries past me into the reception room. My last sight of him is his purple face turning in slow motion towards me. I tumble down the stairs as fast as I can with my hold-all, press the green release button on the doors, and I’m outside in the wind again.

  The permanent loss of my National Library edits, not to mention the Backbencher edits, are all quite disappointing. But I keep buoyant. There are still the grounds of Parliament.

  I enter through the upper gate, wind down the snaking path to the flat expanse outside the Beehive and trudge across the springy, close-shaved lawn towards the drain where I tossed my edit all those hours ago. The rusty grille has accumulated more leaf matter and rubbish, no doubt the result of an evening of wind. I kneel down to stare into the dungeony chute and a smell of acrid damp rises up to greet me. The black oozing sides of the drain catch what little light comes from a lamp nearby, but it’s a long way down and all I can see at the bottom is the odd glint when a droplet lands, from the echoey sound of it, in a shallow, confined pool. No hope of finding the edit I so casually discarded, the tale of the protagonist’s crazy baby-boomer mother and her sociopathic but thankfully briefly starred girlfriend, which has been relegated to the city’s waterways.

  Getting up rather wretchedly, I catch sight of a figure tipping down the steps of Parliament towards me. As he gains the lawn, I recognise the same strutting security guard from earlier in the evening. What a long shift he’s doing. The labour laws in New Zealand really are shit. I grip my trolley and make for the iron gates that exit to the cenotaph and the tomb of the unknown soldier.

  I try to keep my spirits up—all is not lost; I still have the chance of finding at least two of my edits. Back down on Lambton Quay I pass homeless people lying along the footpath. A poor old dude in a foetal posit
ion outside upmarket Kirks follows my progress with one eye, like a dog, and I smile, feeling like a complete arsehole and forgetting momentarily about my edits. I wonder what we’d do, this old guy and me, if the world were to end just now as I was walking ahead of him, if millions of tonnes of seafloor methane rose up and suffocated us and every last living creature, and these were our last moments on earth. Would I hold my nose and sit with him, or just not notice the smell, and hold hands as we burned up? Would we feel a connection with each other, happening to be on Lambton Quay together at the end of the world? I leave him behind and things go on as they always have, and I start to think about my edits again.

  This is my second visit to the cable car depot tonight, so I’m beginning to feel as if I live here—and my fridge is likewise well-acquainted—as I make my way up the covered lane to the ticket box. The place is deserted, lit by a single naked spotlight which is impossible to look at. The ticket person has gone, the security guard has gone. A clock on the wall, I notice, says it’s almost three. A pigeon awake at this hour pecks at secret things on the concrete floor under the bleachers. I stand in the cool spotlit shadows and peer through the gates, which are now firmly shut. The cable car is parked at the bottom of the incline. I know there is the slimmest of possibilities that lying on the floor in that carriage is an edit in which the protagonist feels acutely the futility of existence. I can’t believe I tossed it away, just like that.

  I grip the cold rough iron bars of the gate and shake them. Then something incredible happens. The gates swing outwards in my hands, clanging slightly, and I find myself with my arms flung open and tipped forward with the heaviness of the ironmongery. My involuntary laugh echoes eerily around the depot. So apparently the security guard was too busy behaving like John Travolta to lock up properly! I’m not going to look a gift-horse in the mouth. Leaving my fridge beside the ticket booth, I tiptoe through the yawning gates.

  The carriage is nestled nose-down, as if it came to a sticky end and embedded itself in the level platform. As I step close to its retro, Wild West flank, I feel a chill emanating from it. I try the clunky silver handle and step back in surprise as the door swings out, almost collecting me. As I step inside, the carriage sways with its own private Richter scale. In the vinyl-and-oil smelling interior, my eyes pull all the available light from the splashy dark and I take in the boxy, utilitarian surfaces inside the car, the vibrating wires that soar overhead and out of sight like the flightpaths of crows, the black curve of the Victorian tunnel walls. I am swallowed by the insistent chaotic lines of industry and, standing there, tears come; it’s pathetic. Nothing works, and nothing will ever work again because there are no people here, only me.

  I remember my edit, and look at the floor. Swept clean. What I did here, what I undid here, it’s gone.

  *

  On Willis, I make for the spot where I left my edit in which the protagonist loses, in a spectacular miscarriage of justice, her share of a fifties apartment in Mount Victoria. I reach yuckily into the designer rubbish bin outside the has-been sixties office block. Again, the missing tiles, the scratched-up shine, the embedded filth—it makes your heart sink that once upon a time everyone would’ve been congratulating themselves on modernity. No luck; the cleaner has visited.

  Cuba Street is all but deserted, the bars closed. I slug up towards the bucket fountain, nodding like a donkey with tiredness. A couple of people are sleeping in doorways, rugged up, and a suspicious-looking man is loping down the street. I haven’t got time to be scared. I’m on a mission. I arrive at the rubbish bin outside the Matterhorn. It’s full, and I rush towards it. In there somewhere is a section about lost love, about loss negating love in equal portion so there could be no headway, and as time goes on, loss beginning to accelerate, ∴ as fast as love starts to grow, something bats it down, uses it all up, so in the end, there is only loss.

  Biting the bullet, I begin to go through the bin. I take every piece of rubbish out one by one and drop it on the ground. I don’t need to tell you that it’s pretty disgusting, this detritus of fast food and alcohol—even worse than the waste produced by the writers plus-or-minus-three-percent-readers at the Borich Festival. But I keep going. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a small cart arriving at the top of the mall. A rubbish man is working his way down the street, emptying every bin, and I thank my lucky stars that I got to this bin before he did.

  I get to the bottom. There is no edit.

  Then I realise: I have been looking in the wrong fucking bin! A few metres away is another bin, the bin in which I deposited my edit. The rubbish man in his small cart has arrived at this bin; he wrangles the black plastic bag out of its cage, tosses it onto his cart and drives away. I run after him, calling, but he does not look back as he continues on down Cuba Street.

  I try not to be downhearted. I shoulder my hold-all and grasp my cart. Though all seems hopeless, I must go on.

  I head along to Courtenay Place and eventually I am toiling up Majoribanks Street. I park my fridge at the bottom of the fire escape and scale the steps. The glass doors are locked, but it doesn’t take much to shake them open. I step onto the pink rug. This is the exact place where I spread out my manuscript and made the decision to be economical. The curtains billow out from the open French door. I hear faint snores coming from the bedroom; Mandy was always a deep sleeper.

  I tiptoe to the kitchen and work the pedal on the bin in which I deposited my first edit all those hours ago, before setting off to the awards ceremony. I remember tucking the pages right at the bottom, under the other refuse, the bit where the protagonist is kind of sick of her boyfriend and is confident there will be many other people she feels this way about. Love will be a renewable resource.

  The bin is empty. Mandy has put the rubbish out.

  I am devastated.

  Surely Mandy will let me curl up and grab an hour’s sleep and leave my fridge here while I am in Antarctica. I fold myself onto the L-shaped couch, the place where Cook Blub once sat all in a row, spouting their opinions about agency and belief. I’m drifting off when I am disturbed by a scream. It’s Mandy standing in the living-room doorway. She’s wearing her dressing gown, her hair is wild, and she looks like a harridan. When I reveal my face from the under the throw, she sinks her shoulders.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she says thickly. She glances about. ‘Where’s the fridge?’

  ‘Downstairs,’ I say.

  ‘It’s not coming in here.’

  ‘I know,’ I say, as if that is completely obvious, but I’m disappointed.

  Now that I am discovered, I know I have to go. I sit up and make a bit of a thing of getting up, putting my head in my hands. I look sideways. The paperback about the monster is still mashed against the wall, open, as if weeping.

  ‘Can I have a cup of tea?’ I ask.

  Mandy has her arms folded and her head sunk in the fluffy folds of her dressing gown. She shakes her head tightly. I put on my boots and Antarctic jacket, watched, I am aware, by Mandy from under her eyebrows.

  ‘You’re wearing my dress,’ she says. ‘And it’s ripped!’

  I look down, and it’s true; it is quite ragged. ‘Do you want it back?’ I ask Mandy, in good faith.

  ‘No,’ she says. There’s something new in Mandy, a new decisiveness. No trace of Cinema of Unease. I’m actually impressed.

  The wind buffets me dangerously on my descent. The yard at this hour is dark and creepy, the one pathetic tree in the middle of concrete fighting the gale. I shiver. To the right against the corrugated-iron fence is a line of four red-topped wheelie bins which constitute the rubbish collection for the whole villa. I consider opening each one to see if I can find the bag that Mandy has tossed. When I open the first one, the smell of rotting food makes me gag. The bin is full to the top with stuffed plastic bags, many of them splitting, their skins glinting under the streetlight. I reach out and touch one, feeling the strange warmth brewing within. I cannot do it. I cannot put my hands down into the rub
bish.

  My edits have all gone. They have gone.

  I’m outside the Taj again, on the traffic island that is the confluence of Courtenay Place, Mount Victoria and the boulevard that leads to the southern suburbs. There’s nobody about, and the atmosphere is desolate. I am due at the airport at six. I’m at a low ebb, almost collapsing, if truth be told, from tiredness. My back is aching. I still don’t know what to do with my fridge. My options are narrowing to a sharp point, and frankly time is running out. Plus it’s cold and I need to keep walking. I decide that although I don’t know if Linda Dent has re-accepted my friendship, I have no choice to but to front up at her place and ask her to look after my fridge and to put me up for the rest of the night, which I’m sure she won’t mind. I set off for Island Bay: along Kent Terrace, past the bronze statue of Queen Victoria with her sharp nose in the air as if she can’t stand the verdigris, around the Basin Reserve where the classically round walls are under permanent renovation. Machines sleep like dinosaurs among the rubble.

  I pass the wide steps of the hospital which, oddly, beckon; I imagine myself briefly on a trolley squealing along a lino corridor, paramedics fussing over me while I ask them if my fridge is all right. But my reverie is short-lived. I must plough on towards the tumbledown, verandahed shops of Newtown, which from a distance seem glumly denuded of their fruit displays and plastic leis.

  I’m heading away from the shops and up the hill which forks off towards Island Bay when I notice two things. One, there’s a lot of junk piled up on the sides of the road, creating surreal gutterscapes in the half dark; it must be inorganic collection time. Plus I realise I’m across the road from the complex where Clancy lives. No sooner have I had this thought than I hear a loud shout. ‘Suga!’