VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Victoria University of Wellington
PO Box 600 Wellington
© Forbes Williams 1992
ISBN 978 0 86473 681 9
First published 1992
Reprinted 1993
ebook production by meBooks 2010
This book is copyright. Apart from
any fair dealing for the purpose of private study,
research, criticism or review, as permitted under the
Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any
process without the permission of
the publishers
Published with the assistance of
a grant from the Literature Committee of the
Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council
of New Zealand
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some of these stories have appeared before in
Sport, the Listener, Rambling Jack, Literary Review (inc Boomer),
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Vital Writing
Cover by Neil Pardington
nothing is real
nothing to get hung about
from MOTEL VIEW
… slowing down from the highway as you cross the town's only bridge, you might note the abundance of neon as you first enter Main Street, but all too soon you'll be through all that and back out onto the dark highway. There are three sets of traffic lights in Motel View, but they are traffic lights without purpose—Main Street is the only street—and they are always green. Don't bother slowing down.
You'll continue out along the coast for about another five miles until the road rises sharply and to the left: Hunter's Garage corner. It's actually the second of three nasty bends, but it seems to be the one that does the damage, so watch it. In the winter it can be icy and very treacherous.
Once you're past Hunter's Garage you'll be travelling inland, leaving the bay behind you. You'll wind up the hillsides for about another five miles, till you reach the top of View Rise. At the View Rise lookout you'll probably get out of your car and look back down into the brown silted bay, the steep treeless hills that rise out of its sides, the small but distinct mudflats extending back from the tidal reaches. If it's night, though, all you'll really see will be the flashing coloured dots of Motel View. If you've got a good camera (like John) you may well want to try and take a photograph of all that darkness with the little spots of colour. Put your camera just a bit out of focus and the light blots on the photograph like drops of bright paint. It's like Christmas.
Once over View Rise you'll wind down out of the hills. There's a larger town on the inland plain, and it's only a couple of miles down from the Rise that it first blinks into view, the reassuring sight of a town worth stopping in. As your mind shifts to hamburgers and milkshakes you'll quickly forget the wide round bay, the hills, that odd little amusement park place with the wrong name on the map.
Unless you decide to stay. In which case you'll drive gently once down Main Street till you come to the last motel—The View Inn—realising with a mixture of surprise and annoyance that there are no takeaway bars, no dairies, no pubs, and no vacancy at any of the motels. If you're like us (John is driving), you'll probably do a slow careful U-turn, crawl back along Main Street, ‘just to check’, turn back round again at the bridge, speed up through all the traffic lights, and head on to the next town, which on our map is a thin circle round a fattish dot: symbol, I suppose, of hope. You'll speed out along the coast, and the rest you already know.
Unless you have a flat tyre. Then you'll have to stop. This need not take more than ten irritated minutes of your time, but perhaps you'll light a cigarette (as I do) and wander up the road a bit first, intrigued by this strange, quiet town. If you do, you'll almost immediately get a strong feeling of emptiness, even desolation, as if Motel View is in reality a bizarre ghost town. There'll be no cars, no people, no bicycles, toys, trees, or pets. No life but for a few small shrubs set sparsely upon flat, broad mown lawns advancing to low brick fences, no noise but for the soft bay. Set back on their lawns the low single-storey buildings of motel units, long buildings full of dark windows—like a school really, or a mental institution—and no sign of activity inside them. Just those faithfully flashing lights, giant electric words against the sky, each sign its own distinct style of lettering. It's as if the town is no more than an advertisement.
Once you've walked the length of Main Street, you'll probably begin to notice how cold you are—no breeze, just a still, sharp chill.
Christ it's cold, you'll probably say (as I do), rubbing each arm with the opposite hand. Let's just fix the wheel.
You'll walk quickly back to the car, head down over your crossed arms, trying to remember where your jersey is.
My jersey's in my bag. We'll have to open the boot.
We'll have to open the boot anyway. My mind drifts across the vagaries of changing wheels.
True, I say at last. We will.
If you're travelling with John (as I am) you'll just have to put up with the cold, because even with your jersey on the chill gets in, and he'll want to set up the camera to take long-exposure views of the neon signs. Not having a tripod, he'll use the car roof as a solid base, so you won't be able to change the tyre while he mucks about. I'm not bitter, of course, but we are always stopping in the middle of nowhere so John can take photographs of broken fences, abandoned barns and dead cattle.
I'll go in this place here and see if they've got any food, I say, lighting another cigarette. John struggles with a knob on his camera.
Do you want any food? John's forehead is wrinkled in intense concentration. When he concentrates he grunts, and it takes him nearly thirty seconds of periodic grunting to answer.
What?
I said, do you want any food? Will I buy you some?
Do they sell any?
I don't know! Christ!
Okay, okay, don't get shitty. Something breaks off in his hand. Get me some fruit.
Have you broken your camera? I can hardly disguise my hope.
I don't know. I can't see properly.
Well sit in the car with the door open. It's too dark for a photograph anyway. Aren't you cold?
Red deco letters flash on and off above the car. View Towers. And—a smaller, squarer blue—No Vacancy, flashing less frequently and staying on longer. John won't tell me if he's cold or not, so I shrug and begin walking up the drive. The gravel crunches under my feet.
Like all the other motels, View Towers is set well back on its lawn. It has the same tidy shrubs squatting like gnomes, and the grass smells freshly mown. Everyone I know has a fondness for that smell, as if some primeval instinct deep within our evolutionary past was actually preparing us for the arrival of lawnmowers. The motel itself is also like the others, a low dark building full of windows. As I near it I cut across the lawn, quiet as a cat, to spy in one, see if I can see inside. It certainly does not look like a full motel. The windows are tinted, and the building set far enough back from the road that the flashing signs only reflect back at me. All I can see are a few indistinct shadows, nothing certain. I look into several more windows. It is the same in each one.
A sudden schoolboy panic possesses me, and I run back to the drive. I realise once more how cold I am and walk briskly round the back, following the drive, to the motel office.
The office is weatherboard, seems to hang off its new brick motel as an afterthought, even though it is almost certainly the older building. A bare bulb, sitting over a single step, lights the outside. Hundreds of insects dart round the light, as if an insect world war has at last ended.
Hey, you guys, one imagines insects saying to their families. Hey, you guys! The war's over! Let's go down to the light!
A pale y
ellow wooden door with a frosted glass window leans unhinged in the doorway. One vertical board has been kicked in at its base, and the glass is cracked in several places. Someone has painted in rough handwriting on the door:
View Towers—Moteliers
—Colour Television
—Bed and Breakfast
—4 Star Service
—Credit Cards Accepted
—No Vacancy
Standing on the step, I take the door with both hands and lift it with care out of the doorway. I carry it before me into the small office and lean it against the wall. The insects follow me in. Their small wings whisper.
The decor is strictly linoleum. The floor, the top and sides of the high counter, all are linoleum-covered; even the wallpaper looks like linoleum. There's a sign on the wall behind the counter that repeats the painted words on the door.
There's nobody in the office, but another doorway behind the counter opens into a smallish living-room. A small colour TV is going, with some kind of sports programme blaring out, and in front of it—with his back to me—is a short man with short curly hair and a sunburnt neck. He is shadow-boxing, swinging from side to side, and growling out an intermittent commentary on some game which seems to be a mixture of the one on TV and his own private boxing match.
Go get him! he shouts, pummelling the aerial with a brutal left haymaker. There! That'll show you, little runt! Get him! Go get him! He struggles to the floor, perhaps retrieving the aerial, though it could be he has it in a headlock.
I stop for a second, unsure what to do. He seems too violently engrossed for me to consider stopping him. There's a buzzer on the counter with ‘Press On Arrival’ scrawled alongside, and after a moment's hesitation I decide to risk it. I press. There is no noise. I press again, this time holding it down for maybe fifteen seconds.
Finally another man appears in the living-room. He is fatter than the boxer, but shorter. He stops for a few seconds to look at the TV, then turns to me, stepping into the office. He is rolling up one sleeve, and he looks at me with narrow eyes.
Wha'd'ya want? he says. We're full. Can't you read English?
Maim the bastard! shouts the other man, back on his feet and waving his arms.
We've got a flat. Is there some food we could buy?
He begins on the other sleeve. There's no garage in Motel View. Nearest garage is Hunter's, few miles down the road.
Have you got any food? You know, a restaurant or something.
Grind his head! Grind his fucking head!
This is a motel sonny. Only meal here is breakfast.
Well can we stay?
Jesus Christ! What the hell are you? Kill him!
We're full. I told you we're full. Can't you hear either?
But there's no one here. I looked in your rooms. The place is empty.
He leans forward, pudgy hands gripping the counter.
Kill him! Kill him! Fucking kill him!
Can't you see we're busy? He has begun on the first sleeve again. Already the second one is unpeeling. It occurs to me he possibly spends his entire life rolling up his sleeves.
Have you honestly got no food?
His face reddens. He is the perfect cartoon bulldog.
You better get out of here, sonny, or there ain't gonna be too much of you left.
KILL HIM!
I back out of the office, my hands up.
Okay, I say, okay. I'm going.
Out in the drive I can feel my heart pounding. Some motel. I realise we'd better get the tyre changed and out of here.
At the car John has given up on his photograph. The ground round the boot is strewn with bags.
You just wouldn't believe the people in there! I say as soon as I get close. No food, that's for sure.
I can't find the jack.
God, I thought the guy was going to do me in! Bloody crazy. There was this other guy fighting the air, and just bloody screaming at the television. I reckon we should get the hell out as fast as we can.
I can't find the jack. It's not in the boot.
Yes it is. Eager to upstage I push past him, start rummaging around in the dark boot. It's in here somewhere.
Could it be in the back seat?
I fumble around. I'm sure it's in here. Haven't we got a torch?
The batteries are flat. I don't think the jack's here.
Of course it's here. Where the hell else would it be? Listen, you should have seen these guys. They were off the edge.
Can you find it?
Not yet, but it's in here. I'm sure it is.
Another five minutes weakens my confidence. The jack isn't in the boot. It isn't in the back seat. Finally I accept reality. We can't change the tyre.
John looks at me seriously. His face is alternately red, blue and purple.
What about the guys in there?
Look, honestly, they were going to beat me up.
Well what about somewhere else?
We look up the street. Vista View. No Vacancy. Lake View. No Vacancy. Every one is the same. No Vacancy.
But they're all empty. I just don't understand it.
Well, I don't see that we have much choice. And I tell you, it's too cold to sleep in the car.
I start to shiver. The chill is like a hand down my back.
But we have no choice. Like it or not, we're staying in Motel View.
THE WHISPERING LIBRARIAN
North of Auckland we pull in for gas. The needle indicates a quarter of a tank, but like so many I've known its nervous tendency to deceive provokes a constant dull anxiety, when all we want is a clean, trouble-free run straight through the place. We want to float right over. All those sleek, perfect motorways snaking between each other like it's the twenty-first century … hey, it almost is! Change for good? For sure! And can you check the oil?
The service station itself is like a motorway; naturally we take an outside lane. I head off towards the one-stop shop for a newspaper and some hot food. There's an ache where that hot food should be. Bacon and egg burger, mutton pie, two Chicken Rolls, couple of bits of pizza, several roast pork and apple-sauce sandwiches, two pottles of chips, Picnic Bar, Rocky Road, Mars … a lime milkshake. Can you make it with trim milk please?
In the old days the person serving in a shop actually knew the prices of things and simply tapped them straight onto the cash register; now they must first fruitlessly press each item's label against an anaesthetised bar-code sensor. The old way was quicker—these days there's invariably a queue—but if you want superior technology you obviously have to make some kind of sacrifice. Besides, there's always the paper to read.
I like the short, one-paragraph items best. They're suited to the queue-calming function of newspapers and make no mistake, there's a real art to telling a good story in three or four sentences. Today the pick would have to be the three deaf mutes arrested after breaking into a high school music room. The trio failed to hear the burglar alarm go off, police explain. When apprehended they had with them a variety of instruments, including a set of bongo drums … or one I saw the other day about a Russian mystic who died trying to stop a full-speed locomotive with pure spiritual power. Previously he'd been successful with pedestrians, bicycles and even a car, but the train proved insurmountable. Since the political changes over there they've gone really crazy with all this New Age stuff. One faith healer with his own TV show performs miracles via the actual television, offering afflicted viewers the chance of a cure in their very own living-rooms.
I get a potato-top pie and a Coke, settle up the gas. What can it be happens to all those gold coins you once put in your pocket?
Back out on the forecourt a brightly painted bus has stopped for diesel. A small woman with her hair in a bun oversees the pump, while two boys in grey shorts attend to the windscreen with the help of a small stepladder. As I walk past them the woman throws me a quick smile and mouths an exaggerated silent hello, a knowing, confidential hello, as if there's something she and I alone are party to
, some old secret between us I just can't quite put my finger on this exact instant. But no sound.
How's it going? I reply through a mouthful of hot potato. Mince is dribbling down my hand.
On the road again and after I've cleaned up my hands and the seat cover there's not much left of the paper, though I can let you know that YOU BORN TODAY are a devil's advocate, a joker and secret lover of gossip, with an unfortunate tendency to hurt other people's feelings unintentionally … on the upside the year ahead looks promising both financially and romantically; a holiday could even be part of the picture … but you must learn to be more open.
There's a song I've been trying to remember: a jingle, probably. I'm sure you'll know it. It goes la de da de da da do, de da la da de da la lo—and it's on the absolute tip of my tongue. Da de da de la do do … hey, anyway, you see the problem. Deafness, blindness. Which would you choose?
MALONE
My daughter Celeste, who is fifteen, is in love. She comes to me to talk about it. I always thought daughters went to their mothers on such subjects. I have enough trouble with my son Andrew as it is.
She wants me to tell her about the first time I was in love. What was it like? I try and change the subject. Is it a secret, Dad? she says.
I sip my drink. Yes, I say. I suppose in a way it is.
It's Saturday afternoon. We're sitting out on the deck at the back of our house. I built it myself last summer. I can look across to the houses on the other side of our valley and see into their backyards. Far away people are mowing their lawns. It's cloudy but warm. I sip my drink. Naylor Island comes to mind.
When Celeste and Andrew were young the story of the sinking island was for a long time their favourite. I went through a long period when I often told them stories and I plundered these from anywhere I could: the news, history, films I remembered. Sometimes I made them up as I went along. I got some from storybooks but I never used these books when I told their tales. I preferred the stories to be away from books so they could change and grow and remain new.
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