Motel View

by Forbes Williams

  Celeste's friend Danielle's mother is a friend of Lucy, my wife, and she told Lucy that Danielle had told her that this new man of Celeste's was twenty-three. I feel uncertain how to approach this. How can I tell her I'm scared she'll get pregnant, that this divine twenty-three-year-old will probably have a new girlfriend next week? How do I know he's not violent? What about his driving? Only last week they were advertising a programme that was going to give advice on how to communicate better with your children on these kinds of issues exactly. The ad said they were going to explode a few myths on the way. In the end I forgot to watch it.

  Across the valley I can see tiny people in their gardens. In one place a whole family is having a picnic on a rug. At another they're trying to move a piano. You can see them arguing. Far away, across the city, sirens rise and fall.

  Our house was right at the end of a dead-end street. My father spent every weekend working on it and it was full of quirky additions. It rose out of the surrounding trees and shrubs like a moon-mobile. Sometimes when I was walking home I'd take deliberately long steps like an astronaut.

  Naylor Island began here with a colouring-in competition my sister Sarah and I entered when I was about six. I can't remember ever entering any other colouring-in competitions in my childhood or ever having any particular interest in them either. It's possible my father set it as a task to keep us occupied; my mother was in hospital for a few weeks about this same time.

  It was a large picture, a mountain scene and a lake, with a family of bears playing mini-golf on grass in the foreground. It took me days. I used exactly the same colours as my sister—she had a full set of seventy-two Derwents—but she got a commendation and I didn't. The picture has stayed with me since: whenever I look at mountains in my mind's eye I still see those same mountains from that picture. And right from the start Naylor Island was to me that same picture as well.

  Around this same time in my life I took a whole show-and-tell to myself and told my class about a long world trip my mother and I had undertaken together. There was a world map on the wall in our classroom and I pointed out all the places we'd been. Even the teacher was impressed and for months after that I was terrified that she would bring it up at the parent-teacher interviews. I could see her smiling at my mother.

  That sounded like an amazing trip you had with Paul, Mrs Glass, she'd say.

  What trip? my mother would say, and when she got home that would be that. I never lost my dread of parent-teacher interviews.

  I remember well also my eighth birthday, which because it fell on a Saturday allowed me the right of a proper birthday party with friends. Partly this was a relief: I already owed my best friend Michael Maloney three such parties. There were six of us and my father took us all to the pictures in the afternoon. I think it was Blazing Saddles. All the way back we shot at people in cars around us and constantly urged my father to speed up. In the end he drove along part of the new motorway, even though it was out of our way.

  As we came up the off-ramp we had a blow-out. My father lost control of the car and we hit one of the barriers, bouncing over to the other one and then back across again, finally coming to rest facing the wrong way. Nobody was hurt but during and after the accident there was total silence in the car. I remember clearly the faces of the people who next drove up the off-ramp. My father still hadn't taken his hands off the wheel. I didn't know whether to be proud or ashamed of his driving.

  My interests at primary school were astronomy and war. One night I wanted to see an eclipse of the moon that was to occur well after my bedtime.

  We'll get you up, my parents promised.

  The next morning I had no recollection at all of the eclipse and I couldn't remember being woken. My parents insisted I'd been up and seen the whole thing. I must simply have not woken up properly. You see, they said, you wanted to be asleep.

  I didn't. I wanted to see the eclipse.

  For Christmas one year my sister received an actual record-player and I was given a proper telescope. I couldn't believe my good fortune. I decided I would sleep straight after school and get up when it was still night so I could put my telescope to the greatest use. On Boxing Day my father told us he had a new job and we would be moving to Hamilton at the end of January.

  My best friend Michael was overseas with his family till February. Couldn't my father just tell his new work he couldn't make it till later? No, he couldn't do that. There was a nice home waiting for us in January. But Michael was my best friend, I said. Couldn't I stay with Uncle Douglas? No, I was told, I couldn't. What about Meads, our cat? He would come too. What if he didn't want to? He did.

  Sarah and I became close allies, conferring for hours in her bedroom every evening. Over and over we'd explain to each other the real reasons we didn't want to go. Sarah was in love with a boy from the high school who she often met secretly at weekends and after school. The thought of losing him was intolerable. And we'd both seen the new kids at our school. We knew what it was like to be new.

  In a way Uncle Douglas was going to be even more of a loss than Michael. He was an old friend of my father's with a wild eye that stared out to the side so that you were never fully certain whether he was talking to you or someone else. My father didn't like him any more but Douglas didn't seem to realise this, and he came round almost every weekend. He took more notice of me than any other of my parents' friends and I thought he was wonderful. He kept me supplied with model warplanes and regular war comics. Every Christmas he gave me the Fighting Machine Annual. Michael, who probably knew more about the subject than anyone else in our class, reckoned it was the best annual of all, with the most up-to-date information on weapons and weapon-carrying craft you could get.

  Sarah and I were in the back seat when we finally drove off for Hamilton. We kneeled on it and stared out the back window.

  Bye house, bye house, my mother was saying, the same voice she used to call Meads. My father drove the same as if we were going to the dairy for ice-creams. My sister and I looked at each other. We were both crying. My mother was crying.

  Bye house, she said.

  Sarah settled into Hamilton easily. She had a new best friend and a new boyfriend within weeks. We stopped having our long talks. I didn't find it as simple as her and fell into a pattern of attracting friends by misbehaving at school. This made me unpopular with my teachers and upset my parents. I was an intelligent boy, so why did I waste my chances? Didn't I want to be an astronomer or a scientist?

  As a boy when I'd first been interested in astronomy I'd wanted to be an astronaut, but my parents had convinced me that in New Zealand you had to be an astronomer or a scientist first. Gradually these had become my stated career goals instead.

  No, I said. I wanted to join the Air Force.

  But you have to have good marks to get into the Air Force too, they said.

  No you don't, I said. You just have to be able to fly.

  I continued to bring home bad reports and around the middle of the second year after we'd moved the principal rang my father at work and requested an interview to discuss my poor progress and disruptive behaviour. When I got home all my war books and comics were gone from my bedroom. I wept and pleaded with my parents for them back but they remained firm and calm. I would not be ruining my life with my childish ideas, they said. I'd grown out of them now. It was time for a new interest.

  The following Saturday morning my father drove me into the Hamilton town centre and bought me an instamatic camera and some film. I tried to talk him out of it. What if I never used it? I said. Why can't I just have my books back? Don't you want me to learn to read Dad?

  The camera was a present, he told me. In our family we accepted presents politely.

  When I got home my family were all very impressed with my camera, even Sarah. They lined up in the garden and made me take family portraits. My father wanted to see if you could get a photo of water standing still in the air. He promised to pay the costs of developing and threw buckets of w
ater across the line of the camera and yelled Now! That night in bed I had the best inspiration I'd ever had in my life. I would be a war photographer. I would be world-famous for both my skill taking graphic photographs and my bravery in performing my work at such risk.

  I'm not for war any more, I tried to explain the next day. I'm against it now. Pictures tell the truth of war so people will know. It's a good thing. And it's still photography.

  My parents argued at first but I quickly became immovable. Even when they gave up arguing I continued to put my case to them regularly, following them round the garden on weekend afternoons, demonstrating the way their own logic supported my plans. They would work on in silence as if I wasn't there.

  I set about learning the skills I would require. I borrowed books on photography from the library. There was nothing that specifically talked about photography in war itself although there were lots of books full of pictures of war which I studied for hours every evening. They got hold of a biography of Bob Capa for me from the Auckland library. I renewed it till they wouldn't let me and tore out a photograph of him before I finally returned it. I took as many photographs myself as I could afford to develop. I got myself a paper run and as soon as I was old enough a job as a packer at the local supermarket after school. I built myself a darkroom under the house and bought a better camera. One evening I went along to a meeting of the local photography club. People there said they could see the potential in my work but they were unenthusiastic when I told them my career plans. Some of them hadn't even heard of Bob Capa. I didn't bother going back.

  As I became more and more obsessed with my plan I drifted further from my family. Sarah was in a world of her own anyway, but sometimes I'd catch one of my parents looking sadly at me from across the room, as if I reminded them of an old friend. We talked less and less and I no longer cared about justifying my plans.

  At the same time things at school continued to deteriorate. I was suspended for smoking in the school library and again several months later along with Richard Willis for cheating in a science test. It was nothing, everyone did it. They just wanted to make me an example. It was even in the local papers.

  The Bastille Day after my fifteenth birthday the French teachers organised a special lunch in the school hall for everyone doing French. You paid a dollar and got French onion soup and French bread. There were long trestle tables set up in the middle of the hall floor and they put a record over the loudspeaker system of a guy singing well-known recent pop songs in French. The whole thing was unusually informal for our school, with both teachers and pupils standing round together chatting.

  About five minutes into it someone threw a roll across the entire width of the hall and within about ten seconds there were more than thirty of us down behind the trestle tables dunking torn-off hunks of bread into the lukewarm soup and hurling them at each other and anyone else in the way. People were running everywhere shouting, some at us to stop, most because they had the chance. For about a minute it was uncontrollable bedlam. To ice the cake someone pressed the fire alarm.

  More pupils were suspended than had been in the fight. The ensuing row got onto the national news. I was expelled. Sarah told me later my mother felt like the whole family had been disgraced. She was so ashamed, Sarah said.

  For a year I worked at the supermarket. I bought an even better camera and spent all my weekends out photographing, every evening I could in the darkroom. All my friends were still at school and over the months I lost touch. I retreated more and more into myself and by the end of the year my parents and I hardly spoke to each other any more. It was like the real me had died and I was just the ghost left behind. I decided to leave home and move down to Wellington.

  My plan was to find work as a newspaper photographer. I'd tried this in Hamilton but there just weren't enough openings. It was to be my first step on the ladder to acclaim. I stayed with my grandmother for a week but soon found a flat in Miramar with two guys: Wayne and Gavin. Both were about twenty and they worked in a local bank, but talk about work was strictly outlawed in the flat. There were lots of similar rules and sinning against these led to a fine. This fine went into a kitty to buy alcohol.

  Wayne and Gavin lived for alcohol. They had no interests outside work and would sit at home every night watching videos and drinking. The only decoration in the house, apart from a dartboard at the end of the hall that was never used, was a poster in the toilet listing the Seven Great Drinking Wonders of the World. Both spoke in a strange nasal tone of voice that was obviously put on and they only ever seemed to talk about the past: great parties they remembered where prodigious drinking feats had been witnessed. Their taste in videos was not wide and they would often watch the same one several nights running. Their favourite when I moved in was one that featured two hours of spectacular racing car smashes. As much as expense allowed I too began to get drunk regularly and spend my evenings watching videos.

  There were two small rooms at the front of the flat built as sunrooms, even though they faced south. One was used to store empties and the other was my bedroom. It was only just wide enough for a bed. The flat itself was small but we had a large rough and untended section out the back which I found useful for practising my photography and I cleared out the other sunroom for a darkroom the second week I was there. Wayne and Gavin thought I was crazy, and as my hunting failed to find me a job I began to wonder if they were right.

  Two months of interviews with pompous editors and my photography had been cut down to size. My folio was not bad but definitely not good enough. Come back in two years with a qualification, I was told, and we'll think about it then. Finally I found part-time work in a small privately owned studio in Khandallah. My boss was the photographer, Mr Easton, who owned the place. He was a big man and he chain-smoked all day. Part of his moustache was stained yellow from cigarette smoke. He was friendly enough, but laughed when I told him my plans. I was his only employee. I took appointments, kept the place clean, organised the studio and bought Mr Easton his cigarettes. I started at 7.30 and finished at midday, six days a week. It took two buses to get there and I had to be at the bus-stop down the road by 6.15 to get to work on time. As I worked I plotted with renewed conviction my path to the top of the war correspondent world. I would have to do it freelance. I would have to save the money to go overseas, where maybe my talent and enthusiasm would be recognised.

  Six months into the job I'd saved fifty-five dollars. Bus fares alone took at least twenty-one dollars every week. I asked Mr Easton for more work but he said business was down anyway. As things were I was lucky to have a job at all. I continued to apply for other jobs without success. I was turned down for a polytech course in photography. They told me to go back to school.

  One night I was drinking and watching one of the Electric Blue videos with Wayne and Gavin when my father rang to see if I was all right and to tell me Meads had died. I'd almost forgotten my family existed. Why hadn't I written for so long? he said. Why didn't I go and see my grandmother? I was too drunk to have a serious conversation. All I could do was tell him jokes, silly ones that came into my head from nowhere. He kept saying to stop it, it was a toll call, but new jokes kept occurring to me every few seconds. Finally he hung up on me. I went back to the video and forgot about it.

  About a week later a young woman on a motorcycle drove into the back of a truck parked in the street outside our flat. My bed was no more than five metres from where she hit. I lay in bed and looked up at the red and blue lights flashing across the walls and ceiling and listened to all the voices. A few nights after the accident Wayne and Gavin had an argument over what had happened to her. Wayne said he'd heard she was okay, just a couple of broken legs, but Gavin said he'd heard from a reliable source that she'd died in hospital the following morning.

  I realised I didn't like either Wayne or Gavin. I did all the cleaning and was the only one who ever cooked. They were making me depressed. For several weeks I secretly looked for another place. I found i
t hard this time; most people wanted someone older and my age was usually the first thing I was asked. I looked young for sixteen so people were often suspicious I was a runaway. It was even more difficult because I was also being a lot more choosy than when I'd first come down. I needed a bedroom big enough to set up a darkroom or a spare room nobody wanted, and I wanted to live nearer to work. Finally I found a flat with two other people near the university just above the central city and I moved in one Friday evening when Wayne and Gavin were both out. I left a note and forty dollars for bills, but no forwarding address. I never saw either of them again.

  Noose Music were a three-piece band from New Plymouth. The members wouldn't reveal their names as they opposed the cult of the individual but there was a photograph of them there anyway, playing in a New Plymouth hotel. There was nothing in the picture to suggest that the band had anything particular to commend them but the accompanying article said they were probably the next Rolling Stones and that they had a whole string of number one hits just waiting to be recorded. They played the loudest music in the world and they were coming to Wellington soon.

  The article was pinned on Tristan's bedroom door. Tristan was one of my new flatmates, and he himself was in the photo, although I probably wouldn't have realised if he hadn't pointed it out to me. The light was all wrong and even good pictures can suffer badly on newsprint, but yes, that was Tristan behind the drum set. He told me they'd broken up since the time of the article.

  Tristan was twenty-five. Most people his age wouldn't have thought once about flatting with a sixteen-year-old, but he was friendly right from the start. He told me he gave everyone a mark as soon as he met them. The mark was out of one, and you could only get zero or one. I was a one. It was awful looking for flatmates, he said, because so many applicants were zeros. Some of them must have gone months or even years without success. You heard a lot about counselling for people who repeatedly failed job interviews, he said, but nothing about help for those who repeatedly failed flat interviews. What about the poor people who had to put up with them while they were looking?