Motel View

by Forbes Williams

  Word spreads round the supermarket fast; at the checkouts particularly there's an excited buzz. A woman's shopping exploded. They say she needs an ambulance. The flames reached thirty feet.

  People eye their own shopping nervously.

  The mundane scientific explanation is that among her purchases were a battery and wire wool, and due to careless packing the wool must have made contact with the battery terminals and heated up—but I read somewhere recently that in fact there have been several well-documented reports of spontaneous combustion of shopping and it is now officially recognised as a distinct paranormal phenomenon.

  I like it here. Crowded or empty, it doesn't matter, this is my favourite place to shop. Every week there's some new item on sale or some small innovation or improvement: last week they'd done up the weigh counter in Produce—now it's the Weigh Depot. Or another time recently I noticed they'd put little adverts right inside the trolleys.

  I like it because it's more colourful than anywhere else and you can do all your shopping in one go. They're open all night before Christmas and you can shop at your leisure on Sunday. It never rains!

  It's the one place where no one thinks I'm strange for scribbling notes on small bits of paper—everyone does that here—and you can even copy down recipes from the backs of packets of food. It's a great place to make up after a row, even if you do end up spending a little bit extra. The nonchalant hold-up, the lights going off, that's why I like the supermarket. The deep booming echo when you slam the car door down in the basement carpark. The gossip. The music. The memories.

  When Rachel found out she was pregnant—we even came here then. I suppose I shouldn't romanticise it: it was Sunday morning and we would've been going anyway; even so, it still seems strangely apt.

  For all our time together our only contraception had been Rachel's supposed infertility: a couple of STDs years before and a doctor who'd told her she would never conceive. There'd been missed periods before but they'd always come to nothing, further proof of the diagnosis. Now, though, the breasts were heavier, a second period missed … Rachel got a pregnancy test from a nurse friend who worked at a medical centre across town. It's a small plastic thing: you put a drop of urine in one corner and it blots through, making a minus sign in the middle go pink. You then wait to see if the vertical bar goes pink as well, turning the minus into a plus …

  It did. I've still got it somewhere. The last time I saw it the plus sign was still bright pink. For some reason I'd always expected it would fade.

  That Sunday, shopping, we toured the supermarket in a kind of daze; slowly, dreamily. Thoughts crowded through me; I could see Rachel was the same. Somehow the trolley filled up. I remember it was unusually quiet for a Sunday and there were Hare Krishnas at the main entrance, singing and giving away books. Peace! Love! Happiness! It must have been some time before Easter because the place was alive with eggs and rabbits, all sparkling and colourful in their silver paper.

  It was still a rare thing at that time for supermarkets to sell alcohol and there was a small table set up near the wine for wine-tasting, with a tall, well-dressed woman who was pouring it out into tiny plastic goblet-shaped glasses. There was a choice of chablis or a red—I think it was Jacob's Creek—and naturally we stopped to get our share.

  I've never been much of a one for reds but I took the Jacob's Creek anyway; Rachel went for the chablis. The woman was telling us there was a general prejudice against chablis in New Zealand, that for some reason people often thought of it as common and bland, when in fact it was a full fruity wine with a sharp but pleasant aftertaste. This was the problem with selling wine in cardboard, she said. After you put a particular wine in cardboard nobody believed it could be any good. What was needed was some kind of aggressive marketing that educated people better on this point: that some of the finest wines in the country were available in cardboard containers.

  I caught Rachel's eye. She'd always said if she had a boy she'd call him Reuben, but her sister had only months before cribbed the name for her own newborn son. No one expected Rachel to get pregnant, you see. Besides, there was a 49.8 per cent chance it was a girl anyway… Robyn?

  She raised her glass to toast; I could see she was fighting back tears. Dimly I was aware of the Hare Krishnas still singing, a faint chant just above the music. Hare Hare, Rama Rama.

  I took a sip of my red. It tasted no better than I'd expected. I swallowed the rest in a gulp and dropped the small glass to the floor, ground it flat with my heel like a snail. The woman was still on about cardboard. I noticed a small girl in a blue summer frock, in front of the Deli, crying.

  TODAY I RAN OVER A DOG

  Today I ran over a dog. At first I thought it was a trivial thing—nearly didn't even bother to stop, though I did in the end, down the road a bit. I walked back and stood above it on the road, with my hands in my front pockets, while two children came and watched from under a tree by the roadside, silent. I picked it up, heavy thing, and it whimpered and half-struggled until I put it down in some long grass and it became still. I walked back to the car, rubbing my hands on my pants, knowing the children watched me, knowing the dog was not yet dead. And I drove off fast, revved the engine right up high before changing gears, so the children would be scared, maybe too scared to tell anyone till later.

  Later, with friends, I laughed about the dog, and we made jokes about dogs dying in the grass, stupid dogs who never learn, and I pretended it was something inevitable, just the way life sometimes goes.

  But now I am sad, and I wish it hadn't run out, sleek-haired thing, under the wheel. Maybe it spied a cat, or maybe a new bone had just gone down, I don't know, but I wish it hadn't stared at me, big brown eyes, sad dying eyes, quiet in the grass.

  Another dog pads into the kitchen, stops by its bowl panting, pads on into the room with the fire. I'm on the couch—still rubbing my hands—remembering Anna the fire-eater, who swallowed fire for money and praise and who I loved for her audacity. It pads over to me, licking its face, climbs up onto the couch and curls up until it is Banjo, World Famous Circle Dog, who in her heyday could roll round and round the circus ring in ever-diminishing circles until the audience were hypnotised, so that Anna could come out from behind the rustling curtains and swallow fire while I beat a rhythm on the tom-toms with the same hands that today held a dying dog.

  Hey, Banj. I rub her flank. We're okay Banj. She looks up at me, blank dog look, chews her tongue and sniffs the air. Tonight she has nothing to say to me, nothing at all, and together we sit in front of the dying fire, sinking through the couch towards sleep. With tired eyes and heavy arms I sink, only saved from drowning by Banjo, World Famous Circle Dog, who floats warm under my hand, snoring softly through her strings.

  A BIG HAND

  Thankyou. Thankyou. Thankyou.

  The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge the patience of lovers and publishers, the generosity of friends. The mercy of reviewers. The Physiology Department of the University of Otago.

  His travel agent, his mechanic, drugs. Family. Malcolm and Mary, certain cats. The Moon. Music. TV.

  And—how could anybody forget?—you. You.

  HOPE SPRINGS

  year after year, you must come back

  My first time drunk was on holiday, at the end of my fourth form year. Sweet vermouth, a bottle brazenly stolen from my friend Micky Carlton's father's overstocked cupboard and shared between the two of us on the lakeshore beyond the motorcamp. I remember in a kind of slow-motion replay Micky later hauling me across the highway as I laughed at the oncoming cars and my floppy incompetent body. It seemed a miracle that such a wonderful state of mind could even exist, let alone be so freely available, and it was only three days later I tried it again, this time with many times the dose. I was sick for two days and suitably wiser, but even that couldn't dull my kitten-like interest, a fatal attraction that has haunted me since, though never again will the joy of that first attempt be repeated.

  I'd met Micky a cou
ple of years earlier at the tennis courts when we both happened to be practising by ourselves. He asked me if I wanted a game. We found we both liked Led Zeppelin and Guns n' Roses, and shared stamp-collecting as a hobby forced on us against our will by our parents. We also had the same birthday. Micky was older by a year but we sometimes later joked about ourselves as twins, even though our vague plans to eventually seduce each other's sisters would therefore constitute incest.

  The house my family rented was right next door to Micky's English teacher, Miss Taylor, a perpetually smiling spinster with a strongly favoured ear, so that children on her other side could swear without detection. According to school legend she'd been in a car smash with her fiancé many years earlier: he'd been killed outright while she required major plastic surgery after going through the windscreen. The doctors told her they could only do the operation two ways, one which left a permanent frown, the other a permanent smile. Naturally she'd chosen the smile. Micky and I would spend hours together under the hedge between our two properties, spying on her and whispering taunts.

  My parents disliked Micky; we are judged by the company we keep. For my mother in particular he was too cocky and smart, a bit wild—his parents were separated—and after a clumsy telephone attempt at going out with Cass, my sister, my father privately warned me that boys who repeatedly failed with girls easily became frustrated, and who knows I might be next on his list.

  Careful then to avoid bringing further disgrace to his name, I explained the terrible sickness in the wake of that second time drunk with the lame confession that he and I had simply shared our first cigarette, and it was maybe just as well to learn now rather than later just how toxic nicotine could be. It's amazing to think they didn't laugh in my face. My mother was suspicious enough to come up with the idea that Micky must have secretly laced my cigarette with some other drug, and as this theory gradually grew into fact so too came final confirmation of Micky's unsuitability as a friend. I think she actually felt disappointed to lose this piece of the jigsaw when years later I finally told her the truth.

  In those days Hope Springs was the Fishing Capital of the World. An enormous metal hooked trout arcing over the blue and green sign announcing this glared down at motorists driving in from the north. It was just along the road from our place and for a couple of the years we stayed there I climbed it religiously every day. There was quite a view, and it was only a small trick of the mind to remove the ‘Fishing’ from the title and imagine the place as the actual overall true Capital of the World full-stop—with me up on the trout a kind of unofficial king: mild, beneficent, handsome. I saw myself walking slowly through the town centre, my subjects lining the streets. Over and over people ran up to thank me on their knees for bringing peace to the planet and promise to their future, or to lovingly finger my clothes, as the rest just cheered themselves hoarse. Bravo, good king! Bravo! Every girl in the town wanted desperately to be my queen… it's sobering to now reflect that in New Zealand alone there are several Fishing Capitals of the World, a constant stream of boys and girls clambering up and down their trout.

  My family holidayed in Hope Springs every summer for ten years. The first time I was eight; the last seventeen. The summer after that I spent down in Central, picking fruit twelve hours a day and cursing adulthood. Not once since has our family all gone on holiday together. Naturally these pages that follow tell the story of that last memorable summer in Hope Springs. The last golden summer of childhood. Something like that, anyway.

  I should get one thing clear right away: officially, Hope Springs no longer exists. In the late 1990s the New Zealand Geographic Board changed the name back to the original Te Puna o Tumanako—with time it has gradually worn down to the more manageable ‘Tumanako’—and almost all maps and guidebooks now give the Maori name only, the curious joke of Hope Springs fading ever further into obscurity, albeit with the momentary immortality bestowed here. Even though a couple of decades have passed there are still those bitter about the changing of the name—especially the way it was done—but any vestige of open fighting is long gone and by and large the dissidents keep their muttering to themselves, though as a newcomer you should expect to have your opinions vetted at some stage so that allegiances and dividing lines remain clear and known to all.

  Like everyone else, our family discovered Hope Springs by accident. A friend had told my father of a little-known spot well off the beaten track and apparently just perfect for fishing; just not so easy to find. Clear directions in the city and a painstaking map translated little if at all to the actual choice of roads available and it was only after several hours of U-turns, tantrums and seemingly endless roadworks that we finally drove—without warning—into the distinctly unpleasant smell of sulphur that was always to signpost our imminent arrival in the Fishing Capital of the World. My mother said later it was as if God knew she was about to kill my father and quickly put a town there to stop her.

  Already nearly dusk, we bought some Kentucky Fried and booked into a cabin at the motorcamp, too tired to put up our tent. Next morning my father and I were up at dawn, eager as ever to try out a new place. Within an hour we'd already landed our two biggest trout of all time, and a decade-long love affair began. Miraculously the run of luck tided right through that first impromptu holiday: whole schools, whole educational districts of trout, more than we could even give away; never again would we have it so good—a point of endless rumination for my father all nine summers following. It's my experience, however, that declining fortune is usually the way with love affairs; almost inevitable with fishing. Our last Hope Springs summer we didn't catch a single solitary one, though with everything else going on that was hardly surprising. There probably wasn't a fish within fifty miles of the place.

  I suppose I'm familiar with two distinct versions of what happened that summer: the one I lived and the one on TV. It's interesting now to compare them. I'm lucky in this respect in that in her excitement my mother videotaped much of the news as it happened; even went back and cut out relevant newspaper reports. At the time I scoffed at her—I felt confident I would remember it all later unaided—but now of course I find these records valuable, and I'm grateful for her foresight.

  The whole thing kicked off just before Christmas, far away from Hope Springs, at a pantomime for orphans and homeless children in Wanganui. Several prisoners from the local medium security jail had put together a modernised nativity play, and with good behaviour earned the right to perform it outside prison walls. The earlier performance had gone off without incident, but moments before his second grand entrance for the evening Father Christmas unexpectedly turned violent and managed to overcome two surprised guards, escaping off into the night still in costume and with a large sack of goodies he'd been supposed to give out to the kids. We can only guess as to how the other prisoners finished the play, what they could have done to make it up to the disappointed children. The sack was found across town the following day, in public toilets, empty.

  Santa's real name was Dean Kidd, but to a degree the original alias persisted, particularly as St Nick. Even the police saw the joke: a detective in one cutting my mother kept was quoted as saying they were looking for a fat bearded man in a red suit. Obviously they didn't see Kidd as a particular threat—either that or they thought the countryside was already so crowded with escaped prisoners that one more wasn't going to make much of a difference anyway. Maybe they thought the red suit would give him away, underestimating the pre-Christmas population of Santas as well. Either way, they obviously didn't expect him to go and kidnap his own daughter, certainly not just before Christmas, and least of all from hospital. The Health Authority had egg on its face as well when it was discovered there'd been no actual staff on the ward at the time Kidd's daughter went missing.

  Heidi was the product of a defunct de facto relationship between Kidd and a woman from Palmerston North, Karen Johannes. She was in hospital recovering from asthma. The fact he'd taken her from hospital was probably the
main reason she attained so quickly her status as Suffering Child icon—and Kidd's his as The Beast—though the widely held suspicion that he must have somehow exploited his role as Father Christmas to expedite the kidnapping no doubt also contributed. And we mustn't forget it was the silly season—Feast of Fools—when all news must be amplified even more than usual to fill the gaps left by holidaying politicians.

  At the time—beyond the odd bit of sarcasm thrown at the TV newsreaders as I walked through the living-room—none of this was of any interest to me. I had my own problems to worry about. Money, for a start. Girls, the future: what I was going to do with my life. My readiness to leave home, for example, probably the single issue my parents and I could actually agree on, though even then there was still the when and how, the where and who with to endlessly debate. The whole thing with my parents, what in hell had gone so wrong between us. All these things … what I really wanted was to leave the Hope Springs holiday entirely, let my family go ahead without me. I could look after the house, save them worrying about the pets and the paper; we could all have a bit of a breather. I thought they'd be pleased to have the respite.

  My mother laughed out loud when I put the idea to her.

  To that, she said, the answer is simple. No.

  I'm no longer able to accurately date the falling out with my parents. At the time there were many particular incidents mapped out in my mind: clear, specific examples of injustice and hypocrisy laid out like exhibits for the Family Court. What made it so extra galling was that my case would never be heard. Friends were sympathetic up to a point, but ultimately indifferent. Only I could see the complete unfairness of everything, how wronged I really was. For example I had many friends whose parents wouldn't have thought twice about letting their children of my age stay and look after the house while they went away on holiday. My parents and I had an agreement that in a few more months I would go flatting; if I could look after a flat how come I couldn't look after my parents' house?