From Under the Overcoat

by Sue Orr

  I stayed absolutely still, my blanket pulled up around my face. He continued holding her hands. The tense knots in her fingers unravelled, leaving them smooth. He was oblivious to me. To the other sleeping passengers, to the stewards who moved quietly through the dark aircraft, occupying the nothingness of the place between earth and outer space.

  He remained an old man. His rough, quivering hand reached out and with the back of his knuckles, he gently touched his wife’s face. Slowly, his fingers caressed her cheek, as though he was patting a cat. From time to time, he would stop. A smile of delight spread across his face. Then, the gentle touching resumed. She never stirred.

  Minutes, then hours passed this way. At some point, I fell asleep.

  I woke to the smell of eggs and the clatter of food trolleys. For a moment, I lay absolutely still, my eyes closed. I listened to the click click click of window blinds opening. When I opened my eyes, rays of sunlight pierced the stale air of the cabin.

  I had rolled over in my sleep, my back was turned to the Jipsons.

  ‘I am saying to you, Mia Jipson, that you have the toothpaste in that confounded rubbish bin that you call a handbag.’

  ‘It’s not here. You had it last. You forgot to put it back, obviously.’

  ‘I did not have it last. I used it in the lounge at LA, and then handed it to you. Remember? After you told me to go brush that foul tuna salad off of my breath if I wanted to sit next to you in a plane for twelve hours …’

  ‘Oh yessir, I recall that! But did you bring the toothpaste out of the bathroom? I believe not. I believe, Lionel, that you left it in there.’

  I sat up and looked at them. He was polishing his glasses with the corner of a white handkerchief. She had tipped the entire contents of her handbag into her lap, searching for the toothpaste. Both of them looked exactly as they had the night before when they boarded the plane.

  We exchanged Good mornings and How did you sleeps.

  ‘Very well, thank you,’ she said. ‘Like a log.’

  ‘A log? Huh!’ he said. ‘Make that a hog. Snoring away, keeping everyone else awake. Did she keep you awake? I’m so sorry if she did …’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said.

  I thought I wanted to know what the time might be. But not the time in Los Angeles, nor the time in London, both of which were displayed on the screens. I didn’t know what other time there might be.

  AFTER THREE DAYS IN London, I started an email to Joe. My fingers froze over the keyboard. A virus — that’s what it felt like. It had taken hold before I went to Auckland, infecting our emails, sabotaging any real effort or intention to sort things out between us. Those cute little emoticons whizzed through cyberspace, antipode to antipode, flirting with each other — wink wink smiley face — in passing.

  There was no point, I thought. No point in starting all that again.

  The London spring that year was spectacular. Although I’d lived in the city my whole life, its beauty seemed brand-new. Trees were in bud everywhere and warm rain made everything grow quickly.

  One Saturday morning I watched a tulip open. It was in a pot on the kitchen table. I stared at the miniscule movements of the individual petals as they let each other go. I thought about waiting on the tarmac of Sydney airport, watching night turn to dawn. I turned the computer on and bought an airline ticket to New Zealand.

  SPECTACLES

  Lotte Jones was making thick black coffee for Jackson Klein in that funny little café halfway between Kilbirnie shops and the sea. Jackson sat where he always sat — under a large poster of Che Guevara, at a round wooden table which wobbled due to one leg being slightly shorter than the others.

  He removed from under the short table leg a tatty, flattened piece of paper that was meant to stop the wobbling but didn’t. He tore two blank pages from his notebook, folded each of them four times, and wedged them under the short leg. The table was momentarily more stable — still enough, at any length, for him to begin work.

  Lotte put the little brown cup down in front of him. Jackson put on his glasses and positioned his pen on the next blank page in the notebook. The notebook was thin — he got through them quickly — so he picked up the pen and wrote on the next blank page: Buy a new notebook. Then he let the pen rest back on the pad.

  ‘I heard on the radio, there’s a sea fog,’ Lotte said. ‘Did you see it?’

  ‘I drove through it on my way here,’ Jackson said. ‘All those weeks of glorious weather, now this. It’s thick like a dream — no, not a dream … like soup. No no, not soup!’ He shook his head in irritation and pressed his fingers to his temples. He squinted, thinking hard.

  Such a geek, thought Lotte.

  ‘Like cotton wool, it’s more like cotton wool. That’s it! Thick like cotton wool.’ His face lit up at the simile. He picked up his pen and scribbled in his notebook. The scrawling letters took up half a page.

  Everything about Jackson was dramatic. It was to do, he’d told Lotte once, with being a playwright, something called the reveal process. She’d been trying to remember a coffee order at the time and hadn’t taken much notice.

  ‘Can I ask you a cheeky question?’ she said, picking up the empty cup. ‘Can I try on your glasses? My eyes are getting worse every day.’

  ‘I don’t mind, not at all.’ Jackson carefully lifted the spectacles off the bridge of his nose. He handed them to Lotte. ‘Of course, they are especially made, you understand, designed just for me. My eyes are in a right old state, thanks to this …’ He drummed his fingers on the lid of his laptop. ‘A right old state, thanks to writing.’ He laughed at his joke.

  Lotte let that one go. She slipped the glasses on her face, taking care not to touch the lenses. ‘That’s odd,’ she said, looking up, down, lifting them on and off her nose. ‘When you’ve got them on, they make no difference at all. They’re like plain glass.’

  ‘That’s the thing!’ said Jackson. ‘Everyone’s eyes are different. It just goes to show that your vision problem is totally different from mine. Which isn’t surprising, when you think about it. Given that I write all day and you make coffee.’

  Lotte looked again through the glasses — at Jackson, at Che Guevara. She followed Guevara’s wistful gaze out the window. There was no out-of-the-ordinary distortion. A blurry screen filtered her world, as it always had.

  The sea fog had been crawling up the cold sands of Lyall Bay, through the quiet hallways and sitting rooms of the beachfront houses. It drifted, just then, past the café door. A man emerged from the first tendrils of mist. He wore a black winter coat belted tightly at the waist. On his feet were sturdy boots. A scarf covered his mouth, meeting his thick black moustache, and a green woollen hat with flaps protected his ears. His form quickly took shape as he outstepped the heavy white fog. He didn’t look in the café, at the barista and the writer. He shouted loudly to nobody as he walked by.

  There was nothing special about the man. This was the sort of neighbourhood where people got around in clothing entirely unrelated to the season. This was the sort of neighbourhood where people frequently addressed the heavens with their thoughts and observations, regardless of whether they were accompanied or quite alone.

  Lotte gave the glasses back to Jackson, who cleaned the perfectly clear lenses with a soft yellow cloth.

  JACKSON KLEIN WAS FIFTY-FOUR and lived with his well-heeled wife in an affluent suburb overlooking the harbour. He mainly wrote short plays, none of which had made it to stage. His creativity, he believed, was greatly enhanced when he installed himself in a bohemian café to work. There was something about the possibility of grime. He particularly liked the unpretentious atmosphere of the little place halfway between the shops and the sea.

  He’d recently worked out why his writing was yet to find an audience. It was erudite, so much so that even the academics failed to understand it. So he abandoned that sort of work.

  Now it was all about art reaching people. The people — the ordinary man and woman. He tested his creat
ive ideas out on Lotte. Although he never pried into her personal circumstances, he sensed her to be the exact target audience for his simple yet profound writing.

  His imagination would often spark at the oddest moment — in the middle of the night, or while brushing his teeth — the next morning he would race to the café to bounce ideas off her.

  LOTTE JONES WAS SIXTEEN, but small like a boy. Her skin was the colour of mochaccino. Her hair was straight and shiny and black and she wore it pulled back tightly in a ponytail. She lived near the café with her parents, Malcolm and Gloria. Malcolm Jones was violent and a drunk and a gambler. He spent most of the household income on the horses. Gloria was a cleaner. Her dull waking hours were focused on the shiny linoleum floors of Wellington Hospital.

  Lotte’s eyesight had been poor all her life. Years ago she slipped the attention of the Ministry people who came to the school and asked the children to read the big black letters on the wall chart. Maybe Lotte had been absent that day? Who can remember, so far back? As time passed, she learned to memorise the things she needed to know — enough to see her slide through the school years, labelled a slow learner. When Gloria questioned Lotte’s vision, Malcolm convinced her there was nothing to worry about.

  On two occasions, Lotte had bravely called Malcolm on his brutal behaviour. After the first, he slapped her hard across the face, leaving four red marks that turned to streaky bruises. The second time, she bypassed her father’s heavy hand. She went to the pub in the city where her father went to gamble.

  The family barely scraped by thanks to Malcolm’s gambling, she explained to the manager. The manager had nodded and tut-tutted and, looking over Lotte’s slender young boy-body, said he would see what he could do. The following day she arrived home to find her mother cradling a broken arm in a sling.

  As soon as Lotte could leave school, her father arranged the job at the café. The café — which, by the way, didn’t serve food and was nothing more than a money-laundering front for other ventures — belonged to a friend of Malcolm. Malcolm liked the idea of knowing where his daughter was, all the time.

  She mastered the massive coffee machine the same way she had mastered crayons, cooking and house cleaning: by touch, sound, smell and a heightened sense of intuition. You’d never know, watching her, that her sight was poor — certainly her customers had no idea. Lotte flicked switches, swirled knobs and heated milk without glancing at what she was doing.

  Lotte hid enough money from Malcolm for them to get by. He knew how much she earned, but he didn’t know about the tip jar on the counter. She tried to make sure that her mother was never at home alone with her father in the evenings, when he drank the most.

  There was a price to pay for her vigilance. Lotte paid it in bruises. Sometimes, she saw the blows coming and managed to dodge them. Sometimes, when she was exhausted, when her eyes were extra tired and her guard was down, she did not.

  BUSINESS WAS SLOW. LOTTE decided to wash down the coffee machine. She scrubbed the filter baskets with a little wire brush. There was a set of miniature screwdrivers in the drawer under the counter. Slowly, mostly by touch, Lotte unscrewed the external parts of the machine. She cleaned them in hot soapy water and reassembled them, taking care not to cross-thread the tiny screws and nuts.

  Jackson picked his pen up, sighed, and put it down again. He plugged his laptop into the wall and pushed a few buttons. He sighed some more. Then he pushed down hard on the table and scraped it across the floor. He opened his notebook once more and ripped out two blank pages, then folded them and placed them under the short table leg, on top of the pieces of paper already there. The table wobbled because now three legs were much shorter than the short leg.

  Lotte saw he was having trouble getting started.

  ‘What are you working on?’ she asked, bending down low to reconstruct the coffee machine. The tiny components were impossible to see; they kept falling from her fingers. She strained to guide them to exactly where they needed to be.

  More sighs from Jackson. ‘I’m writing a modern version of a story by Nikolay Gogol.’

  ‘You’re copying a story? Is that allowed?’

  ‘It’s not copying, Lotte. I would never copy someone else’s work. It’s called interpretation.’

  ‘Okaaay,’ said Lotte. It was impossible — impossible — to thread the screws through the minute holes in the nuts. She should never have dismantled the machine. ‘Nikolay Gogol. Don’t think I’ve heard of him … what’s he done?’

  ‘Done?’

  ‘Written. What’s he written?’

  ‘You possibly haven’t heard of his books, he’s Russian …’

  Lotte couldn’t think of any Russian writers, not off hand. ‘Try me,’ she said anyway.

  ‘Well, there’s a funny old tale about a nose that falls off a man’s face and becomes a person. And there’s quite a famous play, called The Government Inspector.’

  There was no response from Lotte, just the tinkle of tiny metal tools dropping on the concrete floor and swearing to follow.

  ‘There are other stories, “The Overcoat”, for example, which is the story I’m focusing on. And “The Diary of a Madman” …’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Nope?’

  ‘Nope. Never heard of them.’ Lotte’s head popped up from behind the counter. She smiled at Jackson. ‘Anyway. What’s the problem?’

  ‘The problem is the ghost. There’s a ghost in “The Overcoat”, right at the end of the story. Actually, not right at the end. Past the end of the story.’

  ‘Well, it’s at the end then, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s the point. Exactly the point. Gogol got to the natural end of the jolly story, and forgot to stop writing.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ From behind the counter.

  Jackson knew Lotte wasn’t really listening. Uh-huh was what she said when she was getting on with something. Which was fine. It helped the reveal process to keep talking.

  ‘Yes … the problem is that the story itself comes to a natural end, with the death of the main character.’

  ‘Sounds cheerful. What does he die of?’

  ‘The cold. He saves up, buys an overcoat, has it stolen and dies of the cold.’

  ‘Uh-huh …’

  ‘So the story’s done, but then this ghost arrives and starts running around accusing everyone of stealing his overcoat.’

  ‘So it’s a ghost story,’ said Lotte.

  ‘That’s the point. It’s not. The ghost bit tacked on the end just ruins things. It detracts from what is otherwise an incredibly powerful, simple story … muddies it totally. Such a distraction … no literary scholar has ever been able to figure out why the ghost appears. What it all means … including me. Which is why I can’t get started on this confounded piece of work.’

  ‘Just ignore it then.’

  ‘Ignore what?’

  ‘The ghost bit. Pretend it’s not there.’

  ‘That’s impossible. It is there. You can’t just start ignoring the bits of classic literature that you don’t understand.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Lotte, ‘he was …. what’s the guy’s name again?’

  ‘The one who loses the coat? Akaky Akakyevitch.’

  ‘No, the guy who wrote the story.’

  ‘Gogol.’

  ‘Maybe Gogol was just having fun. Maybe he liked ghosts, and wanted one in this story. Makes sense to me. Man has coat nicked. Man gets cold. Man dies. Comes back as ghost for revenge. You know, like Freddy Krueger.’

  ‘Gogol would not have been having fun. Serious writers don’t have fun, Lotte. Whatever the reason for the ghost, it’s not fun.’

  ‘If you say so.’ Lotte had no idea, really, why a writer would not choose to have fun. If there was the slightest opportunity to create joy, would one not seize it?

  ‘It’s quiet, isn’t it. Must be the fog,’ she said, changing the subject.

  ‘More likely the festival.’

  ‘What festival?’ Lotte hoped it might be
another Cuba Street Festival. Last year, late one night when her father was out, she had taken her mother up on the festival’s small Ferris wheel. They sat together at the very top, in a yellow seat, and looked at the city sparkle and buzz beneath them. They listened to laughter and shouting. Not a word passed between them.

  ‘The writers festival,’ said Jackson. ‘It happens every second year, always in March. Famous writers come for a week, to talk about their books. People fly in from all over to hear what they have to say. Today’s the last day.’

  ‘So you think that’s why no one’s drinking coffee today? They’re all at this festival?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Jackson. ‘I imagine that anyone who is able to get the time off work, and who can afford the tickets, will be there. Anyone, that is, involved in serious literature. I’m heading there shortly myself.’

  Lotte had nearly finished cleaning the coffee machine; all that remained was the milk steamer. She held a stainless steel jug filled with cold water under the spout. She turned the black knob on the side of the machine and the spout began to hiss.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘I’m not so sure about this festival. I think it’s the fog keeping people at home.’

  She dropped the jug. Boiling water splashed across the tender, pale skin on the inside of her arm, between her wrist and elbow. The water kept coming — she had filled the jug to the very top — and as she watched her skin went bright red and formed tiny bubbles beneath the surface. It felt as though she had brushed up against an iceberg. She watched as other older scars on her arm shrivelled and merged into the new ugly red welt.

  The empty jug clattered to the floor. Jackson rushed to Lotte.

  ‘Oh no, oh my goodness!’ he cried. He ran to his table for no obvious reason, then dashed back to her. ‘We need an ambulance. Where’s my phone? Where’s the phone, Lotte?’

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Lotte. She stood quite still, staring at her arm, as though it belonged to someone else. ‘Don’t ring an ambulance. Cold water. That’s what we need.’

  Jackson looked at the girl for a moment, then turned on the cold tap at the sink. He held Lotte around the shoulders as the water ran over her burned arm. ‘How did you manage that?’ he asked.