‘I wouldn’t like to think you were developing bad work habits.’
‘I’ve shown no sign of it so far, have I? Anyway, this family and their bloody reverence for tertiary education—the fat fruit with a hollow heart. I mean, all I’ve learnt so far is how to mimic a certain way of writing—’
‘You should have stuck with your science degree.’
‘What? And get good research skills? There’s nothing I want to research, nothing I feel I need to know—’ I broke off, my mind banking like a gull scaling a buttress of wind. Remembering—no, not remembering, but knowing—the lines of one of his poems. Seeing the page before me, reading the words as they formed under his moving hand:
What do I need to know?
In a universe with laws
To govern the physical
And metaphysical
Making a closed fist of possibility.
There is no room
To dispute these facts
Thus I progress
From hope to hopelessness
Wanting only that
Which is impossible
You
To forget that you are dead.
Grandfather was saying, impatiently, ‘By now you should have some idea of what you want to do.’
I shrugged. ‘Get some job, make money, go overseas for a bit.’
‘Yes, all well and good, but where do you see yourself in ten years?’
I thought carefully. There are certain things you can’t say to the people who’ve paid your way, fed you, fretted over you, got you to the doctor when you were ill, carefully selected the right gifts for Christmas and birthdays, paid the bills you couldn’t quite afford. You can’t say, ‘In ten years I see myself as a speck of ash on a vast coal cocooned in ice and shrouded in smoke.’ Nor, ‘I see myself standing, holding a gun, under a black flag.’ No, you can’t say that sort of thing.
‘I’ll figure it out,’ I said. ‘It’s all under control.’ (Sure—some career in complicity, some job, some house, some bank account. No. There’s nothing I want. I don’t want anything.)
‘You’ve got to give it some thought,’ Grandfather said, then pushed the remainder of his quiche across the table to me.
The hinged gates of the day swung this way and that, drafting my thoughts, so there were fewer paths to follow hour by hour.
The interview with Armitage was satisfactory. It didn’t dispel my comfortable contempt for the man, not because he refused to grant my request for a further extension (I would probably have been disappointed if he had) but because he was the same familiar someone easy to hate: stern, concerned, conscientiously fair, telling me he couldn’t offer me more time than he was prepared to offer anyone else in difficulties, saying, ‘Of course you see my point—’ in his reasonable, world-explaining voice, a Kiwi cured of his accent, speaking received English in the way the recipient of a miracle parades a clean, healed body. ‘You can’t expect additional privileges to those of any other student. I don’t believe your case really warrants that.’ While I sat with my back to the bookcases concealing the door, happy he was being so self-consciously egalitarian, knowing he was enjoying putting me in my place (everyone else’s place), yet still willing him to do something for me he wouldn’t consider doing for anyone else.
‘Put the essay in my pigeonhole tomorrow,’ he instructed, and I left his office warmed by a sense of my own superiority. Now I could fail out of pique. The university (which I decided, tidily, he represented) didn’t want me—no one would bend the regulations to keep me interested and present.
Yet, even as I thought all this, I knew it was childish and paltry—I was stalking off full of hot wires of anger and defiance, thinking vaguely of heroic scenes like the Glowworm ramming the Admiral Hipper, and other such nonsense. As if dropping out of university was some kind of gallant gesture (about all that was available to me).
I walked back down into the city through the five-o’clock twilight. It was one of those evenings where no one seems to have any patience, when pedestrians dodge through the traffic, heedless of danger, and cars nose slowly through crowds on crossings before the ‘Wait’ sign has reappeared, and a minute waiting at a busy intersection would be long enough to witness an accident or near accident.
Manners Mall was full of people, and a mood of hysterical excitement. Various groups were competing for attention, attempting to snag the two opposing currents of traffic. First a three-guitar, two-amplifier group of buskers, who had staked out for themselves a large sound-claim—one which took in the young man behind the Greenpeace display table, who was speaking with fierce animation to a friend. It must have been a friend, because, although the volume of the buskers’ music meant even antagonists would have had to put their heads together to hear each other, this was obviously a conference between friends. The young man, despite his wild expression, had his hands behind his head, elbows crooked, as though miming prostrate submission while still standing up. I passed them, caught the voice—East London accent—very earnest, his soul dancing like a flame on the tip of his tongue.
Street and shop lights were glowing out of the pavement. It was filmed with water which caught ghostly reflections of buildings and people and the low, plump coverlet of cloud—so that all of us were walking on an imperfect mirror of fallen rain as if across a sheet of glass spanning a long fall into a second soft sky.
I went home and sat on my bed, surrounded by books and papers, knowing I wouldn’t do any work. I felt defeated, because it was frightening to overcome wanting, even wanting something as unimportant as academic success. Being cast out of yet another desire, however ordinary it was, made me feel homeless and incapable. I didn’t want to go out and join Mike and Sue in front of the TV, since the first thing they’d say would be, ‘Have you finished it yet?’ To which I’d have to reply, ‘No, and I’m not going to, either. It isn’t really a big deal, not in itself—’ Knowing the same thing had happened, was happening to them, that, generally, we weren’t dispossessed of things, of people, but of desire. Somehow it seemed impossible to want anything enough, or for long enough.
I left the door open so I could hear my flatmates, and the TV voices. I sat, semi-exiled in the bell-jar of brightness created by the bedside lamp, idly reading the titles from a photocopy of the key to British Books in Print: Confidence in God and Time, Correct Ideas Don’t Fall, Labour Policy in the United States, The Joy of Mourners, Zero is Not Nothing. A collection of cryptic messages, reminding me of the books the Sunday school kids at my primary school used to recite, demonstrating their virtue or acumen—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers—as if knowing the names were enough.
I fell asleep before Sue and Mike switched off the TV and went to bed, while the house was still reassuringly awake.
Again. I was running along a muddy track, through drapes of wet air that seemed a lighter element than that from which I had emerged, as though I had just fought my way free from mud and was now gliding, warm, washed, through unresisting air.
Beside the track the last of the flax bushes, wind in their leaves, clapped encouragement. I ran, intact, untroubled, strong. The track, hill, pine forest surrounding me, a thin, unfinished image, as if the landscape showed only the yellow and cyan composite of a printed colour photograph—fused in a faded, deadly green—without the final magenta and black plates that complete the world on paper in a colour reproduction. Something substantial was missing, and my awareness of an unknown wrongness kept trying to beat me back at every step, like a strong wind, warning.
Before me on the slick path was a thin hurrying figure, someone who must be pursued and apprehended.
I woke to a touch, two fingers pressed into the palm of my hand, and the odour of Nina Ricci’s L’Air du Temps. Andrea sat down beside me. My papers slid and rustled. Light rain gleamed on her hair like a beaded veil.
Out in the lounge her current lover was muttering something about the cold—announcing, ‘I’m going to run a hot bath, OK?’
‘Sure, go ahead.
Take your time,’ Andrea called back, without shifting her gaze from my face. ‘Were you having a bad dream, Kelfie?’
‘A strange dream.’
‘You were grinding your teeth and muttering. Your door was open and the light was on. I thought you must still be in a death grapple with the essay. Did the essay win?’
‘I’ve given up. I’m going south tomorrow if I can get my bike on the ferry.’
‘Did anything I said last night help you make up your mind?’
‘I think I had sort of made up my mind before I even began trying to write it.’
‘Well, at least you know your mind’s made up. Not like me and my last, the one for Drama. Remember? I wrote it, rewrote it, polished it, typed it up—then didn’t hand it in. I carried it around for weeks, past the deadline, even past the period of grace.’
‘Do you know why you did that?’
‘Yes, but I couldn’t explain it to you.’
‘Try.’
‘I suppose you think you already know,’ she said.
‘Ah huh.’
‘Figures.’ She fell quiet again. As she considered, the pipes began howling, their usual sound when a bath was being run. We both glanced automatically at my clock to check that the ‘no baths after one o’clock’ rule wasn’t being infringed. The pause lengthened as we attended to the racket the plumbing was making, both mentally mapping the positions of the other presences in the house; Sue and Mike awake now, in their beds, Sandy just shutting off the taps and lying back in the tub, we two alone, together in the restored silence.
Andrea said, ‘You know how you read kids’ books, Kelfie?’
‘Yeah. I missed reading all the good young adults’ fiction when I was a young adult—too busy impressing people by conspicuously sitting around reading Prometheus Unbound or Notes from the Underground.’
‘We reckon we can tell how depressed or pressured you’re feeling by how many new books are lying around the house. For instance, if you go out shopping on Friday night and come home with three bought books and four from the library, that means you’re stressed and depressed.’
‘I did that last Friday.’
‘Exactly. Two days before the deadline for an essay and a week before exams.’
‘Pretty telling, eh?’
‘I read every one of those books you bring into the house. And do you know what I love about them? Those kids, the heroes and heroines of the stories, they solve their problems. They pay the price, but they get something precious in return. And they save the world—or their worlds. Especially in the fantasy books. There’s always something they must find to help them, something which does exist and which they are able to find. Or there’s something they have to destroy, some one enemy to defeat, or curse to raise, or misunderstanding to clear up.’
‘But it’s never easy, and it always changes them.’
‘Yes. But they grow, and are wiser or more courageous for their experiences, more certain who they really are, where they really belong.’
‘Except sometimes, like when Susan is abandoned by the Wild Hunt at the end of The Moon of Gomrath.’
Andrea nodded. ‘But when things like that happen in kids’ stories they are more shattering than Winston Smith breaking down in Room 101, or Anna Karenina throwing herself under the train.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘because when the heroes and heroines of kids’ stories put out their hands to the universe, they almost always have their hands clasped.’
Andrea got up and turned the lamp to sidelight her face as she stood before my mirror. She took my comb and began combing the crystal beads of rain into her hair. As she did so she said, ‘Like you, I was a good student and what I did was generally praised—’
‘Exalted,’ I said, about myself, not her. ‘Often I was much better than good.’ Stubborn egotism asserted itself, because at that moment, having decided to quit, my academic track-record seemed very precious; the safest, neatest portion of my public identity.
‘You mean you, not me. “Exalted”!’ She laughed, then went on. ‘Well—it wasn’t enough. Being good wasn’t enough. And working the late shift at Databank for eighteen dollars an hour isn’t enough either. I don’t want to be able to just look after myself—save myself—’
‘You want to be able to save the world.’
She replaced my comb on top of the dresser, and turned back to me, the light shining in her face. ‘But I can’t want that.’
‘Why not? Saving the world is what needs doing.’
‘Except I can’t do it. Oh, I subscribe to the right papers and periodicals, give money to the right people, stand in pickets, write letters, read the recommended books, but I’m still as much immersed as the next person in the thing I want to save the world from.’ She blinked and rubbed her hand over her face. I returned the light to its original position, so that it illuminated me and my cluttered bed.
‘I feel completely superfluous most of the time,’ she complained, more peevish than unhappy—the problem perhaps too vast to register accurately as tragedy. ‘You don’t seem to have this problem, Kelfie. Not that you aren’t dissatisfied, obviously you must be, to be dropping out—’
‘That’s nothing!’ I said, angrily.
‘I’m not making fun of you. What I mean is that you manage to impress everyone who knows you with this air of autonomy.’
I was unable to overcome my urge to revise this remark. ‘It’s not autonomy, it’s irresistibility.’
Her hand went up to her throat. ‘See?’ she said, distressed.
‘What?’ I demanded, sensing she was about to have one of her characteristic outbreaks of concern for my sanity. I tried to deflect her. ‘What is “See?” supposed to mean?’
‘Kelfie, I care about you, but you scare me. You’re unsafe.’
‘How am I “unsafe”?’ My tone was intended to make her feel she was being dramatic and stupid. But she stood up in the path of my derision, saying calmly, ‘You’re unsafe like a bad road in bad weather, too, and changeable, and downright crazy.’
‘How can you say that?’ What she said hurt and kept hurting worse, working its way in. ‘We’ve lived together for two years, you’re my friend—’ Rage under shallow indignation. Then the rage broke out and I found myself kneeling on the bed senselessly tossing handfuls of books and papers on to the floor—furious because she was afraid of me, when I had so often encouraged her to fear me, more furious because she was afraid for me, which was insulting and demeaning and impossible to deal with. ‘Fuck you!’ I shouted, and hurled the last sheaf of papers at her feet, where it skidded into a neat, white half-circle, which she stepped across coming towards me.
I threw myself down and curled up, my body numb and my mind an arena of slowed time and expanded space, in which I seemed to float, trying to negotiate with my temper and hide a desire to punish her, because it was wrong to want to hurt my friends.
I felt the bed shift as she knelt on it and leaned over me. ‘Are you crying?’ she asked, curiously.
‘No.’
‘I didn’t mean it to sound as bad as it did, Kelfie.’
‘When we leave this flat, I’m not going to live with you.’
‘Who’s “you”? Me? Us? Or everyone?’
‘Everyone. I’m not going to live with anyone.’
She put her hand on my shoulder. I uncurled, relaxed and lay back with my hands behind my head.
She frowned at me. I had recovered too quickly and she had decided the outburst was faked.
‘How can you treat me as though you think I’m crazy, when you’re supposed to be my friend?’ I asked, accusing.
She sighed. ‘You are crazy. You think you’re something you’re not.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘I’m not sure—perhaps just not subject to the same rules as everyone else. That alone is enough to make you crazy.’
Her next remark was interrupted as we heard, out in the still night, the sound of oystercatchers crying somewhere above the
harbour. I sat up. ‘It sounds as though there’s a wilderness, not a city, out there, and we can walk down through the bush to Pipitea and dig for pipis.’
‘Dreamer,’ she said, placated, and turned to go.
‘Hey, Andrea, chuck me my cards, they’re on the third shelf.’
She picked up the silk-wrapped pack and tossed it to me.
‘I want to see whether I should go south tomorrow.’
‘I thought you’d already decided you would.’
‘I want the cards to confirm my decision. And for the bookings to be clear, the sailing on time, and the Strait calm—everything informing me, “Of course you’re doing the right thing.”’
Her silence, as she stayed standing in the doorway, insinuated another ‘See?’
‘Andrea?’
‘Yes?’
‘Remember when I was caught on the road by the big slips last April? While you and the others were waiting for me at my the bach?’
‘Yes.’
‘That guy, Simon Wrathall, who used to do that weird comic strip for Enclave, who killed his lover—he was up on the Hill that night, when the landslides closed the road.’
‘And?’
I shuffled and cut the pack. ‘And nothing. Just he was there, I met him—he had the body in the boot of his car.’ I looked down, laying out the first three cards, in succession: The Magician, The Chariot, The Ace of Swords. Andrea turned away and I said softly, after her retreating back, ‘I am what I think I am.’
Wrathall wrote me a letter. He wrote that he wouldn’t have thought to try to make contact, but that he had seen me on TV.
—I saw you on television, briefly, among a crowd leaving a meeting—a light wind catching your coat, the intermittent mist of your breath blurring your face, and your arrogant, intimate stare at the camera—which may have been merely pointing your way and focused elsewhere. There you were, staring through the possibility that the camera wasn’t focused on you, through the likelihood that the seconds of video in which you appeared would be edited out of the broadcast, through all chances and uncertainties, into actuality. Yourself the subject, the only subject of the scene throughout the seconds of your appearance. So much so that the camera, as if of its own volition (as though it were not a camera, but my eyes), moved to follow you as you walked, coat blowing, breath smoking, across the wet street—not far away, already somewhere else in time and space, five hours on from taping to broadcast, but—coat blowing and breath smoking—immediate, close, realised.