The Polish woman was slumped against him; she grunted and laughed. She rubbed her nose against his shoulder. He wanted to thank her. Bill wanted to tell her that she had saved his night. But that sounded a little too over the top. He didn’t want to scare her. He certainly didn’t want her to think he was hopeful of another meeting in the not-too-distant future. That’s not how these things happened or were supposed to happen. As he glanced up at the frozen black sky he happened to catch a shooting star on its singular journey. Why not leave it at that? He’d been out with Elgar when he’d spotted another dog. That was all the world needed to officially know. He tried to guess the hour. He pictured his wife at the door. The guests taking their rosy faces out to the car. He would go home and apologise to Gina. He’d had a good long walk with Elgar. Plenty of time to think. And now he would say he was sorry. When he knew guests were on their way he should never have gotten the dog so excited.
broken machinery
It was in my second year of high school that she moved out. The briskness with which I was despatched to McDonald’s that Friday night somehow connected with her urgency to get on with a new life. Saturday morning Mum was packed and gone. There had been no serious arguments. No shouting. Late Saturday morning I went back to McDonald’s, this time with Dad. We walked there in a daze. There was nobody else involved, at least not then; but had there been, Dad would have had an easier time understanding.
For a while he sniffed at the air, expecting perfume, and where he’d grown used to a familiar voice there came, instead, this new silence. From his rapt concentration on papers strewn over his desktop he tended to look up suddenly, as if touched by a chill that had started at the base of his spine. Then he’d rip his glasses off his face, ready to confront the devil.
‘Pete! Jesus,’ he said. ‘Please don’t creep up on me like that.’
I had my mother’s old office. It was only now she was gone that we referred to it as my mother’s office, and after school I went there to help out with what had been her responsibilities. I rolled the Tomorrow’s Bride into cardboard cylinders ready to be slipped into letter-boxes. Four times a year the Bride crept up one wall of yellow-painted hessian, almost to touch the ceiling. The rest of the time, if there wasn’t much doing, I got to answer the telephone.
The last digit on the telephone next to me was different from the one in Dad’s office. Late afternoon it would be Mum calling to see how I was making out; we chatted away and through the glass partition I saw Dad frown at his desktop.
Mum said, ‘Why don’t you start calling me Helen? Would you like that?’
‘If you want to,’ I said.
‘It’s not what I want, Pete, honey. It’s what you want. That’s what’s important. If you want to call me Helen, go right ahead.’
After I hung up Dad came through and stood, friendly, his hands deep in his pockets rattling change.
‘So, what’s your mother’s news?’
‘Nothing much.’
‘Go on,’ he said, with a kind of embarrassed grin. ‘She must have said something.’
I said, ‘She wants me to call her Helen.’
Dad laughed. He chuckled all the way back to his desk. He shook his head at something lodged in his memory.
I was the result of what he called his ‘boom’ period. I followed on the heels of the Porsche. While I was at primary school we moved from the cramped semi-detached without a view to the two-storey house on the hill. One of the bedrooms Dad took for an office. A desk was pushed hard up beneath the window, which overlooked the valley of motley tin roofs; the view escaped the hills and ran out towards the heads. I think of him in there with the telephone grafted to his ear, kissing Helen’s forehead when she brought in his morning tea and cheese crackers. Still on the telephone, he might lift a scrap of paper with doodlings and my mother’s eyes would pop. Then she’d nod approvingly at the figures, and rumple his thin, lifeless hair, which belonged more to a fat boy than my father. Then she might kiss his balding spot and rub it as if making a wish. That’s what I remember.
But the winter she became Helen Jefferson, instead of chatting about her university classes I wanted to tell her that not everything was as it should be with the Bride. My job got easier. The publication got thinner, down to an anaemic thirty pages, with not half the advertising of the old days. I had no complaints. The Bride was more easily packaged. Plus we could carry more in the van borrowed from Uncle Dirk, and so it took less time to distribute.
‘The market’s shot,’ was all Dad would say.
‘Why?’ I asked. Why should a good thing end?
‘Why? Why anything …’ he said. Dad pushed back from his desk on his swivel chair and stared out the window, found a flock of starlings and followed their black shiver against the dusk; a nerve was sprung and the flock suddenly broke west.
‘These things can happen without warning. Without so much as a hint of what lies around the corner,’ he said. ‘I’m not even sure asking “Why?” is the best way of going about it. What can I tell you …’
‘Mum used to say that,’ I said.
‘Did she?’ he said. What else? he was going to say. Instead he settled for, ‘She’s smarter than most. I can tell you that.’
He drummed his fingers on the windowsill, trying to re-focus. I see now it was just a matter of getting something in his sights. Not surprisingly, the moment he lifted his attention from the publication, the first thing to catch his eye was destined to become an obsession.
It just happened to be squash. Those short July afternoons, the office routine took a turn with Dad picking me up outside the school gates and driving off to the squash club. He ran about the court like a wounded beast. Crashed off the walls and came back to the receiver’s side drenched and glowing unhealthily, his jaw slack. ‘Another game,’ he gasped, and in this final game I contented myself with bringing the ball back into the centre court, nice and easy.
An idea began to take shape when Dad, discovering that he had lost four kilos, reacted as if he had gained something. Saturday morning we motored into town. In the jeans boutique loud with rock’n’roll Dad grimaced his way inside the doors and, without a word to the thin shop assistant, pointed to what he wanted from the rack and threw down a plastic card on the glass counter. He took to wearing jeans and sweatshirts to the office.
In August, instead of getting out and hustling space for the traditional bumper Christmas issue, we went skiing at Mt Hutt. What gave him that idea? What clues can be found in a person who has never before expressed any interest in skiing?
‘What’s got into him, Pete?’ my mother, Helen Jefferson, wondered during our telephone conversations.
The afternoon we were to leave for the South Island, I came home to find a stranger foraging in the boot of the Porsche. ‘Oh, hello, Pete,’ he said, and stood straighter than normal, next to our new ski equipment. He looked sour, and this I would say was due to his determination to get over and done with this moment in which I should note, and perhaps comment favourably on, the mass of curly hair, which was a good deal more dark and lively than it had been when he stepped from the shower that morning.
I don’t think he cared one way or the other for the skiing. On the chairlift he sat more like a commuter than an enthusiast. We did get friendly with a group of university girls. Most mornings we piled on the bus which took us up the slopes, and with the girls Dad threw back his head and laughed longer and louder than necessary. The girls all called him Graeme. I was happy for him—everything was going sweet. But maybe he pushed himself too far, too soon. Late in the day when he was bone-weary he stumbled coming off the chairlift, ending up sprawled in the snow. His lips were pressed together, and the corrugations in his chin deepened and didn’t match up at all well with his perm. It looked as if two different faces had been hurriedly pieced together after an accident.
After that he pottered about at the bottom of the lifts. He waved me onto the chair with the girls and we waved back at this stranded ma
n in sunglasses and mittens standing like a pointsman in the snow. His hands clasped behind his back, he just stood there and watched, and resisted all the vertical motion of the mountain. At night he rubbed moisturiser into his face. His skin darkened. Then it got tighter, to the point where he stayed inside the lodge during the last two days rather than risk another dose of mountain sun pulling it apart.
He was more excited about the homeward trip. On the ferry he kept disappearing to rub moisturiser into his face. Once we were out of the swell he stayed on deck, standing at the rail with the rest of the passengers, staring back at the bulging shorn hills reeling us inside the harbour. Around Pt Jerningham the city surprised, and Dad stepped back from the rail. He spun around, saw the terminal rear into view and checked himself.
‘How do I look, Pete?’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You’ve still got your sunglasses on.’
‘Right. The sunglasses.’ He touched their rim then took his hand away. ‘Look all right, do they?’
‘Sure.’
‘I can always take them off.’
‘Whatever you’re comfortable with,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to point them out.’
‘Well, thanks, Pete, but I’m finding it a bit glary. How are you finding it … Phew,’ he said.
‘It’s definitely in our eyes,’ I said, and Dad, shielding his from the imaginary glare, pointed vaguely with his free hand to the gluey haze over Tinakori Hill.
Inside the terminal Helen stood to one side of the exit doors. She knew about our failure to book the car on the ferry. Over the phone she had insisted on picking us up. ‘I want to, Pete,’ she had said, rather sharply in the end. She saw me now and waved. She had on large rimmed sunglasses so only the corners of her mouth indicated a smile.
‘There she is, Dad,’ I said, and just like that he dropped six hundred dollars’ worth of skis. Like a man racked by sharp chest pains. That’s how he later explained it. Other passengers following behind had to jump quickly to either side. Dad kept looking at Helen, but the way he looked it was as if he was combing his memory for something, a code that clearly wasn’t there anymore. Helen had taken off her sunglasses and was waving and smiling. I hissed at Dad to whip off his sunglasses. He didn’t hear, and it was never clearer: all the old confidence of the household Helen Jefferson had taken with her when she left.
Now she kissed Dad’s cheek, then talked a streak as if she’d won something. ‘Well … so, how was it? Absolutely brilliant, I bet. Well, come on, you two. I’m taking you both to Pizza Hut.’
Severely sunburnt, his skin moist, and hanging in there with the sunglasses, Dad hunched up like a circus bear in Helen’s small Honda. At Pizza Hut he and Helen sat at opposite ends of the cubicle. I kept my head down in the middle and picked away at a bowl of french fries.
‘New jeans, Gray,’ she said. ‘I did notice.’
Dad blushed and whipped off his sunglasses and where the mountain sun hadn’t burnt there were goggle-size white rings around his eyes. My mother burst out laughing. ‘Oh Gray, you should see yourself.’
We never went back to the squash club—neither of us mentioned it. Dad grew out his perm and went back to his old slacks and blazer. He kept saying how badly he had fallen behind.
He had great intentions—leaving for the office very early—but by mid-afternoon he was done for. Overwhelmed, he sat before a desk that no longer seemed right; its top was vast and unconquerable, as if in the time Dad had taken to duck out for the mail the desk had asserted its own autonomy. It started with the desk, but gradually spread to other things that had been an integral part of Dad. I hardly ever saw him on the telephone anymore.
Soon there was no longer any point in dropping by the office, and at home I found him stretched out along the couch, reading, and writing letters to friends whose names I associated with the old household. People who used to come to dinner; others who had since moved away.
He spent hours in the kitchen. It was a new thing for him, as the squash had been and the skiing was intended to be. He always had his face in a cookbook, and during the last term, when I walked in from school, I would be asked to sample something, to sip from the ladle a Chinese soup he’d laboured over that afternoon.
He mentioned the lease on his office ending in November, that he didn’t think he would renew it. A few nights later—he had cooked enchiladas and chopped tabouleh—he said he was putting the Bride on the market.
‘Time to move on to other things …’ He checked me for a response, then got up from the table.
Trouble was, apparently nobody thought the publication worth moving into. Yet what would have once presented itself as a problem, Dad disregarded. He had his reasons. The house market had changed. First-home owners weren’t building any more, and so the publication, with its advice on how to subcontract and achieve a low-cost new house, was an idea fallen on hard times.
The truth is, Dad allowed the Bride to lapse into receivership. The outstanding bills were for small amounts and when I came to understand such things it confounded me why he, why anyone, should have allowed a business with such a solid track record to be shot down by shrapnel. At the time it was less noticeable and, if anything, consistent with how he was managing the rest of his life.
Labour Weekend, a sunny Monday afternoon, we drove around the bays to Days Bay for ice-creams. We mingled with other families by the duck pond. We hired a dinghy and rowed out beyond the wharf. Dad lay back in the bow and opened up his face the way he had on the ski slopes. We didn’t talk much but he was able to respond and chuckle at small things—a silver splash as a kahawai broke near the bow to scatter a shoal of herrings and, in the shadows beneath the wharf, the half-panicky delighted yelps from a dinghy-load of girls pursued by a dinghy-load of boys in wet jeans.
It was on the way home that the Porsche’s muffler finally dropped onto the road. At Seaview, as well, something that sounded like a box of marbles rolling about made him pull over to the roadside. We got out of the car; Dad kicked the grille and the bonnet leapt up. Then he thought the better of it. The time was past when he might have rolled up his sleeves and set about correcting what had gone wrong. I don’t know whether the parts were too far gone or whether he just couldn’t be bothered. He removed the house keys from the keyring—the car keys he left on the driver’s seat—and without a word we walked the mile to Hutt Park, where Dad called a taxi. I suppose he was doing what was easiest.
We had to borrow Uncle Dirk’s van to clear his office. Dad chose to do it at night, which probably had something to do with his feelings as the longest tenant on the ground floor. Back and forth, we carted out back issues of the Bride, pens and charts, files; we filled boxes. In a desk drawer he found a passport photo of Helen Jefferson, taken before their trip to Honolulu. The three weeks they were away I stayed with Uncle Dirk.
‘Here’s your mother,’ he said, handing me the photo. ‘Best leave the desk and chairs, Pete.’ He gave the office a final once-over. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘What time is your mother expecting you?’
‘About now,’ I said.
‘What? Nine already? Christ’s sakes, Pete, why didn’t you say?’
We dumped everything in the garage. Boxes and boxes. The bottom of one collapsed and out fell old bromides, ads scissored from other publications, a batch of company seals. I was about to gather it all up when he stepped in with a broom and swept it with the dust and dirt of the garage floor into a pile by the other boxes. We were finished by 10 p.m. I went inside the house for my suitcase and school gear. Then we drove Uncle Dirk’s van into town. Helen’s flat in Thorndon was down a narrow lane. Okay for a car—Helen’s, say—but Dad didn’t want to risk Uncle Dirk’s van.
‘He’s a working man, Pete,’ he said.
He fussed with getting the van parked. I had my schoolbag under my left arm and held the suitcase in my left hand. I had worked it out that I would shake hands with my right hand. Then what? Only that it would be done quickly.
The van shu
ffled its rear end into place. The handbrake went on, and Dad said, ‘Looks a bit dark down there. I’ll help you with your suitcase, Pete.’
We could hear the clear notes of a jazz band from the tavern up the road. Dad said, ‘Sounds like a sassy neighbourhood.’ Not Bride territory, he meant. Then a little way down the lane, where the tall feathery toi-toi leant over the fenced-in courtyards, I could hear Helen’s wind chimes, then I saw the Honda parked smack up against the door of what she said had once been a sea captain’s cottage. Still short of the door Dad dropped the suitcase, and I backtracked a few steps to stare with him at the light through the front-room curtains. It was the only light on in her house.
‘I’ll tell her the van broke down, shall I?’
‘Tell her nothing of the sort,’ he said. ‘When she sees you it won’t matter. You’ll be right, Pete.’
The wind chimes sounded again. I knew I should invite him inside, but worried that he would accept. In the end I said, ‘Fancy a cup of tea, Dad?’
‘Don’t think so, Pete.’
He didn’t move a muscle. Dad standing there in this bricked lane and the night dancing away from him with its sassy notes, mutinous as his own office had become and altogether as bewildering as Helen Jefferson.