The Man in the Shed

  ‘Did I ever tell you how your mother and I met, Pete?’

  ‘Nope,’ I said.

  ‘Remind me one of these days,’ he said.

  I went to shake hands and he kissed my forehead.

  ‘Kiss your mother for me,’ he said.

  He rang each day after that, always before Helen arrived home. We talked about what he was making for dinner that night. A couple of times Helen came through the door and she knew who I was talking to; her eyes grew wider, popped like the old days, and she seemed to look too hard at the mail.

  ‘Your father?’ she asked. ‘What’s new?’

  ‘Chicken tandoori,’ I said.

  ‘Funny,’ she said. ‘He was always a meat and potatoes man.’

  Dad rang twice in the last week of November. The first time to say he’d found a buyer for the house, and the second time to say he was moving to Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

  what we normally do on a sunday

  My mother had known another man while Dad was away. Now that my father was back living with us she was trying hard to close off that chapter.

  I was expected to know more than I did about Mr Windly and my father was disappointed that I couldn’t shed more light. I loped alongside him and his gaze fetched off to the cool shadows of Hagley Park. He liked to walk holding his hands behind himself so that anything he might blurt could be passed off as an idle thought. Just an idea to float.

  ‘Your mother says that Mr Windly would like you to visit. Apparently. What do you say to that?’ I didn’t know what to think except hurting my father is the last thing I would do. I was curious though. I couldn’t think why Dave Windly would want to see me. He must have come to the house many times when I was there, asleep and unknowing at the far end of the house. I had seen him on plenty of other occasions. But they were fleeting and I was incidental to his purpose of visiting, and when I thought of Dave he was nothing more than a flash in the window. Sometimes my mother forgot to empty his ashtrays and in the morning I’d see them and know he’d been here in the night. My father gazed across a field where some kids were running a ball around. ‘I was asked to pass on that message,’ he said. Then his eye caught a red streak of a kite spiralling above the treetops. ‘Remind me to get one of those. I think we should. What do you reckon?’

  ‘I think we should too,’ I replied.

  His hand tousled my hair and I moved to his side, to his tobaccoey smell. His rough face grazed mine. ‘We’re mates?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘Forever?’

  ‘Forever,’ I said.

  My mother worked part-time in a real estate office, typing, answering the phone. I often came by there after school so we would walk home together.

  A few days after Dad told me about Dave Windly, he came across the road towards us, blindly waving his hands at the traffic. He didn’t seem to notice me. He had eyes only for my mother and as soon as he saw her displeasure he said, ‘Ten minutes, Marie—that’s all I’m asking.’

  My mother continued to tie on her scarf. She snuck a look at me and decided she would say what she wanted anyhow. ‘I thought we discussed this already, Dave. You promised me you wouldn’t do this anymore.’ She put her hand on my shoulder, and Mr Windly raised his hands in mock surrender.

  ‘I’m not ambushing you. You’re free to go.’ Then he noticed me and winked. ‘How’s Harry? I know a place where they make the best milkshakes in town.’ I looked up at my mother, and Mr Windly said, ‘Hell’s bells, Marie.’

  ‘Ten minutes,’ she said.

  ‘That’s all I’m asking for,’ said Mr Windly.

  The cafeteria was a few doors along from the real estate office. We were the only ones in there. My mother chose a booth towards the rear and sat with her back to the street. Mr Windly brought over a tray with a pot of tea and a milkshake for me. Then he sat down beside me and gazed across the table at my mother, and said, ‘You’re as lovely as ever, Marie.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter what I say, does it?’ said my mother.

  Dave leant back to get a good look at me.

  ‘Harry doesn’t mind a compliment passing his mother’s way.’ He laughed to himself and poured my mother’s cup. Then he said, ‘Do you still take milk or has that all changed as well?’ My mother threw him a look and again he held up his hands. ‘Sorry. Overstepped the mark. Sorry,’ he said again. And he looked sorry. As he sat stirring his tea my mother shook her head at him. She said that he had to try harder. Mr Windly nodded like he really was listening and taking it onboard, then he reached over and placed his hand on hers.

  ‘That’s not what I mean by making an effort,’ said my mother.

  Mr Windly took away his hand and stuck it in his pocket. He shook some change there. I drew on my straw. I was beginning to feel uncomfortable because I knew I was in the way of whatever Mr Windly wished to say to my mother. In the end he must have thought he’d say it anyway.

  ‘I want to meet him, Marie.’

  My mother said he could forget that. Mr Windly didn’t look like he was about to.

  ‘I want to see what kind of fellow he is,’ he said.

  My mother looked at her wristwatch and Mr Windly reached around for his coat, and stood up. ‘All right, Marie. You know how to get hold of me.’ Then he remembered me. ‘Hey, sport, how’s that chocolate?’ I stared inside the aluminium container and squirted up the last of the chocolate milk. By the time I looked up Mr Windly was gazing calmly across the table that divided him from my mother. ‘Marie, I’m not asking your permission.’ He said, ‘I know where he works.’

  ‘God, Dave. You followed him.’ Mr Windly didn’t deny it. He picked up the salt shaker and examined it. ‘I don’t believe it. Doesn’t matter what I say, does it?’ said my mother.

  ‘I’ll wait until I hear from you, shall I?’ said Mr Windly.

  My father was dead against Mr Windly visiting us. It was night-time and I lay in bed listening to him argue with my mother. He couldn’t see the point of it. My mother went on beating the eggs for the meal she was preparing in advance. I heard her say lightly, ‘I expect he only wants to talk to us about insurance.’

  ‘Oh sure, and I’m about to buy it from that fellow.’

  On the night he turned up my father stood in the front room waiting and chain-smoking. I think he was nervous about what he might do. But all the accumulated hurt and resentment lifted the moment he saw Mr Windly pass through the front gate and limp up to the door. A cigarette hung from my father’s hand. He stroked his chin and looked behind himself to seek out my mother through the walls of the house, wondering, I thought, how she could have taken up with a fellow old enough to be her father.

  Mr Windly entertained with an endless supply of stories. He made my father laugh. At other, sneakier moments I caught his eyes following my mother about the kitchen. I thought my mother was aware of her effect. She smiled even when her back was turned. My father drank down his beer, then looked at the empty glass a little surprised.

  Towards the end of dinner my mother took a phone call in the hall. At first Mr Windly and Dad waited for her to return. But she went on talking and finally Mr Windly said he thought he would have a smoke.

  ‘How about you, Ross?’ He pushed a silver cigarette case across the table for my father to pick up and admire. From where I sat I could see a neat round hole in it.

  Mr Windly lit his cigarette, inhaled and turned his attention to the silver box. ‘That,’ he said, ‘I removed from a German officer. The man was sitting at a table just like we are. Only he was dead. Though, I have to say, at first glance you wouldn’t have known it. This man was staring back at the open door. A bullet had hit him in the neck. Must have bust his spine, I imagine. He looked irritated, like it wasn’t the right moment for him to have been shot.’

  My father began to laugh but stopped himself when he saw that Mr Windly hadn’t intended a joke.

  ‘His cigarette case stopped the first bullet. Or maybe it was the second.’
br />   ‘First or second,’ repeated my father. He nodded like he knew about these things even though he was just a primary school kid at the time Mr Windly came across the German officer.

  ‘Sure, I suppose it doesn’t matter,’ said Mr Windly. ‘But if it was the first bullet then you can imagine he was probably feeling lucky. He was probably halfway through congratulating himself when bang! that moment of irritation set in. There you have it. The roller-coaster fortunes of war. Probably why I found insurance such an easy transition.’ He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another from the silver case.

  ‘You own this house, Ross?’

  ‘Marie picked it,’ said my father.

  Mr Windly looked around himself. ‘You did well. It’s a sound house. Decent neighbourhood. Close to the park.’

  My father reached over and pinched my cheek.

  ‘Good for Harry.’

  ‘Sure. Good for anyone, I’d have thought.’ Mr Windly leant back in his chair to look for my mother.

  ‘She won’t be much longer.’

  ‘No. I was just wondering … two bedrooms?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Three’s a good number. Nice and solid. A house is the biggest investment in a person’s life. You scrape and save to pay off the bloody thing; you paint it, you look after it, hell, you come to love it … then one day, who knows … a fire or earthquake. Something happens.’

  ‘The unexpected,’ said my father, taking another cigarette from Mr Windly’s case.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Mr Windly. ‘The unexpected. I think that about describes what I have been trying to say. The house crumbles. The very thing you’ve poured your heart and soul into. You can’t believe what has happened. You can’t believe it could happen to you.’

  ‘Like the German soldier,’ said my father.

  ‘The German fellow. Hurt and confused.’

  ‘Irritated, I thought,’ said my father.

  ‘And that,’ said Mr Windly. He was about to say something else when my mother returned.

  ‘I’ve been telling war stories,’ he said, and for some reason it produced a look of concern from my mother.

  ‘Are we ready for pud, then?’ she asked.

  We saw Mr Windly again after that evening. My grandfather died later that year after a month in hospital with pneumonia. The pneumonia weakened his heart and when he died he was at home tying up his sweet peas. There was a will and my father inherited his house out at Brighton. There were some Trust details, legal things that my father took to Mr Windly.

  My father was building spec houses along Memorial Avenue out towards the airport. He worked long hours. At night he fell into bed and was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. My mother spoke of him as an absent stranger. She told me he woke from dreams in which he was hammering nails. He worked every day, even weekends. We hardly saw him. Finally, my mother said this was ridiculous; he might as well be back at Manapouri. Manapouri. Mere mention of the word brought forward a painful memory. Immediately, he cut back his hours and spent time with me over at Hagley Park.

  One day in the park we ran across an old workmate of my father. He and Sonny Reardon had shacked up together on the Manapouri Project.

  My mother stared back at our visitor—at his stained and broken teeth and the mane of grey-flecked hair brushed back past his ears like a woman’s. He wasn’t like the tradesmen my father worked with, men whose eyes and features she thought of as having been shaped with the right angles they placed upon the world all day and every day. Sonny didn’t look like anyone my father would know. He was unshaven and his coat had lost its buttons. But I could tell she wanted to like Dad’s visitor. For Dad’s sake she wanted to like him. She went to take his coat and he held up a hand to say he would keep it on, and my father laughed out loud at the private joke that excluded my mother. I could see him watching my mother for signs of disapproval. He knew she wouldn’t like him remaining in that filthy great coat. Now he watched her raise the glass my father had poured her.

  ‘Here’s to happiness,’ she said.

  ‘Happiness,’ said my father’s friend, and he added, ‘because everything Ross said about you I see is true.’

  My mother sipped her beer and went fishing with her sly eyes.

  ‘Does that mean nice things?’

  ‘Beautiful things,’ said my father’s friend. ‘Beautiful. Many times beautiful.’

  ‘In that case,’ she said, ‘you can come back any time.’ She laughed and my father sat back relieved.

  That night she sat with me in my bedroom trying to brush my eyelids shut and will me to sleep. It wasn’t working because of the laughter coming from the kitchen. My mother asked, ‘When did your father last laugh like that?’ She sat there thinking. ‘You know, Harry, I don’t remember him once mentioning the name of that man.’ She said the name over to herself—‘Sonny.’ We listened in the dark to them shouting names of other men they knew down at Manapouri. It was another world that neither I nor my mother knew about.

  In the morning I noticed the door to the sitting room was closed. My mother came out to the hall and put a finger to her lip and I tiptoed past. The silence of the house felt heavier than normal. After my mother arrived home that afternoon she found the door still shut. This time she knocked and hearing no reply she pushed on the door and entered the sitting room. A cushion stuck inside a white pillowslip sat at one end of the couch. There was a smell of tobacco. My mother was sure she could smell that coat. She walked across to the window, pulled back a curtain, then changed her mind.

  Around teatime the two of them tramped in the door with Mr Reardon’s drawing materials, a bag, and a package wrapped in brown paper that turned out to be four cod.

  ‘Tonight I make special fish in coconut,’ he said.

  My mother leant her elbows on the kitchen table and watched Mr Reardon cook. She said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever eaten coconut. It’s not something that Ross would cook.’ Only she enjoyed the joke. My father never cooked. Mr Reardon, on the other hand, looked like he did it all the time. His hands moved quickly, quick as blades, and as he worked he talked to my mother. He had lived in the islands. When my mother asked him ‘doing what?’ he wiped his hands on a tea towel, looked around for his bag and pulled out a sheaf of drawings. We thumbed through sketches of small boys tumbling over waterfalls. Sketches of the marketplace and Apia’s rickety main street. The lush gardens. Villages. Portraits of billiard players, planters, Samoans. He said he’d worked in an ice factory but mostly he sold his sketches to day tourists off the cruise ships. There was one sketch of a beautiful girl with long braids. My mother held up the drawing. ‘Hello. Who’s this?’ she asked, and Mr Reardon went back to his frying pan.

  ‘Maia,’ he said softly. ‘That is Maia.’

  My mother looked across to me to see if I had caught that.

  ‘Maia is still in Apia?’ asked my mother.

  ‘No, Maia is in heaven waiting for me. Waiting for her Sonny.’ He told of working in Apia’s ice factory, and how Maia had never known what it was to shiver. One day, without telling anyone, she walked inside the freezer at the ice works; the door closed after her and, as no one knew she was in there, she froze.

  ‘Oh, that is so sad,’ said my mother.

  ‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ said Mr Reardon.

  ‘Yes, but I mean, to die like that.’

  Mr Reardon glanced up to the ceiling. ‘She is waiting for her old mate to show up,’ he said. ‘Of course, it is silly to hope. After all these years how would Maia possibly recognise me?’ He looked over to my mother to see that he had her attention. Then he said, ‘That is why I stay in this coat.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is true. Of course. It is so she will recognise me.’

  He kept a straight face until her own expression fell into line with his. Then he burst out laughing.

  ‘You bugger,’ she said. ‘I am not going to believe another word you say.’

  M
y father’s friend stayed with us for a week until he found a flat in town. We all missed him. My mother especially. She’d grown used to someone else cooking for us. The day he left we came home to a pile of sketches on the kitchen table. Some were drawings of my mother gardening and cooking. Others of me wrestling with Dad on the lawn. One of me on my bike pedalling for all I was worth. I looked so much like a boy that I was both pleased and embarrassed. Another of Dad with his foot up on a sawhorse smiling back at the picture-maker caught my mother’s interest. She looked at the drawing for a long while. I couldn’t quite see what she had found, but there was definitely something in that drawing that disturbed her. Dad’s hair, the way he looked up from under his bushy eyebrows, his carpenter’s arms falling out of rolled-up shirt cuffs. It was the something else that she studied, a kind of understanding, or closeness; something that approached a knowledge that excluded her. When she glanced up from the drawing she looked puzzled by the world as though in some fundamental way it had gone and changed while her attention was elsewhere.

  Mr Reardon’s place was in Montreal Street, a big old house with white-painted fire escapes—split into three flats. Mr Reardon’s was on the ground floor facing the street. Without my mother’s knowledge Dad put down two months’ rent to get his friend settled. From a Colombo Street trader he bought pots and pans, cutlery, crockery, a bed, a bookcase and a lamp. He took some towels and bedding from home. I went out shopping with Dad and Mr Reardon, and outside a butcher’s shopwindow the different cuts of meat caused Mr Reardon to stroke his jaw and wince.

  ‘Meat’s useless to me. It’s too bloody tough …’

  Over dinner my father told Mum he was going to give Mr Reardon some money to get his teeth fixed. As my mother was slow to answer, he said, ‘You’ve seen how bad they are.’

  When my mother failed to answer, my father repeated what he’d just said.

  ‘I’m listening,’ she said.

  ‘You look like you’re eating to me,’ he said.

  Without looking up she asked, ‘How much?’