The Man in the Shed

  A white picket fence surrounded the grave of a baby girl born late last century. Further along were derelict beaches. We climbed the wooden steps to the lighthouse and the paint came off the rail in our hands. The wind howled off the point, and we sheltered in the lee of the lighthouse, gazing south to that afternoon’s walk.

  Kath sat on the cold concrete, staring out at the strait. Last night we had had sex. We had been storing up for Kaikoura, when Kath would be at her most fertile. But the previous night we had stayed in an old farmhouse with fires blazing in three rooms. It was full of pastoral art—sheepdog and shepherd sculptures, and winter mustering scenes on the walls. The parents had lost a child to leukaemia, but their religiosity retained a kindly humour. ‘God loves mothers’ was pinned next to a Steinlager poster of the All Blacks leaping high in the air. Kath and the mother got on fine. She helped in the kitchen with the soup. Every so often she looked up to see how I was getting on with the ten-year-old boy, and rewarded me with warm smiles. These moments convince her that I would be a good father.

  ‘Ray,’ she said, as we were packing up to leave the lighthouse. ‘Did you see the Chambers’ toddler this morning put the toy telephone to the cat’s ear?’ Kath had looked on with a kind of rapture—transfixed at the spyhole to this other world we can’t quite break into. I noticed, as well, the mother watching Kath with her own quiet thoughts.

  ‘Ray,’ she said, ‘I also had this dream …’ She shot me a glance to test the air. ‘But that I won’t tell.’

  Kath’s stride was full of skip and bounce. The last two days she had walked with her nose to the ground. Now we happily made our way along the lighthouse road, headed south to keep the appointment in Kaikoura. But for the road it would have been slow going. Every so often the wind, which was at our backs, swept out of a divot in the hills and hit us face-on. It was a bruising and tiring day.

  Early evening on the fourth day, Kaikoura showed in the distance all fuzzy and warm. Tired, we pushed on. We had left the beach for the road. The offer of a lift would answer a prayer but neither of us dared to hold out a thumb.

  Kath gave me a chocolate.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘my feet are blistered. My hair roots are annoying the hell out of me. There’s chafing on my inner thigh. Yet, you know what? I’m happy. I feel really good.’

  She took my hand and gave it a squeeze.

  ‘So,’ she said, further on. ‘What’s on your mind?’

  She tugged my hand.

  ‘Ray?’

  ‘I just hope you’re not pegging too much on tonight, that’s all. Nothing, really.’

  ‘Well—not really nothing at all. And for that matter I wasn’t even thinking …’

  ‘All right. All right. My mistake. Let’s try a song. Come on. “These boots are made for walking …’ ”

  ‘No,’ she said, and just like that the song died in me.

  ‘Steak,’ she said a few minutes later. ‘I want to eat a steak.’

  At some point we stopped for her to pee. A truck soared past. A carousel of light and hissing tyres. Then after, in the perfect silence, came the delicate Japanese sound of Kath’s pee. Funny the things you remember.

  It was dark so we didn’t notice the cloud change until, on the outskirts of Kaikoura, it began to rain. First the wind fell away. It was quiet and we could hear a television set through the trees. Then large cold drops began to fall.

  A motorist stopped to look at us, and drove on. We kept to the road alongside the beach. The rain fell on the iron roofs of the cottages. There was a squall from the sea, and the iron roofs gave warning. A few minutes later cold rain struck us face-on. Kath had fallen behind. She made no effort to shield herself; she dragged her blistered heels, and held up her face to the beating. The light from a streetlamp fell across her flushed cheeks. Furious and silent, she limped past me.

  I walked ahead again, and half an hour later, from the doorway of the Blue Pacific Hotel bottle store, I watched Kath limp along the esplanade underneath the swaying Norfolk pines. The sea crashed ashore, and the rain hosed down. Halfway across the road to the Blue Pacific she made no attempt to hurry … Finally, finally, she stepped up onto the footpath, still downcast, and plopped her head against my shoulder.

  ‘I’m sick of this,’ she said. ‘I just want to be pregnant. I want to be pregnant and stay home and read books.’

  In a tiny room at the end of a cavernous hall, Kath shook off her wet clothes. She sat on the bed and kicked her feet loose of the panties. Then she dug around in her knapsack for the pill bottles, and poured a small amount of white powder onto a sheet of notepaper, and this she funnelled into a small single shotglass. She ran the hot-water tap until it was warm and mixed a small amount with the powder. The baking soda solution was supposed to thin out her secretions, or, if you like, put a bit of whip into the flagging tails of the sperm she suspected of being slow finishers.

  She lay back on the single bed. Her head fell to one side of the pillow and, while she administered the potion between the legs, she stared at the wallpaper inches away with patient eyes. I wondered if she was thinking of the Chambers’ kid. Kath’s feet were red and swollen. Chafing had turned her inner thigh raw. For the moment these wounds went unnoticed; with a curious detachment she twirled her finger inside herself. Usually she makes these little preparations elsewhere. Her fine concentration in this regard was a surprise. Outside our window we could hear footsteps in the puddles, beer crates sliding off the back of a truck. Muffled bar talk drifted up through the floorboards and marbled carpet.

  Kath turned her head back from the wall.

  ‘Okay, Ray,’ she whispered.

  She reached up, and we began this act which, like physical therapy, is preoccupied not with what is before us, but with what hopefully will result. Hope, yes. Passion? Well, there has to be, doesn’t there? But in this case file it away under polite laughter.

  She reached under me to empty the sacs.

  Outside the rain had returned with a grudge. It poured, and for a while we lay there listening to it gurgle down the pipes by the window.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll have that steak now,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you try to bring something in? I don’t want to walk another step.’ She reached for her watch as she raised her feet onto the bed end. For half an hour Kath was supposed to lie there with her feet up to help everything find its way inside. Waste not, want not. We have pretty well exhausted the jokes.

  ‘Two fish. Or if you can’t get that, Chinese. Otherwise a cheeseburger. No onion though. Okay, Ray? I don’t think that’s unreasonable. This room is too small for onion.’

  I woke early next morning. It was so still outside. I left Kath asleep and crept down the hall. Apparently we were the only guests. The doors were all open. At the end, in the window of the bedroom fronting the esplanade, the stars were out in a milky cluster, and, behind the town, like something that had crept up in the night, stood these mountains completely covered in snow.

  By mid-morning the sun had caught up to the peaks.

  Kath stayed in bed. She said she wanted to give her chafing a chance to heal.

  So I went out for a walk. Fresh kelp was piled high on the beach from last night’s storm. I could smell it from where I sat in the Garden of Memories at the foot of the memorial to Kaikoura’s war dead.

  A brackish creek emptied out at the foot of the gardens. An elderly man in a grey coat took my glance as a sign of interest. ‘That’s Lyell Creek,’ he said, and cleared his throat. ‘An eighteen hundred and seventy-nine Road Board decision called for the release of one hundred black swans on Lyell Creek, and the paid employment of a gondola.’ This fluency left the man a little breathless, and even embarrassed, as if he had been struck by something outside his control, like hiccups.

  Nothing, however, seemed to agree with the warmth of the winter sun—neither the cold peaks, nor the tidy hoovering action of the tide up the bank of loose shingle.

  A large bone from the fin of a whale
had been casually placed in a bed of polyanthus. At regular intervals tall and curved whale ribs touched points over the path winding through the garden. An information sheet from the visitor centre told their story. The very first inshore whalers had caught the pups and led the mothers inshore to be slaughtered. In no time at all the inshore waters were cleaned out. First the whales, then their predators drifted away. The whalers left behind a few oil pots and shipwreck timber, an enormous quantity of bones and a residual carelessness that is to be found just about everywhere. In the Garden of Memories the bones had recently been spray-painted and the surrounding leaves of karaka trees had copped a white dusting. Same with the grass at the foot of each whale rib; it had been needlessly and sloppily sprayed.

  Kath was still in bed—captive and listless. She lay there looking at her fingernails. I’d opened the door too suddenly and given her quite a start, which, in turn, quickly passed to resentment—the old look of the bad old days.

  Once outside, though, her spirits lifted. It was warmer in the noon sun than inside the Blue Pacific. We followed the curve of the beach for the Pier Hotel, bathed in sunshine, on the point where the fishing boats were moored.

  We asked for and got the room with the sun porch facing the sea.

  Mrs Fender said we would be sharing dinner with the hotel trustees that evening.

  When we entered the dining room a plump man in a brown suit called out the seating arrangements: ‘Boy, girl. Boy, girl …’ Nearly all the trustees were elderly, and a feisty chap with broken blood vessels in his face made a big show of Kath sitting next to him.

  A waitress brought two carafes to each table. She went to pour Kath’s glass, but Kath placed her hand over it.

  ‘Give her some red then,’ said the man with broken blood vessels.

  ‘Kerry,’ the man’s wife said firmly.

  Once again Kath politely declined the wine, and the woman, with the quiet glee of having solved a riddle, clapped her hands.

  ‘You’re with baby, dear?’

  Kath blushed; then, to my surprise, she nodded.

  ‘Oh wonderful,’ the woman said.

  Kath glanced away from me. She looked happy. The woman asked the baby’s date of arrival, and how long she planned to stay in hospital, and would she breastfeed, and without missing a beat Kath provided answers. She said she planned to stay at home. But only for a short while. ‘Yes,’ the woman said guardedly. She was quite a bit older. Five grandchildren. But Kath’s knowledgable talk of creches, and a plan—which we had never discussed before—to get a nanny on board as soon as possible drew a questioning look from the woman. She didn’t say anything however. Perhaps that would come out later on the drive home with her husband.

  We finished dinner and on the way up the stairs Kath said, ‘Not a word please, Ray.’

  The week passed slowly at the Pier Hotel. Each morning Kath took her temperature. It remained steady, without the telltale variation she hoped for. Kath said it wasn’t important. Such tests are at best an indication, but hardly scientific. We went out for walks. We just strolled about, nothing too strenuous. On the beach I noticed she stepped warily. Of course I kept getting ahead of her. Once I happened to glance up to the coast road and I thought I saw a red sports car on the sun-lit bends. I looked harder. I decided I must have imagined it. ‘What?’ she asked when I walked back to where she stood in the shingle. Her hand was circling her belly. It was as if she was willing something to happen.

  We visited the library. We sat in there with the pensioners and terminally unemployed. We read the newspapers. Up north a Maori radical delighted in a demographic trend promising Maori would outnumber Pakeha by the year 2050. In Doonesbury, AIDS-infected Andy was going out of this world with great style. It was hard to believe that his creator would really let him go. But on our second-to-last morning in Kaikoura, I brought the Press upstairs, and said to Kath, ‘Andy’s dead.’

  Finally, Kath’s blisters had healed. The chafing had disappeared.

  We left at first light, and walked along Avoca Road to the point. In the half-light we wandered past the Fyffe homestead with its house piles made of whalebone vertebrae. We might have stopped for another reason: in the late eighteen-fifties, with the digging of the house foundations, a moa egg the size of six hen’s eggs was discovered. A few days earlier I had visited and found the house addition to be part of a ship’s cabin. The resident curator said its pink paint was made from whalebone oil. A stack of rib bones stood in a corner with a yard broom. A toilet seat was covered with two ancient strips of sheepskin. In the window hung a tea towel of a fox hunt.

  We stopped outside a small bach with a shingle that read, ‘Beware of the dog, Kung Fu’ and a few other filthy Japanese words.

  ‘My god,’ she said. ‘Tell me that isn’t a moa neck and head.’

  Mounted on an old tree stump was a length of curved punga. I couldn’t quite see what she was getting at. I didn’t say anything of course.

  We took the cliff-top route to South Bay and, where the road joined up with the main road south, we stopped for tea and gingernuts. At our feet, lying in the roadside grass, was an aluminium capsule of Berocca effervescent vitamin B tablets with a .22 bullet-hole in its side—that raised a laugh.

  For the rest of the day we tramped south. At the Kahutara river mouth the road linked up with the beach and we walked high above the rocks where the seals lolled in beds of kelp.

  The sun left the road early afternoon and the rest of the way we walked in the shade of the hill and on a black road.

  ‘Ray,’ Kath said. ‘What do you think of the name “Humphrey”? I told that woman at the Pier we were calling our baby Humphrey, but I’ve just realised, wasn’t there a famous sea elephant or something called Humphrey? I mean, personally, I don’t mind. But I thought you might.’

  ‘I don’t,’ I said, and that was as much as we said for the next hour.

  I settled into a rhythm, and daydreamed about nothing in particular. I can’t say what actually pulled me out of it. An instinct, edgy and expectant I suspect, rather than Kath’s shouting. I turned in time to see Kath sit down on the roadside. She just sat down and put her head between her knees. A car hissed past. Strange faces lined the windows. She kept her head hanging there. She said, ‘It’s come … My baby … Oh god, Ray. Look at me.’

  We stayed in Oaro that night, at the guesthouse of another farmer retired from the hill country. The one before had had arthritis in his ankles. This one had artificial hips. He was very attentive, and concerned for Kath as she wouldn’t leave the bedroom.

  He said, ‘We can keep her dinner for her. Maybe she needs some aspirin.’

  Her insomnia kept me awake and I spent the whole night on my side unable to face her. In the morning she said she wanted to go home.

  ‘I said, I want to go home.’

  ‘Right. I heard you the first time.’

  ‘The last thing I want is another day of this,’ she said, pulling on her boots.

  ‘Follow the railway lines. You’ll be right,’ the farmer said. ‘The tide’s high though. I don’t know what you’ll do past Mikonui.’

  At Oaro the road swung inland for Christchurch, and we did as the farmer advised and followed the railway tracks alongside the coast.

  I don’t know why we can’t have kids. There is no clinical reason, at least none that we haven’t already explored. The journey—and this place where we had arrived—were all too familiar.

  In the distance we could make out the aptly named Spy Glass Rock—a neat oval on the far point. Short of there, the inshore water looked to have made its peace with the bluffs. The water there looked deep and settled. The likely way around the point was over the bluff, or we could take the railway tunnel ahead.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘What’s your preference, Kath?’

  She said she didn’t care.

  ‘Course you care.’

  ‘Either or … You decide. I don’t care.’

  ‘You should care.’


  ‘No, Ray. I don’t. I don’t feel anything. I could climb Everest right now. Anyway, I don’t see why I should decide.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. Although my mind wasn’t made up until we were almost upon the tunnel, and without another word I dropped down to the beach and found us two sticks.

  The tunnel entrance was dark and rather threatening. Whenever we have ventured this close to a tunnel or cave, we have gotten a bad case of the heebie-jeebies. Not a word this time. There was no encouraging pinpoint of light to aim for, which I took to mean that the tunnel, somewhere along the line, curved.

  We walked along the rubble between the railway track and the tunnel wall. In no time it was dark and very cold. The sound of the sea washing ashore was replaced by the raspy noise of our stick ends tracing the tunnel wall. It was the only way of going forward. Otherwise the tunnel was black and directionless.

  We walked for maybe ten minutes before a word was spoken.

  ‘This is stupid, Ray. Stupid.’

  ‘It’s also faster.’

  ‘What if a train comes?’

  ‘We lie down,’ I said. There was ample room between the tracks and the tunnel wall.

  ‘I don’t like this. I want you to know that,’ she said.

  And a few minutes later, ‘You always have to go that bit further, don’t you? Never mind that it means risking all. Or anybody else.’

  There was a chirping sound overhead, and the sudden beating of small wings. It might have been bats. But, had Kath asked for my opinion, I would have said I thought the noise belonged to birds.

  After a moment, she said, ‘Ray?’

  ‘Yep?’

  ‘Are you scared?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.