A Man Melting (18 page)

The flavour of the chirimoya was slight but distinct, the flesh soft and slimy; it dissolved to leave a large black seed in my mouth. I removed it with my thumb and forefinger and held it up to the sun. It looked like a beetle.

‘And?’

‘It’s a bit like sherbet,’ I said.

‘Uh-huh.’

I was thinking what a nightmare it would be if the black seeds actually were beetles. Cutting into the fruit and the thing crawling with insects.

‘Have you tried
naranjilla
?’ he asked.

‘No. What’s it like?’

‘Sort of like a persimmon, I guess. What about
taxo
?
Tuna
?’

‘The fish?’

‘Go buy us a
tuna
.’ He pointed to the fruit stand. ‘
Un tuna, por favor
,’ he said slowly. ‘Mind the prickles.’

‘Prickles?’

He waved me off.

The taste was difficult to describe. I felt like I was at a wine tasting, searching for the right flavours: pineapple, lime zest, chalk.

‘That grows on a cactus,’ he told me. I stopped worrying about flavours.

When we’d finished the
tuna
, I asked, ‘What’s tuna in
Español
? The fish.’

‘
Atún
.’

‘That’s funny.’

‘I guess.’

‘What should I buy next?’

‘
Maracuyá.
’

‘What’s that?’

‘Passionfruit.’

‘Oh, I’ve had those before.’

‘Over here or at home?’

‘Home.’

‘Then you haven’t had
maracuyá.
’

We worked our way through all the fruit on offer. Him sitting on the bench, slipping the iguana pieces of banana (smaller and sweeter than any of those back home) and tamarillo. Me standing. Occasionally someone walking past would wave or say, ‘Hello,’ or ‘Afternoon, Henry.’ In
English. I figured he was a kind of local celebrity. Perhaps he was mentioned in the
Lonely Planet
. But by this stage I was more interested in the fruit. The
maracuyá
were the best. I must have had half a dozen.

‘The works of Nature,’ I said, holding up my last
maracuyá
half as if proposing a toast, ‘are to those of Art.’ The sun was setting. To look at the river was to look through a window into pitch blackness.

‘Come,’ Henry told me, standing and picking up the iguana.

‘Where are we going?’

‘There are people you should meet.’

‘People?’

‘Don’t worry. This is not an ambush.’

We walked to the end of the promenade. Children were playing soccer on a patch of dirt. Their shirts in four piles to mark the goals. The undersized ball barely visible in the dim light. There was a fire in the distance, already casting shadows.

‘There,’ he said, gesturing towards the fire with the iguana.

‘Does he have a name?’ I asked.

‘It is not necessary to name animals.’

As we approached, I could make out three people standing, warming themselves by the fire, another two sitting cross-legged on the dirt. They were all tourists like me. All middle-aged, male. Standing closest to me was Robert, my friend from the airport. Still in his floral shirt, three days’ growth gracing his cheeks.

‘Welcome to the waiting room,’ he said. The others smiled.

‘You were all booked on Aero Islas?’ I asked.

‘More than that,’ Robert said.

One of the seated men stood up, dusted his backside. ‘You know he’s been there.’ He pointed at the man with the iguana, Henry. ‘He’s met them.’

‘Met whom? Been where?’

‘There.’ He pointed towards the west bank of the river, the ocean ninety kilometres beyond, the archipelago nine hundred and seventy-two kilometres further.

We were all standing now, all facing Galapagos.

Henry placed the iguana on the ground and it walked to the vacant side of the fire. It was no surprise that he had been to the Galapagos. I had built them up to such mythical status, it seemed obvious a visit to the islands changed people. For the better, for the worse, it didn’t matter. It changed people.

‘Yes,’ Henry said, staring out across the river, ‘I went there. I tracked them down. I burst into their office — what a disappointment that was. I shouted, “I am Henry Devon, acting manager, data analytics division. I intend to grow three inches this year.” They just looked at me, of course. Eight of them, sitting at their terminals. Posters of frigate birds and giant tortoises on the walls. What did I expect? To see him?’

‘You … Charles Darwin emailed you too?’

‘All of us,’ Robert said.

‘The funny thing’, said a man with a pair of reading glasses hanging from a cord around his neck, ‘is we come for different reasons. Some to escape, some for the wildlife, some for the language, some’, he looked at Henry, ‘for
confrontations, and some as if guided by an invisible hand.’

‘A surprising number arrive mad,’ said Robert. Henry had wandered into the shadows to retrieve his iguana.

‘He emailed you all?’ I said.

‘Oh, we’re not unique,’ said another man who until that moment had been silent. He had a comb-over, except the hair wasn’t covering his scalp but was left to flop down over his right ear. ‘There must be thousands of recipients. Thousands. Only a small percentage must come. That’s all they need.’

‘When I discovered the hyperlinks,’ Robert said, ‘I was disappointed.’

The others all agreed.

‘But we came.’

‘Hyperlinks?’ I asked.

‘In the emails,’ the man with the uncombed comb-over said. ‘All those phrases to do with travel.
Across vast oceans
.’

‘
Years of indolence
,’ said Robert.

‘
This fair planet.
’

‘
Those islands.
’

‘
A magic flute
,’ said the man with the reading glasses. ‘That was what got me.’

‘Me too.’

‘Hyperlinks,’ I repeated.

‘To the ministry’s page.’

‘
Ministerio de Turismo
.’

‘This is all part of an advertising campaign?’

‘I don’t think he clicked the links,’ Robert said softly.

‘Didn’t click the links?’

‘He thought it was really Darwin?’

‘That’s not possible. Is it?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course not.’

‘But you didn’t click the links.’

I looked over the river again. Imagined those chunks of rock in the middle of the ocean, battered by waves, ignored for centuries: a sudden tourist destination.

The men around me continued to fire off questions.

My stomach twisted.

‘Leave him be,’ Henry said from the far side of the fire. ‘He’s had a lot of fruit today.’

Ricky and me were sitting in Midland Park. He offered me a smoke but I told him I don’t smoke coz of that ad where they squeeze a tube from a smoker’s heart or something and it’s full of yellow gunk. He said, ‘Whatever.’ I had only hung out with Ricky a few times and felt a bit stink when he said whatever but I don’t want yellow gunk in my tubes, eh? I feel clogged up enough already with all the hard-out things at home, like my head is full of mashed potato or something.

After Ricky took a few drags from his smoke, some pigeons started walking towards us. It was the middle of the afternoon so all the suits were back in their offices and it was only us two sitting in the park. I thought maybe the pigeons thought we had food, but it was just Ricky smoking and me sitting there, waiting for him to decide what we should do next coz I was out of ideas and low on dollars. Ricky said,
‘Watch this,’ and he tapped the ash from his cigarette down by his feet and the pigeons kept coming, but stopped just out of range of his feet, probably scared he would boot them or something. After a few seconds of not being booted, one of the pigeons stepped closer, right up to the ashes at Ricky’s feet and pecked at them like it was eating the ashes.

Man, the bird
was
eating the ashes.

Ricky tapped his smoke again, just to the left of the first pigeon, and the other pigeons waiting out of booting range walked up and started eating his ashes too.

‘That can’t be good for them,’ I said, thinking about what the ash would do to the tubes inside the pigeons if just the smoke could gunk up your insides.

‘They’ve been eating my ashes for a few weeks,’ Ricky said. ‘Haven’t seen any of ’em drop dead.’ He kinda laughed. ‘Evolution, eh?’

I don’t know why this made me angry but I didn’t want to hang with Ricky anymore after he said that.

‘I’m going,’ I said.

‘See ya,’ he said, like he didn’t care, and I left him smoking and feeding his ashes to pigeons.

I crossed Lambton Quay to get a feed at BK. Like I said, I was low on dollars, but if you wash out a used cup in the bathrooms you can totally get free Coke coz it’s self-service. And if you ask for a soft-serve but tell them to put it in a sundae container instead of a cone, you get more for your fifty cents.

I was thinking about all the tricks as I rode the escalator up, until I saw a dead leaf and a cigarette butt at the top of the escalator getting pushed up against the comb thing
that the steps go into. People were just stepping over the leaf and the butt like they didn’t notice or like they didn’t
want
to notice, but I thought it was cool. The leaf and the butt looked like they were dancing as they bounced against the comb and the steps slid into the floor. Like they were happy or something. Even though it was a dead leaf and a cigarette butt.

I stood at the top of the escalator and watched the leaf and the butt dance and wasn’t even worried about looking weird or gay coz it made me feel a little lighter, like someone had taken a handful of mashed potato out of my head.

After three unsuccessful elections in two different towns, Noah ‘Rusty’ Kissick settled on a trout-centric campaign to become mayor of Rainbow Gorge — the fish were, after all, what the town was named after. While he alienated many with his claim during a candidates’ debate that trout were
not good eating
, he managed to convince the townsfolk that protecting the trout and luring more fishermen from the city were not mutually exclusive. Compulsory catch-
andrelease
was the future, and Rusty Kissick would deliver.

As mayor of the small town he had few administrative duties and even fewer ceremonial ones. Between the closing of one fishing season and the opening of the next, he busied himself petitioning the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries to grant Rainbow Gorge an exemption from the
imposed season and allow year-round fishing. But petition as he might, MAF continued to reply with a ‘No Exceptions’ boilerplate. He liked to think it was the disappointment that sapped the fire from his hair — so that it now resembled vermicelli — but he clung on to ‘Rusty’, the only nickname he’d ever liked.

The day before he opened his third fishing season as mayor, Kissick was trying on his regalia when his personal assistant walked into his office.

‘Good god, Mrs Johansen! You really must knock.’ He blushed like the time his mother caught him trying on her heels.

‘There’s a new letter from MAF, your highness,’ she said drolly, which again reminded him of the incident with his mother’s heels.

He looked at the envelope, which appeared to be thicker than the previous one-pagers, and said, ‘Well, I’m chuffed,’ with his queer habit of describing his emotions in lieu of offering thanks.

‘Glad to hear it, sire,’ she said and curtsied, but Kissick didn’t notice — he was furiously trying to open the envelope. Mrs Johansen tutted and went back to her sudoku puzzle.

According to the letter, MAF was sending up a sustainability consultant to evaluate whether to grant Rainbow Gorge an extended fishing season.

‘Extended?’ Kissick huffed to himself, but felt confident that, face to face, he could talk the MAF consultant into a total exemption.

Over the next few weeks, the MAF evaluation was bumped from his top priority, and eventually slipped his
mind for days at a time, as he pursued the affections of Tilly Thompson, the mayor of Whangamanu. The two had been seated at the same workshop table at that year’s National Mayoral Conference in Greymouth; their model of the Beehive made out of Popsicle sticks and egg cartons had won second place.

‘It’s not fair,’ Kissick had told Tilly that night at the bar. ‘The mayor of Hastings was an architect.’

‘She’s sleeping with the mayor of Johnsonville, did you know that?’

‘Delicious,’ Kissick said.

He felt sick for three days following the conference — like the time he ate a dead moth as a child and that very afternoon heard ‘There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly’ for the first time — until he decided to invite Tilly to talk about change management at the next Rainbow Gorge council meeting. When she agreed, he booked every room in the town’s only motel.

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to be billeted at my abode,’ he informed Tilly Thompson over the phone.

‘It’s no bother,’ she replied, ‘I can just drive home afterwards.’

‘But it’s a three-and-a-half-hour drive.’

‘Don’t worry about me.’

After ringing off, Kissick tried to cancel his reservations at the Rainbow Gorge Motel — without success.

During Tilly Thompson’s visit it felt, to Kissick at least, that she was constantly asserting her independence. She paid for her own steak-and-cheese pie, brought her own laptop and projector for the presentation and, while Kissick
was waylaid by a phone call, went around and shook all the councillors’ hands and introduced herself.

After this, Kissick decided to play hard to get. His only contact with her was forwarding hilarious emails with titles like, ‘If You Grew Up In The Fifties, You’ll Get This’ and ‘Men are from Masterton, Women are from Venice’.

Unfortunately, she was now playing harder to get than he was. He stayed awake at night drafting emails in his head to express the designs of his heart, but on the eve of the MAF consultant’s arrival, he still had not sent anything.

That very same eve, a mysterious noise sounded from deep in the hills beyond the Hendersons’ place. It quivered in the breeze like an uncertain whisper. Some said it was the sound of Sheila Stone’s ghost crying. Others said it was just the wind.

At dawn the next morning, Steve the chemist was stealing John and Yvette’s newspaper when he saw a middle-aged man — sporting the kind of moustache men secretly admire and women try not to laugh at — emerge from the bush.

‘Hello there, I’m Barclay Fortitude,’ the man said. He was wearing a tramping pack and tight khaki shorts.

‘Did you hike here?’ Steve asked, and Fortitude nodded. ‘Must’ve heard the ghost last night then, eh?’

‘Ghost?’

‘A-according to some people,’ Steve said, back-pedalling. His hand was behind him, fiddling with the plastic covering of the Hendersons’ newspaper. ‘Kinda sounded like
whourirr
- ooh-irr
,’ he said, waving his available hand as if he was playing a theremin.

Fortitude put his pack on the ground and removed what
looked like a small, round-bottom flask, only wooden. ‘I think you’ll find it was this.’

‘Is it magic?’ Steve the chemist asked, in three words renouncing his lifelong subscription to the tenets of science.

‘It is a koauau,’ Fortitude replied. ‘An instrument.’ He held it with both hands, all eight fingers around the circumference of the bulb, both thumbs supporting it underneath, and placed it to his right nostril.

For the rest of the day, Steve the chemist told everyone who came into his pharmacy about the strange man from the bush who’d played a flask with his nose and made the
whourirr
-ooh-irr
sound everyone had heard the night before.

The news quickly spread to Kissick, but he was too busy awaiting the arrival of the MAF consultant to care about strange instruments and stranger trampers. To calm himself, he decided to take a walk and inspect the most popular fishing stretch of the creek — Heavy’s Bend, the locals called it — and told Mrs Johansen to text him if the MAF consultant arrived before he returned.

Kissick himself did not fish — the way the waders went all the way up his legs without protecting his crotch made him ill at ease. Indeed, he never went near the water except for ceremonies or photo ops. Before he could even lay eyes on the creek, however, he was met on the path by three distraught locals in waders — their aspect of distress heightened by their ungainly movements.

‘Great Barrier Island!’ said Snowy Kerr, the eldest of the three. ‘I knew you’d be behind this, Kissick.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ replied the mayor.

‘Like Whakapapa you don’t.’

‘Show him, Snowy,’ said Damian Driscoll, who was like a nephew to Snowy Kerr, although no one in town quite knew what the family relationship was.

They parted to let Kissick through to the creek.

‘What’s that smell?’ Kissick asked, and turned to face the others while continuing to walk backwards up the path towards the clearing. They stared at him accusingly. ‘What? I didn’t blow off, honest.’

‘For the love of Christchurch, turn around,’ said Snowy.

‘Oh,’ said Kissick.

Dozens of dead trout floated on the surface of the filmy water.

‘Fishing’s been shocking all season, and now we know why,’ said Bully Jacobs, the third member of the fishing party.

‘Pollution,’ Damian explained.

‘That’s impossible,’ said Kissick, and swiped a fly away from his face.

Back in his office, Kissick reclined with a cool flannel on his forehead. He didn’t know what had killed the trout. There was no way it could have been his fault, but once the MAF consultant saw what had become of the creek he would be done for, if only because of his fondness for saying, ‘The captain must be prepared to go down with his ship’ at council meetings. In fact, he said it almost every time he voted at a council meeting, so proud was he of his commitment to the town and his implacable integrity, or at least the impression created by his use of powerful aphorisms. Damn those aphorisms, he thought now. The sinking ship in particular. He imagined being sent to Somes Island to live out his days
as a leper-hermit to ensure he did no more harm.

‘Knock knock,’ said Mrs Johansen as she entered his office. ‘The MAF fellow is here.’

‘Christ, I can’t see him now,’ Kissick said, snapping to attention. ‘I have to think.’

‘He’s just out there,’ she whispered, and glanced through the door to smile at the man with the laughable moustache who was sitting on the couch next to her daughter, Madison, who had a temperature.

‘Stall,’ whispered Kissick in reply.

‘How?’

‘Come on, Mummy,’ Madison said from the other room.

‘I don’t know. Flirt or something.’

‘Come
on
, Mummy,’ said Madison, who was now standing in the doorway with her arms crossed.

‘Look after her for a minute,’ said Mrs Johansen. She went and sat next to Barclay Fortitude in the reception area, leaving Kissick to play
don’t touch that
with a suddenly taciturn Madison.

‘So you work for MAF, huh?’ Mrs Johansen asked coquettishly.

‘That’s right.’

‘Do you just specialise in fish, or are you a big-picture person?’

‘No, just fish at the moment.’

‘Well then, perhaps you could help me,’ she said, and ruffled her recently permed hair with a slow hand. ‘I’ve always wondered, when Noah took all those animals on his ark, what about the fish?’

‘Well,’ Fortitude said, clearing a slight tickle in his throat,
‘I guess he had fish tanks on board.’

‘Mummy!’ Madison stamped her foot from the doorway, before Kissick — exposing only his arms to the MAF consultant in reception — removed her from view.

‘No,’ said Mrs Johansen, ignoring her daughter with a parent’s aplomb, ‘I mean, what about all the other fish? The flood wouldn’t drown them! There’d be no point taking them on the ark.’

She looked terribly chuffed.

To her disappointment, Barclay Fortitude was distracted at this moment by Kissick finally emerging from his office. The mayor had decided — while Madison was biting the fleshy part of his hand — to face this thing head-on in the hope that this man could help uncover who or what was really to blame for the dead fish.

‘We have a slight problem,’ Kissick said, wiping invisible crumbs from his navy sports blazer. ‘One that I am at a loss to explain.’

‘What?’

‘I should show you.’

Fortitude was reduced to tears at the sight of the floating fish being dive-bombed by wood pigeons.

‘Kereru are not supposed,’ he said, and paused for the composure to finish his sentence, ‘to eat fish.’

Kissick put a hand on Fortitude’s shoulder and said, ‘I know, it’s awful, just awful. They’ll send me to Somes Island for this.’

‘I doubt they’d trust you on a wildlife reserve after what you’ve done here,’ Fortitude replied.

‘But I don’t know what’s happened. I’ve done nothing.’

Fortitude nodded and asked to be left alone.

That night, the townsfolk reported hearing Sheila Stone’s ghost crying over by Heavy’s Bend.

Kissick passed the next three days like kidney stones, but was greeted by the more pathetic figure of Barclay Fortitude on the fourth day — even his moustache was limp.

‘I know what happened,’ he said, almost breathless. ‘Come with me.’

On the way to the creek, the two had to pass through the town square. As they did, they gathered a procession of curious locals, all with their own theories about what had killed the fish. Fortitude listened to the townsfolk but did not speak until they were all at the stretch of water which had been voted the best fly-fishing spot in the North Island twice in the last six years. Kissick was busy thinking that the town would have to change its name — it certainly wasn’t a gorge of rainbows anymore — unless it referred to a different type of rainbow … He began a text to Mrs Johansen, asking her to fish out the article in the paper a couple of weeks earlier on gay tourism.

‘Rainbows,’ Fortitude began, breaking Kissick’s train of thought, ‘are primarily surface feeders. That’s how fly-fishing works. But rainbows are not stupid fish. They do not forget every seven seconds.’

‘Isn’t it three?’ Damian Driscoll asked Snowy Kerr.

‘I thought it was five,’ whispered Steve the chemist.

‘That’s goldfish,’ said Yvette Henderson.

‘Catch and release,’ continued Fortitude, ‘sounds good in theory. But the trout have learnt their lesson. They’ve
had enough of the trauma of being caught and have stopped feeding on the surface. I observed this behaviour upstream yesterday. The problem is, there’s not enough food beneath the surface to sustain these majestic fish.’

‘What are you saying?’ asked Bully Jacobs.

‘I’m saying these fish starved to death because they didn’t want to be caught anymore.’

The two last people ushered out of The Rod and Tackle that night were Fortitude and Kissick.

‘I can kiss re-election ba-ba-bye,’ Kissick said, leaning against a drainpipe.

‘I don’t want to stop drinking,’ Fortitude said softly.

‘I have a cabinet in my office. Full of ba-ba-booze.’

‘Do you always stutter when you’re drunk?’

‘I’m not stuttering. I’m savouring my words.’

After fumbling with the keys, setting off the burglar alarm, mashing the keypad until the alarm stopped and tripping over the
Rainbow Gorge Welcomes You
mat in reception, Kissick stood proudly before the door to his office. ‘Here we are. The promised land.’

‘You’re not my favourite person at the moment, you know?’ Fortitude said.

Kissick poured Glenfiddich into two coffee mugs and let his guest sit in his swivelly chair. He even offered to let Fortitude try on his mayoral regalia, but his companion remained glum.