The Man in the Shed (12 page)

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.

‘Then walk faster. I do not like it in here one little bit.’ Her hand touched my shoulder with a slight shove. ‘Go,’ she said impatiently. She got round me okay. We must have reached the start of the bend because the light in the tunnel entrance had squeezed to a pale quarter moon.

Small rocks turned over as Kath charged on ahead. Once
she stopped and called back, ‘Ray, are you still there?’

‘Still here,’ I said.

A moment later I heard her cry out. ‘Jesus. Ray, I’ve dropped my stick.’

She was on all fours. I couldn’t see her of course. But I could hear the light scuffing sound of her hands feeling around the loose rocks for her dropped stick.

I called ahead of me, into that darkness. ‘Okay. Don’t move. Just stay where you are. I’m coming, Kath. Keep talking to me.’

At the same time I began to wonder, what if a train was to come through now? It was a stupid time to wonder what we were doing here, and how it was we had arrived here at all. It was kind of a stupid moment to realise you did actually care for somebody else after all.

‘Kath,’ I said, pushing her name ahead of me.

‘I’m here, Ray.’

Thank god. She was ten metres or so ahead.

‘Kath. Make sure you are against the tunnel wall.’

‘I am, Ray. I’m kneeling on the side of the track, I think.’

I told her to keep calling to me. Finally, a voice almost underneath me called up, ‘I’m here, Ray.’ Her hands touched my knees. My thigh. My jacket. She climbed up me like this, until she had regained her feet.

‘Hold my hand, Kath.’ She took hold of my left hand. My right hand held the stick. It was pitch-black; the only sound was the stick end dragging against the wall.

‘I shouldn’t have rushed. I’m sorry, Ray.’

‘Shush,’ I said. ‘Listen.’

We could hear the sound of the stick against the wall. Behind us it was impossible to see, and so it was ahead, too, but I felt we must be at the curve, now, and that soon we would have something to aim for.

She wasn’t talking to him, and he wasn’t talking to her. It was over the dog again. Their own dog, Elgar, and the mutt across the road. Elgar and the dog in question were always sniffing each other’s butts. She was worried about the consequences. She thought Elgar and the other dog were totally unsuited to each other. Elgar was short, built low to the ground, a tail-wagger. The dog across the road stood on spindly legs and was known to be a depressive. His wife had gone on at length; at first it had been amusing, but then she got so over-the-top she wouldn’t let it alone, and so he had begged to differ. He had put it to her that breeding followed its own logic, that the
laws of nature sorted everything out in the end. Why get wound up over nothing? The word ‘nothing’ seemed to have done it. She rounded on his laziness, his come-what-may attitude to everything in life. He dared to ask if she was premenstrual, and things went from bad to worse.

The dog looked miserable. It sat on its mat in the kitchen looking up at the two of them. It looked so sorry to have caused all this. For that matter, even the trees out the window looked sorry.

She had a way of making anger rise from her shoulders. Right now her shoulders were furious as she stood with her back to him, working at the bench. His own hands were deep in his pockets. Something needed to be said. Definitely something needed to be said. This was silly. He thought, I should really say something. I really should. And then: Why is it always me? Why was it always up to him to make the situation better? Besides, he could see how it would end up. It was boring even to think about. He would offer to talk to the neighbours about their dog. Then he would apologise for picking up the ball after she had told the dog in no uncertain terms that it was to leave the ball alone. The ball only got the dog excited. It would run around inside the house and in its excitement fart a lot. And they were expecting guests, and she didn’t want to see their faces suddenly tighten up and the tips of their prissy little noses dance around the odour in the hall where the dog had leapt farting in the air for the ball. So he would say he was sorry. Then what? She would sigh and lean her head back against his chest and she would say she was
sorry too—she probably shouldn’t have used that tone. She knew he meant well. He loved the dog. The problem would turn out to be not the dog, but some shitty office stuff she’d brought home from work.

What he said in the end was that he would take the dog out for a walk. The time wasn’t right, he knew that: the guests were due to arrive any minute. But that was half the point: he didn’t care. Normally it would have provoked a cry of disbelief from his wife. ‘What do you mean? Joe and Cass are due here any minute. They’re bringing a house guest, someone or other. What do you mean …?’ But instead she said, ‘Go,’ because to maintain her staunch silence was marginally more satisfying than to remind him of his responsibility. ‘To our guests,’ she might have added. But she had said ‘go’ like she didn’t care if he was there or not. She didn’t even turn around. She snatched at the vegetable knife. As he backed out the front door with the dog on the lead he could hear the knife on the chopping board. Boy, was she pissed off. Good, he thought. He nodded down at the pavement. Good. Fuck her. Good—again, nodding at the house, and now inhaling the cool night. It felt good. It felt fantastically good.