The Man in the Shed (17 page)

The silences at home lengthened. My mother withdrew deeper into herself. It was as though she too had entered into the fabric of the secret and that she also had something to protect.

One Sunday morning she made a final effort to get through to my father. I say ‘final’ even though at the time I had no idea that it would prove to be the case.

‘I thought we could do something different today,’ she said. Since it was Sunday morning that meant passing up the regular Sunday lunch with Mr Reardon. I could see that same thought cross my father’s mind but he was determined to show a cool hand.

‘Such as?’ he asked.

‘I was thinking about the Port Hills. I haven’t been up there for donkey’s years.’ She stood by, waiting for my father to object. She said, ‘I was thinking we could take a picnic up there. Just the two of us. Harry can play at a friend’s.’

‘I can go to Michael Bevan’s,’ I said.

My father closed his eyes. He didn’t have to say anything.

‘Well, why not?’ asked my mother.

‘Marie, you know why.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t.’

‘Christ, Marie, what do we normally do on a Sunday?’

‘That’s my point. Just for once let’s do something different.’

My mother went and stood behind him, hoping. For a
brief moment it looked like my father would relent.

‘No. I can’t,’ he said in the end. ‘You know I can’t.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘It’s the one high point in his week.’

‘Then disappoint him,’ said my mother. She took her hands off my father’s shoulders, and waited.

‘Marie,’ he said. ‘Where’s this coming from?’ My mother took a deep breath. She looked up at the ceiling. She wiped away a tear. Hearing that, my father turned around and took hold of her. ‘Marie, what is this? What’s going on here?’ My mother closed her eyes. She swayed in his hands. ‘Eh? I can’t hear what you’re thinking, Marie.’ Then he said, ‘He’s a mate. I can’t just let him down.’

‘Let me be your mate. Just this once.’

My father didn’t know what to say to that.

‘I feel so alone,’ my mother said then.

‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ said my father.

‘Yes. You are here.’

‘Yes is right. My god, Marie.’ He acted like he had just been given a fright. He looked around for me then. ‘Your mother had me worried for a moment, Harry.’

‘All the same,’ said my mother. ‘I think I’ll take Harry up to the Port Hills.’

It meant that my father would have to make lunch but he knew better than to complain.

I hadn’t walked along the Port Hills for years, not since Dad was away, and my mother reminded me of our favourite places. This rock. That patch of grass. I sat in a cockpit of rock
and grass, my mother beside me. The wind made it like we were flying. My mother had to keep flicking her hair from her face.

‘You can say anything. Whatever comes into your head, Harry. You’re allowed to up here,’ she said.

‘Well?’ she said a moment later.

‘Nothing much. I wasn’t thinking of anything.’

‘I don’t believe you.’ She smiled, like it was okay, and immediately I thought back to that scene of my mother staring across the field to my father and Mr Reardon.

‘You quite sure you haven’t anything to say, Harry?’

‘Nothing,’ I said.

There were cyclists out on the road. Walkers. Families carrying blankets and flasks. The bus that had brought us up here passed with a new load of faces at the windows. We walked around two cars with smoking radiators. I felt my mother sneaking sidelong glances at me, waiting for me to say something. A hawk silently glided on the tops. To fill in the silence I started reciting the names of cars that passed us by. I knew them all. That one is an Austin Healey. This one a Morris. Now a Ford Zephyr. I kept on until my mother recognised one. Its blue-and-cream paint. Squarish windscreen.

‘That’s an Austin Cambridge,’ I said, and to my surprise the driver pulled over. My mother bent in the window. She turned around and I saw she was relaxed and happy. ‘Harry, look who’s here. Mr Windly’s invited us back to his house for a drink.’

The seats were firm. The leather smelt like new. I was
secretly pleased we had run into Mr Windly. I felt like sitting, and it was a nice change to see my mother smiling and laughing on the road down the Cashmere side of the Port Hills. I looked out the window at the new housing. The clay still showed through the newly sown grass. We turned down a concrete drive and my mother gave a gasp at the monster house at the end of it. ‘My god,’ she said, and her reaction seemed to please Mr Windly.

The garage was under the house. This was the first time I had seen an arrangement like that, and we rose up a short flight of steps to inside the house. We bounced in there with birthday smiles, Mr Windly limping after us, holding the handrail for support. Everything smelt new. The carpets. The wallpaper gleamed. We tiptoed and whispered at the back of Mr Windly as he gave us a tour. We stopped outside the doors of two bedrooms and we peered in at the immaculate bedspreads. It didn’t look like anyone had ever disturbed them. In the kitchen Mr Windly threw open the cupboards and the fridge for my mother to inspect. The best was last. The living room opened to a vast window, the biggest I had ever seen, which looked over town and the plains beyond. It was the same view I had seen from my rock-and-grass cockpit. When I turned around Mr Windly was smiling back at me. ‘Follow me,’ he said, and he led the way to his billiard room.

‘What do you know about this game, Harry?’

‘Billiards. Nothing,’ I said.

‘Or snooker. I prefer snooker myself.’

My mother presented herself in the door and smiled with
admiration. ‘This is so beautiful, Dave.’

‘Isn’t it just? Get yourself a cue, Harry.’ He said to my mother, ‘We can have that drink after if that suits you.’

‘It does.’

Mr Windly limped over to a shelf and picked up a blue chalk cube. ‘Chalk up, Harry,’ he said. ‘Most people only put it on after they miss. No one ever wants to blame themself for an error made.’ I watched him set himself and draw his cue back. ‘The idea is to hit through. Hit with confidence, I always say, or not at all.’

Mr Windly talked his way around the table. ‘In this game you have to be patient, Harry. You bide your time until the other bloke comes unstuck. Then you progress through the colours. Yellow. Green. Brown. Blue. Pink. Black.’ My mother ventured in from the door and folded her arms to watch Mr Windly pot the colours. He played his next shot and my mother laughed. Mr Windly shook his head and wondered how he could have snookered himself. ‘Look what I’ve done here, Harry. Hairbreadth from that pot of gold and I go and snooker myself.’ He walked around the table surveying the position from every available angle. The pink obstructed a clean shot at the blue. The white, pink and blue sat in a straight line, the first two balls casting a shadow. ‘What a situation. What am I to do, Harry?’ I had a feeling he knew exactly what to do and that he was just humouring me. He shook his head and tsk-tsked. ‘Normally, you ask yourself, why didn’t I see it coming? You think, if only this, that and the other had happened …’ I looked over at my mother. She had lost her
smile but she was listening intently to what Mr Windly had to say. ‘There is a solution, however,’ he said, and I noticed my mother step closer to the table while Mr Windly went on with his explaining. ‘There is a practical approach and there is an imaginative approach. The practical man will play it safe, minimise his losses. He doesn’t want to hit pink and give up six when he’s only looking at four.’

We watched Mr Windly settle down to the practical man’s stance. He set himself to play the safe stroke. His elbow went back with the cue then he pulled out of the shot. He dropped his trailing leg and straightened up. He asked me to pass the chalk. He said to my mother, ‘For the imaginative man the prize is obscured but not out of reach.’ My mother caught me looking at her and waved my interest off. She was blushing, though, and I was so caught up wondering about this that I almost missed Mr Windly’s amazing shot. Without fuss, without even taking time to calculate the angle, he settled and drew a bead on the white ball and hit through. The white hit the cushion and nipped back behind the pink to collect the blue and deliver it to the side pocket.

My mother applauded and Mr Windly, cool as you-know-what, took a bow. He handed me his cue to put on the rack. ‘I’m going to make your mother that drink I promised. I expect you will want to get in some practice.’

‘Be careful of the felt, Harry,’ my mother said.

‘Oh, I’m not worried about that,’ said Mr Windly. ‘He’s got a nice action on him.’

‘Don’t tell him that,’ said my mother. ‘It’ll swell his head.’

‘Some it might,’ said Mr Windly.

I spent the rest of the afternoon knocking balls into the pockets. I tried over and over to bounce the white off the cushion like I’d seen Mr Windly do but without the same luck. I peeked through the door a few times. Mum and Mr Windly were in big comfortable armchairs pushed up to the window. I didn’t want to interrupt them or to give Mr Windly the idea I was through with snooker, so I kept on knocking balls around the table until Mum came and got me. She said to Mr Windly, ‘I think you’ve introduced him to a bad habit.’

‘Here’s hoping,’ answered Mr Windly. He bowed his head and lit a cigarette.

‘I hope he won’t be smoking next.’

‘Nope,’ said Mr Windly, shaking his head as he exhaled. ‘He can ruin himself on his own.’

My mother laughed and Mr Windly said it was good to hear her laugh again. Then he said, ‘You know, Marie, you can visit again. You can come here any time you like. And Harry.’

My mother looked out the big window, for the moment smiling at something distant or an idea that had just slipped into her thoughts.

‘Good. It’s done,’ said Mr Windly.

‘I can’t drive, Dave.’

‘So what’s the problem? I’ll teach you.’

My father had concealed things from my mother. He had always pretended things were more complicated than they
actually were. Mr Windly showed her things. The big one was showing her how to drive. To start with she gripped the wheel of Mr Windly’s Austin Cambridge. I think she thought that if she loosened her grip the car would wrestle out of control. Soon she relaxed. Soon she was driving on her own. The car was the key. It enabled her to get out in the world and, importantly, escape that tight space occupied by my father and Mr Reardon. No one had said it was that easy. ‘Fancy that,’ she’d say, and that look of pleasant discovery was to remain with her. Foot down, nurse the gear shift, raise the foot and press down on the accelerator. Give and take—that was something that even a piece of machinery could understand.

It was that simple. From that afternoon on, my mother’s life took a turn for the better. My father moved out the following winter. He and Mr Reardon moved to another flat. Eventually they would move to Queensland. By then, however, it wasn’t so much a shock as a slight shifting of boundaries. Our own lives were undergoing subtle changes too. We were spending more time at Mr Windly’s. Most evenings we drove up there. Mum would make dinner. I would have a round of snooker with Mr Windly. One night he said to me, ‘Why don’t you stop calling me Mr Windly? I think we know one another well enough now for you to call me Dave.’ Then one night we stayed over. After that it just felt natural.

My wife would love us to be friends with the Laurensons—or for that matter, the Kerrs. It’s a package deal, since we cannot befriend the Laurensons without the Kerrs or vice versa. Right now Jude is standing at the window. Since I came into the kitchen she has supplied me with a blow-by-blow account of the shovels and picks and backpacks shoved in the back of the Laurensons’ Pajero. And now, for my information, she says, ‘There go the plants. Tea-trees by the look of things.’ Then she gives the saplings their Maori pronunciation—Kanuka. She releases the word slowly as if it is a new taste she is unsure about. But native saplings is the essential point, here.

This is something the Laurensons and Kerrs get together to do at weekends. They climb the hilltops around here and put up with the gorse clawing at their arms and legs to plant natives. Ross Laurenson has told me all about the colonising instincts of pines. How on windy days the pine seed is carried aloft to the native stands. From there, it is an amazingly short time until they gobble up the goodness of the earth and lay waste to entire hillsides.

I don’t know what it was exactly but after that conversation with Ross, I just knew we would never be good friends. It was nothing he actually said—for the most part it made sense. But while Ross did most of the talking I just looked at him and thought, ‘We’re not ever going to be friends. Not good friends.’ And that’s fine. You can’t be good friends with everyone in the universe.

Lately, however, Jude has been particularly anxious to know what I may have said to Ross that has left us without an invitation to join the Laurensons and Kerrs. She mines me for details. Specifically she would like to know what I said to Ross about pine trees. Was I in any way disagreeable? Tetchy? Look, my point is simply this. If she wants to plant natives why does she need the Laurensons and Kerrs to hold her hand? And, for that matter, I would say to Jude to just look at the Laurensons. Sometimes they go off by themselves in their oilskin parkas and canvas knapsacks. They leave the house, holding hands, to ringbark a pine tree that has given itself away above the bush line. It’s an honourable thing to do and I’m glad someone’s doing it.

I don’t know why I’m smirking; I don’t mean to.

‘We all stand to benefit,’ says my wife humourlessly from her place at the window. She says, ‘I admire what they are doing. If only more people were to follow their example.’

I throw the newspaper onto the table which means I’m gone. I have things to do. We’ve talked about the Laurensons and the Kerrs for long enough.

But before I disappear, Jude would like me to answer something.

She says, ‘Before you run away …’ and of course I hate it when she puts it like that—
before I run away
. What would I be running away from? ‘Before you run away,’ she repeats, ‘I want you to answer me this. Can you please tell me what we believe in? I’d be interested to know.’ Her shoulders kind of pop forward. ‘I want to hear it from you. From your lips,’ she says, which is to say that one of my long silences will not save me. Not today.