The Man in the Shed (2 page)

I was already in bed when later that night I heard voices in
the hall. I heard Mum say, Perhaps we can put him on the couch.
Perhaps
was one of my mother’s favourite words.
Perhaps
belonged to the margins of the world we roamed in—it was an expression of possibility. In my mother’s use the word had a generosity of spirit pushing from behind, a kind of moral consideration. Some time later I heard them set up the couch. In the morning I found him on it with his face turned away. Instead of a pillow, his hand rested under his cheek. I crept past and opened and closed the door with the same consideration. I did not want to wake him. The next time I saw him he was in the kitchen, at ease in his neatly turned-up flannels. His face was large, larger than either of my parents’ faces.

A week later he was still in our lives. There must have been some sort of discussion. In any event I had missed it. There wasn’t room in the house. So we parked him in the shed out the back. Mum made some curtains. Dad rustled up a camp stretcher. The neighbours flung a floor rug over the fence, which they kindly said they had no use for.

Another neighbour we didn’t know well, except as some kind of scientist, turned up at the door with a chess set under his arm. As I was the one who answered, his interest went straight over my shoulder to probe the interior of our house. He said he’d heard we had a visitor. Might he be up for a game of chess? Right on cue our man emerged smiling out of the dark hallway in his white shirt and dark slacks. He’d just come out of the shower. His hair was wet. He came towards us buttoning his shirt at the wrists.

Dad was still at work. Pen was out somewhere with Jimmy Mack. So it was just me and Mum for an audience. Our man took the window seat for himself and gestured to one of the chairs for our neighbour. That end of the kitchen filled with an energy it didn’t know well. It was a particular kind of silence that amplified the sounds of the outside world. A passing car’s gear shift made our lives feel all the more stationary, and in the silence that filtered back down I could hear the dog scratching herself and the thrushes in the guttering. Outside the window the hedge top was shiny and twiggy. Overhead the roofs cracked in the heat. It was a day for the beach. But there we were, packed in around the chess set on the kitchen table. Our man smiled a lot which, on this occasion, I took to be a show of confidence. The smile was for the walls of the kitchen, for the moment at hand, but it was clear that Mum thought the smile was for her, and her face, I noticed, lit up.

Our neighbour drew himself over the board. He squinted down at the pieces, looked surprised, whistled through his stained teeth, then sat back in his chair, folded his arms contentedly, hugged himself, now very sure of himself. Then he dropped his arms at his side and sat upright. Checkmate, said our man.

Dad could ask me, as he did later on, how the day had gone and I would tell him it was all right. The neighbour from across the way came over for a game of chess with our man. And although what I said was true enough, it failed to pass on those things that were surely more interesting than pieces
moving about a board. I could not begin to tell him about this new atmosphere that the kitchen hadn’t known before. I could not draw his attention to an exchange of smiles that said so much more than I could say. Things had happened but under cross-examination I wouldn’t have known how or what to say they were. A description of the thing itself would lead nowhere useful.

One afternoon we found ourselves alone in the backyard. The man in the shed stood looking around and grinning at everything. I couldn’t think what to say to him. Finally he said, Why don’t you show me your neighbourhood?

I took him up the street. We passed the house with the woman and the cats. We passed the house with the long grass. A Maori family had moved in recently. We still didn’t have much to do with them. There followed a stretch where the front lawns were mown and the flowers almost too bright to be real. We passed the house where in the winter I had seen an ambulance pull up. I’d waited until the stretcher came out bearing old Mrs Quinn who, I learnt later when Mum read out her obituary, had actually taught at my school and was a one-time high jump champion, but that was a long time ago. When I saw her she was covered in tarpaulin and strapped to the stretcher. I thought of asking the man from the shed if he had any explanation for the straps but instead I walked quickly on without saying anything about Mrs Quinn or the stretcher. It remained a private moment and a few minutes later I was pleased I hadn’t said anything. Mrs Quinn was my first dead person.

We walked on as far as the green metal fence at the end of the road, and there we turned and walked all the way back up to where our street met with the main drag down to the beach, and where, on the corner, we stopped to smell the damp sea air. A flock of seagulls was winging it up the valley. Bad weather was on the way. At this time of the year it would be just a one-day wonder, what we called a clearing storm—it would be cold, all wind and fury, and then we would wake to a world perfectly still and new, and by the afternoon the roofs up and down the street would be cracking in the heat and all the dogs would be looking for shadows to crawl into.

Now we turned and walked back the way we’d come until we reached the shingle drive. Here the man in the shed stopped and looked back up the street. It was as though he thought there might be something else. But there wasn’t anything else. This was it. You live in a nice neighbourhood, he said. I hadn’t ever thought of it as a nice neighbourhood or, for that matter, a bad one. It was just where we lived. I wished I could have shown him something. An event of some kind. Briefly I entertained walking him back to Mrs Quinn’s. Instead I shrugged.

Just a few years earlier the Sputnik had broken free of the earth’s atmospheric crust. Anyone who has hit a tennis ball higher than a house roof will understand the ambition of the Sputnik crashing through all those layers of containment. The Sputnik provided pictures, which were published in our local newspaper. For the first time in human history it was possible to look back at the planet we inhabited.

More modestly, the edge of the sea served the same purpose. There, unable to venture further, we could stop and turn away from the horizon and look back at our lives. As the tide came in, bottom feeders slid across our fading footprints and our collapsed sand battlements. If you were to wait a few more hours for the tide to turn it was as if you’d never passed this way. You were strangely free of the historic fact of having walked in a particular direction and touched this piece of the earth. The wet sand sparkled, then it turned to slate under a passing cloud. Suddenly it was ready for the world to start over, to create new footprints. Down there
perhaps
was the way forward, towards temptation.

I watch Mum make a small pile of her clothes, watch the way she steps out of her leather sandals. She pulls a white swimming cap down over her ears. She suffers earache in cold water. Without her hair, her face looks older, more mannish. As she enters the sea the man from the shed does his washing-of-limbs thing. I watch Mum push on into deeper water. She isn’t the fastest of swimmers—her stroke is a bit laboured and the man from the shed easily catches her. Once he does he lounges around in the sea; he lies in it, lies on his back looking up at the anchored cloud, then rolls over and with a few powerful strokes has caught up with her again.

When the forecasted rain arrives in a heavy squall I hurry to the bus shelter by the car park. When rain falls onto sand the sound is soft. The world is suddenly packed with cotton wool. It hears nothing and yet at the same time its capacity to hear feels infinite. The sand will absorb all. On the History
Channel, whenever the troops stagger ashore under fire, the sand explosions are spectacular, sand rising with volcanic gusto but also falling back into place, to tidy up after itself—or others, as it were. Rain is almost pleasant when you swim in the sea. Rain smooths out the waves, creates tiny pools that exist only for the moment they are observed.

From the bus shelter I stick my head out into the weather to see Mum stumble into the trench inside the sandbar. The man from the shed offers a steadying hand. She accepts it. As they climb up the shelf she takes her hand back to place against her thigh. And I breathe out again, relieved she has taken her hand back. I am relieved because as far as I can see there isn’t a story in what I am seeing. There isn’t anything down there that I might report when Dad comes home and asks after my day. They are back on damp sand. I look further up the beach. A wind could blow and nothing would disturb that packed sand. Their footprints will be there the next day. The larger and slightly unaligned right footprint of the man from the shed and Mum’s own trailing pitter-patter prints, patient, dependable. The rain had blown in halfway through their swim and left everything plastered down. Now it was pouring off house roofs, down copper and plastic guttering to run ankle-deep in pavement gutters, a grey tide of suburban murk moving towards the storm drains. In another twenty minutes or so a black tide will burst from the discharge pipes at either end of the beach and a black stain will push out to sea. I poke my head around the corner of the bus shelter for one more look. Mum and the man from the shed have gathered up their
clothes. They are running for the changing sheds.

Later that night Dad pokes his head in my bedroom door to ask how my day went, and did I make it down to the beach. And without compromising myself or telling a lie, I say, It rained. Even though it is dark I can make out his relief. That’s the story, he says.

What he already knows—I get the feeling he’d like more of that.

There are days, though, when the waiting turns Dad to stone. His eyes turn grey, and at such times I can almost detect the redundancy of the industrial age upon his skin and pouring out his nostrils. Down at the beach where Pen and I have taken off in different directions, he stands alone on a midden of broken glass, amid sun-cracked condoms and other Saturday-night cast-offs, which exercises his mind in regard to my sister. Pen is following the edge of the tide. She is walking into unpatrolled waters without a care in the world—which is bullshit, I know, because I am certain she is very alert to the interest she is creating. I can hear the doors opening and closing up at the car park. Mum doesn’t appear to share Dad’s concern. She goes on combing the shoreline for cats’ eyes. She collects them for the drive. From out of her shadow my sister emerges with the same detachment, though she is not quite indifferent, because she is walking the way I have seen her do many times in town where she will turn her head to check her reflection in the passing shopwindows. One of the faces up at the sea wall is Jimmy Mack’s. He has been banned from seeing my sister for one month. It was Dad’s idea. I don’t know why.
He was the one who sat explaining to Jimmy in his car outside our house.

The seagulls make their racket. Somehow they save the day. They glide on the wind. They drop shellfish over the car park. They make you feel as though you have been on an outing. Now something big and carefree lands nearby: I kick it back to the playing kids and the beach ball floats unevenly seeking both buoyancy and a place to land. And I go back to grinding my heels into the sand. I want to see how deep they will go. I want to see how far they will go.

On another day, a burner—along this same stretch of fine sand, between umbrellas with their splatter of daisies and suns, the spread towels—sunbathers lie everywhere in a home brew of vinegar and oil. The quick death of melanoma goes unmentioned, along with Mum’s pregnancy. The world we cannot see has heaped clues in a neat line along the high-tide mark. Piles of jellyfish with their blue stingers have kept a lot of people out of the water. But not Mum and the man from the shed. They are doing their laps between the moored rafts. Dad looks down at a woman’s bra half filled with sand that washes back and forth in the tide and looks up again, concentrating on the estuary much farther down the beach.

I don’t know where Pen is. But she is not here with us. It’s just me and Dad today and we are walking with our fishing tackle to Sandy Point.

There is a smell of blood in the air. Where we intend to fish, the sea bears a red stain. The blood is from the meatworks.
In the killing season—now—fish swim in from the depths to feed at the edge of the red mealy stain that began with stock moving along the pens, a stun gun knocking the sweet life out of their skulls, and the beast hooked up and flensed by men in white caps and white overalls and white gumboots who carve it up into the hindquarters and forequarters, all those juicy joints of the butcher’s shopwindow. The blood is sluiced along pipes laid from the works to an outfall buried under the lid of the sea.

And here the fish come in their droves. Even today, in what would normally be un-fishlike conditions. Too much sun, too much light, too much daylight bombarding the surface of the sea. Yet there they are, cutting up the water, a frenzy of fish, some leaping from the water in sheer terror at the passing shadow of a kingfish. I have seen one chase a kahawai all the way onto the rocks, where a grateful fisherman picked it up with one gloved hand and with the other sliced open its gills, blood spurting out and a confused fear draining the fish’s shocked eyes.

Earlier that morning I’d come into the kitchen to find Mum and Dad already up, a remnant of the night upon them both. Silence and anger looking for somewhere to alight. Mum with one leg twisted around the other, all her attention focused on the bench top. She waited until Dad had finished his toast and gulped down the last of his tea. She waited until he had packed his lunch. She waited until after he pulled on his boots in the hall. Then, just as the door was about to close, she called out—in passing—that she planned
to go swimming—ocean swimming, as she calls it—that afternoon. The door didn’t close immediately. Neither of us could see what Dad made of that announcement. I pictured him on the porch, his head at a tilt, which is the way he usually looks after leaving the house and has stopped halfway across the lawn to wonder if he’s remembered everything.