The Man in the Shed (6 page)

Bella was due at a friend’s birthday party in an hour. I ran down to the bookshop and picked up a gift, then I dropped her off on the other side of the city and left Clara at my sister’s.

When I got home Stuart was up. He was in the kitchen waiting for the jug to boil. As I came in he barely looked up. I pulled up a chair and sat down. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘this is what happened.’

After the office, the younger ones had wanted to go to one of the bars. Stuart and Don had lamely followed. Stuart is
forty-one years old and Don is perhaps a year or two older. I am thirty-seven. The other engineers who’d flown up from the South Island for their ‘conference’ are younger still. According to Stuart the younger ones led the charge. And one thing led to another. Or, more true to say, one bar led to another.

Around eleven o’clock it occurred to Stuart to ask the others where they were staying. Well, that was the funniest thing, according to Stuart. It seemed none of them had stopped to think that far ahead, so Stuart led them to a backpackers, where the engineers checked in their bags before heading back out to the bright lights.

It seems … well, it doesn’t seem so much as it happened … they headed off to a well-known strip club. This wasn’t so much a surprise, I have to say, as Stuart admitting to it; as a result I feel able to trust the rest of what he had to say.

At the strip club, one or two or more, god knows, paid for lap dances. It doesn’t matter who, though Stuart did mention names, but a few of them headed upstairs to pay for a woman. That’s when I found myself looking back at the scratch on Stuart’s cheek.

‘So. That’s it?’ I asked.

‘More or less,’ he said.

‘You spent the whole night in the strip club?’

‘No. They did. I didn’t.’

Stuart said he left them; he doesn’t know what hour that was. He’d had enough, he said. He says he couldn’t remember where he’d left the car, which is a good thing. And he’d
forgotten about the room he’d paid for at the backpackers. He says he didn’t have any idea where he was headed. It was late, but not that late, he claims. Anyway, he says there were still lines of people waiting to get inside the more popular night spots.

Within a block he’d left behind the noise and the lights and the crowds. He was on one of the streets running down to Te Papa on the waterfront. His legs carried him on. He says there was no decision in his head or will left in his body except for in his legs, apparently. Somehow he got himself across those lanes of traffic on Wakefield. I shudder to think. Then, he says, he walked around to the seaward side of the national museum and that’s when he saw the flax bushes. As soon as he saw them, he says he knew what to do. He crawled into the flax, where I suppose he passed the rest of the night and which, I gather, accounts for his torn shirt and the cut on his cheek.

In the morning, as he woke in the flax bushes, he says he became aware of others—drunks, I suppose, hoboes, I guess, whatever you wish to call them, street people. That’s the company he kept that night sleeping in the flax bushes outside the national museum.

Now, if someone else was telling this story, in other words if all this was being recounted by someone else and it involved someone else’s husband and family, I wouldn’t know what would have appalled me the most. The lack of a phone call—at any time that night. The binge drinking. The strip club. The lap dancers, or the business upstairs in the strip club. But no, the thing that distresses me the most is the thought of
Stuart crawling into those flax bushes. It is the thought of the man I married in good faith waking in the flax bushes with all the other drunks of the city, and it is also this: he is really no better than them, and that fact would be known to everyone if he didn’t have a home to go to.

Sunday night I ironed a fresh shirt and left it on the bed. Monday morning I dropped Stuart off at the office for an early meeting with a client. Later I went along to Te Papa as a parent helper with Clara’s Year 8 class. It is that time of year when teachers cast around for activities outside the classroom. We took in the Maori waka, and after that the kids scattered and flew like moths to the voices of piped history in various parts of the museum. The trip ended up on the marae level overlooking the waterfront. From there I could look down to the flax bushes where my husband had spent Saturday night.

Already it felt like history. And here I suppose this story might have ended. I might try to forget it, and move on, as everyone says. But while standing there with the rude wind in my face, I felt a nagging that had nothing to do with it or the cries of squabbling children over my shoulder. I decided to take myself down to those flax bushes.

A woman office worker sat on the lawn, smoking and sunning her bare legs while she tackled the crossword. She didn’t pay me any attention, though. She didn’t see an anxious middle-aged swamphen creep into the shrub and the flax. It was easy to see where people had burrowed through. The ground was well trampled. I poked around. You could see
where sleeping bodies had lain, and in one or two places there were plastic and glass bottles lying among the bark chips. One of the other women, the mother of one of Clara’s friends, yelled out to me. What was I doing down there? What on earth was I grubbing about for? I could hear her laughing voice rallying above the gusting wind. But I pretended not to hear, and went on looking for a piece of Stuart’s white shirt.

The daub of brown paint will be Alice’s first building, and working with a quick brush hand Pioneer Towers is up in a jiff. Other than the Towers the surrounding countryside is of a marigold colour, cowlick fields swept back by a steady nor’-wester to the Alps in the west. And just coming onto the canvas—now—is Harry Wills, an Englishman, on the hop from Sydney, whipping his horses across the plains for the Towers. It is late in the day when he draws back the string on his covered wagon. He offers up a hand to his entertainers and they descend and pick their way in gold braid shoes across a muddy street for the new Harold Wills Theatre. It is, as it
appears to be, a pale memory, a penny-pinched version of the Globe—not with the same reek of history, of course, but Alice has mixed in some yellow with brown for a weathered look, and stroked in the new/old theatre next to Pioneer Towers. And after the theatre, she plans an eating house and, next to it, a bar, and across the street a police station and gaol. And at the end of the street, a church of sharp cheekbones and high forehead.

Within view of the church Alice adds the farmhouse. A man with a black bag tethers his horse. George Burt, the district veterinarian, has arrived to deliver Alice’s mother, and sew up her grandmother, and make her respectable in death. Towards the top of the painting, near the snowline, Alice sketches in a stone farmhouse, to get to which, many years earlier, George Burt rode a day and a night to deliver Alice’s father.

And here, on the edge of town, Alice adds the Memorial Hall. On New Year’s Eve her father and mother will escape from here into the nearby paddocks. The high-country boy will prod about in the underclothing of Alice’s mother, and less than six months later he will be found twitching nervously in the registry room of Pioneer Towers with its official odour of ink and wood. Through the open door he will cast an eye out to the street where the horses stand flicking the wind from their ears. There he will stand then, curling his toes inside his boots. He is twenty-two years old—old enough, he feels, to be irritated by the sense of truancy entering into what is supposedly an honourable act. In two hours’ time he
and Alice’s mother will be making their way to Christchurch for the ‘honeymoon’, a place from which, instinctively, they know there is no return and of which they can hardly bear to speak.

Alice steps back from the canvas, and pulls a face at the muddy town. The details are too large; they need to be scaled down. A few derelict fence posts are needed to lie in the tall grass, a few sagging lines for the church. And perhaps a memorial clock ought to be grafted on to Pioneer Tower for the farmers’ sons who have failed to return.

It also occurs to Alice that sadly there is nothing here for her son, Mark, to recognise or latch on to, except to recall perhaps what a boyish eye once caught from the window of a speeding car. Bless him. Bless my boy and make him grow, Alice says to that part of the canvas, the foreground, which is more familiar.

The scratchy whites and blues are the makeshift shops with their backs to the sea—she can add the details later, because here is the small primary school outside town, where Alice taught and her son attended. And nearby is their home, a cottage, and in the backyard a woman paints at an easel.

Mark is eight years old, and his father has just bought a cray boat. There will be none of the weekend trips or picnics along the coast they had promised each other before packing up house in Christchurch. The cray boat is no pleasure craft. Nor does the fishing timetable respect weekends. To their friends back in the city they boast of a full life, and too little time.
Soon there will be no reply, as many of their friends move overseas, or marry, spawning into streams of their own making. The names are on the tip of Alice’s tongue, but the owners’ faces have drifted, and parted company with the bits and pieces of Alice’s memory.

A number of their friends did make it to Richard’s funeral. From others, overseas, came letters and cards of condolence—and a few with chiding tendencies spoke of the ‘enormous perils faced by those who
choose
to make their living from the sea’, as if Richard had willed the storm—and the boat onto the reef. But there had been kind invitations, too. Summers spent in holiday baches, which she took up for Mark’s sake—to give him a nice memory. That is exactly how Alice thought of it, at the time—the opportunity in later life to recall his feet and toes sinking into sand, a moment’s premonition of the earth’s undertow joyfully ignored, and even shrieked at. But, notably, the first summer Alice decided to stay at home put an end to further invitations.

She created instead summer holidays in the place where they lived. They set up day camps on the sheltered side of the house, and spent all their time between here and the kitchen. At night hot nor’-westers swept down on the town. The wind bellowed in the chimney and the boy climbed into Alice’s bed. In the morning they woke to white clouds running with blind terror. One morning Mark asked her to paint the wind. In a whimsical moment she hurled the jar of grey watercolour over the fence at the beach end of the garden. The paint streaked—then briefly rippled as a gust caught underneath
and carried it aloft. A day later it formed a dead skin over a small area of dry scrub and beach shingle—and the wind had gone. In a contrite mood the sea straggled ashore in what would be a day of pleasant surprises. Alice set up the easel for Mark in front of the white Peace rose climbing the trellis against the house; she later returned to find among the painted white flower-heads a splash of black and gold. From Mark’s canvas she traced the rogue colour on the Peace climber, and gleefully announced, ‘A sport.’

She explained to the small boy the aberrant nature of sports, this capacity of a completely different kind of rose to spring unexpectedly from the parent. A sport was outside history. There was no patiently evolved process, no careful layering or natural selection. It just suddenly appeared as its own idea—extraordinary as a new technology or a whole new language. ‘Now we get to name it,’ she told him. He was in a restless mood. She wasn’t even sure he had been listening.

‘Call it “no-name rose”,’ he said.

Alice’s paintbrush returns to the school, fleshing out the temporary prefabs that have stayed on, permanently, a flash of silver for the jungle-gym bar on which Mark once split his lip and ran into the staffroom, blood pouring from his mouth.

The painting, she has decided, ought to hang on the wall above the dining-room table. Alice has in mind those whitewashed walls in the photograph Mark sent of his apartment. She imagines him escorting a young woman around
the landscape, imagines them arm in arm, stopping at the playground for a turn on the swings. She imagines the three of them going out for breakfast in town—and, for all his acquired foreignness, Mark delighting in his local knowledge. Of course the young woman will not be able to help herself, sniggering with Mark at the powdered coffee, the painted placemats of great thoroughbreds.

Above the town Alice paints the cemetery. She had been happy to bury Richard here, with its lovely views of the bay. She can remember coming here as a family—just the three of them—and Richard kneeling down to whisper in a small boy’s ear. ‘On a clear day, you can see South America and the peaks of the Andes. On especially clear days, you can see the back of your own head.’ On that occasion Mark had looked carefully, squinting his eyes up ambitiously—he’d been about to announce a distant landfall when his father, holding back his laughter, placed his hand over the boy’s mouth.

In the weeks after Alice buried Richard she would sometimes spend an hour sitting next to his grave, watching the last of the day depart. One time she measured her own grave—six paces by three—next to Richard’s, and sat there, wondering which memories she ought to take with her. And wondering too at the brilliant sunset—is all this simply for me, my benefit alone? Why aren’t more people around to enjoy it?

Alice paints her way down from the cemetery through the north end of town towards the railway station. She paints a figure hauling a suitcase, although on the day in question she
had driven Mark to the railway station. He had come home simply to say he was leaving. An offer of a job had come from an architect in Sydney.

The two days he was home he refused to go out, afraid of who he might bump into. Finally it was time for Mark to catch the train to Christchurch. Alice drove her son to the station. The entire way, Mark looked out a side window. Perhaps, she thought, he’d been making his own last-minute selections: allowing bits of the town to stick to his wandering gaze to take with him across the Tasman.

There was the matter of her parting gift. She had had to dash back to the car. A 1955 issue of
Pictorial New Zealand
. She shouted through a half-closed window in his carriage, ‘It isn’t supposed to be reading material. Although, of course, you can read it.’