The Antipodeans

by Greg McGee

  The Author was the 2013 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellow and gratefully acknowledges the support of the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship and the Trustees of the Wynne-Manson Menton Trust.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

  ISBN 978-1-927262-47-4

  An Upstart Press Book

  Published in 2015 by Upstart Press Ltd

  B3, 72 Apollo Drive, Rosedale

  Auckland, New Zealand

  Text © Greg McGee 2015

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  Design and format © Upstart Press Ltd 2015

  www.upstartpress.co.nz

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form.

  E-book produced by CVD Limited

  For Family

  and

  I miei amici Caimani.

  About the Author

  Greg McGee writes for theatre, film and television, in which he has won numerous awards. More recently he has concentrated on prose. Under the pseudonym of Alix Bosco he won the 2010 Ngaio Marsh Award for best crime fiction novel for Cut & Run, and was a finalist the following year with Slaughter Falls. He has since written his first novel under his own name, Love & Money, and the biography of Richie McCaw, The Open Side. He was the 2013 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellow. He lives in Auckland.

  The past is in us . . . not behind us.

  Tim Winton, Aquifer

  Venice 2014

  1

  He’d insisted they take a boat, an Alilaguna, so that her first view of Venice would be from the water. She’d asked whether that was wise — there was a low drizzle floating out of the early dusk at Marco Polo airport, and he was already shivering as they walked to the jetty.

  ‘Drizzle’s good,’ he’d said, hauling on his suitcase. She’d offered to pull it for him, told him she could easily do both, but he wouldn’t have it. Now he was labouring, as they arrived at a short gangway leading down off the jetty. ‘You’ll feel the ghosts of the place.’

  That seemed so unlike him. ‘Ghosts, Dad?’

  He didn’t answer. Perhaps he hadn’t heard her. He’d always been selectively deaf, even when he was well. It had been one of the things that had driven her mother mad.

  As the boat-bus droned along the channel, leaving a white wake trailing in the brown water and falling darkness, they passed a couple of islets with scruffy trees hiding all but the roof-lines of industrial garages. There were boats on cradles having their bums wiped. It could have been one of the less attractive indentations of the Auckland isthmus, lacking only mudflats and mangroves.

  He refused to sit. That didn’t surprise her: the osteoarthritis in his knees had given him pain throughout the long flight. He stayed on his feet, hands gripping the rail, staring out across the barely ruffled water. ‘Shallow,’ he said. ‘Treacherous.’ He pointed towards some lights out to the left, barely visible through the gloom. ‘Franco and I used to fish off Murano.’

  She saw his hands were shaking. Big hands, more so recently as the flesh withered on his frame. Hands that looked as if they’d crutched lambs or milked cows or pruned vines. They mostly lied, those hands: he’d been brought up on a farm but had spent his working life as a solicitor, a self-styled ‘paper-pushing all-rounder’ who did conveyancing, corporate, trusts, estates — and matrimonial property, in which he was not pleased to be currently acting for his only child. She wished it wasn’t such an unholy mess. It was hard to say whether it had taken a toll on him — he wasn’t a man who allowed emotion to leak — but she’d resolved before coming with him not to let her pain show.

  He was pointing to a cluster of lights on the other side, told her it was Mestre, the mainland city, then looked puzzled. ‘There used to be huge gas flares and light towers over there.’ He addressed a question to the pilot, dour and overweight, who hadn’t said a word to them or the other three passengers as he’d taken their tickets and loaded their suitcases. He seemed to have trouble understanding the question, and her father the answer, but he eventually reported that many of the installations at the mainland port, Marghera, had been closed down ‘because the pollutants were rotting her’.

  Her? She’d read a lot of guff about Venice — there was an awful lot of guff about Venice — and a fair bit of it had been so purple it could have been written by a desperate real estate agent. She should know. But her father’s use of the female pronoun for a collection of old stones made her wonder. He was looking away, into the darkness ahead. ‘There she is,’ he said.

  Clare looked and could see nothing, still blinded by the lights of Mestre. Then she saw a wide, muted light, sitting low on the water, which became buildings, none more than four or five storeys. The boat motored straight at them, slowing slightly, but not enough, she thought, instinctively looking for the wharf where they would surely disembark. Suddenly they were among those old stones, between them, moving up what she should have known was a canal, which soon brought them to what her father told her was the Grand Canal.

  He had also told her Venice wasn’t a picture postcard, and he was right: it was an illustration from a fairy tale, the unimaginably ancient and detailed facades of the palazzi, lit to show their Byzantine bones, seeming to float just above their reflection on the water. Between some of the grand houses, other smaller lanes of water led off into a gentle rose light thrown by lanterns, danced through by the drizzle. And everywhere, boats, barges, big and small, carrying all manner of people and produce.

  She shouldn’t have been surprised, and yet she was. She’d imagined Venice as a kind of theme park with canals and stripe-vested straw-hatted gondoliers singing ‘O sole mio’, not a working city where the main street was water, plied by truck barges and boat-buses carrying Coca-Cola and building materials and people.

  She heard her father say something in Italian, quietly, almost muttering to himself. An impeccably dressed man in a hat and coat at the rail nearby overheard and turned in surprise, clapped his hands once and said, ‘Bravo!’

  ‘What’d you say?’ she asked.

  ‘The words of a Venetian song,’ he said. ‘O beautiful Venice, I can never leave you, you’ve made me fall in love with you.’

  She was stunned into silence. She’d heard him speak Italian before, but never heard him sing a song or even quote poetry. Like most of the lawyers she’d known through him, he fancied himself as a writer. She’d seen the florid letters and e-mails they wrote to each other. But, with her father at least, the orotund wordsmithery on the page had seldom come from his mouth. In that too, he was true to his southern origins.

  ‘It’s pretty gorgeous, Dad,’ she said, but found herself thinking that almost anything can look good at night, particularly if you’ve got a bit of water to reflect the lights.

  As the Alilaguna approached another bridge across the canal, and slowed, she could see his hands were shaking. ‘I came to hate this place,’ he said. ‘I felt trapped.’

  Okay, she thought. That’s real.

  2

  What happened next was real, too, and disconcerting. The Alilaguna stopped at Sant’Angelo, which wasn’t what her father was expecting. After an exchange with the pilot in which neither seemed to understand much of what the other was trying to say, her father told her that he’d thought the boat stopped at Accademia, another couple of hundred metres further, but that was apparently a vaporetto stop, not an Alilaguna stop. Why such a short distance should be of any consequence became clear once they’
d lifted their suitcases off the pontoon and hauled them to the end of a long narrow alley. He seemed lost.

  Worse, when he asked a local where Campo Santo Stefano was, the local corrected his pronunciation. Then he didn’t appear to understand the man’s reply.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said to her. ‘You’re never lost in Venice, it’s too small. You just temporarily don’t know where you are.’

  They seemed to remain that way for quite some time, going round in a circle of endless labyrinthine alleys punctuated by nasty little humped bridges over small canals, which forced them to lift their suitcases. He weakened quickly and looked bewildered.

  After more instructions and gesticulations, they arrived at a large, rectangular piazza that turned out to be the one he was looking for, Campo Santo Stefano. They plunged into various blind alleys along one side before they found the right one, which led to a smaller piazza, San Maurizio. More blundering, more infernal humped bridges, before the third door he tried turned out to be their B & B, though there were still three flights of stairs to carry the suitcases up. He was struggling but wouldn’t hear of her suggestion that he should leave his suitcase and she’d come back for it.

  A serene young man sitting at the small reception desk at the top of the stairs must have been deaf not to hear them coming, she thought, until she saw the little white pods in his ears.

  ‘So sorry to disturb, you,’ she said, as her father stood gasping with his hands on his knees.

  There was another reality check when the young man showed them their room. She knew space was tight in Venice, and he’d warned her they were sharing a room, but the sight of a double bed, one old wardrobe and a single that looked as if it had been requisitioned from a jail cell was depressing. The claustrophobia wasn’t helped by dark purple curtains over a window that scarcely justified them. They’d surely heard of venetians? She could easily redress this room to make it feel much more spacious, but even then, you’d only ever advertise it as a single.

  Her father had caught his breath sufficiently to complain to the young man that he’d booked a room for four, a double bed and two singles, so they’d have a spare bed to lay their suitcases out on.

  ‘Oh no, Signor,’ he said, ‘no mistake.’ He pulled a trundler bed out from under the prison cell single.

  Her father just nodded, his fight gone. When he’d proudly explained on the flight over his cunning ruse in booking a room for four, he’d seemed on top of it, ahead of the game. Now he seemed pitiful. They couldn’t put their suitcases on the trundler because she’d have to climb over them to get into bed. There was room for one suitcase on a narrow bench beside the wardrobe, so hers went on the floor, impeding any access to the window.

  Before she unclipped her suitcase, she stepped over it, pulled the dusty curtain back and looked out onto a dreary internal square. It was about three metres across and looked like an open lift shaft someone had forgotten to fill in. There were shuttered windows on three sides and the lower floor looked abandoned, the flagstones covered with seeping mould. One of the books she’d read lamented that Venice was crumbling, eroding, liquefying, being reclaimed by the sea. The sooner the better, she thought.

  She’d fallen asleep easily enough, but something woke her. She lay awake and thought she’d quietly cry herself to sleep. Her woe-is-me litany was easily summoned: How did I end up like this, thirty-one years old in a crappy hotel room with my father? This is it, me and him, I’ve got no one else in the world. How tragic is that? It was something of a relief to have some variation on the same old grief-stricken riff about her husband fucking her best friend, etc., etc. She was so bored with it, so sick of it, yet still so enmeshed in it.

  Moments would come back to her and she’d pore over them like entrails. Sarah, now she thought of it, had once said she didn’t like hairy men. When had Nicholas started having those crack sack and back waxes he said were for her? She’d always thought he’d had them because no pubes made his penis look bigger. That penis he was so proud of — ‘Say hello to Pedro!’ Pedro? Nicholas was a Greek from Melbourne! Nick the Greek — it’s why he hated that diminution of his name. Olive skinned, hirsute, except on his balding pate, and overweight — she could say it now: fat. Fat hairy arse. Hairy back. She’d thought she liked that, it had seemed so exotic once, though when her counsellor pointed it out, she could see that it might be just a reflexive thing, a reaction against the tallish, blondish, emotionally austere males in her family. So. Her upbringing, her conditioning, had given her a weakness for fat, a weakness for short, for hairy, for swarthy. Not to mention volatility. Great. Say hello to Pedro? She was so fucked.

  She tried to heed her counsellor’s advice and not lose herself in what had gone wrong, but couldn’t help it. Maybe Nicholas’s waxes had been for Sarah all along. She felt so humiliated. It was such a public betrayal and rejection — all their friends, the social media. And being business partners just made it so much worse.

  Where would they be now, the two of them? It would be early afternoon in Auckland. Late winter sun would be falling across the matrimonial bed in their Sunny, Mount Eden Treasure, Grammar Zone. They’d be fucking on those virgin white pure cotton sheets that had cost a small fortune. After he’d admitted they’d done it on their bed, she couldn’t bring herself to take them back, or even that Belgian linen throw, which would probably be lying crumpled on the shag carpet — how appropriate — along with their clothes . . .

  She’d unfriended both of them on Facebook and that would have automatically worked the other way as well. She wasn’t so masochistic as to go to either of their sites any more, but there was always Twitter. @clarebelle was still being followed by @sarahbelle — she wished there was a way of remotely renaming it @slutbag — and she just had to get a message out there. Nicholas was still there through the agency. She knew they’d be checking. Tweeting was the only means left to her of maintaining a public presence with a bit of dignity. In her tweets, she’d been terribly excited about the upcoming trip, accompanying her father to the romantic little village just inland from Venice where he’d once lived for a reunion in his honour . . . A last hurrah, though she didn’t tweet that.

  Now she was actually here, she needed to tell the world, or at least Slick and Slut, that she was feeling no pain, that she was having a ball. She opened her iPhone and got into Twitter. Loving Venice and Venetians, she thumbed. Wild. Say hello to Paolo! LOL. On second thoughts, she deleted LOL; it seemed both a bit young and a bit old, not to mention desperate. Adding a hashtag like #betrayed or #lovelorn would have been more honest, real, but she didn’t want the company of her own kind.

  She pressed Send and felt better for it. She was sure she could get back to sleep now. But then she realised what had woken her earlier. It sounded like a rhinoceros about to charge.

  He’d warned her that, ‘according to your mother’, he snored and she’d told him not to worry, she was a heavy sleeper, she could sleep through anything. But she was thinking of Nicholas’s deep, sonorous snoring, not these epiglottal, arrhythmic snorts.

  When she’d mentioned, not complainingly, that Nicholas snored, he, typically, defensively, had said she snored too. That was the way he responded to anything he perceived as criticism. Ping-pong. No further discussion, no attempt to address the situation. So she’d asked him if her snoring was a problem for him. Was it keeping him awake?

  ‘Next time, I’ll let you know,’ he’d said. It had sounded like a threat. Nothing happened until he star-fished one night, and kicked her shin so hard she yelped and woke him up. ‘Can you keep it down, for Christ’s sake!’ he’d told her.

  There was no point explaining. She’d slept on the sofa in the still warm living room, then next day made up a bed in the spare room, the one they’d designated the nursery. Once that single bed was there, it was enticing. Nicholas seemed permanently exhausted — now she knew why! — and would fall asleep on the sofa in front of the t
elevision after the best part of a bottle of wine over dinner. He’d already be half cut most evenings by the time he got home, after meeting some ‘client/banker/valuer/solicitor/mate’ in a nameless bar along the strip. He’d get angry over almost anything she said. It was easier to sleep undisturbed in the spare room than have him crawl into bed in the early hours already hung-over, and often horny. Sometimes in the morning she’d lie there and try to remember what she might have said to upset him. And she’d tried to work it out since, whether there was any sort of pattern to their arguments, a consistent complaint that she might have picked up on if she’d been more attuned, whether there might have been a clue she’d missed . . .

  Her counsellor had told her not to do this, to stop trying to unpick what had gone wrong, stop remembering him as he was before it had all gone wrong, the man with huge energy and charm and big brown eyes, who had made her laugh and dance drunk to Springsteen . . . Stop that. ‘Surrender to what is,’ she’d said.

  During the day, he’d be strung out or speedy. There never seemed to be time to discuss anything: the real estate partnership seemed to devour them both. Her father had warned her when she and Nicholas had set up the agency that a cautious, diligent businessperson could protect himself or herself against most calamities: the one big, uncertain, almost uncontrollable vulnerability was to your partner. That was her father’s way: he hadn’t tried to overtly dissuade her, but he’d seen something in Nicholas she wished she’d seen herself.

  The trouble was, her father’s noises were so unpredictable. She’d almost be off, convinced he’d stopped, then he’d rear up again. She knew he wasn’t well, that he must need his sleep, particularly after their hike to get here. She’d seen his chalky, thin old man’s calves under his robe after he’d had his turn in the tiny bathroom, which had only a shower. That was a shock. He’d always had powerful legs; she had the thighs to prove it, worse luck. He’d been your typical Kiwi male prototype, legs like strainer posts and surprisingly spare up top. In little more than eighteen months, he’d gone from indeterminate late middle age to old: from healthy to sick, she reminded herself. She had to grin and bear it and get to sleep between blasts. She had to. She was almost off again, when the rhino was overtaken by a bull elephant, calling to its mate across the vast plains of the Serengeti.