Quicksand Tales

by Keggie Carew

  I am to get out of the car with the torch, tell Animal I need a pee, walk into the woods, stop, turn the torch off, then run as fast as I can and get to the road, where Ian will meet me, once he’s told Animal that I’ve gone. The theory behind the plan is that Animal will not think I will run off on my own, leaving Ian, and so he will allow me to go for a pee. Once I am free, however, he will know that I will be able to identify him, which hopefully will discourage him from harming Ian. It is not perfect, but it is all we have. I am amazed that Ian has the steeliness to come up with a plan in the first place, and doubly astonished he is brave enough to remain with Animal alone.

  I open the car door gingerly – the passenger side, opposite to where Animal is leaning – and get out. I tell Animal I need to pee. He grunts. I walk slowly into the woods, each footfall-crunch amplified, as far as I dare. Then I stop. My heart is thumping so loud I imagine he will hear it. I turn off the torch. I wait a second. I take a few paces. Then I start to run. And I run and I run and the cold night air burns into my lungs, and the adrenalin kicks in and I’m panting and running and running. I get disorientated and worry if I’m running the right way. I have no idea where I am, I am just running through tall forest trees in the middle of the night, and I am breathing so loud and hard, pwhoo, pwhoo, and the cold air is burning my chest, and I cannot stop. I run on and on. And eventually, after I don’t know how long, I reach the road. I reach the road, but I need to keep hidden because it’s way after midnight and I’m a nineteen-year-old girl with only a torch, and I certainly don’t want to be picked up and go from the fat into the fire.

  And then another thought comes into my head: I can’t just wait for Ian like we’d arranged. What if the plan has gone horribly wrong? What if, at this very moment, Ian is being attacked? And I am just waiting on the side of the road? I realise I have to get help. I must get the police. So I run along the road, ducking into the forest every time I hear a car. After nearly a mile I see some lights. And thank God it’s a motel. I go in and, still panting, slump on the reception desk. I blurt out the whole story. The man at reception looks at me like I’m mad. I make him call the police. He rings the police. I breathlessly tell the police about Animal sleeping against our car and camping in the forest and making notches on my head. The policeman sounds suspicious. They want to know where I am from. I tell them; they are more interested in my nationality than in the situation. I can tell they think I am a crazy woman. The policeman asks me what crime has been committed. I tell them as far as I know no crime has been committed . . . yet. But one could be being committed at any moment. It seems we have got into a semantic discussion about the here and now, what exists, what doesn’t exist, what might exist. The policeman tells me they cannot investigate a crime that hasn’t been committed. I realise it’s useless. Time is hurtling by. Ian could be in mortal danger, or he could be looking for me. I give up with the motel and go back out on the road where I stand by the edge, ready to leap into the forest, looking into the blackness, wondering what the fuck I am going to do next. Waiting. Walking. Running. Not sure where to go. Or where to stop.

  And then I see a pair of headlights flaring through the trees and illuminating the bend in the road behind me. I turn. I hear the distinctive puttputtputt of a VW Beetle. Horace! Surely! A VW driving very, very slowly. Kerb-crawling along. Its two white beams coming towards me. And yes! I can make out the white skunk stripe. It is Horace. But as I run towards it, my feet suddenly become lead, my stomach plummets to the base of my spine, my skin goes cold. Who is behind the wheel? I approach cautiously. My eyes are fixed on the dark shape of the driver’s head. And then I make out Ian’s curly hair. But just as he pulls up by my side, again I experience a moment of terror as I realise it might be a trick, that Ian might be driving, but that Animal might be hiding in the back with the knife. Ian opens the door. His face looks white. ‘Get in!’ he hisses urgently. I look over his shoulder. ‘It’s all right! Get in!’

  We howl with relief. That we are out of it. Away from Animal. Free and alive. Ian says when he told him that I’d gone, that he had frightened me, he stood up, put his sleeping bag over his head and began to sway like a bear. Ian stood there, himself frozen for a moment as Animal swayed. Then he backed slowly towards the car, opened the driver’s door, folded back the bed; he said his heart was pounding in his chest, he couldn’t look at Animal. He flipped the driving seat around as fast as he could, but his hands were shaking and he couldn’t slot it into the runners so he just rested it in position. The keys were in the ignition, thank God. He quickly glanced towards Animal, and amazingly (in my view) said goodbye, then he got into the car, turned on the ignition, and as fast as he possibly could, took off. I am astonished at his bravery, his wherewithal. He even took back the knife!

  We drive six miles to the far side of the nearest town then look for a motel. We hide the car round the back. We pay for a room. We put every stick of furniture in the room against the door, but we still don’t sleep a wink. The next morning we leave at daybreak. As we drive through the town of South Lake Tahoe, we see Animal walking down the empty street, sack slung over his shoulder. We both scream. Ian puts his foot on the gas, and I’m too terrified to look back.

  THE AMATEUR WAITRESS

  I stepped out of the plane onto the passenger stairs, blinking into the early morning southern skies at Auckland Airport, after a forty-eight-hour, five-stop flight with my very new New Zealander husband, Jonathan. It was February 1987, and it was already hot. I had just been sprayed by a man with an aerosol in each hand walking down the plane’s aisle wearing shorts and long socks – European bugs (and attitudes) – and I was about to meet my in-laws, waiting for us in Arrivals.

  At the bottom of the stairs, three strides across the tarmac, the person in front of me, having heard my English accent, stopped, turned, and asked me what I thought of New Zealand. I looked across the runway towards the terminal building.

  ‘Looks great,’ I said.

  I had met Jonathan just a few weeks before in the old dog biscuit factory near Tower Bridge on the Thames in London, where he was a breakfast chef in the canteen of the Jacob’s Street Film Studios, and where, two floors above, I had been temporarily lent a derelict studio. He had come to the exhibition I’d had in one of the wharf-side warehouses. Each day, after his cooking shift, Jonathan had been collecting all the leftover food, boiling it up in a massive industrial-sized saucepan, and taking it to the South Bank to feed the homeless people who dossed down under the walkways. I offered to drive him in my VW campervan – better, I persuaded him craftily, than the car he’d been lent by the canteen manager. Jonathan had been in England for a year, but his work permit was about to run out. It was just typical of course to meet someone I liked whose work permit was about to run out. And to cut a short story shorter, three weeks later, on Saturday 10 January, for the exhilarating madness of it, we got married in Brixton Registry Office at nine-thirty a.m. Nine-thirty because the price went up after ten a.m., although I distinctly remember I had to fork out twenty-five quid for an emergency licence. The term ‘emergency’ was what they called any booking within two weeks. ‘Emergency?’ I joked. ‘Desperation more like.’ The morning was cold and snow was in the air. Dad drove us to Brixton and turned up the radio full-whack – it was on a local station playing reggae – and we cruised along, deep bass thumping, Dad, in his inimitable way, steering with his knees and clapping the air in those big swallowing cracks I was so familiar with.

  And now I was queuing with the aliens, shuffling along foot by foot, clutching my passport, until at last we tumbled out into my new life and the arms of my new family.

  We drove through the suburbs, past clapboard wooden bungalows, unfamiliar trees, red bottle-brush bushes, Jonathan chatting to his family, me in the back, head skewed, nose glued to the window, orientating myself in this new world. Auckland was a low-rise leafy drawl of painted colonial houses set back behind lush front gardens, with big American-type cars and pick-ups parked al
ong the street, all facing the same direction. I was entranced by the leadlight windows and wrap-around verandas and corrugated roofs, and I was entranced by the gardens, alarmingly called sections, overflowing with hibiscus and jacarandas and the great fanning leaves of banana trees, and bushes with huge blossoms I had never seen before. It was one of these, 19 Castle Street in the Auckland suburb of Grey Lynn, that we would be lucky enough to call home in a couple of months’ time.

  Having found somewhere to live, the next thing we had to do was get jobs. So Jonathan went door-knocking with his cordon-bleu chef skills and the boast of having cooked in one of Sydney’s best restaurants, You & Me. At the first knock he landed a job at Le Gourmet with New Zealand’s celebrity chef of the time, Warwick Brown. Warwick was the smart, rakish, new-rich, no-messing, can-do, inordinately capable kind, whose swish restaurant was in the old fire station in Ponsonby, a twenty-minute walk up the road from our house. Hooray. It seemed logical, with Jonathan’s hours, and because we were broke, that I should also get a job in a restaurant. So it was decided. I would waitress.

  New Zealand in 1987 was in the giddy bubble of the property and banking boom. Interest rates were 22 per cent, and there were a lot of people who seemed to have loadsofmoney and were flashing it about, so the restaurants were noisy, full and very busy. Le Gourmet, being a high-class establishment, only hired experienced waitresses, but further down Ponsonby Road were lots of other restaurants, because Ponsonby Road was the restaurant street. There were old, traditional restaurants like Noblio’s, with linen tablecloths and carnations in vases, which had been there ever since Jonathan could remember; new, trendy white-leather-and-chrome restaurants; BYO (Bring Your Own – alcohol) restaurants; Italian and Greek and Creole restaurants; and lunch bars – and so off I went, door-knocking.

  The Carpet Bagger: no. SPQR: no, sorry mate. Stuff & Waffle: not hiring. Rigoletto’s: did I have any experience? Well, no, but what could there possibly be to it? Take the order, bring the food? I worked my way down one side of the street, increasingly despondent as each restaurant turned me away, until I got to the bottom and stood outside Dr Livingstone, I Presume.

  I knocked without hope on a thickly painted green door and was just about to leave when a greasy-long-haired, unshaven man with puffy-ringed eyes and flapping socks opened it. The struggle of not saying, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’, left me speechless; he certainly looked the part, as if he’d been dragged backwards all the way from Victoria Falls.

  ‘G’day,’ he said, without moving his mouth.

  ‘I was just wondering,’ I began, cowed and apologetic and very English-sounding – annoying even to myself, ‘if you might be looking for any waitresses?’ As if I had a few.

  He looked me up and down. My feet got ready to walk away. ‘Experience?’ he asked bluntly.

  ‘A bit,’ I lied.

  And I was hired. There and then on the doorstop. I stood there looking dazed. ‘Um . . .’ What now? I wondered.

  ‘Be here by five.’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘You want a job next year?’

  ‘No, of course, fine, right, yes, thanks, okay, sure,’ I burbled. ‘Great, see you at five. Bye, then.’

  And off I skipped home with my news, the stupid ‘Bye, then’ reverberating in my ears.

  Dressed in what Jonathan advised was waitressing attire – black skirt (which I owned) and white shirt (which I had to buy) – I arrived ten minutes early. I knocked. Nothing. I knocked louder. Nothing. I stood there. I knocked really loudly and the door flew open. Dr Livingstone was still in his socks, eight inches of woollen tongue flapping from the end of his toes, but now he had an apron on, and on his apron was a map – in blood, guts, tomato juice and an awful lot of green.

  ‘G’day,’ he ventriloquised, eyes fogged over.

  ‘We met earlier . . .’ I foolishly began.

  His head, almost imperceptibly, beckoned me in.

  I crossed Dr Livingstone’s threshold into a jungle world. Murals of waterfalls splashed down the walls, tigers peered from behind rubber plants, rope lianas trailed around door frames, toy parrots perched on branches: Dr Livingstone, I Presume was a themed restaurant; even the tables were green.

  My first job was to lay the green tables with green leafy just-wipe vinyl-coated tablecloths, and adorn each place setting with a monkey-printed paper napkin. Meanwhile Dr Livingstone stirred a massive stockpot of bubbling broth in the tiny kitchen at the back with the tiny window looking out onto a tiny yard full of overflowing dustbins. Steam billowed out, condensation ran down the tiny window. It was jungle-hot in there. Drops of sweat bubble-wrapped his brow. Where were his sous chefs? I wondered.

  This chef, it turned out, did everything himself. Stirred, chopped, prepped, diced, rolled, dunked, butchered – starters, mains, puddings, the lot.

  ‘Um . . .’ I stood in the doorway.

  Dr Livingstone looked up and glared.

  I brought my hands up, open-palmed, into a what-shall-I-do-now? mime.

  ‘Well, familiarise yourself with the menu,’ he snarled sarcastically.

  Dr Livingstone’s menus were eighteen inches tall, laminated (no changes, then) and decorated with a drawing of Dr Livingstone in a pith helmet peering out between two giant leaves. Each dish had a jungle-themed name. Cocktails: Jungle Juice, Python Poison and Crocodile Tears. You know you want to! the menu exclaimed. The cocktail ingredients – variations of vodka, ginger, pink lemonade, pineapple, lime, Hawaiian punch, strawberries and white rum – were in brackets with a ‘witty’ quip. Starters: Tiger Tail Soup (spicy fish with a bite to it!), Snake Sizzlers (spicy bacon croquettes, hiss hiss!), or Dead Men’s Fingers (salami and avocado – nice and sticky!). For mains you could have Jungle Stew (spicy lamb, still jumpin’!), Jungle Curry (spicy chicken, still crowin’!), Cannibal Cutlets (spicy pork, still snortin’!), Monkey Mayhem (spicy beef, still leapin’!), Piranha Pie (spicy fish, watch out for your fingers!) or a Tarzan Burger (spicy-spicy! Very dicey!). I smiled, nodded and chuckled as best I could. For dessert there was Dr Livingstone’s Jungle Ice (pineapple ice cream), Dr Livingstone’s Cannibal Ice (chocolate ice cream and raspberry sauce – sorry, but that’s what it was), or Dr Livingstone’s Snake Ice (kiwi fruit ice cream).

  The list was pleasingly short for such a physically large menu, and I also noticed that everything was incredibly cheap: $4 or $5 for starters, while the mains were only $6 to $10 each.

  I checked my watch. An hour before service.

  ‘Um,’ I hesitated. ‘When are the other waiters coming?’ I asked.

  Livingstone’s lip sweetly curled. ‘Yer on yer own, mate.’

  He turned back to his jungle stock and threw a kilo of carrots onto his chopping block.

  I stared at the two dark circles radiating outwards from his armpits on his blue T-shirt, another growing oval stuck to his back. ‘Oh, right,’ I said.

  I didn’t know what to call him, and by now I was too intimidated to ask. ‘Um. Do we have any bookings?’ I asked.

  ‘Fifty-four,’ he grunted.

  ‘Fifty-four!’

  Livingstone was hunched over the chopping board, knife flashing as the diced-carrot mountain grew. Then onions. Then tomatoes. A hill of chopped-up beef. A hill of glistening pinky-white raw chicken. Rivulets of watery blood twisted around islands of pips and peelings, then dripped off the worktop as Livingstone’s flapping socks mopped up the floor. Also on the bench were three open boxes of fish fingers.

  He turned his testy eye on me. His neck had developed a liver-coloured heat rash with a nasty boil gathering at the end of it like a full stop.

  ‘Right,’ I said, my face set in a rictus. ‘What about the wine?’

  ‘They bring their own,’ he quipped dryly.

  ‘And what, what if, what if they forget?’

  ‘They don’t.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Great. Is there a book with the bookings?’ I asked.

  ‘Nap.’

  I thought he said nap, but I wasn�
��t going to ask. Bloody hell, baptism by fire. Livingstone was still chopping. The kitchen was unbearably hot and airless. Sweat tributaries fanned into a delta down the back of his neck, one hand chopping, the other sweeping food aside. More carrots, a dozen avocados, chop, chop, onions, chop, pineapple rings, chop, sticky syrup everywhere, chop, chop, peppers, chop, chop, pips, stalks, little mounds and hills around the bench, monkey meat slumped in crimson pools, jars of chilli paste and mustard, tomato ketchup bottles with their tops off, a tower of burgers. A new hill, orange and white, the fish fingers, chop-chopped. The Jungle Stew was raging. Indeterminable shapes bobbing in the steam.

  ‘Ow!’ Livingstone yelled as he whipped his finger away from the chopping board and straight into his mouth. ‘Plaster!’ he shouted, pointing to a cake tin on a shelf.

  Now, one thing I did know about kitchens was that chefs used blue plasters when they cut themselves, because only the day before Jonathan had come home with a blue plaster on his thumb. Why blue? I asked. So you can find them easily if they fall off. I rummaged around in the tin but could only find beigy-pink plasters.

  Livingstone was sucking his finger, looking at me. Oh, no, I was going to have to put it on his finger! He was sucking hard, then his finger was in front of my nose. Crimson blood began filling a deep-sliced crevice. Trying not to wince, I peeled away the backing and pressed the plaster over the wound.