The Salted Air

by Thom Conroy

  Tense and absorbing, this innovative novel brings a fresh approach to New Zealand writing.

  What happens when grief draws you to your partner’s married brother?

  28-year-old Djuna is without a foothold. The suicide of her partner has left her derailed and casting about for the joy she fears may be gone for good. Her parents’ relationship has disintegrated, her family home is occupied by Burmese refugees, and she is drawn to the one man she must reject.

  In pursuit of a roving father and a renewed sense of belonging, Djuna wanders from Wellington to the natural beauty of New Zealand’s remote East Cape. Narrated in vivid, confessional vignettes, The Salted Air tells a story of transgression, love and hope.

  ‘There are moments of dry and sometimes barbed humour, moments of tenderness, in finely wrought physical details… [The Salted Air] is a story that takes its time, because it’s partly about time, time for experience to be both contemplated and confronted.’

  – James George

  ‘Thom Conroy writes a prose so close to the lives of his characters it feels seamless. Djuna, with her family habit of keeping a journal, negotiates a formidable catalogue of loss, betrayal, flight and redemption without losing her eye for “the input of life and the sting of salt”.’

  – Elizabeth Smither

  THE

  SALTED

  AIR

  THOM CONROY

  To my daughter, my partner, my mother and my grandmother — four generations of women who have made this book possible.

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  NOT ONE AFTERNOON IN JUNE

  THE MIRACLE OF THE ORDINARY

  THE PASSAGE

  THE NEW JERUSALEM LUTHERAN CHURCH

  THE LESSON

  THE PUMA

  THE SHED

  PHANTASMAGORIA

  ONCE

  IN HARVEY’S CHILDHOOD BEDROOM

  SALT

  THE BOY IN MAGORIA

  STORIES AND THEIR ENDINGS

  THE PRODIGY

  A BOAT ON A DARK CANAL

  THE SMALL, STARTLINGLY WHITE BATHROOM

  THE BIRD

  THINKING OF HARVEY

  NO PEACE

  ON THE CORRELATION OF APPENDAGES

  A POISONED WOMAN

  HUG-ME

  CARETAKING

  WHO’S TO BLAME?

  THE SICKLY TUI

  WHAT COUNTS

  WHAT CHILDHOOD IS MADE OF

  THE ELM

  WHAT BECKETT DID

  GLINDA

  UNSPOKEN

  LYLE IN BOXERS, AGAIN

  IN HARVEY’S CHILDHOOD BEDROOM AGAIN

  WHAT WAS TAKEN

  SOUNDTRACK COURTESY OF HARVEY

  AN ECLIPSED EPIPHANY

  WHERE THE DEAD ONES GO

  THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON

  THE EMBEZZLER

  DRESSED FOR HIM

  DROWNING

  A MESSAGE FROM THE AFTERLIFE

  THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE

  MERINGUE

  JOY

  AT THE BAY

  THE ANIMALS

  ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MEMBRANE

  NEW AT PLAY

  CHINA

  TO HAVE SOMEONE

  ON A ROOF

  A CALL ON THE MALTESE FALCON-STYLE PHONE

  THE REMEMBERED BLOSSOM

  A VAST AND WELCOMING PLAIN

  IT COULD BE FUN

  CHILDHOOD(S)

  AN OLD DAD

  OUT OF THE FIRMAMENT

  HYDROTHERMAL WONDERS

  LINE IN A NOTEBOOK

  HONEYSUCKLE, BEES AND FLOWERS

  THE SEPTIC GABBER

  ICE

  TAMPO, ALONE ON THE ISLAND

  SOME WEIRD SHIT COMING OUT OF THE SEA

  THE PAST

  IN THE TOILETS

  ODE TO THE IBEX

  A BANK OF CLOUDS

  THE ONTOLOGY OF CHILDHOOD

  FASTER THAN JENNY OR RACHEL OR BOYD

  SURINAME

  TIME, RETREATING

  GETTING THE TONGUE

  TAONGA

  MORE TAONGA

  DAUGHTERS

  LIVING

  WHO WEARS TURTLENECKS?

  TALKING TO THE MOON

  UNCLE NIGHT

  SOMEWHERE IN CHRISTCHURCH

  WHEN IN ROME

  GIRLHOOD

  THE FLIGHT OF A BUTTERFLY

  THE 28 JANUARY PREMONITION

  MR BOB OR NOTHING

  THE END

  TO KEEP A FATHER FROM HIS CHILD

  THE SALTED AIR

  MY COMFORTING LITTLE CREEK

  I AM NOT HERE

  LIMBO

  TWO PEOPLE IN A MOTEL ROOM

  DANGEROUS GROUND

  CAT COUNTDOWN

  THE UNDEAD TRANCE

  IN WHICH DJUNA COMES TO AN ENCHANTED PLACE

  WHEN MY MOTHER WAS A GIRL

  THE BREAKING OF THE FELLOWSHIP

  HAPPY WAITANGI DAY

  A NEGATIVE TRANSCENDENCE

  RETURNS

  INSTA-DAIRY

  WHAT LUCY WANTS

  THE INCIDENT AT THE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

  IT’S ALL HARVEY’S FAULT

  WIND-TALK

  INTO THE CAVE

  THE FIRST MOSQUE IN PALMERSTON

  IN THE WELLS’ BATHROOM

  WAITING ON A TRAIN

  IN OTHER WORDS, LIVING

  THE WILL OF THE KEY CHAIN

  STEVE CYNZK’S FAULT, AGAIN

  THE IMPOSSIBLE DINNER

  ON THE BANKS OF THE MOST POLLUTED RIVER IN THE WORLD

  ALSO BY THOM CONROY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  FOLLOW PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE NZ

  COPYRIGHT

  NOT ONE AFTERNOON IN JUNE

  When I think of my beginning, I don’t picture the afternoon of my conception. It’s not that I mind calling up the image — June, the mugginess of southern Ohio stifling and the pileated woodpecker taking up the task of sound as the heartbeats of my parents slow in the last moment of post-coital cool-down. If I don’t start with my conception it’s because I don’t feel this moment captures where I begin. What I think of as my origin, my actual first moment, is borrowed from a picture that was kept among hundreds in a box in the days when photographs were things you would keep in a box, like the Stars Wars trading cards my dad has told me he collected when he was a boy.

  This picture of my parents that strikes me as my actual beginning was taken by my mum’s sister. It has always seemed very far away, and in the faces, or in the composition, there seems to be some awareness of distance, some shimmering of light in the overhead trees, intended, perhaps, as a monkish lesson on mindfulness. A note of present preserved, a note that both fades and reasserts itself as present, here. A ringing in my head.

  Under the high trees, thin and tee-shirted and dark-haired, are my parents. Lucy and Eugene Claremont. They are standing in a garden. There are no spades or pitchforks in the frame, but this seems like an oversight, a mere accident. My father’s red shirt — later my nightshirt, and later still a faint piece of crimson in the rag bin — is smeared with soil. In this photo my mum is a few years younger than I am as I write this now, though I’m nowhere near motherhood. A damp strand of her hair holds tight to one cheek. I am there. Somehow I know.

  So maybe this story is about what’s lost, but it’s also about what’s waiting to be found.

  THE MIRACLE OF THE ORDINARY

  One day, back when he was alive, Harvey and I went to Breaker Bay. We walked down past the point, past the bunker where the unfired guns were stationed to protect the capital from Japanese subs. Holding hands, we climbed along the tidal pools, the sharp rocks chewing up our ba
re feet, and we stopped when we came to a group of middle-aged nudists in the surf. Why is it that these nudists all look the same? German or Belgian with bright red pubic hair and floppy bodies.

  We turned back then without talking. There was nothing affected about our shared silence. It was ordinary silence that sprang from an ordinary cause, such as simply having nothing much to say. We were not bored. We were not tired of talking or uninspired. Simply satisfied to let the breaking waves make sound on our behalf. To let the seagulls have the floor.

  We walked until we came to that rock arch where you always find someone’s initials or a blackened patch of wall from a fire. I remember thinking that I had never understood why anyone carved their initials in rock. Didn’t they understand that they were just initials, just two letters? I know they say that people carve their initials to be remembered, but it seems to me that no one ought to bother remembering you if you can’t even take the time to write out a full name.

  Djuna Lane Claremont — you see, isn’t so hard.

  We came to that rock arch and we sat beneath it. After a while, Harvey lay down, and I lay beside him, my head on his shoulder. I felt at peace — and still do now, thinking of it. Harvey and I didn’t do anything memorable that day. I don’t think we said very much. We weren’t alone. Lots of people came by, walking dogs, chatting, one older man singing to himself. A toddler wandered into the arch and then wandered out without noticing us, as if we were figures carved in the stone. We watched the sky change. Its blue crystallised and grew harsh, like the skin of some electrically charged sea animal, a thrumming crackling blue. The shadows on the far side of the harbour altered, orange strokes and black strokes shifting, trading places. A ferry plunged out into the strait. Another returned on the opposite side of the channel. The nudists came past, dressed now, or mostly so. All the men were still shirtless, their chests a painful salmon.

  I wasn’t hungry or restless lying there with Harvey. We had some water with us, and little by little we finished this. We watched the green come out in the far-off hills as the sun slanted away and the sky emptied of its lustre, the skin of the electrified sea animal growing dry and gently dying in front of us. I saw how high the tide had come.

  The sky went grey and a darkness grew slowly across the water, starting from the near surf and spreading across the harbour, out into the brilliant white-coloured water of the strait and soaking into the South Island, and, I guess, spreading out beyond that into the southern ocean and over the empty ice mountains of Antarctica. A deep cold came out of the stone at that moment, and we made our way back to the car. We drove home with the radio playing low and the evening lights just coming on in the houses. At home, we cooked with a little small talk between us, and ate on the tiny balcony overlooking the street. There was no candle, no wine. Just streetlight and tap water. A few cuddles.

  I don’t think we made love that night, but I can’t remember. What returns to me now is lying in bed with Harvey and thinking of my parents. Thinking of how deeply I loved him and them, and believing that my story would turn out to be one about love. I was thinking, too, of how very ordinary the day had been, and all at once I understood that I, too, was ordinary.

  All my life I had grown up believing that something miraculous was about to occur, some unexpected door was on the verge of opening, and my second life, my real life, would begin. In this life, nothing would be ordinary and nothing would be as it had been before. A complete transformation awaited me — I had believed that with all I was worth. But on that night with Harvey, I remember thinking I had been wrong. Or, perhaps, I had been right, only in reverse. The miracle, the transformation, was simply that I would come to accept myself as who I was. It seemed to me then that this revelation was something unheard of and astonishing. To succumb like that, so simply, to what was ordinary, and to love it for being ordinary. This was my gift.

  Still is.

  THE PASSAGE

  Sometimes I think of all the women of our line as they appear in black and white photographs, their sleeves pulled up past their elbows, something knowing in the eyes under their hat brims, a look that is a direct challenge — not only to some man who is not posing beside them and is therefore lost forever, but to all of us women who come after. I bore you, this look says. My lust made you. Your lust will never create me, and so in some way it will always be meagre beside me. My body is the tunnel, yours the passenger. When the passenger travels on, the passage is left standing.

  THE NEW JERUSALEM LUTHERAN CHURCH

  My father and I have always been physically close. I think of his body and immediately I think of his arms, as I know my mum does, or used to — no, she still does. I will not lie. This is a rule I set myself: not to turn away, never to lie. Too much has happened for that. My mum is living in America again now, separated from my father and me, but she still loves my dad, yearns for him, lies in her bed in her room in the town where my dad grew up and feels the many ways her body hurts without him. She has told me all this, but even if she had not, I would know it was true.

  My father’s body reminds me of a church — not because it is sacred. No, it reminds me of a specific church, or rather of a simpler version of a specific church. The church is called New Jerusalem Lutheran, and it exists in the same town as the one which raised my father, the one where, for coincidences both bizarre and ordinary for my parents, my mother has now found employment. The town is Swallsborough, Pennsylvania.

  My father reminds me of the New Jerusalem Lutheran Church in Swallsborough, Pennsylvania.

  The New Jerusalem Church is riddled with secret passages, or it used to be when my dad was a child. He has told me everything, and my dad is not a man who goes short on detail. At least when I was growing up he was not. A timber wing had been added on the central stone building, and in the back of a Sunday school classroom of this wing there was a bench for arts and crafts. My father tells me that if you climbed on that bench, you could, in turn, get onto a filing cabinet and, from there, you had merely to lift the hinged door in the ceiling to access the attic space.

  This space was lit only from dormer windows covered in wire mesh, and it smelt of pigeons and dust and, inexplicably, evergreen. There was a wide central passage where my father could run, hopping deftly from joist to joist. In this space the church stored its life-sized nativity scene. This was a scene such as you rarely see these days — a scene including not only the primary players but a choir of angels, a pair of life-sized Styrofoam cows, three sheep with wool glued to their backs, a pig, chickens, and even a donkey wearing a baggy hide of felt.

  Off the main corridor of the attic space were branching crawlspaces where deacons had stowed boxes of papers they could bear neither to destroy nor to see again. If you followed one crawlspace to its end, it took you to another trapdoor. When you opened this door, you found yourself on the landing of the catwalk above a stage. My father told me about once dropping onto the landing during a Wednesday evening talk. On the other side of the black curtain was a man droning on about a new life in Jesus, a fresh life like a new day, like opening an unread book.

  Who among you would like a life like this?

  I think of my father as the New Jerusalem Lutheran Church in Swallsborough, Pennsylvania, because he is sturdy as a building to me. Reliable, I suppose, but also because he seems like an addition attached to something larger, some old stone structure of self I can no longer see.

  And he is full of secrets. For years now, my parents and I have kept journals, ringed notebooks where we write anything we please. When we all lived under one roof, we kept our journals in the kitchen beside the cookbooks. They were not private. Quite the opposite: we wrote them for each other. More than that, we wrote them to each other, though we never put it that way. Rambling memories and records that seem now like different segments of a cloth, and this cloth was something that came close to being our lives — the bits of them made from words, at least.

  Later, I started a journal on my own. Private,
but not quite a diary, not quite not a diary either. Later still, I started writing things outside of the not-quite-a-diary. Jottings on scraps and envelopes. On little screens and larger ones. And sometimes I compose only in my mind, crafting the language of stray passages without ever managing to get them on paper. And, together, all these pieces, the public, the private, the in-between and the unwritten, form a dark whole that’s always out of reach, a whole that cannot be contained. An always-in-progress cataract of words, rushing away from me. A wholeness where one part interrupts and intercedes, overlaps with a few passages before it spills off the page onto some forgotten scrap of paper doubling back with names I don’t quite know, an image that is foreign and impossibly familiar, memories of old dreams.

  My father’s secrets were not illicit — or, rarely so — but they were random, always unforeseen. Sudden divulgences of emotion, such as the unexpressed despair he felt at his job, or his contempt for the kind-hearted older neighbour who lived on a double section beside our house. Mum and I baulked at such secrets, said we could never understand him. But what we could not understand was his honesty, and afterwards we would come clean and admit that Eugene was simply the most courageous of the three of us.

  The secrets were not always confessions. The secrets were gifts. Sometimes my father would reveal his private arrangements of the world. I think of the day, for instance, when he wrote about the walk he took from his office on the far side of the river, across the breadth of Palmerston North and up to the terrace where we lived. He wrote that he divided the walk into parts and that for each part he imagined a fantastic and entertaining hazard, in the way a child would. For the river crossing, a taniwha was lurking in the logged-up mud of the fetid shallows. Across the golf course he was chased by wild dogs. Coming up on to the terrace where we lived, he wrote that he always imagined our neighbour Phillip Botage at his window with some implement of terror, a hand grenade or a sighted rifle.

  Me, too! I wrote in the margin.

  A few months before Eugene and Mum split up, my father stopped writing altogether. His silence. That, too, was a secret I could not have imagined.