The Salted Air

by Thom Conroy

  My mother took a sip of her tea and set it down with perfect control. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But did you ever think that maybe he should be?’

  HUG-ME

  The next day I’m walking in Alexandra Park in the flux of sun and cloud-refracted half-light that is mid-January in Wellington, when I see a man jogging up the hill toward me, eyes squinted nearly shut. He’s wearing a tee-shirt that says I Hate Running. The man’s features are so tight he may be on the brink of shouting obscenities or going into cardiac arrest. God, I think, the shirt is a confession, a cry for help — somebody save him!

  As soon as he’s past, I chuckle, the power of the joke finally getting to me. The shirt reminds me of my father’s Hug-Me teddy bears.

  Eugene and Lucy moved to New Zealand on the advice of Steve Cynzk, a friend. Steve Cynzk had been teaching history at the university in Palmerston North and was taken with the lemon tree in his yard. He, too, was young. On a Christmas visit in America he went poetic over the purity of a river in that town — only later did we discover that it was among the world’s dirtiest. My parents, Bedouin-hearted leapers-of-faith, caught Steve’s fever. Who could not forgive them for it? They were recent postgraduates with edifying degrees and a four-year-old daughter who would bloom where she was planted, as everyone told them.

  As an interim job, my father purchased the business of a Procurer of Goods. And so my father spent the next twenty-something years procuring goods, new, used and allegedly new. When I was maybe ten, he purchased fifteen hundred pink teddy bears with Hug-Me printed on their chests. The teddies were spongy-soft and doe-eyed, and everyone who saw them longed to obey their command. Alas, the bears could not be hugged, because their arms had been sewn to their sides.

  As I’m coming out of a little copse of trees, my phone rings. It’s my father. Voilà.

  ‘Dad,’ I say. ‘I rang you a week ago.’

  My father’s voice is broken by static and marred by the note of apology, but it is his voice nonetheless, and it consoles me to hear it. Aligns something within.

  ‘Sorry, dear,’ he says. ‘Reception up here is awful. I don’t even bother to keep the phone on.’

  ‘Tell me when you’re coming back,’ I say. ‘And where we’re going to live when you do.’

  While I was housesitting in the hills outside of Palmerston North, my father stopped by to tell me he was delivering a load of furniture to Whakatane for an old acquaintance of my mother’s, a woman named Moana. He also let me know he had rented out the family home, just for a year’s lease. I was flabbergasted: there had been no talk of him moving, no talk of our home going to someone else. ‘I need to get away for a while,’ he had said. ‘Your mother, you know … You’re welcome to come along with me.’

  A month later I got a letter addressed from Paki Holiday Park, East Coast. I looked up the park, but there was no trace. When I finally spoke to Dad again a week or so after that, he clarified the situation. ‘Used to be a holiday park.’

  ‘Dad?’ I say today, climbing to a higher spot on the paved walkway. ‘Can you hear me? When are you coming back?’

  ‘Heard you,’ he says. ‘And I’m thinking. Not sure when I’m coming back, dear, but you’re welcome to come up here, you know that.’ There’s a blossom of silence after this. When he’s talking again, he mentions doing him a favour.

  ‘Can you go up to the house and talk to a guy … Hamish somebody. Hold on … Hamish Lippleton. Can you talk to him for me?’

  ‘Is this business?’

  ‘It’s about the house, Djuna. He wants to talk, but only will in person. You know how I love a good business proposition, but you’d do just as good a job as me. And I’d like you to take a look at the place, make sure all is in working order.’

  My dad gives me the number of Hamish Lippleton and we talk a bit more. Just before we hang up, he asks if I’ve heard from my mother. She lives ten thousand miles and I don’t how many time zones away, but, yes, I have heard from her. The day before yesterday.

  ‘Oh?’ says my father, suddenly uninterested, as if I’d foisted the subject on him. ‘And what does she say? How is she? What’s new, that’s all I’m asking.’

  ‘She’s working very hard,’ I say. ‘And she told me it snowed … Dad?’

  The line is quiet, but then I hear the little hum that means my father is thinking. ‘Snowing in Swallsborough,’ he says. ‘There’s a beautiful image.’

  It’s not until I’m on the bus that I realise that I want to take my father up on his offer. I want to come and live with him. But immediately I know that the reason I didn’t say this is because it’s not exactly what I want. What I want is for Mum and him and me to live together again. But, no, this is not what I want. What I want is the past back, and the nicked table of our kitchen and the sickly old tui outside who croaked every morning, and I want no death, never. And no insurance man ever to have lain down beside me with tears upon his face.

  Can I have these things, please?

  CARETAKING

  My time housesitting in the mountain retreat last autumn and winter almost did me in. That someone would have let me be the caretaker of any place, when I was so clearly not up to the job of taking care of myself, bemused me. The house was grotesquely magnificent, an obscene Edwardian villa with a library and shoe-sized holes in the hallway. It was in the back of beyond, and below you could see the city of Palmerston North, an unlikely maze of lights on the plain.

  I started my time up there with all the right intentions, but by the end of the first week I began snooping. I sat on the long veranda, burning candles and making myself drinks and reading old private letters about people I didn’t know. How thrilling that was at first. On the plain below, Palmerston glowed in absolute silence, remote as stars. I began to think of the town as a sprawling but unoccupied storage facility, and I imagined its moving lights as purely mechanical, the technological relics of a lost civilisation.

  One day I found the key to the library hanging on a little hook in the liquor cabinet, but the room was disappointingly empty. It had been cleared for painting, and there were sawhorses and piles of disassembled light fixtures everywhere.

  There was one set of leather-bound tomes amid the paint dust. Classics in Philosophy. I started to read the Leibniz, copying long passages into my notebook. But when there is a great multitude of little perceptions, in which there is nothing distinct, one is stunned; as when one turns continuously round in the same way several times in succession, whence comes a giddiness which may make us swoon, and which keeps us from distinguishing anything. Death can for a time put animals into this condition.

  I left the week before the owners were due back, arriving at Lois’s at about one in the morning. She was awake and fully dressed, as if she had known I was coming all along.

  WHO’S TO BLAME?

  The whole time I was staying in the house in the hills I was thinking the same thing. Day in and day out, I had a single thought going through my mind, and the thought wasn’t the result of self-pity — at least I don’t think it was. It was a fact, but one of those facts that cannot be accepted, integrated, so that it can at last solidify into pure information. I was thinking: It’s my fault. That Harvey died was my fault.

  I never told Bruce where I was living, but towards the end of my stay he discovered me — that’s a story for some other entry. My father, however, came out to visit me often, urging me to come back and stay with him in town. I always refused. And I didn’t let him stay over at the house either. It was lonely, and solitude was the last thing I wanted, but I thought I needed it. Some medicine I believed I must swallow.

  ‘Look,’ my father would say, ‘don’t blame yourself. I know you think you could have stopped him, but what about next time?’

  ‘He didn’t die next time,’ I said. ‘He died this time.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  The truth is I still think my father was wrong. And, anyway, I was also talking about Bruce.

  THE SI
CKLY TUI

  This tui was the family joke. He would sit in the elm tree every morning, starting from maybe 5 a.m., and saw out his same four notes. Hours and hours on end, rain or sun or clenching wind, there he was crowing out those same four god-forsaken notes. I say it was the family joke, but really it was very sad. I thought his song was the loneliest sound I’d ever heard, until one day when I was about thirteen the tui was gone and the absence of his song turned out to be much lonelier.

  WHAT COUNTS

  After Harvey died, after the funeral and Bruce in my bed, my mum came from America to stay with me. While she was here, we spent almost every moment together, as if one of us had cancer and this one visit was all we would have.

  One night we were camping in the Marlborough Sounds, sitting on an empty beach as satellites criss-crossed overhead, and I told her I did it on purpose. I said I wanted to teach Harvey a lesson.

  My mother said, ‘What makes you say you did it on purpose?’

  ‘When I came back from my weekend away, I hesitated outside the door,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t get the key in the lock.’

  ‘You were tired.’

  ‘I was nervous. I was nervous because I knew what I would see.’

  My mother took my face in her hands as if it were a fruit she had found lying on the foreshore.

  ‘You were nervous because of what you thought you might see.’

  ‘That counts as knowing.’

  ‘My dear and lovely daughter,’ my mother said, ‘that does not count.’

  WHAT CHILDHOOD IS MADE OF

  I grew up schooled in disappointment. But, like all connoisseurs, I developed a refined taste for it.

  My parents’ mantra was that they had been fools to move so far from home, and their constant promise was to move back to their homeland, though it never seemed to be the right time for it. They had been fools, too, to buy our cramped little stucco house with the cruel Phillip Botage as our closest neighbour. My father wanted to live in the bush, growing sweetcorn and lathering himself in icy spring water. Instead he drove his truck to estate sales and auctions and warehouses and hurriedly emptied flats, swiftly taking in the goods that he was likely to be much slower in dispersing.

  My mother’s disappointment was deeper, compact, and you approached it as you approached the surface of an oily well. My mother laughed every day of our life together. She drew a mural on my tree hut and made two-layer cakes for breakfast. At the same time, her disappointment was the bedrock of my childhood. It was ghostly and unyielding, a draught blowing across your feet until you stopped feeling it. For years, disappointment struck me as the baseline condition of a healthy and enjoyable life.

  THE ELM

  There was one thing in my life that could never disappoint me. In the back of our tiny garden, shielding our house from any sun through the winter and rising up like a feature of the cityscape on the river terrace, was an elm. While the sickly tui was alive, it was in this elm that he made his home. The first time we met our neighbour Phillip Botage was when he knocked on our door and volunteered to chip in for the cost of having the thing cut down.

  In our first months at the house, my father tried to construct a tree hut in the branches of this elm, building a ladder up to the lowest branch before abandoning the project because he thought it might harm the tree. Needless to say, Phillip did not get his way with the elm. Out of retribution, I think, he hacked down the row of pines that hid his house from the street and then doubled the width of his long driveway, destroying a shoulder-high hedge between our houses in the process.

  I watched all this activity from the canopy of the elm. I also saw our kind-hearted elderly neighbour on the other side, Mrs Craigge, who kept an illegal menagerie of chickens, ducks, guinea hens and rabbits. Long before I was old enough to safely do so, I climbed to the mid-section of the tree, where I found a nook spacious enough to hold me, my fizzy drink and my notebook for the next eleven years.

  The ranges outside of town had always struck me as flattened and unimpressive, but from the nook I could see into their dark valleys. I could see the storms sweeping off the beige flatland and catching on the hills as if hooked. Every night, a predictable but marvellous attenuation occurred, so that for a quarter of an hour the hills loomed, shimmering like coral until the sun broke the horizon and their hulking forms shrank away.

  When I think of other people staying in our house, I am not upset at the idea of them sleeping in my bed or sitting on my toilet. What I can’t stand is the thought of them climbing my tree, resting in my nook and taking in the sight of the hills at dusk. They are among the small collection of things I can safely call mine.

  WHAT BECKETT DID

  On the night of the day my father calls and asks me to go and talk to Hamish Lippleton and check on the house, Lois knocks on the guest-room door and steps inside before I can respond. I suppose I could have locked it.

  ‘I saw those women in town,’ she says. ‘The ones who live together. With the little girl. What’s the girl’s name again?’

  Those women who live together are Erin and Miranda. Lois’s attitude regarding same-sex relationships is to find them delightful and off-handedly entertaining. This is meant to pass as a liberal view.

  ‘Erin’s daughter’s name is Maddie,’ I say. ‘Her partner is Miranda.’

  Lois lingers. Her fingernails make contact with the door frame, a single click. There is more to this conversation, I can tell. I put my finger in my book, shut it.

  ‘They’re the ones holding onto your things, aren’t they?’

  ‘They had room for it, yes.’

  Lois crosses to me. ‘I was just thinking of the Wells,’ she says.

  Lois sits beside me on the bed — on my bed, which I’m also aware is her bed — and she turns my hand so that she can see the cover of my book. ‘Malone Dies,’ she says. ‘You’ve got to be kidding, Djuna!’

  ‘It’s a good book.’

  ‘What kind of book is this for you? Why so dreadfully morbid?’

  ‘It’s not morbid,’ I flip back to a page I’ve dog-eared and read aloud: ‘for I might have found nothing better to speed me from this place than the nocturnal sky where nothing happens, though it is full of tumult and violence…’

  Lois looks befuddled. For a moment, her eyes are unfocused and she looks her age. It’s only a glimpse, but it’s a terrifying one, like glancing into the chasm you’re crossing on a precarious bridge.

  I say, ‘What do you think?’

  Lois smiles, her eyelashes fluttering. That quickly she has recovered, but I’ve seen what Beckett did to her and I won’t forget it.

  ‘Could be worse, I guess.’ She leans over and touches my forehead with her lips. ‘I think Irene would like something from her son.’

  ‘They have all of Harvey’s things.’

  ‘What about something that would not have been in his things?’ She rises. ‘Something that might be with a lover’s things.’

  In a moment the door is shut and Lois is gone.

  How do I feel? I’m angry, but also a little confused. What exactly am I meant to give Irene Wells? Does Lois have something in mind? Has she rummaged around in my boxes? How dare she poke her nose in my business. What gives her the right? And then I have another question: can these emotions possibly belong together? The flame of anger and the blunting slap of confusion?

  Yes, I decide, they go together. They fit together without cancelling each other out, too. Emotions are like this. Muddled cutlery in a drawer, each piece at cross-purposes. I decide something else as well: I’ll do it. I’ll go to see the Wells. Put some private token into Irene’s hands. But what? Some beach stone Harvey slipped in my pocket during a gale? One of his blank cards with the semi-obscene drawings in them?

  What is it a mother wants from her dead son?

  GLINDA

  The next morning I wake to rain battering so softly on the roof it sounds as if it’s falling on cotton. Lois is not home, but she’s left a book for me on
the kitchen table. I know it’s for me because my name is written on a Post-It note stuck to its cover. The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield.

  Later, the rain stops and the harbour and the far hills are hung in cloud. But the city itself is caught in a hole of sun, so finding this fact inspiring, I catch the bus to Newtown where Erin lives. Erin is a good friend, or at least she seemed to be when Harvey and I would visit so that Harvey could use one of her computers to mix his despairing minimalist electronica. She’s only storing my stuff because Harvey was working with her on a piece of techno music commissioned for a gallery opening when he died. I guess she’s also storing my stuff because Erin’s one of the only people I know under thirty who owns her own house and so she has the room.

  On the flagstone steps of Erin and Miranda’s house I get my special feeling, that feeling that some intimate thing is imminent. As usual, I swallow it. I crave intimate encounters, but to acknowledge my feeling or even let it linger in my head for too long will jinx everything.

  The door opens, and it’s Miranda.

  ‘Djuna?’ she says. She has a thick head of dreads threaded with red and yellow, and a dark face that looks deadly serious when she’s concerned about anything. Her expression flits around and eventually finds itself in a smile. My presence is both impossible and slightly repellent. I try not to think such things, but I know I stink of death. I see the traces of it in my own face sometimes. A certain rigidness at the corners of my eyes.

  ‘Come in,’ she says. ‘Come on. Oh, yeah. It’s — you look good. It’s great to see you. You really do, you look really good.’