by Thom Conroy
‘What is it?’ Lyle says. He’s following me into the hallway of his building. His voice is cracking. ‘What are you doing, Djuna? Why are you leaving?’
Why am I leaving? How am I to answer this question? Because Harvey’s mine. I can’t say that, and so I just turn and begin down the steps. On the landing, Lyle catches up.
‘Hold on, wait. It’s because I mentioned Harvey, isn’t it? I thought you were all right with that. You’re the one who said he was dead.’
I take Lyle’s arm and pull him close to me, kiss his cheek. ‘I just have to go. I’m going back to Lois’s.’
‘Now? It’s after two. You can’t go now.’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I can. And I begin heading down the steps again.
Outside, the city has gone sour. Down on the far corner, a group of men are stumbling and laughing. The streets are empty, the doorways are full. Lyle goes jogging up beside me in track shoes with no socks. I probably shouldn’t notice it, but he strikes me as a little charming.
‘I’ll walk you,’ he says.
‘I’m going by myself.’
‘Djuna, at least let me walk you.’
I stop, take him by both arms, and stare at a spot on his forehead when I reply. ‘I want to walk by myself. I’ll be fine.’
Lyle raises an eyebrow and takes a step away. ‘You go ahead.’ He waves to the footpath beside us. ‘You walk alone.’
‘You’re going to follow me.’
‘It’s a public street.’
I turn and start walking. Every time I glance back, there’s Lyle maybe ten, fifteen metres behind. When I reach a hill, I start to run. He’s still with me, but then I dash into a side street, run faster still and, without glancing behind me, duck into a gap between two houses.
I crouch down until I see the shadow of Lyle running past.
I’ll wait here until he comes past again, heading home. He will give up, eventually. He’ll text me, of course, but I won’t reply. Not tonight. Tomorrow I’ll ring and apologise, but for now I’ll stay put and wait. This is living, though. I’m sure of it. You crouch in front of the gate of some stranger’s house, you wait for a man’s footsteps, you walk home alone in the dark.
One little incident after another just like that.
That’s all it is.
And that’s enough.
WIND-TALK
While the Puma and Carl the fuckwit are away on an overnight trip up to Masterton, my mother and I are unloading the dishwasher in their kitchen, the balcony sliders open even though it’s raining and great long gusts of wind roar through the house, fluttering drapes and paper and the pages of my notebooks on the dining-room table. I’m reaching up to hang a wine glass on the rack suspended from the ceiling when I look at my mother and say, ‘Is it true that you asked Dad for a divorce?’
My mother, still in track pants and tee-shirt, hair unwashed, answers without turning from the cupboard where she’s putting away a colander: ‘Yeah.’
Now I have the wine glass dangling by its bottom and it’s the beat where I must either take out another dish or speak, and what I want is to speak.
No, I want to scream. To ask Lucy how she could throw away a man who obviously loves her, a man still seeking opportunity and adventure at his age, a man with laugh lines who has lived the first fifty-two years of his life without undue fret, unpossessed by pretention or ignorance, charismatic, upbeat, a negotiator and able tinkerer known for his honesty and mostly ungreying sideburns, a man who can cook you a dazzling dinner and do all the cleaning up after? But what I do is remove a yellow dinner plate from the bottom rack and stack it on its shelf while the wind whistles and shudders the glass in the windows.
INTO THE CAVE
I am standing at the mouth of a cave. We’re in a stream gorge, Lyle and I, the churning hum of cicadas on all sides, a slice of blue-grey sky overhead. A wet dusk in the bush, each stone underfoot cupped in its own shadow. I can turn back, I know this. The others have already turned back. Tipsy or chilled, a little bored, that crew who began the walk from the lodge out here in the twilight, with the ranges still tawny from the sun, the white pinwheels of wind turbines shining in the high late-summer paddocks. These people, the Wellingtonians, have turned back for the lodge. It’s just rained. They’ll return when the water is lower, they say. They’re going to check their phones, read their magazines. They will come to the cave tomorrow.
They will never come again.
In his monstrous tee-shirt with the name of a bike race faintly printed on it and his wide, square glasses, Lyle says, ‘Are you sure you want to go in?’
‘I thought you were my guide?’ I say. ‘Haven’t you even done this before?’
‘Yeah,’ Lyle turns on his headlamp, and a thin beam of light illuminates the surface of the black water. ‘Only I never went all the way. I turned back.’
I step in first, walking in my track shoes up to my knees, the cold of the mountain water striking my shins like a blow from a metal bat. What am I doing? Where am I going? I know that Lyle wants to know the answers to these questions as well, but I don’t have them. I’m walking into the dark, cold water with a ripe hunger for it. With a sense of how much I shouldn’t be here at all, with an image in my head of Christine, the girl who once slept with Harvey. I see her standing up there on the farm road, the sprawl of the Ruahines behind her, and her shaking her head, just flicking her hair and saying she thinks she’d better head back. She thinks it’s too late for the cave now.
She’s right, of course. It is too late. Somehow this is why I’m going.
‘Djuna?’ Lyle has not stepped into the water yet, and I’m at the edge of the range of his headlamp. I turn to him, a shadow in the shoals, every feature of his face darkened by the light which illuminates the two rock sides of the gorge, steep and junglesque. We could be in Africa or Indonesia, anywhere. But at the same time, I am absolutely and utterly here and nowhere else.
I turn back to the cave entrance and walk into it, walk under the vine-ridden archway of it, twisting on my own headlamp. Like that, the rushing darkness of the space encloses me. I’m waist deep. I can see only black rock and black water and the glint of something luminescent by my feet.
Eyes, scales, jewels.
I press on, stepping into a sudden hole so that I sink up to my chest. I gasp. Lyle, stumbling, crashing in the dark, his headlamp shimmering on the stalactites above us. Now he is beside me, panting, saying my name, asking me to hold on, to wait for him. I reach out and his hand is there, so I hold it.
We press on, the sides of the cave narrowing and the water rising now almost to our necks, roaring by, spraying our faces, loose stones shifting under our feet. The ceiling lowers, the walls close to single-file width, my headlamp shines on a clump of tangled branches and wet leaves that block the way. Or appear to block the way. Lyle shouts something to me, presses up behind, the water hurtling, rushing into our faces, pouring into our mouths when we try to speak, and so I stop speaking and begin to rip away the leaves, the old branches, prying and levering and picking away the debris from the hole in the rock before us, a hole just large enough to crawl through. Moving against the current, I pull my body over the wall of debris and rock, the jagged surface of the ceiling gouging my skull, my back, but I keep going, I keep going until I have pressed myself through the tiny channel and into the lighter grey of the cavern beyond.
LATER, BREATHLESS WITH HYPOTHERMIA-POTENCY COLD and jogging along the empty farm road, Lyle and I do not speak. We know, or think we know, that soon enough we’ll be at the lodge the group of us have hired for the weekend, a fire burning, dry clothes on our backs, but that doesn’t stop us from worrying about the deep, soaked-in chill. We’re moving fast, but from a height, the elevation of a mountain or the altitude of a helicopter, say, we would be almost standing still. Two shadows out here in the sweep of the open plateau, two little figures running for cover, running as if from the night itself. We won’t die, but the thought is there, I can tell it is.
The reminder of survival and the comforting primal worry of warmth. At the same time, we’re cleansed and sharpened, rich with some new animal sense of being. At least I know I am.
THE FIRST MOSQUE IN PALMERSTON
Driving alongside the sudden expanse of the sea and the great green hulk of Kapiti portside while on the way to the Wells’ for a lunch I must admit I’m dreading, I tell my mother that Hamish Lippleton called again, that they’re getting ready to finalise things with Mrs Craigge, and have I considered his offer at any more length. I’ve told my mother about all this before, and as soon as I mention Hamish Lippleton’s name, she prangs the heel of her hand on the dash. This is more emotion than I’ve seen her display since she’s returned.
‘I need that money, Djuna.’ I glance at my mother, at the silver light of the sea on her tired face. Somehow she must read the affection I’m feeling for her the wrong way, because she makes eye contact and says, ‘I do, Djuna. I’m not a young woman. I need my half of the sale of that house, I’m sorry.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘I told Hamish we can’t donate the house.’
We’re passing the stretch of the sea on Highway 1, the only glimpse you get once you’re out of Wellington. It’s always a bit deflating to see it vanish like that, to have the glorious sun-drenched coastal verve swept away from you just as you were getting cosy with it.
‘Of course, I do like the idea of it,’ my mother says, changing tack completely.
‘Me, too,’ I say.
We drive on for a bit. An advert comes on the radio, and my mother switches the station. First one then another two-trailer milk tanker goes whooshing by. For no particular reason, I say, ‘It would be the first mosque in Palmerston.’
My mother reaches for my hand then. She squeezes it.
‘I’m going to be fine, Djuna. Don’t worry about me.’
We haven’t been talking about her, and I wasn’t worried about her, but I don’t say this. I squeeze her hand back because, now I think on it, we might have been talking about her all along.
IN THE WELLS’ BATHROOM
When I enter the Wells’ bathroom I’m beside myself with cheerless feelings. Dinner conversation has oscillated between the micro-details of Bruce’s impending and seemingly hopeless court case, the desolation of the American winter my mother has just left, and the suddenly woeful circumstances of Ella’s childhood now that Joanne has fallen into a desperate state and is often unable to care for her. Sue, the neighbour, has been helping when she can. An aunt comes in on Saturdays. The Wells are helping, of course. The situation is holding but not necessarily sustainable.
So there I am sitting on the toilet, reading some soulless stitched aphorism about happiness, with this fog of gloom settling over me, when I don’t know what happens but I begin to laugh. It starts with me picturing Harvey and Bruce sitting on this very same toilet, their trousers down around their ankles, and it moves quickly onward and outward, dissolving images and associations and taking hold of me like a coughing fit. Without meaning to, I’m in the grip of laughter I don’t fully understand. It hums through my organs, a muscular and alien possession that I cannot keep in check. I don’t want to, but I’m laughing out loud. I’m bent over on the toilet seat, trying to fold my diaphragm and staunch the flow of it, but it’s no use. I’m laughing loud enough to be heard in the hallway. I’m laughing hysterically, my breath sputtering and catching. I’m laughing loud enough to be heard out in the dining room and maybe in the garden and down the street, but the simple fact is that I don’t care in the least.
WAITING ON A TRAIN
Tomorrow, an impossible dinner will take place. I’m sitting on a long blue bench in the Palmerston North train station as I write this, waiting for Lyle to arrive. I’m hoping — no, closer to praying — that munificence will reign at this impossible dinner, but once again I’ve got a troubled feeling. Is this a premonition or simply garden-variety good sense? With my mother and father and Reina around one table, is not a skirmish more or less guaranteed? But, then, there are mitigating factors. One, neutral ground. We’re meeting at the new home of our host, Steve Cynzk, which is reassuring, but also cause for anxiety, as he has yet to see my parents as separate entities. Two, Tama, Joanne and Ella will be there, a trio of buffers from both camps. It’s my mother I’m most worried about, but, in a pinch, Lyle and I are in her corner. We’ve got her back.
When I re-read what I’ve put down in the last few pages of my almost-full notebook, it really does strike me as impossible. I should call the dinner off. I should ring Steve to insist he cancel. Contact Tama and ask him to talk some sense into Eugene, give him the spiel about being a summer dreamer. On the other hand, my ribs still ache from the laughing fit earlier today, and this body memory seems to me like a promise. A promise of what? I don’t know.
There’s more to consider on this point, much more, but here’s the whistle of the train, the incoming chug and rumble that means Lyle will soon be standing here by my side and the impossible dinner will be that much closer.
IN OTHER WORDS, LIVING
From the station, I drive Lyle to his hotel. My mum and I are staying at some low-end place in the rose-clad suburbs, but Lyle, newly employed, is feeling flush and staying in a two-room suite just off The Square. Miranda and Erin are still looking after my stuff, and Lyle’s new gig is writing for one of Erin’s websites.
‘Good pay, work from home,’ he’s saying as I back into a carpark, ‘and some of it’s not even boring. But best of all’ — he raises his finger, pontificating — ‘it’s sorta in my field.’
‘I thought a Master’s in English was among the world’s useless things.’
Lyle gives me a half-hearted scowl. ‘Who says so?’
‘You do.’
We drop off Lyle’s things, try to pretend the ‘upscale view’ is of something better than a half-acre of black and silver roofs, and head down to street level. We’re meeting my mother somewhere for dinner, and one thing about Palmerston is that if we just keep walking around we’re bound to run into her sooner or later.
I’m going along not consciously doing anything at all. I’m not paying attention to whatever it is Lyle’s on about beside me, some mumbly comment about an app he’s downloaded that Erin’s co-written. What I’m doing is gliding through the little pockets of crowd, smelling Thai food, watching the evening sun patter around in the crowns of the trees, listening to the engines and the laughter and some child moaning about what he hasn’t got, imbibing it all, taking it in, the long cool drink of people doing what people do on a Saturday night, and suddenly it occurs to me that what I’m doing is bobbing along on the stream of life.
In other words, living.
IN THE RESTAURANT — PLASTIC TABLECLOTHS AND WAITERS in jandals — my mother is doing her best impression of a buoyant and emotionally healthy individual. For the first time since she’s been back, her hair is clean. Her blouse is ironed and, now and again, the gleam from the track-lighting creates the impression of a shine in her eye. Lyle, who I’m beginning to see has a slow but certain sixth sense for such things, jaunts off to the toilets before the food arrives, so my mother and I have the chance to gossip about him. She’s met him before, but only once, when he was dropping me at home. Tonight the two of them have been chatting since we sat down and I’m hankering for an appraisal.
‘So?’
‘I already told you I liked him, Djuna.’
‘You like Munster cheese.’
My mum takes in a long breath. ‘He seems considerate. Interested. Upbeat.’
‘Now you sound like a greeting card.’
I say this and something unpleasant happens to my mother’s face. A sort of collapse in which new lines emerge, the irises go dark. A hardening.
‘I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m sorry, Djuna. I’m doing my best.’
‘I know,’ I say. I feel desperate and a little bit ashamed. ‘It’s totally fine. I’m sorry. You’re nervous about tomorrow night. About dinner
with Dad, I get that.’
My mother waves her hand at me, too quickly, I think. It calls to mind Dad’s intentionally casual tone when he asks about her. ‘I’m a big girl. I’ll be fine.’
‘I know you will. But it’s reasonable to be nervous. Meeting Reina won’t be easy, I understand that.’
My mother opens her mouth to reply and Lyle is standing beside her. ‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘if I interrupted—’
My mother laughs just under her breath. ‘You interrupted nothing.’ She smiles at me with a peculiar tightness to her lips. ‘I was just saying how good I felt. Feel.’
THE WILL OF THE KEY CHAIN
I drop Lyle off at his hotel and, without thinking, hop out of the car to walk him to his room. We know each other well enough for him to come up here and join me for the impossible dinner between my ambivalently estranged parents, sure, but why am I walking him to his room? This question stirs up through my solar plexus and seeps out into the chilling air between us, rising like a wisp of steam above the carpark and hovering around the streetlights. Lyle glances at me, a just-checking look, because I know he, too, notices this new question loitering in our vicinity.
What happens is nothing at all. We enter the faux-flowered polished-chair-rail beige-carpeted interior of the lobby without so much as catching the attention of the desk attendant, pass side by side down the wide corridor and stop before the lift, silent, a bit confounded by the pink lights of the three descending floors. The lift opens, we wait. The doors shush apart, and there we both are, still waiting in the brighter, mirrored light from the lift. Now the lift doors are waiting, too. Any moment they’ll snap shut and we’ll be left here waiting for the rest of our lives.
