Karen said, 'I got you this.'
It was a tiny, rectangular, satin pillow, embroidered in beautiful colours. She made me lie down and put it over my eyes. It was unexpectedly heavy, pressing down, cool and soothing on the contours of my face.
'It's fantastic,' I said.
She read from a pamphlet. 'Slows rapid eye movement. Good for headache, hangover, insomnia.'
'Thanks.' I grabbed her wrist.
'S'all right,' she said.
I began to invent a character. He would be very sick, very old. He would have lost most of his connection to the world. Confronting death, he would see life for what it was — a struggle for survival, among animals. His view would be detached and clear. He would see himself, having come from the earth, soon to return to the earth.
I made pages of notes. I exhausted myself. I woke in the night, switched on the lamp and wrote down thoughts I was afraid I would have lost by morning. I started transferring my ideas onto my laptop. The only thing that stopped me was visitors. Dying Larry, wheeled out onto the sunporch, would be contemplating an object — a telephone, say — in his simple, pared-down way, when Karen would arrive with another casserole of horrible puréed food. I got quite irritable with her. I had Larry crutching along a sun-striped hall, looking at pictures of nuns and the Pope in a Maori cloak, Larry menaced by a Samoan cleaner, Larry shouting at a choir. He knew he would never leave the Institution. He lived minute by minute. His life was intense, full of dazed revelation . . .
The phone rang. 'It's Tony Irons,' said the voice. It was the writer I'd interviewed before hospital. 'I've got a couple of points,' he told me. I made him hang on. I got the piece I'd written about him up on my screen. It was good. I wasn't changing it. His hands, I remembered, had shaken throughout the interview.
'You asked me about sources for my fiction.' His voice was nervous. I heard him drag on a cigarette and blow out.
'Did I?'
He rustled some papers. 'Do I base my characters on real people or do I make them up?' He drew a big breath. 'Jack, the answer is both. Things have to be psychologically accurate. When I create a character, even if it's based on a real person, it takes on its own identity. The fictional filter changes it. Changes it utterly!'
I twiddled the keys on the laptop. 'Mmm, good,' I said.
'And there was a point you raised about my childhood. If I could just take you back . . .'
He went on. He had a list of twenty-five points. I thought he would never go away.
Tuesday morning. I was in the bathroom. The doorbell rang three times before I got to it. I saw Dee at the bottom of the stairs, walking away. The door slammed.
'Stop! I'm here!' I called. I hobbled downstairs as fast as I could and shouted after her, 'Dee!'
The mothers were arriving. 'Dee!' I had a pain. I hunched over and a loud noise ripped through the air. (Did the playgroup mothers stiffen? Did they exchange stony, significant looks?)
She was coming back. I hung on to the door handle.
'You all right?'
'I'm much better.' I crept up the stairs after her, praying that my insides would behave.
'Sit down,' I said. I cleared papers and books off the couch.
She gave me a characteristic look: tolerant, incredulous. 'I thought I was supposed to clean?'
'Oh yes. Clean.'
'Or did you just want me to sit and talk?'
'That too. No, really, cleaning first.'
'You are going to pay me?'
I settled down to watch the playgroup. One of the women gestured towards my window. I nodded gravely. I imagined going down there, the women gathering around as I unfurled my notes. They would be flattered by my interest, struck by the accuracy of my observations. They would laugh, covering their faces shyly.
The vacuum cleaner started up. The phone rang.
'You asked about plot structure,' Irons said. 'I meant to say there's something that Chekhov (I think) said about fiction. That a, um, work of art, a work of fiction, must have good architecture. By which he meant it has to have a pleasing, a beautiful structure.'
'Actually, Tony, I'm writing a novel of my own.'
'Oh. Great!'
I clapped down the phone. I worked. Larry had escaped from his carers. A cliff above a beach, the sun spilling into the horizon. He looked at the sky and thought he could feel the earth rolling away beneath him. A wave boomed like a slamming door, the islands were turning to black silhouettes. There was a ship strung with lights out at sea.
The vacuum cleaner popped and died. Dee thumped it. The mothers glanced up at me. There was laughter, grimaces. I went back to my work. I had the pleasing feeling I'd become a fixture for them — a benign presence, almost part of the group.
I interrogated Dee. Gina had talked of 'going on a trip with a friend'. She had bought a daringly short skirt. She'd scraped the side of the car again. She'd had a fight on the phone, after which she'd stood on the lawn swearing. Someone had rung back and she'd cried and smiled. She'd been out one night until 3 a.m.
Dee left. I felt cold. So Gina was being unfaithful. She would have some ridiculous rationale to do with our separation, some nonsense about needing to move on.
Oh, you vicious tramp! I wanted to tell her: I miss you. I see you everywhere. Nobody matters but you.
There was a knock on the door. I opened it, my eyes full of tears, expecting to be throwing myself on Dee. (Deadpan Dee, how many of our quarrels had she witnessed over the years?)
It was a policeman.
He got straight to the point. There had been a complaint. I had been watching the children in the yard. Had caused discomfort. There was talk of 'intense peering'. Strange behaviour. Shouting in the street. Note-taking, or sketching. Someone had mentioned a camera.
'What camera?' Outrage was added to hurt. My playgroup friends had complained.
I snatched up my notebook. 'I don't look at the children. It's the women I'm interested in. I've had thoughts about animals. That they are animals.'
'Animals?'
'We're all animals,' I said.
He didn't want to hear it. He took a heavy tone. I wasn't to upset anyone else. He didn't want to have to come back again. I told him I'd been sick. He said I ought to see someone about it. 'We know where you are,' was his parting shot.
Wounded, I took refuge in the mind of Larry. Karen came, the nurse came. I ignored them and worked on. Larry was captured by his carers and brought back to the Institution. He was taken on an outing in a minibus and some amusing incidents took place . . .
The next day there was an easterly storm, driving rain, purple sheet lightning, rain drumming on the sandpit cover, water pooling on the concrete. Larry, labelled as a rebel, was locked in a battle of wills with a sinister nurse, and mused late at night about death. I watched the rain falling over the city, falling through city lights. The nurse tried to inject Larry with a painkiller; he refused, fearing her motives. The struggle exhausted him. In a black moment he had a sense of the void.
When Dee came the following day I gave her a package and some money. 'Post this to Gina,' I said. 'It's the start of my novel.'
Her report: a man had come to collect Gina in a big car. He was introduced as Nigel. Gina had giggled a lot. She was elaborately, yet minimally, dressed.
Listening, I bared my teeth, mangled this 'Nigel' between my fingers. 'No!' I shouted. I pressed my forehead against the window. Below, women hurried children inside, arms around little shoulders.
Dee hitched the parcel under her arm. I lay down after she'd gone, too exhausted to move.
The phone rang. I let it switch to the answerphone. Tony Irons said, 'Jack? If you feel like a drink sometime? I'm interested in the idea of a journalist who wants to write a novel. You, in other words!'
I couldn't get up. I didn't eat anything. I lay with my face to the wall. Karen came, rang the nurse, and they both tried to bully me into moving. I ignored them. Karen got upset, called me childish. She offered me soup and tea. I s
hook my head until the nurse put her foot down and said I'd have to be seen by a doctor.
I told Karen I was dying. 'It's what you want,' I said.
She shouted at me. 'How can you say that? I've looked after you. I've been here day after day!'
'I'm still dying,' I said. I heard her crying. I kept my face to the wall. She said my name. She sounded despairing. By the time I'd made up my mind to turn over, she'd gone.
When I woke there was a woman by my bed.
'Gina!' I sat up, full of joy. I put my arms around her. I told her I was dying. I told her I missed her. I begged her to come back. I said: 'I see you everywhere, in passing cars, in dreams. No one matters except you.'
She said, 'I read the stuff you sent. It's funny. It's bleak, though. Just lonely old Larry. Can't you pad it out a bit? Make a plot, add other characters?'
'What other characters? I've been ill, and nothing's happened. I've been completely alone.'
'There must be real people you can write about.'
'What people? There's only Karen and the nurse.' (I didn't mention Dee.)
'You could put me in it.'
'But I haven't got you!'
'I'm here, aren't I?'
I woke again. The sky out the window was pink. I was alone. I lay looking at the pearly sky. After a while I went to my computer, sat down and began to write: There were red swirls. I fought my way out of them. I wrote my way to this point, here. Because Gina always puts me straight, you see. She tells me what's important and what to throw away, and that is why I love her.
stories
I was sitting at my desk. It was a cold morning in June. The wind was rattling the windows and the rain had bits of hail in it. I was watching my neighbour, Ron Cassidy. He was up on his roof trying to fix a loose bit of iron. The wind was blowing his sweatshirt up over his broad, pale, freckled back. He was wearing shorts, calf-length socks and carpet slippers. His feet were slipping about on the wet iron.
I've lived here for five years. I live by myself, with two cats. There are the Cassidys on one side, and on the other a friendly old couple I don't talk to much. We say hello on the driveway. I'm on good terms with the man down the back. We sometimes have a chat. But it's the Cassidys I talk to most. As soon as I moved in here we started having words.
Ron Cassidy used to be an athlete a long time ago. He never managed to find anything to do after his sporting career was finished. These days he presents himself as a sort of builder or odd-job man. He has a battered truck filled with paints and hardware and tools, a trailer attached to it, piled high with more odds and ends. Often he sets off in this vehicle looking purposeful, only to return a short time later, perhaps with more junk piled on his trailer, or less junk, or the junk rearranged. Some afternoons he ties junk to his trailer and moves it from one end of the driveway to the other. He is always trotting around his property with some kind of appliance, repeating, mechanically, to anyone who comes near, 'It's got to be done. It's got to be done.' And everything he does makes his house older, messier, sadder, closer to being ruined.
One day he unloaded an ancient portable generator from his trailer. He set it up under my bedroom window and attached it to a high-pressure hose. Then he ran the generator continuously for two days, while he water-blasted his roof. It was so loud I couldn't shut it out of any part of my house. I couldn't work. I couldn't read. At the end of the second day he'd scoured the paint off half his roof. He stopped work and took the generator away. Months later, the roof is still half scoured and half covered in old paint. The walls of the house are also half painted. At the front a set of windows is covered in black polythene, half fixed. He has a homemade security gate, half of which is broken.
Under the house is Ron's workshop. This neon-lit, cobwebby basement, full of dead machinery, is where he and his son Blake apply themselves to their most serious passion: tinkering with cars. I have sometimes sat here working while Blake and his dad have sawed a car in half. When they stop work I can hear the murmur of their earnest talk. Something like: 'Yeah, the fuggin. Yeah. The wrench. The fuggin wrench. Yeah. The fuggin.'
They have the usual trouble with their tools. Whole days are devoted to fixing the dodgy saw they've borrowed to cut the car in half. In the evenings young Blake, an apprentice mechanic, likes to invite his friends over. After the traffic has died down in the street, after the long and stressful day, I relax to the sound of Blake's engine, with its souped-up oversized exhaust being revved into a scream, until it sounds as if it's begging for mercy. The youths cluster around the open bonnet, humourlessly smoking. In the lull after the screaming the car steams, its guts splayed — the tortured corpse. Blake's face is intent, white, tiny-eyed. Sometimes he breaks into a sharp-toothed grin: 'Eh! Look a' that!' As he might have done when the kitten exploded that time, when the puppy sighed and died, when the helpless thing he was fucking with finally gave up the ghost, and whimpered no more, and hung limp from the clothesline . . .
Oddly, I don't hate Blake. (I do hate his parents. I do.) Once, when I'd been in the paper and on TV, Blake went through a phase of greeting me in the street. He did a sort of wave — ceremonious. It was my being on TV that did it. I'm sure TV is the ultimate reality for Blake. Reading and writing are not his thing. Once he put a sign on an old car he'd dumped outside my house: 'Some FCKWIT stole my plates. Please RETURE.' He has a large tattoo on one arm and clumsy, boyish hands. It's hard to hate a boy. It's hard to hate a boy who can't spell 'return'.
Anyway, you'd think from all this that I live somewhere a bit scruffy, wouldn't you? Somewhere out west, or quite far south? Henderson, Mangere. But no. The Cassidys live in Remuera. We live in Remuera. It's not supposed to be like this.
So we have words. I'm no shrinking violet. I'm a writer, and I need quiet. (I've had a reasonably successful career. I'm old now, and a few people know my name.) Like Ron Cassidy, I need to be home all day. Unlike him, I like getting a bit of work done. And I've done a fair bit of raging out into the drive and telling them to turn down or off whatever machine they're operating.
But the thing about the Cassidys, apart from their living in Remuera and being so disreputable, is that they're fantastically paranoid and aggressive. If you complain, they do not apologise. They rear up and fight back. And if I've ever taken any direct action (sometimes I write angry letters; once, despairing, I threw two large tomatoes at the revving youths) they're not slow to take revenge. My car has been attacked with a brick, my windscreen wipers stolen. My tomatoes arrived back on my doorstep soon after, accompanied by a mountain of rubbish.
Mrs Cassidy — Glenda — who works in a bank, is as sharp and stringy as her husband is flabby and dull. She's not above leaning over the fence and giving me what for, when I've been cramping Ron and Blake's style with some mean-minded complaint. She stands by her men. She has a great sense of drama, and is always scurrying out to see what I've done to Ron and Blake this time. Sometimes I get a cold feeling when I'm out, and turn, and there is terrible Glenda, stooped, pitched sideways with the strain of the blackest scowl she can sustain without turning her face inside out.
The tumbledown house, moody Blake, glowering Glenda, moronic Ron, the piles of junk on Ron's trailer going back and forth all day — all of this has unsettled me so much that I've often thought of moving. I haven't managed to yet, even though I've been so sorely tried.
The Cassidys' latest trick (revenge for one of my complaints) is to park a couple of derelict cars outside my house so I have nowhere to park my own. They're always 'trailing their coat', as the Irish saying goes. They're always itching for a fight . . .
***
It was a cold June morning. I was sitting at my desk watching Ron Cassidy fixing a loose bit of iron on his roof. The wind rattled the windows and the rain had bits of hail in it. Ron was wearing carpet slippers. His feet slipped about on the iron. I started writing: an elderly woman was sitting in her house. She was watching her neighbour, an aggressive, unpleasant man who, for years, had made her li
fe difficult. She was thinking about hate. She was thinking: there are very few people I hate, but that man is one of them. He has made me unhappy in my own house. And he hates me. She thought: if this were the Balkans or Rwanda, if society broke down and that man suddenly had the opportunity, he would kill me. Given the chance, I wouldn't kill him, even though I hate him, because I am a better class of person. But he would kill me.
She watched him sliding about on the roof. He had a hammer and a mouthful of nails and he was trying to hold down a section of iron. The wind tore at his clothes and hair. He slipped, threw up his arms and dropped the hammer. She saw him catch hold of a rusty overflow pipe to steady himself. It broke and came away. He teetered for a second, his body twisting, his hands clutching the air. The pipe tilted with him. There was a scattering of pieces of iron, nails, broken pipe. The wind got under the iron and made it shriek. He fell into the yard below. She heard his heavy body hit the concrete.
She sat still. Some minutes went by. No one came out to help him. No one was home over there. She could see his legs. She waited, looking at his legs. They didn't move. It started raining hard. He lay in the rain. She felt very strange sitting there, looking at her neighbour's legs. She picked up her coat and umbrella and went slowly out into the street. She stood outside her gate, the rain drumming on her umbrella. She got in her car and drove away.
***
The Writers' Festival was on. There had already been two days of appearances by local and overseas writers. At three that afternoon I was to appear in An Hour With Celia Myers, in which I would talk about my career and read from my work. I'd already chaired a session with three young women novelists, and taken part in panel discussions with some overseas writers. It had all gone well. The sessions were lively, and I'd managed to avoid any disasters or embarrassments. I'd been told that my Hour With session had sold reasonably well. I enjoyed festivals. My books were especially popular with women. After the session with the young novelists the crowd had been enthusiastic, and I'd realised how much I enjoyed the crush, the warmth of all those bodies pressing towards us. I live alone. My husband died years ago, and my daughters, Dee and Viola, have long since grown up. Mostly it suits me, being alone. But I crave the human touch.
Opportunity Page 2
