A Man Melting

by Craig Cliff

  At the Do and Dye hair salon the next day, there was no such candour.

  ‘Hold on, let me get this straight,’ Monique, my new stylist, said. ‘You leave a rich-as job in Boston to come back to the ’naki and work in a bank?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  She stuck the comb in her mouth for a moment, stood back and looked at my hair. ‘You probably had a ten-times better stylist over there, eh?’

  I wanted to shake my head but her hands were suddenly either side, tilting my face down. ‘You pay for it, over there,’ I managed to say with my chin pressed against my chest.

  She began snipping again. I rolled my eyes up to the point of pain and saw her pursing her lips in the mirror. I couldn’t decide if she was pouting or concentrating.

  A woman came into the salon with a boy of about four. I felt Monique’s hands leave my head and we both watched the new arrivals through the mirror: the mother in a kind of white trench coat, cinched at the waist, asking one of the other stylists for an appointment; the boy climbing on top of the magazine table and trying to balance on the ever-moving network of glossy covers. When they left, Monique grabbed the hand-held mirror and began showing me the back of my hair. ‘I think I understand, eh?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Why you’d come back.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You know what it’s like? Those salmon returning home to the same tiny creek they was born in, to … what’s the word?’

  ‘Spawn?’

  ‘Exactly. You’ve returned to spawn.’

  She was now crouched in front of me so that her eyes were level with mine. Her eyebrows were raised. I wasn’t sure if she wanted me to agree with her theory or the haircut. I smiled blankly. Whatever my reasons for returning to New Plymouth, procreation was not one of them.

  Outside the salon, I saw the mother and her daredevil son in front of Lowe’s Pharmacy. She was talking to a woman in a white uniform, the boy tugging the cord of her trench coat. The pharmacist was instantly familiar, but again it took me a moment to place her. Mrs Shipley. Sandra Shipley.

  I had to walk in that direction anyway, and could not help slowing as I passed. I heard the woman with the four-year-old say, ‘I’m not going if he’s there, Mum. I’m not.’

  So this was Mrs Shipley’s daughter. I knew she had a daughter about my age, but she had not attended St Stephen’s. Something about separating home and work. But as I walked to my car I wondered if Sandra Shipley had known something about the school.

  Over the next week I saw three more teachers from St Stephen’s, though like Mr Haines and Mrs Shipley, they all had other jobs.

  Mrs Chapman, running a lawn-mowing franchise with her husband.

  Ms Matai, though she may have married since those days, ruling over the customer service desk at Woolworths.

  Mean old Mrs Yew, the parking warden.

  New Plymouth was crawling with teachers, ex-teachers; crawling with my distant, near-forgotten past.

  The two teachers I knew I would not be seeing on the streets of New Plymouth any time soon were Jim Lewis and Kerry Drewe.

  Mr Lewis had taught Standard Two and was the cricket master. He was tall, though perhaps his height was exaggerated by his Stubbies shorts and — when the principal, Mrs Choudry, was not on his case — jandals. His legs were always shaven and tanned, his curly hair always overdue for a trim.

  Mr Drewe was the opposite. He was quiet, rounded, uninterested in sports. He maintained an immaculate comb-over, though I do not remember anyone at school ever mentioning this fact — sometimes you have to be told something is ridiculous before you can see it.

  There were only four male teachers at St Stephen’s during my time there, and the school made sure that every pupil had at least two of them as classroom teachers during their six years (what was egalitarian then seems perverse in hindsight). I had Mr Drewe in Standard One but avoided Mr Lewis, getting Mr Tramble in Standard Three.

  Mr Drewe was famous, if that’s the word, for China. He went there every second or third year, sometimes taking a whole term off school. No one wondered what the attraction was: he seemed more than willing to share everything he experienced over there. All his classes did projects on China. He gave chopstick lessons. He cooked chicken feet (which never more than five children in any class dared to eat) and wontons (more popular). He wrote every student’s name in Chinese characters with a fine-tipped paintbrush. He taught us the characters and pronunciation of the numbers one through ten, then made us do an entire maths lesson in Chinese. He took us to the Chinese Association in Merrilands; we watched a video of women dancing, then made kites.

  Although Mr Lewis was the one us girls had crushes on and the boys tried to impress with their skateboards and plaster casts, the general consensus was that Mr Drewe was a better teacher. You were considered lucky to get into his class. From what I heard about Mr Lewis’s classes, I wasn’t impressed. His pet subject was fish, which seemed like a more boring version of the dinosaur projects we’d all done in the primers. The only thing noteworthy enough to reach the ears of those of us who avoided his class was the time he made ceviche, though it was relayed to us as the time Mr Lewis ‘ate raw fish’.

  When I heard the news, via my mother, that both Lewis and Drewe had been accused of sexually abusing pupils over a period of twelve years, in which my six years at St Stephen’s sat squarely in the middle, I found it hard to believe. I was at university down in Dunedin. A very young nineteen. Still a virgin. Still subject to crushes. It sounded as if Lewis and Drewe had acted together, but I did not remember them being particularly close. Mr Lewis seemed more matey with Mr Tramble, making no secret of the fact they drank together on Friday nights; if anything, it was as if Lewis and Tramble made fun of round old Mr Drewe. But, I reasoned, along with the rest of New Plymouth, if Lewis and Drewe were doing what they were accused of doing, wouldn’t it make sense not to appear too tight at school? I could not, however, understand how I could spend a year in Mr Drewe’s class and not notice anything. Surely someone in my class must have been approached, propositioned, if not actually molested? For a moment I felt hurt. This is terrible to admit, but I felt the fact I had not even been hugged by Mr Drewe, let alone felt his hand creep up my skinny, high-jumper’s thigh, was a slight. Another example of my invisibility in the world. I thought of Della Finnegan, my best friend, the most beautiful girl in my class. If Mr Drewe really was a pervert, surely she would have known? But she had never mentioned anything. What did that mean about our friendship? I felt doubly betrayed.

  Later I learnt that the former pupils making the accusations were all male, and I felt stupid and terrible and sick for those nameless boys. I was still confused by how this could have all gone on around me but with time, once the shock of the accusations subsided and the possibility that Drewe and Lewis sexually abused boys at my school became as viable as my true memories of St Stephen’s, I began to construct scenes. Cricket-mad Nick Haitana spending all those hours in the nets with Mr Lewis. One day he is invited back to Mr Lewis’s house for a Coke … Malcolm Fergusson (though everyone called him Mim), winner of the regional science fair for his project on the kilojoule content of breakfast cereals, being chaperoned to the national competition in Wellington by Mr Drewe. And who should show up at the Sharella Motor Inn but Jim Lewis, there to watch the cricket at the Basin, of course …

  The accusations were followed by arrests, bail, trials, retrials … When they were both finally convicted I was living in Boston. I had accommodated the fact two teachers at my primary school were sexual predators into my back story so completely that the convictions meant nothing to me. They had been a fait accompli. I stumbled into a small-town- girl-made-good persona. I made jokes about the size of New Plymouth. About the faux pas of my father. About how I was so plain as a child the convicted sex offenders we called teachers didn’t know I existed. The week before I was due to start work in New Plymouth, I paid a visit to the bank branch of which I was to become
assistant manager. I half expected to find another teacher from St Stephen’s behind the tellers’ desk, but there were no familiar faces.

  I was shown to the office of the current assistant manager, Emma Bates, and told to wait. In a way I would have preferred to have not met my predecessor, not to have seen my office lined with her photos, the accretion of documents and corporate knick-knacks that comes with years of service. Better to have entered a bare office and made it mine; let it be filled with my own memos and mementos, with nothing to measure its condition against but its bare state. But, as the months passed, I found myself comparing my jumble of boxes and books and golf umbrellas with Emma’s.

  When she entered, I was looking at a photo of her and a man I guessed was her partner — attractive in a farming family kind of way — embracing in front of a waterfall, half a rainbow ending above his head.

  ‘Nice photo,’ I said, placing the frame back on her desk.

  ‘We probably look so young there,’ she said, her eyes avoiding the photo. ‘How are you finding life back in Taranaki? A change from Boston, I bet.’

  ‘You could say. But I like it.’

  ‘Nathan,’ Emma glanced at the photo, ‘has got a job in Japan, coaching rugby. That’s why I’m leaving.’

  ‘Japan? You’ll love it. Nihongo o hanashimasu ka?’

  She looked down at the photograph for an instant, then at me. ‘You speak Japanese?’

  ‘A little. We dealt with a few Japanese clients at my old firm.’

  ‘I’m so jealous. I just haven’t had the time. I thought that we’d done our travelling in our twenties. Not to Japan, mind you. But now I feel like I’m going to have to relearn everything, you know?’

  I told Emma how I had travelled for six months before settling in Boston, and felt that was enough. Sure, once I had my job in Boston I bemoaned the routine, planned elaborate trips to the Yukon or Honduras, took less elaborate trips to Vancouver and Cancun, but the strange truth of it was that I found more pleasure in settling in the US than on any of my travels. It was not until three months had passed that I realised where so much of the joy of my new surroundings, my new life, was coming from: the fact it was not New Zealand. It seemed kind of magic to live in a world without Paul Holmes. Without the latest Winston Peters scandal or the prognosis of Daniel Carter’s pulled muscle. To be exempt from attending family barbecues and eightieth birthday parties. If I wanted, I could dip in and out of affairs at home — the internet could tell me the winner of the latest Dancing With The Stars, my father always good for an update on which cousin’s business was about to go under — but it was a choice. I could pretend Jason Gunn and Fat Freddy’s Drop and Nick Harrison didn’t exist. If I wanted New Zealand wine I could buy it from any liquor store. If I wanted to walk through Boston Common wearing jandals and one of those breast cancer T-shirts from Glassons that no one outside of New Zealand seems to understand, I could. If I wanted to pretend I was one of nine siblings, or won a silver medal at the Commonwealth Games (The what?), I could. I could construct my own collage of New Zealand and call it New Zealand, and no one was there to dispute it.

  Emma looked at the photo of Mt Taranaki on the calendar on her far wall. ‘Is it too early to be homesick?’

  The way I told it to friends and family, I got my job at the bank because they were wowed by my experience in a big-city American financial services firm, the suggestion being that they didn’t understand quite what I did in Boston and I didn’t understand what I was expected to do back in New Plymouth. Only the latter was true. As Emma showed me around, introducing me to a variety of faces and names I would take too long to remember and reconcile, I was forced to acknowledge that I had been fooling myself about my new job being an easy one. The sheer number of rooms behind the Staff Only doors was enough to make the arches of my feet ache. There was even a subterranean level which accommodated a lunchroom, postal dispatch and the building manager’s workroom.

  We stopped outside this last door. The sign read: Facilities. She knocked. We waited.

  ‘You’ll meet Eric around, anyway,’ Emma said. ‘He’s the man to see for anything electrical. Anything broken. Except computers. Though I wouldn’t put it past him to know about computers.’ She leant in. ‘Just between you and me, our IT team are in for a shake-up. Bunch of slackers, the lot of them. That’s for management ears only.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said, unable to restrain a smile. It was the first time I had ever been referred to as management. In Boston I had risen to the level of principal analyst but, at least according to the organisational charts they were always redrawing and clogging our inboxes with, I never had any staff reporting to me directly. Being called management was one of those moments, like your first slow dance or roasting your first turkey, that surprise with their significance. Moments that seem, when they arrive, to announce another step up the ladder of maturity. There in the corridor between the lunchroom and the stairwell, I was reminded of the conversation I’d had with Spencer back in Boston, when I told him not only had I been applying for jobs in New Zealand, but had accepted an offer.

  ‘You’re running away. Is that it?’

  ‘I’m not running away, Spence. This decision isn’t driven by fear —’

  ‘Oh really?’

  ‘This feels like the first adult decision of my life.’

  He looked at me coldly.

  ‘I don’t want to grow old in Boston.’

  ‘Sounds like fear —’

  ‘You know that liver spot I found on my hand the other week?’

  ‘That turned out to be dried Coca Cola?’

  ‘It got me thinking, you know. It’s coming. It already shows around my eyes, the crow’s —’

  ‘Come on, Rachael.’

  ‘There are fewer and fewer places to hide as you age. You can’t rely on good skin or radiant hair to cover any deficiencies in your personality. You can’t rely on hopes and aspirations to cover for your current lack of success.’

  ‘You’re successful.’

  I held up my hand for him to let me finish. ‘There may be cosmetic actions to slow the aging progress — hair dye, facelift, night school — but everyone eventually ends up bald and naked to the world’s accusing glare.’

  ‘This is a rehearsed speech. You’re giving me a rehearsed speech?’

  ‘Spencer. Please. I loved you like crazy, okay. I fucking did. I loved you to the exclusion of everyone. I didn’t go home for three years, for one thousand days, because I didn’t need to see my family. I needed you. I didn’t need friends. I had you.’

  ‘I can’t believe you’re still holding Newark against me.’

  ‘Well …’ I thought about how the incident had now become synonymous with an entire city. Soon I would be holding the state of New Jersey against him, then the whole of North America.

  ‘You said you could never see yourself returning to New Zealand.’

  ‘I did. I couldn’t. But lately I keep thinking about New Plymouth. I see things. Buildings, streets. The terraces of Pukekura Park. A snow-capped Mount Egmont. They pop in to my head and I think about what it would be like to go back and live in a place where I know thousands of people. To stop making first impressions and instead build on a real foundation. Doesn’t that sound like a grown-up way to live?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, shaking his head, defeated.

  ‘The very things that drove me to leave New Plymouth — the smallness, the lack of privacy — it turns out are the things exerting the greatest pull. I’m going back, Spence. I’m sorry.’

  Spencer was right, it was a rehearsed speech; though, as with all rehearsed speeches, it didn’t come out as planned. But it was the actual speech rather than the intended one that echoed in my head during that first month back in New Plymouth. Managing staff in the busiest bank branch in New Plymouth, buying a house, paying regular visits to family, spending weekends working in the garden. Doesn’t that sound like a grown-up way to live?

  My week shadowing
Emma — assistant assistant manager I called myself — ended too quickly and I found myself alone in her office, stripped of her things, her personality, and awaiting mine.

  I had a lot of reading to do during those first few weeks to come up to speed and preferred to do it in the lunchroom. At least that way I felt as if I was a part of the branch, rather than a stowaway in a barren office. Months later I would learn that my residence in the lunchroom had been construed as slacking off by many of the tellers (though they always took the time to have a chat, tell me about their children in far-flung places, recommend their naturopath, complain about the latest uniform). It was an impression I only shook two months later when half the branch got food poisoning from a platter of California rolls.

  One day, perhaps in my third week, I was walking down to the lunchroom with a stack of mortgage assessments when, passing the facilities door, I heard what might have been music. I imagined Eric the building manager repairing an office chair, listening to Concert FM on an old transistor. I stopped, realising I had not yet come face to face with Eric. I considered knocking, but wondered what I would say. As I thought about pressing my ear to the door, the music stopped. In the silence I lost my nerve and hurried to the lunchroom.

  I didn’t meet Spencer until I had been in Boston for eighteen months, even though we lived in the same apartment building. When I finally got around to the I have a boyfriend speech with my mother, she told me, ‘Life has a way of withholding characters.’ I knew she was referring to me. Perhaps not me exactly, but the twelve years my parents tried to conceive until I came along. It made the eighteen months just-missing Spencer — riding the down elevator while he came up, jumping into the same cab he’d just left — seem trivial. Still, it was true, as with all withheld characters, that once he arrived his stain seemed to trail through the memories that pre-dated him. For Spencer and I, this was what quickly bonded us. As for my mother, I suspect this is why she and I never truly clicked.