A Man Melting

by Craig Cliff

  And so it was with Eric the building manager. The four weeks before I saw him with my own eyes is now stained with his presence. His name on everyone’s lips. His latest repair carried out just before I entered a room. His hand-signed health and safety messages plastered all around the lunchroom.

  When I finally saw him, he was waving his arms in front of the automatic doors at the front of the branch. The doors refused to open. He was wearing dark blue drill trousers, a brushed cotton shirt that reminded me of my father’s pyjamas and a tan tool belt.

  ‘This happen often?’ I asked.

  ‘I can let you out,’ he said, not turning around. He reached for the red door-release button to the left of the doors.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘just curious.’

  He pushed the button anyway and the doors opened. When I didn’t move he turned and looked at me for the first time. There must have been a long moment of silence, him inspecting my name badge, me realising Eric the building manager was yet another teacher from St Stephen’s.

  Eric Tramble: the squiggle at the bottom of the health and safety notices suddenly seemed so clear.

  Mr Tramble. Tighten the skin beneath his eyes, return the colour to his hair, double its volume, and it was him. Mr Lewis’s drinking buddy. The teacher who decided it was a good idea for a class of nine and ten year olds to construct a model town in Room Five the term it was vacant. He pushed all the desks together and covered them with linoleum, face down so that he could draw roads and house plots in permanent marker on the dull, sack-coloured surface. He asked us to name the town. We chose Trambleton, recognising from the first that this was more his project than ours. Everyone was given a million dollars and Mr Tramble ran an auction. We each needed at least one piece of land on which to build a house, though he strongly suggested we buy some land on the high street for the fish n chip shops or hair salons or toy stores from which we would earn our living. But we were only nine and ten. When the auction started, no one wanted to bid. We all had our eyes on the high street or the plots around the tiny teardrop of a lake Mr. Tramble had created out of blue cellophane. Properties were sold for a dollar. Then, when it came to the lake-front sites, bidding started at a million. Mr Tramble decided we could pool our money with friends — there were lessons to be learnt everywhere — and so seventeen of the class ended up in the first lake-front property.

  After the auction, we were to construct our buildings out of polystyrene. He bought along his polystyrene cutter: a guitar string through which he ran a small current so it was hot to the touch (but would not electrocute us kids) and could cut through the polystyrene packaging we had bought from home to make the walls and roofs of our houses. But with only one polystyrene cutter and a town’s worth of buildings to make, we quickly lost interest in Trambleton.

  ‘Sorry,’ Eric Tramble said, in front of the faulty doors, ‘I thought you were a customer.’

  ‘I don’t believe we’ve properly met, Eric.’ I held out my hand. ‘Where’ve they been hiding you?’

  His hand froze halfway towards mine and he looked at me. ‘I’ve been working, Ms Dawn.’

  It occurred to me that I was now my teacher’s boss. ‘No, I didn’t mean it like that.’

  He smiled and his hand found mine. It was warm and worn. ‘You’ve come from the States, they tell me?’

  ‘But I’m a local girl.’ I waited to see if he recognised me. Surely someone would recognise me. But he didn’t even ask which school I had gone to.

  After that day, I saw Eric Tramble everywhere. Fixing the coffee machine. Installing door-closers on the second floor. On his hands and knees with half the tellers looking for the butterfly from a customer’s earring. My office seemed to conspire to bring him into my life. Halogen lamps blew in the overhead panels. The new shelves I ordered arrived unassembled. My computer screen took on a sickly green tinge. I tried resetting, tried unplugging, tried giving it a knock. The green tinge persisted. As I was considering sitting down and attempting to work with it like that, Eric walked past my open door and I called him in.

  ‘I think it’s dying,’ I told him.

  ‘Reminds me of the old monochrome monitors,’ he said. ‘The bad old days. Before your time, perhaps.’

  ‘No, I remember.’

  His mouth opened slightly, as if he was about to say something. The inside of his lower lip was crimson. The flush of life it revealed was shocking, almost carnal.

  He said nothing.

  I closed my eyes, tried to forget that deep red. I wanted to tell him that I remembered the day he came into Mrs Shipley’s class, my class, and asked, ‘Hands up who wants to be a part of history?’ That he had chosen me along with Della Finnegan, Mim Fergusson, Nick Haitana and Johnny Nuku. That I was there when we threw the old computers into the skip. But I couldn’t. He didn’t remember me. I didn’t want to sound like one of those people who couldn’t let the trouble at St Stephen’s go.

  I was back at Do and Dye the next evening to see Monique.

  ‘How’s the new job? Your hair seemed to hold up okay,’ she said.

  ‘I’m still settling in. Still lots to learn.’

  She led me over to the shampoo station.

  ‘I’m with Kiwibank,’ she said, loud enough to be audible over the rush of water past my ears.

  ‘That’s too bad.’

  ‘You’re not going to try to win me over?’ She squeezed out a glob of shampoo and began to work it into my hair.

  ‘I’ll try the soft sell, I think. Slip in the fact we’re always voted number one on customer service polls when you least suspect it.’

  ‘You’re smooth, Rachael. Real smooth.’

  ‘Did you go to St Stephen’s?’ I asked.

  ‘Me? Nah. Spotswood Primary. Did you? You weren’t there when those teachers …’

  I couldn’t nod with my head leant back like that, but I answered with my eyes. Her fingers lifted from my scalp. She felt around for the tap and began to rinse my hair.

  The conversation flowed fine as she cut my hair — I told her about the bedsit in Fitzroy I was renting to put some space between me and my mother; she told me about her three-year-old niece, clearly trying to plumb for my maternal instincts — but ever since I mentioned St Stephen’s, there was something chalky in her demeanour.

  When I visited my mother on the weekend, I told her about Mr Tramble being the Building Manager at my work.

  ‘Tramble?’ she said.

  ‘My Standard Three teacher.’

  ‘I’m in my seventies now, Rachael.’

  ‘That’s rubbish, Mum. You’re as sharp as ever.’

  ‘Mr Tramble, Standard Three. Yes, I remember.’

  ‘Don’t placate me, Mum.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it, dear.’

  ‘Remember when St Stephen’s was all you’d talk about?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s really accurate.’

  ‘Every time you’d call me at Cumberland, it’d be Mr Drewe this, Mrs Choudry that.’ Poor Mrs Choudry. It wasn’t enough that she resigned as principal as soon as the arrests were made and spent hours being interviewed by the police, cooperating in every respect; she still felt the need to drive her car off the end of Moturoa Wharf. According to urban legend, when they recovered her body they found a note in a Ziploc bag which said, ‘The captain must go down with her ship.’

  ‘That was some time ago, Rachael. Everyone has tried —’ she paused, ‘— to move on.’

  ‘Fine. Good. I’m happy for everyone. But all I did was mention Mr Tramble and you clam up, play the Old Timer’s card.’

  ‘Don’t joke about Alzheimer’s. You know about your uncle.’

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘Mr Tramble, okay. What do you want me to say? That I find it hard to believe he could work alongside those perverts and not suspect anything? That he’s better off mopping the floors of a bank than looking after children?’

  ‘No one knew, Mum. I spent a year with Mr Drewe.’

  ‘You w
ere only young.’

  ‘Maybe so. But —’

  ‘Everyone feels hard done by. Some people have borne more of the brunt than others.’

  What my mother wasn’t saying, but made clear enough, was that she wouldn’t be surprised if Mr Tramble had, at one time or another, abused children himself.

  I left my parents’ house feeling upset with my mother, sorry for Mr Tramble and all the other St Stephen’s teachers, but unable to shake the image of Eric Tramble’s crimson lips.

  At work on Monday I went out of my way to talk to Eric, but didn’t run into him in any of his usual haunts. On Tuesday I decided to knock on his door and offer him some club sandwiches left over from a lunch meeting with the automatons from Corporate. Again, when I came up to the door marked Facilities, I heard music. This time I was sure it was not the radio. It was too tinny, too simple. It sounded like a music box. I imagined Mr Tramble in there, holding a baby blue music box in his hands like a sapling for repotting, the milk-skinned ballerina slowly pirouetting atop. It was an image I knew to be irrational, but I couldn’t bring myself to knock on the door on the slim chance that would be what I saw. I went to the lunchroom, threw the sandwiches in the bin and covered them with four half-scrunched paper towels.

  Della Finnegan was not in the phone book. I looked up Della Fergusson, in case the improbable had happened and she and Mim had married, but struck out there as well. For all my fantasies about slipping back into New Plymouth and having a ready-made network of friends, I felt much the same as I had in Boston those eighteen months before latching on to Spencer. Everyone my age in town seemed to have come from somewhere smaller: Waitara, Opunake, Eltham. Everyone who grew up in New Plymouth seemed to have moved on to somewhere bigger: Hamilton, Melbourne, Yokohama. I harboured the slight hope that soon they would backflip as I had and begin to yearn for New Plymouth, for the sight of the surf breaking along Fitzroy Beach, for a loaf of Yarrows toast slice. That Della and Mim and anyone else with a half-familiar face and a birthday after 1975 would make the first adult decision of their lives and come home. Though the longer I spent as an outcast in my hometown, the more I wondered if Spencer had been right. Maybe I had been scared. But of what? Spending the rest of my life with him and his ceaseless sketching (‘I’m an architect, babe, it’s what I do’)? Spending it with someone who was oblivious to Crowded House, who thought the haka was good for a laugh, and seemed unwilling to accept that I would continue to call sweet potatoes kumara until the day I died?

  I went to the William Bryan for a glass of wine one night and ended up bringing someone back to my bedsit. My head resting on the soft part of his shoulder, I asked about St Stephen’s. Where was he when the scandal broke? (Te Awamutu.) Did it make the national news? (He had a vague recollection.)

  I told him about when we went to Rotorua for camp. Three classes of us. Both Standard Three classes (Mr Tramble’s and Mrs Chapman’s) and Mr Lewis’s Standard Two class. It was the first school camp where we actually left New Plymouth. The year before we had camped in the school hall; we drank mugs of Milo in the staffroom and watched E.T. on video.

  The first day in Rotorua was spent at Hell’s Gate, inspecting the mud pools, counting down until the geysers erupted, holding our noses until our nostrils hurt. The next day we went to the lake front and skimmed stones for what seemed like forever. In the afternoon we went to Leisure World and rode the hydroslides. All the boys were in fits over the Black Hole. After pushing off, you were plunged into complete darkness and shot straight down, then buffeted from side to side until you emerged into the light, made involuntary mole-faces and ungracefully entered the splash pool. Della refused to do it, even if I promised to go with her. I remember her holding my hand the whole afternoon, even down the blue hydroslide, which was the tamest.

  We were not the only children there. There were locals. Boys and girls about our age. Their togs too tight or too loose, never with a towel. They didn’t seem to belong to a school group despite it being a school day. They ran everywhere, from the slides to the video arcade to the mini golf, where they coughed loudly during people’s backswings.

  Della took me over to watch the bumper boats. Around three o’clock we returned to the base of the hydroslide tower to find a crowd had gathered, all St Stephen’s students. Mr Tramble was there in the middle, Mrs Chapman off to the side, Mr Lewis nowhere to be seen. From someone on the edge of the crowd we got the story. One of the locals claimed he had left razor blades in the Black Hole. Another had told some of our boys to ‘Fuck off back to Palmerston North’. Mr Tramble was trying to dissuade the boys from going over to the locals with their mini-golf putters swinging.

  ‘It’s all talk,’ he said, his hands resting on his hips. The image I see when I remember this scene may be a pastiche of eighties fashion crimes, but it has Mr Tramble in a stretched white T-shirt, a picture of Snoopy playing soccer on the front. On his bottom half: blue Speedos. Across his nose and cheekbones: fluorescent yellow zinc.

  ‘But Nick got cut,’ Johnny Nuku said. It could have been two other boys, perhaps from another class, but Nick and Johnny seem to have secured speaking parts in most of my memories from St Stephen’s.

  ‘Let me see,’ Mr Tramble asked.

  Della and I tiptoed to see over the shoulders of the kids in front of us. I imagined Nick holding out his calf, cut open as if it was a leg of lamb at the butcher’s, but we only heard Mr Tramble say, ‘That’s not a cut. It’s just a scratch.’

  He tried reasoning with the crowd. He asked how the boy could have affixed razor blades in the Black Hole, wouldn’t they wash out? But no one was satisfied.

  Again his hands found their way to his hips. An expression crossed his face which, with hindsight, I now realise was delight. He enjoyed being the centre of attention. He was playing auctioneer again. He stripped off his white T-shirt and threw it over the heads of the crowd to Mrs Chapman. ‘I’ll go down the Black Hole,’ he said, ostensibly to her but really to us kids, ‘and prove it’s safe.’

  Mrs Chapman’s face, half hidden by a flannel bucket hat, did not vary from an expression of polite disinterest.

  I felt my hand being pulled. Della was forcing her way through the crowd and bringing me with her. ‘Don’t do it, Mr Tramble,’ she said, already close to tears.

  ‘Della? It’s okay. There are no razor blades. It’s just something those other boys made up.’

  Della pulled my hand up with hers to wipe her eyes, but I shook my hand free. I didn’t know why she was reacting like this. I didn’t like being there beside her, now in the middle of everything.

  Mr Tramble patted Della’s head, her hair bright and delicate as spun sugar, and turned to me. ‘You look after Della for a moment, okay, Rachael?’

  I must have said yes or nodded or something because Mr Tramble turned and began to make his way up the wooden steps of the hydroslide tower. The gathered boys made an Oooo sound. The girls crept closer to Della, patting her on the back and offering reassurance. Where did this reassurance come from? How did they know everything would turn out all right? Was it simply because nothing bad had ever happened to them — to us — or, as seems more likely, we didn’t yet know how to recognise the bad and the potentially bad: it was all a blur. A plane crash made into a Disney movie with a little editing.

  Della and I were shepherded towards the splash pool. When Mr Tramble made it to the top of the tower, he leant over the barricade and gave a wave, then a thumbs up. I felt Della’s hand clutch mine again, squeeze it so hard I began to bite my bottom lip. The whoosh of the hydroslide was accompanied by the faint thudding of Mr Tramble’s body striking the sides of the pipe on the way down and the gasps and nervous giggles of the children around us.

  Mr Tramble’s body emerged for a split second at the end of the slide, then disappeared into the roiling white of the splash pool. Della looked at me, still crushing my hand, but I couldn’t reassure her. I didn’t know if Mr Tramble had been cut, or even if he was still alive.

&
nbsp; He seemed to be beneath the surface of the water for an age.

  Della began to cry again.

  I tasted something salty and metallic in my mouth. I ran my finger along the inside of my bottom lip and held it out to the world, as if I was trying to determine which way the wind was blowing. My finger was covered in blood.

  Then, at the edge of the pool, not more than three metres from where Della and I stood, Mr Tramble emerged. He stood upright in the knee-deep water, very much alive, very much in one piece, the yellow of his zinc sliding down his face like a cream pie tossed against a wall.

  When I finished this story, there in my bedsit, staring up at the ceiling tinged pink by the glow of my clock radio, my friend from Te Awamutu was asleep. I wasn’t sure what I had expected.

  I continued to hear the music box sound at work. Winter was coming. The sun set earlier. The mornings were crisp. Tinny music from behind the door marked Facilities seemed part of this inexorable progress. I stood at the door once or twice and listened, hoping the tune would coalesce into something other than a jangle of high-pitched notes, but all I got was the image of Mr Tramble hunched over, red-eyed and covetous, watching the ballerina twirl.

  My period was late. I’d never had a one-night stand before and made sure we’d used several forms of protection. It seemed both impossible and perfectly reasonable: how else would the universe punish me for leaving Spencer?

  I left at four o’clock and went straight to Lowe’s Pharmacy.

  It seems there are two key demographics for pregnancy tests: those trying to have a baby and those hoping to avoid it. Anything with a baby, a stork or the colours pastel blue or pink on the packaging were not for me. I picked up a plain white box, black text trumpeting the test’s accuracy while never mentioning what a positive result would mean, and headed for the counter.