A Man Melting

by Craig Cliff

  There was an older gentleman with a bandaged hand being served. Waiting behind him was a girl of about twenty holding the largest bottle of sunscreen I had ever seen. While in my office, I had been in a rush to get the test out of the way, but now that I held the box I welcomed any delay.

  While I was browsing the hair products, one of the pharmacists from the prescription counter came down and rang up the girl’s sunscreen. I fell back into line, still trying to figure out if it was next week or the week after that I had my next appointment with Monique at Do and Dye. Then, without having to look back at the pharmacist, I realised it was Mrs Shipley.

  I knew the sudden terror I felt was irrational. I was a grown woman; it was just a pregnancy test. Besides, she wouldn’t recognise me from twenty years ago. No one ever did. But, as I turned and turned the box that screamed Please don’t let me be pregnant in my hands, I prayed the old man with the bandaged hand would stop talking with the first assistant before Mrs Shipley became free.

  No such luck.

  The girl with the sunscreen made her way to the exit and Mrs Shipley in her gleaming white pharmacist’s smock gave me a warm customer service smile. I placed the pregnancy test on the counter, not really looking at it, nor at Mrs Shipley.

  ‘Rachael Dawn,’ she said.

  I looked up at her eyes and found them fixed upon my name badge. Of all the things …

  ‘Rachael Dawn,’ she repeated, the cogs still turning in her head, then something clicked and genuine warmth flushed through her features. ‘I heard you were overseas.’

  I felt like crying: a mixture of misery over my uncertain maternal state and joy that she had heard about me within the last decade. ‘I was. For six years. I’m back now.’

  ‘And working down the road, I see. I’m a customer, you know.’

  ‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘If you’re ever looking to refinance, ask for the assistant manager.’

  ‘Is that you? Oh, how wonderful. Is Eric still there? Eric Tramble?’

  I nodded. Her mouth seemed to swallow her bottom lip.

  ‘He doesn’t remember me,’ I said, unsure where this candour was coming from.

  ‘You might be surprised. He was a proud man.’ The way she said proud made it sound like an insult. Perhaps it was the past tense, the implication that pride comes before a fall — the most Taranaki of adages. I thought of the daughter she didn’t send to St Stephen’s.

  I was about to ask if she ever suspected Eric Tramble had been involved with Lewis and Drewe when she picked up my pregnancy test. ‘Trying, are we?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  She swiped the barcode and I handed over a twenty.

  ‘Well, best of luck, Rachael,’ she said, handing back my change. ‘It’s a twisty-turny road, this life.’ She placed her hand on my upper arm and rubbed it gently. I knew then that she understood as well as I did what that pregnancy test meant.

  When I got back to my bedsit, I couldn’t face taking the test. I lay on my bed watching Serendipity on DVD for the twenty-fifth time and finished a packet of double chocolate Mallowpuffs.

  My period arrived.

  False alarm, everyone.

  Noneed for the pregnancy test.

  No need to get all worked up.

  But something of that gnawed-at feeling remained.

  All this time, I was unaware of the postcards Spencer was sending me. He sent them to my parent’s place as that was the only postal address he had and my mother, in all her wisdom, had decided not to pass them on to me. Instead they sat in the top drawer of her beside cabinet. When I stumbled across them — my father had sent me to find spare batteries for the television remote — my first thought was that I had sent these postcards to my parents. The images were all of Boston. The gleaming golden dome of the Old State House. The USS Constitution. Trinity Church. Bunker Hill. Paul Revere’s House. My mum preferred postcards of floral clocks or cityscapes at night. But for me, each image had charm. A memory, or the sense of a memory, from the time I wasn’t quite a tourist, wasn’t quite a local.

  I turned the postcards over. They were all addressed to me, but with no heartfelt pleas that I return. No words begging my forgiveness. No blather about the weather. Just sketches. A bowl of clam chowder in blue ink on the back of a postcard of Quincy Market. Two pencilled swans, their necks making a love heart; a photo of the swan boats from the public gardens on the reverse.

  I had never given my mother the full story of what had happened with Spencer, although I had used the words ‘a clean break’ more than once. But still.

  ‘You had no right, Mum.’

  ‘You were still settling back in. It didn’t seem right, him trifling with you.’

  ‘He wasn’t trifling.’ I held up a postcard of Fenway Park. On the back Spencer had drawn a fanged monster in green permanent marker. Below this he wrote: Who is the Green Monster? ‘It’s an in-joke,’ I told my mother. They were all in-jokes. Little tugs at the hem of my skirt:

  Remember this?

  Weren’t we good together?

  Didn’t Boston feel like home?

  ‘From what I’ve gathered, Rachael, he has no right to joke around.’

  I shuffled the stack of postcards again. A less than stunning view of the East Side from across the Charles with a tiny white arrow, unnoticed on my first flick through, glued above our apartment building. On the reverse: a stick figure with long feet riding the down elevator while a pig-tailed stick figure rode up.

  I looked at my mother and realised she would never understand.

  I drove around New Plymouth that afternoon with the postcards stashed in my glovebox. I couldn’t face returning to my bedsit and the town seemed devoid of wonder. The mountain, the beaches, the clock tower — without someone to share these things, to help build new memories and in-jokes, they were hard candies with the gooey centre sucked out. What is one’s sense of home, I decided, but a series of in-jokes?

  The only thing left of interest in New Plymouth was Mr Tramble. Just as I had come to accept the guilt of Lewis and Drewe with time, it seemed I was condemning Mr Tramble. The music box sound had drawn out the bum notes in my memories — his hand lingering too long on Johnny Nuku’s shoulder, his eagerness to dive down the Black Hole. I wanted so dearly to be wrong, for this all to be blown out of proportion by my loneliness and disappointment. But I needed to know.

  Before I could figure out how to get into his workroom and solve the mystery of the sound, one day Eric Tramble appeared in the door to my office holding a blue ice-cream container.

  ‘I hear you’re leaving us, Rachael.’

  ‘That’s news to me.’

  He stepped inside. ‘You’re not going back to Boston, then?’

  I swallowed hard. ‘No.’

  ‘Of course you’re not.’ He lowered himself onto the seat in front of my desk, peeled off the lid of the container and produced a mandarin. ‘Care for one?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  He began peeling, keeping the skin in one piece.

  ‘Is there something I can help you with, Eric?’

  He opened his mouth to insert the first segment of mandarin, and there it was: that deep, obscene scarlet.

  ‘Not really,’ he said, still chewing the segment. He popped another orange earlobe into the bloodfire of his mouth, then bent forward with his hand cupped over his lips.

  ‘Eric?’

  ‘Pips,’ he explained once upright, and rattled his fist. ‘So much for seedless mandarins.’ He made a humpf sound. ‘Life will find a way.’

  I tried to remind myself who I was talking to. This was Mr Tramble, mayor and magnate of Trambleton, hero of the Black Hole, Jim Lewis’s drinking buddy.

  ‘They say,’ he continued, ‘a lot of seeds in a mandarin means the tree has experienced some kind of shock. Extreme frost, wind or animal damage, drought. The tree thinks this is the end of the line. If it doesn’t create offspring, then that’s it. No more mandarins. A world without mandarins — the though
t must break the heart of a mandarin tree. So the tree puts all its resources into making seeds. That’s why the seediest mandarins aren’t as sweet, aren’t as plump. Flavour is a luxury when life is at stake.’

  He looked at what was left of the peeled mandarin resting on his thigh. He picked it up with thumb and forefinger as if it were toxic, placed it back in the blue ice-cream container and resealed the lid.

  ‘Gives me the creeps,’ he said. ‘Thinking of my fruit as human. Struggling for life. To reproduce.’

  I was aware that I had hardly said a word since he’d come into the room. It felt as if he was talking me out of something.

  ‘We may console ourselves,’ he continued, ‘with the full belief that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy and the happy survive and multiply.’

  ‘Who are you quoting?’

  ‘Didn’t I teach you about Darwin, Rachael?’

  ‘You … you remember me?’ I was close to choking up.

  ‘You were a plain kid, and now you are a beautiful woman.’

  ‘St Stephen’s —’ I said, but was unsure what words I intended to follow.

  ‘Do you remember Trambleton? What a disaster that was.’

  I wiped a tear. ‘Why didn’t you say something sooner?’

  He looked down at the ice-cream container on his lap. ‘I can’t even tell my wife that one of my students is my boss.’

  I remembered what Mrs Shipley had said about him being a proud man.

  ‘I hear sounds, Eric. Sounds coming from your workroom.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Oh?’

  He wrinkled his nose. ‘I guess it’s time for show and tell.’ He stood and I followed him down to his workroom. He unlocked the door and ushered me into the darkness. The tube lighting flickered, once, twice, then held. The room was dominated by what looked, in that first flash of light, like a psychic’s stall at a carnival. A table covered with a garish yellow cloth which hung down to the floor. Around the room: workbenches and a collection of office chairs in various states of repair. In the second flicker, the apparatus at the centre of the room looked too complicated for a psychic. Perhaps it was one of those tests of coordination where you have to guide a metal loop around a wire course without touching the wire. In the full glare of the fluorescent lighting, it was even more complex than that.

  ‘For my grandchildren,’ Eric said.

  I walked around the table and saw that the view from the door was of the rear of the apparatus. Rounded, magenta letters were sewn onto the front of the yellow cloth announcing Professor Prickle’s Famous Flea Circus.

  The wires, masts and glass receptacles suddenly made sense. Here was the tightrope, a balancing pole bisecting the rope at its midpoint, affixed by an intricate knot of transparent wire. There, the daredevil’s cannon, the flaming ring and trampoline. I looked closer and the entire surface of the table was cut into interlocking shapes.

  ‘Sit down,’ he told me, pointing to a burgundy-upholstered chair at the back of the room. He parted the curtains at the back of the table, manipulated something, then brought both hands into the open with a flourish. The fingers of his left hand were wrapped delicately around the knob of a glass receptacle.

  ‘Don’t worry. There are no fleas. This,’ he lifted the glass, revealing the circular opening at the bottom, ‘is just for the illusion. Once a champagne flute, now, with a bit of heat and encouragement, a flea enclosure.’ The fingers of his right hand ran and jumped across the surface of the table.

  He must have flicked a switch somewhere, as the two masts supporting the tightrope began folding inward. The cannon, hoop and trampoline sunk down into the table. A diving platform began to rise into the air, stopping at Professor Prickle’s eyeline, a thimble-sized landing pool fifty centimetres below.

  ‘And now, fresh from the cliffs of Acapulco, Pepe Pulga will defy death — or meet his maker — from heights untested.’ Here was the Mr Tramble from my childhood. The auctioneer. The showman. But all of the seediness that had crept into my recollections now seemed preposterous.

  The diving board bent down deliberately, rose sharply, bent down again, then shuddered. Professor Prickle’s eyes followed the imaginary flea up into the air and down to the splash pool, which issued a squirt of water on cue.

  ‘Pepe?’ Professor Prickle bent over the pool. He looked up at me slowly. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have witnessed — wait, what’s this?’

  A droplet of water appeared, leading away from the splash pool, then another and another.

  ‘He’s all right! Ladies and gentlemen, Pepe Pulga!’ Professor Prickle held his arms out for applause, then Eric Tramble added, ‘Etcetera, etcetera.’

  I smiled.

  ‘The folly of an old man,’ he said, smoothing a corner of the table.

  ‘But what about the music?’

  ‘The music? I still haven’t got it right. I’ve another year until retirement, you know, barring disciplinary action.’

  ‘Please.’

  He scratched his head, but I could tell he was already back in the role of Professor Prickle. He flicked a few switches, pulled the curtains at the back and came to stand beside me. The diving platform descended back into the table. Three terraces rose near the back, dotted with tiny but discernible instruments: trumpets, tubas, trombones, saxophones, cellos, violins, guitars and a gently rocking triangle. And up the back: a large gong.

  ‘Remember,’ Eric said, ‘it’s a work in progress.’

  His hand came to rest on my shoulder. The jangly music began. The instruments gyrated as if under the control of bebopping fleas. It was as insane and tonally challenged as it had been from the other side of the door. Nothing made sense.

  I felt strangely elated.

  I never thought I would move back. But there I was, sitting in the front seat of Mr Haines’s taxi on the way to the airport.

  ‘I won’t be needing this anymore,’ I said, and handed back his business card. M.B. Haines — Taxi Driver.

  He turned the card in his free hand.

  We came to a stop at the lights before the Waiwhakaiho Bridge. He turned to look at me.

  ‘I remember you,’ he said. ‘Flew in from Boston not that long ago.’

  ‘Seven months.’

  ‘That long? Back to the US of A, is it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Just a visit, or something more permanent?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I thought I was coming back here for good. But it didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like home anymore.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘What is one’s sense of home but a series of in-jokes, right?’

  ‘I like that.’

  ‘I thought you would.’

  I imagined Spencer sifting through his mail. Receiving my postcard. A troupe of Maori doing the haka in grass skirts and glistening face paint; on the back, This card entitles the bearer to one free joke about New Zealand.

  The car accelerated as we entered the open road.

  ‘Mrs Shipley’s class, right?’

  ‘Good memory.’

  ‘Thanks. You see her around?’

  ‘Lowe’s Pharmacy.’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘And Eric Tramble. I saw quite a bit of Eric Tramble.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ His eyes flicked up to the rear-vision mirror as he veered left and turned into Airport Drive. ‘Sorry, love, but I can’t remember your name.’

  ‘Rachael.’

  ‘That’s it. Rachael, can I ask what made you come back to New Plymouth in the first place?’

  The question my family couldn’t come out and ask: Why would you come back? Are you crazy?

  ‘Unnatural selection,’ I said. ‘I let fear get the better of me.’

  ‘I would have thought coming back required some bravery.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s better to let nature run its course.’

  We pulled up to the curb at the Dep
artures drop-off point. ‘Well, best of luck to you,’ he said, opening his door and popping the boot. ‘Go forth and multiply, and all that.’

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I may just do that.’

  Acknowlegements

  Thank you to those of you who’ve read my work along the way, offering support, encouragement and opening the occasional door, in particular: Bill Manhire, Abby Stewart, Anna Taylor, Emma Gallagher, Gigi Fenster, Kate Mahony, Lucy Orbell, Mary Macpherson, Sue Orr, Tom Fitzsimons, Vicki Cliff, Margaret Cliff, and Marisa Donaggio.

  Shout out to Laura Carter for letting me use her idea for a story, and to my brother Darren for not yelling at me when I blink.

  ‘Manawatu’ was first published in Sport 36, 2008 (VUP) ‘Copies’ was first published in The Best New Zealand Fiction, Volume 5 edited by Owen Marshall, 2008 (Vintage) ‘Another Language’ was broadcast on National Radio (NZ) 2007

  About the Author

  Craig Cliff was born in Palmerston North in 1983. Since then he has accumulated three university degrees, experienced office life in Australia and Scotland, swum in piranha-infested waters, slept at 4200 metres above sea level, tried to write a million words in one year, and learnt there’s not much to do in Liechtenstein. His short stories have been published in New Zealand and Australia; one of them made it into Essential New Zealand Short Stories edited by Owen Marshall. These days he lives on Wellington’s south coast and works for the government.

  Copyright

  The assistance of Creative New Zealand is gratefully acknowledged by the publisher.

  A VINTAGE BOOK published by Random House New Zealand, 18 Poland Road, Glenfi eld, Auckland, New Zealand

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