by Carl Nixon
A world full of signs, but can you trust what they say? A clever and touching short story about fathers and sons and reading what we signify to each other.
Guilt pushes Rob into accompanying his elderly father on a long road trip. But when a phone call disrupts their journey, who is looking after whom?
Contents
Reading the Signs
The first chapter from Carl Nixon’s The Virgin and the Whale, 2013:
Also by Carl Nixon
About the Author
Copyright
Reading the Signs
Carl Nixon
DANGER! FALLING DEBRIS
I tell my brother that driving is like riding a bicycle; you never forget. I tell my sister that Jack’s only sixty-eight, that he’s got years of safe driving ahead of him. ‘There’s absolutely nothing for any of us to worry about.’ Disappointment sighs deeply at the other end of the line. Guilt keeps phoning me up twice a day.
I take a different approach. I tell them both that the new Speight’s campaign is about to be launched. ‘I can’t possibly take time off from the agency to drive Jack to Nelson. And there’s Ginny and the baby to think about.’
‘He’s your father,’ says Ginny that night. ‘He’s old. What if he falls asleep while he’s driving? He could hit a lamppost.’ She looks at me as though she has lost something among the new lines around the corners of my eyes. I close my book and roll over in bed. I lie with my back to her and watch the glowing red numbers on the alarm clock change. It gets to the point where I can say exactly when one number will vanish and another will take its place.
‘Rob?’
I close my eyes and pretend to be asleep. Even in the darkness I can say when the eleven changes to a twelve. The baby starts to cry.
In the morning I ring my brother and tell him that I’ll drive up with Jack. I feel like I’ve been suckered by one of my own campaigns. I feel as though I’ve seen the signs, BUY!!! BUY!!! BUY!!!, and rushed headlong in, credit card at the ready. I feel as if it’s the rest of my family who should work in advertising.
BUS STOP
Jack has sold his car to a collector in Nelson. The car is a 1965 Triumph. He has owned it for thirty years. The seats are buffed leather without a single split, the dashboard a grainy walnut. It is parked on the side of the steep street outside my house like some type of travelling museum. The ‘Look But Don’t Touch’ Museum.
‘He’s the one buying the car. Couldn’t he come here?’ I’d asked.
My father had crossed his arms. ‘I got a better price this way.’ His lips had become thin. End of conversation. Jack should write a book about body language: he’s turned it into an art form; he’s turned it into a martial art form.
NO STOPPING AT ALL TIMES
I load my overnight bag with the Air New Zealand logo into the boot. Ginny is standing on the footpath in her silly gorilla slippers. She looks incredibly tired as she holds the baby, moving him from one hip to another. There are bags under her eyes worthy of their own zippers. The baby hasn’t been sleeping well. A persistent cold. His nose is raw from the tissues and he has learnt to turn away angrily when they appear. As I watch, twin creeks of snot run freely down his cupid face.
‘I’ll be back by Wednesday afternoon. Promise.’ I kiss her on the cheek.
‘I’ll pick you both up from the bus station.’
The baby waves his hands towards my face and I bend to him. His fingers wiggle against my lips. ‘Where’s your nose, Greggy? Where’s your nose?’ He touches his face on cue and his fingers come away sticky wet. ‘Sorry.’ Ginny smiles thinly. ‘Be a good boy for Mummy.’ The top of his head fits into the palm of my hand like a softball.
Jack opens the driver’s side door and gets in.
‘I thought you were driving,’ Ginny whispers.
I shrug. I kiss her again and get into the car. The inside smells like Juicy Fruit chewing gum and leather polish. Jack starts the engine, which sounds loud in the early morning.
‘Bye.’ I wave desperately. I am the happy enthusiastic man in one of my own advertisements. I wave BYE BYE BYE.
Ginny holds up the baby’s hand and makes him wave as my father pulls out into the street. Jack does not check over his shoulder or even glance in the rear-view mirror.
‘You’d better do up your safety belt,’ I say. Jack grunts and looks as though he is considering whether to push me from the moving car.
NO U TURN says the sign.
SPEED LIMIT 100
The car has a top speed of ninety. Beyond that everything vibrates and the steering becomes sticky and dangerous.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING DUNEDIN, GATEWAY TO THE SOUTH, reads the giant billboard. That’s one of mine. I’m in charge of all the city council accounts and co-ordinated the entire Gateway to the South campaign myself, nationwide.
Although he has never said so directly Jack gives the impression that I am wasted in advertising. I have won awards that he has only barely acknowledged. Some of my best work lines the drawers in his kitchen.
I lean my shoulder against the window and watch my breath fog the glass as we drive through pastureland that is not scenic enough for commercials. The cows are too skinny, the sheep are off-white. There are too many swampy patches where brown reeds stick up like bristles.
USE LEFT LANE UNLESS PASSING says the sign near the top of the hill. Jack stays stubbornly in the right lane. I glance in the rear-view mirror. There are at least five cars behind us trailing in a tight pack. A white Toyota passes us on the left.
‘You’re supposed to use the left lane.’
‘Don’t tell me how to drive.’ His shoulders bunch up towards his ears.
But a hundred metres up the road he moves the car into the left lane as though he has drifted over that way by accident. Cars flash by on our right and a man with red hair gestures angrily as he pulls alongside. Jack stares rigidly ahead like an ostrich avoiding reality for all its worth. The crumpled brown paper bag skin on the back of his hands smooths out as he grips the steering wheel. His knuckles become a pale mountain range. The red-haired guy accelerates away and I think of all the white lines between here and Nelson. MERGING TRAFFIC says the sign.
FOOD 10KMS
We stop in OAMARU. A lot of the buildings are made of white stone with tall columns out the front. HOME OF JANET FRAME. There are not many people around. A new road funnels cars around the centre of town and slingshots them north without ever seeing the imposing white stone buildings. We have only detoured ourselves because Jack needs a PUBLIC TOILET.
UNLEADED. SUPER. DIESEL. I buy an ice-cream while I wait. We are the only people at the service station apart from the attendant who is still inside and must be all of nineteen. He has a short crew-cut straight from an army recruitment drive. Either that or he’s some type of racist skinhead. The whole place looks like it could do with some increased promotion. I start to put petrol in the car and the crew-cut wanders out to see if he can help.
‘Nice.’ He cups his hand and looks in the driver’s window.
‘It’s my father’s.’
‘Right.’ He’s one of those people who replies as though he’s ticking the answer, as though this was the exact response he was looking for. Silently we contemplate the numbers on the pump as they roll over. I let the attendant screw the cap back into place. I want him to feel that he has contributed, to offer him what little job satisfaction I can.
My father returns wiping his hands on his pants and gets back in behind the wheel. He stares at the ice-cream wrapper I have dropped by my foot. I pick it up and slip it into my pocket.
‘We didn’t need petrol.’
‘We would’ve had to fill it sooner or later.’
‘Timaru would have been fine.’
‘Did you put in the additive?’
‘I didn’t know you needed additive.’
Jack gets out of the car again. He grunts and uses the door to pull himself up. I watch in the side mirror as he unscrews the cap and then gets a small, orange squeeze-bottle from the boot. He measures out a small amount of clear liquid and pours it into the tank. He then uses a clean cloth to wipe the side of the car before he gets back in.
‘I could drive for a while,’ I say.
‘I’m fine.’
Jack had all his teeth out when he was twenty-four. It was the thing to do at the time. He’s worn dentures ever since. As he pulls the car out of the service station, he uses his tongue to push his bottom plate around his mouth. He does this when he is angry or upset or nervous. The white teeth appear between his lips bobbing like whitecaps in a stormy ocean.
CENTENNIAL CELEBRATIONS
On a long stretch of road I see three white crosses tied to a fencepost. On our right the sea is pale blue and flat. At the foot of the post are several bunches of flowers. I wonder how three people managed to die on such a straight stretch of road. Did the driver fall asleep? Perhaps they didn’t read the sign. DRINK AND DrIvE says the billboard. That’s clever. Really clever. I wish I’d thought of that. I look across at my father and see the way that his nose angles down sharply at the end.
I recall a night when I was about eighteen and came home drunk from a party. It might have been the Leavers’ Ball. I’d made a lot of noise climbing in the window. I’d just fallen on the floor and was struggling to get up when suddenly the light was switched on in my room. My father had been standing in the doorway with my softball bat in his hands.
‘You’re drunk.’
He came over, bat raised, and I really thought that he was going to hit me but he just stared at me. Then he turned around. As he left he switched off the light and left me lying in the dark under the open window. I remember lying there for a long time, drunk and scared. I think I was crying.
NORTH BOUND TRAFFIC
We had always planned to break the trip in CHRISTCHURCH, THE GARDEN CITY, although the lack of natural reference points in that city makes me nervous. In Dunedin I get my bearings from the ridges and hills and from the garishly painted villas which lean over the streets like fat but well-meaning aunts. In Christchurch, though, everything is at eye level and I have the feeling that I am constantly lost.
Entering the city Jack alternates between being overly cautious and aggressive. When he believes that the car in front is going too slowly, he accelerates up behind it, hunched and muttering. He seems wary, however, of the cars parked on the sides of the road. Perhaps he thinks that a mother pushing a pram will step out in front of him unexpectedly, although the few mothers I do see with prams seem no more skittish or unpredictable than their southern counterparts.
ONE WAY. Christchurch is a city of unco-operative streets. NO ENTRY. Jack becomes confused by the arrows that bar him from travelling north. The morning cloud has vanished and it is hot. We seem to be in the car yard part of town. NO INTEREST FOR 6 MONTHS. The flags squirm and struggle against a gusty north-west wind. Jack winds down the window, admitting the traffic noise and the smell of exhaust. Sweat rolls down the side of his face and follows the line of his jaw like a tightrope walker before falling into the safety net of his lap.
‘It’s left here,’ I say. But he overshoots the street and we are carried along by the surrounding traffic, part of the herd. ‘Do you want me to drive? I know the streets.’
‘I am feeling a bit tired.’
He pulls over on yellow lines outside a café. LOADING ZONE. People sitting at tables outside watch as we trade places and I feel as if I am reliving my student days, stopping at traffic lights so that everyone can change places quickly before the light goes green. I am tempted to walk past the people at the tables and into the coffee shop and then out the back door.
VACANCY. SPA POOL. SKY TV.
We are sharing a twin room. I lie awake listening to Jack breathing. It sounds like hard work. It sounds as though there is a strong man pushing down on his chest, forcing each breath out of him.
Slipping out of bed, I go into the next room where the carpet is pale blue and the couch has pink flecks, and take an envelope out of my bag and spread some photographs over the glass coffee table in front of the couch. I lied about the Speight’s campaign. The work has all been done. Here are the final images. The promotion is trying to make Speight’s the beer of choice among the twenty-five to forty-year-old middle income demographic in the Otago–Southland area. Traditionally the Speight’s campaigns have been aimed at the rural sector but sales have levelled out over the last year and the brewery demanded a new approach.
Underneath his casually unbuttoned business shirt the model has sculpted, hairless pectorals. He is standing in an expensive modern kitchen with a view of the mountains out the window. In one arm he is holding a baby. In the other hand he has a can of Speight’s.
S.N.A.G. SOUTHERN NEW AGE GUY.
There was a drawn-out debate at the agency as to whether linking beer and childcare was irresponsible. In one early version of the poster it almost looked as though the model was about to feed the beer to the baby but we all agreed that that wasn’t desirable. After the photos were reworked the general consensus ended up being that the campaign would be controversial whatever we did. We pitched it that way to the brewery and they leapt at it. Controversy is worth its weight in advertising gold. The general manager wanted to know if we could deliberately leak details of the campaign to the Breakfast Show.
PLEASE CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS, reads the sign over the sink.
Outside, it has started raining and cars heading north hiss by on the main road. I look at the pictures spread out in front of me and suddenly feel terribly tired. I need some fresh air.
I put on my clothes and slip out the door. TURN LEFT says the sign at the intersection. Feeling deliberately contrary, I turn right and walk down to the corner. I think about Ginny. Although I haven’t said this to her face, she clearly hasn’t been right since the baby was born. It’s as though she is seeing the world through a sheet of glass. Her reactions to everything that I say are so slow. There is no enthusiasm any more. She reminds me of that magician I saw on TV who encased himself in ice for days and days.
I have been randomly walking, enjoying the way that the movement irons out the cricks from the long drive. But when I look around I see that I am lost. How did I get here? Was it a left or a right here? And because I’m going back if it was a left now, it would have been a right then. There is no one around to ask.
I follow the street signs looking for something familiar — a name that I can hold on to.
‘Are you okay, mate?’ A big guy in a singlet top has come out of his gate. He is holding a black rubbish bag in one hand.
‘Actually, I’m a bit lost. I’m looking for the Hereford Motel.’
‘Hereford Street is two over. That way.’ He points his chin down the road. ‘Take care, eh.’
‘Thanks.’
When I go back into the motel bedroom it is very quiet. I stand in the doorway, thinking that my father has died. He has slipped off quietly in his sleep. I stand there for several minutes but am still not sure how I feel.
‘Rob?’
‘Shit!’
‘What is it?’
‘Nothing. You scared me. Sorry, I couldn’t sleep.’
He does not say anything and I get back into my bed. We both lie silently staring up at the moving shadows on the ceiling.
KAIAPOI. WOODEND. WAIPARA.
And then later, KAIKOURA. WHALE WATCH. SWIM WITH THE DOLPHINS!! FISH AND CHIPS. The small towns drift past like images from a television show where the sound is turned down low. Jack is driving again. CRAYS! COOKED! CRAYS!
<
br /> ‘I haven’t had a cray in years,’ says Jack and pulls over into the rutted, shingle car park next to the small caravan displaying the sign. On the other side of the road the beach slopes down to the water and kelp floats on the surface like greasy dreadlocks.
‘Didn’t you sometimes bring us up here when we were kids?’
‘Yes. Your grandfather had a bach around the coast, South Bay.’
I have cloudy memories of my father untangling nets which were strung over a fence. I remember a dinghy that smelt of fish, and my sister and I trapping seagulls beneath a clothes hamper propped up on a stick. Jack stares out at a rock, which is like a small island threatened even by the gentle swell. ‘Dad died and none of the family could afford to buy the others out. I miss that place.’ We stand and watch the sea. A breeze toys with my father’s thin hair.
The crays turn out to be forty-five dollars each. ‘Daylight bloody robbery,’ says Dad. ‘I’m not paying that. We used to catch ten in one pot.’
‘My shout.’
‘Don’t be silly. It’s a waste of good money.’
‘I want to. I haven’t had a cray in years.’
I buy a cray. It comes wrapped in newspaper like fish and chips. Dad and I cross the railway track and walk down to the shingle beach. We sit and watch surfers paddling out to sea like shiny black seals in their wetsuits. Actually, there are a few seals sitting on the rocks. We get a good whiff of them on the wind. I unwrap the cray. It is bright orange. We haven’t got any forks so I break it apart with my hands and we pick the moist white flesh out of the shell.
‘It’s good,’ says Jack.
He nods up at the road. That’s where that kid was hit by the train.’
‘Kid?’
‘Don’t you watch the news?’
