by Carl Nixon
‘Must have missed it.’
‘A surfer crossing the tracks in the evening didn’t see the train. It hit him and he got thrown about fifty feet.’
‘Was he killed?’
‘He was lucky. Just broke a few bones.’
When we finish the cray we throw the shell to a flock of gulls that have gathered near us, waiting. They scream and fight over the remains. Further down the beach one of the seals looks in our direction. When we walk back to the car I see the sign which the surfer must have ignored.
DANGER. UNSCHEDULED FREIGHT TRAINS. EXTREME CAUTION CROSSING.
I look left and right. Nothing is coming that I can see.
We get back into the car and drive on, and Jack tells me that he thinks that the cray we ate was close to being undersize and wasn’t worth the money.
WINDING ROAD NEXT 5 KMS.
FIRE DANGER
In NELSON there is a message at the hotel to call home. Ginny picks up the receiver on the second ring.
‘Rob?’
I can tell something is wrong just from the way that she says my name. The idea comes into my head that she is leaving me but then I hear the words baby and sick and blood tests. Ginny breaks down on the other end of the phone and it sounds as if she is under water. Big bubbles of sound drift down the line and into my ear as I stare out the window at the hotel car park. Jack is wiping the windscreen with a rag, rubbing away the remaining smear of insects from the glass.
NO VACANCY.
‘It’s okay, love. Everything is going to be fine.’ I say this over and over, even though I’ve no idea if it’s true or not. ‘Everything is going to be fine.’ That’s what I’m supposed to say, isn’t it? Isn’t that what men say?
‘I took him to the doctor again because of his cold,’ she says in her strange underwater accent.
‘Good, that’s good.’
‘His blood cells are wrong. They said there’s a chance it’s leukaemia.’
I stop saying that everything is going to be fine. Through the window I watch Jack lift one of the windscreen wipers and drag the rag along its length. He squats down to inspect something on the paint which I can’t see while the advertising man in me composes a slogan.
THE BIG C
FOR LITTLE G
THE BIG C.
WHY NOT ME?
‘I’ll catch a plane back. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
Ginny is a long way beneath the surface of the water when I eventually hang up the phone. I go outside to tell my father the news.
AIRPORT 5 KMS
The trip to the airport feels as if it is taking forever. We drive around the port towards the beach. On the footpath people are getting on with their lives as though nothing is wrong. Of course nothing is wrong for them. I watch people laughing and holding hands. There are families with ice-cream cones. Healthy kids drip melted hokey-pokey onto the footpath.
‘What’s taking so long? Why is there so much traffic?’
‘There’s some type of cycle race,’ says my father, who is driving again. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get there.’
Jack’s right. I must calm down. I have to think about something else. I concentrate on reading the signs. OPEN. BEACH NEXT RIGHT. CAMPING GROUND. They drift into view and then are gone. I feel as though if I do not read each one, if I miss the meaning, I will overlook some vital piece of information.
SILK FLOWERS 4 DOLLARS EACH.
LIMITED SPEED ZONE.
POTTERY.
CAUTION TRIATHLON IN PROGRESS.
My father drives carefully past the cyclists who are moving alongside in groups of four or five. Their clothes are bright yellow, blue and red. They wear numbers. I watch 6 and 27 catch up to 101. The numbers are not as good as the signs at distracting me. They move too much, their meaning is too obscure.
In front of us one of the cyclists clips the wheel of the bike he is following. There is a yell and five or six bikes wobble and then go down in a heap. Jack swears and slams on the brakes. The lane we are in is blocked while the cyclists pick themselves up. There is some blood. The whole thing seems to be taking forever. Jack gets out of the car and marches over to a race official who has appeared out of nowhere. From inside the car I can see Jack’s mouth move but can’t hear what he is saying. I can imagine, though. He is telling the official about the baby.
The cyclists who have not been able to carry on and the official all look over towards me. Some of them shake their heads. I feel as though I should be wearing a sign. CAUTION.
Someone stops traffic and we are allowed to go. People watch me curiously as we pass. They gaze in through the window. What are they seeing? Jack looks tired and old. He has not shaved in two days. I cannot imagine how I look, although I hope I am drastically changed. I cannot stand the thought that I look the same as I did before I heard the news. Jack turns right at a new stretch of road which I don’t remember from previous trips. SLOW. ROAD WORKS. The sides of the road are barren except for thin could-be-trees supported by stakes. MEN AT WORK.
So far Jack has not said anything to me about the baby. He has simply bundled me in to the car and headed for the airport, where according to the hotel receptionist there is a flight for Dunedin leaving in forty-five minutes. But what would Jack say? What has he ever been able to say during the big events of my life? Although present he was always devoid of words. Jack has always been a hard man to read.
DEPARTURES. ARRIVALS.
Jack and I sit in plastic chairs. The plane for Christchurch and Dunedin is delayed but will be leaving in a short while. I will be boarding soon. Right now I have to wait.
‘Do you want something to eat? There’s a cafeteria.’
‘No thanks.’ I cannot remember or even imagine what feeling hungry is like. Jack goes over to the cafeteria and returns with an egg sandwich. He hands it to me and I unwrap the Gladwrap and put some of the bread and egg in my mouth.
‘Not as good as the cray,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Not as good as the cray you bought us for lunch.’
‘Oh, yeah. Right.’
‘It’s probably nothing. Ginny said they weren’t sure yet.’ He is looking directly at me.
‘They’re still doing tests.’
‘You see, it could be nothing. Not what they think anyway.’ Jack smiles and for some reason I do feel slightly reassured.
We do not speak as the ARRIVAL and DEPARTURE signs on the screen stay resolutely unchanged. And then it is time to go. I stand. Without warning, my father is hugging me. I turn to him and hug him back hard and feel myself dissolve into the smell of his clothes. He is solid and strong and his stubble rasps my cheek. He grips me and puts one hand on the back of my head. I can feel it warm against my hair. I am sobbing uncontrollably, not caring who sees me. His hand pats my head and then smooths. Pats and smooths. ‘It’s okay,’ he says. ‘Everything is going to be fine. Everything is going to be fine.’
I open my eyes. EMERGENCY EXIT reads the sign on the door. I find the sign reassuring although I’m not sure if I believe it. Who is to say that in the event of a fire or a hurricane or a plane crashing into the terminal the door will actually open, that it will provide the promised escape? There are no guarantees.
‘Reading the Signs’ was first published in The Best New Zealand Fiction: Vol 6, Owen Marshall (ed.), 2009.
The first chapter from Carl Nixon’s The Virgin and the Whale, 2013:
A touching, clever novel about stories, about using them to create your own identity, and about the way they can forge bonds of love.
It is 1919. Elizabeth Whitman is working as a nurse in the local hospital, waiting for her husband to return from war, though he is missing in action, ‘presumed dead’. She keeps him alive for their four-year-old son, Jack, by telling the story of a man she calls The Balloonist, who went away in a hot air balloon and has adventures in exotic countries.
When she is asked to nurse a returned soldier whose head injury has reduced him to an
animal-like state with no memory, Elizabeth starts telling stories to him. It is through them that she manages to engage his interest and offer him a new life … in more ways than one.
CHAPTER ONE
How to begin?
It is a perennial problem. Ever since the first campfires struggled to keep the clawed shadows of the forest at bay, storytellers have grappled with what combination of sound and meaning to set loose among the dancing firelight. Which words should be cast towards the expectant faces?
Or, in a relatively recent development: what inky scratchings will lead the argosy of dark shapes on their way, bobbing in military rows across the calm pale oceans bordered by these covers?
Spoken or written, either way the first words must be strong enough to carry the burden of everything that follows.
Once upon a time. It has certainly stood the test. But I think not; not on this occasion.
In the beginning was. That is undeniably one of the most ancient and powerful openings of all.
Let me tell you a story. No, far too generic.
A man walks into a bar. Unlikely.
But wait. For our purpose, perhaps that last will do. Conventional wisdom holds that when trying to get an audience’s attention it’s a good idea to begin with something light-hearted; an icebreaker to draw people in, to get them on side.
So here is the joke: Balaenoptera musculus.
Admittedly it’s not the rib-tickler it was when first told by Carl Linnaeus back in 1758. That’s the year the diminutive Swiss botanist, one of the first to practise rigorous scientific thought, classified the blue whale into: order (Cetacea), suborder (Mysticeti), family (Balaenopteridae), genus (Balaenoptera) and species (B. musculus).
The funny ha-ha part is that, while the Latin musculus is generally translated from the Latin as ‘muscular’, it can also mean ‘mouse’. The biggest creature ever to exist on the face of the Earth is given a name synonymous with all things small.
Starting with a straightforward explanation may be best after all. It’s not flashy, but it will suffice.
This story takes place in the year 1919 in a small city. It is the third largest metropolitan area of a country, which is a former colony and still a dominion of Great Britain. For the purpose of our story let us call this city Mansfield.
The city was named by one of its founding fathers in tribute to his hometown in the English county of Nottinghamshire. As was nearly always the case, the area on which Mansfield was built already had a name. In the language of the tribe of dark-skinned and tattooed people who had lived there for countless generations the name spoke of an abundance of food, combined with the word for a basket woven from flax. The wet lowlands and estuary teemed with flounder, herring and eels. It was a cornucopia of shellfish and waterfowl. Place-of-the-overflowing-food-basket is a rough translation, although even then some of the subtleties of meaning and cultural significance are lost.
This name went unnoticed by the vast majority of the colonists.
On the day of its (re)naming, Mansfield, to the pale newcomers, was just a collection of temporary huts located near the coast at a swampy meeting of two rivers. Unproductive. Wasteland. Some settlers thought it so unpromising that upon arriving at the port after a voyage of many weeks they immediately upped sticks and set out for other provinces.
By 1919, however, the swamp has been drained and the twin rivers contained between narrow banks. Mansfield has risen to become a thriving city. Its port is the busiest in the country. Wheat, barley, wool, frozen lamb and mutton, all grown and raised on the fertile plain that stretches away from the city to the west as far as the mountains, are shipped from the port as fast as they can be produced, destined for Mother England.
The city’s inhabitants are overwhelmingly of good British stock: English on the whole and some Scottish. (Blessedly, from the point of view of the other settlers, the Irish have largely stayed away.) Most of the citizens are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. They still refer to the United Kingdom as Home (note the capital ‘h’).
The indigenous tribe was only ever small and exposure to measles and influenza quickly reduced their numbers to almost nothing. By 1919 there is hardly a brown face to be seen in Mansfield. This lack is viewed by most of its citizens as one of the city’s most positive attributes, along with a high quality of ground water, well-maintained street surfaces, the lighting of public places and the early and widespread adoption of both electric trams and Mr Bell’s telephone system. Mansfield also boasts excellent sewerage. The tidal estuary has proved to be a very convenient depository for the city’s effluent; it is flushed twice a day.
It may be enough by way of description to say that Mansfield is sometimes referred to as ‘the most English town outside of England’. If this conjures up images of a shallow river lined with willow trees, of Gothic Revival and Neo-Baroque buildings in stone and brick, or men in white playing cricket on summer’s emerald lawns, perhaps a central square with an impressively spired Anglican cathedral, well, then you wouldn’t be shooting very wide of the mark. Not wide at all. There are similar towns and cities to be found scattered throughout the world: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa has a few — think of Durban.
One of the most interesting features of Mansfield at this time is its whale. The ‘Mansfield Whale’, as it is called, is not, unfortunately, a live specimen. (That truly would have been something, perhaps exhibited in a specially constructed pool or fenced-off part of the harbour.) The city possesses the intact skeleton of a Balaenoptera musculus.
This had been acquired by the Mansfield Museum just over a decade earlier, in 1908. The government of the day generously contributed £200 towards the cost of acquiring and housing the specimen. Another £300 had been raised by public donation.
The blue whale was already dead when it washed up on a remote beach on the far side of the country. It took four men a month working twelve-hour days to hack, scour and boil away the stinking blubber, the muscle and stubborn ligament from the bones. These were then taken by barge, ship and rail to Mansfield. The bones were later loaded onto carts at the train station and pulled by teams of draught horses to the museum grounds, where they were painstakingly reassembled using metal rods drilled through the calcium.
The skeleton measures 99 feet in length — using the accepted standard method of measuring whales; that is by taking the length of a straight line between the point of the jaw and the notch in the tail, which marks the termination of the backbone.
Head length: 21 feet.
Length of ‘hand’: 12 feet.
Width of tail: 21 feet.
Not surprisingly, the galleries of the Mansfield Museum were unequal to the task of housing such an exhibit; they were simply far too small. A long corrugated-iron shed was built adjacent to the museum in the grounds of the Botanic Gardens specifically for the job. (Corrugated iron! That most ubiquitous of building materials in the colonies; strong, light, cheap, able to be stacked like playing cards, adaptable to almost any circumstance. It is even pleasing to the eye, given one generation and half a chance.)
The shelter — really just a roof, as it is open on three sides — pushes in against the stone wall on the southern side of the museum close to the main entrance to the Botanic Gardens and is visible from Nelson Avenue. Beneath the iron, the whale — all 9 tons — is suspended above the bare earth by heavy chains.
On the day of the skeleton’s official unveiling, 23 March 1909, the Mansfield Press reported that ‘thousands arrived to pack the whale shelter and overflow into the adjacent galleries’.
The reason for the overwhelming interest was that, at the time, it was the biggest whale skeleton held by any museum in the world. Such a coup sent a surge of civic pride washing through Mansfield. Its ripples lapped against the shores of the entire nation. The ‘Mansfield Whale’ was even mentioned in such august publications as The Times of London and The Washington Post. ‘Our whale’ put Mansfield on the map.
But (th
ere is always one) …
Here at the start of our story, in 1919, the time since the end of the Great War can still be counted in months. While the citizens of Mansfield looked away across the oceans to husbands and fiancés, sons and brothers fighting in Europe, rain has blown in under the roof of the corrugated shelter. The crowds have long ago dispersed. The once crisp white bones are faded to grey. The metal rods have rusted, leaving stains the colour of strong tea around the edges of the drilled holes. The damage is most obvious in the multiple joints of the hands. Lichen has found a home along the southernmost jaw (20 feet 8 inches).
Only visitors to the city and young children still stop to marvel at the seemingly impossible scale of the creature’s construction. For the rest of the citizens of Mansfield, familiarity and the numbing toll taken by the war have rendered the huge skeleton if not invisible, then very close to that terribly lonely state.
Also by Carl Nixon
Settlers’ Creek
Box Saxton just wants to bury his teenage stepson’s body in the churchyard near the farm where Box grew up. What happens, though, when the boy’s biological father, a Maori leader, unexpectedly turns up in the days before the funeral and forcibly takes the boy’s body? According to Maori custom the boy must be buried in the tribe’s ancestral cemetery at the small coastal town of Kaipuna. According to the law there is very little Box can do. With no plan and little hope, Box gets in his old truck and drives north, desperate and heartbroken.
This gripping novel explores the claims of both indigenous people and more recent settlers to have a spiritual link to the land.
Rocking Horse Road
The body of a teenage girl is found on the beach in the days leading up to Christmas, 1980. It’s an event that makes a huge impact on all those who live along Rocking Horse Road, which runs through the Spit, a long ‘finger of bone-dry sand’ between the ocean and the estuary. It’s an event that for one hot summer brings together a group of fifteen-year-old boys and then keeps them linked for the rest of their lives.
