The Ice Shelf: An Eco-Comedy

by Anne Kennedy

  I felt a deep pity for Miles. His passive-aggressive personality wasn’t his fault. He’d had an incredibly uptight white Protestant middle-class upbringing in the outer suburbs. We’re talking Noa Valley. You can’t imagine more of a cultural wasteland. I don’t blame poor Miles for anything; in fact I am full of admiration for the way he’s coped.

  All the same, at this juncture—especially because Miles’s parents had outright given him the deposit for the apartment, and he always emitted an unspoken and quite frankly disgusting sense of entitlement over it—I had no intention of going anywhere.

  I made a bit of a joke of it. ‘Woo, going too fast!’ I said, backing away for emphasis. I realised I was just the littlest bit wobbly on my pins. I must say, I’d always thought that if there was any leaving to be done, I would be the leaver and Miles would be the leavee. The CDs, the bag, the pudding thing, all seemed like empty gestures. I wasn’t too perturbed, even when Miles wheeled his suitcase over to the doorway and stood there with it cocked while he looked at the carpet and said he didn’t know if he loved me anymore, he probably didn’t, and perhaps—here his voice double-clutched for a second—perhaps he never had.

  ‘Even before,’ he added and looked up, finally.

  ‘Before what?’ I asked, and I stared out his brown eyes.

  ‘Janice.’

  ‘Before what?’

  With his big, slightly greenish teeth gritted, and as if something were being twisted out of him like water out of a wet cloth, he said loudly: ‘Before the murder.’

  I felt a section of my face fall away, yes, like an avalanche, but I didn’t care. It was madness. He was mad. I searched back out the window, the harbour, the wind visible in the quivering waves, trees, sails, like a Van Gogh. I checked Twitter. Linda Dent had retweeted my pudding. Linda was a trouper, and a frequent profile-picture updater. I saw she was sporting giant black nerd glasses which seemed to stay on her tiny white face only by some miracle. I replied, Thanks for the RT @heartwriter xxxx <3.

  I’d like to break off here and spend a moment, if I may, analysing Miles’s manner when he said the words ‘I don’t think I love you anymore, perhaps I never did’. We New Zealanders have a reputation for being low-key; diffident, flat as a pancake, if you like, in our verbal delivery. We’re dark and brooding and we’re always second-guessing ourselves, at least that’s how we behave in our novels and films. Just watch Sam Neill’s Cinema of Unease and you’ll see what a complicated bunch we are. The trouble is—and this used to bother me a lot, made me feel a sense of un-belonging in my own country—I’d never actually met anyone who behaved as if they’d just stepped out of Vigil. Perhaps that’s a bad example, since the characters in Vigil are relatively loquacious, especially the wiry guy who carries the dead father back to the farmhouse on his back like a sheep. In My Father’s Den is a better case in point. The protagonists in that novel (and in the film) stand around with their shoulders hiked, looking sideways at the other characters as if they (the other characters) might run them through with a meat cleaver. They don’t say much, as you wouldn’t; the odd monosyllable, sometimes with a qualifier attached like a shaky lean-to. My point is, most people I knew in real life yammered on, full of their own opinions, and having no trouble expressing their feelings verbally at any pitch. In fact, sometimes you’d wish they were more like the characters in In My Father’s Den so you could get some peace and quiet. For years I felt stranded—an alienating mismatch between me and the characters I met in New Zealand literature. That was until: enter Miles.

  When I first met Miles, at Meow Café, a very cool bar that has slam nights, book launches and indie bands, I recognised like a lightning bolt the New Zealand character. There he was, leaning against the bar or, rather, hovering nervously next to it. He was perfect, from his Munster shoulders to his brooding frown to his startled yeah-nah—an endearing New Zealand bet-each-way mannerism. I went over and said hello. He was big and blocky, the upper part of his body dominant in a way I found sexy. He smiled at me, his square teeth little photo-reversals of his square head, and I felt a charge like an electric current, only pleasant. Later I invited him out as part of a dating phase I was on (long story) and things went on from there. As I got to know Miles, I discovered I was not mistaken in my assessment. He *is* the thinking person I first introduced in these Acknowledgements—smart, funny, sensitive, and somehow he holds down a job as a curator at an art gallery in town. But he also maintains a glorious diffidence; he is never quite sure, he is a master of the modifier. How excited I was, that night at Meow, that I had finally met a true New Zealander. Of course, now I understand that my slightly unorthodox upbringing (for which I am supremely grateful, I hasten to add, and I will show just how grateful later in these Acknowledgements) was responsible for this process taking so long. There weren’t many true Kiwis at the commune, for instance. The upshot is, I have another profound debt to Miles. Not only do I understand the quintessential New Zealand élan vital as Sam Neill explains it, I also know how to write characters like Maurice Gee writes them, which is of course a gift for any writer.

  Let me return to the night in question—Sago Pudding Night, as I fondly dubbed it. I could look at Miles, zipped up in his black thinking-urban-person’s jacket (despite the weather) and telling me in a voice as flat as road-kill (a possum, if you could still tell) that he thought perhaps he didn’t love me anymore, and I could say, ‘Hallelujah, I hear you, I get it.’ I laughed. Then I cried. I suppose I was feeling a jumble of emotions as I tried to interpret the qualifiers—and I was probably still under the misapprehension that the Miles-and-me equation was more-or-less mathematically correct. Of course now—*now*—I can see I was sorely mistaken, but that night, as it dawned on me that Miles really was leaving, I have to admit, I did get a bit hysterical. I would probably not have got a role in a film adaptation of a Maurice Gee novel. It’s true that I did plead with Miles. I did dispose of a few breakables. I did unpack Miles’s wheelie suitcase out the window. I remember the vibrant shape of a pair of pants caught momentarily against the pulsing harbour lights. Despite the jangle, I still noticed concrete significant details. I remember Miles’s hairy ankles like tussock between my fingers as I crawled along the hall floor. How silly I was. But it was just one of those bittersweet argy-bargies that happen between lovers, or at least ‘lovers’. I want to add here that if anyone happens to hear Miles’s version of events, visitors to the apartment for instance, I can assure you that none of it is true.

  And, of course, as it turned out, by leaving that night Miles was doing me a huge favour, and the proof of the pudding (which on Sago Pudding Night was a pertinent saying indeed), is the very book you are reading. I don’t know how I can ever repay him, but hopefully these Acknowledgements will go some way towards doing so.

  A few minutes after Miles had wrested his ankles from my grasp, I found myself at the living-room window while he bobbed about in the courtyard with a flashlight, dodging cars and gathering his clothes. As I stood watching, it occurred to me all of a rush that I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do next. Where would I go if—just suppose, on some future occasion—I had to leave the apartment? And what would I do after my course at the Global School finished in a few weeks? For the first time in quite a while—two years at least—I felt a great nothingness yawning ahead, and to tell the truth it frightened me. In my chest, where my heartbeat should’ve been the biggest show in town, a trembling had taken over. Hearing Miles clattering back inside, I ran to the study and locked the door. It was warm in there from the heat of the day. I sat down at the big brown desk. Presently I could hear Miles knocking politely (his lovely low-key New Zealandness) and bleating, ‘Janice, Janice.’ He knocked and knocked, but I wouldn’t let him in. We had a pathetic Janice / Go away / But Janice / Fuck off kind of conversation. I sat in the dark red den-ish room with nothingness stretching ahead of me, and I had an idea.

  I did what any sane person would do under the circumstances: I applied for an
Arts New Zealand grant. My tutor at the Global School, Clancy McKinney (whom I will thank later in these pages), had been telling me for months I should apply for something—if you’re not in you can’t win, sort of thing—but I’m actually a modest person and I’d brushed off her advice. Now, the throes of relationship crisis appeared to have made me reckless. Maybe Clancy was right; maybe it *was* my turn for a serving of gravy after all. Because nek minnit I found myself ambling through the Arts New Zealand site, and, I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw. While not on the scale of Sweden and Denmark and countries with well-educated children and stylish blond furniture, little New Zealand, for all its isolation, rural economy, neoliberal ways and second-hand recession, wasn’t doing too badly where arts funding was concerned. There was a certain gamut: you could get a quick injection of cash to fund a slim volume of poetry while you continued with your little life in your scungy flat; you could score enough to live almost like a middle-class person for a year, burning fossil fuels while you wrote, say, a novel; you could jet to Menton and write in the very room where Katherine Mansfield worked, plus swan around Paris in the summer; and the biggest grant of all was the one you got when you were nearly dead and they’d better give it to you now or they’d be sorry.

  I trawled through the list, feeling like Goldilocks trying things on for size: the big gruff Papa Bear grant, the medium-sized Mama Bear grant, the squeaky little Baby Bear grant. I soon realised, though, being realistic, that the first two categories were out of my league; to get them you needed to have been an arse-licker for years. Hopefully there would be something for me, but, as I scrolled down, despite the abundance, nothing seemed quite right.

  I’ll pause at this juncture to note—and I think this is important—that I’ve never been the kind of writer who busily and immodestly applies for every hand-out going. I believe one should be restrained in applying for tax-funded dollops, and when I see the line-up of B-team writers of chick-lit and chick-with-dick-lit and microscopic collections of poetry who get mountains of dosh for their little enterprises, I think to myself, there is no justice in the world. But I keep my equilibrium in the knowledge that posterity will sort it out, and I continue on my self-funded, self-starter, starter-pack approach to my writing.

  In the den, feeling a rash of prickly heat engulf me, I noticed that the atmosphere in the room was, in fact, quite suffocating. I turned from the computer and did something rare for a Wellingtonian: I opened the window. A welcome gust of cool air floated in, plus the merry sound of the traffic grunting and tooting in the streets below. The harbour shimmered like a stage lit for Swan Lake, while the sun slipped behind the black cardboard hills in the distance. As I shaded my eyes I felt strangely enveloped by the evening, as if the apartment, the outdoors—harbour, hills, air—and myself, were all on a continuum, our cells somehow intermingled. I shivered, inhaled some exhaust and blew it out again. There was another knock from Miles, a last muffled message; goodbye, he couldn’t live with a murderer. (He seriously said that.) I was about to close the Arts New Zealand site forever when, taking one last scroll through the list of grants and residencies, something caught my eye. The award that seemed just right leapt out at me like a beacon—none other than the Antarctica Residency.

  I imagined myself a lone figure in a vast white landscape, made small by the steppe and the distant white horizon, so frozen I couldn’t feel my hands or my nose. I wanted to make the little space inside me which had once been warm but was now cold, *was* a coldness—I wanted to make it normal, and in a white-out it would be acclimatised. It hit me that that was what I’d wanted for some time. Now I imagined myself a snow angel beating my wings slowly, a fuzzy dot having a tiny, whispery impact on the vast whiteness, and at the point where thought meets feeling, everything would fade and go numb including the coldness inside me, and I wouldn’t need to bother about it anymore.

  Coming to from my reverie in the study, I realised two things. One, the knocking on the door had stopped; two, I should abso-fucking-lutely apply for some dollars!

  I considered my chances fair to medium. My CV was looking pretty damn healthy, though I say it myself. I’d already published a little book, the aforementioned Utter and Terrible Destruction, my roman à clef, with publisher Tree Murphy of Chook Books (whom I will thank later in these Acknowledgements), even though it didn’t have a spine; I’d almost completed my course at the Global School; I’d once been the featured writer at Meow Café’s Poetry Live; I blog at janonice.com and keep a buoyant writer’s profile on Facebook and Twitter and also post quite a bit of political stuff. Just recently, a fellow blogger wrote a review of Utter and Terrible and said it was ‘like fine wine’.

  So with all this good luck and good circumstance going on in my life, I thought, Why Not? Why Fucking Not, Janice? I had a brainstorm of inspiration and found myself furiously typing up a story about a young woman who’s had quite a tough life for various reasons and who has this crazy idea to go down to the ice and lie in it like a snow angel and warm up a little patch just the size of herself (imagine if we all did that), and that piece breaks off and floats away and gradually melts but in the process warms up a little neighbourhood in the ocean and that causes an island to be engulfed. Though I say it myself, my concept was quite allegorical. The rest, as they said, is history.

  At one point, as I filled in the online form, I looked up from my pool of light and heard a roller door shudder closed in the courtyard below and the throaty rev of Miles’s ancient Peugeot accelerating into the night. I was beginning to think this little sojourn on my own in the apartment wouldn’t be so bad after all. Miles would be back and in the meantime I would get on with things in an extremely productive way. I tweeted a screenshot of my application. On Facebook my post got three likes within five minutes, from Mandy, Linda Dent and Nick Hall. Back on Twitter, Mandy had retweeted it, and I’d also been faved by @fringefestdweller in the UK who wished me luck. I replied, Thanks muchly for the RT @fringefestdweller, fingers crossed! I did a few favs and retweets, tweeted a link about this massive, disgusting whirlpool of plastic that’s in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, considered following a new follower but decided not to and followed someone I’d been thinking for some time now should’ve been following me. And then who should fav my tweet but Clancy McKinney, who only goes online once in a blue moon. I replied, Thanks so so much for the <3 @fancyclancy. Hope you’re having a nice evening :-)). No reply, but that was okay; I retweeted it. My application had created a bit of a flurry, which I saw as a good sign.

  Although things avalanched somewhat alarmingly after the formative Sago Pudding Night, I soon realised that Miles was right—we had fallen utterly and completely out of love. Erotic love, I hasten to add. I still hold Miles in high regard, and we remain the best of platonic friends to this day. I did experience a certain amount of heartache though, and I’d like to return for a moment to the question ‘What sparks creativity?’ I do believe now—older and wiser, if only by a year—that pain may be partially at the root of it. If that’s the case, I’m forever in Miles’s debt, because without the fast-turnaround fuck-fest he embarked upon immediately following Sago Pudding Night, which really was quite a tawdry laundry list, I don’t think I would’ve had the benefit of going through the emotional agony necessary to be a writer. I especially can’t thank Miles enough for the final vulgar leg of the slut-gala, which turned out to be the one that stuck (and I suppose became, by definition, not-tawdry, not-vulgar, but I will leave you, Reader, to make up your own mind about that). It was this last affair (the reader might also ponder the term ‘last’ in context of a man who has a history of unfaithfulness) that led to the total and, as it turned out, silver-lined destruction of our relationship. I am delighted to report that Miles and Dorothy—of the fifties outfits and Femme De Rochas perfume—are now a devoted (sic) husband and wife.

  The result of Sago Pudding Night, then, was that I suddenly found myself with my life restored to me. With Miles out of the apa
rtment, I took over his study as my preferred place of writing, feeling some relish that this russet, mannish space was now mine, at least for now. Before this, I’d written at the dining table, as described earlier, or on the couch or in bed. The apartment was reasonably spacious, but still, it was a city pad. I didn’t mind, honestly; in fact I found it wonderfully ironic. This might be vital information for anyone researching certain things in the future: that most of The Ice Shelf was written in makeshift liminal spaces. Nevertheless, on moving into Miles’s study, I felt a surge of expansiveness amongst the solid furniture, the wall-to-wall carpet, the purring dehumidifier. I had a room of my own, albeit temporary. When Miles came back, I would no doubt be called upon to relinquish the study because Miles happened to have been born into a family with their mitts on cash. The truth is, no one ever really has a room of one’s own; everything is temporary, all things must pass. Nevertheless, I spread my books and papers around the leathery surfaces and got stuck into finishing the first draft of The Ice Shelf.

  Those last couple of months alone in the apartment were magical. This was a writer’s retreat with yours truly blissfully ensconced. The weather remained eerily sub-tropical, but I wasn’t complaining. I fell into a routine of working late into the warm night, cocooned in the plush burgundies of the study, swivelling on the old wooden chairman-of-the-board chair, shifting sometimes to unstick my thighs. Through the open window, traffic noise and the smell of exhaust—which in Wellington usually blew away before they could be clocked—hung on the air, and that was somehow exciting. Occasionally I would look away from my work, down at the harbour which, with its little moonlit scallops, spread like a petticoat out from Oriental Bay. I would watch planes trembling up from behind the craggy silhouette of the eastern hills.