by Anne Kennedy
Eleven o’clock in the morning would find me sitting at the same study window with coffee, looking out at the same view in its daytime garb of dappled green and khaki, of military camouflage. This was the life! In the afternoon (which, come to think of it, was only an hour later, but days spent alone are strangely long) I’d find myself wandering from room to room. I’d never been so alone, and I was absolutely loving it. I would reward myself for my morning’s work with a little finger of vodka and orange, then get back to my manuscript.
In the late afternoons I’d pop down the hill to pick up some supplies for dinner from the superette on the corner. It turned out that the liquor store man next door, an alt-rock type with a long stringy hair, liked films, especially French New Wave cinema, and we’d have a really excellent rave about Truffaut, Rivette et al., and once he even forgot to charge me for a bottle of vodka, so engrossed was he in our conversation on Céline and Julie Go Boating.
The evenings were long, and I found I had oodles of time to watch the harbour lights twinkling and plunging. I’d mull a bit. I’d check Facebook, do a few tweets, see if anyone famous had died or if anyone I knew had published a book with a spine, but was usually relieved to find not—I mean that no one had died, of course—and I’d post a link about rising sea levels because I know this really good site that most people don’t know and also about the Syrian refugee crisis urging people to sign up to take a family (I definitely would if I had a house). Perhaps smoke a bit of weed to pass the time, truth be told. Out the front windows and obliquely to the north, ant-like people promenaded along Oriental Parade. On occasion I experienced a slight pang of loneliness watching tiny couples enfolded romantically as they trimmed the shoreline, but when I got out the binoculars, they seemed to be propping each other up in their drunken stupors. What a fitting metaphor for my new state of freedom, I thought; I didn’t need to hold anyone else upright, and I certainly did not need to cling to another person to move forward on life’s upmarket foreshore.
Then I’d do some more writing—nobody to please, nobody to worry with the light, nobody to disturb with the creaky floorboard near the sideboard. The city would quieten, the promenaders would battle home, and I’d have the night to myself.
Before I turned in, I’d check Facebook and post about how many words I’d written that day, and Mandy, Linda Dent and Nick Hall would like it, and there might be a comment like Keep on keeping on Janice!, or, Woohoo!, which I’d like. I’d check the Guardian to see if anyone who’d won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 or something had died, and maybe get a quote that was worth tweeting. I’ve always been polite about thanking people for their RTs. That’s just me. Plus I’d usually post a link about the environment, because actually that’s the most important thing. We’ve reached CO2 levels of 400ppm and when we get to 450 the polar ice caps will melt, sea levels will rise—wiping out cities and huge tracts of farmland, causing widespread famine—the ocean will become more acidic, threatening fish and coral reefs, and all around the world there’ll be extreme weather—hurricanes, blizzards, tornadoes, droughts—and because it’s warmer there’ll be more mosquitoes carrying disease. And so to bed. It would feel like about a year since I got up. A day that feels like a year is an immeasurable gift for any writer.
After a couple of weeks of this, I felt like I was a character in one of those John Wyndham novels in which everyone else has died but I’ve been spared because I’ve been having some kind of operation. I peered down at the windswept shrubs in front of the building, half expecting them to walk. I tweeted, I feel like a character in a John Wyndham novel #whereiseverybody? and waited for the RTs to roll in, but only Mandy obliged with, Watch out for the Triffids @Janiceawriter!!! It’s probably a bit perverse, if I’m being perfectly honest, and I do value honesty above everything, but somehow Mandy’s RT annoyed me. I replied all the same, Thanks muchly for the RT @mandycoot!
*
In the middle of all this, I went along to the last class (sadly) of my Global School course. Clancy lived in a Newtown council flat complex that looked like a slum on the outside—the seventies rustic timber cladding was black with mould—but she’d made it nice inside. Clancy teaches creative writing from her kitchen table and is absolutely awesome. Because I’d been a latecomer to sign up (I’d just got my payout for unlawful dismissal from the Glass Menagerie), and she could only fit six students in her kitchen, after one class of trying to squeeze me in Clancy decided she would open up a second class just for me, which suited me fine because, to tell the truth, there were a couple of really annoying people in the other class. The one drawback was that Clancy’s three boys, who were with their dad on the other class night, were there and Clancy had get up periodically to go and break up fights in the bedroom. I am never having children. Anyway, Clancy really knows her stuff. We’d been working on The Ice Shelf since July. I was looking forward to getting any final pearls of wisdom Clancy could offer me.
She ushered me in with a big-gauge beckoning arm. Clancy has a get-on-with-it manner and always dresses in a Lycra top and sweatpants, as if she’s about to go for a run. We settled at the kitchen table with tea and gingernuts, and Clancy folded herself on her chair. She was lean and intent, and her waka-blond afro was squeezed into a topknot like Māui’s mother, with her red supermarket glasses perched there. I opened up my draft and pushed my laptop towards her, a bit bashfully actually, and Clancy pulled her glasses down onto her nose and frowned at my latest crots, jotting down the odd comment and going ‘Mm, mm’, but that was just her. (Crots are the short prose pieces that make up a discontinuous narrative, according to my dictionary of literary terms, but not many people know that.) Yelling and thumping could be heard in the bedroom. From her folded position, Clancy looked at me over her glasses.
‘You know what I’m going to say, right?’
I wriggled about, because I had a fair idea.
‘Edit it down, Suga. It’s too …’
Too what? I could feel my lips going like the wah-wah emoji.
‘Too too,’ we said together, and laughed, and Clancy went into a paroxysm of coughing. When she’d recovered she said, ‘Don’t be offended, okay? You have to be thick-skinned.’
I assured her my skin was really thick. Then Clancy had to go into the bedroom to deal with the yelling and thumping. She could make her voice sound surprisingly like a foghorn when she wanted to. Tears sprang into my eyes, but I brushed them away. The thing is, being too *too* is also my strong point. It’s actually what Clancy, awesome as she is, will never get. And what no one ever seems to get, but they will, one day, although probably when I’m dead. The noise in the bedroom ceased suddenly, as if a switch had been flicked. I am never having children. Clancy reappeared and took up her position.
‘Don’t be offended,’ she said.
I wasn’t in the least offended.
‘You know what I’m going to say next, right?’
I sort of did.
‘Kill your darlings, darling.’ Clancy laughed, and coughed. She always said that. ‘Kill ’em dead,’ she added for emphasis, but I got it.
I promised I would.
‘Don’t be offended, okay?’
‘Okay,’ I said.
Clancy clucked all the way through the rest of my pages, laughing sometimes, sighing, jotting, mm-mm-ing—the whole Shakespearean gamut. She had to go back into the bedroom to sort out the yelling a couple of times. When she came back the second or third time, she sat down at the table and sighed. I sighed. We laughed. ‘Life, eh?’ ‘Yeah, life,’ said Clancy. ‘More tea?’ she offered, but I happened to have half a bottle of vodka in my bag because I’d been to see a friend earlier and this was what was left and she hadn’t wanted me to leave it at her house because she might drink it, so that’s why it was in my bag.
Clancy seemed quite pleased at this and grabbed two glasses.
‘The ice shelf,’ I said idly.
‘To The Ice Shelf!’ said Clancy, and we drank. After a while she said, �
�Saw you applied for that thing.’
‘The Antarctica thing,’ I said.
‘Yup. Yay. Good for you, you go girl!’ said Clancy.
‘Thanks,’ I said. Because Clancy is awesome.
She went to the bedroom to break up a fight, and when she came back she said, ‘Suga, what I want to know is, how’re you actually going to get this fucking residency? Like, in your hot little hand.’ She closed my laptop, which I tried not to take personally.
I explained that I’d slaved over my application, that my CV was healthy; I even started to describe how the whole impetus for it had been Sago Pudding Night. Clancy interrupted.
‘Your application? Your CV? Are you kidding me? Girl, it won’t cut the mustard.’ I suppose Clancy realised she’d made a dent in my ego—I’m usually thick-skinned—because she added, ‘Don’t go all offended on me.’
I said I wouldn’t. I poured more vodka.
‘Are you sure? Because I know you.’ Clancy got up and lit a fag out the open window, and talked back into the kitchen on the inhale. ‘Tell me, did you get straight into Theory of Creative Writing or whatever the fuck they call it?’
She knew I hadn’t.
‘Or were you waitlisted?’
She knew I had been.
‘Were you in the main part of the Borich Festival?’
‘Clancy,’ I said.
‘Or were you in the fringe?’
I sighed.
‘Did you grow up in fucking Noa Valley?’
Clancy ducked into the bedroom, and I sat listening to the distant rumpus, feeling a bit hopeless, if truth be told. I looked around the kitchen, at the worn orange bench, the wire dishrack stacked neatly, the blue dishcloth hung on a little rail beside the bottle of dishwash, green as a duckpond. When the yelling from afar suddenly cut out, I heard instead the soft hum of the white fridge. I took a breath. It was true, I didn’t grow up in fucking Noa Valley. Thank Christ for that.
Clancy came back to the table and looked at me curiously.
‘What?’ I said.
‘No, you what?’ she said.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘Good,’ said Clancy. ‘Let’s get to work.’ She opened her ancient laptop and drummed her fingers on the cracked Formica table while it came back from the dead. ‘Come on, you crock of shit.’ It whirred and clicked, and finally coloured up. ‘Okay,’ said Clancy, reattaching her glasses. She perused the site like an abseiler. ‘The usual suspects. Dean Cuntface, Roderick the Dick, and Dame fucking Carol.’
‘Phew,’ I said. ‘Thought you were going to say Dame Bev.’
Clancy looked at me over her glasses. ‘Would that be some kind of problemo?’
I assured Clancy it wouldn’t be, it was just I’d had a run-in with Dame Bev once, but actually I admire her hugely and will thank her later in these Acknowledgements. We laughed, and I emptied the last drops of the vodka, being careful not to give Clancy too much because she’s a cheap drunk.
Clancy busily wrote the names of the committee on an envelope, and on the back she scrawled a to-do list, getting quite excited. ‘You’re gonna slay ’em, Suga.’ She handed me the list but grabbed it back to add a last item, shuddering a bit and mouthing silently, ‘So-cial media.’
We laughed and I filed the list in my laptop bag.
On the doorstep we hugged for a long time. I heard myself whimpering a bit, and Clancy said, ‘Do it, Suga,’ and I murmured, ‘I will, for sure.’ Clancy is the bomb. I walked away from the mouldy housing complex, the sound of the boys’ yells and thumps receding, and I felt a jumble of emotions—yes, I was sad that it was my last class at the Global School, but on the other hand I was all fired up. I knew what I had to do. I would kill ’em dead.
To return to the aftermath of Sago Pudding Night: my writer’s retreat progressed. I wrote my novel and things were generally magical, although the apartment started getting the teensiest bit messy. Being tied up with my roman, I hadn’t been as zealous as usual in picking up bottles and plates or putting out the rubbish, plus the soprano of the washing machine on spin was distracting, so I was waiting until I’d worn all my clothes before running it. Occasionally, it’s true, I did look across the room and remember the life Miles and I had planned in the lovely fifties apartment, our little family, calmly living each day, portioning them out, this day, that day, under one roof while everything moved subtly around us, while the universe cooled. But mostly, I was so engrossed in my work I didn’t even know what day it *was*.
With my Global School course finished, I had nothing to disturb me apart from the odd phone call from Miles. He seemed regretful about how things were going, but I wasn’t going to let him come back just yet. I was having too much of a good time alone, getting on with my writing, which is the main thing. When he called, I’d say sorry but I wanted to keep the experiment going a little longer. Miles would make noises—I’d pick up the odd ‘possibly’, ‘maybe’, ‘might’—and then he’d hang up.
I also read the scrawl on the back of the envelope Clancy had given me, which went thus:
1) Review Punch and Judy at New Brighton (Roderick the Dick’s new book) on blog favourably!!! even tho it’s a crock of colonial shit!!!
2) Go to Dean Cuntface’s book launch, Blondini’s, Feb 12 at six, buy the book, get it signed even tho you’ll have to talk to the wanker.
3) Retweet all their tweets, including anything!!! to do with Dame Carol.
Love Clancy xxxxx
I started busily retweeting Dean Cuntface, @hattencoat, who tweets funny little things people said in the LRB, and Roderick Lane, @gimmeshelflife, who’s the most shameless humblebraggart you’ve ever come across. Dame Carol isn’t on Twitter, thank God, at least there’s one pie she doesn’t have a finger in, but she is on Facebook. I researched all of them on the internet and just about threw up over pics of their blond grandchildren at their holiday baches and close-ups of the medals they got for their Queen’s Birthday honours. Roderick the Dick also blogs (probably at selfaggrandisement.com). I started writing a review of his new book which I couldn’t afford to buy, and it wasn’t in the library yet, so I read it quickly crouched down in Unity Books. Clancy was right, it was a shocker. I noticed it was published by my publisher, but everyone makes mistakes. Here is a greatly abridged version of my review:
Punch and Judy at New Brighton, by Roderick Lane (Chook Books, 50pp, $24.99). Reviewed by Janice Redmond.
Roderick Lane is a household name in poetry in this country with two collections of lyric verse published to acclaim, so it will be music to the ears of his readers that he has turned his attention to the long narrative poem form. Punch and Judy at New Brighton is a finely tuned, lovingly crafted poetic reimagining of his childhood. It is a gorgeous, sensuous poem of sea, sand and sky, of roast lamb and warm tomatoes, and of the eponymous Punch and Judy shows that were staged on the very seashore of his youth.
Lane takes us on a magical journey through 1950s New Brighton. He engages with a love for the land that has been in his family since the 1860s acquisitions, contends with the burden of a colonial heritage which he reworks finely into an appreciation of what it was/is to Be Pākehā and distills into poetic form the idiosyncrasies of a certain New Zealand hesitation. This text could arguably be aligned with the seminal film Cinema of Unease. Throughout, Lane’s voice is spare, new and utterly beautiful:
Mum pegs
washing
on the line.
Dad fixes
the car.
(From, ‘The Backyard’)
Punch and Judy at New Brighton tantalises, shocks and surprises. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to all who enjoy the very best of New Zealand poetry. Roderick Lane is a national treasure.
I followed Roderick the Dick on Twitter then tweeted my review and bingo, a few hours later Rod faved it and retweeted it. Yuss! I ticked off the first item on Clancy’s list and allowed myself a small vodka and orange to celebrate.
One evening while I was punching awa
y at my keyboard in the subdued velvetiness of the study, I made a discovery that I *don’t* think was meant for my eyes. I’d paused in my typing, casting around for the right word, how you do, when something made me reach down and try to open one of the dark polished desk drawers. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of this before, perhaps my trusting nature, but the drawer mysteriously would not open, which of course piqued my interest. I wrestled with the bone handle. Surely it was just stuck; but no, it was locked.
How to proceed? First, I poured myself a vodka (sans orange—run out). Then it occurred to me there might be a key to the desk drawer somewhere in the apartment. I flew from room to room, kicking rubbish and clothes out of the way as I went, ferreting through other drawers and cupboards. I did find some keys, several in fact, and each time, I rushed back to the desk in excitement, but when I tried them they didn’t work, and I slumped over in disappointment. Finally kneeling in front of the drawer like a religious nutter, I tried, in succession, a hairpin, a nail file, a wire coathanger, a box-cutter, a piece of floppy blue nylon strip from a package. Janice ‘Fingers’ Redmond! Nothing worked. I gave up.
Nek afternoon when I went into the study and saw again the drawer barred to me, even though the room was currently my own, I was seized with new determination. I fetched a screwdriver and proceeded to prise off the front of the drawer. This took some doing. The desk was none of your flimsy custom-wood; it was solid mahogany, had belonged to Miles’s father before the parents downsized. (Miles’s father even looked like the Chairman of the Board on the ‘Chance’ card in Monopoly—small feet, big ‘corporation’.) I found I had to plunge the screwdriver into the join in several places and in each one to wrestle and wrench, and finally the front of drawer came free, leaving a bright rawness. Gazing at the splintery mess, I realised something hilarious about this episode, and I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before: when Miles had used the room with his father’s swivel chair, in the flat he’d been given the deposit for, he’d been *in his father’s den*. And now I occupied it! I sat back on my heels and rocked with laughter.
