by Anne Kennedy
Across the street, I can just see Clancy’s topknot poking up above the tall mesh fence on the perimeter of the complex. I duck around broken furniture and paint cans and tow my fridge across the road. ‘Suga!’ she’s saying. Juggling her cigarette, she drops a bag of rubbish into a wheelie bin, darts outside the fence and hugs me.
‘What are you doing?’ she asks. She’s wearing winceyette pyjamas.
‘Going to Antarctica,’ I say. ‘What are you doing?’ Because it’s, like, the middle of the night.
‘Oh, I just woke up and remembered—’ she gestures dismissively at the bin. ‘But wait, wait, you’re going to Antarctica? Yuss!’ Clancy punches the air. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
I mumble something. I’m actually shy, despite everything.
‘Then they worked!’ says Clancy.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘The tactics! You reviewed the book by Roderick the Dick?’
I tell Clancy yes, and she squirms with delight.
‘And you went to Dean Cuntface’s book launch?’
I nod.
‘You retweeted all their, you know, tweets?’ Clancy takes a celebratory drag on her cigarette. ‘Good for you, girl! So what else has been going on? Did you put a deposit on an apartment?’
‘Not quite yet.’ I don’t have the heart to tell Clancy about the 364 days.
‘Never mind, Suga,’ says Clancy. ‘Keep going. That’s all you can do.’
We stand quietly for a moment in the greyness. Then a strange look comes over Clancy’s face. She has noticed my hand resting on the bar of the cart.
‘Wait, is that yours?’ she asks, pointing to my fridge.
I tell her, briefly, the whole story.
‘Suga,’ she says. Then, ‘Suga,’ a few times. She finishes her cigarette. ‘What you should do,’ says Clancy, kicking out lightly in the direction of my fridge, ‘is leave the fucking thing here. You wouldn’t read about it, but hello! It’s the inorganic collection.’ And she flaps at the jumble of all the stuff people have thrown out, the broken custom-wood furniture, the deflated air-mattresses and old vacuum cleaners.
‘And stay the night,’ says Clancy, ‘what’s left of it. I’ve got the kids so it’s just the couch, but you’re welcome to it. I’ll drive you to the airport in the morning.’
The thought of a hot cup of tea and a place to curl up in the warm flat tempts me. And maybe I should leave my fridge with the inorganic collection. It would be the most sensible thing, at this point in time. I consider it, while Clancy tells me about her new project, a community poem thing on a blackboard at the library where everyone writes their stuff but they’ve had a bit of trouble with people writing obscenities, plus she’s got a great new class, they totally rock. She interrupts herself to ask, ‘So, what about your manuscript? How’d the edits go?’
I hesitate, and Clancy gets it. ‘Come on, come inside.’
I feel a small coldness deep in my body. What should be warm is cold. I have to go. I knew it all along, of course. I can’t leave my fridge, not after all we’ve been though. I can’t stay at Clancy’s. I’m going to Linda Dent’s because Linda will be the one person who will look after my fridge.
‘If you’re sure,’ says Clancy.
‘I’m sure,’ I say, and I smile even though I don’t really feel like it.
‘Take care of yourself,’ says Clancy, and we hug and she clanks back inside the gate.
I’m about to head off to Island Bay when something occurs to me. I haven’t said thank you.
‘Clancy!’ I call.
She looks around, her hand already on her door handle. ‘What?’ There’s a frisson of annoyance on her face. I can see it, even in the dark.
‘Nothing,’ I say.
‘Take care, Suga,’ she says, and goes inside.
Then I continue up the hill—quite a climb, but I make it, and soon I’m dropping away down past the football fields towards Island Bay. When the clouds part briefly I catch a glimpse of the cup of sea that is Island Bay nestled between its hills in the distance at the bottom of the valley. The wind catches me and it’s a struggle burrowing into it with my fridge. The southerly is cold and howling now, and I try to keep my teeth from chattering with thoughts of the cup of tea (hopefully with something in it) that Linda will offer me and the cosiness of her couch and the nice big woolly blanket that I will snuggle into for two or three hours before I have to head to the airport.
As I get nearer the beach, the odour of salt and fish takes me back to my childhood stint at Island Bay School and the little bedsit that Sorrell and I lived in without a fridge. I’m near Linda’s in Trent Street, a short, low-lying street that hunkers down just lower than the Esplanade. You wouldn’t want to be here in a tsunami.
I open the latch on Linda’s little gate and trundle up the narrow path past the shrub-studded pocket-garden, Lost in Space-like in the darkness. The front door is inset shyly on the side of the house—recalling the era of the bungalow, surely the architectural equivalent of Cinema of Unease. But I have concerns other than cultural comparisons as I knock on the bobbly glass, smiling inwardly at my own stupidity. What a mug! Why I didn’t come here earlier in the evening, instead of setting out disastrously with the artists with whom I will go to Antarctica, I’ll never know—and then getting waylaid by the likes of Eric? If I’d come straight here, I’d still have my laptop, I wouldn’t have had to chase my edits all over town, and I’d be tucked up in bed right now snoozing before the alarm, a cup of tea, and my ride to the airport. But I decide not to follow that train of thought which could have the capacity to make me the teensiest bit downhearted. I shiver and knock again on Linda’s chattering door.
It takes me another ten minutes of vigorous knocking to realise there isn’t going to be an answer. Maybe Linda is an especially deep sleeper. Maybe Linda is on drugs! Joking. She could be away. If so, I wonder if there’s a chance I could let myself in. I’m sure Linda wouldn’t mind. We go way back.
I edge into the little weedy concrete yard at the back, and immediately my heart leaps. In the conglomeration of out-buildings (washhouse/toilet/shed) is an empty car-port—suggesting that Linda is in fact away on holiday, or something. Things are looking up. I’m positive that if Linda knew of my plight, she’d let me leave my fridge here until I’m settled again. I wheel under the corrugated iron roof, feeling immense relief. As I do, a big cold drip, no doubt an offcut of the rain earlier, plummets down the back of my neck. I shudder violently, outraged, then laugh at myself for attributing some malevolent intent or at least trickery to the weather. Avoiding the oily, furry patch in the middle of the parking space, I stop and take in the vibe; boxes, tools and plastic chairs are arranged around the perimeter like an audience to a stage. Yep, this is it. Without further ado, I nestle my fridge in the least-cluttered corner between a scarred wooden bench and a bike. Finally, a temporary home of sorts!
I feel as if I’ve had a load lifted off my shoulders and I stand, just being, listening to the wind whistling and rumbling. All will be well. It’s then that I notice a power socket on the one solid wall of the carport. It’s set on an exposed beam, makeshift-looking, but it is a socket, and it seems to beg me to plug in my fridge, especially because as I look at it, I hark back to last night when the weird thing happened at Mandy’s, to do with her dodgy power box and me being blamed. I decide to put my mind at rest.
The shower of yellow sparks that erupts from the back of the fridge followed quickly by a sizzling sound and an acrid, fishy burning smell makes me jump. It’s too dark in the carport to inspect the damage with any reliability, but when I peer around the flank it does seem that the area where the power cord strikes out on its own with umbilical independence has been scarred black.
It’s been a very long night. I pace around the yard, distraught, I have to say. I find myself wringing my hands. The concrete tiles, the opportunistic dandelions growing up between, the shambly outhouses, ripped sky above—all has taken on a kind of personhood
, as if they’re watching me in my distress, in a detached kind of way, but watching nevertheless. I shake my fist at them, at the chairs and boxes in the carport, and pace some more. Even though the yard is sheltered, it’s still cold and the gale, without a clean run, draws upwards. My Antarctic jacket balloons like a fifties dress, and I fancy for a moment that I might be sucked aloft like Dorothy. But I simmer down enough to remember that I could still, hopefully, stay the rest of the night at Linda Dent’s. Dear Linda Dent! Even in my stressed-out fug, it occurs to me she might have a key somewhere, under the mat or tucked in some cobwebby crevice around the back door.
I visor through the dusty window and see plastic toys and tiny shoes and socks scattered all over the kitchen floor. The fridge is covered with wild, crayoned drawings and the bench is a godawful mess. It’s as if a family got up and left, just like that, abandoned everything suddenly for some strange and terrible reason. A clock on the wall says 4:40. The scene is desolate, and I am desolate. J’en suis désolée, I remember from French class. Linda has no children. She is a neat freak.
I come to the unfortunate conclusion that Linda doesn’t live here anymore.
I’m tarrying on the footpath across the road from the foreshore, wondering what to do. The massive concrete seawall—I take in the full panorama to right and to left—is smashed to pieces. Last time I was here, on a beautiful summer’s day a year or so ago on the occasion of Linda Dent’s launch party, children ran along the wide concrete parapet as if it were the Great Wall of China and groups of Italian fishermen leaned in against the scooped-out wall lip and smoked and talked, the emphatic softness of their conversation bouncing out over the water to the scraggy little island fifty or so metres offshore (the island of Island Bay). I remember now, in the news, the big storm, the like of which no one had ever seen before. The wall lies in tonne-sized concrete curls on The Esplanade, as if a stone giant has gone to the hairdresser and said, Take it all off! Now, with no barrier, no line in the sand, Cook Strait powers up and over the high point of the beach and froths across the road with a fuck-you attitude. After all, it’s the sea. The tide seems to be going out, and as each wave dribbles back home, more and more of the Esplanade, once the site of Sunday drives, is revealed. It is textured with a kind of oily sand-art. Some boundary between function and freedom has been broken; antidisestablishmentarianism of beach and asphalt. I look down at my feet. My boots and the wheels of my cart are sodden and foamy from the dregs of a wavelet. We walk.
Seeing it’s five-ish in the morning now and I have to be at the airport by six, I need to make a movie. With no bus, no taxi, no phone, and no money, the quickest route is around the coast. To the casual observer (but of course there is no observer at this hour) I must look like the Ministry of Silly Walks or an Olympic walker as I rock along the Esplanade, northwards from the beachfront, away from the chunks of wall which, when I glance back, look like the Elgin Marbles. To my right, the sea is angsting itself again and again on the rocks below; the backdrop of sky is shingled and opalescent like a pink pāua. On my left, hills climb; I’m moving outside of the bones of the valley. A light goes on in one of the cottages nestled in at the bottom of the cliffs, and the first bird, a bellbird I think but I don’t really know, tolls somewhere in the scrunched bush above. I notice that the wind has dropped quite dramatically and that the air is much warmer. I’m suddenly steaming underneath the weight of my Antarctic jacket, and I stop to tear it off and stuff it into my hold-all. The red dress, held together now only by my hoodie, flutters in the odd, light gust and I feel relief, coolness.
I’m following the coast road as it swoops out to the first rocky outcrop after the shelter of the bay. The neat row of cottages, snuggled up in a united front against the sea, is thinning. The darkness is falling away, and as I reach the point from which I can see more bays scalloping around to the flat, hazy airport in the distance, I notice that the air has gone blue. The tight, shrubby perm on the hills isn’t black anymore but a bluey-green like the Blue Mountains; the waves are a luminous, rippling, metallic blue like a teenage girl’s smartphone; the sky has gone from pink to a soft, cotton baby-blue. Everything is still; the air, the light, me. I stop in my tracks with my fridge. I know what this is. It is l’heure bleue.
I think back to the last blue hour, eight or nine hours earlier, twilight on Lambton Quay. At that point, everything seemed robust and possible, the tissue of the blue impregnable, and everything was still to come. When it passed, there seemed no doubt there would be another and another blue hour, so the change was festive, interesting. But this moment, *this* blue hour, feels fragile, as if it has no substance, as if night and day hang at a terrible crossroads; when it passes, something will be smashed. And it does pass, in my next breath, and the scrub on the hills is now a dull green, the sea navy, and the air has no colour at all. I am suddenly afraid.
I’m still sweating. I take off my hoodie and stow that away too and sit heavily on my hold-all in order to get the zip done up. I have the impulse to put all this, all that I’m experiencing, into words, to write it down, to make sense of it, but it seems too late. I trudge on in the lightening air with the crash of the sea on one side, the bush livening with birds on the other.
A few metres past the point, I do something that I know is very wrong, and I feel the teensiest bit ashamed to even relate it here, but I have no choice—to do it or to tell it; it must be told, otherwise what’s the point of these Acknowledgements, or even of writing per se? In short *Why write?* (I have no idea! ∴ I have no ideas.) So on this occasion, walking around the coast to the airport to connect with my flight to Antarctica, I have absolutely no choice in doing what I am about to describe: I wheel my fridge onto the strip of gravel, the ledge between the footpath and the rocks two or three metres below where the harbour continually breaks itself. I lever the fridge off its cart, and I leave it there on the verge and walk away quickly with just my hold-all. If only I’d foreseen what would happen! If only I’d had a better plan of action earlier in the night, last night; or if I’d plotted days ago, weeks ago, what to do. If I hadn’t stored the fridge in Mandy’s living room for ten months, if I hadn’t taken the fridge from the apartment; it I hadn’t bought it from the secondhand dealer in the first place, I would not be in the position of having to dispose of it.
I tell myself not to look back. There are worse things, people do a lot worse. I won’t look back, I will look ahead, to the airport which is coming into focus in the new bright day. I stop to hastily unzip Mandy’s dress, what’s left of it, and to peel off the undershirt, stuff it (with difficulty) into my hold-all, and quickly zip the dress back up.
Walking again, I feel ludicrously light, as if I might float away. This is right but it is wrong, and a few tears come and I say under my breath, but it stays with me because the wind has gone, Janice, don’t be ridiculous! As I begin the next indent of the coast, I can’t help myself: I look back to the rocky point, and am just in time to see my fridge topple silently down onto the rocks. On impulse I launch back, to save it, my fridge—no, to save the rocks. But there’s nothing I can do. What would I do?
I have my flight to catch. I need to hurry.
I toil on around the coast, and as I pass the next rocky point, the sun throws a sliver of radiant light over the horizon which spills across Cook Strait. I stop, blinded. This is the real dawn. Now I realise that the blue hour was just a passing moment. I’m tried, and even though I should hurry to make the airport in time, I figure having a short rest makes good sense, it will allow me to keep going in the long run. So, at Moa Point, where the coast has straightened out, in fact has become quite desolate, utilitarian, scattered with odd, unnatural-looking rocks, I sink down onto the walkway. At six o’clock (I’m guessing) the first plane roars up from the airport and whines out over the hills. I am bathed in the smell of diesel. There’s another plane, and another.
As I sit on the rocky shore at Moa Point, I start thinking about The Ice Shelf. I haven’t given much c
onsideration to it for what seems like days but in reality is several hours. All of a sudden, with the sun getting me right between the eyes, it hits me that there is one section left. I don’t know why I’ve forgotten it—I suppose the stress of the evening, my sense of homelessness, my loneliness, my terrible childhood; there is a host of reasons why I might not have my wits about me. Reader, do *you* recall the piece of writing I stuffed into my hold-all all those hours ago above the motorway, after the demise of my laptop? Well, no doubt you have had an easier life than me. If nothing else, I’m a survivor, a glass-half-full kind of person, and even though the last section is not half a glass, not even a quarter of a glass, is more like the milky ring at the bottom which has gone smelly, I plunge my hands between the cold zippy teeth of my hold-all and my fingers close around the crisp page of the very last extant section of The Ice Shelf. Shading my eyes from the bounce of sunlight across the harbour, I scrutinise the text. I see, on skimming through, that it concerns the falling of red matter. I am sure that if you’ve been following these Acknowledgements, you will have guessed what is contained in the last edit.
The last edit concerns, of course, the baby. It all takes place at one moment and that moment is the point of no return. Warnings have become meaningless, denying has become obsolete. There is no more holding on, there is no more explaining, there is no more making sense of things. This is what happens: the redness which although it might not look exactly human, is human, is ejected from what might have been thought its home. If it could think, it might even call this place ‘home’. Vacating home, the baby tumbles down a long avenue in a maelstrom of blood. It erupts into oblivion, which is a blessing. Nothingness is preferable to agony.
Our flesh will be singed red and begin to bubble. The pain will be excruciating and we will scream, but no one will help us because everyone else will be screaming in agony, writhing and twisting, their eyes rolling back in their head. The hair on the heads of multitudes will be alight like halos but burning out quickly and leaving prickles like the gumfields and scarred scalps. There will be the smell of flesh cooking, and the screaming will go on and on, relentless, until it does relent. And then there will be silence. At that point, everything will have turned to ash, quite quickly because of the extreme heat—the skin of the people, the houses, the cars and trains and planes, the forests, the mountains; the lakes, the rivers, the sea will have been sucked up as steam. If anyone were watching, they might liken it to an experiment they conducted in science class at school, where elements were combined and left overnight and, upon the student’s return to the sulphur-smelling lab in the morning, crystals would have formed.
