A Man Melting (23 page)

‘We probably look so young there,’ she said, her eyes avoiding the photo. ‘How are you finding life back in Taranaki? A change from Boston, I bet.’

‘You could say. But I like it.’

‘Nathan,’ Emma glanced at the photo, ‘has got a job in Japan, coaching rugby. That’s why I’m leaving.’

‘Japan? You’ll love it.
Nihongo o hanashimasu ka
?’

She looked down at the photograph for an instant, then at me. ‘You speak Japanese?’

‘A little. We dealt with a few Japanese clients at my old firm.’

‘I’m so jealous. I just haven’t had the time. I thought that we’d done our travelling in our twenties. Not to Japan, mind you. But now I feel like I’m going to have to relearn everything, you know?’

I told Emma how I had travelled for six months before settling in Boston, and felt that was enough. Sure, once I had my job in Boston I bemoaned the routine, planned elaborate trips to the Yukon or Honduras, took less elaborate trips to Vancouver and Cancun, but the strange truth of it was that I found more pleasure in settling in the US than on any of my travels. It was not until three months had passed that I realised where so much of the joy of my new surroundings, my new life, was coming from: the fact it was
not
New Zealand. It seemed kind of magic to live in a world without Paul Holmes. Without the latest Winston Peters scandal or the prognosis of Daniel Carter’s pulled muscle. To be exempt from attending family barbecues and eightieth birthday parties. If I wanted, I could dip in and out of affairs at home — the internet could tell me the winner of the latest
Dancing With The Stars
, my father always good for an update on which cousin’s business was about to go under — but it was a choice. I could pretend Jason Gunn and Fat Freddy’s Drop and Nick Harrison didn’t exist. If I wanted New Zealand wine I could buy it from any liquor store. If I wanted to walk through Boston Common wearing jandals and one of those breast cancer T-shirts from Glassons that no one outside of New Zealand seems to understand, I could. If I wanted to pretend I was one of nine siblings, or won a silver medal at
the Commonwealth Games (
The what?
), I could. I could construct my own collage of New Zealand and call it New Zealand, and no one was there to dispute it.

Emma looked at the photo of Mt Taranaki on the calendar on her far wall. ‘Is it too early to be homesick?’

The way I told it to friends and family, I got my job at the bank because they were wowed by my experience in a big-city American financial services firm, the suggestion being that they didn’t understand quite what I did in Boston and I didn’t understand what I was expected to do back in New Plymouth. Only the latter was true. As Emma showed me around, introducing me to a variety of faces and names I would take too long to remember and reconcile, I was forced to acknowledge that I had been fooling myself about my new job being an easy one. The sheer number of rooms behind the Staff Only doors was enough to make the arches of my feet ache. There was even a subterranean level which accommodated a lunchroom, postal dispatch and the building manager’s workroom.

We stopped outside this last door. The sign read:
Facilities
. She knocked. We waited.

‘You’ll meet Eric around, anyway,’ Emma said. ‘He’s the man to see for anything electrical. Anything broken. Except computers. Though I wouldn’t put it past him to know about computers.’ She leant in. ‘Just between you and me, our IT team are in for a shake-up. Bunch of slackers, the lot of them. That’s for management ears only.’

‘Absolutely,’ I said, unable to restrain a smile. It was the first time I had ever been referred to as management. In Boston I had risen to the level of principal analyst
but, at least according to the organisational charts they were always redrawing and clogging our inboxes with, I never had any staff reporting to me directly. Being called management was one of those moments, like your first slow dance or roasting your first turkey, that surprise with their significance. Moments that seem, when they arrive, to announce another step up the ladder of maturity. There in the corridor between the lunchroom and the stairwell, I was reminded of the conversation I’d had with Spencer back in Boston, when I told him not only had I been applying for jobs in New Zealand, but had accepted an offer.

‘You’re running away. Is that it?’

‘I’m not running away, Spence. This decision isn’t driven by fear —’

‘Oh really?’

‘This feels like the first adult decision of my life.’

He looked at me coldly.

‘I don’t want to grow old in Boston.’

‘Sounds like fear —’

‘You know that liver spot I found on my hand the other week?’

‘That turned out to be dried Coca Cola?’

‘It got me thinking, you know. It’s coming. It already shows around my eyes, the crow’s —’

‘Come on, Rachael.’

‘There are fewer and fewer places to hide as you age. You can’t rely on good skin or radiant hair to cover any deficiencies in your personality. You can’t rely on hopes and aspirations to cover for your current lack of success.’

‘You’re successful.’

I held up my hand for him to let me finish. ‘There may be cosmetic actions to slow the aging progress — hair dye, facelift, night school — but everyone eventually ends up bald and naked to the world’s accusing glare.’

‘This is a rehearsed speech. You’re giving me a rehearsed speech?’

‘Spencer. Please. I loved you like crazy, okay. I fucking did. I loved you to the exclusion of everyone. I didn’t go home for three years, for
one thousand days
, because I didn’t need to see my family. I needed you. I didn’t need friends. I had you.’

‘I can’t believe you’re still holding Newark against me.’

‘Well …’ I thought about how the incident had now become synonymous with an entire city. Soon I would be holding the state of New Jersey against him, then the whole of North America.

‘You said you could never see yourself returning to New Zealand.’

‘I did. I couldn’t. But lately I keep thinking about New Plymouth. I see things. Buildings, streets. The terraces of Pukekura Park. A snow-capped Mount Egmont. They pop in to my head and I think about what it would be like to go back and live in a place where I know thousands of people. To stop making first impressions and instead build on a real foundation. Doesn’t that sound like a grown-up way to live?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, shaking his head, defeated.

‘The very things that drove me to leave New Plymouth — the smallness, the lack of privacy — it turns out are the things exerting the greatest pull. I’m going back, Spence. I’m sorry.’

Spencer was right, it was a rehearsed speech; though, as with all rehearsed speeches, it didn’t come out as planned. But it was the actual speech rather than the intended one that echoed in my head during that first month back in New Plymouth. Managing staff in the busiest bank branch in New Plymouth, buying a house, paying regular visits to family, spending weekends working in the garden.
Doesn’t that sound like a grown-up way to live?

My week shadowing Emma — assistant assistant manager I called myself — ended too quickly and I found myself alone in her office, stripped of her things, her personality, and awaiting mine.

I had a lot of reading to do during those first few weeks to come up to speed and preferred to do it in the lunchroom. At least that way I felt as if I was a part of the branch, rather than a stowaway in a barren office. Months later I would learn that my residence in the lunchroom had been construed as slacking off by many of the tellers (though they always took the time to have a chat, tell me about their children in far-flung places, recommend their naturopath, complain about the latest uniform). It was an impression I only shook two months later when half the branch got food poisoning from a platter of California rolls.

One day, perhaps in my third week, I was walking down to the lunchroom with a stack of mortgage assessments when, passing the facilities door, I heard what might have been music. I imagined Eric the building manager repairing an office chair, listening to Concert FM on an old transistor. I stopped, realising I had not yet come face to face with Eric.
I considered knocking, but wondered what I would say. As I thought about pressing my ear to the door, the music stopped. In the silence I lost my nerve and hurried to the lunchroom.

I didn’t meet Spencer until I had been in Boston for eighteen months, even though we lived in the same apartment building. When I finally got around to the
I have a boyfriend
speech with my mother, she told me, ‘Life has a way of withholding characters.’ I knew she was referring to me. Perhaps not me exactly, but the twelve years my parents tried to conceive until I came along. It made the eighteen months just-missing Spencer — riding the down elevator while he came up, jumping into the same cab he’d just left — seem trivial. Still, it was true, as with all withheld characters, that once he arrived his stain seemed to trail through the memories that pre-dated him. For Spencer and I, this was what quickly bonded us. As for my mother, I suspect this is why she and I never truly clicked.

And so it was with Eric the building manager. The four weeks before I saw him with my own eyes is now stained with his presence. His name on everyone’s lips. His latest repair carried out just before I entered a room. His hand-signed health and safety messages plastered all around the lunchroom.

When I finally saw him, he was waving his arms in front of the automatic doors at the front of the branch. The doors refused to open. He was wearing dark blue drill trousers, a brushed cotton shirt that reminded me of my father’s pyjamas and a tan tool belt.

‘This happen often?’ I asked.

‘I can let you out,’ he said, not turning around. He reached for the red door-release button to the left of the doors.

‘No,’ I said, ‘just curious.’

He pushed the button anyway and the doors opened. When I didn’t move he turned and looked at me for the first time. There must have been a long moment of silence, him inspecting my name badge, me realising Eric the building manager was yet another teacher from St Stephen’s.

Eric Tramble: the squiggle at the bottom of the health and safety notices suddenly seemed so clear.

Mr Tramble. Tighten the skin beneath his eyes, return the colour to his hair, double its volume, and it was him. Mr Lewis’s drinking buddy. The teacher who decided it was a good idea for a class of nine and ten year olds to construct a model town in Room Five the term it was vacant. He pushed all the desks together and covered them with linoleum, face down so that he could draw roads and house plots in permanent marker on the dull, sack-coloured surface. He asked us to name the town. We chose Trambleton, recognising from the first that this was more his project than ours. Everyone was given a million dollars and Mr Tramble ran an auction. We each needed at least one piece of land on which to build a house, though he strongly suggested we buy some land on the high street for the fish n chip shops or hair salons or toy stores from which we would earn our living. But we were only nine and ten. When the auction started, no one wanted to bid. We all had our eyes on the high street or the plots around the tiny teardrop of a lake Mr. Tramble had created out of blue cellophane. Properties were sold for a dollar. Then, when it came to the lake-front sites, bidding started at a million. Mr Tramble decided we could pool our money with friends — there were lessons to
be learnt everywhere — and so seventeen of the class ended up in the first lake-front property.

After the auction, we were to construct our buildings out of polystyrene. He bought along his polystyrene cutter: a guitar string through which he ran a small current so it was hot to the touch (but would not electrocute us kids) and could cut through the polystyrene packaging we had bought from home to make the walls and roofs of our houses. But with only one polystyrene cutter and a town’s worth of buildings to make, we quickly lost interest in Trambleton.

‘Sorry,’ Eric Tramble said, in front of the faulty doors, ‘I thought you were a customer.’

‘I don’t believe we’ve properly met, Eric.’ I held out my hand. ‘Where’ve they been hiding you?’

His hand froze halfway towards mine and he looked at me. ‘I’ve been working, Ms Dawn.’

It occurred to me that I was now my teacher’s boss. ‘No, I didn’t mean it like that.’

He smiled and his hand found mine. It was warm and worn. ‘You’ve come from the States, they tell me?’

‘But I’m a local girl.’ I waited to see if he recognised me. Surely someone would recognise me. But he didn’t even ask which school I had gone to.

After that day, I saw Eric Tramble everywhere. Fixing the coffee machine. Installing door-closers on the second floor. On his hands and knees with half the tellers looking for the butterfly from a customer’s earring. My office seemed to conspire to bring him into my life. Halogen lamps blew in the overhead panels. The new shelves I ordered arrived unassembled. My computer screen took on a sickly green
tinge. I tried resetting, tried unplugging, tried giving it a knock. The green tinge persisted. As I was considering sitting down and attempting to work with it like that, Eric walked past my open door and I called him in.

‘I think it’s dying,’ I told him.

‘Reminds me of the old monochrome monitors,’ he said. ‘The bad old days. Before your time, perhaps.’

‘No, I remember.’

His mouth opened slightly, as if he was about to say something. The inside of his lower lip was crimson. The flush of life it revealed was shocking, almost carnal.

He said nothing.

I closed my eyes, tried to forget that deep red. I wanted to tell him that I remembered the day he came into Mrs Shipley’s class, my class, and asked, ‘Hands up who wants to be a part of history?’ That he had chosen me along with Della Finnegan, Mim Fergusson, Nick Haitana and Johnny Nuku. That I was there when we threw the old computers into the skip. But I couldn’t. He didn’t remember me. I didn’t want to sound like one of those people who couldn’t let the trouble at St Stephen’s go.

I was back at Do and Dye the next evening to see Monique.