From Under the Overcoat (22 page)

Then he’s back beside her.

‘Pete, I heard you talking to Lucy before.’

‘Oh yeah?’ She can’t see his face, just the silhouette. He crouches down, rearranges the wood and paper.

‘Are you leaving Tok?’

Pete laughs.

‘What does that mean? Yes or no?’

‘Christ, Ronnie. We’re in the middle of a party here.’

‘But why say that? You’ve never said anything like that to me. Yet you spill your guts to a total stranger. So are you leaving me?’ Ronnie’s determined not to cry.

‘You want to know why I’ve never talked to you like that, Ronnie?’

Ronnie doesn’t know what to say. They’ve been together forever but she doesn’t know Pete. She doesn’t know anything.

‘Didn’t think so,’ says Pete.

They slip out the door. Outside, Pete lights a twig and throws it through the bedroom window.

The fire takes quickly — the timber is dry after weeks of no rain. The flames dart out of the windows. Ronnie can hear crashing from within as timber collapses.

For the moment, just this moment, the little house is a greater spectacle than the mill behind it. Their friends stand silent, staring. Their mouths hang open.

BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE.

Sandy gives one last strum on her guitar, then rips it up over her head. She’s laughing madly and there’s Jack, right behind her, grinning and stomping his feet. Sandy throws her invisible instrument towards the blazing house.

In the black night, everyone’s dancing like crazy.

Lucy’s standing next to Ronnie. Her eyes are shining. Liam’s behind Lucy, arms around her waist, grinning, talking into her ear.

‘This is how we party, here in Tokoroa,’ Liam shouts. ‘Eh, Ronnie? This is how we do things here.’

‘This is how we do things here,’ says Ronnie. She won’t look at Lucy, at those excited, knowing eyes.

The house is fully ablaze, crumbling. So fragile, thinks Ronnie. Like matchsticks. She can hear, in the distance, the fire siren.

THE BLEEDING STARTS JUST
after the fire engine gets to the top of the track. A stabbing pain, warmth spreading between her legs. She touches her jeans, holds her hand up to the flicker of the flames. The light’s not great but the red is unmistakeable.

Baby
.

Baby baby. Oh
…

In the crazy excitement, it’s easy to slip away to her car. Sobbing, she crouches on the ground, her hands to her groin.

In the back seat there’s a pile of her clothes, her toiletries, the last of the stuff to go into town. There’s a plastic bottle full of water rolling around under the seat. She cleans herself up as best she can in the dark then she gropes around until she finds a packet of pads. There’s another pair of jeans
somewhere too. In the darkness she feels for the denim and pulls them on. She’s crying so hard she’s choking.

In the distance, everyone claps and cheers the firemen as they train their hoses on the burning house.

THE GREY BEFORE DAWN
creeps up behind her. She’s sitting alone on the red leather seat, looking at the mill. The last of the firemen have gone, half-hearted smoke signals from the burnt-out house are no match for the massive black plumes belching out of the smokestacks across the highway.

From here she can see tiny vehicles on the main road slowing down, turning right onto the Kinleith road. Their tail lights fade, but from the opposite direction the headlights become brighter. The night shift has finished; the day shift begins.

Some of their friends drove back to town, once the fire was out. Most of them are asleep in their cars along the driveway. Ronnie doesn’t know where Pete is.

She breathes in deeply, breathes out. She tries to break it down — timber, chemicals and vegetation — but really, it’s impossible. She tries again. There is nothing to smell, nothing at all.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN
THE ANTIPODES

B
ack in the beginning, Joe and I loved an argument. We’d debate anything, anywhere. In the school staff room, at drinks after work. It was exhilarating — yes, that’s the right word for how things were then. People around us started to notice. We’d be bickering about some terrifically important issue, such as whether teabag paper gave you cancer (me negative, Joe therefore affirmative). After a bit, everyone else would be grinning.
There they are. At it again
, they said.

Eventually — at the pub one Friday night — someone said,
Just get a room, you two
. I pretended I had no idea what they meant, until Joe leaned forward and kissed me.

That was five years ago, in London. A few weeks later, we moved in together.

We were very happy indeed in our funny, contradictory way. What am I saying. We were crazy about each other.

Then, one night, a terrible thing happened. I got drunk at a party and accidentally slept with someone. By slept with, I mean had sex. By accidentally, I mean there was no intention to do it and there was immediate self-disgust afterwards. A genuine mortifying accident, with drink totally to blame.

I didn’t tell Joe, but somehow he found out. So he slept with someone too. Not straight away — but eventually that’s what happened. And he did tell me. Forlornly, with a great deal of dramatic sighing, a week later.

‘Retaliation,’ he said, his head hanging low over his coffee cup. ‘That’s all it was, Ellen. I’m ashamed to say it, but it was the only way I could cope with what you did.’ His lovely dark fringe flopped over his eyes. His face was an awful grey colour.

‘Fair enough,’ I replied. It wasn’t fair, not at all, but I wasn’t in a position to argue with the logic.

Days and months passed. We soldiered on. Then one night, Joe slept with someone else. Not the same person he slept with before, which I suppose was something. Or not.

‘I thought we were already even,’ I said, when I stopped crying.

‘We were never even, Ellen,’ Joe replied. ‘Because you strayed first, your transgression was far greater than mine. All I did was catch up, the first time.’

‘But then we were even. One each,’ I said.

‘To be properly even,’ he said, ‘I had to inflict the same pain on you as you did on me. The pain that comes with being one
down, the pain of having to forgive. Not the equitable pain of even stevens. Now, in fact, we are even, because you have to forgive me for one extra thing. As I did you, that first time.’

‘But the only way you said you
could
forgive me was by getting even. Remember?’ I said.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Joe said. ‘Doesn’t matter
how
I forgave you. You’re failing, Ellen, to see things from my perspective. Which tells me you never understood the hurt you caused in the first place.’

‘You’ve been unfaithful to me twice. I’ve been unfaithful to you once. How can this possibly be even?’

‘From where I stand, it’s even,’ he said.

Time went by. Things were different between us. We still argued all the time, but the arguments segued effortlessly into hurtful insults. One day we had a really big fight. It started out as a discussion about recycling — whether it actually created more landfill than normal rubbish. This was exactly the type of delicious debate we used to get off on. But the argument took a sour detour into accusations of selfishness.

We both said some terrible things. For example, I told Joe I had brought us back to level scores on the infidelity count. This was a lie; I hadn’t had sex with anyone else. But just letting Joe think I’d been unfaithful was enough to put me in pain deficit. Or was it credit. I had no idea.

Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. He called me a slut and picked up the globe from the bookshelf. For a minute I thought he was going to throw it at me. But instead, his left index finger found England. He manoeuvred the globe so his right index finger was on the polar opposite. He held the globe aloft.

‘This is as far away from you as I could possibly get,’ he said, glaring at me. His eyes were red and the globe wobbled between his fingers like a speared puffer fish. ‘Any further, I’d be on my way back to you. This is where I’m going.’

I could see the underbelly of the globe. Joe couldn’t. His destination was near the Antarctic. There appeared to be no land under his pointing finger. It was a huge globe and most of the little islands were marked on it. I bent down and looked closely.

‘Bollons Island,’ I read. ‘Fancy that. The antipode of home. Good luck to you there, Joe.’

‘How typical,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘That you would assume here to be home, and Bollons Island to be the antipode.’

‘Here
is
home. It’s where we live. And Bollons is therefore the antipode.’

‘Not if you live on Bollons Island.
Here
becomes the antipode.’

‘I doubt anyone lives on Bollons Island.’ I bent down and squinted again at the underside of the globe. It was hard to tell how big the place was. But it was a lot smaller than Gibraltar, going on the size of the dot.

Joe spun the globe upside down (though he would probably say right side up). He traced a line north.

‘What have we got here?’ he said. ‘Bollons Island. Bracket New Zealand bracket.’

I smiled. Joe was full of it. But there and then, while I swallowed my tears and tried to convince him I’d lied about my second infidelity, he picked up the telephone and bought a ticket to New Zealand.

EMAIL SUITED OUR RELATIONSHIP,
such as it was after Joe left. We got some of that old combative spark back, via smiley faces and the other emoticons available. We shared news of our day-to-day doings in real time — me hunched over the computer in the early evening, him half a day earlier, his time.

I thought it was half a day later — you’d assume, wouldn’t you, that English time would be ahead of New Zealand’s. I’d always thought that was the point of Greenwich Mean Time. It turned out I was wrong about that; it was one of the few things we disagreed on that wasn’t open to interpretation. So yes. Half a day earlier. His morning, my evening the previous day.

Joe lived in Auckland. He’d found a teaching job there. Some months on, he suggested I visit him.

‘Just for a look,’ he wrote. ‘Come and see what life is like down under.’

I smiled when I read that.

‘Down under
what
, Joe? Prepositions require subjects and objects,’ I typed.

‘Fuck off you,’ he wrote back. My heart skipped a beat.

I’D EXPECTED SOME SORT
of passionate reunion, but it wasn’t like that. It felt as though we’d just picked up where we’d left off. Minus any kind of meaningful fighting.

A pleasant détente is how you’d describe it. For the two weeks, we ate and drank and walked the hills and the streets around the harbour, arm in arm. To people passing, we would have looked like lovers. But I slept in Joe’s bedroom, and he slept on the foldout in his lounge. We avoided the topic
of sex. We did not discuss it, and we did not engage in it. I would have liked to. A little antipodean affair, our own polar-opposite feet tangled under the covers.

I wondered whether he’d found someone else. I snooped around the flat when he was out, but there were no signs of feminine influence. I decided to ask him. We were climbing one of the mountains — Mount Eden, Joe said it was. When he told me the name, I thought about Adam and Eve and then I thought, Just bloody ask him. But at the moment the words were forming in my mouth, I froze. I couldn’t say them.

On the evening I left, when he was driving me out to the airport, Joe asked me what I thought of Auckland. I’d been dreading the question, dreading that he would ask it, and dreading that he wouldn’t.

‘It’s alright,’ I said. ‘A long way from home, though.’

‘It’s perfect, isn’t it,’ he said.

I waited. He said nothing else. It was dark and raining. The car tyres hissed on the wet road.

I assumed he would come inside the airport with me. That’s when he’ll ask, I thought. That’s when he’ll suggest I come back and stay. But he pulled in at the dropoff zone, where there was to be no parking and no waiting.

He said some lovely things to me, after he put my bags on the footpath. Some very nice things, about how much he’d enjoyed seeing me again, how glad he was that I’d had the chance to visit his new home. But he didn’t ask me to stay.

Standing in the rain, watching his tail lights disappear around the bend, I felt the ground move under my feet. Not
so much a slip, it wasn’t like that. More as though the earth had tilted ever so slightly on its axis.

MY JOURNEY HOME SHOULD
have taken me first to Los Angeles, then on to London. A total of twenty-eight hours, door to door, stopover time included. But the first announcement I heard, as I dragged my bag into the bright, noisy terminal, was that due to technical issues, the flight to Los Angeles has been cancelled.

The next few flights to the States were already overbooked. There was a plane leaving Auckland for Sydney in a couple of hours’ time, the nice lady at the counter said. I had a choice — fly to Sydney free of charge and make the trip to Los Angeles from there, or rebook directly for Los Angeles in a few days’ time.

I stood at the head of the queue, my heart beating somewhere near the top of my throat. No parking and no waiting. If he’d even offered to come into the terminal with me, I would have phoned him, asked him to come and get me.

I left Auckland at ten o’clock on Sunday evening and landed in Sydney three-and-a-half hours later. Just as fog was closing in on Sydney airport. After two hours in a transit lounge, we boarded the plane for Los Angeles. We weren’t leaving any time soon, but the pilot wanted to take advantage of a sudden break in the weather. Seatbelts were to remain fastened. Departure, when it came, would not be announced.

You’re vulnerable to a certain type of fantasy when you’re strapped down in one place for a long time. While we waited on the Sydney tarmac for the fog to lift, a joyous reconciliation between Joe and me was forming itself in my head. There
was a new home, one minute a terraced house in London, the next an old wooden bungalow in Auckland. There were quite a few babies.

Minutes passed, then hours.

Outside, behind the fog curtain, the night turned charcoal. It was nearly dawn. I stared out the window, trying to spot exact moments of change in light. My head ached. Eventually I dozed off and dreamed of Joe and I getting married. I didn’t wake until the plane was taxiing for take-off.

There were more delays in Los Angeles. I had a five-hour wait for my flight to London. I wandered around the food shops. The smell of curries, fried food and pastries enticed then repulsed me. My body didn’t know whether it wanted breakfast, lunch or dinner. I settled for strong black coffee.

I’d lost count of travel hours long ago; I had got up at seven in the morning — some morning — in Auckland, that’s all I could remember. My eyes were gritty and my bones felt sharp and mean. Outside it was light, I could see blue sky through the windows. In spite of the sunlight, my insides felt frozen. I tried to imagine walking in the California spring morning, but after so many hours in confinement, the idea of open space was frightening.

At the door of the London-bound plane, the flight attendant looked at my ticket, then pulled another piece of paper from his jacket pocket. He checked off one against the other. My heart sank.

‘Ellen O’Neill?’ he asked.

‘That’s me.’

‘You’ve had a bit of a rough journey, so far.’

I nodded. ‘Not the greatest.’

‘To the left,’ he said. He gestured towards business class. ‘Seven D.’

‘Not funny, my friend,’ I replied.

‘We’re overbooked.’ He smiled.

I shook my head, not yet prepared to believe him. ‘Thank you,’ I managed, in the end.

I had never travelled in business class. There were only twelve rows, with seven seats per row — two on each side of the plane and three in the middle. The chairs were covered in soft chocolate-brown leather. They had padded headrests and plush fat armrests and there were big gaps between them.

Seven D was the middle chair in a set of three, halfway down the cabin. The seats either side were still empty. I put my bag under the seat in front of me and sat down.

Serene music played. A glass of champagne arrived. Other seats towards the front of the cabin were filling up, their occupants quietly stowing belongings. The atmosphere was reverent, like the beginning of a church service, nothing like the primal carry-on of economy class. I fiddled with the levers on the armrest and extended the seat as far as it would go. It flattened out to an almost horizontal position; a proper bed. I returned the seat upright, already imagining sleep.