From Under the Overcoat (23 page)

HE HAD SILVER, THINNING
hair clipped neatly to short back and sides, and glasses with thick black frames. He wore a grey pullover and navy trousers.

She reminded me of a small, wind-tossed bird, disorientated after a storm. Her head flicked left and right, twitching and scanning. Her face was creased and weathered by the sun.
Her eyebrows had been plucked entirely off, replaced by two Harlequinesque pencil-drawn arches. Artwork also defined her mouth, a wobbly rose-coloured cupid lassoing thin tight lips.

They stopped at every row, including the full ones, and the man stared at the numbers above the chairs.

‘Is it ours, Lionel?’ The woman’s voice was loud, east coast American. ‘Lionel, is it ours? What numbers are our seats again, Lionel?’

The man ignored her. He looked hard at the numbers, then adjusted his glasses once more and read his boarding pass. He looked up at the numbers again to double-check, then he shuffled further along the aisle to the next row. Little
bird-woman
hopped along behind him.

On he went, looking, checking, looking.

‘Lionel, how hard can it be? Would you find our seats?’ The woman’s voice was close to a screech. She fixed her stare on the man and craned forward, as though she was going to peck him. ‘You’re a useless waste of flesh, Lionel Jipson. Can’t you count?’ She spat the words out. The skin on her neck wobbled under an expensive-looking scarf.

‘Give it a rest, Mia.’ The man kept looking at the seat numbers. ‘You’re making a scene.’

‘You’re the one making a scene. Life with you is one long bad scene. Where are our seats?’

‘Patience, woman.’

‘Would you hurry up, already. These bags are killing me.’

‘Whose fault is that, Mia? Buying up the entire duty-free shop …’

You reach a point, when you’re sleep deprived, whereby
you disassociate yourself from your surroundings. Unable to engage, you sit back and follow things as best you can. That’s how it felt, watching the man and the woman. Their bickering crescendoed and subsided to vicious muttering.

I couldn’t stop looking. I closed my eyes, rubbed them, and when I opened them the man and the woman were standing over me. A stewardess hovered behind.

‘Ms O’Neill, Mr and Mrs Jipson here —’ she gestured to them — ‘have seats on either side of you.’

Of course they did.

The woman leaned across the empty seat and let a gnarly hand rest on my arm. ‘Honey, we were wondering … would you be okay about moving across one, taking the aisle seat just there? So that we can sit together?’

Up close, her face was terrifying. The creases in her skin were clogged with tiny wedges of make-up. False eyelashes clung bravely to her eyelids. But there was something else in those dark bird eyes, something other than the loathing I’d seen directed at her husband earlier. She blinked rapidly, as though she might be about to cry.

I looked at the man, half expecting a frantic, silent gesture forbidding me to move. But he was nodding, with the same pleading expression as his wife. ‘If it’s not too much trouble?’ he said.

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Would you like another glass of champagne, Ms O’Neill?’ The stewardess proffered her sympathy via alcohol. I accepted it.

A lovely business-class meal arrived. I ate it watching a movie and wearing headphones. I was determined to avoid any interaction with Lionel and Mia Jipson. I was worried
the sniper fire next to me would continue into the night, or whatever that cavernous black space outside was, thirty thousand feet above the earth. As soon as dinner was over, the cabin lights dimmed. Everyone pushed their seats flat and settled down for the long flight to London.

I was on my side, with my back to the couple. They’d stopped their bickering, but there was a quite a bit of scrabbling around in bags going on.

I knew I was not going to fall asleep. Maybe it was the champagne. More likely, I’d simply forgotten how. I had never felt more awake in my life. After a time, I rolled over to face the old couple. Peeking first, I opened my eyes just enough to watch.

SHE WAS UNDER HER
blanket, sitting upright. He was still sitting as well. In one hand he held a little bottle of pills, and in the other a glass of water. He dropped a tiny pill into her mouth, waited as she took water and swallowed, then gave her another.

‘Make it enough, Lionel,’ she whispered to him, pushing her seatback to horizontal.

‘Don’t worry, Mia. I know how many.’

Her twitching and shuffling under the blanket continued for a few minutes, then her body settled as she drifted off to sleep. It crossed my mind that he might have overdosed her. I was aware that I should do something about that. But I was mesmerised. I had no choice but to watch.

In the semi-darkness, he took her hands in his own. I looked at the silhouette of her blanket, saw it was rising and falling under her breathing.

He leaned over and kissed her on the mouth.

She didn’t respond. Her appearance was changing. Her face relaxed. The wrinkles slipped away. The ridiculous eyebrows settled down to less severe angles. Her lips formed a girlish pout. In the strange flickering light of the dimmed cabin, with years of marital sparring pared away, I saw Lionel Jipson gaze upon his new bride.

I stayed absolutely still, my blanket pulled up around my face. He continued holding her hands. The tense knots in her fingers unravelled, leaving them smooth. He was oblivious to me. To the other sleeping passengers, to the stewards who moved quietly through the dark aircraft, occupying the nothingness of the place between earth and outer space.

He remained an old man. His rough, quivering hand reached out and with the back of his knuckles, he gently touched his wife’s face. Slowly, his fingers caressed her cheek, as though he was patting a cat. From time to time, he would stop. A smile of delight spread across his face. Then, the gentle touching resumed. She never stirred.

Minutes, then hours passed this way. At some point, I fell asleep.

I woke to the smell of eggs and the clatter of food trolleys. For a moment, I lay absolutely still, my eyes closed. I listened to the
click click click
of window blinds opening. When I opened my eyes, rays of sunlight pierced the stale air of the cabin.

I had rolled over in my sleep, my back was turned to the Jipsons.

‘I am saying to you, Mia Jipson, that you have the toothpaste
in that confounded rubbish bin that you call a handbag.’

‘It’s not here. You had it last. You forgot to put it back, obviously.’

‘I did not have it last. I used it in the lounge at LA, and then handed it to you. Remember? After you told me to go brush that foul tuna salad off of my breath if I wanted to sit next to you in a plane for twelve hours …’

‘Oh yessir, I recall that! But did you bring the toothpaste out of the bathroom? I believe not. I believe, Lionel, that you left it in there.’

I sat up and looked at them. He was polishing his glasses with the corner of a white handkerchief. She had tipped the entire contents of her handbag into her lap, searching for the toothpaste. Both of them looked exactly as they had the night before when they boarded the plane.

We exchanged
Good mornings
and
How did you sleeps
.

‘Very well, thank you,’ she said. ‘Like a log.’

‘A log? Huh!’ he said. ‘Make that a hog. Snoring away, keeping everyone else awake. Did she keep you awake? I’m so sorry if she did …’

‘Not at all,’ I said.

I thought I wanted to know what the time might be. But not the time in Los Angeles, nor the time in London, both of which were displayed on the screens. I didn’t know what other time there might be.

AFTER THREE DAYS IN
London, I started an email to Joe. My fingers froze over the keyboard. A virus — that’s what it felt like. It had taken hold before I went to Auckland, infecting
our emails, sabotaging any real effort or intention to sort things out between us. Those cute little emoticons whizzed through cyberspace, antipode to antipode, flirting with each other —
wink wink smiley face
— in passing.

There was no point, I thought. No point in starting all that again.

The London spring that year was spectacular. Although I’d lived in the city my whole life, its beauty seemed
brand-new
. Trees were in bud everywhere and warm rain made everything grow quickly.

One Saturday morning I watched a tulip open. It was in a pot on the kitchen table. I stared at the miniscule movements of the individual petals as they let each other go. I thought about waiting on the tarmac of Sydney airport, watching night turn to dawn. I turned the computer on and bought an airline ticket to New Zealand.

SPECTACLES

L
otte Jones was making thick black coffee for Jackson Klein in that funny little café halfway between Kilbirnie shops and the sea. Jackson sat where he always sat — under a large poster of Che Guevara, at a round wooden table which wobbled due to one leg being slightly shorter than the others.

He removed from under the short table leg a tatty, flattened piece of paper that was meant to stop the wobbling but didn’t. He tore two blank pages from his notebook, folded each of them four times, and wedged them under the short leg. The table was momentarily more stable — still enough, at any length, for him to begin work.

Lotte put the little brown cup down in front of him. Jackson put on his glasses and positioned his pen on the next blank page in the notebook. The notebook was thin — he got through them quickly — so he picked up the pen and wrote on the next blank page:
Buy a new notebook
. Then he let the pen rest back on the pad.

‘I heard on the radio, there’s a sea fog,’ Lotte said. ‘Did you see it?’

‘I drove through it on my way here,’ Jackson said. ‘All those weeks of glorious weather, now this. It’s thick like a dream — no, not a dream … like soup. No no, not soup!’ He shook his head in irritation and pressed his fingers to his temples. He squinted, thinking hard.

Such a geek, thought Lotte.

‘Like cotton wool, it’s more like cotton wool. That’s it! Thick like cotton wool.’ His face lit up at the simile. He picked up his pen and scribbled in his notebook. The scrawling letters took up half a page.

Everything about Jackson was dramatic. It was to do, he’d told Lotte once, with being a playwright, something called the reveal process. She’d been trying to remember a coffee order at the time and hadn’t taken much notice.

‘Can I ask you a cheeky question?’ she said, picking up the empty cup. ‘Can I try on your glasses? My eyes are getting worse every day.’

‘I don’t mind, not at all.’ Jackson carefully lifted the spectacles off the bridge of his nose. He handed them to Lotte. ‘Of course, they are especially made, you understand, designed just for me. My eyes are in a right old state, thanks to this …’ He drummed his fingers on the lid of his laptop. ‘A
right old state, thanks to writing.’ He laughed at his joke.

Lotte let that one go. She slipped the glasses on her face, taking care not to touch the lenses. ‘That’s odd,’ she said, looking up, down, lifting them on and off her nose. ‘When you’ve got them on, they make no difference at all. They’re like plain glass.’

‘That’s the thing!’ said Jackson. ‘Everyone’s eyes are different. It just goes to show that your vision problem is totally different from mine. Which isn’t surprising, when you think about it. Given that I write all day and you make coffee.’

Lotte looked again through the glasses — at Jackson, at Che Guevara. She followed Guevara’s wistful gaze out the window. There was no out-of-the-ordinary distortion. A blurry screen filtered her world, as it always had.

The sea fog had been crawling up the cold sands of Lyall Bay, through the quiet hallways and sitting rooms of the beachfront houses. It drifted, just then, past the café door. A man emerged from the first tendrils of mist. He wore a black winter coat belted tightly at the waist. On his feet were sturdy boots. A scarf covered his mouth, meeting his thick black moustache, and a green woollen hat with flaps protected his ears. His form quickly took shape as he outstepped the heavy white fog. He didn’t look in the café, at the barista and the writer. He shouted loudly to nobody as he walked by.

There was nothing special about the man. This was the sort of neighbourhood where people got around in clothing entirely unrelated to the season. This was the sort of neighbourhood where people frequently addressed the heavens with their thoughts and observations, regardless of
whether they were accompanied or quite alone.

Lotte gave the glasses back to Jackson, who cleaned the perfectly clear lenses with a soft yellow cloth.

JACKSON KLEIN WAS FIFTY-FOUR
and lived with his well-heeled wife in an affluent suburb overlooking the harbour. He mainly wrote short plays, none of which had made it to stage. His creativity, he believed, was greatly enhanced when he installed himself in a bohemian café to work. There was something about the possibility of grime. He particularly liked the unpretentious atmosphere of the little place halfway between the shops and the sea.

He’d recently worked out why his writing was yet to find an audience. It was erudite, so much so that even the academics failed to understand it. So he abandoned that sort of work.

Now it was all about art reaching people.
The
people — the ordinary man and woman. He tested his creative ideas out on Lotte. Although he never pried into her personal circumstances, he sensed her to be the exact target audience for his simple yet profound writing.

His imagination would often spark at the oddest moment — in the middle of the night, or while brushing his teeth — the next morning he would race to the café to bounce ideas off her.

LOTTE JONES WAS SIXTEEN,
but small like a boy. Her skin was the colour of mochaccino. Her hair was straight and shiny and black and she wore it pulled back tightly in a ponytail. She lived near the café with her parents, Malcolm and
Gloria. Malcolm Jones was violent and a drunk and a gambler. He spent most of the household income on the horses. Gloria was a cleaner. Her dull waking hours were focused on the shiny linoleum floors of Wellington Hospital.

Lotte’s eyesight had been poor all her life. Years ago she slipped the attention of the Ministry people who came to the school and asked the children to read the big black letters on the wall chart. Maybe Lotte had been absent that day? Who can remember, so far back? As time passed, she learned to memorise the things she needed to know — enough to see her slide through the school years, labelled a slow learner. When Gloria questioned Lotte’s vision, Malcolm convinced her there was nothing to worry about.

On two occasions, Lotte had bravely called Malcolm on his brutal behaviour. After the first, he slapped her hard across the face, leaving four red marks that turned to streaky bruises. The second time, she bypassed her father’s heavy hand. She went to the pub in the city where her father went to gamble.

The family barely scraped by thanks to Malcolm’s gambling, she explained to the manager. The manager had nodded and tut-tutted and, looking over Lotte’s slender young boy-body, said he would see what he could do. The following day she arrived home to find her mother cradling a broken arm in a sling.

As soon as Lotte could leave school, her father arranged the job at the café. The café — which, by the way, didn’t serve food and was nothing more than a money-laundering front for other ventures — belonged to a friend of Malcolm. Malcolm liked the idea of knowing where his daughter was, all the time.

She mastered the massive coffee machine the same way she had mastered crayons, cooking and house cleaning: by touch, sound, smell and a heightened sense of intuition. You’d never know, watching her, that her sight was poor — certainly her customers had no idea. Lotte flicked switches, swirled knobs and heated milk without glancing at what she was doing.

Lotte hid enough money from Malcolm for them to get by. He knew how much she earned, but he didn’t know about the tip jar on the counter. She tried to make sure that her mother was never at home alone with her father in the evenings, when he drank the most.

There was a price to pay for her vigilance. Lotte paid it in bruises. Sometimes, she saw the blows coming and managed to dodge them. Sometimes, when she was exhausted, when her eyes were extra tired and her guard was down, she did not.

BUSINESS WAS SLOW. LOTTE
decided to wash down the coffee machine. She scrubbed the filter baskets with a little wire brush. There was a set of miniature screwdrivers in the drawer under the counter. Slowly, mostly by touch, Lotte unscrewed the external parts of the machine. She cleaned them in hot soapy water and reassembled them, taking care not to
cross-thread
the tiny screws and nuts.

Jackson picked his pen up, sighed, and put it down again. He plugged his laptop into the wall and pushed a few buttons. He sighed some more. Then he pushed down hard on the table and scraped it across the floor. He opened his notebook once more and ripped out two blank pages, then folded them and placed them under the short table leg, on
top of the pieces of paper already there. The table wobbled because now three legs were much shorter than the short leg.

Lotte saw he was having trouble getting started.

‘What are you working on?’ she asked, bending down low to reconstruct the coffee machine. The tiny components were impossible to see; they kept falling from her fingers. She strained to guide them to exactly where they needed to be.

More sighs from Jackson. ‘I’m writing a modern version of a story by Nikolay Gogol.’

‘You’re copying a story? Is that allowed?’

‘It’s not copying, Lotte. I would never
copy
someone else’s work. It’s called interpretation.’

‘Okaaay,’ said Lotte. It was impossible —
impossible
— to thread the screws through the minute holes in the nuts. She should never have dismantled the machine. ‘Nikolay Gogol. Don’t think I’ve heard of him … what’s he done?’

‘Done?’

‘Written. What’s he written?’

‘You possibly haven’t heard of his books, he’s Russian …’

Lotte couldn’t think of any Russian writers, not off hand. ‘Try me,’ she said anyway.

‘Well, there’s a funny old tale about a nose that falls off a man’s face and becomes a person. And there’s quite a famous play, called
The Government Inspector
.’

There was no response from Lotte, just the tinkle of tiny metal tools dropping on the concrete floor and swearing to follow.

‘There are other stories, “The Overcoat”, for example, which is the story I’m focusing on. And “The Diary of a Madman” …’

‘Nope.’

‘Nope?’

‘Nope. Never heard of them.’ Lotte’s head popped up from behind the counter. She smiled at Jackson. ‘Anyway. What’s the problem?’

‘The problem is the ghost. There’s a ghost in “The Overcoat”, right at the end of the story. Actually, not right at the end.
Past
the end of the story.’

‘Well, it’s at the end then, isn’t it?’

‘That’s the point. Exactly the point. Gogol got to the natural end of the jolly story, and forgot to stop writing.’

‘Uh-huh.’ From behind the counter.

Jackson knew Lotte wasn’t really listening.
Uh-huh
was what she said when she was getting on with something. Which was fine. It helped the reveal process to keep talking.

‘Yes … the problem is that the story itself comes to a natural end, with the death of the main character.’

‘Sounds cheerful. What does he die of?’

‘The cold. He saves up, buys an overcoat, has it stolen and dies of the cold.’

‘Uh-huh …’

‘So the story’s done, but then this ghost arrives and starts running around accusing everyone of stealing his overcoat.’