The Man in the Shed (11 page)

She watched television at odd times of the day then complained that she felt ‘caught out’ if I happened to pop home early. She slept late. We argued over silly things. I knew what was the matter. And she did, too. We were travelling north, that time, into bright clear skies. It was late January and a drought on the east coast of the island had split the hills open. The slightest breeze gave rise to a dust cloud, and where we pitched our tent you could smell the earth on the caked Manawatu riverbed. I thought the great outdoors might turn things around for her and, I suppose, us. We read and spent a lot of time walking the dry riverbed. I had walked ahead this particular
afternoon, imagining divorce, a new life, a new woman perhaps, and a new house, street, suburb. Suddenly I remembered Kath. I turned around and found her crouched over, parting driftwood and dry reed, clearing the way either side of a massive claw-mark in the mud.

The next day scientists from the National Museum’s Natural History Unit cut out the block of mud with the footprint of
Dinornis robustus
. Television arrived and interviewed Kath on-site. The rest of the holiday was spent combing the riverbed for more footprints.

Home again, and Kath received an invitation from the Natural History Unit to inspect her
Dinornis
footprint. That night she brought home a book on moa. One of its more surprising photographic plates featured the great British anatomist Sir Richard Owen standing next to the skeleton of the towering bird he named
Dinornis novaezelandiae
(prodigious or surprising bird).

For a number of years a copy of this photograph—of the skeleton from Tiger Hill in Otago and the anatomist in his rumpled academic robe—has sat on the mantelpiece next to the photograph of Kath and me whitewater-rafting.

As far as a skeleton is able to, the moa impresses as a rather benign creature. I think it has to do with the kindly tilt of its head in contrast to Sir Richard’s grumpiness. Furthermore I suspect the photographer has asked Sir Richard to place his hand on the hip of the
Dinornis
. Probably it is the professor’s first contact with a photographer. His mouth shows a wry amusement at the unaccustomed bullying. His left hand is
placed familiarly as I mentioned before; and the photographer has achieved something disturbingly conjugal. I can think of no better word than ‘gratitude’ to describe the slight tilt of the moa’s head.

The photograph of the skeleton and the anatomist was the first thing I packed away for this trip.

Then, as the ferry nosed out the heads to the strait, I took out the photograph. The white peaks of the Southern Alps rose above the approaching landfall and, as I looked from one to the other, the
Dinornis
and the view seemed to be clues from two different worlds.

I struck up a conversation with a young blonde woman. A large Canadian flag was sewn onto her backpack. She said she was headed for the lakes. She had flown into Auckland two days earlier. She hoped to be out of here by the end of the week. Queensland beckoned. She had been writing on the back of a postcard while the ferry, newly painted in Mediterranean-white, glided over still blue seas. Whenever the opportunity arose I stole glances at her tanned legs. In June they were like out-of-season fruit.

She asked if I was headed for home. No? You’re travelling too—hey, and she groped towards the awkward business of asking whether I was travelling by car. The Subaru was in the garage at home. We intended to walk. I signalled to Kath through the salted windows of the saloon. She was bent over her maps, contemplating the red arrows showing the moa’s southern path to extinction. Kath’s masters paper described the locomotive speeds of various moa. An excerpt had
even made the
Royal Society Journal
.

The Canadian swallowed her disappointment and smiled politely. Kath had come out on deck and so I joined her by the rail. The sun appeared and people carrying their beer glasses began to line the deck. Kath smiled at the approaching landfall. She took my hand in her own, and I set to worrying about the high hopes she had for this trip. The last I saw of the Canadian was coming off the gangway. I happened to look up and catch a shock of blonde hair in the passenger’s side of a red sports car.

Half an hour later the Blenheim bus dropped us off at the railway crossing at Tuamarina. A man in the cheese factory said it would be quicker if we continued along the highway another two miles. The way we were headed was longer, less traffic, less chance of a lift, but we liked the sound of Blind Creek Road.

We arrived at the coast in an hour and a half, and walked the next four days.

The coastline, as we began to discover, was a bit of a tease. One point was succeeded by the next one, and we never stopped wondering what lay around that point which of course was just another point, and so on and so on. Meanwhile there were things to look at and examine. Here is a dead seagull. A dead seal. A blue plastic Skeggs fish crate washed ashore. A broken toilet seat. A whiskey bottle. A gin bottle. These bits and pieces stuck with me rather avidly. The same with the erosion north of the Awatere River that has left farm fences suspended over gulches like trapeze wire; the massive
shingle platforms of former high tide boundaries; the doorless outhouse tied to the earth in the manner of a tepee. Everything seems so relevant at the start of a journey.

The White Bluffs we had seen from the ferry were suddenly above us. The sun went behind a cloud and we ran laughing beneath the soft, grey papa cliffs to beat the incoming tide. We ran on until we reached the next point—and rounding it, we saw Cape Campbell. It seemed a great distance off, and the intervening coastline looked to have been dealt to with a meat cleaver. On our map the distance from White Bluffs to Cape Campbell was no more than half an inch, but it wasn’t until the following afternoon that we reached the lighthouse.

A white picket fence surrounded the grave of a baby girl born late last century. Further along were derelict beaches. We climbed the wooden steps to the lighthouse and the paint came off the rail in our hands. The wind howled off the point, and we sheltered in the lee of the lighthouse, gazing south to that afternoon’s walk.

Kath sat on the cold concrete, staring out at the strait. Last night we had had sex. We had been storing up for Kaikoura, when Kath would be at her most fertile. But the previous night we had stayed in an old farmhouse with fires blazing in three rooms. It was full of pastoral art—sheepdog and shepherd sculptures, and winter mustering scenes on the walls. The parents had lost a child to leukaemia, but their religiosity retained a kindly humour. ‘God loves mothers’ was pinned next to a Steinlager poster of the All Blacks leaping high in
the air. Kath and the mother got on fine. She helped in the kitchen with the soup. Every so often she looked up to see how I was getting on with the ten-year-old boy, and rewarded me with warm smiles. These moments convince her that I would be a good father.

‘Ray,’ she said, as we were packing up to leave the lighthouse. ‘Did you see the Chambers’ toddler this morning put the toy telephone to the cat’s ear?’ Kath had looked on with a kind of rapture—transfixed at the spyhole to this other world we can’t quite break into. I noticed, as well, the mother watching Kath with her own quiet thoughts.

‘Ray,’ she said, ‘I also had this dream …’ She shot me a glance to test the air. ‘But that I won’t tell.’

Kath’s stride was full of skip and bounce. The last two days she had walked with her nose to the ground. Now we happily made our way along the lighthouse road, headed south to keep the appointment in Kaikoura. But for the road it would have been slow going. Every so often the wind, which was at our backs, swept out of a divot in the hills and hit us face-on. It was a bruising and tiring day.

Early evening on the fourth day, Kaikoura showed in the distance all fuzzy and warm. Tired, we pushed on. We had left the beach for the road. The offer of a lift would answer a prayer but neither of us dared to hold out a thumb.

Kath gave me a chocolate.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘my feet are blistered. My hair roots are annoying the hell out of me. There’s chafing on my inner
thigh. Yet, you know what? I’m happy. I feel really good.’

She took my hand and gave it a squeeze.

‘So,’ she said, further on. ‘What’s on your mind?’

She tugged my hand.

‘Ray?’

‘I just hope you’re not pegging too much on tonight, that’s all. Nothing, really.’

‘Well—not really nothing at all. And for that matter I wasn’t even thinking …’

‘All right. All right. My mistake. Let’s try a song. Come on. “These boots are made for walking …’ ”

‘No,’ she said, and just like that the song died in me.

‘Steak,’ she said a few minutes later. ‘I want to eat a steak.’

At some point we stopped for her to pee. A truck soared past. A carousel of light and hissing tyres. Then after, in the perfect silence, came the delicate Japanese sound of Kath’s pee. Funny the things you remember.

It was dark so we didn’t notice the cloud change until, on the outskirts of Kaikoura, it began to rain. First the wind fell away. It was quiet and we could hear a television set through the trees. Then large cold drops began to fall.

A motorist stopped to look at us, and drove on. We kept to the road alongside the beach. The rain fell on the iron roofs of the cottages. There was a squall from the sea, and the iron roofs gave warning. A few minutes later cold rain struck us face-on. Kath had fallen behind. She made no effort to shield herself; she dragged her blistered heels, and held up her face
to the beating. The light from a streetlamp fell across her flushed cheeks. Furious and silent, she limped past me.

I walked ahead again, and half an hour later, from the doorway of the Blue Pacific Hotel bottle store, I watched Kath limp along the esplanade underneath the swaying Norfolk pines. The sea crashed ashore, and the rain hosed down. Halfway across the road to the Blue Pacific she made no attempt to hurry … Finally, finally, she stepped up onto the footpath, still downcast, and plopped her head against my shoulder.

‘I’m sick of this,’ she said. ‘I just want to be pregnant. I want to be pregnant and stay home and read books.’

In a tiny room at the end of a cavernous hall, Kath shook off her wet clothes. She sat on the bed and kicked her feet loose of the panties. Then she dug around in her knapsack for the pill bottles, and poured a small amount of white powder onto a sheet of notepaper, and this she funnelled into a small single shotglass. She ran the hot-water tap until it was warm and mixed a small amount with the powder. The baking soda solution was supposed to thin out her secretions, or, if you like, put a bit of whip into the flagging tails of the sperm she suspected of being slow finishers.

She lay back on the single bed. Her head fell to one side of the pillow and, while she administered the potion between the legs, she stared at the wallpaper inches away with patient eyes. I wondered if she was thinking of the Chambers’ kid. Kath’s feet were red and swollen. Chafing had turned her inner thigh raw. For the moment these wounds went unnoticed; with a curious detachment she twirled her finger
inside herself. Usually she makes these little preparations elsewhere. Her fine concentration in this regard was a surprise. Outside our window we could hear footsteps in the puddles, beer crates sliding off the back of a truck. Muffled bar talk drifted up through the floorboards and marbled carpet.

Kath turned her head back from the wall.

‘Okay, Ray,’ she whispered.

She reached up, and we began this act which, like physical therapy, is preoccupied not with what is before us, but with what hopefully will result. Hope, yes. Passion? Well, there has to be, doesn’t there? But in this case file it away under polite laughter.

She reached under me to empty the sacs.

Outside the rain had returned with a grudge. It poured, and for a while we lay there listening to it gurgle down the pipes by the window.

‘I don’t think I’ll have that steak now,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you try to bring something in? I don’t want to walk another step.’ She reached for her watch as she raised her feet onto the bed end. For half an hour Kath was supposed to lie there with her feet up to help everything find its way inside. Waste not, want not. We have pretty well exhausted the jokes.

‘Two fish. Or if you can’t get that, Chinese. Otherwise a cheeseburger. No onion though. Okay, Ray? I don’t think that’s unreasonable. This room is too small for onion.’

I woke early next morning. It was so still outside. I left Kath asleep and crept down the hall. Apparently we were the only
guests. The doors were all open. At the end, in the window of the bedroom fronting the esplanade, the stars were out in a milky cluster, and, behind the town, like something that had crept up in the night, stood these mountains completely covered in snow.

By mid-morning the sun had caught up to the peaks.

Kath stayed in bed. She said she wanted to give her chafing a chance to heal.

So I went out for a walk. Fresh kelp was piled high on the beach from last night’s storm. I could smell it from where I sat in the Garden of Memories at the foot of the memorial to Kaikoura’s war dead.

A brackish creek emptied out at the foot of the gardens. An elderly man in a grey coat took my glance as a sign of interest. ‘That’s Lyell Creek,’ he said, and cleared his throat. ‘An eighteen hundred and seventy-nine Road Board decision called for the release of one hundred black swans on Lyell Creek, and the paid employment of a gondola.’ This fluency left the man a little breathless, and even embarrassed, as if he had been struck by something outside his control, like hiccups.

Nothing, however, seemed to agree with the warmth of the winter sun—neither the cold peaks, nor the tidy hoovering action of the tide up the bank of loose shingle.

A large bone from the fin of a whale had been casually placed in a bed of polyanthus. At regular intervals tall and curved whale ribs touched points over the path winding through the garden. An information sheet from the visitor
centre told their story. The very first inshore whalers had caught the pups and led the mothers inshore to be slaughtered. In no time at all the inshore waters were cleaned out. First the whales, then their predators drifted away. The whalers left behind a few oil pots and shipwreck timber, an enormous quantity of bones and a residual carelessness that is to be found just about everywhere. In the Garden of Memories the bones had recently been spray-painted and the surrounding leaves of karaka trees had copped a white dusting. Same with the grass at the foot of each whale rib; it had been needlessly and sloppily sprayed.