The Man in the Shed (7 page)

Rita Hayworth, the Hollywood starlet, was featured that month. There she was with her new husband, Dick, and her two small children, Yasmin and Rebecca, eating breakfast, and Rita has leant across to say something vital and interesting to Dick, all ears with a spoon of cereal poised before his lips. This was the magazine Alice had read in the maternity wing while Mark slept alongside. She had held on to the magazine for reasons that evaded her now. There was another story about Haydn’s head being finally returned to the rest of his body, with quite a ceremony in attendance. A priest in sunglasses oversaw the business end, a solemn Italian sculptor bowed over the composer’s open casket and in the background of the photograph there were flashbulbs from the press photographers.
Elsewhere in the magazine was another severed-head story—this time a photograph of the tree on which Carl Sylvius Volkner had been strung up, before being dragged by Hauhau rebels into the church, where his head was removed and his blood drunk from a chalice. In the Lifestyle section were tranquil scenes of Milford Sound, night bowls in Parnell; in Dunedin a dog sat patiently outside a butcher’s.

Driving home again, Alice had laughed long and hard at the thought of poor Mark opening up the magazine and wondering which of the stories his mother had marked for his attention. Perhaps all she had meant by the gift was that he had arrived at a certain time and place. He shouldn’t read too much into it: a dog waiting outside a Dunedin butcher’s shop, for instance.

It had been in Mark’s later years, those summers he had come home from university, that Alice felt his disappointment. It clung to him like an illness. From the hallway she spied on her son as he lay on his bed, wide awake, arms folded beneath his head. And, listening to what he heard, Alice too felt the incompleteness, felt his need to be awed, and at that moment she had understood how this yearning for a real city came close to grief.

But then, as she watched from the hallway and plumbed her son’s daydreaming, Alice had been astounded to find him seeding the Canterbury Plains with glass towers and shopping malls, buildings with crested eagles on top, lifts that ran up tower blocks like lit glass balls, and atriums filled with silver trees and tame Amazon parrots.
Alice steps back from the canvas and only now, years later, is it clear to her the space her son’s phantom city has occupied. She leans forward, and with her forefinger touches the paint of a tree doubled over from the wind. She finds it hard and dry.

Now, reaching for her paintbrush, Alice begins to reconstruct the tree into something tall and straight and the colour of silver. Now Alice drifts across the city and paints over the empty Theosophical Society building a modern office tower of granite and black glass. Where George Burt delivered her mother, Alice creates a large hospital. A block away, she paints a skyscraper that rises majestically and competitively with the Alps. Between this point on the canvas and the old theosophists’ meeting place, Alice sets about laying down a mesh of shadowed streets and corner pavements splashed with sunlight and lunchtime crowds. She adds in theatres, restaurants, taverns, and in the midst of this city, this phantom city of Mark’s longing, Alice allows for a pocket handkerchief of a park where frisbees float over meadows and young couples lie stapled together. She allows the funny old Colonial replica of the Globe to remain, but over the Harry Wills Theatre she paints the words ‘Restaurant and Museum’—outside its doors, a daub of black for the busker, gold for the trombone.

At the port end of town, quite near the stone steps cut into the wharf where Richard once hoisted up his boatloads of cray, Alice places an opera house and, near it, a fish restaurant and an aquarium filled with performing dolphins and seals for the tourists. Milling among the crowd over the ‘historic’
flagstone area are hotdog vendors, jugglers, pickpockets, thieves of all descriptions. There are yellow cabs, policemen on horseback, a flotilla carrying a beauty-pageant queen. There are marching girls, all with their heads tilted in the same direction. A gunman draws back a curtain in a high-up window masked by a blaze of reflected sunlight. Along another darker canyon there is a candle-lit procession. Over the church hovers Alice’s paintbrush. She hesitates to demolish it because the city will need a soup kitchen for the lives stranded short of the promised land.

Among a cluster of city buildings, she sees one particular striving tower and is about to add a spire when, to her surprise, Alice recognises the Empire State Building. And here, too, is the Chrysler Building with its distinctive gold-chromed capital. And those tenement buildings—from where did they spring? Now she notices the maple trees in what can only be Central Park. When the paintbrush slides from her fingers she does not bother to pick it up. It can wait. She stares at her painting—not quite able to believe what she has done. Up until now she believed this place to be her own sovereign territory. She realises something else as well. Something equally disheartening. She has found out her son. She has located his dreams. Now she picks up her paintbrush and returns to her plagiarised city. This time her eye is drawn to a small inconclusive feature. She can just see a couple of flecks of black and gold outside the old Harry Wills Theatre—and if she squeezes her eyes tight she can make out the beginnings of something quite new and vital … She will give the canvas
another hour to dry, by which time she will have worked up her base, and then she will start on the no-name rose. She wonders if her son will remember.

Sometimes they held hands, but not very often. As far as Mr Simpson was concerned holding hands was ridiculous, and his wife knew well enough how it irritated him. But when the bus had left the border to enter Russia and Maggie took her husband’s hand, there was no attempt to wrestle it away. The Simpsons were on their way to Leningrad. At the thought of which Mr Simpson managed a smile: Leningrad, and the idea of taking a bus there. On two occasions he had taken an intercity bus—once, while work was being done on the car; and another time, after Wellington airport was fogged in, he had bussed up to Palmerston North. But Leningrad
could not be mentioned in the same breath as these other times of inconvenience. Great armies had marched on Leningrad.

It was Maggie who had planned the trip. Two weeks ago Mr Simpson was reading the Sunday papers in Holland Park and Maggie had asked if he would like an ice-cream. She left him sitting on the bench for rather a long time; at least, it had seemed that way as the sun faded over the city into a bank of cloud. Picnickers reached for pullovers; Mr Simpson rubbed his bare arms. Frankly it was irritating to wait that long, particularly so when he viewed his wife returning across a field empty-handed. She hadn’t been able to find an ice-cream vendor, and Mr Simpson had rolled his eyes: it was ridiculous not to be able to find ice-cream in a park on a Sunday afternoon. His wife had walked all the way to Kensington, where she realised—‘silly me,’ she said—that an ice-cream would not survive the return journey. This was the news she returned with, before presenting him with a small cardboard notice. Maggie had found it pinned to a bulletin board in a shop entranceway. The notice—written in both English and possibly Russian—invited ‘interested parties’ to join a bus tour to Leningrad.

Ice-cream, thought Mr Simpson at the passing scenery in the bus window, and alternatively, So this is Russia. It did not seem like a superpower. There was barely any traffic on the road, and the passing farmland looked unproductive and unkempt. All the same he was glad they were off to Leningrad—and not, say, Rome or Venice or those other postcard cities. The Simpsons didn’t know anybody who had
been to Leningrad, not even Yvonne, their oldest daughter, who taught English to businessmen in Turkey.

They had to get themselves to Berlin. The rendezvous was a street corner in the Kreuzberg where the unexpected number of daytime prostitutes, Turks, kebab bars and nightclubs had caused the Simpsons some alarm. Mrs Simpson had needed to push her husband from behind to get him to board the bus. It was her idea. She had to provide the enthusiasm. Put a brave face on things. Out of the bus window, Mr Simpson had watched a young man sit down in a shop doorway, roll up a shirtsleeve and plunge a needle into his arm. Mr Simpson felt a sudden rush of panic; and it was perhaps just as well that the way out was blocked by their fellow passengers humping suitcases and cardboard boxes along the aisle. He could smell food, foreign food—the sharp rotten smell of unrefrigerated meat and forgotten cheese. This was the other time on the trip Maggie had reached for his hand and given it a firm squeeze, as if to say, ‘Everything will be all right.’

Last night they had driven through Poland. Around dawn Mr Simpson briefly awoke to discover they were in a city. He thought it might be Warsaw; and he had thought about waking Maggie to say they were in Warsaw, but instead he fell asleep again, and the next time he woke they were travelling in the countryside. It wasn’t until the bus had reached the border, or shortly before it, that the Simpsons were given a rest stop.

Tonight they would be in Kaunas; Daugavpils; Riga around dawn, and, late afternoon, Pskov, and Leningrad later that night.

Mr Simpson started a letter to Yvonne. He wrote that they had spent much of the day passing through ‘no-account country’. But he fell asleep before he could explain himself.

Shortly before dusk the bus stopped, but not at Kaunas. Mr Simpson had brought a map with him, and he could see they were a short distance east of where the itinerary placed them. Tall pines made a secret of the surrounding countryside. They had stopped at a restaurant and a warm and almost circular glow in the distance suggested they were on the outskirts of a small town.

‘Look here,’ Mr Simpson said to the Greek driver. ‘Shouldn’t we be in Kaunas?’ The driver gazed at the plastic which covered Mr Simpson’s map, then at Mr Simpson with a flicker of contempt for his need to know, as if to say, ‘I decide. Me. The driver.’ Mr Simpson trailed after him.

He could hear his wife saying, ‘I’m sure it is all right. There’s no point in our worrying.’ Then she said, ‘Look, we’re the only ones not inside the restaurant.’ He turned back to her. Suddenly they could hear voices, and laughter, and even what sounded like tears. Over the windows of the restaurant were wooden shutters and warm glow at the bottom of each sill. It occurred to Mr Simpson that they were the only ones left outside. Alone, out here in the Russian night, thought Mr Simpson. Well, it was not quite night because they could see the tops of the pines. But Mr Simpson thought it might be a moment worth telling about once they got home. It would be something Maggie would bring up. ‘Bill, why don’t you tell Paddy and Dan about that time in Russia …’ His wife would
have on oven-gloves and she would be holding an oven-hot casserole dish, and he would shoot a quick look of disapproval, or perhaps laugh, as if she had rekindled a lost memory.

They walked along a path of trodden pine-needles. Mr Simpson allowed his hand to be held, but inside the restaurant, in the cloakroom area, he shook free. Through another set of doors a speech was in progress. Mr Simpson braced himself for the moment when a roomful of faces would stare his and Maggie’s way; but none did. They pushed through the swing-doors and no one paid the Simpsons the slightest attention. A man with greying hair and a sad drooping moustache was giving the speech. At times he interrupted himself to blow his nose and brush away a tear. Mr Simpson’s eyes moved to the far end of the room, where in an open doorway he saw the driver seated at a table. He had started on his food and ate hungrily from a fork, while keeping his other hand on the stem of a wine glass for fear it would be removed, or stolen. None of what was happening in the restaurant seemed to be of concern to him.

There were two long tables set with white table-cloths. Bouquets of wild flowers were set between carafes of spring water. Now, at last, a man in a waistcoat, an older man about Mr Simpson’s age, found them a place at the bottom end of the second table. The Simpsons stepped over a bench and sat down. The Russian spoke in Mr Simpson’s ear, but it was unintelligible. Mr Simpson spoke in English. He said he was sorry. The waiter shushed him. He held up the palms of his hands, as if Mr Simpson had expressed impatience.

The speech had come to an end, and now the speaker began to read from a list of names. ‘Serge.’ A man got up from the Simpsons’ table. A second name was called. ‘Masha.’ A woman slowly rose from the other table. The entire room looked up. The man ‘Serge’ held out his hands and the woman walked over to where he stood, and took both his hands. Another woman at the other table was crying loud, painful sobs. Now the speaker held up his glass and offered a toast and on either side of the Simpsons glasses were raised. The Simpsons tried to follow suit but were raising their own as the rest of the glasses in the room were returned to their resting places. Applause broke out. From both tables people called out ‘Masha’ and ‘Serge’. Room was made at the top end of the Simpsons’ table, and the couple sat down. When the woman began to touch the man’s face with her fingertips Mr Simpson looked away. He folded his napkin and looked at it a while.

The name ‘Andrei’ was called out—it was the man who had sat across the aisle on the bus. This morning he had offered Maggie a carrot smeared with horse radish. Mr Simpson had declined it with a wave of his hand. Maggie had smiled, and said, ‘No, but thank you very much.’ They had their water crackers and tea flask.

Now this same man left the table to run and hug ‘Lenka’, a woman unused to make-up perhaps, and whose hair was more usually kept in a scarf. The women whose names were called appeared older than the men. Their faces bore the lines of perseverance Mr Simpson had seen in old
National
Geographic
s—Soviet women in overalls and scarves, shouldering brooms and shovels.

Not everyone stood up and paired off, thankfully. And soon the business was completed, and the Simpsons were fed a watery stew of potatoes and cabbage. The man alongside pointed to the contents of his glass and said, ‘Schnapps.’ Mr Simpson nodded that he understood. So did Mrs Simpson.