The Ice Shelf: An Eco-Comedy Read online

  It was probably due to having learned maths at schools, which shuts you down, that I thought of this equation:

  like there’s no tomorrow

  ∴ there will be no tomorrow

  The reason I’ve described the Dirt and its ramifications in such detail is that in the end it was responsible for hurrying Hoki Aroha to its demise. It’s a long story, but bear with me because I have some very important thank yous to make in the process.

  One day, while the whānau was out at the crop and had broken for lunch, Valour came up to me and I felt my hand swallowed by his big dirty sweaty one. I knew that finally it was my turn to for instruction in Show Me How. We tromped through some undergrowth, Valour pulling me and smiling back at me. His teeth weren’t in very good nick, but this wasn’t the concern of someone who had rejected dialectical materialism, so I put the thought of it aside. Finally we came to a secluded copse lined with fern leaves. Valour gazed at me.

  ‘Are you ready to become a woman, Janet?’

  I didn’t know what to say, but the right answer seemed to be, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Valour. He looked serious but gleeful.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good,’ said Valour. He was salivating a bit. ‘That’s good. Because I think you are. I think you’re very ready to become a woman, and you’re going to be a beautiful woman.’

  He smiled and I smiled back.

  ‘In fact, I think you’re already a beautiful woman, and do you know what beautiful women like?’

  I shook my head. I didn’t know. I hoped this didn’t mean that I wasn’t beautiful.

  ‘Pleasure,’ said Valour. ‘They like pleasure.’

  He reached down and fumbled my hand. It seemed unbelievably quick, but he had already unzipped his pants. He put his cock in my hand. I gasped because it was such a new thing. I hadn’t ever thought much about what a man’s cock would be like. Now I found it was big and veiny and hard like a Banksia flower and I have to say, at this point I thought it rather disgusting, but I tried not to show it because that would be rude.

  ‘Do you like my cock?’ asked Valour. He was breathing in a strange, hard way.

  I nodded.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘in words.’

  ‘Pardon?’ I asked politely.

  ‘Say, “I like your cock”,’ said Valour.

  ‘I like your cock,’ I said.

  ‘Say it louder.’

  ‘I like your cock!’ I said as loudly as I could.

  ‘Not that loud,’ Valour hissed angrily. He craned back through the bush towards where the whānau were having lunch. I could hear their subdued talk.

  Valour pushed his face very close to mine and smiled. I saw the interesting teeth up close and tried not gag on the fetid smell of his breath because that would be, you know, rude.

  ‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you like my cock. You’re sure you do?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Say all of it.’

  ‘I like your cock.’

  ‘Do you love my cock?’

  I paused for a second. Love is a strong emotion. Truth be told, I wasn’t sure if I even liked Valour’s cock; I’d just agreed on that to be friendly, but I was pretty certain I didn’t love his cock. But apparently I’d upset Valour by not rushing to express my affection for his cock, because now he wrestled me to the ground angrily. He insisted that I say I loved his cock, so I said it. By this time I couldn’t help crying; it was involuntary. Valour put his hand over my mouth, saying, ‘Shh, shh.’ He yanked down my jeans and tipped me over on the ground. I felt an enormous pain explode into something down there. It seemed that the cock which I’d been asked to love was now doing something in my body which I supposed was sex. I knew about sex. I didn’t know it would be like this. I’d thought it would be gentle. I’d thought there would be some nice feelings, some pleasure attached to it. Valour kept ramming his cock into this part of me that didn’t really take to it kindly, I guess because I was uptight. In truth, I wasn’t into it, and I felt bad about that because Hoki Aroha was a cool place full of cool people with a cool school where people didn’t get shut down, they learned instead, Show Me How. And I did really want to be a woman, a beautiful woman. I wished I weren’t so uptight. I wished I didn’t have what seemed to be a door over the part of me down there that stopped the cock, which I was meant to love, from going any further. For a long time, during a lot of pushing, I wished it were not so painful. Because it was very painful; in fact, I’d never felt anything so excruciating. That this was meant to be in the pursuit of pleasure seemed to be the most unfair thing; it was meant to be nice, but it was not. The pain kept going for so long, on and on, that at one point I thought I would die from it and that that would be a good thing. I didn’t care if I never came back to this planet because I was done with it. I was done with pain and the, well, the disgusting feeling of it. I felt unbearably disgusting, like I’d turned into a person who was revolting from head to foot. I was in the midst of this feeling when, all of a sudden, something gave way and Valour, with a groan, graduated to further inside me. Now it was less painful but still somewhat painful. When they ask you at the doctors, what would this pain be on a scale of one to ten, I would say, eight. The first pain, before the door gave way, was nine, but this long-term ramming pain was an eight. It kept going for a long long time, and I thought *this* bit would never end, but suddenly, Valour collapsed on me in a huge shudder and a blinding pain, up to ten, ripped thought me, and I thought *he* had died, not me, and I hoped it were true.

  But after a few minutes he came back from the dead and lay on top of me, squashing me with his weight so I couldn’t breathe and I thought I might die again, this time of asphyxiation.

  ‘Did you like that?’ Valour whispered in my ear, but I couldn’t answer.

  He rolled partially off me and repeated the question.

  I said yes quickly so he would turn his face away. His breath was like a sewer.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Then he got up and out of the corner of my eye I could see him doing up his pants, then he left.

  I came back to join the whānau a different person. Before I’d been a child, now I was a woman. It felt like shit. For the rest of the day, I was dazed and cold, trembling. I could feel myself vulnerable and shaky with a pain between my legs and another pain somewhere deep in my chest.

  And here I want to thank Valour profoundly and from the bottom of my heart. Because where would a woman writer be without having been at the very least sexually abused as a child? For a start, he gave me the means to draw upon personal experience when writing rape scenes—I had all the concrete significant detail right there at my fingertips—but, more importantly, he showed me that I had the ability to carry with me forever the kind of self-loathing and base sense of the abject that are invaluable gifts to any writer.

  I think because I already had an underlying health problem (which turned out to be hepatitis, but I didn’t know it then), and because I’d found the whole sex thing, to be honest, stupefying, the next day I woke once again in a cold sweat and with a cramp gripping my stomach. I lay huddled until it passed, but soon I was feeling queasy and bile was rising in my mouth. Eventually, I had to rush outside and pitch everything I’d eaten the night before into the weeds. I crawled back inside and lay on my couch, groaning and waiting for the sun to come up.

  When Nico clattered through the bead curtain, the baby crooked in her arm, she paused and looked blankly down at me like I was a train going down that feat of engineering, the Raurimu Spiral. I mentioned that I was sick again. She nodded and for a moment a flicker of something crossed her face—compassion? She fetched the red bucket, which was fast becoming my closest friend. Then she went to the bench to start the breakfast with one hand. When Harry got up half an hour later she intercepted him with a murmured, ‘She’s sick again.’ Harry came and put his hand on my burning forehead. He looked at me with tenderness. ‘Janice,’ he said.<
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  ‘Yes,’ I said thickly, gazing up at him.

  ‘How’s tricks?’

  I started to tell him that tricks were not so good, but he was already having a conversation with Nico about the doctor, and Nico said it cost thirty dollars (∴). I stayed retching and sweating on the couch. I’m actually grateful to Nico for that. I have an intimate knowledge of what it feels like to be very sick when no one gives a fuck. I could write a book like The Collector by John Fowles, in which the girl is ‘collected’ by the creepy man and then gets sick. I could write a book the equivalent of that and one day I will.

  If they’d driven me to the doctor that morning, Hoki Aroha might still be a going concern today, but they did not. Harry went to do stuff and Nico, with the baby on her hip and Things One and Two trailing behind, went off to a really important music class in the bush with the other mothers. I lay listening to the quiet of the deserted compound and eventually fell into a restless doze.

  I was woken by what I at first thought were the dregs of a dream—I’d been dreaming I was running across a frozen steppe and with each footfall the ice cracked with a loud knocking sound. But the knocking was real and in my delirious state I got up, wove over to the door and opened it. A man in a grey suit filled the doorway, surrounded by light.

  ‘Does Harry Redmond live here?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He held out an envelope to me.

  ‘Would you give him this, please.’ He smiled kindly.

  I accepted the envelope.

  The man in the grey suit slumped as if a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. He walked back to his car, whistling, and that was the end of Hoki Aroha.

  But first of all it was the end of me at Hoki Aroha.

  I would like to thank Harry in particular for not telling me about the summons. There is nothing like public humiliation for shaping a writer. The shame I felt at the manner in which the commune turned on me after I’d accepted the summons was something that I am convinced every writer should experience.

  When Harry got home, it seemed he already knew what was awaiting him. He stood in the doorway and like a sharpshooter his gaze lined up the envelope on the table immediately. In a couple of strides he’d snatched it from the knotty surface and stood judging its weight in the palm of his hand as if the contents might be explosive. His face bleached whiter and whiter. Meanwhile Nico had erupted from the couch and was at his elbow, fully out of her trance for the first time since I’d been at Hoki Aroha.

  Later I thought back on the usefulness of this detail, the foreshadowing, that Nico needed always to be in a trance for her *not* to be in a trance to have meaning. Events seemed to unfold in slow motion. When Harry wobbled the summons at Nico, his words to her were indecipherable, like an audiotape gone slow and monstrous, and when Nico replied her vocals were distorted beyond recognition. This was all diametrically opposed to what I’d come to expect of Hoki Aroha. Right now, I felt the gaze of Harry and Nico upon me: his stoned blue stare, her scorching brown bullets. I lay on my couch helplessly. What could I do? Things One and Two watched silently, seemingly scared by the vibe. Then Harry rushed out of the hut.

  I heard the news making its way around the commune, the yells and shrieks, the cursing and thumping on walls. A few times the members of the community, briefly abandoning the spirit of aroha, came to scream obscenities at me from outside the hut.

  And so, on the very day I accepted the summons, I was summarily excommunicated from Hoki Aroha. I was bundled with my suitcase, a little shaky on my pins, into Harry’s ute. As we roared out of the gates, I looked back to see commune members running after the car shaking their fists until they couldn’t stand the exhaust any more. Harry planted his foot and we sped to town, and soon I was disgorged onto the railway platform, where I had more opportunity to observe the elegance of the architecture as I waited for the train back to the city, and to Sorrell.

  An update on the commune, in case you were wondering: after it was shut down under a section of the Public Health Act, Harry and Nico decided to give up their Bohemian lifestyle. They moved with Sascha, Thing One and Thing Two to Tītahi Bay and took out a mortgage on a little fibro house, and Harry remembered that he had a degree in Sociology and got a job teaching maths at a high school (there was a teacher shortage). They had a couple more kids and then split up. I spent a Christmas with them once, watching Harry smoke and pace around the little lawn as if it were an exercise yard. One time as I hovered in the kitchen doorway, not sure what to do with myself, Christmas tree lights flickering in the corner of my eye, he turned from where he stood enveloped in the clothesline and told me how he would’ve been an artist rather than teaching simultaneous equations to thirteen-year-olds if it hadn’t been for Sorrell and me. He could’ve been someone, he said, as he ground his cigarette butt into the grass.

  Harry’s second family got to (mostly) grow up in a cosy house with walls and a tree at Christmas time, but they’re not *writers*. There is some justice in the world. I am very grateful to Harry for everything he gave me.

  *

  Reader, this has been a rather long telling of my stint at Hoki Aroha but thank you for bearing with me. My Acknowledgements would have in no way been complete without a full and frank account of the events that transpired at the commune and the chance to express my deep gratitude to those concerned.

  To return to my progress on the night of the Antarctica Awards—because I’m brimming with gratitude about being an award-winner and have more thank yous to make in that regard—I have to say that despite the enormous honour, I’m *not* looking forward to the moment when I will step up to the podium to be handed my award, and everyone will clap and cheer. (My modesty actually is a curse, and no doubt is the reason I’m not as successful as some people I could mention. A certain arrogance on their part, that’s all.) So, on this night, I stoically cantilever my fridge up the steps of the National Library. I had no intention of bringing it this far and hope to be relieved of any encumbrance before the evening gets much older, but in the meantime, I’ve become expert at manoeuvring the appliance around on its sturdy cart—like a rather stocky extra limb. To be honest, Mandy’s shoes pose more of a problem, as the stretching technique hasn’t worked as well as I’d hoped and I’m blistering something dreadful. Plus the wind has got up (Wellington), which impedes my progress. But I heave my fridge up the last few steps to the patio and there, feeling like the giantess in a certain verse novel I read once (on account of the heels), I have an urgent need to perform another edit on my text. Other Awards participants file past, looking on curiously, perhaps even enviously, but I don’t mind because one of the things about being a writer is to seize the moment and not care a hoot for what anyone thinks. I snap crisply through the manuscript. (Researchers may wonder why some of the pages are imprinted with what looks like the footprints of a small and very cute mammal; in fact it is because my fingers are a little dirty from my recent encounter with the drain.) Holding on to the pages in the wind, I take out the sections in which the protagonist spends a year at a commune, is sexually abused by a stoned person, catches Hepatitis A and then is held responsible for accepting the court summons which spells the end of the commune, even though no one had told her *not* to accept packets from strangers who came knocking at the door and so how could she possibly have known? I screw up the pages and drop them on the ground, letting the wind shoot the paper ball across the patio like an air-hockey puck. After this deft excision, the narrative structure is, I think, much tighter and more focussed, and the other sections are allowed to shine like gems. Although slightly shorter, The Ice Shelf feels, in a strange way, *more* substantial. In any case, I still have screeds more crots to play around with. And of course I will be adding new material to the roman as I do field research in Antarctica, gathering the concrete significant details that will make the cold stuff seem new. I hope that not too much more of Antarctica will have melted by the time I get down there. I’ve read in the Dominion P
ost that a piece of ice shelf the size of New Zealand falls off the polar cap every day. I hope I won’t have the misfortune of being on one of those pieces. I hope that coming from New Zealand does not increase the likelihood of being on a New Zealand-sized chunk falling off and in turn cooling the ocean. But, strangely, after living with that idea for a while the thought of floating away where there are no crots, no memories, no thank yous, and no little warmth becomes strangely exciting, like standing on a cliff and thinking you might jump, so you have to be very sure not to. I remember that when I first applied to go to Antarctica, I imagined myself quietly lying down on the ice and never waking up.

  I suppress the idea of the little warmth that had become cold, which I have not thought about for quite a while.

  Having improved The Ice Shelf with my edits once more, my fridge and I move through the glass doors to the foyer of the National Library, being careful not to make a grand entrance, as I despise that kind of attention-seeking. From the foyer, I can see through to the Kōwhai Reception Room where a collection of writers—at least I judge them to be that from their black clothes and uncertain expressions—are milling about with more worldly artists, all of them tipping drinks down their necks as if they’ve just crossed the Nullarbor Plain. I look for somewhere to stow my fridge before I join the fray.

  After my sojourn at Hoki Aroha, I settled back into life in the city with Sorrell. I was lucky during the next period of my life to experience the input of a stepfather, Michael the First, and Mr Monkey, whom you will hear about in due course.

  On arrival at the station in Wellington, I sat on my suitcase in the middle of the main causeway for a short while, no more than half an hour, and finally I saw Sorrell stomping towards me, a little wobbly, a little het up, but obviously it was a wonderful reunion. Sorrell pecked me on the cheek. I thought she might comment on how I’d grown in the last year, or how I looked well from the country air, or how I looked peaky after being ill, but I must’ve looked just the same, because in no time I was following her at almost a run along the causeway and out to the car. She had a new leather jacket and new tan tooled cowboy boots, which she kept glancing down at. I was hoping she’d call me Monster but she didn’t.