The Ice Shelf: An Eco-Comedy Page 13

  ‘What do you think of the car?’ asked Sorrell as we piled in.

  ‘Nice,’ I said, although I couldn’t really tell. It was a step up from the old bomb she used to drive.

  ‘It’s a Porsche,’ she said, smiling out the side of her mouth at me. I noticed she was very thin, scrawny almost.

  ‘We’re going to Michael’s,’ said Sorrell.

  After a silence, I ventured hopefully, ‘Not Poppy’s?’

  ‘Poppy!’ exploded Sorrell. ‘No fucking way.’ And she rumbled about Poppy for a few kilometres.

  ‘Um, who’s Michael?’ I asked, when there was a lull.

  ‘A friend,’ said Sorrell. After a moment she burst out laughing and added, ‘Monster, just between you and me, I met him on a dating hotline!’

  I laughed along with Sorrell. I didn’t like to ask what a dating hotline was, especially when Sorrell yelled to the road ahead, ‘He’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me!’

  My hopes were high, then, as in the dusk we looped back and forth up the gorse-clad ranges above Upper Noa, leaving humanity behind on our way to Michael the First’s house. Eventually we were bumping over a clayey moonscape towards a giant stucco house with a front door flanked by two massive pillars. Sorrell parked at a rakish angle on the expanse of dirt, and leapt out. ‘Come on, Monster!’ Thrilled, I retrieved my luggage from the boot and joined Sorrell under the portico which, to be honest, was quite forbidding. But Sorrell steered me into the vast entrance hall.

  ‘Pretty good, eh?’ she said.

  I saw myself reflected, clutching my WWII suitcase, in the bottom corner of a gilt-framed mirror that took up most of one wall.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ I murmured.

  ‘Back in a sec,’ said Sorrell. She clonked up the sweeping stairs two at a time.

  I waited. A chandelier like a dandelion seed under a microscope hung from the ceiling which reached all the way to the top of the house. The vestibule floor was marble, and two vases the size of children flanked one of the doors. I realised it was cold, and there was the low hum of air-conditioning. Sorrell didn’t come back, so I began to wander around the rooms on the ground floor. Oversized red table lamps, glowing in the dusk, led into enormous living rooms with white couches, red satin curtains and glass cabinets; a formal dining room with glossy, high-backed chairs; so many bathrooms I lost count, again with lamps burning just in case someone might want to be in there; a kitchen lined with expanses of brushed stainless steel reflecting the red of the sunset. At one point I wandered outside onto a terrace the size of skating rink that looked out over the gorse-permed valley. Darkness was coming on.

  Eventually Sorrell came back downstairs and made me two-minute noodles. As I ate on a barstool at the kitchen island, she told me we were lucky to be here and not to forget that.

  ‘Okay? No silly business.’

  I nodded.

  When I’d finished my noodles, Sorrell led me upstairs to a central landing that was bigger than any of the flats we’d lived in previously. Leading off it were bedrooms, bathrooms, dens, a jacuzzi room and a verandah, which looked out into nothingness. My room was big, pink and marvellously cushioned, and it had an ensuite.

  After the commune, the luxury felt almost decadent—running water, a bed, food. The only problem was, it was cold all the time, but I wrapped myself in the copious blankets and throws that were dotted about. Michael the First’s house was and remains the most comfortable house I’ve ever lived in. Good thing it didn’t last too long, or I would’ve been ruined as a writer.

  The next morning we had to be quiet because Michael the First was in bed and any sounds we made would echo up the marble stairs. Sorrell and I tiptoed out of the house, and she rolled the car then crash-started it a little way down the hill. She took me to Upper Noa Shoes to buy the most expensive pair of sneakers I’d ever owned before or since, and, by mid-morning, I was installed at Upper Noa Intermediate.

  I met Michael the First that evening. He was cool in a swept-back Richard Branson way, and I liked him immediately. He presented me with a plastic handbag, and I was and am so grateful. I discovered that he ran a company importing handbags from China. Then, while Sorrell cooked, which I hadn’t seen her do before but she seemed to have acquired a new skill of banging pots around in the kitchen and sighing loudly, Michael encouraged me to get into the jacuzzi. I didn’t need to be asked twice. I went into my plush bedroom and changed into my togs, and a few minutes later I was in a glittery aqua-tiled room floating deliciously in warm, bubbling water.

  Michael the First slid into the water, smiling, and said, ‘It’s like champagne, isn’t it?’ I hadn’t expected to be joined by a hairy chest streaming with rivulets of water. Michael the First bobbed near me as the foam cascaded and the twilight encroached. He offered me a sip from his glass of bubbles. I took it to be polite.

  ‘Nice, mm?’ Michael the First smiled.

  ‘Nice,’ I said, trying to be as grateful as possible.

  It could’ve been blissful, me floating warmly, my new stepfather with his head thrown back in a look of concentration. The only thing was, I didn’t know Michael the First very well at this point, and I thought we should get a little bit more acquainted before sharing the jacuzzi—you know, play a game of Snakes and Ladders perhaps, watch a movie. I hoped that Sorrell would join us, but the pots and pans continued to ring out from the kitchen. Michael the First seemed to be enjoying the bubbles because he was jiggling along with them in a fun way. Presently, he sighed, a long, groaning kind of sigh. To tell the truth, I was a little alarmed at this sigh. It reminded me of certain sighs I’d heard at Hoki Aroha.

  After his sigh, Michael the First turned to me. ‘How are things, Princess?’

  This question was on a par with ‘How’s tricks?’, and in all honesty, I didn’t know how to answer it. The root of the problem was not so much the ‘things’, although that is so vague as to be meaningless, but the difficulty of thinking of myself as ‘Princess’. To be a princess was to feel like total shit.

  We all had dinner together in the big formal dining room. The meal was okay, perhaps a little dry and burned, but after Hoki Aroha, it was a novelty to chew something, and I guess Sorrell was still on a learning curve. Michael the First didn’t seem to appreciate the dinner as much as I did. He asked Sorrell what this shit was. She didn’t reply. I felt a bit sorry for her, actually. I thought I saw her brush away a tear. There was something not quite right about how dinner progressed.

  Tucked in my cushiony bed in my pink room, I leaned back and thanked my lucky stars. Here I was in a lovely big house with my own bathroom and a jacuzzi, plus I had a new pair of sneakers. Could life get any better?

  Presently I noticed a puppet monkey poking around the side of the door and sliding up and down the jamb. It introduced itself as Mr Monkey in a cute monkey voice. To be polite, I giggled, though it wasn’t very funny. I mean, I was thirteen. Mr Monkey was followed around the door by Michael the First. I felt kind of sorry for him that he’d so misjudged the level of my age. I tried to be as nice as possible to put him at his ease.

  He brought Mr Monkey over to the bed and made him climb up my arm in a ticklish way. I laughed politely. Then Mr Monkey said in his funny voice that he wanted to get into bed with me. I didn’t have the heart to say no, so I opened up the covers and let Mr Monkey hop in, which he did, with alacrity, laughing his funny monkey laugh and sort of joshing around. When Mr Monkey tried to go inside my pyjama pants, I suddenly realised—I’d been such a fool—that something was very wrong with Mr Monkey. I knew this, of course, from my Hoki Aroha days, where I’d got wise to the attentions of Mr Monkey-types. The truth is, I didn’t care much for Mr Monkey, or his antics. There seemed nothing to be gained from putting up with it. There was a small risk that if I said anything no one would believe me and I’d be a pariah in my family for the rest of my life, but I decided to chance it. The best course of action seemed to be to yell like crazy, which I did. By the time Sorrell appe
ared, Mr Monkey had leapt out from under the covers and was dangling limply from the hand of Michael the First, who padded from one foot to the other beside my bed.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Sorrell. Her eyes were darting around and somehow it looked as if she hoped she wouldn’t find anything.

  ‘Your daughter is having a tantrum,’ said Michael the First.

  ‘Monster,’ sighed Sorrell, ‘snap out of it, whatever it is.’ She didn’t like emotion in other people.

  ‘He, he …’ I couldn’t get the words out.

  Michael the First was hopping around as if he’d been burnt. ‘This is just—’ he was saying. ‘This is just—’

  Sorrell looked at Michael the First warily. ‘What were you doing?’ she asked in a little voice.

  ‘Saying goodnight,’ said Michael the First, wide-eyed. ‘Is that a crime?’ He backed out of the room waving his hands. ‘If she doesn’t want to say goodnight to her stepfather who gives her handbags and sneakers and lets her swim in a jacuzzi, that’s fine. Not compulsory.’

  When he was gone Sorrell put her head on one side and looked at me. ‘Just keep out of his way,’ she said tightly. ‘We can’t afford to leave.’ She followed Michael the First back downstairs, where the muffled sound of TV news had taken up the airwaves.

  I want to thank Sorrell sincerely for not taking me seriously in the face of pretty damning evidence. I’m certain that if I’d felt the least bit safe in my bed, if I’d been given the benefit of the doubt and had my feelings acknowledged and my reaction considered important, I might’ve grown up with a sense of unshakeable security, and as we all know, that is death to any writer.

  But the events of that evening were not to pass unheralded. The next day when I arrived home from school, the Holden was parked haphazardly on the clay expanse, and I could just make out Sorrell’s blond head sunk in the driver’s seat. A puff of cigarette smoke drifted out the window like a speech bubble. I wondered what was wrong with the Porsche, which was sitting cutely in one half of the double garage, but, as I approached, I realised what was happening; our things were piled on the back seat of the Holden. My heart leapt with love for Sorrell—she’d got the message about Michael the First and had done the right thing. Feeling an exhilarating sense of validation, I broke into a run, schoolbag bouncing on my back, and in a couple of seconds I was at the car trying to wrench open the passenger door. It was locked. I peered through the open top of the window. Sorrel looked to be in one of her morose moods. She took her sweet time unlocking the door.

  ‘He’s kicked us out,’ she croaked on the in-breath as I climbed in. Executing a 90-degree head swivel, she plumed smoke meaningfully into my face. ‘Thanks to you.’

  And thanks to you, too, Sorrell, for the colourful experiences, which is why I’m mentioning this episode in my Acknowledgements.

  We roared through the flat, milk-lit Upper Noa Valley, between the scarred new-brick townhouses, the pristine footpaths that seemed to lead nowhere, and even though Sorrell being in a mood was a drag, I reflected that overall leaving Michael the First’s mansion wasn’t so terrible. I stayed quiet, biding my time until we got to Poppy’s, where Sorrell would have a drink which would cheer her up for a good half hour.

  Staying with Poppy wasn’t as much fun as the previous time. During the rages, I cowered in the red room, which turned out to be a golden opportunity to write some of my early prose. But this pint-sized writer’s retreat was not to last, and after a couple of weeks things reached such a pitch that we left in a night-time flurry and spent a night in the car. The next day, we moved into a room in Island Bay. This was the height of my Annie and period, living in a series of rented bedsits. Sometimes it was fun and we’d snuggle in bed together watching crappy TV, and Sorrell would hug me.

  ‘All right, Monster?’

  I’d nod.

  But Sorrell was depressed most the time, and when she was depressed the Thing that Happened would come up. The Thing that Happened was Sorrell’s grandfather had murdered her grandmother with a shovel out on the farm in 1923, and they hanged him. After that the kids all went pretty crazy, including Sorrell’s mother, who was fostered on some awful dairy farm where she had to milk cows before school and the only way to keep her feet warm was so stand on a cowpat. The Thing that Happened caused a fissure that could never be repaired. When Sorrell was depressed and staring out the window she would say, ‘We’re fucked.’ When things were really bad she’d lie in bed and lapse into Americanese. ‘We’re fuckin’ fucked.’

  But reminiscing about the Thing that Happened and lamenting about being fuckin’ fucked was better than living with Poppy or Michael the First and better than Hoki Aroha. So that winter and spring, when Sorrell stayed most of the day in bed and drank steadily from mid-afternoon, was actually one of the best periods of my life. I look back on it with fondness. I think I did a lot of growing up, learning to be in charge of making toast, our staple, and running to the corner shop to buy Big Ben pies. I also learned to take care of the rubbish.

  Although we didn’t have as big a carbon footprint as some people on account of not being able to afford to use the heater or the car sometimes, Sorrell did leave quite a trail of disposables in her path. I mastered the art of what to do when you forget to put the bin out on the street on a Tuesday night because you are too drunk to remember anything, and then another Tuesday night, and another and another. I became adept at assessing, by smell alone, when our rubbish had got to the point at which there would soon be a note in the letterbox signed by six or seven neighbours followed by a letter, more formal, from the City Council. I would decide that it was necessary to do something about it to avoid any shilly-shallying with the courts. Sorrell would try to avoid it by kissing me on the top of my head and calling me Monster, but it had to be done. I could judge the fullness of a public rubbish bin from a hundred paces, in order that a drop-off might be achieved in a nonchalant manner as one passed and looked up at the sky.

  Sometimes it got really bad and then Sorrell and I would load seven or eight black plastic bags into the boot of the Holden late at night. They wouldn’t quite fit, but the rubbish by this time was beginning to get a bit liquid anyway, so after some squashing the boot would almost close, and Sorrell would hurl herself behind the wheel, and together we’d take a meandering trip to a secluded part of Wellington like the lonely drag up the hill behind Newtown Park. I’d be on the look-out, scanning the horizon like Young Nick from the Endeavour, except not for land, for public rubbish bins. When I spied one, Sorrell would slam on the anchors and I’d jump out and madly jam a bag into it. Towards the end of the trip we’d get a bit sick of this routine and Sorrell would say wickedly, ‘Let’s dump them, Monster.’ I’d laugh and remind her about the envelopes. I knew that if there was even a single piece of telltale mail with your address on it, you could get into a shitload of trouble. But Sorrell would say, ‘Don’t be a square, Monster, don’t let the system turn you into a cog.’ Looking back, this was one of the most bonding times between us, having a laugh about the rubbish. I’m so grateful to Sorrell, because I actually don’t know many daughters who had this kind of intimacy with their mothers, where you could commit a little misdemeanour together and it was not just okay, it was hilarious. Giggling about our plan, Sorrell would veer to the side of the road and I’d leap out and lug the bags onto a grass verge. Usually by this time Sorrell would decide the location was so secluded she could risk stretching her legs and having a smoke. She’d get out of the car, and on the lonely hillside we’d look up at the sky. ‘It’s bloody beautiful, isn’t it, Monster?’ Sorrell would say. I got to know the Southern Cross like an intimate friend.

  Reader, I haven’t forgotten—don’t worry—that I am recounting for you the illustrious night of the Antarctica Awards. Before my grand entrance to the Kōwhai Reception Room, I find myself needing to pop into the loo, so I park my fridge in a temporary position outside the Ladies. Inside, all is cool, white and tiled. Glancing at my reflection in th
e mirror, I note that my makeup has not been quite as fastidiously applied as I’d thought; my eyeliner has run and my face has the patina of a cracked Greek statue. Do I care? Not a bit. I tell myself, ‘Janice, you have other fish to fry.’ And for some reason, although a bathroom is abject, noa, a place of decomposition and endings, I am filled with a sense of possibility and growth among the whiteness, the primeval gourd shapes, the elemental drip of the tap. I haul my much-travelled manuscript out of my laptop bag once again. One day, no doubt, a researcher will enter through the doors of the Turnbull Library, engage in a whispered conversation with a librarian who will bring the original manuscript of The Ice Shelf ceremoniously from the stacks. The researcher (I imagine it will be a man, I don’t know why, a little dishevelled but good-looking in a brainy, professorial way) will carry the folio to one of the glossy wooden tables and spend a morning, perhaps many mornings—perhaps he has secured a post-doctoral fellowship in order to study this text—turning the pages with white-gloved hands. He will wonder, no doubt, how the manuscript acquired its smudges, its coffee-rings, its rain-spatters. He might conclude that the blemishes speak of grit, of work, of real life, and ascertain that the novel represents an attempt to reverse societal destruction. I’m sure that the same goes for the papers of Hone Tuwhare—poems written on building sites, pages tattooed with the heat of a welding torch. (Not that I’m comparing myself with the great man, I hasten to add.) I’m happy to help out this hypothetical, unkempt researcher. I can report that on the evening of the Antarctica Awards, in the bathroom at the National Library, I feel the call of another edit.