The Ice Shelf: An Eco-Comedy Read online

  When Dame Bev chose to use the notion of rubbish as a literary conceit while reviewing my book in the Dominion Post in April 2010, she bit off a little more than she could chew. Yessiree, as they say in America, she picked the wrong person to mess with.

  As we stood chatting beside the wine table at the Borich Festival, I said to Dame Bev that if you’re going to use the word trash, you need to be able to define it, and could she? At first, she pretended to wave to someone else on the other side of the room, but I’d noticed a rubbish bin next to us, a large tub lined with a black plastic sack. As Dame Bev turned to leave, I tapped her on her woolly shoulder, snagging some fleece on my fingernail.

  She turned, eyebrows first.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

  You might be wondering what kind of materials a writer tosses into a rubbish bin at a literary festival. Perhaps you’re hoping that I can deliver an insider’s view. I can do just that. Before I do, I should say there were probably two or three non-writers at the Borich Festival, i.e. the audience, or, in the terminology of the festival, readers. The sample of these readers would not have been big enough to enable any assertions to be made vis-à-vis rubbish, so I will call the group whose rubbish I am going to discuss writers, with a three percent plus or minus factor of error to allow for readers.

  In my naïvety, I’d thought the rubbish of the writers would be of a high calibre. I was anticipating half-written poems on the backs of envelopes, quotes from presenters scribbled down during sessions but accidentally mislaid, tickets to hear celebrity writers—I expected this rubbish to be clean, dry and illuminating. Sadly this was not the case. I admit I was disappointed in the writers (plus or minus three percent readers) at the Borich Festival. This is the catalogue of their rubbish:

  Coffee cups, coffee-cup lids, coffee-cup carriers, screwed-up Borich Festival programmes, serviettes made into paper planes, lolly wrappers, bookmarks advertising the Borich Festival, muesli-bar wrappers, aluminium cans, water bottles, half a mince and cheese pie, balled-up serviettes, paper bags from the Borich Festival books table, a black beret, pantyhose, a diaper, cigarette lighters, plastic cups with dregs of wine, a broken Rubik’s Cube, plastic plates, plastic knives, forks and spoons, cigarette packets, ice-block sticks, a plush dog with the stuffing coming out, deconstructed sandwiches, polystyrene cups, used tissues, empty Panadol pouches, baby wipes, McDonald’s wrappers, a worn toothbrush, Poems of the Universe: An Anthology, and all of the above mixed together like the maelstrom of debris that swirls in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

  Despite its poor quality, the rubbish served its purpose, maybe better than its refined cousin would have. In the end, I could just see Dame Bev’s shiny black sheeplike shoes peeping out from the little mountain. The nineteenth-century parson look had returned to her face.

  ‘Oops,’ I said.

  It was ten to two. In a few minutes I would be doing my second reading in the Side Tent at the Fringe Festival, but I was all of a flutter. It’s not easy being an activist. People think it’s a piece of cake to be brave and decisive, to know when enough crap is enough. In truth, it takes a lot out of you. I’d planned to read six pieces from Utter and Terrible Destruction and, seriously, I don’t know if I would’ve done my usual good job on delivery—I am ‘an amusing reader of [my] work’, according to the blog BookLovers. Well, the Fringe audience never got the chance to find out for themselves, because I was escorted off the premises—not by security; what do you think this is, Jaipur?—by Nick Hope himself.

  I’m getting ahead of myself. To return to the arty bustle of the awards ceremony: the Director of Arts New Zealand has embarked on a speech in which he raves about the talent of the Antarctica winners, which is, well, humbling. I would’ve tweeted about how humbled I was, but my phone was, remember, in a humbled position itself, embedded in a bag of rice in my hold-all. Then there was a bit of a diatribe about the history of the awards, building cultural capital and the importance of telling our stories. I find myself sliding down the wall in a bit of a trance and before long I am pulling out my manuscript and excising a section about several pretentious literary characters. Their presence in the text, I realise, was holding The Ice Shelf back. Just behind me is a big red Chinese vase like the one in The Remains of the Day. I ball the rejects and pop them in the vase. I notice a couple of people, Dame Bev and the head of the Authors’ Fund, observing me with puzzled expressions. I zip up my laptop bag, straighten up and, feeling again a sense of levity, turn my attention properly to the speech. Unfortunately, it is still deathly. A cluster of young student types in black are hanging about, holding their chins and pretending to listen, and as I study them I remember with a pang my own youth, which is fading quickly. On that note I’d like to take the opportunity to make some very important acknowledgements from that time.

  With the experience of Harry, Nico, Sorrell et al., behind me, I found myself, in the late nineties, on the cusp of adulthood, an excitingly sharp lip to teeter upon. I sashayed around Wellington, living in different flats, using the dole as a writer’s grant until they found me a job, so I enrolled at Victoria University and spent several psychedelic years pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in a number of things. In the end I discovered I could educate myself better than any university could. During this period I also ran helter-skelter into the arms of a succession of lovers. I seemed to be rather popular, not to blow my own trumpet. Some of these liaisons, I have to say, were inappropriate. I’m thinking of a certain gang member, and the non-molestation order. But that’s long past, and I am now able to go freely into the vicinity of Rintoul Street, Newtown, if I so choose. All in all, a somewhat tempestuous few years, but what can you expect when all through your childhood you saw a parade of vitriolic posturing and toxic entanglements? However, I am ever thankful for my colourful background, otherwise I and my writing would be quite boring.

  What I really wanted to mention here was my job at the Glass Menagerie, for two reasons: one, I have a hugely important thank you to make; and also because it was during this time that I acquired the fridge.

  After dropping out of university, I was at a bit of loose end for a while—reversing night and day, probably drinking the teensiest bit too much, writing crots, having several intense friendships that foundered in the wee small hours because they were just too artistic, and if I remember rightly staying with Mandy on and off. Then I landed a job at a gift shop in Kelburn called the Glass Menagerie.

  At that point my resumé wasn’t in the best of health, to say the least. But I must’ve done something right in the interview, which was conducted by the manager Wendy in her poky but trying-hard office with its thick carpet and cartoonishly rounded armchairs. The interview started with Wendy peering over her filigreed bifocals at my outfit. I had on my usual big shirt and leggings, and understood pretty quickly that this was too boho for the position. Wendy tossed her pashmina with a sun-browned wrist that was bangled like the lid of a screw-top jar, and observed that I’d had a checkered career. I was halfway out of my chair, thinking it was all over, but Wendy gestured with her bangles that I should sit back down. There followed the single question of my interview, delivered with a slight toffee lisp: was I discreet?

  I hesitated. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was to be discreet *about*. All the same, I quickly gave Wendy my guarantee, in what I hoped was a not-too-shrieky tone, that I was the very soul of discretion. Wendy was probably about sixty, but her beauty treatments, her metallic hair and foundation, made her look older, and when she stood now, she had an elderly woman’s authority, the kind of oomph that accompanies the knowledge that you’re going to die soon so you may as well go for it. I staggered up too, then, and Wendy invited me onboard, welcoming me with open arms, literally, and a gust of Chanel No. 5.

  ‘I have a feeling you and I are going to get along,’ she said as we hugged.

  The formal part of the interview seemed to be over, and I thought it was time to mention my conditions. We remained standing on the tus
socky carpet. Wendy told me about her husband, Jan, spelt with a J but pronounced ‘Yan’. ‘He’s from Holland.’

  Wendy wanted to be friends with me, it seemed, telling me snippets about her life. She told me Jan didn’t come in very often, but he was the mastermind behind the Glass Menagerie chain. I nodded and smiled as if this was the best thing I’d ever heard.

  ‘I just fluff around,’ said Wendy. ‘I love the stock, you see. I’d give it away if I could. But my husband, Jan, spelt with a J, he has the business head.’

  I was to start on the minimum wage. If it were up to Wendy I would’ve started on more, but she was quite silly about these things—there would *be* no shop, nor a job for me, if she were running things, because she was so sentimental. But there’d be ample opportunity for advancement. Wendy would’ve liked to have offered me several hours a day, at least six, on a fixed schedule, especially after meeting me and finding we got along so well. But it wasn’t up to her, she was just a pretty face, ha ha—it was up to Jan.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ said Wendy, ‘Jan says that just wouldn’t work. For anybody.’

  I asked, smiling, how it *would* work.

  Wendy’s teeth flashed—they were quite a pretty tortoiseshell. ‘At least four hours a day. Once in a while, three. Sometimes two, if things are slow. There’ll be the odd day, in the middle of July when the weather’s terrible and no one’s out shopping, when we won’t need you at all, and you’ll be able to have a lovely lie-in and catch up on all your important other things.’

  The fact I wasn’t too rapt about my zero-hours contract must’ve been written all over my face, because Wendy angled her head up under my nose in a reassuring way. ‘I can imagine you ruining this place in the end. Can’t you?’

  I stepped back, puzzled. ‘Ruining?’

  ‘No, running! I said running!’ We both had a good old laugh over that, and I followed Wendy’s gaze out into the shop where the glass objets exploded with light. ‘I’m sure Jan would agree,’ said Wendy.

  I was the teensiest bit disappointed, but nevertheless the job would fit nicely with my writing life for now, as long as I could afford to eat enough to stay alive. On my way out, Wendy gestured towards my body, indicating that I needed to do something about my clothes, so over the next twenty-four hours I bought two sixties jewel-coloured synthetic dresses with big geometric patterns (slightly tight on me) and a pair of black not-very-worn-out penny loafers, all from the op-shop, and two pairs of black tights from the supermarket. I didn’t feel like me anymore, but I was willing to go with that.

  Business was very friendly to start with, very chummy. On my first day Wendy brought in Neenish tarts for morning tea and we sat and had a really excellent rave in her office. She told me how she and her husband Jan, spelt with a J, who was from Holland, had grown the business from nothing and now it had franchises all over the country and Australia, too—which I knew anyway, there are Glass Menageries in all the shopping centres. When Wendy told me she and Jan owned a lifestyle block at Makara and bred horses, I started to respond in kind about Hoki Aroha but realised I should back off from telling her *too* many details. She might have read stuff in the paper anyway.

  That first morning I was dispatched to the stock room, a dark, chilly, hangar-like space with avenues between staggering towers of cartons. Wendy instructed me in my task: I was to unpack boxes of glass objets—vases and platters, little glass animals with paws that tailed off as the knobbly end of the glass-blowing process—delving into a sea of polystyrene, and carefully disrobe them of their bubble wrap, then peel off the tiny Made in China stickers and replace them with bigger, green Proudly Made in NZ stickers from a gigantic roll. Wendy demonstrated on a big sea-glass coloured dolphin with her gold-lacquered nail, and I followed suit on a sleek red vase. She looked on as if I were a moron. ‘Oh, well done, you,’ she said when I’d completed my task. I surveyed my handiwork on the thick glass bottom. In truth, the red prototype did look as if it had come out of some hippy town in New Zealand, and even though it hadn’t, I thought, What the fuck, life’s too short! I replaced stickers all morning.

  At lunch I found I was to take my breaks (apart from the introductory first morning tea) in the stock room on a little stool. A cold wind blew in the open door to the delivery bay. Wendy took her tea in the comfort of her office, not that I minded. I was happy to sit there shivering, eating my sandwiches in the half dark with a slight whiff of the toilet wending its way to me.

  In the afternoon, Wendy tottered out of her office with a crisp new box and a smile on her face. This batch of labels were oval, white and edged with black, like stationery had been after the death of Queen Victoria, and they read ‘Made by a member of the Ngāti Manu tribe’. Wendy showed me with her beetly nail where to apply the stickers on some carved tikis after I’d peeled off the Made in China stickers. I took a tiki in my hands and had a go.

  ‘Um, Wendy?’ I said.

  She cocked her head patiently and I asked, feeling a bit Cinema of Unease-y, whether she could perhaps, you know, get into trouble for using these labels.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Wendy. Her skirt and pashmina framed by afternoon light gave her a draped dusty look, like a marble statue of a Greek goddess. ‘Do you remember why you have this job?’

  ‘Because I’m discreet?’ I murmured.

  ‘Exactly. If you don’t want to work here …’ Wendy gestured to the docking bay, and I followed her gaze through the open roller door. Rubbish blew about in the yard, illuminated in the sunlight. I thought of the beginning of American Beauty, with the plastic bag dancing about. I thought about how when Len Lye was four years old, he was kicking a tin can around outside and noticed the way the light bounced off it, and from that moment he was a kinetic sculptor. I spent the afternoon in the half-light replacing stickers.

  On the way home after work I passed a secondhand shop on the edge of the shopping centre on leafy Upland Road, and noticed a stylish green fridge on display outside. Yes, this was my first sight of the very fridge you know so well. The tough rays of the setting sun bounced off its corners, which were rounded and sleek like a horse’s buttocks. I looked at it idly and reached for the price-tag fluttering from the clunky cream and gold handle: fifty dollars. But I didn’t need a fridge. Mandy had a fridge.

  The next morning, relabelling done for the time being, Wendy initiated me into the art of shopkeeping. The most important thing, she said, eyeing me over folds of a different but similar pashmina, was to smile. She showed her jewel-filled teeth to demonstrate.

  ‘You create the climate in the shop,’ said Wendy, ‘you and only you.’

  I was pleased to have been given such responsibility on my second day. Wendy’s ringed fingers busied themselves with flaps of banknotes as she showed me how to use the till. She demonstrated with big, exaggerated movements how to wrap delicate objets in swathes of tissue paper, how to then slide them carefully into the thick paper carry-bags. And always, always, she said, be careful to take the price-tag off first because nothing was more vulgar than revealing the enormous price of a gift. Then, one must come out from behind the counter to hand over the carry-bag.

  ‘Never, ever pass an item across the counter,’ said Wendy. ‘That is vulgar. Remember, you make the climate.’

  We toured the shop together, inspecting the many glass shelves with their cargo of gleaming objets. Wendy instructed me on how to cajole but not annoy the customers. I was to hover discreetly like a waiter, not breathe down their necks. I was to answer any questions in a friendly manner but not initiate anything.

  ‘Remember—the climate!’ said Wendy.

  ‘Yes, the climate,’ I chimed.

  To tell the truth, I was eager for Wendy to leave me to get on with it. I’d become excited at the prospect of being sole charge. Finally she swept back to her office and I was alone. I stalked around my domain, inspecting the stock. Wendy had a preference for reds and oranges. With the overhead fluorescent strobes bouncing off these colours, the shop was ablaze.
Shelf after shelf reflected a network of gamma rays. The overall effect was of a fantastical world of heat and light.

  Mid-morning, customers began to trickle in. It was as if Wendy had invited her friends to the shop, because they dressed like her and behaved like her too. They were always in pairs and they strode around looking at this item and that and exclaiming to one another, How darling! How adorable!

  Listening to their conversation from behind the counter or roving with my feather duster, it was becoming clear to me that their visits to the shop weren’t enjoyable; quite the reverse, they were agony. ‘What to get Clarissa!’ they would cry to their friend. After an interminable time of peering and touching, the friend would light on an objet and shriek, ‘That is the very thing for Clarissa! I can picture it in the beach house.’ And, tipping the vase or jug or platter upside down to read the label, the friend would add, ‘And look, Bobby. It’s made in New Zealand.’ And Bobby would reply, ‘Yes, you’re right, Pippa, I can absolutely imagine that in the beach house. The colours.’ Pippa might add that the objet was rather pricey, but that didn’t really matter because when one bought something made in New Zealand, one was supporting the locals. And the objet would be ferried with a fair amount of pomp and circumstance to the counter. I would swathe it in tissue paper while the women continued to circumnavigate the shop, and more often than not another objet would take their eye. ‘Look, Pippa, I can picture this in Felicity’s vestibule, can’t you?’ ‘Why yes, I can. And look what it says on the bottom, it’s made by a member of the Ngāti Manu tribe.’ ‘Who are they, Pippa?’ ‘Māoris, Bobby.’