The Ice Shelf: An Eco-Comedy Read online

  Although the desk wasn’t in the greatest shape now, I thought I could glue the front of the drawer back on later without leaving too much trace. But, Reader, my break-in was all in a good cause, and I’ll tell you why. Lying in the tray of the drawer was a slim sheaf of densely lettered papers. We knew it was going to be papers, didn’t we? I picked them up gingerly, snared off the single silver paperclip which left a barbed hole in the corner and settled cross-legged on the floor to read. Boxy, inhuman typeface downloaded from the internet bled to the edges of the sheet; this text had no respect for the A4 page. It was, as they say, an education, and I think it’s safe to say my jaw dropped as, sitting on the dusky carpet, I read information from the Ministry of Justice about what would kick in once the dissolution of our de facto relationship was complete. The first realisation, of course, was that I knew Miles and I were curtains. I’d perhaps imagined a reunification at some point, like one of those Russian states returning to the Soviet bloc. A bittersweet reunion. It would never be. But after my weeks alone in the apartment, I was not so sorry. I’d come around to the idea that Miles and I were better off apart, that we’d fallen out of love and should go full steam ahead separately into the rest of our lives. However, there was more.

  I read that if a couple were together for three years, whether married or de facto (it made no difference), their worldly goods would be split down the middle; read, Miles’s modernist apartment and my green fridge, 50–50.

  I thought hard. It was comforting to know I’d be in ownership of half the apartment; that was as it should be. But surely when settling-up time came, Miles would not be so petty as to deny me the whole of the fridge which I loved, and which he did not. I hoped I wouldn’t have to pay him twenty-five dollars for the privilege of keeping it when I’d bought it with my payout from the Glass Menagerie, a place where I had suffered. My mind raced ahead. Half the apartment would be very nice, enough for a deposit on a lesser flat somewhere, not Mount Victoria, but perhaps tumbledown, Bohemian Newtown or Berhampore, and that would be absolutely fine with me because I’m not a materialist.

  As I scanned the busily formatted pages, I saw that there was a very serious proviso which could affect us if things went awry, though I hoped they wouldn’t: if a couple were together for fewer than three years, each would have no claim on the others’ assets. Miles would not be entitled to half my fridge, and I would have no claim on the apartment.

  This state of affairs simply must not be allowed to manifest. I quickly totted up in my head that I needed to stay in residence in the apartment until the 1st of March, which was three years to the day after I’d first moved in. Then all would be well. I could hold out in the apartment until the 1st of March—under siege, it’s true, but all for a good cause. So that there’d be no chance of me forgetting the date—as if I would, but just to be sure—I photographed the docs with my phone.

  As the steamy months of my writer’s retreat passed, Miles called a few times to ask me, in the nicest possible way, to move out of the apartment. He would string together a bejewelled necklace of qualifiers, each more uselessly decorative than the last—‘thinking perhaps’, ‘probably going to have to’, ‘hopefully in the end’. The calls were excruciating, but I wasn’t budging, not even with ‘the best will in the world’. I came to regard Miles’s polite, hedged phrases as standover tactics. I was being asked to do my own dirty work, to reassure Miles that there was nothing unpleasant and move out at the same time. But knowing what I did about New Zealand law and the official length of a relationship, I wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry, at least not until after the 1st of March.

  In the middle of this I got an email from Arts New Zealand informing me I’d been waitlisted for Antarctica, which felt like a visceral blow—I nearly toppled backwards off my chair with disappointment. But I recovered my spirits quickly and strode around the study telling myself things could be worse; it was okay, I was okay. I was waitlisted, not rejected outright. I decided to call Arts New Zealand to see exactly what was going on. It was just before five o’clock, so I dialled quickly. In a few seconds, unbelievably, I was talking to an Arts New Zealand human being. Having already thanked that esteemed institution for its generosity with taxpayer money, I would like to especially thank one person within its hallowed halls, Didi Musgrove, the junior assistant administrator who proved to be really excellent at her job as zealous gatekeeper. When I asked in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice why I’d been waitlisted, Didi’s officious telephone manner, her verbal attack when asked for an explanation, did her proud. The phone call ended, I have to say, in an extremely unprofessional slamming down of the phone and not on my part. I don’t think I would’ve summoned the determination to continue waiting if it hadn’t been for that spur. So thanks *very* much, Didi ‘You’ll never get an Arts New Zealand grant as long as I’m working here’ Musgrove, love from—although I may not be as smarmy and as sold-out as some Arts New Zealand applicants—an Award Winner, a successful recipient of the Antarctica Residency. I filed my waitlisting under the ‘Give me the grace to accept what I cannot change’ category and allowed myself a vodka and orange to celebrate my mindfulness.

  One afternoon in the middle of my halcyon (apart from the waitlisting) period in the apartment, Miles turned up at the door. It seemed he’d given up the phone calls as a dead loss; round one to me! I got out of bed and let him in, and he waltzed through kitchen and living room, not so much as a by-your-leave, and continued to the bedroom. This was extremely decisive behaviour by Miles’s standards—his only mumble was about the state of the place—and I thought for a moment he wanted sex and was prepared to dilly-dally, for dignity’s sake. But, instead, he sank to his knees and rooted around in the bottom of the wardrobe.

  ‘Lost something?’ I inquired from the doorway. He looked up from grovelling among the shoes, and it seemed he’d had his teeth whitened; they were so ultraviolet he could’ve used them as a torch. The new him, no doubt—which I found a bit creepy, to tell the truth.

  ‘No,’ he said, holding up a pair of black leather dress shoes.

  ‘Going somewhere fancy?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah-nah,’ he said and started on his jackets.

  I had a brief fantasy about asking him archly whether he wanted his paperwork back, but of course that would’ve been cutting off the proverbial nose. Then it occurred to me that *he* might rummage in his desk. Leaving him flipping through clothes as if through A2 posters in a record store, I sidled out and quietly shut the door to the study. By the time he came into the living room I was watching boats idling on the harbour. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him drape some clothes over the couch and head for the study. With a Usain Bolt-style rush, I intercepted him in the doorway. Our hands met on the polished wooden knob. Miles looked at me coldly and seemed about to say something, but Cinema of Unease set in.

  I smiled. It’s funny how you can be coy with someone you’ve fucked madly. ‘I’ve been working in here,’ I said. ‘It might be a teensy bit of a mess.’

  ‘I can sort of probably imagine,’ he said.

  ‘Can I fetch something for you?’

  Miles looked quizzical. ‘It is, you know, after all is said and done, my study.’

  Hearing this line-up of qualifiers, the big guns of passive-aggression, I realised there was no way I was going to keep Miles out. I thought quickly. Flinging open the door, I darted ahead of him into the room and flopped into the swivel chair, and as I did so I remarked on how hot it was, wriggled out of my dressing gown and draped it over the severed drawer.

  Miles went beady-eyed. In one giant arc, he was over at the desk and swiping away the dressing gown, which landed softly on the carpet like a gull on sand. He looked at the hole, which if I’m completely honest was rather rough. He spluttered, did a top-heavy dance, then ravaged through the drawer and came up clench-mouthed with the papers in his fist like a trophy. Then he had, on a scale of Cinema of Unease, a major climax, the big one in which the main character loses
it at the end of Act II. Except that this was only Act I, and I was the main character.

  On my wheelie chair I pushed myself out into the middle of the room, the way one does from the side of a pool, and twirled back and forth, treading the carpet, just watching. I already knew the contents of the drawer, and I wasn’t going to leave the apartment until the 1st of March.

  Miles cradled the papers protectively. His big shoulders were wilted, and I thought for a strange moment that he might cry. Miles doesn’t cry. I don’t think Miles has cried since he was a baby. I briefly imagined him as an eight-year-old at school, holding back the tears while being bullied by a purple-faced bruiser. Still cuddling the sheaf to his chest, he turned to me.

  ‘You probably shouldn’t have done it.’ His voice was weak and groany.

  ‘I had to,’ I said. ‘It was locked.’

  He was suddenly as wild-eyed as a Kaimanawa horse. ‘No! I mean you shouldn’t have done, you know, what you did.’

  My lungs went tight, and everything suddenly seemed bad—the study, the apartment, the harbour, Miles, they were all intolerable, and I couldn’t stand any of them. Things, people, they were all on the same horrible spectrum.

  ‘If it weren’t for you—’ began Miles, but he got no further. He turned and left the apartment briskly, as if none of this had happened, as if everything were perfectly normal and he had a train to catch.

  Alone again, I sat swivelling in the hateful chair which itself had now joined the hateful litany of objects and people, the material world. I wanted it gone. I was not thankful for it.

  I woke very late next afternoon and wondered, as I lay in the lather and tangle of my bed, if I could go on with The Ice Shelf. This was the terrible stage things had come to. As you know, I did go on with it, because you are reading the result right here in this very volume. Somehow on that poisonous afternoon, I dragged myself out of bed and went back into the hated study, sat at the hated desk with the abominable drawer beside me where Miles had dropped it on the carpet, and I started typing. And The Ice Shelf got me out of my personal climate change; it closed up the hole in the ozone layer that had come to hover over my head and give me a stress headache, just the way it does over New Zealand.

  I’d set myself back on my path, or rather The Ice Shelf had.

  The letter from the lawyer changed things somewhat, but a legal document is always going to skim over the emotion of the situation. In the interim Miles and I had shared a few emails back and forth about moving-out dates and about my novel, which was at a crucial stage. Tree Murphy was waiting for the final draft, and I couldn’t let her down or my name would be mud and no publisher, not even Tree, would touch me with a barge pole. My career would go down the gurgler. But Miles wasn’t buying it. I skim-read the letter from Medlyn Limpert and Associates and saw mention of a date in late February by which I should have vacated the property. As I had no intention of going anywhere before March the 1st, I did not open any subsequent letters from Medlyn Limpert.

  One afternoon there was a knock at the door. I thought it must be Miles, although he had a key, so I wondered to what I owed such coyness. I put on my dressing gown, and as I approached the door and saw the figure silhouetted there, the hair stood up on the back of my neck. The visitor wasn’t Miles but a beast of prey. If there’s one thing I learned as a child, it’s how to tell a summons deliverer at a hundred paces, and I certainly had no trouble detecting same through the bobbly glass door of a modernist apartment. Yes, papers were being served, and I had an inkling they were to do with my tenure in the apartment. The other thing I learned as a child was how to be *not at home* when the summons deliverer calls. I crouched beneath the kitchen window, poked my head up lightning fast like a lemur and withdrew again. Lying flat on the floor, jammed right up against the wall, I digested the image I’d glimpsed—a man, jockey-like with a shiny bomber jacket, a shaved head and worried expression; the epitome of the legal lackey. I remembered my great days at the commune Hoki Aroha, which is where I learned the delicate art of summons avoidance, I will be thanking the good people associated with that experience later in these Acknowledgements.

  Over the next several weeks, the light brothel-creeper squelch of the summons deliverer became a frequent sound on the balcony; also his sharp, practised knock, his heavy breathing after the climb up the jagged edge of the building (I dubbed the eight flights ‘the Southeast Ridge’, after Sir Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Everest). I even got quite fond of the summons deliverer’s routine and felt sorry for his trouble, his tender rasping on the doormat, the dejected squeak of his footsteps as he sloped off a failure; it all wrenched at my heart just a little. I’d like to take the opportunity to thank the summons deliverer for reminding me to have compassion for the plight of mercenaries everywhere. What a terrible thing to spend your days carrying out the unethical wishes of financial thugs. I will be raising awareness in the community on this issue as soon as I am in a position to do so. All the same, I wasn’t ever going to open the door to a summons deliverer. I took to living with the kitchen blinds shut permanently and to going out to shop only at night.

  My intensely creative period, however, was not to last. Things came to a dramatic head one late summer night when I’d popped out for half an hour, had had an interesting conversation about 4 aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle with the grunge-styled assistant in the liquor store, and had returned home to an interesting development. The first indicator was when I stood in the doorway of the apartment and took a giant, diagnostic sniff: Femme de Rochas. Dorothy was in the house, which meant that Miles was almost certainly in here too. Also I was the wee-est bit stoned.

  Here I have something very important to relate. This was the very day on which my de facto relationship with Miles had hit the three-year mark. And so, no matter what Miles did, no matter what Miles and Dorothy did—they could throw me out, they could toss me in the air, they could chop me up into little bits and put me in a black plastic rubbish bag—legally, half of the apartment was mine. And half of the green fridge was Miles’s (but I hoped he would not try to claim it). Armed with such knowledge, I took this little home invasion in my stride. It was neither here nor there to me. In fact, deep down, I suppose I’d been expecting this all along. At the very least, I’d anticipated that at some point I would receive another social call from Miles, and I was only surprised that it had not happened earlier. I’d thought Miles was either being kind to me, or a little stupid.

  ‘Happy anniversary!’ I called from the front door.

  Some clunks reverberated from deep in the apartment. No verbal reply, but I didn’t expect one. How could Miles put his feelings into words, having grown up in the Noa Valley, his father the Chairman of the Board, the family muffled by a certain cinematic unease? It was impossible, and I understood and forgave him. I still do. Miles, I forgive you.

  Looking back, I’m thankful for the way the events of this night unfolded. Later, I fondly dubbed it the Tortuous Sex Night, especially when regaling Mandy with the details. Before this, even with Miles’s phone calls, his unpleasant visit, his emails, the lawyer’s letter and the summons, I had not come around to the view that he and I were better apart. I am so, *so* grateful to Miles and of course to Dorothy, because without that reality check, without that reminder, I would not have known, and we might have suffered on in the relationship for years. But as I walked through the apartment, the situation unfolded before me like crystal left to grow overnight in a science lab, like certain experiments I remember from school when we’d set two elements together and on entering the salt- and meth-smelling lab in the morning would see that the two materials had acted on each other forming the most surprising, the most shocking shapes and colours—spindly and blue, or bulky and pink, or finely gossamered like spun sugar. That was how I experienced my progress through the apartment on this night.

  I had no idea what I’d discover as the rooms opened before me. In the sepia hall, where I stopped to clink my keys on the small table, I
saw, lying on the floor, a delicate silk chiffon scarf, umber-coloured and so fine it would be see-through if you held it up to the light. From the careless manner in which it had been dropped, the way it twisted kanji-like across the carpet, it emanated a sense of occupation. The scarf said, ‘I live here now.’

  I’d met Dorothy before, of course, when she’d come for drinks once or twice. She was a lovely person—a diminutive elf with a black wavy bob, pixie ears and a reserved manner. I’d warmed to her immediately. She wore 1950s dresses with full skirts and big polkadots or stripes which filled doorways despite her birdlike frame; her red high-heeled Mary Janes seemed to tango on the parquet floors, and of course the scent of Femme de Rochas disseminated through the apartment. (I’d be reminded of the famous Coco Chanel quote, ‘A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future’, and I’d make a mental note to give myself a squirt from my ancient bottle of Fendi next time I wanted to do anything important, but I always forget.) Miles, Dorothy and I, with the harbour lights as a backdrop, would engage in vibrant conversations about art—Dorothy was an artist, and with Miles being a curator it was natural they should have a lot in common. I didn’t actually have much to say, but I was just grateful to soak up the high-minded and knowledgeable discourse while serving the drinks and tidying up afterwards. I learned a lot about how bitchy people in the art scene can be, especially towards poor Dorothy, and that’s actually really useful stuff for a novelist, vis-à-vis human nature.

  I hesitated, then stepped over the chiffon character and continued on. Perhaps in the living room, but no, perhaps in the study, but no—and then to glimpse Dorothy in a compromising position which lasted no more than a second before one of them, I think Miles, kicked the bedroom door shut with a bang. It was still long enough for me to register tortuous sex, an extremely skinny bum, in fact none to speak of, doing calisthenics on top of Miles’s rectangular torso as if he were a yoga mat, a vision which cast me in a peculiar ontological situation regarding where Dorothy rates on the attractiveness scale compared to me; that is, she doesn’t, so I was left wondering why Miles would trade in someone like me for someone considerably less commercial, let’s be honest, and the conclusion I came to was that he had gone completely insane. That knowledge lifted some weight from my shoulders, and as I stood in the hall, rather frozen, I realised that I had actually, deep down, been taking some blame for the break-up, but when I had the opportunity to gaze into the abyss of Miles’s madness, I understood. Without Miles and Dorothy pointing this out to me, I am certain that I would not be where I am today.