The Ice Shelf: An Eco-Comedy Read online

  I was the first to emerge from the glass doors of Mandy’s flat and to drop like a spider, down, down the fire escape in the dark. I could hear Mandy clambering after me, feel her vibrations on the slats. Once on terra firma, I fetched the handcart from the side of the villa. It was good and robust with a sturdy red frame in tubular steel and firm tyres. I decided the neighbours wouldn’t mind if we borrowed it for an hour.

  We set off jauntily down the deserted street, our journey resounding with the downward thwack of our footsteps and the bouncy rumble of the cart. We passed the odd house with a minor party going on, music thumping, and this added to the sense of excitement. I have to say, on that trip down the hill in the dark with Mandy and cart in tow, I felt more revved up than I’d ever been. I began to hurtle faster and faster down Majoribanks Street until I was running, almost out of control, as if I might surge with momentum through Courtenay Place and out into the harbour. But I managed to come to a screeching halt in the eerie shadow of the apartment building.

  As I stood catching my breath, with cart and Mandy piled up behind me, I remembered something very unfortunate and experienced a plummet in mood: I no longer had the keys to the former chez nous because of course Dorothy had weasled them from me. When I informed Mandy, I must say I expected a show of solidarity. I thought Mandy and I, partners in crime, would stomp around on the corner blowing off steam then hunker down on the curb, chins cupped, thinking caps on, and we’d have a no-holds-barred brainstorm about how to go forward. I suppose I’m idealistic in nature, and I expect other people to be the same, mistakenly as it turned out. Because what I saw on Mandy’s face, caught as it was in an octagon of unaccustomed light, was not solidarity, not resolve, but relief. Clearly, for Mandy, the project stopped here. If I’d thought for even a second of giving up because of one teensy obstacle, the sight of Mandy’s lineny, ironed-out features were all the encouragement I needed *not* to be swayed from my mission. I suppose being brought up in a creative environment among artists and thinkers has an effect. ‘Risk, risk anything!’ Katherine Mansfield wrote. Without further ado I took off across the courtyard clattering the cart behind me, past the row of garages, towards the entrance to the building. Glancing back I saw Mandy step cautiously onto the concrete tiles.

  I pulled the cart up the Southeast Ridge. In the daytime the steps were a dull pink, but in this light everything was dead grey, plus it was a little chilly, but I was full of beans, twisting up and up with Mandy following a couple of flights below. When I reached the narrow landing that ran along the back of the building linking all the apartments on the fourth floor, I gripped the cart and waited for Mandy to join me. On the way along the balcony, we did make a bit of a racket with Mandy’s blundering footsteps, and I suppose me banging the cart into a couple of clothes racks and peg baskets didn’t help, but then trust Mandy to trip on a flowerpot and go kersplat. I shushed her wail and groaned inwardly. We were goners. But you know what? Nothing. Not a peep. I guess all the Radio New Zealand and art gallery types who lived in the building were down in the trendy bars of Courtenay Place swilling martinis and dissing Capitalism—it being Saturday night. The few oldies who’d been resident since before the apartments were fashionable would’ve turned off their hearing aids hours before. A warm, pleased feeling expanded inside me, and I continued on. When I knew we’d reached the very apartment that would’ve been, should’ve been, half mine but for a technicality involving spurious matrimonial laws and a leap year, I stopped and whispered to Mandy that this was it.

  Mandy flailed, tangling with a doormat or something. ‘What?’ she said loudly. Then, at my pūkana: ‘Oh.’ I put my finger to my lips in an exaggerated manner.

  Through the kitchen window I could see, deep inside the apartment, the glow of the hall lamp which Miles always left on to deter burglars. I mouthed this ironic information to Mandy, but instead of seeing the funny side she starting wittering on about being arrested and complaining about her bleeding shin needing stitches. I hissed at her to pipe down or someone *would* call the fuzz. Dropping to one knee, I patted around near the doorstep. I suppressed a yelp as I encountered one of the more ferocious specimens of Miles’s OCD collection of miniature cacti, which he had growing in tiny terracotta pots. Other pots rolled around on the balcony. When I had one tiny terracotta receptacle grasped securely in my fist, I took aim and walloped a small pane of glass in the back door. At the tinkling noise, Mandy and I froze—but, once again, nothing. Three cheers for old deaf people, for meandering conversations about dialectical materialism in the clubs of Courtenay Place. Feeling a renewed sense of thrill, I reached through the window—gingerly, to avoid shards of glass—and rotated the key in the lock. It opened like a charm.

  As I stepped into the familiar tiled kitchen, a chill ran up my spine and I hesitated. The flat was quiet as the grave; the high-gloss cupboards gleamed like stainless steel in the moonlight. I felt as if a net had dropped over me—a heaviness, a tightness. I know it’s ridiculous, but a sob fought its way up from my chest like a balloon. I must’ve made some kind of noise because I could hear Mandy way off in the distance, it seemed, bleating, ‘What? What?’ Part of me wanted to turn around and run back along the balcony, not looking back, and to never set foot in the apartment again. But I’m made of sterner stuff. I had business to do. I shook myself—literally—and said (inwardly), Janice, don’t be such a sook. I beckoned Mandy. Her baleful face trembled across the doorstep like a Thunderbird.

  ‘And bring the cart!’ I hissed.

  Honestly.

  Mandy hurried back out. I opened the fridge and phosphorescence poured out, illuminating the kitchen I knew so well, but I was no longer deterred by sentimental thoughts. I went hell for leather transferring waxed paper packages and pickle jars to the table. Mandy manoeuvered the cart wheels through the doorway and began to help in lacklustre fashion. At one point I rescued a quarter-full bottle of vermouth, of which I knew not the origin, from anonymity among the forest of bottles and quaffed a few mouthfuls, just to keep warm really. Mandy is traditionally a wowser about these things, but, lo and behold, she put out her hand for the bottle. We polished it off standing in the moony atmosphere. She wasn’t so bad, Mandy—*isn’t* so bad. If I’ve depicted her in any way whatsoever in these pages as wet, cautious and generally lacking in spark, that’s not what I intend. Mandy is actually kick-ass, in her own way. As we passed the vermouth bottle back and forth in the kitchen in preparation for our descent with the fridge, we started to giggle. Mandy’s face went pink. The sob that had been lurking in my windpipe since we came in was escorted off the premises.

  Mandy and I ping-ponged between fridge and table with what must have been Dorothy’s special cheeses and her jars of sundried tomatoes until the shelves were empty. I yanked on the power cord and the fridge motor grumbled to a stop like a tired animal. With a bit of oofing and huffing, we hefted the fridge onto the cart, then Mandy, still giggling, held the back door open while I made a few attempts at wheeling the fridge through. Unfortunately I took a chunk of doorframe with me on the way out. In the weeks to come, I began to think of the gash on the side of my fridge and the corresponding bite in the green paintwork as symbolic of, well, a lot of things. Suffice to say at this point, I needed to make the most of that gash because it was all I was ever going to get out of the apartment.

  We had a pretty clear run whizzing back along the balcony, as most of the neighbours’ paraphernalia had been knocked over on the way in, but the Southeast Ridge was a bit of a challenge. I lowered the fridge, bump, bump, bump, down the first flight. Mandy was positioned just underneath in case it toppled, but I was glad that didn’t happen because, to be honest, I don’t know if she would’ve had much of a chance if a five-foot fridge had come chonking down on top of her. I had a letter to Mandy’s mother composed in my head—‘a truer friend there never was, it was mercifully quick, she didn’t suffer’. Luckily I never needed to write that letter. Another flight of steps and we were across the courtyard t
hen bouncing back up Majoribanks Street, staunching our laughter because of the late hour.

  Near the top of the hill where it’s steepest, the going got tough and the cart and fridge, having no purchase, felt as if they were in danger of hurtling back down the slope like a runaway train. We needed a new plan of action; while I wedged the cart still with my back, Mandy galumphed the fridge onto the footpath and together we walked it, like a well-rounded character in a novel, up the remainder of the incline. Mandy went back down for the cart. Outside her villa, as we caught our breath, Mandy came up with the ludicrous suggestion that we store the fridge in the shed around the back. Mandy’s innocence is actually what I love about her. I pointed out, hello, thieves, and it sort of came out that Mandy didn’t want the fridge in her flat. I got a little bit upset, which I’m not proud of.

  We managed to lollop it onto the first step of the fire escape and thereafter to ease it up step by step. The fire escape is rather rickety, and a couple of planks gave out under the fridge’s weight; in fact we almost lost it once or twice. There was much giggling and shooshing and pausing for breath, I can tell you. What a hoot. At one point, when we were trying to turn one of the bends in the steps, we got stuck for so long it seemed as though we would need to spend the night on the fire escape. But then we had a final surge and hey presto, the fridge was on the upper landing.

  Once inside the flat we collapsed on the living-room rug in gales of laughter. I went to the kitchen for the last of the sherry to celebrate. When I came back Mandy was trying to wedge the fridge between door and table. I lay back down on the rug, gazing at its olivey flank and musing on how it was green, but not *Green*. But hey, I didn’t have a car and still don’t. I don’t fly back and forth to Menton and Berlin on literary jaunts. I think I can allow myself a few fluorocarbons.

  And anyway, it wasn’t even plugged in. And Mandy’s living room was where it stayed for several months until, as you know, the night of the Antarctica Awards.

  Reader, before I thank the people involved in the rather complicated night of the awards, I would like to go back to the beginning. As I write these Acknowledgements, I’m realising more and more just how much I’ve been blessed, and how this good luck, this good fortune, the workings of fate, serendipity, however you want to look at it, has shaped me as a writer and as a person. Perhaps I will discover the source of my good fortune if I start at the year dot.

  I thank of course, profoundly, my parents, Sorrell and Harry, for a lifetime of unstinting love and support. I’ve been incredibly fortunate. Sorrell and Harry are characters, both of them, tell-it-how-it-is hard cases. Phew, Sorrell and Harry never ceased to provide fertile ground in which a child’s imagination could grow strong and free. I have no doubt whatsoever that I would not be where I am today without them. As teachers, as role models, they’ve been the best parents a writer could possibly have. I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I say that in the tight-knit community of my childhood—which got slightly looser as time went on, like knitting done on those big wooden needles they used in the seventies, indeed could perhaps best be described in the end as finger-knitting—these two big personalities were well known for their colourful antics. Never a dull moment. They were both artists: Harry a sculptor, and Sorrell a painter, I think. To grow up in such a stimulating atmosphere is truly extending to the creative mind. At times, the excitement was so great that all I could do was cower in my room and write my lisping early prose.

  I would like to thank my mother, Sorrell, for up and leaving my father, Harry, on Christmas Eve 1987, and for taking me, aged seven, with her. Without this melodramatic move, which occasioned me to embark on a rollercoaster ride of hippy schools, scungy flats and hairy stepfathers, plus a stepmother, I wouldn’t have learned key lessons about narrative. My knowledge of subplot was further extended when, five years later, Sorrell dumped me back with Harry and his new wife, Nico.

  The night Sorrell packed her bags was the end of a very long, warm Christmas Eve. Remember, this is the Southern Hemisphere, so Christmas comes in summer, when hay is dried and tethered, as they say, although not in the middle of Wellington where the fake snow shone brilliantly on the trees. I remember I was excited about the presents I might get from Santa, which would appear under said tree that night. My natural optimism was apparent even at that age. The tree had been leaning against the back door for three days. There’d been some discussion, if I remember rightly, about who should put the tree in a pot with bricks to make it stand upright. Sorrell said she did enough around this fucking place without starting on the tree, and Harry said it wasn’t his idea to have a tree in the first place and if Sorrell wanted a tree she should do the fucking tree. But I just knew that the tree would be up by Christmas.

  I went next door to my friend Mandy’s place—yes, we go way back, Mandy and me. Their tree smelt evocatively of a European forest of the kind we don’t have in temperate New Zealand. It smelt of Christmas, and each branch sparkled with a decoration that could tell a story. Sometimes Mandy would pore over the tree, saying, ‘And this glass angel was from Aunty Petty, and this silver reindeer was from Grandma Rose,’ in what some people might think a sickening manner, but I never did. I filled my asthmatic lungs (not diagnosed, but my attacks have proved useful in writing near-death scenes) with the scent of the tree and envisaged how when I got back home our own tree would be standing tall in its pot all ready to decorate with the as-yet-unopened box of Woolworths baubles. But I soon forgot about it, as Mandy and her mother and I, having finished the tree, began to decorate their family Christmas cake with glass figurines—a tiny orchestra of angels playing flutes and trumpets and violins led by a tiny glass conductor. There was a fat glass Santa, and the glass Christmas tree had pride of place in the middle of the cake. We went delicately, handling the fragile ornaments with our fat little fingers, laughing and listening to carols on the radio. When we’d finished the cake, Mandy’s mother made us chocolate milk and we knelt under the tree and shook the presents and speculated as to what each one was.

  Then Mandy’s mother said maybe I should go home, seeing I didn’t actually live at their house. She must’ve known how it was at our place, with my parents being artistic—sound reverberated through the walls of those wooden houses—and I am ever-grateful to her for her tactful non-intervention. I would’ve been so embarrassed if she’d alerted social services to my predicament, which likely would have meant a predictable, safe, secure childhood for me with loving foster parents. I would certainly not be the writer I am today if a concerned bystander had intervened. These Acknowledgements are the perfect opportunity to thank Mandy’s mother for her kindness all those years ago, but she is now ten years into a continuous game of bowls on the lawn of a brick-and-tile retirement village in Tauranga (if Mandy’s accounts are anything to go by, reading between the lines), a game which goes on till death, and I’m not sure she will get around to reading The Ice Shelf. Who cares? I certainly don’t. I don’t expect everybody to read my oeuvre; that would be a very conceited ideal. But if you’re out there, Mandy’s mother, moving from section to section of the water-guzzling leisure lawn and contributing to humanity with the subtle bias of your delivery, thank you from the bottom of my heart, for telling me, on that Christmas Eve when I was seven years old, to Go Home. I went home, through your dinky white picket gate, over our gate which had always lain flat on the ground and through the front door because the back door was unavailable on account of the tree.

  I paused in the dark passage. There was an argument going on, but it would soon be Christmas and the tree would be up and Santa would come. It’s true that the tree itself wasn’t up yet, but Sorrell’s familiar cigar-shape was planted in the middle of the kitchen/living room (a wall had been knocked out once for one of Harry’s art projects and you could see its interesting history), her hair mussed up, face all blotchy. She was saying something like, ‘Trust me to choose a miserable fucking dopehead loser who doesn’t even like Christmas.’ I couldn’t q
uite catch it. But I did hear Harry, loud and clear, bellowing, ‘I like Christmas well enough, I just don’t like it your way you fucking cunt.’ He was sprawled in his chair in front of the TV news. Sorrell and Harry kept themselves well informed about the world. I had reasonable general knowledge (not to blow my own trumpet) and always did well in general knowledge quizzes at school, well, at several of the schools I went to. Sorrell, from the middle of the kitchen, told Harry that she knew how he liked Christmas: ‘You like it off your fucking face.’ Harry snorted and parried wittily with, ‘You like it out of your tree, yes, out of your motherfucking tree!’ The exchange went back and forth some more. I’m very lucky that Sorrell and Harry were walking lexicons of colourful expressions; it is to them that I attribute my love of language.

  Sorrell went over to Harry’s chair and stood touching it with her pale-jeaned knees wishing to any kind of god you could think of that she’d never met him. Harry peered up at her with the blinking innocence he always wore and told her she’d taken the words right out of his mouth. Sorrell turned to me and I watched through the doorway her brown eyes go misty in their kidney-dark sockets, her T-shirt twist tighter over her pouchy stomach.

  ‘Just look at him,’ she said, spitting a bit, ‘the artist! Promise me one thing.’ Sorrell looked at me from under her brow and waited for the reply.

  ‘What?’ I murmured, fearful of what I was signing up for.