The Ice Shelf: An Eco-Comedy Read online

  ‘Promise me you’ll never marry a piss-artist like him.’ She whirled back to Harry, bent down and pushed him on the chest pathetically.

  Harry rumbled from deep in his chair. Sorrell pushed him again and he laughed louder. ‘Fuck you fuck you fuck you,’ or something similar was coming from under Sorrell’s breath, I couldn’t quite catch it. I just hoped we’d do the tree soon. Suddenly Harry rose from his chair like a phoenix from the ashes. I’ve always had an interest in Classics, which has informed my writing on a really deep level. I’m a fan of Anne Carson and James Joyce. Harry swatted Sorrell across the face. She screamed and staggered backwards but recovered against the dining table. He took a step forward and punched her hard in the mouth, and this time she fell, hitting her head on the table on the way down. Blood trickled from her lip onto the rag rug. Sorrell told me in an urgent but muffled voice to call the police. I stood frozen in the doorway. The phone was in the kitchen and I’d have to tiptoe over her to get to it. Harry said not to be a freaking drama queen, which meant not to call the cops. I knew their number. I looked at Sorrell. ‘Call the cops,’ she said into the rug. I looked at Harry. He had his arms folded and was watching a news item. Sorrell unwound off the floor and stumped into the bathroom. Water tinkled, a lovely sound. I thought one or other of them might be going to put the tree in its bucket now that peace was restored, but unfortunately, no; the tree was forgotten.

  I can’t remember how I moved from the doorway, but I must’ve eventually gone into my room and done some writing, just childish stuff, you know, juvenilia, my little poems which are now stored in a blue foolscap filing box marked JUVENILIA with my papers in the basement at 5 McKinley Cres, Brooklyn. Later that evening I ate a bag of liquorice allsorts. I thought someone might put the tree in a bucket, especially after wine had been poured (I’d heard the pissing squirt from the box) and everyone seemed to have cheered up, and Sorrell had told Harry he’d never loved her. She was in a foetal position on the beanbag. He’d never loved her, she said, not for one fucking second. Harry, who was watching a documentary about people with strange sexual fetishes, said at least she’d got one thing right. Sorrell craned her head up from the beanbag, which was reddish and corduroy and smelt like vomit. I never sat in it, but I could describe to you using concrete significant details and a metaphor that a rust-coloured vomity corduroy beanbag is like a pub, it’s like an afternoon in a pub. Harry repeated what he’d said. Sorrell struggled up, all limbs, and sidled up to Harry. I would never have guessed she was such a good spitter. Her spit flew right into his face, bullseye. She said she was leaving. Harry wiped his face on his sleeve.

  ‘Can’t wait,’ he said, looking mild and inoffensive. He always had that baby-faced look, no matter what.

  Sorrell burst into wild tears and ran about the room scooping things up and stuffing them into a plastic bag. Over her shoulder she told me to pack. When I just stood there, she yelled, ‘Go on, pack a fucking bag!’

  I went into my bedroom and stuffed my other pair of jeans, my three T-shirts and some underpants and socks into my schoolbag. A flare of holiday excitement burned in my chest. We were going away. From various parts of the house, I could hear Sorrell’s sobs rushing up the scale. When I went back into the kitchen Harry was snoring peacefully in his chair. Sorrell appeared in the doorway. She looked at Harry and went over to him. She seemed on the verge of doing something to him but didn’t.

  Sorrell backed the Holden off the front lawn in a puff of acrid smoke, and we drove somewhat erratically (but exhilaratingly) to her friend Poppy’s place, an old villa jammed up against the side of a damp, ferny hill in Newtown. Poppy greeted Sorrell in a tattered pink silk evening gown through which a few bones protruded.

  ‘Finally,’ she said, wincing through her cigarette, ‘finally. You’re too good for him, darling, an educated woman like yourself.’

  The passage smelt of mould and was wide as a motorway. Rooms opened off either side with acres of floorboard and heavy brocade curtains bunched on the floor like the trousers of someone sitting on a toilet. I followed Sorrell clomping in her cowboy boots, who followed Poppy swaying in her stiletto sandals, and even at my tender age I knew Poppy had some kind of je ne sais quoi. Sorrell had once told me that Poppy inherited style from her mother, along with the villa; her mother had been an actress. Poppy was telling Sorrell over her shoulder that this visit was amazingly serendipitous because she, Poppy, had just that moment been wondering what to do with the evening. In the big bay-windowed living room, she turned and flicked her opalescent nails over her gown by way of evidence and mouthed soulfully, ‘And then you turn up.’ Poppy never acknowledged my existence, but I knew I was lucky to know her. With her cigarette holder, her vintage clothes (her dead mother’s apparently), her wobbling walk, and her clinking gin and tonics which she clutched passionately in a surprisingly old-looking hand until they ran out, she exuded sophistication. When the gin and tonics did run out, there was the most inventive stream of curses you’ve ever heard, and Poppy resigned herself to the wine-box.

  That evening I crouched on the floor and ate fish and chips while Sorrell and Poppy rearranged themselves restlessly on one of the big moquette couches in front of the ornately tiled fireplace (empty because it was summer) and drank the wine-box flat. Sorrell talked on and on about what a nightmare Harry was, and Poppy said, ‘I know, I know, oh I know. Live here, darling, live here with me, I’ve always told you that.’ Actually there was a little fire at one point—Poppy’s cigarette dangling on a polyester cushion—which Sorrell put out briskly with my glass of water. When the wine-box innard had gone like a collapsed lung, we all went to bed. I slept in a big room with a red bedspread and pillows and red brocade curtains through which a streetlight glowed. I was reminded of the Red Room in Jane Eyre and I was, like Jane, terrified of the red, shifting, coal-like shadows, and also of the strange creaks that resounded along the floorboards in the passage and some strange, cat-like moaning and yowling that went on and on into the night. I sat cuddling my knees because I had nothing else to cuddle. But I’m grateful for the experience because I think it was where I further developed my sense of the Gothic, so useful when writing New Zealand literature.

  On Christmas morning, or it might’ve been the afternoon, I was wandering up and down the long, hollow passage listening to my stomach grumbling and running my fingers along the textured wallpaper when the door to one of the bedrooms opened onto the perpetual night of black-out curtains, and Poppy peered out. She seemed shocked to see me, as if she’d forgotten I was in the house, and we stared at each other for a few seconds until Sorrell, wearing the pink satin robe Poppy had been in the night before but incongruously filling it out, pushed past. She pecked the top of my head on the way to the kitchen.

  ‘Happy Christmas, Monster.’ This was Sorrell’s pet name for me, a term of endearment I look back on fondly. When Sorrell called me Monster, I knew things were looking up.

  Midway through Sorrell and Poppy drinking their wake-me-up tea a bit morosely on the couch, Sorrell clapped her hand to her forehead. ‘Stupid me, I’ve left your presents at the house!’

  I looked up from the etching I’d been making in the carpet. Presents, plural? That’s what she’d said. I never got to find out if it was true—although I’m sure it was as Sorrell always had the drinker’s scrupulous honesty—because after a debate with Poppy, during which I carried on making indentations in the carpet, Sorrell decided not to go back and get the presents because she might encounter *him*. How glad I am that she didn’t. It’s not like Sorrell was blowing Santa’s cover; I already knew he didn’t exist. I’d worked that out as I’d sat in the bay window all morning on my own, tracing with my feet the sun’s journey across the room. If Santa were real, I reasoned, he would’ve known somehow that I was spending Christmas Eve at Poppy’s and not at our own little house. He would’ve known there was a girl waiting for her presents in a big bed in a strange red room in a creaking villa with a chimney in Newtown. So there
was no problem whatsoever with the Barthian death of Santa, he had to go sometime. What I’m so grateful for is the lesson in non-materialism that I learned that Christmas, a lesson so essential for a writer. I don’t think I ever could’ve produced The Ice Shelf if I’d been one of those children who gets everything, who is given, you know, one or two presents on Christmas morning and is allowed the indulgence of pretending to believe in Santa past the age of seven, who leaves a bottle of ginger-beer out for the jolly man and carrots for his reindeer, who looks up at the Christmas tree (in its pot, with its baubles) with shining eyes and a heart full to bursting with excitement. I have Sorrell to thank for the fact that I was never one of those children. Being such a child would just ruin you. You’d be one of those people with a sense of entitlement the size of Belgium. Thank you, Sorrell! I’d go so far as to say that experience was the best Christmas present I ever had.

  From that Christmas on, Sorrell and I lived in a succession of flats around Wellington. All our possessions could fit in the Holden—a couple of squab mattresses, a vinyl-smelling suitcase of clothes and towels, a box of kitchen stuff, and a little cube of a TV. It was fine, really. We didn’t have a fridge, but aside from that, it was freeing to be so portable. Sorrell wasn’t great at keeping up with the rent, so we’d pack up and leave in the middle of the night, giggling sometimes—it just depended. I’d have a few days’ holiday then turn up as the new girl at some foreign-seeming primary school. Sometimes there was no money to fill the tank (the Holden was a gas guzzler) and we’d wait it out, not answering the door, poised to do a runner as soon as the money came through. Sorrell was on a sickness benefit. Over the next few years, moving from place to place, each more unsuitable than the last, I was like the protagonist in Annie and Moon, without the cat. I could’ve written Annie and Moon if I’d ever had a cat. As it was, I could only have written Annie and. That title, its incomplete sentence, reflects poignantly (isn’t language wonderful?) my loneliness, my poverty, my disrupted education. I went to Ridgeway School, Newtown School, Island Bay School, Clyde Quay School, and so on. I think this is why I write crots—discontinuous narratives—and so, in the end I’m grateful for being dragged from pillar to post. I also had the advantage of getting to know a spectacular stepfather, Michael, whom I will call Michael the First (there was another Michael later) and will thank for his input in due course.

  After what seemed like a year at Poppy’s, but it can’t have been more than a few weeks because it was the end of the long summer holidays, things came to a head over a wine bladder. It was one of those long summer twilights when the air is pink and the flowers glow like lanterns in the last of the sun, when Poppy and Sorrell began a raging fight. I listened from my red room. I was reading Valley of the Dolls, which constituted Poppy’s book collection. That was the excellent thing about living there that summer, actually. There was nothing to do and no one to talk to, so I read Valley of the Dolls five times. Eleanor Catton has said that one of the best things for a writer is to read books over and over, so in terms of credentials, I was doing the reqs—not that I’m claiming any great Booker-winning abilities for myself, I hasten to add. I was up to the part in Valley where Neely comes to Jennifer’s funeral after Jennifer has committed suicide rather than have a double mastectomy and Neely stays with Anne and loses the ability to sing for psychological reasons when I heard, ‘Are you sure that’s the last of the wine, Poppy?’ And this was to prove portentous, given we were on the cusp of our own trip.

  The fight that ensued laid down the template for most if not all the major scenes of conflict in my fiction, and, as I’m sure you know, conflict is at the heart of any story. It’s true that I’d been exposed to a rich trove of conflict up to this point, but the evening of the Fight Between Sorrell and Poppy was different. Sorrell and Harry’s fights had been haphazard in structure—not that that was necessarily a negative; I developed a deep understanding of and love for stream-of-consciousness—but Sorrell and Poppy fought with a formal elegance that was breathtaking. From that early age, I understood about escalation. A line of dialogue such as, ‘Are you sure that’s the last of the wine, Poppy?’, uttered in a reasonable and modulated voice, gets rather louder on the second iteration. The third try is becoming tetchy. Soon after, there is shouting, screeching and name-calling. I abandoned Neely and came out into the living room. Sorrell and Poppy were facing each other, each crimson with rage. With perfectly judged timing, they erupted into scratching, swatting and hair-pulling. They toppled in a dramatic two-body crash onto the carpet, where the action continued with an almighty tussle involving throttling and punching. At this climactic juncture, one might truly fear for the participants’ safety.

  Of course from the point in time at which I am writing, I know the outcome of the fight, but as things developed that night, I did not know. I watched events unfold before me, certain there would be a death. I hoped it would not be Sorrell. I loved Sorrell desperately. I certainly loved Sorrell more than Poppy, and if one of them had to die, I prayed to some god or other—knowing even at that young age that this wasn’t a very ethical prayer—that Poppy would be the one to croak. Even though I’d at times fantasised about being adopted by, for instance, Mandy’s family next door, or some lovely family with an orderly house, dinnertimes, and a dog, as I watched Sorrell lying on the carpet with Poppy’s hands fastened around her throat I wanted passionately for Sorrell to remain my mother. But Sorrell’s face was going the colour of pomegranates while her fingers, embedded in Poppy’s dark hair, were knotted like root ginger.

  From the sidelines I wrung my hands.

  Suddenly the two of them went slack and lay on the carpet, lifeless and lumpy, and I thought they were both dead. I froze quickly from neck to toe the way ice progresses in a disaster movie. However, my panic was short-lived because in a moment it became apparent that they weren’t dead; rather, by silent agreement they had called a truce. Sorrell struggled to her feet and brushed herself off. Poppy looked up at me from the floor, her face bloody, her collar ripped. ‘What do you think you’re looking at?’ she snarled. At the time, I thought the question a trifle unfair, and also that Sorrell didn’t defend me, standing there with her hair askew, her ear bleeding—something like ‘give the kid a break’ or ‘shut the fuck up you nasty cow’. But in retrospect, I see the wisdom of it. If she had stuck up for me, I don’t think I would have developed my affinity with the abject, so I am grateful to both Sorrell and Poppy because the plight of the basest creature has become a strong element in my fiction. Keri Hulme has done this too, not that I’m equating myself with the brilliant Keri, I hasten to add. There’s an excellent essay by Janet Wilson on ‘the abject’ in the bone people that could just as well be about Utter and Terrible Destruction and probably would’ve been, only I hadn’t written it then.

  Sorrell stomped barefoot along the passage and into the bedroom, hurling the door shut behind her. I followed timidly—not wanting to be left alone with the fabulous but slightly intimidating Poppy—in time to see the door bounce open a little on impact and for one of the panels to crack. Through the sliver of the ajar door I watched Sorrell pack her bag with athletic fury. I was a fast learner; I went to the red room and packed my own bag.

  Ten minutes later, I found myself being flung against the passenger door of the Holden as Sorrell reversed at speed from the parking pad outside the villa. We drove through the dark suburban streets, desolate at this time of night, and ended up sleeping in the car under some pine trees on a lonely road.

  Bruise-like red-mauve clouds part raggedly as I loop my way—a bit tremulous in Mandy’s heels, and negotiating the fridge on its cart—through the grounds of Parliament to the National Library and the Antarctica Awards. Against the bashed-up backdrop, trees and shrubs gather blackly and the grey buildings of the old Parliament are stern and upright like Edwardian gentlemen. Halfway across the manicured gardens, I rest on the steps of the Beehive but am moved on by a security guard with a big moustache and a chip on his s
houlder the size of Belgium. I amble down the slope and find a bench to sit on at the edge of a fine lawn. The buoyancy I felt at Mandy’s has deserted me and my mood takes a sudden, gull-like descent—perhaps because my friend Francie in Aro Valley who I was sure would look after my fridge while I was transitional voted No on the doorstep of her downstairs flat—but more likely it’s simply that I’ve had a lot on my plate recently. I look out from my bench. The grounds of Parliament have taken on an abysmal Gothicism in the dirty ambience. Not being one to wallow, I open my laptop bag and pull The Ice Shelf unceremoniously from it.

  Even at the time, I find it ironic to be shunted along by a lackey of the state on my way to the very library where no doubt the manuscript I have in my hands will be housed in future along with other national literary treasures. If I crane my neck I can glimpse, nestled in the background between Parliament buildings and the Beehive, the old Turnbull Library, the cute brick English-looking two-storey house on Bowen Street that belonged to Alexander Turnbull, book collector and instigator of the archive. The Turnbull collection is now housed in the National Library building, the venue of tonight’s ceremony, having outgrown the original Turnbull House. Plus the building would be an earthquake risk, whereas the new National Library sits on a slab of state-of-the-art earthquake-proof rubber. But safeguards for posterity are none of my concern. I just get on with it and let future generations deal with all that. As I perch on the bench in Parliament grounds, the pages of The Ice Shelf flutter in the ubiquitous wind. I lick my finger and scamper humidly through the text and after a few moments of flurry I find what I am looking for. Like a gardener coming upon Oxalis, I subtract a melodramatic subplot about a crazy, self-centred baby boomer called S who thinks the world owes her a living, and her high-octane relationship with an anorexic viper called P. Gone, just like that.