The Ice Shelf: An Eco-Comedy Read online

  From force of habit, I am about to slide my recent Ice Shelf offcut into one of the concertina-like pockets of my laptop bag when I stop. Things need to change.

  Let me describe here one of my favourite sites in the world: my laptop bag. Black vinyl, labyrinthine, well-worn, this bag alone would be of great interest to the Turnbull Library. For several years I’ve been in the practice of stuffing all and sundry—drafts, notes, tickets, letters—into its wasteland. My laptop bag is my personal Limbo; like unbaptised babies and philosophers, some papers get stuck there forever. It occurs to me that if I continue with the process of editing The Ice Shelf, I am going to accumulate a substantial bundle, that is to say a shit-load of discarded text. I’m also going to be *on the road*. While I could continue to harbour these off-cuts and at some future date store them in an attic, à la J.S. Bach, I am already quite burdened with possessions—my Antarctica hold-all, my fridge, my laptop, not to mention the extant pages of my manuscript. There on the bench in the diffuse post-storm light, I experience another shift in consciousness apropos The Ice Shelf, and this one really is profound. As outlined above, I’ve always been a meticulous archivist of my work, but now, in an incredible reversal, I decide that I will *not* keep past drafts of The Ice Shelf. With this novel, I’ll be ruthless. I will dispose of all my edits completely. Though this might seem shocking, even violent, I am seized with a sense of rightness about this decision. True, the Turnbull Library will never take delivery of my rejects, but the draft that remains will have—without sounding too pompous, I hope—purity on a scale I’ve never achieved before. At the end of the process, I will transfer the edits to the complete file which I have, of course, on my laptop. The Ice Shelf will be the novel with one, single, pristine final draft. The Ice Shelf will be like the life we are striving for.

  Looking up from the bench after this revelation, I see that I am right next to the statue of King Dick, Premier Richard Seddon, who around the turn of the century (the previous century) solidified the colonial state. He is big and brassy and holds his hand aloft as if to say, ‘We’re over here!’ in case no one had noticed the little nation at the bottom of the world. A few metres from him, beside a bed of bright red cannas, a drain makes a phlegmatic gurgle as if clearing its throat shyly to get my attention. No doubt the downpour earlier has made a river of the city waterways.

  Without further ado, I hobble over to the drain (I’m somewhat hog-tied by my heels sinking into the soggy lawn) and file my edits about S and P between its russet bars. The pages funnel down into the oily rainbow-water where, despite the swift current, they lurk greasily. I hope they won’t cause a blockage; I’d hate to think of sewage backing up in the grounds of Parliament on my account, even if it is for a good cause.

  The really excellent thing about writing discontinuous narrative is that bits come away cleanly from the text, for the most part. There might be a stray reference left behind in another crot, the odd snippet of cause and effect caused by S getting back together with P multiple times, but those will be picked up by the blue pencil of Tree Murphy (who will be thanked later).

  Feeling an incredible sense of lightness now that S and P’s combined weight is gone from the text (not that P’s scrawny frame contributed much heft), I pick myself up and skip, as much as I am able while shouldering a hold-all and a laptop bag and pushing a fridge over the lawn in three-inch heels, towards the National Library.

  Of course I wouldn’t have been within cooee of an awards ceremony if it had not been for the next phase of my childhood. I was summarily shipped off to live with Harry because Sorrell appeared to have got sick of me, judging by the drunken evenings, the missed meals and the general neglect to the point of my head becoming a nit farm. (For evidence see a note home from my teacher Miss McEntee, c.1988, housed in the green filebox, hall cupboard, 15 Stafford Street, Mount Victoria.) Not that I have any recriminations or bitterness whatsoever towards Sorrell. On the contrary, I count myself lucky to have had a mother who valued herself. How glad I am that I wasn’t cursed with one of those sad-sack mothers with low self-esteem who make themselves a slave to their children’s every whim—you know, driving them to Brownies and sports games, encouraging them with their homework, giving them lunch money, taking them on holiday or to one lousy movie during winter break. Luckily, I got to see at close range how it is to really Be Yourself: to sleep—heck!—all day if you feel like it; dispatch your current lover after a screaming fight; pour yourself a stiff gin and tonic mid-afternoon and gaze moodily out the window while creating brilliant rhetorical diatribes about how life has mistreated you. I am absolutely certain that I would not be the creative person I am today if Sorrell hadn’t insisted on not just the odd evening to herself, not just the occasional weekend, but a year—yes, a solid year—of freedom. Hence me being pushed, at the age of twelve, onto a train at Wellington Railway Station with all my worldly possessions, not that they amounted to much, thank goodness, or I would’ve ended up a materialist, and being told by Sorrell to get off at Taihape, while Poppy, with whom she was *giving it another go*, smoked and turned away on the platform. As I was kissed on the cheek and told, ‘Chin up, Monster,’ I must’ve looked a bit like one of those interesting children being evacuated during World War II, with my hand-me-down coat, my battered suitcase and my anxious frown.

  That was how I came to the commune Hoki Aroha.

  Harry would be waiting on the station platform to meet me. At least, that was what Sorrell had said, but to be fair she did add as an aside to the giggling Poppy, ‘But don’t be surprised if the dweeb isn’t on time.’ He wasn’t. I perched on a bench in the elegant waiting room which only slightly smelt of pee and clutched my suitcase. They really are perfections of design, those provincial New Zealand railways stations, and I had time to analyse in detail the cream colonial weatherboards, the red facings, the glorious curve of the veranda struts and their decorative iron filigree. I also observed the station cat—I imagine in the same way Ted Hughes watched animals as a child. I watched closely as it strutted many times up and down the platform. Like Ted Hughes, I could write an animal poem, a poem about the lanky shoulder joints of a cat, its plush one-piece, its urbane air.

  When the light was beginning to fade, a man dressed in navy blue who was noisily locking doors frowned at me and disappeared into an office. I could hear him making a phone call and before long I found myself in the back of a police car. Talk about exciting; I’d always wanted to ride with Mr Plod. Beside me was a kindly female officer dressed a little like Miss Trunchbull from Matilda. We were on our way to the lock-up. But I didn’t spend the night in the cells, and I wasn’t the least bit traumatised to arrive at a brick shit-house in the middle of nowhere with a couple of sour-faced uniforms. I simply sat on the bench in the foyer of the little drunk-tank, staring balefully into the middle distance while evening came on. A dorky constable in a varnished cubicle eyed me worriedly. And in any case, it wasn’t long, well, under two hours, before I heard the explosions of an engine backfiring outside, and I peered out to see a rusty ute shut down suddenly in a puff of smoke and none other than Harry clamber out. He was thinner and greyer than I remembered as he loped, wild-eyed, across the forecourt to the cop shop.

  He paused in the doorway and I prepared a huge smile in anticipation of him looking around to see me perching on my bench with my suitcase. But instead, there in the doorway, Harry did something strange (then again, strangeness is the stuff of fiction). He pulled the neck of his jersey up over his mouth and nose and huffed all of his breath into it, right down to the last gritty wheeze, and then, revealing his face again, he drew in an enormous, fresh gulp of oxygen. Thus fortified, he descended on the cop behind the desk with whom he conducted a brief, strangely squeaky conversation. Before long, Harry was signing a form and shoving it in the cop’s face, then turning to me. Ah, finally, the moment of our reunion! I want to thank Harry for not running towards me, picking me up and whirling me about with tears of joy in his eyes; I’d like to t
hank him for not kneeling down and enveloping me in a warm, fatherly bear-hug; for not raising a smile, for not raising his eyebrow in the most cursory of greetings. As I’ve pondered the nature of writing, one thing I’ve learned is that feeling safe, wanted and loved is the worst possible condition for a writer. A writer needs to have nothing to fall back on apart from her writing. And so, on that occasion in the cop shop, Harry’s frown as he approached my bench, his furious grab at my suitcase and his stride as he exited the nick followed by the trotting yours truly, were all just the ticket for a writer. How grateful I am that Harry didn’t seem in the least pleased to see me, only anxious to be shot of the pigs. A moment later we were we roaring off in a cloud of exhaust and speeding into the countryside.

  It was a wonderful reunion, that journey in the ute. I hadn’t seen Harry since the Christmas Eve five years earlier when he had socked Sorrell in the jaw, so we had a lot of catching up to do. As I said, he was a bit older, a bit more wizened, a bit hairier. His knees twitched and his fingers drummed on the steering wheel as we drove through the dilapidated outskirts of town.

  ‘How’s tricks?’ he asked presently.

  I said tricks were fine, and he thought this was hilarious. More minutes passed and Harry seemed to have forgotten that he’d already asked me how tricks were, because he asked again, ‘How’s tricks?’ This time I paused to consider. Nothing had changed, there’d been no development in the status of tricks since a few minutes earlier, so I reported that tricks were still fine. Harry laughed again. While the countryside flashed by on the long journey out to Hoki Aroha, Harry asked me how tricks were seven or eight times. There seemed not to be a whole lot of other questions up his sleeve, but he did have an interesting repertoire of laughs.

  Now that I have many years of serious reading behind me (I could go so far as to say I am well-read, not to blow my own trumpet), I can recall the playwright Bruce Mason’s famous character, Firpo, meeting the alter-ego of the young Mason on Takapuna Beach and asking ‘How’s tricks?’ on a regular basis. I am filled with excitement to think that someone asked me that resoundingly literary question, perhaps the most famous question in all of New Zealand letters—‘How’s tricks?’ I don’t know many other New Zealand writers who had an episode in their youth when they were asked repeatedly, ‘How’s tricks?’

  But each time Harry asked me this question—even though I was a budding writer *and* I was racking my brains—I couldn’t think of an answer apropos tricks, at least not one that I thought Harry would find interesting. I considered filling him in on Ridgeway School, on Newtown School, Island Bay School, Clyde Quay School, and how hard it was to make friends when you moved so often; and also that I didn’t have a cat. I considered telling him about the suave and sophisticated Poppy whom I was privileged to know, about her big house and vintage clothes, but somehow I needed to keep it all inside. I am reminded of how James Joyce said that if he had stayed in Ireland he would’ve told all his writings over a few afternoons in the pub. How lucky I am. If I’d felt even slightly that I could confide in Harry, I am certain I would’ve squandered my talent orally—probably most of it in the car on that single evening as rolling fields, grey in the dusk, gave way to dense bush and tarseal gave way to gravel and then to dirt. I would certainly not be the writer I am today. I would like to thank Harry from the bottom of my heart for being the sort of person who asks repeatedly ‘How’s tricks?’ but does not want to know the answer.

  It was dark when we got to the commune, although a partial moon had come out from behind the clouds, so I had a hazy impression of about ten charmingly ramshackle dwellings and a few car-bodies dotted about a dirt compound. In a corner of the yard, a goat munched peacefully on a clump of weeds. As the ute bumped over the rubble, Harry cleared his throat, and I had the feeling some kind of announcement was coming. I wasn’t wrong. After a few false starts, Harry told me that it wasn’t going to be just me and him in the house. I swivelled my head and watched Harry’s fingers dancing on the steering wheel. This new information certainly spiked my interest.

  ‘Who else will be in the, um, house?’ I asked as we pulled up in front of one of the sweet, rustic dwellings.

  Harry got out of the car, walked around it, and spoke inaudibly through the passenger window. I wound the window down. Turned out there was a girlfriend, which I suppose wasn’t such a surprise. ‘And three kids,’ said Harry.

  I peered through the car window at the moonlit clearing. A long clothesline off to one side jostled with desultory rags. Pine trees waved in the distance. I had an instant new stepmother and three half-siblings whom I’d be meeting in half a minute. This is why I’m so good at certain techniques in narrative structure, namely the New Development, the Spanner in the Works, the Surprise but Not a Shock. Even though I was gobsmacked by these new developments, they weren’t outside the realm of possibility. All the writing manuals in the world can’t replace the experience of real life. I almost feel I have an unfair advantage over writers who had peaceful, stable, predictable childhoods, writers who knew what the next day would bring, who had a solid knowledge of who their family members were. Where do they get their sense of drama from? I feel sorry for them.

  Buzzing with the anticipation of meeting my new family, or half-family, or step-family, I tumbled out of the car and felt my shoes sink into viscous mud. (I was to learn that drainage was an ongoing saga at Hoki Aroha and the subject of lively debate at community meetings.) As Harry and I squelched up to the doorstep, neighbours’ curtains, in the form of tea towels and bits of sacking, twitched. Fighting off a giddy feeling, I gripped my suitcase and made my grand entrance to the whare at Hoki Aroha. The shock of seeing and smelling my new home that night is undoubtedly where I get my skill at world-building, so I’d particularly like to thank Harry for that. I don’t know where I’d be if I couldn’t summon sensuously a strange and confronting space.

  First of all, there was a bit of a pong which I identified gradually as baby poo, old vegetable and cat’s pee. As my eyes became accustomed to the light I saw that the little wooden room was pleasantly jam-packed in an arty intellectual way—books, guitars, trailing pot plants. The table was covered in a crimson lava-lava and lightly sprinkled with pastel artworks torn from the spiral edge of a sketching block. The same Pasifika material screened shelves under a worn wooden sink bench. I noticed there wasn’t a fridge, but I was used to that. To one side of the kitchen, an open wood fire shifted, sending a chug of ashy smoke out into the atmosphere. On the other side of the room angled in the corner were two tiny beds with little mounds sleeping in them. Then I saw, on a saggy maroon couch in the furthest corner, a round woman flipping through a magazine with one hand and breastfeeding a baby from the other arm. The sucking little blob was clearly the youngest of my half-somethings, brother or sister, at this point I didn’t know. The woman—my new step-mum, I realised with a fresh jolt—blinked at me and said hello in an incredibly calm voice. She went back to browsing the magazine. No doubt she was trying to put me at my ease by not overwhelming me with gooey smiles and attention.

  I stood there wondering what to do, stranded somewhat but slowly acquainting myself with my surroundings and my new life. Harry had gone outside. I found myself taking an instant liking to Nico who, it seemed, was the opposite of Sorrell—comfortably roly-poly, dressed in swishy dark-pink clothes, and with this amazing serenity. I admire people like that. It was as if she was meditating all the time and I was a train going past on her distant horizon. Nothing could ruffle her composure, not even the arrival of her new step-daughter, the sister to her babies. I lurked around awkwardly among the books, bumping a guitar on a stand, and probably resonating like a stringed instrument myself because I kept saying, ‘Um, um.’ By this time Harry had come back inside, much happier and saying, ‘Um what?’ And we all laughed. Well, except Nico and the baby.

  Harry continued: ‘Um, do you want a, you know, meal or something? There’s some soup, I think.’ Nico said calmly that the soup was g
one, and Harry said, ‘Oh well, some bread then,’ and Nico said the bread was gone. I murmured that I wasn’t hungry anyway, and Harry said, ‘Okay, that’s good,’ and everyone agreed it was a good thing. Nico maintained her inscrutable Siamese cat demeanour, but I could tell she agreed.

  After a while, Nico heaved up from the couch, cast the magazine aside (the New Yorker: I guess you never knew when you might be flying from Hoki Aroha to the Big Apple to see a play off-Broadway), and with baby crooked in her arm, clacked through a fiery beaded curtain into a back room. I was still sort of wondering what to do. Harry was sloshing red wine into a jam jar at the kitchen table. He offered me some, then laughed. ‘Only joking.’ He really was quite hilarious. I began to feel at my ease as I sidled uninvited onto the bench behind the table. We both sniggered. I thought Harry was going to ask me how tricks were again, but instead he said, ‘Isn’t she great?’

  I blinked. ‘Who?’

  ‘Who!’ Harry dissolved with laughter into his wine-jar.

  ‘The baby?’ I ventured.

  ‘The baby’s a boy,’ said Harry. ‘Sascha.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Sascha.’

  ‘Isn’t she great though?’ said Harry.

  I nodded. ‘She’s great.’

  ‘She’s the real thing,’ said Harry, looking at me very intently. ‘I’m a lucky guy. Oh and those two, by the way’—Harry indicated the two little mounds snoozing against the wall—‘they’re from before me, but that’s cool. And I mean, she’s the real thing.’ After a while, Harry added thoughtfully, ‘Unlike a certain other person.’

  It was a little hard to breathe, jammed up so tightly between the wall and the table, but I managed to collect some oxygen. Something quite profound began to occur to me as I digested Harry’s words—my first brush with the existential. It went like this: Sorrell was my mother (obviously). To hear from arguably the only person qualified to have an opinion about her corporeality, her thingness, that she *wasn’t* the real thing blew my mind. The table graunched away a centimetre as I nodded, and I was able to breathe easier. The next logical step was—because I was/am my mother’s daughter—to ask the question ‘Am I, therefore, the real thing?’ The self-doubt involved in that ontological question, especially in the lisping first-rationalising of a twelve-year-old, set the imagination soaring. I want to thank Harry most sincerely for planting a great big seed of second-guessing in my young breast which I lug about with me to this day. It has long, twisting, ropy tendrils now. I know I never could’ve produced The Ice Shelf—or any work of literature—without it.