Last night, before I went to bed, I opened the curtains and looked outside.
I can’t remember exactly why: to stare at the moon, perhaps.
This morning, when I woke up, the curtains were closed again. Who did that? Was it the wind, as Tanya said? (She’s the neighbour who comes in once a week to clean). It doesn’t seem very likely to me. But if not, then who?
Drawn curtains are just a small thing: possible evidence of some agency at work. But the real coincidence was with my evening’s viewing. I’ve got into the habit of watching a reality show called American Pickers, about a couple of unkempt bozos from Iowa who drive around in a van ‘picking’ through old attics and outbuildings and barns for various types of antiques: mostly car or petrol-related.
The episode I watched last night included a discussion between the two of them where Frank said he’d drawn back the curtains in the night to check on the van out in the parking lot, only to find them closed again in the morning. Mike asked him if he believed in ghosts, and Frank replied ‘yes’. That’s the point I’d like to stress – the fact that he said yes. The detail of the curtains is suggestive: almost as if the thing in the house were listening (it was, if it’s really me, or some level of me). But Mike’s leap to talking of ghosts was significant. It shows how inevitable that corollary is – has to be, really. Connections.
•
I suppose it’s a bit sad that this notebook has turned out to be almost exclusively a record of my reading and viewing. It’s not that I don’t talk to people: I talk to Tanya whenever she comes over, for instance. Our weekly cup of tea together has become a definite ritual now.
It’s just that most of my imaginative life is now conducted in the third person: in communication with the writers of books and the creators (for the most part) of bad TV. Sometimes I hear myself reacting with mutters and groans to what the people on the screen are saying. Does that mean that things have already gone too far?
I suppose that that’s what comes of moving house so soon after a death. It’s not that I had a real choice in the matter: the lease on our flat did not belong to me, but to my wife, part of her inheritance from her own parents. And moving here did seem to make sense at the time: beach, open air, shops, the kind of little enclave retirees all claim to like. It’s just so boring, though.
Except for those little things: the toothbrush in the middle of the bathroom floor this morning, the creaks and groans upstairs in the night. Those are the reverse of boring, really. Or perhaps it can feel dull even to be scared sometimes.
•
There’s no dialogue at all in the first half hour of The Quiet Earth. Most people wouldn’t notice that unless they (like me) had listened to the director’s commentary on the film, included in the special edition of the DVD.
It makes sense, though: a film about an empty world, with a single protagonist (good old Bruno Laurence, the first real Kiwi movie-star) moving through the featureless landscape between Coromandel and Auckland – what is there to say? And to whom?
It was only after many repeat viewings that I began to pick up on the patterns. And I’m not talking Minotaur posters on the wall, or German names for typewriters, either: the test of a good theory has to be that it’s apparent to others once you’ve pointed it out. Most of the ways people have found to interpret such works as Kubrick’s The Shining founder on that simple principle.
I’ve been trying to write an article about it. I don’t know why. I guess because that was my stock in trade: the high demotic critical mode. It is, I suppose, my version of a writerly comfort zone. Here’s what I have so far:
The first fruits of this new dispensation in New Zealand fiction can be seen in Craig Harrison’s ‘empty world’ novel The Quiet Earth (1981). His protagonist, John Hobson (‘Zac’ in Geoff Murphy’s 1985 film [1]) wakes up in a world from which the rest of humanity has mysteriously disappeared.
Hobson’s phantasmagoric odyssey from Thames to Wellington takes him through the very heartland of provincial New Zealand realism, and straight into conflict with the ‘other’ – another survivor, a Māori soldier.
As the story proceeds, it becomes clearer and clearer to us how much of what Hobson sees is influenced by the experiences and paradigms inside his head: that he is, in a sense, ‘creating’ the events he describes.
Unlike the film, which ends with its protagonist sprawled on a beach in an alien world, where he’s somehow been transported by an exploding power station, the book ends with Hobson killing himself – again.
As he wakes up in the sunlit bedroom of the Thames motel where the story began, we realise, finally, the motivation for his reluctance to pull up the blind and expose himself once more to ‘the enormous light.’ He has been here before. He is enacting his own misanthropic dream of a world without the pain of other people.
•
It’s not that things were that great before I moved here. You know what they say, moving to change your life founders on the fact that you tend to find yourself waiting in the new place.
Beth’s illness was absorbing, I’ll say that for it. New drugs, new treatments – frequent midnight dashes to the hospital for some complication or other. I toyed for a while with the idea of writing a memoir about that: ‘My Struggle with My Wife’s Terminal Illness,’ but that foundered on the fact that it had to be her story to tell.
What did I know about it, there on the outside? What was it really like? I’ll never know, and I’m not sure that it does much good dwelling on such things anyway.
Certainly, accepting early redundancy (there was quite a queue – but they gave me precedence due to ‘personal circumstances’) and transplanting here was intended to free me up for other things – Golden ager activities of all sorts. I don’t like golf, or water sports, or anything much like that except for taking long walks.
I do do that, I suppose: take walks. For the rest, the folly of moving away was that it broke my ties with just about everyone: work acquaintances as well as friends. A few of them have come down to visit, but never twice.
Beth was the one for that sort of thing: the one who could make it all seem like an adventure: somehow create the illusion that anyone should actually want to make a special trip to see us. Now there’s just me, and I’m forced to acknowledge, once and for all, that I am the boring one.
So is she the one twitching curtains, making bumping noises in the attic upstairs? It doesn’t seem much like her. But perhaps she’s got something to say. It’s hard to know what exactly, though. Open up? Wake up and smell the coffee?
•
I’ve been trying to keep going with the Craig Harrison essay. I wanted to say what it’s all ‘about’ – the figure in his carpet, I suppose – but found myself getting more and more confused the more words I put down:
The strength of the idea behind Harrison’s novel is, however, not so much in this use of Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’ as a plot-structuring device, as the facility with which it enables him to discuss the racial, post-colonial themes so close to his heart.What I wanted to talk about was that strange beast that hunts John Hobson, as he moves down the spine of Te Ika a Maui, Maui’s fish, the North Island of New Zealand. That’s the bit that eluded the film makers, who chose instead to halt his journey halfway, in Hamilton.
Far more effectively than in the more programmatic Broken October, Hobson’s suspicions, fears, and final downright homicidal ferocity against Apirana Maketu – note the closeness of that surname to mākutu [curse] – map pākehā paranoia with deadly accuracy.
Harrison’s novel is, then, not just about New Zealand, but the precision of its local setting gives it an almost mythopoeic force.
He runs into it – almost literally – on the way to Rotorua:
I had glimpsed, briefly, a bone-white beast the size of a big dog or a calf, hairless, wet and pallid like an abortion. Its head was deformed, a mutant of dog and goat, yet fat and imbecile, wide mouth snarling to the roots of its teeth, and glistening with spit; the car lights had glared back from red points of eyes rimmed pink. [2]Harrison does his feeling of panic and even indignation at the sheer unnaturalness of the sight very well, I think:
The car ran round bends squealing and roaring. How did I miss hitting the thing? It had gone straight at my left headlight but here’d been no sound or impact. I kept staring in the rear-view mirror half expecting the abomination to be coming after me; no, nothing but dark.He drives on to Rotorua (‘The stench was the same as ever, like shit in hell’), and finds a bed on the sixth floor of a tourist hotel.
I know what I saw back there. If it was real then there were now things living on earth which should be dead, which defied every law of nature I ever knew. And there must be a reason for that. Something I could not live with, in any sense. It demanded my death.
And if what I saw had slid into my retina from inside my mind, then God help me. [3]
•
Yesterday something happened.
It was, I suppose, Tanya’s doing. It turns out that all those odd, inexplicable-seeming things: disarranged pencils, curtains knocked out of shape, do indeed have a single cause – but there’s nothing supernatural about it.
She found it curled up by the rubbish bins: a mangy little stray. I’ve never been much for pets, really: no space for a dog in our flat in town, and while I do remember having a cat for a while when we were kids, I don’t recall feeling any great attachment to it.
This bundle of fur looked half-starved when she brought it in. She decided a bowl of milk was the safest thing, and it soon started to lap away at it like a mad thing (with unfortunate consequences a short time later, it should be said).
Its markings are curiously symmetrical, considering how many bands of light and dark fur, orange and white layers it has. I was struck by the splayed, almost leonine gravitas of its paws, from which I conclude that it is most probably a male.
It was when it was sick on the floor that I began to feel something other than bemusement in the face of this invasion from the outside world, however. It looked up at me with such a guilty air, almost flinching in advance from the shouting and blows it seemed to expect, that I couldn’t help wanting to comfort it: comfort him, that is.
I’ve called him ‘Hobson’s Choice’ – rather a mouthful, I know, but I imagine he’ll settle into it as ‘Hob’ or even ‘Choice.’
Tanya prefers the former, so ‘Hob’ it will be.
•
The Quiet Earth is, basically, a novel about suicide. Its surface preoccupations with colonial guilt and racism, however strongly expressed, mask an obsession with the details of what might happen after death, especially if that death came out of despair.
Immediately after his terrifying encounter with the strange abortion / shadow-creature, Hobson ‘put the muzzle of the shotgun in my mouth and reached down to the trigger.’ On this occasion, though, ‘I could do nothing.’ [4]
It isn’t till long afterwards, in narrative time, after he and his companion Apirana have run down the one surviving woman in Wellington in their car – by accident, but really as a result of the macho rivalry between them – and the two of them have fought to a finish (Hobson wins: sort of), that he finally has the strength to go back to his point of origin and complete the deed.
His realization, at that point, that he hated his own autistic son and indeed caused his death by drowning, linked to the fact that he and his wife spent their honeymoon in Rotorua, gives some substance to his sense that he is indeed creating the circumstances around him: that they constitute a kind of psychological parody of the conditions of his own life.
Of course, as luck would have it, when he does finally muster the guts to kill himself, he wakes up again, in the same hotel room, with – presumably – the same journey of self-discovery to endure. No wonder the film chose a more cosmic ending, with its hero knocked through a hole between worlds into beautiful alien beachscape, with a ringed, Saturn-like planet climbing up from a strangely tranquil sea.
The fact that this is clearly the same West Coast beach which he swam at earlier in the movie, might offer a hint towards the inescapable self-referential mise-en-abîme which lies at the heart of the book.
•
But why do these stories all have to end in tragedy? A Ring of Bright Water, Midnight Express, Old Yaller – no sooner is some endearing animal introduced, than the mechanics of narrative construction begin to plot its destruction.
Can’t we all just live happily ever after?
I took Hob to the vet for his first check-up. He’s not very old: maybe six weeks or a couple of months, they said. The consensus of opinion was that he might have been abandoned by someone driving through town, but no-one really knows.
Certainly he doesn’t seem to be local, and no-one has reported such a kitten as lost (there’s a most heart-breaking display of such flyers on the vet’s notice-board, which I read through half-reluctantly, so firmly do I find myself already attached to my little visitor).
He’s now been spayed, and de-wormed, and given his vaccinations. He’s lying on my bed nursing his discomforts, only half-mollified with the pieces of fish I purchased on the way home. A sad little kitten is he.
•
Tanya’s a bustling, self-important kind of woman: the kind who expects lesser beings to follow her lead.
Her kids have left home, she tells me: some two or three years since. Her partner preceded them by ten years or so (the nature and perversity of his various misdeeds form a good deal of her conversation over cups of tea).
Those cups of tea are getting more frequent, in fact. Under the pretext of ‘seeing how Hob is’, or ‘hearing him meowing outside’, she’s taken to dropping by most mornings.
This is, admittedly, an interruption to my work, but given that such work consists largely, nowadays, of biting my nails and staring at the blank echoing void of the computer screen – before giving up and starting to check out the news sites – I can’t say I mind particularly.
When I first took her up on her offer to come over and clean, I feared that our interactions might be awkward. I hate that Lord of the Manor kind of thing: giving orders, telling people what to do. But she didn’t need much telling. Nor did she make any bones, right from the beginning, about brewing up some tea and sitting me down at the table to drink it with her.
I offered to go out in the mornings when she was coming over, but she pooh-poohed the idea. ‘It’s no trouble. Get on with what you’re doing. It certainly won’t bother me.’
Now, when we meet so much more frequently, you might think we’d find it difficult to find enough things to talk about. But there’s the kitten. He’s always up to something. So are her kids. She doesn’t see them often, but they do drop by, and ring up with various crises.
I haven’t told her much about my life before I came here, but she knows I was a teacher of sorts. She also knows I’m ‘bookish’, and am always scribbling away at something or other.
In fact, the whole thing might have panned out just as she’d planned if it hadn’t been for that phone-call.
•
‘Is this the gentleman of the house?’
‘It is,’ I replied warily – phonecalls from strangers seldom bear good news, as my old Gran used to say.
‘Mr. –– [something I didn’t catch at first]?’
‘No, that’s not my name,’ I replied, on the verge of hanging up.
‘But you’re the one who bought the cat?’
‘The cat?’
‘Yes, the little tabby cat. This was the number we were given.’
‘I do have a cat. But I didn’t buy him. He’s a stray.’
‘Is there someone else there? Your wife, perhaps? She said it was for someone else.’
‘I’m not married.’
‘Oh, well, this is the number we were given. And there’s some paperwork on the cat – his vaccination book, the receipt, a couple of things like that – which got left behind when she picked it up. If you’ll give me your address, I can send it on. That is – I suppose it must be for your kitten.’
‘A little tabby, with white paws and a bib, and lots of stripes?’
‘I guess so. I haven’t seen him myself. It’s just my job to follow up on the paperwork. I don’t know why the folder wasn’t sent on straight away. Perhaps it was a present, some kind of surprise?’
‘Look, can I ring you back. I just need to think for a bit.’
‘Of course, but if you’ll just give me your address, I can post them off, and …’
I put down the phone.
‘What an idiot!’ was my first thought. As if a small kitten would turn up by chance, right outside my doorstep, and turn out to be just the answer to my prayers!
Then I thought of getting a hammer out of the woodshed and going around to Tanya’s house and bashing her head in with it. That one appealed strongly to me for quite a while, I’m ashamed to say.
She’d really fooled me, that was the thing! Lonely old widower, obviously with a bob or two, already housetrained and broken to the plough: what more could a woman want?
Then I looked down at Hob. He was purring and licking his paws. I thought of the kinds of books I read sometimes: of nailing him up outside Tanya’s door with a message taped to his front – of killing him and her and me and everyone all together and setting the gas cylinder to blow up and finish us all in a blaze of glory.
He turned up his little face and smiled at me. He was so soft and warm.
Quite clever of her, I suppose. God knows I needed something.
Notes:
[1] The Quiet Earth, dir. Geoff Murphy, writ. Bill Baer, Bruno Lawrence, Sam Pillsbury (based on the novel by Craig Harrison) – with Bruno Lawrence, Alison Routledge, Pete Smith – (NZ, 1985).
[2] Craig Harrison, The Quiet Earth (Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 1981), 82-83.
[3] Harrison, Quiet Earth, 84.
[4] Harrison, Quiet Earth, 85.
Maurice A. Lee & Aaron Penn, ed.: The Radiance of the Short Story (2018)[14-28/12/17]
[3190 words]
[Published in The Radiance of the Short Story: Short Fiction from around the Globe. Ed. Maurice A. Lee & Aaron Penn. (Lisboa: Editora Edições Humus, Lda, 2018): 551-58;
Ghost Stories (Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2019): 83-92.]
•
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.