Bird North and Other Stories Read online

  Coral stops climbing and points. ‘See,’ she says, smiling down at me.

  The buildings are tall and bunched and under a dome of light. I’ve got my arm around the trunk and with my other hand I’m holding the branch above. Coral’s feet are on each side of my hand and when she shifts I feel the warm outside of her foot. I can still hear the frogs and further away a siren.

  Carl and I grew up on a sloping three-acre section. There were pines on one side and a line of poplars down the other. One day Dad said he’d give us fifty cents if we could climb the length of the poplar line without touching the ground. We went to the top of the first tree and then clambered from one tree to the other. Halfway down the line there was a decent sized gap between two trees and we sat in the uphill tree for ages trying to work out a way across. There was a fence beside the poplars and we talked about using that as a bridge and then for a while Carl was poised to spring from one tree to the other. Dad came over and leaned against the fence. He didn’t say anything, just looked at the downhill tree and back to us. He was smiling and shaking his head like we would never make it. Carl got angry and broke off a branch and threw it at Dad as if it was a spear. Dad dived for cover in the long grass and we pelted him for a while until eventually he raised his hands in surrender, climbed through the fence, and stood between the two trees with his legs and arms set wide.

  People and animals

  Benny drove into the Tunnel Beach carpark. His girlfriend, Carol, was in the passenger seat. It was a Tuesday afternoon, a work day, and other than an old van the carpark was empty. That morning Benny had asked his boss for the afternoon off and at two p.m. he’d driven to Carol’s house. He’d planned to go in both barrels blazing, but on seeing her – kneeling, using long scissors on a swatch of fabric – with the sun making it appear as if her little torso was piped with gold, Benny instead explained how he’d found his boss, ‘Shoes off, no tie, radio on’, and then, with his usual increase in volume, ‘you’d think he was at the bloody beach.’

  ‘But what are you doing here?’ Carol said, standing up.

  It was Benny’s first go at breaking it off with a woman and having fumbled his ‘shock and awe’ plan, and with the cosy room smelling good from some happening in the kitchen, he decided it was the wrong atmosphere for the forthright conversation he’d planned. ‘Well,’ he lied, ‘when I saw Julius bloody Caesar there I told him I’d thrown up and that I was taking the rest of the day off.’

  Carol stopped squeezing his elbow in the way he liked. ‘And you came straight here?’

  ‘You don’t get many days like this in July,’ he said, settling on a new approach. ‘We’re going for a drive.’

  They’d been seeing each other since June. One of their first dates had been at Tunnel Beach. ‘I love the drama of the place,’ she’d said.

  ‘Drama? That’s a women’s thing: Shortland Street, Days of Our Lives.’ He hadn’t thought he was joking, but she’d laughed and then made him sit – on the scruffy turf near the cliffs – in such a way as to allow her soft body to fit between his legs.

  ‘Mr Bureaucrat,’ she’d said, ‘you intrigue me.’

  Benny hadn’t known too much about that – what he remembered most was the warmth off her and the way she raised the leg of his trousers and traced the surface of his knee with the tip of her little finger.

  So, having come upon the turn-off to the carpark, Benny had turned, reasoning as he did that ending it at a beach was no better or worse than ending it anywhere else.

  ‘Look,’ said Carol, after they’d got out of the car and walked past the van. Its rear door was open – the insides exposed: a T-shirt, the side and corner of a bare mattress, two tins of food on a pillow. There was no order, as if there’d been tear gas, or as if sleepwalkers had slid back the door and wandered off. ‘Where are they?’ said Carol, shading her eyes. The T-shirt slipped onto the gravel, then, in the wind, shifted like foam towards a puddle. ‘Uh oh,’ she said, starting slowly towards the van. It was one of the things that frustrated Benny. At work, and in his daily life, he liked to hustle. He’d jog from his work station to a colleague’s desk. Jog from the lifts to the teleconference room. It wasn’t that he was ever late – it was more to do with state of mind, and what he thought, as he watched her retrieve the T-shirt, fold it carefully and place it on the mattress, was that his next girlfriend would need more of that Red Bull kind of attitude.

  ‘Watch it,’ he said, as she slid the vehicle’s door home, ‘those freedom campers use these places like public toilets.’

  There is a tunnel at Tunnel Beach – a nineteenth-century gentleman with daughters who loved to bathe employed tunnelers to make a passage down to the sandy beach – but the area is known as much for the large, paw-shaped promontory that slopes high to low in the way of a full sail. From its highest edge you are sixty metres above the little beach that gives the place its name, while the view north, beyond the beach, and south, is of a coastline where paddocks give way to cliffs, tooling away at the base of which is the Pacific Ocean.

  ‘I can’t see the van-people,’ said Benny. He and Carol were near the middle of the paw, looking back to the track down from the carpark.

  ‘Maybe they’re on the beach,’ said Carol.

  Benny just nodded. The track had been muddy. It was fenced on each side – black cows sat about on the steep paddocks in the way of those anticipating the resumption of a tedious performance – and Carol had gone down clutching the top wire as if her life depended on it. Ahead of her, waiting occasionally to call out instructions, Benny had had plenty of time to think. He’d made a mistake. If he did it here there’d not only be the walk back (he hadn’t noticed its length the last time), but the drive. What if she started crying in the car?

  ‘The seagulls,’ said Carol, ‘they must love it here.’ She pointed at two gulls on the cliff’s edge.

  If her rate of motion got under Benny’s skin this was the sort of comment that ended up in just the same place. Seagulls are seagulls – they don’t care where they are. They fly around looking for food to eat. That’s it. She had this way of turning his comments back on him though. She wouldn’t speak for a while and then she’d describe something she’d heard on the government radio, like how fish communicate using clicks. And then, with anything to do with people or animals, she always got it back to sex.

  ‘Maybe we should go,’ said Benny.

  ‘Back?’

  ‘It’s cold,’ he said, pocketing his hands in his suit jacket. He stamped his feet. One gull went up like a kite. The other tilted its head, flung out its wings and cried.

  ‘Are you wearing your catsuit?’ she said, smiling over her shoulder as she went towards the highest part of the promontory.

  Carol ran her clothing alteration and repair business from the room at the front of her house. An industrial-sized sewing machine sat on a table, beneath which were a set of squat drawers – amongst many unidentifiable things, there were buttons, zips, and spools of red cotton like shotgun shells. Once, while Carol was getting herself ready, Benny tried to manhandle the machine. It’s like an anvil, he’d thought, bending his knees and giving it go. Something shifted in its guts. It goaded him with a whirring sound. He put everything into it, but instead of going off the table it started to topple. He only just managed to save it.

  Another time when he went to pick her up she was sitting in front of the machine. She was sorry to keep him waiting, but there was a job she had to get finished. She’d brought him a can of beer and he’d sat in a lounge chair behind her. This time he’d been relaxed. It was warm and the machine had hummed. When he woke up she was measuring his inside thigh.

  . . .

  Around Carol the sky was a cold, cloudless, far-off blue. ‘It always reminds me of Jurassic Park,’ she said, making wings of her arms.

  Benny went up the slope, and he had to admit it, she was right. Where the waves broke there were rainbows and thunder and their broken water mumbled up the sand of the small bea
ch that was punctured by dollops of rock. The beach itself was shaped like a halved, family-size pie – at the far end were a string of little islands (with spire-like rock formations) – and backed by sixty-metre cliffs, where, immediately below the paddock’s edge, pigeons roosted, putting their heads through their feathers and staring coldly across the abyss.

  ‘They don’t look the sort for a van,’ said Benny. They were an older couple. Sitting, hands on knees, on a small rock at the base of the cliff on which the birds perched.

  ‘Looks like they are waiting for someone to take their picture,’ said Carol, making a follow-me gesture and heading in the direction of the tunnel.

  Benny thought of contradicting her. Saying no, he didn’t bloody well want to. It might be the way into an argument he could punctuate by throwing his head back and saying, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sakes, I can’t take this anymore!’ She’d storm up the track while he brooded down below. He’d let her get out on the road, beyond the carpark, and then drive up to her with the window down. She’d swear and throw gravel. It would be the last straw.

  He followed down the slope, back to where the track from the carpark ended, and to where the tunnel made a shaft through the rock. ‘No,’ he said, but not nearly loud enough.

  The tunnel’s ceiling was close and the air smelt cool and of kelp. Benny started down. Ahead of him the sunlight on the sand at the end of the tunnel made a halo around Carol’s head. She loved to play where the waves spilled up the beach, to hop and skip just out of their reach. One time she ran up and threw her arms around him, settling her face in his neck, and then, and this made him feel really good, she put the tip of her little nose into his ear and sniffed. Benny dragged his hands down the sides of the rock walls. He would’ve liked to shout, or laugh – to work on an echo. ‘Pop, pop, pop,’ he went as he took the last few stairs.

  ‘Boo!’ said Carol, reappearing, and then, without waiting, ‘What are we doing here, Benny?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘What do you want to say?’

  His brain flopped as uselessly as a fish on an escalator. ‘Ah –’ he said, blushing.

  He’d had unimpressed looks from women before, but the one he now got from Carol really hit him in the chest, and all he could do was watch as she turned and hopped onto and then off the tail end of a huge rock – it was in the shape of a sleeping lizard – and crossed the sand towards the old couple. He started to follow but then went down the alley the rock made with the cliffs of the promontory. A wave came up the beach and he stopped. I should have stayed at work, he thought, and in thinking that, he had another, happier thought. He was wearing the catsuit. To be fair though he preferred to call it underwear; it didn’t have a tail after all. Anyway, when she’d ambushed him at the end of the tunnel that’s what he should have said.

  The wave retreated and he scampered around the head of the rock. Breaking up could wait. With his mind made up he expected her to be right there but she wasn’t, and another rock, this one in the shape of an upright clam, obstructed his view up the beach. A wave broke and in good spirits – suddenly he was a US Marine – he dashed up the beach and peered around the edge of the rock. Carol was there, standing behind the old couple. Benny couldn’t hear what they were saying though it was clear they were talking happily – the older woman grinning, while the man gestured at Carol who started to laugh. Not in a subdued way, but as if her laughter were the power behind a machine that made flowers grow. Benny had never seen her like that before and he grinned. He couldn’t help himself. And as he did the last piece of the previous month’s puzzle slotted into place. He liked her. He really liked her!

  He straightened his tie and, wishing he had a comb, put his fingers through his hair. He started to go to her, but then, having a better idea, he stopped and went back behind the rock where he took off his jacket.

  The parcel had turned up in the mail a few days after he’d fallen asleep in her sewing room. Great, he’d thought, when he unwrapped it, underwear. Now she wants to be my mother. The next frosty morning though he’d tried it on. It was black and webby and at first he was confused by the lack of a mid-section. Thin strands connected the upper and lower sections, but the rear and the groin were totally uncovered. They were windows. ‘No way,’ he’d blustered at the mirror when he finally figured it out, then, in a whisper, surrendering to the pleasant squeeze of it and swinging into a slow twirl, ‘No bloody way.’

  Unbuttoning his shirt, he was still holding his jacket and tie. There was no obvious place to put them. My shoes, he thought, feeling pleased that despite his excitement his problem-solving skills were still sharp. He unlaced his shoes, stashed his socks, then folded his jacket and placed it with his tie on top of the shoes. He took off his shirt and added that to the stack. The sea air was a curious, invigorating tongue. It found the bare flesh above his belt line. He dug his toes into the cold hard sand. Mother earth, he thought.

  He leaned into the rock and peered around the side. No longer laughing, Carol was looking beyond him and out to the ocean. He went back behind the rock and straightened the stack of clothes. A gull cried. Another wave broke. He wiggled his toes. It was irresistible. Undoing his belt he pulled down his trousers and folded them onto the stack. He stood. His heart was up near the back of his mouth. He’d signal her to come over and thank her for the suit. She wouldn’t believe her eyes. She’d be tickled. She’d definitely do that thing with her nose. He looked again and waved. The tip of his penis touched the rock face. They didn’t see him. ‘Carol!’ He waved more furiously.

  They looked. He ducked instinctively and then looked again.

  Livestock fall from paddocks around New Zealand’s coastline all the time. Most go over at night, but some, in this case the cow Benny saw as he signalled again to his girlfriend, fall during the day. There was the black speeding weight of it, a sound like someone blowing in an unskilled way into a cornet and, before the assertive bone emptying crack of its landing, a twisting that for a moment convinced Benny it was not an animal – not blood and guts at all – but some theatre prop inhabited by two pranksters.

  Johnsonville

  The three men went into the pub. They’d been on a driving range in Petone. Steve had watched Al and Glen practice their drives. It was late in the day and a lot of other men were practising. There were balls everywhere as if there’d been a storm of yellow hail. A man in an armoured buggy was collecting the balls. The buggy’s nose was shaped like an old style lawn-mower, but instead of behaving like a mower – working round and round or side to side – it was tearing all over the place: past the spindly pines, out to the fringe of the range, through the boggy area towards the golfers. Steve was concerned about the armour. What if there was a chink and a ball got through?

  At the pub they sat near a wide-screen television. There was a game on. Al, who was the shortest of the three and stocky, had drunk over a hundred pints of Guinness at the pub. Around the time he finished his hundredth pint, management changed the way they ran the pint-club. Now you needed to drink two hundred pints.

  ‘That’s why Al’s name isn’t on the wall with the other men,’ said Glen. He’d been polishing his glasses. First he’d done the lenses, then each arm, and now he blew into the hinges that joined them to the frame. Al didn’t say anything. He was watching the rugby. Glen held up the glasses and tipped them so they caught the light.

  Steve felt he should say something. At the driving range he’d said, ‘Good shot,’ and, ‘You got hold of that one!’ But since then he hadn’t said a thing. It was the first time he’d met Al. After the pub he and Glen were going to watch the test match at his flat. ‘Do you ever come to this place on a Friday or Saturday night?’ he said, looking at Al.

  Al was coughing and blowing his nose. He was looking over the napkin at Glen. After they’d picked Al up and on the way to the range Al had sneezed over and over again. Glen had asked if it was swine flu. ‘Shit no,’ said Al, ‘that lays you up for a couple of weeks.’ Then he’d tilt
ed his head back and sneezed again.

  Al finished wiping his nose with the napkin and rolled it into a wet looking ball. ‘I like Guinness,’ he said, holding up his beer and pointing it at Glen. ‘I like the taste of it. Why the hell would I care if I’m not on the wall?’ Al had a loud voice.

  A woman at the bar turned around. She was wearing an All Black jersey.

  Glen smiled into the bottom of his empty glass and then stood up. ‘Another one?’ He put the tip of his finger on the rim of Steve’s glass.

  Steve and Glen had been drinking in the city the night before. Steve had a bad hangover. He knew he shouldn’t have more beer, but the first one had made him less anxious. He nodded and shifted his empty glass. He’d left the nightclub without telling Glen and when he got home he’d sat in bed and watched a romantic comedy. What he would have liked from Al was a story about a man who’d come into the pub one night and met a woman who looked and smelt like she’d been on a shampoo ad.

  ‘Why would two teams wear strips that are so fucking similar?’ barked Al, staring at the television.

  It was dark when they walked to Glen’s car. On the main road there were lots of neon signs on different shops and restaurants. The unlit spaces, where there was an alleyway or a bush, looked black and deep like someone had been punching holes in the place.

  Glen and Steve had decided on a takeaway dinner from the Roast Canteen, but Glen was having difficulty finding a park.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Al from the back seat, ‘park in KFC.’

  Glen went around a roundabout and pulled into the carpark. Then he started in on a story about how when he’d stayed at Al’s place, when he first arrived in Wellington, Al always bought a burger that contained two chicken fillets, bacon, and extra mayonnaise. When Glen mentioned the quantity of mayonnaise a second time, Al shouted, ‘Is this Mastermind or something? Who remembers this sort of shit?’ Then he blew his nose.