Home Theatre, page 9
He wiped his eyes with his thumbs then turned his mind to the day ahead, to the lesson plans he hadn’t written, the lesson plans he would just copy over. Nothing new under the sun.
Aidan Jackson and James Gilroy from Physical Education were in his corner, talking and laughing gruffly, slapping each other on the back. The seats—all cracked brown vinyl and flaky chrome plating—were arranged around the perimeter of the staffroom, as though for a large therapy group. Bryce spotted a vacant section beyond the low tables scattered with newsletters. He swung past the tables, mug of tea in one hand, sandwich in the other, current issue of New Zealand Geographic clamped under an armpit.
He tucked the tea away under his seat and put the magazine on his lap, then tackled the clingwrap on his sandwich. Half of it was squished flat, soggy with mayonnaise, which had also found its way into the folds of the clingwrap. The mayonnaise flicked across his knees as he unstuck the clingy layers.
This was Monday.
‘I know Donna emailed around last term, which seems like ages ago, but I’ve been trying to say hello to everyone in person,’ a woman said as she sat down next to Bryce. ‘Sorry I didn’t manage it before now.’
Bryce looked up from his mangled sandwich and was startled by two things in succession. One, she looked like his wife: same rosy glowing hair the same length, same hazel eyes that crinkled the same way with smiling, same oval-shaped face. Two, she looked unlike his wife: wingnut ears, chin more pointed and prominent, long fringe cut square at the brow line.
A paralysing thought struck Bryce—that Death had reconfigured her and now she was returned but changed. Perhaps Death had conjured her as an anniversary gift. Bryce did not want this gift from Death.
Don’t look, he told himself, staring back at the food in his hands—think of the differences.
‘I’m Fiona,’ she said, and held out a hand, then withdrew it when he showed her the mayonnaise on his fingers.
‘Bryce,’ he said. ‘Science.’
‘I’m Music and Maths.’
There, another difference. Bryce straightened up, felt air leak into his lungs. June had been a botanist, advising on policy in the government’s conservation department. She was a fine statistician, but it was the plants she loved, not how their populations might be numerically modelled. As for music, she had preferred silence, though if the occasion called for it, she usually opted for the simple pleasures of Seventies disco.
‘Sounds like a rare thing,’ he said. ‘A double degree?’
‘Double major. Maths can be taught within a BA. Any dual duties for you?’
Bryce was still eyeballing his lunch. ‘Chemistry. Primary burden is Biology. I did a master’s in Biochemistry.’ He lifted the sandwich to his mouth and took a bite.
‘Sounds very Jekyll and Hyde.’
He grinned briefly, feeling the clumps of bread around his teeth. June hadn’t disliked literature, but neither had she seen the point of it beyond idle entertainment. Her bookish interests were in esoteric texts and illuminated manuscripts. She’d hunt them out in libraries and museums wherever they travelled on holiday. Though her favourite book, as she liked to declare after a few glasses of syrah, was a venerable classic—a work of true poetry, drawing upon a language deeper than language itself: the Yates Garden Guide.
‘Mm. Arguably we can all be—reduced to chemistry,’ Bryce said. ‘Including our moral impulses.’
‘It was a pretty downbeat story.’ Fiona tapped a corner of the New Zealand Geographic on Bryce’s lap, her knuckles scraping the hem of his shorts. Bryce’s leg gave a little jump. ‘Is that good reading?’
She bit into an apple he hadn’t noticed she was holding.
‘I browse it—cover to cover,’ he said, and thought, The dead don’t eat. Eating is surely reserved for the living.
He could hear the machinery of her mouth working steadily on the food. He searched for a line of questioning to thread through the growing silence, and resisted the creeping urge to ask if she had any memories of the time before. Best not to indulge supernatural thoughts. Best to keep to what is real, if for no reason other than some politeness owed to the living—who eat apples.
Fiona swallowed, said, ‘Did you go straight into teaching?’
‘I dabbled around after university. Found some orthodox work in a medical laboratory.’ A familiar anecdote, easily repeated. ‘Testing blood and excrement samples, for the most part. Very process-driven. After two years, I began to wonder if a more dynamic profession might be preferable.’
‘When was that?’
‘Twenty-five years ago.’
‘Quite some time. You must enjoy it’—she gestured with the apple, holding it out as if offering it to him—‘the teaching business.’
He peered at her, and she flashed him a smile. Teeth like June’s—small white stones, incisors squared-off and level with the rest.
‘It’s more or less become another process,’ he said. ‘I teach certain known solutions to certain known problems.’
‘Science isn’t more creative than that?’
‘In high school? No. Perhaps you’re thinking of geniuses like Charles Darwin, Rosalind Franklin, Louis Pasteur. Or the lofty alchemists pursuing the philosopher’s stone?’
‘I just thought “leaps of imagination” was a sort of scientific ethos.’
‘No doubt it is,’ he said. ‘You’re new to teaching?’
‘Professionally, yes. I taught piano informally, in the evenings, when I was working at the nursery.’
‘Nursery?’
‘Sure. Growing plants for garden centres around the country.’
Fiona bit once more into the apple.
Bryce crammed the remainder of his sandwich into his mouth.
June had worked for the government her whole career. Briefings and budget bids and endless bloody meetings, she’d said. But all very keen and green, as far as possible, within the constraints. At home, she had spent every hour she could in the garden. Perhaps she had bedded in plants that Fiona had nurtured.
‘It was tough, picking up a class late in the year, from a temp,’ Fiona said. ‘As Donna said, that’s the workforce shortage for you. But I feel like I’ve got good mojo going into this year.’
‘It’s odd,’ Bryce said. ‘I can’t recall—seeing you around.’
‘Different departments, I guess?’
‘Mm-hmm.’ Bryce squeezed his eyes shut. ‘Makes sense.’
‘I don’t usually hang out in the staffroom—it gets airless. I will, come winter. But this time of year, there’s a nice suntrap behind the gym. I’d only thought I might mop up some new faces in here.’ She nibbled the edges of her apple core.
Who else could she be yet to meet? It felt like he was last on her list. Why was he last on her list? What had she already garnered about him—what information had other people already furnished her with? It seemed unusual he hadn’t met her before now—not impossible, but not likely.
Bryce searched for a corroborating strand of reality. ‘There’s another teacher who works across departments. Relieves in Physics but primarily teaches History. We’ve talked though I don’t often—see him beyond the Science building.’
‘Right. Dylan Somebody, yeah?’
‘Mm—yes.’
‘Are you feeling okay?’
It was true, Bryce was feeling poorly. It was like being buried in sand, the weight of it gradually constricting the body and breath before the grains finally trickle past the lips, down the throat.
‘It’s been—nice—meeting you,’ he spluttered.
He stood up, clutching his clingwrap and his magazine, the mug of cold tea forgotten under his seat. He headed for the door, skirting around the tables, and nearly collided with Jackson and Gilroy, likewise on their way out. Gilroy glowered as Bryce bustled past, but Jackson offered a sympathetic nod, which Bryce, blinkered by his need for escape, did not catch.
Bryce passed the wall of pigeonholes, shouldered the glass swing doors and strode halfway across the overbridge that connected the staff area with the forecourt outside the administration block. There was some glare, but Bryce didn’t think Donna was at her window. He felt the warm sick fill his mouth and he leaned over the railing. A small group of boys were gathered below, like trolls lurking in the bridge’s shadow.
‘Sir,’ one of them said, bowing deeply.
‘Keeping out of trouble?’ said another.
Bryce swallowed.
‘Don’t take the mick,’ he barked. Standing up straight, he finished crossing the overbridge to the forecourt, looked across and saw Donna at the window and waved to her, telling himself, You are a basically sound and stable man, Bryce. The dead are not truly risen, and the world is not ending.
He discarded his clingwrap in a flip-top wheelie bin, which the caretaker was busy filling with fistfuls of chip packets and soft-drink cans and paper bags and fruit peelings and all the rest of the lunchtime detritus.
Heading along the winding, downhill path towards the Science block, Bryce forced himself to conceive of another difference. He found one: she looked like his wife not as he’d last known her, but as she’d looked when she was about thirty-five, fifteen years before Death stalked her through the wilderness.
This realisation helped Bryce not at all.
The night was black and the lake was black. He waded into the heavy water. He had an expectation, like a memory, that the surface of the lake should be blank, but it was pricked with stars. He almost could have navigated by them if their patterns weren’t so unfamiliar. His wife was there, around him, but he did not reach for any part of her. He kept walking, the drag increasing as his body became more submerged. Up to his chest, his neck, his chin. Up to his lips, his nose. He closed his eyes and went under. He stood on the rocky bottom, bounded entirely by the water, feeling its closeness around him, its constant, gentle pressure. The unseen depths beyond. Something wrapped softly around him—a pair of long and bloodless arms. He reached out to meet the embrace and the water pushed against him, resisting. A scream came through the water, distant at first then filling his ears. The water caught at his arms as he struggled up and out of sleep, tangled in his sheets.
There came another scream in the night, from the world outside, and he knew it as the screeching of the possums in the trees.
It had been a summer of nightmares, this first long summer without June. He worked himself free of the bedding, and rose and made a mug of strong, sweet coffee. Facing east, sitting on their old sofa amongst the curtains of foliage drooping from the pots that dominated the living room—as others did the study, and others the guest room, and others the porch—he listened to the layered noises of the night and waited for the sun.
At lunch on Tuesday, nobody was in his corner. He made his way towards the cluster of empty seats. Halfway across the room, she called his name. The world fell away and he froze, poised beyond the boundary of the known universe. Then he felt his trajectory adjust. He sat down beside her and placed his mug of tea and copy of New Zealand Geographic under his chair.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Howdy.’ Death’s gift, smiling graciously. ‘How’re you, Bryce?’
He noticed a pinch of reticence in her voice. She was concerned, but cautious.
‘Sorry for running off yesterday,’ he said, not looking at her, thinking, Wingnut ears, wingnut ears, wingnut ears.
‘It was a little sudden. I enjoyed chatting. You sure you’re okay?’
‘Yes, thank you.’ Bryce forced out a chuckle, which sounded like choking. ‘All these years of teaching, and I still get nervous on the first day of school.’
‘I did wonder if the nerves ever disappear,’ she said, and snapped open an old takeaway container. Penne with a plain tomato sauce. ‘At least we’re all in the same boat.’
‘I suppose we are,’ Bryce said, and thought, Though no two of us is kept awake at night by exactly the same thing.
‘Fair point,’ Fiona replied. ‘Mind if I ask what’s keeping you up at night?’
A dislocating shock—the inner voice transgressing, becoming outer voice.
‘Gardening,’ Bryce whispered.
‘Gardening?’
‘Can’t keep on top of it.’
‘It gets the better of a lot of people.’
Bryce hastily peeled the clingwrap from his lunch and took a bite. Today’s sandwich was in better condition. He had been careful to place it on top of the objects in his shoulder bag that could cause it real damage, and which had caused yesterday’s sandwich so much damage. The main offender was a hefty Biology textbook he’d pilfered from the department’s expired stock two years ago. The book’s major appeal was its hand-drawn illustrations. They resembled those of the books Bryce had been taught from in the Seventies—it may have been the same artist—which displayed a creative bravura lacking in the slick photos and anaemic CAD drawings of the modern textbooks. June had likewise admired the illustrations—the botanical sketches especially, and the charming little animals.
‘I hope nobody’s been causing you trouble enough,’ Bryce said, ‘to keep you awake at night?’
‘Most of the boys seem well-behaved,’ Fiona said. ‘Fairly good engagement across the years. No real trouble I can’t handle.’
‘A professional summary,’ Bryce said. ‘I hear you’re doing great.’
No real trouble, but trouble nonetheless.
Fiona lifted penne from the container to her lips. ‘Ear to the grapevine, eh?’ She put the penne into her mouth.
‘I don’t mean to suggest gossip.’
‘People will always say things to keep themselves entertained.’
He bit off more of his sandwich, chewed quickly, bit off more again. In parallel, she forked penne from the container, finishing it off.
He balled up his clingwrap and squeezed it, released it, squeezed it. ‘Is any particular boy giving you trouble?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You said you’re having not much trouble—but some?’
He rolled the ball of clingwrap between his palms, a residue of mayonnaise and tomato juice coating his skin.
She laughed. ‘It’s nothing, honestly. Last year I had this class clown, a boy called Benny, in my Year 10 Maths class and—lo and behold!—this year he’s in my Year 11 Maths class. He’s just an attention-seeker. Or else, who knows, maybe it’s misdirected adolescent affection. That’s the age group, I suppose. Under-developed brains and an over-supply of hormones.’
‘I recognise the name.’
‘Excuse me, Bryce?’ Jackson had snuck up on them. He squatted down next to Bryce, resting easily on his haunches. ‘Glad I caught you. That circulatory model of yours—do you mind if I borrow it again?’ He added as an aside to Fiona, ‘It has this rubber tubing on hooks, and a foot pump. Kids love to see the red dye sploshing around, especially if a bit spills out.’
‘When—do you need it?’
‘Is tomorrow morning okay?’
‘I’ll dig it out,’ Bryce said, unsure of where exactly he’d need to dig. Over the holidays, some well-meaning person had tidied the Science department’s supply room. He should have told Jackson that the ancient, leaky contraption had finally been consigned to the bin—it might be true.
‘Champion,’ Jackson said, and he clasped Bryce’s arm.
Bryce remembered it was this time last year that Aidan Jackson had hugged him in the supply room.
The resumption of school, after the summer June went missing, had promised the return of structure and purpose to Bryce’s days. But while that promise had been fulfilled, and the days were easier, routines may only reorganise reality, not replace it. In quiet moments, Bryce had felt his grief pushing against the inside of his skin. Then one day, hunting amongst the shelves of equipment, searching for the razor kits—in his next class, they would be preparing thin leaf sections to inspect the cells under microscopes—Bryce had begun to shiver. He was crying when Jackson stumbled into the room with an elbow pressing down the lever handle and a foot pinning open the door, arms loaded up with the circulatory model he was seeking to return. The two men had stared at each other in shock. Bryce registered some dismay as Jackson roughly deposited the model on the floor. The larger, younger Physical Education teacher had then grabbed Bryce and—his nose flattened against a firm pectoral muscle, the muskiness of the neighbouring armpit an unexpected comfort—Bryce had wept for several minutes.
He’d preferred that it was Jackson who found him in the supply room, and not one of his immediate colleagues. There was solace and safety offered in the moment, but afterwards no expectations or awkwardness. The men remained independent of each other.
Jackson had, however, come to June’s wake. The fake wake. That was June’s brother’s clumsy joke. The police had been clear in setting everybody’s expectations. No one lost hope entirely, but as more time elapsed, other possibilities gained better odds. There wasn’t much to go on, said the police. There had been June’s car near the entrance to the hiking trail, and there had been two or three possible early sightings, and there had been some evidence of a camp site. Then there had been nothing, and no body. After four slow, painful months passed, his brother-in-law encouraged Bryce to hold a small ceremony—not the real deal, of course, more of a . . . oh dear!—to help everybody along in the process of mourning. Were they mourning, if nothing had been confirmed? Some form of healing, they agreed, was required.
Naturally, a fake wake suggested the same thing as the real deal. And just as naturally, the absence of a body raised a few questions and a few eyebrows. Bryce’s desire for privacy was interpreted by some in June’s family as a need for secrecy. He had always been a head-scratcher for them, being the quiet sort, whereas June was considered more outgoing. But they were both quiet people, Bryce knew. June was simply better at hiding her preference for solitude. In the end, even fewer members of June’s family attended the wake than Bryce had anticipated. Bryce’s two sisters and brother—gathered together in one room for the first time since their father died, a year after their mother—at first gave their condolences then, drinking steadily, proposed several upsetting reasons for optimism. From school, the Head of Science and several colleagues attended. And then there was Jackson, who came alone and made his excuses politely but promptly as soon as the speeches were concluded, as did most of the other guests.
