What Happen Then, Mr Bones?, page 4
‘Kei te pai,’ Dave replies, and he crouches over his bowl with a hunted look as if Joe had offered him Eden’s apple: DDT, 245T, wax coating, preservative 34567, colour 123^xyz, sweetener 20645#, natural apple flavour 3456789*, 1% bensolysochlorophasbuterol, water added.
Joe shrugs and opens a beer, grabs a handful of extruded-flour product and watches Dave sip his soup.
‘I won’t bother cooking this soon,’ Dave confides.
‘What, takes all the goodness out, does it?’ Joe asks.
Dave replies that he’s heard of some grasses so rich in nutrients all you have to do is soak them in cold water for twelve hours then drink the water, and the body not only gets everything it needs but all your toxins are flushed out. As he speaks, Dave’s eyes light up as if he has just seen a spaceship land.
Joe goes out of the room. Perhaps excessiveness is what he himself needs to suffocate the eternal yawp of anxiety — there must be something in a position so many take refuge in. He too should gather the dewy grass at dawn, fuss over it all day, pick off the insects, rinse it and dry it repeatedly, marinate it in water bottled straight from the throat of a glacier, boil it and strain it and then sip it slowly, reflecting with elysian calm on the day’s sacred work. Joe doubts such absurdity could possibly co-exist with pervasive anxiety. But Susan says, ‘No, you’ve got it all wrong. Just you watch. Soon the benighted fool will have to intensify the ritual to keep his anxiety at bay. He’s just like you, Joe. You started out getting kelp at the Good-health Clinic and now you want a daily scan.’
Valentina laughs with scorn at Dolores and Dave. Valentina gave up vegetables at four, homecooked food at ten; at twelve she sneered at anything not dressed in a shiny wrapper. Now she eats fast food like there’s no tomorrow. She doesn’t understand her purchases alter her tomorrow. They alter everyone’s tomorrow, right down to the contents of the piccaninny’s bowl, even further down to the poor old cow in the feed-lot, the chook in its cage, the blade of grass in its clump of dirt, the price of dirt, the lowest dirty price for labour, supply, life or anything. She sees her diet as the path of defiance between her father’s obsessive concern for health and her mother’s risible passion for haute cuisine. But her mother argues there’s nothing defiant about being enslaved through your mouth, it’s only slightly less revolting than via your privates.
‘In fact,’ Susan lectures, ‘the latter has a kind of honesty the former lacks. In the fast-food world you are tricked into believing your food choices are a form of freedom, of self-expression, although it’s quite a quaint idea — freedom residing in uniformity, obesity and wage poverty. Not to mention the gaudy and tasteless ruination of the streetscape.’
Blah, blah, blah, Valentina thinks, and leaves to cream her alabaster neck before going to the nearest takeaway.
‘Cut off her money supply,’ Joe rages, but Susan can’t bear her daughter’s whining, nor the irritation of discovering her purse has again been raided. She doesn’t want to be one of those parents who gives up discipline because it’s just too hard, but who wants to start a war about food when there’s still sex and drugs ahead of them?
Valentina takes her chips down to the beach and sits on the sea wall behind the Settlers’ Museum. It’s a sweet little building but it would be better as a bar or café: who needs a repository for the trivia of the settlers’ boats in front of the best view in the world? Not that the building is open to the view. Like all old buildings it faces the street, despite the Pacific Ocean lapping at its back door. Valentina chews and swings her legs and stares out at the crimped indigo sea. For the rest of her life this view will live inside her memory as the very essence of home. But right now, the timeframe that allows her no knowledge and no rest, she is thoroughly dissatisfied: what on earth will she do for entertainment in the coming winter? This smug little town is so boring — just wait till she gets out of here, she’ll show them. Already she has sent her photo to an agency. Soon they’ll be ringing her up, soon she’ll be on the catwalks of Paris or the boulevards of Hollywood.
But all roads lead to Rome.
Dolores comes home one fine morning with an incoherent story about a snake.
‘Is this the snake?’ Joe asks, looking up and down the raw-boned youth who has accompanied her.
‘No, no,’ Dolores laughs, and it’s that laugh, the laugh of the about-to-become-infatuated. ‘But Dave’s the one who led me to it.’
With much wearisome prompting, Dolores clarifies her addled story. She had gone for her usual walk at dawn (if anyone could call her weird spectral drift a walk) and had struck up a conversation with this uncouth who was also out scavenging maror: like attracts like, if there’s any need for further explanation. Together they’d followed the trail of the detoxifying native grasses through vacant sections, factories and industrial yards.
‘Then we saw the snake, Uncle Joe,’ Dolores says with bright eyes. ‘In the rubble.’
‘Sure it wasn’t a land eel?’ Joe asks sourly. It’s too early in the day for this particular form of insanity. These two mooncalves want snakes in paradise to prove paradise is a sham, but who needs a real live snake to prove that?
Anyway, Dolores has found two snakes this morning and she’s brought one of them home. The one that’s here is far more alarming than the one that got away.
‘It was a snake,’ Dave insists, ‘no doubt about it.’
‘What are you, a herpetologist?’ Joe asks, rounding on him.
‘You could tell it had scales, even under the mud,’ Dave replies mildly.
‘You’ll see, it’ll be off to lay eggs, and before you know it there’ll be snakes everywhere,’ Dolores adds emphatically.
Joe has never seen so much energy in her, nor her eyes so alive. He feels like throwing cold water on her or slapping her out of her imminent swoon.
Later in the day, Joe joins a group of men informally searching for other snakes. Dolores and Dave had been right: a live female, an Australian Eastern Brown, twelve times more toxic than the Indian cobra, has officially been found in a stockpile of rubbish in a contractor’s yard. Seems it had hitched a ride in a container to a more desirable location — well, you can see its point, the men laugh. The snake, reportedly hissing and leaping about, was picked up in the bucket of a front-end loader and the Ministry of Agriculture notified. They immediately killed the frantic beast on site and after an exhaustive examination determined she had not laid any eggs. Tomorrow, special snake-tracker dogs will be flown in from Auckland to ensure she hasn’t brought any relatives. Something we know illegal immigrants do all the time — you let one in, before you know it he or she brings in another thousand.
Dolores and Dave look smug for a week and Joe is irritated. What d’you think finding one snake in an entire country means, he wants to shout at them. That the world is despoiled, is out of control, is staggering towards apocalypse? That snake is nothing but a symbol of the success of international trade and transportation, and look how quickly and efficiently it was set upon — animal coroners, policemen, agricultural experts, tracker dogs! But he knows that Dave and Dolores despise the traffic in consumer goods from one end or side of the globe to the other. They believe people should eat the local food, the indigenous herbs and grasses, and yes, here they are quite free to move in their secular trance through the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. Everywhere they turn there are edible plants, and when one of them finally keels over ambulances fitted out like hospitals will rush to their aid. Lucky for them they don’t live in Africa.
In his heart, however, Joe Halifax doesn’t really believe the snake is a symbol of success. He shares the deep anxiety of those who believe they are soon to be invaded: poisonous reptiles this year, a hundred thousand boat-people next year, haemorrhagic Ebola after that. Who now seriously believes we can control the borders — diseases, vermin and the dispossessed pour in one long spew from one wasteland to the next.
Joe turns on the television news as if to confirm his viewpoint and indeed, although the first quarter of an hour is devoted to crime, the next three items are concerned with epidemics, war and displacement. Joe fearfully pictures a future that will swamp him. A pox-encrusted deluge studded with glittering serpents will pour over him like a tidal wave. He hurriedly reaches for the remote control and turns off the sound. No modern-day invention was ever better named: this gizmo perfectly controls the information overload from remote regions. Yes, there are the voluminously clothed masses bowing down in the dustbowls, at least now you can’t hear them, and if you turn your head a little to the left or right you won’t even have to see them.
‘Turn that off,’ Susan snaps as she comes into the room with her latest culinary creation. ‘I don’t want that rubbish spoiling my dinner.’
‘It’s all right,’ Joe murmurs, ‘it’s only ecological disaster, war and crime, not the health system, not celebrity high jinks, not kittens stuck up trees.’
‘Well, it soon will be,’ Susan retorts.
She takes the lid off the casserole dish and Joe is assailed by a hundred foreign smells as if the leaking, straining refugee boats had already hauled themselves ashore. He tells his wife he’s lost his appetite and goes out to the kitchen to heat some baked beans.
Susan Halifax sits down at the table for her solitary meal. The preparation has taken her hours, the shopping has taken her days, she has had to make five separate trips for the herbs and spices. And dare she add she has had to go to six weeks of cooking lessons to learn how to take the animal away from its backbone, how to balance the seared pieces of flesh on a high-rise of teetering vegetables, how to pour three different sauces onto the same plate without mixing them, how to turn the offal into soufflé. Fourteen-year-old Valentina, wearing some blinding deconstruction both tight and brief, comes into the room, peers into the casserole dish and says, ‘The sight of your cooking wears me out.’ She demands money for a proper meal and disappears into the wild wet night. Susan picks up the remote and switches the television on again. She doesn’t like eating alone in a silent room.
Unfortunately, she also hates the television news. She loathes how it plays its repetitive little tunes on the nation’s heartstrings. It is like a sentimental and vicious old grandmother sitting in the corner of the room manipulating everyone within earshot. But lucky for her she has missed the crime report: another woman raped and dead under a tree, another child burnt and bashed, another father who’s taken to his own children with an axe, more men running women down on public roads for sport and sex. The experts champ and gnaw at the data and everyone demands more money, but what amount of money can alter the spirit of the times? Complete freedom for everyone, total sovereignty of the individual, society exists to help you express yourself, to empower you in your personal pathology, but in the end what has it ever done for you, you owe it nothing.
Joe Halifax comes back into the living room with his beans and toast. Together they glumly watch the regional weather forecast — more rain, more wind, followed by wind and rain, wind, rain, wind, rain. Paradise was surely never meant to be this cold and wet — perhaps they have got the wrong location.
4
Jean-Paul puts the last item of clothing in his suitcase and shuts the lid. Susan Halifax, sitting on the stripped bed, watches in silence and wonders, How can the ends of the earth be only a ten-hour flight from the centre of the world? Jean-Paul glances at his diving watch, a miraculous invention that still ticks one hundred metres below the surface of any water it finds itself in. Susan pulls down the sides of her skirt which have a tendency to ride up in the wrong situations. The ticking of any timepiece when your latest lover is about to get on a plane bound for the centre of everything is definitely the wrong time for a skirt to be climbing up your thighs. ‘You can’t do this to me,’ she says.
‘Watch me,’ Jean-Paul replies tersely, cruelly. It is essential to be cruel at certain times lest we forget our resolve. Then he stares at Susan’s legs. But there’s no time for that kind of thing now. Surely there must be something more to say, something definitive, something they can both be proud of when they look back at themselves in a year, three, a decade. But of course there’s nothing — nothing worth putting in speech marks. Watches might still tick but that sort of talk stopped years ago.
Susan walks home assaulted by a violent wind burdened with rosemary, reminds herself all the way, This is what you wanted, isn’t it, looseness. Easy enough to say before you discover loose things float away. At home she locks herself in the bedroom and sits down at the dressing table to rub revitalising cream into her skin while preparing to forget Jean-Paul as she’s forgotten all her other men. But in the mirror she suddenly notices that her crow’s-feet have become even more deeply etched and her throat has gone slack. She screws the lid back on the jar and pushes it deep into a drawer where its promises can no longer torture her. Because now she knows the truth: that was her last lover, unless there’s to be someone kind who cares only for company, and what would she want him for? So she will have to remember Jean-Paul, take extreme care to remember everything about him, and about the pain of love, which is certainly more than the exquisite knife of a certain song going in or out an open window.
She sighs deeply. Then she goes down to the kitchen to prepare a splendid ethereal dessert containing a plethora of imported ingredients as reassurance that the centre of the world has not slipped even further away from the ends of the earth. But when the time comes to disturb the trembling pyramids with her spoon, her loss of appetite proves that the real distance is infinite, as it always is when someone who has gone is gone for ever.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Joe asks. ‘I didn’t know there was anything that could put you off your pudding.’
Every evening Susan walks past the foreigner’s house, which remains vacant for a month, then she walks along the street to the sea. Sometimes in late summer it’s like this, windless and fine every evening. Ahead of her in the gauzy light moves a revenant Jean-Paul, not a trick of the light but a projection of her memory and will. For while some seek to forget, others fear it, as if forgetting obliterates not just others but ourselves, makes us new-born every instant, vulnerable to chaos, the repetition of chaos. Every evening when she stands in front of the ocean she can see in the shallows Jean-Paul in his yellow wetsuit, and she sees the corrugated water through his eyes, enticing and mysterious to the wet edge where the sea drains away like water tipping out of a shallow bowl.
Well, of course not, but isn’t that how the flat-earthers would have seen it? Such a fanciful notion. Where did they think the water went — or did they imagine it dispersed gradually as it fell for ever, from a deluge to rain to a fine mist to unimaginable nothing? Naturally, Jean-Paul doesn’t believe the sea drains into the void. Now every ocean is mapped, conquered. Now lone yachtsmen and marathon swimmers strike out as if across a pond and a helicopter goes with them: the camera picks out the intrepid hero in the heave and curl of the wave. The Pacific Ocean is no bigger than a television screen.
It’s impossible now that Jean-Paul will reappear, will suddenly revert to flesh in the summer streets or, draped in aquatic plants, come wading back out of the sea. And there’s no one she can tell. That’s the worst aspect of a secret liaison: even your friends will start the pernicious Chinese whisper that begins with the death of a loved Frenchman and ends in your husband’s ear with sex and an immigrant necrophiliac.
So you keep the burden to yourself. What’s one more bizarre death in a world that’s full of them — men get into violent relationships with chainsaws, women fry their brains in hairdryers, children asphyxiate in car-boots and freezers. And while it’s predictable that a diver on a longish stop-over on his way back to Europe will go sea-diving in warm blue water, and unremarkable that there are fires in Australia in the height of summer, it’s unbelievable, isn’t it, that a man in a yellow wetsuit gets scooped out of the sea in a monsoon bucket and dumped on a bush fire somewhere obscure near the Queensland border.
Well, life goes on, or it doesn’t — either way heartbreak is assured and then buried. It disappears under the arid landslide of daily life, or Susan Halifax hopes it will and then she hopes it won’t. At night she dreams about a large yellow fish barbecuing on glowing cinders in the Australian outback. When she moves towards it to slice off a tender morsel, the fish suddenly sprouts a man’s head and she runs away screaming, only to trip over a branch that resolves itself into a large brown snake. It might seem as if she is running out of her own nightmare into her husband’s — and that’s as good a description of marriage as any — but as we know Dolores hasn’t met her snake yet.
In the morning Susan gets up and takes a shower. The fear engendered by her dream always brings on a pungent sweat. She tries to pull herself together. It’s not as if she doesn’t have enough to worry about, what with two children, a husband who’s always self-medicating and a mother-in-law who’ll hardly leave the house.
But it’s difficult to get the image of the roasting man-fish out of her head. All day it keeps popping up, especially during her long waits in the queue at the local chemist. Nearly every day she’s buying potions for Joe amidst the screaming collection of cough syrups, sun blocks, breath fresheners, foot powders, nasal sprays, vitamin tubes, hair restorers, obesity cures and hangover remedies. While the pharmacist in strapping rude health measures and cuts the powders for every physical incommodiousness and emotional calamity you can or can’t think of, while the obese customers bemoan the miserly government and the hospital waiting lists before shuffling off for their daily hit of trans-fats and nicotine at the price-slash supermarket, random and accidental death hovers above them all in the shape of a fish with a scorched human face. Susan puts the medicine in her handbag and goes home to berate her husband for his foolishness. Perhaps if she can avoid the chemist shop she can avoid the offensive paradox of healthy people dying, and dying gruesomely.
