A Man Melting (22 page)

‘Yes, Miss,’ I said.

If Mrs Oe ever rang my mum, I never found out. The week went by without it being mentioned. The big reappearance was a wolf outside of London. Mum said this was the easiest sighting to explain yet, as the wolf was spotted only three kilo metres from the Whipsnade Zoo. But on
antisceptics.com people had come up with a name for the reappearances. They were calling it the Gaia Amnesty. I had to look up both words at dictionary.com to find out what that meant:

Gaia
—
n. goddess of the earth and mother of Cronus and the Titans in Greek mythology. [syn: Gaea]

amnesty
—
n. pardon of past offences, [Fr. Amnestie: ‘intentional overlooking’, from L. amnestia, from Gk. Amnestia: ‘oblivion’ (see amnesia)].

One night when Mum wasn’t on the news, we were all sitting around the dining room table after dinner. Melanie had her felt pens out and was drawing more moa. Mum didn’t tell her off, but she didn’t stick any of these drawings on the fridge, either. I asked mum if she had heard of the Gaia Amnesty.

‘Now that’s a dangerous idea if ever there was,’ she said.

‘How come?’

‘These people believe that Mother Nature is forgiving humans for messing up the planet the first time around. Like a get-out-of-jail-free card in Monopoly. We get the moa and dodo and woolly mammoth back, and fingers crossed we look after them better this time.’

‘What’s so dangerous about that?’

‘Because it’s not true. How could it possibly be true, knowing what we know about science, about evolution? But even if it was true, that we got a get-out-of-jail-free card, we didn’t earn it. We’ll just expect another get-out-of-jail-free card next time we screw up. Mark my words, Jamie, the animals of this planet are in for a rough time yet.’

The next night, when a millionaire from America
announced he was going hunting in Russia for woolly mammoth and sabre-toothed tigers using a million-dollar helicopter, Mum clapped her hands and said, ‘What’d I tell you? What did I tell you?’

Even Mum wasn’t prepared to go on the news the next night with the word ‘sceptic’ below her name. ‘I haven’t changed my mind,’ she half-shouted into her cellphone, ‘it’s just gotten too ridiculous. Any voice, even one of dissent, on this topic is doing more damage than good.’

I wasn’t just interested in the Gaia Amnesty that week. I also thought a lot about what Matthew Morgan had said about Melanie. I was five when she was born, so I never thought to question it. I think I thought babies came from the cabbage patch or something, though if I had asked my mum, she would have told me the scientific truth: that a man and a woman have sex and sometimes a baby is made and grows in the woman’s womb for nine months and then is born.

But if I had never met my dad, how could he have also made Melanie?

I felt so stupid for never thinking about this before. Mum is always saying that asking questions is the key to getting answers, but I didn’t know how to ask her.

And then she agreed to be on the news again. The man who claimed to have caught the huia in Pahiatua had been arrested for defrauding pensioners.

‘Nothing to do with the huia,’ Mum told me. ‘The people he ripped off saw him on the news and the law caught up with him. But his credibility is shot.’

‘Does this mean we have to go to Uncle Roger’s?’

‘Afraid so, mister.’

But I actually wanted to go this time. How else can you ask someone who doesn’t have the telephone or the internet a question?

I waited until after dinner. Melanie set up her felt pens and paper on the table. Uncle Roger was scanning the bookshelves for something I could read.

‘What about something of yours?’ I asked.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Why not? I don’t even know what sort of thing you write.’

‘Non fiction.’

‘True stories,’ I said, and he nodded. ‘But you don’t see anyone but us.’

‘I’ve seen plenty of people in my time. I prefer the idea of people to the reality.’

‘Why don’t you have any of your books here?’

‘They’re not ready.’

‘What about one of your notebooks?’ I held up the one I had lifted from the pile beside his chair earlier without him noticing.

‘No. Please.’

‘Why not?’

‘Jamie, please give me my notebook.’

I glanced over at Melanie. She had spun around and was kneeling on her chair, looking at us.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I like your title.
Walled In
. Is it a horror story?’

‘Not as such.’ He did a funny little cough, and reached down to the bottom shelf and pulled out a book. ‘Here. You should read this.’

The book was called
Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson. I opened it up and pretended to start reading but really I was just looking at the map on the first page. Uncle Roger sat down in his chair and began flicking through the notebook I had held for that short time.

When I was sure Melanie had turned back around and was lost in her latest moa drawing, I asked Uncle Roger, ‘Are you Melanie’s father?’ I said it with my face hidden behind
Treasure Island
, my voice just loud enough for him to hear.

I heard him move around on his seat. I lowered my book slightly to see what he was doing. He was hiding his face with his book, too.

‘Are you Melanie’s father?’ I asked again.

His voice came from behind the notebook: ‘I don’t think so.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘She, Diana, your mother, never said I was.’

‘But you had sex with her?’

He still wouldn’t put the notebook down. I slammed
Treasure Island
shut.

‘Your mother and I had an agreement,’ was all he said.

I had one more question, but I didn’t ask it. Instead I got up and went to look at what Melanie was drawing. It was not another moa. It was a family with blue faces and hands. A mummy, a daddy, a boy and a girl. The girl was the shortest and had pink love hearts on her cheeks. I reached over her and picked up the paper.

‘Jamie!’

‘This is not your family,’ I said, scrunching the paper into a ball. ‘We do not come from a normal family. We
come from a family of weirdos.’ I threw the paper over to the other side of the room and went to the window.

It was starting to get dark outside. In the window I saw my sister’s reflection get up from the table and collect her drawing. A dark shape moved behind Melanie. At first I thought it was Uncle Roger and felt that judder-bar feeling again. But when I turned around, Uncle Roger wasn’t standing behind my sister — he was still sitting in his chair holding his notebook over his face. I turned around again and the dark shape had gone.

I cupped my hands around my eyes to block out the light from inside so I could see outside better. Everything was still. I kept my forehead stuck to the glass, my hands cupped, staring outside. I wasn’t sure if I was scared or bored.

Then I saw it.

It came out from the opening in the bush Melanie and I had used when we went treasure hunting on our last visit. It walked slowly across Uncle Roger’s backyard, stopping halfway. Its feet were the size of serving dishes. They were just touching the square of light which shone from the window.

‘Shit,’ I said slowly.

‘Jamie,’ Melanie said, growling just like Mum would have.

‘It’s true.’ My voice was quiet but I could tell everyone was listening. I heard them get up and come to the window. ‘Slowly,’ I said. ‘Don’t scare it.’

‘I can’t see,’ said Melanie. She was too short to look out of the window.

Uncle Roger placed his forehead against the glass and cupped his eyes like me.

‘I can’t see,’ Melanie said again. Uncle Roger didn’t move.

It was still out there, looking back at us.

I unstuck my forehead and grabbed Melanie’s hand. I opened the back door.

‘I told you,’ she whispered as we stepped outside. I couldn’t decide if my skin was prickling because the air was cold or my brain was doing it for another reason entirely.

We kept holding hands as we moved across the uneven lawn one step at a time, careful not to scare it. It watched us, its head tilted slightly to the side. In the glow of the electric bulbs, its feathers were the colours of a beef casserole. Slowly, it swung its long neck from us to Uncle Roger at the window, then back to us.

‘Hello,’ my sister said.

I held out my free hand, the palm facing upwards.

‘Can I touch it?’ Melanie whispered.

I squeezed her hand tight with my other hand.

The moa swung its head again. This time its body followed, then one leg, then the other. It stomped off slowly.

‘Bub-bye again,’ my sister said, and I bought my hand down.

I looked back at the window. Uncle Roger was rubbing his eyes.

When Mum arrived to pick us up, she asked what we were doing outside. We had brought all three of the chairs from inside Uncle Roger’s box of a house out onto the lawn, along with blankets and a duvet. Melanie got up from her seat and came and sat on my lap.

‘Take a seat, Mum.’

‘What’s all this about?’ she asked, but she did sit down.

‘Shh,’ Melanie said. ‘You have to be quiet and still.’

Mum turned her head to Uncle Roger, who just nodded and brought his finger up to his lips. She shrugged and wrapped a blanket around her shoulders.

The very moment me and Melanie had been standing face to face with a real life moa, Mum was probably on the TV saying none of it was possible. This was the only way the three of us could think of explaining. It’s not as if I could just log on to antisceptics.com and start a new thread:

How should I break it to my mum that the reappearances are real?

‘You can see the stars out here,’ Mum whispered.

‘The Southern Cross,’ Uncle Roger said so quietly I only understood once I followed his finger up to the four stars which always reminded me of a kite. A giant’s kite that got taken into the heavens by a gust of wind.

‘Amazing,’ Mum said, and Melanie shh’d her again, but I could tell from the way she wriggled on my lap that she was trying not to giggle.

I kissed the top of her head.

We waited.

What must Mum have thought we were waiting for? Perhaps she thought the stars were a good enough reason to sit outside like that. Maybe they were. But three of us were waiting. Waiting and remembering that giant bird.

I never thought I would move back, not for good. But there I was, six years later, placing two suitcases on the pavement outside the New Plymouth airport and sliding into the back seat of a taxi.

‘Where to?’ the driver asked after he had put my cases in the boot.

‘Frankleigh Park.’

‘Sure thing.’

The parts of him I could see did little to suggest anything beyond the old cabbie stereotype: dumpy white guy, bald dome gleaming above a horseshoe of greyish hair. Smoker’s fingers resting on the steering wheel. No-Doz eyes in the rear vision. A very American image, though I could not remember the last time I’d had a white cab driver over there.

It was only when he started speaking again, just past Bell Block, that he began to feel familiar. At first I thought
it was the accent.

‘You can nap if you want. I’m not … you know.’ He tapped the meter.

‘No, I’ll hang out for a bed, thanks.’

‘Righto.’ He left his hand resting over the red numbers of the meter. My eyes lost focus, the pink glow between his fingers slowly took over his whole hand and my thoughts trickled away.

Some time later I felt the car coming to a stop. Traffic light. His eyes flashed in the mirror. ‘You haven’t just come from Auckland, not with two big suitcases.’

‘Boston.’

‘Beantown,’ he said quickly, as though he had not travelled widely but hoped to give that impression. ‘Long journey.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘You’re a bit late for Christmas.’

‘I’m a bad daughter, I guess.’

His laugh. That was what got me thinking of St Stephen’s. There was something trained about it. Polished. A teacher’s laugh.

I leaned forward, pretending to look at the traffic lights, so that I might see his face.

‘There is something satisfying,’ he said slowly, ‘about being stopped at a deserted intersection and waiting for the lights to change. Something singularly human.’

From my position, leant up against the passenger’s seat, I could see his mouth curve into a smile. The lights turned green. We pulled away from the empty intersection.

‘Have you always driven a taxi?’ I asked.

‘Me? No. Not always.’

‘You weren’t a teacher, were you?’

His eyes flicked up to the mirror again.

‘St Stephen’s?’ I knew the answer. I knew, despite the almost grotesque change, that this was Mr Haines.

‘Were you one of my kids?’ he asked.

This made me grin. Not the idiom so much as the accent.
Kuds.
I was struck by a new wave of fatigue. I leant back in my seat.

‘No, I wasn’t one of your kids,’ I said. ‘I was in Mrs Shipley’s class.’

He fished something out of his shirt pocket and passed it back to me. His business card.
M.B. Haines
—
Taxi Driver.

‘You ever need a ride, call that number.’

Looking at his eyes in the rear-vision mirror, I began to wonder if I was mistaken. Was the name of my Standard Four teacher really Mrs Shipley, or was I getting confused with Jenny Shipley, who became Prime Minister a couple of years later? But then he said, ‘Sandra Shipley,’ and let out a deep, almost heartbroken breath.

‘Is she still teaching?’ I asked.

‘No. None of the old lot are.’ His eyes fixed on mine, so direct and sustained I feared we might plough into a parked car.

When I awoke the next morning I could summon more memories of Mr Haines than I had been able to there in his cab. One in particular insisted on being replayed: Mr Haines standing beside the high jump on athletics day, waving a hand.
You kids keep back. Give the girl a chance.
He wasn’t tall and tanned like Mr Lewis; he was younger and less intense. On reflection, he could not have been more than
two years out of teachers’ college — which reinforced how unkind the intervening twenty years had been. My budding crush ended that athletics day when Mr Haines revealed he did not know my name. My feet turned to lead and I muffed my last attempt to make the final of the high jump, my favourite event.

It was clear in his cab the night before that he did not remember me, if there was anything of me to remember:
Oh, you were the girl who hit the high jump pole with your forehead in 1989?

There in my old bedroom, complete with toucan duvet cover and wooden blocks spelling out R A C H A E L, it was easy to link back into that, and the seemingly endless list of other girlhood embarrassments.

Later that morning I was forced to shake off my travel daze and play centre of attention for my parents and the succession of relatives who stopped by to welcome me home. The conversation always circled the same question, in tighter and tighter revolutions, but no one came out and asked:
Why would you come back? Are you crazy?
Instead they wanted to hear about the job I had left (‘Your mother made it sound so fantastic. Very high flying!’), my love life (‘Wasn’t there someone you were seeing? An architect?’), or the political situation (‘Didn’t you get sick of the flag-waving, though?’).

At the Do and Dye hair salon the next day, there was no such candour.

‘Hold on, let me get this straight,’ Monique, my new stylist, said. ‘You leave a rich-as job in Boston to come back to the ’naki and work in a bank?’

‘Pretty much.’

She stuck the comb in her mouth for a moment, stood back and looked at my hair. ‘You probably had a ten-times better stylist over there, eh?’

I wanted to shake my head but her hands were suddenly either side, tilting my face down. ‘You pay for it, over there,’ I managed to say with my chin pressed against my chest.

She began snipping again. I rolled my eyes up to the point of pain and saw her pursing her lips in the mirror. I couldn’t decide if she was pouting or concentrating.

A woman came into the salon with a boy of about four. I felt Monique’s hands leave my head and we both watched the new arrivals through the mirror: the mother in a kind of white trench coat, cinched at the waist, asking one of the other stylists for an appointment; the boy climbing on top of the magazine table and trying to balance on the ever-moving network of glossy covers. When they left, Monique grabbed the hand-held mirror and began showing me the back of my hair. ‘I think I understand, eh?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Why you’d come back.’

‘Oh?’

‘You know what it’s like? Those salmon returning home to the same tiny creek they was born in, to … what’s the word?’

‘Spawn?’

‘Exactly. You’ve returned to spawn.’

She was now crouched in front of me so that her eyes were level with mine. Her eyebrows were raised. I wasn’t sure if she wanted me to agree with her theory or the haircut. I smiled blankly. Whatever my reasons for returning to New
Plymouth, procreation was not one of them.

Outside the salon, I saw the mother and her daredevil son in front of Lowe’s Pharmacy. She was talking to a woman in a white uniform, the boy tugging the cord of her trench coat. The pharmacist was instantly familiar, but again it took me a moment to place her. Mrs Shipley. Sandra Shipley.

I had to walk in that direction anyway, and could not help slowing as I passed. I heard the woman with the
four-year-old
say, ‘I’m not going if he’s there, Mum. I’m not.’

So this was Mrs Shipley’s daughter. I knew she had a daughter about my age, but she had not attended St Stephen’s. Something about separating home and work. But as I walked to my car I wondered if Sandra Shipley had known something about the school.

Over the next week I saw three more teachers from St Stephen’s, though like Mr Haines and Mrs Shipley, they all had other jobs.

Mrs Chapman, running a lawn-mowing franchise with her husband.

Ms Matai, though she may have married since those days, ruling over the customer service desk at Woolworths.

Mean old Mrs Yew, the parking warden.

New Plymouth was crawling with teachers, ex-teachers; crawling with my distant, near-forgotten past.

The two teachers I knew I would not be seeing on the streets of New Plymouth any time soon were Jim Lewis and Kerry Drewe.

Mr Lewis had taught Standard Two and was the cricket master. He was tall, though perhaps his height was exaggerated by his Stubbies shorts and — when the
principal, Mrs Choudry, was not on his case — jandals. His legs were always shaven and tanned, his curly hair always overdue for a trim.

Mr Drewe was the opposite. He was quiet, rounded, uninterested in sports. He maintained an immaculate comb-over, though I do not remember anyone at school ever mentioning this fact — sometimes you have to be told something is ridiculous before you can see it.

There were only four male teachers at St Stephen’s during my time there, and the school made sure that every pupil had at least two of them as classroom teachers during their six years (what was egalitarian then seems perverse in hindsight). I had Mr Drewe in Standard One but avoided Mr Lewis, getting Mr Tramble in Standard Three.

Mr Drewe was famous, if that’s the word, for China. He went there every second or third year, sometimes taking a whole term off school. No one wondered what the attraction was: he seemed more than willing to share everything he experienced over there. All his classes did projects on China. He gave chopstick lessons. He cooked chicken feet (which never more than five children in any class dared to eat) and wontons (more popular). He wrote every student’s name in Chinese characters with a fine-tipped paintbrush. He taught us the characters and pronunciation of the numbers one through ten, then made us do an entire maths lesson
in Chinese
. He took us to the Chinese Association in Merrilands; we watched a video of women dancing, then made kites.

Although Mr Lewis was the one us girls had crushes on and the boys tried to impress with their skateboards and plaster casts, the general consensus was that Mr Drewe was
a better teacher. You were considered lucky to get into his class. From what I heard about Mr Lewis’s classes, I wasn’t impressed. His pet subject was fish, which seemed like a more boring version of the dinosaur projects we’d all done in the primers. The only thing noteworthy enough to reach the ears of those of us who avoided his class was the time he made ceviche, though it was relayed to us as the time Mr Lewis ‘ate raw fish’.

When I heard the news, via my mother, that both Lewis and Drewe had been accused of sexually abusing pupils over a period of twelve years, in which my six years at St Stephen’s sat squarely in the middle, I found it hard to believe. I was at university down in Dunedin. A very young nineteen. Still a virgin. Still subject to crushes. It sounded as if Lewis and Drewe had acted together, but I did not remember them being particularly close. Mr Lewis seemed more matey with Mr Tramble, making no secret of the fact they drank together on Friday nights; if anything, it was as if Lewis and Tramble made fun of round old Mr Drewe. But, I reasoned, along with the rest of New Plymouth, if Lewis and Drewe were doing what they were accused of doing, wouldn’t it make sense not to appear too tight at school? I could not, however, understand how I could spend a year in Mr Drewe’s class and not notice anything. Surely someone in my class must have been approached, propositioned, if not actually molested? For a moment I felt hurt. This is terrible to admit, but I felt the fact I had not even been hugged by Mr Drewe, let alone felt his hand creep up my skinny, high-jumper’s thigh, was a slight. Another example of my invisibility in the world. I thought of Della Finnegan, my
best friend, the most beautiful girl in my class. If Mr Drewe really was a pervert, surely she would have known? But she had never mentioned anything. What did that mean about our friendship? I felt doubly betrayed.

Later I learnt that the former pupils making the accusations were all male, and I felt stupid and terrible and sick for those nameless boys. I was still confused by how this could have all gone on around me but with time, once the shock of the accusations subsided and the possibility that Drewe and Lewis sexually abused boys at my school became as viable as my true memories of St Stephen’s, I began to construct scenes. Cricket-mad Nick Haitana spending all those hours in the nets with Mr Lewis. One day he is invited back to Mr Lewis’s house for a Coke … Malcolm Fergusson (though everyone called him Mim), winner of the regional science fair for his project on the kilojoule content of breakfast cereals, being chaperoned to the national competition in Wellington by Mr Drewe. And who should show up at the Sharella Motor Inn but Jim Lewis, there to watch the cricket at the Basin, of course …

The accusations were followed by arrests, bail, trials, retrials … When they were both finally convicted I was living in Boston. I had accommodated the fact two teachers at my primary school were sexual predators into my back story so completely that the convictions meant nothing to me. They had been a fait accompli. I stumbled into a small-town- girl-made-good persona. I made jokes about the size of New Plymouth. About the faux pas of my father. About how I was so plain as a child the convicted sex offenders we called teachers didn’t know I existed.
The week before I was due to start work in New Plymouth, I paid a visit to the bank branch of which I was to become assistant manager. I half expected to find another teacher from St Stephen’s behind the tellers’ desk, but there were no familiar faces.

I was shown to the office of the current assistant manager, Emma Bates, and told to wait. In a way I would have preferred to have not met my predecessor, not to have seen my office lined with her photos, the accretion of documents and corporate knick-knacks that comes with years of service. Better to have entered a bare office and made it mine; let it be filled with my own memos and mementos, with nothing to measure its condition against but its bare state. But, as the months passed, I found myself comparing my jumble of boxes and books and golf umbrellas with Emma’s.

When she entered, I was looking at a photo of her and a man I guessed was her partner — attractive in a farming family kind of way — embracing in front of a waterfall, half a rainbow ending above his head.

‘Nice photo,’ I said, placing the frame back on her desk.