The Man in the Shed

There are times when he fights back in his own quiet way, when, suddenly and without any prompting that I can see or think of, he will lay down his knife and fork and look across the table at me as though I am a view or the answer to something, and then he will just get up and walk away from us as if none of this is right, this kitchen, even the faces around the table. The family has been misplaced or he has come home to the wrong house. And by the time Mum and I have made it to the kitchen window he is out in the drive looking in both directions. He is looking for something or someone that never arrives. In this way Dad seems to live on hope.

The man in the back shed is the problem. He used to eat all his meals with us. Now it is only when Dad is at work or out somewhere—the latter is a problem because he isn’t ever just
out somewhere
. He is either leaving or returning, and so, even when he isn’t with us at mealtime, the thought of him arriving at the door or even walking down the street is a concern shared around the kitchen table. We sit on our nerves. We look up and stop chewing at the littlest of things—a cough, the dog stirring in its basket, a raised voice from outside. We all have our own lists because not everyone looks up at the same particular moment.

The man from the shed lifts the soup bowl to his lips. This must be a European thing because both Pen and I have noticed it passes without criticism from Mum, which is odd because both of us recall a whack over the knuckles the first time we did the same. Now, watching the man from the shed reminds us of what a natural thing it is to do, and what a pain in the arse it is to have to scrape around with your spoon for the dregs. When he raises the bowl to his lips, his eyes float up to look at Mum. She is staring at her own soup and not saying anything. From the time she sat down she hasn’t spoken. At her elbow is the empty space at the table where Dad usually sits.

She doesn’t look up until we hear the latch on the gate—and then we all do. The man from the shed puts his bowl down and gets up from the table. He looks at Mum. He looks thoughtful, as though he is considering something. He says, You’re going to have to tell him. Mum nods at her soup. The back door opens. We can hear Dad pulling off his boots. We
can hear the old dog rise from her half-bitten cane basket, beating her tail with happiness. The front door closes and at last Mum looks up. She smiles bravely—one each for me and Pen, and we are given to understand that we should forget what we just heard, that it is business as usual. We should, if we can, act like the dog. That would be nice.

But, in fact, when Dad comes into the kitchen both me and Pen jump up from the table. Her boyfriend Jimmy Mack is parked outside. He’s been there the past half hour, waiting for her to finish her soup. I don’t have such an excuse. I mutter, I’ll be off to my room. That’s where I am now, sitting on my bed. The waiting is going on and on. I had imagined the telling would happen as soon as me and Pen exited the kitchen. So I am surprised when I hear doors opening—the kitchen, then the front door, then the doors to the car. I have an idea Mum and Dad are on their way to the beach. That’s where they usually take themselves when something needs to be said. Pen is out in Jimmy Mack’s car. The TV room is sitting in darkness, waiting for someone to turn up. I don’t want to go in there. Nor do I want to go out to the backyard. So I’m stuck in my room.

I’m in bed when I hear the car pull up. Doors open and close—the car, then the front door to the house. There’s no slamming. No raised voices. I listen out for something between them but not a word travels up the hall. I hear the light switches and then, some time after, by which time I am sitting up in bed in the dark, a stillness envelops the house. At a late hour I wake to someone walking up and down the hall.

In the days that follow I never once hear it said—not by either of them—that she is pregnant.

Months later it is still not talked about. There are indirect references. Some morning sickness, but in Mum’s case just ‘feeling a bit off’. Some backaches—and of course the indisputable fact of her stomach ballooning out, and her waddling walk and her difficulty in bending down to pick up anything from the floor. But none of this is ever commented on.

We are waiting—that is what we are doing. The waiting has weight; it has ballast. It loads up the house. It pushes back at the walls. It draws you to the windows. There are eight in our house and I’ve looked out every one of them. There are other times when the world suddenly jolts everyone forward. We come to, and remember that there are lives to be lived and we move back to reclaim those old parts of our selves. Dad has his work to escape to. Pen has Jimmy Mack. I have school and the beach. The beach is also a refuge for Mum and the man in the back shed.

The man in the shed does not enter the sea as the rest of us do, wading and willing ourselves deeper and deeper, braving the rings of agonising cold as they rise up our bodies. The man in the shed stands in the shallows, this tall lean man, washing his legs down, washing his arms down, splashing his face. The tides shuffles in and washes around his ankles. He stoops down and cups some water in his hands, and this he applies to his face and neck. Mum is already up to her waist. She is hurrying to get beyond the sandbars. At the same time she keeps looking back over her shoulder. The beach is more than a kilometre
long but she is interested only in a small part of it.

I am sitting down at the rocky end of the beach, but I can see everything. When I tire of watching them I pull on my flippers and mask and swim out to the kelp beds, and there I lie on top of the sea, spying on fish as they come and go through the hanging curtain of kelp. The fish move without hurry. They seem to move for no other reason than they can. The first super-sized shopping centre has recently landed in our neighbourhood and I’ve noticed shoppers there moving up and down the aisles in the same dazzled state as these fish moving in and out of the kelp. They are looking for something. They’re just not sure what it is.

A few days from now a violent storm will tear the kelp from the seabed and fling it up on the beach and we will move across it with our heads down like those salvage teams in white overalls sifting through the assemblage of a plane wreck. There will be a variety of pale limpid seaweed with a reddish stain and a ribbon-like fish that I have never seen on my snorkelling expeditions. A fish like that is a reminder of how close we are in our everyday lives to the unknowable. On another day we will stand in a circle around the treasure of a drag net—looking down at the albino eel, an elephant fish, and a tiny seahorse grinning impishly as if it had just flopped out of a gift shop. Then there are all the other things, which we cannot identify.

I couldn’t place his accent when he first arrived—even the notion of arrival does not quite get at the surprise of him
standing beneath the porch light. When I went to answer the door I wasn’t expecting him. No one was. We had been eating and talking around the dinner table. I can’t remember what was said, other than this sudden and unexpected smiling tolerance for one another, and then came the knock and we all looked up and Dad said to me, Why don’t you go and see who it is?

My hair was still wet and gritty with sand. Earlier in the day a massive cruise ship with black sides had squeezed through the harbour entrance, and on the far side of the harbour we crashed ashore on the bow waves and each time we landed arse-up in a wash of foaming water and shingle, a tumble of limbs, joy dripping off our faces at our out-of-control lives.

There was his accent. The next thing I noticed about him under the porch light was his clothes. They clearly marked him out as a foreigner. His grey flannels turned up at the cuffs. A neat seam ran down the middle of the trouser leg—it wasn’t overdone but you did notice it, that and the clean grey and the ease of the material itself. It wasn’t just the clothes but the way he wore them, the way they sat on him. He wore his blazer off one shoulder. And his smile—unlike Jimmy Mack’s, say, which came down to two tiny points of a smile set deep in the centre of his black eyes—his smile was evenly spread across his face. It generated warmth. Within a minute of his entering the kitchen we were all smiling, although who could have said at what or why?