The Man in the Shed (3 page)

Mum stood slightly bent in the direction of the door. She was trying to judge the silence. There was no movement—no sound, nothing at all to go on. She called out—again, as if in passing. She said, It’s been such a long time. I thought it would do me some good.

The front door closed quietly, so quietly I heard the snip. I moved to the window to see Dad walk up the garden path. He went out the gate without a second look. Mum was late arriving. She caught the back of his head just before it moved out of sight by the neighbour’s hedge. She had missed what I had seen, and not just this time either: my father’s tremendous ability to absorb pain.

He came home early from work that afternoon and we drove to the beach. He brought along his fishing gear as if to show that his interest lay elsewhere, and not with Mum swimming stroke for stroke with the man from the shed, but along the estuary where the fish were cutting up the sea.

Where I happen to walk belongs to neither one of those two worlds. My sandbar is its own complete kingdom. Right then I could not think of a better place to be. Deep water lay either side of me. It was just a matter of sticking to this splinter of sand. To people sitting in their overheated cars above the
beach I’m sure the tidal transition appears slow and benign. But if you happen to stand at the edge of a sandbar you can see the crumbling sand and the darting shadows of fish following the current to deeper water. That is something we can all understand: the fear of being left behind.

Dad does not look back. He labours on in the heavy grey sand, trailing smoke. I step lightly, knowing as I do that my landbridge is temporary, and even though it gives an impression of substance and reliability it is, in fact, in the process of turning into beach or sinking into the tide. I can feel the fragility of the arrangement through the soles of my feet. The world and my place in it suddenly and surprisingly feel provisional. I had always had the idea that the world was a place specially created for me. And that the task of my parents—in fact their whole reason for being—was to point things out and to get me started.

Now I can see the sandbar is going to deliver me back to the main beach and Dad’s own footprints. When I get there I try stepping in them, then give up. I’m not all that keen anyway as his left footprint is set at an odd angle from carrying the fishing gear on that side of his body and I don’t feel like turning my leg inside out to match him, to pretend to be weighed down by what he is.

His legs are so pale, without any sea grace—more suited, I think, to the garden and welding, activities demanding prodigal patience. He likes fishing, though, and there is no place like the estuary when the fish are running.

I stop once more to see where Mum and the man in the
shed are. Beyond the rafts a bank of cloud turns everything the colour of bronze. I wait for the world to re-emerge. And out it comes again—blue and dazzling. Boats with white sails swan about. The sea breeze has dropped away. I feel on the brink of something—where I’m not quite cold but nor am I burning for a swim either. It’s a summer’s day but so far not one to remember.

When we get to the estuary all the best places are taken. Everywhere are plastic buckets with fish tails hanging out, chopping boards and kitchen towels smeared with blood and fish scale. We pass one fisherman after another, some sitting in the sand looking up at the tips of their surfcasters. They are men trying to divine the presence of fish from the hopeless position of a landlocked life. For the first time in what feels like weeks Dad is moving with urgency. He stumbles on, slip-sliding in the sand, me in tow. All around us the braking mechanisms on reels are shrieking and the grey water is chopped and cut by fishing lines pulled taut, rods bending and unbending in the rod-holders. Surfcasters are pulled back in a great dragging arc, as if the fishermen are attempting to pull the seabed up with two hands. Fish scales are stuck to gumboots—the standard white issue from the meatworks—whittled off fish which already look like the supermarket variety, their guts scooped out and thrown back into the estuary from which they just emerged intact a minute earlier, and now the gulls are flying down to carry off the dangling guts in their beaks.

There is this awful feeling that while we have not entirely
missed the show we are late to it. One fish leaps in the air and for a split second its round eye makes contact in the same way as a face in a passing bus window. The fishing gear is banging against Dad’s side as we struggle for footing in the subsiding sandbanks. He doesn’t even notice when a cigarette butt falls from his mouth. He dumps the bag and starts connecting the sections of the surfcaster, threads the line through the hoops, ties on the lure with its tiny red plastic tongue fluttering lightly against the barbed hook. The tips of his fingers are callused with thick layers of skin the colour of steel, which he cannot scrub off no matter how hard he tries and how often Mum used to badger him. But with those same hands I have seen him pick up gorse and not feel a thing.

He draws back the rod and when he casts there is that terrible and exhilarating shriek of reel. Something brightly reflective catches my eye. Spools of fishing line gather and gather around his feet as the shriek of the reel fades and is answered by the gulls. Blood is streaming down his cheek. The red lure is stuck there—he’s hooked himself. It comes back to me, the way he carried through with the cast regardless, with complete faith, as if he was unaware of what he’d done. Now a look of rage overtakes him, a door-slamming rage. And he reaches up and tears the hook from his cheek. Tears it out as I’ve seen him tear the hook from the mouth of a kahawai. The first time I saw him do that he looked back at my shocked face and assured me, Fish don’t feel a thing. They’re cold-blooded buggers, he said. But as he rips that hook out of his own flesh he swears like a trooper—at the
bastard of a thing, at himself, at the world for getting him tangled up like this. Blood streams down his face, drips onto his shirt collar. His face is red with shame. Slowly he winds in the slack line, his grey eyes locking me out because I am to blame as well.

At an age when he must have known I would be impressed he used to say he made fire engines, but what he really does is solder sheets of metal into a perfectly curved cylinder capable of holding upwards of twenty thousand gallons of water, enough, he tells me, to put out any mid-sized house fire. Now he brought his gear home at the weekend. His welding torch, his helmet and emulsifying fluxes. I helped him haul a number of steel slats and poles down the side of the house to the backyard. A plan to build a swinging garden seat was announced. But I also understood the unspoken part of the plan. He was out to place himself between Mum and the man in the shed. They would have to get past him while he knelt on the lawn in a shower of sparks.

It only took him a couple of weekends to build. Late one Sunday afternoon he stood up and pulled back his welder’s helmet. His face was covered with sweat and hope. He said, Go inside and get your mother. When we came out he was rubbing the slats with a rag. Mum sat down on the swing and waited for the magic to arrive. She couldn’t move it on her own. She tried and shook her head. She smiled down at the burnt grass between her dangling feet and said it wouldn’t work. Dad was already heading for the workshop at the back
of the garage. He’d identified the problem. Something to do with the structure needing more oil. With time, he said, it would improve. It was simply a matter of heavy parts knowing they could move.

Meanwhile the promise of ceremony had drawn out the man from the shed. Mum looked up and smiled as he crossed the lawn. He stood behind her and shoved with a gentle but firm hand and slowly the swing, smelling of newness and oil, slowly it began to move. The back of the swing rolled elegantly away from Mum’s spine and she was smiling up at the man who’d made it work.

The few times I saw her in the swing after that, she sat without swinging, without wanting to, or caring to, it seemed. She held the link chain as her head turned to the shed at the end of the backyard. I wasn’t sure if he was in there and, if he was, why he wouldn’t come out. These days he was shy as a guinea pig.

The swing gave Dad the excuse he was after, but he sat in it without any evident sense of pleasure. He looked like a man sitting at a bus stop. He rolled a cigarette, smoked it, he took it out of his mouth; he studied the end of it, put it back in his mouth, took it out again and flung the butt over his shoulder. He looked at the time on his wrist. He sat there with folded arms until at last he pushed himself up and stood gazing at the sky. He had seen something noteworthy. Now he sat down again, with only the dog there to show interest. She lifted her snout then lowered it back to her front legs.

Another time I was looking on from the bedroom window
when I saw him quickly stand up from the swing. He moved with such resolve that I felt both exhilarated and worried. He’d moved beyond view. I left the window and hurried down the hall to the back door. By which time he was retying an area of the sweet pea vine that had come away from the climbing structure.

I was too young to see their lives in full. These were the clues, gestures towards something that I couldn’t properly comprehend. Mostly, though, it was anger, and inside the house it was as toxically present as fly spray. In the open door I saw their twin beds divided by a vanity. The room was as cold as any motel room I have slept in since.

By now I had stopped thinking of things for us to do together. Mostly I tried to avoid Dad. I could not bear to look at him directly in case he saw the pity I felt for him. So I crept around the house and calculated my movements on going where I knew he wouldn’t be. I wasn’t equipped to help him. I didn’t have the words that he might need to hear. For all of that, I watched and I listened and I was curious to know more and to find out what I could without being direct about it.

From my bedroom window I could see the battered old tennis racquet and dog-bitten ball lying in the dry grass. Once the sight of those two things lying in easy proximity would have drawn me out there right away. But I kept away from the backyard. It was just in case. I didn’t want to be seen talking to the man in the shed. The shameful fact is I didn’t mind talking to him. I liked answering his gently plied questions because that was the shape of our conversation. He had to dig
to get words out of me. And at this apparent resistance of mine he’d give me a little side-eyed look. These days his smile didn’t extend beyond his eyes. It was a matter of loyalty to Dad that I made the conversation operate in this way. But one thing for sure: I didn’t want to be talking to the man in the shed and to turn around and see Dad’s face at the back window. I didn’t know how to put out his sadness. Sure as hell I didn’t want to add to it. So it meant avoiding the backyard and that’s how I became estranged from those things which once had been such a big part of me—the racquet and the tennis ball, the shed too, which had once housed a pet sheep. These things were turning into memories. For the first time I was seeing how time sorted the world into current and past. Time touched everything. One afternoon when I stood at the back window, I realised with a sad sort of shock that nonetheless carried its own quick exhilaration that I had grown apart from the backyard. The disused swing and the man in the shed no doubt played their part. But, also, the backyard had come to represent something else. I didn’t want to go out there because it would mean walking back into the old me who didn’t know anything. When, in fact, I’d just decided I wanted to know the
next
thing. I preferred that to playing around like the dog snapping at fleas popping out of its own fur. I wanted to
know
.

One night I am woken by shouting in the TV room. Unusually it is Dad’s voice, now Mum’s hand-wringing whine and groan, now both, and I am expecting to hear the man from the shed,
but instead what I hear is Pen sobbing, followed by feet marching down the hall. The front door slams with such violence my night-light briefly goes out before flickering back on.

The wounded air of the night lasted until breakfast, where I found Pen sitting at the kitchen table with Jimmy Mack. Jimmy smiled at me. A quick disapproving look from my sister removed the smile. And Jimmy settled for nodding down at the table. Pen’s hair was wet. She looked as though she had been made to stand in a cold shower for twelve hours. She glanced up at me in the doorway then back at her bitten nails. She bit off some more. She flicked it off her fingertips and glanced up again. Seeing I was still there (I wasn’t going to leave without my breakfast), she said through her fingers, I’m pregnant. Jimmy’s face lit up again. He beamed at me across the kitchen and then seemed to remember the moratorium placed on all smiles and happiness and quickly fitted on his earnest school-leaver’s face, of a year back, which I suppose was the best he could come up with to go with the stunning fact that he was going to be a father.

Again things happened without warning. I came home from school one day to find my sister’s room bare. The bed was made, the sheets and blanket perfectly spread in a way that particular bed had never known. The carefully folded back part seemed to define the terminal sense of the room.

There was hardly anything that Pen didn’t take with her to the motor camp.

Now we would stop by there on our way to the beach. My sister would be sitting barefoot on the steps of the caravan
smiling wanly back at the world. We’d get out of the car, doors flying open, bounding cheerfulness in all directions. We were putting on a brave face. It was a hot and tiny caravan I stepped inside. It was shocking to see how my sister’s world had shrunk to a small porthole view of the other caravans standing in a line, the long grass bursting up around the wheelhouse of each. It was clear. My sister’s life had been put on hold.

I was glad to get back in the car and on our way. I was relieved to be driving away from the uncomfortable fact of her stalled life. The sky grew larger in the side windows of the car. From under the wheels came the popping sound of shells. A row of seagulls traced a line of roofs. The houses appeared to sway towards and away from the sea. The soft decay of the beach spread inland. Soon the windblown gardens petered out to sand and burnt lawn. The windows were thick with sea breath. The immensity of the sky mocked the idea of the houses. Why so much concrete in the drive? Why bother with the flower vase halfway along the window ledge? Yet on the way home it was possible to see these same houses quite differently. No longer were these weatherboards the tail end of our neighbourhood of well-maintained brick, but a continuation of the spin drift of the beach; they were another shelf on the shoreline.