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Sport 8: Autumn 1992

[section]

page 49

It was toward the raggedy end of winter that we all began to long for a death.

'I'm going crazy,' Kate told me. It was one of those impossible and dreary evenings that seem to happen a lot in August. I was curled in the ancient red armchair Christian and Boy brought back from the tip that time. It is very forlorn and rather misshapen. I sit in it with my legs over one arm, my back supported by the other. It was raining. I studied my nails, the phone crooked between my shoulder and my left ear. No one else was home.

'I know,' I told Kate.

'This winter,' said Kate, bitterly, 'is never going to end.'

'I know,' I said. Christian had spent the entire morning in a queue on the first floor of DSW. He had come home in a very bad mood.

'Fucking Social Welfare,' Kate said, intuitively. 'They've cut me off three times and now they've arranged this interview to reassess my job potential. I got the letter this morning.'

'I wouldn't worry about it,' I said, and yawned at the Mona Lisa on the wall. We got her out of the library. We've had her nine months already. They keep sending us these fines. 'There are no jobs.'

'I didn't,' Kate told me, very aggressive, 'study for three years to be fucked around by Social Welfare.'

'I know you didn't,' I said.

Mary Wollstonecraft came in silently through the gap where the door to the kitchen used to be and curled up on my lap.

'Stu's on the Sickness Benefit,' I told them both.

'Really?' Kate said. The air was suddenly thick with envy; Mary Wollstonecraft stirred in its draught and abruptly began to purr. Her evil green eyes regarded me intently. It's very difficult to get thrown off the Sickness Benefit, once you've manoeuvred the tricky matter of getting on.

'God. This whole year. I just don't feel—I haven't—Ohh, God, what a year. What a long, boring, terrible year,' said Kate.

'There was Waitangi,' I reminded her.

page 50

'Oh yeah,' she said; her voice lifted slightly and then dropped again— 'But that was summer.'

'I know,' I said.

There fell another of those August evening pauses, late and dreary with nothing to do and no one home and the TV taken back because of the unpaid rentals.

It could be worse. Jeff and Stu have had their phone cut off. Telecon, as Boy would say.

I have a job. It is not, of course, a very good job; I temp, which is not exactly what a degree in Philosophy had intended for me, but with me working at least three or four days a week and Christian at De Luxe three mornings—they pay under the table—we do get to keep our phone. They won't let Boy work at Drama School, but he keeps seven plants in the hot water cupboard. They're all called Audrey III.

I thought of the morning, curled up there in the red armchair, listening to Kate complain. We live in a tiny crooked-sixpence house in the mist and damp of Holloway Road, Boy and Christian and me, and it is never warm enough. Our landlady is a middle-aged Kiwi Chinese—her phrase, not mine. She adores Boy and Christian. She doesn't like me, I'm female. I don't like her, she's old.

Even with Mary Wollstonecraft a heavy weight on my stomach I was cold. It is not shivery cold in Holloway Road. It's more the sort where you get clogged and stilled where you sit; it is too cold to stretch, every muscle rebels against it, and with your body clogged and stilled your mind becomes sluggish too. To get up, to go into the freezing kitchen to make a cup of tea, requires a major exertion of will. Sometimes I go and sit and read in the kitchen with all four elements and the grill of the oven on, flickering blue and purple like a bruise, but the heat won't stay in because Lexa took the door to the living-room to make a workbench out of, and I can't do this very often because we can't afford the gas.

So I just sat there, too cold to move, listening to Kate complain, on and on, and thought of the morning.

An eight-thirty start. I have to be out of bed by seven-fifteen, when it isn't hardly light. The alarm goes off with its cheap tinny thrill and Christian knocks it off the orange-box, but it won't stop and Christian groans and rolls over and says Fuck at me. We are both bad in the mornings, but Christian's the worst. Unemployed people hate to wake up, I've noticed. I was the same, page 51 doing the obligatory six months after finishing up at varsity.

The alarm is whining to a stop, winding down. One last defeated- sounding chirrup and it's still, and I'm all rolled up in the army blanket and my grandmother's patchwork quilt on the sheets I found at the op shop on Majoribanks and I'm warm and I don't want to get up and put on my horrible work clothes and go out into the rain and file all day and I'm drifting back to sleep, and then the door flies open and there's Boy, and he grins at me and chucks Mary Wollstonecraft into the room and says, 'Time for all good Drake girlies to be out of bed.'

'Sod off, Boy,' I say, but sleepy, not vicious like Christian, and Boy grins again and stomps off into the kitchen and Mary Wollstonecraft leaps, purring, on to the bed.

'Jesus Christ,' says Christian.

'Hey, baby,' I say to Mary Wollstonecraft, ignoring him, and she steps delicately over him and settles on the pillow, and Christian rolls over and rears half-upright and stares into my face, all three inches of his hair on end—he's growing it out—and says, deadly, 'Get the fuck out of here, I am asleep,' and there's the good mood for the day, killed stone dead, and I throw Mary Wollstonecraft onto the floor and she stalks away and I drag myself out of the room with my feet flinching from the cold of the lino and into the shower.

Now, the shower in Holloway Road.

It's a trickle and you have to fiddle with the taps every ten seconds and it's either bitterly cold or scalding. When I had long hair I couldn't ever get the shampoo out of it because the water pressure doesn't exist. You know when you're little and you forget your coat and your mother tells you to dodge between the raindrops to stay dry?

You can do that, in our shower.

I lean my head against the mouldy wall, and I'm one sour bundle of anger and hate, and it's the same every morning, the slimy curtain that never gets time to dry, and I probe the shutters open to look out into the street and guess what, it's raining, and Boy is standing outside hopping from one foot to another, saying, 'Hurry up, hurry up, I'm going to be late, woman, c'mon, c'mon,' and I scraunch off the taps and wrap myself in a towel and I think how I hate the winter.

I thought of all this, half-listening to Kate, studying my nails. I looked around our living-room; we keep forgetting to buy new bulbs for the lamps page 52 and it looked dreary and dingy under the one overhead light. Christian had scattered tubes of paint and the Sunday Times (days old) all over the sofa, and for once even the Mona Lisa didn't make it seem prettier, or all the things we have collected, from the market and op shops and friends.

I thought about Kate and Christian and Stu and Lexa and even Boy, who's usually so irrepressible, and how we've been passing our bad mood from one to another like a virus, a social disease indeed, the lethargy that goes with it the sores. Winter, I thought.

There are the winter things, of course: the after-work, after-dark world we live in until late October, early November: the cold bright Wellington you can find after eleven, in the cafés and clubs all along Cuba Street. Kate and I do a lot of movies in winter—two o'clocks, when it's cheaper, and then there is the film festival, which is when Christian and Boy and Lexa deign to join us.

'The arty ones,' Kate says, with that particularly Kate blend of scorn and envy.

I usually make no response to this, although actually I consider myself as one of the arty ones, with good reason I think. There's more to art than Drama School and Christian in holey T-shirts hurling oils on enormous canvases in Lexa's garage. Art is refraction, reflection, manipulation of substance, and at this—I forbear to mention to Kate—I am rather excessively good. As she of all people should be aware.

Yes, but the thing about movies is that you have to leave from them, sometime.

I thought of summer, with the windows open and the sun shining and the coloured lights they put on the trees on Oriental Parade, but it was too far away. I couldn't believe it would ever happen again. It was going to be winter and we were all going to be unemployed or in shit jobs forever.

It was at that moment that I came to a decision.

'Kate,' I said.

The drone stopped. The silence buzzed faintly over the telephone wire. I could half-hear a crossed connection.

'Yes?' she said.

'You know what we need, Kate?' I said, and all of a sudden my body unclogged and I stretched, slowly and luxuriously, daring the cold. It stayed at a safe distance. My fingertips were tingling with evil; even Mary Wollstonecraft was still, watching me.

page 53

'We need a death,' I said, and Mary Wollstonecraft sat upright with her tail twitching. I felt as well as heard Kate's quick intake of breath. Winter damages the telepathy between us, but it was suddenly working perfectly; I could feel her mind tumbling the idea over and over, examining it from kaleidoscope angles, and then it rolled into a niche and stopped.

'Yes,' she said slowly. 'A death.'

I was too excited to stay still; I jumped up and began to pace round the room with the body of the telephone in my hand. When Christian and Boy broke the phone, drop-kicking it, Telecom replaced it with this hideous new flat grey model, with a mute button, three different rings and a lot of other features we didn't need, but I made them give us a thirty-foot cord.

The room looked different, charged; the edges of it vibrated slightly as the evil in my fingertips began to pulse outward, banishing the cold.

'Can you do it?' Kate asked me cautiously,

'I don't know so. I think so. Not alone, I said. I stopped in front of the mantelpiece. The silver pepper and salt shakers we stole from the Park Royal the night the theatre burned down trembled; I willed them still.

'I'm not very strong at the moment,' Kate said hesitantly.

'I know. It's okay. I've got Mary Wollstonecraft. I'll need you as back up, though, Katie, please.'

'When? Now?'

I raised my eyes very slowly until they met their reflection in the black- framed circular mirror; I looked into myself, then at the Mona Lisa, and met her smile for slow smile.

'The beginning now,' I said.

'Oh God. I'm really not very strong, you know, hon.'

I looked down; Mary Wollstonecraft was twining herself sinuously about my ankles.

'Have a shower, get into bed. Then if you pass out you pass out, it'll be okay. You won't, though. I don't need you to do anything, just be there,' I told her. 'You might need to hold me, it's been a while.'

'Okay,' said Kate, and hung up.

My hands were trembling. I picked up Mary Wollstonecraft; she pressed herself into the hollow of my neck.

'All right, baby,' I said to her. 'Time to go.'

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