Michelle pulled her head back inside and closed the door but it didn’t help. The noise and vibrations of the stampede of drenched bodies approaching thundered through the glass front of the bar.
If the mob wanted in, there wouldn’t be any way to keep them out.
Hand trembling, she fastened the bolt at the top of the door. Maybe they wouldn’t smash the door. Maybe they wouldn’t even stop or notice the bar. Maybe she were still OK.
She glanced back at the bar. It was virtually empty. A handful of regulars scattered at the bar in front of Jessica and a couple lone drinkers at solitary tables, their hands clutched around their glasses, determined to ignore the chaos closing in around them.
And then there were the four others. She’d been trying to forget about them. One with a face full of broken glass and blood lying not far from her feet, and the three others back up in the booth, waiting with their desperate thirst for more drinks to arrive.
“What’s going on out there?” Jessica called over to her, resting the phone’s receiver face up on the bar. She hadn’t completely given up hope of getting through to the emergency services. Not yet.
“It looks like a crowd’s got out of control,” Michelle answered, looking back out through the glass. “The police have shown up.” She was surprised to hear that her voice sounded causal, despite her growing fear that what was happening was much worse than that.
The sounds of the running mob were becoming louder, their screams drowning out the fading cries of the police sirens and the wet thuds of fast footfalls pelting the ground as the mob ran up the street.
They were getting close, very close.
Michelle jumped back from the glass when she saw the first one rush in front of the bar. Dozens of them raced past the window in front of her, their faces distorted by their strange expressions and the reflections of the street lights spinning off their wet skin as they ran.
They didn’t slow down or even as much as glance into the bar as they went, yet their fleeting presence chilled Michelle. It wasn’t that she was afraid of them breaking into the bar anymore. It was a terrible certainty that something far worse was coming.
The mob seemed to move as one being. None of them looked to either side, not even for a second. Their heads remained rigidly straight as they moved. It looked odd and unnatural, like they had metal rods bracing their necks in place as they ran.
Worst of all was the shriek. At a distance, it had just sounded like the usual cacophony of yelling and screaming, much like any over-excited crowd. From closer, it was more distinctive. These were not the cries of a normal, out-of-control mob. It was the unified howl of one mind with many voices. Every person was crying the same wordless scream. The different voices of all those people were synchronised to blend into one horrible, bloodcurdling wail.
The shriek whirled around the street outside and then receded as they ran further up the road away from the bar.
Half in horror, half in relief, Michelle took a step back away from the glass but jumped as her foot bumped into the prone body on the floor.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, although she doubted the man was conscious enough to hear her.
She turned back to survey the bar. The patrons seemed relieved that the mob had passed although they had been studiously pretending to be unaware or unconcerned with outside events.
Maybe she would get through this night.
“THIRST!” a loud groan rose up out of the booth and she saw one of the men stumble out of his seat in an even worse state than when she had last left them only minutes before.
His knees buckled beneath him and he collapsed to the ground. Driven by some unreasonable need, he starting dragging himself forward, like a dying man in the desert grasping at a mirage.
“Thhrsst,” he rasped before his face fell flat on the floor and he lay motionless only inches away from the booth.
Michelle looked around the bar. Everyone else avoided her gaze. It was her problem.
She grabbed a pitcher of water and started back up towards the booth but a loud crash from outside distracted her. The drinks on the tables and bar rattled ominously in their glasses. The water splashed and spilt over the sides of the jug she was holding and she realised that the whole ground was shaking.
An earthquake? On top of everything else?
She crawled under a nearby table as the ground continued to shake. A pang of conscience made her drag the table over towards the bloodied head of the man near the door. She couldn’t fit all of him under there with her but she could shield his face from any more broken glass if the front wall of the bar smashed. She cowered under the protection of the small wooden table and tried to avoid looking at the mangled face she was so close to.
The ground stopped shaking. It can’t have been longer than a few seconds, she thought. There was still the tinkling sound of glasses vibrating against each other at the bar but otherwise it had gone quiet.
Michelle peeked out from under the table. The bar was surprisingly undamaged. Maybe the quake hadn’t been as strong as it felt. People started emerging from the temporary shelters under furniture.
“Is everyone OK…?” she started but a deafening smash outside broke her off. The ground lurched in another shuddering wave of tremors.
She pulled herself back under the table. What was going on?
She looked out towards the street. Her hand clutching the black metal leg of the table started to shake uncontrollably. It wasn’t because of an earthquake.
A giant grey tentacle had smashed into the top of two of the cars parked outside on the street, flattening them like they were made of cardboard. She wanted to looked away but couldn’t. She noticed all sorts of details she wished she hadn’t. The thick purple veins that webbed around underneath the semi-translucent skin, the smatterings of blood smeared along the sides of the tentacle that indicated it had destroyed more than cars. Worst was the horrible flicking whip-like motion with which it coiled back off the obliterate vehicles.
She couldn’t see how far back down the street the tentacle reached from her limited view underneath the table. Just how massive was this thing?
She pulled herself out from the table with a reluctant determination she didn’t know she possessed. She had to see.
Michelle froze on the spot as soon as she stood, her curiosity, like her bravery, sinking out of her in an instant. She watched the huge grey tentacle as it lifted back up into the air.
It wasn’t a tentacle at all. It was a toe.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Part Three - Seth
Seth was in the water, his hair swaying gently in the ebb and flow of the icy sea foam that pooled around his head then retreated rhythmically. When the water slipped away the roof of the car was covered in stars.
No, not stars. Tiny squares of broken glass. Safety glass. And blood.
It had all been so beautiful on the wharf, the city crouched behind him expectantly, the dark waves in front of him, a mass of cheerful people around him peering into the water. Faces had leapt out at him, their cheeks glowing with joy, their eyes sparkling. The detail and depth of the world had been achingly beautiful, richer than it had ever been before.
A piece of glass rolled towards his eye as the foam lapped a little higher and Seth coughed, choking slightly as a drop of seawater went up his nose. No time to remember, better get moving.
He turned his head as best he could, surveyed the car. It was upside down, that much was obvious. It was in the water but not under the water. He was propped up, his legs pinned under the driver’s seat and his shoulder against the door. His hands were cuffed. The guy next to him looked pretty dead, in that his neck was twisted at a weird angle and he was slumped face down in the bloody water. The metal grate that separated the back seat from the front had buckled, and Seth could see one of the cops who’d arrested him in the front. He looked even more dead than the guy in the back. His window was broken and the jagged rock which had apparently shattered it had also made a mess of the cop’s head. It wasn’t pretty.
Seth pulled his legs free of the seat and collapsed in a heap on the roof of the car, safety glass crunching under his weight. The more he came into contact with the water the greater his sense of dread and panic grew. Got to get out. Get free.
He swung himself round and began to kick the metal grate, forcing it loose enough to allow him to clamber into the front seat. He did his best to avoid the dead cop but couldn’t help brushing against his shoulder. He twitched at the contact, a shudder running up the length of his body. His hand closed on something cold and he dragged it with him past the driver’s seat and through the windscreen. With a final effort he pushed himself out through the shattered windscreen and into the space between the bonnet and the rocks. Sea foam swirled around his hands and legs as he knelt for a moment breathing heavily, relieved to be out of the car but still far from safe.
The cold thing in his hand was a gun. The cop’s gun. The one he’d tried to grab earlier.
The voice had been whispering to him, unintelligible but alluring. Then someone had grabbed him, spun him around, nearly thrown him into the water. The voice had become suddenly clear, insistent. “Gun. Get the gun.”
The crowd around Seth had faded into dull grey except for one figure, a police officer in a crisp blue uniform, leaning against his car at the edge of the wharf and watching the crowd. The gun at his hip had glowed and pulsed with a reassuring light and Seth had been drawn to it, had to have it.
It wasn’t long before he was being manhandled into the back of the car, in cuffs. He'd watched helplessly as people began to throw themselves off the wharf, into the water. People disappeared under the waves, between the shadows, then after an impossible time they surfaced, walked out of the water and back through the crowd, dripping and sloshing and smiling their way into the city. Then… then something had happened. The car had lurched and slid and flipped into the water, bodies flying around it, and the screaming had started.
There was no screaming now.
Seth lifted the gun and inspected it briefly. It was just like the ones he’d seen in movies, safety on the side, sliding action with the top bit to get a bullet into the chamber, cool as all hell. And reassuring. Definitely reassuring.
“Gonna be a writer… working on a script…”
The low voice wasn’t the whisper, wasn’t in Seth’s head. It was out on the rocks somewhere out of Seth’s line of sight, and worse it was familiar. They were his own words, words from the night before floating back at him on a watery girl’s voice.
“Spare a drink for a lost soul?”
A different voice, the same taunting repetition of his words from the previous night.
Seth inched forward, peered out from under the bonnet of the cop car. He was at the water’s edge, large rocks jagged beneath him, the water spilling over them insistently. Behind the car was carnage, broken wood, twisted floating bodies, and the city watching silently in the failing light. People were moving, sirens were wailing in the distance, but it all sounded far away, unimportant. Sounds heard from beneath the water.
“Let me guess, no ID?”
Seth turned slowly, cliché from a horror film in action, knowing that he didn’t want to see what was behind him, didn’t want to know, should run, but he had to look. Had to see.
Beyond the boot of the car, out in the water where the rocks fell away into swirling depths with deceptive speed, three girls in school uniform were watching him. They were standing knee deep in the water, their scarecrow bodies made up of odd angles. The water was far too deep for them to be that high up. Their heads hung limply and their eyes were overlarge, shiny, their skin pale. If they hadn’t been repeating his words Seth would not have recognized them as the sirens from Aro park. They were schoolgirls? Seth felt suddenly dirty, as though his sleazy old man routine was the worst of his problems.
“Come and join us,” one of the girls said, raising a stiff arm like a marionette. Her index finger curled and relaxed in a series of jerks, beckoning Seth toward her.
“Shouldn’t have taken the acid,” Seth mumbled, looking around and biting his tongue, trying to spot an inconsistency that would show this whole sorry mess to be a hallucination. Nothing changed.
“Joooiiinnnn usssssss….” The three girls chorused, rising another six inches out of the water. Their calf-high white socks were stained with mud and muck and blood, and their limbs dangled loosely.
Seth began to scramble backwards up the rocks, out of the water, stumbling and slipping as he fought for purchase against the handcuffs and the bulk of the pistol in his hands. As he did so he saw the three girls waver for a moment, then suddenly rear up out of the water and into the air. Running up the back of each girl’s legs and under her clothes was a tentacle, dark and pulsating and impossible to focus on. Seth found tears springing into his eyes as a dark shape in the water lurched forward, flinging the girls toward Seth like a child throwing rag dolls. He closed his eyes and screamed, his finger squeezing the trigger of the gun.
When nothing happened, Seth opened his eyes tentatively. He was warm, which was a pleasant change, and it was sunny. The creature in the water was frozen, still difficult to look at. Through a pulsating shimmer Seth could make out tentacles and eyes and fangs or horns or barbs of some sort. He blinked away his tears, tried to focus.
The water was still, waves half crashed but not moving. The three girls hung in mid air, their limbs askew, tiny drops of water halted in mid-air around them Behind him the distant bustle and activity had stopped. A break in the clouds above had let a single shaft of dying light through and Seth was bathed in its warmth. The world was silent.
“Don’t fight now. Just run,” the whisper in the back of his head instructed. It was close now, intimate, warm. Seth looked over his shoulder at the ruins of the wharf and saw with sudden clarity a path through the chaos, a twisted but ultimately safe way through.
He felt the tension in his finger returning, felt the trigger of the gun pull back. In a sudden rush the gun roared and bucked in his hand and the middle of one of the tentacles exploded in a cloud of green mist. The three girls crashed into the rocks around him as the severed tip fell into the sea. Seth scrambled up the rocks and into the remains of the wharf, leaping from broken support pole to pile of corpses to dangling support cable, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the things in the water.
Abruptly the terrifying sound of a city in chaos closed in on him, the sirens and cries and groans of torn steel and wood, and all around the sound of breaking glass, car alarms, heavy impacts and screaming.
The light was gone.
No, not stars. Tiny squares of broken glass. Safety glass. And blood.
It had all been so beautiful on the wharf, the city crouched behind him expectantly, the dark waves in front of him, a mass of cheerful people around him peering into the water. Faces had leapt out at him, their cheeks glowing with joy, their eyes sparkling. The detail and depth of the world had been achingly beautiful, richer than it had ever been before.
A piece of glass rolled towards his eye as the foam lapped a little higher and Seth coughed, choking slightly as a drop of seawater went up his nose. No time to remember, better get moving.
He turned his head as best he could, surveyed the car. It was upside down, that much was obvious. It was in the water but not under the water. He was propped up, his legs pinned under the driver’s seat and his shoulder against the door. His hands were cuffed. The guy next to him looked pretty dead, in that his neck was twisted at a weird angle and he was slumped face down in the bloody water. The metal grate that separated the back seat from the front had buckled, and Seth could see one of the cops who’d arrested him in the front. He looked even more dead than the guy in the back. His window was broken and the jagged rock which had apparently shattered it had also made a mess of the cop’s head. It wasn’t pretty.
Seth pulled his legs free of the seat and collapsed in a heap on the roof of the car, safety glass crunching under his weight. The more he came into contact with the water the greater his sense of dread and panic grew. Got to get out. Get free.
He swung himself round and began to kick the metal grate, forcing it loose enough to allow him to clamber into the front seat. He did his best to avoid the dead cop but couldn’t help brushing against his shoulder. He twitched at the contact, a shudder running up the length of his body. His hand closed on something cold and he dragged it with him past the driver’s seat and through the windscreen. With a final effort he pushed himself out through the shattered windscreen and into the space between the bonnet and the rocks. Sea foam swirled around his hands and legs as he knelt for a moment breathing heavily, relieved to be out of the car but still far from safe.
The cold thing in his hand was a gun. The cop’s gun. The one he’d tried to grab earlier.
The voice had been whispering to him, unintelligible but alluring. Then someone had grabbed him, spun him around, nearly thrown him into the water. The voice had become suddenly clear, insistent. “Gun. Get the gun.”
The crowd around Seth had faded into dull grey except for one figure, a police officer in a crisp blue uniform, leaning against his car at the edge of the wharf and watching the crowd. The gun at his hip had glowed and pulsed with a reassuring light and Seth had been drawn to it, had to have it.
It wasn’t long before he was being manhandled into the back of the car, in cuffs. He'd watched helplessly as people began to throw themselves off the wharf, into the water. People disappeared under the waves, between the shadows, then after an impossible time they surfaced, walked out of the water and back through the crowd, dripping and sloshing and smiling their way into the city. Then… then something had happened. The car had lurched and slid and flipped into the water, bodies flying around it, and the screaming had started.
There was no screaming now.
Seth lifted the gun and inspected it briefly. It was just like the ones he’d seen in movies, safety on the side, sliding action with the top bit to get a bullet into the chamber, cool as all hell. And reassuring. Definitely reassuring.
“Gonna be a writer… working on a script…”
The low voice wasn’t the whisper, wasn’t in Seth’s head. It was out on the rocks somewhere out of Seth’s line of sight, and worse it was familiar. They were his own words, words from the night before floating back at him on a watery girl’s voice.
“Spare a drink for a lost soul?”
A different voice, the same taunting repetition of his words from the previous night.
Seth inched forward, peered out from under the bonnet of the cop car. He was at the water’s edge, large rocks jagged beneath him, the water spilling over them insistently. Behind the car was carnage, broken wood, twisted floating bodies, and the city watching silently in the failing light. People were moving, sirens were wailing in the distance, but it all sounded far away, unimportant. Sounds heard from beneath the water.
“Let me guess, no ID?”
Seth turned slowly, cliché from a horror film in action, knowing that he didn’t want to see what was behind him, didn’t want to know, should run, but he had to look. Had to see.
Beyond the boot of the car, out in the water where the rocks fell away into swirling depths with deceptive speed, three girls in school uniform were watching him. They were standing knee deep in the water, their scarecrow bodies made up of odd angles. The water was far too deep for them to be that high up. Their heads hung limply and their eyes were overlarge, shiny, their skin pale. If they hadn’t been repeating his words Seth would not have recognized them as the sirens from Aro park. They were schoolgirls? Seth felt suddenly dirty, as though his sleazy old man routine was the worst of his problems.
“Come and join us,” one of the girls said, raising a stiff arm like a marionette. Her index finger curled and relaxed in a series of jerks, beckoning Seth toward her.
“Shouldn’t have taken the acid,” Seth mumbled, looking around and biting his tongue, trying to spot an inconsistency that would show this whole sorry mess to be a hallucination. Nothing changed.
“Joooiiinnnn usssssss….” The three girls chorused, rising another six inches out of the water. Their calf-high white socks were stained with mud and muck and blood, and their limbs dangled loosely.
Seth began to scramble backwards up the rocks, out of the water, stumbling and slipping as he fought for purchase against the handcuffs and the bulk of the pistol in his hands. As he did so he saw the three girls waver for a moment, then suddenly rear up out of the water and into the air. Running up the back of each girl’s legs and under her clothes was a tentacle, dark and pulsating and impossible to focus on. Seth found tears springing into his eyes as a dark shape in the water lurched forward, flinging the girls toward Seth like a child throwing rag dolls. He closed his eyes and screamed, his finger squeezing the trigger of the gun.
When nothing happened, Seth opened his eyes tentatively. He was warm, which was a pleasant change, and it was sunny. The creature in the water was frozen, still difficult to look at. Through a pulsating shimmer Seth could make out tentacles and eyes and fangs or horns or barbs of some sort. He blinked away his tears, tried to focus.
The water was still, waves half crashed but not moving. The three girls hung in mid air, their limbs askew, tiny drops of water halted in mid-air around them Behind him the distant bustle and activity had stopped. A break in the clouds above had let a single shaft of dying light through and Seth was bathed in its warmth. The world was silent.
“Don’t fight now. Just run,” the whisper in the back of his head instructed. It was close now, intimate, warm. Seth looked over his shoulder at the ruins of the wharf and saw with sudden clarity a path through the chaos, a twisted but ultimately safe way through.
He felt the tension in his finger returning, felt the trigger of the gun pull back. In a sudden rush the gun roared and bucked in his hand and the middle of one of the tentacles exploded in a cloud of green mist. The three girls crashed into the rocks around him as the severed tip fell into the sea. Seth scrambled up the rocks and into the remains of the wharf, leaping from broken support pole to pile of corpses to dangling support cable, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the things in the water.
Abruptly the terrifying sound of a city in chaos closed in on him, the sirens and cries and groans of torn steel and wood, and all around the sound of breaking glass, car alarms, heavy impacts and screaming.
The light was gone.
Part Two - Margaret
Her eyes opened, and with bland, animal calm she found herself clothed, curled on a dirty floor and in great pain.
Tiny bits of carpet-litter had worked their way into her hair and clothing. Clumps of carpet-hair threaded between her fingers.
She waited for thoughts to come.
To tell her where she was, tell her who she was, tell her what to do.
White sunlight filtered through lifeless old curtains. Dangling. Limp. Pain in her leg. This rotten leg. Ought to chop it off and be done with it. All of the operations, the leg brace, crutches. “Strengthening and lengthening”. Rubbish. Should have chopped it off when she was a girl.
The thought subsided, she forgot again and was content to lie there, breathe, feel pain. Watch the light through the curtains for a long, long time. Minutes. An hour. Longer.
Then the alarm clock rang, and she remembered everything. Everything, it all came back to her. It was time for her to go to work.
One of Shona’s children stood pointing a pistol at her.
‘Blam blam,’ it said.
Margaret frowned. She edged the gate open, squeezing past it and onto the footpath.
The child said: ‘Blam, you’re dead.’
Then, as if annoyed with her failure to comply: ‘You’re dead you crazy _____.’
Margaret turned back to it.
‘What was that?’
She stepped closer to the child.
‘What was that you said? I’ll t–’ Her voice quavering. “I’ll tell your mother”. Unlikely.
No question of the child being disciplined, she thought, fumbling the headphones out of her bag, limping, slipping them over her ears. No question of it. After all, where had it learnt the word?
(“Who were you speaking to?” “Oh I was speaking to that crazy _____ downstairs”)
But the face had alarmed her. The expression in its eyes, one of basic hatred.
She shivered, tucking the headphones’ cord into her empty pocket.
Faces alarmed her. All faces did, she decided. The faces of the people here, sharp-nosed, dead-eyed. They swung about like weapons, swung up to the windows, eyeing the world outside like rifles pointing.
So many people in this city. Surely more now than when she was young. More people cramming the pavement, they seemed a particularly large throng today. Clogging the traffic. Slowing the bus as it inched along Lambton Quay.
Babbling into their phones. ‘No mate I couldn’t get through, I can’t get through to her. No mate the network’s overloaded. Lucky I got you, mate. No mate. Can’t see anything from here. Nah, I’m on the bus mate.’
Of course you are on the bus, we can all see that you are on the bus.
She closed her eyes and blocked out their din. The headphones helped. She imagined music, songs from the records she owned.
Then on the footpath, pushing through the milling bodies, a wave of them flowing the other way, pouring out to sea. So she imagined that she was alone.
Seasons of gasoline and gold
Wise men fold
Near a tree by a river there's a hole in the ground...
One of the girls said:
Margaret pulled off her headphones.
‘What are you listening to?’ the girl asked.
Margaret shrugged, put the headphones into her bag and the bag into her locker. There were other voices, other conversations to distract:
‘So freaky. It was just, I don’t know what it was. Is. It's still there, I was down there. But like I’m covering Julie tonight, so like I had to come back. But everyone’s there. Like everyone.’
‘Gutted.’
‘So gutted.’
Conversations in another language.
'What do you think it was?'
'Last night,' one of the girls said to her. The same girl, talking to her again. Normally the girls didn't talk to her. This one was small, as young as the others no doubt but with the meekness of one even younger.
'I'm sorry?'
'For Land's End I mean.'
Margaret checked the schedule. Land's End was the film, her film. She hadn't known it was finishing.
'I guess you'll be pretty stoked, eh. Can't be too much fun doing cinema checks on that every night.'
'It's popular,' said Margaret. 'I expect they'll change their minds.'
The girl seemed confused.
She said: 'You know you don't have to always do the same movie. You can talk to them and swap over.'
Margaret said: 'It's very popular. I think they'll keep it running, at least for another week.'
She looked around. The audience were coming in. A little soon, she thought. She limped along her aisle and swept the last of the popcorn under the seats.
Surely they would keep it on for another week. It had only been running for... she tried to think.
'Excuse me,' she said, brushing past a patron.
There weren't many of them, but that wasn't the film's fault. They had thought it would be a busy night at the cinema, it usually was, but the customers were scattered here and there as if a bowling ball had swept the middle of them away a minute before. Everyone at the waterfront. Some party, some event or other.
Not many at all, perhaps two dozen in total.
She hovered around the door, uncertain. She had other cinemas to clean in the complex, and possibly she was meant to man the snack counter later. She couldn't remember.
The lights went down.
The audience watched in silence, blue light washing across their faces.
There was a car and inside were four young people, they were trying to find a party or a rock concert. They were lost. For the thirty fifth time they drove down a road and there was a gate and a skull “KEEP OUT”. And her boyfriend drove backward and you thought that would be the end of it but there was a trap and the tyres burst. And they walked through the woods where more skeletons hung and you knew that even though they were scared they were in worse –
The film stopped, very abruptly. At the same moment, the lights went up.
Margaret blinked. The audience muttered, rustled.
'Whew,' said one patron nearby, a young woman. She laughed.
Then the alarm went off.
Tiny bits of carpet-litter had worked their way into her hair and clothing. Clumps of carpet-hair threaded between her fingers.
She waited for thoughts to come.
To tell her where she was, tell her who she was, tell her what to do.
White sunlight filtered through lifeless old curtains. Dangling. Limp. Pain in her leg. This rotten leg. Ought to chop it off and be done with it. All of the operations, the leg brace, crutches. “Strengthening and lengthening”. Rubbish. Should have chopped it off when she was a girl.
The thought subsided, she forgot again and was content to lie there, breathe, feel pain. Watch the light through the curtains for a long, long time. Minutes. An hour. Longer.
Then the alarm clock rang, and she remembered everything. Everything, it all came back to her. It was time for her to go to work.
One of Shona’s children stood pointing a pistol at her.
‘Blam blam,’ it said.
Margaret frowned. She edged the gate open, squeezing past it and onto the footpath.
The child said: ‘Blam, you’re dead.’
Then, as if annoyed with her failure to comply: ‘You’re dead you crazy _____.’
Margaret turned back to it.
‘What was that?’
She stepped closer to the child.
‘What was that you said? I’ll t–’ Her voice quavering. “I’ll tell your mother”. Unlikely.
No question of the child being disciplined, she thought, fumbling the headphones out of her bag, limping, slipping them over her ears. No question of it. After all, where had it learnt the word?
(“Who were you speaking to?” “Oh I was speaking to that crazy _____ downstairs”)
But the face had alarmed her. The expression in its eyes, one of basic hatred.
She shivered, tucking the headphones’ cord into her empty pocket.
Faces alarmed her. All faces did, she decided. The faces of the people here, sharp-nosed, dead-eyed. They swung about like weapons, swung up to the windows, eyeing the world outside like rifles pointing.
So many people in this city. Surely more now than when she was young. More people cramming the pavement, they seemed a particularly large throng today. Clogging the traffic. Slowing the bus as it inched along Lambton Quay.
Babbling into their phones. ‘No mate I couldn’t get through, I can’t get through to her. No mate the network’s overloaded. Lucky I got you, mate. No mate. Can’t see anything from here. Nah, I’m on the bus mate.’
Of course you are on the bus, we can all see that you are on the bus.
She closed her eyes and blocked out their din. The headphones helped. She imagined music, songs from the records she owned.
Then on the footpath, pushing through the milling bodies, a wave of them flowing the other way, pouring out to sea. So she imagined that she was alone.
Seasons of gasoline and gold
Wise men fold
Near a tree by a river there's a hole in the ground...
One of the girls said:
Margaret pulled off her headphones.
‘What are you listening to?’ the girl asked.
Margaret shrugged, put the headphones into her bag and the bag into her locker. There were other voices, other conversations to distract:
‘So freaky. It was just, I don’t know what it was. Is. It's still there, I was down there. But like I’m covering Julie tonight, so like I had to come back. But everyone’s there. Like everyone.’
‘Gutted.’
‘So gutted.’
Conversations in another language.
'What do you think it was?'
'Last night,' one of the girls said to her. The same girl, talking to her again. Normally the girls didn't talk to her. This one was small, as young as the others no doubt but with the meekness of one even younger.
'I'm sorry?'
'For Land's End I mean.'
Margaret checked the schedule. Land's End was the film, her film. She hadn't known it was finishing.
'I guess you'll be pretty stoked, eh. Can't be too much fun doing cinema checks on that every night.'
'It's popular,' said Margaret. 'I expect they'll change their minds.'
The girl seemed confused.
She said: 'You know you don't have to always do the same movie. You can talk to them and swap over.'
Margaret said: 'It's very popular. I think they'll keep it running, at least for another week.'
She looked around. The audience were coming in. A little soon, she thought. She limped along her aisle and swept the last of the popcorn under the seats.
Surely they would keep it on for another week. It had only been running for... she tried to think.
'Excuse me,' she said, brushing past a patron.
There weren't many of them, but that wasn't the film's fault. They had thought it would be a busy night at the cinema, it usually was, but the customers were scattered here and there as if a bowling ball had swept the middle of them away a minute before. Everyone at the waterfront. Some party, some event or other.
Not many at all, perhaps two dozen in total.
She hovered around the door, uncertain. She had other cinemas to clean in the complex, and possibly she was meant to man the snack counter later. She couldn't remember.
The lights went down.
The audience watched in silence, blue light washing across their faces.
There was a car and inside were four young people, they were trying to find a party or a rock concert. They were lost. For the thirty fifth time they drove down a road and there was a gate and a skull “KEEP OUT”. And her boyfriend drove backward and you thought that would be the end of it but there was a trap and the tyres burst. And they walked through the woods where more skeletons hung and you knew that even though they were scared they were in worse –
The film stopped, very abruptly. At the same moment, the lights went up.
Margaret blinked. The audience muttered, rustled.
'Whew,' said one patron nearby, a young woman. She laughed.
Then the alarm went off.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Part Two - Robin
It was a thing with the sky, a great pulsing mass of light shining behind the blueness, and flat glare from the sea, and a solemn peal of sound: “I AM.”
Robin turned her head away and squinted at the footpath. This, perhaps, was what it was like having a migraine. “OK,” she said, “you guys, it’s time we went back and met your Mum.” And they turned and walked back along the waterfront walkway, her face averted from the throbbing light of the sky, and her children running around yelling. At Oriental Beach they had to stop and look for Alex’s lost train, and a man walked into the sea.
She stood there for a moment, trying to believe she’d just seen through her squinting sore eyes a man in a suit, with business shoes, and a leather satchel walk into the scudding foam and slick oily waves, straightly as an automaton. Then she stood there for another moment, in existential dither, waiting for someone else to go and rescue him.
No-one else was there, no-one else was going to dive into the sea ahead of her.
“Fuck,” she said.
So she hauled off her winter coat and gave it to Robot, and unhooked the sling and gave Aroha to her older sister, and awkwardly yanked off her sneakers and hobbled into the water after him. It was monstrously cold. The waves which had looked so placid on the shore fought against her, smashing into her face, and tugging at her feet; but for that one brief moment when she first got her hand on the crazy guy’s collar and she felt warm, as if bathing in a tropical sea, and smelled sweet spices, and heard the humming whisper of something: “i am. i am i am i am.” She felt the soft caress of something around her ankle and jerked her foot away.
“Come on, you fucking idiot!” she yelled at the guy. He flinched, and looked surprised, as if he didn’t know how he happened to be in the sea, and how dare she lay her hand upon him. She tugged his collar harder, and grabbed his arm with her other hand and started pulling. It was going well until a sudden sneaky wave ripped her feet out from under her and she tumbled yelping into the water.
He pulled her up and the two of them staggered, thoroughly wet, onto the gritty sand of the beach, to a gang of cheering children. “It’s not,” she said, shivering, “like you have to just go do crazy stuff like that. There’s, there’s Lifeline and people you can talk to, and doctors can give you pills to stop you feeling so sad.” She blinked and looked up at the man, familiar in his sodden clothes. She reached out a hand (forbidden) to wipe the hair and sand from his face. “Oh. You’re that guy.”
He pointed, gasping, at the sea. “Can’t you hear them?”
“Can’t you hear the mermaids singing?” she said vengefully. Robin draped her coat over her shoulders against the chill of the whipping wind and shuddered. The guy’s lips were blue and his face was a ghastly shade of pallor. “We need to get warm.”
She gathered up the kids and limped up the stairs back to the walkway, hobbled across the road to one of the little cafes that tucked themselves along the coastline. She didn’t look back to see if he was following her, but by the time she was at the counter ordering hot chocolates the door opened behind her and he staggered in. “I’ll pay,” he said.
“You don’t have to –” she said, and checked the card in her pocket, “you don’t have to, Noel.”
“No, no, I got you wet, it’s the least I can do.”
Robin made a face and dumped her stuff by the table. Christie was flattened against the window peering out at the sea, but the light from the window was still making her wince and the paracetamol in her bag hadn’t kicked in yet. She pulled out her phone and made a call.
“Yeah, Claire? Hi, how’s it going?”
A wad of paper towels landed on the table. The suicide guy had sat down in front of her and was wiping the water off his face with them.
“I know we were going to meet on Willis St, but can you come and get us?”
The two boys had joined Christie at the window and were pointing at something excitedly. Robin put the phone down with a guilty thud, a reminder of too many bailouts before. “Look,” she said, “I know you’re lonely, but there’s other things you can do.”
“I wasn’t trying to. Um. Hurt myself. There are things in the water.”
Robin rolled her eyes. Robot said: “Do you think it’s a giant squid?” and she looked at the window – all the other patrons, and the waitress were plastered against the glass.
“OK, so maybe there’s something in the water. Like dolphins or something.”
They both shut up then, and sipped their hot chocolate until Claire breezed in, looking well groomed. Robin slunk out the door clutching her pile of wet clothes. Then she stopped, dropped the soggy mess in the boot of the car and walked back into the cafe. She scribbled her number on one of the paper towels. “If you get depressed again, call me, OK?” She glared at the man, at Noel, “this is not me hitting on you, you get that?” and stalked out again.
It was only later, when she was warm from a shower, and in pyjamas eating fish and chips and ice cream; later when she turned on the tv to watch the 6 o’clock news, wondering if there really had been dolphins in the water; it was only then that she got scared. On the tv (reporting live), the wharf had collapsed. All the people were in the water, and there was something in there with them, and the people were screaming.
i am.
Robin turned her head away and squinted at the footpath. This, perhaps, was what it was like having a migraine. “OK,” she said, “you guys, it’s time we went back and met your Mum.” And they turned and walked back along the waterfront walkway, her face averted from the throbbing light of the sky, and her children running around yelling. At Oriental Beach they had to stop and look for Alex’s lost train, and a man walked into the sea.
She stood there for a moment, trying to believe she’d just seen through her squinting sore eyes a man in a suit, with business shoes, and a leather satchel walk into the scudding foam and slick oily waves, straightly as an automaton. Then she stood there for another moment, in existential dither, waiting for someone else to go and rescue him.
No-one else was there, no-one else was going to dive into the sea ahead of her.
“Fuck,” she said.
So she hauled off her winter coat and gave it to Robot, and unhooked the sling and gave Aroha to her older sister, and awkwardly yanked off her sneakers and hobbled into the water after him. It was monstrously cold. The waves which had looked so placid on the shore fought against her, smashing into her face, and tugging at her feet; but for that one brief moment when she first got her hand on the crazy guy’s collar and she felt warm, as if bathing in a tropical sea, and smelled sweet spices, and heard the humming whisper of something: “i am. i am i am i am.” She felt the soft caress of something around her ankle and jerked her foot away.
“Come on, you fucking idiot!” she yelled at the guy. He flinched, and looked surprised, as if he didn’t know how he happened to be in the sea, and how dare she lay her hand upon him. She tugged his collar harder, and grabbed his arm with her other hand and started pulling. It was going well until a sudden sneaky wave ripped her feet out from under her and she tumbled yelping into the water.
He pulled her up and the two of them staggered, thoroughly wet, onto the gritty sand of the beach, to a gang of cheering children. “It’s not,” she said, shivering, “like you have to just go do crazy stuff like that. There’s, there’s Lifeline and people you can talk to, and doctors can give you pills to stop you feeling so sad.” She blinked and looked up at the man, familiar in his sodden clothes. She reached out a hand (forbidden) to wipe the hair and sand from his face. “Oh. You’re that guy.”
He pointed, gasping, at the sea. “Can’t you hear them?”
“Can’t you hear the mermaids singing?” she said vengefully. Robin draped her coat over her shoulders against the chill of the whipping wind and shuddered. The guy’s lips were blue and his face was a ghastly shade of pallor. “We need to get warm.”
She gathered up the kids and limped up the stairs back to the walkway, hobbled across the road to one of the little cafes that tucked themselves along the coastline. She didn’t look back to see if he was following her, but by the time she was at the counter ordering hot chocolates the door opened behind her and he staggered in. “I’ll pay,” he said.
“You don’t have to –” she said, and checked the card in her pocket, “you don’t have to, Noel.”
“No, no, I got you wet, it’s the least I can do.”
Robin made a face and dumped her stuff by the table. Christie was flattened against the window peering out at the sea, but the light from the window was still making her wince and the paracetamol in her bag hadn’t kicked in yet. She pulled out her phone and made a call.
“Yeah, Claire? Hi, how’s it going?”
A wad of paper towels landed on the table. The suicide guy had sat down in front of her and was wiping the water off his face with them.
“I know we were going to meet on Willis St, but can you come and get us?”
The two boys had joined Christie at the window and were pointing at something excitedly. Robin put the phone down with a guilty thud, a reminder of too many bailouts before. “Look,” she said, “I know you’re lonely, but there’s other things you can do.”
“I wasn’t trying to. Um. Hurt myself. There are things in the water.”
Robin rolled her eyes. Robot said: “Do you think it’s a giant squid?” and she looked at the window – all the other patrons, and the waitress were plastered against the glass.
“OK, so maybe there’s something in the water. Like dolphins or something.”
They both shut up then, and sipped their hot chocolate until Claire breezed in, looking well groomed. Robin slunk out the door clutching her pile of wet clothes. Then she stopped, dropped the soggy mess in the boot of the car and walked back into the cafe. She scribbled her number on one of the paper towels. “If you get depressed again, call me, OK?” She glared at the man, at Noel, “this is not me hitting on you, you get that?” and stalked out again.
It was only later, when she was warm from a shower, and in pyjamas eating fish and chips and ice cream; later when she turned on the tv to watch the 6 o’clock news, wondering if there really had been dolphins in the water; it was only then that she got scared. On the tv (reporting live), the wharf had collapsed. All the people were in the water, and there was something in there with them, and the people were screaming.
i am.
Part two - Adam
Part two - Adam
Adam pressed the ‘end call’ button a smidge too early, the customer had another question that they’d just thought of and Adam had cut them off. He felt guilty but not motivated enough to call them back and find out what the problem was.
There was a lot of noise coming from around the corner, he turned and saw the entire advertising team and half the HR people gathered along the windows, looking out and talking loudly. Sarah caught him looking and craned her neck to see past him.
‘Must be dolphins in the harbour again,’ she said. Adam checked the time: 2.07, it had only been an hour since he got back from lunch but his boss was out smoking another cigarette. He could take a quick break.
‘What’s going on?’ he said to one of the girls from the advertising team, they all looked the same and he could never remember their names. ‘Dolphins again?’
‘Nah, it’s out there see? Past the marina, a dark shape under the water.’
Adam looked past the marina, at the choppy waves and didn’t see anything. The girl, who might have been called Natalie, was watching his face. ‘D’you see it?’
‘No,’ Adam said, but just as he said it his eyes located a dark blotch in the water, ‘oh, yeah.’ It was big, kind of like the purple shadows he’d seen whale watching in Australia a few years back. The dark shape appeared to be right under the surface of the water, it wasn’t a clear shape though.
‘No one knows what it is. It’s not surfacing like whales do, and it keeps disappearing and then reappearing in other places, really fast,’ another of the advertising girls had said this. Adam glanced at her, and thought her name might be Bonnie. He looked outside again, the waterfront was packed with people. They lined the retaining wall, some of them out on the rocks, there was a field trip full of children, probably on their way to Te Papa, all staring at the ocean.
‘I’m going down there after work,’ possibly-Bonnie said.
‘Me too,’ said maybe-Natalie. They both looked up at Adam, expecting him to say the same thing. Adam didn’t want to agree though. Something about that indistinct shape, and the way she’d described it as disappearing and reappearing made his stomach churn. He had a very bad feeling about it, but he didn’t have a good reason for that, and he didn’t want them to think he was weird.
‘Yeah, maybe,’ he said, instead, his voice low and non-commital, ‘I’ve got to get back on the phones.’
At five pm the office emptied faster than usual, everyone was going down to the waterfront to stare into the sea. There were radio stations down there, even the news crew had driven up to do a piece with the dark shapes in the background. It had been established now that there was more than one of whatever-it-was. Adam’s stomach had stopped churning and evolved a hard, tight lump of tension. He left when Sarah did, and was carried along with the flow of people in the stairwell. He found himself joining the crowd. It was hard to find a place near the water now, but the festive mood of the crowd meant newcomers like himself were being allowed through, given a space where they could see what was happening.
When he arrived at the waterfront and peered down into the water, Adam’s sense of balance disintegrated. He watched as a dark shape appeared right in front of him, just a couple of metres away and he felt himself falling forward. He was tipping towards the water, even though every fibre of his body was screaming out against it. Just before he actually fell he caught himself, took an awkward half step forward to regain his balance and cried out.
Wildly, Adam turned and pushed his way back through the crowd, the other people were looking at him now, thinking he was weird. Just like back in school, he thought to himself, when you wouldn’t stop telling people about your dreams. It was hard to get through the throng. Adam walked straight into someone in his eagerness to get away.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Adam said, trying to dodge past the guy. There was no room to get past and the panic he was feeling made Adam angry rather than shy. ‘Look, can you get out of my way?’ It came out much louder than Adam was used to talking. The guy had long hair and was wearing punkish clothes that Adam associated with a student, or someone from Aro Valley: check shirt, leather bracelet, a T shirt with a band logo on it, heavy boots. He looked at Adam but his eyes were faraway, unfocussed. His pupils were huge, like some kind of cartoon character, and he didn't react to Adam's words.
Adam’s need to get away from the ocean was greater than his sense of politeness. He could still feel the pull of whatever-it-was, and that scared him. He grabbed the guy by one shoulder and turned him so that there was space to get past. The guy flinched as if Adam had hit him, but Adam didn’t notice, he just kept pushing through the crowd and out. Behind him the guy cocked his head to listen to something that no one else could hear and then hunched his shoulders and moved closer to the water’s edge.
Once Adam was clear of the mob he started running, heading inland. He ignored the traffic signals and dodged around cars, the traffic was much lighter than it usually was at rush hour, but the streets were packed with parked cars. Inland, he thought, got to get inland.
Adam pressed the ‘end call’ button a smidge too early, the customer had another question that they’d just thought of and Adam had cut them off. He felt guilty but not motivated enough to call them back and find out what the problem was.
There was a lot of noise coming from around the corner, he turned and saw the entire advertising team and half the HR people gathered along the windows, looking out and talking loudly. Sarah caught him looking and craned her neck to see past him.
‘Must be dolphins in the harbour again,’ she said. Adam checked the time: 2.07, it had only been an hour since he got back from lunch but his boss was out smoking another cigarette. He could take a quick break.
‘What’s going on?’ he said to one of the girls from the advertising team, they all looked the same and he could never remember their names. ‘Dolphins again?’
‘Nah, it’s out there see? Past the marina, a dark shape under the water.’
Adam looked past the marina, at the choppy waves and didn’t see anything. The girl, who might have been called Natalie, was watching his face. ‘D’you see it?’
‘No,’ Adam said, but just as he said it his eyes located a dark blotch in the water, ‘oh, yeah.’ It was big, kind of like the purple shadows he’d seen whale watching in Australia a few years back. The dark shape appeared to be right under the surface of the water, it wasn’t a clear shape though.
‘No one knows what it is. It’s not surfacing like whales do, and it keeps disappearing and then reappearing in other places, really fast,’ another of the advertising girls had said this. Adam glanced at her, and thought her name might be Bonnie. He looked outside again, the waterfront was packed with people. They lined the retaining wall, some of them out on the rocks, there was a field trip full of children, probably on their way to Te Papa, all staring at the ocean.
‘I’m going down there after work,’ possibly-Bonnie said.
‘Me too,’ said maybe-Natalie. They both looked up at Adam, expecting him to say the same thing. Adam didn’t want to agree though. Something about that indistinct shape, and the way she’d described it as disappearing and reappearing made his stomach churn. He had a very bad feeling about it, but he didn’t have a good reason for that, and he didn’t want them to think he was weird.
‘Yeah, maybe,’ he said, instead, his voice low and non-commital, ‘I’ve got to get back on the phones.’
At five pm the office emptied faster than usual, everyone was going down to the waterfront to stare into the sea. There were radio stations down there, even the news crew had driven up to do a piece with the dark shapes in the background. It had been established now that there was more than one of whatever-it-was. Adam’s stomach had stopped churning and evolved a hard, tight lump of tension. He left when Sarah did, and was carried along with the flow of people in the stairwell. He found himself joining the crowd. It was hard to find a place near the water now, but the festive mood of the crowd meant newcomers like himself were being allowed through, given a space where they could see what was happening.
When he arrived at the waterfront and peered down into the water, Adam’s sense of balance disintegrated. He watched as a dark shape appeared right in front of him, just a couple of metres away and he felt himself falling forward. He was tipping towards the water, even though every fibre of his body was screaming out against it. Just before he actually fell he caught himself, took an awkward half step forward to regain his balance and cried out.
Wildly, Adam turned and pushed his way back through the crowd, the other people were looking at him now, thinking he was weird. Just like back in school, he thought to himself, when you wouldn’t stop telling people about your dreams. It was hard to get through the throng. Adam walked straight into someone in his eagerness to get away.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Adam said, trying to dodge past the guy. There was no room to get past and the panic he was feeling made Adam angry rather than shy. ‘Look, can you get out of my way?’ It came out much louder than Adam was used to talking. The guy had long hair and was wearing punkish clothes that Adam associated with a student, or someone from Aro Valley: check shirt, leather bracelet, a T shirt with a band logo on it, heavy boots. He looked at Adam but his eyes were faraway, unfocussed. His pupils were huge, like some kind of cartoon character, and he didn't react to Adam's words.
Adam’s need to get away from the ocean was greater than his sense of politeness. He could still feel the pull of whatever-it-was, and that scared him. He grabbed the guy by one shoulder and turned him so that there was space to get past. The guy flinched as if Adam had hit him, but Adam didn’t notice, he just kept pushing through the crowd and out. Behind him the guy cocked his head to listen to something that no one else could hear and then hunched his shoulders and moved closer to the water’s edge.
Once Adam was clear of the mob he started running, heading inland. He ignored the traffic signals and dodged around cars, the traffic was much lighter than it usually was at rush hour, but the streets were packed with parked cars. Inland, he thought, got to get inland.
Part Two - Michelle
Michelle closed her eyes and plunged her head straight under the shower head. The water blotted out everything. The noise of the heavy drops falling on the stainless steel drowned out the background hum of the city and the relief washed over her as she realised she was alone and no one could see her, at least for now.
She washed and conditioned her hair, shaved her legs and even grabbed a handful of the ocean salt scrub that her flatmate, Danielle, claimed had miraculous cellulite defeating properties and rubbed her thighs until the skin turned a satisfying shade of pink. When she couldn’t think of anything else to do to delay the inevitable end, she reached up and turned the shower off. She couldn’t just stand in the shower all day. Danielle would kill her if she used all the hot water.
She grabbed a white towel and dried off before wrapping it around herself and stepping out into the chilly air. Steam had fogged up the window and the bathroom mirror but it hadn’t done much to warm up the bathroom.
Grabbing her clothes from the floor, she padded down to her bedroom. She liked the rare times when she had the flat to herself. The movie she had seen earlier had been disappointing. A slow-moving thriller about an alien invasion. Michelle didn’t mind science fiction as a rule but she liked a bit of action or comedy thrown in. These aliens hadn’t done much other than talk and the whole plot had been largely political. Not her sort of film at all. Still it had saved her from coming home in the morning before Danielle had to leave for work and that meant she had safely avoided the whole ‘where were you last night’ interrogation.
Food. That was what she needed. She headed for the kitchen, wet hair still wrapped in a towel.
The contents of the fridge were not promising. There was a half eaten container of sushi but the clear plastic box had been claimed as Danielle’s in her black territorial writing. A bottle of diet coke, tomato sauce and low fat mayonnaise were the only other items on the barren steel shelves. The day before the weekly supermarket shop was never good.
Michelle grabbed the milk from the fridge door before closing it. She put the jug on to boil and grabbed a box of cereal out of the pantry. With a heaped bowl of sugary cornflakes in hand, she headed into the lounge.
TV. That was what she needed. That would take her mind off things. She grabbed the remote and flicked on the TV as she sat down. The raucous applause of an American talk show audience rolled out before any picture had appeared on the screen. She lifted a spoonful of cereal to her mouth but stopped when she read the ominous title of the show’s episode scrawled across the bottom of the screen. ‘I slept with my boss and now I’m having his baby.’
She put the bowl down on the coffee table and quickly turned off the TV. A DVD, that was the answer. She walked over to the bookshelf and scanned the titles. Jerry Maguire. Perfect. She’d seen it many times before so there’d be no nasty surprises, just a nice, reliable, heart-warming drama. A tear-jerker but a benign one. One of those movies that was guaranteed to make her feel better no matter how crap her day had been.
She slipped the DVD into the player and the anti-piracy warnings leapt up on the screen. She made a cup of tea in her favourite blue mug and snuggled down into the couch. Her predictions were correct. By the time she finished eating her cereal she was thoroughly sucked into the familiar storyline of the film and she relaxed completely.
Her body was still exhausted as she hadn’t slept much the night before and once the tension had gone, she struggled to stay awake. She drifted off into a peaceful sleep on the couch sixty-four minutes before Tom Cruise had Renee Zellweger at hello.
The sound of the remote control falling on the ground woke Michelle up with a start. The off button had been hit on impact and the TV was black and lifeless. She looked with bleary eyes at the time on the DVD player. The square blue numbers blinked over to four forty-four and she realised she was late for work.
She got ready as quickly as possible. Towel-damp hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, shoes shoved on as she hopped towards the door and no time for make-up or a critical examination of her reflection in the mirror before she left. She ran to the bus stop and fortunately got there on time, or rather the bus was later than her so she didn’t miss it.
She rummaged through her bag as the bus pulled out. She found her lip gloss so she could make some attempt to not look as completely unprepared as she felt. Her cell phone had a text message. It was from her friend Siobhan. She was down at Oriental parade and commanded Michelle to get her A into G and get down there. Apparently there were lots of hot guys and it was crazy fun down there. She must have been pissed or something. While it hadn’t actually been raining it was hardly tropical weather at this time of year. Wellington wasn’t exactly Ibiza and she couldn’t picture a typical weekday by the harbour turning into an episode of ‘Girls Gone Wild’.
She got off the bus at a stop on Featherston Street and started walking to the bar where she worked. His bar. She’d have to see him again. She’d forgotten about that.
“You’re late,” Jessica glowered at her from behind the bar as she hurried in to the small staff area to hang up her bag and jacket.
Jessica was a typical employee of the bar. She was pretty, young and blonde but unlike the other girls Michelle worked with she wasn’t particularly friendly, at least not with Michelle. Jessica did her best to make Michelle feel like she didn’t fit in which was a waste of time because she already felt like that anyway. But she wasn’t going to give Jessica the satisfaction of knowing that.
“Yeah, sorry. I missed the bus,” Michelle lied, as she tied on her short apron. “Where’s Richard?”
“He hasn’t shown up either,” Jessica complained. “I’ve been doing everything by myself.”
“At least it looks quiet. It never gets that busy on a Tuesday,” Michelle grabbed a notepad and pencil and stuffed them in the front pocket of her apron.
“I figured Richard must be busy with a girl for him to not show up. He’s so anal about the rostered shifts and everything,” Jessica’s lips curled into a cruel smirk. “I was starting to suspect that he might have been with you when neither of you showed up but you’re not really his type, are you?”
“I’d better get to work,” Michelle muttered, heading for table five to take an order.
Michelle had been right about thing. It did look like it was going to be a quiet night. Just the usual regulars in having their after work drinks to reward themselves for getting through another day.
A well-dressed professional couple sat at a table near the window. They were sharing a bottle of Merlot and a pizza but not much in the way of conversation. She was talking down a cellphone at someone else while he absent-mindedly pulled the anchovies off his slice of pizza. Why would somebody order a seafood pizza if they didn’t like anchovies?
She didn’t wonder about it for long. She already knew their story. It was a typical nice guy trapped in a loveless marriage to a control freak romantic comedy. The wife would be played by someone like Nicole Kidman, although she wasn’t actually that pretty, just slim and well-groomed. The husband would be either Steve Carell or Ben Stiller. A funny nice guy with the required sad, down-trodden eyes. She would be having an affair with either his older brother or his boss (Alec Baldwin), in fact that was probably who she was on the phone to now. Then he would somehow meet up with a cute and quirky dog-walker or marriage counsellor (Cameron Diaz) in a humorous accident and fall in love with her. They’d end up happily ever after and the nasty wife would get dumped by the brother/boss.
She was gathering up some empty glasses when a group of young men walked in. They were loud. And wet. Each one of them was soaked. Not just caught in an unexpected rain shower wet; they were drenched and dripping water all over the floor.
Michelle looked around. There was no one else to deal with them. Jessica wouldn’t budge an inch from the secure position behind the bar, even if Michelle could stand to ask her for help. There were only four of them but it seemed like that was the critical number for a group of males to become a pack.
They looked like they were out to have a good time. In fact it looked like they had been having a good time for several hours already. They must have been students or unemployed to be that drunk this early in the evening.
Michelle walked over to the booth they had commandeered. They seemed quieter now they were seated and the rest of the customers had stopped staring at them.
“Can I get you anything?” she offered and placed some menus on the table. She didn’t think she could tell them to leave just because they were wet. It wasn’t like the bar enforced a strict dress code or anything. Besides, maybe she had just overreacted, maybe they weren’t going to cause any trouble.
One of them looked up at her, grinning. His eyes were large and shiny. She would have thought he was cute if she had seen him in a different situation but here and now his glistening eyes unsettled her.
“We want beer,” he said, his voice tinted with an odd desperation. “Eight jugs.”
“Can I get you anything to eat?” Michelle offered but they shook their heads vigorously.
It figures. They were probably doing the rounds of all the pubs. Ordering up big during the last ten minutes of happy hour.
She spaced out delivering the jugs, partly because she couldn’t carry that much at once but also because she thought she should probably try to get them to pace themselves a bit. If there was any vomit or pissing all over the floor in the men’s toilets, she’d be the one cleaning it up.
“Here you go,” she placed the four jugs down on the table and the men lunged forward at them. They ignored the glasses altogether and gulped the beer straight from the side of the jug, not worrying about the streams of beer that splashed down the sides of their faces as they sculled.
“More! Hurry,” the shiny-eyed one gasped at her with an outstretched arm, as though he was dying from thirst.
She took them some pitchers of water between the rounds of beer but no matter what she brought them, they gulped it down with the same frenzied thirst.
She shook her head in wonder. They didn’t even know if what they were drinking was alcohol or not anymore. They were too pissed to care. But something inside knew it was more than that. Something wasn’t right.
The ‘bored couple trapped in their loveless marriage’ left the bar and she headed over to clean off their table. She looked out the window. It was twilight now, the last rays of sun were sinking from the sky but it was still early in the evening.
It was going to be a long night; it felt like it had been already.
A loud smash and shrill, angry voices snapped her attention back to inside the bar. It came from the booth where the four guys were. From the sound of it, a fight was breaking out. Some of the other customers were staring with nervous horror or morbid curiosity at them; others had quickly finished their drinks and were making their way for the exit. She glanced over at Jessica, who picked up a cloth to start wiping down the bar and kept her head down – behind the bar code for ‘it’s not my problem, you deal with it.’
Michelle hurried over to the booth. There was a scream and one of the men staggered out of the booth as she arrived. He was facing away from her and was swaying dangerously.
“Are you all right?” she put her hand on his shoulder gently but he whipped around to face her.
Michelle heard the frightened scream a second before she realised it was her own. The man had a broken handle of a glass jug sticking out of his face. One of the jagged ends had been forced up into his right eye and blood streamed down his face. Smaller shards of glass had dug themselves into his cheek and jaw. He must have been in shock because there was a manic look of glee in his eyes, even as one of them was oozing red blood.
She tried to steer him over to a chair but he was strong and pushed his way forward towards the door.
“You need to sit down,” she called out, her voice sounding strangely calm and in control. “You should wait until we phone an ambulance.”
He turned back and looked at her. His body was still swaying feverishly but at least he hadn’t run off. She threw a look over at Jessica who took the hint and picked up the phone. They’d need the police too but Michelle wasn’t going to call that out across the bar with those other guys still here.
The sinking realisation snuck up on her. They were still here. They’d gone very quiet but they were still in the booth and at least one of them had done that to their friend. And she was the one who had to deal with it.
She walked over towards the booth, careful to keep a calm, non-threatening expression on her face and not react in a way that would provoke them, no matter what she saw.
“How are you guys doing over here?” she asked but when she looked in the booth she wondered at how she could still be pretending everything was normal.
One of the men was still clutching the broken remains of the glass jug in his fist. His hand looked cut up and bloody. He’d need medical attention too. Not to mention therapy from the looks of it. He was staring vacantly at the seat in front of him and didn’t seem to be aware of what was going on around him.
It was the other two that scared her.
One was lapping up any spilt liquid on the table, and didn’t seem to notice or care about the blood and broken glass that was mingled through the beer. The other was holding an empty jug upside down above his head and shaking it with savage desperation, trying to catch any drops that fell in his mouth. When he caught sight of Michelle, his head turned round to face her with shiny, pleading eyes.
“THIRST,” he pleaded, his voice sounding hoarse and pained.
“I’ll get you some more drinks then,” Michelle forced a smile and backed away from the table.
She hurried over to the bar. Jessica was still on the phone.
“Ask for the cops as well,” she whispered. “Those guys are psychos.”
“I can’t get through,” Jessica hissed. “Apparently the lines are overloaded. I’m on hold…”
Michelle wondered if she was deliberately lying to screw with her but Jessica looked as freaked out as she was.
“Keep trying,” she muttered.
She looked around the bar, trying to figure out what to do. The guy with the glass smashed into his face had collapsed not far from the door. She hadn’t got a clue how to do CPR or anything but she’d seen it on movies.
She rushed over to him. He was lying on his back and when she leant down, she could hear he was still breathing. Just as well. She didn’t really think she could give him mouth-to-mouth without getting covered in blood and broken glass herself.
A loud siren sounded out through the street outside. She looked up through the glass wall and saw the red and blue lights flickering in the darkening night. Thank god. One of the customers must have called the police on their cellphone.
She pulled open the door and looked down to see two police cars speeding down the street towards the bar. She exhaled in relief but the moment was snatched away when she realised they weren’t slowing down. The blaring siren and spinning lights whizzed past her at a dizzying speed.
They weren’t coming to help her.
Her eyes turned to follow her diminishing hope of being rescued as the cars continued down the street. That was when she first saw them.
A crowd of people was heading up from the other end of the street towards the bar. A couple of them passed under a street lamp and she could see even in the distance that they were completely wet. Their soaked hair fell flat against their heads or in heavy clumps against their faces, and their clothes sagged with the weight of water.
And they weren’t just walking up the street. They were running.
She washed and conditioned her hair, shaved her legs and even grabbed a handful of the ocean salt scrub that her flatmate, Danielle, claimed had miraculous cellulite defeating properties and rubbed her thighs until the skin turned a satisfying shade of pink. When she couldn’t think of anything else to do to delay the inevitable end, she reached up and turned the shower off. She couldn’t just stand in the shower all day. Danielle would kill her if she used all the hot water.
She grabbed a white towel and dried off before wrapping it around herself and stepping out into the chilly air. Steam had fogged up the window and the bathroom mirror but it hadn’t done much to warm up the bathroom.
Grabbing her clothes from the floor, she padded down to her bedroom. She liked the rare times when she had the flat to herself. The movie she had seen earlier had been disappointing. A slow-moving thriller about an alien invasion. Michelle didn’t mind science fiction as a rule but she liked a bit of action or comedy thrown in. These aliens hadn’t done much other than talk and the whole plot had been largely political. Not her sort of film at all. Still it had saved her from coming home in the morning before Danielle had to leave for work and that meant she had safely avoided the whole ‘where were you last night’ interrogation.
Food. That was what she needed. She headed for the kitchen, wet hair still wrapped in a towel.
The contents of the fridge were not promising. There was a half eaten container of sushi but the clear plastic box had been claimed as Danielle’s in her black territorial writing. A bottle of diet coke, tomato sauce and low fat mayonnaise were the only other items on the barren steel shelves. The day before the weekly supermarket shop was never good.
Michelle grabbed the milk from the fridge door before closing it. She put the jug on to boil and grabbed a box of cereal out of the pantry. With a heaped bowl of sugary cornflakes in hand, she headed into the lounge.
TV. That was what she needed. That would take her mind off things. She grabbed the remote and flicked on the TV as she sat down. The raucous applause of an American talk show audience rolled out before any picture had appeared on the screen. She lifted a spoonful of cereal to her mouth but stopped when she read the ominous title of the show’s episode scrawled across the bottom of the screen. ‘I slept with my boss and now I’m having his baby.’
She put the bowl down on the coffee table and quickly turned off the TV. A DVD, that was the answer. She walked over to the bookshelf and scanned the titles. Jerry Maguire. Perfect. She’d seen it many times before so there’d be no nasty surprises, just a nice, reliable, heart-warming drama. A tear-jerker but a benign one. One of those movies that was guaranteed to make her feel better no matter how crap her day had been.
She slipped the DVD into the player and the anti-piracy warnings leapt up on the screen. She made a cup of tea in her favourite blue mug and snuggled down into the couch. Her predictions were correct. By the time she finished eating her cereal she was thoroughly sucked into the familiar storyline of the film and she relaxed completely.
Her body was still exhausted as she hadn’t slept much the night before and once the tension had gone, she struggled to stay awake. She drifted off into a peaceful sleep on the couch sixty-four minutes before Tom Cruise had Renee Zellweger at hello.
The sound of the remote control falling on the ground woke Michelle up with a start. The off button had been hit on impact and the TV was black and lifeless. She looked with bleary eyes at the time on the DVD player. The square blue numbers blinked over to four forty-four and she realised she was late for work.
She got ready as quickly as possible. Towel-damp hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, shoes shoved on as she hopped towards the door and no time for make-up or a critical examination of her reflection in the mirror before she left. She ran to the bus stop and fortunately got there on time, or rather the bus was later than her so she didn’t miss it.
She rummaged through her bag as the bus pulled out. She found her lip gloss so she could make some attempt to not look as completely unprepared as she felt. Her cell phone had a text message. It was from her friend Siobhan. She was down at Oriental parade and commanded Michelle to get her A into G and get down there. Apparently there were lots of hot guys and it was crazy fun down there. She must have been pissed or something. While it hadn’t actually been raining it was hardly tropical weather at this time of year. Wellington wasn’t exactly Ibiza and she couldn’t picture a typical weekday by the harbour turning into an episode of ‘Girls Gone Wild’.
She got off the bus at a stop on Featherston Street and started walking to the bar where she worked. His bar. She’d have to see him again. She’d forgotten about that.
“You’re late,” Jessica glowered at her from behind the bar as she hurried in to the small staff area to hang up her bag and jacket.
Jessica was a typical employee of the bar. She was pretty, young and blonde but unlike the other girls Michelle worked with she wasn’t particularly friendly, at least not with Michelle. Jessica did her best to make Michelle feel like she didn’t fit in which was a waste of time because she already felt like that anyway. But she wasn’t going to give Jessica the satisfaction of knowing that.
“Yeah, sorry. I missed the bus,” Michelle lied, as she tied on her short apron. “Where’s Richard?”
“He hasn’t shown up either,” Jessica complained. “I’ve been doing everything by myself.”
“At least it looks quiet. It never gets that busy on a Tuesday,” Michelle grabbed a notepad and pencil and stuffed them in the front pocket of her apron.
“I figured Richard must be busy with a girl for him to not show up. He’s so anal about the rostered shifts and everything,” Jessica’s lips curled into a cruel smirk. “I was starting to suspect that he might have been with you when neither of you showed up but you’re not really his type, are you?”
“I’d better get to work,” Michelle muttered, heading for table five to take an order.
Michelle had been right about thing. It did look like it was going to be a quiet night. Just the usual regulars in having their after work drinks to reward themselves for getting through another day.
A well-dressed professional couple sat at a table near the window. They were sharing a bottle of Merlot and a pizza but not much in the way of conversation. She was talking down a cellphone at someone else while he absent-mindedly pulled the anchovies off his slice of pizza. Why would somebody order a seafood pizza if they didn’t like anchovies?
She didn’t wonder about it for long. She already knew their story. It was a typical nice guy trapped in a loveless marriage to a control freak romantic comedy. The wife would be played by someone like Nicole Kidman, although she wasn’t actually that pretty, just slim and well-groomed. The husband would be either Steve Carell or Ben Stiller. A funny nice guy with the required sad, down-trodden eyes. She would be having an affair with either his older brother or his boss (Alec Baldwin), in fact that was probably who she was on the phone to now. Then he would somehow meet up with a cute and quirky dog-walker or marriage counsellor (Cameron Diaz) in a humorous accident and fall in love with her. They’d end up happily ever after and the nasty wife would get dumped by the brother/boss.
She was gathering up some empty glasses when a group of young men walked in. They were loud. And wet. Each one of them was soaked. Not just caught in an unexpected rain shower wet; they were drenched and dripping water all over the floor.
Michelle looked around. There was no one else to deal with them. Jessica wouldn’t budge an inch from the secure position behind the bar, even if Michelle could stand to ask her for help. There were only four of them but it seemed like that was the critical number for a group of males to become a pack.
They looked like they were out to have a good time. In fact it looked like they had been having a good time for several hours already. They must have been students or unemployed to be that drunk this early in the evening.
Michelle walked over to the booth they had commandeered. They seemed quieter now they were seated and the rest of the customers had stopped staring at them.
“Can I get you anything?” she offered and placed some menus on the table. She didn’t think she could tell them to leave just because they were wet. It wasn’t like the bar enforced a strict dress code or anything. Besides, maybe she had just overreacted, maybe they weren’t going to cause any trouble.
One of them looked up at her, grinning. His eyes were large and shiny. She would have thought he was cute if she had seen him in a different situation but here and now his glistening eyes unsettled her.
“We want beer,” he said, his voice tinted with an odd desperation. “Eight jugs.”
“Can I get you anything to eat?” Michelle offered but they shook their heads vigorously.
It figures. They were probably doing the rounds of all the pubs. Ordering up big during the last ten minutes of happy hour.
She spaced out delivering the jugs, partly because she couldn’t carry that much at once but also because she thought she should probably try to get them to pace themselves a bit. If there was any vomit or pissing all over the floor in the men’s toilets, she’d be the one cleaning it up.
“Here you go,” she placed the four jugs down on the table and the men lunged forward at them. They ignored the glasses altogether and gulped the beer straight from the side of the jug, not worrying about the streams of beer that splashed down the sides of their faces as they sculled.
“More! Hurry,” the shiny-eyed one gasped at her with an outstretched arm, as though he was dying from thirst.
She took them some pitchers of water between the rounds of beer but no matter what she brought them, they gulped it down with the same frenzied thirst.
She shook her head in wonder. They didn’t even know if what they were drinking was alcohol or not anymore. They were too pissed to care. But something inside knew it was more than that. Something wasn’t right.
The ‘bored couple trapped in their loveless marriage’ left the bar and she headed over to clean off their table. She looked out the window. It was twilight now, the last rays of sun were sinking from the sky but it was still early in the evening.
It was going to be a long night; it felt like it had been already.
A loud smash and shrill, angry voices snapped her attention back to inside the bar. It came from the booth where the four guys were. From the sound of it, a fight was breaking out. Some of the other customers were staring with nervous horror or morbid curiosity at them; others had quickly finished their drinks and were making their way for the exit. She glanced over at Jessica, who picked up a cloth to start wiping down the bar and kept her head down – behind the bar code for ‘it’s not my problem, you deal with it.’
Michelle hurried over to the booth. There was a scream and one of the men staggered out of the booth as she arrived. He was facing away from her and was swaying dangerously.
“Are you all right?” she put her hand on his shoulder gently but he whipped around to face her.
Michelle heard the frightened scream a second before she realised it was her own. The man had a broken handle of a glass jug sticking out of his face. One of the jagged ends had been forced up into his right eye and blood streamed down his face. Smaller shards of glass had dug themselves into his cheek and jaw. He must have been in shock because there was a manic look of glee in his eyes, even as one of them was oozing red blood.
She tried to steer him over to a chair but he was strong and pushed his way forward towards the door.
“You need to sit down,” she called out, her voice sounding strangely calm and in control. “You should wait until we phone an ambulance.”
He turned back and looked at her. His body was still swaying feverishly but at least he hadn’t run off. She threw a look over at Jessica who took the hint and picked up the phone. They’d need the police too but Michelle wasn’t going to call that out across the bar with those other guys still here.
The sinking realisation snuck up on her. They were still here. They’d gone very quiet but they were still in the booth and at least one of them had done that to their friend. And she was the one who had to deal with it.
She walked over towards the booth, careful to keep a calm, non-threatening expression on her face and not react in a way that would provoke them, no matter what she saw.
“How are you guys doing over here?” she asked but when she looked in the booth she wondered at how she could still be pretending everything was normal.
One of the men was still clutching the broken remains of the glass jug in his fist. His hand looked cut up and bloody. He’d need medical attention too. Not to mention therapy from the looks of it. He was staring vacantly at the seat in front of him and didn’t seem to be aware of what was going on around him.
It was the other two that scared her.
One was lapping up any spilt liquid on the table, and didn’t seem to notice or care about the blood and broken glass that was mingled through the beer. The other was holding an empty jug upside down above his head and shaking it with savage desperation, trying to catch any drops that fell in his mouth. When he caught sight of Michelle, his head turned round to face her with shiny, pleading eyes.
“THIRST,” he pleaded, his voice sounding hoarse and pained.
“I’ll get you some more drinks then,” Michelle forced a smile and backed away from the table.
She hurried over to the bar. Jessica was still on the phone.
“Ask for the cops as well,” she whispered. “Those guys are psychos.”
“I can’t get through,” Jessica hissed. “Apparently the lines are overloaded. I’m on hold…”
Michelle wondered if she was deliberately lying to screw with her but Jessica looked as freaked out as she was.
“Keep trying,” she muttered.
She looked around the bar, trying to figure out what to do. The guy with the glass smashed into his face had collapsed not far from the door. She hadn’t got a clue how to do CPR or anything but she’d seen it on movies.
She rushed over to him. He was lying on his back and when she leant down, she could hear he was still breathing. Just as well. She didn’t really think she could give him mouth-to-mouth without getting covered in blood and broken glass herself.
A loud siren sounded out through the street outside. She looked up through the glass wall and saw the red and blue lights flickering in the darkening night. Thank god. One of the customers must have called the police on their cellphone.
She pulled open the door and looked down to see two police cars speeding down the street towards the bar. She exhaled in relief but the moment was snatched away when she realised they weren’t slowing down. The blaring siren and spinning lights whizzed past her at a dizzying speed.
They weren’t coming to help her.
Her eyes turned to follow her diminishing hope of being rescued as the cars continued down the street. That was when she first saw them.
A crowd of people was heading up from the other end of the street towards the bar. A couple of them passed under a street lamp and she could see even in the distance that they were completely wet. Their soaked hair fell flat against their heads or in heavy clumps against their faces, and their clothes sagged with the weight of water.
And they weren’t just walking up the street. They were running.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Part Two - Seth
Bed wasn’t cutting it. The bath had been hot enough to drive the chill from Seth’s muscles and the curtains were drawn tight, but he couldn’t sleep. Achingly tired but wide awake.
Seth gave up, got up and made toast. Flicking on the waterproof radio that was suction cupped to the wall above the sink Seth let the buzz of background noise drown out the voice in the back of his head. It had been there since he’d woken up, whispering away, sometimes too distant to make out, sometimes so close he’d had to fight the urge to look over his shoulder. It had kept him from sleep with its insistent words.
“Up, out, into the world.”
He was up now, damnit, but the voice hadn’t shut up. Eat toast, get dressed, get back out into the world. Maybe that would do it.
He probably shouldn’t have taken the acid. He’d heard all the stories about people walking off the top of buildings or eating broken glass or doing some other self-destructive idiot thing while high, but then he’d met a lot of people who’d taken acid and had a good time. He hadn’t met any of the dead people.
“Not yet,” the voice whispered.
Seth turned up the volume on the radio. It was shaped like a flower, bright yellow and green plastic, and sounded terrible. Its sole virtue was that it resisted the damp and the mould and the splashes from the sink. The DJ was talking about the weather and the harbour, rabbitting on long enough that Seth eventually tuned in to the words.
“…the water, not exactly glassy out there and a few more clouds than we like to see but I’m telling you it’s the best…”
Whatever that DJ was taking sounded a lot better than the after-effects of Seth’s night. He fumbled the lid back onto the peanut butter and began chewing his toast thoughtfully, walking out into the hall and pulling his boots on.
“…dozens of people down here at the waterfront watching the waves, a couple even daring to…”
They’d be giving away prizes soon, no doubt. Show up at the station’s broadcast van and win a free t-shirt. First five women to swim topless win a CD. Seth could just about hear the foam coming out of the DJ’s mouth.
“…this thing waterproof? I’m not gonna get electrocuted, am I? If I’m gonna go, I guess live on air is the way to do it…”
Seth left the radio blaring as he stepped out of his apartment. In the relative quiet of the building’s grimy staircase the whisper came to him, gentle this time, placated.
“Up, out, into the world.”
It sounded so happy that Seth couldn’t help whistling to himself as he headed down the hill into the valley. A walk through town would be just the thing.
Seth gave up, got up and made toast. Flicking on the waterproof radio that was suction cupped to the wall above the sink Seth let the buzz of background noise drown out the voice in the back of his head. It had been there since he’d woken up, whispering away, sometimes too distant to make out, sometimes so close he’d had to fight the urge to look over his shoulder. It had kept him from sleep with its insistent words.
“Up, out, into the world.”
He was up now, damnit, but the voice hadn’t shut up. Eat toast, get dressed, get back out into the world. Maybe that would do it.
He probably shouldn’t have taken the acid. He’d heard all the stories about people walking off the top of buildings or eating broken glass or doing some other self-destructive idiot thing while high, but then he’d met a lot of people who’d taken acid and had a good time. He hadn’t met any of the dead people.
“Not yet,” the voice whispered.
Seth turned up the volume on the radio. It was shaped like a flower, bright yellow and green plastic, and sounded terrible. Its sole virtue was that it resisted the damp and the mould and the splashes from the sink. The DJ was talking about the weather and the harbour, rabbitting on long enough that Seth eventually tuned in to the words.
“…the water, not exactly glassy out there and a few more clouds than we like to see but I’m telling you it’s the best…”
Whatever that DJ was taking sounded a lot better than the after-effects of Seth’s night. He fumbled the lid back onto the peanut butter and began chewing his toast thoughtfully, walking out into the hall and pulling his boots on.
“…dozens of people down here at the waterfront watching the waves, a couple even daring to…”
They’d be giving away prizes soon, no doubt. Show up at the station’s broadcast van and win a free t-shirt. First five women to swim topless win a CD. Seth could just about hear the foam coming out of the DJ’s mouth.
“…this thing waterproof? I’m not gonna get electrocuted, am I? If I’m gonna go, I guess live on air is the way to do it…”
Seth left the radio blaring as he stepped out of his apartment. In the relative quiet of the building’s grimy staircase the whisper came to him, gentle this time, placated.
“Up, out, into the world.”
It sounded so happy that Seth couldn’t help whistling to himself as he headed down the hill into the valley. A walk through town would be just the thing.
Monday, July 13, 2009
part 1
This post contains the first part of The Event - introducing 5 characters by 5 authors.
Seth
It was the fish lady’s fault. Seth woke up aching and thirsty and freezing cold, his cheek pressed against the mud and grass of Aro Valley’s small park, his limbs leaden with the chill of the night. The underside of his jacket was soaked through, as were his jeans. He rolled over with a groan and blinked the mist out of his eyes.
It was light. Early morning light, the hour of the walk of shame. Wellington was a terrible place to sleep outdoors, even on its warmest nights. It was a town where people brought woollen hats, gloves and blankets to the outdoor Summer Shakespeare performances.
Passing out in a corner of a park at this time of year was somewhere between reckless and suicidal. If that damn half-breed Deep One singer hadn’t been giving him the eye Seth would never have left the club alone, been set upon by sirens, and ended up half frozen to death.
At least his boots had kept the worst of the cold from his toes.
Seth dragged himself to his feet and stumbled down the slippery path onto Aro Street. He wasn’t far from his flat, no more than fifteen minutes at his current shuffling pace. His legs were wobbly but he was confident that they’d see him home. They always did.
Less reliable was his memory of the night before, but that was to be expected. The plan to drop half a tab of acid and go see a gig at Bodega had seemed entirely reasonable when Mark suggested it, and it had started out fine, but there was something about being in a bar that eroded Seth’s ability to resist drinks. He hadn’t taken enough money to get himself into any real trouble, but trouble had a way of finding him. The more he drank the louder and sillier he got, and for some reason he’d been able to find people to buy him drinks all night.
Then the acid kicked in, the space between the tables distorting and the top of his head slipping away from him. Mark was grinning away and loving every second and Seth was right there with him until he uttered the fateful words.
“That singer. Look at her. Do you think she’s really a fish?”
The Innsmouth look. Straight out of Lovecraft. And damn if she didn’t look like her ancestry was a blasphemous mix of the human and the Piscean. Once the idea was planted in Seth’s brain he couldn’t shake it, couldn’t look away from her cold, dead fish eyes. Her skin was sallow, loose on her bones. Her lips were over-large, never moist, her hands wrapped in gloves to cover the webbing. The band was a kind of fusion jazz group, and the more they played the stranger their music became. There was madness in the music, messages from below the waves that called to Seth, warned him of the return of a great evil.
Too much fucking Lovecraft, that was the problem. And the acid.
He’d left in a state of restrained hysteria, his heart pounding and his jaws clenched. He didn’t utter a word, did his best not to look anyone in the eye. They were probably all in on it.
The streets outside were strangely bright, the streetlights and traffic signals shining out in the crisp air. There were dark shapes of people out on the streets but they were human shapes, nothing monstrous about them. The more he walked the slower his heart beat and as Seth walked past the Aro Valley kindergarten he felt a sense of calm returning. It was just the drugs, nothing to worry about.
The teenage girls with their alcopops, cigarettes, too much eye makeup and lack of fake IDs were an unexpected feature of the park. There was nowhere that would take them, not looking as young as they did, and they were bored. It was the work of a minute to pry liquor from them. In exchange Seth provided a stream of near-nonsensical talk, some of it littered with references to the curse of the subhuman, some of it the usual bullshit about his artistic ambitions. Smiles and further drinks were forthcoming and all was as it should be.
And then he must have passed out and spent the rest of the night soaking up the cold.
At least they hadn’t taken his wallet.
A delivery truck rattled past and pulled into the carpark of the dairy. A young guy in a suit and sneakers power walked past Seth, a scowl on his face and the tinny sound of music spilling from his headphones. Seth shuffled on, dreading the hill that would end his walk home. Lean into it, let the fear of falling convince the legs to move. He’d done it with his eyes closed enough times to know that no matter how hung over he was, no matter how tired, there was always a gutter to throw up into and a warm bed waiting in the end.
Mark was nowhere to be seen when Seth finally made it home.
- Matt
* * *
Michelle
“Sure you don’t want to stay for coffee?”
“I’d better get going.”
“OK,” Richard’s eyes flicked up and down her body. It was a casual, fleeting assessment but it made her self-conscious nonetheless. “I’ll see you later at work then.”
Michelle nodded. She felt embarrassed at the prospect but it was unavoidable. She bounced on her toes, the momentum helping her squeeze back into her jeans. She didn’t know why she had let Siobhan talk her into buying skinny leg jeans. They might be the latest thing and look good on gym-toned bodies but no part of Michelle’s body could be described as skinny, least of all her legs.
“You don’t regret last night, do you?” he asked from the bed, the sheets only just covering up the lower half of his body.
Michelle wondered why he asked. She doubted he really cared what she thought. Maybe he was trying to fill in the silence.
“Of course not,” she forced a smile, hoping her voice sounded light and natural.
She shoved her feet in her boots and once she was safely outside his apartment door, she bent down to pull up the zips.
There was a short flight of stairs to descend before she was back out in the light and safety of the street. She hurried away, making a beeline towards Cuba Mall. It was after nine and the shops would all be open now. If she bumped into anyone she could say she was shopping if they happened to wonder what she was doing at the opposite end of town from her flat on a Tuesday morning.
Michelle cursed herself for overreacting. So she had slept with her boss. Big deal. Heaps of people had done the same thing, if not worse. Why was she so afraid of someone discovering her dirty little secret?
The red don’t-walk light flashed up as she reached the crossing and the waiting cars revved up and lurched past. A handful of sparrows were still meandering in the middle of the road, pecking at invisible crumbs. Michelle flinched as the cars sped towards them. She felt a painful certainty that the birds were too unaware of their impending demise to move. To her relief, the sparrows flew out of the way as the cars were almost on top of them, some unconscious instinct propelling them to save themselves at the very last second.
The light flashed green. Walk. Her feet responded to the signal before she registered it herself.
Flashbacks of the night before spun up in her mind as she crossed the street. She tried to edit the images into a more glamorous Hollywood sex scene but the raw footage didn’t give her much to work with.
She had thought about what sex with Richard would be like before. She wouldn’t go so far as to say that she had fantasised about it, it wasn’t like she fancied him or anything, but Siobhan and the other girls at work had been descriptive in their accounts of what their experiences with Richard had been. When she listened to them, it was easy to picture the movie version. Passionate, impatient kisses; heaving, sweaty bodies pressed against each other; desperate tearing at clothes; then urgent sex on his office desk or up against a wall in the back corner of the bar after closing time.
She had secretly hoped that if she slept with him too she might be able to join in the conversations about what a bastard he was.
Michelle had started picturing Richard as a villain in a Victorian bodice ripper. He was like the dark, heartless lord who ravished every virginal serving girl that crossed his path. She had anticipated being used and discarded once he had seduced her. She hadn’t expected that the seduction would be quite so, well, dull.
If anything, he had been nice. He bought her dinner first. That was unexpected. When he had asked her if she wanted a drink after work, she had thought she was up for a torrid encounter in his office, not a date. Then afterwards when they’d gone back to his apartment, he’d been awkward. Not as clumsy and unsure of himself as she was but not the artful seducer she had thought him to be. He’d slept with every girl that worked at the bar, you’d think he’d know what he was doing by now.
Once he’d abandoned the script for the evening, Michelle wasn’t sure how to act. She couldn’t bring herself to put on the full Hollywood screaming and moaning fake orgasm. She felt too self-conscious in front of him. In the end, she’d just closed her eyes and made a few soft groans when she saw that he was ready to come and was just holding back to make sure she did first. That had been enough of a cue for him and he’d gone straight to sleep when he was done.
Sleeping with the wrong man was meant to have dramatic consequences. Either he should end up falling in love with you, despite you being one of his less glamorous conquests, or you should feel so hurt and used that the whole experience would trigger some empowering and heart-warming journey where you quit your job to travel to some exotic place and ‘found yourself’. Michelle knew that neither of those was likely. She’d feel uncomfortable around him at work for a while, and everything would go back to how it had been before.
Instinct drove her towards Courtney Place and sanctuary. The shops had been far from busy at this time but the zealous sales assistants had pounced on her as soon as she’d set foot through their doors, determined to offer assistance or strike up some meaningless conversation. In the end it had been too much effort to shrug off their advances and then casually wander around pretending to browse through the clothes, so she’d abandoned the charade.
The first movie sessions of the day would be starting soon. Only a handful of people ever showed up to watch movies early on a weekday morning. If she was lucky, she might even get a whole theatre to herself.
There probably wasn’t anything showing that she hadn’t already seen but it didn’t matter. Rewatching a film for the second or third time was just as powerful. Even when she knew what was going to happen, she got so sucked into the story that it didn’t matter. Watching films was the only time she ever felt in the moment, not distracted by what had happened in the past or trying to predict what would happen next.
Her old drama teacher had once said that she needed to draw on the raw emotions from real life experiences. How could she explain that she never experienced any intense or passionate emotions in real life? It was movies that had taught her how to feel. With films she could fall in love in a heartbeat and she could cry so hard that she was convinced her heart would break from the pain. When Michelle watched horror movies, she became paralysed with fear. She wondered if she would be capable of feeling the same terror if the deranged killer on the screen was coming after her in real life rather than the movie’s heroine.
Movies made her feel alive and through them she had lived a vivid spectrum of human emotions and experiences.
It was only real life that left her numb and disconnected.
- Debbie
* * *
Margaret
It had been going on for weeks.
There was a car and inside there were four young people driving into a forest, they were trying to find a party or a rock concert. Two men and two young women.
(You could tell that one of the women had “been around”. Also, that one of the men was a homosexual.)
They were lost. They drove down a road and there was a closed gate with a sign: “KEEP OUT PRIVATE”. There was the skull of an animal on the gate.
The nice girl said: 'I don't like it here.' And her boyfriend who was driving, he agreed, he drove backwards along the road. And you thought that would be the end of it. That they had had a “close call”, they would get out of there and go back. They would decide they didn't want to go to the party after all, they would drive back to the town and admit they had lied.
('Mother I'm sorry, I lied, I wasn't at Susan's house I went out to go to a party.' they would say)
But there was a trap on the road.
And their tyres burst.
And they walked through the woods where more skeletons of animals hung from the trees. And you knew - even though they were scared, they were in worse trouble than they thought.
Margaret stood beside the exit, her torch dangling limp from her hand, light dancing across her spectacles.
Mouth pursed into a frown.
Because the Man had found them. As always. He always did.
At first he told them lies, tried to befriend them but the young people were not stupid. They noticed the inconsistencies in what he said.
But then it was too late, because they had walked into the cellar of the house and he locked the door.
Then he was above them, looking down. He trapped them into different parts of the cellar, cages. They could all see but they couldn't help each other when the Man started doing things.
She swayed on her feet, stared at the screen. It made her light-headed. The first time when the man climbed down into the cage with the girl who'd “been around” and _____ ___ Margaret had fainted. She'd fallen down against the wall and a patron had come over to her.
'Are you okay' he had said.
'Yes,' she had said.
She didn't faint this time, because it was the thirty fourth time she'd seen it.
She had found that when things were too ugly or nasty to watch (such as now, because the Man was in the cage with the homosexual and he ___ ______ ___ ___) she could limp a little further into the cinema and look at the audience.
Their faces were lit up in blue. Some of them were looking away, some were curling up in their seats but many others seemed hypnotised. Men and women both (but mostly men). They stared ahead and their faces didn't move, they didn't even frown. They didn't blink. They just watched.
She hated them sometimes, the people.
Sometimes she imagined that the light on their faces came from an enormous blue wave, sweeping towards them to smash them into pieces.
Her manager said:
Rock music was playing overhead, Margaret didn't hear. Her manager had to repeat herself.
'Margaret. Can you work a late shift?'
Practically shouting at her, this girl of no more than twenty.
'I can't. I'm expected –'
'Okay, no, forget it.'
They treated you badly, insulted you and spoke as if you were stupid. The hours were long. Sometimes you had to do awful things, like clean up popcorn that people had spat out, or sometimes vomit.
What made it easy was that it was always the same. Five years at this new place, she'd established a routine. Before that it had been five years at Mid City, nine years at the Regent Centre.
The Kings One and Two.
The Cinerama – she had started there, in nineteen eighty one. The manager had said: 'You're older than the other girls, but you'll do.'
(He had meant 'I don't like you,' – but Father had known the owner)
('It's the most we can hope for her' he'd said to Mother)
The routine: riding the escalator down into the food court. A bag of McDonalds take away. Wait at the bus stop for the 14, and ride back home with the warm bag in her lap, and with the earphones on. And then two hundred metres along the cold street, limping.
Limping fast. Unlocking the door, hurrying in, hurrying to the door of her room, but it was part of the routine that she never made it in time.
Shona said:
What had she said? Something about the rent.
'It's fish,' she added.
'I've got it,' said Margaret.
'What?'
'I've got the rent.'
'I don't understand.' Always this way. Part of the routine. 'It's dinner I mean. The rent's not due for a week.'
Margaret controlled her breathing.
'I've got it. I will give it to you now.'
She unlocked the door of her room, threw the McDonalds on the floor – she had quite lost her appetite thank you. She rummaged through her dresser until she found the sock, took out the rent money, counted it.
Back in the hall she said: 'Here.'
Shona laughed, actually laughed at her.
'But I don't need it.'
'Here.'
'Margaret keep it, it's not due 'til next week.'
'Please,' said Margaret.
She wouldn't take it.
She said:
And:
But she wouldn't take it, she was playing her games again. How could someone go so long without forgiving?
The rent had been late only once, it had been three years ago, but they would never forgive it, never.
Unable to sleep, she listened to them walking around the house, beside her and above her. She sat on the floor and pulled the bedclothes down.
Margaret imagined her parents were watching her, telling her to get back into bed, that everything would be all right.
She was hungry after all. She shifted sideways, reached into the bag, pulled forth the McDonalds sandwich in its cold yellow box.
She ate furtively, like a prisoner. She looked around her little room. Footsteps over her head now. She imagined him up there, the Man, staring down through the ceiling. He'd trapped her.
It was a bad position, uncomfortable. Her leg ached. And then suddenly there was a cramp. Such pain. She was in a cage and the Man would climb down and ____ and ____ ___ and ____ _______ ___ ____ and ____ ___ and her parents would watch and scream but they were in a cage, there was nothing they could do.
Only watch, and the terrible pain. Her face pressed against the threadbare rug.
'Oh God,' she said.
She slept.
She dreamt that the wave came.
- C G
* * *
Robin
There was a wrong thing about the doors to the Central Library.
It was a wrong thing that bugged Robin every time she went in there, fighting the urge to walk in the lefthand side and jump over the turnstile, giving the security guy apoplexy, or at least making his eyes bug out a bit. It was OK at Vic, over there they hed the Entry and Exit doors arranged the right way, the proper way, so you go in and walk out like the turning of a clock. Deosil.
It was crowded today, and after Robin had taken her books back, gone out through the not-really front doors (on the wrong side), turned left and walked up to Clark’s, the queue along the food counters was legion. By the time she’d got to the end of the queue and collected her pot of tea, she thought she’d have to perch at the bar at the back, but it turned out that Claire had arrived before her and staked out one of the long wooden tables and had her offspring staged strategically around it.
She waved at Robin hurriedly. “Come and take the spot at the end, Robin – I don’t want to have one of those old biddies asking if she can sit here because there’s no room.”
“It’s not too bad,” Robin said, shrugging. “I shared a table once with a couple of ladies from the Women’s Institute. They were here for a conference.”
“Are there Women’s Institutes in New Zealand?”
Robin nodded. “Yep. They told me about their opening night revue – from the way they talked about it I figured that a bunch of them stripping off for a photo shoot isn’t nearly as far out as that movie about the calendars wanted us all to think.”
Claire rolled her eyes and started grilling Robin about the job search (unfruitful) and her love life (challenging) while she helped cut up sausage rolls for the nevvies and niecelings. “The thing is,” Robbin said, “the thing is, it’s all very well listening to those pep talks you get in school and university about changing the world and all that, but, the thing is, once you actually start working, it turns out to be a whole lot of making lists and talking about mortgages in your teabreak.”
“It isn’t all like that – “
“Maybe. But I’m supposed to sound enthusiastic when I write application letters and I just can’t.”
“And that guy you were seeing?”
“Oh. No, that was over a couple of weeks ago, which is just as well because he was pretty smelly in the mornings, or at least his breath was, and he had tongue studs, two of them, which aren’t actually that great when you’re trying to kiss someone.”
“What’s a tongue stud?” Christie asked, her face covered in grease. Robin poked her tongue out and wiggled it.
“No, really,” Claire added, “come to dinner on Friday, there’s a chap I want you to meet.”
“He’ll only want to talk about mortgages,” Robin said glumly, “or rugby, or some band I don’t know anything about.”
“It won’t be like that,” and, la, she was all packed and the offspring were tidied, and she was gathering her bag ready to go.
“Enjoy your haircut,” Robin said, and hustled the nevvies and niecelings out through the other door that didn’t leave her grumbling about lefthand and righthand, and they walked out through Civic Square and over the bridge, and to the Sea.
Today they were going to Oriental Beach, Robin had decided, and did she some more hustling to get them all walking along the waterfront without being sidetracked into Te Papa or Waitangi Park, but they got there in the end, and ran about with bare feet and gritty imported sand between their toes, and they raced ankle deep into the scudding sea, and out again, shrieking, and then Robin sat on the wall huddled into her jacket against the wind, with little Aroha asleep in her sling breathing her little milky sighs, while Christie and her brothers played with someone else’s dog.
THEN. Then this guy Robin didn’t even know sat down next to her and started chatting about the weather, and were they her kids, and what it was like out on the South Coast this time of year, and they were 10 minutes talking before Robin wondered if maybe he was hitting on her. He wasn’t too bad looking, in a middle aged, balding kind of way, but all of a sudden Robin couldn’t talk like he was just this guy on the beach, because she kept wondering did he think that she was flirting with him? Like, when some guys think that when you’re smiling at a joke, really that’s code for ‘ask me out to dinner,’ and they come up with weird stuff like if you say one thing you’re interested and if you say another you hate their guts, when really, you’re just wombling on about what you want for lunch. That, really, truly, really, was why she had trouble dating – she couldn’t work out the code and she never knew what everyone thought they were saying and expected her to just know.
So she got up and collected the children and said they were going to keep walking, and just when she’d got everyone’s shoes back on, THIS GUY came up to her again, and he started apologising, except there wasn’t anything he really had to apologise for, which made it even more awkward. “Look,” he said, “I didn’t mean to freak you out, and I’m not some weirdo who likes to perv at children. I just get lonely sometimes, and I like to talk to people.”
“Oh sure,” Robin said back, nodding in that fake friendly way, “absolutely. It’s just we’re meeting someone in a bit.”
“Right,” he said. “Well, anyway, if you decide sometime that you’d like someone to chat to – any public place of your choosing – give me a call or an email or something. It isn’t good to be lonely.”
“Sure,” and Robin pocketed his card, expecting to ditch it when they were out of sight. “Absolutely. Have a nice day.”
And then they were walking around the edge of the sea, under the great bulk of Mt Victoria, looking out at the great bulk of Miramar that’s a peninsular, but used to be an island, but really is Whataitai, a taniwha that got stuck making a break for freedom.
The thing is, the thing is, Robin knew that all that stuff wasn’t real – that you don’t need to throw salt over your shoulder, that widdershins isn’t a bad thing, that the mountains and islands she lived on won’t some day get up and walk around. She knew it wasn’t like that, she really did, but she wished it were, just a little.
- Steph
* * *
Adam
The alarm went off at 6.15 am and Adam rose slowly out of the dream he was having. It was another strange one. He saw people running down the street, away from the ocean and screaming. He was watching from the window of his flat and taking notes. He wasn’t sure of the significance of that. But he was slowly realizing that he was in bed, it was time to wake up and go to work. Again. Adam tried to remember what day it was. He had a blissful half minute when he thought it was Friday and then realized he hadn’t had a Thursday. No it was Tuesday. Freaking Tuesday. There is nothing good about Tuesday. And he felt like Tuesdays were coming around way too fast, like every time he woke up it was to a Tuesday.
He hauled himself out of bed and stumbled to the shower. Getting up this early he was guaranteed hot water, but it turned out that this Tuesday he didn’t have a dry towel. His towel had slipped off the towel rack, was now a musty pile on the floor half covered with his flatmate’s sweaty gym gear. Swearing under his breath, he pulled it out and took his shower.
It took him 20 minutes to get ready. He had it down to the smallest possible time so that he could sleep as late as possible. He got dressed and ate two pieces of toast. His shoes were near the door so he could slip them on as he walked out. Out on the street it was bitterly cold at that time in the morning, so he hunched up in his jacket, took some deep breaths and tried to wake up. He didn’t actually wake up until he had his morning coffee. He always went to the Mojo on the corner because there was this cute little redhead that worked there and she knew his usual order and he liked to think that she had been flirting with him and that someday he would get up the courage to ask her out. He figured the day to do it wasn’t a Tuesday though. No one was happy on Tuesday morning.
This Tuesday the redhead wasn’t there. He looked around for her and the blonde German girl who had only been at the Mojo for a couple of weeks (she was backpacking) took his order. She noticed him trying to lean and look into the meager kitchen space.
‘She is not here today, she called in sick.’
‘Oh, I uh,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t-’
‘It’s OK,’ she gave him a toothy smile. ‘She should be back in tomorrow I think.’
‘No, I mean, I’m not looking for anyone.’
‘Oh sure,’ the blonde German girl said, ‘you are here each morning making eyes at Gretchen, it’s very sweet.’
‘I really don’t know what you mean,’ he started, but he could see it wasn’t going to work. Adam felt his cheeks going hot. He couldn’t believe he’d been so obvious. All this time he’d been coming in and checking out the redhead, who it turned out, was called Gretchen which he hadn’t known. And he’d been really obvious about it and everyone knew. He was such a jerk.
‘We call you hopeful latte guy,’ she whispered over the counter. Adam took his coffee with horrible finality. He could never come back to this Mojo.
His walk to work took ten minutes; it was quick because was still too early for rush hour to have started. He walked into the building and mentally added today to the tally. Six thousand, seven hundred and forty three times. ‘I really need a new job’ he thought to himself again, that was his mantra. Another routine just like counting the number of times he walked into this awful dead end job.
He swiped his card in the lift, went into the office.
‘Morning,’ he said to Sarah, who sat next to him.
‘Morning Adam,’ Sarah replied. ‘We’ve had an outage, the phones have been really busy.’
‘Grand,’ he said, and he logged into the phones for another day of technical support for an internet company with a middle to large sized client base, depending on their rates.
‘I’m very sorry that you were affected, but the service has resumed now.’
‘That’s not good enough, young man. My granddaughter set me up with a computer and I was bidding on an antique vase on Trade Me and I didn’t win it because the internet went down. What are you going to do about that? That was the only one in the country!’
‘Look, as I said, I’m sorry that you were affected, but we don’t guarantee that we’ll be able to provide a constant service. Our servers broke down, they were fixed and now they’re-’
‘That’s not good enough. I am seriously considering changing to another company.’
He talked the lady down from leaving with a small discount on her monthly bill and got off the phone. He logged out of the queue and took his break. The open plan office was pretty small but the view was stunning. They were right on the waterfront, so on a good morning they had a view over tug boats and ferries coming in and going out you could look across to Oriental Bay with the fountain and the people walking. He made an instant coffee and went and stood out on the balcony.
The harbor was relatively calm for Wellington. The sun was shining and he watched the tourists walking the waterfront path with envy.
He tried to think about the future, but anything interesting seemed too out of reach. He had experience in I.T. and customer support but that’s all he had, and if he thought about it, there were something like 600 other guys with the same experience in this city. That wasn’t even including all the people who moved to Wellington from other places.
He had a good track record in this job, but the thing was, he’d never really excelled at it. Once again he wished he knew just what it was he wanted to do with his life. His friends from school were getting married and having kids, buying houses, becoming managers some of them. He spent his days between the office and his scungy city flat which he shared with two skeezy flatmates. The best thing he’d done lately was beat his previous high score playing ‘Carry on my wayward son’ on the expert guitar on Rock Band.
Adam lingered on the balcony five minutes longer than he should have. This small rebellion would keep him going till lunch time at least.
- Jenni
Seth
It was the fish lady’s fault. Seth woke up aching and thirsty and freezing cold, his cheek pressed against the mud and grass of Aro Valley’s small park, his limbs leaden with the chill of the night. The underside of his jacket was soaked through, as were his jeans. He rolled over with a groan and blinked the mist out of his eyes.
It was light. Early morning light, the hour of the walk of shame. Wellington was a terrible place to sleep outdoors, even on its warmest nights. It was a town where people brought woollen hats, gloves and blankets to the outdoor Summer Shakespeare performances.
Passing out in a corner of a park at this time of year was somewhere between reckless and suicidal. If that damn half-breed Deep One singer hadn’t been giving him the eye Seth would never have left the club alone, been set upon by sirens, and ended up half frozen to death.
At least his boots had kept the worst of the cold from his toes.
Seth dragged himself to his feet and stumbled down the slippery path onto Aro Street. He wasn’t far from his flat, no more than fifteen minutes at his current shuffling pace. His legs were wobbly but he was confident that they’d see him home. They always did.
Less reliable was his memory of the night before, but that was to be expected. The plan to drop half a tab of acid and go see a gig at Bodega had seemed entirely reasonable when Mark suggested it, and it had started out fine, but there was something about being in a bar that eroded Seth’s ability to resist drinks. He hadn’t taken enough money to get himself into any real trouble, but trouble had a way of finding him. The more he drank the louder and sillier he got, and for some reason he’d been able to find people to buy him drinks all night.
Then the acid kicked in, the space between the tables distorting and the top of his head slipping away from him. Mark was grinning away and loving every second and Seth was right there with him until he uttered the fateful words.
“That singer. Look at her. Do you think she’s really a fish?”
The Innsmouth look. Straight out of Lovecraft. And damn if she didn’t look like her ancestry was a blasphemous mix of the human and the Piscean. Once the idea was planted in Seth’s brain he couldn’t shake it, couldn’t look away from her cold, dead fish eyes. Her skin was sallow, loose on her bones. Her lips were over-large, never moist, her hands wrapped in gloves to cover the webbing. The band was a kind of fusion jazz group, and the more they played the stranger their music became. There was madness in the music, messages from below the waves that called to Seth, warned him of the return of a great evil.
Too much fucking Lovecraft, that was the problem. And the acid.
He’d left in a state of restrained hysteria, his heart pounding and his jaws clenched. He didn’t utter a word, did his best not to look anyone in the eye. They were probably all in on it.
The streets outside were strangely bright, the streetlights and traffic signals shining out in the crisp air. There were dark shapes of people out on the streets but they were human shapes, nothing monstrous about them. The more he walked the slower his heart beat and as Seth walked past the Aro Valley kindergarten he felt a sense of calm returning. It was just the drugs, nothing to worry about.
The teenage girls with their alcopops, cigarettes, too much eye makeup and lack of fake IDs were an unexpected feature of the park. There was nowhere that would take them, not looking as young as they did, and they were bored. It was the work of a minute to pry liquor from them. In exchange Seth provided a stream of near-nonsensical talk, some of it littered with references to the curse of the subhuman, some of it the usual bullshit about his artistic ambitions. Smiles and further drinks were forthcoming and all was as it should be.
And then he must have passed out and spent the rest of the night soaking up the cold.
At least they hadn’t taken his wallet.
A delivery truck rattled past and pulled into the carpark of the dairy. A young guy in a suit and sneakers power walked past Seth, a scowl on his face and the tinny sound of music spilling from his headphones. Seth shuffled on, dreading the hill that would end his walk home. Lean into it, let the fear of falling convince the legs to move. He’d done it with his eyes closed enough times to know that no matter how hung over he was, no matter how tired, there was always a gutter to throw up into and a warm bed waiting in the end.
Mark was nowhere to be seen when Seth finally made it home.
- Matt
* * *
Michelle
“Sure you don’t want to stay for coffee?”
“I’d better get going.”
“OK,” Richard’s eyes flicked up and down her body. It was a casual, fleeting assessment but it made her self-conscious nonetheless. “I’ll see you later at work then.”
Michelle nodded. She felt embarrassed at the prospect but it was unavoidable. She bounced on her toes, the momentum helping her squeeze back into her jeans. She didn’t know why she had let Siobhan talk her into buying skinny leg jeans. They might be the latest thing and look good on gym-toned bodies but no part of Michelle’s body could be described as skinny, least of all her legs.
“You don’t regret last night, do you?” he asked from the bed, the sheets only just covering up the lower half of his body.
Michelle wondered why he asked. She doubted he really cared what she thought. Maybe he was trying to fill in the silence.
“Of course not,” she forced a smile, hoping her voice sounded light and natural.
She shoved her feet in her boots and once she was safely outside his apartment door, she bent down to pull up the zips.
There was a short flight of stairs to descend before she was back out in the light and safety of the street. She hurried away, making a beeline towards Cuba Mall. It was after nine and the shops would all be open now. If she bumped into anyone she could say she was shopping if they happened to wonder what she was doing at the opposite end of town from her flat on a Tuesday morning.
Michelle cursed herself for overreacting. So she had slept with her boss. Big deal. Heaps of people had done the same thing, if not worse. Why was she so afraid of someone discovering her dirty little secret?
The red don’t-walk light flashed up as she reached the crossing and the waiting cars revved up and lurched past. A handful of sparrows were still meandering in the middle of the road, pecking at invisible crumbs. Michelle flinched as the cars sped towards them. She felt a painful certainty that the birds were too unaware of their impending demise to move. To her relief, the sparrows flew out of the way as the cars were almost on top of them, some unconscious instinct propelling them to save themselves at the very last second.
The light flashed green. Walk. Her feet responded to the signal before she registered it herself.
Flashbacks of the night before spun up in her mind as she crossed the street. She tried to edit the images into a more glamorous Hollywood sex scene but the raw footage didn’t give her much to work with.
She had thought about what sex with Richard would be like before. She wouldn’t go so far as to say that she had fantasised about it, it wasn’t like she fancied him or anything, but Siobhan and the other girls at work had been descriptive in their accounts of what their experiences with Richard had been. When she listened to them, it was easy to picture the movie version. Passionate, impatient kisses; heaving, sweaty bodies pressed against each other; desperate tearing at clothes; then urgent sex on his office desk or up against a wall in the back corner of the bar after closing time.
She had secretly hoped that if she slept with him too she might be able to join in the conversations about what a bastard he was.
Michelle had started picturing Richard as a villain in a Victorian bodice ripper. He was like the dark, heartless lord who ravished every virginal serving girl that crossed his path. She had anticipated being used and discarded once he had seduced her. She hadn’t expected that the seduction would be quite so, well, dull.
If anything, he had been nice. He bought her dinner first. That was unexpected. When he had asked her if she wanted a drink after work, she had thought she was up for a torrid encounter in his office, not a date. Then afterwards when they’d gone back to his apartment, he’d been awkward. Not as clumsy and unsure of himself as she was but not the artful seducer she had thought him to be. He’d slept with every girl that worked at the bar, you’d think he’d know what he was doing by now.
Once he’d abandoned the script for the evening, Michelle wasn’t sure how to act. She couldn’t bring herself to put on the full Hollywood screaming and moaning fake orgasm. She felt too self-conscious in front of him. In the end, she’d just closed her eyes and made a few soft groans when she saw that he was ready to come and was just holding back to make sure she did first. That had been enough of a cue for him and he’d gone straight to sleep when he was done.
Sleeping with the wrong man was meant to have dramatic consequences. Either he should end up falling in love with you, despite you being one of his less glamorous conquests, or you should feel so hurt and used that the whole experience would trigger some empowering and heart-warming journey where you quit your job to travel to some exotic place and ‘found yourself’. Michelle knew that neither of those was likely. She’d feel uncomfortable around him at work for a while, and everything would go back to how it had been before.
Instinct drove her towards Courtney Place and sanctuary. The shops had been far from busy at this time but the zealous sales assistants had pounced on her as soon as she’d set foot through their doors, determined to offer assistance or strike up some meaningless conversation. In the end it had been too much effort to shrug off their advances and then casually wander around pretending to browse through the clothes, so she’d abandoned the charade.
The first movie sessions of the day would be starting soon. Only a handful of people ever showed up to watch movies early on a weekday morning. If she was lucky, she might even get a whole theatre to herself.
There probably wasn’t anything showing that she hadn’t already seen but it didn’t matter. Rewatching a film for the second or third time was just as powerful. Even when she knew what was going to happen, she got so sucked into the story that it didn’t matter. Watching films was the only time she ever felt in the moment, not distracted by what had happened in the past or trying to predict what would happen next.
Her old drama teacher had once said that she needed to draw on the raw emotions from real life experiences. How could she explain that she never experienced any intense or passionate emotions in real life? It was movies that had taught her how to feel. With films she could fall in love in a heartbeat and she could cry so hard that she was convinced her heart would break from the pain. When Michelle watched horror movies, she became paralysed with fear. She wondered if she would be capable of feeling the same terror if the deranged killer on the screen was coming after her in real life rather than the movie’s heroine.
Movies made her feel alive and through them she had lived a vivid spectrum of human emotions and experiences.
It was only real life that left her numb and disconnected.
- Debbie
* * *
Margaret
It had been going on for weeks.
There was a car and inside there were four young people driving into a forest, they were trying to find a party or a rock concert. Two men and two young women.
(You could tell that one of the women had “been around”. Also, that one of the men was a homosexual.)
They were lost. They drove down a road and there was a closed gate with a sign: “KEEP OUT PRIVATE”. There was the skull of an animal on the gate.
The nice girl said: 'I don't like it here.' And her boyfriend who was driving, he agreed, he drove backwards along the road. And you thought that would be the end of it. That they had had a “close call”, they would get out of there and go back. They would decide they didn't want to go to the party after all, they would drive back to the town and admit they had lied.
('Mother I'm sorry, I lied, I wasn't at Susan's house I went out to go to a party.' they would say)
But there was a trap on the road.
And their tyres burst.
And they walked through the woods where more skeletons of animals hung from the trees. And you knew - even though they were scared, they were in worse trouble than they thought.
Margaret stood beside the exit, her torch dangling limp from her hand, light dancing across her spectacles.
Mouth pursed into a frown.
Because the Man had found them. As always. He always did.
At first he told them lies, tried to befriend them but the young people were not stupid. They noticed the inconsistencies in what he said.
But then it was too late, because they had walked into the cellar of the house and he locked the door.
Then he was above them, looking down. He trapped them into different parts of the cellar, cages. They could all see but they couldn't help each other when the Man started doing things.
She swayed on her feet, stared at the screen. It made her light-headed. The first time when the man climbed down into the cage with the girl who'd “been around” and _____ ___ Margaret had fainted. She'd fallen down against the wall and a patron had come over to her.
'Are you okay' he had said.
'Yes,' she had said.
She didn't faint this time, because it was the thirty fourth time she'd seen it.
She had found that when things were too ugly or nasty to watch (such as now, because the Man was in the cage with the homosexual and he ___ ______ ___ ___) she could limp a little further into the cinema and look at the audience.
Their faces were lit up in blue. Some of them were looking away, some were curling up in their seats but many others seemed hypnotised. Men and women both (but mostly men). They stared ahead and their faces didn't move, they didn't even frown. They didn't blink. They just watched.
She hated them sometimes, the people.
Sometimes she imagined that the light on their faces came from an enormous blue wave, sweeping towards them to smash them into pieces.
Her manager said:
Rock music was playing overhead, Margaret didn't hear. Her manager had to repeat herself.
'Margaret. Can you work a late shift?'
Practically shouting at her, this girl of no more than twenty.
'I can't. I'm expected –'
'Okay, no, forget it.'
They treated you badly, insulted you and spoke as if you were stupid. The hours were long. Sometimes you had to do awful things, like clean up popcorn that people had spat out, or sometimes vomit.
What made it easy was that it was always the same. Five years at this new place, she'd established a routine. Before that it had been five years at Mid City, nine years at the Regent Centre.
The Kings One and Two.
The Cinerama – she had started there, in nineteen eighty one. The manager had said: 'You're older than the other girls, but you'll do.'
(He had meant 'I don't like you,' – but Father had known the owner)
('It's the most we can hope for her' he'd said to Mother)
The routine: riding the escalator down into the food court. A bag of McDonalds take away. Wait at the bus stop for the 14, and ride back home with the warm bag in her lap, and with the earphones on. And then two hundred metres along the cold street, limping.
Limping fast. Unlocking the door, hurrying in, hurrying to the door of her room, but it was part of the routine that she never made it in time.
Shona said:
What had she said? Something about the rent.
'It's fish,' she added.
'I've got it,' said Margaret.
'What?'
'I've got the rent.'
'I don't understand.' Always this way. Part of the routine. 'It's dinner I mean. The rent's not due for a week.'
Margaret controlled her breathing.
'I've got it. I will give it to you now.'
She unlocked the door of her room, threw the McDonalds on the floor – she had quite lost her appetite thank you. She rummaged through her dresser until she found the sock, took out the rent money, counted it.
Back in the hall she said: 'Here.'
Shona laughed, actually laughed at her.
'But I don't need it.'
'Here.'
'Margaret keep it, it's not due 'til next week.'
'Please,' said Margaret.
She wouldn't take it.
She said:
And:
But she wouldn't take it, she was playing her games again. How could someone go so long without forgiving?
The rent had been late only once, it had been three years ago, but they would never forgive it, never.
Unable to sleep, she listened to them walking around the house, beside her and above her. She sat on the floor and pulled the bedclothes down.
Margaret imagined her parents were watching her, telling her to get back into bed, that everything would be all right.
She was hungry after all. She shifted sideways, reached into the bag, pulled forth the McDonalds sandwich in its cold yellow box.
She ate furtively, like a prisoner. She looked around her little room. Footsteps over her head now. She imagined him up there, the Man, staring down through the ceiling. He'd trapped her.
It was a bad position, uncomfortable. Her leg ached. And then suddenly there was a cramp. Such pain. She was in a cage and the Man would climb down and ____ and ____ ___ and ____ _______ ___ ____ and ____ ___ and her parents would watch and scream but they were in a cage, there was nothing they could do.
Only watch, and the terrible pain. Her face pressed against the threadbare rug.
'Oh God,' she said.
She slept.
She dreamt that the wave came.
- C G
* * *
Robin
There was a wrong thing about the doors to the Central Library.
It was a wrong thing that bugged Robin every time she went in there, fighting the urge to walk in the lefthand side and jump over the turnstile, giving the security guy apoplexy, or at least making his eyes bug out a bit. It was OK at Vic, over there they hed the Entry and Exit doors arranged the right way, the proper way, so you go in and walk out like the turning of a clock. Deosil.
It was crowded today, and after Robin had taken her books back, gone out through the not-really front doors (on the wrong side), turned left and walked up to Clark’s, the queue along the food counters was legion. By the time she’d got to the end of the queue and collected her pot of tea, she thought she’d have to perch at the bar at the back, but it turned out that Claire had arrived before her and staked out one of the long wooden tables and had her offspring staged strategically around it.
She waved at Robin hurriedly. “Come and take the spot at the end, Robin – I don’t want to have one of those old biddies asking if she can sit here because there’s no room.”
“It’s not too bad,” Robin said, shrugging. “I shared a table once with a couple of ladies from the Women’s Institute. They were here for a conference.”
“Are there Women’s Institutes in New Zealand?”
Robin nodded. “Yep. They told me about their opening night revue – from the way they talked about it I figured that a bunch of them stripping off for a photo shoot isn’t nearly as far out as that movie about the calendars wanted us all to think.”
Claire rolled her eyes and started grilling Robin about the job search (unfruitful) and her love life (challenging) while she helped cut up sausage rolls for the nevvies and niecelings. “The thing is,” Robbin said, “the thing is, it’s all very well listening to those pep talks you get in school and university about changing the world and all that, but, the thing is, once you actually start working, it turns out to be a whole lot of making lists and talking about mortgages in your teabreak.”
“It isn’t all like that – “
“Maybe. But I’m supposed to sound enthusiastic when I write application letters and I just can’t.”
“And that guy you were seeing?”
“Oh. No, that was over a couple of weeks ago, which is just as well because he was pretty smelly in the mornings, or at least his breath was, and he had tongue studs, two of them, which aren’t actually that great when you’re trying to kiss someone.”
“What’s a tongue stud?” Christie asked, her face covered in grease. Robin poked her tongue out and wiggled it.
“No, really,” Claire added, “come to dinner on Friday, there’s a chap I want you to meet.”
“He’ll only want to talk about mortgages,” Robin said glumly, “or rugby, or some band I don’t know anything about.”
“It won’t be like that,” and, la, she was all packed and the offspring were tidied, and she was gathering her bag ready to go.
“Enjoy your haircut,” Robin said, and hustled the nevvies and niecelings out through the other door that didn’t leave her grumbling about lefthand and righthand, and they walked out through Civic Square and over the bridge, and to the Sea.
Today they were going to Oriental Beach, Robin had decided, and did she some more hustling to get them all walking along the waterfront without being sidetracked into Te Papa or Waitangi Park, but they got there in the end, and ran about with bare feet and gritty imported sand between their toes, and they raced ankle deep into the scudding sea, and out again, shrieking, and then Robin sat on the wall huddled into her jacket against the wind, with little Aroha asleep in her sling breathing her little milky sighs, while Christie and her brothers played with someone else’s dog.
THEN. Then this guy Robin didn’t even know sat down next to her and started chatting about the weather, and were they her kids, and what it was like out on the South Coast this time of year, and they were 10 minutes talking before Robin wondered if maybe he was hitting on her. He wasn’t too bad looking, in a middle aged, balding kind of way, but all of a sudden Robin couldn’t talk like he was just this guy on the beach, because she kept wondering did he think that she was flirting with him? Like, when some guys think that when you’re smiling at a joke, really that’s code for ‘ask me out to dinner,’ and they come up with weird stuff like if you say one thing you’re interested and if you say another you hate their guts, when really, you’re just wombling on about what you want for lunch. That, really, truly, really, was why she had trouble dating – she couldn’t work out the code and she never knew what everyone thought they were saying and expected her to just know.
So she got up and collected the children and said they were going to keep walking, and just when she’d got everyone’s shoes back on, THIS GUY came up to her again, and he started apologising, except there wasn’t anything he really had to apologise for, which made it even more awkward. “Look,” he said, “I didn’t mean to freak you out, and I’m not some weirdo who likes to perv at children. I just get lonely sometimes, and I like to talk to people.”
“Oh sure,” Robin said back, nodding in that fake friendly way, “absolutely. It’s just we’re meeting someone in a bit.”
“Right,” he said. “Well, anyway, if you decide sometime that you’d like someone to chat to – any public place of your choosing – give me a call or an email or something. It isn’t good to be lonely.”
“Sure,” and Robin pocketed his card, expecting to ditch it when they were out of sight. “Absolutely. Have a nice day.”
And then they were walking around the edge of the sea, under the great bulk of Mt Victoria, looking out at the great bulk of Miramar that’s a peninsular, but used to be an island, but really is Whataitai, a taniwha that got stuck making a break for freedom.
The thing is, the thing is, Robin knew that all that stuff wasn’t real – that you don’t need to throw salt over your shoulder, that widdershins isn’t a bad thing, that the mountains and islands she lived on won’t some day get up and walk around. She knew it wasn’t like that, she really did, but she wished it were, just a little.
- Steph
* * *
Adam
The alarm went off at 6.15 am and Adam rose slowly out of the dream he was having. It was another strange one. He saw people running down the street, away from the ocean and screaming. He was watching from the window of his flat and taking notes. He wasn’t sure of the significance of that. But he was slowly realizing that he was in bed, it was time to wake up and go to work. Again. Adam tried to remember what day it was. He had a blissful half minute when he thought it was Friday and then realized he hadn’t had a Thursday. No it was Tuesday. Freaking Tuesday. There is nothing good about Tuesday. And he felt like Tuesdays were coming around way too fast, like every time he woke up it was to a Tuesday.
He hauled himself out of bed and stumbled to the shower. Getting up this early he was guaranteed hot water, but it turned out that this Tuesday he didn’t have a dry towel. His towel had slipped off the towel rack, was now a musty pile on the floor half covered with his flatmate’s sweaty gym gear. Swearing under his breath, he pulled it out and took his shower.
It took him 20 minutes to get ready. He had it down to the smallest possible time so that he could sleep as late as possible. He got dressed and ate two pieces of toast. His shoes were near the door so he could slip them on as he walked out. Out on the street it was bitterly cold at that time in the morning, so he hunched up in his jacket, took some deep breaths and tried to wake up. He didn’t actually wake up until he had his morning coffee. He always went to the Mojo on the corner because there was this cute little redhead that worked there and she knew his usual order and he liked to think that she had been flirting with him and that someday he would get up the courage to ask her out. He figured the day to do it wasn’t a Tuesday though. No one was happy on Tuesday morning.
This Tuesday the redhead wasn’t there. He looked around for her and the blonde German girl who had only been at the Mojo for a couple of weeks (she was backpacking) took his order. She noticed him trying to lean and look into the meager kitchen space.
‘She is not here today, she called in sick.’
‘Oh, I uh,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t-’
‘It’s OK,’ she gave him a toothy smile. ‘She should be back in tomorrow I think.’
‘No, I mean, I’m not looking for anyone.’
‘Oh sure,’ the blonde German girl said, ‘you are here each morning making eyes at Gretchen, it’s very sweet.’
‘I really don’t know what you mean,’ he started, but he could see it wasn’t going to work. Adam felt his cheeks going hot. He couldn’t believe he’d been so obvious. All this time he’d been coming in and checking out the redhead, who it turned out, was called Gretchen which he hadn’t known. And he’d been really obvious about it and everyone knew. He was such a jerk.
‘We call you hopeful latte guy,’ she whispered over the counter. Adam took his coffee with horrible finality. He could never come back to this Mojo.
His walk to work took ten minutes; it was quick because was still too early for rush hour to have started. He walked into the building and mentally added today to the tally. Six thousand, seven hundred and forty three times. ‘I really need a new job’ he thought to himself again, that was his mantra. Another routine just like counting the number of times he walked into this awful dead end job.
He swiped his card in the lift, went into the office.
‘Morning,’ he said to Sarah, who sat next to him.
‘Morning Adam,’ Sarah replied. ‘We’ve had an outage, the phones have been really busy.’
‘Grand,’ he said, and he logged into the phones for another day of technical support for an internet company with a middle to large sized client base, depending on their rates.
‘I’m very sorry that you were affected, but the service has resumed now.’
‘That’s not good enough, young man. My granddaughter set me up with a computer and I was bidding on an antique vase on Trade Me and I didn’t win it because the internet went down. What are you going to do about that? That was the only one in the country!’
‘Look, as I said, I’m sorry that you were affected, but we don’t guarantee that we’ll be able to provide a constant service. Our servers broke down, they were fixed and now they’re-’
‘That’s not good enough. I am seriously considering changing to another company.’
He talked the lady down from leaving with a small discount on her monthly bill and got off the phone. He logged out of the queue and took his break. The open plan office was pretty small but the view was stunning. They were right on the waterfront, so on a good morning they had a view over tug boats and ferries coming in and going out you could look across to Oriental Bay with the fountain and the people walking. He made an instant coffee and went and stood out on the balcony.
The harbor was relatively calm for Wellington. The sun was shining and he watched the tourists walking the waterfront path with envy.
He tried to think about the future, but anything interesting seemed too out of reach. He had experience in I.T. and customer support but that’s all he had, and if he thought about it, there were something like 600 other guys with the same experience in this city. That wasn’t even including all the people who moved to Wellington from other places.
He had a good track record in this job, but the thing was, he’d never really excelled at it. Once again he wished he knew just what it was he wanted to do with his life. His friends from school were getting married and having kids, buying houses, becoming managers some of them. He spent his days between the office and his scungy city flat which he shared with two skeezy flatmates. The best thing he’d done lately was beat his previous high score playing ‘Carry on my wayward son’ on the expert guitar on Rock Band.
Adam lingered on the balcony five minutes longer than he should have. This small rebellion would keep him going till lunch time at least.
- Jenni
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