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