Part Five - Margaret

‘We found her like this,’ said the soldier. Well. Not quite a soldier. A sergeant in the territorials. ‘Walking around, just like this. Almost shot her.’
The doctor, a junior house surgeon about the same age, looked at the man with tired disapproval.
‘Were those your orders, to shoot people?’
The sergeant shrugged.
‘Fucken look at her. Looks like a zombie.’
He wandered off. A short while later, the doctor saw he’d joined a game of touch with the rest of his company.
The woman kept staggering back onto her feet in triage. A ghastly sight, given the condition of her jawbone (it had come loose from one side of her face). They helped her down, pushed her down onto the bench. ‘What’s your name?’ they’d asked her. Eventually one nurse had the idea of tying her down with a bedsheet, and much later a sedative was administered. It wasn’t until the next morning they had time to disinfect her wounds, or to operate on the jaw.

Nicola Rutlidge barely recognised her life anymore. For instance: it was Friday night. Two weeks ago she would have been out on the dancefloor at Coyote with her friends, all of them nursing students like her. Dancing, shouting, occasionally letting the right boys break into their circle.
That was, obviously, before all of this. Before the Big Fucking Disaster, before the camp out here in Kilbirnie. Camp Eight, it was called.
Before David Handscombe. Doctor Dreamboat.
She had another shift with him today – a night shift. “Humana-humana,” as Becca would have said. She took time getting ready in the quarters, which two weeks ago would have been a principal’s office. Leaned in close against the mirror. Not that there was much she could do, there were like no cosmetics anywhere. She picked at a blackhead on her nose, straightened her eyebrows. Smiled, then smiled a different way which brought out her dimples. She wondered briefly if any of her friends had died last week.
‘Hurry up, I need the mirror too.’
‘Piss off.’
The dimples would have to do. A natural asset. Someone had once said that she looked like Katie Holmes when she smiled.
Nicola found she was thinking a lot about her grandparents these days. About the War, how Gran had been a typist in London, and Grandad had been her boss (lucky old Grandad, a boss in a city without men). They’d gotten talking over a man in their office they’d thought was a spy. Could something like that be happening to her? It drove her nuts just thinking about it. “Mrs David Handscombe”.
It would be just too much. But then that’s what happened in a crisis, people got driven together. Like a movie or something.
It was getting dark as she walked beside the sports field. Kids playing, people moping around, talking and smoking. She’d need an “in”, something to talk about. Better yet, some reason to get him alone. She walked into C Ward, which two weeks ago would have been an assembly hall – C Ward was the ones who weren’t going to make it. At least most of them wouldn’t. It made you sad when you thought about it, all the mums and dads and kids. And the crazy old bitch in bed 8, the one who stared back at you.
She remembered a time two days ago when they’d stripped her and washed her. Remembered the pink streak of knotted tissue running down her leg.
The other doctor had stepped back in alarm. ‘Infected,’ he’d said.
But David had pushed him aside, had looked so much like Guy Warner as he took a closer look. ‘I don’t think so mate. Look.’ Pointing at something. ‘Look at the bones. That’s an old scar.’
He’d even spoken to her. ‘Have you had an operation on your hip? As a child? Did you have an operation here?’ So cool. You could tell the old cow wasn’t even listening, but he still had the courtesy to ask her.
Afterwards, when they were walking back together, he’d said: ‘Those bones are so strange, I’m almost tempted to think...’
Nicola had turned to him.
Had breathlessly asked: ‘Think what?’
David, her David had blushed, and said: “You sometimes see that on Siamese twins. She... ah, the woman has two legs, but they’re both the left. One of the legs might have belonged to her sister.”
So much like a soap opera. He was so fucken hot.
Nicola stared at the woman now, who of course said nothing, she never talked. Just looked back at you with dead eyes, like a fish on a bed of ice. A fish with a wire brace on its bandaged jaw. Around them people gasped and moaned and cried out in pain, but this one never made a sound.
‘What are you looking at, Lefty?’
And she almost jumped out of her skin, because the old girl lifted her arms up from under the sheets, held them there for a second, then put her hands against the sides of her head. Covering her ears. Which was scary enough, sort of, but also Nicola noticed there were grey patches all over the wrinkly flesh of her forearms.
So that was it. That was the “in”.
It took her almost two hours to find her chance.
‘Where’s Dr Handscombe?’
‘He’s out somewhere. They’re delivering supplies.’
Waiting, waiting. Then when he came in they were receiving new patients, and one of them had a badly infected foot so they’d had to roll him into theatre and remove it. Finally over the sinks, Nicola saw her chance.
‘Doctor,’ she said to him.
‘Yeah.’ He looked so sad. Poor sad puppy.
‘I’m worried about that patient in C Ward. You know, bed 8.’
David looked at her, she could tell he was drawing a blank.
‘The, uh, Siamese case,’ she added, with awkward emphasis and a dimpled smile.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘What do you mean, what’s the matter?’
‘She’s... well I don’t know, and I’d like your opinion. But I think I’ve found traces of infection on her arms.’ A careful, dramatic pause. ‘They might have to go.’
He sighed. ‘Okay, give me a minute.’ And a minute had been half an hour, but finally he’d appeared and given her an electric pat on her shoulder. ‘Let’s go take a look.’
But when they’d walked down through C Ward, 8 was empty. The covers pulled out and spilled across the ward like a white linen wound.
The old bitch had gone, had danced away on her two left feet.

Early Saturday morning it rained. All along Evan’s bay, a hard grey mist.
There was a check point by the lighthouse, concrete blocks pulled out to stop traffic, but no-one there. Just sand bags, boxes of supplies. So she’d walked on through.
Such sights, downtown. Such amazing sights. And the bulldozers and cranes trying to put it all back together again. Parked vans with flashing lights. Voices calling out to her – no, no. Hands over the ears. No more time to listen to them now.
Out in the harbour – if you looked you could see pieces of it sticking out, like one of those sculptures they put around town. Just another thing that didn’t mean anything. And on the hill behind her, something tall and beautiful, another useless bit of modern art.
Nothing in the sky though. It was vast and grey, with nary a word to say to anyone.
At the Cenotaph they had water blasters, there were three of them cleaning the pavement. One of them saw her, froze like a deer in headlights, but all she was there to do was walk up to the metal pole (it was there, exactly where she’d lost it), snatch it up, and walk on.
Strange how she couldn’t remember her own name, or anything of her life from before, but she’d known exactly where to find that pole. The big round base clunked against the footpath as she made her way uphill, clunked with a dull echo as she walked beneath the overhanging motorway.

She thought a lot about the voice. Tried to remember it, things it had said to her. But the love and the heat had gone for good, and afterwards only the effects remained. Only the lessons it had taught her.
‘Ma,’ she said, clunking up this long, leafy street. What was this street called? Those were the Gardens, over there.
‘Ga,’ she said. Tired from a steep climb, leaning against the pole for a moment and watching a queer old building that may once have been a fire station.
‘Ret,’ she said. That sounded about right. These shops looked familiar. The chip shop run by that Chinese couple. Closed of course. No chips today. Oh don’t think about food – she didn’t care if she never ate again. Couldn’t stomach the idea. Too wet, too warm, too red.
So quiet along here. Every now and then a car rolled past. Green recycling bins out on the street – that was funny. And people sorting through them, like furtive little birds picking out treasure for their nests. Worried eyes looking up at her. No, I will not hurt you, you are beneath my notice.
But what about this! All of this greenery. She looked around herself in a daze, it was all around her, all so green and lush. The bushes came down off the hill and straight onto the street, they were so alive, so full of wriggling things which hid and fucked and ate and gave birth to each other, how had she never noticed this before? She knew instinctively that she had come this way often, had never once stopped to appreciate what was happening on the side of this road. How?
Her head had been full of thoughts, of course. Full of cares and worries. Ma-Ga-Ret. That sound represented some sort of pattern, a cage in which she’d sat, patrolled and guarded by an evil jailor, a wicked face looking down at her through the steel bars, grinning and taunting her. But now - nothing above her but a calm grey sky. The voice had come, and now the rain had stopped. So much to be grateful for. Oh well.
There was something she was supposed to do.
She kept walking, wondering at the world around her, but couldn’t work out what it was.
Lucky for her, a car coming the other way stopped beside her.
‘Margaret!?’ said the woman driving the car.
She paused in her walking, looked in through the open window. A face she recognised stared back with mouth hanging open.
‘Oh my God, is that you? Get in the car.’ The driver leaned over, the door popped open.
She shook her head.
‘Are you all right? What happened to you? Your face!’
She said nothing. Peered in through the open door. The woman, so dreadfully familiar, sat behind the controls of the car with one leg protruding from beneath her shapeless floral dress.
‘Margaret. My God.’
There was a sound for this woman. A sound and a pattern and a cage. She remembered it, said it.
‘Sho. Na.’
‘Yes, it’s me. Are you all right? Get in.’
Again she shook her head. The woman stared, made an exasperated motion with her hands, then looked back down the road.
‘Are you heading for the house?’
The correct thing to do would be to nod. She nodded.
‘Can you make it? You look terrible. Listen... I’m going down to the garden centre, you know? They have a station there for food, I have to go and get food. For the kids. Can you walk? Can you make it back to the house?’
Another nod. And a flash of memory – she hated this woman.
‘Craig is at home but he’s sick. I mean, he’s injured, he’s in bed. The kids are there. Are you going to be okay to walk? You sure you don’t want to get in?’

(Shona stared at her. Her sister shook her head. Thin and drawn, dressed in a nightgown with bandages and wire running across her face, stains of old blood seeping through the gauze. Margaret gestured to the pole, as if to say it wouldn’t fit inside the car, or perhaps to demonstrate it would help her walk home.)
‘...Okay. I’ll see you back at the house?’
(Margaret nodded. For fuck's sake, she was always like this - impossible)
‘I’ll be back there in half an hour. Make sure you go straight there. My God, you look terrible. But thank God, I mean, you’re alive. Okay. I’ll see you at the house.’

She watched as the woman, as the despicable creature in the car swung the door shut and used her one leg to manipulate the pedals of the car, an automatic. A “customised Volvo”, that’s right. Little flashes of memory.
“Craig is at home but he’s sick.” Ah yes. Craig. Where is the rent money.
“The kids are there.”
A long moment out there under the grey sky, thinking and remembering. Yes. Craig and the kids. That would be a start. And then the woman would be home in half an hour.
She turned and started walking with a clunk. That was the round base of the metal pole striking the pavement. The pole. She’d rescued it on her way over. Knew there had to be a reason for that. The metal on the base had gone black, sticky and grimy with residue.
Birds singing somewhere nearby. So many things to be grateful for.

Part Four - Margaret

MM-
Always the same scene, the street, the car yard, the burning museum.

Two figures walked past, one supporting the other. Dragging, even. Perhaps the second one was asleep, or dead.
And the one walking, the one doing all the work, looked up and saw her.
Shouted straight up to her.
Said: “Enjoying yourself? Eh?”
She was trying to understand it. This movie.
“Enjoying yourself up there?”

Always the same image, the waterfront. The wreckage and the water, the strange form there, out in the harbour, a tree that had lost its leaves. And the smell of smoke.
Someone smoking in the cinema.
“Put that out!” she warned. Shining the light around the theatre, but then she was alone of course.
You’re in shock.
But a sensible reaction nonetheless, it was a non-smoking cinema. In fact the whole country was non-smoking now.
Poor dad, him and his rollies.
MMA-
“See what it says here,” he said.
She turned and found him filling a pint glass from a dirty brown bottle. He showed it to her. “Export strength. Means it’s stronger than regular Guinness.”
MA. MAA.
“Seven point five percent.”
And her mother tutting.
“So needless. Doesn’t need to be so violent.”
But of course Mum had no idea. They’d neither of them been to the movies in twenty years, they had no idea of the kind of filthy thing they showed nowadays.
She would have tried to explain it to them, but Margaret couldn’t follow it herself. She couldn’t make the story out at all. It had changed. There were kids, they were driving, and a horrible man with leaking eyes, and the water poured out over everything, dirty water pouring onto the streets, creeping slowly along the tarmac, but then again there were fires and shouts, people running. The people were put into cages. And the man was enormous, tall as a building, once or twice you saw him walking in the distance. And there were lights in the sky, arms coming from the ocean, and –
“Bloody fool,” said her father.
Meaning her of course.

MAAARR.
“Poor dear.” Her mother.
Her mother and father weren’t here, she was alone.
She knew this. She was sitting alone in cinema 7 and she’d gone into shock.
And the man wasn’t walking through the city a hundred metres tall, he was behind her somewhere, out in the hallway. Looking for her.
Going to find her.
GAR.
____ her, kill her.

RET.
There was that voice again – so it was real after all. Drifting into her thoughts, a huge gentle voice from the sky.
MAR-GAR-ET.
Her breath caught in her lungs, she waited and listened.
MARGARET.
A hush.
DON’T BE AFRAID.
Silence hanging in the air of the theatre.

DON’T BE AFRAID.

Out in the hallway, the headphones off. Tuning her senses to her surroundings, as an animal might do.
There. He was there, she could hear him. Back towards the snack counter.
MAR MAR DON’T BE
Limping silently across the carpet, clutching her torch.
Squinting, searching shapes out of the darkness. Only the faintest impressions, dark grey against black – she almost walked into something, a line of poles with a chain running along them.
DON’T BE SCARED.
She wasn’t scared. This was how it happened at the end of these movies, after everyone else was dead there’d be one girl left. They’d chase her and hurt her, pull her hair, make her scream and run. They’d go on an on, chasing her for hours, days, a lifetime. Day after day, chasing her to work, chasing her home again, back and forth.
And then (sometimes) the girl would stop running.
She’d turn around and you could tell from the look in her eyes that she wasn’t
DON’T BE
“I’m not,” she said.
The man was here, at the sound of her voice he groaned, rose to his feet. Seven or eight metres away, the other side of the big round escalator well.
She hefted the torch,
then had a better idea.
She lay the torch down on the carpet, aimed it towards him, and clicked it on. There he was, spotlit in the darkness, a Halloween monster. Except the light was on his legs and body, he was shambling around the curve of the banister but you couldn’t see his face. That wouldn’t matter. She straightened up, she was beside the last of the line of metal poles, which she uncoupled from its chain. It was a metre long, with a round metal base. Heavy, but she could manage it. She hefted it, swung the base up to shoulder height, wielded it like a top-heavy softball bat. Watched as the man stumbled towards her. Licked her lips. Tightened her grip. Watched. She could see it in her mind, a dotted line, the arc that the pole would take as it swung through the air to connect with the side of his head. He needed to come a little closer. Just a few more seconds. Here, now. Grunting with the exertion, it swung and it made the same sound as if she’d thumped it into the floor, a dull carpet thud. He staggered but he was still standing. She took a step back, hefted up the pole, swung again. Swung up this time, brought it down on the top of his head, and this time the flattened base dug in and you could hear something break, like slate cracking. The man said: “Uuuu.” Couldn’t see but it was stuck now, she had to wrench it back and forth to free it from him, and then suddenly streamers of blood were pouring down the front of him. “Uuu-uuu.” She was giggling now. Heft, swing. Thump. Heft… swing… thump. Spots of blood on her hands, on the lens of the torch. Thump. THUMP. A hard, solid blow to his broken skull. He went straight over the banister, tumbled into the well and dropped out of sight.
There was a deep CLUD as he glanced off the escalator, and then a SMACK as he struck the foodcourt tiles.
Her shoulders shook.
MAR-GARR-ET.
The owner of that voice, the Kindness above her, was smiling. Its smile was filling her entire mind – as if her life, her thoughts and memories were a landscape, and that beautiful smile was a golden sun.
It said:
AGAIN.
She was fighting for breath in a frenzy of laughter.
AGAIN.

A strange feeling of elation had come over her. She didn’t feel tired or hungry at all. Perhaps a little thirsty. Calm and excited both at once – and happy. For the first time in years she felt genuinely happy.
She made her way down the steps of Cinema 7, testing the uncertain footing with the smeared base of her pole. The gaping rift – the movie screen – teased her face with bad smells and a cold breeze. She approached it, inspected the terrain beyond, then stepped through.
The back wall of the Courtney Central complex had collapsed to form a snowdrift of cement, girders and reinforcement cables. Margaret picked her way down it like a staircase, it was easy.
She was in the film now. Was she?
She hesitated.
No, she was in shock. Something awful was happening, something too big to name, and she’d killed a –
AGAIN
– that’s right. That’s right. She smiled, content and eager, and picked her way down to the lot below.

Everything was flooded.
Wakefield Street had transformed into a lagoon of thick green sludge – in places it was climbing up the walls. It stank. Margaret gave it a wide berth, making her way along the high ground of the rubble. Many of the nearby buildings had collapsed.
She came down into an alley. It was strewn with corpses. They fascinated her, the way they lay about. Like a pre-school class on their afternoon nap. But if you leaned closer you saw their eyes and mouths were open.
There was a scuffle of movement further along, out towards the street. A young woman teetering on her feet. A ripped blouse, a short skirt… but she saw with relief that the skin hung off her like wet pastry and the eyes had rotted away to pits.
The muscles in Margaret’s arms and shoulders sang as she hoisted and swung, swung, swung the pole.
AGAIN. MORE.
She found more in the street: three of them staggering beneath a tilted traffic light. It looked like too many. Regretfully she walked the other way.
This was Taranaki Street, she realised. Incredible. It had transformed into something else. A waste land. The whole precious, mad, exclusive world, all of the places she didn't belong.
It was funny to think that buildings stood proud, they looked as tall and hard as mountains, but give them a push and they came apart into the cheap materials they were made from. Worthless junk. Concrete, fibreglass, plasterboard. And people were the same. She inspected her pole. Gobbets of red matter and strands of hair clung to the base.
She found another one in an alley (or what remained of one) across the road, it had been injured by falling debris and was trying to stand.
It didn’t tire her, in fact afterwards she was brimming with energy.
Limping faster, almost jogging, with the base of the pole clank-clanking along the asphalt.

HA HA HA. MORE.
The library was still standing. She got one on the street near the library.
In the darkened hull of a fast food restaurant, two.
MORE.
Something strange at the end of Willis Street – she found one, an old man, he was up against a wall, a metre off the ground with his limbs splayed, and he was spreading out like ivy, actually growing into the bricks.
She couldn’t reach any higher than his chest, but she hammered at his ribs until they came apart in a horrible mess.
AGAIN.
Hard to walk here, there was so much fallen glass, tumbled piles of concrete and cement.
There was a group in the little park, she couldn’t tell which type they were. They began calling to her, so she put the headphones on.
And maybe she was tired after all, because a little ways further on she was sick. Her skin felt clammy, it flashed hot and cold.
MARR-GARR-ET.
Yes.
MARGARET NEED MORE.
Yes, she thought, wiping the slime from her lips. Of course, yes. She only needed a minute or two to catch her breath.
LOOK
There was a fire up ahead, a massive fire.
NEED YOU TO –
Okay. Okay.
She limped on.
Shapes ahead, moving, gathering. A big group. Too many. But they were slow – the right kind, mostly, the eyeless kind although there were others too.
YES NEED TO MARGARET AGAIN MORE
Fighting. A man at the edge was swinging his fists. A girl with blood on her face was swinging a long stick. But it was useless, there were too many. Too late for either of them.
NEED
Margaret looked around, wondering where to start.
There was one. Short but very obese, a woman, on the outskirts of the group.
YES
Here was another, a child. But they’d seen her now. She just had time to…
THANK YOU
…before their hands were clutching at her, catching her wrists, pulling her weapon away.
MORE
But no, impossible, there wouldn’t be more. They had her now. They had the man too. They had the girl and they were dragging her to the front, her eyes were round and bulging, she was screaming like a girl in a movie.
MORE
AGAIN MORE
I can’t, she thought.
Too many.
NEED
They carried the girl away. Something was happening at the front.
DON’T BE AFRAID
She wasn’t, she wasn’t. God she didn’t care any more, she felt sick, they were hurting her, pushing deep inside the throng.
NEED
The mass of bodies, staring eyeless eyes, the terrible stink of their flesh but she didn’t care let her die here please she was so tired everything had fallen down you
dead you crazy _____
crazy _____ same as always
was she crazy yes she was crazy leave her alone she knew she was crazy alone useless a murderer so let her die just let her die
MARGARET
but then the voice in her head the sun in her mind flexing like a muscle pouring new light
warmth
energy it poured into her like fire into the heart of her the sadness and sorrow like water and the collision was ANGER like steam so much ANGER blind unreasoning her mouth stretching open
as if it had been building her entire life and it had it had been building and building with every limping step every suspicious stare and whispered criticism why should it be HER to die why HER and not THEM it was THEIR fault it was THEIR FUCKING fault she was this way her life was this way NOT HERS THEIRS keep her at home box her in LAUGH at her friendless a charity case well FUCK THEM fire steam blasting away the weight of the water and inertia was she screaming yes she thought so she seemed to be writhing in their grasp trying to hold her down FUCK YOU like a mad thing sinking her teeth into flesh her thumbs into melted eye sockets elbow back into a jaw fingers thrusting forward the flesh of a throat grasping through skin pulling levering her body turning biting knee flung up into the cushion of a stomach grasping an ear wrenched from a head hair wrenched from a head screaming kicking free of their grasp falling hands closing around a lump of concrete standing swing the rock into a face another face teeth spitting from gums swing the rock into a neck rip the flesh bash it crack it there’s the stick a pool cue jab it into a mouth wrench it sideways the wood splitting the face splitting
YES
THANK YOU MARGARET
MORE
AGAIN
YES
THANK YOU

Part Three - Margaret

It was difficult to keep control of herself. The alarm was very loud.
No-one had told her there would be a drill. She hovered, watching the patrons rise from their seats.
‘Not those doors please,’ she said.
She said: ‘Not those doors!’
But it was no use, they either weren’t listening or they couldn’t hear. Dozens of them had walked down and opened the emergency doors.
She couldn’t remember what was supposed to happen. The last drill had been months ago. And to run a drill during business hours? – but perhaps it was children, she realised. Perhaps children had gotten into the fire alarm and set it off.
A patron stumbled into her and said:
Margaret turned to leave.
But the patron, a fat woman, took hold of her arm.
She said:
Margaret said: ‘Don’t touch me. I don’t know. You’ll have to talk to a manager.’
Impossible to hear anything over the alarm. It was deafening.
And the patrons were everywhere, going where they weren’t supposed to – Margaret had to stifle a scream.
It wasn’t supposed to go like this, she knew that. But she didn’t know what to do.

The noise was ringing through the whole complex. Ringing from above, ringing up from below. She looked around for the shift manager, but there were only patrons, milling shapes, dozens of people, hundreds maybe, pouring out of different theatres and rushing to the stairs and the escalators.
Bumping, jostling. ‘Watch where you’re _______ going, ____.’ A man had almost fallen down the escalator shaft.
She spotted uniforms, a couple of the girls hurrying out amongst the customers. Who was the shift manager tonight? She couldn’t even remember that.
Margaret limped into the staff room. The sound had driven all the thoughts from her head. You’d expect to leave it behind you, but you couldn’t get away from it - it was in here too, loud and immediate.
She checked the roster. It was Arthur. That was bad. As a manager Arthur was short tempered even under normal conditions. He’d said to her: ‘Margaret we don’t need to keep you on. We don’t need to pay you if you're not doing your job.’
The floor shook, she almost fell. It shook again, and again.

And the alarm rang and rang and rang and rang.
She'd thought that they'd come find her in the staff room, but when it was clear that they wouldn't, that she'd made another mistake – they were somewhere else, out on the
water
and she would invariably be blamed for not joining them – she pushed the table over to block the door. Then she crouched in a corner with her headphones on.

Finally the alarm stopped. She barely registered this; the sound had blasted itself onto her eardrums as a perpetual ringing, and the howling anxiety it brought with it had pushed her further and further inside herself.
The floor shook and shook. Margaret sat amongst a devastation of fallen paperwork and bulletin boards. She stared across the room at a poster on the far wall, a Coca Cola poster in which grotesque eyeless monsters bared their teeth at her, appeared to scream.
They made her think of the child, Shona's offspring, with its pistol and its evil face. “Blam blam”.
“You're dead you thirsty _____.”

Later the lights went out.
Time passed strangely in the black silence.
Flailing limbs drowned faces pressed up against the glass as the buses sank deeper into the blue black water.

Margaret roused herself, lifted her head.
Listened through the insulation of her headphones.
There was nothing. The panic had stopped.
The shaking had stopped.

She shifted onto her knees, then stood.
Painfully. She'd been sitting on her leg.
She fumbled through the darkness for a moment before she remembered her torch. The staff room was in a terrible state. She'd have to tidy it before she clocked off, but she didn't know where to start.
She shifted the beam across to the barricaded door, watched it with some apprehension.
No-one had told her there'd be a drill.
Pangs in her leg, threats of a cramp, she needed to move it.

Outside the foyer, the snack counter and the escalator shafts were as dark and lifeless as the staff room. She went to the counter and found that the till had fallen over, as had dozens of bags of M&Ms and Maltesers, the pre-filled bags of popcorn, a dirty feast scattered across the linoleum.
She could hear the sound of dripping water from somewhere below.
But something strange was going on, because the films were still running. She could hear the familiar movies sounds, distant through the walls, of shouting and screams and thuds and thumps. Car engines roaring, glass breaking. The anonymous bass grumble of things being destroyed.
Had the patrons come back in?
Were they were running the films from where they'd left off? Surely they'd have done something about the lights. A chill ran across her shoulders, and a voice tried to warn her of something but it was quickly smothered.
She walked to the top of the steps, and of the escalators coming up, which had stopped.
Someone was lying there, on the steps. She lay in such a way that her head was on a lower step than her feet, with her hair spread out and her skirt hiked up immodestly. One of the girls, she realised. The one who'd told Margaret she didn't need to always watch the same movie.
Beyond her, down near the ground floor ticket counter, she again heard the dripping water. She moved the torch beam and it found a man standing there, in front of the big poster display. He had his head tilted down, and two streams of dirty brown water were pouring from his eyes onto the white tiles. Like a funny exaggeration of crying. He just stood there, and the water splashed out for a while longer. Then it slowed to a trickle.
Margaret opened her mouth to say something, but decided against it. She stepped back, a little quickly, and the torch "ting"ed against the metal railing.
The man looked up. His eyes were weeping black cavities. He said: _______ .
He staggered towards the foot of the steps.

Margaret limped past the queuing point and the ticket collection podium, into the corridor which accessed the theatres.
She considered the toilets, and the door to the large cinema, but decided on a cinema further down. Her theatre, the one screening Land's End.
Her shock-clouded mind cautioned her not to run. The man couldn't see. He couldn't catch up, and there was no danger of him finding her. To reassure herself she cast the beam back to the foyer, and while she could certainly hear his slow wet footsteps mounting the steps, the man himself had yet to materialise.
So no cause for alarm.
She swung through the cinema door and felt a cold draft on her cheek. The theatre was filled with faint bluish light, and as Margaret limped further inside it seemed for a moment as if the film had resumed playing, or a different film, a disaster film set on the waterfront at night. The used car lot behind the theatre complex lay in a ruin of upturned cars (although none were burning) and beyond that Te Papa had been gouged, as if a child had taken clumsy handfuls out of an enormous cake.
Margaret felt suddenly exhausted. She took short, shaking steps up into the back of the cinema, the loose end of her headphones cord trailing behind her.
The back rows were fully intact; she gratefully collapsed into a seat there.
Collapsed and waited to see if the man would find his way into the theatre. What was left of the theatre.
But if you let your mind wander, as Margaret did now, you could almost convince yourself that it was a film, that the screen and the cinema's front wall hadn't fallen away, and that what you were watching was part of the show, light dancing onto canvas.
“Only a movie”. A slow, quiet movie where often nothing moved, but elsewhere there was shouting and running, and distant fires which shone their amber light onto the rubble before her, and the smoke from which sometimes drifted into frame, momentarily obscuring the view.
And often nothing moved, but the devil was in the details. If you watched carefully you saw a section of the museum's wall crumble, and all sorts of strange items come tumbling out – mannequins, skeletons, the wing of an old aeroplane. If you looked closer you'd see the shapes of people moving within the innards of the vast museum – struggling, fighting.
And if you looked past that, further out to the harbour itself, you'd see silent masses of stringy matter lifting up from the water and weaving together, weaving themselves into enormously tall, monstrously thin spires. Like antennae. Like great knitting needles pointing up to heaven.

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.

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