Fish 'n' Chip Shop Song and Other Stories Read online

  fish ’n’ chip shop song

  AND OTHER STORIES

  Having won prizes in major national competitions for four of these stories, had several selected for anthologies of significant New Zealand writing, with numerous broadcast on radio and one even translated into Mandarin, Carl Nixon was long overdue for a book of his own, collecting his stories together. So, here they are. Stories that evoke the South Island landscape as well as the New Zealand urban expanse. Stories that take surprising turns as they explore such things as ‘saving’ a pet parrot, a fruiterer’s true love, a return to Crete, an anticipated seduction and the dreams of a suburban mercenary. There are characters to charm and alarm the reader, characters that are startlingly different and characters that are just like us. There are songs of love and tales of loss, there’s humour and there’s poignancy. Each beautifully told story resonates with a moving depth of emotional understanding.

  ‘With no flamboyance, but with talent and a scrupulous art, Carl Nixon establishes himself as one of our best younger writers’ — Owen Marshall

  fish ’n’ chip

  shop song

  AND OTHER STORIES

  carl nixon

  For Rebecca

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  King Tut’s Last Feather

  The Apple of his Eye

  The Battle of Crete

  The Seduction

  Like Wallpaper

  Dreams of a Suburban Mercenary

  The Distant Man

  Fish ’n’ Chip Shop Song

  Maniototo Six

  Weight

  Family Life

  The Raft

  Tuesday’s Child

  Experiments in SPACE and TIME

  My Father Running with a Dead Boy

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  King Tut’s Last Feather

  when Maurice Harbidge was killed by a speeding sheep truck on a lonely bend of State Highway 73 it seemed only right that his best friend King Tut was with him. Eyes open, staring upwards, Maurice lay on a tussock-covered patch of ground. The spot was just past where the highway first scales the rugged defences of the Southern Alps and dips down again, flattening out near Lake Lyndon, frozen white in winter, and then winds along a broad valley at the foot of eroded mountain ranges. A great hollow in the mountains like vast cupped hands. A lonely place. The only sound after the initial squeal of brakes was the bleating of sheep from the decks of the truck that had killed him. Surrounded by the bald, shingle-topped mountains in this vastness of tussock land, King Tut stood beside Maurice’s body and cried out his loss into the emptiness.

  The young and the old are often the last to be told about tragic events. Although I had seen him two or three times a week for my whole life, it wasn’t until my mother sent me down to Mr Greenslade the butcher for a kilogram of lamb chops, to bring back wrapped in shiny greaseproof paper, that I heard the story of Maurice’s death.

  I was glad of the errand although I complained when asked to go, more out of a sense of twelve-year-old independence than real annoyance. The truth is that I was bored, and the short walk was a welcome diversion. The exhilarating freedom of December with the accompanying expectation of Christmas had been replaced by January apathy. My best friends Tim and Cam Marsden had gone away with their family to visit relatives in the North Island and wouldn’t be back for days. School didn’t start again for two weeks which was a lifetime.

  I walked along the verge of the main road. Our town was built among the first pubescent swellings of the land into gentle foothills before the mountains. The smattering of shops and houses clung to the edge of the highway down which townies and tour buses and heavy trucks bound for the city or places north flashed by. People rarely slowed to the legal fifty kilometres an hour unless they were planning on pulling over to buy a milkshake from the dairy or a steaming packet of fish and chips from Mr Kimball’s. People were eager to get to where they were going which was never here.

  Parting the hanging strips of coloured plastic that kept the flies out, I went into the butcher’s. Inside was goose-bump cool. The air drifted out from the open freezer in waves smelling of blood and seasoned sausage stuffing. Mr Greenslade glanced at me and raised his eyebrows in greeting but did not stop his conversation.

  ‘I’ve got a cousin who’s a traffic cop in Christchurch, so when I heard I rang him up after work and had a bit of a yarn.’ The meat cleaver punctuated his words with the crunching crack of metal on bone.

  ‘Is that right?’ Willie Toogood’s mother leaned forward. She wore a floral cotton dress and I noticed that the fat around her ankles spilled over the top of her shoes.

  ‘Straight from the horse’s mouth. In the Castle Hill Basin. They found the tyre-jack where he dropped it.’ Thump. Bone being split from bone. ‘He must’ve crouched down by the wheel and the sheep truck just came around a bit of a bend and clipped him.’

  ‘How awful.’

  I was only half listening. I stared blankly at a couple of fresh chickens naked and white in the window. Mr Greenslade’s hands seemed to work by themselves as he quickly folded paper around the meat without looking down.

  ‘The truck driver told the police that the poor bugger was lying in the tussock on the side of the road. Reckoned he looked like he was sleeping. Hardly a mark on him, although they’re saying he must’ve died instantly.’

  ‘How terrible.’

  He handed the wrapped meat to Mrs Toogood and the till dinged as he rang up the sale. ‘And that bloody parrot just sitting there on his chest.’

  It was only then that I knew he was talking about Maurice. Maurice Harbidge who rolled my ice creams and scooped out the mixed lollies behind the counter of his mother’s dairy. Tall, thin Maurice. Maurice with the high whistling laugh of a little boy. King Tut’s friend and constant companion. Maurice was dead.

  I was a country kid and thought that I knew about death. I’d seen my father twist the necks of chickens with a sudden violent wringing of his hands, and eaten them for dinner just a few hours later. I’d shot rabbits for fun with my cousin Mat’s gun. But Maurice’s death scared me. Standing in the butcher’s shop, it occurred to me that if Death could round a bend smelling of sheep shit and hot wool and take Maurice just like that, then He could come for any one of us just as suddenly and in just as elaborate a disguise.

  I could not remember a time when the bird had not been perched on Maurice’s bony shoulder. King Tut gave Maurice a certain piratical flair, a quality not often seen in workers in the dairies of small rural towns. He was always called King Tut. Never just Tut. As though King was a first name like Matthew or Ben or Rangi. He was a large bird with a powerful curved beak. ‘A macaw,’ Maurice called him. ‘All the way from South America.’ And the colours. King Tut shone red and orange and yellow and green and at least three shades of blue near the tips of his wings. It was hard to believe that such brightness existed in our town. Colours that bright were reserved for the cars of rich holidaymakers and skiers passing through, and for new Coca-Cola billboards before dust from the passing trucks turned them shades of grey.

  Six days a week you could find Maurice behind the counter of his mother’s dairy with King Tut sitting up on his shoulder. My friends and I came in to buy white paper bags stuffed with chewy milk bottles, Eskimo men in pink and white, orange and chocolate jaffas or aniseed wheels, bags of powdered sherbet. They all sat under the Harbidges’ glass counter, displayed like museum exhibits. Next to the till was a jar full of liquorice straps curled up like garden snails.

  At the sound of the bell over the door Maurice
would appear from out the back where he lived with his mother, even though he was almost forty when he died. King Tut would bob up and down on Maurice’s shoulder and twist his rainbow head from side to side in delight. Often he’d leap down and strut backwards and forwards along the counter.

  ‘What can I do you for? What can I do you for?’ Each word was a drawn-out croak like a rusty door hinge, but the meaning was always clear enough. King Tut had a whole heap of things he could say and just when you thought you’d heard them all Maurice would teach him a new one. ‘Gidday, mate!’ and ‘Did ya like that then?’ were two of his favourites. A few times I heard him sing the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth. ‘Dah dah dah dahhhh!’

  ‘Good boy,’ Maurice always said and rubbed King Tut on the top of his head.

  ‘Good boy! Good boy!’ King Tut would croak in delight.

  Only a fool wouldn’t have been able to tell that those two loved each other.

  I’d heard Dad say once that Maurice ‘wasn’t the full quid’ as if he was the same as Mr Winters who lived four doors down from us. On windy nights I would hear old Winters out in his backyard yelling dirty words at the sky and kicking the trunks of the pine trees, blaming them for his lack of sleep. He went on like that until his daughter came and took him inside. But Maurice wasn’t at all the same.

  Around his mother and other adults Maurice was pretty quiet, but what most of them didn’t know was that Maurice was one of the most popular people in town. King Tut made him a star. Kids went out of their way to come into the shop just to see Maurice and King Tut. Walking down the street, Maurice would be stopped every five minutes by some kid wanting to talk about King Tut, how he was and what new words Maurice had taught him.

  But it was at the Saturday afternoon movies that Maurice and King Tut achieved real fame. They attended every week without fail, and sat in the same seats up the front in the middle. It was a contest to see who would sit next to Maurice and King Tut. Maurice never came with anyone, not a girl or anyone, so the seats on either side were always up for grabs. Kids arrived an hour early just to get those seats. King Tut liked Westerns the best. He would bob up and down faster and faster during the horse chase scenes. Whenever there was a gunshot King Tut would cry out, ‘Take that ya varmint!’ and Maurice would open his mouth wide and laugh his high laugh along with everyone else in the flickering light of the old movie theatre.

  It got to be a bit of a ritual that at the end of the movie, when the good guy shot the baddy down in the street, all the kids would yell along with King Tut.

  ‘Take that ya varmint!’

  King Tut would turn on Maurice’s shoulder and face the audience. He knew everyone was watching him and he loved it. He’d bob up and down so that it looked exactly like he was bowing. That bird was a born showman.

  Although I was too young at the time to express it clearly, I guess Maurice needed that bird. King Tut made him whole. Without him Maurice would have just been Mrs Harbidge’s unmarried son who worked in the dairy six days a week. He might even have been a bit creepy, shy and tall and skinny as he was, the subject of kids’ whispered conversations and shouted abuse. But with King Tut on his shoulder Maurice was the most popular guy in town.

  The only person who didn’t like King Tut was Maurice’s mother. It was never anything she said that revealed her dislike. Not in front of the customers anyway. Her opinion of King Tut was revealed by small signs. Whenever the bird screeched or cried out, her pale forehead would corrugate up. Or her mouth would pucker into a tight bloodless hole — ‘Her cat’s ass mouth,’ Tim called it — as she watched him pull affectionately at Maurice’s ear.

  Once I saw her putting tins of spaghetti on the shelves when King Tut screeched. In the background Mrs Harbidge simply froze, a tin of spaghetti suspended in the air, her neck stiff and white like plaster. No one else saw it. She stayed perfectly still and then she just moved again as if nothing had happened.

  King Tut had been a present from Maurice’s Dad just before he died of a heart attack. Looking back now, I don’t think Mrs Harbidge ever forgave him either act.

  I didn’t go to the funeral. My mother said that a funeral was no place for a twelve-year-old. Instead I wandered down to the stand of gums near the church. The sap from the trunk stuck to my fingers and as I climbed I could hear the muted sound of a hymn. From the fork of a branch high above the ground I watched the people come out.

  Mrs Harbidge wore an old-fashioned hat with a dark veil that came down over her face. She stood alone near the hearse and people went up to her in ones and twos. Watching from the tree, it seemed they moved away quickly, afraid, I thought, to be near her too long in case her bad luck, like head lice, jumped over to them. And still I couldn’t see King Tut. No flash of sunflower yellow or poppy red among the dark clothes of the mourners. There was no squawk or cry of ‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’ as the coffin was loaded into the long black hearse for the short drive to the cemetery.

  ‘Of course Mrs Harbidge didn’t bring the bird,’ said my father when I asked him about it that evening. He seemed amused that I had mentioned it.

  ‘I should think not,’ said my mother. ‘Imagine the squawking and carrying on.’ She clanked the oven door shut to show that the topic was closed.

  I didn’t say anything, but it seemed to me that King Tut should have been the chief mourner. I imagined him sitting on top of the casket, his colours rivalling the stained-glass window behind. I didn’t think he would have cried out or carried on during the service. After all, who loved Maurice more than King Tut?

  I didn’t see King Tut for just over a year after that.

  At first the local kids talked about the accident and speculated about what had happened to King Tut. But as time slid by like a slow river they ceased to question where he was except perhaps as a passing thought brought on by a patch of deepest red in the sunset or a lime green wrapper blowing in the gutter.

  I had only been back to Harbidges’ Dairy once. Mrs Harbidge herself served me. She did not talk beyond telling me the price. Her face was as pale as the milk bottle sweets beneath the glass counter. I half expected King Tut to appear from the top of one of the shelves but there was no squawk or bobbing head. No flash of glowing feathers. The place was still and deserted. It was as though the bleakness of the high country where Maurice died had filled the shop. After that I bought my sweets at the new petrol station where everything was metal shelves and bright lights and I didn’t have to think about Maurice.

  But then it was autumn of the following year. I was alone and practising my place-kicking between the rugby posts down at the domain. The ball bounced end over end and over the fence into the back of Mrs Harbidge’s section. As I bent down to pick it up from the unmown grass, I heard King Tut squawk.

  My palm came away from the window black with dirt. Cupping my hand, I saw that a room at the back of the house had been turned into a dim store room full of junk and boxes. Mrs Harbidge had King Tut in the corner. He was in a rusted cage obviously made for a smaller bird, a canary or a budgie. At first I couldn’t even tell if it was King Tut. His feathers were mostly gone, replaced by patches of wrinkled pale flesh. He reminded me of the baby rats Dad had found in a nest behind the wall and drowned. As I watched, King Tut squawked hollowly and shook the bars with his feet.

  The window wasn’t locked, and it rattled in its frame as I pried it up and climbed through. The room smelt of mildew and bird shit.

  ‘Hey boy. Remember me?’

  King Tut threw himself backwards, thrashing his wings. He squatted among the piles of white shit that had built up like stalagmites on the floor of the cage and glared at me with one yellowed eye. His plucked breast rose and fell. Watching him, I knew that King Tut was mad.

  I imagined him there in the dark room every day since Maurice had died, shut in this cage with no one for company. I knew Mrs Harbidge would never talk to him, never take him out or stroke his head as Maurice had done. She’d obviously been giving him food and water,
but that was it. I doubted King Tut had even seen a cage before this.

  ‘It’s going to be okay.’ I poked my fingers through the bars, but he backed away. Shit streaked his remaining feathers. Reaching down, he yanked another feather from his breast. A thin trickle of blood followed the wrinkles of his pale skin. This was not the King Tut who sat on Maurice’s shoulder bowing and playing to the movie crowd. Maurice’s friend was gone, lost in endless days of loneliness and loss.

  Slowly I opened the cage door. The hinges were stiff. King Tut backed away but hardly protested beyond a sad, distant muttering as I picked him up. His eyes rolled in his head. His heart was beating wildly against my palm and I saw that his feathers were faded. What future was there for King Tut now?

  Twisting his head sharply in my hands, I heard a noise like a muffled twig breaking. I half expected a last defiant squawk, but King Tut made no sound.

  King Tut’s body lay in a white shoe box lined with tissue paper. The cemetery was on a gently sloping hill overlooking the road and the scattered houses, and was backed by a row of tall poplars. Their yellow leaves lay over the graves and in drifts against the headstones.

  Using a trowel I had taken from my parents’ garage, I buried King Tut in the grassy earth on top of Maurice’s grave. To mark the spot I put a feather picked up from the floor under his cage. The end I planted in the ground so that it pointed upwards like a flag. I had washed it clean, and in the last sunlight that touched the hilltop the feather shone blue and green, brighter than anything this town had seen before. Or, in all likelihood, ever would again.

  From the distant foothills a sheep’s bleat drifted through the chill autumn air. As the last sunlight slipped beyond the mountains I imagined the cold emptiness of the high country slowly coming down and covering our town like a winter mist. Who was there to stop it now that Maurice and King Tut were gone?