forty

THE DRAWING PINS

SPRING 1984

… can’t believe he’s insisting on sale,’ says Min, dumping a copy of The Whole Earth Catalogue in a cardboard box that had once held New Zealand apples. ‘Is this yours? The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test?’

‘Mack’s,’ says Pete. It was a long time ago and truth to tell he can’t remember, but Mack had liked that sort of stuff. Gravity’s Rainbow, Slaughterhouse Five, books about drug-fuelled road trips or war, and none of them real. Pete didn’t see the point.

Min tosses it into a rubbish bag with the others destined for the second-hand shop. ‘If he wanted it, he should have taken it. I can’t believe he’s being so selfish.’

‘Well, I guess it’s pretty much his property,’ says Pete, sorting through a pile of papers, newsletters and old copies of The Savage that had been stored in the big hall cupboard. He’d forgotten about that: the community newspaper they had produced for a few months in 1972. Somewhere among all this stuff, in this house, there must be the artwork he left behind when he made his bid for freedom back in 1979: posters he had designed for concerts and an outdoor production of Antigone, which had been pinned up in the dark hallway alongside the Cubans: Fidel screenprinted among flowers, Che in vivid pink and blue, or spilling rainbows from the star on his beret, Nixon as a blue alien, grinning his shark’s teeth smile, the kaleidoscope swirl of arrows designed to draw the people to the central square to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution: Todos a la Plaza! Brilliant posters as vividly self-assured as tropical birds. He had left them all behind that night, packed and fled, knowing if he didn’t go that very instant, if he waited only a few hours, until morning, he would be lost. Some of the drawing pins were still embedded on the wall, but of the posters themselves, there was no sign.

‘But you had a share,’ says Min. ‘And I did, too. And Liz and Steve. We all had shares.’

She is looking small and peevish and not in a mood for reason.

‘But Mack had more,’ says Pete. ‘By far. He put in the most back in the day. It’s not his fault the place is worth so much more than when we all chipped in together and now you can’t afford to buy him out.’

He’d had no idea house prices here had risen so much: $110,000!

‘But I found it,’ says Min. ‘It was my idea. I found it and told the rest of you about it. And everyone worked to make the place habitable. We all put in hours and hours of labour. Steve did all that carpentry and we painted and did the floors. Shouldn’t that be worth something? We each put in everything we could afford in time and money.’

‘And we’ve all benefited from that,’ says Pete. He has no idea why he is springing to Mack’s defence here, not after what happened. Some things said and done you don’t forget. Some people you simply can’t forgive. But here he is, arguing Mack’s corner with Min, who probably deserves his sympathy. He is remembering that she had always irritated him, with her vagueness and romantic optimism. He had always had to repress the urge to pinprick her enthusiasms. Or maybe it’s just that he has forgiven Mack? Maybe he really has moved on? Become an incredibly kind and tolerant human being? ‘Look, it’s nothing personal. It’s just maths. Mack put in well over half, so he’s entitled to over half. You should have increased your share once you started work.’

‘I should have done a lot of things,’ says Min. ‘I shouldn’t have got pregnant or, better yet, avoided Mack in the first place. There was just something about the guitar, the blues, the goatskin coat. Do you remember the coat? It stank but it looked so cool …’

Pete remembers the coat, the blues.

‘You could look at it this way,’ he says, becoming even more extreme and why is he doing this? Does he dislike her so very much? ‘You could say that Mack has actually been very reasonable. He has left a substantial amount of money in this place for years and you have been able to continue living here rent-free.’

‘Raising his children,’ says Min. (Why is Pete always so eager to see both sides of a question? Why is he always so bloody reasonable? No wonder he had driven Mack mad.)

‘Well, yes,’ says Pete. ‘But you’ve been earning.’

‘Not as much as Mack,’ says Min. ‘Not since he started at McClintocks.’

And went over to the other side. Got a job with his uncle. Pete has seen Mack just once since he got back from Melbourne, walking down Colombo Street with a tall blonde. He barely recognised him. Long curls shorn, sleek suit, the woman leggy with big hair and shoulder pads. They looked like the sort they called ‘a power couple’, the kind who would feature on the social pages raising a glass at a fundraiser or gallery opening in this deadly little village. McClintock. He has seen the name repeatedly on hoardings attached to demolition sites around the central city where some old house or rundown pub was being cleared to make way for development. McClintock Property. Pete watched them walk by with a momentary pang: Mack had filled out, but there was still that easy loping stride, that air of confident entitlement that had always drawn him, made him hang about in the cold room in this ghastly house far longer than he should have done, before Mack turned, the way he could, that icy flick of the knife, the snake-bite flash of revulsion, and Pete had known it was time to quit, to take his broken heart elsewhere. Should have done it years earlier. Seeing Mack, though, was a shock.

‘He’s loaded,’ says Min. ‘He doesn’t have to toss me and the kids out on the street.’ And the image rises unbidden: herself trailing to the supermarket in shabby trackies, alone in a desolate flat with a flagon of cheap sherry, become one of her own clients, NFF.

‘Don’t be so dramatic,’ says Pete. ‘He’s not tossing you anywhere. He just wants his money out and that’s fair enough.’

‘Do you know, he wanted to pull it down!’ says Min. ‘Buy us all out and pull it down! He showed me the plans. He thought I’d be impressed. Hideous townhouses with angled rooflines and a rooftop terrace, so you could stand up there, and see over the trees to the Port Hills. With a courtyard in the middle instead of a garden, for parking. Can you imagine? He kept talking about how it was such “a great location”. He actually called the house a “property”. A “property” in a “great location”. He never used to talk like that.’

‘But you put a stop to that,’ says Pete. Min’s anger is exhausting. He longs suddenly for Thanh, for his quiet unruffled calm. He’s been here only a week and already cannot wait to leave. Sign the papers, find his artwork, get back on that plane to Melbourne.

Min drags a carton off to add to the heap in the hall. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I did. I wasn’t going to let him do the standard McClintock thing: pulling down beautiful old buildings to make way for another tacky concrete monstrosity.’

‘Not all new buildings are tacky,’ says Pete. ‘We’ve done interiors in some amazing new-builds. And just because something is old doesn’t mean it’s automatically worth saving.’

‘But it’s our history!’ says Min.

‘Well, yes,’ says Pete. ‘But modern buildings will be history, too, someday. What about the Guggenheim in New York? The Pompidou Centre?’

‘Is that the one with the pipes outside?’ says Min. ‘It looks horrible.’

‘It’s not,’ says Pete. ‘It’s fantastic. We visited it last year.’

‘Lucky you,’ says Min. She had never travelled, had stayed anchored to this tiny patch of the planet, to this house in this suffocating little country, while others had come and gone, living here for a time, then moving on.

He tries for local reference. ‘The town hall?’

‘McClintocks don’t build art,’ says Min. ‘They slap up bog-standard tower blocks and Mack used to love old buildings. He’s changed.’

‘Well, he’s gone,’ says Pete. ‘And don’t fret. Plenty more fish in the sea.’

‘I know,’ says Min. ‘And I’m not fretting. He picks his nose when he thinks no one’s looking and there’s that revolting outie.’

Pete remembers the outie. Mack’s belly button. He remembers the flat on Riccarton Road, the two of them flying on the Triumph on narrow tarmac, heading north to some demonstration. What was it? Agnew? Truxtun? He can’t remember. What he remembers is the road, the bike, sleeping rough under some pine trees near Kaikoura, the best, the golden time. He remembers the outie. The single flaw on that long lean body, stretched beneath the stars. But now is probably not the time to mention that.

‘The thing is, I just don’t want to leave this place,’ says Min, suddenly dissolving into tears. He’d forgotten how readily she cried. Her nose goes all pink and squashy. ‘The kids love it here.’

Sunny is an unappealing little thug who appears to have broken every single window in the conservatory, and Zoe whines.

‘They’ll survive,’ says Pete. ‘You’ll survive.’

She dabs at her nose with a handkerchief dragged from her sleeve. Disgusting habit. He had forgotten about handkerchiefs: surely everyone uses tissues these days?

‘It feels like the end of a dream,’ she says. ‘All of us living together, sharing resources …’

‘Arguing over the petrol log for the van,’ says Pete. ‘And the roster for the TV and hogging the bathroom and not washing the dishes, driving each other mad …’

‘I know,’ says Min, who will not be comforted. ‘But it was an attempt to live differently, wasn’t it? And it was always interesting. So much better than being parked in the suburbs with fences on all sides, not knowing your neighbours.’

The bitter woman from next door in Brunswick Street who had regarded Thanh with eyes like razors, the quiet man who died in the downstairs flat and wasn’t found until the flies swarmed at the windows …

‘Neighbours can be very overrated,’ says Pete. ‘Anyway, that was then, this is now. Time to strike out on your own, Minnie. You’ll be fine.’

Min sniffs hugely. ‘I wonder who will buy it?’ she says, looking round at the house with its open windows, its vegetable garden in its higgledy-piggledy selection of reclaimed railway sleepers, car tyres and plastic containers, its compost bins and the old clawfoot bath they had dragged out, rusted beyond repair, and filled with a noisome broth of seaweed and manure. Everything had found a purpose, nothing had been discarded. Under the kowhai the beehive buzzes with its dancing horde, creatures of mystery producing the honey from which she makes a head-splitting mead using a recipe supposedly dating from the Vikings. Even the weeds had their purpose: nettles purify the blood, dandelions, and chickweed and cleavers.

Weeds and clutter, thinks Pete. And nasty little bees that must be given a wide berth. How did he ever stand it?

He shivers. He’s felt cold for days now, his head aches and he is so very very tired. He could lie down right now, right here, on the floor.

He stands with a carton in his arms. Sways. Falls heavily against the cupboard.

‘Whoops,’ he says. ‘Sorry, Min. Wrecking the place.’

Min doesn’t look up. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she says, tossing a copy of Backyard Farming into a bag. ‘Someone else’s problem now.’ She holds up a copy of Walden. ‘And this?’

Min sorts books.

Pete makes plans.

His share of $110,000, not a lot, but it will help. The flat in Prahan is inching closer and closer. The place he will buy with Thanh, who has come back to him after all from LA and is at this very moment waiting for him back home.

And the whole lovely future stretches ahead, the future they will enter together …