Two Portraits

Man Flicking Free of Feet

He was at the age when the world of physical objects begins its turn against one. Younger than you might think. As we approached the five ways on the outskirts of Nelson in our hot metal box, I could see he was having trouble progressing from the unsympathetic corner – hot, treeless, concretey – and down the other prong of the forking road. This was because he was busy, very busy in fact, flicking one sock foot then the other out in front of him in the extravagant thrusts of a manqué military tattoo, moving but without going anywhere. In this compulsive reiteration, absent from the records of known or recognisably motivated gestures or signs, the man looked as if he were trying to flick free of his feet.

Was the asphalt burning? Or was something assaulting him from inside the puckishly pulled-out toes of his socks?

Where were his shoes?

Where would it end?

Trapped inside his light-absorbing garments – black cargo shorts, black drill shirt with open collar, black-stockinged feet; the evergreen palette of aging rock’n’rollers and New Zealanders of all shades – I could tell he was a prisoner of this hellishly ongoing moment, and didn’t know.

Did you see that man in black socks flicking his feet out front? I asked Christine, who sat low at that wheel, beringed in kohl and silver, extra-long-armed, vestigially Bibaesque at eighty. She was often silent, Christine, which only added vehemence and force to her sallies when they arrived. Now I waited for her as if she were one of those cars that rises before taking off, the brand of car an infant friend once informed me was French for lemon.

…At the roundabout, without shoes, we just passed him?

Struggling to capture this marvel, I made a demonstrative gesture with one then the other hand. Flicking his feet!

No, I missed the man in black socks flicking his feet out front at the roundabout because I was concentrating on driving you to the airport! Christine almost-shouted back in a way that was too large for the occasion but, unlike the man, intentionally so.

It had taken until my third stay in the narrow chamber next to the kitchen that she referred to as ‘the nun’s room’ to realise that in Christine resided the potency of the shy, a potency of which I was enamoured and slightly afraid. With an illustrated dinner plate on one wall, a raw-edged screenprint of clothes line and vegetable patch on another – a deadpan double of Christine’s actual garden – whitewash cupboards cracked ajar to offer views of the jars of tortoiseshell and mother-of-pearl buttons and baskets of cloth nested within, the nun’s room was a sloping paean to the feminine arts. Its legend, that occupants slept well there, was in my case borne out.

I noticed that between her customary outbreaks of speed and light, Christine would hang back and regard, dark eyes pooling and flickering, body atilt. So much complexity in that stance: humour, effacement, doubt, skewering intelligence. Once I came upon her folded into a chair that, if you did a quick scan from the vantage of the hall, was completely hidden from view by the kitchen door. She was reading a book, and had clearly retreated there to be less seen, to be – more – unperceived, so that in achieving my mission of finding her I felt mostly inane and, in my person, without good reason.

She had once been front-of-house for the town’s cult record store – when is a record store not a cult? – from behind whose counter she dispensed musical intoxication for regulars and occasionals over several decades, a barwoman behind her bar. Now, she said, middle-aged men sometimes hailed her in the street, one recently calling – You’re an icon!

How embarrassing! Christine told me ruefully.

And you could tell, as she silently adjusted the absurd garland of small-town fame with attenuated, invisible fingers, she thought they were dickheads but fondly.

But now, now she was thrusting forward in her Toyota Wish, and I was disappointed about the man. He was a sight that derided sobriety and straight-thinking, and that only Christine could have enjoyed as much as me. In fact, the way Christine shouted that stuff about driving to the airport let me know that by association I had, in fact, achieved my real aim – of her enjoying me.

—

Traffic

She toots and tailgates me past one then the other Portuguese butcher on New Canterbury even though we’re approaching the jam and there’s nowhere to go in a hurry or even to go.

My mother is tucked in the back seat in special headgear, crochet crusader veil and non-ironic python fez reconstituted from a handbag, checking out the aggressor – Oooh! A controlling grey bob! – as the other woman shoots a look that breaks like dirty surf while overtaking on the left. Go fuck yourself lady is all I say.

My mother checks the syntax then takes it up, adenoidal – Aww go fuck yourself lady. Aww go fuck yourself lady – like a wind-up tin monkey with gleaming parts or one of those longed-for dolls of childhood that pisses when you give it a drink.