1
MARTIN
The North Shag Rock Public Library stands at the top of a steep, barren hill. It is separated from the rest of North Shag Rock – the North Shag Rock ‘shops’, the North Shag Rock Fire Station and the local waterworks – by a half-mile of bush-glazed, volcanic rock. The town founders wished their library either to occupy a higher, earthly plain or to quarantine it, lest it distract from more practical concerns.
There is no South Shag Rock.
This geographical lacuna is much remarked upon by local bores. If raised by an incautious visitor, the tale of the establishment of the original Shag Rock township will proceed in numbing detail including its eventual division into North and South, in the early years of last century, over liquor regulation. After much civil acrimony, North Shag Rock decided to break away from its decadent Catholic half and form an oasis of Protestant abstention. Even today it retains a reputation for dull sobriety. The main street is bereft of diversion save for a single massage parlour staffed by a rotund Thai woman in her middle fifties.
South Shag Rock was absorbed via mutual agreement with the neighbouring Eden Bay, a suburb that shared its popish tolerance of the pleasures of alcohol. Old timers remain defiant, preferring the diminutive ‘The Shag’ for the whole section of coastline upon which both settlements sit. Road signs and Google Maps maintain a discreet ignorance.
There is nothing remarkable about Shag Rock, North or South. It is known for little besides the strange orange effluvia the mattress factory pumps into the Manukau Harbour and the 6 foot tall, 100kg Polynesian teenagers that the area regularly breeds for West Auckland rugby teams.
Shag Rock Bay lies at the western end of the township. It is, for those with a sense of aesthetics or hygiene, a bitter disappointment. One and a half miles of rocks, mangroves and dead fish with less sand than the Shag Rock Kindergarten sandpit.
On its southern extreme, jutting out into the harbour like it’s disowned the place and decided to make a break for Australia, is the Shag Rock. This eight-metre tall, seagull-shit-bespattered nuisance to shipping is the only natural feature that the pioneers could find to name the area after. In a cleft in the rock near the top, local teenagers used to lose their virginity. One night a kid named Danny, in the throes of unexpected ecstasy, fell off, hit his head on a rock and died.
They stopped after that.
______________________________
On a miserable Friday in May, Martin King stood alone outside the North Shag Rock library doors, frustrated, cold and as far from ecstasy as it was possible to be. He was, for the second time that week, on egg duty.
The chill wind blowing through the empty street gave up on a brief dalliance with some uncooperative leaves, and finding no women in the vicinity with hairdos vulnerable to rearrangement, amused itself flapping Martin’s jean bottoms against his ankles. They were several sizes too big and ‘boot cut’; ideal for a cowboy or a biker but hardly for an assistant librarian who never wore boots. But they had been on sale and besides, Martin had ambitions of boot ownership. It was just, as in so much in his life, he hadn’t quite got round to it yet.
His only company on this wintry afternoon was Sir Edward Lazenby. Sir Ed had done something important in the late 1800s that had got him immortalised in half a tonne of granite near the library entrance. He had a military bearing and Martin, if he could have been bothered to guess, would have said it was for services to King and Empire, likely involving slaughter and pillage of those not so keen on the King and his Empire. But Martin was fond of him. What he liked best was Sir Ed’s thick and lengthy moustache, which Martin coveted and would have attempted to replicate on his own upper lip if genetics hadn’t seen fit to allot him at 29, the facial hair follicles of a ten-year-old girl.
In recent months, the large, red double doors of the library entrance had become a target of the local boys’ high school. As their old and flatulent school bus paused and gasped for a gear change at the top of the hill, the boys, fresh from their home economics class, had taken to launching a volley of less than fresh eggs at the doors.
Sometimes they got lucky and egged an unlucky patron exiting the building; sometimes they got very lucky and the patron was elderly or timorous and took fright, scattering their borrowed books, in a highly entertaining manner, all over the footpath.
But it was when they moved their crosshairs to Sir Ed that the trouble had really started. The sight of Sir Edward’s moustache dripping with rotten egg yolk had inspired several letters to the local suburban paper The North Shag Rock Chronicle. In this correspondence the causes of teenage delinquency were explored: bad parenting, video games and the lack of a decent World War to ‘sort them all out’ being favoured culprits. Cures too were proffered, most illegal outside Saudi Arabia and including a suggestion by the suspiciously named ‘Bart Tocks’ to reinstate caning in schools.
When the egging continued unaffected by such community wisdom, officialdom became involved. A phalanx of indignant dignitaries descended upon the library, meeting with the staff to discuss ‘the assaults on Sir Edward’. It was decided that a robust program of surveillance would begin, tasking library staff to gather photographic evidence of the drive-by eggings. And today sentry duty had fallen to Martin King.
He’d been there a boredom-packed half-hour when he heard the sound of the school bus starting up the hill. He stiffened. As always he was panicked by the thought of where best to hide. The only likely spots were a hedgerow of about half a metre’s height and the corner of the building. Not being a midget or a small child but rather a rangy six- footer, he opted for the corner. The drawback of this choice was that he was in full view as the bus approached. He began a pantomime of extreme disinterest in buses, statues, eggs, almost in life itself. He slumped against the red brick of the library’s south wall, head down and shoulders up, seemingly seconds from suicide. The bus, packed with hormonal merriment, staggered past indifferent to the depressed figure against the wall. Martin heard it come to a squealing stop followed by the sound of the engine idling as it waited at the lights. He took out his phone and smearing himself against the wall, edged round the corner. Eggs were already coming thick and fast; Sir Ed had taken two in the face and one in the crotch. Martin managed two quick pictures before someone, possibly a lookout scout, yelled ‘Look! He’s taking pictures!’
The artillery fire swung left. A barrage of oval missiles headed Martin’s way. A crack shot found his right eye and, as he turned and fled for the doorway, two more pelted each of his bum cheeks. As he frantically yanked open the door, Gemma Frisk, a large woman in late middle age known at the library for her superhuman consumption of light romances, decided to come through it. As a fourth egg exploded between his shoulder blades, Martin abandoned courage under fire and opted for an ungainly and in the circumstances ungentlemanly duck. From his new position close to her generous midriff, Martin looked up to see eggs detonating in Gemma’s cleavage and ’50s bouffant hairdo. Horror-struck that existence outside her secluded spinsterhood held such terrors, she screamed, dropped her eight carefully selected Mills and Boons on the library steps and fell back inside. Martin, obeying the laws of gravity rather than desire, fell over on top of her, his nose buried deep in the fleshy mass of her triple chins.
Extrication was difficult. Martin needed terra firma so he could push himself off the screaming woman and this meant finding where the expanse of Gemma Frisk ended and the library carpet began. As his hands sought purchase, they hesitantly mapped the hills and valleys of Gemma Frisk-flesh. She screamed louder. With relief from both parties, Martin located the floor and got himself up. He looked around. The hail of eggs had ceased.
As Gemma Frisk’s screams wound down, Martin attempted to avoid criminal charges by explaining himself. He half-noticed a small gathering of concerned citizens, most of them elderly, forming in the library foyer.
The assembled pensioners were sure they had witnessed some transgression, but the nature of it was eluding them. A sexual assault possibly, but where did the eggs come in? Further mystification was assured when Martin helped Gemma Frisk regain her feet and began waving his phone in her face reassuring her that justice would be done.
A towel appeared from somewhere and they were both de-egged, until Gemma, still dazed, allowed herself to be led away by Libby, one of the library staff, ‘for a cuppa out back’.
Martin fell into a chair and waited.
What he was waiting for took around twenty seconds to arrive. The five oldsters, still standing gawping at him, parted and into the gap strode Polwart.
‘Well, did you get them?’
Martin nodded, punched his password into his phone and handed it over.
Polwart peered through her ancient spectacles and scrolled down.
After one brief equine snort, she tossed it back to him, turned and walked away.
Martin looked.
There were two near identical shots of what looked like an unruly flax bush growing at the entrance of a damp, dark, malodorous cave.
Puzzled, he turned the phone upside down and held it at arm’s length.
In seconds familiarity dawned.
All he’d managed were two extreme close-ups of his left nostril.
______________________________
The North Shag Rock Public Library is a two-storeyed building of late Edwardian origin. Over the years it has survived both renovation and neglect according to the financial priorities of successive city councils. The current phase is one of dilapidation. The elevator is a shuddering, wrenching antique that only ever makes one-way trips, as no one is willing to risk the return journey. The windows are covered by the accretion of ages, beyond the removal of the most determined of window cleaners, keeping the library in a continual twilight even in the height of summer.
Later that afternoon, as a lightly depressed Martin pushed a trolley of returns across the ground floor’s gaudy red carpet, he wondered not for the first time what the architects had been thinking. He attempted to lift his spirits by picturing a huddle of Edwardian gents picking out ‘bordello red’ from a carpet catalogue perhaps out of nostalgia for an establishment frequented in their youth. The combined effect of dim light, decrepit furnishings and blood-red carpeting made Martin feel that he spent his working life trapped in a Hammer horror movie. The similarities between Polwart and the creatures featured in such movies did nothing to diminish the feeling.
Friday night was usually the busiest for the library. From his six years working there Martin could comfortably predict the rest of the evening: the after-work ‘rush’ of two or three impatient men in late middle age planning weekend DIY projects and unwilling or unable to look up the information they needed on the internet, perhaps a nervy, homely singleton of either sex intent on filling the looming vacuum of the weekend with a sci-fi or fantasy opus, and a few children after books on dinosaurs/disasters/UFOs for school projects. Then came what Martin called ‘the Asian hour’ when Chinese tiger mums would routinely try to check out more than the 20-book maximum in order to fill in the odd moments of their child’s weekend when they weren’t doing their homework or their specially requested extra homework.
After a lull, around 7 o’clock came the drunks. These were of two types. Those who had wandered in by accident perhaps mistaking the library’s façade for a particularly retro night spot; the rows and rows of books coupled with the complete absence of music or alcohol usually made plain their error and they wandered out again. More problematic were the drunks with a purpose. Tonight they were two pissed octogenarians straight from the RSA in hot dispute over which regiment had served where in World War II. The loser of the argument was disinclined to take Messrs Sloane and Armstrong, authors of New Zealand Military History, at their word and beat an expletive-laden retreat through the main doors with fellow codger, now glowing smugly, in tow.
Martin was considered the least dedicated of the three assistant librarians employed at the library. Officiousness, which seemed to Martin to be the defining characteristic of the type of person who becomes a professional librarian, was not in his nature. He was a devotee of the liberating ethos of slack; close enough was always good enough for Martin King.
Take the important bibliographic issue of ‘dog ears’. On more than one occasion Martin had witnessed other staff scolding patrons for returning books with the top corners of their pages folded back. They were instructed to use one of the many and varied bookmarks available for free from the front desk. Martin took a different view. From personal experience he knew that dog ears were the only practical means of keeping your place in a book. Bookmarks, when put down wandered of their own accord so that when they were needed, they were only to be found after a long search on the other side of the room, under your beanbag. In Martin’s view, books were not meant to be returned pristine to the library shelf; they should be dog-eared, coffee-stained, and if at all possible, with shopping lists written in biro on the blank pages at the end. This was evidence the books had actually been read, and not just read but read throughout someone’s day. Hell, if he had his way those returning books without blemish would be grilled as to whether they’d actually read the things. No, dog-ear makers were just fine with him. Yes, Martin thought to himself, I truly am ‘the people’s librarian’.
In his earlier twenties this job had suited him. The being around books, the quiet pace of the working day, the general air of being on the side of learning and civilisation. And for someone who thought of himself as a writer, the job had lineage; Larkin, Borges and Casanova, he often reminded himself and others, were all librarians. He felt particularly pleased about the last of these examples. But as he approached thirty and literary success having deluded or eluded him (he wasn’t quite sure which), Martin had begun to confront the idea of a career in librarianship. After brief thoughts of suicide or starting a new life under an assumed name in Morocco, he had grudgingly applied for an online M.A. in librarianship. Despite this decision, he couldn’t help chafing against the prissy demands of Polwart and the North Shag Rock Public Library way of doing things. He had problems for example with the lexicon. Libraries have patrons not customers. Martin had been constantly told this by other library staff when referring to the people-who-take-out-the-books as ‘customers’. So constantly in fact that, in the spirit of rebelliousness that occasionally bubbled to the surface of his passivity, Martin had decided to keep using the term. Just to annoy them.
But this recalcitrance would have to come to an end, Martin thought wistfully as he shelved the last book from the trolley. Just this morning in signature dramatic fashion, Polwart had announced a council ‘review’ of library staffing. The rumour was that two of the three assistant librarians were about to be ‘reviewed’ right out of their jobs. The survivor, however, would be promoted, given completion of the requisite M.A., to full librarian status: money, power and a council parking space.
Once the shock of the news had worn off, Martin had had to take himself off somewhere nice and quiet (the second floor loos) and give himself a little talking-to. He could just about handle being a failed writer, but he was less sure about being an unemployed failed writer. He might lose it completely, and end up sitting outside a supermarket wearing nothing but tracksuit bottoms and yelling at immigrants. So, he told himself, time to man up. He had to be or at least appear to be eager and committed. There could be no more ‘incidents’. The most recent, a week earlier, had begun with the careless placing of Barbara Cartland.
He had been in ‘The Dungeon’. Officially known as the stack room, it occupied the better part of the library basement and was filled with obscure, rare, valuable, or unpopular publications. A book’s banishment to the Dungeon signified a shift in its fortunes; it was now so little borrowed that it was not shelved above ground where people could chance upon it, but worthy of subterranean storage, where only the truly devoted would seek it out. A stroll along the Dungeon’s shelves was a survey of recent popular fiction that had ceased to deserve the description: Jean Auel leant sadly on Jeffrey Archer, Alistair MacLean mouldered slowly beside Dick Francis, and Virginia Andrews slumped moodily next to Wilbur Smith.
Martin, shelving a trolley of Large Print light romances, had been reflecting on the most recent of a series of humiliations that fate had seen fit to smack him around the ears with. That morning he had received a rejection letter. He’d received many before but he had had really high hopes for The Dewey Decimation System. The editor of Trident books had been especially cutting in his letter. It stretched credulity that, he had written, a librarian could be involved in quite so many revenge killings.
This was the snowball that had set off an avalanche of resentment; as he shelved the cumbrous volumes of what he referred to as geriatric shower nozzle material, he rehearsed a sour litany of complaints against the publishing industry, Man, God and Nature. With each invocation the force of his shelving increased. The climax to all this, as usual was Charlie Sheen. It was nothing personal but, for Martin, Charlie Sheen was the embodiment of cosmic injustice. The fact that this aging, pretty-boy with a gargantuan appetite for sex and drugs was still alive and kicking somehow galled Martin terribly. Sheen, or rather the difference between their respective fortunes was the yardstick by which Martin gauged his wretchedness. If ever his spirits were in danger of inflation, the thought ‘I wonder what Charlie Sheen is doing right now?’ beat them down again. Any Zen tranquillity of mundane library chores, like checking in books or tidying shelves, was for Martin inevitably shattered by the thought that somewhere on planet Earth Charlie Sheen was having a much better time than him. Probably involving a woman the likes of which Martin had only ever seen on a computer screen and the kind of drugs he would never sample due to their exclusiveness, potency and expense.
By the end of the first shelf an uninformed observer would have thought he was trying to kill an especially nimble and resilient fly. When he came to Barbara Cartland, the hyper-successful romance novelist, and spied her dustjacket photo grinning up at him, a mascaraed potato in a puddle of furs, he crashed The Love Pirate down onto the shelf with force. It set off a sizable tremor causing the two shelves below it to clap shut with abrupt violence mere millimetres from Martin’s cock and balls. Narrowly avoiding castration, he gave a high whinny and backed into the Large Print trolley, toppling the entirety of the books with loud concussive plops onto the floor.
Off balance, Martin fell backwards over the trolley and whacked his upper back and shoulders hard on the basement wall. The trolley, now liberated of its bibliographic load, sped into a nearby shelf with force. The shelf rocked back and forth for a moment, giving the watching Martin a cruel moment of optimism before crashing back into the shelf behind. The resulting slow devastation reminded Martin less of the regular progression of dominoes than the chaotic Armageddon of a Formula One pile-up.
Four large shelves came down, scattering books and their fluttering pages like disturbed pigeons. Martin moaned in disbelief as he saw what the fifth and final shelf in the demolition derby line-up contained: the births and deaths paper records recently archived there from the council buildings. The shelf crashed down with such power and noise, it was if the universe was making a comment on the finality of the fate of the lives it contained. The lives themselves, hundreds of sheets of paper loosely paper-clipped into manila folders, were spat out on to the floor in a fountain of gushing bureaucracy.
Awkwardly attempting a reverse limbo dance to get back on his feet, Martin found the one person in the universe he least wished to witness this destruction standing in the doorway. Polwart.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ She screamed.
Polwart, Martin knew, was some kind of Christian and swore as often as Martin prayed.
Martin didn’t know how to answer. So he didn’t.
Polwart emitted a long, throaty sigh meant, he guessed, to express her frustration at having in her employ the likes of Martin King.
‘I’m coming back in one hour. I want to see it fixed.’
She shook her head, turned and manoeuvred her generous frame back up the stairs.
It was a tough hour. Under the clock, Martin had eschewed accuracy for speed. He bundled the births and deaths papers into random folders without heed to whether their surnames or even their nationalities matched. Future family researchers would one day puzzle over the amount of ethnic mingling that happened in the borough of Shag Rock 1880 – 1935.
Ever since, Martin had been at pains to keep on Polwart’s good side. Mainly by keeping as far from her as possible. But with today’s news he had decided he was going to have to attempt to impress her. The thought briefly sent him, while wheeling the trolley back to the returns room, into a desperate panic. Sweat prickled his forehead and his stomach fell down an elevator shaft. How the hell was he going to do that?
Twenty minutes before closing time, Martin was despondently manning the issues desk when a patron/ customer/book-taker-outerer approached. The most peculiar thing of many peculiar things about the man was his sideburns. They were of Victorian length and thickness, giving him a wolfish look. He wore an op shop suit of at least three decades’ vintage and carried a large flax kitbag with what looked like old men’s elbows sticking out the top.
Martin braced himself for one of the occupational hazards of librarianship: dealing with a nutter.
‘I’m researching some local history,’ the man announced, staring intently at Martin’s forehead as if contemplating neurosurgery. ‘I need all you have on nineteenth century West Auckland.’
Martin sucked in air through his teeth and pretended to give it some thought. It never did to let ‘patrons’ think all this locating books stuff was easy. Before you knew it they’d be handing you a list of illegible Dewey Decimal numbers and coming back in an hour. Martin, when advising patrons, tended to adopt the mien of a mechanic diagnosing a problem with a car: ruminative, considering the options, suggestive of hidden expertise. It made him feel a kinship with more masculine trades.
‘You’ll be wanting the 900s. I’m gonna say…’ Martin looked skyward, rocked back on his heels and hooked one thumb under his belt. ‘…993, 994 or thereabouts.’
The man had the reaction roughly equivalent to that of a five-year-old being told Christmas was to be added to the days of the week. He did a weird little jig without moving any part of his body above the knees.
‘Right, right, right…now where would that be?’
‘Our New Zealand history section. Around this corner and on the right against the wall.’
‘I’ve just been looking for that…couldn’t find it.’
‘Well, it was there this morning.’
The man didn’t take mild sarcasm well. It set off a little spasm of blinking and head-bobbing. The whole left side of his face began to twitch.
‘No, no, no, you need to take me to it.’
It was the use of the verb ‘need’ that did it for Martin. He stretched his arms skyward and yawned. Then he dug in his pockets, pulling out a particularly interesting piece of pocket lint, examined it, discarded it, then went in search of it again. Ten seconds or so later he suddenly seemed to remember he was in mid-conversation with a ‘patron’.
‘Ah, well, I’m a little busy…’
The man’s twitch had now migrated to his shoulder blades. He looked like a wallflower psyching himself up, trying to catch the beat for a dramatic entrance onto a crowded dance floor.
‘It won’t take a minute,’ the man said moving his large head alarmingly close to Martin’s.
Martin made no attempt to move.
The man stared at him. Martin noticed one of his sideburns was a centimetre or two longer than the other.
His stare had a certain ‘I’m not above stabbing people’ vibe to it.
Before the man could get his bowie knife out, Martin skirted around the side of the counter and with the man following, struck out in the direction he had been describing.
Strangely the New Zealand history section hadn’t evaporated from existence. ‘Oh, I see NOW,’ the man exclaimed as if Martin had just hacked through dense undergrowth and not led him to a shelf of books in plain sight.
‘Now where’s my book?’
With an internal sigh, Martin scanned the shelves, spotted the book and carefully placed it in Mr Sideburn’s hands. He immediately set upon it, feverishly flicking through, instantly lost to the details of early Dalmatian gum-digging settlements or some such.
Martin waited for a thank-you, but when the man pulled out a dirty
1B5 notebook and began scribbling notes, he gave up and returned to the desk.
The man safely out the door having had two books issued under his name (‘Brendan Whelp’), Martin thought for a moment and then added a warning note to his membership file:
‘This man has been seen lurking around the children’s section, spying on breast-feeding mothers. Please treat with caution.’