2
DEKE
It was a drinking night.
Martin drank on Friday, Saturday and one other night; Sunday if the week ahead held horrors to be faced, Wednesday if Thursday looked sufficiently unchallenging to be got through hungover. By following this strict regimen he was hoping to stay just on the right side of alcoholism.
The drinking usually took place in his garage. A temple to male time-wasting, it held a cracked dartboard, a seriously outmoded stereo (CD player, no USB port), a couch with one squab missing, and an ancient pool table so slanted by uneven legs that any game played on it bore more resemblance to pinball than pool.
It also held the person who, in Martin’s current fallow period of female companionship, he spent most of his time with. When Martin arrived home at 9:30, Deke was in position - sprawled on the couch, a beer in hand with the aluminium bodies of several of its comrades crushed on the floor in front of him. He was listening to something hideously esoteric on the stereo, something that sounded to Martin like a maniac feeding kittens into a band saw while a fellow maniac hit frying pans together and shouted about police brutality.
A year ago, a random act of flatmate application had brought Deke to his door, fresh out of the army, having quit, so he said, due to the lack of ‘action’.
Where Martin loped around the perimeters of life, Deke yearned to be where the ‘action’ was. Raw experience, a personal reckoning with the elemental, was the drive of his existence.
In vainglorious opposition to his generation, he avoided cyberspace entirely, preserving his energies for the real world. In contrast to Martin’s eight long years at the library, Deke was constantly in and out of employment. He had, since Martin had met him, spent time as a quantity surveyor’s apprentice, a rabbit poisoner for the Department of Conservation, a telemarketer, a ladies’ shoe shop assistant, an office cleaner, a traffic warden and (for a mere three days) a ‘Stop/Go’ sign ‘operator’ for a road works gang. But his genius was rationed for living not work. Every week was a different mission in Deke’s quest to feel more truly alive. Hunting pigs in the Waitakere Ranges, learning to abseil, exploring the Auckland sewerage system by torchlight, big game fishing, attempting to create LSD in their kitchen, messing about with Ouija boards, paragliding, amateur dramatics; he’d tried them all since March.
Martin found this zest for life appalling. He had tried to get to the bottom of Deke’s mania for experience but the only clue he’d given him were vague comments about a sickly adolescence. Martin guessed he was trying to make up for lost time. If so, he needn’t have bothered. Martin’s own teenage years were a cramped misery of frustration and he’d been healthy as a horse. Whatever the cause, Deke’s hunger was insatiable. Martin believed (following the adage) there was little he wouldn’t try besides Morris dancing and incest. And only, Martin thought, because he didn’t have a sister.
Martin slumped on the free end of the couch.
Deke stirred.
‘Rosanna’s?’
Martin, used to Deke’s obscure mutterings, thought he understood. It wasn’t personal but for Deke, conversations were inferior addenda to an ongoing inner monologue. He was probably on some kind of spectrum with a difficult Latin name.
‘Rosanna was a friend of Deke’s. An attractive female friend. Despite strenuous efforts, Martin himself had never made a close female friend. He wondered about those men who did. He suspected they were really only after enemy intelligence.
He certainly had been when aged 15 he’d let ‘Fatty Boomba’ Sarah Phillips borrow his protractor set. When she’d returned it, he’d used the opportunity to ask her where he stood in the attractiveness hierarchy of Year Ten boys. In a life full of mistakes this had been one of his first.
The consensus of the Year Ten girls of Clendon High was alarmingly particular. They thought Martin ‘looked good far away’ but was ‘disappointing up close.’
‘Disappointing up close.’
Devastating words.
Ever since, ‘disappointing up close’ had become variously a personal motto, a mantra he had taken to intoning in times of ill fortune, a catchall justification for his personal failures and the epitaph he planned for his headstone.
The ‘far away’ part was worse in a way. It held out the promise of actually looking good. If only he could manage to keep himself forever in the background.
He spent the rest of his high school years and much of university devising ways of doing just that; keeping himself at what he hoped was an attractive distance. Conversations with girls were conducted metres away from them, necessitating a raised voice and expansive gestures that gained him a misleading reputation for extroversion. At university, banished to the backgrounds of campus life by his own insecurity, he would wave frantically at girls from across crowded lecture halls, streets and playing fields, only to flee unmanfully should they approach too close. At parties he would lurk at the periphery, striking poses of macho unconcern both willing and dreading female interest. Photos of student events at the time show him just out of focus, like blurred evidence of Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster, forever lurking at the corner of the frame.
Six or so relationships with women had battle-hardened him since. But still for the older Martin, now thinking of the night ahead (Rosanna’s was usually a sure bet for feminine encounters) the thought of being ‘disappointing up close’ dwelt within.
After getting their approximate time of departure out of Deke, Martin went through to his bedroom to prepare. The house they rented was a one-bedroom unit but Martin, for a substantial reduction in rent, slept in the washhouse. Although it was small, he’d managed to fit his bed, a chest of drawers and a small plastic chair in with the washer and dryer. The washer in its spin cycle sent sympathetic vibrations through his bed; several times he’d woken to Deke doing washing under urgency and thought he was experiencing an earthquake. The dryer, when in use, raised the temperature of the room enough to make him sweat even in the depths of winter and further helped economy by making the heater redundant. By these measures Martin managed to make his paltry assistant librarian’s salary stretch to food, booze and the occasional subscription porn service.
After considering a shower, he opted for a whole-body deodorant spraying program, hoping it would achieve the same result. The question of what to wear took more time. Martin was of the opinion that the key to male dressing was to make it look as though no thought whatsoever had gone into choosing what to wear, while choosing just the right thing to wear. Unfortunately to carry this off successfully took a lot of thought. It also battled with something Martin had once read online on a site giving men tips on ‘picking up’ women. It advised men to ‘peacock’ by dressing for female attention. This had been the motive behind Martin’s past purchase of a fake rattlesnake-skin jacket similar to the one Nicolas Cage had worn in Wild at Heart.
Regrettably, the only attention it had drawn was male: the large welder’s apprentice that had beaten him up for it outside a Karangahape Road nightclub. He now restricted his ‘peacocking’ to a single burgundy-coloured suede shirt and a pair of very tight jeans that looked great but sent his voice up an octave.
Almost-but-not-quite at random, he grabbed a navy blue, V-neck t-shirt that revealed enough chest hair to show puberty was in his past not his future, and his black jeans. That sorted, he went through to the bathroom to ponder his hair predicament. The predicament for the severely balding Martin, was how to look as if he wasn’t. Every time he looked in the mirror before heading out, he attempted through some artful combination of combing and gel application to obscure this fact from the casual viewer. And every time he desperately hoped he’d chance upon some trick of tonsorial magic that would do it. Tonight he picked up his comb with grim purpose but after a few flicks back from his rapidly retreating hairline, put it back down in despair.
His tragic hair loss made him at 29, look 35. To Martin this was but a quick stumble of years to 40, which was the beginning of an inevitable slump into the lassitude of middle age, closely followed by the horrors of elderly decrepitude, only to be relieved by the annihilation of death.
It might as well have been his corpse looking back at him.
Thus enlivened, Martin was ready for his night out.
Deke was ready too. He’d splashed some cold water on his face and put on his army surplus jacket. It was the same camouflage army jacket he always wore which, outside of a Vietnamese jungle, always made him the most conspicuous person in the vicinity.
Martin wondered for the zillionth time just how they had become friends.
Perhaps it was because they shared hopeless pursuits. Martin’s was to write. The adolescent Martin may as well have been sick, for all the time spent in his bedroom. Other than what most teenage boys do in their bedrooms, Martin read. But addiction to the delights of inner space can be as devastating to a life as addiction to heroin. By fifteen Martin had without quite realising, already enlisted himself in that army of miserablists who, disillusioned by the world, withdraw to create their own. At sixteen he had written a three-hour stage play set in a high school entitled Last One Picked. He had never once been to the theatre. Getting absolutely zero encouragement from the few close relatives he inflicted a live reading on, he continued his sad decline through short stories, a film script and several novels. Currently he had high hopes for a gritty urban crime novel with a number of tense scenes set in a library.
Typically, Martin was at odds with the age he found himself in; pursuing an introvert profession in an extrovert culture. A time when verbal and visual incontinence was replacing reflective literacy; of YouTube, of podcasts, of the TV box set, of Instagram oversharing and livestreaming your breakfast. Where did settling down with a work of fiction fit into this noise?
It didn’t. Well, not for anyone under 40. There were still a few refugees from the land of the literate about, dragging their little blocks of paper and cardboard around with them, taking their illicit hits at the back of buses, on park benches and in the few downmarket cafes where the music was under 100 decibels.
Trying to be a writer these days was as wrong-headed as trying to be a blacksmith or a cobbler. There was just no place for the solo imagination, the hermit headspace of the anti-social scribbler, in the newly triumphant ‘social’ media.
Martin knew all this but he couldn’t stop writing.
It’s a natural calling for those who are disappointing up close.
______________________________
Rosanna’s was two blocks away and as they both intended to drink well beyond the legal limit for driving, they walked. Deke briefly suggested driving under the influence as a way he might get his night in jail. One of his latest sought-after experiences, it required a light crime but not one so light he’d get off with only a warning. Drunkenness or a related misdemeanour seemed the go. Martin had been helpful, suggesting a charge of indecent behaviour via a well-timed naked stroll down to the North Shag Rock shops. Deke had rejected this when he saw his path would take him past the North Shag Rock Primary School and the possibility of more serious charges.
They turned the corner into Rosanna’s cabbage-tree-lined cul-de-sac.
‘Robert Duval,’ Deke said out of nowhere.
Martin thought for a moment.
‘Yes…certainly by the time The Godfather came round.’
‘One for the wall then.’
‘Number 37, I believe.’
It was a little game Deke and Martin played. A hypothetical or far-in-the-dim future planned ‘Bald Wall of Fame’ containing all the men who hadn’t let their baldness hold them back from success. It had been started by Deke, just to keep Martin’s spirits up.
When they arrived, the doors of Rosanna’s house were open and music and light and the sound of loud, drink-assisted conversation was assaulting the darkness. Martin remembered when such sounds had excited him, the potential for laughter, social encounters, new music or sex. Now, on the cusp of maturity he knew the laughter would likely be fake, the company and music irritating and the sex happening elsewhere, to other people.
Still the two beers he had sculled en route were beginning to have their familiar effect of dulling the finer senses. The baser senses were now cleared for take-off. Martin punched Deke hard on the shoulder for no particular reason and together they walked across a creaky veranda and entered the party. A quick scan of the partygoers inside showed there were few Martin knew and even fewer he wished to.
They were mostly younger than him and probably students. Martin doubted that there was anyone in attendance who didn’t have, or wasn’t planning on having, letters after their name. The female to male ratio was less in his favour than expected. Rosanna, the host, aflame with conviviality was in one corner talking with two fellow females; the rest, aside from one who could be either or neither or on the way to becoming one or (Martin guessed) on the way back from being one, were decidedly male. In the centre, a man with an overly complicated haircut and a gold-coloured jacket (definitely peacocking) was declaiming on an unknown topic with the high confidence of a true mentalist. Martin quickly and instinctively decided the man was a cunt.
He was speaking to an audience of one, a slim figure, the back view of whom Martin felt was familiar. When she turned her head to take a sip from her wine glass, Martin got a blast of recognition: Katherine. When the cunt left her alone to inflict himself on someone else, Martin left Deke and slowly moved over to her. When he’d got within half a metre without discovery, he turned his back, counted to five and spun round, as if he’d finished one charming encounter and was now ready for the next. His hand now holding a third ice-cold beer brushed her shoulder and she turned to face him. He smiled and with some hesitation which Martin was keen to put down to surprise, she smiled back.
‘Katherine! I didn’t know you knew…’ he trailed off, realising he didn’t know who he didn’t know she knew. He wished he had known he didn’t know that before he started the sentence.
‘Rosanna,’ Katherine supplied, mercifully.
He’d met her two weeks earlier. Every year during the university holidays the library took on one or two students to help shelve books, more out of charity than necessity. These ‘stackers’ were usually female but less usually attractive. Martin imagined the attractive ones were filling their holidays with skiing vacations in Austria paid for by their billionaire boyfriends or perhaps modelling lingerie for the kind of department store pamphlets that had inevitably found their way to the underside of Martin’s mattress when he was a teenager.
Katherine was a very welcome exception.
After watching her from afar for a week, Martin had decided she inspired mixed feelings in him. One of which and not the strongest, was the desire to press his face into her magnificent bosom and yodel loudly until she or perhaps the police pried him loose. The others involved tender words in rainstorms, the slow inhaling of her fragrant hair and protecting her from hordes of menacing but somehow vulnerable samurai.
He liked her.
Which would explain his complete inability to talk to her. Standing there while Katherine waited expectantly, topics of conversation fled his mind like deserters from a battlefield, leaving him making odd, little sounds, half-words, like a stroke victim attempting a tongue twister. With concentration they became words, but somehow resisted being marshalled into actual sentences. He started ejecting them anyway hoping that Katherine would do the hard work of putting them together.
‘Weekend’
‘Doing’
‘Anything?’
These sentence-babies hovered in the air between them; forlorn flares sent up in silence and aching for rescue. None came.
She nodded and looked around the room, perhaps checking for fire exits.
Martin fumed inwardly, half at his reserve and half at Katherine’s. She could at least help him out, suddenly profess an enthusiasm for Greco-Roman wrestling or the later novels of E.M. Forster or something. Just to kick things off.
But all she did was keep smiling and looking like a woman who only talked to men like Martin when she was ordering food.
For the thousandth time, Martin hoped he would be reincarnated in the next life as a wildly attractive woman and have the pleasure of watching men go through the hell of making conversation with him.
‘I forget… what are you studying?’ Martin felt a brief glow of victory at having at last put a coherent thought into English. It was a lie of course. He hadn’t forgotten.
‘Ah, Sociology. I’m doing my M.A.’
‘An M.A. eh? (Awkward.)…What’s your thesis topic? (Better.)’
‘Well, ‘she said, screwing up her face in effort, ‘the full title is: Decolonising the female body: Narratives of female sexual power in Aotearoa.’
Martin hadn’t forgotten that either. He just liked hearing her say it.
She reeled it off semi-apologetically, with her eyes down as if this whole academia thing had been someone else’s idea. Standing there mere centimetres from her gorgeously curved form, Martin knew that couldn’t be true; she knew plenty about female sexual power.
‘I know, I know… it’s a fucking mouthful. My supervisor came up with it really.’
Looking back on it later, Martin felt what happened next could be almost wholly blamed on his third beer.
‘So what do you mean by ‘colonising’ the female body?’
She looked at him closely for a moment to see if he was serious. He held still with what he hoped was a look of generous attention on his face. It must have worked. She pursed her lips and looked down at her wine glass.
‘Well…’
He was making her think! His soul did backflips.
‘…many things, beauty standards, objectification…’
‘Objectification?...So before old Captain Cook came along, no Maori guy ever nudged his mate when a woman walked past and said ‘Get a load of those’?’
Martin had never witnessed someone with their mouth ‘agape’ before. He’d read it in books enough to apply the adjective to the shape Katherine’s mouth was now frozen in, like a carp coming up for air. It was a fantastic mouth, full, brightly lipsticked with potential for poutiness, and Martin hated to see it in obvious distress. Just when he was mentally packing his bags for the life in a monastery this inability to talk to women would doom him to, the Katherine-mouth trembled, widened to a smile and then exploded apart in a raucous cackle, snorting a considerable amount of cheap chardonnay out of her slightly upturned nose. The rest of her body convulsed and shook in a manner that had Martin thinking of…other things.
‘That’s very offensive.’
Martin turned and saw the cunt standing behind them.
‘It was a joke, mate.’
Martin gestured with his beer can at the still laughing Katherine; evidence for the defence.
‘Harassment is always serious.’
Martin wasn’t really listening. He was much too busy thinking how he could make Katherine laugh again.
‘Women have to put up with so much shit. You wouldn’t know.’
Martin realised the guy was still talking. When his last sentence registered, Martin turned to check if he was in fact a man. He was. At least a rough approximation of one, although the multi-layered haircut, flashy gold-coloured jacket and lip piercings would have had his grandfather hesitant to make the designation.
Martin had been wholly justified in declaring him a cunt. He was trying a particularly cunty move here. Martin believed it was called ‘being an ally to all women’.
‘My girlfriend was sexually harassed yesterday.’
Christ.
Not by him obviously, thought Martin. He had about as much testosterone in him as Mary Poppins.
Katherine had stopped laughing. Several other partygoers had turned to look as if they had just heard the squealing brakes of an imminent car crash.
‘Ah, that’s no good mate. Some guys are arseholes eh?’
Martin made a sweeping gesture with his non-beer-holding hand to indicate all those arseholes were out there in the universe, not in here with them. And particularly not standing in his shoes.
‘What happened Jools?’
It was Katherine. Martin noted the use of his first name with disappointment.
‘Couple of labourers catcalled her. Whistled and yelled out stuff.’
The growing number of partygoers now listening with attention were unanimous; this was a high crime worthy of a round of tuts and head shakes. Martin made a good effort at joining in.
‘Poor girl.’ Katherine again, with her head at an angle and her eyes wide with concern.
The cunt was enjoying being the centre of this pity party for his absent girlfriend. A magnet for all the moral concern in the room, he’d been pumped up several shirt sizes, his gold jacket which Martin noted with mild disgust was a Versace, seemed about to burst at its finely stitched seams.
‘As she said,’ he began, flicking his long fringe to the side with a coltish head jerk, ‘if it had happened at her law office she could have had them fired for harassment.’
The four or five people standing near chortled at this hypothetical comeuppance. Martin was not pleased to see this included Katherine.
He looked at the fringe, fluttering bewitchingly in some mystery zephyr inches from Martin’s face. Why did cunts have all the hair?
Just as the others were turning back to their drinks, Martin made his second mistake. This one he’d later blame on the hair.
‘At least she makes more money than them, eh?’
He’d meant it as a compliment. Only loosely harnessed to a suggestion that life might be a mite more complex than the Sexual Politics 101 lecture he’d just been subjected to.
But the cunt, being a cunt, wasn’t having it at all.
‘What do you mean by that?’
This time he flicked his fringe back with the palm of his hand and raised his face slightly to look Martin in the eyes. Annoyingly, his fringe instantly merged with his superabundance of other hair in a pompadour effect. Even more annoyingly, Martin noticed that under all that hair he was startlingly handsome in a pretty boy, Korean popstar sort of way. Prettier in fact, than all the women Martin, a fairly staunch heterosexual, had ever been to bed with.
Fuck it.
‘I meant in the scheme of things, having a couple of goons who’ll probably live and die on a building site yell ‘Nice tits’ at you, ain’t that bad.’
The cunt goggled. His head reared back like he was imitating the Kennedy assassination.
‘She. Felt. HUMILIATED.’
It came out of his mouth in a funny kind of staccato wail.
‘I’m sure she did. It’s one kind of humiliation. Eighteen bucks an hour is another.’
Katherine was staring at Martin and frowning.
The cunt finally lost it and yelled:
‘WOMEN HAVE A RIGHT NOT TO BE HARASSED!’
The entire party joined Katherine in staring at Martin.
The cunt’s fringe was trembling wildly. He moved closer to Martin, squaring up his rather puny shoulders. Martin stepped the short distance between them but with his eyes down admiring the shininess of his jacket. Then he looked up and gave the cunt the smuggest smirk in his repertoire. The tiny part of his brain not affected by beer thought he might regret this tomorrow. The beer-drenched rest then came up with something to say that would make sure he did.
‘She should take it as a compliment. So should you.’
The cunt closed his eyes. He started murmuring something to himself. A calming mantra perhaps. His favourite vegan recipe or the lyrics to ‘I Am Woman.’
Out of somewhere a female body slipped between them.
‘I just love it when two guys argue about sexual harassment.’
It was Rosanna.
‘Sorry Ros. This guy…’
‘Whatever Jools. Come and dance.’
She spun the cunt away from Martin, tossing him a WTF scowl as she did so. They disappeared into another room that Martin now noticed was the source of the music and some intriguingly intermittent flashes of light.
Katherine followed them. She looked crestfallen. Worse. She looked like it had been the last crest she’d had and it had fallen on her foot.
Martin watched her walking away with deep nostalgia for the laughter of half a minute ago and the knowledge that the important business of getting the better of one of the cunts of the world had come at a cost. After standing alone for a while, he went into the kitchen to find another beer.
Half an hour later he couldn’t care less. Sure, he’d care more in the morning, around 6am, probably when he’d awake to a mental montage of the night’s regrets. For good measure they would be followed by the top three mistakes he’d ever made under the influence (titled for ease of reference: the cow, the bonsai tree, and Louise Shand) and a pledge of a liquor-free future of mature living. But for now, the Katherine concern was drowning nicely in a rising tide of alcohol.
He found Deke in a corner talking to a guy with a cast on his leg and deep scarring on one side of his face.
‘This is Gary. He’s into motocross,’ said Deke.
Martin didn’t make much attempt to keep up with the conversation, which involved lap times, CC classes and some hideous injuries. Deke was drinking it all in, no doubt fuel for a future adventure.
Soon the evening picked up speed. There were some high school reminiscences (largely fake on Martin’s part), a long story by somebody called Fizel about his ‘wicked’ trip to India and even at one point some arm-wrestling. Then there were some shots of a liquorice-tasting spirit and more beer. Not unrelatedly, a singalong to an Eminem song broke out, with Martin managing, through artfully delayed lip-syncing, to disguise the fact he knew none of the words.
Through the magic portal of drunkenness, Martin soon found himself back in his bedroom without any memory of how he’d managed to get there. In order to coax the room into staying still, Martin focused his eyes on his open laptop. Doing so, he noticed he had mail.
He opened it and read:
‘Dear Mr King,
Regarding your submitted manuscript The Dewey Decimation System. I’m afraid we are unable to publish it at this time.’
And then typed further down, as if as an afterthought:
As this is your 4th unsuccessful submission to our company, I feel I must give you some advice. Your chances of being published would increase if you desisted from using stock characters in violent and fantastic scenarios who speak in profane commonplaces, and paid more attention to building atmosphere. A little style goes a long way.
Yours sincerely,
Pierce Edmondson
After reading the e-mail a fourth time, Martin thought for a moment and then quickly bashed out a reply.
Dear Pierce,
How’s this for a ‘profane commonplace’? :
Fuck you and your oldest living relative.
Yours sincerely,
Martin King.
And after hitting send, he lay down on his bed and went to sleep.