The Man in the Shed Read online

  Praise for The Man in the Shed and Lloyd Jones

  ‘Jones has shown himself to be our most protean creator of imaginative worlds.’

  New Zealand Books

  ‘Jones is an assured writer who knows how to give the reader enough but not too much as he leads us into the somewhat enigmatic lives of his characters.’

  Waikato Times

  ‘Cleverly drawn and slightly twisted tales which take conventional life and tilt it sideways. It’s filled with quirky characters, poignant moments and glimpses into the eccentricities of family life.’

  The Book Show (ABC National Radio)

  ‘Jones’s work is easy to like and to admire because he rarely cuts people down to size in sizing them up. He doesn’t warm towards his characters, exactly—his gaze is too unblinking for that—but there is a generosity of spirit, which holds incisiveness in check.’

  Adelaide Review

  ‘The stories are suffused with imagery of the sea, the coast and the populace’s dreams of other countries.… Jones does such an assured and skilful job of mixing the surreal with the mundane.’

  Sydney Morning Herald

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2012

  Copyright © 2009 Lloyd Jones

  Published by arrangement with The Text Publishing Company, Australia

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2012. Originally published in paperback in Melbourne, Australia, by The Text Publishing Company, in 2009. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited.

  ‘Who’s That Dancing with my Mother?’, ‘Broken Machinery’, ‘Swimming to Australia’, ‘The Simpsons in Russia’, ‘Where the Harleys Live’, ‘Lost Cities’, ‘The Waiting Room’ first published in Swimming to Australia and Other Stories, Victoria University Press, 1991.

  ‘Amateur Nights’ first published in This House Has Three Walls, Victoria University Press, 1997.

  ‘Going to War for Mrs Austen’ first published in More 103, January 1992.

  ‘What We Normally Do on a Sunday’ first published as ‘Searching for Space’, in Sport 22, ed. Fergus Barrowman, Autumn 1999.

  ‘The Thing that Distresses Me the Most’ first published in The Best New Zealand Fiction, Vol. 3, ed. Fiona Kidman, Random House, 2006.

  ‘Dogs’ first published in The Best New Zealand Fiction, Vol. 1, ed. Fiona Kidman, Random House, 2004.

  ‘Still Lives’ first published in Are Angels OK? eds. Bill Manhire and Paul Callaghan, Victoria University Press, 2006.

  Vintage Canada with colophon is a registered trademark.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Jones, Lloyd, 1955–

  The man in the shed / Lloyd Jones.

  Short stories.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-40035-2

  I. Title.

  PR9639.3.J64M35 2012 823.914 C2011-904123-5

  Cover design by Chong Weng-ho

  v3.1

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  the man in the shed

  the thing that distresses me the most

  lost cities

  the simpsons in russia

  where the harleys live

  still lives

  the waiting room

  dogs

  broken machinery

  what we normally do on a sunday

  going to war for mrs austen

  swimming to australia

  who’s that dancing with my mother?

  amateur nights

  About the Author

  the man in the shed

  There are times when he fights back in his own quiet way, when, suddenly and without any prompting that I can see or think of, he will lay down his knife and fork and look across the table at me as though I am a view or the answer to something, and then he will just get up and walk away from us as if none of this is right, this kitchen, even the faces around the table. The family has been misplaced or he has come home to the wrong house. And by the time Mum and I have made it to the kitchen window he is out in the drive looking in both directions. He is looking for something or someone that never arrives. In this way Dad seems to live on hope.

  The man in the back shed is the problem. He used to eat all his meals with us. Now it is only when Dad is at work or out somewhere—the latter is a problem because he isn’t ever just out somewhere. He is either leaving or returning, and so, even when he isn’t with us at mealtime, the thought of him arriving at the door or even walking down the street is a concern shared around the kitchen table. We sit on our nerves. We look up and stop chewing at the littlest of things—a cough, the dog stirring in its basket, a raised voice from outside. We all have our own lists because not everyone looks up at the same particular moment.

  The man from the shed lifts the soup bowl to his lips. This must be a European thing because both Pen and I have noticed it passes without criticism from Mum, which is odd because both of us recall a whack over the knuckles the first time we did the same. Now, watching the man from the shed reminds us of what a natural thing it is to do, and what a pain in the arse it is to have to scrape around with your spoon for the dregs. When he raises the bowl to his lips, his eyes float up to look at Mum. She is staring at her own soup and not saying anything. From the time she sat down she hasn’t spoken. At her elbow is the empty space at the table where Dad usually sits.

  She doesn’t look up until we hear the latch on the gate—and then we all do. The man from the shed puts his bowl down and gets up from the table. He looks at Mum. He looks thoughtful, as though he is considering something. He says, You’re going to have to tell him. Mum nods at her soup. The back door opens. We can hear Dad pulling off his boots. We can hear the old dog rise from her half-bitten cane basket, beating her tail with happiness. The front door closes and at last Mum looks up. She smiles bravely—one each for me and Pen, and we are given to understand that we should forget what we just heard, that it is business as usual. We should, if we can, act like the dog. That would be nice.

  But, in fact, when Dad comes into the kitchen both me and Pen jump up from the table. Her boyfriend Jimmy Mack is parked outside. He’s been there the past half hour, waiting for her to finish her soup. I don’t have such an excuse. I mutter, I’ll be off to my room. That’s where I am now, sitting on my bed. The waiting is going on and on. I had imagined the telling would happen as soon as me and Pen exited the kitchen. So I am surprised when I hear doors opening—the kitchen, then the front door, then the doors to the car. I have an idea Mum and Dad are on their way to the beach. That’s where they usually take themselves when something needs to be said. Pen is out in Jimmy Mack’s car. The TV room is sitting in darkness, waiting for someone to turn up. I don’t want to go in there. Nor do I want to go out to the backyard. So I’m stuck in my room.

  I’m in bed when I hear the car pull up. Doors open and close—the car, then the front door to the house. There’s no slamming. No raised voices. I listen out for something between them but not a word travels up the hall. I hear the light switches and then, some time after, by which time I am sitting up in bed in the dark, a stillness envelops the house. At a late hour I wake to someone walking up and down the hall.

  In the days that follow I never once hear it said—not by either of them—that she is pregnant.

  Months later it is still not talked about. There are indirect
references. Some morning sickness, but in Mum’s case just ‘feeling a bit off’. Some backaches—and of course the indisputable fact of her stomach ballooning out, and her waddling walk and her difficulty in bending down to pick up anything from the floor. But none of this is ever commented on.

  We are waiting—that is what we are doing. The waiting has weight; it has ballast. It loads up the house. It pushes back at the walls. It draws you to the windows. There are eight in our house and I’ve looked out every one of them. There are other times when the world suddenly jolts everyone forward. We come to, and remember that there are lives to be lived and we move back to reclaim those old parts of our selves. Dad has his work to escape to. Pen has Jimmy Mack. I have school and the beach. The beach is also a refuge for Mum and the man in the back shed.

  The man in the shed does not enter the sea as the rest of us do, wading and willing ourselves deeper and deeper, braving the rings of agonising cold as they rise up our bodies. The man in the shed stands in the shallows, this tall lean man, washing his legs down, washing his arms down, splashing his face. The tides shuffles in and washes around his ankles. He stoops down and cups some water in his hands, and this he applies to his face and neck. Mum is already up to her waist. She is hurrying to get beyond the sandbars. At the same time she keeps looking back over her shoulder. The beach is more than a kilometre long but she is interested only in a small part of it.

  I am sitting down at the rocky end of the beach, but I can see everything. When I tire of watching them I pull on my flippers and mask and swim out to the kelp beds, and there I lie on top of the sea, spying on fish as they come and go through the hanging curtain of kelp. The fish move without hurry. They seem to move for no other reason than they can. The first super-sized shopping centre has recently landed in our neighbourhood and I’ve noticed shoppers there moving up and down the aisles in the same dazzled state as these fish moving in and out of the kelp. They are looking for something. They’re just not sure what it is.

  A few days from now a violent storm will tear the kelp from the seabed and fling it up on the beach and we will move across it with our heads down like those salvage teams in white overalls sifting through the assemblage of a plane wreck. There will be a variety of pale limpid seaweed with a reddish stain and a ribbon-like fish that I have never seen on my snorkelling expeditions. A fish like that is a reminder of how close we are in our everyday lives to the unknowable. On another day we will stand in a circle around the treasure of a drag net—looking down at the albino eel, an elephant fish, and a tiny seahorse grinning impishly as if it had just flopped out of a gift shop. Then there are all the other things, which we cannot identify.

  I couldn’t place his accent when he first arrived—even the notion of arrival does not quite get at the surprise of him standing beneath the porch light. When I went to answer the door I wasn’t expecting him. No one was. We had been eating and talking around the dinner table. I can’t remember what was said, other than this sudden and unexpected smiling tolerance for one another, and then came the knock and we all looked up and Dad said to me, Why don’t you go and see who it is?

  My hair was still wet and gritty with sand. Earlier in the day a massive cruise ship with black sides had squeezed through the harbour entrance, and on the far side of the harbour we crashed ashore on the bow waves and each time we landed arse-up in a wash of foaming water and shingle, a tumble of limbs, joy dripping off our faces at our out-of-control lives.

  There was his accent. The next thing I noticed about him under the porch light was his clothes. They clearly marked him out as a foreigner. His grey flannels turned up at the cuffs. A neat seam ran down the middle of the trouser leg—it wasn’t overdone but you did notice it, that and the clean grey and the ease of the material itself. It wasn’t just the clothes but the way he wore them, the way they sat on him. He wore his blazer off one shoulder. And his smile—unlike Jimmy Mack’s, say, which came down to two tiny points of a smile set deep in the centre of his black eyes—his smile was evenly spread across his face. It generated warmth. Within a minute of his entering the kitchen we were all smiling, although who could have said at what or why?

  I was already in bed when later that night I heard voices in the hall. I heard Mum say, Perhaps we can put him on the couch. Perhaps was one of my mother’s favourite words. Perhaps belonged to the margins of the world we roamed in—it was an expression of possibility. In my mother’s use the word had a generosity of spirit pushing from behind, a kind of moral consideration. Some time later I heard them set up the couch. In the morning I found him on it with his face turned away. Instead of a pillow, his hand rested under his cheek. I crept past and opened and closed the door with the same consideration. I did not want to wake him. The next time I saw him he was in the kitchen, at ease in his neatly turned-up flannels. His face was large, larger than either of my parents’ faces.

  A week later he was still in our lives. There must have been some sort of discussion. In any event I had missed it. There wasn’t room in the house. So we parked him in the shed out the back. Mum made some curtains. Dad rustled up a camp stretcher. The neighbours flung a floor rug over the fence, which they kindly said they had no use for.

  Another neighbour we didn’t know well, except as some kind of scientist, turned up at the door with a chess set under his arm. As I was the one who answered, his interest went straight over my shoulder to probe the interior of our house. He said he’d heard we had a visitor. Might he be up for a game of chess? Right on cue our man emerged smiling out of the dark hallway in his white shirt and dark slacks. He’d just come out of the shower. His hair was wet. He came towards us buttoning his shirt at the wrists.

  Dad was still at work. Pen was out somewhere with Jimmy Mack. So it was just me and Mum for an audience. Our man took the window seat for himself and gestured to one of the chairs for our neighbour. That end of the kitchen filled with an energy it didn’t know well. It was a particular kind of silence that amplified the sounds of the outside world. A passing car’s gear shift made our lives feel all the more stationary, and in the silence that filtered back down I could hear the dog scratching herself and the thrushes in the guttering. Outside the window the hedge top was shiny and twiggy. Overhead the roofs cracked in the heat. It was a day for the beach. But there we were, packed in around the chess set on the kitchen table. Our man smiled a lot which, on this occasion, I took to be a show of confidence. The smile was for the walls of the kitchen, for the moment at hand, but it was clear that Mum thought the smile was for her, and her face, I noticed, lit up.

  Our neighbour drew himself over the board. He squinted down at the pieces, looked surprised, whistled through his stained teeth, then sat back in his chair, folded his arms contentedly, hugged himself, now very sure of himself. Then he dropped his arms at his side and sat upright. Checkmate, said our man.

  Dad could ask me, as he did later on, how the day had gone and I would tell him it was all right. The neighbour from across the way came over for a game of chess with our man. And although what I said was true enough, it failed to pass on those things that were surely more interesting than pieces moving about a board. I could not begin to tell him about this new atmosphere that the kitchen hadn’t known before. I could not draw his attention to an exchange of smiles that said so much more than I could say. Things had happened but under cross-examination I wouldn’t have known how or what to say they were. A description of the thing itself would lead nowhere useful.

  One afternoon we found ourselves alone in the backyard. The man in the shed stood looking around and grinning at everything. I couldn’t think what to say to him. Finally he said, Why don’t you show me your neighbourhood?

  I took him up the street. We passed the house with the woman and the cats. We passed the house with the long grass. A Maori family had moved in recently. We still didn’t have much to do with them. There followed a stretch where the front lawns were mown and the flowers almost too bright to be real. We passed the hous
e where in the winter I had seen an ambulance pull up. I’d waited until the stretcher came out bearing old Mrs Quinn who, I learnt later when Mum read out her obituary, had actually taught at my school and was a one-time high jump champion, but that was a long time ago. When I saw her she was covered in tarpaulin and strapped to the stretcher. I thought of asking the man from the shed if he had any explanation for the straps but instead I walked quickly on without saying anything about Mrs Quinn or the stretcher. It remained a private moment and a few minutes later I was pleased I hadn’t said anything. Mrs Quinn was my first dead person.

  We walked on as far as the green metal fence at the end of the road, and there we turned and walked all the way back up to where our street met with the main drag down to the beach, and where, on the corner, we stopped to smell the damp sea air. A flock of seagulls was winging it up the valley. Bad weather was on the way. At this time of the year it would be just a one-day wonder, what we called a clearing storm—it would be cold, all wind and fury, and then we would wake to a world perfectly still and new, and by the afternoon the roofs up and down the street would be cracking in the heat and all the dogs would be looking for shadows to crawl into.

  Now we turned and walked back the way we’d come until we reached the shingle drive. Here the man in the shed stopped and looked back up the street. It was as though he thought there might be something else. But there wasn’t anything else. This was it. You live in a nice neighbourhood, he said. I hadn’t ever thought of it as a nice neighbourhood or, for that matter, a bad one. It was just where we lived. I wished I could have shown him something. An event of some kind. Briefly I entertained walking him back to Mrs Quinn’s. Instead I shrugged.

  Just a few years earlier the Sputnik had broken free of the earth’s atmospheric crust. Anyone who has hit a tennis ball higher than a house roof will understand the ambition of the Sputnik crashing through all those layers of containment. The Sputnik provided pictures, which were published in our local newspaper. For the first time in human history it was possible to look back at the planet we inhabited.