Each summer, we invite some of Aotearoa’s finest writers to tell us a short tale. Here is the final instalment on this year’s theme, ‘second acts’.
By the time she got up to her room she’d decided she wasn’t going to stay. First thing in the morning it would have to be, because it was too late to leave now. She would have missed the last flight back down, and facing that long train ride again … it was out of the question. So it would have to be tomorrow. But first thing. Because she couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t.
Checking in, she’d wondered for the umpteenth time what she was doing even being in this situation in the first place – thinking about it all day on the train for that matter. Letting the kids talk her into it, a date with a stranger, staying overnight and all the rest of it. What kind of a madcap idea was that, at her age? Brendan had said everyone does it, Mum, and had set the whole thing up, with Kit agreeing. That their father had been gone for a year now and she was still young, that it was time she met someone new, they said, and that they would just go ahead and register her on an app they’d seemed very excited about, scrolling through images at a pitch and downing their gin and tonics.
Then it was a case of: This one? That one? What about him? And he looks nice, doesn’t he, Kit had said, peering into the image on the screen as if she could read the man’s heart right there. He’s a bit like Dad, even, don’t you think? And look, Mum, he likes the things you do. See? The symphony, and all that? They’ve got a great performing arts centre up there. And you can’t stay in the house forever, miles from everyone. It will do you good.
So, all right then, she had let them organise. “Meet” him, whoever he was, after she’d booked into the hotel he’d suggested where they could have a leisurely breakfast the next day and then wander round the city, if they got on, taking it in. He was from a small town, too, the kids said. He’d also lost his wife about a year ago and was learning to get over it.
But what did that really mean, “get over it”? You don’t get over a thing like that. Jonny gone … the feeling of it was enormous. And Brendan and Kit? Well, they had no idea. Of the relief. The comfort of it. The new vast calm. The house was like a church now that their father was actually out of it, away for good and never coming back. So why would she have wanted to leave that peace and quiet to be here, in this awful place? It had been built for gambling. As soon as she walked through the enormous glass doors leading into the lobby she could see that. People were dealing at tables right there by where she had to register. Hearts, darling. Hearts. Clubs. Aces. Why did everything to do with card games sound so mean? It was because they were mean, that’s why. Bridge. Poker. Gin Rummy. All the ghastly combinations and the chances and losses of them, along with the people who played … terrifying. Her voice was shaking when she gave her name to the young woman behind the desk who took her time and then handed over the keys. “Room 1606,” she said. “Sounds like a lucky number, eh?” By then she felt she could barely breathe.
Because no one had any idea. No one. About all that stuff with Jonny and luck, bloody luck. How it had been, and for years and years. No idea. Oh, the odd card game with neighbours, the occasional family holiday with a visit to the casino, maybe, the fun of the slot machines and the children’s cries of delight at the quick heavy rush of coins. But they had not known the half of it. Oh no. Not close to half. Nor of all that went with it – nearly losing the house that one time, and the drinking and those women their father used to take up with when he was gone off on one his jags, remember them? Knocking on the door at all hours and wanting to come in and wait for him? Or on the phone late at night, screaming down the line when would he be back?
It was a wonder she was not the one dead, with the amount of stuff she’d had to keep separate from Brendan and little Katherine when they were young and growing up. A wonder she was not the one sick and cremated and gone forever into ashes with the amount she’d had to keep from herself, for that matter, to learn not to think about it, even.
Yet here she was, thinking about it now. As though gone back into that life – back, back, back – pushed into it by those same children, now adults themselves, and with a view to her meeting some man here they’d found for her online. Was she really so ruined by her long marriage that she hadn’t thought in the first place that there’d been something wrong about that app and couldn’t have said to them from the beginning: What on Earth are you thinking? But there had been that phrase, “He looks a bit like Dad”, and her not being able to reply. And that, too, part of her keeping the story of their father bright for them, for the children, despite everything. So that she’d found herself walking through the ghastly front door of a trap, putting down her overnight bag on its floor, fishing out her credit card. As though he was still with her, the man she’d married. Right there beside her in the lobby, with his: Go on darling, just sign the damn form. Good girl. That’s my baby. All – back, back, back.
For how he would have loved it here. Room 1606. All that. Black Jonny. It was his kind of place, and his kind of people in it. She could hear them – even up here in the hotel room – as though the low terrible hum of their concentration, their powerful immobility in the grip of what they were doing, was in the very sound of the air conditioner, in the atmosphere held in the space containing the bed and the window and the chair.
What kind of man would want to meet in a hotel like this? Symphony orchestras, my eye. Theatre and chamber music. It would have been lies, like it was always lies. It was changing money for chips, is what it was. Spinning the wheel and turning cards into one endless play that finished in being dead. That is all that had ever happened to the kind of man who would want to come here, the kind she’d married. How she had ever managed to keep it, all of it, clear away from her own shining babies? That their father would never show himself to them the way he’d shown himself to her, from after the very first of those trips of his away. Coming home Daddy. But not Daddy. Only someone else instead with a mean card’s name and his black, black hair and his black eyes.
Of course she would leave first thing in the morning. Get the first train. Arrive safely at her lovely house and there would be the Concert Programme playing on the radio. The garden. A glass of wine or two on a Friday. That was all she needed. All she had ever needed. And stupid, stupid online dating. She closed her eyes. On the way to the lift up to her room she’d passed a group of older men and women at a particularly large table, all of them with garishly coloured cocktails and pitchers of drinks set beside them but silent as death while the girl in front dealt their cards. As she’d waited for the wretched lift to arrive, as it seemed to take forever, she’d heard one of them suddenly call out “Hey” and crazily turned. There’d been a man – oh, handsome enough – and a second or two of him looking over at her, his eyes narrowing as he took her in. Give me some of that luck of yours … He’d done it just as Jonny would do it. Go on … Say it … Looking straight into her, willing her … Say my name, my real name … Looking, willing. Do it. Say it. Bring me some of that sweet luck of yours, my darling … It was as though she knew him entirely. The lift pinged, the doors slid open and she’d nearly fallen over getting inside. She could hear voices, female voices, screeching “You bloody flirt. For chrissake! Just play,” as the heavy steel panels closed. They were all of them drunk and now anything could happen, she’d thought then. Anything. She thought it again when, a minute or two later, the doorbell in her room sounded and she opened the door and the same man was standing there.
UK-based New Zealand author Kirsty Gunn is co-editing a Selected Letters of Katherine Mansfield for Oxford University Press and completing a new collection of short stories, Pretty Ugly.
