For Everyone Concerned Read online

  Praise for The Fainter

  ‘Outside the pages of Maurice Gee’s fiction, there is no picture of contemporary New Zealand society as convincing as this one, and its creation of individual characters is unsurpassed.’ Dominion Post

  Praise for Chemistry

  ‘A terrifically good book, so clevely constructed and managed. It’s a work of real tenderness … powerful and convincing.’ Jim Crace

  ‘Wilkins is brilliant at character … the writing is full of verve. Wilkins has an eye for telling detail, a great ear for dialogue and a dark sense of humour. It is easy to understand the acclaim he has already won in his native New Zealand.’ Guardian

  Praise for Nineteen Widows Under Ash

  ‘Wilkins reminds me of some of the great American writers—Faulkner, Lowry, Richard Ford—where the simple story you are apparently reading deepens and broadens and throws out layers and shadows, and you are conscious of an underwater life and a sky overhead, but all the time you are immersed in what seems a limpid, even transparent medium.’ Evening Post

  Praise for Little Masters

  ‘Little Masters is an engrossing, fiercely readable book. It deals with classic themes of parents and children, love and exile, and the sadness of separation and dislocation. Damien Wilkins writes brilliantly about streetwise, smart children and adults searching for love and stability far away from home.’ Colm Tóibín

  Praise for The Miserables

  ‘Wilkins has constructed a powerful portrait of family life... He handles the temporal shifts of the narrative with delicacy, precision, remarkable grace and apparent lack of effort … the prose is controlled, elegant, almost deadpan … A moving and subtle piece of work.’ Times Literary Supplement

  Also by Damien Wilkins

  The Veteran Perils (short stories)

  The Miserables

  The Idles (poems)

  Little Masters

  Nineteen Widows Under Ash

  When Famous People Come to Town (essay)

  Chemistry

  Great Sporting Moments (as editor)

  The Fainter

  for everyone concerned

  and other stories

  damien wilkins

  for nigel cox

  contents

  the world of children’s books

  blarney

  town belt

  I wrote the book

  crown the king

  reunion

  a wide, clear window

  for everyone concerned

  dirt

  divorce

  four fish stories

  wisdom

  conversion

  the shadows

  baby

  american microphones

  mystery creek

  eggs

  the descent of man

  grief

  girls

  the world of children’s books

  This all happened on a writers’ tour of the Far North. It was our day off and we drove to the top of the Island. And do you know, there really is a lighthouse up there. We walked around it. Then we went back to the van and drove to the beach for a swim. The day was hot and windless and blue.

  After our swim, we sat on the beach, with our bruises. That sea, we said. We’d all been dumped by waves, sucked and tossed. You stood on the steep shelf and felt a few thousand little stones move away under you. It took some effort to stay upright.

  Tina said, I didn’t know Gavin was a good swimmer.

  Neither did I, said Kate.

  But he was out beyond the breakers. You could see his feet, then his head. He was long, like a stick, careless as timber, floating and drifting.

  You think he’s all right? said Kate.

  He’s playing silly buggers, said Tina. My husband does things like that.

  Then we heard the faintest shout over the surf and we walked down to the water. Carl was just coming in; his chest was scraped. He said, I’ve had enough of this. We said we had too. Great though, he said and we agreed. It was invigorating. It was a great violent swim full of stones and we were hungry.

  Gavin’s staying out there a long time, said Kate.

  Carl looked out to sea; he wasn’t wearing his glasses. They were up by his towel. Is he out there, he said.

  Then we heard the shout again, even weaker.

  I don’t like it much, said Kate.

  No, I said. It’s a bit strange he never told us he was a good swimmer.

  Why don’t you go and get him, Carl, we said.

  Do you think he’s in trouble? said Carl.

  Yes, we said. Hurry now.

  Carl had done life-saving. There was no one else in our group who could swim like that.

  Every school holidays, Carl rewrote kids’ stories such as The Three Little Pigs and Cinderella for the theatre. I remember thinking, God, maybe I could do that. Carl said he made enough money from these productions to finance his other writing. A nice guy, plus with skills. Point me in the right direction, he said. I’m blind as a bat.

  So we lined him with where we thought Gavin was, and Carl ran back into the sea.

  Then we watched as Carl saved Gavin’s life.

  When Carl brought Gavin in, we laid him on the beach. He was grey, almost metallic, and he looked older, skinnier, shinier. He was panting. We covered him up and said take it easy and you gave us a scare, Gavin.

  Gavin said, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to drive the van any more today.

  We told him not to worry, we’d drive the van. What he had to do was rest.

  In the van we were all quiet. Gavin said, I think I had another two minutes. Tops. I didn’t know which way I was facing and every time I tried to look, I lost all my energy. I tried to shout but I swallowed water. How stupid it would have been. On such a beautiful day, having seen the lighthouse and everything.

  I was ready to punch you, said Carl. But you were a good person to save.

  What were you thinking about out there? someone said. Your life and stuff?

  Gavin was a children’s book illustrator, well known. A real artisan. Famously particular, exact, diligent. The previous month, another of the top picture book artists, and a friend of Gavin’s, had died. She’d lived alone in a house filled with dolls, which seems like a cliché about the person who devotes her life to children’s books. Nevertheless it was true; Gavin had visited the house. Her work featured photo-realistic drawings of children eating ice creams or riding on their fathers’ shoulders. These pictures often caught the child’s face just before or just after some moment of pure emotion: joy or fright or surrender. The images were very much like those recorded by cameras when the shutter is pressed too soon or too late; the photos which are discarded. Pages, then, of children whose faces showed confusion, awkward concentration, or some odd and fleeting private struggle. I always thought these books were a little creepy and hurried my own kids away from them in bookshops or libraries. She’d even written one called A Day at the Beach.

  I was thinking, said Gavin, of my friend who died. I thought first her and now me. I said to myself, that’s going to leave a big hole in the world of New Zealand children’s books, for a while at least, until some new talent comes through, as it always does. Then Gavin laughed. Plus I was thinking of Tom Thumb, he said. Six months of my life I’ve spent drawing that Tom Thumb, almost going blind, drawing that tiny creature, peeping out from behind egg cups, running along people’s fingers. Six months with a magnifying glass and a brush made up of about three fucking bristles.

  Gavin never swore, or not that we’d heard him. He’d taught art in the best private schools. He was tall and somewhat immaculate.

  We drove up the road away from the beach under the same blue sky we’d driven in und
er. Not a sign anywhere of our crisis. People were still entering the surf. We passed the outdoor shower where two women in their underwear were washing themselves. They were both blonde and tanned. It was easy to imagine them as Swedish. Carl and I looked at the women through the van’s windows. Kate said to us, it’s good to know that even a near-death experience doesn’t change the basic male need for a good perv.

  It was getting dark when we reached town. We bought fish and chips at a seaside restaurant, and sat outdoors at trestle tables that were set up on a wooden platform, a kind of pontoon thing built out over the water. It rocked gently. The sea through the wooden slats was oily black.

  Fish and chips! said Gavin. I didn’t think I’d want them but I do. He ate a piece of fish and smiled a bit sadly, or maybe that was just us, looking at Gavin as if he’d changed.

  Thing is, Gavin, we said, worst case scenario today, they could have been having you for dinner.

  We all laughed with our mouths full, full of the sea, which sounded all around us and underneath us. Then Gavin brought out a double-page spread he’d been working on from his book. He said, can you find him? Who can find him? For the first person who can find him, I’m buying them a drink. The light wasn’t good for the search but we bent into the page. We leaned in close so our elbows were touching and our shoulders. And we all looked for him. We looked everywhere.

  blarney

  You travel across the other side of the world, just you and your tent, and end up in a tiny country pub where someone you went to primary school with is buying you a drink. You didn’t even know him that well and you haven’t got that much in common. Cheers anyway!

  He’s over on a rugby trip and he tells you there’s heaps of room on the team bus if you want a ride. No thanks, you say. Well we’re going to Dublin too, says your friend, so it makes sense. Normally this wouldn’t be your idea of a good time but you’ve been on the road for so long and well … Next thing you look out the window and there’s the castle. This wasn’t on the itinerary, says your primary school friend. And someone up front calls out, Which of yous wants to kiss the Stone? And the driver says, this fellah’s in no need of the stone, he’s talked me into taking my bus out here to get me in trouble!

  You pile out of the bus into the late Irish sunshine, which is melting slowly away on the green paddocks. It’s almost closing time and the lady at the desk rolls her eyes. You better run then, she says, he’ll be wanting his tea and he won’t care you’re all big rugby men from New Zealand. You’ve never actually played rugby but no one seems to mind. So you run across the grounds to the castle, seeing who’ll be first to kiss the stone, and the last one’ll kiss something else, you’re all agreed.

  There’s stairs winding all the way up and at the bottom of the stairs, a man in a wheelchair—not old but about forty. Someone says, is this the queue to get up? And the man says, way you go, I’m just waiting for my wife. She’s up there. Then your primary school friend notices the man’s ears, which are puffy and smooth and out-of-shape, and says, You were a front-rower! And he was, until he got paralysed from a scrum collapsing. You want to go up there? he asks him. He says no at first but then you all say it’s no trouble, if he’d like to go up there and see his wife. What are you, asks someone, Scottish? Less of your insults, says the man, I’m Welsh. Then someone tries to sing because of the Welsh, and there’s other rugby talk. You boys go on up now, says the man. And leave you here? you all say.

  So you carry him up the stairs, still in his wheelchair. Rolling maul! you shout. He’s convinced you’ll drop him too. Terrified. Easy, lads, he says, gripping the sides of his chair, Easy.

  At the top, the castle bloke says, I was just about off for my tea. Then we all kiss the stone. Except our new friend, who kisses his wife.

  town belt

  On fine weekends, when he had the kids, he liked to haul them out the door for a walk up into the town belt. Shake out the cobwebs, he told them. It was only a few minutes from the apartment and you couldn’t really mistake it for the real bush—the city was right there—but there were trees, pine cones, grassy slopes, shadowy tracks, new smells, and the kids were breathing it in. They stomped along in their various private moods for the first bit, then gradually the moods started to shift, until more or less the same feeling gripped them all: they were pleased to be there. They were his children and they were happy to be with him. He loved them and they could see it.

  They had their route now, which took them off the main paths, and one day they found a sunny secluded spot where a tree had fallen down. They were out of the wind. He said to them, why don’t we make this place ours? How? they said. They began to build a fort and then they said to him, but it isn’t ours yet. We need things here. So the next time they came up, they were ready.

  His son brought action figures: warriors waving swords and monsters on their hind legs. His daughter fashioned sleep-outs for her dolls from leaves and twigs; the dolls never stayed the week in the town belt but the toy furniture did. Soon they were bringing more and more things out to their spot and leaving them there: little cars, a plastic stove, toy cooking utensils.

  When they were walking in one day to their place the kids thought they saw a man, someone moving in the bushes. He was gone now but they’d seen him. Wearing a green beanie, a sort of disguise, his daughter said. Camouflage, said his son. A random guy, they said. Lots of people used the town belt, he told them. When they reached their tree, they dug little roads out of the dirt and made fences from twigs, and they said, this is our house, this is where we live, can we stay the night? No, he said, it would get too cold up here.

  The following weekend he saw the man himself but this time the kids missed him. The man may have heard him; he was on his knees in the grass above the path, pulling on his pants it seemed. Green beanie. He stumbled off, further up the hillside. A great rage blew up in him at that moment and if the kids hadn’t been with him, he would have taken off after the man. Torn at the leafy, moist bank to grab him. Held him by his worthless throat.

  At the tree they pleaded with him to stay the night until finally he said, all right, all right. They hugged him and said he was the greatest.

  They filled a pack and they dressed in layers of warm clothes and they went up to their spot. They ate chocolate biscuits, drank Milo from the thermos, listened to the wind in the pine trees and watched the dark come down. Occasionally there was a thud nearby; pine cones were dropping around them. They heard things moving in the bushes: possums. They couldn’t sleep. Have you had enough? he said. It was midnight. No way, they said. Shall we go down now? he said. No, they said. Later, when the wind cut at them, he asked if they wanted to go. You can’t run away all your life, they told him. What? he said. What’s that? He found their faces in their sleeping bags but they were asleep. Of course they hadn’t spoken. They were two children sleeping in the forest. All night he watched over them, nibbling the banana which was his breakfast.

  I wrote the book

  For weeks we’d been living on our nerves in the gallery. We were overdue some blow-out time. Not because everything was sorted but because the tension was too much to bear, we secretly arranged a yum char date, slipping out of the gallery at agreed intervals so as not to alert the Director, one of the chief contributors to said tension. The Amsterdam show was opening the next day. Mondrian. Modigliani. Klee. There were things still to do, of course, but the paintings were up, the catalogue delivered, some friendly media already. The Director refused to see any of this. She was in her mad phase. ‘We’re not ready. Why aren’t we ready? Where’s my speech?’ Where I put it when I wrote it the day before. Migraines sent her home most afternoons. Mee-graines she called them, aptly. All about me.

  We had to take one of the upstairs tables, where the heat rose. I liked these gallery girls. Jax, Belinda, Amy, Sara. They were all much younger than me, better dressers, better drinkers. I was a big sister figure in the kind version, possible aunt. They told me everything and I told them as mu
ch as they could bear. The restaurant was busy. We were drinking fast. Food kept coming; it landed there and everyone denied it was her who’d ordered. You did feel bad turning away the Chinese girls with their insistent trays. It was borderline hysteria, especially with the round table, the revolving, and of course the way we’d sneaked out.

  Before the public were allowed in, while the paintings were still ours—this was a special time. For the last few mornings I’d had some private time in front of the Barnett Newman, before heading upstairs into the storm. A knife-wielding psych patient had slashed at the Newman in the Stedelijk some years before. It had been impeccably restored. One of the Director’s anxieties was a copycat attempt in our gallery.

  I looked down on the diners below us and Ray came into the restaurant and sat at a small table in the front window by himself.

  He was wearing a suit. I felt a pain in my side. A suit? He taught at a primary school—had he been made Principal? Was there a funeral he’d come from perhaps? If it was someone we’d both known, I should have been there too, I thought.

  I hadn’t seen him in a year. His hair was cut short, neat. He’d met someone who liked him less woollen, less fuzzy than I had. This Ray had edges. I noticed his shoulders, the pleasing line of them. His ears. But his faults were not invisible: the jigging knee, the way his arms folded too tight so he looked like he had achieved some wrestler’s hold on himself. Through the bamboo, even if he looked up, he couldn’t have seen me. The girls were silly, loud from the Korean beer.