4,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: COPYCAT
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Dusty Springfield’s voice rises from the grave. A Japanese swimming pool attendant waits patiently at the gates of heaven. And the green picnic blanket on the back seat of Carlo’s car just moved...
Bang bang. Slash slash. Crunch crunch.
A collection of retro short stories + fantastical observations from a true crime writer.
Playful, unpredictable and occasionally pretty violent.
This book contains 16 sizzling short stories, 7 even shorter poems + 3 surreal pieces of average shortness all tenuously linked by a running commentary touching on Ned Kelly’s murderous side, chocolate shag pile carpet and the joys of pet goldfish.
‘Wendy Lewis’s writing is taut, arresting and provocative. I couldn't stop turning the pages.’
– Timothy Daly, multi-award winning playwright
‘Confessional, dark, quirky; these pieces offer a little something for everyone.’
– Leigh Swinbourne, author of Shadow in the Forest
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Ähnliche
About Please Forgive Us, Richard Hauptmann
Dusty Springfield’s voice rises from the grave. A Japanese swimming pool attendant waits patiently at the gates of heaven. And the green picnic blanket on the back seat of Carlo’s car just moved…
Bang bang. Slash slash. Crunch crunch.
A collection of retro short stories + fantastical observations from a true crime writer.
Playful, unpredictable and occasionally pretty violent.
This book contains 16 sizzling short stories, 7 even shorter poems + 3 surreal pieces of average shortness all tenuously linked by a running commentary touching on Ned Kelly’s murderous side, chocolate shag pile carpet and the joys of pet goldfish.
‘Wendy Lewis’s writing is taut, arresting and provocative. I couldn't stop turning the pages.’
– Timothy Daly, multi-award winning playwright
‘Confessional, dark, quirky; these pieces offer a little something for everyone.’
– Leigh Swinbourne, author of Shadow in the Forest
Contents
For my mother
In memory of my father and my brother
With lots of love
I lived briefly in Wellington in the late 1990’s. It was a friendly, human-scale city. Peak hour was non-existent. The people were lovely and generous. And everyone was called Martin or Raewyn. Sitting in a sunny little wooden flat in Norna Crescent, I wrote a lot of short stories during this period, all inspired in one way or another by living in New Zealand. Wellington was very steep and very windy. This story captures the steepness.
Death By Steps: Beware the Houses
In retaliation for his ongoing interference with their enquiries into the disappearance of his sister, the police sent Steve to New Zealand. Not just anywhere in New Zealand. Wellington. And he couldn’t just live in Wellington. He couldn’t put his feet up and enjoy a break or put his feet down and partake in delightful treks in the forest. No. They arranged a job for him as a removalist.
It is not usual for police to line up employment for relatives of missing persons.
‘Just to teach him a lesson. That bloke really irritates me,’ said Superintendent Phillips as Steve left the inner Sydney police station after another typically unfruitful discussion about the whereabouts of Zoe. He didn’t know why Steve got on his nerves so much. There was nothing particularly unlikeable about the friendly-good-looking-average-height-average-weight young man who had just left the station but Superintendent Phillips couldn’t help but find him a little hard to take
‘His latest theory,’ Superintendent Phillips told a bored colleague who was tucking into a giant slice of four seasons pizza, ‘is that his sister must have been kidnapped by a semi-ludicrous cult led by a German veterinarian called Sigmund who are planning to fling themselves into the crater of Mt Ruapeho at the next full moon.’
‘A war veteran?’
‘A veterinarian. A vet. Woof. Woof. Meow.’
‘Mt Ruapeho?’
‘It’s a volcano.’
‘In Melbourne? Sigmund as in Freud?’
‘Sigmund as in…er…’ Phillips flicked over his notebook, ‘O’Leary.’ He let the Melbourne reference go by.
‘When’s the next full moon?’ asked the Superintendent’s colleague doggedly, but Phillips wasn’t listening which is just as well. He was on the phone, doing a deal with his cousin who ran a furniture removal company in Wellington. Well, a cousin-in-law really.
When the police approached Steve with the whole package deal: job offer, airline ticket, accommodation, all expenses paid, the idea appealed to him immediately. (The ticket was one way, but at that stage it didn’t arouse his suspicions.) He thanked Phillips profusely for giving him the opportunity to examine the scene of the crime at first hand. Wellington, you see, was where Zoe was last seen.
Superintendent Phillips was glad to wipe his hands of the case – he’d done all he could at his end – which was basically to establish that since Steve’s sister had disappeared in New Zealand it wasn’t his problem. And even though Phillips was a professional and did not let personal likes and dislikes influence his judgement in police cases, he really didn’t like Steve.
The police sniggered as they discussed travel arrangements with Steve which unnerved him slightly. It crossed his mind that spontaneously offering plane flights and job offers to relatives of missing persons was odd but any reservations he had at taking up their kind offer were washed away by the excitement he felt at the opportunity to do his own super-sleuthing once he got over there. He would find his sister, he would do it. And as for being a furniture removalist, the work would be strenuous, yes. A little out-of-left-field, yes. But nothing he couldn’t handle.
No, Steve. No, no, Steve. Don’t do it.
Wellington is made up of a series of winding roads that circumnavigate the hills circling the city centre. Tucked behind the roads, hidden away behind neat pines and walls of daisies are the houses. Hardly any of them are on street level. They are either built below the road or rise up reached by I’ll-build-a-stairway-to-Paradise staircases. No, staircase is not the right word. Steps. Pure and simple steps. Dozens of them. Tens of thousands of them. At least fifty or sixty steps up to each house.
Steve whistled in amazement when it began to dawn on him what life in Wellington would be like. He calculated how many steps he would be negotiating on a daily basis. And the more he thought about it, the more he didn’t like it. And when he added the weight of various pieces of furniture to his calculations (piano X kgs, bookcase Y kgs, double bed + mattress Z kgs) and figured out that he would often have to carry the load up the slope, not down, he became rather disheartened at the thought of starting his shiny new job. Still, he would give it a go, because that’s the kind of man he was – positive and likeable to basically everyone except Superintendent Phillips.
He owed it to his sister Zoe. He had to get amongst the New Zealanders, get to know how their minds work and maybe he would glean valuable information. It did not once occur to him that the whole Wellington set-up was thanks to Superintendent Phillips’ unique blend of personal concern and malice, cleverly designed to destroy.
From the start Steve had problems adjusting to the lifestyle of this strange topographically arranged city. You cannot survive in Wellington without being in peak physical condition because if you are not, you cannot reach your house every evening when you come home from work. That is not strictly true. You can reach the house. But unless you have a will of steel, you cannot find the energy to hoist yourself up the last few steps to get to the front door.
Steve did not know it yet but Wellington is unkind to visitors who do not play by the rules. He did not know that if only his sister had been a little more careful, she may still have been alive today. But she was dead, as dead as a shrivelled up daisy bush in February.
Yes, Steve. Yes, yes, Steve. Don’t think about it.
It was only slowly that the full horror of his idyllic stay in this picturesque city of hills came to him. In glimpses, in whisperings behind gorse hedges, in the absence of elderly ladies with shopping trolleys which was such a familiar sight in his home country. Where do the old people go? he thought. They must be shipped off to flatter places…I mean, they wouldn’t dispose of them, would they?
Yes, Steve. Yes, yes, Steve. Don’t think about it.
He soon discovered that everyone jogged in Wellington, yet another subtle reminder of the tell-tale absence of aged and/or incapacitated residents. At any time of day or night, the pound of fluoro sport shoes would float up to where Steve sat contemplating Zoe’s unsolved fate and indeed, his own. Thud, thud, thud…thud, thud, thud…yet another Wellingtonian in training for their day-to-day existence. Yet another Wellingtonian making sure they would not be left by the wayside, just out of reach of the safety and warmth of their beloved home. Because it seemed to Steve that they had a fear of being left. A terror of not getting there. A great trepidation of not making it up the steps to their house. And in thinking this, Steve was perfectly correct.
It is not unusual for physically unfit Wellingtonians to ‘disappear.’
There are many small white wooden crucifixes scattered through New Zealand, particularly on Motorway 2 out of Wellington through Lower Hutt. New arrivals, like Steve, believe they are commemorating loss of life through traffic accidents, but no, they mark the spots where hapless New Zealanders have collapsed, unable to cry for help, just out of reach of their houses. All is safe in the houses, if only they could reach them. Conversely, outside the houses…
It is not usual for Wellingtonians to discuss these things.
There is a telephone number in the Wellington White pages for anyone who has come within reach of their house but is unable to make it up the steps. The number offers friendly advice at 99c a minute (GST included). This is a number rarely used – it is the Number of Shame – and no Wellingtonian would be seen dead dialling the helpline for two reasons. Firstly, it indicates that you have failed at negotiating steps, one of the fundamentals of Wellington living, and you are thereby regarded with thinly veiled condemnation as a pathetic creature unworthy of the necessities of life such as food, water, lycra and companionship. The second reason why Wellingtonians never dial the Number of Shame is fate. People who use this number are ostracised, excommunicated, or worse.
New Zealanders know what happens when the ‘friendly’ operator takes your call and foreigners do not.
‘Norna Crescent.’
‘Nearest cross street, ma’m?’
‘Raroa Road.’
‘Number of steps to be negotiated?’
‘Sixty two.’
‘Next of kin living in New Zealand?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Next of kin living in New Zealand?’
‘What’s that got to do with –?’
‘Do you have relatives here?’
‘No.’
A pause. Slight but eerily ominous.
‘No rellies? We’ll be right there.’
Breathing a sigh of relief, she puts her mobile phone away. Suddenly, a blaze of light, a siren excruciatingly loud…unidentifiable noises, a crowd of people who weren’t there before, the rush of wind, more strange sounds, a shout, a cry, a scream, no, no, no…and then…nothing.
A small white cross appears in Norna Crescent. When the police later try to trace the whereabouts of Ms Australian Tourist they reach a dead end. There is no record of her last call. Strange. The police shake their heads. They say nothing and go back to setting speed traps on the Desert Road.
It is not unusual for Wellingtonian police to shake their heads.
Did Steve’s sister dial the Number of Shame? Yes, she did. Was the above an accurate transcript of her final telephone conversation? No, it wasn’t. It was severely edited. Zoe dialled the Number of Shame even though she was a fit young woman, fully capable of running up stairs, indeed she could run up stairs while juggling three oranges, adding up √(6 x 16.264) and carrying out a simple conversation in Swahili at beginner’s level. She had finely honed aerobic and endurance skills and was not someone who would collapse by the wayside, calling for help, unable to go further.
What could possibly have induced her to dial the Number of Shame?
If the police had been a little more forthcoming in their investigation, they could have told Steve that the last number she had attempted to dial on her mobile was for pizza. They found a small glossy flyer with a picture of a steaming hot possum and mushroom pizza near the scene of her disappearance and surmised that she had misdialled the second digit and, consequently, had been connected to the Number of Shame.
The Wellington police did not inform Steve of this development because they feared he would ask too many questions. And so he was left with a mind full of doubts, the possibility that he would never know what happened to Zoe, and his sister’s mobile phone. (The police did the courtesy of returning it to him with the last number dialled erased and tell-tale signs of mozzarella removed).
Steve is troubled. Why have they sent me here if they don’t want my help and they don’t answer my questions? This city where everything seems nice but nothing seems right? I’ll make it, he tells himself, doing a passable impression of the positive thinking that had recently deserted him. I’ll find out what happened to Zoe. I won’t be afraid of first impressions, rumours, that certain something in the air, what other people say. But he must confess to a certain uneasiness, a certain distrust of his fellow human beings…
No, Steve. No, no, Steve. Don’t do it.
‘Time for your first day on the job,’ smiles Kai, the hefty New Zealander who’ll be showing Steve the ropes. This is Superintendent Phillips’ cousin – well, cousin-in-law – and he is happy to do him a ‘favour’ as they say in the force.
Steve leaps into the back of the furniture removal truck and Kai slides the door shut behind him. Steve hears the sound of a key being turned. Kai has deadlocked the back of the truck. Superintendent Phillips’ cousin-in-law jumps into the driver’s seat, revs the engine, turns round and beams at Steve as the truck pulls out of the depot and heads towards the houses.
I have always loved weatherboard cottages. And California bungalows. And Federation houses. Not to mention Art Deco in all its shapes and forms and Art Nouveau, not that there’s much of that in Australia. Sydney, the city where I live, grows more and more nightmarish with its obsession with ‘knock-downs’, project homes and rendering every façade in sight. Will grey go out of fashion soon, please? I had a short stay in Melbourne recently and found myself in a Southbank tower with floor-to-ceiling glass staring down at the city lights like the boy in the story and thinking that being so high is weird.
Giving up Spray Painting Means Less Expenditure
There was an eight-year-old boy with dark curly hair and angry eyes. They were a wild, uncanny blue, blazing to cobalt when he was angry and shrinking to violet when he was sad. He lived in an apparently exclusive apartment on the thirty-second floor overlooking the only park in the city.
His apartment had floor-to-ceiling glass which in the old days was called giant picture windows because views were important. But now it was called floor-to-ceiling glass because interiors and finishes were most important of all. It was essential to have dove grey feature walls, a stainless-steel refrigerator that said ‘hello’ when you opened it and a private helipad.
He stood staring down at the messy patchwork of palm trees and pansies, the joggers criss-crossing the trampled buffalo grass and the ibises perched on overflowing garbage bins with transparent sides. A multitude of cars attempted to leave the city as they stop-start-stop-started around the four sides of the highly regular but slowly dying open space.
The front door lock turned but the boy didn’t.
‘Take your hands off the glass.’
‘Why are we so high?’ he asked his mother, still gazing down as the sun spread its last weak streaks of orange across the sky and removing his sticky palms from the window at the last possible moment.
‘It’s the latest,’ she smiled as she flicked off her killer stiletto heels and padded into the kitchen to prepare quinoa salad with grapefruit for her and cheese toasties for the kids.
***
The boy’s sister was different.
Every Wednesday afternoon he and his sister visited their grandma who lived in a neat yellow weatherboard cottage that took thirty minutes by car. His mother used to sigh a lot when they went. He used to think it was because it was a long way to drive. Then he thought it was because his mother didn’t really want to visit her mother on her one day off although she pretended she did. Then he changed his mind. His mother often sighed.
He loved to stare out the window of the car as it stop-start-stop-started its way through roundabouts and stop signs and no left turns. He saw cigarette butts in gutters and strange liquid stains on the stairs of office blocks and adults in dark clothes pacing up and down, talking to themselves. But after a while he saw an ornate metal fence in the shape of grevillea and stained glass windows the colour of rosellas and golden Art Deco lettering on old shops. And as the final fingers of the city groaned and slowly ran out of space, he saw little cottages with giant sunflowers, gardening shops with rambling honeysuckle vines and homes that welcomed him.
He loved his grandma’s house and garden. He watched butterflies. And every twenty minutes a red rattler would go by the back fence, making all the pot plants shake.
His sister was bored.
‘There’s nothing to do,’ she said. She sighed just like her mother and sat in a slump on the verandah with her chin in her hands, hoping someone would come and rescue her from this terrible suburban boredom.
Another rattling old train went by.
That night Grandma died and left the house to his mother.
His mother decided to sell.
‘You can’t do that,’ he sobbed.
‘Stupid old house,’ said his sister.
His mother looked blankly at her two children and then out of the floor-to-ceiling glass, frowning at the smudged palm prints. Damn incompetent cleaner.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I’ll demolish the house, rebuild and sell.’
Nooooo.
The boy ran into his room, slammed the door, and lay on his bed, sobbing.
***
The boy is no longer a boy. He catches the train to his sound engineering course. He grows a beard of sorts, wears tight leather and has a stud in his tongue. He has chosen a career that he has no interest in. He would rather study butterflies.
He finds the course demanding. Obscure. He doesn’t like it but he catches the train obediently every morning and looks out the window without thinking too hard. His eyes flicker at the rusty old ornate metal fence in the shape of grevillea. But the stained glass windows and Art Deco letters are gone. Sticky purple lantana has strangled the giant sunflowers. The backyard of his grandma’s house is now a giant hole in the ground hemmed in by scaffolding.
He hates everything. He spray paints fences. He smashes windows of derelict houses.
His mother is embarrassed. And angry. He waits for her to say what she always says: ‘I’ve given up a lot for you.’
