The Desolation Angel

By Tim Wilson

An angel appears on a refrigerator. An accountant boxes a colleague at work. A woman having an affair finds herself underneath the marital bed. A game show host blows it. A graphic designer reflects on his life. A fired executive tries to revive a Vietnamese man on the air bridge at Toronto International. A financier flies from New York to New Zealand. Nothing happens; everything does. 12 stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tim Wilson
• Release date: Dec 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301111879

Tim Wilson

Ex-foreign correspondent, -taxi driver, -salesman, -English teacher, -smoker. Interested in Endtimes, and beginnings also.

Book preview

The Desolation Angel

Tim Wilson

.

Smashwords Edition

Copyright Tim Wilson 2011

Victoria University Press

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Victoria University of Wellington

PO Box 600 Wellington

victoria.ac.nz/vup

First published 2011

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publishers

National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Wilson, Tim, 1965.

The desolation angel / Tim Wilson.

ISBN 978-0-86473-648-2

I. Title.

NZ823.3—dc 22

Published with the assistance of a grant from

Printed by PrintLink, Wellington

Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

Table of Contents

Unforced Entry

The Desolation Angel

I Did That For You

The Dress Your Daddy Is Wearing

The Big Overseas Experience

Suits

Satan Loves You, Too

Sell Me Your Dreams

Private Beach Bitches

What Would Ray Do?

Coming And Going

Kikuyu

Acknowledgements

Again I’m indebted to Jolisa Gracewood for her improving, intelligent and ever-helpful responses and suggestions as she edited these stories. Thanks to Hamish Clayton for saving me from myself. These pieces were written over a period of almost twenty years. I’m very grateful to those who published early versions, and provided real encouragement: Steve Danby from Radio New Zealand (I Did That For You), Metro’s Stephen Stratford (What Would Ray Do?), and Finlay Macdonald (The Desolation Angel) at the Listener. Fergus Barrowman published four of these stories in Sport (Unforced Entry, The Big Overseas Experience, Suits, Private Beach Bitches). He has been a stalwart, making wise suggestions in assembling this collection, and locating Harvey Benge’s excellent cover image. Joanna Yas and Adrian Dannatt were good enough to publish Private Beach Bitches in New York’s Open City. Thanks also Thanks also to Guy Somerset at the Listener (Sell Me Your Dreams), and Iain Sharp, Bevan Rapson (Coming and Going) and Simon Wilson (The Dress Your Daddy Is Wearing) at Metro.

Unforced Entry

Hi baby, it’s me. It’s your spooky little ex-girlfriend. Your ex-est ex; back, not in your life, but in your house, and breathing . . . God, if dust truly is dead skin, then it’s you I’m inhaling. Surprised? We both are.

Yeah, I know - me being here is weird. When love detonates, the sensible majority moves on. We did smell gas; lucky we jumped. Sorry, I’m not doing sensible right now.

But I’m hardly raving. Check it out babe, I broke no windows and jimmied no locks. Thank my parents. Remember how they separated when I was eight?

Indulge me on this, sugar, it won’t kill you.

Mum vs. Dad taught me that beyond an - often invisible - threshold dignity becomes paramount. So at the end, when I was, as you put it, flaking, and you demanded your keys back, I visited one of those orange kiosks that every shopping mall in the world has.

Hey! Taking a little bit of you cheered me up!! And you still got your key.

Myself, I would have changed the locks. That possibility did cross my mind moments ago, standing on the threshold, trying to look as if I belonged there. But then I remembered how you part your hair: same, same, same every morning. I turned the key. Bingo.

Outside, lovers ate sandwiches in parks and found the fillings meaningful, tyres hummed tunes to roads. I fancied I could hear everything outside.

The house waited. Burglars, I’m told, sometimes defecate on the floors of the places they enter. It’s not machismo, it’s the fear of broaching another animal’s territory. I closed and opened my eyes and saw shelves of half-read books, and a polka dot table cloth.

My home. I lived here once.

Certain changes have occurred, details visible only to a professional eye: the migration of your Robert De Niro poster, for example, from the lounge to the hall. I’m surprised. You worshipped the highly-strung mumblers he played. You even did lines from his films when you were drunk. I always became uncomfortable when that awful taxi driver appeared. Yes, baby, I used to say, I am talking to you.

You know what happened, don’t you? You were in love with awkwardness. Now I think you’re a little embarrassed by your affection. To your credit.

Wait. Are you cool now? Wow!

Honestly, ten minutes ago you didn’t exist. Some R&B thing I like was playing on the radio; I was driving through the hood. Sunlight heating my left arm, the leaves overhead throwing camouflage-pattern shadows. I was guileless, and happy. The song snagged in my head, just the chorus, with this wobbly bass-figure, and I was trying to make my way to the verse. My handbag flapped open and shut, ready to catch all the idle silly thoughts pouring out of me.

Then I saw that almost-antique streetlight we would pass while heading home in taxis, the one where you said, almost without fail, Nearly there. And I remembered my tape.

You chucked me out, remember? I came back one night to find my stuff in boxes, helpfully labelled. As if grief might render me incapable of distinguishing curlers from skirts. Curious how emotional upheaval makes some people get very, very organised.

I left at once. What else could I do? Dad collected the whole caboodle on his way home from work the next day. He said you looked remorseful. Remorseful? I was distraught, my love. No wonder I forgot things.

You weren’t my type, that was my initial assessment. Too short. Women are visually-motivated, sweetheart. Think about it. If the reverse were true, then theoretically we’d sleep with almost anyone. I admit I was intrigued. You had this distant aura, as if something incredibly valuable was being conserved. It prodded my ambition. I’ve never been a democrat; for me, The Group, any group, suggests fish, a school of idiotic, dead-eyed fish swimming in the same direction. I found you cute, then (sigh) sexy. In the usual way, sexy became sex then quasi-attachment.

You thought you knew so much. Bollocks. I had to teach you how women are, and aren’t. Hint: it’s not what teenage boys enjoy watching on the internet.

I should have charged for those lessons. Do you remember how grudging you were? How I had to drag vulnerability from you? I felt like an interrogator, not your girlfriend. The most you could say was that you liked me. Then a certain Friday night, and Friday night’s three act drama: drinks, restaurant, bed. Well, three and a half act, if you count extra drinks and slurred taxi-driver-guy talk between restaurant and bed. In the darkness, in the throes of sexed-up and quasi-attached, I shifted position and saw a small red eye wink. I moaned. Wink again.

I pushed you off me, got up, switched on the light, and quickly determined that you were recording me. With a creepy old-style Dictaphone!!

WTF!!!???

Your response? (a) Aggression - it’s bad manners, you said, to keep one’s eyes open during said activity - and (b) Evasion. The tape recorder was your Dad’s. Sentimental value!

Your Dad’s Dictaphone!?

Dr Freud to Owairaka! Paging Dr S. Freud!

Later: It was your gender that was at fault. As if the annals of masculine carnage explain your inability to say the L-word! Profuse apologies followed, and (to my everlasting horror) tears. Big wet girly tears. It was the first time you’d done this. Sob. Worried I would leave soon anyway, just wanted a keepsake. Sob, sob. Felt emasculated by me. But loved me.

Someday I would like to have a cappuccino with the creep who persuaded other men they had feelings, and that these sentiments, when verbalised, could accomplish certain strategic goals with superficially-hard-boiled but in-fact-trusting women. That would be time very well spent indeed.

It’ll always be your tape, you said, I promise. To illustrate this you removed the tape, found a pen and wrote my name on the side.

You were still naked when you did this, which even now makes for an amusing image. I couldn’t help smiling. Then we remembered we were both nude, which I guess is how we got to the agitated convince-me sex part. Argument dissolved, effectively. We slept late. I woke first. Asleep, you looked contrite. The tape, I decided, was a compliment.

The L-word then, we were agreed. Insomniac joy! We held hands. We cuddled. We picnicked. We played five hundred and walked around naked and did it in every room of the house. Noisily. Thinking back, I still blush in a way that feels quaint.

All my reserve collapsed. I broke the past into morsels, and handed them to you. Previous boyfriends. Food anxieties. My abortion. You fed them back to me like I was your pet. I told you the nickname my mother used for me when I was a little girl; you took it immediately; I didn’t even squeak!

You made my body sing. We had almost two years.

But I . . . altered, from lovestruck to neurotic to compulsive. If a substance nourishes, naturally you want more. You start to worry about supply. Which worries the supplier. Rationing ensues.

Citing necessity (work, old mates, hobbies), you retreated. You took up Aikido, for God’s sake, not to spend time with me. I responded badly. Which provoked greater distance.

Action and reaction. And reaction and reaction, and - boom - I was face down in a suburban guest bedroom, weeping, while my stepmother tapped my back gingerly and Dad made dinner reservations somewhere special.

According to popular myth, this is when women flower. Scumbag drops sweet girl, sweet girl takes up a new hobby. Archery, say. Saves scumbag’s life from rampaging beast and/or kills both him and his new lover with one clean shot. Cops baffled either way.

Our mating dance repeated, in reverse. I couldn’t sleep. I got smashed off a single glass. My grooming went to crap. Oh, and I cried. I cried so much. Make your own comparisons featuring large bodies of water.

My cheekbones sharpened. Sadness made me pretty. Probably, I became the woman you wanted; I know I became the woman other men wanted. Dudes everywhere. On buses, in bars, popping out of rubbish bins. Hellooooo! Evincing a passionate interest in whatever I wanted to talk about. My life as a deodorant ad.

I would’ve slept with your friends, had they been better looking.

Wait. Not quite true. I did sleep with Kevin. I know! Kevin?! He was pathetically grateful.

Just because revenge sours, that’s no reason not to keep serving it.

Some months later I was surfing the net and a pop-up ad appeared for a film we’d seen together. I looked at it, and though I could instantly recall what we ate (popcorn, Jaffas), and when I put my head on your shoulder, and when you reached for my hand, I sort of let go. Smaller screens, our past merely another format. The films we watched are now available on DVD.

First step on the journey that brings me here today. If you think that’s recovery talk, diddums.

The tape then. I looked about at eye level and rummaged everywhere else. The top of the bookcase seemed promising. Reaching up, I found something. The right oblong shape . . . no, too heavy. Lighter fluid for the Zippo that the absence of ashtrays suggests you no longer use. And me here, with my matches and cigarettes; we seem to have less and less in common these days.

Nothing behind the books. Ditto the kitchen cupboard (a punt on your burgeoning domestic interests).

But, darling man-boy, you’re most obvious when you’re trying to be sneaky. I found the Dictaphone in the waste paper drawer, behind plastic bags that - I’m pleased to report - were scrunched rather than folded. And inside it: my tape!

I read my name as written by you, a hasty appeasing hand.

Gotta go, gotta go. I should’ve, that is. But nostalgia got the better of me. I pushed play.

Remember how when you hugged me you used to whisper, This is what we make it? My idea, in coming back, was to test my remade self, post-us. To put the boot on the other foot.

It wasn’t me coming out of that small speaker. A quieter, less verbal girl. Someone who expressed herself through her breathing. Uh, she was saying, as if recalling instructions. Uh. Uh.

It wasn’t me, babe.

Picture this. I’m in your lounge, listening to you and bitchface. You’re in the background, I can hear you, um, beavering away.

I’m trying to be strong, so I’m thinking, He’s acting out, he just wants to repeat me, every girl he’ll ever see is me.

Alternately: this is you, truly, and other tapes are hidden elsewhere.

Someone next door started to sing; a woman. I nearly died.

Found myself, several minutes later, standing in front of the wardrobe holding the YSL shirt I gave you for our 18 month anniversary. It smelled musty but I put it on. I kept searching. The photo was in a bedside drawer. You and her, temple to temple. Incredible. You used to say that snapshots were tacky, you with your tape recorder.

I felt nauseous, stomach-sick, and head-sick.

Next-door’s singing stopped.

There are tricks, aren’t there baby, that lodge in the repertoire? Sucking fingers. Biting. Imprints of the beloved.

That Friday you were examining my cries in the way a collector might watch a butterfly in flight, thinking of his display board and where to drive the tiny sharp pins.

Impossible. I was born in this shitty flat. You were present, the proud father. Maybe I craved fathering. During my parents’ divorce, parenting was swapped for wanting to be friends. Hardly the deal of a lifetime.

I swayed in the shirt that I gave you, jostled by memories.

Of the seam in the bathroom linoleum. Of the kitchen bench. Of the segment of carpet now covered by a coffee table and a hardcover on Frank Lloyd Wright. The places where we loved. I thought of the babies we might have had, their special characteristics coming into bloom as if on a sped-up film. Each, being a blend of you and me, the tall and the . . . slightly below average, are normal-sized. A room full of gurgling babies.

But you’re not a hallucination, are you? You’re alive, and scot-free. And you still have your tape recorder.

Something bad happened here.

My impulse was to turn the place upside down. Maybe I’ve misjudged myself: perhaps I am just like every wronged woman nowadays. The arch ex-wives. The Valkyries of funky revenge. I cut up and fed his suits to the Insinkerator. I crammed hapuka fillets into his curtain hems. I hate all that static. But what can I do? I asked for genuine emotion; I got appliance sounds.

We’re both surprised aren’t we? I have the lighter fluid in my hand. Upended. The room stinks. Lighter fluid doesn’t smell of much in the canister, but sprayed into a stainless steel cooking bowl, it really makes you light-headed.

When I was falling apart, sweetie, I would ring you at work from a pay phone, just to hear your voice. I thought I was being extremely devious.

I wonder if I’ve always had a premonition it would be like this or whether I simply believe in . . . endings.

There goes the shirt. And the Dictaphone. And the tape. Ooopsie!

That snapshot too, just for fun.

Worldliness is supposed to be a friend. To render us capable of discernment.

My trusty matches are