Lifting

By Damien Wilkins

Amy is a store detective at Cutty's, the oldest and grandest department store in the country. She's good at her job. She can read people and catch them. But Cutty's is closing down. Amy has a young baby, an ailing mother, and a large mortgage. She also has a past as an activist.This compelling novel opens in a police interview room, with Amy narrating the weeks leading up to the chaotic close of Cutty's, a time when the store moves from permanent feature to ruin and when people under stress do strange things. An intense exploration of the moment when the solid ground of a life is taken away, this swiftly told novel shows again how unerringly and vividly Damien Wilkins traces the stress fractures of contemporary living.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victoria University Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781776561308

Damien Wilkins

Damien Wilkins is one of New Zealand’s leading writers. He is the author of short stories, poetry and seven novels, including the New Zealand Book Award-winning The Miserables and The Fainter, which was shortlisted for both the Montana New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. He lives in Wellington, where he is the Director of the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University.

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VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Victoria University of Wellington

PO Box 600 Wellington

vup.victoria.ac.nz

Copyright © Damien Wilkins 2017

First published 2017

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

ISBN 978-1-77656-102-5 (print)

ISBN 978-1-77656-131-5 (EPUB)

ISBN 978-1-77656-130-8 (Kindle)

A catalogue record is available at the National Library of New Zealand

Ebook conversion 2017 by meBooks

Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Lifting

Acknowledgements

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 (short stories)

Somebody Loves Us All

Max Gate

Dad Art

for Maree

On the ground floor, from a stand displaying wallets, she began to follow a Person of Interest. Amy sent herself a blank text to fix the time. The woman was probably in her late fifties and had picked up two, possibly three wallets. They were held in front of her as she walked over to a make-up counter. The POI declined help from the girl there. No, she was just looking, thanks. She’d put the wallets—two—on the counter while she examined a row of creams. Then she picked up the two wallets, this time holding them low at her side. She was wearing a large blue parka whose pockets hung open. The woman looked dowdy, Amy thought. Her hair was thin and slightly messy, as if she’d taken off a hat. Her shoes were worn on their inside heels. It was a cold winter’s morning. Perhaps the woman had caught the bus or the train. Amy didn’t imagine a set of car keys in those parka pockets. The wallets were for men. She was buying for her husband? But didn’t men like to buy their own wallets? Amy didn’t really know. There were probably men who couldn’t even do that.

The woman paused at the fountain, watching it bubble. Lots of people did, even trailing a finger. Amy did it herself, and not just to fit in, as part of her job. The action wasn’t indicative. The fountain tempted you. Water indoors had a terrible magic, as if it might flow out and wreck things. The bronze statue of Mercury, installed in the 1920s, was another reason. Children especially wanted to look at the naked man, with wings at his soaking feet and on his helmet, the two serpents on his staff, his pointing finger. As her colleague Timothy had observed, Mercury, the god of commerce and poetry but also of theft, had ended up pointing to the loos. His phallus had been removed in the first month of display following complaints but the groin area was an oddly prominent feature, a different colour following the castration, as if it had been rubbed by hands over decades. Schoolgirls now selfied with it and were often shooed away by senior members of staff.

The POI wasn’t scanning or yawning or stretching. She climbed the stairs wearily, stopping at the first display on the second floor: teddy bears. She was touching the heads of a few of the bears. Amy moved past her closely, also looking at the bears.

‘So expensive,’ said the woman to Amy.

This was a surprise. Had she clocked her? Very unlikely. ‘It’s not the best place to buy for kids,’ said Amy. If engaged, speak about true things. They’d gone to Toy World for Frank. And the Baby Factory.

‘Quality, I suppose.’ The woman had unhooked a bear with one hand. It wasn’t a simple operation with the other hand holding the wallets. She seemed to be looking around for somewhere to put them. Don’t put them in your pocket, please. ‘Can you hold these for me, love?’ The woman was offering Amy the wallets.

‘Of course.’ She took the wallets. Was this some new kind of gig? To let someone else touch the goods as a way of—what? The POI still had to take them back and put them in her parka pocket. Amy saw that the skin on the woman’s wrist was covered in dermatitis. She looked like an older version of Amy. Did her feet also suffer in the cold?

‘I like this one,’ said the woman.

‘Okay,’ said Amy.

‘My son’s wife just had a home birth that went wrong. They live in Christchurch. Put a marble at one end of the hall and watch it take off. I’ll be going down there very soon. She was in the bath at home and the water started turning red. Meanwhile the midwife was making herself a cup of tea.’

‘Help,’ said Amy.

‘My son’s wife went into shock. My son looked at the water and he was shouting. I told them why don’t you just have it at the hospital? Anyway.’

‘Was everyone okay?’

‘A five-centimetre tear.’

‘Ouch.’

‘But everyone’s fine, you know. A dear wee boy. My son’s over the moon. After all they’ve been through with the earthquakes.’

Amy thought of their chimney at home, its possible collapse in a good shake. Suddenly there was the sensation of dust in her nostrils and she had to rub her nose with the back of her hand. She held up the wallets. ‘You’re buying wallets for both of them?’

She took them back from Amy. ‘That’s an idea. No, I’ve always carried a wallet like these. Don’t know why. Never liked purses. Just need to decide on the colour. What do you think, love?’

‘I like the brown.’

‘I do too.’

The woman turned towards the stairs and, holding the railing, went down.

Frank’s birth was, finally, through appointment. Amy’s waters had broken in the Kilbirnie pool and because there was no sign of action, she was booked in to Wellington Women’s the next morning and given oxytocin to augment the labour. He was born that afternoon. Steve had been kindly massaging her feet, which she couldn’t feel. Is that good? he’d asked. Is what good?

Amy watched the woman. Please don’t put the wallets in your parka pocket. She leaned over the railing so she could see the woman on the circular stairs. Above her she could hear Donal beginning his stint at the piano. He always started with something jaunty, frequently a touch wicked. ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’. Oh Donal. At the bottom of the stairs the woman held the two wallets in front of her, as if she still hadn’t decided. She was too tired to decide. She was holding the teddy bear by its arm. She disappeared from view. Normally Amy would have followed her.

In the police interview room, Greg said, Why didn’t you follow her? But Amy didn’t know. She shouldn’t have started here. Why was this relevant? It wasn’t. Yet they’d encouraged her. Go on, go on. You never know. It might be useful. But plainly it wasn’t. Was it because the store was closing down? asked Lucy, the other D. They were real Ds. Amy was a pretend cop. She knew the hierarchy. Mostly the constables on the beat were fine. They came to Cutty’s, issued the warrant, took the offender away. Occasionally Amy took some shit. Petty thieves were time wasters. All this paperwork for a fifty-buck shaving brush. You’re on the frontlines here, darling. Now, with this pair of detectives, she’d hurdled the small stuff and was right in the middle of their dark world.

You didn’t think it was worth it anymore? Lucy said. You felt let down and thought, what the hell. Amy shook her head, no, she was still committed. It would have been too easy to give up. Then, Lucy said, walk us through it. Walk us through what happened.

Okay. Walking was what she did. She walked the floor.

She remembered the morning two months ago, before the woman in the parka showed up. Tell that.

A big headline, ‘Cutty’s Closing’, and a large photo of that silly figure in his top hat and white gloves, the doorman. That’s how she heard she was losing her job. From the paper! Steve had brought it in and, as usual, the plastic wrapping had let in the overnight rain from their front path where the paper had gone splat at 6am. In two months, the department store where she was a detective would be no more. The entire paper was soggy at the top. Wellington’s grand old lady is set to shut its doors. Buildings were ladies. You went inside them.

Amy was furious and stunned, and furious with herself for feeling stunned. Hadn’t they seen it coming?

She stared at the little man in his blue uniform with gold piping. He’d opened the door for almost thirty years or his identical twin brother had. Bert or Douglas. Amy was always careful not to use a name and avoided the pair anyway. One of them had been chatted to by Prince Philip or Prince Charles. There were two sisters who’d worked at Cutty’s even longer than that. Sixty years! They’d sold Vivien Leigh a pair of nail scissors. Mick Jagger had walked through those doors. ‘Lovely bloke,’ said Bert or Douglas. ‘With a piece of pipe down his trou.’ Behind their polish and obsequiousness, the ‘boys’ on the door were filthy and off-putting.

Douglas (it was he) was quoted from a story they’d run a few years back. What do you most like about your job? The people, he said. Sure. Smelling the ladies as they pass me and brushing against them in ways that just elude prosecution.

The people’s palace was coming to an end, the story said. That touch of glamour was going. They called Douglas an icon. He was, he was.

Amy went to the dryer and found a new singlet for the baby. She paired socks for the three people in the house, still surprised at this number. She cleaned the lint from the filter, rolling it into a ball and putting it in the kitchen rubbish bin. Then she took the singlets, and a pair of the baby’s socks—hardly bigger than the ball of lint—into the sitting room and packed them into the baby’s crèche bag, checking again that Steve had put more nappies in. He had. One day he hadn’t. She was on a loop. She went back into the kitchen, took three rusks from the box on the shelf above the sink and put them in the side pocket of the crèche bag. Her fingers felt something sticky. She smelled them. Something sweet of mysterious origin. She took the bag into the kitchen and wiped out the pocket with a dishcloth.

The baby watched her, suspended in his blue harness. He held a rusk close to his mouth like a microphone but he was soundless. Soggy bits were squeezed through his fingers. It was so cold in the kitchen her breath appeared in front of her. She leaned towards him and breathed out in the direction of the baby who jerked back, astonished. What was she? Was fire next?

Steve was at the dairy buying milk for their breakfast coffee. They’d run out and hadn’t noticed. Their whole world revolved around a milk supply, but obviously not for them. Her need for coffee almost made her scratch the paint from the cupboard above her head. There was frozen bread in the toaster. She put her tongue experimentally against the stainless steel of the bench. This was the part of the house that hadn’t been renovated. Kitchen and bathroom. Quelle surprise. Draughts blew in from gaps around the windows. Borer made fresh work of the shelves, small mounds of yellow dust collecting in plates. The wall by the bath was rotting. They needed a new roof. They’d gone into it, as Steve’s father pointed out when she complained, ‘with their eyes open’, but in buying a house or buying anything, she wondered if this was completely true. Blindness was the better spender.

A few months ago, when the sun was coming into their bedroom, none of this had seemed significant. They’d become adults, having borrowed most of the deposit from Steve’s retired parents thereby making a permanent space for the baby. Steve, fortunately, was an only child whereas she and her two sisters, Rebecca and Belinda, had been brought up by their mother. Everyone was congratulating them on getting into the property market and they experienced joy and partial smugness. Now they had no warmth except from plug-in oil heaters that melted money.

Cutty’s was beloved and full of grandness, memories. Birds in cages sang near the famous Tea Room on the fourth floor where mothers traditionally took their daughters after they’d been fitted for their first bras by a woman who, without fuss and with great skill, had been handling young breasts for years. Amy had been one of these daughters, brought in on the train from Lower Hutt. The fitting was awkward, but not horrible, and soon it was over. Afterwards, they had a pot of tea and cream buns. A blind man in a white tuxedo played the white piano. The same white piano was still played at Cutty’s but the man in the tux was different; Donal had only been there twenty years. He was blind too—it was a Cutty’s tradition. Then while her mother chatted to a staff member she’d gone to school with, Amy went and stood in front of the glass case where they kept the old tuatara. Unmoving under the heat lamp, but suffering nonetheless, she believed, the lizard took the punishment of her stare. He’d been resident since the end of the Second World War and lived on still in a special environment at the university. And somehow she had taken strength as a girl from its baggy skin, its squared wrinkled shoulders. Its stance under the glow. And who the hell are you, the tuatara seemed to be saying to anyone who stared.

Cutty’s was the oldest department store in New Zealand. It was a great shock to her mother that lots of people tried to steal from it. Steve’s father had been in the police; it wasn’t a surprise to him that Amy was busy each day. At the police station, though, she thought he might be surprised by this turn in events, even more than her mother. Why? Was it because she felt somehow that a mother would always see her own daughter in whatever shape or form she took but that others failed to recognise her as she stumbled along? Plus Margaret had already witnessed a number of different versions of Amy. When she’d come home with a mohawk and panda bear eyeliner, her mum had laughed. ‘I know it’s just you in there.’ She’d seen her daughter in court and she’d seen her found guilty. Steve’s parents knew about that but only in the abstract, something funny that she’d got up to before she met their son and settled down.

Amy remembered her toast had got caught in the toaster. No wonder she was hungry. She took a knife from the drawer and, checking again that the power was off, she dug at the toast. She angled her body so that the baby wouldn’t see what she was doing.

She wept suddenly on the kitchen bench, standing up, her forehead against the stainless steel. This happened. Their baby was a frightful sleeper and Steve snored as if he was trying to swallow live fish. Recently he’d ordered a packet of plastic rings that fitted inside each nostril to aid breathing but so far there’d been little improvement.

It was a combination of tiredness as well as this news of Cutty’s that now attacked her. At night, the sweeping circular stairs in the department store existed inside her beating head. She was always running up and down them, whenever she closed her eyes. She was always after someone who was always evading her. Occasionally by jumping into the store fountain. Was it the baby? Amy would stare into the frothing water. Then the sound of gunshots coming from the Tea Room and women’s voices. I will have my revenge!

Her job, which she’d returned to after five months’ maternity leave, was the solid centre. Ah, this. I am competent here. She’d been at Cutty’s since she was 30: four years almost; the longest job she’d had.

Her poor mum wasn’t in a position to be much help with the baby though she was always keen to be involved. Her golden age of grandparenting had been with Amy’s sisters’ kids who were now pretty much grown-ups. Margaret had had pulmonary fibrosis for five years. Her father had left shortly after Amy was born and she’d had no contact with him. He’d remarried in England and had other children. Steve’s parents were kind and elderly and not keen on ‘bothering’ Amy. Steve would occasionally go around to look at their router, resolve their Wi-Fi issues. Amy said that she and Steve were a little late