Starlight

For this post, I have decided to upload another short story. Like 69, it was written about a year ago and was also long-listed for the Fish Competition. I could probably do with revision it but I have decided to include it as it is. Interestingly, one of the few who have read it said it gave her nightmares. This certainly wasn't my intention when I wrote it but, perhaps, there is a kind of subterranean nightmarish quality to it. As I said about 69, if you wish to apply my interpretive theory to it, you are most welcome to try.

                                              Starlight

Lentils for dinner again. Always fucking lentils. We keep a sack of them in the cobwebbed storeroom beside another one of Agria potatoes and a barrel of rice. It’s not, to be clear, that I have a gargantuan issue with lentils, but, you know, you have to ask sometimes, is it strictly necessary to have them every other fucking night? It’s Dave’s job to sortie out into the outside world once a month, driving three hours into the town to buy them from a wholesaler there. When Dave carries out his monthly excursion, he does so on a Monday.

            The recipe for dhal is simple. Boil the lentils with turmeric and sometimes tomato and then mix in a fried garnish at the end: cumin or chilli with fried onions, ginger and garlic. We cook in teams of three and, even so, it’s a major fucking effort preparing a meal for thirty people. Sometimes I’ve tried to vary the outcome in different impromptu ways by throwing in other spices – coriander, cinnamon sticks, whatever’s at hand, more or less at random. My culinary experiments tend usually to be abject failures. I’ve discussed with the other members of the house the soul-killing monotony of eating lentils every other night, suggesting we leaven the diet with chickpeas or kidney beans, just for a change, but my requests only ever fall on deaf ears. I have cravings sometimes for steak. Steak with fried egg. Steak with fried onion and mushrooms like I’d once cook and wolf down at the kitchen bench in my flat after getting back from a bender at two in the morning back when I lived in the city, but that, of course, is an impossibility here. The House has its Rules and one of its central commandments is, “Thou shalt not eat the flesh of any animal.” So dhal for dinner every other fucking night is just something we just have to deal with.

            We hold the weekly House meeting in the living room, a big draughty space large enough to accommodate all thirty of the commune’s inhabitants plus a patched and frayed pool table. The seats, arranged in a rough circle, comprise holed sofas, worn leather recliners donated by past inhabitants, wooden dining room chairs, stools and a couple of bean bags. The thirty of us assemble to negotiate responsibilities and fine-tune the logistics of running the place. The weekly House meeting is the fundamental ritual in which the House engages, the pivot around which our diurnal rhythms revolve. A commune is a world unto itself with its own laws, its own social structure and its own internal politics; if you want to live here, you have to renounce all ties to a previous life lived among shallow materialists, a bit like you would if you took vows in a monastery. On the wall hangs a black and white photograph of the twenty odd pioneers who established the House in the first place, back in the early ‘seventies. The commune’s principal founder, long-haired and full bearded, stands in the centre of the group in a striped kaftan radiating optimistic idealism out at his future followers; like Baxter a Catholic, John McNeish had originally envisaged that his community would be dedicated to spiritual, ascetic values, modelling his dream a little after Parihaka, but during the last thirty years the religious patina of the House has worn away and an adherence to Maori religious values is now considered not nearly so essential  to its members ­– although we still attract quite a few flaky, unreconstructed hippies with New Age belief systems. Despite the ever-increasing secularisation of the commune, McNeish’s spirit, and his vision of an alternative society based around principles of collectivism, community and self-sufficiency, continues to hover over the house as both inspiration and moral exemplar.

             At this week’s meeting, we begin by renegotiating the chores. The Swedish couple want, interestingly enough, to build an apiary. Lars and Puck appeared on the scene about a year ago, driving down the long dirt track that leads to the House through dairy country in a beat-up second hand yellow van with which they’d been touring New Zealand and asking us out of the blue if they could pitch their tent in the paddock for a fortnight; they’d heard about the House somehow from some other backpackers and imagined that we would be cool about such a suggestion. Of course, a cool acceptance of the randomness of life is pretty much what we’re all about and we obliged. Pretty soon a fortnight had turned into a couple of months and, three months in and after a couple of residents had dropped out, they dismantled the tent and moved their few possessions into a bedroom in the House. 

            “If we had a few of our own beehives on site,” says Lars, “we could make our own honey and whatever we have left over we could sell at the Farmers’ Market in town.”

            Spirited discussion ensues. Topics range from the possible impact of the Varoa mite on honey production to the politics of subsistence living; eventually however the Swedes are given permission to implement their scheme as long as they pay for it out of their own pocket. It is a curious aspect of House meetings that we require total consensus to take action in any way about anything at all; consequently meetings can drag on for hours and some issues never get finally resolved. There is a kind of conservatism to the House, a sort of institutional inertia that slows down the adoption of new ideas - but this matter at least is sorted out fairly quickly.

            The discussion turns to the next topic on the agenda. One of our newer residents has been failing to perform his assigned chores that include vacuuming and cleaning the second floor. When Gareth, who is twenty-five and has been living in the House for six weeks (having been vouched for by his sister who also lives here), first moved into one of the upstairs bedrooms he had made at least a half-arsed effort at participating in our shared work load but recently he has stopped even pretending to give a shit about the rest of us, showing interest only in the cultivation and pruning of the cannabis patch we keep covertly a little way from the House, out in the bush. It seems to me that pretty much all Gareth does is lounge around on the back veranda picking out blues riffs on his acoustic guitar. There is talk of applying a censure. Typically, this would be being given the job of dealing the latrine. The jade patu that we use as a talking-stick and which was left by a prior tenant is passed from person to person so that everyone can express an opinion. Personally, Gareth fucking pisses me off and, when I get a chance to handle the patu, I say so. Gareth, who, typically, has not even bothered to show up himself to the meeting, is defended by his sister and by Neil, his mate with whom he sits on the roof every morning and evening rolling and smoking  ‘special’ cigarettes; it soon becomes apparent that neither is going to yield to others’ opinions and so, rather than talk all night, we reach a compromise. Neil will have a word with Gareth and persuade him to pull finger and start doing his assigned duties.

             One of the constant vexations of my life here in the House is sexual frustration. Now, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m a sex-maniac or a pervert or anything but I think that there’s something about living in close physical proximity to a whole lot of other young people your own age that can throw a person’s hormonal balance out of kilter. Thoughts of sex occupy a disproportionate amount of my mental life. Unfortunately, there are eighteen men and only twelve women living here so, if a man wants to get his end away, he has to compete with a whole bunch of other guys intent on the same objective. Actually, the odds are worse than that because six of the men and six of the women are coupled off, so the ratio is more like twelve to six. One day, I am out watering the lettuce bed when Jasmine approaches carrying a basket full of eggs from the hen house. She is wearing a short floral dress and her unwashed hair is a mass of dirty blonde curls that catch the sunlight and create the illusion that she has a golden halo. The summer sun is high overhead. I ask her if the hens are laying.

            “You know,” she says, standing with her bare feet planted about a meter apart and ignoring the question, “I’ve been thinking. I believe that we’re all part of the same cosmic life force. There’s an energy that comes from the sun that gets into the plants and the chickens eat the plants and then we eat the eggs, so, when we eat the eggs, we’re eating concentrated sunlight. Our bodies are made all out of photons. The life force connects us, surrounds us, penetrates us. We all glow in the dark.”

            There is something about a dirty girl in a short floral dress and probably no underwear discoursing about being “penetrated” by the cosmic life force that is almost unbearably sexy. I wonder if she is familiar with Wilhelm Reich’s theory of Orgone and ask her if she is.

            “Wilhelm Reich?” she replies. “Who’s he?  Was he a Nazi?”

            At this week’s House meeting, the topic of Gareth’s non-compliance with House rules is again on the agenda. Once again Gareth himself is conspicuous by his absence. The jade patu passes from person to person until it arrives in the hands of Thomas. Thomas has a braided grey beard and alert blue eyes; he has been living in the House for fifteen years, a good ten years longer than anyone else, and the rest of the house tend to defer to his superior wisdom and experience.

            “The whole thing’s gone on long enough. We’ve given him enough time to get his shit together. He’s letting the whole House down. I think we should have him evicted.”

            Thomas’s hard eyed stare is met with a barrage of protest from Gareth’s sister and Neil, cries of opposition and urgent hand-waving. I might digress to make an observation. Although hippies have a reputation for being all sweetness and light I can assure you that this is a misconception. Some of the most intolerant people I’ve ever met have been hippies. The ones I am thinking of look down on carnivores, despise capitalists, loath intellectuals. They leap to judgement and nurture grudges. There’s a kind of blinkered self-righteousness to many hippies, a narrowness of perspective that verges on anal retention. Trust me, I’ve seen it. Fortunately for Gareth, however, the present composition of the House is tilted more towards travellers and dropouts than zealots with ideological axes to grind. We decide to give Gareth a little more time to get his act together and if he’s still not pulling his weight in a week’s time… well, let’s just say that the wheels of the House grind slow but grind fine.

            The other day I’m walking across the back-deck into the House to fix myself a lunch of home-baked pita bread with bean sprouts and fried onions when Neil, who is lying on the hammock smoking, waves me over.

            “I’ll tell you something you didn’t know,” he says, taking a lazy drag.

            Now the thing about Neil is that he only ever talks about one of two things – Bruce Lee or Che Guevara. These are his two core obsessions and, when he wants to deliver a lecture about something, the only uncertainty in the listener’s mind is on which of these two subjects he is going expatiate. It is as though Neil flips a coin in his head and bases his theme on the result.

            “You know, back when he was still living in Hong Kong, the dude was the local Cha Cha champion. That’s part of the reason he had such good coordination.”

            “I’m assuming you’re talking about Bruce Lee.”

            “Mind over matter, bro. Did you know Bruce could pull off moves so fast that the camera couldn’t catch them?”

            Neil, who was a Sociology student at Uni in a previous incarnation, washed up here on the stoop of the House about a year and half ago. Apparently his parents are big-wig lawyers back in the city but Neil’s only life-goals seem to be getting wasted and getting laid as often as possible. At a recent party in fact he hooked up with Samantha and they have been seeing each other since, a fact that fills me with belly-cramping envy but about which I can do nothing. At least, unlike his mate Gareth, Neil does his fair share around the House so I can’t fault him for that.

            The stories Neil has just told me about Bruce Lee are ones he has shared with me before but I decide to just let this pass without comment.

            “Who do you think would win in a fight? Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris?”

            Neil takes another lazy drag on his cigarette and pretends to deliberate. The smell of nutmeg drifts over.

            “Oh, Bruce definitely bro. Chuck’s good but Bruce was the master. Bruce was the guy who actually taught Chuck Norris how to do Kung Fu in the first place you know? Serious.”

            At the next House meeting, Gareth is once more on the agenda. Neil and Deborah put up a little lacklustre resistance, but its obvious to everyone that they have lost the battle. After a little talk, we reach a final consensus.  The House has spoken. If Gareth doesn’t pull his head out of arse this week, he’s history.

            One morning a little after this meeting, Chris and Jasmine are standing on the front deck, sanding the railing preparatory to repainting it, when they see a car driving down the dirt road. It’s a cop car. The cop car pulls to a stop just behind Thomas’s pickup truck in front of the House and two uniformed bobbies in blue caps, a man and a woman, get out and approach the front door. Naturally, the presence of uniformed constabulary puts both my Housemates on edge. The cops enquire as to the address, seeking confirmation that they have arrived at the right destination. My housemates reply in the affirmative and ask what it’s all about.

            “We’re looking for Gareth Davies,” says the male cop.

            Samantha opens her mouth to reply but Chris, quicker on the uptake, cuts in before she can breathe a word.

            “What do you need him for?” he asks.

            “His name has come up in relation to some burglaries and we thought he could help us with our enquiries. We have information that his sister lives at this residence and we believe it possible he might be here.”

            Samantha shuts her mouth with an audible clap.

            “No,” says Chris carefully. “There’s no one called Gareth staying on the property. Yeah, we have a girl with that surname staying in the House but she’s never mentioned a brother.”

            Samantha excuses herself, saying that she needs to use the bathroom, and heads rapidly inside.

            “So,” the cop says to Chris, “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you won’t mind if we have a look around the place and maybe have a word with the sister.”

            Samantha has run upstairs to the third floor to hammer on Gareth’s door. Gareth opens it, bleary-eyed in underwear and tie-dyed shirt.

            “Gareth! The police are here looking for you.”

            “The police?” he replies. “What should I do?”

            “Go hide somewhere. Use the fire escape and go hide on the roof. Quick!”

            Gareth quickly shuts the door. The fire escape is just outside his bedroom window.

            Back on the ground floor, Chris leads the cops into the kitchen. A bunch of us are standing around discussing the Swedes’ apiary but, when we see the pigs in their blue caps, we fall silent.

            “These guys are looking for Gareth Davies,” says Chris. “Apparently he’s Deborah’s brother. I was just explaining to them that no one by that name lives here.”

            “I’m Deborah,” says Debby, walking round the kitchen bench towards them. “He’d be my brother. Why do you want to talk to him?”

            The cops explain again that he is wanted in relation to some burglaries in Auckland. They ask her if she has heard from him at all recently and if she has any idea at all where he might be. Debby tells them that she has had no contact with Gareth for a number of months and has no idea where he’s gone. Helpfully she mentions that Gareth has some friends in Masterton and gives them an address and some phone numbers. During all this, he rest of us keep schtum. After about twenty minutes, the police give up on their interrogation. I suspect that they guess we might hiding something but I surmise also that they can’t be sure if our attitude is indicative of conspiracy or simply the instinctive guardedness all hippies display around people in uniforms.

At any rate, they leave the House shortly without any leads for their investigation.

            A couple of nights later, a bunch of us are sitting around a table we’ve set up in the back yard. It is very dark out, our only source of illumination being a small tealight in a glass jar placed at the centre of the table. There are about seven or eight of us sitting around it. Lars is playing the guitar and Puck is accompanying him on the bongo. Neil is showing Samantha how to roll nutmeg cigarettes. Gareth is cleaning up the kitchen after dinner and so is consequently not present, something we’re accustomed to now anyway. After his close brush with the law, Gareth presumably feels pathetically grateful to the rest of the House and has started not only doing his own assigned chores but volunteering to do others’. Obviously, we are now harbouring a fugitive and this is a new issue to discuss at the next House meeting but, for now, having finally pulled finger, Gareth’s future occupancy is no longer in question. I am feeling cheerful because, for once, people have acquiesced to my pleas and let me cook kidney beans for dinner instead of dhal.

            The thousand thousand stars, far more than you can ever possibly see in the city, are scattered across the dome of the sky. I can understand tonight why the ancients used to speak of the ‘firmament’: it is as though our little gathering is situated at the precise centre of the universe, as though the stars are small glittering gems set in an encompassing mortar, and this beaded sphere has the candle flame at the centre of our table as its precise focus. The stars scintillate benevolently down on us like attendant angels. I move over next to Jasmine and pour her a glass of the House homebrew. We talk, this time not about cosmic energies and trophic levels, but about her childhood growing up in a farm outside Napier and about her family. After a little while, I borrow the guitar from Lars and play her Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want by the Smiths.

            “We should set up a House band,” says Jasmine enthusiastically when I’ve finished. “We should discuss it at the next meeting.”

            Tonight the constellations are lined up in their most propitious positions. Tonight all is well with the world. When everyone falls silent for a moment, we hear the cry of morpork drift over from the stand of cabbage trees at the edge of the yard. Perhaps he envies our conviviality and wishes to participate.

Life here is good. I would never live anywhere else.