Shady Lady

Drinking alone in a bar at night

An e-bike sails past with a Maltese in the front bucket. It looks at you, furious.

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One of the vintage lamps you bought as a pair last summer has fallen off your bedside table. You mean to take it to Shady Lady, the lighting repair shop in the Hutt Valley, but life keeps getting in the way.

Shady Lady is the best-named local business but there are other contenders: Andy Wallhole fine art placement. Straight Flush Plumbing. Well Hung Joinery, though it teeters on the edge of something.

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You’ve been getting mild vertigo whenever you bend to the dog or roll over sharply in bed. It happened once in the supermarket, as you reached to a high shelf for the nice shampoo. Everything went wavy, so you had to pick a cheaper brand at waist-level.

When the wobbles happen, you steady yourself with a palm on the wall or floor. Once, you weren’t ready and keeled over in front of the dog. One moment you were upright and the next you sagged to the side, like a split bag of apples.

It doesn’t last long and isn’t unpleasant — like standing on a boat in a gentle swell. You suppose you’ll need it seeing to.

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You’re driving your daughter to school, as you both slept in. She’s wondering why the dog’s getting so fat. He seems fatter by the minute and will tip nearly 12kg when he stands on the weigh plate at the vet. He only tolerates the weigh-ins because he’s given a meat chew afterwards.

“It doesn’t make sense,” you agree, as you glide past the Botanic Gardens. You’ve cut back his kibble and take him for regular walks. But your memory returns you to the previous evening, when you sat on the kitchen floor licking whipped cream off a beater and held the other one out to him.

There’s a pause for a half a block before your daughter says, “You look a bit like him, you know.”

Oh, you know.

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Your patient is not a good patient. Instead of resting after surgery, they’ve washed the Lego in the bath, to sell by the kilo on Trade Me.

They’ve also been staying up late while your son plays rock riffs on guitar. You can hear them laughing downstairs; their happiness vibrates the floorboards. You’re in pyjamas, already in the sleep position, but push your rabbit-shaped eye-mask to the side and text: IT’S A SCHOOL NIGHT!

You want to add YOU HAVE INCISION POINTS!!! but that’s probably overkill.

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You’ve an hour to wait in a distant suburb while your son trials a drama club, so take the new Maggie O’Farrell to a local bar. You spend a quarter-hour talking to the barman, then order a non-alcoholic Bloody Mary. It arrives brilliantly crimson, with four ice cubes and a bobbing wedge of dehydrated lemon.

You sit on a leather banquette in a modest pool of lamplight and sip it. The glass has been rolled in a zingy fruit powder, which clings to your lip-gloss and fingers. It’s a pleasant, surprisingly sour drink.

It feels mysterious to be drinking alone in the mid-evening when you’re usually in your lounge with the cat on your lap while the dog, animated by envy, tries to sit on your face.

You extend the novelty of this lovely night by driving the long way home, all along the waterfront. It’s black out there but you can make out the waves chopping into points. As you round the sharpest bend, a sudden gust buffets the car.

The heavy weather will hit around midnight, with thousands of lightning flashes and great, thundering booms.

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The physiotherapist takes your head in her hands and turns it 45 degrees to the side. Then she guides you to lie back in a swift movement. There’s a pillow under your shoulder-blades, which lowers your head to bed-level. You gaze at the wall while she studies your rapid eye movements. A student is observing your appointment.

Embarrassingly, there’s no evidence of your vertigo this morning. It can be a dreadful condition. Some people must pitch horribly when told to turn their heads. Perhaps they even vomit, dramatically spraying the wall. Maybe they fall off the treatment table and go into spasm — if I were a physio student, that would be worth the diploma.

But you glide through these tests. You’re sent home with a hand-drawn instruction sheet showing a sexless figure lying prone at various angles. You must perform these exercises three times a day for several days, after which you need never darken their door again.

You imagine yourself in their staffroom at morning tea. “Vertigo, my fanny,” you’d probably be saying, if you were them. “It’s a bid for attention, is what it is.”

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You walk the dog past the local primary, just as the morning bell rings. There’s an e-bike leaning against the railing with a Maltese in the front bucket.

It growls at you, lightly.

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A flock of pigeons that used to roost on a particular house on Karori Road has migrated, for some reason, to a new settling place above the ramen shop in Marsden Village. This shopping street features hanging baskets and old-timey lampposts, so the pigeons are lowering the tone. A canopy protects shoppers from their befoulment, but droppings are spotting the road edge. The pigeons watch passing cars from the overheard power lines and occasionally take flight in a large, rippling drift.

You message your Local News WhatsApp group about this development, which nobody is happy about.

YOU: What we need is a FALCONER

MAGGIE: Now you’re talking

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It’s movie night at the Scout Den. You slip into the darkened hall in the closing minutes of the film, which is being projected onto a screen above the hearth. There’s a lovely, flickering open fire, and the climbing ropes have been pulled to the side. The Scouts are sprawled on cushions and camp chairs and respond to the familiar scenes and dialogue with obvious pleasure.

When Inigo Montoya plunges his sword into Christopher Guest, avenging his father, everyone erupts. Scouts tumble into the night, which smells of woodsmoke, to the waiting cars. “Inconceivable!” shouts one of your Scouts.

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…And here’s another thing

I’m having a terrible run of books, by which I mean, I’m dissatisfied with almost all of them. I read London Falling by the mighty Patrick Radden Keefe and thought, “That was thin.” Then the new Elizabeth Strout. I thought, “Why all the fuss?”

I haven’t cracked the spine on Maggie O’Farrell but I’ll probably read it and think, “Amateur.”

I’m in no fit state to recommend you anything.

I was even cross with a trailer this week, promoting a new Disney series called Alice and Steve. It’s marketed as an age-mismatch comedy in which Jemaine Clement plays a fifty-something who somehow gets into a relationship with his best friend’s twenty-something daughter, and hilarity ensues.

It’s already won critical acclaim at a TV expo in Cannes, but the premise irritates me. I’m sure they’ll give equal comedy billing to Alice, the best friend, to demonstrate some kind of narrative sophistication, but the trailer seems to be most sympathetic to Steve, favouring his hapless point of view.

I don’t know anyone of my acquaintance who would hook up with a friend’s son — a generation born after the death of Princess Diana. Personally, I’d never sleep with anyone unable to tell me where they were when that news broke (I was at a wedding on the Otago Peninsula; I left the reception early to drive to Dunedin and watch TV).

I should give it a chance. Jemaine Clement is one of us; by which I mean, he lives in Wellington. This should be rewarded.

Can you believe I’m eight columns into my reign of terror at the Listener? My new one is about how annoying I find the public. As I said to Vanessa, it wrote itself:

“Hello ma’am,” someone in a charity bib [will] say — a pleasant acknowledgement of my existence, ultimately costing me $25 a month. What happened to the humble gold coin in a bucket? It’s not enough for Forest & Bird, these days — they want your GPS coordinates and a copy of your will.

There was a startling reader’s letter in this week’s magazine, in response to a piece imagining the shame of running over a kiwi. This reader wanted to let me know she’d accidentally bowled one under the front wheel of her car 15 years ago, delivering it neatly to the back wheel, which finished it off. She felt the double-thump.

Her letter explained that the road was narrow, dark, and unlit; it was half past six on a winter’s morning and she didn’t have a torch, and besides, there was no way the specimen could have survived under the crushing weight of human progress (her Toyota Rav4). So, she didn’t stop.

I believe I’ve found my people.

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🍹 Hand-drawn cocktail image from Magnific