The Man in the Shed by Lloyd Jones

attention, though. She didn’t see an anxious middle-aged swamphen creep into the shrub and the flax. It was easy to see where people had burrowed through. The ground was well trampled. I poked around. You could seewhere sleeping bodies had lain, and in one or two places there were plastic and glass bottles lying among the bark chips. One of the other women, the mother of one of Clara’s friends, yelled out to me. What was I doing down there? What on earth was I grubbing about for? I could hear her laughing voice rallying above the gusting wind. But I pretended not to hear, and went on looking for a piece of Stuart’s white shirt.

lost cities
    The daub of brown paint will be Alice’s first building, and working with a quick brush hand Pioneer Towers is up in a jiff. Other than the Towers the surrounding countryside is of a marigold colour, cowlick fields swept back by a steady nor’-wester to the Alps in the west. And just coming onto the canvas—now—is Harry Wills, an Englishman, on the hop from Sydney, whipping his horses across the plains for the Towers. It is late in the day when he draws back the string on his covered wagon. He offers up a hand to his entertainers and they descend and pick their way in gold braid shoes across a muddy street for the new Harold Wills Theatre. It is, as itappears to be, a pale memory, a penny-pinched version of the Globe—not with the same reek of history, of course, but Alice has mixed in some yellow with brown for a weathered look, and stroked in the new/old theatre next to Pioneer Towers. And after the theatre, she plans an eating house and, next to it, a bar, and across the street a police station and gaol. And at the end of the street, a church of sharp cheekbones and high forehead.
    Within view of the church Alice adds the farmhouse. A man with a black bag tethers his horse. George Burt, the district veterinarian, has arrived to deliver Alice’s mother, and sew up her grandmother, and make her respectable in death. Towards the top of the painting, near the snowline, Alice sketches in a stone farmhouse, to get to which, many years earlier, George Burt rode a day and a night to deliver Alice’s father.
    And here, on the edge of town, Alice adds the Memorial Hall. On New Year’s Eve her father and mother will escape from here into the nearby paddocks. The high-country boy will prod about in the underclothing of Alice’s mother, and less than six months later he will be found twitching nervously in the registry room of Pioneer Towers with its official odour of ink and wood. Through the open door he will cast an eye out to the street where the horses stand flicking the wind from their ears. There he will stand then, curling his toes inside his boots. He is twenty-two years old—old enough, he feels, to be irritated by the sense of truancy entering into what is supposedly an honourable act. In two hours’ time heand Alice’s mother will be making their way to Christchurch for the ‘honeymoon’, a place from which, instinctively, they know there is no return and of which they can hardly bear to speak.
    Alice steps back from the canvas, and pulls a face at the muddy town. The details are too large; they need to be scaled down. A few derelict fence posts are needed to lie in the tall grass, a few sagging lines for the church. And perhaps a memorial clock ought to be grafted on to Pioneer Tower for the farmers’ sons who have failed to return.
    It also occurs to Alice that sadly there is nothing here for her son, Mark, to recognise or latch on to, except to recall perhaps what a boyish eye once caught from the window of a speeding car. Bless him. Bless my boy and make him grow, Alice says to that part of the canvas, the foreground, which is more familiar.
    The scratchy whites and blues are the makeshift shops with their backs to the sea—she can add the details later, because here is the small primary school outside town, where Alice taught and her son attended. And nearby