The Man in the Shed by Lloyd Jones Page A

is their home, a cottage, and in the backyard a woman paints at an easel.
    Mark is eight years old, and his father has just bought a cray boat. There will be none of the weekend trips or picnics along the coast they had promised each other before packing up house in Christchurch. The cray boat is no pleasure craft. Nor does the fishing timetable respect weekends. To their friends back in the city they boast of a full life, and too little time.Soon there will be no reply, as many of their friends move overseas, or marry, spawning into streams of their own making. The names are on the tip of Alice’s tongue, but the owners’ faces have drifted, and parted company with the bits and pieces of Alice’s memory.
    A number of their friends did make it to Richard’s funeral. From others, overseas, came letters and cards of condolence—and a few with chiding tendencies spoke of the ‘enormous perils faced by those who
choose
to make their living from the sea’, as if Richard had willed the storm—and the boat onto the reef. But there had been kind invitations, too. Summers spent in holiday baches, which she took up for Mark’s sake—to give him a nice memory. That is exactly how Alice thought of it, at the time—the opportunity in later life to recall his feet and toes sinking into sand, a moment’s premonition of the earth’s undertow joyfully ignored, and even shrieked at. But, notably, the first summer Alice decided to stay at home put an end to further invitations.
    She created instead summer holidays in the place where they lived. They set up day camps on the sheltered side of the house, and spent all their time between here and the kitchen. At night hot nor’-westers swept down on the town. The wind bellowed in the chimney and the boy climbed into Alice’s bed. In the morning they woke to white clouds running with blind terror. One morning Mark asked her to paint the wind. In a whimsical moment she hurled the jar of grey watercolour over the fence at the beach end of the garden. The paint streaked—then briefly rippled as a gust caught underneathand carried it aloft. A day later it formed a dead skin over a small area of dry scrub and beach shingle—and the wind had gone. In a contrite mood the sea straggled ashore in what would be a day of pleasant surprises. Alice set up the easel for Mark in front of the white Peace rose climbing the trellis against the house; she later returned to find among the painted white flower-heads a splash of black and gold. From Mark’s canvas she traced the rogue colour on the Peace climber, and gleefully announced, ‘A sport.’
    She explained to the small boy the aberrant nature of sports, this capacity of a completely different kind of rose to spring unexpectedly from the parent. A sport was outside history. There was no patiently evolved process, no careful layering or natural selection. It just suddenly appeared as its own idea—extraordinary as a new technology or a whole new language. ‘Now we get to name it,’ she told him. He was in a restless mood. She wasn’t even sure he had been listening.
    ‘Call it “no-name rose”,’ he said.
    Alice’s paintbrush returns to the school, fleshing out the temporary prefabs that have stayed on, permanently, a flash of silver for the jungle-gym bar on which Mark once split his lip and ran into the staffroom, blood pouring from his mouth.
    The painting, she has decided, ought to hang on the wall above the dining-room table. Alice has in mind those whitewashed walls in the photograph Mark sent of his apartment. She imagines him escorting a young woman aroundthe landscape, imagines them arm in arm, stopping at the playground for a turn on the swings. She imagines the three of them going out for breakfast in town—and, for all his acquired foreignness, Mark delighting in his local knowledge. Of course the young woman will not be able to help herself, sniggering with Mark at the powdered coffee, the painted placemats of great