The Man in the Shed by Lloyd Jones Page B

thoroughbreds.
    Above the town Alice paints the cemetery. She had been happy to bury Richard here, with its lovely views of the bay. She can remember coming here as a family—just the three of them—and Richard kneeling down to whisper in a small boy’s ear. ‘On a clear day, you can see South America and the peaks of the Andes. On especially clear days, you can see the back of your own head.’ On that occasion Mark had looked carefully, squinting his eyes up ambitiously—he’d been about to announce a distant landfall when his father, holding back his laughter, placed his hand over the boy’s mouth.
    In the weeks after Alice buried Richard she would sometimes spend an hour sitting next to his grave, watching the last of the day depart. One time she measured her own grave—six paces by three—next to Richard’s, and sat there, wondering which memories she ought to take with her. And wondering too at the brilliant sunset—is all this simply for me, my benefit alone? Why aren’t more people around to enjoy it?
    Alice paints her way down from the cemetery through the north end of town towards the railway station. She paints a figure hauling a suitcase, although on the day in question shehad driven Mark to the railway station. He had come home simply to say he was leaving. An offer of a job had come from an architect in Sydney.
    The two days he was home he refused to go out, afraid of who he might bump into. Finally it was time for Mark to catch the train to Christchurch. Alice drove her son to the station. The entire way, Mark looked out a side window. Perhaps, she thought, he’d been making his own last-minute selections: allowing bits of the town to stick to his wandering gaze to take with him across the Tasman.
    There was the matter of her parting gift. She had had to dash back to the car. A 1955 issue of
Pictorial New Zealand
. She shouted through a half-closed window in his carriage, ‘It isn’t supposed to be reading material. Although, of course, you can read it.’
    Rita Hayworth, the Hollywood starlet, was featured that month. There she was with her new husband, Dick, and her two small children, Yasmin and Rebecca, eating breakfast, and Rita has leant across to say something vital and interesting to Dick, all ears with a spoon of cereal poised before his lips. This was the magazine Alice had read in the maternity wing while Mark slept alongside. She had held on to the magazine for reasons that evaded her now. There was another story about Haydn’s head being finally returned to the rest of his body, with quite a ceremony in attendance. A priest in sunglasses oversaw the business end, a solemn Italian sculptor bowed over the composer’s open casket and in the background of the photograph there were flashbulbs from the press photographers.Elsewhere in the magazine was another severed-head story—this time a photograph of the tree on which Carl Sylvius Volkner had been strung up, before being dragged by Hauhau rebels into the church, where his head was removed and his blood drunk from a chalice. In the Lifestyle section were tranquil scenes of Milford Sound, night bowls in Parnell; in Dunedin a dog sat patiently outside a butcher’s.
    Driving home again, Alice had laughed long and hard at the thought of poor Mark opening up the magazine and wondering which of the stories his mother had marked for his attention. Perhaps all she had meant by the gift was that he had arrived at a certain time and place. He shouldn’t read too much into it: a dog waiting outside a Dunedin butcher’s shop, for instance.
    It had been in Mark’s later years, those summers he had come home from university, that Alice felt his disappointment. It clung to him like an illness. From the hallway she spied on her son as he lay on his bed, wide awake, arms folded beneath his head. And, listening to what he heard, Alice too felt the incompleteness, felt his need to be awed, and at that moment she had understood how this yearning for