Fish of the Week by Steve Braunias

Author:Steve Braunias
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781877551741
Publisher: Awa Press
Published: 2012-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

[August 6]

Home

Honey, I can say to her at any time of day or night, I’m home. Home is where I work. Home is where we live, together, since last weekend, in a three-bedroom rented house owned by a chemist. It’s in a suburb where the streets are named after birds. Two of the birds are extinct. We live in an extinct street.

Home is a kitchen with a German stove. It has an instruction manual. I don’t have time to cook; I’m too busy reading the manual. ‘It is best to bake several cakes one after the other.’ And: ‘Do not sit on the oven.’ Also: ‘When baking and basting roasts, steam may be generated … This is a question of physics.’

Home is a porch, a garage, and a shed with two rooms. The shed looks like a classroom. You could teach kids a good lesson in manners in that shed. It has a cupboard with a door that locks.

Home is a backyard with trees covered in apples, nashis, figs, lemons, oranges and birds, including a quiet, handsome pair of spotted doves. The house next door has a caged sulphur-crested cockatoo called Elliot. Elliot can talk. His most spectacular use of the English language is: ‘Puss, puss.’

Home is around the corner from a mysterious white cottage called The Legion of Mary Centre. All I know about it is that the legionnaires keep a beautifully manicured lawn. But there are clues to other places of interest, thanks to an excellent hand-drawn map courtesy of a neighbour. ‘Some mangroves … Secret park … Abandoned shopping trolley.’ One house is marked: ‘Anorexic woman who walks all the time and collects fruit.’

Home is safe as houses. The neighbourhood is patrolled by a community policeman called Brendon. Brendon is thirty-one and owns a moustache. Home is nearby to the necessities of New Zealand life—a bakery, an RSA, a Mad Butcher, and a Work and Income office.

Home is a neighbourhood where a family of Somalians delivers mailbox leaflets from Harvey Norman, Noel Leeming and someone called Domino Pizza. There are a large number of large people in wheelchairs on their way to order pizza. Parents play with their kids on the front lawn after work. Black shags fly overhead, towards water. The sky softens when you look west, towards water.

Home is rent and bills, but home is happy. Home is a woman’s touch, her lingerie, her high-heeled shoes. Home is where I never, ever want to leave. On the day we moved in, I went into the local service station and glanced at an unusually large front-page headline on that morning’s paper: WORLDWIDE TRAVEL CHAOS. I was too tired to buy it. I was too tired to think. My head was full of heavy cardboard boxes with the felt-tip headline: KITCHEN.

But I trudged back around the corner that night, bought the paper, and read how police raids in England had apparently prevented the ‘terror plot’ that aimed to make 8/16 the new 9/11.

The big story was a riot of insane sci-fi.

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