Dead Lemons Read online

  When I finally made it down to Riverton, they told me you couldn’t go further south, that this was “the last town down.” I liked the sound of that.

  So I stayed, without any further plans, because I couldn’t go back. A few days later, I saw the advertisement in the local morning paper, “The Last Smuggler’s Cottage,” and something in the pictures of the ancient cottage and the windblown, wild landscape held my attention. When the description mentioned that it was even further south, actually using the phrase “the last cottage at the end of the country, beyond the last town down,” I didn’t even bother doubting my irrational instincts and booked a viewing.

  “It’s fully restored, as you can see. Much of the woodwork is original,” Ben, the over-friendly real estate agent, said, as I slowly rolled through the empty cottage. It was sunset, and every wall was mapped in squares of golden light and smelled of wood polish and time. I liked the feel of the place.

  “It only has the two bedrooms, even though it’s big enough to fit three,” Ben said. “Wide hallways and doors, handy for a wheelchair.” Not one to miss a selling point.

  “Why’s it called Smugglers Cottage?” I asked.

  “Because that’s what it was. Riverton started around two booms. The first was in whaling back in the 1800s, and the second was the Gold Rush in the Balclutha River. Everybody came down here. But then pretty soon, and almost at the same time, both ran out; no more whales and no more gold. So there were a lot of people going hungry. Those who wanted to be rich met up with those who had boats, and it wasn’t long before lots of smuggling went on. Fair bit of piracy too,” Ben said, with raised eyebrows, clearly happy to be telling the story.

  “Gold, weapons, slaves, whatever you wanted to get out of Asia without paying tax to the King of England, came this way. This cottage, out here close to the sea, was one of the smugglers outposts. Got a bit famous, really. Ooh, I’ll show you,” he said as he led me to the back bedroom. “See here.”

  Ben was bending down next to a built-in bench under the window, pushing against a panel that looked like all the others when to my surprise, the entire bench opened out on heavy hinges to expose a large cavity inside.

  “There’s built-in hidey holes like this all over the place. It’s like living in a piece of history, really,” he said happily. So, managing to suspend rational thinking for long enough, and not trying to inspect my motives too closely, I bought the place.

  My brave plan, as far as I had one: To Not Die Yet, or, at least, die trying.

  I didn’t have it all worked out yet.

  In the parking lot on the way to the car from the hunting and fishing shop my phone vibrates, so I stop rolling to answer.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi, is this Finn?” a female voice asks.

  “Yeah that’s me,” I respond.

  “This is Betty Crowe, I’m your new therapist, the one you’ve been avoiding,” she says brightly. This is, of course, equally true and annoying.

  They said there’d be some follow-up therapy sessions but it still came as an unpleasant surprise when, only a week after I’d moved down to the middle of nowhere, I received the first message from Betty Crowe.

  Ready and pumped to start the healing.

  I ignored them and got on with things.

  “I’ve been a bit busy,” is my unoriginal comeback. I was much better at lying when I was still a drunk.

  “No, you haven’t,” she retorts.

  “Have too!” is my brilliant response.

  I’m beginning to feel this conversation getting away from me.

  “You ever live in a small town before now, Finn?” Betty asks.

  “No, I haven’t,” I say.

  “Everybody knows what everybody does, and you, Finn Bell, have been doing nothing, except for avoiding your therapy sessions, eating junk food, and now buying a gun,” she states in what I’m beginning to identify as a scolding tone.

  Upon hearing this I peer all around with a sudden feeling of paranoia, trying to see if she’s standing right behind me, but the street is deserted.

  “Enough mooping around. You’re going to come down for your session today. It’s the little blue house on Kupe Street. I’ll be in the back garden. I’m waiting, Finn,” she says in a stern voice that makes me nod without meaning to.

  “Mooping?” I say. Doesn’t she mean moping?

  “Yes, mooping, being a moop. It’s like moping but worse. Oh, and go by Patricia at the hairdresser’s across the street from you and pick up my honey pots on the way,” she says, then hangs up.

  As the phone clicks off I hold it at arm’s length, looking at the screen, then all around me again. Crazy, pushy therapist, I think to myself. But I’m going to have to go. Get this over and done with. I knew I was going to have therapy for losing the ability to walk.

  I think also being drunk during the accident and detoxing from full-blown alcoholism in hospital directly afterwards probably locked me in for some serious counselling. I’ve got only myself to blame.

  Moop. It’s a good word.

  I don’t want to leave the gun in the car, even though it’s in a little metal safe. So I keep it on my lap and roll across the road to the hairdresser’s. It’s a tiny, glass-fronted shop with purple and gold decoration and “La Coiffure Salon” in curly writing, big on the window.

  Why do small towns always have boutique-looking places like this for women to go to with French writing on the window?

  The shop actually has a wheelchair ramp, so I roll straight in. There’s a pause in conversation as I trigger the bell. Women in various stages of deconstruction frown at me politely.

  Then a tall woman walks up to me with scissors in both hands. I see up close that she’s really tall—basketball player-sized—and pretty, with an engaging smile. But attractive women with smiles like that still fall in the “way too complex” category for me so I hesitate before continuing.

  “Hi, I’m looking for Patricia,” I say, trying to return her smile despite my glumness at the prospect of therapy later today.

  “Hi, that’s me, you must be Finn,” she says. “Betty called.” She goes behind the counter and lifts out a box full of empty glass jars. I take the opportunity to look around the salon, still feeling a good deal of curious inspection from the assembled womanhood, although conversation has resumed.

  “I do men too, you know,” Patricia says with a glint in her eyes, and it takes me a moment to realise she’s inspecting my clear lack of grooming after all.

  “Why don’t you come back after you’ve been to Betty’s and I can sort out your hair?” she suggests. I hesitate, and she continues.

  “It’s only your first session with Betty. She’s just going start in with her homework thing and you’ll be done in less than half an hour. My cousin Remi had to see her after he broke into the liquor store, and the first bunch of times it was just short sessions. He’s in prison now for the second time he broke into the liquor store, but he says that counselling was good stuff and really helped him,” she explains.

  Right, good stuff, yeah.

  I’m beginning to understand what Betty meant when she said everybody knows what everybody does around here. They clearly don’t mind it, either.

  I’m on my way to automatically say no when I stop myself and actually consider my alternative—sorry, I can’t get a haircut today, I have to go and mount the safe for the gun I bought in case I need to blow my brains out later.

  “Uh, yeah, thanks, that’s a good idea. I’ll come back after,” I say, and I make myself smile again when I say it.

  “Good, then we can get to know you. Here you go,” she says as she hands me the box of jars.

  “Thanks,” I say, and I head out the door. Looks like I’m going to get my head sorted today, inside and out.

  Betty Crowe’s house is easy to find. It looks like something out of a story book; white picket fence and neat rows of flowers in front of a doll house cottage, baby blue with a red door. It’s the kind o
f house everyone’s grandparents are supposed to live in.

  I find Betty behind the house in the middle of a huge vegetable garden, a tiny, wrinkled old woman in oversized gum boots with short, grey hair and a flower-patterned apron. She has sharp features, in a pretty but weathered face and big, dark eyes.

  I imagine this is what retired fairies would look like, if they got really, really old.

  She looks me over and frowns.

  “Put the jars by the back door, thank you, and roll round front. It’s the first room on the right as you come in, I’ll be there in a minute,” she announces, and then turns back to her vegetables.

  I do as I’m told. The room I wait in is clearly for the business of counselling; big desk, massive wall-to-wall shelves full of books about psychology, there’s even a leather couch.

  Behind her chair on the wall is a framed certificate, I expect it to be some degree or diploma but on closer inspection notice that it’s a birth certificate; Betty Crowe’s birth certificate to be exact. Strange.

  “Don’t worry, I have an actual diploma in psychotherapy too,” she says from behind me, “but that just proves that I can remember things I’ve read and write them down again. My birth certificate proves I’m human, and have been so for a long time. I reckon that’s more important.”

  Betty goes and sits behind her desk, shifting her chair to face me.

  “You see the date of birth up there? How old does that make me?” she asks.

  “You’re 71,” I say, wondering where this is going; now wondering if there isn’t a retirement age for therapists.

  “Yeah, I am, and you, Finn Bell are not, and it’s a good thing to be remembering. I’ve spent years not dying. You’re half my age and you’ve almost killed yourself already,” she says, then puts on reading glasses and opens a folder in front of her.

  “I got your file from Wellington. It says here that you’re an alcoholic, your wife divorced you last year, and you lost the use of your legs in a car crash while under the influence. You get released from hospital, you sell your house and your business, and then you move down here to Riverton to live on your own in that little cottage way outside of town; no friends, no family, and no job for you here,” she says.

  She looks up. “Why did you come here, Finn?” she asks.

  And that’s the problem. How do you explain things to someone if you’re not really sure of the why of it yourself, and especially if that person is likely just to get in the way and complicate things and make a big drama? I hold her stare but don’t answer.

  “You come out here to die, Finn? Because, in truth, I have to tell you, I have no problem with that,” she says.

  “Really, this is my therapist talking?” I say, trying not to answer the actual question. Not really knowing how you respond to it, or if it’s even a conversation I can have with someone.

  “Oh, what can anyone still do to me? I’m too old, and there’s no one else here at the bottom of the world to do this work besides me. And in the end, we are the way we are, there’s no changing us,” she says.

  “And you still haven’t answered my question,” she continues. Damn.

  “Fine, then. You pay attention to me, Finn, and I’ll answer it for you. People are all the same when it comes to pain. If something hurts, first they try to fix it. If that doesn’t work and the pain gets too bad, then they try to escape from it. And if that doesn’t work, then eventually they either accept it or kill themselves,” she says with a shrug. “Plain and simple, just takes time.

  “Now there’s something wrong with you; don’t know what, don’t really care either, truth be told. But you’re somewhere along that path. I don’t know if you’ll fix it or not, or if you’ll accept it or not, or if you’ll kill yourself or not. Don’t know and don’t care. But I suggest you get on with it. Either sort yourself out or do yourself in. Just hanging around being miserable about it doesn’t help you or anyone else, does it?” she says, then waits for me to respond.

  Okay, I think, I don’t have anything to lose so I say, “Fine, fuck it, yeah, I’ve thought about it. I don’t want to kill myself but I haven’t been able to fix myself, either.”

  No reaction.

  “But if you’re not here to talk me into being happy and out of killing myself, then why are we here?” I continue.

  “Because you need to find out if you’re a dead lemon,” Betty replies.

  “Dead lemon?” I say, shaking my head.

  “Everything in your head’s alive, right? It’s not just your personality, or soul, or whatever you call the voice in your head in there. Your memories, thoughts, feelings, and even your ideas, they’re all in there, all of them living things, you understand?”

  “Okay,” I say, not really sure that I do.

  “Well, it’s just like on the Learning Channel when they do a show about evolution. Some heads are simply born better than others. Some have good ideas and feelings and things, while others . . . not so much. Some heads are really awesome, but then again, others, well, they’re just lemons. Just no good, not built to survive, the wrong mix of things in there, see? Never gonna do no good for themselves or anyone around them,” she says.

  I nod uncertainly, not liking how much this is making sense to me.

  “Now in nature, if something’s a lemon that’s it, they die out. It’s sad, but thankfully short. And I’m not saying it is fair or I like it, just that, that’s how it is. But when you’re a lemon who happens to be human, everyone tries to help you out and prop you up, and you end up with lemons causing years of pain and suffering for themselves and the people who care about them. Now I ask you, if you knew you were a lemon, if you knew that your future only held decades of you hurting and failing yourself and the people you love, would you stay around and still do it? Or stop and call it a day?” she asks.

  I don’t know what to say now, when she said it I knew, just knew that on some level I had been thinking this; she just put words around it.

  “See, that’s a dead lemon. Someone who knows they are never going to work out but still hangs around causing nothing but pain for themselves and the world. What’s the point?” Betty says, then looks me in the eye.

  “You a dead lemon, Finn?” she asks.

  CHAPTER 3

  June 4, PRESENT DAY . . .

  Dead lemons, huh? I think back to that first conversation I had with Betty all those months ago. Funny, when I wasn’t dying, I wanted to; now that I actually am, I don’t want to. Maybe sooner than I thought, maybe my earlier estimate of lasting until tonight and possibly dying from the cold out here was, for me, uncharacteristically optimistic.

  Things are starting to go wrong. My head is throbbing and my hands feel weird and tingly. My vision is blurry and I feel nauseous and it’s getting harder to breathe. I don’t know how much of this is from injury, since I can’t feel anything below my hips anyway, or how much of this is from hanging upside down. Can you die from hanging upside down? I wonder.

  I think I’ve lost track of time but it can’t have been long. Maybe it just feels longer than it is. I can make out the sun beyond the top of the rocks as I look up and it hasn’t moved much since it all happened, even though it feels like ages ago. I don’t know why I want time to go by faster, as I also don’t want to get closer to dying, but there you go.

  My gaze swings back down to Darrell’s body and then all around me again. Still no way I can see of getting out of here. I tried grabbing hold of my belt and then trying to pull myself up by grabbing the fabric of my pants but it didn’t work. I could only get about to my knee, body bent almost in half and no further. Out of desperation I reach for my other, free leg, which is loosely folded behind my caught leg and the wheelchair but not itself caught up by anything. As I do so something shifts, and the wheelchair lets out an alarming metallic creak. I drop a few inches against the rock.

  I freeze in panic, scared to breathe, but nothing else happens. Okay, not that way. So I look around again.

  I t
hink if I last that long, I’ll have about three maybe four hours left before sunset. The tide is still going out, exposing more slick rocks, speckled with tiny black mussels. Darrell’s legs finally stop moving as they are now completely out of the water, but that’s about the only change I notice to my situation. I’m pretty sure my thinking has taken a knock. Maybe I’m concussed, because my thoughts keep drifting away like just before you fall asleep and then suddenly jerk back to reality.

  I don’t know when it arrived, but at one such time when I’m suddenly back here I realise I have been staring at a big seagull which settled next to Darrell’s body on the rocks. Inspecting him with its crazy bird stare, it hops closer, then away again.

  Before it even starts I already get a sinking feeling, because I know what’s going to happen next. I’ve seen the movie. It’s just been that kind of day, I think, as the bird hops onto his chest and starts pecking at the gunshot wound in his neck as a second seagull swoops in to land. Okay, so we’ll add being eaten by birds to the list of potential problems, I think. Okay.

  Then the wheelchair gives another creak.

  CHAPTER 4

  JANUARY 2, FIVE MONTHS AGO . . .

  “Well, are you?” Betty asks again when I still don’t answer.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Well, it’s time you start figuring it out, don’t you think? And that’s the first part of your homework. Go think about where you’re at. Are you trying to fix things, or escape from them? Or trying to accept things, or trying to kill yourself? Basically, are you a lemon?” she asks. “Because trying to do them all at once is just dumb,” she says. I just stare at her.

  “And I do hope it’s one of the above because if you’re just sitting there doing nothing, just being a dead lemon, waiting for the world to do it for you, then we’re going to have problems, me and you,” she warns.