The Man in the Shed by Lloyd Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

ahead, so Stuart led them to a backpackers, where the engineers checked in their bags before heading back out to the bright lights.
    It seems … well, it doesn’t seem so much as it happened … they headed off to a well-known strip club. This wasn’t so much a surprise, I have to say, as Stuart admitting to it; as a result I feel able to trust the rest of what he had to say.
    At the strip club, one or two or more, god knows, paid for lap dances. It doesn’t matter who, though Stuart did mention names, but a few of them headed upstairs to pay for a woman. That’s when I found myself looking back at the scratch on Stuart’s cheek.
    ‘So. That’s it?’ I asked.
    ‘More or less,’ he said.
    ‘You spent the whole night in the strip club?’
    ‘No. They did. I didn’t.’
    Stuart said he left them; he doesn’t know what hour that was. He’d had enough, he said. He says he couldn’t remember where he’d left the car, which is a good thing. And he’dforgotten about the room he’d paid for at the backpackers. He says he didn’t have any idea where he was headed. It was late, but not that late, he claims. Anyway, he says there were still lines of people waiting to get inside the more popular night spots.
    Within a block he’d left behind the noise and the lights and the crowds. He was on one of the streets running down to Te Papa on the waterfront. His legs carried him on. He says there was no decision in his head or will left in his body except for in his legs, apparently. Somehow he got himself across those lanes of traffic on Wakefield. I shudder to think. Then, he says, he walked around to the seaward side of the national museum and that’s when he saw the flax bushes. As soon as he saw them, he says he knew what to do. He crawled into the flax, where I suppose he passed the rest of the night and which, I gather, accounts for his torn shirt and the cut on his cheek.
    In the morning, as he woke in the flax bushes, he says he became aware of others—drunks, I suppose, hoboes, I guess, whatever you wish to call them, street people. That’s the company he kept that night sleeping in the flax bushes outside the national museum.
    Now, if someone else was telling this story, in other words if all this was being recounted by someone else and it involved someone else’s husband and family, I wouldn’t know what would have appalled me the most. The lack of a phone call—at any time that night. The binge drinking. The strip club. The lap dancers, or the business upstairs in the strip club. But no, the thing that distresses me the most is the thought ofStuart crawling into those flax bushes. It is the thought of the man I married in good faith waking in the flax bushes with all the other drunks of the city, and it is also this: he is really no better than them, and that fact would be known to everyone if he didn’t have a home to go to.
    Sunday night I ironed a fresh shirt and left it on the bed. Monday morning I dropped Stuart off at the office for an early meeting with a client. Later I went along to Te Papa as a parent helper with Clara’s Year 8 class. It is that time of year when teachers cast around for activities outside the classroom. We took in the Maori waka, and after that the kids scattered and flew like moths to the voices of piped history in various parts of the museum. The trip ended up on the marae level overlooking the waterfront. From there I could look down to the flax bushes where my husband had spent Saturday night.
    Already it felt like history. And here I suppose this story might have ended. I might try to forget it, and move on, as everyone says. But while standing there with the rude wind in my face, I felt a nagging that had nothing to do with it or the cries of squabbling children over my shoulder. I decided to take myself down to those flax bushes.
    A woman office worker sat on the lawn, smoking and sunning her bare legs while she tackled the crossword. She didn’t pay me any