Yolk - 2007 open division runner-up

Samara McDowell of Wellington was second in the open division of the Sunday Star-Times short story competition. Judge Owen Marshall said Yolk - about the changing and ambivalent relationship between a man and a woman - was a challenging and ambitious story with a strong sense of real life and powerful emotion.

The thing that gets him?

He called her.

Not just the first time, either. The first three. Or four times, even.

"Hello," he said. He dialled her number and everything. He had to get it from her friend.

Later, when he thinks about it, it's this that gets him: the irony. Well: theirs is an ironic generation. Irony squared.

He rings her, later. After the egg incident.

"Hello," he says. (He calls her.)

"Hello," she says. She sounds bored, like this is a conversation they've had already.

"Don't bother me any more," he says. Only it comes out wrong, not the way it sounded in his head at all, the times he thought about it.

"I'm not bothering you," she says, in a light singsong. There's someone with her: he can hear him. (He can smell him.)

"Leave me alone," he says. Only he sounds frightened.

" ... OK," she says.

Much earlier than this, he moves into the warehouse.

She comes to visit him there. He's pleased: he had wanted to show it to her. Not to her in particular. To his friends. (To her.)

"This is great," she says. "This is just great."

He has already plastered and re-painted the uneven concrete acres of floor. He has already sanded and repainted the loading-bay doors: the beautiful stable-like doors, opening to nowhere, on the second floor. He lifts the heavy bolt and opens them for her.

They play soccer, inside, because they can. She's good: better than he is, really. She kicks straight and hard. He doesn't know why this surprises him, but it does. They play until one of them kicks the ball into his layers and tiers of delicate equipment, balanced along one long wall. He had been half-consciously worrying about this happening for some time.

Then they sit on either side of the oak table, talking.

They try on each other's sunglasses: each notes, in silence, that both can wear both.

They have eaten dinner, with four others, at this very table, in his old flat. It's crazy, how small the table seems now, lost in this space of his new space.

She sighs, yawns, stretches.

"I'll drive you," he says.

"No, it's all right," she says.

"No, I will," he says.

"No, it's all right," she says.

"It's not safe," he says. She rolls her eyes, picks up her own pair of sunglasses.

"You can stay, if you want," he says. He gestures to the single bed in the corner, to make clear what it is he is saying. He knows enough, second-hand, of the stories of the city to feel weird, about her just going out into the night like that. This area is notorious: drunks, crazies. Like that.

"No, I'm OK," she says. Then she stops, eyes the single bed. She turns to him, with one of the abrupt changes of mood that, so early on, he still found intriguing.

"When you're away," she says hesitantly, " can I stay here?"

"You can stay here any time you like," he answers, surprised. She looks at him steadily.

"Thanks," she says.

He thinks about this a lot, afterward (for he is given much cause to do so).

It's not exactly that he didn't mean what he said, at the moment that he said it. It's just that he hadn't thought through what it would mean: to mean what he said. At the moment he said it.

She begins to call him.

At three in the morning. Four in the morning. Five in the morning.

Sometimes she's clearly drunk. Other times he isn't entirely sure what she is, except that she's talking extremely fast. Sometimes there's music behind her voice jazz, blues, house. Sometimes there's other people, laughing.

Sometimes there's nothing behind her voice at all.

Once she says something so outrageous, so offensive, so in-your-face uncalled-for (it's four in the morning; she's drinking whisky in a garden somewhere. It's raining. She's topless. Her breasts are beautiful, tanned and small) that he says to her, "I'm not playing this game any more, I'm hanging up now," and he does.

She rings back immediately. He doesn't answer.

The message she leaves is hesitant, even frightened: there's an edge of sex underneath it somewhere, some knowing charm.

She says, "Please don't be angry with me."

It's as close as he comes to liking her.

He rings her the next day, repeatedly. He can feel her there, not answering. Her voice on the machine has that sex edge to it in its amused neutrality: that knowing charm.

He doesn't leave a message.

She breaks with the pattern, calls him at what is arguably a thinkable time: 8.15, Sunday morning. "Time you were awake," she says. "Time for callisthenics." Her voice is husky: the voice of too many cigarettes the night before, the voice of a girl who hasn't slept.

He groans, rolls over. With the summer light rolling into the warehouse and her pretty hard-on voice in his ear, this close to rich sleep, he likes her again. "God," he complains. "You don't sleep, do you?"

She doesn't eat, either. He seems to remember. She smokes cigarettes, drinks coffee.

"I have to ask you something," she says.

"Go ahead," he says.

"It's really personal," she warns him.

" ... OK," he says. He rolls over, so his erection presses into the forgiving mattress. He rolls over again, and readjusts the receiver. He looks up at the perfect square of perfect sky above his head.

" ... Why do you keep answering your phone?" she says.

It's not even as if she's pretty.

He kisses her just once. They are both drunk, and anyway, she started it.

They're in her white and cream and wood apartment. Everywhere are expensive fabrics and fairy lights, and balcony. There's the sea. He feels, strongly, that his even being there at all is her fault. He slides his bike up underneath the stone steps that lead to her flat. He asks her if he should bring it inside: she looks back at him and frowns. He feels, again, that he is bothering her.

On their way to her apartment, from the city, tracing the path of the seawall, she made him ride his bike along the top of the wall itself, the barely six inch width of it. She laughed and laughed, clapping her hands and jumping up and down. (She was, herself, safe on the ground.)

He glanced down, just once, at the beach. The tide was out. The bike had raised him yet another few feet above the dizzying fall. He imagined, briefly, not only how humiliating but how painful it would be: to fall.

He bumped the bike abruptly off the seawall, landing both wheels together on the pavement.

" ... I wanna do it," she said.

"No," he said.

And then there is the egg incident.

It's six o'clock in the morning. He comes to, groggily. Stones are being thrown, against the loading-bay doors that open out into nowhere. Then the doorbell ringing, insistently, echoing against the high ceiling, all that empty space.

He presses himself against the rough stone wall. The concrete is freezing against his bare feet. He looks out warily, through the smeared glass of the window.

She's underneath, looking up. She's wearing high heels and a linen shift. Her face is made up and her eyes enormous, shining. She carries a perfect little white square leather handbag over one wrist. And she is covered the gleam of her hair, the blue of her dress, the white of her handbag, the brown of her legs with streaks of bright yellow. She's covered with yolk.

He opens the window and leans out.

"Hello," he says.

"Hello," she says.

He's given up even the thought of asking her why she comes.

He stumbles down the narrow winding concrete steps. He unbolts and then unlocks the door. She stands primly, too close to the threshold, so he steps back immediately. Her eyes are absolutely black with pupil, fixed on him.

"I've been at a wedding," she says, gesturing to the formality of her dress. She makes absolutely no reference to the egg, though she is streaked, festooned, garlanded, and so neither does he. As always, she somehow silences him. Standing there dumbly with his bedhead and his feet freezing and his mind sodden and his mouth sour with sleep, he realises it afresh: how much he dislikes her.

"Come in," he says.

She had come up the steps behind him silently. With every one he took he had become angrier. He had gestured to the single bed in the corner, and stumped across to his own bed without looking back at her. He fell into the hollow left by his own body and pulled the sheets over his head.

Five minutes had passed.

"I don't want to sleep here," she said, quite clearly, across the echoing space of the warehouse. He yanked the sheet off his face and looked at her. She was sitting cross-legged on the single bed. She had put down her handbag, taken off her shoes, and put all her rings neatly on the windowledge.

"I want to sleep with you," she had said.

And now she's crooked herself into his groin, as calm and curved as if she belongs there, her buttocks against his thighs, his knees against the back of her knees. His arm has gone around her ribs, but only because it has to go somewhere: he doesn't want to hold her, particularly. He breathes into the warm nest of her hair at the back of her neck. He has an erection, but this is another involuntary physical response. He doesn't think she should take it personally.

Like a lumberjack.

He rears up on one elbow and looks down at her. She's snoring. It's amazing: the walls of the warehouse are reverberating, moving in and out in a regular, hallucinogenic motion in time with what he can only term her "breathing". He looks at her, asleep. He has this momentary insane desire to cover her mouth with his big hand: her mouth and her nose. Just to shut her up. It wouldn't take long. He imagines her body, twisting.

He leaves the warehouse.

When he comes back, she's still there.

She sits bolt upright, her eyes wild. She's still wearing her dress. She stares at him.

"What happened?" she says.

"Oh yeah," he says, sarcastic. She can't fool him. She can't turn up at his warehouse at six in the morning all covered with egg and climb into his bed (she insisted) and then fall asleep and snore and grind her teeth and whimper and then wake up and say What happened? like nothing happened. He's onto her. He's got her number. (He called her.)

"D'you want coffee?" he says. She says "Yeah," and then she's on his phone for three-quarters of an hour while he brings her stuff, like an idiot. She sits upright in his bed, smoking he doesn't and calls London, on his account, on his line. She was born there, or she has a friend there, or However it works, he doesn't see why he has to pay for it.

When he brings her the coffee she smiles at him, a distracted and professional smile, and looks away, still talking.

It's not even as if she's pretty.

She is, frankly, odd-looking. If you ask him. People say "beautiful" but what they really mean is "odd". That's what they mean. And anyway it's not their place she's turning up at, five in the morning, seven in the morning, midnight, midday.

" ... How was the wedding?" he says. She nods, smiles. "Yummy," she says confidently. (Yummy?) It's this he can't abide in her: her confidence. What's she got to be so confident about?

" Well f--- me then," she says.

I beg your pardon? he says. Or thinks he says. He's rigid.

"Honestly. I'm pretty good," she says. He can't believe he's hearing this. " Go on," she says, as it were cajolingly. She kneels on his bed, looking at him. The hem of her dress is pulled up over her braced knees, creating a darkness between them from which he averts his mind. " And then I'll leave you alone," she says.

Tschaah! he says. Or thinks he says. Or thinks. (He called her.)

And stones are thrown against the loading-bay doors. Someone calls his name. Then the doorbell rings.

By the time he comes back up the stairs with the friend, who is carrying his bike, she has stripped the bed. The sheets are stained with yolk. She runs across the warehouse barefoot, with the sheets in her arms, and dumps them in the bath, which stands boldly in all that open space. He watches the friend take her in.

"Hello," his friend says.

"Hello," she says.

"There's yolk on the bath," he says. There is, too. How did that happen? It's dried already: it's going to be difficult to get off.

"I'll clean it," she says.

And she does, while they stand immobile, watching her. They stand looking soberly down at the bath and the stained sheet, the two men, like surveyors. They might as well be stroking their jaws judiciously. Although they are not.

" ... Sugar soap," the friend suggests to him, of the sheet.

She looks up at them obliquely, on her knees, scrubbing at the pocked moonscape of the surface of the bath.

There is a moment here where he absolutely hates her. Her very presence here (egged; egged, and in front of his friend; egged, unexplained, and at this time of day) is like a thick black arrow in a cartoon, pointing to something odd, unresolved, inadequate in himself.

Then all of a sudden then and afterwards, he can't figure out exactly when it happened she and the friend are on the inside, and he's on the outer. He makes them lunch (he makes them, with a kind of helplessness, an omelette: upon which no one comments). Then he clears their plates of the food he cooked, while she and the friend talk. She leans forward across the table to the friend and her eyes gleam. She acts like he's not even there. The friend has all her attention: the friend jokes, she parries, she makes a joke and then they both laugh.

He scoops up all her rings from the windowsill in one bright hard jangle and throws them onto the oak table.

She looks at him. The friend looks at him.

Then she yawns, stretches. " Time to go," she says.

He looks back at her just once over his shoulder. In his dorky bike helmet.

She's covered with egg. Her linen shift is covered with it, and her beautiful tanned legs. Her strappy Italian heels are covered with egg, and there's egg on her carefully retro white leather handbag. Her rings are soaked in egg, and the concave shadow of her smoothly shaven armpit.

The foot of hair she carries around behind her, airily, the sheer fall of it?

Egg.

Her lipstick, freshly painted, is the only colour in her face. She looks every minute of however old she is: her teeth are nicotine-stained, and her fingers.

She's rumpled. She's eggy.

The thing that gets him?

She's smiling.

 

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