Katherine Mansfield Sparkling Prose 2024 – Long List
I could not grieve, not as one should, not in that linear way that the textbooks and self-help pages speak of. Yes, there were tears; yes, anger; yes, bargaining with the universe; yes, a kind of resignation; yes, suppression and denial – all of it. The feelings were both there and not there, shimmering on the surface and buried in the deep dark far beneath, because I had said goodbye already, many years before he had actually passed. I had moved him out of my life, and had never let it go, because it was not something I could justify or forgive.
He was the jolliest man I ever met, and one of the kindest: a soppy drunk, a soft hugger. I could never bring myself to love to his body, but I did love him, and for one or two years saw him as my best friend and built my world around him. We saw in each other, I suppose, the tender parts of ourselves, the soft pink lilies that had grown in place of our hearts, and were fragrant with sweetness and decay.
So we drank, ate pasta, discussed typefaces, listened to Kate Bush and Maria Callas blaring loud from his stereo. At times, after a night out drinking, or when he was between homes, we shared a bed, sleeping side by side or back to back. I thought that was somehow open of me, an expression of love, when really I was holding him close without offering all of myself. He never reached across, never asked a thing.
I was at university then, and later I graduated, moved on, built the kind of life that my parents had, with a wife and children, a dog, a mortgage – the kind of life that was denied in those days to men who were queer. I rejected him, who so craved acceptance; I said things that hurt him; I put him from my mind.
For a while I lived in other cities, and when I moved back I saw him less – bumped into him in cafés, or while he was out cycling. He had got his life together, become a professor, and an artist of some note.
“Let’s have coffee,” I suggested, and gave him my number. He was never bitter, never said an angry word, but I could feel his sadness, his sense of loss; the little space in his heart that was reserved for my betrayal. I’d have rekindled the friendship if I could, but he never called, and I never truly understood the hurt I had caused, not until it was too late, not until he had gone.
At the funeral his closest friends – a category that no longer included me – spoke of his creativity, his love of food and travel, his connection with his students, and also of his alcoholism, his frustrations, his intense loneliness. It was, one friend said, a queer death, which might have spoken to the loneliness of growing up bent in a straight world, but also to something more personal, to the paradox of his life; he was much beloved, but spent his most intimate moments alone.
We all do, of course, for no one sees those gaps in our hearts, no one truly knows what we are feeling or what hurts might linger undissolved within us. I could not face the reception, and instead took my dog into the hills near my home. There, while I was walking and crying, I encountered a kererū. It brushed my face with its wing as it helicoptered past, then it landed on a branch, and for the longest time we stood in stillness, watching each other, reaching out with our minds to the totality of it all – the light and dark of it, the guilts, the griefs, the anxieties, the loves, the ripe juicy plumpness of life.
Finally my dog grew impatient and began to whine, so I moved on, waving to the bird, saying my farewell. It seemed to know something about that, about the finality of things, the futility of regret. Its dark eye watched me as I began to move, then it opened its wings and with a whomp-whomp-whomp it lifted itself into a big open sky.
Bernard Steeds won the inaugural At the Bay Katherine Mansfield Sparkling Prose competition in 2023. He has also won the Sunday Star Times short story competition and been shortlisted for other short story awards in New Zealand and internationally.