Charlotte Grimshaw

Beware the speaker function on your device. In an airport down south, just prior to the lockdown, I pondered what I’d heard when a nearby phone lit up and the caller, seized by a furious need to communicate, gave a rapid, audible sketch of a scene in the time it took the receiver to think about turning off the speakerphone. “Never seen such paralysis. Such dysfunction. They couldn’t work together. They just stared at their shoes.” The spiel went on like that, until it switched to this: “She’s going to do as much as she can, and then she’s going to disappear. Poof – gone!”

The first part described a private meeting of the current National Party caucus. The second referred to the Prime Minister who would, the caller predicted, “do her worst” while she could (strong mandate, the Opposition staring helplessly at their shoes) and then vanish like a phantom, like Keyser Söze.

I’ve heard it before, the idea of Jacinda Ardern vanishing. It comes from middle-aged men in airports who scoff about “Cindy”. It suggests angry wishful thinking, an attempt to render her insubstantial, to pretend she’s a lightweight who could just float away.

Later, at Radio Dunedin, I faced a host who lounged with an air of complex disaffection until he sharpened, focused, and opened with a pleasantry. “So. You’re an arsonist!”

Don’t all writers want to be an arsonist? To torch convention, blaze through lies, light the way to truth. I denied it, then cracked and confessed. “Yes,” I admitted, “when I was five, I set fire to a stand of toetoe in my street. And yes, it spread, and yes, the fire brigade was called.”

I was in the South Island for book events, and so I was in airports and in cars and planes and I was thinking how much I love travel. And now the host cocked his head like a mordantly alert magpie and asked, “What makes a good short story?”

I was off, giving my take: economy, focus, brevity, wit. But this, I was thinking, this is the short story: the radio man’s melancholy, intelligent face; last night’s crowd in the hall in Arrowtown – warm, generous people out on a cold evening, wanting to talk about books. The early morning light on the hills, a hard blue sky, frost on the road, a dog tied up outside the Arrowtown library. The lovely, generous couple who drove me from Arrowtown to Dunedin across the great Maniototo, the scenery so wildly beautiful I was exhilarated. The suspension bridge at Ophir that stands on stone pillars amid landscape as gorgeous and other-worldly as a scene in a fairytale.

The dramatic middle section: our driver decided to take a short cut, turning on to a network of tiny, unpaved roads, and abruptly the mist rolled over us, thicker than any fog I’d ever seen. The car was brand new and its GPS worked in mysterious ways, and as the

We became eerily aware that the fences on either side were hung with pig skins.

“Sire, I fear that we shall have to turn back. He has a hi-vis vest and a road cone.”

fog grew denser and we crept along rough, narrow roads, past faded, crooked signposts, we became eerily aware that the fences on either side were hung with pig skins.

When my phone made its plangent noise, signalling an email, our driver thought it was a truck horn and swerved into the ditch.

This was the short story, to be stored up and remembered in lockdown. Cars, planes, airports. The exhilarating landscape, the road. A voice from the ether opens a window on a scene: a dismal group of politicians, staring at their shoes. The fog lifts, the way becomes clear, the car speeds towards Dunedin. Another hall, another crowd of good people, out on a cold evening, wanting to talk about books. l