Culture
Body on the beach
by Sally Blundell
In Carl Nixon’s writing, we get nostalgia without the romance – seaside suburbs, streets and parks underpinned by tension, tragedy and violence.
A father threads his way through the dunes. It’s dark – the young men on the beach can’t see the features of his face. Into the ocean he launches a small raft, a hand-made job, just big enough to carry a doll – one of the many collected by his murdered daughter – out to sea and far away.
In the knockabout end of one of Christchurch’s beach suburbs, tragedy hits, violently, viciously.
“The raft was a metaphor for not having any control over things, for being out there, pushed around by the currents.”
Carl Nixon, short-story writer, play-wright and novelist – a description inevitably prefaced with the rider “Christchurch” or “southern” – discusses his first novel for adults, Rocking Horse Road, a clear-eyed, unsentimental portrait of a small community trying to deal with the rape and murder of 17-year-old local girl Lucy Asher.
“Lucy’s father is a builder, so building these small rafts was something he could do. Making something and doing something, that’s quite a masculine take on dealing with grief.”
Downing his second latte in a busy city café, Nixon describes his interest in grief: how we deal with it, how we don’t. For his MA thesis in religious studies at the University of Canterbury, he examined how the new Anglican liturgy helped people with grieving (short title: “For they shall be comforted”).
When it comes to death, he explains, we’re a perfunctory lot. If we get the news on Friday, we’ll bury on Tuesday and be back to work on Monday. Done and dealt to. No nonsense, no embarrassing carry-on – just the unspeakable grief that swells up in the throat, unexpectedly, uncontrollably, days or months or even years later.
“I think we could do grieving and death better. Longer. More protracted. And we need more formal rituals to mark the end of the grieving period. We don’t seem to have the historical framework for dealing with some of these things and it’s hard to construct new rituals.” Here he adds the transition of boys into manhood as another inadequately marked passage. “In the 1950s, churches would have had those rituals, but when they fell away they weren’t replaced with anything.”
In Rocking Horse Road, the rituals for Lucy Asher are makeshift. Following the discovery of her body in the sand dunes, local residents attach photos and poems to a no-swimming sign on the beach (they come unstuck, ending up in the sand, stuck in the lupins, tumbling down the road or blowing out to sea in a slow, sad dance characteristic of the poignant detail in Nixon’s work). Mothers keep a more watchful eye on their children. Men – fathers mainly, coasting down the road on a few beers – patrol the spit, that “long finger of bone-dry sand” that marks the southern point of Brighton Beach, a precarious promontory between the estuary and the sea.
A group of 15-year-old students, local boys on that jittery, drawn-out edge between childhood and adulthood, take it on themselves not only to try to discover Lucy’s murderer but also to conserve, to create the life of the girl who lived with her family in the house behind the dairy down the road.
For Mark, Jim, Al, Tug, Jase and Grant, she becomes an obsession, a furtive candle-lighting, clippings-collating fixation that runs like a soundtrack to their emerging manhood, marriages, divorces and their eventual ebbing into broad-waisted middle-agedness.
“It was easy for me to imagine a group of young guys forming this sort of religious order, a kind of sect. They idealise this virgin figure – there are strong religious overtones” (although not as strong, he says, as those in the original short story on which this novel is based).
“They’re not really interested in Lucy’s life. They want the life they created for her. When she turns out to be less than ideal and to have had a sex life – and a somewhat sordid one at that – they can’t deal with it.”
Nixon describes this obsession- in few words. There’s a staunch realism here, a mastery of straight-up, pared-back narration that has drawn comparisons with Owen Marshall. There are elements, too, of the wide-open spaces of Carson McCullers, the strong regionality of Flannery O’Connor. It is a world neither heartland rural nor non-specific urban.
Rather, it’s the makeshift bits in-between – the beach suburbs, the empty carparks, the bleached-out baches; the garages, attics and clubhouses where relationships are provisional, days are long, nights are sweltering and storm clouds stain the horizon. It’s a place both recognisable and specific; the kind of place, says Nixon, that he really likes writing about.
“Some writers make a conscious effort to set their stories in an unnamed town or some amorphous city. For me, that’s got no interest. What interests me is real details of specific places. If you look at Tim Winton,” (Winton, Marshall, Maurice Gee – Nixon reels off the names of some his most admired writers), “he always writes about the same place, the same people.
“I really like writing about New Zealand. This is where I grew up. I couldn’t write about anything else.”
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