"I struggle with resurrecting him": an Easter autofiction
It took me three months to fall in love with him, but Ben wore me down, his manipulations were finer than the dust coming off the chisel chipping away at my resistance, and even more opaque. No one, particularly not a man, had ever really, listened to me like this before. No man had ever participated so willingly in the tomfoolery of my head or indulged my fondest memories and darkest secrets like they were a string of opal beads coming loose in his hands. Ben chuckled on his back in the blue of his room and claimed, in response to my stories, that he was just a nice, ordinary, English guy. Like Ben was short for benign. I was surprised by how easy it was, just being there with him.
At a party two weeks later — by the kind of sheer coincidence endemic to Dunedin— I overheard a woman I already did not like much rave on in a wounded, distorted, freshly broken-up with voice about Ben to a friend, and I whispered in his other available ear: is Ben, nice…he said he was nice? My friend nodded but might have been agreeing with her. And I blamed the fact that she wouldn’t stop talking about Ben, on her, not him, which reveals my feminism to be choosy and subject to karma.
She didn’t know I’d slept with him a fortnight before; after a drought of not fucking anyone for over a year. So, the eavesdropping was the only habitual thing for me, not the casual sex. I am too high maintenance to be treated casually, one of the few things I know about myself, and only by embarrassing misadventure.
But I liked Ben’s room. It was a denim blue den with good white sheets and a view from the bed of the harbour through the bare copper beech, to the other, open side of the sea. And I was in love with someone who lived around the corner from his, who I had not slept with, but stayed the night with a week after I’d been at Ben’s, in another dazzling Dunedin coincidence.
In the taxi after the first night, Ben said, look at me, and then after scanning my face added, you’re still cute, meaning I’d survived what the morning does to strangers. Before the taxi arrived, he said he could not get enough of me, even just lying there. As a fool I read this kind of lush praise as my due. I wasn’t that interested in him, apart from the fact he had nice dope and made me come twice with his hand; he seemed very vanilla. In the daylight he reminded me of a bunyip, a woodland creature, chinless and balding, too shyly vain about his gym body as he went into the ensuite and turned on the shower to hide the sounds of being human from me.
After a while I gave in to his persistent, twee invitations to come back to his house and that convenient den. Ben’s messages made the twin mistakes of addressing me as Miss and using the word cuddle in a sentence. So, I put him off, which made me a challenge, I suppose. Before bed I confessed to being in love with the man around the corner and Ben was really good about it. Which I could have blamed just as easily on the Ecstasy we’d taken. We fell asleep grinning at each other in the shifting morning dark.
When I told Ben about the woman from the party raving about him and his kids he said she suffered from anxiety. He said they went tramping together, and he got cross. He told her, if you don’t like it you can leave. Ben told me the way I lay in his bed doing nothing all day was adorable compared to her grated beetroot and her anxiety. That he could smell me at work. He took a photo of how messy my ancient Nissan station wagon was before he laughed at my holey tights under an expensive dress, and we went inside for drinks at a bar. His mistook my chronic levels of disorganisation for being bohemian and sexy. Both words I despise. Inside the bar Ben confessed in a low voice that he thought Margaret Thatcher was a wonderful woman and this was fresh information to me. What?? I hooted, you can’t be serious?
I think about both those nights with different men, a lot, and sometimes struggle with the chronology, which night was I where? Who did I go home with first? I know I left my red gumboots and silver and sapphire sequinned butterfly top at the house around the corner as I snuck off early, left it there in his ramshackle hut so there would be a reason to go back.
I stayed too long at Ben’s that first night and in the afternoon, while getting ready to leave, he made me wear a jersey his mother had knitted for him back in England because I’d lost my own long grey jersey dress, dancing in my camisole and Uggs at the bar. Ben’s jersey had the texture and look of Muesli and was knitted with wool he claimed Mummy had spun from her own sheep. You have to wear this, he said, fully aware he was being like a girl about it. An adult should not blame the turn her life had taken on a jersey, but I still do.
I could also blame it on the moment when I’d caved and gone back to his house and I was disliking his business shirt and switching off as he yammered on before the Ecstasy hit and he told me his mother had stuck a carving knife in the table because he was sent to prison for shooting at pikies, or gypos as he called them when he was 19. Wait, what? Suddenly Ben wasn’t such an ordinary guy. It is only later that I realised he shot at, or near, caravans full of sleeping children.
At the rest home where I worked, my mobile would vibrate in the pocket of my caregiver’s smock. A text I saved for later from someone else far too young for me and who wouldn’t leave me alone begging to go down on me… and it wasn’t right feeling that much friction reading it in the sluice room after hosing down an old man’s soiled underpants, or for the young man to have to finish his video game before paying me any attention.
Ben seemed like a safer bet compared to the other men chasing me. He would drink cheap cooking sherry and burn Sunday Roasts ready for when I finished my evening shift, and leave small greenstone studs, a gift not quite to my taste, beside the oven. It was sweet and non-threatening. It was cosy. I had no idea I was being seduced because being cherished through conversation felt so wholesome. One of my other men, Tai, scoffed and renamed Ben, The Woman, which was both accurate and underestimated his power.
Ben agreed he was a lesbian when I told him he reminded me of Mum. His charm had a feminine, calculating quality because deep down, he fancied he was a silverback, the alpha and omega of the pack. I underestimated him too, he dripped sweat on me when we fucked, which was gross, but his arms felt nice afterwards. He cooked full English breakfasts and insisted the black pudding on his plate was the best part. He ruined watching Rick Stein for me by making foul lip-smacking noises of possessive delight. Ben had been everywhere in the world I had not. It makes me wince having to admit the concessions I made before I got used to him. When at some point my attachment to Ben’s presence became cellular. I liked the smell of his shirt coming off the hiss of the iron.
Ben let the dog sleep on the bed and really listened while I looked up another old childhood show on YouTube. He was not familiar with Manu from Playskool, but his enthusiasms were equally infectious. He nattered on about his childhood telly heroes Bagpuss and Fingerbob to a taxi driver, and in the back beside me, Kyrie, my true e hoa and sister said: marry him. Ben had given her Ecstasy too. All the drugs came from Ben, he was always sweetly shoving something I was reluctant to take — given my patchy history with psychedelics — down my throat in the name of fun. Ben was like Teflon on the comedown, nothing stuck, which did raise the uncomfortable question of if he had a soul, an actual pip, whereas I’m like a strip of flypaper for a bad buzz, even on the up.
Ben finished me off by taking me to Glendhu Bay, near Wānaka. I was restless about being alone with him in the tiny hut he rented, it was not my grandparents sacred orange and white caravan. My grandfather was dying in his bed at the rest home and here I was with a libertine. Nana and Ben never warmed to each other. I was squirmy while we took Ecstasy and played cards. When he took me back to my river — a haunt even more special than the camp— I felt like I was splitting on myself, so I invited Kryie who was having a genuine romantic crisis to come and share our tiny hut. Ben was good about this and drove us slowly around the empty camp with Dire Straits blaring, which seemed hilarious. Kyrie repeated that I should marry him. I followed Ben back to Dunedin in the decrepit station wagon he claimed to find enchanting and thought, oh I love you, oh no, that’s what this is.
*
Nine months later I’m at another party chatting with an old friend and Ben comes bounding up to join us but the old friend ices Ben by telling him he can never speak to him after the way he treated the woman at the party. She is conspicuously absent from this party and her friends keep giving me the evils. I have just dropped some acid with Ben so this encounter strikes me as doubly startling because I know the trip will hit differently now with this fresh information.
Once Ben skulks off I confess to my old friend that the only thing that really worries me about Ben is his attitude towards my son. I don’t confess that getting ready for the party Ben was fretting that we were spending too much time together, that I was on the benefit and working part time, and it could get him in trouble.
As the acid Ben paid for comes on in the bar toilets at the party I tell myself I am a saint. I tell my reflection that I am the good one. Perhaps the attraction of certain men is that they allow one to wear a halo.
At Ben’s, I find a begging, apologising love letter from the woman at the first party, where she thanks Ben for cooking her lovely meat and grovels for not being grateful. She notes how nice his arms feel. And I write her off as annoying again. I’m stupidly in love with Ben, no sign or nothing anyone says really penetrates, although I have already left him once. I went back to him because I was pregnant, and he wanted to help me not have it. Babies, love, it’s all dangerous and potentially disastrous. And instead of listening to my intuition I tuned out the inner voices, I ghosted myself. I split.
Disassociating is the only explanation I have for why I later let Ben call my son the dirty n****r, something he said more than once to me in different combos about my son when once should have been enough. I would whip around and challenge him, but he’d say, "What are you talking about, I never said that, you’re going mad, I can’t have a mad girlfriend". When I told Tai that Ben used the N word about my son, he could scarcely believe it, not that Ben would say it, but that I would permit it and stay. If anyone praised my son in front of Ben, especially compliments from his own family, I would pay for it later. I would be reminded that my son was not that special, brave or good-looking. Ben said that he could not wait for him to fail. He wanted life to wind him out of his cockiness. None of these sentiments were acceptable to me and to repeat them doesn’t really capture their stinging, dissembling poison. It was like I was stunned.
I’m still unable to reconcile how Ben went from treating me as precious to filming me trying to cut my own throat as he snickered and promised to show the rich friends I refused to meet. I was slow to realise how much Ben strived, above all, to manage perceptions.
The final text where Ben called my son a boff head piece of meat as he tried to kick him out of the house was seared into my mind. I had proof. I can ignore what happens in real life quite easily, it is too shocking to be true, but I have never been able to ignore words on a page or a screen. Ben’s text was the last fray of the string. I felt it snap. As a guy who worked with information, Ben rarely left a digital footprint.
Ben told me I could take the Audi up to Riwaka when I cried and told him that I couldn’t do this anymore. I wasn’t usually allowed to drive the good car. I was meant to be driving up there for Easter to meet Mum. I was certain I was leaving him and was boiling with anger the next day on the drive up the island, but I was also anxious that my son was with me, I thought I would get in trouble with Ben for taking him on a holiday. I could hear Ben in my head saying, that dirty n****r is sitting on my seats.
When I got back to Dunedin a few days later Ben was gone. But I was already familiar with how much he needed to make it look like he was leaving me. So that even he could believe it. I often announced that I was leaving him, and Ben would say that I was ‘mad’ to think anyone else would have me. Then he would counter that he was leaving me. He would remind me everyone had told him I was crazy when we got together. It took two days after we split for Ben to ring his lawyer so he could argue that we had never really been together at all.
He had taken his art, which were just prints, from the house, knowing I would deface them as revenge for not facing my anger. But he left his box of memories behind and after throwing all his abandoned clothes out the window I stuck his memories in the fire: the school reports, the love letters, the Father’s Day cards in scrawly pen, his beloved postcards from Mummy where she described all the cheap cheese she was eating in France, and a friend tried to stop me and said you might regret that later and I replied, no I will not. It wasn’t enough, I needed to scream in his face. I needed to erase him but like a magician he had already disappeared.
When Ben did answer his iPhone he said in a small whimper: I have been told I am an abused man.
My friend was wrong, I still wish I had blown up Ben’s car as the grand finale to incinerating his palpable memories in the log burner. People hate Audi drivers in this country and maybe I would have had the sympathy of the nation. But this is where the age inserts a meme of me walking away gorgeous from a burning car. This is where the mask gets stiff because I was fat and crazy with crazier hair. And all I did to the Audi was spit through it trying to curse it with my venom.
I keep wearing down the old familiar grooves of the record, trying to understand how I could be so naïve and this is where the literature gets in the way. Where we both become reduced to caricatures instead of flawed characters. I was love-bombed, I could have just written that at the beginning. Love bombing is the technical term for the pretty beads coming loose in his hands. It is probably better to be more precise and describe how Ben would smash cups in the garden if he found a mess of my forgotten weeds.
*
I have a friend and former neighbour, Sam, who wanted three people dead so every day at lunch time he set aside five minutes to pray for them. He prayed for their good fortune and for their families. Because otherwise the bitterness would consume him, and he was already recovering from a heart attack. There is something of the fable to this because it’s true. But I enjoy my revenge fantasies too much to pray for Ben, and besides, it’s a bit late now, for any of that.
I used to say, after his attempt to erase me, that it would have been easier if Ben had just died, or if I had, if there had just been some terrible accident instead. And then recently, I found out Ben is dead. And since you can’t speak ill of the dead, I’ll leave it up to Mum instead, who between puffs of her rollie in the time of carnage and lawyers said: he’s gaslighting you. What’s that I asked? He’s a narcissist, she said. Maybe the word narcissist has become so popular because said aloud it has such a satisfying, double hiss.
Now I have done the mahi though! I have done the deep dives into the pop psychology paddling pool! I have scaled down the ladder into the wells of sites which promise recovery from narcissists. I have stalked through every Facebook group run by deranged lonely people sharing battle stories and I have watched YouTube tutorials where beautiful, formerly broken women break it down for me: why Ben was incapable of real love. They are living their best lives now, surely, having escaped a monster.
Did Ben really make me clean the brake dust off the wheels of my new car with a toothbrush while he stood over me with a running hose only to grab the brush from my hand and insist that I wasn’t doing it properly? Was he ecstatic the one time I cleaned behind the microwave?
I finally found the version of my us, the Ben that resonated the most, in an article on trauma bonding on the Business Insider website. I questioned the literature then and myself. But then none of the words we have for heartbreak adequately describe the wound and I would like to surface from the sea of other broken people with just a scar. Instead, I am stuck with this malignant itch while I try and make the literature fit, trying to knit my love story into the lexicon of the bad man with the disordered personality.
My Pākehā great grandmother, who refused to speak to Mum after I was born and asked the room instead who the pickaninny baby belonged to, also spent the last ten years of her life in a Lazyboy trying to unpick a ball of wool, only to make even more of a tangle of it. And I feel like this about Ben’s death, that he should not be allowed to get away with it, but also look at the tangle it makes.
I struggle with resurrecting Ben too, with breathing life back into him, when he died a nobody that wanted to be a somebody. It was his habit to divide the world using labels like this; not mine. I was smug that my worth was a secret.
I have not been able to experience any pleasure from remembering being with Ben without it ringing with too much pain, because paradoxically it was maybe the happiest that I have ever been. The white tent of sheet over us in the blue den and the stories running between us like an orchard of stars. But I cannot remember that brief happiness without feeling the same basic incomprehension I had near the end, when I was constantly frightened that something could happen to my son, an intrusive, obsessive thought that started to take over the longer I was with Ben because shame grafts better than skin and grows other, distracting protrusions. It is an affliction I should have exhausted as my son wishes I would stop talking about it, he is tired of me using him to remember my pain.
The one thing that has helped me to remember, a cheap act of therapy, was to change his name.
*
Ben made me go to his twin, Jasper’s wedding. He knew I didn’t want to go but told me he would break up with me if I didn’t come. Not coming to family weddings, like the dog being on the bed, had turned into a potentially excommunicable offence. This seemed cruel, because I wanted to marry Ben, not watch his twin getting married. Two years earlier Jasper had insulted me the day after my grandfather had died, my first serious loss, by suggesting I should be over it already. I was not. Over it. Yet.
But I fantasised about the dog wearing a tuxedo at my imaginary wedding. I wanted ten bridesmaids! After almost four years together I officially lived with Ben and was off the benefit! I had weathered watching Jasper leave his wife for another woman. I agreed to do pudding for their reception even though I found them and their love repulsive. I reasoned that I could do lovely food and not go, I can send the food and my apologies, I begged. No, he said. Ben assured me that if he was going to marry anyone again it would be me when I needled at him.
I made 86 sugar pastel roses to decorate Nana’s recipe for ginger and lemon jelly mini cheesecakes. I made two giant pavlovas, one topped with strawberries drowning in redcurrant jelly that I had strained by hand, the other was mango, slathered in golden kiwifruit and yellow passionfruit pulp. I dipped more strawberries in white and milk chocolate and made a tower of them with floating plastic cupids. I hate made that food with love. I refused to appear in the wedding photos, I felt too fat, and emitted waves of hostility at the guests who kept asking Jasper what was wrong with the dark, angry woman.
All the children and teenagers at the wedding — my sullen allies who snickered with me up the back during the ceremony — said my pudding was delicious when I accosted them.
But I need the parallel recurring fantasy I nurse to be the real story… where I object to the marriage mid-vows announcing to the converted stables that the whole family is racist and fucked in the head and walk out and drive off from the former asylum… drive off from their family compound with its twee fucking bunting and ex-pat conceit making sure, at least, that my impressive pavs were dressed in the wake of my devastation.
If I had driven off tooting fuck u in the mid-range BMW hatchback that was in Ben’s name but I paid for on his spreadsheet of love and I’d christened Eva Braun in the name of problematic relationships. If I had made a scene, if I had just left in a blaze of incriminating glory. That would have been a satisfying ending.
But then I wouldn’t wake the next day and get on it with the wedding party, less rigid with indignant rage and even apologising to a woman who I had told to get fucked when she asked if I was pregnant in my big indigo smock.
I wouldn’t endure Ben pissing out Ecstasy on me in the toilets after finally catching me as I hooted and shrieked with laughter. I had run off with his drugs to give away to the others to atone for being such a cunt at the actual wedding with my sour thunderous looks. Dancing all night while he said yes darling, yes, in the old goofy way.
Bea, who I loved, wouldn’t sidle up beside me as she unwrapped the Glad Wrap from the couscous and the coronation chicken and say, don’t worry, I’m hating this as much as you.
Or if even earlier, in the blue beginning, if I had been brave enough to knock on the other man’s door and ask for my boots and my sequinned top back. I don’t like taking Ecstasy, at all, it is a hollow, carnival drug and the other man was my kind of orphan.
I remember a woman at the wedding who was so drunk she was swaying with flirty confrontation telling Ben he was the naughty twin, that she had heard about him.
After our first halcyon flush together, Ben stopped letting me play with his phone in bed, citing sensitive work reasons. He distracted me by reminding me I was the first woman he’d managed to be faithful to. He told me over and over that I was different from the others despite his habit of saying certain names and locations with a private frisson.
His rhapsodies about my uniqueness were cut more and more by the undertow of my insufficiencies. I would sit in the car after being savaged not knowing how to leave because Ben paid for everything.
Eventually I would go inside to the warm whare and let Ben redraw me as the princess I used to beg Mum for on paper. And I was often very low maintenance, I’d forget which city he was in when he rang, away on business; I enjoyed the oblivion of my solitude too much and the muted sounds of our teenagers getting on as brothers through the wall.
Except one of the few times Ben unlocked his phone with his thumb for me so I could put on a song for us I accidentally discovered that his top site was watching cam girls…when he hadn’t touched me in months. We had just taken some mushrooms, so I corrected this lack of physical contact by punching him in his malleable, drug fucked face.
If I had just left earlier; then I wouldn’t keep embarrassing myself into revelations like this.
I wouldn’t catch Ben after the vows at the wedding, quietly making sure Jasper mentioned my food and all those hideous sugar roses in his reception speech having won my tenuous presence there by threatening to banish me.
*
On our last holiday we stopped in the motorhome Ben had rented at Cable Bay, a beautiful pale blue and stony place where Tutepourangi, my ancestor was murdered during the musket wars. Ben was indulging me because I kept threatening to leave him so I could write my novel about the wars, and I spent hours on that trip, after I’d made Ben pull over, scanning the sea for dolphins. My search was futile, they only appear for me if my son is there.
I was dreaming of Tutepourangi’s daughter Hinekawa being wrapped in a white sail and then hoisted up the mast by a Scottish captain, Jock McGregor. Jock was hiding Hinekawa from Te Rauparaha’s guerrillas, Ngati Tama. I could see Jock reading Song of Solomon to Hinekawa from his two giant bibles, and I imagine the sound of her laughter in reo as they tilt together lying in the cabin of the ship. I was dreaming of being adorable to nobody and being a proper writer.
And Ben wanted me to leave him. I’ll miss you he said, but when I remember it now, it feels sly rather than wistful, a sideways move away from me. And because all we did together was drink and smoke dope, we took the dog down to the beach with our cans and spliffs, and because we weren’t watching, the dog got onto a blue penguin that was lying in the start of the rocks behind us and Ben had to wring the penguin’s neck to end its misery.
Except penguins don’t have necks. Like a heart, they are just a bolt of muscle so it took an age to die and I couldn’t bear to watch while Ben killed the innocent penguin and our buzz. He said,
Darling, it’s difficult to kill,
Maybe because he was such a pussy.
The next day we are miles down the road at another bay near Rarangi. I can tell Ben is disappointed by the campsite, but it is my turangawaewae and I am happy to be this close to myself. We walk down the cliff path from the memorial park bench named after the dead girl Olivia Hope to the tiny menacing beach at high tide. The cave there at the bottom smells like burning metal to me, the urine of an old taniwha foe in my whakapapa but Ben could not smell it. I am already teasing him about his inferior, colonising nostrils. In the cave, here at the edges of my whenua, there is another dead blue penguin, and the sea is licking at it.
A moment where I could have read the tohu and chosen not to keep taunting him back into life and his vanishing love for me. There was no penguin, there were opals coming loose in the valley between my ribs and lying in the blue den I am almost sure I was the only one, who was ever, really there.
Talia Marshall's story will form part of her debut collection to be published in November by Te Herenga Waka University Press.
Next week's short story is by Auckland writer Evena Belich, taken from her new debut collection How to Get Fired (Penguin, $37), available in bookstores nationwide.
