Idle Torque

 Tom was a boiler stoker in a sweaty, tobacco stained room for forty years with big dreams. He'd always wanted to build things in his spare time, but girls, the Great War, marriage, kids and all that comes of these things had kept him from his quietly modest romances. So it was with a snatching smile that he took his retirement silver tray from the company and instantly pawned it off for a portable welder from a bloke down a dusty old farm road.

 A long time at the company lunch breaks he'd bathed in the shadows of scaffolding, trading wisdoms for his cut sandwiches and reckoned he'd learned a thing or two; by cripes, yes! Listening to the wireless reports of Monty's advance in Africa inside a space all his own, he'd make a new kind of scaffold and save a quarter of the price by making them into triangles - less work and material, stronger braces, same price.

 He set himself up by emptying his wife's garden shed and snaffled up the kauri door from the kitchen/dining room for a bench. Mavis was all smiles and sandwiches on a plate! She loved the freedom of not balancing a dinner in one hand and a doorknob in the other, don't you know, plus having her Tom home at long last was looking like a second honeymoon. The roses were good for a few months without the care they needed from her shed and as a consequence a heap of shining scaffolding grew over the English blooms as Tom toiled away like a man posessed.

 "Wouldn't it be nice if we had something to put on the mantlepiece, dear?" she smiled after a month of watching a crop of metal grow ever higher across the neatly trimmed back lawn.

 "What did you have in mind? This scaffolding thing isn't really paying yet" said Tom.

 "Oh weeell.... Dahlia has been flaunting those silly glass thingys she got at the craft fair that look like swans and so on; it would be something if I could have a little trinket to wave at her...."

 Tom set his welder down, and popped down the road for a bit.

 After an educational and deeply involved stint of learning the art of glass blowing [and a day of reinforcing the mantlepiece as a result of a substantial need for extra tare] Tom had gotten the DIY bug good and proper. He made some skis for his mates at the RSA, learned how to replace his old Morris Minor engine and fix up the old one to flick off later, and got into making ceiling fans that finally, and to his wife's great relief, started turning a profit.

 All this effort was worth a beer so he sat in the quietly shifting chill of a July verandah shivering slightly and watched the cars on the road scurry off to their employment.

 A need presented itself. 

 What he wanted was a comfy chair set in a sunroom for his winter solstices - why not?! He had all the know-how, tools and all the time in the world outside of his ceiling fan business so he drew up his plans, sparked up the furnace that had by now taken over the lawn and proceeded to shatter his glass blowing record. All over the backyard. 

 Repeatedly. 

 What was left of a once beautifully cared-for garden now glittered like a West Coast beach after a storm; the cut sandwiches and Mavis' vision of a reborn honeymoon having been eroded and washed away some time past.

 By the time he'd got it about right, he'd made himself a comfy chair with an easy to grab reclining stick that for convenience jutted up between the legs so he didn't have to lean down to adjust it. He'd also blown one heck of a glass bubble, large enough to surround and enclose the chair in a warm but airless cocoon. A quick nip to the store supplied a glass cutter and he cut and fashioned a door to one side and chucked the whole thing on a floor made of failed skis that he'd fossicked out of the pile in the pumpkin patch.

 This frightening display took pride of place in the front lawn, causing a lot of interested conversations and the odd nose-to-tail traffic collisions to spice life up a little. Neighbours had begun to stare over their fences like a herd of cattle watching the approach of a farm dog.

 It was also a lot warmer, three months having flown by and a golden summer on the doorstep. Tom eyed up the spare fan blades he'd stockpiled on the verandah and decided to upcycle them to cool the new room. Up for the challenge this presented in mounting a ceiling fan to a room that, by design, had no ceiling at all, he dragged some scaffolding off the garden, mounted it to the back of the chair, extended and reversed the blades and built an attached mount. Power was supplied from the old Morris engine and a spare diff that had been quietly brooding in the hallway and to control the volume of airflow Tom nailed a lever onto the side of the chair and put a vent in the glass dome overhead.

 Mavis collared him at the door. She'd been watching the steady migration of industrial flotsam shift for some time and it was with the threat of a distinct lack of roast dinners and more than a subtle domestic breach of the peace that he quietly set to cleaning the place up and restoring the garden to its original state.

 Then, one fine February day, with a cup of tea and a return of the beloved cut sandwiches, Tom wiped down the glass, cranked up the Morris four cylinder, stepped into his sunroom, accidentally bumped the throttle lever to full noise and took out three fences before the wildy spinning fishbowl came to a demented and cracked sigh across the road.

 Police, an ambulance, a ravening horde of retiree gardeners, not a subtle amount of stitches, a magistrate and a fairly hefty number of hours of community service followed. It was all up in the papers; Handyman Destroys Neigbourhood: Launches Aquarium.

 The sunroom sat, neglected, in the front yard; a memorial to his disgrace taunting him. Tom sat in hiding that lonely winter, watched over by his disillusioned wife and cursed the damn thing every day he saw it.

 Mavis grew worried. Tom grew silent and withdrawn, answering only with a grunt or an irritated wave of the hand while he sat at the window staring out at the world. Tom's mood grew darker, deeper, his wife's caring attempts to distract him only compounding his frustration over his very public, spinning failure.

 Then.... a need presented itself!

 For the first time in as long as she could remember, her husband jumped to his feet, kissed her and with a big smile on his face set about cooking her dinner while she hovered in the hallway, ready to bolt like a startled rabbit. That night he pulled the chairs together by the fire and they drank hot cocoa while he listened to her talking about things that mattered most, who had said what and wouldn't it be nice if...

 As the evening grew heavy he tucked her into bed and they listened to the radio about the lads fighting up into Italy until she asked him to turn it off and rolled over to face the wall. He waited until he could hear her breathing softly and then carefully slipped out into the hallway and over to the back door.

 In the dead of night he set to work as quietly as he could, retrieving materials, putting insulation wool into the walls of the shed and hiding his efforts under a lemonwood down the end of the garden. Time and Tom pottered gently on and as the world got back to doing what it was doing a year earlier, a repaired and improved sunroom appeared on the front lawn.

 Painted in a barnyard red, the scaffolding replaced by a cage and a great arm out the back sporting yet another ceiling fan, the tint of smoky glass set astride two great skis, it graced the dawn and inspired a flurry of panicked calls to flustered operators from the neighbours. 

 So it was that in front of a gathered multitude of gawping passers-by, police, newsmen, cameras, shuttered windows and mutters of "He's at it again!", Tom became the first man in Takapuna to take tea hovering a foot off the ground. It was all up in the papers: A Thirst for Higher Things; Housewife takes charge.

 It now sits, bolted to the ground and chock-full of tomato plants, on the old front lawn as a rusting greenhouse. Tom and Mavis' son now sits on the verandah with his kids listening to the wireless news from Korea, but don't you worry... 

 A need has presented itself.