Carl Shuker is the author of The Royal Free, and is appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival. Photo / Ebony Lamb
Carl Shuker is the author of The Royal Free, and is appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival. Photo / Ebony Lamb
To celebrate the 2025 Auckland Writers Festival, we’ve teamed up with New Zealand publishers to showcase some of the authors who will be on stage over the festival weekend.
This extract is from “The Royal Free” by Carl Shuker, a book described as “equal parts workplace comedy, home invasion thrillerand literary conundrum”.
Shuker will appear at the festival as part of the panel for Writing Humour, with Ferdia Lennon, Kaliane Bradley and Michele A’Court, on Sunday May 18, 1pm.
Morning with Fiona
Fiona woke at six with a gentle coo, a call, and some considerate murmurs. He woke immediately, calves stiff, about as rested as could be. He opened her door, pulled two towels from the shub’s curtain rail, and slopped them down on the flooded floor to little avail, and sloshed across to her. She was fully swaddled but strangely content, contemplating him. He pulled the curtains open and she heaved gently once at the swaddle. He unripped the tab and opened it at her chest and her warmth came toasty from the white sleepsuit in the chill room. A smell that he’d forgotten, like Weet-Bix, rising off her. Her arms rose stiffly in jagged increments, and he saw that spooky echo again of how he felt the stiffness in himself. He recognised her again and did not know it would be that way – both selfish and not – that she would be so known. He bent and grasped her at the ribs, her armpits in the webs of his thumbs, and she heaved helpfully to get up, for him, a tiny Nnnngh. And he stood on the sodden towel with her, looking down at the flooded floor and the leaves he’d scooped and piled in the corner and then left there overnight.
She did not answer, but seemed to wait. They looked down at the water, and the creeping dark in the coir matting of the hallway.
“What are we going to do about this?” he said. His father’s voice there. And what was this false confidence? This bravado? It wasn’t some simple problem. A question like that implied an answer already known, didn’t it?
The Royal Free by Karl Shuker. Photo / Ebony Lamb
She sneezed abruptly, her whole small body tensing then subsiding into him. A warm capsule in white towelling from his cheek to his bellybutton. “Has this leaked in from . . .” he tried and then stopped. He didn’t want this to be one of those days where he talked bullshit to her until he was exhausted. He’d read that single mothers ought to keep up the chatter, talk about real stuff, not baby talk, to make more bearable their time alone. Articulate your problems aloud, the books suggested, especially those with the baby. “Now are we going to have X or Y for breakfast? Let’s have X because it’s good for your A, B and C,” and etc. It helped with your sanity and it was calming for the baby. James, however, started pretty badly with half-remembered nursery rhymes, then bastardised and bowdlerised popular songs (Beatles, Beyonce, Beastie Boys), and wound up in totally inappropriate film quotes and fragments of song lyrics like the barely visible peaks of an iceberg of mental fatigue and inability to focus.
Because here it comes – he’d forgotten. He needed to go to the bathroom. He had to empty out all this water on the nursery floor before she returned for her morning nap, and figure out what it was and where it came from. He had to change her and feed her breakfast, which was now part solids or supposed to be (NICE guidance says six months). He then had to shower and get dressed without her leaving his sight (making plans here for the bouncer on the bathroom floor, door open to let out the steam, probably she won’t have patience for him to shave). But most pressingly he had to take a shit, a pressing shit that would take at least five minutes, at least five minutes, and now he’d got her up she was too awake and alert to be laid back down in the Moses where she’d howl and scream in disappointment and distress and he wasn’t going to put her in the Baby Bjorn within his sight and therefore within her sight, too, of him taking a shit. Sitting bouncing lightly on the bathroom floor as he sat looking back at her, making the various faces he supposed he made. So he’d have to wait until first nap, around 10 or 11 hopefully, and that seemed a long way off.
Carl Shuker is appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival. Photo / Ebony Lamb
“I have to go to the bathroom,” he said experimentally, “but . . .”
His feet were freezing and he stepped off the soaking pile of towels and carried her – high, proud, she looked ahead – down the creaking hall, up the stairs to dawn light coming up. He pulled the sliding door to the chill, chill morning and stepped out on to the welcome mat on the balcony. Josephine, the black-and-white cat from next door, erupted from the garden and leaped the fence. He hugged Fiona tighter in the cold. Steam goldly flowing from the air vents of the next apartment, and the next and the next.
To smell and love the morning. She looked about. “Birdy,” he said and pointed and she looked. “Tree.” There, a kind of grace.
Extract from The Royal Free by Carl Shuker. Published by Te Herenga Waka University Press. Out now. Karl Shuker will be appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival May 13-18. For more information and tickets, visit writersfestival.co.nz.
