Owen Marshall Selected Stories (13 page)

A
t the north side, towards the point, the shore was rocky. When the tide was going out I liked to search the ponds for butterfish and flat crabs like cardboard cut-outs, sea snails with plates instead of heads, and flowing anemones in pink and mauve. Once Kenneth let a rock fall on my hand there on purpose, after I told him I didn't want to spend the morning making papier-mâché figures. He said it was an accident, of course, but I knew he meant it. The rock had a hundred edges of old accretions, and cut like glass. I sat and waited for the sun to stop the cuts bleeding. I thought about Kenneth and me, and how I came to be there at all.

I had good friends when I lived in Palmerston North, friends that experience had shown the value of, but when we shifted to Blenheim I didn't have time to make friends before the holidays. I liked Robby Macdonald best. He and I became close later, but Kenneth seemed to attach himself to me in those first weeks. Perhaps he felt it gave him at least a temporary distinction to be seen with the new boy. He came home with me often after school, and lent me
Crimson
Comet
magazines. At Christmas-time he invited me to go with his family to their holiday home in Queen Charlotte Sound. His father was a lawyer and mayor of the town. My mother was pleased I'd been invited, and for sixteen days too. She gave me a crash course on table manners and guest etiquette. I had a ten-shilling note in an envelope, so that I could buy something for Kenneth's parents before I left.

The house had a full veranda along the front, facing out towards the bay. We used to have meals there and, standing out like violin music from among the talk of the Kinlethlys and their guests, I could hear the native birds in the bush, and the waves on the beach. It was a millionaire's setting in any country but ours, though Mr Kinlethly was a lawyer and mayor of the town admittedly. Glowworms too: there were glow-worms under the cool bank of the stream. At night I crept out to see them, hanging my head over the bank, and with my arms in the creek to hold me up. The earth in the bush was soft and fibrous: I could plunge my hands into it without stubbing the fingers. The sand of the small bay was cream where it was dry, and yellow closer to the water. There was no driftwood, but sometimes after rough weather there would be corpses of bull kelp covered with flies, and filigree patterns of more fragile seaweed pressed in the sand.

What Kenneth wanted, I found out, wasn't a friend, but someone to boss about. A sort of young brother, without the inconvenience of his sharing any parental affection. With no natural authority at school, Kenneth made the most of his position at the bay. Each night before we went to bed, Kenneth enjoyed the privilege of choosing his bunk and so underlined his superiority. He might bounce on the top bunk for a while, then say that he'd chosen the bottom one; he might wait until I'd put my pyjamas on one of them, then he'd toss my pyjamas off and say he'd decided to sleep there himself. He liked to play cards and Monopoly for hours on end, or work on his shell collection. Whenever we had a disagreement as to what we should do, Kenneth would say that I could go home if I didn't like it. I think in a way that's what Kenneth wanted — for me to say that I wanted to go home, that I couldn't stick it out. He didn't understand how much the bay offered me, despite its ownership. Kenneth's parents didn't know we disliked each other. We carried on our unequal struggle within the framework of their expectations. We slept together, and set off in the mornings to play together. We
didn't kick each other at the table, or sulk to disclose our feud. His parents were always there, however, as a final recourse: the reason I had to come to heel and follow him back to the house when he saw fit, or help him catalogue his shells in the evening instead of watching the glow-worms.

The Kinlethlys seemed to take their bay for granted, corrupted by the ease and completeness of their ownership. Mr Kinlethly was away more days than he was there, and at night he shared the family enthusiasm for cards. I never saw him walk into the bush, and he went fishing only once or twice as a sort of tokenism. There was no doubt he was pleased with the place, though. He liked visitors so that they could praise it, and I heard him telling Mrs Kinlethly that the property had appreciated seven hundred percent since he purchased it. Mrs Kinlethly had some reservations, I think. She wouldn't allow any uncleaned fish near the house. She said the smell lingered. We would gut them at the shore, washing the soft flaps of their bellies in the salt water, and tossing their entrails to the gulls. Mrs Kinlethly gave us what she called the filleting board, and we would scale and dismember the blue cod and tarakihi in the ocean they came from: the filleting board between Kenneth and me, our feet stretching into the ripples. Mrs Kinlethly seemed sensitive to the smell of fish. When the wind was strong from the sea, blowing directly up to the house, she said it smelled of fish. It didn't really. It carried the smell of kelp, sand-hoppers, mussels, jetty timber, island farms, distant horizons, and fish.

One wall of Kenneth's room was covered with the display case for his shells, and our bunks were on the opposite side. I thought the collection interesting at first: the variety of colours and shapes, the neatly typed documentation. Each entry seemed to have one sentence beginning ‘This specimen …'. Mr Kinlethly wrote them out, and Kenneth proudly typed them on the special stickers, which I got to lick. ‘This specimen a particularly fine example from the northern coast of Sabah'. ‘This specimen a gift from Colonel
L. S. Gilchrist following a visit to our bay' or ‘This specimen one of the few examples with mantle intact'. The collection seemed to admirably satisfy the two Kinlethly requirements concerning possessions — display and investment.

My dislike of the shells began when I had sunstroke. Kenneth and I had been collecting limpets on the rocks, and I forgot to wear a hat. The sun on the back of my neck all morning was too much for me. I lay on the bottom bunk, and tried not to think of the bowl Mrs Kinlethly had placed on a towel by the bed. The family considered it rather inconsiderate of me to get sick. After all, I was there to keep Kenneth amused, not to add to Mrs Kinlethly's workload. I lay there trying not to be a bother, and hearing Kenneth's laugh from the veranda. In the late afternoon Mr Kinlethly brought a guest back from Picton, and they came in to see the shells. ‘A friend of Kenneth's,' said Mr Kinlethly as my introduction. I was bereft of any more individual name at the bay. It was always ‘Kenneth's friend'. ‘I think he's been off colour today,' said Mr Kinlethly. ‘Now here's one in particular, the
Cypraea argus
.'

‘Oh yes.'

‘And
Oliva
cryptospira
.'

‘Strikingly formed, isn't it?'

‘
Cassis cornuta
.'

I wanted to be sick. The nerves in my stomach trampolined, and saliva flooded my mouth. The mixing bowl on the towel seemed to blossom before me. Mr Kinlethly was in no hurry. ‘Most in this other section were collected locally,' he said. ‘Kenneth is a very assiduous collector, and also people around the Sounds have become aware of our interest. A surprising number of shells come as gifts.' Despite myself I looked over at the shells. Many of them seemed to have the sheen of new bone; like that revealed when you turn the flesh away from the shoulder or knuckle of a newly killed sheep. I had to discipline myself, so that I wasn't sick until Mr Kinlethly and his visitor had left the room. The shells were always
different for me after that.

The Kinlethlys had a clinker-built dinghy. It had a little bilge water in it that smelled of scales and bait. They had their own boatshed for it even, just like a garage, with folding doors so that the dinghy could be pulled in, and a hand-winch at the back of the shed to do it with. The dinghy was never put in the shed while I was there. Kenneth said they left it out all summer. We used to pull it up the sand a way, and then take out the anchor and push one of the flukes in the ground in case of a storm or freak tide. Using the dinghy was probably the best thing of all. When we went fishing I could forget the boring times, like playing Monopoly, and helping Kenneth with his shells. I could look down the woven cord of the hand line, seeing how the refraction made it veer off into the green depths, and I could listen to the water slapping against the sides of the dinghy. Closer to shore the sea was so clear that I could see orange starfish on the bottom, and the sculptured sand-dunes there, the sweeping outlines formed by the currents and not the wind. Flounder hid there, so successfully that they didn't exist until they moved, and vanished again when they stopped, as some magician's trick.

Wonderful things happened at the bay, even though I was only Kenneth's friend. Like the time we were out in the dinghy and it began to rain. The water was calm, but the cloud pressed lower and lower, squeezing out what air remained between it and the sea, and then the rain began. I'd never been at sea in rain before. The cloud dipped down into the sea, and the water lay smooth and malleable beneath the impact of the drops. The surface dimpled in the rain, and the darkest and closest of the clouds towed shadows which undulated like stingrays across the swell. ‘I never think of it raining on the sea,' I said to Kenneth. ‘Imagine it raining on whole oceans, and there's no one there.'

‘Bound to happen,' said Kenneth. He couldn't see why I was in no hurry to get back.

‘I always think of it raining on trees, animals, the roofs of cars,' I said weakly. I couldn't share with Kenneth the wonder that I felt.

Kenneth had no respect for confidences. That evening at tea, when Mrs Kinlethly told the others how wet he and I had got in the dinghy, Kenneth said that I'd wanted to stay out and see the rain. ‘He didn't know that rain fell on the sea as well as on the land,' said Kenneth. That wasn't the whole truth of it, but it was no use saying anything. I just blushed, and Mrs Kinlethly laughed. Kenneth's father said, ‘Sounds as if we have a real landlubber in our midst', in a tone which implied he wasn't a landlubber. I learnt not to talk to Kenneth about anything that mattered.

On the Thursday of the second week there were dolphins again at the entrance of the bay. I admired dolphins more than anything else. They seemed set on a wheel, the highest point of which just let them break the surface before curving down into the depths. I imagined they did a complete cartwheel down there in the green water, then came sliding up again, like a sideshow. ‘There's dolphins out at the point,' said Mr Kinlethly. Mr and Mrs Thomson and their two unmarried daughters were with us on Thursday.

‘I've never seen dolphins,' said Mrs Thomson.

‘Quite a school of them,' said Mr Kinlethly. He decided that his guests must make an expedition in the dinghy to see the dolphins. Mrs Kinlethly wouldn't go, but the Thomsons settled the dinghy well down in the water and there wasn't room for both Kenneth and me.

‘There's not room for both the boys,' said Mrs Kinlethly. Kenneth didn't care about the dolphins, but he wasn't going to let me go. He called out that he wanted to go, and his father hauled him aboard.

‘Kenneth's friend can come another time,' said Mrs Thomson vacuously, and the dinghy pulled away clumsily. I waded out a bit, and kicked around in the water to show I didn't care, but I could see Kenneth with his head partly down watching me, waiting to catch my eye, and with the knowing little grin he had when he knew I
was hurt. The dinghy angled away towards deeper water, the bow sweeping this way then that, with the uneven rowing of Mr Kinlethly and Mr Thomson.

‘Dolphins, here we come,' I heard Kenneth shouting in his high voice.

That finished it for me, not missing out on the dolphins, but Kenneth going merely because he knew I wanted to. I'd taken a good deal because, after all, I was just a friend of Kenneth's invited for part of the holidays, but I was beginning to think myself pretty spineless. I thought of my Palmerston friends, and the short work they'd have made of Kenneth. I left Mrs Kinlethly watching the dinghy leave the shelter of the bay to reach the dolphins at the point. I went up to the house, across the wide, wooden veranda and into Kenneth's room. From the bottom bunk I took a pillowcase, and began to fill it with shells from Kenneth's collection. I tried to remember the ones he and his father liked best, the ones most often shown to visitors:
Pecten
maximus, Bursa bubo,
and
Cassis cornuta
, the yellow helmet. The heavy specimens I threw into the bag, and heard them crunch into the shells already there. Once I was committed to it, the enormity of the crime gave it greater significance and release. Whatever outrage the Kinlethlys might feel, whatever recompense they might insist on, Kenneth would understand: he'd know why it was done, and what it represented in terms of him and me.

I took the shells up the track into the bush, and I sat above the glow-worm creek and threw the shells into the creekbed, and into the bush around it. Most disappeared without sound, swallowed up in the leaves and tobacco soil. The yellow helmet stuck in the cleft of a tree, and as I sat guiltily in the coolness and heard the ocean in the bay, it didn't seem incongruous to me, that
Cassis cornuta
set like a jewel in the branches. The bush was a good imitation of an ocean floor, or so I could imagine it anyway.

A sense of drabness followed the excitement of rebellion. I came down to the house, and replaced the pillowcase. Without a plan I
began to return to the beach, scuffling in the stones and listening to the sound of the sea. Mrs Kinlethly came up the path towards me. I thought she must have found out about the shells already, and her response was more than anything I'd expected. She walked with her hands crossed on her chest, as if keeping something there from escaping, and her tongue hung half out of her mouth. It was an obscenity worse than if she'd opened her dress as she came. I tried not to look at her face, and I felt the muscles of my arms and shoulders tighten, like at school just before I was strapped. Mrs Kinlethly passed so close to me that I heard the leather of her sandals squeaking, but she didn't stop or say anything. She went up the steps, and the house swallowed her up in complete silence. I couldn't work out what was happening. I sat down there by the path and waited. I looked out towards the bay and the drifting gulls, letting the wind bring the associations of the sea up to me.