Owen Marshall Selected Stories (16 page)

I was determined not to mention being a parcel. Not admitting it was some way of keeping the full force of its humiliation from me. I quite like Dusty's Captain Marvel suit, I told Kelly. A bit overdone, but I quite like it. I told Miss Erikson I'd help with supper, she said. It won't be worth you coming over for the next dance because I'll start helping her soon, I think. Sure, sure, I said, we must have the grub on time. The grub on time! I couldn't believe I was saying it. And afterwards I'll probably help with the washing up, Kelly said.

Flour-and-water paste isn't very successful when there's any movement. Some of the stickers were starting to work loose on the brown paper. This Way Up fell on to the dance floor. Handle with
Care came off and I tucked it under the twine. It worked down low on my waist, and Dusty and Ricky Ransumeen started pointing and laughing at its anatomical juxtaposition. I took Kelly back to her side of the hall after the dance. See you then, I said. She slipped among the other girls with a murmur. Who could blame her? As I went back over the floor I could see several of my labels there. Fragile, Via Antwerp, Airmail. Maybe someone would start collecting them and draw attention to them. The parcel was ceasing to be recognisable as such. Without stickers, wrinkled and lopsided after the dancing, it had lost what little illusion of costume it ever had. I was a kid wrapped in brown paper and wearing bathing togs and sandshoes. Ah, Jesus me. Only the stamp over my heart seemed firmly stuck. A mark of Cain in crayon that leered out on all the world, and would not release itself, or me. I was beaten all right. I couldn't maintain any longer my vision of how the night should be. And the withdrawal of sexual preferment had weakened me; my esteem had been eroded. I began to work my way towards the door: a paper parcel through the Batmen, policemen, riverboat gamblers and Indian chiefs. Little Wade Stewart was a Pluto. He came up to me with Fragile. Is this yours? he said kindly Yes, what a dag, isn't it? I said. I kept on moving towards the door, and reached it as the lucky spot waltz was announced.

It felt good outside. The summer dusk, the distanced and impersonal buildings, the lucky spot music fading as I made my way to the bikesheds. Bodger loomed up. I got a bit of a nosebleed, I told him, but as I was by myself he wasn't interested. I rode out of the grounds, and the crinkle of the parcel and the lessening music conjoined down the quiet street. I allowed myself the indulgence of self-pity for a time. I was outside myself, I accompanied myself, I consoled myself, for the bland incomprehension of adults and the loss of sexual status. I felt I had been hard done by, that was the truth. Perhaps there would be a fire in the hall. I imagined the flames leaping from the walls, and the riverboat gamblers and fairy queens
put to flight. Faster and faster I biked. I saw the fiery press of the blaze, the terror of my classmates, the impotence of Bodger and Miss Erikson. I stood up on the pedals in the soft, summer night and put on a sprint that would have carried me clear of any possible pursuit. Parcel my arse, I shouted, and louder, parcel my arse. I reckoned that I was about the fastest bike rider at that school. I reckoned that even Dusty Rhodes wouldn't be a patch on me at that. I felt the wind of my flight pushing the brown paper against me as I swept without a light down the blue streets.

There was a light in the living room when I reached home, however. I put the bike away, and looked through the gap between curtain-edge and window-side. My mother was listening to the radio and talking; my father was cleaning his shoes on a newspaper spread by his chair. I had to find some immediate focus for revenge, and they would serve as enemies. I crept into the kitchen and took a packet of my father's cigarettes from behind the clock, and struck a match to inspect the pantry cupboard. Mixed fruit pack, I chose; raisins, candied peel, sultanas, figs, cherries. I took the fruit pack and cigarettes to the woodshed. I sat on the pine slabs in the lean-to there, and ate the fruit mix and smoked my father's Pall Mall. I ripped off the stamp in crayon, and burnt holes in it. I flashed the glowing cigarette against the navy sky, writing Zorro in swift neon. I undid the twine and unwrapped the parcel, burying the pieces in the wood heap. Jesus, I said, so what? Who cares about the dance and being a paper parcel? I was still second fastest in the school, wasn't I? Wasn't I! I sat in my togs and singlet, ate my dried fruit, and watched the smoke curl as shadows from my fingers. Let the world come on, I could take it. And next time it would be different. I could see so clearly the next year's dance, when I would be Napoleon and Fiona McCartney my Josephine. That's how it would be all right.

T
he men coming from the railway yards were the first to notice the fat boy. He stood beneath the overhead bridge, among the cars illegally parked there. He had both hands in the pockets of his short pants and the strain of that plus his heavy thighs made the flap of his fly gape. The fat boy watched the passers-by with the froglike, faintly enquiring look that the faces of fat boys have. The fat boy's hair was amazingly fair and straight; it shone with nourishment; it was straight and oddly medieval.

The men were leaving at twenty past four. It was a conventional extension of the time for washing up that their union had obtained. They resented the fat boy's regard day after day. They were sure that he was stealing from the cars, and it was just as well they were coming past early to watch him, they said. Sometimes they would shout at the fat boy and tell him to get lost, as they walked in their overalls along the black margin of the track past the old gasworks. Seventeen thousand dollars worth of railway property was found missing when the audit was made. The men knew it was outsiders. They remembered the fat boy. The fat kid is the lookout for the ring taking all the stuff, they told the management. Dozens of workers could swear to having seen the fat boy. They went looking for him, but he wasn't to be found beneath the overhead bridge anymore.

Instead the fat boy began to frequent McNulty's warehouse in Cully Street. Even through the cracked and stained windows the staff could see him standing by the side of the building where the
bicycles were left. Sometimes he would kick at the clumps of weeds which grew in the broken pavement there, sometimes he would puff his fat cheeks and blow out little explosions of air, sometimes he would just stand with his hands in his pockets and look at the warehouse as if to impress it on his mind. He had a habit of pulling his mouth to one side, as if biting the skin on the inside of his cheek, the way children do. Often in school time he was there. Sometimes even in the rain he was there. The rain glistened on his round cheeks, and seemed to shrink his pants so that the lining turned up at the leg holes. The new girl looked out and said he looked as if he was crying. The owner said he'd make him cry all right. He was sick of ordering him away, the owner said.

McNulty's warehouse burnt down in November. The owner made particular mention to the police of the fat boy, but when McNulty's built again in a better area with the insurance money, the fat boy never appeared. The paper reported what the owner said about the fat boy. The railway men said it was the same fat boy all right. They said the fat kid was somehow tied up in a lot of the crime going on.

The fat boy seemed to be in uniform, but although he was clearly seen by many people there was no agreement as to his school or family. Some said his socks had the blue diamonds of Marsden High, but others said the blue was in the bands of College. The fat boy had thick legs with no apparent muscles, and they didn't narrow to the ankle. If just his legs could have been turned upside down no one would ever know it. When the fat boy lifted his brows enquiringly, one crease would form in the smooth, thick skin of his forehead.

The fat boy seemed to be a harbinger of trouble. The fat boy walked behind old Mrs Denzil on her way home from the shopping centre, and he loitered in the shade of her wooden fence, which was draped with dark convolvulus leaves and its pale flowers. The police maintained a quiet watch on the house for two days in case the fat boy came again. On the third night someone broke into Mrs Denzil's house and tied her upside down in the washtub. Her Victorian cameo
brooch was stolen, together with the tinned food she hoarded, and eighty-four-year-old Mrs Denzil was left tied upside down in the tub with a tennis ball in her mouth to block her breathing. Oh, that fat boy, they said; even murder, they said. That fat boy was so much more evil than their own sons. There wasn't anything that the fat boy wouldn't do, was there, they said.

Nigel Lammerton saw the fat boy on the night he was arrested for beating his wife. Lammerton told the police that when he returned from the hotel he saw the fat boy on the porch of his home, and that his wife couldn't explain why. Lammerton said that he saw the fat boy looking in the window at them while they argued, but that when he ran outside the fat boy was gone. It was the fat boy, and the medication that he had been taking, that made him lose control, Nigel Lammerton told the court. Mrs Lammerton agreed with everything her husband said about the fat boy.

The fat boy could not be found for questioning, but then no one had ever known the fat boy to say anything. He just watched. The paper said he was malevolent. No one likes a fat kid staring at them all the time. Lammerton said that everyone was entitled to privacy without a fat kid staring at him. The fat boy had the knack of being where he was least desired.

There was a certain effrontery about the fat boy. He appeared in council chambers during the discussion in committee on a special dispensation from the town planning scheme. The deputy mayor was declaring that no present councillors had any connection with the consortium that had made application. He became aware of the fat boy watching him from the corridor to the town clerk's office. The fat boy's fair hair trembled a little as his mouth stretched in a cavernous yawn and, without taking his hands from his pockets, he tapped with his shoe at the wainscotting, the way boys do. One of the councillors went from the meeting to confront the fat boy, but he must have slipped away through the offices, the councillor said.

The deputy mayor thought that in all of his considerable
experience he had never seen such a sly one as the fat boy. He said that somehow he could never bring himself to trust a fat boy, just never could bring himself to trust one, he said.

The fat boy was seen at the IHC centre the day before Melanie Lamb was found to be pregnant. The air was warm, sparrows chirped beneath the swaying birch catkins and pecked at a vomited pie in the gutter. The fat boy stood before the railings and held one of the iron bars like a staff. The children smiled at him as he watched, and were content in his presence, but the supervisors saw him there and remembered when the doctor said that Melanie was pregnant. The music teacher who lived next door to the Lambs thought it a very significant recollection. He said that when he came to think of it he recalled the fat boy standing in the evenings by the hedge at the rear of Melanie's house. A very fat, ugly boy, the music teacher said, and everyone agreed that such a unique description fitted the fat boy perfectly and must be him. It was a terrible thing, the music teacher said, to think that the fat boy could take advantage of Melanie's handicap, even if she was physically advanced.

More than any of the other things, it was what he did to Melanie Lamb that enabled people to close ranks against the fat boy. They recognised in him a common enemy. Vigilante groups organised from the King Dick and Tasman hotels began searching for the fat boy. Not many days before Christmas they caught up with the fat boy by the gasworks. Artie Compeyson was drowning kittens in the cutting, and saw the fat boy watching, but didn't let on. The fat boy was stolid at the top of the cutting, His pudding face and medieval hair showed clearly in the moonlight and against the grimy storage tanks of the old gasworks. He was still waiting when the vigilantes came, and they surrounded him there in the patches of light and shadow. The fat boy didn't run, or cry out. He watched them converge, his thick legs apart and his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his short trousers. He was sly all right.

They managed to overpower him, they said. Nigel Lammerton,
with his experience as a wife-beater, got in one or two really good thuds on the fat boy's face before he went down, and the music teacher, who had an educated foot, kicked the fat boy between the legs. Everyone knew the fat boy must be made to pay for what he had done.

No one seemed to know what happened to the fat boy's body, and such a body wasn't easy to hide. The moon seemed to go behind cloud just at the time the fat boy fell, and the vigilantes became rather confused after the excitement of the night, and the debriefing at the King Dick and the Tasman. Although the police dragged the cutting, they found only the sack with kittens in it, and five stolen tyres.

Nearly everyone was relieved that the fat boy had been got rid of. God, but he was evil, they said, that fat boy, all the things he did. It didn't bear thinking about, they said. And no one likes a fat boy watching them, you know. They shared, among other things, a conviction that life would be immeasurably better for them all with the fat boy gone.

Y
ou'll be wary of too much coincidence, I know, but I had been reading a good deal of Hemingway about that time. We weren't doing it in lectures either. The
Faerie Queene
was what we were doing in lectures. The
Faerie Queene
is suitable for university study because people wouldn't read it otherwise. The lecture in the afternoon was on arachnid imagery in Book Two. The lecturer had the habit of lifting his head from his notes and glancing despairingly around the tiered seating, as if he feared we were drawing closer to suffocate him.

It was raining that day, and the streets were softened with it, and the cars hissed by. I rode very slowly because my bike had no front mudguard, and the faster I went the more water the wheel flicked up at me. So I was in the rain longer, but the water coming down was cleaner than that coming up. When the rain began to run down my face, I imagined I was Neanderthal, and persevered with sullen endurance. Cars came from behind, hissing like cave bears as they passed.

Mrs Ransumeen complained if I dripped inside. So I stood in the wash-house and dried off with a pillowcase from the laundry basket. I wriggled my toes and they squelched inside my desert boots. I put my feet down very flat when I went inside, so they wouldn't squelch. ‘Don't you leave wet socks in your room,' said Mrs Ransumeen.

‘I don't really think Neanderthal was a dead end,' I said. ‘More
and more research seems to show that they added to the gene pool that carried on.'

‘I'm not doing any washing tomorrow. I'm not.'

‘It's subjective, I know, but I feel the stirrings of Neanderthal at times. Some atavism of the mind, I guess.'

‘Oh, shut your blah,' said Mrs Ransumeen. Her face was like an old party balloon that had been left strung up too long, become small and tired with stretch marks and scar tissue. Yet still more air pressure inside than out. Mrs Ransumeen's face was like that; looking blown up and deflated both at the same time.

‘For three pounds ten a week I don't have to listen to your rubbish,' she said. ‘And I don't have to pick up wet socks from your room neither. Stop dripping on the floor, will you.'

Mrs Ransumeen had beautiful hair. She had hair that girls would steal for. It was black and heavy. When well brushed it had a secret gleam, like water glimpsed in a deep well. Every woman has something of beauty I suppose.

I went up the stairs, squelching. The party balloon stood at the bottom. ‘It's a cold meal,' she said. The rain drifted into the window on the stairway landing. I should've gone back down and had it out with her about one hot meal a day. I owed it to myself, to keep my self-respect. For a moment I thought I could do it.

‘Oh well,' I said. ‘Yes, okay.' Even Neanderthal genes can be recessive.

Ron's door was open. He was lying on his bed with his hands behind his head. He was grinning at me. As I changed my socks he mocked me through the wall. ‘Okay, Mrs Ransumeen. Yes, Mrs Ransumeen. Cold tea, how delightful, Mrs Ransumeen. Let me lick your bum, Mrs Ransumeen.' Ron was an engineering student. He lacked any culture, but had prodigious courage. He even took on the Ransumeens once or twice. Got beaten, but at least he took them on. He had to get worked up to it, mind you, with drink, or the desperation of academic failure. He had no culture, but a
certain vision of self, did Ron. He had that hopeless courage that arouses both admiration and pity. In all other ways he was even less than ordinary.

The radio in the kitchen was always on. It was on when we came down for the cold meal. The party balloon liked to listen to the talkback shows. She loved to hear people making fools of themselves. ‘Listen to that silly bitch,' she said.

‘Arp, barp,' went her husband.

‘For God's sake, stop that face-farting all the time,' said Mrs Ransumeen.

‘It's natural, isn't it? A natural function, for Christ's sake.' Ransumeen's face was the evasive, plural face of a man who had no self-respect. A face pushed forward by impetuosity without talent, and worn back again by constant disadvantage. It was the face of a man who gets by how he can. It was the face in which you fear to look in case you see yourself.

The radio said that Hemingway had put a shotgun in his mouth and killed himself. ‘It's a poor show, that's all, if a man can't express his natural functions in his own home,' said Ransumeen. When it said about Hemingway, each object in my line of sight assumed a derisive clarity. There was first the Belgium sausage sandwich on my plate. Its pink edge peeped like a cat's tongue from the uncut side, and the top piece of bread had a smooth indentation in one corner from a bubble in the dough.

‘I saw the old tart next door putting rubbish in our can again,' said the party balloon. The salt and pepper were faceted glass with red plastic tops. The salt had five holes, and two were blocked because of the humidity. What I felt had less to do with Hemingway as a writer, than with the idea that no one cared if he lived or died anyway. There were better writers than Hemingway, but he was the one who died that day. In homes all over the country there would be the news about Hemingway, and no one cared. On the bench was a pie-dish with water in it to soak the burnt apricot on the bottom,
and a tube of golden macaroons. The price was marked with felt pen on the cellophane.

‘Lincoln is always a hard team to beat in the forwards,' said Ron.

‘I'll take all the rubbish I can lay my hands on, and the next time she does it I'll follow that old bitch back and turf it all over her floor.'

‘It said Hemingway's dead,' I said.

‘Bread,' said Ransumeen. He had his hand out for it.

‘Because she lives by herself, she thinks she can do what she likes.'

‘And with this rain there'll be a heavy ground all right, and the forwards will tell.'

‘I said Hemingway killed himself.'

‘Barp, arp. Ah, that's better out than in, as the actress said to the bishop.'

I quite like macaroons actually, but the party balloon never put more than two each on the table. When I'm working I can eat a whole packet easily. The first Hemingway story I ever read was ‘Indian Camp'. Hemingway wasn't always beating his chest. Mrs Ransumeen had a broad, yellow ribbon in her hair. When she turned aside to criticise her husband her hair had a sheen so dark there were hints of purple, as had the skin of a Melanesian bishop I heard preach once in Timaru. Sometimes I thought her hair must be false, and that underneath was the real hair that suited an ugly woman. Ron asked if he could have a stronger bulb in his room. He said he couldn't see to do his work, and he had two assignments due that week. ‘Oh, you shut up,' said Mrs Ransumeen.

‘Yeah,' said Ransumeen. ‘You shut your cakehole. You're just a boarder here.' Vulgarity was a natural property of the Ransumeens, and to deplore it was like criticising wetness in water, or the smell of methane.

The salt sloped high left to low right, and the pepper the other way. It must have happened as Mrs Ransumeen carried them to the
table gripped by the tops in the fingers of one hand. The cellars tend to angle out when they're carried that way. The butter had Marmite on its top edge like an ink line, and one pendant of water dithered from the cold tap. The radio had finished with Hemingway, and begun on political instability in Italy. It was a lot more important perhaps. I don't know. ‘You're not going out tonight,' said the party balloon. Ransumeen gnawed his sandwich and said nothing. It was a silence of hope rather than subterfuge. ‘Are you deaf or bloody something?' she said.

‘I may have to go out for a bit,' he said. She started on him, but with an underlying boredom from countless victories. Ron and I went upstairs.

Nothing in my room had changed for Hemingway, and the houses outside looked the same as ever. Mould stains always showed up on the roughcast when it rained, and the knuckled camellia bushes moved a little in the drizzle and the wind. Nothing flamed in the sky for Hemingway. Not even an aurora of picadors, or quail in the sun.

Mrs Ransumeen's voice reached a competent fighting pitch. She could sustain it as long as she wished. Her virulence was that of self-pity rather than active hatred. ‘And why the hell you can't get some better job anyway I don't know,' she said.

‘Ah, for Christ's sake,' said Ransumeen.

‘S'obvious you won't get anywhere again. We never get invited anywhere.'

‘Who's going to invite us, for Christ's sake?' Ransumeen went out, and left her talking.

‘That's right. That's right,' she said. ‘You bloody go out. Whether you get back in is another story.' She began banging the dishes in the sink, and talking to the radio again. ‘Will you shut your face, I say? Prouting on,' she told the announcer. She traded him for a tidal flow of film themes. She seemed to be banging the utensils in time with them.

It seemed colder in my room as the darkness deepened outside. The bulb of small power grew even dimmer in the cold. Ron came in. He wore two jerseys, which gave him a stomach. ‘The troll has turned off our heaters at the switch board,' he said. ‘It's unbearable.' His hands were yellow with cold, and his fingernails lilac. Mrs Ransumeen had become quiet below. She had laid the snare and was content to wait. ‘We can't put up with it. Why should we? We can't work like this,' said Ron.

‘Today I won't stand for it,' I said. Ron was encouraged by my support.

‘Let's have it out with her.' Ron had a square, practical face and a feeling for natural justice. ‘We'll do something about it. The troll has turned the heat off again and it's the middle of winter.' He swayed and marched on the spot, partly to keep warm and partly in rising militancy.

As we went down together, I felt that the day had to be marked in some way. As the lightning wouldn't strike, some risk was necessary on the day that Hemingway died. Mrs Ransumeen sat with her arms laid before her on the table. The twin bars of the kitchen heater glowed. ‘Our heaters are off,' said Ron.

‘Yes,' I said. It was a token of our alliance. Mrs Ransumeen's fat arms were dimpled, and spreading on the table as if filled with water.

‘So?' she said.

‘It's cold,' I whined. Hemingway knew all about the cold.

‘It's too cold to work in our rooms,' said Ron.

‘Horseshit,' said the party balloon. She began to breathe more noisily through her nose, and she stirred in the chair. She was getting ready to really let go, I thought. Ron and I stood shoulder to shoulder. Then her mood began to change, as visible in its way as a change of weather. Her eyes dulled like the surface of a pond beneath a breeze, and her shoulders settled. Her expression was for a moment surprised as she felt the change spreading from within,
the new imperative. Her hands spread out like a starfish and, despite herself, she began to cry. ‘Oh, I don't know. I just don't know,' she said. As she cried she lifted her hands and began rubbing her face, smearing the tears from forehead to chin. ‘Sometimes I just wish to God I was dead,' she said. ‘One lousy thing after another. One lousy day after another. A rented house, and a husband who becomes less and less a man.' She stood up, and her breathing was broken with hiccups from her sobbing. She went over to the fridge and opened it. From the rack behind the door she took eggs one by one and flicked her forearm and wrist to send them against the window, the bench and the cupboards. Her throwing action was restricted, and her defiance half-hearted. The eggs broke with the sound of black beetles being stood on. Mrs Ransumeen seemed to find no relief in doing it, and it shamed us to watch.

It should have been very comic: my landlady throwing eggs in the kitchen on the day that Hemingway died. Yet the thing is that it wasn't in the least funny. On the radio a man explained the importance of mulching shrubs for summer. The party balloon rather dully cast the eggs, and they crushed like beetles. ‘Now I've bloody done it,' she said. ‘I've started now and I've really done it. He'll notice something when he comes home tonight.'

‘Will he ever,' said Ron softly. He was afraid to disturb her apathy. She began to cry again, and her mouth opened into the speechless square that accompanies the onslaught of tears. She closed the fridge door, and stood with one forgotten egg in her hand.

‘Horseshit to it all anyway,' she managed to say. The situation was beyond her response. She was struggling with a crisis, the significance of which provided her with no greater means to confront it. Smashing eggs and crying were the only outlets she could think of. Ron and I left her there. We had nothing to offer as a consolation. Contempt and fear were stronger than our pity. We went quietly up the stairs. Ron was uncertain.

‘I've never seen her like this before. She's packed up properly.'

That's how it was for me on the day that Hemingway died. I had meant to give it all a humorous gloss, and get in a bit of sex; bed springs and muffled cries. That's what people like in a story. But it remains much as it was. Cold and wet, horseshit and broken eggs, no heat in my room and a landlady I disliked crying aloud in the kitchen.