Owen Marshall Selected Stories (19 page)

As they left amidst the benevolence of Mr Jenkins' smile, and the persistent information from his wife, Brian saw his cone lying in the yard, green and turning brown, and he lined it through the window with his finger for luck, and saw it sprout there and soar and ramify until, like the beanstalk, it reached the sky. ‘A substantial meal,' said the minister.

‘There was too much gravy,' said Brian.

‘I was born in country like this,' said his father. The bush began to stand openly on the hillsides, and on the farmland closer to the road were stumps which gripped even in death. ‘It's awkward country to farm,' said the minister. ‘It looks better than it is.' There would be a hut in his pine, and a rope ladder which could be drawn up so that boars and bulls would be powerless below. Tinned food and bottles to collect the rain. Mr and Mrs Jenkins wouldn't realise that he was there, and at times he would come down to the lower world and take what he wanted. ‘They tried to make it all dairy country, but it didn't work,' his father said. Brian was willing to be an apparent listener as they went up the valley, mile after mile pursued only by the dust.

Dogs barked them in to Sutherland's. The Oliphants and more Patchetts were already waiting in the main room. There was a social ease among them, arisen from a closeness of lifestyle, proximity and religion. The Sutherlands had no children left at home, the last Patchett boy was at boarding school; only the Oliphant twins, six-year-old girls, were there to represent youth. They sat with their
legs stuck out rebelliously because they weren't allowed to thump the piano keys. The Sutherlands had a cousin staying who was a Catholic. Brian watched him with interest. There was a mystery and power in Catholicism, he thought, a dimension beyond the home spun non-conformism that he knew from the inside. Surely there was some additional and superstitious resource with which to enrich life. ‘Absolutely riddled with cancer,' Brian heard Mr Oliphant tell the minister.

When the minister was ready, the service in the living room began. No more exact timing was necessary. Mrs Sutherland played the piano, and Mr Oliphant enjoyed singing very loudly and badly. The Oliphant twins refused to stand up with the adults, remaining in a sulk with their legs stiff before them. Their eyes followed Brian past the window as he went from the house. He thought the piano disappointing in comparison with the accordion, more inhibited and careful, less suited to the movement of leaves and water, to the accompaniment of birds.

Brian remembered a traction engine from previous visits. Once it had been used in the mills, but since left in the grass: heavy iron and brass, and great, ribbed wheels. It was warm from the sun, and Brian scaled it and sat there. The traction engine had been built to withstand enormous pressures, and before an age of planned obsolescence. It was a weathered outcrop, the rust only a film which didn't weaken, and the brass solid beneath the tarnish. A land train cast there amidst the barley grass and nodding thistle. He shifted what levers were not seized, and rocked to suggest the motion of the engine on the move.

‘You get tired of all the services, I suppose?' said the Sutherlands' cousin. He stood in his carpet slippers, and wore a green woollen jersey despite the heat. He was almost bald, with just a rim of coarse, red hair, like the pine needles the boy had heaped up in the morning. Brian came down to talk. It seemed discourteous to remain raised up. ‘I'm in charge of the afternoon tea. I'm a Catholic, you see.' His
eyes were deeply sunk, like the sockets of a halloween pumpkin. ‘I've nothing against your father.' They watched heavy, white geese trooping past the sheds. ‘There's cake, of course, but you know there's watercress sandwiches as well. Can you imagine that?' Brian thought it rabbit food, but the cousin was from the city. ‘She went and collected it from the creek, just like that. There's wonder still in the world,' he said. ‘Did I tell you I'm a Catholic?' The cousin began to cry without making any noise, but shedding tears. Brian gave him some privacy by taking a stick and beating a patch of nettles by the hen-run. But the cousin wiped his tears away and followed him. He didn't seem interested in maintaining an adult dignity any more. ‘Is that gum on your legs?' he said. The boy told him that he had been playing in the trees at Hepburn.

‘There's graves there. One said “Called Home” on it.'

‘“Called Home” — did it really?' The cousin shared Brian's fascination with the phrase. ‘Called Home'. He began to laugh: not a social laugh, but a hoarse laugh, spreading downwards and out like a pool. A sound of irony and fear and submission.

Mr Oliphant began shouting ‘Earth might be fair, and all men glad and wise'. The cousin listened with his mouth still shaped from the laughter.

‘I'd better see to the afternoon tea,' he said. ‘There are lesser rendezvous yet. I'll crib another watercress sandwich if I can hold it down.'

‘Peals forth in joy man's old undaunted cry,' they heard Mr Oliphant singing.

‘These things are at the end of my life,' the cousin said, ‘and the beginning of yours. I wonder if they seem any different for that.' The cousin turned back from the house after a few steps, and came past Brian. ‘Jesus,' he said. ‘I'm going to be sick again.' He rubbed the flat of his hands on the green wool of his jersey as if in preparation for a considerable task, and walked towards the sheds. He gave a burp, or sudden sob.

The Sutherlands, Mr Oliphant and the minister came out in search of him when their afternoon tea wasn't ready. Brian could see the Oliphant twins looking through the window. ‘Have you seen Mrs Sutherland's cousin?' Brian's father asked him. The boy told him about the crying and the sheds.

‘I hate to think — in his state of mind,' said Mr Sutherland. He and the minister began to run. Mr Oliphant saw his contribution best made in a different talent. He filled his lungs. ‘Ashley, Ashley,' he cried: so loud that birds flew from the open sheds, and the Oliphant twins pressed their faces to the window. The echoes had settled and Mrs Sutherland had prevented him from further shouting, when Mr Sutherland came back.

‘It's all right,' said Mr Sutherland. ‘He's been sick again, that's all. He's got himself into a state.'

‘Who can blame him,' said Mrs Sutherland.

‘He was going to make the afternoon tea,' said Brian. ‘He started to cry.'

‘He's a good deal worse today, but the Reverend Willis is with him.' Mr Sutherland was both sympathetic and matter of fact. ‘They're best left alone,' he said. ‘Come on back to the house.' Mr Oliphant was disappointed that it wasn't the end, not even in a more dramatic approach to the end.

‘A sad business,' he said in his lowest voice, which carried barely fifty yards. Brian was left to wait for his father. He thought that in that quiet afternoon he could hear Ashley's sobs and his father's voice. He climbed back on to the throne which was the engine, and rested his face and arms on the warm metal.

A column of one-armed Lascelles was moving back up the valley from the war, each with a poem in his hand, and the accordion played ‘Rock of Ages' as they marched. Mr Jenkins deftly knifed a wild pig, all the while with a benevolent smile, and in his torrent voice Mr Oliphant Called Home a weeping Ashley: deep eyes and woollen jersey. A host of pine owls, jersey green and brown, spread
their wings at last, while old Mrs Patchett escaped again and accused her kin of starvation as she sought an earlier home. Behind and beyond the sway of the accordion's music, and growing louder, was the sound of the grand, poppy-red bull cantering with its head down from the top of the valley towards them all.

M
umsie saw the car coming at five, as she had expected. The general noise of homeward traffic was at a distance, but still the desperation was apparent in the pitch of it. Zip always turned off the engine when in the gate, and coasted on the concrete strips until he was parallel with the window. The grass was spiky and blue in the poor light of winter. Mumsie had cacti on the window sill, and the dust lay amid the thorns of
Mammillaria wildii
.

Zip undid his seatbelt, and stepped out. He took the orange nylon cover from the boot, and began covering the car for the night. He spread the cover evenly before he began to tie it down. Zip always started at the same corner and worked clockwise round the car. He didn't bend to tie the corners as a woman would bend, with backside out, but crouched, agile and abrupt, balanced on his toes. Sometimes when Mumsie was close to him as he crouched like that, she would hear his knees pop. Mumsie wondered if there would be a day when she would go out and ask Zip not to cover the car because there was something of significance she had to attend: a premiere perhaps, or an apparently trivial summons which would become This Is Your Life, Mumsie.

Mumsie knew Zip wouldn't look up as he came past the window: they always reserved recognition for the kitchen when Zip came home from work. Zip would go to the lavatory, and then to their bedroom to take off his jacket and shoes. Mumsie heard him flush the bowl, and go through for his other shoes.

Zip came to the stove. He stood by Mumsie's shoulder. ‘How's things?' he said.

The mist of the winter evening was strung through the poles and gables, the thinning hair of a very old woman. Toby McPhedron tried to kick free a flattened hedgehog from the surface of the road.

‘Fine,' said Mumsie. ‘And you?'

‘Busy as usual,' said Zip. ‘Just the same, Mumsie. You know how it is.'

‘Casserole,' said Mumsie as Zip lifted the lid, ‘with the onions in chunks the way you like it. Chunky chunks instead of sliced up thin.'

‘Good on you, Mumsie, good on you,' said Zip. ‘You know what I like all right.' He rubbed his forehead and circled the sockets of his eyes.

‘So the usual day?' said Mumsie.

‘You know how it is. Busy, of course: always the same.'

‘So Mumsie got a casserole,' said Mumsie.

‘You know I like a casserole all right,' said Zip. Mumsie noticed how the pupils of his eyes jittered the way they often did, although his face was flat and still. He stood beside her and looked at the casserole while his pupils jittered.

‘You know I couldn't get hardly a thing to dry today. There's no wind and no sun. Hardly a thing dried. I had to take most of it off the line again and put it in the good room with the heater.'

‘It's that sort of day,' said Zip. He placed the butter and salt and pepper on the table, and cork mats with the picture of a kitten halting a ball of fluffy wool.

‘Mr Beresford died,' said Mumsie.

‘Mr Beresford?'

‘The place with the new roof, two down from the corner. I heard Mrs Rose talking about it in the shop.'

‘Ah,' said Zip.

‘So nothing of interest at work today.'

‘Uh-huh,' said Zip. He sat down at his place, which was facing the stove and the bench. He laid his hands one each side of his cork mat, as a knife and fork are laid.

‘They haven't found the murderer yet,' said Mumsie.

‘Murderer?'

‘Who murdered those two girls in the boatshed in Auckland. Shaved their heads, I think it said. There's a lot of sick things.'

Zip left his hands resting on the table and he looked at the floor by the bench where the pattern on the lino had been worn away. Mumsie's legs plodded this way and that around the kitchen, but always came back to that worn place, on which she shuffled back and forth from stove to table to bench. Zip seemed absorbed: as if that worn patch were a screen and Mumsie's splayed shoes played out some cryptic choreography. But his black eye spots continued to jiggle, and the focus wasn't quite right to hit the worn lino, but aimed deeper, at something behind. Zip sat still, as if conserving energy for a final effort, or as if that final effort had been made to no avail. Mumsie looked at him from time to time. ‘Mumsie's done peas shaken in the pot with butter,' she said, ‘and baked potatoes in their skins.'

‘You're a winner, Mumsie, that's for sure.'

Tears began to form on the windows, and the light outside was fading quickly. ‘I like to be in my own house when it gets dark,' said Zip. They could hear persistent traffic noise from the corner, and Toby McPhedron ran a stick along the tin fence next door.

‘You don't mind about the heater on in the good room?' said Mumsie. ‘There's no drying at all.'

‘We can go there ourselves later,' said Zip. ‘We'd have to heat one room.'

‘Now why would the murderer shave those girls' heads?' said Mumsie.

‘Kinky sex, Mumsie. You want to watch out.' Zip watched his casserole with the chunky onions being served, and the potatoes
blistered grey-brown, and the peas in butter glistening as emeralds.

Mumsie talked about Mrs Rose's visit to the dentist, about the manner of Mr Beresford's dying third-hand, about the boatshed murderer, and the good room door-knob which just came off in her hand. The tears made tracks down the windows, and those tracks showed black, or spangled back the kitchen light. Mumsie talked of a party at the Smedley's which they weren't invited to, and how either a niece or a cousin of Debbie Simpson's had a growth in her ear which might be pressing on her brain. Zip said, ‘Is that right, Mumsie', and nodded his head to show that he was listening, and in satisfaction as he crunched the casserole onions done in chunks as he liked them, and he kept looking at things deeper than the worn lino by the bench. Mumsie wondered if she should take some pikelets along to Mrs Beresford, or whether she would only be thought nosy because she hadn't really known him. A dog had torn Mrs Jardine's rubbish bag open again, and Mrs Jardine had to clean it up in her good clothes when she came home at lunchtime, Mumsie said.

The winter night, the lizard voice of the traffic at a distance, the condensation on the windows, all intensified the artificial light of the kitchen where Mumsie and Zip ate their casserole, until it was a clear, yellow space separate from the rest of life, independent even from the rest of their own experience, and isolating them there — Mumsie and Zip.

‘Mumsie,' said Zip, ‘now that was a real casserole, and don't worry about the doorknob, because I can get that bastard back on later.'

‘I knew you'd like it, being winter and that. And there'll be enough for you tomorrow.'

Zip lit a cigarette as he stood by the bench and waited to help with the dishes. He pulled the smoke in, and his eyelids dropped for a moment as the smoke hit deep in his lungs. In a long sigh he breathed out. The smoke drifted, the colour of the condensation on the window, and Zip had the teatowel folded over his arm like a waiter, and stood before the plastic drip tray as he waited for the
dishes. ‘I'll put the rest of the casserole in something else,' said Mumsie, ‘and then the dish can be soaked. There's always some bubbles out and bakes on the rim.'

‘Let it soak then, Mumsie,' said Zip.

‘Don't let me miss the start of the news. Maybe they've found the boatshed murderer.' Mumsie liked everyone to be brought to justice. Zip dried the forks carefully, pressing a fold of towel between the prongs. He tapped the ash from his cigarette into
Chamaecereus
silvestrii
on the sill.

‘It's just as well we're not in the boatshed belt,' he said.

‘But it could be anyone, Zip.'

‘Except Mr Beresford, Mumsie. I'd say he must be in the clear.'

‘No, I meant it could be any woman. It said on the talkback that these things are increasing all the time.'

Zip spread the teatowel over the stove top, and shuffled the cork mats into symmetry so that the images of the kittens and the wool were inline. He stood by Mumsie as she wiped the table, and then he sat there and put down a plastic ashtray. Mumsie told him not to pick at the contact because it was already tatty, so Zip rotated his cigarette packet instead, standing it alternately on end and side, over and over again. His fingers were nimble, and the packet only whispered on the table as it turned. ‘We'll go through to the good room soon,' said Mumsie, ‘seeing the clothes are already in front of the heater there.'

‘That's right,' said Zip. He sighed, and the smoke came like dust from deep in his lungs, and drifted in the yellow light. ‘Another day, another dollar,' he said.

‘Just another day, you said.'

‘That's right. Another day,' said Zip. He tapped with his finger on the cigarette above the ashtray; a column of ash fell neatly and lay like a caterpillar.

‘How many of those have you had today?' asked Mumsie.

‘Five or six.'

‘Mumsie's going to have to hide them, or you'll be up to a packet a day again.'

‘You're a tough lady all right,' said Zip.

‘Well, Mr Beresford was a heavy smoker, Mrs Rose said, and he wouldn't be told, just kept on. Mrs Rose said in the shop she wouldn't be surprised if that was it.'

‘But you don't know it was smoking Beresford died of.'

‘It can't have helped,' Mumsie said. Zip continued to turn the packet with his free hand, head over heels it went, again and again. Mumsie said that she'd heard that a lot of drugs had been found in the fire station, but it was all being hushed up. Mumsie enjoyed her delusion of occasionally sharing privileged information. ‘It'll all be swept under the carpet because they know each other, all those people, you see if they don't.'

‘They'd bloody well come down on you or me though, Mumsie, that's for sure,' said Zip.

Mumsie was talking about the food specials at Four Square when the phone rang. She was comparing for Zip the large coffee with the giant and the standard. Standard meant small, but nothing in supermarkets is labelled small. Zip remained still, apart from turning the cigarette packet. He paid no attention to the phone: he had no hope of it. He was unlucky enough to know his own life. But Mumsie was quite excited. She wondered who that could be, she said, and she tidied her hair as she went into the passage. Zip didn't alter just because Mumsie had gone. He stayed quietly at the table as if relaxed, turning the cigarette packet. He did work his mouth, pulling his lips back first on one side then the other, as a horse does on the bit. Zip looked at the table, and the worn lino by the bench, and Mumsie's cactus plants which could survive her benign forgetfulness, and at the windows decked with tears, and his eyes jiggled.

Mumsie was happy when she bustled back in. She felt things were going on. There were decisions to be made and she was involved, and someone had taken the trouble to phone her. ‘It's Irene and Malcolm,'
she said. Zip let out a dusty breath. The tears of condensation left black trails on the windows, and a small rainbow bubble winked as Mumsie shifted the detergent flask. ‘They're going to stay for a few days next week,' said Mumsie. ‘Malcolm's got some management course again.'

‘No,' said Zip.

‘Why's that?'

‘I don't want them here. I don't want them here next week, or next year, or ever. I don't want other people in my house, Mumsie. Got it? I don't want Malcolm and his moustache telling me how well he's doing, and your sister making you look like Ma Kettle all the time.' Zip didn't raise his voice, but there was in it a tone of finality.

‘But they're family,' said Mumsie. She turned the water on and off in the sink for no reason.

‘They're not coming. You're going to tell them that they can't come, or I'm going to. You'll do it nicer than me.'

‘How often do we have people?' said Mumsie. ‘We never see anyone.'

‘I don't want to see anyone, and I don't want anyone to see me. People are never worth the effort, Mumsie, but you never seem to learn that.'

‘I get sick of no one coming. I get sick of always being by ourselves,' said Mumsie.

Zip spread the corners of his mouth in one grimace of exasperation, and then his face was flat again. ‘You're stupid,' he said. ‘What are you?'

‘Maybe I am,' said Mumsie, ‘but I've got a life too. I'm not too stupid to have my own sister to stay, am I.'

‘You're a stupid, old bitch, Mumsie, and I'm as bad. In a way I'm worse, because I'm just bright enough to see how stupid we both are, and how we're buggered up here like two rats in a dunghill. We've got to keep on living our same life over and over again.'

‘Oh, don't start talking like that, and getting all funny.' The
windows were black eyes shining with tears, and the custard light of the room grew brighter in contrast with deep winter outside. The table legs cast stalks of shadow across the floor, and high on the cupboard edges the fly dirt clustered like pepper spots. ‘Anyway I've told them they can come, and so they can,' said Mumsie. She pretended that by being emphatic she had made an end of it, but her face was flushed and her head nodded without her being aware.

Zip eased from the seat, and took a grip of Mumsie's soft neck. He braced his body against hers and he pushed her head back twice on to the wall. Mumsie's jowls spread upwards because of the pressure of Zip's hand, and trembled with the impact of the wall. Their faces were close, but their eyes didn't meet. The sound of Mumsie's head striking the wall echoed in the kitchen; the mounting for the can opener dug in behind her ear. Mumsie began to weep quietly without any retaliation. ‘Now I tell you again they're not coming,' said Zip. He sat back at the table, and began to turn the cigarette packet top over bottom. Mumsie put her hand to the back of her head for comfort, and her fingers came back with a little blood.