Owen Marshall Selected Stories (21 page)

‘Puffer, puffer,' called his mother as she ran in. Her face twitched to one side then the other, as if offering her endless Christian cheeks to be slapped. She meant the asthma gadget with the diaphragm, and she and I tugged Esler to a sitting position, and she did his throat thoroughly as if to ensure it would remain free of greenfly.

When he felt easier, Esler lay back again. ‘Okay Mum, okay,' he said. ‘I'm fine now.' He turned away from us until he could regain the personal distance he required after the ignominy of his attack, his weakness, his mother with the puffer. Mrs Esler touched his downy head once, but he turned more resolutely and she went out, first her dull curls and then the rest of her face, feature by feature, as a freight train curves from view. Esler rested: his skin gleamed with the sweat of illness and puffer liquid. I watched the soap flakes, and the light of the moon through the window without any curtain. ‘Where's Frank?' said Esler finally.

‘In Wellington at the technicians' course,' I said.

‘They'll destroy him in the end, those computers,' he said. ‘He left me the last poem in his Scheherazade series. So detached, so nimble. It makes me doubt my own progress. But those computers are the danger for poor Frank.' He picked up his puffer, held it to his mouth, but forgot to use it. Instead he said, ‘I wish I could have a civilised life.' Beneath the bottom plank of his bookcase, close to the bricks, are Esler's two pairs of shoes. Brown shoes with roughly sewn seams, and each left heel worn to a slant, and the inside liners curling up. Where the outlets for the tubs had pierced the wall, Esler has fitted wooden plugs covered with muslin to improve the seal.

‘Pass the ball, pass it!' cried his father from the living room.

‘France,' said Esler, looking at his poets gathered on the planks. ‘France has always seemed to me a place where people have a civilised life.'

‘A cultivated people. A people who accept without reserve the necessity of art,' I said. I had almost starved to death on my one sojourn there. Having been nowhere, Esler still believed that life can be essentially different in other parts of the world.

He began on the Big Woman again. He was amused by his own recollections of the dreams. It was a tribute to his creative impulse that even the thing he thought was killing him was transmuted into an entertainment for us both. He had his brandy bottle in one hand, his puffer in the other, and he was trying not to laugh. ‘You know,' he said, ‘the odd thing is that I do feel that I might be dying this time after all. It's more than asthma the doctor said, but he doesn't know about the Big Woman, of course.'

Later he started tossing about. I put his brandy away and called his mother. She began to fuss over him, but he became worse. Mrs Esler called to her husband that he'd have to ring the doctor about Esler needing to go into hospital, and Mr Esler came and stood by the bed. He has a face not wildly dissimilar to our own: eyes facing forward, a two-entry nose, mouth, and teeth still nominally intact. Yet what a gulf of species is there. He might as well have been a rock
groper or a pear tree, standing in the laundry.

‘Thirty-six years old, writing bloody poetry, still has asthma, and now dirty dreams,' he said. ‘Jesus.' The sound of the puffer was loud. ‘I blame you,' he said to me.

‘So do I,' said Mrs Esler, her face hidden.

‘Heckel and bloody jeckel. It was a sorry thing when you two and that Frank Heselstreet met up,' said Mr Esler. He went out to phone the doctor.

I decided to go the back way. Mrs Esler came out with me. At the other end of the hall I could see Mr Esler with the telephone cord drawn tight. That way he could stand at the living room door and watch the television as he waited to get through to the doctor.

‘This asthma can't be all that serious, can it?' I asked Mrs Esler. ‘I mean he's had bouts before and come through. There's nothing else, is there?' Mrs Esler held her nose to stop herself from crying, and I didn't say any more. She gave a final, ambiguous face, and then turned her interminable chin away. Mr Esler talked at the other end of the passage on his extended line, as Mrs Esler went back into the laundry.

For a time I waited in the moonlight of winter outside the Eslers' back door. What it came down to, I suppose, was that I thought my friend Esler couldn't die because nothing was ready, and because it wasn't just. There was still too much that was ludicrous, and too much confusion. But you and I and Esler can't always rely on an appropriate setting for our deaths. Esler might have to go in a laundry bed, with soap flakes in the air, brandy under the pillow, a puffer in his mouth, and a Big Woman squeezing him in his dreams, with mould like candle smoke beneath the window sill, with one green vanity collection of his poems from the Whip-poor-will Press, with a polished blue, tartan dressing-gown, and no reason for it to be happening at all. And just a friend or two, who can do nothing but remember better times.

As I walked the path at the side of the house, Mr Esler leant
excessively from his window to bring his harsh whisper closer to me. ‘Murderer,' he hissed. ‘Don't come back. Leave him alone. You bloody writers have done for him.' The moon struck down, and held the Eslers' garden in a frost of light. I didn't take the accusation too much to heart. I knew Mr Esler becomes desperate late at night when all the sports programmes end, when he finds himself with hours ahead and no team left to join, and none to hate, just his wife's Greek faces and his son in the laundry with the ailments of asthma and poetry.

‘Murderer,' I heard Mr Esler hissing. There were guilty ones, of course: Pound and Olson, Eliot and Larkin, Yeats and Frost, Stevens and Neruda, Lowell and Williams, Turner and Sewell, had all made their attacks on Esler. And Dylan Thomas. Now there's a murderer if ever I read one.

At the end of Te Tarehi Drive, and turning into Powys Street, which lay stark in the moonlight, I couldn't help laughing at the dying Esler. Laughter can be a guise of love; laughter can be helplessness expressed. Perhaps Esler is simply dying of his poet's amazement at the world in which he finds himself.

I let the moped engine run on in the shed for a few minutes, so that the battery would charge up a bit after the light had been on. I shook the neighbours' fence to rouse Cerberus again, and savoured the echoing sound. A deep barking dog suits a full moon. Esler had been dying before, and got over it. We all have to get over a little dying of ourselves in life. Is he dying of the asthma and the other things his mother wouldn't say, or is the Big Woman, that preammunition of death, suffocating him in his dreams with excess of loving?

A
s our past recedes we can see only occasional pennons on the high ground, which represent the territory traversed between. So the Ace of Diamonds Gang seems my full boyhood before the uncertainty of adolescence. I recall no peculiar origin; like the heroes of history it arose when it needed to be there.

Always the special moment was when we put on our masks. The triangle of white handkerchief over the lower face, and the red diamond that we'd stamped on with the oil paints that belonged to Bernie's mother. There was frisson as each known face became strangely divided. Not handkerchiefs with red diamonds smudged did we acquire, but anonymity, confederacy, a clear exception to approved society. After Boys' Brigade was a favourite time, when lanyards and Christianity had been dispensed with, we would rendezvous in the centre of the old macrocarpa hedge to become the Ace of Diamonds Gang. The night would be moonlit perhaps, and we would move off in dispersed formation, keeping in touch by drifting whistles and calls of birds extinct except within the diamond lands. Like wraiths we went, said Bernie once. He read a lot, did Bernie. Like wraiths, the Ace of Diamonds Gang, if Ashley's farting didn't give us all away.

The Ace of Diamonds Gang was rather like that, subject in practice to mundane deficiencies which threatened the ideal. Ashley's wind, Bernie's glasses and Hec Green having to be in by nine o'clock every night, were the sorts of things. A certain power of
imagination was necessary, but for thirteen-year-olds the source of such power is inexhaustible. We never spent much time in explicit definition of the gang, however — each had his own motivation, his own vision of the Ace of Diamonds Gang, and when we struck in that small town each of us gloried in a quite separate achievement. Dusty Rhodes insisted that the gang be used to intensify his wooing of Anna Nicholson, who had the best legs in the school. It was love all right. After watching Anna at the swimming sports, Dusty had an attack of lovesickness so severe that he was away for three days. The Ace of Diamonds Gang picketed Anna Nicholson's front garden sometimes, and when she came back from music practices called from the bushes and tossed acorns up to her window. Dusty considered this a normal form of courtship, and the rest of us had not sufficient experience to suggest alternatives. When Anna's father came out with torch and fury, we would drift wraith-like deeper into the shrubbery, not of course from fear, but to give him a taste of the menacing elusiveness of the Ace of Diamonds Gang when true love was thwarted. Dusty could never understand why Anna Nicholson didn't fall for him. The unbearable passion of first love rarely has any relevance to the response of the other party.

For Bernie and me the Ace of Diamonds Gang was more a life warp to escape from being thirteen years old in a provincial town: a chance to conjure heroism, to strike a pose, to create mysteries in which to dwell. We cut the backs off some Christmas cards, and stamped them with the red diamond. We left one at the scene of each of our exploits, just as in the books we read. The senior sergeant would pin them on his incident board we were sure, and his staff would attempt to work out a modus operandi.

So it was something of a let down to return to Seddon Park weeks after we had painted challenges there, and find the Ace of Diamonds card still there, weathered on the side of the cricket shed. ‘They've given up, that's what,' said Dusty.

‘That's it, all right. They've given up,' said Ashley.

‘Perhaps it's still under surveillance,' said Bernie. It was a good word — surveillance, but even it could not impose conviction in that warm morning with the playing fields dipping to the willows, and a harrier club spread in the distance.

‘We haven't actually done much lately,' admitted Ashley, who was sitting downwind a little. ‘As a gang I mean.' We lay in the grass, shading our eyes with our hands, and attempting to justify the lack of daring in recent excursions of the Ace of Diamonds Gang.

Dusty suggested we spend time drilling a hole in the girls' changing sheds, but the rest of us wanted a cause of greater daring, and less obvious connection with our own interest. ‘My father told me Jorgesson poisoned Mrs Elder's Alsatian because it kept him awake at night,' said Ashley. Jorgesson ran the second-hand yard, and his enmity could be relied on. He had cuffed Dusty's head for cheek, and once set the police on us after seeing us on the stacks of the timber yard. And he gave us wretched prices for any lead or copper we scrounged because he had the monopoly as the only scrap dealer in town. Sometimes we retrieved the stuff from his yard and sold it to him twice over to gain a fair price by simple addition, but even retaliatory dishonesty didn't remove our resentment.

‘Hey, Jorgesson,' repeated Dusty. To defy Jorgesson was grand enough to be a reaffirmation of the principles of the Ace of Diamonds Gang, and Dusty agreed to hold in abeyance further collective effort to seduce Anna Nicholson, and the spy-hole in the sheds.

‘Let's raid the place and leave a calling card,' said Bernie, raising a small, clenched fist. ‘Strike and vanish, vengeance accomplished: the Ace of Diamonds Gang.' It was Bernie who usually provided the linguistic motifs for the gang.

‘Christ, yes,' said Hec, ‘but I'll have to be back by nine, remember.'

In the fastness of the macrocarpa we met on Wednesday evening, looked out into the soft, eternal twilight of summer. We linked thumbs to make our pledge and put on our Ace of Diamonds
masks. Just a handkerchief and a change of mind. The mantle of secret brotherhood then fell upon us — oh, it was fish Christians in the catacombs, the Black Hand, Jacobites, the Scarlet Pimpernel. It was the League of Spartacus, the Boxers, it was Kipling's bazaar. I felt a small part of history's perpetual alternative as we ran through the Marlborough evening.

Jorgesson's was in that part of the town which was never very busy, off the main street and down toward the warehouses. On one side of his yard was a panelbeater's, on the other a vacant section, then the timber yard. When night came, all such lands reverted to the domain of the Ace of Diamonds Gang. We scaled the stepped pyramids of the timber yard, and made inventory of Jorgesson Traders. It resembled a field hospital in a desperate war of machines, the corpses and the parts heaped in rough classification as they came in. The ground was toxic and stained with oils, rust and the juices of dismembered machines. There were heaps of taps like discarded hands, radiators, bumpers, fan units, old bricks, used sinks, ceramic fire surrounds, short blocks, coppers, windows, roofing iron, bottle castles in green and brown, heaps of worn tyres like bitter, dark intestines. Amidst all the obsolescence were a few new kitset patio chairs assembled by Jorgesson during his quiet times. Much of the stock was exposed to take its chances beneath the spartan sky, a second category lay in an open-sided shed and its progressively diminishing lean-tos. We knew that the most precious and portable items festooned Jorgesson's army hut, so that it was a labyrinthine progress for him to make the short journey from his desk and cash box to the door.

There seemed a dim light from the hut as we watched from our battlements. ‘He must still be there,' said Hec. Ashley perfumed the night in response to heightened and unexpected tension.

‘But we'll still go,' I said.

‘We should reconnoitre in strength,' advised Bernie. His glasses glinted a moment in the last light of the evening. We steadied ourselves on the timber, and locked our thumbs again in pledge.

So did we move wraith-like across the rough section between the timber yard and Jorgesson's, scouts taking post, then others fading forward. We hand-cupped each other over the fence, drew up Hec as the last, and stood among Jorgesson's darkened possessions. The one window in the army hut showed light like the pale yellow yolk of a battery egg. It was above head height, and we pushed a drill chassis close to the wall — inch by inch to reduce the noise of the high, iron wheels on the gravel and scattered artifacts of Jorgesson's yard.

Jorgesson was lying on the floor by the door, or rather Jorgesson was lying on a woman who was on the floor by the door. It was the only space available: the one strip for the door to open and the clients to stand amidst Jorgesson's plunder. Jorgesson and his love seemed accustomed to the position, for without needing to look behind her, the woman reached an arm to brace herself on the stack of long life batteries, and Jorgesson's trousers hung conveniently on the impressive tines of a wapiti head behind him.

The apparent irrationality of sex is a vast humour to the young. Jorgesson had no electricity in his hut, and the low, angled light from a small Tilly was unflattering, single tendons jerking behind Jorgesson's great knees were picked out, and the wrinkles behind his head, and how flat his backside was in fact. Of the woman there was little more than the one practical arm, and her toes, separate and tumescent as facets in the Tilly light.

‘He's doing her,' said Dusty. ‘He really is.' His voice had qualities of awe and relief, as if after all the furtive talk, the innuendo, the chapter endings, the fade-outs, he was reassured that the act itself was not a myth. Jorgesson was doing it before his eyes. ‘Jesus,' said Dusty.

‘Yeah,' said Hec.

Jorgesson was unaware of any need to prolong his performance for our education. He slipped to the side, cleverly angling one leg between a brass fireguard and a Welsh dresser. He drew a rug about his love, and laid his bare arm upon it to stroke her hair. A candle
sheen glowed on his arm in the localised Tilly light, and his face was all Punch features as he talked, stark in relief and shadow. Braces were a limp bridle from the wapiti, and the love's toes had coalesced with the passing of ecstasy.

The Ace of Diamonds Gang found an aftermath of restful affection disappointing. Dusty grumbled on the drill perch, and Bernie began hand signals of obscure intrigue. We had come to punish Jorgesson, and his pleasure would provide another cause. We withdrew to the darkness of Jorgesson's open shed to plan our assault. ‘Have you got the card?' said Bernie. It was my turn, my turn to spike it, as Bernie said. I could feel it in my top pocket.

They gave me two minutes to creep around to the front of Jorgesson's hut, and there I took the card from my pocket and the brass pin from the side of my shoe. As I fixed it to the centre of Jorgesson's door, fellow partisans began their attack. Stones cascaded upon the roof, Ashley ran towards me down the flank of the hut banging the boards with a length of piping, Dusty and Hec gave their wolf howls, Bernie beat a scoured copper in sonorous rhythm. The Ace of Diamonds Gang had released its terror.

I could hear also a sudden commotion as Jorgesson tried to rise from among his possessions to counter-attack. I had joined the others in a race for the gate when Jorgesson seemed to smite down the door and was behind us, like a black jumping jack with profanity as his sparks. His voice was husky with passion, and rage gave him an initial impetus — but we were prepared. Fled, the white masks and red diamonds flowing in and out of colour as we raced past the streetlights. We were our own audience, struck by the audacity of the Ace of Diamonds Gang. Avengers, raiders, sentinels, even if Bernie had to carry his glasses as he ran and had trouble keeping up. ‘Wait on, wait on,' he kept calling, which impaired our wraith-like progress.

Jorgesson gave up, though, once we reached the Sherwood of the timber yard. It was darker amid the stacks and he had no intimate
knowledge of the trails there. He halted and sent in a verbal pack of bastards, buggers and sods to harry us on our way.

‘Go home, shagger,' shouted Hec.

‘Serve him right,' said Dusty, but his tone was one more of envy than impartial justice.

‘Remember the Ace of Diamonds Gang,' called Bernie hauntingly. We joined thumbs on one of the stacks when Jorgesson was gone, and enjoyed the exaggeration of what we had done, except Hec, who had to go straight home, and risk being belted.

The depleted Ace of Diamonds Gang maintained its identity through the streets and short cuts from the timber yard to its macrocarpa headquarters, each scout call an echoing clearance. Yet after victory over Jorgesson there was arrogance rather than caution in our progress, and in the macrocarpa, darker than the blue, summer night, we put aside our masks and our greater lives with unspoken dismay.

In my room I folded my mask and placed it within the fuselage of the Spitfire Mk II, the special place. I began to undress, and as I pulled my jersey over my head I could feel my library card still in the shirt pocket from the afternoon. Except that it wasn't the library card, it was the Ace of Diamonds sign made out of the back of a Christmas card and, as I recognised it, there was a flux of all my stomach, and blood pumping up my eyeballs, hair follicles quickening all over my skin, falling electrical cadences of primeval terror through the matter of the brain. It was the library card I had pinned on the door of Jorgesson's army hut in the second-hand yard. The Ace of Diamonds Gang had witnessed his secret love, had interrupted it, had taunted him from the night sky and the timber stacks — and I had left my library card pinned to the centre of his door to avow responsibility.

I dreamt of Jorgesson's retribution during the night, starting up in abrupt horror at each climax revealed. Jorgesson in the headmaster's study when I was sent for, Jorgesson waiting in the shadows with an old sickle from stock, Jorgesson fingering a garroting cord beneath
the swaying pines, Jorgesson at the door with my library card and asking to see my father.

That's how it happened. I had just taken a mouthful of toad-in-the-hole when I saw, through the kitchen window, an unnaturally tidy Jorgesson coming past the geraniums. There was a bulge in his pocket which could have been a garroting cord, and his Punch head was tilted to accommodate a paisley tie. Since then I have always hated geraniums and paisley patterns. A geranium is a coarse, disease-ridden plant with a flare of animosity, and paisley resembles a slide of pond water beneath a microscope. Even toad-in-the-hole has never been quite the same again. My father and Jorgesson spent time in sombre conversation and, although I couldn't catch the words, I could see on Jorgesson's face successive expressions of contained outrage, reasonableness, social duty to parents of evil children. My library card passed from Jorgesson to my father, the indisputable proof of a tale too rich to be denied.