Owen Marshall Selected Stories (23 page)

I'm surprised at all the places I've lived in. Ours was the off-season, budget sort of view of Wanganui, Blenheim, Lower Hutt and Bulls, Putaruru and Tuatapere. I never went surfing at Taylors Mistake, or had trout at Taupo Lodge, but I surely know the panoramic view of the Redruth tip, low before the sea, the gull flights wheeling like windmills above the plastic bags massed on the netting. A man putting tiles on the Oddfellows Hall in Invercargill was struck by lightning, yet not hurt much at all. Each working day as I went past, I could see where the spouting was dented as he fell. The windows were small and high to stop the rest of us from seeing what the Oddfellows were up to. Sometimes Iris and I walked past the hall together until we
reached the lights, when she would turn right to old Mrs Brody, who gave her one of the last jobs she ever had, and I would walk on to Acme Smallgoods. Mrs Brody left Mum a Victorian washing bowl and jug used before plumbing was invented. Iris said the set would be worth a fortune today, because it was stamped Duenly Pottery, Sussex, underneath, but the jug was broken when our neighbour's tom jumped up at the budgie's cage. I keep a plant in the bowl now. That bowl is big enough to bath a baby, with bruise blue embossed leaves on it and pink roses.

I've had at least two chances to marry rich, apart from the son of the Drs Utteridge — a sheep farmer from the Hakataramea, and the owner of three rest-homes in Mount Eden. By then, though, neither Iris nor I saw marriage as such an easy step to success. The merino farmer never spoke more than seven words at a time, yet Iris said you've got to think hard about marrying. You've a responsibility to ask yourself if you really want someone coughing in the same bed, walking in and out of your house at will, telling you things about his life. She thought that men were best as visitors.

Iris went at sixty-four: only sixty-four, and I was there. I'd come down to visit her in the first and last house she ever owned. A married couple's house in Murchison, where prices were that cheap. Mum had put new iron on the laundry lean-to and, when the rain began, she took me out in delight to prove it didn't leak, Things were good for her, because she was on super by then and had plenty of work at the pub as well. She was a terrier for work. From the lean-to window we could see the rain cloud moving across the dark, native bush of the Murchison hills, and the rain dashed on the new tin roof. Send her down, Hughie, cried Iris, and she pointed out the good secondhand washing machine and the red lino she'd put down. There wasn't a leak, or a spider's web, in the place. Send her down, Hughie. I think it rains a good deal in Murchison, for the grass on the flats below the bush was lush and there were rushes in the dips. She used to say send her down, Hughie, when she comforted me during a winter we
spent in a Johnsonville caravan. We're snug as a bug in a rug here, she'd say. I turned to say something of this to my mother in her Murchison laundry, but she was falling backwards with a stopped heart. As if pole-axed she went down, and any murmur against it I certainly didn't hear above the rain that Hughie sent down. I reckon she died still with the satisfaction of her own home, the new red lino, tin laundry roof, and some great thing to come, even if she never made supermarket star, lost family heiress, or became a medium who told the police of a dozen murder sites, like Beryl Judkins' aunt.

Beryl Judkins' parents took her camping to the Coromandel and she raved on at school about moonlight swims, campfires and pohutukawa blooms along the shore. I must have whined at home about our failure to have holidays, as a ten-year-old will, so Iris made a tent in our backyard by putting a sheet over the clothesline and anchoring the sides. We had onion chips and lemonade. We lay rolled in blankets watching the sky through the tent end. My mother told me about the black sequin dress she was planning to wear as a jazz sax player. I heard a hedgehog sorting for grubs in the currant bushes as Iris described the life of a cabaret star. Mr Thompson came out late on to his lawn for a leak and a spit. We were quiet until he was inside again. Sure, it wasn't Beryl Judkins' Coromandel. Mr Thompson once had his photo in the paper, because an ancestor had been killed at the Wairau Massacre, he said, and he wanted compensation from the government on behalf of the family. The fighting can't have been far from the bright rose-hips of years later.

We shifted away before there was any response to his claim, but Iris checked at the library anyway to see if anyone with our name had been massacred there. She said Bleekers had been in New Zealand since before the Treaty. We shifted because she was offered a job as assistant matron at Stanhope Preparatory School in Johnsonville, but when we arrived the assistant matron refused to leave, because her marriage plans had fallen through, and so we lived in a caravan at the motor camp until Iris became car groomer at Crimmond Motors.

It was a shock at the time, of course, Iris going like that, but I came to be glad she'd not suffered any sense of failure. She died in her first home and, although Hughie was sending it down outside, not a drop could get through to her red lino and washing machine. The certificate gave Murchison as the place of death. I just thought it strange as about the only one of all those towns and suburbs that I'd not shared with her. All those uncaring places where she had fed and clothed me, and so much more. We're not finished yet, she'd say. Some of us have to achieve what we can despite our lives, rather than as a consequence of them. So there was no supermarket stardom, no Lotto first division, no Brazilian millionaire, no double doctor marriage, no jazz sax cabarets in the sequin dress, not even my father coming back reformed and freshly shaved to start again. Just Iris, my mother, and me.

T
he heavy moonlight gave it all the appearance of quality linen, flattering the exposed walls of the Totara Eventide Home, and the lines of stainless steel trolleys and wheelchairs by the windows glinted like cutlery upon that linen. The moon was more forgiving than the sun, allowing a variety of interpretations for what it revealed. The shadowed places were soft feathered with blue and grey, like a pigeon's breast.

The only sound was Crealy pissing on to Matron's herb garden. The white cord of his striped pyjamas hung down one leg, and his bald head was made linen in the moonlight. ‘Had enough?' Crealy asked the sage, basil and thyme. Residents were not supposed to come out and treat the Matron's herbs to such abuse. Crealy felt his life stir as ever at the defiance of rules. He could see the trim, summer lawn, and the garden which paralleled the side path to the slope of the front grounds. The moonlight lay over it all as a linen snowfall.

Crealy had never before lived in a place so pleasant to the eye, or so well organised — and he hated it. Always a big man, he had never done anything with it, lacking the will, the resolution, the brains and the luck. At eighty-one and in Totara Home, he found that time had awarded him a superiority which he had been unable to earn any other way. He had given little, and lasted well.

Crealy's bladder was empty, so he put a large hand over his face to massage his cheeks, while he waited for an idea as to what to do
next. Even in the moonlight the kidney spots on the backs of his hands showed clearly. He could think of nothing novel to do, so decided to persecute Garfield. He went back through the staff door of the kitchen, and bolted it carefully behind him. Before seeking out Garfield, Crealy wanted to be sure that Brisson was settled in the duty room. He went slowly through the kitchen and the dining room, through the corridors which were tunnels in the Totara of all their past lives.

Crealy stood in the shadow of the last doorway, and looked into the corridor which led past the duty room. He was like a bear which pauses instinctively at the edge of a forest clearing to assess possibilities of gain or loss. He walked slowly down the corridor of mottled green lino, his breathing louder than the regular shuffle of his slippers. Before the duty room he slowed even further as a caution, but his breathing was as loud as ever. The door was ajar, and Crealy looked in to see Brisson at leisure.

The duty room had a sofa, a chair, a log book with a biro on a string, a coffee pot, a telephone, a typed copy of the fire drill on the wall. It had the worn, impersonal look common to all such rooms in institutions, whether hospitals or boarding schools, army depots or fire brigades. Brisson lay on the sofa, and held up a paperback as if shielding himself from the light. His head was round and firm like a well grown onion, and light brown with the sheen a good onion has too. He wore no socks, just yellow sneakers on his neat feet. Crealy was surprised yet again to see how young some people were. He'll lie there all night and do nothing, thought Crealy.

‘Who's that huffing and puffing outside my door?' said Brisson without moving, and Crealy pushed the door and took a step into the doorway. ‘Ah, so it's you, Mr Crealy,' said Brisson. He swung the book down, and his legs on to the floor, in one easy movement. ‘Why are you wandering the baronial halls?'

In reply Crealy made a gesture with his large hands which seemed more resignation than explanation. Brisson was lazy, arrogant,
shrewd — and young. He took in Crealy: the awkward size of him, the sourness of his worn, bald face, the striped pyjamas and, between them and slippers, Crealy's bare ankles with the veins swollen. Brisson gave a slight shiver of joy and horror at his amazing youth, and Crealy's old age.

‘Mrs Vennermann said you squeezed the blossom off her bedside flowers,' he said. Crealy itched his neck. His fingers sounded as if they worked on sandpaper, and the grey stubble was clear in the light of the room. ‘She said you pick on people. Is that right?'

‘She took my Milo,' said Crealy. Brisson picked up the exercise book that served as the log for duty shifts.

‘Shall I put that in here then? Shall I? Mr Crealy deprived of his Milo by Mrs Vennermann. For Christ's sake. And someone said that you have been making Mrs Halliday all flustered. Eh?'

‘It's just all fuss,' said Crealy. He began to think how he could get back at Mrs Vennermann.

Brisson smiled at his own performance, looking at old Crealy, at the mottled lino like a puddle behind him, at the exercise book with the cover doodled upon, and the biro on a string from it. He considered himself incongruous in such surroundings. He had such different things planned for himself. ‘I won't have a bully on my shift, Mr Crealy. If I have to come down to the rooms, then look out. And don't you or the others come up here bothering me.' Brisson hoped to be with Nurse McMillan. What time was it?

‘I don't do anything,' said Crealy in his husky voice. ‘It's Jenny Pen.'

‘What's that?'

‘Eh?' said Crealy.

‘Go to bed,' said Brisson, and saw the old man turn back on to the puddle lino, heard the shuffle and breath of him as he went back to the rooms of the east wing. Brisson did an abrupt shoulder stand on the sofa to prove age not contagious, then relaxed again with his book and thoughts of Nurse McMillan.

When Crealy reached the room he shared with Garfield, Mortenson and Popanovich he was ready for a little action. Jenny Pen time. Jenny Pen was a hand puppet that Garfield's granddaughter had made at intermediate school. Although christened Jenny Pencarrow, it looked more like Punch, or the witch from Snow White, for its papier mâché nose and chin strove to complete a circle. Jenny Pen had a skirt of red velvet, and balanced all day on the left-hand knob of Garfield's bed. At night, ah torment, she became the fasces of Nero's power, the cloven hoof, the dark knight snouted emblem, the sign of Modu and Mahu, the dancing partner of a trivial Lucifer, a tender facsimile of things gone wrong.

Crealy lifted Jenny Pen from the bed end, and thrust his hand beneath the velvet skirt. He held her aloft, and turned her painted head until all the room had been held in her regard. Garfield began to cry, Mortenson turned the better side of his face aside, and wished his stroke had been more complete. Popanovich was just a shoulder beneath his blankets. Crealy walked Jenny Pen on her hands up Garfield's chest, and she seemed of her own volition to rap Garfield's face. ‘Who rules?' said Crealy.

‘Jenny Pen,' said Garfield. Garfield had played seventeen games for Wellington as fullback, and later been general manager for Hentlings. It was all too far away to offer any protection.

‘Lick her arse then,' said Crealy hoarsely, and Garfield did, and felt Crealy's hand on his tongue. ‘You're on Jenny Pen's side, aren't you?' said Crealy.

‘Yes.' Garfield's voice barely quivered, although the tears ran down his cheeks. He could scarcely conceive the life he was forced to lead. His soul peeped out from a body which had betrayed him in the end.

Crealy's eyes glittered, and he looked about to share his triumph with others. ‘What about you, Judge? Want to do a little kissing?' Mortenson gave his half-smile.

‘It's difficult for me,' he said slowly.

‘Bloody difficult with only half of everything working.' Crealy walked over to the last bed, and shook Popanovich's shoulder. There was no reaction. ‘What sort of a name is that for a New Zealander,' he said. ‘Bloody Popanovich!' He banged his knee into Popanovich's back, but there was no defence of the name. It put Crealy in an ill humour again, and he went back to Garfield with Jenny Pen. He began to go through Garfield's locker. ‘It's share and share alike here, Garbunkle.'

‘Communism has the greatest attraction to those with the least,' said Mortenson in his slurred voice, knowing Crealy was not bright enough to follow.

‘Shut up,' said Crealy. He placed a bag of barley sugars and a box of shortbread biscuits on the top of Garfield's locker. ‘Is that all, you useless bugger,' he said. He looked at Garfield for a time, letting Jenny Pen rest on the covers, almost basking in the knowledge shared between them of Garfield's weakness and his strength. And even more, the mutual knowledge of Garfield's former strength and superiority, Garfield's achievements and complacency, now worthless currency before Crealy, who had achieved nothing except the accidental husbandry of physical strength into old age.

‘What else have you got hidden after all them visitors?' Crealy slid his free hand slowly under Garfield's pillow, and withdrew it empty. ‘Come on now, you bugger,' he said.

‘Just leave me alone.'

‘Make Jenny Pen sing a song,' said Mortenson. Sometimes Crealy would have Jenny Pen sing ‘Knick Knack Paddy Whack Give a Dog a Bone', or ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown'. It was an awful sound, but better than the beatings.

Crealy listened a while, to make sure that no one was coming who could take Garfield's part, then he pulled the near side of the mattress up and found a packet of figs. ‘That's more like it,' he said. He sat on the bed as if he were a friend of Garfield. ‘You selfish old bugger,' he said mildly. ‘How many figs do you reckon there are here?'

Garfield didn't answer, and Crealy took hold of his near ear and shook his head by means of it until Garfield cried out. ‘Don't you start calling out, or you'll get more,' said Crealy. He opened the packet and began to eat. ‘For every one you're going to get a hurry up,' he said, and gave Garfield one right away.

So it began. Popanovich remained in hibernation beneath his blankets, Mortenson watched, but tried to keep the true side of his face as expressionless as the other, even though his good leg was rigid. Garfield covered his ears, and Crealy ate the figs, hitting Garfield's face with each new mouthful. ‘Figs make you shit, Garfield, old son,' he said, ‘but I'll make you shit without them. That's rich, isn't it. I said that's rich, isn't it, Judge?'

‘Exactly,' said Mortenson carefully. What time was it? He tried to remember some of the letters of Cicero he had been reading.

The one light from Garfield's locker cast a swooping shadow each time Crealy leant forward solicitously to hit Garfield, and when Crealy held Jenny Pen up in triumph she was manifest as a monstrous Viking prow upon the wall. Mortenson had to accept the realisation that there were underworlds that he had been able until recently to ignore. Now he was part of one, suffering and observing, powerless through reduced capacity and fear.

When he saw a little shining blood beneath Garfield's nose, he could contain his opposition no longer. Yet stress undid his recent progress and Stefan Albee Mortenson, barrister, solicitor, notary public, could produce before the court of Jenny Pen only, ‘Creal, youb narlous nan stapp awus nee.'

‘Careful, Judge. I don't need your squawk. I might come across and give you more than just this feathering Garfield's enjoying. I'll do the side of you not already dead, you pinstripe squirt.'

Mortenson had nothing more to say, and Garfield sat with his chin on his chest as if in a trance. ‘Had enough?' Crealy asked him. ‘You're gutless, the lot of you.' Crealy was bored with his immediate subjects and, with Jenny Pen still on his hand as his familiar, he
went to wander the night corridors of the home. No conversation began in the room he left. Popanovich feigned the sleep of death, Garfield remained slumped in his bed and Mortenson had no way of travelling the distance between them to offer comfort.

Mrs Munro knew nothing of Totara's netherworld. She had her own room in the separate block before the cottages, and the sun was laid on the polish of several pieces of her own furniture which had accompanied her. Mrs Munro could never understand those who complained of time dragging. She herself delighted in time to spare for all those indulgences a busy life had denied her, all those intellectual and emotional considerations that the slog of a seven-day dairy had prevented her from enjoying. She wore the tracksuit which she had insisted on for a Christmas present. She liked the comfort, the lack of constriction, the zippers at ankle and chest which made it easy to get off. She liked the two bright blue stripes and the motif of crossed racquets, even though she had never played sport.

Despite something of a problem with head nodding, and a hip operation on the way, Mrs Munro was quietly proud that, although she was an old woman, she was not a fat, old woman. She didn't complain about the food, and she drew more large-print library books in a week than anyone else in the home. She rejoiced in an hour to while away over a cup of tea, or in writing to Bessie Inder, or in putting drops in her ear, or measuring her room with the tape from the sewing basket. Miss Hails from the main block did visit too often, it was true, and her repetitions tended to start Mrs Munro's head nodding, but there was always the bedding storeroom as a sanctuary, and Mrs Munro had built a little dug-out in the blanket piles where she could rest in her tracksuit after lunch until Miss Hails had given up looking for her, and gone visiting elsewhere.

For the present, though, she counted the spots of a ladybird on her window sill, and watched sour old Crealy smoking on a bench
by the secure recreation area. Crealy was not compulsive viewing, and when Mrs Munro finished her computations concerning the ladybird, she decided she would begin her next romance of the British Raj.

Crealy's cigarette was the last in the packet he had stolen from Popanovich, who was sleeping again. For Crealy, the days were not as enjoyable as the nights, because he was too much under the eye of authority, and the spirit of his fellows was not as easily daunted when the sun shone. He wondered if Mrs Halliday was by the goldfish pond, but couldn't see her, and so he went back indoors to check Mortenson's locker before lunch. In the main corridor he came across Mrs Joyce, who had her blood changed quite regularly at the clinic. Her forearms and elbows seemed forever to have the yellows, purples and blues of ageing bruises. Mrs Joyce had made binoculars of her hands and stood with them pressed to the glass doors, staring out. ‘What's out there?' she asked Crealy.