Owen Marshall Selected Stories (32 page)

The cleaners are nearly finished for the night. The long watch is an exclusively male affair. They walk past us in the shadowed corridor. Dubois asks me to check the fire-doors on level three. He'll catch me up shortly, he says, and as I go on he steps out to separate Carol from her friends, guiding her towards the switchroom with the pressure of his hip. ‘Wait your patience,' Carol says, so as not to seem too amenable while still in view.

The fire-doors are as safe as most excuses. I decide to walk back outside the loading bays. Dubois has told me it is important not to become too rigid in one's routine, for that could be exploited by a thief. I doubt for the moment that he is following his own advice. An angel swish: high on the factory side above me a muffled thump, and a mallard drake falls to the frozen dirt and stones of the moonlit yard. I turn a full circle with a sheepish smile to see who has played this joke, but there is nobody. The drake's sleek head follows me. I don't want the responsibility it brings and try to shoo it away. In response the duck rolls on its side, almost like a cat to have its stomach scratched, but one wing extends in a tremor of departing life and in the soft body feathers where two legs should be, is only one and a little blood. Something terrible has been happening further in the night.

A car without lights is driving slowly down the yard. The gravel crunches sharply in the cold air. It is only Ransumeen who works for Sleaptite Security. Ransumeen is an idle, moaning sod who has been an insulation salesman, grader driver, post tanaliser and now, despite
his complaints, will see time out in the security business. ‘It's an agony, my back,' he says. He gets out and falls into step beside me, pulling on a balaclava to wear beneath his uniform cap. Ransumeen has no regard for me, but seeks anyone to talk to on a lonely shift. ‘It's an agony. Too small for my build. I've a good mind to tell them that I'll have to toss it in unless I get a better car.'

‘Right,' I say. Ransumeen has a habit of arriving at the Lintell Street entrance after ten o'clock when the women are leaving. He hopes to entice the younger ones with an offer of a ride home in the security car.

‘I could do with a workout for the old mutton gun,' he boasts. But Dubois has warned the women against him, because he considers Ransumeen workshy and unreliable. ‘I suppose the cleaners have almost finished now?' says Ransumeen. The balaclava does nothing for his looks. ‘That Eileen's got a nice pair on her, a very nice pair.' He sees the women coming from the lighted doorway in twos and threes, and hurries from me to offer them double service.

The full moon this mid-winter night has a round, idiot face. My nose is putty, and all of us are made slump shouldered by the cold. This stark, dead duck yard of Acme Textiles has no links with the expansive world in which the same night staff played volleyball last Christmas. On that night the air had rolled languidly amidst us, heavy with fragrance of the chocolate factory, the wheat silos, metallic cinders from the foundry, the sharp tar and salt from the harbour, and the plebeian scents of weeds along the fences of stained factory yards. I was in charge of the beer and fruit juice from the munificent management, and took it from the cafeteria into the summer night, where Charlotte, Carol, Rua, Eileen with such a good pair, the Tuki sisters and the others chased a yellow balloon as their volleyball. It was a mutant version of the office party, or the true one perhaps, with Dubois as seigneur, myself as squire in the medieval sense. The cleaners were boisterous and obscene, because they were all female together, away from their families and knowing they deserved better
than the treatment they received.

The world is a thousand worlds and our experience of it is determined by the point of vantage. The history of one moment in one place is a thousand histories, which are horror and joy apart, men and women apart, old and young apart, worlds of temperament and esteem apart, of education and expectation apart. Our own vision is a lie to the rest of the world who jog beside us. Eileen and the Tukis had leapt for the balloon into the tar-and wheat-scented summer night, and Dubois gave gifts of pantyhose purchased from his own wages.

I say nothing to Ransumeen of these recollections. Disappointed in his advances, he heaves phlegm in the moonlight, tells Dotty he's not going her way and complains of the rigours of the job as we head for Dubois' winter headquarters in the boiler room. ‘Where is that mad bastard?' says Ransumeen. ‘A good Kiwi name, I must say — Dubois. Jesus.' The furnace is now kept going all night. Dubois is there before us, his face cherry red in the glow of the drip-feed and his hands clasped around his enamel mug as if in prayer. There is a low, wooden form that we sit on, and the great pipes lead off above our heads, each one lagged with sacking held by hoops of tin. This is the vibrating engine-room of our night ship and almost I can hear the ocean of the outer world surge past. Dubois has made a line of blue plastic packing tape which stretches between the pipes and dries his jockeys, woollen work socks and heavy shirt.

‘I've been thinking about the three-field system,' he says, with only a nod to Ransumeen, ‘as the means of maintaining some level of fertility in village soil. It's the tie to the seasons surely, one spring sowing, one autumn, one fallow, that explains its importance more in the north.'

‘I suppose so.' Dubois is at his most scholarly in the post-coital glow. The fly of his work trousers is still partly undone and the corner of a green shirt can be seen, yet the collar of the one he wears is grey. Ransumeen is a reluctant audience on the occasions when
Dubois and I discuss feudalism. He is not aware of any connection between the past and the present: those not alive have never lived. His perception of life is reptilian, conscious only of the sun which warms his blood during the day, and the frost which slows him in his night work. He can barely maintain a latitudinal interest in things around him unrelated to his appetites, let alone a longitudinal one in the past and the hereafter. Only the concept of
droit de seigneur
appeals to Ransumeen from talks between Dubois and myself in the boiler house, on our rounds, or in the gully of the roof where we have sat on pigeon-blue summer nights.

‘So the big cheese of the district could have every sheila on her wedding night?'

‘It was a prerogative not often enforced in practice,' I say. Ransumeen doesn't want to know that.

‘They knew how to live in those days,' he says. Ransumeen's response assumes, I suppose, that he himself would have been the big cheese.

The warmth of the boiler room is having an effect. Ransumeen lifts his cap to remove his balaclava. ‘There's a bloody vicious Doberman at Fraser's yard,' he says. ‘A real goolie cruncher. The police and our guys won't check anything on those premises.'

‘Fraser's, Fraser's,' ruminates Dubois.

‘Grocery warehouses, down from the coolstores.'

‘Of course,' says Dubois. ‘A big Doberman, eh? They have tender feet.'

‘A real bastard. He tore the cheek off a boy whose bike threw a chain there. He had to have his arm grafted on to his face for ages.' Ransumeen gives me the thumbs up so that Dubois cannot see. He knows the caretaker's interest has been aroused: an odd passion whetted.

‘If you're passing again in a couple of hours with a mate who'll take over here, we could pay this Doberman of yours a visit.' Dubois takes up a stick, and thumps along the overhang of the boiler house
roof until a deadened sound tells him that Pongo is lying in his coats there for the warmth. ‘I know you're there, Pongo. You remember that anything goes missing round here and you're for it.' I have never climbed up to the roof to see Pongo, but passed him once in the yard. He is quiet, gingery and, on winter nights, creeps up to the boiler house overhang in Dubois' fiefdom.

As we begin another round, Ransumeen takes his cue to leave. He complains about his car again. The yard lights and the moon make geometric patterns of the skips and pallets, the high building walls and roofs. All that the day will prove worn and soiled has a bridal veil in the winter frost. How cold it is. Can this be the same ground over which Dubois saunters in summer nights, coming from the staff showers back to his humble rooms by the incinerator? I have seen him with a towel as a skirt, and carrying just his trousers and soap. Parrots and roses climbed on his back: tattoos of green, vermilion and purple. Parrots and red roses while I explained to him that steward was originally sty-ward, to emphasise the importance of swine in medieval times.

With Ransumeen gone we check the west doors and go in again. Dubois continues to give me company on this, my last night. He is thinking of agriculture again. ‘Why didn't they use horses to plough with more?'

‘Horses were few in number and expensive,' I say. ‘The ox was the draught animal for ordinary people: healthier over its life span, giving more work from poor fodder and the people didn't mind eating it at the end. The church then forbade the eating of horse meat.' We talk of medieval stock practices as we patrol the factory. Dubois stops abruptly to feel the air. Niceties of movement and temperature, which I cannot register, tell that a window has been left ajar. Complacent people think that occupations of little status can have no special skills: that any fool can be a lobster catcher, gardener, or poet. The main cleaners' storeroom is ajar, and Dubois' quick instincts lead him to investigate. There lies Dotty with her head on
the orbital polisher and her feet among the mop handles. Her thin legs are hairy and her breath comes as quickly as if she were climbing the Matterhorn.

‘She's taken all her pills at once again,' says Dubois, and lifts her easily in the fireman's hold to carry her into the cafeteria. ‘No. No, Dotty, there's no easy death for you here,' he says, and gives me the daughter's number to ring. It's not the first time, but the last cannot be far off. While we wait and talk of Agincourt, Dotty moans beneath the drug. Dubois has placed a bag of cleaning rags beneath her head, and she smiles fatuously despite the noises she makes. Dotty's daughter and her husband are ashamed of her. They come quickly. Without thanks to us, or more than angry solicitation for Dotty, they bear her away. ‘Poor Dotty,' says Dubois. ‘She's about come to the end of her tether.'

Ransumeen blows his horn after midnight, and it is sharp in the cutting air. He is back with a friend who will patrol while we go to punish the Doberman who bit off the boy's cheek. Dubois armours himself in his dog fighting kit, which I have seen only once before, in October when he killed a roving Alsatian which kept shitting by the boiler house door. More than anything else he looks like a samurai: black breastplate, wickerwork and elbow guards. The orient had a modern feudal age, I remind Dubois. ‘Know your enemy,' says Dubois. ‘It's the head and hands you have to be most careful of.' He has tubular steel finger stalls within his fireman's gloves, and tells us that a fully grown Great Dane has a bite that will shear three-millimetre aluminium, while a bull mastiff damages mainly by shaking. ‘I come crawling for a big dog,' says Dubois, ‘but it's me that walks away. Get past the shock impact and the bite, and dogs rupture internally quite easily really. Sudden, full-body weight even from a kneeling position is too much for them. Rottweilers are sensitive to that, despite their reputation. You see dogs are not meant by nature to be individual fighters.'

Fraser's is well away, among the newer factories on low-lying
ground. Ransumeen switches off, and the car glides down the empty street and up to the gates so as not to antagonise the dog until Dubois is ready. There is a straggling, knee-high mist from the sea, and beyond the streetlight is a main pylon with its own barbed wire enclosure. The thick cables droop and glisten between that pylon and the next. From its skeleton, knuckles of insulators hang to grasp each wire, and the electricity crackles and snaps so loudly in the winter air that it is difficult to hear what Ransumeen says in his voice at once ingratiating and confident. ‘The mad, mad bastard,' he says. ‘No one would believe it, would they?'

Dubois is fighting the Doberman on all fours. Neither of them makes any deliberate noise. The dog has Dubois' left arm in its teeth and shakes its head, wrenches suddenly with an instinct unpleasant to see. All the while it keeps its body away from the caretaker, who shuffles in a circle, attempting to come to it. The sparking of the pylon lines is amazingly loud. The breath rising from man and dog mingles in the broken mist. The fight is difficult to watch because of the many shadows despite the moonlight.

In the entire time the Doberman does not release its first hold. ‘Get the bastard. Stick the bastard,' hisses Ransumeen. His greater animosity is expressed towards the dog, I think. He glances behind to check that the street is empty. Dubois and the dog drag and circle their way to the heavy netting of the inner fence. There Dubois is able to get the Doberman side on at last and bring his elbow down with the weight of his body behind it. Abruptly a sound like the first harsh burst from bagpipes. A second time the sound, and the Doberman scrambles lop-sided away with its head low ‘The bastard's done for. It'll die soon,' says Ransumeen. I see in my mind's eye the duck again, its iridescent head, and the wing fretting on the yard. I hear Dotty snivelling. I tell myself I should have no sympathy for a dog that bites a boy's face.

Dubois gives no commentary on his actions as we drive back to Acme Textiles, and does not immediately take off his helmet. It is
metallic blue, with the half-visor that modern helmets have. Perhaps he wants time for his civilised face to reassemble behind the mask. The leather padding of his left arm is bright with the Doberman's saliva. Ransumeen catches my eye and smirks.

We have coffee and brandy in the boiler room on our return. What envy might Pongo feel, only a thickness of tin, and a world, away. Ransumeen tells his colleague how Dubois got rid of the Doberman, but is cut short by the caretaker. Ransumeen's workmate, who is a keen Salvation Army man, takes the opportunity to produce three glossy, foolscap posters promoting an orphans' fund, and he asks Dubois if they can go up in the staff canteens. It is little enough return for his surveillance, and Dubois puts them aside with a nod, close enough to the furnace to have the flames flicker on the beseeching faces of the orphans as Ransumeen tells the story about the staff nurse and the elephant. It's not well received: Dubois and I have heard better punchlines, the Salvation Army man doesn't like the genre.