Owen Marshall Selected Stories (36 page)

A
return to the place made Hammond think of life, you see, and death, which is necessary at least to highlight life. And the cry of the peacocks across the grass courts from the gardens, and the small children's cases, almost phosphorescent green, or pink, bobbing like marshmallows to keep the cars away. The hospital on the hill where Hammond had worked, the perfumed gardens between it and the town; enduring trees with name tags to introduce themselves to passing generations, a clearing, too, with Humpty on a wall to supervise the swings and regard with an eternal smile the great plaster bum of the elephant slide. The peacocks strode through the paths, tails rich and dark swept in the leaves, but the cries had always an empty truculence.

The mood was self-imposed, of course. Despite having given no warning, Hammond was well received at the hospital. The one departmental colleague who still recalled him, made time to greet him, to reminisce, to introduce him to the head of the unit, with whom they had herbal tea. Ginny had been fond of such drinks. She had small packs of them, each with a name more wondrously aromatic than the contents could hope to be, and there were always a few small, discarded bags clustered at the plughole of the sink. His mother once told him that the only thing from her childhood which could still move her was the recollection of the blue sky seen through the branches of a yellow plum tree in Motueka.

An offer was made to accompany him around the place, but
Hammond knew the pressures of their work, how much of a nuisance the passer by can be in a busy day. The colleague had become intensely interested in the hospital grounds as an unofficial extension of the gardens; the unit chief, on the other hand, was curious he said, as to how funding was controlled in Hammond's existing job. There were condolences as well.

Structurally there had been little change; it wasn't large as hospitals go. A new ambulance put-down bay at casualty admission, an internal decor of lighter pastels, a lot more signs outside informing people of possible destinations. It had all seemed common sense before. There were still the rose plots before the main block and still they seemed in half bloom, unable to provide a full show at any time of the year. The grass was stiff with drought, the garden clods ash grey. Hammond could see the third-floor window from which Mr Neilson, with good reason, did a header to the carpark. A wind from the sea was persistent on the hill, bowling in from a horizon always flat and far and sad.

Hammond followed the exact way he had always taken to the house in Liebers Street. Some of the mundane landmarks were still there. A plaster lighthouse on the Seddon Street corner; the paua shell porch further on; the home of a woman who was once the mistress of an ex-mayor. At the Bidewell Boarding House there was no old garage any more with a hole cut so that the door could be closed and just the front bumper stick out like a moustache at the other end. The dairy had become gaudy and its produce spilled out into makeshift displays on the footpath. Hammond caught a glimpse of the high counter where his children would wait to hear Mrs Lee say, ‘Hokey-pokey, or plain?'

He had been filled with confidence then, believing that, having achieved the qualifications for a professional career, he had passed the greatest test and everything else would come naturally. That experience proved it almost true was the greatest danger.

The house was too far from the gardens for the peacocks to be
heard except in the still of night. Then, when the children were asleep and Hammond and his wife lay together, sometimes they had heard those urgent calls. At first Hammond thought them exotic, but as his own life soured the notes became more discordant. Why, after all, should a creature's beauty be any indication at all of benevolence?

The brick house was part of the archaeology of his life, and even without going in, he could see things as significantly and trivially vital as the ossifications, shards and simple beads in site strata. The cracks in the roughcast beneath the main ridge facing he had twice filled with sealant, and once fallen from to lie painfully winded in the hydrangeas. The golden elm that shook leaves into the gutterings, he had heeled in and sequestered with sacking. There was a false bolt hole in the letter-box that perpetuated one of his lesser mistakes, and the concrete lip to the basement garage was never quite enough to prevent water running in during the worst rains of winter.

The things he recognised were overlaid by the habitation of other people, and as he stood on the sunny footpath the house was both painfully intimate and painfully strange to him, and he had a slight taste of copper at the back of his throat. In one year, inspired by some neighbour since forgotten, they'd had a street party — well, a sort of their end of the street party. Trestles, barbecues, lights strung in the trees and the access denied to vehicles by coloured ropes that depended on toleration for obedience. Ginny had been one of the prime movers responsible for a great success, and people had eaten, laughed and talked in the street well into the night. Everyone was filled wth neighbourly bonhomie and vowed to do it again.

And it was never done again.

Hammond walked on back to the church where he had left his car. At the service there had been several invitations to visit people before he left, but the hospital and the house were all he wanted to meet. At the crematorium Michael and Rae had rested their hands on his shoulder to show they understood that not every father was able to make a success of marriage, but they told him little about
their own lives, and he was too proud to ask. The three of them had perhaps become accustomed to the detachment of correspondence. Lynley Grath had glanced at Hammond coldly at the crematorium. She had been Ginny's friend and he'd fucked her just once from behind at a midwinter party in the Tilbury Rooms. He remembered the sharp moon like a searchlight and the sharp pleasure. Lynley had remained a loyal friend to Ginny and sent Hammond a letter of contempt after the divorce.

Despite all that, the crematorium meant the least to him of all the things of the day. It was a new place with much stained glass and blond wood. It overlooked some sloping paddocks that must have been close to the farm on which Bruce Mulheron fell from his tractor and had his legs so badly injured in the discs. Bruce told him that as he lay there at first, in the shock before the pain, he was aware how sweet the fresh soil smelled. After the rare rains towards the end of summer the mushrooms would come, especially around the gateways and the tops of mounds. Hammond and Ginny often went to Mulherons' and other farms to gather them. Real mushrooms, not the designer ones sold in the supermarkets. Large and quickly black on the underside: sudden of growth and strong and dank and black and white. The kids wouldn't eat them. Ginny would bake them with bacon and onion in a pastry shell and Hammond would bring up a bottle of pinot noir. The plots at the crematorium were mainly roses. They seemed to do better there than on the high ground of the hospital.

The cost of life is everything you have. Hammond was glad that Michael and Rae were making their way independently north. He looked forward to their company for a day or two. More than he could express, he looked forward to having them with him, but for the moment, driving away from the church, driving past the peacock gardens, the associations and reproaches of the small city, he wanted only his own admonitions.

Maybe at last you can be happy, Ginny had once said. I truly
believe that you meant the best for us all, but you weren't willing to forgo anything yourself to make sure it happened. At the time he had assumed that it was requitable malice in the guise of reasonableness. Later he had admitted it as honesty. Thinking of it again after the peacocks and the crematorium, he decided it was truth. How does one find out all the heartfelt emotions that masquerade as love?

How many couples had held each other in the summer nights, in the arbours and ardours of the ratepayers' gardens, and thought the peacocks cried just for them.

Hammond's face itched. He found it necessary to draw the flat of his hand down his cheek again and again. The sun, still powerful, was at an unkind angle and made him sneeze. Sometimes in the summer, after a big blow, the kelp would lie in caramel heaps, rotting on the stones, and the stench would drift into the town centre. Hammond thought he had a whiff of it as he drove north. Sometimes his wife had read Larkin to him while he ate a late supper on his return from the hospital.

Had Hammond stayed until dusk he would have heard the empty truculence of the peacocks although they had been taken from the perfumed gardens years before. Their phantom cries were exactly as the pain a man feels in an amputated leg.

W
e didn't see the Raffles Hotel; it was closed for renovations. Isn't that always the way, and now if ever the trip comes up in conversation with other people, they expect you to have been to Raffles. We saw the merlion at the harbour, though, and the useless gun emplacements on Sentosa Island. We climbed to Fort Canning on the site of the ancient royal palace. We had our photo taken with a black snake at the cable-car terminal and in the Tiger Balm Gardens and in the Orchid Gardens and with pygmy hippos only a fence away. We have a photo emphasising my bulk as I board a bum boat, a photo of my wife boarding the bum boat, a photo of a woman from Tuttle, North Dakota, who for an hour was our best friend in the world, disembarking from a bum boat. We have photos of our hotel bed covered with a day's purchases from plazas twenty storeys high. We have photos in which we can identify nothing, not even ourselves, and for which there seems no earthly or unearthly reason. These photographs tend to cause disagreement as to whether they even belong to the Singapore album, or whether they are of Hong Kong, or Penang, or Bangkok. As if there were any real connection between the settings and ourselves.

But you know all of that. It is part of collective tourist folklore, so let me give you three things that come from a working visit, when I was twenty-seven and had a larger appetite for experience, and a smaller perception of its whereabouts, than my own country suited. Flotillas of scooters and motorbikes at the very start of the day, with
riders wearing their jackets back to front as a windbreak; lizards on the walls where the first sun strikes; Thais, muffled like gangsters, spraying weeds and verges and, unmuffled, doing many of the other menial jobs. From that time I have only one photo. Dog-eared and monochrome, it shows me with Stanley Tan outside the illegal pig abattoir in which we worked. Strangely enough, it was my farming background which provided for me in that close pressed city. That more intimate knowledge of Singapore is like a dream now and provides no link with the present place. For some months I lived closely with Stanley Tan as a friend, but even then we knew that it was the fortuitous friendship of circumstance, and not something that could survive once we left the squeals of the abattoir and the concrete room by the old harbour where we slept with the continual noise and smell of the city through the metal bars of the door. There is a sense of free fall in the relationships of youth that is lost in a later regard for security.

The woman from Tuttle, North Dakota, is a different story. An hour on an Asian bum boat seems to have cemented our lives together. She has since sent postcards from Nepal, Denmark, Egypt, Timor and Tuttle, North Dakota. She is planning a trip to New Zealand with her husband largely on our unsuspecting praise of the country.

Her husband, she told my wife, is six foot three and was legal counsel to the previous Governor of North Dakota.

My wife and I stayed at a hotel in Orchard Road that had an atrium designed by the Pharaohs, and a labyrinth of soft, air-conditioned corridors. I slept more poorly there than I had years before in the barred, concrete room by the estuarine harbour. My wife likes hotels, but I lay listening through much of the night to the shouts from the streets. It was as if gangs still fought there, which, Stanley Tan said, was the regular thing before Lee took over.

So safe a city did he make it that Stanley and I, my wife and I, years apart, could wander late at night and feel quite at ease. My
wife is a perceptive traveller, whereas I am merely a bewildered one. She pointed out to me that although people drove on the left in Singapore, they tended to walk on the right. Nobody whistles as they go about their business, she said, and she was right. I guess that it's some cultural thing between Singaporeans and ourselves.

Orchard Road was like a drying room into which a community had been herded. The cries began with intensity, but were rendered languid by the hot, moist air as they rose towards our hotel room. When we had finished work, Stanley Tan sometimes took a shower in the flush room where the gutted pigs were given a final hose down and their bristles shaved if the buyers preferred them that way. The naked pigs were similar in colour to the naked Stanley, but carried more fat. If he jostled them as he held the hose with one hand and washed with the other, the carcasses would sway coyly away, then back again. Occasionally I showered there myself; it was cooling, but I disliked the feel of blood clots and fat between my feet and the concrete floor. If he showered at the abattoir, Stanley usually took a head he could buy cheaply and exchanged it for the favours of a very short, smiling mother of two who had a calligraphy stall in the direction of our room.

My wife said that I should attempt to find the places I was accustomed to from those far-off months in Singapore. Long hours and little money had reduced my view of the city. After more than twenty years how was I to find the site of an illegal pig abattoir smaller than a New Zealand family home, the barred apartment cell Stanley Tan and I shared, the parasol shop that twice a day served fried rice and vegetable ends among the umbrellas to a few regulars who worked close at hand? The owner of the abattoir saw no reason for breaks of longer than twenty minutes. I could still find my way to Raffles, of course, although my wife and I couldn't go in. Twice I had been there before. Once with a Canadian girl whom I met lost by the parasol shop; once to have a gin sling with Eddie Gilmore who supervised my thesis. There were the ceiling fans and a good deal
of dark wood. There was also an air of self-conscious history. Eddie Gilmore was to give a plenary address at the three-day conference, but knew he wasn't well. ‘Would that I were in the abattoir with you,' he said with feeling. ‘Killing pigs and young again, or better still that I were here and young again.'

Our American friend from Tuttle told my wife and me on the bum boat that of all the places she had visited, and she seemed well through the places of the world, Singapore was the cleanest and the most orderly. She said that they had the sense to teach everyone English in Singapore, and so put them in the ballgame with everyone else. Certainly it's comforting to have foreign people speak your language in their country. The friend from Tuttle, North Dakota, said that she found it easier to understand the Singaporeans than she did us, though we also were in the same ballgame, I guess.

One morning of lurid skies when Stanley and I arrived for work, the old wooden door was still closed and the cobbled pen at the back empty of porkers. Mr Ng stood with a police officer by the wooden door, but what was going on had nothing to do with the abattoir being illegal: in the whole incident that didn't arise. The police in Singapore were busy people with strict priorities. Two people had fallen, or been pushed, from the top of the old building that had the parasol shop on its ground floor. It had happened in the darkness, but the bodies still lay uncovered, though watched by another policeman with folded arms. Mr Ng was impatient with the time taken by police procedure; he wanted to truck in his pigs, but could hardly do so under the very noses of the authorities.

Gold is very special to the Chinese, and my wife had heard of a manufacturing jeweller in Bukit Timah Road who had lovely stuff, and all twenty-two carat or better. We went there in a taxi and, sure enough, the bracelet chains and necklaces were superb, but my wife wasn't the only one to have heard of them and there were whole busloads of people, from all over the world it seemed to me, crowded into a small showroom. Our friend from Tuttle, North Dakota,
seemed the only tourist in Singapore at the time who wasn't there.

After a while I went out and sat on the parapet above the carpark on the shady side. I sweated quietly there and watched an employee from the pottery next door working a pug mill for reconstituted clay. I wished my wife good fortune in finding just the gold chain that she wanted within her budget, and I had a sudden foresight that thereafter, whenever she wore it, whenever it was remarked on, I would again be on that parapet in the hot shade, watching the boy working the pug mill. The clay made a glistening cream right up to his elbows. Several times he looked up and smiled; once he raised an arm richly gloved in clay. I felt a whim to explain to him that years before I had lived in the city, worked with Stanley Tan killing and gutting pigs, eaten in the parasol shop, covered the cheerful woman calligrapher with some considerable goodwill myself while her younger child watched with religious solemnity, been taken by the police to see if I could identify the bodies in the street.

Stanley Tan and I had been regulars for the cheap meals at the parasol shop, and it was thought that we might recognise the dead men, but we didn't. One man was quite plump and much of his chest and stomach was showing from a shirt completely open at the front. There was no sign of injury, but his body was an odd purple-grey that I recall unpleasantly well. Mr Ng was quite sure that they were gamblers who had brought death on themselves and told the police so.

As we went by taxi to the airport my wife and I talked of what we had done in Singapore, so that we could reach agreement on the things to be considered high points, and the incidents of disappointment and bad service that we would retain as criticism. So much experience in between had to be discarded as transient to make room for the next destination. As we talked I half recognised the area through which we moved. Stanley Tan and I had driven out towards Changi sometimes to collect pigs, years before the new airport was built there. We had travelled in an old Bedford truck and
usually at night. There had been fish farms down Tampines Road then, and the moon and few artificial lights would flick and scud from the heavy surface of one pond after another.

Stanley Tan had a smile that was all in the eyes and in the crinkles around them, while his mouth stayed the same. As we came back past the fish farm pools one night, the crate sides of the Bedford tight with pigs from the smallholdings, he told me very dirty jokes that I've forgotten, and talked as well about the tigers which his grandfather could remember in the area. ‘Forget the lions,' said Stanley. ‘Singapore was tiger country, and the Chinese owners of the pepper and gambier plantations had no end of trouble getting coolie workers because of the attacks. You, now, has your family given up anyone to the tigers?'

I began to tell my wife about the tigers and the Tans, but the heat, the noise of the many aircraft overhead and our provincial anxiety to do everything right at the airport distracted us and so there wasn't much pleasure in the telling, or the listening. A kind attendant in the flight lounge, though, took a photo of us both. We are standing close together, both in affection and in accordance with subject grouping, and we have smiles fit for a new destination.