Owen Marshall Selected Stories (42 page)

A lot's still the same. The phoenix palms on the median strip — pineapples we used to call them. The way Donald and Andrew sit waiting while I set out lunch is the same too. The same as Dad used to wait for Mum to provide his food.

The Benvenue Cliffs are still hung with ice-plant and its glassy flowers. There used to be sand dunes between the lawn and the sea, and unpainted, wooden changing sheds. There used to be lupins, marram grass, gorse even, ridges in the dunes and hollows where sunbathers and lovers lay. And in the carnival afternoons there were acts in the sound shell. You sat high on the concrete steps built in the cliff while some local boy sang, ‘How much is that doggie in the window'.

‘We used to come here often in the long holidays,' she tells Nigel, but it's Donald who answers.

‘People don't come the same now. They head inland more, to the lakes.'

‘Well, there's no surf here,' says Andrew. ‘You need a beach with a good surf, or lakes for water-skiing to get young people today.'

‘Young people today!' Donald says. He improves his posture to address a topic that provokes him. ‘I'm sick of hearing about young people today, as if they've grown another head. Listen, young people today are the same as young people yesterday, except they've been allowed to get away with too much. After a boot up the jacksie young people today behave a good deal more like the rest of us.'

‘Perhaps it would work in reverse,' said Nigel, mumbling, his head turned away to watch the swimmers. ‘A boot up the jacksie to make everyone more like young people. A neat experiment, eh.'

‘What's that?' says Donald, but Nigel's said all he wants to, and gets up and wanders off over the sand.

‘Don't go far,' his mother calls. She starts to tidy up and remembers being on the bay as a girl. We had our last family holiday in Timaru when I was seventeen: Nigel's age now, but I was so much older surely. Girls are, though. For New Year's Eve I wore a full-patterned cotton skirt with a stiff petticoat — they were all in then — and stockings, not pantyhose. And clip-on earrings. I'd met Selwyn Holdaway who had an ivy league shirt which looked great. He used to fold the sleeves up to his elbows, and his brown skin, the muscles moving, the silver watch strap on his wrist, made me think of sex.

You can trust your body at seventeen. The back of your neck isn't wrinkled, your legs don't have swollen veins, and your togs don't ride up over a second crease in your bum. My friend Barbara and I used to wear togs under our dresses to walk down from the motel, and we'd stand in the warm, white-grey sand to undress.

Selwyn Holdaway could talk — he was a great talker. He was fun to be with, and if his legs were slightly bandy it didn't matter because they were brown, muscular legs. He was deputy head boy, or proxime accessit I think, one or the other, and he was going to Canterbury to be a lawyer he told me. On New Year's Eve at the top of the Benvenue Cliffs we stood with a soft bush between us and Barbara and her boy, for privacy. There were still people swimming as the New Year came in, some couples on the anchored raft, the
ships' hooters, and a lot of noise from the other side of the bush as Barbara got shirty with her boy.

Between kisses Selwyn talked of going to Canterbury. We agreed to write to each other. He sent me one letter early that year, after he'd started varsity, and I wrote back, but that's all I heard. I blamed still being a schoolgirl. I remember that in his letter he said he'd found great freedom in being away from his family.

If the others weren't here I could walk up the track on the cliffs and look out over the bay again, though it was dark then, of course, that New Year night, and Selwyn Holdaway told me how he was going to write to me about all the things that happened afterwards. He didn't, but all the things happened afterwards just the same.

Nigel has taken off his shirt: his shoulders are red with acne but he doesn't care. Ruth should have him using some of that antiseptic soap, and no chocolate. It's been a long time since Ruth and the boys have been on Caroline Bay, and Andrew is wondering where the years have gone. ‘I still feel the same as these young people around us,' he says. ‘I could stand up and join in, receive the same quick glances from the girls, but then I see my old, white feet on the sand, or pass my hand over my head and find I've grown bald. “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”'

‘You're old, but you never act your age,' says Donald. ‘Never had to work hard enough, that's what.'

‘Don't start with the bullshit, Donald.'

‘Oh, come on you two,' says Ruth.

There they are with the glitter of the sea behind them and the noise of the summer beach around them. The four of them in bright sunshine, which is only a memory of warmth for me now. They wouldn't find it flattering, but they're precious to me because they carry something of Ralph with them as much as for what they are themselves. Donald walks like his dad, and his large, oval thumbs with white moons on the nails are just the same. His shoulders are adopting the same slump of habitual labour. Andrew and Ruth have
Ralph's eyes: the blue irises oddly small so that a full circle of white can often be seen. But Ruth has my skin. The women in my family had wonderful skin.

I look at the four here, and see other characteristics from both sides of the family. A bit of my Uncle Lee in the way Nigel's hair sticks up from the crown, and the thin McCallum lips as Andrew smiles. As my children and grandson walk on the beach I see others, more distant, come forward for an instant through a look, or gesture, signal, then fade away. I've a feeling that the outlines of Donald, Andrew, Ruth and Nigel aren't completely set. There's a jostling aura behind them of generations who want some recognition. And now I've joined them.

The four have a last walk on the sand before they leave, and Andrew and Nigel break into a brief race that only accentuates Andrew's loss of powers. ‘Silly buggers,' says Donald amiably.

‘Can I drive now?' asks Nigel, as if his winning sprint has made him more competent for the task.

‘Oh God,' says Andrew, ‘and I'd hoped for just a few years more.'

‘Maybe later.' Even Ruth shows no support.

‘Maybe on the way back, when you're familiar with the road,' says Donald.

‘I could get a bus back, I suppose,' says Andrew.

And so they pile in and drive back to the main road past the phoenix palms again, and close to the cliff track where Ruth stood on a New Year's Eve with Selwyn Holdaway. Donald lectures the others on the regional downturn. ‘Listen,' he says, ‘I don't know if you realise it, but local government reorganisation and ongoing centralisation will drastically affect places like Timaru. It's make or break for heartland New Zealand over the next few years. Mark my words.'

‘Nigel, mark your uncle's words,' says Andrew. ‘About three out of ten will do.'

‘He really gets into all that stuff, doesn't he.'

The mumble stirs Donald to justify himself. ‘Now look, look, you should realise what's important in the long run, and it's not sport, or art, or saving whales, or getting in touch with your individual consciousness, but economics, which means resources, and politics, which means who controls resources. People who think that's boring and can't be bothered with it are handing over their lives to others.' That's Donald's way: as the eldest he's always taken on a role that is practical and responsible. He talks a sort of layman's politics and economics based on newspapers and current affairs programmes, and he picks out those things that agree with his own experience. Things are always cut and dried for him: sometimes he seems cut and dried himself. His thoughts are full of firm, undoubted principles.

I wish they'd have more common sense. Listen, I'd say, there are too many people who want to talk for a living, and not enough prepared to roll up their sleeves and work. Too many people spend their time discussing gender roles, creative dance, post-natal depression and macramé — and then expect someone else to fill their bellies. They scoff at the routines of work, at those who get up each morning, smother their temperament and give a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. Winter and summer, wet or fine, time of the month or change of life, feeling up or feeling down, it's important just to get on with it. Nowadays there are too many people riding on the back of the solid middle class. It's routines and routine people that matter in the end, get things done, not the media ponces, investment counsellors, would-be pianists, solo mums, Maori and lesbian activists. Andrew never understands that.

It's us who carry the can, and get nothing but sneering derision for being fool enough to do it. My old CSM told me that there are two ways in the army: the easy way and the hard way. The easy way isn't easy and the hard way's bloody hard, he said. It's like that for a practical man in New Zealand now, I reckon. The easy way isn't easy and the hard way's bloody hard.

The road south of Timaru is never far from the sea, along the edge of the downs. Ruth and Andrew talk to bring their lives up to date: they've not seen much of each other for years. Nigel sprawls in adolescent languor, a captive in the presence and purposes of his elders.

Glenavy, where the Waitaki is bridged, prompts Andrew to tell Nigel another family story. ‘Your Uncle Donald fell in love with a girl here years ago. She had such magnificent knockers that she found it difficult to remain upright. Well, that was one reason.'

‘I can see that we're going to have another session of your damn imagination,' says Donald. He's resigned to it.

‘Donald told Dad that he was needed on the other farm to help with heading, but he came over here and took Amelia up the valley for the afternoon. Wild oats rather than heading, eh.'

‘Yeah?' Nigel begins to show an interest.

‘The next day Dad found her bra under the rug in the back seat. I can see him now, bringing it in at morning tea, and Donald's face.'

‘It's an old family story,' says Ruth, but laughs all the same.

‘You know we'd been swimming and sunbathing, that's all,' says Donald, ‘and she kept her togs on to go home. You know that.'

‘We know what you told Mum and Dad. Your brain was quicker in those days, among other things.'

‘Dad didn't say much, but he seemed impressed by the size of the bra,' says Ruth. She, too, has always played a part in ribbing Donald.

‘She was a sizable heifer, certainly, was Amelia,' admits Donald.

Beneath his denial, as always with this story, is a certain embarrassed pride which the others play on. I remember how his father enjoyed the story too; how each of the children starred in their own family anecdotes, as much a part of the family record as the photographs and the collections of small trophies from schools and clubs. Ralph and I would often go over the stories when the children had all gone: a small way to keep them in our lives.

The closer they come to Oamaru the more Andrew is in the grip of the old life, the more what he sees is populated by the past.

We never do completely outgrow our country. Education and travel only make our memories of home more powerful. Not the helicopter views of mountains and waterfalls, but the plain quiet shingle of the Waitaki, say, with the shot of rabbit droppings in the scrapes, or the sight of rugby posts above the fog in winter parks. The corner dairies with the papers piled on the counter, a stainless steel pie-warmer, and a Coca-Cola ad a glossy world away. Uniformed kids on the way home: the greys, blues and greens, the Latin blazer mottos that neither Pakeha nor Maori can understand. Easy country roads through hills contoured with sheep tracks. The long summer beaches with a fragrant breeze coming in and few people to breathe it. The twitch ever creeping out from the fences in to the dry, suburban gardens.

Above all, the committees that meet in community halls and schoolrooms, conference centres and modest boardrooms, vestry rooms, lodges, club lounges and pavilions, civic chambers and staff quarters. The Rabbit Boards, Neighbourhood Watch, Red Cross, Squash Rackets and Indoor Bowls Clubs, PTA and Friends of the School, Women's Auxiliary, RSA, Jaycees, Katherine Mansfield or J. K. Baxter discussion groups, Cactus and Succulent Society, Progressive League, Rape Counselling Centre, Acclimatisation Board, Rotary, Playcentre Management Committee, Guild of Main Street Businessmen, VSA Steering Committee, Federated Farmers, Toastmistresses, Masons, Working Men's Club, Friends of the Takahe, Compost Society, Small Bore Rifle Club, Colenso Textile Brass Band, Civil Defence volunteers, Forest and Bird Society, Trampoline and Gymnastics Promotion League, Avalon Marching Club, Repertory Society, Girl Guides' Management Seminar, Embroiderers' and Potters' Fellowship, Alzheimer's and Korsakov's Psychosis Support Group, the committee to organise the Ransumeen family reunion.

All that mister and madam chair, and rising to a point of order,
and taking the right of reply, and wishing opposition or abstention to be recorded in the minutes.

Who said we are a taciturn people?

All those hobby-horses ridden assiduously in a hundred rooms and halls of nodding boredom, while outside beneath a leering moon a stray dog savages the sheep in the domain, or glue sniffers twitch in the doorways of the main street.

And they drive on, coming closer to Oamaru. They talk mainly of their own lives, sometimes their conversation is of the places they pass, sometimes of me. Nigel remembers that as a small boy he was promised one of his grandfather's guns, and Donald acknowledges the debt and says there's a good Hollis that would suit him down to the ground. Andrew wonders if Ruth and I will be closer than he ever manages with me. ‘Maybe Mum opens up more to you, Ruth, because you're a woman.'

‘It isn't any easier,' she says. ‘Why should it be easier? Mum was never able to talk to me about being a woman. She was just more afraid for me, and her fear made her angry at times and stopped us becoming close. Being mother and daughter isn't any guarantee of understanding you know.'