Owen Marshall Selected Stories (43 page)

She's right. I wanted more for her than I had myself, even though I had everything that mattered. Too much emotion, hope and love is an embarrassment. True feeling for all the family became overlaid with minor irritations and trivial preoccupations — mine and theirs — so that when I should have been grateful for Donald's occasional trips from Christchurch, instead as he talked I was thinking it was time for my television programme, or noticing the dirt from his shoes on the rug.

I should have forgotten sometimes that I'm their mother: put it aside and just talked to them as a person without special responsibility. I should have risked more, but you become more and more aware of the gap between what you feel, and what you can hope to express.

They're nearly home. Cape Wanbrow can be seen above the town,
and the downland is pressing towards the sea. The plains are over and cabbage tree country begins.

There'll be no birthday party for me here after all. Let's leave them now before their disappointment, their grief, or their relief. I've recovered all my life now. Still, they're coming to see me — that might still be true. They may come to see me more truly now than they ever have before.

S
mall-scale heroes are enough when you're a kid. Sometimes just conspicuous possession could do it — the man who drove a Ford V8 CustomLine; sometimes just conspicuous loss — the man who lost an arm in a combine harvester. The fish and chip shop owner seemed to me the most fortunate and successful of businessmen. The government deer culler who regularly got sozzled at the Gladstone pub surely had a life of greater excitement than the rest of us.

Mr Tansley was the caretaker at the gasworks, that collection of dark, smudged buildings with storage domes that could rise and fall like cakes in a fitful oven. He rode a black Raleigh bike. When he went to work he wrapped his lunch tin in the jacket of an old pinstripe suit, so the wire spring of the carrier would grip it safely. He took cold tea in a corked beer bottle, which he dangled at the handlebar in a grey woollen sock as he cycled. He pedalled carefully, intent on the road, as if his lunch box, or bottle of cold tea, was at risk. It was no use calling out to him when he rode past on the old Raleigh, because he wouldn't respond, always intent on the road and his slow, persistent pedalling.

He lived in an army hut behind the Loan and Mercantile building, and close to the river. He had a wooden kitchen table with turned legs outside the door of the hut, and there every morning he had his wash and shave. At head height above the table he'd banged a fair-sized nail into the hut wall, and each morning he brought out a metal-framed mirror and hung it up. Also an enamel basin,
a green towel, an army mess tin with his shaving gear, and so he'd set up there because there wasn't enough light in the hut, I suppose. The first thing, though, that came out of the hut's security, was his Raleigh bike, and he would press his thumb into the tyres as a test, and always lean the bike in the same way, on the same corner of the shed. I knew the inside of Tansley's shed, and always wondered how he fitted the bike in there last thing at night.

From my bedroom window I could see him most mornings with just a singlet above the waist and his braces hanging beside his trouser legs. In the frost, or drizzle, things were done quick time, but on a fine morning his wash and shave became almost an indulgent ritual, and I sometimes went down before breakfast to join him. He used a cut-throat, and would lift his chin high to tighten the skin of his neck, then slide that long, narrow blade down, and wash the soap and stubble from it in the water of the enamel bowl. The handle, with its split for the blade to fold into, was of ivory yellowed with age and use, and smooth as a horse bit.

‘To be clean shaven is a sign of self-respect,' he said once. ‘And a man with no self-respect hasn't any respect for others.'

Tansley had been awarded a medal in the desert, fighting against the Desert Fox, my father said. He'd reached the rank of sergeant, but then lost his stripes because he disobeyed an order. My father said that Norman Beal, who was the manager of the Loan and Mercantile Agency and had been an officer in 23 Battalion, maintained that Tansley was morally right, but they broke him to private all the same.

Tansley must have been an older soldier than most, because even allowing for the view of childhood he was surely nearly seventy when he lived in the army hut twenty years after the war. He was a big man, pale despite service in the desert. The muscles of his chest and arms had begun to loosen. The hair on his large chest was grey, and darker hair grew over his shoulders and down his back. Because he spent so much time in his own company, he carried on a sort of
conversation with himself at times in a quite unself-conscious way. ‘Reckon so,' he'd say. ‘I don't doubt there'll be rain before the day's out', and he'd fling the used water from the basin into the river, and stand and look at the sky to find intention there.

On summer evenings he'd sit on the wooden step of his hut and read the afternoon paper — even that's a thing of the past now. ‘I see old Joey Wadsworth's dead,' he'd say, or ‘Look how they advertise these Jap cars, by Jesus, bold as you like.' You might expect me to say that he and I formed a special bond, that he passed on some principled wisdom to me, and I provided company that mitigated his loneliness, but there was nothing like that. He talked to himself exactly the same whether I was sitting with him or not. From my bedroom window sometimes I could see his lips move. He didn't dislike me; he never told me not to come around; we shared bread and strawberry jam: he just didn't recognise children as the same species as himself.

He had a chrome cigarette-making machine, not much bigger than a tobacco tin, and I often got a glimpse of the simple mechanism when he made one up — rollers and a strip of dark canvas. We're quicksilver as kids, and to me all his actions seemed slow and clumsy. I wondered if his movements had been more adept in the desert when he won his medal. He put a half-choke grip on the loaf to laboriously cut himself a slice, and to do up the buttons of his fly after a piss on the bank was a business of lengthy concentration. The Loan and Mercantile let him use the lavatory at the back of the building, but for just a piss he didn't bother to walk those few yards.

Many afternoons after work he'd walk down Seddon Street and across the bridge to the RSA. He'd have a drink there because I could smell it on him afterwards, but he never came home drunk. It was the company he wanted mainly, I suppose, though he always left his mates behind and came back to the hut alone. There was another man in the town who'd won a medal, but I never saw them together, which surprised me, because I imagined that they would have a lot
in common. Mr Lineen the dentist was the other man with a medal, and his left forearm had been hit by mortar fragments, my father said. In summer when he rolled his sleeves up you could see how pitted and thin that arm was.

My father once suggested to Mr Tansley that he apply for a state house. ‘This hut here will see me out,' Tansley said, and I heard him say much the same another time about his bike. He was getting ready to go to work at the gasworks, putting the lunch box on the carrier, slipping the cold tea bottle into the grey work sock. He lifted the Raleigh by the centre of the handlebars and spun the front wheel to check for any wobble. ‘She'll see me out okay,' he said admiringly.

The bike did see him out, and it wasn't even a close thing, because Tansley was hit by a truck one winter evening when he was biking home in the half dark from his job at the gasworks. He was one day in hospital and then he died. My father said he talked about nothing but locomotives before he died. It seems that as a young man he worked in the railway workshops.

Because my father was both a neighbour and a returned soldier, and Tansley didn't have any family as far as anybody knew, he helped clear out the shed and was a pallbearer. There wasn't any money to speak of in the shed, and no record of a bank account. Someone at the RSA said Tansley used to send all his money in postal notes to Italy, but there are always those stories, aren't there? And how much money do you make as gasworks caretaker anyway?

The town and the RSA didn't care about Tansley's trade, or his lack of savings. The community hadn't forgotten Mr Tansley had won a medal in its service, and so his death deserved to be marked with respect. There were plenty of contributions to do the right thing by him, and the long piece in the paper gave him the rank of sergeant, made no mention of the court martial, and published the citation in full for his military medal. He'd rushed a machine-gun post after its fire had killed two of his mates.

At the funeral Norman Beal of the Loan and Mercantile spoke,
and Mr Lineen the dentist who had the other medal in town — the military cross, which was the officers' version of Mr Tansley's medal, my father said. There was a bugler, and it took place in the special RSA part of the cemetery. It all seemed a long way from the old man in a singlet and hanging braces shaving himself outside his shed with a cut-throat razor, or pissing into the river as he debated the day's weather with himself, or setting off on the Raleigh with his lunch box on the carrier and a bottle of cold tea in a sock.

H
ector Jansen came regularly to Singapore on business. He had his own familiar track through it, but all else remained totally foreign. He knew Changi airport well, how to get to the taxis quickly, how to use Andrew Shih's bank for a decent rate of exchange. He knew several downtown hotels close to the Soong Corporation building. He knew the zoo and Sentosa Island for snatches of relative privacy and the feel of grass beneath his feet rather than concrete. He knew a couple of escort agencies recommended by Andrew Shih. If he kept to his track in the city he seemed quite adept there, but he realised how superficial and restricted his experience was, and that the only thing of significance he had gained over all his visits was some personal credibility with Andrew Shih, and Mr Liang and Mr Yuan-jen at Soong.

On several of his recent visits, Jansen had taken Mervyn Linkiss with him. Jansen had suggested it, and the CEO had wholeheartedly agreed. ‘We need you there, though,' said Tony Alexadis. ‘I never feel happy about things at that end unless you're on the spot, Hector. You've got the touch with those people.' But they needed to groom someone up for the Singapore side of things. Businessmen there don't like abrupt changes of contact, don't respond well to a strange face over a contract. And Mervyn Linkiss was personable, intelligent and someone Jansen wanted to do well in the corporation.

On the latest trip to Singapore, Jansen felt unwell on the night of their arrival. All his life his health had been good. A passing sickness
is soon forgotten, anything that doesn't come to a threatening conclusion, although at the time it worries you. A decade ago Jansen had had evening chest pains over several weeks, which his GP couldn't account for, so Jansen picked up pamphlets on angina and heart irregularities, the cardio-vascular benefits of exercise, and indigestion. But then while he was very busy organising middle management professional development, the pains didn't come any more, and later he hardly remembered why the pamphlets were in his drawer. Even earlier there had been the loud ringing and sharp, spasmodic pain in his left ear while he was holidaying in the Hokianga, so that for several days he didn't go swimming, and rang up a doctor in Whangarei for an appointment. The noises and discomfort stopped suddenly in the night, the appointment was cancelled and recently he had filled in a medical insurance form saying in all sincerity that he'd never had any trouble with his hearing. On his standing CV he described his health as excellent.

The Singapore pain was different, though: it was very central, deep-seated, located somewhere level with the lower ribs, and seeming to need some physical space of its own, so that existing organs there were displaced. When Jansen first woke he thought it was some nausea caused by the heat, but the first movement made him give a sudden cry of distress. Sweat pooled in the hollows beneath his eyes as he lay and wondered what was wrong. He was panting, and gave a small aah with each quick exhalation, which seemed somehow a comfort. With his left hand he reached cautiously, searching for the light switch in the unfamiliar room, then he forgot that in his concentration on his pain. There was enough light from the street anyway, even though the room was several storeys up. It was very early, but already there was traffic noise, particularly the waspish whine of scooters, which for Jansen was always the sound of Asian cities. The hotel was an older one, though still favoured, and the furniture was of massive hardwood. Elephants, surely, must have been needed to move the logs from which such timber originally came.

Jansen straightened himself gently in the large bed, pushed out his legs, so that his stomach had as little constriction as possible, but if anything it made it worse. He remembered the twinges he'd had on the long flight the day before: the sense of his guts being compressed by all that sitting, despite the advantages of business class. The pain flowed and ebbed. It was an acidic pain if such a thing existed. Jansen remembered Mervyn's room number. He had that sort of mind — could still remember the seat numbers of their Singapore flights, and the names of the perfumes he was to buy for his wife, and the exchange rate of the New Zealand dollar against the Euro, the greenback and four Asian currencies.

‘Yes?' said Mervyn, his voice husky with sleep.

‘It's Hector. I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm feeling really crook. I've just woken up with it and it's giving me absolute gyppo in the guts.'

‘I'll come right away. Is your door unlocked?'

‘I'll do it now,' said Jansen.

‘Okay.'

‘Mervyn.'

‘Yes.'

‘What time is it?'

‘Half past five,' said Mervyn.

‘Jeez, I'm sorry,' said Jansen.

He found crawling the least painful form of progress, and pulled a face and hissed as he reached up to unsnib the door. He was on all fours back by the bed, gathering strength to climb in, when Mervyn came and helped him. The thin sheet Jansen pulled over himself was unnecessary in the heat, but even with such pain he wanted the decorum of a covering for his grey-haired chest and pale shin bones. He could feel the sweat of sickness and anxiety trickle through the hair above his ears: each pulsebeat flared an aurora around the light source windows.

‘Hell,' said Mervyn. ‘We're not mucking around here at all. I'm
calling the desk for an ambulance.' Jansen gave a tight nod. He didn't say anything because he was afraid of what might come out if he tried. He concentrated on keeping the pain from taking over altogether. The last thing he remembered was his colleague talking forcefully on the telephone, and at the same time patting down his spiky hair with his free hand. Mervyn was a good guy to cope with an emergency. He did have very peculiar hair in the night, though. ‘Mr Hector Jansen, Room 453,' said Mervyn. ‘Right away. As soon as possible. Whatever emergency procedure you have here. You understand?' He spoke loudly and very distinctly to ensure his English was presented in the most accessible way.

The pain in Jansen's belly was overwhelming.

They'd taken him to a Roman Catholic private hospital close to the harbour. He had his own room with recessed ceiling lights and cream walls. High on the door was a clean, square window through which staff, or visitors, could look in from the corridor. He recognised his suitcase in a corner. Mervyn sat on the only chair in the room. ‘Okay, Hector?' he said. Jansen waited a bit to assure himself the pain was much less, and then nodded slightly. Even that movement was enough to make him aware he had a tube up his nose. Mervyn drew his chair closer: it hadn't been seemly somehow to be peering into Jansen's face when he was unconscious. ‘You had an emergency operation for something that burst in your stomach,' said Mervyn. Jansen thought of a reply, opened his mouth, but couldn't find the strength to speak. ‘I've told the Soong people we'll get back to them tomorrow,' said Mervyn.

Jansen talked to his wife by telephone when he was awake again four hours later. She had been speaking to the doctors and knew a lot more about his condition than he did himself. ‘I haven't seen anyone at all,' he said. ‘Just Mervyn and flowers sent from Mr Yuan-jen.'

‘The doctors have been there, but you've been out to it. They say you'll be fine now, unless there's infection from material that's escaped into your abdominal cavities, but you'll have to stay there
several days before you can fly home. I can get tickets to fly over tomorrow, or the day after.'

‘No,' he said. ‘Thanks, but if everything's okay it doesn't make much sense. You'd just get here and then have to turn round again.'

His wife went on to reassure him that their adult children were fine. It didn't seem inconsiderate to him at all. It had been their way ever since becoming parents. Whatever happened in their own lives was immediately evaluated in terms of its impact on the children. Would his acceptance of promotion disrupt their schooling, or enable them eventually to attend university without taking student loans, or both? Would his wife's absence at the week-long on-campus fine arts course prove a trauma too much for them to bear? And now that both Greg and Samantha were quite grown up, and insistent on their parents pleasing themselves at last, it was too late to alter the focus of their lives. ‘Sam wanted to come over and stay with me until you got back,' his wife said, ‘but I wasn't having her driving by herself all that way while she's pregnant.'

‘No. Quite right,' Jansen said.

‘I don't want her to worry in her condition.'

‘Quite right,' said Jansen.

‘They're both waiting to ring now you're awake more,' his wife said.

Tony Alexadis rang too, saying Jansen was to forget all about business, that the firm was happy to pay for his wife to fly over. He said to pull the plug on the Soong talks for now. They could tee them up again later in the year. Jansen didn't agree. He was sitting up, supported by pillows, and the pain was reduced to a level that allowed him to think about other things if he concentrated. ‘Mervyn can handle it with help from Andrew Shih at the table, and me briefing him in the evenings,' he said. ‘And Mervyn's been up here several times now, remember. He knows the Soong team, and if we don't get something rolling now we're going to lose a whole year, maybe the project itself grows cold.' The CEO wanted the meeting
to go ahead, but only with Jansen's agreement. It was a ritual to show the regard between the two of them, and after a few minutes talk it was decided to carry on, and it had the appearance of being Jansen's decision, though both men knew what the business reality was.

When Andrew Shih came to the hospital, Jansen said the worst thing was being fed by fluids and that he wouldn't have anything near solid for at least another twenty-four hours. Andrew had some misgivings about continuing the talks without Jansen — remember the management faction in the overseas department of Soong working through Mr Hau tong, he said — but Jansen persuaded him that Mervyn was up to it, with their assistance. ‘No one's indispensable, Andrew. You know that.'

‘Soong like continuity of representation during a deal.'

‘So the three of us are still here,' said Jansen. ‘It's just that I'm not able to sit at the table.'

‘You are able to continue to call the shots though,' said Andrew Shih, pleased with his command of the idiom.

‘Tony Alexadis and the board will call the shots. You know that, but we can do a good job at this end.'

‘I think you are right,' said Andrew. They had known each other for more than ten years, and done business together in Singapore for several weeks in each of those years. Andrew Shih specialised in assisting overseas firms, and was a model of confidentiality. Jansen knew that Andrew also represented Bridgeport of Australia, Randra and PSR, but never had Andrew said anything to him about the business dealings of those companies, or any others he acted for. Jansen had seen Andrew drunk, heard his best jokes repeatedly, seen him naked with a Thai girl after the '98 deal, but not once had Andrew divulged anything at all. Jansen liked that, and so did Tony Alexadis. ‘The best lawyers know when to hold their tongues,' said the CEO.

When Andrew Shih had gone, Jansen rang Mr Yuan-jen at Soong and thanked him for the flowers. Also he apologised for being the
cause of the delay in the talks, and said he and Tony Alexadis had full confidence in Mervyn. ‘Yet we have become used to your voice on behalf of your board,' said Mr Yuan-jen solemnly.

‘Thank you,' said Jansen.

‘I know the Catholic hospital. My wife's father had his heart operation done there. All of the doctors are very good. Excellent in fact.'

‘Thank you.'

‘Yet we will miss your voice,' said Mr Yuan-jen.

Mervyn was excited when Jansen asked him to represent the company at the meetings. The excitement showed itself in the rigorous calm he imposed on himself: the slightly lower and more deliberate speech. It was the response that Jansen expected from his knowledge of his colleague, and it reassured him. He gave Mervyn his own briefing papers, thick with handwritten annotations. ‘Perhaps you could spend a couple of hours looking through this,' he said, ‘and then come back and we'll go over it. You know it'll all be positioning on the first day anyway. I'll try to sleep for a while, and you come back about eight tonight.'

‘I'll put it together with my own notes,' said Mervyn.

‘If you can read my writing,' said Jansen.

As he rested, aware of the minor dislocation of having no meal times to mark out his day, he tried to remember his own feelings when he had first taken charge of offshore negotiations for the company. It was unusual for him to search his memory for anything that wasn't strictly applicable to the business needs of the present, but he found the recollection quite clear. He had been sent to Hong Kong to sit in on the preliminary two days of supermarket access talks, with the aim of being able to brief the then CEO when he arrived later. Instead of arriving, the CEO had rung and told Jansen to carry on alone; that they had full confidence in him. Jansen had hardly slept for two days, working on agenda papers until five or six o'clock in the mornings.

It's what Mervyn would do after their talk. He'd go away and cover one hundred percent of everything just to make sure he had the five percent that would come up. That's how a good executive begins, and then with time comes the confidence and judgement which allow selective preparation and some sleep.

When Mervyn came down, he'd read all Jansen's notes, and he asked good questions and was attentive to Jansen's advice. ‘Never hesitate to ask for some time to talk to Andrew Shih. Time by yourselves as an extension to lunch, for example. Andrew's so good on the close legal stuff, but also he's great at picking up on any change of tack. And watch Mr Hau tong: that's where any trouble will come from.'