Owen Marshall Selected Stories (45 page)

‘But I'll recover, right?' said Jansen.

The young doctor smiled so broadly there was a slight ripple in the dark, bristly hair above his ears. He leant forward, holding the cup loosely on his lap in both hands. ‘Would you deal in absolutes in a Catholic hospital?' he said. ‘We must remember our fallibility, but what we can say is that nothing in your condition since the operation changes the opinion that you should make a good recovery. Low level post-op infection is quite common in cases such as yours.'

‘You'd say if there was real concern?' asked Jansen.

‘Yes, absolutely,' replied Dr Lowe. ‘You will go back to the snow of New Zealand certainly, I think. Maybe no skiing for a while, though.' He stood up and yawned, and shrugged his shoulders right up to his ears a few times to ease the muscle tension of a long day.

‘Thanks.' Jansen wasn't a skier, and he rarely saw any snow, but why bother to challenge the image that Dr Lowe and the surgeon had of him and his country. Dr Lowe leant over and squeezed
Jansen's wrist quickly, and he paused outside the door again to look back through the window and wave, as he had when leaving with the surgeon. He had forgotten his cardboard cup, and the small, pale cone of it was left on the flat of the chair.

Jansen used the dimmer until he was lying in semi-darkness. He still had pain, but accepted it and began to plan the changes he would discuss with his wife. Maybe a trip to begin with — lots of places where he wouldn't need his laptop, his cellphone or his briefcase, where he could wear shorts and a garish top, and even the trivial administration of meals, travel and accommodation would be left to others. He knew that his response to all that had happened was quite predictable and conventional, but accepted it as authentic nevertheless. He had a wake up call in Singapore, his friends and acquaintances would say: a heart attack, or food poisoning, or something, and nearly died. A mixture of vagueness and exaggeration is typical of such second-hand accounts. And he gave it all away, they'd say, and resigned just like that. Why not, good on him, some would say, while others would consider he wasn't going to get right to the top anyway, not at his age.

Maybe his wife was right, he thought. An inner-city apartment with no lawns and the only plants those in pots on a patio that had a view of the harbour. Sam was pregnant, and for the first time he thought not only of her health, but of the child she carried and what part in its life he might play.

Jansen was surprised to feel tears on his face, but without any sobbing. He put it down to the trauma of his illness. The hospital smell of his private room masked the sour base of recent vomit and his crusted dressing. The waspish whine of scooters was at a distance, and the whisper of the air-conditioning close at hand. Life was fragile and there seemed the beating of wings in the tropical night. Home was the thing: Hector Jansen wanted to go home.

M
y mother's brother had a farm on the pale loess clay and limestone of North Otago. It was an average farm concentrating on early lambs for the works, and even during his last years my uncle never received any startling offers for it. Its dry hills weren't suitable for dairy conversion, and its soils didn't favour the grapevines that became all the rage in the nearby Waitaki Valley. Yet it was sweet country when it did get rain, and quite free of gorse. The short grassed paddocks in the downs were rilled with sheep tracks: occasional outcrops of limestone were the grey of cigar ash. Almost always there was above it an unclouded egg-blue sky and, although only landscape was visible, in the evenings skeins of seagulls beat their way towards the sea.

I visited a few times as a boy, but I lived there only once for fourteen months after I had a breakdown in my third year at university. My mother preferred to call it a crisis, my father told people I'd hit a rough patch, my mates probably reckoned I'd flunked out as a pothead. I had a breakdown, no matter what you chose to call it. It happened because of a relationship I had with a flatmate and his twin sister. I was getting stoned on prime West Coast shit a lot too. It sounds like a soap opera, I know, but the pain, guilt and confusion of it all finally brought me to an emotional standstill, and I could barely remember to eat, to close the door when I went to the lavatory, or attend the lectures for which I'd enrolled. I felt I lived my life on the bottom of one of those great, sea aquariums with species foreign to me passing as dim shapes soundlessly, and with their own
fixed purpose, overhead.

Even in that place, however, I had a conviction that I didn't want any formal treatment — no psychiatrists, no counsellors, no people unknown to me peering and mouthing through the thick glass of my isolation. Maybe a complete change then, my mother suggested, trying to keep anxiety from her voice, and she thought of her brother's farm amid the quiet hills of North Otago. My father, who loved space and solitude, and had been denied both by his career most of his life, was full of supportive agreement. The country was ideal for recovering from a rough patch, he thought, and with typical generosity he offered to buy me a second-hand car so that I could travel between home and farm whenever I liked.

Uncle Cliff and Aunt Sonia were contented people in whose home depression was an unfamiliar visitor. Sonia was the bright and vocal partner, Cliff a stubby, sunburnt man who thought the best of people. They had two daughters of effortless achievement. Evie had already qualified as a doctor when I went to live at the farm; Samantha was completing her architectural degree, and came home a few times while I was there, making me feel even more a failure in comparison, but through no intention of hers.

I was welcomed in the wooden, red-roofed farmhouse and given Evie's room, which was a chrysalis she had discarded, but still exact to the life she had led at home. Blue and yellow banded curtains, a tray of dwarf bottles of perfumes, lotions and nail polishes on the dressing table, sellotape marks on the painted walls where her posters had been, and on the kitset bookcase her gymnastic and debating trophies — including a small greenstone plinth for best summing up at the South Island inter-secondary school championships. Most of the books were from Evie's childhood, which wasn't all that long ago, but some, less read and more dignified, were prizes she had won at high school:
The Works of Jane Austen
published by Spring Books,
History of Rome
by M. Cary, and a hardcover
Moby Dick
. Clothing she no longer needed remained folded in the drawers and hanging
in the wardrobe, all with a faint, girlish fragrance. At various times and in flagrant abuse of her privacy I examined all of Evie's life left behind: even the seven letters from Shane Tomlinson which were tied in a small bundle with dental floss, and hidden under a pile of notes for scholarship biology. In the sixth form she had the best legs in the world according to Shane.

Dr Evie's room spoke of normality, cleanliness and achievement. It had no sign of the trivial sordidness of my own life, and in the months I inhabited it I felt like a Visigoth camped in a Roman villa. Even my male clothes and large footwear seemed uncouth and out of place. I masturbated seldom and with great furtiveness, aware of the disgust in the expressions of Evie's dolls ranged behind the trophies. In a strange but powerful way I associated Samantha and Evie and their white, girlish rooms, with Rebecca, twin sister of Richard, and a good part of the reason that I was in my uncle's house at all surrounded by a specific family folklore to which I did not belong. ‘What shall we do that's terrible?' Rebecca would say when we'd been drinking, or smoking shit, or just because lectures were over for the week, and by terrible she meant some excess she could laugh at. How different she was from my cousins, yet similar in the ease with which she achieved those things she wanted.

Outside the house was completely different: I belonged there from the first. The yards lay down the slope from the farmhouse, and on the south and west sides were windbreaks of pine and macrocarpa which reached over the implement sheds, the dog cages and the disused concrete dip. The downs rose and fell beyond with paddocks worn to bare dirt at each gateway, and the sheep tracks straggling away over the short, brown pasture. Some of the lower land would be green with lucerne, or in season the low, paler foliage of turnips and chou. From the top hill paddocks you couldn't see the red roof of the farmhouse, or any neighbouring houses, just the grassed hills tumbling towards the Waitaki and back towards the mountains. When I got the shakes, or felt the foreign shapes of the aquarium too
oppressive, or Aunt Sonia's cheerful solicitude became too contrary to my own apathy, then I would have a long run, or let out one of the dogs and walk up to the back of the farm. The dogs enjoyed the release, but they never obeyed me. It was only occasionally that I did something useful there — rescued a cast sheep perhaps, or secured a bit of fence washed out in the gully, but Uncle Cliff always thanked me, as if he had sent me there expressly himself. It was a landscape of masculine reticence, which was something of a comfort: perhaps it was the extension of my uncle's temperament beyond himself.

During my time on the farm, Cliff never once mentioned the reason for my presence, and insisted on paying me a small wage. He told the neighbours and friends we met that I'd been kind enough to come and give him a hand for a while. We could work for hours together without words, or awkwardness; at other times he would talk of parts of his life spent crayfishing in the Chathams, and in North Island shearing gangs, before he'd bought the farm. In the winter, bulked up even more with jersey and a frayed parka, he looked almost square: as if he would reach the same height on his side as standing up. Out of the house he allowed himself a few roll-your-owns each day, and there'd be a brief flame at the cigarette's tip as he lit it. His other indulgence was mints, like great white pills, and he always had some in his pocket to share. Whenever we were close, putting in a strainer post perhaps, or bent over a recalcitrant engine, I would have the hybrid tobacco and mint smell of his breath. If I come across those scents now I'm reminded of his straight-grained goodness.

I was able to relieve Cliff of most of the tractor work while I was there. Years of hard slog were catching up on him, and his back played up on the jolting tractor. Harrowing and discing especially are repetitious, undemanding tasks, and I spent hours outwardly circling in the worked paddocks, while inwardly still circling Richard and Rebecca.

Our flat was in the North East Valley, not far from Castle Street,
and an easy walk into the university. It was in fact an old cottage, low in the valley so that in winter the sun came only for late lunch and then went away again. Colin, Eric and I lived there in our second year, and when Colin went overseas after the holidays, we put a note on the Stud. Ass. notice board, and Richard came in. He was doing economics, marketing, stuff like that; his twin sister, Rebecca, was easily passing science subjects, and was in Knox College not far from us.

Your flatmates aren't necessarily your best friends. Sometimes in fact you lose your friends by having them as flatmates and finding they're a pain in the arse to live with. Sometimes they're just people who pay their share of the rent and do their own thing. Richard had his own friends, with whom he spent a lot of time in his room. His attitude to his room, and to clothes, should have been a signal to me quite early on, but I was slow to pick up on it. In our rooms Eric and I had a heap of assorted blankets on our beds, and one covering the bare floorboards to stand on in winter. Richard, though, went to the op shop and bought an enveloping green and yellow cover, and later to some other second-hand place and bought curtains which he said had the same yellow in them. Once, when he'd been walking up the path behind me, he said that I should let my hair grow longer: that it would suit me that way. He had a sharp wit that I enjoyed, and was a very generous guy. He had a particular dislike of overweight people, and those who couldn't express themselves cogently.

Rebecca first came round to the flat to help with the curtains. Eric and I decided right away that Richard's room was justifiably the focus of the flat for as long as she wanted it that way. She was short, lithe and dark haired; her skin was very smooth and she had a half, I-know-what-you're-thinking, smile. ‘You guys don't really want to help with curtains, do you?' she said.

‘I don't mind giving a hand,' I said. She came round more and more after Richard and I clicked. She said she got sick of the routines and restrictions at Knox. Sometimes she cooked a meal; sometimes
she got on to Eric and me about doing chores about the place. She and Richard didn't like too much of a mess. Sometimes she'd come very late after a party, or dance, and sleep over in Richard's room, and be wearing some of his pyjamas when she came out bleary in the morning. ‘You think they bunk in the bed together,' said Eric, ‘or Richard puts pillows and stuff on the floor?'

‘I'd invite her in myself,' I said.

‘Jesus, so would I,' Eric said.

But then neither of us was Rebecca's brother, which was all the difference surely. I noticed on one of those mornings that she had painted toenails — her small, sallow foot on the cracked lino of the kitchen floor and the pearl-purple hue of her toenails.

There were two nail polishes on the tray on Evie's dressing table in the room on the farm. The plastic tops were the same colour as the thick liquid inside: one was pink and one was red. Both simple, unambiguous colours. Evie's window looked out onto the side lawn of the farmhouse and a large walnut tree with spatulate leaves and the blackening nut cases scattered like sheep shit in the grass underneath. That was one of the jobs I did for my uncle and aunt: I collected up the nuts, shucked them of the tattered, rotting cases, and spread them to dry on the wire of an old bed frame on the veranda. My hands were stained tobacco brown for days, and Aunt Sonia said I shouldn't have bothered, shouldn't have made a mess of myself like that. She knew, though, that it was an attempt to thank them.

Aunt Sonia was one of those central people around whom family and friends revolve. She laughed and talked a lot, and stimulated others to talk while she nodded and smiled as an encouragement to go on. Some women have natural warmth, and she was one. She must have had times of pain and despair, of glum despondency and self-doubt, but I never saw any sign of them. Maybe Cliff was the only witness, maybe she had her black times standing solitary in a closet, the back of the door touching her nose, her face relieved of
any need to register optimistic expression.

In the first few weeks I found her kindness and resolute joy in life crushingly unbearable. I would expend all the smiles I had in response to her, until just a rictus remained, and I would excuse myself, and go and sit on Dr Evie's bed, or, more often, go off into the passive indifference of the landscape. Aunt Sonia's emotional energy and eagerness for reciprocation only made me more aware of a chronic malaise within myself. The more outgoing she was, the more difficult any matching emotion on my part.

Like the rainy day when I'd been there only two or three weeks, and Cliff had gone to town to see the bank manager and do other wet weather business. I spent the morning stencilling some of the wool bales, and then came back to the house for lunch. Aunt Sonia had been baking, and the misfits from the batches were my appetising follow-up to an asparagus quiche: misshapen apricot muffins still warm at their fruitful heart, the end slice of ginger crunch, the Afghan made from the last of the mix which had become the runt of the litter. She was packing all that had passed muster into round tins as I ate. She was taller than Cliff, graceful despite the years of physical work, and she vibrated slightly with energy, whereas he toiled with an easy rhythm, or sat quite still with conscious relaxation.

‘You know we'll help if we can,' she said. ‘You know that.'

I said I did and was thankful for it. ‘Sometimes it helps to work through things if you talk them out, use other people as a sounding board,' she said. ‘I don't want to pry, or make any judgements,' she said, ‘not at all, but if you do want to talk about things then I'm always here.' I said I knew that and appreciated it. I said maybe later I'd feel like doing so, and that there wasn't any big thing to talk about anyway, really. Just sort of getting too tied up with personal relationships at the university. ‘Evie and Samantha were just the same,' said Aunt Sonia, putting the Afghans deftly into the blue tin as if they were eggs going back into a nest. ‘They had all these problems with boys and body image at the same time as coping with
exams. Things get blown up out of perspective when you're under pressure, I think.' I told her they did. I didn't tell her that part of my own problem was a boy, but I told her that I appreciated her offer to talk about things very much, and that having time out on the farm was just the thing I needed right then. Much later I thought it immensely to her credit that, despite her natural disposition to be involved in the lives of all those around her, she never brought up heart-to-heart talks again.