Owen Marshall Selected Stories (46 page)

Richard was keen on candid talks too, not believing that anything should be held back in a friendship. He had his own television in his room, and he started inviting me in to watch stuff. We'd sit on the bed, with some of his matched green pillows against the back board to prop us up. He had a real knack for predicting the storylines. I thought maybe he'd seen them all before, but when we went out to films he was just as accurate. ‘I bet she kills herself with an overdose, and leaves a note incriminating him,' Richard would say, or, ‘It's just soooo obvious, isn't it, that Mr Gendarme is in on it.'

He had this interest in families. He asked me quite a lot about the relationships in mine, and told me a good deal concerning his. His father was the CEO of one of the big power companies, and a wheeler and dealer of shares in a big way as well, Richard said. He supported the family abundantly, but lived three blocks away from them in Thorndon with a younger woman who taught French at the university. ‘My mother never talks about it,' Richard said. ‘She either believes, or pretends, that it's nothing untoward. They have dinner parties at our house, and Dad stays overnight, and then the next day he goes back to his own place. At Christmas-time his partner goes to her family in Marseilles, and Dad comes to us for a family week of presents and reminiscence. Rebecca and I go between the two houses as we like. She says it all comes down to money, and perhaps she's right. Money allows you to escape convention and yet maintain appearances in a way.'

‘Does your father ever talk about it?' I asked.

‘Not much. He says take what you want: take what you want, and pay for it.'

Eric never got invited into Richard's room, and I felt a bit guilty. The two of them didn't hit it off somehow. And fewer of Richard's friends came once he was well settled in. Rebecca, though, came more frequently and I was all for that. She'd bang on my door. ‘You want coffee?' she'd call. ‘Come in and have it with us.' Sometimes the three of us would sit propped on the green and yellow bedcover together; sometimes if it was cold Rebecca would sit on a cushion by the heater and look up at us to talk. I was always aware of her. Even when she wasn't in my field of vision I would know just how she was sitting, or leaning back on the pillows: how relaxed her slim body was, how her dark hair would sway at the side of her face as she talked, how when she was amused a small double crease at the corners of her mouth gave a sudden parenthesis to her smile. She would flip off her blue sneakers and her feet were almost absurdly small, the painted nails winking like gems.

I've got sisters, but I never talked to them the way Richard and Rebecca talked to each other. And I've never heard brothers and sisters talk so unreservedly to each other. Maybe it was because they were twins; maybe it was because they came to treat me almost like themselves. ‘You randy little bitch,' Richard might say lightly when she talked of a night out with one of the Knox College guys. ‘You make sure you keep those rugby boys out of your pants.'

‘What is the smell in this bed?' she might say. ‘I hate to think who you've had in here. It should be fumigated before I come round here again. You been shagging an orang-utan or something?'

I never found that smoking shit gave me all that much of a high, and Richard could soak it up and just be mellow, but Rebecca could get really up on it. Maybe it was her lesser body weight or something. After a few tinnies, or time with the spottle, she was most likely to grab me, and ask what we could do that was terrible. At Queen's Birthday weekend the three of us had a session in Richard's room.
Eric had gone home. We went out late for takeaways into a pale, cold drizzle, and Rebecca walked between the two of us with one hand in her brother's coat pocket and one in mine. ‘Shit, it's cold, isn't it,' she said loudly. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but I reckon that, as we walked, her hand in the pocket lining pushed down towards my cock several times. ‘Jesus, we all need to get warmed up,' she said. The whites of her eyes caught the street lights as she looked up at me.

On the way home we passed one of those wooden houses crammed up to the footpath. We could see a party going on. A group of old people, in their fifties and sixties, all animated and on the go, their faces crowded with gaudy, exaggerated noses, chins and eyebrows like papier mâché heads. To us, pausing in the wet night outside, their gaiety seemed absurd, and they themselves ridiculous in abandonment. ‘What a load of wankers,' said Richard, and we stood laughing and unseen in the darkness to watch them.

‘Time for a wake up call,' said Rebecca, and in one motion took her hand from my pocket, seized an empty milk bottle from the letter box, and flung it at the window.

The party people shrank back with appalled, vaudeville faces for a moment as the window glass shattered; one or two of them cried out with the shock of it. Half pissed and half high as we were, it seemed both catastrophic and enormously funny. We fled, whooping with laughter, Richard and I dragging Rebecca, who said she wanted to see what the old farts would do.

It wasn't just drink and shit, of course, but the derisive power of being young, and being good-looking, and being sure in your own mind that you would end up doing so much better in life than the adult people around you. We left our coats on kitchen chairs and went into Richard's room, kicking off our shoes before climbing under the cover and setting out the containers of Chinese food to share. Rebecca was in the middle again and her soft breast pressed against me whenever she leaned my way for sweet and sour pork.

‘We shouldn't have done it, I know,' she said, ‘but they were so gob-smacked, weren't they. People who dress like that, cardigans and all, deserve everything they get anyway. We should send them a fucking note saying that the style police took action against them.' Her jersey was dry, but her black hair was damp, shiny, and the wetness released a strong scent of some shampoo, which mixed with smell of wine and marijuana on her breath when she laughed, and the Chinese food, to make a potion I found strongly erotic.

‘Those poor pricks when you smashed the window, though,' I said. ‘What the hell got into you all of a sudden?'

‘I told you that the world needed something terrible.'

‘I hate to think what, or who, gets into her at times. It doesn't pay to ask,' said Richard. He was pushing his shoulder against her playfully so that she pressed more against me.

‘Shut up. You can talk.' She was excited rather than offended.

Her words and laughter were quicker, higher. ‘But even if you're a criminal we still love you,' and Richard gave her an exaggerated kiss on one side of her face, which was the opportunity for me to kiss her on the other. I wanted to roll right over on her, despite the pottles of food, and kiss her on her lips, feel the length of our bodies together. I wanted to tell Richard to get out of his own room and leave us alone together. Instead he put his arms around both Rebecca and me and started some mock, half-arsed talk about us being three musketeers and facing the world together. I slipped one hand under Rebecca's jersey, but even in the tactile satisfaction of that I had the uneasy awareness that Richard was stroking the back of my neck with two fingers. ‘Don't anybody chunder on my bed,' he said, and puffed his cheeks to show he'd overeaten as well as earlier indulgence.

We spent even more time together after that. I often asked Rebecca to come out with just me, and she did sometimes. We went to a few pub band nights and some art films, but she liked best to do things as a threesome, and Richard took offence if he wasn't invited. It was a situation new to me, and I told myself that it arose because of the
natural closeness of twins, and that Richard wasn't my competitor for Rebecca in any way that worried me. After all, if it hadn't been for Richard, I'd never have met her at all. Maybe if Rebecca wasn't there, the friendship I had with him may have developed in a quite different way. But that was an uneasy speculation I never dwelt on.

Life turns on such apparently fortuitous things. For if I'd never known Richard and Rebecca, then I wouldn't have spent those months on my uncle's farm, and Cliff and Sonia would have been just one-dimensional relations I'd met occasionally as a kid. The most obvious feature of a person's character may be the salient one, but equally as often you find it quite insignificant when familiarity has been gained. My aunt's warm engagement was the true representation; Uncle Cliff's quiet distance disguised an equal benevolence.

He was aware the old country ways were changing as farming became more technical, new land use replaced pastoralism, and the city populations, growing in both numbers and affluence, pushed their vacationing and holiday homes even into such areas as the Mackenzie Country and the Maniatoto. ‘We've been the Celtic fringe,' he said, ‘and of course we'll be overrun.' He had an unspoken belief that the satisfaction gained from living in the country diminished in proportion to the increased number with which it was shared. Family was different, of course, and I think he liked having me around. Although he never asked about my state of health, he would suggest tasks we could do together if I'd been quiet and by myself for a long time. ‘Would you like to give me a hand dagging and drenching a mob?' he might say, or ‘I thought maybe we could do a lambing round together before it gets dark'.

One day in the autumn drought we went out with Caspar Waldren to see if we could find water. Waldren was a retired farmer and water diviner who lived in Oamaru, but still spent a lot of time pottering on the farm he'd relinquished to his son, and on other properties which he'd come to know well during a long life. He had a big reputation for being able to find underground water, sometimes
by using a fresh willow wand, sometimes number eight wire bent like a clothes hanger. He had boots worn grey at the toes and an excess of brown, weathered skin on his very thin frame. He was sprouting a lot of hair from nooks and crannies such as his ears and eyebrows, and when I was introduced to him he looked thoughtfully into my face, and said he'd met my mother a couple of times. Despite the heat he wore a tattered pinstriped suit coat. He was an absurd old git really, but my uncle treated him with respect, almost deference.

We took the ute along the lower part of the farm, and when we stopped, Waldren went to one of the willows along the dry creek line, broke off a thin branch and stripped it of bark. As we walked over the short grass in the glare of the sun, the two of them talked mainly about neighbours and local stuff from years before, which meant nothing to me. Caspar Waldren held the willow branch with cocked wrists so it was bent in an arc on his lower chest. Every now and again he would stop, or do a small circle while the willow trembled with a life of its own in his hand, but no mention was made of water and their conversation continued just the same.

We reached a place in the little valley from which the gravel road could just be seen, and close to a fence and gateway where Cliff and I had set up a temporary tailing enclosure some months before. A few tails, shrivelled and dark, were still lying in the grass of the paddock. Waldren was talking of a rare snowstorm that had hit years before. His voice was surprisingly strong for such a slight man, but had the hoarseness of age. The willow in his hand began to buck, and then flipped over and pointed to the ground. ‘Whoa, me old beauty,' said Caspar Waldren calmly, and he walked over and around the spot until he stood where the willow branch gave the strongest reaction. ‘This'll be it right here, Cliff,' he said.

‘Great,' said Cliff. He had a waratah with him, daubed at the top with white paint, and with body weight alone he pushed it as far into the dry ground as he could. ‘Thanks for that. Let's go back and have a few beers.' That was the old guy's payment for his divining, that
and Cliff's unquestioning acceptance that there was indeed water down there.

We wandered back to the truck, and as I listened to Waldren going on about the things that interested him, I thought how much a world apart he was from my life at the university. As we bumped back along the farm track to have beer on the veranda, Richard and Rebecca might well have been together on the bed in the flat, driving the smoke of some really good shit into the spottle and getting stoned right out of it. ‘That's it. Jesus, that's the stuff all right,' Richard would say, and flop back on the pillows and rake his fingers lazily through the rising haze of exhaled marijuana. ‘Jesus, that's a lift.' And Rebecca would take just as much and lie back too, and make a noise as if even breathing was a pleasure, and have a smile that was almost post-coital on her small, pale face. How clear her face is still in memory — the thin wings of dark eyebrow, the smooth curve of her cheek, the creases of parenthesis at the ends of her smile. For a slight, non-athletic woman she was strong, the muscles of her neck and shoulders well defined and her breasts high.

The drought that year didn't get quite bad enough for Cliff to spend money drilling at old Caspar's spot, but he had no doubt there was water there all right, and he kept the place marked. Some of the best wells in the district had been found by Caspar Waldren, he told me, and he said that skill was dying out, just like so many country skills before it. I wondered if Rebecca and Richard ever thought of me, and how they'd piss themselves if they could see the life I led on my uncle's farm. I found it hard myself to understand how many ways of life, how many disparate attitudes, can be operating at the same time with no connection at all. During those months I seemed to be in several places at once, unable to get my life together.

Eric left the flat soon after Queen's Birthday weekend. He didn't give much of a reason, but part of it was the threesome thing that had developed with Richard, Rebecca and me. Eric and I had been friends for years and I felt guilty and defensive. When I met him
at the pub a couple of weeks afterwards we talked briefly about it. ‘Oh, man, you should move on out of there,' said Eric. ‘Those two. There's not enough air between them — I don't care if they are twins. And they're always so down on everybody else. Everybody else except them is fucking stupid as far as they're concerned. Let's do something terrible, let's do something terrible: I mean, you have to say there's something pretty weird about her, and they're getting really heavy into smoking shit, aren't they.'