Owen Marshall Selected Stories (47 page)

Neither of the twins had taken to Eric, and that was one reason for how he felt, but he was right in much of what he said. If he'd been right in absolutely everything it wouldn't have made any difference to me. It doesn't matter how long a friendship is when you love someone else. There was no person I wanted to be with more than Rebecca; no place more special than Richard's room with his chosen furnishings, the close body scents mixed always with that of marijuana in a slow convection around the two-bar heater, her hand on my chest beneath the shirt, or over my own hand on her inner thigh. The disconcerting thing was Richard, usually lying on the other side of her — or worse, lying on the other side of me: talking with us, laughing with us, ridiculing the rest of the world, when I didn't want him there.

I wanted just Rebecca and me, the natural thing, but how difficult that seemed to be. She liked to be massaged. It would start with her back, and especially she enjoyed her shoulder muscles kneaded and the very top of her vertebrae where I could feel the thick skin gliding on the bone. Richard would join in, and eventually one of us would undo her bra strap so that we could massage down the sides of her chest. It was usually me, even though I tried to conceal my eagerness, and she would ask who was being naughty, without turning her head, and after a bit say ‘all right, all right,' and turn over and let us push the bra aside. She would let us draw our hands firmly over her breasts in a pretence of massage, swirl our fingers over the rougher, darker skin circling her nipples. I loved to do it,
loved to do it. I have a hundred merging images of it still: the three of us in the dim afternoon light from the flat window, or the buttery glow of the table lamp at night. And the long breathing of the three of us, and her shoulders stretching back, her breasts trembling to our touch, her smile and glances both relaxed and knowing. And Richard would soon transfer his massage from Rebecca to me. ‘You shouldn't tighten up so much. Just relax — all of us should just relax and go with the flow.' And in the pleasure of having his hands no longer on her, I could almost ignore that they were on me. ‘Just round and round and round,' he'd say. ‘It's such a lovely, natural thing to have skin on skin,' as all three of us would move in the ways that pleased us most. ‘You naughty boys. You're terrible, that's what you are,' she'd say.

I knew it was some sort of thrall, as well as pleasure I couldn't deny myself. I hadn't had many girlfriends, but I deliberately got in touch with Melanie Faraday again and asked her to come to a Students' Association fancy dress party with me. Hospital was the theme and there were a lot of people in white coats, or bandages; a lot of crutches and stethoscopes. Melanie's giggle as a response to almost all contact, physical or verbal, was just as I remembered it. She had so little subterfuge, so much assumption of goodwill, and I missed the sharp, stimulating awareness Rebecca always had, which was part sexual promise, part gender hostility. Melanie was attractive enough, but despite that she seemed somehow to have a unisex psyche which stressed things in common rather than exciting differences. She danced with cheerful abandon, and giggled at the interruptions that came from friends who cut in to partner her. She drank a lot, but wouldn't have anything to do with weed, or pills. ‘I'm behind in my assignments as it is,' she said, as if smoking shit would suddenly take a couple of weeks out of her life. ‘I got extensions because I said my father was sick,' and she giggled.

Melanie lived with her parents, and she had her mother's car for the night, so we left the party soon after midnight and I drove down
to park overlooking St Kilda Beach. ‘So it's watching the submarine races again, is it,' she said. She took off her earrings and put them in the glove box. She was bigger and softer than I'd remembered, and that impression must have been a comparison with Rebecca whom I'd been with more recently. I didn't want to think of the twins: I was glad it was just the two of us in the car at St Kilda, just as our headlights on arrival had shown only couples in the other cars. It was the natural thing, wasn't it. Melanie wore a white nurse's uniform with large buttons and she gave a sighing giggle as I undid them. ‘You know the rules,' she said softly. Yes, I knew she didn't actually fuck, but that night I didn't much care. It was some time before I got a hard on, and most of the time I thought of Rebecca in Richard's room: her taut body and uninhibited talk, both of which stoked me to hell. That night with Melanie was a lesson to me that love hasn't much to do with what's comfortable, or natural, or even right. It's about some gut-wrenching imperative that drives you towards a person whatever, or whoever, might be in the way. For me it was Richard who was so often in the way.

As Melanie giggled, or kissed almost as noisily, and we fogged up the windows of her mum's car, and each of us felt the sweat on the body of the other, I knew she wasn't the woman I wanted to be touching, to be listening to, to be smelling.

One of the ways I tried to forget all that on the farm was by running. I'd been into sport at school, but didn't bother at university: all that team ethos and character building shit, and having to turn out for practices no matter how you felt, or how many of the others there you disliked. Running by myself on the farm was different. At first it gave me an excuse to be out of the house when I couldn't face the company even of my uncle and aunt, and then I found that the effort also had a distracting, almost punishing, effect that helped me at the time. My favourite circuit took me up the main gully into the downs, around the limestone bluff which had Maori charcoal drawings in the overhang, and back down the boundary ridge and
along the north side of the long pine windbreak. In the winter mornings the grass was white with frost in the shadows and bowed down with droplets in the sun; in the summer evenings the sheep shit rattled like shotgun pellets on the dry ground beneath my feet, and the sheep drowsed in what shade they could find. The bluff had a steep straggle of matagouri and briar. Sometimes I'd take a spell at the top and look over the low hills of the farm, or back to higher ones behind me. I could see part of the snaking gravel road in the valley, and the place where Caspar Waldren had found artesian water.

My uncle had become very economical of physical effort himself since his back had packed up, but he didn't deride my runs. He thought I was getting fit to play rugby and he approved of that. ‘No, good on you. Go for it,' he said, and told me that he knew the coach of the local club. He'd played a bit himself years before, and liked to watch the game on television, leaning forward and contorting his worn face with vicarious effort at moments of dramatic achievement.

I was not running to anything, however. I was running from the threesome of Richard, Rebecca and myself, running until the physical effort diminished all else apart from that effort and the strange dazed elation that the metronomic action brought. Sleeping was another thing I did a lot. Sleeping and running were both releases from morbid introspection, and the need to decide a future. How easily I could fall into a deathlike sleep in Dr Evie's innocently fragrant room: sleep that was a dark grave even within the night, and made blank the concerns of life. Running and sleeping were both means of avoidance at different ends of some scale I didn't understand. One involved forcing physical effort to obliterate anxiety and guilt, the other was escape from any consciousness at all. ‘Well, at least he sleeps well,' I overheard Sonia telling my mother on the phone. ‘And the air is different here on the farm, of course. Yes, he seems to need his sleep.'

I hadn't slept that well at the flat after getting close with Richard. Smoking shit mellows you out, but doesn't give you good sleep. Not
me anyway. I looked up the effects of marijuana on the net one time, and it said sleepiness was one of them. Some of the other things, though, I recognised in myself: anxiety, apathy after highs, altered perception of time. And it's supposed to stuff your memory too, and there's a lot about that time which is sort of drifting in my mind. Yet nothing could be clearer to me, less subject to loss, than the times with Richard and Rebecca. I could see it all with a sharpness that was almost an agony.

That was the big thing I tried to work out during my time on the farm: had I gone haywire because of smoking so much shit, or was it because of the twins? I decided maybe it was both, and that I had to make a clean break with both. It was a rational decision that I hadn't been able to make as long as I thought Rebecca would choose me. If she'd rung up, though, when I was on the farm, and asked me to come back, I know I'd have gone, as long as Richard wasn't there. There are things in your life that common sense is helpless against.

In late summer Cliff went up to Wellington for a few days to help Evie move into a house she had bought in Petone. Her big earning years hadn't begun, but as a qualified doctor she had no difficulty getting bank money for a first home purchase, and in addition to her other attributes she was shrewd in business. A wooden house in Petone wasn't where Evie would end up, but it would do as a starting point. Cliff had made an inspection of it, and wanted to replace some rotten weatherboards on the laundry side, and fit a much bigger, aluminium frame window in the lounge. He was appalled at the quotes Evie had received from Wellington tradesmen for the job, and quite capable of doing it himself. I knew the quiet satisfaction he would get from ferreting out sound material at rock bottom prices, and the quality of workmanship his daughter would receive. Uncle Cliff had no formal training in carpentry, motor mechanics, plumbing, or even farming, but like so many practical men of his generation he had picked up these skills of necessity from experience and from his various workmates and neighbours, each of whom had
some special expertise.

He wouldn't have been able to go up, he said, if I hadn't been staying on the farm. He said that to make me feel welcome and useful, but it was true as well. It meant Aunt Sonia wasn't alone on the property, and I was there to attend to the outside tasks. It was an opportunity also for her to see what she could do for me. She knew my nature made any cathartic disclosure unlikely, and she didn't press me any longer to talk about my problems. Instead she revealed something from her own past as a sign of trust, and evidence, too, that most of us have false starts in life.

On the third hot evening of Cliff's absence we had an evening meal of cold mutton and salad, and then went out to the veranda and sat on the cane chairs which had weathered grey over years. If my uncle had been at home I may have gone to Dr Evie's room, or had an evening run up to the bluff, but it seemed impolite to leave my aunt without company. The sun hadn't quite gone down, but made reaching shadows from the sheds and trees around the yards, gave a tawny glow to westward slopes of pasture.

‘Have I ever told you I studied in Sydney years ago?' Sonia said. I knew very little about her, and felt minimum curiosity because my own tribulations were crushing. ‘Yes, I played the viola and studied at Otago's music department. I won a scholarship for strings offered by the Perry Academy, and went over there when I was twenty-one.'

‘I never knew you were a musician,' I said.

‘I practised several hours a day for years. I was in the junior sinfonia in Sydney, and a member of a chamber group which gave recitals and recorded for radio. I thought music was going to be my life then.'

‘So do you ever play now?'

‘Never. Haven't for thirty years. I don't even have a musical instrument in the house any more. When you've been able to do something really well, there's no satisfaction in doing it at any lesser level at all. None at all.'

A plausible conclusion, and I didn't question it, although I thought of stories of former sports champions who kept playing on in their sunset decline. ‘Not easy, though, to give it all away after that?'

‘I didn't even see the two years out. I was so homesick that I used to burst into tears when my folks rang, and I had a boyfriend there which didn't work out.'

We sat there on the grey, cane chairs of the veranda, in the last of the day's sun, and looked down to the yards and the still trees. I remembered I hadn't yet fed the dogs. It was a quiet, ordinary place in which to be talking of concert halls and an artistic career. Sonia's hands were hardened with work, and the knuckles swollen a little. They were not a musician's hands. ‘I don't even listen to music much any more,' she said, ‘and that does surprise me. But your life takes many turns, doesn't it, and there's always so much to do.'

She didn't seem to be sad about the loss of music in her life, just interested, perhaps slightly puzzled, at the way things turn out. I didn't realise it at the time, but I think she chose to tell me because she hoped in a roundabout way it might suggest to me that things which dominate your life at one point will often loosen their grip with time. However, I was preoccupied with my own concerns: having a bad patch, as my father would say. The glass was thick between me and the rest of the world, and the shapes swimming above me still threatening. I hadn't much curiosity about what had happened to Sonia's aspirations; why she had gone to Sydney to be a professional musician, and come home again to marry Cliff.

I remembered that conversation, and regretted my selfishness, less than three years later when she died suddenly of a stroke. She had been collecting eggs, Cliff said, on a rare rainy day, and when he went looking for her he found the body slumped in the tractor shed with her legs and shoes outside the overhang, sopping wet. Her arm was around the bucket, he said, and not one egg broken. By that time I'd completed my degree, in Christchurch, had a job with the council there, was breathing air again rather than aquarium water
and was directly in touch with the world.

The funeral service was held in the small Anglican church of Oamaru stone, which wasn't big enough to seat all the mourners who came. People stood around the christening font, at the back of the church, and spilled out into the bright sunshine. It didn't surprise me that Sonia was so well loved. Old Caspar Waldren was there in his number one suit. He shook his tufted face sorrowfully when I spoke to him, as if he divined my failure to have sufficiently appreciated my aunt. And his surprise was evident when Evie and Samantha went against rural tradition and assisted as pallbearers. As we slid the coffin in the back, the polished top of the hearse gave off heat waves which pulsated through my vision of the paddocks around the church, and Cliff's face was beaded with sweat and tears.