Owen Marshall Selected Stories (54 page)

‘The Germans make a good sausage,' said Dad. ‘Here the sausage is a poor man's food, but in Europe they know how to make a sausage, and how to treat it.'

‘I thought you hated the Germans. The war and all that.'

‘The war. I'm not talking about the war. Who said anything about the war. I thought you said something about sausage.'

‘You're right,' I said.

‘In the war the food was bloody awful.'

‘Mine will be better,' I said.

‘War is never better,' said Dad huskily. He looked at me rather belligerently from the depths of the chair, but when I topped up his
wine mug his expression softened.

I moved to another topic. ‘I wonder how Angeline is enjoying her holiday.'

‘She always keeps in touch, always has. Not like some,' said Dad. ‘We hardly hear from Theo. What sort of job does she do now?'

‘I don't know.'

‘It's something to do with work. Some sort of work, I know that.'

‘Right.'

I made a good fist of dinner, though I couldn't find any packet gravy. However Dad sank into one of his repetitive spells, and after asking me over and over who I was again, he began complaining that rats were gnawing at him during the nights. ‘I don't want to sleep in the rat room again tonight,' he said.

‘I don't think there are any rats here,' I said.

‘No one can sleep with rats at you all night. The buggers come out of the wardrobe, I reckon.'

‘Let's close the wardrobe door then tonight.'

‘Oh, they bite to buggery, those buggers.' Dad pushed the coat sleeve up a bit and displayed his pale, waxy skin. ‘What's that then,' he said. ‘Scotch mist?' There were no bites that I could see, but that didn't mean Dad hadn't suffered: pain can be the consequence of belief.

‘No one likes a rat,' I agreed.

‘I don't want to sleep in the rat room tonight.'

‘No one likes a rat.' Dementia's repetition is so easy to fall into.

I did the dishes while Dad in the lounge railed against the rats, and then I watched a Mafia movie on television with the sound well up. It was hopeless to try and swot while Dad went on. He had dried up by the time the film was over, just nodding to himself and giving the occasional knowing chuckle, which fluttered in his open mouth. There is a cocoon of self-absorption that surrounds the very old and the very young.

For this second night I was determined to be better prepared, and I cajoled Dad into a lavatory visit before he went to bed. Getting the big coat off him was a bit of a test: his affection for it had increased during the day. ‘But I'd better have it ready for when I go,' he said testily.

‘Where are you going?'

‘Back to my own place.'

‘Where's that?'

‘Same place it's always been.'

‘But you won't be leaving during the night.'

‘What would you know,' said Dad. I reminded him to wipe himself and flush the bowl, then showed him the way to his bedroom.

‘Why are these rooms always in different places?' he said.

‘All part of the grand puzzle of life,' I told him.

‘I think you're going mad,' he whispered.

Once Dad was tucked up I tried to do more swot, but after the night before I was apprehensive of interruption later in the night, so went to bed at eleven myself. So as not to face the vivid envy of the digital clock face, I lay on my back. Technology was at first a distraction there as well, for on the ceiling was a smoke alarm like a pig's snout, and it cheeped softly to warn that the battery was low. The regular, subdued insistence became finally a lullaby and I fell into a routine anxiety dream of academic failure.

Dad's cries of despair woke me. Piercing, vehement cries, utterly distinct from the echo chamber hoarseness of his everyday voice. ‘The rats are here again, the buggers,' he called, and when I went in and put on the light, he was sitting forlornly on his bed with his big hands clasped. He must have been out earlier in the night because he had piled some books against the wardrobe door, and had a maroon blazer on, but no pyjama top. ‘Rats are king here,' he said accusingly. Tears glittered on his face. ‘Where are my wife and family? Where is my life?'

‘Where are the rats?' I asked to appease him. His other questions
were too tough for me, and called for a divine answer. ‘They've all buggered off,' I said. I pushed books away from the wardrobe and opened the door. ‘See. Nothing to worry about.'

Dad didn't answer, but his expression showed he thought my display was mere naivety, and that he and the rats knew a thing or two.

‘What is this place?' he said finally.

‘It's your daughter's place. You live here.'

‘How can it be Angeline's place when she lives with us? She's still at school, so how can she have a place? Why doesn't anyone tell the truth any more? The world's full of liars now. I tell my staff that deceit is the worst failing, and self-deceit the worst of all.'

I thought Dad was bound to query my appearance in his life, but in that night no doubt I was just one more enigma in a pageant of glaring inconsistency. He sat morosely for a time, breathing heavily, as if defeated in one round and having little hope of the next. He looked at the skirting board in front of him with a dull obstinacy. ‘I'll get back to my home and family,' he said, ‘rats or no rats. You don't know as much as you think you do.'

‘You're right there,' I said, with exams in mind.

I got him to lie down again, and didn't bother hassling him about the blazer, or the reason for his wish to leave the light on. I'm sure Dad was a believer in priorities when he was a captain of industry. For me it seemed the way to go in aged care. Food, booze, warmth, light and rats were all important things; what you wore in bed, or said to passing acquaintances, was of little account.

‘Leave the light on for the migration of the monarchs,' he said with some dignity. I thought he meant butterflies rather than crowned heads, but the connection to either was obscure.

‘Where are they headed?'

‘Rings of Saturn,' said Dad with soft assurance.

‘Of course.'

I stood on the patio for a while, which was dimly illuminated
by the light through Dad's curtains. I could hear him humming to himself in an almost cheerful way, and the golf course across the road was a dark gap bounded by lights of streets and houses. I wondered by what random happenstance old Mr Ladd and I should end up there together, and what small connection it might be with future oddity in which both of us were absent. Maybe his long, dark coat would clothe a jazz musician of the house in time; maybe he'd written a sonnet of censure in regard to rats and folded it in some crevice of the wardrobe from which a buck-toothed child of immigrants would draw it out. Perhaps our tangential conversations would lodge in the Pink Batts, and flap down again decades after into some other verbal banquet of senility.

Dad was asleep when I went back in. The blazer was open and the hair of his chest thick, but almost colourless. I pulled up the sheet, turned out the light, and shook a fist at the wardrobe as a warning to the rats not to start anything. Groggy with bewilderment and fatigue, I lay down on my own bed, pulled my scrotum free from my thighs, and was comfortable. To green numerals and a chirping smoke alarm I was oblivious. Sleep closed on me like the grave.

When I opened my eyes next morning, the clock at the end of my nose showed well after eight o'clock. I spent several minutes working out what was the day of the week, and was amazed that it was only Tuesday. Surely I had been responsible for Dad a week or more. I wondered whether in extreme old age time itself slowed, along with the other functions of life, and if that perception was contagious. To what extent could time drag its feet before halting altogether?

Metaphysics gave place to action when I heard Dad wandering the rooms in search of the lavatory. It lay, of course, behind the one door he hadn't thought to try. ‘Hard luck,' I said.

‘Bloody place.' He still wore the sports blazer, and his pyjama trousers were wet, but nothing worse had happened. There'd be sheets to wash as well, I reminded myself. He voided with sound like a dredge emptying, and the smell billowed through the house
in almost visual intensity. Dad gave a long sigh of relief. It wasn't a bad start to the day. ‘Who are you again?' he asked as I helped him dress.

‘I am the Panjanmandarin of the Empire of the Rats.'

‘No need to get shirty,' said Dad.

‘Remember the rats from last night?'

‘What rats?' he said, scornful in the comparative logic of morning.

‘Anyway,' I said, ‘let's have breakfast.'

‘What's the chance of an egg?' he asked.

After breakfast Dad started to get ready for work, but I told him that he'd retired years ago, and he agreed and went out to his favourite place on the patio in the morning sun. I took my notes on the poetry of Herrick and joined him. Already there was a ladies' foursome on the fairway closest to us. Their laughter just carried the distance.

‘Do you like women?' asked Dad in his soughing voice, and his lantern face hung in their direction.

I said that as a generalisation I was in agreement.

‘There weren't many women in the war.'

‘No.'

‘Women underestimate their anatomical measurements and men exaggerate theirs. That's something I've noticed is a difference.'

I was surprised by Dad's perception, even though it was morning. Every now and again the clouds cleared and the original sharp landscape of Dad's mind was revealed.

‘What else do you reckon about women?'

‘They're much more reliable as workers,' he said. ‘It was my policy to hire women if the jobs were suitable.' Dad enjoyed the sun: kept his face to it even as its summer intensity grew. He had an almost reptilian instinct for heat. Two or three minutes later what he took as a new thought occurred to him. ‘There weren't many women in the war,' he said.

‘So you said.'

‘Did I?'

Throughout the morning I got a little revision done. The high points of our interaction were a couple of trips to the toilet and a shave. The lavatory visits were as laborious as ever, but the shave took a good deal less time than the day before, because we'd done such a good job then. Dad did have another intellectual crescendo, about cars, when we were having a cup of coffee. ‘What sort of car do you drive, Warren?' he said. So Warren was with us briefly again.

‘I've got a motorbike.'

‘One thing that I allow myself in business is a decent car. It gives clients confidence in the firm, but also there's pleasure in the possession of it. Not something posey — no turbo nonsense, or fruit salad colours. A quality six-cylinder three-litre saloon, say, and I prefer manuals. I've never taken to automatics the same.'

‘What have you got now?' I asked, knowing he hadn't driven for years.

‘A Saab, but I'm not sure where it's kept. Since I've been staying with you here, I'm not sure where it's kept. If you could find out we could take a spin to Feilding, or Taupo. I used to have to drive a fair bit on business and enjoyed it. A long trip on a good road without much traffic, and everything in the car ticking over nicely and the world slipping by without being able to get a grip on you.' Dad's voice was quiet and he was restful in the sun. I imagined him as a busy manager, having a few hours to himself in his company car as he went from one city to another. And not knowing in those rather pleasant interludes that a time would come without any pressure of work at all, without a car, sometimes without a memory.

‘Which was the best car you ever had?' I asked him, as a test.

‘I had a V8CustomLine which was a damn good car.'

‘What were CustomLines?'

‘The big Fords,' said Dad. ‘I bought it new and she did over a hundred and fifty thousand miles without missing a beat.' I could see that the recollection of that car was of considerable satisfaction
to him: his wrecked face had a half-smile and his hands were at ease in his lap. Maybe he was thinking of the sheen on the CustomLine when he'd just polished it, the burble of the V8 when he fed it the fat, times on holiday with Viv, Angeline and Theo all close to him. Maybe he was rather caught by some glimpse of himself, lithe and on his way up in business.

I opened a tin of sheep's tongues and we had sandwiches for lunch. It was the sort of meat that Dad managed well and it suited summer. I brought out a few lettuce leaves too, but neither of us was great on salad. Small tasks require a good deal of application at Dad's age. Just to get the sandwich to his mouth without losing the tongue filling was for him a task requiring not just tactical hand movements, but a full strategy.

‘Would you like to go down to the squash courts again this afternoon?' I asked, but of course yesterday was further from Dad's recall than the Ford CustomLine of history, even at midday.

‘Eh?'

‘You could watch me play squash, Mr Ladd.'

‘Could I,' he said, amiable and uncomprehending.

Martin was keen enough to have a break from study, so I dressed Dad in his full-length Wichita coat again, and left him standing dark and incongruous in the bright sun while I brought round the Suzuki. ‘Is it time to go?' he asked as I put his helmet on.

‘Into the sunset, pilgrim.'

‘It's not sunset yet,' said Dad as, twisting round, I helped him find first the left footrest, then the right. Through the summer streets we went, and the guilt I felt was not for any danger that the old guy faced, but for history and literature neglected.

Despite his visit on the day before, Dad saw everything at the courts afresh: the glass court back and the upper seating, the changing rooms with coffin lockers. He was introduced anew to Martin and found inaugural pleasure in it all. ‘You didn't hide the ball yesterday, or swallow it?' asked Martin, but Dad just gave his most quizzical
smile to disguise incomprehension. He sat on the top seating for a while, and I forgot him in the concentration on the game, until after losing a close set I looked up and realised he had gone. He wasn't anywhere I looked inside the building, but when I went from the main doors into the carpark, he was sitting on the small concrete wall, his eyes closed in the sun, singing softly to himself. ‘I wondered where you'd got to,' I said.