Owen Marshall Selected Stories (57 page)

‘Night,' I said. ‘It's night now.'

‘Will the rats come for the pomegranate seeds?'

‘Not a chance now we've got the Ecuadorian lily,' I said.

‘Of course. Of course, and what a relief for all,' he said. ‘There weren't many women in the war you know, but I saw a falcon high up above the desert before the tank attack.'

As I swotted in the lounge, I could hear Dad singing to himself in bed. There were some words, some humming, and a good deal of pom pom and pum pum as he entertained himself. He talked to
himself too, posing such questions as why the sheet had got caught up, where the wardrobe door led to, and when he'd need to get up to leave in time for the meeting. And he answered each question with interest and patience as one might to a friend. In a moment of wishful thinking I imagined the night was to be peaceful and mercifully swift.

I went to bed with a head full of the battle of Gettysburg: Cashtown Inn, Willoughby's Run and McPherson's Barn, and photographers with the armies for the first time. But barely had the smoke cleared when I was woken by the noise made by Dad barging about in the dark hallway. The slick, green numerals told me it was 3.36 a.m. and Dad was weeping loudly. I went out and lit up the hallway. Dad had taken off his pyjamas and wore dark suit trousers and his beloved long coat. ‘Where am I?' he implored brokenly. ‘And who the hell are you?'

‘I'm Brian.'

‘Who?'

‘I'm keeping you company,' I said.

‘Where's Viv and the kids?'

I began an explanation to bridge some thirty or forty years, but Dad turned away with a hollow moan and wandered back into his bedroom. Nothing related to the present was any consolation to him. There seemed no option but to follow him through the looking glass. I persuaded him to exchange suit trousers for pyjama ones by pointing out he had no underpants, but agreed that the coat of the high plains drifter was useful in protecting him in case he was visited by the rats from the other side. Dad went reluctantly back into bed, and to settle him I sat under the covers beside him, for at four o'clock it was cool enough wandering in my boxers. ‘Angeline's coming tomorrow,' I said. ‘You'll like that.'

Dad nodded, his lined face glinting with tears. ‘What about Viv and Theo?'

‘Yep, the whole family.' So could I assume power of life and death,
and summon back his wife and the watery Theo. Anything to keep his mind off the rats; anything to help us drift through the darkness without despair.

‘Things haven't always been easy, you know, Warren,' Dad admonished me. ‘We had a truck load of trouble with Theo. For a while there he just seemed to go from one scrape to another and we were at our wits' end.'

‘I suppose most young guys go through a time when they're fooling with drugs and stuff.'

‘You don't know the half of it,' said Dad. ‘You know he was still stealing money from us when he was nearly thirty years old. He had a baby with a girl in Sydney and he abandoned them both and went trekking in Nepal.' Dad stopped and listened for a time. ‘It's very windy outside,' he said, yet everything was still.

‘A real southerly buster,' I said.

‘Anyway, things haven't always been easy. But they were both great kids and Angeline was never any trouble at all. You worry more about your kids than your own life, do you know that?'

‘Absolutely.'

Dad was quiet for a time, but his hands and face twitched and shimmied as the outward show of some inner agitation, a string of Tom Thumb crackers somewhere along his nervous system. I thought maybe a song or two would calm him, and allow me to go back to my own bed. I was tired, and worried about Dad's condition.

‘Let's sing a bit,' I said.

‘Eh?'

‘Sing a bit. You like that.'

‘What time is it?' said Dad.

‘Time to sing,' I said, but then couldn't think of anything that both Dad and I would know well. I finally came up with ‘Waltzing Matilda', and then ‘Lili Marlene'. Dad enjoyed that especially, and the singing was more successful than I'd hoped. Only once he stopped singing and put a hand to my mouth, then said, ‘Listen to that storm
outside.' There was no wind at all. Or maybe winds cracked their cheeks for Dad that I was too young and temporal to hear.

‘Maybe it's inside,' I said. ‘Let's drown it out.'

We sang ‘How Much is that Doggie in the Window', and ‘Some Enchanted Evening'. Songs are sung by people and in places never contemplated by their composers, and for reasons quite inexplicable in normal times, and we must have been as odd a juxtaposition as any. Eighty-eight-year-old Mr Ladd and twenty-year-old me, strangers in bed together well before the dawn. When we had sung ourselves out, I told Dad I was going to my own room. ‘Do you want the light left on?' I asked him.

‘Better had,' he said. ‘Maybe it's the swordfish making all that noise outside.'

‘They're not doing any harm,' I said.

‘Things haven't always been easy, you know, Warren.'

‘So you said.'

‘Why have I got this coat on in bed?'

‘You might have to get up for a piss.'

‘Nothing's like it was before,' said Dad and he lay back on the pillows. ‘Someone keeps coming in and watching me when I'm asleep,' he whispered.

‘How do you know?'

‘I can hear them breathing,' Dad said.

I stopped in the doorway for a last check. There he lay with the top of his black coat from the bedclothes and his caricature of a face on the pillow. He was looking back at me, and I bet he was wondering who I was again.

‘It'll be morning soon,' I said.

I dropped into my bed as if pole-axed, and into a pit of sleep too deep even for dreams. I awoke to full daylight and the noise made by Dad as he tried to manage himself in the lavatory. I hoped to God he'd taken off the coat, and found my appeal divinely answered. The other things could be washed easily.

‘Did you have a good night?' I asked him, wondering what he remembered of the swordfish, the southerly and the songs.

‘An okay night, I suppose,' said Dad vaguely. ‘It's not as comfortable as my own bed somehow.'

We had our last breakfast together, and Dad was too polite to ask who I was, so I told him anyway. He perked up when I said that Angeline was returning before lunch, and gave me a history of her school achievements, which included awards for physics and impromptu speaking. In the fifth form she gave a reading from the Book of Job at the school prizegiving. ‘Theo didn't do himself justice at school,' Dad said.

There was a full, gleaming summer sun for my last morning with Dad. He sat on the patio again in his black coat and seemed to gradually expand in the heat. I had found his best shoes for him to wear in honour of his daughter's homecoming, and their domed, black toes shone at the end of his grey trousers. While I had a cleanup inside the house I could hear Dad talking to himself from time to time, but there was no anxiety in his tone. He seemed to be scrutinising and rearranging bits of his life from long ago. I took particular care to hide the last empty wine bottles well down in the rubbish bag. I packed my gear ready to leave and put it by the Suzuki. ‘Are you getting ready to go somewhere?' asked Dad as I came back to the patio with mugs of tea.

‘I've got exams in a few days,' I said, and he gave a little chortle as though pleased to be missing out on such things himself. I wanted to wish him well, but wasn't sure how I could do that with sincerity when I knew what was happening to him: the inevitable path before him. ‘You look after yourself and don't worry about things,' I said. How could I thank him for not dying on me during my time of supervision.

‘Thank you. Thank you,' he replied huskily. ‘The nights get longer, don't you think? I suppose I'm not doing much during the day to tire me out.'

Dad was having a snooze when Angeline and her husband returned, but he woke up and knew her immediately, though I thought perhaps he was for a moment surprised to find her so grown up. What a hug they had and then a flurry of questions and answers about their trip and our stay, which bewildered him, and after a minute or two he turned to Angeline's husband and politely asked him who he was again. Welcome to the club. ‘Goodness, Dad, you're wearing that greatcoat on a scorcher of a day,' said Angeline and she raised her eyebrows at me.

‘He feels good with it on,' I said. ‘He likes the heat, doesn't he.'

Angeline called me into the lounge to give me my money in a manila envelope. ‘Was everything all right?' she asked, looking at me keenly. She and I knew there was a rich history to my stay, that there had been wild moments on the heath, but that nothing would be served by the rendition of it blow by blow. To talk about it, to admit to such things as we knew, would give them substance and power.

‘He wasn't so good at night, but otherwise things were okay.'

‘That's the pattern of his dementia,' she said.

It wasn't easy to say goodbye to Dad, for in some ways I never really got to say hello. I wished him well and took his big, loose hand in mine, and he said thank you and that it was a pleasure. But when I was on the motorbike, about to start, with my squash bag balanced on the tank and handle bars, he stood up from his patio chair and called out, ‘Warren, Warren.'

‘What is it?' I said.

He gaped at me for a moment, gave a rueful smile. ‘It doesn't matter,' he said in his hollow voice. ‘I'll tell you next time.'

Angeline smiled as apology for her father's confusion, her husband raised a bland hand. As I rode down the drive I had a last view of Dad standing in the hot sun in his black, gunslinger's greatcoat. In all that mundane suburban scene he was the innocent and hapless harbinger of howling winds, swordfish, lilies and rats, womenless wars, and the high cliff before the chasm.

I
left university with a good degree, but at a time of mild economic recession. I found a job as a vegetable packer at Foley's market, and a south-facing room in a backstreet boarding house in Sydenham. This might seem an introduction to a period of angst and sordid experience, but two things prevented such an outcome. The first was the spontaneous optimism of youth itself, the second was a fellow boarder called Hodge.

Hodge must have been middle-aged, but seemed old to me. He had the room at the end of the hall, and was a run-of-the-mill failure, exceptional only in his infallible bad luck. Hodge was a sort of lightning rod that deflected misfortune from the rest of us. Who knows what it is that makes a man lucky, or the reverse, or why such illogicality exists in a world of just deserts. Maybe it is a proof of karma, and we experience reward for past lives, or must live out expiation. Hodge was a tall man, though incomplete. He had lost his hair naturally, his right big toe in a wood-chopping accident at the Te Awamutu A and P show, and an ear was bitten off some years later by an alpaca which had been eating fermented plums in a paddock next to the Rai Valley store where Hodge stopped to ask directions to some second cousins on his mother's side. His hearing suffered a good deal, and his head tilted towards his remaining ear as if his equilibrium was affected by the loss.

Hodge was surprisingly popular with all of us at the boarding house, for the same reason perhaps that average-looking girls often
have a plain friend. No matter how badly things went with us, Hodge was always a consoling comparison. I remember a spring day smoking tinnies among the marram dunes at New Brighton when he was shat on twice by seagulls: now what must be the chances of that, I ask you.

Hodge received only one letter that I know of, a jury summons, and he was delighted at the prospect of being paid to sit in a warm place for several days with free meals, and just send someone to jail. At the selection session, however, not only was Hodge eliminated by challenge of counsel, but a woman present recognised him as the person who came to her neighbourhood the afternoon before the official Salvation Army donation day and collected many of the envelopes.

Even Mrs Thrall, the landlady, took satisfaction in pointing him out as an example of how the male sex ended up. ‘There's your own future for you,' she'd say triumphantly to me, or Helmut, or Dylan. ‘God won't be mocked, you know.'

Sometimes on a sunny afternoon, when I wasn't at Foley's, Hodge and I would take pillows on to the fire-escape and have a beer and a yarn there. Once his false teeth fell and smashed on the concrete step; another time his heel got wedged between the bars, and Mrs Thrall had to use cooking oil and a mallet to free it. But we had some good hours in the sun. Hodge realised he was sport for the gods, but said that he wasn't as unlucky as most of his family. He told me that his father went right through the war as an infantryman with only shrapnel wounds, shingles and lower rib damage from an encounter with an Italian woman in Tagliacozzo, but then when the returning troopship was in sight of Wellington Harbour, he choked to death on a small bat (
Batis glottum batis
), which escaped from its container and flew into his mouth when he was about to have a beer.

Hodge said his elder brother had seemed the lucky one of the family: a handsome man of prodigious sexual prowess who finally married a stylish Bulgarian woman with substantial investments
in natural gas, truffles and Egyptian third dynasty funerary curios. Unfortunately there was a freakish and random accident in which the Bulgarian wife happened to lose control of her Audi, and smash through the side of a suburban house to reveal her husband in bed with a Samoan meter maid. The wife ditched him without a cent, and two of the meter maid's uncles hunted him down to a DOC mangrove swamp reserve in the Hokianga, and castrated him with a boning knife.

Hodge's other brother went to Australia looking for a more propitious citizenship, but after twenty-seven years of unavailing struggle against drought on his outback property, he had to sell it for peanuts, and when leaving the station for the last time was drowned in a flash flood which overturned his Holden ute in the boundary creek. They found him entangled with his faithful kelpie dogs, which had prevented him from opening the door and swimming out. When they buried him on the property, the grave diggers discovered a vein of opal that made the new owners one of the richest families in Australia.

There was one sister in the family. Her name was Prudence, but Hodge said she was always called Guppy. She got all the brains evidently, and was awarded a PhD in computer science by the time she was twenty-two. Unfortunately on the morning of her graduation, while shaving her legs in the bath, she dropped the electric razor in and stopped her heart. The Peeping Tom from next door broke down the door in time to give her the kiss of life, and she was rushed towards the hospital, but the ambulance was hijacked by a stoned whitebaiter from the Coast while slowing at the Colombo Street lights. The whitebaiter — who years later won a category award in the Gore Country Music Festival — left the vehicle outside a cactus and succulent nursery on the outskirts of the city, and Guppy was recovered no worse than before and taken to hospital. She made a complete recovery from electrocution except for a forked scar on her hip, but the Peeping Tom carried a mutated lowland gorilla virus
picked up when he was helping tribespeople in Zaïre with livestock breeding advice, and he passed it on to Guppy while saving her life. She lost the motor sensory control of all her limbs and spends her time bedridden, constructing highly successful virtual reality games by blowing into a tube connected to computers. ‘She's worth buckets of dough, lucky Guppy,' said Hodge, ‘but she doesn't want to have anything to do with me because I'd never give her the top bunk in our bedroom when we were kids.'

Mrs Thrall had a cancer scare the last year I boarded there. She never let on to us just what part of her was under threat, but when the day came for the final outcome of the tests to be announced, she wanted me to persuade Hodge to go with her as a talisman. She promised that she'd cook a big dish of toad-in-the-hole for the night meal if we'd agree. I remember the three of us driving into the city on a summer afternoon. As we left the parking lot, Hodge was nearly run over by a pimpled hoon in a rusted-out Falcon coming at him on his alpaca side, and so almost inaudible. Hodge stumbled back to safety, but did receive a nasty ankle gash from a skateboarder careering past at the time.

The specialist had the best of news for Mrs Thrall, and as far as I know she's still running that two-storeyed boarding house, happily bitching about the male race and fining guys for taking the house pillows out onto the fire-escape, or leaving syringes in the hydrangeas. It was Hodge, of course, who found it a bad day. When reading an old newspaper in the waiting room he discovered that his ninety-three-year-old mum, the last of his relatives, had been parboiled and sucked under terra firma by a geyser in Rotorua which opened up without warning beneath an inaugural group waiting for the unveiling of a kinetic sculpture in brass, ceramic and poly resin to represent the benevolence of the universal life force.

Hodge told me that after this news he was particularly looking forward to his evening toad-in-the-hole as some sort of counterbalance for the vicissitudes of the day, but it wasn't to be. As we passed the
last tall building before the carpark, an eighteen-stone woman cast herself from the window of the Weight No Longer Clinic. She had failed to meet her monthly loss target, but she was spot on as far as Hodge was concerned. The autopsy showed eighty-nine per cent of his bones shattered, but the eighteen-stone woman had a miraculous escape, became a born-again Christian trauma consultant, and is now a much-loved panellist on early evening television. Sometimes in my dreams I have this one freeze frame with Hodge giving a rare smile as he anticipates his toad dinner, and just above his head this vast, pink mass descending.

I miss Hodge, most of all because now he's gone there is nothing to deflect malicious fortune from the rest of us.