Owen Marshall Selected Stories (17 page)

T
he patio illumine was the single source of light; diffused through glass, influenced in progress by the colours, textures, shapes of furniture and ornaments until the room was dim hued, an aquarium, and movement met resistance from the liquid air. Lucretia was curled in a corner of the large sofa, and Franc urged his claim. His fingers trailed over her left heel, and he traced the relaxed achilles tendon of her ankle. Please. His voice was thickened by anticipation and aquarium air. You can trust yourself with me. Please. The flesh of his neck had a slight sheen of sweat, attractive in the intimacy of that partial light. We need to, he said. What sort of balance have you got? A hundred, two hundred thousand, both earned and given. Tell me how you keep your money. Tell me all the things you do with it; the ways you calculate the interest; all the forms of investment and return you've found. Tell me again those strange things you do with silver.

Lucretia breathed heavily although at rest; as a pouting fish breathes in conscious satisfaction of life sustained. The ruffles of her blouse flared like gills, and were caught in ripples of merging green light, green shadow, as they moved. She looked through the full-length windows and glass doors to the patio, saw above the mask of garden trees a dusted pattern of stars. You could give me silver coins, said Franc. His fingers continued a play of stops along her heel. It's a thing with you — pure silver coins. You could lay out hundreds in the moonlight, white mounds all pressing down. If you trusted
me, if you loved me.

I can't, said Lucretia. As he said silver coins her mouth had opened and eyelids drooped for an instant, but her face was turned away.

Please.

I can't yet, but soon; when we're sure of each other. You know I love you.

How do I know. I don't know, said Franc. His whisper was harsh and close. Lucretia began to weep. Let me give you used notes. He used a lover's voice. All worn notes, warm and worn, the corners frayed like the toes of old slippers, the colours darkened by the alchemy of a thousand palms and purposes. Some have things written on them — names, phone numbers, shopping lists, poetry. They're so old and knowing, like tobacco leaves, with veins of their own life beginning to form again, but old notes are from a tree more ancient even, and with a more persistent fragrance. Used notes at the last are cynical, pleasured, corrupt with all the venal impulse to which they must submit.

Don't, don't, Lucretia murmured.

Please. Just a straight missionary gift then?

I can't: not yet.

Marx, said Franc, jerking his head. He sat up abruptly and began to put on his shoes. Lucretia sobbed beside him. It was a familiar ending between them. A lace snapped because of his impatience, and he swore again — Ricardo. He next spoke calmly, with an effort, ashamed that Lucretia was weeping. I'm sorry. I don't want to upset you, you know that.

We could have sex, she said: an offer of reconciliation.

We can have that anytime, with anyone. It means nothing. A vacant, instinctual rabbiting.

I love you. I want to share the most intense of emotions with you. Franc was eager for agreement, but she was downcast at the injustice yet necessity of her caution. Franc stood in the blurred shadows to put on his jacket. He stroked Lucretia's head; ran one blouse ruffle
between thumb and finger to assure her of affection. I've got to go, he said. It's all right. Forget it. I'll ring you tomorrow.

Lucretia's parents were also concerned for her. They talked of it when she had gone upstairs to her room. Her eyes are red. She's been crying, Mrs Rand said.

What is the matter with her these days? Mr Rand's voice was vigorous with worry and impatience. Why does she keep on with him if they can't be happy. I'm Benthamed if I know.

I think Franc's too serious, and she doesn't want to commit herself.

They're not financing each other are they?

Sol!

Well, I don't understand young people these days. Money is all they think about. And there's no bounds of decency or restraint any more you know. They even hang around the banks and share rooms and make suggestions to people coming in and out. It all needs cleaning up. They caress money in full view in the parks, and whistle at the millionaires. Kids miss school to go gambling together, or sniffing mint dyes.

They're just more open about it, I suppose, and you know Franc's quite brilliant at his job. He's on 100,000 a year, and in three super and pension groups. Lucretia says he has seven major forms of security asset, and not all in this country.

I know, yes, I know, said Mr Rand, but it's all so calculating and deliberate now isn't it. So selfish. You and I weren't always moneying when we first married. We didn't talk about it much; we kept our feelings in check. Look at television and video news now; all details of mergers, frauds, extortion, robbery cases and close-ups of the tellers' faces after they've passed over all the money, and interviews with lottery winners and bankrupts before they've a chance to control their emotions. Drooling coverage of self-immolation, people swallowing the new doubloon which precisely blocks the windpipe. It's disgusting. And the Unions with reports of nonexistent wage
rounds every month to keep the workers titillated. It debases everything. It does. I'm serious.

It's that financial lodge of yours.

No, I'm serious. From the necessary economic motivation and medium of exchange, money's perverted to a personal buzz. No one remembers its social purpose any more.

Stop worrying, and come to bed. Things change.

I mean it. It's a worrying thing that's happening, said Mr Rand. Where it leads and so on.

Come to bed and I'll tell you how the old man Henessey made all his money, and what he does with it.

You don't know.

I do though.

Aw, come on now, said Mr Rand.

I do though. Mabel Henessey got excited at our share club and told me it all. You wouldn't believe about old man Henessey, and he looks so righteous. I know for sure that sometimes he —. Even though they were alone, Mrs Rand leant ladylike to her husband's ear to impart her story.

Is that a fact, said Mr Rand. Well I'll be Keynesed.

Franc drove late at night from the residential heights of the Rands, to the entertainment section of the city strung along John Stuart Mill Boulevard and Laski Street. All that time with Lucretia in the muted light, the affection, the stalemate. He was still breathing deeply, and he could feel the pulse beat at the sides of his neck. He idled down Laski Street in the indulgence district, one more cruising electric car in a line of them, between the loan shops, parlours, coin halls, speciality stands and dough flick cinemas. Franc parked outside one of the smaller arcades. He rested there, telling himself that he needed the rest, and perhaps might do no more than that. He thought of Lucretia, how her breathing became when she was talking of solid silver, how she was in thrall to the cool, moon metal and would place her tongue between her teeth and gently bite when
she saw such coins. He thought of his own father, and what he was making day after day after day. Franc knew his father was behind Pan Globe Enterprises, and that he personally gave bonuses to fifty-three executives one by one in his office each year.

From his car, Franc could see the display of titles in the speciality video shop; hot sellers of the moment. Borrowers and Lenders Be, Mortgage Mistress, What's In Kitty, The Buck Stops Here, and the notorious Cash Me In. He took his thick wallet from the dash locker, and left the car. He was deliberate, yet there was a sense of disappointment in himself within his deliberate mood. Franc ignored the appraising faces of the groups along the arcade frontage. To stand was to suggest interest, and he kept walking, kept his eyes glancing past the faces, until he reached the bankcard vending machines deep in the arcade. The police had grown weary of moving people on, graffiti blossomed on the walls and were interpolated into the intructions themselves, reefs of champagne cans had been built up by the wall and capped with plastic spoons from Jumbo pies. Yet the noise, the movement, the colour and the commerce, kept all tense and defiant.

Like a favourite coral terrace in the reef, the vending wall had its special shoal, its own population, constant, yet ever changing in its pattern, intimate only within itself, yet ever conscious of others watching, twisting out from the vending machines with smiles and body language to be observed, then circling back in to recapture conversation and resume a pose. Franc watched a chunky young man with a Roman fringe. The young man had a gold coin in his hand which was always moving. In obsessive ritual it appeared between each pair of fingers in turn, dipped into the palm, scudded against gravity like a modest, yellow mouse across the back of his hand. Goldy circled out twice from the wall, then came a third time, stood by Franc and performed his easy actions with the coin. He smiled with closed lips to himself, as though he considered Franc was about to say something both humorous and predictable. I want
you to give me used notes, said Franc.

Whatever you say, squire. I've a place handy.

I haven't time, said Franc. Just come further into the arcade.

Whatever suits your fancy, squire, said Goldy.

In a recessed doorway to the closed office of an investment counsellor, Franc gave up his thick wallet, and leant his shoulder into the corner to give him support against the onslaught of ecstasy. Goldy ran notes over Franc's face and hands, crinkled them tenderly beside his ear, insinuated them into the slits of his shirt front. Worn, used notes frayed and soiled to the texture of skin, worn as skin, natural as skin, necessary as skin and sin, scented with usury and compromises and enslavements and desires. Tokens of power, each with its colours of face value a dim nationality in the recess of the doorway.

Goldy was at once skilful and contemptuous, and all the time his own gold remained in his hand, rustling mouse-like amongst the paper money. Goldy took the sweat from Franc's forehead with notes as soft as napkins. This is your thing all right, squire, he said. Franc buckled in the corner, breathing as if stabbed.

Talk to me, talk to me, he said. The notes were familiar, like sections of worn sheets, finely creased and tinged with inflicted experience. Goldy gripped some notes and imposed tension until they tore with the sound of a small fire crackling in its grate. Tens were royal blue, twenties rust orange, and others green and yellow: all colours rendered subtle by usage, and barely more than degrees of shadow in the doorway where Goldy and Franc were close together. I said talk to me, said Franc.

Baht, rupee, escudo, chon, the obedient whisper began. Centavos, peso, florins, centime, rial, colon, satung, piaster, lek, schilling, lira, stater, drachma, krona. Some notes crumpled and fell, lay amongst their feet on the tiled floor of the investment counsellor's small portico. Dinars, talents, zloty, aurei, quetzal, crowns, gulden, cedi, shekel, yen, groschen, ruble. Franc's eyes rolled. The white of them
caught light from the arcade of indulgences and was tinged with green-blue like the white of a hard-boiled egg. There we are then, squire. The two of them were close together in the deep doorway, and notes like worn tongues, with all the knowing and unknowing language, passed between them.

People in search of mercenary pleasure came back and forth in the arcade. The automatic vending machines clicked obligingly, car horns and insolent cries echoed from the street, a youth sprayed dollar signs and kissed them dry, and the neons in the arcade glowed as living coral in tropical intensity. Opposite Franc's doorway a message in pink incessantly began on the left and ran off to the right again, again. Money Is The Best Charge, it said.

I
had never met Beavis before he and I were put on the PEP scheme together. I finished filling in the form promising not to divulge vital and confidential council business which might come my way, and then followed the supervisor to the car. Beavis was already seated. ‘This is Beavis,' said the supervisor.

‘Typhoon Agnes hit central Philippines on the fifth of November claiming more than eight hundred lives,' said Beavis. ‘Five hundred on Panay Island alone, three hundred and twenty-five kilometres south of Manila. Another forty-five killed in Leyte and Eastern Sawar provinces.' The supervisor looked away: I said hello to Beavis.

The PEP scheme was an inside one at the museum because it was winter. Where we were taken, however, it seemed colder than outside. Museums create a chill at the best of times, but in our unused part were ice-floes and penguins. A panorama, the supervisor said. All the penguins were to be handled with care and stored out of harm's way along the wall, but the rest was to be dismantled and carried down to the yard. ‘I'll look in tomorrow and see how you're going,' said the supervisor. His nose was dripping in the cold.

‘Right,' I said.

‘A cold wave at the end of last year claimed at least two hundred and ninety lives in north and east India. Low temperatures and unseasonal fog and rain caused general disruption to air traffic,' said Beavis, with no apparent realisation of irony.

‘There's a toilet and tearoom at the west end of the corridor on
this floor. Ten-thirty and three-thirty,' said the supervisor. He started coughing as he left.

The ocean was what we began on first. As it was plywood it was difficult to recover any sheets to use again. When the water was gone we would be able to move about freely and take greater care with the ice-floes and penguins. I found it an odd sensation at first, standing waist deep in Antarctica as we dismantled it. I pointed out to Beavis the clear symbolism relating to man's despoliation of the last natural continent and so on. Beavis in reply told me that fourteen people were killed in a stampede when a fire broke out during a wedding ceremony at Unye in the Turkish province of Ordu.

We had the green sea out by ten-thirty. Beavis stood shivering by a window we had uncovered and wiped free of dust. He had his arms folded and a hand in each armpit, and he looked wistfully down on to a square of frosted grass, and the neat gravel boundaries. ‘It's time for our tea-break,' I told him.

An outline of a hand in felt pen and a list of instructions concerning the Zip were the only decorations on the cream walls of the tearoom: points about not leaving the Zip unattended when filling and so on. I had it read within the first minute, but then words are always the things I notice. There was one failure in agreement of number between subject and verb, but overall the notice served its purpose. I wasn't as confident in assessing the people. They accepted us with exaggerated comradeship as is the response of people in secure, professional employment when confronted with PEP workers, amputees or Vietnamese refugees. I gave my name and introduced Beavis. Beavis had a classy-looking pair of basketball boots, and the most hair on the backs of his hands that I've ever seen. ‘Army worms invaded the Zambezi Valley in the north of Zimbabwe and destroyed maize and sorghum crops over more than one hundred square kilometres of farmland,' he said. The museum staff present became more amiable still.

One girl had seductive earlobes and dark, close curls. I had a
vision in which I persuaded her to come with me, in which I bit her ear beneath the curls and we made the earth move, or at least shook Antarctica with some vehemence. Instead, all of us apart from Beavis shuffled and spoke of inconsequential things. Beavis had several cups of coffee, then abruptly told us of the twenty-four bed-ridden people who died in a fire which broke out in an old-people's home near the town of Beauvais. Impressively recounted, it subdued us all. I guiltily enjoyed the warmth from the wall heaters and my tea — before going back to the South Pole.

Antarctica had been built in sections and we tried to get as much clean timber and plywood sheets out as possible. As we worked I explained to Beavis the Celtic influence in modern poetry, and he told me of the bush fires in south-east Australia, and the earthquake, six on the Richter scale, which killed at least twenty people in India's Assam state. Beavis had a clear, well-modulated voice, and he was deft with the hammer and saw as well. I thought that he'd probably been one of those students, brilliant and compulsive, whose brain had spiralled free of any strict prescription. We had a rest after managing to strip off the first hessian and plaster ice-floe. The sun gradually turned the corner of the museum, melting the frost from a section of the lawn. It caused a precise demarcation between green and white, like the pattern of a flag. Beavis looked out too, and pondered.

We got on well, Beavis and I, although he wasn't light-hearted at all. As he was releasing one penguin the torso came away in his hands, and left the bum and webbed feet on the ice. Beavis stumbled back on to the discarded timber, exposing the heavy treads of his basketball boots, but he didn't laugh with me, just rubbed his shins and looked carefully down the corridor as if expecting a visitor. ‘There's got to be some natural mortality among penguins,' I said. ‘Put it behind the others and it'll hardly show.'

‘More than one hundred people drowned when a boat capsized in mid-stream on the Kirtonkhola River near the town of Barisal in Bangladesh,' said Beavis.

I carried armfuls of wood and plaster down to the yard before lunchtime. I experimented with several different routes, partly for variety of experience, partly in the hope of seeing the girl with the dark curls, but she wasn't visible. Somehow I imagined her in the medieval glass and tapestry section rather than in natural history panoramas. I discussed the subject of feminine perfection with Beavis, pointing out the paradox that, in nature as in art, beauty comes not from beauty, but from the combination of the ordinary and the earthly. ‘That woman,' I said to Beavis, ‘is skin, blood and spittle, that's the wonder of it.' Beavis considered the insight and told me that more than four hundred passengers were killed when a crowded train plunged into a ravine near Awash, some two hundred and fifty kilometres east of Addis Ababa.

Beavis suffered a headache a little before twelve o'clock. I think the cold, and the dust from the penguins, caused it. He sat on a four by four exposed from the display and leant on to the window. His cheek spread out and whitened on the glass. Three times he began to tell me of a tsunami in Hokkaido, but his words slurred into an unintelligible vortex. He burped, and rolled his face on the icy glass. ‘It's time for our lunch-break anyway,' I said. He rolled his head back and forth in supplication and whispered ahh, ahh, ahh to comfort himself. The penguins refused to become involved; each retained its viewpoint with fixed intensity. Illness isolates more effectively than absence. I knew Beavis wouldn't miss me for a while, so I went to the small staffroom and made two cups of sweet tea, and brought them and the yellow seat cover back to Antarctica.

The yellow cover draped well around Beavis's shoulders, and he held it together at his chest. He had dribbled on the back of his hand and the black hair glistened there. He sipped his tea, though, and listened while I explained why I had given up formal academic studies, and my plan to use the Values Party to restructure education in New Zealand. I think he was pretty much convinced and I let him sit quietly as I worked. Afterwards he seemed to feel better,
because he wiped his face with the yellow cover, and fluffed up his hair. He told me about the Bhopal poisonous gas discharge which caused more than two and a half thousand deaths. ‘I remember that one,' I said. There was quite a lot I could say about Bhopal, and I said it as we started on the penguins and ice-floes again. Beavis's preoccupation with recent accidental disasters was a salutary thing in some ways: it minimised our own grievance, made even Antarctica's grip bearable.

The sun made steady progress around the building, and the frost cut back across the lawn with surgical precision. Beavis's affliction passed. I went, in all, eleven different ways down to the yard with remains of the southern continent, but I never saw Aphrodite. I stopped the permutations when a gaunt man with the look of an Egyptologist shouted at me that if I dropped any more rubbish in his wing he'd contact the PEP supervisor.

There's a knack to everything, and Beavis and I were getting the hang of our job. We didn't tear any more penguins after that first one in the morning, yet some of them were soft and weakened, and smelt like teddy-bears stored away for coming generations. I said to Beavis that there'd been too much moisture over the years, and that a controlled climate was necessary for the sort of exhibits which had stuffed birds. ‘Torrential rain caused flooding and mudslides which killed eleven people and swept away dwellings on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte in the south-east state of Minas Gerais, Brazil.'

Before three o'clock I remembered to smuggle the seat-cover back to the tearoom, and return our cups. I told Beavis that my estimate was that we'd have the whole panorama cleared out inside four days. PEP schemes lasted three months, therefore obviously a good deal of job variety remained — other panoramas to destroy, perhaps. A nocturnal setting for our kiwis, or an outdated display of feral cat species. Beavis made no reply. He was most moved to conversation by literary and philosophical concerns. It was a credit to him really: he had very little small talk, did Beavis.

Do not turn off at the wall
, it said by the Zip in the tearoom. The Egyptologist was there and he bore a grudge. ‘We're going to have three months of this then, are we,' he said. ‘A gradual demolition of the institution around us.'

‘A Venezuelan freighter was washed ashore in Florida during a storm that caused one death and millions of dollars of damage.'

‘For Christ's sake,' said the gaunt man.

The girl with the dark curls didn't come in. The tearoom hardly seemed the same place as that of the morning, but I knew from the writing on the wall that it was. As we went away the Egyptologist had a laugh at our expense. Beavis didn't mind: he trailed his hand on the banisters, and made sure he didn't step on any of the triangles in the lino pattern. Circles were safe, it appeared.

The ice age was in retreat before us. I had fourteen penguins arranged in column of route along the wall, and in the grounds two piles grew — one of rubbish and one of reusable timber. We realised that the sun wasn't going to reach our window, and days start to get colder again in winter after four o'clock. I suggested to Beavis that we leave the penguins in the habitat which suited them, and show our initiative by burning the scraps we'd collected in the yard. We could keep warm with good excuse until knock-off time. I didn't want Beavis to suffer one of his headaches again.

We built a small fire on a garden plot, stood close to it for warmth, and watched the smoke ghost away in the quiet, cold afternoon. Beavis enjoyed the job of putting new pieces on the fire, and I listened as he told of the consequences when the Citarum River overflowed into several villages of Java's Bundung region and considered myself lucky. The park trees had black, scrawny branches like roots in the air, as if the summer trees had been turned upside down for the season. Deep hidden in the soil were green leaves and scarlet berries.

The museum rose up beyond the yard and the park, but despite all the windows I couldn't see anyone looking out at all. No one to
hear us, no one to join us, no one to judge us. The strip of lawn closest to the museum still kept its frost like a snowfall. It would build there day after day. No one to see Beavis and me with our fire. Beavis delicately nudged timber into the fire with his basketball boots, and watched smoke weave through the tree roots. I pointed out to him that we were burning Antarctica to keep ourselves warm, which was an option not available to Scott and Shackleton. ‘More than five hundred died when a liquid gas depot exploded at San Juan Ixhuatepec, a suburb of Mexico City,' said Beavis.

I felt very hungry by the time the hooters went. Beavis and I had missed lunch because of his headache. If he didn't have something soon I thought he might get another attack because of a low blood-sugar level. My own blood-sugar level was pretty low, it seemed to me. We left the fire to burn itself out, and went three blocks down to the shops. I had enough money for two hot pies, and when I came out of the shop I saw Beavis sitting on the traffic island watching the five o'clock rush. Some people walked, some trotted. Some of the cars had Turbo written on their sides, and some had only obscure patterns of rust, but they all stormed on past Beavis who was as incongruous there as among the penguins. His lips were moving. I suppose he was reminding the world of earthquakes in Chile, or of an outbreak of cholera in Mali.

I was surprised how satisfied most of the people were, but good on them, good on them. How should they know that the frozen continent was to be found right here in the midst of our city after all.