Owen Marshall Selected Stories (22 page)

My father punished me with the razor strop, and rang the parent of each friend I had unhesitatingly betrayed. It was the end of the Ace of Diamonds Gang. It was the end of wraith-like sorties into the consciousness of our town. It was the end of silhouettes upon the timber stacks, of thumbs clasped to pledge the redress of makeshift grievances. It was the end of free imagination, and of boyhood perhaps.

T
he chalice of each lily flower was disembodied as darkness spread. Broad lily leaves merged with the shadows of the heavy grass and the docks. Arum flowers were luminous, hung in the night, and in the nearest throats each yellow spadix stood. The casual, crowded growth of such beauty amazed him. He knew the place was just a horse paddock in the suburbs. He had seen at dusk on their arrival the leaking trough, tracks amid the grass and lily clumps, uneven fences, and the horses standing apart for privacy. Yet it became a garden in the night, and from his hip height on the groundsheet the arum lilies were ranged depth on depth, a few pale lights in some places, but most massed as if carried in procession.

‘My mother would have a fit,' Jenny said. ‘Christ, she's got no idea how people can live. All those things owned and folded into the right drawer, or account, all that possession, getting on in the world, is nothing if you haven't found a really close person — a lover. A lover in all respects. A universal lover I suppose. Ha ha. Someone to trust with all of yourself. Don't you think? Don't you think, though?' Her face was itself the milk white of the arum lilies, but alert rather than decorous. She cocked her head and tried to see his expression in the night. Her hand squeezed his, and he could feel the light, individual bones of her fingers.

‘I feel the best I have in the whole trip right now,' she said, ‘and I don't care if we never find these people to stay with. We don't need help anyway. We don't need anyone else. This afternoon, coming up
fast on the main road, it was so warm, wasn't it? I loved being on the back. I almost fell asleep leaning on you, and I could tell, before you turned, if you were going left or right, because the way the muscles of your back moved against me, like part of myself moving. Sometimes when we passed cars, when we were level with them for that moment, I could see couples in their separate seats and knew they envied us pressed together and then accelerating past. I bet they took it out in grudging comments about damn motorbikes. Eh? I think I understand how you feel about the bike now You get this feeling of protection and isolation on a big tourer, don't you think? The faster you go, the more cocooned and invincible you become: the less distinct any threat can be. It's a sort of unity and a sort of detachment, isn't it?'

In the evening the road had sloped down to the bridge, and the Wanganui River was smooth and muddy, lacking the gravel bed of the South Island country he knew. Throttled back, the exhaust had a different note. Jenny pressed her helmet to his, and shouted, ‘Keep going straight on, I think. Don't turn right towards the shops.' They were hoping to find a friend of a friend who might have a bed for the night. A friend's friend never met, never warned, but easy about their imposition they hoped.

In a flat suburb by a sports stadium, playing fields and a few paddocks across the road, the motor had died. The way it had gone made him think it was electrical, not mechanical, or a fuel blockage perhaps, but the light wasn't good enough to find the fault, and the warmth of summer, the languor of a day's travel had sapped any sense of urgency. He had pushed the bike into the paddock, and was held in thrall by the profusion of arum lilies there in the dusk. Each fenceline was overwhelmed with deep banks of lilies, and clusters spread into the low, green fields, and the ditches which especially suited them, so that they suckled in the mud. He had never seen lilies as vigorous and free as weeds before. They were multiplied clump on clump to gain an eminence, and the myriad white mouths among
the heavy leaves glowed in summer dusk. ‘Oh, they grow like weeds round here,' Jenny said. ‘They're everywhere between Wanganui and Palmerston North, but you didn't notice. They've spread all over the place, and nobody thinks twice about them.' But he did. He thought twice, thrice, a hundred times, and always that night he was conscious of the lilies spread around them, and the quiet horses standing thigh deep among their flowers.

‘Finding someone to trust is what really matters,' she said. The lilies had the whiteness of her breast, and like breasts their hypnotic form was curved into the night. ‘You like that, don't you? I know you like me doing that. I know you're smiling; turn your face towards me so that I can see. I don't believe that there's just one perfect partner for each of us in life. As you say it's a pretty odd coincidence that person should just happen to be in our own community ninety-nine percent of the time. But it still seems to me that a lot of people never have a true relationship in their lives, even if they get married and all the rest. Never find someone to talk to as they would talk to themselves: never know someone care for them the way they wished they cared for themselves.'

Their night vision came in time. With his head close to hers, he wondered if the pupils of her eyes had dilated like those of a cat, but as he bent to see, she thought he sought a kiss, whispered assent and drew his mouth to hers. There were moths and flies in the moonlight, and quite loudly a horse blew its vast, flabby lips in derision.

‘I like it best when we're alone,' she said. ‘When there's just the two of us we never quarrel. Have you realised that? It's always when other people are about, our friends even, that any trouble comes. I know you don't like staying with my parents, because you say I'm different then. Now we only have to please each other. I'm the only woman, you're the only man. Do you like that? Turn over this way. I think we should stay on our own, and be happy like now. It's so warm I guess we could just stay here with the flowers you like, and in the morning you could fix the bike.'

From the centre of the city came the sound of a fire engine, or an ambulance, but it meant nothing to them for they had no house and complete health, and later a car horn started in the suburb beyond the stadium and sounded again and again, fainter as it moved away. When all those sounds had passed, there was Jenny's voice, so earnest and so lover-like. More enduring still, when she stopped, was the gentle whine of the night air through the trees, the fences and the lilies.

‘You don't have to worry about me,' Jenny said, ‘because I go into everything with my eyes open and don't expect things to be rosy all the time. You'll see that I can hold down a job if I need to. I can hack whatever has to be done. But the imperative I think is to have some part of each day with the one person who lets you be all of yourself, but not by yourself. You see? Someone to guard your back against the appalling triviality of life. It seems to me that you can't win by yourself.'

Jenny took their oranges from the pannier bag and, in peeling them, reproduced in action the level of intensity she experienced as she talked. She dug and tore the thick skin when she was adamant, and eased it from the fruit in a caress when love was spoken of. Her thin fingers were warm, had the fragrance of leather and orange peel, and the orange peel lay in the dimmed frog green of the grass and lily leaves, held up from the ground by the rich growth. Some pieces showed the underside like mushrooms, and others had their colour up, which caught the faint light and glinted orange to counter the lemon parrot tongues of the arum lilies. She drew on her cigarette, a long, wanton breath, and gave a shudder. He held a match and she squeezed peel at its flame, and the essence spat and flared like a rocket's dying burst far away. Her voice was so private, so trusting, so open to inevitable hurt, that he couldn't look at her, but put his head back and saw the lighted houses on the higher ground where people sat with the limits of their expectations and responsibilities clearly marked around them, while he and Jenny had nothing between
them and the sky, could feel the night air drawn like a tide through the docks, the fences, the free lily clumps, the shadowed horses, and bearing off the scent of oranges and lilies and leather. Jenny's warmth and the salt smell of her hair too, bearing off sweet promises that could not otherwise be borne. The lilies pressed around them in the night, candles with a pale yellow flame. Something ancient in them survived within the modern city. Something biblical that was dispassionate in its magnificence. We believe beauty is of itself an invitation, when in nature it is a guarantee of nothing that we will ever understand.

‘I don't care to look too far ahead,' she said. ‘You never met my grandfather Renneck, but he used to say that you're a long time dead. And he had this other saying — take what you want, and pay for it. Do you see what he meant? I told Mum and Dad I can go back to university any time, but there's other things you can't have on lay-by. Hold me closer because it's getting cooler now. A horse won't stand on us in the night, will it? No, but it's true, isn't it, that nothing matters at all in the end, except having someone to love, but people don't want to say it, or admit it, because if they don't reach it then they're a failure, aren't they, and yet their life still has to go on. They won't, will they, walk over us in the night — the horses, I mean?'

He drew her closer, as if he believed that way they could secure themselves. Save them, save them from the fenceposts uneasy in the ground, from the slope of the stadium against the sky. Save them from the arum lilies, and the shadow horses deep in docks and grass and the lovely bog lilies. Save them from her trust, and his knowledge of its conclusion. Save them, save them amid the lilies from that meek, tidal wind of inconsequence.

I
ris, my mother, had this idea that sooner rather than later something marvellous was bound to happen: a lucky break in life if you kept at it. She wasn't selfish about this, everyone had the same chance for something quite undeserved, like being approached out of the blue in the supermarket by a talent scout to become a model, or marrying an accountant as my aunt did, who now spends money like water and has two homes. For my twenty-first Aunt Esther gave me a cream silk dress, but I snagged it at the polytech wine and cheese on a rivet in the plastic chair.

Even when Iris was too old to go on hoping to be approached in the supermarket for anything other than shoplifting, she believed magnificent opportunity was in the offing. She took Golden Kiwis, and then Lotto tickets, and worked out on the backs of envelopes how she would divide and spend the money. I was to come in for some pretty good stuff when she won, according to the lists. Each mailtime was a high, never mind that she hardly wrote to anyone, had jobs without prospects and shifted a lot. Throughout the drizzle of magazine offers, bills, perfunctory greetings, community newsletters, demands on former tenants and coupon books, she kept a fierce hope in miraculous correspondence. An approach concerning political candidature, perhaps, or an invitation from the Max Factor directorate to be a special consultant, gardenias from a secret admirer, or notification that she was meter maid of the year. Iris never did realise that her whole life was unsolicited. She intently
examined each special offer and would speculate joyously if her actual name was used. But how would they know my name, she'd say, look, they use my proper name. So that I could be at my best, she would roam the twilight, feeling in her neighbours' boxes for shampoo sachets sent as samples. Needs must, my girl, she would say firmly. Our time will come.

Iris answered an advertisement about Dr Asmunzov, professor of the mind, who came and said he could do a seance on my dad, even though he'd gone off, not died. I was seventeen and the professor of the mind had other interests as well, for he clasped my knee beneath the table. Being naturally blonde and with a good bust, I've always had to deal with that sort of thing. Iris, my mother, said that it didn't necessarily mean anything, and that men were just like that. Hormonal, she said, and nothing in it to blame anyone. When she was going to school in Taranaki, a share milker used to undo his fly each day as the bus passed his milking shed. The association gave her a particular aversion to cholesterol, she said.

Iris did win a Christmas hamper when I had chicken pox in Form Two, from Woolworths, and once initiated a correspondence with a firm of Auckland solicitors acting for an unclaimed British estate. The hamper she unpacked on my bed and found lots of low-cost, bulky items under the more glamorous surface layer: Weetbix, dried lentils, toilet rolls, stuff like that, and the solicitors lost interest when we couldn't provide any evidence that the family on the Bleeker side originated in Dorset. I ate a small tin of sardines cold from the hamper, and with my finger, put their oil on all the chicken pox that I could reach. My second-hand bed head had transfers of Pooh Bear and Cliff Richard that were nothing to me.

For a time, when we lived in Wanganui, Iris thought we had a fortune at our toes, because our Aramaho suburb neighbours said that the house we rented used to belong to a retired Greymouth dentist who must have been worth a packet, but left nothing when he died in my room. I did consider using the untainted third
bedroom, but mine was so much sunnier, and I could come and go from the big window without bothering Iris. She said he would have had it all in gold, being able to get it for fillings as a dentist, though other people weren't allowed to buy it. She had a dream of gold-filled Havelock Dark tobacco tins hidden under the brick paving between the back door and the laundry. We dug up the bricks, every one, but found no gold. The bricks remained stacked on the lawn and next winter we got muddy feet going to the laundry. They were a reminder of yet another false lead in the treasure hunt that was my mother's life. It's there all right though, Iris said, he just doesn't want a woman to find it.

My boyfriends seemed possibilities to Iris: opportunities for advantage. Being blonde and with a good figure, as I said, I had plenty of guys coming on to me. You get used to it after a while. Not great, but not unbearable. It's just the effect you have on hormones, I guess. Mum said that she'd been trim herself in her time, but her face had become a bit of a handbag. My father had been an All Black trialist who couldn't get used to his diminished place in life when he got past playing. He had these wonderful hands, though, Iris said, and should really have taken up the saxophone, or the piano. She took it up herself soon after he left, from an easy stage instruction booklet called
Jazz Sax Made Easy
. She didn't find time for much practice, but made herself a black sequin dress to wear when she played in cabarets. I wore it for the leavers' dance at high school and Maurice Prentice told me that I gave him such a hard on that he could only dance stooped.

Maurice wasn't one of those Iris had any hopes of, but Nigel Utteridge and Denzil Smith were. Denzil and I were both keen on roller-skating and won the under sixteen figure skating title in Marlborough, not long after Mum and I shifted down from Horowhenua. Iris saw a magnificent future for us on the international circuit, like Torvill and Dean, with her managing the television interviews and contracts. She cut down the sequin cabaret dress,
sewed in bra cups and I wore it for competitions. Nigel Utteridge was later. His parents were both doctors, would you believe. Each worked in a different practice so they could have professional independence. Mrs Dr Utteridge was quite confiding and told me there were no children after Nigel, because Mr Dr Utteridge was injured by the Big Dipper at the Tahuna fairground. Mr Dr Utteridge had the thickest, most muscular neck you can imagine, wider than his head even. He must have taken up the sport of butting at a very young age. Iris imagined me getting married to the son of two doctors and neither of us having to work again, just sit behind the receptionist's desk, lift our heads occasionally and say, Dr Utteridge will see you now, I'm sorry Dr Utteridge has been delayed by an outbreak of anthrax, Dr Utteridge is at present examining your uterine x-rays. Maurice Prentice was probably the best-looking guy I went out with early on, but very hormonal, always talking about cars and he walked with a stoop.

Sooner or later, Iris would say, our ship will come in. Over Kentucky Fried Chicken on her fiftieth birthday, she told me about this Grandma Moses who, at eighty, started painting pictures of her farm and became famous. The Grandma Moses in all walks of life were a marvel of reassurance to my mother. What can happen once, can happen twice, she said, and she was not afraid to work. She formed a co-operative when we were in Palmerston North. Herself and two huge twins called McIntosh, and they supplied hors d'oeuvres at functions. Salmon or crab finger pastries, gherkin, prune and pineapple on toothpicks, cheese balls, home-ground pâté and cinnamon sticks. They made a go of it, too, though Iris said that people didn't appreciate the cost of the fillings, but then the twin five minutes older than the other had an experience when delivering to the town clerk's farewell. A lap dog ran up inside her dress as she was carrying trays into the civic chambers and she went right off the business. Iris said the filthy little beast had ruined what could have been a catering empire, because that twin had the flair and they
couldn't carry on afterwards.

I don't want you to think Iris's vision was a mercenary one. Money wasn't an end in itself. What Iris wanted was to force life to yield her something of value, something from the top drawer. She had no belief in a heaven and wanted a greater share of life. We all go down to the grave in the end, she'd say. Behind the library building, and no longer used, was the old cemetery on the slope. When I had the job at Hendry's cosmetic counter we would meet some lunchtimes and walk through the alleys of crushed, white quartz between the tombs. She would sigh, but only to cool the meat pies she liked for winter lunch. Iris was in fact cheerful in the cemetery for, of all the people on that slope, only she and I had any further hope of a shot at life. Died for King and Country she might read for me, her meter maid shoes making a sensible crunch upon the quartz. Iris would eat strips from the top of her pie and the steam would wisp into the winter air.

Meter maiding was only one of Mum's skills. She believed in a variety of jobs to lure good fortune. In Christchurch she was a fish splitter for almost a year. Well, Lyttelton she actually worked in, but we lived at New Brighton. A bach over which the fine, grey sand would whisper when the sea wind blew through the marram grass. A millionaire's view of the ocean, Iris said. I was still young enough to need entertainment and she played the water pipes for me. By turning on the taps to different positions we could hear fog horns, fire engines, the howling jabberwocky. My schoolbag on the lino beside me, the smell of fish all the way from Lyttelton, the millionaire's view over the fritz haircut of the marram dunes, as I crouched by the lion paws of the bath to hear tubas, or what Iris said was the farting of the elephants in the jungle. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a way to make a career from this, she'd say, and the water is all free, she'd say.

Called Home, or Till the Daybreak Comes, she read out in the cemetery of that later town. As I Am Now So You Must Be Prepare
Yourself To Follow Me, as we opened up a bag of crisps, pausing by the dearly loved and much missed husband of Astral Pruitt while I explained the new gloss shades of half-pink, full-pink, mink-pink. Iris said that the pasty man had asked her to go to the trots with him, but she didn't like his lank hair. A man should have some bit of natural wave or curl in his hair, my mother reckoned. I had plenty of offers from men myself by that time and, while Iris never interfered, she did say that men made lousy friends, and that women knew how to stick together. Her own mother was a grand friend, she said, and in one tough year went into the city gardens and lopped off a branch to make a Christmas tree.

Mum was fascinated by those things which defy routine — a locust swarm, footsteps of
Homo erectus
, Halley's comet, which was certainly a fizzer, the Brewster kid who used to run howling round the block in Te Kuiti when his parents were fighting. Iris would take a cold sausage or potato out to him and he would snatch it on the trot with his face gleaming with tears in the streetlights. Iris was a good neighbour, though a temporary one. She babysat scores of kids who we never heard of again. Later she would send me out to do it. We received neighbourly kindness in return, of course. In the Brewster kid's Te Kuiti, I remember sneaking over each night to plug an extension cord into old Mr Hammond's work bench. He was rich and never went out after dark. While we lived there most of our power-intensive activities were late at night. We had an adaptor plug into the water heater, and a large frypan for our main feed at nine or ten at night. When we had to leave Te Kuiti my mother made Mr Hammond a green, double-knit jersey with a V-neck and raglan sleeves. Only it had a narrow yellow band, because she was one green ball short.

From what Iris said, my grandmother must have been the same sort of person, though I never met her because she had Iris late and died in a nursing home somewhere in the North Island while we were living in Tuatapere. Iris was a school cleaner. There was a mill just
down the road and the sawdust piles were mountain ranges there: the oldest peaks with the richest colours. Iris said that once I asked for a packed lunch to take to climb them. She couldn't afford to go up for the funeral. Her sister sent some of their mother's things down to her, including a sealed envelope addressed to Iris in her mother's handwriting. For days Iris left it unopened on the mantelpiece, and speculated on the way the contents would change our lives: how it might be the title deed to her father's brick house in Seatoun which she could not remember having been sold, or evidence that she had an illegitimate brother who had become a Cabinet minister in Brazil. The night we opened it we were having curried eggs for tea. The curry coloured the inside of Mum's mouth as she laughed to find clippings about my father's court appearances. This man deserted his wife and daughter, grandmother had written on the newspaper. Men are a different species, Iris told me over the curried eggs. Men are always alone, she said. My father had played squash twice a week for four years with a work-mate, yet never bothered to know where he lived, or how many children he had. Men don't ask anything of each other. It's both their weakness and their strength.

Iris was disappointed by the degeneration that happens to men as they age — hair grew all over my father's shoulders before he left, she said, as if he had died and the mould already begun. The oldest man I ever saw naked myself, was the physiotherapist who took a fancy to me in Putaruru. Being in his line of business he kept himself from the most obvious signs of mould, but he had eerily white, caved-in buttocks and besides, as I lay on my back on the carpet, I grew tired of looking at the unvarnished underside of his desk with the lines of the carpenter's pencil still clear.

My mother did better work than that. When we were in Bulls she saved for my kitset duchess, and spent hours getting the tracks aligned so that you could open and close the drawers with the tips of your fingers. Just radiata, but how she sanded it, then umpteen coats of dark stain and a clear finish. I've still got it, each scratch and
discoloration is a mark of our life. Yet see, the drawers open with finger tips, the tracks have traces of the candle grease Iris dripped on with puckered lips of concentration. The wood smell evokes the rose-hips that in one Marlborough summer were a livelihood for Iris and me. We spent weeks picking them from the briars growing wild on the Wairau terraces and riverbed. It must have been my holidays and my mother had no better job. She picked into the pocket of a bag apron and, try as I might, I can't remember how we got out to the riverbed each day. We sold our harvest to the rose-hip syrup factory. The syrup was a big thing for children's health at the time. Dry river terraces with their rabbit scrapes, foxgloves, bleached grass stems and rose briars. Iris with her bag apron, floppy hat, bloodied knuckles. We're not licked yet, she said. We would have our sandwiches together on the stones, from a paper bag so often used that it had the soft creases of a dowager's face. She'd heard on the radio that the country was poised for great transformation and growth and she was determined that we would be swept along with it. The rose-hips were burnished in all that sun, almost ceramic with a red-yellow sheen. The last time I saw the sequin dress was when Iris offered it to me for Glenda's wedding dance. It had grown dull out of its time, as a lurid fish out of its element grows dull. Perhaps you're right, Iris said.