Owen Marshall Selected Stories (28 page)

The ponga ferns were clumped at head height and great sooty trunks slid up into the shifting forest canopy like the poles of a big top. I called Wesley's name, and heard no reply. There was just the noise of my own feet in the sloping leaf mould, and a chorus of cicadas far louder than I had ever heard before.

Maybe Wesley Smith was watching me, sitting amidst the fern and lancewood with his thin, hairy arms around his knees, and his lustrous eyes wide in the shadows. Maybe he was watching me go through the routine. It wasn't that I didn't care, but that I didn't believe he was lost in the way it would be assumed he was lost, in the way that would be reported in the papers. Prominent penal administrator missing: Dr Wesley Smith lost in Lewis Pass wilderness.

I made my way back up the slope towards the road, and came out fifty metres or so from the parked cars. I stood to catch my breath before walking down to Liz and Jean, before travelling back to the Junction to make the necessary report. Perhaps I rested also so that Wesley would have just that much more time to do what he wished. Within me was a conviction that Wesley would never be found, though God knows what it is makes a person step away from wife or husband like that, from life, and walk into the bush. Afterwards when there was all the speculation about whether he was still alive, still out there, my own interest and sympathy, my own guilt even, was not at all for the consequences of his action: just the motivation.

T
he Staff Clerk
Department of Standard Punitive Levies and Assessable Arrears
Private Bag
Wellington 1.

Dear Staff Clerk,
Supplication For Position 735/A86 As Advertised In Metropolitan
Newspapers

I have decided, Staff Clerk, to take a fresh approach in regard to this position and in respect of our relationship. For this reason I have ignored form PSI7a, which has failed me in the past, and which is difficult to obtain here in any case. I have discarded also the professional detachment and predictability of those former applications to the tribe of Staff Clerk who are Janus at the portal of the Civil Service. I'm weary of shaping myself for the minds of others, attempting to be tailormade for a position as I must imagine it; to be tested by you, Staff Clerk, as a child's block is tested in the shaped vacancies, to see if I pass through to the inside. Fain would I be seen as individual, capable of growth. There is an element of ploy in this novelty, I must confess, but message there as well.

From my hut, Staff Clerk, overlooking the Te Tarehi lagoon, I can hear the ocean in lazy play behind the bar, and on the other hand see thick bush of wonderfully contrasted greens along the estuary,
and crowded back inland. What do you see I wonder, on your left hand and your right, within your typical New Zealand. There is a sort of Spanish moss hangs from the trees here, Staff Clerk, along the river banks. I've not seen it elsewhere. And sometimes at first light the condensation drips from filigrees and branches through the river mist which smokes from the smooth water, and beards up to match the drooping moss.

You see that I have a sincere intention to present myself to you candidly. Let us be truthful, you and I. I am a conventional age for an applicant, 35, and received an education in Auckland, city of my birth. I was in the academic stream in Sledgeham High. In my U. E. year I was not accredited because of a personality clash with the Headmaster (since retired), but in the external exams I achieved marks of 63 in Chemistry and 74 in History. I failed U. E. that year however, because I thought the English exam was in the afternoon, but it was in the morning. Even now, Staff Clerk, the thought of it brings the copper taste of terror to my throat. My conversion to Islam has given me a bulwark against such dependence on worldly things ever again. I completed my U. E. in a second sixth form year at Sledgeham, during which I was canteen monitor and considered unlucky not to be a prefect (the Headmaster had not then yet retired).

As I write this, rain has begun here at Te Tarehi, Staff Clerk. The sky and estuary are fused by the flux of it, the noise drowns the play of the sea. The rain cloud is moving round me from the hills. I am a sort of Crowhurst, drifting here, able to create my own record of the world, for there's no other human observer. The leak by the fireplace has begun again, into the pan I've positioned there. This is a prodigal part of the world, Staff Clerk.

I attended the University of Auckland for two years, and passed Maths and Classics. In addition I took an active part in student affairs, being nominated for the position of student sexual harassment officer, and narrowly missing out at the Vote because of feminist
lobbying. Allah meant men to excel: good women are obedient said the Prophet. In 1977 I decided to interrupt university studies on the understanding that I had the inside running for the post of assistant meteorological officer on the New Zealand Antarctic Wintering Over Party of 1978. Unfortunately my landlord's efforts on my behalf were undermined by political favouritism, and despite passing a three week voluntary snow survival course at Mount Cook, I wasn't offered the post. I had also strengthened my professional background by correspondence courses in meteorological methodology. But what do such disappointments matter in the end, Staff Clerk. Our poet Ma'arri said this world resembles a corpse, and we around it dogs that bark.

Today, Staff Clerk, I shall have whitebait for both meals: whitebait fried in egg and dashed with vinegar. Whitebait heaped up on my enamel plate in defiance of conventional poverty. And for one of these meals I'll have a second course as well, my steam pudding recipe with golden syrup sauce. The Prophet taught that occasional physical indulgence is the means to rid ourselves of bitterness.

After meteorology was closed to me, I spent several years in pest eradication. Do you know the Basin at all, Staff Clerk? It is country difficult to forget. It was my living to kill a great many creatures of the Basin. Rabbits, hares, wallabies and the rest of them, but do you know of the vast flocks of Canada Goose in such places, Staff Clerk? And how they're thinned as flappers, or when moulting. Though it should not, the scale of death has always increased its impact. A magnificent and wily bird, the Canada Goose, who has succeeded as a pioneer here. I began reading poetry in the Basin, Irish mainly, and Australian. Down from the tussock ridge-line, out of the direct wind, I would have my lunch beside the issue Yamaha, and feed on words.

I left the Basin to become co-founder of Aorangi Fitch Breeders Ltd. My partner in this venture was Wally Volper, with whom I had much metaphysical discussion. Wally was temperamentally drawn to existentialist thinking. Our philosophical stock increased, but
unfortunately the fitch breeding business received a fatal check when lightning struck our shed in October '83 and destroyed nearly 100 on-heat fitch females. Yet all is as Allah wills it, and I had become gradually aware of a fundamental incongruity between my killing occupations and my beliefs. Killing needs to be better paid than I found it, and in more than cash.

Here at Te Tarehi, Staff Clerk, the air is always cooler after rain, and you can hear the water long afterwards still dripping, trickling, running in the bush; evened out so that the last of one day's rain is joined by the first of the next. There are peat and moss bogs here, Staff Clerk, as you would read of in Old Ireland, but no stone fences and no bombs. The fern fronds are brown arms as if from chimpanzees, and there are fantails who pine to be admired like chorus girls stumbled on in exile. Also a plague of evening sandflies to prevent a paradise. At night the moon is a bright bone on the water of the lagoon, and the sea shovels the stones endlessly on the other side of the bar: perpetual navy navvy. In those nights are ancient, indistinct New Zealand shapes and sounds along the estuary.

I joined the Islamic commune at Colenso in 1984, after a spell on the oyster boats from Bluff. Comparative religion fascinates us, Staff Clerk, don't you think, once we begin the reflective phase of our lives. We define ourselves by our beliefs, and only the most wise and most stupid never change. I was in charge of hydroponic vegetable growing at the commune, and had a regular correspondence with the DSIR on the subject. I had success with succulents, but was never able to reach the target of self-sufficiency. That wasn't the reason that I left however. Ideological considerations have always been my priority. I was opposed to the move away from collectivism towards an insidious form of charismatic leadership which was undermining the commune. No one would listen to me. I have remained a Moslem, but grown suspicious of institutional links. More and more, Staff Clerk, it is the mystical tradition of Sufism which appeals to me. Of the five pillars of Islam only the pilgrimage has not been followed by
me, but I have time to achieve it.

So I am here at Te Tarehi beside the lagoon: antipodean Walden's Pond for scrutiny both outward and internal. A white heron was in the estuary last week, Staff Clerk, it stood in Japanese simplicity against the dark background of the trees. There are still wild cattle from generations back, small and shaggy. I've seen them burst from the flats into the bush when they're disturbed.

You won't dismiss the general nature of this supplication I hope, Staff Clerk. I want to present a
curriculum vitae
of attitude as well as mere event you see. In my new approach perhaps the hem of bureaucracy can be lifted to let in the Indian summer of Te Tarehi: wasps curled in ecstasy upon the fallen fruits, and recollection of sky broken into blue and golden darts by the partial masking of the leaves above. Don't assume either, that it requires no courage to live calmly and alone and listen to your life passing.

Call for me, Staff Clerk, and I will shave my face and hood my eyes, will place a tie around my neck, will break the days and nights to hours again, will learn whatever sub-paras and subsections apply in each case, will be punctilious as well as punctual in all the Department may require. I will combine with you to serve the quaestor of Standard Punitive Levies and Arrears, keeping all criticism to professional confines.

The estuary is mottled, Staff Clerk, with the shadows of the trees, but my fresh whitebait on the bench are still transparent as if of ice. I feel a sense of incipient competence in the tasks you may assign.

S
imon Palliser had spoken to the Blenheim Rotary Club on his experiences as a noted traveller, and I agreed to drive him down to Christchurch so he could see something of the country on the way before flying out to Paris via Singapore. I was going on business anyway, and the President thought that I could do our scenery justice, so Palliser would have an impression of the place to take with him.

As we crossed the high bridge close to Seddon, Simon Palliser looked down to the blue, wild flowers and the pooled water. He asked me if I'd ever been to the Ivory Coast. ‘I flew in to Abidjan,' he said. ‘Some fifteen years or so I suppose after they got their independence from the French. The heat was killing, and after a few days I decided to move into the hinterland. I hired a car and drove to Yamoussoukro where the President had his palace. I'm telling you this because crossing that river reminded me of the crocodiles of Yamoussoukro. I drove 240 kilometres to get there, through Ouossou and Tomumodi, along a road more and more enclosed by jungle and the red soil the jungle fed on. But at Yamoussoukro itself the jungle had been cleared and a modern city built alongside the President's family village. Great plantations had been laid out too, of mangoes, pineapples and avocados. Down one side of the President's palace an artificial lake had been created and stocked with turtles, catfish and crocodiles. There had been no crocodiles in that district before, I was told.

‘The crocodiles were fed late in the afternoon, and the hotel hired a driver from the Baoule tribe to take me to view them. The driver met me on the broad boulevard in front of the foyer entrance. He was a cheerful and talkative man with fair English. He began to tell me about his country as we walked to the carpark.

It was a little cooler than the coast, and a mist gathered in the city of Yamoussoukro; at once such a modern place, yet the site of chiefly power for hundreds of years.

‘There was a causeway across the lake to the palace gates lined with coconut palms and iron railings, and at the gate the Presidential Guard stood sentry. The crocodiles waited with their mouths agape, on a shelf of sand between the embankment and the lake, and the feeder came in a pick-up truck and took buckets of meat to feed them. He called lovingly in French as he threw pieces down to the crocodiles who seemed short-sighted and inefficient eaters. It began to rain heavily, and colours came up on the backs of the crocodiles, and more crocodiles and a few turtles came out of the lake. The mist crept closer and the rain dimpled the surface of the lake. The feeder then took a chicken from his truck, and swung it back and forth in the rain above the railings, all the time appealing in French to the crocodiles. Then he tossed the chicken into the air.

‘The chicken gained courage from being free in the air and rain. It flapped stoutly and landed over the heads of the crocodiles and in the lake. As it landed a turtle surfaced, as if it had duplicated the flight beneath the water, and the chicken was seized. It was an auspicious thing to happen. The feeder was alarmed and angry; my Baoule driver was glum. The feeder climbed the fence and ran towards the water across the sand to frighten the turtle. Instead one of the largest crocodiles jumped forward like an ungainly rabbit and had the keeper's leg in its mouth. There were perhaps twenty or thirty people watching, and the feeling of all seemed not one of horror, or even active concern, but a deep hopelessness. The crocodile backed into the lake, giving several gulping changes of grip which drew the
feeder more firmly to him. The feeder called out once in French, then was silent, and his long robe trailed behind him. One of the guards fired into the air, and the keeper's wide eyes were fixed on us, his audience, even as he disappeared.

‘The rain dimpled the lake surface just the same; turtle and chicken, crocodile and man were gone, leaving us powerless in the wet. “Quickly come away with me now,” my driver said. I was thinking that there had been no crocodiles at all at Yamoussoukro until the lake had been dug for the President's palace.'

It was a dry year in Marlborough. When we stopped a little past Ward for a thermos of tea, the hills were very brown and the heat confused their outlines. Palliser said it reminded him of Spain. ‘Emotionally, Spain was a turning point for me,' he said. ‘A woman I was very much in love with, left me to take up a United Nations job in the Mato Grosso, and I drifted south into Andalusia and was very drunk, for several weeks. You know Andalusia I suppose? Of the several weeks I can remember nothing, a blank in my life, then I sobered up in the little town of Baeza in the hills above the Guadalquivir. I can feel the very evening, the air heavy with jasmine and orange blossom, the soil red as a heart. There were prickly pears at the roadside and within some of them the torreo bird had picked out small nests, and their heads watched at the entrances as I passed. My friend took me to the café to hear the gypsies sing the cante jondo, and all through it the more stolid locals sat at the back tables and continued with their dominoes. I didn't drink, and watched the gypsies under the influence of wine move from the plaintive cante jondo to a wild flamenco, all castanets and exclamation. In the midst of it a farmer brought in a lynx he had killed in his fields, and hung it from a beam by the door for his friends to admire, or to attract a buyer for the skin perhaps.

‘As the gypsies danced and sang, as the domino players became steadily more absorbed in their own purpose, I sat with the scent of jasmine and orange blossom through the café door, and the Persian
gleam of fur upon the lynx. It turned slowly on the cord, first one way then the other, as if its tufted ears still sought some magnetic north of freedom.'

The seaward Kaikouras crowd the main road to the ocean's edge south of the Clarence river and rise abruptly to over 3,000 metres. Simon Palliser had a love of mountains. ‘Of course Switzerland has been something of a second home to me,' he said. ‘Several times between expeditions I rested at Brunnen on the shores of Lake Luzern. Do you know it? A town of solid, unpretentious houses on a flat strip of land, while beyond it the steep, glaciated slopes descend into the lake like the sides of a fiord. I made a base at the guest-house of the Gotthardt's usually, and from my upstairs room I had a view of the small steamer berths, and the many trees of that part of the town. I remember on one of their election days taking the rack and pinion railway from Brunnen to Axenstein, a high resort with magnificent views across the lake. Because of the elections and the season there were few people travelling, and in my compartment only one other person; a Swedish woman, beautifully dressed, who spoke excellent German. She told me in a gentle, quite unselfconscious way that she had been travelling to overcome her grief at the recent death of her husband, and that her main difficulty was coping with the loss of sexual satisfaction brought about by the abrupt end of her marriage. She had found no opportunity for solace not repugnant to her she said, until seeing me who bore a singular resemblance to her husband.

‘It was all so natural, so kind, so tinged with inevitability. We stood close in the corner of the rack and pinion carriage, with her lovely skirt folded up. Her tears were wet on my cheeks, perhaps I cried myself. She clasped her hands at the small of my back and pulled strongly. Past the blonde hair fastened back from her smooth face, the lake seemed quite calm from such a height and pine forests rose up to the snow line on the mountains above the water. She murmured her husband's name through her tears, I recall. Have you
travelled to Sweden? Sven is a common Christian name there.'

As we drove down the coast close to Kaikoura, Palliser thought he saw a seal on the rocky shore. He was interested because of the heavy swell also, and the scene reminded him of British Columbia. ‘I had a temporary job in conservation there,' he said. ‘I was camped in the magnificently unspoiled Pacific Rim National Park on Vancouver Island. My main task was checking on the sea lions which lived in groups on rocky islets off the coast. On the one day in three or four the swell allowed, I would circle the outcrops in the small boat provided, count the sea lions and record the colour of any tags recognised through the binoculars. Most days I couldn't go out, and I would walk through the stands of Sitka spruce which fringed the beaches, or I would push into the rain forest further inland. The garter snakes would sidle under salmonberry bushes as I approached, and in the cathedral quiet of the rainforest could be heard just the organ music echo of the great Pacific rollers breaking on the first American coast to obstruct them.

‘It was cool rain forest, without many birds, and often difficult to walk through because of the swampy places and fallen trees. Ferns and mosses thrived on the decay, as did puff balls, stallion heads and frilled fungi which added the only vivid colours: visceral gleams of red, yellow and spotted black orange, powdered horns like those of a myriad snails sprouting electric blue from the cancerous side of a log.

‘After storms I would walk the grey sand of the Pacific beach, see the heaped driftwood, whole trees sometimes, and piles of rotting seaweed which were alive with jumpers. Some of the driftwood still had soil and stones in its roots and gum on its branches, other pieces had been fully digested by the sea and were worn and pale like old soap. On one morning I was amazed to see the vast horns of a caribou caught in the cleft of a tree close to the water line. The tips of the tines were four metres apart, and the antlers would make an arch that two men could march through without stooping. I couldn't
dislodge it from the driftwood, and overnight everything was carried away again by the tide and the storm. So are opportunities lost and nothing can be done. I've often thought that the only explanation of such size is that the horns and skull that held them must have been a prehistoric find, carried down to the sea at last from Alaska or the Yukon where some great bull died ten thousand years ago.'

Simon Palliser slept for a while then, his head jogging on his shoulder, and woke when we were coming through Parnassus. I was going to explain the origin of the name for him when we saw a small girl and her doll waiting patiently for the rural delivery man on the grassy roadside by her farm mail box. ‘She reminds me of a child I met once in Mexico,' said Palliser. ‘On my way to Tierra del Fuego I stopped in Mexico and took the opportunity to visit the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza. I drove out from Mérida after a meal of tamale with black beans. Rather than the pyramids and temples it was the sacred well of sacrifice that interested me. A huge, circular limestone opening, and twenty metres down sheer rock walls to water which is twenty metres deep again. Young men and virgins were sacrificed in full finery there. The remnant of the jutting altar can still be seen. Government divers have recently managed to recover gold masks and skulls from the mud.

‘I had my lunch of chocolate and melon by the stones and shadow of the well's lip, and some Indian children squatted around me to beg a share. I could hear the murmur of the visitors and the more assured, single voices of the guides. I could see people clambering up the stepped side of the pyramid. I thought how this setting of absolute tyranny and religious death had become with time a picnic spot and oddity, the stones and pits denied the sacrifice which had given them their significance. When they had eaten my food the children left me, except for one small girl who calculated that I must have something hidden, or that I would tip her for the privilege of being rid of her. She sat by the rim of the well of sacrifice, and childlike twisted her fingers into the cracks of the wall while watching
me intently. All in an instant her fingers drew out a ring of gold with blue amethyst centre, which had lain so long so close to all the people passing. While my mouth was still opening, she rolled the ring once in her fingers as a pebble, and still with her eyes fixed on mine, reached her thin hand over the rim of the well and dropped the jewel to the water and mud far below.

‘She must have seen something in my face then that dismayed her, for she bounced up and skimmed away through the heat of Chichen Itza to join the other urchins. There was nothing I could do, you see, nothing that would bring back such a chance missed.'

I thought the Canterbury plains a good contrast to the landscape earlier in the day, and I told Palliser that the Waimakariri, which was coming up, was one of our major rivers. ‘For me,' he said, ‘the river which has my soul is the Okavango, and I've seen both Niles, the Mekong, Mississippi, Rhine, Ganges, Amazon, Yangtze, Congo, Euphrates, the Don and the Orinoco. The Okavango flows away from the sea into the Kalahari, wonderful incongruity. In ancient times there was a huge lake over most of Botswana, but earthquakes altered the courses of the other rivers which fed it, and now only the Okavango continues spreading over 18,000 kilometres into a million channels and lagoons: the inland estuary of a once inland sea. The great Okavango flows into the sand, holds back the shimmering menace of the desert each year. It's one of the most beautiful and luxuriant places in the world, and protected from the worst of modern encroachment by the tsetse fly and sleeping sickness. I've been drawn back again and again, as perhaps you have yourself. On an early visit I was charged by a tusker while hunting zebra, and had to shoot. The authorities made me pay an excessive elephant licence fee despite my protests that I had acted only in self-defence. The ivory was confiscated, although I kept the tail, and later had an ebony stock fitted to it, making a fly swat.

‘On that visit to the Okavango old Johannes de Wette was still alive, and living on one of the estuary islands in the south.
He was 87 years old and his brother-in-law had captured Winston Churchill during the Boer War. De Wette was one of the true white hunters and we sat overlooking the papyrus beds, listening to the slap of catfish and myungobis, the ugly cries of the malibu stork, while he told me of the old days on the Okavango. They used to make hippo rafts to navigate the swamps by shooting four hippo in the head and sewing their mouths closed. After twelve hours the heat so blew their bellies up that they had the buoyancy of gigantic corks, and were used one at each corner of a log raft. De Wette and his comrades would drift through the channels raised up on hippo carcases as if on a dais. Among the Botswana in those days they were treated like royalty, and de Wette said that a bed of Botswana maidens was provided for the hunters — 18 or 20 girls, their bodies gleaming with fig oil, would lie with arms and legs intertwined to make a couch for the night. De Wette's seamed, Afrikaner face was impassive as he told me, but his deep eyes were wistful as we watched a magnificent white-necked fish eagle plummet from the sky into the deep channels of the Okavango.'