The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories (51 page)

But this was an image I would not lose. It would always be available for reference. There are some pictures you carry in your head.

Like places, perhaps.

I breathed deeply, smelling the sultry air, heavy with the fragrance of damp honeysuckle and citrus leaves, and walked on.

W
HEN
S
HIRLEY HEARS
L
ARRY
putting out the Chinese Checkers she knows he is trying to keep her home for a while longer. They make a plastic tinkle as they fall round in the box. Last time they played she shoved them back any old way. He says she should always put them back in the holes so they're ready for the next game. He complains that the Monopoly money is not put back in the right denominations.

‘Want to be purple or yellow?' he calls, as if it's all set that they will play.

‘Neither,' says Shirley, steeling herself. This is what the counsellors have told her, she must have some life of her own. Sometimes, they said, she would feel as if she was being hard, but it was better for Larry in the long run. She wouldn't be any good to him if she didn't stand up for herself and have time out. Larry has a terminal illness, heart disease, that the doctors can't do
anything
more about. He has had two failed bypasses. It's only a matter of time, but nobody can tell her how much.

He sees
that she is wearing her uniform for work at the hotel, a
peach-pink
overall dress with floral print pockets. She is a solid, meaty woman with delicate hands and fingernails covered with clear nail polish, which shows off her fine white cuticles. Her seal-brown hair is piled up in a floppy bun on top of her head.

‘You don't have to be at work for another hour and a half,' he says.

‘I told you I might call in on Trina.'

He has already put the yellow pegs in their holes. His lower lip trembles. Shirley turns away. She can't bear to see him like this. None of it seems fair. Larry is fifty-four and hasn't a hint of grey amongst his thick crinkly hair; its crest looks hard-edged, like he used to be, before this, before his illness. His fisherman's eyes are still piercingly bright. It's his cheeks that give his condition away, every capillary shining through the paleness of his skin, like a biology textbook with sections of people revealed without the epidermis.

‘Meeting Victor, are we?'

‘Don't be stupid,' says Shirley.

‘Oh, stupid now, is it?' He continues to put pegs in the holes. He is filling in the whole board, so Shirley guesses he will play all six corners at once. There's really no point in her playing him. He can thread the lines for zig-zag jumping before she can vacate her corner.

‘He went out half an hour ago. It would give you plenty of time. Where would you meet him? Out at the quarry? Should be quiet there this afternoon.'

‘It's Sunday, there'll be people walking round to Red Rocks.'

‘Oh, pardon me, have you somewhere else planned? Sunday, eh? That makes it harder. What about the town belt? Some good tracks around there.'

‘I'm not meeting Victor.'

‘But you used to.'

‘When I was sixteen. Thirty-five years ago.'

‘So why did he come back here to live? He'll marry you when I'm gone.'

‘Will he really? And what would Ursula have to say about that?'

‘She won't have any say. He'll dump her, like his last two wives.'

‘That's his business.'

‘Because he was hanging out for you. Just waiting for when you'd be free again.'

Bevis, their boxer, looks from one to another with hopeful wistful eyes. Larry has recently had to give up even the pretence of walking him, he gets too short of breath. The last time he walked Bevis they got as far as the corner dairy and he had to ask the woman to ring Shirley to come and collect him in the car. They live on a hill. In the early days of his illness they saw that as a good thing, walking up this hill to keep him healthy. Now he talks about shifting to a flat property where it would be easier for him to walk, easier to breathe.

But that's not what it's about. Larry knows his days are numbered. He doesn't expect to live anywhere else but here on the hill where he can see the water shining in the mornings, the big sea that he used to ride through southerlies and swell, or on clear days when you could see the fish running and the sun shone in peaks on the waves all around him. There isn't time to go anywhere else.

It is Victor Ross who causes him so much grief, now when death is reaching out to squeeze him by the throat. Victor, who courted Shirley when they were in high school. No, it wasn't like that, they courted each other, she told Larry once. This was when they lived in Napier, and he fished out of there, a man with hard muscles and a quick tongue. Larry had met Shirley in a bar one night, not long after her first marriage broke up, and he was a widower.
They told their life stories to each other the same night when they were not exactly drunk but not quite sober either. They walked down the Parade past cheap hotels and on and on past railway cottages, smelled the yellow sulphur mountain that gleamed unearthly green-yellow in the moonlight, outside the chemicals factory.

‘I see the moon,' sang Larry.

‘God bless the moon,' Shirley sang back.

‘My first love,' she told him, ‘a boy called Victor; I'll never forget him. The boy next door, can you believe, his mother didn't approve of me. “My Victor will go to uni,” as if it were written in the stars. “You're a tart, Shirl,” she said when she caught us at it. Me, I'd never had another boy in my life, never looked at one, it was always Victor, Victor from when I was a little kid, the boy I was going to marry. His father was an accountant and mine worked for the Council. I married on the rebound after they shipped him off for his world tour. Sour face, his mother was, looked as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, those pretty pansy-round eyes that say holier than thou. God was good to me, giving me an accountant, she said once to my mother when they were at the shops. Well, I hear she's dead now, and God knows where Victor is, though my mother says he's doing well. As you'd expect.'

Then Larry said, ‘You've got me now.'

‘You're joking,' Shirley said.

But he wasn't, and they've had twenty years, and that's enough to classify as a long and happy life, Shirley thinks. Which was not to say the first years were easy. They lived in his house with the ghost of his first wife, and all the relatives who lived round about took their time getting to know her. Then her mother died and left her and Trina the house in Wellington, and when she said to Larry, let's go and make a new life, let's start over, Trina sold out her half of the house to Shirley, and Larry fished Cook Strait with the Italians, and did just as well as he'd done up north.

‘It wasn't a new life, at all,' said Larry, after Victor moved back. It had happened out of the blue, just a year ago. The house across the road where Victor lived as a boy came up for sale, and the next thing they knew, Victor and Ursula had moved in.

‘Mrs Ross would die if she could see those decks Victor's putting in,' said Shirley, when first he began to renovate. It fascinated her the way he was transforming the old place. At the weekends he changed from neat blue suits into checked shirts and a little peaked hat with a flap at the back to keep the sun off his neck while he worked. He had become a tall solid man with a moustache. They hadn't said more than a couple of hullos since the first surprised acknowledgement of each other's presence, but she couldn't take
her eyes off what was going on. Then Larry said the stuff about it not being a new life, it never was, and they knew already he hadn't got long to go, and Shirley stopped watching. She doesn't see how Larry can believe that that old habit of love has persisted into her adult life. She wishes she had never told him about Victor, but it's too late.

Now Larry does all the watching for her. Their section slopes away from the house, a twenties bungalow with bay windows, not all that different from Victor's house. Only the road divides them.

‘At least we're above them, he can't sneak off without me seeing him,' Larry says. ‘It's certainly something to be above.'

‘For every up there's a down. We're someone else's downside, so don't get too smart,' said Shirley, and left him to it.

‘I'm sick of this place looking like Ah Loo's laundry,' says Trina, shifting napkins around in front of the heater. ‘This is a helluva time for the clothes drier to pack it in.' It's hard to believe Trina's a grandmother. Her daughter Radinka is home for a week with her baby. Trina is scared she's going to be left with the baby. ‘I wasn't that shit hot in the motherhood stakes,' she tells Shirley, as if Shirley didn't remember. But Radinka is gorgeous, the daughter of an all-in wrestler from a programme they all used to watch on television. He had a huge stomach and a bald head with stripes in the flesh as if he'd been scarred with a meat cleaver. Radinka is eighteen and looks like a brown panther model when she's not pregnant. Her body is sleek and sways as she walks, and she has a braid of dark hair down to her waist. Radinka's not in, which is a disappointment. The main purpose of Shirley's visit was to see her niece and the new baby. Shirley envies Trina her daughter; she and Larry have three sons between them, one of his and two of hers. His son, and one of hers, are on the ferries; the third one, well don't ask, she says when anybody does, and it grieves her that she doesn't know his exact whereabouts, he doesn't write from where he is, but he'll turn up when he's done his stretch. It wasn't serious, she tells herself, just burglary, nothing aggravated.

‘If only someone could tell me how much time Larry has got left,' Shirley says.

Trina glances at her, her eyes shrewd, and lets her go on.

‘Three months, three years, I could get my head around it if I knew'

‘You want to take a Lucky Dip,' says Trina, matter of fact. Trina works in the Lotto shop nowadays. She blows up balloons with a little hand pump for the promotions, and wears funny hats when she's working behind the counter. She says ‘good luck' every time she hands over a ticket, no matter how long the queue is, and sometimes she says to her regulars, ‘I'll have one on you if
you win, love,' and when anyone wins bigger than fourth division she says ‘Congratulations!' in a big loud voice, so that people will come flocking over to see for themselves that people really do win prizes.

‘What good's a Lucky Dip going to do me?' asks Shirley.

‘Heaps if you won. Something to look forward to at least.'

‘You think I'm looking forward to him dying?'

‘I didn't say that.'

‘Maybe he is, perhaps he's had enough.' Shirley feels hard tears like peas under her eyelids, and turns away so that Trina won't see. Lately, she's been talking herself into believing this, because it makes her feel better about the way she's had enough. But she can see that it's a falsehood, Larry doesn't want to die, not for as long as she is there to play games with him and look at the sea. The phone rings as Trina is putting on the kettle for a cup of instant coffee. It's Larry, asking for Shirley. As soon as Trina says she'll pass her over right away Larry seems to lose interest. When Shirley comes to the phone, he says he had forgotten where she put last night's paper but he's just seen it sticking out from under the couch.

‘That was an excuse to ring me,' says Shirley as she replaces the receiver. Her hands are trembling so much she can hardly pick up her coffee. ‘He's always checking up on me.'

‘So how is Vic the Dick?'

‘You see, you're like Larry,' cries Shirley, exasperated. ‘He's always on about Victor.'

‘Well, Victor was a dickhead,' Trina says. ‘D'you remember how his mother used to check his lunchbox to see if he'd eaten all his lunch? When he was twelve, for crying out loud?'

‘He was just a kid. He grew up. He played fantastic soccer.'

‘As long as he didn't get his clothes muddy. He used to say he had a cold when it was raining.'

‘He made the school team.'

‘Yeah. He used to leave you love letters under the soap when he came to visit. Now that
was
wet. Step into the shower, swoosh swoosh, pick up the soap, scratch scratch, paper in the armpits, purple ink, roses are red violets are blue, give me a clue, Shirley, when will you say I do?'

‘Shut up. He never did.'

‘So why did he come back?'

‘Ask him. Call by and ask him. He might show you the renovations.'

‘Loaded, is he?'

Shirley shrugs. ‘Probably. He's got a Rover.'

‘Shit, little Victor. I wonder where he got the money from. A couple won
first division from our shop the other day, did I tell you? One and a half million dollars. They think I don't know who they are, but I do. You can tell by the shifty look they give when they walk past the shop. Smirky little smiles, and noses in the air to let you know they don't need to come in any more. They never missed a week before.'

‘Did they deserve it?'