New Australian Stories 2

by Aviva Tuffield

  Sarah led David from the pub. He leaned against her the way he did when he was on the way to being very drunk. In fact, he was just perfectly, amiably, generously drunk, inclined to pause in order to kiss his new wife. He looked at her and felt grateful. He felt an expansion in his brain that he enjoyed — a feeling that finally he had found his life, or was finding it, was on the verge of finding it, although he was still a graduate student and suspected he always would be. He said to himself, ‘This is my youth, at this moment, right now,’ and because he was drunk, he also said it to Sarah.

  The walk home wasn’t far, but they took their time doing it. Sarah felt a sense of urgency about Sheba but couldn’t translate that urgency into hurry. She felt the way she did in those anxious dreams when she was due somewhere important but was unable to find the items she needed to bring with her. They spent whole minutes standing on the side of the road in order to watch a woman move around her lit basement kitchen, ironing.

  As they approached their apartment, David said, ‘You know I’m coming with you,’ and she didn’t argue. They changed their clothes, and it felt to Sarah, briefly, as if it had been David’s suit and her dress that had married each other earlier in the day. David followed her to the car. Before lowering herself into the driver’s seat she shook her head, just a little, as if she might clear it. She didn’t feel drunk.

  It was an old car, friendly but unreliable, that flew with dog hair when the windows were down. It required patience, particularly in the winter; even now, in June, it demonstrated a good-natured reluctance to start. Sarah turned the key; the engine kicked in and then out. David played with the radio to find a good song and when there were no good songs, he turned it low. As if encouraged by this decrescendo, the car cooperated. Cambridge was lit with orange lights. They passed through the city with exaggerated care and were in the country very suddenly, with the lights of airplanes far overhead. England became a long dark road, then, with bright windows visible across wet fields and trees against the sky.

  ‘What’s wrong with this cat?’ said David.

  ‘Urinary tract.’

  ‘I know that. But what’s wrong with it.’

  Sarah grew defensive on behalf of Sheba. ‘He can’t help it.’

  ‘Why call a tomcat Sheba?’

  ‘They let their kid name it,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s the name of a brand of cat food. It uses real cuts of meat rather than by-products.’

  ‘Crazy.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘It’s crazy. It’s like your mum naming your brother Leslie and your dad doing nothing to stop it.’

  ‘It’s a family name. It’s a boy’s name! And I don’t want to think about my mother. Right now I’m pretending she doesn’t exist. I left my phone at home,’ said Sarah. ‘If she calls, I don’t want to tell her we’re married, and I don’t want not to have told her.’

  ‘So just don’t answer.’

  ‘I’d have to answer. I couldn’t not answer. And then — you know.’ She spread her hands in order to indicate her predicament and then quickly placed them back on the steering wheel.

  David lifted in his seat to feel at his back pocket and said, ‘Shit. My phone’s still in my suit.’

  ‘What do you need a phone for, darling? Call all your girlfriends?’

  ‘I’ve given them the night off.’

  She hit at him with her left hand.

  ‘Watch the road!’ he said, laughing.

  She watched the road. ‘My first drive since getting married,’ she said.

  ‘First this, first that,’ he said.

  At this moment, Mr Ronald pulled out of a dark side road and turned directly in front of them. Sarah’s veer to the left met the back corner of his car; trees moved in front of the windscreen, tyres made a long noise against the road; the car jolted over the grass and stones of the verge; they hit a low wooden fence and felt the engine splutter and stall. And as this took place they were aware of something more urgent occurring behind them: the spin of Mr Ronald’s car, its dive into a roadside tree. Sarah and David remained still for a moment and then noticed the way they were both hunched over, preparing for an impact that hadn’t come.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Sarah, looking back down the dim road. The muted lights of tiny Cambridge hung orange at the bottom of the sky behind them. The car radio continued to play.

  ‘You’re all right?’ asked David, but that was obvious. He opened his door and stepped out onto the road. Mr Ronald’s car reminded him of a cartoon dog, excessively punched, whose nose had folded into its face for a brief and hilarious moment before relaxing out again, essentially unhurt. He watched Sarah run towards it and then ran after her. The driver’s door had opened in the crash, and Mr Ronald sat, his legs pinioned, but his right arm rested against the doorframe as if he were about to casually lean out and make a comment on the weather. He wasn’t moving.

  ‘He’s alive,’ said Sarah.

  She kneeled beside the car and held Mr Ronald’s wrist, and when she released it she wiped her fingers against her skirt. David stood by the tree and passed his hand across his face. He felt the air press in around him and he wanted somehow to press it back. Sarah had found Mr Ronald’s wallet on the front passenger seat.

  ‘His whole name is just three first names,’ she said, inspecting his licence. ‘Ralph Walter Ronald. He’s seventy-six.’

  Sarah looked at Mr Ronald reverently, acknowledging his age and misfortune. She felt that his awkward name had lifted him out of a past time in which she played no part and deposited him here, in his crushed car.

  ‘Which way to the nearest house?’ asked David.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Forward or back?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘This is your drive to work. You drive this way almost every day.’

  ‘It’s dark. I haven’t been paying attention.’

  ‘All right, all right. Should I try the car? Otherwise I’ll have to walk for help. It seems like ages since we saw a house.’

  ‘Nothing in England is ever very far apart.’

  ‘Maybe I should cross the fields. Do you see lights to the left?’

  ‘I don’t see anything.’

  It began to rain, very lightly. The rain seemed to rise out of the ground and lift up into their faces, a cheerful mist.

  ‘All right, try the car, quickly,’ said Sarah. ‘I’ll sit with him. His car won’t blow up, will it? Or is that just in movies?’

  ‘It would have blown up by now. Right?’

  They stood helpless in their combined ignorance, considering Mr Ronald’s car and Mr Ronald trapped within it. The passenger’s seat was whole and healthy, although the accordion-fold of the front of the car left almost no leg room. Sarah brushed glass from the seat and slid in beside Mr Ronald, tucking her legs beneath her.

  David pulled himself away from the tree with great effort and crossed to the car with mid-city caution. It wouldn’t start; it would never start when he was late for a seminar or a critical train; it required tender solicitations after particularly steep hills. Of course it wouldn’t start now, when his need was desperate. Perhaps it was finally beyond repair — and then there would be the panic of finding money for a new car. David tried again. It wouldn’t start and wouldn’t start. He ran back to Sarah.

  ‘No good,’ he said. ‘Fuck it. I’ll run. I’m sure I’ll find someone. Another car.’

  ‘Go forward, not back,’ said Sarah. ‘Keep following the road forward. I think there’s a service station. God, I have no idea of distances on foot.’

  ‘Baby,’ David said, leaning farther into the car. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It was his fucking fault. But, darling, I’m a little drunk.’

  She watched him comprehend this. He was drunker than she was. His eyes filled briefly. There was a scar above his right eye, half hidden in the eyebrow, left over from childhood chickenpox. He often walked through their apartment on his toes, adding to
his height, bending down over her as she lay on the couch. He would put his head on her stomach and look up at her face, and when he did this he reminded her of an ostrich. This is how he looked at her now.

  ‘I’ll be back soon,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be all right. I love you. Don’t be scared.’

  He bent down to kiss her, bent his long, beautiful bird neck, and then began to run. Sarah was amazed at how quickly he vanished into the vanishing light. She looked at Mr Ronald. He wore corduroy trousers and a neat shirt, a woollen vest, and bulky glasses over thick eyebrows. He lay with his head thrown back and to the side, facing Sarah, and his facial expression was bemused and acquiescing. She felt again at his wrist. His legs were caught up with the buckled car, and it was impossible to tell what damage had been done. She sat on her side, looking into his face, and felt the faint breath that hung around his mouth. It smelled like a doctor’s waiting room: just-extinguished cigarettes and a human smell rising up through disinfectant. She heard David try the car again, and she heard the car fail. Then his footsteps on the road, and then nothing. Sarah felt loneliness fall over her quickly; and fear.

  ‘The Queen of Sheba,’ she said.

  (Sheba paused in his tiger-walk, his head lifted towards the surgery door, waiting. No one came through the door, and he dropped his head again, letting out a low small sound that startled the macaws opposite into frantic cries.)

  Sarah was married and no one knew but herself and David, Peter and Clare. Her mother didn’t know. She wondered now about the secrecy — how childish it seemed. They only wanted privacy. They wanted a visa for Sarah, to match David’s student visa, and they didn’t want to bother about the fuss that went with weddings. The last of the vodka wound itself up against the side of Sarah’s head that tilted against the seat; it hung there in a vapour. Mr Ronald’s burned breath came in little gusts up against her face. Was he breathing more, or less?

  Sarah pulled the door as far as it would go behind her in order to feel safe, and to guard against the slight chill in the wind. This was summer, she thought. You waited for it all year, shoulders pushed up against the cold and the dark, and this was your gift: the sun and the bells, the smoke over Jesus Green, geese on the river. A midday wedding. A cat’s catheter, and Mr Ronald by the side of the road.

  Mr Ronald’s eyes opened, and Sarah pulled back from his face. They studied each other. His eyes were yellow at the edges. They were clever and lucid. They looked at Sarah with calm acceptance; they looked at the windscreen, shattered but half in place, and at the proximity of the tree.

  ‘I’ve had an accident,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, you have. How do you feel? Stay still,’ said Sarah. She felt composed. Everything she did felt smooth and immediate.

  ‘I’m all here,’ said Mr Ronald. ‘Everything’s attached, at least.’ He gave a small laugh. ‘It happened so fast, as they say. I see I’ve hit the tree.’ He said the tree as if there were only one tree in the whole country; as if he had always known he would hit it.

  ‘Good of you to stop,’ he said.

  ‘Of course!’ cried Sarah.

  ‘Plenty wouldn’t. Decent of you. I don’t suppose he even thought for a minute about stopping.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Sarah. She looked into the back of the car in panic, as if there might be someone else crushed inside.

  ‘The lout who swiped me.’

  Sarah remained quiet. Then she said, ‘My husband’s gone to find help.’

  She had been waiting to use this phrase: my husband. Her first time.

  ‘Ah,’ said Mr Ronald. ‘I don’t suppose you happen to be a doctor. That would be convenient.’

  ‘Not a human doctor,’ said Sarah. ‘An animal doctor, though.’

  ‘My leg, you see. I think it should hurt, but at this moment it doesn’t.’

  ‘You’re probably in shock.’

  ‘You’re not British, are you. Antipodean.’

  ‘Australian.’

  ‘I thought so, but didn’t venture it. For the first few sentences you might just as well be a New Zealander.’

  He pronounced it New Zellander. Sarah found this charming.

  ‘No, no!’ she protested. ‘We sound completely different.’ She demonstrated the difference: ‘Fish and chips,’ she said. ‘That’s us.’ And then, ‘This is a Kiwi: fush and chups.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Mr Ronald. ‘No one speaks that way at all.’

  Sarah felt chastised. She didn’t resent it — there was something so pleasantly authoritarian about Mr Ronald, who seemed to her like a school principal driving home from church, or the father of a boyfriend, to whom she must be polite at all costs.

  ‘A veterinarian,’ said Mr Ronald. ‘Dogs and cats.’

  ‘Actually I specialise,’ said Sarah. ‘Exotic animal medicine. But dogs and cats too, sometimes. Mostly for friends.’

  ‘What counts as exotic these days?’ asked Mr Ronald. She could see that he was keeping himself occupied as he moved his right hand slowly over his chest and towards his legs, testing for pain and damage.

  ‘Chinchillas,’ said Sarah. ‘Ferrets. Hermit crabs. Monkeys.’

  ‘Monkeys?’ said Mr Ronald. ‘Good god. Does anyone in England actually own a monkey?’

  ‘You’d be surprised.’

  ‘And is it legal?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is.’

  ‘And people will bother to spend thousands of pounds curing a hermit crab?’

  ‘People become very attached to their pets,’ said Sarah. She had defended her clients on this subject before, at parties and college dinners, and whenever she did she saw them all in the surgery waiting room, bundled against cold and worry, holding cages and carriers and shoeboxes with holes punched in them.

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Mr Ronald, and he mused on this for a moment. ‘Dogs I understand, and cats too, in their own way. I grew up with a bull-mastiff. He could knock me down until I was eleven, and then I could knock him back. Once ate the leg off a rabbit.’

  The bull-mastiff walked through Sarah’s mind, eyeing her with care. Hip dysplasia, thought Sarah. Hypothyroidism. A heavy dog. Need help lifting it.

  ‘And you’ve treated a monkey yourself? You seem very young.’

  ‘A capuchin once, yes, with a broken leg.’

  This mention of a broken leg seemed to remind Mr Ronald of his situation. His face altered, suddenly, in pain.

  ‘Do you feel it now?’ asked Sarah. The skin whitened around his mouth and he let out a sound that reminded her of a tiger she had seen on television once, whose roar sounded like a long and drawn-out ow.

  ‘It won’t be long,’ she said. ‘My husband will be back soon.’

  She looked out of the window. The road was dark in both directions and overshadowed with trees. There were dark shapes in the trees that looked like small monkeys, escaped from backyard sheds all over England, swarming with their rotten teeth and cataracts.

  Mr Ronald seemed to have recovered from the attack of pain and now lay back against the seat and breathed quietly. His head appeared larger than most people’s. This gave it a resilient look, although it reminded Sarah of a puppet. There was a band of sweat across his forehead. Without thinking, she placed her fingers on his wrist in order to measure out his heartbeat. It was steady now, and slow. She kept her hand where it was despite feeling revolted by the dampness of his old skin. They sat together listening for cars. Someone will come in this minute, thought Sarah; but the minute passed.

  ‘A capuchin, you say,’ said Mr Ronald. ‘A kind of monk, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, a monk, yes, I think. But also a kind of monkey.’

  ‘I once saw an orangutan in the Berlin Zoo painting on the wall with a dish brush. Looked just like my wife cleaning the shower. But here Douglas is against primate testing. I can’t go in for that. Douglas calls me species-ist.’ Sarah decided not to ask who Douglas was. ‘If they cure Parkinson’s then it’s worth those gorillas, I think. Not a popular stance, I’m told. I
myself can’t stand vegetarians.’

  ‘I’m a vegetarian,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Well, in the abstract. It makes sense for someone like you. A veterinarian. Why heal them and then eat them? But I always say vegetarians ought to eat meat when it’s served to them. Imagine being a guest in someone’s home and turning down food that’s offered.’

  This reminded Sarah of her own grandfather: perplexed and indignant in the midst of his self-imposed wartime privations, carried on unendingly and with pride. Food might run out — eat what you’re given. Life might be lost — don’t mind the monkeys.

  Sarah liked to argue on this topic, calmly maintaining her position, but in this case she would not.

  ‘Oh, but I’m sure you’re a charming guest,’ said Mr Ronald. ‘And here you are, helping an old man in distress.’ He chuckled and the pain came again, stronger this time. It lifted him from the seat a little, and this lifting caused more pain. He shut his eyes against it.

  Sarah waited for this to pass, as it had the last time, and when he was quiet she asked, ‘What can I do? Anything? Is it your legs?’

  He laughed again, sucking in his cigarette breath, and moved his wrist away from her hand. The rain grew heavier and the trees on the road began to move their monkey arms, high above the fields. The fields grew damp and gave up their deeper smells of night mice and manure. No cars passed by. Sarah worried about David in the rain. He couldn’t have been gone for longer than ten minutes, she reasoned; perhaps fifteen. She wondered briefly if the woman was still ironing in her house.

  She asked again, ‘How are your legs?’

  ‘Funny,’ said Mr Ronald, and his breath was shorter now. It left his throat unwillingly. ‘Funny, but one of them’s not even a leg. Left leg, below the knee. Plastic.’

  Sarah imagined him at other times, rapping his fingers against the plastic of his leg, knocking it through his neat trousers while chatting on a bus. The war, she thought, he must have lost it in the war; she saw him and other men running over a French field. Poppies blew in the grass, and he was a young man, strong of limb, and the sea was behind them all as they ran.