She ran along the tilted shelf of rock and next thing, so those on the beach said to the TV interviewer half an hour later, she simply threw herself into the maelstrom, as it certainly appeared to a non-swimmer’s eye like mine when shown on the screen as background to the story. A woman said it was like watching a seal. My wife was there with one man across her shoulder, whom she slapped down on the levelled rock, and was back to the bobbing head of the other man. This time she shunted the almost unconscious Asian ahead of her, rose with him at the lift of the surf, and had him still ahead of her when the force of the wave dumped them out of harm’s way. The woman said she once saw a seal at Marineland in Napier nosing a log in front of it with curious grace. That was how my wife had struck her as she brought the second Asian ashore, and saved a second life for the afternoon. She had bent over with her two fists on her knees for half a minute, then walked along the beach in her underwear, picked up her white shoes, and accepted a beach towel that was offered her while her bird-watching friend ran up to her with the yellow frock she had discarded before running out along the shelf of rock. She would not be interviewed and for a time tried to conceal her name, which helped make her not only a heroine but a heroine of the kind journalists cannot resist.
Gibbons read her name and made the connection. That is when there was a shift again in what no longer seemed our merely professional relations. He became like a boy in his admiration for her. He asked me questions about her that had little to do with what he was being paid to pursue on my behalf. I noticed when I called at his chambers and he tugged on the green tape that held my file, how its depth was added to by the clippings about my wife. These were placed on top of his earlier notes, and the documents regarding property, portfolios, proofs of ownership, etc. Within a fortnight there was a separate folder for what he had cut out, or I suppose had his office manager clip out for him.
It’s a curious thing to feel oneself diminished by what after all had no part in one’s own life, a drama on a beach that a month after it occurs is of interest to few people, surely, apart from those directly involved. Yet I began to feel that in some way I was responsible for what Gibbons simply would not let alone. To him it was an aspect of the marriage I was anxious to be plucked from. He asked more than once did I consider the breakdown of relations irreversible. ‘Irrecoverable,’ I corrected him. ‘Yes, I do.’ He asked about holidays we had taken, an excuse to discuss her tastes in music, paintings, books. I told him she had little interest in any of these things, which seemed to please him more than to disappoint. We spoke of various jobs she had over the years, none of them particularly demanding and none of them, so far as I could see, to the point of what divorce entails. Yet he still took notes in largish, immature writing that I thought said little for the school he had attended and liked to refer to, as South Islanders are prone to do. The irritation I found in all this was not to do with how these diversions would be reflected in his fees, or with what a friend of mine said was his bloody impertinence in the first place, but in the way it set off little detonations as it were in my memory. These brought back scenes and events I had forgotten, for they had hardly carried much significance when they occurred. An Old Boys’ dinner where the head boy from my time, who finished up running a retail clothing outlet in Kaitaia, made a fool of himself spilling a glass of wine over my wife’s evening frock; the time we were at Lake Como when she said she would rather spend the evening in an Irish bar than a ristorante I had found in the Blue Guide; or in Amsterdam—this was our honeymoon too—when I said quite firmly in a club we had chanced on and expected to be merely risqué, ‘That’s as much as I want to see. As I want either of us to see.’ I mention these but there are others that have drifted back, risen up, however you want to phrase it. But they are back, that is the point, back as if they matter, which they do not.
‘Memories are often a parody of what once occurred.’ I said this to Gibbons late one afternoon when for the first time he eased open the door to a small cabinet whose metal handles were a stylised regimental insignia. ‘No longer exists, of course,’ he said, when he saw my looking at the meaningless intricate pattern. ‘Gone like the rest of them. Black Watch. Countess of Ranfurly’s Own.’ I thought the man is either having me on, or is mildly insane. He said, ‘There’s that other row of them you might have spotted in that cabinet when you came in.’
He was busy for a moment with the clinking of glasses, the movement of bottles.
Without turning to me he offered, ‘Mother’s ruin?’
‘Whatever,’ I told him. He leaned down to eye the level he had poured in two glasses. There was the soft explosive puff as he unscrewed the top from the tonic water. There were even little slices of lemon on a saucer, prepared for the event. I had no desire to socialise, yet he had done me a favour, waiting back to see me at the end of a long afternoon. He said as he handed me one of the glasses, that he had read my wife was good at tennis too.
‘Too?’
‘All-rounder. Good at sport.’
‘We met through tennis,’ I said. ‘On a court in Ponsonby that is no longer there.’
‘Ah!’ he said, and added something in Latin that I didn’t understand. The tennis court was owned by a church although anyone could play there when club members were not requiring it. She was coming out of a marriage and so was I. We laughed a lot at the start. She reminded me of someone I had a crush on at primary school who wore green satin bows at the end of long blond plaits. Not that she was blond. It was the cast of her expression. Eyes slightly tilted, feline, which is always sexy. She liked it and laughed when I told her that. We were quite successful at doubles. We won a small tournament at West End Road, which was a club I had always feared. We went to Stanley Street together to watch the occasional big game. ‘Brought you out of yourself,’ my sister said about her, as though I needed to be coaxed from a cage. Her sister liked me because I didn’t drive a Ford and lived in Parnell. Does that tell you something?
Gibbons nattered on. He was disappointed that I failed to thaw after he broke the ice confiding about his badges, his toys. He shook hands as he did after each of our meetings, and in the long run settled matters reasonably. Justly, perhaps I should have said, which is the least one expects. But that business about life flashing before one, which not surprisingly has been in mind since my wife became famous plucking Asians from out of their depth, has taken a turn which has me standing in front of a department-store window as I loved to do when I was a child in Wellington. The great event of December was to press at the windows of Kirkcaldie & Stains and see the tiny mechanical figures move up and down ladders, popping heads around corners, rolling sheets of dough in their miniature bakery, or loading a truck with bags smaller than the scented sachets my mother put between the clothes in our drawers. I am at windows like that in a dream that has become almost regular. (I want to avoid the word ‘recurrent’.) There is this odd aspect to it though, which embroiders mere memory. I stand still and the windows roll past, as if they are the windows of a train, and I see in each as they flash past these versions of myself, my life, in a display which I know is rather good-humouredly droll. There we are, my wife and I, sitting in the Amsterdam club, my arm rising and falling with a tiny frothing glass, and two unclothed puppets jigging on the stage; our stiff-armed slashing with little racquets either side of a stretched cotton net; standing together on a cliff at Makara, staring down as indeed we did, at the dark sliver of a shark cruising transparent water two hundred feet beneath us. Life with its tiresome wonders—there is no reason to think they will ever run out.
What surprises me in one of the passing windows is not the jerky little version of ourselves that is there in all the others, but a recollection of us that is as clear and convincing as that strip of sunlight when the courier’s door slides across, and then slams hard as he pulls it forward. As if ‘in real life’, as we say, there is the calendar on the kitchen wall above the farmhouse table in the house we shared for the good years, the middle yea
rs, the year or so when things fell apart. It is a calendar from that last year, with a spectacular scenic picture for each month. The days of the final month were a grid of squares beneath a view of the Ida Valley, the great range behind the valley forbidding but not frightening, shadowed and austere late on a summer’s evening. The squares were big enough for one to write in appointments, names and telephone numbers, the titles of television programmes not to be missed, birthdays of importance. In that last month of the year my wife’s quirky humour had entered a cross that filled each square, X X X, like so. A cross lightly marked in pencil. Then each day she would rub out the cross from the day before, so as the month progressed, the calendar appeared the cleaner, and more empty. At the end of the month it looked as though it had not begun. That was her sense of humour. A month lived, and yet when you looked at it, it was as though it had never been, a month unruffled as the harbour that time of year, as the harbour we looked down on each morning.
JOSIE
Sometimes when Josie wakes in the early hours, when thoughts can become so tangled, she finds herself thinking, without in the least wanting to, of an old-fashioned theatre she was taken to as a little girl, at Christmas it must have been, because there was a scene she remembers of people in the play holding glasses and singing a carol, and the audience joining in and singing it too. She is standing up there against the tall folded-back curtains that smell musty from being so old. She is standing where everything in the world is pure darkness apart from the light she is standing in, like a bright cloak that seems to fall on her and shines across her shoulders and becomes a brilliant circle at her feet. Sometimes she is herself and at other times there are lines she needs to say that make her someone else, but it doesn’t bother her if she fails to say them. There is such a sense of the whole theatre holding its breath; she knows they are there although she sees nothing outside the bright light. And then she is really awake, and she sees the shape of things rising up at her from the half-dark, and Tigger has jumped down from the bed, which must have been what woke her. Then it all drifts away from her mind completely, until the next time, as though in between it may as well have been in someone else’s mind as in her own.
Robbie sits across the table from her at breakfast, the Herald slapped down and folded, then folded and slapped again, to a quarter of its size and thick as a magazine. He reads out bits he thinks she should know about, or that he holds opinions on. ‘Bastards,’ he would say, about paedophiles and people who showed off, about politicians who were paid would you believe it to talk the arsewipe they do, about Australians who played any kind of sport. Sometimes he would repeat it. ‘Bastards if you ask me.’
Robbie had retired with ill grace, even though he had worked for two years longer than he should have because twenty years before, at the desk in the foreman’s office, he had put the date of his birth back two years. He had told Josie and when she asked him why he said, ‘You never know with pricks like that.’ In those last two years he often reminded her, ‘We’d be in it now all right, if I hadn’t thought ahead.’ He meant they would be living on only what their pensions brought in. ‘No more living it up,’ he liked to joke. ‘No more razzmatazz.’
‘Most people don’t even know what that means,’ Josie said.
‘Ignorant buggers then, aren’t they?’ he said. He liked to remind her how many times did you hear it, blokes counting the days until they retired, couldn’t come a day too soon, then carking it quick as look at you. Robbie snapped his fingers and Josie always thought of the way the tellers counting out notes at the bank used to snap the notes. She hadn’t seen that for ages, though; perhaps these days they were told not to. ‘Like that,’ he said again. He laughs when he says that, a quick bark, his chin lifted slightly. He looks younger for a second. Sometimes the same kind of laugh goes on. There was a word Josie knew she knew but couldn’t think of, then one day it just came to her. Baying, that was it. Robbie was baying when he thought of those bastards dreaming they were in for a sweet time and then, bang, quick as that.
Later in the morning, now the days were his own, he liked to walk to the supermarket. You wouldn’t credit it, he’d say, the way some of those fat-arsed ones down there pile their trollies like tomorrow’s the last day. Just throw themselves in front of you as if it’s a zoo and they won’t be fed again for a week. Done up to the nines some of them too, the sluts.
‘I’ve never seen them like that,’ Josie said, and Robbie told her, ‘Must be in a different supermarket then, mustn’t you?’ When he walked down he liked to take the longer way getting there, following the seawall with its iron railing, crossing the road past what used to be a church but is now a coffee shop painted lemon enough he says to make you puke, and then doubles back on the war memorial. Robbie thought, those poor deluded mutts. He picked up his pace as he walked opposite the bowling green where he had gone for years then suddenly knocked off attending, the new crowd he called them, yapping and yawping like it wasn’t a game to take seriously, school kids would have shown more respect. He passed a couple sometimes, a Filipino wife by the look of her, must have spent her life ironing and carrying on, both of them done up in whites so dazzling you’d think they were waiting for some bugger to put them in an advertisement. Just looking at them made him think of those countries where one mosque was beating shit out of another mosque but at least, he always thought when he watched them on telly, at least they were spotless, the long white clobber they wore before the knuckle started after Friday prayers. But it was nice to see people getting on with life all the same. The Filipino would have been a looker in her day, he’d say that about her.
‘Morning,’ Robbie would sometimes say to people he didn’t know but looked as if they were caring mothers who’d no more shake their children in home abuse like half of Ngaruawahia bloody seemed to, you could tell by looking at them, the caring ones. ‘Morning,’ he’d say when the impulse took him. He touched the brim of his panama as his father had done—only with him, with the old man, it was practically to everyone, he’d have no more known a bastard from the Prime Minister. Then it came home to him that people just didn’t do that these days so he stopped doing it, this finger on the brim palaver.
There were often young blokes hanging round the park before you came to the supermarket so Robbie crossed the road before he came to them. Sometimes he spoke to the Islanders who stood behind a stall near the monument but other times he didn’t, depending how he felt. At least they brightened the street up. There was a woman there some days with a big pink flower slipped behind her ear and tits deep enough if you dropped a coin there you’d have to send a diver down to get it back. ‘Morning,’ he would say, but with her he always touched his hat and the woman smiled back at him, you felt the better for passing her, although of course you never know. Her husband or whatever was this muscly joker who said bugger-all. His arms when he moved the crates of fruit round looked like they had tennis balls stuffed under the skin.
Josie said to her friend who had run a newsagent’s shop until her back got the better of her, ‘Sometimes I worry that he mopes. He says he doesn’t but I still worry.’ When Molly asked her had he had a check-up lately Josie assured her it was nothing like that, thank God. ‘Just half-pie angry half the time. I’ve just about thought we shouldn’t watch the news at all, so much of it upsets him. Even the things he calls the weather girl. Reckons her wearing a wedding ring doesn’t take him in. “You can tell,” he says, “you can tell just by looking at her.”’
‘As long as you can still laugh about it,’ her friend says.
Josie tells her, ‘I say, why not watch the other channel then? It’s the same weather and you won’t have to look at her.’ She and her friend laugh and are at ease together. ‘There’s so much not to grouse about,’ Josie says.
‘A hard thing to get across, though,’ Molly says, ‘if it’s not your nature.’
Then they talked of the new people who had taken over the shop, two youngish women who were nice enough, y
ou had to give them the benefit of the doubt for a while, but you’d never say gracious, would you, that’s one word that wouldn’t occur to you.
Molly said, ‘I think they’re going for a different kind of customer, frankly. Different magazines. Cellophane wrappers half of them, so ask yourself. Some of the older customers say you might as well not be there half the time the way they look through you.’ And after a pause, Molly gives one of her comic winks. ‘Two single women. I never said a thing.’
Josie said anyway she just hoped she hadn’t been that offhand with people when she was younger, but of course how do you ever know? She remembered how her own dad’s deafness had driven her up the wall, she knew now how hurt he must have been because he just didn’t bother much in his last year or so. Nodded if he thought she wanted him to nod, that was about the size of it.
‘He mightn’t have known,’ Molly said. ‘We’re inclined to blame ourselves looking back.’
Josie shook her head. ‘No one’s ever as stupid as you think they are.’ A nun she had not much liked at school had told them that, saying it so quietly as the class turned to the big sash windows you could raise or lower only by catching the tip of a pole in a metal ring. They were looking out at the limping, backward man who kept the school grounds neat. Josie had given him a barley sugar the next day when she passed him. He looked at her with the bluest eyes but said nothing as he turned the orange lolly in his hand, then put it in his shirt pocket for later, he said, for after he finished the lawns. He told her, ‘I don’t eat when I work.’ It took him most of the afternoon, pushing the thin mower that purred as it went forward, throwing out an arc of grass that stuck to his boots and his tucked-in trousers. Odd how she remembered that, about the scraps of grass sticking to his legs when so much else about school she had forgotten years back, and the lolly lying in his opened palm like a little orange crate. His name was Les. Sometimes kids said he had been in an accident and others said he was like that since he was born; he looked nice but you knew as soon as you got close to him there was something wrong. He looked as if everything came as a surprise to him. Sister Xavier’s words had stayed with her. And that other time when Juliet Connor who got a scholarship to St Mary’s tried to push her off the Westmere tram.
The Families Page 6