Etiquette for a Dinner Party

by Sue Orr

  4

  He has no choice but to sell the land. The money is needed for other things. He cannot always remember what they are, the other things.

  5

  The three men who have come to buy the land are not the new owners. The new owner lives overseas. The three men are the new owner’s representatives.

  ‘So who exactly is buying my land?’ he asks them.

  ‘The Blue Corporation,’ one of them says.

  He has never heard of the Blue Corporation. The three men are smiling: proud to be acting on behalf of an honourable enterprise. They tell him this over and over.

  He becomes brave and asks the representatives about the dwelling. He is calm when he says it. ‘Does the Blue Corporation have plans for the house?’ He tries to make it sound like something he has just thought of.

  The real estate agent snarls, or smiles.

  ‘We are glad you have asked us about this. We would like to talk to you about this matter,’ says one of the representatives. ‘The Blue Corporation wants you to stay on, work the land on its behalf.’

  ‘How will I know what to do with the land?’ he asks. He cannot bring himself to say your land.

  ‘The corporation will instruct you,’ one of the representatives says.

  6

  His phone/fax machine is the size and shape of a small breadbin. His wife bought it and sometimes faxed people. They needed it, she said, being so far from civilisation.

  She would stand at the door, look down into the valley, shout ‘Is there anybody out there?’ He never saw her fax a single thing.

  A telephone receiver is attached by cord to the body of the machine. The three representatives stand around the fax machine — touching, pressing, lifting it up to look underneath. He cannot understand the language they are speaking and he wonders why they speak English only some of the time. It is not possible to offend a fax machine, he thinks. And he would not be offended by anything they have to say about it.

  ‘Does this function well?’ one of them asks. He is the tallest of the men; he holds the telephone receiver to his ear, pushing buttons, listening and talking at the same time.

  ‘I think so,’ he says. ‘As a phone it works. I’ve never faxed.’

  ‘Do you know how to use a computer?’

  ‘No.’

  The representatives talk some more, then one goes out to the car in the driveway. He returns with a cardboard box.

  ‘Here is your new fax machine,’ he says. ‘You will like it, it is a very good model.’ He unplugs the old machine and nudges it out of the way with the toe of his shiny black shoe. Almost a kick.

  Thin grey cords flick here and there — click, snap — and the new machine blinks and whines like an animal waking. One representative reads from the instruction manual; another pokes at the grid of numbers and letters on the smooth flat surface. A series of notes play out and then the machine sighs and settles. The blinking stops.

  ‘There, sir. It’s working now. Tell me — what is your telephone number?’ The representative takes a small black notebook out of his pocket, and opens it to a clean page. He writes in shapes and lines, then small black numerals as he takes down the number.

  There is more bowing and handshaking before the representatives and lawyers and real estate agent leave. The real estate agent’s car flicks up gravel as the back wheels spin; he is first out the gate.

  7

  Three months later, he is jolted out of a deep sleep, discovers he is standing naked in the cold black bedroom. He is panicked, lost as to what is wrong in the night. The shrill rings are foreign. He follows the sound through the dark house, stumbling, reaching out to feel his way along the walls and doorways.

  He sees lights flicking across the face of the fax machine. In the dark, he watches. It is the first time, day or night, that the machine has made a noise since he sold his land.

  The ringing stops and a different noise begins. A quiet sound, a hum and then a grind. He wonders if he should say something, whether the representatives have taught this machine to talk to him.

  ‘Hello?’ he says, leaning towards the machine, conscious now of his nakedness. His hands form a cup over his genitals.

  A tongue of paper slowly appears from the front of the purring box. For a moment it seems to flick up towards him, licking, towards his protecting hands. Then it unwinds into the darkness and drops to the floor.

  He picks it up and turns on the light. Across the top of the paper are unusual shapes and lines, similar to — possibly the same as — the ones across the paperwork of the land sale documents.

  Underneath, in large dark typeface:

  PLANT CAMELLIA SINENSIS. CHARGE COSTS TO ACCOUNT: 0047583922345740

  There are no markings that look like a telephone number on the paper. He thinks now the markings on the paper could even be some kind of decorative edging; they might not say anything at all.

  8

  One thousand tea bushes arrive. According to the yellow labels, the shrubs will create a medium-sized hedge up to two metres tall. They should be planted facing the north, in places protected from the wind. They are susceptible to frost and wind burn.

  When the plants are five years old, they will each yield about one kilogram of leaves, which in turn will produce two hundred grams of dry tea. A spring harvest will produce the finest and most tender leaves.

  All this information fits on one tiny yellow label.

  9

  He has prepared the soil for the first of the shrubs. Now he digs and plants, digs and plants. The little shrubs form a brave line across the land; he tries to imagine how they would look to a bird flying overhead. It is the first time he has thought about things in this way.

  The first tea bushes die as he prepares the soil for the next delivery of plants. They bend defeated in the wind that blows up the valley; fragile leaves withering to brown, then black. They crumble to dust in his hands. When the delivery truck arrives with the second thousand, he turns it away.

  ‘What’s the point?’ he shouts at the driver, waving his arms wildly in the wind. ‘Does your wife drink tea? Plant them for yourself .’

  10

  He looks for paper — the kind to write letters on — but there is none in the house. His wife must have had some, in order to fax, but he does not know where she kept it. He has had trouble finding things since she died.

  So he uses the page that rolled out of the fax machine in the middle of the night. Turns it over and pushes it flat on the kitchen table. Writes, in his clearest, slowest hand: Tea bushes dead. Not suited to high country pasture. Please advice. He thinks later that advice looks wrong — maybe it is an ‘s’ not a ‘c’ — but there is no paper to start afresh.

  11

  His wife would go on and on about going to the coast. ‘Just two hours’ drive, and we’d be there,’ she’d say. She went on and on about it. On and on.

  12

  He sets his alarm clock for three o’clock in the morning, the exact time that the Blue Corporation tea bush fax arrived. When the alarm rings, he walks through the dark house and pushes his letter into the machine, into the same thin slot it came from.

  It falls to the ground, so he picks it up and holds it there again, forcing it slightly as he presses the green button on the top of the machine. It makes sense to push the green button, he thinks, in his absence of knowledge about the fax machine. Nothing happens.

  13

  Twenty thousand avocado plants die, followed by fifteen thousand banana trees.

  The land is pitted with empty holes and trenches ready for new plants and trees. Exotic foliage rots — he has pushed it into piles at the edges of the fields. He wonders how his land — the land — looks to the birds high above now.

  He no longer gets out of bed when the fax machine rings in the middle of the night. The pieces of paper keep coming, but he does not place the orders.

  The plants arrive anyway. Passionfruit. Bamboo. Mangoes. Rice. Coconuts. Mushroom spawn.
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  14

  In the middle of the night a figure stands over him; for a moment he thinks it is his wife, come back to ask him for one more impossible thing. He rubs his eyes to wake himself fully, sees it is the fax machine. It has feminine arms, and hands that sit firmly on its hips. Looking very much like a woman annoyed at the way things have turned out.

  ‘Ignoring me is not an option.’ The voice is sure of itself: not his wife’s, but similar. It is the first female voice he has heard since he took his wife’s body down from the rafters.

  He sits up in bed, looks the machine up and down. It has two shapely female legs, untanned. He reaches out and touches one of the legs — they are soft, human. The feet wear his wife’s old dusky pink slippers. How did the machine find the slippers? She was wearing them when she died.

  The machine leaves the room, and he sees that the extension cord for the vacuum cleaner is trailing along behind. There is a sexy swing to its walk. When it reaches the door it turns, and speaks again. ‘It’s Angela, by the way. A-N-G-E-L-A. Not “You-Shit-of-a-Machine”.’

  15

  He can smell breakfast. In the kitchen, Angela is dishing eggs, bacon and toast onto a plate. She passes it to him.

  ‘Aren’t you having any?’ he asks.

  ‘I ate earlier,’ she says.

  She walks to the end of the kitchen bench and bends over to pick up a piece of white paper on the floor. He looks at her underneath. It is an interesting surface of screws and holes.

  16

  In no time at all, Angela has the house shipshape. She cleans, cooks, mends the holes in his clothes. After some weeks she starts to lose her sharp edges; they blur one day, reappear the next slightly rounded.

  It takes a month, on average, for an edge to become a curve.

  Angela finds all the lost things: toothpaste, matches, the wedding album, shoelaces, paper, condoms, odd socks, spare light bulbs, chocolate.

  She has arms and legs and a place for sexual relations. But no head. Nothing to love and hate and argue with and kiss and punch and get worked up about.

  17

  Angela is holding the piece of paper up in front of her, level with her touchpad and blinking lights. He sees fine hairs along her arms catching the sunlight that comes through the kitchen window.

  ‘According to this, you have a golf course to build,’ she says.

  They will work together on this project, starting with the first hole and tee. He needs paper — long uninterrupted sheets — so Angela reaches up, as though to scratch her invisible head. She pushes a button. White paper comes out of her; she holds the button down.

  ‘Say when.’

  ‘When,’ he says.

  Angela kneels on one end, and he on the other. They each have a pencil, and together they draw a tee, and a fairway, and a green that sits up high on the ridge by the woolshed.

  18

  He works hard to contour the land, levelling the tee and green with a blade on his tractor. When he has done all that is possible with big machinery, he gets down on his belly and reaches wide to scrape the dirt smooth flat with a long sewing ruler.

  He moves across the surfaces in the manner of a rolling pin: arms straight, hard up against his sides, so as not to ruin the fine job with his footprints.

  Angela is inside, crafting golf clubs out of brass fireside instruments. She has unscrewed all eight bed knobs off the two beds in the house, and she whittles them into golf club heads, using the tiny nail files from his wife’s manicure set. She attaches the heads to the shafts with very strong glue.

  While he smoothes out the first hole’s final imperfections, Angela tries her swing. She slices to the right, but he believes she could sort it out with practice.

  19

  ‘Are you bored?’ he asks her one day, just testing. ‘Do you want to go for a drive to the coast?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she says. ‘What would be the point of that?’

  20

  At the supermarket, he carries a list. A full stock-up is in order, Angela says. How he has survived for so long on canned fruit and frozen Hereford, she has no idea.

  ‘Hey, mister, I remember you,’ says the girl with the uninterested face and black rings around her eyes. ‘You’re not here for boxes are you? Because I already gave you seven. That’s all you’re allowed. That’s the rules.’

  He stares at the girl, wondering what she is talking about.

  Angela has written: fresh fruit and vegetables, fax paper, cheese and ice cream. And vitamins for them both, to help them stay strong while they finish the golf course. Her handwriting is exactly the same as his wife’s: the neat, sloping script, the tiny hearts she used for full stops.

  A MATTER OF FAITH

  It is hard being the guardian of the museum.

  First, the entrance must be watched at all times, in case a visitor arrives. My desk is in the foyer, to the right of the door — it is a nineteenth-century oak rolltop with twenty little compartments useful for storing small items of documentation. This type of desk has been designed to sit hard against a wall but I have been obliged to turn its back towards the door. Thus when I sit at the desk attending to museum business, as now, I can also see the entrance.

  The foyer is a cavernous area — there is no ceiling as such, only steel girders high above me, supporting the roof. The floor is bare concrete. The foyer becomes stiflingly hot in summer, due to the absence of windows. I chill to the bone in winter, sitting at the desk. I bring a little heater to work during the coldest months.

  The museum building is a corrugated iron shed, on the rear half of a neglected piece of land in an industrial park. The front of this land also has a building on it. That building was once a warehouse, stacked to the rafters with brown cardboard boxes full of I know not what. But the boxes have gone, their contents sold, I presume. The front building is derelict; the windows are smashed and the door has disappeared completely. It is, most recently, home to drug addicts who come and go. They sleep, fight, and share their needles there.

  The museum building has no sign to indicate its purpose, at the roadside or on the shed itself. It is unpainted, and rust is beginning to show in places. I see that the iron sheeting is disintegrating where it meets the woodwork of the window frames. The hinges on the grey tin door are also falling to pieces; one good wrench and the door could come completely off.

  These matters are not the responsibility of the guardian. It is difficult enough to watch the entrance, without conducting building inspections on my way to and from work.

  As if all this is not difficult enough, I must protect a collection that officially does not exist — make sure precious items from another time are never seen or touched or damaged. Doing my job is not an easy task. To do it well, I must be seen at all times to be not doing it at all.

  I have created all manner of untruths to cope with being the guardian, and now I tell them without flinching, without even noticing that I am doing it. My work has turned me into a competent, compulsive liar.

  As a person of the faith, I struggle with this daily. Of course, I must continue telling the lies in the course of the struggle. This leads me to question whether my claim to be a person of the faith is in fact the lie.

  It is too much to be dealing with.

  So.

  From nine to five, Monday to Friday, I sit at my desk, watch for visitors, and attend to museum business. I also often come to work on Saturdays, if I am not busy. A visitor is as likely to arrive at the museum on a Saturday as on a weekday. .

  The museum is always closed on Sundays, when I attend church.

  My place at church is in the third row from the front at the left end of the pew. It is the seat nearest the wall. From there I have an unfettered view of proceedings, and am not bothered by people moving to approach the altar.

  This might suggest that I am an attention-seeker — that I need to be close to the front, where the action takes place. But this is not the case. Those that sit in the third pew also comprise t
he back row of the congregation. The same goes for the right-hand side of the church. There are only two occasions during the year when more than six pews are filled — Easter Sunday and Christmas Day. There are fifty-seven regular church-goers, and we arrive early on those days to ensure our places are not taken by others.

  This might suggest we are a community of a sort, that we plan what happens at church. Not so. We do not meet each other outside the church service, or at least I do not meet any of the others. I cannot speak for them. Upon arrival at church on Sunday we are civil to each other; nod to say hello, and trade a handshake at the appropriate moment in the service. But that is it. From Monday to Saturday, I am too busy with museum business to participate in parochial activities.

  There was a time when this was not the case. When I was a child, the church conducted its business in an entirely different way. It would be fair to say, looking back, that the services were primal — savage, almost — in nature. This was before we learned how to express our devotion to Him in more sophisticated ways. We are attuned now to the mores and expectations of the modern world. There are not many of us that remember.

  From time to time, the size of our congregation decreases by one. A parishioner will be present one Sunday, absent the next. I see the gaping space on the particular pew where he or she used to sit and try to recall that person. Elderly, frail, stooped is what I always remember. Head down in supplication; pale, veined hands clasped together around the black prayer book. Maybe an uncontrolled spasm of the hands as he or she opened pages to the right place. Then, over weeks and months, the space on the pew slowly disappears. The gap is filled from both sides, extra centimetres stolen for hats, gloves, scarves, wider buttocks. Such is the nature of worship.