Drybread: A Novel

by Marshall, Owen

  'In this case I'm a sort of sheriff,' said the parson. 'I'm trying to uphold the law.' He set off an even, metronomic laugh, like a wooden clacker deep within, while his expression underwent no change.

  'What a bullshitter you are,' said Theo. 'You don't care about them at all. You're taking advantage of a family in trouble to make some money out of it all. You're a sanctimonious prick. Well, you won't find Penny Maine- King here.'

  The parson made a small movement as if to leave the shaft entrance, then pulled back, came a step closer to Theo, so that even in the poor light his pale, bald head had a cheese rind gleam because of the raindrops there. His expression was still one of conscious composure. 'You realise there's no personal grudge in anything I do,' he said. 'Nothing unprofessional, or illegal. Quite the contrary. The thing is that I've been engaged to assist in finding Mrs Maine-King. It's just that I represent another party in the matter.'

  'You push into people's lives and misfortune, though, don't you?'

  'Any more than yourself, Theo? Isn't that what you do often as an investigative journalist — search things out that you think the public should be aware of? The only difference is that you carry your findings to the public and I deliver to a single client.'

  'Yeah, well, my loyalty's elsewhere on this one,' said Theo.

  'I've read your pieces. I suppose everyone feels sympathy for the mother and the kid, but the thing is there's always the law — what it provides for, its obligations.'

  It was incongruous, Theo and the parson sheltering in a coal pit at Mount Somers and discussing ethics, while the people who, for one reason or another, had been drawn to a protest against the establishment of a windfarm gradually dispersed. It had the precarious structure of a dream, but the parson was such a palpable presence, so physically detailed, that he grounded everything. The leather of his brown shoes was darkening with moisture, the tattered parka gave off a faint reminder of past fishing excursions, his arm hung in just that slight arc of assumed relaxation.

  'I'll tell you what,' said Theo. 'If I find your car at any place I go to, I'll put some work the panelbeater's way. Okay?'

  'No need to take that attitude,' said the parson. 'I can see it's become a personal thing with you.' He walked back out onto the track, glancing up to the grey sky, but not back to Theo. 'Goodbye,' he said to the air ahead, giving dignity to his withdrawal. It had become a personal thing — not so much between Theo and the parson, as between Penny and Theo. Perhaps that's what the parson meant, but he'd become too far away for Theo to make a reply.

  Theo followed the parson up the track, then onto the grass slope that gave access to the road, but they took no notice of each other, and Theo made no effort to catch up. There were no other people in the open because of the rain, and only a few cars were left, some of them nosing away. Linda was behind the wheel of the Mazda, and, since he'd kept her waiting, Theo didn't insist on driving during the return trip. He told her that the coal shafts were pretty small scale and the coal itself low-grade stuff. 'Oh, come on,' she said. Theo watched the parson's car move off. As Linda paused at the gate, Guthrie appeared and tapped on Theo's window. The rain made his hair a goatish forelock above his dismal face. Theo wound down the window a little.

  'Have you got all you want?' shouted Guthrie.

  'What?'

  'All the stuff you need for coverage. Have you got enough?'

  'Yes, plenty thanks,' said Theo.

  'This bloody weather, eh,' said Guthrie. 'I wondered if you might like an extended interview some time about some of the other issues I mentioned in my speech.'

  'I think we'll leave it at what we've got for the moment,' said Theo.

  'We can't guarantee a great deal of space, you know,' said Linda. 'It all depends what pressure of news there is.' She gunned the car forward and Guthrie's lugubrious face fell quickly behind. 'Useless, moaning prick,' she said. 'He tried to hijack things from Sue Chen, did you see? A born loser.'

  In an attempt to disregard Linda's driving habits, Theo concentrated on the road ahead. He had a last glimpse through the drizzle of the parson's car before it turned a corner in the distance. The parson had wasted a day too, but like Theo he'd get paid for it. Unlike Theo he may have had no other ambition. Theo resented time that wasn't furthering his wish to be with Penny, or to be of use to her.

  'You should take off that damp jacket,' said Linda. She began to recount her conversation with Sue Chen in full detail, and said she was going to see Anna about a feature on her.

  Theo imagined himself running on the brown hills, with the fine rain on his bare legs and face to cool him, and just the sound of his own breathing. His sweat would mingle with the drizzle on his skin, and the taste would have a saltiness which always surprised him.

  13

  When Penny rang him from Alexandra to thank him for his latest piece in the paper, she mentioned again his visit to her mother in the Malahide Home. She felt claustrophobic, she told him, if they didn't get away from Drybread from time to time. 'We spend time in the park here,' she said, 'and Ben gets a chance sometimes to play with other kids at the slides and swings. We insinuate ourselves into the family circle of others.' She gave the last sentence a certain acidity.

  'Why don't we meet somewhere then and make a day of it?' Theo asked.

  'I'd like that,' she said, 'but what about being recognised?'

  They'd be less noticeable as an apparent family group though, and she didn't much resemble the photographs taken in California. Theo pointed all that out, but the essential thing was that they wanted to see each other again, and that wish was clear to both of them behind their casual conversation.

  'Why not Timaru?' suggested Theo. It had no specific association with either of them, and was about halfway between them. 'Plenty for Ben to do there,' he said.

  Just to hear her voice was a pleasure. He was talking from work, and swivelled his chair towards the window, so that his colleagues couldn't see his face. He had spent time with Penny only twice, yet the surge of emotion surprised him.

  Theo arrived in Timaru well before eleven that Tuesday, and parked the Audi at Caroline Bay, close to the loop overhead road. He wandered towards the area where the Christmas carnival had been set up. The grass was parched, completely brown in arcs around the trees where the competition for moisture was greatest. The carnival was over, but the merry-go-round and the octopus remained on site, the chairs chained together, grey canvas covers lashed down, in out-of-season mode. The Big Wheel, partly dismembered, was stark against the sky. The circular railway was permanent. The small train, painted in Thomas the Tank Engine colours, and the open carriages, were parked in the corrugated iron tunnel with metal portcullis gates for security. Ben would have got such a kick out of a ride, but the information board showed that once summer holidays were over, Thomas made his circuits only on fine Sundays. It would be best not to bring Ben past the railway, in case he glimpsed Thomas imprisoned, and mourned the lost opportunity.

  Closer to the sea was a narrow belt of small dunes and marram grass before the curve of the fine, grey white sand. Theo walked that way back to the carpark. Despite the clear sky few people were at the shore. Two older women walked dogs, and were less inclined to acknowledge each other than their pets. 'Come here, Cromwell,' one woman commanded her Labrador. Rather than resembling her gambolling dog, she was very thin, with a mass of grey hair loosely pinned above a sharp-featured and austere face. At the water's edge, with its gentle ripple, a man and woman supervised the darting ventures of two small boys, laughing and vainly calling for them not to wet their clothes.

  Theo could remember being on Caroline Bay only once before: a summer when he'd still been at university, and even that recollection was hazy, because he'd got very drunk and ended up vomiting from a walk bridge above the railway cutting as the ships sounded their horns together at midnight to welcome the new year and the municipal fireworks festooned the dark sky. In the rough morning that followed he'd hung dolefully on the railing a
long the clay cliff, watched the breakers overcome by swell from behind so that the white crests were captured beneath the smooth surface like frost within jade.

  Now he was back by chance and circumstance, walking the bay when he should have been at his desk in the newspaper office. He was there with the two elderly women, Cromwell and the jubilant nuclear family. He was there because he couldn't put Penny Maine-King out of his mind, or her small son. He was there because he had hopes again that he might find someone with whom he could be relaxed and unreserved, and yet excited by too, in every way. He was searching, without being able to acknowledge to himself the importance of search, or quite what its object was.

  When Penny arrived, only a few minutes after eleven, she parked close to Theo's car. She stayed sitting inside for a time, talking to Theo through the wound-down window, as if being so far from Drybread and the bach was something to which she needed to become accustomed. 'There's hardly anyone here,' said Theo. 'It's a weekday, a school day, and people are too busy.' Ben sat quietly too, strapped into his child's carseat. Even after being so long confined, he was silent and watchful, looking at Theo and at the beachfront with its broad, grassed expanse, modest sand dunes and glittering sea. 'This is a good place, isn't it,' Theo said to him. Ben nodded his head, but remained cautious still.

  'He's been good,' said Penny. 'Only a couple of stops in all that way.'

  'That's a good boy.'

  'He's been looking forward to it. Anything for a change from the hut.'

  'You said ice cream,' said Ben accusingly.

  'If you're a good boy, yes,' said his mother. She got out of the car and went round to the passenger seat to release him. 'I haven't even got a bucket and spade for him,' she told Theo. She had just the semi-transparent container of a Chinese takeaway and a wooden cooking spoon. It wouldn't make any difference to the boy, but Theo knew that for Penny it was yet another sign of how far she had come down in the world. She gave a quick laugh with nothing at all of amusement in it.

  They walked across the grassed area, and Theo spread the car rug just before the sand began. The tall blue and white cranes of the container port were clear and noiseless in the distance; an overweight jogger put in her best effort while in their sight. Ben began a collection of marram stalks. The sun was warm to the face.

  'You need to get away from Drybread more,' Theo said.

  'There's Alex every so often.'

  'But you don't have any friends there. No one to visit and talk things over with. No one to make you laugh or cry. You're holed up there in the cottage, getting tighter and tighter.'

  'Yeah, well, every place reflects yourself,' said Penny. 'A happy person might find Drybread idyllic.'

  'This is a tough patch, but you'll come out of it,' said Theo.

  'I hope so. Sometimes I feel lost to myself, if that makes any sense. You and Zack have done a lot, and I'm grateful for that. It mightn't look like it, but I feel more optimistic now. If I'd known, though — known how awful it all was — I don't think I could have gone through with it.'

  'Guilt and failure,' said Theo. 'I reckon guilt and failure undermine you so bloody easily.'

  'You mean your divorce, don't you.'

  'Yeah, I suppose so. It's so common, isn't it? It happens to so many people, yet there's a terrible novelty when it's your turn. Anyway, let's not get into all that today.'

  She and Theo lay on the rug: Theo on his back with a hand over his eyes, Penny on her stomach so that she was able to watch her son as he played. They weren't touching, but close enough for Theo to be aware of a faint perfume and the smell released from her clothing by the sun. She wore blue shorts and a blue and white striped top. Her arms and legs were brown from the Central Otago sun, her hair longer than when he first met her, and loosely tied back. A couple and a child: it seemed a very natural and comfortable grouping. Penny talked a bit about Zack and how the judicial stuff was going, responded to her son occasionally, but mostly she and Theo just lay. Theo hadn't felt so relaxed for a long time. He didn't care about the work he should have been doing for the paper, or what might happen long term for Penny and himself. He wanted to lie in the sun, aware of her by his side, and take no initiatives at all.

  Ben, though, grew tired of the dunes after a time and began asking to go to the sea. It was mysterious for him, as neither Sacramento, nor Drybread, possessed such a thing. As the three of them went barefoot across the sand towards waves that were not much more than ripples, the little boy had incessant questions concerning the sea: where it came from, why it moved, why he couldn't hold it, whether he could take some home. Theo and Penny took a hand each and swung him above the shallow water and he cried out with the joy of it. The present is everything of life for children, and not shadowed by the past or the future.

  He got wet through, of course, and when they went back to the rug on the grass, Penny took off all his clothes except a cotton top and sunhat, and he dried in the sun as he played.

  'Do you ever hear from your Californian friends?' asked Theo.

  'No one knows where I am.'

  'You could write to them under another name, use a post box. You could send an email.'

  Penny didn't reply for a while, held up her hand as if to feel the blue of the sky, and then laid her wrist over her eyes to block the sun.

  'I'm too proud,' she said. 'I've got some good friends, but I'm ashamed to be in such a fucking mess. Stupid, isn't it.'

  'No, I can understand that.'

  'I'm too proud to accept the sympathy that goes with the support they'd give. Things can change so quickly, and you go under.'

  'Well, you know you've got my help,' said Theo.

  'I know.'

  'I really want to help.'

  'I know,' she said.

  'Tell me something about your life over there before you got married,' said Theo. 'What the hell were you doing there anyway?'

  So they lay in the sun and Penny told him about being a ski instructor at Bear Valley and North Star at Tahoe, about meeting Erskine at a diner in the city of Truckee where she went with friends. She said most ski people in the States had money, and women were often into the scene because the right sort of guys were plentiful there. She told him about the professional instructors from Italy, Germany and Austria, and how many of them were talents broken by drugs, or booze. It all seemed a long way from Drybread and a custody case, and reminded Theo that there was so much of Penny's life of which he knew nothing.

  He told her that he'd never been skiing in his life, but had visited Courchevel Le Praz in the summer season while he was backpacking around Europe, and worked for two weeks there for Grummande the undertaker, gluing mahogany laminate to cheap coffins. The younger Grummande told him that the corpses he liked best were those of climbers, or skiers, who died in avalanches. Penny accused Theo of making it up, but he assured her it was true, and why should Grummande lie to him? The undertaker also told him that the season before, a girl had fallen through the ice in the local river and not been found for two hours. He'd been called to collect the body, but just as he was about to put the drowned girl in a body bag, a Scottish doctor on a walking tour stopped and resuscitated her. Many thought it was a miracle, but the doctor said the intense cold had prevented brain deterioration.

  'Maybe I should live in a cold climate then,' said Penny. 'My brain's going damn quick.'

  'Central must be cold in winter.'

  'Jesus, I've just got to be out of there by winter,' she said.

  'Sometimes I think of you and Ben in my place: how we could organise the different rooms and stuff like that.' Theo hoped she'd say something, but Penny just smiled and gave his shoulder a small push.

  'Ice cream,' said the little boy. His thighs were chubby, and his miniature penis and scrotum palely sculptured on the smooth flesh of his groin.

  So Penny dusted the sand from his legs, dressed him and they set off as a threesome back to the cars, where they left the rug, and the pottle half full of ivory pipi shells. T
hey took the piazza steps that spanned the railway line, and sat outside one of the Bay Hill restaurants. Penny was relaxed. She was in an unfamiliar town and with a partner: ordinary and anonymous. Away from Drybread, with all its present and past associations, they talked more casually, more openly, of their lives, allowing some basis for familiarity without assumption of it, or intrusion.

  'What do you miss most?' asked Theo.

  'Money mainly, to be honest. It sounds trivial and selfish, I suppose, but you get used to having stuff around you for comfort, and enough money to spend without worrying about it. It gives you confidence that you have independence and self-respect. If you're poor you're a failure. That's the guts of it, and I'd forgotten. You can put up all sorts of arguments to save yourself from acknowledging it, but you see it in people's faces, in the way they treat you. Poverty is failure made tangible. And it's so much easier to adjust to going up in the world.'

  'I could lend you some money.'

  'I hope it'll come right soon. Thanks, though,' said Penny. 'I think I could get something from Zack Heywood if I had to.'

  'You had a pretty nice place in Sacramento, I suppose.'

  'We built a new home in the style some wise-guy called Californian Tuscan. We've got a pool, a sauna and a water feature in the formal garden. We're even close to the river. Water's a big thing in California.'

  'Sounds pretty flash,' said Theo. 'No wonder Drybread's a bit of a comedown.'

  'I thought the other day of something they had in common — they both began as gold mining settlements. Sacramento kicked on from there, you might say, and Drybread didn't.' They both grinned. Theo liked the wryness she was capable of even when she was unhappy. For him the only significant link between Sacramento and Drybread was personal: Penny herself, leaving the Manuherikia, living in the fast lane of California's capital, then making a bolt back to Drybread when her marriage didn't work out. 'I can't seem to imagine myself over there now,' she said. 'It's like something I've watched on television, not my own life. It's still absolutely clear, but it doesn't seem to have any connection with me any longer.'