Living As a Moon

by Owen Marshall

  ‘Don’t you worry about me,’ I said. I could do that for myself.

  ‘You need to get your arse into gear,’ he said.

  Ramon was a friend outside work as well. On a Friday or Saturday night we often drank at his place until midnight or so, and then went into the city. It made a cheaper night of it. But weekday nights he did advanced courses in business management and bookkeeping, or accounting — I’m never sure if there’s difference. And he didn’t play any sport at all. He said it was non-productive, a debit not a credit, unless you were able to do it professionally. Apart from women’s beach volleyball he never even watched it on television. I played a lot of badminton myself. I was a top club player and that was as far as it went. It helped me forget what I did weekdays on level four: the physical focus of it and the team mates who cared nothing about the supply chain for office equipment. Sometimes when I was on song there were moments of euphoria, moments when the shuttle seemed to hang above like a light bulb, and the high leap to connect with it was effortless. Exquisite relief to put all into an overhead smash, and with the next shot delicately finesse the shuttle a whisker from the net. While Ramon beavered at evening classes during the week, I played badminton, or watched asthmatic, psychopathic serial killers hunted down on television. At weekends we went together into the city in search of one-night stands, though hangovers were the more regular outcome. What could I offer a woman that wasn’t over with the orgasm? It was life in a holding pattern, but whereas Ramon created prospects for better things, I had no real hope of deliverance.

  It’s odd, isn’t it, that often nothing changes for a long time, and then several things happen at once, almost as if pressure has been building without awareness of it. It was a clear, blue Thursday, almost time to finish on level four, and Becky and I were at the big window above the alley. Two guys in black jeans were going through to the car park and started kicking the Labrador that was in their way at the bottom of the steps. ‘Look at the bastards,’ said Becky. Some of the street people came out of the doorway, including Puli, Jimmy, Sex Slut, the bald head with a name like Saucer, and an older, heavy woman with fingerless gloves, who was only there occasionally. They shrieked and capered like a baboon band, and the two guys shouted in reply and pushed their heads forward to show they weren’t backing down. Matthew, Ramon and Felicity came over to the window to watch. Mr Cusip stayed in his office. It was like being high up in a theatre, seeing something nasty from life being played out below, but safe from the threat of it.

  ‘Listen to the silly fuckers,’ said Matthew. He seemed indignant that the alley people were capable of outrage.

  ‘We should ring someone,’ said Becky, but we stayed there at the window as safe spectators.

  It’s the only group fight I’ve ever seen, and not at all like those sequences in the movies. It was all pushing, falling, heaving, breaking apart and closing again: all clumsiness and malicious opportunity. I can’t remember one clean hit, and the noises were more disturbing than the actions. Raw, unrestrained sounds that were unsuitable for people. The two guys fought their way up the steps, disengaged and stood at the top swearing for a while before leaving. Your eyes follow movement, and it was only when the men were gone that I noticed Saucer lying on the ground by the steps and deep doorway. From such a height he looked small, almost restful. The other alley people came and gathered about him. Sex Slut and Jimmy knelt down. ‘I’m ringing the cops,’ said Becky.

  ‘Better had,’ said Matthew.

  We were too far away for any blood, or bruises, any twitching, or eyes rolled back, but the shouting went on. They stood and knelt around Saucer as they would around a brazier on a cold night, and argued. I even thought I heard a laugh. After a time Puli left the group and walked up the steps, and soon afterwards the woman with the fingerless gloves went too, looking back at first, but then determinedly, ignoring the cries behind. They had reasons to avoid attention, I suppose. Some ordinary people joined the group before the police arrived. One man put his coat under Saucer’s head, and another seemed to be arguing that he should be picked up. When the police and then ambulance officers arrived, I could still recognise Jimmy and Sex Slut among the little crowd, although they’d stopped shouting. When Saucer was taken away on a stretcher, Matthew said the show was over, and so it was. It was only then that it occurred to me that none of us had thought to go down from level four during all of it. The alley people weren’t of our world, and it was a long way down.

  Ramon and I went up to the roof at lunchtime next day. Busy Friday and with the weekend to look forward to. A clear sky again, but not all that warm. We sat with our backs to one of the air-conditioning outlets and ate bought sandwiches from clear plastic containers. ‘The vagrant died,’ said Ramon.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘When you were out doing a round the cops came asking what we’d seen. He was dead on arrival, they said.’ They’re expensive, those bought sandwiches, but fresh you have to say. Even though Saucer had died, we could still hear shouting from the alley, even at lunchtime and after what had happened. Sex Slut was screaming about something, and then laughing about something. How could they laugh like that from such lives. ‘They still don’t know who he is,’ said Ramon.

  Ramon also told me that his academic accreditation had come through and he’d been offered a job in a firm of accountants two blocks away. More than three times the money he and I were getting. ‘Jesus, that’s great. Good on you,’ I said, and I tried hard to be pleased as he deserved, but was cast down by the reflection on my own shitty situation. He left me there on the roof and went down to see Mr Cusip and hand in his resignation. ‘Make sure you stick it to Matthew,’ I said.

  The cops didn’t know who Saucer was. They meant he wasn’t anybody. I told myself I was in a totally different situation, and would soon have a plan. Jesus no, you’re not the same, I said to myself. I leant back on the air-conditioning shaft, listened to the jostling voices from the alley below, and watched the vapour trails of the planes above: strings of silver Christmas tinsel dissolving slowly in the blue.

  FREEZING

  A late autumn day with the colours of the dying leaves defiant against grey sky, and a drift of air that was almost a breeze and would have passed unnoticed but for its chill. I was walking down the hill from the university, and making ground gradually on two women in front. They both wore dark, winter skirts and high leather boots. I knew one of them, Alexa Pope, who worked in the registry. As they stepped across a gutter to cross the road, the other woman slipped and fell with surprising force. She lay still for a moment because of the impact, her skirt rucked up to show the scope of inner thigh, a smooth expanse in the soft autumn light.

  Viv said I laughed at her fall, but surely I didn’t, and if so it was the laugh of someone caught off guard by the suddenness of trivial misfortune, and the guilt of finding eroticism in it. Alexa and I helped her to a low, garden wall and she sat there for a few minutes. She was angry, I think to be introduced in such circumstances. ‘No, I’m perfectly okay, thanks,’ she said.

  There was no blood, no apparent damage to herself, or her clothing. She said then that she fell on her hip, and, months later, when we were friends, that she landed on her bum.

  There is in the psyche of every man an unconscious, archetypal image of how a woman should be, and when he meets someone who fits that template, a feeling arises of ineffable fascination, and sadness too. The woman may not be beautiful, may not be gifted, but there is a throb of recognition, the sense of something intrinsic that is glimpsed in the moment.

  Viv had long black hair, pale skin with several dark moles on her neck. She was natural and graceful in movement, and her face possessed inquisitiveness without malice. So womanly, so sisterly almost, that I wanted to go to her with something that would make her smile, and then come back having done no damage whatsoever. She was tall and rangy, and always looked better in winter clothes than those of summer. In light, sleeveless things she seemed slightly di
spossessed, but winter clothing fleshed her out, contained her height, her straight, dark hair and pale skin. Even after we were married I never told her of the powerful jolt I felt at the sight of her thigh after she had fallen on the street, the accidental exposure of herself to a stranger, though often as we lay together I would run my hand to the top of her legs.

  Meetings and partings mark the chronology of our experience, with memory having its own criteria. I remember almost all the occasions on which I last saw people important to me, but not always how they came into my life. Yet how clear the recollection of the two women walking, the changing leaves, the close, grey sky, the sharp sound of their boots, and then Viv’s sudden fall.

  I saw her three days later: she was coming from the university medical centre towards the tower block. She had a bruise on her hip, she said. ‘It’s just as well that any treatment’s free for me,’ she said. Viv was a nurse, but wore no uniform. Instead, close-fitting jeans and a black jacket with long pockets, which hid her hands and wrists.

  ‘Why not come and have a coffee in the staff club?’ I said.

  So something important in the lives of both of us began, though her recollection, as I said, was somewhat different, and our opinions of the outcome may not have been the same. Whatever the subject of our talk at that first coffee, it was an easy conversation, perhaps because we had come together by accident rather than one of us having made a move towards the other. There were no conditions and no expectations, and we made no arrangement to meet again, and so parted with the same ease we’d begun. I didn’t see her again for several weeks, but remembered her boots, her relaxed and inquisitive face, her habit of bulging her cheek with her tongue if she was amused.

  The third meeting had nothing to do with our lives at the university, and so the more unexpected. My father was involved in organising hot air balloon rides as a fundraiser for children with disabilities, and I went to Ashworth Park with him to help the balloon owner set up. I’d never realised what a lengthy and complex business that is: the aligning and laying out of the fabric, the positioning of the basket, the initial propping of the mouth until the controlled blasts from the burner slowly inflated the fabric, and it began to swell on the ground like a fat man. The burner was fierce and loud: great care had to be taken to ensure its flare didn’t damage any tackle. The balloon man was at first quite tense, and spoke sharply to us as casual assistants, but once the thing had lifted off, mushroomed into the still air, he laughed a lot, and enjoyed the wonder expressed by the people who began to gather.

  I watched the first groups go up. The balloon was on a long tether that was never let go, and so the short trip was all about elevation, and enough for those in the carrier to see the city spread out beneath them, take photographs if they wished, and then come back to the same spot.

  Viv came with a tousle-haired guy with a pleasant voice.

  The three of us talked briefly, and he told me his work concerned the classification of historic buildings. I was surprised how much I envied him as they stood close together and smiling in their ascent, until they were too high for me to see their expressions. Before they came back to earth I moved away, but I’d made a decision that I should be the one who stood beside her as she smiled, or cried, or rose, or fell.

  I rang her at the university clinic, and asked her to come with me to see Gloomy Sunday, which became our film, in the way that couples have our tune, our meal, our wine, even our quarrel — all seared into their lives by association with falling in love. Only much later did she tell me that Jay, the man in the park, had wanted to marry her.

  All that is seventeen years past, and I saw Jay’s photograph in the paper two days ago, taken at the opening of a refurbished movie theatre in Wanganui. Viv wouldn’t have been beside him if they’d married: she’s been dead for thirteen months. Cancer of the spleen — lymphoma, which is an ugly word. A rapid form of the disease, but by no means painless.

  It’s customary to say that victims of disease are bravely resigned in their suffering. Viv wasn’t. As a nurse she had a special bitterness concerning the path she was compelled to take. She became a changed woman, an angry, sometimes vituperative person. The specialists told me that was to be expected, but I hadn’t. Her death was pain enough, but to have her personality corrupted by disease and the despairing knowledge of its outcome was quite terrible. Death, it seemed, had taken her, but set up a puppet to mock us and prolong some lesson we failed to understand. That’s the last I’ll say of it. The last I’d think of it too, if that control was possible. How she was before, and how I remember her now, that’s the true image of Viv. Meetings and farewells, meetings and farewells: with Viv it’s the meeting I keep my focus on, and our time with Rachel.

  Rachel was born on a summer’s night when there was a thick flight of the grass grub beetles — small, copper scarabs that blundered in the warm, night air, and lit and crawled on the living and inanimate alike. I’d left the maternity ward with the realisation that something wonderful had happened, and gone out into the hospital grounds. There were beds of severely disciplined roses, the blooms of which had just a tinge of colour in the moonlight. There were short, tapering cypress trees, and borders of long-stemmed lavender. The air was heavy with natural, harmonious scents, and also the drone of beetles, whose bodies struck like pellets. I was reminded of those other pasture predators, porina, whose transformation was not to beetles, but to soft, heavy moths that in rural swarms could so pulp on a car’s windscreen that driving became impossible.

  What a lovely name is Rachel: how marvellous its biblical origin. Viv and I were completely in agreement in the choice, but then we were rarely in dispute over anything that concerned our daughter. The bulk of people are merely reflectors for attitudes and events around them, but some few have an inner luminosity that sets them apart. Viv had that, and so does Rachel.

  The night Rachel was born was one in which my ritualistic father would certainly have proclaimed omens. Even the beetles in their mating dance, the audible flight and pellet impact on solid things, seemed a salutation from worshipful old Egypt. No one else was in the garden, and from the seat there I could look back to the bright, tiered widows of the hospital and forward to the faintly lit roses, lawns and lavender. Winged insects make a sound like string instruments at a distance.

  ‘Go on home now and ring your folks,’ Viv had said as I left her cubicle within the ward. ‘But don’t smoke any cigars inside the house, and put the bassinet in the sun tomorrow morning to air.’ I looked back and saw her watching, trying to catch my eye to reinforce our happiness. There was a nurse within earshot: a tall, Fijian girl who quickly glanced towards me, then away. I sensed she felt pleasure from our closeness, and slight envy too. I’d made no reply, gone out like a prince through the long corridors with the lifts at the end, and into the night garden.

  After Viv died, Rachel and I were cut adrift from other people, and even, strangely, from each other. Love was not in question, but the oppression of it squeezed out ease of communication. Rachel said nothing to me of her aspirations, her fears, her painful and fluctuating relationships with the flouncing girls and slouching boys who were growing up around her, yet we enjoyed each other’s company and carried on a tacit pretence that neither of us was threatened. On my side, at least, I offered a love too heartfelt to articulate, and too natural to require exposition.

  It had always been that way. Viv said there was often something idealistic in the relationship between father and daughter, but I had no sense of being part of a generalisation. Love, however, doesn’t carry any guarantee of responsible action.

  Rachel would come sometimes into my study in the evenings, when I was plodding through essay marking, or lecture preparation. She would sit sideways in the one armchair and draw her legs beneath her. She might lie her head on the backrest and play with her hair — thin fingers as pale as the hair they moved through. In summer she might watch the japonica bushes blurring into the dusk; in winter she might wait for
the neighbour’s security light to come on and show a cat she’d know by name, or listen to the television aerial vibrating in a southerly. ‘Oh, Dad, stop talking such rubbish,’ she might say, or laugh softly at that same rubbish to which she only half listened, while her fingers wove in her hair. Flippancy is a defence against the open engagement that can come unstuck.

  How precious trivial memories are, and what intense pain they carry. I find my mouth half-open, as if there were words, or some cry, that would give relief. We hardly ever talked about Viv. There were consequences, of course, of her death, and our responses. Rachel’s school contacted me a few months after her mother died. ‘Dr Leigh?’ enquired the voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  It was the deputy principal: she wanted me to come in for a discussion. ‘It’s a certain situation,’ she said, ‘nothing to cause alarm, but best talked about together rather than on the phone. Just an area of concern at this stage. Have you perhaps time some afternoon next week? Any afternoon except Thursday and Friday when we’re having the winter inter-school tournament.’

  ‘Monday,’ I said. ‘I can come Monday.’ I’m accustomed to interviewing people, and being interviewed, but having some disclosure about your child is quite different, no matter how humdrum the circumstances.

  I asked Rachel what I could expect. ‘Same old crap,’ she said. ‘Withdrawal, isolation, social distance. You know the stuff that goes with being a loser and a loner. You don’t follow the leader, you’re a weirdo.’ She was having me on, but she was right just the same. Bravado, too, can be a stance.