Living As a Moon

by Owen Marshall

  ‘Come round now. Come round straight away,’ said Melanie when Margaret called. ‘I’m cross you wouldn’t stay here. Where are you anyway?’

  ‘You’ve got lots of family. You’ll be flat out, but thanks. We’ll have plenty of time when the party’s over. You’ll get sick of me soon enough.’ She was standing in the bathroom of the motel at Tahuna, having checked it out. Sachets unfortunately, but there was both shower and bath.

  ‘Come round early then,’ said Melanie, ‘and don’t get all dressed up. It’s informal, just family and friends. You’ll know lots of people. Liz isn’t coming now though, her husband’s had a turn for the worse. It’s really disappointing: havent seen her for, oh, ages.’

  Margaret wouldn’t go early, although she didn’t say that. Better to have time with Melanie the next day, when the whirl of preparation, and the party itself, were both over. Melanie and her husband were using their own home, but having caterers in to do the entrées, the smorgasbord dinner and carry trays of drinks. Margaret walked with the mobile phone from the bathroom into the main room of the motel, stood by the glass sliding door. She asked Melanie about her family, using the name of each member and showing awareness of situation. Is Rachel still considering going back to university to study medicine? Have Shaun and the Irish girl decided to marry now they have a child? Is Melanie’s mother still able to recognise her when she visits her in the home?

  In the courtyard of the motel a man was washing a blue car with a hose, just as Peter would have been. Why bother, though, until she’s home again. Melanie told her about the preparations for the wedding anniversary, and Margaret was interested and supportive. As they talked, Margaret resolved to be outgoing at the party, make an effort to relate to others after several days spent in her own company. Peter had despised people who inflicted their tragic, or despondent, moods on others. You just have to button it, he would say. Suck it up and get on with your life. He had faced a personal grievance case brought by a secretary fired from his firm, a highly efficient young woman who had nevertheless caused disruption in the office because of her mood swings. Her case was upheld, the business had to pay thousands in compensation, but she didn’t return to the job. Peter was unrepentant. He wasn’t going to be pussy-footing around his own office, he said, just because she’d had a row with her partner, or it was the time of the month. He had been equally pragmatic about his illness. He admired discipline and rationality.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Margaret, ‘I’ll let you go, and see you later. You’ll have heaps on your mind.’

  ‘Come as soon as you like,’ said Melanie. Margaret remained at the glass sliding door for a time, watching the man chamois the water drops from the blue cars bonnet and roof. It comforted her. It reminded her of Peter, although the man in the courtyard was short and overweight.

  Melanie’s house was high up, with a view over the sea and the highway from Blenheim. An expensive and attractive home, but without much parking space because of the hill. Margaret knew to leave her car on the road, and when she arrived several vehicles were already there. The evening sun was still strong and the sky clear. She would go in alone, no longer with a husband to talk with if the first people she met were strangers. She felt the oddity of that rather than any apprehension, for she had never been a clinging, dependent wife. It was a sign of alteration, however: an indication of the fundamental shift and loss that death brings. As she approached the door she consciously quickened her step and smile so that she would match the party mood.

  Melanie was on the lookout for her and took her through the other guests to the kitchen island bench where her husband had set up the drinks. Selwyn gave Margaret a kiss on the cheek and held her hand for a time: actions that expressed his sorrow. He said nothing about Peter’s death. He was a surgeon, and knew how such things were, and that you didn’t discuss them at a party. ‘What will you have?’ he said in a voice quiet with compassion. Melanie had disappeared, but then came back with Cheryl Struthers, who had been with them in nurse training and a friend ever since. And divorced, so constituting a suitable companion. Melanie would have organised it, wouldn’t she: told Selwyn that when Margaret came he was to look after her until Melanie found someone Margaret liked. ‘What can I get you?’ Selwyn asked Cheryl, and when he saw they were busy talking, he excused himself and went to offer drinks elsewhere.

  The speeches would begin soon she thought. The jokes about the longevity of marriage and personal idiosyncrasies, and the acclamation from those married themselves, and those divorced, single or dispossessed. Cheryl was talking about her father whom they had recently had to admit to home. Three nights before she had received a call from the staff there saying her eighty-five-yearold father had run away, and when she went round she eventually found him hiding behind a copper beech tree in his soiled pyjamas, weeping in the moonlight. It was like being called to school for a naughty child she said. Old age could be so unfair. Cheryl herself was beginning to be proof of it. Her upper arms were heavy, and her neck had a quilted texture. She said she was going to have a second hip done.

  The growing noise in the rooms made their conversation difficult, and they went out into the warm dusk of Melanie’s patio. Three men were smoking as they leaned on the stone wall and talked in the unhurried way men do. Margaret and Cheryl took light, fabric-backed chairs and sat by the french doors. As they talked, darkness came gradually, so that the garden first and then the men became indistinct: just the waxing and waning of the cigarette tips and the murmur of their voices, companionable laughter. Margaret had a sense that all outside was fading away, even as the party behind the glass grew brighter, more intense. She would go in later and join the friends she recognised among the crowd there, but not for some time. She liked talking with Cheryl in the warmth of the summer night. But even as she listened, responded, talked herself of her grandsons, the visit to see the old house in Puriri Street, the pig’s head in the tree by the lake, the farm at Ladbrook, nursing days many years before, a deeper current of her mind carried thoughts of Peter.

  ‘Help me through, Maggie,’ he’d said, before he went into the hospice. ‘You’re a nurse and know what comes now. You know what to do.’ She did. She knew that often in cases such as his, death was sadistic: that despite the reassuring platitudes of the profession concerning palliative care, suffering would be immense. Love may bring obligations greater than any of society’s ordinances. ‘Help me through,’ he said, ‘as you’ve always done.’ Life can be a buffeting, bewildering journey, and joyous as well. There is plenty of malice and stupidity walking in the world, but luck, radiance, wonder and love are experienced there too.

  ‘I think it’s great you’ve come all this way by yourself,’ said Cheryl. ‘You’ve always been so strong, so positive.’

  Margaret decided there was no guilt: no guilt and no true death until the last of those who love you dies.

  COMING RIGHT

  ‘Jesus, though, am I sick of not having money. Other people have money except us. I see more stupid people than us with money, uglier too. Almost everyone I went to school with has done okay, except for the odd druggie and suicide. Jill Summers as was, has baches at Wanaka and Kaikoura better than our dump, and we only rent it.’

  ‘Yeah, her husband’s a real estate agent, though. It’s a licence to print money,’ said Ian.

  ‘Why haven’t you got a licence to print money?’

  ‘Because I haven’t got the qualifications.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said Noleen. ‘Shit-hot at school, weren’t you. First fifteen, first eleven, stuff all over your blazer pocket, and now guys that were nerds then are sitting behind the desk when we go in to beg for a mortgage. What a good laugh they must have.’

  This was an argument they had often: well, not so much an argument as complaint from Noleen and deflection by Ian. On Noleen’s side it was more a lament than a vindictive accusation. They sat in the car at Lumney Point, ate Kentucky Fried and watched the waves come in at an angle. The windows w
ere misted up because of the takeaways: several years ago the reason would have been different. ‘No, but it’s a bummer, and it’s not even as if we’re hanging in there for a pay-off down the line, like Kate.’ Kate and Martin lived next door, and Kate worked a ten-hour day at Hassell’s Dry Cleaning while Martin finished his law degree and pumped petrol at night.

  ‘Maybe he’ll flunk out.’

  ‘Nah. He’ll be in a suit before you know it, and playing squash at the club at lunchtimes. They’ll get a three-bedroom, brick place in one of the hill suburbs, and flick friends like us.’

  ‘Good riddance then,’ said Ian, ‘if that’s all they care about.’

  He didn’t consider himself a failure. Okay, he hadn’t done much academically, but he’d been a prefect and sports captain: even won the singing cup, which would have resulted in jeering derision for most other recipients. From the seventh form on he was able to get sex fairly often with a variety of girls, and how can a guy be a failure when he’s getting it regular. ‘You’re bloody hot. You know that?’ Asplin Newby told him as they lay on some patio squabs in her parents’ basement. Ian still thought about that sometimes when Noleen was going on. Okay, Asplin went on to varsity and became a microbiologist or something, but that doesn’t change what she said.

  ‘We need to get ahead somehow. That’s what I’m saying. We don’t have to be fucking world beaters, but we need to be on the up. I counted up the other day, and out of our friends only Anna and Frieda don’t own their own homes, and Frieda isn’t even married.’ The recollection caused a gust of discontent, and Noleen wound down her window, and tossed out a pottle still containing some mashed potato and gravy.

  ‘Yes, some whopping bloody mortgages, though,’ said Ian.

  Ian had a job at Central City Tyres and Mufflers, where he fitted and balanced tyres, and replaced mufflers. Five of them worked there, and he was next most senior to the foreman, even though he’d been there only four years. Noleen worked mornings at the Harbour Plantorama, though she hated gardening. Her job was mainly hand watering and responsibility for the portable displays outside the front entrance. She told Tony Bowden that she wanted to make deliveries, but he said if she wasn’t satisfied with what they’d agreed, she knew what to do. ‘You’d remember him at school,’ she’d told Ian. ‘Oily little turd who spent all break and lunchtime in the art room greasing round old Freetley.’

  Noleen was quiet for a time, occupied with taking the skin off the chicken drums because that was what made you fat. Not having enough money was bad enough, but Jesus, imagine being fat and poor. Ian could eat everything he got his hands on and nothing happened, but if she didn’t watch it she just ballooned. The sucking his straw made in the Coke container annoyed her, and his hand scrabbling on the cardboard for the discarded chicken skin. ‘Well, it’s what you pay for, isn’t it? The seasoning or whatever is what you pay for, and you chuck it away,’ he said. ‘Anyway, we’re not exactly starving, are we. We must have nearly three grand in the bank, we’ve got a good set of wheels and the landlord has to do maintenance on the house.’

  He shouldn’t have said anything about the car. Noleen reckoned it was a major reason they weren’t getting ahead. A 1998 V8 Falcon repainted purple and with Zeon mag wheels and lambskin covers. It was a real guzzler, but Ian pointed out that he got a hell of a discount on tyres and exhausts, and mates’ rates for just about everything else. That’s the good thing about being in a trade. ‘It’s a bogan car, that’s what,’ said Noleen. ‘When I went to Woolworths the other week, a skinhead shouted out something about purple and women.’

  ‘I’d knuckle the bastard,’ said Ian.

  ‘For Christ’s sake. That’s not the point I’m trying to make.’

  The point she was trying to make, but wasn’t sure how to get there, was that she wanted to have a baby. Noleen liked kids. She spent time babysitting her sister’s little girl, and enjoyed going there at other times just to play with her. And Ian would be a good dad, she was certain of that. He’d come from a happy family and didn’t have any hang-ups about kids. Noleen talked to him about it that night when they got home. She told him she thought it was time to start a family, but it was no start to family life without a home of your own. ‘You’re the man of the house,’ she said. ‘It’s up to you to come up with more. You know what that last bank guy said about a bigger income stream. Well, we need a bloody river, and quickly so that we can get a loan and into a place of our own. I could do afternoons as well, but that’s bugger all more, and I’d have to knock off when a baby came anyway.’

  ‘I suppose I could give up the Saturday games for overtime.’ He played in the second grade as lock, and most people reckoned he could be still be first grade if he had time for the practices. Noleen felt a bit guilty when he said that. A good deal of his life had been sport before they married. It was what he was good at, and she knew you needed to feel good at something.

  ‘I’m not saying that,’ she said. ‘You need time with your mates, I know. It’s just that we’re not getting on, are we. I don’t see us managing getting a house and having a baby the way it is now.’ She watched a bit more of the reality television programme in which people competed to lose fat. Normally she loved it, because all of them were heavier than her, but she couldn’t concentrate with money worries on her mind.

  ‘I dunno how so many other people do it,’ she said. ‘How, with just ordinary jobs, do they get so much money together for a deposit? How do they get the bloody loans? It beats me.’ Ian was reading a Wheels magazine, but he saw she needed to talk it out.

  ‘Often they get a kick-start from their parents, don’t they,’ he said. ‘Like Rick. $60,000 from the old man, and only principal to pay back.’

  ‘Yeah, well you and I’ll be a long bloody time waiting.’

  ‘We can’t blame your folks, or mine,’ said Ian. ‘If you haven’t got it, you haven’t got it, and that’s the size of it.’

  ‘Something’s got to happen anyway. That’s for sure. Maybe you need to chuck that job and find something a bloody sight better.’

  ‘We could win Lotto yet.’

  ‘It’s not funny, Ian. How can we have a baby on what we’ve got? You need to come up with something. I worry about it most of the time and it’s getting me down.’

  Ian knew it was, and being the sort of guy he was, he accepted her view that it was his responsibility to come up with the something. He didn’t talk about it all the time, but he wanted to get on. He wanted to have a family and look after his kids well. His father had suffered a workplace injury in his early fifties, and money had always been short in the family, but they’d been happy almost all the time: Ian and his mum and dad, his brother Bruce. Noleen and Ian still went there every Christmas, and visited other times too. Noleen got on well with his parents and thought them good sorts, even if they hadn’t set the world on fire. Her own parents hadn’t done anything special, but they had a sort of covetous awareness, inherited by Noleen, of the lifestyles of those a notch or two above.

  ‘Mr Menzies, I’d like to talk about my wages,’ Ian said to the owner of Central City Tyres and Mufflers the next Monday. He’d waited until lunchtime and caught his boss just leaving the small glassed office at the front of the workshop. Mr Menzies showed no annoyance. He motioned Ian inside, closed the door and sat at his desk again, his hands steepled on a wad of invoices.

  ‘Okay, shoot,’ he said.

  ‘Noleen and me are really keen to get a place of our own, and we’re just not getting enough together to be able to make the deposit on anything much at all, let alone the mortgage we’d need.’

  ‘Not easy,’ said Mr Menzies, who still put on overalls from time to time and got stuck in.

  ‘So I was wondering about a rise,’ said Ian.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to lose you. I know you do a bloody good day’s work. I tell you what, Ian. I’ll give you an extra dollar an hour starting from today. I know what it’s like getting some go ahead when you’re not long married
. That’s tops, though. There just aren’t the margins to pay more, and that’s a fact. It’s a cut-throat business and if I’m a few dollars dearer than the place down the road then I’m history.’

  Noleen was pleased with the decisiveness shown by Ian and Mr Menzies. She gave Ian a hug and a kiss, and they went out the next night to the races, and actually made seventeen dollars, not counting the hotdogs and chips, but they both knew that fifty or sixty extra bucks a week wasn’t going to make the difference they wanted. ‘You need to think outside the square,’ she told him. ‘It’s a pity you’re not into computers. Seventeen- and eighteen-yearold geeks set up some website selling party poppers, or passing on police signals, and in no time they sell out for millions. You read about it all the time.’

  Ian wasn’t much on computers, but he was capable of thinking outside the hypothetical square. After a Saturday afternoon game in which his team had been given a bit of a lesson by Varsity, Ian and his mates had a few beers in their wooden clubrooms by the park. It was cold and they clustered round the radiant heater. Several of the wives and girlfriends were there, even half a dozen kids who watched the small television set, or scampered on the wooden floor among the chrome and plastic seats. Budgie, who was a useful half-back, was talking about phone sex with considerable familiarity, although denying he’d ever used it himself.

  ‘It’s big business, big money,’ said Budgie. ‘There’s chicks making four or five hundred bucks in a couple of nights just gassing after washing the dishes and putting the kids to bed.’