There were few people in the staff club, and no one that Sheff recognised apart from emeritus Prof. Wickham, who was almost a fixture. He was a mineralogist who had no family, and who had occupied the same chair on every occasion Sheff visited the lounge bar, despite no longer having a nominal one within the university. Wickham faced the window so greetings were unnecessary, and despite the clearly displayed notice that prohibited animals on the premises, his black cocker spaniel lay at his feet like a discarded overcoat.
Michael bought two dark ales, and he and Sheff began an easy conversation about places they would revisit on any trip overseas. Both had studied abroad; both had long held ideas for articles that necessitated a return to Europe. ‘The exchange rate’s a killer, though, isn’t it?’ said Michael. ‘In the main tourist centres you get an absolute bloody hammering. For the price of a meal out in Paris you could buy a second-hand car here.’
‘I’m hoping to get off the beaten track more: Poland, perhaps. And I’ve always wanted to go to Corsica. Wonderful wilderness walks there, I’m told.’ Sheff had done few of the main New Zealand tracks, but saw himself striding high in the untamed hills above Corte, facing a stern wind and physical challenge. Increasingly he liked to place himself other than where he was.
Soon, however, their talk turned to their profession: the career trajectories of their peers, the decline of both standards and readership, the financial stringency that resulted in second-class, second-hand, telephone-based reportage. An old mentor had succumbed to alcoholism at last, and spent his time singing along to Italian opera. A contemporary of limited ability had become a fabulously well-paid presenter on regional television in Florida. A promiscuous woman of good humour and natural talent had been killed when her hang-glider crashed in Queenstown. The vicissitudes of other people’s lives provide for envy, commiseration and self-congratulation.
As they left the bar, Sheff and Michael passed close to the old mineralogist, who seemed in the process of petrification himself. Wickham paid no attention to them, but the black spaniel sprang to its feet, trotted past Michael, soundlessly bit hard at Sheff’s ankle and then returned to the chair. Sheff’s leg was only mildly scathed, but the fabric of his second-best trousers was torn. It was all over so quickly that the dog was back unperturbed at the professor’s feet before Sheff had the chance to retaliate.
‘The bugger’s ripped my trousers,’ said Sheff accusingly.
The professor remained turned away.
‘Hey, your dog bit me,’ said Sheff more loudly, leaning in.
‘Eh?’
‘Your dog bit me.’
‘He’s called Obsidian,’ said the professor fondly.
‘He’s torn them.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The dog ripped my trouser leg, see?’ Sheff raised his voice, and his foot in a clumsy pose as if about to begin a line dance.
‘Are you a member here?’ said the old man.
‘Oh, come on,’ said Michael, ‘we might as well go. He doesn’t know what you’re on about.’
Sheff had an urge to give the spaniel, if not Wickham himself, a damn good kick up the arse, but he knew that wasn’t a mature reaction, and hardly appropriate in the lounge bar of the university staff club. It was all right for the professor, too senile to be cognisant, and Michael, who saw amusement in it all, but Sheff was angry. Lately he felt he was experiencing more than his share of life’s passing irritations. ‘Old Wickham’s well past it,’ he said bitterly as he and Michael left, ‘and that bloody dog shouldn’t be in here in the first place. It’s as batty as he is. I should write and complain.’
‘Good idea.’ Despite their friendship, Michael would dine out on the incident for some time, with appropriate and increasing exaggeration. ‘Anyway, look,’ he said as they paused before parting at the old lecture hall, ‘I’ll let you know if anything at all turns up. And damn good to see you. Keep in touch.’
Michael had enjoyed the break from his office, but Sheff wandered off with one trouser cuff flapping at his ankle. A woman would be able to sew it up again, but he no longer had a wife, or partner, and that was a greater grievance. And what about the dog’s filthy teeth: he could get some terrible infection. At the thought, his ankle began to throb. Dettol perhaps. He would bathe it in Dettol.
In the evening Sheff poached himself three eggs with an incompetence that resulted in three wizened yolks on his toast, and the whites a residual swirl in the pot. The telephone rang while he was having ginger biscuits, brandy and coffee for dessert.
‘Hello. Sheff here.’ A pause.
‘I know where you live, dude.’ It was a coarse, accusatory voice, male and not one he recognised, and certainly lacking Prof. Wickham’s enunciation.
‘So?’ said Sheff. He knew no one who used the word ‘dude’.
‘I’ve been watching you, mate.’
‘And what’s the reason for that?’
‘Never you fucken mind. Just remember not to step out of line again, or you’ll cop it for real. Okay?’
‘I think you’ve got the wrong number,’ said Sheff. ‘No P, no tinnies, and not much money here. Just a journo having tea. Sorry about that.’
‘Don’t jerk us around again, or you’ll be sorry. That’s all. Don’t pull any of that shit again on us.’
‘What shit?’
‘You won’t get another warning.’ He sounded as if he’d said about all he was going to, but Sheff ended the call without waiting for a conclusion. There was a story there somewhere, but he had no wish to be part of it. The aspect of randomness seemed to be growing in his life, chinks appearing through which quizzical and enigmatic apparitions could be glimpsed. His ankle throbbed a little, and he wondered if somewhere in the house there was a bottle of Dettol, and if he was right in thinking it had medicinal qualities.
Later he watched a television documentary about the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone Park, and was cheered by the scenes of winter through which animals fled, or pursued others. They were creatures without ennui, or prevarication. They were unleashed in a passion to kill, or to escape, that was almost beautiful in its committed desperation. Snow floated in the dark sky and lay gleaming on the branches of fir trees. The wolves and deer were part of an elegant yet ferocious ballet of life and death. Sheff enjoyed the passing thought that Wickham’s mutt would not survive a week in such an environment, would be torn to pieces by those feral cousins, its black hide shredded like trouser material. He dreamt that night of clean winds, forests and elemental forces, and woke with all of it receding like a mist before the sun.
CHARLOTTE HATED BEING IMPRISONED IN THE COT, would rattle the cage and shriek. If no one came she would settle to gnawing at the top rail. Sometimes when Sheff looked in covertly, she was there, a little beaver, using her front teeth, all she had, to get through the paint and into the wood. He was concerned, but Lucy said it was special baby-proof paint with no toxicity at all. Afterwards he could still run his fingers over the bare patch, and feel the indentations that were the sign of their child’s industrious fury.
CHAPTER SIX
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON he wore his best trousers, and met with the other McInnes award judges at Annabel’s apartment in a low-rise complex in Mount Eden, looking out to the park. Before he’d married, Sheff used to jog in the park in the evenings several times a week, and he was reminded of that and his present lack of fitness. Annabel he’d met several times at functions: for fourteen months they had the same employer, though her expertise was management rather than front-line journalism. She had a soft, slightly spreading body that she kept contained in stylish business clothes, and something of an Australian accent she’d picked up while working for several years in Sydney. She was no mug, despite her obliging manner.
Gordy Howell’s plane was delayed and he arrived rather late for the meeting. Sheff judged him to be about his own age. Gordy was short, but with the large, even-featured and benevolent face of an academic accustomed to being paid attention.
A face close-shaven and with a slight glisten of lotion.
The meeting was a professional situation familiar to all three, and they showed a polite deference to one other’s views in the initial discussion. Sheff could see his colleagues had done their homework, and their shortlist candidates were much as his own. Annabel had checked the list of previous winners, and was concerned with the gender and ethnic imbalance; Gordy talked of the ‘wider implications’ of a selection. ‘What message will we be sending the industry?’ he asked. ‘We need to keep in mind that it’s a banner award for journalism.’
‘Just the best piece of investigative writing will do it for me,’ said Sheff.
He believed it, but knew he would probably betray the standard. Robert Malcolm’s articles were superior, but Sheff was open to argument that would justify passing him over. So it must be at even the highest levels of selection, he supposed, selfish and venial considerations disguised as judicious decisions. Popes and tennis club chairmen alike chosen by convocations motivated by self-interest and prejudice rather than the merits of the candidates. ‘I do find occasionally a certain complacency in Robert’s stuff,’ Sheff heard himself saying. ‘There’s a pervasive tone almost of self-congratulation, but the intelligence is there. No doubt about that.’ It was an ambiguous floater to sound out his companions without committing himself.
‘All else being equal,’ said Gordy, ‘I consider it quite legitimate to bear in mind the overall body of work as well as the specific articles for which candidates have been selected.’
‘And there’s always the danger of being influenced by the status, or lack thereof, of the medium in which the material appears,’ said Annabel. ‘If the best stuff is in a women’s fitness magazine, are we brave enough to say so?’
‘Anyway,’ said Gordy, ‘can we agree that our aim today is to nut out a shortlist?’
That wasn’t a difficult task, because it allowed all of them to ensure that at least their candidate of first choice survived, and without showing their hand completely as to the other selections. They ended with coffee, and a list of four that they would mull over before a second meeting to make the final decision. Gordy would surely come down for Robert Malcolm, but Sheff thought if he supported the one woman on the shortlist, then he and Annabel would be united.
Annabel knew Sheff had resigned from the paper, and asked him about it when business had lapsed. Both she and Gordy claimed to be jealous of the freedom he’d been rash enough to establish, but were glad of their own security. Gordy began a humorous account of his department’s battle against the bureaucrats within the university. It was at once self-deprecating yet suggestive of his own role as a champion of disinterested scholarship. Sheff was attentive for a time, as much to the performance as the story, but gradually his gaze and thoughts turned to the park not far away, the open space, the various tones of green, the large trees diminishing in perspective. He remembered running there, sometimes with winter darkness bowling in and his sweat chilled, more often with low sun and warm breeze, and people cutting by on the lower cycle paths. Those recollections became somehow conflated with the scenes from Yellowstone he had witnessed the night before, until he too was pursued through the mountain forest and across high meadows plumed by geysers. He was so lost there that he was unable to respond intelligently when Annabel asked for his opinion on Gordy’s monologue.
‘But you were lecturing for while, weren’t you?’ she said. ‘You must know what it’s like?’
‘Journalists tend to come and go in the system. Hardly any of us see it as a full career thing, and so try to avoid being sucked into internal politics,’ Sheff said. ‘And it’s a very small department – no cliques, no threat to the major players.’
‘Still, you know what I’m on about then,’ said Gordy. ‘The university is a strange world, isn’t it?’ He went on to say more about his experience there, but with slightly less bravura and dogmatism after realising Sheff himself had some experience of academic life.
Both Annabel and Gordy were intelligent, interesting people, making an effort to be agreeable. A few years before, Sheff would have responded in kind. Now he was aware of a variety of impatience, even withdrawal, within himself that he disliked, but was unable to suppress. In the attempt he encouraged Gordy to further mockery of bureaucratic formalism, and laughed with Annabel at the response. Nothing of their real lives was being shared: they were merely passing time in one other’s obliging company. Sheff had experienced relationships that meant so much more, but they had become painful to revisit.
He left soon after, and walked into the park. Gordy remained, waiting to be picked up by a friend with whom he was to stay the night. Nothing had been said about the names, Sheff realised. Nothing about Powell and Howell. Perhaps the two of them stood at Annabel’s window and watched him heading off through the trees on the green slope, using him as a topic of conversation as they got to know each other better. Maybe they were already forming a majority opinion as to the next winner of the McInnes Foundation award. If so, Sheff didn’t really give a bugger. He was wondering if he’d done a stupid thing by tossing in his job.
Three young guys were practising with their short irons, probably in defiance of park regulations. Sheff was reminded of his father’s new voice of illness as it had been on the phone. Golf had been his father’s game: such a predictable choice for an accountant, but there was fascination behind the selection, not just the pragmatic wisdom of making and maintaining business contacts. Some of Sheff’s enduring memories of boyhood had a connection with golf, even in such mundane ways as helping Warwick clean his clubs and gear, and listening to the anecdotes of the round as his father recounted them to his mother. David Lessing trying to get away from the clubhouse without paying for drinks after his once-in-a-lifetime hole-in-one. Susan Pethridge slicing a drive that drew blood on the face of the inspector of police on a parallel fairway. Moss Grainger found buttock-bare in the women’s toilets with a woman locally famous for making ceramic goblins. ‘I kid you not,’ Warwick had said to Belize, ‘such was the rapture of their rutting that they carried on even after discovery. Instinct – how gloriously powerful it is.’
‘It’s not really funny, though. Both of them are married,’ Belize had said.
‘Oh, but it is. It is,’ replied Warwick, and all the time he carried on wiping down his clubs with a damp cloth.
He had a small, stiff brush with which he scrupulously cleaned the grooves in the faces of his irons. He had heavy-soled, two-tone golf shoes that were also cleaned after each round and put heel-out in the same place on a shelf in the garage, above the bag and the trundler. Even the white, dimpled balls were wiped and checked for scars. There was a ritualistic aspect to Warwick’s nature that showed itself more clearly in his love of golf than in any other part of his life.
His father’s devotion to the sport had attracted Sheff to the game, and as a teenager he took it up. They had sometimes played together, but it hadn’t worked out as they hoped. Sheff had too little regard for the niceties. He wore jeans on the course, agitated to play through more leisurely foursomes ahead, and was noisy on the greens. Without discussion, or formal decision, they found it easier not to play much together in competition. Watching on television was quite different. They spent companionable hours physically located on the sofa, yet vicariously at tournaments around the world, while Belize and Georgie moved in one dimension around them. ‘Head down. That’s the thing,’ Warwick would say. ‘Don’t look up till the ball’s been struck.’ And, ‘Concentrate on your own game and disregard other people’s. Much of it’s played in your head.’
Maybe, even as Sheff walked on Mount Eden, his father had sufficient remission from his cancer to allow him to watch the sport on television, or reminisce with Belize concerning his own experiences and acquaintances. If not that, then perhaps the morphine fantasy allowed him to hit farther than ever before and with wondrous accuracy, so that in such visions he accomplished all the ambitions he had relinquished
as a player in life.
Sheff did a long circuit, and by the time he returned to his car he felt relaxed. The mood was not to last. The engine wouldn’t start despite the battery having plenty of charge. He wasn’t good with mechanical things, and had a suspicion that, like dogs, they could sense fear and ignorance in their handlers. The obvious thing to do was go back to Annabel’s apartment and ring for assistance: she might already be observing his predicament with amused concern. Yet Sheff resisted logic because of the slight loss of face involved. He knew there was a garage a couple of blocks away, and set off briskly to ensure he could be there before closing time. It was all a pain in the arse, and somehow typical of his present life in which Murphy’s Law was supreme. The garage was farther than he’d realised when driving, and it was after five o’clock when he reached it. He went straight to the workshop where one mechanic was already cleaning up, and the other in confidential talk with the owner of a red Mazda Six on the hoist. Before Sheff was close enough to speak, the solitary worker was called in to join the technical discussion. The three men seemed to close ranks, excluding Sheff. He kept a polite distance for a time, but with growing impatience as his presence was ignored. Edging closer, he tried to attract the attention of at least one of the service men, but even when he was almost at their shoulders he was apparently invisible to them. Sheff even raised his palm in a small apologetic gesture for interruption. Nothing. He imagined himself taking a cosh from his pocket and bringing it down with force on the head of the senior employee: the satisfying thud of it, the tremor of the man’s cartilaginous, butterfly ears, the startled attention of the others.
‘Excuse me,’ Sheff said politely. All three turned reluctantly to regard him. ‘It’s just that my car’s stuck a few streets back and won’t start. I know you must be almost knocking off.’ The Mazda owner emphasised his precedence by turning back and immediately asking about the cost of brake linings. The older mechanic, unperturbed by his hypothetical coshing, caught his mate’s eye and cocked his head towards Sheff. The young guy took a few steps to be in the sun at the wide workshop door, and motioned to Sheff to follow. He was confident and relaxed within his own jurisdiction, and even Sheff was aware that he was handsome in a slim-hipped, Mafia sort of way: dark hair and eyes, sharp features. The collar of his overalls was turned up, and a grey rag was draped on his shoulder with the casual elegance of a Milanese scarf. Sheff had seldom seen someone whose appearance was so uncharacteristic of his occupation, and would have been intrigued by it in other circumstances.
Carnival Sky Page 5