Carnival Sky

by Owen Marshall

  CHAPTER NINE

  GEORGIE AND SHEFF had their early afternoon rendezvous at the domestic terminal in Wellington. She had a colleague with her who had driven her to the airport: a tall, sallow man she afterwards told Sheff was the chief anaesthetist. His height accentuated Georgie’s lack of it, but Sheff was impressed with the casual travel clothes she wore, and wished he’d thought to dress better. Lightweight dark trousers with deep, zippered thigh pockets, a loose, grey jerkin and Labrador brown suede boots. All of them were obviously new. He was reminded that she had a good deal more money than he did, despite being younger. She looked youthful as well, almost as if she were a graduate, off on her big OE, rather than a forty-two-year-old oncologist visiting the South Island. Her luggage also was a pleasant surprise: just one medium-sized case with a green ribbon to identify it on the carousel.

  ‘Don’t let her get up to mischief,’ said the anaesthetist pleasantly, as if passing over responsibility. ‘And make sure she comes back – we can’t do without her for long.’

  ‘How sweet,’ said Georgie, ‘but I might decide to live in a hut with a view of the mountains and watch the hawks circle. It’s home after all. I could be a rural GP and join Search and Rescue.’

  ‘Just come back safe and sound,’ said her friend, and squeezed her hand quickly while saying goodbye, then loped away.

  ‘Nice guy,’ said Sheff.

  ‘Used to be an iron man.’

  ‘Iron man?’ Sheff thought perhaps it was a colloquial term familiar to hospital workers and indicating responsibility for some specialised technical equipment.

  ‘You know. An iron man. He was fourth or fifth in the Coast to Coast years ago. Still runs to work most days of the week with his clothes in a backpack.’

  ‘Right. An iron man.’ Sheff tried to picture the guy, but all he could recall was the height, a paleness that seemed to dispute outdoor achievement, the tendons flexing beneath the skin of his hand, the sense of civilised attentiveness. The anaesthetist might attempt a similar reconstruction as he drove home. What for him might be salient recollections of Sheff’s appearance? Loose joints almost to the extent of clumsiness, a retreat of blond hair as of a hood pushed back, so that his naked face and forehead seemed large and slightly protuberant. Maybe a paradoxical expression of resigned impatience. ‘If the police asked you for a description of me, what would you say?’ he asked his sister.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Distinctive features. What would you say?’

  ‘Daft, that’s what I’d say. Let’s get rid of my stuff before we start playing silly buggers.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Sheff. He saw himself in the window of the bookshop as they walked to the check-in, and thought, ordinary, maybe even gawky, would be adjectives people would apply to him. He rarely paid attention to how he looked. His luggage was checked through from Auckland, and being unencumbered he should have carried his sister’s case, but she took the initiative. No matter that he was trained as an investigative journalist, considered hard-nosed and used to travelling alone, Georgie became chef de mission, just as Lucy had before her.

  People warmed to Georgie on first acquaintance in a way they didn’t to Sheff. A Chinese businessman who imported pewter ware kept up an animated conversation with Georgie long after Sheff, seated between them, had ceased to take part. Mr Yuan-jen’s father had died of cancer of the throat, and the son seemed to gain relief by talking to Georgie about it, and the new treatments available. Georgie was supportive but, although she made no mention of their own father, Sheff found it a gloomy topic. Nothing that Georgie could tell the businessman could possibly be of service now, but her professional knowledge seemed a comfort to him.

  The man’s polite and restrained grief was something Sheff had no wish to witness, but what he’d said about pewter was interesting, and during the lengthy taxi trip into Dunedin, Sheff made some jottings, aided by his sister’s memory, which, rather to his chagrin, was even better than his own. The ability to retain information was something he was noted for among his colleagues, who themselves were retentive from habit. ‘How come you remember all this stuff?’ he asked, while aware of the meter on the front dash as it rolled up the dollars.

  ‘I just do,’ she said. ‘Dad’s the same, isn’t he? Everything sticks.’

  ‘Except the essentials sometimes,’ Sheff said. Warwick had often forgotten to pick them up from arranged meeting spots, or neglected to pass on messages, despite recalling the exact sum paid for Georgie’s orthodontic treatment as a teenager, and the name of every Kiwi premier and prime minister. Who else, for God’s sake, could trot out Frederick Whitaker, or George Waterhouse?

  ‘Well, what was it the Chinese guy said about the proportion of metals then, if you’re so smart?’

  ‘I’m just brainier than you, that’s what. Admit it,’ said Georgie. ‘Anyway, what Mr Yuan-jen said was that the US now requires pewter used in serving food to be lead-free and to contain 92 per cent tin, 6.7 antimony and 1.2 copper. You know the Romans poisoned themselves with the lead in pewter?’

  ‘And the date for the oldest pewter found – 1450 BC, wasn’t it?’ Sheff asked.

  ‘1450 BC and from an Egyptian tomb,’ said Georgie. ‘What’s it matter anyway?’

  ‘I might do a piece on it.’ He could knock out one of the freelance articles Chris had invited him to contribute. If he could rough something out while it was fresh, less time need be spent on it later.

  ‘Bronze is mainly copper with a bit of tin?’

  ‘Who cares?’ said Georgie. The man himself had been her interest, not his livelihood. ‘This is holiday time.’

  Sheff continued to make his jottings, but a little self-consciously. He recalled that Mr Yuan-jen had said pewter was largely replaced by the mass production of glass and porcelain tableware towards the end of the eighteenth century. What did he have that was pewter? An elephant from Kuala Lumpur and an engraved mug he’d been presented with from fellow officers when he left the Territorials. He kept pencils and biros in it. Maybe pewter wasn’t interesting enough to be one of his subjects for the paper after all. Not unless he could find out more about the Romans poisoning themselves, or the Egyptians entombing it along with slaves for the afterlife. What was the relevance of pewter to a Taupo woman with three kids and varicose veins, but no job or partner, or to a Southland cow cocky worth millions, but grieving for his rugby-playing youth?

  ‘Would you read about pewter?’ he asked his sister. ‘In an article I mean. Would you be bothered?’

  ‘Oh, give it a rest about pewter,’ she said. ‘For Christ’s sake. Are you always like this?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like a nerd. A boring newspaper nerd,’ Georgie said, and Sheff caught the taxi driver’s half-turned smirk, and resisted the wish to make a retort. A couple bickering in public was a spectacle he despised. ‘Anyway,’ said Georgie, ‘you’ve tossed all that in, haven’t you? You don’t have to educate the world.’ Sheff just took in his breath deeply, and watched the green paddocks passing. It was all right for Mr Yuan-jen – a brief flight acquaintanceship and then he was by himself again, and the taxi driver would soon have other passengers to over-charge. Sheff, however, had days, maybe weeks ahead, to spend in his sister’s company.

  Georgie had booked one room with two single beds in a hotel close to the Octagon. ‘Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it? We’re family and it’s more friendly.’ True enough, but Sheff was surprised nevertheless. Brother and sister they were, but now unaccustomed to being together. And the decision had been of so little consequence to her, that she hadn’t bothered to mention it: an assumption of prerogative that Sheff told himself to ignore. And he repressed the childish inclination to choose a bed, and the equally juvenile irritation when she appropriated the one by the window that would have been his own preference.

  They walked for while in the shopping area and the small museum park by the university, and then went to a wine bar in Princes Street for a drink. Georgie had st
udied in the city and was pleased to be there again, but after a time her reminiscence took her away from Dunedin to the greater namesake of Edinburgh. She had flatted with a woman who came from a wealthy Liverpool family, and who walked in her sleep almost every night. Sheff countered with the tale of an interview he had with Aussie politician Kevin Rudd when he visited after the Christchurch earthquake. It had nothing of intrinsic interest.

  Sheff was about to order another drink when a trickle of blood came from his right nostril, bright and thin on the fingers he raised. He remembered the nosebleed in bed a few weeks before: the same bright, arterial blood. ‘Put your head forward and clamp your nose for a bit,’ said Georgie, and she went to the bar and brought back a glass of water and several paper napkins, helped to wipe his face and hands. The bleeding was slight. ‘It’s the Little’s area,’ she said, ‘Lots of capillaries close to the surface. Maybe the dryness in the plane, or the changes in altitude.’

  ‘I had one after my farewell do from the paper. The first for ages, and then another some days later. Do you think it means anything?’

  ‘Nothing to worry about unless it happens frequently.’

  ‘And now I have my own travelling physician.’

  ‘I’m on holiday,’ said Georgie. ‘I’m trying not to read disease in every face I see.’

  ‘Thanks, though,’ Sheff said.

  She dealt with the situation so calmly that others around them were scarcely aware of anything untoward, and after a few minutes he went to the lavatory, washed his face, and then the two of them walked back to the hotel in a soft drizzle that came by stealth upon them. He admired capability, and his sister’s display of it cancelled his earlier annoyance. ‘Sometimes,’ he told her, ‘I can hear liquid sloshing in my stomach. I’m just walking around normally and I hear this water or whatever slapping about in there. It can be quite loud.’

  ‘Everybody does. It’s nothing to worry about.’

  ‘A muscle starts twitching in my thigh sometimes when I’m sitting down. It can go on for a couple of minutes.’

  ‘Just forget it,’ she said with impatience. So he didn’t go on to seek advice concerning the small sores that sometimes appeared in his mouth, or a mole on the back of his left thigh that he could see only in the mirror.

  They decided that if the rain continued, they would eat at the hotel, and if the weather cleared they would promenade, as Georgie put it. It turned out to be the latter, although to stroll past Dunedin’s restaurants wasn’t to experience the ambience of Florence, or Paris. ‘I once had a meal on the Boulevard du Montparnasse with a blind woman who could recognise the restaurants she passed by smell,’ Georgie said. Sheff felt a sudden urge to say he’d had a similar experience, but knew he couldn’t justify it.

  ‘I did see a black girl drop a chocolate from the Eiffel Tower,’ he said, ‘and a homosexual guy hit on me in the Luxembourg Gardens. When I was in Charlottesville I saw a horse fall down stone-dead for no reason during the Thanksgiving Day parade.’

  ‘Pauline Benoit was her name. She went blind as a child because of the trauma of seeing her father being attacked and killed in the street. She was an excellent musician and critic, and wrote reviews for a well-known classical music magazine.’

  Sheff had no reminiscence of equal singularity. The girl’s chocolate hadn’t fallen on anybody’s head, the gay guy after being repulsed had offered no startling aphorism, but just walked away, and the horse in Virginia hadn’t crushed anyone, had done nothing spectacular except falling down in death.

  ‘The sense of smell is the most associative and evocative of all,’ said Georgie, ‘even more than sound, touch, or sight, and often our responses are so subtle, and so instinctive, that we aren’t conscious of the effect. There’s still not a lot known about the role of pheromones.’

  ‘Who killed the blind woman’s father?’ asked Sheff, interested in spite of himself.

  ‘I don’t know, but she went blind because of it. She could distinguish between moules and a paella without going inside.’

  ‘Inside where?’

  ‘The restaurant.’

  ‘Oh, right. So she had a sort of perfumer’s nose.’

  ‘It was compensatory. Her hearing and sense of smell improved when she went blind. She was the sister of a guy I went out with for a while overseas. I never kept in touch, but I remember her better than her brother. I used to be her looking glass. She would stand in front of me before we went into places and make me check her appearance. She said she trusted only a woman to do that. She said men don’t see the same way we do.’

  ‘I did see a chocolate drop from the Eiffel Tower.’

  ‘You said.’ There was no curiosity. As a journalist and older brother shouldn’t he have the more bizarre and insightful experiences? There were those deeply personal things, of course, that he was unwilling to unearth even before himself.

  ‘I never knew you had a French boyfriend when you were overseas,’ he said.

  ‘He was her half-brother. He studied with me in Scotland. People are such a great mix in Europe. Almost all professional folk speak several languages. It’s expected. With just English sometimes I felt under-educated over there, and I’d never felt like that before. But we’re so isolated here, I guess. Music was another language again for Pauline. Sometimes I think I should have specialised in neurology. The brain’s a fascinating organ. Her other senses became heightened you see. You read anything by Oliver Sacks?’

  ‘I have actually.’

  ‘There you are then,’ said Georgie as if she had carried an argument. ‘Yes, the Boulevard du Montparnasse. The restaurant was just past a post office and Pauline used to eat there. Why don’t our streets have beautiful names?’

  ‘What’s the matter with Strugglers Gully Detour,’ said Sheff. ‘And Prohibition Road. That’s got a ring to it.’

  ‘There’s the Avenue of Forgotten Dreams in Prague.’

  ‘I know three Coal Pit Roads.’

  ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ said Georgie.

  An upstairs eatery was their choice, with the prices also elevated. Because of his earlier nosebleed, Sheff chose fish, mild vegetables, and beer rather than wine. Georgie had a curry that was asterisked on the menu as hot, and ate all of it without hesitation, or sign of discomfort.

  At a table close by sat an old man. He wore a low cravat of mingled red and black, and his clothes were of obvious quality though dated, and all of them hung on him. He had shrunk perhaps during lengthy ownership, or maybe he wore the clothes of a larger brother since passed on. The tendons of his neck stood within the loose collar, like stems in a vase, patches of stained skin made a palimpsest of his face, and the black velvet jacket was half slipped from his narrow and sloping shoulders. He seemed oblivious to the bustle of people below the big windows, or the more leisurely movement within the restaurant. He was intent on his food and his own thoughts, as if sitting by himself in a suburban dining room with a cat sleeping on another chair.

  ‘This isn’t so bad, is it? I’m looking forward to seeing Mum and Dad tomorrow,’ Georgie said. Sheff knew little of her as an adult, and even his memory of her as a kid sister was embarrassingly incomplete. She’d always seemed to be accumulating accomplishments – ballet, piano, Girl Guides, Duke of Edinburgh Award, school choir, gym or extra maths – rather than hanging about on the fringe of his friendships and activities. Her school blazer had been as impressively adorned as the uniform of a Pentagon general.

  The old man in the velvet coat at the next table reminded Sheff of their father. Not in dress at all, but in gauntness and self-absorption. Warwick had become that way at the end of his life, although physically imposing and skilled in company when younger. ‘The old guy reminds me of Dad,’ Sheff said quietly as they waited for their dessert.

  ‘How’s that?’ asked Georgie. She didn’t turn to glance at the man, but regarded her brother.

  ‘Just being so loose in his clothes, I suppose, and a sense of inwardness.’
/>   ‘Do you think about Dad much?’

  ‘I wish I’d spent more time with him, especially since he got sick. A lot of stuff was going on with Lucy after the baby died, and then we split, and that’s all I seemed able to feel deeply about. And there was work and everything. Then he got sick. I feel a bit guilty actually. I’m glad you kept on at me to come. You were right.’

  ‘Do you?’ said Georgie. ‘You feel guilty?’

  ‘Well, all he and Mum have done, and when they need something in return I’m too busy with my own fucked-up life.’ He surprised himself with the urgent honesty of his feelings, but Georgie didn’t seem taken aback.

  ‘He likes Lucy. Both of them do, and they wanted you to stay together. She still gets in touch, you know. They still talk. I wouldn’t be surprised if she comes down before too long. Mum and Dad hoped you’d have more children.’

  ‘They never said anything to me.’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said.

  As he and Georgie talked about their parents, the old man got up and left. Upright, he didn’t look at all like their father: smaller and with a gait that suggested he was apprehensive of his own stability. There was still, however, an aura of isolation, of preoccupation. He paid no heed to them as he passed close by their table, and the red and black of his silk cravat caught the light in a momentary shimmer. So out of place were his clothes that he might have stepped off a repertory theatre stage. Whose father and grandfather was he? What life was he almost at the end of, and why did he come alone to an inner-city restaurant wearing velvet that hung on him, and silk at his throat?

  It was becoming cold, as is the way in the south after nightfall, when they walked back to the hotel. Georgie made them coffee in their room, then they watched the late news on television. Almost irritatingly well informed and not amenable to instruction, she was able to debate the staples of his profession, whereas he was almost completely ignorant concerning hers.