Carnival Sky

by Owen Marshall

  ‘No,’ said Sheff. He wasn’t going to be frisked like some kid at a corner dairy.

  ‘He didn’t take any money,’ called Georgie as she left the car and came over to them.

  ‘Well, someone’s ripped me off. You can’t trust any bugger these days. I don’t know why I bother to have a stall at all. If you haven’t taken the money, why won’t you prove it?’

  ‘I haven’t taken money. I’ve told you and that’s the end of it.’

  ‘So you say.’ He stepped closer to Sheff, and jutted his stubbled chin. The three dogs jumped from the ute and gathered with hackles up around their master’s lanky legs.

  ‘Do we really look like highway robbers?’ said Georgie. ‘If we’d been into the tin we’d hardly stop at bagging up a few apricots and apples, would we?’ She smiled, took the forty dollars from Sheff’s hand and held it out to the man. Who could maintain belligerence in the face of a small, cheerful woman who bobbed when she walked, and talked with some authority? ‘You okay with that?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose so. I get pissed-off, though, with city people who think everything in the country’s free.’ He took the money and let his arms relax to his sides, the large, worn hands hanging like grappling hooks.

  ‘Well, no harm done,’ Georgie said. ‘We’d better push on.’ And the two of them went back to the car without further comment from the stall owner, who stood with the dogs around him and rather grimly watched Sheff and his sister leave. Georgie even gave a royal lift of the hand in farewell.

  ‘Well, that ended up being damn expensive fruit,’ said Sheff. ‘Forty bucks, you realise.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you have just humoured him a bit?’ said Georgie. ‘You could see he was uptight. Why didn’t you just turn your pockets out? You had nothing to hide.’

  ‘So why should I?’ Sheff was driving too fast, and he made a conscious effort to slow down.

  ‘How is it that you so often get on the wrong side of people now?’ Georgie said. ‘You’re getting to be so touchy about everything.’

  ‘Okay, okay, let’s just leave it, shall we? Next stall we come to, you can get out and be accused of being a thief.’

  ‘You know what it is?’ said Georgie thoughtfully. ‘You just don’t like people, and it shows in your manner. If you don’t watch it you’ll be one of those perpetually grumpy bastards who seem allergic to life. If you don’t like yourself, then you can’t like other people. Have you thought about that?’

  Sheff chose not to reply. He didn’t want to say something he would regret, and also, as well as platitude, there was truth in her assessment he preferred not to consider.

  Instead he concentrated on the familiar landscape, so limited in palette and vegetation. Orchard country was behind them and the road rose as if on the shoulder blade of a gigantic lion, the hill slopes dry and tawny, the short tussock broken through with layered rock, and rarely house, shed or cultivation to be seen. They were countries foreign to each other, the North and South Islands, separated by attitude as well as latitude – different histories, landforms, climates. Different people.

  Neither brother nor sister wished to arrive at their parents’ home at odds with each other, and they drove in a silence that became increasingly easy, watching the dry sweeps of country with occasional grey, lichen-speckled posts and clumps of willow and poplars in the gullies and around the homesteads. And farther back the pulse of steep hills in the heat. A clear sky, dry heat so much less enervating than the humidity of the north. As children they had baked in it summer by summer and become brown as nuts.

  ‘I’ve got a couple of scaly, rough patches on my legs,’ said Sheff. ‘I wondered if they might be from all the sunburn over the years. Maybe you could take a look at them sometime?’

  ‘Okay, but I wouldn’t think there’s anything amiss. You don’t want to become a hypochondriac. Just have regular check-ups from your GP.’

  No further reference was needed to their disagreement. They just moved on as they had always done, without formal reconciliation. Passing disagreement is as natural as harmony within a family. ‘We’re just about there,’ Sheff said. ‘The Munro place is coming up now.’ And not far beyond it was a long paddock with a line of poplars where Clydesdales once grazed, the only ones of the breed that he ever saw in the district. He’d never seen them moving. When he and his friends had biked past, the horses stood eternally in small groups, posed as if they were aware of their physical pre-eminence and the gaze drawn to it.

  Alex had grown since their childhood, now stretching out to join them along the final run through the rocks and pines to the bridge, the houses grouped according to the styles and materials typical of the times in which they were built. Some of the most recent and highest on Bridge Hill flaunted plaster walls and Tuscan tints. Nearly forty years ago, his father had bought a small lifestyle block on Earnscleugh Road close to the Clutha, and built a brick house that had been moderately imposing for its time. Now it was just another better home, settled into its surroundings, with the pip fruit and citrus trees neglected and a pony paddock leased to the neighbour.

  Sheff felt both familiarity and strangeness as he turned in: everything recognisable, yet the total composition altered by the accumulation of change and the imposition of an adult view. Beneath the indisputable detail of the present reality shimmered a more powerful past, so that a chicken coop was clear on the extension of the garden that now held roses, the tree hut was again visible among the lower branches of the copper beech, and the pebbles under which he had buried snails as a seven-year-old were a button row under the letter box.

  Their mother’s face was at the living room window as they drew up, and all of her at the door waiting when they reached it. She was taller than Georgie, and her hair was very white and tied back in a way that brought her features into prominence: the high forehead, long face and nose, the pale blue eyes, deep-set. She gave them both a quick, tight hug. ‘Get the stuff from the car later,’ she said. ‘Your father’s up today. He said he didn’t want to be an old sad-sack in bed when you arrived. He’s eaten something too, and been talking on the phone.’

  Georgie received the first hug from Belize, and also from her father, who held her longer and patted her back with one hand as he clasped her. Sheff took no slight from that. It was accepted that a daughter be greeted first, and Sheff’s embrace by his father was wholehearted and easy, although even that degree of physical exertion caused Warwick to puff, and stagger slightly. ‘We’ve been looking forward to seeing you,’ he said. ‘How long since we’ve all been here together, eh? Must be ages.’

  ‘Christmas two years ago,’ answered Georgie. ‘Lucy, too, of course, and I brought Morarji Mehta, who was working with me at the hospital and had nowhere to go for Christmas.’

  ‘Well, nowhere he’d rather go than be with you,’ said Belize.

  ‘Oh Mum, there was nothing to it. You can’t leave someone all alone for Christmas Day. He’d barely arrived in the country. Now he’s in private practice in Dublin.’

  Sheff remembered Morarji: a quiet guy with dark, lemur eyes, and a giggle to represent his thankfulness. As gifts he’d brought a large box of Turkish delight and a bottle of Napoleon brandy. Things hadn’t been easy between Sheff and Lucy, close to an end, and she and the Indian doctor had talked more together than either of them did with him.

  ‘Do you hear from him?’ asked Warwick. ‘I quite liked him. For some reason he knew a lot about the Gurkhas. He told me stuff about them in the war, and how the various regiments drew from different tribes, and so each had a special character.’

  ‘For a while I did,’ said Georgie, ‘but then it petered out. Both of us too busy, and I don’t imagine he’ll ever come back here. I suppose he’s still in Dublin.’

  It was typical of Warwick that he’d remembered this casual guest in his home, even the detail of an exchange that Dr Morarji Mehta had no doubt long forgotten. And typical that he drove himself to carry on a conversation despite his illness.
How thin he was, his teeth seeming to have enlarged, yet the skin of his face drawn tight and pale. He was dying, and that was too terrible a topic to embark on as a family, so they talked about a past Christmas and the visitor with knowledge of the Gurkhas. Sheff excused himself and went to the car to bring in the cases. He needed just that time alone to regain equanimity after seeing his father. For a moment Sheff stood by the car, raised his face and closed his eyes. He had no coherent thoughts, just a surge of affection and sadness that he wanted no one to witness, but he had to go back with the luggage and pretend that there were things to talk about apart from his father’s illness.

  ‘Georgie’s in her own room and you’re in the spare one,’ Belize said as he came in, and so for a little while longer he could be silent and carry on with the cases through the passage. The end bedroom was smaller than the others, and looked out onto the untidy orchard with the windfalls showing brown flesh wounds from the birds. It was always called the spare room, but his father now slept alone in his son’s bedroom, so Sheff was dispossessed.

  He recognised little in his old room when later he went in to see his father resting. His stuff was gone, apart from the kitset desk he’d assembled in his sixth form year. On a chrome trolley his father’s medications clustered, laid on a pale towel beside a small stock of books and a bowl of glistening gem stones. The blue and white striped curtains had been replaced with Venetian blinds, and an armchair sat by the window. It was a homely cell in which Warwick spent both day and night when he was low. It had the faint lived-in smell of antiseptics, food, and the vapours of the unwell.

  While Warwick was still dressed, they had an early evening meal, sitting four square at the small window table as they had when a family together. Georgie produced a prize-winning riesling that she said was from Sheff and her, though he’d made no contribution. A double thoughtfulness that shamed him. Belize had cooked fish and rice, very plain for Warwick, but to which the rest of them could add a sweet and sour sauce. It appeared the role of the parents to ask questions, and that of Georgie and Sheff to answer them, as if it was assumed that now everything of novelty and promise was in the children’s lives. Georgie’s in particular. Sheff’s resignation from the paper, and ideas for overseas travel, were soon put aside for discussion of his sister’s real estate investment plans and an invitation to join a national oncology research unit. Maybe a mastery in ontology was also assumed, thought Sheff somewhat sourly.

  There was nothing pointed in the preference given to Georgie, but Sheff was aware of it. He wasn’t accustomed to being of secondary importance. ‘I’m on the judging panel this year for the McInnes Journalism award,’ he interjected.

  ‘You’ve won that yourself, haven’t you?’ said Georgie.

  ‘What’s it for again?’ asked his mother. Even as he explained, Sheff was aware how obvious a ploy for attention it was, how indicative of insecurity, and he became half-hearted in his account. Their attention not held, Georgie and Belize reverted to talk of relative property values in Wellington suburbs, the merits of open-plan living, northern aspects and off-street parking. Warwick drooped somewhat over his largely untouched white fish and rice, and concentrated on breathing. Sheff tried to catch his eye, to share a smile, but his father was lost to them, sunk within himself to conserve energy, or evade pain. A covey of quail quick-stepped across the dry lawn, their cockades black above alert heads. A common sight that drew no attention from the others, but Sheff took it as a small recognition of his arrival.

  ALMOST FROM BIRTH CHARLOTTE had a strong grip. On her first day back from the hospital, even before she could fully focus, she took hold of his index finger and held it tightly. Later, during times when she lay on a blanket to have a kick, Sheff would sit on the floor beside her and put out his finger to be grasped. He took note of which hand she used and told Lucy she was going to be a leftie. He would blow lightly on her face, and she would smile and her eyelashes would flutter.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  AFTER BREAKFAST NEXT MORNING, Georgie followed Sheff when he went to the bathroom to shave. The mirror was large and the natural light good. His parents’ toothbrushes, one red, one blue, to avoid confusion, stood in a small vase. A Venetian bowl held scented boutique soaps that were never used. The glass was the colour of pale ale, had raised, delicately painted flowers, had been in the same place for as long as he could remember. He spoke of it to his sister, but she had something on her mind that she didn’t wish Belize to hear.

  ‘The section’s looking a bit sad,’ she said. ‘Dad’s not been able to keep up with it for ages. Do you think you could get the lawns and edges done today, and maybe a sweep around the paths? I’m going to the shops for Mum soon. She needs quite a bit of stuff.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’ He would have got round to having a tidy-up outside, but it irked him to be instructed by Georgie.

  ‘Well, I just mention it because Mum won’t like to ask.’

  ‘I’d planned to take Mum and Dad for a drive,’ he lied.

  ‘Well, that’s fine. A day won’t make any difference. I only mentioned it because it’s been let go.’

  ‘No, no, I’ll do the lawn. It’s straggly though it’s burnt-off.’ He switched on the shaver even as Georgie said thanks and, after standing for moment, she turned and left.

  ‘It’s a bit of a jungle behind the garage too,’ she said from the hall as she went. He knew he’d been unnecessarily offhand, reacting to his small pique at having a task pointed out, at her tendency to manage situations and people. It had to do with her profession, he decided: he had no recollection of her having that disposition when they’d lived together.

  In their shared childhood he had always assumed seniority, but in adulthood she had attained presence and status. Dr Georgie was accorded significance in the community, and so within the family. He had thought immutable the superiority two years gave him when they were growing up. Irrational though it was, he resented the subtle, telling changes in their relationship. Yet he knew he was in the wrong, and walked out to the car later with Georgie as she left for the shops. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you’re quite right. I’ll get stuck into things here, and thanks for bringing the wine for last night. I’m happy to chip in for that.’

  ‘Forget about it. We must sort out what Dad’s got squirrelled away in those cupboards in the garage. Heaps of Aussie reds, I suppose.’

  ‘We may need them,’ Sheff said.

  He mowed the lawn with a deal of ostentation, cut back a wisteria on his own initiative and accepted his mother’s thanks with no reference to Georgie’s prompting. He went out again and attacked the sprawling photinia hedge on the west side. Its ramification was a sign that Warwick had given up, after many years of severe pruning. When the task was over, Sheff had a blister on the inside of his thumb from the clippers, and pink and green leaf fragments clung to his hair and shirt. He had a shower and came back to talk with his mother, feeling pleased with himself. ‘You need to get someone in, Mum,’ he said. ‘You can’t be looking after the section when you’re nursing Dad.’

  ‘People have been very good.’

  ‘But that’s not a long-term thing.’ They were standing by the large kitchen window with a view of the garden, but she’d finished with talk of outward appearances.

  ‘I want you to make the most of being with your father,’ she said. ‘He won’t say, but he’s been fretting that he wouldn’t have enough time with you both. Whenever you or Georgie rings he talks about nothing else for ages.’ How little indication of that in the conversations Sheff recalled, and they were fewer than he wished.

  As Sheff talked with his mother, he found himself making a close appraisal of her without knowing why. Within the aura of memory she remained a tall, blonde woman, with energetic movement, clear voice, hair loose about her face, and an inclination to dispute, but now her shoulders were narrow, she had a flat-footed walk, and her cheeks possessed the soft sheen of a thousand moisture cream applications. But her hair was still full and heavy, t
hough pulled back severely, and of a startling whiteness.

  ‘You could go through his things with him,’ she was saying. ‘You could choose anything that you’d like to take for yourself.’ Her blue eyes were still what drew attention, enhanced even by the leaching out of colour elsewhere on her face. A light blue in which the pupils were dark, contrasting pips. Her personality had surely weathered with time also, so that the sudden flares of impatience and anger, the transitory enthusiasms and impetuous commitment to causes were worn back to a wary protection of family, memory and possessions. ‘The pain’s awful at times,’ she said, ‘and he won’t come out of it. The doctors have as good as told him it’s hopeless. He just wants to talk about the past, and mostly about things that have never been of any importance.’

  ‘It must be damn tough for you,’ said Sheff, ‘day after day.’

  ‘You take up pretence. It’s easier that way. We sit there for hours, sometimes saying nothing, sometimes talking for the sake of it, and both of us are thinking about him going, and not having the words for it.’

  This ageing woman was his mother. He had once been part of her body, and now he stood quite independently in a life that she had little to do with. He walked past many such women in the supermarket, sat by them in buses and theatres, with impatience overtook them on stairs and footpaths. Surely he should be aware of some dynamic and powerful bond between Belize and himself, but he’d been away a long time, visited seldom, and found some disconnection between his mother now and the memory of a mother so much more important to him. It was a guilty thought, and to assuage it Sheff put his arm clumsily on Belize’s shoulder. ‘He’s lucky. You’ve always looked after him so well,’ he said. She remained looking out of the window and gave a shivering, indrawn breath to compose herself.