Stealing had been more sordid. He pilfered coins from his father’s clothes and his mother’s purse, and showed greater enterprise by selling the lawn-mower petrol to Moose Broughton, who lived close and had a motorbike. Warwick twigged to that loss after a time, but not of the occasional golf ball, or bottles of beer and wine. Sheff developed an informal business relationship with the local junk yard. Having found an entry point beneath the netting he stole nondescript pieces of copper, brass and lead, and sold them back. A profitable recycling that he was wise enough not to overdo, but which came to an end when the proprietor was suspicious of a large brass plate from a traction engine.
It was the emotional flare of risk rather than any material gain that was the true reward. There is some natural inclination for children to exploit the generation before them, perhaps as a compensation for dependence and adult disregard. Authority and pomposity are irresistible targets. So he’d gummed up the keyhole of the PE master’s office with chewing gum, stolen a lawn sprinkler from grumpy bastard neighbour Talbot, wedged potatoes in the exhaust of the Honda belonging to the superintendent of the swimming pool.
Sheff had a clear recollection of one conviction and punishment. He and Bunny Yates had dug up the cacti collection that the vicar’s wife kept beneath her kitchen window, then potted them up and gone door to door as salesmen a few blocks away. From some vantage close to the vicarage however, they’d been recognised and their parents notified. Warwick first took him back to the scene of the crime, and Sheff had the humiliation of compulsory apology increased by his awareness, even then, that concealed amusement was part of the adult response. Physical punishment followed at home, Warwick half-heartedly slapping a belt at his son’s legs. Sheff had felt no animosity towards his father, just the mutual embarrassment and sense of convention observed. ‘You let yourself down by pinching stuff like this,’ his father had said. ‘It’s something you need to grow out of before it’s a habit. You don’t want to have a reputation as a thief, do you?’
‘No,’ Sheff had said.
‘You need to use your noggin. You’re not a little kid any more. It doesn’t work if everybody goes round stealing whatever they want, does it?’
‘No.’
‘There’s no necessity whatsoever for you to steal anything,’ Warwick said. He was right, but had forgotten that adult logic has no sway in childhood.
In his mind’s eye, Sheff could see father and son standing there, the belt still in Warwick’s hand, and a look part admonition and part concerned affection on his face as they talked. Sheff’s legs still stinging, and quite clear on the shelves by his bed the bright kitset model cars that were his enthusiasm at the time. That’s how it is when you come back to the places of childhood: tableaux of precise detail flare out momentarily from the past.
HIS FATHER BELONGED TO A GENERATION that accepted the power of the computer, but was uneasy under its rule. They weren’t born to it and never fully trusted it. Warwick used computers at his work and at home, but missed the reassurance of hard copy, and ran off his most important documents and emails. To be on the safe side, he said. When computers played up he proclaimed them the devil’s work, and could be tetchy for days. And he never became accustomed to how rapidly both hardware and software became obsolete. ‘As soon as I get used to something, I’m forced to change,’ he’d complain. ‘It doesn’t make for efficiency and it’s bloody annoying.’ Sheff sometimes tried to explain to him the growing capability of computers, but his father wasn’t a good listener. ‘I’m not interested in the possibilities,’ he said. ‘I just want them to do the job without going on the blink.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE BED LIGHT WAS ON and the Venetians closed, so it must have been night. What time it was other than that, Sheff had little more idea than had his father. ‘Fuck,’ said Warwick, faintly. His face was stiff with pain, from his half-open mouth came a steady, subdued ‘ahhhhhhhhhh’ sound that seemed to provide some relief, for him at least. With his right hand he plucked restlessly at the blanket, until Sheff covered it with his own hand.
‘See if you can have a sleep,’ said Sheff uselessly.
‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.’ Inhale. ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.’
‘Soon you can use the pump again.’
‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.’
‘It seems worse at night somehow, doesn’t it, Dad? Maybe it’s harder to find distraction. Do you reckon?’ and he squeezed Warwick’s hand and felt a brief return of the pressure.
‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.’ Inhale. ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.’
Sheff started to join in softly, so that Georgie and his mother wouldn’t hear if they stood in the passage, or opened the bedroom door. There was nothing else he could think of that might provide comfort for his father. Even if Warwick wasn’t aware, it was something they could do together. Something in which he was still able to allow his father the lead. ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.’ Inhale. ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.’
Warwick’s yellowed eyes were fixed on those of his son, and his hand still. Sheff saw the familiar small, pale scar on his father’s cheek that even the jaundice couldn’t taint, the outcome of a childhood fall on a rowlock in the family dinghy. ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.’
‘Fuck, though,’ whispered his father. ‘I’ve come to the arse-end of life.’
‘We’re here, Dad.’ He could think of no other support that wasn’t a lie.
‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.’
Please die, Sheff thought. He wanted his father to die: he wished he’d died yesterday, or a day before that. How could he bear to have him live longer – it was too sad and too awful. Please die, Dad, for all of us, but mostly for yourself.
Belize came in and put a hand on her son’s shoulder. ‘There’s a Dr Howell on the phone,’ she said. ‘Something about the award you’re involved with. I’ve left it on the table.’ Gordy Howell had rung twice since Sheff had come south, but he’d been out. Sheff let go of his father’s hand and went slowly into the living room.
‘Hello, Gordy. I’m sorry I haven’t got back to you. My father’s very sick and I’m just not with it.’ As he spoke he noticed scratches he’d inflicted on his arm as he sat beside Warwick.
‘I’m sorry, yes. I gathered that from talking to Chris Stocker when Annabel and I were trying to track you down.’
‘I sort of shot through. I expected to be back by now.’
‘I understand. It’s just that we need a decision right away, I’m afraid.’ Without the reinforcement of his assured and expressive face, Gordy’s voice was almost ordinary. Free of exasperation, however, and Sheff appreciated that.
‘Robert Malcolm’s articles on foreign tertiary students are easily the best in my opinion.’
‘I concur,’ said Gordy, ‘and Annabel will be happy enough, too. Thanks for that.’
‘And I probably won’t make the awards night.’
‘I understand,’ said Gordy again.
Sheff had intended to oppose the award going to Malcolm, who was a snarky, self-assured prick, but because the outcome no longer had significance for him, his answer was an honest one. He knew the reason for being impartial didn’t reflect well on him, but he no longer cared to pretend otherwise. His father was dying. He remained seated by the living room window, the wan street light like a fallen moon. In a barely audible and unintentional way he mimicked his father’s sound. ‘Ahhhhhh. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.’ There was a strange comfort to it.
‘He’s asleep,’ said Belize, coming into the room. ‘You got it sorted with Dr Howell?’
‘It was about the McInnes award,’ said Sheff.
‘You won that, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’ He thought of Robert Malcolm receiving a call from Gordy to tell him of his success: knew the rush of pleasure that would be his. Perhaps even that night. Sheff disliked him, but, after all, his work was the best. Petty malice, like so much else, had fallen away.
‘You know he’s always been proud of
you both,’ his mother said.
Warwick had assumed both Sheff and Georgie would do well at university. He’d done so himself, and had no romantic nostalgia regarding the life there. It was a place of competition and achievement. A good degree was just an aid in establishing some security in life. He was present for all their graduations, and generous afterwards – the Bollinger, the photographs, the full menu at a first-rate restaurant overlooking a fountain, or boasting leather sofas in a large foyer. He and Belize were especially pleased for Georgie. No one on either side of the family had before qualified as a physician. ‘It’s the most demanding academic and professional course available in our universities,’ Warwick had said when toasting Georgie after capping. Sheff knew it was, and knew also that his sister hadn’t just passed, but passed with an ease built on talent, ambition and an almost ferocious application. The last of those he’d not recognised for a long time: it seemed to have taken hold since their childhood together, and was still cloaked by her easy manner.
Belize had a more sentimental attachment to the university lifestyle, at least as she’d experienced it when a student herself. She achieved a BA, but once married she never sought full-time work. At university she’d enjoyed the hostel life, then convivial flatting in Dunedin’s North East Valley, always part of the most conspicuously cool groups on campus. She was active in drama, sport, the student rag and student politics, missed lectures and did just enough exam preparation to achieve C passes. Had there been a cheerleaders’ team, Belize would have been in it.
She had liked to visit Georgie and Sheff while they themselves were students, as if to find her old life. Georgie, whom she visited often, was embarrassed at times by the gusto with which her mother joined in any social activities, even instigating them when her daughter had nothing planned. Belize was a goer, as one of Georgie’s flatmates said, and seemed unaware of any incongruity in partying with her daughter and her friends. Whenever the opportunity was there, she took pleasure in the student life that she was shut out of by time and circumstance, and to which her occasional extramural papers were a consolatory, but inadequate, link. After being a cynosure as Ophelia at twenty, Belize found life as an accountant’s wife in a provincial centre somewhat mundane.
Now she sat, old and tired, with an audience of fears, yet not defeated. ‘Go to bed, Mum,’ Sheff said. ‘I’ll look in on Dad in a while.’ And when he did, Warwick was awake again and wanting to say something; the purpose was in his eyes rather than any movement. Sheff leant towards him, ‘You okay, Dad?’
‘I don’t regret anything,’ Warwick said slowly. ‘All the old clichés are true, aren’t they? About only family, only people, mattering. Life’s bloody unoriginal.’ He gave his slow, big-teeth smile. ‘It’s okay,’ he continued after a pause. ‘For me it’s not a matter of die now, or not die. It’s die now or die soon. All my life seems to be in one pool now – everything at once, if that makes sense.’
‘Of course it does.’ But Sheff didn’t understand at all.
‘Press the red stop key. Hold the on/off key until the screen is blank. Press the green yes key –’ His father was repeating from memory some of the battery-changing instructions for the syringe driver.
‘It’s okay at the moment,’ said Sheff. Except for Warwick’s breathing, there was quiet for a time.
‘Mum’s here. She’s wanting to talk to us. Move over and let her in,’ his father said. He never called Belize that, and must have been speaking of his own mother. Sheff nodded and smiled, moved slightly although no one appeared beside him, but he made no reply for fear of showing incomprehension. ‘That’s true, Mum,’ said Warwick. ‘No one likes the largest dwarf because he has pretensions to normality,’ and then he was attentive and smiling as if listening to his mother’s reply. But soon his head relaxed to the side and moved only with the rhythm of his harsh breathing. His eyes remained open, but turned off. Sheff waited for any sense of departure from an unseen presence, but felt nothing. When he glanced around the room neither light nor shadow held anything inexplicable.
HIS FATHER ONCE TOLD HIM that the most important thing in life was to marry the right woman. Sheff remembered nothing of the circumstances of their conversation, but he knew even then that the remark was not intended for him. The recollection was of Belize standing at the door of the kitchen, taking off her green and yellow gardening gloves, and she and Warwick exchanging a glance of adult complicity and understanding that Sheff found strangely warming despite his exclusion.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
AGAIN THE SICKROOM. Warwick slept, or was otherwise unconscious; Georgie and Sheff sat and quietly talked, Georgie on the chair, her brother on the bed with a forearm resting on the rise their father’s legs made in the bedclothes. It was after lunch, because on the tray was a plate with apple purée and melted ice cream. Little had been eaten. ‘The scar’s more noticeable now,’ said Sheff, and Georgie leant forward a little to see. The small, white crescent on the jaundiced cheek. She dipped a sponge stick in the water glass and moistened Warwick’s dry lips and mouth.
‘Before you came in he was on about selling the house,’ she said. ‘He wanted one of us to buy the other out so it would stay in the family. It was as if Mum didn’t exist. He said both money and water are prone to evaporation.’
‘Maybe he thinks she’s going with him.’
‘Is that meant to be funny?’
‘It’s just that he seems so accustomed to her loyalty.’
‘She’s over four years younger than Dad,’ said Georgie. ‘She’s going to have to make a life without him that may last more than twenty years. I’ve talked to her about it. She’s oddly practical in some –’
‘Seems pretty shell-shocked to me,’ Sheff interrupted. ‘She’ll hardly leave the place.’
‘Well, not while Dad’s here, but she knows that’s not for long.’
‘So then what?’
‘She says she’ll travel. Dad didn’t like to be away from the business for long, but she’d enjoy a decent stint in England, and they used to rave about Portugal. She’s got those cousins hasn’t she, in Somerset and the Isle of Wight? They’ve all been over and stayed here at different times. I met the guy who was qualifying as an engineer. An odd name – Handy, or Candy, or something.’
‘Right,’ said Sheff, who knew nothing of the English cousins. It was both strange and sad to be sitting on his father’s bed, resting a hand on his legs, and talking of a future quite near and certain in which Warwick would have no place, and Belize would travel alone in the world.
‘Remember the great paint disaster?’ Sheff asked his sister after a long silence. It was one of those small, glossed incidents with which families reinforce kinship. Warwick and Belize doing some of the decorating in their new home to save money. He high on a ladder painting the architrave, she kneeling not far away at a skirting board, and Warwick had upset his pot of thick, white paint. Can and contents had come down on his wife. Sheff had heard the commotion from the living room and come running through. He still has an image of his mother with the white paint dripping from her hair and shoulders, and glittering streaks of blood, too, from the gash in her head. Georgie claims to remember also, though she would have been barely five, and maybe her imprint of the drama came from its repetition by others of the family.
‘Yes, poor Mum,’ she said. ‘It’s a marvel she wasn’t knocked out, or worse. And it was ages before she could clean her hair properly because of the wound.’
There was, also, a different category of family knowledge that was never referred to, but that they shared nonetheless, and was part of what bound them together. Belize’s conviction for dangerous driving, for example, and Mrs Souter coming to Sheff’s parents to accuse him of putting his hand under her daughter’s dress. He had, of course. What boy of fourteen would have let the opportunity pass? Isobel Souter was a girl of considerable beauty and presence of mind. She enjoyed squeezing her knees on boys’ fingers, but allowed nothing more. Sheff knew from othe
rs that he was one of several who had given Isobel a hand, but his joy was no less for that. The smoothness, the warmth, the small contractions, their faces still and close as they stood together, although they didn’t look at each other. Sheff could see her eyelashes outlined against the Souters’ blue kitchen cupboard, and her lips drawn back a little to show her tongue. Even when Mrs Souter opened the door, he was unable immediately to move his hand.
Georgie said their mother still had the mark on her scalp from the paint pot. She’d seen it while doing Belize’s hair. It could have been a damn serious thing. ‘She never really wanted to live here. Did you know that?’
‘No,’ said Sheff.
‘Neither did I until just the other day. Well, not how strongly she felt about it. She said she’d wanted to live in the city, Wellington preferably, but Dad was happy here. She didn’t hate it at all, and she’s got close friends and everything, but it wasn’t her first choice, not what she wanted then. But I suppose she realised the business came first.’
Sheff thought of the passing enthusiasms that were so typical of her. For a couple of years she spent much of her free time painting flowers on pale tea sets. She had a jag on restoration of wetland habitats, and one on worm farms. There was a stage in life when the saxophone, inexpertly but persistently played, defined their evenings. When Sheff was at university she took a distance course from Massey on feminist studies, and much later did papers on art history and Italian. She dropped the Italian because one of her fellow students began bothering her by email. She sponsored an African girl. These intense but transient concerns seemed to have left little impression on Belize, or her life, at least externally. The worm farm had subsided into the compost heap beside it, the one or two remaining hand-painted cups were never used, the saxophone lay in its beautiful, dark leather coffin high in the garage, and the simple letters of gratitude and poignant close shots of Aissa in Burkina Faso were long taken from the fridge. How many more times would Jessica see his mother at bridge, and what would replace it as a spike of interest in her life? Sheff’s knowledge of his parents was based on common experience from just a portion of their lives: a temporary orbit with one side unobserved.
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