Carnival Sky

by Owen Marshall

  ‘So overseas, you reckon?’ said Sheff. ‘I remember she liked the Sydney and Hong Kong trips. She used to make all the arrangements when they went anywhere, so that wouldn’t worry her. She wouldn’t go alone, though, would she?’ But Georgie made no answer. She was asleep on the chair, with her chin tucked in, and her face shadowed by the fall of her dark hair. She’d been bedside for many hours: long before he’d come in. Because she was unaware, Sheff’s scrutiny of her face was more deliberate than at other times. She was a woman of forty-two, of course she was, and yet always he saw his little sister, and usually as she used to be. He was beginning to understand the woman she’d become. She hadn’t put on any make-up. Her face was still pale and youthful, and her teeth so white that he decided she must have had them capped.

  As a fourteen-year-old at secondary school she’d persistently relayed his failings there to Warwick and Belize. A passing phase admittedly, but one he’d found so annoying that he retaliated. A Chinese burn for telling that he let down the gym teacher’s tyres, and the destruction of her yellow pencil pouch because of her revelation of his part in writing ‘wanker’ in felt pen on the door of the senior master’s office. Sheff had felt himself entitled to grievance: the code was that what went down at school, stayed at school. And he hadn’t been one of the incorrigibles: just an average pupil with the normal non-specific apathy and resentment that was part of adolescence. After they left school, Sheff and Georgie lived quite separate lives. He went to university in Auckland, and she to Otago to be a doctor. The heightened years of varsity life weren’t a time to be bothered with family, just the confederacy of friends and the fierce, self-centred impetuosity of youth.

  Georgie woke while their father slept on. She opened her eyes without any other movement, seemed immediately alert and gave a smile to acknowledge that she’d dropped off briefly. ‘I was thinking about some of the stuff when we were at school,’ said Sheff. ‘We didn’t get on all that well then, did we?’

  ‘Most of the time you were a right pain.’

  ‘And you were a tell-tale.’

  ‘A couple of years is a generation at school. You’d never recognise me in the grounds. None of us had friends outside our own year group, and now what’s a few years – nothing.’

  ‘Some senior guys had younger girlfriends,’ said Sheff.

  ‘That’s different,’ replied Georgie.

  ‘Did you have a boyfriend after I left?’

  ‘For a while I went around with Sean Apsley, but nothing serious. He took me to the leavers’ ball. You had to have someone to go with. He never had much to say, but he liked to laugh.’

  ‘He was an okay guy, wasn’t he? He was keen on singing and drama, I remember.’

  ‘I’ve never been back to any of the reunions,’ said Georgie. ‘I wouldn’t have minded, but there was never time.’

  ‘I trashed your pencil case once to pay you back for ratting on me. You were a real sneak and that pissed me off.’

  ‘You did too.’ Georgie was amused. She reached out and gave him a light punch on the shoulder. Sharing the recollection of sibling squabbles somehow made them feel closer in the present. So they sat together and talked more, shared more, opened up to each other, with Warwick drugged and sleeping by their side.

  HIS DAUGHTER WAS BORN with a good deal of hair. When he first saw her it was slicked down, but still abundant. A few weeks later he was alarmed to find that it was falling out, obvious on the pillow of the bassinet even though light in colour. Sheff wanted a specialist called in, but Lucy said the loss of baby hair was quite common, and quite normal. He wondered how she got to know so much stuff. To please him, however, she checked with the paediatrician, and naturally was justified. ‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ she said. ‘Our little girl’s fine.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  SHEFF STOPPED AT THE USUAL CAFÉ for a flat white, sitting close to the table that he and Jessica had shared on their first outing, and sometimes subsequently. He liked thinking of them together there, and wished her with him again. At that first table a man with large-tread work boots read a newspaper, and rubbed his head while doing so. Sheff hadn’t completed his piece for Chris on the Henare brothers. He wondered if a visit to some of the old diggings might give it a greater sense of immediacy. And he still intended to write an article on the life of the rural vet, based on Jessica’s experience. If she agreed, it would be a welcome opportunity to spend more time with her.

  Perhaps, though, he should be more original in his journalism, find a new angle to pitch to Chris. ‘Random Café Lives’, or some such. He would go over and introduce himself to the work-boots man, ask him to talk about his achievements, knockbacks and aspirations. ‘Roulette Lives’ might be a better title. Just people who happen to be present and provide the revelation of everyday existence. There were other patrons who offered possibilities. A tall woman with a bosom as horizontal as a desktop, and beyond her an equally tall man with a lined, simian face, jandals and shorts so loose about his thin, tanned legs that most of his crotch was on view. The world teemed with characters and stories, but Sheff’s curiosity had dulled. Pain in any form encourages self-absorption.

  Preoccupied with his thoughts, Sheff didn’t notice the approach of a youngish woman until she was standing close by his side. He looked up, thinking at first that she was staff, but her expression and stance were unaccommodating. A person inclined to pudginess, she kept herself very erect as if to outstrip the tendency. Cherry lipstick seemed to be her only make-up. She wore dark jeans and a purple top. Sheff smiled, as response to her proximity rather than warmth on her part.

  ‘You’re Sheff Davy.’ It was a statement not a question.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sheff – sounds like a name for a sheepdog. Get in behind, that sort of thing.’

  He was confused rather than offended. Should he know the woman? Was she a friend of the family? ‘It’s short for Sheffield,’ he said, and began to get up as a courtesy, but the woman placed a firm hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Well, Sheffield, here’s the thing. You leave Jessica alone and I’ll leave you alone. You try to fuck her and you buy a heap of trouble. It’s that simple. You get in behind, or you get more than you bargained for. Okay?’

  Sheff found it hard to accept that she was serious: that he was being threatened in a provincial, sunlit café by a short woman with bright lipstick. He tried rather more vigorously to stand, but her grip was sure, and he wasn’t prepared to struggle.

  ‘And you are?’ he said. ‘Apart from being bloody interfering.’

  ‘Just leave Jessica alone, that’s all. She’s not interested. There’s other women you can hit on, but leave her alone. Got it?’

  ‘This is a joke, right?’ he said, but felt otherwise.

  ‘Try me. You’ll see,’ she said, and she lifted her hand from his shoulder and walked away, her buttocks rocking beneath the denim. In the park beyond her, two dogs stood nose-to-tail in tense interrogation, and their owners hurried closer, uncertain of the outcome.

  Sheff looked about him, but no one seemed to have noticed the brief, bizarre exchange. The man wearing work boots had put his newspaper down, but wasn’t facing Sheff’s way. The thin, tanned guy still had the shank of one leg resting on the knee of the other and blue underpants showing. Jesus, thought Sheff, that’s a first: being warned off by a stand-over lesbian with scarlet lipstick and a mobile arse.

  But it was unsettling, rather than funny, and despite himself he felt his motives for friendship with Jessica under scrutiny. It was nothing to do with judging her own preferences – she would make her choices – but more his own motives. Had he wanted her merely for casual sex while he was stuck in his childhood town waiting for his father to die? Was it as instinctive and utilitarian as that? If so, he didn’t much like the man he had become. He reassured himself that much more was involved, that he liked her also for warmth, humour and directness, for making some difficult decisions and facing up to the results.r />
  On impulse he took out his cell phone, but then realised that he’d no idea of Jessica’s work number. He asked at the counter if he could borrow the phone book, and wrote down the number of the veterinary practice on a soft napkin. He returned to a table more removed from the work-boots man, and made his call. He framed in his mind sentences about being warned off by the chubby woman, but the receptionist said Jessica was on a farm visit, and Sheff was left with just the smile he had unconsciously assumed in expectation of hearing her voice. Better to ring her in the evening, of course, when she would be home and Emma in bed.

  He did that, lying back on the pillows in his room, and with the door closed for privacy. ‘Dr Woolfe?’ he said formally, assuming that vets like dentists had assumed the title, but she recognised his voice.

  ‘Yes, Mr Davy.’

  ‘Some woman accosted me today,’ he said. ‘I was at the café, and she threatened me. She said she’d kill me if I kept seeing you.’

  ‘You’re making it up.’

  ‘It must be one of your girlfriends. A heavy woman with bright lipstick and jeans. What does your partner look like?’

  ‘You’re making it all up: just fishing. Let’s not talk nonsense.’

  ‘It’s true. Someone’s convinced I’m up to no good. I’ve been rumbled.’

  ‘I can’t think of anyone who’d do that, or have any reason for it. Apart from such flights of fancy, how are things going?’

  ‘Don’t ask me about Dad,’ he said.

  ‘Okay. What then?’ she said.

  ‘Anything ordinary, anything that’s not sad. Tell me about Emma.’

  ‘As a matter of fact she’s had a hissy fit because I won’t let her watch any more of a Shrek DVD. She’d sit there all night. She said she hates me and wants to run away, and she made herself throw up on my best cushion. But now the little madam is fine and having Marmite toast.’

  ‘Right. So it’s not a good time at all,’ said Sheff.

  ‘No. It’s all fine again. It blows over so quickly with kids. By the time she’s done her homework it’ll be forgotten.’

  ‘Tell me about your day then, animal by animal, visit by visit. It’ll give me a feeling for the background on my article on country vets.’

  So Jessica did, talking for fifteen minutes of people, and issues and decisions and diseases, and he interrupted with questions that were often flippant, but she didn’t mind, and much of what she told him was filed away without conscious effort because that was his calling. He was for a short while taken out of himself, as Belize would say, and felt the better for it. Especially he liked her story of the hard man who offered her a pig-dog pup instead of a fee, and had bare feet inside his boots.

  ‘But I’m taking up time you should be spending on Emma’s homework,’ Sheff said.

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘Sheff,’ called Georgie from the passage, ‘Mum wants the phone.’

  ‘Okay,’ he called back, and to Jessica, ‘Sorry about that. I’m getting told off here. I’d better go, but would you like to go out for a meal?’

  ‘It’s easier for me if you come round here. No babysitter then,’ Jessica said.

  ‘Only if you let me bring a takeaway. You don’t want to be cooking after a day’s work. What does Emma like?’

  ‘She likes burgers and I like Chinese.’

  ‘It’s a deal,’ said Sheff. ‘Name an evening.’

  WHEN THEY WERE YOUNG, and on holiday in bigger places, his father used to take them to the movies. He would assume an air of eagerness to match their own anticipation, enthuse while standing before the poster and cardboard advertising, make a performance of choosing and buying lollies. But later, while the animated characters cavorted, and the sound boomed, Sheff would look across in the darkness of the theatre and see his father was asleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  WHEN SHEFF FINALLY completed his story on the Henare brothers and emailed it to the paper, Chris not only accepted the story, he rang back on receiving it, asking how things were.

  As they talked, Sheff had a clear picture of the editor’s office: the computer monitor offset so as not to be between Chris and anyone he invited to sit down, the large window pane lightly mottled on the outside with dirt, a stocky brown vase that occasionally sported home-grown flowers, but more often anchored papers, a family photograph in a Warehouse frame, and the walls bare, apart from a caricature of the editor, as to if to stress that Chris sought no distraction from the enterprise he led. He made no attempt to emphasise his position through the appointments of the room in which he worked. There were outward expressions of his achievement, but the most valuable were more subtly shown in the comradely deference of staff.

  ‘Well, you keep in touch,’ said Chris, ‘and I hope your father pulls through.’ Both of them knew that wasn’t going to happen, but for the inevitable outcome it was awkward to find words. Sheff wanted to ask him how Raewyn was handling the chief reporter’s job, but the query would seem to be angling for some compliment of his own ability when in the role.

  ‘It’s good to have a chat,’ he said. ‘Give everyone my best, and thanks again for taking the piece.’ The payment would be derisive, yet helpful all the same, and journalism took his mind from his father’s suffering. Sheff had to admit to himself that he missed the office.

  ‘Make sure you have your cell phone with you in case we need to get you,’ Belize said when Sheff asked her if he could take the car to Jessica’s. She’d given a blanket invitation to use it any time, but it wasn’t right to just lift the keys and go, assuming neither she nor Georgie would have any reason to leave the house.

  ‘Say hi to Jessica,’ said Georgie, ‘and ask her round here sometime, rather than putting her out. Emma could come. We’d have an early meal.’

  ‘I’m getting takeaways on the way over.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Georgie.

  ‘No proper meal for a child, though, is it?’ said Belize.

  ‘Oh, Mum, it’s just the odd time. You know that,’ replied Georgie.

  Sheff’s mother wasn’t facing him, but an odd angle of light cast a reflection of her face in the glass door of a cupboard while she thought herself unobserved. Even as she kept some social nuance to her voice, her expression was so blank that he turned from it and couldn’t trust himself to speak again. Pretence is sometimes the best protection against the assaults life brings.

  He drove first to the burger shop and then the Chinese restaurant, and as he waited in each he made a vow to give more support to his mother, and give it more openly. He forgot such good intentions in awareness of an itch at the back of his scalp. He had noticed it several times over recent days. You never knew what might be working insidiously against you. Imagine the vermin carried by livestock and feral animals: barely able to be seen, but revealed as monstrously grotesque by the microscope. ‘You’re a Davy, aren’t you?’ said the woman as she gave him sweet-and-sour chicken with noodles, and took his numbered order chit.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought so,’ she said with satisfaction at her own perspicacity, and no interest in further information. She was a former schoolmate he supposed, or a sometime secretary at his father’s work, but nothing in her bony, pale and rather handsome face was familiar to him. Maybe she would be at Warwick’s funeral: in her best dress and a row well back, but confident of some connection.

  On his way back to the car, Sheff heard a noise behind him, and glanced round to see a skateboarder in a green sweatshirt and reversed cap weaving from side to side on the footpath, and propelling himself with swooping kicks. There was surely space and time for Sheff to step across to the road and his car, but the young guy chose just that moment to accelerate and pass on the gutter side. They met with an impact far greater than the mundane circumstances seemed to suggest. Both were thrown down, and the skateboard careered ahead, the screech of it registering for Sheff before his other senses recovered. The rider was up more rapidly than Sheff, and with a quick ‘Sorry,
mate,’ was off in pursuit of his board. Sheff’s first concern was for the takeaways in their plastic containers and bags, but while checking them he felt blood on his face again: warm, more slippery than water, a fine, sleek oil.

  An elderly woman with swollen ankles and bejewelled fingers was the only person who had seen it all, and she held Sheff’s food bags while he dabbed at his face with his handkerchief. She was torn between her initial inclination to help, and the growing wish not to become involved. He thanked her, and before driving away sat for a time, cleaned himself up, made sure blood wouldn’t be left in the car. There was no sign of the skateboarder, although the street was quite plain in the evening sun. What the hell was it recently, with these minor misadventures and random indignities?

  ‘My God,’ said Jessica when he arrived, ‘what have you done to yourself?’

  ‘I got bowled by a skateboard racer outside the Chinese takeaway, but it’s okay now.’ She took him through to the bathroom and he used damp toilet paper and tissues on his face. In the mirror he could see that the blood came from a cut on the point of his chin rather than his mouth. The guy must have accidentally collected him with his watch strap, or body jewellery. The small wound was raw-looking, but soon formed a clot. Jessica said it was better not to put a plaster on, just let it seal in the air. Emma was in the doorway watching with undisguised interest as Sheff sponged his shirt and apologised for the fuss.

  ‘I think you’ll live,’ said Jessica.

  ‘Yes, but it’s not the entrance I intended.’