We got on well, Beavis and I, although he wasn’t light-hearted at all. As he was releasing one penguin the torso came away in his hands, and left the bum and webbed feet on the ice. Beavis stumbled back on to the discarded timber, exposing the heavy treads of his basketball boots, but he didn’t laugh with me, just rubbed his shins and looked carefully down the corridor as if expecting a visitor. ‘There’s got to be some natural mortality among penguins,’ I said. ‘Put it behind the others and it’ll hardly show.’
‘More than one hundred people drowned when a boat capsized in mid-stream on the Kirtonkhola River near the town of Barisal in Bangladesh,’ said Beavis.
I carried armfuls of wood and plaster down to the yard before lunchtime. I experimented with several different routes, partly for variety of experience, partly in the hope of seeing the girl with the dark curls, but she wasn’t visible. Somehow I imagined her in the medieval glass and tapestry section rather than in natural history panoramas. I discussed the subject of feminine perfection with Beavis, pointing out the paradox that, in nature as in art, beauty comes not from beauty, but from the combination of the ordinary and the earthly. ‘That woman,’ I said to Beavis, ‘is skin, blood and spittle, that’s the wonder of it.’ Beavis considered the insight and told me that more than four hundred passengers were killed when a crowded train plunged into a ravine near Awash, some two hundred and fifty kilometres east of Addis Ababa.
Beavis suffered a headache a little before twelve o’clock. I think the cold, and the dust from the penguins, caused it. He sat on a four by four exposed from the display and leant on to the window. His cheek spread out and whitened on the glass. Three times he began to tell me of a tsunami in Hokkaido, but his words slurred into an unintelligible vortex. He burped, and rolled his face on the icy glass. ‘It’s time for our lunch-break anyway,’ I said. He rolled his head back and forth in supplication and whispered ahh, ahh, ahh to comfort himself. The penguins refused to become involved; each retained its viewpoint with fixed intensity. Illness isolates more effectively than absence. I knew Beavis wouldn’t miss me for a while, so I went to the small staffroom and made two cups of sweet tea, and brought them and the yellow seat cover back to Antarctica.
The yellow cover draped well around Beavis’s shoulders, and he held it together at his chest. He had dribbled on the back of his hand and the black hair glistened there. He sipped his tea, though, and listened while I explained why I had given up formal academic studies, and my plan to use the Values Party to restructure education in New Zealand. I think he was pretty much convinced and I let him sit quietly as I worked. Afterwards he seemed to feel better, because he wiped his face with the yellow cover, and fluffed up his hair. He told me about the Bhopal poisonous gas discharge which caused more than two and a half thousand deaths. ‘I remember that one,’ I said. There was quite a lot I could say about Bhopal, and I said it as we started on the penguins and ice-floes again. Beavis’s preoccupation with recent accidental disasters was a salutary thing in some ways: it minimised our own grievance, made even Antarctica’s grip bearable.
The sun made steady progress around the building, and the frost cut back across the lawn with surgical precision. Beavis’s affliction passed. I went, in all, eleven different ways down to the yard with remains of the southern continent, but I never saw Aphrodite. I stopped the permutations when a gaunt man with the look of an Egyptologist shouted at me that if I dropped any more rubbish in his wing he’d contact the PEP supervisor.
There’s a knack to everything, and Beavis and I were getting the hang of our job. We didn’t tear any more penguins after that first one in the morning, yet some of them were soft and weakened, and smelt like teddy-bears stored away for coming generations. I said to Beavis that there’d been too much moisture over the years, and that a controlled climate was necessary for the sort of exhibits which had stuffed birds. ‘Torrential rain caused flooding and mudslides which killed eleven people and swept away dwellings on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte in the south-east state of Minas Gerais, Brazil.’
Before three o’clock I remembered to smuggle the seat-cover back to the tearoom, and return our cups. I told Beavis that my estimate was that we’d have the whole panorama cleared out inside four days. PEP schemes lasted three months, therefore obviously a good deal of job variety remained — other panoramas to destroy, perhaps. A nocturnal setting for our kiwis, or an outdated display of feral cat species. Beavis made no reply. He was most moved to conversation by literary and philosophical concerns. It was a credit to him really: he had very little small talk, did Beavis.
Do not turn off at the wall, it said by the Zip in the tearoom. The Egyptologist was there and he bore a grudge. ‘We’re going to have three months of this then, are we,’ he said. ‘A gradual demolition of the institution around us.’
‘A Venezuelan freighter was washed ashore in Florida during a storm that caused one death and millions of dollars of damage.’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ said the gaunt man.
The girl with the dark curls didn’t come in. The tearoom hardly seemed the same place as that of the morning, but I knew from the writing on the wall that it was. As we went away the Egyptologist had a laugh at our expense. Beavis didn’t mind: he trailed his hand on the banisters, and made sure he didn’t step on any of the triangles in the lino pattern. Circles were safe, it appeared.
The ice age was in retreat before us. I had fourteen penguins arranged in column of route along the wall, and in the grounds two piles grew — one of rubbish and one of reusable timber. We realised that the sun wasn’t going to reach our window, and days start to get colder again in winter after four o’clock. I suggested to Beavis that we leave the penguins in the habitat which suited them, and show our initiative by burning the scraps we’d collected in the yard. We could keep warm with good excuse until knock-off time. I didn’t want Beavis to suffer one of his headaches again.
We built a small fire on a garden plot, stood close to it for warmth, and watched the smoke ghost away in the quiet, cold afternoon. Beavis enjoyed the job of putting new pieces on the fire, and I listened as he told of the consequences when the Citarum River overflowed into several villages of Java’s Bundung region and considered myself lucky. The park trees had black, scrawny branches like roots in the air, as if the summer trees had been turned upside down for the season. Deep hidden in the soil were green leaves and scarlet berries.
The museum rose up beyond the yard and the park, but despite all the windows I couldn’t see anyone looking out at all. No one to hear us, no one to join us, no one to judge us. The strip of lawn closest to the museum still kept its frost like a snowfall. It would build there day after day. No one to see Beavis and me with our fire. Beavis delicately nudged timber into the fire with his basketball boots, and watched smoke weave through the tree roots. I pointed out to him that we were burning Antarctica to keep ourselves warm, which was an option not available to Scott and Shackleton. ‘More than five hundred died when a liquid gas depot exploded at San Juan Ixhuatepec, a suburb of Mexico City,’ said Beavis.
I felt very hungry by the time the hooters went. Beavis and I had missed lunch because of his headache. If he didn’t have something soon I thought he might get another attack because of a low blood-sugar level. My own blood-sugar level was pretty low, it seemed to me. We left the fire to burn itself out, and went three blocks down to the shops. I had enough money for two hot pies, and when I came out of the shop I saw Beavis sitting on the traffic island watching the five o’clock rush. Some people walked, some trotted. Some of the cars had Turbo written on their sides, and some had only obscure patterns of rust, but they all stormed on past Beavis who was as incongruous there as among the penguins. His lips were moving. I suppose he was reminding the world of earthquakes in Chile, or of an outbreak of cholera in Mali.
I was surprised how satisfied most of the people were, but good on them, good on them. How should they know that the frozen continent was to be found right here in
the midst of our city after all.
Valley Day
Every second month Brian went with his father on the Big Kick. They drove up the valley, and the minister took services at the little church of Hepburn and at the Sutherlands’ house. One midday service at Hepburn going up, one in the afternoon at Sutherlands’, then the evening drive home. In the autumn the long sun would squint down the valley and the shadows blossom from hedges and trees, and slant from the woodwork of buildings in angles no longer true.
One sermon did the trick on the Big Kick, with only the level of formality altered to suit the circumstances. The minister was relaxed despite the hours of driving, and treated it as a gallant expedition for his son’s sake. ‘Off on the Big Kick again, eh,’ he said. ‘The Big Kick.’ The scent of the hot motor, taste of finest, stealthy dust, sight of the valley floor paddocks all odd shapes to fit the river flats and, higher in the gullies sloping back, the bush made a stand. Few farmhouses, fewer cars to be met, and dust ahead a clear warning anyway.
Brian had his hand in the airflow, and used it to feel the lift on his palm. He assessed the road. Each dip, each trit-trotting bridge, places he would set his ambushes. Hurons or Assyrians swarmed out to test his courage, while his father practised parts of the sermon or recited Burns and then murmured in wonderment at such genius. Brian made the air take some of the weight of his hand, and he kept his head from the window when a small swamp of rushes and flax was passed in case there were snipers hiding there.
‘Will the one-armed man from the war be there?’ he said.
‘Mr Lascelles. Don’t draw attention to it.’
‘It happened in the war.’
‘His tank was hit, I believe. The arm was amputated only after a long struggle to save it: not until he was back in New Zealand. I visited him in hospital I remember.’
‘You can still feel your fingers when you’ve got no arm,’ Brian said. ‘They itch and that. If someone stood on where they would be then you’d feel the pain.’
‘No,’ said his father, but the boy kept thinking it. He saw a cloud a long way off like a loaf of bread, and the top spread more rapidly than the bottom, and both were transformed into an octopus.
Hepburn was a district rather than a settlement. The cemetery was the largest piece of civic real estate, and the greatest gathering of population that could be mustered in one place. Mrs Patchett had nearly finished cleaning the church. She was upset because a bird had got in and made a mess, and then died by the pulpit. She said there were holes under the eaves. Even such a small church maintained its fragrance of old coats and old prayers, of repeated varnish and supplication, and insects as tenants with a life-cycle of their own. The air was heavy with patterns of the past: shapes almost visible, sounds brimming audible. An accumulated human presence: not threatening, instead embarrassed to be found still there, and having no place else to go. There were seven pews down one side, and six on the other. Down the aisle stretched two parallel brass carpet crimps, but no carpet in between. One stained window, all the rest were plain, a blood poppy amidst green and blue, dedicated to the Lascelles brothers killed within three days of each other in the Great War.
Brian took the bird out on the dust shovel. It left just a stain on the boards behind the pulpit. He threw the bird above the long grass: it broke apart in the air, and the boy closed his eyes lest some part of it fly back into his face. He brought his father’s Bible, soft and heavy, from the car, and the travelling communion tray with the rows of small glasses set like glass corks in the holes, and the bottle full of the shed blood of Christ.
‘Don’t wander off then,’ said his father. ‘Don’t get dirty, or wander off. Remember we’ll be going with one of the families for lunch.’ The boy was watching a walnut tree which overshadowed the back of the church, and ranks of pines behind. He found a place where, Indian-like, he was hidden, but could look out. He crossed his legs and watched the families begin to arrive. The Hepburn church no longer had a piano, and the man with the piano accordion came early to practise the hymns required. ‘Rock of Ages’, and ‘Turn Back O Man’. He was shy, very muscular, and prefaced everything he played or said with a conciliatory cough. Fourteen other people came as the piano accordion played. Fourteen adults and six children. Brian watched the children linger in the sunlight, before trailing in behind their parents. The one-armed Mr Lascelles came. Even to Brian, Mr Lascelles didn’t look old. He wasn’t all that many years back from the war, and he laughed and turned to other people by the cars as if he were no different. Brian got up and walked about in the pine needles as if he had only one arm. He looked back at the trees he passed, and smiled as Mr Lascelles had done. Without realising it he walked with a limp, for he found it difficult to match a gait to having one arm.
The accordionist coughed and began to play, the families sang, and the boy stood still at the edge of the trees to see the valley and the bush on the hills. Rock of Ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee. He felt a tremor almost of wonder, but not wonder. A sense of significance and presence comes to the young, and is neither questioned by them nor given any name. All the people of that place seemed shut in there singing, and he alone outside in the valley. He could see all together the silvered snail tracks across the concrete path, the road in pale snatches, the insect cases of pine needles drawn immensely strong, the bird’s wing in the long grass, the glowing Lascelles poppy in the sunlit window. Rock of Ages cleft for me. Brian tipped his head back to see the light through the pines, and the blood ran, or the sky moved, and the great, sweet pines seemed to be falling, and he sat down dizzy, and with his shoulders hunched for a moment against the impact of the trees. The church was an ark with all on board; it dipped and rolled in the swell of the accordion, and he alone was outside amidst the dry grass and shadows, a sooty fantail, gravestones glimpsed through the falling pines of his own life.
He saw cones. The old cones, puffed and half rotted in the needles were ignored. He wanted those heavy with sap and seed, brown yet tinged with green, and shaped as owls. When dislodged they were well shaped to the hand to be hurled as owl grenades against impossible odds across the road, or sent bouncing among the grave stones to wake somebody there. He gathered new stocks by climbing with a stick and striking them from the branches. At first he climbed carefully to keep the gum from his clothes, but it stuck to him anyway, gathered dirt and wouldn’t rub away, and lay like birthmarks on his legs and held his fingers.
His father was preaching, for the church was quiet. Brian heaped up a mass of pine needles beneath the trees, working on his knees and bulldozing the needles with both hands out in front. He built a heap as high as himself, and jumped up and down on it. When he lost interest he left the trees and walked into the graveyard to search for skinks. Quietly he bent the grass from the tombstones, like parting a fleece, and after each movement he waited, poised in case of a lizard. He found none. He imagined that they were destroyed by things that came down from the bush at night. He picked at the resin stains on his hands. Deborah Lascelles, 1874–1932, Called Home. Brian forgot about the skinks. ‘Called Home,’ he said to himself. He thought about it as he went down the tree-lined margin of the small cemetery and on to the road. He was disappointed that there were no new cars, but one at least was a V8. He shaded his eyes by pressing his hands to the door glass, in an effort to see what the speedo went up to. He reasoned that anyway as it had twice as many cylinders as their car, it must do twice the speed.
Old now is Earth, and none may count her days. The final hymn. Brian went back into the trees and stood as king on his pine needle heap. He arced his urine in the broken sunlight as an act of territory and checked the two balls in his pouch with brief curiosity. He jousted against the pines one more time, and brought down a perfect brown-green owl. He ran his hand over the tight ripples of his cone. He hefted it from hand to hand as he went back to the church.
His father stood at the doorway to shake hands and talk with the adults as they left. Those still insi
de showed no impatience. They talked among themselves, or listened with goodwill to what was said by and to the minister. There were few secrets, and no urgency to leave the only service for two months. Mrs Patchett showed Mr Jenkins the holes beneath the eaves, and he stuffed them with paper as an interim measure, and promised to return and do more another day. Things borrowed were transferred from car to car. Wheelan Lascelles stood unabashed, and on his one arm the white sleeve was brilliant against the tan. ‘That poem you used,’ he said to the minister. ‘What poem was that?’
‘One of my own, in fact.’ Brian shared his father’s pleasure. They smiled together. The boy edged closer to his father so as to emphasise his affiliation.
‘Is that so? I thought it a fine poem, a poem of our own country. I’d like some day to have a copy of it.’
From the sheets folded in his Bible the minister took the handwritten poem, and gave it. It was found a matter of interest to those remaining: the minister giving his poem to Wheelan Lascelles. Others wished they had thought to mention it, and strove to recall it.
‘We’re going to the Jenkins’ for lunch,’ Brian’s father told him when everyone had left the church. The Jenkins lived twelve miles up the valley. The minister preferred having lunch with a family living past the church, for then in the afternoon the trip to Sutherland’s was made that much shorter. He let the Jenkins drive on ahead because of the dust, and followed on. ‘Mr and Mrs Jenkins eat well,’ he said to his son with satisfaction.
On a terrace above the river were the house and sheds of the Jenkins’ farm, and a long dirt track like a wagon trail leading in, and a gate to shut behind. ‘What have you got on yourself?’ said the minister, as he checked appearances before entering the house.
‘Gum.’ Brian rubbed at it dutifully, but knew it wouldn’t come off.
Owen Marshall Selected Stories Page 18