Owen Marshall Selected Stories

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  During my time on the farm, Cliff never once mentioned the reason for my presence, and insisted on paying me a small wage. He told the neighbours and friends we met that I’d been kind enough to come and give him a hand for a while. We could work for hours together without words, or awkwardness; at other times he would talk of parts of his life spent crayfishing in the Chathams, and in North Island shearing gangs, before he’d bought the farm. In the winter, bulked up even more with jersey and a frayed parka, he looked almost square: as if he would reach the same height on his side as standing up. Out of the house he allowed himself a few roll-your-owns each day, and there’d be a brief flame at the cigarette’s tip as he lit it. His other indulgence was mints, like great white pills, and he always had some in his pocket to share. Whenever we were close, putting in a strainer post perhaps, or bent over a recalcitrant engine, I would have the hybrid tobacco and mint smell of his breath. If I come across those scents now I’m reminded of his straight-grained goodness.

  I was able to relieve Cliff of most of the tractor work while I was there. Years of hard slog were catching up on him, and his back played up on the jolting tractor. Harrowing and discing especially are repetitious, undemanding tasks, and I spent hours outwardly circling in the worked paddocks, while inwardly still circling Richard and Rebecca.

  Our flat was in the North East Valley, not far from Castle Street, and an easy walk into the university. It was in fact an old cottage, low in the valley so that in winter the sun came only for late lunch and then went away again. Colin, Eric and I lived there in our second year, and when Colin went overseas after the holidays, we put a note on the Stud. Ass. notice board, and Richard came in. He was doing economics, marketing, stuff like that; his twin sister, Rebecca, was easily passing science subjects, and was in Knox College not far from us.

  Your flatmates aren’t necessarily your best friends. Sometimes in fact you lose your friends by having them as flatmates and finding they’re a pain in the arse to live with. Sometimes they’re just people who pay their share of the rent and do their own thing. Richard had his own friends, with whom he spent a lot of time in his room. His attitude to his room, and to clothes, should have been a signal to me quite early on, but I was slow to pick up on it. In our rooms Eric and I had a heap of assorted blankets on our beds, and one covering the bare floorboards to stand on in winter. Richard, though, went to the op shop and bought an enveloping green and yellow cover, and later to some other second-hand place and bought curtains which he said had the same yellow in them. Once, when he’d been walking up the path behind me, he said that I should let my hair grow longer: that it would suit me that way. He had a sharp wit that I enjoyed, and was a very generous guy. He had a particular dislike of overweight people, and those who couldn’t express themselves cogently.

  Rebecca first came round to the flat to help with the curtains. Eric and I decided right away that Richard’s room was justifiably the focus of the flat for as long as she wanted it that way. She was short, lithe and dark haired; her skin was very smooth and she had a half, I-know-what-you’re-thinking, smile. ‘You guys don’t really want to help with curtains, do you?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t mind giving a hand,’ I said. She came round more and more after Richard and I clicked. She said she got sick of the routines and restrictions at Knox. Sometimes she cooked a meal; sometimes she got on to Eric and me about doing chores about the place. She and Richard didn’t like too much of a mess. Sometimes she’d come very late after a party, or dance, and sleep over in Richard’s room, and be wearing some of his pyjamas when she came out bleary in the morning. ‘You think they bunk in the bed together,’ said Eric, ‘or Richard puts pillows and stuff on the floor?’

  ‘I’d invite her in myself,’ I said.

  ‘Jesus, so would I,’ Eric said.

  But then neither of us was Rebecca’s brother, which was all the difference surely. I noticed on one of those mornings that she had painted toenails — her small, sallow foot on the cracked lino of the kitchen floor and the pearl-purple hue of her toenails.

  There were two nail polishes on the tray on Evie’s dressing table in the room on the farm. The plastic tops were the same colour as the thick liquid inside: one was pink and one was red. Both simple, unambiguous colours. Evie’s window looked out onto the side lawn of the farmhouse and a large walnut tree with spatulate leaves and the blackening nut cases scattered like sheep shit in the grass underneath. That was one of the jobs I did for my uncle and aunt: I collected up the nuts, shucked them of the tattered, rotting cases, and spread them to dry on the wire of an old bed frame on the veranda. My hands were stained tobacco brown for days, and Aunt Sonia said I shouldn’t have bothered, shouldn’t have made a mess of myself like that. She knew, though, that it was an attempt to thank them.

  Aunt Sonia was one of those central people around whom family and friends revolve. She laughed and talked a lot, and stimulated others to talk while she nodded and smiled as an encouragement to go on. Some women have natural warmth, and she was one. She must have had times of pain and despair, of glum despondency and self-doubt, but I never saw any sign of them. Maybe Cliff was the only witness, maybe she had her black times standing solitary in a closet, the back of the door touching her nose, her face relieved of any need to register optimistic expression.

  In the first few weeks I found her kindness and resolute joy in life crushingly unbearable. I would expend all the smiles I had in response to her, until just a rictus remained, and I would excuse myself, and go and sit on Dr Evie’s bed, or, more often, go off into the passive indifference of the landscape. Aunt Sonia’s emotional energy and eagerness for reciprocation only made me more aware of a chronic malaise within myself. The more outgoing she was, the more difficult any matching emotion on my part.

  Like the rainy day when I’d been there only two or three weeks, and Cliff had gone to town to see the bank manager and do other wet weather business. I spent the morning stencilling some of the wool bales, and then came back to the house for lunch. Aunt Sonia had been baking, and the misfits from the batches were my appetising follow-up to an asparagus quiche: misshapen apricot muffins still warm at their fruitful heart, the end slice of ginger crunch, the Afghan made from the last of the mix which had become the runt of the litter. She was packing all that had passed muster into round tins as I ate. She was taller than Cliff, graceful despite the years of physical work, and she vibrated slightly with energy, whereas he toiled with an easy rhythm, or sat quite still with conscious relaxation.

  ‘You know we’ll help if we can,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

  I said I did and was thankful for it. ‘Sometimes it helps to work through things if you talk them out, use other people as a sounding board,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to pry, or make any judgements,’ she said, ‘not at all, but if you do want to talk about things then I’m always here.’ I said I knew that and appreciated it. I said maybe later I’d feel like doing so, and that there wasn’t any big thing to talk about anyway, really. Just sort of getting too tied up with personal relationships at the university. ‘Evie and Samantha were just the same,’ said Aunt Sonia, putting the Afghans deftly into the blue tin as if they were eggs going back into a nest. ‘They had all these problems with boys and body image at the same time as coping with exams. Things get blown up out of perspective when you’re under pressure, I think.’ I told her they did. I didn’t tell her that part of my own problem was a boy, but I told her that I appreciated her offer to talk about things very much, and that having time out on the farm was just the thing I needed right then. Much later I thought it immensely to her credit that, despite her natural disposition to be involved in the lives of all those around her, she never brought up heart-to-heart talks again.

  Richard was keen on candid talks too, not believing that anything should be held back in a friendship. He had his own television in his room, and he started inviting me in to watch stuff. We’d sit on the bed, with some of his matched green pillows
against the back board to prop us up. He had a real knack for predicting the storylines. I thought maybe he’d seen them all before, but when we went out to films he was just as accurate. ‘I bet she kills herself with an overdose, and leaves a note incriminating him,’ Richard would say, or, ‘It’s just soooo obvious, isn’t it, that Mr Gendarme is in on it.’

  He had this interest in families. He asked me quite a lot about the relationships in mine, and told me a good deal concerning his. His father was the CEO of one of the big power companies, and a wheeler and dealer of shares in a big way as well, Richard said. He supported the family abundantly, but lived three blocks away from them in Thorndon with a younger woman who taught French at the university. ‘My mother never talks about it,’ Richard said. ‘She either believes, or pretends, that it’s nothing untoward. They have dinner parties at our house, and Dad stays overnight, and then the next day he goes back to his own place. At Christmas-time his partner goes to her family in Marseilles, and Dad comes to us for a family week of presents and reminiscence. Rebecca and I go between the two houses as we like. She says it all comes down to money, and perhaps she’s right. Money allows you to escape convention and yet maintain appearances in a way.’

  ‘Does your father ever talk about it?’ I asked.

  ‘Not much. He says take what you want: take what you want, and pay for it.’

  Eric never got invited into Richard’s room, and I felt a bit guilty. The two of them didn’t hit it off somehow. And fewer of Richard’s friends came once he was well settled in. Rebecca, though, came more frequently and I was all for that. She’d bang on my door. ‘You want coffee?’ she’d call. ‘Come in and have it with us.’ Sometimes the three of us would sit propped on the green and yellow bedcover together; sometimes if it was cold Rebecca would sit on a cushion by the heater and look up at us to talk. I was always aware of her. Even when she wasn’t in my field of vision I would know just how she was sitting, or leaning back on the pillows: how relaxed her slim body was, how her dark hair would sway at the side of her face as she talked, how when she was amused a small double crease at the corners of her mouth gave a sudden parenthesis to her smile. She would flip off her blue sneakers and her feet were almost absurdly small, the painted nails winking like gems.

  I’ve got sisters, but I never talked to them the way Richard and Rebecca talked to each other. And I’ve never heard brothers and sisters talk so unreservedly to each other. Maybe it was because they were twins; maybe it was because they came to treat me almost like themselves. ‘You randy little bitch,’ Richard might say lightly when she talked of a night out with one of the Knox College guys. ‘You make sure you keep those rugby boys out of your pants.’

  ‘What is the smell in this bed?’ she might say. ‘I hate to think who you’ve had in here. It should be fumigated before I come round here again. You been shagging an orang-utan or something?’

  I never found that smoking shit gave me all that much of a high, and Richard could soak it up and just be mellow, but Rebecca could get really up on it. Maybe it was her lesser body weight or something. After a few tinnies, or time with the spottle, she was most likely to grab me, and ask what we could do that was terrible. At Queen’s Birthday weekend the three of us had a session in Richard’s room.Eric had gone home. We went out late for takeaways into a pale, cold drizzle, and Rebecca walked between the two of us with one hand in her brother’s coat pocket and one in mine. ‘Shit, it’s cold, isn’t it,’ she said loudly. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but I reckon that, as we walked, her hand in the pocket lining pushed down towards my cock several times. ‘Jesus, we all need to get warmed up,’ she said. The whites of her eyes caught the street lights as she looked up at me.

  On the way home we passed one of those wooden houses crammed up to the footpath. We could see a party going on. A group of old people, in their fifties and sixties, all animated and on the go, their faces crowded with gaudy, exaggerated noses, chins and eyebrows like papier mâché heads. To us, pausing in the wet night outside, their gaiety seemed absurd, and they themselves ridiculous in abandonment. ‘What a load of wankers,’ said Richard, and we stood laughing and unseen in the darkness to watch them.

  ‘Time for a wake up call,’ said Rebecca, and in one motion took her hand from my pocket, seized an empty milk bottle from the letter box, and flung it at the window.

  The party people shrank back with appalled, vaudeville faces for a moment as the window glass shattered; one or two of them cried out with the shock of it. Half pissed and half high as we were, it seemed both catastrophic and enormously funny. We fled, whooping with laughter, Richard and I dragging Rebecca, who said she wanted to see what the old farts would do.

  It wasn’t just drink and shit, of course, but the derisive power of being young, and being good-looking, and being sure in your own mind that you would end up doing so much better in life than the adult people around you. We left our coats on kitchen chairs and went into Richard’s room, kicking off our shoes before climbing under the cover and setting out the containers of Chinese food to share. Rebecca was in the middle again and her soft breast pressed against me whenever she leaned my way for sweet and sour pork.

  ‘We shouldn’t have done it, I know,’ she said, ‘but they were so gob-smacked, weren’t they. People who dress like that, cardigans and all, deserve everything they get anyway. We should send them a fucking note saying that the style police took action against them.’ Her jersey was dry, but her black hair was damp, shiny, and the wetness released a strong scent of some shampoo, which mixed with smell of wine and marijuana on her breath when she laughed, and the Chinese food, to make a potion I found strongly erotic.

  ‘Those poor pricks when you smashed the window, though,’ I said. ‘What the hell got into you all of a sudden?’

  ‘I told you that the world needed something terrible.’

  ‘I hate to think what, or who, gets into her at times. It doesn’t pay to ask,’ said Richard. He was pushing his shoulder against her playfully so that she pressed more against me.

  ‘Shut up. You can talk.’ She was excited rather than offended.

  Her words and laughter were quicker, higher. ‘But even if you’re a criminal we still love you,’ and Richard gave her an exaggerated kiss on one side of her face, which was the opportunity for me to kiss her on the other. I wanted to roll right over on her, despite the pottles of food, and kiss her on her lips, feel the length of our bodies together. I wanted to tell Richard to get out of his own room and leave us alone together. Instead he put his arms around both Rebecca and me and started some mock, half-arsed talk about us being three musketeers and facing the world together. I slipped one hand under Rebecca’s jersey, but even in the tactile satisfaction of that I had the uneasy awareness that Richard was stroking the back of my neck with two fingers. ‘Don’t anybody chunder on my bed,’ he said, and puffed his cheeks to show he’d overeaten as well as earlier indulgence.

  We spent even more time together after that. I often asked Rebecca to come out with just me, and she did sometimes. We went to a few pub band nights and some art films, but she liked best to do things as a threesome, and Richard took offence if he wasn’t invited. It was a situation new to me, and I told myself that it arose because of the natural closeness of twins, and that Richard wasn’t my competitor for Rebecca in any way that worried me. After all, if it hadn’t been for Richard, I’d never have met her at all. Maybe if Rebecca wasn’t there, the friendship I had with him may have developed in a quite different way. But that was an uneasy speculation I never dwelt on.

  Life turns on such apparently fortuitous things. For if I’d never known Richard and Rebecca, then I wouldn’t have spent those months on my uncle’s farm, and Cliff and Sonia would have been just one-dimensional relations I’d met occasionally as a kid. The most obvious feature of a person’s character may be the salient one, but equally as often you find it quite insignificant when familiarity has been gained. My aunt’s warm engagement was the true represe
ntation; Uncle Cliff’s quiet distance disguised an equal benevolence.

  He was aware the old country ways were changing as farming became more technical, new land use replaced pastoralism, and the city populations, growing in both numbers and affluence, pushed their vacationing and holiday homes even into such areas as the Mackenzie Country and the Maniatoto. ‘We’ve been the Celtic fringe,’ he said, ‘and of course we’ll be overrun.’ He had an unspoken belief that the satisfaction gained from living in the country diminished in proportion to the increased number with which it was shared. Family was different, of course, and I think he liked having me around. Although he never asked about my state of health, he would suggest tasks we could do together if I’d been quiet and by myself for a long time. ‘Would you like to give me a hand dagging and drenching a mob?’ he might say, or ‘I thought maybe we could do a lambing round together before it gets dark’.

  One day in the autumn drought we went out with Caspar Waldren to see if we could find water. Waldren was a retired farmer and water diviner who lived in Oamaru, but still spent a lot of time pottering on the farm he’d relinquished to his son, and on other properties which he’d come to know well during a long life. He had a big reputation for being able to find underground water, sometimes by using a fresh willow wand, sometimes number eight wire bent like a clothes hanger. He had boots worn grey at the toes and an excess of brown, weathered skin on his very thin frame. He was sprouting a lot of hair from nooks and crannies such as his ears and eyebrows, and when I was introduced to him he looked thoughtfully into my face, and said he’d met my mother a couple of times. Despite the heat he wore a tattered pinstriped suit coat. He was an absurd old git really, but my uncle treated him with respect, almost deference.