Hodge
I left university with a good degree, but at a time of mild economic recession. I found a job as a vegetable packer at Foley’s market, and a south-facing room in a backstreet boarding house in Sydenham. This might seem an introduction to a period of angst and sordid experience, but two things prevented such an outcome. The first was the spontaneous optimism of youth itself, the second was a fellow boarder called Hodge.
Hodge must have been middle-aged, but seemed old to me. He had the room at the end of the hall, and was a run-of-the-mill failure, exceptional only in his infallible bad luck. Hodge was a sort of lightning rod that deflected misfortune from the rest of us. Who knows what it is that makes a man lucky, or the reverse, or why such illogicality exists in a world of just deserts. Maybe it is a proof of karma, and we experience reward for past lives, or must live out expiation. Hodge was a tall man, though incomplete. He had lost his hair naturally, his right big toe in a wood-chopping accident at the Te Awamutu A and P show, and an ear was bitten off some years later by an alpaca which had been eating fermented plums in a paddock next to the Rai Valley store where Hodge stopped to ask directions to some second cousins on his mother’s side. His hearing suffered a good deal, and his head tilted towards his remaining ear as if his equilibrium was affected by the loss.
Hodge was surprisingly popular with all of us at the boarding house, for the same reason perhaps that average-looking girls often have a plain friend. No matter how badly things went with us, Hodge was always a consoling comparison. I remember a spring day smoking tinnies among the marram dunes at New Brighton when he was shat on twice by seagulls: now what must be the chances of that, I ask you.
Hodge received only one letter that I know of, a jury summons, and he was delighted at the prospect of being paid to sit in a warm place for several days with free meals, and just send someone to jail. At the selection session, however, not only was Hodge eliminated by challenge of counsel, but a woman present recognised him as the person who came to her neighbourhood the afternoon before the official Salvation Army donation day and collected many of the envelopes.
Even Mrs Thrall, the landlady, took satisfaction in pointing him out as an example of how the male sex ended up. ‘There’s your own future for you,’ she’d say triumphantly to me, or Helmut, or Dylan. ‘God won’t be mocked, you know.’
Sometimes on a sunny afternoon, when I wasn’t at Foley’s, Hodge and I would take pillows on to the fire-escape and have a beer and a yarn there. Once his false teeth fell and smashed on the concrete step; another time his heel got wedged between the bars, and Mrs Thrall had to use cooking oil and a mallet to free it. But we had some good hours in the sun. Hodge realised he was sport for the gods, but said that he wasn’t as unlucky as most of his family. He told me that his father went right through the war as an infantryman with only shrapnel wounds, shingles and lower rib damage from an encounter with an Italian woman in Tagliacozzo, but then when the returning troopship was in sight of Wellington Harbour, he choked to death on a small bat (Batis glottum batis), which escaped from its container and flew into his mouth when he was about to have a beer.
Hodge said his elder brother had seemed the lucky one of the family: a handsome man of prodigious sexual prowess who finally married a stylish Bulgarian woman with substantial investments in natural gas, truffles and Egyptian third dynasty funerary curios. Unfortunately there was a freakish and random accident in which the Bulgarian wife happened to lose control of her Audi, and smash through the side of a suburban house to reveal her husband in bed with a Samoan meter maid. The wife ditched him without a cent, and two of the meter maid’s uncles hunted him down to a DOC mangrove swamp reserve in the Hokianga, and castrated him with a boning knife.
Hodge’s other brother went to Australia looking for a more propitious citizenship, but after twenty-seven years of unavailing struggle against drought on his outback property, he had to sell it for peanuts, and when leaving the station for the last time was drowned in a flash flood which overturned his Holden ute in the boundary creek. They found him entangled with his faithful kelpie dogs, which had prevented him from opening the door and swimming out. When they buried him on the property, the grave diggers discovered a vein of opal that made the new owners one of the richest families in Australia.
There was one sister in the family. Her name was Prudence, but Hodge said she was always called Guppy. She got all the brains evidently, and was awarded a PhD in computer science by the time she was twenty-two. Unfortunately on the morning of her graduation, while shaving her legs in the bath, she dropped the electric razor in and stopped her heart. The Peeping Tom from next door broke down the door in time to give her the kiss of life, and she was rushed towards the hospital, but the ambulance was hijacked by a stoned whitebaiter from the Coast while slowing at the Colombo Street lights. The whitebaiter — who years later won a category award in the Gore Country Music Festival — left the vehicle outside a cactus and succulent nursery on the outskirts of the city, and Guppy was recovered no worse than before and taken to hospital. She made a complete recovery from electrocution except for a forked scar on her hip, but the Peeping Tom carried a mutated lowland gorilla virus picked up when he was helping tribespeople in Zaïre with livestock breeding advice, and he passed it on to Guppy while saving her life. She lost the motor sensory control of all her limbs and spends her time bedridden, constructing highly successful virtual reality games by blowing into a tube connected to computers. ‘She’s worth buckets of dough, lucky Guppy,’ said Hodge, ‘but she doesn’t want to have anything to do with me because I’d never give her the top bunk in our bedroom when we were kids.’
Mrs Thrall had a cancer scare the last year I boarded there. She never let on to us just what part of her was under threat, but when the day came for the final outcome of the tests to be announced, she wanted me to persuade Hodge to go with her as a talisman. She promised that she’d cook a big dish of toad-in-the-hole for the night meal if we’d agree. I remember the three of us driving into the city on a summer afternoon. As we left the parking lot, Hodge was nearly run over by a pimpled hoon in a rusted-out Falcon coming at him on his alpaca side, and so almost inaudible. Hodge stumbled back to safety, but did receive a nasty ankle gash from a skateboarder careering past at the time.
The specialist had the best of news for Mrs Thrall, and as far as I know she’s still running that two-storeyed boarding house, happily bitching about the male race and fining guys for taking the house pillows out onto the fire-escape, or leaving syringes in the hydrangeas. It was Hodge, of course, who found it a bad day. When reading an old newspaper in the waiting room he discovered that his ninety-three-year-old mum, the last of his relatives, had been parboiled and sucked under terra firma by a geyser in Rotorua which opened up without warning beneath an inaugural group waiting for the unveiling of a kinetic sculpture in brass, ceramic and poly resin to represent the benevolence of the universal life force.
Hodge told me that after this news he was particularly looking forward to his evening toad-in-the-hole as some sort of counterbalance for the vicissitudes of the day, but it wasn’t to be. As we passed the last tall building before the carpark, an eighteen-stone woman cast herself from the window of the Weight No Longer Clinic. She had failed to meet her monthly loss target, but she was spot on as far as Hodge was concerned. The autopsy showed eighty-nine per cent of his bones shattered, but the eighteen-stone woman had a miraculous escape, became a born-again Christian trauma consultant, and is now a much-loved panellist on early evening television. Sometimes in my dreams I have this one freeze frame with Hodge giving a rare smile as he anticipates his toad dinner, and just above his head this vast, pink mass descending.
I miss Hodge, most of all because now he’s gone there is nothing to deflect malicious fortune from the rest of us.
Watch of Gryphons
His apartment was on the Corso Cavour, on the south-east side of the old city. He was quite close to the archaeological museum and th
e garden of the San Pietro church, from which pale Assisi could be seen on the flank of hills across the broad valley. The view from the upstairs apartment, though, was of the street, and the noises were of the street and kept him awake at night until he became accustomed to them.
Dr Luca Matteotti had met him at the station and taken him to the offices of the department responsible for water and power in Perugia. Rather than any personal welcome at the station, Matteotti outlined the hierarchy within the reservoir project organisation and stressed his own overall supervision and responsibility. The director’s manner was distant, but on that first day Paul thought it just the effect of formal English as a second language.
Both the station and the offices were in the new part of the city, and nondescript in a way that made them interchangeable with the station and offices of a hundred other cities. But after the coffee and fruit, the introductions to strangers who would become familiar enough, the director drove him up the hill to the old city with its great walls and serenity. ‘The gryphon is the symbol of Perugia,’ he said, as they passed through one of the gates with that strange hybrid carved above it. Paul was to see stone gryphons many times again. They were on the main buildings of the square, but also reduced and more roughly carved, sometimes mutilated, above low doors in narrow streets and on some of the oldest tombs. They carried, despite absurdity, vestiges of ancient and superstitious power.
‘This was an Etruscan city,’ said Matteotti, and Paul didn’t reply because he knew nothing of the Etruscans except that they were superseded by the Romans. ‘There is a great well beneath the city which is nearly two and a half thousand years old. Hydrologists are not new in Perugia, Mr Saville.’ The director was smiling, but obviously enjoyed the put-down.
‘That’s interesting,’ Paul said.
It was several days before he first saw the woman from apartment four. As he came up the stairs he heard the loud noise of one of the double turn locks on the apartment doors, and she passed him with a slight smile as a reply to his greeting at the bend in the stairs. Light brown hair she had and a pale skin. ‘Buongiorno,’ he’d said, and she had smiled and glanced at him without much interest. She’d be nearly forty, he thought, and that was all that occurred to him. Three mornings later he saw her in the bread shop when he was earlier than usual for his breakfast panini. She was supple in movement and spoke quietly to the shopkeeper. ‘Buongiorno,’ Paul said, and she gave him the same impersonal glance, as if she had never seen him before.
She lived in the apartment one down from him, and always when he saw, or heard, she went in and out alone. Perhaps because there were boisterous families in the other sets of rooms on that floor, and he and the woman lived alone, he wondered about her sometimes.
In the early weeks, though, he was preoccupied with work. Luca Matteotti proved to be an unpleasant and difficult man who saw no reason for Paul and Jeremy to be on the project team for the new reservoir, and accepted them as consultants only because the joint venture British company insisted. Within the first few days he had queried the need for a full series of bore samples to determine if material to be excavated from the site could be used as fill in the earth dam. ‘What else would we do with it,’ he exclaimed. He had the habit of looking out of the window of his office as he talked, as if Paul’s face was repugnant to him, and he accepted outside calls during their discussions, and kept Paul waiting while he did so.
‘He hates us both,’ said Jeremy.
‘Yes, but you he hates just because you’re English. Me he hates personally.’
‘He hates us both because we know our job and we’re here,’ said Jeremy. Yet Paul knew Matteotti disliked him not just on the grounds of profession, or nationality, but because their personalities repelled each other. Nothing would alter that; nothing would mitigate it. There was some incompatibility which crackled like electricity between them whenever they were together, and which sometimes surprised the two themselves with its nakedness. Some atavistic emotions were at stake which careful formality could not completely cover. Paul disliked the habitual hauteur of the director’s expression, his considered and false laugh, refined dress sense, assumption of cultural superiority, laziness, and his habit of observing the outside world instead of looking at the person he was addressing. He was something of a prick, Paul decided.
Jeremy he liked a lot, but the Englishman had his family with him, and although they were hospitable, Paul didn’t want to push that hospitality too far, and he spent most nights working in his apartment, or in the many restaurants of the old city, sometimes with Italian members of the project team. He enjoyed their company, but his lack of Italian made it difficult for him to develop such friendships.
As he spent much time in the apartment, Paul took an interest in people coming and going around him: The Arcottis and Sarzanos were families who seemed similar in their noisy and happy concentration on children, yet they had little to do with each other. They had no time perhaps for anyone beyond the breathless confusion of their own lives. The woman from number four was apart from all that, as Paul was himself. She seemed to have only a fleeting engagement with the world, though outside the apartments must have lain a more substantial life. He grew to know her balanced step in the hall when he was in his own room, and to recognise her from a distance outside by her walk, the cut of her hair and its light brown lustre.
In his mind she was alone always, because he’d never seen her with others, and in that unquestioned, almost unacknowledged, male way he saw little distinction between being alone and being available. So he was surprised, disappointed even, when he came past her door one evening and heard the laughter of a man and a woman in her room. The woman’s laughter was quick and unrestrained, at variance with the demeanour he’d witnessed in public; the male laugh was relaxed. Though Paul hadn’t paused in the hallway, he felt a moment of aural voyeurism and quickened his pace to his own apartment. Once afterwards he heard the two voices, but never in laughter again, and he never saw anyone coming or going there except the woman. Maybe it was just a visitor, a married lover, or a brother from the other side of the city. A woman like that should have more than a brother’s company; should have someone close in the long evenings when Paul himself sat on his balcony, which was little more than a window ledge, and looked over the jumble of orange tiled roofs. They were the gutter-shaped tiles, alternately convex, concave, which Paul was told were originally made by women moulding the clay over their thighs. He had his plans and memos, but often instead of working he would observe the street beneath him, the local people cheerfully walking out to the restaurants, the lift of their voices louder and less guarded than the conversation of New Zealanders. Sometimes he would take the short walk to the high garden of San Pietro church and watch pale Assisi gradually fade behind the dusk that filled the valley. The great stone wall of old Perugia bounded the formal garden, and below it the cars and scooters contested the steep road, becoming visible when night fell, only as white and yellow firefly lights, although the noise remained the same.
By the second month, the feasibility study involved over twenty men at the reservoir site, and Paul worked among them in jeans and an open-necked shirt. Only one or two had any English, but he joked with them using his few words of Italian, mime and laughter. The Italians loved laughter. He wasn’t their immediate superior so he relaxed with them. Sometimes, instead of using his cellphone to call for a car, he would ride back to the city with the men in a van. Matteotti was against such blurring of status. He told Paul that he should have a jacket and tie when on-site, and that by fraternising with the men he made it more difficult for the overseer.
Matteotti gave him a ticking off about these things during a routine meeting with Jeremy and several other planners. It was such bad management etiquette that Paul went to his office afterwards and complained. ‘You could have asked me to come in and raised these things personally,’ he said. ‘That’s the way it should be in the first instance anyway, not an official blast. I don’t
appreciate being criticised in front of my colleagues, and in any case all that stuff about clothes and status is incidental to what we’re trying to achieve here.’
‘It is incidental in your opinion, but not in mine,’ said Matteotti. ‘On-site relationships have a performance outcome sooner or later.’ He was looking at Paul, which was surprising in itself.
‘I’ve no argument with that. It’s the nature of the relationship we seem to disagree about.’
‘And I told you at the meeting what I expected. That’s the whole point, so there will be no further misunderstanding,’ said the director. He drew papers towards him as a sign he considered the conversation over. Paul thought it likely that he felt satisfaction in such disagreement, that he saw himself as the bulwark against foreign technocrats who would usurp a legitimate Italian endeavour, and encourage a vulgar popularism. Paul looked at the smooth, dark head of the director bent over his papers, and was tempted to say something about their antagonism, and how they might deal with that in the time they would work together, but he knew that Matteotti would see such openness as an attack, and went out without saying more.
Paul had half agreed to meet a group in the evening at a family restaurant near the Etruscan gate, but after the row he didn’t feel like company. He sat on his ledge with a bottle of Trasimeno wine and took less pleasure than usual in the Italians passing beneath him. Because of his own mood, the happiness and laughter of others seemed vacuous and banal, and he wondered why he’d come to work among people so different from his own.
Owen Marshall Selected Stories Page 59