Carnival Sky (10 page)

At a table close by sat an old man. He wore a low cravat of mingled red and black, and his clothes were of obvious quality though dated, and all of them hung on him. He had shrunk perhaps during lengthy ownership, or maybe he wore the clothes of a larger brother since passed on. The tendons of his neck stood within the loose collar, like stems in a vase, patches of stained skin made a palimpsest of his face, and the black velvet jacket was half slipped from his narrow and sloping shoulders. He seemed oblivious to the bustle of people below the big windows, or the more leisurely movement within the restaurant. He was intent on his food and his own thoughts, as if sitting by himself in
a suburban dining room with a cat sleeping on another chair.

‘This isn’t so bad, is it? I’m looking forward to seeing Mum and Dad tomorrow,’ Georgie said. Sheff knew little of her as an adult, and even his memory of her as a kid sister was embarrassingly incomplete. She’d always seemed to be accumulating accomplishments – ballet, piano, Girl Guides, Duke of Edinburgh Award, school choir, gym or extra maths – rather than hanging about on the fringe of his friendships and activities. Her school blazer had been as impressively adorned as the uniform of a Pentagon general.

The old man in the velvet coat at the next table reminded Sheff of their father. Not in dress at all, but in gauntness and self-absorption. Warwick had become that way at the end of his life, although physically imposing and skilled in company when younger. ‘The old guy reminds me of Dad,’ Sheff said quietly as they waited for their dessert.

‘How’s that?’ asked Georgie. She didn’t turn to glance at the man, but regarded her brother.

‘Just being so loose in his clothes, I suppose, and a sense of inwardness.’

‘Do you think about Dad much?’

‘I wish I’d spent more time with him, especially since he got sick. A lot of stuff was going on with Lucy after the baby died, and then we split, and that’s all I seemed able to feel deeply about. And there was work and everything. Then he got sick. I feel a bit guilty actually. I’m glad you kept on at me to come. You were right.’

‘Do you?’ said Georgie. ‘You feel guilty?’

‘Well, all he and Mum have done, and when they need something in return I’m too busy with my own fucked-up life.’ He surprised himself with the urgent honesty of his feelings, but Georgie didn’t seem taken aback.

‘He likes Lucy. Both of them do, and they wanted you to stay together. She still gets in touch, you know. They still talk. I wouldn’t be surprised if she comes down before too long. Mum and Dad hoped you’d have more children.’

‘They never said anything to me.’

‘Of course not,’ she said.

As he and Georgie talked about their parents, the old man got up and left. Upright, he didn’t look at all like their father: smaller and with a gait that suggested he was apprehensive of his own stability. There was still, however, an aura of isolation, of preoccupation. He paid no heed to them as he passed close by their table, and the red and black of his silk cravat caught the light in a momentary shimmer. So out of place were his clothes that he might have stepped off a repertory theatre stage. Whose father and grandfather was he? What life was he almost at the end of, and why did he come alone to an inner-city restaurant wearing velvet that hung on him, and silk at his throat?

It was becoming cold, as is the way in the south after nightfall, when they walked back to the hotel. Georgie made them coffee in their room, then they watched the late news on television. Almost irritatingly well informed and not amenable to instruction, she was able to debate the staples of his profession, whereas he was almost completely ignorant concerning hers.

Having been married, Sheff knew to use the bathroom first and speedily so that his sister could command it for as long as she wished. He thought she’d choose to take her pyjamas in with her, but instead she changed beside her bed without hesitation, talking as she did so of her plan to buy an ex-State house as an investment property. He supposed that for a doctor no mystery, or reserve, remained concerning the body. Before he turned politely away he had a glimpse of her breasts, the nipples and areola dark against her pale skin, and he recalled the pink flush of Lucy’s tits. Colour helps the baby latch on, she’d said.

In bed Georgie continued to watch a History Channel programme on the Aztec civilisation, but Sheff lay turned away and thought of the old man at the restaurant, and how when bent over his meal, but only then, there was something in his demeanour that reminded Sheff of the last time he’d seen his father. A sense of separation from others,
an unspoken acknowledgement that departure wasn’t far away.

‘Warwick,’ Belize used to tell him, ‘you’re not listening to a word I say,’ and he would give a faint smile, look directly at her and raise his eyebrows to show she then had his full attention. He was unable to absorb himself in the present, and seemed to roam within his mind. Not that Warwick had been ineffectual in the here and now, or lived in dreams. He was an accountant with two partners and several staff. As well as reaching a golf handicap of seven, he was an excellent bridge player and had been a nationally ranked swimmer as a junior. Achievement, however, meant little to him, and there seemed some part of him unexpressed. ‘Your father only camps in life,’ Sheff’s mother once told him. And now Warwick had come to a time in his life bereft of future, the great bulk and the best of the journey over.

Georgie turned off the television and the light, and said goodnight. Sheff lay on his back between the stiff, clean sheets. He always slept on his side, but lying face towards the ceiling was his thinking posture when in bed. His father was still on his mind. Tomorrow he would see him for the first time in seven months. Sheff remembered that visit, his father, already ill, looking at family photographs, his long fingers tapping the images, the skin fine and wrinkled as tissue paper on the backs of his hands, and browned with age rather than sun. ‘It must be strange,’ he’d said, ‘to see yourself during the first years of your life, yet have no recollection of them. We tell you about things you and Georgie said and did, and you’ve no memory of them at all. Your mother and I know more about that time of your life than you do yourself. That’s odd, isn’t it? Our first selves are strangers to us.’

Sheff thought of some of those times he and his father had set aside to be together. During Sheff’s years at university they completed several of the South Island bush walks, and Sheff turned down the opportunity for others. He’d become exasperated with his father’s need to push on, so that often they completed the tracks a day or more before expected, and Sheff’s memories were head-down images of the path before him, rather than quietly observed views and relaxed
conversation. His father had been physically capable, yet didn’t particularly extol that as a virtue, and now his body was betraying him and there was nothing he could do.

Before Sheff turned on his side to sleep, he recalled his father’s laugh, abrupt and brief, the laugh he had when he was in his prime and Sheff a schoolboy. His father delighted in instances of foolish vanity and disrepute from what he termed ‘the zoo of the world’, and his natural humour was tinged with cynicism, yet he had a love of family and a decency in his treatment of people. Sheff hadn’t given much thought to his parents for years. He had been too absorbed in his own life. But in the Dunedin hotel room, on the way home with Georgie, he lay thinking of his father, and the old man with the sunken cheeks and expensive clothes too big for him in the Indian restaurant. It came to him that it was loneliness he’d glimpsed: the loneliness that people obscured for most of their lives, but which is exposed at the end.

HIS FATHER COULD COOK ONLY ONE DISH.
He did so rarely, but with a degree of ostentation otherwise foreign to his nature. A casserole made to a recipe he claimed had been gifted to his family by a French miner. It had quartered onions, mushrooms, corn, both beef and pork, and a good deal of red wine. Sheff and Georgie would watch him cover all the bench space with the ingredients and the paraphernalia of preparation. ‘No use going to so much trouble for just one meal,’ he’d say. ‘The flavour of a casserole grows with each reheating.’ It all went into a capacious, lidded enamel pot. Before Sheff and Georgie outgrew such tomfoolery, he would make incantations as he sprinkled thyme across the surface. Warwick’s casserole was always a hit on the first couple of winter servings. Less so on subsequent days, despite the claim of enrichment.

THE RENTAL FIRM’S OFFICE was close to the hotel, and there they were given a lime-green car so small that Sheff had to put the back seat down to get their cases in.

‘Jeez,’ he said.

‘Well, if you’d wanted a limousine you could’ve done the booking yourself.’

‘I just meant it’s a bit poky with the stuff we’ve got, that’s all. Anyway, I’ll drive if you like, at least until we get well clear of the city.’

‘I’ll do it. I don’t want you to feel your ego diminished by driving such a little car.’ Sheff was surprised at the umbrage she took to what he’d intended to be a casual remark. Maybe she wasn’t as even-tempered as he assumed, and so he made no comment whatsoever about her driving habits, although quickly exasperated by them. She was competitive at the lights and truculent at the roundabouts: she wandered from lane to lane, and overestimated the car’s ability to accelerate when, on the spur of the moment, she passed other vehicles.

‘We can take our time,’ said Sheff, forcing a casual voice. ‘Enjoy the country heading into Central.’ Georgie didn’t reply, but had a neck-and-neck race with a plumber’s van, whose driver had a silver ring in his ear, and slid his tongue in and out suggestively.

‘Jesus, steady on.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ said Georgie, and cut in ahead of the van without any acknowledgement.

When they were well out of the city he watched the countryside for a while – a landscape green and with heavy river soils. It was different to the north with which he’d become familiar: that semi-tropical country of muddy rivers, mangrove estuaries and the bush always pressing down to reclaim hard-won land. A frog-green place of warmth, wetness, growth and decay, and where the spirit of the Maori was pervasive.

Even at Lawrence he was still not in the landscape of his past, and only when they were passing Ettrick did he feel the hard-edged, arid country of Central Otago begin to form about him: bare hills and the open scents of home. Perhaps he should do a couple of articles on less hackneyed aspects of the place, the sometimes brutal history rather than lakes and golden poplars in the fall, but the journalistic urge seemed to have left him after the brief pewter enthusiasm, and he relaxed back and listened to his sister, who was talking of some cousins he couldn’t place.

‘You remember Julie Leem, of course,’ she said.

‘No.’

‘She used to sit on me when they came to visit.’

‘I remember Russell Leem who arrived once in the Christmas holidays with his parents, and they stayed a few nights. He slept in my room, and I could never find my water pistol afterwards. I’m sure he stole it.’

‘He’s a corporate CEO now in Wellington.’

‘It figures: a born robber. And I remember he turned his nose up at all the vegetables on his plate and no one said a thing, yet we were always made to eat them.’

‘You’re jealous.’

‘That too. He was always whingeing, though, wasn’t he? There was always something wrong. Had Russell been there when Christ rose from the dead, he would’ve complained he left the tomb in a mess.’

He remembered also overhearing Mrs Leem disparaging his mother, but said nothing to Georgie of that. He’d been in the hall as the Leems talked in the guest room. ‘Belize isn’t a woman you can possibly relax with, is she?’ said Mrs Leem. ‘And what sort of a name is that? Belize. My God.’ And then the conciliatory murmur from the husband. Sheff had felt shame for his mother, rather than anger at Mrs Leem. The small burst of that unreasonable shame he could still revisit, the feel of the carpet beneath his bare feet, the exact tone of the woman’s voice, and the heavy smell of small-town dusk, even though he had no recollection of what either Leem looked like, or to which side of the family they belonged. The memory was unbidden and surprisingly strong: Sheff shook his head slightly to dispel it, and concentrated on the passing landscape.

They had agreed on brunch in Roxburgh, and when they stopped there Georgie took it upon herself to decide what was best for them. ‘We don’t want slabs of greasy pastry and meat,’ she said. ‘No sausage rolls. Something light and colourful.’

‘Sounds like choosing wallpaper,’ said Sheff.

‘You don’t need a wad of heavy food when you’re sitting in a car all day.’

‘Speak for yourself.’

‘I hate to imagine what you’ve been stuffing down since Lucy left.’

She was walking close beside him, and again he was conscious of the rise and fall of her, as if she rode a persistent and invisible swell. He looked down surreptitiously to see if there was a particular aspect of her gait that would account for it.

Her intelligence, optimism and empathy were all admirable in the abstract. She was full of stimulating opinions, confident and skilled in argument. Nevertheless, there were those female habits that exasperated him – the ready involvement with others when it served no practical purpose, the tendency to talk for the sake of filling silence, the inclination to enter shops even when lacking any intention to buy, and the inordinate time spent in toilets. What could occupy
a woman for so long in the lavatory was a mystery to him. Surely it was a mistake to allow mirrors there, as women were encouraged to gaze at themselves. And Georgie seemed normally to have several lines of thought simultaneously, so that sometimes they broke into her conversation as non sequiturs. In the midst of a discussion on Islamic fundamentalism she could abruptly ask if he’d changed his socks.

‘I can’t smoulder,’ Georgie told Sheff as they sat in a place so outdated that it could still be described as tea rooms: cream walls, Formica surfaces and custard squares, and a young waitress almost beautiful without showing any awareness of it. What prompted Georgie’s comment about her own lack of allure was a group of three having drinks close to the street. Two women, one man, and by their clothes and insouciance obviously just passing through. The two may well have been sisters, and they seemed in competition for the attentions of their companion, who sat with outstretched legs crossed at the ankles, and watched the few passers-by, turning to make quick comments to the women from time to time. He was consciously handsome and with the arrogant expression of a toreador. The women weren’t pretty, but they were young, and hunting, and sexual awareness was in every movement and expression, maybe in all they said, though Sheff couldn’t hear the conversation.

‘I can’t smoulder and I can’t pout,’ Georgie said resignedly, also an observer.

‘But you could step in and save some guy’s life. That’s a pretty cool introduction.’

‘The cute ones don’t seem to need the kiss of life.’

‘Here I wouldn’t be too sure,’ Sheff said. Had he been by himself he would’ve eaten quickly and left, but Georgie encouraged reminiscence, talking of people they had known from Roxburgh when young, and orchards that had been strung along the roadside and now reduced. Their father’s clients in the district had included a man who had an arm maimed by machine-gun fire in the war: scars and pits along the underside. He used to bring half a hogget as a gift at Christmas time.

In the Kiwi way, there was no service charge and no tip expected. After paying, Sheff complained to Georgie about the exorbitant additional charges in European restaurants, and the rudeness if expectation wasn’t met. ‘Why should the bastards get away with so much double-dipping?’

‘You’re such a tight-arse.’

‘Well, I’m not earning, am I?’ Sheff said. Georgie with a doctor’s income and no family to support. No divorce settlement. ‘It’s the principle of it, though,’ he said, trying to save face. ‘There’s a service charge made, but they still expect a tip. You get sick of being ripped off, day after day.’

But Georgie wasn’t listening. She was texting their mother to let her know when to expect them. Another courtesy, another thoughtfulness, that hadn’t occurred to Sheff. ‘She’ll be baking something,’ Georgie said. Yes, she would, and with the fierce impatience with which she tackled all household tasks. Sheff remembered spring cleaning as a time to keep well clear of his mother, as she took on a soiled universe with a mixture of resolution and anger that was non-specific in its expression. She bitterly resented the necessity, but couldn’t live with the tasks undone.

‘You can drive now if you like,’ said Georgie. She had left the car awkwardly close to a large, slab-sided van, and in attempting to clear that, Sheff was oblivious to a white car backing out from the opposite side. They met with a subdued, but definite jolt.

‘Bugger, bugger, bugger.’

‘Never mind,’ said Georgie with complacent sympathy. ‘There can’t be much damage, and these parks can be tricky.’

Sheff got out to be confronted by a young woman in tracksuit pants and slippers. ‘I’ve got a baby in the car,’ she hollered. ‘Don’t you bother to look where you’re going?’

‘Sorry,’ said Sheff. ‘It’s just that we were both backing out at the same time. But there’s hardly even a bumper scratch.’

‘I’ve got a baby in the car,’ the woman exclaimed to a passing
couple, who paused on their way to express dismay, look in at the solemn infant and glance accusingly at Sheff.

‘Do you want my name and details?’ he said to the baby’s mother. ‘I’m really sorry.’

‘You’ve been very lucky.’ The woman was grudging, as if she somewhat regretted there wasn’t more cause for drama and consequence. She tugged at the bumper of her car, but it remained firm. She traced a deep, weathered scratch with affected surprise as if it had just appeared. ‘Well anyway,’ she said, ‘give us your name and address, and if I find something goes wrong afterwards I’ll have it for the insurance.’ She then looked in at the small child in its backward-facing seat to see if there were dents, or skin off, worth an insurance claim. The baby smiled.

‘Such a beautiful little girl,’ said Georgie, who had joined them, and she bent to the window for a long professional look into the baby’s calm face.

‘You’ve got to be so much more careful with a child,’ the mother said emphatically, as if expressing a new truth.

‘I know,’ said Sheff humbly. She could have no idea how painful it was to have her talk of any threat to a baby.

‘Okay then.’ But she lingered for a time between their two cars, reluctant to let go of unexpected moral authority, peered at the tarmac for liquid spill, placed a slippered foot on the bumper to test if it was secure.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Sheff again. How could he suggest that a woman in slippers with a baby in the car could bear any share of guilt? His culpability was obvious.

‘We’ll let it go at that, then,’ the woman said.

‘We appreciate your understanding,’ said Georgie. ‘My brother will pull back in and let you away first.’ Sheff did so, and the car with its smoky exhaust heaved away from the parking area. ‘Could have happened to anyone.’

‘My own fault,’ said Sheff, but he was aggrieved nevertheless.
Georgie had driven badly all morning without incident, and he had a ding the minute he got behind the wheel, and in a park of less than a dozen vehicles, in a town of a few hundred slow-moving people. Jesus. It was just a scratch on the rental, but an obvious one. His pride had suffered the greater injury.

‘It’ll all be covered by the firm’s insurance,’ said Georgie in condescending, sisterly support.

‘We should stop and get something to take to Mum,’ she said almost as soon as they had left Roxburgh and were passing the road stalls with the lattice signs advertising fruit and vegetables. And pony poo, honey and pine cones. ‘Don’t go too fast and we’ll keep an eye out, especially for apples. I think Mum and Dad like Braeburn best.’

‘Couldn’t we just buy some when we get to Alex?’

‘No,’ said Georgie uncompromisingly, ‘It’s fresher from the gate, and more natural.’ So Sheff had to slow whenever a stall was sighted. Georgie had the annoying habit of delaying decision until he had almost pulled in, and then wanting to go on. After the last such hesitation there were no more stalls for quite some time, and Sheff was about to allow himself the satisfaction of telling his sister she’d lost the chance because of prevarication, when at the end of a descending left-hand sweep in the road they saw a small stall with a hand-painted advertising board. ‘Just the thing,’ said Georgie, as if the place had been in her mind all along.

They were close enough to the trays for her to remain in the car and give instruction to Sheff as to her choices, while he held up examples of produce. The stall was unmanned, but the prices clearly displayed, and a large honesty tin sat next to the cucumbers. Sheff was digging for change when a farm ute with dogs in the back drew into the gateway, and a tall cocky, all boots, knees and elbows, came over to the stall. Without a word he took the tin from Sheff, and briefly stirred the notes and change with his hand.

‘There should be a hell of a lot more than this,’ he said evenly. ‘Look at all the stuff that’s been taken.’ Sheff refrained from pointing
out the impossibility of that. The guy didn’t strike him as someone interested in nuances of language. Instead, Sheff was placating.

‘I was just getting change.’

‘Yeah, should be a fucken sight more than what’s here. What have you got?’ and he made a quick mental tally of the contents of Sheff’s plastic bags, while Sheff proffered the two twenty-dollar notes as evidence of his intent to pay. ‘Let’s see what’s in your pockets,’ said the man.

‘No,’ said Sheff. He wasn’t going to be frisked like some kid at a corner dairy.

‘He didn’t take any money,’ called Georgie as she left the car and came over to them.

‘Well, someone’s ripped me off. You can’t trust any bugger these days. I don’t know why I bother to have a stall at all. If you haven’t taken the money, why won’t you prove it?’

‘I haven’t taken money. I’ve told you and that’s the end of it.’

‘So you say.’ He stepped closer to Sheff, and jutted his stubbled chin. The three dogs jumped from the ute and gathered with hackles up around their master’s lanky legs.

‘Do we really look like highway robbers?’ said Georgie. ‘If we’d been into the tin we’d hardly stop at bagging up a few apricots and apples, would we?’ She smiled, took the forty dollars from Sheff’s hand and held it out to the man. Who could maintain belligerence in the face of a small, cheerful woman who bobbed when she walked, and talked with some authority? ‘You okay with that?’ she said.