The Families

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  A lot later, when she was with her husband on a farm near Tirau, Cecilia came across the brochure from the agency where she saw herself looking frightened, although in fact she had been happy when the photographer told her first to smile and then not to smile. It was the second photograph they had used. ‘Cecilia’ it said above her in large print, and then in smaller letters told all the things she could do, the cooking and her being good at figures and responsible for junior staff, and what the woman who interviewed her must have put in, ‘personable and intelligent, good English, from a good family’. All she had said was that her father was dead and her mother lived with an aunt, the two sisters in their own house on an island famous for its sugar. When she thought of her mother who looked much older than she was and had gone astray in her head, if she told the truth, she thought too of her aunt who had worked in a bar, and looked after three children whose fathers were in other countries, and said sometimes when she became angry that she would jump under a truck to get away from it all. Cecilia supposed ‘good’ could mean all kinds of things.

  In the brochure she found in her husband’s house there were ticks in red pencil against her photograph, and those of two other girls, one who was prettier than she was, and one who was uglier. She wondered if he had written and asked about the three of them and the pretty one was already gone. Not that it mattered now. She knew from the one day every month when they drove up to Hamilton and she met her other friend from home, that Jack was a lucky one to have. He was kind and did not ask her to walk about the house with no clothes on the way her friend from Frankton had to do, and did not make her get up early when he got out of bed at five o’clock.

  Jack had a grown-up daughter in Auckland who did not like her. She had become used to that. ‘This place stinks,’ his daughter said when she came into the living room and saw the shelf where Cecilia had set up some little pictures and a dish of flowers and sometimes burned a candle.

  ‘She’s everything her mother wasn’t, that one,’ Jack said. He did not mind seeing his daughter only once or twice a year. ‘And that self-satisfied prick,’ he said about his son-in-law. Cecilia knew his daughter’s husband liked looking at her. He would brush against her if they were alone together in the kitchen. Or sometimes try to touch her. But she did not tell Jack because when he became angry he would break a plate or a cup or the radio once when a man from the bank telephoned him, and he had driven off to town without asking if she would like to go with him. But he was always kind to her. When they went to Hamilton he would park near the centre and tell her, ‘Be back here in a couple of hours, OK?’, and give her money to do what she liked with.

  He knew she would go to the post office and send most of it to her sister, because he never asked her what she bought with it. She said to her friend from Frankton, who was given money to buy underclothes, ‘My husband is very generous.’ Her friend sometimes would open a shopping bag and move aside the tissue paper and show her a leather bra with silver studs around it, or clothes with zips and holes in them in different places. Her friend talked about her own husband as if he were a customer. ‘I know he likes it like that,’ she would say. But mostly when they met she and Lisa would talk about home. When they did that it was as close to them as if they had just stepped from its crowded streets and hot clinging air into the coffee shop they met at in Garden Place. After an hour they would go out again to the cool empty square where they would kiss and laugh and each go back to where their husbands waited for them, in different car parks. For the first few minutes English tasted like stones on their tongues, and sometimes for the first day afterwards they were lonelier than usual for home.

  Yet Cecilia always knew how fortunate she was, when she looked out from the kitchen window and saw the green hills, and the track down to the main road where the tanker came along early in the morning and the mail van later in the day, when she turned on the television while Jack was out fixing the fences or getting the cattle back from where they strayed sometimes near the DOC reserve or arguing with the mad bastard on the next farm, who said he wouldn’t pay half for the new shelter belt. This was her house and all this, ‘all this’ as Jack liked to repeat, was hers as much as his. He let her telephone home every Sunday night and didn’t mind that she cried when her aunt said things deliberately to upset her, things like her mother never taking off the paua shell necklace that she sent her, or that her sisters had been into the city for the carnival, none of them seemed to miss her now as much as they used to. This year when the shrine was carried through their district on the feast day it had stopped at their very door, so it would be a good year for them all, for Cecilia too maybe? Sometimes she said to Jack, would he be happy, he’d have to be happy, if she became pregnant? She sat on his knee and put her arms around his neck and on the right days she wore the charms that he thought were just ornaments she liked. But he laughed when she asked him. He said if his daughter in Auckland was so damned ropeable about his getting married again just think what she’d be like if she had a little sister as well! And he never asked her what she would like most of all, next to that. Because it would have been so easy to answer. She would have said for Jack to take down the picture that was always there on the mantelpiece of his first wedding day, which had been before she was even born, the picture of the pale woman with lipstick like a cut across her face. To take it away and put it in the high cupboard above the hot-water cylinder where there were other photos that must have been on the walls once, like the horse with a blue cover across it that said ‘Breeders Plate’ and Jack standing next to the jockey. He was so much younger, and nice-looking, but just the same, just as kind. Or a photo of men holding golf clubs. Cecilia would like to see the wedding photo put up there with those. And another of the same woman by herself in a silver frame that stood on the table in the hallway, just outside the bedroom door. Even to see that one torn up, the face too thin to be halfway attractive, and one of herself put there instead, smiling and in her pink dress that she knew Jack especially liked, and the charms around her neck. She would know she was numero uno then for good.

  FAINTING AND THE FAT MAN

  The voice was bellowing down at him before he knew whose it was, or where he lay.

  ‘How many?’ the bellow said. ‘Count them for me! How many can you see?’

  Robin wondered what he was to take them for—a distant view of skyscrapers, a cactus as you used to see them at the beginning of cowboy movies, its stalks filling the screen? Or a hand was it, just a hand, with the finger puppets whipped off?

  ‘How many?’ the voice continued to demand. ‘How many?’

  The questions made him angry. He knew what it was up to, that distended face way beyond the fingers, as though beyond the bars of a grille. The features shook into focus. The bulbous eyes, the red web of veins showing in their whites. The wings of the ears. He said, ‘Five. Five fucking fingers. Now let me sit up.’

  He knew now that he had slipped, slipped stepping up to the urinal. He had tilted back and lost balance, and hit his head on the tiled floor. He must have been out to it for half a minute, a minute, how could he tell? And now this shape looming over him, going through his first-aid routine to test him for a stroke.

  Robin sat up and took in where he was. He felt fine. Strange, but fine. He raised his hand to feel behind his head. He took the folded magenta handkerchief from his blazer’s breast pocket and dabbed it at the swelling. He examined the stained square, the circle that showed black on the coloured cloth. He looked at the fat man who still knelt beside him, who appeared disappointed, who had expected the fallen stranger to be much worse.

  He said, knowing it would irritate this heavy man who so wished to test his reactions and who now stood with two soaked knees from the recently mopped men’s room floor, ‘The Japs, do you know that? They liked wearing dark blue because it was harder for the blood to show. It stained but it could have been water. Could have been a cup of tea.’ Surprised at how his words just tumbled out. He had spoken th
em before understanding what they said. He knew they were not the right things to say.

  The fat man stood there above him. He made no attempt to help him stand. But Robin could hear him breathing hard, as though what he had done, kneeling down and calling to him and standing up, had been an effort. He looked ten feet tall, tugging at his cuffs, then both his hands like flippers, their fingers joined, brushing across the front of his suit. Robin raised one hand to the porcelain basin above him, to assist in drawing himself up. Nothing to write home about there, he thought, seeing his reflection in the mirror above the basin. There was a bright thread running from behind his ear, onto the collar of the checked shirt he had never liked, but what could you do with a Father’s Day gift if you’re not to offend people? He dabbed the handkerchief against his neck. The bump at the back of his head began throbbing now he was on his feet.

  The fat man continued to watch him. Robin was damned if he was going to thank him. He thought, you can smell his disappointment. Helped this fellow with a stroke, that was what he hoped to be able to say, making a thing of it, loving the drama. The way people did who had the luck to witness an accident. Not much older than I am, that’d be my guess. Hadn’t been drinking, no, simply keeled over. Happened that quickly. Well, the fat man wouldn’t be trotting all that out, not this time. ‘Five,’ he had said, almost immediately, and, ‘My name is Robin.’ He had given his address, his telephone number. You need me, sport, he wanted to tell him now, more than I need you, surprised at the nastiness of what he thought. The fat man left without another word. It was not a good feeling between them. The empty men’s room now rang with it. If you can say that, Robin thought, can you say that?

  As he later thought on it, he was a little ashamed of his tetchiness, of his resentment against a stranger, but defended it. His wife told him, ‘The poor man was trying to help.’

  ‘He was intrusive,’ Robin said. ‘He took advantage.’ That Pamela was right was not the point. In fact his distaste grew for the man who had loomed over him, his breath wheezing at him, his stubby fingers raised.

  ‘My God,’ Pamela said, ‘what a nasty piece of work you can be if you try.’ Serious behind her joking tone.

  Robin too not wishing to sound pompous, although he did, as he told her, ‘You don’t usually bother to say “when you try”.’

  Little skirmishes was all they were, these occasional contretemps between them. They were contented enough together. Rubbed along. Sometimes he told her, ‘We’re luckier than most of those we know. Our kids like us. We like each other.’ We’re lucky in the long run, was what he meant.

  ‘You’re fortunate,’ Pamela told him now, ‘that it was only that. Just a slip, I mean.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Robin said. But it stayed with him, the shock of it, his coming to on the tiles of a public lavatory. There was more to regaining consciousness than just taking fingers for fingers, than counting up to five. A shadow there, somehow, behind it. That was what he blamed the fat man for.

  There is so much to occupy one in retirement, another thing to be grateful for. He had little patience with friends who went on about boredom. As though having time to yourself was a complaint. Jack Kelty now, one of the smartest men he knew. Stacked with talent. And his wife. As those who knew them years back before they married used to say, he’s got himself a looker there! The most fascinating smile Robin had ever seen. A Jean Allison lookalike, which meant next to nothing if you mentioned that to anyone under sixty. Then their boys, both of them making a mint in IT. Last year they shouted their parents a Greek cruise. Yet Jack would drop by as he had most of his life but sit there now and whinge, the complaints ticking over as though some little motor had been switched on. Politics. The young. The programmes on TV. Even the tonic water he found fault with, not the fizz in it there used to be. Robin said after he left, after their two customary gins, ‘Jack’s become a bore.’

  Pamela said, rather sharply Robin thought, ‘He’s not content to sit there reading half the day.’

  ‘Hardly fair that, is it?’ He looked up from his armchair. Impossible to mind too much, whatever she said. They weren’t together because of words, they weren’t going to be divided because of them. She brushed back the greying hair that fell across her forehead. As if he’d want to be anywhere else, even if he was being ticked off. In spite of, it always came back to that. For her too, he knew that. He thought of the heap of things that went against what she just implied—the walking club they went on every Wednesday, the season concert tickets, of course she knew all that. But no, he could not help telling her again, she was hardly being fair saying that.

  ‘I was talking about Jack,’ his wife said. ‘How he hasn’t resources the way you have. You’ve become so touchy.’

  ‘Touchy?’ But leaving it there. Pamela took the two empty glasses from the table beside the chair, their slivers of lemon making him think of small exhausted fish. She turned at the door into the kitchen. ‘I’m outside for a while if you need me.’

  ‘Need you?’

  ‘The phone or anything.’

  He wished he was not so aware of her—what was it since that ridiculous slip? Her vigilance, that was it. And that image coming back to him, the raised insistent fingers, the breathy demand, ‘Can you say how many?’

  He took up his old copy of Xenophon, its pencilled notes going back to the prefab where the flash library now stood. Back fifty years pretty much to Mr Minn turning his sallow, celibate face to the three students who sat in the confined room, stuffy with the smell of ageing books and papers, black-and-white photographs of sixth-century vases pinned to the walls above the shelves. Chapple began reading with such ease the account of the mercenaries’ trek down to the sea, the chapter Butler, who became a cleric, so stumbled over. Chapple the one real scholar among them, killed ten years later in a car crash near Heidelberg. But as Robin now remembered him, opening a page at random and reading it as though it were a newspaper. In summer the light sifted down through the big trees in Alfred Street into Mr Minn’s office. You sat in the shifting dapple of the afternoon, the fluid shadows and the patches of light, with old Minn wandering off into reminiscence, then embarrassed he had presumed too much, and tapped the text in front of him, ‘If you would, Chapple?’ No more than middle-aged, but ‘Old Minn’, as ancient to them almost as the lines he had them read about the Persians. None of those in the room really friends together, but a warmth, there’d been that, hadn’t there, in the old grey prefab? ‘Red figure vases,’ Minn sometimes shyly confiding, ‘the acme, in my opinion.’

  But now Pamela calling him back. Shouting, actually, so that he put down the book and flung open the conservatory door, joining her on the loose metal path rising to the palisade of roses on the ridge at the section’s end. She lurched angrily at the wheelbarrow that failed to budge.

  ‘I’ve been saying,’ Robin told her, ‘I’ve been saying we should get a new one, haven’t I? How many years have we had it?’

  ‘Oil,’ Pamela said, ‘that’s all the damn thing needs.’

  He knelt on the edge of the lawn and poked with his finger at the angled wheel. ‘If you think oil’s going to straighten that out you’re in for a surprise.’

  And the mower, she said, the bloody mower had packed up on her too. Robin tried to make light of it, to draw her back from one of those flare-ups that distressed her more than they were worth. He asked her, why not drive down this minute to PlaceMakers, why not do that? They had been talking about it for weeks, what better time than now?

  Pamela said, ‘We could ask Ted Pike.’

  ‘Ted’d say the same thing.’ And then, ‘I’ll put these away and we’ll drive down.’

  From the door of the wooden garden shed he called across at her, ‘Come on, I’ll get the keys.’ Calming her down, that was the story. In half an hour’s time she would tell him she was sorry for her rage, and he would assure her nothing was more justified, one paid a fortune for stuff and then it packed up on you. He would tell her he�
��d be worried if she wasn’t upset. She now walked back towards the house, pulling off her gardening gloves and slapping them against her leg. Her lips for the moment, though, still pale as though she’d been eating chalk.

  Ted Pike was the neighbour people longed to have. On call to help carrying in a new piece of furniture, sharing a skip for rubbish when the underhouse was cleared out. He had worked for years in the office at PlaceMakers, a source of catalogues and advice and if he couldn’t come up with an answer to a query offhand, he knew a man who could. Pamela phoned him when she went inside. Wait a week, he advised her from behind the big picture window where she could see him, across their dividing hedge, holding the phone, raising his other hand to her, his thumb raised in assurance. Wait a week he told her, a new shipment of barrows was due in from China, ‘never seen anything more stylish’. But pop down now for the mower, he said. He knew Evans was on this afternoon. Evans was your man. Before he rang off Ted joked, because joking was expected of him, that they wouldn’t see much of him in his own garden over the next week. ‘In-laws,’ he said, knowing how to come across laconic. As if the word he had said was ‘plague’.

  Whoever the hell Evans is, Robin thought, as he backed from the garage and Pamela reported what Ted had said. And ten minutes later saw for himself.

  ‘You go ahead,’ he instructed Pamela. He must keep his voice steady, he told himself, he must not let on. ‘You’re better at explaining,’ he said, ‘you’re better with people like that.’

  Better that she went up to the counter alone to speak with the big man who leaned above the counter filling in a form that was spread in front of him, who looked up and smiled at the woman approaching him, his immediate assurance that he was here to assist, in any way he might. He exuded service.