Living As a Moon

by Owen Marshall

  The DP and I sat close together in her office as she told me that Rachel was bright, but uninvolved with her peers, or her work, drifting through school. The room was small and all the horizontal spaces above floor level heaped with papers and books. The place smelled faintly of washing powder and dedication. Supermarket cartons used for storage accounted for the former, and Mrs Bridges the latter. She was a small, taut woman brimming with concern for her charges, and possibly fearful of some cataclysmic breakdown of authority. ‘There’s so little of her, isn’t there,’ she said. ‘Physically, I mean. Such a slim girl. She eats well at home?’

  ‘She’s always been thin, but I don’t think there’s a problem there,’ I said. ‘I hope not. She doesn’t refuse food, just eats small amounts.’

  ‘Her teachers say she’ll go through complete periods without volunteering a word, without any interaction with fellow students. We have difficulty getting her to turn her iPod off. Not that she’s rude, but she seems to be in another space. She used to be so outgoing, so involved.’

  That was true. Rachel was so often in another space, as I was myself, and we could semaphore a sort of whimsical goodwill without either of us comprehending the world the other lived in. As Mrs Bridges and I discussed Rachel’s withdrawal, I had a strong sense of Viv’s presence transposed on my own, the weight of her concern and her anger that she wasn’t there for her daughter as she was entitled to be. Her intercession would have been so much more telling and insightful than my own.

  When the interview was over, and the DP held the door open obligingly for me, she looked up, shook her small face briefly as if to clear her vision, and asked me if I would consider coming into the school on the next careers night to talk about the value of history. ‘It’s the sort of subject for which students don’t see that many applications in later life,’ she said.

  Classes were changing as I walked back through the grounds. How I wished to see Rachel among the mooching, or jostling, streams of kids. How I wished to comfort our skinny girl adrift alone in adolescence, but she didn’t come my way. I was failing her, and Viv too. The school kids, both boys and girls, didn’t seem to feel the cold. Many wore no uniform blazers, or jerseys, just blouses, or shirts, often hanging loose at the waist, while I wore a jacket and knitted red scarf. I must do more for Rachel, I told myself at the gates where several boys were playing soccer with a soft drink can. ‘Pass the fucker, pass it,’ said one.

  ‘Useless, man,’ said another.

  I’d get professional help maybe, or we’d go together to some support group for the bereaved — but I knew neither of us would buy it. Therapies that worked by reduction of Viv’s memory weren’t for us. Withdrawal is a natural reaction to pain, Mrs Bridges had said. I recognised it in myself as well as Rachel. Selfishness is a reaction to pain too. ‘We’re going to talk about the school thing on Saturday,’ I told Rachel that evening.

  ‘Whatever.’ A tone dismissive, but not sullen.

  On Saturday my laptop was playing up, freezing often and bringing up one error message after another. I complained aloud and bitterly at yet more malfunction, and Rachel replied with high, derisive laughter from her room. ‘What’s the matter with it?’ she said, having come to the door of the study.

  ‘Everything. Bloody thing freezes up. I’m going to take it into town now. Why don’t you come?’

  ‘It’s freezing out there too.’

  ‘We can go to a mall and have hot chocolate.’

  ‘Big spender,’ she said.

  ‘Come on then.’

  ‘Okay, then,’ she said.

  It was cold, bloody cold. August is often a bad month. There’s a sort of seasonal drag which means that even as the days lengthen the weather worsens. On the walk from the house to the car, the cold air rose like ice water up my shins. ‘Fuck, it’s cold,’ Rachel said. Obscenity comes as a surprise from such a slight body and in such a light voice, but I knew not to offer any rebuke if we were to be friends for the day. She had jeans and a padded jacket, but was so thin that surely body heat was impossible to conserve. I had an impulse to hug her, but was afraid to appear maudlin, and my mood was already unsteady.

  ‘What’s the matter with it?’ the young guy in the repair shop asked. He had a quiff of hair like snow tussock, and elongated nostril apertures showing darkness within as if they bored deep into mahogany.

  ‘That’s what I’d like you to find out,’ I said.

  ‘It freezes up all the time,’ said Rachel.

  ‘Right. Freezing.’ He said the second word as he was writing it down on a label that also needed my phone number.

  The label reminded me of the polished copper that stood resplendent in our sunroom with a rubber tree inside. The gleams of dark leaves and of the metal sides richly complemented each other. The copper had belonged to Viv’s farming grandparents, and with difficulty was broken from its heavy, workaday casing. I had taken it to a metal stripper, and there too filled in a label for identification. After some months and a number of evasive replies to my telephone enquiries, I went back to the business and assumed an authoritative, dogmatic manner. The proprietor eventually admitted that he’d been slack with the labels, and after acid dipping all the coppers in a single session, was unable to identify one from another. He took me out into his yard, and there in the mechanical jungle of a lean-to were a dozen or so coppers. I chose the very best one, bore it home and allowed Viv to continue with the assumption that it represented some special part of the archaeology of her family.

  ‘Don’t lose the label,’ I told the tussock guy. ‘Things get muddled so easily.’

  ‘Right,’ he said disdainfully.

  ‘Oh, Dad,’ said Rachel.

  ‘When will it be ready?’ I asked.

  ‘We give you a ring,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’ve taken the phone number.’

  We had our hot chocolates in a mall. The small tables from the café spread into the thoroughfare, so that people were often ducking past on a shortcut, threatening cups with a swinging handbag, or ankles with a leashed terrier. ‘We should have a holiday this year,’ I said. I’d been thinking about it since the visit to the school.

  ‘Where’d we go?’

  ‘We can talk about it.’

  ‘I remember when we went to stinky Rotorua.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And we went another time way up north: to the cape and back, and stayed in a motel by mudflats with mangroves,’ she said.

  ‘The Hokianga. The place we stayed was Rawene. Your mother got that nasty splinter in her hand from the wooden walkway through the mangroves. Remember that?’

  ‘I’d like to go overseas. Some big place like Sydney with all those shops and people so that you don’t have to think for yourself what to do.’

  ‘Well maybe we should do that. Your mum would have liked that.’ I was surprised how naturally I was able to mention Viv again.

  We normally avoided talk of her, uncertain of each other’s ability to cope. I wasn’t sure of the duties of a father, apart from love.

  ‘And we need to talk about school — about you not doing so well.’

  ‘Not here. I don’t want to talk about stuff in the middle of the mall,’ Rachel said.

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘’Cause it’s all about Mum really, in the end it is, or anyway that’s what everyone thinks.’

  ‘Is it?’ I said. The last time we talked much about Viv was Rachel’s fifteenth birthday, when she’d said her mother would’ve let her friends stay over. She found it difficult to see why having just me made any difference. Was I going to rape all seven of them? she asked.

  The mall wasn’t the setting for a conversation of any importance: Rachel was right about that. It was a place full of strangers and empty chatter. A place of false conviviality, hard surfaces and futile bustle. ‘I don’t want to go home yet,’ Rachel said. ‘Let’s go up to the lookout and shout out. Your voice carries so far in winter. When you’ve finished a shout you can still hear i
t going away, yet it’s not an echo.’

  ‘You know how cold it’ll be up there, though.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘Windy too.’

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Please.’

  So we walked to the car and drove around the bays towards the airport. Rachel in the front seat beside me, was a reminder of our loss, of Viv in that seat and Rachel behind, and the three-way conversation over years, with Viv’s face tilted often so that she could see her daughter. When three’s a family it’s never a crowd.

  ‘I’m worried about the school thing,’ I said. ‘I don’t want you unhappy there the way Mrs Bridges says.’

  ‘I’ll be okay, you’ll see. It’s just I’ve been quieter and people aren’t used to that. I’m okay, really.’

  ‘Do you dream about your mother?’ I asked, without knowing quite why I said it.

  ‘Yes, sometimes. They’re almost always about rows we had.’

  ‘You didn’t argue much though.’

  ‘No, but that’s mostly what the dreams are about,’ said Rachel, ‘but I don’t really want to talk about it. Most dreams are stupid.’

  ‘Funny, but I don’t dream about her. Lots of memories, though, lots of stuff that’s very clear. Lots of really happy stuff actually.’

  ‘Like what?’ asked Rachel, without pausing in the scrutiny of her nails.

  ‘Like coming down a sloping street and seeing her for the first time walking ahead under birch trees. Like the time the three of us went to Greytown and then had lunch at a winery with outside tables and a boules area. And you cried because a goose snatched cake from your hand.’

  ‘I was just a kid,’ said Rachel.

  So she was: just a kid, and Viv and I just her mum and dad and all three of us just a family out for the day. What could be more ordinary then, and more memorable, more painfully special, now. Viv reading from the wine label for me, the debris of the meal on the wooden table, the movement of other people about us who were excluded from our complacent existence as a family. Just the high tumble of a cloud in the blue overhead, the paddocks with grass not grapes, the touch of open air on our faces. Just Viv and me and Rachel, and the white goose breaking in on our togetherness to steal food and make one of us cry. It could be one of those dreams I don’t have, instead it’s a scene that floats always behind the present view — with that of Viv falling on the street, ascending into the sky with Jay, catching her hand on the rough timber of the Rawene mangrove boardwalk, smiling from the maternity bed as I go out into an Egyptian summer night of whirling beetles, and all the other tableaux from a time when happiness was to be expected from life.

  I parked in the rough, off-road loop, and we walked up the winding track through gorse and broom. We stopped talking because we had to walk single file and the wind buffeted words away. Up there, at the crest, is the memorial to the First World War and Gallipoli. I watched Rachel walking up the slope ahead of me, her body so slender that she was able to wrap her coat one and a half times around it, and her thin, denim-clad legs like scissor blades. I felt my face tighten in the cold rush of air, and saw the white scud of wave tops in the strait. A strong wind breaks the complacent unity of a view; makes the elements of it contestable; levers uncomfortably at junctions and unfastened ends.

  Rachel climbed onto a ledge of the monument, faced into the wind. The force of it seemed an exhilaration. She spread her arms to feel the lift, as a gull does. ‘We’re above just about everything, aren’t we,’ she said, without looking back at me. She took my hand to climb down, and we put the wind to our backs and went down to the car. ‘Jesus, it’s got so cold, hasn’t it,’ she said.

  ‘Freezing.’

  ‘Let’s not talk about any school crap today,’ she said. ‘I’ll deal with that, okay?’

  ‘Are you sure? You’ll say if you need help?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We’ll talk tomorrow then,’ I said. ‘It’s important we talk more. You can see that.’

  ‘Maybe talk about a holiday.’ She was shrewd to see some personal advantage amid all this concern.

  ‘Maybe.’

  So, no resolution, no epiphany that would ensure understanding between us, just father and daughter getting through the winter as best we can, and lucky enough to have each other. Meetings and partings, dreams and memories, love and loss: hold on tight, that’s all you can do in life. Viv would have understood that.

  HEAD BUTTING

  My job at Foleys market. Vegetables mostly. The trucks come up the side alley and unload. Wally and me take the bloody heavy wooden trays in through the metal sliding door. Sometimes its Shaun. They lock it nights with a fucken lock big as a handbag. You wouldnt believe veges would be so heavy. Drumhead cabbages and leeks. Pumpkins of course, but they look heavy bastards. The buck tooth driver gives me stick. ‘Hey, cretin, dont you drop nothing.’ Some day Ill have a licence of my own. Keep the truck cleaner too. I could head butt him I reckon. ‘Jesus,’ he says to Wally. ‘Thick as pig shit.’

  ‘Aw, leave him alone,’ says Wally.

  So after that we take the stuff into the vegetable shed with a plastic screen thing to the shop. Wally does the vegetable aisles and tells me what needs topping up. ‘No, not topping up,’ Wally says, ‘Remember the new stuff goes underneath, or behind old stuff. Kinda like underpants,’ he says. ‘You dont want old stuff left there forever.’

  They mark our clothes at the Home. Everything has TV on it. Toby Vinney. Not that funny I reckon. Things not marked get pinched. Saa wears some of my stretchy things anyway. Hes too big for my coats and trousers. He has the other bed in my room. A big bastard, but okay mostly. Even his dick is brown. Eva asked me when he first came. She wouldve found out when they started rooting anyway. They go out and do it in the van, in the shed. I dont say. I dont mind him. In the first week he took me on at head butting. ‘Jesus, Toby, youre a fearless prick though, eh,’ he says. ‘Youll kill yourself, or someone, you mad fucker.’ Ive always been best at head butting. No one takes me on twice. Saa could beat the shit out of me with his fists if it came to it, but he wont take me on at butting. We dont mind each other. Hes okay. He doesnt hurt Eva the way some do.

  They keep the temperature down in the vegetable shed. At closing time I bring green leaf stuff back from the aisles and cage it in big tubs of ice water. That way it looks just as good next day. You can eat stuff when they cant sell it. You go off most of it after a bit though. Mrs Graingers dead keen of course. ‘You ask, Toby,’ she says. ‘The more you bring home the better. They throw away bucket loads I bet.’ They dont. Theres a pig man comes once a week. Its a crap truck, but theres this hoist on the back for the drums. He lets me work it if hes not hurrying.

  ‘A couple of years and youll have the hang of it, Toby boy,’ he says.

  Anyway, Mr Simmonds says to take a good deal back on Fridays. ‘Its a contribution to that Home of yours,’ he says. ‘I dont care what you say, but those churches do a good job for people like you. Take those soft, spotted pears and the outer lettuce leaves pile,’ he says. I do.

  ‘It all helps, Toby, see,’ says Mrs Grainger.

  The Homes okay when Mrs Grainger or William Kaaras there. But Coombes is a bastard. When he has a night stint he gets into the two Mongol girls who take chocolate for it. I can hear it in the next room. Saa just laughs. ‘You just keep your bloody mouth shut, Toby,’ Coombes says, ‘or maybe Ill shut it for you.’ I could maybe head butt the bastard, but hes a nasty bastard, eh. I dont want to be sent back to any foster. ‘You keep your stuttering to yourself, cretin,’ he says. I should head butt the bastard.

  William Kaara got me the vegetable job at Foleys. He took me down in the van to see Mr Simmonds. ‘I know he cant work out front,’ he says, ‘looking like that and everything, but he sticks at things. He likes routine and the only stuff hell try and nick are ciggies.’ Mr Simmonds hes a bald and skinny bastard. I could head butt him I reckon no sweat. He turned out okay though.

  ‘You look after
him,’ he says to Wally on the first day. ‘Well give the poor bugger a go, but make sure he works. Were not a charity organisation.’

  ‘Well its not rocket bloody science is it,’ says Wally.

  Wallys not a bad bastard. Shauns more of a selfish bastard. Hes always talking about rooting the checkout girls. Stands at the plastic screen to the aisles and watches them with his hand in his pocket. ‘Could do some butting there, eh Toby,’ he says. Hes a lazy bastard. Likes to get out of the vegetable shed and into the aisles pretending to stock stuff up. ‘So cold in here even the carrots can’t keep a fucken hard on,’ he says. He knows I could head butt him.

  I started serious head butting in my first foster in Wanganui. One bastard son and three of us fostered. The son gave us hell. Chimp he called me. Hed walk past with his legs bowed out and knuckles in armpits. He used to kick the shit out of us when his father wasnt kicking the shit out of us. I cant remember the names or faces of the other two foster kids. They were usually hiding. I says to the bastard one night, ‘How about a bull fight. You know, on hands and knees and then bloody charge.’ I broke the bastards nose. His father kicked the shit out of me, eh. I got taken away to other fosters. Youve got to have something youre fucken good at though. I found it with that bastard. I go in hard, over and over. I dont care if I die doing it. No bastard takes me on in head butting now much. Not if they know me. Im pretty much left alone in the Home now. At night sometimes I kneel up and rock so that my head just touches the wall. I can keep it up for hours. I like it. Fuck knows why. ‘Youre a sad little prick,’ says Saa. Hes okay.

  The new guy in the butchery at Foleys didnt know me. He came through the supermarket to see me. Pulled the plastic strip curtain back at the entrance to the vegetable shed. ‘This the cretin then?’ he says.

  ‘Go back where you belong,’ says Wally, but the big bastard laughed.

  ‘I hear the fucker cant even read,’ he says. I can too. Paul hes called. He kept giving me a hard time. All the time calling me cretin and that I never had a root in my life. I never have.