Carnival Sky

by Owen Marshall

  So they met. Monday afternoon. Sheff took his father’s Commodore, noting with a touch of unjustified irritation that it was almost out of petrol. He put in eighty dollars’ worth on his way to Jessica’s place. She retained the family home, a low house of pink summerhill stone set back from the road and behind silver birch trees, with a concrete patio and ranch-slider doors. When she answered his knock she had a phone to her ear, and motioned Sheff inside, then into the living room. She was explaining to someone that a mutual friend had failed to pass on a message. To give her privacy Sheff wandered into the kitchen he could see through the open door.

  It was no tidier than his own, and had a faint smell of bread and Marmite. On the fridge door were pages of colourful, childish drawings, held by magnetised alphabet letters and a bright ladybird. There was also a small, blue certificate awarded to Emma Hutton of Room Five for showing consideration towards others. Sheff visualised his own fridge, the door entirely blank, and little inside except milk, cheese and beer.

  ‘Apologies,’ said Jessica, coming to join him. ‘It’s rude of me, but the phone went just before you knocked.’

  ‘I was looking at your daughter’s drawings,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, she’s seven. I pick her up from school at three, so we’ll have to be back before then. But the café isn’t far. We can walk if you like.’ Jessica hadn’t gone to a lot of trouble with her appearance. She wore jeans, a white shirt and black sneakers, and her dark hair was held back with a simple band. He admired her lithe movement and the belt neat above her hips. If she wore make-up it wasn’t obvious.

  ‘Does she look like you?

  ‘More like her father, most people say. Well you knew him, but then both of us are reasonably tall and dark-haired. She’s quite a bubbly kid, and I don’t think I was ever that.’

  ‘I imagine it’s been tough on you all?’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I mean that you’re divorced, yet there’s Emma as the link between you. You can’t just wave goodbye and go your own way. Lucy and I could please ourselves. We’re okay with each other, but there’s nothing binding us now.’

  ‘Oh, she sees plenty of her dad. We’re all cool about it. What is it they say? An amicable split?’ Yes, it was what they said, but surely in most cases the amicable came after the split and not before.

  Sheff remembered her ex-husband, but only as a boy. Kevin Hutton, who had double-jointed thumbs and a shrill whistle as his primary school accomplishments, and at high school was very good at maths and cricket, and had a temper you didn’t wish to arouse. ‘Anyway,’ continued Jessica, ‘let’s go and have this coffee, or it will be time to pick her up.’

  They walked down the quiet, warm streets to the old part of town, and sat at a wooden table outside the café. When Sheff was a child, mostly people went into such places to eat and drink behind windows and doors. The footpaths were to walk on. No one had ordered espresso or latte, or eaten gnocchi, or pesto. And even now that they did, it was sometimes with a provincial self-consciousness concerning such acquired continental ways.

  He saw the town around him with that half-recognition you have when meeting an old friend after many years. Most of the buildings conformed to memory, although shrunk from boyhood’s perception, and with occupancy often changed. The lighting shop now sold computers, the bookstore had become a video parlour, and where he had once sat in the ornate barber’s chair for short-back-and-sides were orchid blooms, bright ceramic pots, artificial greenery and scented lavender and thyme. The brass plate for Prescott, Prescott and Swann still shone; however, Southern Realty’s window continued to display house photographs, Kinnaird’s old stone building was still a dentist’s surgery, and the cramped bric-à-brac and stamp collector’s den, always seeming the most precarious of businesses, was still hanging on.

  The town was noticeably busier and more prosperous, which Jessica said was because of the success of viticulture and tourism. ‘That and people starting to get out of the cities to places like this. Funny, isn’t it? Wanaka’s just racing ahead. Even overseas folk. Once the idea was to retire to the city, but now there’s professional people who find it fashionable to do the opposite. There’s even a mini dairy boom based on irrigation, and that’s good for our business, I must say. Cockies use vets a lot more these days – it’s just part of normal farming practice. We hardly saw a cow as kids, did we?’

  Sheff enjoyed sitting with her. He was tired of being by himself, or with male companions. It was a relief also to be away from his family; freed briefly from the sad focus there. But it was more than that. He liked being close to her, even though he knew little about her adult life, and hadn’t much bothered with her when she was Georgie’s girlhood friend. As they talked he endeavoured to define for himself what it was that attracted him. It was all there physically. He would have quite happily taken her through the café to a storeroom at the back and made love standing against the shelves. But it was more than that, too. She was at ease, he decided. She was at ease with herself and the world, when so many around her were ill at ease in one way or another.

  ‘What do you deal with most?’ he asked, putting from his mind the storeroom, the tremulous tins on the shelf, the urgent muffled voices, the ultimate crescendo of pleasure.

  ‘As a vet? Stock mainly, as I said. There’s a lot of artificial insemination and progeny testing. Flock improvement’s all about science now. There’s always town people with pets, of course, but that’s not a significant part of what we do.’

  ‘Little old ladies with cats and dogs, though, surely.’

  ‘Birds are the worst. I dislike birds, especially budgies and canaries. They’re buggers to diagnose, and sicken and die so readily. And birds have a dry, unpleasant smell. Have you ever noticed that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s a result of skin parasites and being caged.’

  ‘Poor buggers.’

  ‘It’s natural, I suppose, your job influencing how you observe the world. You probably haven’t noticed, but working dogs run at a slight angle to their forward direction. Perhaps that way their legs don’t obstruct each other. You register little things like that.’

  Sheff was interested in people’s vocations, and not merely because his profession often required it. How you made a living affected how you saw the world, and how you saw the world affected the manner in which you made a living. In spending so much time with Georgie in recent days he had become aware of how her personality was shaped by her occupation. And now Jessica with a similar concern, except that malpractice, or negligence, surely had less serious repercussions. He imagined he would’ve been very different as a person had he chosen some other career: more committed to things apart from his own pleasure and comfort, and less critical of subterfuge in the manner information was presented to him. ‘I suppose the advantage is that animals can’t talk back,’ he said.

  ‘But they can be stubborn and bloody-minded. And sometimes quite heart-rending, too. Dogs and horses especially. They seem to have grown closer to us emotionally over thousands of years.’

  Their coffee came, and Jessica stopped talking while the girl was with them, and when she had gone began a different conversation. ‘How’s your father?’

  ‘Dying,’ said Sheff, and then because that was so abrupt and sounded uncaring, ‘Nothing much else can be done for him. There are secondary cancers everywhere, and any more treatment would only prolong his suffering.’

  ‘I didn’t realise he was so bad. He seemed quite cheerful when I came with Georgie.’

  ‘He makes a hell of an effort for our benefit and anybody who comes, but it’s a sad and brutal struggle.’

  ‘When I used to come over as a kid, I thought your parents were so cool,’ said Jessica quietly. ‘Belize had label clothes and your dad would come back from work in his suit. They would sit outside and have a glass of wine before dinner. Sometimes your father would go through his private mail there, and I was amazed at how many letters he got – a pile of
them at his elbow. We never got much mail at home, and my dad wore a suit only to weddings and funerals. Belize used to give us shortbread and little cartons of juice. Your father had some joke-shop buck teeth. He wore them at one of Georgie’s birthday parties. You must remember that?’

  He did. His father slipping away and then coming back into the room with his golfing cap pulled down low and the preposterous teeth with swelling, pink gums, and leading the singing of ‘Happy Birthday’. He recalled it so well perhaps because it wasn’t typical of Warwick, and had been done as a special effort to ensure Georgie’s party was a success. Amusing at the time, but in recollection sad, because it brought to mind Warwick now, his own teeth become a joke quite without humour.

  Jessica’s talk of their youth returned it to him more clearly. He was in the place of that experience, and the more he revisited it, the more he felt the ache of what they had to go through in the present. The careless family life of boyhood served as backdrop only to emphasise the lurching shadows now about him. ‘Last night he told me that sometimes when he’s lying there for hours, he feels he’s levitating, rising inexorably towards the ceiling. The cocktail of drugs, I suppose,’ he said.

  ‘The best thing is that he has you and Georgie with him now,’ said Jessica. ‘Anyway, look, I’d better start back in time to pick up Emma.’

  So they walked back to the roundabout, and then towards the primary school. And they left the topic of his father behind, and talked of people they’d both known as children. Bunny Yates, Albie Waltenberg, Paul Cary, Reinier Heigler and Christine Smith were all Sheff’s year. ‘Bunny’s done well in the army,’ Jessica said. ‘He was on television talking about a peacekeeping force he led to the Solomons, or maybe it was Papua New Guinea. Paul’s still here. I see something of him because he’s taken over both his family farm and his uncle’s. He’s in a pretty big way. Albie’s back after working for aid agencies overseas for years.’

  ‘Paul was the athlete of the school, and he pissed the rest of us off because he never trained, but always won.’

  ‘He still looks trim enough, although he’s completely bald. He’d like to catch up, I imagine. You kicked around together a lot, didn’t you?’

  ‘I might give him a call,’ said Sheff, but felt no great inclination to do so.

  Instead his attention was taken by the magazine billboards propped outside a dairy. Airbrushed faces of female celebrities and breathless headlines of tragedy, pregnancy, alimony, stalkers, sexual eccentricity and feuds. All suggesting significance and revelation that the stories themselves failed to deliver: the brush with death being revealed as the demise of a second cousin, the secret obsession as a fondness for caramel creams. Although Sheff knew that such journalism, like the poor, will always be with us, his professionalism was affronted as ever. ‘Who reads this crap?’ he said.

  ‘I do, sometimes,’ replied Jessica. ‘Everybody does, I guess. It’s the fast food of journalism – only harmful if it becomes your total diet.’

  ‘I never read it except in waiting rooms when there’s nothing else. The bad punning titles, the iconic this and incredible that, the platitudes. “A nation mourns!” “A community is stunned!” Jesus. I’d shoot any journalist who wrote that. In every conceivable circumstance, including Armageddon, thirty per cent of the people couldn’t give a fuck.’

  ‘But you’re an elitist snob, aren’t you?’ she said cheerfully. ‘And you should lighten up. Why should you tell people what to read?’

  Any honest answer to that would only substantiate her charges, and all he wished was to enjoy the time with her. ‘You’re absolutely right,’ he said, ‘and it sells, so what other virtue does it need?’

  But Jessica merely smiled at his sarcasm, and began again to talk of people they’d grown up with. The bell hadn’t gone when they reached the school, and they sat on wooden slatted seats that ran along the side of the classrooms. He remembered the feel of them on his backside from thirty-five years before, although the school was changed in many ways. Surely in his time there the playing areas had been clear expanses of lawn, or asphalt, on which they had created their own challenges and games, and now there was a variety of apparatus – wooden forts on piles, slides, rotating drums, metal corkscrew ascents, monkey bars, a climbing tree with plastic ropes in bright colours. Other parents waited also, mostly women, and more competed for parking places at the peak hour. ‘What happens to Emma when you’re working?’ he asked.

  ‘Sometimes my mother comes, but mostly I pay a woman to look after her at her place until I get back. She’s a good sort. Emma likes her and she’s got a girl in the same class. It works out well usually.’

  Sheff had forgotten the pandemonium at the end of a school day. An eruption of kids from classrooms everywhere, running, skipping, shouting, dawdling, propelling skateboards and small wheeled scooters, disappearing in coteries, ambling off alone, or greeting their parents with offhand familiarity. All seemed to have backpacks, the smallest children almost overwhelmed by them, but scuttling along nevertheless. The voices were shrill and echoed among the buildings and over the grassed field and play areas.

  Emma was taller than Sheff had expected, and large-featured. Her arms and legs were long, thin and loosely jointed, and she moved like a freshly fashioned and attractive marionette. After a prolonged farewell to her best friend, she greeted her mother and said hello to Sheff when prompted. She took Jessica’s hand as they walked, and talked of her class’s responsibility for the coming school fair. There was little chance for Sheff and Jessica to say anything more to each other, but he took pleasure in seeing how close mother and daughter were, how entirely meshed in each other’s lives. When they reached the house, Jessica as a courtesy asked if he wanted to come in, but it was time to go.

  As he drove to his parents’ house, Sheff calculated that had Charlotte lived she would be three years and nine months old. Too young for school, but perhaps already at kindergarten. He and Lucy had very much wanted a baby, and when finally Charlotte was born they lit a red candle to celebrate her first day home, and saluted her with glasses of bubbly. Her hair had been fair and fine, sometimes damp on her forehead as she slept in the cot. Her fingernails were as if made of glass, and she could spread her toes almost as well as she could her fingers. Sheff didn’t allow himself to imagine the life he and Lucy and Charlotte might have had, but stayed sitting in the car for a little while after arriving home, and then went in to the only family he had.

  HE HAD GRIEVANCES, OF COURSE, concerning his parents, even if recognised in retrospect as unjustified. We never quite forgive our mother and father for treating us like the children we were.

  In the year Sheff started secondary school a small circus came to town. No elephants or high-wire acrobats, just trick cyclists, conjurors and clowns. The tent was more a marquee than a big-top. Sheff and two friends bunked school to watch the circus setting up in the park. Not an arresting sight, or offence, but they were found out and hauled before the headmaster. Paul and Bunny had lengthy letters from their fathers giving excuses and taking responsibility. Warwick’s short note said he’d given no permission, and that he and Sheff would accept what punishment the school considered appropriate. Sheff had forgotten what that was, but not forgiven his father’s objectivity.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  HIS FATHER NEEDED be taken to Dunedin hospital for a check by the specialist there. Sheff drove, with Georgie beside him, and Belize sat in the back with Warwick. Despite the reason for the trip they attempted to treat it as an excursion, the road providing novelty for commentary, and also the familiar for reminiscence. Recent memory also. As they passed through Roxburgh, Sheff saw the tea rooms in which he and Georgie had sat, and the parking area where he’d bumped the car that bore a baby, but his sister said nothing of that. How much change there had been since in their relationship; Sheff found it difficult to account for his earlier exasperation.

  Dunedin had been the big smoke when Sheff and Georgie were children. Warwick
had taken them to the movies, or the beach playground, while Belize shopped, and then they would rendezvous, and after she’d stowed her parcels in the boot, describing each as an essential purchase, they would go to one of those family restaurants, perhaps the railway carriage, that offered beer-battered fish and chips, carpet-bagger steak, pork medallions with apple sauce and kumara mash – perhaps one pasta dish as a nod to continental cuisine.

  And on those trips they had often passed the hospital without a thought that one day it would be the single reason for Warwick’s journey. Now no entertainment, shopping or eating out: just the necessity to front for another grim examination and then drive home again without reprieve. Warwick was a private patient, but the specialist and Georgie wanted to take advantage of the hospital’s new, high-tech scanner.

  He was taken almost immediately. His wife and daughter accompanied him, but Sheff thought that was family enough. He briefly gripped his father’s shoulder before he was led away by the women he loved, one each side and ready to support him.

  The out-patients’ waiting room was merely the enlarged side of a wide corridor, and patients, visitors and staff went by in procession, their rank, affiliation and hold on life shown by dress and demeanour. Two back-to-back rows of upright chairs with red vinyl seats, low tables with outdated magazines, and posters on the walls giving the symptoms of more afflictions than people wished to consider at one time. Pamphlets, also, allowing patients to put by their present ills and be informed of those awaiting them, malignant moles, tumour-induced amnesia, tinnitus, cervical cancer, varicose veins, cataracts, bunions and Parkinson’s disease. Sheff was both attracted by such material and apprehensive of it, for following such reading he recognised most of the symptoms not specific to women as present in his own condition.

  Almost all those seated were old, at least by Sheff’s reckoning, though one young guy in shorts and a slipper on his left foot sat with such physical complacency that he may as well have had a placard around his neck that read, Sports injury: I will live forever.