‘Well, the Depression, as you say.’
‘He was still the same twenty-five years later – all his life in fact. I made up my mind I wasn’t going to live like that.’
‘And you haven’t,’ said Sheff. ‘You gave us every opportunity. The difference, though, was that you had a professional career in good times. Anyway, I don’t think Grandad was that bad.’
‘You hear about retail therapy now, well, he would get a real buzz from not spending. Nothing gave him greater satisfaction than deferring expenditure, or avoiding it. He was a strange man, but a good father in most ways. Gave up drinking to make sure the bills would be paid.’
‘Yeah, well I need to generate some income myself. I said I’d do some pieces for the paper and I’ve done bugger-all.’
‘What sort of stuff are you looking for?’ asked Warwick.
‘Nothing serious. Chris – he’s the editor – is happy for light one-offs about quirky folk doing quirky things. Articles for complacent weekend readers before they get out the lawn mower, or clean the car.’
‘Well what about modern-day gold-diggers?’
‘What gold-diggers?’
‘The Henare brothers just down the road. They still go out panning and cradling. They know I’m interested in stone polishing and sometimes give me special pieces they’ve come across for the tumbler. They’ve got a good eye. They run possum trap lines as well. There’s a good market for the fur now, and the beggars seem to be everywhere these days.’
‘Sounds just the thing,’ said Sheff. ‘Gold and fur – bound to be a story there.’
While they were talking, Georgie put her head through the doorway and raised her eyebrows in enquiry, unseen by Warwick, then went away reassured.
Sheff had a sense that his father was aware their talks were part of a drawn-out and undeclared farewell, but neither of them wished to acknowledge this. Warwick’s responses became slower, he cradled the morphine syringe driver in its carry bag as a child does a comfort toy, and finally fell asleep, his eyes only partly closed, as his son talked of the difficulties faced by newspapers in competition with the internet and junk mail. There was a catch in Warwick’s breath occasionally, as if he were suddenly immersed in cold water, or pressure were applied to a sore spot. How vulnerable he looked, how physically sunken and reduced, with the cartilage of his nose pressed white against the skin, and a caterpillar disarray of tufted eyebrows. He was shrinking day by day, as if as his substance reduced the carapace contracted. Death by rack and reduction, until there might be little to deliver to the grave.
‘Okay, Dad?’ Sheff said, as a check his father wouldn’t notice if he left. Warwick’s left arm lay awkwardly, and Sheff moved it onto the blanket over his father’s chest, noticing that between the skin and bone on the back of the hand were just the dark, raised and twisted veins, and no flesh at all. A growl of thunder startled him, but Warwick was oblivious. Everyone comes to an end, Sheff told himself: rationality to hold himself in. Thirty years or so, if averages held, and it would be his turn. But he had no son and no daughter to usher him out, and that struck him with an unexpected force of disappointment. He was glad Warwick had told him about the clock falling – that first memory of the shattering noise, then the quivering sound of the spring, the shirtsleeve half turned on an arm long at rest that had belonged to Sheff’s grandfather, the miser. He could remember little of his father’s parents apart from the coloured jubes his grandmother would bring on rare visits, and how his grandfather would stand him in the doorway and mark above his head in pencil. ‘You’ll get height from the Claussens,’ he’d said, resting his hand like a cap on Sheff’s fair hair. ‘Norwegian big feet and hands, too.’
In the dining room, Georgie and his mother sat together, watching the piled, dark thunder clouds slowly topple, but the lightning had passed. It was uncommon weather for Central. They turned towards Sheff when he came to join them. ‘He’s asleep,’ he told them.
‘Bombed out on the pump,’ said Belize.
‘Not hurting, anyway,’ said Sheff. ‘That’s all that matters.’
‘What were the two of you on about all that time?’ said his mother.
‘Stuff about Grandad mainly. He seemed to enjoy casting back.’
Nothing more was said. Warwick’s restfulness, whether induced or not, had spread to them, and they were all still, if not relaxed. Waiting had become their main occupation. Waiting, yet avoiding talk of the reason for it. The clouds, heat, the juxtaposition of the three of them sitting again in the familiar place.
‘Ah, well,’ murmured Belize.
‘What’s that?’ asked Georgie.
‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’ Although on such a large scale, the clouds seemed to be circling just this one home, and the effect was mildly hypnotic so that Sheff, Georgie and their mother lolled a little in the heat and conversation became elliptical.
‘Did I tell you Simon Pask phoned?’ said Belize after a while. He was Warwick’s partner in the accountancy firm. ‘And did you know Mr Risman died?’ continued Belize.
‘Risman from school?’ asked Georgie.
‘Yes,’ said their mother. ‘After his wife went, he shifted to Tekapo and spent most of his time fishing. They found the dinghy drifting one hot, calm day, but there wasn’t a body.’
‘He was so short,’ said Georgie. ‘Smaller than most of us.’
Risman had taught science, and would leave the classroom at least once each period and stand in the corner of the verandah and have a fag, holding it in the cup of his hand so that it wasn’t easily seen. Very occasionally in the summer he came to school in walk shorts and long socks, so that just his knees were exposed, wrinkled and with a tinge of yellow like a parsnip. He wrote on Sheff’s sixth form report that he must try harder, and Warwick had admonished Sheff, who said complacently that he could pass most subjects without swotting. ‘So can the majority in the world,’ Warwick had said mildly. ‘More important to think about what you could manage if you did some work. However, if you want to take pride in being lazy, that’ll have its natural consequences. Your sister seems to have got past that already.’ He’d said little more about Sheff’s report, and gone on to give Georgie brief, considered and justified praise for her own.
At the time Sheff had assumed adolescent indifference, but he worked harder the next year. The scene was plain in his mind: the white tablecloth still spread although clear of dishes, the thin report books with firm, red covers, and a close heat within the room just as it was in the present, though without thunder clouds. Warwick, Belize and Georgie had all been there, but would surely have forgotten long ago. Maybe the report books had been burnt, maybe they lay stained and worn in the top cupboard, in a cardboard box, crammed together with his swimming and life-saving certificates, Georgie’s music and Duke of Edinburgh awards.
So Dinky Risman was drowned, and the summer heat persisted. The thunder seemed over, and with little rain. Sheff was disappointed, for noise and movement might offer some release.
SOME BABIES HATE WATER, Lucy had told him, but he couldn’t remember their daughter ever crying in the bath. The water intrigued her. She tried to drink it. She was excited at the sight of it. When she sat in the bath with his hand, or Lucy’s, at her back, she would beat the surface with her arms, close her eyes against the splash, and squeal with the pleasure of breaking the world into so many pieces.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ON A STILL, BLUE SATURDAY Sheff and Georgie went to Wanaka with Jessica and Emma. Jessica took her car because she was dropping off a cat that had been treated at her clinic and kept overnight. It was a smallish tabby that languished in a carry-cage on the back seat between Emma and Sheff. ‘Mum said to keep your hands on top so the cage doesn’t rock too much,’ Emma instructed him.
‘Quite right,’ and he did as he was told. ‘We don’t want him being carsick, do we?’ he said.
‘It’s a girl cat.’
‘Oh, okay.’
‘She’s going home again
after being in hospital,’ Emma said firmly.
That home was on a side road close to Clyde: a large, wooden house with wrought-iron scrollwork beneath the verandah roof, and knee-high gleaming blue and red ceramic plant pots flanking the steps. Sheff showed willing by getting out and carrying the cage to the front door, where he and Jessica were met by a slim woman already dressed to go out. When complimented on her appearance by Jessica, she said she was about to leave for an exhibition opening at the new gallery. She was eager to comfort her pet, and while Sheff held back the spring door of the cage she lifted the tabby out. Although it had seemed comatose while in the car, the cat responded to the woman’s grip by sinking its claws into Sheff’s hand as it passed. ‘The poor thing’s completely traumatised,’ its elegant owner said. She cradled it while Sheff wound his handkerchief around his hand.
‘Are you okay?’ Jessica asked him.
‘It’s fine. Just scratches,’ he said.
‘Do you want to come inside and put something on it?’ the owner said unenthusiastically. ‘I’m off in just a moment myself.’
‘No, it’s nothing,’ said Sheff.
‘Anyway, I’d keep her in the house for a day or two,’ said Jessica. ‘She should be fine now, but let me know if she doesn’t perk up.’
‘I couldn’t bear anything else to happen to her,’ the woman said. ‘She never seems to keep well. Just one thing after another.’ She had the door closed before Jessica and Sheff had reached the bottom of the steps. She was uncharacteristic of the local women, but he made no uncharitable comment to the others.
‘Sorry about that,’ said Jessica when they returned to the car. Emma was briefly interested to see the bright blood on the handkerchief.
‘You made the girl cat angry,’ she said.
‘It always seems to be something with you, Sheff,’ Georgie said.
‘A paradoxical omen. It means the rest of the day is bound to be completely wonderful.’ He was resolved that it would be so, and leant towards Emma to share her book that told of the ballet aspirations of a mouse. He couldn’t help but speculate, however, on the range of bacteria that might exist on the claws of a sick cat, and repressed the wish to ask Jessica about possible infection.
The trip seemed much shorter than he remembered – through the gorge, past the garish giant fruit sculpture at Cromwell and on through the yellow country to Lake Wanaka, with bare hills on the horizon like a jaw of worn teeth. Past the township and then the short drive to Glendhu Bay with pigfern frothing at the road side just as he remembered it. Hundreds of people were already there: in the water, on the narrow, sloped beach of grey grit dappled with quartz, or farther back among the willows, the tower pines, the caravans and house trucks on the grass. Sheff was surprised at the number, but it cheered him to be among so many people whose only concern seemed to be enjoyment.
Brother and sister had brought no swimming togs south with them, but they wore shorts and stood in the lapping ripple while Jessica took Emma into deeper water, towed her by her arms, encouraged her to shout and splash. The water was wonderfully clear, and the quartz pebbles lay like shells on the lakebed. How bracing the water, even though it was ripening the scratches on Sheff’s hand. Afterwards they walked the lake line for a time, watching others, meddling with the minimum debris: contorted driftwood, cast lake weed and leaves in curved lines, the odd opaque plastic bottle and one green jandal. Emma found a stick, bone-white from exposure, and trailed it as a tail in the stones. A little apart from the others, Sheff noticed that Georgie, even without shoes, still had the typical rise and fall in her walk, while Jessica’s gait was an easy and even stroll. Her stomach bulged slightly in the one-piece costume, her breasts above tautened the fabric, her thighs were smooth and solid, her expression open and slightly quizzical. A good-looking woman.
They went past the boat-launch site with its warnings of didymo and lagarosiphon, on to quieter reaches. Just beyond the high-water mark they found a measure of shade by a willow, and Sheff spread a rug and the three adults settled there. Emma played in the shingle while covertly watching other children nearby, appraising their possible willingness to let her join their game. Sheff had a floppy hat of Warwick’s, and he lay with it over his face. It had the faint smell of his father, and also the ineffable fragrance of hot sun on fabric that was part of his memory of childhood. With eyes open he could see just a suffused blood glow from the sun, with eyes closed the noises surrounding him seemed to be accentuated – the cheerful voices, the occasional, distanced vehicle, or boat, and behind it all the regular, subdued susurration of the far-stretching lake.
The surroundings brought to mind one of his most powerful memories of his father. They had been at the same beach as a family when Sheff and Georgie were still young and each summer day an epoch. They had sat on a tartan rug by willows, and briars with bright cherry rose-hips. Belize complained of sand blowing into the picnic things, and they were preparing to go home because of the rising wind. Most people had already given up for the day. Sheff, Georgie and Warwick had been swimming. The children were still in their togs, but their father was dressed again and starting to tidy up when the noise on the beach began to change, becoming focused and chorus-like as people crowded together to watch two youngsters struggling well out in the lake after the capsize of their kayak. Two dark heads bobbing when the chop allowed a view, cries, arms briefly flailing to catch attention. People had left the water, but several adults, including a large woman in a yellow sundress, rushed back fully clothed and laboured out, trying to get through the waves.
Sheff remembered how his father took time to kick off his shoes, drop his long trousers, before following. Warwick was a good swimmer, and soon he passed all the other would-be rescuers but one, and reached the two boys. He and the other strong swimmer didn’t attempt to drag the boys back through the waves, but remained there, supporting and calming them until a motor boat arrived and the emergency was over.
There was no medal, nothing in the paper, in Sheff’s recollection not even a visit made in gratitude from the boys’ parents, though surely that occurred; but there was the example of his father’s composure and ability to cope, and the oddity of Warwick coming back from the boat wearing just his wet shirt and underpants. They’d taken up the tartan rug and picnic things, and gone back to the car in the same way they always did after such outings, except that his father had no underwear beneath his dry trousers, and no shirt beneath his light, blue jersey. ‘All the kids needed to do was stay calm and stay afloat,’ Warwick had told Belize, and he didn’t talk about it any more. Warwick had acted well, and Sheff was proud of him, but it was all forgotten and lost, and no one on the same lake beach now knew, or cared, anything of it, and the briar seemed to have been eradicated.
‘Are you sleeping, lazy bones?’ asked Georgie. She pushed his foot with her own.
‘Trying to.’
‘Jessica was saying that a gold-mining consortium did a lot of testing around the Old Man Range a year or so ago, and the rumour was they found plenty, but were waiting until prices go even higher.’
‘That’s the rumour after every round of exploration wherever it is,’ said Sheff. ‘It’s a lot more exciting than accepting yet another failure.’ He’d covered several such land and seabed drills in various parts of the country. Mainly they were in search of oil and gas. They began with high expectations and much publicity, yet almost all finally petered out, leaving merely industrial conspiracy theories and pub stories of lost opportunity. But Sheff didn’t want to spend time talking about any of that. He pushed the hat back from his face, sat up, and asked Jessica if she was content to live her adult life in the same place she’d spent her childhood. He liked to hear her talking about herself, not just because she was articulate and forthright, but because it conjured up an existence different to his own, and was a distraction from his father’s illness. And when she was talking he could regard her quite openly, without his admiration being apparent.
‘You coul
d’ve had a fashionable practice in Christchurch, or Wellington,’ he told her. ‘Celebrity cats and parliamentary poodles. You’d get called into the zoo when the white tiger went down with appendicitis, or the orang-utangs had ankylosing spondylitis. Fame would attend you.’
‘He doesn’t even know what spondylitis is,’ said Georgie mockingly.
‘Do too. It gets you in the back.’
‘What a waffler,’ said Georgie.
‘I like ongoing programmes to do with larger-scale animal husbandry,’ said Jessica. ‘I’m involved with long-term research on merinos, especially footrot. The use of Tylosin and Linco-Spectin, for example.’
‘You’ve got him there,’ said Georgie.
‘Pass,’ said Sheff.
‘Anyway, there was more than my career to think about. Kevin was happy here and Emma’s had the same friends for years. I think it’s tough on kids to go from place to place and have to begin all over again. But journalists are born wanderers, so maybe you think differently.’
‘I’ve been around a bit, but Central’s pretty good country to come back to,’ said Sheff. Some children, shouting as they jumped the ripples, reminded him again of his father’s exploits. ‘Do you remember Dad helping to save those boys here?’ he asked his sister.
‘Of course,’ said Georgie. ‘He swam out and helped hold them up. They would’ve drowned otherwise, it was so rough, and he never talked about it. He never talked about things enough, did he?’
Jessica had heard nothing of Warwick’s mild heroism, and Sheff was happy to let his sister recount it. Georgie had been an independent observer, and her story brought back detail he’d forgotten, or perhaps not registered at all. Yes, the big woman in the yellow dress had caused a secondary emergency, her courage not matched by ability in the water, and having to be retrieved from the waves. And yes, that was true, one of the boys was struck on the head by the rescue boat and was bleeding when they came in. How old would Warwick have been then? Forty-three? Forty-four? Much as Sheff was now, and how able, contained and assured, ready to parry whatever life thrust at him.
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