Carnival Sky

by Owen Marshall

  ‘Ah well, you’ve got it here now.’ Sheff turned to go.

  ‘Would you like a beer?’ And as if he’d pushed a button, the light came on in the small porch of the house and the door opened. A younger man in jeans and a candy-striped shirt came onto the step. The hair on his crown was fluffed up, as if he’d just risen from drowsing on a sofa.

  ‘Is that you, Dad?’ he called.

  ‘The bloody pipe fell on me, but we’ve got it here now,’ said Gavin. ‘Bring us out a couple of cans, will you?’ Gavin was pretty limber for an old guy who had been hit by a pipe. He sat down easily on the concrete border of the drive, and Sheff did the same, his back pressing into the stalky lavender and so increasing the fragrance. He had nowhere better to be at midnight in his home town. Gavin worked his head tentatively, then smoothed his soft, salt-and-pepper moustache with gentle downwards strokes, although it was the back of his head that had been struck. ‘I won’t tell him the bike’s stuffed,’ he said. ‘He uses it to look for work.’

  ‘The handle bars might come right with just a good yank,’ Sheff said.

  ‘It’s cooler out here,’ said Gavin, as his son came from the house with two cans of beer, handed them over, nodded without a word to Sheff, as if it were customary for his father to be hosting a friend so late at night and on the concrete kerb of the drive.

  Gavin waited until his son had gone back inside, before taking a first mouthful. ‘You know bipolar?’ he said.

  ‘I know of it.’

  ‘He’s bipolar,’ Gavin said. ‘He’s down at the moment and so hasn’t much to say. It’s a very different story when he’s up. Anyway, here’s cheers.’

  ‘Cheers.’ The beer was cold, and Sheff felt the first mouthful all the way down. The lavender was so pervasive that its aroma replaced the flavour of the drink in a slightly disconcerting way. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘So you’re from round here? I’ve never spotted you before.’ After taking a mouthful, Gavin smoothed down his moustache again. Even in the dim light its archaic nature was plain, covering not just the upper lip, but drooping low so that nothing of his mouth was visible until he spoke.

  ‘I come from here originally, but I’m just back visiting my parents. My father, Warwick Davy, is an accountant here.’ Local people usually responded when Sheff mentioned his father’s name, but not the old guy.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ was all he said, and then, as if they had been discussing his son’s condition for some time: ‘Yeah, this bipolar thing is a real big dipper. He couldn’t live by himself and get by. It would be either prison, or the bin. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry – well, you do really, but it doesn’t help.’

  ‘Didn’t they used to call it manic depression?’ Sheff said. His own mood was rather elevated. He had a lavender beer, a companion whose troubles were no concern to him. No pipe had fallen on his head. It was pleasant to be relaxed in the night and talking idly of a new affliction.

  ‘I think it killed his mother. She couldn’t take the ceaseless worry of it. You never know what’s next, and he’s a bugger for going off his pills and not letting on. He’ll save the world one minute, and the next be bawling because he can’t butter his bloody toast.’

  ‘It’s a day by day thing, I suppose. Never goes away,’ said Sheff. ‘But he’s lucky to have you for support.’

  ‘Mostly you wouldn’t know it.’

  ‘I guess he’d soon notice if you weren’t around.’

  ‘That’s about the size of it.’ Gavin lifted his head to the mysterious sky and gave a long sigh that ruffled his moustache and seemed as much from satisfaction with the beer as despair at the family predicament. For a moment Sheff thought he might contribute sorrows of his own, but decided rather to be a listener.

  So the two of them sat a little longer embraced by darkened lavender on the rim of Gavin’s drive, and with stoical nonchalance the old man told of his family circumstances. Then almost abruptly Gavin stood, plucked the empty can from Sheff’s hand, and said he’d better go inside. ‘You never know what’s going on with him,’ he said.

  ‘Well anyway, it’s a credit to you, and thanks for the beer,’ said Sheff glibly as they moved apart.

  ‘What you don’t face you can’t recognise,’ Gavin said. ‘It’s like your own arse: you carry it all your life, but couldn’t pick it out in a crowd.’ Sheff could think of no adequate reply to such profound wisdom.

  On his way home he travelled some of the streets he’d walked as a boy, to and from school and roaming with friends. The air was still welcoming though cooling slightly, but something in the reduced light made him think of winter in Central, rather than summer. Surely there was nowhere in New Zealand that had such a swing of seasons, from the fierce blaze of high summer to the minus six degree frost common in the equally dry winter. The frozen grass of the July playing fields would crush like cornflakes beneath their shoes in the morning, and they knew never to touch iron railings with bare hands. A garden hose left lying on the lawn would snap like a candy stick with just a kick. Their noses ran in winter more from the cold than colds, and for the same reason they shed tears even as they laughed and played on ice and snow, tobogganing perhaps, or skating on the tarns. Sheff could recall the white frost on the full fleece of the sheep, the dark, glittering hoar frost draping the fruit trees, the mist sprites dancing on the surface of the broad river. Any pothole puddles would be frozen solid so that dagger shards could be stamped out of them, and the creek pools would hold the ribbon weeds as if in crystal, even small bubbles motionless in their ascent. And the fog days, cold, heavy and still, with the trees barely sketched and receding.

  No winters now were as those winters of childhood. Cold then came full circle, and burnt as fire did on the exposed skin.

  Night walking occasioned a mild voyeurism, glimpses of domestic life framed by windows and bathed in soft, yellow light, or flickering in the blue haze of television as he paused unseen. In a front flat an old woman in an apron, clipping the foliage of her pot plants with the solicitude usually reserved for attention to a child. A family laughing soundlessly at the screen, and their gaze directed there rather than at one another. The modern kitchen in which a husband was urgently voluble, and his wife immobile, holding a cup and staring into the darkness where Sheff stood. The blonde girl in the red bathrobe who had a foot on the coffee table to enable her to paint, or file, her nails. A bay window with three Persian cats posed close to the glass: so still that only the head swivel of the middle one at the last moment of Sheff’s passing proved they were flesh and blood. A squat man in short pyjama bottoms grazing from his fridge. The faint alien light from within isolated him there in the darkened room, accentuated the furled hair of his chest, the corporeal solidity of his bare shoulder, the sausage or somesuch he held like a thick pencil, the stoop of him as he looked for more even as he ate.

  Such vignettes were like Vermeer paintings, lit from within, at once symbolic yet contained, and strangely uncommunicative.

  Georgie was up when Sheff arrived home. She’d been checking on their father. Her toenails were a vivid tangerine against her pale feet, and her pyjamas were pale blue satin and heavily creased. ‘You’ve been away a long time,’ she said.

  ‘There was this old joker pedalling with a pipe and he crashed off. I stopped to give him a hand.’

  ‘A pipe?’

  ‘A long water pipe sort of thing,’ said Sheff. ‘He had it on his shoulder, but lost his balance and the pipe hit his head as he fell. He was okay, though.’

  ‘What the hell was he doing with a water pipe in the middle of the night?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ He hadn’t thought to ask.

  ‘A pipe?’

  ‘Yeah, he didn’t say why, but he was bringing it home when everything was quiet. And when I was walking back from that I kept thinking of winter here as a kid. We just took it for granted, didn’t we?’

  Georgie shook her head in impatient bewilderment. ‘I’m off,’ she said emphatically, and
went into her room. Sheff was disappointed. He wanted to talk to her about bipolar. Gavin’s son had once taken to a Welsh pony with a machete, claiming it was one of the four horses of the Apocalypse, and another time lifted the living room carpet and scattered rat poison and mustard there because Beelzebub was rising from Hell below. His affliction had driven his mother to her death. How was it that so much strangeness and fearful possibility existed in a humdrum world? What was to be found in quiet houses everywhere when the sun went down? How could a son and daughter face the responsibility imposed by their dying father?

  HE SAW HIS FATHER DRUNK ONLY ONCE, and had no wish to witness it again. Warwick had been to Queenstown at a two-day summer conference, and arrived home very late on the Sunday. A colleague dropped him off, but didn’t stay to give any explanation to Belize. She tried to get him inside, but he was full of unnatural hostility. ‘Don’t start. Don’t start, woman,’ he said cuttingly when she scolded him. ‘Just bugger off and leave me alone. I’m going to have a few swings.’

  He took off his jacket and dropped it carelessly on the grass. He disappeared into the garage and after a considerable time appeared again with a driver and some balls. Belize told Sheff and Georgie to stay inside, but they grouped at the door with her to watch their father flailing in the moonlight. He gave up trying to tee the balls and struck them where they lay. ‘Bugger,’ he said after each shot that went astray, and only once, ‘Yes, yes, you beauty.’

  Quite suddenly the urge left him, and he dropped the club, left his jacket lying, pushed wordlessly past the family at the door and went heavily to the bedroom. ‘You father’s not well,’ Belize said. ‘Go back to bed now. Everything’s okay.’

  Sheff and Georgie were still at primary school, but Warwick nevertheless made a formal apology at breakfast. He was groomed and in his suit for the office as on any other work day. ‘I’m sorry for last night,’ he said. ‘It was rude and silly, and I’m ashamed of myself. The whole weekend was just so damn boring.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  SHEFF WAS DREAMING of a balloon ride. One of those magnificent, multi-coloured balloons held in a net, with below it a wickerwork basket, as so often illustrated in books for children. He and several spotted Dalmatian dogs had their heads over the side and were gazing at the landscape passing far beneath – corn fields, clumps of trees, and long, sun-glittering canals. And with the typical illogicality of dreams he was concerned not at having spotted dogs as companions in a runaway balloon, but that no bubbly and club sandwiches had been provided despite earlier promises. There was also increasing anxiety as the balloon swept lower and headed ominously towards a line of huge red and yellow totem poles that hadn’t been evident before. Sheff searched above for the burner cord that would give a flaring burst, but there was no cord, no burner, and all seemed awry. The Dalmatians were united in criticism of him in a language that wasn’t canine, yet remained foreign and unhelpful. The basket began a violent rocking, and he woke to his mother shaking him by the shoulder.

  ‘He’s gone,’ she said, and behind her in the dimness loomed his satin-blue sister. Both turned back without saying any more, and he got out of the bed awkwardly, still with an ebbing fear of totem poles and linguistic exclusion. But he knew at once what had happened. In silence the three went back to Warwick’s sickroom and grouped at the bed. Both his arms were restful on the cover, and Sheff wondered if Belize had arranged them so, but his eyes were still half open and his mouth almost completely, as if he were acquiescing to yet another spoonful of some pap. With relief Sheff realised that there was nothing intrinsic there of his father: he was gone at last and had left just this yellowed husk lying in the bed, a thing evoking neither love, nor terror. On the bedside table lay his discarded hearing aids, like small dead creatures with antennae.

  Sheff put an arm around his mother’s shoulders. ‘Were you here?’ he asked.

  ‘Georgie was with him,’ she said.

  ‘What do we have to do?’ he said.

  ‘I’ll let Andrew know later, and I know he’ll come round first thing,’ said Georgie.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Nearly five,’ Georgie said. She also had an arm about her mother, and the three of them stood close. None of them wept. ‘And afterwards we need to call the undertaker. You could do that for us,’ she said to Sheff, ‘and later a notice for the paper.’

  ‘Sure.’ He accepted his sister’s professional right to take the lead at such a time.

  Belize wanted to tidy the room before Dr North came. Sheff and Georgie sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee, waited for morning to come. Bird calls began as if it were just another day. There was something Sheff needed to ask, and he did so after checking his mother was still in the sickroom. ‘Did you do anything, give him stuff as we talked about?’

  ‘Yes,’ Georgie said. Sheff waited for her to say more, but she just looked at him steadily. He would have to ask for anything else, and what was the point of doing that?

  ‘You did the right thing,’ he said. ‘I loved him, but I’m glad it’s over. I never realised that you could be so relieved to see someone go, and yet love them.’

  ‘Now we do,’ said Georgie. ‘The only way he lives now is in us. When we go that’s his final end, too. I’m glad I was the one with him. I was able to clean him before Mum came.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘All the muscles relax,’ said Georgie, and Sheff understood. At the end, as always, she had taken the difficult tasks, and he’d avoided them.

  They were quiet together for a time, then he asked, ‘You reckon Mum will be okay?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe I can get her to come back with me for a while, or Aunt Cass could come here to be with her for a bit. She’s happy to do that, she says. They’ve always been close.’

  ‘You’ve been great, Georgie. Really great. I mean it. It’s made it so much easier having you here. You were the one Dad wanted.’ Sheff needed to say it, admit to himself and also his sister, and he found the truth wasn’t hard to say after all. His father’s final reliance on Georgie wasn’t a sign he loved his wife and son any less.

  ‘It’s just being a doctor,’ she said. ‘He knew I wasn’t responsible for his treatment, but I think he understood that I could do something if it became utterly unbearable. He needed that reassurance.’

  ‘Did he ask about it?’

  ‘Sometimes when we were alone he did, and I said I’d be there. Just knowing that he wasn’t entirely at the mercy of the disease was something: that he had an end-game strategy. He always liked the sense of some control of his own life. And although he wasn’t gushy, he had a lot of love, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sheff, ‘and I feel that’s still there, still strong. I reckon we’ll always have a sense of that.’

  ‘So do I.’ They let talk lapse for a time, and sat watching the light coming into the garden, and listening to the birds heralding it.

  ‘I’m going through to see Mum,’ said Georgie, ‘and then I’ll ring Andrew.’

  ‘He won’t notice anything, will he?’

  ‘If he does I don’t imagine he’ll say a thing. He’s known our family a long time. I think what he’s prepared to do himself, and what he’s willing to allow others to do, are two different things.’

  ‘I’m happy with it.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ said Georgie. ‘We need to think of Mum now. Do you think you’ll still go overseas quite soon?’

  ‘I’ve rather gone off the idea. I didn’t think we’d be down here as long, and I don’t feel much like travelling right now. I could change my mind, though, and I’ll have to think about some sort of a job again soon.’

  ‘I’ll have to go back almost straight after the funeral. It’s not fair on the others at the hospital otherwise.’

  ‘Well, maybe if Mum doesn’t want to go with you, I could stay on here for a bit if Cass can’t come down immediately. And there’ll be Dad’s stuff to sort out.’

  ‘But Mum
may not want it done straight away,’ said Georgie. ‘You’ll need to check with her. You’ll need to be patient, Sheff, you know? She’ll be up and down for quite a while, but you realise that. It really should be me here, I guess, but the pressure’s on.’

  ‘No, you’ve given a hell of a lot, and you made regular visits when Dad got sick. I didn’t do enough. I see that now. Maybe I can make up for it.’

  Belize would prefer Georgie’s solace in her worst grief, but Sheff made up his mind to do his very best. He had the rather strange idea that he needed to shift some of the affection he had for Warwick to his mother. His father had been easier to love because he didn’t expect it, but no more deserving, Sheff realised.

  ‘When did you last go in?’ Sheff asked.

  ‘Just after you went to bed.’

  ‘Did he talk much?’

  ‘He said his mother was standing in the corner of the room. Nothing else.’

  ‘He told me the same thing sometimes, and yesterday he thought you and I were there as kids, and he talked to those apparitions as he once did to us, while I sat beside him. Any divisions of time seemed to have collapsed. Spooky in a way, and sad too.’

  ‘It’s a common thing near the end,’ said Georgie. ‘Anyway I’d better ring Andrew now.’ As she stood up to go, she leant over to Sheff and touched his face briefly. ‘It’s okay to feel relief,’ she said. ‘I’m sure Dad did.’

  Yes, he felt the flow of emotional release, but it was grief too. ‘It was absolutely the right thing,’ he said. He was too choked-up to say more. He felt no inclination, or necessity, to go into the sickroom again. There was nothing there that mattered. Everything vital of their father had become memory.

  He was surprised how few people he felt it was necessary to tell of his father’s death. Belize and Georgie, however, were busy on the phone for a long time, talking earnestly to people who had been close to Warwick, or were to them. Sheff rang Chris, also Nick and Raewyn. It would be a brief topic of conversation when the journos met over Friday drinks in the Ascot bar. Raewyn and Nick would feel for him, the others would speculate concerning his plans now that his father was dead, and, he hoped, wish him well in a summary way before turning to things nearer to their own lives. Donna would understand, even though Sheff hadn’t got round to ringing her with sympathy for her own loss. It was borne home to Sheff that a diminishing number of people were essential in his life.