CHAPTER THIRTY
BELIZE AND GEORGIE took upon themselves the task of sorting Warwick’s things in the house. There was urgency because Georgie had to leave. Sheff wasn’t consulted, but on the morning after the funeral his mother put the bowl of polished stones in his hands and asked him to take them to the garage and have a sort-out there. It was the accustomed demarcation of responsibility: inside as a woman’s domain, and outbuildings as a man’s responsibility – and perhaps refuge.
‘Don’t you want to keep them? They were Dad’s favourites.’
‘Too sad,’ she said briskly, ‘and I never took to them. That tumbler often went night and day. Gave me the heebie-jeebies. There’s buckets of them out there. They don’t do anything, do they? Maybe we could give them to a school fair or something.’ But those in the bowl had been Warwick’s final selection, and the slanted sun dancing through them had made a shifting kaleidoscope of colour that he loved. ‘You’re welcome to them,’ said Belize.
Despite a sense of trivial betrayal, Sheff admitted to himself that he didn’t want them either, or not so many. At the garage bench he put his hand deep into the bowl, and the stones, smooth as medicinal capsules, slithered in his fingers as if lightly oiled. He took just a few of the most brilliantly coloured and slipped them into his pocket. Later he’d have time for sentiment concerning them perhaps. There were many hundreds more in plastic containers with felt pen identification on the lids in his father’s writing: ‘Agate seconds’, or ‘Best citrine’. Other small bins held various grades of grits and plastic pellets. Sheff turned on the tumbler, and for a while stood at the garage bench listening to the sound. There were stones still in there that his father had never lived to see reborn in any form. He’d have to get rid of it all, perhaps as a job-lot on Trade Me, and then the garage would be more as Sheff remembered it, and his father’s golf equipment have pre-eminence once more: the trundler, the leather bag in which the Ping clubs were clustered, some with individual covers, the tonguing shoes heel-out on the shelf above. And, even higher and never disturbed, the dark and finely dusted leather of the case that held Belize’s abandoned saxophone.
Sheff turned off the tumbler, but remained standing there as the noise died away. His mother was right about the stones. They didn’t do anything, even though there was a tactile pleasure to be had from them and the colours of many were splendid. He wondered if maybe the local secondary school would like them, or if he should just pour them into a glittering heap at the gate and see how many were taken away. He rather liked the idea of a voluntary dispersal of the trove, passers-by carrying off personal choices until the magpie heap was gone and unwitting mementos of his father spread throughout the town.
Georgie came out while he was fossicking on the shelves to see what else would have to be sold, given away or thrown out. ‘All these stones,’ she said. ‘Mum will be glad to be rid of them.’ She had a mug of coffee for him.
‘I thought she might’ve waited a while before having a clear-out. What’s she like with his clothes and personal stuff?’
‘We’re going through it all. She’s not keeping much. I know she’s going to give you the good watch, and me the wedding ring. She’s been a bit tearful, but she doesn’t want to be left with lots of stuff to deal with by herself when I go back tomorrow. What about you?’
‘I can stay a while. Maybe I’ll do an article or two.’
‘You’ll miss Jessica when you go. You two have really clicked.’
‘It’s odd, isn’t it?’ Sheff said. ‘A lesbian woman with a child, and I like being with her more than anybody else.’
‘She understands people. She hasn’t had an easy time of it herself, but she’s come through. I think the two of you are good for each other just now.’
‘You’ve talked with her about me, I suppose?’
‘Not much. She’s closer to you than me now, but that’s fine. She likes you. She feels for you. Just because someone’s not sexually into men doesn’t mean they dislike them all. Guys seem to find it hard to get their heads around that.’
‘I don’t know much about all that,’ he said. He wondered if perhaps his sister did.
‘Neither do I,’ she said, ‘but it’s not all that mysterious surely. A friend’s a friend – that’s the main thing. You make the most of it.’ Georgie touched some of her father’s things, lightly, but as if in both contact and farewell. ‘All of a sudden most of it’s just junk, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Dad’s gone and this stuff’s meaningless without him.’
She made as if to leave, and then turned back and watched him sipping his coffee. She came a step closer, and after another short silence spoke again. ‘We’ve never really talked about Charlotte, have we?’ she said. ‘It was the worst possible thing that could’ve happened to you and Lucy – and it did happen, and we all knew both of you were heartbroken, but there was nothing we could do to make a difference. I did say I’d come up, remember? Mum and Dad, too.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you just buttoned-up.’
‘We couldn’t share it with each other, so it was impossible with anybody else. She tried, I couldn’t.’ Sheff was aware how still he was. One hand felt the slowly diminishing warmth of the coffee mug, the other was in his pocket and the stones he’d selected from his father’s bowl slid skink smooth in his fingers. He was glad the light wasn’t great in the garage, but he met his sister’s gaze without evasion. ‘Somehow nothing that other people said was appropriate, or adequate, and just seemed strangely to diminish Charlotte. No one else really got it, really understood. I know that’s arrogant and untrue, but I think Lucy in the end felt the same.’
‘I won’t go on about it, and we’re both just coping with Dad’s death anyway,’ said Georgie, ‘but I just want to say I think you need to let go of a lot of that stuff. You don’t want it to become an itch, but neither do you want it to be too tender to touch. A pity you didn’t persist with the counselling, though I know the guy rubbed you up the wrong way. Your trouble, I reckon, is you had no chance to fight for Charlotte: it was over before you and Lucy were aware of any threat. Even a losing struggle is a form of catharsis, like with Dad, but you wanted to fight for her and you couldn’t, and you’re still angry about that. You were powerless, and being pissed off at the world is your expression of it. Anyway, that’s all I’ll say. Okay?’
‘Yes. It’s okay.’ And it was. He was able to hear his daughter’s name from Georgie without any pain, or anger.
‘And I’d better get back to Mum. I haven’t got any of my own stuff together yet.’
‘I’ll miss you. You know that?’ said Sheff. ‘We couldn’t have got through without you. I’ll never forget what you did for Dad.’
‘I wouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t agreed.’
‘You were the only one of us who could help him at the end. You had the power and you used it for love.’ It was difficult, almost pretentious, but he needed to say it, because maybe they would never talk about it again. ‘It was the right thing. I’m sure about that,’ he said.
A few weeks earlier he would have resented her analysis of his feelings, whatever the accuracy, but now he accepted the truth of it, and acknowledged the concern and affection that prompted it. He stood with his sister in the comparative dimness of the garage, and for some reason he had a heightened perception of physical context, although there was no connection with their conversation. His father’s orphaned recreational possessions, the subdued sheen of the Commodore, the fruit trees of the old orchard framed by the single garage window and bowed in the heat.
Georgie let a silence lie for a time, and then took up a handful of Warwick’s favourite pieces from the bowl. ‘What is it with all these bloody stones?’ she said. ‘I never really got that. It isn’t the sort of thing I thought he’d go for.’
‘Carnival sky,’ said Sheff. ‘I think he just loved the colours, how they could be released from the stone. How it could just be there as something beautiful. The sun striking
the colours through the bowl.’
‘Weird, eh?’
‘I’ll drive you through to Dunedin tomorrow,’ said Sheff, but Georgie didn’t want Belize to have the long trip there and back, or to be left alone in Alex. She’d take the bus. She gazed about the garage and puffed her breath out noisily.
‘Anyway, I’d better go in again,’ she said. ‘But all this stuff. Will you keep the golf clubs?’
‘Well, in some ways I’d like to, but they’d just sit around my place as they sit around here. And there’s the hassle of getting stuff to Auckland. Probably better to flog them off. Maybe a garage sale? What do you reckon?’
‘Mum wouldn’t want a lot of people poking around. Not now. I’d just clear everything to an auction house. Up to you, though.’
‘So Mum’s giving me the gold watch? I’d love to wear that sometimes for Dad.’
It was a Tissot with intricate links on the strap. Belize had bought it for Warwick in Switzerland as a wedding anniversary present, and he wore it only on special occasions. As a boy Sheff would watch him take it from the box, fasten it and leave his steel watch on the table until he resumed an everyday world. He would do the same, he decided: wear it when he was clean, well dressed and going somewhere special. And while there he would think of his father wearing it in similar circumstances and with the same pleasure. Not solid gold of course, but gold nevertheless, and elegant, with just the clear face, and none of the gimmicks that festooned some watches.
At lunch he thanked his mother for it. ‘His name’s engraved on the back,’ she said.
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘We did it recently. I won’t give it to you now, but remind me when you go. He wanted you to have it. The wedding ring’s for Georgie. She’ll end up with mine as well, but that’s what your father wanted. You can have his Omega too, if you want it, but I thought I might keep that.’
‘That’s fine, Mum. We can swap if you like,’ said Sheff. Talk of his father’s personal belongings was beginning to upset Belize: her lips tightening and a little shiver coming into her face. Sheff and Georgie turned the conversation to the crop in the old orchard. So much good fruit lying rotting in the long grass.
‘When we’ve got them so has everybody else,’ their mother said. ‘The market price doesn’t even cover the picking and transport.’ And so for the moment they led her from grief to common grievance. Without spraying, the bugs got into most of them anyway. Then the birds.
What was it like to lose someone with whom you’ve experienced life for fifty years? Lucy and he had Charlotte for less than eleven months, and the loss of her had broken both of them. Belize would go on because she had no choice, as Sheff and Lucy had gone on, but not together. Sheff had never made any objective assessment of his parents’ marriage, as boy or man. He’d always known them together as part of the natural state of things. They argued sometimes, even on rare occasions provoked each other to anger, but there was no threat, or vituperation, no sense they wished to live in any other way than together. Whatever disappointments and failures each experienced were not blamed on the other. ‘If you’d like to go away for a few days, that’s fine by me,’ said Sheff. ‘I’d look after things here.’
‘When I get used to being here by myself, then I’ll think of going away for a while perhaps,’ answered Belize.
PEOPLE HAVE THEIR FOIBLES AND FLAWS, often the result of vanity, and Sheff’s father wasn’t immune. He disliked wine bores, but in his undemonstrative way considered himself something of a connoisseur. Once, when Cass was visiting, the sisters switched labels and trapped him into praising as a reputable Bordeaux, a bottle that was merely vin ordinaire. Belize was quite capable of taking him down a peg or two occasionally. He joined the laugh against himself, but Sheff could see that he was a little affronted all the same.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
SHEFF AND HIS MOTHER took Georgie to the bus the next morning. She was wearing the same light, suede boots he’d noticed when he met her at the Wellington airport on their way south, and she bobbed as always when she walked. Sheff still hadn’t found an answer for that. How much closer brother and sister had become: how admirable she had proved in the past weeks.
They sat in the sun outside the information office and waited for departure time. Travellers went past to get brochures, or visit the small museum and art gallery. Most were older couples, the women purposeful and ahead, the men often rather dutiful followers, their thoughts more on cold beer than gold-field artefacts, or local watercolours. Almost all those wearing shorts had made a serious sartorial mistake.
‘Who’s going to give me health advice now?’ Sheff complained to his sister. ‘Lately I’ve had these loud clicks when I turn my head. Something must be going wrong in the vertebrae.’ This drew a smile from Georgie. ‘I get these floaters in front of my vision, and my tongue feels like a piece of shoe leather in the mornings.’
‘You’re breathing through your mouth and snoring, that’s all,’ she said. ‘Mum and I hear you sawing wood half the night.’
‘And then there’s the foot cramps, and the sneezing when I look at the sun.’
Most of the talk, however, was between Georgie and Belize, not just because they were parting; it was always that way. Mother, son and daughter. Husband and father was gone. Gone, but not wholly absent, for true affection maintains a presence in the heart.
‘If you can’t get me at home, then use the cell phone,’ Georgie was saying. ‘I’ll try to ring every day for a while. Don’t forget that Aunt Cass wants you to go up. Anytime at all she said.’
‘Maybe when everything here is sorted and Sheff’s gone,’ said Belize.
‘Or she’ll come down to you. She’s happy to do that, too. Or come up to me. I’d love that. And get Sheff to take you out in the car sometimes. The worst thing is to be stuck away by yourself. When will you go back to bridge?’
‘I may even go next week,’ said Belize, ‘but don’t worry, I’ve got plenty of things to fill my time. I must get to the solicitor in the next few days.’
And so it went. It wasn’t the opportunity for Sheff and Georgie to share much that was meaningful. The final minutes before her departure were made more impersonal when they were joined by a mother and daughter well known to Belize, and who were also travelling to Dunedin. So for brother and sister at the end, standing at the bus steps, there was just a hug and one wry look between them as Mrs Abercrombie, having exhausted her condolences, talked freely of her holiday plans. Georgie took a seat by the window and looked down at her mother and brother before the bus moved off. Talk was no longer possible, but they smiled and made personal faces to show affection and sympathy. Sheff raised a thumb and his eyebrows, Belize mouthed goodbye, Georgie put her palm on the glass.
‘I need to go to the supermarket on the way home,’ Belize said when the bus had gone. Sheff understood it as a distraction from the compounded feeling of loss, and they talked about what they needed to buy as they drove, and not about Georgie. It was like the green bottles on the wall in the song: four of them, then three, now two, and when Sheff left there would be Belize by herself needing to make a life in her old age.
In the supermarket he pushed the trolley, and his mother went ahead selecting goods from the shelves. It wasn’t a large shop by city standards, but that made the job easier. At the checkout there was one man in front of them, pushing his purchases along to the operator, who was very tall, very pallid and very thin, and perhaps only fifteen or sixteen years old. He held the bar codes to the screen with arms so slender that the skin seemed to lie directly on the bone, and his sharp elbows about to break through. When it was his mother’s turn, Sheff went first and stood to receive the bags.
‘How are you today?’ he said. The gaunt boy stopped abruptly, arms up, like a praying mantis. His eyelids fluttered for a moment, and then he was violently sick on Sheff’s legs. ‘Ah, no, no. Oh, shit no,’ Sheff said despairingly, but too late. The vomit was copious and very fluid, splashing lik
e a bucket of water on his shoes and the floor. An acrid stink rose around them, so strong it was almost visible. The checkout boy reeled away, head still down. How could such a reduced torso regurgitate so much?
The concern at first was entirely for him. ‘It’s all right, Bobby. It’s okay. How do you feel now?’ said his nearest fellow employee, a motherly woman with thick glasses and heavy breasts that drew her shoulders forward. She put her arm around Bobby and gave him a plastic bag to contain the last of his retchings. The other shoppers eddied with murmurs of commiseration, but kept a wary distance. One well-dressed woman abandoned her trolley immediately and headed for the door. Bobby, Sheff and Belize were shepherded into the staff washroom, which had toilet, a shower and lockers along the far wall. Bobby’s colleague attended to him, and Belize was equally helpful to Sheff, who had suffered more, at least externally. Bobby’s power vomit had left his own clothes quite untouched, but Sheff had to stand in socks and underpants and hold his trousers under the shower, while his mother swabbed his shoes with wet paper towels.
Attenuated Bobby and his comforter were ready to leave quite soon. ‘I need to get him home, he’s all of a shiver,’ she said. ‘He has a reflux syndrome, don’t you, Bobby?’ and the boy gaped affirmatively. ‘Have you said sorry to the man?’
‘There’s no need,’ answered Belize. ‘These things happen.’
But why always to me? Jesus Christ, thought Sheff. Why always me?
‘I’m sorry,’ said Bobby without making eye contact. He was just a skinny kid, embarrassed and unable to cope.
‘That’s okay,’ said Sheff. What other response was there? Next maybe would be the expectation that he run poor Bobby home, when he needed running over.
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