Owen Marshall Selected Stories

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  ‘I won’t be going that way’

  ‘There’s only one way to Te Tarehi, for God’s sake!’ Sinclair gave a burst of laughter, drawing the others into laughter too. Neddy made himself comfortable in his car. He switched on a tape. Sinclair had the folded sheet at last from his pocket, and he came confidently towards Neddy’s open window.

  ‘Bite your arse,’ said Neddy gently, and the Charger moved away. The misshapen creatures jiggled in the back window, the posts of the yards made a pattern of reflections in the green, metallic paint.

  ‘Bastard,’ said Sinclair. He went into the quarters to find Cathro and complain. ‘Cathro, Cathro,’ he called.

  The Charger didn’t come back during the night. Before we started next morning Cathro rang the two other homesteads in the district, in case Neddy had broken down, but they knew nothing. Then, after ten, Mr Beaven rang back. Neddy’s car had been seen in a gully on the Ypres Creek turn-off, and Neddy was dead.

  Cathro and I drove up. Mr Beaven and his head shepherd were there. They were waiting for the constable from Te Tarehi. The car had missed the corner and struck the yellow creek bank. From the road there seemed to be no damage. The metallic paint was untouched beneath the fine dust that the dew had set. But when we climbed down we found the Charger had struck with force. Mr Beaven and his man had covered Neddy and the dash with a rug from the back seat. His legs lay in a restful pose partly out of the door. I could see from the soles of his stock boots, how little wear they’d had. The flaccid monsters hanging in the back window jostled each other in the wind.

  It was an intrusion to wait alongside the car. We went back up to the road and waited for the police. We leant on Mr Beaven’s car and talked. ‘He’s been driving around here night after night,’ said Mr Beaven. ‘We keep seeing the lights from the homestead, along Kelly’s Cut, the through road, and here as well. At times we’ve passed him on the road coming up. A green Chrysler without bumpers. He must have been covering a hundred miles or more a night, just cruising round.’

  ‘Listening to his music,’ said Cathro. ‘Neddy loved to be by himself, listening to his music as he drove. The boys called him Prince Valiant.’

  ‘I saw that on the car,’ said Mr Beaven. ‘All doo-dahed up all right.’ Cathro didn’t say anything about Neddy girlfriend in town, the girl that each of us had imagined according to his own expectation, and who had no other life.

  Those nights Neddy had left us, he’d fired up on beer and music, driving along the top roads. It didn’t say much for our company, but then ugly country breeds ugly people, I suppose. Even so, the death of someone you don’t know well can have its acid, for without the protection of emotion there’s a clarity in what is bleak and random. As we sat and waited in the morning, I thought of Neddy driving alone, with his dashlights, the monsters, the songs of Whitey Schaeffer and Webb Pierce. And, in the darkness, that poor country slipping by.

  Thinking of Bagheera

  ‘You don’t much care for pets, I know,’ says my neighbour. She smiles bleakly across the patio, and sips my Christmas sherry. She is pleased to be able to categorise me so utterly. It won’t do to try to tell her of Bagheera, though what she says brings him back to me.

  The cat was not even mine, but had been bought for my younger sisters. They soon excluded him from their affections, however. My sisters preferred those possessions which could be dominated. Compliant dolls who would accept the twisting of their arms and legs, and easily cleaned bright, plastic toys. The cat went away a lot, and had for them a disconcerting smell of life and muscle.

  My father named the cat Bagheera. My father had a predilection for literary allusion, to use his own phrase. Not that I heard him use it about himself. He was referring to Mr McIntyre, his deputy. I remember my father talking about Mr McIntyre to Mum; pausing to preface his remarks with a disparaging smile, and saying that Mr McIntyre had a predilection for literary allusion. I caught the tone although I couldn’t understand the words. There was blossom on the ground that evening, for as he said it I looked out to the fruit trees, and saw the blossom blowing on the ground. Pink, apricot blossom, some lying amid the gravel of the drive, a fading tint towards the garage.

  In the evening Bagheera and I would go for a walk. We agreed on equality in our friendship. We would maintain a general direction, but take our individual digressions. In the jungle of the potato rows or sweet corn I would hide, waiting for him to find me, and rub his round head against my face.

  The cat brought trophies to the broad window sill of my bedroom. Thrush wings, fledglings, mice and once a pukeko chick. My father hated the mess. He always drove the cat from the window when he saw it there. Yet often at night, waking briefly, I would look to the window and Bagheera would be there, a darker shape against the sky, his eyes at full stretch in the dusk. I was the only one in the family who could whistle him. It was a loyalty I would sometimes abuse just to impress my friends. Within a minute or two he would appear, springing suddenly from the roof of the sheds, or gliding from beneath the red currant bushes at the bottom of the garden. Beauty is not as common in this world as the claims that are made for it. But Bagheera’s black hide flowed like deep water, and his indolent grace masked speed and strength. At times I would put my face right up to him to destroy perspective, and imagine him a full-size panther, see the broad expanse of his velvet nose, and his awesome Colgate smile.

  In December Bagheera got sick. For three days he didn’t come despite my whistling. We were having an end-of-term pageant at school and I was a wise man from the east, so I didn’t have much time to look for him. But the day after we broke up, I heard Bagheera under the house. I talked to him for more than an hour, and he crawled bit by bit towards me, yet not close enough to touch. I hated to see him. He had scabs along his chin, his breathing made a sound like the sucking of a straw at the bottom of a fizz bottle. He wouldn’t eat anything and just lapped weakly at the water I brought, before he backed laboriously again into the darkness under the house.

  Each time I looked, his eyes would be blazing there, more fiery as his sickness grew, as if they consumed his substance.

  My father decided to take Bagheera to the vet. He brought out Grandad’s walking stick and said that he’d hook the cat out when I called him within reach. How easily the cat would normally have avoided such a plan. My father pinned Bagheera down, and tried to drag him closer. Bagheera rolled and gasped before he managed to free himself and creep back among the low piles. He knocked an empty tin as he went. It was the tin from the pears I had stolen after being strapped by my father for fishing in my best clothes. When the walking stick failed my father lost interest in the cat.

  He had given him his chance and after that he put the matter out of his mind. My father possessed a very disciplined mind. I couldn’t forget, though, for Bagheera had become my cat. At night I would look sometimes to the window, but his calm presence was never there, and instead I kept thinking of his eyes in the perpetual darkness beneath the house. Beseeching eyes that waited for me to fulfil the obligation of our friendship.

  I asked my father to shoot Bagheera. To put him out of his misery, I said. It was a common enough expression, but my father had no conception of misery in others. I imagine he saw it, in regard to people at least, as the result of incompetence, or lack of drive. But I kept on at him. I said that Bagheera might spread infection to my sisters, or die under the house and cause a smell in the guest rooms. These considerations, which required no empathy, seemed to impress my father. He refused to fire under the house, though, he said. I’d have to coax Bagheera out where he could get a safe shot. He wasn’t supposed to shoot at all within the borough limits, he said. At the time I didn’t fully realise the irony of needing my father to kill Bagheera. I was the only possible go-between.

  My father came out late in the afternoon, and stood with the rifle in the shade of the grapevine trellis, waiting for me to call Bagheera out. I felt the hot sun, unaccustomed on the back of my knees as I lay down. It w
as about the time that Bagheera and I would often take our walk, and I called him with all the urgency and need that I could gather. Even the pet names I used, even those, with the sensitivity of boyhood and my father standing there, for I would spare nothing in my friendship. Bagheera came gradually, his black fur dingy with the dust of the foundations, and the corruption within himself. I could hear his breathing, the straw sucking and spluttering, I could see his blazing eyes level with my own. To get him to quit the piles, and move into the light, was the hardest thing. I was aware of my father’s impatience and adult discomfort with the situation.

  ‘Move away from it,’ he said, when Bagheera was at the veranda steps and trembling by the saucer of water. My father raised the.22, with which he never missed. No Poona colonel could have shown a greater sureness of aim. My sisters grouped at the study window to watch, their interest in the cat temporarily renewed by the oddity of his death.

  The shot was not loud, a compressed, hissing sound. Bagheera arched into the air, grace and panther for a last time, and sped away across the lawn into the garden. Just for one moment he raced ahead of death, just for one moment left death behind, with a defiance that stopped my breathing with its triumph. ‘I wouldn’t think anyone heard the shot at all,’ said my father with satisfaction. The saucer lay undisturbed, and beside it one gout of purple blood. Don’t tell me it wasn’t purple, for I see it still, opalescent blood beside the freshly torn white wood the bullet dug in the veranda boards.

  I didn’t go to find the body among the currant bushes. Instead I went and lay hidden in the old compost heap, with the large, rasping pumpkin leaves to shade me, and the slaters questing back and forth, wondering why they’d been disturbed. My father and mother walked down by the hedge and I heard my father talking of Bagheera and me. ‘I find it hard to understand,’ he said. ‘He seemed determined to have it shot. Sat there for ages cajoling it out to be shot. And after the attachment he seemed to have for it, too. He’s a funny lad, Mary. Why couldn’t he leave the wretched thing alone?’ My father’s voice had a tone of mixed indignation and revulsion, as if someone had been sick on the car seat, or one of his employees had broken down and cried. But I remembered Bagheera’s release across the lawn, and thought it all worthwhile. He’d done his dash all right.

  I lay in the evening warmth, and watched a pumpkin flower only inches from my face. The image of the pumpkin flower was distorted in the flickering light and shade beneath the leaves. The gaping, yellow mouth and slender stamen nodded and rolled like a processional Chinese dragon: the ones they have at weddings, and funerals.

  Requiem in a Town House

  Mr Thorpe came off sixteen hundred hectares of hill country when he finally retired, and his wife found a town house for them in Papanui. Town house is a euphemism for a free-standing retirement flat, and retirement flat is a euphemism for things best left so disguised.

  Mr Thorpe made no complaint to his wife when he first saw the place of his captivity. She had accepted a firmament of natural things for forty years, and he had promised her the choice of their retirement. Yet as the removal men brought those possessions which would fit into the new home, Mr Thorpe stood helplessly by, like an old, gaunt camel in a small enclosure. Merely by moving his head from side to side he could encompass the whole of his domain and, being long-sighted by nature and habit, he found it hard to hold the immediate prospect of their section in focus.

  It wasn’t that Mr Thorpe had come to the city determined to die. He didn’t give up without a struggle. He was a farmer and a war veteran. He went to church on Sundays with his wife, and listened to the vicar explaining the envelope donation system. He joined the bowling club, and learned which side had the bias. But he could not escape a sense of loss and futility even amid the clink of the bowls, and he grew weary of being bullied by the swollen-chested women at afternoon tea time.

  Mrs Thorpe developed the habit of sending her husband out to wait for the post. It stopped him from blocking doorways, and filling up the small room of their town house. He would stand at the letter-box, resting his eyes by looking into the distance, and when the postman came he would start to speak. But the postman always said hello and goodbye before Mr Thorpe could get anything out. There might be a letter from their daughter in Levin, a coloured sheet of specials from the supermarket, or something from the Readers’ Digest which he had been especially selected to receive. It wasn’t the same as being able to have a decent talk with the postman though.

  The town house imposed indignities on Mr Thorpe: its mean conception was the antithesis of what he had known. To eat his meals he must sit at what appeared to be a formica ironing board with chrome supports. It was called a dining bar. After a meal Mr Thorpe would stand up and walk three paces to the window to see the traffic pass, and three paces back again. He would look at the knives in their wall holders, and wonder at his shrunken world. He had to bathe in a plastic water-hole beneath the shower. His arthritis prevented him from washing his feet while standing, and he had to crouch in the water-hole on his buttocks, with his knees like two more bald heads alongside his own. He thought of the full-length metal and enamel bath on the farm. Sometimes he went even further back, to the broad pools of the Waipounae River in which he swam as a young man. The bunched cutty grass to avoid, the willows reaching over, the shingle beneath. The turn and cast of the water in the small rapids was like the movement of a woman’s shoulder, and the smell of mint was there, crushed along the side channels as he walked.

  In the town house even the lavatory lacked anything more than visual privacy. It was next to the living room: in such a house everything, in fact, is next to the living room. Mrs Thorpe’s bridge friends could hear the paper parting on its perforations, and reluctantly number the deposits. Mrs Thorpe would talk more loudly to provide distraction, and her husband would sit within the resounding hardboard, and twist his face in humiliation at the wall.

  The hand-basin was plastic, shaped like half a walnut shell, and too shallow to hold the water he needed. The windows had narrow aluminium frames which warped in his hand when he tried to open them. The front step was called a patio by the agent, and the wall beside it was sprayed with coloured pebbles and glue.

  The section provided little comfort for Mr Thorpe. The fences separating his ground from his neighbours’ were so vestigial that he found it difficult not to intrude. One evening as he stood in the sun, like a camel whose wounded expression is above it all, he was abused by McAlister next door for being a nosy old fool. Mr Thorpe was enjoying the feel of the sun on his face, and thinking of his farm, when he became aware that he was facing the McAlisters as they sunbathed on a rug. Mrs McAlister had a big stomach, and legs trailing away from it like two pieces of string. ‘Muttonheaded old fool,’ McAlister said, after swearing at Mr Thorpe over the fence. Mr Thorpe turned away in shame, for he was sensitive concerning privacy. ‘Oiy. Go away you nosy old fool,’ shouted McAlister.

  After that Mr Thorpe unconsciously exaggerated his stoop when he was in his section, to reduce the amount of his body which would appear above the fences, and he would keep his eyes down modestly as he mowed the apron lawn, or tipped his rubbish into the bag.

  He tried walking in the street, but it was too busy. The diesel trucks doused him with black fumes, and most of the children used the footpath to ride bikes on. The pedestrian lights beckoned him with Cross Now, then changed to Don’t Cross whenever he began.

  Mr Thorpe took to sleeping in the garage. In the corner was a heavy couch that had been brought in from the farm, but wouldn’t fit in the house. It was opposite the bench on which he’d heaped his tools and pots of dried-up paint. At first he maintained a pretence of occupation between bouts of sleep, by sorting screws, nails, tap washers and hose fittings into margarine pottles. As his despair deepened he would go directly to the couch, and stretch out with his head on the old, embroidered cushion. It was one place in which he didn’t have to stoop. He had an army blanket with a stripe, for he had begun t
o feel the chill which is of years, not weather. There he would lie in the back of the garage; free from the traffic, the McAlisters, and the confines of his own town house. He had always been able to sleep well, and in retirement he slept even better. He was granted the release of sleep.

  Mr Thorpe would lie asleep with his mouth open, and his breath would whine and flutter because of the relaxed membranes of his mouth and throat. His face had weathered into a set configuration, but it was younger somehow when he slept. His wife played bridge in the living room with her friends, or watched programmes of glossy intrigue. Mr Thorpe lay in the garage, and revisited all the places from which he had drawn his strength. Age is a conjuror, and it played the trick of turning upside down his memory, so that all he had first known was exact and fresh again, and all the things most recent were husks and faded obscurity. Mr Thorpe talked with his father again, soldiered again, courted again; yet when he was awake he forgot the name of the vicar with whom he shook hands every Sunday, and was perplexed when asked for the number of his own town house. Waking up was the worst of all. Waking from the spaciousness and immediacy of past experience, to the walls of his small bedroom closing in, or the paint pots massing on the garage bench.

  ‘He sleeps all the time, just about,’ Mrs Thorpe told the doctor, and Mr Thorpe gave a smile which was part apology for being able to sleep so well. ‘He must sleep for sixteen or seventeen hours of the twenty-four sometimes. He sleeps most of the day in the garage.’