Owen Marshall Selected Stories

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  The Kinlethlys seemed to take their bay for granted, corrupted by the ease and completeness of their ownership. Mr Kinlethly was away more days than he was there, and at night he shared the family enthusiasm for cards. I never saw him walk into the bush, and he went fishing only once or twice as a sort of tokenism. There was no doubt he was pleased with the place, though. He liked visitors so that they could praise it, and I heard him telling Mrs Kinlethly that the property had appreciated seven hundred percent since he purchased it. Mrs Kinlethly had some reservations, I think. She wouldn’t allow any uncleaned fish near the house. She said the smell lingered. We would gut them at the shore, washing the soft flaps of their bellies in the salt water, and tossing their entrails to the gulls. Mrs Kinlethly gave us what she called the filleting board, and we would scale and dismember the blue cod and tarakihi in the ocean they came from: the filleting board between Kenneth and me, our feet stretching into the ripples. Mrs Kinlethly seemed sensitive to the smell of fish. When the wind was strong from the sea, blowing directly up to the house, she said it smelled of fish. It didn’t really. It carried the smell of kelp, sand-hoppers, mussels, jetty timber, island farms, distant horizons, and fish.

  One wall of Kenneth’s room was covered with the display case for his shells, and our bunks were on the opposite side. I thought the collection interesting at first: the variety of colours and shapes, the neatly typed documentation. Each entry seemed to have one sentence beginning ‘This specimen …’. Mr Kinlethly wrote them out, and Kenneth proudly typed them on the special stickers, which I got to lick. ‘This specimen a particularly fine example from the northern coast of Sabah’. ‘This specimen a gift from Colonel L. S. Gilchrist following a visit to our bay’ or ‘This specimen one of the few examples with mantle intact’. The collection seemed to admirably satisfy the two Kinlethly requirements concerning possessions — display and investment.

  My dislike of the shells began when I had sunstroke. Kenneth and I had been collecting limpets on the rocks, and I forgot to wear a hat. The sun on the back of my neck all morning was too much for me. I lay on the bottom bunk, and tried not to think of the bowl Mrs Kinlethly had placed on a towel by the bed. The family considered it rather inconsiderate of me to get sick. After all, I was there to keep Kenneth amused, not to add to Mrs Kinlethly’s workload. I lay there trying not to be a bother, and hearing Kenneth’s laugh from the veranda. In the late afternoon Mr Kinlethly brought a guest back from Picton, and they came in to see the shells. ‘A friend of Kenneth’s,’ said Mr Kinlethly as my introduction. I was bereft of any more individual name at the bay. It was always ‘Kenneth’s friend’. ‘I think he’s been off colour today,’ said Mr Kinlethly. ‘Now here’s one in particular, the Cypraea argus.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘And Oliva cryptospira.’

  ‘Strikingly formed, isn’t it?’

  ‘Cassis cornuta.’

  I wanted to be sick. The nerves in my stomach trampolined, and saliva flooded my mouth. The mixing bowl on the towel seemed to blossom before me. Mr Kinlethly was in no hurry. ‘Most in this other section were collected locally,’ he said. ‘Kenneth is a very assiduous collector, and also people around the Sounds have become aware of our interest. A surprising number of shells come as gifts.’ Despite myself I looked over at the shells. Many of them seemed to have the sheen of new bone; like that revealed when you turn the flesh away from the shoulder or knuckle of a newly killed sheep. I had to discipline myself, so that I wasn’t sick until Mr Kinlethly and his visitor had left the room. The shells were always different for me after that.

  The Kinlethlys had a clinker-built dinghy. It had a little bilge water in it that smelled of scales and bait. They had their own boatshed for it even, just like a garage, with folding doors so that the dinghy could be pulled in, and a hand-winch at the back of the shed to do it with. The dinghy was never put in the shed while I was there. Kenneth said they left it out all summer. We used to pull it up the sand a way, and then take out the anchor and push one of the flukes in the ground in case of a storm or freak tide. Using the dinghy was probably the best thing of all. When we went fishing I could forget the boring times, like playing Monopoly, and helping Kenneth with his shells. I could look down the woven cord of the hand line, seeing how the refraction made it veer off into the green depths, and I could listen to the water slapping against the sides of the dinghy. Closer to shore the sea was so clear that I could see orange starfish on the bottom, and the sculptured sand-dunes there, the sweeping outlines formed by the currents and not the wind. Flounder hid there, so successfully that they didn’t exist until they moved, and vanished again when they stopped, as some magician’s trick.

  Wonderful things happened at the bay, even though I was only Kenneth’s friend. Like the time we were out in the dinghy and it began to rain. The water was calm, but the cloud pressed lower and lower, squeezing out what air remained between it and the sea, and then the rain began. I’d never been at sea in rain before. The cloud dipped down into the sea, and the water lay smooth and malleable beneath the impact of the drops. The surface dimpled in the rain, and the darkest and closest of the clouds towed shadows which undulated like stingrays across the swell. ‘I never think of it raining on the sea,’ I said to Kenneth. ‘Imagine it raining on whole oceans, and there’s no one there.’

  ‘Bound to happen,’ said Kenneth. He couldn’t see why I was in no hurry to get back.

  ‘I always think of it raining on trees, animals, the roofs of cars,’ I said weakly. I couldn’t share with Kenneth the wonder that I felt.

  Kenneth had no respect for confidences. That evening at tea, when Mrs Kinlethly told the others how wet he and I had got in the dinghy, Kenneth said that I’d wanted to stay out and see the rain. ‘He didn’t know that rain fell on the sea as well as on the land,’ said Kenneth. That wasn’t the whole truth of it, but it was no use saying anything. I just blushed, and Mrs Kinlethly laughed. Kenneth’s father said, ‘Sounds as if we have a real landlubber in our midst’, in a tone which implied he wasn’t a landlubber. I learnt not to talk to Kenneth about anything that mattered.

  On the Thursday of the second week there were dolphins again at the entrance of the bay. I admired dolphins more than anything else. They seemed set on a wheel, the highest point of which just let them break the surface before curving down into the depths. I imagined they did a complete cartwheel down there in the green water, then came sliding up again, like a sideshow. ‘There’s dolphins out at the point,’ said Mr Kinlethly. Mr and Mrs Thomson and their two unmarried daughters were with us on Thursday.

  ‘I’ve never seen dolphins,’ said Mrs Thomson.

  ‘Quite a school of them,’ said Mr Kinlethly. He decided that his guests must make an expedition in the dinghy to see the dolphins. Mrs Kinlethly wouldn’t go, but the Thomsons settled the dinghy well down in the water and there wasn’t room for both Kenneth and me.

  ‘There’s not room for both the boys,’ said Mrs Kinlethly. Kenneth didn’t care about the dolphins, but he wasn’t going to let me go. He called out that he wanted to go, and his father hauled him aboard.

  ‘Kenneth’s friend can come another time,’ said Mrs Thomson vacuously, and the dinghy pulled away clumsily. I waded out a bit, and kicked around in the water to show I didn’t care, but I could see Kenneth with his head partly down watching me, waiting to catch my eye, and with the knowing little grin he had when he knew I was hurt. The dinghy angled away towards deeper water, the bow sweeping this way then that, with the uneven rowing of Mr Kinlethly and Mr Thomson.

  ‘Dolphins, here we come,’ I heard Kenneth shouting in his high voice.

  That finished it for me, not missing out on the dolphins, but Kenneth going merely because he knew I wanted to. I’d taken a good deal because, after all, I was just a friend of Kenneth’s invited for part of the holidays, but I was beginning to think myself pretty spineless. I thought of my Palmerston friends, and the short work they’d have made of Kenneth. I left Mrs Kinlethly
watching the dinghy leave the shelter of the bay to reach the dolphins at the point. I went up to the house, across the wide, wooden veranda and into Kenneth’s room. From the bottom bunk I took a pillowcase, and began to fill it with shells from Kenneth’s collection. I tried to remember the ones he and his father liked best, the ones most often shown to visitors: Pecten maximus, Bursa bubo, and Cassis cornuta, the yellow helmet. The heavy specimens I threw into the bag, and heard them crunch into the shells already there. Once I was committed to it, the enormity of the crime gave it greater significance and release. Whatever outrage the Kinlethlys might feel, whatever recompense they might insist on, Kenneth would understand: he’d know why it was done, and what it represented in terms of him and me.

  I took the shells up the track into the bush, and I sat above the glow-worm creek and threw the shells into the creekbed, and into the bush around it. Most disappeared without sound, swallowed up in the leaves and tobacco soil. The yellow helmet stuck in the cleft of a tree, and as I sat guiltily in the coolness and heard the ocean in the bay, it didn’t seem incongruous to me, that Cassis cornuta set like a jewel in the branches. The bush was a good imitation of an ocean floor, or so I could imagine it anyway.

  A sense of drabness followed the excitement of rebellion. I came down to the house, and replaced the pillowcase. Without a plan I began to return to the beach, scuffling in the stones and listening to the sound of the sea. Mrs Kinlethly came up the path towards me. I thought she must have found out about the shells already, and her response was more than anything I’d expected. She walked with her hands crossed on her chest, as if keeping something there from escaping, and her tongue hung half out of her mouth. It was an obscenity worse than if she’d opened her dress as she came. I tried not to look at her face, and I felt the muscles of my arms and shoulders tighten, like at school just before I was strapped. Mrs Kinlethly passed so close to me that I heard the leather of her sandals squeaking, but she didn’t stop or say anything. She went up the steps, and the house swallowed her up in complete silence. I couldn’t work out what was happening. I sat down there by the path and waited. I looked out towards the bay and the drifting gulls, letting the wind bring the associations of the sea up to me.

  Mr Kinlethly came up next, without his trousers and with everything else wet. Instead of his hair being combed across his head as usual, it hung down one side like ice-plant, and the true extent of his baldness was revealed. ‘The dinghy went over. Kenneth’s gone,’ he shouted at me forcefully and looked about for others to tell. He seemed amazed that there was just me by the path in the sun, and the birds calling in the bush behind the house. His eyes searched for the crowds that should have been there to receive such news. When I made no reply, he turned away despairingly. ‘Kenneth’s gone. I must get to the phone,’ he shouted at the monkey-puzzle tree by the veranda, and he strode into the house. His coloured shirt stuck to his back, and on the ankle of one white leg were parallel cuts from the rocks.

  The house filled rapidly after Mr Kinlethly made his phone calls, until there were enough people even for him: relatives from both sides of the family, friends, and folk from the next bay. Two policemen from Picton came, quiet men who kept out of the house and began the search for Kenneth. I rang my father when I could, and asked him to pick me up at the turn-off by four o’clock. My mother had made it very clear to me about thanking the Kinlethlys before I left, but the way it was I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. I just packed my things, and walked up to the road to wait for my father. I was up there by mid-afternoon, and I climbed up the bank above the road and sat there waiting. I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast. I could see right over the bay, and although the house was hidden by the foreshortened slope and the bush, I could see the boatshed like a garage at the edge of the sand. Where the dinghy had capsized at the point, the chop was visible, occasional small, white crests in the wind.

  The Divided World

  The world is divided between you and me, you and me babee, you and me. The world is divided between those who laugh on the inward, and those on the outward breath; between those who say at this point in time, and those who say that it does appear to be the case.

  The world is divided between the superstitious, and the unimaginative; between those who love men, and those who love women; between those who have witnessed Bjorn Borg’s top-spin, and those who have lost the chance; between the exemplary, and the few of us who are left.

  The world is divided into those who appreciate Jane Austen, and fools. The world is divided between the apathy of ignorant youth, and the despair of incorrigible old age. The world is divided between those who blame Lucifer, and those who blame a lack of dietary fibre; between mediocrity and its own evolution; between the overworked, and the unemployed; between those who have a daughter, and those denied the greatest blessings.

  The world is divided between those who say they adore the country and never go there, and those who say they hate the city and never leave it. The world is divided in the beginning, on all sides, and before God. The world is divided between those we betray, and those who betray us; between those who wake in the darkness with tears, and those too drugged to dream; between those who will not stand a dripping tap, and those who are moderate men. The world is divided among those who deserve it, but not often and not enough.

  The world is divided between those who realise their own value, and those who think they may still amount to something; between those who prefer quiz shows, and those who still await their frontal lobotomy; between the old which has lost its edge, and the new which has not been tested; between indecision and hypocrisy, between feeble vacillation and energetic error; between cup and lip. The world is divided between those who understood the significance of Randolph Scott, and the new generation.

  The world is divided between those who know nothing smoother than satin, and those who know a woman’s thigh. The world is divided between the meek who will inherit the earth, and the strong who will dispossess them of it; between those who believe that they are essentially alone, and those who will be convinced with time; between Sadducees and Pharisees, Hannibal and Hasdrubal, Shaka and Dingane, Dracula and the Wolfman.

  The world is divided between those who make a profession of software and prosper, and those who say they recall garlands, mole-catchers and stone walls. The world is divided between silver spoons, and macrocarpa childhoods; between the appalling and the appalled; between consenting adults; between the devil, and the deep big C; between honest toiling forwards, and flashy temperamental backs; between those who help others, and those prepared to let nature take their course.

  The world is divided between those who have owned a Triumph 2000, and philistines; between those who have had sex, and those prepared to give it another try; between those who remember the old school haka, and those who attend no reunions even in the mind. The world is divided between those who have a favourite corduroy coat, and those with no affection for habit. The world is divided between those who maintain the distinction between further and farther, and those who compromise with usage; between those who have attended universities, and those who have been inwardly disappointed in other ways; between animals who know only joy and pain, and we who can visualise our own deaths. The world is divided between those who can roll their tongues, and those with more archaic genes. The world is divided between those who should know better.

  The world is divided between the Greeks and their gods, and the Trojans who would otherwise have won; between the Green Mountain Boys, and the Black Mountain Boys; between those who gargle in a stranger’s bathroom, and those with acquired delicacy; between the undiscerning undistinguished undeserving mass, and us. The world is divided into the states of Jeopardy and Paranoia, Halidom and Dugong, Condominium and the Tribal Lands, all of these, none of these. The world is divided between those who try themselves, and those who seek a less corrupt judge.

  The world is divided between those who are tolerant and wise, and their husban
ds. The world is divided between those in authority, and those resentful of it; between those who are white, and those whose virtues are not so immediately apparent; between those who face the world with a religion, and those who wish to but have only irony in its place. The world is divided between those who have shifted to the North Island, and those passed over for promotion; between one thing and another if distinctions should be made; between tolerant contempt of the artist, and awe of the Cactus and Succulent Society’s president. The world is divided between a lawyer and his client, but not equally or per se.

  The world is divided between those people whose character is known, and those from whom something may still be expected. The world is divided between rancour and disgust, idolatry and idiocy, ballet and bidet, Sordello and Bordello, Bishop Blougram’s and Prufrock’s apologies. The world is divided between the first and the last; between a man and a woman; between sun and moon; stoics and epicureans; scholards and dullards; the fragrance of mint in the riverbeds and desolate clay. The world is divided between Lucky Jims, and those who see no humour in it; between professed intentions, and the things we would wish undone; between nostalgic falsehood, and anticipatory regret; between dreams of avarice, and visions of self-esteem.