Owen Marshall Selected Stories

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  That’s how it happened. I had just taken a mouthful of toad-in-the-hole when I saw, through the kitchen window, an unnaturally tidy Jorgesson coming past the geraniums. There was a bulge in his pocket which could have been a garroting cord, and his Punch head was tilted to accommodate a paisley tie. Since then I have always hated geraniums and paisley patterns. A geranium is a coarse, disease-ridden plant with a flare of animosity, and paisley resembles a slide of pond water beneath a microscope. Even toad-in-the-hole has never been quite the same again. My father and Jorgesson spent time in sombre conversation and, although I couldn’t catch the words, I could see on Jorgesson’s face successive expressions of contained outrage, reasonableness, social duty to parents of evil children. My library card passed from Jorgesson to my father, the indisputable proof of a tale too rich to be denied.

  My father punished me with the razor strop, and rang the parent of each friend I had unhesitatingly betrayed. It was the end of the Ace of Diamonds Gang. It was the end of wraith-like sorties into the consciousness of our town. It was the end of silhouettes upon the timber stacks, of thumbs clasped to pledge the redress of makeshift grievances. It was the end of free imagination, and of boyhood perhaps.

  Lilies

  The chalice of each lily flower was disembodied as darkness spread. Broad lily leaves merged with the shadows of the heavy grass and the docks. Arum flowers were luminous, hung in the night, and in the nearest throats each yellow spadix stood. The casual, crowded growth of such beauty amazed him. He knew the place was just a horse paddock in the suburbs. He had seen at dusk on their arrival the leaking trough, tracks amid the grass and lily clumps, uneven fences, and the horses standing apart for privacy. Yet it became a garden in the night, and from his hip height on the groundsheet the arum lilies were ranged depth on depth, a few pale lights in some places, but most massed as if carried in procession.

  ‘My mother would have a fit,’ Jenny said. ‘Christ, she’s got no idea how people can live. All those things owned and folded into the right drawer, or account, all that possession, getting on in the world, is nothing if you haven’t found a really close person — a lover. A lover in all respects. A universal lover I suppose. Ha ha. Someone to trust with all of yourself. Don’t you think? Don’t you think, though?’ Her face was itself the milk white of the arum lilies, but alert rather than decorous. She cocked her head and tried to see his expression in the night. Her hand squeezed his, and he could feel the light, individual bones of her fingers.

  ‘I feel the best I have in the whole trip right now,’ she said, ‘and I don’t care if we never find these people to stay with. We don’t need help anyway. We don’t need anyone else. This afternoon, coming up fast on the main road, it was so warm, wasn’t it? I loved being on the back. I almost fell asleep leaning on you, and I could tell, before you turned, if you were going left or right, because the way the muscles of your back moved against me, like part of myself moving. Sometimes when we passed cars, when we were level with them for that moment, I could see couples in their separate seats and knew they envied us pressed together and then accelerating past. I bet they took it out in grudging comments about damn motorbikes. Eh? I think I understand how you feel about the bike now You get this feeling of protection and isolation on a big tourer, don’t you think? The faster you go, the more cocooned and invincible you become: the less distinct any threat can be. It’s a sort of unity and a sort of detachment, isn’t it?’

  In the evening the road had sloped down to the bridge, and the Wanganui River was smooth and muddy, lacking the gravel bed of the South Island country he knew. Throttled back, the exhaust had a different note. Jenny pressed her helmet to his, and shouted, ‘Keep going straight on, I think. Don’t turn right towards the shops.’ They were hoping to find a friend of a friend who might have a bed for the night. A friend’s friend never met, never warned, but easy about their imposition they hoped.

  In a flat suburb by a sports stadium, playing fields and a few paddocks across the road, the motor had died. The way it had gone made him think it was electrical, not mechanical, or a fuel blockage perhaps, but the light wasn’t good enough to find the fault, and the warmth of summer, the languor of a day’s travel had sapped any sense of urgency. He had pushed the bike into the paddock, and was held in thrall by the profusion of arum lilies there in the dusk. Each fenceline was overwhelmed with deep banks of lilies, and clusters spread into the low, green fields, and the ditches which especially suited them, so that they suckled in the mud. He had never seen lilies as vigorous and free as weeds before. They were multiplied clump on clump to gain an eminence, and the myriad white mouths among the heavy leaves glowed in summer dusk. ‘Oh, they grow like weeds round here,’ Jenny said. ‘They’re everywhere between Wanganui and Palmerston North, but you didn’t notice. They’ve spread all over the place, and nobody thinks twice about them.’ But he did. He thought twice, thrice, a hundred times, and always that night he was conscious of the lilies spread around them, and the quiet horses standing thigh deep among their flowers.

  ‘Finding someone to trust is what really matters,’ she said. The lilies had the whiteness of her breast, and like breasts their hypnotic form was curved into the night. ‘You like that, don’t you? I know you like me doing that. I know you’re smiling; turn your face towards me so that I can see. I don’t believe that there’s just one perfect partner for each of us in life. As you say it’s a pretty odd coincidence that person should just happen to be in our own community ninety-nine percent of the time. But it still seems to me that a lot of people never have a true relationship in their lives, even if they get married and all the rest. Never find someone to talk to as they would talk to themselves: never know someone care for them the way they wished they cared for themselves.’

  Their night vision came in time. With his head close to hers, he wondered if the pupils of her eyes had dilated like those of a cat, but as he bent to see, she thought he sought a kiss, whispered assent and drew his mouth to hers. There were moths and flies in the moonlight, and quite loudly a horse blew its vast, flabby lips in derision.

  ‘I like it best when we’re alone,’ she said. ‘When there’s just the two of us we never quarrel. Have you realised that? It’s always when other people are about, our friends even, that any trouble comes. I know you don’t like staying with my parents, because you say I’m different then. Now we only have to please each other. I’m the only woman, you’re the only man. Do you like that? Turn over this way. I think we should stay on our own, and be happy like now. It’s so warm I guess we could just stay here with the flowers you like, and in the morning you could fix the bike.’

  From the centre of the city came the sound of a fire engine, or an ambulance, but it meant nothing to them for they had no house and complete health, and later a car horn started in the suburb beyond the stadium and sounded again and again, fainter as it moved away. When all those sounds had passed, there was Jenny’s voice, so earnest and so lover-like. More enduring still, when she stopped, was the gentle whine of the night air through the trees, the fences and the lilies.

  ‘You don’t have to worry about me,’ Jenny said, ‘because I go into everything with my eyes open and don’t expect things to be rosy all the time. You’ll see that I can hold down a job if I need to. I can hack whatever has to be done. But the imperative I think is to have some part of each day with the one person who lets you be all of yourself, but not by yourself. You see? Someone to guard your back against the appalling triviality of life. It seems to me that you can’t win by yourself.’

  Jenny took their oranges from the pannier bag and, in peeling them, reproduced in action the level of intensity she experienced as she talked. She dug and tore the thick skin when she was adamant, and eased it from the fruit in a caress when love was spoken of. Her thin fingers were warm, had the fragrance of leather and orange peel, and the orange peel lay in the dimmed frog green of the grass and lily leaves, held up from the ground by the rich growth. Some pieces showe
d the underside like mushrooms, and others had their colour up, which caught the faint light and glinted orange to counter the lemon parrot tongues of the arum lilies. She drew on her cigarette, a long, wanton breath, and gave a shudder. He held a match and she squeezed peel at its flame, and the essence spat and flared like a rocket’s dying burst far away. Her voice was so private, so trusting, so open to inevitable hurt, that he couldn’t look at her, but put his head back and saw the lighted houses on the higher ground where people sat with the limits of their expectations and responsibilities clearly marked around them, while he and Jenny had nothing between them and the sky, could feel the night air drawn like a tide through the docks, the fences, the free lily clumps, the shadowed horses, and bearing off the scent of oranges and lilies and leather. Jenny’s warmth and the salt smell of her hair too, bearing off sweet promises that could not otherwise be borne. The lilies pressed around them in the night, candles with a pale yellow flame. Something ancient in them survived within the modern city. Something biblical that was dispassionate in its magnificence. We believe beauty is of itself an invitation, when in nature it is a guarantee of nothing that we will ever understand.

  ‘I don’t care to look too far ahead,’ she said. ‘You never met my grandfather Renneck, but he used to say that you’re a long time dead. And he had this other saying — take what you want, and pay for it. Do you see what he meant? I told Mum and Dad I can go back to university any time, but there’s other things you can’t have on lay-by. Hold me closer because it’s getting cooler now. A horse won’t stand on us in the night, will it? No, but it’s true, isn’t it, that nothing matters at all in the end, except having someone to love, but people don’t want to say it, or admit it, because if they don’t reach it then they’re a failure, aren’t they, and yet their life still has to go on. They won’t, will they, walk over us in the night — the horses, I mean?’

  He drew her closer, as if he believed that way they could secure themselves. Save them, save them from the fenceposts uneasy in the ground, from the slope of the stadium against the sky. Save them from the arum lilies, and the shadow horses deep in docks and grass and the lovely bog lilies. Save them from her trust, and his knowledge of its conclusion. Save them, save them amid the lilies from that meek, tidal wind of inconsequence.

  Iris

  Iris, my mother, had this idea that sooner rather than later something marvellous was bound to happen: a lucky break in life if you kept at it. She wasn’t selfish about this, everyone had the same chance for something quite undeserved, like being approached out of the blue in the supermarket by a talent scout to become a model, or marrying an accountant as my aunt did, who now spends money like water and has two homes. For my twenty-first Aunt Esther gave me a cream silk dress, but I snagged it at the polytech wine and cheese on a rivet in the plastic chair.

  Even when Iris was too old to go on hoping to be approached in the supermarket for anything other than shoplifting, she believed magnificent opportunity was in the offing. She took Golden Kiwis, and then Lotto tickets, and worked out on the backs of envelopes how she would divide and spend the money. I was to come in for some pretty good stuff when she won, according to the lists. Each mailtime was a high, never mind that she hardly wrote to anyone, had jobs without prospects and shifted a lot. Throughout the drizzle of magazine offers, bills, perfunctory greetings, community newsletters, demands on former tenants and coupon books, she kept a fierce hope in miraculous correspondence. An approach concerning political candidature, perhaps, or an invitation from the Max Factor directorate to be a special consultant, gardenias from a secret admirer, or notification that she was meter maid of the year. Iris never did realise that her whole life was unsolicited. She intently examined each special offer and would speculate joyously if her actual name was used. But how would they know my name, she’d say, look, they use my proper name. So that I could be at my best, she would roam the twilight, feeling in her neighbours’ boxes for shampoo sachets sent as samples. Needs must, my girl, she would say firmly. Our time will come.

  Iris answered an advertisement about Dr Asmunzov, professor of the mind, who came and said he could do a seance on my dad, even though he’d gone off, not died. I was seventeen and the professor of the mind had other interests as well, for he clasped my knee beneath the table. Being naturally blonde and with a good bust, I’ve always had to deal with that sort of thing. Iris, my mother, said that it didn’t necessarily mean anything, and that men were just like that. Hormonal, she said, and nothing in it to blame anyone. When she was going to school in Taranaki, a share milker used to undo his fly each day as the bus passed his milking shed. The association gave her a particular aversion to cholesterol, she said.

  Iris did win a Christmas hamper when I had chicken pox in Form Two, from Woolworths, and once initiated a correspondence with a firm of Auckland solicitors acting for an unclaimed British estate. The hamper she unpacked on my bed and found lots of low-cost, bulky items under the more glamorous surface layer: Weetbix, dried lentils, toilet rolls, stuff like that, and the solicitors lost interest when we couldn’t provide any evidence that the family on the Bleeker side originated in Dorset. I ate a small tin of sardines cold from the hamper, and with my finger, put their oil on all the chicken pox that I could reach. My second-hand bed head had transfers of Pooh Bear and Cliff Richard that were nothing to me.

  For a time, when we lived in Wanganui, Iris thought we had a fortune at our toes, because our Aramaho suburb neighbours said that the house we rented used to belong to a retired Greymouth dentist who must have been worth a packet, but left nothing when he died in my room. I did consider using the untainted third bedroom, but mine was so much sunnier, and I could come and go from the big window without bothering Iris. She said he would have had it all in gold, being able to get it for fillings as a dentist, though other people weren’t allowed to buy it. She had a dream of gold-filled Havelock Dark tobacco tins hidden under the brick paving between the back door and the laundry. We dug up the bricks, every one, but found no gold. The bricks remained stacked on the lawn and next winter we got muddy feet going to the laundry. They were a reminder of yet another false lead in the treasure hunt that was my mother’s life. It’s there all right though, Iris said, he just doesn’t want a woman to find it.

  My boyfriends seemed possibilities to Iris: opportunities for advantage. Being blonde and with a good figure, as I said, I had plenty of guys coming on to me. You get used to it after a while. Not great, but not unbearable. It’s just the effect you have on hormones, I guess. Mum said that she’d been trim herself in her time, but her face had become a bit of a handbag. My father had been an All Black trialist who couldn’t get used to his diminished place in life when he got past playing. He had these wonderful hands, though, Iris said, and should really have taken up the saxophone, or the piano. She took it up herself soon after he left, from an easy stage instruction booklet called Jazz Sax Made Easy. She didn’t find time for much practice, but made herself a black sequin dress to wear when she played in cabarets. I wore it for the leavers’ dance at high school and Maurice Prentice told me that I gave him such a hard on that he could only dance stooped.

  Maurice wasn’t one of those Iris had any hopes of, but Nigel Utteridge and Denzil Smith were. Denzil and I were both keen on roller-skating and won the under sixteen figure skating title in Marlborough, not long after Mum and I shifted down from Horowhenua. Iris saw a magnificent future for us on the international circuit, like Torvill and Dean, with her managing the television interviews and contracts. She cut down the sequin cabaret dress, sewed in bra cups and I wore it for competitions. Nigel Utteridge was later. His parents were both doctors, would you believe. Each worked in a different practice so they could have professional independence. Mrs Dr Utteridge was quite confiding and told me there were no children after Nigel, because Mr Dr Utteridge was injured by the Big Dipper at the Tahuna fairground. Mr Dr Utteridge had the thickest, most muscular neck you can imagine, wider than his head eve
n. He must have taken up the sport of butting at a very young age. Iris imagined me getting married to the son of two doctors and neither of us having to work again, just sit behind the receptionist’s desk, lift our heads occasionally and say, Dr Utteridge will see you now, I’m sorry Dr Utteridge has been delayed by an outbreak of anthrax, Dr Utteridge is at present examining your uterine x-rays. Maurice Prentice was probably the best-looking guy I went out with early on, but very hormonal, always talking about cars and he walked with a stoop.

  Sooner or later, Iris would say, our ship will come in. Over Kentucky Fried Chicken on her fiftieth birthday, she told me about this Grandma Moses who, at eighty, started painting pictures of her farm and became famous. The Grandma Moses in all walks of life were a marvel of reassurance to my mother. What can happen once, can happen twice, she said, and she was not afraid to work. She formed a co-operative when we were in Palmerston North. Herself and two huge twins called McIntosh, and they supplied hors d’oeuvres at functions. Salmon or crab finger pastries, gherkin, prune and pineapple on toothpicks, cheese balls, home-ground pâté and cinnamon sticks. They made a go of it, too, though Iris said that people didn’t appreciate the cost of the fillings, but then the twin five minutes older than the other had an experience when delivering to the town clerk’s farewell. A lap dog ran up inside her dress as she was carrying trays into the civic chambers and she went right off the business. Iris said the filthy little beast had ruined what could have been a catering empire, because that twin had the flair and they couldn’t carry on afterwards.