Owen Marshall Selected Stories

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  I don’t want you to think Iris’s vision was a mercenary one. Money wasn’t an end in itself. What Iris wanted was to force life to yield her something of value, something from the top drawer. She had no belief in a heaven and wanted a greater share of life. We all go down to the grave in the end, she’d say. Behind the library building, and no longer used, was the old cemetery on the slope. When I had the job at Hendry’s cosmetic counter we would meet some lunchtimes and walk through the alleys of crushed, white quartz between the tombs. She would sigh, but only to cool the meat pies she liked for winter lunch. Iris was in fact cheerful in the cemetery for, of all the people on that slope, only she and I had any further hope of a shot at life. Died for King and Country she might read for me, her meter maid shoes making a sensible crunch upon the quartz. Iris would eat strips from the top of her pie and the steam would wisp into the winter air.

  Meter maiding was only one of Mum’s skills. She believed in a variety of jobs to lure good fortune. In Christchurch she was a fish splitter for almost a year. Well, Lyttelton she actually worked in, but we lived at New Brighton. A bach over which the fine, grey sand would whisper when the sea wind blew through the marram grass. A millionaire’s view of the ocean, Iris said. I was still young enough to need entertainment and she played the water pipes for me. By turning on the taps to different positions we could hear fog horns, fire engines, the howling jabberwocky. My schoolbag on the lino beside me, the smell of fish all the way from Lyttelton, the millionaire’s view over the fritz haircut of the marram dunes, as I crouched by the lion paws of the bath to hear tubas, or what Iris said was the farting of the elephants in the jungle. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a way to make a career from this, she’d say, and the water is all free, she’d say.

  Called Home, or Till the Daybreak Comes, she read out in the cemetery of that later town. As I Am Now So You Must Be Prepare Yourself To Follow Me, as we opened up a bag of crisps, pausing by the dearly loved and much missed husband of Astral Pruitt while I explained the new gloss shades of half-pink, full-pink, mink-pink. Iris said that the pasty man had asked her to go to the trots with him, but she didn’t like his lank hair. A man should have some bit of natural wave or curl in his hair, my mother reckoned. I had plenty of offers from men myself by that time and, while Iris never interfered, she did say that men made lousy friends, and that women knew how to stick together. Her own mother was a grand friend, she said, and in one tough year went into the city gardens and lopped off a branch to make a Christmas tree.

  Mum was fascinated by those things which defy routine — a locust swarm, footsteps of Homo erectus, Halley’s comet, which was certainly a fizzer, the Brewster kid who used to run howling round the block in Te Kuiti when his parents were fighting. Iris would take a cold sausage or potato out to him and he would snatch it on the trot with his face gleaming with tears in the streetlights. Iris was a good neighbour, though a temporary one. She babysat scores of kids who we never heard of again. Later she would send me out to do it. We received neighbourly kindness in return, of course. In the Brewster kid’s Te Kuiti, I remember sneaking over each night to plug an extension cord into old Mr Hammond’s work bench. He was rich and never went out after dark. While we lived there most of our power-intensive activities were late at night. We had an adaptor plug into the water heater, and a large frypan for our main feed at nine or ten at night. When we had to leave Te Kuiti my mother made Mr Hammond a green, double-knit jersey with a V-neck and raglan sleeves. Only it had a narrow yellow band, because she was one green ball short.

  From what Iris said, my grandmother must have been the same sort of person, though I never met her because she had Iris late and died in a nursing home somewhere in the North Island while we were living in Tuatapere. Iris was a school cleaner. There was a mill just down the road and the sawdust piles were mountain ranges there: the oldest peaks with the richest colours. Iris said that once I asked for a packed lunch to take to climb them. She couldn’t afford to go up for the funeral. Her sister sent some of their mother’s things down to her, including a sealed envelope addressed to Iris in her mother’s handwriting. For days Iris left it unopened on the mantelpiece, and speculated on the way the contents would change our lives: how it might be the title deed to her father’s brick house in Seatoun which she could not remember having been sold, or evidence that she had an illegitimate brother who had become a Cabinet minister in Brazil. The night we opened it we were having curried eggs for tea. The curry coloured the inside of Mum’s mouth as she laughed to find clippings about my father’s court appearances. This man deserted his wife and daughter, grandmother had written on the newspaper. Men are a different species, Iris told me over the curried eggs. Men are always alone, she said. My father had played squash twice a week for four years with a work-mate, yet never bothered to know where he lived, or how many children he had. Men don’t ask anything of each other. It’s both their weakness and their strength.

  Iris was disappointed by the degeneration that happens to men as they age — hair grew all over my father’s shoulders before he left, she said, as if he had died and the mould already begun. The oldest man I ever saw naked myself, was the physiotherapist who took a fancy to me in Putaruru. Being in his line of business he kept himself from the most obvious signs of mould, but he had eerily white, caved-in buttocks and besides, as I lay on my back on the carpet, I grew tired of looking at the unvarnished underside of his desk with the lines of the carpenter’s pencil still clear.

  My mother did better work than that. When we were in Bulls she saved for my kitset duchess, and spent hours getting the tracks aligned so that you could open and close the drawers with the tips of your fingers. Just radiata, but how she sanded it, then umpteen coats of dark stain and a clear finish. I’ve still got it, each scratch and discoloration is a mark of our life. Yet see, the drawers open with finger tips, the tracks have traces of the candle grease Iris dripped on with puckered lips of concentration. The wood smell evokes the rose-hips that in one Marlborough summer were a livelihood for Iris and me. We spent weeks picking them from the briars growing wild on the Wairau terraces and riverbed. It must have been my holidays and my mother had no better job. She picked into the pocket of a bag apron and, try as I might, I can’t remember how we got out to the riverbed each day. We sold our harvest to the rose-hip syrup factory. The syrup was a big thing for children’s health at the time. Dry river terraces with their rabbit scrapes, foxgloves, bleached grass stems and rose briars. Iris with her bag apron, floppy hat, bloodied knuckles. We’re not licked yet, she said. We would have our sandwiches together on the stones, from a paper bag so often used that it had the soft creases of a dowager’s face. She’d heard on the radio that the country was poised for great transformation and growth and she was determined that we would be swept along with it. The rose-hips were burnished in all that sun, almost ceramic with a red-yellow sheen. The last time I saw the sequin dress was when Iris offered it to me for Glenda’s wedding dance. It had grown dull out of its time, as a lurid fish out of its element grows dull. Perhaps you’re right, Iris said.

  I’m surprised at all the places I’ve lived in. Ours was the off-season, budget sort of view of Wanganui, Blenheim, Lower Hutt and Bulls, Putaruru and Tuatapere. I never went surfing at Taylors Mistake, or had trout at Taupo Lodge, but I surely know the panoramic view of the Redruth tip, low before the sea, the gull flights wheeling like windmills above the plastic bags massed on the netting. A man putting tiles on the Oddfellows Hall in Invercargill was struck by lightning, yet not hurt much at all. Each working day as I went past, I could see where the spouting was dented as he fell. The windows were small and high to stop the rest of us from seeing what the Oddfellows were up to. Sometimes Iris and I walked past the hall together until we reached the lights, when she would turn right to old Mrs Brody, who gave her one of the last jobs she ever had, and I would walk on to Acme Smallgoods. Mrs Brody left Mum a Victorian washing bowl and jug used before plumbing was invented. Iris sai
d the set would be worth a fortune today, because it was stamped Duenly Pottery, Sussex, underneath, but the jug was broken when our neighbour’s tom jumped up at the budgie’s cage. I keep a plant in the bowl now. That bowl is big enough to bath a baby, with bruise blue embossed leaves on it and pink roses.

  I’ve had at least two chances to marry rich, apart from the son of the Drs Utteridge — a sheep farmer from the Hakataramea, and the owner of three rest-homes in Mount Eden. By then, though, neither Iris nor I saw marriage as such an easy step to success. The merino farmer never spoke more than seven words at a time, yet Iris said you’ve got to think hard about marrying. You’ve a responsibility to ask yourself if you really want someone coughing in the same bed, walking in and out of your house at will, telling you things about his life. She thought that men were best as visitors.

  Iris went at sixty-four: only sixty-four, and I was there. I’d come down to visit her in the first and last house she ever owned. A married couple’s house in Murchison, where prices were that cheap. Mum had put new iron on the laundry lean-to and, when the rain began, she took me out in delight to prove it didn’t leak, Things were good for her, because she was on super by then and had plenty of work at the pub as well. She was a terrier for work. From the lean-to window we could see the rain cloud moving across the dark, native bush of the Murchison hills, and the rain dashed on the new tin roof. Send her down, Hughie, cried Iris, and she pointed out the good secondhand washing machine and the red lino she’d put down. There wasn’t a leak, or a spider’s web, in the place. Send her down, Hughie. I think it rains a good deal in Murchison, for the grass on the flats below the bush was lush and there were rushes in the dips. She used to say send her down, Hughie, when she comforted me during a winter we spent in a Johnsonville caravan. We’re snug as a bug in a rug here, she’d say. I turned to say something of this to my mother in her Murchison laundry, but she was falling backwards with a stopped heart. As if pole-axed she went down, and any murmur against it I certainly didn’t hear above the rain that Hughie sent down. I reckon she died still with the satisfaction of her own home, the new red lino, tin laundry roof, and some great thing to come, even if she never made supermarket star, lost family heiress, or became a medium who told the police of a dozen murder sites, like Beryl Judkins’ aunt.

  Beryl Judkins’ parents took her camping to the Coromandel and she raved on at school about moonlight swims, campfires and pohutukawa blooms along the shore. I must have whined at home about our failure to have holidays, as a ten-year-old will, so Iris made a tent in our backyard by putting a sheet over the clothesline and anchoring the sides. We had onion chips and lemonade. We lay rolled in blankets watching the sky through the tent end. My mother told me about the black sequin dress she was planning to wear as a jazz sax player. I heard a hedgehog sorting for grubs in the currant bushes as Iris described the life of a cabaret star. Mr Thompson came out late on to his lawn for a leak and a spit. We were quiet until he was inside again. Sure, it wasn’t Beryl Judkins’ Coromandel. Mr Thompson once had his photo in the paper, because an ancestor had been killed at the Wairau Massacre, he said, and he wanted compensation from the government on behalf of the family. The fighting can’t have been far from the bright rose-hips of years later.

  We shifted away before there was any response to his claim, but Iris checked at the library anyway to see if anyone with our name had been massacred there. She said Bleekers had been in New Zealand since before the Treaty. We shifted because she was offered a job as assistant matron at Stanhope Preparatory School in Johnsonville, but when we arrived the assistant matron refused to leave, because her marriage plans had fallen through, and so we lived in a caravan at the motor camp until Iris became car groomer at Crimmond Motors.

  It was a shock at the time, of course, Iris going like that, but I came to be glad she’d not suffered any sense of failure. She died in her first home and, although Hughie was sending it down outside, not a drop could get through to her red lino and washing machine. The certificate gave Murchison as the place of death. I just thought it strange as about the only one of all those towns and suburbs that I’d not shared with her. All those uncaring places where she had fed and clothed me, and so much more. We’re not finished yet, she’d say. Some of us have to achieve what we can despite our lives, rather than as a consequence of them. So there was no supermarket stardom, no Lotto first division, no Brazilian millionaire, no double doctor marriage, no jazz sax cabarets in the sequin dress, not even my father coming back reformed and freshly shaved to start again. Just Iris, my mother, and me.

  The Rule of Jenny Pen

  The heavy moonlight gave it all the appearance of quality linen, flattering the exposed walls of the Totara Eventide Home, and the lines of stainless steel trolleys and wheelchairs by the windows glinted like cutlery upon that linen. The moon was more forgiving than the sun, allowing a variety of interpretations for what it revealed. The shadowed places were soft feathered with blue and grey, like a pigeon’s breast.

  The only sound was Crealy pissing on to Matron’s herb garden. The white cord of his striped pyjamas hung down one leg, and his bald head was made linen in the moonlight. ‘Had enough?’ Crealy asked the sage, basil and thyme. Residents were not supposed to come out and treat the Matron’s herbs to such abuse. Crealy felt his life stir as ever at the defiance of rules. He could see the trim, summer lawn, and the garden which paralleled the side path to the slope of the front grounds. The moonlight lay over it all as a linen snowfall.

  Crealy had never before lived in a place so pleasant to the eye, or so well organised — and he hated it. Always a big man, he had never done anything with it, lacking the will, the resolution, the brains and the luck. At eighty-one and in Totara Home, he found that time had awarded him a superiority which he had been unable to earn any other way. He had given little, and lasted well.

  Crealy’s bladder was empty, so he put a large hand over his face to massage his cheeks, while he waited for an idea as to what to do next. Even in the moonlight the kidney spots on the backs of his hands showed clearly. He could think of nothing novel to do, so decided to persecute Garfield. He went back through the staff door of the kitchen, and bolted it carefully behind him. Before seeking out Garfield, Crealy wanted to be sure that Brisson was settled in the duty room. He went slowly through the kitchen and the dining room, through the corridors which were tunnels in the Totara of all their past lives.

  Crealy stood in the shadow of the last doorway, and looked into the corridor which led past the duty room. He was like a bear which pauses instinctively at the edge of a forest clearing to assess possibilities of gain or loss. He walked slowly down the corridor of mottled green lino, his breathing louder than the regular shuffle of his slippers. Before the duty room he slowed even further as a caution, but his breathing was as loud as ever. The door was ajar, and Crealy looked in to see Brisson at leisure.

  The duty room had a sofa, a chair, a log book with a biro on a string, a coffee pot, a telephone, a typed copy of the fire drill on the wall. It had the worn, impersonal look common to all such rooms in institutions, whether hospitals or boarding schools, army depots or fire brigades. Brisson lay on the sofa, and held up a paperback as if shielding himself from the light. His head was round and firm like a well grown onion, and light brown with the sheen a good onion has too. He wore no socks, just yellow sneakers on his neat feet. Crealy was surprised yet again to see how young some people were. He’ll lie there all night and do nothing, thought Crealy.

  ‘Who’s that huffing and puffing outside my door?’ said Brisson without moving, and Crealy pushed the door and took a step into the doorway. ‘Ah, so it’s you, Mr Crealy,’ said Brisson. He swung the book down, and his legs on to the floor, in one easy movement. ‘Why are you wandering the baronial halls?’

  In reply Crealy made a gesture with his large hands which seemed more resignation than explanation. Brisson was lazy, arrogant, shrewd — and young. He took in Crealy: the awkward size of him, the
sourness of his worn, bald face, the striped pyjamas and, between them and slippers, Crealy’s bare ankles with the veins swollen. Brisson gave a slight shiver of joy and horror at his amazing youth, and Crealy’s old age.

  ‘Mrs Vennermann said you squeezed the blossom off her bedside flowers,’ he said. Crealy itched his neck. His fingers sounded as if they worked on sandpaper, and the grey stubble was clear in the light of the room. ‘She said you pick on people. Is that right?’

  ‘She took my Milo,’ said Crealy. Brisson picked up the exercise book that served as the log for duty shifts.

  ‘Shall I put that in here then? Shall I? Mr Crealy deprived of his Milo by Mrs Vennermann. For Christ’s sake. And someone said that you have been making Mrs Halliday all flustered. Eh?’

  ‘It’s just all fuss,’ said Crealy. He began to think how he could get back at Mrs Vennermann.

  Brisson smiled at his own performance, looking at old Crealy, at the mottled lino like a puddle behind him, at the exercise book with the cover doodled upon, and the biro on a string from it. He considered himself incongruous in such surroundings. He had such different things planned for himself. ‘I won’t have a bully on my shift, Mr Crealy. If I have to come down to the rooms, then look out. And don’t you or the others come up here bothering me.’ Brisson hoped to be with Nurse McMillan. What time was it?

  ‘I don’t do anything,’ said Crealy in his husky voice. ‘It’s Jenny Pen.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Eh?’ said Crealy.

  ‘Go to bed,’ said Brisson, and saw the old man turn back on to the puddle lino, heard the shuffle and breath of him as he went back to the rooms of the east wing. Brisson did an abrupt shoulder stand on the sofa to prove age not contagious, then relaxed again with his book and thoughts of Nurse McMillan.