Owen Marshall Selected Stories

by Vincent O'Sullivan

‘Okay,’ said Paul. He went out into the north quad and cut across the grass, under the wet-weather walkway to the school office and on towards D block. The frizzy girl half walked, half ran beside him. ‘Thanks for telling me, ahh —. Thanks for telling me. What’s your name?’

  ‘Nadine Troy,’ she said, giving a little skip at the disclosure.

  ‘Anyway, thanks, Nadine. You can get away home now.’

  ‘Mrs Beale told me to come back.’

  ‘Okay then.’

  Maybe Mary-ann had found a stash of shoplifted stuff, or copped some kids for vandalism. Last year there’d been the discovery of marijuana plants in the ceiling of one of the computer labs, with bulbs rigged up for light and all. How few people outside the system realised the truth of schools — that they weren’t cosy and manageable but, like society at large, were places of ambivalence, jostling contradictions, and with a small but powerful criminal fraternity. Many of the druggies, car thieves, intruders and vandals who contested with the police in the weekends, donned uniform themselves on Monday and went off to their classes with their intentions quite unchanged.

  ‘So what’s Mrs Beale on about then, Nadine?’

  ‘I dunno.’ Nadine trotted up beside him, encouraged by being spoken to. ‘I was just going past the gym and she came out and told me to get you from the common rooms.’ Nadine’s frizzy hair shook like metal filings and he half expected her to jangle. He guessed she was a fourth former, but had no recollection of ever having seen her before, though that was common enough in a large school. He liked her openness and willingness to help. Some kids would be already whining that they had to go, and couldn’t someone else do whatever it was that was asked of them.

  Paul and Nadine went in the main door of the gym, the shadow there a sudden reduction of light and temperature. The gym was a cool, clean space: the high ceiling, polished wooden floor with court markings in white and blue. No equipment visible at all except the heavy ropes drawn from the centre and secured to the wall bars.

  ‘Mary-ann,’ called Paul.

  ‘In here.’ Her voice came from one of the storage rooms by the Phys. ed. office. Paul went to the open door and looked in to see the shelves of balls with checker-board markings, the clumped skipping ropes, and Mary-ann kneeling on the floor beside a girl whose head rested on a grey gym mat and whose legs were dark with blood.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said.

  Mary-ann looked up at him, the straight hair at the sides of her face finishing at her jaw line. ‘I wanted to ring from the office here, but it’s locked. Could you use your cellphone for the ambulance?’ Paul turned away to dial so that he wouldn’t be looking at the girl as he spoke: her heavy, pale legs with the knickers half down, her heavy, pale face with an expression both questioning and oddly resigned.

  He had forgotten Nadine, but facing back into the gym he found her close beside him, and as he spoke to the emergency service he tried to position himself between her and the tableau in the equipment room. He held up his hand though she wasn’t making any attempt to push through. He felt more immediate pity for Nadine than for the girl on the floor, an irrational feeling, but powerful nevertheless. When he’d finished on the phone he moved out, ushering Nadine back a bit. ‘Look, Nadine,’ he said, ‘Mr Quintock needs to know about this. Would you go to the office and ask him to come over, and then could you please go up to the top gate and guide the ambulance down here? Don’t take any notice of the No Vehicle signs — come over the lawns by the swimming pool as a short cut.’ Nadine whirled about without speaking, with a final jangle of hair ran noisily through the shadowed body of the gym, was outlined for a moment in the bright rectangle of the door, then was gone.

  Paul crouched beside Mary-ann, and his knee popped loudly in protest. ‘Have you got a clean handkerchief?’ she asked him, and when he gave her the handkerchief, compactly folded, she shook it out with a flourish almost as a conjurer might. Paul took the girl’s listless hand in his and could feel the slight sweat on it. Her face was forlorn, as if floating a long way below him.

  ‘It’ll be okay,’ he said. ‘The ambulance will be here in a jiffy. Don’t you worry. Everything’s fine.’

  He thought that he recognised her: not by name, but as the unexceptional sixth former who always had a small, clumsily acted part in the school plays. ‘She hasn’t been attacked, has she?’ he asked Mary-ann, though knowing he shouldn’t talk in front of the girl as if she wasn’t there.

  ‘She’s been pregnant,’ said Mary-ann. How well she managed a minimum of specific information.

  With relief Paul heard Gareth’s loud, enquiring voice in the gym, with relief he went out and motioned him towards the equipment room, where the two of them stood talking in the doorway, Gareth’s voice becoming more subdued as he looked past Paul to see Mary-ann and the girl on the floor. ‘Right, right,’ Gareth said. ‘Poor kid.’ He hesitated to go closer for it seemed very much the sort of thing women coped with. ‘Ambulance?’ he said, taking responsibility for lesser matters.

  ‘On its way. I must go out and help Nadine guide them in.’

  ‘Parents?’ said Gareth.

  ‘We haven’t done anything about that yet,’ said Paul.

  ‘I’ll see to that now.’ Gareth’s upper body swayed away, but before his feet moved he remembered he didn’t know the girl’s name. He swayed back and stepped in to be beside Mary-ann. He leant low and put a hand on her shoulder, gently, as if she were the injured party. ‘And this is?’ he said softly.

  ‘This is Susan Bates,’ said Mary-ann. Susan’s face still floated against the grey shadows of the thick mat. Mary-ann was stroking a cheek with the back of her forefinger.

  Paul and Gareth walked quickly together across the gym and into the bright sunlight. They saw the ambulance coming across the lawn. ‘Jesus, what next, eh?’ said Gareth. He lifted his eyebrows very high and puffed out some air through puckered lips. ‘I’d better find which hospital they’ll go to,’ he said. Paul watched him stride off, halt the ambulance briefly with a gesture, send a trio of gawping boys packing, then hurry on to his office.

  It was bread and butter stuff for the two ambulance guys. They had Susan Bates in the back, Mary-ann Beale as well at her insistence, and were on their way in just a few minutes. Paul was left in the full, quiet sun outside the gym almost as if nothing had happened at all. But he wasn’t alone. There was a seat along the outside wall of the gym, and Nadine had been sitting there since guiding the ambulance in. Her hands were spread each side of her on the warm wood of the bench. She was lifting the heels of her shoes up till her feet rested on the toes and then dropping them again. She did it quickly over and over again.

  Paul sat beside her. ‘Thanks for helping,’ he said. Her heels went up and down, up and down. The sun was warm on their faces. ‘She’ll be okay now I’m sure.’

  ‘Did she have a miscarriage? My aunt had a miscarriage, but she had children again later.’

  ‘I don’t really know,’ he said.

  It could have been awkward because of who they were in the school, because they didn’t know each other, because of what they were talking about, but events had pushed them past all that. ‘Look, I’ll run you home,’ he said. ‘I have to go up to the hospital to get Mrs Beale anyway. All this has made you late, hasn’t it.’

  ‘I don’t live far,’ she said. ‘Maxwell Street by the park.’

  ‘Mrs Norman lives somewhere there, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Sometimes I babysit for her.’

  ‘Good on you anyway,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have a word to your form teacher.’

  ‘I didn’t do much. I’d better go now.’ She stood up and he noticed how small her hands were, and that the cuffs of her jersey had been folded back twice because it had been bought for her to grow into. ‘What was that girl’s name, Mr Broussard?’

  ‘Her name’s Susan Bates.’ He knew he shouldn’t be telling her, but she deserved such a confidence. ‘Remember she had a part in the last play. She was the
fat witch, but it wasn’t a big role.’ Nadine nodded and went off down the path with her noisy shoes, and her fair, metallic hair frizzed in the sun. Paul sat and watched until she turned the corner of the science block. He lifted his heels and let them drop again, over and over. He found it oddly relaxing.

  How It Goes

  Picture this if you will — a silky, summer’s night and the porina moths in pale, whiskery candlewick are a clumsy mass intoxication in the warm air. There’s the fragrance of the trees gathered in the still night: macrocarpa, pinus radiata and walnut around the yards, more subtle essences from the last of the native bush in the gullies higher up. The boy stands very still, the better to look and listen. He holds the .22 loosely in his right hand, and the long metal torch and a school backpack in his left. The backpack hangs with the weight of three dead possums. Far down the valley lights are winking, glowing and then cutting out, glowing again, as the car, or truck, goes from bend to bend.

  The boy stands and listens, watches: at ease in the night. His face is round and smooth, his hair thick and fair and soft, but his body has begun a growth spurt for adolescence so that his arms and legs have a slight clumsiness, although outdoor athleticism is always on the point of catching up.

  The lights come closer, pass the turn-off to Heyworths’ and Annans’. For the first time he can hear the engine. The sound doesn’t carry as well as in the frosty air of winter. He recognises the sound of the ute: his father must be coming home.

  The boy begins walking back through the trees and across the yard before the farmhouse. He goes from the shadows through soft moonlight and into pine shadows again. One of the dogs slinks out of its kennel, the chain clinking like coins, but it doesn’t bark, perhaps because he has the rifle in his hand. The yard is almost bare of grass, just stones and earth because of the mobs of sheep that have passed, and the movement of machinery, and the scratching of the chooks that now roost hidden in the implement shed, or the lower branches of the pines, maybe even on the perches built for them in their own house.

  He throws the possums onto the jutting timber of the tank stand to be skinned tomorrow. He washes blood from his hands in the laundry and goes inside. He puts a small handful of ammunition into the box in the kitchen drawer, and after checking the chamber of the .22 he leans it at the back of the hot water cupboard. He stands in the open back door for a time looking down towards the garage, but the summer night is thick with the flight of moths and the light attracts them so that they come tumbling towards the doorway, like lobbed paper pellets. So he closes the door and stays outside with all around him in the shadows of the night, or the soft, indistinct light of the moon. Picture it. And so he waits for his father with the confidence of one who has rarely been disappointed in affection.

  The ute comes up the steep, uneven drive, and its lights flare and glance on the dark mass of the macrocarpas, then break out across the open space of the yards. The ute noses into the open sheds next to the tractor, and when the boy’s father turns the engine off, the noise takes time to dissipate, and the small natural sounds take time to resume: the fluffle of a chook in the lower branches, the distant dry cough of a sheep, morepork echo from the far bush. Listen and you will know them.

  The father comes carrying supermarket bags, and the boy opens the door for him and follows him inside. ‘You okay then?’ the father asks, and the son nods. The man puts the bags on the bench without interest in them, and goes through to the lounge with its worn vinyl suite and large television. He sits well down in a chair so that his knees are almost level with his head. He is a tallish man, but most of his height is in his legs, and his bare forearms are burnt to the colour of copper. ‘We’ll have something to eat soon, eh,’ he says.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘We’ll rustle up something from the can tonight.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ says the boy. The father has a habit of rubbing his hands on the tops of his thighs, and the sound on the twill fabric is like soft rain on the roof.

  ‘Your mum sends her love.’

  ‘When can she come back?’

  ‘Not for a while yet, I’m afraid,’ says the man. He lets his head rest back on the chair, gives a small yawn of discomfort, then sits up ready to say more. The boy is leaning on the back of the sofa, and his father flaps a hand to get him to sit down.

  ‘She’s okay, though?’ The boy sits and smooths his hair down at the same time. He feels no great apprehension, as his mother talked it all through with him before she went: about the lumps in her breast and the need to get rid of them in case they became a nuisance.

  ‘Look,’ says his father, ‘it’s a matter of things being more serious than the doc first thought, that’s all.’ He doesn’t hesitate much; he’s obviously spent some time while driving home getting sorted what he wants to say. ‘There’s some more tests to be done and that, but he reckons there’s no sign of anything really bad. You know that sometimes women get cancer there?’ The boy shook his head. ‘Well, they do, and that’s the worst thing they could find, and it’s not that thank God, but the doc still wants some tests to find out why your mum’s tired all the time. A night or two at most. It’s not worth her coming all the way home and then back again for tests.’

  The father waits then, looking at his son, giving time for the boy to ask anything else, but there are no questions. The father gets up purposefully from the chair; he claps his hands together. ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Time for something to eat, or we’ll be here all night.’

  It is as they leave the room that the man turns the television on. Neither considers it unusual that they should half watch it through the open kitchen door as they make a meal. Neither of them is accustomed to continual conversation, and the lack isn’t a source of awkwardness. They have Wattie’s baked beans on toast with two poached eggs each as well. The boy has a Coke, which is something of a treat, and his father a beer, which is routine. They take their meal back to the lounge to eat, and watch a movie about gangsters which is set in a country on the other side of the world. They don’t bother to draw the curtains: they live three miles from their neighbours, on a country road that is little used. Picture the simple weatherboard house with a red, tin roof set on the river terrace close to the sheds and yards. In the moonlight, of course, the red roof is another colour altogether, and the yellow spill from the lounge window shows the rough lawn, the struggling azaleas and the netting fence that keeps the stock from the garden. And yes, the heavy moths labour through the warm air, attracted to the light. A summer blizzard of insects whirls there in the waning window light, but to the father and his son it’s just life, and the soft pattering on the glass is unremarked.

  When the gangster movie is over, the man tells the boy that he’d better shoot away to bed. ‘Maybe tomorrow you can come in with me to see your mum,’ he says. ‘If I can get a good run at things tomorrow morning, we’ll go in after lunch. I’d like you to help me in the yards.’

  ‘I’ll get up when you do,’ the boy says. He knows his father will be outside by seven.

  ‘No, that’s okay. Just come on over when you’re ready. I’ve got crutching to do.’

  The boy is in his room when his father talks to him from the lounge; it’s not far away, and with the television off there’s no need for the man even to raise his voice. ‘I haven’t forgotten about us going pig hunting,’ he says. ‘It’s just this thing with your mum is what’s important right now.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘We’ll go soon and knock a few over. We’ll get Geordie and his dogs.’

  ‘I got three possums tonight,’ says the boy.

  ‘Good riddance to the buggers,’ says his father. ‘Goodnight.’

  ‘Night, Dad.’

  The boy lies in his bed with a strip of moonlight across his legs and angling across the room. It’s so quiet he can hear his father in the lounge rubbing his hands on his knees, and he knows he’ll be sitting well down in the soft chair, with his long legs like trestles before him. The bo
y thinks he’ll get up really early in the morning, and be there to help when his father goes outside. He’s made such resolutions before and not managed them, but he tells himself this time will be different.

  Even with his father so close, there’s a sense of absence in the house. The boy is old enough to realise that there are reasons his father might not be telling him all the truth about his mother, and he hopes that’s not so. He’s briefly shaken by an aching desolation quite new to him, and then feels better again. His father is only a wall away: tomorrow he’ll see his mother and she’ll maybe come home with them. Things will be okay. He has experienced nothing so awful in his life that he would think otherwise.

  Picture him asleep in the small, plain bedroom of the farmhouse, with the moonlight through the window forming a pale, blank screen on the wall, as if some film is about to start and tell us more about his life.

  An Indirect Geography

  They’re gathered up: met here to travel south to help me celebrate my ninetieth birthday, but I couldn’t wait any longer. Such decisions are made for us, and death has released me to accompany them on the journey to my funeral. Better they don’t know the change of plan.

  They cluster ready for departure in this summer morning. Donald’s my eldest, and become pompous, though he’s family minded and reliable. It’s his car they’re using and his Aaple Motels they’re leaving from. Nigel isn’t his, of course. He’s Ruth’s youngest, and she’s my youngest — only forty-six. I never know what to make of Nigel. I can’t understand what he says. He talks in an adolescent mumble while he turns his face away. Andrew’s my second son. His father always said he was the deep one, but his brains don’t seem to have made him happier than anyone else. ‘All aboard who’s coming aboard then. We’d better be on the road,’ says Donald. It’s his car and he’s the South Islander on his own ground. Nigel asks if he could drive for a while, but Donald says maybe later, on a quiet stretch south of Ashburton perhaps.