Owen Marshall Selected Stories

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  I look at the four here, and see other characteristics from both sides of the family. A bit of my Uncle Lee in the way Nigel’s hair sticks up from the crown, and the thin McCallum lips as Andrew smiles. As my children and grandson walk on the beach I see others, more distant, come forward for an instant through a look, or gesture, signal, then fade away. I’ve a feeling that the outlines of Donald, Andrew, Ruth and Nigel aren’t completely set. There’s a jostling aura behind them of generations who want some recognition. And now I’ve joined them.

  The four have a last walk on the sand before they leave, and Andrew and Nigel break into a brief race that only accentuates Andrew’s loss of powers. ‘Silly buggers,’ says Donald amiably.

  ‘Can I drive now?’ asks Nigel, as if his winning sprint has made him more competent for the task.

  ‘Oh God,’ says Andrew, ‘and I’d hoped for just a few years more.’

  ‘Maybe later.’ Even Ruth shows no support.

  ‘Maybe on the way back, when you’re familiar with the road,’ says Donald.

  ‘I could get a bus back, I suppose,’ says Andrew.

  And so they pile in and drive back to the main road past the phoenix palms again, and close to the cliff track where Ruth stood on a New Year’s Eve with Selwyn Holdaway. Donald lectures the others on the regional downturn. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘I don’t know if you realise it, but local government reorganisation and ongoing centralisation will drastically affect places like Timaru. It’s make or break for heartland New Zealand over the next few years. Mark my words.’

  ‘Nigel, mark your uncle’s words,’ says Andrew. ‘About three out of ten will do.’

  ‘He really gets into all that stuff, doesn’t he.’

  The mumble stirs Donald to justify himself. ‘Now look, look, you should realise what’s important in the long run, and it’s not sport, or art, or saving whales, or getting in touch with your individual consciousness, but economics, which means resources, and politics, which means who controls resources. People who think that’s boring and can’t be bothered with it are handing over their lives to others.’ That’s Donald’s way: as the eldest he’s always taken on a role that is practical and responsible. He talks a sort of layman’s politics and economics based on newspapers and current affairs programmes, and he picks out those things that agree with his own experience. Things are always cut and dried for him: sometimes he seems cut and dried himself. His thoughts are full of firm, undoubted principles.

  I wish they’d have more common sense. Listen, I’d say, there are too many people who want to talk for a living, and not enough prepared to roll up their sleeves and work. Too many people spend their time discussing gender roles, creative dance, post-natal depression and macramé — and then expect someone else to fill their bellies. They scoff at the routines of work, at those who get up each morning, smother their temperament and give a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay. Winter and summer, wet or fine, time of the month or change of life, feeling up or feeling down, it’s important just to get on with it. Nowadays there are too many people riding on the back of the solid middle class. It’s routines and routine people that matter in the end, get things done, not the media ponces, investment counsellors, would-be pianists, solo mums, Maori and lesbian activists. Andrew never understands that.

  It’s us who carry the can, and get nothing but sneering derision for being fool enough to do it. My old CSM told me that there are two ways in the army: the easy way and the hard way. The easy way isn’t easy and the hard way’s bloody hard, he said. It’s like that for a practical man in New Zealand now, I reckon. The easy way isn’t easy and the hard way’s bloody hard.

  The road south of Timaru is never far from the sea, along the edge of the downs. Ruth and Andrew talk to bring their lives up to date: they’ve not seen much of each other for years. Nigel sprawls in adolescent languor, a captive in the presence and purposes of his elders.

  Glenavy, where the Waitaki is bridged, prompts Andrew to tell Nigel another family story. ‘Your Uncle Donald fell in love with a girl here years ago. She had such magnificent knockers that she found it difficult to remain upright. Well, that was one reason.’

  ‘I can see that we’re going to have another session of your damn imagination,’ says Donald. He’s resigned to it.

  ‘Donald told Dad that he was needed on the other farm to help with heading, but he came over here and took Amelia up the valley for the afternoon. Wild oats rather than heading, eh.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Nigel begins to show an interest.

  ‘The next day Dad found her bra under the rug in the back seat. I can see him now, bringing it in at morning tea, and Donald’s face.’

  ‘It’s an old family story,’ says Ruth, but laughs all the same.

  ‘You know we’d been swimming and sunbathing, that’s all,’ says Donald, ‘and she kept her togs on to go home. You know that.’

  ‘We know what you told Mum and Dad. Your brain was quicker in those days, among other things.’

  ‘Dad didn’t say much, but he seemed impressed by the size of the bra,’ says Ruth. She, too, has always played a part in ribbing Donald.

  ‘She was a sizable heifer, certainly, was Amelia,’ admits Donald.

  Beneath his denial, as always with this story, is a certain embarrassed pride which the others play on. I remember how his father enjoyed the story too; how each of the children starred in their own family anecdotes, as much a part of the family record as the photographs and the collections of small trophies from schools and clubs. Ralph and I would often go over the stories when the children had all gone: a small way to keep them in our lives.

  The closer they come to Oamaru the more Andrew is in the grip of the old life, the more what he sees is populated by the past.

  We never do completely outgrow our country. Education and travel only make our memories of home more powerful. Not the helicopter views of mountains and waterfalls, but the plain quiet shingle of the Waitaki, say, with the shot of rabbit droppings in the scrapes, or the sight of rugby posts above the fog in winter parks. The corner dairies with the papers piled on the counter, a stainless steel pie-warmer, and a Coca-Cola ad a glossy world away. Uniformed kids on the way home: the greys, blues and greens, the Latin blazer mottos that neither Pakeha nor Maori can understand. Easy country roads through hills contoured with sheep tracks. The long summer beaches with a fragrant breeze coming in and few people to breathe it. The twitch ever creeping out from the fences in to the dry, suburban gardens.

  Above all, the committees that meet in community halls and schoolrooms, conference centres and modest boardrooms, vestry rooms, lodges, club lounges and pavilions, civic chambers and staff quarters. The Rabbit Boards, Neighbourhood Watch, Red Cross, Squash Rackets and Indoor Bowls Clubs, PTA and Friends of the School, Women’s Auxiliary, RSA, Jaycees, Katherine Mansfield or J. K. Baxter discussion groups, Cactus and Succulent Society, Progressive League, Rape Counselling Centre, Acclimatisation Board, Rotary, Playcentre Management Committee, Guild of Main Street Businessmen, VSA Steering Committee, Federated Farmers, Toastmistresses, Masons, Working Men’s Club, Friends of the Takahe, Compost Society, Small Bore Rifle Club, Colenso Textile Brass Band, Civil Defence volunteers, Forest and Bird Society, Trampoline and Gymnastics Promotion League, Avalon Marching Club, Repertory Society, Girl Guides’ Management Seminar, Embroiderers’ and Potters’ Fellowship, Alzheimer’s and Korsakov’s Psychosis Support Group, the committee to organise the Ransumeen family reunion.

  All that mister and madam chair, and rising to a point of order, and taking the right of reply, and wishing opposition or abstention to be recorded in the minutes.

  Who said we are a taciturn people?

  All those hobby-horses ridden assiduously in a hundred rooms and halls of nodding boredom, while outside beneath a leering moon a stray dog savages the sheep in the domain, or glue sniffers twitch in the doorways of the main street.

  And they drive on, coming closer to Oamaru. They talk mainly o
f their own lives, sometimes their conversation is of the places they pass, sometimes of me. Nigel remembers that as a small boy he was promised one of his grandfather’s guns, and Donald acknowledges the debt and says there’s a good Hollis that would suit him down to the ground. Andrew wonders if Ruth and I will be closer than he ever manages with me. ‘Maybe Mum opens up more to you, Ruth, because you’re a woman.’

  ‘It isn’t any easier,’ she says. ‘Why should it be easier? Mum was never able to talk to me about being a woman. She was just more afraid for me, and her fear made her angry at times and stopped us becoming close. Being mother and daughter isn’t any guarantee of understanding you know.’

  She’s right. I wanted more for her than I had myself, even though I had everything that mattered. Too much emotion, hope and love is an embarrassment. True feeling for all the family became overlaid with minor irritations and trivial preoccupations — mine and theirs — so that when I should have been grateful for Donald’s occasional trips from Christchurch, instead as he talked I was thinking it was time for my television programme, or noticing the dirt from his shoes on the rug.

  I should have forgotten sometimes that I’m their mother: put it aside and just talked to them as a person without special responsibility. I should have risked more, but you become more and more aware of the gap between what you feel, and what you can hope to express.

  They’re nearly home. Cape Wanbrow can be seen above the town, and the downland is pressing towards the sea. The plains are over and cabbage tree country begins.

  There’ll be no birthday party for me here after all. Let’s leave them now before their disappointment, their grief, or their relief. I’ve recovered all my life now. Still, they’re coming to see me — that might still be true. They may come to see me more truly now than they ever have before.

  Mr Tansley

  Small-scale heroes are enough when you’re a kid. Sometimes just conspicuous possession could do it — the man who drove a Ford V8 CustomLine; sometimes just conspicuous loss — the man who lost an arm in a combine harvester. The fish and chip shop owner seemed to me the most fortunate and successful of businessmen. The government deer culler who regularly got sozzled at the Gladstone pub surely had a life of greater excitement than the rest of us.

  Mr Tansley was the caretaker at the gasworks, that collection of dark, smudged buildings with storage domes that could rise and fall like cakes in a fitful oven. He rode a black Raleigh bike. When he went to work he wrapped his lunch tin in the jacket of an old pinstripe suit, so the wire spring of the carrier would grip it safely. He took cold tea in a corked beer bottle, which he dangled at the handlebar in a grey woollen sock as he cycled. He pedalled carefully, intent on the road, as if his lunch box, or bottle of cold tea, was at risk. It was no use calling out to him when he rode past on the old Raleigh, because he wouldn’t respond, always intent on the road and his slow, persistent pedalling.

  He lived in an army hut behind the Loan and Mercantile building, and close to the river. He had a wooden kitchen table with turned legs outside the door of the hut, and there every morning he had his wash and shave. At head height above the table he’d banged a fair-sized nail into the hut wall, and each morning he brought out a metal-framed mirror and hung it up. Also an enamel basin, a green towel, an army mess tin with his shaving gear, and so he’d set up there because there wasn’t enough light in the hut, I suppose. The first thing, though, that came out of the hut’s security, was his Raleigh bike, and he would press his thumb into the tyres as a test, and always lean the bike in the same way, on the same corner of the shed. I knew the inside of Tansley’s shed, and always wondered how he fitted the bike in there last thing at night.

  From my bedroom window I could see him most mornings with just a singlet above the waist and his braces hanging beside his trouser legs. In the frost, or drizzle, things were done quick time, but on a fine morning his wash and shave became almost an indulgent ritual, and I sometimes went down before breakfast to join him. He used a cut-throat, and would lift his chin high to tighten the skin of his neck, then slide that long, narrow blade down, and wash the soap and stubble from it in the water of the enamel bowl. The handle, with its split for the blade to fold into, was of ivory yellowed with age and use, and smooth as a horse bit.

  ‘To be clean shaven is a sign of self-respect,’ he said once. ‘And a man with no self-respect hasn’t any respect for others.’

  Tansley had been awarded a medal in the desert, fighting against the Desert Fox, my father said. He’d reached the rank of sergeant, but then lost his stripes because he disobeyed an order. My father said that Norman Beal, who was the manager of the Loan and Mercantile Agency and had been an officer in 23 Battalion, maintained that Tansley was morally right, but they broke him to private all the same.

  Tansley must have been an older soldier than most, because even allowing for the view of childhood he was surely nearly seventy when he lived in the army hut twenty years after the war. He was a big man, pale despite service in the desert. The muscles of his chest and arms had begun to loosen. The hair on his large chest was grey, and darker hair grew over his shoulders and down his back. Because he spent so much time in his own company, he carried on a sort of conversation with himself at times in a quite unself-conscious way. ‘Reckon so,’ he’d say. ‘I don’t doubt there’ll be rain before the day’s out’, and he’d fling the used water from the basin into the river, and stand and look at the sky to find intention there.

  On summer evenings he’d sit on the wooden step of his hut and read the afternoon paper — even that’s a thing of the past now. ‘I see old Joey Wadsworth’s dead,’ he’d say, or ‘Look how they advertise these Jap cars, by Jesus, bold as you like.’ You might expect me to say that he and I formed a special bond, that he passed on some principled wisdom to me, and I provided company that mitigated his loneliness, but there was nothing like that. He talked to himself exactly the same whether I was sitting with him or not. From my bedroom window sometimes I could see his lips move. He didn’t dislike me; he never told me not to come around; we shared bread and strawberry jam: he just didn’t recognise children as the same species as himself.

  He had a chrome cigarette-making machine, not much bigger than a tobacco tin, and I often got a glimpse of the simple mechanism when he made one up — rollers and a strip of dark canvas. We’re quicksilver as kids, and to me all his actions seemed slow and clumsy. I wondered if his movements had been more adept in the desert when he won his medal. He put a half-choke grip on the loaf to laboriously cut himself a slice, and to do up the buttons of his fly after a piss on the bank was a business of lengthy concentration. The Loan and Mercantile let him use the lavatory at the back of the building, but for just a piss he didn’t bother to walk those few yards.

  Many afternoons after work he’d walk down Seddon Street and across the bridge to the RSA. He’d have a drink there because I could smell it on him afterwards, but he never came home drunk. It was the company he wanted mainly, I suppose, though he always left his mates behind and came back to the hut alone. There was another man in the town who’d won a medal, but I never saw them together, which surprised me, because I imagined that they would have a lot in common. Mr Lineen the dentist was the other man with a medal, and his left forearm had been hit by mortar fragments, my father said. In summer when he rolled his sleeves up you could see how pitted and thin that arm was.

  My father once suggested to Mr Tansley that he apply for a state house. ‘This hut here will see me out,’ Tansley said, and I heard him say much the same another time about his bike. He was getting ready to go to work at the gasworks, putting the lunch box on the carrier, slipping the cold tea bottle into the grey work sock. He lifted the Raleigh by the centre of the handlebars and spun the front wheel to check for any wobble. ‘She’ll see me out okay,’ he said admiringly.

  The bike did see him out, and it wasn’t even a close thing, because Tansley was hit by a truck one winter evening when he was biki
ng home in the half dark from his job at the gasworks. He was one day in hospital and then he died. My father said he talked about nothing but locomotives before he died. It seems that as a young man he worked in the railway workshops.

  Because my father was both a neighbour and a returned soldier, and Tansley didn’t have any family as far as anybody knew, he helped clear out the shed and was a pallbearer. There wasn’t any money to speak of in the shed, and no record of a bank account. Someone at the RSA said Tansley used to send all his money in postal notes to Italy, but there are always those stories, aren’t there? And how much money do you make as gasworks caretaker anyway?

  The town and the RSA didn’t care about Tansley’s trade, or his lack of savings. The community hadn’t forgotten Mr Tansley had won a medal in its service, and so his death deserved to be marked with respect. There were plenty of contributions to do the right thing by him, and the long piece in the paper gave him the rank of sergeant, made no mention of the court martial, and published the citation in full for his military medal. He’d rushed a machine-gun post after its fire had killed two of his mates.

  At the funeral Norman Beal of the Loan and Mercantile spoke, and Mr Lineen the dentist who had the other medal in town — the military cross, which was the officers’ version of Mr Tansley’s medal, my father said. There was a bugler, and it took place in the special RSA part of the cemetery. It all seemed a long way from the old man in a singlet and hanging braces shaving himself outside his shed with a cut-throat razor, or pissing into the river as he debated the day’s weather with himself, or setting off on the Raleigh with his lunch box on the carrier and a bottle of cold tea in a sock.

  Wake Up Call

  Hector Jansen came regularly to Singapore on business. He had his own familiar track through it, but all else remained totally foreign. He knew Changi airport well, how to get to the taxis quickly, how to use Andrew Shih’s bank for a decent rate of exchange. He knew several downtown hotels close to the Soong Corporation building. He knew the zoo and Sentosa Island for snatches of relative privacy and the feel of grass beneath his feet rather than concrete. He knew a couple of escort agencies recommended by Andrew Shih. If he kept to his track in the city he seemed quite adept there, but he realised how superficial and restricted his experience was, and that the only thing of significance he had gained over all his visits was some personal credibility with Andrew Shih, and Mr Liang and Mr Yuan-jen at Soong.