Owen Marshall Selected Stories

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  ‘How’s it looking?’ Jansen said.

  ‘Is excellent,’ she said.

  His room had a television on a swivel bracket, but he didn’t turn it on, although he knew there were English-speaking channels. There was also a remote, which dimmed the light in the room, and he used that until there was a soft, half darkness. Activity in the corridor outside decreased as the night went on, and Jansen lay on top of the bed with the air-conditioning at maximum coolness. The pain in his stomach was somehow the pain of recovery, and not the fearsome thing he’d experienced in the hotel room — was it two, or three, days ago? He had not the slightest inclination to dwell on the Soong talks, or Andrew Shih and Mervyn. Thoughts about his boyhood, his time at university, his two and half years in Canada were insistent and clear. It’s having the scare with the operation and everything, he told himself in the soft dimness. He’d heard others talk about the effects of such a shock: the reassessment of your life. That’s what it was.

  Until he’d gone to Canada he’d played a lot of badminton, represented his province even, but he’d never picked it up again on his return. His job had early begun to push other things from his life. In his mind’s eye he saw the shuttlecock in a perfect arch, and his quick, athletic leap to meet it. He remembered a men’s double partner who used to bite his own arm to increase concentration, and a mixed doubles one as expert in blasphemy as in the game, despite her schoolgirl looks. He was listening to the whispering of the air-conditioning and trying to remember her full name when Samantha rang. She wasn’t sure of the time over there, she said, and hoped she hadn’t woken him. Jansen was more interested in her health than his own. ‘Oh, Dad, stop worrying about me. I’m pregnant, not sick. I wanted to go over to Mum’s, but she says she’s fine. Concentrate on getting better yourself, for goodness sake. What’s the latest from the doc?’ As he reassured his daughter, Jansen wanted to talk about her as a child: the years when the four of them were the corners of the family square, and almost everything was shared. He’d experienced a measure of power and responsibility in business, but not with the gratification of love that accompanied them in fatherhood. He just avoided any sentimental mention of that by a switch to badminton, which seemed even to him somewhat random.

  ‘I used to play badminton a lot, Sam. Did you know that?’

  ‘I remember some of your racquets we used to play with as kids. They had very narrow metal shafts, didn’t they?’

  ‘That’s them. It was my main sport before I went to Canada, and then for some reason I gave it away. Busy, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, you won’t be playing badminton for a while now. Are you okay? Are you sure you don’t want Mum or Greg to fly over?’

  ‘I’ll be home in no time,’ said Jansen.

  ‘You’re not being bothered with any business stuff while you’re in hospital are you?’

  ‘None at all.’

  Jansen dozed for a while after his daughter’s call and was woken by the slide of his cellphone from his relaxed hand onto his neck. He recognised his surroundings immediately; was not at all disorientated. Mervyn at the Sheraton would be still working almost for sure, but Jansen had no curiosity about that.

  Other things had gained in importance since his illness. Sixty-four was an age at which it seemed some balance began to tip, triggered by the failure of his digestion. His father had been chief economist for a bank, but in retirement spent all his time and energy, and a good deal of money, in ridding offshore islands of rats so that native bird species would have a better chance. In old age he derided the profession in which he’d spent most of his life, and which had provided well for him. Economics is a dead language and smells of it, he told his son. And later, when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, he reminded Jansen that old age rarely comes alone. Hector Jansen had loved his father, his mother too, and in thinking of them with a tenderness that surprised him, he drifted off to sleep in the darkened and private room of the Catholic hospital in Singapore.

  His pain, if anything, was worse the next day, and both his doctors came back to look at him. His temperature was up a bit. The surgeon said that there was a moderate infection and that they’d go back to intravenous feeding and give him antibiotics. ‘It’s a dirty operation once the wall of the duodenum has been perforated,’ he told Jansen. ‘Infections are unfortunately quite a common consequence. You should monitor your own discomfort carefully, and we’ll take another x-ray.’

  ‘Will it keep me here any longer?’ Jansen asked.

  ‘In another twenty-four hours we’ll know how things are,’ the Chinese surgeon said. He was a very thin man, and the skin of his head followed the bone structure so closely that he had a slightly mummified appearance.

  Andrew Shih rang at the end of the day to say that the second day of talks had gone well. He and Mervyn were on their way to informal drinks with Mr Yuan-jen of Soong. The invitation was a good sign. ‘Mervyn did very well again,’ said Andrew. ‘You’d be proud of him. After lunch Mr Hau tong ambushed us with some in-house memos he’d got hold of, setting out retail margins, but Mervyn was hardly ruffled. He’s very well prepared, and has a good rapport with Mr Liang too.’

  ‘That’s great, yeah,’ said Jansen.

  Andrew Shih put Mervyn on, and, during the conversation, Jansen could briefly hear Andrew telling the taxi driver the best way to Mr Yuan-jen’s executive club. Jansen had been there several times himself, and remembered the long veranda festooned with wisteria, and the Second World War photographs behind the bar: the thin British general surrendering to the Japanese, and then later the Japanese officer in his turn handing his sword to the British and Americans.

  ‘How are you, Hector?’

  ‘A bit groggy today,’ said Jansen.

  ‘Maybe I won’t bother you by coming in tonight, then,’ said Mervyn. ‘Let you get a good rest.’

  ‘Andrew says the day went well. Good on you.’

  ‘I think we’re making sound progress. It’s a constructive atmosphere, apart from Mr Hau tong, and Andrew’s really on the button.’

  ‘Maybe I should give Tony a ring,’ said Jansen.

  ‘Actually I’ve done that. I thought I’d better check in. He especially asked about you, wanted me to pass on his best wishes.’

  The circle was closing without him: not with any deliberate exclusion, not with any particular intent, just the pressure of business and the need for the main players to be in direct touch. No one’s indispensable. Commerce is a broad pond and the circles form and reform constantly on its surface. Jansen felt only a slightly cynical relief after the call. He hadn’t felt up to talking business with Mervyn anyway. Isolated and ineffectual because of his illness, Jansen felt only a benign apathy concerning his career. For the first time he saw past his work to some equally worthwhile life beyond. Sixty-four’s not old, not as such, he told himself. He traced with his fingers the perimeter of the dressing on his stomach; massaged gently to test the pain.

  Jansen had a vomiting session in the afternoon, bringing up bile and a little blood. The lesser doctor took out the tubes and asked him to sip a thin, white liquid every ten minutes or so. ‘This will give you a lining,’ he said cheerfully. Jansen saw on the blue name tag that the doctor’s name was Lowe. Without the eminent presence of the surgeon, Jansen was more aware of the individuality of the younger doctor. Dr Lowe was darker than most Chinese, and his face was pock-marked from the eyes down. He had an easy, natural smile that made his face attractive despite his complexion. His voice was deeper than most of his fellows: more European in timbre. ‘A wash is a pleasant thing after the discomfort of vomiting,’ he said. ‘I’ll arrange it immediately, and just ask if you want something for the pain.’

  A male nurse gave Jansen the sponge bath, and recounted his backpacking experiences in Queensland and the Northern Territories. He said the sky was bigger there than in Singapore.

  ‘Has the air-conditioner any cooler setting?’ asked Jansen. The nurse looked at the dials carefully, and
said it didn’t.

  Jansen slept for an hour and woke feeling no worse, but for the first time he had the thought that maybe he would die in Singapore: that the end of business for him would be the end of everything. He was angry with himself for not considering the possibility earlier, for not being more searching in his talks with the doctors. He rang the buzzer — he’d not used it before — and when a nurse came, said that he’d like to see Dr Lowe as soon as possible.

  Dr Lowe came within fifteen minutes, and his smile was untroubled. He sipped from a white cardboard cup, and pulled the one chair closer to Jansen’s bed. ‘So,’ he said, ‘there is something?’

  ‘I’m worse today than yesterday,’ said Jansen.

  ‘Yes, you have an infection as we said, and with that a slight fever. It happens quite frequently with acute admission cases such as your own. The abdominal cavity is difficult to cleanse of all intestinal material.’

  ‘But I’ll recover, right?’ said Jansen.

  The young doctor smiled so broadly there was a slight ripple in the dark, bristly hair above his ears. He leant forward, holding the cup loosely on his lap in both hands. ‘Would you deal in absolutes in a Catholic hospital?’ he said. ‘We must remember our fallibility, but what we can say is that nothing in your condition since the operation changes the opinion that you should make a good recovery. Low level post-op infection is quite common in cases such as yours.’

  ‘You’d say if there was real concern?’ asked Jansen.

  ‘Yes, absolutely,’ replied Dr Lowe. ‘You will go back to the snow of New Zealand certainly, I think. Maybe no skiing for a while, though.’ He stood up and yawned, and shrugged his shoulders right up to his ears a few times to ease the muscle tension of a long day.

  ‘Thanks.’ Jansen wasn’t a skier, and he rarely saw any snow, but why bother to challenge the image that Dr Lowe and the surgeon had of him and his country. Dr Lowe leant over and squeezed Jansen’s wrist quickly, and he paused outside the door again to look back through the window and wave, as he had when leaving with the surgeon. He had forgotten his cardboard cup, and the small, pale cone of it was left on the flat of the chair.

  Jansen used the dimmer until he was lying in semi-darkness. He still had pain, but accepted it and began to plan the changes he would discuss with his wife. Maybe a trip to begin with — lots of places where he wouldn’t need his laptop, his cellphone or his briefcase, where he could wear shorts and a garish top, and even the trivial administration of meals, travel and accommodation would be left to others. He knew that his response to all that had happened was quite predictable and conventional, but accepted it as authentic nevertheless. He had a wake up call in Singapore, his friends and acquaintances would say: a heart attack, or food poisoning, or something, and nearly died. A mixture of vagueness and exaggeration is typical of such second-hand accounts. And he gave it all away, they’d say, and resigned just like that. Why not, good on him, some would say, while others would consider he wasn’t going to get right to the top anyway, not at his age.

  Maybe his wife was right, he thought. An inner-city apartment with no lawns and the only plants those in pots on a patio that had a view of the harbour. Sam was pregnant, and for the first time he thought not only of her health, but of the child she carried and what part in its life he might play.

  Jansen was surprised to feel tears on his face, but without any sobbing. He put it down to the trauma of his illness. The hospital smell of his private room masked the sour base of recent vomit and his crusted dressing. The waspish whine of scooters was at a distance, and the whisper of the air-conditioning close at hand. Life was fragile and there seemed the beating of wings in the tropical night. Home was the thing: Hector Jansen wanted to go home.

  Buried Lives

  My mother’s brother had a farm on the pale loess clay and limestone of North Otago. It was an average farm concentrating on early lambs for the works, and even during his last years my uncle never received any startling offers for it. Its dry hills weren’t suitable for dairy conversion, and its soils didn’t favour the grapevines that became all the rage in the nearby Waitaki Valley. Yet it was sweet country when it did get rain, and quite free of gorse. The short grassed paddocks in the downs were rilled with sheep tracks: occasional outcrops of limestone were the grey of cigar ash. Almost always there was above it an unclouded egg-blue sky and, although only landscape was visible, in the evenings skeins of seagulls beat their way towards the sea.

  I visited a few times as a boy, but I lived there only once for fourteen months after I had a breakdown in my third year at university. My mother preferred to call it a crisis, my father told people I’d hit a rough patch, my mates probably reckoned I’d flunked out as a pothead. I had a breakdown, no matter what you chose to call it. It happened because of a relationship I had with a flatmate and his twin sister. I was getting stoned on prime West Coast shit a lot too. It sounds like a soap opera, I know, but the pain, guilt and confusion of it all finally brought me to an emotional standstill, and I could barely remember to eat, to close the door when I went to the lavatory, or attend the lectures for which I’d enrolled. I felt I lived my life on the bottom of one of those great, sea aquariums with species foreign to me passing as dim shapes soundlessly, and with their own fixed purpose, overhead.

  Even in that place, however, I had a conviction that I didn’t want any formal treatment — no psychiatrists, no counsellors, no people unknown to me peering and mouthing through the thick glass of my isolation. Maybe a complete change then, my mother suggested, trying to keep anxiety from her voice, and she thought of her brother’s farm amid the quiet hills of North Otago. My father, who loved space and solitude, and had been denied both by his career most of his life, was full of supportive agreement. The country was ideal for recovering from a rough patch, he thought, and with typical generosity he offered to buy me a second-hand car so that I could travel between home and farm whenever I liked.

  Uncle Cliff and Aunt Sonia were contented people in whose home depression was an unfamiliar visitor. Sonia was the bright and vocal partner, Cliff a stubby, sunburnt man who thought the best of people. They had two daughters of effortless achievement. Evie had already qualified as a doctor when I went to live at the farm; Samantha was completing her architectural degree, and came home a few times while I was there, making me feel even more a failure in comparison, but through no intention of hers.

  I was welcomed in the wooden, red-roofed farmhouse and given Evie’s room, which was a chrysalis she had discarded, but still exact to the life she had led at home. Blue and yellow banded curtains, a tray of dwarf bottles of perfumes, lotions and nail polishes on the dressing table, sellotape marks on the painted walls where her posters had been, and on the kitset bookcase her gymnastic and debating trophies — including a small greenstone plinth for best summing up at the South Island inter-secondary school championships. Most of the books were from Evie’s childhood, which wasn’t all that long ago, but some, less read and more dignified, were prizes she had won at high school: The Works of Jane Austen published by Spring Books, History of Rome by M. Cary, and a hardcover Moby Dick. Clothing she no longer needed remained folded in the drawers and hanging in the wardrobe, all with a faint, girlish fragrance. At various times and in flagrant abuse of her privacy I examined all of Evie’s life left behind: even the seven letters from Shane Tomlinson which were tied in a small bundle with dental floss, and hidden under a pile of notes for scholarship biology. In the sixth form she had the best legs in the world according to Shane.

  Dr Evie’s room spoke of normality, cleanliness and achievement. It had no sign of the trivial sordidness of my own life, and in the months I inhabited it I felt like a Visigoth camped in a Roman villa. Even my male clothes and large footwear seemed uncouth and out of place. I masturbated seldom and with great furtiveness, aware of the disgust in the expressions of Evie’s dolls ranged behind the trophies. In a strange but powerful way I associated Samantha and Evie and their white, girlish
rooms, with Rebecca, twin sister of Richard, and a good part of the reason that I was in my uncle’s house at all surrounded by a specific family folklore to which I did not belong. ‘What shall we do that’s terrible?’ Rebecca would say when we’d been drinking, or smoking shit, or just because lectures were over for the week, and by terrible she meant some excess she could laugh at. How different she was from my cousins, yet similar in the ease with which she achieved those things she wanted.

  Outside the house was completely different: I belonged there from the first. The yards lay down the slope from the farmhouse, and on the south and west sides were windbreaks of pine and macrocarpa which reached over the implement sheds, the dog cages and the disused concrete dip. The downs rose and fell beyond with paddocks worn to bare dirt at each gateway, and the sheep tracks straggling away over the short, brown pasture. Some of the lower land would be green with lucerne, or in season the low, paler foliage of turnips and chou. From the top hill paddocks you couldn’t see the red roof of the farmhouse, or any neighbouring houses, just the grassed hills tumbling towards the Waitaki and back towards the mountains. When I got the shakes, or felt the foreign shapes of the aquarium too oppressive, or Aunt Sonia’s cheerful solicitude became too contrary to my own apathy, then I would have a long run, or let out one of the dogs and walk up to the back of the farm. The dogs enjoyed the release, but they never obeyed me. It was only occasionally that I did something useful there — rescued a cast sheep perhaps, or secured a bit of fence washed out in the gully, but Uncle Cliff always thanked me, as if he had sent me there expressly himself. It was a landscape of masculine reticence, which was something of a comfort: perhaps it was the extension of my uncle’s temperament beyond himself.