Carnival Sky (14 page)

‘Remember the Painter place back there?’ said Sheff. ‘He’ll be well gone by now, the old guy. Remember I had that job there in the holidays?’ But Warwick didn’t reply, and it had too small a place in their past to interest Belize and Georgie. Old man Painter had taken the thin cigarette stub carefully from his mouth in case it had stuck to his lip. He had lit it and drawn a slow lungful. He had handed over the cheque with a due sense of occasion.

‘Well, son,’ he’d said, ‘just don’t spend it all at once.’

CHARLOTTE HAD RESISTED ANYTHING
being put on her feet, and was diligent in removing what was forced on her. Booties were kicked off, and later shoes and socks discarded no matter how cold it was. She would pull her foot close to her face and worry at laces, or Velcro straps, until she had them undone. Sheff had been concerned about it. ‘Why won’t she keep anything on?’ he said.

‘Because she has such beautiful feet,’ said Lucy.

SHEFF HAD RARELY been as attentive to his father as he was when Warwick was dying. As a child his parents were the magnetic poles of his life, but in adolescence he’d begun to resist the attraction, and in adulthood he largely forgot it in the immediacy of his own affairs. Now he sat for hours with Warwick, taking his turn with Georgie and his mother to fill up the day, and sometimes night. And it was more than just a duty. During the good patches there was time to tease out conversation without concern for practical value. Indulgence is granted to the dying. One hot afternoon when distant thunder rumbled beyond the open window of the sickroom, they talked of first memories.

‘Did you ever meet Elaine Pettigrew?’ asked Warwick, after they had counted down the interval between a lightning flash and the thunder that followed.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Sheff.

‘She was in the office for years.’

‘No, can’t place her.’

‘Well, anyway, she reckoned she could recall events from the time she was in the pushchair. A white dog came and licked her leg, she said, and she remembered the Chinese fruiterer weighing potatoes in scales that hung from the ceiling, and the red face of her newly born brother brought home when she was two. Heaps of stuff, and
specifically tied to chronological markers. Whereas I can’t think of much that happened at all before I was five, and not a lot afterwards for a couple of years.’

‘I guess your family repeat things about you, and after a while you come to believe that you recall them yourself. That’s part of it,’ said Sheff. ‘Like the story that I went down to the library to see if it was open, found it was and came back home to get the books to return. Conscious memory doesn’t kick in for most of us until we’re at school. The earliest things are often seared in by fear, or oddity, like the dog licking her leg. Imagine how gigantic an ordinary dog would seem to a baby.’

‘So what’s the first thing you can remember?’ his father asked him, shifting his head on the propped pillows so that the tendons flexed like puppet strings beneath the slack skin of his neck.

‘The cupboard under the sink. I could open it and get inside with the pots and tin trays. The water pipes twisted down in the darkness at the back like petrified worms, and there was a smell of damp wood, dishwashing liquid, mould, and the yellow contact on the shelves. Confined spaces give you a sense of security when you’re really little, even if they stink.’

‘Yes, you’d turf everything out and bang on things. You were a little bugger for opening every door, cupboard and drawer you could. You’d get stuck in all sorts of places and howl until you were rescued, and then do it again. Belize always said –’ Instead of finishing his sentence, Warwick stretched his head up and to the side, opened his mouth, held the pose for a moment, then relaxed back.

‘Is it worse today?’ asked Sheff.

‘No worse,’ his father said. ‘It’s okay.’

‘I’m sorry.’ For a moment Sheff felt an urge to cry, but it passed as a gust and he was okay again. If his father could bear approaching death, then a son should be able to witness it without tears. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘what’s yours? Your first clear memory, I mean.’

‘The clock falling off.’

‘Off what?’

‘Off the kitchen shelf. We had a clock with a large wooden case the colour of chocolate, and my father used to put letters behind it, bills and things that needed attention later, and they gradually pushed the clock closer to the edge. It must have been a summer tea time, because I remember my father’s sleeve was rolled up as he reached to push an envelope behind it. And it was the last straw. The whole bloody thing came crashing down, smashing the glass face and making a hell of a noise, and some of the papers fluttered down. Mum cried out with the shock of it. The case splintered, and the mechanism continued to jangle for a second or two. To me it seemed like the end of the world.’

‘How old were you?’

‘I was on an ordinary kitchen chair, but I had a cushion, so no more than four, I reckon. We left that house before I went to school. Oddly enough, I’ve no recollection of how Dad took it, but I can still hear Mum’s shriek, and the little jangling noise from the wreckage when everything else was still.’

‘Well, it’s a long time ago now, Dad.’

‘Strange, though. I can see exactly how my father’s white shirtsleeve was turned up on his arm that summer evening, yet years of more important stuff since has vanished.’

Dark, massive clouds tumbled before the sun so that the room dimmed suddenly and then lit up again richly, and thunder growled a long way off. And there were wind gusts that flounced the bushes. Sheff went to the window and closed it. ‘How will you remember me?’ his father asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘My father was a miser. That’s what I recall most of all,’ said Warwick. ‘He was good to us, but he had a pathological fear of poverty. It must have been living through the Depression. He had to work on the roads, and rabbits were the only meat they ever had, he said. He never got over those days no matter what happened. He lived and
died a miser. He hated a light on in an empty room, or to buy food for a cat. He never put more fuel in the car than was necessary for the immediate trip. I think he was afraid of evaporation. He would get the very last out of a tin of boot polish until the bottom itself had a shine, and he would force himself to eat a green rind of cheese, or a rotten banana, rather than throw it out.’

‘Well, maybe we forget how tough times were in the thirties.’

‘I remember him in the garage with a hammer straightening used nails, and nothing pleased him more than to find a coin on the road, or a fizz bottle to cash in. He tried to resole our shoes himself, and when finally he had to let them go he would strip out the laces to tie up the tomatoes. Jesus.’

‘Well, the Depression, as you say.’

‘He was still the same twenty-five years later – all his life in fact. I made up my mind I wasn’t going to live like that.’

‘And you haven’t,’ said Sheff. ‘You gave us every opportunity. The difference, though, was that you had a professional career in good times. Anyway, I don’t think Grandad was that bad.’

‘You hear about retail therapy now, well, he would get a real buzz from not spending. Nothing gave him greater satisfaction than deferring expenditure, or avoiding it. He was a strange man, but a good father in most ways. Gave up drinking to make sure the bills would be paid.’

‘Yeah, well I need to generate some income myself. I said I’d do some pieces for the paper and I’ve done bugger-all.’

‘What sort of stuff are you looking for?’ asked Warwick.

‘Nothing serious. Chris – he’s the editor – is happy for light one-offs about quirky folk doing quirky things. Articles for complacent weekend readers before they get out the lawn mower, or clean the car.’

‘Well what about modern-day gold-diggers?’

‘What gold-diggers?’

‘The Henare brothers just down the road. They still go out
panning and cradling. They know I’m interested in stone polishing and sometimes give me special pieces they’ve come across for the tumbler. They’ve got a good eye. They run possum trap lines as well. There’s a good market for the fur now, and the beggars seem to be everywhere these days.’

‘Sounds just the thing,’ said Sheff. ‘Gold and fur – bound to be a story there.’

While they were talking, Georgie put her head through the doorway and raised her eyebrows in enquiry, unseen by Warwick, then went away reassured.

Sheff had a sense that his father was aware their talks were part of a drawn-out and undeclared farewell, but neither of them wished to acknowledge this. Warwick’s responses became slower, he cradled the morphine syringe driver in its carry bag as a child does a comfort toy, and finally fell asleep, his eyes only partly closed, as his son talked of the difficulties faced by newspapers in competition with the internet and junk mail. There was a catch in Warwick’s breath occasionally, as if he were suddenly immersed in cold water, or pressure were applied to a sore spot. How vulnerable he looked, how physically sunken and reduced, with the cartilage of his nose pressed white against the skin, and a caterpillar disarray of tufted eyebrows. He was shrinking day by day, as if as his substance reduced the carapace contracted. Death by rack and reduction, until there might be little to deliver to the grave.

‘Okay, Dad?’ Sheff said, as a check his father wouldn’t notice if he left. Warwick’s left arm lay awkwardly, and Sheff moved it onto the blanket over his father’s chest, noticing that between the skin and bone on the back of the hand were just the dark, raised and twisted veins, and no flesh at all. A growl of thunder startled him, but Warwick was oblivious. Everyone comes to an end, Sheff told himself: rationality to hold himself in. Thirty years or so, if averages held, and it would be his turn. But he had no son and no daughter to usher him out, and that struck him with an unexpected force of disappointment.
He was glad Warwick had told him about the clock falling – that first memory of the shattering noise, then the quivering sound of the spring, the shirtsleeve half turned on an arm long at rest that had belonged to Sheff’s grandfather, the miser. He could remember little of his father’s parents apart from the coloured jubes his grandmother would bring on rare visits, and how his grandfather would stand him in the doorway and mark above his head in pencil. ‘You’ll get height from the Claussens,’ he’d said, resting his hand like a cap on Sheff’s fair hair. ‘Norwegian big feet and hands, too.’

In the dining room, Georgie and his mother sat together, watching the piled, dark thunder clouds slowly topple, but the lightning had passed. It was uncommon weather for Central. They turned towards Sheff when he came to join them. ‘He’s asleep,’ he told them.

‘Bombed out on the pump,’ said Belize.

‘Not hurting, anyway,’ said Sheff. ‘That’s all that matters.’

‘What were the two of you on about all that time?’ said his mother.

‘Stuff about Grandad mainly. He seemed to enjoy casting back.’

Nothing more was said. Warwick’s restfulness, whether induced or not, had spread to them, and they were all still, if not relaxed. Waiting had become their main occupation. Waiting, yet avoiding talk of the reason for it. The clouds, heat, the juxtaposition of the three of them sitting again in the familiar place.

‘Ah, well,’ murmured Belize.

‘What’s that?’ asked Georgie.

‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’ Although on such a large scale, the clouds seemed to be circling just this one home, and the effect was mildly hypnotic so that Sheff, Georgie and their mother lolled a little in the heat and conversation became elliptical.

‘Did I tell you Simon Pask phoned?’ said Belize after a while. He was Warwick’s partner in the accountancy firm. ‘And did you know Mr Risman died?’ continued Belize.

‘Risman from school?’ asked Georgie.

‘Yes,’ said their mother. ‘After his wife went, he shifted to Tekapo
and spent most of his time fishing. They found the dinghy drifting one hot, calm day, but there wasn’t a body.’

‘He was so short,’ said Georgie. ‘Smaller than most of us.’

Risman had taught science, and would leave the classroom at least once each period and stand in the corner of the verandah and have a fag, holding it in the cup of his hand so that it wasn’t easily seen. Very occasionally in the summer he came to school in walk shorts and long socks, so that just his knees were exposed, wrinkled and with a tinge of yellow like a parsnip. He wrote on Sheff’s sixth form report that he must try harder, and Warwick had admonished Sheff, who said complacently that he could pass most subjects without swotting. ‘So can the majority in the world,’ Warwick had said mildly. ‘More important to think about what you could manage if you did some work. However, if you want to take pride in being lazy, that’ll have its natural consequences. Your sister seems to have got past that already.’ He’d said little more about Sheff’s report, and gone on to give Georgie brief, considered and justified praise for her own.

At the time Sheff had assumed adolescent indifference, but he worked harder the next year. The scene was plain in his mind: the white tablecloth still spread although clear of dishes, the thin report books with firm, red covers, and a close heat within the room just as it was in the present, though without thunder clouds. Warwick, Belize and Georgie had all been there, but would surely have forgotten long ago. Maybe the report books had been burnt, maybe they lay stained and worn in the top cupboard, in a cardboard box, crammed together with his swimming and life-saving certificates, Georgie’s music and Duke of Edinburgh awards.

So Dinky Risman was drowned, and the summer heat persisted. The thunder seemed over, and with little rain. Sheff was disappointed, for noise and movement might offer some release.

SOME BABIES HATE WATER,
Lucy had told him, but he couldn’t remember their daughter ever crying in the bath. The water intrigued her. She tried to drink it. She was excited at the sight of it. When she sat in the bath with his hand, or Lucy’s, at her back, she would beat the surface with her arms, close her eyes against the splash, and squeal with the pleasure of breaking the world into so many pieces.