Carnival Sky (18 page)

‘How soon do you think you’ll have to go back to Wellington?’ he called to his sister, but she had closed the door, and made no answer, though he could see her through the window, smiling and talking with their mother as in happier times, the electric light casting a yellow glow towards him.

HIS FATHER HAD BEEN A BUSY MAN,
accustomed to an adult world of business responsibility, and in demand by organisations of various kinds whose officials often lacked confidence in financial matters. He assisted a few from a sense of duty, but refused to become involved with local government, saying his clients expected him to be politically
impartial. He suffered the tedium and trivial aggrandisement of committees, and his reward was the idiosyncrasy of human nature they displayed. Sheff and Georgie had become accustomed to the stories he told Belize at the table, and even then realised he allowed in them an element of theatre normally repressed. Fisticuffs after the AGM, moral turpitude at the highest level, Mrs Warren locking herself in the loo, Mr Brown wearing a shirt identified by a food stain at five consecutive meetings. Warwick never revealed much concerning the business of his clients, but felt free to exploit his community service.

WARWICK TURNED YELLOW, even the whites of his eyes, and although his appetite dwindled still more, his hands and feet became puffy. Sheff helped him to piss into a metal pannikin because he found it a struggle to go to the lavatory. The urine was startlingly dark and stank. ‘What the hell’s happening?’ Sheff asked Georgie.

‘Jaundice,’ she said. ‘The liver and kidneys are giving up because of the cancer. His blood’s full of toxins that affect the brain. That’s why he’s coming out with some of the strange stuff about dead people, and places he hasn’t been to for yonks, or not at all. Make sure you don’t contradict any of it. Just go along with everything he says.’

‘The swelling’s water retention, is it?’

‘Oedema, yes. He’ll sleep more and more, provided he’s pain-free, or sedated,’ she said.

‘But he’s not pain-free. He’s in agony some of the bloody time. You and Andrew have to do more. You’ve got to up the ante with the syringe driver so that he can give himself as much relief as he wants. You wouldn’t let a dog die the way Dad’s suffering.’

‘I’m going to the hospital to talk about it all after lunch,’ Georgie said.

She did, and that evening Andrew North called as he’d promised, wearing a suit as he always did. He came with his pleasant, nodding
smile, and slightly formal sympathy that was nevertheless sincere. In the presence of other family members there was no challenge, or disagreement, between the two doctors, but Sheff was aware of a little niggle between them when they stood talking in the hall after seeing Warwick. The words were indistinct, but the tone unmistakable. Once Andrew had gone, Georgie came back inside, lifted her eyes in exasperation when only Sheff could see, but said nothing in their mother’s presence. Later when they were alone, Sheff asked Georgie what the doctor’s opinion was. ‘You couldn’t get anyone more caring and professional, but he’s not a great one for drastic intervention,’ she said.

‘For Christ’s sake. Relief of pain’s a duty, isn’t it?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Georgie, ‘but it’s a judgement call in the end. Anyway, I’m going in to sit with Dad for a while. I won’t drink in front of him, but I could do with something later. Why don’t you get one of his good reds from the shed. There’s no use saving anything up, is there?’

Warwick had liked to talk of his cellar, but it was just the two deep cupboards at the end of the storage area of the double garage, and close to the bench on which he had his stone-polishing tumbler. The wine was in the dark, out of the worst of the heat, but the vibration must have been detrimental. Sheff reached far into the racks and brought out bottles that he held to the light to identify. Some had tags tied to their necks on which his father had written description, or provenance – ‘Gold medal winner Melbourne 2001’, or ‘Gift from golf club committee’. One was in a white, polystyrene sarcophagus on which Warwick had written with a free hand: ‘$86 will cellar twelve plus years’. Another, an esteemed local pinot noir, had ‘From Atticus’ written on the label. In its incomplete, but poignant way, the shed wine collection was a glass diary of aspects of his life. Sheff took inside just a modest Australian shiraz. What cause could there be for celebration?

Belize had been persuaded to go to bridge, and brother and sister sat together to talk and drink. They had come home together much as
strangers, but were drawing close. ‘I never asked you why you chose medicine,’ said Sheff.

‘Because it was hard and I wanted to show I could do it. Because it could take me anywhere in the world, and because Mum was so keen for me to be a doctor.’

‘I didn’t know that. Dad would’ve been the most interested I would’ve thought.’

‘He backed whatever I chose,’ said Georgie. ‘I think Mum liked the idea of a doctor in the family – not in case of illness, but the distinction of it.’

‘And does it have distinction?’

‘As a matter of fact, I think it has. So many of the professions have gone backwards in people’s opinion – lawyers, teachers, clergymen, even accountants like Dad – but doctors are still up there. Aren’t they? Maybe I’m arrogant and wrong. Anyway, I think Mum was thinking of the spin-off for her as much as me.’ Georgie smiled, knowing her brother would understand. ‘No, I don’t mean that, of course.’ She rose from her chair, went into the hall to listen a moment, then came back and poured more wine.

‘Do you like it?’ Sheff asked.

‘Medicine?’

‘Yeah. Do you like what you do?’

‘Most of the time. There’s a lot of gratitude. I hadn’t thought about that beforehand, but it becomes just as important as the money. You feel people appreciate what you do, the skills you have. It’s oddly empowering. A few people take their anger, or fear, out on you, but I’ve not had that much. The workload is the worst thing – so hard to say no when the need is there, but Christ, you just have to get time away from it, too. Not everything’s about sickness. Not everything’s even about recovery.’

‘A lot of people die, though. That must be tough,’ said Sheff.

‘You do the best you can. Sometimes you know the patient’s going to die despite your treatment, but you can help the manner of it.
Death isn’t the worst thing that can happen.’

‘It’s not?’

‘It’s the dying that you can have a measure of influence over. Most people I see are more afraid of dying than death.’

Sheff had seen three dead people, all at different times and in different circumstances. His grandfather had been available at the undertaker’s for relatives to view. Sheff was in his second university year and went in to see the old man from curiosity, rather than grief, or abundant affection. At eighteen he felt that death was just an oddity, a minor risk, rather than his own destination. The shirt and tie were very loose around his grandfather’s neck, and the post-mortem grooming had given him an expression of alert satisfaction quite foreign to his nature: as if he had been surprised by a compliment, but quite chuffed all the same.

The second body was that of a Chinese man struck by a car in Leighton Road, Hong Kong. Sheff and Lucy heard the sound of the brakes as they walked single file on the crowded footpath, and most people continued walking even though the man lay close to the gutter. He was a poor man in a few worn clothes of the same drab, faded grey, and what could be seen of his skin was grey also, rather than yellow. His thin sandals had been knocked from his feet by the impact, and the soles of his feet were heavily wrinkled. There was no sign of blood. Although he’d been alive only minutes before, he looked as if he’d been dead for a long time, except that the body was still relaxed and soft on the hard surface of the road. Two policemen appeared almost immediately and stood by the body without disturbing it. Lucy had walked on quickly, and Sheff had soon followed, both of them hemmed in by the crush of living people among whom they were conspicuously foreigners.

Charlotte’s death was different, not something observed that came and passed as external experience. Some part of Sheff followed her and never returned. He’d come into the nursery room expecting she would be awake after the afternoon nap. To be the parent who picked her up
was a weekend privilege. In the dim, curtained room he looked down from above the cot for her smile, perhaps the upraised arms as she recognised him, but there was merely a dollish and supine anonymity. It was a memory he avoided when he was able, superimposing by conscious effort the many joyful recollections of her, but it was always waiting, always the last card in the pack. Charlotte had been gifted to them and then taken away, and nothing could be done, nothing forgotten, nothing regained.

SHEFF’S VIEW OF HIS FATHER
was sometimes brought into question by the opinion of others, and with that came the realisation of ambiguity. A mother, or father, is more than a parent, has relationships that engage quite different qualities and aspirations. When adult himself, Sheff understood that to see his father purely through the prism of his own memories was to license both distortion and reduction.

Aunt Cass’s husband, who was always obliging and attentive to others, once told Sheff that his father wasn’t easy company. ‘Not a hell of a lot of small talk with your dad, is there? When I’m alone with him I feel this pressure to say something to fill the silence, and if it’s not significant enough for a reply, he’ll just smile, or puff his cheeks out in the way he does. It’s as if we’re in a meeting and he’s waiting for me to come to the point.’

‘IS THE TUMBLER GOING?’ his father asked, eyes fixed on the ceiling.

‘No,’ said Sheff. ‘It hasn’t been going for ages.’

‘But I hear it.’

‘Well, I’ll check later, but I don’t think so.’ Sheff knew the gem-stone tumbler in the garage hadn’t been used for many weeks. Warwick’s interest in polished stones was strong, but a comparatively recent hobby compared with golf. When Sheff and Georgie were young their father had shown no lapidary enthusiasm, but on more recent visits as adults they had become accustomed to the bowls of glistening rose quartz, amethyst, jasper, obsidian, petrified wood and blue lace agate, and the faint persistent sound of the tumbler from the garage workshop, on and on and on, twenty-four hours a day for days on end. The house had begun to fill up with their father’s displays, until Belize put her foot down and restricted him to one large bowl of his all-time favourites, as a talking point, which sat by the wide living room window to catch the light. The bowl had been moved into the sickroom with him. What was its source, this interest late in life, seemingly disconnected to anything they knew about him? What aspiration did it represent, or disappointment assuage?

‘It’s in the polish phase,’ said his father. ‘I can tell by the sound.’

‘We’ll let it run then. That’s okay.’ There was no purpose in insisting on reality.

‘I can’t remember what I had in it. Tiger eye maybe, or pounamu. I’m just not sure. I’ll have written down the time it went in.’

‘There’ll be some beautiful stuff for sure,’ said Sheff. Such lies were a small offering.

‘I remember being in the train on the way to Pisa from Genoa, and we were passing close to the famous marble quarries at Carrara, and there were piles of the stone close to the tracks ready to be loaded. It was very cold, which seemed unusual to me, and the marble stacks were white with frost.’ Warwick was so animated by the recollection that he raised his head, attempting to catch his son’s eye. ‘Michelangelo used it, and the Romans before him,’ he said. ‘And, and, the statue on our own war memorial here in Alex, now there’s a thing.’ Enthusiasm over, his head fell back to the pillow.

‘Must be the best stuff then.’ Sheff tried to give his voice a matching involvement. Everything flowed together and he was unsure of the time, even of the day.

‘The leaning tower was disappointing, and we weren’t allowed in it, but I can still see those stacks of Calamari marble blocks with the early sun glinting on the frost.’

‘Carrara.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ said Sheff. What the hell did it matter, marble blocks, or squid rings, when you were dying? Correction served no purpose. ‘What was it you got out of it?’

‘The European trips?’

‘No, the tumbling stones thing. What is it that grabbed you about that?’

Warwick didn’t answer for a time, as if he thought it a needless question, or maybe one that had too many answers. ‘I liked the transformation,’ he said finally. ‘Starting with something you kicked with your boot, visualising the inner thing, and then, if you were lucky, seeing the gradual release of completely different colours and contours.’ Such a considerable sentence was demanding for him.
His voice wavered, and afterwards he coughed. Sheff looked at the bowl of polished stones not far from the bed. They weren’t placed to advantage, but still had a layered and visceral gleam.

‘And these ones are your favourites?’ he said.

‘Belize got sick of stones everywhere, and the noise as well. I can see why, but when I was sitting by the window and that bowl was there, sometimes the sun would strike just right and make a sudden blaze. Just like a carnival sky.’ Warwick lay quiet for some time, and then he said, ‘When’s Georgie coming in to see me?’ His stare had gone back to the ceiling.

‘Soon,’ said Sheff meekly. ‘She’ll be in soon.’

Later, Sheff washed his father. The fiddly disengagement of the syringe driver was the worst thing. After that the easiest way was to sit him on a small wooden stool within the shower cubicle, let the warm water dribble on him, flannel him with liquid soap. Warwick didn’t complain, but nakedness diminished him even further: the sparseness of his hair emphasised when wet, acorn penis and dark scrotum, the flabby, yellow chest although he had become thin. The nails of both big toes were thick and darkened, like pieces of tusk, and the discolouration ran well back towards the cuticles. Later, Georgie would tell her brother that a fungal infection was the cause, and one very resistant to treatment. Sheff remembered his father in terms of a full integration of body and spirit, but if he’d once been enshrined in his body, he’d certainly ended by being imprisoned there.

Somewhere Sheff had read that by the time you die, your body contains not one cell that you were born with, all having been replaced in the process of natural renewal so that the original physical self is gradually lost, and each cell duplication is a little less efficient than the last, like successively less legible photocopies. Surely deep in the heaviest bone, though, would be something immutable? It was a question his father would have enjoyed in better times, but after his shower he was tired, and lay in fresh sheets without talking, although looking sometimes at his son, and sometimes wrinkling his face as if
in reaction to a strong smell. ‘Drybread,’ he said finally and put his hand on Sheff’s arm as if to transfer in that way the relevance and recollections he lacked the energy to express otherwise. Sheff knew he wasn’t talking of food, but the long-abandoned mining settlement in the Manuherikia Valley.

Before Sheff had left for university, he and Warwick had visited the small cemetery there: a huddle of graves roughly fenced-off in a long, sloping paddock and with a few shattered trees surrounding it. Not a building in sight, but the rough pasture and the line of the Dunstan Range rising behind. In Warwick’s family was the story of a Davy jailed as one of a group of near-starving miners who held up and robbed a supply wagon in the 1860s, and who soon after drowned and was buried at Drybread. Nothing had been found in the newspaper records, and no Davy could be made out on the worn gravestones in that quiet, isolated place.

At the age of seventeen, Sheff had little interest in family history, and while Warwick inspected each headstone, or wooden cross, he’d wandered off to the brow of the paddock to see if there was any sign of the old sluicings. He took little notice of a small mob of Hereford cattle close by until one detached itself and came trotting towards him with increasing truculence. ‘Just stand still, Sheff,’ his father had called, but then he wasn’t close as Sheff was, nor directly in line, nor able to hear the stentorian breathing of the beast. Sheff had run, and had been struck down from behind before he got far. The impact was flat and hard: he felt no horns although the steer possessed them.

It then stood irresolute until Warwick came and drove it off. It hadn’t been an especially sizeable animal, but whenever Sheff told the story afterwards in his father’s absence, it became a great, maroon bull, not a shitty-arsed steer.

Maybe that was the incident his father wished to evoke, maybe by the mention of Drybread he wanted rather to summon the bygone Davy who had been starving there, and was buried there, at least in the family folklore. Sheff had no opportunity to ask. Warwick had fallen
asleep, his sparse hair still damp from the shower, and his stubble the colour of cigarette ash. Sheff gently took his father’s hand from his own arm, laid it on the bed, and went out of the sickroom.

Sheff had a nosebleed late that night. He woke just beforehand with a tingling feeling in his nostrils, and had time to sit up before the small, soft flow began. He used the sleeve of his pyjamas to save the sheets, and sat with his nose gently pinched between thumb and forefinger. The bleeding wasn’t great and was soon over. He could think of no cause. Maybe in his sleep he dealt with his face roughly. Maybe he should ask Georgie for advice again, check his blood pressure, or his sinuses. Maybe a stroke, or heart attack, was imminent. Things were always worse in the dark. After a few minutes he got out of bed and went quietly to the bathroom, then put his top in the laundry and returned to his room. He made no check on his father because he was afraid he might be lying alone and in pain. A cowardice that arose from helplessness.

HIS FATHER HAD A DIFFERENT SMELL
before he got sick: the smell of a fit, clean man. It was still there in the wardrobe on the clothes he no longer wore. It was more personal even than the heavier fragrance of a woman’s closet, because it was unalloyed by powder, or perfume. To open his father’s wardrobe was more poignant for Sheff than any photograph of Warwick in his prime. The faint, familiar smell evoked an almost atavistic conviction of security, benevolence and love.