Carnival Sky (20 page)

AGAIN THE SICKROOM. Warwick slept, or was otherwise unconscious; Georgie and Sheff sat and quietly talked, Georgie on the chair, her brother on the bed with a forearm resting on the rise their father’s legs made in the bedclothes. It was after lunch, because on the tray was a plate with apple purée and melted ice cream. Little had been eaten. ‘The scar’s more noticeable now,’ said Sheff, and Georgie leant forward a little to see. The small, white crescent on the jaundiced cheek. She dipped a sponge stick in the water glass and moistened Warwick’s dry lips and mouth.

‘Before you came in he was on about selling the house,’ she said. ‘He wanted one of us to buy the other out so it would stay in the family. It was as if Mum didn’t exist. He said both money and water are prone to evaporation.’

‘Maybe he thinks she’s going with him.’

‘Is that meant to be funny?’

‘It’s just that he seems so accustomed to her loyalty.’

‘She’s over four years younger than Dad,’ said Georgie. ‘She’s going to have to make a life without him that may last more than twenty years. I’ve talked to her about it. She’s oddly practical in some –’

‘Seems pretty shell-shocked to me,’ Sheff interrupted. ‘She’ll hardly leave the place.’

‘Well, not while Dad’s here, but she knows that’s not for long.’

‘So then what?’

‘She says she’ll travel. Dad didn’t like to be away from the business for long, but she’d enjoy a decent stint in England, and they used to rave about Portugal. She’s got those cousins hasn’t she, in Somerset and the Isle of Wight? They’ve all been over and stayed here at different times. I met the guy who was qualifying as an engineer. An odd name – Handy, or Candy, or something.’

‘Right,’ said Sheff, who knew nothing of the English cousins. It was both strange and sad to be sitting on his father’s bed, resting a hand on his legs, and talking of a future quite near and certain in which Warwick would have no place, and Belize would travel alone in the world.

‘Remember the great paint disaster?’ Sheff asked his sister after a long silence. It was one of those small, glossed incidents with which families reinforce kinship. Warwick and Belize doing some of the decorating in their new home to save money. He high on a ladder painting the architrave, she kneeling not far away at a skirting board, and Warwick had upset his pot of thick, white paint. Can and contents had come down on his wife. Sheff had heard the commotion from the living room and come running through. He still has an image of his mother with the white paint dripping from her hair and shoulders, and glittering streaks of blood, too, from the gash in her head. Georgie claims to remember also, though she would have been barely five, and maybe her imprint of the drama came from its repetition by others of the family.

‘Yes, poor Mum,’ she said. ‘It’s a marvel she wasn’t knocked out, or worse. And it was ages before she could clean her hair properly because of the wound.’

There was, also, a different category of family knowledge that was never referred to, but that they shared nonetheless, and was part of what bound them together. Belize’s conviction for dangerous driving, for example, and Mrs Souter coming to Sheff’s parents to accuse him of putting his hand under her daughter’s dress. He had,
of course. What boy of fourteen would have let the opportunity pass? Isobel Souter was a girl of considerable beauty and presence of mind. She enjoyed squeezing her knees on boys’ fingers, but allowed nothing more. Sheff knew from others that he was one of several who had given Isobel a hand, but his joy was no less for that. The smoothness, the warmth, the small contractions, their faces still and close as they stood together, although they didn’t look at each other. Sheff could see her eyelashes outlined against the Souters’ blue kitchen cupboard, and her lips drawn back a little to show her tongue. Even when Mrs Souter opened the door, he was unable immediately to move his hand.

Georgie said their mother still had the mark on her scalp from the paint pot. She’d seen it while doing Belize’s hair. It could have been a damn serious thing. ‘She never really wanted to live here. Did you know that?’

‘No,’ said Sheff.

‘Neither did I until just the other day. Well, not how strongly she felt about it. She said she’d wanted to live in the city, Wellington preferably, but Dad was happy here. She didn’t hate it at all, and she’s got close friends and everything, but it wasn’t her first choice, not what she wanted then. But I suppose she realised the business came first.’

Sheff thought of the passing enthusiasms that were so typical of her. For a couple of years she spent much of her free time painting flowers on pale tea sets. She had a jag on restoration of wetland habitats, and one on worm farms. There was a stage in life when the saxophone, inexpertly but persistently played, defined their evenings. When Sheff was at university she took a distance course from Massey on feminist studies, and much later did papers on art history and Italian. She dropped the Italian because one of her fellow students began bothering her by email. She sponsored an African girl. These intense but transient concerns seemed to have left little impression on Belize, or her life, at least externally. The worm farm had subsided into the
compost heap beside it, the one or two remaining hand-painted cups were never used, the saxophone lay in its beautiful, dark leather coffin high in the garage, and the simple letters of gratitude and poignant close shots of Aissa in Burkina Faso were long taken from the fridge. How many more times would Jessica see his mother at bridge, and what would replace it as a spike of interest in her life? Sheff’s knowledge of his parents was based on common experience from just a portion of their lives: a temporary orbit with one side unobserved.

‘So overseas, you reckon?’ said Sheff. ‘I remember she liked the Sydney and Hong Kong trips. She used to make all the arrangements when they went anywhere, so that wouldn’t worry her. She wouldn’t go alone, though, would she?’ But Georgie made no answer. She was asleep on the chair, with her chin tucked in, and her face shadowed by the fall of her dark hair. She’d been bedside for many hours: long before he’d come in. Because she was unaware, Sheff’s scrutiny of her face was more deliberate than at other times. She was a woman of forty-two, of course she was, and yet always he saw his little sister, and usually as she used to be. He was beginning to understand the woman she’d become. She hadn’t put on any make-up. Her face was still pale and youthful, and her teeth so white that he decided she must have had them capped.

As a fourteen-year-old at secondary school she’d persistently relayed his failings there to Warwick and Belize. A passing phase admittedly, but one he’d found so annoying that he retaliated. A Chinese burn for telling that he let down the gym teacher’s tyres, and the destruction of her yellow pencil pouch because of her revelation of his part in writing ‘wanker’ in felt pen on the door of the senior master’s office. Sheff had felt himself entitled to grievance: the code was that what went down at school, stayed at school. And he hadn’t been one of the incorrigibles: just an average pupil with the normal non-specific apathy and resentment that was part of adolescence. After they left school, Sheff and Georgie lived quite separate lives. He went to university in Auckland, and she to Otago to be a doctor.
The heightened years of varsity life weren’t a time to be bothered with family, just the confederacy of friends and the fierce, self-centred impetuosity of youth.

Georgie woke while their father slept on. She opened her eyes without any other movement, seemed immediately alert and gave a smile to acknowledge that she’d dropped off briefly. ‘I was thinking about some of the stuff when we were at school,’ said Sheff. ‘We didn’t get on all that well then, did we?’

‘Most of the time you were a right pain.’

‘And you were a tell-tale.’

‘A couple of years is a generation at school. You’d never recognise me in the grounds. None of us had friends outside our own year group, and now what’s a few years – nothing.’

‘Some senior guys had younger girlfriends,’ said Sheff.

‘That’s different,’ replied Georgie.

‘Did you have a boyfriend after I left?’

‘For a while I went around with Sean Apsley, but nothing serious. He took me to the leavers’ ball. You had to have someone to go with. He never had much to say, but he liked to laugh.’

‘He was an okay guy, wasn’t he? He was keen on singing and drama, I remember.’

‘I’ve never been back to any of the reunions,’ said Georgie. ‘I wouldn’t have minded, but there was never time.’

‘I trashed your pencil case once to pay you back for ratting on me. You were a real sneak and that pissed me off.’

‘You did too.’ Georgie was amused. She reached out and gave him a light punch on the shoulder. Sharing the recollection of sibling squabbles somehow made them feel closer in the present. So they sat together and talked more, shared more, opened up to each other, with Warwick drugged and sleeping by their side.

HIS DAUGHTER WAS BORN
with a good deal of hair. When he first saw her it was slicked down, but still abundant. A few weeks later he was alarmed to find that it was falling out, obvious on the pillow of the bassinet even though light in colour. Sheff wanted a specialist called in, but Lucy said the loss of baby hair was quite common, and quite normal. He wondered how she got to know so much stuff. To please him, however, she checked with the paediatrician, and naturally was justified. ‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ she said. ‘Our little girl’s fine.’

SHEFF STOPPED AT THE USUAL CAFÉ for a flat white, sitting close to the table that he and Jessica had shared on their first outing, and sometimes subsequently. He liked thinking of them together there, and wished her with him again. At that first table a man with large-tread work boots read a newspaper, and rubbed his head while doing so. Sheff hadn’t completed his piece for Chris on the Henare brothers. He wondered if a visit to some of the old diggings might give it a greater sense of immediacy. And he still intended to write an article on the life of the rural vet, based on Jessica’s experience. If she agreed, it would be a welcome opportunity to spend more time with her.

Perhaps, though, he should be more original in his journalism, find a new angle to pitch to Chris. ‘Random Café Lives’, or some such. He would go over and introduce himself to the work-boots man, ask him to talk about his achievements, knockbacks and aspirations. ‘Roulette Lives’ might be a better title. Just people who happen to be present and provide the revelation of everyday existence. There were other patrons who offered possibilities. A tall woman with a bosom as horizontal as a desktop, and beyond her an equally tall man with a lined, simian face, jandals and shorts so loose about his thin, tanned legs that most of his crotch was on view. The world teemed with characters and stories, but Sheff’s curiosity had dulled.
Pain in any form encourages self-absorption.

Preoccupied with his thoughts, Sheff didn’t notice the approach of a youngish woman until she was standing close by his side. He looked up, thinking at first that she was staff, but her expression and stance were unaccommodating. A person inclined to pudginess, she kept herself very erect as if to outstrip the tendency. Cherry lipstick seemed to be her only make-up. She wore dark jeans and a purple top. Sheff smiled, as response to her proximity rather than warmth on her part.

‘You’re Sheff Davy.’ It was a statement not a question.

‘Yes.’

‘Sheff – sounds like a name for a sheepdog. Get in behind, that sort of thing.’

He was confused rather than offended. Should he know the woman? Was she a friend of the family? ‘It’s short for Sheffield,’ he said, and began to get up as a courtesy, but the woman placed a firm hand on his shoulder.

‘Well, Sheffield, here’s the thing. You leave Jessica alone and I’ll leave you alone. You try to fuck her and you buy a heap of trouble. It’s that simple. You get in behind, or you get more than you bargained for. Okay?’

Sheff found it hard to accept that she was serious: that he was being threatened in a provincial, sunlit café by a short woman with bright lipstick. He tried rather more vigorously to stand, but her grip was sure, and he wasn’t prepared to struggle.

‘And you are?’ he said. ‘Apart from being bloody interfering.’

‘Just leave Jessica alone, that’s all. She’s not interested. There’s other women you can hit on, but leave her alone. Got it?’

‘This is a joke, right?’ he said, but felt otherwise.

‘Try me. You’ll see,’ she said, and she lifted her hand from his shoulder and walked away, her buttocks rocking beneath the denim. In the park beyond her, two dogs stood nose-to-tail in tense interrogation, and their owners hurried closer, uncertain of the outcome.

Sheff looked about him, but no one seemed to have noticed the brief, bizarre exchange. The man wearing work boots had put his newspaper down, but wasn’t facing Sheff’s way. The thin, tanned guy still had the shank of one leg resting on the knee of the other and blue underpants showing. Jesus, thought Sheff, that’s a first: being warned off by a stand-over lesbian with scarlet lipstick and a mobile arse.

But it was unsettling, rather than funny, and despite himself he felt his motives for friendship with Jessica under scrutiny. It was nothing to do with judging her own preferences – she would make her choices – but more his own motives. Had he wanted her merely for casual sex while he was stuck in his childhood town waiting for his father to die? Was it as instinctive and utilitarian as that? If so, he didn’t much like the man he had become. He reassured himself that much more was involved, that he liked her also for warmth, humour and directness, for making some difficult decisions and facing up to the results.

On impulse he took out his cell phone, but then realised that he’d no idea of Jessica’s work number. He asked at the counter if he could borrow the phone book, and wrote down the number of the veterinary practice on a soft napkin. He returned to a table more removed from the work-boots man, and made his call. He framed in his mind sentences about being warned off by the chubby woman, but the receptionist said Jessica was on a farm visit, and Sheff was left with just the smile he had unconsciously assumed in expectation of hearing her voice. Better to ring her in the evening, of course, when she would be home and Emma in bed.

He did that, lying back on the pillows in his room, and with the door closed for privacy. ‘Dr Woolfe?’ he said formally, assuming that vets like dentists had assumed the title, but she recognised his voice.

‘Yes, Mr Davy.’

‘Some woman accosted me today,’ he said. ‘I was at the café, and she threatened me. She said she’d kill me if I kept seeing you.’

‘You’re making it up.’

‘It must be one of your girlfriends. A heavy woman with bright
lipstick and jeans. What does your partner look like?’

‘You’re making it all up: just fishing. Let’s not talk nonsense.’

‘It’s true. Someone’s convinced I’m up to no good. I’ve been rumbled.’

‘I can’t think of anyone who’d do that, or have any reason for it. Apart from such flights of fancy, how are things going?’

‘Don’t ask me about Dad,’ he said.

‘Okay. What then?’ she said.

‘Anything ordinary, anything that’s not sad. Tell me about Emma.’

‘As a matter of fact she’s had a hissy fit because I won’t let her watch any more of a
Shrek
DVD. She’d sit there all night. She said she hates me and wants to run away, and she made herself throw up on my best cushion. But now the little madam is fine and having Marmite toast.’

‘Right. So it’s not a good time at all,’ said Sheff.

‘No. It’s all fine again. It blows over so quickly with kids. By the time she’s done her homework it’ll be forgotten.’

‘Tell me about your day then, animal by animal, visit by visit. It’ll give me a feeling for the background on my article on country vets.’

So Jessica did, talking for fifteen minutes of people, and issues and decisions and diseases, and he interrupted with questions that were often flippant, but she didn’t mind, and much of what she told him was filed away without conscious effort because that was his calling. He was for a short while taken out of himself, as Belize would say, and felt the better for it. Especially he liked her story of the hard man who offered her a pig-dog pup instead of a fee, and had bare feet inside his boots.

‘But I’m taking up time you should be spending on Emma’s homework,’ Sheff said.

‘No problem.’

‘Sheff,’ called Georgie from the passage, ‘Mum wants the phone.’

‘Okay,’ he called back, and to Jessica, ‘Sorry about that. I’m getting told off here. I’d better go, but would you like to go out for a meal?’

‘It’s easier for me if you come round here. No babysitter then,’ Jessica said.

‘Only if you let me bring a takeaway. You don’t want to be cooking after a day’s work. What does Emma like?’

‘She likes burgers and I like Chinese.’

‘It’s a deal,’ said Sheff. ‘Name an evening.’

WHEN THEY WERE YOUNG,
and on holiday in bigger places, his father used to take them to the movies. He would assume an air of eagerness to match their own anticipation, enthuse while standing before the poster and cardboard advertising, make a performance of choosing and buying lollies. But later, while the animated characters cavorted, and the sound boomed, Sheff would look across in the darkness of the theatre and see his father was asleep.