Carnival Sky (29 page)

SHEFF REMEMBERED HIS FATHER WAS ONCE
attacked by the husband of a woman who had set up a family trust and named Warwick as a trustee. The couple were in the process of an acrimonious separation, and Warwick served as a target. The guy came to the office and lost his temper while they were talking at the reception desk. By chance there was a workman’s stool ladder in the corner, and the man
hit Warwick’s hand with it and broke a small bone in the wrist. There was even a bit in the paper about it. The husband apologised and admitted he’d been drinking; Sheff’s father didn’t bring any charge.

Sheff had just started university, and when he was home soon afterwards, he thought his father would be full of the incident, but Warwick was dismissive. ‘His life’s fallen to pieces, the poor bugger,’ he said. ‘I feel sorry for him even though he’s brought a lot of it on himself.’

THERE WAS A PERSISTENT nor’wester, sirocco’s cousin, on the Sunday afternoon that Sheff went to Jessica’s house to cut back the macrocarpa hedge on the back boundary. He was an accustomed presence, no longer an intrusion on the weekend time Jessica and Emma spent together. The little girl accepted his visits, seldom made deliberate reference to her father, even sometimes shared with Sheff the non-threatening concerns of her happy life, even if she didn’t always experience them as such. She sought nothing from him, but accepted the friendship he had with her mother. She wore red overalls appliquéd with contrasting fabric mermaids, pixies and dancing queens. Her brown arms were thin and strong. With her mother she raked and piled the clippings, talking all the time. As Sheff worked he could see Jessica replying, but the wind and the clatter of the clippers’ two-stroke motor prevented him from hearing what they said. Still air has little presence, but with the wind comes the realisation that air has body, force and direction, that it has a will, and a voice for that will.

The cut macrocarpa foliage had an individual fragrance that was, to him, intrinsic to a Kiwi childhood. It was strong despite the wind and the stink of the motor, and brought memories of games and skylarking in days so extended that each seemed a life within itself.

Jessica hadn’t been able to find earmuffs, and the noise was
wearying. He wore plastic goggles, however, and the scuffed surfaces seemed to further isolate him, so that he wasn’t part of the movement and talk between Jessica and Emma. They were naturally connected, and he was a lens and life away. The next year someone else would discipline the hedge, and Emma may well have forgotten him.

When the trimming was done, Sheff cut the motor, but for a moment the noise persisted in his head, beating and retreating like the sound of wings, and then there was just the skirl of the wind and Jessica and Emma talking loudly against it. The smell of the clippings was raw and strong. Sheff helped to gather and stuff them all into a wool bale until it stood much higher than Emma. So many native plants turned brown in the drought, but macrocarpa was a foreigner and defiantly green. Emma wanted to climb into the bale. ‘Can I jump it down? Can I?’ she cried, and without waiting for her mother’s permission, he lifted the little girl onto the clippings and held her hands for balance as she bounced there happily.

‘Just be careful you don’t scratch your legs,’ he said and glanced at Jessica to ensure she was okay with the initiative he assumed. What simple things give delight to a child. As he watched her, heard her laughter and held her outstretched arms, Sheff experienced a sudden frisson of sadness and loss that swept on with the wind. Emotional steadiness was in his nature, but recent years had proved it insecure.

Dinner was a mushroom quiche that Jessica had made with Sheff in mind rather than her daughter, who had cheerios with tomato sauce instead. As the guest he’d brought a Bannockburn pinot noir, and they ate in the glassed sunroom because of the wind, sitting on the bleached fabric of folding chairs around a white, plastic table barely large enough for the few plates. Although he had washed his hands, each time he lifted fork, or glass, to his mouth the aroma was of the macrocarpa, and not unpleasant.

Emma was excused from the table quite soon and sat apparently beyond listening distance by the living-room door to colour pictures, while her mother and Sheff talked of the article he was writing on
her life as a country vet. Every good story needed an angle, he said: something to give direction and coherence, and he’d decided to emphasise Jessica’s place in a world of colleagues and clients who were largely male. She was okay with that, provided there was nothing about her sexual orientation.

‘And we need some trivial mysteries,’ he said, ‘like why birds poop white when other creatures don’t.’

‘Charming.’

‘Stuff about keas digging the kidneys out of living sheep, and genetically modified super bulls.’

As they talked, laughed and readily digressed, there came within him again a piercing and passing sadness for his father and daughter. For all of his life except the past few days his father had been alive in the same world, even though apart, even if not consciously brought to mind. That had been an unacknowledged reassurance. Like Charlotte, he’d been real and then he was taken away. Love wasn’t enough to keep them.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Jessica, and she leant forward, shading her eyes against the low sun so that she could read his face.

‘I was just thinking of Dad. It’s taking me a while to get used to his not being here.’

‘Maybe you’ll never get used to it, but accept it all the same.’

Sheff sat back cautiously: the folding chair accentuated any movement. He turned his face to the sun, and heat was a faint pressure on his face. The wind had lessened, but still gusted around the house. ‘No, I feel fine,’ he said. ‘I feel really fine. It’s the right thing somehow to stay on here for a bit, and not just cut and run now he’s dead. This was his stamping ground. He lived here most of his life. It’s my place too, though in a different way.’

‘It can be a narrow, bitchy little town sometimes,’ Jessica said.

‘So can they all, but it’s a great place, too. The landscape here seems more real than elsewhere. Maybe it’s just there’s more of it and less of us. Maybe it’s because we grew up here.’

‘Most young people move on,’ she said. ‘And some people feel they grow out of the place and need the reassurance of saying they live in a city, as if being in a big place makes you somehow more important.’

That brought them back to her job, and the article. They’d arranged a time for Sheff to go with her and observe her at work. It would purport to be a usual day in her professional life, but of course they planned to rig it somewhat so that it was more than representative, had the aspects that Sheff knew would most interest an Auckland readership. Lots of woolly merinos, plenty of tupping, far-off homesteads, incongruous science and laconic southern characters. ‘Maybe a blasphemous parrot for light relief,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

‘What is it with you and parrots?’

‘What’s a blaspmouse parrot?’ asked Emma, looking up from her crayons and felt pens.

‘One that uses naughty words,’ said Sheff.

‘Like poo-bum?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Don’t encourage her,’ said Jessica.

‘Piss, snot, poo, poo, bum.’ Emma had them all out before Jessica could interrupt.

‘Okay, that’s enough,’ said her mother firmly. ‘It’s time to get ready for your bath.’

They cleared the table, and Sheff stacked the few plates in the dishwasher while Jessica sorted Emma’s clothes, and prepared her for a bath. Sheff was struck by the foreshortened day that is the lot of small children. Not much past seven-thirty, the sun still shining, yet the meal was over and Emma would soon be in bed. It hadn’t been uncommon for him while at the paper to still be in his office at such a time, and much later eat a meal with the moon as sentry outside the house.

Emma began talking to her mother about the coming school fair, and Sheff offered her his father’s polished stones. ‘What are they like?’ Emma asked.

‘They’re smooth and pretty – all different colours.’ He knew Warwick would be pleased to share.

‘I’d love them,’ she said and smiled, surprising him with the pleasure this gave.

After her bath, Emma went through her homework reading book with her mother, sitting together on the sofa, and then she said goodnight to Sheff and went with Jessica to her room for her story. He could hear her asking questions about the pictures, then debating lights-out time, and he poured himself more wine and tried not to think of the family that he, Lucy and Charlotte would have become. The wind was slackening with the end of day, and the shadows were relaxed, fully stretched out over the lawn towards the freshly clipped hedge.

This was where he had ended up: far removed from his life of only a few years ago, sitting in the house of a lesbian veterinarian who had been his sister’s school friend. Childless and fatherless. But he resisted the temptation to feel sorry for himself, for he had family still, and friends and health and whatever future he chose to make. And he was in a landscape of beauty, a town of friendly, shrewd people. He didn’t feel anger. He resolved not to see himself as hard done by in any way at all. Very few people will love you in life, more will dislike you, and the majority be indifferent. You have to make your own way and discover your own purpose.

‘I feel bad about being so bloody selfish,’ he said later, when Jessica and he were alone. ‘All the time rabbiting on about my problems. I must be the same with Georgie and Mum.’

‘Well, you’ve cut the hedge. That’s one less problem.’

‘What else have you got for me? Health, finances, sex life, parental or spiritual dilemmas – I’m your man. Dr Davy for the real gravy.’

‘Georgie’s beaten you to that, though.’

‘There must be something.’

‘I hardly ever clean my car,’ she said. ‘It was something Kevin always did. There always seems to be something more important.’

‘Done,’ said Sheff. ‘I’ll come round. Warwick always used Turtle wax. There’ll be some at home.’

Without invitation he unlaced and slipped off his shoes, then lay down on the sofa with his head in Jessica’s lap, his feet hanging over the arm. It was a posture of both vulnerability and intimacy, and one he hadn’t experienced for a long time. He could feel the warmth of Jessica’s thighs, and looked up at her past the swell of her breast, yet it was less a sexual pleasure he felt than one of togetherness, even, strangely, of protection. She brushed hair back from his face and let her hand rest there on his forehead. ‘The cut has healed up well. You wouldn’t know now,’ she said. He put a hand on hers and she straight away put her other hand on that, as if in some recalled game of patacake. So they were close together with three hands on his head, she sitting relaxed, and Sheff lying on his back.

‘I feel both confused and happy,’ he said.

‘Does it matter?’

‘I don’t know. It should, I suppose. I feel I want to be with you, but we don’t fit together in all the expected ways, do we?’

‘Do we have to be fucking to be important to each other? One of the things I’ve come to realise is that sex isn’t enough. You need more to love someone.’

‘I guess I’ve always assumed it’s a necessary part, though.’

‘You’re just so conventional, aren’t you?’

‘Pretty much,’ he said, and Jessica closed her hand in his hair and wobbled his head in mock exasperation.

‘I think you’re right not to go overseas so soon after your dad’s death,’ she said. ‘Okay, it’s fresh places and experiences, but you’d be alone so much of the time. Not good when you’re feeling down.’

‘I’ve been feeling down for a good while, so maybe not much would be different.’ He still had his right hand between hers on his head, and it caused an uncomfortable angle for his arm, so he disengaged, but gently so that she wouldn’t feel it was an emotional withdrawal. He let his arm trail from the sofa onto the carpet, feeling
the pile against his knuckles and not minding it.

Right there was the point at which he could either talk of Charlotte’s death, or evade it. He didn’t trust himself to go there, but wanted the closeness to continue. ‘But you’ve had your own shit times,’ he said, ‘breaking up with Kevin. It’s a sort of black hole, isn’t it, and for a time there seems no way out at all. Lucy and I went through it. Jesus. There’s that stupid saying that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but some things so nearly take you down that you’re permanently damaged. You have a sort of emotional limp that’s with you always.’

‘But you can’t know it’s always yet, can you?’ said Jessica. ‘You feel it so strongly now, but maybe you’ll pull out of it better than you think.’

‘Did you?’

‘The nights were the worst. He used to ring late at night, often drunk, saying he wanted to come back, and a couple of times I agreed, but it didn’t work – just drew out the agony for both of us and upset Emma. He couldn’t get his head around the sexual thing: that there wasn’t another guy, but still someone else. He forced me once, and that made both of us feel even worse. You feel guilty when you break up a marriage in the way I did – I still feel it now. For months I used to wake up almost frantic and wonder what the hell I’d done. When Emma kept asking for him, I used to go into the lavatory, sit there and cry. I used to throw up sometimes. I don’t think I could go through it all over again, but things are much better now.’

‘I got drunk a few times, but that didn’t help. I’ve had an almost savage need to hold someone accountable and couldn’t find anyone except myself. Maybe I took it out on Lucy, too – I don’t know. Things just don’t connect and matter as much as they used to.’ He paused to give Jessica the chance to say something, but also to weigh up if he wanted to carry on. ‘You’re in a bloody pit, and there seems no way out.’ Jessica remained silent, just moved her hand in his hair, and he was unsure if he heard it as well as felt it. ‘This is a bit like being on the psychiatrist’s couch,’ he said when they had been quiet for a time.

‘I don’t think they really use them, do they?’ she said.

‘Probably not.’ Yet being stretched out there in intimate vulnerability was conducive to confession. For the first time Sheff spoke unguardedly about finding Charlotte dead and all that followed. How the pinks and greens of the soft toys in the cot accentuated her pale skin, how one of the dancing bears on her pyjama top was darkened by childish dribble, how one small hand was cupped and empty. She had kicked off the blanket and lain unshielded. How Lucy had been unable to stand, and had been crouched on the floor when the ambulance people came.

Sheff and Jessica talked for long time, without moving from the sofa, so that the living room grew darker and the sun in the west was just a red line of reflection on the underside of the cloud hung close above the hills. Each of them talked of a unique experience, yet one that provided understanding of what the other had gone through.

His father’s death somehow made it easier for Sheff to accept that of his baby daughter. He could find no logical reason for that, but his reliance on rationality had diminished. It was as if his grief for Warwick had added to the backlog of sorrow concerning Charlotte, until the whole was too great to contain, and had to be released.