Carnival Sky (5 page)

‘COME IN BY ALL MEANS,’ said Michael. ‘I’d like to catch up. I heard you’d left the paper. Not tomorrow morning, though, and most of my lectures are early afternoon. Apart from that I’m pretty much here all this week.’ His voice on the phone held the same quick warmth that Sheff knew from their time teaching on the journalism course together, and he looked forward to talking with Michael again. In a busy life friends tended to be those people you met up with in the course of your work and, if those circumstances altered, you drifted apart. Friendship required conscious and sometimes inconvenient effort. With a twinge of guilt, Sheff realised that he hadn’t bothered to keep in regular touch with Michael, and was now contacting him when there might be some advantage in doing so.

As befitted its academic status within the university, the School of Journalism had its home in a modest, thirty-year-old ‘temporary’ building on campus. It lay single-storeyed in the shadow of lofty buildings with equally lofty pretensions, and had an allocation of only one staff park that Sheff knew would be taken. He left his car on the street, and enjoyed his stroll through the grounds. He wondered about an investigative piece on the changing nature of universities, especially the decline of standards and the rise of staff workloads that reduced the opportunity for research and academic publication.
He disliked journalism that was deliberately alarmist, but there was justifiable concern there surely. From habit he framed a few paragraph points in his mind as he walked.

How beautiful in their youth, and aware of their youth and beauty, were many of the women students who roamed the place, and how scruffy and undeserving of their company and favours were the males who accompanied them, or trailed behind. How much better Sheff would be as partner to such women were he twenty years old once more. And why, when he’d been that age, had he wasted so much life on sport and beer, rather than seeking the reward of women’s company, which of course was defined at that age as sex? The question quickly supplanted that of university performance, and as he walked he conjured the names and images of all the girls to whom he’d made love as a student. A disappointingly brief list, and even some of those encounters had ended badly.

The father of one girl had come to Sheff’s door and threatened him, while his flatmates inside overheard all of it with a delight they often revisited in his presence. After nearly twenty-five years the humiliation of it still occasioned a frisson of horror. ‘I’ll tear your gonads out with my teeth next time, you little prick,’ the father had said. A big man: a building contractor from Silverdale, who had swelled in the doorway until he blocked the sun.

And there had been long-haired Sandra, who fell asleep beneath him after the capping party while by minimum exertion he prolonged the joy of coitus, thus showing her own stimulus had been somewhat less than his own. A deflating experience for the masculine ego, though as far as he knew she’d shown sufficient compassion not to tell others of it.

‘The ivory towers are no more,’ said Michael, after he’d answered Sheff’s knock. ‘Bums on seats. Especially foreign bums, because they pay well.’ Long, chin-heavy face, long, lank hair, and a smile of genuine welcome. His office was that of a squalid muddler: books, dead flies, newspapers, files, magazines, running shoes and food
pottles scattered, or heaped unsteadily, around his computer, seeming in inexorable encroachment. The room was small even without the clutter, and Sheff could barely find a track to the only other chair.

‘I’m happy to do a semester paper or two,’ said Sheff. ‘You’re still doing one on ethics and protocols, I suppose?’

‘I wish I had something to offer. There’s only two of us as it is, and nothing’s secure any more. It’s the three Rs – restructuring, retrenchment and redeployment.’

‘Nothing at all?’

‘Maybe casual tutoring. Nothing more, I’m afraid. It’s a different world – my God, yes.’

Both of them were aware of the irony. Sheff had once been in Michael’s chair, young for the appointment and marked as having unusual promise. He had been largely responsible for Michael being appointed as lecturer, and now in an awkward reversal he sought a favour. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Sheff. ‘I just thought I’d keep my hand in while I sorted things out. I’ve about decided to go overseas.’

‘It’s a bugger. I really wish I could do something. Maybe later in the year.’

‘No problem. Anyway, it’s good to keep in touch. You get so bogged down in work, don’t you?’ In the trembling, transparent jaws of a sandwich container close by, he could see the remains of bread, cheese, pork and sallow, degenerating lettuce. The smell was surely yellow. There was name for that conflation, but Sheff couldn’t recall it. Even as he continued the conversation, part of his mind persisted with a word search.

‘Have you got time to come over to the club for drink?’ asked Michael, pleased to move from the professional to the social.

‘Sure. Why not?’ Time was something he now had in good supply. ‘I might pick your brains about the best investigative stuff over the last year,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow I’m getting together with fellow judges to talk about the McInnes award.’

‘Who are the others?’

‘Annabel Powell, and Gordy Howell.’

‘Sounds like a vaudeville comedy duo,’ said Michael.

‘Don’t get me started. Annabel will be okay. Know anything about the Howell guy?’

‘Never heard of him. Actually I think the field’s a bit thin this year. I can’t think of any really significant exposé stories. The usual celebrity beat-ups and credit card overruns, but nothing that showed up someone with a real nose.’

Michael was already at the door and putting on his jacket. The elbow sweep dislodged a cardboard box on which the words ‘business expenses/tax’ in fading felt-pen had been crossed out and ‘assessment moderation’ added. He took no corrective action, yet paused, and his face became passive as something crossed his mind. ‘I suppose there’s Robert Malcolm’s stuff on overseas tertiary students. Raging institutional avarice and irresponsibility, eh?’

‘True.’ But Sheff wasn’t pleased to have Malcolm’s worth endorsed. He knew him quite well, disliked his manner, and had an unacknowledged inclination to hinder any success due him. Once at a seminar Malcolm had pointed out a flaw in Sheff’s presentation on the use of overseas press agencies. It wasn’t the correction that rankled so much as the collective laugh that had followed it.

There were few people in the staff club, and no one that Sheff recognised apart from emeritus Prof. Wickham, who was almost a fixture. He was a mineralogist who had no family, and who had occupied the same chair on every occasion Sheff visited the lounge bar, despite no longer having a nominal one within the university. Wickham faced the window so greetings were unnecessary, and despite the clearly displayed notice that prohibited animals on the premises, his black cocker spaniel lay at his feet like a discarded overcoat.

Michael bought two dark ales, and he and Sheff began an easy conversation about places they would revisit on any trip overseas. Both had studied abroad; both had long held ideas for articles that necessitated a return to Europe. ‘The exchange rate’s a killer, though,
isn’t it?’ said Michael. ‘In the main tourist centres you get an absolute bloody hammering. For the price of a meal out in Paris you could buy a second-hand car here.’

‘I’m hoping to get off the beaten track more: Poland, perhaps. And I’ve always wanted to go to Corsica. Wonderful wilderness walks there, I’m told.’ Sheff had done few of the main New Zealand tracks, but saw himself striding high in the untamed hills above Corte, facing a stern wind and physical challenge. Increasingly he liked to place himself other than where he was.

Soon, however, their talk turned to their profession: the career trajectories of their peers, the decline of both standards and readership, the financial stringency that resulted in second-class, second-hand, telephone-based reportage. An old mentor had succumbed to alcoholism at last, and spent his time singing along to Italian opera. A contemporary of limited ability had become a fabulously well-paid presenter on regional television in Florida. A promiscuous woman of good humour and natural talent had been killed when her hang-glider crashed in Queenstown. The vicissitudes of other people’s lives provide for envy, commiseration and self-congratulation.

As they left the bar, Sheff and Michael passed close to the old mineralogist, who seemed in the process of petrification himself. Wickham paid no attention to them, but the black spaniel sprang to its feet, trotted past Michael, soundlessly bit hard at Sheff’s ankle and then returned to the chair. Sheff’s leg was only mildly scathed, but the fabric of his second-best trousers was torn. It was all over so quickly that the dog was back unperturbed at the professor’s feet before Sheff had the chance to retaliate.

‘The bugger’s ripped my trousers,’ said Sheff accusingly.

The professor remained turned away.

‘Hey, your dog bit me,’ said Sheff more loudly, leaning in.

‘Eh?’

‘Your dog bit me.’

‘He’s called Obsidian,’ said the professor fondly.

‘He’s torn them.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The dog ripped my trouser leg, see?’ Sheff raised his voice, and his foot in a clumsy pose as if about to begin a line dance.

‘Are you a member here?’ said the old man.

‘Oh, come on,’ said Michael, ‘we might as well go. He doesn’t know what you’re on about.’

Sheff had an urge to give the spaniel, if not Wickham himself, a damn good kick up the arse, but he knew that wasn’t a mature reaction, and hardly appropriate in the lounge bar of the university staff club. It was all right for the professor, too senile to be cognisant, and Michael, who saw amusement in it all, but Sheff was angry. Lately he felt he was experiencing more than his share of life’s passing irritations. ‘Old Wickham’s well past it,’ he said bitterly as he and Michael left, ‘and that bloody dog shouldn’t be in here in the first place. It’s as batty as he is. I should write and complain.’

‘Good idea.’ Despite their friendship, Michael would dine out on the incident for some time, with appropriate and increasing exaggeration. ‘Anyway, look,’ he said as they paused before parting at the old lecture hall, ‘I’ll let you know if anything at all turns up. And damn good to see you. Keep in touch.’

Michael had enjoyed the break from his office, but Sheff wandered off with one trouser cuff flapping at his ankle. A woman would be able to sew it up again, but he no longer had a wife, or partner, and that was a greater grievance. And what about the dog’s filthy teeth: he could get some terrible infection. At the thought, his ankle began to throb. Dettol perhaps. He would bathe it in Dettol.

In the evening Sheff poached himself three eggs with an incompetence that resulted in three wizened yolks on his toast, and the whites a residual swirl in the pot. The telephone rang while he was having ginger biscuits, brandy and coffee for dessert.

‘Hello. Sheff here.’ A pause.

‘I know where you live, dude.’ It was a coarse, accusatory voice,
male and not one he recognised, and certainly lacking Prof. Wickham’s enunciation.

‘So?’ said Sheff. He knew no one who used the word ‘dude’.

‘I’ve been watching you, mate.’

‘And what’s the reason for that?’

‘Never you fucken mind. Just remember not to step out of line again, or you’ll cop it for real. Okay?’

‘I think you’ve got the wrong number,’ said Sheff. ‘No P, no tinnies, and not much money here. Just a journo having tea. Sorry about that.’

‘Don’t jerk us around again, or you’ll be sorry. That’s all. Don’t pull any of that shit again on us.’

‘What shit?’

‘You won’t get another warning.’ He sounded as if he’d said about all he was going to, but Sheff ended the call without waiting for a conclusion. There was a story there somewhere, but he had no wish to be part of it. The aspect of randomness seemed to be growing in his life, chinks appearing through which quizzical and enigmatic apparitions could be glimpsed. His ankle throbbed a little, and he wondered if somewhere in the house there was a bottle of Dettol, and if he was right in thinking it had medicinal qualities.

Later he watched a television documentary about the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone Park, and was cheered by the scenes of winter through which animals fled, or pursued others. They were creatures without ennui, or prevarication. They were unleashed in a passion to kill, or to escape, that was almost beautiful in its committed desperation. Snow floated in the dark sky and lay gleaming on the branches of fir trees. The wolves and deer were part of an elegant yet ferocious ballet of life and death. Sheff enjoyed the passing thought that Wickham’s mutt would not survive a week in such an environment, would be torn to pieces by those feral cousins, its black hide shredded like trouser material. He dreamt that night of clean winds, forests and elemental forces, and woke with all of it receding like a mist before the sun.

CHARLOTTE HATED BEING IMPRISONED IN THE COT,
would rattle the cage and shriek. If no one came she would settle to gnawing at the top rail. Sometimes when Sheff looked in covertly, she was there, a little beaver, using her front teeth, all she had, to get through the paint and into the wood. He was concerned, but Lucy said it was special baby-proof paint with no toxicity at all. Afterwards he could still run his fingers over the bare patch, and feel the indentations that were the sign of their child’s industrious fury.