Etiquette for a Dinner Party (16 page)

At four o'clock, Pop and I went to feed out. We loaded the hay bales on to the tray on the back of the tractor — Pop lifting them on, me using my whole body to push them into place. I pushed so hard that one of them fell off the edge of the tray into the mud. I swore and I didn't even care if Pop heard.

'You okay, son?' He stopped loading bales and watched me. His face was wet with sweat, like it was in the photo. I couldn't bear to look at him any more.

'Yep,' I said.

'You sure? You don't look okay.'

'
Yes
.'

We headed off across the paddocks. Pop drove the tractor and I sat on the bales on the back. When we got to the cow paddock, the cows ran towards us, their big fat ugly udders swinging side to side. I leaned over the back of the hay bale tray and spewed up onto the muddy tracks from the tractor tyres.

Pop brought me back to the house then finished feeding out by himself. Gran ran a hot bath for me, which was nice but didn't fix anything. On my way through the sitting room I checked to see whether the Big Trip Box was still on the bookcase. It was, so I took it down.

The first thing you see in the box is the little London bus ticket. It somehow always stays on top, even though it's so small. I pressed the ticket down flat over my knee and stretched it to get all the creases out. I thought about Pop, him climbing up onto a red double-decker bus on the other side of the world. It would have been morning for him and the middle of the night for me. I would have been asleep while he was getting his ticket off the driver and scrunching it up in his big hand and putting it into the pocket of his blazer.

And then, days later, him flying back around the outside of the Earth — he and all those other old soldiers wearing their RSA blazers. Gran would have found the bus ticket in the pocket. She would've gone to throw it away, but then had second thoughts and put it in the trip box. .

Pop goes to the RSA on Saturday nights. The RSA is like the pub, except if you haven't been on New Zealand's side in a war you can't go. Gran says not that you'd want to, she says all they do there is drink and talk about dubious and unproven acts of bravery, whatever that means. But I would give anything to go. To the RSA, I mean, not to a war. To hear the stories about the Germans. About the Japs who nearly invaded New Zealand and are the reason we can't buy a Toyota Corona.

Pop came in from feeding out and Gran yelled at him to take off his shirt and trousers and socks. And to not walk all that grass through the house. Then I heard the shower going and him singing 'God Save The Queen'. I went into their bedroom to wait for him.

I started off on Pop's side of the bed but I ended up sliding down into the dip in the middle, where I slept when I was little. Pop came in with his towel wrapped round him and steam coming off his body. I closed my eyes while he got dressed, till he gave the order — At Ease, Corporal
—
then I watched.

His war medals are in his socks and hankies drawer. He keeps them in a black box with dark red velvet inside. He pulled on his blazer, then he opened the drawer and lifted out the box. He stood in front of the big mirror on Gran's dresser and pinned the 1939–1945 Star to the front pocket of his jacket.

It was my turn. I took the Italy Star, with its striped ribbon — red, white, green, white, red — and six shiny golden points.
GRI
in the middle, with a little
VI
underneath. I stood on the bed, and pinned the medal on his jacket.

'Can I come with you?' I knew what he would say. But I always asked.

'No son, you're too young.'

'When will I be old enough?'

'When you've served your country.'

It had to be right then. I held my breath, then I said it.

'You know that guy you told me about in the war, Pop, the guy Freyberg?'

'General Sir Bernard Freyberg, VC.' Pop always held his chin up high when I pinned on the Italy Star, as though he didn't quite trust me not to prick his neck.

'What did he do, again? At Cassino?'

'He led the New Zealand soldiers, son. He made the decision to retreat, when we couldn't overcome the Germans.'

'So he gave up?'

'He didn't give up. He was saving lives. New Zealanders' lives.' Pop looked straight at me. We were eye to eye, with him standing straight in his blazer with his medals and me on the bed. 'He did the right thing.'

I'd finished pinning the Italy Star to Pop's pocket. I slid down off the bed and knelt beside it. Underneath was the card with the red windmill. I stood up and handed it to Pop and the sick feeling came rushing back.

He opened it and looked at the photo. He smiled — it was the same smile he had in the photo. The smile started to turn into a laugh — just a little one at first, then it got bigger and his shoulders started to shake. His medals clicked against each other.

He turned the card around, so the photo was facing me. He looked as though he was going to say something about it. Like he was going to do show and tell. He was still laughing.

This was not how I had planned things. He wasn't ashamed. He didn't even look upset that I had found the photo. I tried hard not to cry. I didn't have a strategy for this. I just had my question. So I asked it.

'Does Gran know about your naked friends from overseas?'

He started to laugh again. The more he laughed, the harder it was for me to keep the tears from coming.

Pop pulled me over to him and hugged me hard against his blazer. I could feel the points of the star medals pricking my face. We stayed like that for ages and then I felt his big body go still against me. The laughing had stopped. We just hugged each other until I stopped crying.

We sat on the side of the bed and I told him about my mission earlier in the day. How I thought that Gran didn't know about the photo. There was still time, I told him. He still had a chance to get rid of it.

'Are you sure about that, son?' He had a bit of a smile, and I reckon he was starting to realise how close he had come to wrecking our family. For someone so good at strategies, it was strange how he'd gone to the other side of the world and forgotten about thinking things through to the end.

'Pretty sure,' I said.

I looked at the card in his big rough hands. It looked like a weird thing from another world, maybe even from outer space. 'At least it's out of the Big Trip Box now,' I said.

Pop opened the card again and looked at the photo. He still had the funny little smile — I couldn't tell exactly what he was thinking but I was guessing he was a bit embarrassed about his lack of planning.

'We can do better than that,' he said, and he ripped the card into pieces so small you could never in a million years guess what it had been before.

I heard a noise behind me and I turned around. Gran was standing by the door, smiling at Pop and me. I knew for sure, then, that I'd done the right thing.

'You have dirt under your fingernails,' Linda said. She was pouring English Breakfast tea from a white china pot into fragile teacups.

John looked at his hands, and there it was.

'It's not dirt,' he said. 'It's earth.' He was surprised to see it too.

He cupped his hands and stared at the tiny wedges of black at each fingertip. Then he remembered that he had knocked the pot plant off his desk at work the day before, as he was reaching to answer the phone. He had felt dismay, anger, then an unexpected rush of pleasure as he got down on his hands and knees and slowly scooped the black moist earth back into the terracotta pot. It had crumbled then formed again in his palm. He pressed it down firm against the roots of — what was it? — some plant, he didn't know the name. He had taken longer than was necessary to clean up the mess.

He got up from the table, kissed Linda good-bye, and went to work.

At the office, he saw immediately that someone had moved the pot plant to the far corner of his desk. He appreciated the thoughtfulness, but put it back where it belonged. Next to his snow globe, that tiny world with the strange little boy lifting his arms to the sky. Other people had the Eiffel Tower, or London Bridge, or something else famous in their snow globes. His was an oddity — a gift from Linda on their first wedding anniversary. .

John sold real estate. He'd done so all his working life — thirty-something years. In the early days he'd made a go of it, but now everyone else in the company outperformed him.

He often wondered why. How a person could attract less business the more trustworthy he became. He worked by the rules, made sure all parties to a deal came away feeling good about things. But nowadays people seemed to prefer the younger agents: the girls with the short skirts and winter tans, the lads with the European cars and cryptic number plates. 10DAIT, for example, on the black Porsche that swung in next to his old Ford in the car park each morning.

For a while, there'd been another guy in the office going through a slump in sales too. Month after month, the two of them had engaged in some sort of tacit, desperate competition to lift their performances. One time, the other guy would fail and John would sympathetically pat him on the shoulder when passing by his desk. Then John would falter, and the other guy would do the same for him. At some point the other guy left, and the boss dropped John's monthly target to 'something more manageable'.

Occasionally the boss would give him a listing, one that she had secured for herself. John would arrive at work to see an address written in her messy scrawl next to his name on the New Listings Chart. He would frantically rub out her words with the sleeve of his shirt and rewrite them, checking over his shoulder for smirking colleagues. After a while, he stopped. He understood, from the looks he got, that everyone knew. .

He stayed late at the office that night, alone, flicking through the cards in the little red plastic box on his desk. They were grouped according to suburbs — Kelburn, Karori, Northland, Khandallah — each area colour-coded with a sticker in the top left-hand corner.

Every card represented the beginning of an acquaintance: a handshake, warm palms, very nice to meet you. He flipped the cards over slowly, waiting to visualise the faces. It was odd that he couldn't remember any of them. He reached the final card and started back at the beginning, slower this time.

Finally he gave up waiting for a face. He started the phone calls.

'Graham Thomas? Hello, yes, this is John Dobson, of Stanton Realty.' Polite chat about weather, sport, the busyness of lives. 'We met at the Rotary dinner.'

That much he knew. It was written on the index card.

'Yes . . . a great night wasn't it?'

What did he look like, this Graham Thomas? The voice sounded fiftyish, Graham Thomas was possibly his own age. What
did
he look like? No idea, but pressing on.

'You mentioned you were thinking of selling. I was wondering . . .'

The answer was always no, at first.

'Look, that's fine. It's just . . . there's so much interest in your area right now, I thought I should give you a call.'

Waiting for the spark of greed, the shift in the voice. John knew now who Graham Thomas was. He'd placed the face.

'What sort of prices? Well, Graham, they are ridiculously high, if I'm to be honest with you. In fact, overpriced. It's a seller's market. We just can't get enough on our books. But look, I'm sorry to have bothered you at this time of night.'

Here it comes.

'Well, yes, I can call around, take a look. But I hear what you're saying. You don't want to sell.'

Buyer's market, seller's market, buyer's market — another hour passed as John chatted on in the semi-darkness to the anonymous names on the cards. Then he stalled mid-sentence. A cold, prickly sweat started at the back of his neck, crept up through his hair and settled on his forehead.

He pressed on.

'The situation is fascinating, actually, we all thought the bubble would burst last year, never thought it could last this long. Because you know Mrs . . . Miss . . .'

Words coming fast now, tumbling: his mind sifting them, breaking them down, like the earth that had crumbled and fallen through his fingers the day before.

'It's just dirt, isn't it? It's just dirt. It's just dirt — no it's . . . it's earth. It's the Earth and anyway . . . land is what we do to the dirt, in the earth. We smother and clutter and . . .'

Stop
, he thought.
Stop it
. John closed his eyes as the feeling of nausea worked its way through his body. It threatened to pull him under. He shook his head, pushing back at the desire to carry on with the nonsense.

There was silence at the other end of the phone.

'Pardon me? Are you there?' a voice said, after a time. 'Mr Dobson? Hello?' She was anxious — he could hear that — but he hesitated before answering. Made sure he was fully back in the present.

'Oh yes, yes I'm here. I'm sorry, lost you for a minute.'

Who was she? Was she selling or buying? He had no idea which side of the game he was on. .

John got home at eight-thirty. Linda was watching television in the lounge and the kids were sprawled across the floor at her feet.

He stood for a moment in the doorway looking at his family. For a time now, he had felt as though the tiny filaments that connected them were fraying, breaking off one by one. It had to do with a lot of things — long hours, few sales, his desire to provide. But when he had tried to bring it up they had just looked at him, not understanding at all.

Tonight, as he watched the backs of their heads, he felt it — a distinct, tiny
ping
somewhere deep in his chest. The last strand severed; Major Tom floating away. It was a real pain — a physical one. His hand searched for the spot and found it.

'Hi everyone,' he said. He felt something wet on his face — tears. He was grateful that the only light was the dim flicker from the television.

The children replied together, Hi Dad. Their eyes never left the screen.

He took a deep breath, willing himself to speak in his usual voice, say the usual things.

'How was school?'

'Good.' An empty chorus.

The family had eaten an hour ago, Linda said. She didn't look up from the television either. He knew she was annoyed about the time.

He took his dinner out of the warm oven and removed the tinfoil from the top. There was a bowl of green salad on the kitchen bench and he tipped all of it onto his plate, next to the meatloaf. Then he sat down at the table, at the single place-setting remaining. He waited for his hands to stop shaking before he ate. .

It was 1967.

They would meet after work at Suzy's, a coffee bar on Willis Street. It was the only place open at night. He had just started at Stanton's and she was working at a doctor's surgery.

She'd passed the gift over to him, eyes shining bright.

'Happy anniversary, John,' she said. 'I love you.'

She'd wrapped the snow globe in Christmas paper, although Christmas had long passed. He guessed what it was, even before taking it in his hands and shaking it gently. There was the shape, of course, and then the sound and feel of the sluggish movement inside.

All around them, people moved and talked. The air was warm and steamy, filled with laughter and the smell of damp, heavy overcoats.

He carefully peeled the Sellotape back off the white paper, so as not to tear it. Then he folded it, neatly dissecting green reindeer and red jinglebells. She reached across and took the paper from him, put it back in her handbag.

'I thought we'd agreed,' he said. 'No money, so no presents.'

She laughed, a light melody playing over the top of the café hum.

'Oh, I know . . . I know we agreed. But I already had it.'

John smiled again, raised his eyebrows.

'I bought it ages ago, before we got married. I don't know why, I just liked it.'

John held the globe up in front of him, cupped it in his hands. The little boy inside was poised as though singing to the gods — feet apart, arms thrown skyward, head back, eyes shut. He wore a brown coat and boots. When John shook the globe, grey glitter stormed around the child.

'I liked it, it seemed real,' said Linda. 'Not like the tourist ones.'

John held the globe up a little higher. As the glitter settled, he squinted through it to the other side, trying to frame Linda's face, trying to catch the red blur of her lipstick. .