Owen Marshall Selected Stories Page 9

  Nurse Hart was the night nurse on the geriatric ward. She seemed to feel the responsibility of it deeply. Unlike the physios and Nurse McKerrow, she wasn’t immediately good-looking, and she was very quiet. She had legs, though, said Chris. Chris was quick to notice those girls who had legs. Nurse Hart’s legs were long and graceful, growing more rounded to the thighs. Nurse Hart liked Chris and me to be in the dayroom watching television, in case something went wrong with her patients.

  The physios were the best-looking girls in the hospital, except for Nurse McKerrow. All of us agreed the physios were the best, though, apart from Jimmy, we couldn’t think of any explanation for it. Jimmy thought it was because they liked massaging people, and we knew that was just the inevitable expression of Jimmy’s mind. ‘All that rubbing and gripping,’ said Jimmy slyly. ‘The good-looking ones like to do it the most.’ Jimmy was in for some sort of club foot, but he wasn’t very Byronic. He had a cramped, impoverished face, and acquaintance disclosed a mind of similar character. He collected magazines of nudes, and laid them on the bed when the nurses came, in what he considered a subtle declaration of intention. From the balcony one day we watched Jimmy playing with his transistor. He found a woman’s voice on one channel, and lay twisting the volume knob back and forth so that it sounded as if the woman was panting.

  ‘Poor little bastard,’ said Chris. Colin would have laughed, but Chris saw the poverty in Jimmy rather than the humour.

  The Reverend Metcalf came to see us on Wednesday. Wednesday was his hospital day. I haven’t anything against clergymen as such, not as such, but Chris and I disliked the Reverend Metcalf. He wore a look of infinite understanding and superiority. He had a rich, well-modulated laugh, tinged with pathos to hint at the load of revelation he bore. He would lay out his modulated laugh as a tapestry, while his eyes strayed to other beds, or the face of his digital watch. He was a vicarious vicar: a walking crucifixion, full of suffering yet having experienced no pain. I watched Chris regard the Reverend Metcalf as he left. ‘The Liberal Mythology again?’ I said.

  ‘The Liberal Mythology.’ Chris moved restlessly in his bed, stirred by the appearance once more of his old adversary. ‘Life and death are the religious divisions in the Liberal Mythology,’ he said. ‘Now the reality of it, Hugh, the reality, is different.’ Chris loved the word reality. The way he said it gave it weight and sheen, a soundness. ‘The reality is the cycle of growth and decay.’

  ‘And life after death?’ I asked, because I couldn’t quite see what he was getting at.

  ‘How can the personality survive death, when it can’t always survive life? That’s it, all right. Take Puck, or the Wrestler: there’s not much left to gather, is there? The Liberal Mythology deals in theory, see Hugh. You have life, and you have death: you have the prime of functioning personality, you have its perpetuation in spirit. It’s a very comforting thing, the Liberal Mythology and being a theory it doesn’t concern itself with the complications of transition.’ Chris rolled over carefully. He put a pillow beneath his groin, and hung his head over the bed in his favourite position to rid himself of flatulence. ‘There’s a bit of the pattern of the lino further down that looks like a giraffe,’ he said. His yellow hair drooped away from his neck, and I was dismayed to see how the bones stood out beneath the skin.

  Perhaps it was because he was losing so much weight that Chris had to have another operation. You don’t know with bowels, mind. Mr Millar came to see him again, and told him he was to have another operation. The rest of us on our beds looked across to him to see how he was taking it. ‘I’m having my operation Tuesday, Nurse McKerrow. Give me a kiss.’ It was unashamed blackmail, and both he and Nurse McKerrow laughed. She looked quickly down the ward, then bent over Chris. She kissed him, and Chris made no attempt to encircle her with his arms, but with one finger traced a line down her side, sweeping slowly over her hip before dropping his hand to the bed again. ‘Tell Mother I died happy,’ said Chris, and Jimmy cried out excitedly as we laughed, and said he wanted a kiss too. Nurse McKerrow went back up the ward. She looked as if she had received as much as she had given.

  The night before his second operation, Chris came up to the geriatrics’ television with me. We sat with Puck and the Wrestler, and watched a film about a donkey that talked. Chris couldn’t sit still; he leant on his chair more than he sat on it, and he lay on Puck’s bed with him for a while. Nurse Hart brought us coffee, and tried to share with us her fears concerning old Mrs Sanderson in the main ward. Later, when the donkey was winning the war for the Allies, Nurse Hart came back crying, and told us that Mrs Sanderson had tried to swallow her handkerchief and choked to death. Chris and I went into the darkened ward, and pushed Mrs Sanderson out to wait for the hospital orderlies. Mrs Sanderson’s wispy hair stood up from her head, as if in her death she had frightened herself as well as Nurse Hart.

  After the orderlies had come and gone, Nurse Hart remained in the dayroom with us for comfort. She stood by Chris’s chair and tried not to be upset. Chris held her hand and talked to her. Gradually her head came down towards the chair, until she rested her forehead on the top of Chris’s head. Her hair covered part of his face, and she didn’t speak, though Chris continued to talk in his reduced but definite way. It was a scene of reassurance. The Wrestler and I were quiet, although I was not unaware, and Puck seemed to realise that the mood of the dayroom was particularly calm. ‘Poooo-ook,’ he said tentatively. ‘Poo-oo-ook,’ and the sunshine of it, and the sighing pine trees, gathered around us.

  Chris was a lot worse after the second operation. He didn’t seem to be able to pull himself right back to complete participation. The pain made him restless, and sometimes impatient. When I looked at him, and he wasn’t aware of it, his face was full of a strange enquiry. As if he were getting smaller and smaller inside himself and could hardly see out of his own eyes. He didn’t come up to the television anymore at night. Nurse Hart asked me how he was, and when I told her that he wasn’t so good, she looked even more nervous than usual. She was afraid one of the geriatrics might have a turn, she said. Two died the week before, she said.

  Chris liked to read poetry with me, and often on warm afternoons we would sit in chairs in the balcony room, and talk of poetry. I pushed for Dylan Thomas, and though Chris liked him well enough, he wouldn’t have him in first place. He said that Thomas was the storm, but that Frost was the clarity after the storm. He may be right, the more I come to think of it. Other afternoons we would just sit and look over the hospital grounds towards the city. On those occasions we’d talk only when things cropped up: like the charcoal burners’ dream, for instance, when Chris and I saw a primary school class crocodiling past towards the library. ‘When I was a boy I believed in the stories read to me about the charcoal burners’ dream,’ said Chris. ‘Those poor but sturdy charcoal burners who would share their bread and cheese in the forest with anyone who needed it. No matter how the odds were stacked against them, the charcoal burners believed that if they were brave and kind, then things would work out in the end. And so they always did.’

  ‘I haven’t read a story like that for a long time,’ I said.

  ‘Neither have I,’ said Chris.

  He kept trying, though. He had all the guts in the world; well, metaphorically, of course, his lack of it in the other way was the problem. On a Wednesday, when the Reverend Metcalf had gone, but the false tapestry of his laugh still lingered, Chris undressed Nurse McKerrow. ‘Nurse McKerrow,’ said Chris seriously. ‘Why have you taken off your cap? I thought that was against the regulations?’ Nurse McKerrow instinctively touched her cap, then went on washing old Mr Webster. ‘Nurse McKerrow, you shouldn’t take off your stockings in the ward. Not here, Nurse McKerrow.’ Colin looked from one to the other, his face sagging because he was so busy trying to realise what was going on that he forgot to keep any expression on his face. Chris drew the blanket up towards his head. ‘Not your uniform. My God, Nurse McKerrow, you can’t take off your uniform in front of us a
ll.’ Jimmy began to laugh. Nurse McKerrow looked across at Chris, and they held each other’s glance like a sliver of sunlight from one side of the ward to the other. ‘Lovely Nurse McKerrow,’ said Chris in a mocking voice of no mockery, ‘you have nothing on at all. Nothing at all. How could you be so shameless.’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ squealed Jimmy.

  ‘Nothing at all,’ said Chris quietly, and smiled at her across the ward.

  ‘You are the biggest fool,’ said Nurse McKerrow, smiling with her eyes.

  ‘I see Nurse McKerrow with nothing on at all,’ said Chris.

  And so he did, and she knew he did and didn’t mind, while Colin couldn’t understand, and said, ‘What’s this all about? Bloody Chris Palmer’s going mad again.’ Even if Nurse McKerrow had taken all her clothes off, Colin wouldn’t have seen what Chris saw because he didn’t have that searing, blue spark of imagination that Chris had. That searing, blue spark that burnt away the flux and the dross, and allowed Chris to see reality as it was, and as he wished it to be, both at the same time. And Chris knew the difference between them: that was the price for seeing both, I suppose. The blue spark that gave the light was corrosive, eating away at the bowels of things.

  Chris was never bored with life. He hated what he saw at times, but he was never bored with life. He was on a higher voltage than any of the others. When I compared him with the bland conformity of Colin and Richard, or the shrunken appreciation of the world that was Jimmy’s, then I couldn’t understand why it was that Chris was dying, why the doctors were cutting his bowel up piece by piece. I wasn’t prepared to change places with Chris myself, but if I’d had the power I would have let Jimmy or Colin, any of the others in the ward, die in place of Chris. I’m not afraid to admit it. Like Chris I’m not in the grip of the Liberal Mythology any longer: I don’t believe in the charcoal burners’ dream. If God had given me the power, I would have said, give Jimmy or Colin the bowel. I could have said it firmly. It doesn’t matter how many times we talk about people being equal, it’s not true. Some people are worth a dozen of the rest of us. The way perhaps one pohutukawa is worth a dozen tea-tree bushes. You don’t like the idea, but I’ll say it again. Some people are worth a dozen of the rest of us.

  On Chris’s last afternoon I was playing poker with Richard. Chris hated cards. Cards is just killing time, he used to say. He hated even to be near people playing cards, as if the trivial and repetitious talk as the cards were played prevented him from reading, or thinking. The ward was warm and quiet. Nurse McKerrow was laughing and talking in the office, and old Mr Webster had his transistor on to listen to the cricket. Chris stood in the balcony room by the windows, his fair hair drab in the sunlight. When I looked up again, he had opened the window and was sitting on the sill itself, facing back towards us. That surprised me, for he didn’t like sitting on anything hard. I picked up a red jack, I remember, a red jack which pleased me because it gave me a straight, and when I looked up again Chris was gone. Jimmy was pointing and crying out.

  To walk without crutches I had the habit of counting the steps. It helped me to be deliberate, and to anticipate the discomfort. So I counted from one to eleven as I walked into the balcony room. The garden was a long way down, the garden into which I’d released the bird on the day I arrived. Chris lay by the camellias, his blue dressing-gown distinct. His flight through the air had pushed up the legs of his pyjamas, and his long, white ankles showed amid the camellia bushes.

  Nurse McKerrow phoned downstairs, and a doctor and orderlies came out into the garden. Nurse McKerrow tried to lead me away from the window, but I stayed. I watched the doctor’s urgency replaced by resignation, and saw one of the orderlies shake his head. Colin began to construct his emotional defence. ‘It must have been an accident,’ he said. ‘Oh my God, what a thing to see. A fall, an accident like that.’ I didn’t answer him, but I thought it was the old Liberal Mythology all over again: the charcoal burners’ dream.

  Usually I won’t let myself dwell on it now I’m well. But sometimes when I catch a whiff of some antiseptic, or see those old-style radiators, like the piano accordions that stood along the wall in Men’s Surgical Two, then I think of Jimmy, of Puck, of Nurse McKerrow, and of Chris. I have a feeling that they’re all still there; that the mood of resignation and reality is waiting for me, waiting for the end of the charcoal burners’ dream.

  Cabernet Sauvignon

  with My Brother

  I walked the last two miles to my brother’s place. I was lucky to have hitched as close as I did. Along the flat through Darfield and Kirwee early in the morning I’d done a good deal of walking, but then a tractor repair man took me to within two miles. He told me he’d been working on the hydraulics of a new Case harvester which cost eighty thousand dollars.

  I love the accumulated heat of the Canterbury autumn. When you rest on the ground you can feel the sustained warmth coming up into your body, and there are pools of dust like talcum powder along the roads. It’s not the mock tropicality of the Far North, but the real New Zealand summer. It dries the flat of your tongue if you dare to breathe through your mouth. After spending the vacation working on the coast, I was happy to be back in Canterbury.

  My brother Raf lived on seventeen hectares of gravel close to West Melton. He had been a tutor in economics at Lincoln, but resigned on a matter of principle. He said it was a form of hypocrisy to pretend to any skill in financial affairs, when the best salary he could command was that of a tutor. Raf said that the most important things to achieve in life were privacy and revenue. At West Melton on seventeen hectares he had privacy, but the income was precarious. Raf’s best crop was manoeuvres. He said he received a small but consistent return from manoeuvres. The army paid him for access to the riverbed. Heavy manoeuvres was the better paying crop he said, but harder on the ground.

  As I walked up the natural terrace to Raf’s place, the heat shimmer on the riverbed was already beginning. The stones in Raf’s paddocks didn’t seem to have become any less numerous. I noticed that because last time I visited my brother, he told me that ploughing only brought them up, and that picking them off was uneconomic. Raf believed that if the ground were grazed naturally, and just a little super added from time to time, then worm action would increase the height of the soil until the stones were eventually covered right over. He said he read a report of French research on it in Brittany. Raf had a knack of finding theoretical justification for his lifestyle.

  He was working on his motorbike when I arrived. It was an old Norton 500 cc, an enormous single-pot machine, and his only form of transport. With it he towed a trailer large enough for ten bales of hay. He left the front tube hanging from the tyre, and came down the track to meet me. ‘Ah, Tony,’ he said, and took me by the shoulder. ‘I hoped to see you before the term began.’ His blue eyes seemed bleached from the sun, and his hair and eyebrows were nearly white. ‘I told myself you’d come,’ he said. Although he was my brother, he was about fourteen years older than me: we were more like uncle and nephew in some ways. I was aware of the emphasis and undisguised pleasure in his voice. ‘I’ve got quite a lot of beer at the moment,’ he said proudly. ‘I sold another dozen lambs last week.’ To have revenue to share, as well as privacy, made him feel his hospitality was complete.

  ‘I can’t stay the night. Lectures start tomorrow. I should have been in today, really.’

  ‘Well, we’ve the day together then,’ said Raf, ‘and you’ll get out sometime during the term.’

  I went with Raf into his house, and he put into his pygmy fridge as many bottles of beer as it would hold. The kitchen floor had a slant, and when the fridge was operating the vibration caused it to creep from the wall, inch by inch. I could see it, as we sat at the table with our coffee, shuffling up to Raf’s shoulder like a prototype robot. ‘It takes about seven minutes to reach the table,’ said Raf. He tolerated it because it never broke down, just had to be pushed back to the wall every seven minutes. ‘I have to switch it off when I go
outside,’ he said.

  Raf felt no obligation to ask about our parents. Not that he disliked them; it was his way of showing that his friendship with me was apart from any other connection between us. He knew I’d tell him anything that he should know. ‘You seem happy here still,’ I said.

  ‘Happiness is related to the level of expectation,’ said Raf, and he pushed back the fridge. ‘To be the mayor of Wellington, or the second richest farmer in Southland, is a gnawing futility if you can only be satisfied by being Prime Minister. Our education system should be directed to inculcating as low an expectation as possible in every child, and then most of them could grow up to be happy.’ Raf’s spur of the moment principle paid no heed to envy, but then he was working from the premise of his own nature. My brother was one of the minority who didn’t compare themselves with others. He was self-sufficient in his ideas and ambitions. He enjoyed simple things like being able to produce a meal for me from his property. We went outside, taking some beer with us and I helped Raf to fix the front tube. As we did so he laid out his plans for our lunch. ‘If only we’d had rain,’ he said, ‘then there would have been mushrooms. I’ve been spreading the spores year by year. Now I get cartons-full at times and take them in to sell. Everything’s right for them now except the rain.’

  ‘I’m not all that fussed on them anyway,’ I said, just so that he wouldn’t feel my level of expectation had been high.

  ‘I’ve been saving some rabbits, though, down by the pines. And I’ve got plenty of eggs and vegetables. We could have chook, but fresh game is better.’ Raf thought we should cull the rabbits before we had too much beer, and we went off over the stones and brown grass of his seventeen hectares towards the pines. ‘You’re doing accounting and economics, aren’t you,’ he said.