Carnival Sky (13 page)

So they walked back to the roundabout, and then towards the primary school. And they left the topic of his father behind, and talked of people they’d both known as children. Bunny Yates, Albie Waltenberg, Paul Cary, Reinier Heigler and Christine Smith were all Sheff’s year. ‘Bunny’s done well in the army,’ Jessica said. ‘He was on television talking about a peacekeeping force he led to the Solomons, or maybe it was Papua New Guinea. Paul’s still here. I see something of him because he’s taken over both his family farm and his uncle’s. He’s in a pretty big way. Albie’s back after working for aid agencies overseas for years.’

‘Paul was the athlete of the school, and he pissed the rest of us off because he never trained, but always won.’

‘He still looks trim enough, although he’s completely bald. He’d like to catch up, I imagine. You kicked around together a lot, didn’t you?’

‘I might give him a call,’ said Sheff, but felt no great inclination to do so.

Instead his attention was taken by the magazine billboards propped outside a dairy. Airbrushed faces of female celebrities and breathless headlines of tragedy, pregnancy, alimony, stalkers, sexual eccentricity and feuds. All suggesting significance and revelation that the stories themselves failed to deliver: the brush with death being revealed as the demise of a second cousin, the secret obsession as a fondness for caramel creams. Although Sheff knew that such journalism, like the poor, will always be with us, his professionalism was affronted as ever. ‘Who reads this crap?’ he said.

‘I do, sometimes,’ replied Jessica. ‘Everybody does, I guess. It’s the fast food of journalism – only harmful if it becomes your total diet.’

‘I never read it except in waiting rooms when there’s nothing else. The bad punning titles, the iconic this and incredible that, the platitudes. “A nation mourns!” “A community is stunned!” Jesus. I’d shoot any journalist who wrote that. In every conceivable circumstance, including Armageddon, thirty per cent of the people couldn’t give a fuck.’

‘But you’re an elitist snob, aren’t you?’ she said cheerfully. ‘And you should lighten up. Why should you tell people what to read?’

Any honest answer to that would only substantiate her charges, and all he wished was to enjoy the time with her. ‘You’re absolutely right,’ he said, ‘and it sells, so what other virtue does it need?’

But Jessica merely smiled at his sarcasm, and began again to talk of people they’d grown up with. The bell hadn’t gone when they reached the school, and they sat on wooden slatted seats that ran along the side of the classrooms. He remembered the feel of them on his backside from thirty-five years before, although the school was changed in many ways. Surely in his time there the playing areas had been clear expanses of lawn, or asphalt, on which they had created their own challenges and games, and now there was a variety of apparatus – wooden forts on piles, slides, rotating drums, metal corkscrew ascents, monkey bars, a climbing tree with plastic ropes in bright colours. Other parents waited also, mostly women, and
more competed for parking places at the peak hour. ‘What happens to Emma when you’re working?’ he asked.

‘Sometimes my mother comes, but mostly I pay a woman to look after her at her place until I get back. She’s a good sort. Emma likes her and she’s got a girl in the same class. It works out well usually.’

Sheff had forgotten the pandemonium at the end of a school day. An eruption of kids from classrooms everywhere, running, skipping, shouting, dawdling, propelling skateboards and small wheeled scooters, disappearing in coteries, ambling off alone, or greeting their parents with offhand familiarity. All seemed to have backpacks, the smallest children almost overwhelmed by them, but scuttling along nevertheless. The voices were shrill and echoed among the buildings and over the grassed field and play areas.

Emma was taller than Sheff had expected, and large-featured. Her arms and legs were long, thin and loosely jointed, and she moved like a freshly fashioned and attractive marionette. After a prolonged farewell to her best friend, she greeted her mother and said hello to Sheff when prompted. She took Jessica’s hand as they walked, and talked of her class’s responsibility for the coming school fair. There was little chance for Sheff and Jessica to say anything more to each other, but he took pleasure in seeing how close mother and daughter were, how entirely meshed in each other’s lives. When they reached the house, Jessica as a courtesy asked if he wanted to come in, but it was time to go.

As he drove to his parents’ house, Sheff calculated that had Charlotte lived she would be three years and nine months old. Too young for school, but perhaps already at kindergarten. He and Lucy had very much wanted a baby, and when finally Charlotte was born they lit a red candle to celebrate her first day home, and saluted her with glasses of bubbly. Her hair had been fair and fine, sometimes damp on her forehead as she slept in the cot. Her fingernails were as if made of glass, and she could spread her toes almost as well as she could her fingers. Sheff didn’t allow himself to imagine the life
he and Lucy and Charlotte might have had, but stayed sitting in the car for a little while after arriving home, and then went in to the only family he had.

HE HAD GRIEVANCES, OF COURSE,
concerning his parents, even if recognised in retrospect as unjustified. We never quite forgive our mother and father for treating us like the children we were.

In the year Sheff started secondary school a small circus came to town. No elephants or high-wire acrobats, just trick cyclists, conjurors and clowns. The tent was more a marquee than a big-top. Sheff and two friends bunked school to watch the circus setting up in the park. Not an arresting sight, or offence, but they were found out and hauled before the headmaster. Paul and Bunny had lengthy letters from their fathers giving excuses and taking responsibility. Warwick’s short note said he’d given no permission, and that he and Sheff would accept what punishment the school considered appropriate. Sheff had forgotten what that was, but not forgiven his father’s objectivity.

HIS FATHER NEEDED be taken to Dunedin hospital for a check by the specialist there. Sheff drove, with Georgie beside him, and Belize sat in the back with Warwick. Despite the reason for the trip they attempted to treat it as an excursion, the road providing novelty for commentary, and also the familiar for reminiscence. Recent memory also. As they passed through Roxburgh, Sheff saw the tea rooms in which he and Georgie had sat, and the parking area where he’d bumped the car that bore a baby, but his sister said nothing of that. How much change there had been since in their relationship; Sheff found it difficult to account for his earlier exasperation.

Dunedin had been the big smoke when Sheff and Georgie were children. Warwick had taken them to the movies, or the beach playground, while Belize shopped, and then they would rendezvous, and after she’d stowed her parcels in the boot, describing each as an essential purchase, they would go to one of those family restaurants, perhaps the railway carriage, that offered beer-battered fish and chips, carpet-bagger steak, pork medallions with apple sauce and kumara mash – perhaps one pasta dish as a nod to continental cuisine.

And on those trips they had often passed the hospital without a thought that one day it would be the single reason for Warwick’s journey. Now no entertainment, shopping or eating out: just the
necessity to front for another grim examination and then drive home again without reprieve. Warwick was a private patient, but the specialist and Georgie wanted to take advantage of the hospital’s new, high-tech scanner.

He was taken almost immediately. His wife and daughter accompanied him, but Sheff thought that was family enough. He briefly gripped his father’s shoulder before he was led away by the women he loved, one each side and ready to support him.

The out-patients’ waiting room was merely the enlarged side of a wide corridor, and patients, visitors and staff went by in procession, their rank, affiliation and hold on life shown by dress and demeanour. Two back-to-back rows of upright chairs with red vinyl seats, low tables with outdated magazines, and posters on the walls giving the symptoms of more afflictions than people wished to consider at one time. Pamphlets, also, allowing patients to put by their present ills and be informed of those awaiting them, malignant moles, tumour-induced amnesia, tinnitus, cervical cancer, varicose veins, cataracts, bunions and Parkinson’s disease. Sheff was both attracted by such material and apprehensive of it, for following such reading he recognised most of the symptoms not specific to women as present in his own condition.

Almost all those seated were old, at least by Sheff’s reckoning, though one young guy in shorts and a slipper on his left foot sat with such physical complacency that he may as well have had a placard around his neck that read,
Sports injury: I will live forever
.

‘Nah, nah,’ he kept saying with friendly denial into his cell phone. Many people waited as couples, with just the occasional exchange between them regarding the length of time they had been there, or the activities of their absent grandchildren. Each time a nurse came and called up a batch for appointments, those waiting perked up and chatted briefly of how they were thus advanced in the list, or suppressed chagrin that they had been sitting longer than some who received the call.

Behind Sheff, two men who were strangers traded intimacies of
their health without exchanging names.

‘I suppose you’re here for the old prostrate?’

‘Prostate, yes.’

‘Me too. A bugger, isn’t it. What’s your PSA level?’

‘Well, shot up a bit according to the last blood test, so I’m back here.’ His voice was lower, more guarded, but the topic still drew him in.

‘How many times you up in the night?’

‘A couple or more.’

‘Well, it’ll be at least the old digital today won’t it, if not the machine?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Good, though it’s not a woman doctor, eh?’

‘No,’ which meant yes.

‘You had a biopsy then?’

‘Yeah, just one.’

‘And pissing blood isn’t fun, is it? It’s the old knife for me. I was going to have the new treatment with radioactive rods, or some damn thing, but it’s not suitable for me evidently, so it’s the knife for sure.’ Rather than apprehension, there was in his voice a sombre pride that he was a more serious case than his companion. Sheff didn’t turn, but later the man responded to the nurse’s call for ‘Mr Lilly please’, with a resounding affirmative and followed her into view. A stubby Harry Secombe man in work clothes, who went with false jauntiness to meet his prognosis, the nature of which wasn’t in doubt for all who had overheard his conversation.

None of these people meant anything to Sheff, yet he wished them well. Even though nothing could save his father, Sheff was glad Warwick had private medical insurance and so could have the best care. And he thought with admiration of Georgie, whose professional time was spent with people who were hurt, angry or afraid, and avid for miracles. How steadfast she’d become, and how understanding.

His reflective calm was disturbed by a woman coming back from the water dispenser, a thin, elderly person with a head hung like a lantern
in advance of her body because of osteoporosis. She tripped on Sheff’s foot although it wasn’t outstretched, and fell against him helplessly, too slow in reaction even to put a hand out. Water splashed Sheff’s neck, the woman’s face struck his shoulder, causing her denture to pop out with life of its own and jiggle in his lap. Instinctively Sheff reached to steady the woman, and they ended clasped in mutual embarrassment and disorder. The thrall of boredom in the waiting room was briefly broken. The small consternation brought a clerical assistant from out-patient reception, who took the woman chirping back to her seat, and the teeth away to be rinsed. Once again Sheff had the sense of being the victim of trivial happenstance, yet viewed with suspicion by those around him. He assumed what he hoped was an expression of injured benevolence, and took up a leaflet on rhinoplasty.

Georgie returned first, by herself. Sheff got up to join her and, as he passed by the elderly water woman, she steadfastly looked away. He thought of making light of the folly to entertain his sister, but decided she’d take satisfaction in adding the incident to all the other examples she’d stored up of his lack of adroitness in everyday life. ‘How did it go?’ was all he said.

She gave a slight shake of her head, and screwed up her eyes. ‘We’ll get an official report,’ she said, ‘but there’s nothing to give hope, I’m afraid.’ She spoke softly and with no dramatic emphasis, but the words had an almost physical impact so that he had to steady himself, and he became aware of the pulse beat behind his eyes.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said.

‘Well, we knew really, didn’t we? Nothing’s changed.’

‘Where are they now?’

‘He needed to go to the loo. I had a private talk to Mr Quincy when Mum took him out. He’ll go over the new scan, but doesn’t think there’s anything else we can do now except try to keep him comfortable.’

‘So did he say how long?’

‘Everyone’s different, but it’s days, weeks at most,’ said Georgie.
Conversation still went on around them. The water woman, mouthing on her recently cleansed dentures and still obdurate in refusal to look at him, went unsteadily by.

‘Look how stooped that old duck is,’ said Sheff.

‘Kyphosis – dowager’s hump,’ answered his sister without a second glance. Sheff saw Harry Secombe walk sombrely towards the exit after his consultation, but decided not to tell Georgie about his prostate.

Sheff would have asked more about Warwick’s session, but his mother and father came slowly to join them. A girl wearing a smock emptied a small trash bucket into a black polythene bag, an elderly man pulled up his trouser leg and rubbed his ankle, the skin there mottled purple and vermilion with the massed tendrils of tiny veins. A brief laugh from someone unseen and well down the corridor merged with coughing near at hand. Sheff was appalled at their indifference: the lack of respect for his father, who deserved so much more than other people. His father was dying, and the world paid insufficient attention.

As they went carefully back to the car park, Belize gave a reprise of the examination for Sheff’s benefit. She was impressed that Mr Quincy and Georgie knew one another, as if somehow that might ensure a positive outcome. ‘I’ve just met him professionally at conferences, Mum. I don’t know him all that well,’ said Georgie. ‘He was part-time at med school for a while, but not while I was studying. Just stop for a moment, Dad.’ She had noticed that Warwick’s blue shirt-tail lapped over the back of his trousers, and she loosened his belt and tucked the material in, while he stood patiently. He had nothing to add to his wife’s description of the scanner procedure, or examination, nothing to say of the effort he found it to undress and dress, or of the talk with Mr Quincy. He stood as a work horse would while its traces were adjusted, and when Georgie finished and patted his shoulder, he moved off gingerly again.

‘Would you like to go somewhere for a meal?’ Sheff asked.

‘Why not? Why not?’ said Warwick with palpably false bravado. His
voice had altered in illness, acquiring a husky remoteness as if, although physically still close at hand, the essential man was floating away. And his speech was subject to unintended and fluttering changes in register.

‘I think a light omelette at home would be better. You know you can’t stand much,’ said Belize.

‘You’ve had enough up and about today, haven’t you?’ said Georgie.

Sheff would have argued against the women, but he sensed that his father was in agreement with them, despite wishing to deny his weakness. On the drive home Sheff put on the climate control because of the late afternoon heat, and Warwick soon fell into an uneasy sleep resting against his wife’s shoulder. It was still light, but Sheff remembered those times coming home in the dark many years before. He and Georgie in the back seat of the Triumph 2000, drowsy, but happy with the day. The darkness outside, the customary confinement within, the familiar noise and minor movement, all adding to an unexamined sense of family and security. Warwick and Belize might be talking of friends, or work, or whether they should pave a barbecue area. Or they may have said all they wished, and been at ease with that. Sometimes Warwick had whistled show tunes; he was fond of musicals. He could catch a note on both the outgoing and indrawn breath, and Sheff would lean his head against the window, watch the road unravel in the pale beam of the headlights, and think of not much at all.

‘Your shirt’s wet,’ said Georgie. ‘I noticed it back at the hospital. What’ve you been doing?’ The truth was both complicated and tedious.

‘I spilt a cup of water in the waiting room,’ he said, and that was accurate as far as it went.

‘They’re all different, those dispensers, aren’t they?’ said his mother. ‘And sometimes it’s hard to get the cardboard cups apart. Almost as difficult to open as those tiny pottles of milk you get on planes, and they squirt over you no matter what you do.’ Perhaps it was from his mother that Sheff inherited incompetence in such things.

He went back to thinking of his whistling father in the past. Once when they were playing in an ad hoc foursome, Warwick had been rebuked for the habit by one of the opposition, who was lining up a putt. Warwick was a bit of a stickler for sporting etiquette, and quite put out and apologetic. Sheff imagined that he would have whistled at the office too, while working with the computer, or preparing to see a client, and no one would have objected, for that was his domain. Whistling seemed to have gone out of fashion, along with wearing floppy hats and writing letters.

By Speargrass they passed the Painter farm, where Sheff had worked in the holidays at the end of his seventh form year. The sinuous dirt track up to the house and sheds that looked much the same, except even more desperately in need of a coat of paint and with some planks twisting awry as they weathered. Warwick had arranged the job, and allowed Sheff to use the car. Driving there and back had been the best parts of the day, for he’d felt quite grown-up, and would lift a finger from the wheel casually to acknowledge the few other motorists, as was his father’s habit.

Working with old man Painter had been less satisfying. There was often no break for smoko, morning or afternoon, and they rarely had lunch in the house. Sheff remembered a window held open by a wooden spoon, and curtains stained with condensation and bedraggled like worn petticoats. Mr Painter was a widower who seemed to Sheff at seventeen to be as old as the stumps they spent much of their time uprooting. A thin, dark man in a singlet, with heavy wrinkles on his upper arms where the flesh had atrophied despite no let-up in physical work. For the first few days Sheff had shared the old man’s midday meal, mutton sandwiches and cold milk tea from a flask, but then he said his mother was keen to provide, and so she was once he’d asked her.

Painter usually had the stained stub of a roll-your-own in the side of his mouth, sometimes lit and sometimes not, and he could eat without removing it. They must have done all sorts of farming jobs, but in retrospect it seemed to Sheff every day was spent pulling out stumps. Old man Painter had a Farmall tractor with a perforated metal seat
perched high, and he would sit swivelled there, watching impatiently while Sheff hacked with an axe around the tree roots and then attached the chains. Painter had been a Bren gunner in the war, but he never talked about that, or much else. Racehorses seemed to be his only interest apart from the farm, and Sheff knew nothing about that.

Maybe before Sheff started work there, Warwick had agreed with Painter what the pay would be. It was never mentioned between Sheff and the old man. He was given nothing at the end of the first week, or any week except the seventh, when the farmer came out to the car with him at the conclusion of the last day, and fished a cheque out of his pocket. The sum was more than Sheff expected, given what he knew of the Painter lifestyle. On the back of the cheque the old man had written in pencil the number of days and hours Sheff had worked, the rate, and then calculated the total. The working remained there, as in a piece of primary school arithmetic.