Carnival Sky (21 page)

WHEN SHEFF FINALLY completed his story on the Henare brothers and emailed it to the paper, Chris not only accepted the story, he rang back on receiving it, asking how things were.

As they talked, Sheff had a clear picture of the editor’s office: the computer monitor offset so as not to be between Chris and anyone he invited to sit down, the large window pane lightly mottled on the outside with dirt, a stocky brown vase that occasionally sported home-grown flowers, but more often anchored papers, a family photograph in a Warehouse frame, and the walls bare, apart from a caricature of the editor, as to if to stress that Chris sought no distraction from the enterprise he led. He made no attempt to emphasise his position through the appointments of the room in which he worked. There were outward expressions of his achievement, but the most valuable were more subtly shown in the comradely deference of staff.

‘Well, you keep in touch,’ said Chris, ‘and I hope your father pulls through.’ Both of them knew that wasn’t going to happen, but for the inevitable outcome it was awkward to find words. Sheff wanted to ask him how Raewyn was handling the chief reporter’s job, but the query would seem to be angling for some compliment of his own ability when in the role.

‘It’s good to have a chat,’ he said. ‘Give everyone my best, and
thanks again for taking the piece.’ The payment would be derisive, yet helpful all the same, and journalism took his mind from his father’s suffering. Sheff had to admit to himself that he missed the office.

‘Make sure you have your cell phone with you in case we need to get you,’ Belize said when Sheff asked her if he could take the car to Jessica’s. She’d given a blanket invitation to use it any time, but it wasn’t right to just lift the keys and go, assuming neither she nor Georgie would have any reason to leave the house.

‘Say hi to Jessica,’ said Georgie, ‘and ask her round here sometime, rather than putting her out. Emma could come. We’d have an early meal.’

‘I’m getting takeaways on the way over.’

‘Good idea,’ said Georgie.

‘No proper meal for a child, though, is it?’ said Belize.

‘Oh, Mum, it’s just the odd time. You know that,’ replied Georgie.

Sheff’s mother wasn’t facing him, but an odd angle of light cast a reflection of her face in the glass door of a cupboard while she thought herself unobserved. Even as she kept some social nuance to her voice, her expression was so blank that he turned from it and couldn’t trust himself to speak again. Pretence is sometimes the best protection against the assaults life brings.

He drove first to the burger shop and then the Chinese restaurant, and as he waited in each he made a vow to give more support to his mother, and give it more openly. He forgot such good intentions in awareness of an itch at the back of his scalp. He had noticed it several times over recent days. You never knew what might be working insidiously against you. Imagine the vermin carried by livestock and feral animals: barely able to be seen, but revealed as monstrously grotesque by the microscope. ‘You’re a Davy, aren’t you?’ said the woman as she gave him sweet-and-sour chicken with noodles, and took his numbered order chit.

‘Yes.’

‘I thought so,’ she said with satisfaction at her own perspicacity, and
no interest in further information. She was a former schoolmate he supposed, or a sometime secretary at his father’s work, but nothing in her bony, pale and rather handsome face was familiar to him. Maybe she would be at Warwick’s funeral: in her best dress and a row well back, but confident of some connection.

On his way back to the car, Sheff heard a noise behind him, and glanced round to see a skateboarder in a green sweatshirt and reversed cap weaving from side to side on the footpath, and propelling himself with swooping kicks. There was surely space and time for Sheff to step across to the road and his car, but the young guy chose just that moment to accelerate and pass on the gutter side. They met with an impact far greater than the mundane circumstances seemed to suggest. Both were thrown down, and the skateboard careered ahead, the screech of it registering for Sheff before his other senses recovered. The rider was up more rapidly than Sheff, and with a quick ‘Sorry, mate,’ was off in pursuit of his board. Sheff’s first concern was for the takeaways in their plastic containers and bags, but while checking them he felt blood on his face again: warm, more slippery than water, a fine, sleek oil.

An elderly woman with swollen ankles and bejewelled fingers was the only person who had seen it all, and she held Sheff’s food bags while he dabbed at his face with his handkerchief. She was torn between her initial inclination to help, and the growing wish not to become involved. He thanked her, and before driving away sat for a time, cleaned himself up, made sure blood wouldn’t be left in the car. There was no sign of the skateboarder, although the street was quite plain in the evening sun. What the hell was it recently, with these minor misadventures and random indignities?

‘My God,’ said Jessica when he arrived, ‘what have you done to yourself?’

‘I got bowled by a skateboard racer outside the Chinese takeaway, but it’s okay now.’ She took him through to the bathroom and he used damp toilet paper and tissues on his face. In the mirror he could see
that the blood came from a cut on the point of his chin rather than his mouth. The guy must have accidentally collected him with his watch strap, or body jewellery. The small wound was raw-looking, but soon formed a clot. Jessica said it was better not to put a plaster on, just let it seal in the air. Emma was in the doorway watching with undisguised interest as Sheff sponged his shirt and apologised for the fuss.

‘I think you’ll live,’ said Jessica.

‘Yes, but it’s not the entrance I intended.’

‘You could grow a big, big beard to cover it,’ said Emma.

‘Good idea,’ he said.

‘I don’t think it needs stitches,’ said Jessica.

‘The woman at the Chinese knew me,’ Sheff told Jessica a little later as she laid out the food. But he was thinking of the screech the skateboard made as it sped on, riderless, and the difficulty the passing woman had in bending down to pick up the takeaways.

‘Was she Chinese?’

‘No. A blonde woman with no eyebrows and a long nose.’

‘No idea,’ said Jessica. ‘Maybe someone from school.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘Why is he having tea with us?’ asked Emma.

‘I told you. Sheff’s someone I used to know ages ago and his sister’s a friend. You know that.’

‘Georgie,’ said Emma. ‘Do you know my daddy?’ she asked him briskly.

‘I used to, but not now,’ said Sheff. ‘I live in Auckland. I’m just back for a while.’

He knew little about children, was unsure what you talked about with a seven-year-old girl. To ask about school was too avuncular, and he knew nothing of children’s TV programmes, so he questioned her about her burger, and Emma when pressed said it tasted funny.

‘Serves me right,’ he said to Jessica afterwards when Emma was watching a
Little Mermaid
DVD, and he and her mother remained sitting at the table.

‘Kids embarrass you with honesty sometimes. Other times they’re just cantankerous,’ said Jessica. ‘She liked it okay, or she wouldn’t have eaten it.’

‘It still seems like afternoon.’ The light outside was strong. Soft, purple hues lay in the folds of the hills.

‘That’s another thing with children. Bedtime rules the house,’ she said.

They sipped wine and talked sparingly, half watching the colourful flash of the cartoons, trying to ignore the high, American voices of the characters. Sheff liked it there. A home with no sickness in it, and nothing portentous, nothing brimming, behind trivial conversation. He moved to the sofa when Jessica took Emma to her bed, and held up his glass of riesling to catch the evening sun. He could hear Jessica reading to her daughter, and he wondered about the ex-husband: whether Kevin still wished to be with his family, and how it felt to be denied that. His own divorce from Lucy had carried pain and bewilderment enough, but was all in the shadow of Charlotte’s death. What paralysing confusion it was to have a woman bound closely in a shared life, and then have it all come to pieces, a dead-end road of memory on which nevertheless he had to walk back and forth. But not this night, he told himself.

After the story-reading, Jessica tried to slip back to the living room, but Emma wanted to delay her with questions. ‘Sheff should go home now,’ he heard her complain, before being shushed by her mother. He didn’t acknowledge he’d overheard when Jessica returned from the bedroom and sat beside him on the sofa, although she gave a short, quick laugh and raised her eyebrows. He couldn’t blame Emma for resenting his intrusion, and he knew he lacked an easy, engaging manner with kids.

‘I sent a story off to the paper I used to work for,’ he said. ‘Do you know the two elderly Maori blokes living a few blocks down from Mum and Dad?’

‘I know of them. The Henare brothers, right?’

‘Yeah,’ said Sheff. ‘They go after gold, and possums. Evidently they do okay too.’

‘They must just about be past it, surely?’ Jessica asked.

‘It gives them something to do, I suppose, and bulks up their pensions a good deal. But I’m still keen on a vet piece, maybe several. I need to talk to you about that.’

‘I’m not sure. I’ll have to sound out my clients – see how they’d feel about their stock and management stuff being out in public. People can be funny about that.’

‘Well anyway, we can talk some time,’ said Sheff. He felt strangely relaxed, almost tired, sitting in the sunlit living room of a woman who had been a childhood friend of Georgie’s and now played bridge with his mother. A woman he was attracted to and who had rebuffed him because she was a lesbian. Jessica knew his family situation, yet had no close emotional involvement, nothing pent-up about his father that he need consider. And she hadn’t known Lucy and Charlotte. ‘It’s just so good to be away from the house sometimes,’ he said, ‘and you’re the only person I know.’

‘Happy to be useful,’ Jessica said.

‘I didn’t mean it to sound like that.’

‘I know,’ she said.

‘Tell me more about the kids we went to school with.’ It was something they had in common, and it was easy conversation: finding the humour, the unexpected, or the predictable, when present lives were checked against the personalities of childhood. He had no wish to be a bore, though, and Jessica had work the next day, so he left with the fingering shadows and the last shafts of the setting sun, and was home to sit with his father as darkness fell.

‘The one good thing, I suppose, is that you’re all together there as a family,’ Jessica said when he left her.

HE ONCE HAD A DREAM
that he was at his daughter’s primary school. He was looking in from the cold concrete, through the glass doors to the lighted room where the teacher and children were absorbed with class activity, and oblivious to him. There were colourful and carefree posters on the wall, and the children moved about the classroom freely, talking and working. Charlotte was one of them, and he was gripped with almost overwhelming relief that she was happy; that she didn’t need him with her to be content and busy and with others.

‘SHEFF?’ QUERIED THE VOICE on the phone. A man’s voice with an accent hard to place.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s Albie, Albie Waltenberg. I was at bridge on Wednesday, and Jessica Woolfe said you were back to see your dad. How is he?’

‘No good at all, but everything possible is being done.’

‘What a bugger. I’m really sorry.’

Albie Waltenberg, who had been the fall-guy of their adolescent group, too good-humoured and trusting to retaliate for their small treacheries and set-ups. Albie, who never did the homework, but was usually top of class. Albie, who was hopeless with girls, yet somehow got a meter-maid pregnant while still at varsity, left without a degree and became a salesman in a hardware shop in Hamilton. Although all that was a long time ago, and didn’t explain the accent; Sheff recalled Jessica saying he’d worked for international aid agencies abroad.

‘Jesus, Albie. What’ve you been up to all this time?’

‘Overseas mostly. I thought you might like to come round and have a drink, but I understand if you aren’t up to it. I could whistle up one or two of the others maybe.’

But he was alone when Sheff went. None of their former mates, and no sign of family either. Albie lived in one of those cheap townhouses that builders throw up when between better projects. The
second of four clones crowded together, with flimsy wooden lattice fences, carports and river stones loosely laid between the concrete paths. Albie had lost most of his hair and all his naivety, but retained his goodwill despite the years overseas that he described to Sheff as they sat at an outdoor glass-topped table barely large enough to hold the small bottles of Stella Artois. Albie had worked in Malawi, Chad, Somalia, Guinea-Bissau, Pakistan, Venezuela, Indonesia, the Philippines and more, gained a world view and a nearly fatal dose of dengue fever, ended back where he began without any awards for sacrifice, and with little money. ‘I burnt out really,’ he said. ‘Most people don’t understand, but how could you until you’ve seen how it is? Dirt, death and desperation. Especially the women and children. You wouldn’t believe what women face in some of those places. Bloody awful, yet the resilience is humbling.’

Albie had become thin without fitness accompanying it. His hair had a monkish generosity about his ears, but the bare top of his head was mottled with blemishes like giant freckles. Each wrist had a pronounced round bone on the little finger side, as if a marble lay under the skin. He tapped his fingers on the glass table as he talked, as if not all his urgency could be released in speech. ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘sometimes I have to bite my tongue, listening to people moaning about their difficulties here. Pricks going on about broadband speeds, petrol prices, the failure of their deep freeze, or general angst about existence when they’ve no idea what it’s like to be really up against it.’

Sheff imagined himself included in the judgement, and resolved not to whine about his own life. No doubt Albie was right, but one’s own trivial oppressions bulked as large as the horrors faced by others simply because they were closer in emotional perspective. ‘The last I heard you’d dropped out of varsity and got married,’ said Sheff. ‘What happened?’

‘Melanie took up with the manager of the hardware store I worked in, and so we split up. Peter must be twenty-four now, but I don’t see him, or his mother. She’s got two more boys now. It all seems to
belong to another life and I’ve let go of it completely.’ Yet his smile flickered with the surge of feeling within. Even good works among the starving and the destitute hadn’t assuaged all pain.

Sheff changed the subject by mentioning others of the gang – Paul Cary, who had become a successful cocky, and Reinier Heigler, an Auckland QC, but it was soon clear that Albie had an agenda. ‘I’ve read your stuff from time to time,’ he said. ‘I used to follow your political column in the Sunday paper. Some good analysis, yeah.’ He nodded his head, took a deep swallow from his glass, but had some difficulty in the segue to what really interested him. ‘The thing is,’ he said in a little rush, ‘I think you might be just the guy to help.’

‘In what?’

‘In saving the country,’ said Albie with righteous firmness. He hitched his chair closer, and Sheff half expected him to give the conspiratorial look around that is the theatrical cliché. ‘Have you any real idea of what’s actually happening north of us.’

‘Come on, Albie, there’s not going to be any Maori revolution – not in a military way at least.’

‘I’m not talking about that. Jesus, people going on about global warming, carbon footprints, religious fundamentalism, corporate greed, pandemics – and all the while the real threat is about to overwhelm us. People, that’s what it is. Indonesia, the Philippines, India, they’re bursting at the seams with raving people, and they’ll come flooding into Australia and New Zealand soon, no matter what policies and obstacles there are. They’ll just come, or die trying, because they must. It’s happening in Aussie already, and we’re next. Jesus.’

In the glare of Albie’s obsession, Sheff felt distanced from his old friend. Nothing that he could say of education, of birth control, of government regulation, was any counter for Albie, whose accumulation of statistics, anecdotal instances and august authorities was impressive, whatever the accuracy. ‘We need someone like you,’ he said urgently. ‘We need access to the media. You speak the
language and have the contacts. We can’t pay much, but you’d have the satisfaction of the cause. If nothing’s done bloody soon, then it’s too late: an invasion of millions of despairing people will come and swamp us all. It’s already begun. It’s not bloody aliens we have to fear, but too many of ourselves.’

Sheff could recognise considerable truth in what Albie said, but the fixation, the exaggeration, were clear to him also. His profession had accustomed him to zealots, and the greater disappointment was the realisation that Albie had got in touch with him not because of friendship, but possible advantage. Albie’s hair had largely gone, and his nose had an Etruscan prominence that Sheff was unable to recall from their youth, yet there was enough left of the friend he had known to deter him from being dismissive. ‘Well, I’m not actually with a paper at the moment. I’m taking a sort of break. Maybe I could do a one-off piece about your experience overseas, and you could work in some of this stuff.’

‘A one-off’s no good, Sheff. This has to become a major issue, right up to government level. We need to rouse a hell of a fuss, and quickly.’ Sheff didn’t know the composition of Albie’s ‘we’, and preferred not to be included.

‘What do you do for an income since you’ve been back?’ Sheff asked. Albie was silent for a while, as if reluctant to have the subject changed, then he gave a sort of grimace that was part a yawn, and left the consideration of catastrophe to explain the mundane. He did relieving at the high school on the strength of his incomplete degree, and organised the electorate polling booths at voting time: a triennial boost to his earnings. He said he had offers for quite big jobs overseas, but couldn’t take the risk again because of his health. His rundown on the symptoms of dengue fever and malaria was almost as depressing as his description of the looming refugee tsunami.

‘My immune system just can’t take it any more. It’s buggered,’ he said.

As a boy, Albie had the most brains and least malice of them all.
Why wasn’t he the QC, or the corporate executive? Why did he have to get dengue fever before he could become famous in a television documentary as the director of aid programmes in exotic countries? Some people have the talent for accumulation in life – money, accomplishments, family, acquaintances, a few inches around the middle – while others fine down, like Albie, until they are alone in a small, cheap house with a single obsession. Sheff wondered if he was heading that way himself: a disgruntled divorced guy living alone, and bitching about the falling standards of his profession.

Albie came out to the road to see him leave, and only then made reference to the cut on Sheff’s chin around which a bruise had blossomed. He’d allowed conversation to go by that re-established contact before making such a personal comment. ‘I got bowled over by a mad skateboarder in the main street,’ said Sheff. ‘Footpaths are as dangerous as the roads these days.’

‘Bummer. And the school kids on those scooters are just as bad,’ Albie said, and then, ‘Nice car,’ as they stood by Warwick’s top-of-the-range Commodore.

‘Yes, unfortunately Dad can’t drive any more.’

‘Anyway,’ said Albie, ‘you think about coming on board to get something done. People overseas send me stuff regularly that’s never released here. Bloody frightening, let me tell you. I could give you a ring and bring material round for you to have a gander at. Great copy for hard-hitting stories.’

‘I’m just concentrating on helping Mum and Dad at the moment.’

‘Yeah, of course.’ Albie looked up and down the road as if in search of more community-minded companionship, and hissed a little through his teeth. ‘Good to catch up,’ he said. They had been too long, and too far, apart, for boyhood comradeship to bring them together.

On his way home a gravel truck passed from the other direction, dropped and then threw up a stone that smacked loudly on the windscreen and left a star-shaped fracture. Bloody hell. He would say nothing to his father, but explain to Belize. His father was unlikely to
be in the car again, so why trouble him. If Sheff hadn’t gone to Albie Waltenberg’s it wouldn’t have happened; another sentence or two from Albie about the refugee horde, and the conjunction of stone and windscreen wouldn’t have occurred. And the truckie would be driving on oblivious, quite unaware of any responsibility. ‘Fuck,’ said Sheff loudly. He remembered what Albie had said about those who faced real affliction in life, yet such is human nature, that if rape, starvation, murder and robbery are not an immediate prospect, then you rage against a windscreen chip.

In the third form Albie had fallen from high in one of the willows at Frenchman’s Point, and dislocated a finger. The digit had protruded back strangely from the others, and Albie had run for home sobbing in a high-pitched voice, and holding his injured hand aloft like an Olympic torch. They had knocked themselves about as kids. Sheff was surprised none of them had suffered serious injury.

In the fifth form, Albie was the only boy in the singing competition, and chose a piece from
Porgy and Bess
. His voice was surprisingly good, but the performance in the school hall was greeted with derision nevertheless. His peers knew that boys didn’t sing, certainly not songs like that. Despite the headmaster’s admonitions afterwards, their opinion didn’t change.

Albie would be just as disappointed as Sheff at their reunion. There would be no call with insider information from overseas sources, no further invitation to join the cause to save the nation.

Their names were unchanged, but they were different people now. There was irony, too, in the meeting: Albie fixated on teeming populations while living in Central Otago with an empty landscape stretching to the sky.

HIS FATHER HAD COME TO AUCKLAND
towards the end of Sheff’s first year at university. He had business there, but remained a second
day so that they could have time together. They spent the afternoon at Kohimarama, and went to an Italian restaurant in the evening. His father talked of a trip to Portugal that he and Belize were planning, and of his business partner’s suggestion that they open a branch in Queenstown. Afterwards they went to Sheff’s hostel room. Warwick sat on the one chair by the desk, Sheff on the bed. ‘They’re tight little cubbies, aren’t they?’ his father said. ‘Anyway, tell me how things are going.’

Sheff wasn’t sure himself. He was coping with the work okay, but until he passed a few exams he couldn’t know how well. He was more at ease talking about the sport he was playing. His father didn’t press. When he was leaving, he told Sheff that he and Belize thought about him often. ‘You’d come to us if there was anything, wouldn’t you?’ he said. After he’d gone Sheff found an envelope on the corner of the desk. Five hundred dollars and no note.