Living As a Moon (7 page)

Ramon and I went up to the roof at lunchtime next day. Busy Friday and with the weekend to look forward to. A clear sky again, but not all that warm. We sat with our backs to one of the air-conditioning outlets and ate bought sandwiches from clear plastic containers. ‘The vagrant died,’ said Ramon.

‘How do you know?’

‘When you were out doing a round the cops came asking what we’d seen. He was dead on arrival, they said.’ They’re expensive, those bought sandwiches, but fresh you have to say. Even though Saucer had died, we could still hear shouting from the alley, even at lunchtime and after what had happened. Sex Slut was screaming about something, and then laughing about something. How could they laugh like that from such lives. ‘They still don’t know who he is,’ said Ramon.

Ramon also told me that his academic accreditation had come through and he’d been offered a job in a firm of accountants two blocks away. More than three times the money he and I were getting. ‘Jesus, that’s great. Good on you,’ I said, and I tried hard to be pleased as he deserved, but was cast down by the reflection on my own shitty situation. He left me there on the roof and went down to see Mr Cusip and hand in his resignation. ‘Make sure you stick it to Matthew,’ I said.

The cops didn’t know who Saucer was. They meant he wasn’t anybody. I told myself I was in a totally different situation, and would soon have a plan. Jesus no, you’re not the same, I said to myself. I leant back on the air-conditioning shaft, listened to the jostling voices from the alley below, and watched the vapour trails of the planes above: strings of silver Christmas tinsel dissolving slowly in the blue.

A late autumn day with the colours of the dying leaves defiant against grey sky, and a drift of air that was almost a breeze and would have passed unnoticed but for its chill. I was walking down the hill from the university, and making ground gradually on two women in front. They both wore dark, winter skirts and high leather boots. I knew one of them, Alexa Pope, who worked in the registry. As they stepped across a gutter to cross the road, the other woman slipped and fell with surprising force. She lay still for a moment because of the impact, her skirt rucked up to show the scope of inner thigh, a smooth expanse in the soft autumn light.

Viv said I laughed at her fall, but surely I didn’t, and if so it was the laugh of someone caught off guard by the suddenness of trivial misfortune, and the guilt of finding eroticism in it. Alexa and I helped her to a low, garden wall and she sat there for a few minutes. She was angry, I think to be introduced in such circumstances. ‘No, I’m perfectly okay, thanks,’ she said.

There was no blood, no apparent damage to herself, or her clothing. She said then that she fell on her hip, and, months later, when we were friends, that she landed on her bum.

There is in the psyche of every man an unconscious, archetypal image of how a woman should be, and when he meets someone who fits that template, a feeling arises of ineffable fascination, and sadness too. The woman may not be beautiful, may not be gifted, but there is a throb of recognition, the sense of something intrinsic that is glimpsed in the moment.

Viv had long black hair, pale skin with several dark moles on her neck. She was natural and graceful in movement, and her face possessed inquisitiveness without malice. So womanly, so sisterly almost, that I wanted to go to her with something that would make her smile, and then come back having done no damage whatsoever. She was tall and rangy, and always looked better in winter clothes than those of summer. In light, sleeveless things she seemed slightly dispossessed, but winter clothing fleshed her out, contained her height, her straight, dark hair and pale skin. Even after we were married I never told her of the powerful jolt I felt at the sight of her thigh after she had fallen on the street, the accidental exposure of herself to a stranger, though often as we lay together I would run my hand to the top of her legs.

Meetings and partings mark the chronology of our experience, with memory having its own criteria. I remember almost all the occasions on which I last saw people important to me, but not always how they came into my life. Yet how clear the recollection of the two women walking, the changing leaves, the close, grey sky, the sharp sound of their boots, and then Viv’s sudden fall.

I saw her three days later: she was coming from the university medical centre towards the tower block. She had a bruise on her hip, she said. ‘It’s just as well that any treatment’s free for me,’ she said. Viv was a nurse, but wore no uniform. Instead, close-fitting jeans and a black jacket with long pockets, which hid her hands and wrists.

‘Why not come and have a coffee in the staff club?’ I said.

So something important in the lives of both of us began, though her recollection, as I said, was somewhat different, and our opinions of the outcome may not have been the same. Whatever the subject of our talk at that first coffee, it was an easy conversation, perhaps because we had come together by accident rather than one of us having made a move towards the other. There were no conditions and no expectations, and we made no arrangement to meet again, and so parted with the same ease we’d begun. I didn’t see her again for several weeks, but remembered her boots, her relaxed and inquisitive face, her habit of bulging her cheek with her tongue if she was amused.

The third meeting had nothing to do with our lives at the university, and so the more unexpected. My father was involved in organising hot air balloon rides as a fundraiser for children with disabilities, and I went to Ashworth Park with him to help the balloon owner set up. I’d never realised what a lengthy and complex business that is: the aligning and laying out of the fabric, the positioning of the basket, the initial propping of the mouth until the controlled blasts from the burner slowly inflated the fabric, and it began to swell on the ground like a fat man. The burner was fierce and loud: great care had to be taken to ensure its flare didn’t damage any tackle. The balloon man was at first quite tense, and spoke sharply to us as casual assistants, but once the thing had lifted off, mushroomed into the still air, he laughed a lot, and enjoyed the wonder expressed by the people who began to gather.

I watched the first groups go up. The balloon was on a long tether that was never let go, and so the short trip was all about elevation, and enough for those in the carrier to see the city spread out beneath them, take photographs if they wished, and then come back to the same spot.

Viv came with a tousle-haired guy with a pleasant voice.

The three of us talked briefly, and he told me his work concerned the classification of historic buildings. I was surprised how much I envied him as they stood close together and smiling in their ascent, until they were too high for me to see their expressions. Before they came back to earth I moved away, but I’d made a decision that I should be the one who stood beside her as she smiled, or cried, or rose, or fell.

I rang her at the university clinic, and asked her to come with me to see
Gloomy Sunday
, which became our film, in the way that couples have our tune, our meal, our wine, even our quarrel — all seared into their lives by association with falling in love. Only much later did she tell me that Jay, the man in the park, had wanted to marry her.

All that is seventeen years past, and I saw Jay’s photograph in the paper two days ago, taken at the opening of a refurbished movie theatre in Wanganui. Viv wouldn’t have been beside him if they’d married: she’s been dead for thirteen months. Cancer of the spleen — lymphoma, which is an ugly word. A rapid form of the disease, but by no means painless.

It’s customary to say that victims of disease are bravely resigned in their suffering. Viv wasn’t. As a nurse she had a special bitterness concerning the path she was compelled to take. She became a changed woman, an angry, sometimes vituperative person. The specialists told me that was to be expected, but I hadn’t. Her death was pain enough, but to have her personality corrupted by disease and the despairing knowledge of its outcome was quite terrible. Death, it seemed, had taken her, but set up a puppet to mock us and prolong some lesson we failed to understand. That’s the last I’ll say of it. The last I’d think of it too, if that control was possible. How she was before, and how I remember her now, that’s the true image of Viv. Meetings and farewells, meetings and farewells: with Viv it’s the meeting I keep my focus on, and our time with Rachel.

Rachel was born on a summer’s night when there was a thick flight of the grass grub beetles — small, copper scarabs that blundered in the warm, night air, and lit and crawled on the living and inanimate alike. I’d left the maternity ward with the realisation that something wonderful had happened, and gone out into the hospital grounds. There were beds of severely disciplined roses, the blooms of which had just a tinge of colour in the moonlight. There were short, tapering cypress trees, and borders of long-stemmed lavender. The air was heavy with natural, harmonious scents, and also the drone of beetles, whose bodies struck like pellets. I was reminded of those other pasture predators, porina, whose transformation was not to beetles, but to soft, heavy moths that in rural swarms could so pulp on a car’s windscreen that driving became impossible.

What a lovely name is Rachel: how marvellous its biblical origin. Viv and I were completely in agreement in the choice, but then we were rarely in dispute over anything that concerned our daughter. The bulk of people are merely reflectors for attitudes and events around them, but some few have an inner luminosity that sets them apart. Viv had that, and so does Rachel.

The night Rachel was born was one in which my ritualistic father would certainly have proclaimed omens. Even the beetles in their mating dance, the audible flight and pellet impact on solid things, seemed a salutation from worshipful old Egypt. No one else was in the garden, and from the seat there I could look back to the bright, tiered widows of the hospital and forward to the faintly lit roses, lawns and lavender. Winged insects make a sound like string instruments at a distance.

‘Go on home now and ring your folks,’ Viv had said as I left her cubicle within the ward. ‘But don’t smoke any cigars inside the house, and put the bassinet in the sun tomorrow morning to air.’ I looked back and saw her watching, trying to catch my eye to reinforce our happiness. There was a nurse within earshot: a tall, Fijian girl who quickly glanced towards me, then away. I sensed she felt pleasure from our closeness, and slight envy too. I’d made no reply, gone out like a prince through the long corridors with the lifts at the end, and into the night garden.

After Viv died, Rachel and I were cut adrift from other people, and even, strangely, from each other. Love was not in question, but the oppression of it squeezed out ease of communication. Rachel said nothing to me of her aspirations, her fears, her painful and fluctuating relationships with the flouncing girls and slouching boys who were growing up around her, yet we enjoyed each other’s company and carried on a tacit pretence that neither of us was threatened. On my side, at least, I offered a love too heartfelt to articulate, and too natural to require exposition.

It had always been that way. Viv said there was often something idealistic in the relationship between father and daughter, but I had no sense of being part of a generalisation. Love, however, doesn’t carry any guarantee of responsible action.

Rachel would come sometimes into my study in the evenings, when I was plodding through essay marking, or lecture preparation. She would sit sideways in the one armchair and draw her legs beneath her. She might lie her head on the backrest and play with her hair — thin fingers as pale as the hair they moved through. In summer she might watch the japonica bushes blurring into the dusk; in winter she might wait for the neighbour’s security light to come on and show a cat she’d know by name, or listen to the television aerial vibrating in a southerly. ‘Oh, Dad, stop talking such rubbish,’ she might say, or laugh softly at that same rubbish to which she only half listened, while her fingers wove in her hair. Flippancy is a defence against the open engagement that can come unstuck.

How precious trivial memories are, and what intense pain they carry. I find my mouth half-open, as if there were words, or some cry, that would give relief. We hardly ever talked about Viv. There were consequences, of course, of her death, and our responses. Rachel’s school contacted me a few months after her mother died. ‘Dr Leigh?’ enquired the voice.

‘Yes.’

It was the deputy principal: she wanted me to come in for a discussion. ‘It’s a certain situation,’ she said, ‘nothing to cause alarm, but best talked about together rather than on the phone. Just an area of concern at this stage. Have you perhaps time some afternoon next week? Any afternoon except Thursday and Friday when we’re having the winter inter-school tournament.’

‘Monday,’ I said. ‘I can come Monday.’ I’m accustomed to interviewing people, and being interviewed, but having some disclosure about your child is quite different, no matter how humdrum the circumstances.

I asked Rachel what I could expect. ‘Same old crap,’ she said. ‘Withdrawal, isolation, social distance. You know the stuff that goes with being a loser and a loner. You don’t follow the leader, you’re a weirdo.’ She was having me on, but she was right just the same. Bravado, too, can be a stance.

The DP and I sat close together in her office as she told me that Rachel was bright, but uninvolved with her peers, or her work, drifting through school. The room was small and all the horizontal spaces above floor level heaped with papers and books. The place smelled faintly of washing powder and dedication. Supermarket cartons used for storage accounted for the former, and Mrs Bridges the latter. She was a small, taut woman brimming with concern for her charges, and possibly fearful of some cataclysmic breakdown of authority. ‘There’s so little of her, isn’t there,’ she said. ‘Physically, I mean. Such a slim girl. She eats well at home?’

‘She’s always been thin, but I don’t think there’s a problem there,’ I said. ‘I hope not. She doesn’t refuse food, just eats small amounts.’

‘Her teachers say she’ll go through complete periods without volunteering a word, without any interaction with fellow students. We have difficulty getting her to turn her iPod off. Not that she’s rude, but she seems to be in another space. She used to be so outgoing, so involved.’

That was true. Rachel was so often in another space, as I was myself, and we could semaphore a sort of whimsical goodwill without either of us comprehending the world the other lived in. As Mrs Bridges and I discussed Rachel’s withdrawal, I had a strong sense of Viv’s presence transposed on my own, the weight of her concern and her anger that she wasn’t there for her daughter as she was entitled to be. Her intercession would have been so much more telling and insightful than my own.

When the interview was over, and the DP held the door open obligingly for me, she looked up, shook her small face briefly as if to clear her vision, and asked me if I would consider coming into the school on the next careers night to talk about the value of history. ‘It’s the sort of subject for which students don’t see that many applications in later life,’ she said.

Classes were changing as I walked back through the grounds. How I wished to see Rachel among the mooching, or jostling, streams of kids. How I wished to comfort our skinny girl adrift alone in adolescence, but she didn’t come my way. I was failing her, and Viv too. The school kids, both boys and girls, didn’t seem to feel the cold. Many wore no uniform blazers, or jerseys, just blouses, or shirts, often hanging loose at the waist, while I wore a jacket and knitted red scarf. I must do more for Rachel, I told myself at the gates where several boys were playing soccer with a soft drink can. ‘Pass the fucker, pass it,’ said one.