Carnival Sky (23 page)

WALKING WAS A SOLACE. The mild exertion, the sense of at least physical progress, a changing scene, all a temporary escape from the sad house. Sheff found himself setting off both day and night with little regard for the hour. Sometimes Georgie went with him, but mostly he walked alone. At night the town suburbs were insubstantial, each quiet house with lit windows much like another, their individuality cloaked by silence and lack of definition. Even the rock outcrops on and around which many homes stood were moulded more into the surroundings. During the day Sheff was brisk among his fellows, as if he too had purpose and a rendezvous. In the darkness he tended to mooch, often finding himself turning corners without conscious decision, or standing blankly before a building that had nothing to recommend it.

Only twice did he experience anything at all unusual. On the first occasion he’d walked to the home of one of Belize’s friends to collect offered flowers, and as he came back over the narrow walkway of the metal bridge he met the stand-over woman from the café who had warned him to leave Jessica alone. He didn’t recognise her at first, but she blocked his way at one of the abutments where bird droppings from above were most conspicuous. ‘You haven’t taken any notice, have you?’ she said, and gave a shake of her head to indicate she knew the answer. She was wearing red shorts this time, and her legs were
brown, sturdy and ended with very small feet. Before he could think of an answer, she calmly reached out, took the flowers unopposed and dropped them over the rail. The bunch disintegrated in the air, some blooms fell directly, others appeared to glide. The woman pushed past, not withdrawing from the chest-to-chest physical contact. ‘Warning number two, Sheffy boy,’ she said as she went. He was left with the buffeting sound of a stock truck passing on the bridge.

Retaliation was difficult. You didn’t follow a woman and grab her: Sheff didn’t even know her name. He was abandoned. He could see her solidly walking on, her small, soft shoes making no noise, and downstream he could see Mrs Gemmell’s yellow and white flowers creating arabesques on the smooth flow of the river. Despite his anger, he was aware of their beauty, the colours diminishing until he could barely recognise them, and then they were swept around the bend formed where the two rivers met.

He told his mother he’d dropped the flowers himself. It was easier that way. He’d paused to watch a power boat, he said, sneezed and lost the lot just like that. ‘Let’s hope she doesn’t come round and expect to see them in a vase,’ Belize had said.

The other oddity was the pipe man. Sheff was on his way home late at night, but the yellow street lights made plain a man riding in the middle of the otherwise deserted street. He pedalled cautiously nevertheless, one hand steering and the other balancing a long pipe on his shoulder. A water pipe it seemed, and it swayed before and behind him although he cycled slowly. The shadows created a strange double image when he was exactly halfway between light poles, and then closed up again as a single figure. Noiselessly he passed, until when turning left at the corner he lost his balance and fell with a great clatter and a single cry, the heavy metal pipe clouting him as he went down. Sheff stood still for moment, expecting some reaction from the nearby houses, but nothing came. The road was empty and silent again, and he the only onlooker.

The man was sitting up when Sheff reached him. ‘Fuck,’ he said
with emphasis. He was small, elderly, but with a walrus moustache from Victorian photographs. ‘Fuck, and I almost made it,’ he said. ‘I’m just round the corner.’

‘We’d better get off the road,’ said Sheff, but the guy stayed put, feet outspread, rubbing the back of his head.

‘The bloody thing gave me a fair wallop,’ he complained. It had, yet part of Sheff’s spontaneous reaction had been amusement, for he was often enough the victim of everyday misfortunes to appreciate the discomfort of others.

‘I’ll take the bike if you like,’ Sheff offered. The handle bars were no longer aligned with the front wheel, which made it tricky to push, and the mudguard pressed on the tyre.

The old man stood up and clumsily hoisted the pipe onto his shoulder again. It must have been at least six or seven metres long, and had a raised joint about halfway along, like the belt of a garden worm. ‘That’s kind of you,’ he said and set off, still well out on the road, until he came to his driveway. Sheff followed at a calculated distance behind, so that the veering pipe didn’t give him a swipe as well. Even so, he had to be careful not to step into the front wheel of the bike as he pushed it awkwardly beside him.

‘Gavin,’ the man with the pipe said after he had lowered it beside a thick border of lavender that gave a heady scent to the warm night air. Sheff introduced himself in turn, and readily gave up the bicycle. ‘Ta,’ said Gavin, and then ‘Fuck’ as even in the poor light he saw the extent of the damage. He leant it against the side of the house. ‘You’d think I could pedal quietly home this late without a bloody drama.’

‘Ah well, you’ve got it here now.’ Sheff turned to go.

‘Would you like a beer?’ And as if he’d pushed a button, the light came on in the small porch of the house and the door opened. A younger man in jeans and a candy-striped shirt came onto the step. The hair on his crown was fluffed up, as if he’d just risen from drowsing on a sofa.

‘Is that you, Dad?’ he called.

‘The bloody pipe fell on me, but we’ve got it here now,’ said Gavin. ‘Bring us out a couple of cans, will you?’ Gavin was pretty limber for an old guy who had been hit by a pipe. He sat down easily on the concrete border of the drive, and Sheff did the same, his back pressing into the stalky lavender and so increasing the fragrance. He had nowhere better to be at midnight in his home town. Gavin worked his head tentatively, then smoothed his soft, salt-and-pepper moustache with gentle downwards strokes, although it was the back of his head that had been struck. ‘I won’t tell him the bike’s stuffed,’ he said. ‘He uses it to look for work.’

‘The handle bars might come right with just a good yank,’ Sheff said.

‘It’s cooler out here,’ said Gavin, as his son came from the house with two cans of beer, handed them over, nodded without a word to Sheff, as if it were customary for his father to be hosting a friend so late at night and on the concrete kerb of the drive.

Gavin waited until his son had gone back inside, before taking a first mouthful. ‘You know bipolar?’ he said.

‘I know of it.’

‘He’s bipolar,’ Gavin said. ‘He’s down at the moment and so hasn’t much to say. It’s a very different story when he’s up. Anyway, here’s cheers.’

‘Cheers.’ The beer was cold, and Sheff felt the first mouthful all the way down. The lavender was so pervasive that its aroma replaced the flavour of the drink in a slightly disconcerting way. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

‘So you’re from round here? I’ve never spotted you before.’ After taking a mouthful, Gavin smoothed down his moustache again. Even in the dim light its archaic nature was plain, covering not just the upper lip, but drooping low so that nothing of his mouth was visible until he spoke.

‘I come from here originally, but I’m just back visiting my parents. My father, Warwick Davy, is an accountant here.’ Local people usually responded when Sheff mentioned his father’s name, but not the old guy.

‘Uh-huh,’ was all he said, and then, as if they had been discussing his son’s condition for some time: ‘Yeah, this bipolar thing is a real big dipper. He couldn’t live by himself and get by. It would be either prison, or the bin. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry – well, you do really, but it doesn’t help.’

‘Didn’t they used to call it manic depression?’ Sheff said. His own mood was rather elevated. He had a lavender beer, a companion whose troubles were no concern to him. No pipe had fallen on his head. It was pleasant to be relaxed in the night and talking idly of a new affliction.

‘I think it killed his mother. She couldn’t take the ceaseless worry of it. You never know what’s next, and he’s a bugger for going off his pills and not letting on. He’ll save the world one minute, and the next be bawling because he can’t butter his bloody toast.’

‘It’s a day by day thing, I suppose. Never goes away,’ said Sheff. ‘But he’s lucky to have you for support.’

‘Mostly you wouldn’t know it.’

‘I guess he’d soon notice if you weren’t around.’

‘That’s about the size of it.’ Gavin lifted his head to the mysterious sky and gave a long sigh that ruffled his moustache and seemed as much from satisfaction with the beer as despair at the family predicament. For a moment Sheff thought he might contribute sorrows of his own, but decided rather to be a listener.

So the two of them sat a little longer embraced by darkened lavender on the rim of Gavin’s drive, and with stoical nonchalance the old man told of his family circumstances. Then almost abruptly Gavin stood, plucked the empty can from Sheff’s hand, and said he’d better go inside. ‘You never know what’s going on with him,’ he said.

‘Well anyway, it’s a credit to you, and thanks for the beer,’ said Sheff glibly as they moved apart.

‘What you don’t face you can’t recognise,’ Gavin said. ‘It’s like your own arse: you carry it all your life, but couldn’t pick it out in a crowd.’ Sheff could think of no adequate reply to such profound wisdom.

On his way home he travelled some of the streets he’d walked as a boy, to and from school and roaming with friends. The air was still welcoming though cooling slightly, but something in the reduced light made him think of winter in Central, rather than summer. Surely there was nowhere in New Zealand that had such a swing of seasons, from the fierce blaze of high summer to the minus six degree frost common in the equally dry winter. The frozen grass of the July playing fields would crush like cornflakes beneath their shoes in the morning, and they knew never to touch iron railings with bare hands. A garden hose left lying on the lawn would snap like a candy stick with just a kick. Their noses ran in winter more from the cold than colds, and for the same reason they shed tears even as they laughed and played on ice and snow, tobogganing perhaps, or skating on the tarns. Sheff could recall the white frost on the full fleece of the sheep, the dark, glittering hoar frost draping the fruit trees, the mist sprites dancing on the surface of the broad river. Any pothole puddles would be frozen solid so that dagger shards could be stamped out of them, and the creek pools would hold the ribbon weeds as if in crystal, even small bubbles motionless in their ascent. And the fog days, cold, heavy and still, with the trees barely sketched and receding.

No winters now were as those winters of childhood. Cold then came full circle, and burnt as fire did on the exposed skin.

Night walking occasioned a mild voyeurism, glimpses of domestic life framed by windows and bathed in soft, yellow light, or flickering in the blue haze of television as he paused unseen. In a front flat an old woman in an apron, clipping the foliage of her pot plants with the solicitude usually reserved for attention to a child. A family laughing soundlessly at the screen, and their gaze directed there rather than at one another. The modern kitchen in which a husband was urgently voluble, and his wife immobile, holding a cup and staring into the darkness where Sheff stood. The blonde girl in the red bathrobe who had a foot on the coffee table to enable her to paint, or file, her nails. A bay window with three Persian cats posed close to the glass: so
still that only the head swivel of the middle one at the last moment of Sheff’s passing proved they were flesh and blood. A squat man in short pyjama bottoms grazing from his fridge. The faint alien light from within isolated him there in the darkened room, accentuated the furled hair of his chest, the corporeal solidity of his bare shoulder, the sausage or somesuch he held like a thick pencil, the stoop of him as he looked for more even as he ate.

Such vignettes were like Vermeer paintings, lit from within, at once symbolic yet contained, and strangely uncommunicative.

Georgie was up when Sheff arrived home. She’d been checking on their father. Her toenails were a vivid tangerine against her pale feet, and her pyjamas were pale blue satin and heavily creased. ‘You’ve been away a long time,’ she said.

‘There was this old joker pedalling with a pipe and he crashed off. I stopped to give him a hand.’

‘A pipe?’

‘A long water pipe sort of thing,’ said Sheff. ‘He had it on his shoulder, but lost his balance and the pipe hit his head as he fell. He was okay, though.’

‘What the hell was he doing with a water pipe in the middle of the night?’

‘I’ve no idea.’ He hadn’t thought to ask.

‘A pipe?’

‘Yeah, he didn’t say why, but he was bringing it home when everything was quiet. And when I was walking back from that I kept thinking of winter here as a kid. We just took it for granted, didn’t we?’

Georgie shook her head in impatient bewilderment. ‘I’m off,’ she said emphatically, and went into her room. Sheff was disappointed. He wanted to talk to her about bipolar. Gavin’s son had once taken to a Welsh pony with a machete, claiming it was one of the four horses of the Apocalypse, and another time lifted the living room carpet and scattered rat poison and mustard there because Beelzebub was rising from Hell below. His affliction had driven his mother to her death.
How was it that so much strangeness and fearful possibility existed in a humdrum world? What was to be found in quiet houses everywhere when the sun went down? How could a son and daughter face the responsibility imposed by their dying father?