New Australian Stories 2 (8 page)

Mr Ronald seemed to have recovered from the attack of pain and now lay back against the seat and breathed quietly. His head appeared larger than most people's. This gave it a resilient look, although it reminded Sarah of a puppet. There was a band of sweat across his forehead. Without thinking, she placed her fingers on his wrist in order to measure out his heartbeat. It was steady now, and slow. She kept her hand where it was despite feeling revolted by the dampness of his old skin. They sat together listening for cars. Someone will come in this minute, thought Sarah; but the minute passed.

‘A capuchin, you say,' said Mr Ronald. ‘A kind of monk, isn't it?'

‘Well, a monk, yes, I think. But also a kind of monkey.'

‘I once saw an orangutan in the Berlin Zoo painting on the wall with a dish brush. Looked just like my wife cleaning the shower. But here Douglas is against primate testing. I can't go in for that. Douglas calls me species-ist.' Sarah decided not to ask who Douglas was. ‘If they cure Parkinson's then it's worth those gorillas, I think. Not a popular stance, I'm told. I myself can't stand vegetarians.'

‘I'm a vegetarian,' said Sarah.

‘Well, in the abstract. It makes sense for someone like you. A veterinarian. Why heal them and then eat them? But I always say vegetarians ought to eat meat when it's served to them. Imagine being a guest in someone's home and turning down food that's offered.'

This reminded Sarah of her own grandfather: perplexed and indignant in the midst of his self-imposed wartime privations, carried on unendingly and with pride. Food might run out — eat what you're given. Life might be lost — don't mind the monkeys.

Sarah liked to argue on this topic, calmly maintaining her position, but in this case she would not.

‘Oh, but I'm sure you're a charming guest,' said Mr Ronald. ‘And here you are, helping an old man in distress.' He chuckled and the pain came again, stronger this time. It lifted him from the seat a little, and this lifting caused more pain. He shut his eyes against it.

Sarah waited for this to pass, as it had the last time, and when he was quiet she asked, ‘What can I do? Anything? Is it your legs?'

He laughed again, sucking in his cigarette breath, and moved his wrist away from her hand. The rain grew heavier and the trees on the road began to move their monkey arms, high above the fields. The fields grew damp and gave up their deeper smells of night mice and manure. No cars passed by. Sarah worried about David in the rain. He couldn't have been gone for longer than ten minutes, she reasoned; perhaps fifteen. She wondered briefly if the woman was still ironing in her house.

She asked again, ‘How are your legs?'

‘Funny,' said Mr Ronald, and his breath was shorter now. It left his throat unwillingly. ‘Funny, but one of them's not even a leg. Left leg, below the knee. Plastic.'

Sarah imagined him at other times, rapping his fingers against the plastic of his leg, knocking it through his neat trousers while chatting on a bus. The war, she thought, he must have lost it in the war; she saw him and other men running over a French field. Poppies blew in the grass, and he was a young man, strong of limb, and the sea was behind them all as they ran.

‘Diabetes,' said Mr Ronald. ‘Didn't know, did you, that it could take your leg off?'

Sarah shook her head, but she did know. She'd seen diabetic dogs; cats too. She'd cut off their legs. The French field fell into the sea, and the rain still fell against the roof of the car.

‘Started as a blister, then an ulcer,' said Mr Ronald. ‘Just a mishap. A blister from new shoes. No one tells the young: be careful of your feet. Feet should last a lifetime. What can be prevented? Everything, they say. No they don't. They say not everything.'

He laughed harder now, in a thin straight line, and his cheeks drew in over the laugh so that Sarah could see the shape of his skull and the crowded teeth, nicotine-stained, that swarmed in his mouth. Perhaps this wasn't laughing, but breathing. The steady rain and wind moved the car slightly, back and forth, and it felt as if they were floating together gently at sea. The branches of the tree against which the car was pressed were black shapes at the corner of Sarah's eye, like Sheba at night, stalking rats with his stomach full of jellymeat.

(Sheba himself lay panting in the corner of his cage, overwhelmed by a calm fury and a pain on which he concentrated with a careful doling out of attention. He kept himself steady, but his small side rose and fell, rose and fell, higher and then deeper than it should. His eyes moved toward the door, and his mouth sat open, showing pink.)

The laugh was a clatter behind Mr Ronald's teeth, a rough edge over which his breath moved hectically. Sarah huddled close to him as he moved against the back of his seat, placed her arm around his shoulders, and touched his damp forehead. She felt her hair lift away from her skin, all along her arms and the back of her neck. The summer passed through the car, windy and wet.

‘Hold on,' said Sarah. ‘Just hold on.' Her mouth was against his ear. David would come soon. You could swear at a cat that rocked this way, crowded close in pain and confusion; you could talk softly, not to the cat but to the idea of the cat, to the faces of the family you must explain to about the cat. You could sing to the cat and if you had forgotten its name you could call it kitty — you could say ‘hold on, kitty' while your hands moved and your neck craned forward and the parts of you that understood the machinery of a cat, its secret and moving parts, worked beneath the cat's terror. You could set the leg of a monkey and watch it, later, as it limped across the surgery floor, scowling and shaking its funny fist at you.

Noises came from Mr Ronald's throat now, and these sounds seemed accidental, the by-product of something else. They continued past the point Sarah felt certain he had died; they rattled on in the can of his throat. Sometime after they had subsided she became aware of the sound of a radio playing. In her own car, or this one? Who could Douglas be? A son? A grandson?

Sarah was now unsure of how long she had been sitting beside Mr Ronald, and how long it had been since he had stopped making any sound at all. Gently she laid his head back against the seat. His wife cleaned the walls of their shower, and he had been to see orangutans in Berlin. He was too young to have been in that war.

Without warning, David filled up the space in the passenger door of Mr Ronald's car. She had been so certain she would hear his footsteps on the road, but he was here in the doorway, as if she'd summoned him out of the field.

‘I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't find anyone.' He was breathless and wet. ‘I ran and finally found a house, but there was no one home. I thought about breaking in. Kept going for a bit but no sign of life. No cars on the road, even. So I headed back to try the car again.'

He looked at the stillness of the man in the driver's seat. He saw the blood on Mr Ronald's trousers and the way that it crept towards his belt and shirt, and searched for blood on Sarah.

Sarah concentrated carefully on David's face, which swam in the sound of the rain and the radio and the end of the vodka. My husband. She smiled because she was happy to see him. Then she placed the wallet in Mr Ronald's lap.

Sarah moved to step out of the car, and David made space for her.

‘How is he? Has he woken up? How does he seem?'

When a cat died during an operation, when a newt was too sick to be helped, when it was necessary for a macaw to die, then Sarah must tell its owners. It was difficult to tell them this true thing, and so along with it she added other, less true things: that the tumour caused no pain, that the animal hadn't been frightened to go under anaesthetic. Still, it was difficult. It made no difference to Sarah that words were inadequate to her enormous task. Of course they were. There might be a time when she would have to tell her friends, Sheba's owners, that he wouldn't survive his infection. Their grief, she knew, would be altered by a slight embarrassment that they felt it about a cat. Each loss of which she had been the herald seemed now to lead to this new immensity, her own: Mr Ronald, dead in a car. But they didn't know Mr Ronald. David had never even spoken to him. They had been married that midday, with no rain. There were no witnesses.

‘He's dead,' said Sarah. She stood and shut the door behind her.

David fought the desire to lower his head and look through the window. It seemed necessary to make sure, but more necessary to trust Sarah. He held his hands out to her and she took them.

‘My god,' he said. She shook her head. He knew that when she shook her head in this way, it meant: I'm not angry with you, but I won't talk.

‘What now?' he asked. ‘Should we take him somewhere?'

It seemed to David that Sarah owned the wreck, owned the tree and piece of road on which Mr Ronald had died, and that he need only wait for her instructions, having failed to find help. He thought of her sitting alone with the unconscious body of an old man, and he thought of the moment at which she must have realised that he was no longer unconscious: that he was dead. David saw with certainty that Sarah was another person, completely separate from him, although he had married her today. His wife.

‘We'll try the car again,' said Sarah. ‘We just have to get to the surgery.'

‘And use the phone there,' said David.

Sarah crossed the road, and he followed her. She didn't look back at the wreck. Waiting on its grassy rise slightly above the road, their car had a look of faithful service, of eagerness to assist. It started on the third try with a compliant hum. Sarah had always been better at coaxing it; even before trying the ignition she'd been sure it would work. She was uncertain if this resurrection was good or bad luck or if, beyond luck now, it was simply inevitable. Now that she could see the rain in the headlights, she realised how soft it was, how English. She missed home, suddenly: the hard, bright days and the storms at the end of them, with rain that filled your shoes.

It grew dark in Mr Ronald's car as Sarah's headlights passed over and then left him, and it remained dark as she left that piece of road and that tree. David watched Sarah drive. They didn't speak. As the distance between their car and Mr Ronald's grew it seemed that the roads were all empty — that all of England was empty. It lay in its empty fields while the mice moved and the airplanes flew overhead to other places, nearby and faraway.

They reached lit buildings and then the surgery so quickly it seemed impossible to David that he couldn't have found help within minutes. Sarah walked calmly into the building, and she spoke calmly with the nurse. She didn't look at the telephone. There was no blood on her clothes. David watched his wife as she made her way towards the Queen of Sheba, who rubbed his head against the bars of his cage. He was waiting for the pain to stop. And then he would be let out, healed, to hunt mice in the wet grass.

Reward Offered

JON BAUER

The old man smiles. This is his favourite bit.

He opens their garden gate, brings the dog in, turns and closes the gate, a curtain twitching inside the house. The old man's stomach a helium balloon in the sky.

The sudden squealing of children, the kelpie straining on the string now, not wanting to sniff anything.

The front door flings open and a woman beams, faces appear round her legs, little hands gripping on and lifting her dress inadvertently higher, the dog lurching forward, its tail batting the old man's legs.

He extends the lost-dog sign in his hand, corrects himself and lets go the string, the family falling on the animal then squinting up at the man as if at the sun.

‘Thank you
so
much. Where did you find her!'

Back outside the house now, biscuit crumbs on his clothes, his hair sticking up from rough and tumbling with children. He waves enthusiastically at their steaming-over of the lounge window, turns and opens the gate, steps through, whistling, shuts the gate — glances up, but the children are already gone.

He makes his way as far as the next corner, out of sight, rolls himself a smoke, his face concentrated, the pleasure of the good deed already fading from his chest. He attempts to hold on to it, tries to stop it seeping out between his ribs.

As he licks the paper his gaze is on the hills in the distance. Forty or fifty kilometres away, but there he is looking at them in the blink of an eye. What was distance when you had eyes? When you could see what you were missing.

At the corner the old man joins the main street and its usual morning hubbub of food-delivery trucks and the unsteady old. Lapdogs are tied up outside the miniaturised supermarket, cafés are full of laptops and blue collars mixing with white — foccacias, lattes and
Great, thanks, how are you?

He travels among the throng, as ignored as if this was an old sepia photo and he's that smudge of a person moving through the background.

Outside the pub, he sits with a beer and a
Winning Post
, people wafting like bees in and out of the supermarket over the road — a woman coming along towing a chocolate labrador, the dog's underbelly littered with distended teats.

The old man puts his beer down and watches dog and owner pause outside the supermarket, then go on.