Free Harlequin Rex by Owen Marshall Page B

express their feelings. It was a courtesy perhaps that they had developed in order to live together. How much of marriage which is called natural, is only customary.
    As David walked from his father in the garden, his mother appeared from the sunporch, came impetuously on to the steps. How he loved her. Yet, as always in that home, he felt passed from one affection to another, rather than included in their united love. ‘Oh, wonderful to see you,’ she called, and they went in together. Looking smart as ever, his mother. Appearance was for her a competition, like all else in life: against one’s earlier self, against every other woman in the world, though the intensity of the struggle rarely showed. She had a brief, fierce pressure when they hugged, and again David was her special boy, her vicarious opportunity. ‘Good for you. Good for you,’ she said. ‘I’m so proud.’
    ‘It’s all the help I had from you and Dad. ’ Forgotten, then, all her actively expressed reservations about Llama Heaven, and the population he lived with there. Forgotten, her anger at the drunk driving charge, her exasperation with his failure to write, her objection to his obscenity and idleness. Remembered truly the love and letters, the financial help, the absolute knowledge of being in her thoughts every day of her life.
    His mother’s mid-brown hair still had a sheen, when that of most middle-aged women had become drab. The cream   linen was crisp to his hand as they hugged, and she wore a perfume bought on her last trip to Sydney. How well David knew his mother’s pride, from long experience as its main object and the main source of betrayal. As he’d grown up he had felt a sense of helplessness before such love, sensing that there was no way he could stop his achievement, or failure, from being felt in her heart. Through the dimpled glass door behind her, he could see the misshapen image of his father coming to the house.
    ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’m now qualified, but unemployed. I know more about glacial geomorphology than anyone would ever wish to hear, and already I’m starting to forget it.’ Sometimes he still woke from anxiety dreams in which he was fooling around at Llama Heaven, quite unprepared for exams.
    ‘Just think of all the opportunities to build a professional career,’ his mother said. The prospect made her face young, gave vibrancy to her tone. ‘I’ve told your father that we’ll celebrate, of course.’
    The shape of him became somewhat clearer behind the dimpled glass as he sloughed off his shoes. Was it David’s imagination that she seemed to hurry the things she went on to share with him, before his father joined them? His parents had a civilised marriage, which somehow ached with lost possibility.
    The Christchurch restaurants were stuffed with graduation groups on the night. Some wore gowns and hoods with self-conscious relief that, for the night at least, they weren’t failures. David and his parents had eaten a meal as expensive as most, drunk South African bubbly, leaned together for the freelance photographer who worked the room on an evening so ripe for business that his cajolery was quite untested. The photo is still in his mother’s album: he is between his parents, of course, and still clear behind David is a thin woman at another table, caught just for a moment and eternity in the lives of unknown people. The   tendons of her long wrist show as she pauses with a forkful of cannelloni to shout joyously above the noise of the crowded room. She is old, defiant, risible, wears a short- sleeved green dress, and inhabits the family album with as much substance as any other figure there.
    David Stallman MA. Even Llama Heaven couldn’t last for ever.

NINE
    One of their great failures was Alice Bee, who garrotted a male visitor departing from Hoiho. The caretaker’s Samoyed found the body beneath the ornamental flaxes far back from the car park. The guy was still in his tie and sports