Owen Marshall Selected Stories by Vincent O'Sullivan Page B

that bulged outwards and heavy, green tiles. The shrubs and treesmust once have been in ordered harmony with the house, but in old age had attained a freakish disproportion. Shattered pines along the south side reached over the tiles and mounds of their needles lay in the guttering. The path to the front door was obstructed by the growth of a giant rhododendron, mostly wood, but with a few clusters of leaves that defied the drought. The tall macrocarpa hedge down the other side had been cut so often that there was little foliage, rather a series of massive, convoluted branches that seemed barely contained in the rectangular shape the years had imposed on them.
    Wayne and I avoided the rhododendron and walked along the concrete path towards the back door. At the far corner of the house was a sunporch that had been glassed in comparatively recently, for its large panes contrasted with the windows of the rest of the house. Wayne stopped suddenly at the corner, and I stumbled into him from behind. ‘There’s someone in there,’ he said. ‘We can ask him.’ We stood a little foolishly by the glass doors and looked in. The place was well chosen, for despite the hedge the late afternoon sun was a warm pressure on the backs of our heads, and suffused the room with an amber glow. The rich and heavy light was liquid, and its slow current bore dust that glinted and eddied, dissipating the shape of the dark dresser and falling like a fragile veil in front of the old man who sat facing us.
    The old man was dressed, but over his clothes he wore a pink candlewick dressing-gown, and in front of the cane chair he sat in, his zipped leather slippers stuck out, shiny and without the wrinkles of wear. Something in their positioning made it seem they had been placed by someone else, rather than the random result of movement. A green towel lay across his lap and his hands rested there, the fingers curled and trembling slightly. ‘Hello,’ said Wayne. He said it uncertainly, because he felt odd speaking through the closed door, yet he couldn’t keep looking in at the old man only a few feet away without saying something. There was no coarseness of age in the old man’s face, no warts, enlarged pores or tufts of hair. He seemed tohave passed the time of excrescences and, like driftwood, only the essential shape and grain remained. His head and face were entirely smooth, polished even, the skin in the amber of the afternoon sun responding with a slight sheen.
    â€˜Don’t think the old coot heard me,’ said Wayne softly, and he turned his face away to snigger uneasily. The old man’s neck did not stand up from his collar, or the folds of the candlewick dressing-gown. Instead it protruded parallel with the ground like the neck of a tortoise, and so his head, to keep his abstracted gaze level, was tilted back. His head and neck were not directly forward, however, but rested more along the line of his left shoulder.
    When I was a boy I had a favourite marble with a coloured spiral at the centre of the glass. Gradually the surface got crazed; little pits and star bruises appeared on the glass until it was clouded and the coloured spiral had lost its vividness. The old man’s eyes were like that, and the lower lids had fallen away somewhat, revealing moist red linings that emphasised the bruised opaque eyes, and contrasted with the pale sheen of his skin.
    Wayne would have opened the door, but the old man was alone in the room and there didn’t seem much point. We carried on round the house until the back door, where we knocked and waited. After seeing the old man Wayne needed reassurance of his youth. He performed several jumps from the crouch, leaping towards the tiled roof and patting the guttering. No one came to the door in answer to our knocks, or Wayne’s acrobatics. ‘Strange sort of an outfit,’ he said. ‘There must be someone else about, surely.’ We were going to leave