I'd worked my way up: now I was a boss. In my team there were four men and three women. Two of the men had children, but among the women there was agreement: we didn't want children. We cared about our careers; we didn't want to lose what we'd fought to achieve. We didn't like kids — the idea of them was boring and claustrophobic. We were always testing one another, probing for signs of weakening. Mike at work brought his baby in once. It lay in a car seat, its eyes closed, its syrupy mouth open, a tiny string of spit trembling on the glazed bottom lip. Bright felt toys dangled above it — suns and stars. He put his hand on its head. The dip of the fontanelle, little strings of soft hair. Our shrugs, our ironic jokes. Clenched fists. Clenched fists.
I showed Peter the houses I'd circled. We went out in the car. He drove, ironically smoking. We looked at the first house, a suburban box, crammed with beige furniture and pastel reproductions and maidenhair ferns in pots.
'Try to picture it unfurnished,' I said hopelessly.
We snorted our way around two more. I wanted to stop scoffing and take it seriously, but Peter kept making funny jokes. I'd only got him this far by pretending it was a laugh, something he could write about: an amusing afternoon, the hidden secrets of the suburbs. I wanted a villa with a return veranda, or an old workman's cottage with wooden floors and uneven windows and a garden, not a townhouse with cardboard walls and brown carpet. I wanted what the agent didn't have. We went for a coffee. There was a week to go until the election. Hoardings stood along the roads.
In the café I looked through the paper again.
I said, 'I know this house!'
I showed Peter: a big place in Remuera, four bedrooms, a view of Mt Hobson. Marie's house. Marie.
I met her when we were both thirteen. There was to be a mufti day at school and she'd got the day wrong, had turned up in plain clothes when everyone else was in uniform. She was blushing, humiliated, hiding her face behind her long curly hair. Attracted by her distress, unsure whether I was sympathetic or wanting to mock, or just, out of boredom, wanting to get close to someone else's pain, I went and sat beside her, and when she said she was going home to change I offered to go with her. I don't know why. We both got in trouble for it, I remember, taking off without telling anyone, getting on the bus and riding all the way back to the house in Remuera, getting the key from under a rock in the garden, going in and finding Marie's mother at the kitchen table in a dressing gown, crying and taking pills, throwing her head back, tipping the tall glass, and telling us to leave her alone, leave her alone.
'They're getting a divorce,' Marie told me. Her bedroom upstairs was striped with sunlight. I looked over at Mt Hobson, the trees against the hard blue sky. Her walls were covered with posters of The Clash.
All the time I knew Marie her parents were getting a divorce. They fought their way into 1981. Her mother had a secret boyfriend, her father stayed at work and Marie spent a lot of time at my house. That was where she got her political education. It was the time of the Springbok rugby tour. There were protests against the South African team coming to play in New Zealand. Marie's parents were all for the rugby tour — they were right-wing. Her father was a rich businessman, a 'fascist', she said. She liked the political talk in our house. She and I started going on anti-apartheid demonstrations. Her parents forbade it and mine encouraged it — went on the marches themselves. Marie and I prided ourselves on being at the front of the march every time. We were obsessed with The Clash. I got myself a short spiky haircut. We were scornful, fierce, daring, political; we got in trouble at school and relished it; we were best friends.
I looked at the picture of the house where I'd spent so many afternoons.
'Let's go and see it,' I said. I explained: 'We used to go on protest marches. She wasn't allowed. We told her mother we were going shopping. My best friend. Outrageous Marie . . .'
Peter gave me an indulgent look. This was something he did approve of — a sentimental journey, a look back at my past. He enjoyed the thought of me as young, teenage, silly, dizzy. 'Yes! Let's see the house where you played with little Marie.'
I rang the agent. He had finished his open home but would wait and let us in. We drove back, past the election hoardings.
'We're going to have a National government,' I said. I felt depressed about it. 'I wish I could do something.'
'Do?'
'Oh, I don't know.'
'Labour's run a lousy little campaign.'
'So what? What about what matters? What about politics?'
Peter sighed and smiled languidly. 'Politics, well . . .'
When we first met he told me, 'I don't really like opinionated people.' He was — what was he? — too cynical? too fey? for political convictions, too light and subtle and comical. I thought of that Dickens character, Harold Skimpole. 'What use is money to me?' he says. 'What would I do with it? I'm just a child . . .'
The house was huge; we could never have afforded it ourselves. Peter stood in the hallway pretending he was interested in the kitchen, the big sitting room, the lush front garden.
The agent told us, 'A writer lives here. Celia Myers? She's finding the house a bit big for her, now she lives alone.' Outside we heard a car engine beginning to be thrashed into high revs.
Celia Myers! We made faces behind the agent's back. It was the kind of odd, quirky chance Peter's luck often brought him: licence to poke around in the house of a writer, to sift through her cupboards and check out her bookshelves. He specialised in interviews and in-depth profiles and here he had an inside look at the literary dame's life — her gardening shoes at the door, her odd, mixed collection of art, the notes pinned on the fridge, the open diary on the bench, her bedroom with the novels and the earplugs on the bedside table, the old bird off out somewhere, unable to prevent him snooping, only the agent hovering doubtfully behind him as he opened closets and studied shelves, making mental notes, his quick imagination, his sense of humour working. He would notice everything; he would be funny and observant about it all.
I adored him. I wanted to keep hold of him. He'd had a lot of girlfriends, but I thought, I really did think, that we were a good match. There were little blow-ups and tiffs: he could be distracted and impatient, or obscurely offended, and I held back in a way I'd never have been able to when I was younger, careful not to crowd him, not to be demanding. I kept secret my relief at winning him back. We'd had such good times, the whole year. His funny emails. Hilarity in bed on a Sunday morning. Our walks by the marina. Moments when he was suddenly sincere or loving or vulnerable, and I was smitten.
And now I was making my way up to the bedroom, Marie's room, where we'd sat and talked, and jumped around to The Clash, where I'd had the kind of teenage certainty you don't get back, full of rebellion and laughs and the thrill of your own daring.
I wondered what had become of her parents. Perhaps they'd got around to divorcing, sold the house, gone their separate ways. I saw Marie sitting on the floor in the afternoon light, an assortment of objects in front of her: masking tape, scissors, glue, string. I smiled at the memory. She was a terrorist, temperamentally. She always wanted to go too far. I didn't know where she was now, what city, what country. Did she have a husband, children?
Peter came up the stairs. I pointed at the floor. 'Marie, she sat here and . . . I remember it so clearly. It was 1981, during the Springbok tour. Marie wanted to do something. There was some company, aligned with the tour. And she made this thing, sitting here on the floor.'
Peter said, 'I got caught in an anti-apartheid march once. I jumped into an alley while it passed. All the shouting and hooting. The earnest faces.'
'You mean you hid?' But I was charmed by his expression, enough to smile, to cover what was sharp in my tone.
The agent came up. In the garden next door a group of youths was standing around an old car. The engine roared; birds flew up from the hedge. The agent half closed his eyes. Then he smacked his hands against his thighs and made as if to bustle us downstairs. Peter, polite, o
bedient, turned to go. I said, 'You go on down.' The agent ushered Peter ahead.
Marie. She sat on the floor in the sunny room, while her mother whispered into the phone downstairs, while I lay on her bed and worked on my homework, while the dog lay panting and snuffling by the door, Marie, gluing and pasting and sculpting. She wore rubber gloves. Perhaps she had her tongue stuck out the corner of her mouth. Her long hair pinned up on top of her head.
She finished what she'd been making and put it on the bed next to me.
'That'll teach them,' she said.
It was a malevolent-looking thing. She'd summoned up her knowledge of what it should look like from films and TV, I suppose. She'd always been good at art. A frisson went through me, a little shift, where I thought how it would appear to an innocent person, coming upon it unexpectedly. There were wires, and bits covered with tape that could be . . . could be what? Gelignite, plastic explosive? There was an aerial sticking out of it, a nice touch, the spiky point quivered slightly. It gave — radiated — an impression of sensitivity, of terrible potential. She frowned over it, the little sculptress, turning it critically, this way and that in her gloved hands. It was encased in a wooden box, wires running through and around it. I reached out.
'Don't touch!' she commanded, and, narrowing her eyes, whispered, 'Forensics.'
We looked at the inert thing. Marie's bomb. Fake, of course, designed to scare, to disrupt, to make an anti-apartheid point: she would place it in the building of the company associated with the Springbok tour. Marie sitting on the floor, the dog's asthmatic wheezing, Marie's mother coming up the wooden stairs, her face through the crack in the door, sharp blue eyes, a look of wry amusement, the silent stare, the retreat. I think back now: did I ever hear Marie's mother say anything, apart from that first time when we came upon her with her water glass and her bottle of pills? Perhaps we saved her that day, coming back. Always after that she was silent, secretive. Just the distracted glance and the footsteps on the wooden stairs, the voice whispering into the phone. I heard the stairs creaking now in the lull between revs, the car in the garden below, its engine exposed, steaming. How old was Marie's mother when we came home that day and found her at the kitchen table? She couldn't have been older than I am now.
'All set?' the agent said.
Marie did exactly what she'd intended. She took her bomb into town, left it in the building, walked away, and succeeded in shutting down the whole of the central city. It was the aerial that made it so effective; this I learned from the TV news. The police, unused to dealing with such things, refrained from using their radios in the ensuing panic, for fear of setting the thing off. There was chaos, evacuation, workplaces shut down. Hours later the army arrived, and — does my memory serve me or am I making this up? — a khaki robot, appearing on the TV news like a jerky green reptile, trundled towards Marie's little creation, picked it up in its metal jaws, carried it delicately out into the street and blew it up. Boom! A small explosion after all.
Marie walking away, her curly hair, her baby face. Her oversized handbag, long earrings, short skirt: the unlikeliest terrorist. Her plump shoulders used to shake with mirth, with terrible laughter. Where was she now? Was she still 'political'? I used to love her, even though she could be distant sometimes, cold suddenly, then warm and generous and kind, tougher than I was. I admired her self-sufficiency. I was soft, compared to Marie. She was my age. Does she have kids? I think she does. She would. She would have got them. Got what she wanted.
You bastard, you fucking Peter Pan, why won't you tell me you want to share a house with me, why won't you say you want to have a baby with me, didn't we have our youth so we could grow up, so we could leave our childhoods behind?
'I used to spend a lot of time in this house,' I said, and the agent made a sound, a cluck of impatience, and stood uncertain and annoyed while next door the youths revved the engine again, a high note, a scream.
I went around to her place afterwards, came round here; she was out in the garden burning evidence, like a professional criminal. Masking tape, wires, plastic, glue, went into the garden incinerator, Marie poking them down with a stick. I said I'd seen a TV statement from the anti-tour group HART, denouncing her stunt, calling for restraint. Marie laughed. I did too. Her curly hair blew in the wind. We stood out there in the evening light, the smoke drifting up and over the trees, Mt Hobson on the skyline. Lights coming on in the houses on the hillside, melancholy notes from a piano. Marie's mother's face at the window, turning away. The incinerator, still there, down in the garden, by the lemon tree.
The police vowed to catch the perpetrator at the time, to catch Marie. She showed no signs of being scared. They never did. She was clever, Marie, cleverer than I was, but she didn't go to university as far as I know, didn't take up a career, but disappeared into the suburbs, or to another country. I rang her parents a few times, usually when I was a bit drunk and sentimental and lonely at university, asking for news of her. Once they said she was in Australia, another time she'd moved flats and they didn't have a number. I imagined her with children, a boy and a girl, curly hair, unreliable smiles. I looked down at the garden, the hedge, once clipped, now allowed to grow wild: the artistic hand of Celia Myers. What struck me was how long ago it was, how long since I had stood out there with Marie.
Peter walked out onto the lawn. I looked at him. What is it to get pregnant without asking, consulting the man? To take what you want, just take it. Is it opportunism? Is it theft, or female terrorism? Is it a crime?
thin earth
I look back on my marriage, searching for patterns and clues. I think about the good times and the bad times, and I try to work out why things turned out the way they did. Sometimes I get an idea and decide to write it down, although I don't have much faith in my scrawled notes. There's no point talking to Max. He doesn't believe in analysing. 'Best to move on' is what he says. 'No need for post-mortems.'
Last night I had a dream about our trip to Wanganui, when we were still married and Charles was still at King's School. I remembered how I'd loved the town, and how it seemed to have a special flavour, particularly because of the bad thing that had happened there. The way I dwelt on it, as if it had been laid on as a special entertainment just for me! I see myself, hair-trigger alert, alone, running through those silent, dusty small-town streets. And then later, on the trip back, something happened that made me feel — not different, but, I don't know — more reflective. Perhaps I understood better what the bad thing had meant to the people whose lives had been crushed by it.
Anyway, the dream set me off thinking about that holiday. It was high summer in Wanganui. There I was, flustered, one eye on Max junior, the other on the local newspaper spread out on my knees. Max lounged beside me, his gaze fixed on Charles, who stood out on the cricket pitch, a slim, elegant figure in the hot light, poised to deliver his killer bowl . . .
Charles was playing in a four-day cricket tournament. It was just before the end of the school holidays, the hottest days of the year. We'd come down from Auckland with him for the fun of it, to see the town and stay in a motel. Charles and the rest of the team were billeted in the dormitories at Wanganui Collegiate. Karen and Trish's sons were playing; they'd come with their husbands, along with a lot of other parents. They were lined up along the edge of the field with their deckchairs and umbrellas and picnic baskets. It was early but already it was hot, cloudless, still. The grass was faded; the ground was hard and dry. Simon Lampton, strenuously jolly, his nose covered with white zinc, was handing around boxes of juice.
The parents, the milling kids. Karen and Trish waving. I, fiddling with my glasses, looking down at the paper, pretending not to see. I didn't want to sit with those two. I was reading about the murder.
There were streets cordoned off near the river when we'd driven in. It had been on the radio. A young woman, a barmaid, had finished work, stayed for a few drinks, left the bar and vanished. She'd been found in the Whanganui River, floating by the bank. Sh
e was twenty-one years old.
'Slow down,' I'd said to Max as we passed. There was a caravan set up, some policemen. Those tapes they use to cordon off crime scenes. I see myself as if from outside, the laden car slowing, my face pressed against the glass.
After we'd unpacked that first day I went for a walk. The motel was by a railway line. Heat rose off the stones, the grass was withered. I looked along the train track to where it disappeared around a bend, the trees forming a green tunnel over it. The streets were quiet, full of misty light. There was hardly anyone about. In the suburban streets around Wanganui Collegiate there was silence, hush, closed windows and gates, streets so thickly covered by trees that the sun shone down in thin beams of light. Empty gardens. Green shade. Walking, I kept looking behind me. Thinking of that girl.
But it wasn't here she'd been killed, in the prosperous suburbs around the Collegiate, but down near the river, where the houses are small, shabby, poor — tiny workman's cottages, ragged bungalows. These were the streets we'd seen as we drove in. I wanted to go down there.
The police had no early leads. They were 'building a picture' of the girl's life. A 'lovely', 'bubbly' person, she was the daughter of regular churchgoers (Baptist). She was 'always willing to help someone in need'. She had ambitions beyond working in a bar. There was no regular boyfriend, but a wide circle of friends. A popular young woman. Her parents too devastated to comment . . .
That first day of the tournament, Max and I watched the game for an hour or so. I finished reading the paper. 'I might go for a run,' I said.
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