'It's a bit hot, isn't it?'
'Will you look after Maxie?'
'Yeah.'
Little Max settled down against his father. They looked very alike: handsome father, white-blond child.
I said, 'You know the murder? I think I'll go and look for clues.'
Max laughed.
'Go on, Mummy,' Maxie said. Big Max patted my leg and lay back. I went away feeling happy.
I changed into my running clothes at the motel. The room was stifling. I locked it and set off, across the main street and down towards the river. The further you got from the Collegiate, the poorer and more ramshackle were the houses. The streets were just as empty down here. Occasionally a dog looked up from a porch, or a figure moved between washing lines, behind a slatted blind. I recognised the name of one street: the young woman had lived there with her parents. There was a tiny Baptist church on the corner, where they'd held her angry, desolate funeral, described in the local paper. I reached the river and stopped. The river was wide, stretching away into a blue summer haze. I ran along the path looking down. Somewhere near the bank, in the shade under the trees, the body had been found, floating. I looked at the long grass along the path, thinking I would find something. I stopped a couple of times to look at bits and pieces lying on the ground, knowing it was foolish yet hoping to find something, a real clue.
A man wearing a hood passed me, his head down, his face hidden. His hands were heavily tattooed. He turned once and looked back, as if he'd sensed me staring. There was the black shadow under the hood, an absence of face. He turned away, with a flounce almost, a quick rotation of the hips, something smooth and furtive. I checked my watch. Murderers often return to the scene of the crime.
I didn't find the exact spot. It was too far along the river. I came to a railway bridge. There were rowing boats and spectators along the bank. I was getting to the end of my strength. Max would be wondering where I was. I rested, watching the boats. Then I turned back.
I went a different way. Three young men sat on a veranda, their feet resting on old beer crates, silently watching me. Two little girls played outside a rundown house, the door open, a shape moving behind the flyscreen. Towards the main road a van pulled out of a liquor wholesaler, nearly running into me. I called out, 'Hey!'
The driver's shaven head sat necklessly on his shoulders. He had a beard, a gold earring. The van's back windows were blacked out and it was daubed with symbols: suns, moons, stars, crosses. Painted along the side, in black Gothic lettering, were the words Sinister Urge. The man glared, reversing out. I saw his face behind the windscreen, reflections of leaves sliding across it. He had missing teeth, a tattoo on his cheek. He drove off with a dramatic little squeal of tyres.
That night in a café on the main street I was describing him to Max. The van with its blacked-out windows, the painted words: Sinister Urge. Imagine him parked outside a school! I said, 'But if he was genuinely sinister, if he wanted to abduct people, he wouldn't want to advertise it, would he? He'd drive an anonymous car. So why just threaten people? Why does he want to do that?'
'More wine?' Max said. He was trying to get Maxie to eat his dinner. The little boy was slumped, exhausted, in his chair, red circles of sunburn under his eyes. Max held a piece of garlic bread under his nose. Maxie gave it a weary swipe.
'Did you find any clues?' He signalled for the waitress.
'No. I probably saw the murderer, though.'
'The freak in the van.'
'No, a guy in a hood.'
'Oh, right.'
I looked at Maxie. 'He's sunburnt,' I said.
'Well, while you were looking for clues I couldn't find his hat.'
'Oh. Sorry.'
Maxie slumped moaning into Max's lap.
We walked back up the main street under the hanging baskets of flowers, Maxie on Max's shoulders, asleep. I looked at his little brown leg, Max's big hand holding it.
'It's so nice to get away, out of Auckland.' I put my hand in Max's back pocket. The town had woken up a bit. Boys cruised down the street in low-slung cars, stereos thumping. There were groups of teenagers. A band was setting up on an outdoor stage. A banner behind them read: Subhuman.
'Jesus, look at them,' Max said. There were three boys, twanging their instruments, testing their microphones in that humourless way they do, 'Two two. One two.' Their faces were painted, their clothes ripped. Their heads were shaven at the sides. Dreadlocks sprouted from the tops of their heads.
Max eyed them. 'Imagine if your kid turned out like that.'
One of the boys had black lipstick and eye-paint; another had his face blacked out.
'Fucking nightmare,' Max said. He hitched Maxie up higher.
'You never know,' I said. 'They might be Collegiate old boys.'
'Over my dead body,' Max said vaguely.
One of the boys donned an oxygen mask. Max applauded. 'Oh, tremendous, that. Nice touch.'
I laughed. 'He's got quite a nice little face, the one with the makeup.'
'Nice? God!'
We walked on companionably through the warm dark.
In the night the motel room was hot, pitch black, silent. I woke from dreams that were loud, garish, raucous; they came at me and receded and I lay spinning in the dark before I sensed them coming again, points of light rushing across the blackness, a mad caravan: their flaming torches and whirling figures, their fires.
***
The next day we went out for breakfast, then to the Collegiate fields. Trish arrived, clambering down from her husband's SUV. She was wearing an extraordinary outfit, all stripes and pleats and ruffles. Maxie stared.
'I've got a red waine hangover!' she called. 'Saimon and Karen haven't even got up yet!' She sank down next to us and talked lazily to Max for a while.
Women liked Max: he had a kind of restless, rogue air. I listened and smiled. I wasn't at ease with Trish; she brayed and talked about money and never stopped fundraising and ordering people about. What was it about her and the Lamptons that made me uncomfortable? Their stifling 'respectability', I suppose. Deep down, some small, fierce part of me despised the way they behaved, although I was faintly shocked at myself. But already I was thinking of running away, down to the river, through the hush of the Collegiate neighbourhood, then the treeless glare of the poor streets with their rickety fences and scruffy gardens, and finally the river with its gorgeous misty distances, its blue beauty glittering under the pearly sky — its beauty and what it held within it, things hidden below the surface, terrible things.
Here came Simon Lampton trudging across the field, a pair of fold-up chairs slung over his shoulder. He stood waiting for Karen, who was carrying a tiny shopping bag. She told him where to put everything. Karen and Trish talked about their night out.
'You were a raiot. You nearly got Saimon into a faight!'
'It wasn't quite like that,' Simon said, embarrassed.
Trish let out a screech of laughter. It carried in the still air. Out on the pitch the boys and their coach looked up. Simon glanced at me, wrinkling his forehead. He was a big, awkward man. He held up his hands, as though to quell the cackling women. Max stretched out, sexy and languid on the grass. I caught Trish eyeing him and giving Karen a look. I imagined them over their red wines, the lewd things they'd say.
I said to Simon, 'Have you been reading about the murder? I went down to the river, where she was found, the dead woman. The town's different down there. It was spooky on the riverbank.'
I stopped. Consternation in his eyes. 'The murder?' he said.
'Yes, I went looking for clues,' I said, trying to charm, ingratiate. Oh, funny little me.
He looked pained. 'How horrible.'
'Mmm, awful. A young woman, bludgeoned to death . . .'
I was getting this all very wrong. There was a look of revulsion on his face.
'It is terrible,' I said hastily. 'I'm being frivolous. Sorry.'
He gave a weak smile. Silenced, I watched the cricket. I listened t
o Max murmuring with the women, his louche, cynical chuckle. Why wasn't I horrified by the idea of the dead girl? I just wanted to go back there. I wanted to go down to the river and find the exact spot this time, where they fought, where he picked her up and threw her dead body down the bank, down into the speckled shallows.
I surprise myself. I can run faster and further than I ever could before. I'm running away from the playing fields, genially dismissed by Max, who doesn't mind looking after Maxie, whom he adores, released from squawking Trish and nervous Simon, running away, down to the river. What is it in me that wants to stand in the very spot? Is it just that I want to be right at the point of something, anything, so long as it is at the highest, hardest pitch of feeling? Or is it that I do not understand something that Simon Lampton does? I remember thinking as I ran: I don't know if Max loves me. I don't know. How can I know?
***
I didn't see the man with the hood again, nor the man with the sinister van, although I looked for them, running each day through the silent, heat-shimmering town. I loved the place; the more I ran through it the more it turned away from me: charming, secretive, elusive. I felt as though I were following some important thing that I couldn't quite catch, only saw it at the corner of my eye, fading into the leafy shadows. In the afternoons, drugged with exercise, I watched the clouds moving across the sky, the boys on the field, thin figures in bright light.
On the fourth day, at lunchtime, Charles ended the tournament by whacking the ball away for four. We clapped and cheered. There were little speeches, a prizegiving. Dependable Simon lugged out a chilly-bin full of iceblocks. And then we were getting in our cars and heading out of town, the boys tired and silent, Max cheerful and smelling of the peppermints he'd sucked to mask the smell of the matey cigarette he'd shared with Trish behind the trees.
We drove past the crime scene, deserted now, the evidence tapes hanging limp, the police caravan with its torn posters. We were heading to Rotorua: the boys had requested a trip to the mudpools. We drove for a long time in contented silence, my hand resting on Max's thigh.
At a motel in Rotorua the boys played minigolf. We sat on the balcony in the hazy evening light. Max smoked, his feet up on the railing, his gaze fixed on the boys. He jumped up to get Maxie a sweatshirt, thumped down long-sufferingly to help free a trapped ball. I remember his smoke curling up into the air, the boys' voices, the tiny thwack and scuttle as the golfballs rattled through their courses. There was an orange streetlight outside the window of our room; it blinked and buzzed in the night like an incensed eye, peering between the blinds while Max and I made love.
The next day at Whakarewarewa, told of the price for a family ticket, Max said, 'You're kidding!'
Something formed, shaped itself up, in the face of the woman in the booth. Lips parted, downturned mouth, nostrils widening.
'Is there a problem?' she said.
Max shrugged, and thrust the money through the hole. The woman fell to hard laughter with one of her colleagues. A whiff of brimstone hung in the air.
'God, Max,' I said. 'Don't have a fight before we're even in.'
He laughed, wiping sweat from his face. Here it was even hotter than Wanganui — boiling water under the earth, white fire pouring out of the sky. It felt as though you could get sunburnt through your hat. Below the bridge children were diving for coins, their brown bodies sleek and shining. Charles and Maxie threw in some coins and the boys surged up onto the bank, shouting, spitting, calling for more. We moved on into the village. Neither Max nor I had been before. We were struck by the bucolic shabbiness of the place, its tumbledown fences and tiny dilapidated buildings. There was none of the touristy artificiality we'd expected.
'It's sort of raw,' Max said wonderingly. Between the buildings there were glimpses of battered cars, washing lines, back doors lined with gumboots and stacks of beer crates.
'Well, it's a real village,' I said
We stood at the edge of a briny blue pool, the water steaming. Bags of corn were cooking at the edge. Heat came up in waves, along with the rich, oddly enjoyable sulphur stink. A woman wandered past with a walkie-talkie and a voice crackled out of it, asking whether the corn was cooked. The boys ran about marvelling at the plopping mudpools, the steaming vents. Across an expanse of rock and clay and scrub, over which clouds of steam wafted, a geyser suddenly shot water high into the air.
The boys shouted and pointed. 'We want to go to the geyser. Over there!'
We walked towards it but came to a locked gate. Trying to find our way we headed up behind the village, past a hall in which a concert was being held for a tour group. A fierce child eyed me from a doorway. Behind a flyscreen, a woman jigged a baby in her arms.
A rough track led up a hill and we followed Max, who was determined to find the geyser for the boys. We walked through low scrub past mudpools, the white clay crusts all pitted, the water letting off waves of steam. I enjoyed the heat. We stood on a point looking down on an emerald-blue pool. Then we walked down into a shallow dip of the land, a crater. Amid the scrub there were white clay banks, bubbling pools, still, chemical-green puddles. A sign said: 'Danger. Thin earth. No responsibility taken.'
I caught up with Charles. 'Listen,' I said.
We could hear water trickling under the earth. I called out to Max.
He waited for me. He'd picked Maxie up.
I said, 'We shouldn't go off the path. There are signs saying "Danger. Thin earth." And listen.'
There was the sound of water running under our feet.
'That water's hot,' I said. 'If you fell through . . .'
Max grinned. 'You'd be cooked.'
'Don't go off the path.'
He was already walking away. Charles ran to catch up. I followed. I heard water again, right under where I was standing. I didn't like it. When I caught up with Max he was putting Maxie up on his shoulders.
'We're going to cut across there,' he told me. 'To get to the geyser.' He pointed across an acre of scrub, steam drifting across it.
'There's no path there. What if you fall through?'
Charles was already walking ahead around the edge of a mudpool.
'You can hear the water under the ground. Listen!'
Charles laughed. 'Don't freak out, Mum.'
I ignored him. I hated him siding with his father, laughing at me. 'Max! You can't take them across there.'
'We'll be fine. Come on.'
Little Maxie watched me patiently, not unsympathetically: poor Mummy, making a fuss again.
'I'm not walking on that,' I said. 'It says not to.'
Max shrugged, and followed Charles across the clay. It looked thin, dry, brittle. I felt frantic watching him.
I couldn't make myself walk where they'd gone. I turned away, my eyes stinging. I was furious, ashamed. I went back along the path. Had I abandoned my own children out of fear? But they were not abandoned. They were with their father. I thought about Max's power, his separateness. His love for the boys, their love for him. That he could carry them away and I would be left with nothing but the sound of my angry pleading, the ground trickling away under my feet.
Thin earth.
***
I waited at the bridge, watching the local boys diving for coins. The sun was an angry white eye. I waited for a long time. After an hour I walked back over the hill but there was no sign of them. I went to a hut near the gate. Two guards, a young man and young woman in floral shirts, were sitting behind a desk. I asked how I could get to the geyser.
They glanced at each other. 'You can't get to it from here. It belongs to the other guys.'
'Other guys?'
'The neighbours!' They exploded into giggling.
'How do I get there?'
'You have to go round the road, go to their gate and pay them.'
You keep that quiet, don't you? I thought. That the main attraction isn't in your bit of the park. I said, 'Can I borrow your phone?'
They were kind, getting out of the way and lettin
g me ring Max's cellphone, allowing me go on trying when there was no reply. Then he answered, and suddenly I was calm and reasonable, laughing along as he told me they'd crossed the scrubland and been caught in the neighbouring park without the right ticket, that they'd been briskly ushered out, having viewed the geyser, and were walking all the way back around the road.
I met them coming back. The boys were eating iceblocks. I laughed over my stupid attack of nerves, admired Max's acumen in getting what the boys wanted. Max, adopting a faintly cynical and patronising air, allowed me to praise him.
'Silly old Mummy,' the boys said. We straggled back to the village and opened up the car to let out the heat.
I found myself thinking about the girl in Wanganui. The funeral. Her parents. How it must have been. There were boys playing cricket, the sun was shining, rowboats were racing on the sparkling river, and their daughter was dead. I thought of them, burying their only child. I watched as Max carefully buckled little Maxie into his seat. I thought: I must take care of my boys, love them, guard them. I must take care.
The baking concrete, the furnace glare of the afternoon sun. Max straightens; we face each other over the bonnet of the car. There is something in his expression. A moment of hardness, clarity between us. A bird, turning and turning in the air above us, gives a high, sad, warning cry. I think of that expression Max likes to use: 'Over my dead body.'
He believes, with justification, that I am incompetent and hysterical. These are our roles — I dizzy, he rational. These are the parts we play. But a kind of communication passed between us then, as if, for a moment, we had abandoned our lines and were confronting each other, free of script, on an empty stage. He nodded and stared off at the hillside, absorbing the thing I was telling him.
If you leave me, you go alone. Over my dead body will you take them away.
home
I was working in Teulada for my friend Freddie. He owned a couple of bars and nightclubs in the town. I used to work for him in London and after he left and set himself up in Spain he phoned me and told me to come on down, so I packed my bags and went there, and soon I was living in a little house by the sea and working behind the bar at Freddie's, and I was happy to be away from London's cold winter and its dead grey light. Those first mornings in the village, when I woke up and walked out onto the terrace and the light was all golden and buttery and the sun was sparkling on the sea, I felt almost happy — healthy, anyway. I felt more alive than I had for a long time.
Opportunity Page 17
