by Gee, Maurice
‘Get out of the car, Mum.’
‘She can’t feel anything below her neck and she never will. Her body is alive but there’s no way it can let her know, and no way she can tell it that it belongs to her. They’re worried about her breathing. And spasms. And bed sores. And how to empty her bladder and how to stop her kidneys being infected. That’s how it’s going to be for the rest of her life. Did you know?’
‘Get out.’
‘Olivia knows.’
‘You’re all words, Mum. You’re in some fancy world and you haven’t got a clue what the real one’s about.’
‘I think perhaps she could use some coddling. Think about it.’
She got out and closed the door with a three-inch slam. She left him with the smile – slanted, skewed – that seemed to say she knew, she knew, and he must learn one day. He hated it. He’d seen it all his life and hated it. He could not understand how Ulla’s accident had somehow put him in his mother’s power. That was something he must not allow – and going his own way, being alone, getting on with his work, were things that he must do now, no matter who got hurt.
He drove into Lambton Quay and turned off at the Kitchener block, half of it dead buildings and the rest barely alive, where one day his father’s glass tower would rise. His father knew. Howie knew, better than his mother, and made no fuss about fine feelings and mystery. He knew that Kitchener was inside the line where a building would work, where tenants would come, he knew to a metre where the line ended, and why the Glencoul stayed full while the Plaza went broke. He knew when all the leases ran out everywhere in town and how much the tenants paid and when they would want better space. He knew how long to bed down a deal. He thought ahead. Research. Know-how. Acceptable risk. No mysteries. No smiles that said I know, you don’t. Learn the system, work it, think ahead, take your chance, and go, go, go – make a difference that way, with new buildings and new jobs, and don’t stop to wring your hands like poor fucking Gordon when the thing doesn’t end up right. Cut your losses, try again. That was the lesson, and no stuck-up smile that said feelings were the main thing. That was for girls. He wanted Howie to have Damon.
I’m better off alone, that’s my way, Athol thought.
He parked the car and went up dark steps into a lobby where broken tiles clanked under his feet, and found a lift waiting and pushed the button for the penthouse floor. On my way to see a minister of the crown, he thought, even if he is just a little one. The ease amazed him. You walked in, up you went, no security, and Fox would answer his own door. What was it Howie said? A man could make a fortune here in the assassination business if only someone wanted the silly buggers shot.
Red whiskers. A fringe along his jaw from ear to ear to emphasise the line of it and make him seem strong, make him seem his own man, who lived by his own rules, while in fact he was a wimp, with no opinions of his own, in and out of the shadows, grinning in the light with his strong teeth, and smirking in the corner, waiting for the main chance, which he wouldn’t know when it came, and licking arse. That was Fox. A gift for words, in quantity not quality, and a gift for obedience, and a raging unfocused greed.
‘Hello, Gilbert.’
‘Athol. Come in, boy. I was just thinking about you.’
‘Yes?’
‘How’s the lady wife? How’s she getting on?’
‘It’s a broken neck, Gilbert. They don’t mend.’
‘Medical science is full of miracles. Don’t give up hope. That’s an order. I was reading in Newsweek the other day about a Korean boy, all sheared off at the hips he was and they’ve kept him alive, they’ve got him working again down there, built him a whole bag of works, new bladder, little plastic bag for his shit to go in. Can’t give him a new donger though so I guess he hasn’t got full privileges, ha ha, but what I mean, Athol, if they can do that for some kid, in some slant-eye place, no offence, then there’s something they can do for your wife. Keep smiling, boy. Fox has spoken. What will you have? Scotch?’
‘Thanks. With water. Half and half.’
‘Water is a capital offence. It’s the ruination of good Scotch.’
‘It’s the way I like it,’ Athol said mildly. He sat on the sofa. ‘How’s it going, Peter?’ – to the man there.
‘So so.’
‘Teaching him his steps?’
‘You could say that.’
Okay, Athol thought, clam up. I don’t want to know anyway, I just want to see how the pair of you perform.
‘There is, of course, the other side of it,’ Fox said, handing Athol his drink, ‘and that is law and order, that’s what concerns me most. Your wife’s is a private tragedy, and I feel for you, Athol, I feel it here,’ putting his hand wide-splayed on his chest, ‘because I lost a lady wife too, before her time, in different circumstances – there was no lower life came off the streets, she was called Home you might say. I know you boys aren’t of my persuasion, but a happening of that sort – enough! What concerns me here, a decent woman coming home to her own house, in the middle of the day, sun shining outside, birds in the sky, and she finds some creature, animal, in there, and he strikes her down. I want stronger laws to cage – they’re sub-human, Athol, Peter. They lack a faculty, and in my opinion – put them down! That’s our duty. We’re human, they are not. Up from the drains. Half a brain. Fox has spoken. Drink up. That’s an order.’
He should leave it to the minister of police, he does it better, Athol thought. ‘What are you going to do about Shearwater, Gilbert?’
‘Shearwater? Shearwater? Some sort of seagull, is it? Ha ha!’
‘I don’t like the way my name keeps getting dragged in. I bought something and sold something, a simple piece of business, years ago. I don’t like being in the political stuff. So don’t try and play me, Peter,’ turning to him, ‘or I’ll say what really happened and that won’t make Gilbert look very good.’
‘It’s on the record, Athol,’ Peter Kleber said. ‘You owned some property, that’s all. We’re not saying anything else.’
‘There seems to be a suggestion that I persuaded him.’
‘No.’
‘Twisted his arm. Maybe you don’t know it, Peter, he came to me.’
‘Hey,’ Fox cried, ‘I’m here.’
‘He said we should form a company and buy Shearwater farm because when the stormwater dam went in – you know all that.’
‘Gilbert wasn’t in politics then,’ Peter Kleber said.
‘He was in planning. He knew where the houses were likely to go – ’
‘Hey – ’
‘But the information didn’t come to me in a privileged way. I’m a businessman. I invest. I don’t know how it is for him, of course.’
‘I’m buggered if I’ll be talked about – ’
‘Why did you sell so quick?’
‘Because I thought it wouldn’t go. I told Gilbert that. And it didn’t go. It’s still sitting there.’
‘And he still owns it,’ Peter Kleber said.
‘Not my fault. He could have got out when I got out.’
‘It wouldn’t have made any difference. As soon as he bought that land, knowing what he knew – ’
‘I won’t tolerate this,’ Gilbert Fox cried. ‘I’m here, in this room, and I’m a minister of the crown and I won’t be talked about as if I can’t add two and two. Shearwater was a mistake. I wrote it off years ago. And I would have quit that property if I could have done it without taking a loss – ’
‘Wouldn’t have helped,’ Peter Kleber said.
‘I know it wouldn’t have helped. I know all I can do is damage control. But I’m an honest man, I didn’t do anything wrong. Buying that land wasn’t dishonest to me. I knew there was a chance the scheme would be shelved. I took a risk. But what I won’t tolerate, in my own house, is to be patronised by some jewboy moneygrubber who counts his takings into a jam jar every night.’
‘Jewboy?’ Athol said, amazed.
‘You act like a jewboy. Your brother’s a croo
k. Your old man skates just inside the law. Peet’s a dirty word. Athol, you told me Shearwater was all right, there was nothing I needed to worry about. Finished. Done. You sold at a profit. And you left the rest of us holding the can.’
‘I told you to make your own minds up. Anyway, I’m off.’ He had not touched his drink. ‘I came by to say what I’ve just said – leave me out or I’ll tell the Post how it started and I don’t think there’ll be much of you left after that, Gilbert.’ He grinned at Peter Kleber. Grinning was hard. ‘You’re the one who should be in politics.’
Going down in the lift he thought, Jewboy! And Peet a dirty word. Gordon had made it that, with his chase after money. Work was not about money, money was a by-product and had to be respected, it was a way of measuring things; but work was about itself and for itself. If you did it properly you grew not in wealth, not in power, which was for people like Fox, but in busyness and accumulated pleasure in yourself. He came smiling from the lift – and thought of Kleber’s stillness up there, at the end, and the instant pinkness in his cheeks. Kleber was, of course, a Jew, which Fox would be remembering. But Kleber wouldn’t stay, he wouldn’t take it, you took so much and then you got out. And Fox, without his right-hand man, was done for. Athol laughed. It was the first time he had laughed since Ulla had been attacked.
He drove to his office and let himself in. The Shearwater story was in his safe – all the records, with clippings from the Dominion and the Post – and he spent an hour turning pages. Not that there was any need; he had it in his head: his part, the purchase, 406 hectares, with Fox and Baster and Smythe – and there he was, Athol Peet, there was his name, but it did no harm, for he had sold his share and gone in the early days when he had seen that nothing would move, and that was the end of it for him – and Fox’s part, the four-dollar companies with the inverted names, Treblig, Retsab, and the interest never declared. A stupid man, Fox, a greedy man, and not the smiling schemer his mother thought. There was nothing criminal in what Fox had done, but he would come tumbling down because he was in politics and someone had found out his secrets and his greed.
Athol was pleased. Stupidity should be punished and quick ways not succeed. Steak and oysters, French wine, fruity words, and all that slapping on the back and fat jokiness: for amateurs. Athol was a pro. He saw his way as monkish, simple, strait. He felt his sharp nose and polished head. The office was his place; he squeaked his chair, he rapped his desk.
I could put a bed behind the door. I could live in here, Athol thought.
Gwen sat at Ulla’s bedside, by her head, which, she thought, was the whole of her. Torso, legs, stretching away, arms arranged, fingers spaced, they were nothing now, they were bone and tissue fastened on with latching that was merely mechanical and Ulla was up here in the dry melon of her head. How could it be, how could Ulla survive? Mind and body were linked, sacramentally one might say, if nature were allowed its sacraments, and now that this divorce had taken place did the partner here at home have a way of making herself seem whole?
She slept. Who slept? Could she any longer signal sleep to the parts down there? Perhaps they were awake, independently. Gwen shivered – and thought, Stop. She was not the one it was all about. She had to think of Ulla as a person on a bed even if hideous things were going on. She held Ulla’s hand – it is her hand, although I could stick pins in her and she wouldn’t know – and traced Ulla’s mouth with her fingertips. That would be felt, perhaps, in her fractured sleep. But her own hands seemed divorced from each other, and her left to betray her right. No, stop, she thought, I musn’t imagine or I’ll go mad and I’ll be no use to her then.
The stitches exposed in Ulla’s cheek were comforting. They closed a wound that she must feel. Her lips, swollen and dry, and her eyelids, swollen too, and moist, seemed filled with the excess of life stored in her head. It was all up there in that round shell held in the halo brace. Could Ulla be seen as larger now? In spite of the screws fixed in her skull? In spite of the shrinking that her clipped hair seemed to show – the desiccation on the surfaces?
Gwen dipped her finger in the water glass and wet Ulla’s lips. ‘Ulla,’ she whispered. Did she have night and day or was she simply intersecting planes of consciousness, and lights, and spaces, and faces that leaned and receded? Did she have memories, and did she have now? And understanding, did she have that? Ulla, she thought, I don’t want you to understand. Then: Ulla, you’ve got to know it all. She too seemed broken into parts, and did not know which one she must stay with.
‘I’ll sit with you for ever, love, if it will help,’ she said. And blushed a little at the falseness of it. I want to help her live, she thought; but how much life is left, and does all that body down there count?
Meanwhile Ulla slept, and half woke, and slept again, receding, advancing, on slopes that tipped her sideways and made her hold on. From time to time – although there was no time – she found a land where she could be still. It stretched to far horizons in a dark blue night and glowed from deep within itself. Lakes looked through to empty other worlds and the sun lay invisible below the smooth outline of the hills. A mountain gleamed like a dog’s tooth and two or three yellow stars blinked in the sky. She tried to stay there …
Part 2
Chapter Five
The money was safe but not the jewellery. He did not look at it again but put it in two handfuls in a sock and tied the top with string and drove up the Ngaio gorge and down Old Porirua Road, where he threw it from his car window into the bush. He followed it, a harder throw, with the satin box. The other sock, knotted to give it weight, he lobbed over the car roof as he drove back to town on the Hutt Road. For a few moments he was free. He felt as if he’d drunk too much and gone outside and spewed and now felt good. Or as if he’d washed his hands and face. The ballsed-up day was over; he had fixed up his mistake.
At the start he had locked his door and sat on his bed, doubled up as though his guts were aching; he had looked out the window, and lain down, and heard noises, and waited for something to happen. Up the hill the cops were in the house. The space between there and here was gone. They could grab him by reaching out an arm. Everything stood hard up against him.
He saw the woman touch the floor lightly. Her head rushed at the edge of the door. A crack like kindling wood. The door swung with her weight as she slid down. ‘The stupid bitch.’ But mostly he remembered his hand on the stair rail and every time he thought of it an itching started in his palm.
He turned on the radio and heard the ZB news at six o’clock. It was there. A thirty-six-year-old woman hurt in an attack by an intruder in her Kelburn home. The police were looking for a slightly built male with fair hair, in his early twenties, wearing a navy sweatshirt and carrying a dark-coloured bag. Some money and jewellery were missing from the house.
It made him feel better. That could be anyone. Fair hair, jeans, a bag. Anyone. If you didn’t have dark hair it was fair. If you weren’t tall or fat it was slightly built; and jeans and a sweatshirt, anyone. Then all his details of face and body – mouth, nose, knees that bent, eyes that looked out – crowded in and the man was him. He recognised himself. He felt that he must not let anyone see him any more.
He drank some Coca-Cola from the fridge. When it was dark he drove out to Ngaio and dumped the jewellery, remembering not to keep the odd sock. He bought some fish and chips from a Chinese in Courtenay Place. A burger was what he wanted but McDonald’s was too bright; he thought it sensible not to go in there. And sensible to go home and get off the streets. He ate his fish and chips sitting on the bed and drank another can of Coke and counted the money again. Fourteen hundred and forty dollars. With what he had in the bank it brought him to over five thousand. He felt that he should celebrate. Go somewhere. Listen to some rock and have a beer. And not think of his hand and fingerprints. Stop thinking about the woman and wondering if she would die. The woman was no business of his.
He put his jacket on and walked three streets down to the Hermitage
. Went in from the alley, past a car with an insane rottweiler inside, bought himself a beer, sat in the dark listening to the band: Karori kids with a name like that, Killing Bambi. The place started to fill up – guys wearing bandannas and torn-off sleeves and leather vests, girls with nose studs and shaved hair. Too many nigs though, too many tats, it made him nervous. He edged to the bar – rub of leather smooth as soap, with smells sucked up in it. Bought another beer, slid back. Kept himself alone against the wall.
More people came in. The lead singer started a death-metal roar. Lights bulged and shrank like jellyfish. They turned from red to green, going faster; faces and biceps were printed on the dark. Eyes that shone like oil turned at him. Rosser put his beer on the floor, where it spilled and coiled between his feet. He held his hands over his face until the roaring stopped.
‘You okay, mate?’
‘Gotta go.’
He ran out almost doubled up. The rotty clawed and slobbered on the glass. Eyes gone mad. Rosser ran the three streets home; locked the door again; curled up in the dark on his bed. ‘I’ve got to stop this’ – but could not think of any way he might. He knew that what was perfect had been broken. He knew that now he could not act in his own way but must watch what other people did and then do something in return. It seemed that he would never be alone. People were around him everywhere.
So what do they see? And what do I do? The jeans, the sweatshirt. He stood up and took them off. He picked his bag up in the dark, heard something fall and roll away, but did not switch the light on until he had stuffed his clothes in and zipped the bag. He stood in the room in the light. Opened the bag again, put in the sneakers and socks he had worn that day. ‘Yeah,’ he said, and took his underpants off and put them in too and stood naked on the mat. He looked at his new Reeboks down against the wall. They glittered there like ice. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Jesus,’ he said. He wanted those. But made himself put them in the bag. He zipped it up and flattened the bulges in its sides.
