by Gee, Maurice
‘Hey, Leeanne.’
Oh Christ no, oh please no.
‘Can I see the baby, Leeanne?’
She ran to the door. ‘Go away, Danny.’
‘I want to see the baby. I like babies.’
‘He’s asleep. Go away.’
He turned the knob and pushed; slid her back.
‘No, Danny.’
‘Won’t hurt ’im. Just want to hold ’im for a minute.’
‘No – ’
‘Hey, Leeanne, that stuff about skinny, eh, that was kidding, eh.’
She slipped by him into the hall, yanked him back, closed the door. ‘Not in there. You’re not going there.’
‘Don’t you push me round, Leeanne. I don’t like fucken people pushing me round.’
‘Stay out of my room. Okay? Okay?’
‘Sure okay. Don’ wake the baby, okay?’
‘Go in there. In your room. Go and sleep in there.’
‘Sure I will. That’s my room. You come too.’
‘No, Danny.’
‘You’re not so skinny. You got nice tits.’
‘Stop that.’
‘Shouldn’ waste good tits on the baby. Hey, Leeanne, lemme see you feed him, okay?’
‘In here, Danny. There’s your bed. Lie down now. Go to sleep.’
But it was, she knew, no good. Danny would not sleep. There was knowledge in him. He need not be as drunk as he was letting himself be. She would fuck him to stop him waking Sam. No way out. She must try to keep him friendly. She must try to get away and feed Sam by herself.
And somewhere in the night Danny would hurt her. She wondered how badly he would hurt.
Chapter Seven
Like tiddlywinks, Howie thought, flying into Wellington. Up into the air and down into the bowl. He didn’t like this city, cramped up in an arse-end place and full of hot-air merchants, full of wankers, who thought that the important thing was a set of rules they’d just made up. Seventeen meetings over seven months, and still they were inventing objections.
He looked at the buildings cluttered on the edge of the sea. Without the reclamation there would be no city there. Great harbour but the land was second rate. It should have been left to the seals. A little fishing port maybe, that should be Wellington, with a wooden wharf sticking into the sea. Auckland was the proper place for the capital. He felt that he was dropping down conferring benefits and he looked forward to the time when he would climb back into the sky and fly north to the town where he belonged. He felt, too, like a Viking coming out of the mist, standing in the prow ready to leap on to the beach and loot the churches, sling the women over his shoulder and sail off.
It would please the newspaper hacks if they knew he felt like that; it would make them yabber with delight, for that was how they liked to portray him: a raider. Even the cartoonists had fastened on to him, without of course bothering to look: shark teeth, top hat, popping champagne corks. The pot belly they drew on him offended him most. If they bothered to look they’d see that he was muscle and bone. And if they ever talked to him they’d know he was more than that.
It amazed Howie that no one had ever asked him what he thought – what the mental and imaginative components might be. They believed that he had nothing in his head. They believed he was a pair of grasping hands and an open mouth and a belly popping buttons off its shirt. They drew him as though he was never quiet and never alone. He saw and grabbed, they seemed to say; but they could not begin to understand all the things that made up ‘seeing’, or that ‘grabbing’ was part of a process and not instinctive at all, not greedy at all, but a reasoned step. The instinctive bit came earlier. Howie had worked it out, the three parts: imagination, purpose, action. Money had a place all right. Money had to be got, like men and materials, to make the project – whatever it was – move. It was part of the content in a plan or scheme, a part of design. Due proportion, Howie thought – money comes in there. And if I make some cash at the end, why shouldn’t I be paid for my time? It was wages. The cowboys, the quick-flick boys, went out in ’87 and now it was five per cent stuff, and okay too, okay with him. He didn’t want more than he could earn.
Ron Quested did. Ronnie had to be watched. He was one of the arse-flame boys who had come through clean, by accident; and now he believed he was – who was that bloke of Gwen’s whose mother dipped him in a creek so spears wouldn’t touch him? Ronnie believed he was like that. He wanted more than he could earn, and he would probably get it. He could always add up quicker than the next guy and grab the bits that got left lying round. Watch him, Howie thought, don’t let the bugger screw the scrum. Keep him out of the way when you say, This is the deal. Howie always did that part as open as a book, no matter what the lawyers were computing.
Tony Dorio drove him into town. They came out of the tunnel on to the Basin and Howie began to like Wellington more. Its cramped spaces made him feel that he could knock down and put up endlessly. It got his adrenalin flowing, which was good for a meeting that might be filled with quick and sudden stuff. Tony would do the talking and Lonnie Baldwin keep score, but they knew, everyone knew, that he was the one who said, This is it, let’s go.
‘How’s Ronnie? Sulking?’
‘Not too much. I think he’d be sorry if we screwed up.’
‘We won’t screw up. If we play it right we’ll go through on the casting vote. You keeping him busy?’
‘When he’s in. He’s out most times.’
‘Doing what?’
‘He wants to build a restaurant. He’s out with Peter Kleber looking at sites.’
‘Why Kleber?’
‘He’s split with Gilbert Fox, that’s the word. He and Ronnie went to school together.’
‘The old boys, eh? Wanking in the dormitory. And now they want a restaurant so they can be Hudson and Halls.’
‘It’s not like that,’ Tony said mildly.
‘Maybe not. Tell him to put something together and we’ll look at it. Just keep him out of Kitchener.’
‘Sure, Howie,’ Tony said. He drove in his non-Italian way, changing down, changing up, everything smooth. Tony never went off line and never took a risk. He’s perfect for what I need him for, Howie thought. He’s the other part of me. Without his steadiness and his attention, PDQ would have missed getting Kitchener. The client liked him, AMP; the planners liked him too, that’s why Howie let him do the talking. But I’m the life in him, Howie thought; behind it all there’s me. I’m the one who sees it, no one else. It was like being up the willow tree, swaying in the wind, with the whole of Falls Park, the changing sheds, the diving board, the picnics and sprat-jaggers and canoes spread out below. No one but Howie Powie had the whole view.
What we need now is the demolition, he thought. Until that building’s down they’ll keep on trying to change the rules. Today was just one more attempt. Seven months ago Council had voted fifteen-five in favour of an underground carpark on Kitchener, jointly funded, twenty per cent to eighty per cent, by PDQ and themselves. That twenty was the PDQ sweetener – parking spaces to keep the shopkeepers happy, and Council, or the Citizens amongst them, happy too. What Howie was after was the airspace above. That was where his tower would go. The tower was the reason for it all. He had known that the greenies and their mates, the sandal-wearers and lentil-eaters, and the usual claque of old-building freaks and car-haters, would get busy and swing a few, but he had not foreseen how many, or that they would force another vote. It was ten-all now and everything depended on the mayor.
A bloody professional wobbler, Mrs Dunwoodie, the mayor. She was ending her first term and was up for re-election in November and so was trying to please everyone. Who was the politician who said, I must follow them, I am the leader? That could be Mrs Dunwoodie’s motto. The only way to firm her up was to wave the big stick.
‘Get me Lonnie Baldwin on the phone,’ he said in the office. ‘Lonnie,’ he said, ‘Howie here. Have you got that letter ready to go?’
‘Hey, no,’ Tony Dorio s
aid from the door.
‘Hang on a minute, Lonnie. Yeah, what?’
‘It’ll backfire.’
‘No it won’t. You point the gun, you pull the trigger. She’s not going to go to court and lose the Council more than a million bucks.’
‘You could push some of the others offside.’ Tony, with palms lifted, was Italian suddenly. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Howie.’
‘I do. Lonnie? Send it so they get it early in the afternoon. And I’ll want you there tonight, so come round here and you and me can work out a strategy.’ He put down the phone.
‘I think we’ve blown it,’ Dorio said.
‘Ah Tony, if we blew it we blew it a long time ago. Now I want to talk to our lady friend before she gets the squitters too damn bad. Get me the mayor,’ he said to his secretary.
‘Mrs Dunwoodie. Cora. I know you’re going to stand firm on this. I’ve checked with our lawyers and the precedent says you vote for the status quo. That means the decision of March 10, approving the project.’
‘I’m not sure I know what you mean.’
‘The March 10 decision is the status quo, that’s what I mean. You’re bound by it.’
‘No, I’m not. I’ve taken legal advice as well. The status quo is that we do nothing, because nothing has been started yet. There’s no contract.’
‘I think you’re wrong there, Cora. The agreement constitutes a binding contract. That’s what my lawyer says. You decided fifteen-five. You voted for it yourself.’
‘But I can’t go against my own advice. I can’t do that.’
‘You’re getting bad advice, Cora. It’s going to be a tied vote so the decision’s yours. And you have to vote for the way things are. That’s the rule.’
‘I’m not going to be pressured, Mr Peet.’
‘Hey, call me Howie. Look, get some independent advice. Get someone from outside Council.’
‘I can’t do that. You don’t understand, there’s great opposition to this carpark. I must be seen to do the right thing.’
‘You must be seen not to wobble, Cora. That’s the right thing for you, politically. And you can’t go costing Council big sums of money. There’s been too much of that, the ratepayers don’t like it at all.’
‘I think we might have to discuss all this in public – ’
‘You can’t do that. It’s confidential stuff. You’ll be in breach of contract.’
‘Well – what did you mean, costing Council big sums of money?’
‘For the work we’ve put into Kitchener already. There’s a letter from our lawyer on its way round right now. All the details are there. We don’t want to go to court over this.’
‘I haven’t seen any letter.’
‘It’s on its way. They’ll send a copy straight through to you.’
‘I think you’re making a big mistake.’
‘Well, we don’t want to do it this way. But you’ve backed us into a corner so there’s not much we can do. The only one who can make a mistake now is you. I think you should go for the status quo in there tonight. In fact it’s what you’ve got to do. We’ll see you, Cora, in, what, nine hours time? I hope it all works out okay. Bye for now.’ He hung up. ‘Shit, bye for now’ – to Dorio – ‘I never thought I’d hear myself say that.’
He felt as if he’d been in bed with Cora Dunwoodie and left her flattened out on the mattress. It sustained him through an afternoon of phone calls and discussions with consultants and councillors friendly to PDQ, and Dorio and Baldwin as well, and when they went into the Council Chambers that night he felt a burning in his blood and a fullness in his chest – adrenalin working – and he was ready for another bout. If he won here the next step would follow; he could get the Kitchener building down, and once that was done there would be no turning back: games were over and the real thing was under way.
He kept himself remote, but secretly, behind a still face, conducted the meeting like an orchestra. Tony and Lonnie Baldwin talked for him – Tony neatly, going over the negotiations between PDQ and Council step by step, keeping it simple, turning everything into a fact; Lonnie in his singsong voice, a bit like a nervous schoolboy, but effective all the same, pointing out that Council’s decision had established a binding contract, which might lead to court action if an attempt to rescind were made. PDQ – and Lonnie made Tony read the figures – had clocked up seven thousand professional staff hours and costs exceeding a million dollars in preparing the proposal.
Beasley, the Council chief executive, replied that no contract existed because he had refused to sign one. Unlawful, Lonnie said, but never mind; the contract was legal without his signature because PDQ had met Council’s requirements at every point in negotiations.
That was thin, Howie knew, but he kept his eye on Cora Dunwoodie – advanced into her and knew her again. She was the one who counted, the vote was hers. And he knew that he had her – felt her reading things politically, felt her cross the boundary into choice, into risk, with a jolting in his own heart and with a rushing in his blood that for a moment dizzied him. Good girl, he said.
She interrupted Waterhouse, the greenie: ‘I feel I must warn councillors at this point, I must ask them to remember that anything they say can be used in court if legal action follows tonight’s decision.’
Good girl. He did not object – though Lonnie objected – when Council moved into closed session to talk to their lawyers.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said as they waited, ‘we’ve got her.’ There’s only two people here, he wanted to say, and it’s her and me, and I’ve got her tied up and delivered; she’s only a girl after all.
The vote, when it came, was a nice little production; it satisfied him. Cora used her casting vote with a manly resolution. He felt Tony’s hand on his arm, restraining him, but he did not need it. He was not going to jump up and down with delight. They voted a second time, and again Cora Dunwoodie made it eleven-ten, instructing Beasley to move ahead with the contract and get it signed.
He nodded at her, smiled, but did not approach; left her to the journalists, avoided them himself. Back in the office he let his pleasure open quietly. It was too soon for the big celebration; that would come when they said, Rip it down, put it up. All he could do was done and he was satisfied and pleased to have a time for being still. Tony and Lonnie could handle the next two weeks – the contract, the resource consent application, the demolition permit. Then he would come in again, getting the builders on the job. That was the part he liked best. He opened a Black Label and called Tony and Lonnie in.
‘Good stuff, Tony. Fucking good work, Lonnie.’
I’m going to put a building up, with mirror glass all the way, she’ll be a diamond in the sky, and higher than anyone has gone. He felt himself open like a flower. Yeah, a rose. He wanted to say it to see how Tony and Lonnie would react. But only Gwen would know what he meant – and he thought of her, scruffy, dried up, sharp, with places in her mind that unfolded and unfolded just when you thought she’d reached the end. Gwen would know what he meant by rose. Howie Powie, you’re no dope, standing on her toes to kiss his cheek. She would hate his building though. She would say, A monstrosity. He closed up sharp.
Ron Quested came in. ‘So?’ he said, grinning.
‘Have one, Ronnie. Here’s to us.’
‘You got her?’
‘She rolled over and put her legs in the air.’
He drank with them for half an hour, then left them with the bottle. He walked to the Glencoul and stopped on the corner for a better view of it, bronzed and sheathed, stepping into the sky. Beautiful, he thought. And full of people doing things. It’s there for a reason and it works. Stuff Gwen, she doesn’t know a thing.
He stopped in the bar for another drink – sat alone, enjoying himself. He would never be rid of Gwen; she was a mozzy in the night, you slapped and thought you’d got her, but she kept coming back. And you kept on itching because the bitch could bite. Okay, Howie thought, she’s part of my life, like bursit
is, eh; she’s something I’ve done and you don’t get rid of what you’ve done, no way, but I make the big rules, so bite away, Gwennie, there’s nothing else you can do. He toasted her with a final drink.
Back in his room he rang Darlene and heard her wake. ‘Howie, ah Howie’ – yawn – ‘I thought you’d never ring. Do you know what I did today, I mowed some of the lawn.’ He liked her to do that.
‘You clean the mower?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oily rag?’
‘Yes, Howie. I had a swim. I did four lengths.’
‘Good on you. Overarm?’
‘A little bit of dog-paddle. I get sore arms, Howie.’
‘You dive for the stone?’
‘Yes. I nearly got it. I’ll get it tomorrow. Did you wow them, Howie? At the meeting, I mean.’
‘Sure I wowed them. They didn’t know their arse from their elbow.’
‘I knew you would. Do you want me to talk some stuff to you?’
‘Nah, save it, honey. Tomorrow night. We’ll do it then and stuff the talking, eh?’
Darlene laughed. ‘I’m touching myself.’
‘Well, cut it out. I’ve had enough excitement for one day. Anyone call?’
‘Gordon did.’
‘What did he want?’
‘I don’t know. He’s creepy, Howie. I know he’s your son but I wish he didn’t kind of creep all the time. It’s like he’s always coming out of the dunny.’
Howie was startled. Darlene was like that, talked silly for hours on end and then said something exactly right.
‘Give him a drink and send him home. You don’t have to listen to his stuff.’
‘That’s what I did.’
‘Okay, love. Now keep after that stone. I know you can do it.’
‘Yes, I will. And don’t you go ringing up for one of those hotel girls.’ She said it to please him and he was pleased.
‘There’s no such thing, love. Not at the Glen.’
‘You could find one if you wanted.’ That was to please him too. ‘I’ll think about you, Howie.’
