Death on Demand

by Paul Thomas

  Leaning on her walking stick, she made her way to the top of the stairs. What a God-awful din. She thought of trying to find the earplugs she’d used to block out her husband’s snoring. He, bless him, had claimed it was all in her mind.

  She lurched forward, losing her balance. The landing rushed up to meet her. Her last thought was to wonder if the loud click that seemed to come from inside her head was the sound of her neck breaking.

  LORNA

  Parnell, Auckland, one month ago

  She had to clasp the cup in both hands to stop it spilling, and it clattered in the saucer when she put it down. The man at the next table was staring at her. She could feel his prying gaze roam over her like a torch beam. She could almost hear his eyebrows clench as he observed her burning cheeks and shaking hands and the mess she’d created – the puddle of milk, the dusting of sugar. She trapped her hands between her thighs, where they couldn’t shake and couldn’t be seen, and looked straight ahead. Everyone in the café must be looking at her, thinking, what’s going on there? What’s up with the woman of leisure in the Trelise Cooper outfit and the Blahnik shoes?

  It was a good question. What the hell was she doing there? Why was she, a sensible, enviable, middle-aged married woman who’d hardly done a reckless or wilfully foolish thing in her life, sitting there summoning up the nerve to go into the apartment building across the street and have sex with a man she barely knew? Why would anyone in her position and in their right mind even contemplate it?

  Because while her husband doted on her (which, in his mind, was proof of love), he wasn’t really interested in her as a person. He was solicitous, respectful, indulgent, but never sought her opinion on anything beyond trivial domestic or social matters, and struggled to conceal his indifference whenever she volunteered it. He was happier to go to work than get home, happier to hook up with his male friends than stay with her.

  Because there was more to life than lunches with other ladies who lunched, and tennis, and yoga classes, and charity work (socializing by any other name), and overseas holidays, and supervising the gardener.

  Because the children had left home.

  Because she was ashamed of not having done more with her life, in the sense of using her ability and exposing herself to a wider range of experiences and challenges.

  Because it was too long since she’d had an adventure.

  Because she was bored.

  Because she wanted to have a secret, something thrilling and forbidden she could relive second by second when she woke up at three in the morning.

  Because when it was over she could walk away, knowing there would be no aftermath, no repercussions.

  Because there was no risk.

  She finished her coffee. Her hands had stopped shaking. She placed her palms on her cheeks. They were warm as opposed to hot, which meant pink as opposed to crimson. Pink she could live with.

  She stood up and walked out of the café, not caring if people were staring at her, feeling the first, faint stirrings of arousal.

  CHRISTOPHER

  St Heliers, Auckland, two weeks ago

  He’d always wondered how he’d react if it came to this. Pretty well as it turned out, assuming you subscribe to the code of the stiff upper lip. Quite the stoic, in fact. He hadn’t swooned or broken down or got angry; he’d sought clarity on the time frame and, as the condemned often do, thanked his sentencer. The specialist had admired his courage, belated acknowledgement that he was a patient rather than a case study.

  It was a different story at home, of course. He’d thrown up, he’d howled and ranted, he’d soaked his shirt front with tears like equatorial raindrops. When the crying jag had run its course, he stared at himself in the mirror above the basin. A Latin phrase he hadn’t used or thought of since boarding school popped into his head: Morituri te salutant – those who are about to die salute you. He seemed to remember it was what the gladiators said to the emperor before hacking each other to bits for his entertainment.

  He sat beside the pool drinking $300 cognac. Buggered if he was going to leave that for the wake. When the sun went down he went inside and passed out on the sofa. He woke up in a room stuffy with sun, having slept for fourteen hours. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d managed ten; probably not since his student days. It was a fine time to regain the knack of sleeping in.

  He thought about telling his friends, but that could wait. There was nothing they could say or do and he wanted to put off being treated as an endangered species for as long as possible. They would ask, “Have you had a second opinion?” This was the second opinion – and third, fourth, fifth, and sixth. The best people in the field in Australasia, doyens and Young Turks, safe pairs of hands and pushers of the envelope, optimists and pessimists, had read the notes and studied the images. They were unanimous: It’s inoperable. It’s terminal. Time is very short. We are very sorry.

  He would put off telling the kids for as long as possible too. They were both overseas and there was no point in disrupting their busy lives any earlier than necessary. That was how he rationalized it anyway. The real reason was that their grief would be intolerable.

  He thought of getting in touch with his ex, just out of curiosity really. Would she feel guilty about the way she dumped him, without warning or sympathy? Would she offer to nurse him? He suspected the answers would be no – she simply didn’t do guilt, that one – and yes. She’d probably want to be involved, not because he meant anything to her, but because she would respect the fact that he was dying. But he wouldn’t have that. No matter how bad things got, he wouldn’t have that.

  There was only one person he yearned for, one person he wished he could cling to in the night, but she was out of reach. He’d made sure of that.

  TITO IHAKA, JOHAN VAN ROON

  Wairarapa, yesterday

  Well, would you look at this, thought Johan Van Roon as he nosed his car through the trees into a space between two grimy utes. It was a classic summer scene. A cricket match was in progress on a converted farm paddock, a natural oval bordered by a long, curving stand of macrocarpas on one side and a stream on the other. Brown hills undulated across the horizon. Late afternoon was becoming early evening, and the burn and dazzle of Wairarapa summer had receded to a benign, golden glow.

  Van Roon got out of his car, almost planting his boat shoe in a fresh cowpat. Yep, classic Kiwi all right.

  He jumped the stream at a point where it narrowed to not much more than a metre, and negotiated a low wire fence to join the scattering of spectators on the boundary. Some boys were having their own game with a plastic bat and tennis ball, while a couple of toddlers tottered like drunks among the female support crew spread over several picnic rugs.

  A classic scene, perhaps, but not one in which Van Roon had ever expected to see Tito Ihaka. Yet there he was at square leg, typically the only fielder not wearing a cap or floppy hat. Unless Van Roon’s eyes deceived him, Ihaka had shed some weight. It wasn’t that he was a shadow of his former self, like the ex-fatsos in diet adverts who pose beside life-sized cardboard dummies of their old, blubbery selves, but there was definitely less of him.

  Next over Ihaka was stationed on the long-off boundary, not far from the spectators. Van Roon wandered across. Ihaka was too focused on what was happening in the middle to notice him.

  “You’ve been down here too long, mate,” said Van Roon. “I suppose you’ve taken up pottery as well.”

  Ihaka glanced over his shoulder. “Detective Inspector Van Roon. What brings you…?” The rest of the sentence was drowned out by a group bellow from the middle. Ihaka’s head whipped around. His team-mates were trying to alert him to the imminent arrival of a skier. Ihaka got a sighter, unhurriedly positioned himself and took the catch with a minimum of fuss, the ball seeming to nestle gratefully in his meaty grasp.

  The other fielders converged. After a minute or so, Ihaka extracted himself from the back-slapping huddle and walked over to Van Roon. “If I’d fucking spilled that
,” he growled, “you’d be face-down in a cowpat right now.”

  Van Roon retreated to a wooden bench a few metres back from the boundary. Nothing’s changed, he thought. Ihaka might have spent five years in this backwater, he might have lost a bit of weight and taken up a team sport (and a pretty white, middle-class one at that), but under those cricket whites was the Tito he knew and loved – and had sometimes regretted ever setting eyes on.

  A few minutes later Ihaka came on to bowl. Van Roon expected him to try to bowl faster than was sensible for a man of his age and build. In fact, he shuffled in off half a dozen paces and rolled his arm over as gently as if he was bowling to an emotionally fragile eight-year-old in backyard cricket. While his slow-medium trundle seemed, to Van Roon’s admittedly untrained eye, to sit up and beg to be flogged to all corners of the ground, it proved too crafty for the opposition. In quick succession three batsmen launched violent swipes and were either clean bowled or caught in the deep. With the youngster bounding in from the other end chipping in with an athletic caught and bowled, the game ended in a clatter of tumbling wickets.

  The fall of the final wicket was the cue for a round of hugs and high-fives. Van Roon wished he’d brought a camera: he knew people who’d pay top dollar for photographic evidence of Ihaka participating in mass man-love, however sheepishly.

  The players came off the field, the teams shook hands, chilly bins were looted. Van Roon sniffed the beguiling aroma of sausages on the barbecue and wondered how long he’d have to wait for Ihaka. But less than five minutes later he came over with a bottle of beer in each pocket and a sausage wrapped in white bread and smothered in tomato sauce in each hand.

  “So how do you like Wellington?” he said, parking his backside with a thump which made the bench shake and Van Roon think that maybe his eyes had deceived him after all. “And spare me a five-minute bleat about the weather.”

  “Who needs five minutes?” said Van Roon. “The weather sucks, end of story. Apart from that, Wellington’s great.”

  “And the job?”

  “The first few months were interesting in the sense that nightmares can be interesting. It seems to be getting less interesting, thank Christ. And you?”

  “What about me?”

  “How’s it going over here?” said Van Roon. “I mean, it’s been five years, right? I didn’t think you’d last six months.”

  Ihaka shrugged. “Time flies when you’re asleep. You didn’t drive over the Rimutakas to watch me play cricket, so what’s up?”

  “Missed you too, mate. McGrail wants to see you.”

  “What the fuck for?”

  “He didn’t share that with me,” said Van Roon. “Said it was confidential.”

  Ihaka grunted derisively. “What did he say?”

  “That he wants you up there ASAP.” Van Roon rummaged in the pockets on his cargo shorts and produced a folded sheet of paper. “Your flight details.”

  Ihaka scanned it. “I’m on a flight first fucking thing in the morning.”

  Van Roon nodded. “He said – and I’m not making this up; he really did use these words – ‘time is of the essence’.”

  1

  Now and again, during what he sometimes thought of as his exile, Tito Ihaka would wonder what he’d be doing at that moment if he’d actually remembered to forget his cellphone.

  When the fateful call came, five years earlier almost to the day, he was in a Ponsonby Road bar striving to maintain a Mandela-like air of twinkle-eyed magnanimity as he waited for a woman he’d known for less than half an hour to finish apologizing for what her ancestors had done to his ancestors.

  There’d been a time when it amused him to see how many of Maoridom’s current social and economic ills he could browbeat contrite Pakeha into accepting the blame for, and how outrageous his demands for redress had to be before they baulked. But white liberal guilt wasn’t as much fun as it used to be. In fact, it bored and sometimes even irritated him, all that vicarious shame and retrospective moral certainty over what took place in another time and a different world.

  The woman had moved on to imported diseases. She was clearly a bit of a flake, but a certain amount of flakiness had to be expected in that neck of the woods. And she was a cutie all right, standing there gnawing her lower lip and showing off her pierced belly button and a scoop of active cleavage. Ihaka’s strategy, based on several optimistic assumptions, was to hang in there nodding gravely for a few more minutes, get another margarita into her, then steer her onto the subject of race relations in the here and now and exactly what conciliatory gestures she was prepared to make to atone for the rapacity of her forebears.

  When his cellphone rang, Ihaka automatically plucked it from his jacket pocket. He apologized and went to put it straight back, but the woman wouldn’t hear of it. “Answer it,” she said. “Please. Do it for me. It’s bad luck not to. I really believe that.”

  “Where the hell are you?” rasped Detective Sergeant Johan Van Roon, once Ihaka’s protégé, now his equal, and his closest – some would have said only – friend in the police force. “Did you really think no one would notice you’re not here?”

  The woman was already surveying the room. Being familiar with the dynamics of the bar and pub scene, she assumed Ihaka would shortly be walking out of her life. But there were plenty more fish in the sea, and she was confident of landing one. She doubted he’d put up much of a fight.

  “So how’s the party going?” said Ihaka finally.

  “Well, it’s warming up,” said Van Roon, “but then it’s been going for three bloody hours. Look, I know he’s an old woman, but Christ almighty, Tito, the bloke’s put in fifty years.”

  Senior Sergeant Ted Worsp was retiring after fifty years on the force, having made more comebacks than tuberculosis. He’d been on the brink of retirement for well over a decade, but some interfering prick would always find a little task or project for him, some bullshit community-policing role or a cold case over which he could make an ineffectual fuss. Little or nothing would be achieved, but anyone who happened to ask could be assured that something was indeed being done.

  And now that he’d clocked up the half-century, his departure was being marked as if the greatest crime-fighter since Wyatt Earp was bowing out. Everyone from the District Commander down had gathered to give him a big send-off. Everyone except Ihaka.

  “Ah, fuck,” said Ihaka. The woman interrupted her reconnaissance to give him a deadpan, raised-eyebrows look. It was a look of such pure cynicism that he had to wonder if the whole bleeding-heart thing had been an act. Maybe she didn’t really give a shit about Maori obesity and the diabetes epidemic. I suppose I should be flattered, he thought.

  He shrugged and grimaced to indicate that the caller was being difficult and half-turned away. “I suppose Boy and Igor are there?”

  “Of course they’re here,” said Van Roon. “Is that what this is all about?”

  Three months earlier Ihaka’s boss Detective Inspector Finbar McGrail had been promoted to Auckland District Commander.

  Over the course of the thirteen years they’d worked together the pair had established a strange, symbiotic, much talked-about relationship. A lot of the gossip that swirled around Auckland Central Police Station concerned McGrail’s tolerance, even indulgence, of Ihaka. For a time the popular theory was that McGrail was doing it under sufferance: he had to cover for Ihaka and turn a blind eye to his disregard for protocol and procedure because Ihaka had something on him. Maybe it was the same dark secret that had compelled one of the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s rising stars to resign abruptly and emigrate to New Zealand. Sceptics pointed out that McGrail probably got the fuck out of Belfast because he was on an IRA hit list. They also asked how Ihaka, who’d never ventured further afield than Sydney and was hardly a student of international affairs, would know more about McGrail’s Northern Ireland past than the recruitment team who vetted him before bringing him to New Zealand.

  The rumour-mongers then tilled more
obvious and fertile ground: McGrail was a devoted husband and father and a lay preacher in the Presbyterian Church, but behind that pillar of the community façade he was obviously some kind of sleazebag or pervert because people who wore their virtue on their sleeves always were. Ihaka must have found out that McGrail consorted with under-age Oriental prostitutes or rent boys, or visited a dominatrix once a fortnight to have his nuts slapped around with a fly swat.

  What gave this version of the theory legs was the catch-22 cynicism – the more virtuous McGrail appeared, the more likely he was to have a depraved secret life – and the fact that even Ihaka’s most fervent detractor (and there was hot competition for that title) had to admit he had a nose for deceit and human weakness. It took a few years, but eventually even the hardcore cynics came to accept what those who believed the evidence of their own eyes had argued all along: Ihaka didn’t have anything on McGrail because there was nothing to have; McGrail really was as straight and above-board as he appeared to be.

  The truth was both more complicated and more prosaic. In his dry Ulster way, McGrail quite enjoyed confounding other people’s expectations, but it was hard-headed calculation rather than contrariness that led him to cut Ihaka a liberal amount of slack. Yes, Ihaka was unkempt, overweight, intemperate, unruly, unorthodox and profane, none of which featured on McGrail’s checklist of what constituted a model citizen, let alone a police officer. But when it came to operating in the cruel and chaotic shadow-world where the wild beasts roam, he was worth a dozen of those hair-gelled careerists who brought their running shoes to work and took their paperwork home.