Star Sailors

by James McNaughton

  ‘Yes! That’s wonderful, baby.’

  ‘Are you okay, Mummy?’

  ‘Yes, darling. Mummy’s just happy.’

  ‘Crghghghghhhh!’

  Minutes pass. Her glow subsides. Perhaps arranging to meet Malcolm here to get her bikini top back wasn’t such a great idea. The café feels like another personal space she doesn’t want him in. It would have been better to meet Malcolm somewhere she doesn’t care about. The top is essential, though, with summer coming and it being so great and expensive.

  She hopes she won’t have to say anything; that he’ll understand it’s over. But she’s acutely aware that they’ve never had an argument or even a disagreement. His willingness to agree with everything she says, to avoid even the slightest whiff of something that might become conflict, worries her. Will he explode? She fears resentment turning to hate, or even blackmail. She fears he knows what’s coming and won’t bring the bikini top with him, but try to get her to pick it up from his apartment on the Mount late at night. Anything to prolong contact. She checks her screen. Disabled.

  The door bangs shut, the new bell tinkles, and there he is, smiling brightly, in a way that would surely hurt his face if sustained long enough. He seems taller and slimmer than usual. Without happy pills he comes across more distinct and individual. His totally bald head (a political statement) is suntanned; his intense green eyes blaze under thick black brows. Hanging off his hand is his four-year-old son, the blonde-ringleted Irwin. He’s beautiful. Mandela mistook him for a girl on their first meeting.

  Malcolm bends down to kiss her cheek. ‘Mwah! How are yoooooou?’ His cologne is very good. His voice careens around the café with the lively fruitiness of a flamboyant gay man. For a moment it’s almost the Robusta of old and she smiles. She assumed him gay until the very moment they started fooling around, but still suspects he is.

  Mandela has come over from the toy box, displaying a turn of speed that stokes her guilt, promptly pulls up his shirt and sticks his tummy out. ‘My appendicitis scar,’ he says.

  ‘Cool!’ Irwin says, tracking a finger down the pale white line.

  ‘Hiiiiii Mandela,’ enthuses Malcolm. ‘How are you?’ When talking to children, even his own child, he adopts the persona of a Play School presenter, annunciating his words in an exaggeratedly delighted manner. This unusual radiance about him was attractive at first, like a beacon of coloured light in a watchful and conservative community, a veritable lighthouse in the fog—but now she’s not so sure. Careful, she thinks, reminding herself she’s not sure about anything at the moment. Opening the washing machine this morning she saw something move. There was no rat. And just before, with the disembodied laughter.

  It is strange, though, the sense of fervour about Malcolm. He’s always intensely theatrical, even in their most intimate moments. It wouldn’t surprise me, she thinks, to see him turn over the toy box—scattering the toys and frightening the children—and stand on it to harangue the near-empty café about the second coming of Christ. She smiles. He still makes sense: on the Mount he’s even weirder than she is.

  Mandela tells Malcolm he’s building a ship for animals, and the boys disappear.

  ‘An ark?’ Malcolm calls after them, raising his thick black caterpillar eyebrows.

  This is it, Karen thinks, the cue for him to begin his career as a slowly deteriorating street preacher, popularly known as the Homeless Australian.

  But no. He merely smiles, sweeps his purple Merino cardigan off his shoulders like a matador flourishing a cape and sits opposite her.

  She gets straight to the point. ‘Did you bring my, um… ?’ The boys, though engrossed with wooden blocks and plastic animals, are still within earshot.

  ‘Upper garment.’ Malcolm smiles brightly while nodding several times, as is his habit, even in bed. ‘I did, I did’ is rendered ‘I deed, I deed’ by his accent. ‘Shall we make the handover now?’ he asks, almost gleefully.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Over or under the table?’

  Seriously: ‘Is it wrapped?’

  His smile disappears in a flash. ‘Yes.’ Nod, nod.

  ‘Over.’

  As he bends over to take a branded shopping bag from the burgundy man-bag resting at his ankle, she sees the faint remains of scratches she dug in his smooth and gleaming pate while in a dark corner of the Greek Memorial on the Mount.

  ‘How did you explain those scratches?’

  ‘I told Cyn I sneezed while pruning the rose bush.’

  For all his talk about politics and the environment, for all his abstract monologues—which she’s found fascinating and been grateful for in the way they’ve enlarged her view of the world—there is key information he won’t tell her, just basic personal stuff, as if he’s a superhero with a secret life.

  The wind hoots and a few drops of rain crash-land, leaving trails on the window. It may pour down yet. She’d like him gone by then. Off to save the world.

  ‘Don’t you miss Australia?’

  ‘I love rain, Karen.’

  ‘Gales?’

  ‘It’s bracing! Come on!’ When his ecstatic smile is not returned he becomes instantly sombre, nodding gravely. ‘No, I’m still grateful to be breathing clean air and drinking free water.’ The nodding continues. ‘There’s a lot to be said for splendid isolation in the South Pacific, a relatively small population, plenty of precipitation and a government striving to remain transparent and democratic.’

  He was a TV chef in Australia, apparently. She hasn’t seen the show but has seen him in his kitchen at home. A transformation occurs. Cooking makes him joyful and confident. She realises she’d like to watch him cook again, whatever happens.

  ‘There’s a robarista. A cheap one. You’ll have to go to it and wait 45 seconds.’

  ‘I’ll pass, thanks.’ Nod, nod. His green eyes settle and he speaks softly. ‘How’s Jeremiah?’ He caresses the name, as if her husband is mortally ill.

  ‘He’s doing better.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘He… Since, you know, the bombing, and with Mandela’s appendicitis, he’s become quieter. He’s…’

  Malcolm nods, eyes shining. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘yes.’

  For a moment Malcolm is her intimate friend again. ‘He’s so tender with Mandela,’ she tells him. ‘He listens. I think we’re—’

  ‘Listens? Wow.’ The smile has become forced. The nodding, she can tell, is to encourage her to divulge more that he disapproves of. ‘And to you too, I guess,’ he says evenly. ‘Good.’

  ‘He’s stopped to smell the roses, as they say.’

  ‘Yeah, yes.’

  ‘Just how long the stop lasts is another question.’

  He takes her hand. He’s about to say something out of character, she can tell.

  She withdraws her hand before he can speak. Absurdly, she’s blushing. ‘I have to go,’ she says, checking that the bikini top is in her bag.

  The black caterpillar brows steeple. ‘Already?’

  ‘Yeah, sorry. I have to go.’ Where. What. There’s nowhere!

  He nods gravely, green eyes tracking her as she stands. ‘Are you okay, Karen?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ She turns away. ‘Mandela, come on, honey. We have to go.’ To the chemist, she thinks.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Mummy has to get something.’ Just half a pill. Cold turkey’s unrealistic. It’s better to reduce. Relief fills her at the thought of the prescription in her handbag she was sensible enough to not throw away.

  Mandela turns from the blocks and holds his fingers up. ‘Ten more minutes.’

  ‘No, we have to go right now.’ Half a pill and then home and a kid’s movie in bed with Mandela. One step at a time.

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Come on.’

  As she reaches for his hand, his mouth turns down and his head tips forward. ‘No!’ He frowns furiously and crouches over a block, protecting it.

  She smiles. ‘I’ll get you an ice cream,’ she sa
ys through gritted teeth as she heaves him up.

  ‘No!’ he yells in her face, ‘I don’t want ice cream!’

  ‘Okay, you don’t have to have one. But put the block down, darling.’

  ‘No, I don’t want to!’

  She pries the block from his monkey-like grip and lobs it at the toy box. It misses and bangs on the floor. Mandela’s face contorts as if yanked by invisible fishhooks and he wails with awful power.

  ‘Say goodbye to Irwin,’ she says rhetorically, as she carries him to the door, with one toe dragging on the floor. He’s half her height now.

  ‘No! I don’t want to!’

  Faces in the café lift from their screens. She feels a hot flush stain her throat and spread up her face. It’s too much, this scrutiny—even here, where she has never been stared at! She feels herself slipping, losing control.

  Someone laughs loudly.

  Malcolm’s fruity voice rings out. ‘It’s just a phase.’

  Another hollow laugh.

  Mandela begins kicking as she opens the door. ‘NO!’ he screams. ‘I DON’T WANT TO!’ He writhes violently. She can only just hold him until they get out onto the street, where she lets him down and turns her back on the café, relieved to be outside in the gale, where his yelling is rushed away by the wind.

  Oh God, she thinks, his coat. She looks through the window. Malcolm has gone. No. She sees his lustrous dome. He’s on the floor with Irwin playing with blocks. He must have thrown himself down there.

  ‘I don’t want to go! I don’t want to!’

  As Mandela batters her legs with his fists, she considers leaving the coat in the café and buying a new one. Three hundred dollars, she thinks. No, I’ll have to go back.

  ‘Would you like a marshmallow, Mandela?’ It’s Trix, without a coat or jacket in the wind, in the street, outside the Gate and without security. She’s bending over with a warm smile to look Mandela in the eye.

  He doesn’t know her and is shocked into silence. The blows against Karen’s leg turn into a fervent embrace.

  ‘Look what I’ve got.’ Like a magician, Trix holds her closed fist before his face. Slowly, she turns it over and, with a flourish of the other hand across her fist, opens her fingers. A pink marshmallow, slightly flattened, sits on her palm.

  He swings at it, meaning to knock it to the ground, but she’s too quick. She closes her fist and his hand slaps her knuckles.

  ‘Too slow.’

  ‘Huh.’ A glimmer of a smile.

  She theatrically opens her hand again. Now there are two marshmallows. Mandela lets out a hiccupping laugh. Karen yelps with surprise. This time he goes for them with the intention of keeping them.

  She lets him have them. ‘You’re so fast!’ she exclaims.

  Karen feels she’s been saved by an angel.

  ‘Nothing wrong with his lungs,’ Trix says, straightening up with a smile, the wind flattening and yanking her shoulder-length blonde hair. ‘I was just in there,’ she says pointing at the narrow shoe shop next to the café, ‘when I heard him. And then I saw you and thought, Ah-ha. I had the marshmallows from a hot chocolate, for a nephew I’m about to see.’

  ‘I’m going to give you a hug,’ Karen announces, and does.

  ‘Oh,’ Trix squeezes back, ‘don’t mention it.’

  Malcolm is there in the doorway of the café, holding out Mandela’s jacket. Irwin peers around his legs. ‘Oh, hi,’ he says to Trix. To Karen he says, ‘I have Mandela’s upper garment.’

  Karen’s smile freezes as she takes the coat. ‘Malcolm, this is Trix Stanaway. Trix, Malcolm. Little Irwin there is one of Mandela’s playmates.’ She wants Malcolm gone and will say no more. Yet he remains.

  ‘Mum!’ Mandela has eaten the marshmallows. She kneels down and begins to put on his coat. ‘Muuuum! Are you listening to me?’

  Trix bends down. ‘I’m out of spun sugar I’m afraid.’

  ‘Huh?’ Mandela forgets his point.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Trix,’ calls Malcolm. But he doesn’t go back inside.

  ‘Nice to meet you too, Malcolm.’ To Karen she presents a business card with a handwritten address scrawled on it. ‘Here, come up and see me some time.’ She drops her voice to a theatrical whisper, which has the pleasing effect of actually excluding Malcolm. ‘I’m just over the road. It’s my secret base.’

  ‘Thanks! I will.’

  ‘You’d better! See ya.’

  Malcolm stands in the doorway, a rigid smile inscribed on his face.

  Karen is too busy doing up the toggles on Mandela’s coat to look up and notice him. Finally the little bell on the café door dings, announcing his departure.

  Free, she thinks, and with something to look forward to. She takes the prescription from her handbag, screws it up and realises there are no rubbish bins on Courtenay Mall since a bomb was planted in one six weeks ago. To drop the prescription and watch it tumble away in the wind would be satisfying but also littering. She clenches her fist on the balled paper. Not quite gone.

  ‘Mummy, I think it’s going to rain!’

  It is. After three weeks, it’s starting to rain. People are smiling, stopping to hold their hands out from the awnings, their attention diverted from the lurid digital circus by something as humble as water drops. Karen pops the prescription in her mouth and starts chewing.

  7

  Happy Hour begins at 8 pm on Friday night. Lights in the canteen are dimmed. Elevator music plonks and tinkles. Around 60 of the younger employees of Venture Group—those aged 50 and under—sit in clusters around the ends of the long tables and in chairs arranged into rough circles and horseshoes. Ties are loosened and make-up has been touched up. It’s a net-free interaction period, so glances at wrists and forearms and into open bags are furtive, and trips to the toilet numerous. Legal, Media, Comms, IT and HR mingle scrupulously. A volley of laughter subsides on luxury carpet and leather. Through the high and wide expanse of glass lies the black harbour, ringed with lights. Cars crawl bumper to bumper on the elevated motorway: Outers heading north, into the gale, homewards.

  Jeremiah wanders in late, as he has every Friday night for the last year, and although he looks like he always does, bear-like in his crisp business shirt and tie, he feels radically different; rudderless and so pulverised with gratitude he hardly knows himself. The award-winning chairs, the mid-range wines and gourmet cheeses put on by the social club are such an act of almost overwhelmingly generosity he feels he might tear up. The pretty PAs and HR officers shine so brightly he can’t look at them. He loves the north-facing harbour views and the inky ocean and even the electricity benevolently powering everything around him. Such gifts are presented to him. Stupefied, he pops a free 20-dollar craft beer.

  ‘See you later, big guy.’ He instinctively tenses as the bicep slap comes in. ‘Have a great weekend.’

  Jeremiah radiates robust good cheer and gratitude towards the HR manager. ‘You too, Charles.’

  What now? He’s unable to think straight and would like to go straight home, but his love and respect for Mr Gully detain him. For Gully had said only minutes ago, as he gripped Jeremiah’s hand in his squash court-sized corner office on the tower’s top floor, ‘Now, young Jeremiah, go downstairs and have a beer. And we’ll see you on Monday. Yeah?’

  Thank you, thank you, thank you. The towers of Petone twinkling beyond the dyke at the far end of the harbour have a charm about them he’s not noticed before. I must take Manny there, he thinks. Do a tour of the pumping station.

  Baz—the IT guy who testified to Mr Gully that Jeremiah’s email security (currently under review) slows at choke points and ‘sometimes’ requires manual override for big outgoing content—is splayed out on his chair with some other IT guys, looking lucky to be alive. Jeremiah’s glad Baz hasn’t lost his job either, but he’s also embarrassed and ashamed at what happened and doesn’t want to make eye contact, let alone thank him in public for speaking up on his behalf. He heads for the safety of the games room.

/>   Le Stratton is king of table tennis and the usual suspects are playing. Jeremiah joins them.

  With a smash Le Stratton wins a point and, as Winiata from HR lopes away to retrieve it, Le Stratton calls out, ‘J-man. Ready for a hiding?’

  Jeremiah rolls his right shoulder. ‘You can try.’

  Fusi narrows his eyes, mock cold and threatening. ‘J.’

  Winiata returns with the ball. ‘J.’

  ‘Hey guys.’

  Le Stratton is his friend and rival, with an emphasis on rival. They are both 31 and have the same job in Contracts as lawyer-programmers. They push each other. It’s what is known as a healthy rivalry. Jeremiah has endurance and focus. Le Stratton has more flair for loopholes and reinterpretations. They complement each other. They kayak or cycle together most Sundays: intense sessions, often in dreadful weather and punctuated by terse verbal exchanges. Jeremiah has better upper-body strength in the kayak, while Le Stratton, 19 kilograms lighter, does better on the cycle. Both have been vying for promotion to Head Office in Masterton. Lately Jeremiah had reason to believe he had the upper hand, the definite edge. But no more. No more.

  Le Stratton—blond, blue-eyed—does his fancy serve.

  This morning we were equals,Jeremiah thinks; this evening I’m on probation. It is obvious to him now that Le Stratton’s triumph was always inevitable. He went to the right schools, went to a sailing academy as a boy, grew up in Roseneath on the Mount before it was walled, and had a solicitor for a father. Jeremiah grew up in the northern wind-blasted hill suburbs favoured by the under- and unemployed, attended the local low-decile schools and did not set foot inside the Wall—on an orientation visit for promising graduates—until he was in his early 20s. The fact that he was the underdog in their rivalry made him the favourite in his mind. But he knows, as the ball cracks under Le Stratton’s paddle, that a bubble has burst. His dreams are not just over, but rightly over.

  Le Stratton smashes. Wins. ‘Five–one. Next.’

  Winiata goes to retrieve the ball again. This time it’s run all the way to the full-sized snooker table, where the senior Comms managers Radley and Hodge are at work with the custom-made cues they remove from hard suitcases and screw together like high-powered rifles for an assassination. They play outsiders for money and Jeremiah avoids them. They’re classic Gutenburgers, full of disdain for the digital age and new technology, and he can’t seem to say anything they find agreeable.