‘Sea’s a bit green,’ Jeremiah says.
‘Already?’ Barnes says. ‘Ah, I don’t care.’
‘You’re the water expert, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
‘Okay, J, any decision to… commit aquatic activities…’ Barnes giggles, ‘will be at our own risk.’
They shake.
‘The bars’ll be safe though, right?’ Annette asks him.
‘Until 10 pm, statistically.’
‘Noted,’ she says. ‘Bye-ee.’
Jeremiah feels himself coming back as he continues down the drive and hears the faint pop of firearms from the sound-proofed temporary range set up in the school hall. I belong, he tells himself. I belong.
A couple of minutes later he’s standing with two sets of parents from Mandela’s pre-school centre, describing the bombing to them. He has versions of varying length, depending on the importance of the audience. The two sets of parents from Plearn are getting the short version, which is actually quite similar to the modest, self-deprecatory version he offers management. The difference with the management version is that he will leap at any opportunity to expand on an interlocutor’s point of interest, whereas with this code-writer, financier, and their semi-employed artisanal spouses, he will not be drawn. They horseshoe him. His biceps bulge as he sketches the dome in the air. ‘The blast was about here, about halfway up the dome, over the water. Yeah, we were lucky. The concussion’—he turns his hands down—‘knocked us flat at 50 metres. Platinum’—(Yes, please note that I swim at Platinum)—‘was evacuating in a column. We were at the back, further from the blast. Shrapnel everywhere. It was brutal.’ He sketches falling objects. ‘Lights, concrete, steel, plaster, even flax bushes, came down into the water. We were lucky enough to be able to get up and walk out.’
‘Was it very terrifying?’
‘Confusing, mainly. The blast was like a thunderclap.’
‘Yeah? You thought it was, like, a simulated tropical storm?’
‘I did for a second. Then bang, it’s pitch black, and you’ve been knocked over by an invisible train. The injuries were…’
‘Oh dear. How awful.’
Jeremiah does traumatised squirrel, clenches his jaw and looks down. Loosens the rigid muscle.
‘Jeremiah, you’re missing something out.’
His feeble hopeful squirrel look, as if sniffing the air at spring’s first breath after winter. ‘I am?’
‘About helping the injured!’
‘We saw it on the news, mate.’
‘Such modesty!’
He waves his hand. ‘Oh, that was nothing. Literally. The lifeguards did the real work. I just ferried a couple of injured people. Did what I was told.’ In fact, he was so drunk it was a miracle he didn’t drop someone.
‘Carried horrifically injured people long distances in the dark, not knowing if a second bomb would go off. And you were injured yourself, right, with your perforated eardrum?’
They have no idea how horrible it was. Going back into the dark to carry another mangled person out. Stepping over bodies and body parts. And when the screens reactivated all at once, dozens lit up on the arms of the dead and the personalised tones rang and rang and rang. If the group were senior management and interested, he might try and describe that heartbreaking scene and even allude to his nightmares. ‘I just helped people who needed helping.’
‘Well, you’re very modest.’
‘It’s all a bit of a blur, really.’
Shoulder slaps, handshakes, kisses. For minutes at a time now, as he does the rounds between looking for Karen and Mandela, the whole Consolidated fiasco is forgotten. Then it churns his stomach and weighs on his mind, until he sees someone he knows and launches into the bombing and forgets it again.
Last year he and Karen had arranged to meet at the gun show’s trademark Tü statue, should they become separated. At the time—during a difficult patch—they had subscribed to a relationship expert’s advice that a spouse’s sense of value is heightened by temporary mysterious absence. The theory is that spoken arrangements and prearranged meeting places, at prearranged times, provide natural ‘slippage’ opportunities in which absence becomes presence. It’s a long shot, he thinks, but she may remember.
The four-metre-high carved wooden figure stands sentinel in the middle of the gun stalls. It’s a logical meeting point. Jeremiah stands at Tü’s feet. He looks up at the war god’s wild, staring paua shell eyes, his open mouth and thrusting tongue. Jeremiah checks his screen. His inboxes are piling up with advertisements for mood relaxers and workplace performance enhancers. There’s no message from Karen. He sighs and closes down. Maybe the playground, he thinks.
At the swings he tells the management version of the bombing, and because one member of his audience is a couple of rungs further up the ladder and has just purchased a gun, Jeremiah makes a special deviation from his narrative to describe the masked protestors’ fury outside the dome, concluding with, ‘They hate us.’
‘That’s why we’re here, Jeremiah. That’s why we’re here.’
Congratulated, shoulder-slapped and kissed again, he checks the ice cream van. Still no sign of wife and child. He’s about to check out the Magnus stall, when he recognises the back of Karen’s black bob. Of course. He was looking for her old pinned-up mass. His hungover brain is definitely not firing on all cylinders.
She’s sitting on a kerb talking to an old man whose bald head he doesn’t recognise from behind. He must be one of the grandfathers at Mandela’s pre-school. It’s a genuine conversation, he can tell by the way their heads incline together and by the haphazard spot they’ve chosen to sit. Karen makes a heated point. She gesticulates passionately. The man nods several times. He puts his arm around her shoulder and says something. Karen stops speaking. Drops her hands. They embrace. What the hell? Jeremiah thinks. They’d look like lovers if the guy wasn’t so old.
‘Daddy!’
‘Superman! There you are.’ Jeremiah is strong enough to scoop his son up with one arm.
‘Hi, Daddy.’ Mandela’s little hand clasps around Jeremiah’s neck. ‘This is my Daddy,’ he tells a blond boy of about four staring up at them. ‘His name’s Jeremiah.’
‘Hi. What’s your name?’ Jeremiah asks.
‘Irwin Yolander.’
Jeremiah transfers Mandela to the crook of his other arm and shakes Irwin’s sticky hand. ‘Nice to meet you.’ Feeling Karen’s eyes on him, Jeremiah twists his torso at full extension and raises one eyebrow as if hearing his name called from behind: quizzical squirrel. Pivoting back, bearing Mandela’s 17.5-kilogram weight like a feather, he watches her and the bald man approaching, smiling. The man’s much younger than he appeared from behind—only in his mid-20s—and tall.
The bald young man (Chemotherapy? No, of course not, he’s an Inner) nods, delighted. ‘You must be Jeremiah. I’m Malcolm. I’ve heard so much about you.’
They shake. Gay, Jeremiah thinks as he slowly lets Mandela down, one-armed, in a controlled display of strength. Karen has often mentioned a desire for a gay male friend on the Mount. ‘I just met Irwin,’ Jeremiah says as the boys run off.
Malcolm nods emphatically. ‘My son, yes.’
Hefting Mandela around in the heat has raised a prickle of sweat. ‘Getting hot.’ Jeremiah’s tongue sticks briefly to the roof of his mouth.
‘Isn’t it?!’
He looks to Karen for water and help. She has no water. ‘Busier than last year.’
She looks around to assess the validity of his claim regarding the size of the crowd.
‘Thought you might be at the Tü staue,’ he adds.
‘That statue is offensive,’ Karen tells him. ‘It’s cultural appropriation for profit.’
‘Was it that last year?’
‘Yes.’
Malcolm nods. ‘Tümatauenga is also the god of fishing and cooking. That statue is offensive in all kinds of ways.’
‘Australian?’
‘Yes, yes, th
at’s right. “Geeday, mait.” I saw the light about three months ago.’
Jeremiah ungrits his teeth and smiles. Breathes. He reminds himself that foreigners on the far Left also find New Zealand an attractive destination. A very low-stakes situation, he thinks. However, acting on a personal rather than professional level, it’s better that he make a strong first impression if Malcolm and Karen are to be friends. And furthermore, a strong performance will be reported by Malcolm and relayed throughout the expatriate gay community, which may have unexpected professional benefits down the line given that the only Australian immigrants who can afford the visa now are rich.
‘What did you do in Australia, Malcolm?’
Malcolm nods emphatically, as if the question is very good. ‘I was a chef, Jeremiah.’
A very successful one, Jeremiah thinks. Which explains the cooking and fishing knowledge. There must be steel in him somewhere which finds form in the pressure-cooker of a professional kitchen. The man has height. ‘Excellent,’ he says, ‘Karen could use a few pointers.’
The smile drops from Malcolm’s face.
‘And I could use a lot of pointers,’ Jeremiah adds. ‘I could use all the pointers you’ve got, Malcolm.’
This provokes a nodding smile from Malcolm, but no conversation. Jeremiah looks to Karen to wrap things up.
But she prolongs the interaction, as if wanting to torture him. ‘Did you find a park alright?’
Bang-bang! Bang!
The crowd inhales. Heads turn up toward the road, where the shots sounded from. Those who were leaving stop in their tracks and peer fearfully up the drive.
‘Mandela!’
‘Was it a gun?’
Someone in the distance is yelling a command. It must be the police.
Bang!
Mandela runs into Jeremiah’s arms. Three security guards pound up the drive in their flak jackets, automatic rifles at the ready, focussed intently ahead.
Karen is at his side.
‘Oh no,’ Mandela says.
Jeremiah encircles the boy in the fortress of his arms.
‘Sssh, it’s okay, darling.’ Karen rubs his head.
Malcolm has picked up Irwin and tells him there’s been a nasty accident.
The thin wail of a siren floats up from Central Security in Roxburgh Street. The defence helicopters will be scrambled from the top of the Mount. Yet Jeremiah senses the incident is already over, because only three guards were dispatched from their positions. The detail at the top of the drive must have handled the situation. In the tense silence he notes that the popping from the school hall has stopped.
‘I guess that’s the end of the Roseneath Gun Show,’ Malcolm tells Karen.
Jeremiah feels he’s missing something, a judgement of some kind, and doesn’t like it. ‘Not necessarily,’ he tells Malcolm. ‘It might not even make the news tonight if it’s deemed commercially sensitive. For all intents and purposes there may be a homicide or mass shooting that didn’t happen.’
Malcolm frowns. He’s Australian.
‘If a shooting occurred on school grounds, it will be deemed commercially sensitive because, for the purpose of the expo, the school grounds in their entirety are a retail area. The media can’t broadcast speculation that is commercially sensitive.’ Malcolm’s face is blank. Jeremiah can see he must go back and lay some groundwork. ‘Car parks,’ he continues, ‘are historic trouble spots at retail locations; that’s where the vast majority of your thefts, muggings and sexual assaults occur. However, the retailer is only responsible for consumer protection in the area where the actual transactions occur; not any nearby parking area. By entering this expo we have entered into a business agreement and accepted personal responsibility for what might occur in parking and pedestrian access areas. For that reason, the retailer can’t be held responsible by the media for a crime they didn’t commit.’
Malcolm puts Irwin down. Jeremiah puts Mandela down. The boys move off a little way and look around uncertainly.
‘It’s alright, boys,’ Karen tells them, ‘I’m watching you.’
‘However,’ Jeremiah continues, ‘if the shooting occurred on the road, it will be reported by the media as an incident in a public space—on the condition that no allegations are made against nearby businesses. As I alluded to earlier, if a shooting happened a metre inside the driveway, on school grounds, it won’t be reported, for legal reasons.’ Malcolm looks incredulous. Jeremiah thinks, I need to make the recipe a little simpler. Slowly and clearly, he says, ‘Business can’t be held accountable for the acts of criminals.’
‘But people know it happened, Jeremiah.’ Malcolm giggles and nods at the many agitated people in the crowd contacting loved ones on their screens. ‘It’s being reported.’
‘They don’t know the facts. They’re speculating. All they know is that it was a retail car park incident, like one of the many that occur in Greater Wellington.’
Malcolm frowns and stills his head. ‘But this is Inner Wellington. There is no crime behind the Wall—’
‘Well, actually—’
‘An Inner fired that gun, Jeremiah. Maybe he bought a gun and then got stuck on the drive. Maybe it was road rage, right? The public needs to be informed so they can be protected from similar incidents. Perhaps new legislation needs to be passed?’
Jeremiah shoots a look at Karen. She’s expressionless. Time for this interaction to terminate, he thinks. It’s hot and his tongue is sticking in his mouth. He feels he’s given enough to the gay Australian expatriate community. He wants a cool drink and to sit in the shade with his wife and child. But he needs to finish strong. ‘You know that’s what happened?’ he asks. ‘That someone got road rage?’
‘No, I’m speculating.’
‘Well, exactly. Look, I wouldn’t come into your kitchen and tell you how to break eggs. This is my field of expertise and I’m telling you, from a legal perspective, that this incident, because of its location, is unlikely to affect future gun shows.’
Malcolm’s voice is smooth and patient, as if he is talking to a child. ‘But it will if I don’t come back next year because of this shooting. I have personal choice, Jeremiah.’
‘Yes, but for every person like you who stays away because of the shooting, there’ll be another who decides it’s the reason she needs a gun. This is the point. If the gun show is not legally responsible, there’ll be no backlash in real terms.’
‘Real terms? Those shots sounded real to me, Jeremiah.’
‘From a business perspective. We’re not discussing philosophy here.’
‘Sorry,’ Malcolm laughs. ‘What are we discussing?’
Flamed with annoyance, Jeremiah widens his eyes a fraction at his wife.Save me.
‘Where did you park, darling? Is it far up?’
‘Quite far.’ Consolidated rears its hideous fire-breathing, earth-scorching head.
She frowns. Her black eyes convey thoughtfulness. ‘Well, with Manny the way he is, so weak, it might be better if we slowly make our way down to the sea pool and meet you there.’
We?he thinks. Meaning you and this guy?
‘And it’ll save you the hassle of picking us up at the gate,’ she adds, planting a goodbye kiss on his lips.
He shakes Malcolm’s limp hand. ‘Malcolm, have a great day.’
‘You too. We might see you later then, yeah?’
We might see you later? he thinks. ‘Yeah, I’ll see you soon.’ Mandela’s gone, chasing Irwin. His red superman suit flashes through the crowd, which has unknotted somewhat and begun to drift around the stalls. Popping has resumed in the school hall.
There’s no way the event will be cancelled.
Karen raises her eyebrows. ‘Usual spot.’ And she turns and follows Mandela. Malcolm follows her.
That’s it, he thinks. I’m buying a gun. And he’s away, striding hard with his hangover towards the gun stalls. But his sense of virtuous purpose quickly falters in the heat stoked by the dense crowd, and Consolidated and the r
ighteous anger of the shareholders at losing market share assail him. He fears their just vengeance, and his mouth is so dry. He realises he can talk charmingly about the bombing no more. He is unable to explain even a simple legal matter to a chef. Thankfully, the attention of those crowding the stalls is firmly focussed on the guns and not him.
Normally he’d browse through the other stalls with no intention of buying, only to confirm in his mind the superiority of the Magnum Opus. But he has no appetite for play. He scans the stall signs above the milling crowd.
Magnum.
‘Coming through,’ he says. The density of the crowd is vindicating; the shooting has not resulted in the consumer flight that Malcolm expected. On the contrary, rather than fear, he senses around him a gathering of resolve, a steeling determination. My people, he thinks.
Two black-capped Magnus representatives, sweating in smart black uniforms, stand in the secure area inside their stall, overseeing a dozen display cabinets. Magnus is something of a niche brand. Their guns are big, heavy, simple and indiscreet. The Magnus Opus .50, the largest calibre handgun on the market, is so big it can only be carried in a holster under a padded jacket. Weighing as much as a light machine pistol, it’s essentially a home defence weapon, too big even for most vehicles. Few buy the Magnus Opus but plenty want to look at it.
Tourists, Jeremiah thinks as he edges closer.
As soon as the jet black pistol comes into sight, long and clean-lined, resplendent in its bed of purple velvet, the senior Magnus representative picks him out.
‘The Magnus Opus .50, sir. You look to me like a buyer.’
Heads swivel. Jeremiah nods. The crowd parts. Without any further ado, the representative lifts the weapon out of its case with two hands and passes it to Jeremiah with the care and concentration of a doctor passing a newborn baby to its dazed father.
In a daring display, Jeremiah immediately weighs the weapon in one hand. He flexes his right bicep mightily as he points it at the ground in the centre of the stall. The pistol’s much vaunted 2.4-kilogram weight is less than the bar bells he runs with. It feels perfect. Anything lighter would be inconsequential. The representative’s patter of familiar record-holding specs comes into audible focus: ‘… won’t pierce first-rate body armour, but a chest shot from 20 metres will often result in cardiac arrest’—as tested on pigs, Jeremiah knows, for the most part, but the effect has been noted on real home invaders. ‘The 32-gram bullet simply cannot be shrugged off. One shot will stop. In fact, if two unarmoured assailants entering your family home are advancing in file formation, one bullet will take out both of them. One shot will stop. Yes, the Magnus Opus .50 is a special weapon and requires an owner with special qualities…’
Star Sailors Page 12
