Starlight Peninsula

by Grimshaw, Charlotte

  Scott rummaged in the mess on his desk. ‘I’ve lost my glasses. I must have left them at Q. What do you think of Ed Miles at close quarters?’

  ‘He watches. In silence. It’s disconcerting.’

  ‘His “quiet menace” act. It’s not an act. I wouldn’t like to be the PM with Miles breathing down my neck. Anyway, re Newgate. Terry has concerns. He wants boundaries. He’s been so burned. So … let down.’

  Eloise thought about Carstone, Newgate’s champion, the ‘campaigner for justice’. The ‘ball of energy’, with his roguish winks, his anecdotes of times when he’d ‘singlehandedly’ exposed injustice and conducted whole court cases, and stayed up all night writing submissions and negotiating, this (he continually implied) without the help of any lawyer. He was ‘battle-hardened’, ‘a bit of a rebel’, ‘fearless’ — it all gained greater accuracy when surrounded by inverted commas.

  ‘Did he mention money again?’

  ‘Terry? No! Terry’s not in it for the money. And what a brain. What a mind. The way he powers through the evidence, he’s got it all stored in his head. Ask him about any aspect of the case, he’ll come right out with it. He’s amazing. The energy of the guy …’

  Eloise picked up the ruler and tried to prise open a drawer with it. She put the coffee cups down and said, ‘Actually, let’s go out for coffee.’

  ‘Good idea. Let’s go out. Let’s get out of this death trap. Our side of the building’s the worst apparently. Selena came into my room with her hair standing on end. She said there was this huge click. And then a silver flare came off her stapler.’

  ‘Everyone’s on edge.’

  ‘Jack said there was a sort of St Elmo’s fire in the lift yesterday. People freaked. What are they doing about it, is what I want to know. People can’t work, they can’t focus. They don’t dare touch anything. They’re developing learned helplessness, like abused children …’

  ‘You all right?’ he asked five minutes later.

  ‘Fine,’ Eloise said.

  They were on the back stairs, having decided against the lifts. In the foyer a group had gathered to discuss the state of the building. For a week now, staff in Z and Q wings had been terrorised by a strange new hazard: static electric shocks. Every door handle and metal object had become a potential source of fright and pain. The working theory, tentatively put about by management, was that it had to do with renovations in the building next door. Some issue with wiring, with the electrics. Technicians moved about the building, gathered in groups, frowning and discussing.

  Scott now said, ‘Thee and I are planning … a bit ambitious but the kids will …’

  Eloise listened to him talk about his life: his clever photographer wife Theadora (he called her Thee) and the children, his daughters Sarah and Sophie and the third afterthought child, little Iris. He said things like, ‘When you have children, it’s like being in love all the time. Surrounded by love.’

  He doesn’t smile, he beams. Eloise smiled faintly. She thought about her own domestic scene: the wind combing the grass over the peninsula, the white sky filling the window of the upstairs bedroom, the melancholy cries of gulls over the dog park. The Saturdays. Even worse, the Sundays.

  He said, ‘You and Sean got a nice weekend planned?’

  Her whole body tingled. ‘A few things. Nothing special.’

  Later, on her way out, Eloise called in to Q Wing looking for Scott’s lost glasses. She inspected herself in the harsh light of the mirrored room. People passed in the corridor; there was a general rush, someone speaking urgently and angrily about a delay. There was a line of dresses and jackets hanging on a rail; she tried a few against herself, too frilly, too shiny, not her style.

  Should she change everything about herself?

  The connecting door to the next room was slightly open and she heard a cough, voices.

  Through the crack in the door, Eloise looked at Mariel and Jack Anthony facing each other. Mariel leaned forward and rested her forehead on his shoulder. He stood for a moment, then took her by both arms and pushed her back and looked at her. Neither said anything.

  Eloise raised her fingers to the door handle. There was a painful snap and she whipped her hand away, stumbling against a chair. They both turned. Jack Anthony walked across and closed the door, and Eloise hurried out of the room.

  On the bus she stood up for an elderly woman whose grateful smile turned to a gasp as they lurched around a corner and she fell. Her bag of shopping crashed down, fruit and tins rolled and scattered. A man, half-risen from his seat, held the woman up, preventing her from subsiding into his lap. Passengers began gathering the groceries as the woman, still hopelessly off-balance, pawed feebly at the man, flecks of spit at the corners of her mouth. Someone shouted at the bus driver. Eloise picked up the shopping bag and collected what people had gathered from the floor. She tried to catch the eye of the man who was now lowering the old woman onto the seat across the aisle from him, but he looked away and brushed the sleeve of his jacket, frowning and annoyed. He was tall, with thick black hair and a hawkish face. Uptight, she thought. But — she looked closer — he had a dragonfly tattooed on the back of his hand.

  Now the walk along the peninsula in the hot dry wind. In her shopping this fine Friday evening: a bottle of white wine, a ready meal of vegetable curry and a couple of DVDs.

  That afternoon she’d seen herself on camera, talking to Scott in the studio. There was a difference: she’d lost weight. It was exactly a month since Sean had left her, and she’d stopped cooking; what was the point? Now, alone, she ate eccentrically and fast, often standing at the kitchen bench: peas and tomato sauce, sardines on toast, pots of ready-made curry. It was strange, she kept thinking, so strange.

  In the stone house on the peninsula, she lived through extraordinarily long silences: a whole day, two days. Silences that lasted through the Carmelite regime of a long weekend …

  They’d been married for some years when she got a phone call from a woman telling her Sean was having an affair. The woman said her informant was a secretary at Jaeger’s, the firm where Sean worked as a commercial lawyer. Eloise was very calm, listening. The woman’s tone was weird and rambling, possibly mad, and Eloise thought her spiel about Sean and a young actress might not be true. But when she confronted him there was a terrible pause. He didn’t say anything — and then he confessed. They had a ferocious shouting match — she shouted and he mostly just listened; she threw a coffee cup, smashing it on the wall near his head. She threw another. When she threw the third he packed a bag and left. Now he was holed up at the actress’s house across town. It was as abrupt as that.

  There were nights of frantic distress when she demanded explanations, sent furious emails, expected him to come home. One evening he did come home and she angrily told him to leave, thinking she should out of pride and some vague idea of tactics but not actually wanting him to. And then a final message from him saying he wasn’t coming back.

  In all the time they’d lived together, they’d spent very few nights apart. Now she was in shock. She’d got lazy about keeping up contact with friends, and she was very alone. The situation seemed so unreal that she hadn’t got around to telling Scott, or any of the people she worked with. It was so strange …

  She opened the wine and turned on the TV news. Mariel Hartfield was squeezed into a bright white top, very sexy, and her glossy black fringe was just slightly too long, giving her a sleepy look. Eloise knew that Mariel took a beta-blocker before going on air, more reliable than yoga for keeping you calm if anything went wrong. Eloise had read the label on the prescription bottle, and had seen Mariel popping the pill while getting her hair done. At the time, she’d congratulated herself for noticing. Because she was observant …

  The pill dilated Mariel’s pupils, giving her a benign and distant air. She said, ‘The Minister has declined to comment on the speculation. Political editor Sarah Lane has more.’

  They crossed to Sarah Lane, live in front of a flax bus
h in the grounds of Parliament.

  Eloise refilled her glass. Should she get a dog? She imagined it: greeting her at the door, joyfully wagging its tail. Barking at intruders. A companion on her weekend walks …

  Sarah Lane said, ‘Mariel, while Minister O’Keefe has now confirmed her due date, she has, until today, declined to comment on persistent rumours surrounding the paternity of her child. Prime Minister Jack Dance has also refused to comment, saying only that he has full confidence in Ms O’Keefe and that her personal life is not a matter for him or anyone else to discuss. However, following publication yesterday of an article by Ian Ramsey in Witness magazine, the Minister has released a statement expressing concern at what she calls an unprecedented intrusion into her private life, and reiterating that she is not obliged to discuss the question of paternity with anyone unless she chooses to. She also says she is considering laying some kind of complaint against Mr Ramsey in relation to the Witness article.

  ‘Mariel, you could say the Minister’s statement is notable for what it doesn’t say. It obviously doesn’t shed any light on the paternity question, and it doesn’t make any denials in relation to any of the male government ministers and one prominent businessman named in the article, who’ve been the subject of rumours in this matter for the past few months. Those individuals may also want to lay complaints against Mr Ramsey, but so far none is prepared to comment. Look, the government will be wanting to tread very carefully here. There’ll be a general desire not to let things get out of hand with what ministers are calling everything from a side issue to a distraction to an outrageous intrusion into a member’s private life. Adding to pressure on Minister O’Keefe is the roll-out of her new child poverty initiatives next week, which she won’t want overshadowed, and, even more delicate, her policy outlining new measures for sole parents on benefits. The Opposition will obviously want to proceed carefully here too, but let’s put it this way, Mariel, they won’t be ungrateful that the government’s having to deal with this distraction at this time. I think the only thing we can safely say at this point is: Watch this space. Mariel?’

  There was now a shot of Minister Anita O’Keefe walking towards the cameras, elegant in her tight dress and high heels, her hair pulled back, a fixed smile. The microphones appeared in front of her. The questioning wasn’t rough or persistent, she wasn’t mobbed, she passed easily, ignoring, smiling. Did she get behind the door of her office and lean against it with her eyes closed? If Sean had been here Eloise would have said to him, ‘Look at her, that little smile. Mona Lisa. Like she’s hoarding something, like she’s in possession of something.’

  Yeah. A baby.

  Already slightly drunk, Eloise walked into the kitchen and contemplated the curry. She spooned it into a bowl and shoved it in the microwave. While it heated she went out on the deck and looked across the estuary to the dog park. The tide was on the turn, the banks of the creek glistening with purple mud, and she watched a man and dog playing fetch, the arc of the ball and the mad speed of the dog, and behind them the evening sky crossed with delicate ropes of cloud.

  Perhaps she should have got pregnant, not consulted Sean, just let it happen. She thought about Anita O’Keefe, whose refusal to comment had caused speculation about her pregnancy. It was being said (excitedly rumoured, fervently hoped) that the father was a serving politician, and married. A cabinet minister perhaps. Minister O’Keefe, who was young, unattached and very attractive, had been the subject of gossip since she’d been given a cabinet post. She’d been popular with senior politicians, who squired her about looking modestly proud and discreet, as if they’d invented her themselves. Maybe she’d worked her way through all of them. Secretly slept with all of them, and now the whole male front bench was terrified of the pregnancy — and of their wives. Or maybe there was no father. She’d got herself a sperm donor. Gone down to the lab and ordered a baby off the plans.

  A single brown bubble had surfaced in the curry, like a blister. Eloise squeezed rice out of a plastic bag and ate the hot fragrant mess, her eyes on the TV. Mariel turned to Jack Anthony, there was the usual chatty feed into the topic of weather, and they both turned to the weather presenter — the haggard one Eloise called the Sinister Doormat — who now told Eloise that tomorrow would be a continuation of the Big Dry.

  All along the peninsula the drought had turned the grass brown. A network of cracks had opened up on Eloise’s lawn. She glanced through the glass ranch slider — out in the gulf the water was like steel — and wondered how much longer it would be her lawn. Sean was going to force the sale of the house. His mother, Lady Cheryl Rodd, had recently visited Eloise. She still felt cold rage at the memory, the tyrannical old bag, barging in and coldly patronising her, like a social worker. ‘Are you sleeping, dear? Keeping your strength up, dear?’ Her beady eye on the chattels, and implacable in defence of her son. The house, Lady Cheryl confirmed, would have to be sold, since Sean had his heart set on what she called ‘his new course’. Eloise would understand this. A tough decision, but someone had to make those.

  What did she care, so long as her son was happy?

  While Eloise was trying to freeze Lady Cheryl off the property the cleaner backed out of a spare bedroom with his knapsack vacuum cleaner, and Lady Cheryl jerked her thumb at Amigo and whispered stagily, ‘What about him? I know you’ve got that TV job, but you might have to cut down on a few expenses.’

  Well, Lady Cheryl was the little actress’s problem now.

  Sean’s family, the Rodds, were so rich he could afford to let her have the house, but Eloise knew some terrifying Tulkinghorn from Sean’s law firm would soon arrive, bringing papers from the Rodd dynasty. She also knew she needed to visit a lawyer herself, but so far she’d lacked the will. All she could manage was to cling onto the routine of work.

  And then there were the weekends.

  It was very unhealthy and unwise and she deplored it and it was a disgrace and all, but she couldn’t help getting drunk, sitting in front of the big plate-glass window, watching the sky turn red over the estuary and the last figures — small, black, slanted against the wind — making their way across the dog park in the fading light. She tried to watch one of the DVDs but her attention kept wandering, and there were many trips to the fridge for more wine, and then a long session in front of the computer, searching through Facebook and Twitter for electronic traces of Sean, virtual views of Sean — the online version of her weekend wanderings. She also checked the Facebook pages and Twitter accounts of Minister Anita O’Keefe and other members of the government. Ms O’Keefe had been in the habit of tweeting about the cities she was visiting, and Eloise, who’d been watching her for a long time, had noticed she’d often been in the same city as the prime minister. Since the minister’s pregnancy had become public, Twitter had never shown Anita O’Keefe and Jack Dance to be in the same place at the same time.

  Running out of material on the politicians, she looked at Mariel Hartfield’s Wikipedia page. Mariel was Ngai Tahu, had worked for the Melbourne Herald, in Britain for BBC World, at Nine in Sydney, as a reporter and sub-editor for Eyewitness and News1, and was currently co-presenter with Jack Anthony on Evening News1.

  Later, when Eloise was so tired and tipsy she’d lost the ability to touch type and was reduced to stabbing with two fingers, she wrote Sean an email. In her mind she called it emailing the dead. She was sending words out into the void. I am in rather a bad way was her next vague thought, as she rested her forehead for a moment on the desk.

  Later she slid off the chair, wandered over to the sofa and lay down. There was a moment when she lucidly, sternly, examined the state of affairs. (And rebuked herself for being drunk.) Sean’s departure was the second loss in her life. Marriage to Sean had been a way of remedying (and perhaps not facing up to) a loss that had occurred before. And now Sean was gone … That was why she was in a bad way. You pick yourself up once, but twice? It was too much. Eloise frowned. Now Sean was gone, she thought, all my chickens. All my chicken
s … they’re coming home to … root? No.

  That was it: since Sean had left her, all Eloise Hay’s emotional chickens were coming home to roost.

  She slept, she flew into dreams. Scott Roysmith floated in the air upside down, he was a kite, his string held by a lone figure in the dog park — Andrew Newgate. Newgate turned, and his glasses were filled with red light.

  When Andrew Newgate smiled his eyes stayed watchful, and his eyes followed you. With Terry Carstone, it was different. Terry’s eyes didn’t follow you. They were looking at something no one else could see: the mind of Terry Carstone. They were always looking inward. And they said, Watch me. Watch me. Look at me …

  Outside, on the edge of the peninsula, not far from the dog park, shapes were moving in the dark.

  FOUR

  I’m not fooled by surface appearance. I read between the lines. I am observant.

  But Andrew Newgate looked at her and his eyes were unreadable. His glasses mirrored the red sky over the park and then a tiny black shape, the reflection of a dog, crossed them, crossed over the arc of the glass and disappeared into space …

  This weight on her. It was the weight of the weekend, of loneliness and childlessness, the ticking of the biological clock, of one loss and then another, the second making the first come home to roost. All that weight, but there was something else. As she swam up into consciousness there was matter pressed against her face. Eloise surfaced with a gasp and pushed her way clear of the heavy cushions.

  Her head was pounding and her mouth was dry, and she had the beginnings of a searing hangover — hypersensitivity, suicidal ideation, tristesse — but now there was something else again. A rhythmic thumping. She stood up, and her heart, already racing, sped with alarm as the thumping turned into battering and there was a crash, followed by shouts and then, terrifyingly, actual screams. Her hands flew to her ears.