‘You should be in Queen Street late at night,’ said Hartley knowledgeably, though he hardly ever was himself. ‘There’s some real weirdos around then. Street people drift into these night camps in the parks and under flyovers, sleep in cartons and toilets, light fires in the rubbish bins. There’s a guy who runs along the railway platforms late at night dressed as a chicken, and an old Polish woman who attacks the park flower gardens and sings to the statues. There used to be a man who preached at midnight outside the Maritime Museum, going on about the apocalypse and pointing to angels in the sky, but he got beaten up and died.’
‘It must be so sad. They’ve started out like everybody else, full of dreams and confidence, and find themselves with nothing.’
‘Most are alcoholics, or druggies. Maybe both. A few seem mad, or deliberately act that way. It’s a way to draw attention to themselves when they can’t distinguish themselves in any other way.’
‘They all seem to crowd around here — hang around the square and malls,’ Sarah said.
‘There’s nothing enjoyable or worthwhile in their own lives so they want to come into ours.’
‘I feel sorry for them.’
‘I saw three guys kicking a taxi driver one time.’
‘What happened?’
‘They ran off, but I helped the taxi driver a bit. He called it in and the police came. Too late, of course, to catch them. They looked as if they were still schoolkids, and kept laughing and shouting all the time. They kept shouting — go home, fuck off home — because he was Malaysian, or Indonesian, I forget now.’
‘You realise how lucky you are, don’t you, when you see things like that — the lives some people have.’
‘I know how lucky I am,’ Hartley said. ‘I can hardly believe how lucky I am.’ He held a hand up, fingers spread, not for a high five, but so she could match it with her own hand in a slow press, entwine her fingers with his.
‘What else have you seen?’
‘Here?’
‘Other odd things, anywhere,’ she said. She liked to be entertained, and he was quite good at it, enjoying her attention. Neither of them demanded absolute truth, and to tell each other stories delayed discussion of those issues that might entail disagreement, or force decisions.
‘I saw this road rage incident last year in the carpark of the New Lynn supermarket,’ began Hartley. ‘A van clipped the wing of an Audi when it was backing out. He didn’t do much damage, but he wasn’t going to stop and the Audi owner came running across, wrenched open the door and grabbed him. The van guy tried to push him off and kept driving so that the car owner ended up being dragged along, but he wouldn’t let go. I could see his suit trousers and the soles of his shoes. It all seemed to be in slow motion: the van didn’t accelerate and neither of them said anything. After a few seconds he did let go, and the van roared away then, leaving him on his bum on the asphalt. I went over to see if he were okay, but he didn’t say anything when I asked. He just got up, went to his car and drove away. There were three bags of groceries he’d dropped not far off, but he didn’t do anything about them. Some kids, or some drifter, had a lucky find later, I suppose.’
‘He could’ve been run over,’ said Sarah.
‘He was just highly pissed off, I think, and didn’t trust himself to stick around afterwards.’
‘A lot of things happen in carparks. Think how often they’re mentioned in the papers for fights, bag snatches or burnouts. Places to keep away from, after dark especially.’
‘I usually park in a far corner,’ Hartley said. ‘Less likelihood of a ding. People are maniacs with the trolleys.’
They were quiet for a time, the silence between them comfortable, watching the variety of people and activities around them — buskers, lovers, mothers, businessmen, tourists and the homeless, all citizens of the public space. The lawns with immature trees and raised kerbs: the brown, tiled central area with seagulls, some standing on just one red leg, and pigeons seeking handouts. A tall man with a green and white striped shirt and his suit jacket on his knee, sat leaning back with his eyes closed. A professional taking brief reprieve from the office, Sarah decided. Below the balustrade of the Box Café and Bar an older man with short, bare legs and a long nose, twisted balloons to resemble animals and offered them for sale, and rather closer a young Asian woman read poetry in a high, declaratory voice, hoping to attract custom for the books piled neatly at her feet. An Indian family, all with identical red shiny jackets, went up the broad concrete steps to the Aotea Centre, and an Island girl with a beautiful smooth, high forehead came down them. There were lots of young people, some in school uniforms, some of much the same age in mufti.
‘Why aren’t they at school?’ Sarah asked.
‘It’s well after three,’ he said. ‘Mind you, schoolkids seem to be on the streets whatever the time these days. The teachers are probably desperate and send them out to do surveys or something. Anything to see the back of them.’
‘God yes, look at the time. I hadn’t realised. I have to get back.’
‘Okay.’ He stood up, ready to walk back most of the way with her; looking forward to it.
‘I’ll have to get a taxi,’ she said. ‘The time just flies, doesn’t it.’
The taxi stand was close, and she was soon gone, without a kiss, but allowing her fingers to trail over his wrist and hand as he held the door. ‘Bye then’ was all she said. He watched the car until it turned out of sight. He tried to hold onto the mood they had enjoyed, but the place lost its gloss when she was gone. Solitary once more, and so placed at familiar disadvantage among his fellows, he walked back to his car at the motel without a word, drove home and saw to his own needs. He was accustomed to returning home to find it as he had left it, and he was sick of it. Nothing altered, nothing fresh, no welcome and no surprises, no questions about his day, or sympathetic placation of grievances perceived. No one to give him value in the life in which he found himself. He knew that most of the world’s population would change places with him if they had the chance, but he found no satisfaction in that.
It wasn’t quite true that nothing awaited him, for on the answerphone was a message from his doctor’s receptionist, saying that before they supplied a further repeat prescription for his pills he needed to come in for a consultation. It had been some time since his last check-up, she said. Hartley thought it just a means of ensuring the practice received another payment: his own firm had policies with much the same motive. He disliked going in not so much for that reason however, as for the routine enquiry it entailed regarding any repetition of the incident that had led to the need for medication.
He hadn’t said anything of that experience to Sarah, despite being open about almost everything in his life. The incident was quite clear and beyond denial, yet he was unable to own it. It was like an infection picked up while travelling, and attributable to a foreign country. He couldn’t remember the motive, but had no difficulty in recalling the actions themselves. It was after a long and rather difficult day at work, and he’d gone to a café not far from the Hastings Hull office for a coffee. Other people had felt the same need and there was a queue. While he waited, Hartley had observed a man in a white Mercedes steal a parking space from another motorist, and sit smirking when he’d achieved it. Hartley had taken the metal sugar container from one of the café tables, walked into the street and hammered the bowl on the windows and bonnet of the car.
The matter never reached the courts, partly because of the efforts of his colleagues at Hastings Hull, partly because the driver had got out of his car and punched Hartley to the ground and then kicked him, so creating possible legal jeopardy for himself. The driver had acted in accordance with his nature, but Hartley’s part was quite out of character. So there had been the assessment, the medication and certain reservations expressed concerning his well-being since Madeleine’s death.
It had been unfortunate and unintended, yet Hartley had felt a heady release, an almost primal joy in giving way t
o his feelings for once and acting on impulse. The solid impact of the sugar bowl — crump, crump — on the painted metal, the astonished fury of the driver’s face. Even the assault he suffered as a consequence hadn’t diminished the satisfaction.
But he didn’t want to spend time thinking about that. He watched television news that included a sad account of a girl murdered by a former boyfriend, and was reminded of poor Emily Keeling, beside whose grave he and Sarah had first met. ‘Love me, I am dying.’ Hartley decided to find out more. He was strangely drawn to the tragedy himself, but more importantly because Sarah had been intrigued, and he found pleasure in bringing such things for them to share. He left the television and went to his office and the computer. Information wasn’t hard to find, and this time Hartley concentrated on the killer rather than Emily herself. Edward Fuller, a twenty-one-year-old brickyard labourer described as a ‘young man who has hitherto borne excellent character’. After his death the police found a suicide note in his pocket, written in red ink.
‘I love Emily Keeling as no one ever loved before,’ he’d written, and ‘I shall speak to her tonight and ask her whether she will have me without her father’s consent. If she objects we will both die together.’ And they did. He shot her twice in the chest with a British Bulldog 45-calibre pistol, then ran off and killed himself a few houses away. How painful and isolating love can be when it is frustrated. Hartley was fascinated by the all-consuming nature of it, aware of the positive form in his own happiness. He imagined young Edward, driven beyond rational behaviour into a brief place of declaration and terrible decision. It played out in his mind as a scene from an early black-and-white movie: Edward in a passion firing at Emily, then running in grief and panic past the wooden colonial houses until he couldn’t bear what he’d done any longer, and turned the pistol on himself.
The tale was gothic, yet given banal authenticity by the careful, plodding detail of the reports, even of the clothes, the name of a passing boy, the shop sofa on which Emily was laid, the British Bulldog 45. Only the site of Edward’s grave was unknown, unlike that of the girl he murdered. He lay grassed over somewhere, undeserving of any marker, yet refusing oblivion.
Poor bugger, thought Hartley, with some complacency, and he imagined how readily and sympathetically Sarah would respond to the further information. Tragedy at such remove is to be savoured.
Hartley was in the office at Hastings Hull, talking with a retired, unmarried school principal about an endowment to her former school, when the thought occurred that he had no photograph of Sarah; not one picture to remind him of the times they had been together and all those to come. Why the hell hadn’t he taken some shots at Omaha Beach?
It wasn’t unusual for him to be thinking of Sarah when engaged in other things — she was his default setting. He became slightly more animated, rocked a little and smiled as he talked to his client because he was thinking of having photographs of Sarah in his house. Some showing them together, some certainly only of her. Maybe one of her at a table at Magnus.
The teacher thought his increased enthusiasm was in response to the amount she mentioned for the endowment, and the magnanimity of her offer. She was neither prim nor authoritarian, but short, friendly and at ease. She warmed to Hartley. She liked his slim body and quick movement, the slight genetic tan of his skin and his unruly hair. He was masculine without being overwhelmingly male. She found big men offputting rather than imposing, although she was not without experience of them through both work and pleasure. Big men didn’t age well.
‘I have no children of my own,’ said the ex-principal, ‘so I’d like the money to benefit the young women of my school. I shouldn’t say “my”, but that’s how I always think of it. One becomes identified with the institution after so many years. I have an open invitation to be on the stage at the end of year prize givings, but I don’t go, of course.’
‘I’m sure you’d be welcome. And would you prefer a stipulation that the endowment bear your name?’
‘If you think that appropriate,’ she said, pleased that he’d saved her from the need to make the suggestion and so reveal vanity. In a hundred years her name might still be heard, as a recipient came forward to receive the Jacqueline Huntly Dawe prize for head girl. She smiled at the thought of it, and Hartley smiled back, thinking of satisfaction less remote, and so they parted on good terms. The teacher imagined that she’d made quite an impression on Hartley. It was a misinterpretation of his warmth, but made her day. He was enamoured, she thought. He might contact her again perhaps on some pretext concerning the endowment.
Hartley wasn’t a natural with a camera. The people in his photographs seemed so much farther away than they had appeared when he took the shot. He would do better for Sarah, though, he thought, and the following morning when he met her at the café the first thing he did, after their kiss of greeting, was bring out his phone and state his intention. He was surprised by her reaction to his enthusiasm. ‘Why would we take photos, for God’s sake?’ she said.
‘I’d like one at home. Something to remind me of you when we can’t meet up.’
‘Dangerous for me, though. Doesn’t that occur to you?’
‘Who’d know? Who would recognise you anyway? No one who came to my place.’
‘Just one then, and by myself. Promise?’ she said. He was right, and she too apprehensive. ‘I probably look a fright anyway. You should’ve said.’
‘You’re fine as you are.’
So he took one with her sitting under the umbrella with her slight double chin showing because of the angle of her head, and one hand on the table by her cup and saucer. She did look fine, and despite the limit she’d set, he quickly took a couple more, but the first turned out to be the best, even though her smile wasn’t completely relaxed. He wondered again if she coloured her hair, for the dark brown showed no traces of grey. ‘No more now,’ she said. He had no one to whom he was accountable, and could display what photographs he wished, but she found it hard not to assume he was subject to increasing guilt and apprehension concerning their meetings, just as she was herself.
‘I should take some at the motel,’ Hartley said.
‘Oh, stop it,’ she said.
‘Let’s walk a bit. The park maybe?’
‘No, I can’t. I’ve got to get back. Some people are coming soon.’
‘I hate people coming,’ he said. ‘Other people don’t deserve you.’ He put a hand over hers on the table. ‘Bugger other people,’ he said with a smile.
‘I know, I know, but there it is.’
‘When do they go?’
‘They’re having lunch. Who knows after that.’
‘I could stay in town, maybe catch up on stuff at the office, and see you when they’ve gone.’
‘Too much hassle,’ she said, ‘and I’ll have to get some dinner on once they’ve left.’ They knew they were talking of the Spanish motel.
They kissed and parted, and Sarah was aware of a new emotion. When she sought to identify the feeling she realised with a small shock that it was relief. For the first time she was conscious of feeling better leaving him than coming to him. She loved him, but that affection was counter to all the other vital currents of her life. She walked faster, with greater determination, as if that in itself would provide an answer. Sarah was in the predicament so common in general that it was usually regarded with dismissive humour, but she felt an ache of growing anxiety. She could deal with it, she told herself. She could pull back to the safe ground of friendship and nobody would be hurt. There was still time to achieve that. She had gone just a little too far in companionship, as thousands of people did every day. With common sense and understanding it could be managed, as others had coped with the same situation.
Hartley drove back to the western hills and put the shots he’d taken of Sarah onto his computer. He decided that he would have copies of the first one framed and placed in the study, the living room and the main bedroom. That way, when he was at home, Sarah would be i
n sight for almost all the time he spent there. He could be looking at her photograph when he sent her a text, come back after being with her and feel he wasn’t eating alone, glance at her face before he switched off the bedside light. And when at last she came to live with him, she would see the images of herself that had been his consolation as precursors.
He’d expected to dream of her, but rarely did. Dreams cannot be summoned, and perhaps his mind at night was eager to step from the traces of his fixation and roam at will, or maybe those dreams in which he and Sarah were united were in such core sleep and so deeply personal that he had no recollection. Only once or twice he woke in bed thinking she lay with him, and with a swiftly fading experience of eroticism.
How little fulfilment he had experienced in his life. He was almost sixty, but felt he had only recently begun to live with the richness and depth that was possible for the fortunate. Some people’s lives seemed filled with variety and excitement that his own had lacked. He’d spent years in the drab repetition of commonplace travails and banal achievement that were entirely without note. Even the disappointments of his marriage were surely the lacklustre experience of so many other unexceptional people. Where was the joy and sustenance of affection? His father too selfish and uncaring, his mother too busy and partial to an only daughter, his wife too fearful of the world, his son too far away. Was there anything that stood out from the mundane and predictable?
There was Ruth maybe, the Picton woman — an odd incident abundantly clear, but as if it had happened to someone else.
It had been a few months after Madeleine’s death and he’d travelled south for distraction. He took the ferry from Wellington and arrived at Picton on a blustery, afternoon feeling a little queasy after the voyage. A Maori taxi driver gave him advice regarding accommodation and drove him to a holiday park out of sight of the sea, ‘Get a chalet if you’ve got the money,’ said the driver. ‘Some of the old cabins are a bit grotty, eh. You have a fair walk to toilets and stuff. I had one for a few weeks when I came here, before I got sorted. Yeah, a chalet’s the thing.’ Hartley had been impressed by his concern and helpfulness, and gave him five dollars in addition to the fare.
Love as a Stranger Page 10
