by Greg McGee
Den’s face faded, replaced by the view of the harbour from his balcony. The deep purple of the harbour had become a dark maroon. ‘The magic hour,’ said Den’s voice, over a slow fade, ‘the world bathed in the softest light, achingly beautiful because it signals imminent darkness.’ On cue, the screen went to black, as what sounded like raucous elephants revealed themselves to be bellowing guitars, out of which a voice, not Den’s, insinuated itself. Into the distance, a ribbon of black . . .
It wasn’t a song Stan recognised, but Will did. ‘Pink fucking Floyd! Would you fucking believe it?’ Stan wanted to laugh – it was so Den – but couldn’t in the face of Will’s incandescent anger. The old Will, back in all his fiery darkness. ‘The old cunt,’ he said, waving at the laptop as Pink Floyd blasted on. ‘Couldn’t help himself, even at the end. Mawkish sentiment and bloated ego.’
Stan’s head was still whirling. ‘So, he’d intended to–’
‘Top himself, yes. He had a pistol.’
‘When was this?’
‘Look at the date on the file. He recorded that on the day of his seventieth, just before the party.’
‘So,’ said Stan, still struggling, wishing he hadn’t had so much to drink, or that Will had left this until morning. ‘After the party, he was going to–’
Will was still pacing, talking as much to himself as Stan. ‘We didn’t need the fire. Fuck, if I’d known he had a plan, we’d have the best part of another mil from the insurance payout for the house.’
Stan couldn’t look at Will, stared at the black screen with the music still blaring out. When Will said he needed to take a piss, and disappeared down the hallway into the bathroom, Stan stood, shaky. There was nowhere to go. He wandered down the hallway, questions forming, as Pink Floyd followed him. He eased the front door open and shut it carefully behind him, as the bull elephants launched into a final reprise.
***
THERE were new laneways running parallel to Ponsonby Road, which Stan staggered into, seeking to avoid the garish light of the street itself, but they turned out to be extensions of clubs and restaurants, back terraces of vodka and whisky rooms, refuges for furtive smokers, not thoroughfares. Full of big people, young people, his age but from another planet, many of them huge, women busting out of too tight, too skimpy, too short, in groups taking selfies, singing songs to the camera, al fresco karaoke, big men in black, dressed like the bouncers they maybe all were. Despairing of pushing his way through, Stan went back around onto the street. The fat of the land had always been the townies’ description of rural life, but everyone he knew at Te Kurahau was as scrawny as him. In his new gear and blistering shoes, he might look like he belonged, but he felt like an alien. Where do all these people come from? Who are they? What do they do? All these people, young like him, pissing their lives away. He could talk. He was pissed too. Pissed, distressed. Everyone was in the same boat, pissing up to relieve the despair. How did you catch hold of your rushing life and make it meaningful? Over the background noise of shouting and singing and arguing and laughing voices, the music of live bands was leaking out from the small venues he passed, the drums sited up against the street end so they didn’t overwhelm the space, the tinny whack of snare drums signalling another bar, another band, long before you got anywhere near them, and long after you’d passed, these cracks puncturing the air like pistol shots. This was how it had been when his mother died. The numbness. Nothing had changed. The years between were meaningless: he’d done nothing, changed nothing. He was fourteen years old. The rest of his life, Rachel, the lettuces . . . What was he thinking? It was all bullshit. Will was selling meth – that page of foil that had fallen to the floor, full of tabs. That’s what Yelena had been trying to tell him at Kook A Chew. Of course Will wanted to invest in legit businesses, he needed to wash his dirty money. Lila’s Uber, probably a great front for delivering meth. Clean and green? What a fucking nerve! Money wasn’t just money, Lester said, money was what you did to get it. The lettuces were fucked, he was fucked, Will was evil. We didn’t need the fire.
IT WAS TOO early for Henry. He wouldn’t have finished work and it wasn’t his polite knock, but a despairing hammering. When she opened the door to a barefoot brother carrying a sock-stuffed shiny new shoe in either hand, his first words were: ‘The fire. It was Will. He admitted it!’
The change in Stan since she’d dropped him off was stark – his new clothes already baggy on him, his short hair sticking out in clumps as the gel disintegrated, his eyes wild. Ellie didn’t know quite what to say, so she hugged him close, like a baby, trying to pacify him. He pushed her off. ‘Didn’t you hear what I just said? He admitted it!’
‘I heard,’ she said, and tried to conjure up as much shock as she could. ‘That’s awful.’
That might have worked with most people, but not with Stan, even drunk. He gawked at her, open-mouthed. She’d seen that incredulous look before, in her clients, when what was about to befall them and their children at the hands of their partners or the judges or the department was revealed. ‘This isn’t news to you, is it,’ he said. It wasn’t a question. ‘You knew!’
‘I didn’t know.’ She needed to deflect him, buy some time. ‘Will never said anything to me. But I sort of realised it only made sense if it was him. If Dad was no longer living in the house, Mum’s half-share would be released. It was about the money.’
‘You should see the video,’ he cried. ‘Dad was terrified about what was about to happen to him. He knew exactly what was waiting for him, and he wanted to die with dignity.’
‘I know he had a plan.’
‘You knew he was going to top himself?’
‘Not at the time, no. Much later, when it was too late.’ Ellie wanted desperately to stop the questioning, cauterise the revelations until she’d had time to consider how much Stan should be told. She asserted her older sister status, told him Yelena was in bed, he needed to have a shower and get some sleep, she’d make him up a bed on the sofa, they’d talk in the morning. While he was in the shower, she put sheets and a duvet on the big sofa. When he emerged, it was clear his new clothes hadn’t stretched to his undies – they were supermarket specials with white strips of elastic showing where the cheap material had disintegrated. He looked so thin and exhausted and vulnerable that she had to stop herself from weeping as she pulled the duvet over his bony chest. To her relief, his eyes closed as soon as his head hit the pillow. His last words were almost a sigh. ‘Tomorrow, we’ve got to call the fire investigator, maybe the cops, okay?’
‘Okay. We’ll talk about it tomorrow and decide. Let’s sleep on it.’
***
BUT sleep didn’t come easily. She rang Henry to warn him Stan had overindulged and was on the sofa. Henry got there before she had to ask, told her to take care of her little bro and he’d see her tomorrow. She hadn’t told Henry she’d missed her period; she’d wait until she was sure. That was okay, she told herself, she was simply being sensible, controlling the release of information, not harbouring a secret. She’d once thought, when she had no secrets, that they’d be corrosive, undermining. But secrets, she’d learnt, could be a binding agent for those who owned them. Serious secrets. Like arson and murder.
She’d expected everything to change, but not for the better. She’d done something unimaginable, notionally evil, and by her laws of simple morality, a good person who does bad suffers for it. Her world ought to have changed. Yet nothing much did initially, as she waited for a storm of remorse to break over her.
The low point arrived the day after they buried Dwayne Collins in the rose bed. The rain had come. She’d pulled a sickie and driven through the downpour to Te Henga, jumped on Brownie and gone to the lake. God knows what Vicky, the owner, had thought was going on with her – unrequited love maybe: maybe townies appeared quite often on dreary days to ride their sorrows away. She’d ridden Brownie into the water up to his withers. She was soaked
anyway, the saddle and blanket were sodden. She took the pistol from her parka and threw it as far as she could. Just before it hit the surface, she half expected an arm to rise from the water and catch it, like Excalibur, except that the sleeve would be dark blue with police insignia on the shoulder. But it splashed and sank. She’d taken off her parka and driven back to town with the heater on full blast, shivering so hard she had to hang on to the wheel for dear life.
She never went back to the agency. After another duvet day, she’d phoned in her resignation. She ought never to have returned in the first place. Her failure was in not recognising that her work there was done, or, more accurately, that work was done with her. That had been clear even before she’d taken another person’s life.
She’d gone back to volunteering for FreeLunch4Kids, shortly before it was revealed to be owned by a supermarket chain. The shock of finding that you’d been volunteering not for a charity but to serve the ends of a commercial entity that had found a lucrative way to jettison its surplus was mitigated only by the turmoil that followed among the volunteers. There’d been meetings and coffees, lots of excuses to be in the same space as Henry and talk about things that mattered. At an angry meeting between the volunteers and the representatives of the supermarket and the ‘charity’, Henry had stood up in the middle of the venom and said the most important thing he needed to know was whether the kids were still going to get their lunches. She loved him right then. Afterwards he accepted her offer of a drink. They’d gone to a little tapas bar where he wasn’t known, and she’d basically thrown herself at him. Luckily, he was coming just as hard the other way.
All that time she’d been waiting for the guilt to engulf her, waiting for overwhelming remorse to paralyse her, for the turpitude of what she’d done to wring her out and leave her hanging, morally bereft . . . But nothing came. She couldn’t summon up any kind of feeling about the demise of Dwayne Collins, apart from revulsion at the memory of his bloodstained mullet.
It helped that no one else gave him a second thought either. Those darkly hilarious pre-Christmas speculations in that Kings-land bar were truer than those women could ever have hoped: no one missed Dwayne Collins. In fact for those who knew him, the world was a much better place. Ellie might have expected exactly that for Jackson, Lila and Miriama, of course, but it went much wider than that, as those women in the bar had speculated. The agency didn’t have to try to execute a safety plan for Miriama when she was invalided home, the state didn’t have to pay Collins the dole, or fund his trial, or his imprisonment, or any futile attempts at counselling and rehabilitation. He became a zero on the state and agency spreadsheets.
And it quickly became clear the police also didn’t give a toss. Lila, who was living with Miriama, told Ellie the police wanted to interview her mother about the assault. For reasons Lila didn’t need to explain, she was uncomfortable being around cops. Jackson by then was with Stan in Golden Bay. Ellie was reluctant, but what could she say?
Detective Sergeant Tracey Costigan had turned up, acted like Ellie was her best mate and lamented her resignation from the agency. Miriama was in a wheelchair and struggling to talk, so it was a one-sided conversation, blessedly short. Afterwards, Ellie walked Tracey to her mufti car, and without asking a single question got the unofficial police narrative: Collins was an incorrigible recidivist on the run with serious criminal charges hanging over him, who must have used his criminal contacts to get out of the country. He might surface in Oz when he’d inevitably commit another crime and be deported, or he might come back to try it on again with Miriama. They’d deal with that then, but in the meantime they’d live in hope that the nasty little shit would cross serious crims in Oz who would put a bullet through his head and save everyone some grief. As Tracey wished for that bullet in Collins’ head, Ellie tried to turn her wince at the memory of him lying face down on the deck into into a wry smile. ‘Sadistic piece of shit,’ said Tracey, as she reached her car. ‘The world is so much better for his absence.’
That was the moment, when DS Costigan drove off without a backward glance, that Ellie’s world finally tipped on its axis. She was swaying on the footpath and had to prop herself up with one hand on the door of her car to keep from falling. It had been gradually becoming apparent, but that was the moment it really hit her: that of her many and various good works, of all her acts of kindness and compassion, the very best thing she’d ever done was shoot a man in the head.
Perhaps, with a good lawyer and a sympathetic jury, what she’d done wouldn’t be murder, but it was homicide. She had taken another human being’s life. She had killed. She had clung to the car door until the horizon settled, then gradually let go and realised she could still keep her feet. She could walk. She could step forward into this new world, with its very different moral parameters.
When she’d told Stan she didn’t know that Will set fire to the house, it was sort of true – in the sense that Will had admitted anything to her. But somewhere in her marrow she’d understood that Will and Lila had provided each other with alibis that night. And just as they’d never discussed the fire, she and Will had never discussed Collins’ death. They didn’t have to. Lila knew everything, so Will knew everything: they were, she and Will and Lila and Jackson, inextricably bound together, a disparate little family with a black hole of secrets at their centre, a centripetal forcefield pulling them powerfully into the same orbit. And Stan had to be drawn in there too, somehow.
Freeing Lila and Jackson from their father’s brutal oppression was a gift beyond anything they could have expected, but Ellie didn’t want their gratitude tested by police interrogation. She knew her action had begat other, unintended consequences. She’d tried not to think about Will and Lila, but she’d seen the instant lift in both their fortunes that could only have come from exploiting the vacuum left by Dwayne. She’d found that she preferred her brother being a dealer than a user. It was that pragmatic, that selfish.
Things were about to change for her little brother, and nothing she said or did could jeopardise his bright new future. Or her own. She was thirty-eight and, she hoped, pregnant. It wasn’t at all the sort of world she’d worked for, or thought she’d be bringing a child into. And yet. That world, its essential nature, was something she couldn’t control, though not long ago she’d been naive enough to think she could. She imagined squeezing Henry’s hand, and feeling the answering pressure. It was enough. She slept.
***
WHEN she awoke, it was just before seven. There’d be a couple of places already open up on the strip, even on a Sunday. She’d grab her skinny little brother and get some folded eggs and bacon and mushrooms and spinach into him, or a three-egg Benedict on big hash browns, washed down with espresso, and see if she could keep his mouth full long enough to talk some sense into him. When she dressed and tiptoed through to the sitting room to wake him, the sofa was empty. His new shoes and socks were on the floor where he’d left them, but Stan and his clothes were gone.
STAN WAS STANDING on what was left of the deck in front of the levelled site when he heard her car coming up the drive. He’d never seen the blackened ruin. He’d fled back to Te Kurahau from the motel up the road the morning after the fire. The absence of the house was shocking, what used to be there now an expanse of bulldozed earth with surveyor’s pegs marking out the dimensions of the footings for a new home. The only remnant of the old house was a square concrete-lined crater where the garage had been. He remembered they had all run down the stairs into that garage and then out onto the parking bay, where they’d counted heads, as the house began shooting flames behind them. Will and Lila were missing, of course.
He was trying to sort that chaos. It didn’t help that last night’s poison had swollen his brain, pushing it against his skull so hard it felt bruised. The first voice he’d heard that night, rousing him from sleep, had been Jackson’s, he was sure – even though he hadn’t come into Stan’s room. Had he heard his vo
ice before the panicked beeping of the smoke alarms? He couldn’t say. Had Jackson been given a heads-up by Lila? At Will’s request? Even Will wouldn’t want their deaths on his conscience, surely.
He turned away as he heard Ellie calling his name, and padded in his bare feet down the steps, through the gate and onto the cold wet of the grass path. He could see her coming towards him, at the far side of the rose garden, now a patch of thorny sticks apart from a couple of Cecile Brunners, still showing a tiny pink flower. He saw Ellie stop suddenly, frozen to the spot. She wasn’t looking at him, but at something right in front of her. Her face flushed, then crumpled with relief when she spotted him. He didn’t want her to be relieved. ‘I can understand now why the insurance company wouldn’t pay out,’ he said.
She answered warily, slowly, as if bone tired by the whole subject. ‘Does it really matter? Most of the value was in the land.’
‘It doesn’t matter that he burnt our house down?’
‘I’m not saying it doesn’t matter,’ said Ellie, then began talking as if by rote about the good things Will had done, how he had sold the land to Georgie, who, it turned out, was as interested in what she called a ‘clean canvas’ as she had been in the original home. More importantly, Ellie said, Will had found a buyer who wanted their mother’s garden preserved, and that was the main thing.
Stan was incredulous. ‘Burning the house down is okay because he got someone to preserve Mum’s garden?’
‘You don’t understand,’ she said.
He admitted that he didn’t understand, and even though she was becoming distressed, he determined to harden his heart and not crack. ‘Then there’s Dad,’ he said. ‘His last agonies.’
‘You really want to talk about that? I was there with him through the worst of his terror. Where were you?’
