True Stars
Page 12
When everything was done for her husband, she sat down to smoke a cigarette, drink black coffee and check that her nails had not been chipped. She kept a bottle of Flame Glow enamel in the kitchen for quick repair jobs. This was her time to gather her thoughts before she drove down and opened up at the shop. She listened carefully to the first news assessments of the day, and tucked away information that the customers might touch on later. It made her sad, the number of things that were wrong with the world. She despaired that they would ever come right. Her father had been a Mason who recited his pledges while locked in the bathroom where nobody could hear them, not even her mother. He was head of the family; it would have been unthinkable for her mother to have questioned his right to make decisions. Lola would never have gone to work if she hadn’t been left a widow with a little boy to bring up; in times of hardship she was against married women going to work and taking men’s jobs away. But this hardship the country was enduring was different, not her problem at all. The Government had brought it upon themselves; she still couldn’t believe that, at the beginning, a woman had been put in charge of the police. A woman, the Minister of Police. Her head still spun when she thought about it. Jeff had said, once, ‘Well, we got a better pay deal under her than we ever did with anyone else.’ ‘That was because she was soft,’ Lola told him, ‘and look at her, she couldn’t handle it in the end, and now they’ve got a Maori, you can’t expect things ever to get better the ways things are, except there’s a change of Government, you just think about it.’
As she stubbed out her cigarette and smoothed down her skirt the phone rang. She hurried. It might be her son ringing from Australia, or wherever he was. Though she hadn’t heard from him for some time. Maybe a year or more. Probably two, actually.
It was the station. ‘Jeff’s only had about two hours’ sleep,’ she said. ‘He’s had one of his bad nights, can’t someone else attend to it?’
Reluctantly, she went into the bedroom. The thought of taking the phone off the hook when Jeff was trying to sleep often occurred to her but the idea upset him so much the first time she suggested it that she never mentioned it again. He was already out of bed.
‘They didn’t say what it was, oh God, it’s not an armed call-out, I hope, if it is and anything happens to you I’ll never forgive myself for not telling them you weren’t here, Jeff …’ Though she knew that he would probably be the last they would call.
He touched her arm as he passed. He had heard her go on in this vein many times before, and although she made him so angry he could hit her, afterwards he would feel sorry; she might not understand the job but he knew she was scared of being left on her own. They needed each other, it was a definition of love. It was one that did. And he liked pleasing her.
She watched him covertly as he listened to the station call. His face creased with annoyance. ‘I’m tired of their games,’ he said at last. ‘Well, yes I am in charge of it, but patrol section’s been in on it too … O’Meara was the last person to interview her and he’s done two straight shifts in a row through till last night.’ He rubbed his forehead. ‘I’ll come down and check it out later … No, not just because it’s Kendall, we can’t afford to take chances like that, but I reckon she’ll turn up. It’s all right Constable, you were correct to call me.’
Lola, sorting through her purse, slowed down the process still further, without real hope that he would tell her. For once, however, Jeffrey seemed more than ready to unburden himself.
‘Kendall’s wife’s been reported missing,’ he said. ‘Well, I’d be surprised if she is, but Kendall’s been ringing their house during the night and she’s not there.’
‘Has anybody been round to their place?’
‘Yes. There’s been a fairly messy break-in. No sign of her, her car’s gone.’
‘That’s a bit creepy.’
‘There was a party at Appleblooms’ last night.’
‘You think she stayed the night with someone?’ Lola was working to keep the excitement out of her voice.
‘I don’t know, she might have had too much to drink, something like that. She’s careful about things like drinking and driving, y’know. I’ll give her that.’ Not that he felt like crediting Rose with much this morning.
‘I heard she drank too much. I heard she was a lush.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘I forget … somebody in the shop perhaps.’
‘Lola, who?’
‘Just something Teddy said last election night.’
‘Teddy O‘Meara?’
‘It was just a chance remark. Jeff, it was at a party, that party we went to that night. It was nothing.’
‘All right. All right then.’ He stood tapping the phonebook with his fingernail. Then he began dialling Toni Warner’s number.
Lola, out of habit (it was to protect her, the things she knew and didn’t know, Jeff told her) left the room.
When she came back he was yawning, looking creased and a little drawn around the mouth. She could see he was preparing to go back to bed.
‘Toni Warner’s out, but her husband said Mrs Kendall left town for Wellington yesterday.’
‘But she should be there by now?’
‘She doesn’t have to be. She didn’t tell Kendall she was going so I don’t expect she intended to get there yesterday.’
‘Isn’t anybody going to do anything?’
‘CIB’s checking the break-in, but they’ll probably just find it’s a routine one, nothing to do with her going walkabout. Nothing I’m going to lose any sleep over.’
She pecked him on the cheek as she picked up her car keys. ‘That’s my lad. Commonsense, eh?’
But she felt a small pang of disappointment as she drove towards town, wondering whether, as Jeffrey was not going to pursue the matter, she might be excluded from an up-to-date bulletin.
When she had gone, her husband, rumpled and awake, looked at his watch and wondered how long he could leave it before he woke O’Meara. It was ten past eight. He drank the last coffee in the pot without heating it, and dialled.
‘Mr O’Meara is not to be disturbed,’ said a frosty voice at the other end.
‘Disturb him, Mrs Marment, Please.’
‘Is it in the line of duty, Sergeant?’
‘It is.’
‘Oh well … when duty calls … I’ll get him.’
‘No, on second thoughts … what can he do? Sorry Mrs Marment, just thinking aloud.’ He put down the phone.
By 8.30 he was in the office. ‘Put a Query Person through the computer,’ he told the constable on duty.
Only he knew that the POI index wouldn’t show up anything. That stood for persons of interest and Rose Kendall might be interesting to herself and her friends, but she was not interesting enough to have got into police files.
Not yet, anyway.
6
The road had become familiar since Kit entered Parliament. When electorate business required her attendance in Wellington at short notice Rose flew, but if she could arrange it she preferred to drive. The Desert Road in the hard centre of the North Island held a fascination for her which she could not explain, even to herself.
Most people saw it as an obstacle which had to be crossed over; the long stretches edged with tussock, the hairpin bends following one after another, the mountains lurching away to the right on the southward journey, sometimes steam escaping from a volcano; the silences, if you were forced to stop, broken by the explosion of a military cannon near the army settlement and the lines of dark-green canopied trucks hurtling in convoy towards you; the rib of the earth unfurling beside the road, rainbow-striped with veins of multicoloured earth.
But in this heart of the island Rose often stopped from choice, to stand at the edge of the road, looking at the mountains or the causeway from the power scheme which ran through a slash of the earth. There was a sense of danger here, but also the clean incorruptible force of the elements.
She had travelled the road when
it glittered with snow lacing its edges, brilliant with travellers from north and south, skis stacked on the roofs of their Volvos and BMWs, fluting signals to each other on their horns as they raced, outstripping one another even before their arrival at the snowfields. At the highway cafs, before they entered the desert stretch, their voices trilled, snapping as brittle and pretty as the icicles in the air, their scarves making gay banners that proclaimed their camaraderie, their exuberance, their money.
Other times she had driven through wet nights when the sides of the roads were almost indistinguishable from the sealing in the headlights, and fog had gripped the car, turning it into a solitary capsule hurtling along on its own except for the freight trucks which moved at night. Sometimes she saw her own old name flash past her, Diamond Carriers, the sign set in a bright blue form shaped like the Cullinan diamond.
Today, the glow of fires surrounded her and smoke blew across the road. A burn-off on the tussock was taking place and rows of beaters moved across the landscape. She stopped at a high point in the road. Rosehips covered a wild creeper growing on the bank. Using the car chamois to guard her fingers, she pulled off a branch. The fruit shone in her hand; she placed it on the passenger seat of the car. Billowing smoke stung her eyes.
As she watched the flames licking the distance, an army jeep pulled up beside her.
‘Could you move along?’ called the driver. He was a fresh-faced tanned young man, perhaps twenty, with a dirty streak across his cheek.
‘I’m just taking a rest,’ she said, smiling at him.
‘You’ll block the traffic, didn’t you see the signs back there?’ he shouted over his running engine. She saw his impatient dismissal.
‘The car’s off the road.’
‘Do you need help?’
‘No. Thank you.’
‘Then there’s a rest area half a kilometre down the road. Use that.’
He revved his engine and roared away into the smoke.
Driving through the acrid cloud, Rose’s mind switched back into the black mode it had occupied for so long. She did not see herself as running before fire. Entering it, yes, prodding it, and stirring up a blaze, but not this, hunted, and chased by the flames at her back.
Yet that was what it was like, how it had been, for longer than she cared to remember.
She had come to the desert to find space. It was why she came so often, as if there were answers to be found near the mountains. Maybe she could determine from a distance, in space expunged of junk and paraphernalia, what was causing her so much trouble.
Weyville had closed in around her. For awhile she had thought she was in charge of the town and its fortunes, as well as her own and that of her friends and family. From where the Diamonds and Ellis Hannen had come, perhaps that had been tempting fate. But she could not accept that.
She had been away to training college and she had met Kit and somehow these two events had placed her in an equivocal state, between one side of town and the other.
The easy answer, on the face of it, was to do what she was doing now, leave Weyville for good. But of course it was not easy. It was the hardest answer of all. It could finish up with her leaving Kit and causing more political scandal in the process. Every marriage break-up in political life was trumpeted across the papers. She could bear that, she supposed, but it still did not answer why she had to leave him in the first place. Or whether she wanted to.
It was all tied in with the phone calls.
In personal terms, she could not think what she had done to attract such hatred. She was certain that the caller was not Katrina. It could be Jim Diamond, but she did not believe it was her brother’s style. Besides, the way Ellis had spoken of Jim made her think that he wished her no harm. Then there was Larissa, who saw herself as having been injured by her aunt. Rose did not think Larissa was capable of such sustained provocation although it was a possibility she could not discount altogether, and there were the girl’s friends to consider too. They struck a chord of terror in her, especially Gary.
Essentially, she believed the key must be politics, of one kind or another.
Certainly, here in the dark heart of the desert the recurring echoes in her head were not the personal but the affairs of the nation: the unfettered and now lawless market, the cheap imports made with sweated labour that were closing down businesses, the thousands dismissed from their jobs every week, the ridicule of the unions with whom she and Kit and their friends had once been aligned, the tension which stalked the streets and the ugly face of greed.
If this was what Kit believed in now, then it was time for them to admit to each other that they believed in different things after all, and to be done with each other.
But she was not ready, she decided, to bow out without finding who dogged her footsteps. This was one of the more indefinable shapes of terrorism, the fear within. She glanced behind her in the mirror to check whether she was being followed.
There had been a fight the night before. In the main street of Taupo glass lay in piles in the gutters. It had happened after the pubs shut, and weary and footsore marchers who should have been in bed hours before clashed with local gang members.
Wiki Muru left the march in the morning and was driven back to Weyville by a friend to arrange bail for her son, Matau. His arrest had taken place the previous afternoon, before the fighting broke out. By the time she arrived, her uncle had attended the court and fixed it all up. She picked up her own car and drove fast, heading back towards the marae, hoping that there would be nobody ‘there, the mess in town cleaned up and the march underway again.
Matau sat sullen and uncommunicative beside her. He had large bruises on his chest and forearms where he had tried to protect himself from kicks.
‘Did O’Meara do it?’
‘I didn’t see.’
‘They say you ran over that kid.’
‘They got no proof.’
‘Did you do it?’
‘Nah.’
‘Don’t bloody mess with me. Did you or didn’t you?’
‘Fucken let me outta here,’ screamed her son, tearing at the door handle. She slewed, slowed the car, and braked to a halt.
She looked across at her weeping son and the welt above his eye. That’ll be a beauty, she said to herself.
‘I don’t reckon you did,’ she said aloud, but gently so as not to scare him away.
Matau had flung the door open and sat with one leg poised over the edge ready to take flight.
‘That don’t matter, does it.’
‘Yes,’ she said, forcing her will to communicate with him. ‘It’s all that matters.’
He put his head on the dash and sobbed. ‘They done me over, they done me. They never fucken listened Ma.’
‘They never listen full stop,’ she said, and her mouth was thin.
At the marae people were milling around in front of the meeting house. Word had come through that the farmers were sloping off back to Weyville. On reflection they felt that few of them could afford the time that it would take to march all the way; besides, they wanted to dissociate themselves from the violence that had taken place and from lawless elements amongst the marchers.
Lyle Warner looked straight past Larry Verschoelt’s shoulder into the jewellery shop window in the main street. A shiny black hand held a fan of gold cards. A crystal bull rotated on a stand.
‘I saw the light, by God, I did,’ Larry said. He leaned against his pick-up.
‘Sure,’ said Lyle. ‘Conversion to the Labour Party’s like religion.’
‘By God, it is no reason for you to joke. I am a poor man, Mr Warner.’
‘Money?’ Lyle said incredulously. Blackmail was something that happened to other people.
Larry spat, hitting a slick of oil in the roadway, and thrust his hands into the pockets of his workshorts. ‘I saw you gettin’ into Harry’s missus, Mr Warner.’
The bull twinkled with refracted light. ‘How much?’
‘Say, ten.’
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br /> ‘Ten grand?’
‘I reckon.’
‘I don’t have it.’
‘Aw, you don’t?’ Larry waved to someone across the street. ‘There’s a coupla other things I know, Mr Warner. Interesting things. You know what I mean?’
It was lunchtime when Basil slunk in the back door. The teacher had been in touch and Katrina had told him he was not to run off home any more. The kid never listens, she complained to Minna, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor, sewing. She had sewn up seams on Sharna’s overall, patched a hole in one of Basil’s school jerseys, and now was putting buttons on one of Katrina’s blouses.
‘You don’t mean him to,’ said Minna, biting a thread. Her teeth were very even, a little too small for perfection.
‘If you must do that, use the scissors,’ said Katrina. ‘It doesn’t need buttons anyway.’
‘Are you going to let your tits hang out?’
‘Don’t be vulgar, I’ll wear a singlet under it. Anyway, what do you care?’
‘You’re a sloppy cow. I’ll make Basil some cheese sandwiches.’
The child had crawled under the sofa and was staring out at them with malevolence.
‘Did you get into trouble with the teacher?’
‘Yes.’ He inched out from under the furniture. ‘I hate her.’
‘She’ll hate you if you don’t behave, you rotten little sod.’
‘Shut up Minna.’
‘Somebody should look out for him. Anyway, I’m making him sandwiches, aren’t I?’
‘You’re a priceless little pearl, Minna. So what did your sodding teacher do to you, Bas?’
‘What did he do to her? Katrina, I told you not to get this again.’ Minna looked disgustedly at the white bread which was all she could find, and started stroking on the margarine.
Basil rocketed into Katrina’s arms, sobbing noisily. Minna rolled her eyes.
He had hardly settled himself in his mother’s lap when the coughing began, a deep gasp rising from his chest. He sounded as if he was suffocating.