True Stars

by Kidman, Fiona

  They were sitting at a table in the trucking caf at Bulls. ‘I tell you what, I’m starved.’

  ‘I’ve ordered for you.’ As Ellis spoke the proprietor, red-eyed from the early morning start, put plates covered with steak, two eggs each and chips in front of them.

  ‘Jeez, Ro, you get yourself tied up with some weirdos. Kendall, and now Applebloom.’

  ‘I’m not tied up with Applebloom.’

  ‘You were, it was all over town a few years back.’

  ‘And Kit’s not weird, he’s my husband.’

  He shrugged. ‘That banking chap foreclosed on me once. While ago now. Dunno what he thought he was going to do with my trucks. Asked him once, he said mebbe he’d drive ’em himself.’ He polished his knife against his overall and began eating. ‘Tell you, Ro, I wouldn’t let that joker drive my pig in a perambulator.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Ah.’ He sliced an egg and inserted half in his mouth. ‘Saw the error of his ways. Think he just wanted to cut me down to size. So much for the working man’s friend. He set me back though.’

  ‘Is that why you sold the trucks?’

  ‘Sorta. Less hassle driving for other people.’

  ‘Screw him, which as it happens, which Ellie, as I have mentioned, I did not. Recently,’ she qualified.

  ‘I wasn’t asking.’

  It was easy sitting here in the Manawatu where the shining grasses stretched away from the edges of the town into distance, to laugh at Morris’s expense. In the night, though, she had got up and walked through to the kitchenette to get a glass of water. Her mouth tasted like dirty newspaper. He was asleep in one of the single beds. She had looked down at him sleeping. His face was neat and composed, no different from when he ushered clients into his office at the bank. Even his beard hadn’t begun to show on the smooth surface of his skin. From the beginning she had admired the way he confounded her expectations of his role, his busy sturdy sexuality, the compact perfection of it all. This was what she had wanted. He stirred in his sleep — What is it? — turned over, looked at her, his eyes open. You can’t play the system if you don’t believe in it.

  That’s no better than Kit, she said. He closed his eyes again. It’s all chaos, he said then, as if he had been talking in his sleep, as if he were dreaming. Actually it’s a joke, she replied, although he couldn’t hear her. She put the jar of pickled bums where he would see them when he woke up.

  In the morning when he was leaving she asked, ‘Is it you who’s to be the alternative candidate, then?’ He was closing his briefcase in the back of the car and appeared not to have heard her.

  Now she sat turning her hand towards the light so that it caught reflections on her topaz ring, unearthed from the drawer before she left home. What she had never told anyone, not even Kit, was that she had taken the ring once to get it valued and the jeweller had laughed in an embarrassed regretful way when he returned it to her. Although the gold filigree was good, and certainly antique, the stone was glass, maybe even beer bottle glass, although it was a cunning imitation. Maybe, about the time of the Depression, someone had had the stone removed and this put in its place. It seemed like the kind of joke Ellis might enjoy but she decided not to tell him.

  ‘I think there’s a plan afoot to get Morris selected in place of Kit at the next election,’ she said instead.

  ‘They’re really taking the right on board.’

  ‘They think they’ll move the Party back to the left.’

  Ellis looked incredulous, then he began to laugh. ‘If that’s Weyville’s version of the left wing, God help socialism.’

  ‘What do you know about politics?’

  He stopped laughing. ‘About as much as you do.’

  When she looked injured, he grinned. ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘Anyway, you know I’m right.’

  A woman hurried in and sat at a table nearby. She glanced at her watch with annoyance as if she was running late for an appointment. Her hair was sleek and shiny brown and she wore a wedding ring. By the cut of her suit Rose would have said she was a business-woman of some kind, although it was hard to see her in the context of the Bulls caf. Rose thought she might be twenty-five or so, although when she studied her in what she hoped was a covert fashion, for she had almost run out of things to say to Ellis and what there was left to ask was difficult, she decided she was closer to thirty. Maybe even older. The woman ordered breakfast and took some notes out of a briefcase. She studied them as she waited for her meal and when it came she continued to look at them, frowning as she did so, putting her fork down between rapid mouthfuls in order to scribble on the papers. Rose wondered how she could be so thin and eat so much. A folder on the table bore the words VISUAL DISPLAY UNITS. Everyone seemed to be into computers these days. Rose wondered how difficult it was to learn about them. Toni said they were a living and strictly to be ignored if you could. Technological, unfortunately essential, high-tack. She left them all to Lyle.

  ‘How did you find me?’ Rose asked Ellis, losing interest in the woman. It was the question she would have to ask sooner or later.

  ‘Heard the cops were looking out for you. Bit hard to miss you on the main road south in that piebald contraption of yours, seeing I’m on the road all the time. Followed you on down here from the motel.’

  ‘You going to ring the cops?’

  ‘Figured you’d do that yourself.’

  ‘I already have.’

  He nodded, drank some of the rank hot coffee they had been served.

  ‘So you are running away?’

  She introduced a note of caution. ‘I’m going to Wellington. To Kit. My husband the weirdo.’

  ‘Taken a long time getting there.’

  ‘I’m not running away. Just moving on. I’ve had some scary times. I’m taking charge. Um, Ellie, about Morris.’

  ‘Applebum?’ He drew a line across his throat with his forefinger.

  Part II

  7

  The Minister clasped his hands and swung around in his swivel chair. Beyond him lay Wellington Harbour. Below were the docks and a tangle of railway lines leading out of the city towards the faultline. The bronze-tinted double-glazed glass of the Beehive window glinted with wintry sun. Rex Gamble considered his tastes aesthetic; the walls of his office were covered with a mixture of paintings from overseas as well as leading New Zealand artists while the wall of books behind him reflected an interest in Florentine architecture. A tall slim man, he swam six lengths of the Beehive pool each morning. If he could only stop smoking he would consider himself an example to his colleagues.

  Still, he comforted himself, this single vice kept him lean, protecting him from the ravages not just of State banquets but the insidious daily intake of a Bellamy’s diet He wore an unadorned white shirt, a neat lemon tie, black shoes and black socks with his light grey suit. He joked to press photographers about getting his ‘good side’ in such a way that nobody believed (at least, at the time) that he was serious. Usually they aimed for the left which had a serious, just discernible crease. Once a week he walked up the Terrace to get his slightly longer than fashionable hair and his very blond beard trimmed at the Razor’s Edge and marvelled each time that this was a country in which Cabinet Ministers could walk around the streets to the barber of their choice without a bodyguard. But recently he had been going in late afternoon when the crowds were thickest and he could mingle less conspicuously amongst them. Or so he hoped. There was a general twitchiness around the corridors these days. Unfortunately the public always recognised him; there was a price to pay for his appearance. And the Press Gallery had him down for a marked man, especially when he dined out.

  He looked at his watch. He had meant to ask his secretary to order him a table for two at Le Petit Lyon but on second thoughts there was a delegation in town which could be eating there tonight. Il Casino was his preference, but his ministerial colleague Mike Moore ate there too often for comfort. In the end he would almost certainly have to settle
for wine in a BYO canvas carrybag and throw himself again on the mercy of his newest girl — he corrected himself mentally, newest woman friend’s cooking. She cooked well, that was not the problem, but his driver had parked outside her house for three nights out of the last four and the ministerial car was becoming obvious in the street.

  In the meantime, he awaited Kit Kendall’s visit with growing impatience. Until that was over he could make no private phone calls. As a second-fiddle minister in a Government already eyeing others with constant suspicion, he was not about to give indications of clandestine communication, personal or professional, to backbenchers. He was not at all certain how he would fare in a Cabinet reshuffle. His portfolio was small enough as it was.

  Kit had, in fact, delayed the meeting simply by dawdling. He more or less knew why Gamble wanted to see him, and he had no answers. He excused himself from the rimu-panelled debating chamber, turning to bow to the Speaker, and retreated down the gangway. A debate on estimates was adequately covered; the Press Gallery was almost empty. Kit took the marble staircase, forgoing the clanking lift, stopped to chat with the tour guides and a messenger, and finally made his way to the covered access that joined the old Parliament Buildings and the Beehive area. He crossed the balcony above the Calvert mural. A party of some kind was going on in the foyer below, perhaps a book launching, the sort of gathering that had been popular when the Government first took power. Every minister was jumping on literary bandwagons then and launching anything from atlases to slim volumes of poetry; the place crawled with women dressed in downbeat black, sporting Katherine Mansfield haircuts, and middle-aged men in jeans who called on embossed accents to order their drinks, a sprinkling of suits, a panama hat or two, and a number of greenstone pendants. It was a similar scene today. The gathering gravitated towards trays of sausage rolls cut in half, club sandwiches and marinated drumsticks of No. 9 Tegels. There was rarely enough alcohol for even the most ambitious drinker to start falling over, but a younger man than usual, with multi-studded ears, was trying to climb the marble stairway on the opposite side of the foyer. As Kit leaned on the railing watching a security guard restrain the unruly visitor a wave of envy swept over him.

  He had written a book once, a textbook on dothistroma pini, a disease which attacked pine trees; its presence had been noted in New Zealand by a scientist in the 1960s. Kit’s book was intended to be definitive; it had taken him years to write and he reckoned on new discoveries about the spread of the disease along the way, but the topic was exhausted by the time he finished the manuscript. Sometimes, although he did not mean to, he blamed Rose for the length of time it had taken him. There were so many family commitments and obligations to fulfil, so much parent togetherness with the children to be honoured. He had almost wished they had not been so bright, so able. It would have been a relief, perhaps, to have had average hard-working children who made their way through the system and got steady average jobs at the end of it. Instead, he and Rose were saddled from the beginning with the knowledge that their children were university material, would go places, demand sacrifices beyond broken nights and hardship. Or, knowing what Olivia’s and Richard’s potential was, that he could have hidden it from people like his parents, who hung with delight and pride on the achievements of their grandchildren, as they had once done on his and his brother’s.

  His brother had never married. These children were ‘all they had’, as they reminded him, not just now and then, but constantly, in letters and phone calls and on visits. Cherish these creatures who are our hope of immortality. Let them be free spirits but make sure they are spirits in our own image. He remembered how daunted they were by Rose on her first arrival. She had worn too much make-up and too-pointed brassieres and stiletto heels and she was so nervous she could hardly speak, just sat turning a large ring which if he hadn’t known better he would have said was paste (and the gold looked good). If she had not had a teacher’s certificate his mother might not have made such a determined effort to be nice, and then to her surprise she had found that she liked Rose, and before long the idea had taken hold that she would be the ideal person for Kit to marry, as if it was she who had discovered her and not him. She had never been disappointed.

  Now they, his parents, were dead and he was richer (or at least he had spent their money on assets), and so were the children, and they had gone, and when he went home, after first getting elected, Rose would cry at night. He sometimes wanted to cry too, not for them, but himself. He would never write another book, or save another tree except as a Sunday horticulturalist. It was impossible to tell where the time had gone. If it was personal achievement which he craved, he supposed that he must be fulfilled in this as a parliamentarian, but his parents had missed even that, and anyway, they had been astute enough in life to have heard the victory turn hollow had they lived (his father had asked at least once a month when the book would be coming out up until a year before he died when he stopped without warning and did not mention it again).

  Kit went to Weyville much less often now that Rose had come to live in Wellington and refused to go back north with him; a situation which was making his life both difficult and embarrassing. His electorate ‘surgeries’ were virtually boycotted; he had cut them down from once a week, when first elected, to once a fortnight; he paid Harry Ryan a retainer out of his own pocket to open the office in between times — he slept at Harry’s place, too, now that Belinda had left him. Even though the filthy mess in the Kendalls’ house had been cleaned up after the break-in, he didn’t have the heart to stay there. ‘People are saying you’ve left me,’ he complained to Rose. ‘How can they say I’ve left you, when I’ve come to live with you?’ she said, smiling.

  Rose didn’t cry at night any more, or, in fact, at all. She gazed with seeming serenity at him each morning across the pottery coffee mugs she had bought at Clayshapes. Sometimes she seemed like a still centre that he could not penetrate. At other times she looked around her with an appraising eye. He knew that she was thinking how small their Hataitai flat was, and she was quite right; it was suffocating him.

  Without her it had been idyllic.

  Gamble believed in monetarism; the more the Minister of Finance’s policies came under fire as the second term of the fourth Labour Government staggered on, the more enthusiastically Gamble embraced them, or so it appeared to observers. But the unease on the Government benches had not escaped him. Backbenchers, who never, in their wildest dreams, had believed that they would be sent to power by their blue-ribbon electorates in 1984, saw their constituents turn against them with lightning speed. Many had given up jobs which would have progressed satisfactorily had they stayed in them; now they saw themselves facing unemployment after the next election. Kit Kendall had, reputedly, been a competent scientist who ‘got on’ with people. Rex Gamble supposed he would have been the head of a minor branch of a government department by now. Four years later it was unlikely that he would ever be re-employed by that department again.

  Gamble had been, and still was, a businessman. The sharemarket crash had left him shaken but intact. His interests were widely spread. Any shrewd operator, he believed, could have covered himself against the inevitable. He called it business acumen. Political commentators called it being in the know, observations he shrugged aside. But he was uneasy, worried about the infighting in caucus, and within the Party itself. With enough support he was certain the loony left, as he thought of their opponents, would renege on the deals the Government had in place. The Prime Minister was waivering on sales of the nation’s assets; there was talk of more benefit handouts, and the country was still in the grip of the unions. Gamble shuddered to think of spiralling wage rounds. And a change in direction would inevitably spell the end of his own political career, in much the same way that Kendall and his like already faced ruination. It was a fine line they all walked.

  He leaned across his desk, favouring Kit with a long scrutiny, as if inviting an exchange of candour. ‘Where was your wife for tho
se two days?’

  ‘Taking time out. Well, that was how she explained it to me.’

  ‘I see.’ He looked sad. ‘I understand the Prime Minister is having second thoughts about you sitting on the Select Committee on Internal Security.’ He tapped the file on his desk with meaning.

  ‘I’m not a security risk.’

  ‘I don’t think you are. I’d like you to sit on the committee. It would be bad news if you didn’t.’

  ‘It would be a public scandal. I might as well resign. You don’t need to tell me.’

  ‘I don’t want you to resign.’

  Too right, he didn’t, Kit thought, seeing it all.

  ‘If your good lady wife could just explain a few details about those missing days,’ Gamble was saying. He opened the file. ‘You see, there were these people she met along the way.’

  ‘She was upset. Someone had been giving her the hang-up treatment rather a lot.’

  ‘No voice phone calls. The weapon of the ’eighties. Well we all get those.’

  ‘They were driving her … well, she couldn’t take much more.’

  ‘Do they bother you much?’

  ‘I don’t get them.’

  Gamble looked pained.

  ‘And then our dog’s throat was slit,’ said Kit hurriedly. ‘She was pretty frightened. And our house was broken into.’

  ‘But that was after she left, I understand.’

  ‘What are you saying? Look, there was paint stripper thrown on her car. She couldn’t have done that. I know she didn’t do that.’ But his voice was uncertain.

  ‘Then there were the marchers.’

  ‘Oh, the marchers. Well, you know that didn’t come to much. It was full of crooks, that march.’

  ‘A handful of them did turn up in the end, as I recall.’

  ‘Half a dozen. I saw them in my office.’ Stung, he said, ‘But there were some good people amongst them. Wiki Muru is a fine person.’ It eased his heart to say this.