A memory came to him: a couple whose baby he’d delivered, the husband a gushing TV personality, Scott Roysmith. All psyched up to act in a drama called the wonder of birth, he’d told Simon about a night-time storm during which the lightning had lit up clear sky, great patches of bright blue in the dark.
‘I realised that if only you could see it, the sky at night is blue,’ Roysmith had said, while Simon tended to the writhing wife and the nurses popped in and out, checking on the celebrity patient. The wife shrieking at her husband to stick his blue sky up his arse . . . The baby was a girl, he remembered.
He had seen so many babies, handled them, looked into the empty blue of their eyes. Their eyes are always blue and cloudless, before they’ve lived. Because they haven’t lived.
I’ve helped people to be born. Does that even the score?
I can’t think of what I have done.
Marcus opened the car door.
‘Hi Dad . . . What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. Just thinking.’ He coughed. ‘Seatbelt.’
His bag was on the back seat. As they drove over the hills he could hear Weeks’s coffee cups clinking.
At the Gibsons’ there was no answer to their knock, but from inside came the sound of raised female voices, shrieks of raucous laughter.
Simon shouted out hello. Another collective shriek, then Janine called out, ‘Come in.’ The room was full of women and the floor was covered with balloons and feathers.
Janine, hectically rigged out in leather miniskirt, teetering golden sandals and a see-through top, came wading through the detritus. ‘Excuse us, we had a hen party last night. My Chloe’s getting married. We haven’t been to bed yet, we’re all a bit spacey. Have a coffee, Simon. Marcus, the boys are all on the boat, they’re waiting for you.’
Sharon Cahane was reclining on a white sofa, a gaudy pink boa draped along her elegant frame. With manicured fingers, she wafted an artificial feather over her nose.
Janine said, ‘We had a burlesque dancer come; she showed us how to strut our stuff.’
Sharon looked at Simon and minutely rolled her eyes.
‘Then we hired a bus and went back to town, to a strip club.’
‘It was hilarious.’
The way they all shrieked in unison. Native birds, he thought.
He said, polite, ‘I didn’t realise people still did these things. Hen nights.’
‘Course they do. The men had a stag party. They even got Colin Cahane on a jet ski.’
Peter Gibson put his head around the door. He winked, his face boiled. ‘All right, ladies? We’re off now, leave you to it. Gidday Simon, I’ll bring your boy back around eight. Colin’s coming; he can run Marcus over the hill.’
He disappeared, and the native birds shrieked again, as if the mere sight of a man was exquisitely funny. The feathers kicked up, drifted down.
Outside, the water glittering with points of light, the flags snapping. Gibson’s boat was heading out of the marina, churning through the green water. Simon felt he wasn’t quite present in the hot room; he had a sense of floating amid the brightness, the rustle and stir of balloons and feathers, the yellow rectangle of light sliding across the ceiling and down the wall as the boat glided past, its hull reflecting the sun. A hen party. Were these people stuck in a time warp?
His grip on things had loosened, leaving him uncertain. He seemed to be groping for explanations. While the world spun, while the world raced on (flood fire tempest famine) these women floated in their provincial, feather-headed bubble. He thought . . . He thought, Don’t tell Claire. And then, yes, tell her. Describe every detail. Strip clubs, balloons, feathers. Claire would be merciless.
But the women were not oblivious to the world. The coffee and cake roused them from their hungover torpor, and they started to talk. They frowned, serious. The faux accents, that had slipped a bit, returned.
‘They have another baby so they can get more benefit . . .’
‘They’re draining the country dray . . .’
‘. . . lazing around . . .‘
‘. . . on taxpayers’ money.’
‘The country’s drowning under the . . .’
‘Welfare dependency . . .’
There was a short silence.
Another yacht went by the window. Janine yawned, covering her mouth. Her gold bracelets pinged.
‘Colin wants to buy shares in a vineyard . . .’
‘Oooh, lovely.’
‘Don’t talk to me about waine. My poor head . . .’
The shriek of mirth was more subdued, they were yawning, glazed. Sparkling dust floated in the shafts of sunlight.
Simon got up, made his excuses, left them among the drifting feathers, slumped in their pile of boas.
How Could You Have
Got This So Wrong?
He turned onto the Rotokauri road, winding up into the hills. Near the summit, where the land fell away from the highway in steep slopes, he pulled over, walked up and down the edge of the road, looking into the dark bush, listening. He saw his reflection in the side of the car, tall and thin and curved. The wind sighed in the tops, a native pigeon landed on a branch and looked pompously down at him.
Taking Mereana’s phone, he threw it so hard he hurt himself. Instead of soaring away into the valley it hit a tree, rebounded and disappeared, too close to the road. He couldn’t even get a simple thing like that right. The pigeon cocked its head, watching him as he stooped on the roadside, straightening his elbow with elaborate care. Crime was a young man’s game. It was killing him.
He leaned against the car, feeling the warmth of the metal against his sore leg and his strained elbow. He heard Weeks’s voice. Do you miss her? Feel guilty? He raised his eyes and there was the pigeon, stupid, astonished, preening its white bib.
Should he throw his phone and Weeks’s coffee cups down there too, or find another spot? Was it better to spread the evidence, or would that make it easier to find? A little stab of self pity: he was so beleaguered and alone, so inexperienced. He needed support, information, peer review (the little gnome in his head, blackly laughing). He needed the hushed silence of his office and a textbook that would tell him: Disposal of incriminating evidence: international best practice.
Pressing his fingers to his eyes he saw red sunrise against his lids. Then he straightened, fighting the urge to turn, run.
‘Hi,’ he said.
The man coming towards him was big and broad, with a satanic little goatee beard.
‘All right, mate?’
‘Yes. Fine, thanks.’
‘Not broken down?’
How had he arrived without any noise? It was unbelievable. Simon looked for the milk float or silent Prius, but saw only an ordinary red Holden Omega, its driver’s door open and the still shape of a woman, vigilant in the passenger seat. But the athletic build, the Holden, the official tone, that Westie brute’s goatee: a cop, he thought. He twitched the bag on his shoulder.
‘Just on the phone. Getting bit fresh air.’ His tongue was frozen; it was like talking through a mouthful of porridge.
The man was already turning away, making a signal to his passenger.
‘But thanks for asking,’ Simon called after him.
The man turned, actually looked at him, considered, seemed about to ask another question but only said, ‘No worries.’
The red Omega pulled away, Simon raising his hand.
Leaning back against the car, his arm to his face, he had a moment of bitter incredulity. A cop. Possible cop. Even if not a cop, a witness, in fact two witnesses, who had seen him in this spot, who would remember later if questions were asked. They would search the bush beneath the road, find the phone.
He was already plunging down the slope, his feet sinking into the soft piles of rotting vegetation, looking for the tree the phone had hit. Everyth
ing looked different below the bush canopy and he was soon disorientated. The bush smelled of tea and spices, a rich brown reek. The air was cool near the ground; he skidded, landing on his rump in a pile of rotting nikau fronds, their fibrous dust rising around him. He lay on his back for a moment, gazing at the sky. Against the blue the manuka trunks were black, covered in a furry fungus. A weta, its feelers waving, scrambled over the top of a dislodged palm frond, so close he could see its shiny black eyes. He flinched away. A car droned by on the road above.
After an age of searching he slumped down on the soft ground and his eye fell on something metallic inside a pile of manuka twigs. The phone had landed in the centre of a network of spider webs strung among dead leaves and fallen branches. He stuck his hand into the sticky membrane and extracted the phone, tearing the webs away with it.
It was a long way back up to the road. He fought through a patch of toetoe and cutty grass that he hadn’t passed on the way down, and tore his shirt on a tree branch. When he reached the road his mouth dropped open, he could have sunk to his knees. The car was gone.
He set off walking one way, changed direction, dithered, rounded the next bend and found it parked exactly where he’d left it. He should have realised: in the bush, sense of direction is the first thing to go.
At Rotokauri he bumped the car over the rough grass drive and through the gate, remembering a wave for the watchful sentries, Jon, Shaun, Ray. With a sense of futility — the farce he’d made of things — he left the car and shouldered his bag of contraband, heading for the Little House.
All was silent and the sun’s blaze was pitiless, the trees still in the heat. Even the birds were subdued, their squawks drowsy. On the other side of the lawn Trent or Troy crossed the shell path, plugged into an iPod and actually dancing, clicking fingers, swinging elbows. Simon watched him shimmy past in the silence. He disappeared behind a tall hedge and reappeared on the slope of a further lawn, a figure cut out of light, graceful and mad. He turned and seemed to beckon, as though drawing Simon into the strange, dark core of the world. The garden was a mesh of bright colour, the light so merciless it seemed it could fray the very substance of matter, revealing what pulsed behind.
The image suddenly reared up before him of Weeks’s grotesquely distorted body, his splayed limbs and vulnerable, bare, boyish ankle.
He closed his eyes, listening. Yes, it was there, the shimmering wall of sound.
In the hot utility area behind the Little House, among the rubbish bins, piles of recycling and reeking containers of rotting garden clippings, he loosened a brick from the wall and set to work smashing the coffee cups into dust. It was harder than he’d expected; the pieces kept shooting about and getting lost in the grass and he had to stop every few minutes to make sure he was still alone. In his agitation he hit his own thumb with the brick, raising a dark crimson half-moon of blood in the nail.
He had seen plenty of death, had handled bodies, babies who died being born or were born dead — you filled out the form Status: Not Born Alive. Sometimes, rarely, women died in childbirth or afterwards from complications, and he and the team would pull off their masks and step back and listen, as if they could hear the grief building behind the swing-doors, in the waiting rooms and corridors.
I have prevented deaths. I’ve brought babies back to life when they were floppy and blue. I have held back death. Does this count in the score?
——
In the stillness the tuis let out little exhausted warbles and clicks, pure drops of sound. A rosella flashed between the trees. After their pounding, Weeks’s coffee cups lay in blue and white shards on the concrete slab beneath the bins. Simon scuffed them about with his foot, replaced the brick and limped inside.
In the bathroom he washed his hands and rinsed his face, dabbing gingerly at his sunburnt cheeks. He wondered how to dispose of the phones; he had yet to construct a plausible lie if he were asked about Weeks’s having called him. Brooding on this he shambled out of the bathroom and smashed his knee into a table leg. He hopped back into the bathroom, scrabbling for the pain pills. All that bending over the coffee cups hadn’t helped the injury; the skin below the bandage looked red and tight. He pushed his finger doubtfully into the strange-looking flesh.
It was good to take the weight off and sink down on the soft bed. He plunged into a queasy, uncomfortable sleep; he seemed somehow to be hanging on, as if the bed were tilting, and at one point had the sensation of being awake but paralysed and unable to rouse himself, his breath growing shallower and his limbs inert until, with a massive effort, he wrenched himself towards consciousness. He sank into sleep again and saw Ford’s wife May, her shiny dark eyes fixed alertly on him, one hand to her glossy hair, bracelets jingling as she flicked a strand from her face.
He woke, dozed, woke again, thinking about May. She was beautiful, but what had always struck him was her intelligence. She gave the impression she could see into his soul; worse, she was greatly inclined to laugh. It was her ridicule he had feared. Once, lulled by an implausible rumour that the old man had dried out, Ford had unwisely taken her to meet Aaron. May was Sri Lankan and Aaron, after downing about a barrel of whisky, had unleashed a tirade of racist abuse. Ford had feared he’d lost her but she’d come back. After the old man had gleefully called her, among other appalling things, a ‘curry bitch’, May had shrugged it off. All she asked was that they never see Aaron again and Ford had been happy to oblige her on that.
His thoughts blurred. That May. In the dreamlight, her gaze held him. And she began to dance, very slowly at first, without taking her eyes off his face, and then she began to spin, until her body blurred and the air around her began to whirl so fast that light was gathered in and he was looking at a cone of spinning air, points of light glittering inside it.
‘Make it stop,’ he said.
May said, ‘But this is not my dream.’
He coughed, rose on his elbows and nearly cracked his head on Karen’s forehead. She was leaning over him, her ruby pendant dangling on its chain and coldly touching his nose.
‘Sorry. You looked so peaceful,’ she said.
She stood at the window, arms crossed, one hand cupping an elbow. The pose was theatrical. She turned, swung her arms, went to speak and then gazed away out the window, her eyes on a distant point.
Christ, out with it. Spare me the pantomime. She had presented him with a glass of iced water. He sipped it irritably.
‘We need to talk.’
‘Ah yes?’ He raised his eyes, a sudden ache in his teeth from the cold water.
‘Your behaviour. I can’t . . . It’s not . . .’
He sighed, waited.
‘Even your expression right now, you should see yourself. Like a sort of gargoyle.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You look contemptible. I mean contemptuous. There’s something I have to tell you. That silly Kessler test. It didn’t tell me I was normal. It said I was stressed.’
‘Really.’
‘It made me think about why that would be. I’m worried about Elke. But there’s also our marriage. Your behaviour . . . When we eat dinner, I look up and you’re waiting for me to finish. Just staring at me, waiting. When we go to the beach you wait for me to stop lying in the sun. Anything we do, you stand about waiting for it to end, with that gargoyle look on your face. I don’t think you’re capable of enjoying anything we do. You terrify me in the car with your speeding. You hardly eat. You’re thinner. Sometimes when you look at me all I can see are these huge, cold, pale eyes with tiny little black pupils in them and this square grey face, and it’s like being looked at by a reptile.’
He cleared his throat. ‘Don’t hold back.’
‘I want to tell you something.’
There was more? He pressed the glass against his eyes.
She sat down next to him on the bed. The springs let out a small affronted squeak.
‘Simon, I know you had an affair. OK? There’s no point in denying it. Women know. I don’t know who it was with or anything about it, but I know it happened, and that it ended a while ago.’
He stared.
She’d never said a word. His Karen, who was so straightforward, an open book, who couldn’t control herself and always blurted out whatever was on her mind no matter how tactically foolish, who was . . .
Admit it, who was simple-minded. Beautiful, graceful and simple-minded. The perfect, undemanding presence, radiant with common sense, wonderfully unimaginative and calm, the sexy, dyed-haired goddess whose greatest pleasure was to receive the wealth, to revere him for his manly skill at bringing it home, to spend it on trappings, trappings, oh God.
She fingered the ruby pendant. ‘The details aren’t important now. I know you, Simon. I know you think I’m a featherbrain. It’s my fault in a way.’
‘Your fault?’
‘How else would I have got you to marry me? It’s another thing women know. They can tell what men want. If they want the man, they give him what he wants. Featherbrain, ice queen. Whatever. Get it?’
Silence.
‘I know what you wanted. Like I keep telling you, women know. You didn’t want to live alone, but deep down you did. You wanted to be with someone who wouldn’t really know you. Who wouldn’t see you. So that you could be married and have a family but in yourself, you could be alone.’
He looked at her almost with fear.
‘But here’s the thing. Sometimes you’ve wished you weren’t alone. You’ve looked out of your little hermit’s cave and wondered why you took such a lonely path. Why it was even necessary. And you dreamed of being in love. Requited love.’
His eyes burned, he squeezed them shut. How could she be capable of an insight like that? It was almost supernatural. He had an alarming sensation, something catastrophic happening to his chest. To be understood. Stripped bare. It was pain but the pain was exquisite.
‘Get it, Simon? I wasn’t “not seeing you” all this time. I was looking away. Because that was what you wanted.’
Soon Page 15
