Funny how the embarrassment was the worst of it, getting up in front of all the beady eyes, threading through the rows, the teacher’s face, half censorious, half thrilled by the interruption. His mother’s gestures impossibly exaggerated, the faces she made as she explained in a stage whisper. The memory sent a chill of shame up his spine. He and Ford had got in the car still holding their singing sticks. They threw them out on the highway, watched them bounce away, over and over . . .
All afternoon huge white clouds came together and broke apart, their edges seamed with dazzling silver. He sat on the deck of the Little House, massaging his knee, desultorily going through a few physio exercises. In the last hours the knee had developed an irritating click, the sound made him wince. He brooded. The knee, Karen’s look of persecution as she trudged away towards the dunes. Elke’s luggage. His mind made the leap: he still had the DVD of the three short films by Arthur Weeks, stuck in the side pocket of his suitcase.
Picture it. The damp room, the bare table and chairs. The thickset interrogator with his eyes of ice. Yes, Dr Lampton. Arthur Weeks. Remember him? The guy you’ve ‘never met’. And what do we find but a DVD of his very own films stuffed in your suitcase.
He went to get up, the knee clicked horribly, he sank down, so exasperated by this new consideration it settled on him almost like boredom. Crime. Who knew it would be so utterly, exhaustingly irksome? If only he could wave a lordly hand and shout from his office, ‘Clarice, another piece of incriminating evidence.’ And she would bustle in with her fat and her irony and her spinsterly devotion, and clutch it to her massive bosom, and make it go away.
Only she’d be back, wouldn’t she, popping her head around the door. ‘Just off home, Simon. I’ve binned the DVD, but what do you want me to do about the phone records?’
Crime was a terrible little car chugging along while from its exhaust pipe a cloud of foul black smoke billowed and billowed and eventually obscured the road ahead and behind, no going forward, no way back. That’s what crime was. Yeah.
He closed his eyes.
Were criminals ever captured because they just couldn’t be bothered any more? Yes, those would be the cases where they said, ‘In the end, he wanted to be caught.’
He opened his eyes. A tui let rip with the most elaborate trilling and piping, clicks, whirrs, plonks, drips of sound; it ran through its whole repertoire while he stared at it in disbelief. It got him on his feet at least, the tyrannical soloist, the arsehole. The tui: our woodland Cacofonix. Was it his imagination, or was he laughing more? Perhaps the closer you got to losing everything, the funnier it got. It would be nice to think so.
Unable even to face the problem of the DVD, he limped to the pool. He entered the path between the hedges and saw Roza and Ford at the edge of the pool, steadying a purple blow-up dinosaur while Johnnie launched himself onto it. There was a loud squeak as child and plastic connected. Under the little boy’s weight the dinosaur bent fore and aft, as if it was eating its own tail. Roza had her hand on Ford’s shoulder.
Something in him assented sadly, without bitterness. He loved Roza, but she would prefer Ford, because Ford was more attractive. It was nature, what could he do? Everyone found Ford more attractive. When the two brothers were together, faces turned from Simon to Ford; he drew people, because he was sure of himself. In the same way, people gazed at Elke a lot more than they were willing to contemplate Claire, something Claire had realised, absorbed into herself, a wound. But these bitter little wounds made you lean and hungry, they sharpened you. If she wanted one, Claire might score herself a better husband than Elke because she knew she was plain. She couldn’t afford to be dreamy or lax. Likewise, David craved money because he’d been poor. Ageing men yearned for young women, because of the youth they’d lost. And Simon? He’d done his share of clawing and grabbing. Yes, sure.
He dumped his towel and began swimming lengths, avoiding Johnnie on his slowly revolving plastic barge. He swam until his arms gave out then lay down on a deck chair in the sun.
Johnnie called from the pool. Roza got him out and tucked him in a towel on her deck chair. Simon dozed. The slop of the pool water in the pump. Ford turning the pages of his book. He dreamed he was far out at sea, drifting amid the wrack and rot, the mild blue water stretching far. Roza’s voice.
When Soon and Starfish brought news from the battle against Barbie Yah, the Red Herring stared long and hard into the fire. Finally he looked up and gave a rare smile.
“Loose lips sink ships,” he said.
Simon sat up. Johnnie was watching him.
Uncanny child. Those startling eyes.
Evening. A full table, at the head of which David, to the delight of the group, was explaining how it was going with Dean, and those exercises for the enhancement of his gluteus maximus.
Simon was hardly eating and was drinking steadily, first two of Troy’s powerful gins, now wine. They’d both crossed a line, he and Karen. He’d done the unthinkable and she’d said the unsayable; he guessed what she’d lost with her outburst. If only she could have kept her cool, let the girl go off and be with her little brother, no big deal, waited until they were back in Auckland and claimed her with kindness and humour and all the natural affection between them. But she’d lost it, set up a barrier; she’d antagonised, forced Elke to make a choice, the fool. Worse, she’d insulted Roza to Elke’s face. She’d likely damaged his relationship with Elke too, with her raging and jealousy. But we’re all fools, and weak, who among us can keep cool when the situation demands tactical shrewdness, iron self-control? He wondered whether Roza had goaded Karen, tweaked her jealousy. It wouldn’t have taken much. He remembered Claire’s little warning he’d dismissed so easily, ‘Roza hates Karen. Hates her.’
Karen was flushed, her eyes glittering, she laughed too long and loud at David’s jokes; he felt nervous watching her. Poor Karen. After her outburst she’d cried a bit, moped for an hour, eventually trudged off to the beach for a swim, refusing his company, hand to brow; no, no, she wanted to be alone. Left on the deck he reproduced in his mind Elke’s face as she slammed the door, she who had been always the dreamy, inept and clumsy one; hilariously so: she couldn’t make a sandwich without dropping bits all over the floor, she bumped into doors, she created mess wherever she went, a room as neat as a pin would magically disarrange itself as she entered, books would slide off piles, cushions would fall to the floor. So unlike Claire’s athleticism, and manly driving, and spartan room, Claire the brilliant, plain one, all wry humour, freckles, shapeless legs, big bum, the one Karen didn’t love but he did; he should have listened to her, his clever girl. What else had Claire said: that he and David were alike, that David was in love with him, or was it that David was in love with the idea of him? No, that was going too far. She had a vivid imagination, his Claire, and a tendency to humorous bitterness.
Yes, Elke lived in a dream, but think of her expression, slamming the door in Karen’s face. Out of the blurred, childlike beauty something hard and sharp had formed. This was what Karen was up against, why she could never win — if you could call it winning — the thing she wanted, the hold she wanted to have. That expression, or — what could you call it? — that quality, he’d seen forming in his adopted daughter’s face, was the very essence of Roza.
At the evening hour, the quiet voices. Burners had been lit to keep the insects away, trailing black lines of smoke in the air. The attendants hovered, David shifted his conversation from workouts to movies, the women argued with him over films and stars. When he laughed they laughed, when he looked serious they lowered their eyes and vaguely smiled.
The sea was calm and gleaming under the moon.
There was an unwritten rule at the table: no political talk. If Simon had said ‘Should our soldiers be in Afghanistan?’ or ‘Has American foreign policy actually changed since Obama?’ they would smile, their eyes would slide away. They talked about which schools were
good and the best ways to fundraise, the Cock and Ed talked about boutique wines and investing in vineyards, David ranged from movies to restaurants to the merits of foreign resorts. Roza complained privately about inane conversation but she was apolitical and rarely talked about the outside world. She did know a lot about books. She worked for a publisher and they all respected her knowledge. If a book was mentioned, people said, ‘Roza will have read it’ and often she had, or she knew about it; it was her party trick, she would smile and say, ‘Actually, I do know about that one’, and tell them a bit, not too much, just enough to show she could tell you more if she chose. David would beam with pride. My beautiful, clever wife. Not just a pretty face.
David didn’t read recreationally: novels bored him and he didn’t fancy non-fiction. Aside from work, money was his interest; he pursued it single-mindedly, with devotion. Although his personal interests were in blind trusts there were ways around that, trusts set up to mirror the blind trust, other methods only he and Ed discussed. In rare moments of spare time he watched television, sitting hunched forward with his fingers pressed to his temples. House. Grey’s Anatomy. CSI New York. He called it ‘chilling out in front of the box’. This was a phrase associated in Simon’s mind with ‘Me Time after the gym’. The fatuousness made him wince, although he wouldn’t have admitted it to Claire. Or Ford.
Simon had locked away his own political instincts; they’d been swamped by David’s friendship. He thought about Ford’s take, which Ford had relentlessly hammered out to Simon at pre-dinner drinks. Side by side in wicker chairs holding their tinkling tumblers of gin, far enough from the main group that Ford’s quiet tirade couldn’t be heard, thank God. The deficit was huge, Ford said, unemployment was climbing, the government was borrowing vast sums every week, they’d cut taxes to the rich (true, Simon’s income had increased: good) and they were slashing social programmes to pay for it. The poor were finding it increasingly hard to buy food. They were building extra prisons for the underclass they were creating. And this was a court, Ford whispered relentlessly, that was increasingly cut off from the nation it was supposed to serve. They weren’t even worrying, these airheads, they were talking about Brad and Angelina (in the last few minutes a heated debate about the Jolie-Pitt twins) and Jennifer Aniston (was Jen still hot?) and the best method for the maintenance of swimming pools, and whether their expensive private schools were giving value for money.
‘I’m grateful for the insight you’ve given me,’ Ford said. ‘They’re even more frivolous than I’d imagined.’
Simon scowled. Ford had a tiny pearl of spit in the corner of his mouth. Pompous prick. Ford and Claire: the bitter ones. Never impressed, always negative. Always looking for the bad. Ford didn’t mind hanging around Roza, though, did he . . .
Now across the table the Cock and Gibson were leaning close together, Gibson writing something on a table napkin, the Cock nodding with a faint curl of the lip. Gibson showed his too-white, too-even teeth, waving the bit of paper, blurred with booze as usual. The Cock sat back.
‘Maybe,’ he said coldly and stretched out his long arm to receive more wine from the hovering Troy without looking at the young man, who was looking down the front of Sharon Cahane’s low top, she clad in a kind of black catsuit that showed off her stunning figure, as tall and shapely as Roza’s although she was not quite beautiful, her features skewed at the corner of her mouth by a scar from a car crash. Having exhausted the topic of Brad and Angelina she had now begun to talk about her workouts, the thrill she got from being pummelled and told off and manipulated by someone as sexy as Garth.
‘Ooh, call me a cougar,’ she said, ‘an old cougar. Tell me you don’t love it, Roza, those long runs along the beach with Garth, the way he orders you about, the warm-downs.’
‘Mmm,’ Roza said, and Karen laughed like a good sport, and Roza turned to her, benevolently smiling, and signalled to Troy. Her sweet voice, honey-coated, but what did the coating conceal? ‘Karen, you look like you need more wine.’
Simon’s elbow slid off the table. Steady. Was he overdramatising? Looking around the laden table at the complacent faces, it seemed unbelievable that his secret could damage, even derail, something as solid as the government of a small, peaceful country.
But think. They would call it ‘The Weeks Affair’. It would be noted that he’d left the Prime Minister’s summer residence, killed Weeks and driven straight back to Rotokauri. ‘Taken refuge’ there. Lived with the secret there, disposed of evidence there, he who was a member of the Prime Minister’s extended family, his close, even his best, friend, and part of a group that included Ed Miles, the Minister of Police. The taint would spread and billow like black ink.
Should he kill himself? But the children.
David lit the Cock’s cigar, their faces illuminated red as they leaned together. A look passed between them.
Roza had moved to a soft chair at the edge of the deck. Elke came out of the house and sat down next to her, leaning close, and Roza put her arm around the girl and started pointing out the stars. The pot. The Southern Cross. The Cock watching them, Sharon’s harsh voice: ‘I said to him, don’t fuss. And you know what he does? He bins the whole suit. Because it’s got this teensy little mark you can’t even see.’
Juliet Miles laughed, glanced nervously at the Cock, red flaming in her cheeks.
The Cock looked levelly at them.
Sharon: ‘He’s listening. Don’t give me the evil eye, darling. You know you’re unbelievable.’
‘My wife is astonished again. My wife finds the extraordinary in everyday things.’
‘And then the other day, he—’
‘No, it’s not difficult to keep my wife diverted. There’s so much for her lively mind to take in.’
Ed said to Karen, ‘Enjoying the workouts? Losing weight?’
Karen gave him a wide-eyed look and moved away.
‘In fact, if my wife encounters more than one idea at once, she’s left reeling.’
Screech of laughter from Sharon Cahane.
Ford had fallen silent. He was staring at everyone grimly, as though making a final tally of the failings of each.
Simon went over. He said, quiet, ‘You’re looking left-wing.’
‘Feeling left-wing.’
They watched Elke and Roza.
Ford said in an undertone, ‘How can they not look alike and yet be so alike?’
‘Body language,’ Simon said. Sadness weighed him down. ‘We’ve lost her.’
‘No. You don’t lose people.’
‘But she wasn’t ours to begin with. We got her late, eight years old.’
‘Karen,’ Ford said.
‘Yeah, she’s . . .’ She was standing at the rail now, facing the sea, her arms crossed over her chest. A forlorn pose.
‘Life. Nothing’s fair.’
‘Thanks. That’s very comforting.’ Simon frowned, trying to hold on to a thought. His poor brain, marinated in Trent’s gins. ‘So if nothing’s fair, Ford, what’s the point of your politics? Why not just let nature take its course, let the poor die; that’s survival of the fittest.’
‘Some of us see human nature for what it is. But we still have a duty to elevate ourselves.’
Simon snorted. ‘Self-righteous bastard.’
Ford turned to him. ‘What do you actually care about, Simon? No, seriously.’
Care about? Family. David. Yes, he did love David. And Roza. His patients. In a different way.
‘I’d do anything to protect them,’ he said.
Ford looked at him, curious. ‘Protect? Who, Simon?’
Anything.
In the warm dark, fumbling with his suitcase, he pulled out the DVD in its plastic cover. It was turning into a big night over at the main house, they had the stereo cranked up loud. David must have got his second wind and no one would dare to go to bed before him.
> The sound of the bass drifted over the compound. At a party he’d once seen Sharon and the Cock, drunk, get up and head for the dance floor. Expecting middle-aged ineptitude they’d all been transfixed by the Cock’s dancing. His thin, sinister face expressionless, he’d danced with the smoothness of a pro. He was fit, no move he made was out of rhythm. His wife wasn’t bad either. ‘White men can dance,’ some wit had shouted but the Cock and Sharon just danced on, impassive, tranced, in their own world.
Unnatural that an uptight middle-aged man, a government minister, could move like that. Karen said that after she’d seen the Cock dancing she was even more scared of him than ever.
He shivered. Something walking over his grave. What to do with the DVD? Another swim? But the weather had turned in the late afternoon, the wind had got up and the sea was messy, running with currents, uneven waves rolling across the shorebreak and seaweed tossing in the hubble and bubble. White foam flying in the air, the gulls riding the currents. There was another big summer cyclone out in the Pacific Islands; they would be brushed by the edge of it. It had got hotter all evening. A suffocating humidity had crept over the settlement, until you felt you had to suck the air hard to get anything from it. The air was laden with moisture, everyone sweating. One minute Roza was pointing out the stars to Elke, the next they were snuffed out, the whole sky black and pressing down like a blanket.
For a moment he considered putting the DVD in the machine and watching it again. The story of Hamish and Anahera. Instead he went out the back and broke the disk and its cover into pieces. He had a sense of sacrilege, as if he was breaking Mereana’s bones, crack crack. There was an outside light faintly pulsing, moths and insects bombing into it. Mosquitoes settled on him, he slapped them away. Somewhere out beyond the light he heard rustling. He stopped and listened to the harsh chatter and purr of a possum, and in the distance a morepork crying. The sea was making a low roar, stirred up by a weather monster far away.
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