Clarice, now on the phone, said no, loudly, six times. No explanation, no pleasantries, just no. He wondered what was being asked by the poor supplicant on the other end. And whether he could persuade Clarice to start taking antidepressants.
‘I’m afraid not,’ Clarice said, and slammed down the phone.
His next patient plucked the skin around her hollow middle and whispered, ‘I’ve put on so much weight.’ She had baby-fine hair through which he could see her white scalp, down on her cheeks, red veins on pale eyelids. Her shoulders were sprinkled with dandruff and loose hairs.
He checked the admission notes. Forty-two kilos, and she was not short.
‘You’re underweight.’
She looked coy, simpered, picked fluff off her jacket, her expression lit with smiling paranoia: she wasn’t fooled. He was part of the regime, the conspiracy to make her fat. Mad, he thought. Anorexia actually makes you mad. The thinner you get the crazier you become. Another vicious circle. What if he leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers and said, ‘Listen, fatso. Listen, you unfuckable lardarse.’ Would that be enough to finish her off? It came to him how sane the last patient had been, with her strong body and her fiery blushes, her mortified laughter. This one was what his mother-in-law would quaintly call ‘away with the fairies’. It was usually the parents that started it, wasn’t it, forcing girls to finish meals, making food the currency of control. She had an inward look and a faint, bitter smile as he explained he was recommending she see a specialist psychologist, glad there was no immediate need to examine her; she looked so fragile, as if you’d leave bruises all over her, and she was emotionally volatile, the kind of person who generates endless complications. Get it wrong and she’d be screaming, and the state she was in now you’d always get it wrong.
As though about to cry, she squeezed her eyes shut. He looked at the space between her neck and her shirt collar, at her fine, vulnerable bones; he caught a sense of the pity he was trying to keep at bay as he slapped the cardboard file shut, handed her a note, stood up and ushered her to the door.
‘See my secretary.’
His hand looked like a massive paw shaking hers. Her fingers were cold. She stood at the reception desk facing Clarice, who glared over the rims of her reading glasses. Thin, hunched shoulders, child-sized limbs; she looked so lost. He remembered breaking up the DVD of Arthur Weeks’s film about a young woman with green eyes.
The sound it made, like the cracking of tiny bones.
In the mall he found books for Karen and Claire and magazines for Elke who didn’t like reading, and then spent twenty minutes being shown expensive tennis racquets in a sports shop. He wasn’t quite sure what he was doing. Told it would be better if Karen and Marcus tried the racquets themselves, he bought a T-shirt for Marcus and headed for the car park. He drove to the house, calling out to Claire as he unlocked the door but already sensing she wasn’t home. The hall was full of afternoon sunlight, dust revolving in the air.
He looked around, snooped a bit. The kitchen was tidy, even the food in the fridge was neatly arranged, her sensible veges and soups and low-fat dairy stacked in tidy piles, labels all up the right way. Unlike the eternally skinny and graceful Elke who lived on lollies and junk food, Claire dieted and jogged and survived half the time on carrots but with little effect; she was always cursing her figure, had spent her life at war with her own body. She felt she was too tall, her legs and bum were too fat; she was always hiding parts of herself under loose clothing. It was no use his telling her she had beautiful eyes and a terrific mind and a strong body she should be happy with, he could only hope she would work that out.
He sensed that Karen’s dislike of Claire was partly aesthetic: her daughter wasn’t pretty or chic enough. Claire’s look of Ford was enough to put Karen off; she had Ford’s brains and stubbornness and big, clear blue-grey eyes, and she shared her uncle’s lack of sartorial sense. Karen swore by retail therapy, but shopping was Claire’s idea of hell. Simon had heard Karen pointedly praising Elke’s outfits in front of Claire. Divide and rule. If Karen had been confident she wouldn’t have resorted to it, but she had to put Claire in her place. It was a pity. Karen went off like a banshee if he got in on the act; she insisted their elder daughter was impossible, she made herself unlovable and the friction was all her fault.
Claire would be out for a run. He went upstairs and looked in her room. The bed was made, the desk covered in paper held down with coffee cups and textbooks. He left the book he’d bought on her pillow, a note inside the cover. How to tell her he loved her? He settled for cheery and short, xxx at the end.
Hoping she might pound up the path in her running gear he sat on the garden wall and listened to his phone messages, the hot bricks burning the back of his legs. He called, but her cell phone went to voicemail.
They would be all right, Elke and Claire, and Marcus too. They were pretty much grown up, they had a conscientious mother and a family trust full of money, and all three knew their father loved them. It was a private compulsion of his, making sure they knew he loved them. He remembered the loneliness of childhood.
Time was an arrow and this was the point of it, he was adding up the score. He didn’t think he could get away with his half-truths to David. He needed to make sure his affairs were in order, as much as a person’s affairs could be said to be in order when he was about to lose everything and go to jail.
Karen, the children, his patients. Was this where he would leave them? It was time to start driving but he went on waiting for Claire, sweating in his suit, the afternoon sun sending down a relentless glare. What would he find when he got to Rotokauri? A little reception: Ray, Shaun, Jon, Ed Miles smiling thinly in the background? And perhaps Ms Da Silva herself, jinking a pair of handcuffs . . .
What do you care about? He thought about Ford’s nagging, his insistence that ‘apolitical isn’t good enough’. Ford had wound up his last censorious harangue with, ‘Admit it, Simon. Under your friend’s government the gap between rich and poor has got so wide it’s a scandal.’
It now occurred to Simon that every time Ford told him the gap between rich and poor had got wider, something in him thought: good. He’d left his poor past, made it to the right side of the gap, and if there was a distance between himself and the past, so much the better. David must feel like this too. This was why his most consistent message was that he stood for ‘aspiration’. He was aiming at people like himself and Simon. The ones who’d succeeded through their own efforts were the ones who cared most about keeping the gap wide. Simon’s own lack of politics was really politics of a basic kind: I am one of those who want poverty to exist so we can affirm our own sense of well-being.
He recognised the force of the feeling, saw it was morally wrong, and also saw that Ford didn’t understand it. Like Claire, Ford assumed that if you made people aware of inequality they would naturally want to remedy it. It hadn’t occurred to him that the ‘haves’ would reject the idea of levelling society, even if you could show them a way to make everyone better off. For all Ford’s talk of people being animals he hadn’t grasped this aspect of the animal kingdom; for all his and Claire’s intellectual toughness there was an innocence about them. They believed in the goodness of people.
‘Greed is good’ had the unspoken corollary: poverty is good. So long as it was someone else’s.
Simon gently flexed his knee. He thought: don’t mention these musings to Claire.
At Rotokauri, drinks were under way under the pohutukawa. Sharon Cahane had her foot up on a stool, her ankle wrapped in a bandage.
The Cock leaned back in his chair. ‘My wife will use any excuse to be waited on.’
Sharon rattled her empty glass suggestively at Trent, who advanced with a jug in which pieces of fruit bobbed in a thick, clear liquid. He bent and poured, she wafted a napkin over her suntanned décolletage and said to the Cock, ‘Your sympathy is touching.’
>
‘My wife swathes herself in bandages at the slightest mishap. Some call it a cry for help . . .’
Sharon’s laugh caused Trent to start. The jug wobbled.
‘In my wife’s case I merely call it strategy.’
The women leaned together, tapping pretty nails on their glasses.
‘A cry for help.’
‘He’s off again.’
‘He’s got that look on his face.’
‘If only he’d wear a sunhat. Colin darling, you look boiled.’
David and the Cock, summoned by a staffer, went off for a conference call.
Ed Miles suddenly stood up, shaking his sleeve, a pink stain spreading on the material. ‘Christ, Juliet. Can’t you be careful?’
Sharon said, languid, ‘Ooh Ed, your beautiful shirt. Is that a new one?’
Juliet’s cheeks were scarlet. ‘Sorry.’ She grabbed a napkin and tried to mop his sleeve; he snatched his arm away. ‘You’ve done enough damage, thanks.’
There was an awkward silence.
Roza said, ‘I don’t think people should talk to other people like that in my presence.’
Ed smiled with difficulty at Roza. Red spots appeared on his cheeks.
She said, ‘If they do, I think they should apologise. What do you think, Sharon?’
‘Oh definitely,’ Sharon drawled, fanning her chest, her eyes on Trent. Juliet looked down, her face rigid.
A little flare of rage burned in Ed’s eyes. He shrugged, smiled again at Roza and said, ‘So sorry. I’ll just nip off and change.’ He threw a napkin on the table and left.
‘Hmm,’ Sharon said. ‘Touchy!’
Juliet took a breath, fluttered her hands. ‘Oh, what can you do with them?’
Roza pressed her lips together, gave her a look of polite enquiry. ‘Do? With who? Whom?’
‘Men are hopeless, you know.’ Juliet smiled weakly and waved her hand, tipping over Karen’s glass, which was fortunately empty. ‘I’d better just go and . . .’ She didn’t finish, pointed across the garden and rushed off.
‘Off to fuss around him,’ Sharon said. ‘Off to grovel.’
‘Men are hopeless,’ Roza repeated slowly. ‘Do you know, I hate that one. Men are hopeless. So when men do nasty things — cheat, lie, beat us, make us wear our burqa — we don’t complain. We say cosily, “men are hopeless”. It’s the flipside of “all men are beasts” and it’s just as meaningless. It’s worse because it’s slavish.’
‘Touched a nerve, have we?’
Roza smiled, ‘Oh shut up, Sharon.’
‘My husband’s definitely hopeless.’
Karen joined in their laugh, giving Simon a look. ‘Yeah,’ she said.
Silence. Roza and Sharon glanced at her and then at each other, amused lift of eyebrows. Karen blushed.
‘Not wanting to gossip . . .’ Sharon said.
They laughed, since this was her usual opener to gossip.
‘Not wanting to gossip, but Janine told me she and Peter Gibson are going to counselling.’
‘Oh, her.’
‘Roza, you’re such a snob. Just because she wears leopard-skin miniskirts.’
‘Whole matching leopard-skin outfits. And drives that massive sort of tank. And her husband with his gold chain.’
‘And his dental implants. Those sparklingly whitened gnashers.’
‘But they’re extraordinarily rich,’ Karen said.
Another pause. Roza and Sharon looked at her.
‘Yes, they are,’ Sharon said, as though encouraging a child. She turned back to Roza. ‘They’re going to counselling because he had an affair with some little twenty-year-old.’
‘Ugh.’
‘Is that all you can say? Peter and Janine are very dear friends.’
Roza laughed, ‘Oh, rubbish.’
‘Well, of course, Colin only puts up with Gnashers for his own mysterious business reasons. Anyway, Janine’s panic-stricken old Toothy-Pegs is going to leave her.’
Roza signalled to Trent for a refill of diet Coke, held up her glass, thanked him nicely. She said, ‘Gnashers won’t leave her.’
‘No?’
‘No, he loves her. They’re perfect for each other. She should just keep calm and carry on.’
‘Well, that’s sage advice,’ Sharon said, brushing some invisible thing from her neckline.
Roza looked intently at her glass. ‘I’m not convinced by the idea of counselling.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You and David would never need it. You’re a dream couple.’
‘It’s not that. But what if a marriage is like a work of art? A completely unique work created by two individuals. How can an outsider intervene?’
‘That seems a bit complicated. What do you think, Simon?’ Sharon leaned towards him, rattling the ice in her glass.
He was realising the folly of mixing painkillers with Trent’s strong fruit punch. Tilting his glass at Roza he said, ‘She’s a work of art.’
‘Ah, such a gentleman. And how was your day at work?’
But he’d caught sight of Ed Miles heading back across the lawn, and didn’t reply.
Politics
‘Coming,’ Roza said. ‘I’m just talking to Johnnie.’
The Green Lady walked on the lonely shore with the Ort Cloud, the Dead White Cat, the Red Herring and Tiny Ancient Yellow Cousin So-on. Soon and Starfish followed.
“A rolling stone gathers no moss,” the Red Herring observed, and Tiny Ancient Yellow Cousin So-on added, “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.” The horizon was a haze of red against the black sea, and the Bachelor’s bed could be seen driving over the treetops, the feathers of the Cassowaries spiky in silhouette, the Bachelor lounging on the cushions, evening cocktail in hand.
“Look!” said the Green Lady. At the far end of the beach in the dusk, a figure was walking towards them.
It was Soonica, and she was alone.
Johnnie was handed over to Tulei, who backed out of the room with a disapproving look. Roza said under her breath, ‘Bless you, Tulei.’
In the dining room Roza told Karen she would have to move to the far end of the table because Ed enjoyed her company so much and she was sure they could squash in, Trent having brought an extra chair. There was an atmosphere of low-level tension among the help, even an outbreak of bickering, with Trent flouncing campily out of the room and Troy banging the door. The first course was cold and the second arrived in uneven batches, after which Simon heard David say to Roza, who was remonstrating with Shane or Chad, ‘You fire Jung Ha out of the blue, you get chaos in the kitchen.’
Simon gave up pushing his cold meal around the plate. He leaned close to Roza. ‘The gap between rich and poor. Ford says it’s getting wider.’
Roza dabbed her mouth with a napkin. ‘I know what your brother thinks.’
‘What about you?’
She looked vague. ‘When I was growing up, my father was the fourth-richest man in the country.’
‘Your money got David started.’
She glanced around. ‘Don’t say that to him.’
‘I wouldn’t. David always says you’re not interested in politics.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Ford says apolitical’s not good enough. It’s not intellectually good enough.’
She smiled and said, ‘Your brother’s so fierce’, in the indulgent tone all the women used for Ford, as if he were a noble savage: so sexily primitive and unspoiled. Which was a tremendous irony, Simon thought sourly, given that Ford regarded the women of Rotokauri as frivolous and anti-intellectual, and condemned their refusal to discuss anything serious.
Even Karen had started echoing the lenient tone. What a chameleon she was. Irritated, he’d reminded her, ‘But you hate Ford.’
‘He’s lonely, the poor man. Don’t be nasty about your own brother.’
‘What? I love my brother. You’re the one who said he shouldn’t even come here.’
‘Oh, don’t be mean-spirited, Simon.’
Now he whispered to Roza, ‘Is the gap between rich and poor too wide? I’ve just had a big tax cut and I earn a million a year. I didn’t need it. The poor got a tiny tax cut and a rise in GST. So the gap is . . .’
The look she was giving him was hard, faintly amused, slight curl of the lip.
‘Darling Simon. Don’t try to be Ford. It doesn’t suit you.’
Simon walked slowly along the path under the trees. Light spilled across the lawn and voices and music came from the open French windows of the big house, where David had shown no sign of wanting to go to bed. Figures moved behind the wire in the artificial green light of the tennis court. He heard Elke laugh. ‘Fuck off Marcus,’ she said. Beyond the dunes the sea was calm, with a sheen of moonlight. Someone called his name, he turned.
Ed Miles took off his glasses, polished them on a handkerchief and put them on, a studied move. Simon gave what he hoped was a look of mild inquiry. ‘It’s a beautiful evening.’
Miles looked down and smiled. ‘Oh yes.’
Simon said, too sharply, ‘Well, I’m off to bed . . . ?’
‘David wants a word.’
‘Now?’
‘He’s in the main office.’
Miles walked beside him. Were the three of them going to talk together? Should he ask Miles whether he’d found anything out? The adrenalin had started to run around his body, hard and sharp, as strong as pain, but his hands were steady. It was like this in the operating theatre; even on the rare occasions when things had gone wrong and some urgent reversal was required, his hands did not shake.
They crossed the deck, passed Ray and entered through the glass door, Miles following Simon.
David was leaning on his desk, his arms folded. Simon looked at Miles in the reflection of the glass, saw him nod at David and walk out, closing the door.
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