Acid Song (16 page)

‘A little like
Before Sunrise,
’ Linda suggested.

‘A little. But here they are both hiding something. They both have a secret, and as their back stories are revealed piece by piece we more want them to get together, and more see how impossible this is. We also see that they are both running away from the same problem, and that neither understands how to deal with it.’

‘So what are the secrets?’ Jonathon asked, and there was just the smallest glimmer of interest in his eyes. This question was inevitable, and Simon had decided in advance how it would be answered. Now, facing them both, seeing that for them this is what it all hinged upon, he almost lost his nerve. But he knew promises made through time, from old self to new, must be kept, or the illusion of self fails.

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘What do you mean you can’t tell us?’

‘If you want to know you have to read the whole screenplay.’

The silence lasted only a beat, but long enough to show that neither had been expecting this. Jonathon was the first to splutter his disbelief.

‘Are you seriously suggesting that unless we let you through to
the next round, you’re not prepared to show us why we should let you through to the next round?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m suggesting,’ Simon replied, although he felt none of the certainty he had hoped for. Clearly this was insane, and in the years to come he would regret this moment, and the moment when the promise had been made. ‘That’s the power of mystery.’

‘It’s nuts,’ Jonathon punctuated the judgement with a solid clearing of his throat, as if attempting to clear his distaste for the project.

‘I think I’d like to read it,’ Linda said. A look of undisguised disgust clouded Jonathon’s pretty face. There was history between these two and it was Simon’s good fortune to have arrived in the aftermath. He was being offered shelter amongst the debris.

‘Really?’ Simon asked.

‘Sure. You have the whole screenplay there?’

‘Yeah, of course.’ Simon fumbled it from bag to desk, and pushed it eagerly across the table, as if once past halfway it could not be given back.

The silence was surly, filled with conversations-to-come, between a man and a woman who had not yet agreed upon their places.

‘This doesn’t mean we’re accepting the idea of course,’ Jonathon warned. ‘We’ll be asking to read a selection.’

‘But I’m through to the next stage?’

‘Apparently,’ he admitted.

‘We’ll call you,’ Linda added. ‘Some time in the next eight weeks. Congratulations.’

Linda rose and shook his hand. Simon skipped down the stairs.

‘How was that?’ asked the barmaid.

‘Better than I expected.’

‘Full bladder, you see. It makes all the difference.’

PADDY WAS AN old friend. Amanda had him to thank for introducing her to Simon five years before. It was during Paddy’s first entry in the 48 Hour Film Festival, where teams of hopefuls bravely attempted to squeeze their vast ambitions through the window-trap of a sleep-free weekend. Amanda was fresh out of a journalism course and had just blown the last of her loan money on a MiniDV camera, state of the art then, now drawing only a trickle of interest on TradeMe. Camera ownership promoted Amanda to ‘director of filming’ (Paddy was ‘director’ which meant he got to hand out the titles) while Simon was a friend of Paddy’s from the theatre and film course up at the university: ‘Really funny, he’s already written most of his first screenplay, he’ll be excellent for the script, fucken lucky to be working with him.’

Simon’s advertised hilariousness was in fact a delicate flower: reluctant to bloom and easily damaged. The ‘legendary editor’ Paddy had found was unfamiliar with their software and the lead actress, doubling as the carefully cultivated object of Simon’s affection, refused to utter what Simon considered to be one of the best lines he had ever written, so murdering the nascent relationship.

The film was submitted incomplete and the public showing three days later was excruciating. Simon and Amanda drowned their sorrows together, and one thing led to a lover. It was another year
before Paddy, in an alcohol-assisted spurt of self-pity, revealed he had only invited Amanda on to the project because he ‘had feelings for’ her (how quickly the camera was forgotten).

These days Paddy worked at the Film Archive. He wore a lot of black and had discarded his contact lenses in favour of glasses. He had recently taken up smoking. His was the indomitable sort of optimism that allowed him to believe that if only he could get these few details right, the rest would surely fall into place. Amanda didn’t see so much of him any more, but he was always friendly, and good for a favour. Eager to help. He waved at her from behind the counter and ran around to release the door.

‘I’ve found the tape,’ he informed her, bursting with pride. ‘It’s easy enough, if you know where to look. Karl was meant to be doing the cataloguing of the news footage, but he turned out to be full of shit, so Grant’s had me doing it on weekends.’

Paddy turned and led the way through to the viewing room, the spring in his step immediately unsettling. Amanda remembered how vulnerable he was to suggestion. He had started to put on weight: a little bulge of fat had made itself comfortable above the waistline and was settling in for the journey.

‘You want to wear headphones? Or we can just listen through the sound system if you like. I was going to set it up in the theatre, but Karl’s screwed the projector again. I could probably fix it though, if you want to wait, have a drink…’

She shook her head and sat in front of the small screen. Paddy hovered at her shoulder. She felt his eyes pass quickly over her breasts, like a draught skimming through the room.

‘Headphones would be good.’

Paddy handed them to her, his fingers brushing hers. Five years had passed. How could it be that in his head the same nostalgic reel was still playing? He sat down beside her and stared expectantly at the screen.

‘You want to get another pair of headphones?’ she asked him, before he could suggest sharing.

‘No, it’s all right. I’ve already seen it.’

He hit play and sat breathing heavily beside her. Amanda shrugged off his presence: a cloud to the side of the sun.

Paddy had made good with his promise. The screen filled with the faded colours of 1981. A studio host in a brown suit attempted to match the dignity of the occasion, but was foiled by the lushness of his sideburns. Amanda marvelled at the way this hair had been allowed to grow into its natural waves. The programme was filmed two weeks before that year’s general election, the day the ‘meet the candidates’ roadshow arrived in Palmerston North. There was a sputtering of studio audience applause as the two guests were announced: the applause choking quickly as somewhere off a floor manager reminded the people this wasn’t
It’s in the Bag.

Amanda was reminded of the rugby books her father treasured, full of black and white photos showing fifty-year-old men with stern faces representing the All Blacks. So it was with Richard who sat across the low table from his opponent, squirming in the chair, his forehead already beaded with sweat. His frame was a little lighter, and his hair a shade darker; but the blue suit, the broad tie, the chrome framed chair … somehow he had always been old.

The thirty minutes to follow represented the end of the part of his life Richard refused to speak of, which in turn had only made Amanda more assiduous in her research. Up until this point the polls had put Richard well ahead, something of a surprise given that he was taking on an incumbent. Richard had come to be spoken of, in the viral manner of lazy editorials, as the respected intellectual who didn’t talk down to the people; a man for all seasons, young and vital; a liberal who grew up on a farm; a man who could build bridges in a country whose faultlines had been exposed.

This night was to have been his crowning glory. He was a polished
public speaker, a formidable intellect with the pertinent facts always at his fingertips, strong in his convictions, not frightened to express an opinion. It was meant to be an easy victory, the sort that would benefit not only Richard, but his party too. The first step.

The MP sitting across from him in the studio had been written off, a journeyman who had ridden his luck too far. He was a small man with quiet eyes lost beneath an exaggerated forehead. A man who had failed to serve the local constituency with any sort of pride and now sat waiting on his expired meter. Or so the script had been written.

With the benefit of hindsight to sharpen her vision, Amanda saw the things the commentators at the time had missed. Richard moving about in his chair during the introductions, looking one size too large for the furniture, the glass of water beside him already empty. And Brendan Ward by contrast sitting dead still, not a bead of sweat on his generous scalp. His eyes may have been small but they were steady, and the expression on his peculiar face exuded calm. Slack, perhaps. Uncommitted, certainly. But a politician nonetheless. An expert in this game. Cornered, roused from his three year slumber, waking. Amanda imagined she saw the slightest of smiles pulling on the corners of his mouth. She could hardly bare to watch.

As the sitting MP Brendan Ward got to speak first, and calmly filled the policy vacuum with worthy platitudes. ‘These are hard times,’ he told his audience. ‘Prices are rising, jobs are falling, debt is accumulating, the world economy has turned its back on us and here at home our private hatred has spilled out into the streets.’ An odd approach to take perhaps, listing one’s own failings first, but the pitch, if a little morally malnourished, was at least simple. We’ve screwed up, and the other lot might turn out to be even worse. Of course he didn’t put it quite like that – he spoke of caution, of steadfastness, holding one’s nerve – but it was easy enough to
translate. Richard should have been able to put him away in the first round. Who wouldn’t have been expecting it?

Amanda listened carefully, trying to hear in Richard’s first faltering words the rewriting of history she longed for, the rebuttal that was never delivered. But television is made to look effortless by experts. This was strange territory for Richard and he was nervous. Beneath the harsh studio lights the camera magnified every symptom, making tragedy of his good intentions. Try though she did to see past it, Amanda too was drawn to the beads of sweat, the bobbing head, the big swallowing breaths, the thick lips made clumsy by sentences that tonight refused to behave. She saw what the voters saw, what the television demanded they see.

Where Brendan Ward had made the three minutes feel like ten, building smoothly to his dishonest conclusion, Richard’s allotted time scrunched itself up small, and his words couldn’t be made to fit inside it. When the interviewer politely called a halt he was barely through his introduction, and his hasty dismount left the audience confused. He looked surprised, lost for a moment: the sort of incomprehension you associate with the very young and the very old. The vulnerable. Amanda wanted to reach back through the years and hold him. Tell him everything would be okay, that he wasn’t the first to have been ambushed. But she didn’t want to vote for him.

‘So tonight we have three areas of concern, and we will split our time between them. Each candidate will have an opportunity to answer a question provided by our studio audience. Richard Bradley, to you first then. And the question comes to us from Russell Kaye from Feilding.’

Russell Kaye wore a geometrically patterned jersey and had carefully combed his hair down for the big occasion.

‘Yes, my question to both candidates is where did you stand on The Springbok Tour and why?’

The question had lurked in the background of every public meeting this election. Are you Us, or are you Them? To which tribe do you belong?

‘In the end I think history will be our judge,’ Richard opened. ‘And although I have upset many people over the last few months by expressing this view, I remain loyal to the stance I took, and indeed I remain proud of it. It would be easy for me to deny what was clearly an unpopular viewpoint in this electorate but I don’t want to be the sort of politician who blows in the wind of popular opinion. I, ah, look, let me put it this way, if sport and politics don’t mix, and economics and politics don’t mix, and religion and politics don’t mix, and family and politics don’t mix, then I don’t think that leaves politics with enough for us to even be bothering with this election. I haven’t entered politics in order to keep it out of our lives. I have entered politics because I believe it can enhance our lives. That I think is the important thing.’

He breathed out a little at the end of that, and Amanda saw his broad shoulders drop as he relaxed. He believed he had answered well, and maybe he had, if only it had been in another forum. Brendan Ward leaned smoothly forward towards the live camera, as if what was to follow was intended to be shared with a single viewer. He did not wait to be invited to speak, for he was the sitting MP, this would be his floor until someone had the courage to wrestle it from him.

‘Let me say by contrast I am the sort of politician who does blow in the wind of popular opinion. I’m not here to tell you how to think, I’m here to represent your views: it’s called democracy.’

Someone in the studio audience laughed and there was a smattering of applause. The MP for self-advancement knew he was only a statement away from catching the wave.

‘And what’s more, I don’t think this is the time for preaching to the other side about the way history might judge them. This is a
time for putting a terrible episode behind us, for working together. I believe in mending bridges, not building fences. I didn’t enter politics to tell you how you should live your lives. You know that. I stand by my record on that.’

Again they applauded. A record of saying nothing, promising nothing, contributing nothing; yet somehow he made such moral indolence virtuous; implying that to hold a point of view was to rob the electorate of its sacred right to freedom. A ridiculous assertion, but Richard was not used to boxing shadows and before he could gather together a response the next guest questioner was on his feet, his moustache moving in time to the query he had practised all morning.