Drybread: A Novel (11 page)

'My neighbour's gone mad,' said Nicholas. He and Theo
were standing in the night on the stark, concrete top of the
building in which they worked. There was a small fortress
in the centre that housed the narrow stairwell and the
vitals of the central heating and air conditioning, a broad
strip on all sides and then a concrete wall to waist height.
There were grilles in the flat concrete to take rain, and a
few straggling pipes and antennae reaching up like the
enfeebled shoots on a vast stump.

It was an unauthorised place, but people came up anyway
seeking some respite from the offices and machine rooms
below. There were cigarette butts and small, flattened juice
packets on the north side, which gave a view towards the
river, the old law courts and grassed spaces. Even though
it was night, much of that was still visible because of the
city lights.

'Completely mad, I'd say,' said Nicholas.

'How's that?'

'He has these discussions with his dog, a runt of a
fox terrier so highly strung that it's in a constant state of
quivering agitation. He has discussions about politics,
bowel movements and diet, leaving pauses for the foxie to
reply, and then carrying on as if it has. Sometimes he laughs
at something the dog says that I can't hear. Spooky really.

He'll go on for ages, but whenever I meet him he's not
interested in neighbourly conversation. I'm no substitute
for the dog.'

'What's his name?'

'Rossiter,' said Nicholas.

The streetlights were on, and many rooms in the office
blocks were lit up, maybe for security, or for the cleaners
who came into the lost empires when everyone else had
gone home. There was always some traffic, especially taxis,
and some walkers also, loud and skittish in twos and threes,
or quietly making a solitary way.

'I'm not sure what to do,' said Theo.

'This is about Penny Maine-King?'

'I'm not sure what's the best thing,' said Theo. 'Her
husband wants a meeting to sort things out, and Penny
won't come out of hiding yet. She wants Zack Heywood
and me to go and talk to him in France.'

L'France. Jesus.'

'He has some sort of business there. I really want to
help if I can, and this might be the way to do it. I'm just
worried about stepping into the life of a family where
there's so much pain, so much at stake. I don't know what
she expects.'

'She expects you to want to sleep with her.'

'But it's not just her and me involved, is it?'

'Women see sex as the start of something,' said Nicholas,
'and men see it as an end.'

'But it's not really about that. If you want to be with
someone you have to take on what's important to them
— the accumulation of their lives. Their grievances and
achievements become your own. I don't seem to be very
good at that.'

'Don't get gun-shy because of what happened with
Stella,' said Nicholas softly. Flippancy and cynicism put
aside for a moment, he leant forward over the concrete
wall in pretence of observing some activity in the street
below. 'I wish to God some woman was interested in me,'
he said.

Theo had no reply to that. The sincerity struck home
though, and a sense of the loneliness Nicholas lived with.
Theo realised that his companion had deliberately let that
show, and that such brief vulnerability was his display of
friendship.

They were quiet for a time, looking from the darkened
platform of the building across the city with its lines of
streetlights, lit chequerboard windows, coloured neons and
the fireflies of the moving cars. 'When I'm up here,' said
Nicholas finally, 'I always feel I want to smoke. I don't
know what it is.' Theo felt just the same. It wasn't just the
butts scattered at their feet. Something more than that:
something to do with being at a height, temporarily cut
off from the stress and bustle as the paper was put to bed
below. Something to do with night and an almost schoolboy
delight in truancy. 'Well,' said Nicholas, 'I'd better head
back down, I suppose. I'm supposed to help one of the
subs go through some stuff on American politics.'

'Is your neighbour really that weird?' said Theo. 'A lot
of people talk to cats and dogs. Maybe it's healthy even
— a form of catharsis.' He'd read of ponies, goats, pigs and
white rats being taken into rest homes and kindergartens,
where the inmates lined up to pat them and be told they
shared almost all their DNA.

'This Rossiter is something else, though,' said Nicholas.
'It's not just the interminable conversations with the dog,
and the cultivation of Peruvian cacti and succulents in a
glasshouse he can only crawl into. I've seen him standing
naked in the heavy rain and soaping himself.'

'Is this the guy who complains when you play classical
music?'

'Yeah. He set the council noise abatement officer on me.
Didn't have the guts to come round himself. As it happens
I know Ray Mortensen from the council anyway. He said
Rossiter was in tears when he made the complaint.'

As a journalist, Theo often dealt with people who
were emotional about their views. Unlike most of the
public, however, he realised that conviction and anger
aren't guarantees of justifiable grievance. Vehemence is
often confused with truth. The world can't believe that a
weeping and distraught mother can be in the wrong, or an
impassioned witness be false. What about Penny then, and
the view he'd espoused?

In the cool night air Theo and Nicholas walked back
to the stairwell. The final access to the roof was just a steel
ladder bolted to the wall, which flexed slightly when you
climbed it. Nicholas went first. He paused when he was
halfway down, his face upturned to where Theo waited his
turn. 'If I were you, Theo, I'd give this chance with Penny
Maine-King my best bloody shot.'

'Yes,' said Theo. 'It's easily the best thing that's happened
to me in a long time.'

Nicholas was out of sight, but his voice came up to
the roof. 'Just don't start screwing her until you're sure
of what you're prepared to take on. I mean the boy and
everything.'

Theo had sent an email to Penny in paradise, saying they
needed to talk, and that he'd drive down to Drybread on
Easter Monday unless he heard back from her. There was
no answer before then, so early that morning he walked
the considerable distance to his work carpark where he'd
deliberately left the Audi. The parson was on his mind,
although he'd seen no sign of him since Timaru. Theo
didn't take the main carpark exit, but drove down the
narrow alley between the paper and the backs of the beauty
parlour and the pet shop, and out to the other side of the
block. Once clear of the city he relaxed.

Solitary, long-distance driving was an exercise in
containment: just him, just the vehicle, transient in the
passing landscape. Other people's lives were also turning,
but they seemed at considerable remove. Penny and her son
may have been already on the autumnal hillside; Nicholas
putting his feet up to watch CNN news on television; Anna
tying on her netball bib to take her place in a workmanlike
seniors team in the Easter tournament; Zack entertaining
his daughters with tales of his Virginian boyhood; Erskine
Maine-King already on his way to Nice perhaps, thinking
of his son rather than business. The parson may have
been entering Theo's study, morning light catching the
buttermilk complexion of his bald head. Maybe Stella
was meeting a friend she and Theo used to visit together:
Stella would be bright, wouldn't she, bright with that sort
of brittle determination to make the best of her talent and
opportunities, and because Theo had proved dispensable.

Theo occupied himself by making a considerable list of
Stella's virtues, and a shorter list of his own. Both were as
honest as he could make them, but they didn't mesh well
together — that was the rub. It's not virtues that marriage
needs, but compatibility. Stella was particularly adept at
identifying his selfishness. 'Not everything is about you,'
she had said, but somehow for Theo it always was. He had
to learn that always you carry a spear in the drama that is
other people's lives.

Stillness and open heat had been his experience of
Drybread on the first visit, stillness and high cloud on
the second trip, but as he drove through the Maniototo
towards the Manuherikia and Penny's gully that third time,
a full and persistent wind blew from the west. It groomed
the gullies of gorse and broom, fluffed the dry grasses and
the tussock on higher country, swept high birds through
the sky without a wing beat. On the last stretch into the
hills on the gravel road there was no hanging plume behind
Theo, for the dust was gusted away from the wheels, and
the wind whistled at the exterior mirrors.

He parked by the macrocarpa hedge, but not in its lee,
so the wind almost wrenched the car door from his hand
when he got out. Penny was looking out of the window
as he approached the house, and let him in before he
needed to knock. 'It's a shit of day,' she said. They were
too familiar to shake hands, not familiar enough to kiss:
she rested her hand for a moment on his arm as he came
past her in the doorway. On the floor of the all-purpose
room, Ben was kneeling on newspaper and rolling Playdoh
into unpromising cigar shapes. He wore a Bob the
Builder sweatshirt and had a large Band-aid in the centre
of his forehead. 'No, it's nothing,' Penny said, 'He just saw
them in the drawer and wanted one. He knows they're
supposed to make you feel better. He's bored.'

Sometimes it's so easy to make a little kid's day. Theo
had remembered to get something for Ben at the service
station: a couple of chocolate eggs half price because Easter
was almost over. Penny didn't allow the boy more than
one. She helped Ben take off the rosetted foil, smoothing
it out for him to play with later. The child gave Theo a roll
of dough in exchange, and insisted he have a pink Band-aid
on his face also. Theo moulded the dough as he sat on the
sofa and told Penny about the visit to Zack Heywood and
asked her why she wanted him to go to France. 'I haven't
got anyone else to ask,' she said. The doors were rattling in
the wind, which made the cottage resonate.

Theo didn't think she said it to get sympathy, but Jesus,
how isolated she was. At a time in her life when she expected
to have the greatest sense of family and community, she was
fighting her husband and a court order, and had to ask Theo
for help. No brother or sister to support her, her mother
ga-ga in a retirement home, her friends thousands of miles
away. 'What I know of Zack I like,' she said, 'but I want
someone else there to ask things a lawyer mightn't want to.
Someone I know better. A real person to stand in for me.'

'So Zack's not real?'

'You know what I mean,' she said. 'It's just a job, isn't
it, even for the best lawyer.'

'I need to know what's essential,' Theo said. 'I don't
know much about your life, your husband or what the
hell you expect to happen. A cock-up over there could be
pretty disastrous for you. You know that.'

Penny didn't answer. Bending over, she encouraged
her son to put four legs on one of the dough lumps, then
raised her head and looked at Theo levelly for a moment.
'But are you willing to help if you can?' she said.

He said yes, because how could he not when she and
the kid were stuck the way they were? He said yes because
he'd like to fuck her, but it was more than that. He said
yes because he felt best when he was with her, and that
was the strongest and least explicable reason of all. When
he was with her he felt somehow at the centre, instead of
at the edge.

'You haven't had any lunch yet have you?' she said. 'Ben
hasn't either. Let's have something, and them maybe he'll
sleep and we can talk.' It was a scratch meal, with nothing
heated. Ben and Theo shared peanut butter sandwiches,
apples and bought fruit cake but diverged when it came
to drinks: diluted juice for the boy, and a can of Speight's
for Theo. Penny had eaten but drank a beer. Ben seemed
cheerful enough, and told Theo it was too windy to play
outside. Theo was about to say something to him about
the parson and Caroline Bay, but thought better of it. That
experience was better left dormant in the boy's mind. As
long as he had his mother, maybe he didn't care much, and
he was too young to realise that they'd come down in the
world. Little kids are emotionally resilient, we tell ourselves,
because we don't want to consider otherwise, and we don't
want to think too much about our own childhoods.

Wind isolated the bach as motion had isolated the car.
Theo had a sense of everything outside being fleeting and
disturbed, and the three of them inside the bach close-knit,
fixed, with just the juddering doors between one state and
the other.

When Theo asked Penny if Erskine was an unreasonable
man she said it was difficult to be reasonable when
your kids were involved. He then asked for her bottom-line
requirements, and she said shared custody and fair
distribution of what they owned.

'You mean half of everything?' he asked.

'Less than a quarter of what he's worth would do me.'

'Zack said he's got plenty.'

'He's rich enough, and I don't want to live over there
any more. The point is the money thing for him is just
a bargaining chip in the real issue of custody. That's the
guts of the thing you have to realise. The judgement there
gave him custody and me only visiting rights.' Theo had
wondered about the reason for that, and as if to explain it,
Penny went on. 'That judge had a thing against psychiatry
as well, and I was having counselling.' There it was, for the
first time, the fuse of something important in everything
that was happening, but Theo let it lie.

The little guy became sleepy as Penny and Theo talked,
so she took him through to the one bedroom, while Theo
picked up the newspaper from the floor, folded it, took it
to the back door and jammed it underneath to stop the
noise. As he came back down the short passage, Penny was
at the bedroom door. 'He's out to it already,' she said, and
stepped back for him to see Ben on the double bed which
filled most of the low-ceilinged room. She'd slipped off
his shoes. He lay in his light clothes totally relaxed with
his small arms spread on the faded patchwork quilt, and
his breathing so easy no movement could be seen. The
walls were rough tongue and groove, a worn marmalade
lino covered the floor, stacked on the far side were four
matching blue travel cases, incongruous in their obvious
quality and fashion. All of it spoke of things gone awry; of a
time of painful and uncertain transition. Maybe Penny was
as aware of that impression as Theo himself, but neither of
them referred to it as they went back to the main room.

Without Ben's presence and distraction, without Play-
Doh being thrust at them for improvement, Theo and
Penny were at one of those cusps of possibility in their
friendship. She was asking something significant of him,
and when a woman asks more, a man is entitled to seek
some return. He imagined how good the sex would be with
her; it was many weeks since he had last been with Melanie
on the Christmas tree bed in her flat by the Heathcote.
One voice told him just to reach out to Penny, kiss her
and discover the reaction; another, with greater regard to
experience, advised thinking with more than his cock. In
the cliché parlance of the magazines, Penny was vulnerable,
so it wasn't the time to ask for involvement. And sex
involved some degree of commitment. Half an hour on
that old couch while Ben napped, and he would be drawn
into their lives, inescapably implicated in an unhappiness
that had nothing to do with him, except professionally.

And Penny didn't seem set on seduction. She'd taken
no extra care with her appearance, and talked on about Zack
and Nice and how her husband would meet all expenses.

She'd taken no extra care, but nevertheless Theo lost his
last reservations about her attractiveness. He had become
accustomed to the startling whiteness of her capped teeth,
her careless hair, her sometimes wary expression and
assertive language. He liked the fullness of her hips and
her long arms, and was drawn to her smooth, muscular
neck. And her breasts weren't that small.

'Fixing something up with Erskine in Nice is the best
chance,' she was saying. 'Probably the only chance, because
we can't stay here much longer. It's not fair on Ben, and
the money's running out, and Zack reckons if we don't
have a compromise to take to the Family Court very soon
that'll be it.'

'Did you play a lot of squash, or something?' he said.

'What's that got to do with anything?' Penny said.

'You look fit, that's all. Stronger than a lot of women.'

'A lot of women in the States work out,' she said. Then
she paused and looked directly at him, and her expression
gave a little wry twist that was almost a grimace: unattractive
in itself, yet so typical of her that Theo found it quite
moving. She was sitting on a kitchen chair and he was on
the sofa. The wind still buffeted the building, although the
thudding back door had been muted.

'Theo,' she said, 'I'm not looking to get into anything
right now, okay.' It was a rebuff, but she leaned forward to
deliver it. 'I'm only just holding things together as it is. I'm
close to tears half the bloody day, and I can't sleep at night.
I can only just keep myself together for Ben's sake, okay?'

'I can understand that,' he said. 'It's a rocky time for you.
I just hope it all pans out, and you know I'll do what I can.'

'I like you,' she continued, 'but I'm a wreck right now.
I can't take on anything else. You wouldn't want to know
what's inside my head sometimes.'

'Maybe I would,' said Theo quietly.

'Fuck, no. Believe me you wouldn't.'

And that was the end of thinking with his cock for that
day. He was glad he hadn't made a bigger fool of himself,
that she had intervened before that happened. The surface
of the conversation showed little of the stir beneath, but
there was change. She knew Theo wished to be confidant
and lover, and as she chose to continue a friendship he took
it optimistically — assumed she was deferring opportunity
rather than refusing it. And it suited his pride to think that,
rather than seeing himself as the only help at hand.

'How old are you?' she asked. Non sequiturs had begun
with him, so she felt justified.

'Thirty-eight.'

'So am I,' Penny said. 'You look a bit older.'

'Thanks,' said Theo.

'Anyway, let's get back to the Nice trip. I don't want
you to feel you have to, but I see it as the best shot of
finishing the business for everybody, and you'd get a good
final exclusive out of it.'

They talked more openly than before about her
marriage. 'You'll probably like Erskine,' she said. 'He gets
on well with guys.'

'But not women?'

'Other women he gets on well enough with.'

'So you're splitting because he played around.'

'No,' said Penny. 'It's because we don't love each other
enough any more and that's quite different. That bit's simple,
but we both love Ben a great deal and that makes it hard.'

The wind continued to buffet the house around them,
which made it seem even smaller, but no rain came. Rain
would be both a novelty and a blessing at Drybread,
just as it had been in the North Canterbury hills. Theo
remembered how his father would leave the table to go
and stand beneath the carport and watch the rain falling.
'Send her down, Hughie,' he would say, and the longer it
rained the happier he became. In the winter, perhaps, rain
came to Drybread as well as snow.

Theo faced the long drive back to Christchurch, and
needed to get going. Also, for some reason not clear even
to himself, he wanted to be gone when the boy woke up.
Penny said he could spend the night on the sofa, and meant
exactly that. 'Don't come out,' he said. 'It's a bastard of a
wind. I'll talk again with Zack Heywood and send you an
email.'