Living As a Moon (23 page)

Even the weather mirrored Patrick’s fortune: calm and bright. He resolved to visit the killer in prison, aware of how their lives had diverged so sharply since that rainy day at the petrol station in Petone. He found, however, that this wasn’t a simple matter. Geoffrey Wenn had been sent to Paremoremo in Auckland, and prison visits were initiated by the prisoners themselves, not visitors, and as well there was a whole sequence of applications, approvals, booking times and identifications required. Also Sonia wasn’t in favour of his renewing contact. ‘Nothing that he did was intended to favour you,’ she said. ‘He killed somebody, right, and he wouldn’t have hesitated to kill you. Best to keep away from someone like that, and you don’t want people thinking you’ve any sympathy for a murderer.’

‘I suppose his life’s hell,’ said Patrick.

‘And so it should be,’ she said.

Patrick didn’t mention his intention to Sonia again, but when the GAM CEO asked him to attend a sales conference at Titirangi, he wrote to the killer, who put the bureaucracy in motion. Patrick described his visit as being based on non-religious, yet compassionate, grounds.

Visits were allowed only in the weekends, so on the Saturday following his conference, Patrick drove to Albany and Paremoremo. He expected to be sitting before one of those glassed-in booths he saw on TV crime shows, but the visiting room was open and reminded him of his home-town polytechnic where he’d done his trade exams. Small, cheap tables beyond squinting distance of each other, and tubular chairs. There was one warder seated by the door, and two others wandered listlessly among the groups, or stood intent before the one window.

Patrick didn’t recognise Wenn at first. He no longer had any sort of beard, and, although still scrawny, he’d lost the hard edge of freedom, had already slackened with apathy. He didn’t regard Patrick with any apparent anticipation. He sat well back in the hard chair, with his knees apart, and, after a glance at Patrick, seemed more interested in people at other tables in the visiting room. He caught the eye of a fellow prisoner talking to a hard-faced woman in jeans, and gave the thumbs-up sign. Wenn made no attempt to start a conversation with Patrick, neither did he show any eagerness for his visitor to begin one. What need of hurry, what possibility of good news, could there be for a killer serving a long term? No doubt he’d had the odd Bible-basher call on him before.

‘I brought you some cigarettes and biscuits,’ said Patrick, ‘but the staff took them to check, and said you’d get them later. Do you remember I was in the petrol station when the cops came to get you?’ said Patrick.

‘Yeah.’

‘We came out of the lavatory together, and then you made a break for it when you saw the police.’

‘That’s right. Yeah, I remember.’ But the recollection didn’t cause him any excitement, or surprise. He remained well settled on the chair, and with his hands on his splayed knees. He sucked his teeth.

‘You were in the paper and that,’ he said. Patrick realised that their meeting that day meant nothing to the killer: nothing had come from it to benefit him, nothing to make it noteworthy in a day he wished to forget. For Patrick it had been a lucky strike with a string of consequences to his advantage, but for Geoffrey Wenn, Patrick was just a guy he had pissed next to before being arrested.

‘Anyway,’ said Patrick, ‘I just thought maybe a visitor would be something of a break for you, and they tell me cigarettes are always useful in here.’

‘Yeah,’ said Wenn. He seemed to be waiting for Patrick to come to the point of the visit, to start talking about the capacity Jesus had for forgiveness, or reveal a programme of reading skills supported by the local Association of University Women. Yet Patrick had no further explanation for being there than he’d already given, and felt awkward.

‘Can’t be much of a life,’ he said fatuously, and the killer didn’t bother to reply, just let the bottom of his thin face twist a little.

The conversations at most other tables were equally desultory, and prisoners and visitors glanced around often as words failed them. In a way it reminded Patrick of visiting his father in hospital, where he’d been given an even more severe sentence. Only the woman in jeans seemed to be talking against the clock, on and on about her money troubles. Patrick heard snatches to do with back rent, hire purchase goods, Sally Army parcels, repossession of a free-standing hotpot, and the inability to afford a school camp for one of the kids. ‘It’s the kids, though, isn’t it?’ she said, not lowering her voice at all, oblivious to listeners in the intensity of her focus. ‘I mean, okay, we’ve fucked up, but I can hardly stand what it does to the kids. You know?’ The man had no hair, and his skull bones made uneasy conjunction. He nodded affirmatively, as if she had suggested a treat. ‘You know how Shane is,’ she said, and he nodded again. ‘Sometimes at night I stand outside the little bugger’s door, and I hear him crying in his sleep.’

Patrick tried to focus on the killer’s face so that something to say would come to him, and the woman’s life would recede. He felt that he was in some bog of existence and would be sucked under if he stayed longer. He wanted out. ‘Am I allowed to give you money?’ he asked Wenn. ‘Just a few bucks I’ve got on me?’

‘Stuff it up your arse maybe,’ said the killer. He leant back a little more, and grinned at his bald-domed mate.

Patrick didn’t know how to respond to such animosity. ‘I suppose I’d better be going,’ he said. The killer showed no interest. He remained seated as Patrick stood up and began to leave. When Patrick glanced back from the door, Geoffrey Wenn was still seated, his arms folded, and his attention on the bald man and his woman visitor.

In the car park a large woman struggled to get out of her Suzuki beside Patrick’s. She seemed winded by the effort, and stood puffing for a while, her small mouth with dolly pink lipstick open wide. ‘They don’t think of us, do they?’ she said. ‘Oh no, no, they don’t think what it does to the family, do they? Punish one, punish all: that’s what they reckon, don’t they? What show have we got, eh?
No
show at bloody all, that’s what, isn’t it?’ It was another chorus to that of the hard-faced woman in the visiting room. She swayed off towards the prison buildings. Patrick decided there was no need to mention the visit to Sonia: that there was no one to thank for what had happened to him over recent months. It was just the play of indifferent circumstances, sometimes supporting you above your fellows, sometimes pulling you down. As he drove he concentrated on a projected new range of aluminium struts for caravan and campervan awnings, and occupied himself by going over the specifications in his head. He’d always had a knack with figures, and found it reassuring to let them form and disassemble in those predictable patterns quite free of emotion, or any augury.

Professor Huchro gave the keynote address at the conference in Grenoble. It’s an odd place perhaps for academics to gather to talk about Imperial Rome, but the university there offers excellent facilities, and the venue is popular because of the skifields close by.

The content of most such gatherings is predictable, even repetitious, and often location becomes the point of attraction. I’m not into winter playgrounds myself, but was interested when I read that Paula Huchro was to give a paper on the importance of sea power during the time of the Flavian emperors.

We’d met in our mid-twenties as assistants at a minor archaeological dig in Italy, had been colleagues there for six weeks. Before Grenoble I’d seen her only once again, fleetingly, at a symposium in Genoa. Paula is married, but keeps her maiden name, perhaps as a nod to feminism, perhaps more to pay tribute to her Polish origins.

I sat in the third-floor room of a modern wing of the university at Grenoble, next to Andrew Neiderer, reader in classics from the University of London, and listened to Paula’s address. A window cleaner worked from an enclosed seat that travelled on a bar attached to the outside of the building. No noise intruded. He was youthfully agile, did his job well and I could see snow on the mountains not far away. Paula was poised, authoritative, deserving of the respect she was accorded in her field. She was short, still inclined to plumpness, but her hair was much darker than it had been when she and I were young in Italy. It appeared quite natural, although it must have been dyed.

Anacapri was the first archaeological dig of which I was ever part. I was one of two PhD students funded to gain experience. The widening of a walled street had revealed the remains of a first century BC domestic shrine, and a midden, the use of which went back at least a century earlier. The site was close to Axel Münthe’s Villa San Michele, and the tourists going there would sometimes be attracted by our chatter and the signs of excavation, and walk up the cobbled slope to watch for a moment in the accosting sun. A canvas awning was stretched between poles to keep the glare from us as we crouched on the little terraces of stony soil amid the sectioning tape and pegs. The tourists soon tired of the meticulous sifting and scraping, the constant delay for recording, the lack of arresting discovery, and drifted back to the street that led to San Michele, where they could stand under cool arches and see the rich pickings of Münthe’s classical collection displayed to advantage on the very spot where once Tiberius had a villa.

The archaeologist in charge was only a few years older than me. Colum taught at the University of California, and his industrious talent almost matched his overweening ambition. A lanky, ginger-haired and freckled guy who refused to cover up, and whose body refused to tan: burn and peel, burn and peel, so that always there were overlapping lines of sloughing skin like pale tide marks on his reddened body. His acumen in scholarly matters was indisputable, however, and he bested me with condescending ease in any professional disagreements. ‘Good try, man,’ he’d say, ‘but you got a way to go yet. Keep taking the tablets.’ He did some digging at the excavation, but most of his time was spent site mapping and cataloguing.

I disliked Colum most of all because he was having sex with Paula, who was the other graduate student funded for practical experience. Her tuition was more personal and intensive than mine, and at night I was kept awake for a time by her head butting the thin wall between our cramped rooms in Capri harbour, down the winding, narrow road from Anacapri. ‘Come on, come on,’ Colum would exhort, as if impatient for her to follow suit in a card game.

She was then a short, fair girl who, because of Colum’s attentions, seemed to inflate during our stay, until dimples appeared on her cheeks and knees. Even her nose became a more dominant feature. Whether Paula’s weight gain was the consequence of satisfaction, or guilt, I was unsure. She said little during her work both night and day during the first weeks on site. Faustus and Alessandro, the two permanent team members, were puzzled, I think, at her reserve, given her almost immediate openness with Colum.

Paula and I usually worked together, and at first there was constraint between us because of her relationship with Colum, although that was never mentioned. I admired her knowledge, her industrious enthusiasm and persistence. Fieldwork has never been the aspect of classical studies most attractive to me, and some hot afternoons, cramped from sitting and crouching, and also a little bored with the precise discipline required in a dig, I would wander off and take a long break: have a beer at the café cum bar with a view of the chairlift. Well, we weren’t even getting paid. Paula didn’t accompany me: Colum would lift his sandy eyebrows as if to say, boys will be boys.

It was the discovery of the coin that brought us closer. We were sitting on wooden slats on the shallow terrace of the site’s level three, when her narrow trowel flipped out a denarius we later found had been minted by Sextus Pompey during his war with Octavian. An interesting coin to be there on the island of Capri. The day was unusual also: high cloud and a strong sea wind that puffed dust from Paula’s trowel into our faces.

I lifted my head in excitement, and was about to call out to others of the team, when Paula put a hand on my arm. ‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘Keep quiet about it.’ The excavation was a shallow one as sites go, and my neck was above the level of the cobbles nearby. Because of the thrill I felt, I expected Colum and Faustus, working not far away, to be caught up in awareness of it, but their faces remained down. ‘Just keep working,’ said Paula. She rubbed the coin a couple of times in her fingers, then slipped it into her pocket. She began the scrupulous, small-scale excavation again in the dry soil, and the wind ruffled the orange site tapes and blew grit as before. Just the passage of a little time made me an accomplice, and without conscious decision.

We finished early because of the wind, and Paula and I went to the nearby café and had small glasses of yellow Limoncello liquor. Most of the tourists had already gone down the steep road to the harbour and the boats waiting to take them back to Sorrento, or Naples. Paula’s lover was our superior and someone I disliked. That situation created wariness between us, but by saying nothing of the find, she created new ambiguity.

From the café patio we could see the chairlift that took visitors low over the last gardens and up to the mountain lookout. I went up several times during my stay, and enjoyed the quiet, skimming ride as much as the view from the island’s top.

‘You won’t say anything about it, will you?’ Paula said.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What do you reckon it is?’

‘A denarius of course.’

‘Yeah, what period, though?’

‘I’m not going to take it out now. Let’s not even talk about it. You know what people are like round here. I’ll clean it up a bit when I get a chance and you can have a look at it.’

‘What about Colum?’ I said.

‘What about him?’ Paula showed no embarrassment.

‘Aren’t you going to tell him?’

‘He doesn’t own me,’ she said.

You could have fooled me. For the first time, sitting there in the cooling wind, I had a sense of her resolve and independence. Because she was short, quiet and plain, because she was pleasuring Colum at night, I’d assumed she was submissive, and reliant on others. How difficult we find it to avoid such superficial assessments. We didn’t talk any more of the coin that day, but it marked special knowledge between us, and a basis for friendship of a kind. Later, in the darkness, I heard her head, or knee, tapping on the wall again, and Colum’s exhortations, and knew their relationship more complex than he realised.

In my free time I went often to Villa San Michele to enjoy its spacious beauty, and examine the treasures Münthe had gathered there: Greek and Egyptian artefacts as well as Roman. Such views, too, and I could stand there and think of Tiberius looking out from that same place, feel thankful not to live in a despotic age. Torre was guide and custodian of the villa. He was as much interested in the dig as I was in San Michele, and we spent time together in both places, and time together in night restaurants drinking imported beer and Limoncello. Torre was middle-aged and had the darker skin and stockiness of a southern Italian. Arabs, I later heard a professor from Milan call them. Torre had a central bald spot around which small curls lapped, and a fine voice, but he sang vacuous American pop songs instead of arias, perhaps to display his command of English. Often he spoke of going to the USA, where he imagined wealth awaited everyone. His cousin in Dayton, Ohio, had two cars and was a member of a country club. The cousin said he wouldn’t come back to Italy. It had too much of a past, he said, and not enough of a future.

I never went to Torre’s house, never met his wife, saw only one of his large family — a barely adolescent son. On the few occasions that he and I stayed drinking late, the boy would track us down, and Torre would get up without demur, put an arm around his son and they would begin the walk home. I don’t remember the son ever saying one word. ‘Buona notte, amico mio,’ Torre would say, and extend his free arm towards me as if about to make a declaration.

I told Torre that I had difficulty getting to sleep in the cramped room in Capri, though not of the noises that were the cause. I complained of the heat, the lack of space and privacy, the fag of having to go up and down the hill each day. It was a relief when he allowed me, in the last few weeks of my stay, to creep into the villa’s kitchen, spread my rug on the pale tiles and sleep there. He gave me a key and his trust. His strict instruction was that I kip in no other room, touch nothing. I would wake in the morning with bright light glinting on the large, copper cooking pots, with the shelf of blue pottery, and a soft breeze through the open rooms. When Torre arrived to prepare for the day’s visitors, and we passed with a smile at the door, there would be no evidence of my stay.

Colum went to Naples during the third weekend to give a progress report to the museum director there, and it was then that Paula showed me the coin. On Sunday we went down to the harbour and had lunch in the Sarzano family restaurant, well away from the tourists and the promenade cafés that served the insalata Caprese applauded in the travel guides. The cramped Sarzano room lacked ambience and faced a modern concrete wall with no niches for lizards, no quaint gates, only graffiti and casually parked scooters that leaked oil onto the pavement. The oil lay drably until rain came, then awoke, spread glistening, rainbow wings. The wine was bad, but the seafood made all worthwhile, and the prices were reasonable. The waiter was young, thin, with full lips, but an insufficient moustache. He’d taken a dislike to me because I didn’t tip well. Waiters there assume all foreigners are rich.

Afterwards, Paula and I walked up to the little cemetery. So tidy, so obviously a place lovingly visited, with sealed photographs on many of the graves and plaques, and none of the vandalism so common at home. We sat on the stone step of the Vergotti family tomb and she showed me the denarius, no larger than my thumbnail, with the fine, raised head of Sextus Pompey on the obverse. We agreed it must have been minted about 40 BC. I have always felt a frisson of delight to hold history in the hand, and returned it with reluctance. ‘Highly bloody unprofessional, you know,’ I said. It was more envy than malice.

‘Oh, bullshit,’ she said. ‘I love it. You love it. You know it’s almost impossible to get anything out of the country legitimately now. And it would only end up in a drawer in the museum in Naples with scores of others, even more likely flogged off by some curator there.’

‘You’re right. Will you tell Colum before you go?’

‘You don’t like him, do you?’

‘Not much, but then you do.’ The well-kept graveyard had little exposed earth, or grass, but walls of polished stone inset with photographs and inscriptions like large filing cabinets of the dead. But Paula’s enjoyment was to touch the silver coin, hold it openly for close inspection.

‘I like you just as much,’ she said.

‘Come off it. You’re sleeping with the guy. I was in the next room remember.’

‘Colum’s okay. The sex is okay too. The important thing’s the commendation I’ll get at the end of the stint, and maybe that’ll influence the examiners when I hand in my dissertation, and the universities I apply to afterwards.’

I was taken aback, not so much by the calculation in her behaviour, as by her honesty in admitting it. We all act in our own interest, but usually disguise it, even to ourselves. I was flattered that she confided in me, although she was sleeping with Colum. I felt male regret too, that ours was a confidence of colleagues, that it was Colum who came to her room in the dark, exposed the pale, fullness of her thighs, took habitual and firm possession. I told her righteously that she was bright enough not to need that sort of help.

‘My parents were immigrants from Poland: they’re poor. I’m not exactly a beauty queen, no friends in high places. Nah, I have to make it happen, or it doesn’t happen,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean shagging every lecturer I’ve had. I haven’t had the hard word put on me much actually, which shows the competition perhaps. But it hasn’t been easy. Even a doctorate doesn’t guarantee a decent position any more. I don’t want to end up for life in a polytech, or a teachers’ college, some provincial museum.’

Here was a realism foreign to me, and an unvarnished expression of it equally unusual. I had a sense of a background and struggle that made my own experience almost genteel. If she’d been confiding in me late at night after a good many drinks, I wouldn’t have been so surprised, but it was mid-afternoon in a quiet graveyard. We sat in the patch of shade at the entrance to the Vergotti tomb, and between buildings was a glimpse of the yachts and fishing boats of the harbour. And she was absolutely right. You did what you could to give yourself the best possible shot at the career you wanted.

‘But you’re a bloody good student, aren’t you,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t be here otherwise. You deserve the best opportunity.’ On several occasions she’d shown understanding and knowledge superior to my own, but I was too proud to admit that. Perhaps I wasn’t God’s gift to academia after all. I had a quick, unbidden sense of how we looked together there, talking on a stone step in the cemetery. Myself tall, gawky, the lucky one of the family, my grandmother said: the spoilt one, Pops said. Paula, dumpy, with a face like a beachball under her large hat, and dangling a water bottle between her knees. Just for moment I saw us from the outside, as you see a photograph of exact replication, yet with the knowledge it has fallen into the past.