Opportunity (5 page)

I made sausage sandwiches and washed them down with
beer. I went to bed drunk, and fell asleep straight away. I
started having a dream. I was at the mouth of a railway tunnel.
There was snow outside and it was freezing cold. There was a
small boy pulling himself through the snow. He was dirty and
neglected. He came into the tunnel. He said, 'I'm cold.' I picked
him up and held him, and I was filled with terrible grief.
Great, deep, rhythmic sobs came out of me. The boy wasn't
Lars, then he was. I wept in regular gasps, woke dry-eyed,
then started crying properly. I was struck by the sensation, the
lingering power of the dream-sobs. The emotion was deeper
than any I'd felt while awake.

I lay and dozed. The boy wasn't Lars, then he was. It made
me think the dream wasn't just about Lars. It was about pity.
Was it about pity for all people? For Carita?

I grew up in a big house in Remuera with my father, who was
a wealthy businessman, and my stepmother, Rania. Rania
was beautiful and elegant. She was obsessed with my father.
He was unfaithful to her and it made her insecure. She was
clinging and neurotic and terrified of getting old. She spent a
lot of time in spas, having beauty treatments. When she was
fifty-five, she looked thirty-five. She went to a plastic surgeon
and had her eyes done and her breasts and neck lifted. She
was nearly six feet tall, with a perfect figure, a smooth oval
face and green eyes. When she was in a bad frame of mind she
looked at the world with hatred, as if it were something that
was polluting, that would destroy her.

I was an only child. My mother died when I was four. My
father married Rania, one of his girlfriends, soon after. He
and I always got on well but Rania tried to keep him away
from me. They wanted to have children but she wasn't able to
conceive. Rania stayed childless, and pencil slim, and girlish.
She didn't understand that her husband was my father. She
behaved as though I were a female rival who had to be kept at
bay. She winced when my father and I came near each other.
She threw tantrums, sulked and raged. When I hit puberty
she could hardly stand it. She looked at me with a kind of
horrified prudishness. I would walk in on her telling her
friends how impossible I was. If she and my father met me in
the street, he would say, 'Come with us, Claudine, we're going
to such-and-such a place', and Rania would nudge me with
her sharp elbow and say, 'No, let her go; she won't want to
come with us.' It used to amaze me, the amount of energy my
stepmother spent fending me off. She liked to tell a story
about how, when I was a young child, she'd suffered a bout of
depression (she was 'highly strung') and had had to fight the
urge to smother me. She told this story at dinner parties —
while I was there. Her eyes went moist when she told it. Her
nostrils flared and she smoothed her hair away from her bony
face. The story moved her: how she had suffered. She said I
had been an extremely difficult child.

My father worked long hours. He had an importing
business. When Rania and I argued he rolled his eyes and
sloped off to his study. Then, later, through the study door, I
would hear his low voice on the telephone. He was a compulsive
seducer, an adept womaniser. He was handsome, suave,
evasive. I can picture him now, slipping out the back door,
ducking neatly into his car as his name was shrieked, with
incredible force, from an upstairs room.

Rania's family had escaped from some Egyptian slum and
come to New Zealand with nothing. She had certain feelings
about money. If I brought friends home she wanted to know
what cars their parents drove, what school they went to, and
how big their houses were. You could see her sneaking looks
under the table, checking their shoes. She wanted to wrench
them to her chest and turn over the labels on their clothes. If
they had slightly less money than us she was pleased. If they
had more she was narrow-eyed but polite. If they were poor,
she was cold. For Rania, to be poor, or just ordinarily
struggling, was distasteful. She shuddered away from cheap
things. She dressed in matching outfits, in designer suits and
shoes and sunglasses. She drove a white Mercedes convertible.
She looked like a vamp in an airport thriller. Her fingernails
were blood red, and an inch long.

I went to an expensive private girls' school: St Cuthbert's. I
got into plenty of trouble there. Rania gave me spending
money, and my friends and I spent days in town, hanging
about in music stores, sneaking into pubs, buying cosmetics.
In the weekends we went to nightclubs. On the way home we
set fire to cars. I knew a boy called Blake who lived in our
street. He was expert at it: you got some rubbish, wedged it
under the chassis and lit it. The car would burn, and eventually
there was a muffled pop and it exploded. You could blow up
two or three cars at once and get away before the police and
firemen turned up. Or you could just hang around and watch
the show, as if you'd just come around the corner and it was
nothing to do with you.

During the day we burgled houses. We stole clothes, TVs,
stereos, gadgets. I liked looking around other people's houses.
While Rania was leafing through
House & Garden
under the
sunray lamp at Spa Sierra, Blake and I were out in the field
inspecting the real thing: some conservatory or water feature,
or laboratory-sized kitchen. We dawdled around the suburbs
in the daytime, and if there was an open window you could
just reach in and take something — a radio or a clock, say —
while people were in the house. Or swim in the pool of an
empty house, or stroll through gardens, picking fruit. Long
afternoons in the sunlit grids of the suburb, other people's
property: the real, the personal — I wonder what I thought I
was doing with it. I was just as likely to throw away the things
I stole. I didn't want any of it. Not really.

I kept one thing: a clock, it belonged to the old lady who
lived next door to Blake. He said she was a writer. While we
were burgling her house Blake kept threatening to burn it
down. One thing I remember, we were still in the house when
she came home. We hid in one of the bedrooms. She heard us
and went quiet, then shouted something and rushed to the
front door. She was frightened. We ran out the back door and
climbed over the fence.

We disliked school for the usual reasons. The teachers were
humourless and mealy-mouthed; they rewarded dullness and
crushed originality; they valued only the nice and the drab.
You know how it was: the pallid girl with the hairy legs and
the big mane of dead hair, the girl who was
no trouble at all
,
was cooed over and admired and cherished. Girls with talent,
on the other hand, had to have it squashed out of them, had to
be punished and ostracised and belittled.

'The teachers are cunts,' I said to Rania.

She looked at me, with her Arabian eyes. She was drinking
iced tea and smoking a gold-tipped cigarette. 'Is good school,' she said.
'Cunts or not.'

***

'I'm checking out,' I told her. It was a Sunday morning in
winter. I was seventeen. My father eyed me over the top of
the fridge. He was wearing a white robe and holding a phone
to his ear. Now he clamped the phone to his chest. 'Checking
out? Of where?'

'Of school. And out of here.'

Rania looked down. She coughed harshly: she liked to go
down to the summerhouse at the bottom of the garden and
smoke hash. Only once a week. She was moderate in her
habits.

'You can't do that,' my father said.

'When did you leave school? Sixteen? And look at you.
Rolling in money.'

'You have to get a . . . a . . . degree!' He twitched the phone
irritably back up to his ear. Rania made a tsking sound and
shook her head. I levelled my gaze at her.

'What've you got a degree in, Rania? Nail polish?
Fucking?'

'Hey!' they both said.

I went on, tonelessly. 'In handbags? Facelifts?'

Rania picked up the folded newspaper and threw it at me.
My father ducked. 'Say that again?' he said intently into the
phone.

'Frocks? Hair dye?'

Rania reached across the table to slap me but she was too
slow. She made an animal noise through her teeth and held
her red nails against her face. 'Gnaaaa,' she said. Her fingers
quivered.

'Go on, rip your face off. You can always get a new one.
Yeah, get them to rig you up a new one!'

Unable to talk over the screaming match that now gained
pace and volume, my father put his phone away and leaned on
the top of the fridge, his chin on his hand. There was a moment
when Rania and I couldn't hear each other, or ourselves. Her
face was contorted. I could see her back teeth. Then there was
a lull.

'What are you going to do, then?' he asked. 'In life,' he
added, delicately. He pinched his fingers over his brow.

'Can't you give me a job?'

The phone on the kitchen bench rang. Rania snatched at it,
but my father was too quick. 'Call you back,' he muttered into
it, and ducked his head. 'I'll think about a job,' he said to me,
and slipped out of the room. We listened to him thud up the
stairs. Rania made another sound: weary, cynical: 'Eeeeyah.'

That afternoon my father and I conferred in the summerhouse.
He offered me a job in the waterfront office from which
his associate, Mr Ling, conducted some of his deals. The winter
sun was setting over the big house. Somewhere within, in a
trance of Egyptian cunning, Rania plotted and lurked. The
camellia bushes were flowering, and covered in the dead brown
blobs of flowers already gone bad. My father smoked a brown
cheroot, smoothed his bottle-brown hair and told me, eyes
glazed, fist cupped protectively around his pungent smoke, 'If
you ever need money, you come to me. You come to me.'

'You sound like a gangster, Dad,' I said.

He took my arm. 'Let me tell you a few things about Mr
Ling,' he said.

Later I was in my bedroom, among the magazines and
cuddly toys. While packing a single reproachful sports bag
— six impractically flimsy outfits, four cartons of Rania's
cigarettes and a ton of makeup — I was busy regretting Rania's
shoe size. It was only the canoeish length of her feet that
stopped me stealing a swag bag of gold stilettos, of jewelled
mules. Below, a fresh fight was breaking out. My father's new
girlfriend kept ringing the house and it was getting on Rania's
nerves.

Their voices rose. He threw her cigarettes into the pool. She
told him to get a hairpiece. 'You are very nearly bald!' She told
him she'd suffered enough. 'My bags are packed! The lawyers
are poised!'

He went down on one knee and begged her not to go. Her
gaze travelled ironically upwards, her eye caught mine as I
leaned from the upstairs window. I saw his hunched shoulders,
his head bowed at the level of her crotch. There was a thin
moon above the plum tree, and tinselly Venus beside it,
shining down. Rania was brown and slant-eyed, like a witch.
My father had his fingers crossed behind his back. She let him
win her over — her long fingers suffered themselves to
unclench, to run over his hair; he rose and clasped her hands
in his — but it was beginning to be over. I could see it all. It
wouldn't be Rania who packed her bags and called the lawyers.
My father would never let that happen. No, unquestionably,
he would be the one to go first. And only once he'd worked
out what to do with his money.

There were reversals and re-workings. After all, they'd been
together a long time. I'd left the big house by then, and wasn't
witness to their final parting. I heard about it later from Rania.
He moved into a penthouse with his new girlfriend, but kept
sneaking back home (to be mauled and punished and slashed
with Rania's six-inch heels). After a couple of nights he would
flee, scratched and bloodied, back to the penthouse. He was
working out his old addiction. Eventually his girlfriend put
her foot down. She told him he needed a change. He came to
me at the offices of Mr Ling, and told me he was heading
overseas. 'To Thailand first. Business interests. Then we'll take
it from there.'

He left me a lot of money. And the job, which gave me a lot
more money than it should have, being a job that was all about
doing very little. He left the big Remuera house to Rania, for
me to inherit when she died. I haven't seen him or heard from
him since. I know he's moved about all over the place. Vietnam.
Brazil. Georgia. The Ukraine. I've wondered, sometimes,
whether I have any half-siblings out there. I mean, he's always
put it about to such an extent, you'd think there'd be someone
(some Thai or Australian or Arab or American) who looks
uncannily like me.

But I have no word of anyone so far.

Mr Ling and I hit it off when I went to work for him, down
there at John John G. Shipping. He taught me to play mahjong.
He made deals and I managed the office. There were shady
things going on with the business, but I only did light office
work and arranged the files. If I'd dug a bit deeper I would
have found that John John G. Shipping was a front. But I
didn't care about that.

I lived in an apartment on the waterfront with two St
Cuthbert's old girls, Mackenzie and Nadine. They were in
their early twenties. Both knew my father. Mackenzie was a
PR agent who liked to snort coke and go out with awful, crass,
rich property dealers, and Nadine was a presenter on a
children's TV show. We went out every night, drinking and
clubbing. I spent all the money I earned. Nadine had a
permanently stuffed-up nose and a squeaky Mickey Mouse
voice because of all the drink and drugs and blowjobs she got
through. Her cartoon voice made her popular with children,
and whenever we went near kids we were mobbed by her
teeny fans. Like most of us private-school girls Mackenzie and
Nadine talked about money all the time, wouldn't be seen
dead in a cheap car, and had nasty faux St Cuthbert's accents.
(That accent of ours: what's it supposed to sound
like
? And
where does it think it comes
from
?) We were always bawling
for whaite waine and calling it naice and, like true private-school
girls, we were good at shouting and drinking and being
unbelievably aggressive in the traffic. Nights we spent in the
waterfront bars, days I sat in the office, making phonecalls for
Mr Ling. During lunchtimes I played mahjong. And then, one
day, it all came crashing down.

I went to work and found the glass doors locked. There
were men in suits inside, carrying boxes of files. They had Mr
Ling on a plastic chair and someone was sticking a bit of paper
under his nose. I walked away. I went and stood at the edge of
the wharf looking down at the water. I couldn't think what to
do. For a while I had the irrational idea that if I kept very still
no one would see me. I had the office keys in my hand; I let
them fall into the water. I saw them sink under the green
swell. The sun was shining on the water; the light was very
bright. There was a man in a suit walking towards me. 'Good
morning,' he said. 'Claudine Zambucka? Would you please
come with me?'