Second Chances (31 page)

A figure was standing on the top step, its face turned towards me. I grabbed the banisters and staggered back, though it took only a split second to realise that this apparition was Finn, gazing glassily with blank eyes.

‘Finn!’ I breathed.

His eyes widened in speechless terror, and I took the rest of the stairs two at a time. I knew that rabbit-in-the-headlights stare. He didn’t know who I was, or where he was, and he was scared.

‘Come on, baby,’ I whispered, taking him by the hand. ‘Don’t be all spooky, you gave me a fright.’

Leading him to the boys’ bedroom, I crossed my fingers. If I was lucky, he would return to deeper sleep. He snatched up Buccaneer Bob and lay down, mumbling. His eyes were closed by the time I covered him up. I waited for a couple of minutes, stroking his hair as his breathing deepened, then slid out.

I looked in on Sacha. Her room smelled like a locker room; she needed to sort out her washing. My girl was curled up under her duvet, one hand resting on her cheek. She was snuffling a little, and her face felt cushiony soft when I kissed it. She looked barely older than her brothers.

All was well.

All seemed well.

Kit passed out in the studio that night, surfacing with the mother of all hangovers the following afternoon. By then the boys had gone to play with William Colbert. Kit drooped by the kitchen stove, guzzling Alka-Seltzer and apologising twice a minute. He was wretched, but I was too furious to be appeased. I gave him the silent treatment.

‘Can’t believe myself,’ he said. ‘It won’t happen again.’

I shrugged. I was pulling on lace-up boots for riding.

Kit hunched, dropping his forehead onto his fists. ‘I’m going teetotal until I leave for Dublin. How’s that?’

I managed a hollow laugh.

‘C’mon, Martha. I’m pulling out the stops! Teetotal. Cold turkey. Not another drop.’

‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’

‘Where are you off to?’ he asked as I picked up the car keys. I think he’d really forgotten.

‘Galloping into the sunset with Clint Eastwood,’ I snapped. ‘Got a problem with that? Deal with it.’

Kit capitulated like a lamb. Mum didn’t. In fact, she yelled all the way down the drive.
Are you mad?

‘Tama said he just needed to talk to me. He’s an honourable guy. I trust him.’

Yes, but do you trust yourself when you’re so angry with Kit?

‘Chill. I’m much too fat to have a fling. I couldn’t possibly take my clothes off for a new man! I’d need to spend six months in the gym first.’

Remember Sacha’s father!

Ouch. She had a point there.

Tama was waiting as I parked next to his ute. We were away within minutes.

‘What are those boys up to this afternoon?’ he asked, as we crossed the dunes.

When I explained about William Colbert, he nodded. ‘I’ve known Pamela since we were both small.’

‘Really? Isn’t she much older than you?’

‘She was at Torutaniwha Primary School with my cousins. Most of ’em fancied old Pam. She had the boys pawing the ground in her younger days, but that Frenchie got in first.’

We rode steadily, side by side, casting blue shadows. The autumn light was soft and diffused; it was hard to tell where the air ended and the water began. Tama didn’t seem anxious to talk for a time, and I didn’t prompt him.

As we reached the headland, he scratched his nose. ‘This isn’t easy,’ he said. And indeed, he looked less at ease than I’d ever seen him. For one deliriously skin-tingling but deeply embarrassing moment I thought he was going to make a move then and there, dragging me off Kakama and onto the sea-washed sand. Mum was going ballistic. If she hadn’t already been dead, I really think she might have had a heart attack.

‘Go ahead,’ I prompted, feeling my cheeks burn. ‘I’m listening.’

He tilted his hat lower over his eyes. ‘I’ve heard things.’

‘Heard things?’

‘You’ve been losing things.’

I was bemused. ‘Well, we were burgled and—’

‘I’m not talking about the burglary.’

This wasn’t at all the conversation I’d expected. ‘We’re chaotic. We’ve still got stuff in cardboard boxes. I expect it’ll all turn up.’

‘An antique painting? You really think it’s lying around somewhere?’

‘Well, no.’

‘How’s that lovely daughter?’ he asked, in what seemed an abrupt change of subject.

‘Sacha? She’s . . . well, she’s fine.’

‘Fine?’

‘She’s a teenager—all tantrums and tiaras at the moment.’

Then he seemed to change the subject yet again. ‘My sister used to live in Torutaniwha. Her husband was a top bloke. Samoan guy. He worked in the forestry. Got crushed by a log and killed. She had two little kids, and they gave her a payout.’

‘Ira and . . .?’

‘Jonah was the older one. Anyway, she started sleeping with some idiot and he talked her into running off to Auckland with the boys. I didn’t like it but it was her life, not mine. The new boyfriend spent all her money then ditched her but she wouldn’t come home, she stayed in Auckland and brought up those kids pretty well on her own. Ira was top student at teacher college.’

‘He’s a credit to her,’ I said, with feeling. ‘What about the other son?’

‘Jonah’s an electrician. He had a girlfriend, flash car, widescreen TV. All the things people seem to think they need. Even managed to buy a house. He’s no angel; always pushed the boundaries, partied hard.’

‘But he’s doing okay?’

‘He tried a few drugs. Weed, ketamine, all kinds of shit he put into his body. He could still hold down his job, never took a day off sick no matter how rough the night had been. But in the end he began to dance with the devil itself.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means he went too far. It’s called P over here. You know what that is?’

‘Of course. Well, sort of. Not really.’

‘Ice, or whiz—lots of names. Crystal meth. Pure methamphetamine.’

‘Amphetamine. That’s speed?’

‘It’s nothing like the speed people used when I was young. They call it P because it’s
pure.
It can be almost a hundred per cent pure. If you read in the paper about some really nasty murder, chances are this stuff was involved. Sometimes it’s gang wars, because this is a multi-million-dollar business. Sometimes it’s some poor punter who hasn’t paid his dealer. Sometimes it’s just plain evil.’

The penny was dropping. ‘Oh . . . like Jean and Pamela’s son.’

‘Daniel.’ Tama looked bleak. ‘Lovely kid. He was in Jonah’s class at Torutaniwha. They were mates.’

‘We’re surrounded by ocean. Can’t we stop this stuff at the border?’

‘It still gets smuggled in. Anyway, you can make it in your kitchen! If you look on the internet you’ve got a choice of recipes. So it’s being cooked up all over the place—in kitchens and cupboards and cars, what the papers call clan labs. You know how resourceful we New Zealanders are. Kiwi ingenuity, Martha! We have a can-do attitude. We can fix anything with number-eight wire, so you bet we can cook our own fries.’

‘Fries?’

‘Jonah called it that. I asked him why, he said because it fries your brain.’

I felt something very nasty in the pit of my stomach, a squeezing hand so cold that it ached. ‘So . . . what happened to Jonah?’

‘He’s safe, for now.’

‘That’s good.’

‘No. Not good.’

‘Is he—’

‘In prison.’

I looked at the shadowed profile. Did this uncle—this self-possessed, profoundly dignified man—queue up at the prison gates on visiting days? Did he stand quietly with arms and legs akimbo while guards searched his pockets and sniffer dogs circled?

‘People using this stuff need money,’ he continued unhurriedly. ‘They need a truckload of money. If they’re a lawyer or dentist or something, they can afford it. Plenty of users are professional people. It’s everywhere, I’m telling you. Everywhere. I couldn’t believe the things Jonah told me. Your accountant, your lawyer, your doctor could easily be using it. But if they’ve got no income they have to find other ways of paying.’

‘Burglary, you mean?’ I was wondering whether this jailbird nephew could somehow have burgled our house. Perhaps that was what Tama was trying to tell me. I was ready to be nice about it.

‘They start by selling everything they have. They’ll sell the shirt off their back if they have to, the food from their shelves, they’ll sell their bodies. Nothing matters except getting the next hit. It’s all they think about. They’ll steal from their families.’

‘Is that what Jonah did?’

‘Martha! Listen to what I’m saying, will you?’

‘I
am
listening.’ But I wasn’t, not really. I didn’t want to. We rode on, while the ice fingers twisted my gut.

‘Is Sacha still playing her flute?’ asked Tama.

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘
Is
she?’

I leaned forward to lay my cheek on Kakama’s neck, breathing in the warm horse smell and taking comfort from her strength. I felt chilled all over now.

‘Jonah became a different human being,’ continued Tama. ‘It began small, the thing. The terrible devil thing. Just a cute little demon. But he made a pet of it, and it grew. He began to miss days at work—one time he was so wired, he phoned his boss at two in the morning to tell him he wouldn’t be coming the next day! So he was out on his ear. A qualified electrician, but nobody would employ him. He’d lost control—talking big, acting wild. He’d be up for a week and then he’d sleep for days.’

You know how it can be when someone is trying to point out a curiosity to you? A rare hawk, say. They point excitedly and they shriek, ‘Look there, beyond the tree . . . between the pylon and the windsock . . .
there
, see it?’ And you strain your eyes but you still can’t see the bloody thing. And then they whisper patiently, ‘No, look again. It’s next to the red chimneypot. Got the red chimney? Right, well just to the left of that . . . hovering . . . see?’

Tama was still talking. ‘He lost interest in everything, even in life. He lost his home. Car got repossessed, so did the TV but he’d already sold that. He sold everything. He stole stuff from his girlfriend and her parents. So she dumped him, and he didn’t even care. He thieved from his mother and aunties and nana.’

I didn’t want to hear any more. I wanted to go home.

‘He got scared, reckoned people were out to kill him,’ said Tama. ‘Well, perhaps they were. It’s a dark world he’d got into. The trade’s big business—
big
business. It’s mostly controlled by gangs, and life is cheap to those people. You don’t want to piss them off.’

I remembered the motorbike gang on the road, and shuddered.

‘Maybe he owed someone money,’ said Tama. ‘By this time he was on the streets. I went and got him and brought him home, thinking maybe I could straighten him out. The poor kid . . . you know, he tried to get clean. He said it was like crawling in the desert, dying of thirst, but there’s cool water gushing from a spring. You
have
to have it, nothing else matters. And then . . . well, we lost him. Things began to disappear. You know what I’m saying? Little things, at first. Cash. Then other things.’

And suddenly there it is, that bird. It balances and wheels and dominates the landscape. You can’t miss it. You wonder how you could have been so blind.

My hands began to shake. I could barely hold the reins. ‘I don’t . . . Look, Tama, I understand what you’re suggesting, and I know you’re only trying to help. But you’re just plain wrong. You don’t know me very well, and clearly you don’t know Sacha at all.’

‘You’ve taken offence. Can’t blame you.’

‘I haven’t taken offence, but this is a laughable idea.’

‘Is it?’ He looked into my face. ‘I don’t see you laughing.’

‘For a start, I know for a fact that Sacha had nothing to do with our burglary. I drove her to school myself that day.’

‘I’m sure she didn’t burgle your house herself.’

‘Well, then!’

Tama sighed. ‘One of Jonah’s user mates was a younger guy, an accountant’s son. The kid could get his hands on cash . . . Dealers target people like Sacha. Do you understand, Martha? It’s their method. They need punters whose families have some money. When they couldn’t siphon any more from the dad’s bank account, Jonah and his mate got desperate. So they borrowed the family car—a flash convertible. Parked it up in town, then phoned their dealer to come and get it. Told the parents it’d been stolen.’

‘Look . . . we just aren’t that kind of family.’

‘A family like mine, you mean?’

‘No, I don’t mean that. Sacha wouldn’t steal from us. She’d never experiment with hard drugs, either.’

‘Who would have known when you’d all be out, both the day of the burglary and the day the painting was taken?’

I couldn’t stand any more. ‘Can we turn back now, please?’

At some silent signal from Tama, both horses immediately wheeled around, making ripples and eddies as they splashed along the tideline.

‘What happened to Jonah?’ I asked.

‘He disappeared. A year later, he turned up in court in Auckland. Burgling, shoplifting, mugging. Thousands of dollars. I went to support my sister. That kid wasn’t Jonah any more. He didn’t talk like Jonah, didn’t think like Jonah, didn’t even
look
like him. He’d rotted away.’

‘He admitted everything?’

‘The police drove him around and he pointed out all the places he’d burgled. He was a wreck by then. Never saw anyone change so much in a couple of years. He’d been a fit, handsome guy. Big fella, like Ira. Truckloads of confidence. He ended up looking like an orc from
Lord of the Rings
, you know? Even his teeth went rotten. He thought there were bugs living under his skin.’

‘Bugs? D’you mean insects?’

‘Running around under his skin. They drove him crazy. He scratched and scraped until he was bleeding, then right into his flesh. I heard the probation officer call it “meth mites”. It’s the P flooding their system. The poisons get forced out of their pores.’

Dog’s got fleas. Frigging chickens have lice.

‘How’s your poor sister coping?’

Tama shrugged. ‘She says this thing will kill him in the end.’ He twisted sideways in the saddle and looked me in the eye. ‘Look, I hope I’m wrong. Maybe I’m just a fussy old coot. But I’ve seen Sacha change since you arrived here, and it’s bothered me. Then yesterday Ira paid me a visit. He was pretty upset, wanted to tell me what’s been going on at your place. It seemed like the last piece of the jigsaw.’