Soon (13 page)

He said, ‘You worry too much. Everything's fine.'

‘If Roza could hurt Mum, she would.'

‘Ah, that's crap, Claire.' He thought, Why would
you
care? You've been hurting your mother all your life.

‘I know what you're thinking. Just because I don't get on with Mum, you think I'm not telling it like it is. But I've
seen
—'

He cut her off. ‘OK, I get the picture. Thanks for the warning.'

Irritated, he gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. She shied away. Outside, he got a cold feeling, didn't want to leave her like that. He went back in.

‘Claire.' He put his arms around her. ‘Don't worry. I understand.'

‘Do you?'

‘Count on it. I understand what you're saying. Never think I don't. And you're the cleverest person I know.'

He held her tight. ‘Just don't be so . . . imaginative.'

‘Watch this space,' she said.

‘Darling, you're just ridiculous.' He kissed her cheek. ‘See you later. Drama queen.'

He took Karen's little Honda, thinking he would call an AA mechanic later to check his own car. He cleared off a pile of ChapSticks and lipsticks and worked himself gingerly into the driver's seat, amused at the tininess of his wife — how did she fit? His knee throbbed as he made room for himself, pushing the seat back, rearranging the mirrors. On the passenger seat she'd left a stack of brochures and magazines and tubes of hand cream and a tangle of netball bibs and a pair of running shoes and two Nike caps.

The car was an automatic, the only kind Karen would drive, its tinny engine whining and lurching its way between gears. After driving his big smooth beast it was like being crammed into a pedal car. He much preferred manual gears and took a moment to adjust, hitting the brake once, thinking it was a clutch. What a risible vehicle; he should buy Karen something better. He drove leaning down to massage his painful knee.

He was driving along the street towards his office building when he saw Arthur Weeks. Swearing softly he pulled over, lowering the window. His phone started to ring.

Weeks leaned down. ‘I knew you were in town today. I called your receptionist.'

Simon looked at his phone. Clarice calling. He let it go to messaging. ‘What can I do for you?'

The young man hovered with an anxious, twitching smile. ‘Come for a coffee.'

Silence.

Weeks raised his voice, eager, urgent. ‘Quick coffee at my flat, it's not far away. I want to tell you a couple of things. And I'll give you Mereana's phone.'

Simon shook his head. But he thought of what Claire had just said. Lack of communication had its own risks. Perhaps it was better to know what Weeks was up to.

‘Come on, what've you got to lose?' Weeks said.

Simon's phone started ringing again; he looked at it, distracted.

‘It's literally two minutes' drive away,' the young man urged, repeating the address, the phone shrilling again. Simon said, ‘Yes, OK, I've got it. Just go away, will you? Let me deal with this and I'll come.'

‘OK. See you in two.'

Simon watched him walk to his car and drive off. He checked his messages. There was nothing urgent, just Clarice making work for herself.

He started driving then stopped the car, trying to decide what to do. Was it a mistake to follow Weeks? The phone rang again. Clarice. He had an irrational sense that the phone
was
Clarice, a little nagging, spying outpost of her that he had to lug around. Would she be able to tell if he turned it/her off? Irritated, he put the thing on silent, and when it went on vibrating and flashing he got out of the car, walked along the street and slipped it into his office mailbox in the gatepost. He glanced around. From a window opposite two small white dogs stared down at him. They had patches of black around their eyes, two little ghosts, their ears twitching.

The flat really was only two minutes' drive away, at the very top of a small, quiet street running up the side of Mt Eden. The young man was waiting, and he led Simon up a flight of concrete stairs to his flat. The rear windows looked onto the grassy slope of the hill; from the front there was a view of the suburbs stretching away across the isthmus.

Weeks showed him to a concrete deck out the back and bustled inside, saying he would make coffee. Simon sat on a canvas chair. Across a wire fence the paddock rose sharply towards the summit. It was a dazzling morning, bright sunshine, and there was a rich, hot smell of grass and manure. The traffic sounded distant below.

Weeks came out with two coffee cups. He said, ‘Strong brew. I need it. I don't sleep, insomnia. It's got so bad I've started taking sleeping pills. Then in the morning I need coffee to clear my head.'

Simon didn't look at him. ‘That's called a vicious circle,' he said.

‘I know. Anyway. How's your holiday going? You've been staying at Rotokauri with the Hallwrights. And the Cahanes. Ed Miles, our charming Minister of Police. I read it in the paper. Must be interesting. That Cahane — knows everything, finger in every pie. Apparently he's interested in Norse mythology? I was thinking about him — he's quiet, but there's that intensity, what is it, patrician anger? A vast sense of entitlement? Ambitious, incredibly right wing, fanatical; you can imagine him being a kind of hysteric.'

But what did he know about Cahane, or any of them? Anger rose in Simon like gas. One spark and he'd go off.

Weeks went on, ‘I'd like to meet them. Hallwright. Cahane. Ed Miles. The beautiful Roza Hallwright. And your Elke Lampton, Mrs Hallwright's daughter.'

Neither spoke for a moment. A butterfly fluttered lopsidedly over the long grass, the cicadas clicked and crackled. Avoiding Weeks's sharp little black eyes, Simon fixed his gaze on the paddock, the bees climbing and toppling in the grass stalks, the drunken flight of the butterfly. He heard the coy voice lingering on the loved names: Roza, Elke.

Weeks said, ‘Speaking of the beautiful Roza Hallwright, are the rumours true?'

Silence.

‘Mrs Hallwright and an extremely wild youth? Possible recent relapse? Suggestion of drugs? I met a glamorous woman at a party, her name was Tamara Goldwater. She was drunk, she said she had a tale to tell about Roza Hallwright. She mentioned the Hallwrights' main housekeeper. Mrs Lin Jung Ha . . .'

Simon controlled his anger. ‘So you want to meet them. But you're not just some hack, you're a “movie director”. Only a failed one. With your “short films” and your “Sundance”. Just an ageing kid hanging around the real people. Making up ugly gossip. Trying to find some life. Because you don't have one of your own.'

‘Whoa.' Weeks put up his hands.

Simon looked at him, sensing the young man's ego properly flicked.

‘When did you last see Mereana?' Weeks asked. His voice turned hurt and hard now.

‘I don't know her.'

The young man was pale, his face pinched, untouched by the summer sun. His eyes were like wet stones. ‘So you won't mind me mentioning to people that I've got her phone with your picture in it.'

‘Yes, I will.'

‘Why?'

‘Because it's none of your business where my picture is. It's none of your business.'

‘OK . . .'

‘When did you last see . . . this woman?'

Weeks said, ‘You mean which one of us was last to see her. Let me guess. That's important to you, because you want to know when she disappeared. You want to know, did she disappear because of you.'

‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘I know you had a relationship with her,' Weeks said.

‘Well, you know wrong.'

‘She told me.' Weeks smiled recklessly. Triumph, anticipation in his eyes.

‘You're lying. When did she tell you?'

‘Wanting to know when — that's what gives you away. You're trying to figure out what happened to her. If you didn't know her you wouldn't care about
when
.'

‘Why don't you leave it alone?'

‘I want to know what happened to Mereana.'

‘I don't know what happened to her.'

A pause. Weeks looking at him.

‘OK? I don't know.'

‘So you know
her
. Come on, did you like my films? The woman who plays Anahera, you know what we did? We gave her green contact lenses. Remember Mereana's eyes?'

Simon stared, hating him. He said, ‘Did the woman, the real Mereana, get a job at Maori TV?'

‘No. It was Mereana's ambition, that's why I put it in the film. She — the real Mereana — finished school, she was going to go to Auckland University, do a media course. But as soon as she got to Auckland she wasted all that; she went off with an idiot — a rich boy who'd been to King's. He was bright, good family, been a genius at school and then dropped out. She was stupidly in love with him and careless, which meant she got pregnant. Then she got busted, because her boyfriend decided to pull off a series of enormous drug deals with some ancient dinosaur bikers, Hell's Angels, and she was surprised one day coming back from the supermarket by the Armed Offenders Squad. A house full of fat bikers and ninjas and the boyfriend covered in blood because he'd run into a glass door trying to get away. The cops found wads of cash and drugs. She said it was nothing to do with her but they charged her as well.

‘He got a big sentence and she went to jail and they took her baby away for the last bit of her stretch. Her boyfriend's family banned her. She had to fight to get the kid when she got out, and then it died of meningitis, and the family blamed her for that. After that she was just lost, she didn't care about anything. She had a job managing a café out at the airport.'

‘Nice story,' Simon said.

‘She told me about you.'

‘Oh really.'

‘She came to see me here. It was summer, we climbed the mountain and sat up there. She described you. A doctor. Obstetrician. Married. Rich. Willing to go and fuck her in the really bad house she was living in, because it was close to the airport, which fitted with his business trips. She said there was something wrong with this doctor; he was unhappy, there was something bad going on in his life, and since there was something wrong with her too, they got on well.

‘She said he reminded her of her loser boyfriend who'd gone to King's, the jailbird, he looked similar, curly hair and broad shoulders, only the doctor hadn't gone to King's, she said he'd grown up poor. She said she loved him but he was married and had kids and he was really old.'

‘What did you say?'

‘I said, the doctor's no good, that's a hiding to nothing, married guy, old guy. Get rid of him and move in with me. She didn't want to. I wasn't her type.'

‘Your love was unrequited. The doctor was her type.'

‘It was. He was. I said to her it's doomed with the doctor, which she knew, but she let it happen because she was lonely.'

It was new detail: Mereana's arrest, the fact that the father of her dead child was a middle-class ex-King's boy. He'd never asked, only listened to her stories about living in the Far North as a child. For a moment he thought about her: face, body, eyes, voice, without revulsion and disgust. But he didn't want her memory, he pushed it away.

Weeks said, soft, ‘Do you think about her? Worry about her? I remember, she had a theory about why the doctor liked her. It was to do with his childhood. He thought there was something bad about himself and he was taking it out on her. Using it up on her.'

‘You've got the wrong doctor.'

‘I've got the one who's in her phone.'

‘Means nothing.'

‘Do you miss her? Feel guilty?'

The anger broke through. ‘I've got nothing to feel guilty about. But listen, Weeks, that time up here with her, did your friend
tell
you you weren't her type? That could've made you angry. Maybe you fought, you were drunk, you smacked her head into a rock. Maybe you dragged her down the hillside, put her in the boot and drove her out to the Woodhill Forest. Now all you've got left is your insomnia and your pills and your corny film. Close-ups of sparkling green eyes, shots of tossing hair, all that shit, and meanwhile you're trying not to think about the muddy hole you rammed her in when you'd finished with her.'

Weeks stared, blinked.

‘Nice story,' he said.

Silence between them. Words carried across the paddock from a conversation between two people on a walking track: ‘Summit.' ‘Perfect.' ‘South.' ‘No.'

‘Did you love her?' Weeks's voice had gone dogged, hurt, like a youth confronting his father. Simon felt something through his anger. He thought of his boy, Marcus.

He said less roughly, ‘You make things up. I'm a doctor so I like facts. She's your creation. Make up whatever you like.' He added, ‘You're the one on the guilt trip.'

‘Why guilt?'

‘You've used details about her, put them in your film.'

‘No. She's my friend. I want to find her.'

‘What a hero. Nothing to do with your career.'

A reckless smile broke out on Weeks's pinched face; he quelled it like a boy nursing a pleasingly evil secret.

He said, ‘I
have
had a new idea recently.' He lowered his eyes mod­estly. ‘I've written a screenplay about a National Party Prime Minister.'

There was a steel water bowl on the concrete, set there for a cat or dog perhaps, and the sun caught the water and made a dazzling white glare. Simon kept his eyes on it, and when he looked at Weeks there was a black hole in his vision, an absence of light surrounded by a burning border.

From behind the blackness Weeks said, ‘What I'd like is for you to let me in.'

He was dizzy. ‘Let you in?'

The young man's voice seemed to come from far away behind the shimmer, the crackle of the cicadas. ‘Into your circle, or, OK, even if it's just a few times, let me meet these people, the Hallwrights, the Cahanes, all of them.'