Soon (15 page)

David had got rid of the sports towel and was busy with his eggs. His cheeks and neck were flushed from the morning workout, his blond hair damp. He glanced up and Simon met the hard grey eyes, took in David's pink-and-gold charm, the solidity of his body in the sports clothes. Claire had said David was in love with him; she was all hot air and fiendishness but he did himself sometimes feel love for David.

As a boy he'd hung around in loose gangs with Ford; later he'd been so driven and uptight he hadn't been good at making male friends. He was better with women; the barrier of difference allowed him to relax. No surprise he'd chosen to practise O and G. He'd married Karen in order to belong, in order not to be alone, and yet in some ways he'd remained alone. There was Claire, his own girl, the best girl in the world, and Elke and Marcus; all three of his children were a joy, but still there was something he yearned for and had never achieved; it was what Ford had had with May.

He'd been singled out by David, and it had turned his head. The people surrounding David were politicians and staffers; you could tell he didn't trust any of them. David's only close friend had been old Graeme Ellison; now Graeme was dead, David seemed to be drawing Simon closer. It occurred to Simon that David, for all his power and popularity, was oddly solitary. He had Roza and Johnnie; he had his two older children, Izzy and Mike; but no extended family, no large circle, at least not one that was close. He had Simon and Karen. He wanted Elke . . .

Simon caught sight of the newspaper headline again. He felt nausea at what he was hiding and what damage he could inflict. There was no way to come clean, nothing to do but wait. If they came for him, he could bring everyone down.

That hot, stunned morning, driving slowly down the mountain and entering the plain of the suburb, he had crossed his Rubicon. His mind clear, he'd envisaged the alternative: frantic and pointless CPR on Weeks while on the phone to the ambulance, full explanation, submission of his knee, car and statement for inspection. Handwringing: so dreadfully sorry, the poor young man, a tragic accident, I did everything I could. He'd briefly considered this course and rejected it, because it was impossible.

The mistake had been agreeing to go to Weeks's flat. If he'd rung an ambulance as soon as Weeks had gone over the wall, he would have had to explain too much. Why, the police would ask him, had he gone up that street instead of driving into work? To look at the view? If he denied knowing Weeks and they discovered Weeks had rung his cell phone, they would want to know why he'd lied. They would conclude the pair must have met, and for a reason. Simon Lampton — David Hallwright's friend — and an unknown young man. What had they been up to? Some gay thing, a lovers' fight? Once a police inquiry was under way the media interest would be unstoppable. It would not stop until everything was tainted and everyone he loved was damaged.

So he'd checked the neighbouring windows for signs of life, and when he'd satisfied himself there were no witnesses he'd retrieved the two coffee cups, got in Karen's car and driven away. Crossed his rust-red river, driven slowly west, carrying in his head the shimmering wall of noise. The sound hadn't left him. Late that night as he drifted between dreams, he'd imagined it was the sound of Weeks's soul shrieking out into oblivion.

He'd pulled himself together reasonably quickly, driven back home and put Karen's car back in the garage without going inside or seeing Claire. There were no marks on the front bonnet; he'd only nudged Weeks, after all. He got into his own car and drove into the car park at work with the dashboard warning light pinging and the faint smell of burning rubber. After he'd finished his paperwork and seen his patients he drove all the way back to Rotokauri without breaking down, and left the car at the local garage.

During the day he could think rationally in his own defence. The death had been an accident. Weeks had threatened him; his nerves had been on edge; the bang on the window had startled him; the pain in the knee had been extreme. He'd tried to drive away and his hot, sweaty hands had slipped on the wheel. The young man, when he'd got to him, had had a fractured neck and had died instantly, and as a doctor he was qualified to judge. There was absolutely nothing he could have done to save him. More damage, infinite damage, would be done by owning up and trying to explain.

But if the police caught up with him now, it would be harder to convince them the death had been accidental. He could plead panic, but it wouldn't go down well. The scandal would be greater; he could even be charged with manslaughter. Or murder. There would be questions about the time of death. Had he driven away while Weeks was still alive? He knew that wasn't the case, but the evidence would have to be analysed, discussed, picked over. It would be the end.

The night before, loosened by the evening pill (his knee hurt more at the end of the day), his mind had ranged free. He remembered his anger, heightened by his fright at the bang on the window, then the wrenching pain in his knee. Had he driven at Weeks in rage? Would the young man have gone over the flimsy fence if Simon hadn't jammed his foot hard on the pedal? In his agitation, driving Karen's automatic rather than his own manual car, had he pushed the accelerator thinking it was a clutch? He couldn't recall.

In a dream he saw Mereana. It horrified him that she was smiling. She said, ‘Did you wish you could push a button, make him disappear?'

He woke with a dry mouth, compulsively smoothing the top sheet with his hand. He thought: but what was my crime? I had an affair with Mereana Kostas. I got involved with her because I was at a low point. That's all. He lay listening to the rustling, moving black night. He slept and dreamed again: Roza walking in a green forest with Johnnie, shapes in the trees behind her, the light unreal, theatrical clouds writhing in the sky.

He heard Roza's voice. She said: ‘I am the Green Lady. I am the Voice. I made this happen to you.'

Roza and Johnnie laughing and the sound again. He saw a dark cloud; it was a whirling cone of insects, coloured shapes shimmering inside the darkness. They were dragonflies.

There will be no mercy, he thought.

He was walking towards the dunes. It was hot and still and the track stretched ahead, broad and overgrown and pitted here and there with the tracks of mountain bikes. He stopped to rest, adjusting the tight bandage on his knee. Now when he walked across the lawns with David, people joked about it: ‘They even walk the same.'

David's limp was permanent, the result of a car accident in his youth. Simon's was less pronounced already and would eventually disappear, he hoped, although the improvement that morning was partly due to the double dose of painkillers he'd popped before leaving the Little House. In his bag he was carrying towel, suntan lotion, book, two phones and two blue coffee cups.

He'd tried to think it through. Weeks had called Simon's cell phone and those calls must be logged, most obviously in Weeks's phone. Those who got away with crimes were
forensically aware
(it was so easy to slip into the jargon). He decided to get rid of his own phone, as well as the cups and Mereana's phone. But he would still have to think up a reason why Weeks had called him.

There was so much he couldn't control. Had Weeks told anyone about meeting him? In a city full of eyes, it seemed impossible that he hadn't been seen on Weeks's street.

Someone calling. He turned, shielding his face, saw a dark shape against the blaze of early sun. Karen.

‘Marcus wants to go over to the Gibsons. Can you give him a ride?'

‘Off for a swim,' he said, shouldering the bag.

‘I'd drive him but Juliet and I've got Garth for the hour, they're waiting for me.'

He sighed, trudged after her.

‘They've invited him out on the boat.'

‘You think it's safe?' He pictured Gibson drunk out of his mind, exuberantly ramming the wharf.

‘Of course it's safe. It's not like they're going out in a dinghy. They've got
crew
.'

They reached the gate, passing Ray, whose eyes seemed to follow them unpleasantly. Karen went to get Marcus, Simon fetched his keys and waited in the car. He didn't want to see his son. He didn't want to talk to him or look at his hands or his messy hair or his young, volatile skin, the quick changes of expression: bravado, secretiveness, baffled innocence.

There was a voice in his head, very light, tired, washed out. He blocked it. A seagull swooped down and landed on the fence, and he looked into its pitiless black eye, like a tiny peephole into the universe. The bird stood ruffling its pure white feathers against a blue sky that was bright, hard, clean.

A memory came to him: a couple whose baby he'd delivered, the husband a gushing TV personality, Scott Roysmith. All psyched up to act in a drama called the wonder of birth, he'd told Simon about a night-time storm during which the lightning had lit up clear sky, great patches of bright blue in the dark.

‘I realised that if only you could see it, the sky at night is blue,' Roysmith had said, while Simon tended to the writhing wife and the nurses popped in and out, checking on the celebrity patient. The wife shrieking at her husband to stick his blue sky up his arse . . . The baby was a girl, he remembered.

He had seen so many babies, handled them, looked into the empty blue of their eyes. Their eyes are always blue and cloudless, before they've lived. Because they haven't lived.

I've helped people to be born. Does that even the score?

I can't think of what I have done
.

Marcus opened the car door.

‘Hi Dad . . . What's wrong?'

‘Nothing. Just thinking.' He coughed. ‘Seatbelt.'

His bag was on the back seat. As they drove over the hills he could hear Weeks's coffee cups clinking.

At the Gibsons' there was no answer to their knock, but from inside came the sound of raised female voices, shrieks of raucous laughter.

Simon shouted out hello. Another collective shriek, then Janine called out, ‘Come in.' The room was full of women and the floor was covered with balloons and feathers.

Janine, hectically rigged out in leather miniskirt, teetering golden sandals and a see-through top, came wading through the detritus. ‘Excuse us, we had a hen party last night. My Chloe's getting married. We haven't been to bed yet, we're all a bit spacey. Have a coffee, Simon. Marcus, the boys are all on the boat, they're waiting for you.'

Sharon Cahane was reclining on a white sofa, a gaudy pink boa draped along her elegant frame. With manicured fingers, she wafted an artificial feather over her nose.

Janine said, ‘We had a burlesque dancer come; she showed us how to strut our stuff.'

Sharon looked at Simon and minutely rolled her eyes.

‘Then we hired a bus and went back to town, to a strip club.'

‘It was hilarious.'

The way they all shrieked in unison.
Native birds
, he thought.

He said, polite, ‘I didn't realise people still did these things. Hen nights.'

‘Course they do. The men had a stag party. They even got Colin Cahane on a jet ski.'

Peter Gibson put his head around the door. He winked, his face boiled. ‘All right, ladies? We're off now, leave you to it. Gidday Simon, I'll bring your boy back around eight. Colin's coming; he can run Marcus over the hill.'

He disappeared, and the native birds shrieked again, as if the mere sight of a man was exquisitely funny. The feathers kicked up, drifted down.

Outside, the water glittering with points of light, the flags snapping. Gibson's boat was heading out of the marina, churning through the green water. Simon felt he wasn't quite present in the hot room; he had a sense of floating amid the brightness, the rustle and stir of balloons and feathers, the yellow rectangle of light sliding across the ceiling and down the wall as the boat glided past, its hull reflecting the sun. A hen party. Were these people stuck in a time warp?

His grip on things had loosened, leaving him uncertain. He seemed to be groping for explanations. While the world spun, while the world raced on (flood fire tempest famine) these women floated in their provincial, feather-headed bubble. He thought . . . He thought, Don't tell Claire. And then, yes, tell her. Describe every detail. Strip clubs, balloons, feathers. Claire would be merciless.

But the women were not oblivious to the world. The coffee and cake roused them from their hungover torpor, and they started to talk. They frowned, serious. The faux accents, that had slipped a bit, returned.

‘They have another baby so they can get more benefit . . .'

‘They're draining the country
dray
 . . .'

‘. . . lazing around . . .‘

‘. . . on taxpayers' money.'

‘The country's drowning under the . . .'

‘Welfare dependency . . .'

There was a short silence.

Another yacht went by the window. Janine yawned, covering her mouth. Her gold bracelets pinged.

‘Colin wants to buy shares in a vineyard . . .'

‘Oooh, lovely.'

‘Don't
talk
to me about waine. My poor
head
 . . .'

The shriek of mirth was more subdued, they were yawning, glazed. Sparkling dust floated in the shafts of sunlight.

Simon got up, made his excuses, left them among the drifting feathers, slumped in their pile of boas.

How Could You Have
Got This So Wrong?

He turned onto the Rotokauri road, winding up into the hills. Near the summit, where the land fell away from the highway in steep slopes, he pulled over, walked up and down the edge of the road, looking into the dark bush, listening. He saw his reflection in the side of the car, tall and thin and curved. The wind sighed in the tops, a native pigeon landed on a branch and looked pompously down at him.

Taking Mereana's phone, he threw it so hard he hurt himself. Instead of soaring away into the valley it hit a tree, rebounded and disappeared, too close to the road. He couldn't even get a simple thing like that right. The pigeon cocked its head, watching him as he stooped on the roadside, straightening his elbow with elaborate care. Crime was a young man's game. It was killing him.

He leaned against the car, feeling the warmth of the metal against his sore leg and his strained elbow. He heard Weeks's voice.
Do you miss her
?
Feel guilty
? He raised his eyes and there was the pigeon, stupid, astonished, preening its white bib.

Should he throw his phone and Weeks's coffee cups down there too, or find another spot? Was it better to spread the evidence, or would that make it easier to find? A little stab of self pity: he was so beleaguered and alone, so
inexperienced
. He needed support, information, peer review (the little gnome in his head, blackly laughing). He needed the hushed silence of his office and a textbook that would tell him:
Disposal of incriminating
evidence: international best practice
.

Pressing his fingers to his eyes he saw red sunrise against his lids. Then he straightened, fighting the urge to turn, run.

‘Hi,' he said.

The man coming towards him was big and broad, with a satanic little goatee beard.

‘All right, mate?'

‘Yes. Fine, thanks.'

‘Not broken down?'

How had he arrived without any noise? It was unbelievable. Simon looked for the milk float or silent Prius, but saw only an ordinary red Holden Omega, its driver's door open and the still shape of a woman, vigilant in the passenger seat. But the athletic build, the Holden, the official tone, that Westie brute's goatee: a cop, he thought. He twitched the bag on his shoulder.

‘Just on the phone. Getting bit fresh air.' His tongue was frozen; it was like talking through a mouthful of porridge.

The man was already turning away, making a signal to his passenger.

‘But thanks for asking,' Simon called after him.

The man turned, actually looked at him, considered, seemed about to ask another question but only said, ‘No worries.'

The red Omega pulled away, Simon raising his hand.

Leaning back against the car, his arm to his face, he had a moment of bitter incredulity. A cop. Possible cop. Even if not a cop, a witness, in fact two witnesses, who had seen him in this spot, who would remember later if questions were asked. They would search the bush beneath the road, find the phone.

He was already plunging down the slope, his feet sinking into the soft piles of rotting vegetation, looking for the tree the phone had hit. Everything looked different below the bush canopy and he was soon disorientated. The bush smelled of tea and spices, a rich brown reek. The air was cool near the ground; he skidded, landing on his rump in a pile of rotting nikau fronds, their fibrous dust rising around him. He lay on his back for a moment, gazing at the sky. Against the blue the manuka trunks were black, covered in a furry fungus. A weta, its feelers waving, scrambled over the top of a dislodged palm frond, so close he could see its shiny black eyes. He flinched away. A car droned by on the road above.

After an age of searching he slumped down on the soft ground and his eye fell on something metallic inside a pile of manuka twigs. The phone had landed in the centre of a network of spider webs strung among dead leaves and fallen branches. He stuck his hand into the sticky membrane and extracted the phone, tearing the webs away with it.

It was a long way back up to the road. He fought through a patch of toetoe and cutty grass that he hadn't passed on the way down, and tore his shirt on a tree branch. When he reached the road his mouth dropped open, he could have sunk to his knees. The car was gone.

He set off walking one way, changed direction, dithered, rounded the next bend and found it parked exactly where he'd left it. He should have realised: in the bush, sense of direction is the first thing to go.

At Rotokauri he bumped the car over the rough grass drive and through the gate, remembering a wave for the watchful sentries, Jon, Shaun, Ray. With a sense of futility — the farce he'd made of things — he left the car and shouldered his bag of contraband, heading for the Little House.

All was silent and the sun's blaze was pitiless, the trees still in the heat. Even the birds were subdued, their squawks drowsy. On the other side of the lawn Trent or Troy crossed the shell path, plugged into an iPod and actually dancing, clicking fingers, swinging elbows. Simon watched him shimmy past in the silence. He disappeared behind a tall hedge and reappeared on the slope of a further lawn, a figure cut out of light, graceful and mad. He turned and seemed to beckon, as though drawing Simon into the strange, dark core of the world. The garden was a mesh of bright colour, the light so merciless it seemed it could fray the very substance of matter, revealing what pulsed behind.

The image suddenly reared up before him of Weeks's grotesquely distorted body, his splayed limbs and vulnerable, bare, boyish ankle.

He closed his eyes, listening. Yes, it was there, the shimmering wall of sound.

In the hot utility area behind the Little House, among the rubbish bins, piles of recycling and reeking containers of rotting garden clippings, he loosened a brick from the wall and set to work smashing the coffee cups into dust. It was harder than he'd expected; the pieces kept shooting about and getting lost in the grass and he had to stop every few minutes to make sure he was still alone. In his agitation he hit his own thumb with the brick, raising a dark crimson half-moon of blood in the nail.

He had seen plenty of death, had handled bodies, babies who died being born or were born dead — you filled out the form
Status: Not Born Alive
. Sometimes, rarely, women died in childbirth or afterwards from complications, and he and the team would pull off their masks and step back and listen, as if they could hear the grief building behind the swing-doors, in the waiting rooms and corridors.

I have prevented deaths. I've brought babies back to life when they were floppy and blue. I have
held back
death. Does this count in the score?

——

In the stillness the tuis let out little exhausted warbles and clicks, pure drops of sound. A rosella flashed between the trees. After their pounding, Weeks's coffee cups lay in blue and white shards on the concrete slab beneath the bins. Simon scuffed them about with his foot, replaced the brick and limped inside.

In the bathroom he washed his hands and rinsed his face, dabbing gingerly at his sunburnt cheeks. He wondered how to dispose of the phones; he had yet to construct a plausible lie if he were asked about Weeks's having called him. Brooding on this he shambled out of the bathroom and smashed his knee into a table leg. He hopped back into the bathroom, scrabbling for the pain pills. All that bending over the coffee cups hadn't helped the injury; the skin below the bandage looked red and tight. He pushed his finger doubtfully into the strange-looking flesh.

It was good to take the weight off and sink down on the soft bed. He plunged into a queasy, uncomfortable sleep; he seemed somehow to be hanging on, as if the bed were tilting, and at one point had the sensation of being awake but paralysed and unable to rouse himself, his breath growing shallower and his limbs inert until, with a massive effort, he wrenched himself towards consciousness. He sank into sleep again and saw Ford's wife May, her shiny dark eyes fixed alertly on him, one hand to her glossy hair, bracelets jingling as she flicked a strand from her face.

He woke, dozed, woke again, thinking about May. She was beautiful, but what had always struck him was her intelligence. She gave the impression she could see into his soul; worse, she was greatly inclined to laugh. It was her ridicule he had feared. Once, lulled by an implausible rumour that the old man had dried out, Ford had unwisely taken her to meet Aaron. May was Sri Lankan and Aaron, after downing about a barrel of whisky, had unleashed a tirade of racist abuse. Ford had feared he'd lost her but she'd come back. After the old man had gleefully called her, among other appalling things, a ‘curry bitch', May had shrugged it off. All she asked was that they never see Aaron again and Ford had been happy to oblige her on that.

His thoughts blurred. That May. In the dreamlight, her gaze held him. And she began to dance, very slowly at first, without taking her eyes off his face, and then she began to spin, until her body blurred and the air around her began to whirl so fast that light was gathered in and he was looking at a cone of spinning air, points of light glittering inside it.

‘Make it stop,' he said.

May said, ‘But this is not my dream.'

He coughed, rose on his elbows and nearly cracked his head on Karen's forehead. She was leaning over him, her ruby pendant dangling on its chain and coldly touching his nose.

‘Sorry. You looked so peaceful,' she said.

She stood at the window, arms crossed, one hand cupping an elbow. The pose was theatrical. She turned, swung her arms, went to speak and then gazed away out the window, her eyes on a distant point.

Christ, out with it. Spare me the pantomime.
She had presented him with a glass of iced water. He sipped it irritably.

‘We need to talk.'

‘Ah yes?' He raised his eyes, a sudden ache in his teeth from the cold water.

‘Your behaviour. I can't . . . It's not . . .'

He sighed, waited.

‘Even your expression right now, you should
see
yourself. Like a sort of
gargoyle
.'

‘Thank you.'

‘You look contemptible. I mean contemptuous. There's something I have to tell you. That silly Kessler test. It didn't tell me I was normal. It said I was stressed.'

‘Really.'

‘It made me think about why that would be. I'm worried about Elke. But there's also our marriage. Your behaviour . . . When we eat dinner, I look up and you're waiting for me to finish. Just staring at me, waiting. When we go to the beach you wait for me to stop lying in the sun. Anything we do, you stand about waiting for it to end, with that gargoyle look on your face. I don't think you're capable of enjoying anything we do. You terrify me in the car with your speeding. You hardly eat. You're thinner. Sometimes when you look at me all I can see are these huge, cold, pale eyes with tiny little black pupils in them and this square grey face, and it's like being looked at by a
reptile
.'

He cleared his throat. ‘Don't hold back.'

‘I want to tell you something.'

There was more? He pressed the glass against his eyes.

She sat down next to him on the bed. The springs let out a small affronted squeak.

‘Simon, I know you had an affair. OK? There's no point in denying it. Women know. I don't know who it was with or anything about it, but I know it happened, and that it ended a while ago.'

He stared.

She'd never said a word. His Karen, who was so straightforward, an open book, who couldn't control herself and always blurted out whatever was on her mind no matter how tactically foolish, who was . . .

Admit it, who was simple-minded. Beautiful, graceful and simple-minded. The perfect, undemanding presence, radiant with common sense, wonderfully unimaginative and calm, the sexy, dyed-haired goddess whose greatest pleasure was to receive the wealth, to revere him for his manly skill at bringing it home, to spend it on trappings, trappings, oh God.

She fingered the ruby pendant. ‘The details aren't important now. I know you, Simon. I know you think I'm a featherbrain. It's my fault in a way.'

‘Your fault?'

‘How else would I have got you to marry me? It's another thing women know. They can tell what men want. If they want the man, they give him what he wants. Featherbrain, ice queen. Whatever. Get it?'

Silence.

‘I know what you wanted. Like I keep telling you, women know. You didn't want to live alone, but deep down you did. You wanted to be with someone who wouldn't really know you. Who wouldn't see you. So that you could be married and have a family but in yourself, you could be alone.'

He looked at her almost with fear.

‘But here's the thing. Sometimes you've wished you weren't alone. You've looked out of your little hermit's cave and wondered why you took such a lonely path. Why it was even necessary. And you dreamed of being in love. Requited love.'

His eyes burned, he squeezed them shut. How could she be capable of an insight like that? It was almost supernatural. He had an alarming sensation, something catastrophic happening to his chest. To be understood. Stripped bare. It was pain but the pain was exquisite.

‘Get it, Simon? I wasn't “not seeing you” all this time. I was
looking away.
Because that was what you wanted.'

Her tone hardened. ‘But my telling you all this is a very bad sign. Why would I let you in on all this if I still wanted to be married? I'm telling you because I don't care. I'm laying down my cards. I'm out of the game. I don't want to play any more . . .'

She tossed back her hair and seemed to lose focus; stuck on the metaphor she ran on, wandering through ‘Showing my hand', ‘Resigning', ‘Leaving the field', ‘Heading for the bench'. He was so struck with surprise he simply looked on, his hands placing themselves feebly about him; he tremblingly touched his sore knee, his eyes, his mouth. Good God. Karen. His golden Karen, goddess of furniture and foreign travel, of coffee mornings and fundraising lunches, Karen who said ‘Taxpayers' money' and ‘Wet bus ticket' and ‘To be honest, I need a bit of Me Time after the gym. ' Was it any wonder he'd thought her a fool? His beautiful, ferocious, golden fool. All this time she'd understood him. She'd known of his affair but had not said a word . . .