The Last Time We Spoke (12 page)

The inmates took something of yours, Benjamin. They stole your shoes, just as you stole a life not yours to take, and just as your ancestors were robbed of their land by white men with muskets. You tried to fight back. Your fellow inmates were stronger and you succumbed. Life throws up such patterns all the time.

Why do I continue to watch over you and feel the pain of your lowly life when matters of the flesh are no longer mine? I am at one with this universe, with the silent coves of the Marlborough Sounds, the golden grasslands of the Aoraki, the shimmering waters of Kaikoura’s coast. I am the call of the weka and the cry of a morepork. I am the shudder and boom of thunder. The sound and the silence of this earth and sky. I am complete.

My answer is simple, boy. I watch over you because you are a part of me and me of you. The same thread binds us, earth to earthling, sky to soul. We are different phases of the same. And though you have been cut loose of this connection, I stay, for a reason that goes beyond you, into the future. You see, if you remain cut loose from your culture, so will your descendants, and so will theirs.

Back then to my story. 1840. Beside the River of Waitangi where the Treaty I was telling you about was so hastily drawn up. A pact
between the English and your ancestors, and signed by many Māori chiefs in the belief it promised cooperation and respect. But
…
Yes, there is a ‘but’. There were two versions of this seminal document – two translations, two understandings. Two misunderstandings.

Kevin had his back to the door when Carla walked in. He was finishing his lunch and the smell of fish pie clung to the walls of his cubicle.

‘My darling,’ she whispered, kissing the top of his head. His hair hadn’t grown back over the scar – the purple fleshy ridge rising up like a railway track between his sparse greying bristles.

He looked up, bemused. ‘I’ve had enough. Take it away.’ As Carla lifted the tray, her elbow accidentally toppled his pink plastic mug, flooding the leftover mash with redcurrant cordial.

‘Now look what you’ve done, you silly woman!’ he burst out. ‘You’ve got no business working here if you can’t do the job properly. What’s more, I know you’ve been fornicating with Mr Meady in Room Twelve. He told me. You’re just a whore.’

‘Stop it, Kevin! Stop! It’s me, Carla.’ She fought to keep her voice steady. ‘Me! Remember the farm?
The Willows
? Rangi and Rebecca? Do you remember our son, Jack?’

Some days he was lucid, other days so confused. And lately, it seemed that he was having more bad days than good. He had so little reserve, that any ailment – a simple urinary tract infection or even just a head cold – could tip him into delirium.

‘Pah!’ he exclaimed, fiddling furiously with his dressing-gown cord.

‘They’ve put the thugs away,’ she said slowly, sitting down next to him. ‘The ones who did this to you, my darling. Fourteen years for one. Nineteen for the other.’

It was the first day of the rest of their lives, she told him. They had to grasp what had been given them, accept it, and move on.

Kevin rubbed his nose roughly and stared ahead.

‘Look what I’ve brought,’ she said after a time, delving into an old Farmers plastic bag to retrieve two scrunched balls of tissue paper.

Kevin looked on with eye-protruding fascination. Carefully she unwrapped them, smoothing out the creases in the paper with meticulous attention. Then she placed first one, and then another crystal glass on the side table.

‘I thought we could share a drink together, just like old times. Toast the future. Look at maybe getting you back home with me. What about it?’

Without waiting for a reply, she lifted out a bottle of sherry and poured two generous glasses. ‘I love you, Kevin. I love you, for ever,’ she said, handing him a glass.

He eyed it quizzically before tipping his head back and swallowing the liquor in one wet gulp. Surprise splashed across his face as the alcohol gushed unhindered down his windpipe, and before Carla had time to take a sip herself, Kevin’s swig had been rerouted and sprayed all over her clothes with a vigorous cough.

‘Oh, Kevin!’ she cried, dabbing at the sticky maroon liquid.

Kevin coughed again, and again, and again, his face turning puce, then dusky. He hauled himself up and stumbled around the room.

Carla chased after him, trying to slap him on the back as his coughing turned strangulated and feeble.

Panicking, she leant on the emergency button, before running out into the corridor. ‘Help! Somebody, quick! My husband. He’s choking!’ Kevin was prostrate on the floor by the time the two nurse-aides burst into the room, one carrying a large cylinder of oxygen. They knelt down beside him and tilted his chin upwards, forcing his mouth open to check for an obstruction.

‘It was ju-ju-just the drink,’ Carla stuttered, pointing to the bottle of sherry.

‘He didn’t choke on his food?’

Carla shook her head.

The nurse slammed an oxygen mask over Kevin’s blue lips and rolled him onto his side.

‘I must reiterate, Mrs Reid, that this sort of behaviour is totally unacceptable.’

Carla was sitting in Tracy Lomax’s office. The manager, a parrot of a woman with a tight blonde bun, was lodged behind her vast mahogany desk. She peered at Carla from around an oversized arrangement of fake magnolias.

‘The rules we have here are in place for a purpose. Our responsibility is first and foremost to our patients, all of whom, as you well know, have suffered from some sort of head injury. With temperaments labile and reflexes impaired, alcohol is forbidden. Absolutely forbidden!’

‘I’m so sorry, Tracy. It’s just that I wanted to …’ Carla stopped.

Tracy arranged a conciliatory smile. ‘Fortunately, this has not had a dire outcome, but I’d leave Kevin to sleep right now; he’s had more than enough excitement for one day. The doctor will check him over a little later.’

‘Do you think—?’ Carla leant forward in her seat. ‘Tracy, do you think Kevin will ever be able to come back home to live with me?’

The hospital manager took off her glasses and fixed Carla with a sobering stare. ‘Mrs Reid … Carla,’ she said slowly, ‘I do not believe you would be able to cope with Kevin on your own. Not unless a huge amount of additional support was put in place, which would be incredibly expensive to sustain on a long-term basis. ACC wouldn’t cover a half of it.’

She paused. ‘Kevin is not doing as well as we’d hoped, especially following the second brain bleed.’

Carla scanned the woman’s words for hope.

‘Look, we are having a team meeting later this month with the doctors, physios and OTs. I’ll put it out there. My feeling is that you won’t manage on your own. He really has deteriorated. I personally don’t believe Kevin will be able to live independently again.’ Carla nodded robotically and stood up, muttering another apology as she backed out of the office.

‘I am obliged to file an incident report,’ Tracy called after her.

‘I understand.’

Carla wandered down the corridors, passing the open doors of other residents’ rooms – peep shows on broken lives.

She drove home not seeing the road, instead navigating the troubled highways of her mind, and it was only when she turned into the driveway of
Willowlands Residential Park
that she realised she had driven back to the farm and not her apartment.

Reluctant to reverse onto the busy highway, she motored on through the new subdivision with its schist pillars, landscaped driveway, and imported date palms. She came to a roundabout where the old barn had once stood. Distracted, she let the car veer towards the grassy bank, before suddenly overcorrecting. The
wheels spun on the loose gravel and the car glided across the road, mounted the opposite verge and came to an abrupt halt.

Carla was shaking as she climbed out and steadied herself against the hot, dusty car. Her surrounds came into focus. She was disorientated. Her breathing picked up. The pieces of a familiar jigsaw were all jumbled up.

Surfaced roads. Missing trees. Absent fences. New homes sprawling over freshly turned earth. The dam now bordered by sandstone pavers. An ornamental boulder rising out of the water like the artificial whale at Kelly Tarlton’s aquarium. DOC-green benches dotted around the brackish water, lending the place a park-like feel. A large red sign warning off children unaccompanied by an adult – a far cry from Jack’s carefree afternoons spent catching eels and guppies, no adult in sight.

She wandered down the road towards one of the new houses – a Spanish monolith, all turrets and arches and terracotta tiles. She could just imagine the real estate jargon:
Hear the castanets as you sip sangria on the deck and watch the sun set behind majestic hills!

A token willow tree had been left standing. The rest were now stumps poking through the land like amputated fingers. The house was obviously empty, save for a lone tradesman working on the guttering.

Carla lifted her skirt and hoisted herself over the fence, the freshly painted creosote blackening her thighs. She made her way around the perimeter of the newly demarcated property to the foot of the hill on the other side. Overgrown gorse and wild blackberries left angry welts on her ankles as she scrambled up the rise, her city-idle legs tiring quickly.

She’d forgotten about the summer screech of cicadas, the din now competing with the growl and whine of a distant digger, and the
tap tap tap
of a solitary hammer.

Her heart started hammering in her throat and not just because she was unfit; she knew she should turn back and preserve the picture she held in her mind. But her legs kept moving, carrying her up to the top of the knoll. She had to see for herself. She had to.

Even though Carla had prepared herself for the inevitable, it still came as a shock, and when she saw it, she crumpled to the ground.

‘I hate you!’ she screamed, curling up on the dry, prickly grass. ‘I hate you!’

The farmhouse was gone. She knew it would be. In its place was a rectangle of rubble bordered by a band of fluorescent orange plastic, from which hung the sign
Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted
.

It was the only place in the apartment suitable; new homes weren’t built with the high studs of older buildings. The rail ran across the bathroom from the pockmarked mirror to the opposite wall. It was a structural support, but also handy for hanging wet washing. It would do.

Carla removed her shoes and pulled herself up onto the slippery white rim, so that she was straddling the bathtub.

The rope she’d found in her allotted cubicle of storage space in the basement of the building. It was one of the few things she had brought from the farm. Kevin used to always go on about how indispensable a good rope was. ‘Useful for myriad things from towing vehicles, to retrieving dead cows from ditches.’

The knot slid smoothly along the rope, reducing the slack until the hairy fibres were prickling her neck. Being a former Scout mistress had paid off; the knot would hold.

From her position she could see out of the sliver of open bathroom window. The evening light was a gentle mauve on teal. Beautiful. But just another trap. God was putting on one final
show of splendour in a last-ditch effort to woo her back to this world. Well, it was too late.

A spider hunkered in the crook of the window frame – two almond beads of body, a splash of white on brown, long legs splayed like the rays of sunshine in a child’s drawing. The outline of the creature was so distinct that Carla felt as if a net curtain had just been lifted on the world and she could see in focus for the very first time. The whisky might have had something to do with that, though she’d been careful to not overdo it, throwing back just enough to quash the voices inside her head. She still needed to be in control.

The noose was now uncomfortably tight. She swallowed against its resistance, then closed her eyes and let her toes slip inward over the bath rim, her feet losing the firm reply of cold enamel.

‘Lio Va’a to visits. Lio Va’a to visits,’ the PA system boomed across the exercise yard.

They were playing Crash, a cross between rugby and bullrush. Lio wiped the sweat off his forehead, spat onto the ground, and headed for the gate.

‘Lucky. The bitch must be gagging for it,’ some guy cooed.

‘That’s the third fuckin’ visit this week,’ bleated another.

Since Ben had been at ‘The Rock’, he’d had that command only twice – once for a lawyer’s visit, the other time when Simi and George had come to see him.

They’d told him the DOAs had disintegrated, what with both him and Tate being inside. Matt was prospecting for another gang, and the rest were just cruising. They said Ben had earned props and had real cred in the hood. Said he would easily get into another crew when he got out.

It was good seeing his mates, but also weird. Strangely, Ben felt more alone with them around. Even though the three kept up the act that their lives were still intertwined, he knew that at the end of the hour they would walk through the sliding metal gate and he’d be the one left behind. They also seemed quite immature – like
kindergarten kids, when he’d graduated to big school.

One good thing about their visit was that they’d brought him cigarettes and a phone card. He used it to give his mum a call. She promised to come visit, just as she’d promised a hundred times before. Said she was just waiting for Debs to get down from up north, then she’d catch a ride in with her. So Ben kept booking four visits a week, the maximum permitted, just in case. Visits had to be booked from the inside. If an upcoming visit wasn’t written in the book, it didn’t happen.

When his mum did finally get her act together, she arrived at some random time and they wouldn’t allow her to see him. ‘No booking, no visit.’

That’s when Ben levelled one of the screws and got five days in Secure. It was five days of hell – in a freezing cell with just a thin foam mattress on the floor and a putrid-smelling bucket in the corner. One hour a day to exercise alone in the yard; the other twenty-three in lockdown. And because of his assault on the guard, he was reclassified IDU-1, which meant any visitations for the next three months were permitted only from behind a wall of glass. Ben wasn’t overly concerned; it wasn’t as if he had visitors lining up to see him.

Getting back to East Block was sweeter than a tinnie, and doubly sweet because Jocko had been moved on to Paremoremo, the maximum-security prison just outside of Albany. So Ben now had the whole cell to himself.

The only bad thing about his cellmate moving out was that his TV went with him. Jocko had kept it switched on day and night, even when coverage was down and there was just static. But Ben had got used to the intrusion, the incessant din plugging the dark ditches in his mind. The new long hours of nothing nearly did his head in. Crazy thoughts kept sprouting like seedlings in a dark
cupboard, till his head was a tangle of them. Often the thoughts came without proper words attached – Ben didn’t own many words. Thoughts that left him anxious and angry.

‘Toroa to visits. Toroa to visits.’

Was he dreaming? Ben looked up at the bridge. It was Shirley.

‘You fooling with me, miss?’

She smiled down at him. ‘Name’s in the book, Ben.’

‘Yeah, but I made them bookings just in case someone turned up, random-like.’

‘Cut your fussing and get your arse to the gate.’

Ben’s pulse picked up. He didn’t know what it was about, but it was definitely better than another faded day of slow boredom.

Shirley came down off the bridge and escorted him. He liked her, the only cool screw in the joint. She even knew his name, and whenever she saw him, she stopped to talk. ‘So how you doing, Ben? Keeping on the straight road?’ or ‘Your day going OK, Ben?’

At Visits he stripped off in front of the guard and handed over his clothes. The guy shoved them into a numbered locker and handed him an orange overall, which he put on back to front. Ben knew the drill from the few visits he’d had. He slipped on the overall and turned around for it to be zipped up from behind. The zip was then secured with a plastic tie. It was the same procedure around his wrists, to ensure that no contraband could be stashed up his sleeves or inside the overall. Not that this was likely to happen, since he’d be separated from any visitor by an inch of glass.

He sat down and waited, watching the second hand creep around the cracked white clock face. He could read digital, but he couldn’t tell the time off this ancient instrument. In fact, the whole building was practically prehistoric; the date it had been built, eighteen something-or-other, was inscribed on the arch over the entrance. Rumour had it the place even
hosted a few hangings before executions were finally outlawed.

‘Is this visit going ahead or what?’ he asked, the suspense getting to him.

The screw didn’t look up from his paperwork.

After what felt like forever, the guy’s radio crackled, giving the go-ahead. He got up unhurriedly and scanned his clipboard. ‘You’re IDU-1,’ he said, stating the obvious.

Ben was used to the overkill. In prison, protocol was everything. Words, rules, procedures, guidelines – they were uttered, repeated, ticked, checked, rechecked, confirmed, and reconfirmed. It could drive a dude crazy. But oddly, it was also reassuring. A shield against the unpredictability of what could go down inside.

The guard led him down a narrow corridor into a shoebox of a room with a viewing window at one end. There was the shape of a person on the other side, but he couldn’t see who it was – the light was coming from behind his visitor, and the glass was smudged with greasy fingerprints.

He stepped forward and the silhouette was at once familiar.

Ben’s heart whooped and then crashed. ‘Fuck!’

‘Sit down and speak into the receiver,’ the screw ordered from behind him.

Ben felt for the chair and sank down slowly, unable to take his eyes off the face peering back at him. The left side of her face was swollen like a fermented breadfruit. A purple-black cloud swung over her one eye. Her lip had been split in two, each half jutting out awkwardly to move independently of the other. Her long limp hair had been brushed over the top of her head in an attempt to hide the fresh clearing of bare scalp. And when she tried to smile, Ben saw that his mother’s front teeth were missing.

He put his hand to the glass, almost glad for the barrier. She looked too fragile to touch, like she’d crumble on contact.

She lifted her hand to meet his. Her knuckles were grazed and two fingers had been strapped together with grubby pink Elastoplast.

They stayed like that for a while, mother and son, hands touching … glass. It reminded Ben of when, as a child, he’d measure his palm against hers, and she would laugh, telling him he was getting so big he’d soon be a man.

He picked up the receiver with the same sense of helplessness he used to feel when one or other of his mother’s partners started knocking her about. This time, though, it was a pane of glass, not fear that kept him from her.

‘
He
do this to you, Ma?’ he finally managed, his anger climbing up over the horror in front of him. Ryan had outdone himself.

Tears swam across her yellowed eyes. ‘Didn’t bring takeaways home quick enough,’ she said grimly. She pulled down the corner of her lower lip down and winced. ‘Fast food not fast enough.’

She laughed hoarsely, then began to cough. ‘But nothing a bit of sticking plaster can’t fix, boy. So don’t you go worrying over your old ma, you hear me? I’m made of strong stuff.’ She shifted on her chair like an old person. ‘That’s not why I’m here. I wanted to tell you what I’m about to do.’

Ben closed his eyes.

‘But first, tell me, how you doing, kiddo?’

He shook his head.

‘You lookin’ kinda scrawny. They feeding you enough?’ She rummaged through her bag. ‘I brought you some toffees.’

Ben jumped up and thumped his fists down on the counter. ‘Fuck, I’ll kill him, Ma. I’ll fuckin’ kill him!’

‘No point getting all worked up, Benjamin. I got a plan. Sit down. Listen. I want you to be better than him. You can’t go around beating up the screws. They said that’s why you behind this glass.’

Ben couldn’t hear her any more; he’d dropped the receiver. His head was all fire and anger and pain. He turned to the prefab wall divider and dropped a hole through it, right into the next booth.

Two screws burst in. ‘That’s it, Toroa.’

‘I’ll fuckin’ kill the bastard!’ he shouted, dodging one screw and winding the other.

‘Ben, don’t!’ his mother shouted through the abandoned receiver.

Two more guards rushed in. Ben thumped and kicked and bit and scratched. Then he was in a headlock and his mother’s frantic screams were part of a silent movie he never got to see.

Days later, he learnt that when they found her body, a Women’s Refuge card was still hidden in the side of her shoe, and the money she’d squirrelled away for months in the toilet cistern, in her purse. They told him she never made it to the refuge. Ryan had tracked her down soon after she left the prison in Deb’s car with the kids all squashed in the back seat. He’d taken her out in front of them, in front of Lily and Cody and Anika. In front of Brooke and Dina.

Cole, one of the laggers on East Block, read Ben the newspaper article, filling in the gaps left by the sparser version relayed to Ben by the authorities. Cole said she’d been stabbed over ten times and that Ryan had cut Debs too when she’d tried to intervene, landing her in hospital with a collapsed lung.

Ben never got to go to his mother’s
tangi
. The authorities refused him permission. He was too much of a risk to the community.