The Night Book (2 page)

‘It was what I decided to do. I wasn’t sure — I don’t know. I didn’t want to go out there.’

He threw aside the paper he’d been reading. Pacing across the room he said, ‘I have to deal with her in the night. You’re always asleep.’

‘Well, you’re usually writing in your journal. If you don’t want to deal with her then wake me up.’

‘Sure. I could set off a bomb and you wouldn’t wake.’

She said steadily, ‘I look after her in the day. If she bothers you at night, call me and I’ll take care of her.’

‘She doesn’t bother me. But I had to work out what to do. Anyway, what’s the harm.’

‘Well, it’s a bit weird isn’t it, running around in a graveyard in the snow with a young girl in the middle of the night. What if someone saw?’

Simon stared at her, furious. ‘You wanted her. If she creates weirdness it’s not my fault. I just have to deal with it — with your charity case, your whim.’

‘My
whim
?’

He raised his voice. ‘She’s a little girl. She’s real. What did you think she’d be, a doll? Something you could just play with? You think it’s all so simple. Just go out and shop for a kid.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You want to be the charity worker, and then when there’s a problem you call me weird. I am not weird. I am just
dealing
with her. While you
sleep
.’

They blazed at each other, lost track of the argument, said hurtful things. They hadn’t argued so savagely since the first years of their marriage, when they used to fight, jealous after parties, or irritated after a boring encounter with in-laws, yelling in bed, tearing strips off each other, before making up in the morning with blistering sexual energy.

She put her hand over her mouth, tears welling up. ‘You don’t want her. You never did.’

‘That’s just bullshit.’ For a moment he hated her; there were some things he could never make her understand. Then he was sorry, and put his arms around her.

She said into his chest, ‘I’m going to call the police.’

‘What?’ He pushed her away.

‘About the suitcase. It’s obviously stolen stuff, and there are all those horrible magazines.’

‘All right, do that. Tell them to pick up the bag and then let’s forget it. We’ll work on getting her to stay in her bed, that’s the only real problem.’

He called her Elkie. LK. Little Kid. She was tough. The children went to an inner-city school that was full of rough kids from the local housing estate. At first, all three were teased for their accents and their unstylish provincial clothes. Claire especially was mocked for her haircut and her boyish shoes. Elke took action. She got Karen and Simon to take them to Oxford Street one weekend and fit them out with shoes with heels and the right style of jeans. Claire was reluctant and miserable, but Elke breezed out of the changing room looking like a local. She got Karen to take her to the hairdresser, and had her hair layered and flicked. She started to round out her Kiwi vowels.

Claire came home in tears. She had worn her new London shoes with thick striped socks, and had been mercilessly teased, the kids surrounding her in the playground, chanting and laughing.

Elke said, ‘Well why did you wear those socks?’

Claire turned on her, furious and miserable. She shouted, ‘Adopted bitch.’

‘Claire!’

Elke leaned against the door, trim and pretty in her outfit. She had bought herself a cheap silver chain with a little strawberry on it, inlaid with a smiley face. She looked expressionlessly at Simon.

He went to the bedroom, where Claire was crying angrily. The provincial socks were lying on the bed. Her face was round and red and hot. She had put on weight and her legs were shaped like his — not slim like Karen’s, but heavy and ungainly. Her hair stood up in dowdy spirals.

He sat beside her and crushed her in his arms; he wanted
to protect her from everything. The fact that she was plain and awkward and miserable made him burn with love for her. She had set out with high hopes that morning, wearing the new shoes and the gaudy, naively coloured socks. Even he could have told her they looked wrong. His poor, clever, innocent girl.

Elke sidled in. She said, ‘I’ll tell you what to wear, then they’ll leave you alone.’

Claire’s face blazed with hatred. Simon frowned over her head, silently telling Elke to leave it for now.

Elke shrugged and went off to the games room with Marcus.

Karen came in and sat down on the bed, sighing. ‘Claire. That thing you said to Elke. You mustn’t.’

Claire made a growling sound, her head in the pillow. She said, ‘You like Elke because she’s cute and pretty. Everyone likes her more because she looks nice.’

Karen said, ‘That’s not true. We love all three of you equally. Don’t we, Simon.’

‘Don’t lie. Fuck off,’ Claire shouted.

Karen’s voice went up a notch. ‘Don’t swear. This jealousy, Claire, it’s something you have to conquer. It’s something bad
in yourself
.’

Simon reacted against Karen’s tone; it was the hectoring note she struck when she was ‘dealing with a problem’. It was the strict voice a little girl would use when telling off her doll. He saw how it made Claire bereft, hearing that her feelings were something bad
in herself
.

He said to Karen, ‘You go and check on the others.’

He soothed her out of the room, then sat with Claire and told her how much he loved her. It seemed wrong, indecent, to go against all the rules, but he couldn’t stop himself.

He told her, ‘I love you more, I love you most. You’re my little darling. Ever since you were born I’ve loved you with all my heart, and Marcus too.’

She knew what he was saying, that he loved her more than Elke. She knew it was wrong to say it. She was shocked, soothed, gratified.

‘Okay?’ he said, hugging her.

She sighed, turned over on her back, picked up one of the striped socks and hit him with it languidly. He went out of the room, troubled. He felt as if he’d done the right thing by his girl and at the same time he had a faintly cloying, disgusted feeling, as though he’d committed a crime.

Before they went back to Auckland, they flew to Australia, and Simon did a short stint as a locum at Bundaberg Hospital, where they were short of obstetricians. At the end of the month they went up to Port Douglas for a holiday and stayed in a hotel in the town, where Simon spent a lot of time on the phone making arrangements for returning to his practice in Auckland.

There was a connecting door between Simon and Karen’s room and the children’s. Both rooms had balconies that opened directly onto the pool, and you could walk out of your bedroom, open the gate and plunge straight in. Karen worried that Elke would get up in the night and go in the pool, so Simon got hold of some wire and tied the gate shut each evening.

After being cooped up in London, the children were wild about the pool and the white sand beach that stretched mile after mile, fringed with coconut palms. It was winter, which meant the days were hot and clear, and you could swim in the sea without having to wear a full Lycra body suit to ward off marine stingers. In Port Douglas, summer brought rain and extreme heat and the stingers, tiny jellyfish that could kill you if you were stung badly enough.

They took a tourist boat out to the Great Barrier Reef. They were given body suits, since there were marine stingers on the reef, and
they all went snorkelling.

Simon swam away from the group and dived in water so clear that the colourful fish seemed to hang in the brightness. He dived down and lay on the bottom. Above him tiny fish veered in dazzling schools and the sky wavered, chrome blue, above the skin of the water. He felt the cold London months washing away from him. He swam up a rope, a buoy bobbing at the top of it like a balloon. The fish swirled around him and the light danced in rings and spirals on the white sand. He came up and saw Karen surrounded by the children, spitting on her mask and laughing, and he swam lazily towards them.

Karen took holiday photos. Elke was svelte in her Lycra suit, Claire was dumpy and brave.

Claire stood on Marcus’s foot and he shoved her hard. She slipped and fell over.

Claire got up and hit Elke.

‘Why hit her? Hey.’

‘She laughed,’ Claire said.

Simon grabbed her wrist. ‘Just get over it,’ he hissed.

She pulled away from him. All the way back on the boat she sulked, and he felt bad, but was too exhilarated by the sea and the sun to care much.

One morning they set out to walk to the end of the beach. The sand was strewn with coconuts, the palms waved and the surf crashed sparkling onto the shore. Simon walked with Marcus, drawn to the five-year-old boy’s silent, uncomplicated presence, a relief from the undercurrents, the feminine warfare.

He and Marcus walked fast and soon they were a long way ahead. Behind them, the others were three bright blobs in the wavering heat. The bush along the shoreline made a shimmering green wall against the sky. After an hour they came to the last stretch of beach, where
a reef ran out into the sea, the water was shallow and bronze in the sun, shirred by the wind, and they watched a group of windsurfers on the beach, the sails skimming across the water, shooting delicately over the waves.

Around a curve of the coast the sand was dimpled with bleached driftwood and the bush near the shore was thick and tangled. The beach ended in an estuary, green water running out through stands of bright mangroves. They looked across the estuarine flats, to where the steamy channels ran through the swamp. There was a sign warning them not to go further, because of the crocodiles — the salties could be three metres long, and they were aggressive. They would even jump up at you when you were in a boat. Marcus wanted to go to the edge of the mangroves, but Simon pulled him back, and they lay in the shade of a dead tree stump, bleached white by sun and salt, its branches reaching up like arms.

Marcus poked the sand with a stick. He said, ‘Elke went in the pool last night.’

Simon sat up. ‘She’s not allowed to do that. How’d she get through the gate?’

‘She went out in the corridor and round that way.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

‘Claire said not to.’

‘But she could drown.’

Marcus looked at him. ‘Claire said don’t get her in trouble.’

Simon tried to read the boy’s expression, started to speak and gave up, squinting along the shoreline, making out the shape of the others in the distance.

He lazed in the shade while Marcus bowled coconuts into the sea. When Karen and the girls arrived, he could tell immediately that something was up. Karen’s answers were clipped; she shrugged away and wouldn’t look at him.

He took her aside. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Why didn’t you wait for us? You went ahead and left us. I had no way of catching up. We couldn’t call, you were too far away.’

He was exasperated. ‘Look around you. Look at the beach, the sky. It’s beautiful and all you can do is throw a sulk?’

‘You wouldn’t wait. I wanted to stop. I’m tired. I didn’t want to go all the way to the end.’

‘So why didn’t you stop?’

He jammed his cap on his head. Jesus. Family life.

All the way back Karen sulked, and didn’t thaw out until that evening, when they were sitting at a café on the main street having dinner. She sipped her wine and when her mood started to break she put her hand on his arm: making peace. He squeezed her hand but looked away — and this wasn’t enough, he knew. She made a tsking sound and drew away from him.

Claire said, ‘Stop it.’

‘Stop what.’

‘Elke kicked me.’

Karen said, ‘Claire.’

Claire went red. ‘It’s not me. You always think it’s me.’ She nudged Elke hard, Elke flung out her arm and a drink spilled across the table. Simon got up fast as the cold, sugary liquid cascaded into his lap.

Karen took Claire by the arm, dragged her out into the street and told her off in savage whispers. Elke licked her sticky fingers and watched.

‘Stop looking,’ Simon told her roughly. There was a mirror on the wall among the photos of tropical fish and coral reefs; he saw himself scowling, ineptly mopping the table with paper napkins.

He thought how it would be to live alone, without all the fights and bitching and tears. The secret, somehow shaming thought
had occurred to him before, but it had always served as a way of confirming how much he did want it: family life. The young waitress swung towards him through the tables, tossing her hair out of her eyes. He thought about leaving, living alone, breaking free of it all.

That night Simon and Karen drank a lot of wine. They went back to the hotel, put the kids to bed and watched the TV news channel. He reached out for Karen, wanting her, but she pushed him away. ‘I hate it when you’ve been drinking.’

‘I’m not drunk.’

But he was, so drunk in fact that he forgot to wire the pool fence shut.

Karen slept restlessly beside him. He was hot and uncomfortable, scratchy with sunburn and dry-mouthed from the wine. Everything was out of alignment, jagged, spoiled. Something was breaking up inside him, he had lost faith or conviction; a force had been unleashed that would break up everything they had. Karen believed passionately in the family. She thought everything was fine; she wouldn’t see it coming, but it was coming, whatever it was. The falling apart, the breaking down.

The fearful, disjointed thoughts ran through his head until he slept.

There was a sound and it took a moment for him to understand: the gate had creaked open next door. He hurried, silent on the plush carpet, through to the connecting room and found Elke in her bathing suit, about to get into the pool. She looked up at him with a blank, hard stare, as though they had discussed this already and agreed. He couldn’t be bothered speaking.

She slid into the water, and he followed her, swimming in his boxer shorts. They swam without talking, in the cool silence. The spiky plants hung over the water, making shadows like spears. There were strong scents of tropical flowers and damp earth. The water
danced and shimmered in the dim lights from the hotel corridor. The cool streams swirled around his body and he thought of all the night hours he’d spent with the strange little girl; her silence that seemed to contain understanding, her self-contained, unchildlike ways.