The Night Book Part 16

He followed her out of the bar, into the car park. A woman shouted and slammed a car door and the car drove off with a screech of tyres. Mereana hunched her shoulders and hurried ahead. Simon caught up with her.

'What was I thinking,' she said.

'It was all right.'

She shook his hand off her arm. 'No. It wasn't.'

He said, 'Well what did you expect? Did you think I'd blend in?'

'I don't know,' she said, sullen.

'I meet people like that all the time, in my public practice. It's not a big deal.' He felt airy, cheerful, the gin still hot inside him. He poked her in the ribs, trying to cheer her up, but she walked in silence.

When they'd got back to his car he said, 'Don't be sad', and tried to put his arm around her but she pushed him off, mimicking him, her mouth twisted, 'People like that. You meet people like that.'

'Well, I do.'

'You meet them and look down on them.'

'Well. Yes, sometimes. So what?'

'It's all a joke to you.'

'What is?'

'Everything. You shouldn't come back here.'

'Mereana.'

'f.u.c.k off.'

He stared at her, shocked. Her eyes glittered. He unlocked the car door, got in and started the engine.

He was about to drive away when she wrenched open the pa.s.senger door, got in and knelt on the seat, putting her arms around him, clinging to his shoulders. He held her arm. Her voice was choked, 'I feel so bad sometimes. I don't know what I want.' She banged her hand against her chest. 'I feel like I've been cut open here and everything's bleeding out of me, and I'm lonely, and then I think if anyone comes near me I'll go crazy, and all I want is to be left alone.'

Simon held her arm. 'I'll stay away,' he said, stupidly.

'No, no. Come back. Don't say you won't.'

'But it's all wrong.'

'No. I'm just explaining to you, I can't understand what I want. I feel something but it's outside me and I can't get to it. Sometimes I think it's like being dead.'

He sat, helpless, his arm around her.

She raised her head. 'You should just go,' she said.

He hesitated.

'Bye,' she said. She got out, slamming the car door, and ran into the house.

He exited the motorway and pulled over, thinking of Mereana alone in the tiny house. He should have followed her inside, said something. She was upset; what might she do, hurt herself? He should never go back there, but the idea of cutting himself off seemed brutal. He felt trapped and hated her, and then he was full of remorse.

Dread settled on him. He'd been gingered up by the encounter in the pub, but how would he have explained it to Karen if the gang members had beaten him up?

He thought of his father, Aaron Harris. He'd aimed to get as far away from the old man as he could, had succeeded and never looked back. But there was something he could have told Mereana: the house she lived in now was hardly different from the one in which he'd grown up. There were the same tiny rooms and wooden floors, the scruffy untended garden. Cobwebs on the louvre windows, three steps down to the yard. The corrugated iron fence, the rotary clothesline turning in the breeze, the bright windy s.p.a.ce of the paddock beyond. The alcove under the wooden stairs crammed with empty bottles, tin cans glinting among the long weeds. Waking to find his father pa.s.sed out drunk on the porch, vomit on the floorboards, the shouts in the night, the thud as his mother's body hit the wall. In winter the blinding melancholy of the rain on the walk to school, heartbreaking darkness in the afternoons, the smell of wet unwashed clothes, his mother licking her finger and making it sizzle on the iron, in summer the blistering sunburn, untreated boils and scabs, fevers and terrors. Everything he'd fled from - childhood, bitter adolescence, scalding feelings, yearning, hate, hope, exhilaration -he'd left it behind. He'd escaped from himself.

So why go back? Why go anywhere near a place that resembled the past? And why, through all his confusion and trouble, did his mind turn always to Roza Hallwright? Something in Roza's face, in her expressions, in the way she moved, had struck him so deeply that he felt he'd loved her for a long time, as if he'd had a template waiting to be filled, and there she was, a perfect fit. He loved her, and this had so unnerved him that he'd spun off course, out of time, back in time.

He drove across town, to the expensive suburbs at the eastern edge of the city. The street lights dimly pulsed, and the pohutukawa cast black shadows. The houses were large, hidden behind high walls and elaborate topiary. He cruised to the end of the street and stopped outside the Hallwrights'. It was one of the biggest houses in the city, sprawled across three quarters of an acre of land, surrounded by high concrete walls and fronted by an iron gate.

The upstairs windows were lit up and he imagined her alone in there. It was a weeknight; the bozo would be down in Wellington.

He could go to the front gate, ring the bell, speak into the intercom. But he couldn't; the Hallwright children would be in there with her and the house would be surrounded by security, possibly guards, definitely cameras. (If the bozo won the election she'd have to get used to a squad of policemen in the house.) He could walk across, ring the bell; he could tell her he was in trouble, that he thought she had the answer. He could tell her he couldn't stop thinking about her; that she'd managed to throw him off course. That he couldn't fathom his own mind. And she wouldn't understand. She would withdraw, thinking him mad, press a b.u.t.ton, and armed ninjas would spring from the hedge and drag him away. No, it was impossible, and yet for some time he sat there and seriously contemplated it. This is an emergency, he kept thinking. I need your help.

Someone walked past the lighted upstairs window. He held his

breath.

Simon stopped dreaming and started the car. Worried that he'd alerted someone, and that his number plate would be written down, he drove slowly and prudently away, heading home.

Elke was at the window, not looking out, but staring at her own reflection, arranging her hair and making faces. She was trying out versions of herself. He stood on the path, watching her slowly turn and turn, striking poses. She made a hideous face, pulling down her lids and pushing up her nose, she smiled and rolled her eyes, then paused and listened, and mimed a big, cheesy laugh. He realised she was imitating someone. At the back door he heard Karen's voice, and the unmistakable grind of Trish's rattling laugh.

He walked in. Trish had a habit of saying 'Yes' on an in-drawn breath, sucking the word into herself. She and Karen were sitting at the table, sheets of paper in front of them, and through the door to the dining room he could see Elke, smiling evilly. She did a little twirl and came through, circling around him for a hug.

'h.e.l.lo Daddy dearest,' she said, with an ironic flourish.

'h.e.l.lo LK. h.e.l.lo all.' He hugged Elke and she sniffed his lapel, looking up at him, expressionless.

'Simon darling,' Trish said.

'How was it?'

'Exhausting.'

'Poor you! Now look at this.' Trish unfurled a sheet of paper. 'What do you think?'

He was afraid to get too close, thinking he might smell of something. Paint. Smoke. 'What is it?' he said warily.

'It's the new sports pavilion for the school.'

'But they've already got a sports ... pavilion.' He hated the word. It was so prissy.

'This is the new one. It's state of the art.'

He looked at the drawing and said, 'All these new buildings - are the kids going to have any s.p.a.ce left to run around?'

'This has a gym. It'll be joined to the swimming ...'

'Pavilion,' Simon said.

Karen looked sharply at him.

He said, 'What happens when you've filled up all the land? When you've fundraised and built so much you've got nowhere left to put anything?'

Trish said, 'Well, there's always room for improvement. There are plans, you know, to demolish the old hall and replace it with a state of the art ...'

While Trish ran on he tuned out, bored and irritated. Fundraising was a way of life for people like Trish; if you didn't need anything, you held a meeting and invented a list of things you needed, and then went about browbeating everyone into contributing. What dear old Trish really needed, he thought spitefully, was a job. Some days, when he picked up Marcus from his private school, the one that was to have the new sports pavilion, he watched little boys hauling expensive golf bags across the road, thousands of dollars worth of equipment, lugged by skinny nine-year-olds. He thought of his own childhood and sighed.

He said, 'When was the old hall built? The one you're going to knock down.'

Trish looked up from her list. 'I don't know, darling. The eighties?'

'It's practically a Roman f.u.c.king ruin then.'

'Simon!' Trish went off into her wheezy laugh.

Karen coldly stared.

Trish had turned red. Mopping her face and fanning herself she said, 'Now. For the Big Night Out.'

He backed out of the room, Elke following him up the stairs. 'You been all right?' he said.

She sucked in her breath and said, 'Ye-es,' in a perfect imitation of Trish.

He looked into Claire's room. She was at her desk, leaning over a pile of textbooks, and waved at him vaguely, her mind far away. Marcus was lying on his bedroom floor in his pyjamas, reading a comic. The aquarium bubbled away on top of the chest of drawers. Simon looked into the swirling water, counting the fish, and Marcus dragged himself up off the floor and punched him lightly on the arm.

'Bed, mate,' Simon said.

He had a shower, got changed and lay down on the bed. Downstairs Trish broke out in another asthmatic laugh. The wind made a tiny whining noise in the roof tiles. He was tired; he had a blinder of a headache and his mind reached across the city, to Mereana's house at the edge of the field. The warehouse a big square hulk of black against the sky, the lights on in the row of houses, the crazy neighbour, the Nelf, pa.s.sing the windows in his n.a.z.i helmet. She would lie on the couch and watch TV; she would clean her aquarium using the stuff he'd bought, or maybe she'd go back to the pub and sing karaoke with the bros, stay until closing and walk home in the dark, p.i.s.sed enough not to feel scared of the shadows, the silence at the edge of the field. He could see her body, feel her lightness, smell the smoke and paint; he could nearly hear her voice but he couldn't see her face, not properly. He thought - dry split lips, pierced ears, green eyes hidden behind a fringe of dark hair. A pulpy cut on her index finger where the bottle opener had slipped. Narrow shoulders and waist, strong hands. She had slender legs and long narrow feet. He thought back to the night when he'd delivered her baby. He'd turned it around and pulled it out; after all that trouble, he'd taken one look and known it was going to be fine. She'd crouched on the bed, whispering to it, her green eyes wild.

That night, years ago, he'd gone home and there had been Elke in the kitchen, awake as usual, watching the dawn, and he'd told her, 'No more night book.' He'd ended the secret night hours they'd spent together, when they'd sat in the lamplight and felt as though they were the only two alive in the city. He remembered Elke's stillness, the ticking clock, the click of his fingers on his laptop keys, the warm animal smell of her hair against his cheek, and outside in the darkness, the dreamy rain.

He turned the wedding ring on his finger. Mereana had recognised it from that night at the hospital. The gold band that looked as though it had been plaited; he and Karen had bought themselves a ring each in Italy, in Florence, way back when they were first together, before they'd had the kids. Walking across the Ponte Vecchio, admiring their outstretched hands, a couple of stupidly grinning Kiwi innocents on their first trip abroad. They'd thought themselves very sophisticated.

He thought about Mereana grabbing hold of him in the car, clinging to him. He couldn't picture her face. It would be like opening a door.

He felt overwhelmed, exhausted, all the pent-up energy of the evening fizzing in his body. Lying flat on the bed he couldn't relax, listening to Karen and Trish talking downstairs; it sounded as if they'd wound up their business and were getting into the wine. He closed his eyes and had a memory: he was a schoolboy; he'd been hauled in to the head teacher's office for drawing on a desk. There were the brown walls of the office, the dumpy woman standing over him, interrogating him, and he silent in the stripes of summer sun through the window. He wore sandals with a broken strap and he hadn't had a haircut for months, his hair standing up in a wild afro of greasy curls. There was a huge untreated boil on the back of his neck and a dull, sour smell came from his clothes and his skin. He'd been little Simon Harris back then, before his parents had split up and he'd taken his stepfather's surname; back then, dingy and unkempt, he'd been unmistakably the son of Aaron, the local drunk. He remembered what the teacher had said finally, shaking her head. 'I don't know what to do with you.' She'd peered at him. 'Do you know that you're a strange little boy?' She wasn't unkind, perhaps she was truly perplexed, but his whole body had blazed with hatred and he'd felt it in his core. He was strange, and she could see it. He could never look her in the face again, even after he'd finished his last year at primary school, and she'd handed him the certificate for being dux. She'd wished him well and he'd scowled and looked at the b.u.t.tons of her shirt.

He had spent his life getting away from being strange, had armoured himself against it. His visits to Mereana were a trip back to a part of himself he'd banished, but they were crazy, selfish, wrong, and he risked damaging everyone. He was letting the old self, the old strangeness emerge. It was a good life he'd made; he was the sum total of his choices, and he should be content. And yet he was screwed up with restlessness and anxiety, and half in love with the risks he'd been taking. They gave him the sense that life had become interesting again. And still that persistent, nagging sense of a truth somewhere, hidden from him.

He got up and listened on the landing. Karen and Trish had moved into the sitting room, the girls had shut their doors and gone to sleep, and Marcus was snoring with a Tintin comic resting on his nose. Simon gently removed the book. The boy shifted irritably, batting him away.

He prowled restlessly around the master bedroom, before reaching into the top shelf of the wardrobe and taking down a file. It was the record of Elke's adoption, a great wad of paper, notes of interviews and a.s.sessments, school reports, vaccination records, legal doc.u.ments, letters from the lawyer, the agency, government departments. He leafed through it. Karen was a meticulous record-keeper. She had taken on the business of Elke like a job, and managed it efficiently; everything was crisp, chronologically ordered and in its right place. Elke was her project, and she took pride in it. Every good report was an achievement. She'd grown to love Elke in the process, because the girl was easy to love - unlike poor, awkward Claire. Strange Claire. At bad moments he saw that Karen came close to hating Claire, and the girl was capable of being vicious about her mother. But this was all right, he thought, because he was there to balance things. Claire was his treasure, his very own girl. And Marcus was so dreamy and easy, he was everybody's favourite.

He picked up a photograph of Elke in school uniform, smiling but not sweetly, her mouth full of gaps and big white new uneven teeth, before she'd grown tall and lean and got her orthodontic braces, and filled out and turned into a young woman. Her chin was raised; it was a challenging look. You could picture the scene: she was not co-operating. He thought, school, the kids being lined up, the photographer jollying them along. And she didn't like the photographer, she thought he was stupid. You could see it: he was getting her to pose, making silly jokes, and she was turning her body slightly away and giving him that antagonistic, knowing look.

Simon studied it. It wasn't a flattering picture; it made her look plain, with the snaggly teeth and a rash of sunburn roughening her skin. She'd smoothed out considerably since it was taken, but it caught the power and intensity in her eyes. I don't like you, is what her expression said. I will not let you come near. He hunched forward suddenly, staring. He dropped the picture on the bed, looked again - yes, it was unmistakable. Not the features perhaps, but the expression, the characteristic tilt of the head ...

Hearing voices and the front door banging downstairs, he jumped up, gathering the spilling pages, cramming them back in the file, stuffing the photo back on top and closing the folder. A page fell out and swooped across the floor; he grabbed it and slid the file back into the wardrobe.

When Karen came upstairs he was in the bathroom staring at the mirror. She stood holding a pile of folded clothes and he muttered 'Won't be a second', closing the door with his foot. Locking it, he sat down on the edge of the bath.

In that moment, looking at the photo of Elke, he had understood. This was why he couldn't get Roza out of his head, why he dreamed about her, why he had veered off course, risked everything and gone, with Mereana, so far outside the bounds of safety and order that his whole life was teetering on the edge. It was because he had seen in Roza such a strong resemblance to his adopted daughter that he had been struck, fascinated - and blinded. Roza had appeared to him like his love grown up, made separate and real. In her, he had seen what he already loved. He had a moment of amazement at his own confused male dimness. Why hadn't he realised this before?

On the last day of her marriage his mother had shouted at his father, 'You're sick. You're a pervert.' They'd fled to his aunt's house after that. Three years later his mother married his stepfather, Warren Lampton. He had never discovered what his father had done that had made his mother call him those names. He and his brother had struggled all their lives with the taint of Aaron's badness. Now, was the badness coming out in him?

He willed himself to calm down. He'd never done anything except love Elke, and only as a father would. He'd done nothing wrong. If a beautiful woman reminded him of his adopted daughter, and if he'd realised he was fascinated by the woman because of that resemblance and even if, because of it, he felt he loved her, this did not make him 'sick'.

He emerged silently from the bathroom and slipped into bed, avoiding Karen's eye. His injured arm ached. He had the sense of spinning in the dark, the earth rolling back and away from him, his thoughts jumbled and surreal.

The wind blew leaves skittering across the yard and the moon shone in and out of the clouds. The police helicopter circled overhead, close enough to shake the house, moving to hover at a point a few streets away, the white searchlight beam playing over rooftops and gardens. The moon was pale and insubstantial behind a mesh of pale clouds, a watermark moon. The helicopter lifted, hovered then turned abruptly and veered away towards the city, leaving the gardens in darkness. In the silence a morepork started, a gust of wind heaved up the tree branches, sending a shiver though them, and the shadows jittered on the bedroom wall.

eleven.

There she is again, the s.e.xy b.i.t.c.h dancing at the window, she's p.i.s.sed and holding a beer bottle against her chest, closing her eyes and singing, and if he goes outside and crosses the field he knows he'll hear her belting it out, her voice good and true and sweet, a real voice, not trained but clear and tuneful, she sings out loud like this when she's been drinking, she's come stumbling back from the pub where he drinks and deals most nights, gets p.i.s.sed, carries out business and finishes up with a burn out in the back car park with a couple of the brothers, comes back in with his brain on fire and there she'll be, lit up in the coloured spotlight on the little stage or standing up swaying on a chair with the microphone in her hand doing the karaoke, tiny starry lights from the dis...o...b..ll crossing her face, she's the pub champion, the skinny chick with the great t.i.ts, the one the brothers all wish they could f.u.c.k, and usually while she's singing there's the distraction of fights, flare ups, chicks having a go, all slapping and shrieking and hair-pulling, someone getting the bash, someone getting sick or ripped off, with all that going on he's got to focus hard round eleven to make sure he catches her leaving, sometimes she's slipped out before he's realised she's gone and he's running out into the car park and seeing her in the distance heading for the shops, blowing smoke out behind her; she's f.u.c.king hard to keep up with but he usually manages it, follows her all the way home, and if she's weaving and p.i.s.sed he can go quite close and she doesn't notice, though one night there was fog hanging like rags along the edge of the field and she stopped, turned and called out, Who's that, and all he did was freeze and she said into the dark, f.u.c.k off, whoever you are, and shrugged and walked on fast, ended up running the last bit to her house, but on the next night out she walked alone in the dark as usual, the only chick who would walk along that edge of the suburb where the houses thin out into paddocks and yards and bits of vacant land like the country, and when she gets back from the pub she gets out a beer, turns on her stereo and starts to sing, and he creeps close to the window and watches until she runs out of steam and falls down on her couch. He hears music in his head all the time, the bros take the p.i.s.s, call him a mad c.u.n.t but he loves the music that plays in his head, and when he's had a ma.s.sive burn the music plays for him and it carries his mind through the window into the room where she's dancing, the hot b.i.t.c.h, moving like she's gagging for it, like she's calling him in, she raises her eyes to the window, croons out into the square of blackness where he sways and listens and burns.

One night when she dances like this, singing him into her, he will go. He will kick down the door, and give her what she's been asking for, all these nights.

Look at her. How she wants and wants. How lonely she is, yearning, reaching, singing him in.

Listen!

twelve.

From the bedroom window Roza watched the car draw up and park outside. She walked slowly to her dressing table, sat down and looked in the mirror, studying her face, trying out expressions: 'composed', 'open', 'relaxed'. Her feelings were kept in check; they were somewhere outside herself, and her body was fixed in a state of artificial calm. She had been to see Tamara that morning, telling her that the stress of the coming election was affecting her badly and she needed help to get through. She had emphasised how difficult her position was: her life had been taken over by a force outside herself, party people might be watching her for signs of flakiness, she'd developed the crazy fear she was being followed. Tamara was thrilled by all this, and had entered into the fiction that she was the only one who could help Roza, although she'd said at first, 'Why don't you go to the GP and get some valium?' Roza had tried to explain, evasively, that this wouldn't be enough; she'd gone beyond sensible solutions. She didn't spell out to Tamara that her greatest fear was that she would drink, and the only way she could stop herself was to subst.i.tute booze with something equally strong, and less detectable. She would stop when the crisis had pa.s.sed; she really did think this was possible. She hadn't told Tamara she was an addict, so Tamara didn't need to overcome any scruples on that score when she gave Roza some slithery little plastic packets from her stash, supplied, she confided, by her s.e.xy pool man, Curtis. During their conversation Tamara's three-year-old had rocketed around them, waiting to be taken to his kindergarten, the cleaners had been working in the house, a puppy of some expensive and exotic breed was gnawing a shoe on the deck, and Tamara sat by the edge of the pool painting her toenails.

As the kid drove his plastic toys around the deck and the puppy growled and the cleaners shouted over the noise of the vacuum cleaner, Roza had pressed on, alert to Tamara's expressions, acutely judging her mood, trying to pick the right things to say. She felt the force of Tamara's p.r.i.c.kly, resentful personality, and tried to meet it on every front with charm. Tamara was the only person she could trust; she emphasised this, without trusting Tamara at all. Even as she took what she wanted from her she was thinking of ways she could deny they'd ever talked or that she'd ever asked for anything. She was mortified, but still, she wasn't hurting Tam, she was actually giving her something: the thrill of conspiracy, of proximity to David's fame, the promise of a revival of friendship at a time when Roza had access to a world Tam would love to enter, if she was allowed. She would owe Tam, but would worry later about how to repay her.