The Night Book (17 page)

The morning after he’d argued with Karen and stayed with Mereana, Simon had woken in her bed, wondering where he was. He’d looked down at Mereana’s tattooed arm and remembered. The room was full of early sun. He’d lain back with a sense that he had stepped outside all his worries and fears and weariness, that he was in a sunny limbo where nothing mattered and nothing could touch him. He’d drifted, dreaming, for what seemed a long time, then he’d got up and walked out the back door, into a world washed clean by the previous night’s rain.

Mereana’s house backed onto a field. On the far side of it was a vast corrugated iron warehouse, its steel roof shining in the sun. The storm had gone, leaving a vivid sheen over everything. The sky was blue, the light was painfully bright and the field was full of white flowers. Simon had stood in the bright clean world, looking at the flowers in the long grass, birds circling overhead, a single red car moving in the distance along the line of the field.

A man had come out of the back of the next house, a tall figure dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt. He was wearing what looked like a metal helmet and holding a small mirror. The mirror flashed in the sun as he angled it this way and that, adjusting the helmet. He batted
away a flying insect, put the mirror in his pocket and stood swaying, his face raised to the sun. He began to move one hand rhythmically, as if listening to music, but Simon couldn’t hear anything.

Simon had stared at the tall, black, swaying figure. Rich grassy scents came up out of the ground. It was early but the sun was warm, the grass was shining, and everything was silent, bright, strange. He’d felt he was drawing the brightness and strangeness into himself, drawing in the silence, had had the sense that he was weightless, outside the world. He drew in the surreal vividness and the bright silence. He was exhilarated.

The memory of this came back to Simon.

The memory stayed, and it wasn’t long before he went back. He was invited to speak at a conference in Christchurch. His session was titled
Tension-free tapes and anterior colporrhaphy: an overview
. At Auckland airport he went to the café and bought a coffee and Mereana came out and looked at a point over his shoulder, twirling a pen in her fingers. They were shy, shuffling awkwardly, then looked intensely at each other and laughed.

He sat and drank his coffee, taking note of everything about her. He looked at her breasts under the tight white shirt, the way her black uniform skirt hugged her figure. She was taller than he remembered. One of her shoes was nearly worn through, about to lose its sole. She wore light pink nail polish, nearly white. There were freckles on her nose, and she had two earrings pierced through each ear. He listened to jokes and laughter between the workers in the kitchen. Mereana was the manager; she spent time on the phone making orders. At one point she walked past him holding a clipboard, her hair swinging over her eyes, her movements quick and graceful. Her green eyes were striking in her brown face. She was a beautiful woman. She didn’t exist in his world and he didn’t exist in hers. He thought of
that moment at the back of her house, the bright silence, the sense that he’d been transported into a strange, brilliant, other place.

Simon lingered over his coffee. He imagined being dead. Walking in silence, through a beautiful landscape. You see it but you’re not there. It’s a vision, of something past, something lost.

He was called for boarding. He brushed past her as he left, telling her he’d be coming back through the next day. She said she wouldn’t be working. She said, ‘Come to my house.’

He told her he would come.

In Christchurch the next day he got a taxi driver to find him a pet shop, and bought a package of aquarium supplies. He knew what would be useful now, having set up Marcus’s tank. By three in the afternoon he’d delivered his second paper and taken a taxi to Christchurch airport; the flight back was smooth and landed early, and he drove straight to Mereana’s street.

This time he noticed that her house was blue, and that all the tiny bungalows along the edge of the paddock were painted in candyish colours: pinks, blues, yellows and greens. They were run down, with peeling weatherboard walls and overgrown gardens. Grass grew up through the front steps and there were old couches and dead cars on some lawns. Mereana’s house was fronted by a crooked picket fence; in the yard were a birdbath and a chipped garden gnome. Across the paddock behind the houses, the roof of the giant warehouse flashed the sun back at him, dazzling bright, and a heavy jumbo jet was coming slowly in to land at the airport, the roar of its engines seeming to follow it, its shadow crossing the field.

Simon stood at the edge of the road. The plane disappeared behind the trees. Cars moved along the far edge of the paddock, flashes of speeding colour between banks of hedges. A child rode a bike along the road, its wheel squeaking. At the house where the
man had worn the metal helmet there was a sunflower made of corrugated iron nailed to the fence. Simon listened. In the distance he could hear the approach of another plane. There was the squeak of the bike wheel. His shadow was black on the road.

He knocked on the door. She had been painting a chest of drawers, and her shirt and jeans were flecked with green paint. She said, ‘Leave the door open, I’m getting stoned on the fumes.’

The sitting room was striped with late afternoon sun and there were newspapers and paint tins all over the floor. He gave her the package of aquarium stuff and she knelt on the couch and opened it, then hugged him. The hug made him thrilled and uneasy and for a second he wanted to leave. She lay back on the couch, saying she was dizzy. There was a rattan blind over the window and the sun came through in golden lines. He wandered into her room to look at the aquarium, watching the fish as they flipped and swam, the bubbles swirling over the pristine white stones. The glass was so clear that the tank seemed to float, a cube of water.

He called out, ‘You keep it really clean.’

‘I keep it perfect. But if you keep it too clean you kill the good bacteria. I been reading about it. Here.’ He went into the sitting room. She held up a book. ‘Aquariums for beginners.’

He sat down on the floor, leaning his back against the couch. ‘You know when I was here last, I saw a man over at the house next door. He was wearing a helmet.’

‘Oh, him. He’s a nex-gang member. It’s a Nazi helmet. Storm-troopers.’

‘He just stood out there, sort of swaying, holding a mirror. It was strange.’

‘He’s … you know. Too many drugs. But he’s harmless. Close up, he looks like a nelf.’

‘A nelf.’

‘Like a pixie. He’s got pointy ears. Plus one eye looks one way and one looks the other.’

The light in the room deepened, turned golden. She ran her hands over his shoulders, touched his neck and ears and back and he said, facing away, ‘No, I shouldn’t have come here.’ He felt her hands lighting up his nerves, sending thrills down his body. He caught her wrist and held it, then got up and turned, kneeling on the floor, closing his eyes and putting his face on her stomach where her shirt had ridden up, and the warm flesh against his face sent everything else out of his mind. He raised his head and she said, ‘Top drawer.’ The urgency in her voice excited him, sent him stumbling into the bedroom where he opened the drawer, rummaging with eager, clumsy hands.

He pushed up her shirt and bra, pulled down her jeans and pants. Her body felt thin and light; she smelled of smoke and paint; she wrapped her legs around him and the cushions of the old couch slid sideways, tipping them onto the floor. She pulled his suit pants down and they fucked on the floor. He closed his eyes and held her. He thought, Roza.

They walked out into the paddock. The sun was going down behind the trees, shining a last dazzling beam of light off the warehouse roof.

She said, ‘They have a bomfire out here on Guy Fox. Hundreds of kids. It’s chaos.’

He put his arm around her shoulders and looked back at the row of small, coloured houses, not wanting to think of chaos and hundreds of kids. He wanted the emptiness, the dazzled silence.

‘I shouldn’t come here,’ he said. ‘I’m married.’

‘Yeah, I know.’ She picked a piece of grass. ‘But it’s not the married bit, is it.’

‘Are you ever worried living here by yourself?’

‘I’ll be getting a flatmate, for the rent, but no, I like being by myself. I grew up in the country.’

She told him about living in the Far North, in a tiny wooden house at the edge of Doubtless Bay, how they used to put a line off the deck and fish while they were in the house. She said, ‘My father and uncles grew heaps of dope. They were heavily into golf. They used to tee off into the sand dunes and then get all us kids to go hunting for the balls.’

‘Would you ever go back and live there?’

‘There’s not many jobs up there. My olds are dead but the family’s there. I go back sometimes. ’

Simon sat down. The grass was long and prickly. There was another plane coming in, light glancing off a wing. He stared up into the sky, until the blue particles teemed and danced in his eyes. He listened: the roar of the plane, the crackle of the grass, his breathing, the air shushing in his ears.

She said, ‘I didn’t think you’d come back here.’

Her tone was light. Indifferent. He said with a sickly grin, ‘Did you want me to?’

There was a pause. She looked away, then she said quietly, ‘Yeah, I really did.’ She brushed her hand over her eyes, got up suddenly and walked away, towards the houses. The sun was going down and the trees cast long black shadows. Now the windows of her house were lit up with gold. The plane had landed and there was only the sound of the wind rustling the grass. He watched her walking away. That dream again, of being dead. Bright silence. The eye following the figure walking away, the mind dazed with silence and stillness, you’re seeing but you’re not there, you’re looking from another world, at what has been and gone, and is lost.

An ant was biting his leg. He got up, slapping at it, and followed her into the house.

Mereana made a pile of toasted sandwiches and handed it to him on a paint-flecked plate. She flipped the lids off two bottles of beer and sat down beside him. ‘We could go down the pub. I sing karaoke. I’m good.’

He stroked her arm. ‘I can’t.’

‘Because someone might see you. But no one you know’s going to go to the pub I go to.’

He said carefully, ‘I suppose that’s true. But I have to go home.’

‘The pub’s on another planet from you. The nelf goes there. People like that.’

‘Hmm. Drinks with the nelf.’ He made a fastidious face.

She looked at him, her eyes very bright. She smiled. ‘If you can’t be seen with me, then maybe you’d better go.’

He sat with a toasted sandwich in his hand. A long string of melted cheese stuck to his lip. He brushed it off, feeling like a fool, laid the sandwich down on the plate and said emptily, ‘I’m married.’

‘And I’ve got a boyfriend.’

‘Have you.’ He stared, his stomach lurching; he felt wounded, then relieved. ‘Have you,’ he repeated.

‘Mind your own business.’ She crammed a bit of toast into her mouth and grinned.

Simon said, ‘I could go for one drink.’

She jumped up. ‘C’arn then.’

He laughed. ‘The pub. Oh God.’

He was worried about time but she said it wasn’t far and they wouldn’t need the car. They walked along the row of houses and turned into a road that wound through a shabby suburb, past warehouses and factories, and into a shopping centre. The pub was a corrugated iron barn with a wholesale liquor outlet to one side, decorated with a mess of advertising signs. Simon looked grimly at
the brutal structure. Mereana was right: no one he knew would go near this place.

She led him into an enclosed yard, its iron walls disguised by wooden trellises. They went through a glassranchslider into the warm dark gloom. Along the back wall the pokie and pinball machines bleeped and glowed. There were some low round tables with seats but most of the punters stood leaning against high benches, drinking jugs of beer. A blackboard behind the bar advertised fish and chips but no one was eating. A sign said, NO WORK BOOTS. NO GANG PATCHES.

Reverting to ancient pub memory, Simon suggested gin and tonic. Mereana nodded. She’d gone rather silent. The grizzled oldie behind the bar looked pointedly at Simon’s expensive suit and raised an eyebrow before pushing the glasses across the scarred surface. They found a high table and leaned against it, sipping their drinks. Simon’s legs started to ache. He was out of practice with drinking spirits, also with standing up while drinking. The gin slid down his throat, all mist and fire and ice. It hit him hard and he said, swallowing, ‘Is this where you go all the time?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s horrible.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

He waved his hand towards the back wall. ‘All those
machines
. And neon lights and no proper tables and no food.’ Not to mention the clientele. My God, he thought. Look at that one. Six foot four, full facial moko, hands black with tattoos. The huge bro, all rolling eye and gapped teeth, smacked his lips and peered around the room, his bloodshot eyes brimming with — how could you describe it? — mirth, rage. To take offence, to pick a fight, that would bring him joy. Just looking at him made Simon feel elderly, white and frail. He thought of Trish and Graeme’s Remuera party, the women in their
satin skirts and long boots, the men with their boozy red cheeks and venal eyes; now here was another crew of cut-throats: the no-money kind. The violent kind. Simon watched a skinhead with Gothic letters tattooed on his neck approach the huge bro and perform a series of elaborate handshakes.

‘Gang members,’ Mereana said. ‘They’re looking at you because of the suit. Maybe think you’re a cop.’

‘Oh, terrific. P’raps we should drink up and go.’

Now the gang members had all turned. Simon and Mereana looked at each other. For a moment it seemed hilarious. Mereana widened her eyes. ‘They’re coming.’