The Night Book (18 page)

Simon swallowed a gulp of gin. The big bro was shambling towards him, followed by another whose face was set in an expression of outraged stupidity. The big guy had a malignant, intelligent eye; his henchman, with his parted lips, looked close to sub-normal. Simon looked down and noted the big one’s fingernails, the clubbing that suggested heart disease.

The big guy raised his chin. ‘Eh bro.’

‘Hi,’ Simon said.

‘Nice suit.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You’re not from round here.’

‘No,’ Simon said and added, irrelevantly, ‘I’m a doctor.’

‘Eh. What you doing here?’

‘I’m having a drink with my friend.’

The big guy took a long hard look at Mereana and said, ‘You take care round here.’ He held out his hand and Simon shook it.

‘I will.’

The big guy leaned in, his breath reeking of booze, ‘You shaken my hand. You’ll be okay now. Okay.’

He turned and walked away stiffly. His jeans hung off his
sagging backside; a chain dangled down from his hip, his big boots were unlaced. Simon automatically assessed him, as if he were a patient: Intelligent. Keen eyes. Alcoholic. Eighteen stone. Forty-ish. Emphysemic. Heart disease. Not long to live.

Mereana lit a cigarette. ‘God,’ she said, disgusted. ‘Stupid fucks.’

‘Well, they were quite welcoming in their way.’

But she wasn’t inclined to laugh. He said, ‘You want another one?’

‘No. Let’s go.’

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.’

‘Fuck 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 passenger 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 space 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 passed 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 button, 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.

‘Hello Daddy dearest,’ she said, with an ironic flourish.

‘Hello LK. Hello 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 space 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 fucking 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, passing the windows in his Nazi 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, pissed 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 buttons of her shirt.