The Night Book (7 page)

Karen turned on Simon. ‘Why do you let Claire do that? She’s got all these naïve ideas. She knows nothing about money and you just let her attack me over and over again. You let her.’

He opened his eyes wide. ‘Darling, you’ve got to defend your ideas. You’re the one with the political mind in this house. I just focus on my patients.’

There was a silence. Karen flicked her hair. She said slowly, ‘I suppose I am the political one.’

She looked pleased. ‘Poor old Simon. Are you feeling sore?’

She adjusted the pillows for him.

A week later, Simon got up at dawn and drove to the airport. He felt
all right, just a bit of stiffness in his shoulder and arm when he bent to pick up his bag. He left his car in the long-term park and flew down to Wellington for a conference.

All day people asked him about being mugged and he told them the same thing. By the end of it he felt like a drink, so he and Peter from the hospital went to the hotel bar and shared a bottle of wine. In the taxi on the way to the airport he was light-headed, stale and headachy with the wine. It was getting dark already and Wellington looked tiny, huddled against its hills. He had a sense of impermanence and alarm, as though he’d had news of some momentous, agitating change.

They were late for the flight and had to hurry down the hall to where the staff were waiting to hurl their bags through the security screen and hustle them onto the plane. They took off in a sudden rainstorm, the plane arrowing up through the streaming air. Simon looked down at the heartbreaking twilight falling on the hills, the last sheen on the cold sea. The hills were riddled with black seams of shadow. It was desolate and beautiful.

Coming down into Auckland they passed through a storm. As they bumped and lurched through the mountainous clouds he thought of surfing, the plane skidding down the curling lip of the air. An air hostess was taking his used coffee cup when a flash lit up the wing, and a loud bang shook the plane. She clenched her fists and the cup crumpled in her hand; her eyes went fixed and intense and for a brief second he and she stared at each other. There was a stillness, a pause, and then, as nothing more happened, there was an outbreak of exclamations and questions; some people got out of their seats, appealing to the staff and someone said loudly, to nervous laughter, ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’

The hostess firmed up her smile, said something vague about the storm and levered her way along the seats towards the front
of the plane. The seatbelt sign pinged several times. There was noannouncement, only more silence as they flew and dropped, flew and dropped. Simon thought of his family, way down there in the wooden house. Each time the plane dropped the nerves flared in his injured side.

The landing was smooth and it was only when they were on the ground that the pilot came on the PA and confirmed the plane had been struck by lightning.

Simon and Peter waited for their bags. All around them there was talk about the lightning strike. Why hadn’t the pilot said something? Made them suffer all the way down. There was an agreeable atmosphere of something shared and collectively endured, strangers saying goodbye to one another as they left. Peter was talking but Simon was imagining how he would tell his kids. Claire needed a story to be told properly, in linear fashion, with all detail intact. She would interrogate him, come back to it, offer theories. Elke would receive the story in silence, and you wouldn’t know whether she’d even listened properly, until later, when she would let on that she’d heard every word.

They walked out of the airport. The rain was coming in sheets, the wind pushing them sideways as they crossed the road. They ran in under the roof of the car park and said goodbye. Peter drove off and Simon shook off the rain, fumbling for his keys.

A woman stood leaning against a pillar, talking into a cellphone. She was arguing, her voice getting louder. ‘You were supposed to wait. That’s not my fault. No. No. So I’ll have to get the bus …’

Her voice broke. She wiped her eyes and whispered some curse, raising her eyes to the ceiling.

Simon moved towards her. She had long black hair, tied back, her eyes were green, and she was wearing a black skirt, a sleeveless waistcoat and a white shirt. She turned away from him and
rummaged in her bag and he hesitated, thinking he should leave her alone, but she fumbled with the cellphone, let out a despairing ‘
Fuck
’, tried to catch it and missed. The phone hit the concrete and skittered along the ground.

He picked it up and handed it to her.

‘Hi,’ he said.

She jerked back, surprised.

‘You all right?’ he said.

She stared.

‘I heard you arguing.’

‘Do I know you?’

He said, ‘We’ve met before. A long time ago. I mean, I fly a lot for my job, and I see you working in the airport café. I’ve sometimes wondered how you’ve got on.’

She gave him a sour, mocking smile. ‘Mister, what are you talking about?’

‘I’ve said hello to you quite a few times in the airport café, when you’re serving. I wasn’t sure if you recognised me. I thought maybe you …’

‘I say hello to everyone at the counter. It’s my job.’

‘Yes. Well.’ He laughed. ‘Of course. Anyway.’ He hitched up his bag. ‘Hope you’re all right.’

‘My ride went and fucked … went and left without me. We had a fight.’ She looked at him closely. ‘Do I know you?’

‘No. It doesn’t matter.’

She looked down at her bag. ‘I’ve got to go and find a bus.’

They looked out at the sheeting rain. A piece of newspaper blew raggedly over and over in the wind, taxi drivers struggled with bags in the orange lights of the terminal and a plane roared in over the building, the sound echoing off the walls.

‘It’s a real storm. Can you not get a taxi?’

She scoffed. ‘A taxi. Yeah right. There goes my pay.’

There was a silence.

‘You could give me a lift,’ she said. She smiled, showing a missing tooth.

‘No. Really. I can’t really. It wouldn’t be …’ He thought of the word.
Appropriate
. He didn’t say it. It wouldn’t be appropriate. Or safe. For me.

Her smile died. The wind blew her hair over her face.

‘Yeah. Ciao,’ she said. She turned and walked away, leaving him twitching his briefcase in his hand. She bent to meet the wind and he saw the rain hit her.

He went back to his car, hesitated, then turned and hurried across the concrete into the road.

‘Wait,’ he called.

But when he got to her she was annoyed. ‘How do you think you know me? Why don’t you just say?’

‘Let’s go back under the roof.’ They were getting drenched. He didn’t want to touch her but he herded her with his arms outstretched, back under the roof. She stood wet and glaring.

‘Here. Come on. I’ll give you a ride. Where do you live? Let’s get in the car.’

She didn’t move.

‘Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be … I just saw you drop your phone and I really have met you before. I’m a doctor. You were my patient about, I don’t know, some years ago. I’ve seen you working in the airport lots of times and remembered. Here’s my card.’

She looked at it.

‘I’m getting in the car. If you want a ride come along.’

She didn’t move so he got in the car and waited until she came around and opened the car door. He cranked up the heater, drying his hands. ‘Christ, it’s wet, but so strangely warm!’

She held the card and looked at him.

‘I’m an obstetrician. I deliver babies. You came in one night and I helped you have your baby. I remembered you.’

‘Because I was …’

‘Yes. You were with the prison guard, and they said they would take the baby away. I recognised you about a year ago when you started working in the airport café and I’ve wondered sometimes how you got on, whether you did have to give the baby up.’

‘I got her back.’

‘Oh, you did. That’s great.’

‘When I got out, when she was eighteen months old.’

‘I’m glad you got her back.’

She said slowly, ‘You had a ring. Like a chain.’ She pointed at his hand.

‘A ring? Oh, a ring. Yeah. This one. Wedding ring. My wife bought it for me. On the Ponte Vecchio — that’s a bridge in Florence.’

He held out his hand, showing her. The ring was a band with the gold twisted, as if it had been plaited.

She touched the ring with her finger. ‘I remember your hands, with the ring. You had some weird jersey on. With sheep.’

‘Did I? Yes. That old thing. I think my wife made me chuck that out.’

He smiled weakly, but she didn’t smile back, regarding him with a fixed expression. ‘You pulled her out.’

‘I did. I had to turn it round first. Gave me endless trouble. It was a girl, wasn’t it.’

‘Alicia.’

‘That’s a nice name.’

‘After Alicia Keys. I sing. I’m a good singer.’

‘So does she live with you now?’

‘No. She don’t live with me no more.’

‘Oh. Right.’ He laid his hands on the steering wheel, careful to sound neutral.

‘She’s dead.’

‘Oh no.’ He felt it. He’d turned her baby around, pulled her out, she had been taken away but her mother had got her back. That she was dead was a sick feeling for an instant, and then it passed.

She was watching him. He shrugged and said, ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

She said in a hard voice, ‘You gonna give me a ride?’

‘Yes. Where do you live?’ He turned the keys.

‘Mangere. I’ll tell you the way to go.’

Driving, he felt her stillness beside him. She gave him brief directions. The rain sluiced across the windscreen, the motorway lights bled and blurred in the watery light. She hummed a tune.

He said, ‘Was she living with you when she died?’

‘Yeah.’ Her tone was empty, careless.

‘Was there an accident?’

‘No.’

‘Did she …’

She yawned and said, ‘Why do you want to know? What’s it to you?’

‘I don’t know. I saw her being born. I pulled her out, remember. Why shouldn’t I wonder how she died?’

‘Watch it,’ she said suddenly.

He braked and nearly put the car into a skid. Half the road was flooded with a giant puddle and they ploughed into it, sending up a spray of water. He changed gear and they drove forward, the windscreen wipers chopping back and forth.

His arm and side ached. He said coldly, ‘We were both there when she was born. We both …’ He didn’t really know what he wanted to say, except perhaps that he was needled by her neutral tone. It was
depressing that she seemed to care so little. She’d probably beaten the child to death; it wouldn’t be surprising or unusual, given her history, the jail sentence, the fact that she was at least part Maori. Everyone knew about Maoris and child abuse. He felt tired, and regretted his offer to drive her into the heart of South Auckland. He peered ahead. The houses were tiny and unkempt, the lawns covered in dead cars. Every wall and fence was sprayed with graffiti, the shops were closed and covered with metal grilles to stop vandals, and rubbish was piled up everywhere. She directed him through a series of dingy suburban streets and he started to think he wouldn’t be able to find his way out, and went into a mordant little daydream: his car breaking down, the crowbar through the window as he waited for the breakdown service; the headlines. South Auckland mystery. Doctor found savagely beaten. Renowned obstetrician, ‘close friend’ of David Hallwright …

‘What’s so funny?’ she said.

‘Nothing.’ He glanced at her with dislike.

‘We’re nearly there,’ she said.

There was a break in the rain. He slowed at the top of a hill and saw the churning sky ahead of him, ragged clouds lit up by the glow of motorway lights.

‘Left,’ she said too late, and he missed it. He swore under his breath, just wanting to get away now, to push her out of the moving car and drive away. She directed him to stop outside a row of little houses.

‘Right you are then,’ he said, hearing how flat he sounded.

She reached down for her bag. ‘Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘You want to …’

He cut her off. ‘No. Gotta go.’ The look he gave her now was insulting, he could tell. Just a tiny hint of incredulity. As in, you weren’t thinking of inviting me in, were you? In there? Me?

She pulled her bag to her chest. ‘Why did you give me a ride?’

He said irritably, ‘Because it was wet and I felt sorry for you. Because I remembered you and your … baby.’

‘Why do you say the word baby like that?’

Was he going to have an argument with a complete stranger on a dingy street in South Auckland?

She said, ‘Don’t look at me like that.’

He held up his hands. ‘What do you mean?’ He glanced out at the dark street.

‘Don’t look at me like that.’

He said, ‘I don’t know what you mean. Just go inside, okay, and get some dry clothes.’

She said dreamily, ‘Why did you pick me up and then look at me like I’m a piece of shit? Why did you bother?’

‘I gave you a lift, end of story. Now get out of the car and go inside. I need to get home to my family.’

‘Well, I haven’t got any family.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it. Oh for God’s sake, come on, don’t make things complicated.’

She said, ‘Alicia caught meningitis. I put her to bed and she had a cold. When I woke up in the morning she was sick. She had a rash on her stomach. I took her straight to the doctor, he got her an ambulance to hospital and she was dead by that night.’

Simon leaned his head against the steering wheel and closed his eyes. He said, ‘Are you going to get out of the car?’

She opened the door. He watched her cross the pavement. After a moment he got out and followed her. ‘I’ll walk you in,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the look of this place.’

A car howling by picked them out in the headlights: a tall man stooped over a woman, her face turned towards him, the rain hammering down on them.

She got out her keys and looked at him dully.

‘You wanna borrow a towel?’

‘Eh? Yes. Thanks.’ He’d forgotten to lock the car and remembered that his bag was on the back seat.

She turned on the lights. It was a tiny wooden bungalow with a sitting room and kitchen combined, and two bedrooms and a bathroom opening off it. She went into the bathroom. Through a door was a bed stacked with cardboard boxes. He sat down on a couch, shifted and pulled a coffee cup from under him. The walls were bare, and the kitchen bench was piled with a jumble of appliances too big and gleaming and new for the room, some still in boxes.