Demons (16 page)

‘
We’ve bloody well booked!’
a man said, a solidly built guy who looked extremely unhappy and
unlikely to retreat without a fight.

‘
Sorry,’ said one of the
protestors, ‘but we’re asking people to support us by boycotting
the restaurant.’

The ranks of the protestors closed up even
more tightly.

‘
You’re
telling
us not asking. Get out of the way!’

‘
What’s it about?’ Chris
asked the big guy. He looked down at us, saw how we were dressed
and said. ‘Bloody idiots,’ referring, I assumed, to the protestors
and not to us. ‘Read their signs. It’s all a load of
crap.’

We hadn’t read the placards yet.

DON’T EAT ON SACRED GROUND.

THIS PLACE IS TAPU.

BONES BEFORE BREAD.

‘
But what does it mean?’
Chris asked again. I shrugged, instinctively slipping my bone
pendant into the front of my dress. I was starting to feel even
colder.

Chris’s question was overheard by one of the
protest leaders, a tall, lanky man wearing a thick jersey and
beanie. I thought I glimpsed a small silver

cross in a fold of his jersey but I couldn’t
be sure.

‘
They’ve been replacing one
of the old floors in preparation for extending the restaurant,’ he
said loudly above the swell of sound. ‘Found the remains of an old
Maori burial ground. Refuse to close the restaurant while it’s
being investigated.’

Chris turned to me. ‘What’re we going to do?
You’ve booked you said. It’s not fair we can’t get in.’

Everything was conspiring against us
tonight. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

But the big guy had overheard Chris and it
seemed to inflame him even more.

‘
You’re right there mate!
Well, I’ve just about had enough of this. I know what I’m going to
fucking well do!’

He made a random swing at the man who had
spoken to Chris, missing him but causing him to sway back on his
feet so that he almost toppled over. The rest of the protestors
swelled towards the big guy, pushing him away. At the same time his
supporters surged forward. If we hadn’t been standing on the edge
of the crowd it would have been like being caught in a riptide. It
was getting nasty and out of hand, fast. I saw someone with a cell
phone start to make a call. They didn’t need to. The police arrived
at that very moment, no doubt already alerted by the restaurant
owners.

‘
Let’s get out of here,’ I
said again.

We slipped away as the
police broke up the potential fight. There was a
Pizza2Go
nearby so we
went there instead. We’d both lost our appetites for more fancy
fare.

Players in a scene

‘At least we raised the
dress status of
Pizza2Go
,’ said

Chris.

We were back at his place much earlier than
we’d expected. Chris’s father was still out, at a Council planning
hearing said Chris. ‘Those meetings can go on forever.’

‘
I’m sorry about how it
turned out,’ I said. ‘Your birthday in worse ruins than the Tower
of the Winds.’

‘
Hey,’ he said. ‘I’m a
great fan of ruins.’

‘
Another time perhaps,’ I
said, finding it hard to smile.

‘
But somewhere else,’ said
Chris. ‘Not the South Bank. On reflection I don’t fancy the idea of
having a meal in a cemetery.’

‘
Me neither,’ I
said.

‘
How could they do that,
just carry on as if it was nothing?’ said Chris. ‘Imagine if
someone you knew had been buried there and other people were
dropping bits of food onto them.’

‘
I know. I
agree.’

‘
Are you happy?’ he asked
me out of the blue.

‘
Yes. I think I am,’ I
said. ‘Despite everything. Are you?’

‘
Yep,’ he said.

I went off into a bit of a dream.

I thought about Becs, the way she had looked
at me wearing her dress. Then the way she looked whenever she
talked about Ms Shapiro. I had thought it was because she despised
lesbians but tonight, reflecting on what she had said (or, rather,
hadn’t said) it occurred to me that it might have been more anger
than aversion. Anger because the opposite of aversion was true and
she didn’t want it to be that way, wasn’t ready yet to admit who
she truly was.

I thought about masks. They complicated
life.

We had our own names and unique
personalities but inside us dwelt multiple possibilities. We could
call ourselves other names, pretend to be who we wanted to be, who
we weren’t, who people thought we were, who people wanted us to be.
It was called acting and we were all actors, some part of every
day. I couldn’t be positive about who the true Becs was but I was
pretty sure it wasn’t the Becs I had first met.

Chris, on the other hand, I felt more
confident about. He was Chris, the guy I’d fallen for, had shared
pizzas and birthdays with. He was Christopher, his father’s son,
who carried his father’s dreams (or his demons) on his shoulders,
whether he chose to or not. He was also Chris, a rational and
irreligious ancient Greek.

I was Andrea McNamara but had been, at
different times, a pretend Catholic priest, a potential youth group
leader, an inventor named Andronicus, nicknamed Andy. A girl as
well as a boy, an androgynous, ambiguous being.

And that night, for the first time, both
Chris and I put on entirely different masks and played new,
exciting and previously unexplored roles.

STRANGE MEETING

‘Was it good?’ I ask, once we’ve ordered out
food. ‘Being away for all that time? Doing what you wanted to
do?’

I deliberately put the emphasis on ‘you’ and
‘wanted’.

‘
Yeah, it was great. Really
great.’

‘
So tell me about it. Tell
me about the graffiti. Did you write what you said you
would?’

‘
You remembered that! Out
of everything else.’

‘
I haven’t forgotten
anything.’

‘
I did. In ancient Greek of
course so it wasn’t immediately obvious that it was modern
me.’

‘
Then you were falsifying
history,’ I say. ‘You’re a fraud.’

He glances at the table top, around at the
other diners, at the pigeons cooing in the guttering, at the carved
heads above the drainpipes. Anywhere but directly at me. ‘I guess
so.’

‘
Did you think I would have
forgotten?’ I ask.

‘
Course not,’ he says. He
shakes his head, his hair flying. For an instant I have the
impression he’s about to begin snarling like the MGM lion in old
movies but he simply says, rather meaninglessly, ‘Hey, but anyway,
it’s great bumping into you like this.’

‘
Like the fates twisting
their whatevers?’

‘
I guess. Do you remember
their names.’

I shake my head. ‘You’ve got me there.’

‘
Klotho, Lachesis,
Atropos.’

‘
When you say that,’ I ask,
‘do you see them in English or in Greek letters.’

‘
Greek,’ Chris
confesses.

‘
Smart arse.’

‘
At least I’m keeping that
part real. I can’t help it.’

‘
What? Being a smart
arse?’

He just shrugs. ‘It’s a small world. Fancy
meeting you today.’

‘
This is a small place in a
small world,’ I say. ‘The odds of meeting someone you know, or once
knew, are high.’

‘
Still . . .’

Still. Yes, I know what he means. I didn’t
expect to meet him either.

Sipping coffee across a table, waiting for
the salad to arrive, we both become shy and uncertain, as

it was at the beginning. As it was at the
beginning until I became Chloe and he became Daphnis and we, like
them, finally began our dance around the meaning of Love, learning
its complex and ambiguous language written in an unfamiliar
script.

Daphnis and Chloe

Chris’s room, above the garage. I’d been up
there before. Occasionally, and lately more often, we’d kissed and
carried on a bit, nothing too serious, too irretrievable.

How far is too far? I think that might have
been another one of Father Wright’s youth group questions from long
ago. I don’t remember that very much discussion resulted from it.
Everyone felt far too embarrassed.

The room was linked to the main house by a
narrow corridor above the driveway. Going from the house to his
room we stopped on this airy bridge and Chris said, before we
kissed, ‘The Bridge of Sighs in Venice. Imagine.’

To be honest I didn’t know what he was
talking about. But did it matter? No.

‘
More like the eye of a
needle,’ I said, equally cryptically. ‘But they’re only for camels.
Come on.’

A book rested, closed, on the low table
beside his bed. I picked it up. Daphnis and Chloe. A
translation.

‘
It’s an ancient Greek
novel,’ Chris said.

‘
Should I be surprised, O
Classics Geek?’

‘
Don’t mock. I’ll always be
one. You’ll have to put up with it.’

‘
I wasn’t mocking,’ I said.
‘Honestly. What’s the book about?’

‘
Two teenagers, like
us.’

Chris started to describe the plot.
Sometimes, at

times like those, I could hardly believe he
was for real. I wished I hadn’t asked.

‘
They’ve been abandoned by
their parents and brought up by slaves to look after sheep and
goats. They meet and fall in love, but . . .’

‘
But what?’

Chris took the book from me. His hand was
warm on my hand. It shook slightly. My heart was shaking, too, but
who could tell?

‘
They’re so innocent, they
don’t know what to do about it, being in love, so this old guy
called Philetas passes on some advice, the advice he’s already been
given by the god Pan.’

‘
He’s not a pervert, this
old guy, is he? Sounds like one.’

Chris read from the book.
‘
There’s no cure for love: not in
drinking, not in eating, not in singing songs. Not unless you kiss
and embrace and lie together with naked bodies
.’

He stopped, looking up from the page.

A challenge? An invitation? Telling me the
plot was his plot. But the truth was I didn’t need either a
challenge or an invitation. I didn’t care any more about the
deliberateness of it all. All I knew is that I wanted what he was
describing. We’d missed out on the main course but there was still
the promise of a delicious dessert.

How do you know that what your conscience is
saying to you isn’t the voice of the devil? Was the devil a demon
sitting on my shoulder? What was, what were, my demons?

How far was too far?

If there was going to be guilt, we were both
guilty.

‘
We’ve kissed,’ I
said.

‘
And embraced,’ he
said.

‘Dim the lights,’ I said.

Naked bodies are often cold bodies. I
discovered this as we stripped off in Chris’s room above the
garage. Maybe it was the cold of uncertainty, of nervousness, of
fear, of all these things. Or maybe it was simply caused by the
fresh easterly breeze that slid between the ill-fitting wooden
window frames and laid cold fingers on our skin.

It was dark but not dark.
We were in a
near dark
that was gradually being illuminated.

We looked at each other,
taking in what it meant to bare our bodies. Were we also risking
baring our souls? Did Chris believe in the existence of souls, in
life after death? I had never asked but I thought not. Didn’t I,
deep down, still believe
that much
at least?

‘
I feel light,’ I said.
‘Freed from gravity’s pull.’

‘
I said you looked
fabulous,’ said Chris. ‘And you do. With clothes, or
without.’

And I felt I did.

We were too far away from each other,
isolated in our own fragile, naked spaces. I raised my arms,
reached out towards Chris, pulled him in close to me.

‘
You’re a vision,’ said
Chris, burying his head in the ready-made space between my neck and
shoulder.

I slid my hands down his back and gradually
we sank onto his bed, embracing skin to skin, check to check, hip
to hip, lips to lips.

Pinhead.

Geek.

Irish.

Greek.

Catholic.

Atheist.

‘Like Daphnis and Chloe at the beginning,’
Chris said, his voice muffled in my ear.

‘
Like Adam and Eve before
the apple,’ I said.

I felt Chris move his head slightly back to
focus on me. ‘Adam and Eve never went as far as this, not while
they were in the Garden of Eden.’

‘
How would you know? Were
you there with them?’

‘
No,’ he chuckled, ‘but I’m
in Paradise with you.’

‘
Me too,’ I said. ‘Me
too.’

And, once again, time momentarily took a
rest.

How did I get here, to this point?

A good, Catholic girl like me.

Suddenly materialising from nowhere my
childhood game-ambition to become a priest returned and rested its
head gently, but firmly, on my other shoulder.

God’s finger appeared, reaching out to mine,
trying to close the gap.