Drybread: A Novel (9 page)

'I just want a quick look in one of the coal diggings,' said
Theo. He was her senior after all, and a weary representative
of male autonomy.

'I'll wait in the car. Don't be all day,' she said.

A fine, almost horizontal rain began to come in with
the wind. It occurred to Theo that whatever the aesthetic
and economic arguments concerning the turbines, the
meteorological consultants had got it right about the wind.
Rain is always welcome in Canterbury: the treeless brown
hills stretching back to Mount Somers were proof of that.
He went by himself down one of the rough dozer tracks
and into a small shaft at the end of it. Theo expected to see
railway lines, perhaps of wood, but there were no tracks,
or skips, just a scattering of poor quality brown lignite on
the tunnel floor. He wasn't interested in the excavations,
or the coal: he wanted to see if the parson would be drawn
after him. He stood back from the entrance, protected from
the wind and swirling drizzle, and waited. It was possible,
of course, that he'd been mistaken about the car behind
them earlier in the day, or that the parson had turned back
once he saw that the protest was Theo's destination, not a
rendezvous with Penny Maine-King.

A protester wandered away at a distance, placard held
in front of her body as a shield against the rain, then there
were just the gravel excavations, the shafts, the scattered
rusting implements of a barely profitable enterprise, and
the hills beyond. Linda wasn't a patient woman, and Theo
didn't wish to antagonise her unnecessarily when they had
a considerable drive back. He was on the point of leaving
the shaft when the parson came into view, walking with an
assumed casualness, and with a frayed parka as inadequate
cover. Theo kept close to the side of the tunnel so that he
wasn't easy to see from the track. He enjoyed the feeling
of being dry and out of the wind there, while able to see
the parson uncomfortable in the elements, and not sure
whether to enter the shaft. To watch and yet not be seen
produces a powerful, atavistic satisfaction.

The parson seemed concerned for his town shoes, so
picked a path to keep him from the worst of the wet clay
and the brown, soft coal. He saw Theo, was indecisive for
a moment before continuing forward sufficiently to gain
shelter from the tunnel overhang. 'I'm afraid Mrs Maine-
King doesn't live in a coal mine,' said Theo.

'No.' The parson seemed relieved to be recognised. It
meant he didn't have to bother any longer with surveillance
techniques, which were inconvenient in the worsening
weather. And his meeting with Theo in the carpark had
proved he needn't feel apprehensive about a physical
contest. 'I don't suppose you've thought any more about
the advantages of co-operation,' he said.

'Not at all,' said Theo. It was the first really close-up
look he'd had of the parson, and what struck him was the
unadulterated physicality of the man: the heavy flesh of
his facial features, the creases in his clothes containing that
large body, the faintly audible breathing as he pumped in
oxygen. 'You enjoy hounding Penny Maine-King and the
boy, do you?' Theo asked.

'In this case I'm a sort of sheriff,' said the parson. 'I'm
trying to uphold the law.' He set off an even, metronomic
laugh, like a wooden clacker deep within, while his
expression underwent no change.

'What a bullshitter you are,' said Theo. 'You don't
care about them at all. You're taking advantage of a family
in trouble to make some money out of it all. You're a
sanctimonious prick. Well, you won't find Penny Maine-
King here.'

The parson made a small movement as if to leave the
shaft entrance, then pulled back, came a step closer to
Theo, so that even in the poor light his pale, bald head
had a cheese rind gleam because of the raindrops there.
His expression was still one of conscious composure. 'You
realise there's no personal grudge in anything I do,' he said.
'Nothing unprofessional, or illegal. Quite the contrary.
The thing is that I've been engaged to assist in finding Mrs
Maine-King. It's just that I represent another party in the
matter.'

'You push into people's lives and misfortune, though,
don't you?'

'Any more than yourself, Theo? Isn't that what you
do often as an investigative journalist — search things out
that you think the public should be aware of? The only
difference is that you carry your findings to the public and
I deliver to a single client.'

'Yeah, well, my loyalty's elsewhere on this one,' said
Theo.

'I've read your pieces. I suppose everyone feels sympathy
for the mother and the kid, but the thing is there's always
the law — what it provides for, its obligations.'

It was incongruous, Theo and the parson sheltering in a
coal pit at Mount Somers and discussing ethics, while the
people who, for one reason or another, had been drawn to
a protest against the establishment of a windfarm gradually
dispersed. It had the precarious structure of a dream, but
the parson was such a palpable presence, so physically
detailed, that he grounded everything. The leather of his
brown shoes was darkening with moisture, the tattered
parka gave off a faint reminder of past fishing excursions,
his arm hung in just that slight arc of assumed relaxation.

'I'll tell you what,' said Theo. 'If I find your car at any
place I go to, I'll put some work the panelbeater's way.
Okay?'

'No need to take that attitude,' said the parson. 'I can
see it's become a personal thing with you.' He walked back
out onto the track, glancing up to the grey sky, but not
back to Theo. 'Goodbye,' he said to the air ahead, giving
dignity to his withdrawal. It had become a personal thing
— not so much between Theo and the parson, as between
Penny and Theo. Perhaps that's what the parson meant,
but he'd become too far away for Theo to make a reply.

Theo followed the parson up the track, then onto the
grass slope that gave access to the road, but they took no
notice of each other, and Theo made no effort to catch up.
There were no other people in the open because of the
rain, and only a few cars were left, some of them nosing
away. Linda was behind the wheel of the Mazda, and, since
he'd kept her waiting, Theo didn't insist on driving during
the return trip. He told her that the coal shafts were pretty
small scale and the coal itself low-grade stuff. 'Oh, come
on,' she said. Theo watched the parson's car move off. As
Linda paused at the gate, Guthrie appeared and tapped on
Theo's window. The rain made his hair a goatish forelock
above his dismal face. Theo wound down the window a
little.

'Have you got all you want?' shouted Guthrie.

'What?'

'All the stuff you need for coverage. Have you got
enough?'

'Yes, plenty thanks,' said Theo.

'This bloody weather, eh,' said Guthrie. 'I wondered
if you might like an extended interview some time about
some of the other issues I mentioned in my speech.'

'I think we'll leave it at what we've got for the moment,'
said Theo.

'We can't guarantee a great deal of space, you know,'
said Linda. 'It all depends what pressure of news there is.'
She gunned the car forward and Guthrie's lugubrious face
fell quickly behind. 'Useless, moaning prick,' she said. 'He
tried to hijack things from Sue Chen, did you see? A born
loser.'

In an attempt to disregard Linda's driving habits, Theo
concentrated on the road ahead. He had a last glimpse
through the drizzle of the parson's car before it turned a
corner in the distance. The parson had wasted a day too,
but like Theo he'd get paid for it. Unlike Theo he may
have had no other ambition. Theo resented time that
wasn't furthering his wish to be with Penny, or to be of
use to her.

'You should take off that damp jacket,' said Linda. She
began to recount her conversation with Sue Chen in full
detail, and said she was going to see Anna about a feature
on her.

Theo imagined himself running on the brown hills,
with the fine rain on his bare legs and face to cool him,
and just the sound of his own breathing. His sweat would
mingle with the drizzle on his skin, and the taste would
have a saltiness which always surprised him.

When Penny rang him from Alexandra to thank him for his
latest piece in the paper, she mentioned again his visit to
her mother in the Malahide Home. She felt claustrophobic,
she told him, if they didn't get away from Drybread from
time to time. 'We spend time in the park here,' she said,
'and Ben gets a chance sometimes to play with other kids
at the slides and swings. We insinuate ourselves into the
family circle of others.' She gave the last sentence a certain
acidity.

'Why don't we meet somewhere then and make a day
of it?' Theo asked.

'I'd like that,' she said, 'but what about being
recognised?'

They'd be less noticeable as an apparent family group
though, and she didn't much resemble the photographs
taken in California. Theo pointed all that out, but the
essential thing was that they wanted to see each other
again, and that wish was clear to both of them behind their
casual conversation.

'Why not Timaru?' suggested Theo. It had no specific
association with either of them, and was about halfway
between them. 'Plenty for Ben to do there,' he said.

Just to hear her voice was a pleasure. He was talking
from work, and swivelled his chair towards the window, so
that his colleagues couldn't see his face. He had spent time
with Penny only twice, yet the surge of emotion surprised
him.

Theo arrived in Timaru well before eleven that Tuesday,
and parked the Audi at Caroline Bay, close to the loop
overhead road. He wandered towards the area where the
Christmas carnival had been set up. The grass was parched,
completely brown in arcs around the trees where the
competition for moisture was greatest. The carnival was
over, but the merry-go-round and the octopus remained
on site, the chairs chained together, grey canvas covers
lashed down, in out-of-season mode. The Big Wheel,
partly dismembered, was stark against the sky. The circular
railway was permanent. The small train, painted in Thomas
the Tank Engine colours, and the open carriages, were
parked in the corrugated iron tunnel with metal portcullis
gates for security. Ben would have got such a kick out of a
ride, but the information board showed that once summer
holidays were over, Thomas made his circuits only on fine
Sundays. It would be best not to bring Ben past the railway,
in case he glimpsed Thomas imprisoned, and mourned the
lost opportunity.

Closer to the sea was a narrow belt of small dunes and
marram grass before the curve of the fine, grey white sand.
Theo walked that way back to the carpark. Despite the
clear sky few people were at the shore. Two older women
walked dogs, and were less inclined to acknowledge each
other than their pets. 'Come here, Cromwell,' one woman
commanded her Labrador. Rather than resembling her
gambolling dog, she was very thin, with a mass of grey hair
loosely pinned above a sharp-featured and austere face. At
the water's edge, with its gentle ripple, a man and woman
supervised the darting ventures of two small boys, laughing
and vainly calling for them not to wet their clothes.

Theo could remember being on Caroline Bay only
once before: a summer when he'd still been at university,
and even that recollection was hazy, because he'd got very
drunk and ended up vomiting from a walk bridge above the
railway cutting as the ships sounded their horns together
at midnight to welcome the new year and the municipal
fireworks festooned the dark sky. In the rough morning
that followed he'd hung dolefully on the railing along the
clay cliff, watched the breakers overcome by swell from
behind so that the white crests were captured beneath the
smooth surface like frost within jade.

Now he was back by chance and circumstance,
walking the bay when he should have been at his desk in
the newspaper office. He was there with the two elderly
women, Cromwell and the jubilant nuclear family. He
was there because he couldn't put Penny Maine-King out
of his mind, or her small son. He was there because he
had hopes again that he might find someone with whom
he could be relaxed and unreserved, and yet excited by
too, in every way. He was searching, without being able to
acknowledge to himself the importance of search, or quite
what its object was.

When Penny arrived, only a few minutes after eleven,
she parked close to Theo's car. She stayed sitting inside
for a time, talking to Theo through the wound-down
window, as if being so far from Drybread and the bach was
something to which she needed to become accustomed.
'There's hardly anyone here,' said Theo. 'It's a weekday, a
school day, and people are too busy.' Ben sat quietly too,
strapped into his child's carseat. Even after being so long
confined, he was silent and watchful, looking at Theo and
at the beachfront with its broad, grassed expanse, modest
sand dunes and glittering sea. 'This is a good place, isn't
it,' Theo said to him. Ben nodded his head, but remained
cautious still.

'He's been good,' said Penny. 'Only a couple of stops
in all that way.'

'That's a good boy.'

'He's been looking forward to it. Anything for a change
from the hut.'

'You said ice cream,' said Ben accusingly.

'If you're a good boy, yes,' said his mother. She got out
of the car and went round to the passenger seat to release
him. 'I haven't even got a bucket and spade for him,' she
told Theo. She had just the semi-transparent container
of a Chinese takeaway and a wooden cooking spoon. It
wouldn't make any difference to the boy, but Theo knew
that for Penny it was yet another sign of how far she had
come down in the world. She gave a quick laugh with
nothing at all of amusement in it.

They walked across the grassed area, and Theo spread
the car rug just before the sand began. The tall blue and
white cranes of the container port were clear and noiseless
in the distance; an overweight jogger put in her best effort
while in their sight. Ben began a collection of marram
stalks. The sun was warm to the face.

'You need to get away from Drybread more,' Theo
said.

'There's Alex every so often.'

'But you don't have any friends there. No one to visit
and talk things over with. No one to make you laugh or
cry. You're holed up there in the cottage, getting tighter
and tighter.'

'Yeah, well, every place reflects yourself,' said Penny. 'A
happy person might find Drybread idyllic.'

'This is a tough patch, but you'll come out of it,' said
Theo.

'I hope so. Sometimes I feel lost to myself, if that makes
any sense. You and Zack have done a lot, and I'm grateful
for that. It mightn't look like it, but I feel more optimistic
now. If I'd known, though — known how awful it all was
— I don't think I could have gone through with it.'

'Guilt and failure,' said Theo. 'I reckon guilt and failure
undermine you so bloody easily.'

'You mean your divorce, don't you.'

'Yeah, I suppose so. It's so common, isn't it? It happens
to so many people, yet there's a terrible novelty when it's
your turn. Anyway, let's not get into all that today.'

She and Theo lay on the rug: Theo on his back with a
hand over his eyes, Penny on her stomach so that she was
able to watch her son as he played. They weren't touching,
but close enough for Theo to be aware of a faint perfume
and the smell released from her clothing by the sun. She
wore blue shorts and a blue and white striped top. Her
arms and legs were brown from the Central Otago sun,
her hair longer than when he first met her, and loosely
tied back. A couple and a child: it seemed a very natural
and comfortable grouping. Penny talked a bit about Zack
and how the judicial stuff was going, responded to her
son occasionally, but mostly she and Theo just lay. Theo
hadn't felt so relaxed for a long time. He didn't care about
the work he should have been doing for the paper, or
what might happen long term for Penny and himself. He
wanted to lie in the sun, aware of her by his side, and take
no initiatives at all.

Ben, though, grew tired of the dunes after a time and
began asking to go to the sea. It was mysterious for him, as
neither Sacramento, nor Drybread, possessed such a thing.
As the three of them went barefoot across the sand towards
waves that were not much more than ripples, the little boy
had incessant questions concerning the sea: where it came
from, why it moved, why he couldn't hold it, whether
he could take some home. Theo and Penny took a hand
each and swung him above the shallow water and he cried
out with the joy of it. The present is everything of life for
children, and not shadowed by the past or the future.

He got wet through, of course, and when they went
back to the rug on the grass, Penny took off all his clothes
except a cotton top and sunhat, and he dried in the sun as
he played.

'Do you ever hear from your Californian friends?'
asked Theo.

'No one knows where I am.'

'You could write to them under another name, use a
post box. You could send an email.'

Penny didn't reply for a while, held up her hand as if
to feel the blue of the sky, and then laid her wrist over her
eyes to block the sun.

'I'm too proud,' she said. 'I've got some good friends,
but I'm ashamed to be in such a fucking mess. Stupid, isn't
it.'

'No, I can understand that.'

'I'm too proud to accept the sympathy that goes with
the support they'd give. Things can change so quickly, and
you go under.'

'Well, you know you've got my help,' said Theo.

'I know.'

'I really want to help.'

'I know,' she said.

'Tell me something about your life over there before
you got married,' said Theo. 'What the hell were you doing
there anyway?'

So they lay in the sun and Penny told him about being a
ski instructor at Bear Valley and North Star at Tahoe, about
meeting Erskine at a diner in the city of Truckee where she
went with friends. She said most ski people in the States
had money, and women were often into the scene because
the right sort of guys were plentiful there. She told him
about the professional instructors from Italy, Germany and
Austria, and how many of them were talents broken by
drugs, or booze. It all seemed a long way from Drybread
and a custody case, and reminded Theo that there was so
much of Penny's life of which he knew nothing.

He told her that he'd never been skiing in his life, but had
visited Courchevel Le Praz in the summer season while he
was backpacking around Europe, and worked for two weeks
there for Grummande the undertaker, gluing mahogany
laminate to cheap coffins. The younger Grummande told
him that the corpses he liked best were those of climbers,
or skiers, who died in avalanches. Penny accused Theo
of making it up, but he assured her it was true, and why
should Grummande lie to him? The undertaker also told
him that the season before, a girl had fallen through the ice
in the local river and not been found for two hours. He'd
been called to collect the body, but just as he was about to
put the drowned girl in a body bag, a Scottish doctor on a
walking tour stopped and resuscitated her. Many thought
it was a miracle, but the doctor said the intense cold had
prevented brain deterioration.

'Maybe I should live in a cold climate then,' said Penny.
'My brain's going damn quick.'

'Central must be cold in winter.'

'Jesus, I've just got to be out of there by winter,' she
said.

'Sometimes I think of you and Ben in my place: how
we could organise the different rooms and stuff like that.'
Theo hoped she'd say something, but Penny just smiled
and gave his shoulder a small push.

'Ice cream,' said the little boy. His thighs were chubby,
and his miniature penis and scrotum palely sculptured on
the smooth flesh of his groin.

So Penny dusted the sand from his legs, dressed him
and they set off as a threesome back to the cars, where they
left the rug, and the pottle half full of ivory pipi shells.
They took the piazza steps that spanned the railway line,
and sat outside one of the Bay Hill restaurants. Penny
was relaxed. She was in an unfamiliar town and with a
partner: ordinary and anonymous. Away from Drybread,
with all its present and past associations, they talked more
casually, more openly, of their lives, allowing some basis
for familiarity without assumption of it, or intrusion.

'What do you miss most?' asked Theo.

'Money mainly, to be honest. It sounds trivial and
selfish, I suppose, but you get used to having stuff around
you for comfort, and enough money to spend without
worrying about it. It gives you confidence that you have
independence and self-respect. If you're poor you're
a failure. That's the guts of it, and I'd forgotten. You
can put up all sorts of arguments to save yourself from
acknowledging it, but you see it in people's faces, in the
way they treat you. Poverty is failure made tangible. And
it's so much easier to adjust to going up in the world.'

'I could lend you some money.'

'I hope it'll come right soon. Thanks, though,' said
Penny. 'I think I could get something from Zack Heywood
if I had to.'

'You had a pretty nice place in Sacramento, I
suppose.'

'We built a new home in the style some wise-guy called
Californian Tuscan. We've got a pool, a sauna and a water
feature in the formal garden. We're even close to the river.
Water's a big thing in California.'

'Sounds pretty flash,' said Theo. 'No wonder Drybread's
a bit of a comedown.'

'I thought the other day of something they had in
common — they both began as gold mining settlements.
Sacramento kicked on from there, you might say, and
Drybread didn't.' They both grinned. Theo liked the
wryness she was capable of even when she was unhappy.
For him the only significant link between Sacramento
and Drybread was personal: Penny herself, leaving the
Manuherikia, living in the fast lane of California's capital,
then making a bolt back to Drybread when her marriage
didn't work out. 'I can't seem to imagine myself over
there now,' she said. 'It's like something I've watched
on television, not my own life. It's still absolutely clear,
but it doesn't seem to have any connection with me any
longer.'