Jake's Long Shadow (10 page)

SIMON’S FATHER, EDWARD, asked Polly if she were related to the
illustrious
Maori family of Bennetts, of which several brothers became knights of the realm for services to the community and in their professional lives, one being the first Maori psychiatrist who ended up running a mental hospital, others pre-eminent leaders in their fields.

No, she said, Bennett was the name of her stepfather who was related, second cousins, to the well-known Bennetts and a man in her eyes who deserved a knighthood for just being a wonderful stepfather — had to stop herself gushing about Charlie.

It pleased Edward hearing this, he said it was far more difficult to be a stepfather. He was not surprised to hear the man she described was a relation of that great Maori family, and his eyes went sad indicating he wished there were a lot more the same. But of course Edward Harding was too polite to say it outright, too polite to state the truth.

Then Edward asked if Polly minded if he and Simon talked business, and
of course she said she didn’t and would he mind her listening in? Of courses and of course nots flew back and forth, along with smiles. She was glad Edward didn’t suggest she go out to the kitchen to talk to his wife; kitchens not being Polly’s favourite place, she was a grazer, or ate on the run, preferred others to cook, liked restaurants. This was one of Charlie Bennett’s few bad qualities, his belief that a woman belonged in a kitchen before anywhere. Of all Charlie’s good teachings and influences this was one Polly was never going to buy. (I’m not going to be some house-bound girlfriend or wife of a man who sees all the action while my action is in the kitchen and the bedroom.)

It was property father and son talked about, another language, of cap rates and capital gains and servicing costs and dollar opportunities, cost, rates, overheads, admin, blah-blah-blah; it wasn’t long before Polly started switching off. But as she’d asked to listen in she could hardly wander off and talk to Dot in the kitchen, where she could be heard clattering around. So Polly tried to make herself pay attention, though her thoughts kept wandering to Simon.

She was enjoying his company greatly, so far they hadn’t found anything to disagree about. He was only a small-time property developer — doing three or four single residential developments a year — but selling them at a good profit. He had a surf life-saver background, though that had waned to just spending a lot of time at beaches. There Polly showed him how to collect shellfish, pipis, cockles and snorkel for kina. He liked a drink, but never so much he lost control; he had fun but it never went past a certain point. He didn’t smoke and nor did Polly, though he teased her intolerance in forbidding it in their shared rented house. And she teased back that he’d wasted his parent’s money spent on his private boarding school as he failed to go on to university. Though he countered that university was for theory and life was the real study.

In bed, well it was getting better as they came to understand each other. At least he wasn’t threatened by her sexual assertiveness (I get that from my mother, she always said it’s one of nature’s better blessings and don’t let anyone make you feel guilty for enjoying it). And he wasn’t a walking ego like most men in their early twenties, seeing the world through their eyes only. Best of all, they could talk, and about nearly anything under the sun, or the one that shines on young people who don’t know an awful lot but are interested in things beyond just themselves. Importantly, their talk was hardly ever
about
someone, personal gripes, that gossip talk of the immediate stuff.
Not them, they talked about how to make the best of the future. So Polly had already made up her mind to try for a long-term relationship.

She watched — rather than heard — father and son communicating until the name Trambert was mentioned, and her ears pricked up. Can’t escape you, Mr Trambert. Should she mention seeing him at the polo match? No. I’ll listen.

They were talking about a block of housing-development land Trambert had had on the market over two years and that had remained unsold. Father and son, however, spoke Trambert’s name with obvious disdain, indeed contempt.

Edward said, The man’s a fool, doesn’t have an ounce of business brain and is always getting involved in deals that go wrong. As close to bankruptcy as one can get. It’s only a matter of time.

So, another myth was taken care of in her head. (I — my mother raised us on the belief — thought he was rich. My boyfriend and his father, who should know, are saying he’s far from it.)

A bigger surprise came at hearing mention of Pine Block — the dreaded Pine Block — and it being the lowest end of the market but — but? But what? Polly all ears then.

But, with the biggest opportunities, according to father and son. (Pine Block?) She couldn’t believe her ears. Surely not
the
Pine Block?

Edward said, Especially if you’re starting off with very little capital. (So Simon didn’t inherit heaps, like I first presumed. Not that that was why I was attracted to him. It was his self-confidence, the way he walked up to me in that bar and asked where the queue was to meet me so he could wait his turn.) Though it wasn’t capital or opportunity Polly heard, it was those words — to her ears one word: Pineblock. Two syllables. One sound. Quite another meaning. Now she could not be more interested.

It turned out not to be the exact Pine Block she spent the first (
impressionable
, horrible, but the making of me in many ways) years of her life, but the suburb of new housing next to it, still under the umbrella name of Pine Block. And still the roughest part of Two Lakes. Polly listened to another world being revealed. The same world, one embedded in her memory, gouged deep into her emotions (but not deep enough, all of you Pine Block nobodies who want people like me down there with you). The same houses of ugly design with ugly-minded tenants and the insidious creep of welfare dependency, a grim mix that could only become a slum. Now these two
effectively foreign people (to Pine Blockers you are) are talking of turning it back into an area that means something.

Being profit first. Aesthetics next. No, says Simon’s father, aesthetics by default. Aesthetics only within the means of your budget.

And Polly — laughing inside at the irony, of her being here, from there — listened even more closely.

Afterwards, driving home, Simon summarised: the land was sold by a farmer, Gordon Trambert as it happens, to developers who built what Simon called a ghastly, Jerry-built mess of boxes. Each was packed onto as small an area of land as a stretched city-council law would allow. They then sold the houses to working-class people for a sizeable profit, but left them driveways of bare dirt to finish, their own fencing to put up, tiny sections to landscape. Sold to people the developers must have known lacked the skills, the
background
, the knowledge and the money to do this finishing themselves.

So, gradually the majority of owners lost interest in their properties, lacking every means to complete them. Cars that gave up became part of the landscape, inclement weather turned the dirt driveways to mush, poor tradesmanship soon caused internal water seepage, poorly applied paint started breaking down, cheap building materials crumbled under wear and tear; on and downwardly on it rapidly went. When first it had been sold as a first-time home-owners Utopia.

Inevitably, property values moved down, against the trend everywhere else, and more and more owners found themselves with mortgages higher than their house valuation. Being in less secure employment the house owners had job losses. And a house worth less than you paid for it and mortgage payments becoming harder to keep up meant pressure from the bank, eventual forced sales. Some just abandoned their properties. Private investors moved in like vultures, renting out the houses to tenants with no stake in the place. Slum mentality set in. Slum mentality, with all due respect to you — Simon said without managing to make it sound patronising — was trash the property you rent, get into rental arrears, throw parties that end in further destruction, leave broken-down car bodies everywhere, then broken appliances and next it’s rubbish they’re too lazy to put out for collection. Move next door, into the next street, the good people move out, the slum dwellers have won.

What happened next was you had houses — an entire area of them — selling for far less than what it would cost just to build them, the same size, let alone covering the value of the land.

Here’s the story so far, Polls (and his point). A white inherited
landowner
sells the land to white property developers, who sell the not-quite finished product to predominantly brown people for a high profit. The brown people don’t have the necessary, and nor the true value of the asset, to have their turn at improving the property. So, they give up and eventually move on and are replaced by an even less enlightened brown type,
ill-equipped
or not equipped at all, to handle life beyond basic functions of day-to-day survival, hand-to-mouth existence.

The cycle completes itself when white speculators like myself move in, using bank loans, buy a house dirt cheap, completely refurbish, lay lawns, put in plants, trees, concrete driveway and footpaths, even an extra few hundred dollars spent on a good solid fence can add many times its cost to the value.

Next, get a new (much higher) valuation on the property and raise a loan on that to pay back your initial purchase and renovation price, and it ends up you have got it for not only no or little money in, but you rent it to tenants of your choosing, being a better-class tenant, and it returns a surplus of several thousand dollars a year. In addition, you still own the house, which should now appreciate in value.

Now Polly understood what was meant by debt servicing. And a whole lot more besides. But you could only get good tenants if you transformed the area by doing up lots of places. This in turn paid you back. For multiply the returns on each house by fifty, a hundred — a handsome Simon now with a meaningful smile — and you have made a huge profit, not risked any of your own capital, and you’ve lifted the standard of life in an area
previously
considered unsalvageable. This came as a profound revelation to Polly.

So this means — she was almost afraid to ask lest she had misunderstood — that you can do all this, get to own a large number of houses, or have equity in them, without using a cent of your own money? (How can this be?) How could this be? (Even to Charlie Bennett’s adopted daughter, who thought she was up with the play. When clearly I’m not.) In fact, Polly felt positively ignorant.

Or until Simon said it wasn’t rocket science, it wasn’t even admirable as in respected by real business people, since it could be regarded as slum
landlording
, which had a certain stigma. But to hell with that, Simon didn’t care, there was a lot more stigma if you hadn’t made it in anything in life. It was just starting somewhere, he said, and making the best you could of it until the day you sold, he and father thought five to seven years hence, as a parcel
to a family trust or to a professional landlord wanting to extend his holdings. You repay your loans and should still have extra profit in the hand.

Polly let Simon know she was quite stunned by this information, of a social and thence process of capitalism. Simple, in a way: it just depended which side of the fence you chose to stand on.

But then she got a bit guilty, a bit emotional, and said it seemed so unfair. Simon said, No, it wasn’t. But nor is it fair you’re born beautiful, Polly, and that I was born to a loving, supportive family. It’s not fair Tiger Woods has golfing talent and most everyone else doesn’t.

He said to come with him, he was going to look at a house he might buy in Pine Block, but she declined, without saying why. He could drop her off at the home they rented (and had discussed buying together). It had four bedrooms, two living rooms, a heated pool. By Pine Block standards, it was a palace. To Polly, she reckoned it was no more than she deserved. I pay my half of the rent.

Three hours later Simon came home smiling. He’d put in an offer on the property, and the agent had told him it was virtually certain the vendor would accept his price as they were under severe pressure from the bank.

Polly teased him for being a heartless exploiter of poor people’s misery. Though, really, she wanted to know more about this property investment business as it sounded right up her alley. And he talked.

At the end of it she asked if having capital helped. Of course, the whole system ran on capital and it would be an advantage having it at the ready for any exceptional deals that might come up, the kind that don’t hang around for long.

She asked, ever so casually, about the idea of her putting in capital in exchange for an equal partnership. After all, if we’re living together, why not? I have fifty thousand saved. No need to say more.

And he said, ever so casually back, Do you have any ideas for a name to call our new property investment company?

To which she smiled and said, Why yes. How about Integrated Properties Limited? And he laughed and took her and they moved around the floor a bit and then made love. Afterwards she told him, The last time I was in Pine Block I was set upon by several Maori girls, most of whom I knew and had grown up with.

So it’s revenge time?

No. It’s called getting even.

HE’D LOST THE ability to reflect, to remember the relationship in general terms — no, each moment, each incident was in itself. Today’s rejection measured more than yesterday’s, the day’s before sweet bodily welcomes.

If this moment hurt, then it hurt. And someone had to fix it and since he wasn’t into fixing mode himself for himself, then the someone had to be Kayla. And since she couldn’t, not every time, Alistair’s only option was to sulk. Or even feel devastated, for the Alistair Trambert of Gordon and Isobel’s raising had been told from a young age that sulking was for those with no means to articulate their problem. (Well, a young man who’d given up, a young man who’d surrendered his personal pride, rejected the standards he’d had instilled, he could sulk.)

One morning, though, just before his wake-up time of between eleven and twelve, maybe half an hour past that into the afternoon, Alistair either had a dream, or he had a thought that felt like a dream because it was crazy. It must’ve been a dream because it read like a story. First there was this life,
on welfare, in the club, a couple dossed down in the living room from two weeks ago, who’d said they were only staying a couple a nights and who screwed very noisily, and it was an obscenity, not a turn-on, not free audio porno. And, it came a little harder than faintly, an obscenity that his own life had gone nowhere and ended up like this.

They seemed just like the couple who dossed there before them, who stole Sharns’s little stereo from her bedroom (violators) and this being the third flat in a year they’d invaded; the parties, the trashing done to this place and the others, if not by them then other welfare losers. But we’re guilty by association.

Every afternoon dragged by, slouched in front of the TV, or down at the pub making a glass of beer last till someone walked in with the dough to buy you a jug, which usually became two, three, which gave you the courage to go up to someone else and borrow till next Thursday, and then you spent weeks and months avoiding him and your twenty-buck obligation, but it was inevitable he’d run into you. Then it was either pay-up time or physical
retribution
. Or you could grab a Peter to borrow from to pay Paul.

The fridge was empty, echoing to the weekly question: Did you contribute to the food kitty? And there would always be times when the fix ran out, reduced you to going through the ashtrays, but Sharneeta was too tidy to keep full ashtrays in her bedroom.

Then every Thursday the woes got washed away, again, by the government bank instalment; you got to have beer, cheap wine by the cask, tailor-made cigarettes, maybe a McDonalds or KFC treat, just as long as too many spongers weren’t in residence — and then life got steadily more difficult in this
seven-day
cycle. It seemed to have no end, did this film reel of life on welfare.

Where Kayla was he didn’t know. And for once he wasn’t filled with that fear, that bleating need to call out for her, Where are you, hon? Kayla? Kayla, you here, babe? In that usual way of his, which he’d also stopped reflecting on. Until right this instant, when he asked himself, Would my old man ever have done that? Woken up bleating like a hungry spoilt baby for my mother’s milk? Worse than that: with a need, being a weakness, that my existence is nothing unless it’s got my (baby) lady on tap, on call?

No, never, not Gordon, for all his faults, for his blind belief that the next big money deal would solve his every problem, still he had never sought his meaning from Alistair’s mother.

For the first time Alistair looked at those dirty sheets with his mother’s
eye. Oh, she wouldn’t like to see this. Did she dirty them? Did my father’s tossing dreams and sexual exertions and accumulation of sweat and bodily secretions dirty them? Not even Alistair could throw that kind of blame ball. Then who did?

You and Kayla did. (So why hasn’t she washed them?) Why should she? (Why shouldn’t she? She’s the woman. I’m the man.) Is that what you call yourself — a man? (I don’t think so, Al.) I don’t think so. Oh, to hell with this, go and get myself breakfast and stuff my father. He’s to blame all right, at least for a lot of it.

Out in the living room the couple were up, kind of, end to end on the sofa under a blanket, smoking and laughing and, Alistair noticed, flicking the ash on the floor. Like they did yesterday, and he was just as surprised as yesterday at himself for noticing such a trivial matter. What’s the problem?

So he ignored it. The dude, Shane was his name, no surname — who has a surname in the club? — offered Al a smoke, and his bird, Neylatia (pretentious, working-class name, cheap, like she is), said, Hi, you sleep later’n us. Hahaha. (Hahaha to you, too, peasant.) Alistair feeling a venom he usually reserved for thoughts of his father. And this had class snobbery in it (but who cares?). His mother would die to see him in company like this. (Look at the black mascara smudged round your stupid blinking eyes. Your hair’s not been washed in ages.)

Neylatia asked then: Hey? Anything t’ eat in this place? We’re starving.

So another thing rankled. In fact, it started up a process tending towards heating. Though he didn’t say anything or let them know.

Inside the fridge — empty. Not one thing. The freezer compartment — a packet of peas, open, half used, a tray of ice cubes and that was it. What day is this? Sunday. There’s always food around on a Sunday, it’s Tuesday and Wednesday it runs low, often as not out, and by Thursday everything is gone, even without the spongers like those two here. But out on a Sunday?

Last night the spongers had gone drinking somewhere else, as had Alistair and Kayla, just three houses down the street to her girlfriends’ pad shared by four of them, with two having to bunk up together in one bed as it was a three-bedroom place. They weren’t lesbians though. Just singles who liked to party and to boast about who they woke up with, what he looked like, how horny he was, what he drove if they were lucky, or what a boring shit he was. The two in the one bed tossed who would use it if one scored a man. If both did, well what’re sofas for?

They took booze, and the girls’d put on a good basic meal of luncheon sausage slices with pickle, boiled spuds and cabbage. Served it up with that measured look, of telling you it was your turn next, party and a feed at your place, as they were on welfare, too. Able-bodied, sound of mind, yet the system said that mattered not. (Hey? Maybe someone’s trying to forget we exist by buying our silence and gaining our vote for the arrangement to continue?)

What time you and Kayla stumbled home you don’t remember, only that it was late and the spongers were still not home and you both crashed.
Bye-bye
, Saturday. (Another empty, meaningless day.) So, between then
and
now the spongers must’ve brought in their mates and emptied the fridge and the freezer out and had a cook-up. Now with the damn cheek to be starving.

He didn’t know what happened, for it wasn’t a coming-to-the-boil process after all, it was an eruption. Wait a minute, it couldn’t be an eruption for he was too small in stature, too timid of personality for it to be that. Call it an outburst, of freezer door slammed shut, and his voice (mine?) demanding to know who the eff ate all the effin’ food in there?

And he saw Shane’s look of outrage and how he jumped to his feet.

That an accusation, bud?

Depends how you answer it. Anyway, it’s time you two moved on. Find your own place. We’re starting to have trouble, like, breathing. You know? We want you to go.

You want us to go? What, no few days’ notice, nothin’? Shane was more than outraged, he was violated.

Please, get that threatening look out of here. You do anything to me and I’ll call the cops. (Swear I will, a-hole.)

Looking at the pair looking at each other in disbelief, and yet a kind of knowing there as well. Alistair said, You’ve got ten minutes, and he went to the bedroom to wait the time out.

To be rid of the nervous energy, he decided to strip the sheets and pick up the countless items of strewn garments covering the floor.

Now, where was I? Dad. That’s right: not being responsible for my
situation
and maybe other things he’s been blamed for. But not yet ready to embrace that realisation, maybe another time. It was one o’clock, why the day was past half over, but at least with some meaning for once.

For some strange reason he wanted to share the moment with Sharns, not Kayla.