Living As a Moon (16 page)

As long as I endeavoured to maintain the deception that I was a good person, I was never at ease. I feel more comfortable now that I admit a good many shortcomings. You must become more tolerant of yourself as you go on, otherwise regrets and guilt become incapacitating. Michael used to say that the trouble with me was I’d had things too easy for too long.

He and I were such old friends that I can’t point to a specific origin. We went to the same primary school, maybe even the same kindergarten, though memory strains that far back. We swirled with our contemporaries — a shoal of sprats. The sprats gradually formed into coteries, one of which contained us both. Our friendship had its fluctuations over the years. It was strongest when we had need of each other, when occupation or proximity drew us together, when neither of us had an obsessive conviction, or ambition, when we were least focused on the women in our lives. We never lost our friendship entirely, however, and the longer it lasted the more life and incident we had in common, and the more natural it seemed. Close friends become like family, with whom courtesy may be disregarded without affection being questioned.

Flattery was not one of Michael’s skills, or intentions. He was cynical and pessimistic by nature, also loyal and possessed of a sort of dogged courage. He was a tight arse as well, never more pleased than when paying less than his fellows. You didn’t put one over Michael, or if you did you didn’t repeat it.

As adolescents we must have seemed an odd pairing to a casual observer. I found sport a bore, and Michael was senior champion in discus, shotput and javelin. But his success came not from dedication and a consuming interest, but natural physical advantage and a quick understanding of technique. He couldn’t be bothered with the training demands of team sports. From an early age he was very broad and strong — and intelligent. In the courtroom he was an intimidating figure: had he been poorly dressed and in the dock, rather than suited and counsel, he might have been termed hulking.

In all the years before we went to university, I seldom went to his house. Michael preferred to come to mine, or we would meet in town, or at school. ‘Mum doesn’t keep well,’ he’d say. I realise now that what she suffered from, and so what the family suffered from, was the antipathy between herself and her husband. Maybe it’s not a terminal sickness, but it’s a debilitating one. I remember best a rare overnight stay when I was a sixth former and my parents travelled to Sydney for a wedding.

Mrs Chute — pronounced shoot — worked as receptionist for an optician: Mr Chute was an engineer with the council. They’d known me for ever, but seemed rather surprised when I turned up for tea, and with a small duffel bag for the night, though they must have agreed to host me. When Mrs Chute talked, her husband looked at his plate with a reduced, disparaging smile, ready to change the subject as soon as she finished. When he spoke, Mrs Chute busied herself with small, distracting tasks, picking lint from her sleeve, touching the flowers in the centre vase, or reaching past her husband to gather plates. Sometimes a quick, exasperated laugh, when nothing but exasperation could account for it.

There was never a suggestion of any physical violence, or even vindictiveness, and I suppose they assumed an agreed partnership was presented. Mr and Mrs Chute were rarely together, and that’s why I hadn’t noticed their predicament earlier. I can’t remember any other occasion when I was with Michael and both his parents. Perhaps I overstate the situation; maybe it wasn’t so much dislike they shared, as indifference. Whatever had drawn them to marriage had passed long ago, and they were stranded together, with Michael and his small sister, Penny: they were like strangers seated together on a long haul flight and barely maintaining civility.

I offered to help with the dishes as my mother had instructed me, and, as Michael and I dried, his mother talked to us quite freely about the teachers at our school, some of whom she’d recently had discussions with at a parents’ evening. Mr Chute was watching television, but when we went through later, and Mrs Chute remained in the kitchen, he showed an equally friendly side in advising us on political questions quite outside our interest. Neither of them made any reference to each other then, or in all the years I knew them.

I’ve realised since that their marriage wasn’t unique, but at the time I had only my own parents for comparison. Their relationship was one of gracious compromise, quiet affection and mutual support. The example set for me was so much better than that for Michael, but I didn’t profit by it.

Michael married early and divorced early. I was best man, but never knew Frances well. He and I were living in different cities then, both working hard at our professions and seeing little of each other. Frances was a lawyer too, and I remember her as a dark, slender woman always coming, or going, rather than sitting down to talk. I never asked him what went wrong, and all he volunteered was the comment that he had colleagues at work and needed more than that at home. I consider that the two of us were close in the way men are: Michael was honest in what he said, but his nature wasn’t confessional at all. Guys don’t like to download emotionally: you can become a sort of hostage to personal revelation.

When I shifted to Auckland we spent a good deal of time together again, as single guys: not much in the clubs, but leisurely meals at smaller restaurants, and companionship at the movies, or theatre. Some evenings we’d just sit in his lounge, or mine, with a bottle of wine and put the world to rights. He’d talk quite openly about his cases, as I would about the business world. We trusted each other’s confidentiality. He was into politics, and I preferred classical music.

Michael had a house set in the native bush close to Titirangi, and I have a more modest place in Mount Eden. Neither of us lived as monks, and quite often we made up a foursome and went to a gallery opening, or festival session. Katherine Broughton was the woman with Michael on these occasions. She was a legal secretary at his work: as dark and slender as Emma, but more demonstrative and more relaxed.

Once four of us flew to Australia for the Melbourne Cup, although I cared nothing for racing. We had a couple of nights in Sydney too, and went to see
Death of a Salesman
. I became accustomed to Katherine’s distinctive and attractive laugh: sudden and often at things only she found amusing. She wore her hair long, and I admired the dark sheen of it.

Another trip we did together was to Wanaka and Queenstown. Four of us flew to Dunedin and hired a car for a summer week.

We spent a lot of time talking as we travelled, as we visited wineries and restaurants, as we sat in motel units. Katherine knew interesting stuff about Japan, because her father had taught at an international school there. She said that we don’t realise that there’s an entrenched traditional class system in Japan that still has enormous influence, but it’s not apparent to outsiders. She thought that in the end it would be the oriental races that controlled the world. I don’t remember what the woman I was with talked about. Katherine had a distinctive perfume — faint, but lingering.

Michael liked a drink, especially beer, but seemed impervious to any effect of alcohol, not so much because of muscle mass, I think, as the power of his will. I’ve known few people with such implacable self-control. He hit me once, but it wasn’t a lapse, just full intention. We were at a party in Mission Bay, not long after I came back from establishing an outlet for my company in Singapore. The hosts were a couple rather older than us who ran an employment agency and bred Siamese cats that skulked, with the occasional strangulated cries, in the shrubbery at the edge of the paved barbecue area.

You have no experience of yourself as the complete drunk: no personal recall of the point of extremis. That’s one reason you tend to dismiss the extent of your offensiveness. I remember only brief frames: one was the effort to skewer a cat with the barbecue fork, one reducing a silly woman to tears with loud argument, one a confrontation with the indignant hostess, one being punched hard in the ribs by Michael. There was the pain of the blow, and the pain of having it administered by a friend. There was the moon on the water as he drove me home round the bays and refused to talk to me. There was the vague, sour guilt the next morning, and two more people whom I hoped not to meet again.

I rang the cat hosts and apologised. The woman’s response was icy brevity. I also rang Michael. ‘So much of what we do in life is involuntary,’ I said. ‘I blame those bloody Siamese cats. The noise of them would drive anyone to drink.’

‘You’re not funny, or clever,’ he said. ‘You’re a sad fuck who hurts himself, and other people as well.’

‘I’ve just hit a rough patch.’

‘You need to take stock of things before it’s too late,’ Michael said. ‘Time to stop playing silly buggers.’

He was right, but that didn’t influence what life had in store for him. What’s fair has little to do with what happens, and that’s fortunate for most of us, but not Michael. Two weeks later he was the victim of a hit and run driver while jogging on a gravel road through the Waitakere reserve. He lay in a ditch for thirty-six hours before being discovered. The coroner concluded he would have been alive for some of that time. The driver responsible was eventually found, but that didn’t seem important to me. Michael was gone, that was the thing. The best and oldest friend, the one most casually treated and most valued.

Michael’s father was long dead, but I met his mother at the service in Tauranga, and went back briefly afterwards to that same house in which I’d stayed for a single night while in the sixth form. I hadn’t seen Mrs Chute for many years, and Penny only a couple of times since school days, when she and her husband came north to visit her brother. ‘I can’t make any sense of it at all,’ said Penny outside the crematorium. ‘Just can’t see why someone with such talent and strength would have that happen. And Mum shouldn’t have had a religious service. You know Michael wasn’t religious at all. It was hypocritical, but nothing I said would talk her out of it.’

At the house Mrs Chute took refuge in duties as a hostess, bearing plates of club sandwiches, and spotting mourners who had no tea or coffee to console them. But when you were close to her, a quivering rigidity could be seen in her face.

She put her hand on my forearm. ‘I’ve put some photos on the other table,’ she said. ‘There’s some of you together at varsity, and you’re in the wedding ones of course. I’ve heard nothing from Frances. Not a line, not a phone call. I don’t suppose you’ve kept in touch?’

Mrs Chute had placed the photographs in rough chronological order, so it was possible, in a circuit of the dining room table, to have a haphazard overview of Michael’s life. Because he was a physically imposing guy, it was especially difficult to realise that now he filled no space in the world at all. There were the formal shots of the wedding, graduation, Michael being called to the bar, and candid pictures, including one of us both on the Honda 350 he had when we flatted in Patiti Crescent.

Katherine came to the house after the service, but her relationship with Michael was unknown to his mother. ‘I’m just someone from the office as far as the family’s concerned,’ she told me. She was pleased to find me there, as she knew hardly anybody else. Katherine, too, was surprised that Frances hadn’t appeared. ‘I met her once briefly at work,’ she said. ‘It was after the divorce and over some division of assets stuff. I think Michael pretty much gave her everything she asked for.’ I almost said that was out of character from my experience, but it wasn’t the time for that sort of comment. Katherine didn’t stay long, and after looking at the photographs, slipped away. Together with Mrs Chute and Penny, I suppose she was the most affected by Michael’s death, but I was probably the only one there who knew that. Perhaps her grief was augmented by not being able to declare or share it, by not appearing in any of the snapshots of Michael’s life. As I waited to say goodbye to Mrs Chute, I saw through the window Katherine going down to her car alone. Dark clothes, dark hair and neatly slim. During our conversation we hadn’t said anything significant of our loss.

‘Did you like the the vicar’s words about Michael?’ Mrs Chute asked me as I was leaving.

‘Very moving,’ I said. After all a eulogy, the whole business, is more for the benefit of the living than the dead. Michael couldn’t give a stuff.

‘He’ll live always in our hearts,’ his mother said.

To be honest I think my feeling after Michael’s death, initially at least, was weariness rather than anger, or sorrow. There was a pointlessness about so much that I’d assumed significant before. But that would pass, I told myself. It’s a predictable emotional response and then equilibrium is restored.

Katherine rang me a fortnight after the cremation.

She wanted the chance to talk about Michael, she said, and we met during lunchtime in a small sushi bar not far from her work. She was there when I arrived, and I sat on a high stool beside her and ate sushi, although it’s not my sort of food. Katherine had only a herbal tea. ‘How are you managing?’ I said.

‘I’m feeling rotten.’

‘A sudden death like that. It’s such a shock, and there’s no chance to say goodbye, is there? No preparedness at all.’

‘You don’t mind talking?’ she said.

‘Of course not.’

‘I’m feeling rotten because he’s gone, and because I’m pregnant,’ Katherine said. Her voice was quiet, composed, but a declaration of pregnancy has an intrinsically melodramatic element somehow, and for just a moment I was aware of that, and just as quickly ashamed of the response. Maybe because a man never faces pregnancy, there’s always an element of make-believe, or amused complacency — even deus ex machina.

‘Did Michael know?’ I said.

‘Oh yes. We’d been talking about it a lot before he was killed. He wasn’t keen on having it, although he said he’d support me in whatever decision I made. I don’t doubt that at all. You know what he’s like.’

‘Were you going to get married?’ I wasn’t embarrassed to ask Katherine such a question — after all she’d come to me — but there was a sense that I was intruding into Michael’s life when he didn’t have one any more. He’d made the decision not to tell me of the most important thing happening to him, and now it was being revealed to me in a way over which he had no control. Michael and I had come to value privacy in our friendship.