Living As a Moon (22 page)

‘A fair while, yeah,’ said Baz.

‘Is she even-tempered?’ Brian’s brother was married to a woman of tempestuous moods, and Brian thought it a bloody tragedy. His brother said sometimes he felt like hitting her when she flew off the handle.

‘She’s pretty good,’ said Baz. ‘Throws a shitty from time to time, but usually I deserve it. But then we’re not living together, so you’re not sure are you?’

‘Keep away from a moody woman, that’s all I’d say,’ said Brian. ‘That’s bloody important, I reckon.’

‘You’d be right,’ said Baz. He was thinking of the Ashburton girl.

Brian wasn’t going to risk further advice on such a tricky and personal concern. He felt lucky in his own marriage, but never attempted to analyse it. He checked his pocket watch, and got to his feet. ‘Ah, well,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ said Baz, and they picked up their goggles, hard hats and ear muffs and walked back up the slope to the fallen tree. Without any comment they stood for moment enjoying the view and the quiet before starting the chainsaws. The downs were patched with crops of different, subdued colours, and willows marked the snaking path of the creek. Some of the grass was shut up for hay, and the wind made soft, sweeping undulations in it. The late afternoon sun was close to the skyline made by the foothills, and already some groups of gulls were flying back towards the coast. Neither man had anything to say about the rightness they felt in working there.

They had the trunk lying free, and many of the branches reduced to firewood, before they knocked off for the day. Even though they were accustomed to the work, their arms were getting twitchy with fatigue, and that wasn’t good when working with chainsaws. Brian lacked the natural balance that Baz possessed in physical work, and he was older, but he compensated with effort and strength. ‘I’m about buggered,’ he said.

‘It’ll be easier tomorrow on the sawbench,’ Baz said. Brian had to push himself, didn’t he: had to prove day after day that he could hack it. Why couldn’t the silly bastard just ease up a bit? But Baz admired the tenacity of it, even so. Brian could work the arse off most guys.

They both put their gear into the Bedford. Brian took off his steel-capped boots and put on sneakers worn down at the heel. ‘Fancy a beer on the way in?’ he said. He took his cellphone from the glove compartment and clumsily rang Jenny. His voice was self-conscious. ‘We’re on our way,’ he said. ‘We’ll stop for a beer at the Oaks. Shouldn’t be long though.’ A hundred wives might think differently, but Jenny knew one beer would be it, and so did Baz. Sometimes on these occasions he stayed on to drink and Brian went on home.

‘I’ll drive if you like,’ said Baz.

‘You’ve locked the Commer?’

‘Sure,’ said Baz. Who the hell was going to walk through Colin McFedron’s place to pinch a dunger like that?

He knew that after work Brian liked to smoke one cigarette: a roll-your-own that was a survivor from a former habit put by. Brian smoked it as they drove back to the city. He had the window partly open, but Baz quite liked the smell. It relaxed Brian to smoke, so that pale radiating lines showed at the corner of his eyes and pale seams on his weathered forehead. The two men talked hardly at all as they headed for the hotel, and the silence between them was an easy one.

They sat outside at the Oaks because of their work clothes. There were long wooden tables and forms. From habit both Brian and Baz assessed the how well the wood was weathering, but didn’t comment. There was a hedge that cut down noise from the road. Baz had a lager and Brian a dark ale. Baz had a peculiarity that Brian disliked of rattling his drink in his mouth before swallowing, but what did that matter really, he told himself. Baz had proved a bloody good worker: the best he’d had since he started the yard and mill. You didn’t get guys prepared to slog the same these days.

‘I’d like you to have a look sometime at that Mack truck I was talking about,’ said Brian.

‘Sure.’

‘We’d be pretty well set up then. It’s not been a bad year at all.’

‘Good,’ said Baz. He imagined that Brian would be squirrelling away a fair bit. Not a lot of impulse spending with old Brian.

‘How would you like to come in as official partner?’ said Brian. ‘It’s no big deal I know, but you do half the work. Fair’s fair. There’d be more in it for you that way.’

It came as a surprise for Baz. He’d always worked for someone else; his family had always worked for someone else. He hadn’t imagined the possibility of any other status.

‘I haven’t got the money to put in,’ he said. It was true. A single working guy, he spent his money as he got it: spent it on drink, on his car, on takeaways and sometimes happy baccy, on Emily. He was thirty-three and paid rent for the flat in which he lived.

‘We’d work out something about the plant,’said Brian. ‘It’s just a two-man business, isn’t it: the leased yard, the sawbench and the trucks. No big deal. But fair’s fair, and you do as much as me. Fifty–fifty down the middle. I don’t want you going off with your brother whitebaiting or something. Seems to me we work okay together. Anyway, you have a think about it. And it could be a good thing if you’re popping the question to Emily.’

‘Thanks,’ said Baz. He put a long arm across the table to shake Brian’s hand and they held the grip for a moment. ‘I appreciate it.’

‘We’ll have to put something on paper,’ said Brian.

‘I’m not worried about that.’

‘Nah, we need something. Maybe you and I go in and see the accountant if you’re keen. We should keep away from the bloody lawyers if we can.’

‘Too true,’ said Baz.

‘If we both get stuck in then I reckon we can do well enough. We haven’t got the overheads of bigger outfits, and they’re not interested at our scale anyway. A niche market, the accountant calls it. And you should bring Emily around for a meal sometime. Jenny would like to meet her.’

That’s all they said about the partnership that day. The two of them sat a while longer in the lengthening shadows. There was brief talk about how much time they reckoned McFedron’s windbreak would take, and whether they had enough covered space at the yard to store the timber, then Brian finished the last of his beer and stood up. ‘Better head off,’ he said. ‘Want to be dropped?’

‘I’ll stay for a while, I think,’ said Baz.

‘Okay. I’ll see you in the morning then — a bit before eight.’

‘Sure.’

‘We should go to the yard on the way out and get that load of firewood done.’

‘Okay,’ said Baz.

He watched Brian go, slightly splay footed in his dirty sneakers, and with sawdust still flecked in his work shirt. A straight-up sort of guy, despite taking everything so seriously. Not a barrel of laughs, but he’d always played fair with Baz, and now he’d given him a bloody good chance to get ahead. Didn’t have to do that. Baz wouldn’t forget it.

As he left, Brian had a last glimpse of Baz, just getting up to go and get another beer: tall, loose limbed, yet with natural coordination. His dark hair, stiff with sweat, was like a cock’s comb and the gap in his teeth showed. He might settle in for a session. Brian knew he had mates who drank there. He’d grow out of that, though, especially if he married his girl. The thing was he could work, not like so many young buggers. That’s what you needed in a partner, someone who could graft, someone who wasn’t stupid, didn’t put you in danger. Someone who wasn’t distracting you by yakking all the bloody time. They’d do okay, he reckoned, him and Baz.

‘And how are you anyway?’ said Uncle Blick when they met without design at the airport.

‘Not so bad, not so bad,’ said Patrick’s father, who was dying of prostate cancer at the time. Afterwards Patrick asked his father why he didn’t tell the truth. ‘None of his bloody business,’ his father said. ‘He’s always been a snooping sort of bastard.’ Blick came to the funeral three months later, though Patrick put it down to a sense of family solidarity rather than callous curiosity.

‘He went down so quickly,’ said Uncle Blick sombrely at the chapel. ‘I met him at the airport only weeks ago and he was fine, then wham. There’s no way of knowing, is there, and he was three years younger than me.’

‘We appreciate you coming,’ said Patrick.

‘Wham, just like that,’ and Uncle Blick’s face contorted slightly as if he felt the impact.

Patrick was unsettled by his father’s death. He felt grief, of course, but also it forced him to evaluate his own life. He was thirty-eight, unmarried, and with a polytechnic diploma in small business administration. Unfortunately he didn’t have a business of any size to administer. He worked as a salesman for Globus Aluminium Mouldings, and usually pronounced the name of the metal in the American way, because he thought it sounded more classy. In an endeavour to improve his circumstances not long after his father died, he asked GAM for a raise in salary and a better company car. Both requests were refused, and the manager said that in fact things weren’t that good, and they’d have to let him go with a redundancy of just a week’s salary for each year he’d been with them. ‘It’s something I hate to do,’ said the manager. ‘It’s a hell of a thing, I know. To be honest, Patrick, we’ve had to give priority to those with dependants. You’ll appreciate that, I know.’

To save a little face with family and friends, Patrick told them he’d resigned because he wanted to live in a bigger place with more opportunities. He moved to Wellington and rented a run-down bach at Eastbourne in which the sound and smell of the sea were always present. The owner intended bulldozing it and building a new place on the valuable section, but in the meantime, because the lease was only month by month, the rent was reasonable. Someone had gathered shells onto the small frontage over the years, and it resembled a giant child’s sandpit. Someone had painted a green and blue parrot on the roughcast by the low back door, and the single bedroom smelled of stale sweat as well as the sea.

Within the first week, Patrick had a choice of two jobs: one was handling freight at the airport, the other was in a Johnsonville video store. He took the latter because it was closer to Eastbourne, and also because he was fond of films and videos. The guy who interviewed him said the staff were entitled to fifty per cent reduction on hire, but in practice if you took stuff home at lockup time and had it back when you came to work, no one bothered about it. Just keeping your fingers out of the till was the main thing, he said.

Two of them were on at a time and Patrick was surprised how busy it kept them. Issues and returns were only part of it. He spent a lot of time sorting out those titles that were to be put out for cheap sale because of excessive wear, or because they were no longer in demand. There were thousands of videos and DVDs and a special computer program to keep track of them. There was a screened section at the back of the shop that held the porno stock, and Patrick soon noticed how many of the customers would add a highbrow art movie to their stack of porn, as if that made the average content morally acceptable. It wasn’t a career, of course, and Patrick intended to find something with better prospects within a few months.

All that changed the day he met the killer at the petrol station in Petone. Twenty dollars’ worth of 91 unleaded, and he wanted a paper as well. It was a cold Sunday morning in August, and the light rain shoaled in with the wind from the sea.

Afterwards Patrick wanted a piss, and he went past the two aisles and into the lavatory that had a small black cut-out of a man on the door. That’s where the killer was, although Patrick didn’t know his identity at the time. The killer wore a black beanie, black jeans, leather boots and a grubby, blue windbreaker. He was smoking and looking reflectively at the roof as he pissed onto the stainless steel back of the urinal. Patrick took up his stance at the far end of the grating. Sometimes he’d noticed that men preferred to go into a cubicle if there was even one other person at the urinal, and that seemed oddly prudish to him.

The killer washed his hands briefly, and balled a paper towel. ‘It’s a real shit day out there, mate, isn’t it? Bloody wind and bloody rain and bloody Sunday.’ He was a thin, undersized man with a face like a chisel and a small goatee beard. He worked the zipper of his jacket up and down, and then left it in the same position as before.

‘Nasty day all right,’ said Patrick. He took his turn at the basin as the killer stepped aside to check his teeth in the mirror.

‘I suppose a joker just has to keep on keeping on, eh, mate.’

‘That’s about the size of it, I’d say,’ said Patrick.

So they came out of the lavatory together, and Patrick was only a step or two behind as they went past the aisles towards the counter and the door. Afterwards, Patrick would say that he noticed there was no one behind the counter, and had an uneasy feeling, but it wasn’t true. What he did notice were the three policemen standing around the killer’s car by the pumps, and he had a glimpse of others going around the back of the shop. ‘Ah, fuck it, no,’ said the killer, in a tone of both weariness and anger, and he reached to the back of his jeans and pulled out a knife with a straight blade. He waited until Patrick drew level, then he took him by the shoulder. ‘What we do, see, is walk right on by so everyone’s okay,’ he said.

‘What?’ said Patrick.

‘A hostage like, mate. And you and I walk right by the cops so you don’t get hurt.’

‘It won’t work,’ said Patrick. ‘It’s like stuff on video, and that never works in real life. Only cocks up things worse.’ He didn’t believe that on such a drab day anything of moment could happen.

For just an instant the killer looked highly brassed off, and Patrick half expected a blow, but then his companion said, ‘You’re right — course you are. Bugger,’ and he dropped the knife and sprinted for the door. He was pretty speedy, even in boots, and he made the doorway before the police could intercept him, and hared away across the forecourt, leading with his narrow chin and goatee. A car of police reinforcements was coming out from the city, though, and they spilled out eagerly and brought him down. Whatever he’d done, Patrick still felt a certain sympathy to see the poorly dressed, skinny guy borne down by so many. There was something of an augury in it, perhaps.

The police showed some special interest in Patrick at first, but after the counter and forecourt men said he’d arrived separately from the killer they eased up, even letting him walk up close enough to the captive still on the ground to see the small grey stones caught in the matrix of the wet soles of his boots, and his thin, hairy wrists in the handcuffs. The killer lay passively, with one cheek pressed on the glistening road and his eyes half closed. It reminded Patrick of the way chooks are when you hang them by the legs. A sergeant said the killer’s name was Geoffrey Madden Wenn.

A journalist arrived when Patrick and the two garage men were still giving information to the police, and he said he wanted to talk about what had happened. Then a TV crew came and were disappointed that the killer had been taken away. Patrick spoke briefly to them as well. It was the security camera footage, however, shown on the news the next day, that created the surge of interest. It caught Geoffrey Wenn gripping Patrick by the shoulder and holding up the knife, and although Patrick’s words to the killer couldn’t be heard, the trick of the camera was to make it seem that Patrick was full of composure rather than bafflement, and that his insouciant advice had put Wenn to flight.

So both the print and television journalists sensed the possibility of one of those passing, but profitable, instant celebrity creations so much a part of their trade. The security camera film was replayed in many contexts, and the revelation that Patrick and Geoffrey Wenn had talked together in the lavatory before the latter’s arrest provided further ramifications. ‘In Lieu of Danger’ was the punning headline in one Sunday paper; ‘Killer’s Philosophy in WC’ was the banner of another.

It wasn’t that Patrick set out to tell any lies, or even to take advantage of fortuitous circumstance: he was just an ordinary guy unaccustomed to being sought out, unaccustomed to flattery, or being the centre of attraction. The attention of women journalists in particular he found strangely gratifying, and he was drawn into specious elaboration, exaggeration and conjecture by their open interest and familiarity. The brief conversation between Patrick and the killer in the men’s room was spun out into an exchange of some depth and significance. ‘I think he was oppressed by the dismal day and the sort of life he had,’ said Patrick. ‘He wanted to talk, and he said that Sundays were always a bummer for him. He was determined not to give in to despair, however. He told me that you needed to be resilient: to keep on keeping on. I got the impression, too, that he was a lonely, troubled guy. I don’t know all the things he’s done, of course, and there was definitely threat and anger in him, but he was reaching out as well, I reckon.’

What Geoffrey Wenn had done was run over a man who had discovered his cannabis plot in the bush behind the Butterfly Track: come down on him in his yellow Holden ute, the prosecution said, and run over him full tilt. The defence lawyer said the dead man was a known drug dealer who had threatened to take over Wenn’s plot. The prosecution said the victim was a reformed man, innocently taking exercise on his doctor’s orders.

It was a high-profile case, partly because the defence lawyer hinted that they could name some well-known Wellington personalities with links to the growing of marijuana. The publicity kept Patrick’s name in the news also, and there were benefits in that. Globus Aluminium Mouldings had its head office in Wellington, and after his heroism were keen to have Patrick back on the staff. The CEO himself called Patrick in, and said that the regional manager who had sacked him had shown a regrettable lack of judgement. Patrick was offered the situation of deputy to the national sales manager, who was due for retirement within a year or so, and the position carried with it a new six-cylinder car and mortgage perks. The CEO also said that they hoped to structure a new advertising campaign around Patrick, which would stress the reliability and value of GAM products.

Patrick took the job. He was a reasonable salesman and understood he’d got a lucky break that could be the making of him if he worked hard. As the CEO realised, the publicity of the Wenn case was a definite advantage in attracting business. People liked the association with him, which gave them a talking point with their fellows and families. ‘You know that guy who talked down the murderer in the Petone service station?’ they might say. ‘I had him in giving a quote for the new conservatory range frames today. He’s GAM’s chief salesman here. Seemed a decent bloke and we had quite a chat. No way was he going to back down at all even if the bastard did have a knife, he told me. Said he’d twigged right from the start there was something odd about him.’

Sonia Tonkisse was the accountant at GAM. She was a year older than Patrick, better qualified and with an equable temperament, which is very attractive in a woman. She was good-looking, too, in that way that emphasises grooming rather than obvious points of appeal. Patrick liked her and, rather to his surprise, Sonia favoured him too. They began going out together and getting to know each other in the rather measured sort of way that suited both of them. Patrick was still regaining confidence after his GAM dismissal, and Sonia was as scrupulous with life’s decisions as she was with GAM’s accounts.

Patrick bought a house in Seatoun: a double-storeyed roughcast-over-brick home with a glimpse of the sea. The price was a good deal more than he’d planned to spend, but he went along with Sonia’s advice. Best to take advantage of the firm’s low mortgage rates, she said, and the place was bound to appreciate considerably in that area and with that construction. She had contacts in the real estate business, and also there was the tacit understanding that she and Patrick might in time live there together.

Two women’s magazines ran features on the couple. The cover photograph of the first showed Patrick standing at the bottom of the front steps and Sonia two steps up, leaning informally on his shoulder. The shot was nicely framed by the arched entrance, and the article stressed both Patrick’s record of heroism and the romance he’d found since. The second cover showed the two of them framed by the lounge window and with the sea just visible. ‘Killer confrontation forgotten’ was the caption, by which the magazine hoped to keep the incident alive in the public mind.

Neither prosecution nor defence called Patrick at the trial, and Geoffrey Wenn received a sentence of fifteen years’ imprisonment. The trial stirred up public interest once more, but it subsided more rapidly the second time: new trepidations and monsters soon filled the media and the national consciousness. Patrick, however, found the incident hard to put out of his mind. The image of the killer face down on the wet road: the sordidness and loneliness of that slight man borne down by the righteous supremacy of the police. Patrick had benefited from a random meeting with him, and felt obscurely under some obligation because of it. It occurred to him that maybe he should visit Wenn in prison. The idea came back more strongly on the day the GAM CEO called him into the office to congratulate him on orders, and confirm the expectation of Patrick’s promotion after the retirement of the national sales manager. ‘Susan and I would like you to be our guest on a yachting trip next weekend. Time we all got to know each other better. We’re asking Sonia, of course, and a few friends we’d like you both to meet. I like to think of our management team as a family. We’ll probably sail across to the Sounds and do a bit of blue cod fishing. Sheer heaven.’ The CEO came from behind his desk and lingered at the door with Patrick a while to show the possibility of a new relationship. ‘All work and no play, you know,’ he said. The CEO’s personal assistant in the outer office looked up and smiled at them both warmly.