Opportunity (15 page)

Before Alan's performance the next day I sat at a café table
drinking coffee. I had half an hour to wait in the Sunday
afternoon sunshine. The sky was blue but the mountain was
still hidden behind a shroud of mist, the clouds boiling around
it, rising, falling. A man came along the street. His hair was
tied in a ponytail and he was wearing a dark blue coat. He
walked closer, stopped and said, 'Andrew Newgate!'

'Andrew!' I said in surprise.

He sat down, lit a roll-your-own cigarette, inhaled and
leaned back, looking at me as if it wasn't at all strange to meet
me in New Plymouth after all this time. His eyes were flat
blue, expressionless. His hands were grimy, his nails black.
His face was grey, unhealthy, finely lined. He looked no
different from the time when I'd lived in a flat in Auckland
and he, a friend of the landlord, had occupied the spare room
out the back, a strange, cold, enigmatic character, talkative
but self-enclosed — Andrew. Smith? Smythe? He was a
shadow, a no man. The same first name was about all we had
in common.

'What are you doing here?'

'I live here,' he told me. 'It's my home town.'

I said I was down for the festival with my friend, the pianist
Alan Reece. I came up with a few bits of small talk. Andrew
looked at me with his unreadable eyes.

I said, 'Remember the landlord, what a miser he was?'

'I still hear from him.' His tone was hostile.

'Tell him from me he was cheap bastard,' I said, laughing.

He got up. 'Fight your own battles,' he said.

I blinked.

'Good luck to your boyfriend.'

I was angry. 'He's not . . .' But he was walking away.

He looked back once, without expression, a phantom
fading back to the other side. He went around a corner, gone.

I thought about the underground bar, the boys screaming
'Zombie, zombie.'

Waiting for Alan I daydreamed: New Plymouth was a place
of goblins, of ghouls.

Alan played brilliantly. There was a big audience. Afterwards
he was elated. He held my arm as we moved through the noisy
crowd. We had drinks at the bar and he overdid it, with relief
and cheerfulness. In the toilets he told me, 'I've gone and got
drunk.' We came out into the milling foyer and he grabbed me
and kissed me on the cheek. 'They're talking about you
because you're so handsome,' he whispered. I pulled away but
he held my arm tight, held on.

The driver came for us. We drove through the green fields.
Alan nodded and snored, his cheeks flushed, his clothes
rumpled. I looked at him sleeping.

The driver said, 'Finally.'

Out the window I saw the mountain. The mist had lifted.
Draped with the last wisps of cloud, rising against the blue
sky, white and pure, cold and sharp, it appeared to me like an
idea once obscured now become clear, something ancient,
savage, unforgiving.

Peter and I had been seeing each other for a year, spending
one week at his place and the next at mine, although lately
we'd spent more time at my apartment, mine being spacious
with a deck we could sit out on and drink wine in the evenings
and look over the sea, the harbour still and glassy through
the long, hot summer and the evenings full of golden light
turning to soft black shadows, and the voices in the street
below, the drowsy summer street. I liked to walk along the
marina in the evening and look at the water, the rainbows of
oil smearing the surface, the light dancing zigzags on the sides
of the boats. Peter strolled, listening to me with his customary
expression. He had an air of sweet, hastily assumed politeness,
as if you'd startled him out of some dreamy reflection and he
was gathering his thoughts, waiting to see what came next.
He blinked, widened his blue eyes, smiled, and 'Really?' he
would say, turning his head on one side while I laughed and
explained myself, refining some statement that his manner
had made seem clumsy or too forceful. The laugh always there
behind his curved mouth, ready to break out. I felt I was the
solid one. I was the solid one.

Sometimes I woke in the night and saw him standing out
on the deck, looking at the calm sea, the curtains moving
around the open door, his cigarette a little point of fire
spiralling into the dark as he threw it away. He was a light
sleeper. His night prowling disturbed me; it made me think he
was looking for something outside and beyond ourselves. I
didn't like to think he wanted freedom. I pretended I didn't
know how he drifted about in the night, walked through the
rooms, played with his mobile phone, how he lay awake, his
arms folded behind his head, his eyes open and unseeing.

At the end of summer we started looking at houses. We'd
talked about it on and off. I was eager to share a house but
didn't want to seem so. I would have liked to stay in my flat
and for Peter to move in — I didn't fancy moving into his
cramped bachelor lair — but my landlord had given me notice
he wanted to sell my place. Soon the sign would go up and I
would have to find somewhere new to live. The sentence
hanging over the place gave every evening out on the deck a
poignant flavour, and already we were talking about the flat
with a sense of nostalgia.

Now I was lying on the bed, the real estate section open in
front of me, circling possibilities: the small houses for first-home
buyers, the inner-city ones.

Neither of us had owned a house before; we agreed, jokingly,
that it was about time. Or was I the one who said those things?
Perhaps Peter only listened, then slid away from the subject.
'We can afford it!' I said. I was a senior manager; he was a
journalist. Neither of us felt very grown up; secretly we
couldn't believe how old we were, and the idea of buying a
house made us anxious: was it capitulation, would it tie us too
stiflingly together? I could imagine Peter asking himself these
questions. I thought about them myself, and I hid how much
I wanted it, how desperately I wanted it.

I'd worked my way up: now I was a boss. In my team there
were four men and three women. Two of the men had children,
but among the women there was agreement: we didn't want
children. We cared about our careers; we didn't want to lose
what we'd fought to achieve. We didn't like kids — the idea of
them was boring and claustrophobic. We were always testing
one another, probing for signs of weakening. Mike at work
brought his baby in once. It lay in a car seat, its eyes closed, its
syrupy mouth open, a tiny string of spit trembling on the
glazed bottom lip. Bright felt toys dangled above it — suns
and stars. He put his hand on its head. The dip of the fontanelle,
little strings of soft hair. Our shrugs, our ironic jokes. Clenched
fists. Clenched fists.

I showed Peter the houses I'd circled. We went out in the
car. He drove, ironically smoking. We looked at the first house,
a suburban box, crammed with beige furniture and pastel
reproductions and maidenhair ferns in pots.

'Try to picture it unfurnished,' I said hopelessly.

We snorted our way around two more. I wanted to stop
scoffing and take it seriously, but Peter kept making funny
jokes. I'd only got him this far by pretending it was a laugh,
something he could write about: an amusing afternoon, the
hidden secrets of the suburbs. I wanted a villa with a return
veranda, or an old workman's cottage with wooden floors and
uneven windows and a garden, not a townhouse with
cardboard walls and brown carpet. I wanted what the agent
didn't have. We went for a coffee. There was a week to go until
the election. Hoardings stood along the roads.

In the café I looked through the paper again.

I said, 'I know this house!'

I showed Peter: a big place in Remuera, four bedrooms, a
view of Mt Hobson. Marie's house. Marie.

I met her when we were both thirteen. There was to be a
mufti day at school and she'd got the day wrong, had turned
up in plain clothes when everyone else was in uniform. She
was blushing, humiliated, hiding her face behind her long
curly hair. Attracted by her distress, unsure whether I was
sympathetic or wanting to mock, or just, out of boredom,
wanting to get close to someone else's pain, I went and sat
beside her, and when she said she was going home to change I
offered to go with her. I don't know why. We both got in trouble
for it, I remember, taking off without telling anyone, getting on
the bus and riding all the way back to the house in Remuera,
getting the key from under a rock in the garden, going in and
finding Marie's mother at the kitchen table in a dressing gown,
crying and taking pills, throwing her head back, tipping the
tall glass, and telling us to leave her alone, leave her alone.

'They're getting a divorce,' Marie told me. Her bedroom
upstairs was striped with sunlight. I looked over at Mt Hobson,
the trees against the hard blue sky. Her walls were covered
with posters of The Clash.

All the time I knew Marie her parents were getting a
divorce. They fought their way into 1981. Her mother had a
secret boyfriend, her father stayed at work and Marie spent a
lot of time at my house. That was where she got her political
education. It was the time of the Springbok rugby tour. There
were protests against the South African team coming to play
in New Zealand. Marie's parents were all for the rugby tour
— they were right-wing. Her father was a rich businessman, a
'fascist', she said. She liked the political talk in our house. She
and I started going on anti-apartheid demonstrations. Her
parents forbade it and mine encouraged it — went on the
marches themselves. Marie and I prided ourselves on being at
the front of the march every time. We were obsessed with The
Clash. I got myself a short spiky haircut. We were scornful,
fierce, daring, political; we got in trouble at school and relished
it; we were best friends.

I looked at the picture of the house where I'd spent so many
afternoons.

'Let's go and see it,' I said. I explained: 'We used to go on
protest marches. She wasn't allowed. We told her mother we
were going shopping. My best friend. Outrageous Marie . . .'

Peter gave me an indulgent look. This was something he
did approve of — a sentimental journey, a look back at my
past. He enjoyed the thought of me as young, teenage, silly,
dizzy. 'Yes! Let's see the house where you played with little
Marie.'

I rang the agent. He had finished his open home but would
wait and let us in. We drove back, past the election
hoardings.

'We're going to have a National government,' I said. I felt
depressed about it. 'I wish I could do something.'

'Do?'

'Oh, I don't know.'

'Labour's run a lousy little campaign.'

'So what? What about what matters? What about politics?'

Peter sighed and smiled languidly. 'Politics, well . . .'

When we first met he told me, 'I don't really like opinionated
people.' He was — what was he? — too cynical? too fey? for
political convictions, too light and subtle and comical. I
thought of that Dickens character, Harold Skimpole. 'What
use is money to me?' he says. 'What would I do with it? I'm
just a child . . .'

The house was huge; we could never have afforded it
ourselves. Peter stood in the hallway pretending he was
interested in the kitchen, the big sitting room, the lush front
garden.

The agent told us, 'A writer lives here. Celia Myers? She's
finding the house a bit big for her, now she lives alone.' Outside
we heard a car engine beginning to be thrashed into high
revs.

Celia Myers! We made faces behind the agent's back. It was
the kind of odd, quirky chance Peter's luck often brought him:
licence to poke around in the house of a writer, to sift through
her cupboards and check out her bookshelves. He specialised
in interviews and in-depth profiles and here he had an inside
look at the literary dame's life — her gardening shoes at the
door, her odd, mixed collection of art, the notes pinned on
the fridge, the open diary on the bench, her bedroom with the
novels and the earplugs on the bedside table, the old bird off
out somewhere, unable to prevent him snooping, only the
agent hovering doubtfully behind him as he opened closets
and studied shelves, making mental notes, his quick
imagination, his sense of humour working. He would notice
everything; he would be funny and observant about it all.

I adored him. I wanted to keep hold of him. He'd had a lot
of girlfriends, but I thought, I really did think, that we were a
good match. There were little blow-ups and tiffs: he could be
distracted and impatient, or obscurely offended, and I held
back in a way I'd never have been able to when I was younger,
careful not to crowd him, not to be demanding. I kept secret
my relief at winning him back. We'd had such good times, the
whole year. His funny emails. Hilarity in bed on a Sunday
morning. Our walks by the marina. Moments when he was
suddenly sincere or loving or vulnerable, and I was smitten.

And now I was making my way up to the bedroom, Marie's
room, where we'd sat and talked, and jumped around to The
Clash, where I'd had the kind of teenage certainty you don't
get back, full of rebellion and laughs and the thrill of your
own daring.

I wondered what had become of her parents. Perhaps they'd
got around to divorcing, sold the house, gone their separate
ways. I saw Marie sitting on the floor in the afternoon light, an
assortment of objects in front of her: masking tape, scissors,
glue, string. I smiled at the memory. She was a terrorist,
temperamentally. She always wanted to go too far. I didn't
know where she was now, what city, what country. Did she
have a husband, children?

Peter came up the stairs. I pointed at the floor. 'Marie, she
sat here and . . . I remember it so clearly. It was 1981, during
the Springbok tour. Marie wanted to do something. There was
some company, aligned with the tour. And she made this
thing, sitting here on the floor.'

Peter said, 'I got caught in an anti-apartheid march once. I
jumped into an alley while it passed. All the shouting and
hooting. The earnest faces.'

'You mean you
hid
?' But I was charmed by his expression,
enough to smile, to cover what was sharp in my tone.

The agent came up. In the garden next door a group of
youths was standing around an old car. The engine roared;
birds flew up from the hedge. The agent half closed his eyes.
Then he smacked his hands against his thighs and made as if
to bustle us downstairs. Peter, polite, obedient, turned to go. I
said, 'You go on down.' The agent ushered Peter ahead.

Marie. She sat on the floor in the sunny room, while her
mother whispered into the phone downstairs, while I lay on
her bed and worked on my homework, while the dog lay
panting and snuffling by the door, Marie, gluing and pasting
and sculpting. She wore rubber gloves. Perhaps she had her
tongue stuck out the corner of her mouth. Her long hair
pinned up on top of her head.

She finished what she'd been making and put it on the bed
next to me.

'That'll teach them,' she said.

It was a malevolent-looking thing. She'd summoned up
her knowledge of what it should look like from films and TV,
I suppose. She'd always been good at art. A frisson went
through me, a little shift, where I thought how it would appear
to an innocent person, coming upon it unexpectedly. There
were wires, and bits covered with tape that could be . . . could
be what? Gelignite, plastic explosive? There was an aerial
sticking out of it, a nice touch, the spiky point quivered
slightly. It gave — radiated — an impression of sensitivity, of
terrible potential. She frowned over it, the little sculptress,
turning it critically, this way and that in her gloved hands. It
was encased in a wooden box, wires running through and
around it. I reached out.

'Don't touch!' she commanded, and, narrowing her eyes,
whispered, '
Forensics
.'

We looked at the inert thing. Marie's bomb. Fake, of course,
designed to scare, to disrupt, to make an anti-apartheid point:
she would place it in the building of the company associated
with the Springbok tour. Marie sitting on the floor, the dog's
asthmatic wheezing, Marie's mother coming up the wooden
stairs, her face through the crack in the door, sharp blue eyes,
a look of wry amusement, the silent stare, the retreat. I think
back now: did I ever hear Marie's mother say anything, apart
from that first time when we came upon her with her water
glass and her bottle of pills? Perhaps we saved her that day,
coming back. Always after that she was silent, secretive. Just
the distracted glance and the footsteps on the wooden stairs,
the voice whispering into the phone. I heard the stairs creaking
now in the lull between revs, the car in the garden below, its
engine exposed, steaming. How old was Marie's mother when
we came home that day and found her at the kitchen table?
She couldn't have been older than I am now.