Opportunity (2 page)

Dee didn't say anything.

'That kid goes around attacking the others. The mothers
stop him, but that same young woman only rears up if he
heads for
her
kid.'

Dee traced her name on the window.

'The mothers have a radar — when something's going
wrong they turn. The nannies don't have it. They don't favour
the kid they're looking after.'

'You need to get out more,' Dee said.

'Young women might be the worst people to be nannies.
What if they're programmed to dislike other people's kids,
because they're gearing up to have their own?'

'O-kay,' she said.

'The thing is, Dee, we're all animals. Creatures.'

She turned.

'We're all animals,' I said again. I looked into her eyes and
saw a kind of darkness there.

'I look after your kids,' she said.

'Well, you're all right.' I sighed.

She got up. 'I'm going to see a lawyer. My ex-boyfriend was
arrested. They took us to the police station.'

'Were you charged?'

'No. And I've split up with him now.'

'Did they put you in a cell? What was it like?'

She stared down at the yard. 'There's something about
being put in a cell. It's bad out of all proportion. Don't tell
Gina,' she added.

She left. Karen came. 'Who's been here?'

'No one.'

'I know about all your "friends",' she said impressively. She
removed Dee's lipstick-smeared cup from the coffee table.
'I'm glad you're feeling better.' She sniffed.

Outside, the yard was empty. Rain drummed on the blue
sandpit cover. Karen sat down. 'I talked to Gina.' She smoothed
the arm of the couch with her fingers. 'She wanted to know
how you were.'

'Really? What did she say? Exactly?'

She smiled. 'She's so over the top. What are you writing?'

'A piece about the playgroup mothers. About how they're
animals.'

'Animals?'

I went quiet. I was angry with her for not telling me about
Gina. I hated the way she said 'over the top'. She was repressive,
bigoted, right-wing. She worshipped money. She was aggressive,
two-dimensional. But I knew why I loved her. Because
she was always little sister, putting on a front. Dressed up in
her outfits, acting important. She was good at organising, she
was 'steady' and 'sensible'; she was never over the top. But it
was all armour, and just the foot-stamping dumb little girl
underneath. Only a big brother would see her so clearly.

I felt tired. I stood up and put my hand on her shoulder as
I passed on my way to the bathroom, where I hunched over
the bowl, waiting to be sick. Oh, nausea, with its browns and
greens. A terrible sense of complexity came over me. I was
known for being funny in my weekly column. I'd written
something about the playgroup, but it was too dark. That we're
all animals — it isn't very
funny
. I would have to concentrate
on my novel. But how was I going to write it when I couldn't
leave the house?

Karen said, 'I got you this.'

It was a tiny, rectangular, satin pillow, embroidered in
beautiful colours. She made me lie down and put it over my
eyes. It was unexpectedly heavy, pressing down, cool and
soothing on the contours of my face.

'It's fantastic,' I said.

She read from a pamphlet. 'Slows rapid eye movement.
Good for headache, hangover, insomnia.'

'Thanks.' I grabbed her wrist.

'S'all right,' she said.

I began to invent a character. He would be very sick, very
old. He would have lost most of his connection to the world.
Confronting death, he would see life for what it was — a
struggle for survival, among animals. His view would be
detached and clear. He would see himself, having come from
the earth, soon to return to the earth.

I made pages of notes. I exhausted myself. I woke in the
night, switched on the lamp and wrote down thoughts I was
afraid I would have lost by morning. I started transferring my
ideas onto my laptop. The only thing that stopped me was
visitors. Dying Larry, wheeled out onto the sunporch, would
be contemplating an object — a telephone, say — in his
simple, pared-down way, when Karen would arrive with
another casserole of horrible puréed food. I got quite irritable
with her. I had Larry crutching along a sun-striped hall,
looking at pictures of nuns and the Pope in a Maori cloak,
Larry menaced by a Samoan cleaner, Larry shouting at a choir.
He knew he would never leave the Institution. He lived minute
by minute. His life was intense, full of dazed revelation . . .

The phone rang. 'It's Tony Irons,' said the voice. It was the
writer I'd interviewed before hospital. 'I've got a couple of
points,' he told me. I made him hang on. I got the piece I'd
written about him up on my screen. It was good. I wasn't
changing it. His hands, I remembered, had shaken throughout
the interview.

'You asked me about sources for my fiction.' His voice was
nervous. I heard him drag on a cigarette and blow out.

'Did I?'

He rustled some papers. 'Do I base my characters on real
people or do I make them up?' He drew a big breath. 'Jack, the
answer is both. Things have to be psychologically accurate.
When I create a character, even if it's based on a real person,
it takes on its own identity. The fictional filter changes it.
Changes it utterly!'

I twiddled the keys on the laptop. 'Mmm, good,' I said.

'And there was a point you raised about my childhood. If
I could just take you back . . .'

He went on. He had a list of twenty-five points. I thought
he would never go away.

Tuesday morning. I was in the bathroom. The doorbell
rang three times before I got to it. I saw Dee at the bottom of
the stairs, walking away. The door slammed.

'Stop! I'm here!' I called. I hobbled downstairs as fast as I
could and shouted after her, 'Dee!'

The mothers were arriving. 'Dee!' I had a pain. I hunched
over and a loud noise ripped through the air. (Did the
playgroup mothers stiffen? Did they exchange stony, significant
looks?)

She was coming back. I hung on to the door handle.

'You all right?'

'I'm much better.' I crept up the stairs after her, praying that
my insides would behave.

'Sit down,' I said. I cleared papers and books off the couch.

She gave me a characteristic look: tolerant, incredulous.
'I thought I was supposed to clean?'

'Oh yes. Clean.'

'Or did you just want me to sit and talk?'

'That too. No, really, cleaning first.'

'You
are
going to pay me?'

I settled down to watch the playgroup. One of the women
gestured towards my window. I nodded gravely. I imagined
going down there, the women gathering around as I unfurled
my notes. They would be flattered by my interest, struck by
the accuracy of my observations. They would laugh, covering
their faces shyly.

The vacuum cleaner started up. The phone rang.

'You asked about plot structure,' Irons said. 'I meant to say
there's something that Chekhov (I think) said about fiction.
That a, um, work of art, a work of fiction, must have good
architecture. By which he meant it has to have a pleasing, a
beautiful
structure
.'

'Actually, Tony, I'm writing a novel of my own.'

'Oh. Great!'

I clapped down the phone. I worked. Larry had escaped
from his carers. A cliff above a beach, the sun spilling into the
horizon. He looked at the sky and thought he could feel the
earth rolling away beneath him. A wave boomed like a
slamming door, the islands were turning to black silhouettes.
There was a ship strung with lights out at sea.

The vacuum cleaner popped and died. Dee thumped it.
The mothers glanced up at me. There was laughter, grimaces.
I went back to my work. I had the pleasing feeling I'd become
a fixture for them — a benign presence, almost part of the group.

I interrogated Dee. Gina had talked of 'going on a trip with
a friend'. She had bought a daringly short skirt. She'd scraped
the side of the car again. She'd had a fight on the phone, after
which she'd stood on the lawn swearing. Someone had rung
back and she'd cried and smiled. She'd been out one night
until 3 a.m.

Dee left. I felt cold. So Gina was being unfaithful. She would
have some ridiculous rationale to do with our separation,
some nonsense about needing to move on.

Oh, you vicious tramp! I wanted to tell her: I miss you. I see
you everywhere. Nobody matters but you.

There was a knock on the door. I opened it, my eyes full of
tears, expecting to be throwing myself on Dee. (Deadpan Dee,
how many of our quarrels had she witnessed over the years?)

It was a policeman.

He got straight to the point. There had been a complaint. I
had been watching the children in the yard. Had caused
discomfort. There was talk of 'intense peering'. Strange
behaviour. Shouting in the street. Note-taking, or sketching.
Someone had mentioned a camera.

'What camera?' Outrage was added to hurt. My playgroup
friends had
complained
.

I snatched up my notebook. 'I don't look at the children. It's
the women I'm interested in. I've had thoughts about animals.
That they are animals.'

'
Animals
?'

'We're all animals,' I said.

He didn't want to hear it. He took a heavy tone. I wasn't to
upset anyone else. He didn't want to have to come back again.
I told him I'd been sick. He said I ought to see someone about
it. 'We know where you are,' was his parting shot.

Wounded, I took refuge in the mind of Larry. Karen came,
the nurse came. I ignored them and worked on. Larry was
captured by his carers and brought back to the Institution. He
was taken on an outing in a minibus and some amusing
incidents took place . . .

The next day there was an easterly storm, driving rain,
purple sheet lightning, rain drumming on the sandpit cover,
water pooling on the concrete. Larry, labelled as a rebel, was
locked in a battle of wills with a sinister nurse, and mused late
at night about death. I watched the rain falling over the city,
falling through city lights. The nurse tried to inject Larry with
a painkiller; he refused, fearing her motives. The struggle
exhausted him. In a black moment he had a sense of the
void.

When Dee came the following day I gave her a package and
some money. 'Post this to Gina,' I said. 'It's the start of my
novel.'

Her report: a man had come to collect Gina in a big car. He
was introduced as Nigel. Gina had giggled a lot. She was
elaborately, yet minimally, dressed.

Listening, I bared my teeth, mangled this 'Nigel' between
my fingers. 'No!' I shouted. I pressed my forehead against the
window. Below, women hurried children inside, arms around
little shoulders.

Dee hitched the parcel under her arm. I lay down after
she'd gone, too exhausted to move.

The phone rang. I let it switch to the answerphone. Tony
Irons said, 'Jack? If you feel like a drink sometime? I'm
interested in the idea of a journalist who wants to write a
novel. You, in other words!'

I couldn't get up. I didn't eat anything. I lay with my face to
the wall. Karen came, rang the nurse, and they both tried to
bully me into moving. I ignored them. Karen got upset, called
me childish. She offered me soup and tea. I shook my head
until the nurse put her foot down and said I'd have to be seen
by a doctor.

I told Karen I was dying. 'It's what you want,' I said.

She shouted at me. 'How can you
say
that? I've looked after
you. I've been here day after day!'

'I'm still dying,' I said. I heard her crying. I kept my face to
the wall. She said my name. She sounded despairing. By the
time I'd made up my mind to turn over, she'd gone.

When I woke there was a woman by my bed.

'Gina!' I sat up, full of joy. I put my arms around her. I told
her I was dying. I told her I missed her. I begged her to come
back. I said: 'I see you everywhere, in passing cars, in dreams.
No one matters except you.'

She said, 'I read the stuff you sent. It's funny. It's bleak,
though. Just lonely old Larry. Can't you pad it out a bit? Make
a plot, add other characters?'

'What other characters? I've been ill, and nothing's happened.
I've been completely alone.'

'There must be real people you can write about.'

'What people? There's only Karen and the nurse.' (I didn't
mention Dee.)

'You could put me in it.'

'But I haven't got you!'

'I'm here, aren't I?'

I woke again. The sky out the window was pink. I was alone.
I lay looking at the pearly sky. After a while I went to my
computer, sat down and began to write:
There were red swirls.
I fought my way out of them
. I wrote my way to this point,
here. Because Gina always puts me straight, you see. She tells
me what's important and what to throw away, and that is why
I love her.

I was sitting at my desk. It was a cold morning in June. The
wind was rattling the windows and the rain had bits of hail in
it. I was watching my neighbour, Ron Cassidy. He was up on
his roof trying to fix a loose bit of iron. The wind was blowing
his sweatshirt up over his broad, pale, freckled back. He was
wearing shorts, calf-length socks and carpet slippers. His feet
were slipping about on the wet iron.

I've lived here for five years. I live by myself, with two cats.
There are the Cassidys on one side, and on the other a friendly
old couple I don't talk to much. We say hello on the driveway.
I'm on good terms with the man down the back. We sometimes
have a chat. But it's the Cassidys I talk to most. As soon as I
moved in here we started having words.

Ron Cassidy used to be an athlete a long time ago. He never
managed to find anything to do after his sporting career was
finished. These days he presents himself as a sort of builder or
odd-job man. He has a battered truck filled with paints and
hardware and tools, a trailer attached to it, piled high with
more odds and ends. Often he sets off in this vehicle looking
purposeful, only to return a short time later, perhaps with
more junk piled on his trailer, or less junk, or the junk
rearranged. Some afternoons he ties junk to his trailer and
moves it from one end of the driveway to the other. He is
always trotting around his property with some kind of
appliance, repeating, mechanically, to anyone who comes
near, 'It's got to be done. It's got to be done.' And everything he
does makes his house older, messier, sadder, closer to being
ruined.

One day he unloaded an ancient portable generator from
his trailer. He set it up under my bedroom window and
attached it to a high-pressure hose. Then he ran the generator
continuously for two days, while he water-blasted his roof. It
was so loud I couldn't shut it out of any part of my house. I
couldn't work. I couldn't read. At the end of the second day
he'd scoured the paint off half his roof. He stopped work and
took the generator away. Months later, the roof is still half
scoured and half covered in old paint. The walls of the house
are also half painted. At the front a set of windows is covered
in black polythene, half fixed. He has a homemade security
gate, half of which is broken.

Under the house is Ron's workshop. This neon-lit, cobwebby
basement, full of dead machinery, is where he and his son
Blake apply themselves to their most serious passion: tinkering
with cars. I have sometimes sat here working while Blake and
his dad have sawed a car in half. When they stop work I can
hear the murmur of their earnest talk. Something like: 'Yeah,
the fuggin. Yeah. The wrench. The fuggin wrench. Yeah. The
fuggin.'

They have the usual trouble with their tools. Whole days
are devoted to fixing the dodgy saw they've borrowed to cut
the car in half. In the evenings young Blake, an apprentice
mechanic, likes to invite his friends over. After the traffic has
died down in the street, after the long and stressful day, I relax
to the sound of Blake's engine, with its souped-up oversized
exhaust being revved into a scream, until it sounds as if it's
begging for mercy. The youths cluster around the open bonnet,
humourlessly smoking. In the lull after the screaming the car
steams, its guts splayed — the tortured corpse. Blake's face is
intent, white, tiny-eyed. Sometimes he breaks into a sharp-toothed
grin: 'Eh! Look a' that!' As he might have done when
the kitten exploded that time, when the puppy sighed and
died, when the helpless thing he was fucking with finally gave
up the ghost, and whimpered no more, and hung limp from
the clothesline . . .

Oddly, I don't hate Blake. (I do hate his parents. I do.) Once,
when I'd been in the paper and on TV, Blake went through a
phase of greeting me in the street. He did a sort of wave —
ceremonious. It was my being on TV that did it. I'm sure TV
is the ultimate reality for Blake. Reading and writing are not
his thing. Once he put a sign on an old car he'd dumped
outside my house: 'Some FCKWIT stole my plates. Please
RETURE.' He has a large tattoo on one arm and clumsy, boyish
hands. It's hard to hate a boy. It's hard to hate a boy who can't
spell 'return'.

Anyway, you'd think from all this that I live somewhere a
bit scruffy, wouldn't you? Somewhere out west, or quite far
south? Henderson, Mangere. But no. The Cassidys live in
Remuera. We live in Remuera. It's not supposed to be like
this.

So we have words. I'm no shrinking violet. I'm a writer, and
I need quiet. (I've had a reasonably successful career. I'm old
now, and a few people know my name.) Like Ron Cassidy, I
need to be home all day. Unlike him, I like getting a bit of
work done. And I've done a fair bit of raging out into the drive
and telling them to turn down or off whatever machine they're
operating.

But the thing about the Cassidys, apart from their living in
Remuera and being so disreputable, is that they're fantastically
paranoid and aggressive. If you complain, they do not
apologise. They rear up and fight back. And if I've ever taken
any direct action (sometimes I write angry letters; once,
despairing, I threw two large tomatoes at the revving youths)
they're not slow to take revenge. My car has been attacked
with a brick, my windscreen wipers stolen. My tomatoes
arrived back on my doorstep soon after, accompanied by a
mountain of rubbish.

Mrs Cassidy — Glenda — who works in a bank, is as sharp
and stringy as her husband is flabby and dull. She's not above
leaning over the fence and giving me what for, when I've been
cramping Ron and Blake's style with some mean-minded
complaint. She stands by her men. She has a great sense of
drama, and is always scurrying out to see what I've done to
Ron and Blake this time. Sometimes I get a cold feeling when
I'm out, and turn, and there is terrible Glenda, stooped,
pitched sideways with the strain of the blackest scowl she can
sustain without turning her face inside out.

The tumbledown house, moody Blake, glowering Glenda,
moronic Ron, the piles of junk on Ron's trailer going back and
forth all day — all of this has unsettled me so much that I've
often thought of moving. I haven't managed to yet, even
though I've been so sorely tried.

The Cassidys' latest trick (revenge for one of my complaints)
is to park a couple of derelict cars outside my house so I have nowhere to
park my own. They're always 'trailing their coat', as the Irish saying goes.
They're always itching for a fight . . .

***

It was a cold June morning. I was sitting at my desk watching
Ron Cassidy fixing a loose bit of iron on his roof. The wind
rattled the windows and the rain had bits of hail in it. Ron was
wearing carpet slippers. His feet slipped about on the iron. I
started writing: an elderly woman was sitting in her house. She
was watching her neighbour, an aggressive, unpleasant man
who, for years, had made her life difficult. She was thinking
about hate. She was thinking: there are very few people I hate,
but that man is one of them. He has made me unhappy in
my own house. And he hates me. She thought: if this were
the Balkans or Rwanda, if society broke down and that man
suddenly had the opportunity, he would kill me. Given the
chance,
I
wouldn't kill him, even though I hate him, because I
am a better class of person. But he would kill me.

She watched him sliding about on the roof. He had a
hammer and a mouthful of nails and he was trying to hold
down a section of iron. The wind tore at his clothes and hair.
He slipped, threw up his arms and dropped the hammer. She
saw him catch hold of a rusty overflow pipe to steady himself.
It broke and came away. He teetered for a second, his body
twisting, his hands clutching the air. The pipe tilted with him.
There was a scattering of pieces of iron, nails, broken pipe.
The wind got under the iron and made it shriek. He fell into
the yard below. She heard his heavy body hit the concrete.

She sat still. Some minutes went by. No one came out to help
him. No one was home over there. She could see his legs. She waited, looking
at his legs. They didn't move. It started raining hard. He lay in the rain.
She felt very strange sitting there, looking at her neighbour's legs. She
picked up her coat and umbrella and went slowly out into the street. She stood
outside her gate, the rain drumming on her umbrella. She got in her car and
drove away.

***

The Writers' Festival was on. There had already been two
days of appearances by local and overseas writers. At three
that afternoon I was to appear in An Hour With Celia Myers,
in which I would talk about my career and read from my
work. I'd already chaired a session with three young women
novelists, and taken part in panel discussions with some
overseas writers. It had all gone well. The sessions were lively,
and I'd managed to avoid any disasters or embarrassments.
I'd been told that my Hour With session had sold reasonably
well. I enjoyed festivals. My books were especially popular
with women. After the session with the young novelists the
crowd had been enthusiastic, and I'd realised how much I
enjoyed the crush, the warmth of all those bodies pressing
towards us. I live alone. My husband died years ago, and my
daughters, Dee and Viola, have long since grown up. Mostly it
suits me, being alone. But I crave the human touch.

I left my car in the parking building and walked down to
the Hilton. The cold rain was sheeting down, but the Hilton
was the perfect place to be on such a melancholy afternoon.
The building was at the end of the wharf and the windows
looked out onto the harbour all tossed with foam and white-
caps, and the container ships in the rain, and the ferries
crossing the water. In the late afternoon the water took on a
silvery sheen and the air just above it was a haggard yellow.
The cold light on the water only made it seem cosier inside.
People rushed in, folding their umbrellas and shaking off the
water. Inside, in the crush and heat and chatter, there were
tables loaded with books for sale, long queues for tickets and
coffee, people filing into sessions or gathering for signings. I
walked in and stood for a moment, feeling myself gently
bumped and buffeted by the crowd. There was a smell of wet
wool. I was nervous about my forthcoming session; this gave
me a feeling of inertia, of uneasy, drowsy luxury. I could have
sneaked off to one of the rooms upstairs and lain across the
bed drinking, sprawled and stalled, while time went on
somewhere else without me . . .

I stood still, calming myself. I looked across the crowd. I
saw a man standing against the high windows, the grey sea
behind him. I wasn't sure until he moved and looked towards
me. He was older and heavier, slightly stooped, but it was him.
After all these years. The memory came rushing back. I
remembered a scene long ago: a hotel room, the opened minibar,
myself much younger — a beautiful, blonde younger self.
The yellow light on the walls. The expensive linen. The rain
drifting past the windows and outside the canyon made of
city walls, the browns, the tans, the desolate spaces. Shirred
water on a roof far below. No sound, the concrete silence. The
bed where he lay, where he lounged and smiled. I saw him.
And I saw him. Long ago, in the room of my nerves. And
here, between the hotel pillars! And there, appearing again,
and walking up the stairs now, a programme in his hand.
Walking up the stairs to where a crowd was gathering: for An
Hour With Celia Myers. The woman he . . . The woman whose
marriage . . . Long ago, in the room where he lay, where he
grinned and smoked and made a joke, I'd looked out at the
darkening city and thought of my husband Joe, at home, not
knowing. At home with our daughters.

I followed him up the stairs. I looked at his back, his
shoulders. Let's call him Martin. Long ago I fell in love with
him, and went to bed with him, and Joe found out and left me.
And then Martin told me: 'I don't love you. I love someone
else. I love another woman.'

Joe and I got back together after a while, but things were
never the same. And now he's dead I look back and think
about what our life would have been like. I know it would
have been better if I'd never met Martin.

He had joined the queue. He was going to my Hour With.
It was impossible. I couldn't allow it. I would yank him out of
the line. 'I'm not having you sitting there ruining my hour.
Smirking. Making your smartarse jokes.' I moved towards
him. I used to yearn to hurt him. I had such violent dreams.
But I only did it on paper in the end. On paper, and in my
head.

'Celia! Celia!' Now here came Sarah, weaving though the
crowd. 'Celia, I've been looking all over for you. Come this
way. What can I get you? Water? Coffee?'

She hustled me to the Green Room. I let her push me gently
into a chair. I stared at the coffee she put in front of me. I
thought about the affair, how it had felt back then. I had been
happily married with two children. I met Martin at a party.
He made me laugh. He sent me witty notes. Some of the things
he wrote were quite beautiful. We started meeting secretly. I
remembered the hotel room. My nerves. The rain drifting
past the window, the yellow light inside. The joy and the fear.
I was right up at the sharpest, sweetest peak of feeling. I'd
been married for so long, a hard-working mother for so long,
and then, suddenly, I was back in the time when feelings
overwhelmed me, when everything was vivid.

He felt none of those things — I know that now. He'd never
been married. He didn't have the sense of 'coming alive again'.
He was just doing the same jaded thing he'd always done:
having a fling. After a while he told me he loved someone else.
Just like that. He didn't mince words. I fled back to Joe. But
Joe found out and he left me. I was distraught. I got Joe back,
but the hurt didn't go away. There was a new distance between
us.