Opportunity (9 page)

'Viola,' I said, with a flash of guilt. Then I was really angry.
I went to hang up.

'I'm with a man,' she said.

'What?' I grappled with the phone.

She whispered, 'He says he's your father.'

My hands started to shake.

'I was walking home from the pub. He stopped his taxi and
asked if I wanted a ride. We started talking. I told him what
my job was. He asked were you Dr Lampton . . . and he said
he was your father.'

'Where are you?'

'I'm in his flat. He invited me. He's drinking. He's
getting . . . angry.'

'Angry?'

'Is he violent?' she asked.

I got up off the bed. Karen sat up and stared.

'Oh, Christ. Just leave.'

There was a pause. 'He won't let me,' she whispered.

Again I went to hang up. But if he injured her . . . She was
asking for help. He was my father. She had me. I raged at her
silently. There was a bang, cursing, in the background. I
started. 'Viola? Are you there?'

'He says he hates you, hates everything.'

'Okay. Just wait. I'll help.'

'All right,' she said, being brave. I saw myself punching her.
Then I pictured
him
punching her. I was on the verge of tears.
'Don't worry, darling,' I said.

Karen caught my arm. 'What is going on? Who's "darling"?
Simon!' she shouted after me. I dressed, ran downstairs, got in
my car.

On the way I rang the police. I must have made it sound
serious. When I turned into the street there were patrol cars,
and police on the wooden fire escape. They had Viola in the
yard, and further up the stairs my father was arguing.

I said to Viola, 'Are you all right?'

My father was taken past. 'I've done nothing,' he said to his
escort. 'She knows it.' He wrenched himself close to me,
amazed. 'Why are
you
here? Did you call the cops? I could
lose my job. I've got debts. You've done this. It's a trick.'

He was pulled away, shouting.

Viola said, 'I didn't want to call the police.'

I rounded on her. 'Well, they're here now. What did you
think you were doing?' I watched as my father was shoved into
the police car. I was calming down. I was starting to think.

She said, 'I thought it'd be all right to go to his house. He
said he was going to have a party with some musicians. It
wasn't like going with a stranger, because he said he was your
father
.'

'Everyone's a stranger. Was he drunk?'

She hesitated. 'A bit, maybe.'

I leaned down to her. I said, 'He's a drunk who drives a
taxi. He has to be stopped. He's going to kill someone.'

'You want him to lose his job?'

'You think he shouldn't lose it?' I took her arm and pushed
her towards the cops.

The sergeant said to me, 'You'll need to make a statement.'

'Gladly,' I said.

But in the car I said to Viola, 'How did you know my
number?'

'I remembered it from work.'

'How did you call without him knowing?'

'He was pacing around the kitchen, raving about you, your
mother, what bastards people were. I picked up the phone —
he didn't even notice. He's crazy. I was
frightened
.' I glanced at
her. She saw my expression and looked stunned. I felt fear
come off her — fear of me. I stopped driving so fast and said,
'This is a situation. We need to get through it. He stopped you
leaving. Anything else?'

'He kissed me.' She shivered.

'That's assault.' I pictured it: him kissing Viola.

'We'll get him,' I said. 'He won't be hurting anyone again.'

At the police station I had a talk with a senior sergeant. I
told him everything.

'He's known to us,' the man said. He went from one room
to another, came back. He told me what my father was saying.
He said, 'It's a long chance, him picking up your young friend.'
There was a silence. I wondered what my father had said. The
sergeant looked at me steadily. I could tell he was turning over
the possibility that Viola and I were connected in this, that we
were in league.

'I can hardly believe it myself,' I said. Just get through this,
I thought. Just see it through.

He said, 'But we can get something out of it. We can finally
ban him from the cabs.'

I went into the room where Viola was sitting.

'Tell them everything,' I said. 'The drinking. The kiss.
Everything.' I looked hard at her. 'Don't leave anything out.'

Afterwards I got her back in the car and drove her to our
house. The thing would have to be explained to Karen.

Karen had all the lights blazing. Viola blinked. She looked
extremely young, foolish and vulnerable.

Karen said, 'So this is the "darling". '

Viola's mouth turned up in a mad grin. She looked rudely
around the room, as if storing up detail.

In a caustic voice I explained what had happened, adding
that I had feared for Viola's safety, and that the word 'darling'
had been meant to reassure. I made it plain that I was at the
end of my tether, that I was upset.

Karen looked contrite, then ironic. She said sharply, 'How
did she know our home number?'

'I remembered it from work,' Viola said.

Was there a simper in her answer? She looked from me to
Karen. She smiled. I jumped out of my chair. Was she enjoying
this — torturing us, making trouble between us?

But she couldn't have contrived it. She couldn't have known
she was going to meet my father. He'd admitted that he'd been
cruising around, that he'd stopped for her on a whim; also
that they'd never met before. It was sheer chance — although
it
would
be Viola he found, walking in the night alone. I
thought about it. She should have refused the lift. But he was
a taxi driver. She would have assumed he was after a fare. Then
she trusted him because he was connected to me. And she'd
been frightened. I'd heard it in her voice. My father was
violent, drunk. It couldn't be her fault.

Could it?

I paced to the window and back. Karen looked at her watch,
then at me. She raised her eyebrows.

'I'll take her home,' I said.

'Can I go to the toilet?' Viola asked. I was repelled by her
silly tone, furious. We waited while she used the lavatory. She
came out. She had redone her makeup. I saw Karen coldly
noting this. Viola grinned cheerfully and said, 'Right then.'

I saw Karen's angry face at the window as we walked down
the drive.

I asked for Viola's address and drove there. I waited for her
to get out but she stared at her hands and said, 'When your
father was talking about you he said, "I bet my son doesn't like
trouble. I bet he likes everything nice and polite, but I'm
trouble and
you've walked into it
." That was when I got
frightened.'

I laughed angrily. 'Now who's got trouble,' I said.

'He said, "I bet no one at his work knows about me. What
can you and I do about that?" '

I remembered something. When he was being marched
past he pushed back his hair with his fingers. A nervous
gesture, despairing. I have the same thick black hair. I have
the same mannerism. It steadies my hands.

'I feel sorry for him,' she said in a treacly voice.

I was afraid then. She'd invaded my life at its most painful
centre. She'd been let loose in it.

I reached across, pushed open the door and told her to go.

I drove home.

Karen and I went to bed and lay close together, talking for
a long time.

***

My secretary helped us move Viola on to another job. The
police charged my father with indecent assault. Indecent? A
single kiss is enough, the senior sergeant told me. It was a
way of getting him out of the taxis. He promised to make sure
Viola fronted up at court as a witness. As far as I know, she
kept the whole thing secret. She never told a soul.

I only heard from her again once. A few months after my
father was banned from the cabs, just before he took too many
pills one night and died, Viola rang me at home. We had
guests for dinner. I took the phone out of the room. I controlled
my trembling hands. She sounded as if she'd nerved herself
up. She said, 'You could look back on this, after a long
time . . .'

I wanted to shout at her, I have a life.
A whole life
. And
you . . .

She was still talking. I cut her off. 'You've got a lifetime of
opportunities ahead of you,' I said.

'Opportunity?' she said. 'That's what I meant. You could
ask, that night, who wanted what from whom?'

I started to walk back towards the dining room.

'I can't talk to you,' I said.

Plane sailing: The art of determining a ship's position on the
theory that she is moving on a plane.

I gave my baby the middle name Max after his father. He
already has a son called Max. Max junior. My son is Matthew
Max Grace. He never sleeps.

Well, he does sleep, but in restless snatches. He tosses and
turns and makes loud snuffling noises, then wakes with a loud
wail. He has never slept through a whole night. People warned
me about this. They said it would be hard bringing up a child
on my own. They urged me to consider it carefully. They must
have been mad if they thought I wouldn't do it.

When I first took Matthew home from hospital I had to go
to the supermarket, and I went to pieces in the aisles. I wanted
to hang on to a shelf, crying. I thought I would fall, that the
floor was lurching under my feet. I got through it. I made it
home with my shopping, then I stayed in the house for two
days, recovering. I've always been independent, reasonably
cool under fire. Interesting to find that a trip to the supermarket
could be harrowing, terrifying, defeating.

A month later, when I was walking along Upland Road
pushing Matthew in his pram, I saw a ship in the sky over Mt
Hobson. It was three-masted, gold, with glittering rigging,
like a picture in a child's storybook. It hung in the air, sails
rippling, banners flying, and the air around it glowed, pearly
white. I watched it sail over the edge of the mountain,
disappearing into the blue distance, the shimmer of the sky.

I went for a check-up with the obstetrician, Dr Lampton. I
didn't tell him about the ship specifically, but I mentioned that
I'd had very little sleep. I said something about the edges of
reality getting a bit blurred. He gave me a long, cool, assessing
look. Then he asked me some careful questions about my
mood.

'I'm happy,' I told him. And it was true.

When I think back to how it was before . . . I was in love
with Max but he had a wife and two sons, Max junior and
Charles, and a big house, and a settled family life, and although
I knew this when I began having an affair with him, I still
hoped that he would leave it all for me. He wasn't getting on
well with his wife. He suspected she was seeing someone —
there was a man hanging round, and he was hurt by this,
although he said, 'Of course I don't find her sexually attractive
any more.' He was tall, handsome, elegant, beautifully dressed;
he had a habit that I found irresistible of coming out with
shocking statements in his patrician King's School drawl, and
I longed to take him to my stolid, timid mother's house in
Penrose, just so he could horrify her with some dreadful,
languid dismissal: 'What a
bastard
so-and-so is, just a
bastard
.'

He smoked cigarettes, and though I begged him not to (I'm
a dentist — 'You don't want to get oral cancer, darling,' I said)
I found this habit endearing too, his fierce disregard for
niceties and pieties, his refusal to care what other people
thought.

I liked being seen out with him; even, I'm ashamed to say,
liked the throbbing, ostentatious racket of his Porsche Turbo.
We'd been an ordinary, middle-income family — my father
was a clerk, my mother worked in a shop — and I was excited
by Max's wealth and glamour. It wasn't that I was materialistic.
It was just that he was rather . . . sensational. I loved him. I
suppose I always will. I can't say it without tears. I go into
Matthew's bedroom and look down at his face. His eyes move
while he sleeps. Sometimes he half opens them and looks
from side to side, wildly, under his lids, like a crazy little
animal. He gnashes furiously on his dummy, plugged in to his
dreams.

I was so in love with Max that I spied on his family. It was
summer. They lounged out by the pool. I could hear the boys
shouting and fighting. I watched Max's wife cooking dinner.
I'd go cold at work the next day, imagining the embarrassment
if I'd been caught. But still I'd end up driving towards his
house. One night he rang my mobile when I was two houses
down from his. He wanted to come to my place. I had to race
to my car and drive home before he got there. When we were
in bed a bit later I kept laughing. He said primly that I sounded
hysterical. Then he propped his head on his hand and told me
he'd been talking to his wife. He was going to rent a townhouse.
They'd agreed to separate.

I hid a rush of tears. I chattered excitedly. What about? I
suppose — how pathetic — I started making plans. He left,
moody and preoccupied. I was full of hot sympathy. I glowed.
Poor Max, how hard it would be for him, starting all over
again. I wondered what would be a decent period of time
before I could move into the townhouse too. I saw myself
being kind, nobly considerate, when his poor wife came to
drop off the boys . . .

Soon after he'd moved to his new place, I got tired of
waiting for him to call. I went there. He'd been ironing his
shirts. He threw himself down on the bed, tired, surly,
unwelcoming. He gestured at the ironing, 'Want to do them
for me?'

I hesitated. I said I would. He watched me from the bed, his
expression cold and mocking; he was forcing me into a parody
of what he knew I wanted: domestic bliss. I was upset, chilled.
Later I rang him. Then the tears, recriminations. His coldness.
Did I — I cringe to think of it now — did I appeal, plead? He
turned evasive, hanging up, leaving his phone off the hook.
There were a few more unsatisfactory meetings until he finally
came clean. He said he had met someone new. He was seeing
someone else.

After he told me I walked home to my flat. There's a kind of
horror in finding out you're not loved. Imagine discovering
that someone you love wants to kill you. It feels like that,
doesn't it, the end of an affair? He doesn't care if he never sees
you again, doesn't care if you live or die. I remember how the
world turned, in an instant, into a dark, pitiless place. I
discovered that I minded living by myself. I heard noises in
the night and was afraid.

During my check-up, when I told Dr Lampton I was happy,
I was remembering the moment when I realised I was
pregnant. To be left alone, grieving, and then to find there was
something that wasn't lost! Everything broken, in pieces, and
then I discovered . . . Oh my child, my treasure. Out of the
ruins. I say these ridiculous, half-joking things to myself, out
of happiness. My treasure, my precious jewel.

Okay, his father was a bastard, but he was a classy one. I'm
sure my son will be devilishly handsome.

***

When Matthew was seven months old I needed money
to pay the mortgage, and I didn't want to lose my place in
the city dental practice, which had been filled until then by
a locum. My mother was retired, and offered to look after
Matthew during the day. He was healthy, thriving, radiant
— and nocturnal. The district nurse gave me a book on infant
sleep problems. I read: 'Only a tiny percentage of children
will not respond to these techniques.' My son (his perverse
father's child) belonged to that small, rugged group. He slept
slightly longer stretches, that was all. And then the loud wail,
the rattling at the bars of the cot, the stunned roll out of bed,
the glazed, blundering hours when all options — ignoring,
soothing, feeding — were exhausted. Watching the sun come
up, sitting on his bedroom floor. Black silhouettes on the ridge
of Mt Hobson. A finger of sun moving across the floor.

The nurse told me 'leave him to cry'. My neighbours held
out for a fortnight before they began to complain. They went
so far as to insinuate that I was ill-treating my boy. How he
screamed, left to himself. As though he were being torn away
from the world.

At work I took things slowly, stopping often to double-check.
What was it I told nice Dr Lampton — that the edges
of reality sometimes got a bit blurred? I never lost my grip; it
was just that my dreams sometimes
entered
reality and ran
alongside, so that I might see some light, bubbly, surreal thing
at the edge of a perfectly prosaic scene and blink, and secretly
watch it, as it glided slowly away . . .

People have recurring dreams in which their teeth fall out.
They're meant to have a particular meaning, although I've
forgotten what for the moment. Anyway, I was the dreamer
who pulled out people's teeth. I hope I don't sound cavalier.
I believe I was perfectly competent. To try to explain that
strange time, my dreamtime: I felt I was living on the junction
between two different planes, the sleeping and the waking,
and at odd moments I could see into both. I kept all this to
myself. God. Of course I did.

It was summer again, long hot days, the city emptier than
usual. It was a good time to go back to work, there was a
relaxed, holiday mood among the secretaries and hygienists,
who gathered at the front desk to chatter about their sunburn
and their boyfriends; the upstairs consulting rooms were hot
in the afternoons as the sun angled in, and I got away as soon
as I could after work so I could take Matthew and my mother
to the waterfront for a late swim. At the beach I relaxed, and
the afternoon turned drowsily, pleasantly incoherent. My
mother eating an icecream. My son's hands patting the surface
of the water. The dazzle off the sea. Sounds muted in the
mellow air, cloud shadows on Rangitoto Island.

One day at midday, storm clouds moved over the city.
There was something bruised and greenish about the sunlight
before it dimmed and disappeared. The dark was surprising.
It was hot. The secretaries had been whispering about the next
patient I was to see: Scott Roysmith, the newsreader. Our
practice was near the TV studio, and we saw a lot of their staff,
but Roysmith hadn't been in before.

For a moment that morning, I'd been surprised he'd
booked himself in with me. Why surprised? Because I gave
him such a terrible time every night. I was irritated by his
mannerisms. Watching the TV news I'd often startled
Matthew by giving Roysmith strident tellings-off. He was
obviously clever but there was something naïve about him.
He could be perky or melodramatically pompous; most often
he was excessively cosy and cute. Yes, cute. He had a
combination of blink and smile that said: What an ingratiating
chap I am; I am
unassailable
in my charm. His flirting, his
over-egging, was unnecessary. Stop hamming it up, I wanted
to tell him. Please, play it straight!

Night after night I'd snapped and nagged at Roysmith, and
now here he came, bounding up the stairs, full of beans, open-faced,
holding out his hand to shake mine.

'Goodness me! The sky's looking peculiar! Great to meet
you,' he said, or 'exclaimed'. His hair bristled with the humidity.
I felt a little snag of sympathy for him. His hair was over-large;
it sat on top of his head like a brown turban. Beneath it, the
bridge of his teeth was too narrow for his mouth. He glanced
away, smiling. His hand was slightly damp. Probably he hated
seeing the dentist.

I invited him to sit. 'What can we do for you today?'

He settled himself, made some adjustment of his face
before he answered. He held the edges of the armchair. How
strange it must be to have been previewed, to be reviewed, by
the people you meet. I saw myself two nights ago, hurling a
cushion at his face.

He said in his soft drawl, 'I've had a woonderful chap I've
always gone to.'

I looked at the form he'd filled in. 'Yes. Mr Dumbleton.'

'He's over Ponsonby way. Do you know him? Dentist . . .
artist, fisherman, raconteur. Just a great bloke. We got on like
a hoouuse on fire, for yeeeears.'

I nodded. He shifted on his seat, leaned forward. 'But he's
had enough. He wants to retire. He's going to write novels.
Marvellous! And I thought,
Bugger
. I'll have to find myself
another dentist!'

I thought, because of his job, he thinks I think I know him.
So he doesn't try to break the ice; instead he tries to 'be
himself ', so that I will 'recognise' him.

'Do you have a particular problem?' I asked.

'Well, I've got a bit of a dodgy old tooth back there. I think
I might have a hole. Two, actually.'

'How long have you being seeing Dumbleton — Mr
Dumbleton?'

'Six years.'

I glanced at Rowan, my assistant. I hoped Bryce Dumbleton's
novels were better than his dentistry.

I explained what I would do: examination, X-rays and so
on.

'Goodness gracious me, it's humid!' he said. The sky had
got darker. There was a rumble of thunder, the air crumpling.
Rowan, a tall, slim Indian woman, came forward to prepare
him.

'Lovely to meet you,' he said. I caught her flustered little
tremor of nervousness — his fame — also his look of faint
humiliation as he was pushed back, swathed, cranked to
horizontal in the chair. Patients, feeling helpless, stare at
Rowan's beautiful hands, at her pretty necklace, as if everything
very near has become intensely important. When I lean over
them they close their eyes, open them, laugh, look around for
Rowan, but she has gone, withdrawing silently behind the
screen, where she sits at her computer, ready to appear when
I need her.

I adjusted him, and the light. I looked in. There was a lot of
plaque — so much so that his gums had receded in places. He
had a couple of other issues, things that should have been
taken care of earlier. (What a hack that Dumbleton was.) I
told him I would take X-rays. I leaned over him, my arm
around the head that appeared every night in my sitting room.
I said, 'Open, wider, now bite gently down,' and the mouth
that was so familiar with its jawing and joking bit down, and
opened, and I shone my light in there, picked, probed, scraped,
prepared him for another X-ray, and the sky outside seemed
to swell in the square of window and become astonishingly
black. There was a boom of thunder, abrupt, close, and he
started, his head against my arm, and laughed, and tried to
say something, 'Goodness . . .' and I said, dreamily, holding
him steady, my eye on that glossy black square of glass,
'Don't.'