Settlers' Creek (6 page)

When he had sat down again and buckled himself in, the attendant who’d been stationed by the door as he boarded came over. She leaned across the now empty seat. She didn’t smile. ‘Excuse me, sir, I need you to please remain seated until we land.’

Box nodded. ‘Yeah, that would be fine.’

For the rest of the flight he was aware that all the attendants were watching him carefully.

He sat almost perfectly still, feeling nauseous and hollow bellied, and stared out of the window into the nothingness of cloud and rain until the wheels jarred down against the tarmac and the pilot announced that they’d arrived.

Before.

Before the international recession that took Saxton Construction’s legs out from under it like a blind cripple being tackled by an All Black.

Before.

Before the property boom really took off and made him a rich man.

Before all of that, hadn’t he been happy? Happy enough.

Box sat in the back of the taxi with his forehead pressed against the cold glass. His eyes were open but he didn’t register the passing suburbs. The plane had chased the storm as it travelled north. He had arrived back in the city to pissy rain and a sky as grey and low as the one he’d left behind. Box tried not to think, to make his mind as endlessly blank as the hiss of the taxi’s tyres on the wet road.

When he’d got into the taxi at the airport the driver had swivelled in his seat. He’d taken in the new clothes and the plastic bag full of wet gear.

‘I see you like to travel light.’ A big grin.

Box grunted. He gave his address, his voice as flat and cold as the day outside. The driver had read the writing on the wall and hadn’t said a word since.

Before. As little as eighteen months ago money wasn’t an issue. Box’s business was doing well — better than well, brilliantly. He had four houses on the go. When they were finished, all of them would be worth over a million. Two were for clients, the other two he’d been building on spec, to be flicked on when they were finished, for a tidy profit. Or that was the theory, the way it had worked out when he’d done it half a dozen times before. Plus, he had a block of eight industrial units that he was developing himself down by the river. At the peak of the boom Box was employing twenty-five guys, plus dozens of contractors.

Before. They lived a house on Taylor Hill, overlooking the beach. He’d built the place for Liz and the kids. And for himself too, if he was being honest. Shit, but he loved that view. From the wide deck you could see north along the big sweep of the coast. Box and Liz would sometimes lie in bed at night with the windows folded back and listen to the surf hitting the beach below.

Instead of a clapped-out Toyota Hilux, Box had been driving a late-model BMW; nothing too flashy. He’d bought it at auction, second hand, sure, but with low mileage and not a dent on her coal-black paintjob. He didn’t believe in throwing away money.

Who would’ve picked that it would end the way it did? Every year for five years house prices had gone up by twenty per cent. The construction business had gone up with them. And right on the top of that tide, bobbing like a champagne cork, was Saxton Construction. A slowdown
was predictable. But what happened was like a fairy godmother’s spell wearing off at the stroke of midnight. Banks started to fail in America. The media began muttering about something called the sub-prime mortgage market, whatever that was. Box didn’t pay much attention at first. But within a few months even people here started getting jumpy. Property values began levelling off. And then, inexplicably, they were actually falling back. The two houses he was building were finished but didn’t sell. Box couldn’t pay people to come to the open homes, when two years before he’d sold houses just like them right off the plans. Now buyers were edgy, nervous. They were thinking that they were going to pay more for their new house than it would be worth in a month’s time. A month? Try a week. Nothing was selling. No one was building new homes.

House prices started collapsing and their owners, those with debts who had to sell, went down with them, raking and clawing as the earth fell away beneath them. The television news and the newspapers were full of nothing else. Reporters loved talking up the problems. First the economy was stalling and then it was shrinking. Overseas orders for everything dried up. Credit companies were failing. Businesses were downsizing, people were being laid off. Unemployment was predicted to hit fifteen per cent. Recession, they called it, but it was as close to a depression as you could get without tipping over the edge.

Box’s financial headache had been made worse by the industrial units. He’d budgeted for them all to sell within three months of being finished. After eight months he still hadn’t sold one. All up, Box was left owing the bank the best part of two million dollars. Overnight the bankers stopped being his best mates and came after Saxton Construction,
snarling and spitting like pit bulls in pinstripes.

A lot of other builders had declared themselves bankrupt straight away but Box had tried to trade his way out. He’d mortgaged their house for all he could get, pumping more and more of his own money into the business. He was trying to ride a rough wave, every day reassuring the dozen worried chippies he still employed, fielding calls from nervous subcontractors, even picking up tools and going back to doing the finishing work himself. Not that anything he did made a blind bit of difference in the end. The final straw came when one of his clients, a good guy, someone Box had known for years, defaulted on the final payment for a house.

In the space of a year, Box had lost it all. He’d lost the business, the freehold house on the hill, both the cars. The houses he’d built on spec were eventually sold off by the bank, the units as well. Everything went spiralling away down the proverbial loo. Even after all he owned was sold he was still left owing money. He had been forced to swallow his pride and declare himself bankrupt. Pretty much the only thing he’d been left with was the rattletrap Hilux. And that was only because Patrick, the accountant he was dealing with at the receivers, was an okay bloke. Pat reckoned the ute had depreciated right off the books. For a hundred bucks they’d let him hang onto what had always been his — a 1988 Toyota Hilux, dented and scratched, with a single cab, split vinyl seats and a close-to-rotten-through wooden deck that needed replacing. It was what the builder’s apprentices had done errands in. And the crazy thing was that at the time Box had been grateful.

The taxi was still carrying him across town. There came a point where the paintjobs on the houses he was passing
became consistently faded. The effect was as defined as if a council planner had drawn it in ink on an early map of the city. The houses themselves were smaller. A lot of them had that useless-prick-of-a-landlord-will-get-around-to-it-when-he-gets-around-to-it look. There were archaeological layers of graffiti sprayed over the bus stops and wrappers from KFC and McDonald’s collecting in the water-filled gutters. Almost back, thought Box. Almost — he couldn’t bring himself to use the word home — almost at the house they lived in.

The taxi driver turned off the main road at the Indian dairy. Half a dozen teenage boys stood out of the rain beneath the overhang of the shop. A couple of them stared at him. They were cut-rate American rappers in baggy jeans and black hoodies. Box met one kid’s eyes. The boy looked down at the ground and then as an afterthought spat on the wet footpath in an act of manly defiance.

Box felt heady, as though he was starting to come down with the flu. He was having trouble thinking. When he concentrated on the moment he could make it last forever — stretch it way out like chewing gum. Until it snapped. And then the whole trip home seemed to have gone by in a blink and he couldn’t recall any of the details about the descent into the city or disembarking from the plane or even how he had found this taxi. Shock. Grief. It was probably normal, this unreality that had set in like a sudden sea fog on a fine day rolling across his brain.

‘Pull over up here, by the white fence.’

The taxi slowed and then stopped on the opposite side of the road from the house he and Liz now rented, where they had lived for the last year. Box could see over the low concrete wall to the front door. All the way back he’d
been trying not to think about what Liz had told him on the phone. But now he was actually here her bloated and poisonous words squatted behind that door, ready to scuttle forward as soon as he touched the handle.

‘You okay, mate?’

‘Sure.’

‘I said, that’s sixty-five dollars?’

‘Okay.’

He handed over his credit card again and signed the paper the man handed him. ‘Thanks.’

‘No problem. Have a good day.’

Box got out and closed the door. He stood on the footpath in the drizzle, holding his plastic bag. He watched as the taxi drove to the end of the road and turned left without indicating. Despite the rain, the grass verges all up and down the street were yellowed, as good as dead. All the ground this far east in the city was sandy. Trying to get any type of garden growing was next to impossible. Stunted yellow grass, geraniums, cabbage trees — that was what grew here among the council houses and the streets lined with rentals. Not that most of the people living in Box’s street were into gardening, unless you counted the neighbours three doors down who were cultivating a bumper crop of old car chassis on their front lawn. And, he suspected, an attic full of hydroponic weed. Liz had told him on the phone that there’d been three burglaries on the street in the last two weeks.

Box took a deep breath and slowly let it out. He looked up and down the street again and then up at the concrete sky. Finally he forced his legs to move. He walked over the road and in through the gate, then slowly up the front path towards the house, dreading what he would find inside.

The first thing Box noticed when he opened his front door was the smell of baking. He stood on the veranda with the handle of the door still clasped in his scarred builder’s hand, and breathed in the warm aroma of scones. Scones and afghan biscuits, fresh coffee as well. The house smelt like a café.

He stood, sniffing like a suspicious dog at the long hallway that ran down the middle of the old villa. There was a beehive-murmur, an unfamiliar voice coming from the kitchen at the other end. The smells and the sound of the voice made him doubt that he was in the right house. And then he felt ridiculous. He was just stalling, simply too afraid to go in, afraid of what came next.

Heather came out of her bedroom. She saw him and froze and then her pale freckled face collapsed and she exploded into tears.

That’s what it took to propel Box over the threshold: his daughter’s crumpled face, her raw unmasked need. It broke his heart to see it. He went to her and wrapped both his arms around her as she sobbed and shook. Heather was sixteen. The crown of her head was a missing piece of jigsaw that fitted neatly beneath his chin. Her forehead pressed against his chest and he cupped the back of her head with one hand. She gasped for air.

‘It’s okay, love. It’s going to be okay.’

He sounded trite and ridiculous even to himself. But what else was there for him to say?

And then Liz was in the hallway. Box didn’t see what room she came out of, she was just there. He met her gaze, then looked away, shocked. Stricken, that was the word.
She looked stricken, and even worse. He lifted one arm and made room for her. Liz was as slim as she’d been when he first met her, and only slightly taller than Heather. There was more than enough of Box to encompass them both.

They huddled together in the no man’s land of the hallway. Box somehow stayed dry eyed. Liz and Heather were sobbing, struggling for breath through tears and snot and mucus; the bodily discharge of grief, which was wiped unnoticed onto Box’s sweatshirt.

So this is it now, he thought. This is all that’s left, contained here in my arms. Box felt like the survivor of a devastating earthquake. He was a refugee who’d been left with only those things that he could hold.

Box couldn’t judge time any more. They might have stood that way for five minutes, or maybe, probably, it was much longer. Since that phone call from Liz, whole minutes seemed to flicker by. Others stalled, and ground to a halt. Now all he knew was this warm sobbing huddle, primitive and timeless.

At last he felt Liz pull gently back. She mopped her eyes with the back of her sleeve.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘What for?’

‘I wasn’t here.’

‘It’s not your fault, Box. Just bad timing.’

She gave him a struggling lopsided smile for which he was painfully grateful. Her dark brown eyes were bloodshot and her face was puffy with crying. Although it probably wasn’t true, Box thought she looked as though she had shed weight; overnight, slim and fit had become gaunt.

A stranger’s face appeared from the kitchen at the end of the hallway. Box saw a short chubby man in a dark
suit. His face was full, with hanging cheeks and a puffed bottom lip like a beautiful girl’s. Dark spiky hair grew low on his forehead.

‘Sorry, I’ll give you a minute.’ He disappeared back into the kitchen.

‘Who’s that?’

‘The funeral director. I needed to start organising things.’

‘Right.’

Of course. There would be a thousand details to arrange. Liz probably already had a list. He suddenly felt like someone who, while out for an evening walk, had stumbled upon the wreckage of a train. But the rescuers were already hard at work. He wasn’t sure what he could do to help, where he was most needed.

‘I’m sorry, Box, but you weren’t here.’

‘No, it’s fine. Really. Thanks.’

‘I used the same place that we had for Mum. Do you remember? Box?’