Soon (16 page)

He swallowed, took a breath.

‘Karen,' he began, and his voice deepened and steadied as he searched for the right words. ‘An “affair”? I thinking you a “feather­brain”? Yearning for “requited love”? What can you possibly mean?'

A sorrowful note crept into his tone. He shook his head and felt control returning, his wild heart slowing down.

‘My darling Karen, I can't, I just can't believe it.
How could you have got this so wrong
?'

Later, after she was lying in his arms sighing and laughing lightly at herself and saying, ‘Oh who cares' and ‘It's just so silly', he turned and whispered, ‘Did you really mean it? You'd leave me?'

‘No, no.'

He said, ‘I can't live without you. You're my world.'

‘Yes.'

‘You've had some strange notions in your head. Weird ideas. An “affair”. Me in a “hermit cave”. You made me quite worried.'

‘No, no,' she said vaguely again.

‘I'm sorry about your Kessler score.' He added, ‘There are plenty of ways you can get help for non-specific anxiety.' He paused, not breathing. It was outrageous but she took it, although she stayed silent. Was it his fancy or did her cheek, pressed against his, grow suddenly colder? Oh shameful, reptilian husband.

They dozed in the heat. After a while he gently pulled his arm out from under her sleeping head and went to the bathroom. He looked at his face. Age had softened and loosened his skin, he bore the imprint of the ribbed duvet cover on his right cheek, and there was a small network of broken capillaries under one eye. Experimentally he smiled, then winced — the effect was ghastly. No wonder she'd called him a reptile.

He brooded, looking down at her sleeping form. She was lying on her side, facing away from him, her blonde hair spread on the pillow. He turned to open a window and had the impression he'd caught her watching him in the dressing-table mirror. Was it a trick of the light? She was sleeping, her eyes tight shut, her expression innocent. No. She had been watching him.

A perverse thrill buzzed in his body. He went close to her, looked at her shining blonde hair and smooth tanned skin, he lay alongside her and pressed his face against her body, breathing in her clean scent of soap and suntan lotion.

He found himself considering a startling new idea. Is it possible I could fall in love with my wife?

He left her sleeping, stole away to the beach. Limping over the dunes with his bag of evidence he felt like a mad gnome in a fairy tale, setting out to lift the curse, leaving his princess in her drugged sleep. A fish would grant him three wishes, the skies would writhe, a storm would smite the House of Hallwright. He would look down from his lonely hermit's cave to see the Green Lady's armies massing on the distant beach.

Fool. Bungling idiot. It is criminally negligent to have held onto these phones for so long.

Passing freckly twin girls about nine years old he greeted their mother, a tall fat woman, her large white legs ending in tiny feet encased in yellow swimming shoes. A cartoon woman, shooing along her improbable children. The twins, identical, thin, sidling, sucked ice blocks and fell against each other with sudden mirth at the sight of him. He laboured past, doing his best with the bad knee on the soft sand, shooting the girls a look that made them both freeze then subside into hiccups of needle-sharp laughter. Go on, laugh at the cripple.

The mother's voice rose, scolding. A seagull abruptly bombed into the air in front of him, screaming and flapping. He flinched, floundered on.

He stopped at a place where the beach shaped itself in a long bow. Here the shore rose, causing the beach to shelve away steeply below the waterline. Oystercatchers were running along the water's edge, following some mysterious directive that made them all turn and crowd in the same direction at once, calling to each other like an excitable crowd at a sale.

Leaving his bag up on the dunes he waded in, carrying Mereana's phone. He swam a long way out, paddling over the swells, sculling on his back and watching the gannets as they plummeted into the milky blue sea. How far out was enough? Each time he decided to let go of the phone he changed his mind and swam further, until the land was a grey smear in the hazy light. He wondered how far he'd have to go before the shoreline disappeared behind the great curve of the earth. Out here was where David sometimes came on his thuggish jet ski, sending his minders into a panic.

The swim exhilarated him, he went further still.

At the last minute he wondered whether he should have weighted the phone. Treading water he took it apart, dropping the bits separately, pushing the floating pieces down, swivelling about in the water, eventually losing sight of them as he swam into a patch of seaweed. The surface was scummed with feathery purple fronds, the temperature suddenly warmer. The water gleamed, viscous in the fierce light, bubbles floated on the surface, a stick bobbed, and quite near him a penguin surfaced and looked at him with a round eye. A cloud shadow passed over and the seaweed seemed to be moving, as though he'd swum into a strong current. He thought of orca, sharks, had a sense of his vulnerable legs scissoring away under the surface.

He kicked to get away from the flotsam, reached the edge of it and swam into a mass of tiny jellyfish. He could feel them against his body but could barely see them, little ribbed lemon-shaped blobs with a tiny seed of green-gold matter nestled inside — perhaps they were not jellyfish but the eggs of some large fish. They flickered in the water, slipped and slithered against his chest; he could even feel them between his fingers. It began to seem that the sea was not mere substance but a live thing that would swallow him. Oh, Karen. Have I found you only to be sucked to a watery grave? But some frantic and undignified overarm, his face averted high, as though primly scandalised by the slithering globules of marine jelly or egg or sperm, got him through to clear water.

The sun had moved and now the land was sharply defined, reachable. He took a breath and dived, kicking strongly. Down here the sea moved peacefully, a million million grains of sand were shifted, bubbles rose. He opened his eyes and saw the surface wavering above and shafts of light angling down and there was a dreamlike peace in the vast mass, its moving currents slopping against the edges of the world. He thought of the expression ‘buried at sea' and saw his own body gently drifting among brittle fish skeletons, skeins of seaweed, flickering water-light. There was a singing in his ears, he looked down and saw his white waving hands, his bony feet kicking, shafts of light and beyond, darkness, a black curtain drawn over the deeps. He kicked upwards and surfaced in a streaming caul of silver bubbles. Out near the horizon a rain cloud had arrived and a gannet, turning at the point of plummeting, brushed its wing tip against the edge of the darkness. Then it plunged, and there was the small white flare as it broke the surface.

As he swam in, a breeze came down and smacked the surface, breaking it into shards. There was a metallic smell in the air. Fat drops started to plop around him, large and far apart, an invisible and inexpert sniper taking aim at him from the clouds. And then the darkness opened with a single flash of lightning and a lone thunder crack, one of those violent summer outbursts that are over almost as soon as they've begun. Warm rain drummed on his scalp, his eyes were cleansed of salt, his face streamed with it and then it stopped, the sun broke through and he was surfing in on a perfect wave. The rain cloud, having dumped its load, broke up, leaving only a sheen on the beach and a line of oystercatchers fluffing out their wet feathers and stamping their footprints in the sand.

His clothes had stayed dry in the bag. He was chilled, his fingers numb and fumbling. He dried himself and made his way through the dunes to the path.

By the time he got to the pool he was sweating again, his knee aching. Figures lay on loungers, slumped in the heat, a rectangle of dancing white light playing on the side of the pool house. At the edge, Roza stooped to fish something out of the water while Ford stood beside her, watching. She stood, nearly overbalanced and caught Ford's shoulder. His big arm reaching to hold her steady. She laughed and flicked back her hair and looked Ford in the eye, suddenly serious. A wrench in Simon's chest, as if he'd received a sharp punch in the solar plexus, stopped him in the act of opening the child-proof gate.

‘Simon. There you are.' She was wearing sunglasses on top of her head like a second pair of eyes, and a white bikini exactly like Elke's with a gold ring in the front clasp.

Johnnie climbed up the ladder and sat on the edge of his mother's deck chair, looking expressionlessly at the two men. ‘Make Soon talk,' he said.

‘Yes, yes.' She put her hand to her hair, distracted. In the distance someone sneezed three times. Behind the hedge Shane, or was it Troy, drove back and forth on a ride-on lawnmower.

Simon felt the hard shape of his phone in the pocket of his shorts.

‘God, it's hot,' he said to the air. Hesitation (could it be stage fright?) made his legs stiff and awkward as he crossed the hot concrete. He dived in and surfaced, snorting. Roza, with Johnnie leaning against her, rested her chin on her hand and regarded him steadily. He shaped his mouth into a smile (his reptilian rictus) and turned his body away, sculling gently with his hands. His throat closed over. Really, it was ridiculous to feel so unnerved. But no, it wasn't. Considering what he was up to, it was surprising he hadn't had a breakdown. What would his Kessler score be now?

For a moment there, amid the dancing blue-and-white light, he examined the idea: Arthur Weeks was dead, and Simon Lampton had killed him.

Had he touched the body?

He willed Roza to look away, but no, she was still gazing at him, a slight smile on her face. To distract himself he began a series of splashy lengths; it was the only way he could get hard exercise after all, with the bad leg. The bad leg sustained while driving Weeks to his death over a concrete wall. He had a sudden urge to laugh, to burst out of the water shouting his secrets. You think you know me. Poor deluded fools!

The stunned unreality of that morning. The heat. The quiet terraces. The sound of traffic below. The way the air had seemed to compress, as though the oxygen had been sucked out of the world. He had stooped and looked. Had he felt for a pulse? No, one look had been enough. The spinal-cord injury had been catastrophic, death immediate, no need of amateurish fumbling for airway or pulse. But if you did touch, there could be DNA. A hair. A piece of skin. And when you backed away, did your clothes catch on the bushes? Did you leave a hair on the deck where the coffees were drunk, did you touch the arms of the chair Weeks gave you? Of course you did. He saw Weeks's back deck silvered with chemical substances, lit with special lights, scrutinised with all the fiendish tricks of the forensic trade. Little flags to mark the places where Simon Lampton had sat and drunk coffee, where his shoes had rested, where his fingers, always restless, always touching, had nervously placed themselves. But they have no record of your DNA. They can only use this evidence if they find you.

But the phone calls. The phone calls.

He stopped swimming and lay on his back. Roza's voice.

“But why,” Starfish asked, “does Barbie Yah want to take Soonica away?”

The Red Herring threw some potions into his cauldron and considered long and hard. “Many hands make light work,” he finally said.

Starfish sighed. “I see,” he said, not really seeing at all.

The Red Herring looked strangely at Starfish.

“But too many cooks spoil the broth,” he said.

Soon snorted. “Starfish is a moron,” he chanted quietly.

Starfish ignored him and asked, “Red Herring, where is the Green Lady?”

The Red Herring looked into the fire. It was said he could read the future there.

“She is preparing for combat,” he said. “And when her armies and the armies of Barbie Yah meet, none who falls in battle shall be spared.”

Johnnie singing, tunefully. An Island song. The drone of the ride-on mower as it trundled across the lawns. Simon looked at tiny fat reflections of himself in the chrome as he climbed up the metal ladder. He lowered himself on a deck chair. No sudden movements, careful of the knee.

A moment passed. Ford turned a page. Roza said sleepily, ‘Johnnie, don't.'

Simon sat up, stretched and clapped his hand to his thigh.

‘Shit,' he said. ‘Oh shit.'

They ignored him. Ford turned another page. Roza yawned.

He got up and flapped around the chair. ‘I've . . . Oh, damn . . .'

Finally they looked.

‘I've jumped in the pool with my phone in my pocket. It'll be ruined. I'll have to throw it away. What a waste . . .' Shut up, he thought. ‘It's . . . Only I've . . . I'll have to get a new one straight away. Otherwise work . . .'

‘Oh. What a pain,' Roza said.

They watched him holding up the phone, showing them, shaking it, trying to make it work. His clumsy fingers stabbing at the buttons, he had the sudden fear it would survive the drenching and surge busily into life. But the screen stayed blank, thank God. There were little beads of moisture inside it.

‘I'll have to drive in and get a new one. Clarice'll have to work it out for me. I have to be available for patients . . .' He was gabbling.

Roza sat with her chin on her hand. Roused from her torpor, she was looking at him with interest.

Ford put his fingertips together, thoughtful.

‘Yep. You've killed it,' he said.

Simon looked at his brother silently. That's right, Ford. Good. Testify to that.

Evidence

Karen was standing in the sitting room of the Little House while Elke walked to and fro in the second bedroom. Karen turned, her expression pinched, angry.

He squeezed her shoulder, went to the bedroom door. A twitch of amusement at the sight of Elke's chaotic open suitcase, then sadness; their girl was packing her bags. And with what touching, what characteristic ineptitude.

She tossed a T-shirt onto the pile of crumpled jeans, tiny shorts, shoes, belts, a hairy brush sticking up at an angle, glossy women's magazines: Beat Bad Hair Days, What He Really Wants, Great Sex in Eight Steps. Forcing a tennis racquet into one of the side pockets she crammed the lid over the bulging pile.

He stepped over her white bikini with the gold clasp, dropped in a damp puddle on the floor.

‘Nice bikini.'

‘Roza bought it.'

Behind them, Karen made a small hissing sound.

Elke raised her eyes. ‘What?'

Karen said, ‘I don't see why you need to move up to the big house. Johnnie's got sleep problems; why should they make you play the nanny? They've got that Polynesian.'

‘You mean Tuleimoka. God, Mum.'

‘Surely they pay her to get up.'

‘I'm his sister.'

‘Well, you need sleep too.'

‘He's not going to wake me up. He likes having me there, at bedtime and that. It's cosy. And we're going home soon, what's the big deal?'

Karen squeezed her fists, a spasm of frustration. ‘Oh . . . It's Roza, isn't it. It's her idea. She wants you up there so she can—'

Simon said, warning, ‘Karen.'

‘Why? Why can't I say it? So she can claim you, so she can make out she's the most important person in your life.'

‘Karen!'

But something had come loose, she smacked her palm against the door frame, ‘We loved and cared for you, brought you up, and where was she then?
Where was Roza
?'

Elke looked at Karen as though focusing on her for the first time.

Simon tried to herd Karen away but she waved him off. Mother and daughter didn't move, eyes locked. Elke slowly extended her hand. Her tone was formal, polite. ‘Excuse me while I finish packing, Karen,' she said, and slammed the door in her face.

Elke marched off to the big house and later Simon carried her suitcase up there, handing it over to Chad, who silently vanished with it indoors. Tuleimoka and Johnnie were having their singing time on mats in the cool shade of the veranda. He recognised one of the Maori songs from his own childhood, an action song, to be performed with sticks for beating time. At primary school they'd done their Maori stick songs using rolled-up newspapers.

Sudden memory: the back of Ford's head in assembly, a humid, windless grey morning, steamy Christmas weather, the sky full of hot rain, Ford's voice among the others singing while the rolled-up sticks beat time, and the sudden surreal appearance of their mother up the front, red-faced and distraught as she whispered and gesticulated at the headmaster, her voice cracking and rising, so sorry but she'd come to collect them, they were leaving town, escaping from crazy Aaron for the last time.

They never went back to that school.

Funny how the embarrassment was the worst of it, getting up in front of all the beady eyes, threading through the rows, the teacher's face, half censorious, half thrilled by the interruption. His mother's gestures impossibly exaggerated, the faces she made as she explained in a stage whisper. The memory sent a chill of shame up his spine. He and Ford had got in the car still holding their singing sticks. They threw them out on the highway, watched them bounce away, over and over . . .

All afternoon huge white clouds came together and broke apart, their edges seamed with dazzling silver. He sat on the deck of the Little House, massaging his knee, desultorily going through a few physio exercises. In the last hours the knee had developed an irritating click, the sound made him wince. He brooded. The knee, Karen's look of persecution as she trudged away towards the dunes. Elke's luggage. His mind made the leap: he still had the DVD of the three short films by Arthur Weeks, stuck in the side pocket of his suitcase.

Picture it. The damp room, the bare table and chairs. The thickset interrogator with his eyes of ice. Yes, Dr Lampton. Arthur Weeks. Remember him? The guy you've ‘never met'. And what do we find but a DVD of his very own films stuffed in your suitcase.

He went to get up, the knee clicked horribly, he sank down, so exasperated by this new consideration it settled on him almost like boredom. Crime. Who knew it would be so utterly, exhaustingly irksome? If only he could wave a lordly hand and shout from his office, ‘Clarice, another piece of incriminating evidence.' And she would bustle in with her fat and her irony and her spinsterly devotion, and clutch it to her massive bosom, and make it go away.

Only she'd be back, wouldn't she, popping her head around the door. ‘Just off home, Simon. I've binned the DVD, but what do you want me to do about the
phone records
?'

Crime was a terrible little car chugging along while from its exhaust pipe a cloud of foul black smoke billowed and billowed and eventually obscured the road ahead and behind, no going forward, no way back. That's what crime was. Yeah.

He closed his eyes.

Were criminals ever captured because they just couldn't be bothered any more? Yes, those would be the cases where they said, ‘In the end, he wanted to be caught.'

He opened his eyes. A tui let rip with the most elaborate trilling and piping, clicks, whirrs, plonks, drips of sound; it ran through its whole repertoire while he stared at it in disbelief. It got him on his feet at least, the tyrannical soloist, the arsehole. The tui: our woodland Cacofonix. Was it his imagination, or was he laughing more? Perhaps the closer you got to losing everything, the funnier it got. It would be nice to think so.

Unable even to face the problem of the DVD, he limped to the pool. He entered the path between the hedges and saw Roza and Ford at the edge of the pool, steadying a purple blow-up dinosaur while Johnnie launched himself onto it. There was a loud squeak as child and plastic connected. Under the little boy's weight the dinosaur bent fore and aft, as if it was eating its own tail. Roza had her hand on Ford's shoulder.

Something in him assented sadly, without bitterness. He loved Roza, but she would prefer Ford, because Ford was more attractive. It was nature, what could he do? Everyone found Ford more attractive. When the two brothers were together, faces turned from Simon to Ford; he drew people, because he was sure of himself. In the same way, people gazed at Elke a lot more than they were willing to contemplate Claire, something Claire had realised, absorbed into herself, a wound. But these bitter little wounds made you lean and hungry, they sharpened you. If she wanted one, Claire might score herself a better husband than Elke because she knew she was plain. She couldn't afford to be dreamy or lax. Likewise, David craved money because he'd been poor. Ageing men yearned for young women, because of the youth they'd lost. And Simon? He'd done his share of clawing and grabbing. Yes, sure.

He dumped his towel and began swimming lengths, avoiding Johnnie on his slowly revolving plastic barge. He swam until his arms gave out then lay down on a deck chair in the sun.

Johnnie called from the pool. Roza got him out and tucked him in a towel on her deck chair. Simon dozed. The slop of the pool water in the pump. Ford turning the pages of his book. He dreamed he was far out at sea, drifting amid the wrack and rot, the mild blue water stretching far. Roza's voice.

When Soon and Starfish brought news from the battle against Barbie Yah, the Red Herring stared long and hard into the fire. Finally he looked up and gave a rare smile.

“Loose lips sink ships,” he said.

Simon sat up. Johnnie was watching him.

Uncanny child. Those startling eyes.

Evening. A full table, at the head of which David, to the delight of the group, was explaining how it was going with Dean, and those exercises for the enhancement of his gluteus maximus.

Simon was hardly eating and was drinking steadily, first two of Troy's powerful gins, now wine. They'd both crossed a line, he and Karen. He'd done the unthinkable and she'd said the unsayable; he guessed what she'd lost with her outburst. If only she could have kept her cool, let the girl go off and be with her little brother, no big deal, waited until they were back in Auckland and claimed her with kindness and humour and all the natural affection between them. But she'd lost it, set up a barrier; she'd antagonised, forced Elke to make a choice, the fool. Worse, she'd insulted Roza to Elke's face. She'd likely damaged
his
relationship with Elke too, with her raging and jealousy. But we're all fools, and weak, who among us can keep cool when the situation demands tactical shrewdness, iron self-control? He wondered whether Roza had goaded Karen, tweaked her jealousy. It wouldn't have taken much. He remembered Claire's little warning he'd dismissed so easily, ‘Roza hates Karen.
Hates her
.'

Karen was flushed, her eyes glittering, she laughed too long and loud at David's jokes; he felt nervous watching her. Poor Karen. After her outburst she'd cried a bit, moped for an hour, eventually trudged off to the beach for a swim, refusing his company, hand to brow; no, no, she wanted to be alone. Left on the deck he reproduced in his mind Elke's face as she slammed the door, she who had been always the dreamy, inept and clumsy one; hilariously so: she couldn't make a sandwich without dropping bits all over the floor, she bumped into doors, she created mess wherever she went, a room as neat as a pin would magically disarrange itself as she entered, books would slide off piles, cushions would fall to the floor. So unlike Claire's athleticism, and manly driving, and spartan room, Claire the brilliant, plain one, all wry humour, freckles, shapeless legs, big bum, the one Karen didn't love but he did; he should have listened to her, his clever girl. What else had Claire said: that he and David were alike, that David was in love with him, or was it that David was in love with the
idea
of him? No, that was going too far. She had a vivid imagination, his Claire, and a tendency to humorous bitterness.

Yes, Elke lived in a dream, but think of her expression, slamming the door in Karen's face. Out of the blurred, childlike beauty something hard and sharp had formed. This was what Karen was up against, why she could never win — if you could call it winning — the thing she wanted, the hold she wanted to have. That expression, or — what could you call it? — that quality, he'd seen forming in his adopted daughter's face, was the very essence of Roza.

At the evening hour, the quiet voices. Burners had been lit to keep the insects away, trailing black lines of smoke in the air. The attendants hovered, David shifted his conversation from workouts to movies, the women argued with him over films and stars. When he laughed they laughed, when he looked serious they lowered their eyes and vaguely smiled.

The sea was calm and gleaming under the moon.

There was an unwritten rule at the table: no political talk. If Simon had said ‘Should our soldiers be in Afghanistan?' or ‘Has American foreign policy actually changed since Obama?' they would smile, their eyes would slide away. They talked about which schools were good and the best ways to fundraise, the Cock and Ed talked about boutique wines and investing in vineyards, David ranged from movies to restaurants to the merits of foreign resorts. Roza complained privately about inane conversation but she was apolitical and rarely talked about the outside world. She did know a lot about books. She worked for a publisher and they all respected her knowledge. If a book was mentioned, people said, ‘Roza will have read it' and often she had, or she knew about it; it was her party trick, she would smile and say, ‘Actually, I do know about that one', and tell them a bit, not too much, just enough to show she could tell you more if she chose. David would beam with pride. My beautiful, clever wife. Not just a pretty face.

David didn't read recreationally: novels bored him and he didn't fancy non-fiction. Aside from work, money was his interest; he pursued it single-mindedly, with devotion. Although his personal interests were in blind trusts there were ways around that, trusts set up to mirror the blind trust, other methods only he and Ed discussed. In rare moments of spare time he watched television, sitting hunched forward with his fingers pressed to his temples.
House. Grey's Anatomy. CSI New York.
He called it ‘chilling out in front of the box'. This was a phrase associated in Simon's mind with ‘Me Time after the gym'. The fatuousness made him wince, although he wouldn't have admitted it to Claire. Or Ford.

Simon had locked away his own political instincts; they'd been swamped by David's friendship. He thought about Ford's take, which Ford had relentlessly hammered out to Simon at pre-dinner drinks. Side by side in wicker chairs holding their tinkling tumblers of gin, far enough from the main group that Ford's quiet tirade couldn't be heard, thank God. The deficit was huge, Ford said, unemployment was climbing, the government was borrowing vast sums every week, they'd cut taxes to the rich (true, Simon's income had increased: good) and they were slashing social programmes to pay for it. The poor were finding it increasingly hard to buy food. They were building extra prisons for the underclass they were creating. And this was a court, Ford whispered relentlessly, that was increasingly cut off from the nation it was supposed to serve. They weren't even worrying, these airheads, they were talking about Brad and Angelina (in the last few minutes a heated debate about the Jolie-Pitt twins) and Jennifer Aniston (was Jen still hot?) and the best method for the maintenance of swimming pools, and whether their expensive private schools were giving value for money.