The Last Time We Spoke (9 page)

The air in the van was a foul brew of disinfectant, traffic fumes, and old urine. Ben slid along the cold metal seat as they lurched round a corner. He locked his fingers into the grill to steady himself. He felt strangely excited. Being arrested wasn’t so bad after all. It was definitely better than the endless empty days of no action. The fear that had held him in a headlock for six weeks, now seemed almost silly. Another court appearance was guaranteed credibility with his crew. And when he got out, he’d be able to command some serious respect.

The van slowed in the morning traffic. A silver Honda Odyssey pulled up behind them. The driver started applying her lipstick in the rear-view mirror. A boy and girl wearing school blazers and striped ties were sitting in the back seat. Ben could see them craning their necks to get a look inside the van. He leant close to the small square of window and pulled a face, but the kids didn’t register. One-way glass.

Ben had never owned a blazer, nor proper school shoes for that matter, and his mum had never driven him to school. She didn’t own a car – not one that worked – though she did walk him to the end of the road on his first day of school. He grinned now when he
thought of her shouting her mouth off at the truant officer as she chased the small, jittery man off their property. Mind you, she still gave Ben a hiding for wagging.

‘You’ll never get out of this shithole if you don’t go to school,’ she’d yelled. Yet sometimes she was the one keeping him home when she needed him to look after the younger ones.

Then there was the day Mr Roberts, his science teacher, made fun of him in front of the whole class. Ben walked out of the room, through the school gates, and never went back.

He stared at the cars snailing behind them in the traffic. Sometimes, when sober, Ryan would tinker with the car wrecks that lived on the front lawn, promising to fix one for Ben’s mum. It never happened. She preferred Holdens, anyway – the new, brightly coloured ones. Ben used to dream of winning the Lotto and walking into one of those flash car yards to choose his mother the biggest and shiniest vehicle on the sales floor. He sneered now at his foolishness.

As the van slowed and turned into the courthouse driveway, something hit the back window. Orange yolk slid down the glass. Then a camera lens was pushed up against the window and there was a burst of ice-white light. Had name suppression been lifted?

Ben blinked and quickly rearranged his expression: teeth clenched, eyes steeled.

‘Hope you rot in hell, you piece of shit,’ a woman screamed, her eyes bulging, her mouth twisted. ‘Scum of the earth!’

Scum of the earth. That was a good line. He’d use it. He began to tap his sneakers on the floor of the van and click his fingers to an imaginary beat.

He was kept in a holding cell for about an hour with a guy who reeked of garlic and couldn’t speak any English. Then it was his cellmate’s turn in court and Ben was left alone. He preferred being with the other dude, even if he did smell bad.

When it was his turn, Ben was handcuffed to a screw and led upstairs to the courtroom. He’d tied the upper half of his prison overall around his waist so that his FCUK T-shirt could be easily seen, especially if there were going to be TV cameras. He rolled into the dock.

The room was long and narrow and smelt of recently vacuumed carpet. At the front, ruling the space, was a long desk on a platform. Facing it were four rows of tables and chairs. At the very back of the room were benches filled with people.

When Ben entered the dock, the hum of voices went quiet. Blood was crashing through his head like water down the Huka Falls. He scanned the faces in the room with the same anxious nonchalance of a traveller entering an airport arrivals lounge. He was hoping to spot some of his crew.

‘Benjamin. Hey, Benjamin! Over here!’

It wasn’t hard to spot his mum’s brown face among the pale ones, but seeing her really threw him. He hadn’t given her much thought since his arrest.

Water started to leak from his eyes. He looked away and dug
his chewed nails into the palm of his hand to distract himself from being so weak.

Ryan wasn’t anywhere to be seen – no surprises there – but his mates? He’d have expected them to show. It was a public hearing. He checked again. Not a single member of the DOAs there to support him. He really wanted them to see him now, a senior pro, not some juvie. But maybe they were scared. He just wanted to tell them he was airtight and would never grass on them.

‘All rise.’

The judge, a thin, white-haired Pākehā woman, walked in and sat down behind the desk at the front of the room. A large purple stain spilt from her forehead onto the side of her face. Where it stretched over her head, no hair grew. Her glasses, small circles of naked glass, kept sliding down her nose. Each time she pushed them back up with her middle finger, it looked like she was flipping off the courtroom.

Everyone sat down. Ben too. The guard yanked him back up. Then a man in a dark suit stood up and addressed the court with a crazy salad of words. Ben couldn’t understand anything. Next was a woman in crazy-high shoes and a tight yellow skirt. After her, another woman. The judge swivelled this way and that, like she was watching a tennis match.

Ben felt weird, as if he was in some gaming alley watching somebody else’s game. Courtroom characters on a PlayStation screen deciding some bad dude’s fate.

When it came time for him to enter a plea, the guard had to nudge him.

‘How do you plead?’ repeated the judge.

‘Guilty.’

‘In a voice the court can hear.’

‘Guilty.’ But it was not how Ben had planned it to sound. It
should have come out proudly, a guilty that screamed, ‘Screw you!’

The judge set a date for sentencing, closed the folder in front of her, blew her nose with a loud, wet sound, and said, ‘You may stand down.’ Then Ben was being led away. At the courtroom door he turned and gave the DOA finger sign, hoping to claw back some mana after that pathetic plea. He didn’t look at his mum, though. He felt really stink about that later.

You admit you are guilty and now must pay. I cannot argue with that. Your ancestors lived by such a code. It was called
‘utu’ –
a rule respected by all, which restored the balance and made right the wrong. The cornerstone of collaboration between our people. Were one
hapū
to infringe on the boundaries of another, violate their women or diminish their mana, then men would go to war to reclaim that which had been taken.

But see, I am getting distracted again. I must continue with the story I had begun to tell. I pick up with a giant floating island spotted by Māori at Poverty Bay in the July of 1769.

What relevance has this to you, you say? 1769. You were not alive. Nor your father or grandfather. And so?

Remember what I said before – connectedness is everything. With this giant floating island the trajectory of your history would change.

The sighting was in fact no odd-shaped island, but a vessel with rig and sail, a barque captained by one Lieutenant James Cook. Such a sight. Can you imagine the fear and wonder of your ancestors? A fair-skinned man towing behind him a whole new civilisation – new tools and technology, religion and recreation, new food and plant life too.

Such a tide of change. So much good and so much bad yoked together for the journey forward. A future of wheat and flour and warm baked bread. Of literacy and learning and innovation. A future of fevers, boils, and unexplained death. Of greed. The musket too. And the white man’s way.
Auē!

Lorraine from Victim Support drove them back to the farm, Carla in front, Kevin in the back.

The radio crackled, The Warehouse promising everyone a bargain.

Carla worried at a piece of dry skin on her elbow.

They passed the Christmas tree farm, its conifers halfway to Christmas height. The tennis courts, where gorse clawed at the roadside fence. The school, its prefab buildings turning their back on the busy highway.

She felt as if they’d been away for a very long time, the familiar now strangely foreign.

It started to drizzle and the windscreen wipers screeched across the glass, a dead leaf trapped in their clutches.

Lorraine put out a hand. ‘You okay?’

Carla nodded.

Then Lorraine was indicating to turn. The car slowed to a standstill. As they waited in the middle of the road for a gap in the traffic, a truck transporting animals to the abattoir overtook them, buffeting the small car and filling it with the stench of ammonia.

They swung into the driveway. The pukeko postbox was still headless. A couple of months back there’d been a spate of incidents
with postbox vandals in the area. Kevin hadn’t got around to fixing theirs. Now he probably never would.

The car rattled over the gravel driveway lined with bare-limbed willows. The day lilies were also spent, their dry, brown stems standing to attention above the limp, yellowed foliage. Only the flaxes still looked robust, their taupe leaves untouched by the change of season.

As the car emerged from the stark tunnel of trees, the garden opened up.

‘Oh, what a lovely place!’ Lorraine exclaimed. But autumn had already passed its prime and the garden was turning in on itself, reds and greens making way for dry leaves and fallen splendour.

Carla struggled with the car door.

‘Hang on a minute, Carla. It’s the central locking.’

Carla continued to rattle impatiently at the handle and finally the door swung open. She leant out of the car just in time to vomit on the lawn.

Lorraine came round to help, holding Carla’s hair out of the way with one hand and supporting her forehead with the other. ‘It’s going to be hard at first,’ she said softly.

Carla wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Sorry.’ Her palate and nostrils burnt. ‘I’m sorry.’

Lorraine led the way into the house, reintroducing them to their home of twenty-seven years. Carla stopped on the threshold. A vase of yellow carnations stood on the console table surrounded by a collection of sympathy cards. Jack’s pottery lion had been shifted.

She reached for Kevin’s hand and they stepped inside together, the pungent smell of cleaning agents promising bleached memories and sanitised surfaces.

‘Your brother Geoffrey tells me the freezer is full,’ Lorraine said. ‘People have been dropping in meals all week.’

Carla put down her handbag and moved slowly down the corridor. Each room had been faithfully restored, though small clues told that it was strangers who had reordered her life. On the bookshelf, poetry and fiction were mixed up, and the mauve hand towel in the guest bathroom did not match the larger green towels. Dustbins stood naked, minus plastic liners, and the set of pewter frogs on her dressing table had been laid out in a straight line, the new arrangement spelling out a violation.

‘Hold on, Kevin. Just a minute,’ she heard Lorraine say as the toilet door was pushed open and the toilet seat flung back. Carla pretended she hadn’t heard. Kev often couldn’t make it to the toilet on time now.

Pulled by some morbid magnet, she continued toward the garage.

She opened the door and scanned the room, her eyes hungry for detail. The air was concrete cold and devoid of any recognisable smell, and the floor stippled with pale patches where chemicals had stripped away dark stains.

Carla knelt down and ran her hand over the concrete.

‘Carla? Carla, where have you got to?’

She stood up quickly. ‘Coming!’ Then she saw it, beside the door handle, midway up the wall – a black dot, no bigger than a five-cent coin, raised like a blob of paint on a canvas. She peered closer and touched it. The scab on the wall came away on her finger, exposing a bright red blotch on the wall beneath.

‘There you are,’ Lorraine said, bursting into the space.

Quickly Carla slid her hand into her pocket, protecting this last little piece of Jack.

Mike Adams picked his way across the overgrown lawn, stepping cautiously over a rusted barbecue grid, warped bicycle wheel, and the deflated crescent of a punctured soccer ball. Two abandoned car wrecks dominated the derelict yard. Inside one of them – a doorless yellow Toyota – sat three children, two in the back, one at the wheel. As Adams approached, they stopped playing and eyed him with a mixture of suspicion and interest.

‘Hiya,’ he said, lifting his hand in tentative greeting, his shirtsleeve riding high to expose his chunky divers watch.

Dark eyes peered and heads tilted.

‘Who’re you?’ demanded the lean boy in the driver’s seat. He looked of school-going age. Dark curls fell to his shoulders. Each rib of his bare chest was delineated by a ripple of skin.

‘Who you?’ mimicked a little girl in a luminous green T-shirt, snot streaming into her words.

‘My name’s Mike,’ he said, squatting down on his haunches to put him at eye level with the smallest of his audience.

The little girl was now right beside him, quizzically eyeing his white Converse trainers.

‘Is your mum home?’

‘You mean Miriama?’ the older boy said, taking hold of the little girl’s hand and yanking her backwards. Adams nodded, standing up again and sliding his hands into his jean pockets.

‘Yeah, she’s here.’ He tossed his head towards the house.

The third kid, who had remained in the car, seized the opportunity to usurp the driver’s vacated seat and speedily ensconced himself behind the wheel. But his success was short-lived. As soon as the older boy discovered the insurrection, a squabble ensued and Adams was left to make his own way to the house.

A supermarket trolley overflowing with empty beer bottles guarded the paint-peeled door, the excess scattered across the porch.

A dog growled, startling Adams. The culprit – a suckling mongrel bitch – stood at the end of the veranda, long teats drooping from her mangy frame. Four runts niggled at her, chasing the piggy-pink pendulums of skin.

Adams breathed out. The creature clearly only had energy for a token snarl.

He rapped on the square of frosted glass. A washing machine on spin-cycle whined loudly inside. He knocked again, louder this time, and through the glass saw the silhouette of a woman approaching.

The door opened partway. A barefooted woman in faded jeans and a once-white tee leant out.

‘Yup?’

‘Mrs Toroa?’

‘Who’s asking?’

‘I’m Mike Adams.
Kia ora
.’

‘
Kia ora
,’ she replied sardonically, her economical gaze translating into,
And who the fuck might you be
?

‘I’m a reporter for the
Herald
. I was wondering if—’

The woman’s face tightened and her dark eyes narrowed. ‘Not another bloody reporter! Listen up, ’cos I’m only gonna say this once. Get lost!’

Adams intercepted the door as it slammed shut, wincing as his arm broke the force.

‘Look, uh. Look, ma’am, I know you must be fed up with the media scrutiny and all,’ he said, struggling to hold open the door, ‘but I’m writing an article about your son. I want to tell
your
side of the story.’

‘You’re all the same, you bloody reporters!’ she raved, leaning more heavily on the door.

Adams flinched. With his free hand, he fumbled in his back pocket, dropping his wallet onto the ground. ‘I’ll pay for the inconvenience,’ he said, quickly securing the wallet with his foot. The pressure on his arm eased.

Minutes later, and twenty dollars poorer, he found himself inside the sitting room. The place reeked of cigarette smoke and dank mould. He looked around. A naked light bulb hung from the ceiling. Two fist-sized holes decorated the otherwise bare back wall. A stack of empty KFC tubs cluttered one corner. On the table stood a paintbrush in a jar of cloudy purple water, and beside it, an open box of watercolours and an oblong piece of painted card.

Adams removed his sunglasses and sank onto the sofa. Stuffing oozed from the cushion like shaving foam. He picked up the painted piece of card and held it up. His hand was shaking. The painting was unfinished, one corner still the untouched grey of a dismantled cereal box, but advanced enough to be coherent – a marketplace with sagging awnings, crates of overripe fruit, baskets of mottled vegetables. Flies, dogs, a jostle of people. Well-placed dabs of colour for a head, a dress, a gesticulating arm.

‘This is good,’ Adams said. ‘Really good. Who’s the artist?’

‘Get on with it,’ she said, ignoring him. ‘If my partner finds you here, you’re dead meat.’

Adams licked his lips and pulled himself out of the dip in
the couch. He opened his notebook and produced a pen.

‘Mrs Toroa—’

‘The name is bloody Kāpehu. Never married Ben’s father.’

‘Oh sorry. I mean, not that you didn’t marry, just that I got your name wrong.’ Her mouth twitched, barely camouflaging a smile. Adams felt stupid. It wasn’t as if he was new to this sort of work. The story had been his initiative, his editor running with the idea. It was a well-worn issue, juvenile crime, but he was good at finding the angle, teasing out different truths. He’d wanted to be a lawyer, but his grades weren’t good enough.

‘How do you feel having a boy up for murder?’

‘Jesus, man! How do you think I feel? Fuckin’ over the moon?’ She sucked her teeth loudly. ‘You fellas are something else.’

Already he’d been lumped with ‘you fellas’… The first minutes of an interview were everything. He’d already blown it. He was behaving like some junior intern, his apprehension out of all proportion to the task.

‘Could you see it coming?’ he persisted. ‘I mean did you ever get an inkling when he was growing up that—?’

‘He’s a good boy, my Ben!’ she said, her vehemence and passion taking Adams by surprise. ‘He just got in with the wrong crowd.’

‘I didn’t mean to …’ He averted his eyes, not brave enough to let them accompany his words. ‘Murder … That’s a serious charge.’

She didn’t reply.

He looked up. Her taut face had slackened and the hardness had loosened. A shine of water tracked across her eyes.

Adams swallowed.

She must have been pretty once, he thought. She had a high, rounded forehead and full lips. But her hair fell away from a middle parting to drape limply down the sides of her sallow face. She was thirty-three – he knew that from the research he’d done – yet the
years had weathered her body and added at least a tatty decade to her.

A baby started to cry.

She didn’t move.

‘Ben been in much trouble before this?’

She sniggered, exposing discoloured teeth. ‘You could say.’

‘So did you get help?’ he asked abruptly. ‘I mean, what did you do to try and stop him?’

She looked momentarily taken aback at Adam’s change in tone, then shrugged. ‘What could I do? I got other kids to worry about. I clean offices at night. I can’t keep them locked up, can I?’

He refused to give her the satisfaction of shaking his head.

‘Look,’ she said, staring directly into his eyes. ‘I’m real sorry for what he’s done. For that … for that family.’ She stopped, chewed the inside of her cheek.

‘And your partner. So he’s not Ben’s father—’

The baby’s crying grew louder and more desperate.

‘He’s a member of a motorcycle gang, isn’t he?’

She looked up slowly, her lids lagging. Then she stood up and left the room.

Adams shifted on the couch. Was this his cue to leave? He pulled out his business card and put it on the table.

He was just about to get up when she reappeared, a baby on her hip. The sour smell of a soiled nappy filled the room. She sat down, stuck a hand into her T-shirt and pulled out a drooping breast topped with a large maroon nipple. The baby’s mouth hit the bullseye first time and began to suck furiously.

‘How old?’ Adams asked, trying not to focus on her breast. His wife was expecting. Eight months. Their first.

Kāpehu looked up to the ceiling, as if doing a calculation in her head. ‘’Bout five months.’

Adams couldn’t tell whether it was a boy or girl. ‘Very cute,’ he said.

She looked down at the baby in a strangely detached way, as though he’d just pointed out something she hadn’t noticed before.

‘The kids in the yard yours too?’

‘Two of ’em,’ she said, craning her neck to look out the window. ‘Six altogether. Another in the oven.’ She tapped her board-flat stomach, then let out a chesty laugh. ‘So much for breastfeeding being a contraceptive, eh! You gotta smoke?’

Adams shook his head. He felt a rush of anger at the thought of her smoking while pregnant and breastfeeding. His wife had been so careful to avoid any risk to their unborn child.

She arched her back, fumbled in her jeans pocket, and retrieved a crumpled box of cigarettes. So she had her own!

She pointed to a box of matches on the table, and leaning forward, got him to light one for her.

As she inhaled, the baby came off her nipple and started to cry. Deftly she swung it under her other arm and lined it up with her left breast. Adams wondered where the milk came from; her frame was so spare, her body all chipped and used.

‘Any chance Ben could be innocent?’

‘Oh for fuck’s sake, the boy’s ’fessed, hasn’t he?’ Adams felt the heat spreading through his hair. Another pointless question he’d not even planned to ask. This was a disaster. There was no rapport – a journalist’s most important tool. Too much other stuff seemed to be getting in the way.

He stumbled on. ‘Have you or Ben’s father spoken to him since he’s been in custody?’

A car door slammed. ‘Sure I have,’ she said, pulling the baby off her breast and laying it down on the couch beside her, before emptying the glass of dirty paint water out the window and hurriedly sliding the painted card, paintbrush, and box of paints, under the sofa.

‘But it’s real difficult ’cos I haven’t got no transport, have I?’ she
said, sitting back down again and picking up her squalling charge. There was a thud and then the sound of footsteps. Adams’ eyes met Kāpehu’s. His limbs felt suddenly heavy.

A huge man strode into the room.

Adams’ eyes widened. Tattooed biceps bulged from under a black sleeveless jacket, and black leather trousers hugged a pair of tree-trunk thighs. Adams took it all in – the steel-capped boots, slit of sunglasses, the tail of greasy hair, and in an instant he was a boy again, cowering in the corner.

‘Yo,’ the guy said with a grimace, his legs locked astride. ‘Visitors, have we?’ He removed his sunglasses and his black eyes swung from Adams to Kāpehu, to Adams. ‘And who the fuck might you be?’ Adams was already on his feet, his notebook squirrelled away, perspiration sucking his blue Polo shirt to his skin in dark wet patches.

‘Just another bloody Jehovah’s Witness,’ Kāpehu said, tossing her head with feigned casualness. Adams looked down. His business card was lying on the table. Perspiration trickled down his sideburns onto his cheeks. He stepped forward, trying to obscure it from view. ‘Just on my way.’

‘Too bloody right, you are.’ Adams stumbled as he moved toward the door. Glancing back, he saw the card was gone. He tipped his head at Kāpehu, then turned and hurried out.

As he passed the car with the kids playing inside, the mongrel deserted her litter to snap more seriously at his heels.

He swung a foot at her, leapt over the low wall, and flicked his car remote. Inside, he hit the central locking button, fumbled with the keys, and pulled off; the car lurching in fits and starts down the avenue.

Ten minutes later, and out of state-house territory, he pulled up under a tree, switched off the engine, and remained there until his legs had stopped shaking.