Singularity

by Charlotte Grimshaw

There was a tiny weatherboard house, a boat pulled up on the sand below it, and a long fishing line strung out on poles into the estuary. Beside the house, in a clearing striped with sunlight, the air warm and still and dusty, was a wooden picnic table, at which a fat woman was reading a book. A small boy in yellow togs decorated with skulls and crossbones waded out of the water and ran towards her, cannoning into her side. She dropped her book and pushed him away, saying in a lazy, good-natured voice, ‘Get off, you, you’re soaking wet.’

  She watched them. The boy lay down under the long line and covered himself with sand. The woman went back to her book. Angela decided to walk past them along the shore. She turned, and Pastor Kyle was standing behind her.

  He was holding a bucket. In it was a mess of scraps and bones and blood.

  ‘I followed you,’ she said.

  ‘I see that.’ His gaze was steady.

  ‘I thought it would be a shortcut to the car.’

  ‘I’m going to feed the pig,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’

  She followed him into the clearing.

  ‘This is Mrs Sendells,’ he said. The woman closed her book and sat back. She had a massive face and forehead, large eyes, wiry, curly hair and a small, thin-lipped ugly mouth. Her eyes were grey. She looked at Angela without expression, her massive arms folded. The boy came trailing over, covered in sand, and leaned against her. He was about seven years old, with close-cropped brown hair and freckles on his nose.

  ‘This is Joseph.’ Pastor Kyle patted the boy’s head. The boy smiled shyly and looked away.

  ‘I’ll show you the track back,’ Pastor Kyle told her, and walked off.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ she said to the woman.

  ‘God bless,’ she said. Her eyes followed them. Her expression didn’t change.

  Angela hurried after Pastor Kyle. A short distance from the house was a smelly enclosure made of wooden boards. The pig stuck its hairy snout through a gap, grunting and squealing. Pastor Kyle emptied the slops.

  ‘She’s your wife?’

  He sighed and put down the bucket. ‘Mrs Sendells usually lives in Auckland. She’s having a holiday. There’s no room in my little shack.’

  ‘Who’s the boy?’

  ‘A member of my church.’ He faced her. ‘Any other questions?’

  ‘No. Only you never mentioned …’

  ‘You’ve stayed in my house. That doesn’t mean you’re part of my family.’ His eyes were cold.

  ‘No.’ She looked away, stung.

  ‘I’ll show you the track.’

  He led her up a slope to a headland above the beach. They climbed across rocks, crashed through a bit of bush and came to a track that led to the jetty where she had left the car.

  She set off but he called her back.

  ‘Angela. I’ve helped you, haven’t I? You’ve stayed in my house. We’re … friends.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I should explain. There are issues in our church family. A young woman, one of our community, had a divorce that, well, that was very sad. She’s needed a refuge for her son, Joseph. Mrs Sendalls and I have agreed to help her.’

  ‘A young woman?’

  ‘Yes, it’s a bad domestic situation. There’s a difficult, violent, cunning ex-husband, who mustn’t find out where his son is. Young Joseph needs safety and privacy. Do you understand?’

  ‘I won’t tell anyone.’

  ‘Absolute privacy.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘God bless you,’ he said.

  She drove home, thinking it over. A woman had got Pastor Kyle to hide her son from his father. She remembered the letter in a child’s handwriting that she’d found in Pastor Kyle’s drawer. The letter had said, What I wish for is to live with my mum. Who was the letter addressed to? It was all very strange. Angela went round and round it and didn’t know what to think.

  Nathan was in a better mood when she got home and she forgot about Pastor Kyle. But she woke in the night and thought of it again. Pastor Kyle’s manner had been odd, strained. And yet there could be a perfectly good explanation. In any case, Pastor Kyle was right. She owed him, and she would have to mind her own business.

  A month later she came home from the dump, turned on the TV and there on the six o’clock news, was a picture of the boy she’d seen that day with Pastor Kyle.

  Nathan had mates over. They were rowdily drinking beer. One of the cousins, picking at a guitar, broke into scraps of melody that were strikingly sweet and true. They were crowded into the sitting room and Angela couldn’t shut them up, nor watch the late news. The little party went on for longer than she could endure. She lay in bed seething with frustration. At four in the morning a string broke on the guitar, there was a brief spat followed by reunion: loud oaths of allegiance hoarsely sworn under the bedroom window, under a bone-white slice of summer moon. Angela lifted the blind and saw a speckled streak of moonlight glittering across the bay. Four battered utes roared into life and the cousins sped off. Nathan came scraping his way along the hallway wall, towards bed.

  The next day she went straight to the shop for a paper. The story was on the front page. It was a child custody battle that had taken a striking turn. Pastor Kyle had lied: the boy’s name wasn’t Joseph, it was Samir Jarrar. According to the paper, the boy’s mother, one Karen Lot, had been accused of serious child neglect. The Family Court had taken the boy from her and awarded full custody to the father, Ramzi Jarrar, who was a Lebanese New Zealander, a pharmacist. Karen Lot, the article said, had then colluded in a plan with her father, a Mr Bryan Lot, to kidnap the child and hide him away from Mr Jarrar, in defiance of the court order. Bryan Lot had abducted the boy and disappeared, and Karen Lot was refusing to say where he and the boy were. The father, Mr Jarrar, was appealing for information. The police were searching for the boy. How had Pastor Kyle and his wife ended up with the child? The only clue was that Bryan Lot was a pastor in an evangelical church.

  In a side article she found this: Letters have been received, purporting to be from the child, Samir Jarrar, saying that he is well and happy, and asking that he be allowed to live with his mother, not his father. The authenticity of these letters has been questioned by the boy’s father, Ramzi Jarrar, who says his son, aged six, does not have the skill to write them.

  Pastor Kyle and his wife must have agreed with the Lots that they would take the boy and hide him from Mr Jarrar. But the Family Court had decided Karen Lot wasn’t a fit parent and that Mr Jarrar was. Surely the court would know best?

  Angela drove back to the estuary that afternoon. She parked the ute back from the road in a layby where she hoped it wouldn’t be seen. She walked past the jetty, along the track, over the rocks and down the slope through the trees.

  She hid and watched. There was no sign of life. She went further into the clearing. The house was empty. The windows were closed, the door was locked and the long line had been reeled in. The pig was gone from its pen.

  She walked along the shore. The tide was sluicing out towards the mouth of the estuary. Shadows slanted across the beach. She walked around the curve of coast until she came to the sandy path. She set out with the uneasy fear that someone might be watching her from the hillside above. She hurried past the gannets around the rocks. There was rain out at sea, great curtains of water sweeping in, and the sea had a metallic sheen. A shower dripped down through the branches and the wind sighed in the treetops. She reached the bottom of the hill below Pastor Kyle’s bach. Instead of going up the path she clambered through the scrub, and arrived on a section of bank behind his house, looking down on the garden. There was no sign of him or his wife or the boy.

  She stayed in her perch for a long time, until the shadows grew long and spiky on the dunes, and the thought of darkness began to bother her. She left her lookout and retraced her steps.

  She drove home. What she’d seen a month ago seemed remote now. Perhaps the boy in the clearing wasn’t the one pictured on the news. The fat woman with her ugly,
curly mouth and her level stare, the little boy covered in sand, Pastor Kyle with his bucket of bones: the scene took on the flavour of a fairy tale or dream, touched with faint, sensual menace: the golden, dusty light among the trees, sunshine and shadow, the murmur of the sea.

  Nathan was sitting on the deck rolling a beer can over his forehead. Angela sat down beside him. ‘Nathan, don’t tell anyone this. Promise.’

  He shrugged. Nodded.

  ‘I’ve seen that boy. Samir Jarrar, the one in the news whose grandfather kidnapped him.’

  He didn’t say anything. He stopped rolling the can over his face.

  ‘You know the one I mean.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘I saw him.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In a house over at the estuary. Only he’s gone now.’

  ‘They said on TV they think that boy’s in Taupo.’

  ‘Well, he’s not,’ she said, looking sharply at him. She was surprised he knew what she was talking about. ‘I only saw him once, but it was him all right.’

  He stood up. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  She threw up her hands.

  He said quietly, ‘Are you trying to stir up trouble. Do you know how many police would come crashing through here if you spread this.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then maybe you should keep your mouth shut.’

  She said, ‘Pastor Kyle’s got him. It was his house.’

  ‘Pastor Kyle. He’s your friend. He’s everyone’s friend up here. If you get him into trouble, for no reason …’

  He put his arms around her. ‘Don’t make trouble. We have to live here. I love you.’ He pushed her back and looked into her eyes. ‘Do you know how much I love you.’

  She pushed him away impatiently. Hurt flashed in his eyes. She leaned against him, and he held her tight, pushing his face into her shoulder. They sat like that, in silence, while the last of the sunset lit up the hillside and the shadows darkened in the dips and gullies above the bay.

  Weeks went by. They worked in the dump. The weather grew cooler and the settlement emptied out. Now there were days of rain, soaking the brown land, making rivers of red mud at the sides of the roads. The bay was calm and still, the water silvery. They fished from the rocks in the early mornings, in the salty silence under the pohutukawa trees. Stingrays glided under the water, rippling their wings, fish jumped, rain dimpled the water. Nathan slid off the rocks wearing a mask and snorkel, gathering kina, diving and surfacing like a seal. Under the white sky the bay, ringed by black wet rocks, seemed to be holding itself in check. All was calm, the only sound was the patter of the rain.

  One afternoon Nathan gathered a sack of kina and loaded it into the ute. They drove along the dirt road towards the pine forest. There was mist hanging over the tops, the camping ground was deserted, and in the forest the air was cool and damp. They both shivered at once, and looked at each other and laughed. Once they got stuck and Nathan had to rock the ute backwards and forwards, until they shot out of the bog with a roar and a spray of mud.

  Huru came across the clearing to meet them, taking the sack of kina. Three women brought chairs onto the deck and began to take the innards out of the kina with spoons. The children tottered around, the toddlers wearing only nappies, despite the chill.

  Huru took Nathan aside and talked in his ear. Nathan nodded and chewed his nails, and occasionally broke out in a false little chuckle. They walked away into the trees.

  Hineana offered Angela a spoon for the kina. There was a lot of clutter on the deck, clothes hanging on lines above their heads, stacked tools, a yard broom.

  Angela looked at a pair of boy’s yellow swimming togs, decorated with skulls and crossbones.

  She spooned out the messy kina and tipped it into a bowl. One of the women started singing, low and tuneful and sweet.

  ‘Seen Pastor Kyle lately?’ Angela asked Hineana.

  Hineana rolled her eyes and smacked her lips and laughed, ‘Oh, he never comes out here. No never. He doesn’t come here.’ She grinned at Angela, toothless, shaking her head. ‘Not him, oh no.’

  The rain drifted against the dark wall of the trees. Hineana offered her a beer. They worked, listening to the low singing. Hineana looked at Angela again, chuckling and shaking her head. Her eyes were very bright. Angela put her hand on her arm. ‘I’ll just go to the toilet.’

  She went quickly through the musty bedroom; there was nothing but the bed and a pile of clothes. In the lean-to laundry, under a pile of coats, she found a large box striped with black and blue tape — the box she’d seen Pastor Kyle carry from his bach.

  Outside, Huru and Nathan were shaking hands. They left, driving out as the last patches of light were gleaming in the sky. Angela pretended to have a headache, and went to bed as soon as they got home.

  At first light next morning she took the ute. On Pastor Kyle’s track the bush sparkled with dew and the ground sent up a wet earthy scent. The surf was rough at the White Beach, the waves booming. She knocked on Pastor Kyle’s door. He opened it, wearing pyjama trousers and a holey grey jersey. The place smelled of cigarette smoke.

  She walked in and said, ‘You’ve given that boy to Huru.’

  He stood very still. He lit a cigarette, never taking his eyes off her.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said.

  Slowly, he went to the kettle and filled it. He cleared his throat. ‘You’re upset. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘The police are looking for him. If you don’t send him back I’m going to tell someone.’

  He faced her. ‘Angela. Think about what you’re saying. You want to make trouble for your friends?’

  ‘I won’t get anyone into trouble if you send him home.’

  ‘Home.’

  ‘He’s supposed to be with his father. He’s got a custody order. You can’t leave him out there.’

  ‘You will let me down. And others.’ He pursed his lips, studied his fingernails, considering. ‘You might like to think about this. Nathan drove the boy out there. He’s involved in this. And so are you, that means.’

  He looked at her steadily. There was a silence.

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said.

  ‘Think. You had nothing before you came here. This is your home, your community. Huru …’

  ‘How can you have anything to do with Huru?’

  ‘Huru understands what’s right. That boy was being brought up without his church family. Without God.’

  ‘And he’s with God now? That place is evil. If you leave him there, you’re evil.’

  ‘You’re going to betray Nathan,’ he said.

  He paused, and then added softly, ‘What will Huru think about that?’

  She snatched up one of his cigarettes and lit it. Her hand trembled. ‘If you don’t send him back in three days I’ll ring the police.’

  He put the kettle carefully down. ‘Is this the new self, the new you?’

  ‘I’ll give you three days,’ she repeated.

  His expression was dreamy, strange. He mouthed a couple of words, smiled, shook his head and said, ‘I took you in.’

  She faltered, ‘That’s not the point.’

  He came towards her, his voice toneless, mechanical. ‘You’re faithless. Disloyal. You are the slut daughter of a drug-addicted whore.’

  She ran out and fled down the path. She stopped on the track several times, thinking he was following her. Panicking, she couldn’t start the engine. Finally she got it going and drove towards home.

  She pulled over on their road and looked at Nathan’s little house with the beautiful, misty bay spread out before it, the water crossed by cloud shadows, the gannets circling and plummeting, hitting the water like bombs. A squall disturbed the calm; the water broke into a million glittering ripples. Pastor Kyle was right; she couldn’t go home. This was the last time she would sit here, looking over the bay.

  She turned the ute around and headed for the main road. The sun was rising highe
r over the brown hills; the eastern sky was pink, the light glowed softly at the edges of the clouds. A hawk flew up from the road and circled lazily away. A feeling rose in her, so reckless, so happy … She nearly drove herself off the road.

  She made it to Auckland in the evening and found a room in a cheap motel in Greenlane. She abandoned Nathan’s ute in a car park. She waited. Pastor Kyle was cunning and he wouldn’t want trouble. He would know she was serious about telling someone. Sure enough, after three days, the TV news reported that the boy had turned up at a small police station outside Whangarei. He was returned to his father.

  The following month it was reported that Nathan and Huru had been arrested in the settlement. There were drug charges. They were to be questioned about Samir Jarrar. Pastor Kyle’s name wasn’t mentioned; his role in the affair stayed a secret between him and his God. As far as Angela knows he’s managed to keep it that way. No one talks to the police up there.

  Two weeks after she got back to Auckland she found a job in a restaurant and a room in a flat. She tidied herself up, wore long sleeves to cover her arms. One day the man she had known up North as Brad Richards came into the restaurant. They talked. He came back regularly. He started to ask her out. She took her time. She didn’t want to go out with anyone for a while. She was working hard, earning good tips, preparing for the operation to remove her tattoos.

  THE OLIVE GROVE

  Larry told Emily, ‘The universe is expanding.’

  In the hours before dawn, when thunder cracked in the mountains and still there was no rain, Beth’s voice came out of the dark, ‘Per, are you listening? Have you heard a word I’ve said?’

  Sometimes Emily could hear her parents laughing. Beth would sigh in the morning, ‘Per makes so many jokes, I can’t get to sleep.’

  Long nights. Forked lightning through a crack in the curtains. There was heat and distant storms, no rain.

  The darkness was gigantic and had size and weight. Emily felt she was pressed into a tiny space. Everything was in the ear. Voices. Silence.

  She lay in the dark, thinking. Before Beth and Per there was no Emily. Emily was Nothing. Then there was the Big Bang (ha ha, the big old double bed creaking in the night) and Emily began to be. Before Beth and Per, there was no family. No Emily Larry Marie. The family began: a small, tight nucleus, full of packed energy. Years passed, eons of notimetime, of crowdedtime, of allclamouringatoncetime. And everything moving out across the vast emptiness, always spreading outwards. One day there would be no Beth, no Per …