by Stella Duffy
Stella Duffy was born in London and brought up in New Zealand. She has lived in London since her early twenties. She has written thirteen novels, ten plays, and forty-five short stories. She won the 2002 CWA Short Story Dagger for her story Martha Grace, and has twice won Stonewall Writer of the Year in 2008 for The Room of Lost Things and in 2010 for Theodora. In addition to her writing work she is a theatre performer and director. She lives in London with her wife, the writer Shelley Silas.
Other titles by Stella Duffy and published by Serpent’s Tail
Calendar Girl
Beneath The Blonde
Fresh Flesh
ACCLAIM FOR WAVEWALKER
“Very near the top of the new generation of crime writers” The Times
“The clever money should be on Duffy when the crime-writing Oscars are dished out” Telegraph
“A feisty little page-turner guaranteed to keep you up all night” Big Issue
WAVEWALKER
Stella Duffy
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99–69810
A catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request
The right of Stella Duffy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Copyright © 1996 Stella Duffy
First published in 1996 by Serpent’s Tail, 4 Blackstock Mews, London N4 2BT
Website: www.serpentstail.com
First published in this 5-star edition in 2001
Set in 10pt ITC Century Book by Intype London Ltd
Printed in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham, plc
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my mother Peg, with love and gratitude
Thanks to:
Shelley always, Yvonne of course, Doug Nunn, Tracy Burns, Judy Burns and Hilary Burns for a North Californian imagination – with special thanks to Tracy for the belt buckles and to Doug for Mendocino mendacity, The Amsterdam Hotel, San Francisco – Caron Pascoe and Isobel Middleton for compassionate reading, Vee for first teaching me how to talk to women, Luke Sorba for the non censoring, Rebecca Ellis for the icecream and most especially Laurence O’Toole for editing a big lump of stuff into readability.
CHAPTER 1
He looked down at the syringe in his hand. It was shaking. Both his hand and the syringe were shaking. Anita stirred in the bed, more worried by her dreams than by the man leaning over her. The only light was from the little oil lamp and it cast his shadow huge against the opposite wall. He grabbed her shoulder and turned her to face him.
“Anita?”
“Mmm? What? I’m asleep … What do you want?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Go to bed. We’ll talk in the morning. I don’t want to talk about this any more.”
“You have to.”
Anita sat up in bed.
“For God’s sake, be quiet, you’ll wake John.”
“No, I won’t.”
“You will if you carry on with this shouting.”
“Believe me, I won’t.”
“Look, there is nothing to discuss. Everything is settled, just as we said at dinner tonight. We will finalize all the details in the morning before you leave.”
“I don’t think you really want to do this.”
“You’re wrong. I know what I want to do, and I don’t need you to tell me. Not any more. If you don’t go, I’ll wake John and tell him to get you out of here.”
“You won’t.”
“That’s it. I told you this morning that you will never again tell me what to do. I want you to go! John … John?”
Anita rolled John over to her and opened her mouth to scream when she felt the heavy, dead weight of her husband as it fell against her body. She would have screamed, she was ready to scream, she’d opened her mouth to scream, but the man was kissing her as he pushed in the syringe and then the only sound was the rushing of blood in her ears and then there was no sound at all.
He burnt their bodies and the farmhouse for safety – and a certain degree of malice, during the two days he’d stayed with them, Anita had, despite his protestations, refused to give him an extra blanket for his chilly room.
He’d known what he planned to do when he arrived, it had just taken a couple of days to be sure it was really necessary. It was.
What he didn’t know was that every night Anita’s daughter went to sleep crying for her mummy. The child that lived with her aunt and visited Anita and John once a month. Or had, until their deaths. But, despite her tears, she knew him. She knew who he was.
I am walking between them. Walking between her and him. Holding him back and bringing her forward. Walking with silent steps that leave only prints in the sand, washed away by the next wave. There will be a time when the wave does not wash my print away. When I choose to make a mark that will be seen. I am both hunter and fisherwoman and bide my time until the moment. I will know when the time comes.
So will he.
CHAPTER 2
In 1970 Maxwell North was twenty-seven and dissatisfied. A promising career in any of several medical fields awaited him, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to care enough to make the commitment any one of them would require. He’d been in full-time education from the age of four until he graduated from Harvard Medical School at twenty-three, he’d followed that with two years in a city hospital, another year studying specialist psychiatric methods (contributing two highly respected papers to the field), six months at an inner city rehabilitation centre dealing mainly with alcoholism and finally a year in his father’s practice in a wealthy Boston suburb – where there were plenty of alcoholics and valium addicts available to use as guinea pigs. And he still had to make a decision. Several long and frustrating arguments with his father had created not so much a resolution as deadlock.
“How can I decide what it is I want to do. I’m only just starting to break into this field, and it’s huge – I’ve got more choices than most people I know …”
“That ought to make it easier.”
“But it doesn’t, I’m twenty-seven. I’ve only discovered where my interests lie in the past couple of years.”
“At your age I was married and your sister was two years old.”
“Yes, I know Father, but the truth is that you didn’t have all the options open to me, you were only ever going to go into general practice.”
“Well, it’s certainly been good enough to provide for this family, not to mention putting you and your sister through school!”
“I know. I’m not saying for a moment that you haven’t done well, for yourself and for all of us, I just don’t know if that’s what I want – I don’t want to settle down yet, general practice is good and stable and I think maybe I could do…”
“Better?”
“No. Just more. Maybe I could really achieve something…”
“Then go into research, you know I’m prepared to back you.”
“But I want to research with people, I want a new type of clinic, I don’t even know where to begin!”
“Maxwell, this conversation is, as always, going nowhere. Now listen to my proposal. Either go into general practice, I’m prepared to make you a partner, or help you set up your own practice, whichever you wish, or – if you really feel that you have ’more to do’, then go into research, I’m sure I have some contacts who can help get you started. But I am not prepared to have this discussion any longer. Make a decision and let me know in the morning. Now if you’ll excuse me, your mother has been waiting for over an hour and I’m not going to hold her up any longer. We will be dining out tonight, you can let me know your decision at breakfast. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Sir.”
Peter North str
ode out of the room, leaving his son staring after him.
“Yes Sir, no Sir, three bags full Sir, I’m twenty-seven but I’ll do as you say Sir, after all, you hold the keys to the bank.”
For as long as he could remember, Max’s decisions had been dictated by his father. While his older sister Diana had been allowed to do pretty much as she chose, within the bounds of taste decreed in the Ivy League code of ethics, he had been expected to follow exactly the same route as all the other men in his family. Good degree from Harvard Medical School followed by a career in medicine and, until the past couple of years, that hadn’t been too hard. Max had been happy to accept the advantages his family had been able to offer and had looked forward to becoming a younger version of his father – a well-respected, solid citizen, settling down with a nice girl very like his own sister and breeding more little Norths to carry on the family tradition and inherit the family wealth. And then last year he’d met Anita. She’d come into his father’s surgery with a sprained ankle acquired running away from the police at a demonstration. She was Dutch, young, pretty and stood for everything Maxwell and indeed, the entire North tradition, believed was corrupting the youth of America. She was even on the pill. He’d taken a brief medical history, strapped her ankle and, in a moment of uncharacteristic vigour, had asked her out to lunch. Anita had surprised herself by accepting. They became lovers. And it was through meeting Anita, very much a European free spirit, a “hippie”, that Max had started to realize he had more choices than he’d previously thought. And with that new point of view came something he had never previously experienced – dissatisfaction. Twenty-seven was late for a teenage rebellion, but it was exactly what Max was having. Which is why, after this last argument resulting in his father’s ultimatum, he didn’t try to reason with him, one grown man to another, but finished a bottle of his father’s best malt whiskey, packed a medium-sized hand-tooled leather suitcase, called Anita and booked two one-way tickets to Mexico. At twenty-seven, having never attended a peace rally or listened to Bob Dylan, Maxwell North ran away from home.
It wasn’t exactly “On The Road”. For a start they travelled first class and secondly, Max, having worked as a doctor for the past four years, had not only his own savings but also his extensive earning ability to fall back on. But for a boy with his background it was brave. In the first month they played – swimming, hiking, staying up late, eating and drinking. Max chose not to call his parents and face an argument, but sent home a postcard every three days. By the second month this had dwindled to once a week and by the third month to once a fortnight. After three months in Mexico, Anita was starting to get restless.
“This is fine for you Max, you have never had such an experience. But I get tired of teaching you all the time.”
“Teaching me?”
“Yes, about books, thought, the world. I have come to America to learn more myself. I want to travel more, to see more. There are other people you should be talking to, not just me. We must move on. You should find work.”
“But I’m learning how to relax!”
“Max, you’re rich, you don’t need to practise relaxing, you need to practise real life. A real job, meet some real people. Let’s go to California.”
“Oh right, where the real people are, huh? Hippies and drop-outs and draft-dodgers?”
“There are medical centres, community programmes. You should use your training, I thought you wanted to do research? Just because you came to your profession through your family, doesn’t mean you should turn your back on it altogether. You like being a doctor don’t you?”
“Yes. But I thought what I did, living off my family’s inherited wealth and all that, was immoral and would be wiped out entirely, come the revolution?”
“Don’t worry, it will. But for now you can repay your debt to society by taking me to California. You might even find some lives to save and then you wouldn’t need to feel so guilty.”
“I don’t feel guilty.”
“Then you should.”
“Really?”
“No, not really. Guilt is a wasted emotion. Loving me Max, is not. Come here and hold me.”
The sex Anita and Max had was beyond Max’s wildest dreams. He’d “made love” to a variety of other girls, friends of his sister, friends of the family, girls he’d studied with – nice, ordinary, middle-class girls – and with all of them it had been the same. Max took the lead, Max made love to them and they moaned in more or less the right places and were very polite once it was over. They may even have enjoyed themselves, but neither they nor Max were likely to be brave enough to talk about it and find out. With Anita however, Max discovered sex. And passion. And desire. And the satisfaction of that desire. Anita was not at all the kind of woman to lie back and wait until Max was finished. She demanded orgasm and pleasuring and she too took control. Their mutual body feasting was ardent and fierce. With Anita, Max learnt not only how to pleasure her, but also how to receive pleasure, to acknowledge that he had a right to pleasure. She taught him how to give in to her and allow himself to be taken. For a man brought up to be as in control as he was, the pleasure of yielding was something he’d never even known existed, let alone one he could hope to experience on a regular basis. For Max, brought up in the strict Boston overcoat of conformity and social regulations, sex with Anita was like running naked through Times Square with everyone applauding and cheering him on.
They made love on yet another sandy beach and then Anita turned to Max.
“Now, I’m tired of hitch-hiking, I think we should drive up to San Francisco – what sort of a car do you want to buy?”
CHAPTER 3
The day that Max and Anita drove into San Francisco was a shiny blue and yellow summer day and Max felt like his life was finally happening. He’d had his holiday and now this would be the real thing. Admittedly, San Francisco was all the clichés Max had expected it to be – but it was also more. More than just the drop-outs and druggies and draft-dodgers, it was also new and vibrant. And gentle. Brought up in the East Coast extremes of climate, he was used to the overwhelmingly hot summers and bitter cold winters. He didn’t yet know what gentle, moderate summer warmth can do to a city – how it makes the public come out on the streets, how people go to bed much later on balmy nights, what it was like to lie awake at 3 a.m., covered only by thin cotton and listen to the sounds of music from open windows all along his street. Even San Francisco’s winter charmed him eventually – the rain and mist muting sharp corners and colours, softening his environment just as it threatened to soften his character.
At first they just floated around the city, both discovering it for the first time. After a couple of weeks staying with Anita’s friends – mostly foreign, mostly female – Anita decided it was time they found a place of their own and so, after several blazing telephone rows with his father, Max finally had backing to look for a home.
“All right. You want to buy a house? Then you get a job too. No money from this family is going to support you and that … that girl, until you at least attempt to make some contribution yourself. You find a place, apply for a licence and set up a practice – then I’ll decide just how much of this ludicrous endeavour I’m prepared to pay for!”
Max took to walking the hills and a month later, with a secret loan from both his mother and his sister, he put a deposit on a house on the edge of North Beach. It was halfway up a hill, cable cars rumbled by just a block away and on a clear day the view from the upstairs windows looked clean across the bay out to Alcatraz and Angel Island. The seven-bedroom, three-reception, turn-of-the-century house wasn’t quite Pacific Heights but Max decided it would do for the time being and, as Anita pointed out, it wasn’t as if they had to squat Alcatraz like the Indians either.
“We’ve already got so much more than they have Max. If they can make that barren plot into a home, then we can definitely make this work.”
And it did need a lot of work, not least in making friends with the neighbours, but
while the locals were suspicious of Max, his East Coast vowels not sitting especially well in their immigrant area, they quickly warmed to Anita, who had far more points of common ground with their new neighbours than he did. For the next two months while he was waiting for his records to be checked by the California State Medical Board, Max cleaned out the basement, turning it into a workshop and then stripped and painted woodwork, plastered old walls, replaced cracked windows and even started work on the garden, a paved courtyard with a thin strip of grass and two trees – a stunted lemon tree and a persimmon tree laden with early fruit. It was probably more physical labour than he’d ever encountered in his life. Anita supported them with two waitressing jobs and occasional work as a model at life-drawing classes. She’d been disappointed that Max hadn’t found them a home over on Haight, but understood his reasoning that if they were to take money from his father, they’d have to at least have the house in a place his father would cope with.
“Anita, as far as he’s concerned, it’s bad enough that I’m choosing to live out here, with you, unmarried. We can at least live in a neighbourhood where he’ll be able to bring himself to write the address on an envelope.”
“Just as long as it’s the envelope that sends the cheque, that’s cool.”
“I thought you hippies didn’t care about money?”
“Don’t be silly Max – it’s the redistribution of wealth we care about. Not a case of not having money, more a case of who keeps the money. Didn’t you read those books I gave you?”
“Not really. I couldn’t get past the stuff about the rich being such bad guys. Didn’t seem to ring true somehow…”
Max’s confession led to a hose fight in the garden where he was watering the new wisteria and jasmine vines – a concession to Anita, as he’d refused to plant marijuana, she’d insisted he at least plant sweet-smelling flowers instead – and, when they were both dirty and wet, an hour or so of sex al fresco to steam them dry. Anita lay on top of him, her still wet hair clinging to his shoulders.