Opportunity

by Grimshaw, Charlotte

  I lay and dozed. The boy wasn't Lars, then he was. It made me think the dream wasn't just about Lars. It was about pity. Was it about pity for all people? For Carita?

  daughters

  I grew up in a big house in Remuera with my father, who was a wealthy businessman, and my stepmother, Rania. Rania was beautiful and elegant. She was obsessed with my father. He was unfaithful to her and it made her insecure. She was clinging and neurotic and terrified of getting old. She spent a lot of time in spas, having beauty treatments. When she was fifty-five, she looked thirty-five. She went to a plastic surgeon and had her eyes done and her breasts and neck lifted. She was nearly six feet tall, with a perfect figure, a smooth oval face and green eyes. When she was in a bad frame of mind she looked at the world with hatred, as if it were something that was polluting, that would destroy her.

  I was an only child. My mother died when I was four. My father married Rania, one of his girlfriends, soon after. He and I always got on well but Rania tried to keep him away from me. They wanted to have children but she wasn't able to conceive. Rania stayed childless, and pencil slim, and girlish. She didn't understand that her husband was my father. She behaved as though I were a female rival who had to be kept at bay. She winced when my father and I came near each other. She threw tantrums, sulked and raged. When I hit puberty she could hardly stand it. She looked at me with a kind of horrified prudishness. I would walk in on her telling her friends how impossible I was. If she and my father met me in the street, he would say, 'Come with us, Claudine, we're going to such-and-such a place', and Rania would nudge me with her sharp elbow and say, 'No, let her go; she won't want to come with us.' It used to amaze me, the amount of energy my stepmother spent fending me off. She liked to tell a story about how, when I was a young child, she'd suffered a bout of depression (she was 'highly strung') and had had to fight the urge to smother me. She told this story at dinner parties — while I was there. Her eyes went moist when she told it. Her nostrils flared and she smoothed her hair away from her bony face. The story moved her: how she had suffered. She said I had been an extremely difficult child.

  My father worked long hours. He had an importing business. When Rania and I argued he rolled his eyes and sloped off to his study. Then, later, through the study door, I would hear his low voice on the telephone. He was a compulsive seducer, an adept womaniser. He was handsome, suave, evasive. I can picture him now, slipping out the back door, ducking neatly into his car as his name was shrieked, with incredible force, from an upstairs room.

  Rania's family had escaped from some Egyptian slum and come to New Zealand with nothing. She had certain feelings about money. If I brought friends home she wanted to know what cars their parents drove, what school they went to, and how big their houses were. You could see her sneaking looks under the table, checking their shoes. She wanted to wrench them to her chest and turn over the labels on their clothes. If they had slightly less money than us she was pleased. If they had more she was narrow-eyed but polite. If they were poor, she was cold. For Rania, to be poor, or just ordinarily struggling, was distasteful. She shuddered away from cheap things. She dressed in matching outfits, in designer suits and shoes and sunglasses. She drove a white Mercedes convertible. She looked like a vamp in an airport thriller. Her fingernails were blood red, and an inch long.

  I went to an expensive private girls' school: St Cuthbert's. I got into plenty of trouble there. Rania gave me spending money, and my friends and I spent days in town, hanging about in music stores, sneaking into pubs, buying cosmetics. In the weekends we went to nightclubs. On the way home we set fire to cars. I knew a boy called Blake who lived in our street. He was expert at it: you got some rubbish, wedged it under the chassis and lit it. The car would burn, and eventually there was a muffled pop and it exploded. You could blow up two or three cars at once and get away before the police and firemen turned up. Or you could just hang around and watch the show, as if you'd just come around the corner and it was nothing to do with you.

  During the day we burgled houses. We stole clothes, TVs, stereos, gadgets. I liked looking around other people's houses. While Rania was leafing through House & Garden under the sunray lamp at Spa Sierra, Blake and I were out in the field inspecting the real thing: some conservatory or water feature, or laboratory-sized kitchen. We dawdled around the suburbs in the daytime, and if there was an open window you could just reach in and take something — a radio or a clock, say — while people were in the house. Or swim in the pool of an empty house, or stroll through gardens, picking fruit. Long afternoons in the sunlit grids of the suburb, other people's property: the real, the personal — I wonder what I thought I was doing with it. I was just as likely to throw away the things I stole. I didn't want any of it. Not really.

  I kept one thing: a clock, it belonged to the old lady who lived next door to Blake. He said she was a writer. While we were burgling her house Blake kept threatening to burn it down. One thing I remember, we were still in the house when she came home. We hid in one of the bedrooms. She heard us and went quiet, then shouted something and rushed to the front door. She was frightened. We ran out the back door and climbed over the fence.

  We disliked school for the usual reasons. The teachers were humourless and mealy-mouthed; they rewarded dullness and crushed originality; they valued only the nice and the drab. You know how it was: the pallid girl with the hairy legs and the big mane of dead hair, the girl who was no trouble at all, was cooed over and admired and cherished. Girls with talent, on the other hand, had to have it squashed out of them, had to be punished and ostracised and belittled.

  'The teachers are cunts,' I said to Rania.

  She looked at me, with her Arabian eyes. She was drinking iced tea and smoking a gold-tipped cigarette. 'Is good school,' she said. 'Cunts or not.'

  ***

  'I'm checking out,' I told her. It was a Sunday morning in winter. I was seventeen. My father eyed me over the top of the fridge. He was wearing a white robe and holding a phone to his ear. Now he clamped the phone to his chest. 'Checking out? Of where?'

  'Of school. And out of here.'

  Rania looked down. She coughed harshly: she liked to go down to the summerhouse at the bottom of the garden and smoke hash. Only once a week. She was moderate in her habits.

  'You can't do that,' my father said.

  'When did you leave school? Sixteen? And look at you. Rolling in money.'

  'You have to get a . . . a . . . degree!' He twitched the phone irritably back up to his ear. Rania made a tsking sound and shook her head. I levelled my gaze at her.

  'What've you got a degree in, Rania? Nail polish? Fucking?'

  'Hey!' they both said.

  I went on, tonelessly. 'In handbags? Facelifts?'

  Rania picked up the folded newspaper and threw it at me. My father ducked. 'Say that again?' he said intently into the phone.

  'Frocks? Hair dye?'

  Rania reached across the table to slap me but she was too slow. She made an animal noise through her teeth and held her red nails against her face. 'Gnaaaa,' she said. Her fingers quivered.

  'Go on, rip your face off. You can always get a new one. Yeah, get them to rig you up a new one!'

  Unable to talk over the screaming match that now gained pace and volume, my father put his phone away and leaned on the top of the fridge, his chin on his hand. There was a moment when Rania and I couldn't hear each other, or ourselves. Her face was contorted. I could see her back teeth. Then there was a lull.

  'What are you going to do, then?' he asked. 'In life,' he added, delicately. He pinched his fingers over his brow.

  'Can't you give me a job?'

  The phone on the kitchen bench rang. Rania snatched at it, but my father was too quick. 'Call you back,' he muttered into it, and ducked his head. 'I'll think about a job,' he said to me, and slipped out of the room. We listened to him thud up the stairs. Rania made another sound: weary, cynical: 'Eeeeyah.'

  That afternoon my father and I co
nferred in the summerhouse. He offered me a job in the waterfront office from which his associate, Mr Ling, conducted some of his deals. The winter sun was setting over the big house. Somewhere within, in a trance of Egyptian cunning, Rania plotted and lurked. The camellia bushes were flowering, and covered in the dead brown blobs of flowers already gone bad. My father smoked a brown cheroot, smoothed his bottle-brown hair and told me, eyes glazed, fist cupped protectively around his pungent smoke, 'If you ever need money, you come to me. You come to me.'

  'You sound like a gangster, Dad,' I said.

  He took my arm. 'Let me tell you a few things about Mr Ling,' he said.

  Later I was in my bedroom, among the magazines and cuddly toys. While packing a single reproachful sports bag — six impractically flimsy outfits, four cartons of Rania's cigarettes and a ton of makeup — I was busy regretting Rania's shoe size. It was only the canoeish length of her feet that stopped me stealing a swag bag of gold stilettos, of jewelled mules. Below, a fresh fight was breaking out. My father's new girlfriend kept ringing the house and it was getting on Rania's nerves.

  Their voices rose. He threw her cigarettes into the pool. She told him to get a hairpiece. 'You are very nearly bald!' She told him she'd suffered enough. 'My bags are packed! The lawyers are poised!'

  He went down on one knee and begged her not to go. Her gaze travelled ironically upwards, her eye caught mine as I leaned from the upstairs window. I saw his hunched shoulders, his head bowed at the level of her crotch. There was a thin moon above the plum tree, and tinselly Venus beside it, shining down. Rania was brown and slant-eyed, like a witch. My father had his fingers crossed behind his back. She let him win her over — her long fingers suffered themselves to unclench, to run over his hair; he rose and clasped her hands in his — but it was beginning to be over. I could see it all. It wouldn't be Rania who packed her bags and called the lawyers. My father would never let that happen. No, unquestionably, he would be the one to go first. And only once he'd worked out what to do with his money.

  There were reversals and re-workings. After all, they'd been together a long time. I'd left the big house by then, and wasn't witness to their final parting. I heard about it later from Rania. He moved into a penthouse with his new girlfriend, but kept sneaking back home (to be mauled and punished and slashed with Rania's six-inch heels). After a couple of nights he would flee, scratched and bloodied, back to the penthouse. He was working out his old addiction. Eventually his girlfriend put her foot down. She told him he needed a change. He came to me at the offices of Mr Ling, and told me he was heading overseas. 'To Thailand first. Business interests. Then we'll take it from there.'

  He left me a lot of money. And the job, which gave me a lot more money than it should have, being a job that was all about doing very little. He left the big Remuera house to Rania, for me to inherit when she died. I haven't seen him or heard from him since. I know he's moved about all over the place. Vietnam. Brazil. Georgia. The Ukraine. I've wondered, sometimes, whether I have any half-siblings out there. I mean, he's always put it about to such an extent, you'd think there'd be someone (some Thai or Australian or Arab or American) who looks uncannily like me.

  But I have no word of anyone so far.

  Mr Ling and I hit it off when I went to work for him, down there at John John G. Shipping. He taught me to play mahjong. He made deals and I managed the office. There were shady things going on with the business, but I only did light office work and arranged the files. If I'd dug a bit deeper I would have found that John John G. Shipping was a front. But I didn't care about that.

  I lived in an apartment on the waterfront with two St Cuthbert's old girls, Mackenzie and Nadine. They were in their early twenties. Both knew my father. Mackenzie was a PR agent who liked to snort coke and go out with awful, crass, rich property dealers, and Nadine was a presenter on a children's TV show. We went out every night, drinking and clubbing. I spent all the money I earned. Nadine had a permanently stuffed-up nose and a squeaky Mickey Mouse voice because of all the drink and drugs and blowjobs she got through. Her cartoon voice made her popular with children, and whenever we went near kids we were mobbed by her teeny fans. Like most of us private-school girls Mackenzie and Nadine talked about money all the time, wouldn't be seen dead in a cheap car, and had nasty faux St Cuthbert's accents. (That accent of ours: what's it supposed to sound like? And where does it think it comes from?) We were always bawling for whaite waine and calling it naice and, like true private-school girls, we were good at shouting and drinking and being unbelievably aggressive in the traffic. Nights we spent in the waterfront bars, days I sat in the office, making phonecalls for Mr Ling. During lunchtimes I played mahjong. And then, one day, it all came crashing down.

  I went to work and found the glass doors locked. There were men in suits inside, carrying boxes of files. They had Mr Ling on a plastic chair and someone was sticking a bit of paper under his nose. I walked away. I went and stood at the edge of the wharf looking down at the water. I couldn't think what to do. For a while I had the irrational idea that if I kept very still no one would see me. I had the office keys in my hand; I let them fall into the water. I saw them sink under the green swell. The sun was shining on the water; the light was very bright. There was a man in a suit walking towards me. 'Good morning,' he said. 'Claudine Zambucka? Would you please come with me?'

  They sat me on a plastic chair next to Mr Ling. They held bills of lading in front of me and asked me what they were for. I told them I didn't know. A bit later they took me and Mr Ling to the police station, in separate cars. I went on saying I'd been hired to carry out light office duties. I tried to impress on them how stupid I was. I acted hurt and pompous, as though I thought the menial tasks I performed were vitally important to the running of John John G. Shipping. None of them mentioned my father — I suppose he'd disguised his connection to the place. And I hoped nice Mr Ling wouldn't divulge the staggering sum I was being paid for doing practically nothing. 'What's this all about?' I kept asking. They let me out eventually, with threats, and warnings of a bruising rerun. 'We'll be in touch,' they said.

  By the time I got out the day had gone. The day had disappeared while I was sweating it out at Central Police. The town hall clock told me it was 4 a.m. I had no money and no coat. It was freezing, and, unusually, there was thick mist hanging in the streets. It took me a long time to walk home, and then I remembered I'd thrown away my keys. That was a stupid thing to have done. I couldn't get into the building.

  Workmen had been reshaping the path, and there was a patch of broken stones and concrete. I was looking around in it for something to throw up onto the balcony, when a man walked out of the fog. I straightened up, a bit of concrete in my hand. I remember thinking how extremely pale he was. I waited for him to pass but he stopped. He was about thirty, with a round face and curly hair. He was wearing a suit. He said something about himself. He clutched his arms to his stomach. I told him to go away. And he attacked me. Just like that. Or was something else said? Perhaps I swore at him and he . . . Anyway he attacked me. He stumbled forward and took hold of my shoulders. I hit him with the stone I had in my hand. It wasn't very heavy — maybe as big as half a brick. He clawed my face. I hit him in the head. He bent over, staggering. And then I ran away.

  When the sun came up I was walking along Tamaki Drive. I had a scratched eye, laddered stockings, and half the buttons wrenched from my shirt. One of my shoes flip-flopped against my foot, the heel left somewhere on Quay Street.

  It was high tide. On the harbour side the water glimmered all silvery and cold, the sky was high and pale and tinged with rose. Over in Judges Bay the water was deep green and still under the pohutukawas. I looked at the water and thought how beautiful it was — the rippled silver, the slow green. When the dawn came an idea had got into my head. There was something missing. The man at the waterfront — I couldn't remember what he'd said. Something about himself. Or about his body. Had he told me he was hurt? Out in the harbour a c
urrent — smooth water crossing ripples — formed a snaky question mark. Was it possible he had asked for my help? I laughed. You came to the wrong place, mister. Sorry about that. I turned into Ngapipi Road. Still about a mile to go. Where was I heading? Back to the big house I'd left a year before. I couldn't think of anywhere else to go.

  I knocked on the door. Piles of leaves lay along the path. The lawn had been mown, the hedges trimmed, the summerhouse freshly painted. Looking around, I was having to re-work the picture I'd built up in my mind over the year, a scenario I'd relished during my quiet hours at John John G. Shipping: that of Rania, now abandoned, gone speechlessly to rack and ruin. Instead, when she wrenched open the door and stood staring down her nose with the highest, snootiest Arabian disgust, she looked more burnished and coppery than ever. She looked like an ad.

  'Pooh,' she kept saying after I'd persuaded her to let me in. 'What please is that horrible smell?'

  'Police stations.'

  'Pooh!'

  I waited, patiently. 'Can I have a shower?'

  'Pooh!'

  Eventually I was sitting at the kitchen table, wrapped in one of her old robes, while she pretended to look through the fridge. 'Nothing much here,' she said with sprightly malice. 'But you're not exactly fading away!'

  I settled for one of her powerful coffees, and an International Gold. 'How are things with you, Rania?' I asked.