Her expression went dark. 'Your father left me with nothing. No money. How could I pay the bills?'
'So what did you do?' I could tell she hadn't had to scrimp or save. Her face, her hair, her clothes, all bore evidence of the costliest attention.
She smiled coldly. 'I have a business.'
'What sort of business?'
'Gentlemen's club.'
'A brothel?'
'Sauna, massage, brothel. Sure. Very good business. Ling and I . . .'
'Mr Ling!'
'Ling is silent partner.' She hummed and looked out the window.
'Oh really.' I told her why I'd been at the police station. Then I regretted having told her, because I had to spend a long time getting her to not throw me out.
'This is my house,' I protested, after a while.
'Not yet it isn't! Only when I die! I don't want trouble here! Go away!'
'Don't be ridiculous.' I was weary. 'I want to go to bed.'
'No! Get out!'
'Oh, shut up, Rania,' I said. I went to my old room. I dragged a chest of drawers in front of the door. I took out an empty drawer and put it next to the bed, as a weapon. I crawled into the cold sheets.
I dreamed Rania was coming at me, a satin cushion in her hands. She said, intently, 'He's gone now. He's gone. There's only you and me . . .'
For two days I hid in the upstairs room. In the mornings she rattled the doorknob and threatened to call the police, and told me to be out by the time she came back. When I heard her convertible on the drive I went down to the kitchen. In the evening we watched television together in the sitting room. Rania lived on cigarettes and diet pills and sparkling wine. On the third day I went out to the shops, and withdrew some money from my bank account, slumping with relief when they let me do it. I'd feared there might be some sort of freeze on my funds. That night I cooked her a meal. She watched me prepare it and waited for me to start eating, as though suspecting I'd slipped in some poison. She had a few mouthfuls and then lit a moody cigarette. I ate all mine and then finished hers.
She stared at me. Then she drummed her fingers on the table and said, 'So. Fatty boomsticks. You want a job?'
'In a brothel? No thanks.'
'Administration,' she said smoothly. 'Strictly no contact work. Managing the girls.'
I thought about it. I was curious. 'Yeah, go on then. When and where?'
'You come with me. Tomorrow.' She pulled her long black hair away from her face. There were rich, raisiny shadows under her eyes. Her eyes were black-lined and almond-shaped, in the painted face. I looked at her: my Egyptian stepmummy, with her hating eyes.
'And now I must go and watch Antiques Weekly,' she announced, and swept from the room. I heard the fizz and crackle of the TV. Her mad scent hung in the air.
The next morning we stood outside her brothel. It was called The Land of Opportunity. It was a grand old stone house with stained-glass windows, at the end of a row of shops.
'We are strictly upmarket,' Rania said. 'Lot of doctors, lawyers. Judges. Pillars of community. Top civil servants, policemen . . .'
She ran on. Like most people in this game, she liked to make it sound as if everyone did it, they just didn't admit it. Especially people of great talent and distinction. 'Politicians, captains of the industry, artists, television executives . . .'
I followed her up the stairs.
'Actors, diplomats, visiting dignitaries . . .'
We entered a velvety bar, with couches and heaped cushions.
'And no Maoris,' Rania finished.
'No Maoris?'
'Customers maybe. If tidy. Girls, no.' Her eyes were slits.
'You can't do that. It's not . . . It's against the . . . Human Rights Convention.'
'Is my place.'
'God. You're supposed to have left all that behind when you came here. You can't go on like that.'
'Is classy place.'
'God, Rania!'
She told me what I had to do. I sat in a kind of nook up the front and matched the girls with all the captains of industry and diplomats and judges. Except of course there weren't any of those. If you checked out the conversation in the lounge, pre-date, you'd find it wasn't very intellectual. Or very classy. Mostly the men were drunk, or needing to get drunk very quickly; most were sweating yobs whose eyes bulged with all the things they were planning to do, once they'd loosened up enough there in the lounge. And none of them looked like they had any money.
After a month I knew my way around. I was well established in The Land of Opportunity. Rania seemed resigned to having me back in the house, too. She and I went on arguing about the race issue. I was pretty shocked by her attitude. I tried to put it in her terms: 'Okay. Forget the civil rights question. You're turning away good merchandise. I mean, they tend to be better-looking, for a start.'
'Not than the Asians.'
'Okay, not better than the Asians. But better than the whites. Better than all that pastiness and freckles and flab you've got going out there.'
In the end she said she would have a few Maoris if they pretended to be Arab. That was a good laugh, but Rania seemed to believe it was possible. Or she pretended to. She hired a Maori woman called Diana, who was very good-looking and who, pretending with satirical insouciance to be an Arab, got on well with Rania. When Diana was taking a break they sat in the office together, smoking and watching the lounge through the one-way glass. They were both brown and narrow-eyed and mad and hard. Sometimes they were joined by Mr Ling, for a session of mahjong. Mr Ling had done some work on his identity: he now sported a perm, and everyone called him Mr Long. In the evenings the place stank of coffee and cigarettes and booze. And sex and crime. And money.
A few months after Diana arrived, she brought her little cousin Darlene in to work at The Land. Darlene was an awkward girl with a witless, compulsive laugh. It was a chuckle, characteristically Maori, but with the charm hammered out of it — a dull, reflexive plea for peace-not-violence. I sat in my nook listening to her. The laugh was unbelievable. What terrible forces, what deprivation, had produced that abject sound?
'I told the fulla eh, ih ih ih ih, stick it up yor arse, eh, ih ih ih ih. Got a smoke? Ih ih ih. And he goes, nah, cuz, gunna stick it up yor arse, ih ih ih.'
That was Darlene off duty. When she was entertaining clients she was nice and polite and put on a few airs: 'And where do youse fullas stay? Eh? True? Long way to come, eh? My cousin's from there, eh. He's a mean bugger, eh. Ih ih ih ih.'
She was a useful girl, just turned seventeen. She didn't usually baulk at anything. But one night, when a stag party had taken over the lounge and the men looked, to me in my corner, like predatory animals, with their watchful, calculating eyes, Darlene had some sort of meltdown or failure of courage. Her laugh got higher and stranger, and more repetitive, until it was like panting, like a full-blown panic attack. Diana got up from her place on the couch. She drew Darlene to her bosom and took her into my corner, whispering in her ear, stroking her hands.
'Baby,' she said. 'Baby.' Darlene looked blankly at me, over Diana's shoulder. Her breathing slowed. Her eyes closed.
Diana gave her a little shake. 'There now. Hush now. Okay, kid? Okay?'
They hugged. Diana wiped Darlene's tears.
Then she forced a couple of pills down the girl, mopped her makeup and booted her back to work. It was a bumper evening. Rania and Mr Long were up all night afterwards, talking tax evasion.
I had an idea after that, thinking about their faces — Diana's and Darlene's. The eyes, the cheekbones, the beautifully curved lips. I decided Diana was Darlene's mum. I put it to Rania but she just looked at me over her champagne flute and made a hissing sound between her teeth, 'Ssssssss.' Mr Long appeared at the door behind her, his face folded into a smile. When he smiled his eyes disappeared. He lounged there in his black suit, with his no-eyes smile.
At home one afternoon, I sat smoking in the summerhouse. The days were lengthening, the light was bright, the winter chill had
gone. The garden was full of flowers. Above the house the sky was delicately striped with cloud. I remembered my father standing by the dropping buds of the camellia bush, cupping his hand around his brown cigarette. I remembered my dead mother. One memory: she was sitting on the couch, it was raining, a man had just come to the door and gone, and she was crying. I looked out at the liquid world and listened to a story record while I waited for her to stop crying, and when I moved my head the ripples in the windowpane made trenches in the lawn. I remembered the man who came at me out of the fog that time, down on the wharf. He said to me . . . what did he say? They took my. Please. I need your. I need your . . .
A car was nosing down the drive. It was Mr Long, in his black Mercedes. Rania came out of the house. She walked with him, talking. He nodded. Soon we would head across town, to The Land. The girls would be waiting — the battered merchandise, their use-by dates near expired. And the men, the clients — they reminded me of something. They reminded me of myself. Long ago, in all those back yards, the empty houses in the drifting afternoons. The breaking and entering. The searching, the rummaging. And then the emptiness of a white courtyard, ribbons of light glancing off a pool, the strewn pile of knick-knacks and trinkets. A kind of daze afterwards, a confusion in the lull. What did the men want? What did I want? What I stole I threw away. I didn't want it. Not really. What was the thing we looked for, and couldn't find?
I crossed the lawn. We were wearing black that day, Rania and I. A sentimental acknowledgement (to placate the girls) of Darlene's death the day before. Her substance issues (her smorgasbord drug habit) had finally finished her off. All evening I would be boredly soothing deluded clients: 'She understood me,' they would say. 'She listened.' 'She was the only one who cared.' I wouldn't set them straight. I wouldn't tell them: she barely noticed you. She was out of her mind. And if you did swim into focus, she was out of her mind with fear.
Now I stepped up to the black car. Mr Long opened the door. I sank into the plush seat. In the front Rania lit a goldtipped cigarette. She angled the mirror at me and raised her eyebrows. I smiled. Mr Long drove up the drive. The iron gates closed with a heavy clunk on the high walls. Soft music played. We cruised across town. At The Land of Opportunity we got out. The three of us, Rania, Mr Long and I. In our black sunglasses. In our mourning weeds.
him
There are some unsolved murders in this city, and I think three of them are connected.
I think they were done by the same man. The first was a woman found murdered in a city office block. In the second, a woman walking downtown went missing and turned up dead behind a suburban building. The third was a man found dead at the bottom of another office block. The killer is operating in a small area. He lives somewhere central. How do I know this? It's instinct. I just know I'm on the right track.
I used to have lunch with my husband, Max, in the city. We'd go to a café in the mall and there was a security guard stationed at the entrance. He had cold blue eyes and an intent expression. When I passed him I always had the strange fancy that he was making a noise, a sort of low, avid exhalation, like a beast. I thought of the noise as ravening. My husband didn't have any fancies about noises, and when I described this impression he smiled tolerantly and glazed over as usual. But I thought, that man is a killer.
When the woman was found dead in the very same building the man worked in as a guard, I didn't have any trouble figuring out who was responsible. The next time we went to the mall for lunch the place was full of cops. I don't remember seeing the guard there again. But I did see him soon after, in Remuera, when I was buying a cake for a big lunch party I was having. I stared and stared. He looked up and I saw that he'd noticed me. I was worried then, in case he realised I suspected him. Imagine if he turned up outside my house!
A week or so later, when I was with the boys in Foodtown, I turned around and the same man was standing right behind me. This is the sort of thing that happens to me: I go looking for trouble and then find I've bitten off more than I can chew. I got a fright, but I knew what I had to do. I glanced at him in a completely neutral way. I went on talking to the boys and dawdling through the aisles. I thought, if I show anything, it'll confirm that I know, and he will follow me to the house. The boys had no idea what was going on, and he stopped following after a while, and went away. It was a test of my nerve. I realised how careful you have to be, especially when you're the mother of young children.
I didn't see the man again, but I didn't stop thinking about him. When I heard about the woman who'd gone missing and turned up dead I thought him again. And now he's thrown someone off a building in the city. The police haven't made any progress, although they don't tell the public everything. But I'm sure I'm the only one who's worked it out. It all comes from being observant, and noticing what people are really like.
Max only ever paid attention to things that affected him. We had a relative who started growing a tumour behind his eye. Each time we saw him his eye had got more prominent, until he looked like a monster. After one lunch I said to Max, 'I'm glad John's getting his eye seen to at last.' Max looked completely blank. He said what was I talking about. If you don't notice a huge eyeball you're not going to pick up the subtleties.
Max and I didn't talk much about anything, to tell the truth. He was always too busy. I told my friends Karen and Trish about my theories, but they laughed a lot and strayed off the point. We ended up talking about the kids and complaining about our schedules. Karen and Trish each had two children. My two, Charles and Max junior, were nine and four. We'd taken Charles out of his state primary school and sent him to King's School. Max went to a private kindergarten.
I had to do a lot of driving, what with all the children's activities. There was golf, cricket, swimming, piano, extra maths, violin, gymnastics. There seemed to be a competition at King's about who was paying the biggest fortune to turn out the most talented kid. It struck me as a bit rude the way the mothers went on about money. They brought it into the conversation all the time, either explicitly or by hints. They complained about how much they'd spent, just so you'd know how much. That's what the school was like.
'Nothing but the best for my boy,' Max said. 'You get what you pay for,' he said.
I shared the driving with Karen and Trish, and I supposed it was good the boys had so many activities. My childhood was different. I remember my mother coming home from work and asking, 'What've you been doing?' and we always said, 'Playing under the house.' We spent hours down there in the dirt and cobwebs. There were no adults around. We made huts. We pretended. We ran wild.
Sometimes, when we were driving to golf, I looked back at the boys. They had their faces pressed against the window. I wondered what they were thinking. I tried to talk to them but they just grunted and glowered. I tried to keep to the speed limit. In the back the trolleys and golf bags rattled with a cold, clinking sound.
***
Charles was playing soccer and I was standing on the sideline, warming my hands with a takeaway coffee.
Karen said, 'And I picked up some cute ski suits from Baby Gap?'
There was a man coming across the field. He was in jeans and a T-shirt, although it was cold and showery. He had strong shoulders and a nice lean body. I'd seen him somewhere before.
'It had to be the five series. Then the Porsche Cayenne. There's no pleasing . . .' Karen stopped. She nudged me.
The man was smiling at us. His glasses were smeared with rain.
'Hi, Kim,' he said.
I remembered: he was Dan Weston, the father of one of Charles's school friends.
'I had a word with the coach. Tom's changed to Charles's team.'
'Oh good.'
Dan was young and good-looking. We started talking. Karen made it obvious she thought he was pretty nice. He said he worked in TV, some technical role. Tom was his only child. He lived near the soccer ground, and he said why didn't we get together after the game so Charles and Tom could play. Karen dropped hints that she'd li
ke to come too, but he didn't pick up on them. She turned huffy after that. Dan smiled at me and I thought he knew she was annoyed, and that he was sharing a little joke with me about it. His eyes were sharp and alert. He looked as if he noticed things about people.
I walked along with Dan after the game. Charles looked surprised when I said we were going to Tom's, but soon the boys were racing ahead, shouting and kicking the ball to each other. Karen stood by her car, watching.
Dan and Tom lived in a stucco building a few streets back from the beach. They had a small flat on the ground floor. The sitting room was full of pot plants and the winter sun shone directly in. There were shelves full of books. They had a yard out the front, and a picnic table. There were some big tubs with palms, the dirt filled with cigarette butts. The kitchen was tiny but clean.
Dan said, 'I've only got instant coffee. Is that okay?'
It all seemed so sunny and simple; it made me feel light and happy. I thought: why do we need all the stuff we have? There was a ramshackle garage in the front of the yard, with a battered car that Max wouldn't have been seen dead in. It made me feel embarrassed, but in a rich, pleasurable way, as if Dan had told me a family secret.
We sat at the picnic table. He had an opinion about everything: books, politics, TV, the arts. The time went by fast. It seemed all right to ask, 'What does Tom's mother do?' He said they'd split up and that she'd gone home to the Wairarapa, leaving him to bring up Tom as best he could.
He seemed so hard up I wondered how he could afford to send Tom to King's. Straight away, as if he could read my mind, he told me that his ex-wife's parents paid. They were wealthy farming people. He got very serious and said he wanted only the best for Tom, even if it meant he had to go without things himself. He said he believed fiercely in education, and that he wanted to make sure Tom worked hard. He said he thought Charles would be a good influence on Tom, because Tom was lazy, whereas Charles was a studious, bright boy.
'Charles is tall for his age isn't he?' he said. 'Well coordinated, too. He looks great on the soccer field.'
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