Opportunity

by Grimshaw, Charlotte

  'You're a fugitive,' she said, smiling at me.

  She was always a bit sentimental. She had a weak spot for me. She liked listening to me. Plus she thought it was interesting, the way I lived. I had no permanent job, no money, hardly any clothes, no house. I was a bit of a fugitive, it was true. But from what? From the things I hadn't done.

  She said, 'You're free. You're not trapped in things. But I always wanted to be . . . anchored.'

  'So are you anchored? Or trapped?'

  'I'm not trapped,' she said quickly. She shook her head.

  I said, 'I keep thinking, if my old friends were here, they'd just pick me up on their motorbikes and we'd go off and do lots of good things.'

  She stared. 'But they're all gone,' she said. 'They've grown up. Like me. They've got kids, families.'

  Families! I told her about various tricky moments with my parents. I talked about them destroying my dope in the Wastemaster, all those years ago.

  'That was the beginning of the rift,' I said darkly.

  'But no one's parents let them keep dope in the airing cupboard,' she said. 'You can't hold that against them now.'

  'Oh, can't I?'

  'No!'

  'They should have sat down and smoked a joint with me.'

  'Oh, rubbish!' She was laughing at me. 'Why don't you try being kind to them, instead of waiting for them to be kind to you? Turn it around, now you're old.'

  'Old? I'm not old!'

  'All this working in bars. You were so clever at school. Much more than me. Remember how you got A-pluses for everything? Literally!'

  'Indeed,' I said politely.

  'So why don't you go to university? It's not too late.'

  'Oh, I could, I suppose,' I said, staring off. But it was too late, of course.

  She frowned, looking stupid and conscientious, like a social worker. I gave her one of my most terrible smiles, and she flinched and grinned madly.

  I reminisced a bit more, since she seemed to like it. I told her about the mountains of cocaine, the oceans of booze I'd got through, in my years in Spain. I'd had a lot of wine by this time and was yearning for something stronger. I thought about a trip over to Ponsonby. The trouble was, I didn't have any money.

  The bar closed. I walked Lisa down the road. I sang her a Spanish football song. I told her how I wanted to do a line of coke. She didn't do drugs, never had — it was one of her limitations. She'd never got over having a Bible-banger for a mother. When we got to her gate I kissed her on both cheeks. 'That's how we do it in Spain,' I said.

  She said fondly, drunkenly, 'I suppose I could drive you home.'

  'But that would be illegal!' I said.

  I could hear her laughing in the dark as I reeled away.

  Now I was wide awake. It was a hot night. I was fizzing with wants. I wanted an Everest of coke, an orgy, a fistfight. I decided to walk home the long way, to cool off. I slouched along the street. There were a lot of big houses. I wanted to go to Ponsonby and get my hands on some drugs. I thought about crashing back and asking Lisa for money. I knew she would give it to me, because she liked me so much. But I couldn't do that. I stopped. Something rose in my brain like a hot wave, and I realised I was extremely drunk. I could see across to Mt Hobson, the lights in the houses up the hillside. I couldn't go home to the little single bed and the familiar furniture and my parents' faces in the morning.

  I passed a café, its doors closed. I sat on a seat for a while, looking down at the water in the Orakei Basin. I walked on through the dark, still, leafy streets. There was an old Mercedes parked in a driveway. I groped my way along the fence. In front of it was a new Porsche. I went back to the older car and tried the door. It opened. I got in and reached under the dashboard, using my lighter to see. I did a bit of wrenching and pulling, tearing my fingernails in the process. After a lot of work and a fair bit of damage I got the right combination of wires and started the engine.

  The motor coughed, throbbed, steadied. I waited for a moment. The house was at the far end of the long drive. No lights came on; there was no sign of life. I backed the car out and onto the road, and eased it away, into the rainy night.

  At the bottom of the road workmen were moving a whole house on a truck and I had to wait. A policeman walked towards the car, looked in (my face fixed in nervous rictus, my fingers white on the wheel), then waved me on, and I drove through a slalom of flashing lights and traffic cones and away, towards the west, seeking my line, the lifeline of coke that was waiting for me.

  Driving on Shore Road I lit a cigarette, and, as I glanced into the mirror, gasped, froze and jammed my feet down on the pedals. The car swerved and bucked, hit the kerb, juddered along the gutter and mounted the pavement. It crashed into a fence, throwing me forward onto the steering wheel.

  There was someone sitting in the back seat.

  I couldn't move. I let out a whimper. Blood dripped from my nose. He didn't say anything. I could hear him behind me, breathing.

  'I'll get out,' I whispered, nodding to myself. I felt for the door handle. There was still no sound but the breathing. I panicked, wrenched the door open and fell out onto the pavement. As I scrambled up I looked in the back and saw the big, still head silhouetted against the window. He looked at me.

  It was a dog, a black Labrador. He must have been asleep on the seat and had sat up, bewildered to find himself on the move. Now he was peering at me enquiringly. I wondered why he hadn't made any noise before, but when I got close I saw from the white hairs on his muzzle that he was very old. I patted him. He turned big innocent eyes on me. He pushed his cold nose into my palm. I got in the back seat with him. I leaned on his musty flank and wept. Oh, Jesus, old dog. Oh, life.

  I got back in the driver's seat. I heaved a deep, trembling sigh. My nose was bleeding down my shirt. The snout of the car was wounded too, crushed up against the fence. I connected the wires, started it and backed it onto the road. In the mirror I could see my passenger's big, patient, noble head, swaying as he kept himself upright.

  I started driving westwards. But I thought about what would happen if I left the old dog parked in a Ponsonby street. There was no guarantee I'd find him again. Once I met my people over there I would be entering the vortex. I would be gone. He would be lost.

  I would have to take him home. But I wasn't sure which street I'd taken him from. I didn't fancy cruising around looking while the roads were full of workmen and police. I pulled over. We sat in silence. He let out a doggy little moan and settled himself down on the seat.

  I reached back and opened the door.

  'Best you get out here, mate,' I said. 'Before we get any further away.'

  He raised his snout and gazed at me sadly.

  'Go on, get out! Walkies. Find your way home.'

  He made that weary little groan again and put his snout on his paws. I slapped his flank. He didn't move.

  Frustrated, I got out and reached in the back door, pulling him. He was a dead weight.

  'You stupid lump,' I said, furious. I hit him on the head. He just looked at me. I hit him again. He flinched. I backed away. I wiped my bloody nose on my shirt. I got in the car and said, 'I was going somewhere. Now I can't. Because of you, you fucking cunt.'

  He didn't move.

  I thought about my family. My parents. Will and Lucy, their baby.

  'Sorry,' I said. I put my hands over my face.

  I reached over and patted and stroked his head. 'We can't go back to my parents' house,' I explained. 'So what do we do now?' His eyes were large and liquid and trusting. He looked out of the window.

  I found a cloth in the glovebox and cleaned my face. I started the car. I zipped my jacket over my bloody shirt.

  I said, 'We'll go on a bit of a journey. How about up north? A road trip — it'll be nice.'

  I drove in the direction of the harbour bridge. He lay down across the seat.

  'Don't worry,' I told him. 'I'll take care of you. Everything's going to be fine.'

  the prod
igal son

  My father grew up poor. He and his twin brother lived in Opotiki, in a house with a dirt floor. Their father left them, and their mother brought the children to South Auckland. She took housekeeping jobs, and worked in a bakery. The old state house where they lived is still there, at Mangere Bridge. My father used to play on the mudflats. He went to Mangere Bridge Primary School.

  Their mother, my grandmother, was strict and very religious. She worked hard to give her sons a good upbringing, despite the hardships. My father's twin, Barry Weston, became a vicar. My father had a lot of different jobs before he bought the bakery in Mt Albert that he owned for many years.

  Every Sunday my parents took me and my brother Tim to the church where my Uncle Barry was the vicar. We sat in our pew listening to his sermon, my mother in a good-natured, open-mouthed trance, my father with his arms folded, stolid, proud, censorious. He always went up to Barry afterwards, shook his hand, leaned close to his ear and said something that no one else could hear, at which they both laughed. Then they stood together, still as strikingly alike as they'd been when they were boys, and spoke to the people who approached them — the old ladies, the nervous young men, the huge-bosomed matrons.

  My father was as much in charge as Barry after the sermon was over. He took people aside and spoke to them, gravely and compassionately, about their problems. He was important in his own right, a member of the vestry and an organiser of church functions. It was said that everything would fall to pieces without Ted to organise it. Barry was the 'dreamy' one, the one who 'couldn't organise his way out of a paper bag'. Ted managed the fairs and the church maintenance, and worked to keep the congregation going. Numbers did dwindle over the years, but there was always a solid core of what Barry called 'worshippers', and even, later, a new generation of married couples who came to the service and enrolled their children in the Sunday School, part of a new wave of conservatism that was supposed to be sweeping the country.

  When I was a little boy I was proud of my father and my uncle and I liked standing with them after church. I wanted everyone to know I was Ted Weston's son. But when I was a teenager things changed. There were certain words I began to have a bad feeling about. Worshippers. Ministry. Sharing. My father and Barry had a particular hushed, special way of saying them. It started to grate on me. I noticed other things. When a difficult subject came up, instead of talking about it directly, my father would say to us, 'I'll just tell you a little story.' He'd begin his tale in a low, syrupy voice, and it always ended up with a moral, a lesson we were to take from it.

  'So you see,' he'd say, 'I'm just trying to show you . . .'

  He and Barry 'showed' adults too, when they came up after church. The worshippers nodded and blinked as they listened to the stories designed to teach them this or that, and they turned out bleak, watery smiles as Ted and Barry encouraged and shared, and praised them for their little triumphs.

  'Your son's had so many problems. And now he's doing so well. It must be wonderful for you.'

  'Having your family around you, Mrs Cranston. It's wonderful for you, isn't it?'

  'Up and about now, Bob? How wonderful.'

  Often you sensed that things weren't actually wonderful, or at least were more complex than Barry would allow, but there was something smothering and final about his pronouncements; the parishioner's role was to bob his head, to smile bashfully, and to agree. It was all wonderful.

  For the most part, the congregation were so humble and obedient that it used to give me a slightly disgusted feeling. I began to dislike being 'shown' things, and to wince at Barry's patronising social worker tone, which he used everywhere, even with ordinary, successful people who were more sophisticated than he was.

  Barry used to say, 'I am one who listens.' But he was too busy doing God's work to notice whether people received his pearls of wisdom with gratitude, or with the strained look of someone who had been handed a hideous, inappropriate present and was being forced to be polite about it.

  I squirmed about these things, and eventually they put me off the church. My younger brother, Tim, went regularly. He stood in line with Ted and Barry after sermons, and even began to imitate their manner towards the congregation. He was said to be a fine, steady young man, a perfect candidate for the ministry. He was charming and good-looking and polite. He had his sensible, caring tone down pat. The old ladies loved him.

  My father had sensed me pulling away from the church, but he knew he could rely on Tim to stick with it. There were no difficult, critical aspects to Tim's character. He was similar to my father, in that he enjoyed lording it over simple people, in a way that would have made my mother embarrassed. Tim couldn't get enough of good works, and after he married, he and his wife kept going to Barry's church and sent their kids to Sunday School there.

  Tim and Dad were especially close but that's not to say that I didn't get on with them. We were a happy family. My mother had a sunny nature and if there were things about the church that she disliked she glossed over them. The furthest she went was a little exasperated grimace every now and then, when Dad and Barry were being especially pompous.

  At a family barbecue one day the conversation turned to education. I stared out the window, glazed with boredom, as members of the family held forth. Barry and Dad sat together, very upright and dignified, and if anyone got excited, one or other would hold up his hand, gravely shake his head to restrain the hothead cousin or nephew, and offer a little story to show the way. There were predictable elements to the stories. One was that no one was to 'think himself ', or get ideas, above his station; we were all equal, and no one should be thought superior even if he had achieved more than other folk. Barry and Dad did not tolerate the sin of pride; they were assiduous levellers.

  Barry's son, Dan Weston, a clever, quiet boy of thirteen, had described boys in the lower forms of his school as 'thick'. Barry looked sorrowful.

  'It worries me when you talk that way, Dan. People might think you're . . . Let me tell you a little story. A man I knew had a son who was dux of his grammar school. Clever, like you. And do you know what happened to him? Well. The poor boy committed suicide.'

  Dan stared strangely at his father.

  Barry went on. 'What about that chap we went to school with, Ted? Brilliant scholar — what was his name? Sam, Simon, something? Had a bright future. He went right off the rails. By the end he was . . . Well, put it this way, Dan, he was going through bins.'

  Barry put his head on one side, his voice clogged with regret, his eyes watchful, hard. 'So I'm just trying to show you . . .'

  Tim chimed in with some inane platitude. I glanced up, and happened to see Barry give Dad a wink that was patronisingly approving of Tim, but somehow toadish and shrewd too. I was struck by the slyness of the wink, and by Dad's expression as he acknowledged it. It was as if I'd glimpsed, for the first time, a secret current that ran between my father and uncle, a current that seemed to me, at that moment, to have something to do with the will to power. It was an odd thing to notice, in a flash like that. I wondered about it. Did Dad and Barry wink at each other over the heads of their congregation? Was there cynicism in them, hidden beneath their godliness?

  ***

  Since he'd grown up poor, Dad had strong feelings about money. He talked about bills when they came in, and he was often up in arms because he thought the electricity company was wasteful and we were paying too much. When I look back, I think money (along with 'hard work') was held up in our house almost as a thing to worship, although Dad would never have admitted that the sin of avarice lurked in our house.

  I met my girlfriend Emily at university, and I took her to lunch with my parents to introduce them. Emily was having a dispute with the boss at the café where she worked. Dad didn't like the idea of someone being underpaid and he started to advise her, but she looked distracted, and after a moment she tossed her hair and said, 'Oh, it's only money.' I laughed. Dad stared. She ignored him. I could tell by her glances at me that she k
new there was something in the air. He kept staring at her all through lunch. He looked as if he wanted to kill her. He didn't say anything direct to me, but Emily made him bristle, and it took a long time for him to warm to her.

  Tim's wife, Alison, was studying to be an eye surgeon. Tim had a patchy series of jobs before deciding to become a real estate agent, specialising in commercial property. He talked a lot about his ventures and made himself out to be a terrific entrepreneur, but I got the impression he wasn't consistently successful, and that he relied on Alison to bring in the serious money. There was something striving and fake about him, striding around with his briefcase, shouting into his mobile phone. He'd looked much the same when he was a little boy playing grown-ups. My notion of Tim, if I ever thought about it, was that he was incompetent in most things he tried because he wasn't very bright, but that he had such an aggressive, energetic personality that he managed to convince people he knew what he was doing. He liked telling the family about the tough business calls he'd made. 'Someone has to make the hard decisions,' he'd say. Among our extended family it was understood that Tim was the sensible one in money matters. I was supposed to be bit of a spendthrift, what with my posh, flighty girlfriend and my refusal to participate in long discussions about bills and bargains and the right appliances to buy.

  I studied law and started working in a firm after I'd qualified. I had a mostly permanent relationship with Emily. Tim and Alison had a couple of kids, and bought themselves a house.

  We had a bach a few hours' drive away from Auckland and we spent all our holidays there. Dad had a boat he took out fishing and Barry and his family used to come and stay. It was a nice place that my parents had bought when it was just a little shack. They'd built onto it, and made it big enough for the family. We spent all our summers there, swimming, fishing, walking out onto the estuary, having picnics. We used it as often as we could. When Tim was married and I was going out with Emily we shared it, sometimes all squeezing into it together.