by Bowes, K T
The ‘shaker’ was a man given the job of shaking hands and handing out leaflets. He pumped Tama’s hand ardently and thanked him four times for coming. “Are you new here?” he said, his eyes glinting with the scent of fresh blood.
“We’re just visiting,” Hana said, giving Tama a hearty shove towards the seating area and snagging a leaflet as she dived past. “They mean well,” she hissed as they passed a group of young people.
“They’re scary!” Tama whined. “Are you sure they only want my soul?”
“Yeah, pretty much,” Hana sighed, wishing she felt less jaded. “But you did great, sweetheart. Logan would have left after the hugger but you kept going. Well done.”
“Logan would’ve left before the hugger!” Tama corrected her.
They found seats away from the gathered knots of people, greeted by well-meaning people along the way. Tama stared at Hana in surprise. “Do you know everyone in Hamilton?” he demanded.
“To be fair, I’ve been in Christian circles for a lot of years,” Hana replied. “Churches are like big washing machines; we go round and round and potentially come out cleaner.” Hana recognised signs that Tama felt overwhelmed and sheltered him as best as she could.
Their ineptitude at locating anyone in the dimly lit atmosphere meant Lucy had to find them. She sat alone in the back row looking sad and isolated until she spotted them further along. She waved to Hana as she and Tama screwed their heads round trying to find her. “There she is!” Hana said and nudged Tama. His expression became bashful.
“Thank you for coming,” Lucy gushed, hugging Hana and Tama in turn. His eyes grew round as Lucy’s enthusiasm mimicked that of the lady on the door and he glanced at her sideways. Hana shook her head at him and winked. “I didn’t know if you meant it,” Lucy said, raising her voice over the band’s first chords.
“I try not to say things I don’t mean,” Hana reassured her, Lucy’s enthusiasm making the journey out into the cold worthwhile.
Lucy sat between them as though seeking shelter and Hana noticed a group of young adults gathered in a row of seats in front. She watched as they whispered to each other, turning around and staring at Lucy and her guests. Hana felt anger prickle inside her chest at their rudeness, especially in a place designated as safe and when they turned again as one and stared in their direction, she lost her patience. “Hi!” she yelled at the top of her voice, just as the band paused between beautiful, melodic background songs. Hana eyeballed each one of the youths, communicating the reprimand through her wooden smile and flashing green eyes. She resembled a lunatic, waving frantically like a redheaded Barbie doll and the reaction was instant. The group faced the front like a choreographic move and resisted the urge to stare again. “Perhaps their consciences finally kicked in,” Hana whispered to Lucy. One could always hope.
Tama put his arm protectively around his new girlfriend and Hana flanked her other side. Between them they offered Du Rose solidarity. Tama didn’t seem freaked out by the worship which was loud and meaningful, but Hana felt chided by the message of the preacher. His style was different to Pastor Allen’s as he moved around the front of the church, forcing his audience to follow with their eyes and not fall asleep. He was energetic and controversial with a clear brief not to sugar coat his message. “We are all only one heartbeat away from eternity.”
Hana shouldn’t have needed reminding, but she did. Her first husband had gone to work one day and not returned and she knew everything existed by the grace of God. She prayed silently with honesty and self-awareness. If she was one heartbeat away from eternity, perhaps it was time to get her own life in order instead of meddling in everyone else’s. The preach was about making it right with God but convicted Hana at another level as she contemplated her spat with Logan. Life was too short and she ached to seek Logan’s forgiveness as well as her maker’s.
As they stood to sing the final hymn, it hit her with such clarity she sat down with a bump. Tama looked across at her in concern. He squatted in front of Lucy and whispered in Hana’s ear. “What’s up, Ma?”
Hana shook her head. “I’m fine but I know what Logan’s up to.”
At the end of the service, Tama handed her the car keys. “I’m going to an all-night cafe with Lucy and some of her nicer friends,” he said. “Will you be ok on your own?”
Hana nodded and kissed him on the cheek, hurrying home as fast as she dared without getting a speeding ticket. Taking a deep breath, she let herself into the unit, discovering Logan and her daughter laid on the lounge rug. Logan balanced on his side smiling at Phoenix, who kicked her legs beneath the baby gym. They both looked as Hana came in, kicked her boots off and sat on the sofa. “Hey.” Logan smiled at his wife. He looked gorgeous; his grey eyes surrounded by long black lashes were happy and his hair flopped forwards over his eyebrows. He lay on his side, resting his body on one elbow with his hand against the left side of his face. He glanced at Hana and flicked a dangling bear so it jiggled and Phoenix giggled.
“Listen,” he said with excitement. “Say it again, Phoe. Dada, dada.”
The little girl cooed and waved her arms and legs, beaming at her father. She pursed her rosebud lips and repeated his words, “Dadadadada!”
Hana laughed and clapped, biting her bottom lip with pleasure. “You’re so lucky!” she said to her husband and he beamed.
“I’ll teach her to say Mama too,” he promised.
Hana smiled. “She was always going to say Dada first,” she said generously. “She adores you.”
Phoenix grew tired of performing to order after a while and the novelty of her parents’ elation wore thin. She became fractious and Hana fed her to sleep, sitting on the sofa while Logan made a drink. He brought the mug of tea and sat next to his wife, gently massaging the baby’s tiny feet through the sleep suit as she drank and snoozed. “I’ve worked it out,” Hana said quietly, taking the mug. “Call it divine intervention.”
“I thought you might,” Logan replied and his wife showed her surprise, emerald eyes widening as she turned to face him.
“Why?”
Logan sighed and put both arms behind his head, leaning back against the seat. His shirt came up and showed his stomach and Hana resisted the urge to stroke the smooth olive skin beneath. “Because we agreed we’d be honest with each other and I don’t want to keep secrets. You’re an intelligent woman and I wanted you to work it out. But I needed to give you time to understand my reasons for acting as I have.”
Hana nodded once and felt a wave of sadness. One heartbeat away from eternity. “I’d have liked the chance to say goodbye,” she said and a glossy tear rolled down her cheek.
Logan put his arm around her. “No time. I needed to move him as soon as he’d done that last Level 3 assessment. He achieved Level 3 with Excellence based on internal assessments, without having to set foot in any of his exams. It had to be that way. That was the internal assessment he sat last week when I asked you to leave him alone. I organised it and my offsider in the department sat with him while he did it. I wanted to know he’d leave here with everything he needed. He’s got university entrance and can do whatever he needs to provide for his family.”
“But he’s a murderer,” Hana said. “How on earth can he live with that?”
“Firstly, James only thinks he’s a murderer, not that he’d listen to me and secondly it was self-defence. He was waiting for Matron to fetch the van to do the run to the doctors and saw Collins through the dining room window. He went to ask for that damn plane and they argued. Collins attacked him with the shovel and from what James says, the man was high and didn’t make sense. He prodded the boy with it but kept falling over. James said the man went mad, telling him he was a dirty immigrant and should go home. The boy snapped, grabbed the spade and jabbed Collins in the chest with the handle. He reckons Collins fell backwards straight into the trench.”
“So he covered the body and went off to the doctor’s about an infected toe?” Hana was incredulous. “He
should have stayed and faced what he did. This will haunt him for the rest of his life. We don’t get to be judge and jury on stuff like this, Logan; it’s wrong!”
Logan shook his head. “Collins was moving around when James left. He was thrashing around trying to get out of the mud and yelling at James. The biology teacher did it, Hana, not the kid. The post-mortem said he was hit in the face by the metal end of the shovel and James is adamant he poked him in the chest with the handle. It doesn’t fit with a blunt force trauma to Collins’ face. Peterson did it and buried him. Would you rather James stayed here and waited it out while his family starved in a village in Korea, all their dreams of solvency gone? He was their last hope, Hana. I needed to give him a chance to start over somewhere else.”
“It’s not right,” Hana said. “I don’t know if I can live with this.”
“I know it doesn’t help,” Logan said gently, “but Collins sold dope to the older boys. He was pedalling it in school, not to the boarders thank goodness, but to the day boys. He ran a wholesale business from that shed by the tennis courts.”
Hana shook her head to clear her brain. “Why did nobody notice? And how did you get James out of the country? Bodie got called into work to go and see a student at the boarding house so the cops are looking for him.”
Logan frowned and Hana’s body tensed in anticipation. “Che helped me. His guys shipped James out through a back door. I gave him cash from the sale of my Triumph so it’s untraceable and away he went, to a new life and hopefully a good job.”
“Not Che!” Hana cried, disturbing Phoenix who splayed her arms in her sleep. “I thought you cut ties with the Triads!”
“I have,” Logan replied through gritted teeth. “But I needed him to do this. It’ll be fine.”
“No it won’t! You’ll owe Che now and what will he demand in return?”
“Nothing, Hana.” Logan smoothed his hand over her red curls. “Trust me.”
“But I’d have liked to see James first,” Hana maintained.
Logan interjected, “No, Hana! You’d have tried to convince him to do the right thing. He was terrified. It started that day in the office when you came over and he kept saying he wanted to go home. He was so odd it began unravelling then. I asked him about it and that night, Pete caught him trying to take an overdose of stuff; just a cocktail of crap. He was a mess.”
“Then he should have seen a doctor, a mental health worker and a pastor! Not a bunch of Triad henchmen,” Hana bit, feeling upset and tainted by her guilty knowledge. “What will happen to the biology teacher? Have they charged him with murder?”
“Just about. It’s a matter of hours according to Odering because a lot of the evidence is circumstantial.”
“So why move James?” Hana stuck her chin out and looked defiant. “Why not leave him here?”
Logan shook his head. “One of the other boys saw him argue with Collins and gave a statement to Odering last night. He called his mother and she drove down and took him to the police station. James needed to leave. He couldn’t cope with any more dealings with the cops. He was a wreck as it was. Cops are often corrupt where he comes from and he didn’t handle their questions well, especially as he believed he’d killed Collins. He thumped Bodie, did you know that?”
Hana nodded. “So I gathered.” She thought back to the cut on Bo’s face and James’ apology in Logan’s office. He wasn’t saying sorry for hitting, but for hitting him. “Did you drive him away this afternoon when you used the car?” she asked sadly.
Logan nodded and stretched again. “I met Che’s guys at a service station in South Auckland and James went off with them. He seemed happy to be going. He gave me this regal bow and then ruined it by sobbing all over my shirt. Oh...” Logan reached down and grappled around in his front pocket, pulling out a crumpled envelope with Hana’s name on. “He asked me to give you this.”
Hana took the envelope in her hand, twisting it over and over, looking at the neat, spiky writing. She thought about the frightened Year 9, forgetting to answer to the western name he’d chosen for himself and constantly lost in the school building. He’d sat with Hana often in the days before he made friends. She helped him get a part-time job so he could buy his own textbooks without bothering his mother in Korea, writing a painstaking curriculum vitae over long hours of word switching and trying to make him sound like a good candidate. James loved Phoenix and was kind to Jas after the accident with Action Man, rebuilding him limb by limb and gluing on the mop of black hair. Hana sniffed. “The hair James glued onto Action Man is lost in a hand dryer.” She rubbed a hand roughly across her eyes. “Unless McDonald’s really did post it back to Jas.”
While Logan winded Phoenix and took her to the cot, Hana unfolded the envelope and slipped her fingernail beneath the fold. It was a tatty white envelope and the letter inside comprised of A4 lined refill paper covered in scratchy writing. She read it four times before Logan returned and the ache in her heart was still painful. Hana pushed it towards Logan and he shook his head. “It’s ok, babe. It’s private so I don’t need to read it but you know you can’t keep it, don’t you? ”
‘Dearest Miss,
You have been like mother and friend to me. I will not forget. You did give me your own food when I missed breakfast and you help me get job. But best, is that you listen to me, accept me and understand me. That one thing had more value than all others put together. Home has been calling me for a long while and all this killings has made me need family more than ever. Mr Du Rose has given me chance to be somebody and I am grateful. I will make you proud of me. One day, my name will make you smile.
Your friend for evermore.
James.’
Hana read the precious letter one final time and folded it in half as Logan held his hand out. She placed it into his palm with obvious reluctance. Her husband gave a sad smile and pushed the refill back into the envelope before moving out of Hana’s sight. She heard the click of the barbeque lighter and smelled the paper burning, as her husband destroyed a letter which could be misread by other eyes seeking a murderer in the face of a frightened, teenage boy, who’d already spent far too long away from home.
Chapter 26
Hana lifted her chin into the bracing fresh air as she wandered along the main road, trying to clear her head. Red coils streamed out behind her and she searched for peace, connecting with the sleeping baby in the pram. Phoenix stirred and Hana stopped and stroked the soft cheek with her hand before releasing the tiny thumb from the blankets and watching her baby push it between her lips.
Hana thought of James and felt the heaviness descend over her heart. Logan had burned her letter and then taken her to bed to console her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he’d whispered in the darkness, resting his weight on one elbow to avoid crushing her. ‘I don’t know how else we could have done it.’ Hana shook her head and wondered if it would always be that way, their different moral codes colliding and inflicting damage and destruction wherever they touched.
Hana’s sedentary life jarred against the taste of danger which rose without warning from her husband’s past, flooring her with its outlandish violence and betraying the terrifying nature of the line he once walked. “Why involve Che again?” she raged under her breath, remembering how the Triad queen had stared at her with spiteful, gimlet eyes. The ruthlessness in the woman’s face had stripped her bare and Logan’s easy acceptance of their ways drove a wedge between them which rocked their young marriage to its core. But Hana Du Rose loved her husband and if he’d moved James out of New Zealand, she had to believe it was for the best. She just dreaded the awkward moment when the police demanded to know where their suspect was and Hana found her son standing before her with his eyebrow raised in disgust. One heartbeat away from eternity. The phrase caught at her imagination and wouldn’t go away. “We’re all headed for eternity,” Hana grumbled, “but where we get to spend it is the real question.”
Her feet took her up the road to the rest home where her old frien
d lived. Father Sinbad welcomed her as enthusiastically as always, but the sight of the oxygen mask over his face alarmed Hana. “What’s wrong?” She parked the pram in the corner and perched on his bed, reaching for his wrinkled hand. His wheelchair looked empty by the window, bisected by a shaft of brilliant light as its owner fought for each breath.
“The wind is cold but the sun’s shining,” Hana said, glad Father Sinbad’s blind eyes couldn’t see the terror on her face. “It’s nice in your wheelchair.”
“Aye,” he rasped. “Nice.”
“Is this what holidays do for you?” Hana asked, lightening her voice to mask the fear. “Maybe I shouldn’t bother.”
“Oh ye know,” Father Sinbad rasped, momentarily pulling the mask down so he could speak. “I was always in da waitin’ room for de Lord. I be tinking dat he’s left da throne room and is on his way down for me.”
“No!” Hana shouted in her vehemence. “Don’t say that! It’s nothing, you’ll make it through!”
The old priest left the mask dangling from his ears and patted her hand beneath giant, gnarled fingers bent from twisting rosary beads. “I’m tired me darlin’, tired of bein’ blinded, tired of bein’ old and tired of bein’ here on dis planet anymore. I want to run and jump and dance wit me maker. It’s time for me to go, Hana Du Rose. Be pleased for me.”
“I can’t be pleased,” Hana whispered. “Don’t ask me to be.” The tears came thick and fast, taking her by surprise. “I’ll be lost without you. I need you to be here; please don’t give up. Don’t leave me.” A breath caught in her chest, pausing her selfish tirade and Father Sinbad gave her a beatific smile and squeezed her hand.