After all, what would be left of the sense of achievement if everyone went up in the world?
And twice a week he had a run to Kaikoura where he took general freight for the stock firms. There he noticed Rebecca, who was a hairdresser in the small salon across from the hotel: next to a second-hand caryard ringed with netting and aflutter with red and green bunting, where the salesman played his fingers into the tread of tyres with the fervency of Thomas exploring the wounds of Christ.
As he ate his quiche and fries, drank Old Dark, David could see Rebecca talking to the middle-aged women as she washed their hair, cut it, sat them under the driers — or, rather, responding to their talk with a smile and few words of her own. She had a round, nondescript face, but over two or three lunchtimes David noticed that she was tall and solid, well able to bear the weight of a man, and the signs were that she had good hips and tits beneath her rather loose-fitting smock. Sometimes at a slack time she would stand looking out into the street, and catch his eye across the thoroughfare. Her bland, doughy face never altered its expression, but neither were her eyes quick to disengage. Long hours in the cab, the reviving fitness and loneliness, made David keen to get to know her.
On a still day, when the heat had drawn a sea mist into the town, he crossed the road after his lunch and stopped in the doorway of the hair salon. ‘Any chance of a quick cut?’ he said. ‘It’s not only women, is it?’ He spoke to Rebecca, but she transferred the question with a glance to Jeanne, who owned the salon. ‘No problem,’ said Jeanne. ‘Rebecca can take you in fifteen minutes or so.’
David knew he could return the favour in a good deal less time, but he just smiled and thanked them, and went down to the foreshore shingle, which was immediately behind the shops. He’d never found playing the smart arse to be a very productive line. He enjoyed the surge of the sea air and watched the whale spotting boats at a distance. He thought of Jocelyn Parks whom he’d first met on the observation platform of the gondola restaurant, and united with so often after: the strength of her long, pale arms on his buttocks as she urged him into her; the regretful gasp she gave when he drew out of her for a time to forestall climax; the low laugh when he went in again. The greatest aphrodisiac is a partner’s pleasure. In Jocelyn’s spare bedroom had been a quality print of Raeburn’s ‘Mrs Scott Moncrieff’, and so often was it in his line of sight while locked in extremis, that the painting became utterly suffused with an almost unbearable eroticism.
How many loving and generous women could he expect? Let there be prayers of gratitude for Mrs Parks, but he didn’t dare hope that Rebecca would be any, or sufficient, consolation. He knew that he was coming down in the world.
‘You want much off?’ said Rebecca later. She was washing his hair, and the shaped lip of the basin tipped his head well back. The swell of her breasts under blouse and smock bumped his cheek in a practical way as she massaged shampoo in.
‘Just a good trim,’ David said. There were all the warm, blatant scents of the salon, but, when she was closest, a slight whiff of meat pie and instant coffee. She and Jeanne talked together as if, being prone, David was invisible, and only when he’d been placed upright in front of a mirror did he have any opportunity to start up a conversation. Rebecca obviously found his tale of twice-weekly visits to the town less interesting than Jeanne’s account of the Lucas wedding reception at which the cake stand had collapsed upon the bridesmaids.
‘Oh, yeah?’ Rebecca said when David told her how he’d seen her from the hotel ‘Is that right?’ she said, after he offered the obvious flattery in his opinion that she was good at her job. When there wasn’t much hair left to be cut, he asked her if she had a coffee break and if she’d like to share it. ‘I’m married,’ she said matter-of-factly, and she held up the hand with the ring, as if it would make some difference to his intention.
‘Just a coffee,’ David said. ‘Someone to talk to before I start back again.’
‘No thanks,’ she said.
‘Maybe next time I’m up?’ but Rebecca began to talk to Jeanne about the Lucas wedding again. Mr Lucas paid for a helicopter to take the couple to Hanmer for the first night of their honeymoon, and the bride threw her bouquet out. It burst in the rotor swirl of air and the flowers fell over the guests, Jeanne said, so that a score of women were able to claim they’d be next.
David was close enough to Rebecca to confirm that she had a plain, heavy face, but also that her legs and arms were shapely in a large-scale way, that her powerful neck rising from the pale blouse and worn, blue smock, was smoothly white, had a slightly waxy sheen, like the core of a fresh leek. He imagined his mouth there, the pulse quickening, a slow flush rising.
Over several visits he continued to call into the salon, at first just putting his head around the chipped, blue doorway for a few words with both of them before going over to the hotel, but then Rebecca began going for a coffee with him on her break.
‘Just as long as you realise you’ll get nothing out of me, you know. I’m married.’ And she held up a large hand with its very modest band. ‘All clear on that?’
‘Sure,’ said David. ‘It’s just nice to have someone to talk to on the days I come through.’
So it was, but David imagined that Rebecca must often have been bored with hairdos, in a town of a few thousand people whose claim to fame was the sperm whales passing offshore. He told her stories of Australia and Europe, some of them his own, some borrowed to impress. He knew he was making progress when she asked him not to come to the salon any more; that she’d meet him at the beach frontage, or the corner past the hotel. It showed that she’d become aware that it could seem they were meeting for sex, and, because she persisted despite that, the possibility of it being so was tacitly admitted. ‘I don’t mind meeting to talk,’ she said, ‘just as long as you know you won’t get anything out of me.’ Again he avoided the cheap and obvious rejoinder.
In a prosaic sort of way she was quite interested in his life: where he lived, how efficient a housekeeper he was for himself, why he had given up farming, the expense of travelling overseas. Her own talk was of the salon, and gradually, increasingly, her home circumstances. There wasn’t anything else. Jeanne was okay to work for, but there weren’t any opportunities, Rebecca said, no future in it, not at all. Her husband was a crayfisherman, but didn’t have a boat, or quota, of his own. Fishing was getting tougher. ‘It’s all a percentage catch sort of thing,’ she said.
Sometimes they sat on the marram grass and shingle bank by the sea; sometimes they would sit in the truck cab at the lookout, or by the seal colony. The more it was obvious they had little in common, the more he relaxed, and the more she appealed to him. He wanted only one sort of contact with her; nothing else to give purchase on either side for sensitivity, or obligation, or pain.
Rebecca’s Nan was in her eighties, almost completely cut off from life by Alzheimer’s disease. We begin by being enshrined in our bodies, and end by being imprisoned there. She had a small unit by the overhead bridge, and David and Rebecca first met there on a day the southerly made it too cold for the foreshore, or even the cab of the truck. ‘I have to do her hair later, you see,’ said Rebecca as additional justification.
‘Is it a stew today?’ asked the old woman as David entered the living room. ‘I hate any meat disguised with a gravy. You never know what’s gone into it, do you.’ She wasn’t sick, but her voice had the terminal hoarseness of old age, and her stockinged feet were uneven and discoloured, like a bag of marbles.
‘She thinks you’re Meals on Wheels,’ Rebecca explained.
‘No, no, meat should be cooked alone and plainly visible,’ said Nan firmly, as though Rebecca had been sticking up for stew.
‘Nice to meet you,’ said David.
‘I’ll just make your bed, Nan, then we’ll have a cuppa together.’
There was just the toilet-cum-bathroom, a sitting room with its annex kitchenette, and the one single bedroom into which the old woman’s country marriage bed was
shoehorned so that there was barely space to walk around the walls. Rebecca’s Nan talked of the eleven pieces of junk mail she’d received that very morning, while David followed her granddaughter into the bedroom.
‘Stop it,’ said Rebecca when he came close behind her and gripped her hips, but all that was gathered in the room of hopelessness, loss and decay became the powerful incitement to defiance. ‘She’s just out there, and I have to be back to help Jeanne by two,’ but she was easily toppled from the alley alongside the bed on to the handmade quilt of her Nan’s life, which smelled of Deep Heat, unwashed wool and exhalations of bewilderment. ‘What on earth would I want with power tools, even at half price,’ said Rebecca’s Nan. Rebecca tried to close the door completely with a kick, but David was already sitting on her to undo her salon smock, her blouse, her skirt. She knew it was no use showing him her wedding ring again.
‘Easy on now,’ she said. ‘Easy on. Nan’s just out there.’ She had a wide, white belly with the umbilical twist like a small delicacy on an uncooked pastry top, and a pink welt beneath her breasts from the edge of the bra.
‘They clog up the box for the good mail,’ said the old woman. ‘I don’t want any hot-air balloon rides. I don’t want country and western music, exercise bars, or trolleys to wind up garden hoses.’
Rebecca made little noise during it. Her head went progressively back with an open-mouthed smile. The old woman’s walking stick tapped with unaccustomed and poltergeistal energy on the bed end where it hung, and Rebecca brought her heavy arms and legs around David’s back to restrain his efforts to get maximum height for each plunge.
The pleasure was greater than he’d anticipated: but then it always was. Such joy exits only in the moment of attainment.
‘Did I see the man bringing me a dinner?’
‘I’ll get you something in a minute, Nan, when I’m finished here.’
Had a Basque with a bomb, a serial garrotter, a charismatic evangelist, the ghost of Christmas past, come in to do the three of them mortal harm, they could not have broken from their preoccupations — David and Rebecca striking the sparks of life itself, and Nan sifting the embers.
‘Alan never writes to me at all,’ said the old woman firmly.
‘He does, Nan. You know he does.’ Rebecca’s breasts were impressive, covering all of her chest, even when she was underneath. David tried to wrestle her on top so that gravity would show them to best advantage.
‘Junk mail’s all I get. Nothing personal at all. Stuff you’re supposed to spend money on. Nothing from people you really know.’
The walking stick smartly struck the moments and movements of the struggle, many more than a grandfather’s twelve, until they were locked together, quite still, in that instant which the French call the little death, and the only sound was Rebecca’s sigh and his deep breathing.
They dressed with difficulty in the ditch between bed and wall, and then went back into the living room, waking Nan so that she started in the chair. ‘My goodness, where did you come from, Rebecca? How long have you been in there?’
‘I was making your bed, Nan. You know.’ Rebecca went to the kitchenette and began to make a cup of tea for all three.
Nan put her hand on David’s with surprising speed. ‘Not out on the boat today?’ she said. ‘That’s nice. You should have more time with Rebecca.’
‘I’m late for the salon as it is,’ said Rebecca.
David just smiled. To find pleasure in life was quite enough without expecting logic with it. When reason can’t be found, rhyme is some satisfaction.
‘What was it I was saying?’ asked Nan.
‘Don’t think that you’re going to get that out of me again,’ said Rebecca, giving him his cup. ‘I’m happily married.’
‘Do you think the postman’s been?’ asked Nan.
He did, though. Not every time that he made the round trip, not as often as he wished, but on occasions enough to keep him hopeful, she agreed to his suggestion that they should visit her Nan in the lunch hour. Tidying the bedroom, Rebecca said, and through the partly open door she would maintain a sort of desultory parallel conversation with the old woman, both of them caring little for the words they used, and with their interest elsewhere. Each time there was the same ritual. He would snare her in the confined margins of the Deep Heat room: each time her small resistance to support the pretence that his intention was unexpected, each time the faded salon smock removed to show the large nipples, darkly compressed beneath the fabric of the cups. She grappled him in the same way each time, no interest in variety, until the expanse of her white belly had a thick sheen of sweat and their thighs smacked like paddles. No tender and mutual absorption, but instead straining face to face as if in dispute concerning his cock between them.
It was what he deserved, wasn’t it? It was all that he was capable of offering. He had given up any idea of love in regard to a woman: that far place in poetry and homily, which continued to recede. Love wasn’t for the likes of him, was it? And always close behind love was the pain of its betrayal. Family had taught David that.
They were at it when the crayfish husband came one sunny lunchtime, when the sea had let him down perhaps, and he heard the noises even before he began to talk to Nan, and walked straight on by before she could begin to wonder how he managed to arrive twice — right into the bedroom with so little space to stand that he climbed onto the bed with them in his amazement and anger. A fisherman knows how to use his hands and, even in the tumult of the struggle the three of them made, there on Nan’s marriage bed, he wasted only a few blows on David before concentrating on his wife. David ran in shirt and boxer shorts past Nan, put on his trousers in the confined porch — where he could hear the noises from the bedroom — ran three blocks more to his truck. Tears of fear and remorse were driven back towards his ears. ‘Turn the television down,’ complained Nan in the empty sitting room. ‘How can I hear myself think with such a racket.’
All the way back to Gore Bay, David disciplined himself to keep within the speed limit, and he spent just long enough at the bach to lift his cash and stash of shit, a few personal things that had survived prison, and leave a note for Samuels Bros, that he’d been called away by sudden family illness. He then began hitching back the way he’d come, hoping to confuse anyone interested in his movements. He passed through Kaikoura before dark with a refrigeration engineer and his family, already becoming accustomed to a new name, and oblivious to the children’s game of guessing the colours of oncoming vehicles. The through road to Blenheim didn’t pass the salon, where Jeanne still told of the helicopter wedding perhaps, or the unit by the overbridge where Nan’s incapacity for short-term memory would surely save her from everything except the first shock.
What had happened there, dear God?
‘Green, green. Yes.’
‘It isn’t. It’s blue.’
‘Green. Green.’
‘Bloody cheat.’
‘Just shut up.’
‘Cheat.’
‘I’ve won, and you can’t take it.’
‘Knock it off, you two. I won’t tell you again.’
Some people seem to get away with expressing their weaknesses without much consequence; others have no luck. Or maybe it’s that they don’t learn their lessons fast enough. He’d done it this time, David knew. No more chances to put things behind him, to straighten himself out — all the platitudes to excuse a past. He’d gone too far to be able to return and make any more than a pretence to be like those people who could live frankly and with some self-esteem. Acid from his stomach rose to the back of his throat; his hands clenched as if he were in some free fall and knew, even as he counted, that there was no rip-cord. He felt his body throb with an agony which was part remorse, part horrified sympathy for Rebecca, but most essentially just pity for his own predicament.
‘Do you do much fishing yourself?’ asked the refrigeration engineer as he drove along the rocky coast, past surfcasters and crayfish stalls. His wife was
inspecting her nails, his boys were selecting jubes from the bag — again by colour.
‘Not a lot, no,’ said David.
‘Heading any further north than Blenheim?’
‘No, no plans for that,’ said David, but he had: he wanted to reach Wellington where Chris lived, someone he could rely on for help.
THIRTY
From Tolly’s dinghy at the pink float, well out in the sound, the buildings of the Slaven Centre were pleasantly distant, but the greater satisfaction was that no solid ground linked them. Between the two in the boat and anything that happened at Mahakipawa, was a disconnecting fluidity. Other times, other selves, as well as other places, could be kept at some remove by the green and sinuous ocean arm of the sound. The weak chop apologetic on the dinghy, which sidled on its anchor rope in response. The bright sun sharply metallic in faceted reflection from the water: both David and Lucy wore dark sunglasses and relaxed against the bleached canvas cushions. Were they hidden there perhaps? Were they out of sight and out of mind for the world, for Harlequin, for any past and any future?
Lucy had caught one large, blue cod, which had come up dark and spiralling from the depths, and it lay on the slatted bottom of the boat, its passionate colours drying and beginning to fade.
David stroked Lucy’s warm forearm and said he felt like making love. She reminded him of Tolly’s telescope: quite possibly half of Takahe were clustered round it, and they’d be visible from other vantages in the centre too. When he asked where those others might be, Lucy just smiled and her eyebrows lifted at the rims of her dark glasses. Did she want to talk about Schweitzer? David had just themselves on his mind.
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