by Fiona Kidman
‘From what I hear there’s more than her been damaged. What about my sister? She’s in the hospital down south.’
‘I know,’ Janice said. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t do nothing.’
‘Auntie’s going to be all right,’ Wiremu said. ‘She wasn’t cut bad.’
‘I don’t want you bringing fancy city ways here,’ Mere said. She was speaking to them both. ‘No booze, none of that other stuff, you know.’
‘No trouble, Ma,’ Wiremu said. ‘Honest. I come back home for peace and quiet and some of your good kai.’
Finally, Mere said to Janice, ‘Well, I suppose if you’re good enough for my son you’re good enough for me.’ The subject of marriage never came up again.
Janice gave birth to her and Wiremu’s son, who they would call Patariki, with the help of Mere and the women who lived there in the bush. The electricity, fed with a generator, had gone on and off while she was in labour, so that she gave birth by the light of kerosene lanterns. Patariki looked like a small dark eel when she first held him, with a shock of black hair standing on end. He was a tough little guy. He needed to be. The roof of their house was all but caving in; winter draughts leaked around the windowsills. There were no locks on the doors — that went without saying because people came and went in one another’s houses. Wiremu got some seasonal farm work for a time, but he had to travel so far to the jobs it wasn’t worth it. At least they managed to save for a new corrugated-iron roof; it made a difference. They put a roof on Mere’s house, too. Mere said, that girl of Wiremu’s, she’s a hard worker: it was high praise.
They grew vegetables, and some days they would get in one of the old cars at the settlement and drive out to the coast to catch fish and collect kina. Once a month, when their benefits were due, they went to Kohukohu and caught the ferry over to Rawene to buy supplies, have takeaways for a treat. Heaven, and later, Patariki, caught a bus to school.
‘Often as not,’ Janice said, ‘they’d come home and tell me they missed the bus. No good giving them a hiding, wouldn’t do no darn good. Wiremu says to me, What’s the point, they ain’t never going to be the prime minister. We were so darn happy, you wouldn’t believe. Well, I think Wiremu was, even though he reckoned he’d missed a bus or two of his own in his day. His uncle come up once from Auckland, in his ute. Wiremu borrowed it off him and took me all the way to Cape Reinga. We got to that place where the two oceans meet and you can see the walls of water smashing up against one another. It’s the place where the spirits fly off when you’re dead. Wiremu says to me, One day you an’ me will be gone and we’ll be off over the sea. And come another time, the children will follow.
‘I said, Heaven too? Though that wasn’t fair ’cause Wiremu always treated Heaven like she was his kid. Still, I could see stuff going through his head. He says, Heaven will find her way. I didn’t know what he meant by that, but I let it go anyway.
‘We come to Kohukohu one day, just to stock up on a few odds and ends — it’s only a little store there. Some cars had just crossed the water from Rawene, taking the short road up through the bush to Kaitaia. And this day, there’s Darrell, large as life. I saw him before Wiremu did. I felt the bastard in the air, like a bad smell. I thought they’d have put him away for good, running round with an axe like that, but no, he’s out, done his time again. He’s driving a nice car, not new but quite flash. I think he might not recognise me, it’d been so long, and I looked pretty different, you know, I’m big eh, big puku, and I’ve got muscles from all that work in the gardens, my hair tied up. But he knows me. He says nothing. I say nothing. I think perhaps he’ll let it go. I get into the car with Wiremu, old banger it was — we used to just drive them till they stopped and leave them where they were. Somebody always found another one. But this car, it’s pretty darn slow and old. Darrell must have been just hanging back, you know, letting us go on ahead, leading him right along to our house.
‘He pulls up. I tell my friends, get inside, don’t talk to him, he’s a bad man. Darrell says to Wiremu, All right, I know you. But this time I’m here on business. You got what I’m after? Man, we got no drugs here, Wiremu tells him. But Darrell doesn’t believe him. He goes back to the car. I call out to Wiremu, Look out, here’s trouble, but Wiremu is faster than him, he’s got the shotgun he used to keep by the door. Darrell sees it. Okay, man, I’m out of here. Easy. And he backs off, just like in the movies. I figured he had a gun of his own but he wasn’t going to try anything on. We had a couple of smokes to calm our nerves, you know what I mean, and tried to figure out what would happen next.’
‘He came back?’ one of the women ask.
‘Nah, not that I know of. But people started looking at me funny. It was one thing for Darrell to find me in Auckland, but another thing that he’d tracked me up there in the bush. A couple of weeks later, Wiremu up and died. Yep.’ Janice fell silent, her eyes filling. ‘Yeah, well. I can tell you I loved that guy. An aneurysm, the doctors said. Well, why couldn’t he have had his aneurysm a couple of weeks earlier if he had to have one?’
Janice’s voice was bitter. ‘I knew soon enough what they were thinking. After the tangi, nobody’s talking to me. I figured it out, they reckoned I brought a curse on that place. They weren’t interested in what the doctors said. So that was that, you might say. I headed off, finished up south again. Sulphur Town. The kids seem to be okay about it, although I could tell Patariki was pining for the Hokianga. Mere tried to stop him leaving but he was my kid. And then of course good old Darrell turned up, too. He found me soon enough. Same old same old.’
ANNABEL ROSE WAS STUDYING the brief of her case for the day. She gazed across the still waters of the lake towards the island at its centre. Her breakfast lay untouched in front of her on a circular glass-topped table with delicate wrought-iron legs. The table stood on a wooden deck painted white, adorned with white ceramic plant containers. Bright green herbs, flourishing mint side by side with parsley, were planted in one and a white-flowered camellia in another. Every aspect of her house was designed to reflect what she saw as her own personality, cool and light on the surface, steel beneath.
A familiar sound broke the train of her thought, the faint crunch of gravel beneath the tyres of a Daimler moving smoothly up her driveway. The beautiful pale grey sedan was a recent model, around about 1998, purchased not long before she met its owner, Harold Penny. He kept a special spray in the glove box to maintain its new leather smell. Harold said that, as the millennium rolled around, just months away until they became citizens of the twenty-first century, the car would become redundant. Everything of the past thousand years would suddenly fall out of date. He said this half in jest, but there was an edge to it, a reflection of how they all felt. Annabel herself felt some slight unease, a misgiving about the future that she hoped would be resolved when the round numbers had all rolled over and it could be seen whether their computers were still working or not.
Harold, His Honour, Judge Penny, to be more accurate, unsheathed himself from the car and sauntered over, his hand raised in greeting.
When Harold visited her, he closed his eyes for a moment as if refreshing himself from the world beyond. He was a tall, thin, slightly angular man with a high domed forehead, hair beginning to thin around his temples, a long face, heavy curved eyelids, only a slight fullness of his mouth displacing the symmetry of his features. His clothes were chosen with care by another woman. His socks were made of silk that outlined the boniness of his ankles which, Annabel happened to know, were cold when he first got into bed, however warm the weather might be outside.
‘Should you be here?’ she asked. Neighbours did notice that the judge’s car cruised up the widowed lawyer’s drive. A shame she’d been left so young, they said. One of them had remarked, at a barbecue, in a seemingly casual way, how nice it was she had someone to keep an eye on her.
He made a small shrug of denial. He would be presiding in the district court later that day, hearing the case of the woman on whose behalf Annab
el was appearing: Janice Pawson, up on charges of selling cannabis from her home, charges she flatly denied. Her children, a young woman with the unlikely name of Heaven, and her half-brother, Patariki, had already pleaded guilty to lesser charges of possession. The girl got some periodic detention, the boy, a minor, was cautioned. Annabel couldn’t understand why people gave their children names like Heaven, redolent of the seventies and hippy communes and drugs. Little wonder they got mixed up in this sort of stuff. Heaven and Patariki had insisted, when they spoke to her, that what had happened had nothing to do with their mother. At the time, Heaven was living in a house on the western side of town with a boy called Rob. Heaven had some tinnies in her knapsack when she came over to raid her mother’s pantry.
‘We were being a bit naughty, that’s all,’ she told Annabel. ‘I know we were stupid. It wasn’t Mum’s fault.’
Patariki was at home when she called and she had given him a couple of joints. But deep in the recesses of the house the police had found some rolled-up twenty-dollar notes, the giveaway sign of the dealer. Planted, that’s what Janice Pawson said. The police didn’t like her.
‘Why wouldn’t they like her?’ Annabel asked.
Although Annabel knew about Darrell — she’d acted for Janice before when she’d had trouble over him — she’d had no reason to dislike her. Darrell was known to the police. He gave them serious grief, escaping from holding cells and going on the run, a serial criminal who threatened to blow their brains out if they got close enough to him before he was captured. It had never happened, but there was always the chance that some day he would make good his promises. He was also the father of Heaven.
‘I don’t think she’s guilty,’ Annabel said.
‘You have to say that,’ Harold said, taking a piece of her uneaten croissant and nibbling an end off it.
‘She wants a jury trial.’
‘Oh, she’ll cave in.’
‘Seriously, Harold. Why would she if she’s guilty? She’s had a tough life, she’s on legal aid. And she’s been inside for nearly nine months already. Of course it would be easier for her to plead guilty and get it over.’
Harold stood up with deliberate care, so as not to knock over the little table, and walked inside, opening cupboard doors. He knew where things were in her house.
‘Shall I get you another croissant?’ Annabel called, not really listening for his answer.
She was doing a mental summary of Janice, an overweight woman with cropped hair dyed black, a scuffed denim jacket worn over a colourful T-shirt, tight jeans and boots. She had silver studs in her ears and sported a tattoo of a dragon snorting fire on her left forearm. Or, that was her when she first sought Annabel’s help over a tenancy agreement that had gone sour. She got evicted from properties because, she claimed, Darrell rang up and told lies about her to whoever her landlord happened to be at the time.
The last time Annabel had seen her, she was wearing an orange jumpsuit, prison garb, on remand in Auckland. Yet the woman she saw in the prison had a quiet certainty that she found convincing. Could be Darrell had got in and planted the money, Janice had told her, and if it wasn’t him then it had to be the cops and nothing would ever surprise her. Not any more.
Harold returned, bearing a cup for himself. ‘Not unless you decide you’re going to eat this after all.’ He poured coffee and spread fig jam on pieces of her croissant. ‘So why don’t you tell her to plead?’
‘Suppose she does and it all turns to custard? I don’t know how long you’d give her.’
‘No,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘you don’t, do you?’
‘Harold,’ she began. But he wanted to change the subject. His wife, Fleur, was going to visit their children in Australia, she’d be away for a fortnight. He and Annabel could get away together for a few days. He needed a break and so did she. She got too involved in her cases, she couldn’t make everyone’s life perfect. Where would she like to go? To the lakes at Nelson, or down to the Wairarapa and do the wine trail? She ought to think about it. He got up again, smoothing crumbs from his suit.
‘By the way, that girl Heaven, she’s running with Sergeant Coleman’s boy. I should have put her away, too.’
Annabel stared at him. ‘The boy Rob she’s living with? Is that what this is about?’
‘Jack reckons his boy’s getting drugs from her. At least we can shut down the supply chain.’
‘If Coleman’s boy wants dope he’ll get it from somebody, Heaven or no Heaven. Anyway, she’s a nice enough girl. Very attractive.’
‘Really? That may be so. But.’
‘But what, Harold?’ Annabel had learned long ago to listen to what came after the ‘but’. Harold, however, was silent, not offering the clue. She had to say it for him. ‘So Janice and her family are an embarrassment to the cops?’
‘They want her inside for a stretch. The girl’s talking about going up to Auckland to be closer to her mother.’ He kissed her forehead. ‘We get shot of the lot of them.’
He reversed down her driveway at speed, a small flurry of pebbles skittering in the wake of the tyres.
IT WAS BELINDA’S DAUGHTER SIMONE who found Janice’s name in the newspaper. Sleek and shiny Simone, who was still living at home, even though she was twenty-five. The paper was in a pile left in the laundry cupboard for recycling and the item was a paragraph in a side-bar about crimes in the provinces. ‘Don’t we have an Auntie Janice?’ she asked her mother.
Belinda leaned over her shoulder and her eyes widened. ‘How old is this newspaper?’
Simone turned it over to read the date. ‘It was back in April.’
Simone was an advertising copywriter who went to work in the city. I shouldn’t make home so comfortable for my kids, Belinda said with a laugh when she talked to her friends. I can’t get rid of them. The truth was she liked them all around her. Dylan still kept his room the same as when he was a teenager, coming home to crash more often than not, although officially he lived in a flat with a group of young men his own age. He could play a conch shell or a guitar with equal ease; on the weekends he played rugby. His boots, discarded from the winter season, were in the clutter of shoes at the doorway. He worked at the museum, with its columns like the Parthenon, restoring collections. Dylan’s passion was archaeology; he travelled to Greece once a year. Only Peter, the eldest, was independent, a quiet man, never quite at home around his siblings, in a way Belinda couldn’t explain to herself or to them. He’d left home when he was twenty-one, as soon as he graduated with a commerce degree, and had worked in a bank ever since, wearing a suit and tie every day.
Home, the place that Belinda kept so cosy, was a villa in Grey Lynn, with lacy wooden fretwork decorating the verandah. It stood on a rise that sloped down behind the house. In the spring, lavender flowered in the front garden, sunflowers in the summer. The back garden was planted in vegetables, tended by Seth, and there was space for hens. The interior of the house was made colourful with bright rugs, deep couches, a rosewood sideboard laden with large blown-glass objects that shimmered in a multitude of hues. As the journalists who came to interview Belinda would write, you could see the eye of the film maker at work in the composition of her surroundings. Seth worked from home as an ecological consultant. The move to Auckland, taken when the children were all at school, had suited them. Belinda was still in demand in the screen industry, still making documentaries, many of them overseas or in the Pacific. She showed her films in Toronto and Stockholm, in Sheffield and Prague. Her favourite approach was dramatised accounts of events that had changed history, both great and small. She believed that truth was best served by the camera’s eye, that she was in some sense a recording angel. Somebody had to tell it the way it had once been, where they had all come from.
And how it was had just entered the pretty, organised chaos of their lives: her sister was in prison.
‘I need to make some calls,’ she said. ‘Seth, can you turn that television down? Puh-lease.’
Seth was par
ked on a sofa. ‘Hush,’ he said, his face glum, as he hunched towards the screen, intent on the rugby. Belinda paused to watch for a moment. Those flashing young thighs, such gorgeous blokes she’d say, joking again, my middle-aged lust. New Zealand was losing over on the other side of the world in Wales, the unthinkable happening. It was a replay of a game that had taken place the night before, and he was analysing the disaster frame by frame. Seth loved rugby now that he was older, just as his father had. Don would have been proud of him. It had been hard for Seth, coming from a family like his, to stand up and oppose the tour in ’81. It was the only subject that ever caused a rift between her and Seth’s parents. They, the kindest people in the world, who had saved Belinda and given her a life, couldn’t understand what had got into her, going off on demonstrations. For once her mother-in-law Maisie had refused to mind the children.
Simone said, ‘Mum, what are you doing? You don’t see her, do you? Perhaps it’s somebody else with the same name. Anyway, it was months ago, she’s probably out by now. Mum, you can’t.’
Belinda’s mouth was set. ‘It’s time to mend bridges in this family.’
‘Do you and she hate each other?’
‘No,’ said Belinda. ‘No. We just didn’t look after her, that’s all.’
Simone looked at her curiously. ‘I thought you lost track of your family.’
‘True,’ said Belinda, ‘but I think it’s time to find them again. This one, at any rate.’
ALTHOUGH THE RUGBY WAS LOST, at least, as Seth said, just weeks later we’ve got a change in government. It was as if life could go on, although the way the country had been in mourning, that seemed doubtful for a while. Labour was back in at last, Helen Clark was the prime minister and, soon after the rugby disaster and the elections, the millennium came around and the numbers rolled over without the world ending.