Death on Demand

by Paul Thomas

  Lilywhite subsided into the pillows, closing his eyes. A minute went by, then another. Finally, his eyes opened and locked onto Ihaka: “There’s one condition attached to what I’m about to tell you: that you keep it from my children until I’m gone. Beyond that, well, anything you can do would be much appreciated. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “You’re right, of course. I had Joyce killed.” He tapped his chest. “In a funny sort of way, the guilt has helped me come to terms with this. Why should I have what I took from her?”

  “So who killed her?”

  “Well, there’s the catch. I don’t know.”

  3

  Christopher Lilywhite made his confession as if he had all the time in the world. He began at the beginning.

  In 1972 Joyce Herbertson came down from Dargaville, where her father dug holes for the Ministry of Works, to attend Auckland Teachers’ Training College. She lived in Royal Oak with her aunt and uncle, who mowed sports fields for the city council.

  A friend of her aunt’s worked at Smith and Caughey’s in Queen Street, where one got to fawn over a better class of person. She took a shine to shy little Joyce, who’d been brought up to be respectful of her elders no matter how ghastly they were, and wangled her a part-time job in the Manchester department.

  Joyce studied hard, she played competitive netball, she went to church every Sunday, even paying attention to the sermons. Her aunt soon gave up stealing peeks at the diary which Joyce wrote up in bed each night and kept under her pillow. Although she rationalized this invasion of privacy as in loco parentis concern for her niece’s welfare, it was nothing more than prurience, and in that regard Joyce was a disappointment. After two anticlimactic months her aunt decided she got more of a tweak from a Mills and Boon.

  Now and again Joyce permitted herself to dream, but what she expected to do was go back to Dargaville, teach at the primary school she’d attended, and couple up with a nice young man with reasonable prospects, a steady sort who’d go on to be a deputy this or assistant that or a subbranch manager. Her parents would want him to be a churchgoer, but that wasn’t a sticking point for her. After all, if you took out the miracles – the virgin birth, and take up thy bed and walk, and on the third day he rose again (all the slightly hard to believe stuff) – and the ritual – the prayers and psalms, the stale wafers and communion wine – it really boiled down to being a good person and treating people the way you’d like to be treated. She would never have voiced this thought, but it often occurred to her as she slid to her knees to drone along with the rest of the congregation: wouldn’t it have pretty much the same effect if they dispensed with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost and just drummed the Golden Rule into everyone?

  She got a job at Remuera Primary School and moved out of her aunt and uncle’s place into a flat in Meadowbank, sharing with a couple of girls from her netball team. One of them was in her second year of a Bachelor of Education at Auckland University. People were always telling Joyce she had a good brain, so she enrolled at university and paid her flatmate’s rent for a fortnight in return for her notes and essays from the year before. She worked even harder, played social netball, and went to church every second or third Sunday. She gave up keeping a diary. There just didn’t seem much point in depriving herself of fifteen minutes’ sleep to record the fact that today had been pretty much the same as yesterday and the day before.

  She went out with Stuart, an arts student she met in the university library. Stuart wrote hectoring poems about the downtrodden masses and having to get by on a B bursary, and studied her minutely as she read them. She developed a routine of ambiguous sighs and shakes of the head which seemed to satisfy him. They went to gloomy films with subtitles and had long pashing sessions back in his room at the hostel that left her with bruised lips and an aching jaw. The pashing escalated to fondling through clothes, then to hand-jobs for him and less than reciprocal ferreting between the legs for her. Even though Stuart was the one getting his rocks off, he pressed her to go all the way and dumped her when she said not yet. A fortnight later she drank too much sparkling wine at a party at her place, and gifted her cherry to a gatecrasher who made her laugh.

  She awoke with the worst hangover ever and upset with herself, not so much for losing her virginity but for giving it away to someone who wouldn’t appreciate it. She went to church, which made her hangover worse. Maybe her other flatmate, who’d quit teaching and got a sales job with Air New Zealand which enabled her to lead parallel sex lives in Auckland and Sydney, was right: there was going out with a guy, up to and including having sex with him, which actually wasn’t that big a deal; and there was falling in love and getting married, which was. That was the bit you only wanted to do once.

  She got back on with Stuart, who pretended not to notice that something had happened to her virginity. She’d thought that sleeping with her boyfriend, as opposed to an amusing gatecrasher, would feel better in both senses, but it didn’t seem to work like that. It was good having a boyfriend, though. One-night stands were like Chinese takeaways: quick and convenient. One moment you were laughing at a corny joke, next thing you were on your back. When you woke up, the guy was gone and you could get on with things, as if it was a day like any other. She knew people who pretty much lived on Chinese takeaways. She didn’t want to do that. She’d heard guys talk about girls who did.

  By the time Joyce was into the third and final year of her degree, her expectations had changed. Back in Dargaville for Christmas and New Year, she understood why being in prison was called doing time. Nothing much happened, the hours crawled by, then you turned on the TV. She got her flatmate’s boyfriend to ring up pretending to be the principal, and told her parents she had to go back to work early to help him sort out some unspecified problems. They were quietly proud – not surprised, mind you, but proud – that he’d called on their Joyce in his hour of need. She drove south in her Morris 1100 with the certain knowledge that she would not go back to teach at her old primary school, and would not marry a local boy, whatever his prospects.

  One Friday night Joyce and Stuart met Penny, the flatmate who worked for Air New Zealand, at a cheap and cheerful Italian in Parnell. She arrived with a guy she’d picked up at the pub. Christopher worked for a company that exported kiwi fruit; he travelled overseas on business and drove a company car. He was different from the guys she knew: Stuart, the bleeding poet, and her friends’ sporty, self-satisfied boyfriends, and the various goofs who took pride in aspiring to being nothing more than a bit of a lad.

  By upbringing and instinct Joyce was a National Party supporter, but she kept her views to herself, partly because she wasn’t an ideologue and partly to avoid upsetting Stuart, who was an anarcho-communist. As far as Joyce could make out, that meant he’d quite like to eliminate every political figure who wasn’t an anarcho-communist, starting with the prime minister, Rob Muldoon, whom he wanted to eliminate even more than Augusto Pinochet and all the whites in South Africa. Christopher turned out to be a Muldoon admirer but, unlike Joyce, wasn’t inclined to soft-pedal his views to keep the peace. Unlike Stuart, he could argue about politics without losing his temper.

  Stuart got flushed and sweaty; he raised his voice and jabbed his finger; he called Christopher “a fucking Nazi”. Christopher told him to grow up. Joyce didn’t know where to look. Penny asked if they could please change the subject. A waiter came over to remind Stuart that he was in a restaurant.

  Stuart told Joyce they were out of there. Without even thinking about it, she said, “See you later.”

  “People couldn’t believe it when I started going out with Joyce,” said Lilywhite. “Understandable, really. My previous girlfriends had been either private-school princesses or party girls like Joyce’s flatmate. Suddenly here was this small-town girl, this rather earnest primary schoolteacher, not bad-looking by any means but not someone who stopped the conversation when she walked into a room. Put it this way: my mates weren’t green with envy.

>   “What they didn’t get was that her difference was the big attraction. I went to a private school. I’d been going out with precious, empty-headed little bitches since I was fifteen. Joyce might have been unworldly, in the sense of not being sophisticated, but she came from the real world. She wasn’t stupid; she read newspapers as opposed to glossy magazines; you could have a conversation with her that wasn’t about things that don’t matter. The party girls were fun but, let’s face it, you don’t take them home to meet your parents. Well, I certainly didn’t. My father was one of the Canterbury Lilywhites – first four ships, Christ’s College, all that stuff. He gave me two pieces of advice about women: the most important quality in a prospective wife is loyalty; and while you don’t want a prude, if you marry a sexual animal, she’ll end up humiliating you. That’s a direct quote.

  “Joyce and my parents got on well. She was polite to the point of being deferential. They liked that, and they liked the fact that she obviously adored me. Of course, they weren’t too thrilled about her background, but I guess it was a case of two out of three ain’t bad. And while appearances can be deceptive in this regard, she didn’t come across as someone who couldn’t get enough sex.

  “The idea was that Joyce would keep working till she got pregnant, but the Lilywhite juice is high-octane stuff. Once we put our minds to it impregnation ensues like night follows day. By the time we got back from the honeymoon she was pregnant. Six months after Matthew was born she was pregnant again. Our marriage was very much like my parents’ – I was the breadwinner; I went off to work, Joyce stayed home to look after the kids, keep the house immaculate, and have dinner waiting for me when I returned from slaying dragons. Everything revolved around me, and that was that. We’d go to dinner parties where wives got cross-eyed drunk and made bloody fools of themselves or played footsie under the table or picked fights with their husbands, and I’d thank God I’d had the good sense to marry Joyce. It wasn’t long before my mates, who’d been a bit patronizing about her, were telling me what a lucky man I was.

  “Without over-egging the pudding, we chugged along very happily for twenty-odd years. With the benefit of hindsight you could question whether a woman as able and energetic as Joyce could be truly happy in that arrangement but, as I’m sure you know, Sergeant, lots of able and energetic women are. Bright, healthy kids, a good provider, a nice home, security – plenty of women have been content with that package. As the kids got older she did some relief teaching, and threw herself into supporting their extracurricular stuff – coaching Sandy’s netball teams, scoring for Matthew’s cricket teams, sewing outfits for their stage productions, chauffeuring them all over the show.

  “I was quite content with my lot too. I might’ve played up once or twice when I was away on business but that was just the old male ego, proving to yourself that you’ve still got it. Afterwards you feel bloody ashamed, and go and buy the wife something expensive. The plan was basically to retire at sixty having made more than enough money, get a decent-sized boat, play a lot of golf, and watch the grandkids grow up – all, of course, predicated on the assumption of a long twilight.

  “Then in 1999 a couple of things happened. Sandy left home so we were empty nesters, and I got in the financial shit. The old story – taking your eye off the ball, trusting people because they’re members of Royal Middlemore, delegating too much because work keeps getting in the way of a good time. Joyce was entitled to say ‘I told you so’ because she had. She’d always taken an interest in my various projects. I’d ignored her, of course. ‘Don’t worry your little head about it, darling, I’ll come out smelling of roses as I always do.’ But she didn’t say ‘I told you so.’ She must’ve thought it – she would’ve had to be a saint not to – but that wasn’t Joyce. Well, not yet anyway.

  “One night, when I was on my third or fourth nightcap and blaming everyone except myself, Joyce announced that she was going to start cleaning houses – other people’s houses. Well, I went fucking ballistic. No wife of mine was going to be a charlady, I’d rather live under a bloody bridge, my parents would be spinning in their graves, the whole nine yards. And, you know, it was really the first time in our marriage that she just dug her toes in and basically said go ahead, squawk till you’re blue in the face, it won’t make a scrap of difference.

  “The way she looked at it, we simply had to generate some income. With the kids gone she had time on her hands, and there was a demand out there. People were always complaining that they either couldn’t find anyone to clean for them, or the cleaners they had were useless. That set me off again: bad enough that she was going to clean houses, but doing it for people we knew and socialized with! She wouldn’t budge on that either. ‘Our doctor and lawyer are friends of ours,’ she said. ‘What’s the difference? They don’t work for mate’s rates and neither will I.’ I should’ve realized I was bashing my head against a brick wall, but I was so used to having my own way. I yapped away till she hit me with a question I couldn’t answer, or maybe I didn’t want to: why was I far less troubled by what people thought of me going bust than of her being a cleaner?

  “She had it all worked out. After three months she’d hire someone to give her a hand, and someone else three months after that, and so on. After a year she’d quit doing cleaning work and focus on building the client base and managing her staff. She’d hire recent immigrants because they’d work their arses off and wouldn’t have hang-ups about doing menial work. I said, ‘You really think it’ll be that easy?’ You know what she said? ‘If you haven’t got anything constructive to say, I’d prefer you didn’t say anything at all.’ As it turned out, her business plan erred on the side of caution: after six months she had a crew of Eastern European women working for her. Dumpy, hairy little boots they were, like something out of that Borat movie, but I’ll tell you what: they weren’t frightened of hard work. Before the year was out she’d sold her first franchise.”

  Joyce started cleaning houses and Lilywhite went underground. When the money started coming in, though, it dawned on him that he’d fallen on his feet.

  Like every other borderline charlatan in the property game, he’d taken steps to ensure that one bum project wouldn’t put him in the poorhouse: their house was in Joyce’s name, and he’d set up a maze of shell companies and trusts designed to drive creditors to distraction. Even so, he was reconciled to having to sell the house, trade down, and pull his horns in. But with Joyce reinventing herself as a human ATM, none of that was necessary. In fact, he was actually better off: he had the same standard of living without having to work for it.

  He took on a couple of consultancies to keep his hand in, but otherwise devoted himself to the agreeable pastimes of the idle rich – skiing, boating, golf, lunch. He rewrote history, turning the trainwreck which had put him out of business into the necessary second act adversity in a drama that would end happily ever after.

  But it didn’t take him long to realize that while he’d gained an enviable lifestyle, he’d lost something he’d taken for granted and which was central to his self-image: the upper hand. He was no longer the dominant partner. Not that Joyce expected him to be a house husband. Far from it: it was a point of honour for her that no matter how busy she was, she didn’t let things slip on the home front. Their friends developed a line of banter around the housewife superstar who built a business empire by day, then rushed home to cook her husband a gourmet meal and remove the wine stain from his favourite golf shirt.

  It was hardly surprising that Joyce became more confident and assertive: everything she touched seemed to turn to gold. She opened a café in Remuera catering to young mothers. There was a play area and kiddies’ programmes ran non-stop on a big-screen TV. She hired students who were good with small children; they’d bring the mothers a latte and read the kids a story. She helped a friend get a similar operation off the ground in Takapuna, taking a twenty-five per cent stake. She took over a little family business that made strollers and pushchairs. Lilywhite thought she
was mad, but he had no idea how much research she’d done. Like all her ventures, it was a winner.

  For twenty years Lilywhite’s opinions had carried a decisive weight, whether they were discussing war in the Gulf, how much to spend on recarpeting the lounge or whether Sandy’s party outfit was appropriate. When he held forth at dinner parties, as he tended to do, he was used to having Joyce back him up or, if she happened to disagree with him, keep her opinion to herself. At first her dissent was so mild it barely registered, but slowly the pushback became less diffident.

  When a relationship is undergoing such a transformation, there comes a moment when you simply can’t go on pretending that nothing has really changed. Lilywhite announced he was seriously thinking about getting back into property development; Joyce flatly vetoed it. They argued on and off for a week, but she was implacable. When he finally played the “if I don’t do something, I’ll become an alcoholic” card, she said she could do with some help on the marketing side.

  He stared at her. “You mean work for you?”

  “Why not?” she said. “I’m a very good boss.”

  He said he’d think about it.

  Joyce still did wifely things, but the housewife superstar carry-on began to grate. She would get home; they’d sit out by the pool with a glass of wine; her cellphone would ring. It would be work-related, and that would be the end of their catch-up, the window supposedly set aside to talk about them. He’d hire a movie she’d expressed interest in but she’d half-watch it with a computer on her lap, or not watch it at all because she couldn’t afford the time. He’d complain that he never used to bring work home, but she’ d just shrug. One night he made the mistake of asking what the shrug was meant to mean. She said, “Perhaps you should have.”

  While she didn’t become overtly resentful of his foibles and self-indulgence or dwell on the disparity between her workload and his life of expensive leisure, he deciphered the code and felt the chilly draughts of unarticulated disapproval. Time was if she didn’t want any more wine, she’d just say so; if he wanted to open another bottle, that was up to him. Now her moderation had to be elaborated on: as much as she’d like a second glass, it wouldn’t be a good idea because she had a diary like Helen Clark’s. When he got irritated, she told him he was being oversensitive – they were statements of fact, not digs at him. Lilywhite found this hard to believe. He thought she was becoming self-important, entranced with the notion of herself as a self-made, workaholic high-achiever.