Bill refills his glass with iced water and they make their way down the hall to the cinema. As they enter the pre-warmed space the lights come on. It’s a 30-seat theatre, with a personal couch at the front for times when it’s just them. She regularly watches overseas fashion shows alone and with colleagues, they have movie nights and Bill has ‘big game’ nights. The cinema gets a lot of use.
Like a conscientious nudist, Bill lays his towel on his post-exercise chair adjacent to their couch before sitting down. He likes to sweat before he showers and is not allowed to sully the leather. It’s a nasty habit of his she’s resigned to living with. It’s such a minor fault, really; it’s not like he takes testosterone or some other ghastly ‘life enhancing’ cocktail of stimulants like most men his age. The Mount is full of old men running around pumped full of chemicals and acting badly. Bill is fit, but also has some of the traditional virtues of old age, such as wisdom and tolerance. He’ll try and see the bigger picture, not just what’s in it for him. He lacks that whiff of desperation the so-called eternally young have. She’s had relationships with men like that before and there’s no way of finding a comfortable rhythm—not even of sleep and wakefulness. Continuously geared for physical action, they’re restless, fidgety, evasive, bored and prone to lie. The talk is all about rock-climbing and paragliding, but the reality is sex clubs and brothels, where they’re likely to indulge in extremes. So Bill’s sweat is no big deal. He doesn’t even linger long enough for it to start to smell, really. Twenty years ago it might have been an issue worth fighting over, but the fact is that he’s a seven-pointer, hormone neutral, exercises and is in the condition of a healthy 60 years. So she’ll take a bit of sweat any day. ‘Oh, I ran into Karen this afternoon.’
‘Karen?’ he asks distractedly, watching the muted images on the big screen.
‘Jeremiah’s wife, remember? The spaced-out model in the Modesty suit?’
‘Oh,’ he grins, ‘her.’
‘Mandela was having a tantrum in the street.’
He snorts. ‘What was she wearing?’
‘A lovely hemp and polyester Holly McQuillan skirt, quality brown leather boots with buttons, and a Formby pea jacket. An excellent weather-appropriate, late-morning ensemble. She seemed a lot more mature with proper clothes on, a screaming child, and normal-sized pupils. I had a couple of marshmallows I’d saved for Raoul.’ She waves a magic wand in the air. ‘And saved the day.’
‘She’d have been grateful.’
‘I was hugged hard. Maybe a little too hard.’
‘Yeah?’
‘A guy came out of the café with Mandela’s coat, a friend of hers, apparently. I had the feeling she’d left the coat because she’d literally run out of the café to get away from him. Frosty.’
‘Well…’
She likes the way Bill mutes the ads for the latest health remedies and exercise plans yet keeps a beady eye out for new developments that might turn into something worth investigating. His long, lean brown figure crowned with white hair appears to be lounging, but he doesn’t miss much. His blind spots she loves him for: they all concern her and Sailor Sam.
‘Well, what?’ she asks.
‘It wouldn’t surprise me if Karen had an affair.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, she’s quite sexual, I suppose.’
‘She is? Anyway, that doesn’t follow.’
‘No, you’re right.’ He takes a drink of water. ‘But look at the guy she’s married to. He’s become Mother Teresa since the bombing. She needs a man.’
Trix snorts with laughter and covers her mouth.
‘Ah, that’s a bit harsh. It was a wake-up call, of course, a near-death experience. With Mandela, too. It’s just the way he makes prolonged eye contact now and shakes hands in a meaningful way, holds on just that little bit longer. Someone was talking about an ice-skating cat the other day and Jeremiah was listening all solemn-like and nodding significantly.’
‘That’s what Mother Teresa did when told about cat videos?’
Bill laughs. ‘Ah, to be honest, I’m really warming to him. It was tough for everyone. And like I say, his kind of discretion and loyalty are hard to come by.’
‘Yeah, I think Karen’s brave. That Modesty suit, you know, took a lot of courage, even if she was a little high. Fashion to her isn’t just about being pretty. I invited her up to the studio.’
‘She loves your stuff.’
‘There is that as well.’
Trix wonders if the Brodericks laugh about Bill in private, at the way he behaved so appallingly after the bombing. So drunk he couldn’t walk straight, he wept and ranted about Sam until he was sedated in the back of an ambulance outside the dome. It was terribly embarrassing. The worst of it was that Bill wasn’t injured and took up three medics’ valuable time.
He always gets wound up when reliving his time with Sailor Sam, wracked as he is by irrational guilt about Sam’s disappearance and lost legacy. It’s awful and pointless but on a deep level, for some reason, he feels responsible for the myriad seemingly insurmountable problems besetting the planet. Part of the reason, she thinks, is because his generation saw the world fall from a kind of Eden.
His pain was attractive when she first met him; obscure in source and strongly felt. She was struck by something in him beyond the run-of-the-mill obsession with the world of things, some abstract obsession similar to her love of design, which possessed her for as long as she can remember. One of her earliest memories was a broken red plastic tail light she found in the street; it held a powerful and inexplicable fascination for her. The way it processed light, the curves like nature but not, the oddly concentrated adult genius of it. A touchstone. The first secret manifestation of her calling. She suspected that Bill had also been called, but it hadn’t worked out for him. This active, handsome professional wasn’t merely presenting the baggage of 2.3 marriages like the average male Inner his age, sore points brought on by traumatic repetition in the domestic environment. His was a soulful and central distraction. The mystery had taken a while to get to the bottom of. It took a while—the length of their courtship—to come out, because Bill had buried his trauma deep. They discovered it together, in a sense. And released it.
Now he even shares this demon—loudly—with strangers, as he did at the Beach. But he seems to have shed much of his load since that ‘lapse’ as they call it, after the bombing, and become lighter. As if telling the story one last time and releasing his buried anxieties in such a spectacular and uninhibited fashion was what he needed to finally move on. It means that his retirement really can be a new chapter. She’s happy for him.
Bill selects a story about the grain, corn and canola crop failures in North America, Europe and Siberia. More bread riots are predicted worldwide as a result. Bill has a professional interest in it. It’s Venture Group news.
‘They can’t mention starvation in this item,’ he tells her. ‘Big agriculture can’t be held accountable in any way for existing social and political systems, cultural preference, and lack of alternative food sources that define the rate of supply.’
They see expanses of variously flooded, wind-flattened and parched crops, and then other crops, unaffected by the weather but ruined by disease and pestilence. It’s hardly even news any more. Like the ocean’s expanding dead zones, it’s the new normal.
Sure enough, as Bill said, the likelihood of starvation is only mentioned in relation to developing countries relying on subsistence agriculture. The suggestion that a private company will fail in any way, including a failure to meet demand, is speculative and illegal. Talk of greatly increased demand accompanying the tracking shots of barren fields is general. She’s glad that Bill has bought a vineyard on four acres of land near Napier for his retirement. It’s another option.
After the item he turns to her. ‘Who was the guy Karen was with?’
‘Another parent. Quite a distinguished looking guy, really. A lot different from Jeremiah. Like, almost the opposite:
lanky, bald, arty.’
‘Well…’
‘Well, what?’
‘Well,’ Bill says, ‘Karen married Jeremiah and got Mother Teresa. That’s not fair.’
It’s not even funny but Trix snorts again, loudly, and Bill begins to laugh with the new lightness he has, and they can’t stop laughing for an immoderate amount of time.
5
Bill closes his eyes. Rests his head in his hands. He has to prepare a press release for Green Farm celebrating the fact that more than 50 per cent of Taranaki’s rivers and streams that were once unsafe for swimming now contain only traces of nitrogen and phosphorus, and no faecal bacteria. The truth lurking behind this proclamation, he suspects, is that there was no water in these waterways when the measurements were taken. Could it be possible? Would they actually take the readings in exactly the same place as historical readings, despite a temporary lack of water in those waterways due to shifting rain patterns? They could blame the automated sensors, of course, should a human ever bother to check a PR release before publishing it as news. Would they get away with it? No, but a dispute about pollution levels is infinitely better than a frank admission of them. Any argument will be drowned in the thunder of events overseas.
But the statistic about faecal bacteria isn’t even news, and hasn’t been since the dairy industry went bottom up in the early 2020s with the introduction of synthetic milk. White and mainly water, yet no one saw it coming. Not for the first time, Bill wonders why. At the end of the day, Australian banks did the best out of dairy. Converted cheap farms into lifestyle estates for foreign elites fearing the apocalypse. Many say the social and economic costs of the failure of the dairy industry have been as bad as environmental ones.
Bill notes that Green Farm hasn’t mentioned cadmium left in the soil from superphosphate. Heavy metals in agriculture and fisheries are notoriously difficult to spin. The government relieved a lot of pressure on dairy and the fertiliser industry in that regard with their masterstroke of 2012: land classed as agricultural that was contaminated by cadmium became unclassifiable as contaminated land.
It’s too much to deal with at 3.30 in the afternoon. He leaves his desk, probably to get a coffee, grateful that his retirement is looming, grateful that the awful open-plan offices he skirts, in which cameras and work programmes continually assess juniors’ performances, will soon be nothing but a memory. He can’t help but feel sorry for the young men and occasional women hunched in deathly earnestness at their work stations. Not one of them even glances at him as he passes, for fear of breaking a work unit. The women are under particular pressure in this regard, having been hired under duress due to the flack Klotch’s gender-biased Resilient Families policy has received. Loading HR with women wasn’t enough. What a surprise. Bill wonders if it’s really a win for the young women to be able to dedicate their lives to Venture Group. They have to work harder and better than the men to prove themselves; they can’t allow the sensors to pick up any breaks in concentration. They can’t even look at each other, let alone talk. And tonight they’ll work at home. They’ll learn that nothing important exists outside of work. And they’ve only just begun.
Bill sighs. His retirement won’t exactly be a bed of roses, either. It presents special problems of its own. One being that none of his middle-aged sons has ever found steady work, yet all have families to support. They scrape along at the best of times, and then there will be months when one or more of them are between jobs and it falls to him to pay their bills. Paul drives in an increasingly driverless industry: trucks, taxis, buses and trains. John works in construction: insulation, roofing, piling, plastering and painting. Only Simon, the eldest, and most hopeless of his sons, has had a string of jobs that might at times have been regarded as a semi-professional career. There were some years when he even received NST. Simon works in medical supplies: stock manager, dispatcher and sales. Yet Simon, with his five children and unemployable wife, needs the most help of all Bill’s sons and always has. At 63 Simon is between jobs again after a take-over, and Cheryl is pregnant with her second child conceived outside of their marriage. The father—this time—is a 17-year-old schoolboy; a classmate of Simon’s eldest son, Torrentz. Simon caught the boy in bed with Cheryl, wearing only his school socks. The police came and took the boy home. When dropping him off, the officers smelled something: a meth lab—the boy’s. He was supporting his solo mother and three siblings after his father’s imprisonment for disseminating child pornography (purely in order to support his wife and children, the defence had claimed). Simon is still sleeping on the couch a month after Cheryl gave birth to the schoolboy’s son. Simon suspects she visits the boy in the youth detention centre. He’s drinking heavily and putting on weight, as he always does between jobs or when his wife’s having an affair, but this time it’s worse. Bill worries the run of semi-professional jobs is over and the drinking will continue and the weight will balloon. They live in a G3 gated community in Tawa, but Bill can’t support their brawling and chaotic life there forever. They’ll have to go free range on social welfare. Bill fears that his eldest son may even end up on the streets.
He finds himself in the lift, heading down to the canteen with ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’ running through his head. One of the new earthquake emergency food and water supply units which double as toilets has been installed in the lift. He sits on it. There was no time for lunch today, but for some reason he’s not hungry. Disgorged from the lift, at a loose end, he carries on to the canteen anyway.
Bill would like Simon to come and work on the run-down vineyard he’s bought near Napier. The problem is that a paying job with free accommodation would inevitably attract Cheryl and her flock. They’d probably show up in a schoolboy Romeo’s car, her pregnant again. Would Simon mind? No, he’d be so delighted to see Cheryl that he’d shake the kid’s hand for delivering her safely.
Cheryl’s hold on Simon is a complete and utter mystery to Bill. She’s just plain bad for him. A study of costs and benefits would quantify this conclusion overwhelmingly. If Bill didn’t know Simon so well he’d think him a masochist. Simon’s more of a saint, always seeking the good in people and the underlying motivation and pain behind their hurtful actions. Or he seemed saintly as a boy, anyway, in his refusal to fight back and desire to reach out to his attackers. As a middle-aged man he’s more like a punch-drunk boxer in the ring, hardly aware he’s being hit. As if he can hear the punches land but not feel them anymore.
No. Cheryl’s marriage campaign of attack, siege and slaughter would scare Trix off in an instant. And it’s Trix’s company Bill wants as he builds up the vineyard and makes it a success. A future without Trix at his side is bleak. Yet even if Cheryl stays away from the vineyard, there is the problem of the large outlay required to make the house inhabitable to Trix’s standards. Along with the expense of making the vineyard viable. Inland Hawkes Bay is heating up and all kinds of pests and diseases are flourishing. What he’d really like is to buy a little vineyard in the Hutt Valley, a running concern, but that’s beyond his means. The conclusion is undeniable: he’s short of money—despite taking a job at Venture Group.
The canteen’s empty. He breathes a sigh of relief and lets the robarista make him an espresso. Thirty stories high. The big window is a wall of blue. The harbour sparkles. Distant whitecaps chop, gusts lift veils of spray. He sips his coffee and stares at a patch of sunlight on the table as Karen Carpenter sings.
6
‘Mummy, slow down!’
‘But I’m not…’ Karen slows. The sinewy flex of Mandela’s wrist incites her guilt. His strength reminds her how much she allowed him to fade—almost to nothing. It was close. The connection between body and life is a just a thread. Cut it and the body gets left behind. The relentless world goes on without it. And on. My sacred duty, she tells herself, is to protect that thread. Keep my son with me in life. Look after him. Like my mother looked after me. I will do the same. Look after my son, this little boy holding my hand.
No, she tells herself again, there is no bomb. No obliterating force.
In her mind she repeats a positive affirmation: ‘Seek the same quiet and inexhaustible good in every object.’ She seeks it among the street’s lines and flaring brightness. There could be that goodness here. Maybe. Probably. Like in the texture of the cut flowers at home.
‘Mum, what are you thinking about?’
‘Ah, just…’ She thinks to transfer money from the Life! account. Having told Jeremiah her new TS Stanaway bag cost twice what it actually did—an amount he accepted without question—she regrets not tripling the fake figure. She checks her screen, a simple bangle holomaker with an old-school lithium battery expressly designed for easy removal. ‘Just that you need to stay close to me in town, baby.’
‘I know, Mummy.’
‘You need to hold on tight to my hand all the time.’
Should he wander out of sight on Courtenay Mall for a few seconds he could be kidnapped. It happens: bouncers or kitchen hands collecting a thousand paydays in one unguarded moment.
‘I want to go home.’
‘No. We’re nearly there.’ They’re not. She activates her bangle screenmaker again. No messages. She wonders what is it she would like to receive so much. Realistically speaking. They’re still 50 metres from the Gate at Roxburgh Street. And then it’s another 100 metres down Courtenay Mall to Robusta. A new anxiety: what if Malcolm senses she’s decided to end their affair, or whatever it is, and doesn’t cooperate? What if he doesn’t show up? Or will it be good to see him? She fears it will be, on some level, and doubts she has the strength to push him away. What else does she have to look forward to—or even do?
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