Star Sailors

by James McNaughton

  ‘Take him,’ Winiata says, meaning Le Stratton, as he hands the ball to Fusi, an athletic guy in his 20s from Sales, who holds his paddle like a professional and can smash either way. Back in line next to Jeremiah, Winiata says, ‘Hang on, let’s play doubles. We’ve got the numbers.’

  Fusi shakes his head. ‘After I’ve taken Le Stratton down.’

  Le Stratton. It’s a name people like to say. Jeremiah’s own surname, Broderick, is not used, and J, or J-man, is not called out across crowded bars in quite the same way.

  But at least I still have my reputation, he thinks. Relief at still having his beautiful job and the little haven on the Mount that it pays for washes over him. I nearly lost everything, he thinks. So close he’d come to that nightmare scenario: the ritual humiliation of loading their possessions into a moving truck. The shame of it. He knows the contempt and schadenfreude felt by spectators because he felt it himself when Irys was fired and went back to live with her parents in Johnsonville. There would be much curtain-twitching during the truck-loading, slow drive-bys and the jolly passive-aggressiveness of specially routed running groups clad in the very latest smart activewear: ‘Moving out, mate? A promotion? No? A holiday? No?’ Once their miserable possessions were in the truck and taken beyond the safety of the Wall, what then? More humiliation. Who would have them? Who would put them up at night? An LGBTQIA fashion person? And then to eke out an existence on Karen’s salary at Flux? Submit to the ravages of age with the end of NST? Survive on cheap processed food? Lurk in some spareroom filled with dresses and coathangers? Send out CVs (‘Reason for leaving your last position?’) for crappy jobs with hundreds of applicants? Do school runs twice daily? Be sniffed at by mothers in the cloakroom of a decile 1 school? Be punched by an alcoholic father at the school crossing? Get fat? Get sick? Get divorced? Who would care? The friends and relatives he abandoned to become an Inner would be the most hostile and suspicious of all. And rightly so! I’ve learned my lesson, Jeremiah tells himself as the paddles crack; let me stay here and work hard. I was proud and reckless. I will not be now.

  It was a contract for legal services concerning procurements, submitted by a new client, an Australian trading company named Consolidated who sought legal representation in New Zealand. The contract included a fantastic clause that looked wrong even at first glance, before it went through the database; a strangely clumped section of text. It stated that Venture Group were liable for costs, including to reputation, incurred through flaws in legal advice in future contracts with other New Zealand companies dealing on Consolidated’s behalf. Outrageous. An insult. Laughable. On Thursday he mentioned the strange clause to Mr Gully in the canteen, who saw him immediately afterwards in his office, looked at the contract, took off his glasses and belly-laughed.

  Gully gave him full reign and Jeremiah had gone after them, like Le Stratton would, seemingly offering to provide full protection, as they requested, while actually offering almost nothing. The clowns at Consolidated, who had apparently drawn up the contract with outdated foreign software, afforded him plenty of opportunity.

  In the elevator on Friday morning, Gully had asked him how it was going. Jeremiah promised him a notated final draft that afternoon. Gully chuckled and said he was looking forward to it.

  At 5 pm, excited by the original work he’d done, Jeremiah sent the amended contract to his boss. But the intranet overloaded, as it tends to do on Friday afternoons, and gave him a bogus security warning. Three times he tried to send the document before undertaking a manual override on the security block. Smiling as he began to close up and log off, anticipating a cold one with Gully in the canteen, the floor dropped from under him. His scalp froze. His blind stupidity struck him, pummelled him. He’d sent the contract back to Consolidated by mistake, complete with spicy comments for Gully in the margins.

  Le Stratton has lost to Fusi, emphatically apparently—Jeremiah phased out and missed it. The memory of his rank incompetence has flushed his face. Two more paddles are produced and it’s ‘Law vs Humanities’, as Le Stratton calls it. Fusi and Winiata lean on each other’s shoulders and stretch their hammies as they might before a rugby game.

  ‘You okay, big guy?’ Le Stratton asks him

  ‘Tough week.’

  Le Stratton’s blue eyes glint. ‘You fuck up?’

  The guy doesn’t miss a thing. It’s one of the times Jeremiah would like to be more open with his friend, but he needs time to regain his equilibrium before that happens.

  ‘Nah, just coming down with something. Feels like the flu?’

  ‘You make a Friday afternoon fuck-up and tell me you’ve got polio?’ Before Jeremiah can reply, Le Stratton turns brightly to Fusi and Winiata. ‘Mugs away,’ he says brightly, and bounces the ball to them.

  It bounces back. ‘You lost the last game.’

  ‘Such a rare occurrence.’ Le Stratton does his ‘baroque’ serve and hits the net.

  ‘Wow. Just like on TV,’ says Winiata.

  ‘A very serious lapse of judgement’ was how Gully just described it in his office. One which ‘will undoubtedly have serious repercussions, particularly in the Australasian business community.’ Not only the prospect of securing new clients was compromised, he was told, but retaining long-established ones. Even shareholders were mentioned.

  Winiata blows a sucker smash, to general laughter. Jeremiah manages a grin. He really wants to go home now, partly to escape Le Stratton, who scents blood, but also to count his blessings and poke at his wounds in peace. Furthermore, he has fulfilled his obligation to Gully by consuming the beer he was advised to. Knowing he’s nearly free from scrutiny, Jeremiah makes an effort to finish strong. Pretending he cares about the game, he huddles low to receive serve. ‘Nothing gets past,’ he tells Fusi, feeling in his torso and arms the reassuring quality of a brick wall. He’s not sure if he’ll tell Karen. I’ll tell no one, he decides; pretend it didn’t happen. Didn’t happen, he tells himself as he returns the ball. It’s four–four, first to six. Didn’t happen; the ball goes back. He really wants to win now. His next ‘Didn’t happen’ hits the net. Then Le Stratton tries to smash a long ball and they’ve lost.

  ‘That’s one for humanity,’ says Fusi.

  8

  The pulverising pre-spring gales run out of puff and Saturday dawns still and clear. Last year, in similarly miraculous calm weather, the Brodericks had walked to the inaugural Mt Victoria Gun Show at Roseneath Primary School, stopping for a coffee and a paddle at the sea pool on the way. Everything was new for the Brodericks then, and the gun show was new for everyone on the Mount. Excitement crackled around the stalls. People reached out. Numbers were swapped and promises made to catch up. Jeremiah knew the gestures were rhetorical for such busy people, but he appreciated it nonetheless. While sipping a wine at a bar on the Cliff after the show, satisfied, spent and happy, the Brodericks found themselves toasted by a band of three middle-aged couples, all employed in security on the Wall. The Brodericks were celebrated for being made of ‘the right stuff’, and were roped into a bar crawl. Jeremiah was not allowed to pay for a drink. The merry band talked guns fervently and debated when the opportunity might come to use their new purchases in a nonprofessional capacity. Drinks went down fast. The security people asked Jeremiah and Karen slightly odd questions about life Outside. Another. Another. Hilarity came as impairment kicked in.

  It was the first time Jeremiah and Karen had felt the full force of the Inner community’s famous sense of kinship. Strangers smiled, embraced and celebrated them. Jeremiah was reminded of Christmas as an only child surrounded by a circle of adoring relatives who gave him presents. Mandela had loved it too. For the first time since leaving their little house in Broadmeadows a month before, Mandela fitted in perfectly. He ran wild with other kids his age, bursting with excitement to be up so late and playing in darkness with new friends, while the happy grown-ups laughed and drank at tables beneath the stars.

  But on this wonderfully fine morning, which has promi
sed so much for so long, Jeremiah is hungover, having drunk half a bottle of whisky upon returning from work last night in the cluttered storage space he calls his office. No lasting insight about the Consolidated disaster was gained with alcohol, nor any sense of relief. He feels sluggish and oppressed as he chops a German banana for his cereal. The thought of buying a gun energises him. He’s had his eye on the elephant-stopping Magnus .50, the heaviest handgun on the market, which requires a certain amount of strength to even aim, according to reviews. It’s perfect. His excitement flares and rapidly expends itself.

  His eyes droop and close over the flashing share market numbers on his office screen, despite a second coffee and some upward movement in the figures. It’s going to be a long day. He tells Karen, who knows nothing of his awful blunder and new probation conditions—and never will—that Mandela’s post-operation fragility obliges them to drive to the gun show.

  Their flat doesn’t receive morning sun, so the heat in the air surprises them as they pull out of the internal garage. It’s only 10 am but already 27 degrees, according to the dashometer. Jeremiah overrides the air con and winds down the windows. Karen removes her psychedelic blouse. Jeremiah blinks his approval at her tight-fitting black sport singlet emblazoned with bleeding red roses and her short red cotton skirt. He wears a camo T-shirt, a hunting cap and cargo shorts. Each forearm sports a skeleton screen: on the left a Venture Group device, based on a stylised V and G; on the right, his black sun personal transfer. Both look like tattoos until the holoscreen is activated. Mandela wears his Superman suit with tracking chip.

  It’s a beautiful day and the gun show is an event they’ve all been looking forward to, especially after the Beach bombing and the growing nighttime security problems outside the Wall, but he’s awfully rattled by the Consolidated business and his head feels hot from his hangover, he’s hungry already and thirsty again, and tired. Didn’t happen, he tells himself as the sparkling harbour disappears from view behind the Wall. He catches glimpses of the crowd of lightly dressed Inners making a colourful trail through the trees along the Cliff. Didn’t happen.

  ‘Daddy, can we stop at the sea pool?’

  ‘On the way back, Manny.’ I’ll nap in the trees, he thinks.

  ‘Are we rushing?’ Karen asks him.

  ‘We need to get a park.’

  ‘There’s one.’

  ‘There’s one, Daddy! There’s one!’

  ‘No, we need one up near the show. That’s why we’re driving.’ Jeremiah takes the wheel and shifts the car to manual control. The automatic park-locater on their inexpensive car is not effective in crowded situations where illegal parking is tolerated, and the self-drive function is hopeless in this kind of congestion. If they got out and tried to send the car home, it would probably never be seen again.

  ‘Why are we driving, Daddy?’

  ‘Because you’re weak.’

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m much better.’

  ‘Put him on your shoulders?’ Karen suggests. ‘There’s another one.’ She peers back. ‘Make a U-turn.’

  ‘No, we’re parking at the show. I told you.’ Pain flares behind his eyes. He suppresses an acidic burp as they turn up onto Mt Victoria again and the bright harbour reappears below. Ahead, parked cars are crammed bumper to bumper up to the balloon-festooned gate of Roseneath Primary School, through which summery pedestrians stream. It’s like the entrance to a beehive. The park-locater registers no legal spaces within a kilometre radius. As the car in front stops briefly to unload passengers, he looks up the hill and sees cars parked in an unbroken shining line stretching away out of sight, probably to the summit. The Mount is bad for parking at the best of times.

  ‘I know an internal garage in Mt Vic where we could park,’ Karen suggests. ‘Ours.’

  A car noses out of the school driveway, parting the brightly coloured stream of pedestrians flowing down. His reply to Karen is to turn down the drive.

  ‘You’ll never get one down here.’

  ‘He just left.’

  ‘Did you see how flustered he was?’

  ‘That doesn’t mean he couldn’t find a park.’

  Karen shakes her head and looks out the window.

  Ten metres down the drive, Jeremiah knows he’s made a bad mistake. He’d expected to see cars parked at the side in spaces cars wouldn’t normally be, but hadn’t expected them so tightly packed. It’s obvious he was not the first to take manual control. People walking in front haven’t anticipated that anyone would attempt to drive down and don’t know to move out of the way, and beeping the horn feels as if it would merely announce his poor judgement: Look at me, I’m an idiot! He stops. The back of the car is slapped.

  ‘Get out here,’ he announces.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Get out here. I’ll find a park and meet you.’

  In a flash Karen is out and helping Mandela out of his car seat.

  ‘Nice driving!’ someone says.

  ‘Sorry!’ Karen calls.

  The back door slams. He puts the car into beeping reverse and turns to look out the back window. Incredibly, a car is nosing down the driveway behind him. ‘Idiot,’ he hisses. He waits for the driver to see him and turn back, but the car keeps coming because there’s another moron behind him. There is no choice but to press forward and pray for a space on the netball courts. He crawls down the sloping drive at the pace of the oblivious elderly walking ahead of him, doing his best to ignore comments made by those passing by on foot, which range from a youthful sarcastic, ‘Good luck with that, mate’, to a super-elderly, ‘Well, I never’, to darker utterances he can’t quite make out. The back of the car is slapped again. ‘Try walking one day!’ He winds the windows up and turns down his hearing enhancer. The ear-drum perforated by the bomb blast (he hadn’t noticed at the time) got infected and antibiotics didn’t work, as is increasingly common. The choices were either stem cell regeneration or bionics. The latter option increases the audible spectrum significantly, so he went bionic. He stares straight ahead through his sunglasses. For ten seconds, he realises, he had forgotten about Consolidated. The netball courts come into view. Please, please, please, he thinks. They’re packed to capacity and most cars are boxed in. On such a nice day? Although there’s probably room enough to execute a five-point turn, he’s pushed on by the clowns behind him. The second, smaller car park further down is also packed. It’s the serious buyers, he realises, who have brought cars; those who want to take their automatic rifles home straight away rather than wait for delivery. There’s not even half a park he could attempt to squeeze in to. What now? He looks back. The cars behind are starting to reverse back up the drive against the flow of pedestrians. He follows suit, grateful to be at the back of this ignominious column rather than at the head.

  When he eventually finds a tight illegal park about a kilometre up the mountain, Jeremiah sits and takes a minute. Placing his sunglasses on the passenger seat, he rubs his face and eyes. The headache has worsened. Well, he thinks. There’s no point sitting here. With a sigh he replaces his sunglasses and climbs out of the car. Standing at a rail, he breathes a deep draught of the hot and heavy air. Red Windex roofs tumble down to the sparkling harbour, already this year blooming green with algae. The fair is a riot of colour: sun umbrellas cover the gun stalls, which are encircled by brightly dressed Inners five-deep. Sombre armed guards in black line the outer perimeter of the school, which also functions as part of the secondary inner fence encircling Mt Victoria, Roseneath and part of Hataitai. Security never sleeps. The three-metre-high concrete Wall, with its police nests and crown of barbed and razor wire, is mostly out of sight from his vantage point, but to think of it—running from Oriental Bay up Kent Terrace, its imperious sweep up the eastern flank of Mt Victoria, the generous loop south below the fortified summit that embraces the better part of Hataitai, and its plunge southeast to take in Evans Bay—brings him comfort, the sense of being safe in the heart of a stronghold. There are hundreds of his people at the show.
Everyone will be there. And soon he will make his way amongst them to buy his magnificent black Magnus and boxes of heavy bullets. He takes another breath of hot, thick air. The school car parks really are jammed. It was insane, he realises, to try and park down there. I fucked up, he thinks—again.

  A siren flashes on the rail. He turns, startled, towards the police car that has busted him for his reckless park. It’s only his hazard lights, he sees, left on since he reversed up the school drive.

  The depleted bunch of popped and wrinkly balloons at the primary school gate seem to recognise his weariness. Kindred spirits. It’s really hot. More people are leaving than arriving now, and those leaving have a wilted look about them. He reactivates his hearing enhancer and braces himself for the barrage of talking, listening and catching-up in the furnace at the bottom of the drive. The prospect of staying up drinking until the wee hours is dire. On the upside, he has the Beach bombing to talk about, honed by repeated tellings at work over the past month, which is brilliantly relevant to the gun fair. As for Consolidated, it didn’t—

  ‘Hey, J-guy.’

  ‘Barnesy.’ They shake. ‘Annette. Lovely day. You’re leaving already?’

  Barnes looks a little embarrassed. ‘It’s crazy, man. Too hot.’

  ‘We’re going down to the sea pool,’ Annette says.

  Barnes is an engineer about five years his junior whom he doesn’t really know. A water guy. They worked together briefly a year ago on a sanitation clause in a contract for Deep Spring, and the three of them had a drink that one night and have promised to catch up ever since.