Star Sailors

by James McNaughton

  Jeremiah nods. ‘You mean the current.’

  ‘Huh?’

  No, she doesn’t know yet—how could she know about the Indonesian Flowthrough Current? The news of its stoppage due to fresh water from Antarctica is being held back a few cycles to enable the deacquisition of corporate assets in Australia. He was going to tell Karen that while the event spells a significant economic downturn for Australia in the form of reduced precipitation, it creates a tremendous number of opportunities for business in New Zealand. It was a close call; he almost let classified information slip. Careful, he tells himself. ‘The current… situation,’ he continues, ‘is not ideal, Karen, but we do the best we can. We’re doing okay.’

  ‘Lawyers do well, Jeremiah, but what about everyone else?’

  ‘You’re doing okay too, Karen.’

  ‘Lawyers enable big oil to continue to extract and sell their reserves, even though everyone knows the consequences are disastrous.’

  ‘Energy suppliers have pledged to fulfil their obligations. Their hands are tied, Karen. And in any case, the world simply isn’t ready to surrender its main energy source. The results would be disastrous. You have to choose the least painful road: immediate chaos or organised transition. Furthermore, holistic climate models indicate—’

  ‘Holistic climate models were a big fraud and you know it. They allowed big oil to continue ruining the environment for profit.’

  ‘Karen, this isn’t you talking.’

  Her eyes narrow. Blood blotches her throat. ‘I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.’

  Her scarcely contained rage indicates that she is in fact talking. Whoever’s been feeding her, she’s taken it on board. She owns it. For now, anyway, he thinks. He changes tack. ‘Look, Sam is what it is. What can I say?’

  ‘It?’

  ‘The phenomena, or whatever you want to call it. Look, it still rains. Right? Trees still grow. Manny’s going to have the best the world can offer. At the end of the day, greenhousing is not about Sam, it’s about population increase. And for us, this little family, it’s about doing the best we can with the cards we’re dealt. Everything I do is legal.’

  ‘Not right.’

  ‘The terms are interchangeable, practically speaking. I’m a lawyer, not a philosopher or theologian. I deal in facts of law, facts built over hundreds of years that allow an advanced civilisation to function.’ He spreads his arms. ‘The law built and sustains this home.’ He points southward, to Wellington. ‘The law built TS Stanaway and protects its intellectual property.’ He draws his open palms together, in another Klotch variation of the Muslim gesture he secularised. ‘The law keeps us safe. Law guarantees Manny’s future.’

  After a pause, Karen says in a quiet, calm voice, ‘You lied, didn’t you? The messages are fake. Big business wrote them and you signed them off.’

  He notes the growing blotchiness on her throat and the heaving of her chest, as he tries to recall the exact terms of the nondisclosure clause regarding his spouse. There are, he remembers, three recommended responses to questions.

  An astonishing shriek rents the silence. She’s never shrieked before. The redness has migrated from her throat to her face, and her eyes blaze.

  ‘You cunt!’

  ‘What?’ She’s never called him that before. And over what? A political discussion? ‘Excuse me? Calm down, Karen. Please.’

  ‘I didn’t want to think it was possible. But it’s true! How could you?’

  She’s gone, taking the air with her. His breath is heavy, his heart gallops. Appallingly, another ear-battering shriek tears up the stairs. Manny has already left to stay with Pastels for the duration of the party, but the help preparing the party will hear. Has she lost her mind?

  He turns to the running window, the rain and churned up mud and moat-like puddles. World War I comes to mind. Where, he wonders, did I go wrong? More rats have emerged, seeking higher ground. They’ve become insouciant under the cloak of rain, jaunty even. One takes a brief swim. He’s reminded of the recent outbreak of bubonic plague in a South Auckland slum. Overcrowding, he thinks. Fleas in shared bedding. Doesn’t apply here. Different world. The directed responses to spousal queries in his nondisclosure contract return to him: ‘They don’t tell me much’, ‘I didn’t work on that’ and ‘That’s not my area of expertise’. His mind settles as he realises where he went wrong. He thinks, I allowed myself to be drawn. I stepped off the path and became lost. Now that I have found the path again, I shall remain on it.

  ‘Shit!’

  A black object struck the window right next to his head. A purse? Rattled, he straightens up and peers out. No one. Just mud, rain and rats.

  He draws back the ranch slider and finds the culprit and object in one: a little bat, lying dead or unconscious, face-up and ugly in a puddle. He pokes it with his foot. Turns it over, face-down in the water, to be sure it’s dead.

  28

  King Arthur? Jeremiah stands before the full-length mirror in the smallest bedroom upstairs, where Karen has relegated him because she cannot afford to be disturbed by him ‘anymore’ while dressing. When she’d yelled through her locked door, a realisation had landed as if delivered by a chiming elevator into his brain: the party means more to her than to me.

  Through the eyeholes cut in his round Norman-style helmet, Jeremiah appraises the costume Karen designed for him. With fashion being her department, he ceded all control, promising that he’d go out of his comfort zone for her, as the spouse of an up-and-coming designer. ‘It’ll be a little edgy,’ she’d warned him during the fitting of a base bodysuit from which the end-product would be sized. She smiled and measured his arms. ‘Maybe a little androgynous.’ He’d smiled back at her in the mirror as he flexed his biceps into a ball—forcing her to remeasure. As if.

  Deep breath. Jeremiah relaxes into the look. The Norman helmet, with its nose guard, is cool despite being non-Arthurian. The design is convenient, allowing speech and sustenance, yet conceals his eyes and cheeks. The tight aluminium chainmail onesie is growing on him in the way it reveals his musculature, but the tiny silver shorts? There’s only just enough fabric to conceal the screen stuck to his hip. He wears nothing else but felt silver slippers, which don’t look at all metallic. People won’t notice my feet, Jeremiah thinks, as he flexes his chest and biceps. Muscles leap and expand mightily to strain against the chainmail, almost threatening to pop it open. That’s awesome. It’s the overall effect which is important, he tells himself, rather than the detail of the silver shorts. Still, he’s not entirely convinced. He texts Karen, King who?

  While waiting for her reply, he lifts a foot and flexes his thighs. Pivots and swivels. Looking over his shoulder in the mirror at his buttocks packed into the tiny silver shorts, snug beneath the tight, light coat of aluminium chainmail, he wonders if anyone seeing him from behind would take him for a knight at all. He turns around again. The polished beads glint. Perhaps they’d think him a water feature? Like the solar-powered fountain at work, on which beads of water run along fine wire. He adjusts his package. A big nuts night—he’ll take it.

  Resolute squirrel: no real transformation occurs, only a shadowy clenching of his jaw. Yet it’s better than the rear view. He makes a mental note to back away from Mr Klotch when their conversation terminates.

  Karen’s reply reads, Could you do a quick check around? I’ll be a bit longer.

  Chilly, he thinks, but not overtly hostile. He responds generously, Sure.

  He bows and backs away from the mirror and out of the room.

  As he descends the grand carpeted staircase, with his hand on the banister for support because the loose felt slippers feel slippery on the lush new carpet, he looks down into the entrance area, hung with great banners and bolts of blue cloth which shift and flare in blue light, and has the unsettling sensation of feeling like a princess being presented, rather than a king making his entrance.

  Near the foot of the stairs stands a woman with a toned naked back and
thick black horns. From the bottom of her baggy black pants point stiletto heels and cloven hooves. A ripped young man in a short tartan kilt, mask and tam o’ shanter hat is taking directions from her. The woman dismisses the pseudo-Scot, turns, looks up at Jeremiah and smiles dazzlingly from behind a Zorro mask. She’s topless.

  ‘Good evening, King Arthur.’

  My costume’s pitched about right, then, he thinks as he descends and extends his hand.

  She curtseys. ‘I’m Wanda, the staff coordinator. So pleased to finally meet you, Mr Broderick.’

  A free-standing, gas-powered fire encased in blue stained glass provides the entrance area’s only illumination. He doesn’t want to notice the way the flickering blue light slides and plays over her breasts. ‘Pleased to meet you, Wanda. Should be quite a party, I think.’

  ‘I’m very excited.’ Her breasts heave. ‘Please take a walk through the seven coloured chambers and let me know what staff improvements I can make before your guests arrive. The violet/tüäpökere room is perhaps a little controversial for this early hour.’

  ‘I’m eager to look around, Wanda, but I think I’d better leave those kinds of decisions to my wife.’

  Wanda curtseys again, more slowly this time, and more respectfully, it seems.

  As Jeremiah strides away, the chainmail jingles slightly and he feels Wanda’s eyes on his rump.

  Above the entrance to what was previously the front living room is a small sign: päpura. Purple, Jeremiah thinks. That’s an easy one. The room is illuminated by a purple glass lamp, and he is struck by the fantastic fleeting shapes the flames project on the heavy purple drapes, carpet and padded furniture. Mystery and power. It’s remarkably different in character and feeling from the blue entranceway, which seems rather common and democratic by comparison now. No doubt the party designer has insights into the psychological effects of various hues, he thinks. Or they have some kind of symbolic meaning. His pondering is interrupted by movement in the corner.

  It’s a clown, made nearly invisible in the purple light by his purple chequered suit and curly purple hair. He’s rummaging through a box. Sensing Jeremiah, the clown stops his search, stands and turns. On the end of his white-painted face sits a round purple nose. He bows. ‘King Arthur!’ And he remains bent over, eyes cast down, frozen. Purple light plays across the clown’s back.

  Oddly unsettled, Jeremiah leaves. Again, the sensation of eyes on his rump.

  The käkäriki room, once the indoor tennis court, has become a lushly appointed ballroom. The DJ behind the mixing desk wears a full-face comedy mask of white porcelain distorted in a frozen laugh and large headphones. Emerald light flares and crawls across the wall hangings. The cold hilarity of the mask, seemingly provoked by the desk and records, make the DJ appear feeble-minded. He doesn’t look up.

  Jeremiah decides to send Karen an encouraging message, something that will satisfy her leftist leanings. Looks great. And the rooms have Mäori colour labels. Great learning opportunity.

  The dining room has become the karaka chamber. From the hall, the glow of it reminds Jeremiah of an orange lava lamp, a decorative novelty item he has distinctly unfond memories of from his university days, when on the one and only occasion in his life, in the cushion-strewn room next to his at the hall of residence, he took a class A drug. The three bearded hippies who talked him into it morphed into dogs (two Irish Setters and a German Shepherd) and barked at him, insisting, with strangely pronounced words accompanied by eager whining between their bouts of barking, that he focus intently on the detaching orange globules in the lava lamp and see what they saw: the planetary and the molecular in an eternal cycle of creation and chaos. ‘Look! Look! Look! Woof, woof, woof!’ Jeremiah had fled through a beaded curtain, out of the building, off the campus and down to the harbour. The memory hurries him on.

  Karen’s reply arrives. Get the Mäori labels taken down. Now.

  He sighs. The Left is an impossible booby-trapped labyrinth. But given the increasing talk of revolution in the air, it’s a labyrinth he should probably try to begin to negotiate. He replies, Fine. What reason should I give?

  The mä chamber was previously the library (and will become the new gym after the party). It’s one of the larger downstairs rooms, certainly the grandest, and promises to be dramatic. He pops his helmeted head around the corner. The long room is milky white. Cast through white-stained glass, the light is blizzard-like, waving, advancing and retreating. At the far end of the chamber stands a white bar, behind which the high inbuilt bookshelves have been stocked with a multitude of coloured bottles. Two tall young women with platinum hair, white feathery masks and white body paint on their faces and breasts stand behind the bar. One walks around from behind it, chatting to her colleague as she attends to a white container emitting steam. Jeremiah realises she’s wearing nothing at all but white body paint and white heels. Embarrassed, he steps back just as the naked woman sees him.

  Wait, he thinks. It was the violet room that Wanda said was controversial, not the white. Anxiety chimes. If it’s normal for the staff to be so casually naked now, he wonders what will happen when the hour grows late and the rich and powerful begin to play in earnest. The nocturnal appetites of the super-elderly are notorious. Where is there left to go for those women? What will be demanded of them by terminally bored and powerful sensation-seekers? And, he thinks, what will be demanded of me? What will my superiors require of me and Karen?

  He jumps at a touch on his elbow. It’s Wanda. He searches the eyes behind her thick leather Zorro mask (etched with an ornate furry moth) for some warmth. The blue of her eyes is sapphire-like, the whites like snow. She blinks her long black lashes once, slowly, and inclines her head.

  ‘King Arthur, your first guests have arrived.’

  ‘Already? Listen, I haven’t got to the violet room yet, Wanda. But here—will those women be alright?’

  ‘Alright, my liege?’ Wanda links her arm through his and leads him down the hall towards the blue entrance. A black-hooded juggler, with a full back tattoo of Escher’s ants on a Möbius strip, mounts a unicycle with practised ease. A couple of masked acrobats spin lazy warm-up cartwheels. He’s gratified to see they’re wearing leotards.

  ‘I mean, are they, you know, warm and safe?’

  ‘The white/mä chamber deceives the eye, my liege. It is warm and the women in it very much want to be there.’

  He stops. ‘Wait. Karen wants the Mäori colour labels taken down.’

  Wanda inclines her head.

  He unsticks his screen from his hip and slides it through his aluminium chainmail. ‘She says, um, that they’re “grossly inappropriate in this context”.’ He raises his eyebrows and realises that Wanda can’t see them beneath his helmet. He suspects that hers are raised beneath her mask.

  She nods. ‘Yes, my liege.’ She takes his arm.

  ‘Wait, the violet room.’

  ‘Please.’ She presses him on. ‘Your wife has not yet come down and your guests are not the type accustomed to waiting. But let me assure you in the meantime, sire, before you complete your inspection, that all of our staff very much want to be here. Very much.’

  As Bill loads the dishwasher Simon paces the hall, trying to walk away Solangia’s fretful crying. She’ll fall asleep soon, Bill tells himself, and Simon shortly after. There are still two hours until the courier arrives—plenty of time.

  To avoid the possibility of another discussion with his son, Bill goes outside for a cigarette. He lights up by Simon’s car and blows a cloud of smoke on the wreck. Won’t take my money to fix it, he thinks. Would rather hitch home with a six-month-old baby in summer instead. It’s not safe. It’s reckless. Solangia will travel tonight in the cool comfort of a professional courier vehicle. If Simon still wants to, he can stand by the highway for hours with his thumb out in 35 degrees plus—alone.

  A couple of long exhalations later, Bill admits to himself that Simon has scored a hit with the money jibe. He’s learned to swing. Twent
y years with Cheryl has taught him that much at least. But it was a sloppy swing. Simon is not here to make money. It’s not about money. He’s here to get some peace and quiet for once in his life. My money, Bill thinks, taking a long final drag, wherever it came from, has nothing to do with that. Simon can work for free.

  Bill drops the butt and grinds it in the gravel with his heel before he realises he shouldn’t. Old habits. Too far to bend down.

  Told off by Simon. Jesus. He looks up at the summer stars, twinkling, pulsing, coloured, still beautiful—maybe more beautiful than ever—now that the world’s coming apart at the seams. And yet colder too, the longer he looks, as if scattered high and impassive over a battlefield in war. No, he thinks, they don’t signify the creator’s cool detachment, but his nonexistence; they’re nuclear furnaces around which rage other evolutionary battles for survival, microbial and sentient. Bill’s brief nicotine rush subsides and the longer he looks at the stars the more remote they become, and the lonelier he feels and less certain of anything.

  The sound of Solangia crying meets him in the kitchen. Still awake, he thinks. Wide awake. The jerky persistence of her wailing suggests real suffering.

  He knocks lightly on the bedroom door. Will Simon accept my help at least, he wonders, if not my money? He knocks. Waits. Knocks again. No reply. ‘Everyone alright?’ He cracks the door and the power of Solangia’s crying becomes apparent, as well as the deeper rumble of Simon’s snoring. The baby’s hands flail above the drawer, which has been placed on the floor behind a chair against the wall—in a place where Simon won’t accidentally stand on her. That’s good, Bill thinks. Simon recognises his own clumsiness and has learned to plan around it. More progress, along with the fighting back.

  Bill lifts the squalling baby. So light and yet so much noise. Her sightless red face is all-consumed by pain.

  ‘What’s up, Sol?’