Is she running a temperature? Bill holds her soft face to his cheek. She’s cooler than she looks. The insect bites have settled. She burps and ejects a little parcel of puke onto his shoulder. The wailing immediately tapers off into silence.
Bill assesses the puke and grins. ‘A bargain.’
‘Uh.’ Her long, thin fingers straighten, then curl slowly shut.
A blast of brass and the front doors swing open to the rainy night. Jeremiah wasn’t expecting such drama. The door staff are dressed like 17th-century gentlemen. The pair of horn-blowers, the entrance security detail and umbrella bearers all wear tall white wigs, ornate crimson jackets, puffy breeches, sheer white stockings and buckled shoes. Yet he scarcely sees them because the first cohort of fantastically masked guests stand in rank between the columns, all protected from the elements by rain-spattered sheer black gowns closed to the throat. Like a colony of mutant bats, Jeremiah thinks. He scans the inscrutable rank of half-masks and unmoving, silent mouths beneath them. Many of the women are birds of prey and wear tall feathered headdresses above cruelly beaked visages. The men favour demons and the living dead, topped with feathered highwayman hats. The fantastic host stand silently between the columns, as frozen as their expressions, and stare as if awaiting a signal. Jeremiah feels naked, not only unknightly but in danger of being eaten alive. They’ll become more human, he thinks, with the cloaks off. Their costumes and bodies will reveal personalities and identities the masks conceal. No one moves. He looks for the Cupid’s bow of Tiroli’s lips. There are many red bowed lips. A horned ghoul with a trickle of bright blood painted on his powdered jaw brings to mind the puddle stained by a drop of bat’s blood. After Jeremiah had drowned it, a man in a sterile white suit had come immediately to collect the stiff, mouse-like thing. A man in white rather than black.
From the brass horns comes a staccato salute. A spell breaks. Mouths curve into smiles. Teeth are revealed. The company sweep towards him. Who are they? He looks for rats at their feet. He looks below the hideous coloured masks to their chins and throats, for clues of their age, at least, but there’s not enough flickering blue light to see by. Nothing is familiar. He cannot place anyone, not even as fashionistas or Goldens. He turns and looks up the stairs for Karen. Where is she? He feels helpless as the guests envelope him and flow past as if he’s invisible. ‘Welcome!’ he cries. A feathered highwayman’s hat is thrust at him, and then another and another as more and more black-cloaked guests pass him. The horns play a sustained salute.
No one removes their wet cloak, nor even opens one. It’s the theme, he realises. There are no costumes, just masks and cloaks. After swooning at the enormity of Karen’s deception, he finds—as the ebullient black-backed guests disappear into his house and the delights of its seven coloured chambers—he has an armful of men’s feathered hats.
As two costumed footmen discreetly relieve him of this burden there comes through invisible speakers the first deep and resonant notes of a solo cello; swooping, insistently mournful music broken with abrupt resinous discords. The music grows darker and more sinister as it gets louder and drowns out the rain’s organic hiss. What kind of party, he wonders, is this? A faint squeal reaches him from a distant room. The violet chamber? As he turns to locate the screamer, a masked woman at the top of the grand staircase transfixes him.
The black hair piled on top of her head and studded with diamonds is like Karen’s, but it can’t be her, for she’s not a damsel in distress clad only in strategically placed singed rope that he, King Arthur, has just saved from a fire-breathing dragon. This woman wears a winged crimson mask plumed with long crimson feathers, and a crimson velvet gown with an outsize stiff collar. She’s strung with pearls and her fingers are adorned with large green and red stones. Measured and regal, needing no banister for support as she descends the centre of the staircase, she nods to him.
‘King Arthur.’
‘Karen? What’s going on?’
The horns sound another staccato salute outside and another anonymous cohort of gay and laughing black-gowned masked guests sweep over the threshold. Karen is surrounded at the foot of the staircase by a dozen of them.
‘Karen, you look wonderful!’
‘But this place is incredible! It’s a country estate! Like Brideshead!’
‘Amazing! The coloured fire is fabulous!’
Behind the excited colony around Karen stands a half-circle of more reserved guests. Karen backs up a couple of stairs and bows her head to them. She receives some muted bows in return. One man removes his feathered highwayman hat, sweeps it with a flourish and drops to one knee. A shaved and muscled calf is freed from the constraints of his black gown. A cyclist’s calf, it sports a tattoo of the Platinum Pagoda. Jeremiah doesn’t recognise it.
Many of the sheer gowns, he notes, fall straight and cling. He suspects these guests are nude beneath, but just as many clearly wear something, at least, and some must wear substantial costumes, judging by their padded shoulders and projected busts.
‘Welcome,’ Karen intones, with a little curtsey. ‘Please enjoy yourselves.’
The Goldens (for it must be only Goldens who hung back) stream past him, brushing by each of his shoulders, their grotesque and elaborate masked faces directed straight ahead, or above, at the vigorous play of blue light on the blue tapestries. It’s as if he exists only as an inanimate obstacle to be avoided. No, his human presence is confirmed by a feathered highwayman’s hat pushed into his stomach, and another, and another.
In the cluster near Karen comes a cry, ‘Who are you?’
‘Oh my God! I thought you were Pozninka! That’s why I…’
‘Aaaahhhhh!’
The excitement of the masked fashionistas runs very high. Beyond the electrifying possibilities of their anonymity at the party there is the thrill of the unseasonable storm, the inky night of the Wairarapa after the seedy sodium glow of Wellington, the flooding negotiated in the bus from Masterton station, and the terror of stepping on relocating vermin. Karen is a rallying point for the Outers, the eye at the centre of a black-cloaked whirl, and Jeremiah resigns himself to the fact that it will be more than a few minutes before he can talk to his wife and find out where his real costume is. He plays sentinel while he waits, standing to attention at the bottom of a banister, with his back to the staircase. Her perfect teeth flash as she laughs at some hilarious remark. You bitch, he thinks.
More guests arrive, but now in the role of sentinel of the staircase, he is spared the indignity of holding highwayman hats, and it falls to his perspiring white-wigged footmen to do the job they are paid to. He casts an irate eye around for Wanda or Tiroli or anyone he knows (Le Stratton is a definite maybe; communication has been minimal since Jeremiah’s promotion). The fashion crowd, an energetic and eclectic mix of multitasking designers, photographers, models, PAs, dressmakers, suppliers, retailers, technicians, marketers, make-up artists and promoters—all seamlessly united by their disguises—has grown larger, yet shows no sign of leaving the blue entranceway. They meet each other as if they’ve been separated for years and then fall into intense discussions in which all parties are scandalised. Jeremiah’s sense of disorientation is hardening into annoyance. The joke was good, possibly even very good, but it can’t go on all night. To queries asking his whereabouts, he hears Karen say that he’s incognito. The fervour around her shows no sign of abating.
The ominous piped cello stops dead. A heavy ticking replaces it and there comes a loud clang, accompanied by a subsonic pile-driving punch which goes deep into Jeremiah’s stomach. The hour strikes brutally, nine times. No amount of ear-plugging can stop the impact of the nine crunching body-blows. When silence returns and he opens his eyes and stands up (for he had sunk into a crouch and turned off his hearing aid), any trace of queasiness is gone within seconds, and relieved laughter breaks out as it would among those who are climbing out of a rollercoaster.
Karen whispers hotly into his good ear, ‘It’s better for you to stay dr
essed like that tonight. Trust me.’
She turns away, her face hidden behind the high crimson collar of her gown as she leaves him and makes her way back to the bevy of fashionistas, some of whom are sheepishly replacing the masks they tore off in distress during the marking of the hour. The glimpse of pale human faces is comforting even though he knows none of them. The sawing cello strikes up again. He wanders off in search of the violet chamber.
The slow curl of fingers was Solangia’s last waking act. She’s fast asleep. Her teenage father probably isn’t, Bill thinks, as he moves to place her in the drawer on the floor. He’ll be up to no good, thanking his lucky stars that Simon’s such a sucker. ‘Good luck, kid,’ Bill tells her softly. ‘You’ll need it.’
Having second thoughts, he holds on to her and sits in the armchair Simon placed to protect her from his nocturnal blundering. She smells clean and good, and Bill would like his son to share his enjoyment of her recovery from gas to instant collapse into the arms of Morpheus, but he’s out too. The fleshy rattle of his snore is a back-and-forth battle for oxygen. He’s too fat and poor. Bound for an early death, unless someone does something soon. Well, I’m doing something, Bill declares to himself. It’s 60 minutes until the courier comes and a new chapter in Simon’s life begins.
Simon wasn’t always fat, but always had a fat boy’s awkwardness. Bill pictures him at primary school, seemingly lost on each of the rare occasions that he dropped Simon off or picked him up. He made a slow-moving target for the other flinty, confident children racing around with their shouts and fast-changing alliances. Bill had ached for the seconds, minutes, hours, months and years his son would have to endure, lost, when everyone else knew the way.
Simon’s face is younger and less care-worn in sleep. The sleeping Solangia, by comparison, has shed no major load. Sleep, Bill remembers, is a higher state of consciousness, according to the Buddhists. There might be something in it, he thinks. Simon’s face has a quality of holy selflessness, as if he were dreaming for someone else.
It’s moments like these when Bill wishes he believed in karma—then all of Simon’s countless little kindnesses towards damaged individuals would see him reborn as a king in the next life. Not a rich person, necessarily, just one never lost in the playground, one who rarely stumbles. But the cold reality, he thinks—and not for the first time since Simon began putting on weight with abandon—is that Simon will die young, and the people he gave his life to will squabble over the cost of his funeral, and that’ll be game over. The Christianity that Simon embraced as a teenager only ennobled his helplessness, made him a bigger target.
The vision of Simon in the playground returns to him: the hesitant kid suspended in the flow of life. Too good for this world. Or not hard enough. The truth, Bill admits to himself, is that when he did drop his son off at school, he always just left him and hurried away. Not once did he stay. Not once. Those most wrenching glimpses of his lost child were always through a fence or a classroom window as he was leaving.
Maybe some kids need to hold their father’s hand and be helped, he thinks. They need a father to help them order the world as it comes rushing in. The schoolyard was no mystery to me and never was. Yet it was to Simon. Why didn’t I shine a light? But what could I tell him? That one looks nice, because he’s quiet—make friends. Look out for that one, because he’s quiet—don’t make friends.
With Simon he often had an overpowering sense of humanity’s essential solitude, of the failure of words to communicate meaning that would actually change anything. Post-Sam, that was, he thinks. I was very busy. Or something. Always a deadline. A nihilist with deadlines, Sash called me when we broke up. I couldn’t stay with Simon even once, untangle at least one single thread for him—no, because all the hand-holding in the world wouldn’t have helped in the end. People need to make their own mistakes, learn their lessons at their own pace and sustain the damage necessary to find their limits. Pain is necessary. It’s how we learn. It’s how we’re wired. Basic creatures that we are.
He examines Solangia’s sleeping face. Simon was once as vulnerable. Hurt can be limited, he thinks, managed. Could I have done something? Taken him out of school, maybe? Spared him? Been with him more? Taken him under my wing? Yes, yes, I left him. Simon wasn’t like his brothers. There were times when his boyhood compassion and tolerance hinted at true greatness of spirit. But I left him, Bill thinks, to be bashed and worn down. I abandoned him when he needed me most.
The snoring ceases with a last rattle, like an old-fashioned combustion engine that has been gunned, before it reluctantly falls silent. One eye unsticks and then the other as Simon raises himself on his elbows. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Ah, Sol woke up. You didn’t, though.’
‘You were staring at me.’
‘I was? Oh, sorry. She got me thinking about you as a child. I’ll leave you in peace. Good—’
‘And? What were you thinking?’
This new sharpness, Bill thinks. ‘About how you always had compassion for those who treated you badly, even at primary school. It was wonderful in a way, and hard too, for a parent. I was never sure if it was saintly love or an inability to get out of the way.’
‘You don’t believe in saints, remember. Or religion.’
Like Cheryl, religion is a topic they agreed to disagree on years ago. ‘No. But I believe in selfless, unconditional love. Love that continues regardless of the object’s actions.’
‘What else do you believe in?’
‘Well, look, any kind of belief system is like the stars, Simon: it doesn’t pay to look too long and hard at one or it gets strange. Someone really wants to sell an ideology? It can’t be from a human. Humans are hopelessly flawed. Make out it’s by divine authority—that settles it. There is no God. There are higher forms of consciousness than ours, though. By higher I mean more complex than ours. Sam’s species is more complex. They understand more.’
The mention of Sam has been a blow. Bill feels that, and understands why Simon might resent the name ‘Sam’ being his father’s last word on everything, but he doesn’t care. Simon asked what he believes in, so he told him.
Simon pulls himself up to a sitting position and rubs his face. ‘Humans can’t transcend their limitations?’
Still well over an hour for him to flake out again, Bill thinks. ‘To be better than human, one has to be born that way. As a Starsailor.’
‘That’s a miserable conclusion.’
‘Why?’
‘You give humanity a fail grade on its inherent nature.’
‘The least you can do is face the facts, yeah? I mean, take a group of apes. As if one will ever go out one day, gather bananas and return and distribute them. Species have essential natures, natural limitations.’
‘That’s a great ape, Bill.’
‘Okay, so there’s the odd extraordinary individual off the right of the bell-shaped curve, but it can’t take the whole species with it.’
‘What about evolution and the transfer of knowledge? An extraordinary individual can leave behind a record that is shared and propagated, one that lifts a species’s consciousness.’
‘No human’s managed it. For each step forward there are two steps back.’
Simon scowls. ‘That’s not true.’
‘Einstein? Science and technology’s brought us to the brink of destruction.’
‘I don’t mean scientists.’
Bill sighs. ‘Religion hasn’t helped.’
‘It’s essential.’
The old impasse again.
Simon breaks the silence. ‘It’s funny, but you remind me of a certain type of churchgoer.’
‘You mean the type dragged along by their partner?’
‘No, the type who passionately believes in Jesus but feels no inclination to personally follow his teachings.’
‘What?’
‘That’s like your relationship to Sam. You believe in him as a kind of presence, but that’s all. Wouldn’t a true di
sciple become a climate-change activist at least?’
‘I tried!’
‘Not hard.’
‘What would you know about it?’
‘More than you think, Bill.’
‘Excuse me? Where would you and your family be if I hadn’t held a job down?’
Simon sighs. ‘It makes sense why you’d like to drink your last days away.’
‘What?’
‘We’re going to hit the road while it’s cool. I’ll get a taxi to the highway and we’ll hitch from there.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’
Simon swivels on the bed, plants his feet on the floor. ‘Best time to travel in summer with a baby.’
‘Now? No, you need to sleep. You’re not prepared. You’ll be robbed. Stay one more day. Leave tomorrow night and I’ll organise a ride for you. I know people who drive to Wellington regularly.’
‘I don’t want a part in this, Bill. This vision of yours. It’s wrong.’
‘What vision?’
‘All this land for one person.’
‘Not one—’
‘Yes, one. And all the water you’re using—for what? To make alcohol and money. You’re like a sozzled lone wolf. Get some friends up here. Grow your own food, be self-sufficient and sustainable. Live simply. Set an example. Help people.’
‘You’re suddenly very full of advice. Well here’s some for you: stay away from Cheryl for a while and get your mind back. Lose some weight. I want to help you.’
‘You’ve sold out. I haven’t. Give me my daughter.’
‘She’s not even yours!’
‘You’re very concerned with status, aren’t you?’
‘What?’
Bill’s screen emits the gate signal. The courier already? If it is, she’s early. He stands, and Simon prepares himself to receive the baby. Bill slips past him, through the door, taking Solangia with him.
‘Where are you going!’
To the violet chamber. As Jeremiah negotiates his transformed hallway, now dimly illuminated by hurricane lamps and laid with rubber matting for the swivelling unicyclist and swishing acrobats, excited guests flit past him from chamber to coloured chamber, some squealing with excitement. He realises he is beneath notice, like others in costumes similar to his: the lightly clad gladiators, nurses and dominatrixes holding drinks trays. Karen has dressed him as a waiter.
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