'I mean do you miss all the stuff you did before you retired?'
'Never miss it. It wasn't any picnic, you know, keeping trucks on the road, and trying to find steady guys and enough business.'
'It was lovely country, though, Dad,' said Theo.
'Never miss it,' said his father emphatically. He sat like a goblin Abe Lincoln, with both arms resting on the chair.
His hair was a grey stubble, his face slightly scaly from constant exposure to the glaring, antipodean sun.
'One day I'd like to take you and Mum back to some of those places for a day or two. Some of those lovely, quiet beaches out from Cheviot perhaps.'
'Yeah, well, we're pretty busy until Christmas,' his father said. 'And we're hoping to get over to Sydney to see Lee and the kids.'
It's not uncommon for children, adult or otherwise, to find the company of their parents an imposition, but Theo hadn't thought much about the reverse being true. The visits to his parents were dutiful on everyone's part. He brought nothing that engaged their existing priorities: nothing of bridge, or bowls, nothing of common ailments of decline, above all no absorbing and spontaneous children with handicrafts of love. He came with the shadow of a failed relationship. His gift was a supermarket cardboard basket of Easter eggs, their gaudy foil wrappings catching light from the television when his mother placed them on the tray table.
'Thanks for that,' she said matter-of-factly. If his personality lacked sufficient charisma to enthuse even his own mother and father, what chance did he have with Penny Maine-King?
Theo tried again when his mother returned with three buttered halves of apricot muffin, the exact number a warning of individual allocation. 'I was saying to Dad that you might like to have a trip back to some of the old places.'
'It's just we seem to be so busy,' she said. 'Goodness knows where the time goes.'
It went on assembling a losing hand of playing cards, on bowling biased balls up towards the kitty, on finding a Thomas the Tank Engine T-shirt for Tom, and a pink plastic tiara and fairy wand for Mandy. It ticked by during the chatter of teacups and vapid voices in cream-painted clubrooms, and it advanced remorselessly as they watched repeats that filled their small lounge with canned laughter and stock imitations of life.
Theo told himself that his mother and father had a more essential existence than was ever on view, or revealed in their conversation. What was presented could not be all they possessed of life. Such a belief was presumptuous and judgemental, but he held to it. Surely when they talked privately, his parents had topics and understandings that were enriched by personal philosophies and subtle epiphanies which arose from their own experience. That they chose not to reveal themselves to him was a lesser blow than the possibility that the banal drift of their lives was really as it appeared.
'What do you hope for these days?' Theo enquired recklessly.
'Hope for?' His father's tone was almost of derision, and his mother gave a slight laugh as though to cover inappropriateness.
'I mean your ambitions for yourselves — what you're aiming for. Hopeful, special things.' Even as he spoke, Theo winced at his own words. The television images jiggled; the heavy, yellow sunlight of afternoon through the Venetians tiger-striped the small lounge.
'Winning Lotto and not getting sick. That's what we bloody hope for,' said Theo's father.
'And for the family,' added his mother piously. 'It's all family, isn't it.'
When Theo had turned fifteen his father taught him to drive. It was the one time that Theo felt Don had an urgency to pass on something to him. Maybe behind the value his father attached to the ability to drive well, was the expectation that Theo would end up continuing the family trucking business; perhaps he felt contributing to such a practical skill absolved him of the need to offer any emotional inheritance. There were four trucks, and the biggest and best was an articulated Mack that his father rarely let anyone else drive.
Theo didn't learn on the Mack, or any of the trucks, of course, although he later drove them to earn money in school and university holidays. In the end he could back a stock crate to match a loading race within an inch or two. No, he learnt in the family Ford, and even then was surprised by the patience his father showed, and his concern for the welfare of machinery. 'Listen to the engine,' his father would say. 'The engine talks to you. Its tone of voice tells you everything: when you need to change up or down, when it's at ease and when it's straining.'
The driving sessions Theo had with Don were the best times they shared when he was a boy. They started just sitting in the car with the motor off, and his father talking of how an engine worked, how all the controls and instruments enabled the driver to get the best out of it. They ended many weeks later driving over downland and hill roads, with Theo behind the wheel, and his father making brief comment sometimes beside him of trucks, and farms, and stock, and the people concerned with that life. Theo hadn't realised then that he was experiencing the greatest closeness he and Don would ever have.
They came to the door to farewell him, his mother glancing to the houses on either side to see if they were observed, his father working his Punch features comically in lieu of anything to say. His mother tall, with her long, equine face angled to regard Theo; his father reduced, like a jockey, at her side.
Theo felt a mixture of dissociation and baffled tenderness as he gave a wave of farewell. He was conscious of the soft movement of the air on his face as he walked to his car, of the warmth of the sun, of the fragrance of cut grass, and the hovering white butterflies in the garden strip. In the grassed centre of the cul-de-sac turning circle was a large kowhai tree, with contorted seed pods spread at its feet like a swarm of dead bees. It was his time to be alive, he reminded himself, and he shouldn't waste any of it. It was the very short time when green life was allowed him in the endless shuffle of people past, present and future. He would run in the evening when the sun had slipped below the horizon. He would admit to himself and Penny that he wanted to be with her as a complete partner, and resolve to attain a life that had something in it which was valiant and purposeful in terms of the spirit. He would drink less in the evenings, and give greater support to his colleagues during the day. He would seek something of significant value outside himself to acknowledge.
16
'My neighbour's gone mad,' said Nicholas. He and Theo were standing in the night on the stark, concrete top of the building in which they worked. There was a small fortress in the centre that housed the narrow stairwell and the vitals of the central heating and air conditioning, a broad strip on all sides and then a concrete wall to waist height. There were grilles in the flat concrete to take rain, and a few straggling pipes and antennae reaching up like the enfeebled shoots on a vast stump.
It was an unauthorised place, but people came up anyway seeking some respite from the offices and machine rooms below. There were cigarette butts and small, flattened juice packets on the north side, which gave a view towards the river, the old law courts and grassed spaces. Even though it was night, much of that was still visible because of the city lights.
'Completely mad, I'd say,' said Nicholas.
'How's that?'
'He has these discussions with his dog, a runt of a fox terrier so highly strung that it's in a constant state of quivering agitation. He has discussions about politics, bowel movements and diet, leaving pauses for the foxie to reply, and then carrying on as if it has. Sometimes he laughs at something the dog says that I can't hear. Spooky really.
He'll go on for ages, but whenever I meet him he's not interested in neighbourly conversation. I'm no substitute for the dog.'
'What's his name?'
'Rossiter,' said Nicholas.
The streetlights were on, and many rooms in the office blocks were lit up, maybe for security, or for the cleaners who came into the lost empires when everyone else had gone home. There was always some traffic, especially taxis, and some walkers also, loud and skittish in twos and threes, or quietly makin
g a solitary way.
'I'm not sure what to do,' said Theo.
'This is about Penny Maine-King?'
'I'm not sure what's the best thing,' said Theo. 'Her husband wants a meeting to sort things out, and Penny won't come out of hiding yet. She wants Zack Heywood and me to go and talk to him in France.'
L'France. Jesus.'
'He has some sort of business there. I really want to help if I can, and this might be the way to do it. I'm just worried about stepping into the life of a family where there's so much pain, so much at stake. I don't know what she expects.'
'She expects you to want to sleep with her.'
'But it's not just her and me involved, is it?'
'Women see sex as the start of something,' said Nicholas, 'and men see it as an end.'
'But it's not really about that. If you want to be with someone you have to take on what's important to them — the accumulation of their lives. Their grievances and achievements become your own. I don't seem to be very good at that.'
'Don't get gun-shy because of what happened with Stella,' said Nicholas softly. Flippancy and cynicism put aside for a moment, he leant forward over the concrete wall in pretence of observing some activity in the street below. 'I wish to God some woman was interested in me,' he said.
Theo had no reply to that. The sincerity struck home though, and a sense of the loneliness Nicholas lived with. Theo realised that his companion had deliberately let that show, and that such brief vulnerability was his display of friendship.
They were quiet for a time, looking from the darkened platform of the building across the city with its lines of streetlights, lit chequerboard windows, coloured neons and the fireflies of the moving cars. 'When I'm up here,' said Nicholas finally, 'I always feel I want to smoke. I don't know what it is.' Theo felt just the same. It wasn't just the butts scattered at their feet. Something more than that: something to do with being at a height, temporarily cut off from the stress and bustle as the paper was put to bed below. Something to do with night and an almost schoolboy delight in truancy. 'Well,' said Nicholas, 'I'd better head back down, I suppose. I'm supposed to help one of the subs go through some stuff on American politics.'
'Is your neighbour really that weird?' said Theo. 'A lot of people talk to cats and dogs. Maybe it's healthy even — a form of catharsis.' He'd read of ponies, goats, pigs and white rats being taken into rest homes and kindergartens, where the inmates lined up to pat them and be told they shared almost all their DNA.
'This Rossiter is something else, though,' said Nicholas. 'It's not just the interminable conversations with the dog, and the cultivation of Peruvian cacti and succulents in a glasshouse he can only crawl into. I've seen him standing naked in the heavy rain and soaping himself.'
'Is this the guy who complains when you play classical music?'
'Yeah. He set the council noise abatement officer on me. Didn't have the guts to come round himself. As it happens I know Ray Mortensen from the council anyway. He said Rossiter was in tears when he made the complaint.'
As a journalist, Theo often dealt with people who were emotional about their views. Unlike most of the public, however, he realised that conviction and anger aren't guarantees of justifiable grievance. Vehemence is often confused with truth. The world can't believe that a weeping and distraught mother can be in the wrong, or an impassioned witness be false. What about Penny then, and the view he'd espoused?
In the cool night air Theo and Nicholas walked back to the stairwell. The final access to the roof was just a steel ladder bolted to the wall, which flexed slightly when you climbed it. Nicholas went first. He paused when he was halfway down, his face upturned to where Theo waited his turn. 'If I were you, Theo, I'd give this chance with Penny Maine-King my best bloody shot.'
'Yes,' said Theo. 'It's easily the best thing that's happened to me in a long time.'
Nicholas was out of sight, but his voice came up to the roof. 'Just don't start screwing her until you're sure of what you're prepared to take on. I mean the boy and everything.'
17
Theo had sent an email to Penny in paradise, saying they needed to talk, and that he'd drive down to Drybread on Easter Monday unless he heard back from her. There was no answer before then, so early that morning he walked the considerable distance to his work carpark where he'd deliberately left the Audi. The parson was on his mind, although he'd seen no sign of him since Timaru. Theo didn't take the main carpark exit, but drove down the narrow alley between the paper and the backs of the beauty parlour and the pet shop, and out to the other side of the block. Once clear of the city he relaxed.
Solitary, long-distance driving was an exercise in containment: just him, just the vehicle, transient in the passing landscape. Other people's lives were also turning, but they seemed at considerable remove. Penny and her son may have been already on the autumnal hillside; Nicholas putting his feet up to watch CNN news on television; Anna tying on her netball bib to take her place in a workmanlike seniors team in the Easter tournament; Zack entertaining his daughters with tales of his Virginian boyhood; Erskine Maine-King already on his way to Nice perhaps, thinking of his son rather than business. The parson may have been entering Theo's study, morning light catching the buttermilk complexion of his bald head. Maybe Stella was meeting a friend she and Theo used to visit together: Stella would be bright, wouldn't she, bright with that sort of brittle determination to make the best of her talent and opportunities, and because Theo had proved dispensable.
Theo occupied himself by making a considerable list of Stella's virtues, and a shorter list of his own. Both were as honest as he could make them, but they didn't mesh well together — that was the rub. It's not virtues that marriage needs, but compatibility. Stella was particularly adept at identifying his selfishness. 'Not everything is about you,' she had said, but somehow for Theo it always was. He had to learn that always you carry a spear in the drama that is other people's lives.
Stillness and open heat had been his experience of Drybread on the first visit, stillness and high cloud on the second trip, but as he drove through the Maniototo towards the Manuherikia and Penny's gully that third time, a full and persistent wind blew from the west. It groomed the gullies of gorse and broom, fluffed the dry grasses and the tussock on higher country, swept high birds through the sky without a wing beat. On the last stretch into the hills on the gravel road there was no hanging plume behind Theo, for the dust was gusted away from the wheels, and the wind whistled at the exterior mirrors.
He parked by the macrocarpa hedge, but not in its lee, so the wind almost wrenched the car door from his hand when he got out. Penny was looking out of the window as he approached the house, and let him in before he needed to knock. 'It's a shit of day,' she said. They were too familiar to shake hands, not familiar enough to kiss: she rested her hand for a moment on his arm as he came past her in the doorway. On the floor of the all-purpose room, Ben was kneeling on newspaper and rolling Playdoh into unpromising cigar shapes. He wore a Bob the Builder sweatshirt and had a large Band-aid in the centre of his forehead. 'No, it's nothing,' Penny said, 'He just saw them in the drawer and wanted one. He knows they're supposed to make you feel better. He's bored.'
Sometimes it's so easy to make a little kid's day. Theo had remembered to get something for Ben at the service station: a couple of chocolate eggs half price because Easter was almost over. Penny didn't allow the boy more than one. She helped Ben take off the rosetted foil, smoothing it out for him to play with later. The child gave Theo a roll of dough in exchange, and insisted he have a pink Band-aid on his face also. Theo moulded the dough as he sat on the sofa and told Penny about the visit to Zack Heywood and asked her why she wanted him to go to France. 'I haven't got anyone else to ask,' she said. The doors were rattling in the wind, which made the cottage resonate.
Theo didn't think she said it to get sympathy, but Jesus, how isolated she was. At a time in her life when she expected to have the greatest sense of family and co
mmunity, she was fighting her husband and a court order, and had to ask Theo for help. No brother or sister to support her, her mother ga-ga in a retirement home, her friends thousands of miles away. 'What I know of Zack I like,' she said, 'but I want someone else there to ask things a lawyer mightn't want to. Someone I know better. A real person to stand in for me.'
'So Zack's not real?'
'You know what I mean,' she said. 'It's just a job, isn't it, even for the best lawyer.'
'I need to know what's essential,' Theo said. 'I don't know much about your life, your husband or what the hell you expect to happen. A cock-up over there could be pretty disastrous for you. You know that.'
Penny didn't answer. Bending over, she encouraged her son to put four legs on one of the dough lumps, then raised her head and looked at Theo levelly for a moment. 'But are you willing to help if you can?' she said.
He said yes, because how could he not when she and the kid were stuck the way they were? He said yes because he'd like to fuck her, but it was more than that. He said yes because he felt best when he was with her, and that was the strongest and least explicable reason of all. When he was with her he felt somehow at the centre, instead of at the edge.
'You haven't had any lunch yet have you?' she said. 'Ben hasn't either. Let's have something, and them maybe he'll sleep and we can talk.' It was a scratch meal, with nothing heated. Ben and Theo shared peanut butter sandwiches, apples and bought fruit cake but diverged when it came to drinks: diluted juice for the boy, and a can of Speight's for Theo. Penny had eaten but drank a beer. Ben seemed cheerful enough, and told Theo it was too windy to play outside. Theo was about to say something to him about the parson and Caroline Bay, but thought better of it. That experience was better left dormant in the boy's mind. As long as he had his mother, maybe he didn't care much, and he was too young to realise that they'd come down in the world. Little kids are emotionally resilient, we tell ourselves, because we don't want to consider otherwise, and we don't want to think too much about our own childhoods.
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