Starlight Peninsula
Page 31
As I write, the tide is racing in the creek, the seagulls are crying over the house, and the sun is going down. There is a change in the air; it’s the beginning of that special kind of iron light, signalling autumn is on the way. The sky is bright, hard, blue; the air is very clear. Along the peninsula road, the windows are lit up with red fire. In the living rooms, Mariel Hartfield, all smoky eyes and sleepy, enigmatic smile, is telling the nation how it spent its day.
A layer of the world was hidden from me. I wanted to ask questions, and with your help I found the courage to do so. I received answers, and I have also let some questions, as Sean would put it, ‘lie on the record’. The Rotokauri file, which documents the last days of Arthur Weeks, remains an open one. I’ve done as Kurt Hartmann jokingly advised me, and given it a spook-style working title: SOON.
I asked Kurt Hartmann, ‘Do you think I’m being followed?’
His answer was unequivocal: Yes.
There was a man with black hair and a dragonfly tattooed on his hand. I haven’t seen him lately. Was he a phantom in a migraine dream? I was so ill and lonely — perhaps, now Nick is always near, and I’m drinking less and I feel safe, I’ve stopped seeing ghosts. I don’t really believe this. Did the dragonfly man vanish once he’d stolen Arthur’s file? Or once I’d stopped talking to Hartmann? What about the figure I saw in the abandoned stucco house? These questions are why I’m keeping the file open. It won’t be closed. Because I am still watching. And across town, Simon Lampton is watching, too.
That morning, when we saw in the dawn together, under a sky ‘riddled with light’, Simon Lampton and I came close — as close as two people whose interests are implacably opposed could come. Do you understand what I mean, Klaudia? We came close, and I made a choice, based on what I had. You probably won’t approve, but I made the kind of choice Arthur wanted to make. He loved the Woody Allen film, Bullets Over Broadway; he wanted to be ruthless, like the gangster in the film. He thought that would mean he was a real artist. But he wasn’t so tough. Arthur was a good person. I loved him for his goodness. I don’t think he knew just how ruthless the world can be.
You told me the past is a dead star, its light still reaching me. You told me to try to live in the Now. And you also said, Klaudia, that a house is a metaphor for the mind. I came close to losing mine. What I want to do now is fill my house with people.
For lunch this weekend, I’ve invited Nick, and Scott Roysmith and Thee Davis, and their three daughters, Sophie, Sarah and the indomitable Iris. Scott and I will, no doubt, discuss our upcoming story on mass hysteria. He will argue in favour of balance, but in this case, I suspect management will be hoping for something thoroughly one-sided.
My sister Carina and the Sparkler are coming, along with Silvio, and Carina’s husband Giles, on a rare break from his bridge-building project in Thailand. Nick has offered to help me with the food. I suggested my usual, takeaway pizzas, but he had the quaint idea that he and I should cook.
I would like to invite you to come, Klaudia. I feel as if you’ve spent a lot of time here on the peninsula, in the haunted house of my mind. Assuming it would be professionally inappropriate for you to accept a lunch date, I will send you these thoughts instead. And I will dedicate this record —
To the memory of Arthur Weeks. And to you.
Eloise Hay
Starlight Peninsula
4 April 2014
About the Author
Charlotte Grimshaw is the author of five critically acclaimed novels, Provocation, Guilt, Foreign City, The Night Book and Soon, and two short-story collections, Opportunity and Singularity. She has been awarded the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship, and is a winner of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award. Opportunity was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Prize, and won New Zealand’s premier Montana Award for Fiction or Poetry. Singularity was a finalist in the Frank O’Connor International Prize and the South East Asia and Pacific section of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. The Night Book was one of the three fiction finalists in the New Zealand Post Book Awards. Soon, a bestseller in New Zealand, has been published in the UK, Canada and the US. Her monthly column in Metro magazine won a Qantas Media Award. She lives in Auckland.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Provocation
Guilt
Foreign City
Opportunity
Singularity
The Night Book
Soon
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First published by Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2015
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