by K T Bowes
“What?” I snapped and he laughed.
“I need to speak to your dad first.”
My head shook from the first mention of Jordan Saint and continued like a clockwork toy with the key stuck. “You’ll do that on your own, mate! I don’t want to see him ever again!” My vehemence made Jack screw his head sideways to stare at me.
“You don’t mean that!”
“I bloody do! He’s done it this time. Dirty old man.” The head shaking began again, accompanied by violent shudders of misery. “My mum would be knocked sick by his behaviour this last few years. He’s a nasty, selfish old man who ruins other people’s lives just because he can.” I glared at Jack. “I’m happy to drop you at his place, but I’m not going in.”
“Fine!” Jack belted himself up and sat facing forward. “But I need to talk to him before I go to the station and tell them what we just found out.”
Chapter 27
I sat outside and waited while Jack traipsed upstairs to my father’s apartment alone. When he’d walked around to the driver’s side and tried to make me accompany him, I locked the doors. He licked my window out of spite and I waited until he went out of sight before getting out and shining the glass with a tissue from my pocket.
“There you are!” The male voice made me jump and I tippled forwards, connecting with the side of my car. Brian Montana loomed behind me, his soft, Polynesian skin like caramel in the late sunshine. I smiled with relief.
“Hey, coach. How ya doin’?” I stuck out my hand and he shook it in his giant paw, leaning in to press his nose to mine in a hongi. He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, opening them long enough to read my soul like an open book.
“Good, number nine,” he said, referring to me as always. “Been tryin’ to call you.”
“Oh.” I thought about the phone in my glove box, turned off to avoid my father’s many calls. He’d enjoyed an orgasm without dying so he could quit calling me every time he got a sniffle. “It’s not working.” Almost the truth; it couldn’t work unless I switched it on.
“I need you tomorrow,” he said, fixing brown eyes on mine and watching me hold my breath.
“I can’t,” I began, but he raised his hand.
“No excuses, number nine. My right wing has gaps and you’re it.”
“I’m not playing this year!” My voice hiked up a notch. “We had a conversation at Christmas and you agreed.”
“Only to shut you up.” Brian snorted. “Do as you’re told. Game’s at nine. Be there an hour early to run through some drills.”
“But I haven’t trained!” I hated the whine I heard in my tone and Brian grabbed me in a bear hug, enfolding my face and torso into his giant chest.
“You look all right to me,” his voice rumbled. “Be there. We need ya.”
He let me go and I wobbled on my feet from the temporary suffocation. “I don’t know where my soccer boots are.”
His laugh echoed in the car park, bouncing off the other vehicles like a pin ball. “Crap!” he snorted. “Yeah, ya do. See you tomorrow.” He turned and set off for the apartment block, waving over his shoulder. “Gonna raak up yer dad now.”
“Good luck with that!” I watched Brian skid to a halt and stare back at me, a confused look on his face. Fearing he might return for an explanation, I bounced into my car and locked the doors, hiding behind the tinted glass like a fugitive.
An hour later, I sat with my legs crossed, busting for the toilet as Jack sauntered through the front doors with a grin on his lips. “Haha,” he sniggered as I deactivated the central locking. “You got called up for The Priestesses.”
“Shut yer face!” I snapped, gunning the engine. “I need a wee and it’s your fault.”
“Could’ve come in.” He fixed his seat belt in place and halted the irritating warning alarm from the dashboard. “Nice to catch up with Brian.”
“I didn’t think they’d talk to you,” I grumbled and jumped at Jack’s peel of laughter.
“Is that why you agreed to drive me? You’re so transparent, Ula! Your dad behaved like a gentleman, actually.” He glanced at me sideways when I didn’t reply, eager to be back on my good side. “Sorry. The time flew, especially after Brian arrived.”
“Did you get to ask him about his little house guest.” I couldn’t keep the bile out of my voice.
“Didn’t need to say much,” Jack replied, looking at me sideways. “You didn’t know they were married, did you?”
The BMW possessed incredible brakes and the stopping distance proved beyond my wildest dreams. The emergency stop I pulled would have sent Jack through the windscreen if he wasn’t belted in. He swore up a blue streak in my vehicle and I opened the windows after I’d pulled off the main road and parked in an affluent Auckland suburb. “Your language is vile,” I commented, looking in the rear-view mirror at my white complexion and frightened brown eyes, focussing on getting my heart rate to slow. I’d almost been rear-ended and it scared me.
“You left tyre marks!” Jack squeaked, his eyes terrified.
“Because of what you said!” I gritted my teeth and balled my fists, willing the prickling tears not to betray me. “They can’t be married.”
Jack rolled his eyes. “Sorry, sorry. Ula, that was an awful way to find out. I thought you knew and just wanted to cause trouble.”
“Get out.” I pressed the button on the dash and the doors unlocked. “Get out, Jack.”
“No.” He clung to his seat belt as though I might rip it off him and a red mist descended over my vision. He believed I’d be spiteful enough to set the cops on my father just for fun.
“Get. Out.” I separated the words and felt my heart pounding blood through my ears. My breath caught in my chest and rage consumed me. When Jack refused to budge after being thumped twice, I fixed my palm over the centre of the steering wheel and pushed.
In addition to great brakes, the BMW owned a super-sized horn. It blared out into the suburb and echoed off buildings like a claxon. Other drivers turned to stare and a woman walking her dog stopped on the pavement across the road. Jack tried to move my hand but his broken wrist caught the gear stick as he raised the cast and he hissed in pain. “Get out!” I screamed like a maniac and fear lit his eyes in the realisation I meant it.
The horn continued without pause, attracting the attention of every human eye in the street and with a look of betrayal, Jack climbed out of my car.
I left him standing on the pavement clutching his broken wrist in his other hand with a look of disbelief on his face. Clumping my foot on the gas, I forced my way into the stream of traffic, letting the tears streak down my face in the privacy of my vehicle. My hands shook and I drove the wrong way along a one-way street by accident before arriving home and sitting in the parking garage in my car. I howled then like a baby, wailing into the empty space and leaving my dignity on the seat. I missed my mother and knew she’d be appalled by May-Ling and their mutually convenient union.
My father’s cruelty cut me to the quick and when I’d cried myself into a state of sullen anger, I grabbed my phone from the glove box and turned it on. Sixty-four messages and thirty missed calls flashed on the screen and I emptied the box without reading or listening to any of them. Then I blocked Dad’s number and resisted selecting the option to receive a text if he tried to contact me. His reign over my life ended there, in a dirty parking garage under an apartment block inhabited by people who were down on their luck. He’d put me there and he’d have no part in watching me clamber out.
Chapter 28
Jack didn’t come home and I wasn’t bothered. I’d put the chain across the front door anyway and planned to ignore him. I dwelled on my behaviour far too much over the cooking sherry and made myself maudlin and depressed. Sobbing some more, I watched myself cry in the bathroom mirror, which was silly but entertaining. I couldn’t make it look attractive like an actress’ gentle tears because I screwed my face up too much and my nose bulged.
Jack’s betrayal
seemed almost worse than Dad’s. I thought he knew me but he didn’t. Or maybe he did and I didn’t like what his assumption revealed. My reaction told him I knew nothing about my new stepmother but it scored deep gashes in my soul that he could believe I’d set him up by taking him to see Jordan and saying nothing. I washed my face with cold water, poured the cooking sherry down the sink when I spotted flies in the bottom and went to bed with Pete’s laptop. It’s not like anything he said from the grave could destroy my mood much more.
I deduced the other person in the most interesting set of conversations must be someone familiar. Whoever it was knew me.
‘She’s a sweet chick. Just have babies with her and it will be ok. That’s what I did.’
‘Yeah, she’s lovely. I fell on my feet with her. It was a great idea.’
At first I wondered about my father but his atrocious spelling would have outed him within the first sentence. Who else took part in the planning and organisation of my fake marriage? I considered all of them and drew a blank. My husband and his friend talked about soccer with an expert’s eye which narrowed out more people. I glossed over Pete’s father as the writer. I’d seen how he spoke to Pete and the written conversation contained too much affection and the kind of advice delivered by someone who cared. It couldn’t be the same man who slapped me in public. I felt the writer to be male and his affinity with the gay community ruled out even more candidates, including Aunty Margaret. I seemed no nearer to solving his identity after two hours of drunken reading and alternate sobbing than when I started.
But I knew Pete in death more than I ever had in life. He cared about me in a way I hadn’t realised and it affected me. It brought healing to know I wasn’t his stooge and he spoke about his anger towards me in ways which made sense. I’d been his public saviour and his private jailer. I gave him a veneer of respectability whilst removing his freedom.
‘I look at her sometimes and wish she knew. I think she’d understand. We could come to an arrangement where I got her pregnant and we lived together as friends. I like her. She’s cute and funny. We just want different things.’
I dwelled on whether I would have remained satisfied with such a half-life. At work, I saw women every day who put everything into their only child and kept nothing back. When the teenage stage hit and their love fell on deaf ears, they shattered like unfired pottery.
I skimmed the conversation which took place over four years, covering the attack on my husband in an Auckland toilet and my subsequent entry into his double life. I gained nothing new from the exchange and let the messages scroll past my tired eyes until the end when it finished with a message sent to Pete the day he died. It remained greyed out and I hovered over it, not wanting to change it from ‘unread’ to ‘read’.
‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ it said.
My heart quailed at the timing of the message, sent as my husband’s body flew through his windscreen and sent fragments of glass into his handsome face. The suicide note sneaked to the front of my mind again and left me reeling. But the online message seemed out of place and strange, as though another discussion had crept into the mix, left over from a phone conversation or something said face to face which jarred with the usual harmless banter of the chat room. It related to nothing spoke of previously.
Thoughts of Pete’s death rolled my stomach and I turned my brain by an act of will towards Teina, savouring his smile and the way he’d loved me, expunging the damage from my marriage of convenience and the lack of confidence it wrought in my personality.
I craved Teina then; in my mouth, my body and most of all in my head. I used the laptop to search for residential addresses listed under T. Fox and lawyers with his name as partner or associate. My fingers moved over the keyboard, desperate to find him and bring him running. Nothing. Nothing relevant, anyway. There were two hundred addresses in New Zealand inhabited by a Fox and twelve of them attributed to T. Fox, but none of those lived in Auckland. I found one lawyer by the name of Fox but unless he worked as a woman during the week, it wasn’t him.
Laying back against my pillows in the empty bed, I stretched my finger towards the power button and acknowledged my readiness for sleep. Then it happened. The screen made a peculiar noise and an icon flashed in the top right corner. I sat up straight and peered at it, using the mouse to click out of the online address book. I closed out of the nonsensical spreadsheet I’d also glanced over, not understanding the numbers next to team listings, but having toyed with it being something to do with the gambling scam. With everything else closed or minimised, it left only Pete’s conversation with the stranger and I stared in horror at the flashing box on the screen where a new message sat waiting.
‘Pete?’
I held my breath and scrolled around the screen, looking for the box at the top where I always checked I hadn’t changed anything. Panic sped up my pulse as I tried to work out what I’d done wrong. “Think! Think!” I urged myself. “Pete never saw the last message and it was a different colour; grey. It was grey. I didn’t change it. I clicked nothing!” I stared at the screen, where the final unread message looked the same colour as the blue ones above. In my clicking around with addresses and searches, I’d somehow marked it as ‘read’ and the chat room sent a notification to the sender.
“I kept it showing as offline!” I shrieked, but the laptop screen flickered without concern for my blunder. The drop-down-box on the right showed a thumbnail of the saxophone image and the word, ‘online’.
‘Who is this?’
I heard the indignation hidden within those three small words and it dawned on me that Pete’s friend knew his real identity. He hadn’t called him, ‘Musician’, but ‘Pete.’ If they knew my husband, they also knew whoever read the six-month-old message wasn’t him.
Chapter 29
It took less than a second to click Pete’s profile to show him offline, but the threat remained and haunted my dreams all night. I woke up countless times sweating, imagining a faceless spectre hovering over me waiting to smother the life from my body. The laptop sat next to my bed and it remained silent, logged off and charging. I wasn’t sure I’d have the courage to open the lid again and contemplated dumping it in the estuary during the early hours of the morning as I cowered under the sheets afraid.
Up and dressed by six, I sat at the kitchen counter in my soccer kit, dark smudges of sleep deprivation beneath my eyes and my unruly hair knotted into a high ponytail. Shaking fingers hugged the mug of tea in front of me. In the calm light of a new day I regretted my reaction to Jack’s wrong assumption, but didn’t know how to put it right.
My landline rang and I picked it up, the product of a gut reaction. Jordan Saint’s guttural tones spewed from the handset. “What the eff’s going on with you, lazy bloody woman! I nearly ended up in hospital with my heart yesterday and you...”
The click of the handset docking killed the irritating voice and I felt an overwhelming satisfaction. I waited for guilt to catch me up but nothing came. “Get your wife to look after you now,” I said to the empty room and dumped my mug in the dishwasher.
Driving my gorgeous car caused a smile to touch my lips. I loved it more each time I climbed into the driver’s seat, relishing independence and freedom. I reached the All Saints’ ground in twenty minutes without the usual traffic volume present on every other day of the week. Parking outside the locked gates I waited, finding myself early.
“Yey! Ursula, oh wow! So glad you’re here!” Two of my team mates arrived, hugging me and gushing their gratitude. “Amanda fell last week and twisted her knee after a bad tackle. She’s having physio but might need an operation.” Leonie glanced at me sideways. “I’m glad you’re back.”
“Just filling in,” I said, holding up my hands. “I haven’t trained and I don’t want to be a regular team member.”
“But we miss you.” Alice moved closer and lowered her voice. “We hoped you’d take up the Captaincy this year.”
“Leave her.” Leonie
nudged her team mate’s arm and widened her eyes in warning.
I fixed a smile on my face and knew their minds had gone straight to my husband’s death. “I didn’t quit because of Pete,” I said, keeping the smile in place. “It was for lots of reasons. I felt I needed a break and until this week, I didn’t own a car. I caught the bus everywhere.”
“Someone said that,” Alice gasped. “But what happened to your car?”
“Alice!” Leonie shoved her hard and gave me a look of apology. “We haven’t been talking about you, Ursula. Promise.”
“It’s fine.” I leaned back against my car and made a decision to scotch the rumours. “Pete didn’t have life insurance and left a lot of debts. I guess he didn’t expected to die right then. I sold the house and my car and it’s been quite hard.” I jerked my head towards the BMW and fixed the smile back on my face. “I’m all square now though. I’ve worked my way out of it and things will be better.”
The girls mirrored my enthusiasm and admired the car until Brian arrived, grinning at my presence. “I’m glad you showed up,” he said, unlocking the gates and embracing me. He pressed his lips to my forehead like a benevolent father and I detected a sense of relief in the action. Once on the training ground, he morphed into slave driver mixed with Roman centurion and flogged us to death in a warm up which left my knees trembling.
“I’m done!” I groaned, laying flat on my back on the grass. “I’ve got nothing left for the game.”
“Get up, girl!” Brian snapped and nudged my boot with his foot. “Should’ve come to training last week.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but he walked away, still bemoaning my lack of commitment. “And the week before and the week before that.”
“Ignore him,” Leonie said, helping me up. “He’s thrilled you’re back. Anyone can see that.”
I nodded and looked around me at the other ten players, all younger than me by at least five years. Alice wore the captain’s band around her upper arm and I felt pleased for her, knowing my decision to decline the honour last year was the right one. Pete’s death and the subsequent revelations which unfolded around my head left me numb inside and I wasn’t in a good place when Brian made the announcement at the end-of-year party.