“Go on,” I tell her. “Go for it.”
Sally’s face breaks suddenly into her gay smile and she rises and leaves me sitting there, watching, as she takes John’s arm and the pack carries on down the road and vanishes in the distance.
A group of hobbits caper up the street, brown jerkins pulled tight with ropes around their middles, and purple hoods on their heads. When they see me, they cheer and wave and I wave back. Tom is leading them, Marion is in the middle, and I think I can see Helen arm in arm with Fred. “Come with us,” they call, but I shake my head and raise my glass to toast them. Ian and Deepak bring up the rear. Ian waves at me, a smile lighting up his freckled face, but Deepak turns away.
I heave a sigh and look down at my empty glass. A half-empty bottle sits on the table so I refill my glass and look back out at the street.
A motley collection of reptiles is chasing the hobbits, I think they’re supposed to be dragons, or maybe Taniwha? I recognize the one with the large bottom and the long, white tail. Sure enough he angles his serpent head toward me and it is Scott Peake.
“I can’t tell if you’re a snake or a leech,” I say, but I don’t think he hears me. He turns away and slithers on down the road.
A breakfast wanders past—eggs, bacon, sausage, and something red. The man in red looks a bit like Nicholas. Perhaps he is supposed to be stewed tomato or maybe a red herring.
Finally, I watch a small group of Chinese men walk past. They are dressed as Chinese businessmen. Quon Dao sees me and comes over to where I sit.
“Lin,” he says with a smile, “you’re not going?”
“I was supposed to be somewhere else,” I reply.
“Everyone is wearing fancy dress. We don’t know what to do about our clothes,” he gestures at their plain gray garb.
“I’ll help you.” I cross the street to a tourist shop and beckon Dao and his three assistants inside. “Hawaiian shirts!” I tell them, “Pick out the color you like and throw them on over your clothes.” Then I grab four leis from the stack hanging on the rack. “And wear these around your necks.”
The Chinese are now all smiles as they, too, head on down the road.
When the elf king and the elf queen arrive back, I am dozing on the sofa.
“How was it?” I ask.
“Brilliant!” says Max. “Especially the final.”
“Fantastic!” says Jess. “Especially the parade. Next year we’re going to get a bigger group together,” she adds excitedly. “Next year I’ll have my own retinue of elves.”
“So who won?”
“New Zealand,” says Max.
“The pack of cards,” says Jess, like many of the attendees: more interested in the fancy dress than the game.
I get up and go to the kitchen. “Tea? Or, something stronger?”
“I drink herbal tea, Auntie, do you have any of that?”
“Call me Lin. Auntie is so aging.”
“Sure, Auntie Lin. And I’m hungry. Do you have anything to eat?”
“Omelet?”
“I had eggs this morning.”
“Sorry. Um, foie gras?”
“What?”
“Pâté.”
They settle for foie gras on toast followed by Stilton and crackers.
Max tidies up and puts the dishes in the dishwasher, and Jess curls up in the quilts on her sofa.
“I bet you get lonely. Maybe I could stay here and be company for you,” she says. “At least until I find a flat.”
“There isn’t much room.”
“You’re at work most of the time, aren’t you?”
I laugh. “We’ll see. First, you have to talk to your parents and persuade them to accept you going to the course here.”
Then I tuck them up and turn out the light and go to my room, smiling, because I have some children to look after now, and I promise myself I’ll get back to Ngatirua and see the rest of my family soon. Maybe next month, after the launch.
When Ben rings I promise him, after the launch, we’ll see each other then.
That night I sleep better. Sally’s face was happy. Jess and Max are happy. And the end is in sight. I just have to stay focused and stay on track. In four weeks’ time, I will get my life back.
In four weeks’ time, we will have launched or failed.
Chapter 44
Three weeks from launch, Nicholas comes knocking at the door. When I open it, his eyes stare at me out of tiny pupils.
“What do you want?”
“You should be more polite,” he says and pushes past me into the room.
“I didn’t invite you in,” I say. “I’d like you to leave now.”
He sits down on my sofa. “I’ve got a business proposition for you.”
“I’m not interested in doing any business with you, Nicholas.”
“That winery I own part of up in the bay?” he says. “I need some money to pay the costs this quarter.”
“I’m not buying a share.”
“I’m not giving you a share. I want you to loan me the money.”
“Hello? Why would I loan you money?”
Nicholas stares at me and then stares out the window where the wind is whipping the tops of the trees back and forth. He reaches into his man bag and pulls out a photo.
“Because I have this,” he says and tosses the photograph on the coffee table.
I pick up the photograph. The quality is poor, the shapes are grainy, and the colors are washed out.
“You’re asking for money?” I eventually ask. “How much?”
“Ten thousand should do it,” he replies.
I gaze at his face and think about my options.
“Let me see what I have on me,” I reply, rising and picking up my purse. My iPhone is at the bottom, so I scramble for a moment or two before pulling out my wallet.
“I’ve only got five hundred dollars in cash.”
He reaches out his hand. “I’ll take that now and the rest when you get the cash out.”
I hold onto my wallet. “Let me get this straight, Nicholas. You want what?”
“I’ve told you, ten thousand dollars in return for that photograph.”
“And if I don’t give you ten thousand dollars?”
“One copy of the photo goes to your boyfriend and another goes to the newspapers. So much for your brilliant career, huh, Lin?”
“This is blackmail.”
“Call it whatever you want. Just give me the money.”
He stands in front of me with his hand reaching for my wallet.
“Are you going to hit me if I don’t give you money?”
Nicholas is shaking. “Just give me what you have, bitch.”
I hand him the notes. “I’ll get you the money, but then I don’t ever want to hear from you again.”
His eyes flicker, and I know he has no intention of vanishing out of my life. “Sure. Just been caught short this month, that’s all.”
He walks out the door, and I close it behind him and lean my back against it, my eyes closed.
Later that week, our first live network test does not go well. In the middle of the night, the network goes down. We send out the technicians, but it is dark and they cannot isolate the fault.
At eight in the morning, we hold an urgent audio-conference. “What’s going on?” the chairman asks. “What the hell is happening down there!”
“We have a problem with the network.”
“Then fix it!”
“We’re trying to, but we haven’t found the cause yet.”
The field technicians have been out since first light examining each section of the network. Tom has his network managers at the table and they are poring over the network diagrams and the switch records.
At nine thirty I get the call that they have found the fault.
“There is a hole in the overhead fiber cable,” Tom tells me over the phone. “In that stretch that runs along the edge of the forest. They’re replacing the line so the service should be o
perational again within an hour.”
“A hole? What caused it?”
Tom is silent for a moment. “Jake thinks it’s a bullet hole.”
“Christ.” I consider that possibility for a moment. “Is someone trying to sabotage us?”
“We don’t know. The boys are checking the scene.”
As soon as I hang up, my cell phone rings. Alison’s name flashes up on the screen.
“Hello,” I say.
“Lin? How are you?”
“I’m well. And you all?”
“We’re all doing fine, thanks. Oh, except Wal is complaining about his back and you know Christopher gets those bad headaches, and actually my hip aches a bit if I walk too far. But apart from that we’re all fine.”
“Oh, good.”
The desk telephone rings, but I leave it for Helen to answer.
“Viv and I wondered if you’d like to visit for Art Deco weekend. It’s such a lot of fun, I’m sure you’d enjoy it.”
Helen puts her head in the door.
“Ah, um, I don’t think I can decide right now.”
Helen mouths, “Tom.”
“Can I call you back?” I say.
“Of course. Anyway, it’s in two weeks’ time, so you don’t have to make up your mind yet.”
“Right, right. Anyway, I’ll call you.”
I get off the phone and pick up my landline.
“Tom?”
“We think we’ve worked out what happened with the cable,” he says. “The boys found a dead possum beneath the line.”
“So?”
Tom snorts. “We think some twit was out shooting possums and caught one sitting on our cable.”
“A possum hunter. Great. I’ll call Hobb and let him know the mystery is solved.”
I look up at the picture on my wall of the road to Ngatirua, and I promise myself, when this is all over, I’m going there.
“So what action are you taking to make sure the cable is bulletproof?”
“We can’t make it bulletproof. That doesn’t make sense.”
“Then make it possum proof.”
“I don’t think we can make it possum proof either.”
“How can you make sure the problem doesn’t happen again?”
“It was a freak accident, Stewart. We can’t protect against freak accidents. What we can do is get the redundant route built so we don’t lose service if there is a network fault.”
“Why isn’t there a redundant route already?”
Because you cut it out of the budget, I say, but silently, because by now I know this chairman takes no accountability for any bad decisions.
“We’ll need to increase the funding allocated.”
“I’ve already told you we won’t be increasing the budget, Mere, so find yourself another answer.”
When he hangs up, I ponder whether there is anything we can possibly do to get that redundant route in before we go live. We knew it was a risk. My head hurts as I try to think of where we can find the money to complete the ring.
This time I cannot find any options.
Chapter 45
I read somewhere that dreams are the result of your brain trying to make sense of the fragments of memory that flash through your mind as you sleep. Your sleeping brain strings the images together to make a story. I’ve always wondered whether scriptwriters have cleverer dreams than the rest of us.
Lately, in my dreams I can see no images. I can just sense danger, as if something horrible is standing behind me about to attack. When I wake, the nightmare still has me in its grasp. I can’t quite recall the details, but I know there was something amongst trees, stalking me. I can’t recall if I saw anything, just the feeling of dread and that I couldn’t escape.
Sometimes I dream I have struck the beast before it gets me and I kill it. I don’t remember seeing anything except a corner like a grave with concrete edges and darkness all around, but I think I killed something or someone, bludgeoned them, though I can’t imagine what with, and I can’t imagine what they looked like, either alive or dead. Maybe one of those Doctor Who monsters you cannot ever see. But the beast always seems to return, as if I didn’t quite strike hard enough. I never feel the relief that the beast is dead and the danger is gone, until I wake up at four in the morning and my tired mind remembers it was only a dream. Then I lie awake and worry about Hera instead and the nightmare fades.
In the morning, the dread is gone, although sometimes I worry about having such dark, violent dreams. What happened to the light and gentle images of friends and lovers and hobbits?
Nicholas swaggers in. His eyes are normal today, I’m glad about that. Hopefully, he will be more rational.
“Have you got the money?” he asks.
“Have you got the photo?” I reply.
He smirks and lays a photo on the coffee table. God knows who the stupid bitch is. Can’t be me. I am not stupid.
“Just a moment,” I say, and then I press the button on my laptop. A recording of our last conversation plays.
Nicholas’s face stiffens. “How did you do that?”
“The wonders of modern technology. Especially, Apple,” I reply. “I turned my iPhone onto record while I was getting out my wallet. Oh, and it’s recording now as well, so sit back down while I tell you what’s going to happen next.”
“Where is it? Damn you!” He teeters on his toes, his hands opening and closing in fists by his side.
But I judge Nicholas to be a weak little piffle of a man, and, sure enough, he slumps back onto the sofa.
“You won’t find it. And my friends downstairs are listening on the other end. They’ll be upstairs in a flash if they think you’re threatening me. In fact, they only gave me fifteen minutes before they come up anyway. They’d like to—talk—with you themselves.”
He stares at me.
“So, Nicholas, you’ve become a blackmailer. Well, I’m not taking it. That photo of yours? Which no doubt you have on file? No one will believe it’s me. They’re far more likely to believe you’ve doctored an image.”
“People will believe it’s you! I’ll make sure of it!”
“My reputation is as an uptight, sexless teetotaler. And you won’t be around to make any claims. You’ll be in the clink being done over by some really nasty big bastards.”
His eyes widen and his skinny bottom twitches.
I give him my cool executive smile. “You see, I’ve checked how the police deal with blackmailers. They’ll throw the book at you and go to extreme lengths to protect your victims. In this case, me.”
I’m bluffing, but he won’t be able to read that in my eyes. His face, however, is transparently furious. His eyebrows are lowered, his eyelids tense, and his lips are compressed.
“I’ll take for granted you’ll resign from your job overseeing my sisters’ affairs in Wellington,” I say. “Okay, the fifteen minutes are nearly up, and I really think you would be wise to leave before my friends arrive to have their own chat with you. And, Nicholas? If you ever set foot in this house again, I tell my sisters what you are, and the recording goes to the police. Understand?”
When I open the door, he gets up and goes, as fast as Joe did, down the stairs, down the path, and out onto the street.
But I worry. He still might distribute the photo. Sure I’ve bluffed him that no one will believe the woman to be me, but I know from bitter experience that people believe what they want to believe, especially if it’s something negative about a woman in power.
And in New Zealand, especially, they like to cut the tall poppies down.
I walk in Sally’s open door and collapse on her sofa. Tonight Sally’s face looks less tired than mine. She opens a bottle of champagne.
“Was that Nick I saw going past the window?” she asks. “What was the matter with him?”
“He had the shits,” I reply. “So he had to run.”
Sally snorts and hands me a flute. “He’s bad news. You know, I told him he wasn’t my type
and so he put some photos of me up on Facebook. Horrible photos.”
“Oh, no. Sex stuff?”
Sally shakes her head. “I didn’t sleep with him. But he took some nasty shots anyway, which made me look fifty and fat.”
“Oh.”
She sighs. “I had to grin and bear it. Anyway, let’s forget the little creep. How is Ben? And Cheryl?”
“They’re fine. Cheryl found out Joe was arrested last month for beating up some guy in the pub. He’s out on bail, but we’re hoping they’ll put him away for a while.”
“Is she still staying with Ben?”
“Ben tells me she’s settled in too well. He’s still sleeping on the sofa in the living room. Emmy’s mother has taken a job in Cape Town for six months so Emmy’s with Ben full time.”
“Long-distance relationships are tough,” says Sally. She takes a swig and turns to look at me. “Haven’t you thought of moving to the mountain? Since the mountain can’t move here?”
“There’s no work for me in Dipton.”
“Does that matter?”
“Of course, it matters. You know it matters! I’m not just the sum of my looks and personality, I’m the whole package. And the whole package includes my career, the income I make, the fact I can afford to spend money on whatever I want, the fact no one has to support me.”
“You mean you don’t trust him to love you without the money.”
I gaze at the bubbles floating to the top of my glass and don’t answer. That’s not quite what I meant, but maybe it’s true.
Because who am I if not the slick executive high flyer? I am no longer young, and I’m only average on the good-looks front. What else do I have to offer? What other edge do I have to say I’m special?
“Is it worth it, Lin?”
“What?”
“Your brilliant career as a chief executive.”
In the background, Michael’s computer makes a pinging noise as he plays a computer game, and the wind rattles the double-hung windows on the side of Sally’s living room and whistles in the chimney. Polly sits up and scratches her belly with her left foot.
I examine the liquid in my glass. It is half empty.
“Of course, it’s worth it,” I tell her, and smile my executive smile, the one that doesn’t reach my eyes.
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