by Greg McGee
One of the other women said it wasn’t about eugenics because these cretins had already procreated. It was about saving the women and children they’d already maimed.
It was Rosemary, the academic, who’d suggested it might stack up on a cost/benefit analysis: that if you could cull twenty of the worst offenders for five k each, say, that was only a hundred k per annum, an eighth of the agency’s annual operating budget. ‘Just imagine the effect – each year, twenty of the worst offenders are permanently removed from the agency’s books, so after five years, for an outlay of half a million, you’ve got rid of a hundred brutal recidivists who would never offend again. You could multiply that by a factor of ten, say, in terms of the people they affected – the women, the children, their neighbours, their children’s friends, the teachers, their mothers, fathers, cousins.’
‘Not to mention their social workers and DV advocates,’ said Ngaire. ‘Multiply by twenty! Imagine the downstream savings, the millions saved on hospital and prison services, the millions more outlaid on wrap-around social services on these scum and their victims. Zip. Gone. No judge, no jury, no appeal. Brutal summary justice in the dead of night, the sort these bastards understand.’
Ellie had been right with them. Word would travel. Within that five years, she reckoned, the worst of them would be gone, and potential offenders would be warned off – there’d be a bigger bully in town. There’d be millions of dollars available for other social services, for education, health, they’d be able to mothball half the prisons.
By then the laughter had dried. It was a sober moment. That night, as the women drank in anticipation of Christmas, of being with their families while mayhem was being visited on women and children in other homes, there was a moment when they’d looked at each other in silence, both amazed and fearful at the vision they’d laid out. And how truly attractive it was.
***
WHEN the door opened, Ellie had to adjust her sightline downwards. A shy girl of about eight was partly obscured. ‘Have you come to see Mummy?’
As Tanya, Ellie remembered from the arrest report, led her down the hallway, past the stairs, towards the back of the house, Ellie heard Alana calling to her daughter – ‘Come and tell me who it is, darling.’ But Tanya was determined to show, not tell.
‘This lady was at the door,’ said Tanya, as she ushered Ellie into the open-plan kitchen and dining room. Alana, now much bigger than Ellie remembered, was lying on a window seat behind the table, propped up with cushions. She had a beautiful open face, which, Ellie was disappointed to see, was registering alarm at the sight of her visitor. ‘Oh shit,’ she said, ‘you can’t be here.’
‘I’m pleased you remember me, Alana,’ Ellie lied.
Alana’s face was unmarked, but she didn’t seem to be able to get comfortable and was clearly in pain with every breath she drew. Sua-Bensen never left bruises where they were visible. Ellie was hoping that, now she was here, Alana might ask her to sit down, but her expression hadn’t changed; in fact, she seemed terrified. She kept looking up, as if beseeching Ellie to do the same. Was it God she was supposed to be seeing? Then she got it: Sua-Bensen was upstairs.
Ellie had to hold her terror in, and back away slowly, as if the mad dog could actually see her, not just hear her. She raised her voice. ‘Lovely to see you looking so well, Alana, but I can tell you’re really busy and I’ve got these other people I’ve got to call in on.’
‘Can you show the nice lady out, darling?’ said Alana, the relief on her face palpable.
‘But Mummy–’
‘Sorry I can’t stay for a cup of tea, Tanya – another time.’
The stairs were between Ellie and the front door. She had to get past them before he came down and blocked her exit. She mimicked telephoning. Ring me. She couldn’t risk leaving her card, but Alana would know how to make contact by now, if she was able to. ‘I’ll call you anyway,’ she whispered. ‘Please pick up.’
The hallway was still empty as Ellie went past the banisters towards the front door. She daren’t look up the stairs: if she did, she would break and run. At the door, she turned to the little girl. ‘I’m very sorry, Tanya, that I can’t stay.’
‘Mummy’s weeing blood.’
As Ellie walked back up the path to the street, she kept her gait as calm and regular as possible, gave no hint of the panic inside her, though she could feel his eyes on her back. She slipped gratefully into the car, but realised that, from upstairs, Sua-Bensen would have clocked her rego. Nothing she could do. Drive. Get away.
Back on the main street, she pulled over. She wanted to ring the district court and berate the useless clerk who’d left the hyphen out of Sua-Bensen’s name so that he was called early. Instead, she tried to compose herself with one eye in the rear-vision mirror, and rang the police Family Violence Team number. You took your chances on who answered the phone, but this time she was in luck. A sergeant she’d never spoken to before answered the phone, took note of the information and told her she’d get a unit to Sua-Bensen’s house as soon as one became available.
***
SHE’D had worse happen – the Sua-Bensen thing wasn’t even a confrontation, really – but she’d been younger. As she drove on, she was having trouble getting her heartbeat down. Stopping her hands from shaking and sweating on the steering wheel. Keeping her eyes on the street ahead, instead of constantly checking the rear-vision mirror. If she had Sua-Bensen and his cohorts figured right, they’d be driving a late-model top-of-the-range fully tricked-out ute or SUV, or one of those American gangsta cars. But every modern car behind her, even the latest and smallest, seemed to have huge grilles, most of them blacked out. They looked like a school of sharks, with gaping toothless mouths. But she could imagine the teeth.
Once within the confines of the hospital carpark, Ellie felt safer. People everywhere, witnesses. And, if the worst came to the worst, A & E a wheelchair ride away. She usually read the police arrest report in the car, but she felt too unsettled, so she shouldered her bag and headed for the cafeteria. She decided not to risk a coffee and ordered a smoothie which, according to the menu, contained some berry with destressing properties. She was there to see Miriama Hohepa, who’d been admitted to intensive care on Saturday night with extensive injuries – fractured ribs, ruptured spleen, broken nose, eye socket and cheekbone, and concussion. ‘Like a road crash’, the attending officer had written. Her partner or husband was still at large. Her hands were still shaking too much to get the report out of her bag, so she decided to wing it. When she reached the thoracic surgery ward, no Miriama. The duty nurse was flummoxed for a moment: yes, she could confirm that Ms Hohepa’s ruptured spleen had been removed in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Ellie was rerouted to the neurological ward. At some point the surgeons had realised that Miriama’s concussion symptoms had helped to mask the fact that she’d had a stroke, most probably while she was being beaten. Ellie followed the charge sister’s directions to a room at the end of a long corridor. She’d warned her that Miriama was comatose and probably unable to talk anyway, since the stroke had affected her speech and hearing. The severity and long-term effects were yet to be accurately assessed. Ellie wasn’t to try to talk to her. The charge sister gave her every excuse to turn and go, but Ellie couldn’t go back to the agency and tell Rosemary that.
She tiptoed into the room, as if Miriama might have magically revived, but there was no chance of that. She was a diminutive Māori woman, a couple of low bumps under the sheets, hooked up to three different tubes, one down her throat. The eye further from Ellie was covered by a bandage that extended down to the broken socket and cheekbone. It looked enormous. Miriama’s other eye wasn’t bandaged. The pouch beneath it was black with blood that must have drained from her broken nose.
Ellie sat there in shock. Eventually, she lifted her bag onto her knees. This evil couldn’t be a one-off, surely. Even if Miriama�
��s relationship with this monster was new, he would have committed other atrocities. She took out the arrest sheet, intending to look for previous, but didn’t get past the names at the top of the preamble. The woman’s partner, the offender, who had previously served three years for serious criminal assault on this same victim, was Dwayne Michael Collins. Ellie’s watering eyes skated across the name, although it did ring a bell. It was the next two names that froze her: the children of this long-term abusive relationship. A daughter, Lila Hera Collins, nineteen, living at the home address out the back of New Windsor, and a son, Jackson Terei Collins, sixteen, a ward of the state, current address unknown.
Ellie bent forward and rested her head in her hands. She had to get out of here before Miriama woke up, she knew that much. Because Ellie had been unable to talk to her, any conflict of interest was still theoretical. She’d hand the file over to Rosemary as soon as she got back to the office. She stood up and started pushing the material back into her bag. She’d forgotten to turn her mobile to silent, and grabbed it quickly when it rang, missing the name on the screen.
‘Ellie?’ said the voice. ‘It’s Teresa.’ Ellie knew the voice and name from somewhere but it was so out of context – she was so out of context . . . ‘From the clinic. You were going to ring me about a donor. Is this a bad time?’
She thought of saying she’d ring back, but the day wasn’t going to get any better. Sitting beside this broken woman in the neurological ward was as peaceful as it was going to get.
Ellie remembered a line at the bottom of the information sheets, the very last question, a kind of afterthought: ‘Would you be willing to meet a potential recipient before she starts treatment if you were asked?’ ‘I’m sweet with that,’ SD 00007982 had written. ‘Up to them.’ When she asked whether it was possible to meet SD 00007982, there was a long pause before Teresa said she’d see what she could do.
Ellie thanked her and cradled the mobile in both hands as if it might be a talisman. What are you looking for? was the question she thought Teresa might ask. What are you expecting to see? Ellie was so glad Teresa had the experience and good grace not to ask, because Ellie wasn’t sure of the answer. If she used this donor’s sperm to impregnate her egg, there would be this inchoate soul inside her, someone new, who couldn’t be known in advance. But she wanted her choice to at least be informed by elements she couldn’t measure or evaluate simply by reading an information sheet. Tenderness, compassion, emotional intelligence. The child might be male. She needed to be sure that she didn’t bring another beast into the world. If she was to have a son, she had to see his father, she had to ask him about his mother and his two sisters, she had to look into his eyes and see what she needed to see when he talked about the women in his life.
WILL WANTED TO fuck her then and there. He could feel his cock lifting against his jeans. Claudia had brought clean towels into the steamed-up bathroom, and when he’d hoisted pink, cherubic Archie from the water into the towel she held, his forearms had brushed against her breasts. They’d stood there up against one another, Archie swaddled between them, nestled in under the swell of her as they kissed across him. ‘Stay,’ she whispered. ‘Stay and fuck me.’
And he would have. Yelena’s mantra, one of many, would have counted for nothing. Wait until you want it, then wait some more. Enjoy self-denial. Take the power back, the power over yourself. Saying no is powerful. Fuck that! Two months of abstention on every level was enough: Claudia was a voluptuous fuck and he missed that. She was also so fecund she’d probably already conceived just from his hands on her tits. Luckily, the kids were better than prophylactics. He could have held off until Archie had been read his story, but then there’d be another couple of hours before Kristin was ready for bed. He could even have tried for that, but for an appointment he couldn’t miss.
He climbed up to Great North, turned right and headed west, back to Grey Lynn. He remembered walking along this ridge just a couple of months ago, but it seemed as if years had slipped by. Time flies when you’re high, he used to say. The converse was equally true: it sure as hell slows when you’re low. And he’d had a lot of that. Learning a new business had been some help, but commercial realtors didn’t work weekends, and he’d found those hardest to fill, when he wasn’t with the kids.
Being in commercial property gave him a different take on the buildings he was walking past. He’d started seeing figures instead of concrete and steel: cap rates and square metre rates, and gross rent multipliers and replacement values minus allowances for depreciation. His head was now so full of this shite he felt like a fucking quantity surveyor. But Yelena had been right again. Basic needs. People needed shelter, people needed a place to sleep, a place to work. They didn’t need fucking TVCs and they didn’t need the crap the TVCs were trying to sell. But although Will was grateful to Yelena for the break, commercial property wasn’t necessarily his gig, long term.
He’d actually enjoyed finding a lessee for the Flame building. Talking it up was easy because he knew so much about it. The hard part was cleaning the place out. Getting rid of the accumulated filmic and office bric-a-brac was like emptying your father’s garage after he’d carked. Virtually every object trailed a sliver of history, and the more he threw in the skip, the angrier he got with the failure of it all, the futility, the humiliation, and the more he threw in the skip. Everything would have gone to the tip if Trish hadn’t remonstrated. He’d even have ditched the Avid, which turned out to be worth fuck all anyway – there’s nothing so worthless as outdated technology. Trish’d run a garage sale of the costumes and props, plastic swords and retractable knives and weaponry mainly, and kept the proceeds after slipping him a couple of hundred, and they were done. Gone, over forty years of Den and Branko’s lives, and a fair chunk of his own. He was glad for the end of it. Savage, clean.
The next thing was the sale of the section. With what he knew, he could run the campaign himself, save on land agent’s commission – or take it himself off the top. That’d give him some breathing space, to sort those insurance fuckers for the fire. Then . . . then he’d be able to move on. Jump. Once he found a place to land. Commercial property wasn’t it. Sooner or later, he would find something else that people needed, something they would pay for. He would keep his eyes peeled for the right opportunity. And he would keep his memory keen, sharpen it like a blade on steel, for those who had fucked him over.
Looking west through the grey dusk, he saw a darker shade looming above the Waitākeres. Rain coming in. He quickened his pace. He didn’t mind keeping Lila waiting, but fucked if he was going to get wet.
***
THE fish and chip shop closed the vats on Mondays, but somehow the fatty miasma lingered in the stairwell, and he was close to vomiting by the time he’d fought his way up through it to his flat. He’d scarcely recovered his breath when his mobile belched: I’m here. He crossed back to the door and unlatched it. She was there, in her black coat and even blacker shades. Twitchy as all fuck. But not like she was strung out on short rations waiting for the next hit, something different. Nervous. Anxious. Maybe because she didn’t know why she’d been summoned. He hadn’t seen her in weeks, since he told her, finally, after a few false endings, that he was finished with P, he was no longer buying. It was funny: he’d thought maybe the sex would be harder to stop than the dealing, but not fucking Lila had hardly been an issue. He’d sort of known that the fucking had always just been an adjunct of the deal. Once the ice was on ice, so was the sex.
Yelena had warned him that it wasn’t so much the physical cravings that would get him, it was all the space in your head the drugs used to fill. You have to keep your brain occupied, she’d said. She was the prime example: constantly talking, doing, thinking, theorising. She was fucking exhausting to be around; no wonder she collected sponges like Ellie. Yelena had a theory about everything and most of her advice was pretty good, as long as you stayed away from geopolitical conspiracies. She’
d talked about Dionysus, who she said was the Greek god of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, whose appetite – a bit like hers, from what he could gather – was unquenchable.
There was another goddess she mentioned – he couldn’t remember her name, maybe it was Eleanor – who was all sweetness and light and nurturing. Yelena said she believed in those polarities: they were presented in the gods as male and female, but she reckoned both elements were in us all. That might not be true of women like Claudia and Ellie, Will thought, but it was certainly true of Yelena. And of him. There was a part of him that still missed being out of control, the part of him freewheeling downhill with no handbrake.
Why was Lila so anxious? He doubted that she would have objected if he’d wanted to reinstate their relationship. Then she lowered her black shades and revealed an even blacker eye, the left one, completely closed. Must have been a flush right cross. Shit. ‘Dad’s gone loco, tried to scam the supplier,’ she said. ‘He’s off his fucking head.’
‘I’m sorry, Lila.’
‘Yeah, well.’ She was twitchy as, wouldn’t leave the door, had her hand on the handle, like if she let it go she was lost. Just tell me what the fuck I’m here for.
‘I know where your brother is.’
***
THE neon fish wasn’t leaping tonight, so he had a clear view down to Lila, crossing the street to the crappy grey hatch and getting into the passenger side. He clocked the driver. Same guy. Her father, the white-trash whippet with a mullet. Same denim jerkin. One tattooed arm hanging out the window, with a cigarette dangling in his closed fist, swinging, impatient to be gone.