by Chris Else
‘Fantastic. You know, everyone together.’ Ward looked at him, eyes shining. Tears of emotion nearly. That’s what Ward liked most of all, wasn’t it? Everyone together. Like a family.
In the trendy satellite town of Durry, four couples live in the support and trust of their joint friendship. They’ve stuck by one another through young love and marriage break-up, hard times and rising affluence. Each knows the others inside out. But now the teenage daughter of one of them has been killed in a hit and run. Cracks begin to appear in their relationships. Can the centre hold?
Chris Else’s latest novel explores this network of friends, wives, husbands and lovers. With insight and compassion, he takes us through the aftermath of the accident on River Road and reveals our own deep need for human comfort and reassurance, even in the midst of seeming plenty.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A number of people have helped in the writing of this book. I began it while I was working on a different project during my tenure in the 2003 Foxton Fellowship, generously provided by Diane and Peter Beatson. A period of full-time work to complete it was made possible by a Creative New Zealand project grant. In between I had a lot of help from people who provided background information: in particular, Jim Chipp of Wellington Community Newspapers, Johnny Levesque from the Williams Garden Centre and Ian McMeeking of the Wellington CIB. They are not, of course, responsible for any errors of fact in the text. Finally, I would like to thank my editor, Jane Parkin, and my three most perceptive of readers — Barbara Else, Emma Neale and Harriet Allan — for their guidance in helping this novel reach its potential.
For my daughter, Taibi
Contents
Title Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Dedication
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About the Author
Other books by Chris Else
Copyright
1.
YOU STUPID MAN. YOU stupid, stupid man. You don’t think. You don’t feel. You feel nothing for no one but yourself. You are insensitive. You play games. You manipulate, manipulate. You stupid man. Always, always you manipulate me. You are nice, you buy me presents, then you go quiet, you say nothing for hours, or else you shout because I don’t do what you want, because I have my own life, and you think what I do is nothing. You hate what I do because it’s mine. So would it be a surprise if I go with someone else? Someone who listens? Someone who understands me? Would it be a surprise? We have no life any more. We don’t make love. You ruin it because you drink too much. You drown yourself in wine and in whisky until there’s nothing left, until it’s all gone, all finished. And I can’t stand it that you hate what I do, because if you hate that, you hate me. So what choice do I have? You give me no choice. I have to have a life. So I don’t want you. Go away! Get out! Get out! Just leave me alone!
2.
HANNAH CRESWELL’S NEXT APPOINTMENT was a man called Tom Marino. He was small and well formed and wore a navy-blue pea jacket and blue jeans. He had black hair and eyebrows, a trimmed black beard, black fuzz at his throat and curling in tendrils from the open neck of a white shirt. The black sheep, she thought, although there was nothing ovine about him. He was wilder than that. Standing at her door, looking up at her with amber eyes, long dark lashes.
Hannah was taller than many men, and the doorstep made her taller still. She watched him from her height, a moment’s hesitation as her intuition felt for him. He smiled but it was only with his mouth and teeth, white teeth in the dark beard. His eyes gave her nothing. He was wary. She felt that he would spring away if she moved too quickly.
‘Tom?’
‘Yes.’
‘Come in, please.’ A gesture to draw him forward. He mounted the step and entered her house. She took his coat and felt the heat of him against the backs of her fingers, caught the scent of soap. It seemed incongruous, untrustworthy, a mask of cleanliness. She hung the jacket on the hooks beside the door and ushered him down the hallway towards her office. His shoulders in the white shirt were square, his back straight. The shadow of his torso lurked beneath the cloth.
‘Sit down,’ she said.
He went to the usual chair, the patients’ chair, black leather, in the corner beside the window, but he didn’t sink back into the cushions. Instead, he perched on the edge of it with his hands in his lap and his legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle. His shoes were brown, expensive-looking and polished bright. They had pointed toes and leather soles.
She sat down opposite him.
‘Welcome.’ She smiled to help him feel at ease.
Immediately, he moved, leaning forward, drawing his feet back towards the chair, his elbows on his knees.
‘Hi.’
She let the pause lengthen. She could feel his resistance, his uncertainty beneath the push of his confidence.
‘I’m just here to listen,’ she told him, ‘and to make suggestions maybe. This first session is an exploration, to see if we can work together. At the end of it, we can decide if we want to go on or not.’
‘How do we start?’ he asked. She remembered the voice from the telephone when he made the appointment. Deep and soft, seductive.
‘Just tell me a bit about yourself.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘Whatever seems relevant.’
‘My name’s Tom Marino. You know that. I’m forty years old. I run Greenwise, the garden centre in Hammer Road. I’m …’ He had turned his head and was looking out of the window into the trees that pressed close up against it. ‘Last year, six months ago, at the end of November …’ A flick of his eyes. ‘My daughter was killed in a hit-and-run accident.’
Hannah thought she remembered it. A teenager with a bicycle, hit by a car. She waited.
‘I guess, in a sense, indirectly, that’s why I’m here,’ he said.
A pause.
‘Indirectly?’
‘My partner, Lisa, thinks I’m not coping with things very well. She thinks I’m in denial.’
‘What do you think?’ she asked.
‘Me? I just want to know why it happened. Not in the Meaning of Life sense. That’s bullshit. I want to know in a practical way. How Carla got hit. Why she was there. She was supposed to be going to the library. Somebody must know something. Somebody other than the one who did it, that is. I just think that if we had a little bit more information, then we might catch the driver. That I might understand it better.’
A pause. He was very still, very tense.
‘How old was Carla?’ Hannah asked.
‘Sixteen.’
She felt a wave of sadness,
grief and rage surging into her as if something had broken and it was pouring out of him. The word sixteen was the key, the loss and waste in that word. The anger startled her but she knew why it was there. He needed it to protect him. And his partner was wrong about one thing. However poorly he was coping, he wasn’t in denial.
He was looking out of the window again. The trees there were part of the therapy. She had let them grow to form a shield but they were not impenetrable. Like a forest, they drew you into them and tempted you away into a space where strange things were possible.
‘Maybe understanding it, or trying to, is a means of dealing with it, working through it,’ she said.
He nodded, agreeing with her or just allowing the comment. ‘It’s different for Lisa. Carla’s not her daughter. Not that she doesn’t care. Of course she does. She and Carla were really close. It’s …’ He looked at her, a wry expression. ‘I should explain. We have one of these modern families. I’ve got, had, two kids. Carla and Vincent, who’s nineteen. Lisa has a daughter, Imogen. Imogen lives with us most of the time. Vincent did too until he started university. Then he went to his mother, in Winston. Carla used to live with her mother and come to us on weekends and in the holidays. Until last year, when she moved in permanently.’ He glanced back out into the trees. She let the pause lengthen and draw him on.
‘Annabelle, that’s Carla’s mother. Annabelle and I split up eight years ago. I was working in computers and … well … a life crisis all round, I guess. I decided to get out of that and do something different, so I moved up here and bought the garden centre. Annabelle couldn’t understand it. She still can’t. We don’t communicate very well. We hardly talk at all since Carla died.’
She watched him, saw the signs of blame, the bitter twist to his mouth. And the guilt, the inevitable guilt. She was tempted for a moment by Annabelle’s story but she let it pass.
‘Lisa and I have been together seven years. She works on the local paper. The Advocate. That’s how we met. She interviewed me when I took over Greenwise.’ Another pause. He was remembering, perhaps, that first encounter, or feeling the space of the relationship.
‘I’m not really answering your question, am I?’ he said suddenly.
‘Which question?’
‘About how well I’m coping.’
‘Do you have a different answer to the one you’ve given?’
‘Am I coping?’ He looked down at his fingers, which had formed themselves into a rounded cage, strangely delicate for such a fierce nature. ‘Yes and no, I guess.’
‘Tell me about the no part.’
He did not answer immediately. He was uncertain, she could see. He was on the point of decision. Slinking back and turning away or stepping out into the open.
‘I suppose the thing that troubles me …’ He looked up at her. ‘I guess … I don’t know …’ Another glance out of the window as if he might escape through the trees. ‘I’m having an affair.’
His gaze flicked to his left and he sat there, very still, waiting for her judgement, the moral judgement. She had none to make, of course. She was not interested in right and wrong. She believed that human beings were creatures of the wild, with instincts, needs, desires that drove them. Judgement was an instinct. Like revenge.
‘Tell me about it,’ she said.
‘It’s been going on a couple of months now. It just happened, I don’t know why. And I don’t seem to be able to do anything to stop it.’
‘Do you want to stop it?’
‘Yes. No. I guess I just don’t care any more. And I guess, in a way, I’m obsessed.’
‘You’re obsessed with this relationship?’
‘Yes. And with other things. Other possibilities.’
‘What sort of possibilities?’
‘I don’t know. When I think about it now, at this moment, there doesn’t seem to be anything there. It’s like a desert, empty, dry. Cold. But then, when I’m with someone, anyone I find attractive and even some I don’t find that attractive, I feel I have to … I want to say “make love to them”, but love isn’t the word … I don’t know what the word is.’
And do you confess to them? she wondered. Is that what happens? But she couldn’t ask him that. It wasn’t meaningful just yet. Instead she said, ‘And this is different from the way you usually feel?’
‘Yes. I mean, it’s normal to think about sex, to be aware of other people in that kind of way. I suppose the difference is that I need to do something about it.’
‘That’s what troubles you? Needing to do something?’
‘Yes. I don’t think it’s right. It’s not responsible. I don’t want to hurt people.’
‘Lisa?’
‘Yes. And other people. They don’t need any grief from me.’
An interesting word to choose, she thought.
‘Has anything like this ever happened to you before?’
‘When I left Annabelle. But that was different, too. I wanted to find somebody.’
‘And you found Lisa?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you’re saying you don’t want to find anybody now.’
‘No. Nobody real.’
‘Somebody unreal?’
He didn’t answer. He was looking at his hands again. The left one held the right wrist. Right palm opened and then closed, testing his grip, feeling the sinews move.
It is all unreal, she wanted to say. The world we see, the people we love. We paint the desert with our urges. But it would not help him if she told him that.
The pause lengthened and she began to consider the possibilities that had opened up, the paths she might point out to him. Perhaps the best one was the most obvious, the most direct.
‘Is this situation, this obsession, connected with Carla’s death, do you suppose?’
He looked up at her, a little flash of hope, gone in a moment.
‘I guess it must be,’ he said. ‘But I don’t see how.’
‘Is that what you want to find out? How?’
3.
LISA CAIRNES OF THE Durry Advocate opened the door of her four-wheel drive and stepped down into the cool morning air, the pale light, smell of dew-soaked earth. The scents crept over her and into her head. She closed the car door softly, stood there, looking round. A dog was barking, an old dog, somewhere ahead of her out of sight. She was in a clearing, trees on both sides and, in front, a view out to the north-east, the Kaimohu Hills, grey in the distance. To her left was an old ute, mud-spattered, and beside it a corrugated-iron shed and a water tank on a wooden stand and then a battered caravan, half-covered in creeper, a dead-looking mass of tangled stalks trailing over the black roof and down the dirty-yellow sides. Rust streaks bleeding from the window frame.
The dog was coming slowly over the far side of the knoll. It was black, with a white muzzle, floppy ears and a round barrel of a body. A mongrel, mostly labrador, wagging its tail now. She waited for it, watched it thread its way through what looked like a garden, ragged zigzag paths between the clumps of growth. There were vegetables and ferns and stout seedlings — baby shrubs and trees. The dog lumbered on, doing its job. Stiff lift of arthritic legs and rolling hips. Your call, dog, your territory. It stopped in front of her, looked up, seeking her out with breathing nostrils. Scent of me? You’ll smell cat, she thought. She held out her hand for it to sniff.
‘Hello, dog.’
‘Hello, lady.’
She started.
A man was standing a few metres away to her right, watching her. He was tall and lean, his lined face half-hidden by a floppy, stained hat. He wore a faded shirt and a shapeless jersey, khaki wool with a hole in the left elbow. Baggy grey trousers, tied at the waist with twine and tucked into black gumboots. In his right hand, upright like a spear, he held a garden hoe.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I guess you’re Max.’
‘I am.’ He was squinting at her from under the brim of the hat, his eyes bright, deep in wrinkled sockets. He had a nose like a wedge and bushy white
eyebrows. There was a mist of white stubble around his cheeks and chin.
‘I’m Lisa Cairnes. From the Advocate.’
He didn’t answer, just looked at her. She felt an urge to move, to walk away, to pace the ground, but she resisted. Thrust her hands deep into the pockets of her jacket. Looked down to her left, at a clump of arum lilies, one white trumpet curled at the lip and the thick golden stamen. She felt hungry suddenly. A growl in her belly. Remembered she had had no breakfast. Stupid woman.
‘You’ve got a nice spot here,’ she said, for something to say, glancing up at him.
‘Nice?’
She indicated the garden. ‘The ferns and so on.’
‘That’s what I do,’ he said. The dog had gone to him and was nuzzling his knee. He ignored it.
‘How long have you lived here?’
‘Seventeen years.’ He moved then, a quick shift of the hoe to his left hand, swinging it to the horizontal. ‘This piece you’re going to write. What’s in it for me?’
‘Depends what you mean,’ she said. ‘We can’t pay you anything. But it might help in other ways.’ She took a step towards him. ‘I understood you have a problem, a legal dispute.’
‘Might have.’ A quick wriggle of his shoulders as if something had bitten him there.
‘And that’s why you wanted to talk to me?’
‘Might be.’
Good God, what is this?
‘Look,’ she said, ‘if I’m wasting my time, tell me now.’
‘Wasting? Hm.’ He pulled a face, a bad-smell face. ‘You talked to them next door?’
‘The Kerringtons? No.’
‘You going to?’
‘I’m a journalist. I get the facts. I tell the truth, the way I see it.’
‘I don’t want any cutesy-wootsy stories about this crusty old bloke that lives in a caravan and grows native plants.’
‘I don’t write that kind of story.’
‘Somebody at your paper does. I’ve read ’em.’
He turned away suddenly, began to walk towards the open side of the clearing. Lisa followed him, picking her feet along the zigzag path, feeling the brush of leaves against her ankles, damp soak in the fabric of her jeans. Max was soon way ahead of her. He had the rhythm of it somehow, striding forward with his hoe like a quarterstaff. He seemed to lever himself over the ground. She felt heavy in comparison.