On River Road

by Chris Else

  ‘I mean, Jesus, maybe something was mentioned, back then, about you possibly using it but, hey, when was that? Years ago. Buried back in the mists of time somewhere.

  ‘We arrange,’ she said, with a little shrug. ‘That’s why we didn’t give all to McCracken.’

  ‘What do you want it for anyway?’

  ‘To grow more. To expand the business.’

  ‘What business?’ A spasm of annoyance. ‘You don’t have a business.’

  ‘You’re spilling,’ she said, getting to her feet.

  For a moment he didn’t understand, then he noticed the cool of liquid on his fingers and, looking down, the spots of wine, dark like the spatter of blood across the cream wool of the carpet.

  She was moving away, out through the door, leaving him staring at the space behind her, leaving him with his anger. Why? Why did she needle him like this? How was it possible? Stay calm, get a grip. Hold it, stop it wriggling. A lump of numbness and helplessness, deep down, held tight in the cold.

  She was back with a stainless-steel bowl and a cloth, coming towards him, kneeling beside his chair. He moved his legs, twisted, shrinking away, until he realised what he was doing, relaxed again. He didn’t touch her though. If he’d let his leg go back to where it was, his knee would have been touching her shoulder.

  She was alternately dampening the cloth from the water in the bowl and dabbing the stain, heavy jabs of her fingers, which he could hear, dab, dab, dab, and which shook her body. Vicious. Yes, she was vicious under all that coolness, wasn’t she? The way she tore at you and pecked at you.

  ‘So what is this business supposed to be?’ he asked.

  ‘Plants, of course. Wholesale supply.’

  ‘Wholesale? Who for?’

  ‘Tom. And others maybe.’

  ‘Tom? Oh, fuck! Not Tom. Why are you doing this to me?’ The words came before he understood what he was saying, what they might imply.

  ‘Oh?’ She stood up, looked at him. She had the bowl in one hand, the cloth squeezed tight in the other.

  ‘I know you fancy him,’ he said, ‘but this is going too far.’

  ‘I don’t fancy him. He’s a friend.’

  ‘Don’t give me that. I’m not blind. I mean, I watched you snuggling up to him on the sofa the other night, and now you’re telling me you want to do business with him? Business, my arse! All you want to do is spread your fucking legs.’

  ‘Pig!’ She said it softly. He almost didn’t hear.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I should. I should fuck him. Then you will see.’

  ‘What did you call me?’

  ‘Pig!’ She yelled it this time, leaning towards him, mouth coming at him in great bites. ‘Fat pig. You are stupid and dirty and you talk, kwoik, kwoik, kwoik, like nonsense. You make no sense only animal noise. You have no thinking. You are brainless. You are blind. You cannot see. You cannot understand. You spit your drink. You swear with a dirty mouth. You cannot think. You stump, stump, stump in your own shit, turning round and round and round —’

  ‘Shut up!’ he yelled, just to stop her. ‘Shut your fucking mouth!’

  ‘I tire of you. I don’t want this any more.’

  ‘Get out of my fucking house!’

  ‘This is not your fucking house. This is my house. I make this house. I find the things. I paint the walls. This is …’

  ‘I paid for every last cent of it.’

  ‘Pay? You think money is the world. Well, go and shit on your money. Just like you piss on the floor.’ She turned the bowl in her fist, a slurp of pale pink sparkling water cascading to the carpet.

  ‘Bitch!’

  The wet cloth hit him in the side of the neck.

  ‘Bitch!’ he yelled again, but she was leaving, she was gone.

  ‘Fucking bitch.’ To himself this time, almost to himself. A sob, almost a sob. God, he couldn’t let her do this to him. It had to stop. Fucking bitches, all of them.

  He reached out for the bottle, filled his glass.

  19.

  AT 2.30 P.M. ON Saturday 2 May 2003, in the High Court at Winston, after nine and a half hours’ deliberation, the jury of seven women and five men found Polly Drafton not guilty of the murder of her husband but guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of provocation.

  20.

  HANNAH CRESWELL WAS NO longer surprised when her clients’ dreams began, as if on demand, between the first and second appointments. If the analysand was positively oriented towards the therapy, it seemed, the unconscious responded. In most cases, too, the response was not just a cluster of random images. It had a structure and a set of resonances that echoed the pathology, a little drama that played out the cognitive and affective configuration of the brain that produced it. Illuminating? Well, not necessarily. Sometimes it seemed more like a bird trying to distract you by fluttering along the ground away from its nest, but there were usually enough clues to open up the space and glimpse the complexes within it.

  Tom Marino was waiting for understanding, for enlightenment. His eyes were not so guarded this time. Could she help him? Sitting there, leaning forward, his hands dangling between his thighs, his fingers interlaced at the tips. He had fine hands, long delicate fingers.

  Begin, she thought.

  ‘According to Jung, the figures in our dreams aren’t necessarily people from the real world but they might not be arbitrary constructions either. Sometimes they fall into certain categories, which he called archetypes and which seem to be universal across human cultures. Personally, I think the archetypes are all to do with how the brain’s wired up.’

  ‘Biology?’

  ‘Yes. The products of our evolution, if you like. They’re the conscious manifestations of what must ultimately be neurological functions. They appear in our dreams and in art and literature, too. They’re like a narrative grammar that forms the basis of our stories — myths and so on. I suppose, in a sense, a dream is a kind of story, a first draft, perhaps. Or a sketch of a work of art that has some good bits and some muddle. There are parts that work really well and say exactly what the artist wants them to and others that are confused or contradictory. Does that make sense?’

  He nodded, watching her.

  ‘Now, one of the archetypes, and the one that very often appears when someone first gets into analysis, is the Shadow. Jung had a theory that in the course of our growth and development we have to choose among our traits and characteristics. Some of them we reject. These, the aspects of ourselves that we don’t really like or don’t really want to acknowledge, get incorporated into the Shadow. It’s a kind of complement. It usually appears as a vague or incomplete figure. This is because there aren’t enough traits to make a fully rounded, complete person. It’s often either dark, or two dimensional, or only partially animated.”

  ‘Like the singer on the stage,’ he said.

  ‘For example.’

  ‘So that’s part of me? The part I don’t approve of?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Well, I guess I’m not inclined to sing in public. And I wouldn’t wear a clown costume. I’m not an exhibitionist.’

  ‘You think clowns are exhibitionists?’

  ‘They’re into performing, playing a part, and they’re, well, kind of confrontational. They push a certain silliness in your face.’

  ‘Silliness?’

  ‘A lack of reason, logic.’ He gave a little laugh, a snort, and turned his head, looked out of the window into the trees outside. ‘I guess that’s my Shadow, near enough.’ He thought about it for a moment and then glanced at her, an awkward look, like someone caught in an unguarded act. ‘What about the two heads?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Two-faced? Yes, I guess so.’

  ‘How would that be?’

  ‘Well, you know, walking around as if everything is normal. And Carla’s dead. I guess that’s kind of artificial, isn’t it? It kind of makes me a clown, in a sick way.’

  Interesting, she thought
, that he honed in on that directly when there were other, more conventional ways he might be said to be two-faced.

  ‘So what about this rhyme?’ he asked. ‘This “promissory magic”?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. Promissory? Promises. IOUs. If my promissory days are done, does it mean I can’t make promises or borrow money? Or I can’t expect other people to keep their promises, maybe. All bets are off, is that it?’

  She said nothing, let the silence lengthen into another thought.

  ‘And the three-day corpse. It’s out in the sun, in the open. Exposed. This Shadow? Is that what’s exposed?’ A sudden glance at her, a desperate look. All the fears clamouring for attention suddenly. ‘Maybe it means I’m living on borrowed time?’

  ‘Don’t push too hard,’ she said. ‘There may not be an answer. Not here, today, now.’

  ‘Yes, well. If this Shadow’s like you say, it isn’t necessarily going to make sense at all, is it?’

  ‘Maybe not rational, ordinary sense.’

  ‘I think I am living on borrowed time. It can’t go on like it is, can it?’

  He sat back in his chair, staring at the trees again. His fingers lifted to the side of his face, the beard, tweaking the hairs there. Thinking. Or feeling it. Feeling it was what he needed more, perhaps.

  ‘Is a zombie a Shadow?’ he asked, glancing back at her.

  ‘It could be.’

  ‘I feel like a zombie, sometimes. Going through the motions. It’s as if my whole life before that day has been rubbed out. The living dead.’

  ‘That, perhaps, is just a response to the trauma. A kind of shock.’

  ‘Or maybe I want to be like her. Dead. I don’t believe in life after death. I wish I did.’

  ‘What do you believe in?’

  ‘Nothing. There’s nothing there when the light goes out.’

  And yet, she thought, you have your ghost to deal with still.

  21.

  TOM MARINO AND KENNY Wiremu stood on the edge of the turning circle at the back of Clisserford, looking out over the flat green slope towards the stream and the distant hills beyond. Kenny was a small, nuggety man with a fringe of black beard sprouting like gorse from his jaw, a black beanie pulled down to the tips of his ears.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Front-ender and a couple of trucks? A grader maybe. Easy.’

  ‘How long’ll it take?’

  ‘Ooh.’ A big show of figuring it out. Kenny’s lips did a little put-put-put to prove the cogs were turning. Tom guessed he had already done the calculation. He was just trying for a bit of contingency. ‘Ten days?’

  ‘Eight.’

  ‘Might rain, eh?’

  ‘Eight days if it doesn’t rain.’

  Kenny didn’t answer. This was the closest he would come to an agreement.

  ‘How much?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Hmmm.’ More considering. ‘Sixteen grand.’

  ‘Twelve.’

  Kenny laughed. He had two teeth missing in the left side of his upper jaw. ‘Fourteen-five,’ he said when he’d got over the joke.

  ‘When can you start?’

  ‘Nineteenth. Give or take.’ Rocking his hand, giving or taking.

  ‘How about the twelfth?’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Reschedule. You can squeeze this in, only eight days.’

  ‘Nagh,’ Kenny said, but without much force. Tom took that to be a maybe.

  ‘All sorted, then?’ A silence.

  Kenny looked at him. Dark eyes, sly grin. All sorted.

  Tom had a feeling for the air. He came from a long line of sailors who lived and died on the water but, of course, it is the air that carries the sea’s messages, the whiff of a storm, the scent of a distant shore. With Kenny gone, he started to walk away over the grass towards where the bigger mound would be; towards the hills in the west, bright, golden-grey in the morning sun. The sky above was clear blue, pale at the horizon. A puff of cloud. He sniffed the wind, the little breeze that smeared his cheeks and brow and eyes with the chill of the mountain valleys, the cold smell of growing things. His spirits lifted, a gesture towards the light.

  A hopeful morning, then.

  He took out his cellphone, dialled the number. Lifted the phone to his ear. The ringing tone.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Mr Greenwise.’ She’d picked him from her caller i.d.

  ‘Hi. I think I have a deal on your excavations.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘A local company. PDD Earthmoving.’

  ‘PDD? What does that stand for?’

  ‘Pretty Damn Deep, I think.’

  She laughed, her strange little gulp. ‘Come and tell me about it,’ she said.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Right behind you.’

  He turned. In the L-shape made by the garage block and the house was a lawn surrounded by a low hedge. It had a little fountain in the centre. Paths and borders formal in their symmetry. Most of the beds were bare, stripped for the winter, and beyond them, on the veranda, Laura Kerrington stood, white shirt and red pants bright against the shadow behind her. Mistress of the House.

  ‘There’s something you can help me with,’ she said as he started to walk towards her.

  ‘Oh, what’s that?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  He stepped through a gap in the hedge, began to cross the lawn. The fountain was a concrete statue, a fake Greek thing, a woman holding an amphora on her shoulder.

  ‘Do you like it?’ she asked, in his ear.

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘I think Mountford had dreams of Versailles. I don’t know. I can never decide. I might rip it out.’

  Closer to her now, where she stood in front of a set of French doors, open. Right hand on her hip. He closed his phone, slipped it into his jacket pocket, walked the few metres to the foot of the veranda steps. She was already moving, turning away, stepping inside.

  ‘Take your shoes off,’ she said, over her shoulder.

  He did so, although his shoes were clean, polished as always, just a little damp from the grass, that’s all. He left them on the boards outside the door.

  It was a long room, rectangular, stretching across the back of the house. Gleaming floors of native timber, scattered with oriental rugs. The furniture was arranged in islands: a dining table with six chairs, a lounge suite around a low table, two easy chairs at angles to one another but facing out towards the garden. The walls were covered with an embossed paper, silky sheen, and pictures, old photographs and paintings, in heavy frames. He breathed deep but couldn’t catch the scent of the place. There was nothing. No smell. How could somewhere smell of nothing?

  Laura was moving through a door to his right. He hesitated, unsure if he should follow her or not. Above him, hanging from the ceiling, were two chandeliers, which did not quite match, in two plaster centrepieces. Two ceilings originally. Two rooms, therefore. Two heads on a cartoon clown.

  ‘Here.’ She was in the doorway, beckoning. ‘Take your coat off too.’ She disappeared again.

  He removed his jacket, crossed the floor. The bare boards between the rugs were slippery beneath his socks. A doorway led into a kitchen. Modern shelves and cupboards of golden wood, the stove-top and hood in stainless steel. There was an island bench in the centre and a bar with two high stools with black leather seats. On the right-hand wall a black-leaded coal range, for decoration only. It had a vase of flowers on top of it.

  She was at the refrigerator, bending, taking something out.

  ‘Open this.’ Handing him a bottle. Pol Roger.

  ‘You drink champagne every morning?” he asked, stripping off the soft metal seal.

  ‘Not quite every one.’ A glance at him, a little grin.

  He couldn’t read her mood, but it was different from her usual restraint. Suppressed energy, a wriggle in her movements. Excited, was she? Pleased with herself?

  He twisted the cork and
pulled. A soft pop. Poured into one of the champagne flutes, tilting glass and bottle, pale gold of the liquid, rim of bubbles at the surface. Handing it to her, taking the other glass. She hoisted herself on to a stool, sat with her legs crossed, one heel tucked behind the spell. Left forearm lay along the surface of the bar. There was a little gold charm bracelet at her wrist. And the rings on her fingers. Bells on her toes, no doubt.

  ‘Well, thanks for this,’ he said, lifting his glass to her. ‘An unexpected bonus.’

  ‘Here’s to me.’ Clinking with him.

  ‘All right. Here’s to you.’ Sitting down himself. He sipped the wine, the dry fruit, little zest of bubbles.

  Her look, a sly expression. It didn’t suit her, gave her painted lips and smooth plucked eyebrows a tawdry air. She was teasing him, he realised. She wanted his curiosity about what she was celebrating. The thought had an odd effect. He felt not interest but a mild disdain. If you need the attention of someone like me, you’re in a sad way, baby.

  ‘What’s the occasion?’ he asked.

  ‘Ah!’ She drank. Her glass was already half empty. She picked up the bottle from the bar between them and refilled. ‘I just closed a deal,’ she said. Her left hand balled into a little fist, a shake of triumph. ‘I just closed my first million-dollar deal.’

  ‘Well done.’ Toasting her. ‘What sort of deal?’

  ‘Forenza. Four hundred and twenty thousand shares at seventy-nine cents. Sold them for $3.47.’ She tossed back her head, lifted her fist in another clench. ‘Whooo!’

  ‘This is an interest of yours, then?’

  ‘It’s what I do. To keep my sanity.’ She laughed, not the gulp this time but a little girlish giggle.

  ‘Sanity?’

  ‘Oh, shit. I’d go spare otherwise, wouldn’t I? Stuck here by myself all day.’ Then she leaned towards him, touched him on the sleeve. ‘Don’t tell Monty, will you?’ Anxious tone. He guessed, then, that the champagne was not her first drink of the day. A lonely life. Stuck in a huge house with nothing to do except play the stock market. Waiting for hubby to come home.