True Stars

by Kidman, Fiona

  ‘Mrs Muru, oh yes. But she didn’t finish the march.’

  ‘Well no. Her son was up on a charge at the time.’

  ‘What did he get?’

  ‘Three years.’

  The silence deepened. It was getting dark out in the city. In the outer offices the secretaries were putting on their coats, preparing to descend the circular tower by the lifts and pour out into the street towards their buses and trains, their families and bedsits.

  ‘Your wife met some people on her way south. She spent the night with…an old friend of hers.’ Gamble hoped that his voice was suitably compassionate.

  Kit flushed scarlet, turned away until his blush had subsided. He had never coped well with embarrassment. ‘I cannot afford to antagonise Applebloom,’ he said carefully, wishing to hide any trace of surprise. He was not even sure that he was correct but it was a guess that rose instinctively to his lips. The worst thing would be that he was wrong and that she had found someone else.

  But Gamble was nodding sympathetically. ‘I can see that. Very sensible of you, old chap.’ Kit noticed that he did not close the file. ‘Really, it confirms my opinion that you’re above reproach as far as this committee is concerned. I would hope that I could handle such a … delicate matter as, well, as decently as you.’

  Fat chance that he would need to, Kit thought. Gamble always cut and run from his marriages before they turned messy.

  ‘There’s just one other matter to clear up.’ Gamble looked back at the typed-up notes in front of him. Soon it would be too dark to see, but the Minister made no move to turn on the lights. ‘She met a communist on that journey. An infiltrator of the old school.’ He smoothed the sheaf of paper.

  Kit shook his head. ‘No. That can’t be right.’

  ‘Not once but twice. A truck driver.’

  ‘Hannen? Not Hannen.’

  ‘She went straight from her … I know this is painful, her tryst at the motel — I must say I thought Applebloom could have afforded better, your wife paid, incidentally, in cash — to a meeting with Hannen just over an hour later.’

  Kit stood up and walked over to the window, although this was not entirely protocol. He looked out across the harbour where a swell was developing and rows of whitecaps marched across the edge of the wind. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it.’

  The office was on the fifth floor of the old DIC Building, now trendily renamed Harbour City Centre, on Lambton Quay. The lift was lined with a pale greenish carpet that spread beyond to the floors in the building. There was often a man with a dog in the lift. When Rose stepped out the only sound was the steady rustle of water behind the varnished door marked Men’s Toilets. Arched windows admitted filtered light. Lilac and sepia tiles lined the passage walls to shoulder height for what seemed like miles. Rooms leading off bore a strange anonymity, although the doors were discreetly lettered with the names of doctors, dentists, gem dealers (she saw destitute women in the latter offering to trade their engagement rings), opticians and accountants. And Buff Daniels.

  It was like going to an analyst.

  ‘I’ve made some charts,’ said Buff Daniels. The private investigator did not look like Colombo, or Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. In a city of civil servants the small gingery man would have passed for one.

  ‘See, critical path analysis.’ He had lined up papers that had fed out of a computer. They were covered with names.

  ‘We line up the possibilities. Match events. Take this one… your former students.’

  ‘I really don’t think…it’s so long since I taught.’

  ‘Grudges can resurface when kids get older. Especially with your connections. We’ve been through that.’ He looked at her as if she was being recalcitrant. He had been famous for divorce cases when adultery still mattered, got famous tracking a runaway company director to Port Moresby in the ’seventies, and specialised in high-class family feuds. He was reputed to be able to smell who sold the family silver by the time he drove up a tree-lined driveway.

  ‘You’re really keen on this line?’

  Buff walked around his charts. The names of Rose’s family and friends and all the people she could think of whom she had ever known stared back at her.

  She stood shaking her head. ‘I can’t make the connections,’ she said.

  ‘But that’s what I’ve done,’ Toni said. She was kneeling on the floor of the Hataitai flat surrounded by paper.

  The spread sheets didn’t look much different to the ones Buff Daniels had made, but they listed some names Rose had forgotten.

  ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘Nick did them.’

  ‘Nick Newbone? You told him?’

  ‘He was the only person I trusted to make up the charts.’

  ‘It seems like you’ve told everyone in Weyville, Toni.’

  Toni shot her a look. Perhaps, Rose thought, she will say something about the Appleblooms, but of course she didn’t and Rose couldn’t ask.

  ‘Stick to the point,’ said Toni. ‘Look, my charts are better than his. We’ve arranged them by streets and occupations.’

  ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘With the electoral rolls.’

  ‘Toni, you’re clever.’

  ‘I know. Then we’ve broken them down into shift workers.’

  Rose studied the charts. ‘Yes, so you have … we talked about that, didn’t we?’

  ‘There are patterns in the times they ring.’

  ‘Have you worked them out?’

  ‘Consistent for a week, maybe two weeks, then there’s a break.’

  ‘A nurse?’

  ‘No nurses in Power Street. Where the phone box is. The one they traced the call to.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the same street,’ said Rose, catching on. ‘Surely he wouldn’t make the calls in the street where he lived. Maybe when he’s passing on his way home from somewhere. Wherever that is.’

  ‘I think it’s the same street. Or very close. It’s miles to another phone box.’

  ‘A nurse would know how to slit a dog’s throat. It was a tidy job.’

  ‘Mill workers live over there.’

  ‘Newspaper workers do shifts. Association of ideas, huh?’

  ‘You mean Matt or Hortense?’

  ‘No I didn’t. Did I? I don’t know. Let’s have some lunch. Let me dress up and we can go out. We’ll get a taxi so we don’t have to park. You look good already, Toni. You look a million dollars.’

  She did too. She was dressed in a green frock that hugged her hips and flared out around the knees. Her black hair was cut even shorter. Her energy permeated the tiny flat. She had flown from Weyville the day before to attend a conference on school boards — ‘not that I’m sure they’ll work,’ she muttered darkly to Rose, ‘but we’ve got to get into them, not that I’m talking politics, don’t get me started.’

  Though they had spoken of the Prime Minister’s illness, with the same intense fascination that was sweeping the country. ‘Do you think he’ll die?’ Toni had said even as she stepped through the door. ‘He’ll be a martyr like Norman Kirk, I wonder if he’ll have a state funeral.’ ‘He’s getting better,’ Rose had said, ‘he can’t die now,’ and Toni had retorted, ‘Well, maybe it would be better if he did, he doesn’t seem to be doing anything else, does he?’

  ‘I don’t mind staying here,’ Toni was saying. ‘Honestly. Anyway, I’m booked on the 1.30 plane. Lyle minded the kids yesterday after school.’

  The flat consisted of a living area, two very small bedrooms and a bathroom. Kit and Rose slept in one of the bedrooms in a bed that almost filled it. Some nights Kit came in late and slept in the other bedroom on a stretcher. He had installed a desk in this room. In the early mornings, when Rose brought him tea after one of these late sessions, she would find him sitting at the desk, apparently working on papers that were piled on it. Quite often it looked as if he was moving them from one side of the desk to the other. She remembered her neat little piles in the desk she had commandeer
ed from her daughter. She wondered sometimes if Harry was answering any of the letters these days. Kit never asked her to answer any mail. Once she had found a card from a psychiatrist propped against the teapot on the breakfast bar where she would find it. She had wrapped it up with the potato peelings.

  The living area opened through sliding doors on to a tiny balcony. All around the flat they could see the sea below them: Evans Bay where the yachts were moored lay to their right; the city stood across the water to their left, the lights shining in tracks over the waves at night like the raiments of priests. Over the bay a white luminous monument to a dead prime minister loomed on a headland jutting out to sea. Some days the sea was the colour of hydrangeas, on others — like today — it was salad green and stirring all the time under a grey sky. There were days when it was as much as she could manage to contend with the sky. The flat stood in the flight path of planes landing and taking off from the airport, depending on the wind. Today it was a northerly and the roar of jets taking off into the wind drowned out their conversation every few minutes.

  ‘Okay, so I’ll ring someone to pick up the kids.’

  ‘Sarah would do that for you.’ Testing the water. Sarah would confide in Toni if she was unhappy or worried or thought that Morris had acted strangely. But then, she reminded herself, it was months since his mysterious absence. Knowing Morris it probably hadn’t caused a ripple.

  She tidied up the bench with her back to Toni. They had been drinking coffee ever since Toni turned up unannounced on the doorstep with her computer printouts. Rose had asked Toni where she had stayed the night before, but she was evasive. Now Toni consulted a notebook.

  ‘So why didn’t you get in touch?’ Rose asked, pursuing the silence. ‘We could have gone to a show. I tell you Toni, I’m not going to let the grass grow under my feet here.’

  ‘The meeting took ages to wind down.’ Toni put on a black jacket and walked through to the bathroom to admire the effect. ‘I like it here. It’s quiet, apart from the planes.’

  ‘Eight minutes to the middle of the city.’

  Because they were calling out to each other over a jet, it took both of them a moment to hear the phone. Rose had finished the dishes and gone into the bedroom to change.

  ‘Let it ring,’ Rose called. ‘I’ve left phones behind.’

  But the phone kept on. On the seventeenth ring Toni said, ‘Rose that’s driving me crazy,’ and picked it up.

  Rose came out of the bedroom wearing pantyhose and a slip.

  ‘I shouldn’t stay,’ Toni was saying. ‘But why not? Why don’t we? Rose wants to go out. We’ll meet you at five…at the Oak Bar, okay? … I’ll make her.’ She looked at Rose. ‘It’s Nick Newbone, he’s in town too.’

  Rose shook her head violently, but Toni said goodbye and hung up. Rose said, ‘Are you seeing Nick?’

  ‘Don’t be small town, Rose. That’s what you said you’d left Weyville for.’

  ‘Sex is pretty universal, isn’t it? The only difference in this town is condoms. They tell me they’re making a comeback.’

  Toni’s hands shook slightly on the page she was running her finger over. ‘Let’s say it’s political wherever it happens.’

  ‘Problems on the home front?’

  ‘Everyone’s got problems. No, I’m not seeing Nick, as you so delicately put it. Speaking of problems, why did you let that phone ring? Rose, tell me? Can’t you answer phones any more? Hey, are you telling me the phantom’s moved down here? Rose, I’ve been doing all this work…’

  ‘The phantom moves around. The phantom was here for a week, and he’s gone away again. I thought I was safe.’

  ‘When? How long ago?’

  ‘It stopped ten days ago. He knows my address, of course. He sends me a letter now and then.’ She opened the cutlery drawer and slid out a pile of letters from underneath the plastic compartment tray. ‘Weyville postmark. Auckland postmark. And in the week he was phoning up again, no postmark. Dropped by and put one in the letterbox. Next day I was in the village at the hot bread shop and he popped it under the windscreen wipers while I slipped in and bought a French roll, a farmyard loaf and six doughnuts because I thought Kit was coming home that night and he likes doughnuts so I bought him some. I remember itemising everything in that brown paperbag while I sat there, and the piece of paper, which I had thought was a parking ticket, looked through the glass right back at me. Then I saw that handwriting, very careful plain writing, almost printing. Sometimes he uses a typewriter, but he can’t have had one here, so he printed in the same writing that he uses to sign the letters. A Friend. Someone Who Keeps An Eye On You. Oh, by the way, Kit didn’t come home that night. I ate all the doughnuts myself.’

  ‘What does Kit say about these?’ Toni turned an envelope over with distaste.

  ‘I haven’t told Kit. You could say Kit’s and my relationship is on the big dipper.’ She pulled her dress down over her head and slipped her feet into a pair of shoes that had been lying under the sofa.

  ‘You were humouring me.’ Toni gestured at her charts.

  ‘It’s being taken care of, okay?’ Rose bundled the papers up into a rough ball and threw them in a corner of the room. ‘It’s not happening, Toni.’

  ‘But it is.’

  ‘Not to you. To me. I don’t want to see Nick Newbone tonight, either. He happens in Weyville, not here. Now what are you going to do?’

  Toni hesitated, deciding whether or not to walk out. ‘We’ve always been friends, you and me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She gestured, not wanting to make the break. ‘We’ll have lunch and I’ll catch the 5.30.’ Her mood changed and she laughed. ‘There, compromise.’

  ‘You’ll stand Nick up.’

  ‘Stand him up? No, I won’t. It was you he was ringing.’

  Across town in his office, Kit was talking to Alan Smart. Smart was a senior backbencher whose father had worked on the wharves and been locked out during ’51. Alan had been twenty then and marched with his father. Diligent, and unswerving to his socialism, it was difficult to see why he had never been elevated to Cabinet. Some said he was of more use as a prod to straggling consciences where he was. The other view was that the new right had blackballed him.

  Smart said, ‘The Prime Minister’s going to need all the support he can get when he comes back to the House.’

  ‘If he does.’

  ‘He’s not dead yet. Where do you stand?’

  ‘I don’t think I need answer that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I would have thought my loyalty was obvious.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I’m getting at.’

  ‘Look, there isn’t going to be a showdown with the Finance Minister.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  Kit hesitated. ‘If there was, he’d win it hands down.’

  ‘And if he does, the Government loses the next election.’

  ‘That’s simplistic.’

  ‘Aren’t you reading your electorate, Kit?’

  Kit yawned and looked at his watch. He was due to meet Rex Gamble for lunch.

  Toni wanted to eat Italian but La Spaghettata was booked out with a crowd from the university. They walked up past James Smith’s and Toni spotted a canary-yellow felt stetson with a black band round it displayed in the window and declared it was exactly what she had always wanted. She went straight in and bought it. On the track of Italian now, they fought their way along Courtenay Place, planning to turn right up Cambridge Terrace to Ferruccio’s. The wind buffeted them from behind and sideways.

  ‘I should have bought a piece of chin elastic.’ Toni clutched the hat.

  ‘We should have caught a bus.’ Rose huddled into her coat. But she lengthened her stride. She liked it here, this end of town in particular: New Season’s Muttonbirds, the Women’s Place bookshop, the urn with the child’s face over the Bar-B-Q-King Restaurant, the green and red Shanghai, even the Courtenay Place bus shelters where the pay phones hardly ever work
ed and the drunks hung out and slept on mattresses and fought. These were people and things she could see. Fashion and violence, which seemed more dictatorial than even Auckland’s self-evident hedonism, left her more uncertain. ‘The constellations are falling apart,’ someone had said at a party the week before, ‘Odd things are happening, people are slitting each other’s throats for leather jackets, there’s traffic jams composed entirely of left-hand drive brothel cars, we spend our lives talking to each other on our answerphones and never hearing the real voice.’ (It had occurred to her then that what she needed, had always needed, was an answerphone; Kit said it was an unwarranted expense when people could always leave messages for him at Parliament. But that was not what she meant.) The people she met owned futon beds, bidets, personalised number plates, told stories to themselves aloud in public, talked about the decline of kiwifruit, deplored the rise of the white backlash and the numbers of Greeks who drove Rollers, belonged to the Diet Clinic, made excuses for sending their children to private schools, and believed that couple togetherness could cause stress. Well, amen to that.

  Beneath it all ran the ongoing fear of the big one, the earthquake that would kill them all. Sometimes as she walked she thought she could see the lurch in the shining earth coming towards her but then she would decide that it was simply her own unstable heart.

  When Rose and Toni were seated in the restaurant, dense with Chanel No. 19 — grassy perfumes were in this winter — Rose saw Alan Smart’s wife, Mary, at the next table. She was lunching with the wife of an Opposition member who played Tag war games at the weekends. They were holding transistor radios to their ears. That was another thing Wellington people always seemed to be doing, as if they could not bear to go without their fix of news. Mary Smart looked grave. The other woman gave a slight excited squeal. ‘He’s having an operation on his heart,’ she cried.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ Toni muttered. ‘They’re talking about the Prime Minister.’ Mary Smart caught Rose’s eye.