Behind him advanced Murray. Brand-new Crusaders tee shirt over straining belly. Brand-new CD cap on top of fiftyish balding head already flushed and beaded with sweat. Clare watched him walk the length of the plane all the way to the second-back row. The second-back row because she had read somewhere that in a plane crash the tail often survives while, up the front, first class and business class are smashed to smithereens. Further proof that the meek do indeed do better in the long run. It was not as though she was an anxious flier: quite the contrary. She enjoyed the moment of lift-off, that prospect of empty uninterrupted time, those twenty-seven hours without phone call, email or urgent meeting. Nevertheless, the tail seemed a prudent choice. Should the plane come down over Iran, there’d she be, in with a chance of survival in row 66.
But now, seated at the back, she experienced a flicker of regret. Such slow torment, such building dread as he comes down like doom, his sports bag knocking at the heads of those passengers already seated. He approached like some hideous inexorable force. Like fate. He peered at his ticket. He peered at the numbers above the seats. He paused beside hers. He lifted the sports bag into the locker overhead, and the tee shirt rode up over white bloat and a line of scrubby hair stretching from navel to sagging beltline. He turned and sank into the aisle seat. The air smelled suddenly, richly, of one of those manly deodorants advertised with sailing ships or wolves howling in rugged wilderness: a bouquet barely distinguishable from the blue stuff they pour into motel toilets. He glanced at her as he fumbled beneath his rump for his seat belt. His arm knocked hers from the armrest.
‘Howzitgoin?’ he said. A quick appraisal from beneath the CD cap. Face. Breasts. Clearly as disappointed as she was with the card he’d been dealt by airline bingo: too old. Too plain. Too flat. But she’d have to do.
Murray was a Lion, off to join other Lions to roar for a couple of days in Birmingham, then on to watch the ABs play Wales and Scotland. He had the tickets for Cardiff Arms and Murrayfield already, bus trips, hotels, the lot, no pissing around. A lot of people gave up on the ABs after the World Cup: said they were overpaid and had lost the mongrel, but Murray hadn’t given up. It was easy to be a supporter when your team was winning, and let’s face it, they usually were, they were the best in the world, no question, but Murray was loyal right now, when it counted. That was the Anzac spirit, eh: you stuck with your mates, you stood by them when their backs were to the wall …
‘Do you really mean to compare losing a game of rugby to dying at Gallipoli?’ Clare wanted to say, but it was already too late. Murray was on to the general decline of the country: the nanny state with its Resource Management Act and all the rest of it. Christ, you couldn’t give your kid a clip over the ear without risking arrest. The country was stuffed and if he was younger he’d be off to Aussie, no question. There was no incentive to achieve any more: everyone wanted something for nothing and if you were prepared to work hard you just ended up handing over your hard-earned cash to support some bludger keen to have a bunch of kids so they could sit round on the benefit. Kiwis had to wake up. The world didn’t owe us a living. Now, he’d been to Singapore, and by god you had to hand it to the Asians. They really knew the value of a dollar. They put in the hard yards. Not that you wanted too many of them over here: some parts of Auckland you could hardly believe you were in New Zealand any more, it looked just like Hong Kong. What with all the Asians and the bloody Maoris taking whatever they could grab …
The monologue droned on as they rose to 30,000 feet. Up through the midnight sky above mountains with their crevices of dark bush between peaks capped with scraps of snow, over the skinny rim of the west coast, out over the ocean gleaming in the moonlight like hammered pewter. On and on as the crew wheeled out the trolleys and the drinks were poured. On and on as the plane settled to its course towards Australia and the first of the miniature dinners arrived. On and on through mouthfuls of beef and a red wine Murray thought was pretty reasonable, though he was usually a beer man himself, but New Zealand wines were up there with the best in the world, no question. When we got our act together we could strive for excellence, just like we did on the rugby field … On and on through the small square yellow pudding, though Clare’s sister Maddie had warned her: Never touch the pudding. She had once worked for six months for a catering firm that produced small square yellow puddings such as these for an international airline. Never touch the puddings, she’d said. But here was Clare spooning up salmonella and god knows what in desperate distraction as the monologue on her right droned on and coffees were poured in minor turbulence mid-Tasman.
But after the coffee, wonderfully, miraculously, Murray took a couple of sleeping pills, said he didn’t want to arrive in Pongoland jetlagged, and suddenly he was silent. His head lolled on his blow-up neck support, the cap fell askew, his mouth sagged open and emitted a rhythmic succession of tiny whiffling snores. He was asleep.
He slumped a little to one side so that his arm overwhelmed the armrest and she was pressed to the left. She made no move to dislodge him, dreading that he might wake. She sat wedged against the cabin wall while Australia emerged from the darkness beneath their wings, tinted dawn-red and a dozen shades of ochre and squiggled with the lines of dry watercourses. Cautiously she found her water bottle and took a sip. Carefully she fitted on the headphones and checked the movies on offer. Surreptitiously she selected The Lord of the Rings, Part Three, not because she wanted to see it beyond all else: she hated The Lord of the Rings. She seemed to be the only person in the country who hated The Lord of the Rings.
She had gone to the first of the trilogy with Paul. The opening — the little hobbit village — she had liked well enough. All those Peter Jackson lookalikes with their enormous prosthetic feet and the little round houses. That was the part she had liked as a child when she’d tried to read the book. The rest was boring: fight after fight with no real doubt about the outcome. Of course Frodo and his mates would survive. Of course they’d get to Mordor. She had never got past the first chapter, so she didn’t know when they got there or what happened when they arrived. And she didn’t care.
She had always preferred stories where there was at least an element of doubt, just a chance that the writer might give up on the characters he or she had so carefully created and drop them over a cliff. Timmy might disappear down a tunnel, and George might get lost looking for him and never be found. The Roman legion might march off into the fog and never return. She liked the quest to resemble real life, when people could go to the river and drown like the boy in the cemetery across the road, who had Perished in the Attempt to Save his Two Companions one summer afternoon in 1932.
When people could say they were off to the shop to buy a packet of cigarettes and simply disappear. No record. No evidence of foul play. No letter of explanation or apology.
Doubt was hard and sad, but at least it was real. It was interesting. The adult Clare still preferred the unpredictable. The Lord of the Rings made her feel breathless and confined. She felt trapped within a structure of repeated certainties.
But not to go to The Lord of the Rings was tantamount to treachery, a failure to endorse New Zealand’s pre-eminent status as Most Beautiful Film Location in the World. Not to mention Home to the Friendliest People. Liv Tyler and Ian McKellen both thought so, and they’d know for sure. She had sat beside Paul in a cinema at Hornby that was crammed with the fortunate inhabitants of the beautiful friendly isles, all munching and sucking and looking out for familiar bits of the Upper Rakaia or Piha transformed by the camera into mystical places, or waiting for that split second when a tiny blue car carefully negotiates a narrow road in the background somewhere west of Mordor. She was numb with boredom. An hour plodded by. An hour and a half. The characters were still running through caverns and across rock bridges that should properly have induced her latent capacity for vertigo but had no impact on her whatsoever.
Ordinarily, she was capable of feeling choking fear at the very sight of that photograph of Amer
ican construction workers perched on a steel beam to eat their lunches, boots swinging nonchalantly hundreds of metres above ant-like cars. Or the photographs in Paul’s climbing magazines of tiny figures swinging from a frail web of rope as they leapt for a hold on some massive face in Fiordland or bivouacked on a sheer cliff. She could scarcely bear to contemplate them, even when they were safely contained between the pages. But trapped on the way to Mordor she found her mind wandering. Should she buy those boots she had tried on that afternoon? Too expensive, but so beautiful. Just the right height, just the right kind of soft Spanish leather with that neat little buckle at the ankle. And she might as well have good boots while she could still wear them, while she could still …
She must have sighed, because Paul turned to look at her.
‘What?’ he said. He appeared to be enjoying it. He had read all the books by the time he was ten. Three times in the case of The Hobbit. His mother had made sure all her children could read well before they went to school and made a determined effort to introduce them early to what she called Good Literature. Paul had particularly loved Tolkien. His brother had preferred Narnia.
Paul’s hand moved automatically from the gallon tub of popcorn to the lips, his rhythmic crunching reminding her of a horse in its stall, chewing chaff. She could see the outline of his jaw in the reflected glow from the screen. A lean jaw, not jowly, though Paul could eat his way steadily through vast quantities of food, while she was becoming distinctly plump. Even though she ate sparingly and avoided dairy products.
‘Pad Thai?’ she whispered. ‘Or Vietnamese Beef Salad? After this is over?’
Paul shrugged. Scooped another handful of popcorn from the tub. ‘Don’t mind,’ he said. ‘You choose.’
He didn’t care about food. He had been raised on the principle of ‘eat what is put in front of you’. His mother could not abide faddishness. Clare could never quite believe she was not being tested when she ate at Dorothy’s. Paul’s mother seemed to take delight in presenting the most inedible or unlikely food to any newcomer at her table: strange soy-protein substitute meals with long-distant expiry dates she had bought at half price from the supermarket. Things that were meant to resemble Chicken Kiev or Beef Wellington yet were constructed entirely from vegetable matter.
Nor did Dorothy accept dietary intolerance in others. It was simply a matter of will. Clare picked at some creamy cheesy mess wrapped in pink stuff meant to resemble ham, torn between good manners — she had been raised not to make scenes when a guest in other people’s houses — and self-preservation. She was gambling on survival. There was at least a fifty percent chance she’d be ill later, creeping down the hall in the dark to the bathroom, intestines objecting strenuously to what was being demanded of them.
After dinner, the dishes would be left stacked in the sink: Dorothy and her timid husband had spent twenty years Out in India. Something to do with the railways. At Partition, faced with the return to post-war Stroud, they had cast about for somewhere more amenable and found it on Collingwood Street in Nelson. There were the bungalows with their big leafy rhododendrons and verandas. There was the Cathedral to supply a focus for Dorothy’s instinct to do good. Domestically, they lived in a chaos of little brass tables and unwashed plates, at some level always expecting someone pleasantly deferential to come in and clear away, as someone else had previously fanned the fire in a distant kitchen to prepare their delicious luncheon. Faced with the reality, Dorothy retreated. She’d close the door firmly on the remains of the unspeakably awful meal and marshal everyone into the living room, where they would sit listening to the Concert Programme, stuffing envelopes for a Good Cause.
‘Might as well make use of the extra manpower!’ she’d say, fetching the cardboard box filled with earnest concern for typhoon victims in Sri Lanka or a clinic in Bangalore that desperately required a new roof.
Clare would fold A4 fliers and listen to her stomach as it gurgled and made startled adjustments. Paul had told her once that as children Dorothy had fed them potato mashed with gooseberries and beetroot whenever they were ill in bed. She had read about it in a book by a Russian mystic in whom she placed great faith. And her belief seemed to be justified. Her children got well with astonishing rapidity — though that might not have been attributable to the healing properties of gooseberries nor to the children’s innate robust good health, as Clare pointed out to Paul. Faced with sour pink mashed potato on a daily basis, she’d have risen from her sickbed too.
As a result, Paul could eat anything at all, while showing no sign of a palate whatsoever. Taste was a sensation that seemed to have passed him by, defeated by long exposure to soy protein in an advanced state of decay.
He happily munched his way around India, eating curries from dubious vendors. In New Zealand he ate franchised nuggets of poultry feathers and gristle, and hamburgers of anonymous protein clamped between two buns so light and airy they stuck to the roof of the mouth. He ate pies from dingy dairies and corned beef sandwiches from fly-flecked tearooms, sandwiches that were so stiff the bread furled upward like the wings of dead moths pinned open for display. He ate cream buns with stale cream, barbecued chicken legs that were burned on the outside but pink and raw and running blood at the bone. He had an iron constitution. He ate sparingly, when he remembered. And he didn’t care what.
Clare could see his jaw moving steadily up and down in the reflected light from the busy boring screen. She could see the little leap at the throat as he swallowed.
Pad Thai, she decided. Or maybe a green curry … Frodo blundered on towards Mordor on his big prosthetic feet. Run, Frodo! For god’s sake, run!
She hadn’t gone to see the second in the series. Paul was no longer there to suggest it. But she had to watch the third because her sister was in it. Maddie was a warrior, in the Final Battle or whatever it was called. The big showdown when it was fairly safe to bet Righteousness Triumphed. Ho hum. And Evil exploded in a tempest of gore. Maddie had worn a suit of special lightweight armour and a thick nylon beard that spilled from beneath her helmet. She had responded to an advertisement in the Press requiring experienced riders with unclipped horses.
It sounded like fun. A month’s filming up at Twizel, which had finally become what it was surely always intended to be — a fantasy setting, and not an overnight assembly of identikit houses sprouted like strange fungi on the shores of a brand-new hydro-lake. Maddie spent the month living in one of the Ministry of Works standard family units, all meals and accommodation paid for and a chance to appear in a Hollywood blockbuster. She had left her job. She was just doing food prep at the Plaza so it didn’t matter. She didn’t care what she did, just whatever it took to earn enough for food and rent and the expenses attendant on maintaining a 16.3hh thoroughbred called Chester. Maddie’s real job was hunting. Old-fashioned, jumping-over-fences-and-galloping-after-hounds hunting. Tearing-hares-to-pieces hunting.
‘An animal gets killed, yeah,’ she said. ‘But heaps of people eat meat. And have you looked at an abattoir lately? I bet you haven’t — but I had a job in the gutroom at Leithfield once, and I can tell you I’d tons rather be a hare running for my life in the open — and half the time they get away anyway — than be carted for miles in a truck and slaughtered in a factory.’
‘But not for sport,’ said Clare, uneasily aware that she was at that very moment eating a kebab from a takeaway on Riccarton Road which was Maddie’s idea of catering for a Saturday night dinner party. ‘For necessity,’ she said, through a mouthful of slaughtered lamb. ‘Not sport.’
‘Oh shut up,’ said Maddie. ‘Have some more hummus and stop being so pious.’
Which was how their arguments usually ended.
Being a warrior turned out to be less exciting than Maddie had imagined. It involved lots of hanging about in hot armour, waiting for the cameras to be set up. She had passed the time pleasantly enough by having an affair with a Queenslander who had been over in New Zealand for the rodeo season and decided to give film-
making a go.
‘It was such a laugh!’ said Maddie. ‘Both of us in our armour, in steamy clinches behind the catering tent!’
She had appalling taste in men. Lloyd was narrow hipped and foxy, and wore high-heeled cowboy boots in which he strutted when he was not in armour, pinching Maddie’s bum in a proprietorial manner that would normally not have been tolerated: Clare had seen her sister tip a margarita over a hefty footballer for less. But when Lloyd pinched Maddie hard enough to make her yelp she had recovered instantly — and what was this? She giggled! Clare had looked on in amazement as her sister sashayed off between the tables at Madisons, simpering. Yes. Simpering. Lloyd had turned back to his steak — he ate only steak and chips, none of that green shit, as he put it to the waiter when he was giving his order. He sliced a chunk from his steak. Blood oozed onto the plate. He looked over at Clare. Straight in the eye. The look was hard and direct. It said, Maddie is mine. He could do what he liked with her.
He had a wife of course, back in Queensland. And a handicapped kid. He could never leave them, Maddie said, though he loved her more. Definitely. She was his soul mate, the woman he had been looking for all his life. He had never met anyone to match her. He didn’t love his wife. They had separate beds and, Maddie said, never had sex any more, that had all ended long ago. They stayed together just for their child, for little handicapped Colin. Lloyd could never leave them, not while his son depended upon him. But Colin didn’t have a long life expectancy. It was only a matter of time before his dreadful disabilities proved too much, and when that sad day came Lloyd would at last be free to leave his wife, after a suitable grieving period, and come to share the rest of his life with Maddie. Together for ever. They’d buy a place over here in New Zealand, out in the country with good grazing for their horses …
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