Carla held her breath, the Lord’s Prayer scrolling through her mind.
‘Nah. I’m hungry for some pussy.’
‘Forget it, TT. Let’s get outta here.’
‘Fuck off, Ben.’
A hand grabbed Carla’s bottom. She screamed, but as in a dream, no sound escaped.
‘No!’ Kevin’s voice resounded through the laughter that filled the endless moment.
‘Settle, boy, we jus’ gonna service the missus. You gotta learn to share. Ain’t that right, bro?’
The cold woke Carla. The terracotta tiles had driven an aching chill through the fibres of the kilim rug into her skin, her muscles, her marrow. Her brain registered only this most basic sensation – cold – otherwise, it was blank, as if a thousand volts of electricity had passed through, deleting neural pathways and wiping all trace of thought and fragment of memory. She tried to cough. Her throat felt stuffed full of autumn leaves.
Squinting downwards, she saw the shadow of her swollen, cracked lips. With her tongue she traced their bloated outline. Dried mucus and crusted blood stopped the fine vermillion creases and filled her nostrils with an alien stench.
One of her eyes agreed to open; the other remained shut.
Something off to the right caught her attention. She turned her head – the action delayed a few seconds behind the intent. The early morning sunshine had transformed a piece of broken glass into a prism and a rainbow of light now arched over the room.
A small clay pot came into view, then receded. Carla screwed up her obedient eye and pulled the pot back in focus. A lopsided sphere of clay engraved with stick figures – a lion, an elephant, a monkey. It was almost familiar … Synapses fought to connect, her mind desperate for an anchor. Then the relief of recognition! It was the pottery bowl Jack had made when he was eight, his first attempt at throwing clay. The bowl had been presiding over the entrance hall for the past decade.
Grasping this recollection served to bridge a chasm, providing thought with a route back into Carla’s consciousness. Like a flash flood, reality rushed in and she dropped her head back onto the floor, reeling from the information that now placed her firmly back in time and place.
Her body started to convulse with fear and pain. Metallic tears trickled into her parched mouth. Her big toe pointed sharply downwards in spasm. She tried to lift her head again, but the morning leant on it as the sharp light of dawn escaped the confines of the prism to wash over the room.
‘Kevin! Jaaack!’ Carla’s voice lurched into space like a stretched cassette tape. ‘Kev?’
She moved her head to the left. Her good eye scanned the room. It stopped at a twisted mound of clothes and limbs. Kevin – his bruised body at right angles to the wall. Motionless.
‘Kevin! Kev! Can you hear me, Kevin?’
Nothing but the memory of her warped voice filled the ensuing silence. Her eye moved frantically on, searching for Jack. She didn’t expect to find him. He would have been in the garage when … He’d have escaped and raised the alarm. A complete circuit of the room. No Jack. She swallowed, relief sticking in her parched throat.
She had to reach Kevin. But she couldn’t move. Not even lever herself up. Her hands were missing. Where were her hands?
It took a moment to understand that they’d been bound so tightly behind her back she’d lost all feeling in them.
After several false starts Carla managed, like a frog doing breaststroke on its back, to manoeuvre herself haltingly across the room. Her muscles were burning and her arms stinging where the tiles rasped off slivers of skin.
About halfway over her body suddenly seized and refused to obey further commands.
‘Come on!’ Carla cried aloud, writhing on the floor like a dug-up earthworm. Kevin was so close.
Like an Olympic athlete just metres from the finish line, she demanded complete concentration from every part of her body, her pain miraculously dissolving into the focus, and with one final burst she was upon him.
She dropped into the small of Kevin’s back and sank her face into his shirt. It smelt of stale sweat and dried fear. How she loved to snuggle up to him on a Sunday morning, moulding to his craggy contours and helping herself to his toasty heat. Now his body was cold and unyielding.
A heaviness spread across the room like dry ice. Carla lay there under the weight of this new reality, her will to live leaking from her body.
Click. A distant, but distinct click. Then Mozart swept down the corridor and into the room. Mozart? The sound swelled, growing louder and louder until the room was steeped in music.
Panting and perplexed, Carla gave over to it, the notes peeling back her fear to make way for other emotions, and her crying rose from a place she had never visited before.
Four beeps grounded her. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Good morning. This is the five o’clock news on Thursday the twentieth of March. The radio alarm!
Only when Carla’s sobbing had subsided and her gasps and gurgles were no longer loud in her ears, did she notice Kevin’s chest. Barely perceptible – she had to be completely still herself to see it – but there for certain … the gradual rise and fall of his ribcage as wisps of air threaded into and out of his lungs.
Chapter Three
BEN
They pulled into a deserted service station. Despite being at least an hour from the action, Ben’s heart was still hammering in his chest, and his head bursting with a crazy cocktail of people and panic. Everything was mixed up – the thrill, the buzz, the bad bits. He felt as if he was inside one of those extreme arcade games.
Through the store window he could see a lone petrol attendant behind the counter. The guy was dressed in his regulation uniform and sporting a twist of white fabric on his head.
‘That dude with the turban,’ Ben said, turning to Tate, who was searching the footwell for the fuel cap lever. ‘He’s a Sikh.’
Tate ground his teeth in reply. The sound – like chalk screeching across a blackboard – made the skin under Ben’s ears crawl.
‘Let’s get us up some pies,’ Tate grunted. ‘I’m fuckin’ starving.’
Now that he thought about it, Ben was hungry too.
Tate got out, leaving the engine running. They’d nicked the Toyota from an Albany car yard, after abandoning the farm vehicle. It was low on fuel.
Ben fiddled with the radio dials, scanning the airwaves until he found something he recognised. ‘Snap Yo Fingers’. He bobbed in time to the beat and chewed on his fingernails. Next minute, Tate was sprinting across the forecourt, hoodie up, pockets bulging.
‘We’re outta here!’ he shouted, jumping in the car.
So he hadn’t paid.
They sped off, the smell of burnt rubber rising up through the car.
‘Dumb move, bro,’ Ben said, looking back through the rear window at the Sikh already on the phone. ‘Just lost our lead time.’
Tate put his foot flat and the Toyota picked up speed –140, 150, 160 kilometres an hour.
‘You should’ve seen the joker’s face when I walked out,’ he said with a grin. ‘He’s like, “Hey, you forgot to pay, sir.”’ They both laughed.
Then Tate was doing a screeching U-turn and doubling back.
‘What the—?’ There’d been too many surprises. The night had already unravelled way beyond Ben’s expectations.
‘Chill, bro,’ Tate said, swerving into a parking lot behind a public library. ‘We’ll hang here for a while, till the pigs are off our scent.’ Which they did – scoffing pies, drinking cola, and sharing a joint.
Tate was already completely stoned. He’d been on the fries for two days leading up to their big night, and with weed and booze thrown in, it was no surprise when he suddenly crashed, his long, lean body slumping over the wheel.
Ben hung in. He didn’t do crack, and even on marijuana he reacted differently to others. Sure, it rounded off the sharp edges in his brain, but never made him sleepy, just mellow, as if he were travelling on a never-ending sigh. It also made eve
rything super intense and clear, as if his brain had put on spectacles, or someone had shone a bright light into the dark drawers of his mind.
He was twelve the first time he’d tried a joint. There’d been a party at his house and he couldn’t sleep because of the noise. When he got out of bed to go to the toilet, he bumped into a woman wearing pointy cowboy boots, a purple poncho, and shimmery gold Stetson.
‘Wanna try some, kiddo?’ she’d said, offering him a toke.
He did. And soon all the bad things in his head started to shrivel up like weeds after a dose of Roundup. A few puffs of the joint were better than any CYF’s counsellor, and definitely easier than running away from home. He was hooked from day one. It wasn’t cheap, but he always shared what he got with Lily; his sister needed it more than he did.
One time, when one of his mum’s squeezes – Ben couldn’t remember which one it was – had beaten her up really badly and she was lying on her bedroom floor like a bruised grapefruit, Ben had offered her a puff. Though she was nearly out of it, she still managed to be wild at him for smoking the stuff. She gave him a slurred talking to, using big responsible-parent words, then took the joint off him and smoked it all. The two of them had ended up leaning against the bedroom wall laughing and laughing, despite his mum’s lip being split and her nose a bloody mess.
Tate was snoring loudly. Ben looked across at him. The spray of red on his jeans had darkened to a splatter of black. Ben tilted his seat back until he was lying flat. He looked up at the ceiling and traced the thick seam in the roof fabric as it dipped under the sun visor, ran along the edge of the windscreen, and looped over the rear-view mirror. For some bizarre reason he couldn’t stop thinking about the Sikh gas attendant. It was dumb to be thinking about him of all people, considering what had already gone down that day. But the guy reminded him of one of his old schoolteachers. Mr Singh. Ben would have stayed in school if all his teachers had been like Singh. He was a big fellow – over six foot – with a woolly black beard, dark eyes, and a twist of cream fabric forever on his head. Ben smiled when he thought of Singh’s socks. The guy wore the same clothes day in and day out: brown suit, beige tie, brown lace-ups, and then these wild lettuce-green socks.
Rumour had it that Singh had worked in the courts before turning to teaching. You could tell he hadn’t been in the job forever; he didn’t have the same dry expression the other teachers did. His face was as fresh as a full-price watermelon. And he always looked like he wanted to be there in front of his class.
Once, Singh had come upon Ben doodling instead of doing a maths worksheet. He’d picked up Ben’s drawing, looked at it for the longest time, then held it up for the rest of the class to see. ‘You’ve got talent, Ben Toroa,’ he’d said in his deep rumbling voice.
Ben was on a high all day, despite getting a detention, and for a while after that wanted to be a Sikh, although he wasn’t sure about the whole turban thing.
Swearing gives to the inarticulate the illusion of eloquence. One of Singh’s favourite sayings popped into Ben’s head. He scratched his head irritably. ‘Fuck you!’ he cursed, his voice ricocheting off the inside of the car. Tate stirred.
Then Ben heard the scream of a siren. His breathing picked up and he slunk lower in the seat The noise grew louder, and louder, then started to fade.
‘Hey, TT. TT, wake up, man,’ he said, shaking his mate.
Tate opened his eyes, two milky-white marbles covered in fine webs of red.
‘Time to get out of here.’
They decided to abandon the car and call George, who collected them in a stolen Nissan, and the three of them went for a spin across the Harbour Bridge before heading back to Glenfield just as the grey light of dawn was climbing up over the dying night.
Beyond
The wind finds me, its sun-baked notes carrying dune dust from the Hokianga, salted spray from Cook Strait, and pungent bursts of crushed wild thyme from some southern slope. So many treasures carried on the wind’s caressing breath. It brings me Rotorua’s sulphured steam rising from the bubble and burst of a molten earth; a lone tui’s captivating call; the rattle and clink of pipi shells tossed into a sack. It brings skeins of vibrant colour from Hahei’s teal-green waters, and the damp, dark coolness of forest and fern – redwood and kauri, kiokio and mamaku. I sense the stolid patience of four fishermen on Tolaga Bay wharf, and taste the sweetness of some forager’s honeyed harvest. Such riches! Yet I cannot enjoy them. Not today. For this breeze has brought me more …
‘You have lost another son,’ it cries on a gust. ‘Aotearoa, New Zealand, you have lost another son.’
I am giddy with the news. It sucks up all the air and light, as if reversing the creation, rejoining Ranginui, Sky Father, and Papatūānuku, Earth Mother, and squeezing out all that is life.
Another son of Kupe has fallen from my basket, the woven flax now limp and loose. Where will it end, this unravelling? Where will it end?
Chapter Four
CARLA
Carla heard the voices and went rigid. They’d come back! The thugs had come back. She held her breath.
‘Curtains are still drawn.’ A man’s voice. ‘That’s odd; the dogs are still in their cages. They don’t look like they’ve been fed yet.’
‘Rangi, something’s not right.’
Carla breathed out. It was Rangi and Rebecca, the share milkers! She lifted her head and tried to call out, but her voice was hoarse and would not climb over a whisper.
‘They probably spent the night with Jack in town. Or maybe Kev’s alarm clock finally packed up.’ A hearty Rangi chuckle.
Carla tried to call out again, but only a thin murmur spilt from her mouth.
‘C’mon, chook, let’s get on with the milking. Kev deserves a day off.’
‘Hey look. Jack’s Beetle.’ Rebecca’s voice. ‘He must still be here.’
‘See, told you we shouldn’t be bugging them. They probably all had a late night. Wasn’t it Kev and Carla’s anniversary yesterday? I’m sure Kevin said so.’
The voices started to fade.
‘He---e---lp!’ Carla’s voice scraped and clawed at her throat.
‘You hear that?’
‘What?’
‘Someone calling.’
The footsteps came closer, then there was knocking at the front door. ‘Yoo-hoo! Anyone home?’
Carla looked about frantically. There was a kitchen stool off to her right, just within reach of her foot. She lifted her leg and swung it at the stool. A wild pain exploded in her ankle as she connected with the wood. The stool teetered, rocked in space, then settled.
‘Carla? Kevin?’
Carla tried again, this time dropping the stool. It landed with a thud on Kevin’s crumpled frame. He gurgled.
‘You hear that, Rangi? There is someone inside. I got a bad feeling about this. Let’s call the police.’
‘Slow down, chook. I’ll see if I can get in. The bathroom window’s open.’
‘But Rangi.’
‘What?’
‘The front door. It’s not locked.’
Carla fixed her eyes on the door. The handle was slowly depressed.
Rangi and Rebecca’s voices shrunk to a whisper. ‘You stay here. I’ll—’
Suddenly a crack of golden light fanned out across the room. Carla squinted. In the doorway was Rangi’s solid silhouette.
‘Jesus, Becks! Call one-one-one.’
Carla was shaking uncontrollably, despite the blanket Rebecca had wrapped around her.
‘A pillow! Kevin needs a pillow,’ Carla spluttered. ‘And another blanket. He’s so cold, Beckie. Where’s the ambulance? My Jack? It’s taking so long.’
‘Soon, love. Soon,’ Rebecca said, stroking her arm.
‘Kev! Kevin, can you hear me?’ Carla barked in a hoarse whisper. ‘Can he hear me? Is he breathing? He’s still breathing isn’t he?’
‘I think so,’ Rebecca said, looking at Kevin’s motionless frame.
Rangi put down the phone
receiver and knelt down beside Kevin, putting his ear to Kevin’s chest. His frizz of brown hair obscured Kevin’s grey face. After what felt like forever, he nodded.
Carla’s body loosened. She tugged at Kevin’s shirt with a bruised and trembling hand. ‘Kevin Reid, you stick with me.’
Then she remembered. ‘Becks, what is a one-eight-seven?’
‘A what?’
‘One of them said … I think he said he’d done a one-eight-seven.’
Rebecca shot Rangi a bemused glance. He was still on the phone to the emergency services, one ear to the receiver, one tuned in to the conversation between his wife and Carla.
‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ he said, again interrupting the operator. ‘She’s saying one of the intruders said something about a one-eight-seven. That’s right. Yeah.’
Rangi’s skin blanched and motley circles of cream rose through his toffee-coloured complexion. He lowered the receiver, his eyes wide. But Carla’s unanchored thoughts had already floated on to new territory.
‘Thank God he was in the garage,’ she mumbled. ‘Thank God. I mean, just for a beer. We shouldn’t tell him about Kevin. Not yet.’
‘Who?’
‘Jack!’ Carla said impatiently. ‘He raised the alarm. Didn’t he?’ Then she tilted her head, her eyes darting skittishly over jumbled thoughts. ‘No … He couldn’t have, because you—’
Rebecca opened her mouth and closed it again. Carla looked from Rebecca to Rangi, then back to Rebecca. ‘You … I heard you out there. You thought we’d slept in. And you said Jack’s car was still here. So where is he? Where’s Jack?’ Her words were tripping over each other as they tried to keep pace with her thoughts.
Carla heaved herself off the ground.
‘Carla, wait!’ But she was already staggering down the corridor, her blood pressure struggling to catch up. She shambled past Jack’s room – his mattress upturned on the floor, the cupboards gaping. She passed the toilet – a potent pool of yellow stagnating beneath the shiny white bowl. And her bedroom, where disembowelled drawers had been flung across the carpet, their contents strewn in frenzied disarray. Books stood on their heads, jackets buckled and spines ripped. Carla’s jewellery box lay open, the lid unhinged, the baize compartments empty save for a lone brooch clinging on by a bent clasp.
The Last Time We Spoke Page 3