Soon

by Charlotte Grimshaw

  “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” he gravely began. A cheer went up. He went on, “A stitch in time saves nine.” Another cheer. “But most of all, my friends, a cat may look at a king, and . . .” He paused and looked around the clearing, “A leopard may change its spots!” Everyone cheered, much heartened and refreshed by the Red Herring’s pearls. Beside him Tiny Ancient Yellow Cousin So-on had lit some mysterious incense and an eerie, smoky scent wafted through the crowd, sending the friends into dreams of jewelled gardens. Now they would be calm and strong for battle.

  Roza shaded her eyes. ‘Here he comes.’

  Simon looked at the cords and ropes of muscle in the trainer’s neck. Garth wore a T-shirt so tight you could see his pectoral muscles twitching as he came stumping through the dunes.

  Johnnie drummed his legs on the sand. ‘Make Soon talk!’

  ‘I’m going for my torture session, darling. Garth bends me into all these interesting shapes.’

  ‘And how’s it going,’ Simon asked politely, ‘with David’s bum?’

  ‘Mm, good, I think. Dean’s got special exercises for him and a potion to drink — some kind of protein. It’s probably steroids.’

  ‘Is the bum getting any bigger?’

  ‘Well, it’s early days. Dean’s very optimistic.’

  Simon flopped on his back with a mirthful sigh.

  ‘You could use Garth if you wanted, Simon. He does Karen and Juliet.’

  He knew this, for that very morning he and David, eating scrambled eggs together on the veranda, had watched Karen, Juliet and Sharon Cahane lying on mats on the lawn and scissoring their legs in the air. Garth had them on a light programme: a round of exercises followed by a brisk walk to the gate, and then a warm-down, which took just as long and involved Garth lying with them on the mat and manipulating their muscles. The ladies seemed especially keen on this part. David had watched Juliet, who was wearing baggy khaki shorts and bright pink sneakers, having her plump, freckly leg stretched and pummelled by Garth, and said, ‘What’s he supposed to be doing to her? It’s just sort of foreplay, isn’t it? He’s a sex tool.’

  Simon had said, ‘Is that what it’s like with you and Dean?’

  ‘Well, no, we don’t get that close. Not yet, anyway. He stands with his hands on his hips and looks at my arse from all angles. Sort of making plans . . .’

  Now, on the hot beach, Simon rolled over close to Roza and whispered, ‘All that massaging and muscle-flexing — it’s just sex.’

  ‘Garth’s totally professional. He has ethics. And a degree in PE. So has Dean.’

  ‘Oh, bollocks.’

  ‘He’s doing great things for me. I’m going to have a body to die for.’

  ‘You’ve got that already. Don’t let him turn you into him.’ He smoothed the sand with the flat of his hand. ‘Anyway, what was the character’s name in Howard’s End? The lower-class one.’

  ‘Mr Bast.’

  ‘So the higher-born Miss Whatever falls in love with him?’

  ‘Miss Schlegel. She has his child. She has an affair with him, because she’s impulsive and a romantic and she has a sense of justice — she looks beyond class. The Miss Schlegels are a bit like Eleanor and Marianne Dashwood.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Sense and Sensibility. Have you read it? No? Well, never mind. Mr Bast is rather superior, but thwarted by class.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  Simon said, ‘It’s not that she just fancies the oik in him?’

  ‘Er, no. Shall I lend you a copy?’

  ‘Thanks, I’ve got a book to be going on with,’ he said.

  Garth reached the top of the neighbouring dune and started down the other side. His head was too small for his powerful body. There was a scalloped crease in the centre of his chest and his muscles — chest, arms, barrel-shaped thighs — were so prominent that he had a permanent air of strain, as though he might explode. He was a warning against overdoing it, Simon thought. But then, you could only look like Garth or Dean if you were twenty-four, and exercising all day long.

  ‘Gidday, buddy,’ Garth said to Johnnie.

  Johnnie scowled and looked down. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Can I borrow your mum?’ Winking at Roza.

  ‘No,’ Johnnie said.

  ‘Sorry, champ. Mum’s got to do her workout!’

  Garth had a very small chin, Simon noted. And a big bum. He was faintly camp — with his twinkly ‘buddy’ and ‘champ’ — and amiable, and he had tight blond curls and pale, prominent blue eyes. His big arse projected his torso slightly forward. He had a habit of clenching his fists, and looked as though he should have little horns and cloven hooves. Simon reminded himself to suggest to Roza that Dean and Garth were secretly a married couple.

  She was gathering towels and gear.

  He said, ‘My brother’s coming.’

  ‘Oh, good. Ford. I really want him to.’

  ‘He said he’d come for a day, but I’ve told him he can stay in the Little House.’

  ‘Did you tell him it’s my idea? He can stay as long as he likes.’

  ‘Yeah, I did. It’s kind of you. When you’ve got all these extra people. Ford’s . . . well, he’s lonely, since Emily left him. He’s a bit spiky and fierce; I hope he doesn’t annoy David. He tends to be quite, you know, left wing.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. Now Johnnie, we’ll go and find Elke. She and Ray and Shaun are going to take you for an ice cream. Would that be nice?’

  Johnnie brightened. ‘I saw Ray’s gun.’

  ‘His gun? He didn’t show it to you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Oh. He shouldn’t do that, should he, Simon?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Simon said, lazily watching the waves breaking into lines of pure white foam. ‘What’s the etiquette with guns?’

  ‘Well, you’re not supposed to wave them about. You’re not supposed to brandish them. At the children. Um, would you mind taking this? And this? And this? ’ She loaded Garth with towels, togs and a bucket and spade. ‘Bye Simon. See you for lunch.’

  ‘He lifted up his shirt,’ Johnnie said.

  ‘What about his trouser leg?’ Roza said. ‘I’ve always imagined he’d have a gun strapped to his leg, just above his boot. Shall we ask him? Are you all right, Garth? Could you just take this little one as well? And if I just pop that on the top . . .’

  They went off across the dunes, Roza and Johnnie hand in hand and Garth balancing his teetering load, following a short distance behind. She would be making Soon talk.

  Simon spotted Sharon and the Cock down at the water’s edge, carrying swimming gear and a beach umbrella. He lay low in the dunes, watching through the marram grass as they passed by. A minute later a couple of David’s bodyguards ambled past.

  There was no shade. The sun was directly overhead and the hollow in the dunes grew hotter until he started to feel light-headed. He dumped his bag down on the shore and waded in, swam out beyond the waves, floating over the swells and watching the gannets diving. Sharon and the Cock were two wavering shapes in the distance; they’d gone all the way to the estuary. He swam further out, until the gannets flying overhead made him nervous and he turned back, imagining a missile of beak and talons plunging towards his scalp. When he reached the shallows he found the water had swept him some way south and he had to walk back for his bag.

  He crossed the lawns. Voices drifted from the pool. Marcus and the Gibson boy had managed to import a trio of girls into the compound, and were engaged in strenuous and loud attempts to impress; there was much splashing and shouting, shrieks from the girls. The Little House was empty. He stood in the warm, sunlit room, listening to the creak of the wooden walls and birds squabbling over the roof tiles. The light was green, shining in through the grapevine that grew across the veranda trell
is. In the bedroom he took the DVD of Weeks’s films out of its hiding place and put it in the machine.

  The first film opened with a rural scene, in summer. A man and woman were living in a small wooden house by a beach. They were poor, their lives were basic and their relationship was troubled. Simon watched, bored. He wanted to find something significant, a clue to Weeks.

  He paused the DVD and sat dreaming in the warmth. Beyond the open door the tuis squabbled in the bushes and rosellas flew between the trees, bright flashes of colour. He thought about his daughters: conscientious Claire, alone at home with her books, and Elke, who had, that morning, signed up for tennis lessons with Garth. Simon was now grateful for Garth’s campness; it was a relief, what with all the male virility hereabouts. Elke wandered though the compound in her minuscule, loose bikini, her shirt slipping off one brown shoulder, and with her sweet manner and her vague, distracted air she seemed unaware of the eyes that followed her. Could she really be so artless?

  Simon had watched the Cock ogling her by the pool, and David watching the Cock, and the Cock noticing David watching — and that minor tension seemed part of a deeper unease between David and his deputy. As lazily apolitical as he was these days, Simon had noticed a personal chill between the two, and he supposed the Cock was straining to rein in his ambition.

  But David had it over the Cock. The PM was not only popular; he was the most psychologically acute and manipulative person Simon had ever met. After an evening with him, Simon sometimes felt exhausted and drained. David expected certain responses and this required an adjustment in Simon’s conduct — only a minor deviation from his natural manner, but maintaining it made him tired and hollow. And yet he went on conforming; they all did, as if mesmerised. Only Claire hadn’t responded to the demands of David’s court; she had rebelled, and been excommunicated.

  The Cock was subtly challenging, but the Cock wasn’t quite sure of himself and he was distracted — he couldn’t keep his eyes off David’s women.

  Simon frowned. ‘David’s women.’ But Elke wasn’t David’s.

  He tried to look at it in a detached way. These days he grappled with the private sense that since Elke was his daughter and Roza was her mother, he and Roza belonged together. But then there was David: Roza was his wife and the mother of his son, and his wife’s daughter resembled his son. Ergo, David felt that Roza was his, and Elke was his . . .

  Did he hate David?

  The idea gave him a jolt. Everyone remarked on how attached David had got to him, how David always wanted Simon around, insisting he be present on expeditions and at functions, how he reserved a seat for Simon next to him, had a trick of drawing him aside for private conversations, leaving others awkwardly looking on. The court was jealous and suspicious, but Simon was spared its worst machinations by the fact that he wasn’t a politician. With the exception of the Cock, who kept a cool distance, David’s staff and friends made sure to ingratiate themselves with the Lamptons. Until recently Simon had been ‘family’, but now they’d started calling him David’s best friend.

  Admit it, he did enjoy the obsequiousness of the staff and the way David’s circle deferred to him. He and David (like Roza’s Mr Bast!) had both grown up poor. David had been an orphan, farmed out to relatives in Tokoroa. Simon and his brother Ford were the sons of crazy, drunk taxi-driver Aaron Harris, from whose South Auckland house the family had fled in terror. Their mother had struck it lucky in the end, marrying Warren Lampton, their stepfather, a good man. But the rented house where Simon had visited Mereana had been no shabbier than the dump they’d lived in with Aaron.

  He and David and Ford had dragged themselves into the middle class, although David still sounded like a yob, always getting his words wrong. The Cock was a mandarin, with his private-school education and his university degrees; he was smoothly fluent. But David’s inarticulacy made him popular.

  Simon watched the birds dancing this way and that around the bird table, like bossy women with large, fanned skirts — women at a Trish Ellison fundraiser. In what spirit did David stare at Elke? Was his attention ‘fatherly’? You could never tell what was in David’s mind. But Simon kept part of himself hidden too. One necessary precaution: making sure David never suspected how deeply he felt about Roza . . .

  After dozing he woke feeling sharper.

  He pushed play and watched episode two of The Present, set on a beach (pohutukawa, white sand, heat haze over dunes). The story, about people living in the Far North, starred a young woman with long hair and green eyes. She was lively, slim and dark-skinned, and had a way of looking at you sideways which gave her a sly, ironic air. Simon sat very still. It was a portrait of Mereana.

  For years he had wished her dead. ‘Why do you look at the funeral notices?’ Karen would say. And there he’d be at the breakfast table, casting his eye expectantly down the columns. He had buried her, and the details of the affair: the row of tiny houses where she lived near the airport, the squalid pub they’d once visited, the quirky interior of her house, the smoky smell of her hair and skin, her primitive way of talking, her rough hands and feet. Her memory was tainted by the depression that had made him crave her kindness and her love. And here, controlled by Weeks, she was lithe and beautiful and wandered across the sand and tossed her hair and swam in the sparkling water, spoke corny dialogue and made a joke, while a young man (‘Hamish’) trailed after her, yearning . . .

  Weeks had called her Anahera, which means angel.

  Taking the DVD out of the machine, he hid it. Sleep came again, an escape.

  He woke with a crick in his neck and a dry mouth, thought his phone had rung and that Karen had called out, but there was no missed call and no one in the Little House.

  Everything lay still in the heat. The tuis and thrushes had stopped squabbling at the bird table and there was a hush in the green shade under the trees, only the sound of the sea coming across the dunes and the faint drone of a car on the coast road. The teenagers were no longer shouting and splashing over at the pool. His sweaty legs peeled off the canvas of the chair and he was dizzy when he got up, lurching into the bathroom to wash his face.

  He tidied himself and walked across the compound to find David holding court under the trees and Troy and Trent hovering with trays and glasses; it was a Saturday which meant, according to David’s regime, they were allowed wine with lunch, although Simon hated to drink during the day, the afternoon narrowing into a tunnel of lethargy, headaches.

  The Cock was holding a spray can which he squirted fitfully around his feet every few moments, complaining of mosquitoes.

  Johnnie arrived with Tuleimoka. He had something to show everyone: a jar with holes punched in the lid.

  ‘It’s a poisonous spider.’ His small face was solemn, thrilled.

  They all peered at the dark shape in the jar.

  ‘It’s deadly,’ the boy said, shaking the jar. ‘I caught it.’ He brushed past the Cock, tipping over his glass. The Cock, mopping the table, visibly irritated, said, ‘I’m starting to feel sorry for that spider. Why don’t you let it go?’

  ‘It’s a specimen.’

  ‘Surely it would be more humane if you tipped it into the bushes.’ A bitter, hectoring note entered the Cock’s voice. He stood over the boy. ‘It’s not going to be a pet. It’s going to die in there.’

  David watched the Cock without expression.

  Roza said, ‘I think in this case my sympathies are with the human creature, rather than the animal.’

  The Cock, incredulous: ‘The human?’

  ‘The child,’ Roza said.

  ‘The human’s not in a jar.’

  ‘It’s Johnnie’s find. His prize.’

  The Cock shrugged, picked up his can of insect spray and squirted along the edge of the table.

  Ed Miles said to Sharon, ‘Can you tell your husband to stop squirting me?’

  ‘But he seems
to be enjoying it,’ she said.

  Ed lifted his feet out of the way. ‘He’s not so high-minded about flies and mosquitoes, is he. Not all David Attenborough about them.’

  David went back to sorting through photographs. ‘Here’s a good one of you and me,’ he said, beckoning to Simon. ‘Put these aside, Roza, I’m going to frame them — the one of me and Simon, this one of us and Karen, and this one of Elke and Johnnie.’

  Roza, Karen and Juliet crowded around. Roza snatched one up. ‘That’s going in the bin.’

  There was a chorus. ‘Give us a look, no, you look gorgeous Roza, what a waste, don’t throw it away.’

  Ed held out his hand. ‘Can I see?’

  ‘No you can’t,’ Roza said. ‘It’s terrible.’ She folded it and put it in her pocket.

  David said, ‘What about this one of all the four ladies together? You like that one, Ed?’ He handed it over.

  ‘Nice,’ Ed said. He looked at Karen. ‘Lovely trio.’

  Karen was expressionless.

  The four women looked and regretted their own hideousness and praised each other’s beauty, and put the picture aside.

  David said to the Cock, ‘Cahane, here are the ones Roza took yesterday — you and Sharon on the boat, you two on the beach, you and Sharon looking lovely by the pool.’

  The Cock fished reading glasses from his shirt pocket and dutifully took up each print before Sharon passed them around.

  ‘Great,’ the Cock said, bored.

  David collected them and patted them into a pile. He handed them to the Cock. ‘These are all the pictures with you and Sharon in. Take them.’

  There was a silence.