Soon

by Charlotte Grimshaw

  ‘Yes, I will.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s none of your business where my picture is. It’s none of your business.’

  ‘OK . . .’

  ‘When did you last see . . . this woman?’

  Weeks said, ‘You mean which one of us was last to see her. Let me guess. That’s important to you, because you want to know when she disappeared. You want to know, did she disappear because of you.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I know you had a relationship with her,’ Weeks said.

  ‘Well, you know wrong.’

  ‘She told me.’ Weeks smiled recklessly. Triumph, anticipation in his eyes.

  ‘You’re lying. When did she tell you?’

  ‘Wanting to know when — that’s what gives you away. You’re trying to figure out what happened to her. If you didn’t know her you wouldn’t care about when.’

  ‘Why don’t you leave it alone?’

  ‘I want to know what happened to Mereana.’

  ‘I don’t know what happened to her.’

  A pause. Weeks looking at him.

  ‘OK? I don’t know.’

  ‘So you know her. Come on, did you like my films? The woman who plays Anahera, you know what we did? We gave her green contact lenses. Remember Mereana’s eyes?’

  Simon stared, hating him. He said, ‘Did the woman, the real Mereana, get a job at Maori TV?’

  ‘No. It was Mereana’s ambition, that’s why I put it in the film. She — the real Mereana — finished school, she was going to go to Auckland University, do a media course. But as soon as she got to Auckland she wasted all that; she went off with an idiot — a rich boy who’d been to King’s. He was bright, good family, been a genius at school and then dropped out. She was stupidly in love with him and careless, which meant she got pregnant. Then she got busted, because her boyfriend decided to pull off a series of enormous drug deals with some ancient dinosaur bikers, Hell’s Angels, and she was surprised one day coming back from the supermarket by the Armed Offenders Squad. A house full of fat bikers and ninjas and the boyfriend covered in blood because he’d run into a glass door trying to get away. The cops found wads of cash and drugs. She said it was nothing to do with her but they charged her as well.

  ‘He got a big sentence and she went to jail and they took her baby away for the last bit of her stretch. Her boyfriend’s family banned her. She had to fight to get the kid when she got out, and then it died of meningitis, and the family blamed her for that. After that she was just lost, she didn’t care about anything. She had a job managing a café out at the airport.’

  ‘Nice story,’ Simon said.

  ‘She told me about you.’

  ‘Oh really.’

  ‘She came to see me here. It was summer, we climbed the mountain and sat up there. She described you. A doctor. Obstetrician. Married. Rich. Willing to go and fuck her in the really bad house she was living in, because it was close to the airport, which fitted with his business trips. She said there was something wrong with this doctor; he was unhappy, there was something bad going on in his life, and since there was something wrong with her too, they got on well.

  ‘She said he reminded her of her loser boyfriend who’d gone to King’s, the jailbird, he looked similar, curly hair and broad shoulders, only the doctor hadn’t gone to King’s, she said he’d grown up poor. She said she loved him but he was married and had kids and he was really old.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said, the doctor’s no good, that’s a hiding to nothing, married guy, old guy. Get rid of him and move in with me. She didn’t want to. I wasn’t her type.’

  ‘Your love was unrequited. The doctor was her type.’

  ‘It was. He was. I said to her it’s doomed with the doctor, which she knew, but she let it happen because she was lonely.’

  It was new detail: Mereana’s arrest, the fact that the father of her dead child was a middle-class ex-King’s boy. He’d never asked, only listened to her stories about living in the Far North as a child. For a moment he thought about her: face, body, eyes, voice, without revulsion and disgust. But he didn’t want her memory, he pushed it away.

  Weeks said, soft, ‘Do you think about her? Worry about her? I remember, she had a theory about why the doctor liked her. It was to do with his childhood. He thought there was something bad about himself and he was taking it out on her. Using it up on her.’

  ‘You’ve got the wrong doctor.’

  ‘I’ve got the one who’s in her phone.’

  ‘Means nothing.’

  ‘Do you miss her? Feel guilty?’

  The anger broke through. ‘I’ve got nothing to feel guilty about. But listen, Weeks, that time up here with her, did your friend tell you you weren’t her type? That could’ve made you angry. Maybe you fought, you were drunk, you smacked her head into a rock. Maybe you dragged her down the hillside, put her in the boot and drove her out to the Woodhill Forest. Now all you’ve got left is your insomnia and your pills and your corny film. Close-ups of sparkling green eyes, shots of tossing hair, all that shit, and meanwhile you’re trying not to think about the muddy hole you rammed her in when you’d finished with her.’

  Weeks stared, blinked.

  ‘Nice story,’ he said.

  Silence between them. Words carried across the paddock from a conversation between two people on a walking track: ‘Summit.’ ‘Perfect.’ ‘South.’ ‘No.’

  ‘Did you love her?’ Weeks’s voice had gone dogged, hurt, like a youth confronting his father. Simon felt something through his anger. He thought of his boy, Marcus.

  He said less roughly, ‘You make things up. I’m a doctor so I like facts. She’s your creation. Make up whatever you like.’ He added, ‘You’re the one on the guilt trip.’

  ‘Why guilt?’

  ‘You’ve used details about her, put them in your film.’

  ‘No. She’s my friend. I want to find her.’

  ‘What a hero. Nothing to do with your career.’

  A reckless smile broke out on Weeks’s pinched face; he quelled it like a boy nursing a pleasingly evil secret.

  He said, ‘I have had a new idea recently.’ He lowered his eyes mod­estly. ‘I’ve written a screenplay about a National Party Prime Minister.’

  There was a steel water bowl on the concrete, set there for a cat or dog perhaps, and the sun caught the water and made a dazzling white glare. Simon kept his eyes on it, and when he looked at Weeks there was a black hole in his vision, an absence of light surrounded by a burning border.

  From behind the blackness Weeks said, ‘What I’d like is for you to let me in.’

  He was dizzy. ‘Let you in?’

  The young man’s voice seemed to come from far away behind the shimmer, the crackle of the cicadas. ‘Into your circle, or, OK, even if it’s just a few times, let me meet these people, the Hallwrights, the Cahanes, all of them.’

  ‘So you can spy on them.’

  ‘I’m not a gossip columnist. This connection between us is a gift. I want to make a good film, a work of art. Come on, why not?’

  ‘A gift.’

  Weeks’s voice went on: ‘It’s not political. I’m an artist. I need to do a bit of research on that world. Check my facts. Let’s face it, I don’t have any money, I don’t mix with that kind of people. I want to make portraits of contemporary society. I want to do the rich and powerful as well as the poor. I’ve got the idea for a kind of modern-day Victorian melodrama. I’ve been reading a lot of Dickens . . .’

  Dickens. Simon thought about how much Dickens he’d personally read: zero. He said, ‘The Hallwrights? Look at them on YouTube, like a normal stalker. I’m not letting you in anywhere. It’s not going to happen.’

  Weeks lowered his voice. ‘What about Merean
a? Do any of your friends know about her?’

  He was dazzled again. The black hole in its circle of light. ‘No. Why would they?’

  ‘So you wouldn’t want me to ask them?’

  Simon sat forward. ‘That’s a threat. I let you in and you don’t spread rumours about me.’

  ‘I just think we could help each other.’

  ‘I don’t want your help.’

  ‘I’ll just have to go on looking for Mereana by myself.’

  Simon stood up. ‘Weeks, I’m not going to do anything for you. Whatever you threaten me with. I will not be talking to you again. Do you understand?’

  He limped down the steps. A cat prowled along a fence, somewhere in the distance a siren started up. The car was parked next to a rickety fence, on the other side of which, about ten metres down, was the concrete yard of the house below. All was quiet; there were gardens behind concrete walls, high hedges, a ramshackle garage sagging under the weight of a milkweed vine. He stood listening to the emptiness, the hum of traffic below.

  The car had turned into an oven. He started the engine and cranked up the air conditioning. Sweat rolled down his face, his hands were wet. He tried to remember the exact words Weeks had used. The threat in them.

  There was a bang, so sudden everything flew out of his mind. Weeks was at the passenger window, he’d banged hard on the glass. Simon writhed. In his fright he’d wrenched himself sideways, and something had popped in his knee.

  Weeks was coming around the front of the car.

  The pain in the knee was huge; it filled Simon’s whole body. Anger flooded him. He stamped the accelerator to pull away. But his sweating hands slipped on the steering wheel, he didn’t turn hard enough left and the front right bumper hit Weeks’s hip, sending him backwards against the low fence. The fence gave way, his arms flew up in the air and he went over the top of the wall.

  Simon braked and got out. He stood waiting for a furious Weeks to scrabble up over the edge, come at him. He was ready.

  Silence. Only the cicadas sawing away. He edged forward, looked over, clapped his hand to his mouth. He hobbled along the road, found steps, limped down into the yard. Weeks had fallen ten metres and landed on his head on the concrete.

  He looked at the angle of the head and body. Weeks’s eyes were open, blood and fluid trickled from his ear and nose. His skull was fractured; he could possibly have survived that. But his neck was broken too.

  A phone lay in bits near his hand. Simon put the pieces in his pocket and backed away, looking around at the yard bordered by the windowless back of a house and the high retaining wall Weeks had fallen down. Struggling up the steps he passed an empty garden, a washing line with sheets, a closed back door. A vast stillness seemed to have descended, as if the oxygen had been sucked out of the world. His eyes blurred, he floundered, realised he was holding his breath, sucked in air and heard himself let out a moan.

  On the street he toiled back to the car, looking at the house above; one side of it was Weeks’s, there was no sign of life in the other; the front window had its blinds lowered.

  One more look down at Weeks, the grotesque angle of the body, the head squashed sideways. His shoe had come off, exposing a sock and a thin ankle.

  He forced himself to climb the steps to Weeks’s back deck. It was a peaceful scene: the warm air trapped in the shelter of the house, the summer paddock, the bees climbing and toppling in the dry stalks. Across the hillside, the walking track was deserted. He picked up the two coffee cups. Every step down to the car the pain slowed him but also carried him, forcing him forward when all he wanted was to sink down.

  Putting the cups on the passenger seat he drove slowly down the empty street, crossed the main road and entered the grid of the suburbs. He stuck to residential areas, winding his way west as far as he could, avoiding main roads, shopping centres, bus routes. The rows of houses had taken on a toy appearance; the colours looked unreal in the morning glare and he was distracted by the illusion that Karen’s car had been at once shortened and heightened, transformed into a Lego-mobile in which he trundled, trundled, with mad toy-town slowness.

  Eventually he parked under trees on a road on the edge of an estuary. He pulled himself out of the car, sat on a bench, his sore leg stuck out awkward and stiff, and found himself taking an interest in the speed of the tide creeping in over the mudflats, as if he’d entered a new world in which things taken for granted had assumed powerful significance: speed, colour, sound. There was a noise in his head, the sound the world made as it turned. The mangroves and flax bushes gave off a bright sheen, a heron stood motionless at the water’s edge.

  There was a hard object in his hip pocket. He pulled out the pieces of phone that had been scattered near Weeks’s hand. He slotted in the battery and fitted the back, and when the cracked screen came to life he saw it wasn’t Weeks’s phone, it was Mereana’s.

  Banging on the window, the young man had said something. It could have been, ‘Here. Here it is.’

  He must have decided to give up Mereana’s phone.

  Had he fetched it, hurried down the steps after Simon, banged on the window, come around the bonnet towards the driver’s side, and offered to hand over the one thing he could hold over Simon as proof?

  Simon looked at the gold sheen on the mangroves, the dark purple-brown of the estuarine mud, the pinks, greens and yellows in an oil slick on the slow water. It seemed to him that something was coming writhing up out of the colour, that it was alive.

  The Green Lady

  Soon, Starfish and the Village Idiot were crossing the forest on their way back to the castle. They were carrying fishing rods.

  “Starfish, you poof,” Soon said complacently, “you’re a failure at most things, and fishing is one of them.”

  Little Starfish ignored him and went back to help the Idiot, who’d got tangled in a creeper. Then they heard hoof-beats, and the Green Lady and her men rode past them, armed and on their way to the castle.

  Keeping a wary eye out for the High Priestess Germphobia, they followed her to the castle to see what was going on. But the Green Lady entered into a secret conference and they were told nothing.

  Later that evening they heard a rumour from the Bachelor, who was parked in his bed in the courtyard and drinking cocktails with his girlfriends the Cassowaries.

  “It has come to me through the grapevine,” the Bachelor said in a languid voice, “that the secret conference concerns your sister, Soon.”

  “Her!” Soon said in a scornful voice. He preferred to ignore his sister, the mysterious and beautiful Soonica.

  “It seems,” the Bachelor went on, “that Barbie Yah herself has hatched a diabolical plot, and that your sister is involved.”

  “Involved? Then let’s have her arrested!” Soon cried. “De­tained. Thrown in jail. Or perhaps tortured. What do you think, Vill?”

  “Ha ha,” said the Village Idiot.

  “That’s monstrous,” Starfish said. “Your own sister!”

  “You’re right. Forget torture. Let’s have her executed,” said bloodthirsty Soon.

  Starfish said, “What else have you heard, Bachelor?”

  The Bachelor lay back on his pillows, drew his satin robe around himself and narrowed his eyes. The menacing Cassowaries hissed softly. Coloured steam rose from the Bachelor’s potent cocktail. “The witch Barbie Yah, in cahoots with her henchwoman, the Ort Cloud’s Wife, has tried to cast a spell on your sister, to draw her away from us forever. She has had their paid spy put a spell on Soonica, in order to create a door into her dreams. Soonica received a message in a dream to enter the Dark Forest. The Green Lady rode after her and brought her back, but Barbie Yah told Soonica in another dream how to escape. Soonica woke in time and returned to the castle, but she is in danger every time she sleeps. She must not sleep unless she is under lock and key!”

  The Bachelor
turned to Soon. “The Green Lady will save your sister; I have no doubt of it. But the battle may be difficult. And it will be fought in the world of dreams.”

  Johnnie was silent. In the trees, a tui ran through its repertoire of squeaks and trills.

  Finally the boy asked, ‘Does the Bachelor have a name?’

  Roza considered. ‘He does actually. Now you ask. The Bachelor’s full name is Schlong Lovewand. He’s the son of another great bachelor, Cock Lovewand.’

  ‘What’s his mum’s name?’

  ‘She’s . . . let’s see. Mountain Titswoman.’

  Simon looked up from his book. Roza went on pushing Johnnie on his swing. Mother and son faced him, with their potent eyes, their identical smiles. The sound of their laughter filled his ears.

  From his station, propped and braced with cushions on a chaise longue, he watched the mother and the little boy, now on their knees in the grass hunting for specimens. His leg was tightly bandaged. He’d had an appointment with an orthopaedic surgeon who had told him the damage wasn’t severe enough to require surgery, at least not at this stage, and had recommended physiotherapy and special exercises, a period of rehabilitation that should improve it.

  He hadn’t had to invent anything about the injury: he’d described getting out of the car in a hurry, wrenching the knee sideways, the terrible click or pop, the pain. He’d been given strong painkillers; they were effective but at night they made the edges of reality blur; he saw images melting, like photographs set on fire and curling as they burned. Somewhere inside him there was a vibration like the crackle of cicadas, a wall of noise.

  Karen was sitting up in bed, hunched over. It was morning, hot sun coming in through the blinds. He put his hand on her warm back.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  She clenched her fists under her chin. ‘Roza’s asked Elke to go on their trip to America.’

  ‘That’s nice. She’ll love it. If she can fit it in with her studies.’

  Recently Elke had, without much enthusiasm or purpose, enrolled for a BA at Auckland University. He wasn’t convinced she’d see it through but they’d encouraged her.