by Else, Chris
Blue Cormer saved me the trouble of answering. 'I don't reckon it's Moss,' he said. 'My money's still on that little shit Cleat.'
'Yeah, yeah.' A few of the others thought so too.
'The way he creeps around. He's an absolute fuckin' slimeball. I want to wring his fuckin' neck.'
'Yeah,' I said. 'He's been hanging round our place. He was eyeing Gith up.'
'Aw, Jesus!' Trevor said. 'That's disgusting!'
'He'd fuck anything with a hole in it, that bugger,' somebody said.
'Your poor bloody handicapped kid that don't know which way is up.'
I wasn't sure who that was and I was about to turn round and say something when Blue put his hand on my shoulder.
'Listen, mate,' he said, 'you have any trouble with that little cunt, just let us know, eh. It'd give me the greatest pleasure to sort the fucker out.'
'Yeah, right on.'
'It's a bloody travesty of this justice system that pricks like that are still walking the streets,' Trevor said.
'Lock 'em up and throw away the key, I say.' That was Mark, I reckon.
***
I'M NOT SURE why I said what I did about Billy Cleat. It wasn't strictly true. Any hanging round that Billy had done was as much about getting money out of me as about Gith. So far, since I had given him the second ten bucks, he seemed to be sticking to the deal. I had seen him in the distance now and again but the only times he had come near me were when I was well away from the service station. He did it that night when I was on my way home, sneaking out of the shadows in the pub car park.
'Mr McUrran. Sir.'
I stopped. Maybe I felt a bit bad about dissing him to Blue Cormer.
'Something to report, sir,' he said, coming up to me with his sideways walk.
'What?'
'Colin George,' he said. 'It's a Nissan van and a brown dog.'
'Thanks.'
He looked at me, blinked. Then his eyes shifted to my left shoulder. I felt like I had something crawling on it.
'Is that what you wanted, sir?'
I knew what he meant.
'No more money till you get me something on the other bloke, Rick Parline. Right?'
'Very good, sir.'
I turned and walked away. I had to stop myself from looking back.
***
GITH WAS FLICKING through a magazine when I got home, one of those things with pictures of movie stars looking glamorous or not. I had often wanted to dress her up and make her look like a movie star. I'd even talked about it a few times but all she did was laugh.
She put the magazine down when she saw me and I went and sat next to her on the sofa, put my arm around her. She leant into me, with her head on my shoulder. We sat there for a while in the silence as we often did, but for once I started to feel just how much silence there was. I remembered talking to Brenda and how easy that had been. Not like the pub, where everybody was trying to one-up everybody else. I liked Brenda, but nothing was ever going to happen there, was it?
'We're all right, eh?' I asked.
Gith nodded.
'We need to stick together.'
'Gith.'
'I mean, do you like living here? We don't have to.'
She didn't answer.
'We could sell up and go somewhere else.'
'Narg.'
'Only, you know, it might be kind of dangerous here. For us. For you.'
I felt her tense. I had to go on now. I had to tell her.
'Everybody seems to think either Billy Cleat or Moss Vield took that girl. Everybody except us. And the person who really took her.'
'Gith.' I was surprised at how calm she seemed to be.
'You figured this out already? For yourself?'
'Gith.'
'And you're not scared?'
She shrugged and then with her left hand she started to undo the buttons on my shirt, starting with the lowest one. I put my hand over hers to stop her. I had more to say.
'I'm not a real bright guy,' I said. 'And I do dumb things. We should be keeping our heads down. We should be ignoring everything and everybody and minding our own business, but somehow, you know, I want to know.'
'Gith.'
'I'm just scared I'm going to get us into more trouble.'
'Narg,' she said.
Later that night, while Gith was watching TV, I took the chance to check on the rifle and the shells. They were still there where I'd left them.
***
A COUPLE OF mornings a week Pita used to come over and look after the pumps while I went down to Katawai to do the banking and whatever other bits and pieces couldn't be done on a Saturday morning. If there was a lot of work booked in, Gith stayed behind. It was around a twenty-minute drive if you didn't push it too hard; first over the long bridge across the Mangatiki River and then a series of easy curves through rolling country on the other bank. That day, driving down, I kept a special lookout for the house Julian had talked about, the one that used to belong to the Parlines. It was an old villa, tucked away behind a big overgrown hedge so that all you could see was the red rusted roof and a gable with the paint worn down to the bare wood. Did the Parlines still own it? And, supposing they did, did they ever go there?
Katawai itself is a dump of a place. There's always a bit of a smell hanging around and the air never looks or feels right — like there is dust in it. The only reason to live there is to make money, and it's easy to see why people commute from smaller towns like Te Kohuna. I generally tried to get out of there quick as. That day, though, I took the chance to get myself a haircut, dropping into the place in the main street where I usually went. It was pretty quiet and I was in the chair after five minutes or so.
'What'll it be today?' Doug said as he slipped the cloth around me and tucked it into my collar.
'The usual,' I told him.
'Ah, you're not going for the number one, then.'
'Why would I?'
'I was starting to think it was a new fashion up your way.
I've had three blokes in here from Te Kohuna in the last few weeks wanting their heads shaved.' He had a comb in my hair now and a clipper was going.
'Maybe they've all got nits,' I said.
He laughed. 'Looks like a serious outbreak, then. Actually, you just spoilt my theory. I was figuring they'd started some sort of secret society up there.'
'You mean like the Masons?'
'For instance.'
'Who are they?' I asked.
'One of them's a bloke called Wyett. You know him?'
Wyett? Was that weird or what?
'No,' I said. 'Not really.'
'Don't know the other two by name but I used to see one of them round here a fair bit. I think he lived in Katawai until a month or so ago. Had an Asian girlfriend.'
I couldn't figure that one out. The only Asians in Te Kohuna were Chung Dong and his family. Their girl was about twelve years old.
***
I STOPPED AT the old Parline place on the way home, pulled over onto the shoulder beside the hedge. There were two wooden gates that had dropped on their hinges and stuck in the broken tarseal of the driveway. I lifted one of them and opened it enough to squeeze through. The garden was not as overgrown as I'd thought it would be. Even the weeds sprouting through the cracks in the drive had been cut back close. I soon saw why. An old ewe was standing in the shade of the hedge. She stared at me, jaws grinding slowly over a mouthful of grass or leaves, as I shut the gate behind me.
The house was as bad as it looked from the road. It had a verandah along the front but you could see sky through the rusted iron of its roof. The wooden steps were broken and they creaked under my feet. There were two bay windows, one on each side. In the one on the left the panes were covered by old roller blinds, hanging off centre. I crossed over to the window on the right. The glass was blurred with dust and dirt but I could just make out bare floorboards and faded wallpaper. I walked back to the door and tried the knob. Locked.
The ewe kept on s
taring as I went back down the steps and round the side of the house. Broken tarseal of the path. In the middle of what might have been the veggie garden was an old wooden wheelbarrow, upside down, and over to one side an incinerator made from a steel drum, brown with rust. The boundary fence was the usual post and wire, and beyond it a paddock stretching away to a line of trees. Who had let the ewe in? Somebody must have.
There were wooden steps up to the back door. On the ground beside them was a cardboard box, falling apart because the rain had got to it. It was half full of empty beer bottles. Next to it a chipped enamel basin with a soggy blue rag. The door was shut, bolted and padlocked.
I kept on walking round the house. On the northern side was a little orchard — green leaves and purple plums. A big bay window here. Through the blur of dirt on the glass I could see something inside. I rubbed a clearer space with the side of my fist and put my hands up to stop the light.
It was a big room with a bare wooden floor, dark back there in the shadows. Facing the window was a chair, rusted chrome with a torn red vinyl seat. Other things, too, that I couldn't make out. I walked to the back door and grabbed the wet rag out of the bowl. It smelt pretty bad but I figured it would do the job. Back at the window I wiped a bigger space in the dirty glass so that I could see better.
On one side of the room was an old dresser with a cardboard box on it. Hanging over the edge of the box was what looked like the cord of a venetian blind. I could just make out the plastic knob on the end. Next to the box was another beer bottle, which still had the cap on. Nothing else except a chunk of four-by-two about a metre long propped against the end of the dresser, dark paint or stains on its lower end.
There was something weird about that chair. It seemed like it had been put there facing the window so that somebody could look out. I thought about them sitting there; in winter maybe staring at the branches bare and dripping with rain, or in spring with all the white blossom, or now in the summer with the leaves and the plums. Peaceful? Looking out might have been peaceful but looking in sure as hell wasn't. The hum of the highway made the silence creepy. There were stains on the wall above the dresser, damp that had spread down from the ceiling and dried into the paper like washed-out blood. I got the feeling that the person in the chair had been a prisoner, tied up so that they couldn't move, and that the view was a kind of torture. A picture of Dagmar popped into my head, his folded arm, his twisted mouth.
I had a wriggly feeling in the skin behind my shoulders, like somebody was watching me. I turned round real quick. Nobody. A little breeze shifted in the plum trees. The sun was warm on my face and hands. I let out a big breath and found I had been holding it, like I was trying not to take in poisoned air. Suddenly I wanted to run, to get out of there. The old ewe stared as I went out through the gate and pulled it shut behind me. It felt good to turn the ignition of the Surf and have the motor kick into life, to merge into the traffic on the road.
7
ON SATURDAY MORNING Pita Ratene came over as usual to man the pumps for the day, and Gith packed her bag for her visit to the farm. After that we pretty much stood round waiting for Ma. Gith seemed happy about the trip. I reminded her about the puppies and she laughed. Perhaps a dog of her own would give her something to think about, as Ma said. It might add a bit to our security too.
Ma was there around ten-thirty, and by eleven Gith was belted in to the little blue Honda and they were gone. It felt weird afterwards. In six or seven years this would be the first night Gith and I had not been in the same house. Part of me felt free, like a burden had been lifted, but another part was just lost. I made myself a sandwich and had a cup of tea, mostly because I couldn't think of anything better to do, and then I went for a walk.
I popped in to see Len and Kath. Len seemed a lot worse physically but better in himself. He smiled in a tired sort of way and talked about the garden. His roses were in full bloom and he liked to smell them every day. I said I would come and do some weeding for him, given that everything was starting to get a bit overgrown.
'Thanks,' he said, 'but not to worry. The weeds come and go like everything else.'
When I left, Kath came out to the gate and told me they were arranging for Len to go into the hospice in Palmerston North. Any day now, she said. Would I keep an eye on the place while they were gone?
'Sure,' I said. 'No problem.' Thinking that it sounded like they were going away on holiday when the truth was that she would be the only one coming back.
It was a fine summer day. The sky was blue with puffs of white cloud, the air warm. I walked from Len and Kath's place to the corner of Maungaiti Road. The same bunch of kids were there, squashed together on the bench. One of the boys was swinging from side to side on a telegraph pole. He poked his tongue out at me. I did the same to him. A kid on the bench laughed.
'Yo, Fat Man,' one of them said.
I pretended not to hear and tried to figure out where I should go. I could keep on along the main drag, past the café. I could stick my head in and say hello to Brenda. The thought of her gave me an odd sort of feeling but I knew I should be ignoring that. Just because Gith wasn't around didn't make it right.
I crossed the road and headed off down Anzac Street. The Domain was on my left, houses on the right. After about a hundred metres I came to St Peter's on the corner of Church Street.
It's made of stone and a smaller version of one of those big European numbers, with a pointed arch for a doorway and a steeple with a cross on it. There is a bell on a wooden frame beside the gate and a few oak trees in the yard. Some graves, too, although the main cemetery is up the highway towards Tapanahu. Used to be, when we were little, that Ma took us kids to church sometimes. The Old Man never went. He didn't say religion was a load of bull but I knew that's what he thought. Ma didn't bother with it now either. There were still a few who did. You saw them hanging around outside after service on a fine Sunday morning.
I turned the corner into Church Street, headed south past the community hall. It seemed quiet there for now, only one cop car outside. Maybe they were all up at the Vield farm, combing the place like Monty said. I remembered talking to Kerry Ryan. I still couldn't figure out if I'd done the right thing there. Should I have said something about Anneke Hesse? Part of me still said no, stuff it, keep your head down, but another part just couldn't let the thing go. There was only one reason I was walking down Church Street.
Rick Parline's house was about halfway along the block. It was a single-storey place made of yellowish brick with a green tiled roof, front windows that were made up of little squares. In the garden there were two tall skinny trees that came up to points. One of them was dark green, the other a yellow colour. Flowers, too, lots of them, along the path that ran diagonally from the iron gate to the front door. A concrete drive went straight from the gate down the side of the house to a garage. There was a dark green Pajero parked in the drive and, in front of it, partly hidden, a white van. I couldn't see the number plate. For a second I wasn't sure what to do. I was tempted to go and look at the van but I had hired Billy Cleat to do that job, hadn't I? Then I thought of the chair in that room in front of the window and the creepy feeling it gave me. Nothing like the house I could see in front of me now — a house that showed a fair bit of money.
I opened the gate and walked down the drive. Nobody seemed to be about. I passed the Pajero. By the time I was beside its front wheel I could read the registration plate on the van. I could also see that it wasn't a Mitsubishi but a Toyota Hiace. What I didn't pick straight away was a woman on her hands and knees beside a flowerbed next to the garage.
'Can I help you?' she said, sitting back on her heels.
She was young and slim and wearing loose-fitting brown pants and a white blouse. She had a red scarf tied around her head, bright green gloves and a pair of big dark glasses.
'Ahhm . . .' What the hell was I going to say? All I could think of was the question I really wanted to ask. 'Do you folk have a dog?'
'Yes,' she said, kneeling up a bit straighter. 'Why?'
'A black dog?'
'Black and white — border collie.'
'Oh, well, that's okay then. There's a black dog hanging round our place. Somebody said it came from Church Street. We've got a few head of sheep up there and . . . you know.'
'Our dog's with Rick and Mikey down at the Domain. At least I hope she is.'
'That's all right then. Sorry to bother you.'
'Right.'
I took one more look at the van's number plate and walked away.
Back at the gate I couldn't figure out what to do. I could go to the Domain and check on Parline, or I could keep walking south along Church Street to Ramp Street. Also, there was a problem with that bloody registration number. I had no pen or paper on me and I was bound to forget it if I didn't write it down. I turned and headed south. Then I had an idea. I pulled out my mobile and put the van's registration into the contact list. The phone beeped at me to say the battery was low but I made it. I turned it off and slipped it back in my pocket.
Basingstoke Road runs down from the main highway to Church Street and then carries on to make a triangle with Anzac. After Basingstoke, Church Street becomes Ramp Street, which runs along the flat for about fifty metres and then goes down in what for Te Kohuna is a steep hill. From here the tarseal gets crumbly at the edges, the verges are overgrown, the gardens are full of weeds and the houses in pretty bad shape. At the bottom of the hill is an old four-strand wire fence and a chain-link gate. Beyond the gate is the bank of the river, a boggy area of winding paths and shallow pools where the reeds are head high in places. In a wet winter it is all half a metre under water. In a dry summer it's a dustbowl.
I walked slowly down. There was a weird smell in the air, kind of sour and muddy. Wayne Wyett's house was seven or so from the top of the hill. It was the opposite of Rick Parline's. There was no front fence or garden, only an area of cracked tarseal. It was made of concrete planking and there were patches of mould under the windowsills. The roof was rusty and one of the front windows was covered over by a piece of plywood. It didn't look that much better than the house on Katawai Road. I went on past, taking the chance to look down towards the back. There was a big garage to the rear of the house. The door was shut. No vehicles anywhere. No signs of life even. I headed off down the hill. As I got closer to the gate the smell got stronger. It was even warmer down here than it was up top and it seemed as if everything was rotting, like bad silage. The gate was padlocked. On the other side two deep ruts curved away to the left round a big clump of reeds. There were footprints, too, maybe ten centimetres deep and filled with brown scummy water. It would be a fairly easy place to dump a body.