The Night Book Part 7

'Here. Come on. I'll give you a ride. Where do you live? Let's get in the car.'

She didn't move.

'Look, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be ... I just saw you drop your phone and I really have met you before. I'm a doctor. You were my patient about, I don't know, some years ago. I've seen you working in the airport lots of times and remembered. Here's my card.'

She looked at it.

'I'm getting in the car. If you want a ride come along.'

She didn't move so he got in the car and waited until she came around and opened the car door. He cranked up the heater, drying his hands. 'Christ, it's wet, but so strangely warm!'

She held the card and looked at him.

'I'm an obstetrician. I deliver babies. You came in one night and I helped you have your baby. I remembered you.'

'Because I was ...'

'Yes. You were with the prison guard, and they said they would take the baby away. I recognised you about a year ago when you started working in the airport cafe and I've wondered sometimes how you got on, whether you did have to give the baby up.'

'I got her back.'

'Oh, you did. That's great.'

'When I got out, when she was eighteen months old.'

'I'm glad you got her back.'

She said slowly, 'You had a ring. Like a chain.' She pointed at his hand.

'A ring? Oh, a ring. Yeah. This one. Wedding ring. My wife bought it for me. On the Ponte Vecchio - that's a bridge in Florence.'

He held out his hand, showing her. The ring was a band with the gold twisted, as if it had been plaited.

She touched the ring with her finger. 'I remember your hands, with the ring. You had some weird jersey on. With sheep.'

'Did I? Yes. That old thing. I think my wife made me chuck that out.'

He smiled weakly, but she didn't smile back, regarding him with a fixed expression. 'You pulled her out.'

'I did. I had to turn it round first. Gave me endless trouble. It was a girl, wasn't it.'

'Alicia.'

'That's a nice name.'

'After Alicia Keys. I sing. I'm a good singer.'

'So does she live with you now?'

'No. She don't live with me no more.'

'Oh. Right.' He laid his hands on the steering wheel, careful to sound neutral.

'She's dead.'

'Oh no.' He felt it. He'd turned her baby around, pulled her out, she had been taken away but her mother had got her back. That she was dead was a sick feeling for an instant, and then it pa.s.sed.

She was watching him. He shrugged and said, 'I'm sorry to hear that.'

She said in a hard voice, 'You gonna give me a ride?'

'Yes. Where do you live?' He turned the keys.

'Mangere. I'll tell you the way to go.'

Driving, he felt her stillness beside him. She gave him brief directions. The rain sluiced across the windscreen, the motorway lights bled and blurred in the watery light. She hummed a tune.

He said, 'Was she living with you when she died?'

'Yeah.' Her tone was empty, careless.

'Was there an accident?'

'No.'

'Did she ...'

She yawned and said, 'Why do you want to know? What's it to you?'

'I don't know. I saw her being born. I pulled her out, remember. Why shouldn't I wonder how she died?'

'Watch it,' she said suddenly.

He braked and nearly put the car into a skid. Half the road was flooded with a giant puddle and they ploughed into it, sending up a spray of water. He changed gear and they drove forward, the windscreen wipers chopping back and forth.

His arm and side ached. He said coldly, 'We were both there when she was born. We both ...' He didn't really know what he wanted to say, except perhaps that he was needled by her neutral tone. It was depressing that she seemed to care so little. She'd probably beaten the child to death; it wouldn't be surprising or unusual, given her history, the jail sentence, the fact that she was at least part Maori. Everyone knew about Maoris and child abuse. He felt tired, and regretted his offer to drive her into the heart of South Auckland. He peered ahead. The houses were tiny and unkempt, the lawns covered in dead cars. Every wall and fence was sprayed with graffiti, the shops were closed and covered with metal grilles to stop vandals, and rubbish was piled up everywhere. She directed him through a series of dingy suburban streets and he started to think he wouldn't be able to find his way out, and went into a mordant little daydream: his car breaking down, the crowbar through the window as he waited for the breakdown service; the headlines. South Auckland mystery. Doctor found savagely beaten. Renowned obstetrician, 'close friend' of David Hallwright ...

'What's so funny?' she said.

'Nothing.' He glanced at her with dislike.

'We're nearly there,' she said.

There was a break in the rain. He slowed at the top of a hill and saw the churning sky ahead of him, ragged clouds lit up by the glow of motorway lights.

'Left,' she said too late, and he missed it. He swore under his breath, just wanting to get away now, to push her out of the moving car and drive away. She directed him to stop outside a row of little houses.

'Right you are then,' he said, hearing how flat he sounded.

She reached down for her bag. 'Thanks.'

'You're welcome.'

'You want to ...'

He cut her off. 'No. Gotta go.' The look he gave her now was insulting, he could tell. Just a tiny hint of incredulity. As in, you weren't thinking of inviting me in, were you? In there? Me?

She pulled her bag to her chest. 'Why did you give me a ride?'

He said irritably, 'Because it was wet and I felt sorry for you. Because I remembered you and your ... baby.'

'Why do you say the word baby like that?'

Was he going to have an argument with a complete stranger on a dingy street in South Auckland?

She said, 'Don't look at me like that.'

He held up his hands. 'What do you mean?' He glanced out at the dark street.

'Don't look at me like that.'

He said, 'I don't know what you mean. Just go inside, okay, and get some dry clothes.'

She said dreamily, 'Why did you pick me up and then look at me like I'm a piece of s.h.i.+t? Why did you bother?'

'I gave you a lift, end of story. Now get out of the car and go inside. I need to get home to my family.'

'Well, I haven't got any family.'

'I'm sorry to hear it. Oh for G.o.d's sake, come on, don't make things complicated.'

She said, 'Alicia caught meningitis. I put her to bed and she had a cold. When I woke up in the morning she was sick. She had a rash on her stomach. I took her straight to the doctor, he got her an ambulance to hospital and she was dead by that night.'

Simon leaned his head against the steering wheel and closed his eyes. He said, 'Are you going to get out of the car?'

She opened the door. He watched her cross the pavement. After a moment he got out and followed her. 'I'll walk you in,' he said. 'I don't like the look of this place.'

A car howling by picked them out in the headlights: a tall man stooped over a woman, her face turned towards him, the rain hammering down on them.

She got out her keys and looked at him dully.

'You wanna borrow a towel?'

'Eh? Yes. Thanks.' He'd forgotten to lock the car and remembered that his bag was on the back seat.

She turned on the lights. It was a tiny wooden bungalow with a sitting room and kitchen combined, and two bedrooms and a bathroom opening off it. She went into the bathroom. Through a door was a bed stacked with cardboard boxes. He sat down on a couch, s.h.i.+fted and pulled a coffee cup from under him. The walls were bare, and the kitchen bench was piled with a jumble of appliances too big and gleaming and new for the room, some still in boxes.

She came out with a towel and tossed it to him.

'Thanks. Have you just moved in?'

'No.' She glanced at the kitchen bench. 'That's a friend's stuff. He brings it home. He just got that.'

She pointed at an oversized television surrounded by slim speakers, an iPod on a stand, a tangle of plastic cables.

'Entertainment system,' she said dourly. 'Blu-ray and that.'

'Nice.'

'You can have some DVDs if you want. I don't want half of them.'

'I'm right, thanks.' He towelled his face. 'Where did he get it all from?'

'A shop, I s'pose.'

There was a silence. They looked at the huge TV.

'What's so funny?' she said.

'Nothing.'

'I'll show what else he got. Look.' She drew him into the bedroom. Sitting on top of a chest of drawers was a box of light. Simon came close and looked in. It was a large, elaborate aquarium with a hinged lid. A small pipe, jutting out of the side, shot jets of water onto the surface, turning to streams of bubbles as the water flowed down into the tank. Orange and white fish hung brightly in the silver bubbles, seeming to kiss the tiny b.a.l.l.s of air as they rose, and the green weed waved like banners. Simon stood very near and watched a fish nose above the fine white stones on the bottom, drifting over the white dune. It kicked up the sediment, making a little burst of gold.

She said, 'My mate didn't want it, eh. He gave it to me and I set it up. There's all this stuff that came with it.' She pointed to a row of plastic bottles. 'I bought the fish. They told me at the shop how to do it all. You can't give them water straight from the tap, you have to like process the water, and it's got filters at the back you have to wash out and change. He couldn't be a.r.s.ed doing it and neither could I for a while, it just sat in its box, but then I just got the idea one day to buy the fish. I like it. I like the way it looks.'

He said, 'It's beautiful. It's a little world in there.'

If you'd asked him, he would have had no interest in something like that, but it did look enchanting, a vivid, dazzling, unexpected sight in the dark room. The ripple and glow of it, the sound of the water falling, the way it created a scene so compact and wholly of itself and different from what was outside. The tiny creatures, in their quiet, brilliant world.

He said, 'It's the light that makes it so pretty, and the colours.'

'I keep it clean. If you don't you get all this mould and s.h.i.+t. There are these potions you put in the water, to keep it fresh. And you have to clean the gla.s.s. I got this special thing to do it with.'

Simon straightened up painfully. 'So, your mate as you call him ...'

'Yeah, Lydon. He's been staying here on and off.'

'Where does he get all this stuff?'

She tossed her head. 'He just comes by it, eh. You want to feed them?'

'Is he a burglar?'

'No, but he works in a warehouse near the airport. They're all bent there, he says. He just takes a share to keep in, so they don't think he's a nark. He calls it peer pressure.'

'So he comes clanking in with all this stuff ...'

'Look. I'll feed them.' She dropped some flakes and the jets of water sent them whirling round the aquarium. The fish darted after the food, chasing it through the miniature forests of weed.