The Night Book Part 8

They watched in silence.

After a while he said, 'I really can see why you like it.'

'I lie here in bed looking at it. And you go to the shop and there's all these extras you can get for it. They're expensive, though.'

'Have you got any coffee? It'd be good if I could have a hot drink. Then I'll get off home.'

'Yeah.' She looked at him. 'What's wrong?'

'I got this injury recently. I was mugged. It's giving me a bit of pain. Can I just ...'

His head was throbbing and he walked out and lowered himself down on the couch, gingerly covering his eyes. 'I don't know, maybe getting so wet ...'

'You got mugged,' she repeated.

'Yes. In the Civic car park. I seem to be having all sorts of adventures. I don't know. It never rains but it ...'

She put her hand on his forehead. He started.

'You're sick.'

'Do you think?' He s.h.i.+vered.

'Mate, you're the doctor.'

He was feeling sick. It had come upon him properly at the moment he missed the turn into her street, a kind of sourness in the nerves that might mean some kind of virus.

'You want some Panadol?'

He nodded. She made a cup of coffee and brought him the two white pills, which he swilled down, croaking, 'That'll do it. I'll just wait a minute and then I'll go.'

She went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. When she came out she was wrapped in a towel and he looked at the tattoos on her arms.

She lit a cigarette. 'You want a shower?'

'No.' He sat up, blinking. She went into the bedroom and put some clothes on, then came out and sat down next to him and put her hand on his forehead again. 'Cooling down,' she said primly.

He laughed. 'I don't know what's going on with me lately. So. Will your friend be home soon? Dragging in some new haul?'

'He's moving out, thank G.o.d. He's only temporary. So if you know anyone who needs a room.'

'Right.'

'Not that you'd know anyone who wants to live here.' She reached over and turned on the stereo. It was a woman singing, something sad. A wave of strong feeling came over him; his eyes p.r.i.c.kled. She was looking down at the carpet, leaning her chin on the rim of her coffee cup.

He said, 'I'm sorry about the ... about Alicia.'

'She wasn't called Alicia. I made that up. I only got into Alicia Keys after she died. She was called Aroha.' She shrugged and sighed. 'Corny name, I s'pose.'

'Did you make anything else up?'

'No.'

They listened to the woman singing. 'I'm sorry anyway, whatever she was called.'

They sat there for a minute. It was warm and comfortable. He wanted to stay like this, his eyes closed, listening to the music, but he said, 'I've got to go.'

'All right.'

At the door he said awkwardly, 'What's your name? I can't remember.'

'Mereana.'

'My name's Simon. Simon Lampton.'

'You think you can drive? Cos you look quite sick, eh.'

He fiddled with his keys. 'I could give you some money.'

'What for?'

'I don't know. If you need it ...'

She smiled. It was a dangerous look. 'You really are trying to get in trouble, aren't you.'

'No. Why would that ... Well, do you mean it would be wrong? Everything's wrong, isn't it. Giving you a lift is wrong, coming in is wrong. It's not ... appropriate.'

'Not appropriate. So you won't be coming back then. We could've gone down the pub and I could sing you some karaoke.'

'Okay. Well. Goodbye. Good luck.'

'But where's the money? How about my money?' Her voice shrill. 'Hey, don't think you can f.u.c.k off without giving me my money.'

He moved towards her, agitated, raising his hands.

'Bye,' she said quietly.

He gave her a last look as he went away and she grinned savagely, and then the grin dropped and she looked empty and tired. He hesitated, almost went back to her, but stopped himself, jogging across the gra.s.s, into the swirling night.

He looked at the street, its row of tiny houses bristling with satellite dishes. His father, Aaron Harris, lived in a street just like it. The thought of him made Simon's nerves jangle.

He had spent his whole life getting away from his chaotic, debauched old man. The family skeleton. Despite his punis.h.i.+ng lifestyle, despite frequent trips to emergency wards, dry-out facilities and detox units, Aaron refused to die. Will we never be rid of him, Simon's brother sometimes said, smiling grimly, and it was all grimness with Aaron; it was always bad news. He surfaced every now and then to plague and torment his sons, who had made good, who'd fled rather than followed his bad example. They'd spent most of their lives pretending he didn't exist. In later life Aaron had shacked up with a Maori ex-stripper, with whom he'd had a son, Simon's half-brother, Reid ...

Looking at the ragged houses, Simon heard Karen's voice in his head. What are you doing here? What are you playing at? He felt dread settle on him; obscure, half-formed fears. He used to have bad dreams, of waking to find everything gone - the house, the career, the beautiful wife, all, in some terrible moment of reckoning gone, taken away because he was Aaron Harris's son, because he should be out here in South Auckland instead, stewing in a tiny flat, in his Y-fronts, nursing his beer can, while some terrible slapper screeched around his head. In the dreams suited functionaries, repossession agents, sorrowfully drew him aside. There'd been a mistake, they told him; none of it was his. Those dreams were very bad. And he'd stopped having them, once he'd got older. He'd relaxed, and got happy.

He knew he had a proper fever now. The pain in his head was silvery; it was like those bright stars, holes in his vision that had dazzled him when he'd been mugged and was slipping into fainting and shock.

He got in the car, locked the doors and started the engine. The car shot away through the rain. He thought of Roza Hallwright, of her husband. Out here, seized with foreboding, he felt he understood Hallwright, the bozo with his mangled sentences, the guy who'd grown up poor and made good. Hallwright's famously ostentatious house, his money, his elegant wife: these things he sh.o.r.ed up against his past, against old memories and shames. Simon knew how it was. In the popular mind, Hallwright's single-minded acc.u.mulation of a.s.sets, his frantic offsetting of past deprivation, made him fit to run the country. This guy knew what to do with his money; he would know what to do with ours. But what would he really do with it? Did he care about the ones left outside the walls? No, was the answer. And now, full of dread, Simon felt the same: keep them out. Keep them out. And yet ...

He jolted and gripped the wheel as the car threatened to spin out, the back wheels slipping on a wet corner. He controlled it, slowing down. What was it with him?

He stopped to get his bearings. Guided by the dull blaze of the nearby motorway lights he turned and drove, hoping to find an onramp, yet blanked by dead ends. He looked ahead and saw traffic whizzing against the skeleton outline of a playground. The rain drummed on the roof. Sighing, he turned the car around.

He pictured his family at home, peacefully waiting, and he thought especially of Elke. She was connected to whatever it was with him. She had always been a puzzle, an unanswered question, and lately more so. Little Elke. She had disturbed the family peace, caused Claire to make war on her mother, stolen their sleep, upset the smoothness of their lives - but that wasn't it. They had weathered all that. She was happy and settled; they had been praised for their parenting in inspections and reports. The adoption had been a success. But somehow she had altered his course. Life had stayed smooth, but Elke had wrong-footed him. It was because he loved her, because of the way he loved her. The fever throbbed in his head, shaking his thoughts loose, and for a moment he felt detached enough to consider it: that he loved her not as a father would, but as a stranger. Chastely, carefully, virtuously, but pa.s.sionately. Whatever genes, was not present in her. He would never have touched her nor done any wrong; it wasn't a s.e.xual thing, and he had no interest per se, none at all, in young girls. But he had felt the different quality of his love, and he'd been disorientated by it. Love had made him vulnerable; it had worn away at him, broken down his walls. And the burden of his strange pa.s.sion, the secret weight of it, seemed lately to have increased, to a point where the orderly calm of his life felt threatened. Now the suited functionaries, the dream repo men, might have said, 'No, you cannot have Elke. We are taking her away. You are not a suitable father. You are not fit.'

He saw the motorway onramp ahead of him, and with relief accelerated up the slope. The traffic was thin: now it would take him only minutes to get home. His mood lifted and he thought, with bad form to raise it, but he would have liked to know why she'd been in prison, and for how long. What it had been like. Instead he'd been so overwhelmed by the sheer recklessness of letting her get in his car that he'd barely asked her a thing.

When had he become so effete?

five.

'Dad.'

'Yeah.'

'When the fish die, can I get a turtle?'

'When they die. Christ. They're meant to be your pets. You're meant to love them. Not race on to the next thing.'

There was a silence. They looked into the aquarium. Marcus ran his finger across the gla.s.s.

'Yes, Dad. But Dad, when they die ...'

Marcus had been agitating for a pet dog. And Simon had got out of bed on a Sunday morning and said slowly, as if the idea had just dawned on him, 'A dog's a bit of a nuisance, old chap, when we go on holiday overseas and things. But how about this? It would be just as good. An aquarium. Of your very own.'

In the pet shop he had dragged Marcus and Elke away from the animal pens. 'So cute,' Elke said, her eyes soft. Down among the newspaper sc.r.a.ps and plastic toys the velvety puppies rolled and sparred, letting out high-pitched yelps.

'Over here,' Simon said, hustling them ahead. 'Look at this one.' He picked out a big tank, confidently slapping its side. 'It's ma.s.sively expensive, but oh well.'

He got them interested in the tank and its accessories, the coloured stones, the range of bright weeds, the bottles of water softeners and natural bacteria and cleansers, and then they argued over which fish they should take home in the bulging plastic bags. When they emerged, hundreds of dollars later, rain was spiking down into the puddles and the late afternoon dark was setting in. It had been the stormiest winter since records began. They had been lashed and browbeaten by the weather. Simon grappled with the heavy tank, angling it into the car boot while rain sluiced the back of his neck.

In the car the Elke and Marcus sat with plastic bags on their knees. The fish flipped and swam, distorted by the plastic into streaks of colour. Every time the car went over a b.u.mp Elke screamed.

He spent hours setting up the tank on Marcus's chest of drawers. He read the manual and showed the kids how to prepare the water, measuring the chemicals out of plastic lids. They washed the tank and lined the bottom with white stones, and Marcus and Elke planted weeds in the bottom. Elke had insisted on adding a plastic castle from the pet shop and Marcus had chosen a little model diver that bobbed above the stones. They poured in the water, and floated the fish in it in their plastic bags, so they could get used to the temperature.

As the last of the light was fading, the rain stopped. There was a moment of drenched calm and the garden glowed with metallic green light. The children drifted outside and Marcus started to play with a ball on the lawn.

Claire slouched in, a textbook under her arm.

'What do you think?' he said.

'Yeah. Nice.' She went away.

He called Elke and Marcus inside and they launched the fish into their new habitat. He turned on the light and the pump, and the water filled with a swirl of tiny silver bubbles.

Simon stood back, hands on his hips, admiring the beautiful liquid world.

'What are you going to call them?' he asked.

Marcus looked at his new pets. 'How about Up, Down, Backwards and Forwards.'

'That's only four.'

'And Centre.'

'So, which is which?' Simon persisted gently.

'That's Up, that's Down ...' The boy's voice was toneless. 'That's, um, Backwards, that one with that string hanging from underneath it. What is that, Dad.'

'It's s.h.i.+t.'

'Oh.'

Simon allowed him out to play again.

He took Marcus's point: the fish were not real pets. You couldn't hug them, and they couldn't go anywhere. They couldn't leap up and greet you when you got home. They didn't even look all that different from one another. I'll get the poor kid a dog, he thought, glancing out the window at Marcus, who was frowning as he positioned the ball on the wet lawn. Simon noted his son's quick, secret smile as the ball arced towards Elke's head. Elke had got too old to mess about with the football, and Marcus took regular revenge for her defection. She was dreamily picking her way across the wet gra.s.s. Now the ball hit her cheek with a resounding smack. She shouted with fury and lunged towards him but the boy was already running, delightedly fleeing ...

The aquarium was for himself, Simon knew. He felt guilty - his own bouncy, disingenuous enthusiasm had made him queasy all afternoon, and he had wondered, when she looked at him sharply, whether Elke had noticed - but he was irrationally pleased with it. The fish were not pets but they were beautiful, and so was their small world. When you turned off the lamp in Marcus's room the tank glowed. It was pleasing in itself, but there was more to it, the secret, inexplicable motive. He had wanted an aquarium since he had seen Mereana's, because it was beautiful, but also because it gave him an imaginary connection to that night. He thought about the encounter with pleasure, like remembering a trip to a foreign place where you weren't supposed to go and not expected to emerge from unscathed. It wasn't so much that South Auckland was exotic, although it was definitely the rough side of town. It was more that he'd stepped outside the rules. That night, all feverish and dazed and even, he thought now with amus.e.m.e.nt, fresh from being struck by lightning, he'd gone and done all sorts of things he wasn't supposed to do. Like inviting a strange woman into his car. Like inviting (even worse) a former patient into his car. Going to her flat. Thinking about her, wondering about her life. Offering her money (what was that all about?). Keeping it secret from his wife.

'Mum. Where's Dad?'

Karen was making school lunches. Outside, in the garden, the warm, relentless rain. What was it with the weather ...

'Mum. Where's ...'

'I don't know, darling. I suppose he's in your room, staring at the fish tank.'

Simon stepped away from the aquarium and surveyed it critically. He'd been using a special brush to clean the gla.s.s. With one part of his mind he registered Karen's tone. So capable, so exasperated.

When he'd come home from Mereana's house that night he'd been sick: febrile and trembling. Karen had sniffed sharply and said, 'What's that smell. Cigarettes?'

He'd made for the bedroom, scuttling past her in his guilty, smoky clothes.

'What've you been doing? Why are you so late?'

'I'm sick,' he'd said, and crept towards the bed. 'The plane was struck by lightning,' he'd told her. 'No, it really was.'

'I don't know. All the sc.r.a.pes you've had lately. It's been bedlam here, by the way. Claire outdid herself. She's been totally obnoxious for twenty-four hours.'

'Sorry,' he'd whispered.

She'd stood over him, hands on hips. Shaking her head, 'What is it with you ...?'