Anticipation (24 page)

Vita, who is waiting for me in the Sunnyview Retirement Home, thinking whatever it is contented old women think when left to
their own devices. Waiting for someone to ask.
Tell me about Lester.

Through the dregs of the nineties, I make my way there. Swinging my bag, caught up in the scenery, looking everywhere but down. Which is a shame, because it’s not just Vita Bodgewick up ahead — there’s also a big hole. The same one that Will Biggs tumbled into fifty-four years ago. It’s waiting for me as well. It has my name on it, you see.

I
n the last minutes of 4 May 1945, the hole in the pine forest floor south-west of Lübeck is barely five hours old. And look! What should we find at the bottom of it but my very own blood, all wrapped up with Vita Bodgewick’s.

Above their clammy slit trench, there’s a sky, thick and low and dull grey-black, but Eddie Harding and Lester ‘Bodge’ Bodgewick can’t see it for the trees in this Grimms’ fairy tale of a forest. The night is quiet now, as still as a carol. Though it’s spring, still a bitter little snow is flitting through the pines, a ghost of the Ardennes.

Eddie’s hands are cold. Bodge wraps his own around them, brings them up to his chest, presses them there, against his heart.

Somewhere down by the river, in the village perhaps, a dog begins to howl. At least, Bodge hopes it’s a dog. There are nightmares enough in these trees already. S-mines that’ll rip your guts out. Booby traps that’ll take out your eyes. Murderous children with dead men’s guns, and SS heroes lurking like bloody werewolves.

Eddie’s breath is warm against his ear.

‘We should go apple picking this year,’ says Bodge. ‘We’re bound to be home by August.’

Eddie shifts his hips, holds Bodge a little tighter and says nothing.

‘We can stay at my mum’s.’ Bodge pictures the matching counterpanes on two narrow beds beneath low beams. Clean sheets with little blue flowers. The warm weight of the thatch above, and the curve of his old mattress. ‘She’s been on and on about meeting you.’

Up ahead in the Germans’ fox-hole, someone coughs.

‘The first thing we should do, though,’ Bodge continues, after a
while, ‘soon as we get to London, is go down the Queen’s Head in Old Compton Street, get a ploughman’s and a pint.’ He turns his cheek into Eddie’s shoulder. ‘My shout.’

‘Shh,’ says Eddie. ‘There.’ He frees his hands, rubs Bodge’s arms and shoulders. ‘You warm now?’

‘Yes,’ lies Bodge.

Gently, so gently, Eddie rolls him over. Bodge feels the familiar weight, the long press of Eddie’s body against his back. His lips part. He breathes in the smell of Eddie’s blanket, dirty wool, and the fresh-dug earth beneath it. He lies still.

‘Hush,’ says Eddie. ‘There now.’

It doesn’t take long — much less time than we tend to imagine. Eddie’s thighs grip, and his elbows pin, and he finds the soft skin at the base of Bodge’s neck, and presses his thumbs into it with such tenderness, such need. Such love. Five heartbeats. Ten. It’s not the first time they’ve played this game, and Bodge is drifting with it, the cold night opening up, and he doesn’t have time to think anything much at all, until it’s too late, because Eddie hasn’t let go. Five beats more.

Oh shit.

Oh no.

Eddie.

Apple blossom.

A blond boy he loved once, silky and hazel-eyed.

Blackness, coming down.

‘Shhh,’ says Eddie, and kisses, so gently, the back of his head. ‘There. All done now.’

How long do they lie like this? Long enough for Bodge’s body to go cold. Not long enough for the Shermans to arrive. Not until dawn, which is still several minutes away when Eddie sits up, and begins to make Bodge decent.

Too long, as it turns out. Because Eddie hasn’t yet finished when Will Biggs drops into their hole.

‘Eddie?’ Will whispers cheerily. ‘Guess who!’

Eddie stares at him like he’s a grenade. Will Biggs, on the floor of his slit trench. For fuck’s sake. What are the chances?

‘Sorry, mate,’ says Will to the silent Bodge, upon whose legs he has landed.

Eddie senses the hand of fate. He stares, and his life flares bright like a fuse, in that split second of calm before everything blows apart, but there’s nothing to do. No time. And he wishes Will were a grenade, because by now it would be over.

‘All right, boys?’ says Will. ‘I brought you some cigs.’

Slowly, Eddie stands up.

‘Ed? What’s up?’

It’s not far. A hundred yards perhaps, no more, to the German gun. But it’s still dark, and it seems to take forever for them to see him, and about halfway there Eddie gets an idea, and reaches into his pouch. With the grenade in his hand, he starts to run, and he stumbles a little over a branch, and at last the Spandau gunner wakes up and begins to fire. He’s not very good, and Eddie thinks he must be new, because who the hell would have thought a man could get this far?

Eddie’s close now, he can see the line, and it’s all about the running. He’s braced for the tackle, but it doesn’t come, and he’s forgotten why he’s here because he thinks he just might win. He takes a shove to the shoulder, but it barely slows him down. From ten yards out, he makes the throw, and he knows it’s good, and the last thing to go through his mind, before the Spandau round, is the good old Wimbledon hurrah.

There are real cheers, seconds later, after the flash and the thump, and the bits of Germans come down. Men move up to secure the Spandau. It must be officially dawn, because down on the road there’s a hum and a throb as the Shermans turn over and prepare to move up through the line.

In Eddie’s slit trench, Will starts to feel for Lester Bodgewick’s pulse, and finds him cold. He lights a smoke, and thinks he understands.

A head appears above them. ‘Bodge?’

‘He’s dead,’ explains Will, as a captain drops in. Will hands him a smoke.

‘Ah,’ says the captain. ‘Thanks.’ He takes a drag, and exhales.
‘And who the fuck would you be, exactly? If you don’t mind my asking.’

‘Biggs, sir. AFPU.’

The captain sighs. ‘Of course.’

There is a moment’s silence.

‘So. Did you get all that?’

Will shakes his head. ‘Bit dark, sir.’

‘Can’t say I had Harding down as the type.’

‘The type, sir?’

The captain shrugs. ‘Suicide by German.’

‘No, sir. Neither did I.’

‘You knew him?’

‘I’m engaged to his sister, sir.’

‘I’m very sorry, Sergeant. About Harding, I mean.’ The captain puts out his cigarette. ‘He’ll go up for the Military Medal, of course.’

They both stare at Lester Bodgewick, a crumpled shape, sharpening with the dawn. Will can see his face now. It is very white and young, and pretty, like a statue. An angel above a grave.

Will can also see, in the strengthening light, that there are red finger marks around Lester Bodgewick’s neck, that his battledress is in disarray, and that, those things aside, he has no wound.

‘I don’t understand,’ Will says.

The noise of tank engines builds in the silence. The captain looks at his watch, and rubs his hands across his face. ‘My men have to move up now,’ he says, but he stays where he is, and looks, again, at Lester Bodgewick.

‘One of the enemy,’ he says firmly, at last, ‘crept in and strangled poor Bodge in the night. He never saw it coming.’

Will says nothing.

‘He had a mother, I presume. Your friend.’

Will nods, slowly.

‘Bodgewick too. Let’s do what we can for them, Sergeant.’

The captain leaves. Will stays where he is. The sounds of men and tanks move away, and more Spandaus start up, and he feels a kind of nothing. Another 88 begins to thud. He smokes another cigarette.
Then he takes the Contax out of his bag and frames a shot.

Private Lester Bodgewick, on his deathbed, in the hole he has dug for himself, in enemy ground.

The shutter closes, opens. Will puts the camera down. Gently, he straightens the boy’s uniform, buttons his trousers, tucks in his vest. He wraps the body up in the blanket, but for some reason, he can’t bring himself to cover Lester Bodgewick’s face.

He climbs out of the hole, and walks across last night’s no man’s land. There, on the forest floor, he takes his final frame of the war. Eddie’s portrait. A last record.

I have it here in my hand. And if I were Babs, what might I recognise inside her great-great-nephew’s skull, all its patterns exposed to the lens of William Biggs, to judgement and the sky?

‘Did you find your friend?’ asks Bob, back down on the road to Lübeck.

‘No,’ says Will.

Before they reach the coast, the Germans have surrendered.

The pointlessness of it all isn’t lost on Vita Bodgewick. The cruelty. Her little brother being taken from her on the very last day of the war.

‘At least I know Lester didn’t suffer,’ Vita writes. ‘He was shot in the head. Straight through, clean as a whistle. He wouldn’t have felt a thing, so the captain said.’

She still has all Lester’s letters. One for every week he was over there. Which wasn’t long, because he only went out on D-Day. (‘He had to wait till he turned eighteen,’ she explains. ‘He tried lying about his age like the other boys, but no one believed him. He always looked so young.’)

They had to be careful of the censors, Lester and she. But they had a code.

‘A lot of people didn’t understand about that sort of thing back then,’ she goes on. ‘But I did. Lester loved your great-uncle just like I loved my Stan.

‘Eddie looked after him, you see. That’s how they got started.’

They’d been so looking forward to meeting Eddie, she and her mum. Not that her mum really knew about Lester and Eddie — not officially, anyway — but she was happy that Lester had a friend. Someone taking care of him, over there. Someone he wanted to bring home. And he was so handsome, my great-uncle! Lester had sent them a photograph. They looked like film stars, both of them. In their vests and braces, in front of some grand ruin somewhere, Eddie’s elbow on Lester’s shoulder.

He was coming down with Lester, as soon as they got demobbed. Lester hoped he might stay. For the apple-picking season, at least. Maybe more. When the war was over.

‘How strange and sad it is,’ Vita Bodgewick writes, ‘that they both got killed on that last day. I hope it may comfort you — as it has always comforted me — to know that they died happy, and in love.’

It would be nice — don’t you think? — if I wrote back to Vita. And I do. I send her a calendar for Christmas. One of the nice ones I have printed up for work, with arty photographs of cabbage trees and paua shells and ponga and golden sands. Which are as far away as you can get, really, from trenches, and Kings Close, Wimbledon, and Kate, and Sarah and Evelyn and Betty and May, and the floor of a German forest where Private Lester Bodgewick was not shot, and Eddie Harding did not earn the Military Medal.

There could be other explanations, couldn’t there? Perhaps someone else strangled Lester Bodgewick. Grief. Perhaps that’s what drove my uncle onto the German guns so close to the scheduled ceasefire. Perhaps Eddie — that sixth-generation Harding — really was a last-ditch hero, and his medal got lost in the post.

It’s not impossible. So why can’t I believe it?

In return for my calendar, Vita has the photograph she wrote of in her first letter copied, and sends it to me. Eddie and Bodge. Laughing in a field somewhere — France, I think — their backs to the wreck behind them. And I sit beside the fire for hours — the first of a new millennium — but still, I can’t quite bring myself to burn it.

A
bout a year after Vita’s last letter, I take a day off. A Monday cold enough to light the fire when I get up, though it can’t be more than a month after Valentine’s Day. I’ve slept in, and what’s left of the morning doesn’t look up to much — blustery and grey and flat — so after I’ve drunk my coffee and got the mail, I decide to do the laundry.

There are two pairs of Greg’s suit trousers stuffed between the clothes basket and the wall — his handy place for putting his drycleaning. It’s not doing the fabric any good down there, so I pick them up and smooth them down, and then I think, what the hell, I’ve got a few things of my own that need to go in — I’ll do a run into town, drop them off. Maybe pick up some steaks, a nice bottle of red for dinner. So I go through the trouser pockets.

In the first pair, I find twenty bucks, three business cards and a restaurant peppermint wrapper. In the second, I find a condom.

It’s in the back pocket, buttoned up, with a restaurant bill. Dinner for two at the Strathcairn Inn — a place no one we know would go. They started with champagne. Somebody had crayfish mornay. It had to be her — there’s no way Greg would touch shellfish. I look for the date: 14 February. No wonder they pushed the boat out.

It’s the rudeness of it that gets to me first. How lazy is this man? It infuriates me, the carelessness, the sheer stupidity, of leaving these things here for me to find.

And then it’s the trousers. Which I’m still holding in my hand. Clearly they haven’t been cleaned. Did he even take them off? Did she? This is the fabric against which his prick twitched and stirred, made its first little moves, the pin-striped wrapper around
the erection my husband had for some woman who wasn’t me. Which was pressed against what? Hand, or groin, or arse? There’s no telling what could be on here.

I hold the trousers further away from me. Then I carry them, carefully, downstairs, and I put them on the fire. There must be more nylon in them than Greg would like to admit, because they make a delightful blaze.

His credit card statement is on the table with the rest of his mail. I feel free to open it now. The Strathcairn Inn is there. Several times. And on 13 February, my husband, who doesn’t believe in Valentine’s Day, spent eighty-two dollars and seventy-five cents at City Florist Interflora.

I don’t believe in Valentine’s Day myself. Nor did the buyers of 32 Gladstone Road, obviously, or I wouldn’t have been working all that evening. So I’m not sure why it bothers me so much that, in all our nearly eleven years, Greg has never bought me flowers.

I look around. The house is a mess. So I start tidying up.

Someone has to do it.

I work my way around the living room, picking up all the things that Greg hasn’t put away, everything that isn’t in its place. I start with the easy stuff. Saturday’s newspaper. Last week’s
Oreti Reporter
. The cricket club newsletter,
GQ, The Rotarian
. The files he brought home for the weekend and neglected to take back to work. Dirty tennis socks. They all burn very well.

The jersey he’s left on the sofa puts a bit of a damper on things, and I have to add more pinecones. Chastened, I put his sports watch and trainers and sunglasses straight in the bin. Then I move upstairs.

I pick up all Greg’s clothes from the floor, the stray socks, the pile of buttoned-up shirts beside the clothes basket. And then I remember something he quoted at me once — life’s too short for sorting laundry, wasn’t that it? So I take the whole basket downstairs.

I have a very nice time for a while. But when everything’s gone, and I look around again, the house still seems off. A bit grubby and cardboard and used, like an empty takeaway box. And I
realise that I’m looking for something else to burn.

The oil painting that Greg’s parents gave us for our wedding catches my eye. I’m pretty sure those fake fur cushions would flare up well. A minky faux sacrifice. I can almost feel them under my hands. Almost, but not quite.

I turn my back on the cushions and go back upstairs. I pack a bag. And I drive away from Otatara. Perhaps a little too fast.

I’m not sure where I’m going. A motel, probably. But none of the ones on North Road look quite right, so I keep on driving up SH6, past the freezing works, Winton, Greg’s parents’ place. Cemeteries and racetracks.

Distance seems important. Speed, too. Because my husband is leaving me — isn’t he? — and I need to get as far away as I can before he comes back.

Which he will — about six o’clock, probably. Walk in, throw his keys down somewhere — forgetting their location in mid-air — and ask, Hey, have I seen his sunglasses? His trainers, his watch, his socks?

Unless I’m not there. Not a bit, not even slightly. Because I have seen his condom and his receipt. And he has no one but himself to blame. No
you never, I didn’t, she was
.

I drive north. Towards William Biggs. Crossing the rivers high. The Oreti, unreported, at my side, a line to the left, until it veers away west and I keep going. Through country that rises and hardens and dries, and then closes behind me. Somewhere near Garston I hear it snick, snapping shut like an old Swiss watch. And I see I’m not going back.

Jake looks up from fixing a bolt in my new handrail. ‘I’ll be finished next week,’ he tells me.

Behind him, the Waitemata rolls and glints.

‘Fantastic,’ I say.

From the end of the jetty I look down into green water shot through with the light of the sun, the slow sparkle of silt. No
deeper, surely, than Coldstream Pool. The coils of Jake’s mooring rope float just below the surface, turning gently.

It looks generous today, the sea. Warm and thick and buoyant, ready to hold you up, so that you don’t even have to kick, you can just lie on your back and float like I watched Jake do last summer. And if your head should slip under the water, it wouldn’t be dark. The noise in your ears gentle as a heartbeat. And after a second you’d tip up again without trying, and take a breath and look at the sky.

It’s easy to launch the dinghy at high tide. I don’t really need the winch Jake’s put in on the ramp, but he wanders down to give me a hand with it anyway.

‘Careful,’ he warns again, sticking his own right in to adjust the chain, ‘of your fingers.’

I’m only going into the city to pop my head into the monthly sales meeting. Stand behind Gillian and smile, shake hands with February’s Top Earner and be home before low tide.

So I’m as surprised as anyone to find myself in a 1920s apartment in Emily Place at four o’clock, listening to the evening traffic build through the broken glass. The listing agent, Krishnan, is new and plainly terrified — of me, or dirtying his nice Italian suit, it’s hard to say. Together, we look over eighty-two square metres of dust and debris. It smells of exhaust fumes and pigeons and mould. I walk out through the high doors from the living room onto the terrace, look down on the little park and take a deep breath. There’s a whiff of something else back there as well. I’m pretty sure it’s money.

‘So where did they find her?’ I ask Krishnan, when he steps outside.

He gestures at another set of french windows. ‘In there.’ The frames creak gently as the breeze of the CBD moves through their missing panes. ‘The police climbed round from the next-door terrace and broke in. Found the old girl tucked up in her bed.’

Something to aspire to.

Krishnan shakes his head. ‘Five years. Imagine that. Without anyone having missed her.’

Ah, yes. The perils of direct credit.

‘She didn’t have any family?’

‘Not that they could find. So sad, isn’t it?’

I look over the balcony again. It’s a pretty park. A steep tropical triangle that nonetheless exudes the charm of a West End garden square. I was there, walking through it, the day Maggie phoned. Over seven years ago, now. You could have seen me from up here, watched me pause, rest my coffee on that park bench under the pohutukawa trees and sit down to take the call.

‘I’ve got a type three spinocerebellar ataxia,’ my mother tells me, sounding rather proud. ‘It’s very rare.’ (No one else in Bradbury Street has one of those. But wait — it gets even better.) ‘I’m the first case in New Zealand, the specialist says. It’s a one-in-a-
hundred-thousand
chance.’

Unless you happen to be in our family, in which case the odds are roughly fifty-fifty. Maggie doesn’t mention that, which is strange, because surely the specialist must have told her. Maybe she wants to spare me the truth. It doesn’t seem like her.

It’s about a month since I left her waving, set-jawed, in the window of Bradbury Street the morning after we got back from Dunedin. Today, as soon as I saw the call come up, I knew she must have got the results — Maggie never rings my cellphone. She prefers to leave messages I don’t have time to return on my answering machine at home.

There’s not a lot she can tell me about SCA3 that my browsing history hasn’t already covered. But I listen carefully, phone held hard up against my ear, shutting out cicadas and mynah birds, echoing jackhammers and concrete trucks and the hum of Beach Road traffic. This is my mother’s moment, after all. It’s not every day you find out how you’re going to die.

When she hangs up, I call Sally. We meet at Quadro at
five-thirty
. There’s a guy in the bar whose name I won’t later recall, and after Sally leaves, we go upstairs to his room and prove to us both that I’m alive, all neurons firing. At some point, I turn my head and see he’s wearing a wedding ring. But it’s too late now. And if I’m honest, I don’t care.

I’m a veteran of betrayal. It doesn’t have much to do with actual sex — it’s what we imagine goes on around it. The little interruptions and asides, the smiles and mistakes and accommodations. That’s not what we’re about here. This night is a swift white scrawl on an empty slate that tomorrow will be wiped clean. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.

(Anyway. If you still think that sex is intimate, you’re lucky. You’ve never watched someone die.)

The next morning, I slip into the shower and out of the door before he’s awake, leave him forgetting my name (which I may have said was Susan Fisher). I put a plush maze of corridors between us. No one looks up as I stroll through reception,
tip-tap
, and behind me the plate glass doors slide shut, and I’m out into a new morning, warm and humid and euphoric.

All those nights, married to Greg, when I’d sit in the bathroom, forehead pressed to the wall, and long for a trapdoor to open up. An escape chute into a crisp white anonymous hotel world with a privacy bolt and
Do Not Disturb
on the door. I’ve finally found it. Slid right through to the other side. Outrun myself. And now I can saunter down dawn-soft Lorne Street, jacket off, because the sun’s coming up, and I’m only thirty-five and I can still show my arms, and anything can happen.

Are you sure you want to do this?’ says Jake.

Four floors above Emily Place, we look around in silence. A little draught from the chimney skitters a pile of dead flies along the hearth tiles.

‘I’ll get all this shit cleaned out,’ I say. ‘You won’t have to deal with any of that, I promise.’ There must be some firm I can call.

Jake shakes his head. ‘It’s got great bones,’ he admits.

‘So, can you do it?’

He sighs. ‘I was going to go to Bali this winter. Mate of mine’s got a house over there. Ubud — you been there? It’s nice.’

‘Ubud’s not going anywhere.’ I nudge my shoulder against his
arm. ‘It’ll still be there next year.’

‘Yep, I guess so.’ He prods at a patch of mould on the skirting board, glances up at the ceiling and smiles. ‘The question is, will I?’

‘Come on, it’s not that bad.’

Jake smiles again. He walks around the apartment again, testing floorboards, tapping walls. Stops in the bedroom doorway, leans on the frame. ‘Well, there is something about the place. It feels — I dunno, sort of —’

‘Happy,’ I say firmly.

‘Yeah, maybe that’s it. I can see what you see in it.’

Happiness and clean bones.

‘So if I buy it, you’ll take it on?’