Starlight Peninsula (16 page)

Selena was clearing out her office and talking litigation. She and the Sinister Doormat had fallen out: each accused the other of defamation and theft of stationery.

Management put out a statement: they were processing a number of complaints from staff about the alleged ‘shock’ issue. Enquiries were progressing well, and experts were being consulted. Details to follow.

In the course of a long phone call to Eloise, Demelza mentioned that Andrew Newgate had appeared in a women’s magazine, talking about his quest for a girlfriend. Women would have to convince him, Newgate said, that they were ‘not just interested in his fame’.

‘I can’t believe it, chuck. Lord Muck.
They
have to convince
him
. Nothing about
him
having to convince
them
he won’t
murder them in their beds
.’

In the same women’s magazine, it was foretold that Mariel Hartfield and Hamish Dark (both in their forties), would be trying for another baby, if that was what they were doing when they were seen near a building that possibly housed an IVF clinic. (A rival magazine had recently photographed Mariel walking near a children’s clothing store and announced:
Mariel: Twin baby joy
.)

On TV, Mariel wore sky blue and announced: Jack Dance’s polling woes deepen. She went on: Opposition attacks continue, amid allegations Mr Dance ordered or at least knew about illegal spying
against Kurt Hartmann. Justice Minister Ed Miles has refused to comment on the US bid to extradite Kurt Hartmann, other than to say that the extradition procedure is ‘on track’.

Jack Anthony, in a summer-blue suit, explained: The true economic toll of this summer’s drought.

The Sinister Doormat stood at the door of Q Wing’s hair and makeup suite and hissed, ‘Stuff you, bitch.’

Not just a pencil-thin blonde with huge breasts but a qualified meteorologist, the Sinister Doormat’s job was to ‘add value’ to the weather. The weather formed a significantly large segment of the evening news. The Doormat and the weather had had a lot in common these last few months. They both went on and on being beautiful and golden, and not changing, and never getting old.

Eloise sat sweltering in the Honda. The air-conditioning wasn’t working, and the car was parked in full sun at the top of a quiet suburban street. She started the engine and drove slowly, checking mail boxes. Number 18 Pukeora Place, the Epsom address she’d found in an electoral roll at the local post office, was a sizeable white villa with a landscaped garden, a beautiful stained-glass front door in blues, greens and reds, and an orange tiled roof. There was a fig tree on the front lawn, which was fronted by a dry stone wall.

The slope of a small volcanic cone, Mt Matariki, rose steeply beyond the line of houses. She got out, went to the gate and leaned over to check the mail in the letter box. She took hold of an envelope and pulled it out. It was addressed to Mrs Karen Lampton.

Now she stood, glazed, her eyes fixed vacantly on the blue wooden bench on the front porch. It would be easy to open the gate, walk up past the twin ornamental trees in pots, ring the bell beside the
stained-glass
door. But what then? The thought of trying to explain made Eloise feel exhausted. She went back to the car and drove away.

At home on the peninsula, Silvio lying across her legs, a glass of wine at her elbow. Trying to frame it: a sad story. Long time ago now. There are things I never asked. So sorry to bother. There’s just this thing I’ve wondered about. If you wouldn’t mind. Your name.

Your name and the name of a missing woman. Mereana. The detective, Marie Da Silva. You remember, with the odd-coloured eyes? She must have. Did she? You see, the man I loved. The man I wanted to marry. The love of my life. He wanted to write a screenplay about a National Party prime minister. He had brown curly hair, deep-set eyes, he was tall and thin. Did you ever? His name was Arthur Weeks.

Arthur.

Scott rang. They talked about Kurt Hartmann, who was trying to seek discovery from the Crown to support his bid to resist extradition. Scott passed the phone to Thee, who made Eloise laugh.

She rang Nick, but he wasn’t picking up. She rang Carina, who read extracts from the Sparkler’s school report:
Rachel Margery has achieved the highest marks in her class in Maths
. (Maths!)
Also the highest mark in reading and spelling. A very capable student who must learn not to chat so much to …

But Carina had to go. Eloise picked up her book. ‘Come here,’ she said to Silvio.

‘Want to come for a ride, Silv?’

On the west side of Pukeora Place, she unclipped Silvio’s leash and allowed him to run up the pedestrian walkway that led through the gardens and onto the volcanic cone. She panted up after him, and they emerged on the terraced slopes, heading for the top. On the rim of the crater she looked down and saw that the water that usually pooled in the dip had dried up. Silvio was already down there sniffing around in the yellow grass. She walked a circuit around the crater, while Silvio ran up and down the inside of it.

From here, she could see the orange tiled roof of number 18. She headed down the slope, calling the dog, and reached the dry stone wall at the end of the back lawn. Beyond the lawn was a swimming pool, and glass doors opening onto a deck. She was about to turn back, when Silvio ran ahead, found an open gate and appeared on the lawn. He lowered his head, sniffed, raised his head and looked at her. The white dog against the green lawn, legs squarely planted, like a Matisse
cut-out
, and beyond him the wavering plastic blue of the pool. She walked towards him.

Like walking into something new, a world of perfect forms — white dog, green grass, the hushed air of a dream. What was the thing she looked for and couldn’t find? To cross the line, to find what lay beyond the colour and shimmer, the bright, block-like form of the world …

Eloise found she had entered the gate and was crossing the lawn, calling and shaking the leash. The glass door opened. A man came down
the steps and dumped a plastic bag in an outside bin. Eloise walked around the side of the swimming pool, calling Silvio. The man turned and stood looking at her, at ease, unhurried.

He was tall and slim, with broad shoulders and greying curly hair. He was wearing suit trousers, a white shirt, black shoes. He reached for the tea towel draped over his shoulder, and dried his fingers. His hands were square, blunt, unusually large.

Eloise hesitated. Using Google, she’d found his picture on his practice website. In person, he looked different. Those big hands. Had she seen him somewhere before?

‘Nice dog.’

‘Sorry. This is Silvio. We were on the mountain. He has no respect for private property.’

The man smiled, a lazy, benign expression. Not bothered. He was almost turning away.

‘I’m sorry, are you … Dr Lampton?’

He turned to face her.

‘Dr Simon Lampton?’

Silvio sat down. He looked from one human face to the other. The swimming pool filter made a rhythmic, slopping sound and an intricate pattern of sunlight played on the white weatherboards behind Simon Lampton’s head. His face was suntanned, weathered, his eyes were sharply fixed on her. He shifted position, carefully pulled the tea towel off his shoulder and gathered it in his big hands.

‘Have we met?’

‘No.’

He made a slight gesture, a twitch of the shoulders, dismissive, impatient.

Eloise put her hand flat on Silvio’s head. She swallowed. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t …’

Now he looked at her with closer attention. She could see him
shifting gear: this was no longer a meaningless encounter. It was some sort of
situation
. When he spoke his voice had a clipped, professional edge.

‘Is everything all right?’

‘Sorry.’ She bent down, put her hands on her knees.

‘Do you need help?’

Eloise thought about it. ‘Yes.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I feel dizzy. Can’t breathe.’

‘Here, sit down.’

He guided her to a wooden seat. His tone had softened. ‘Do you have medication? An inhaler?’

‘I’m all right now.’

‘Allergies?’

He sat beside her and put two fingers on her wrist. She looked at the crisp white material of his shirt, his chunky silver cuff-links. He smelled of clean clothes, aftershave. They sat, listening. He let go her wrist, looked her in the eyes and said, ‘Still breathless?’

His expression was serious, respectful.

‘Sorry. No.’ Eloise squeezed her eyes shut. ‘There’s nothing wrong. At least not physically — it’s more psychological.’

He stood up. ‘Ah.’

‘Have you got time to talk?’

‘Actually, not at the moment. I’m pretty busy. My wife’s in the kitchen, we’re about to have some people over.’

Silence. He waited, then said, ‘Do you live around here? I haven’t seen you.’

‘No.’

After a while he looked at his watch. ‘If you’re okay, maybe you could take this nice dog, Silvio, did you call him, and finish his run. Do you think? The gate’s open down there.’

‘I’m not mad.’

‘No. I’m sure. But I’d better be getting on with things, so …’

There was a woman’s voice inside the house, the sound of a door closing.

‘I wanted to talk about the man I used to live with.’

Now he had a little exasperated laugh in his voice as he said, ‘I’m really not the person for that.’ He stood over her and she looked up at him, his arms crossed, his face set with wary calculation. He looked competent, tough, his expression closed, calmly set against her, deciding how most safely and efficiently to deal with her. He was checking her out, trained eyes measuring available data, at the same time edging away. He was used to dealing with ‘situations’, appropriately, within ethical and professional guidelines, all that. He was also coolly searching his memory, since she’d mentioned his name —
query
: some odd acquaintance of his wife? Patient? Stalker? Eloise could see him considering all this, so it was with a weird sense of comedy that she said, ‘Can I come in?’

He raised his hands, palms outward, fingers up. ‘We’re busy at the moment. My wife and I, like I said, we’ve got people coming. Would you like me to call someone for you?’

‘Okay. I’m fine now. Made a mistake.’ She picked up Silvio’s lead.

‘Breathing okay?’

‘Yes, fine thanks. I’m sorry.’

She walked away over the lawn, turning once to look back. He was watching her and raised a hand. Making sure she got off his property.

‘Come on, Silvio.’ She herded the dog into the car, agitated, in a hurry to get away. The drive ahead seemed too far, it would take ages, too long before she could sit down, think, get her head straight …

She sat at the lights, cursing the slow traffic. A giant, bloated snake of motorway lay between her and the peninsula, every inch of it crammed.

You’re running away
.

Getting your head straight: what did that mean? Relax, sit yourself down. Open a bottle. There you go: an interlude of clarity and calm before the gradual increase in speed, the enjoyable lurches into sentimentality, melodrama, delusions (of coolness, charisma, rich bravado), the end dash towards the vortex. What was not to like?

She sped on; here came the three-lane roundabout and motorway junction at Highway Ra, one of the most famously testing intersections in the city. At rush hour it was a maelstrom, requiring maximum aggression, a take-no-prisoners poise. She accelerated, forcing her way into the right-turn lane
comme d’habitude
, but then something happened. She changed her mind.

There was resistance. There was an emphatic blast of horns. There were forearms twirled out of windows, shouts. But the Honda shot through the gap between two trucks, cut off a taxi and dodged a bus. Forcing a Holden to brake hard, she made it to the other side. Silvio tried to stay upright, his claws scrabbling on the seat. Eloise turned left.

She drove to the road at the base of Mt Eden.

The tiny Honda seemed to hesitate and cough, as if to gird itself, before bouncing over the cattle stop and entering the park road. Then it rallied, and whirred bravely up to the top of the volcanic cone.

They sat in the grass above Arthur’s flat. Below the slopes, the suburbs lay in grids, and lights were beginning to come on in the wooden houses. Arthur’s deck was in shade and the sunset was like an advancing army, banners of red cloud above the dark line, all motionless, as if painted on the taut canvas of the sky — all as still as the single, tiny star above the horizon, and the pale moon.

Eloise talked, Silvio listened. All those stars. Some of them are dead, but they are so far away that their light is still reaching us. The night sky glitters, Silvio, but it doesn’t move. Except for the fleeting passage of shooting stars and the steady, beetling progress of satellites,
the firmament appears frozen. When you go outside the city, to a place beyond light pollution, the millions of stars are arrayed with such cold, dense fixity that they make life on earth seem impossible. Flowers, colour, skin, fur, softness, swiftness, movement, your beautiful woolly coat, Silvio. How? By what strange fluke? Extraordinary that such things exist or survive when you look up at the mineral blackness, the diamond-studded infinity.

She talked, Silvio listened, until Arthur’s deck was lost in shadows, and the sunset deepened, and began to pour itself like lava down the curved back of the world.

Eloise received a text from Klaudia. Hers was the last appointment of the day, and the office had just had its driveway concreted. Klaudia sought to warn her that she would have to climb around the wet cement by holding onto the white pole at the gate.

Having easily achieved the manoeuvre with the white pole she went inside and met Klaudia in the hallway. The therapist was hitching up her trouser leg and peering at her shoe.

Klaudia straightened. ‘I went out on an errand, when I came back I stood in the concrete. The men were angry with me, but they’d put no warning sign, no plank over. I walked in it and they had to redo the concrete. That’s why I texted you.’

‘Do you want me to come in now?’

‘Yes, yes.’ She limped in and sat behind the desk, shaking her head, frowning. The workmen had been annoyed with her; she was embarrassed, flustered. She said, ‘It was my fault but it was their fault, too. There was no sign.’

‘Are you … wearing concrete shoes?’

‘No. It’s fine. How are you, Eloise?’

‘I’m still having trouble sleeping …’

Eloise was in mid-sentence when she saw it: the widening of the nostrils, the gradual tensing of the jaw and neck as Klaudia, with the utmost delicacy, suppressed a yawn.

It
was
hot in here. The sun was shining directly in, dust motes turning in the light. Klaudia thrust her shoulder forward, bent her elbows, clenched her fists, covertly stretching.

Eloise said hurriedly, ‘Can I put something to you? A hypothetical question.’

‘Of course. Just a moment.’ Klaudia got up and limped across the room. Eloise tried to get a look at her shoes. She’d started talking in a rush, Klaudia nodding, while under the desk perhaps the cement was hardening around her foot. Would she have to lever her shoe off with a chisel?

Klaudia stood by the door, a hand up to her neck, moving her shoulders. ‘Right. Where were we?’ She sat down again, fluttered her eyes, and put a hand politely up to her mouth.

Eloise took a tissue from the box on the desk. Obviously she needed to take things up a notch. ‘Do you think confiding is important? The mere fact that you’ve told at least one other person?’

Klaudia paused, considered. ‘Put it this way, Eloise. Why do we suffer when we are prevented from telling our true story? It has to be existentially important.’

‘Klaudia, if you perceived that your mother would be indifferent to your death, wouldn’t that be one of the most frightening things you could contemplate?’

Klaudia held her pen above the page.

‘That would be the abyss, wouldn’t it.’

‘Go on?’

Eloise looked at the terrace outside. There was no sign of the rat. ‘Not your stepmother or adoptive mother or wicked aunt. Your
mother
. Wouldn’t care if you died.’

‘I am listening.’

‘And it’s not because …’ Eloise paused, trying to reign herself in, and gave up, ‘it’s not because she’s a junkie or an alcoholic, or poverty stricken, or a battered wife. And it’s not because you’re autistic or schizophrenic or because you’re violent towards her. There’s no reason like that. You’re her child and she wouldn’t care if you disappeared for good.’

Klaudia was looking out at the bricks now, too. Summoning the rat perhaps. Wanting the rat to show up for moral support. For light relief.

‘Her wish would be unnatural, wouldn’t it?
Against nature
,’ Eloise said, sweating.

‘Sure,’ Klaudia said. ‘A mother is supposed to love her child.’

‘And wouldn’t it also be an invitation to suicide? For the child?’

‘Why so?’

‘Philosophically. If you came from your mother and she hates you, then you hate yourself.’

Klaudia placed the tips of her fingers on the desk and frowned down. She swallowed. ‘In your theoretical scenario, Eloise, the mother doesn’t necessarily hate the child; she hates an aspect of herself. She is not seeing the child, she is seeing a projection of herself, that blinds her to the real person. She cannot see outside herself.’

‘Or, she just hates the child.’

‘But if to love your children is natural, perhaps there is something to make this mother unnatural — a pathology that prevents normal emotion.’

‘If the mother’s a freak then the child’s a freak,’ Eloise said.

‘No one is a freak here. There is neuroticism.’

‘It’s the abyss.’

Klaudia gently smiled. ‘It’s an old abyss. One that can be left behind. It’s possible to be on a different mountain now.’

‘With only a can of worms to eat,’ Eloise said.

Klaudia looked down, curled one hand and glanced at her fingernails.

Looking at your nails was a sign of boredom, wasn’t it? Eloise had a sense of sorrowful comedy. What a funny life Klaudia must have. Dealing with an endless parade of bores and creeps and nutcases, and, meanwhile, what was going on in
her
life? What pains and tics and doubts, what waves of ennui. Not to mention the concrete now hardening on her shoes.

What did it mean when you started to feel sorry for your shrink? You start out all beady-eyed and vigilant, suspecting she’s the Harold Shipman of her profession (or your mother) and within no time you’re bleary-eyed with sympathy and ready to tip-toe away, so sorry for the agony you’re putting her through.

Klaudia stared out at the bricks and said, ‘You mention philosophical questions. In fact, it’s Shakespearean.’

Eloise paused. Shakespearean: that was quite good, wasn’t it? Better than being told your issues were trivial. It was nearly as good as biblical.

‘Can I ask you another hypothetical question, Klaudia? If I wrote you letters, what would you do with them?’

‘I would read them and put them in your file.’

‘And they’d be confidential.’

‘Of course.’

‘What if I gave you a document written by someone else? Would you put that in the file and keep it confidential?’

Klaudia turned her head on one side, with the expression she had, of listening to something very faint, a long way off. ‘I am not sure what you are suggesting?’

‘What if I gave you something that relates to my state of mind — showed it to you to demonstrate how I’m feeling. Would you keep it locked in my file?’

‘Yes, I would.’

‘And keep it confidential?’

‘Of course.’

Eloise experienced a gap, a beat of time, in which she thought nothing. They were both looking out at the mossy bricks, and beyond, the wind flipping the leaves, making them shine. The sky was hard, clean, bright.

‘My neighbour and I, Nick. We might have started something.’

‘Oh, a relationship?’

‘I went over to his house.’

‘But weren’t you afraid, after hearing the voice in his house?’

‘I got drunk. Dutch courage.’

‘Is that wise? It is better to make important choices when you are sober. Especially choices about your safety.’

‘I don’t feel safe being alone.’

‘But still. Have you heard the voice again?’

A sudden needle of pain in her head made Eloise hesitate before saying, ‘Do you believe in ghosts, Klaudia?’

‘No. But perhaps the dead are present to us.’

‘I let Arthur down.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Klaudia, if I gave you a whole file, would you keep it for me?’

‘Of course, Eloise. If you think it would help. Where is this file?’

‘I’ve hidden it. I’d have to bring it to you.’

Klaudia’s smile, so wolfishly pretty, lit up her face. ‘Of course. No problem.’ She gave her thigh a little slap, and a cloud of dust rose, sparkling, into the air.

‘We have made great progress, Eloise,’ she said.

‘Some, Silvio, have called my problems Shakespearean.’

They were down in the laundry. Eloise measured out a cup of dry, smelly biscuits.

‘Here you go. Here’s your dinner that you hate.’

Silvio sniffed, unenthusiastic.

‘I can see why you’re not keen. You want a bone. A steak. A chop. But Carina says these give you the full range of nutrients.’

Silvio looked at her with his golden eyes.

‘I know. You’re saying you’re not a hen. You’re not a mouse. You don’t want
pellets
for dinner. Only thing is Silv, I haven’t got anything else.’

The dog lowered his long nose into the silver bowl and stirred its contents.

Eloise watched. She was thinking about Klaudia — again. Always brooding about Klaudia. Would erotic transference come next? Turning up at Klaudia’s house, asking for a date. Or her hand in marriage. It was true, Klaudia did have very nice blonde hair. And a pleasingly sly, characterful face …

She directed a wry smile at Silvio. Dogs, Carina had told her, can read faces. They can distinguish a frown from a grin.

The dog crunched up his pretend meat, dry as dust. The fur on his legs was black. That morning, while he was sniffing near the blackened toe toe, a cloud of ash had formed itself into a cone beside him, and whirled away along the peninsula.

Godspeed.

It’s Shakespearean, Silvio. You come from your mother. If your mother doesn’t love you, it sends a powerful message. Nature is whispering, You don’t belong. You are, in the Shakespearean sense, ‘unkind’ — inhuman, unnatural. It feels like a malign invitation. It feels like a glimpse into the Godless universe, into the void.