Starlight Peninsula (3 page)

‘I don’t know. Yell at him. Punch him. It’s not rational. None of it’s
rational.’ She tipped back the glass, drank. Strange, it was nearly empty. ‘I’m not looking for him in order to punch him,’ she added.

‘I understand.’

‘What do you understand?’

‘The impulse. To go looking.’

She stared. ‘Really?’

‘Sure. I split up with someone not long ago.’

‘You’ve got me drunk again.’

‘You’re fine.’

Eloise felt a slackening, she wasn’t able to shut up. ‘My marriage was a cure. A barrier. A remedy.’

‘For what?’

She whispered, ‘Grief.’

‘I see. For a previous relationship?’

‘He
died
.’

‘Oh. Sorry. Did he have an illness?’

She looked sadly at her glass. He filled it.

‘I shouldn’t drink this.’

‘Yolo.’

She snorted. ‘Did you just say “yolo”?’

‘Go on, tell me about it.’

‘My partner, before Sean, he was found dead outside his flat with his neck broken. The police found he’d been taking pills for insomnia, and they thought he might have sleepwalked. There was a flimsy wire fence; he fell against it and it gave way. He went over the retaining wall.’

Silence. The sudden deep barking of a dog along the peninsula.

‘It was strange.’

‘Why?’

‘He never sleepwalked. He might have taken the odd pill, but they told me he took a huge dose. The police told me he had a bruise on his thigh. They never found out how he got it.’

‘So what do you think happened?’

‘I don’t know. Arthur was a journalist. We both worked in TV, that’s how I met him, just after I’d done my communications degree at AUT. He was older than me.’

‘Was he an investigative journalist?’

‘He did all sorts of things, TV One current affairs, wrote for
Metro
and
North & South
. Worked on screenplays. We were living between his flat and mine. I was about to leave mine permanently and move into his. That morning I’d been in Sydney, I went straight to his flat from the airport.’

She paused, sipped her drink. It was the crime scene at the house next door that had brought it back. Summer. A hot morning on the side of Mt Eden. Towing her suitcase up the hill to Arthur’s, she’d passed a man wearing a white boiler suit and a shower cap, his shoes encased in bags. When she stopped outside Arthur’s gate a group of people with notebooks looked towards her. They’d been clustered at the top of the retaining wall, looking down.

Opening the flat she went in, called out, walked around. The rooms were full of sunlight. The doorbell rang.

On Arthur’s front steps a blonde woman, a detective, asked for her name and spoke strange words. ‘A man has been found dead. We haven’t identified him. We’ve had a suggestion from a resident he might live here.’

They took her to him. He’d fallen against the rickety wire fence and gone over when it gave way. He was lying on the hot asphalt terrace below the retaining wall. She saw his thin ankles, one dusty shoe come off. She wasn’t allowed to touch him, but she saw that his eyes were closed, his mouth was pursed as if in shock or surprise, and a part of his skull was broken and sticking up out of his matted, bloody hair in a triangular shard.

After that, the morning had turned unreal, toy-coloured. There
were seams of evil pulsing behind the sky. Eloise stood on Arthur’s back deck looking at the grassy mountainside, the walking track winding to the summit. There were police up there, searching through the waving grass, pacing along the path, inspecting the wire fence and the stile. She turned to the detective and said, ‘Why are they up there? You must think it wasn’t an accident.’

‘We don’t know anything at this stage.’

She remembered arguing, ‘But they’re looking for clues. Why go searching up the mountain if it was an accident? Do you think someone hurt Arthur then ran up there?’

‘We don’t know.’

The blonde woman detective and her partner drove Eloise away from Arthur’s flat and into Central Police Station. She was distracted by the woman detective’s odd-coloured eyes: one blue, one brown.

‘After he died everything was terrifying. I was afraid all the time. I went back to living in a flat my father owned. I got burgled. Or someone broke in, anyway. They didn’t take anything.’

‘That’s bad luck.’

‘It
was
bad luck. I knew that’s all it was, but it made me even more scared. I met Sean and he seemed so solid. That’s what attracted me, he was all wholesomeness and muscles and honesty, like a big strong bodyguard. Honesty, so I thought. I didn’t know at first that he was rich, that he had family money. That’s how we got the house so quickly. Which we now have to sell. We got married quite quickly. I blotted Arthur out. We were close, happy. And now my marriage, all that I built up between me and ruin — it’s gone.’

‘So you have to confront the past. It hasn’t gone away.’

‘It might kill me.’

Nick topped up her glass. ‘It won’t kill you.’

‘You think?’

‘No, it’s good to look back. Helps sort out the present and future.
Stop walking the earth and confront the situation. I’ll tell you something, when my ex and I broke up, I was depressed, couldn’t sleep. I was angry. She told me to see someone about it, and I ignored her. Maybe I shouldn’t have.’

He splashed a large helping into his own glass, leaned back and put his shoes up on the glass coffee table. ‘You know, the dog that howls, the one you think is a wolf.’

‘Yes?’

‘See, it may just be a husky.’

Something had wormed its way into her chest and was pinning her down, making her writhe like a speared fish. It was early morning, and it was foggy. She was in her bedroom, the glass door to the upstairs deck was open, the white curtain not stirring. Silence, no wind. The dog park was shrouded in mist, the city buildings a grey blur on the horizon. It came back to her, how much she’d drunk, how much of herself she’d given away. To someone she didn’t know.

Oh God, she’d made a fool of herself with the wine and the fright of the police raid next door, and then the brandy tipping her over the edge. The vile taste of it now rose in her throat and lit up her chest with a miserable sick heat. The memory swam up: walking back to her gate with Nick, raising her voice. ‘They asked you to look for the
other half
of
someone? The police wouldn’t invite search and rescue volunteers into a crime scene.’

‘They do, we’ve been trained. We follow their lead, don’t touch, just look. If we find something we call them over.’

And her repeating, ‘It can’t be true.’

Remember what Sean used to say,
When you’re drunk, Eloise, you’re like a dog with a bone
.

Nick standing straight, looking down at her. ‘You calling me a liar?’

‘A crime scene. I don’t know …’

Later she’d said, ‘Anyway, you think a husky. Not a wolf?’

He said, ‘If you’re going for a walk tomorrow, why don’t we look for your wolf together?’

Going for a walk. That so didn’t cover what she’d been doing. Had she said no to his offer to come along?

One thing she was sure about: no more drinking. Not for at least two days.

She walked out onto the deck and stared at the white world. There were banners of mist hanging around the trees and in the east the obscured sun was a silver disk, surrounded by a ring of light. It was going to be hot. Silence and stillness along the peninsula. The fog muffled sounds. Two shapes, a man and a dog, crossed the bridge to the park, disappearing into swirls of air. She watched the vapour rearrange itself behind them.

It was impossible to see if the tide was in, and the dog park was hidden, but she was close enough to the stucco house to catch sight of a person in one of the upstairs rooms. The figure moved past a window, appeared at another, and disappeared. Eloise waited, but there was no further sign of life.

Down in the kitchen she turned on the TV and watched a clip of Minister Anita O’Keefe being interviewed on the introduction of her families package, involving tax credits, a baby bonus, and legislation
governing liable parent arrangements. The minister fielded questions smoothly. Brushing off a final enquiry, on a certain magazine’s insinuations about the paternity of her unborn child, she managed to seem both steely and poised. She would not comment, of course.

Of course. Eloise stooped, and rested her cheek on the cold bench top. Outside the air whirled and collapsed in on itself, the sky fallen onto the lawn. A seagull landed, edging along the deck rail on its red feet, and Eloise opened the glass door and threw it a crust. Screams as more gulls bombed down onto the deck, scrapping over the bread.

Prime Minister Jack Dance appeared in the studio endorsing O’Keefe’s package, before moving on to his core message: Opposition leader Bradley Kirk was so unpopular he’d lost control of his caucus, so busy dealing with internal wrangling and ‘chaos among his members’, he was unable to lead his own party.

‘It’s bedlam on the Opposition side, I’m afraid,’ said Dance, whose public nickname was Satan.

The news crossed live to Wellington and a shot of the Beehive. There was a barber’s chair set up on the sunny forecourt outside Parliament, and Richie Carter, the youngest member of the Opposition shadow cabinet, stood beside it, two girls in matching T-shirts holding his arms. Carter’s smile was forced. A jokey spiel from reporter Chad Going: Carter had been volunteered by his leader, Bradley Kirk, to have his head shaved as a fundraiser for Cancer Research. Kirk himself would do the shaving, and now appeared wielding a hedge trimmer. A laborious joke. Eloise sipped her tea as Kirk roguishly posed for the cameras. Then he took up a hairdresser’s razor and started shaving off the young man’s hair.

Oh how hilarious. Carter began to look smaller as his hair came off, his pale scalp showing, his reddened ears sticking out.

The camera panned back and there was a shot of the crowd, among them Anita O’Keefe and a junior woman MP, who was filming the proceedings on an iPhone, and laughing.

Eloise went on thinking about it in the shower. It was for a cause. You shaved your head to raise money, in solidarity with those who lost their hair through chemotherapy. But who gets shaved against their will? Prisoners, collaborators, traitors. The subjugated.

Opposition leader Bradley Kirk was famously a nice guy, his niceness one of the reasons why his leadership was being questioned. You wouldn’t pick him as a bully.

The older man humiliates the younger, while a beautiful woman watches. Sean would dismiss it as a lame stunt, ‘desperate stuff from Labour’, because Sean votes National, because his family funds the National Party. Scott Roysmith will call it a selfless act of charity. What would Arthur have called it?

Atavistic, was the word she was looking for. Arthur would have said, What’s Carter done to piss Bradley Kirk off? And maybe, Who’s screwing who here? Arthur noticed details, things she missed. He would have seen something ancient and primitive and savage in it, something sexual.

The sun was rising, hot behind the fog. She walked around the outside of the stucco house. It was closed up, windows locked and the doors sealed with tape. So how could she have seen someone upstairs?

She set off, worried about running into Nick, walked towards Ponsonby, headed in the direction of Newmarket, then the waterfront. There was a thin covering of cloud over the sun but it soon burned off and the sea glittered, chemical blue. It was beautiful, but it was the wrong place. She turned inland, and kept walking.

To Maungawhau, Mt Eden, the highest cone, its green terraces rising steeply above the city. She turned onto a path that led between wooden fences and through suburban gardens, onto the hillside and up to the summit, where the coaches parked, and the tourists milled around, photographing the rock-strewn volcanic crater and the slopes
where Maori once built their pa and fought off marauding tribes, the view of suburbs stretching all the way south to the airport and north to the city. Haze of sun over the Sky Tower, shining dust.

She crossed the summit to the west, climbed a stile and walked down the hillside track. She had only been back twice since the morning Arthur died, both times to take away clothes she’d left there. The detective with the odd-coloured eyes had been with her. When the policewoman briefly left the room to talk on her cell phone Eloise, suddenly angry at being watched, and at being told she could take nothing of Arthur’s, pulled a file of his papers from under the desk and concealed it in the sports bag containing the clothes she’d collected. She’d taken it home and hidden it.

Now the track led through the long grass under a stand of trees and came out above the concrete deck where she and Arthur used to sit on summer mornings, listening to the sounds of the city below.

From here she had a view of the roof and the deck, the back door and the kitchen window. A wisteria vine grew up a trellis, and there was an orange beach towel hanging on a wooden chair. She left the path, treading carefully on the uneven ground, avoiding holes and stones hidden by the long grass. She recalled summer mornings waking with Arthur to the sounds of cicadas and birds, the scent of hot grass and pine through the open window. Arthur’s jokes and crazes, his obsessions. He would get up in the night and make notes. He said, ‘I’ll change my name to Abelard,’ and explained when she didn’t get it.

She stood on the hillside remembering, the patch of sun on the deck, light catching a metal water bowl left there for the cat, stillness, and she saw a man cross the deck and behind him Arthur getting up from the wooden chair, talking to the man who was just inside the kitchen now, Arthur pulling a leaf from the wisteria vine as he talked, rolling it between his fingers. Arthur’s eyes, his face, his thin body and long legs. Turning to follow the man, he kicked the metal bowl
of water, she caught the flash and shimmer of light. The door closing.

Eloise sat down in the long grass and watched the cloud shadows crossing the suburb. The cicadas sang so loud they had no meaning, no essence, only sound. The green mountain, once a plate of fire spilling lava, site of ancient wars, the clouds above it filtering sunlight, sending down the beams that Maori call the ropes of Maui. She lay in the grass and dreamed.

Killing time.

She was halfway along Karangahape Road when she remembered sitting in a room at the police station with the woman detective. Her name was Marie Da Silva. She had blonde hair, long at the back and sticking up like gold wire on top of her head. She had a male partner who seldom talked, only watched — she remembered his steady stare. Detective Da Silva showed her a note written by Arthur. In his scrawling handwriting in black felt pen, there were names divided by a forward slash.

‘This mean anything to you?’ Da Silva asked. ‘Do you know these names?’

Eloise, who had been silent, began to talk. Words spilled out of her. Arthur always had a lot of projects on the go. He wrote copious notes. He was working on a play. He was part of a team of writers on a TV comedy show. He was finishing a screenplay about a National Party prime minister. He wanted to plan his first novel. Arthur was a barrel of energy, he was curious about everything. He wanted to experience as much as possible, to come up against things, institutions, people. He was especially interested in politics. He wanted to write about right-wing politicians, and he wondered how he could get into their world, which he didn’t belong to.

The names he’d written down could relate to any of those projects.

She’d felt as if she were defending Arthur against a terrible accusation.

‘They’re not the names of politicians,’ the detective said, giving the list a push across the table. ‘Are they.’

There was some kind of question behind her question.

Eloise said, ‘You know who they are.’

‘Are you asking me if I do?’

‘It sounds as if you do,’ Eloise said. The detective’s eyes were disconcerting.

The detective tapped a finger on the paper. Her hands were small and neat. ‘I might know who one of them is. But you don’t?’

‘No.’

What Eloise remembered was feeling embarrassed afterwards that she’d said a ‘barrel of energy’. She’d meant a ‘ball’, got mixed up with ‘barrel of laughs’ and stumbled on, not correcting herself.

All that time gone by and still, today, she winced. As if anyone would have even noticed, barrel or ball.

Those hours in the police station, she’d felt she was defending Arthur against the suggestion that his death was his fault. But she’d turned away from detail, shielded herself from questions. She’d pushed the piece of paper back across the table, saying numbly, ‘I don’t know the names. I’ve got no idea.’

After they’d finished investigating and told her Arthur had been affected by sleeping pills and had probably fallen off the wall by accident, she hadn’t argued or asked questions, she’d accepted the verdict and carried on.

Already learning to live without him.

Evening on the peninsula. The walkers stood in groups while the dogs sniffed and chased. The tide was full, the estuary brimming, tips of the mangroves sticking out of the slow green water.

She put the laptop on her knees and Googled Detective Marie Da Silva. A few entries, mostly newspaper reports of criminal cases where
she was quoted giving evidence or making statements to media, a couple of pictures: there was the strong angular face, blonde hair, unmatched eyes, one blue, one brown. She didn’t look much older. No sign of her on Facebook or Twitter.

Absent-mindedly, Eloise wandered over to the kitchen and shoved a plastic pot of curry in the microwave. Waiting for the ping, she realised she’d already poured a glass of wine and drunk half of it, contrary to her earlier resolution, which meant she’d have to postpone not drinking until tomorrow, otherwise it wouldn’t be proper abstinence.

Resignedly drinking, she watched Mariel Hartfield, who was reading a news item about a plane crash. Beautiful Mariel with her rich, resonant voice, her face framed by thick, glossy black hair, the fringe slightly too long. Smooth brown skin, perfect full Maori mouth, those sleepy eyes.

Strange — might as well have another glass of wine — strange how newsreaders become celebrities. You go to AUT, get your journalism degree, work your way up through radio and TV, then they decide you can read the news and suddenly you’re a celeb and a national icon, and it’s all about what you’re wearing and what silly, ersatz names you call your kids and not much about the actual job: broadcasting the news. The latest
Woman’s Day
had ‘bubbly A-lister’ Mariel and her ‘hunky husband’ musing on the subject of ‘heritage’. ‘I’m a Mozzie,’ Mariel said, a Maori Aussie, brought up in Queensland, had to be persuaded to come here by her husband, ‘but now I’m in love with all things Kiwi, of course’.

Eloise watched the bulletin: crime, politics, crime, human interest, international, crime, crime. Tired, she drifted a little. She saw Arthur standing in front of the TV, ruffling his curly hair, making it stand on end. He said, ‘Listen.’

She sat up, tipping the plate sideways off her knees. Mariel was still talking. Her voice.

Listen.

But Satan Dance appeared, making a statement in Parliament. Eloise turned off the television. It was dusk; the sky was high, pale, a single star just becoming visible. She sat in the dark looking across to the dog park, where she could see figures moving against the sky. The laptop was beside her on the sofa. She picked it up and a photograph of Marie Da Silva appeared on a wall of Google images.