Starlight Peninsula (8 page)

‘Is there any actual evidence for who leaked against Dance?’

‘Not yet. But I bet it was Ed Miles — backed by the Hallwright faction. Hallwright wants Dance out and Miles in. Dance’s denied he knew about illegal spying, but having to deny it made him look bad, right. So the fight’s on.’

‘The Opposition are saying there’s going to be proof that Dance knew, that he acted illegally. Someone’s armed Bradley Kirk with some dirt.’

‘So Dance will be looking for ways to shaft Miles in return. Any dirt on Miles.’

‘Presumably,’ Scott said. ‘And there’s something else, too. Last night my friend Mrs Twitcher told me to stand by for information about Baby O’Keefe.’

‘The father? Is someone going to leak that as well?’

‘There’s not much else to the story other than who’s the daddy. We can only hope he’s not a civilian.’

‘Cos we want the fall-out.’

‘Yeah, the hoped-for fall-out.’

Eloise said slowly, ‘With everyone talking about it, the fact that she hasn’t named the father suggests …’

‘That it’s someone who doesn’t want to admit it. Or maybe she just quite rightly thinks it’s no one’s bloody business.’

‘Maybe it’s a sperm donor.’

‘She’s a workaholic. The whole thing about her is that she’s sexy as hell but she’s married to the job. Lives and breathes policy. Mad for
select committees and late-night debates. She only hangs out with politicians. If it’s not a sperm donor, it’ll be one of them.’

Scott stared out the window. After a long pause he clenched his fists and said, ‘Children need a father.’

‘Oh. Right …’

‘I, I love my children so much, it’s crazy. You’ll find out, Eloise. If,
when
, you and Sean decide to have kids, it’s the most wonderful, the most marvellous thing you can do. You find yourself immersed, just
surrounded
by love. Just the other day Thee and I …’

Eloise half-listened. She was remembering the person hidden behind Kurt Hartmann’s eyes. How many of us are living so deep below the surface, no one knows who we are?

Out on the northwestern, the gridlocked traffic queued and slowed. By the time they got back, Mariel Hartfield was up on the big screen at reception, sleepily gorgeous in a tight black jacket, and halfway through reading the evening news.

Anita O’Keefe wasn’t telling. Satan Dance wasn’t commenting. Ed Miles, the Minister of Justice, was available and was commenting: ‘I will not review my decision to deny Andrew Newgate compensation for the ten years he spent in prison.’

And later in the bulletin, Ed Miles appeared again: ‘The Opposition,’ he said, ‘should put up or shut up. As far as I can see, there is no truth to the allegation that Prime Minster Dance acted outside his powers by allowing illegal spying on citizens. I do not, and never have had, leadership ambitions. I am one hundred per cent behind our current leader, Jack Dance.’

And now came the weather. The Sinister Doormat was predicting weather that would surprise us. It would surprise us by not changing. By going on day after day, giving us worryingly more of the same.

Along the peninsula, the air was hot and still. The iron roofs blazed with reflected evening sun, and the boardwalk was busy, a steady procession of dogs and owners making their way across the bridge to the dog park. Eloise was walking on the edge of the estuary. She shaded her eyes and squinted at the gulf, where the water lay silver and flat. Heading home for the first time in two days, she was thinking: Make a plan. It would be good to make a plan. But there was so much, so very much, that needed fixing.

Drink less. Find a hobby. Join a club. Meet a nice man. She passed one of the neighbours who’d tried to stamp out the fire on her lawn. The look he now gave her was scandalised, reproachful. Look at that glare. Go on, get your staring done.
Whatevs
.

She frowned. See, I love living by myself. Living alone: what a thrill.
The freedom. You can do what you. No need to answer to. When the impulse takes you, you can …

The migraine had gone but its effect had lingered — rawness, dizziness, a feeling of teetering at the edge of a cliff. At one point during the night at Carina’s a shaft of darkness had split her vision, as if a door had opened, and she’d seen the shape of a man, blacker than the darkness, at the end of the bed. She lay watching the black figure, her whole body poisoned with adrenaline, until he passed across the room and was gone. She dreamed that behind the fabric of the night there was a deeper blackness, only glimpsed when the night had frayed. When she woke in Carina’s spare room she was wired, exhausted, with a yearning for touch so strong she would even have hugged smelly Silvio, if he’d snuffled his way onto the bed.

She had woken with a memory, of a story in a book Arthur had given her a long time ago. But who was the author?

Now, just off the bus, she was carrying a DVD of Kurt Hartmann’s hip hop tracks, a vegetable curry hot pot, a box of Panadol Extra, a memory stick of interview notes, and a bottle of chardonnay. She passed two boys hauling up a bait-catcher on the edge of the creek, the plastic cylinder filled with writhing sprats. She thought: Yoga. Meditation. The whole mindfulness thing. Or Nick’s hobby: search and rescue. Finding lost kids, bewildered oldies. Camaraderie. The satisfaction of it. Their relief and gratitude.

Book clubs. Karate?

Now she came up against the singed bushes, the new line of black at the boundary of her property. Nick, at least, had taken the fire calmly. She summoned up his face: strong jaw, clear blue eyes, slightly rough skin. A tall, lean figure, thin even. Ruggedness mixed with a gentle manner: that was an appealing combination.

She looked up at the blank windows of the stucco house. A layer of the world was hidden from her. She’d thought her marriage was solid,
that Andrew Newgate was an innocent man, that Mariel Hartfield and Jack Anthony hated each other. That there was no sense in wondering about the death of Arthur Weeks. Was it her own fault that she was lost? Had she been wilfully blind?

The evening light shone on the blackened bushes and the sooty base of the toe toe; the air was full of shining dust. Beyond the line of gardens the estuary stretched away to the horizon, crossed by ripples as the tide turned. Eloise walked on under the high light sky, hearing the cries of seagulls, the shouts of children on the playing field along the peninsula road, melancholy sounds, distant in the summer evening. The air still smelled of fire.

Nick came down the side of his house, dragging a load of cut ponga fern fronds. He was in jeans, sunburnt, his eyes bloodshot from the dust and sun, his hair messy. The light was turning golden behind him, dust and fern fibres floating in the air, and he stood scratching his head and looking at her with a slightly dopey smile.

‘Where you been? You been away?’

‘No. Oh yes, I stayed a night at … a friend’s.’

She went on, awkward, ‘I nearly knocked on your door the other night, after you’d gone home. But you had someone with you.’

He dumped his load on the ground. ‘Oh?’

‘A tall guy, black hair. I came across the lawn and saw you, and thought I’d better leave you to it.’

‘You should have come over. Did you interview the mogul?’

‘We did. The house is incredible. We fed his chickens.’

‘Chickens?’

A pause. Stupid grin on her face. She tried to frown.

He said, ‘Why don’t you come over tonight and tell me all about it?’

‘I’ve got work to do.’

‘Come over when you’ve finished.’

‘Well, thanks.’ She turned to go. ‘The man in your house …’

‘Which evening was it? A man did come over. He was a cop, asking about the stucco house. I said I’d never noticed anything untoward.’

‘Did he have a tattoo on his hand?’

‘A tattoo? I didn’t notice. Why?’

‘I thought I’d seen him somewhere, I can’t remember where.’

Nick shrugged.

She shouldered her bag.

‘Might see you later then?’ he called after her.

The door was deadlocked. She used both keys and entered the cool, dim hallway, closing the door behind her, and passed into the sitting room, where the evening light was casting a rhombus of tangerine light on the wall. She set out her shopping on the bench, turned on the television, then changed her mind and switched it off again.

She listened: the ticking of an art deco clock Sean’s mother had given them. The fridge motor. A car driving up the peninsula road. She turned the television on again. The Sinister Doormat, her face rendered more sepulchral by a tight ponytail, was standing in front of the weather map, predicting the usual: no rain.

Listening, she walked through the hallway to the internal garage door, checking rooms, behind doors, even, with a flustered shake of her head, how stupid, opening cupboards and looking behind beds.

Outside, the low sun picked out bare branches along the fence. From the estuary there was a flash off a boat, glass catching the last rays. The Doormat was now addressing a chart decorated with rows of little yellow suns. Eloise drifted to the windows and watched the children out on the path. One boy had his bait-catcher slung over his shoulder, the other carried a stalk of toe toe, like a spear against the blue sky.

She poured herself a glass of wine and walked around the rest of the ground floor, noticing a trail of Silvio’s and the Sparkler’s black footprints in the hall, the Sparkler’s handprints on a glass door, on a coffee table. The Sparkler’s drawings on scraps of paper in the sitting
room. Evidence of a crime: Silvio had, in an idle moment, gnawed a wooden edge of the steps.

At the bottom of the stairs, she stood with a hand on her stomach, thinking of Hine at work, who, in the café that evening, had taken Eloise’s hand and pressed it to the hard mound of her stomach, the skin suddenly, astonishingly, moving under Eloise’s fingers, making her jump and pull her hand away.

‘So freaky!’ they all said, wanting to feel again. The baby was pushing its foot against Hine’s stomach. You could feel the hard bulge moving under the skin. Imagine it. The presence inside you.

‘Alien,’ someone said.

Stop thinking about babies.

Speaking of babies, she had kept up her surveillance of Anita O’Keefe. Her latest theory was holding: that the father of Baby O’Keefe was Prime Minister Dance, married father of adult children and secret lover of the beautiful young Minister for Social Development, whose travels around the country, revealed on Twitter and Facebook, used to, before the pregnancy, mirror his own. That was the theory anyway. But stop thinking about babies.

Eloise was on the stairs. She looked out the window at a patch of dry grass and a pepper tree, its long shadow crossing the garden. Ahead on the landing, the door to her bedroom was open. She entered the room and saw that the window to the balcony was closed, that all was tidy and unstained, the Sparkler and Silvio not having passed this way. She heard whispering behind her.

In the bathroom a tap was running a thin stream of cold water. She turned it off, returned to the bedroom and sat down to take off her shoes. A cushion had fallen on the floor. She picked it up and noticed that the door of the cabinet next to her bed was open. The book she’d been reading was not on the top of the pile. She searched, found the book at the back of the cabinet, behind the stack.

How had it moved?

Everything was uncertain, as mysterious as a migraine dream. In the next room she found the book she’d been trying to recall: Arthur’s copy of a collection of Chekhov stories. She sat down on a deckchair on the upstairs balcony to read:

The sun was going down behind the stucco house, the windows blazing with reflected light.

I can’t stay here.

But her phone was ringing.

‘Hang on a second,’ she said half an hour later, and tilted the wine bottle. The level seemed oddly low. She filled her glass. ‘Go on.’

‘I said to him, You say Pilger lacks balance. I say … I say Pilger has a point of view. He
cares
. He cares and he has a point of view and he
gives
it to you. He
socks
you right between the eyes. And I said, So
what is
this thing you call balance? Do we
always
need to provide the other point of view? Tell me this. What if there
isn’t
another point of view? What if there’s just
the truth
? Know what I mean?’

Eloise, who had been looking at the ceiling, allowed her chair to fall gently back onto its four legs.

‘E? You still there?’

She sipped, swallowed and said, ‘You get sick of the endless “on the one hand, on the other hand”. Sometimes there’s just the truth.’

‘Exactly.
Exactly
. I knew you’d … But we need balance to assess the truth. We need a balanced attitude. As I said to Thee …’

She drank, tilted back her chair, listened. Scott roamed away from his central point, came back to it, veered off again. She liked the sound of his voice. She loved the fact that he was talking. In fact, at that moment she loved
him
, tireless Scott: his enthusiasm, his goodness.

Keep talking
.

‘Now, Pilger on the Aborigines. It’s searing stuff. I’m not saying there’s
never
another point of view. Obviously some things are subtle and you’ve got to cover the whole picture. But to dismiss it out of hand just because you want “two sides of the story”. I said, Mate. There’s a place for belief. There’s a place for
anger
.’

Balance, she thought. Balance. Her mind wandered and she was back in Dr Klaudia Dvorak’s office at the rear of the old Herne Bay shop, the French doors open to the garden. Eloise was talking, elaborating, and something had caught her eye out there in the garden, a movement.

This was true: while she was sitting with Klaudia, a large, pale brown rat had emerged from under a mound of leaves, and begun sniffing around the edge of the patio. Eloise didn’t stop talking, she droned seamlessly on, all the while watching the big, sleek rat picking its way through the undergrowth. Its nose so busy, its progress so cautious … While talking, she’d considered mentioning the rat, decided it wasn’t relevant, and carried on without missing a beat.

I edited out the rat
. And if she was editing, was there balance? How could she know she was telling Klaudia the truth? Wasn’t it all selective,
and didn’t any conclusion Klaudia drew from their discussions depend entirely on Eloise’s subjective take? She wondered if
balance
was a question she could raise with Klaudia herself.

‘Know what I mean?’ Scott said.

‘Totally,’ she said into the phone.

It really was surprising, the way the wine seemed to be emptying itself out of the bottle. There was soft twilight outside the window, the black horizon seamed with orange and gold, a wavering stain of light on the water. People hurrying home with the last of the sunset.

Listening, the phone held in the crook of her neck, Eloise reached up to the very top kitchen shelf and edged a gin bottle into her fingers. She nearly over-balanced as Scott went on, ‘Have you watched Hartmann’s hip hop tracks? He does the whole gangsta DJ thing. Stupid backwards cap and bling, all that. The songs are absolute shit but the girls in hot pants are amazing.’

Eloise primly slid the wine bottle back into the fridge. Best not to finish it off. You don’t want to overdo things. She upended a slug of gin into her glass, and searched in the fridge for tonic.

She poured, sipped and said in a thick voice, ‘He’s being a Man of the People. He talks about the People reclaiming the internet. He doesn’t mention how much money he makes out of the revolution.’

‘Mmm,’ Scott yawned.

He was fading. Eloise said quickly, ‘He’s got his political ambitions.’

‘Right.’ Scott livened up. ‘Totally opportunistic ones. He wants to prevent his extradition, right. Like I said to Thee …’

Eloise tilted back in her chair, fixed her eyes on the ceiling.

It was late when he finally hung up. She was by the lamp, in a little bubble of light. Beyond its glow the darkness seemed to throb, as if in time with her heartbeat. She pitched herself forward and up, into the warm shadows. As she went around the room turning on the lights, her heart, which was already racing with the alcohol, sped up so fast
it ached. In the estuary the water reflected the lights of a fishing boat, making its way out to sea.

Her chest hurt. She felt odd. But when had she last eaten anything? She and Scott had dipped into a bowl of chewy lollies at Kurt Hartmann’s; that was it. No wonder she felt light-headed. She found her shopping, selected the packaged curry meal and slid it into the microwave, watching it revolve on its glass plate. She turned, and her eyes fell on the book she’d been reading when Scott rang, the Chekhov story called ‘The Black Monk’.