All Saints: Love and Intrigue in the Stunning New Zealand Wilderness (The New Zealand Soccer Referee Series Book 1) (8 page)

I caught
Vanessa on Tuesday morning as soon as her heels tapped into the front
reception. “I need to speak to you about one of my boys,” I said, standing in
her way and forcing her to deal with me. She nodded me into her office, her big
hair wobbling on her head and dumped her bags on the visitors’ chairs, denying
me a seat and daring me not to hang around too long.

“Lawrie Hopu is showing signs of
significant difficulties with social interactions and learning. He gets angry
and confused and doesn’t seem to know what’s going on half the time. I’d like
him assessed.”

“Join the queue!” Vanessa scoffed
and I saw the frustration in her face. She was as much a victim of the system
as Lawrie. “Unless his parents can pay, I’m afraid he’s stuck in the line, same
as the rest of the poor little buggers.” She ran a hand over her eye, smudging
her impeccable makeup. “Perhaps we should start a donations page and keep it
running for the duration of the school’s existence. I can’t touch the
operational budget for things which are clearly operational and then the
ministry ties my hands behind my back in all other matters.”

I nodded in sympathy. “I know.
But Lawrie’s urgent. I don’t have his kindy notes yet, but his behaviour is
escalating and yesterday he terrified some of the other children with the level
of violence he exhibited. Physically restraining him opens up a raft of other
problems.” I bit my lip and prayed none of the other children mentioned to
their nice parents at tea time how Helen picked up the flailing child and
squashed him into her wobbling boobs until he couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t in
the operational handbook and forcing a five-year-old to choose between fighting
and gasping for air was probably illegal. In Helen’s defense, she’d been trying
to cuddle him but her large appendages got in the way.

I stepped backwards towards the
door and narrowed my eyes at Vanessa. “You’ll end up with him and his
whānau sitting in here while you suspend or expel him,” I said, certainty
in my voice. “I’m just trying to head it off.”

Vanessa sighed and sank her
well-shaped bum into her office chair. “Ok, thanks. I’ll get him put on the
list for the educational psychologist and talk to someone at the ministry.” She
shrugged and her neat suit jacket shuddered up and down on her shoulders. “And
I’ll get Julie to ring the kindy. They know the rules.”

I opened my mouth to tell her I’d
already asked and then closed it again. Julie would think I’d complained about
her but it couldn’t be helped. “Thanks.” I left Vanessa to her frustrations and
sorted out my classroom before school. The deputy principal’s role opened up a
few weeks ago but the thought of applying made me shudder. I suspected they’d
bring someone in from outside; someone who didn’t mind no longer having their
own class of children, someone happy to push paperwork around a desk and play
with the bigger picture view. The management points on my salary and the kudos
for a job title of that magnitude failed to sway my opinion. I’d stick with the
Lawries, the Jennies and the Carls; children who’d hopefully left my care
better than they entered it.

My cell phone rang in my handbag
as I sorted out paint pots and water for the morning’s activities. “Sorry,” I
winced with a glance at Helen. “Forgot to mute it.”

“Just answer it,” she said with a
furtive look at the door. “We were both half an hour early; if they can’t let
you answer the phone for a second, it’s a poor show.”

I darted into the stock cupboard,
phone in hand and hissed a reply into the handset. My father’s expletives bit
into my ear drum. “I’ve run out of bloody medication,” he rasped. “Get it for
me.”

“I’m at work, Dad.” My tone
betrayed my discomfort as Helen clattered around in the classroom.

“Fine! I’ll just bloody die
then.” He let off a stream of other unpleasant works and I clasped the phone to
my collar bone in embarrassment.

“Your place is two bus rides away
from here, Dad. Isn’t that why you employ May-Ling?”

Silence.

“I’ll get it after work. I don’t
want you to die, ok?”

He disconnected, leaving me with
the consequences of his frustration. I sighed, knowing his bad-daughter label
would stay lodged in my chest all day. Not fair, especially when I had better
things to worry about.

“That your dad?” Helen asked,
knowing the drill.

I nodded. “Yeah. He gets his
prescriptions faxed to the pharmacy just up the road from him and then expects
me to take two buses over there and walk it round. He asked before the weekend
but it slipped my mind.”

“A smack to the head can do
that.” Helen continued slapping wooden paint brushes onto the table, the
splayed bristly ends well past their usefulness. She picked one up and eyed it,
attacking the pigs’ hair tufts with scissors to make them more uniform. “We
need new ones,” she commented and I rolled my eyes and turned away.

“No money for that,” I sighed.
“No money for anything.”

“Doesn’t that home-help lady live
at your dad’s?” Helen asked with curiosity in her pudgy face.

I nodded with deliberate
slowness. “Yes. She moved in before Christmas. The place is a permanent mess
and I keep meaning to phone the company and complain, but he likes her. I pick
up the phone to ring them and then end up bottling out. The lady who cleaned
and picked up after him before was efficient and got everything done. But he
didn’t like her as much because she wouldn’t let him upset her.”

Helen chewed her bottom lip in
concentration and trimmed another brush with the rounded scissors. “I’d ring
the company. She might try to con him out of his money.”

I nodded. “That occurred to me.
I’m a coward. Taking May-Ling away would unleash the beast and I’d be over
there every night on the bus, tidying and making his dinner. He’s so mean and
he ran through over ten carers before the last lady told him to wind his neck
in. I wish they hadn’t moved her on.”

“Maybe she left,” Helen
suggested.

“Nope. She’s still with the same
company. I’ve seen her in the supermarket near me with her children and she
wears their uniform.”

“Weirder and weirder,” Helen
chirped, snorting as Colin strolled past my door. “Speak of the devil and he
shall appear.”

I laughed and plopped water into
the jugs on the table, knowing as thirty-one children washed their brushes and
turned the liquid varying shades of brown, there would be at least two major
spills and one catastrophe with a painting. Sometimes it felt like predicting a
car accident but driving the same route, anyway.

The children exhibited excitement
beyond the extreme as they made thank you cards for the firemen who’d visited
the day before. They wore old shirts over their uniforms to mitigate the damage
and made a peculiar sight. I’d cut the sleeves off most of them and the body
reached the backs of the children’s knees. The shirts came home with me in a
carrier bag once a month to wash, reminiscent of the days when Pete wore them
and the worst spills were spaghetti juice or coffee. I knew he’d be disgusted
at what I’d turned them into; it’s probably why I did it.

“This is the fire engine!”
screeched a child with glasses and carrot orange hair. He gritted his teeth in
excitement and the brush shook his hand as he clenched every muscle in his
body.

“Lovely Kane,” Helen intoned.
“Inside voice. Watch what you’re doing with that brush, oh now look what’s
happened. Go to the sink and wash around your ear, Meredith and wait a minute
your shirt’s caught in the...” She supervised the first crisis of the morning
while I mopped up the second. I’d got the grounds man to make up blocky wooden
holders for the water jugs but still the children managed to knock them over.
At least it reduced the disasters to under twenty per session.

Helen moved off to deal with
Meredith’s paint filled ear and I helped Kane redo his fire engine, his chest
hitching in grief at the version crumpled into the dustbin. “I like this one
better,” he announced eventually, his face breaking into a smile.

“Mine’s got zombies,” Kevin said,
huffing and puffing as he scratched the scrubby brush across his paper.

“I don’t remember any zombies in
the fire engine,” I said, keeping my voice level. I’d spoken to his mother
about the games she allowed her son to play and the effect it had on his view
of the world.

“It keeps ‘im quiet!” she’d
replied with indignation. “You should try havin’ eight kids, missus.”

“I don’t want to see zombies in
your picture,” I said with determination. “I want a proper thank you for the lovely
firemen before the end of this lesson, otherwise you’ll have to stay in and do
another one with Mrs Morris at playtime.”

“Ar, no!” he exclaimed. “She’ll
push me into her things and Samuel couldn’t breathe last week!”

“I liked it!” Samuel shouted from
across the room. “Them’s is squishy like a cushion.”

“You said yer didn’t! Liar!”
Kevin yelled and I quelled the noise and the disruption with a well-placed
raise of my eyebrows.

“Kevin, get rid of the zombies.
The firemen will be offended because none of them looked like they were
starving.”

“They had big muscles!” crooned a
pretty little girl with long, brown pigtails which swished into her painting
every time she moved her head. “My mum asked me all about them.”

“Did she want to know about the
fire engine?” Kane chirped, scrubbing the brush across the dodgy rectangle with
green paint.

“Nope, just the firemen.”

“What colour’s that?” I asked
Kane, keeping my voice level as he worked hard to keep the green separate from
the red, avoiding the diarrhoea colour of the zombies on the artwork next to
him.

“This one?” He shoved his finger
into the middle of his fire engine leaving a fingerprint. “Ooh, windows,” he
mused, beginning to make it look like a cruise ship instead, using all ten of
his digits to create holes in the paint.

“Yes, that one.” I forced him
back on task with my question and he looked at me as though I might be simple.

“It’s red, innit!” he scoffed and
I glanced at Helen in despair. Colour blind. I added a visit by the nurse with
her psychedelic chart to my list of requests and walked around the classroom
for the next hour. I righted toppling water jugs, overflowing pallets and doled
out poster paint like there was a national shortage.

Helen joined me in the staffroom
for morning tea and we sank into the sofas with relief. “Those firemen were
jaw-droppingly hot,” Helen snorted, “but they’ll see their pictures and have a
crisis.”

“You didn’t think they were! You
said they were old and crusty.”

“They weren’t as luscious as last
year but they looked tastier than my Bert in his boxer shorts with his belly
hanging over the top,” Helen sniggered.

“And the green fire engine,” I
groaned, pushing Bert’s semi-dressed image from my mind and wanting to wash my
eyeballs. “What will they make of that?”

“That explains heaps,” Helen
sighed. She slapped my thigh in camaraderie. “Not bad though, love. One poked
ear, two poked eyes, only four major spills and one minor one. It’s getting
better.”

“You forgot the fight.”

“Ah, yep. Paint brushes at dawn.
Parents in, or do we deal with those two ourselves?”

“Ourselves.” I gnawed on my
bottom lip and contemplated the scary father who came to pick up one of the
paint brush jousters. He’d stood over me at the meet and greet during the first
week and stared down my blouse without shame. I glanced sideways at Helen with
her wobbling boobs of destruction and decided in the interests of health and
safety, I should keep her away from him.

The day continued through basic
mathematics, more alphabet learning, colouring in alphabet letters, writing our
names and a story. I often looked back on the day’s achievements and wondered
how such basic tasks could seem so exhausting. My father punctuated the lessons
with abusive texts which I mainly ignored. I responded to the last one, ‘
I’m
effing dying
,’ with, ‘
Then do it quietly.
’

He didn’t respond again, but I
smiled at his misspelling of the ‘f’ word for most of story time. Short sighted
old men should be banned from texting. He remained silent for a while and then
as I cleared up ready to catch the bus home, he sent his most damaging one of
the day.

‘
Cops been. Said you killed
Mark Lambie.’

“You don’t have to do this.” I sat
in Helen’s car feeling awkward as she negotiated the traffic towards my
father’s apartment in Mangere.

“It’s fine,” she replied,
grinning and waving at an aggressive male who honked his horn at her and passed
over the centre line to zoom by.

“You know him?”

“Nope,” she said with a grin.
“But now he’s wracking his brain over that nice wave and worrying I’m from his
workplace, a friend of his wife’s or someone who can damage him later.”

The driver settled into the
traffic in the right hand lane and gave Helen a beautiful if somewhat fake
smile as she went straight ahead.

“I might try that,” I said with a
giggle and she looked at me sideways.

“From the bus?”

I sighed. “Yeah. From the bus.”

We said our goodbyes and she
dropped me outside Dad’s place. The entrance to the warden controlled
apartments displayed local artwork donated by bored local teens. The graffiti
truck parked on the verge and the council worker used a power blaster to remove
it. I gave him a pleasant smile and he stopped his hose long enough to let me
pass. “Spray paint costs a fortune,” I said, my expression confused. I pointed
towards the fading block capitals depicting someone’s wonky name and the man
nodded and shrugged.

“So do drugs,” he said. “And they
still do that an’ all.”

I went inside wondering about the
relevance of his answer and felt glad I was only educating future graffiti artists
and not clearing up after them. The lifts smelled of disinfectant and the
carpet on Dad’s corridor bore some horrific stains. I let myself in using a key
and heard a strange noise coming from the lounge. It sounded like someone
pumping up an air bed. “I’m early,” I said, walking into the dim room with the
prescription bag in my hand. “Helen waited for me at the pharm...”

My elderly father sat on the
knackered sofa with his trousers round his ankles. His home help, allegedly
from the Philippines, sat astride him, naked from the waist down. They grunted
in unison, sex noises filling the room as the fifty-year-old woman raised
herself up and down on her knees. I gaped with my mouth open before the bile
rose into my throat and caused me to close it. Dropping the bag on the carpet,
I turned and marched from the flat, leaving the front door open. I couldn’t
remove the image from the backs of my eyelids and even hot tears of disgust
couldn’t lever Dad’s open mouthed look of ecstasy from my brain. I shuddered and
trembled with horror and nobody sat next to me on the ride back to downtown
Auckland in case it proved infectious.

An hour and another bus ride
later and I pushed my front door open with my hands full of mail from the box
downstairs. The image still floated around my inner vision but I’d replaced it
mostly with the red mist of fury. I rang the company who’d organised May-Ling
to inform them she’d crossed the line in her caring and met with his case
worker. “That’s not in her job description,” I said, hearing my voice wobble.
“I walked in on them and it was hideous. I’d like her removed, please.” I
stopped myself adding ‘surgically’, not wanting someone else to suffer
nightmares too.

“Mrs Saint.” More silence. “Your
father terminated his contract with us before Christmas. I have no idea who
this May-Ling is; she’s nothing to do with us.”

I sat on my sofa for a while with
my head in my hands. Dad didn’t text which could mean a number of things. I
liked to imagine he felt great shame, but reality told me either he’d had a
massive coronary or worse, was still in the same position I left him in. A
spiteful part of me hoped they got stuck like it and the warden called the fire
brigade to prise them apart.

I reread his last text; the one
which caused me to alarm Helen with my shaky silence and the flicker of fear
began again. I wondered if the two police officers told my father their
suspicions or if he’d jumped to conclusions. I contemplated ringing the station
and confessing to not only abandoning a drunk on his doorstep like he meant
nothing more than a newspaper, but also to dashing back to my place and
allowing myself to be undressed by a complete stranger.

The cringe came from the inside
out and I put my head in my hands. My cousin Jack worked as a cop and anything
with my name on it would reach his ears. I didn’t want him to know about Teina,
even though I knew he couldn’t tell the family. The Saints excommunicated him
the minute he stepped into his police issue trousers. Saints hated cops almost
as much as referees. It was rule number two.

I couldn’t spend the evening
worrying so instead I called Aunty Pam. She answered the phone with her usual
brand of cheer. “What’s up, sweet pea?”

I held my breath and then
exhaled, splurging all my most recent problems with it. “I found the home help
on top of Dad, the cops think I murdered Uncle Mark and I slept with a total
stranger.”

“I’ll be there in thirty minutes,”
she said, her voice calm and even.