Drowned Sprat and Other Stories (15 page)

After a gap, the line of guests resumed with a thin, narrow-boned woman dressed in luminous chlorophyll green. She was doing her best to ignore the woman beside her, whose long, twisted locks of hair cascaded over her shoulders and ample body right onto the table. She was the most vivacious of all of them, laughing and tossing her head so that the ends of her hair dangled in various of the guests’ water glasses. The next guest wore a Viking hat complete with horns — one of those plastic ones from a toy shop, thought Billy. As he watched in amusement, the guest blew out the candle in front of him and ate it. His friend, who wore a more extravagant set of horns and who sat head and shoulders above the others, turned to him, scowling. Billy felt some sympathy for the first Viking — there was nothing on the table but water and candles and it was almost midnight.

Up and down the table Billy searched for his customer. There was a row of guests whose faces he could not see, the ones with their backs to the window. Most of the backs were wearing fur coats, like the woman at the head.

Ah — there was the builder — standing up at the other end of the table, his battered felt hat firm on his head and one hand resting on its brim. A woman smaller than the builder but bearing a strong family resemblance — his sister, maybe — stood beside him, her hand resting also on her own hat, a grey and white cloche. The table fell silent, all heads turned to watch them. Swiftly, elegantly, the couple removed their hats to reveal, springing from each head, a pair of long, furry, pink-lined ears. Below the ears the faces now blurred, took new shapes: he was a hare and she was a rabbit.

Dumbstruck, Mack and Billy watched as the metamorphosis continued around the table: the first fur-coated woman was nothing but an opossum, destroyer of forests and coastal trees.
What Billy had previously taken to be an ornate chair back was in fact her bushy tail. The spiky-haired man twinkled now all over with the spines of a hedgehog; the mother wallaby beside him soothed her agitated joey with her paws. Beside her sat not her husband, but a mynah bird, preening and vain. Further along was the lonely depressive, a ship rat. A poplar tree, a willow, a goat and deer were next, the goat still chomping his mouthful of candle, white globules of wax shining in his whiskers. Great hilarity erupted around the table when all the changes were complete — there was wild and extensive toasting, evident delight in one another’s appearance.

Billy’s one-time customer rang a glass.

‘My friends, it is with the greatest of pleasure that I welcome you to my house.’ His voice was loud and high and carried easily to the brothers’ ears. ‘You are safe here — no guns can trace us, no traps, poisoned bait or native-garden enthusiasts. Is it our fault we were transported to this country?’

It was a rhetorical question, but a resounding negative rose from all sides.

‘And do we intend to stay?’

‘Absolutely!’ supplied the goat, scraping at his whiskers with a hoof.

‘This very site, my friends,’ the hare went on, ‘was intended for the construction of a five-star hotel, a cinema complex, a golf course and a games parlour. Better by far for Mother Earth that it be our refuge. A crown of thorns adorns a nearby hill, beds of hay and soft earth await your dreaming heads in the …’ He paused, as if trying to remember a word, ‘… sleep-out. We are innocent creatures, taking root, crawling and walking upon the innocent earth.’

A great rustling of leaves, snickering, braying and whistling
erupted, accompanied by a strong perfume of jasmine, of ginger-plant and morning glory. Only the rat sat quietly, the black end of his nose waffling and scenting at the air. Suddenly he stood up on his hind legs, his mouth open in a kind of rat-bark, his long worm tail lashing behind him. One of his pink hands pointed at the shadowy faces on the other side of the glass.

‘Let’s go!’ Billy looked at his brother. They’d been crouched there for so long that Billy’s bad knee had seized up like a rusty padlock.

Eyes shining, a childish, delighted grin on his face, Mack stood up.

‘No!’ Billy made a lunge to stop him — his brother was opening the door — but his knee crumpled and he landed hard on the boards.

He didn’t think he’d knocked his head as he went down, but he must have — and judging by the time of day, he’d been out to it for some time. The builder sat in his chair on the verandah, the beer and glasses beside him. Billy sat up.

‘Where’s Mack?’ he asked.

‘Who?’ the builder asked softly.

‘My brother — I followed him up here last night —’

The builder shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t seen him. But you — I opened my door this morning and there you were, dead drunk and curled up on the verandah.’

‘But I —’

‘Hair of the dog?’ offered the builder, with a glimmer of humour in his dark brown eyes.

A sudden, terrible thirst gripped Billy by the throat and he drank the proffered glass, down to the very last drop. Then, without saying goodbye, he staggered along the bluff for home
and a good long sleep.

‘I had the weirdest bloody dream of my life,’ said Mack that afternoon, as they were getting ready to go fishing.

‘Yeah?’ asked Billy carefully. ‘What about?’

‘Introduced animals. Yeah, that’s what they were. Pests.’

‘What were they doing?’ Billy asked casually, throwing a plastic bag of frozen bait into the boat.

‘Shit … it’s kind of embarrassing. It was a kids’ dream. They were all up there —’ He pointed at the grove of trees surrounding the finished house, ‘having one hell of a party.’

One of the questions Rick is asked, now that he trawls celebritystyle through his fifteen minutes of fame, is ‘How did she think she would get away with it?’ Just now journalists are not allowed anywhere near me, which is a shame because I could answer the question directly then. Quite often, lying here on my bed, I imagine what I would say to them if they were allowed in; what I would say if they asked
me
that question; how I would explain where the inspiration came from, what my true feelings are, whether I suffer any regrets. I would be ordered in my telling of the tale; not like Rick, who seems to leap about all over the shop and can only talk about his own responses to the situation, not mine. He doesn’t even seem to know what our kids think about it. Very often, on the sound bites I’ve managed to catch before the nurses come running and herd me away from the Dayroom, Maryam is sitting beside him nodding sagely, though I suspect
her understanding of the conversation around her is minimal.

If I was asked, I’d begin with the idea and where it came from. I’d begin like this, like a story:

Inspiration of any kind is not what you expect in Pak’N Save but inspired I was, a year ago, while I was shunting a trolley massive with pesticides, herbicides, modified genes and wordy coloured plastic. At the end of the aisle, examining bags of flour and sugar, stood two North African Muslim women. They were heavily veiled in flocked, fine velvet, their dresses voluminous and dark. In profile only their hands, foreheads and feet showed skin, a glint of gold on the hands, the sandals high-heeled and feminine, toenails boudoir red.

I stopped beside them, hunting for icing sugar. As one of the women weighed a bag of flour in her narrow hands, the other dragged out a five kg sack and hoisted it into their trolley. It seemed they were discussing the purchase and agreeing to take the larger bag. Afterwards they moved off, heads together, side by side at the trolley handle, and I didn’t catch sight of them again until I joined the queue at the checkout. The one who hoisted the bag was now heaving out all the shopping and the other was standing a little to one side with her hands folded on her long dress — her jilbab — resting over her pregnant stomach. Above the veil her eyes were soft and dreamy, her forehead a smooth, brown blaze in the high fluorescent light. The one doing all the work was older, perhaps in her late thirties or early forties, her eyes crow’s-footed and her framed expanse of brow faintly scored with three or four lines.

In the carpark, I saw them join a man who waited with a child asleep in the back seat. Bored, he stayed slumped at the wheel, picking his teeth, while the women filled the boot.

As I passed by them, the true relationship of those women
broke over me like a wave: it was as real and engulfing as if they had looked up from their boot-packing and told me: ‘We are his wives.’ It was as if they had told me how together they cooked, cleaned, bore and raised children, took turns in his bed. As I passed them the younger one reached out to lie for a moment the flat of her hand on the other’s labouring back, a gesture of affection and concern.

On the way home I thought about them, the lives they must lead. I saw them side by side at the kitchen bench, weighing beans. I saw them folding an overwhelming basket of laundry. I saw how the younger one managed the hoovering while the older one helped the children with their homework; how they planned celebratory meals together; how they dealt with headlice, flu and stomach-bugs. One was better at baking, the other at the erotic arts.

And always, always, always, they had company. They didn’t spend the hours alone in the house that I do, wielding a desultory toilet-brush, flicking about an ineffectual duster, waiting for the phone to ring and listening to the silence.

It wouldn’t be bad, I thought, having another wife around to help shoulder the burden of the house, the kids and Rick. And if she added another baby to the family, that would be fine too. I always wanted more, and now that I’m nearly fifty I’m too old. Another wife would free me up considerably for other things: intellectual pursuits, some serious drinking and afternoon sleeps.

I’ve always known I’m prone to depression, I would tell the journalists, but now I suspect I’m also obsessive, because once an idea has taken hold of me I find it hard to let go. At the time I made the decision to find Rick and me another wife, the black dog had my throat in his jaws and now and again gave me a shake discombobulating enough to keep me in my bed. In fact, my trip
to Pak’N Save came about only because the children had had takeaways for tea three nights running. The guilt had got to me.

People imagine depression to be banal and somehow calm, still, dead water, idle — because that’s how it often presents. Not so. True depressives are people with overactive minds. Behind the orbs of our melancholic eyes, self-regarding and febrile fantasies vie with a refusal to accept the dreary, quotidian facts of human existence. For me, once the depression lifts and the black dog moves on to hound someone else, the obsessive idea becomes the likeliest plan of action and I am incapable of subjecting it to any rational examination.

I began the process on the 3rd of May and by Christmas we had her. It was far quicker and easier than I would have thought. Rick is telling the truth when he says he had no clue what I was up to, not until he discovered her tucked up in his duvet when he fell, heavily sauced, into bed on Christmas Eve. Of course, he’d known I’d moved Jimmy into the games room, his bed jammed between the wall and the billiard table, and Stevie in to share with Luke, and that for a month or so I’d been doing out Jimmy and Stevie’s old room, stripping it of their posters, soccer boots, mouldy socks and abandoned experiments. I’d put in a king single — I had, after all, slept in a double bed for twenty-two years and an ordinary single would have been too much of an adjustment — and painted the walls a waiting, innocuous cream. She and I would slowly fill it with personal objects required on our off-nights — books, CDs, chocolates, a small fridge stocked with wine and rare, expensive delicacies.

Another of the questions Rick is asked, as he continues to trawl celebrity-style through his fifteen minutes of fame, is if I had ever said I was surprised when I first saw her, if I had got cold feet, if at that stage I had finally questioned my motives and the
morality of the situation. He always says he doesn’t know, that you’d think after two decades with the same woman you’d know the workings of her mind, but that he obviously didn’t, though he’d thought he did. He suspected something was up, he told the sympathetically nodding heads of Paul Holmes and John Campbell and even David Letterman; he said he remembered asking me if I was having an affair.

The truth is, I was so far down the track by the time Maryam arrived, I could never have turned back even if I’d had some niggling doubts, which I didn’t. I felt only, as Maryam first became visible on the giant screen in the Arrivals Hall, a great sense of achievement, as I imagine the buyers in my husband’s Greenlane car yard do when they’re persuaded to purchase an Audi, a Beamer, a Porsche — some cock-car far beyond their means but full of potential adventure.

Maryam was at least as beautiful as her prototypes, the women I’d seen choosing flour. Her face, seen for the first time close up, showed an habitual dreaming calm, a deep acceptance of all the injustices and difficulties of her life. I know this will be hard for you understand, but within moments of meeting her, I wished I
was
her. I wanted to have had her experiences, for my face to be like hers, not with its bitter lines around the corners of its mouth, its perpetual irritable scowl. She seemed more real than I was.

The last ten years of Maryam’s life, prior to flying to New Zealand, had been of unremitting hardship and poverty in an Iranian refugee camp in Turkey. All the men in her family are dead — not a male survives over the age of nine. She came to us through our local church, which is an American one with powerful connections in the rescuing business. Here I could go into detail about the paperwork, the money I paid out, the people
I bribed both here and some outfit on the internet which somehow also got involved — but I’ve been asked not to do that. Immigration was alarmed at how easy it was for me to get her, our sweet, uncomplaining Maryam. It wouldn’t be so easy now, not since the war.

I carried her bag for her to the car and we drove to a motel in St Heliers, not far from our place, a couple of blocks towards the water. I had been there earlier in the day to stock the kitchenette with food and stack the table with dictionaries and simple readers filched from Stevie’s school-bag. It seemed reasonable to me that she have at least a primitive grasp of English before she came to live with us. On top of the books was a photo album, so that she could acquaint herself with the faces of her new family. I showed her how to operate the remote control, how the kettle worked, and left her to sleep off her jet lag. She wasn’t happy about me leaving her at first, but after a while the doctored tea I gave her dried up her tears and put her on the nod. I pulled the covers over her and drove home.

Every day for nearly a month I spent hours with her, perfecting her for Ricky Dicky. It was a time of utter bliss: I was consumed with excitement and anticipation. (No wonder the poor man thought I was having an affair!) Her English came along in fits and starts and she learned to cook some of Rick’s favourite meals as far as was possible in the under-equipped kitchen. At first, she was frightened of me. I suppose she disliked being locked in each evening as I left, and sometimes I had to force her to have her tea so that she would be quiet until I came back again, though she never did cry out or try to draw attention to herself.

I assuaged my conscience by telling myself women like her are often confined, that after all these centuries they must have
a genetic predisposition to it, a kind of innate anti-claustrophobia. I took her soiled laundry home and brought it back clean, secretly attending to it while the family were out at work or school; I made sure she always had enough to eat and was warm and comfortable. My only worry was that she would fall sick and I would have to take her to a doctor. If that happened, I planned, I’d go somewhere in Manukau City, somewhere chaotic and impoverished, somewhere where an overworked doctor might not ask too many questions.

It was during the week before Christmas that Rick’s Christmas present made her first visit to the house, the house that has since been photographed and splashed all over every newspaper and news show in the country. A month ago Rick put it on the market; because of its infamy and views it’s bound to fetch about a million. She liked the Spanish arches around the front entrance, the yukkas in the beds of stones, the retro shagpile in the games room and Luke’s Persian cat. She touched all those things, and asked me for the word for them. She dipped her hand in the swimming pool and would have taken a mouthful of it, but I stopped her. The view from the picture window in the dining room, over the roofs to the harbour, transfixed her.

‘Sea,’ she said, pointing. ‘Boats.’ Above her face-veil her eyes crinkled, the skin around them pushed upwards by her curtained smile.

Her response to the kitchen disappointed me. I thought she’d be pleased to see all the things I’d shown her pictures of in the brochures I’d taken to the motel, brochures I’d held on to since I’d bought the things years ago: the breadmaker, the dishwasher, the blender, the espresso machine, even the fridge and stove. She showed no desire to push any of the buttons, even though I’d given her rudimentary lessons in their operation.
Instead she brought her hand up to her face, slipping it under her niqab, and stifled a bored yawn.

The piano in the family room elicited more of a response — she pressed down several keys at once and listened carefully as the unharmonious chord jangled through the open-plan, harmonious-flow part of the house. She brought her left hand to join her right and explored the lower reaches, but the bass notes seemed to alarm her and she sprang away, hurried down the little flight of steps to the games room. I watched her take in Jimmy’s bed, the billiard table — she picked up a shiny white ball, carressed it, replaced it on the baize — but it was my exercycle that interested her more.

Hooking her long dress into her knickers, she hoisted herself up, carefully placed her feet on the pedals and pedalled, slowly at first, then faster and faster, her lap a padded cushion of pumping, piled-up frock. I fancied she was smiling a little under her niqab, her eyes incandescent, black as treacle in the light diffused through my white nets, and I decided right then to buy her one of her very own for Christmas. We could come here in the late afternoons, face west to the gilding hills as the sun set and race away together, side by side, sweating a little, pumping on the moss-green Bremworth. Even though by then I had begun to suspect that Maryam wasn’t the full quid, that her simplicity somehow went beyond her peasant, refugee past, it never occurred to me that I should give her up. I thought we would get along just fine. I would have remained loyal to the contract.

I never did get to see her on her exercycle, though I had bought it and hidden it in the garage, wrapped in swathes of bright paper. I was gone by the time she opened it, taken away on Christmas Eve, just after midnight.

At eleven o’clock on the 24th of December I was in the
kitchen, drying up the last of the dishes, when Rick emerged from his bedroom, his hair tousled, an intensely puzzled and somehow panicked expression on his face. After talking to me for a while, during which time his alarm vanished, to be replaced by what I call his salesman’s voice, a sing-song decisiveness, he rang the services.

‘My wife has lost her mind,’ I heard him say into the cordless, and I thought then of my cellphone in my bag and how I wished I could ring someone — but who? I could text the Minister of Immigration and try to make him understand that having Maryam to live with us was a two-way act of charity. But I couldn’t move; I felt turned to stone, my back wedged into the kitchen bench and a damp tea-towel over my shoulder.