Jake's Long Shadow (25 page)

I guess a start would be we take Rachel off your hands for a while.

But this was another moment. Sharns was staring untypically directly at him. He knew those kind of eyes (my wife is with the same look and too often for my complete comfort).

Fearing for his own loss of judgement, Charlie stood up rather abruptly. I'm happy to take little Rachel home with me. Beth would be delighted, I know she would, to hear a baby's sounds of life in our empty nest. (Please, Sharns. Give me the baby and take your leave before I do something I regret.) You'd be welcome to come over as often as you liked, to talk about things, see Rachel.

For a long time she looked at him and, yes, it was sex in her eyes, and it was a question of him, Was it love he was giving her with his own watering eyes, love before it was lust? Didn't have to be deep love, just a passing thing,
just an opportunity for a lost woman to be told she is loved for herself. (Tell her, Charlie. Tell the woman for her own sake. It doesn't have to go any further.)

But he only jiggled his outstretched hands, took his eyes to the baby, which she passed over like a parcel, Sharns's eyes urging him to hold onto this moment that didn't have to pass, not if he didn't want it to. Except he took his (true man's) eyes down to the helpless child and put his all into gazing at her until responsibility and manhood washed over, and next Charlie was locking the office and out on the street, carrying this living thing and smiling at the thought of Beth's face seeing him walk in with a baby. Why, if the baby didn't get an all-night colic screaming attack, a man might make love to his dear wife in, ahem, a more unconventional way, which he knew she secretly wanted. (I can learn. I can make myself lose this inhibition. I can do and be anything I want.)

SHARNEETA SAT BESIDE Alistair, who had come out of his coma a few days ago, so the doctors told her. (One also demanded to know who I was, as if I wasn’t likely to be a visitor to a white middle-class man, and I told him we flatted together. Which he didn’t seem to like for he just up and strode off down that shiny lino passage that reflected and echoed this kind of power a doctor, or surgeon whatever, must have in hospitals. Stuff you, pal. Even I’m outside your sphere of influence.)

Her watch said she’d sat here for twenty-five minutes when his eyes opened. The first thing he said was her name: Sharns. (I like being called that by those I like.) Aware she liked him more than she thought.

She said, Hi. You walked the wrong street.

No, he said. They were always there. I think it was the time, you know, being night. What night does to them. My mother tells me I almost died. He managed a smile from that busted-up face. It must have hurt, for he winced.

So, what was it like, nearly dying? (Is it a relief? Does it hurt? Do you
know?
)

I don’t remember anything. Not of the beating, either. I was just walking down the street with the tin of — it doesn’t matter. It happened and now I’ve got to move on.

Tin of milk powder? Is that what you were doing? You didn’t leave Rachel by herself? (Oh God, don’t add to my burden.)

No, of course I wouldn’t leave her by herself. And don’t you be going on about you doing it. You got your reasons.

But Sharns wasn’t about to be fobbed off. You’re in here ’cos of my baby? You were getting her milk powder and I was (in my misery state down at Jojo’s) out boozing?

You weren’t out boozing, Sharns. Not like having a good time. You were out because you were so far down you thought you were gonna go crazy.

So, who’s the patient? Sharns wanted to know.

We’re all patients and we’re all healers. Don’t go there, Sharns. So where is my little Rachel?

(My, he said?) Some good people have taken her for a while, until I can get my shit together. Alistair, I’m sorry.

Don’t be. We all get dealt different hands. If you hadn’t had the baby I would’ve lazed myself into a hole too deep to climb out of, swear I would have. Our little Raych saved me. I can’t wait to see her. To hold her.

(Hold her? How I wish I had such a feeling.) I’ll ask the people to bring her to see you. You okay now, like on the mend on the inside? I mean, you look it. Even with your face how it is.

Really? Do I look like I’m mending inside? Hey, maybe I am. My parents have been right by me all the way. My old man, he’s changed. We talked for the first time as equals.

I never met my father. I tell you that?

No. Looking at her with eyes inviting her to him whatever she wished of herself. But she wasn’t quite ready to let that moment in.

I heard a bunch of guys took care of those thugs who did this to me.

Vigilantes, she said, hearing Mr Bennett’s disgust with jungle justice, which she didn’t agree with. (We came close, Mr. But glad we didn’t get to find out.)

My father told me and I’ve never seen him so, I don’t know, satisfied. You’d think he’d organised it.

Stranger things have happened, I can tell you.

If the vigilantes thought they were doing me a favour — I think they suck.

Sharns shrugged. She didn’t agree. You allowed to smoke in here?

No. And nor are you.

I can hold off.

Alistair … the rent’s in arrears. I’ll have to find somewhere I can put your stuff. There’s someone made an offer to buy the house from our landlord. I heard she’s a Maori woman with a heart of ice. Drives a flash sports car. Guess she’ll kick me out like she’s done to all the rest. Owns heaps of properties in Pine Block.

I’m going back home for a while, Sharns. You’ll have to find another flatmate. Or you could — well, I could ask my parents if you could stay with us, till you get the money thing sorted.

No. (Impossible. Not me, not you, bitch.) The voice in Sharns’s head like a bully had arrived. No, why would they have me staying there — in
that
house?

It’s just a house, happens to have six bedrooms. One can be yours. He meant something different, she picked it in the tone since the face was too swollen to read.

We could try, like, sharing?

Yes, he nodded. Nodded again and his hand found hers. In the photo we argued about, you were a beautiful teenager and you’ve grown into a very beautiful woman.

Last guy said that raped me and gave me the child nightmare. Belted me around to complete the dirty deed.

Alistair smiled up at her. No need to make promises.

APEMAN SMELT BURNING and he felt a burning of a knife entering his body. No sense of atonement or redemption came to him. Just that smell of flesh burning. The pain. And this final experience come shrieking out, a blackness unto itself, yet with a face. It had a face.

The face reserved for those who met her, who were finally confronted with her, of the unbearable beauty if you deserved it. Or else she had hair stranded, matted by the dirt of herself her terrible inner being, and big juju lips that none should want to kiss nor hear speak their name, not if she is called Lovey (oh, my poor suffering sister). Or children of her bad womb.

He got dragged into the darkness still calling out, no he was screaming the name, not of the man who had given sworn statement against him in the court and helped convict him of murder. Not of his victim, the good sad woman Tania.

The name Ape was screaming was his mother’s name and asking her why (
why
did you do those things?) even in knowing there could never be any
explanation why, not to undeserving souls, not Apeman who chose the name with coldest deliberation and who lived the role to the awful,
merciless
hilt. (Like the knife buried in me, to the hilt.)

Oh, it was all burning flesh and a last name firing from Apeman’s lips, they were saying her name, Beatrice, what a wasted lovely name on such a woman-beast. Burning poor Lovey’s flesh like she had. Burned into a li’l boy’s brain, turned his heart to charcoal. His soul to cinders. Beatrice, why? (’Cos she never stepped out of the Big Darkness, Montgomery. A darkness worse than death ’cos it takes so long to live and suffer it. It takes so many down with it, it does, li’l Monty grown into a big bad-arse bastard.)

The name Abe Heke never entered his head, not his last moment of thought, when it had so consumed those years of festering in prison
confinement
. Not Abe Heke’s name, only she who made him like this, only her name echoed in that lightless vault.

They burned him, against a protocol of Maori that says no body shall be cremated. Odd, when Maori of old put to white-hot burning rocks the flesh of enemy, of kept slave, and ate of those humans’ flesh. He had no rights, not as a life-serving prisoner. Nor cultural or otherwise Maori to claim and render him unto eternity in the proper fashion.

He’d have liked that, his body burned, reduced to ashes that if it wasn’t for the wood of his coffin would amount to so much less in weight. Better than a coffin in the cold ground in an unmarked grave, even though none would claim his ashes and the State anyway would have refused their release, not a man deceased serving a life sentence. His remains would be disposed of in a place not mentioned, the hand-written name Sellotaped to the plastic lid falling off somewhere.

Ashes to unmarked earth, this staunchest gang leader for whom nothing was too bad a deed to commit. Who thought it all would shut out this, the final word, the cause of it, of him what he turned out to be. With the name of a bitch on his juju lips so much like hers.

SIMON TOLD POLLY he was leaving. But why? And what about our property partnership? What the hell have I done? Polly shocked, not for a moment expecting this. Not another woman is it?

No. Yet in a way you’re another woman. You’re not who I fell for.

Simon, I don’t understand. I truly don’t.

I know you don’t and that’s what makes this hard.

Just tell me why. So he told her and when he was finished she was shaking her head in denial. You like money, too. The whole world does and those who claim they don’t are liars. Liars, I tell you.

I like money. I like the freedom it brings. But worshipping it, no. Polly, don’t you see how obsessed you are by money?

You’re saying I talk it all the time? What about the other stuff I talk about, not related to money? Or doesn’t that count? What about when we’re making love, do I mention money then? And couldn’t I accuse you of being obsessed with sex and therefore I’m leaving you over it? Don’t you, like most
men, want sex all the time? So, is that okay but me, a woman, thinking about money a lot is not okay? Stuff you, Harding, I’m not taking this crap. If you want to go then go.

It’s what I just said, Polls.

Don’t call me Polls. That’s reserved for those intimate with me. And what about our business arrangement? Do we sell up, liquidate the lot when values are on a steady rise? What if I don’t want to sell up?

Then you can buy me out.

With what? How? We’ve already borrowed on a lot of the equity.

The same method we used to buy the properties — leveraged banking.

Your remaining equity is sitting there, as mine is, as the bank’s added security on their loan. We’ve got seventy per cent gearing and they don’t go higher than that. So, Mr anti-money, you’ll be happy to go without your share of the disgusting lucre until we can get higher revaluations in, what, two years’ time?

You’re playing the spiteful game now, Polly.

Go to hell, pal. You can’t accuse me of being a crass materialist and money-obsessed and expect me to be cracking a bottle of Dom with you.

He gave her a look. You see how you’ve changed? Before we met you’d never heard of any of these champagnes, now they’re part of your everyday vocabulary.

So? Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be, that life keeps growing, our outlooks broaden? Haven’t your parents been in agreement with me on the Maori problems in particular because most Maori have never got the money thing, how money works, how to make money? Didn’t they think I was oh so wonderful to be a Maori woman talking, thinking, most of all acting like they — you — do? Now it’s so bad you’re leaving me? Who did you say was in the wrong here?

My parents — and I — are in agreement with you, on lots of things, probably most. But I, Simon Harding, with his own mind, does not find a materialistic woman at all appealing. It’s like you’ve won Lotto and your miserable suburban existence can be ostentatiously put behind you. Not how I operate, sorry.

You mean not how we operate. Being your class.

Why don’t you add race to that, Polly Bennett, and be done with it?

Race then. And it is race in the death, is it not?

Could not be further from race. But if you have a need to make it that then go for it, it’s a democracy.

It is race. You’re saying, you can take the girl out of the ghetto but you can’t take the ghetto out of the girl.

Grow up.

Simon, I’ve heard you countless times talk about your money heroes, the ones on the Rich List, and how so-and-so’s bought a boat worth thirty million. Someone’s house is worth twelve million. Jeremy Lyons, or James Whosafloo has got three million dollars’ worth of cars in his garage the size of a warehouse. Now, is that not crass, but Polly Heke, aka Bennett, is crass for wanting a few expensive toys not remotely in your heroes’ league?

I don’t have to live with those people. Sleep with them.

Is that what you call your love-making efforts with me — sleeping? I’d have thought it was closer to a coma in terms of performance.

You’re being cheap now.

Oh, am I just? That still doesn’t make you even half of a good lover, in case you’d been kidding yourself in that department.

Anything else you want to expose of yourself, Polly, who is sounding more like a Heke than a Bennett?

Go, Simon. And I’ll not be selling our properties, nor buying out your share, not for two years at least. You make me sick.

He looked at her for some moments. You’re not even close to crying, are you?

No, she said. You cry for what you lose. You’ve lost, not me.

Though when Simon left she found herself with tears, of course she did. Simon was a good man, including as a lover. She’d just said that. As to being the other things he accused her of, Polly could not see it. Not for one moment, for it meant her house was built on sand. Which said a vital young life, spilling over with future plans, was wrong. And that could never be.