Opportunity (17 page)

On the fourth day, at lunchtime, Charles ended the
tournament by whacking the ball away for four. We clapped
and cheered. There were little speeches, a prizegiving.
Dependable Simon lugged out a chilly-bin full of iceblocks.
And then we were getting in our cars and heading out of town,
the boys tired and silent, Max cheerful and smelling of the
peppermints he'd sucked to mask the smell of the matey
cigarette he'd shared with Trish behind the trees.

We drove past the crime scene, deserted now, the evidence
tapes hanging limp, the police caravan with its torn posters.
We were heading to Rotorua: the boys had requested a trip to
the mudpools. We drove for a long time in contented silence,
my hand resting on Max's thigh.

At a motel in Rotorua the boys played minigolf. We sat on
the balcony in the hazy evening light. Max smoked, his feet up
on the railing, his gaze fixed on the boys. He jumped up to get
Maxie a sweatshirt, thumped down long-sufferingly to help
free a trapped ball. I remember his smoke curling up into the
air, the boys' voices, the tiny thwack and scuttle as the golfballs
rattled through their courses. There was an orange streetlight
outside the window of our room; it blinked and buzzed in the
night like an incensed eye, peering between the blinds while
Max and I made love.

The next day at Whakarewarewa, told of the price for a
family ticket, Max said, 'You're kidding!'

Something formed, shaped itself up, in the face of the
woman in the booth. Lips parted, downturned mouth, nostrils
widening.

'Is there a problem?' she said.

Max shrugged, and thrust the money through the hole. The
woman fell to hard laughter with one of her colleagues. A
whiff of brimstone hung in the air.

'God, Max,' I said. 'Don't have a fight before we're even in.'

He laughed, wiping sweat from his face. Here it was even
hotter than Wanganui — boiling water under the earth, white
fire pouring out of the sky. It felt as though you could get
sunburnt through your hat. Below the bridge children were
diving for coins, their brown bodies sleek and shining. Charles
and Maxie threw in some coins and the boys surged up onto
the bank, shouting, spitting, calling for more. We moved on
into the village. Neither Max nor I had been before. We were
struck by the bucolic shabbiness of the place, its tumbledown
fences and tiny dilapidated buildings. There was none of the
touristy artificiality we'd expected.

'It's sort of raw,' Max said wonderingly. Between the
buildings there were glimpses of battered cars, washing lines,
back doors lined with gumboots and stacks of beer crates.

'Well, it's a real village,' I said

We stood at the edge of a briny blue pool, the water
steaming. Bags of corn were cooking at the edge. Heat came
up in waves, along with the rich, oddly enjoyable sulphur
stink. A woman wandered past with a walkie-talkie and a
voice crackled out of it, asking whether the corn was cooked.
The boys ran about marvelling at the plopping mudpools, the
steaming vents. Across an expanse of rock and clay and scrub,
over which clouds of steam wafted, a geyser suddenly shot
water high into the air.

The boys shouted and pointed. 'We want to go to the geyser.
Over there!'

We walked towards it but came to a locked gate. Trying to
find our way we headed up behind the village, past a hall in
which a concert was being held for a tour group. A fierce child
eyed me from a doorway. Behind a flyscreen, a woman jigged
a baby in her arms.

A rough track led up a hill and we followed Max, who was
determined to find the geyser for the boys. We walked through
low scrub past mudpools, the white clay crusts all pitted, the
water letting off waves of steam. I enjoyed the heat. We stood
on a point looking down on an emerald-blue pool. Then we
walked down into a shallow dip of the land, a crater. Amid the
scrub there were white clay banks, bubbling pools, still,
chemical-green puddles. A sign said: 'Danger. Thin earth. No
responsibility taken.'

I caught up with Charles. 'Listen,' I said.

We could hear water trickling under the earth. I called out
to Max.

He waited for me. He'd picked Maxie up.

I said, 'We shouldn't go off the path. There are signs saying
"Danger. Thin earth." And listen.'

There was the sound of water running under our feet.

'That water's hot,' I said. 'If you fell through . . .'

Max grinned. 'You'd be cooked.'

'Don't go off the path.'

He was already walking away. Charles ran to catch up. I
followed. I heard water again, right under where I was
standing. I didn't like it. When I caught up with Max he was
putting Maxie up on his shoulders.

'We're going to cut across there,' he told me. 'To get to the
geyser.' He pointed across an acre of scrub, steam drifting
across it.

'There's no path there. What if you fall through?'

Charles was already walking ahead around the edge of a
mudpool.

'You can hear the water under the ground. Listen!'

Charles laughed. 'Don't freak out, Mum.'

I ignored him. I hated him siding with his father, laughing
at me. 'Max! You can't take them across there.'

'We'll be fine. Come on.'

Little Maxie watched me patiently, not unsympathetically:
poor Mummy, making a fuss again.

'I'm not walking on that,' I said. 'It says not to.'

Max shrugged, and followed Charles across the clay. It
looked thin, dry, brittle. I felt frantic watching him.

I couldn't make myself walk where they'd gone. I turned
away, my eyes stinging. I was furious, ashamed. I went back
along the path. Had I abandoned my own children out of fear?
But they were not abandoned. They were with their father.
I thought about Max's power, his separateness. His love for
the boys, their love for him. That he could carry them away
and I would be left with nothing but the sound of my angry
pleading, the ground trickling away under my feet.

Thin earth.

***

I waited at the bridge, watching the local boys diving for coins.
The sun was an angry white eye. I waited for a long time. After
an hour I walked back over the hill but there was no sign of
them. I went to a hut near the gate. Two guards, a young man
and young woman in floral shirts, were sitting behind a desk.
I asked how I could get to the geyser.

They glanced at each other. 'You can't get to it from here. It
belongs to the other guys.'

'Other guys?'

'The neighbours!' They exploded into giggling.

'How do I get there?'

'You have to go round the road, go to their gate and pay
them.'

You keep that quiet, don't you? I thought. That the main
attraction isn't in your bit of the park. I said, 'Can I borrow
your phone?'

They were kind, getting out of the way and letting me ring
Max's cellphone, allowing me go on trying when there was no
reply. Then he answered, and suddenly I was calm and
reasonable, laughing along as he told me they'd crossed the
scrubland and been caught in the neighbouring park without
the right ticket, that they'd been briskly ushered out, having
viewed the geyser, and were walking all the way back around
the road.

I met them coming back. The boys were eating iceblocks. I
laughed over my stupid attack of nerves, admired Max's
acumen in getting what the boys wanted. Max, adopting a
faintly cynical and patronising air, allowed me to praise him.

'Silly old Mummy,' the boys said. We straggled back to the
village and opened up the car to let out the heat.

I found myself thinking about the girl in Wanganui. The
funeral. Her parents. How it must have been. There were boys
playing cricket, the sun was shining, rowboats were racing on
the sparkling river, and their daughter was dead. I thought of
them, burying their only child. I watched as Max carefully
buckled little Maxie into his seat. I thought: I must take care
of my boys, love them, guard them. I must take care.

The baking concrete, the furnace glare of the afternoon
sun. Max straightens; we face each other over the bonnet of
the car. There is something in his expression. A moment of
hardness, clarity between us. A bird, turning and turning in
the air above us, gives a high, sad, warning cry. I think of that
expression Max likes to use: 'Over my dead body.'

He believes, with justification, that I am incompetent and
hysterical. These are our roles — I dizzy, he rational. These are
the parts we play. But a kind of communication passed
between us then, as if, for a moment, we had abandoned our
lines and were confronting each other, free of script, on an
empty stage. He nodded and stared off at the hillside, absorbing
the thing I was telling him.

If you leave me, you go alone.
Over my dead body
will you
take them away.

I was working in Teulada for my friend Freddie. He owned a
couple of bars and nightclubs in the town. I used to work for
him in London and after he left and set himself up in Spain
he phoned me and told me to come on down, so I packed my
bags and went there, and soon I was living in a little house
by the sea and working behind the bar at Freddie's, and I was
happy to be away from London's cold winter and its dead grey
light. Those first mornings in the village, when I woke up and
walked out onto the terrace and the light was all golden and
buttery and the sun was sparkling on the sea, I felt almost
happy — healthy, anyway. I felt more alive than I had for a
long time.

It was pretty hectic working for Freddie; he was always off
his face, although he managed to run a tight ship and make a
lot of money, God knows how. He had a lot of rich friends —
people he'd gone to public school with, who used to pass
through — and he'd play the host and give them what they
wanted: all-night parties, hilarious messy times, lots of drugs.
There were always girls reeling off the dance floor, dancing on
the sand, wading into the sea, shrieking at one another in
their posh voices.

A couple of times I took long trips with Freddie. We drove
into France and Germany, stopping along the way at places
where Freddie had business or someone he needed to call on.
Once he took me to a wake in a chateau in France — his
friend's father had died. We'd stopped off in a couple of bars
and done a few lines of coke along the way, and by the time we
got to the place Freddie was feeling pretty regal. We drove up
miles of tree-lined driveway, screeched into the courtyard of
the most stupendous mansion, were greeted by a bowing
lackey and led through a lot of grand rooms. He showed us
into a sort of ballroom where there were a lot of people
grouped around, everyone very quiet. I hung back but Freddie
took command as usual. He strode up to his friend, the
bereaved son and heir, shook his hand and shouted, 'Jonty!
Let me be the first to congratulate you!'

I had a girlfriend in Teulada, a good-looking girl called
Mimi. She worked in the bar too, and she was nice, but it got
on my nerves the way she stuck so close to me, always cooking
dinner for me and trying to keep me with her on our nights
off. In the end I told her it wasn't working and we'd have to
call it off. It made her sad — she spent weeks crying about it
— but after a while she went to London and married the bass
player of her favourite band. I toughened her up. Set her on
her way. That's the way I looked at it. I wished her luck.

Just before I left Teulada a fight broke out in the bar. I came
out of the back, pilled up to the eyeballs, and a girl crashed
onto the sand at my feet. I just stood there staring at her. There
was a big punch-up spilling off the dance floor, and soon
people were throwing chairs, bottles, glasses, anything they
could get their hands on. In the office Freddie was on the
phone to the police, telling them there was a riot. Typically
they didn't show up, and we just had to wait for the brawl to
run out of steam. There was a lot of clearing up to do
afterwards, and plenty of ruined stock. Freddie was up in
arms and decided to go to the police station to complain. He
marched in and gave them a piece of his mind, said it wasn't
good enough and what did they think they were doing, just
sitting around while the place was torn to pieces. The next
night we were all apprehensive, but people seemed to be
behaving themselves. The bar was full and the night was going
well. But the police had decided to get their own back on
Freddie for the telling-off he'd given them, and the next
moment they'd turned up mob-handed, forty of them, with
torches and dogs. So there was uproar again. Freddie was in
the kitchen holding a dinner plate with six lines of coke on it.
He threw it over his shoulder. Then he stuffed some pills
under the fridge, but the police saw him and had the fridge
lifted up. Freddie was led away shouting, 'It's all for me,
officers! I'm an addict!'

I lay low and didn't get arrested. The bar was closed down
and I walked the short distance home along the waterfront, hearing the screams
and crashes and shouts behind me. The sea was calm and still, and the moon
was making a shining path across the water. I got home and had a few drinks.
When I went into my room I saw my flatmate had put a letter on my bed. It
was from my father. He said it was his seventieth birthday soon (so it is,
I thought, glazing over a bit) and would I like to come home so we'd all be
there for the party. I lay on my back staring at the ceiling. I thought about
home. I thought I might do it. He'd offered to pay the fare.

***

It took a bit of doing, getting home. I was in a bar in London
with all my gear and a transvestite stole my bag with my
passport in it. I was off my face at the time, and I cursed
myself afterwards for not realising that this creature who was
doing funny tricks in front of me, dancing and twirling and
making faces, wasn't just trying to make me laugh. I ran out of
the bar after her, or him, but it was too late. I had enough cash
to live on for a short time, but barely enough. I had to apply
for a new passport and it was pretty difficult with hardly any
funds or ID. I stayed with a friend of mine in Wanstead; she
was into something called Vortex Healing. It was a spiritual
thing, to do with lifting the bad karma out of places. She took
it very seriously.

'We're a worldwide network,' she told me.

'Yeah,' I said, 'course you are.'

She did a procedure on my back, I don't know what it was,
but I felt a kind of weight, a strange burning. I told her and she
gave a smug little smile and said that my luck would change.
Which it did, actually. I got my passport, and I bought myself
a ticket to New Zealand — although I have to confess that by
the time I got back it was too late for my father's birthday
party.

Just before I left London I'd completely run out of money
and I ended up staying with a woman I didn't even know. I
met her in a bar; she started buying me drinks and the next
thing I knew she was taking me to a poetry reading. I was just
biding my time, keeping myself relatively sober so I wouldn't
miss my plane. Anyway, I sat around laughing at the poets.
The next morning she kicked me out of her bed and I struggled
off down to the tube and went to Heathrow. When I got on the
plane, in that enclosed space, I realised what a mess I was and
I pitied the family sitting next to me. I went to the toilets and
had a wash with paper towels, wetting them and doing myself
over. It seemed to take ages, bouncing around in the tiny
cubicle. I couldn't do much about my clothes, but I took off a
couple of layers and left them in the toilet. It was going to be
summer where I was going. Auckland. I hadn't been back for
years.

I had a sense when I got off the plane that the air was soft,
not harsh like the mineral air of London. You could smell
plants and even cows. The sky was high, light, wide. The light
was too bright. All the functionaries at the airport had new
wide-brimmed hats, which looked ridiculous. I'd been away
long enough for the place to seem familiar but altered, as if I'd
walked into a place that was an approximation of what I
remembered. My parents were waiting for me and for a second
we were all struck a bit dumb. I was thinking what little old
people they looked, and I don't know what they were thinking
about me. I was bigger, for one thing, not skinny like I used to
be. My brother was there with his wife and baby. Poor old
William, he was always the sensible one. When I got outside
and saw the police cars painted yellow and orange instead of
blue and white like they used to be I said to him, 'Jesus, what
have they done to their cars? Is that for Christmas?' He
laughed. My mother said my name in her dry, ironic little
voice. Dad tried to pick up my suitcase and she hissed at me,
'Help him.' I shook myself out of a bit of a daze and picked up
the bag.

Dad drove. My mother screwed herself around and stared
at me fiercely.

I said politely, 'So, what have you been doing?'

'Oh, just waiting to die,' she said.

Dad said, 'The trip's quite quick now they've put in more
motorway.'

'Indeed,' I said.

William was ahead of us in his station wagon, its back window
crammed with baby equipment.

'What have
you
been doing?' my mother asked.

'Just a lot of drugs, basically,' I said.

My father sighed.

My mother gave me an acid look. 'At least William . . .'

'Thank goodness for William,' I said sincerely.

'Lucy's very nice, you know,' my mother said. That was
William's wife.

'My girlfriend left me,' I said. I felt a little pang. I sighed.
'Mimi . . .'

'Mimi!' She thought
that
was a scream. She went on
repeating the name. 'Sounds like a poodle,' she said. I said was
I supposed to have a girlfriend called Desdemona or Cressida,
some bullshit name like that? She snorted.

My father stopped at a red light and turned around. His
face was so lined, so baffled. He smiled, wanting to be kind. I
stared back for a second, my face fixed, then looked away.

'Green,' Mum said.

Dad wrenched himself around and groped dimly at the
gears. The car shot forward. His thin grey hair straggled over
his collar. His shoulders were thinner than they used to be. I'd
got more solid; he'd shrunk. I wasn't sure I was going to live
to his age, however. Not with all the booze and dope and coke
and E I'd put away over the years. I sat looking at the backs of
my parents' heads. My body was on London time and I was in
a bit of a trance, almost drifting off. I could have done with a
line of coke. They'd tried, but they'd failed when it came to
me and drugs — failed to stop me, I mean. What they should
have done when I was fourteen is sat down and smoked a
joint with me. But that piece of common sense was beyond
them.

When I was sixteen my friends and I grew a little cannabis
plantation. Once we'd harvested it we hid it in the back of the
warming cupboard at my place. A few days later I came home
to disaster — my parents had discovered my stash. They'd
brought it out and piled it on the kitchen bench. My mother
had a big spoon and she was stuffing the leaves down the
Wastemaster. While I was standing there, stunned at this
calamity, she barked at my father, 'On!'

He turned the switch. She forced the dope down into the
whirring grinder. At her command he turned it off. She took
more leaves from the bench and pushed them down. Then
'On!' she snapped. I came alive at that point, rushed forward
and shouted at them to leave my stuff alone. My mother held
me off with the big spoon. 'On!' she shouted, and my father
reached up obediently with his trembling thumb, pressed the
switch, and ground the last fruits of my labour to pulp . . .

A rift opened up after that. Betrayed, I took to my room
and began to learn the electric guitar. The house throbbed
with my angry chords. A battle raged between my parents'
classical music and my own eclectic range — I was particularly
fond of one song that burst out with the exhilarating lyric,
Slut! Slut! Dirty Bitch!
I remember my mother beating on my
door, shouting at me to turn it down. Oh, it's all a long time
ago now. A long time . . .

At each red light my father turned and looked at me
carefully, smiling and sad. My mother fidgeted in her seat and
ate peppermints, and screwed her head around, her glasses
flashing, to fire questions. How long was I staying? Would I
think about coming back for good? Did I have any ideas about
getting myself together?

There was a sudden heavy shower, the car sluiced through deep
puddles, then the sun came out and the road steamed, and I saw a rainbow riding
between the wooden houses — appearing, disappearing, a blur of bright
colour, the flash of sun through leaves, diamonds of light.

***

I nodded off in the middle of lunch. Muttering about time
zones I crashed into the bedroom they'd given me — not my
old room but William's. Perhaps they couldn't bear to have me
back in my old lair. Later, after dreaming uneasily on the
single bed, I got up and groped my way downstairs. I was in
the kitchen with little idea of where I was, until Dad swam
into focus next to me. I was looking at the Wastemaster.

'Poor Sam: you're not up to much, I suppose,' he said. He
put an experimental hand on my shoulder. I glanced at it, as
though at an insect, then at him, as if to say, what's
that
doing
there? He registered my expression and we both smiled — I
tightly, he ruefully but with affection. I could see him thinking,
difficult old Sam, poor old Sam. An idea swam about in my
fuddled mind; I was re-registering my parents, comparing
them, having been away so long. My mother and I, we have a
kind of carry-on: tough, some might even say obnoxious, but
my father is different — more gentle and straightforward. I
think William takes after him. He'll be henpecked to death by
that wife of his, for sure.

'Shall we get a video tonight?' Dad said.

'Certainly,' I croaked. I felt like falling flat on my face.

Will and Lucy came for dinner with their baby, who was
quite a cute little boy. I sat him on my knee and tried to teach
him a Spanish football song. I got through the meal with the
help of a lot of booze and some racy anecdotes about Spain. I
was in good form, my head cleared by the wine. Lucy seemed
to find me hilarious. She kept going off into shrieks, which
made my mother glare. I'd warmed to Lucy, in fact I was
already feverishly imagining an affair with her — Will
stumping off to work and Lucy sighing and folding nappies
and looking out the window, and I in the driveway with my
Spanish tan, my bottle of wine, my gypsy guitar . . .