The Night Book (9 page)

Roza sat back and sipped her coffee, putting a hand to her brow. The manuscript was a disaster. It was a train wreck. If anyone got hold of it, studded as it was with suicidal phrasings, it would do him nothing but damage. ‘Feminist cronies’ was a public relations debacle all on its own. And there were plenty more. But the
naïvety
of it, she thought. The naïvety of thinking you could express yourself like this, and not be torn to shreds. His simplicity, his lack of guile, made her go towards him rather than away. Because if he was that simple, if he was that much of a failure at managing his own image, you had to start suspecting … What? That he was telling the truth? It was a puzzle. People could be extraordinarily competent in life, and on the page, toddlers. Babies.

‘Myself and my family were gutted,’ Marden scowlingly wrote. ‘No way was this incompetent woman going to stop there.’ The incompetent woman, in this case, was the police minister, Sonya Kingsley (BCom, LLM).

‘Coming for a coffee?’

Placing a protective arm across the page, Roza looked up at Cheryl, the marketing assistant.

‘I was just looking at this Marden thing. For a laugh,’ she added.

‘Oh
him
. Why isn’t it in the bin?’

‘It’s fairly … illiterate.’

‘Yeah. Well. I don’t know why he thought we’d be interested.’

‘Has anyone here actually read it? Has Ellen?’ Roza asked.

‘God, no.’

‘I’ll pop it in the recycling,’ Roza said.

Cheryl drifted off to the foyer and Roza waited for a moment before putting the manuscript in her bag.

Roza loved her work. It was another reason why she didn’t want to move to Wellington. Most of the staff were women and it was a companionable atmosphere. Most were Labour voters, Roza knew, but they didn’t hold politics against her. There seemed to be a comradely understanding that a lot of husbands were horrible, and if hers was the leader of the National Party it was a cross for her to bear, not a reason to dislike her. Or perhaps it was that they liked her enough to forgive her this detail. Or, she thought, perhaps it was because they sensed that she didn’t revel in David’s position, that she was not only apolitical but somehow tentative, reluctant even. Anyway, she loved her work and her colleagues, and she didn’t want to give them up. When she was in the office she felt surrounded and warm.

Now, as she joined the group for a coffee, she thought about the manuscript in her bag. All at work had helped with the publication of
Small Town Girl
, the ghosted autobiography of Marden’s accuser, Shelley O’Nione.
Small Town Girl
had been a hit, and Shelley O’Nione
had travelled to readings up and down the country, where fans had come forward to tell their own stories of rape and sexual abuse.

Marden had obviously decided to respond to O’Nione’s accusation with a book of his own, but he was considered toxic: no journalist, ghost writer or biographer would go near him. Even hardened PR agents had turned up their noses. He’d had no help and so, painfully, hopelessly, he had ground out his own life story, and there was no one to warn him, no one to say, Tell your story if you must, but not in this way. They will crucify you if you tell it this way.

If Roza had mentioned she was reading Marden’s book, everyone at work would have been loudly sickened. And she never would have looked at it, but for a chance discovery a couple of days earlier when she had been reading some publicity about the O’Nione book. There was a long article about the police sex crimes inquiry, and attached to it were clippings, reviews, photos and a profile by the
Herald
feature interviewer Emily Svensson about one of the other accused policemen, a Reid Harris, who had also been acquitted. And it had caught her eye, by chance, that this Harris had a half-brother whose surname was Lampton.

It was not a common name. She had paused, thinking about Simon Lampton. It seemed impossible that he could be connected to something so squalid. But then, no one could choose their family.

She had been curious.
A bit of detective work
. She had tried to find out whether Simon Lampton was related to Reid Harris. She had got on the internet and found a picture of the aftermath of his trial. Walking next to the acquitted Harris, holding his arm, was a man so strikingly like Simon Lampton that he had to be his brother. She Googled ‘Lampton’ and found a picture of the same man on a university website: Professor Ford Lampton, of the History Department at Auckland. Finally, she had found an article on the
internet about a funeral, and a picture of Ford and Simon Lampton together. Small town. Small world.

Her detective work finished, she’d forgotten about Lampton for a couple of days. She was too busy at work to think about anything else, but then, one lunchtime, she’d remembered Ray Marden’s manuscript and felt curious again, because of the chance connection to Lampton.

Marden’s prose was excruciating, and yet she could picture him, jobless, alone, hated, laboriously grappling with his thoughts, and something in her nature assented, acknowledged his pain. She knew what it was to be the misfit, the odd one out. It was part of her history: she was the product of all that secret abuse she had inflicted on herself.

He had been accused of raping O’Nione when she was eighteen and he was a twenty-four-year-old constable. He said it was consensual. After fifteen years she had come forward to accuse him, and her complaint had triggered the inquiry that had brought other accusers forward, drawing in Reid Harris, and the other policemen. You’d never unravel the truth after all that time. But, Roza reasoned, the juries had believed Marden, not O’Nione, and he’d been acquitted, having consistently denied the charge in the strongest terms. And Roza had never been sure about O’Nione, the celebrity victim with her frown of public pain. O’Nione had made sexual complaints about six other policemen too. All her life she had been preyed on by cops. She seemed to have been extraordinarily unlucky.

An idea formed in Roza’s mind. She pushed it away, then came back to it: I could correct the manuscript for Marden and send him a note. Let him know the mistakes he’s making. She would have to make sure he understood that was all she was giving him, nothing else — just a little bit of editorial advice, since no one else would give it. But she had to think of David — she wasn’t even going to
mention Marden at home; David would sensibly run a mile. Perhaps she could send the manuscript and note to Marden anonymously. But maybe even that was taking a risk, being careless and selfish when David needed her to be steady and reliable, especially just before an election.

At staff drinks, Cheryl was giving a rundown of her recent medical adventures.

‘Yeah, Simon’s very easy. Relaxed,’ she said.

Roza said slowly, ‘Simon Lampton. I
think
I’ve met him. We were at some dinner.’

‘He’s really good,’ Cheryl said. ‘You can see him on the private. He did both my births, but he does all the gynae stuff too.’

‘Oh yes,’ Roza said.

‘You know you were saying you and David might have a baby.’

‘I don’t know, it’s probably not the best timing. But David’s keen.’

‘You definitely should, Roza,’ Cheryl said. ‘You’d be such a good mother. I’ve got his numbers here.’

Roza stepped back a fraction, holding up her hands. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be in the phonebook. And I’d have to get pregnant first, wouldn’t I.’

Cheryl said, ‘You’ve got to get on with it, darling. Your biological clock’s ticking. Here, I don’t need this now.’

She handed Roza a piece of paper with Dr Lampton’s details, listed for patients: after-hours numbers, a cellphone. Roza felt a wave of heat rising up her neck and into her cheeks. She smiled vaguely and sipped her orange juice. She could smell alcohol all around her; it seemed to hang like a vapour in the air. It was definitely time to go home.

Before they all left she crumpled the bit of paper with Lampton’s
numbers on it and put it in the bin. Then, in the lift, she said she’d left something on her desk, nipped back, fished the paper out of the bin and put it in her bag.

Roza lay on the bed upstairs. Outside the window the clouds had seams of pure white, like ice, as they moved slowly across the sky. She was drinking tomato juice with copious amounts of pepper. The house was quiet. She narrowed her eyes and listened, and the ice in her glass let out a tiny, tortured crack.

David was out with his team, being photographed in front of billboards. Roza had felt a twinge of panic, something spinning inside her, when she’d seen the first billboard on Quay Street. From a background of sky blue her husband gazed massively down, his jaw set: Resolve. The future. Hope. Command. Stopped in her car at the lights, nursing a cup of takeaway coffee, she’d peered up at him, allowing herself a small twitch of mirth. Hello, darling. You had to laugh.

But she wasn’t laughing now. Beside her on the bed lay the pages of Ray Marden’s manuscript, now covered with jottings, markings, underlinings in red. She put down a page and picked up Simon Lampton’s phone numbers. Did she want a baby? As she considered this she took a long sip of her fiery drink, and felt it go burning down. Meet like with like. Nerves with nerves. Pain with pain.

David was keen for her to have a baby, she knew he was. And she loved him for it. Added to her customary sense of unease was a weird excitement, a restlessness that flattened her one minute and sent her prowling round the house the next. The looming election, obviously, but the excitement and agitation in her body, the nerves — this wasn’t to do with David or the crazy predicament of being the wife of the next prime minister. Or Ray Marden. It was all to do with herself, and, now that she’d met him, the question that involved
Simon Lampton. She was wary of agitation and excitement: any strong emotion was dangerous, as were hunger and fatigue. It was stressed at AA meetings: you had to look after yourself, stay on an even keel. She lay on the bed and looked for calm. The tiny crack of the ice cube. The clouds that seemed to be throwing themselves massively forward, and yet to move so slowly across the sky. But there was even something disturbing about that vast build-up of cloud …

She picked up the TV remote. The screen revealed the American Republican vice-presidential candidate speaking from a podium.

Oh, you … Roza thought, looking at the screen.

The vice-presidential candidate: anti-abortion (even in cases of rape or incest), an advocate of teaching creationism in schools. The crowd whooped and stomped and shouted.

Roza half-closed her eyes, took another blazing slug of tomato and pepper and watched a Republican campaigner being interviewed at the rally, a plump, tiny-eyed individual toting an enormous photo of a foetus. ‘We must protect life, all life.’ ‘As the Lord Jesus tells us.’

Oh, you fucking stupid … Roza thought.

She looked at the piece of paper again. She wanted to cry, but no tears came. But tears were dangerous. But everything was dangerous. Even the sky had menace, with its crystal curtains, its mountains of ice, so beautiful calm and cold. She looked at the cellphone number, and thought about ringing it, looked at the chest of drawers, where her own cellphone lay. And as she saw herself picking it up and dialling Lampton’s number, she felt it: the terrible pull. How can I do what I want without succumbing to what I don’t? How can I look for life when the fear of drinking pulls me the other way?

‘You’ll be all right,’ David had said, when she’d agreed about wanting a baby. He believed it, or he believed he could make it so;
he thought he could keep her all right, because he thought he could do anything, just by working hard. She loved him for believing this.
Darling, it’s the thought that counts.
He knew she was vulnerable — she’d told him about her problem as soon as they’d met, and he’d insisted on driving her to her AA meeting and made her laugh (and shed a tear) with his cheery reply: ‘But that’s great. You can drive us home from parties.’

He had been slightly desperate when they met, scarred by the death of his wife and struggling to do the best for his kids. They’d come together out of the ruins of their former lives. It fitted, it suited them that they were both escaping from something. The baby was the next logical step.

What she felt now was incredulity. That she had been introduced to Simon Lampton, and that, after all her thinking around the subject in the last year, someone had put his numbers in her hands. And now, thanks to Lampton’s big donation to the party, she would be seeing him again very soon. She looked at the TV. The Republican candidate would say
God
was pushing her towards Lampton.

You fucking stupid …
cunt
, Roza thought. And she lay on the bed, remembering.

She remembered the long ago hot summer after she’d sat her school exams, when she and Myron Jannides had loaded up their backpacks and zoomed out of the city on his motorbike. They’d holed up at his parents’ bach at Karekare, a little two-bedroom wooden house in the bush above Lone Kauri Road, about a kilometre up the dirt road from the beach. The water came from a big corrugated-iron rainwater barrel, and there was no flush toilet, only a little outhouse with a long-drop hole in the ground, set away from the house. From the balcony you could look down the valley, over the shining bush to the sea. She remembered the afternoon light on the hills, the way the
shadows in the gullies deepened to black as the sun crossed the sky, how she and Myron had bush-crashed down the hillside to the stream, where the water moved through the striped shadows and big eels came up from the deep pools, pricking the surface with their horned snouts. They had followed the stream all the way down to the beach, fighting their way through the bush or swimming where it was deep enough, and had come out by the waterfall, where they’d hunted for freshwater crayfish. They had spent their days at the beach, lying on the hot black dunes or body-surfing in the waves. Roza was a strong swimmer; she could get out the back with the boys and body-surf the biggest waves, not the way most people did, face-down in the water with their arms rigid, like learners in a kids’ pool. If the wave was a good one you could surf down it with half your body out of the water, your arms spread out and your head up, watching the boiling foam come smacking up towards you. She and Myron had competed, surfing next to each other. It was like flying. She was so sunburned the skin blistered off her face. She was covered in freckles and her hair was dry and tangled with salt. Myron’s blond frizz was bleached nearly white and his back was scaly with burn marks.