True Stars Page 10

  Mungo helped himself to wine, deftly extracting the neck of a fresh cask as if he was doing an internal. Morris held a glass against the light for a moment. As Toni watched him move in this house, she sensed how he loved it. It was the kind of house which was exactly like the Kendalls’ was supposed to have been. A group of people sat in a conservatory which was almost entirely filled by a kauri table lit from above by leadlights, while others stood in the adjoining kitchen. There were other rooms given over to conversation nooks, and fat sofas, bookcases and handblown glass, where Morris entertained other bankers and clients, but this room was the Party’s, their powerhouse during Kit Kendall’s last two election campaigns. The room felt right, a place that drew them together.

  Nick and Hortense with Mungo joined the circle, pushing it wider. In this fourth year of the Lange Government they talked about race relations and the crime wave, about privatisation and the Auckland drift, about what happened in Wellington (they all had different theories, particularly about the way that corruption ate at the hearts of men and women who went there), about the running down of the health service and what might be contained in the report of the Royal Commission on Social Policy and the hope it held out — a last hope, somebody said — and whether Lotto should fund the arts; whether, in fact, art was over-subsidised.

  ‘It must be,’ Denise pronounced, ‘because it was so hard to get into Nureyev at the Festival.’ She had been dying to slip in the fact that she had seen Nureyev in Wellington. ‘I was so close to the front I could hear him breathe, and see him when he scratched the back of his leg. They mucked up the bookings, you know. Somebody ought to do something about it.’

  ‘The Government can’t fix everything,’ Matt said, suddenly coming to its defence. ‘You can’t blame the Government for that.’

  Nonie clutched Denise’s arm frantically at the end of the table. ‘I said to Denise, didn’t I, how we should get the share club going again, didn’t I love?’

  Denise moved closer to Hortense, the alliance with Nonie collapsing now there was someone else to talk to. She and Gabby had managed rather better since the crash than the Verschoelts, and tying herself to Nonie’s coat-tails again seemed less than a good idea. In fact, there were times when she blamed Nonie, however cruel that made her feel in her heart.

  ‘I’ve been covering the march,’ said Hortense to Matt.

  ‘God bless them,’ said Denise.

  ‘I wanted to go on the march,’ said Harry. ‘I’ve been sold out.’

  ‘Speaking of selling,’ said Denise, her lipstick hovering in the gap between her front teeth, ‘did you know Nixon’s have sold out, and Gabby’s bought in a share of real estate. It just went through today, didn’t it, Morris?’

  So that explained their presence: Morris’s star clients for the day. Toni looked to catch Morris’s eye, but he was testing the ripeness of a cheese and arranging it on a plate. He didn’t look at her. But then why should he be accountable? Every day he must make deals for people who were worse by far than Denise and Gabby. It was his job.

  In the kitchen Sarah was gliding round, bending between the oven and bench, her movements like silk falling through a ring. Toni couldn’t take her eyes off the two of them, Sarah and Morris, arranging food, working like a team, giving the same amount of attention to all their guests. She did a mental shrug. If it came to it, she did the same for Lyle’s clients. You didn’t need style to buy computers.

  If only Rose were here, if she could talk to her, she might make sense of the evening. She supposed she meant, if only things hadn’t gone wrong. Toni suddenly ached, acknowledging more loss than she could comprehend right now, about so many things, about what happened to people and why things changed.

  ‘We’re thrilled, aren’t we, Honey Puff?’ Denise was still on about their deal. She plumped herself against a cushion.

  Gabby looked suitably modest.

  ‘It’ll be like the old times,’ Denise babbled into the silence. ‘Affluence. I love affluence, don’t you all love it?’

  ‘But weren’t you against the Government yesterday Denise?’ said Matt drily.

  Hortense, seeing the drift of the conversation, edged away from Denise.

  ‘Oh yes. I am. We are.’ She gathered herself, defiant. ‘We’d have been affluent anyway.’

  ‘They lay the envelopes out on the table,’ Harry was saying. He was drunk, too, in a slow methodical way that still allowed him to follow his thoughts through one by one. ‘But you only get one if you’re still employed. How about that? A envelope. An envelope, yep, that’s right, an envelope that says you’ve still got a job. And you keep looking for your envelope, and there is no envelope. That’s how they tell you.’

  ‘Where’s Belinda?’ Matt asked Toni tersely, looking aside when she pretended she hadn’t heard him.

  Belinda, Harry’s wife who had kept her maiden name and wasn’t called Belinda Ryan, was younger still than Sarah, but then she wasn’t in the room. She was in the Applebloom’s bathroom with her back pushed against the toilet cistern and her legs round Lyle Warner’s waist while he fucked her. She had been putting on eyeliner when he came in and shut the door behind them. She watched him undoing his zip in the mirror and drop his trousers without turning round or speaking. When he got hard she touched the reflection in the mirror.

  ‘Kinky, eh?’

  ‘Jesus, it kills me seeing you with him,’ Lyle said.

  ‘Get your gear on,’ she said, glancing at the door, ‘they’ll catch us.’

  ‘Get yours off.’

  The first time, she leaned on the towel rail with her buttocks arched towards him and her skirt hitched around her waist. She leaned against him and cried when they’d finished, not brave any more.

  ‘When are you going to tell him?’

  ‘When are you going to tell her?’ They were whispering fiercely.

  ‘Love, I’ve got kids. I need time.’

  ‘You won’t ever do it.’

  ‘I will. If we get you fixed up somewhere first. A place, you know. I can help.’

  She nodded.

  ‘So?’

  ‘He’s lost his job.’

  ‘Belinda. C’mon, they’ll find us. Promise.’

  ‘I can’t. I don’t know. Don’t leave me, not just yet.’ She had big white teeth and a top gum that showed when she smiled and a snub nose. He thought he must be crazy, but he wanted her as much as anything he had ever had. Or owned. To stop her crying, or to extract a promise, he didn’t know which, he had put her against the toilet.

  A huge central fan mounted in a solid brass holder whirred while Rose ate her meal in the hotel dining room. A man and a woman, dressed up as if for an anniversary, ate awkwardly at another table. They were her only company. A man in a red T-shirt, emblazoned with I’M A HUNK, TOUCH ME in black letters, walked through bearing an enormous live crayfish. He slapped it until it produced an anguished squirm. ‘It’s alive, it’s alive,’ he sang.

  ‘Sorry about the noise — one helluva row,’ he said, wandering back later, holding a jug of beer this time. He pirouetted a full circle by Rose’s table and stole a bread roll from the side of her plate.

  Guitars stirred and strummed in the bar below her when she went upstairs to her room. The room contained a single bed covered by an orange candlewick spread, a narrow bare cupboard with chipped brown paint which served as a wardrobe, a bedside table without a lamp, and brown curtains with tasselled drawstrings. Outside, horses were tied up at the entrance to the public bar, pawing and snorting softly by the light of the single street lamp.

  She went downstairs to find the private bar of which Ellis had spoken, but it was closed. The crowd, mostly Maori, through which she threaded her way to the public bar, was dense, and so was the smoke. They were singing: Knock three ti-imes on the ceiling/ when you want me and someone in the crowd laughed when she went up to the bar which also doubled as a bottle store with an iron grille over a shelf of spirits.

  She smiled, but nobody smile
d back. A Pakeha woman, one of only two in the room, stepped up to her and blew smoke in her face.

  In the silence Rose heard herself say, ‘A half of brandy, please.’

  Back in the room, their laughter seeped through the floorboards. She tipped a measure of brandy into the tumbler on the bedside table and turned the covers back on the bed. She swallowed the brandy. Not tonight would she lie awake waiting for the phone to ring, her eyes parched, until, unable to bear it a moment longer, she downed Halcyon, only to be woken minutes or hours later, her arm lurching sluggishly through the dark space between her and the telephone beside the bed, to lie shivering afterwards with Roach at her side until the pills, or fatigue, or simply disbelief, released her into sleep again. She undressed and slid into the sheets. It was cold and clean inside.

  She may have dozed; it was much later that there was a knock on the door. The man in the red T-shirt was standing outside.

  ‘The missus says there’s a phone call.’

  ‘There must be a mistake,’ she said, pulling her housecoat around her.

  ‘There’d better not be,’ he said, not at all jocular now. ‘It’s a bloody fine time of night to get someone out of bed.’

  The hotel was very quiet as she padded downstairs in bare feet.

  ‘It can’t be for me,’ she repeated. She was going to say that nobody in the whole world outside of this hotel knew that she was here, but thought better of it.

  She picked the phone up off the counter. ‘Hullo.’ She waited. ‘Hullo, who is it?’

  At the other end she heard it, the firm unerring click of a phone being replaced.

  Hortense had started talking dirty; it was that time of night. ‘You’ve got to believe me, I know about vaginal orgasm,’ she was telling Mungo. ‘You think because you’re a doctor you can tell me what I feel, but you’re a man. Isn’t that right, Sarah?’

  Sarah and Belinda were in the kitchen smoking a joint and didn’t answer her, not because they were unfriendly but they were absorbed in saying very little. Morris watched his wife and Toni watched Morris. The party had loosened up since the Taites and the Verschoelts had suddenly left.

  Nick had spotted Larry in the garden leaning against a tree. Thinking him ill he had gone out to rescue him and found him peeing against a pottery urn in the Applebloom’s shrubbery, his arc golden in the moonlight, his face ghostly.

  ‘The bathroom was full,’ he said.

  When he came inside he had acted sober and quiet. ‘I think it is time we go home,’ he had said firmly to Nonie and handed her her coat before she could protest. As they and the Taites had come together they all felt impelled to leave at once.

  Now everyone except Belinda talked more easily.

  Lyle sat alongside Toni, his arm around the back of her chair, his fingers brushing her shoulder when she talked. She sat quite still neither responding to nor rejecting him.

  ‘I mean, what’s the matter with us, if we don’t talk about these things,’ said Hortense. ‘We’re no better than the fundies up the road.’

  ‘I am,’ said Sarah, shaking her head. ‘I am.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Belinda wistfully, ‘you are too, Sarah.’

  ‘Talking of which,’ said Hortense, turning to Toni, ‘did you see them out in force when you were talking to Wiki this morning? Singing?’

  ‘I heard something,’ said Toni, surprised. ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘Covering it, of course. Newspaper, read all about it, eh Matt?’

  ‘You didn’t tell me. You didn’t interview me. What are you saying about it?’ Toni cried.

  ‘I interviewed you for yesterday’s march, big boots. Don’t worry kid. It’s a new angle. Matt knows all about it. Bit of police brutality, bit of beating and thumping.’

  ‘Tell. Why didn’t you tell us before?’

  ‘Ears.’ She meant the departed guests, and Larry in particular, but Matt was glancing at her, silencing her anyway.

  ‘Rose was there,’ said Hortense, getting the message. ‘Just standing there in the middle of the fundies. Kind of weird, our friend Rose.’

  ‘Why aren’t we marching anyway?’ cried Belinda. Her eyes were unnaturally bright.

  Sarah leaned against the stove. ‘Remember when being high meant you were afraid to fall out of a tree?’

  ‘We were thirty then,’ said Hortense, with reverence, joining them. ‘Or thereabouts.’ She had forsaken Mungo. Now her eyes followed Belinda thirstily, as if for details. At the far end of the table, in the conservatory, Matt and Nick were huddled together, the phrase ‘core strategy’ escaping from the edges of their discussion. They looked slightly secretive, even in this gathering. Their eyes followed Morris from time to time, with a speculative air. Nick’s glance was occasionally troubled.

  ‘We should all be out there marching,’ shouted Belinda, turning on Toni.

  ‘Don’t take it out on me,’ Toni said, slipping out of Lyle’s range. Aside, to her old and dear friend Matt, she said, interrupting his conversation, ‘I don’t know where Rose is Matt. I feel I’ve lost her.’

  Puzzled, he said, ‘But you saw her this morning, she was going to Wellington.’

  ‘I feel scared about her.’ She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. ‘It’s all right, I’m drunk, we’re all drunk.’

  Harry, who hadn’t spoken for nearly an hour, raised himself at the sound of his wife’s clamorous voice. ‘Why did you let them in here?’ he said to Morris. ‘Those people, they wrecked things, not us.’

  ‘The march is on,’ said Toni, recovering herself. ‘Why beef about it, the people it matters to are marching.’

  ‘It matters to me,’ said Harry. ‘I’m unemployed, remember.’

  ‘Larry Verschoelt isn’t doing too well himself,’ said Matt uneasily.

  ‘You didn’t tell me they’d be here tonight,’ Harry said to Morris.

  ‘You could have left, old chap,’ said Morris. He was screwing caps on to bottles so that nobody was encouraged to help themselves to another drink.

  Harry looked at Belinda. ‘No I couldn’t,’ he said thickly. ‘What are you, Applebloom? Who can read you, eh? Name like Apple-bloom. Such a lovely …’ he hiccupped, stopped. ‘Such a romantic name,’ he began though he knew, he must know, Toni thought, how they all ached for him to stop, ‘sounds like orchards, cider, green grasses, perfume, haybarns. Lovely name. You’re poetry, Apple-bloom. And all the time you’re a Jew. A Jewish banker called Appelblum …’ In case anybody didn’t understand, he spelt: ‘B–l–u–m, programme of anglicisation of the Jews …’

  ‘Stop it, Harry,’ screamed Belinda, covering her ears with her hands. ‘For God’s sake, stop it!’

  Harry had half-risen and was leaning against the table; Matt was moving towards him to lead him out: Harry whom they had loved, Harry who worked hard for them, and they had trusted, and was now about to be dumped like yesterday’s leftovers. Then the phone rang.

  Morris picked it up. He listened, spoke carefully, and turned away from them.

  ‘Yes, certainly,’ he said, ‘certainly, I can make that meeting. I’ll make the arrangements in the morning.’

  One by one the group began gathering their belongings together, awkward that they appeared to listen to their host’s telephone conversation in the wake of silence that followed Harry and Belinda’s outbursts.

  ‘Yes,’ Morris said again, ‘it’ll be quite all right. Can you give me the venue again?’

  ‘Who was it?’ said Sarah when he had hung up.

  ‘Nobody you know,’ said Morris. He put his arm around Harry. ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘but you’re wrong too.’

  ‘I know,’ said Harry. ‘I know. I’m sorry …’

  ‘No need. Come and see us again soon. All right?’

  He put out his arms to hug Harry, and around them the others laughed too loudly, relief washing over them.

  ‘Are you going away?’ Sarah asked Morris.

  ‘Yes,’ Morris replied regretfully, extrica
ting himself from Harry’s embrace. ‘Yes, I have to go away tomorrow evening. I may stay overnight.’

  Sarah stared at him as if the others were not there, a look of incomprehension flitting across her face. Her eyes met Toni’s, puzzled. Finding no answer there, she shrugged. Turning back to the others, she acknowledged their goodnights with little cloudy smiles.

  ‘Have you finished charging Muru?’

  ‘Not yet, we’re still recovering stolen goods.’

  ‘And are they worth the trouble?’

  Teddy O’Meara looked at the senior officer. Campbell thought, yes, he is trying to work out what I’m asking him. It’s just as well for him to wonder.

  ‘Here’s the list … sir,’ said Teddy, offering it.

  ‘I was only asking. Have you given a copy to CIB?’

  ‘I have.’

  Of course he knew that O’Meara would have done it. Teddy always had. It was none of his business, strictly speaking. But he couldn’t help looking over the list. He might be able to locate some missing property off it anyway. Campbell saw from the list that Matau Muru, Wiki’s youngest son, who had been uplifted that afternoon from the unemployment march heading south, pending a number of charges relating to breaking and entering, had been found to be in possession of the following items: one riding saddle, two bridles, one video recorder containing film of an unidentified couple of males dressing in women’s clothing, the top tier of a wedding cake, three tins of Watties baby food and two of Heinz, a bottle of Tia Maria, a Batman comic, a collection of birds’ eggs, a Rover badge, two car tyres and a Hillman Hunter mudguard.