Copyright © 1999 Anthony McCarten.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-688-16303-3
Chapter One
FACTORY GIRLS
It was some time on Saturday night after work but before closing time down at the pub that Delia Chapman saw a spaceman. Well, that wasn't quite true. She saw ten of them. They stayed for about half an hour. And they took her on their vessel. They had silver suits and stainless-steel boots. The vessel was ultramodern and entirely impressive.
Delia had completed her third straight split shift in the small-goods packing section at Borthwick's Freezing Works. Her body, therefore, was still at breakfast, her head at midnight, her internal clock as scrambled as an international flight attendant's, and although she was completely exhausted she was too confused to sleep. Still wearing her white factory clothes and gum boots, she left her family farmhouse on foot, bought a bag of hot chips at the Texacana Take-away Bar and wandered on the river road toward the highway leading out of town.
Who expected to see something like a spaceman in Opunake? Since Delia was unprepared for such a nationally significant experience she was, at best, clumsy in her observations. Two hours later she was able to report that she had had a nice time, seen some lights and a few shapes, and had received a dozen or so nonverbal commands. But beyond that, and when pressed for more explicit details, she could add only that her guests had been extremely polite throughout the incident and had treated her as if she were extremely important.
Only when the earliest and most amused reactions to Delia's claim had been voiced the next morning in the bakery, the betting shop and in the express lane at the New World supermarket, and only after people had purged their systems of terms like "silly bitch" and "stupid mole" and "total spinner," did any more open-minded appraisals begin.
Delia Chapman was sixteen years old. In her penultimate year of high school, she was one of a raft of light-headed young women to have taken summer jobs at Borthwick's. Requiring of its employees an inhuman rotation of day and night shifts as the seasonal kill reached its peak, it was known that 80 percent of the town's female population were being taxed to the point of near nervous collapse by the factory's unrelenting regimen. Delia's hysterical claim had therefore to be seen in the mitigating light of a record-breaking slaughter.
There were other theories why she would invent such a story. Delia Chapman was known to wear a Lakers NBA basketball cap wherever she went. Often she added to this a University of North Carolina T-shirt and imported sneakers, and with a Walkman player on her hip and gum in her mouth, she seemed to have become a living, breathing showcase of Americana. Could not the sighting of a spaceship, then, be viewed as just the next logical step in her metamorphosis into a Yank?
At the time of the visitation, put later by the town's resident policeman at approximately 9:20 P.M., most of the town was glued to a much-delayed broadcast of a rugby test match between the All Blacks and England played at Twickenham: A bitter fight for screening rights had left the area deprived of the live program and those gathered in the public bar were tortured with the pent-up passion of a day spent avoiding even a hint of the final result.
By 9:50, while the game was still in progress and the outcome far from certain, Delia's life had been changed forever, but except for the painfully dull boy at the Texacana who remembered that Delia had bought one scoop of chips and declined vinegar, nobody could corroborate a single aspect of her strange story.
Harvey Watson, the local policeman, who also doubled as Delia's weekend netball coach, used a gentle tone with her, more akin to that of a priest hearing a confused confession, when he drove her home an hour later that same night. Why was she telling him a story like this? Had she just seen a movie? Half of the holiday movies and all the television shows nowadays were about aliens; perhaps she'd been watching too many. He could tell right away that she was in some kind of shock; she would feel better if she told him the truth, he said. He could sense her internal search for another story which could otherwise explain her tousled hair, the bruises on her arm and the unfocused look in her eyes. And yet something seemed to prevent her from finding an alternative explanation for her bewilderment. As her mouth opened, her expression faltered. And when the words came out, they were merely a reiteration.
"The ship was like um ... kind of like a ... ball of light, I s'pose. A great ball of light. And it was sort of resting on a ... on a ...”
"Yes, on a what?" he asked, craning forward. "Resting ...?"
"On a tripod."
Delia was not dressed for ambassadorial duties when she saw the glorious visitation. How must she have seemed to these visitors, standing before them in her rubber boots, holding her bag of chips? Her white uniform must have suggested that the human race was a much more practical life-form than is really the case: a pale breed, brown-haired, wide-eyed, uncertain, mute, compliant, vegetarian and polite.
Delia represented billions that Saturday night.
* * *
Across town Delia's father sat in front of his television. Marty Chapman understood that his daughter had gone to bed with the same splitting headache which currently plagued him. His interest in sports, along with everything else, had dissipated in recent years, and had wafted away like methylated spirits from an open bottle. He watched a gardening program on channel two.
The propagation of dahlias in a hothouse environment was the subject, and Marty watched it with a weary detachment, one leg thrown over the arm of his chair while an unseen moth fought for survival on the froth in his half-emptied glass of beer. On the television an overweight English lady explained her blueprint for cultivation. When the subject of the show switched and she began to describe a pogrom for combating noxious weeds, he rose and hit off the set. His house fell silent, and the fear of living his life alone arose around him like a fog.
The underarms of his white shirt were stuck to his sides with sweat, and his temples pounded. He decided to take an aspirin and water with him up the stairs to his single widower's bed.
Before going up he went out onto his porch, which was bordered with his late wife's flower pots, and urinated prolifically onto the grass. His farm could use the liquid. In the distance against the moonlight he saw his bony, dehydrated cattle on the hills. In winter the lowland pastures flooded and were reduced to vast mud flats thick with river silt; now, he had to contend with an early drought and the hottest recorded Christmas season in forty-two years. He did up his fly and rested against the door frame, where his daughter's height was scratched in ten levels from childhood to her maturity a year ago. He tugged his mud-stiffened bootlaces free, wrenched the boots from his feet and left them outside to air.
At the top of the stairs Marty stopped outside his daughter's door. He did this mostly from habit. It was not unusual that he himself had banished her there, and so would stop to listen for sounds of rebellion from behind her closed door. His solution to the great mystery of solo parenthood was to be meticulous in his supervision of Delia. But where greater wisdom and experience would have permitted him to conserve his energies for those moments requiring his genuine concern, growing ignorance of his daughter's maturing nature kept him in a near-exhausted state of perpetual vigilance. Women had always been a mystery to him, and the taller his daughter became, the more restless and desperate grew his dilemma.
With his teeth Marty tore the aspirin from its foil wrapper, dropped it into the glass and watched its merciful white bubbles. He waited in pain as the tablet sank to the bottom and the glass clouded, foamed and then delivered the effervescing pill back to the surface, dwindled by then to a white medicinal fudge. He swallowed it quickly, and put his ear one last time to Delia's door. His full attention was given to this task, listening for sobs, or the radio, or tuneless singing to an unheard Walkman. He couldn't hear a thing. He knocked, and raised his voice, calling her name, but no reply came.
The often-repaired latch on Delia's door exploded into pieces.
The window was wide open. Marry Chapman could not tell how long his daughter had been gone. All women were beneath trust.
* * *
Phillip Sullivan had been driving all day as night fell. The trip had been uneventful, except for one incident in which he had overtaken a long line of slow-moving cars on the highway, blaring his horn to protest their sluggish pace. On a reckless passing maneuver, however, in which he overtook all eight vehicles in one sweep, he realized he had been honking at a funeral cortege. In his rearview mirror, he saw each mourner's car, headlights respectfully switched on, and when he passed the hearse at the front of the convoy, he received from the graven undertaker a look of such stinging rebuke that it seemed an augury from God. Phillip decided in that vertiginous moment that his life must change.
Sometimes a single look can be the seed of the most lasting changes; and, coming after a month of sobering events, this one motivated Phillip to conquer his fatal weakness—a rarely displayed but frightening temper—once and for all. Easing his foot off the accelerator, he resolved to renounce his hot-bloodedness and to replace with quiet patience the rage that had ruined his career.
The sun sank into the Tasman Sea to the west as he approached Taranaki. The conical peak of the mountain reared up 2,500 meters above the farmland, illuminated in passionate color in the long December evening. He stopped at a roadside picnic area in Patea, the heat bearable at last, ate a sandwich and watched the effect of nightfall upon the mountain. He consulted his AA map which lay on the passenger seat beside an extremely rare copy of Turgenev's Sportsmen's Sketches, and saw that he was almost at Hawera, only fifteen kilometers along the coast from Opunake.
Beyond Hawera Phillip passed a cut-rate traveling carnival, a motley collection of trucks and trailers set up in a paddock. The enterprise was tiny and ramshackle. He watched as a short man with bushy sideburns and tattooed arms carried antique segments of railway four or five times his own size. As a very small boy Phillip had ridden once on a ghost train; his mother, who believed in the bold confrontation of one's fears, had bought two tickets, hoping the ride might cure the boy of an infantile fear of the dark. But once inside the tunnels Phillip had fallen into a deep silence, not of terrified apoplexy, but of solid boredom. Deafened by the screams of the other children Phillip could only observe the frailty of the illusions, the botched effects and the amateurism of the ride. The dangling skeletons were clearly made of plastic; the fires intended to burn sulfurously in the eyes of skulls were simply flashing red lights like those on the family stereo; and the one real human face, animating several characters by appearing on top of their shoulders in appropriate hats—a witch spitting curses, a rancid sailor swilling porter, a dungeoned loon in manacles pleading for royal justice—belonged to none other than the lady ticket seller, breathless and untalented, who audibly scampered around the outside of the structure plunging her variously costumed head into the darkness through a number of small holes in the wall. Crushed in tightly beside him, Phillip's mother believed that violent cathartic forces would cause her son to try to jump from the train in the darkness, so she gripped him firmly in a primitive initiation ceremony. But it wasn't fear. Phillip wanted to ponder the stupidity of others in peace. Why were people screaming? Did they see something that he could not? Was it possible—a question to fill a lifetime!—to experience a single event on many levels? It would take Phillip fifteen years to realize that a penchant for analysis was born in those dark passageways, that the ghost train experience had been his very first outing as a cynic, and that at the tender age of seven he had already been rerouted from daylight into those unlit catacombs which were the natural habitat of the intellectual.
Turning a corner, his car's headlights probing the intense darkness, he very nearly collided with a specter in white, standing in the middle of the road. It was a young woman, barely real, her arm raised to shield her eyes from his headlights. She made no attempt to move. Phillip's car had stopped only centimeters from her shins, his fires smoking, his heart in seizures. He sat forward in his seat to confirm the vision: shoulder-length brown hair, a white smock, bare legs channeled into white rubber boots. He gaped at her for several seconds before he got out of the car.
"I almost didn't see you." He caught his breath. "Are you ... okay?"
Listlessly she looked back at him: wide-eyed, stoop-shouldered, bony, a reluctant beauty of about sixteen years. After several more moments, she asked in a voice barely above a whisper if he was going to the nearest town. She turned her face away and out of the light.
"I think the next town north is Opunake," he replied, studying her profile and noting a reluctance to talk.
"Oh," she said.
"Can I give you a ride there, then?"
She nodded after a second, ungrateful, strange.
"Do you know it?" he asked, losing patience.
She turned back to him. "What?"
"Do you know Opunake at all?"
Again, she nodded. "I live there."
These were the last words she spoke for the whole journey.
The road into the township swept in an arc between sea and mountain. Out of the corner of his eye, Phillip monitored the girl's small activities. Fingers, dirty under the nails, fidgeted constantly in her lap, knitted into a scrum one second and then climbed all over each other the next. She also smelled vaguely of mud, and of the country, of manure. The odor and her finger gymnastics combined to give him the impression that at any minute she would burst out with a sensational explanation of what had happened to her. But nothing came. Whatever her story, he was unworthy of it.
In an effort to fill the awkward silence, he gave an exact figure to the number of kilometers he had driven that day, and inquired about the state of the old Opunake Public Library, casually mentioning that he would soon mastermind its long-awaited reopening. Reportedly, the building was no more than a shoebox, he told her, and from his correspondence he understood that for ten years it had sat across the road from the council chambers, abandoned, serving only as a greenhouse for cobwebs, as a mansion for mice, as an aviary.
But nothing drew a response, or even a turn of her pretty head.
Almost for his own enjoyment, he then began to describe the long list of desirable new books, classics and translations, encyclopedias and reference magazines, which would be among his first orders to the national library service in Wellington. All were volumes he deemed essential to a half-decent library, and it would be his responsibility, he told her, to present the town of Opunake with a comprehensive list of titles and to place within each rural's grasp the treasure trove they had for so long been denied.
Delia Chapman formed no opinion at all of this young man as they drove in the shadow of the mountain, only that the antiseptic smell of his cologne reminded her of being at the dentist's.
* * *
Opunake looked to be in the grip of a civil emergency. All along the main street cars were abandoned. The even rows of clapboard shops were dark. The streets were empty. Stretched between power poles overhead were the banners of tawdry Christmas lights, many bulbs defunct so that the festive message was impaired: Candles had no flame; MERRY XMAS no X; a Santa no head.
Phillip pulled up in front of the White Hart Hotel, the only vibrant feature of the town.
His passenger did not stir.
* * *
Sergeant Harvey Watson was feeling distinctly under the weather. He had not been sleeping well since his vasectomy, and was not looking forward to this evening's public meeting. The townspeople, bloated and sunburned, were still gathered in the public bar of the White Hart Hotel after the disastrous rugby test.
The sergeant had anticipated a great victory and had seen in it an opportunity to speak to a captive and good-tempered audience. This wish had not been granted. After the All Blacks' shock defeat, the crowd was in a murderous mood. Incensed by the bunglings of the French referee, they had no tolerance for further bad news of an official nature. Harvey would need to be very forthright in such a climate of dismay, and he longed to be at home with his wife, his police hat hanging on the back of the door, secure in his bed and succumbing to the devastations of sleep.
He mingled with the more irascible patrons at the bar, shaking hands, consoling the most depressed sports fans and reforging old alliances like a seasoned politician, turning down offers of a drink and instead whipping up a constituency of goodwill before his speech. He concealed his sleeplessness well, as he concealed all details pertaining to his recent surgery. In a town such as this, the notion of a vasectomy was still considered avant-garde. Indeed, he had made sure that it be conducted out of town, and in utmost secrecy. It had taken only half an hour, and apart from a small yet distressing deposit of blood the next morning in his abundant white underwear, his routine had been otherwise undisturbed. As a peacekeeper in a small town, Watson knew very well how people expanded personal peculiarities into grounds for vicious prejudice. So it was doubly important that as the town's sole police officer he be far above rumor and dissent.
"Now let me have your attention," he said, and the crowd in the bar gradually fell silent.
"I know you're all wondering why I've called this public meeting. I can now tell you. As you know, we've had a lot of problems in trying to slow down highway traffic coming around the mountain on the way to New Plymouth. Traditionally these drivers, many of them businessmen, have had no respect for people who live in a small town such as this, and for a long time I have made it my personal responsibility to address the problem by sitting out in my car for many long hours on the edge of town with radar facilities. Unfortunately, I've only ever had limited success. Smart-ass collaborators coming the other way have tended to alert oncoming traffic farther down the road to my presence and I've largely failed to find a vantage point where I can set up my equipment and remain unseen. Now, from Wellington, I have received news that ..." and here he drew out an impressive sheath of government papers and raised them into the air. "I have been advised that we are earmarked for a speed camera."
There was a unanimous look of incomprehension around the room. Watson continued his prolepsis.
"Now for those of you who don't know, these speed cameras take high-quality night and day photographs of speed-limit violators, regardless of who they are. One of these cameras will initially be placed on the southern highway out of town for a trial period of a year. Now I know that up till now I have been lenient on local residents in favor of pursuing the out-of-town freak who shoots through here willy-nilly, but with this speed camera we enter a new era of nondiscrimination."
Again the sergeant's statement seemed to have no impact whatsoever. The wall of somber faces looked at him as if he were a complete stranger—though as the town's only netball coach he was responsible for the training and general fitness of many of their daughters.
"And so I have called you all together to alert you to this fact, because I don't want you coming back to me at some later stage with your speeding tickets, asking for them to be torn up. I won't be able to do that. Once the camera has furtively taken your picture, there is nothing on heaven or earth that can be done. Everything from the camera will be processed and sent to Wellington. Times have changed."
After a final silence, the first objection was voiced. Whittaker, the barber and tobacconist, asked whether Wellington could also process a quick clout by a sledgehammer in the middle of the night. Watson replied that reckless destruction of police property was a criminal offense and anyone with that sort of impulse should consider the consequences.
At that point a tide of pent-up disgust with this and a thousand other perceived invasions of the townspeople's privacy erupted across the bar, threatening a repeat of the riots of nine years earlier when two of the four assembly lines at the freezing works had been shut down in defiance of the union. The interior of the White Hart Hotel had been largely demolished on that occasion and much of the mahogany decor had never regained its former glory. Even the once twelve-pointed antler horns above the bar were reduced to a series of pathetic stumps. It was, in a way, the last act of the union before its deregulation.
But Watson was already picking up his hat and making his way toward the side door which led to the car park. At the door he stopped and turned, assured of his escape route. He raised both hands.
"Now settle down. If you just lay off the gas, none of you will have anything to worry about. The only people who need to be concerned about this are the lawbreakers."
With that, he slipped out and shut the door behind him. The sound of public rancor became a soft rumble. When he reached his patrol car, the only word he articulated was "Fuck." Someone had slashed his front-right tire.
The gentle tap on his shoulder from behind made the sergeant jump out of his skin.
* * *
Phillip Sullivan led Sergeant Watson around to his Ford out on the main street. When they got to his vehicle, Phillip had to explain that the young woman he'd described was no longer in his car.
"She was here a minute ago," he protested as both heads peered into the car's interior.
"And you say you didn't get her name?"
"No."
"Then maybe I'd better get yours. Don't you reckon?"
Watson fixed a firm but tired look on the stranger. He was in no mood for a midnight calamity. Every cell in his body appealed to him for sleep, and this woolly story of a mercy dash with an unnamed woman was a hideous substitute. The matter of his own slashed tire was far more pressing, as was the first indication of an unpopularity he could professionally ill afford.
"All right, where do you think she went?"
"I don't know," said Phillip.
"You don't know?"
"No."
Phillip looked down the road to where it disappeared into darkness.
* * *
At the crowded bar, Delia quickly found a drink in her hand, thanks to the generosity of the pub owner's wife, Lucille, who, having no daughters of her own, was eternally patient with the sentimental dilemmas of young women.
By this time, the pub's patrons had split up into small groups around the room, beginning at the back with the remote farmers who drove massive V-8 Holden Commodores and were therefore the most threatened by the camera proposal, and continuing in an arc of diminishing resentment to the older women at the bar who were mostly members of the local bowling club and rarely drove at all, and never with any haste.
"Are you all right there, Delia, love? You look a bit pasty. Get that drink down you, put a bit of color back in your cheeks." Lucille often ignored the underage drinking laws, exercising her own judgment.
"Ta." Delia raised the glass. No sooner had it touched her lips than two huge young men flanked her on either side and a third draped his head over her left shoulder.
"Oi," said one.
"Oi oi," said another.
"Oi oi oi," completed the third.
With rehearsed precision three empty beer glasses struck the bar top at the same moment, their owners so indivisible from each other that the young men's heads appeared to sprout from the same body—a three-headed six-armed beer-drinking Medusa, and the bane of all of Opunake's young women. Although they behaved like teenagers, they were, in fact, well over thirty, their common mix of buoyancy and cultivated stupidity keeping them in a state of perpetual juvenility.
"Deeeee ..." began one, as if he were in a choir.
"... eeee ..." sang the second.
"... lliiiaaa!" sang the third.
The weight of the three hefty forearms fell across her shoulders, and forced her to lean forward over the bar. She shut her eyes.
It was this precise kind of boozy machismo that made her loathe being a teenager. Since the onset of puberty, she had tried to delay her own flowering by cutting her hair short, wearing shapeless clothes, and developing a stooped and slouching walk to fend off the slavish eyes of local boys. Yet despite her best efforts, these tactics backfired on her. The only effect of this camouflage was to throw her startling qualities into greater relief, and in the fever of acquisition created by all things unattainable they drove her price higher still.
"Leave her alone, you boys!" shouted the pub owner's wife. "I'm serious. Leave her alone. Go on. Now!"
Lucille, heeded by everybody and everything, guided Delia to the quiet end of the bar as the young men departed.
Delia was never going to marry either, never. Fortunately, she had been spared the humiliation of having a sexual appetite. Sex, in her mind, would be like letting an eel from the river take liberties with you: unthinkable. No matter how long the queue of hopefuls or how vicious the slander that she was a snotty bitch who had her legs welded together, she was an implacable iron maiden. And everything had been running to plan, sexually speaking, until her impulse to go and get a bag of chips just a few hours before.
"Where have you been? Are you all right?" Lucille asked.
"Mmm."
"You've got marks all over your clothes. Smells like some sort of manure."
"I just slipped over. I think I did. I'm all right. Thanks. I'm okay."
When Sergeant Harvey Watson reentered with Phillip Sullivan beside him, silence scattered like birdseed across the bar, giving rise to a moment's confusion. Phillip was the first to spy Delia in the corner, her back turned on them, drinking quietly on her own. Without a word Watson crossed the floor with official haste and guided her back through the crowd to exit through the side door.
The locals, who had been holding their breath, erupted into a renewed flurry of consultation and discord as the door closed.
* * *
In order to satisfy his curiosity about the girl, Phillip had offered to change Watson's tire, while the officer talked to Delia under the discreet light of a streetlamp some distance away.
Phillip jacked up the patrol car until the lacerated tire lifted off the ground. When he looked over, he saw that Delia was now speaking, and Watson seemed to be accepting silently whatever was being said to him. His hands never left his hips, and his head turned only occasionally, to check that no one was secretly creeping up on them.
Phillip pulled the wheel from its hub and placed the four chrome nuts in the hubcap. He went to the trunk to find the spare tire.
Watson was shaking his head now, scratching behind his ear and displaying signs of irritation at what he was being told. He turned from Delia, walked three paces away and then returned to ask a new question. She lit a cigarette and Phillip could not decide whether she was deeply upset or utterly unaffected by the conversation.
Phillip finished the job, fastened the last nut tightly, replaced the hubcap. He wiped his hands and made a polite slow movement toward the two of them, and so heard the officer admonishing, "Now look, Delia, that's enough of this nonsense. I want you to ... I want you, listen to me, Jesus ..." The officer's well-lit face was showing signs of high color, while Delia's was in strict shadow, her mood still indiscernible.
Watson came over to Phillip.
"You finished? Thanks a lot. Well look, I'll, ah ... I'll get her home."
Phillip nodded and looked at Delia. She kept her back turned, puffing on a cigarette in the cone of light from the streetlamp. He was about to step forward to say good-bye to her, his weight shifting to his toes, when the sergeant's hand came down heavily on his shoulder. Watson was shaking his head with such potent authority that Phillip nodded and at once walked back to his car, where he turned the key, revved the engine to a fever pitch and pulled out onto the road.
Back under the streetlamp, the sergeant watched the car move into darkness, sighing heavily. Then and there he made a vow to himself never to mention a word of what he'd been told to another human soul—with the exception of his wife, with whom he shared everything.
"Okay, let's go over this again, Delia. From the beginning. And for God's sake, this time, please, please try and be a bit serious."
* * *
In his living room, Opunake's mayor, Jim Sullivan, was organizing his scrapbook of recent municipal celebrations when his wife called out to him that his nephew had arrived and was waiting out on the porch.
He went to the screen door carrying a glue pot, and stood looking at the boy through the mesh. A cloud of moths almost obscured the unadmitted visitor.
Sullivan had been dreading Phillip's arrival for some hours, and his nephew's lateness further disinclined him to invite him indoors. For two years, reports had filtered back to the mayor of the young man's mediocre military record. Now, with Phillip's most recent military disgrace still large in Sullivan's mind, a dishonorable discharge as a result of a kitchen brawl in which one man was maimed, he could feign no interest at all in the boy. Only as a favor to his dear sister had he agreed to find a place for his nephew "somewhere on the municipal payroll" and so had conjured up for him a small and meaningless job, an extension of Phillip's work in the army: the reopening and running of Opunake's tiny library. In a town where few people read anything more serious than the Sunday tabloids or pulp romances, the new job could hardly be more irrelevant.
"You're here, then."
"Uncle Jim."
Sullivan nodded, keeping his reception cool. "Well, Flo has sorted out some bedding in the trailer around the back. We've put the power on. It should do you for a while, until you find a place of your own. We'll talk in the morning. At least you found your way here. Everything all right?"
"Fine. I won't come in."
"How's that sister of mine?"
"Fine."
The mayor explored the boy's face for a family likeness. He saw some hope in the jawline, a familial hawkishness, a slightly beaked nose: All the rest derived from that gutless interloper who was Phillip's father, and the overall effect was unlikable. The young man had been a kid the last time Sullivan had seen him, and even then was patently not a team player. A stand-backish child with a marshmallow handshake; the army had been an appalling choice. Sullivan could imagine the scenario: a corner-bunk kid from day one, unable to forge comradeship, clean and humorless, a drill-sergeant favorite. Every barrack sought a butt for its pranks, and Jim Sullivan did not need to be told how his nephew had been goaded and harangued and steered, hour by hour—God help the poor bastard—toward a Discharge for Extreme Violence Against a Fellow Soldier, all over the nonissue of a dispute over the seating plan in the mess hall: It need only be noted that the boy's character was flawed from the first. He had not lived up to the promise of that dynastic jawline.
"All right then. The trailer's around the back. I'll jack up a council flat for ya maybe, but that should do for now."
Phillip nodded and stepped back into the darkness with his bag, leaving the screen empty but for the moths.
The concept of collage had recently impressed itself upon the mayor, and it was with this in mind that he returned to his scrapbook, not stopping to consider that his nephew might require a hot drink or food after his long journey.
The trailer would suffice for a while. It stood in a far corner of the property under a plum tree, wheel-less, a relic set up on concrete blocks, an early statement from the mayor that Phillip was being punished. Phillip smiled and found the knob, opened the rusty refrigerator-sized door, and stepped inside to a dank aroma of mildew and rot. He pulled his sleeping bag out of its sack at once, not wishing to check his surroundings, and lay down on the narrow and armpit-scented berth in the dark, his nose pressed into the rancid potpourri of a degenerating mattress. A mosquito bit him on the arm in the dark before audibly escaping, and the area quickly swelled; but a quarter hour later, and still deep in dislocated thought, Phillip had the great satisfaction of terminating the same buzzing insect, blindly mashing it dead on his forearm: It gave up the stolen blood at once, unusable and contaminated now, his own corpuscles mixed with those drawn from a dog's ass, no doubt, but back at least where they belonged.
* * *
The sergeant drove Delia home. His patrol car bucked as it shot off the road onto the unpaved drive that led up to a simple white wooden farmhouse, half concealed from view by pohutukawa trees.
Marty Chapman was standing on the porch as the car arrived, and Harvey Watson again had to summon his energies, marshal his wits and further postpone his entry into the delicious haven of sleep.
Delia Chapman walked straight past her father and went inside. The two men could argue the details. Watson did his best to defuse the tension, but he knew that with Marty Chapman one was always dealing with the unknown. He tried taking a tangent, and discussed the upcoming netball game against an invitation team of female schoolteachers from Hawera:
"Delia remains the best goal-shoot in the entire district."
But Marty wanted an explanation. Why was his daughter being delivered home in a police car? What the hell had she done now?
The sergeant started to explain that he had merely passed Delia on the road and thought it unsafe for her to be out walking so late. Certainly he had no official complaint. And there was no cause for alarm of any kind. Furthermore, it was getting late and—as he realized he'd been saying all night—it was time everyone went to bed.
When Marty Chapman received this information silently and declared with a fixed expression that he needed no more excuses, Watson returned to his car. The sergeant did not walk away with an easy conscience, however, and thought that whatever happened in the ensuing minutes between Marty and Delia under the guise of disciplinary action had better be within the strictest bounds of the law and in keeping with higher moral principles. This consideration was not without basis. On two occasions in the past year, he had noticed that his prized goal-shoot had bruises on her arms and legs, and his suspicions as to their origin needed no further fuel. He was sworn to protect the innocent, and even if his jurisdiction was questionable once the front door was closed, he would not hesitate to invade the delicate chemistry of a family unit to exercise his authority. From experience, he knew that evenings of high drama like this seldom ended with the departure of the police.
Watson left the house and headed home just below legal speed.
* * *
Marty Chapman had had enough. He sat in his downstairs armchair with the window open, wearing only his pajama pants. He was staring at the blank TV screen and wondering what next to do. Despite the aspirin, his headache had intensified. Delia was up in her room and her door with the broken lock was closed.
With headphones over her ears, Delia listened to a tape on her Walkman. Her walls were covered with posters of the New Zealand netball team in action over a victorious fifteen-year period, and her own awards, medals, ribbons and citations were pinned in a neat display over her bed. It was a childish collage which she had already outgrown but was still some months away from taking down. When the tape finished, she took off the headphones but did not turn the light off or lie down on the bed. Instead, she took off her soiled clothes which really did smell of dung, went to the wardrobe and selected a dress which she'd not worn for several months. She put it on and looked at herself in the mirror. As she sat down, gazing at her reflection, it was as if she were waiting for someone, or something, and only the sound of their arrival would break her trance. And then someone did arrive.
The already broken latch permitted her father to enter with ease.
"So what's all this about?" He was strained by humiliation and his own irrelevance. He was capable only of hearing words which would further justify his anger.
"Harvey gave me a lift," she said.
"Where were you?"
Then she told him about the first man, the stranger. A bag of chips. The highway. Marty was unhappy: All this was no excuse for being out. He wanted to know the name of the young man, but she didn't have a name for him. She was old enough to take care of herself, she argued. Eventually he left the room and she lay on the bed in her summer dress, legs curled up, looking at the ceiling which kept from her the multitudes of quietly raging galaxies beyond.
* * *
Harvey Watson's careful and near-silent glide into his garage was to no avail. His wife had been awakened an hour earlier by the erratic alarm on their replica Queen Anne carriage clock. When Watson crept into their bedroom, naked and quiet as a church mouse, she was already resting on one elbow and waiting for him.
He sat on the edge of the bed, disconsolate, and rewound the clock. He would have to be up again in four hours. His eyes were sore and his back ached. He was in no mood to talk.
"How did it go?"
"Fine. A few grumbles. Mainly fine."
"Tell me about it, then. Who was there? What happened?"
"It was fine. Over in ten minutes."
"Then why are you so late?"
Watson sighed from deep within himself. Without even resetting the alarm he put down the clock and jettisoned his last hopes for the simple peace of his bed.
But perhaps it was best. Margaret, his sweetheart, his wife and sole confidante of eight years, a big-city girl and divorced mother of two before meeting her "big old cop," was the only one capable of comforting him in times of real trial. Being a one-man police force was a lonely profession, and loneliness could easily father despair.
"If I tell you something, you have to swear to keep this strictly to yourself. It's police business. Okay?"
In the half-light his wife did not bat an eyelid. For eight years he had prefaced every bedtime conversation with such a request, and for eight years she had stared innocently back at him, no such promise ever coming. It was a historical grievance: She refused to have her bedroom shrunk to a witness box, where nightly she would have to swear some oath to her own husband! Where was basic trust? When would he realize that such insults kept them from finding true sincerity in their marriage?
For his part, Watson knew very well the strengths and weaknesses of the woman who had delayed marrying him for four years out of a common distaste for policemen. He knew that the life she had inherited was a largely monotonous one compared to his own incident-filled career, and that in an effort to keep her brain from atrophying and to exercise daily her prodigious memory, she had compensated for her lack of vocation by trading with others in the most virulent gossip. He knew all of this, yet he continued to reveal to her the most confidential aspects of his work. It was, in effect, a belated reward for the sacrifices she had agreed to make in marrying him.
"Jim Sullivan's nephew, Phillip or something, who is apparently going to reopen the old public library or something, drove into town a couple of hours ago ... with Marty Chapman's girl, Delia."
"Delia?"
"Showed up at the pub. You're not going to believe this."
"What?"
"She was in a bit of a state. Been found by Jim's nephew wandering out on the highway south of town in a daze apparently."
"What had happened?"
"I dunno."
"Did you talk to Delia?"
"Mmm."
"What did she say?"
"I blame that father of hers."
"Why?"
"He's a psychopath, that's why. She's terrified of him. No wonder the girl has the odd problem."
"Harvey? What is it?"
"I talked to her."
"Yes."
"I ..." he said. "She ..."
"What happened?!"
"She said ..."
"For God's sake, Harvey!"
"Out there in a field ... Look, I've gotta get to sleep. I've gotta get up again in four hours!"
"Something happened out in a field?"
"Let's forget it. She'd had some sort of fall or something, I'm sure of it."
"What did she tell you?"
"She just said she'd seen a spaceship out there in the field and one of the blokes got off it and took her on board or something for half an hour or so and then let her go."
"What?"
"She's gotta play netball for me next Saturday. I don't want this to get out. Oh ... and I turned the oven off, I can't eat those chips tonight."
"A what? A ... spaceship?" Her laughter was loud.
"Margaret, it could have been anything. It could have been a lot of things. She's not a liar. And she's not a lunatic."
"But hang on, you said she was taken on board!"
"Anyway, the last thing I need is this getting out. She's a good girl. Nicest girl on the team."
Margaret lay back, her hand on Watson's shoulder. "She's just having you on, Harvey! She's pulling your leg, darling."
"I don't want anyone to know. All right, Margaret? I don't care if there are a hundred fucking spaceships straight from Mars landing out there right now, Delia's had a hard enough time with that father of hers."
"Did you tell him about it?" She laughed again.
"Of course not. In a day she'll have forgotten all about it."
"She must have been drunk."
"She was sober and deadly serious. Everything I said to talk her out of it, she'd just say, `I don't care if you don't believe me.'"
"She's mad, just like her mother, God rest her soul. That whole family, I'm telling you. There's something going on out on that farm. Young girls don't start saying this sort of thing without reason, Harvey."
Watson got into bed. Margaret started kissing him. Soon he responded with ancient determination, drew himself on top of her and started to move in slow motion, until she stopped him with a sweet kiss on his lips and pulled out four silk scarves from under the pillow.
"Oh, not now, Margaret," said Watson, consulting the Queen Anne carriage clock. "Oh, please. It's nearly, Jesus, look ... two in the morning. I haven't slept in weeks."
"All right," she whispered seductively. "I'll be easy on you. I'll let you tie them loosely."
He paused, arrested and imprisoned in a life of service. With his big hands, he took the silky cords from his wife, and in a patient, loving regimen began to fasten one scarf to each corner of their marriage bed.