WILLIAM STAYED AT a Single Men’s Camp. He was number 29C amongst rows and rows of square huts, each one painted a pale, pale yellow, each one exactly the same as the next.
He worked amid the pine-tree soldiers who marched up and down in their towering dark rows, all lined up like the huts. William marched up and down too, kicking hard white fungi off the lower trunks when he was feeling vicious. He carried his chainsaw on his shoulder, and cut them down, one by one, he and his boys laying whole armies to waste. And afterwards, when the logs had been dragged away, they did a big burn-off, leaving the land smouldering behind them.
Sometimes William sat on his bed, looking at old family photos that his ex-wife Lita had developed herself. They were grainy black and white photos, full of the moodiness and shadows that had rubbed off their relationship and on to her fingers. Her fingers had always smelt of the chemicals she’d used in her dark room: a bit like rotting eggs. William had come to like that smell, because it reminded him of her.
He remembered when he’d first got with Lita. She’d been working for a photographer, taking photos of other people’s children. One Saturday, she’d helped herself to the big white umbrella that reflected portrait flashes with snaps of diamond light, and carried it to the Guy Fawkes display.
He tried to hold her back, but when the line of squibs that bled silver all the way to the ground went off, Lita had climbed over the barrier with her bottle of bourbon, running underneath, laughing as the sparks bounced off her dark hair and slid through her fingers.
William had climbed after her with the umbrella, as white and full as the absent moon. It came between him and the blackness of the night. He held it over her as well, so that the silver dribbled over the sides like a monsoon of mercury. With his free hand, he lifted her hips to meet his, and she pushed herself against him, burning his lips and groin with hers until a fireman ran over, shouting and waving his torch.
William put the photos of his kids under his pillow, and went to get his dinner. He smiled at Moana, the young girl who worked in the canteen, dishing up meat with thick brown gravy and ladling custard onto the plates of steamed pudding. The canteen smelled of boiled peas, and it buzzed with the sound of men talking and passing the salt.
On the walls there were notices to the men, signed, ‘By request from Molly, Polly and Dolly.’ ‘Don’t smoke.’ ‘Put your plates away, your mother’s not here.’ ‘No boots on the tables.’ ‘No alcohol to be consumed on these premises.’
Tomato sauce clumped out of the bottle and on to his plate. It was a dark, slightly reddish brown, like the blood that he’d sometimes seen on the sheets when Lita had gotten her period suddenly. It also reminded him of the way her nose had dripped blood the time he’d nearly broken it.
His parole officer had gotten him this job when he’d got out of jail after that, and he’d found Clay already staying in their house. He’d had to take his stuff straight to the Single Men’s Camp. ‘I wasn’t going to wait around for an arsehole who did what you did to me,’ said Lita. William was glad that he wasn’t living in the same area, even though it made it harder to see the kids so often.
‘You could have picked someone who had a bit more going for him looks wise,’ William said to Lita. ‘Bald head. Beard like a cobweb curtain. Always wearing those black motorcycle T-shirts. He looks as if ZZ Top just cut him loose.’
‘My arse looks better,’ said William. ‘How do you think that makes me feel, when you’re leaving me for him?’
‘I don’t give a fuck about how you feel,’ said Lita. ‘All I ever wanted was someone to adore me. I was really clever at school. I could have been a doctor or something. But all I’ve ever dreamed about since standard one was having beautiful kids and a man that loved me. I suppose I got it half right.’
‘What am I? Chopped liver?’ asked William.
‘I’ve never really felt like you loved me,’ said Lita. ‘Half the time, you didn’t even talk to me. And when you did, you were being nasty.’ She was crying now.
William hated women crying.
‘Ever since dot I’ve had it drummed into my head that my mother is beautiful, sexy and fun to be with, and that I’m fat and ugly and unlikeable and unattractive to boys. No matter how many men have wanted to fuck me, or told me that I’m beautiful, twelve hours later, the effect has worn off, and I need to be told all over again.’
She wiped her eyes with her hand, and dark smudges of eyeliner mixed with her tears. ‘That’s why I reckon that I stayed with you for so long. You never said anything nice about me, so I’ve never had to worry that one day you’d realise you’d made a mistake. And if I ever had gotten you to say I was beautiful, maybe that would have made it true, because it would have been so hard to come by. But now Clay tells me I’m beautiful every day, and that keeps me going.’
William looked at her in amazement. He couldn’t believe that she didn’t know the way she really looked. He wouldn’t have wanted to tell her when he was with her, or she might have gotten the idea that she could do better than be with him. All the same, he’d assumed she knew. ‘You had a mirror,’ he said.
‘Yeah, and any time I look into it, I see a solid-packed woman with the wrong shaped face,’ she said.
‘Bullshit,’ said William. ‘You’re tiny.’ And then, aggrieved, ‘I’ve said you looked nice.’
‘Twice in six years,’ said Lita, ‘you’ve said I looked nice. And once you said I looked good. But that was only because I asked you whether I looked alright in some new jeans.’
‘Well,’ said William, ‘when I said you looked nice, that was what I meant.’
Even he had to admit, when he thought about it, that Clay treated Lita like she was special. He had a bit of work on in Kaikoura on her birthday, but he drove all the way up in his ute to take her out for dinner in the old pub at the beginning of the gorge at the bottom end of town.
And when he married her, he paid for everything. Lita wore pewter satin, picked out in matching seed pearls and silver thread, and had a thin charcoal coloured boa around her neck. They got married underneath the double steel overbridge, where so much coal had fallen from passing trains that it was like silky black dust beneath their feet.
The guests all drank champagne, and the bubbles trailed upwards like the lines of tiny pearls on Lita’s dress.
‘Ram’s piss,’ said William when their eldest boy told him about it later.
He knew it was just dumb to have taken those swings at Clay. But it was the way Clay had seemed so smug and right at home in William’s house, and the way his baby girl called Clay ‘daddy’. ‘I’ve got two daddies now,’ she’d told William. But William made it about the way William had purposefully bought the kids a big, fat bar of chocolate each, knowing that it was nearly time for dinner. Clay had taken it away when they’d only just gotten to pressing the first bites against the roofs of their mouths with their tongues.
His daughter had cried, and William hadn’t liked that. He couldn’t stand it when any of them cried. And now he was going straight back to court again next week. Lita had insisted.
‘I hope I don’t bloody go back inside,’ said William gloomily, to his mates at the pub.
‘What’s it like, prison?’ asked one of the younger men, his face still raw enough to have pimples under his stubble.
‘You’re just another fucking Māori in there,’ William told him. ‘Just another Māori carving a photo frame with his kids’ names underneath.’
‘There’s that girl you fucked last week,’ said his mate. ‘She’s looking at you.’
William glanced over, and the girl stooped to pick up a coin off the floor. ‘If she was Pamela Anderson, and she bent over like that, I’d be up her now, not standing here talking to you,’ he said.
‘She wants it. Why don’t you go and get her?’ someone said.
‘Nah, she’s not Pammy, is she?’ said William.
‘Oh,’ said his mate. ‘I might try to get in there then.’
William was thinking about what Lita used to say. ‘Always on about your boss’s wife, some German model, or the girl on the Magnum ad. Of course you think they’re sexy. But what do those women have in common? You can’t get with them, William. And that’s why you want them. You don’t like intimacy. It’s always about work, work, work. You don’t want to come home and have to interact with me. It’s too hard for you.’
‘I haven’t got enough words to cope with all the fucking talking you want to do,’ he’d protested.
‘And when by some miraculous chance you are here, you just sit around and try to be hurtful with those little put downs,’ Lita continued. ‘Making me feel bad about not being the German model. Because it’s all too hard, so you’d rather not try. And rather than admit you can’t handle it, you pretend it doesn’t matter in the first place.’
William watched his mate moving in on the girl who wasn’t Pammy. He fingered his wallet. He found himself more and more often showing the photos of Lita and the kids that it contained to any woman that he did get talking to in a pub. ‘Beautiful,’ they always said.
‘Of course I’ve got beautiful kids,’ he would said, very proud, always arrogant.
‘They favour their mother,’ was the usual answer. ‘She’s beautiful too.’
Recently, he’d asked her on the phone, ‘What would happen if I told you now?’
‘Too late to count,’ she’d replied.
Not that he fucked any women very much any more. He drank too much to get it up at all most nights. He thought that might have been the real problem with Lita. Smoking a bit of weed didn’t help either.
When he went back to his hut, William dreamed of having sex on a hill with Moana. It was a Dr Seuss hill, with tufts of black grass, and rings of white mist. The light was grey, because it was getting dark. He lay on top of Moana, with his dick between her legs, but she was slipping away from underneath him because of the slope, and he couldn’t get the angle right.
They walked up higher and higher, looking for even ground. But the hillside just got steeper, until they were bracing themselves against it. They clung to the grass with their fingers, and he couldn’t get himself inside her at all. The light was almost gone, and he could hardly see her. William realised that she was going to slide right out of reach, and that there was nothing he could do about it.
Unable to satisfy himself in his dream, he woke up sweating and angry, and had to have a wank. He put on his work boots to go and have a piss outside. There was a sea of grey gravel between each hut, and the undersides of his feet had gotten pale and soft.
When he went to court, he wore a dark suit and tie that someone had lent him, and it didn’t quite fit. ‘William Dean. Haven’t I seen you before?’ asked the judge. He studied the notes in front of him. ‘Back again for the same offence, I see. It would seem that you have a bit of a problem with seeing red, Mr Dean,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said William. ‘I’m pretty much colour blind.’
‘Not quite what I meant,’ said the judge dryly. ‘But you’re in the right place. We deal in black and white here.’