The Tomorrow Shines housing development, east of the Splash, had been built just before the last big recession. It was completely out of place both with the bay itself and the existing township. Less than thirty houses crammed in together in what had been planned as the first stage of a larger project. There was still a faded sign on the western road, near the bridge that connected back to the older street grid. It promised dozens of gleaming standalone units, a mini-supermarket, new shops. Rain and weather had punished the sign, and its posts were now submerged in clumps of whisper fingers.
Reality had intervened hard on this dream. Tomorrow Shines had ended up being a small set of out-of-place dwellings an inconvenient walk from the real shops. None of the promised amenities and conveniences had been built. It was mostly filled with young families deep in mortgage hock, where one or both parents had day jobs in Wellington central, and kids were packed off to schools along the way.
Tomorrow Shines was plainly and simply a con job built on the carcass of people’s dreams to have a piece of land and a home that was theirs. Though as misplaced as it was, the place felt like a counterweight to those sections of town where the dusty scent of old families still seemed to hold sway.
The man stalked through back lawns dotted with bicycles and playsets and barbecues, disregarding everything but the smell of something wrong, the trail he was following—
Lucia, standing before a horseshoe group of children. A ragged band, seven of them. Perhaps some of the same ones he’d passed with Hedy on the Hermit Cave journey.
A red-haired girl in the centre of the horseshoe, pig-tailed, grimacing. The cruel righteousness of a self-appointed inquisitor.
…and not only have you been stealing from our houses, the girl pronounced, you’ve been putting things up all over the place. Spoilin’ the environment.
The girl held up a black twisted thing.
Right in my Mum’s begonias, she hissed. Do you know what she’d say to sex toys in her begonias?
That’s a camera strap, you idiot, Lucia said.
But there was a look on Lucia’s face the man barely recognised, one he didn’t like at all—
You’re guilty and wrong, the girl said. Offer your regrets.
Shan’t, Lucia said. I’m not doing anything.
But Lucia’s cheeks were red and she was trying not to cry—
Do it, said the girl. Else there’s real trouble.
It sounded so exactly like the echo of something a parent would say, in a household where threats loomed. The pigtail girl simply a reflection of the creatures that had spawned her.
Lucia walking forward, shame-faced, offering her shoes. Purple-gold trainers with mismatched laces. She loved those shoes. They’d found them half a year ago, and with her magpie sense had clung to them and kept them. Taking them off, unlacing them slowly with shaking fingers. Placing them on the bare dirt of an unsealed driveway.
The horseshoe children moving forward, constricting. The pigtail girl and a doughy boy of perhaps ten front and centre. Pulling their pants down. Squatting over the shoes. Pissing on them. A horrible spidery whooshing sound. Splatters everywhere. The other kids whooped and cheered.
That’s what you get for stealing and lying, the bare-arsed pigtail girl said. We piss on you. And there’s nothing you’ll do to stop it.
The man charged. Howled. Rage driving through him like rocket fuel. The children scattered. The pigtail girl stumbled with her pants and he threw her into a wall. A man, probably her father, came out of a garage and he was hitting, hitting, hitting, enraged like nothing else, until a group of people pulled him off. Lucia tugging him away and begged him to go.
They made it out of Tomorrow Shines by the skin of their teeth. Lucia snatched her pissy shoes as they left.
• • •
It was the docility that had done it for him. More than the cruelty or obscenity of children. Just seeing Lucia accepting an imposed fate.
Never, ever, ever do that again, he said.
Steal? Lucia said.
Surrender, he said.
One last thing curled in Lucia’s hand. Something she’d refused to give up even to her captors. An antique emerald ring. He stared.
Who’s is that? he said, though he half knew the answer already.
She told him. He stared again.
I thought we could bargain with it, she said.
This isn’t a place of bargains, he said. I thought you’d have learned that.
So we get on the bus, right? We’re leaving. One p.m. You keep saying so.
Not yet, damn you. We’re not leaving Hedy with this kind of trouble.
Oh so now we’re bargaining—
Shut up, damn you. You smell like redheaded piss.