Phoenix was into her crawling in a big way, proving hard to contain as her expertise increased. At Amy’s place, the rugged floorboards with random nail heads poking out and the presence of Jas, who crawled around behind her, drove Hana to distraction. By mid-morning on Saturday, she was ready to quit and walk out altogether.
Tama showed up around ten thirty and collapsed width ways across Hana’s double bed, where he stayed until after lunch, maintaining he wasn’t hung over – just extremely tired.
“You flamin’ liar!” she raged at him. “You’re boozed up!”
But it was pointless. Tama lay like a dead man, his head sagging off one side of the bed and his feet lolling off the other. Jas used him as a trampoline for a while but got quickly bored when there was no response. Logan shot off to school on foot for an emergency meeting with Angus, joined by a small but available contingent of the board of trustees able to make it at short notice. Item one on the agenda was likely to be - the presence of the body in the staff accommodation.
By lunchtime, the fated ‘open home’ loomed and help had not arrived. Amy was on shift and Bodie, evidently still tied up at the school site with the dead body. It left Hana completely alone with two small children and a house which got messier by the minute. Hana’s endless tasks involved cleaning, putting away valuables, stowing the Du Rose’s possessions in the boot of the Honda and trying to make the place presentable enough for potential buyers to traipse through the house. The two excitable children drove her almost mental with their antics and Jas got the baby so wound up, Phoenix didn't sleep at all, offering her mother no relief.
Hana finished loading the last suitcase into the Honda –a mission with the roving children – feeling a tightness in the wound on her collar bone. She touched it gingerly just as the baby squealed so hard with excitement in the hallway, she projectile puked milk and sandwich all over the hall rug. Hana rushed up the stairs just as Jas stood up, looking guilty.
“Oops!” he said. “I was only playing doggies with her on our hands and knees. I thought she liked me chasing her.”
“I’ve had enough now!” Hana snapped. “I just asked you to behave for a little while.” She snatched the baby up and changed her, faced then with shampooing the sick stain from the rug. In desperation, she hid the elderly carpet in the garage at the back of the property.
The buoyant, male real estate agent let himself into the kitchen just before one o’clock, full of enthusiasm and bonne homie. “All set are we?” he asked with a patronising air and Hana gritted her teeth as he inspected the house. She listened to his expensive shoes click around the floorboards as he readied himself to show perfect strangers around Amy’s house, in the hope they were serious buyers and not just nosy voyeurs. He popped his white-blonde head around the kitchen door. “Er...there appears to be a body in the second bedroom,” he said, hopping from foot to foot nervously. “I think it might put people off.”
“Oh no!” Hana wailed. “Tama!” She raised her eyes to heaven in misery as Phoenix pulled her earring and Jas snorted. “Oh, don’t worry. Just sell him as a fixture.”
The agent stood outside the Honda with a grizzling Phoenix under one arm and a giggling, spinning Jas gripped in the other. Hana found Tama uncooperative, stumbling bare foot down the hallway and falling down the side steps. With difficulty, she peeled him off the driveway and shoved him in the front of the car and the little children in the back. The agent pointed at something behind her. “You might want to move that out of the way first.”
Hana groaned as she discovered Tama’s ute still parked behind her. In a temper she snatched the keys from its comatose owner and cranked the elderly gearstick into reverse without care, shooting the ute out onto the street backwards and abandoning it there at a jaunty angle. “Bloody men, I’m sick of the lot of them!” she cursed as the agent shot inside the house and slammed the front door.
The stitches in Hana’s chest pulled, tight and painful as she struggled to cope with this latest drama. It seemed so unfair. Every fibre of her being screamed out for her safe place in the Hakarimata Bush, but she knew Logan would be furious if she took off there; besides which, Jas and Tama would still be with her and their juvenile behaviour was one of the problems.
“You probably shouldn’t leave my truck there,” Tama slurred. “It’s not really the look that they’re going for; that kind of shabby chic.”
“Well, what do you want me to do?” Hana shrieked, alarming him with the hysteria in her voice. “I’ve done my best. If you don’t like it - you move it!” She hurled the keys at him, feeling guilty when they hit him straight in the groin with her appalling underarm. Tama slumped in the passenger seat with a groan and went back to sleep, clutching his crotch.
Hana drove across to the boys’ school, determined to seek out her errant husband and son. “Who the hell do they think they are?” she raged. “Leaving me to do everything all by myself. I’ve just had heart surgery! They knew that.”
“Who the hell?” Jas piped up, loving the sentence a little too much and repeating it like a parrot. “Who the hell? Who the hell?”
The back gate to the school site stood wide open but the narrow street to the staff unit was cordoned off by police tape. Hana parked the Honda on the grassy edge of the soccer pitch, realising as she turned in her seat that all her passengers were fast asleep. “Typical!” Exasperated, she stomped off towards her unit.
“Hey, Mum, how you doing?” Bodie called as she got to the police tape. He stared at something intently on the ground before writing on a clipboard. The tape fluttered white and flimsy in the breeze with ‘Police-Incident’ printed from one end to the other in a navy blue font. “You ok?” her son asked, looking at her frazzled demeanour as she ducked under the tape and got it caught in her hair tie.
“Not really!” Hana snapped, flushing with rising humiliation as she fought with the tape. She yanked her hair tie out and her amber locks tumbled down her back. At that exact moment Logan emerged from a side door of the boarding house looking like he didn’t have a care in the world. He sauntered across the lane with his hands deep in his pockets, treating Hana to a wink and one of his lazy smiles.
She felt the angry red mist descend over her eyeballs and heard the vitriol pour from her mouth, as though she were a bystander. Logan stopped dead in the middle of the lane, his eyes widening in shock as she launched. “So, this is how it is then?” she screeched. “You make me stay somewhere I don’t want to be, prevent me going home and then abandon me with two small banshees and one big drunken idiot. I get left to clear up for the ‘open home’ all by myself at a house that isn’t even mine and then have to find somewhere to take them all for two hours. Thanks for nothing! I’m not supposed to be lifting and yet that’s all I’ve done all morning. I’m sick of being dictated to! I’ve managed perfectly well for the last nine years and I refuse to be dumped on anymore!”
Hana reached flipping point, not helped by the extra uniformed spectators who poked their heads from various doors and windows around the property. She jabbed a pointed finger first at Bodie and then at her husband. “You can go and get your son out of the back of my car and you can get your lump of a nephew out of the front! And both of you can stick your orders up your...”
Detective Inspector Odering’s amused face appeared on the front steps of Hana’s unit, quickly followed by the rest of his lanky, smartly suited body. He made no attempt to control his enjoyment at the floor show. Hana’s impromptu diatribe ceased and she bit her lip as embarrassment flushed her porcelain complexion. The detective shoved his hands in his trouser pockets and leaned against the doorframe, eager to hear more.
Bodie’s eyes lowered in guilt and he muttered a hasty, “Sorry.”
But as ever, Logan’s face was unreadable. He raised a dark eyebrow in challenge and Hana gulped, backing away from him and sensing his distaste for her childish scene. She caught Odering’s eye and played for an audience of one. “Oh, don’t worry,” she called in a casual sing-song voice and jerked her head towards the grinning detective. “Take as long as you like. I’m never coming back!” Then she turned on her heel and stomped off to her car.
Neither of the men followed her with any intention of retrieving their respective charges. Arriving at the vehicle, it seemed a mean to tip the sleeping Jas and Tama out onto the wet grass and leave them there, much as she wanted to. Instead, Hana gunned the engine and did a full circle. She successfully stripped off a huge arc of precious-first-eleven-soccer-pitch-grass on her heavy tyres and almost wiped out a red Lexus saloon. It pulled out from behind the boarding house, jamming on the brakes and making a dreadful skidding sound as Hana sped by.
The ghostly, familiar face of a woman peered through the windscreen as the car screeched to a halt, her hand half raised in greeting. Ignoring her, Hana headed through the back gate, still consumed by her fury at the selfish men in her life. How dare they tell her what to do? How dare they leave her to do it all by herself? Who did they think they were? “One minute I’m too fragile to leave alone and the next, I’m capable of vacuuming, cleaning bathrooms and managing rowdy children. And loading heavy bags and people into the car!” she fumed.
Her other companions snored and dribbled and her rant was entirely wasted. It was only as Hana reached the main road west out of Hamilton, she realised why the other driver looked so familiar and a heavy ladle of guilt poured over her heart. “Oh, no!” she groaned. “I almost crashed into Alan Dobbs’ wife, Dora.”
The children woke as the vehicle reached the coastal town of Raglan. Hana had no idea why she ended up there, but the hour long drive had allowed her to cool off. As she parked up in a small street next to the harbour, she remembered with horror that the doctor hadn’t cleared her for driving yet. Which meant she was uninsured and driving illegally.
It wasn’t the parking of the car which woke its occupants, although it was a pretty shocking display of parallel parking, but the sound of Hana’s unrestrained crying. Her tears were full of injustice at the men who regulated and dictated to her and then left her to deal with the consequences alone. Tama reached an unsteady hand towards her. “What’s wrong, Ma? What happened?”
Hana’s reply was unintelligible, hampered by the wad of tissues in front of her face. Tama attempted to comfort her, but ended up sitting in the passenger seat with Jas crying on one knee and Phoenix on the other. Only Hana knew why she sobbed like an inconsolable child and the others sat and watched with sour faces. Jas put his arm around the baby, who wiped her nose on his sleeve and they all looked accusingly at Hana “What?” she sniffed crossly. “How is it all my fault?”
“Hey, come on, let’s all go somewhere for a drink and something to eat. Then we’ll all feel a bit more...human.” Tama seemed decently apologetic for once and took control of the situation. He led them all to a hotel facing the sea and seated them in a booth by a large, picturesque window. He fetched soft drinks and ordered copious amounts of food, paying at the bar.
“Thanks,” Hana sniffed. “That’s really generous of you. It can’t be cheap.”
Tama grimaced and held up Logan’s credit card. “I still had this from last night when I nipped out to get some groceries.” He held up his pint of cola. “Cheers Uncle Logan.”
Jas sat with tears still dappling his cheeks while Hana fed her baby, trying to be surreptitious in the corner. Her eyes were swollen and red and Tama looked genuinely sorry as he wrinkled his nose and contemplated her misery. “Sorry, Ma. I didn’t mean to be such a dick,” he offered.
“I’m not supposed to drive,” Hana whispered across the table, her voice hitching after the painful sobs and her eyes welling up with tears again. “I’m still sick. Logan just left me to it. He knew when the ‘open home’ was and he still didn’t come back. The kids were crawling around driving me mad and I had to clean everywhere again. Oh no!” Hana clapped her hand over her mouth. “I don’t think I got the chunks of sick off the wall and the bed was all rumpled where you got off it.”
“I know what you can do,” Jas said, poking his index finger up his nose. “You can ring Poppa Logan and shout really loud down the phone ‘I’m going to knock your bookin’ head off!’ That always makes Mummy feel heaps better.”
People in the hotel restaurant looked their way as Jas did a talented impression of his mother without volume control engaged. Hana’s chest hitched again and she grabbed involuntarily at the pacemaker. Jas crawled onto Tama’s knee and as the young man reached out and put his hand over Hana’s, Jas added his tiny paw to the pile. “Sokay, Hanny,” he said, his face earnest. “Gimme your phone and I’ll shout it.”
As if on cue, Hana’s phone rang out into the quiet restaurant, bleeping from inside the change bag under the table. “Leave it!” she said with force, forbidding Tama or Jas reaching for it. Especially Jas. “It’ll be Logan or Bodie grovelling and I don’t want to hear it.”
“Naughty Poppa and naughty Daddy,” Jas whispered, pushing out his bottom lip and looking grumpy. Hana closed her eyes and felt guilty. Her phone rang again and then when it stopped; Tama’s began trilling in his jeans pocket. “Turn them all off,” Jas insisted. “Then the baddies can’t get us.”
To Hana’s surprise, Tama did as he was told for once.
Without meaning to, the little gang of runaways entered into Jas’ imaginary world of covert operations and undercover spy tactics and the child showed his metal as a budding combat operative. He stared around the restaurant making mental notes of who was there, creating an alternate reality in his mind. “That man in the corner with a newspaper is a terrorist,” he announced and horrified, Tama took a look at the innocent customer and put his hand over Jas’ mouth. “He is!” Jas asserted, biting Tama’s finger. “His glasses are strange.”
“Oh, my goodness!” Hana hissed. “We don’t need this right now.”
“I need to pee, quickly,” Jas complained. “It’s gonna come out on your legs in a minute, Tama.”
Hana groaned. Tama held his hand up and shuffled sideways off the bench, taking Jas with him. “I’ll go,” he sighed, rolling his eyes as Jas made him walk around the room so he could get a better look at the man.
A briefcase at the man’s feet held all the possibilities of an incendiary device and Jas wondered if he would get to use his bomb disposal skills. He tried to execute a perfect drop and roll on the way past but Tama, thinking he had stumbled, hauled him up and led him back to the table. Jas sunk further into his alternate reality. “This kid’s weird!” Tama complained to Hana back at the table.
She narrowed her eyes and shook her head. “Don’t say things like that in front of him,” she chastised. Tama smirked.
“Yeah but you didn’t disagree, did ya?”
When his fish and chips arrived, Jas managed to drag himself successfully back into the real world for the duration of his chewing. Hana ate a few hot chips, helped out by her daughter who sucked them to death and then squashed them on the plate. The baby’s eating habits made Jas feel sick and he gagged a few times. “That’s disgusting!” he breathed and stared at the little girl with a screwed up face. If he thought too hard about what she was doing, or watched the long strings of saliva that dangled between her tiny fingers and the golden fried potatoes, it made tears come into his eyes and his food launch dangerously up his gullet. “Baby Phoenix,” he said without looking at her, “I’m promoting you to the military police division. Then you can eat by yourself with the prisoners. It can be a sort of torture for them.”
“Dah,” Phoenix replied obligingly as she squished a chip through the gap between her front teeth.
Jas distracted himself by covertly scrutinising the man in the corner. He was definitely up to something, looking at his watch and appearing shifty. Jas made sure he memorised everything about his fellow customer; his hair, face, clothing and shoes. The little boy even registered the make of his spectacles, which had a tiny ‘DG’ in the corner of the frames. Dolce and Gabbana – Jas knew that. He was so interested in the man that twice, he almost toppled off Tama’s knee. Phoenix enjoyed the look on the little boy’s face as he pitched precariously forwards and laughed like a drain at him.
Tama was fed up though and eventually plonked him back down on his own seat. “Mate! Pack it in!” He turned to Hana. “What are we going to do now?” he dared to ask, regretting it when her eyes automatically filled with tears. She shrugged, not having thought past parking the car, which was difficult enough. “Want to get a hotel for the night?” Tama suggested and Hana shook her head miserably, not knowing the answer.
“Logan would kill me and then you. Actually, I think he’d kill you first.”
The man in the corner table squeezed himself through a gap between the chairs and left. Hana was astounded to see Jas bob his head down into his hoodie and mutter something into the cloth tassels dangling down from the neck. “Suspect is on the move. Repeat, suspect is on the move.”
Hana sighed with an air of hopelessness as Tama smirked at the child. “I can’t decide if he has an overactive imagination or genuinely requires a psychiatrist,” she whispered.
Jas watched with beady eyes, concentrating as the man went into a jewellery shop across the street. It wasn’t a flashy chain store affair but a local tradesman who made individual one-off pieces, largely influenced by the seaside location. The Māori craftsman specialised in expensive pounamu or jade work. As he went across the street, Jas watched intrigued as the man pulled his hoodie up over his stubbly blonde hair and a baseball cap further down over his face as a shield. The watcher’s interest was almost obsessive, knowing deep in his core that something was about to happen. As the man shot quickly out of the jewellers not five minutes later, Jas leapt to his feet screaming, “10:31-crime in progress!” and bolted across the hotel restaurant floor, almost legging up a waitress carrying two bowls of chowder.
Tama looked at Hana in alarm, but she pointed to the baby on her knee and he swore. The young man stumbled from the booth and pelted after Jas, leaving Hana panicking in her seat.
“Jas!” Tama grabbed the little boy’s arm as he managed to get out of the hotel door, whipping him around with an angry look on his face.
“No, no! Tama, get him!” Jas yelled. “He’s a terrorist!”
At the word terrorist, the whole street went into a panic and emptied as tourists shot into shop doorways and hid. The man from the hotel wrenched open the door of a bright red Ford Sierra across the street, hurling himself into the passenger seat as it screeched to a halt alongside him. He only just got his legs into the vehicle as it took off at speed.
“What are you doing, kid?” Tama yelled at the boy in his grip.
“Shut up! Shut up!” Jas squealed, bouncing on the balls of his feet and closing his eyes, memorising the registration plate of the vehicle. He repeated it over and over, not wanting Tama’s chastisement to wipe it from his quick brain. He slapped his hands over his ears and refused to take them off until the cops arrived.