The children’s ward of the Weyville Hospital was a long annexe to the main building, with a glassed-in wall like a porch running down its length. The linoleum was still that dark and institutional brown which achieved a high polish and squeaked when the nurses walked on it in their soft-soled shoes. ‘Everything will be different when the new children’s ward is built,’ the hospital board had promised for years. Only it never happened. Lately, in the wake of new recommendations to cut the health vote, a rumour was circulating that the whole ward might get closed down and the Weyville children would have to go elsewhere for treatment. The threat was enough to quieten complaints about the state of the old hospital, at least for the moment.
There was nowhere for parents to room-in with their children, but a blind eye was turned towards those who brought in a mattress or a folding chair to sleep by a distraught child.
Katrina slept in such a chair by Basil for nine nights in a row, although she couldn’t exactly describe him as distraught. If anybody had asked her, she might have said that she was, but nobody did. Basil’s cough was deep and hacking. He was not in any danger, Mungo Lord said, when he called on his rounds, but they would keep him under observation for a few days.
The first week wasn’t so bad, or at least Basil didn’t seem worse. If anything, he was better than he had been for months. The children who could get out of bed ran wild during the day and Basil usually led the charges down the passage. The nurses looked fraught whenever Basil was in sight and during the day Katrina had been slinking out, not wanting to admit that the monster on the prowl was hers. The pit was the day he taught the other boys to look up the nurses’ skirts while they attended bed patients. Basil lay in wait by the beds; as soon as a hapless nurse bent over he and two or three others would be up the back of her legs and clutching at the tops of her panties. It wasn’t like school where the kids could be expelled, but there was talk of Basil being sent home as soon as possible.
Katrina could not quite fathom why he was being kept there anyway. When she asked for information she was referred to Mungo Lord who always looked vague and said that it was better to be sure than sorry. ‘It’d be a good idea for you to get in touch with the cystic fibrosis organisation, help you cope a bit better.’ He glanced at his watch.
Basil was receiving medication, though Katrina wasn’t sure what it was for; as far as she could see, that was the only treatment. ‘I don’t quite understand what’s happening,’ she said to Mungo Lord when this had gone on for seven days.
‘My dear Katrina,’ he said, ‘don’t worry.’
It annoyed her that he called her Katrina, though she had not dealt in formality since she wore chiffon ball dresses. Minna said she should demand that he call her Ms Diamond, seeing that she had gone back to her maiden name. Minna had moved in with her at the house in Blake Block. It had all happened very suddenly. Life was much easier with her there and Katrina enjoyed the luxury of tidiness and routine that Minna imposed on the household. Sharna cried less and there were times when she almost liked the kid.
She liked being treated tenderly too, and thought, oh yes, if Paul, or Wolf, or even George (not that George had seen her for more than a day in his entire life; she wondered what he’d say if she ever came across him and presented him with evidence of those twenty-four hours ha ha he’d have to believe that red hair) could see her now. But sometimes she felt she could never live up to Minna’s expectations of her. She couldn’t hear herself telling Mungo to call her Ms Diamond. But she might just call him Mungo one day and see how he liked it.
When she didn’t move out of the doctor’s way he ran his hands through his hair in an exasperated way. ‘Look, you don’t have to bother about understanding things, you’ve got better things to do.’
Presuming, she supposed, like looking after Basil and keeping him out of the nurses’ hair, or their pants.
Later, she heard him say to the charge nurse, ‘I feel like wringing that woman’s neck till her eyes pop out sometimes.’ She guessed there must be some difficult mothers around and was sure he couldn’t be talking about her.
Another day, speaking to the same nurse, who was nice as pie to him, she had noticed, and a bad-tempered bitch when she spoke to junior staff, he said, ‘She’s thick as an A-rab’s armpit, if you ask me.’
Coincidence, Katrina told herself. He couldn’t have been talking about her.
A day or two later Basil was listless and did not want to get out of bed. Nobody objected to him staying there.
It was nearly midnight on the tenth evening when Katrina touched Basil’s head again, feeling a dry restless temperature beneath her hand. His breathing was uneven.
She was so tired she couldn’t think, couldn’t sleep either. She dragged herself down the passage to the coffee and television room. The coffee dispenser had a notice on it requesting that coffee not be taken into the ward, but at this hour of the night she figured nobody would notice.
In the passage another mother, in with her son, leaned against a wall, smoking. An older woman, she could almost have been the child’s grandmother.
‘Makes you think a bit, doesn’t it?’ she commented to Katrina. ‘Place like this.’ She held out her cigarette pack, and flicked open a lighter when Katrina accepted.
‘How long’s your kid in for?’ Katrina dragged smoke down and held it.
‘Just overnight. What about yours?’
‘God knows.’
‘I never wanted this little bastard, but I don’t like seeing him in here.’
‘How many have you got?’
‘Six.’
‘Jesus. What happened?’ As if she didn’t know, but there you are, you asked questions like that in hospital corridors at night.
‘There was a young man from Matterhorn, who wouldn’t have been born, if his mother had known the letter was torn.’
‘Yeah. Tell me about it. Fucking birth control. Fucking pill.’
‘Fucking everything. I’ve got a drink, d’you want one?’ The woman opened a shopping bag slung over her arm, producing a bottle of Malibu. She unscrewed the top, handing it over.
‘Ta.’ Katrina swigged, feeling the rum and coconut slide through her, leaving a delicate trail of fire all the way to her gut.
‘Have some more. It’s benefit day.’
‘So it is. I’d forgotten.’
‘How could you do that?’
‘Easy.’ Katrina gestured towards the ward where Basil lay. After awhile she said: ‘I’ve gotta see Bas. See if he’s okay.’
‘All right. Come back, will you?’
Katrina looked down at Basil. He wasn’t coughing but his temperature was high. His head was turned on the pillow, then he rolled over. She visualised his father, the turn of his head and how she had been stunned by the full frontal beauty of it the first time he turned and looked at her. Her eyes prickled. The enormity of what was going to happen to Basil filled her, threatened to topple her. He had been her biggest gamble, and it was a goof-up. She would have him for a few more years while he got more and more sick and then he would die. The room felt claustrophobic; the row of sleeping restless kids made her want to throw up.
A light was on in the office. The senior night nurse was filling in charts.
‘My kid’s sick,’ she said.
‘He’s doing all right. His temperature’s up, but we’re keeping an eye on it, Mrs Diamond.’
‘Ms Diamond,’ Katrina said, too loud, feeling foolish. Her head floated gently somewhere about level with the ceiling.
‘Ms Diamond,’ the nurse replied, watching her.
‘I want you to ring Dr Lord.’ Katrina spoke carefully. I’m not drunk, she reminded herself, I’m exhausted out of my mind, and a couple of nips have gone to my head. Reassured, she spoke more boldly. ‘I want you to ring him right now and tell him to come and look at Basil.’
‘I’ll ring him in the morning. Why don’t you get some sleep?’ There was a note of steel behind the words.
‘I’ll ring him myself. I’m being messed about.’
‘Then I’ll have to have you removed from the hospital if you do that.’
In the coffee room Katrina’s new friend had filled an ashtray while she was gone. She was listening to the all-night programme playing quietly on the shelf radio. When Katrina arrived she looked up, half asleep. ‘What’s up? You look crook.’
‘I feel crook.’
‘Hey, I’ve been trying to place you. Didn’t you used to teach dancing?’
‘That’s right. How did you know?’
‘Used to teach my cousin.’ She mentioned a name but Katrina couldn’t place it.
‘Always wanted to learn. I never did.’ The woman sounded dreamy. ‘You’d think I’d have learnt, everyone danced in those days, real dancing not hurdy gurdy stuff like they do now. But not me, number one came along when I was fifteen; they let me keep her if I kept outta sight until I was sixteen when I could get married. The father stuck around. Something to be said for him, I suppose, but I wish he’d buggered off before he left me with six. Ah well.’
She stubbed out her cigarette and got out the bottle. ‘Here, have another one.’ This time she slopped some in styrofoam cups from the coffee dispenser. ‘Go on, it’ll help you sleep. You’ve gotta get some rest.’
Katrina drank and the radio started playing old-time dance music.
‘Teach me.’ The woman stood up, holding out her arms to Katrina.
‘You’re crazy’, But the woman was pulling her by the hand.
‘C’mon, a few steps. Please.’
‘Okay, just a few then, I don’t feel too much like standing up.’ They stood poised together. ‘Put your hand on my shoulder, okay, and I put my hand on your waist like this, I’m being the man, see.’
They both giggled, stumbled a little against the passage wall as Katrina manoeuvred the woman along. ‘Right, point your toe a little, foot together with mine, and one two, here we go, follow me.’
The woman smelled comfortably of cigarettes and booze, and after a moment Katrina put her cheek against hers. ‘All right? Is that okay?’
So it was that while Katrina and the woman whose name she never learned danced in a corridor and while Minna took care of Sharna, Mungo Lord lay sleeping and Basil died.
The early shift had just begun. Jeffrey Campbell viewed the day to come with unease. He often found himself thinking about early retirement options; he and Lola could take a trip. In the meantime, they both needed a good holiday to tide them over. The girl would like that. He smiled fondly to himself The feminists would rap him over the knuckles if they could see into his head; only he was not planning to give them access.
A travel brochure was spread out in front of him. The white coral of Raratongan beaches gleamed, beckoning under the station light. Perhaps she would want to go somewhere with more shopping? What he would really like was to choose exactly the right place and present her with the tickets. That way she wouldn’t be discussing it with all her customers before they made a decision. Campbell sighed. He knew his wife’s weaknesses. If possible, he would like a holiday that had not been decided by half the female population of Weyville.
Teddy O’Meara walked in and threw his hat on the desk beside him. ‘I’m glad I’m going off duty. They’re burying the Warner woman today.’
‘You’ve been recalled for it.’
‘Ah shit.’
‘A pity the body couldn’t have been released sooner, there’s a few people out there who’ve had a chance to work up a head of steam.’
‘Preserve us from ranting females.’
‘They’ve got a point.’ Campbell stopped short of condemning fair comment.
‘Yeah? Warner’s lawyer’s going for provocation. I reckon he might get it, too.’
‘D’you happen to know whether Mrs Kendall’s coming back for the funeral?’
‘Wouldn’t have a clue, Sarge. I haven’t seen the lady in months.’
‘I gave you a copy of that last letter about her?’
‘Oh, yep, Daniels. The Lambton Quay sleuth. The letter’s on file.’
‘I thought you might have heard something. We seem to have drawn blanks all round.’
‘You’d be the first to know if I did. Anyway, there’s not much we can do about her while we’re here and she’s in Wellington, is there?’
‘If Mrs Kendall’s coming back to town we ought to know about it. She might need protection.’
‘Have you mentioned it to CIB?’
‘Well. I’m thinking about it.’
O’Meara lifted an eyebrow. It was so light it almost disappeared into his skin. Then his face widened in a disarming smile. ‘She is a couple of sandwiches short of the full picnic, don’t you reckon?’
‘Sooner or later that turkey has to make a slip,’ said Campbell grimly. ‘I’d like to be there when he does.’
O’Meara shrugged. ‘Yeah, I guess.’
‘You ought to get some rest before the funeral.’
Campbell got called out after that to investigate an overnight break-in at the Blake Block School. On his way back to the station, along Blake Pass, he stopped at the filling station to look at some spanners. He knew he was dawdling, wouldn’t have tolerated it in other staff, but anything rather than the station was irresistible today. He had no special use for spanners but he thought he might eventually do a little tinkering on some old motors. Retirement again; he would have to make a decision soon.
He listened to petrol gushing in the background while he chose a twelve-inch crescent, feeling the weight of it in his hand. The attendant took it without comment and dropped it in a container bag.
In the background a man was sweeping the yard, bending and shuffling along like someone much older than his years. Campbell recognised him as the attendant who had been beaten up and robbed months earlier. His neck had been injured.
‘I thought your mate was still on compo?’
‘I thought your mates might have caught the bastards who did him.’ The attendant handed him a Biro to sign his credit slip.
Driving through the Block, Campbell looked for clues, as if he could somehow sleuth the air. It occurred to him that the reason he stayed in Weyville was, in spite of all he said to the contrary, because he loved it. All his life he had heard people slamming small towns as if lesser beings lived here. His father, the Irishman, was a Dublin man; he said that the heart died before the body in places like this. Why did you stay, his son had asked him, to which his father had shaken his head and asked where else a man was to find a bite to eat to feed the hungry mouths. Which was a lie, because there were only the two boys to feed. At the weekends his father had worn string around the tops of his pants and pissed himself after he had been to the pub; during the week he worked on a factory floor. His son had disappointed him, a boy with an absence of music in his heart, he said, too quiet for his own good and a straight and narrow kind of lad at that.
Now he knew, as he watched the town shaking itself into gear for another day, that he had always wanted to die in a place like this. There were empty streets and filling stations, motels that nobody went to any more and lawns littered with old cars and flightless wooden butterflies on houses and rusting railway tracks, and cold blue lights which lit the vacant shops at night; there were houses where people slept six to a room and beer bottles piled on the verges in this part of town, and up the road there were neat suburban boxes with clipped edges and blinds which lined up with each other right around the sides of the house and milk bottles out on the dot and hair nets and cold cream and letterboxes with gnomes on them waiting for letters that never came from children who had escaped (he thought of his wife’s son then), and there were sumptuous places like Orchard Close and Cedarwood Grove where he was now heading, and all of them he loved. For, as well, there were children playing outside the schools, and Queen Anne lace growing in the gardens, there was a library where all the attendants knew what all the borrowers read and put books aside for people, and art exhibitions where everyone who went to see the pictures understood them, home-baked bread and pot-luck dinners, flower shows and horticultural demonstrations (he and Lola went to the rose pruning at the garden by the lake once a year) and a cemetery where the dead were buried beside their relatives.
He needed to remind himself of all of this because a scandalous killing had taken place in a town already full of random violence and it was the responsibility of the police to stop it and still it kept on. An image of a ball bouncing up and down assailed him; it hit the ground and a force propelled it upwards and if you were quick you caught it but if it eluded you it bounded off into space and you might well lose it in the undergrowth. There was no one simple way that you could keep the ball under control, but the mystery that surrounded Rose Kendall seemed to be at the heart of the problem, almost the force itself.
He shook his head, tired. Too simple. Blame politics for everything. That was what people were doing. Only he couldn’t get it out of his head that politics was people; it was like diets and what you put in your mouth. We are what we eat, fat, thin, healthy, unhealthy. That was how it looked to him. People had done politics to themselves.
Campbell turned the car into Cedarwood Grove, heading towards the Kendalls’. Emerging from the driveway, Teddy O’Meara’s off-duty Laser picked up speed and passed him.
Teddy drove on, sliced to a halt as he caught sight of Campbell and did a fast U-turn.
‘Place looks dead quiet to me,’ he called when he was alongside Campbell. ‘I’ve checked right around, snug as a bug in a rug.’
He gave a thumbs up, letting his motor idle. Jeffrey Campbell studied the dead windows. Trees were growing in a wild unchecked way across the driveway. Someone had collected papers from the letterbox, but items of junk mail had fallen out and were strewn along the path.
‘I heard you up here, Chief.’ O’Meara tapped his skull with his forefinger.
‘Yep, good one, Teddy.’
‘And I called the Newbone woman, the one who works on the paper …’
‘Hortense?’
‘The Kendalls aren’t coming. Skedaddled.’
‘You’re kidding?’
‘Nope.’
‘Know any details?’
‘Not yet.’ The young man spoke with triumph and with the pleasure of someone who has been seen to do well in such an obvious manner.
‘Thanks. Well done, O’Meara.’
Campbell drove down Cedarwood Grove. Glancing back in the rear-vision mirror, he saw O’Meara hesitate, but it was only to put on sunglasses in the early morning light.
A hearse bore down on him travelling away from the hospital. A small coffin was carried inside it. Its smallness and bareness affected him. He pulled over to the side of the road, thinking how important it was that he sort himself out before he went back to the station. After awhile it occurred to him that O’Meara had not passed him.
When Larissa saw the line of cars winding through the hills that led to the crematorium she could not believe so many people would be coming to Basil’s funeral. The sun glinted on their roofs and fenders, and their headlights blazed on full beam in the midday light.
She glanced at her mother’s stony face beside her. Katrina had not addressed anyone directly all day.
‘That’s amazing,’ Larissa said, to nobody in particular. She rather wished that she had let Gary come now. ‘It won’t be your scene,’ she had told him, ‘and anyway my mother doesn’t like you.’ It was getting easier and easier to be nasty to him these days, partly because he didn’t really notice. He was out of it a lot of the time or else he was away working at the greenhouse. It would have been all right if she could have asked Jason.
Of course she could see that would have been a mistake.
But she felt that he would have understood more about life and death. He had been very nice to her since this had happened. ‘It doesn’t matter too much, he was my half brother and I hated his father’s guts,’ she told him. But she had a feeling that it did matter, that the death of a brother could not be so easily dismissed; nor could she discount the enormous role he had played in her alienation from her mother. What lay before them both, now that Basil was dead, was a mystery that Larissa could only guess at. Maybe nothing would happen. After all, death was about nothingness, so why should she expect it to deliver solutions and answers, to her in particular.
Her uncle, Jim Diamond, was standing on her other side. He looked puzzled too when he saw the cars coming towards them. He flicked a look at his watch. Now Larissa could see that there were family station wagons and a sprinkling of Volvos in the procession. Perhaps, after all, there were only twenty or so, but that was twenty more than they expected to come to their funeral.
‘We’re early,’ he said, to Ellis Hannen rather than to her.
‘I don’t understand what’s going on. Perhaps we should just go in.’
‘The coffin’s not in place yet,’ Jim said. ‘I’ll ask the funeral director.’
The funeral director, one of the new school with a chubby face that positively renounced lugubriousness, was looking unusually perturbed. He hurried forward to speak to Jim, drawing him to one side and whispering.
Jim shook his head, and shrugged. ‘It’s the Warner funeral,’ he announced to Katrina when he returned. ‘They weren’t due for another half hour, but the police have had a problem with the families. Some of his turned up and her family wanted to get stuck into them plus there’s a radical group of women who went to the service and Mrs Warner’s old mother from Hawke’s Bay can’t understand what they’re doing there, so they’re coming up earlier here than they were expected.’
‘They all ought to migrate to the Blake Block, don’t you think? Such behaviour, we could sort them out.’ Minna was actually wearing a dress, an embroidered caftan which had seen better days, but looked as if it had been starched-up for the occasion. Her blonde hair swung against it like spun glass as she moved. Sharna was sleeping in her arms, her head against Minna’s shoulder.
‘They’ll just have to wait,’ said Ellis.
‘That’s the point, they want them to go first, so they’re not all hanging round while we have our service.’
‘But that’s not on.’ Minna was genuinely shocked now.
‘Well we’re still early, you see.’
‘It’s all a mix-up, I am so sorry.’ The funeral director was close to wringing his hands. ‘Special circumstances, it’s very awkward. They’ll only take a few minutes, having had their main service at the church. This is just a short committal.’ Beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead. ‘It would be so sad if … if your service were to suffer any disturbance. For your sakes, I am thinking of.’
‘I don’t care,’ said Katrina, speaking at last. ‘It really doesn’t matter.’
‘Oh thank you, Ms Diamond. So kind.’ The funeral director bobbed his head. ‘Most unusual circumstances. Most understanding. Perhaps if you would care to sit in your cars. Or I could provide a little place for you to retire to at the back of the chapel.’
‘We’ll stay here and watch them, thank you,’ said Katrina.
An uneasy silence fell over the group. A small red-complexioned man in an unremarkable suit with a raincoat thrown over his arm and a briefcase in one hand had joined them, or was at least standing near to them. It was difficult to tell exactly where he had come from. His stance was distant but respectful. For all that, Larissa did not like the way he was looking at her. She was trying to work out where he fitted in when he moved towards the incoming group of mourners.
Larissa recognised some of the local cops trying to look inconspicuous. They were a laugh really, they stood out like sore thumbs. Though O’Meara looked kind of cool, you had to give it to him, he was a bit of a dude. He did not let on that he had seen her as he walked on into the chapel. Apart from them the cremation was supposed to be private, so the mourners consisted of tearful relatives and another group whom Larissa remembered from the days when they visited her aunt’s house. Presumably classed as ‘close friends’, they appeared strung-out and desperate to the point of incoherence. Matt Decker and Nick Newbone and Harry Ryan (who looked as if he was going to faint) carried the coffin with some other men. Larissa was glad they weren’t having pallbearers; she couldn’t think who they could have got to make up the numbers.
‘That’s Mungo Lord,’ said Katrina, making a little darting movement in the direction of one of the pallbearers whom Larissa had not recognised on the far side.
‘Leave it.’ Minna put out a restraining arm. ‘Not now.’
‘He wouldn’t see me.’ Katrina’s voice traced acid into space.
Mungo, preoccupied with the sorrow of the moment did not, indeed, see Katrina.
‘You’d think Rose Kendall would be there,’ said the reddish man with the raincoat, to Jim.
‘You’d think Rose Kendall would be here. She’s my sister.’ Jim’s voice was grim.
The man swallowed, looked as if he was about to take his own pulse, Larissa thought. She wondered who was going to say first what a phoney this guy was, pretending to be one of them, when really it was like he was spying on them.
‘Name’s Daniels, just call me Buff,’ said the man, extending his hand to Jim.
‘It’s like Jim’s sister not to be here,’ her Aunty Fay said. Fay was a washed-out person who had started to cry as soon as she saw Toni Warner’s coffin topped with a spray of red hothouse carnations. Larissa tried to read the card as it was lifted out of the hearse. It said something like, ‘In memory of our beloved Toni, from the Weyville Branch of the Labour Party’: then the funeral director came back and took it off the coffin and replaced it with a similar one which was from Toni’s mother and father and children, and put the Labour Party one on the table in the foyer. Another bouquet which was as good as identical to these two remained in the hearse. The card on it read; ‘To my darling Toni, love you for ever, Lyle.’ Only no one moved to bring that inside, and Lyle, being locked in jail, was unable to deliver it himself.’
‘Rose always leaves things to other people,’ Fay said.
‘That is not exactly true,’ said Katrina, surprising them, and again silence fell over the group.
Jim was turning to the sandy-haired man to make conversation, which was the appropriate thing in Jim’s eyes to do at a funeral, and Larissa was getting ready to denounce him as a spy when she was distracted by the sight of her own father, Paul, emerging from a V12 Jag. She watched with a kind of wonder as he sprinted across the grass towards them.
‘Am I too late?’ he panted.
‘We’ll be starting in a few minutes.’
‘But …’ He gaped around the group, seeing Katrina now.
‘My former husband,’ said Katrina loudly to Minna. Inside the chapel heads turned, mouths pursing and shushing them. ‘My son is dead,’ she said to Paul.
‘I heard that, gee I’m sorry, I didn’t know yours was today too. Kind of coincidence, eh.’ He ran his hand over his thinning hair, then gestured towards the service, embarrassed. ‘I thought I ought to come, you know, the firm’s gone computerised. Well. I did business with Mr Warner’s firm.’
‘Gawper,’ said Minna.
‘This bit’s private,’ said Larissa, ‘so you’d better come to ours.’
As the mourners from Toni’s service filed out, a car started up in the parking lot, driving away at speed.
‘Applebloom,’ said Ellis Hannen. ‘I wouldn’t have gone in either if I’d been him.’
Finally, at exactly the appointed hour, they walked into the chapel to confront the fact of Basil’s dying. Larissa had no way of knowing, of course, but she suspected that the same fire would consume both Basil’s and Toni’s misadventures.
That night the weather changed and fog lay in dank streamers over the town. Buff Daniels, returning to Wellington, was driven off the road in his car. At first he did not believe it was happening. The following car commenced overtaking and slowed down two or three times alongside him as if the driver was uncertain, then fell back.
Then on a shoulder of hillside the car drew level again, holding the road until an oncoming car approached, as if on a signal, and Buff drove towards the only place left for him to go, over the bank. Listening to the wheels spinning, the gathering wind whipping the sides of the gully where he had landed, and his own heart racing, he heard too the cars turning and coming back to the spot where he had gone down.
That might have been an end of it, but a truckdriver called Ellis stopped, attracted by the unquenched beam of his headlights, and pulled him back on to the road. The cars which had pursued him accelerated off into the night. Daniels was grateful for a passion for numbers which printed them like photographs in his brain. The world was swirling around him, but when he woke up he was certain, sooner or later, he would remember.