“Bernie?”
Red felt his way in the darkness, found the matches on the table and lit the hurricane lamp. One of the jugs of sherry was missing off the table, so the old man had obviously got up at some time. Red wandered into the bedroom and found Bernie lying on his bed, dead to the world, the half-empty jug alongside amid gobs of toilet paper. Red knew he’d get no sense out of the old man that night, and that there was no point in cooking him a meal. He reached down to pull a sheet and blanket over him so that he wouldn’t get a chill in the night. His hand brushed Bernie’s cheek. It felt cold, unnaturally cold. He held the lamp closer to the old man’s face. His eyes were half open but they’d long given up seeing. Bernie had died alone, and there was nothing Red could do about it.
Red took the lamp back out into the main room and sat down at the table. He’d failed a dying man. He put his head in his hands and let his tiredness and dismay wash over him. Archie had to see Bernie, too, so that he’d understand. Red went to the door and whistled. The dog sensed what was afoot the second he stepped into the shack. Instead of trotting in to see Bernie, he stole in, nose quivering. He sniffed along the length of Bernie’s arm to confirm his suspicions and retreated to the door, pausing to look reproachfully at Red.
Red forced himself to his feet. He hadn’t wanted the responsibility of caring for Bernie but the responsibility had found him anyway. He opened Bernie’s cupboards and grabbed as many preserving jars as he could find, relics from the time Bernie bottled the fruit from his plum, peach and nectarine trees. He opened the freezer compartment in the top of Bernie’s fridge. It was filled with trays of ice kept for icing his catch. Bernie had never entirely discounted the possibility of taking his boat to the rise one final time. Red took the trays out and shook the cubes onto the bench. He filled as many jars as he could with ice and sealed them. He carried the jars into the bedroom and distributed them evenly around Bernie’s body. He pulled the blankets up over him to trap in the cold air, found two more in the wardrobe and tossed them over the bed as well. He tidied up the floor around the bed, put the top on the half-empty jug and put it away in a kitchen cupboard. He pulled the curtains closed. Bernie had liked to sleep late and had curtains to block out the morning sun. The curtains would help keep the shack cool. Red began to feel better. He’d done his duty. The bach was tidy and Bernie was taken care of. He half-filled a tin with chicken pellets and went out to round up the chooks. There was nothing else he needed to do. Once the chooks were safely in the henhouse he could go home and slip back into his routine. At least until morning. He picked up the two pieces of snapper and turned down the hurricane lamp.
Another day was drawing to a close, a day in which he’d had to confront Japanese poachers and the navy, a day in which Bernie had died and cleared the way for the woman to claim her inheritance. His world was changing, but at least he still survived.
Rosie Trethewey was not happy. When she’d left for work that morning, summer had been in full cry. The sun had beaten down from a cloudless blue sky, and for once, though only briefly, she was glad the judge had taken away her driving license. But the walk up Shelley Beach Road to the bus stop had soon tested her antiperspirant and found it wanting. Her cotton dress had darkened beneath her arms and clung to her back. Then she’d cursed the judge and the smug policemen who’d picked on her and booked her for speeding. Even the judge had expressed surprise that her Volkswagen could go as fast as the police had claimed it had. But that was Rosie. She only had two speeds, flat out and stop.
The afternoon had brought clouds, low and threatening, and sent temperatures plummeting. She’d shivered in windowless offices while the air-conditioning thermostats struggled to figure out what was happening and failed. She’d spent the day talking to groups of women, trying to divine their innermost thoughts and attitudes toward toilet cleaners and bathroom disinfectants. Up until then Rosie had thought that skid marks were something immature men in fast cars left on roads. She’d learned differently and wished she hadn’t. But the job of a market researcher was to research markets, and there was a market for toilet cleaners, just as there was for most other things. She had no control over what products she was given to investigate. Nevertheless, it had been an unedifying day and was no way to spend a life.
“You’ll have to find something else to do,” Norma insisted whenever she moaned about it. Norma was her friend and meant well but, Christ on a motorbike, what was there left for her to do?
The rain had held off until the bus deposited her at the top of Shelley Beach Road, then the heavens had opened. Typical. The only certain thing about the weather in Auckland was that it would change. Rosie began to run but quickly realized the futility of it. She was going to get soaked no matter what she did. She walked head-on into the wind and driving rain as it howled in off the harbor. The thin cotton stuck fast to her body like a second layer of skin, defining her figure in intimate detail. Rosie didn’t care a damn. There was no one dumb enough to be out in the rain to see her, and even if there had been, she was in no mood to care. She was more concerned with the cold and her hates. Walking briskly helped fend off the chill from the wet and wind, but there was nothing she could do about her hates. She hated the judge who wouldn’t let her drive her car, and she hated the police. It was their fault she was cold and wet. She hated buses. She hated her job. She hated her flat. She hated her father, her ex-husband, stupid women who had nothing better to do than waffle on endlessly about toilet cleaners and skid marks as if they were making some worthwhile contribution to the sum total of human knowledge, and she hated dresses that rode up and bunched at the crotch.
“You waste too much energy on negative thoughts,” Norma kept telling her, but Norma was younger, better looking and had a boyfriend who was loaded. It was easy for Norma to give advice. Nature had given her everything except depth.
Her flatmate hadn’t closed their letterbox properly the day before, and all the mail was saturated. She cursed the office wally who told her to keep the windows of her VW open a half inch to let air circulate. Now rain circulated. Too bad. She stepped off the driveway onto the path that wound through the overgrown garden to the once-grand two-story home that had been converted to flats. Leaves tipped water over her as she brushed past unpruned bushes. The downspouts were blocked, causing the gutters to overflow and a sheet of water to cascade off the roof right in front of the steps leading to the front door. She groaned aloud. There was the whole front of the house, but of course the gutters had chosen to overflow by the front door. She’d complained to the landlord.
“Plumber’s coming to fix it next week,” she’d been told, but next week never arrived and neither did the plumber. She hated the landlord, cheap old bastard, and she hated the real estate agent who’d signed her up to a two-year lease. She opened the door to her flat and paused, wondering how to circumnavigate her beloved kelim rugs that lay scattered across the dark-stained timber floors. Then she thought of her flatmate, who’d simply barge in regardless, and gave up. She’d long given up protecting her things against flatmates and considered herself lucky if nothing was stolen when they moved out.
She closed the door behind her, switched on the light because the flat was gloomy even on a bright day, and began to strip off her wet clothes. She thought of leaving them in puddles on the floor as her flatmate would, but thought better of it. It was smarter to leave one big puddle to wipe up than half a dozen smaller ones. She slipped out of her clothes. Wet, cold and naked, she didn’t feel a bit beautiful, but she had the sort of figure that turned men on, particularly the one watching from the window of the house next door. She groaned at the indignity, gathered up her bundle of wet clothes and strode into the bathroom. She didn’t even bother giving her voyeuristic neighbor the finger as