“Really?” She was looking at him with genuine interest. “Why?”
“Have you ever asked a child why it learned to speak?”
“No.”
“Same for me.”
The crafty devil!
Silence in her jade eyes. She smelled good.
“How’s your Maori school?” he asked.
“Not bad.”
The image of her naked body at the window when they were fifteen was superimposed over the present. In the distance, a mangy dog was ferreting about in an overturned garbage pail. The sun had forced people indoors. Even the children had vanished from the face of the earth.
“How about you?” Hana asked.
“Oh, nothing special.”
“But you learned to speak Maori.”
“If you can call it speaking.”
“We all have to start somewhere.”
Paul could have sworn she was talking about the two of them.
“Do you know what you’re going to do when you leave school?” she asked.
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“I don’t know yet. It depends.”
Hana grinned charmingly. “As mysterious as ever.”
“You’re the one who disappears at every opportunity,” he retorted, “not me.”
“You ought to leave too.”
“I don’t plan to grow old here.”
“All the more reason not to waste time.”
Hana only had eyes for him. Either that, or he was going crazy.
“Are you waiting for someone?”
“My friends,” she replied.
“Still with the same group?”
“Still alive.” She looked around at the crummy houses that constituted their neighborhood. “Ah, here they are!”
The Douglas sisters were coming across the waste ground toward the bus stop, in their uniform of horrible long johns and hunting jackets.
“We’re going to town,” Hana said. “To Kelly Tarlton’s aquarium. Do you want to come with us?”
Paul glanced sulkily at the Douglas sisters as they approached. “Aue,”8 he said, getting up.
They didn’t have much more time. They didn’t have any time at all. Without thinking, Paul leaned down and kissed her, like a man throwing himself into the lion’s den.
For a moment, Hana was taken aback, but she let him go. The Douglas sisters were already giggling.
“Who is that guy?” one of them asked.
“My neighbor,” Hana replied.
The girls burst out laughing in unison. “Is that him? Hey, he’s cute!”
Paul had just turned the corner. Hana shrugged. Cute? No, that really wasn’t the word.
The smells from the Chinese restaurant drifted up to the hotel room. Osborne lay on his bed, staring into space and drinking. The rum helped the bitterness of the cocaine go down, but not the rest.
