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1.
There was a bit of everything in the suitcase: speed, opium, grass, cocaine, acid, PCP, amphetamines—most of them for sale legally—morphine, ecstasy, MDMA, as well as a small quantity of heroin.
Osborne chose some MDMA powder. The light from the street lamps threw shadows across the naturalistic painting on the wall of the room, the kind of cheap reproduction you found in Parnell. He took off his bandage. The injury had finally healed. His mind, on the other hand, was as confused as ever.
Globule appeared, balancing on the window sill.
“I thought I told you to get out.”
Her big yellow eyes stared at him with a kind of brazen innocence. He stroked her, then put on his jacket and went back down to the bar. There, Kieren served him a vodka and lemon, then another one.
It was a Friday. Lawyers, bank employees, students, the congenitally idle: the customers were a noisy, heterogeneous crew. Garish signs invited the local population to drink white wine or Australian champagne, but beer seemed to be the beverage of choice. Eleven o’clock. Osborne ordered one last drink, as the bar was about to close. Only the imposing Maori doorman seemed to have his eye on him—a professional eye. Osborne left the bar, crushed in the middle of a lively, tipsy crowd. Heat had seized hold of his body and wouldn’t let go of him.
The Bronx, a fashionable club in the centre of town. He drank, hoping to dispel the medicinal taste that lingered in his mouth, trying to forget everything else—especially Hana. He watched everyone in their frenzied attempts to prove they were alive: young people on the dance floor, mimicking erotic contortions to pounding music, living sculptures whose fleeting moves he followed, lost in the present tense, the photographic moment, already certain that his consciousness was disintegrating. Even Hana’s ghost had vanished in the labyrinth of his mind. He was again in the eye of the cyclone.
He was in the grip of all these contradictory feelings when he had the impression that someone was smiling at him. A girl standing with her back against a pillar at the edge of the dance floor. Her face was strangely familiar. A tall mixed-race girl who reminded him of . . . Suddenly, the stroboscope started pulsing, sending black stars shooting through his head, and he stepped back against the counter. The girl and her smile had disappeared, there was nothing there now but a concrete post and people moving past it like crazed puppets. Then he felt a hand on his lower back. It was the girl he had seen earlier. She gave him an equivocal wink, then retreated to the middle of the aisle, her dress dancing in the flashing light.
In the back pocket of his pants, there was a scribbled note. It wasn’t easy to read in this light, but there was only one word on it: Come.
On the dance floor, the people were still moving frenetically. Plagued by constant hot flashes, Osborne made his way to the exit.
The girl was standing just outside the club, smoking a cigarette, a star ignored beneath the stars. Sturdier than Hana, but wearing a light dress that emphasized the same hips, the same legs, she was smiling like a cat in the moonlight.
“We met the other evening,” she said, pupils dilated. “You were already in a lousy state then.”
That seemed to amuse her. Her face was a satiny brown in the light of the street lamps. Osborne looked at her as if he had been on earth for a very long time. She put her hands on his burning cheeks and kissed him, her eyes open. It was clearly something she had been wanting to do for a while.
“Ann,” she said. “Ann Brook.”
He could smell her, a mixture of French perfume and sweat.
“In the elevator,” she went on. “Don’t you remember? That reception at Sky City?”
“Oh, yes.”
Ann Brook didn’t look any older than twenty-five at most, but the look in her eyes was very adult.
“Come this way,” she whispered, drawing him into the adjacent alley.
They smoked a joint in her car, a state-of-the-art convertible.
“What kind of grass is this?” Osborne asked.
“Datura,” she said, blowing smoke out into the cosmos. “A hallucinogenic plant from South America.”
“Are you a connoisseur?”
“A big connoisseur!” she said brightly, gesturing toward her chest.
He liked her, and they seemed to be getting along well.
“What were you doing at that reception?” he asked.
“Nothing special. Looking at people’s faces.”
“And what did you see?”
“They were old and ugly. Not like you.” She gave him a greedy look. “A friend of mine is throwing a party over in Ponsonby. I promised I’d swing by, but it’s still early. We can have a bit of fun before that.”
According to the dashboard it was midnight. Osborne had her thighs in his line of sight. “OK,” he said, stubbing out the joint against the door.
Ann Brook switched on the ignition and the convertible started up.
“I’m in advertising,” she said to the stars.
“I don’t care.”
