Paul had only retained a few fragments of his childhood, a handful of memories ditched in early adolescence, when they had moved to the Red Hill neighborhood to live with Thomas, his future stepfather.
There was a foul smell from the fish factory when the wind was in their direction, but at least he and his mother had their own house now, with a small neglected garden and a future. Thomas said he’d take care of the garden, because gardening was man’s work. The future could take care of itself.
Mary kept saying she’d like to see roses, which would bring good luck to the child she was expecting, and also a few fruit trees, to brighten the place up. Paul would listen to them without saying a word. He wasn’t much of a talker.
Luckily, there was Hana, the clear-eyed mixed-race girl who lived next door. Two black braids down her back, breasts still undeveloped, but already bearing herself like a queen. A barbarian queen. Paul would watch her in the evening through the bathroom window. By climbing on the toilet seat, getting up on tiptoe, and clinging to the sill, you could just see her room. He had to work around the other family members’ use of the bathroom, his stepfather’s “what-are-you-doing-in-the-bathroom-all-this-time,” not to mention his own hygiene, but every evening Hana was there, at nine o’clock, in her room. She would take off her clothes, leaving only a T-shirt on, and go bare-legged to the window and stand gazing out at the insects buzzing around the street lamp, then draw the white netting that served as a curtain and slip beneath the sheets.
Sometimes, Hana left the window open, and the breeze would blow the netting into the room. Paul would watch her from his pedestal, imagining the smell of her flesh, her skin, her private parts, her hands, her thighs, those thighs she would part for him, one day. She was all he had. He would be all she had. One day.
In the meantime, with the consent of their new neighbors, Thomas planted a series of shrubs that he said would take several months to grow. So Paul had a whole season to spy on his neighbor, standing on tiptoe, and at the age of fifteen he could always hope he’d grow faster than the hedge.
His ankles hurt at first, then he got used to it.
It took Hana ten days to discover his stratagem. It was an evening in October. She was just about to close her bedroom window when she spotted Paul’s nose in the half light on the other side of the hedge. The little devil! She hesitated at first. Should she raise the alarm? Teach him a lesson? Tell her parents, which might end in a thrashing for her? Paul didn’t move an inch, his fingers tense on the window sill. Pretending to ignore him, Hana leaned toward the street lamps and looked for a long time at the orange-tinged clouds fading above the rooftops. When she straightened up again, Paul was still watching her. He knew, though, that she had seen him. She must have seen him. At that point, Hana stopped thinking and calmly took off her T-shirt.
She was wearing nothing underneath, only her smells. Paul breathed them all in as they floated to him on the breeze. From now on, she would be his obsession—because that night, Hana went to bed without closing the curtain. That night, and the following nights too.
Their little game, their secret ritual, lasted one whole season, Paul clinging with one hand to the window still, praying that his mother wouldn’t suddenly decide to use the bathroom, and Hana content to display her nakedness to his crazed desire. Five months touching one another from a distance, five months imagining one another’s bodies. It was a long time and at the same time not long enough.
A long time, because Hana slept naked.
And not long enough, because the hedge kept growing . . .
The sheep in the adjoining field scattered as the Boeing that had left Sydney three hours earlier turned at the end of the runway. A steward announced that the ground temperature at Auckland airport was seventy-three degrees. Osborne closed the novel he wasn’t reading, his mind dulled by the Californian wine served during the flight. After ten months of exile, he was coming home. His feelings about that were still neutral. Among his neighbors, the whites couldn’t wait to get off, whereas the Maoris didn’t look overjoyed. Osborne took his overnight case down from the baggage compartment, switched off his mind, and set off through the different stages of customs.
City of sails, the tourist posters proclaimed. He left the arrivals area and immediately spotted the plainclothes cop in the airport parking lot. The guy must have seen his face somewhere, because he immediately came toward him.
“Welcome to the country!”
Tom Culhane was a pakeha with Irish skin and unkempt red hair that made him look like a partly peeled carrot. He looked to be about forty and, judging by the lines at the corners of his eyes, a man with more than a few worries.
“Sergeant Culhane,” he said, shaking Osborne’s hand vigorously. “I’m going to be your partner. You can call me Tom. Good flight?”
Sergeant Culhane was smiling politely. The knot of his tie was askew and he wasn’t carrying a gun. Hiding his inebriation behind his twisted glasses, Osborne breathed in the surrounding air, a mixture of pollen and kerosene.
“Apparently, your baggage has gone straight to the hotel,” Culhane went on. “So if you have what you need, shall we go?”
Osborne lifted his overnight case to show that he was all set.
“In that case, I suggest we go straight to headquarters,” Culhane said, clearing his throat and motioning for Osborne to follow him. “Captain Timu has asked me to introduce you to the department and help you settle in.”
No reaction. They took a few steps toward the car.
“How long have you been away? A year, right? You know we have a new headquarters, don’t you?”
“No.”
There was a dog in the back of the Ford, a beige Labrador, furiously beating the seat with his tail. Osborne put his hand through the open window, and the dog immediately licked his fingers.
“Oh, yes,” Culhane said. “I took advantage of the car ride to bring my dog along. He’s still young, he finds it hard to stay at home. I hope you don’t have anything against dogs? Lie down, Toby! Lie down!”
Osborne caught hold of the nose sticking out of the window, and let the smile die on his lips. “Toby, eh?”
The Labrador had fallen silent. Not sure what to do, Culhane grabbed the wheel, and they drove out of the parking lot. “All right, Toby?”
Osborne sat there in his dark suit, impassive. Culhane was on his guard. It wasn’t just a matter of rank. Osborne had a deceptively calm air about him that Culhane found inscrutable, his breath stank of alcohol, and he still hadn’t seen his eyes.
They drove for a while. Nestling between the harbors of Waitemata and Manukau, Auckland loomed on the horizon. White and pink houses, the blue skyscrapers of the Central Business District in the distance, and, everywhere else, the sea.
“How was Australia?”
His face turned toward the window, Osborne was breathing in the sea spray from the Pacific, in vain—his sinuses were too blocked.
“I had tickets for the Sydney Olympics,” Culhane went on, “but that was when Rosemary fell sick. Rosemary’s my wife. A pity, it would have been a good opportunity to travel. Not that she cares much for sports. I’m the same—I used to follow everything, especially rugby, but as you get older the fascination wears off, and you start to take an interest in other things. Apart from the All Blacks, of course.”
Travel, sports, his wife: still no reaction. Through the open window, Osborne was looking out at the landscape, the sailboats crisscrossing the Hauraki Gulf. He could have mentioned the boat people who had showed up the previous week off Brisbane. On TV, you saw them in close up throwing their children in the sea to force the rich country of Australia to let them in, followed by local celebrities expressing their concern for these poor devils, while pointing out that, of course, throwing your own children in the sea wasn’t something people like us did. What you didn’t see on television—that would have required a wider shot—was that there were aid ships there, not so far from the starving boat people, and that they were throwing their children in the sea so that they at least could be saved.
That was the only thing that had stayed in Osborne’s mind from his exile in Australia, but he didn’t say anything about it. He didn’t say anything at all.
With his big paws on the wheel, Tom Culhane decided to drop the chat. They were driving now on the expressway linking the airport to the outskirts of the city. The sky was fabulously blue. Osborne stubbed out his cigarette on the door, picked up his suitcase, laid it on his lap, and searched inside. Toby had sat up in the back and was now yapping and beating his feet on the seat.
“He smelt a kennel!” Culhane his master said. As the animal was starting to bark, he cried, “Quiet, Toby! We’re not blind!”
Osborne had taken a small plastic bag from his suitcase, and from it he drew two large cannabis leaves, crushed them in his palm, tipped them out onto a sheet of paper, sprinkled a small quantity of cocaine over them, and rolled the joint with astonishing speed. He smoked the whole of it in a few acrid puffs. The smoke danced for a moment in the front of the car then quickly drifted out through the open window.
Culhane was silent until they reached Auckland.
