On the beach, the heat haze created mirages. For a long time, Pita Witkaire sat there beneath the pohutuwaka, contemplating nothingness.
His wife was dead, and so was the guardian angel of her memory.
9.
Osborne rolled over on the couch. The steel of the knuckle-duster had torn the top of his skull. The hardest thing was to undress.
“Don’t move.”
Sitting beside him, Amelia helped him to take off his sticky jacket then wedged a pillow on the armrest of the couch. She disappeared a moment from his field of vision—he thought he recognized a Rothko painting on the living room wall—and climbed the spiral staircase leading to the bedroom and bathroom. She soon returned with a first-aid box in her hands, and sat down on the edge of the couch.
“What—”
“Don’t talk.”
Searching in the box, she took out a pill and stuck it between his lips.
“Morphine sulphate,” she said. “You’re going to feel groggy a while longer but it’ll help you to bear up.”
She started examining the wounds on his skull. One of them was a deep cut, under his hair, where a bump was now forming. The blood had finally congealed but he must have lost nearly two pints. There was also a star-shaped wound high up on the forehead.
“Well, if you were trying to get yourself killed, you nearly succeeded,” Amelia said, putting the first-aid box down at the foot of the couch. “Can you talk?”
He looked at her, but said nothing.
“What happened?”
Osborne made an irritable gesture that told her nothing at all. How stubborn he was! Amelia unpacked compresses, cotton swabs, antiseptic, as well as needle and thread. She cleaned the wounds, making little piles of scarlet swabs on the table.
“Is the morphine taking effect?”
Enclosed in his pain, Osborne was wandering in areas of shadow, his head bursting.
“All right, I’m going to sew up your skull now,” she said in a neutral voice. “We can’t leave a hole like that in that stubborn head of yours.”
She threaded the needle and leaned over his scabs.
“It’s not going to be pleasant, but here goes.”
He let her go ahead, without a glance at the neckline of her shirt even though it was right under his nose. The needle, as it went in, made the wound bleed again.
“Am I hurting you?” Amelia said, mopping the blood as best she could. “I have to patch you up.”
“Leave it,” he murmured—the smell of antiseptic was making him feel nauseous.
As she finished her work, Amelia made a few comments on how resistant his scalp was, and gave him a whole series of pieces of advice that she knew he wouldn’t follow. The whole operation, efficiently conducted, took less than three minutes.
“Who did this to you?” she said as she put her instruments away.
Osborne made an evasive face. The only thing he knew for certain was that the guys who had beaten him up had come to kill him.
“Did you see their faces?” Amelia insisted. “Recognize their voices?”
He placed his bloodstained hand on hers, to silence her. Embarrassed at the thought that she might be letting her feelings show, Amelia preferred to check the stitches.
“I’m not your mother,” she said, “but you ought to stop hanging about the streets at night. You’re going to end up dead if you carry on like this.”
Osborne smiled vaguely, drunk with morphine. He had a last vision before sinking into sleep: a diaphanous hand stroking his, and the moon through the living-room window, swaying between the branches . . .
* * *
Paul was waiting on the landing stage. He had fixed their rendezvous for eleven, it was now a minute past eleven and there wasn’t a sign of Hana. Had she received his stone? On the gangway, the man in the cap was getting impatient—it was time to go.
“So what are you going to do?” he said. “We’re about to leave.”
Paul stubbed out his cigarette on the landing stage. “You can wait two minutes.”
Unlike the crowded quaysides of Queen’s Wharf, the commercial port was virtually deserted. A few ships were stagnating in the green water, lazily keeping guard over petroleum tanks, pipelines, and other reserves of the city’s energy. A handful of tourists had come up on deck, and were ordering soft drinks. The gangway was about to be raised when she finally arrived.
Her gait was light and supple, her back arched, her chest ample beneath her purple blouse.
“You took your time,” he said.
“Nine years.”
