Paul took his hand from his pocket and gave her back her stone. “You wanted to see me?” he said.
Hana smiled as she pocketed the missile. “Yes.”
“Is it because of Dooley and his gang?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t care about them.”
But Paul could sense that something was up. “What do you want, then?”
“To tell you I’m changing my life,” Hana, replied, her jade eyes flashing like comets.
“Really?”
“Yes, really,” she said proudly.
“Why, don’t you like your life?”
“No.”
Paul put his hands in his pockets. He too was starting to get soaked. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I’m going to a kohanga reo.”
A Maori school that practiced total immersion. Paul felt himself shrinking into his skin, and put it down to the cold. But a sense of dread was rising within him.
“It’s in the country,” she went on. “I’ll be a boarder.”
Hana was going away. Leaving him on his own. Abandoning him.
“Well, good luck,” he said, in a neutral tone, although he was seething inside.
“Thank you,” she said, with an exaggerated bow of her head. “It’s really nice of you to say that.”
Paul clenched his teeth, powerless. What else could he say? It was her parents who would bleed themselves white to offer her a way out, not him. All he could do was flatten that son of a bitch Dooley, him and all those like him. So what was she waiting for? A goodbye kiss? Permission to leave? A slap across the face? This business of the kohanga reo was nothing to do with him. He wasn’t the one who was going to change his life. She was abandoning him. Anyway, he wasn’t of Maori stock, he was a mongrel, so what could he do?
They were looking at each other like creatures of two different species.
“Well,” he said, “goodbye, then.” Concealing the bitterness that had him by the throat, he held out his hand, but she didn’t take it.
“I’ll be back some weekends,” she said, looked into his eyes like someone looking into a deep well, then vanished abruptly in a cloud of rain.
Leaving the expressway, Osborne drove to the little cemetery at Opua, a village by the sea.
There, he laid a few flowers on a brand new white marble gravestone, and stayed on in the morning breeze, brooding. The ocean air rose, languid and salty. Life was there, grand, magnificent, and he couldn’t see it. Jack Fitzgerald’s death had brought him back home, but it was the memory of Hana that hovered in the spectrum of time.
Sitting on the gravestone, he finished his joint and watched the birds hopping along the path. Red and black tiekes, a species like him, not very good at flying.
Abandoning the flowers to the Pacific winds, Osborne tiptoed out of the cemetery where the remains of Jack Fitzgerald rested. You might not be able to waken the dead, but some were light sleepers.
Stink of diesel
grips your head
Smoke rising
here and there!
The music propelled him at top speed around the series of bends that snaked down the side of the hill. He plunged back into civilization. It was noisy and joyless.
He had been in touch with his old contacts, especially in the Maori community, but the questions he had asked had mostly remained unanswered. Nobody knew the origins of Malcolm Kirk, the serial killer Fitzgerald had taken out, but one thing that all his informants agreed on was that Kirk must have had some powerful protectors to have caused such carnage. There were also strange rumors going around about Zinzan Bee, the former activist and shaman of the Ngati Kahungunu tribe. He had been seen around South Auckland, and Fitzgerald had tried to contact him just before everything went belly up, but what had happened, what had become of Bee, nobody knew. Ditto for his supposed links with Malcolm Kirk.
Osborne wondered if Chief Medical Examiner McCleary had sent Fitzgerald his first postmortem reports, if that was why the computer in Fitzgerald’s house had been wiped clean, if the two men had discovered something, if there had been anything to discover. Truly, he didn’t know a thing.
* * *
Tom Culhane was eating fish-and-chips wrapped in newspaper. It wasn’t so much the fish and chips themselves that he liked—actually, there were a whole lot of things he liked more—as the ritual of eating them. There was something comforting about them, like the smell from your mother’s body. And he’d always liked to take his time. His father said it was congenital. Tom was so uncompetitive, he had never gotten any farther than substitute on the rugby team, before making a hash of his law studies, which he had started on his father’s orders—“When you don’t know what else to do, study law!” The prodigal son hadn’t only failed in his university course, but also in his first love affair—six months feeling devastated, six more to recover—a love affair he would forget ten years later when he married Rosemary. In the meantime, given his lack of enthusiasm for codes and figures, his father had urged him to join the police. Once again, Tom had obeyed, more out of family feeling than any sense of vocation, and had served fifteen years in Christchurch.
But in Auckland everything would be different. He’d promised Rosemary. They had Dr. Boorman, apparently the best specialist in the country, who would eventually find out what was wrong. Boorman was expensive, of course, but they’d manage somehow. Not that they had much choice. It was either that or the end of their marriage.
