Mazarine Read online

  I unlocked the front door and paused, expecting the dog to greet me in his usual fashion. He wasn’t there.

  Silence. The dog appeared at the end of the hall, put his head down, came towards me. He wagged his tail, then lunged forward, picking up a tennis ball that I’d left at the door and trotting away down the hall. Something went off in my head.

  ‘Maya?’

  I ran after him, tripping over him at Maya’s door, falling into the room.

  Nick had his back to me and his hands on the french door, about to step out into the garden. He went completely still.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said.

  He didn’t move.

  ‘Hey.’

  He turned and faced me.

  ‘Hi Frankie,’ he said.

  ‘How did you get in here? D’you have a key?’

  He sat down on Maya’s bed.

  I snapped, ‘Get off there. This is my house.’

  He stood up, slowly.

  ‘Why are you in Maya’s room?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Why were you in the park this morning?’

  His face looked different. He was Nick, but he wasn’t.

  I waited, then said, ‘You were watching for my car, but I came up through the gully. You would have slipped out, I wouldn’t have known.’

  His silence was a force. He was so still. Why Maya’s room?

  There was a bit of chain sticking out of his pocket: it was Bernie’s leash. I pointed. ‘What are you doing with that?’

  Silence.

  ‘Give it to me.’

  He drew the leash out of his pocket and dropped it on the bed.

  ‘Were you going to take him?’

  But, unbelievably, he moved towards the door, reaching for the handle.

  ‘You’re not going to leave? No explanation?’

  He said nothing, just opened the door.

  I grabbed one of Maya’s old paperbacks off the shelf and hurled it at him. It hit him in the side of the head, knocking him off balance. He staggered, put his hand to his temple, stared.

  Then he was coming at me, fingers on my neck, pushing me down to the floor and forcing my face into the carpet. I couldn’t move; my arms were awkwardly trapped under me, my wrist bent backwards. I could hear the dog barking and growling, then Nick grunted and swore, and his hands jerked and I heard a thud and a yelp, and then the pressure let go. When I got to my feet he was gone, the french door was open, and the dog was sitting on his haunches, panting.

  I ran around locking everything, but what was the point of that? The house had been deadlocked, and still Nick had got in. I lay on the sofa, looking out at the stormy sky, the dog on the floor beside me. There had never been any physical violence between us, not a single push or shove. I was numb, uncomprehending. I didn’t know what to do.

  When Nick and I broke up, Maya said, ‘You can find someone better.’

  I’d dismissed that, since she’d never got on with him, and we came close to having a row about it when we were unloading boxes in the new rented house, and she said something about Nick and denial: my denial.

  ‘You made him up. You invented what he was like. You never saw the real Nick, just the story. And then in the end, you did.’

  I was hot and bothered with unpacking and I told her to shut up, stop standing around criticising and help me. It unnerved me to hear her talk like that, and I didn’t think it was the kind of discussion you should have with a daughter. I’d always wanted her to know I was in command, that she could feel secure, and I thought I’d succeeded — she was a steady, confident girl.

  Now, lying on the sofa, I felt something bad come near, just outside the numbness: knowledge I’d been blocking out.

  I’d never admitted to her that I’d split up with Nick because he’d started making me uneasy when he’d revealed, just a couple of times, that he wasn’t the man I’d thought he was. Now I took hold of Maya’s thesis, examined it. I’d ‘invented’ Nick Oppenheimer, created a character for him, that of the safe, knowable, wholesome guy, cheerfully masculine, tough but with a heart of gold. This invention was made possible by the fact that he was enigmatic. He was a blank space into which I poured my hopes. And, because his true nature was hidden, the disparity between the real and the invented was only gradually and subtly revealed, a process not helped along by what Maya called my ‘denial’.

  I’d made him into rather a cliché, I suppose, because ambiguity and complexity would have been less reassuring.

  So, to give Maya’s theory full expression: Nick Oppenheimer was the creative product of my yearning and my loneliness. And then I found out he had a real self.

  It was getting dark. If only there was a close friend I could call now. Contact with other people often made me wince, and I shied away, but then I got so lonely. My wrist was painful and I didn’t want to move; only my mind was busy, spinning in its terrible uncertainty. If I’d invented Nick Oppenheimer, did that mean I made up other people too? What if, in reality, Inez Bravo Sinclair was so warm and chatty you could barely shut her up, a paragon who, despite being saddled with a deranged daughter, still managed to gladden hearts wherever she …

  Well. In one sense, that was the case.

  It came back to me: Nick had picked up Bernie’s leash. If I hadn’t stopped him, would he have taken my dog?

  According to my girl, I’d created Nick Oppenheimer. And now I had no way of keeping him out of my house.

  FIVE

  For half an hour, the downpour slowed and there was a last showing of watery evening light, then the squalls intensified and huge rain roared on the corrugated-iron roof. Still I lay on the sofa, not moving.

  I could call the police. He had got in (god knew how) and assaulted me, so presumably I could apply for a court order to keep him away. But would that work?

  He would deny having been in the house. He would say he had no reason to be there; he lived happily out west with his new partner. He’d never been in the cul-de-sac, had no key; it wasn’t even possible he could have entered.

  The most terrible thing had been his face, how altered it had been. No, the worst thing was his hands on me, the strength in them, pinning me down. How could I stay in the house?

  I dragged myself upright and rang Natasha. She was in her car, I could hear the stereo playing Pearl Jam.

  ‘I had a fight with Nick.’

  ‘Nick? I thought that was all over.’

  ‘Can you feed my cat? Something’s come up. It’s complicated.’

  ‘Well. Hm. You could ask Inez.’

  ‘She doesn’t speak to me.’

  Silence.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘She does speak to you.’

  ‘Maybe when other people are around. She’ll say pass the salt.’

  A long pause.

  ‘I don’t want to hear this, Frances.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘You don’t understand Inez, somehow.’

  ‘Right. Somehow, I don’t.’

  Her voice rose. ‘They’re my parents. I don’t want to hear this stuff. I won’t have it. What is wrong with you?’

  ‘Quite a lot, I believe.’

  ‘You’re paranoid.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m paranoid. I’m the black sheep. And Frank’s lovely, but he can’t stop counting his ceiling tiles. That leaves you. The only one they can still control.’

  What was wrong with me? She would hang up. I said quickly, ‘Sorry. I’ve had a terrible day.’

  There was a longer pause. Then she said, ‘Frank isn’t obsessive at all. He’s brilliant and his students love him. You know, he’s quite a changed person. He’s had his problems, but he’s very loving, somehow.’

  God, how perfectly she could reproduce Inez’s tone. Families. The grief they engender, even when you should be so far beyond caring. I felt it, registered the sting: Frank, once the family problem, what with his habit of falling spectacularly off the wagon, was being rehabilitated, manoeuvred into a more favourable
light. Now I was the only one with something bad in my self.

  I rubbed the stinging tears from my eyes and said, ‘Don’t worry about the cat.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘All is well,’ I said.

  A thump at the window had me jumping off the sofa in fright. It was a blackbird, blown against the glass by a squall and now lying stunned on the deck. Beyond, the ferns were lashing in the gale, their undersides flipped up, silvery in the underwater light.

  The bird moved its sodden wings, raised its body using a wing as a lever, and shuffled to the edge of the deck. It launched off, swooping low onto the grass.

  I checked: all was quiet in the cul-de-sac, the lights coming on in the houses. I walked across the lawn and ducked through the gap in the hedge.

  My neighbour Mark was in his kitchen, his face at the steamed-up window. He answered the door holding a knife.

  ‘G’day. Cooking.’

  He stood listening with the knife held delicately, flat against his upper arm. He was wearing board shorts, nothing else. His glasses were fogged up, and he pushed them to the top of his head and squinted at me.

  I started up about the cat. ‘It’s straightforward, biscuits and water. I’ll leave you the spare key. Just for a short time.’

  ‘How long’s a short time?’

  I hesitated, but he held up the knife. ‘No worries. Just text us when you’re back.’

  ‘The other thing is,’ I said.

  It seemed important to explain in full, about the dentist, the drugs, feeling sick. I was gabbling, all over the place. Mark checked his watch.

  ‘So, I left the car in the supermarket carpark. Normally I’d walk down through the gully, but it’s pretty much flooded. So, I was wondering …’

  The word Natasha had used. Paranoid. I was too paranoid to walk down to the carpark, even if I took the long way around the road. I certainly couldn’t face the shortcut through the gully, in the dark and rain, with Nick out there.

  Mark said, ‘Mate, I’m cooking.’

  ‘Oh. Well.’

  ‘Tell you what. Give me your keys and I’ll pick your car up in the morning. You can take mine.’

  ‘Really? Which one?’

  He and his wife owned a café, and were always blocking the cul-de-sac with their beaten-up service vehicles.

  ‘Take the station wagon. We’ve got the van. I’ll drive your car till you get back. Same to me.’

  ‘Are you sure? You don’t need it?’

  ‘Nah.’

  I thanked him; he listened, holding the knife and eyeing me sideways in his shy, myopic way.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ I told him.

  The hall was long and dark, crossed by a narrow shaft of light from the half-open kitchen door. I picked up my car keys, bag, jacket, a sack of dog biscuits, a ball. I locked up and let myself out the back door, pushing the dog ahead of me.

  The lawn glowed, intense green in the stormy light. The sky above the house was dark grey, almost black. The blackbird was gone.

  At the edge of Mark’s garden, I stopped — how could I be so stupid — and went back for my laptop.

  Would Nick have taken it if I hadn’t caught him? But perhaps he’d already nosed around inside it remotely, using some kind of malware, however he did it at work.

  For a moment, I listened. The wet lawn in the blinding rain, the white dog against the lashing ferns. A dizzy sensation overcame me. I was floating outside my body, and none of it was real.

  I delivered the keys to Mark and drove out of the narrow street, testing the loose steering wheel. Beside me on the passenger seat, the dog opened his mouth in a wide, oikish yawn, with a little moan as he snapped his mouth shut.

  As I drove, the lonely feeling was mixed with another sense: wrongness at leaving the house where Maya knew she could find me.

  But think, there was no need for a candle in the window: she was twenty years old, place wasn’t important to her, connection was. She would find it quaint to use a landline, and as long as I had my laptop and phone, we could find each other.

  I concentrated on the immediate problem of driving, getting the hang of the gears, adjusting to the sway of the old car’s moving parts. I could wiggle the steering wheel an inch each way before it actually engaged. One of the side mirrors was cracked, and the clutch let out long tortured squeaks when I moved off in first gear. There was a kind of Zen in attending to all this that calmed me. I have always enjoyed driving.

  On the motorway heading south, the lights were shrouded in halos of rain; squalls blew leaves and rubbish across the lanes. The only idea I had was to get out of town, to go south and find a motel where I could decide what to do next.

  It was a reflex, what I used to do when I was young, after a fight with a boyfriend or an altercation with Inez and the Judge: I would get in my car, the old Cortina, drive to a dingy motel on the Hamilton strip and sulk for a few days, well, it wasn’t sulking really, it was lying low. I would calm down, the time alone would soothe me, until I could face people again.

  Why didn’t I have a best friend? Any friend since Patrick? Someone I could ring, descend upon, rope into one of those all-night couch sessions out of books and TV: friend A, broken-hearted, weeps, rages, eats ice cream and gets drunk, while friend B soothes, advises, gets drunk in solidarity.

  The last close female friend I’d had was in high school. After that, none. No woman got near; I did not allow it. I’d had some male friends over the years, but apart from the company of the men in my life, ‘partners’ (Patrick, Nick), I did everything solo, never shared a private sorrow with a woman, never confided, nor traded secrets, nor went shopping with, nor took long lunches, nor sought feminine advice. Looking back, it seemed like quite a feat. Decades of solitude.

  Was I a misogynist? Of course not. I loved Maya. Natasha and I got on well, I adored her actually, but in personality we were like members of a different species — well, that’s not quite true, we shared a lot, jokes, memories, similar perceptions. It was socially that we were not alike; in fact we were at opposite ends of the scale. If I was ‘different’, my sister was a social genius, effortlessly making and maintaining friendships. She’d been like that from an early age. Why was I the different one, and little Natasha always surrounded by her gang, her clique?

  The giant pylons rose up ahead of me, retreated in the rear-view mirror, their shapes blurred and distorted in the rainy dark. The windscreen wipers worked hard against the streaming rain, and the car was buffeted by gusts of wind.

  Why? It must be in the genes. Nature: I was born this way, Natasha was born that way, Frank was born with his problems; this is the human lottery of inheritance.

  Sudden ancient memory: I was five or six years old, and had been taken to a house where families had gathered, a social occasion involving many children who were cavorting on a spacious lawn, engaged in some kind of rough game requiring shrieking and chasing; these were kids of all ages, not necessarily well acquainted with one another, who’d been shooed outside by their parents and had fallen naturally into play. I yearned to join in. I almost got up the nerve, but failed, and in the end simply sat watching, shut out by my own inhibition. I couldn’t make myself. I remember the sadness of it. I know little Natasha would have toddled gamely out into the midst of the lawn and immediately blended in. What had stopped me? Was it something bad in my self?

  My wrist was still painful, and the steering wheel, with its alarming slackness, required me to use both hands. I pulled into a service station and bought paracetamol, and a bottle of ginger ale to wash it down. As soon as I’d driven out onto the highway again, I realised I was ravenous, but it was too late to turn around, and I made do with the ginger ale and the pills.

  An idea occurred to me. I began trying to reconstruct a memory: Maya in the passenger seat of my car, my glamorous girl in her tiny shorts and withered T-shirt and blue-tinted Michael Kors sunglasses. I was dropping her off at a friend’s house, and as we drove she was describing a
domestic dispute. Two women are arguing, one loses her temper and hurls a shoe at the other’s head.

  Maya had told me about the day she and Joe Libard had visited his mother. South of Auckland, they had driven on State Highway 1 until they got to an old wooden church with a spire, which Maya said she’d recognised from before, when she’d been to a music festival on the banks of the Waikato River. They’d turned off at the church and passed a big pond that used to be part of an old cement works.

  After that, I couldn’t remember what she’d told me, except I had the impression the house she’d described was not far from the pond. She mentioned it was a rural property, that there were fruit trees and a swimming pool. And possibly a beehive? Not sure. There was a prison in the vicinity, where Joe Libard’s mother worked, though in what capacity I wasn’t sure, as a prison guard presumably. I pictured a grimly leathery old lesbian, with her truncheon, her jangling ring of keys.

  Joe had spent a lot of time at my house, but I had never met his mother, nor his other mother, the one who’d thrown the shoe. Maya had been amused by that incident: as she told it, she and Joe had both ducked or jumped out of the way and the shoe had hit Joe’s mother, Mazarine, on the shoulder. Who had, Maya said, rolled her eyes, calmly picked it up and gone on talking. And yes, there were definitely bees, I remembered now; Maya had described the other woman, whose name I couldn’t recall, wearing a hood and pumping smoke from tiny bellows as she tended the hive.

  Was it wrong that I’d never met these women, especially Mazarine, the one who was the actual, as in the biological, mother of the boyfriend who’d lured my Maya away? Well, they lived out of Auckland, and the opportunity hadn’t come up, and Maya’s decision to follow Joe Libard to London had been rather abrupt, and he’d left two months before her, so his mother hadn’t been at the airport when I saw Maya off. And I hadn’t taken Joe seriously. He was elusive, a vague presence, and secretly I’d been hoping, expecting, someone better to come along, a young man who was more, what? Dynamic, perhaps. More focused and career-minded, less disdainful of formal education. I had all the usual middle-class preoccupations, hopes that my girl would end up ‘comfortably off’.