The Night Book (15 page)

A man was speaking. He had red hair and a boiled face, his words sounded like gibberish and she couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying. He was expensively dressed, and he kept playing with a heavy watch on his wrist. Roza stared at the watch and became aware of a smell in the room; it conjured up a whole world for her in the strange way that smells trigger powerful memories. It was the smell of breath. Roza put her hand to her mouth. Long ago, she had been so sick that the smell of food on a person’s breath had been enough to make her throw up. She had only ever felt like that once before. The odour intensified, and she felt she was going to vomit. She leaned forward and tried to focus on the orange carpet, but the woman next to her smelled garlicky and the room reeked of coffee, and Roza began to gag. The man with the boiled face paused
as Roza jumped up and ran out of the room.

In the toilets she washed her face. She looked at herself in the mirror, at her white face and huge, spooked eyes, knowing what she’d wanted to do in there before nausea had sent her running: she’d wanted to tell her story, to confess. But she didn’t dare. Meetings were supposed to be confidential, but you couldn’t be sure, not when you were married to David Hallwright. She needed to ring her sponsor, but instead she walked out of the building into the park and sat down on a bench. She bowed her head, and there in her mind was the girl holding out her hand as the warm rain exploded on her palm, the girl frowning and saying, ‘Ugh. Hate the rain.’ The girl with Roza’s eyes, Roza’s hands.

She had just turned sixteen when her and Myron’s baby was born, the little girl that someone else had named. She said the name to herself. Elke. A woman had adopted her and named her, and then, Roza had discovered later, the woman had died. Later, as she’d also found out, the Lamptons had fostered her, then adopted her, and there she was, standing against the rain, holding her hand out as the rain splashed off her palm.

Roza had dreamed many times that the girl had asked: ‘Why did you give me away?’ She would try to explain, but her mouth would not work and her legs froze as she tried to follow, and the image of the child would fade away. Roza had not wanted to have the baby, but her mother had prevailed. By the time they’d finished arguing about hell and damnation, and all the other threats her mother could unload, it was too late for an abortion. With cold determination, Roza’s mother had rented a house in Hamilton, and moved herself and Roza down there before the pregnancy began to show. The baby was born at Waikato Hospital. Myron Jannides had gone to live in Perth with his mother. His mother had spoken of a new life for her and Myron — she meant a life away from Roza.

Roza gave the child up for adoption. She was weakened and distressed by the pregnancy and birth, and by her mother’s badgering. And she didn’t want her mother to take over the baby. She knew this now: it was partly to save the child from her grandmother that she’d given her away. Roza had realised, much later, that there had been something wrong with her mother, that you could even have called her mentally ill. She was hysterical, obsessive, aggressive, cold — and excessively prudish. But all that was meaningless now.

The thirst came on so strongly that Roza drew air in between her teeth. She craved the numbness that booze gave her, the break from herself. She’d started drinking after giving the baby away. If you do something so wrong, so unnatural, it’s hard to face the day to day. She knew now how wrong and unnatural adoption was. She shouldn’t have been persuaded to have the child, but once she’d had it, she should have kept it. That was her mistake. The baby had been undersized and premature when she was born, as if she’d known she was unwanted, and had not properly thrived, and Roza, a tall and fit teenager, had borne no scars from the birth, not even a single stretchmark to give away the fact that she’d been pregnant. It was a quick, uncomplicated delivery, and the baby, a tiny, uncanny-looking creature, had been rushed away from her to an incubator to be fed on formula through a tube, minimally handled, artificially warmed, wired up to monitors.

She’d meant to tell David, but she hadn’t had the courage at first, and then, as time had gone on, it had seemed that if she told him now, he would find it strange and shocking that she had kept something so fundamental from him. She’d had the sense that secrets grow when they are untold; that they become still more secret, more unsayable. And her fearful instinct had been that the stress of telling might send her back to drinking. Roza bowed her shoulders as the rain fell. She had looked into the girl’s eyes for the first time, and she
was crushed with grief.

David wouldn’t care that she’d had a baby at sixteen and would be upset that she’d never told him about it, but the real sticking point would be admitting to him that she’d given the child away. He would say, ‘Why did you need to do that? In this day and age. There’s no shame in having a baby when you’re young and unmarried, we’re past all that nonsense.’ He would be shocked; he loved his own children so much, and she wouldn’t be able to make him understand how it had been, and the relief that Roza had felt (yes, admit it, relief) when they’d said, ‘It will be all right. We’ve found someone suitable to adopt’, and she had passed the incubator for the last time; the child lying in there behind glass, separate, already remote, her tiny face turned away.

Roza went on crying until she felt very light and distant from her surroundings. She made a decision, and with it came relief. She would go and see her old friend Tamara. She walked to her car. Visiting Tamara. She would be lulled, rescued, doomed.

She shouldn’t have gone looking for Elke. Having signed her rights away she wasn’t supposed to look until the girl was twenty. But her new-found sobriety had given her confidence and once she’d started she couldn’t stop looking. It was before she’d met David — she mightn’t have done it after she’d met him. She had wavered, been indecisive; she’d given up the idea for a while, but then had gone to a private investigator who operated an office out of his house in St Heliers. She didn’t hear from him for a long time, but then he’d rung her up and asked her to come and see him. When he gave her the information about Elke she’d asked, ‘But how did you find out?’ and he’d answered, ‘I have my contacts.’

So she’d found out where Elke was, and the names of the people she was with, and for a long time it was enough. She hadn’t wanted
to know any more. And then David had gone into politics, and now, at last, she’d come face to face with Simon and Karen Lampton, the people who owned her child.

Even then, she’d thought she could deal with it. She and David would have a baby together. Life would go on …

She parked outside Tamara’s big villa. There was no one home, so she sat down to wait on a wooden bench on the veranda. The vision of Elke returned and the tears came again. The rain cleared and the sun cast a watery glow over the garden, making delicate rainbows across a swing and slide on the lawn.

The gate opened and Tamara marched up the driveway, wearing tight Lycra pants and a running shirt and carrying weights in her hands, her head down, pumping her thin arms against the weights. She had headphones on, and an iPod clipped to her top. She didn’t look up until she reached the steps, and when she saw Roza she let out a predictable, Tamara-style scream.

Roza sat beside the swimming pool while Tamara made a big thing of her stretches and exercises performed up against the verandah rail. ‘If I don’t warm down I go
stiff
, darling,’ she said, finishing with one leg hiked up against the wall of the pool house, dabbing her forehead with a towel and grunting lightly. Her hair was dyed blonde, her nails were long and manicured and her fingers were heavy with expensive rings. She was tall and slender, with a sharp nose, blue eyes and smooth, creamy brown skin.

She and Roza had been at school together. Tamara had come out from England when she was five, the only child of a boozy, chain-smoking solo mother who had passed on her recipe for success: it was all about snaring a wealthy man. Mrs Porter had taken up real estate and laid her persona on thick: she was the working-class slapper with a heart of gold, a goer, a laugh, her dyed blonde hair
done up in a beehive. After hours she usually had a long-ashed fag in one hand and a glass of bubbly in the other; her house was a stew of smoke and hilarity, booze and vulgarity, and Roza had gone there to escape the strained, frigid atmosphere at home. She’d sometimes been bored by Tamara, and in exasperated moments had found her limited, but she’d had more fun with her than with any other friend. They used to laugh until they made themselves dizzy.

Tamara reached for a heavy lighter and lit a cigarette. She had scored: her husband was rich. Tam lunched, shopped, travelled in grand style, dressed her children in designer clothes, drove a black Mercedes the size of a tank, all with a kind of mordant triumph, and when her husband wasn’t around, which was often, she smoked and drank and took drugs, and laughed about it all.

Roza said, ‘Can I have one?’

Tamara slid over the cigarette packet. She said, ‘So what’s wrong? Is he having an affair? Or are you?’

‘He might be having one, with his assistant.’ Roza described Dianne, her tight black suits, her bouncy pony-tail. Tamara listened with gruesome enjoyment. Roza was playing a part. She couldn’t tell Tamara anything real, so she slipped back into the kind of talk Tamara liked: all men were bastards to be exploited, women had to live on their wits; the spoils were ease and comfort and money. It was rubbish and she disliked it; it was a kind of slumming, and she knew why her friendship with Tamara hadn’t survived their growing up. Things that were a laugh when you were young and unserious became squalid when you were old. Roza wouldn’t have dreamed of going after a man
for his money
. Tamara hadn’t changed. But she was kind and affectionate. When she’d discovered Roza on her verandah she’d hugged her and dragged her inside, asking her what was the matter. ‘Oh, I’m all fucked up,’ Roza had said, smiling and wiping her eyes, grateful for the warmth.

Roza felt a small rush from the cigarette. She was dizzy for a moment. Tamara looked at her, her head on one side. Her eye looked bright and flat, like a bird’s.

Tamara might have had her suspicions about Roza’s problems, but she was unscrupulous, and she loved company. She was never happier than when people were sinning around her. Roza knew she hadn’t really come to Tam for friendship. She had come to get high. She knew her old friend so well; she was counting on her to offer something. It was wrong and she ought to leave now. Tamara probably guessed why Roza had come; she would offer something in the hope that it would revive their old bond, or maybe even to punish Roza for abandoning her. Tamara had sometimes hinted that Roza looked down on her. She might not altogether mind the spectacle of snobby, silver-spoon Roza Danielewicz cut down to size. Their friendship was so ancient they were like siblings, bound together by love, resentment, old hurts.

Roza smoked, snagged by sudden urgent need. Her mouth was dry. Tamara was watching her, possibly enjoying the moment, holding out on her. Roza felt a prickle of antagonism, then shame. Pretending to revive a friendship when you wanted something; it was contemptible. Tears came to her eyes.

‘I’ve missed you,’ she said, and meant it, but a moment later she knew it wasn’t true. She hadn’t missed Tamara; she’d turned her back on her with relief. What she meant to say was, ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come.’

Tamara sighed and inspected the end of her cigarette. ‘Who’d have thought. You’re practically the wife of the prime minister.’

Roza grinned. ‘I know. Isn’t it weird.’

‘What’s it like?’

Roza blew out smoke. ‘It’s mad,’ she said. She described the fundraising events and the rallies, the zealots and the sycophants,
the bursts of hostility from passers-by, the trembling fans who seized David’s hand in the street and wouldn’t let go. Fleetingly she thought of Simon Lampton, his intensity, his air of unwillingness, but she stuck to funny anecdotes, sensed the success of her monologue and felt herself falling into the old pattern: she was back with Tam, laughing at the world. At the same time she knew that she was singing for her supper. She paused.

Tam laughed.

Sweat broke out on Roza’s forehead. There was something dangerous in that laugh. She had forgotten how sharp Tam was. Maybe she had underestimated how insulted Tam would be to have her turn up like this, after years of silence, playing at being friends. Every time she felt Tam holding back her desire was twisted tighter. She felt trapped, and she thought Tam sensed it. This was what addiction was: keeping what you wanted hidden, being tormented by it, lying and play-acting in the most shameful way. And if people sensed your need they held out on you. Roza was starting to panic. She hadn’t done anything except smoke a cigarette but she was deep in, and frightened. She needed to get up and walk out, just leave, no explanation. She put her hands on the arms of the chair.

Tam said, ‘I’ve missed you too.’

Roza went still. Tam gazed away, over the sunlit pool, and said, ‘You look stressed.’

Roza murmured, ‘It’s been nerve-wracking. I really am sure the bastard’s bonking his secretary.’ A voice howled in her head. Shame. Shame. ‘And his kids are slightly fucked up. The girl’s all right but the boy can’t stand me. I’m the wicked stepmother.’ This is hateful, she thought. This is not me, this is the sick Roza. Again she put her hands on the arm of the chair.

Tam said, ‘You want a coffee.’

Roza stared.

‘I’ve got a little something we could put in it.’

Roza gave a snicker. Her mouth twitched. ‘Mmm,’ she said weakly. They looked at each other with sudden warmth and complicity. Like a sexual moment, Roza thought, as Tamara went into the house. The word ‘Peach’ was written across the bum of Tam’s sweatpants.

Roza stretched out, letting the sun fall on her legs. She was washed out, floating, closing her eyes and seeing little red sunsets ablaze against her lids. She thought, sometimes you can’t hold out any more. Then there’s just the letting go.