Singularity Read online

  SINGULARITY

  Charlotte Grimshaw

  To my parents, and to Oliver and Margaret

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  THE YARD BROOM

  THE OLIVE GROVE

  OPPORTUNITY

  PARARAHA

  THE OTHER

  THE NIGHT BOOK

  THE BODY

  NYMPH

  SINGULARITY

  TRIAL

  DRAGONFLY

  OPPORTUNITY

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  THE YARD BROOM

  It had started to get hot as soon as the sun rose. Angela got up early and went out onto the deck. A few stars hung on the horizon, but the sky was turning to pale blue and the air was thick with a haze of dust and seeds. The plants and trees were motionless. There had been no wind for a week, just the heat and the cloudless sky, the land burned brown by the drought. The skin of the bay was smooth and glassy. In the distance the dunes of the White Beach seemed to hang in the air above the dried-out swamp and the hill, recently burnt by a scrub fire, stood out black against the banks of pure white sand. A truck rumbled by along the road, raising dust. A dog wandered along under the gum trees. Angela went to the bathroom and looked at her face in the mirror. There was the sunburned skin, the straw hair, blue eyes, and the black shadow that had risen in the night under her right eye, dark and ugly as the burnt hill in the distance. She touched it, and felt it throb. A phrase came into her mind. ‘The last straw …’

  Nathan was lying on his side, asleep, his muscular arm with its tattooed circle of barbed wire resting along his body. He had a small, neat boyish face, even-featured, with a tidy, curving mouth. His head was shaved; he wore a bone carving round his neck. His hand, the fingers loosely curled, was black with tattoos, and there was a small star tattooed on his cheek below his eye. His fingernails were broken and black from work, as were hers. They couldn’t get the grease and grime out of them, and after a while they gave up trying.

  Last night they’d gone to a party deep in the pine forest. Angela hadn’t wanted to go; the people who lived in the forest were like bandits, they lived in tumbledown shacks surrounded by dead cars; they made their money by growing dope and trading drugs. They were Nathan’s cousins but Angela was afraid of them. She’d tried to make excuses but he’d persuaded her to go, and she’d driven there with him in the ute and sat out on the deck with toothless Hineana, who rolled joints on her knee while slapping away the howling kids who tottered around her, crying for attention. ‘Get off, I’ll give you a hiding,’ she threatened, whacking their heads, grinning, smacking her lips. She looked demented, though there was an intelligent, malignant gleam in her eye. Angela offered to put two of the smaller children to bed. Hineana shrugged and went on rolling her joints. When Angela took the two stinking toddlers inside she couldn’t find where they were supposed to sleep. She put them in a double bed. Outside, people were already drunk and stoned. She lifted up the blind. The house lights shone across the clearing, making shadows of the hulks of dead cars, and beyond that the trees rose like a black wall. The trees crowded around the house, suffocating it, shutting out the light. Anything could happen out there.

  Nathan had been shifty all evening — he was up to something with Hineana’s husband Huru Wright. There was a man called Brad Richards who’d come up from Whangarei, and he and Huru and Nathan were cooking up something, Angela could tell. She couldn’t stand Huru. When he looked at you, it was like being watched by an animal. His expression was intent and cold, also blunted and damaged, as if all feeling had been beaten out of him. He was long-haired and short and squat, and his shoulders sloped like an ape’s. When he smiled, it gave you a shock. He looked as though he were thinking over some horrible, pleasurable, secret idea.

  She glanced down at the two kids. They were silent, staring, not moving. She thought, they’ll be just like their parents. Little killers. As she got up, one of them started to cry and reached out a hand. He had no choice being here, but why was Angela here? She heard Nathan calling her. She pulled the boy’s small hand off her arm and went out. She sat on the deck and drank beer.

  There was a fight — two men squaring off, their shadows playing on the ground, until one struggled free from the other and ran straight into the blackness of the trees. His opponent stumbled back to the deck and went on drinking. The other man stayed out there, watching perhaps, just outside the circle of light. That was what bothered Angela about the place, people huddling in the light and the blackness all around, so that everything was compressed into a hellish little space, and always the feeling that something cold and immovable was watching. She put her hand on Nathan’s and said, ‘Let’s go, before …’

  It was hours before they went, and when they did he was so drunk and stoned he could barely keep on the road. Dust and pine needles and insects whirled in the headlights. He hit a bank and stalled and she sat while he cursed and struggled to start the engine. She saw shapes just outside the lights. He began to accuse her of crazy things, keeping secrets from him, spying.

  ‘Huru says you sit there just looking at people,’ he said. ‘Staring at them, like you’re taking notes.’

  Something he’d talked about with Huru and Brad Richards had made him paranoid. ‘It’s freaky out here,’ he said, setting off too fast, so that they crashed and bumped on the rough surface, risking another stall or a crash into the clay bank.

  They drove out of the forest. Now they could see the sky and the blazing stars, and the dry, barren scrubland in the moonlight. The moon was shining on the sea down at the bay, and there was a boat going out, sending a beam of light across the water. The camping ground was full of caravans and tents and there were torches on the beach — people fishing or going for a late night swim.

  ‘You don’t like Huru, do you?’ Nathan said unpleasantly.

  ‘You know I don’t. What’s to like? His good looks?’

  He said quietly, ‘He’s my cousin.’

  ‘I don’t have to like him. Anyway, you don’t like him either.’

  ‘So I can’t trust you then.’ His voice took on a self-righteous whine. He drummed his fingers on the wheel. His expression, when he glanced at her, was very bad.

  ‘Come on,’ she pleaded. ‘You’re paranoid. You can trust me.’

  ‘I might have things I need to keep to myself.’ He gulped and cleared his throat, as if his mouth had gone dry. The ute swerved.

  ‘Hey, you idiot. Watch it!’

  ‘You watch it. You watch it,’ he shouted. He slammed on the brakes and slapped her on the side of the head. Stars exploded in her eyes.

  He looked stunned. ‘Sorry,’ he whispered, and reached out his hand. She pushed him away. They sat in silence. There was a fire down on the beach and they could hear people singing.

  It was early morning, but she could tell it was going to be hot. Wavy lines of heat rippled up from the dry, brown land. There were little tornadoes of dust in the distance as cars drove along the main road. She put on her shorts and boots and reflector jacket and walked down to the dump. This was the only place for rubbish disposal in the settlement. There was no collection; people had to bring the rubbish in themselves. There was already a pile of bags at the gates, left by those who couldn’t be bothered waiting for the dump to open. She collected as many as she could, dragging them along to the office, a shipping container, where they sheltered from the rain and the heat, and kept their gear. The dump had been overhauled — people used to throw everything into a single large container, which was then taken away by truck. Now it was called a recycling station, and the rubbish was sorted into types, and people had to pay to dep
osit their loads. Nathan and Angela worked fulltime sorting the rubbish and taking fees. In the summer the baches and camping grounds were full and there was a huge amount to be sorted; in the winter they dealt with the rubbish from the permanent residents.

  Nathan turned up in the ute. Angela started on the bottles. She could tell when a car was approaching by the clouds of dust, and when it drove onto the site she came out of the shade of the office and took the bags and the fee. The locals arrived in their beaten-up cars and were lazy and messy, and tried to avoid paying. The holiday people had good cars and were conscientious about what they handed over. These shiny city people — even their rubbish was tidy. It was always the same: the kids, grumpy and hot from being in the car, would open the door and she’d hear the chorus of reedy little voices, ‘Pooh!’ ‘It stinks.’ ‘Oh phwoar!’ and then the giggling and the squabbling between those who wanted the window open, and those who couldn’t stand the pong. It was bad all right. Not only did the bins give off a terrible reek but the land itself, especially in summer, was soaked with layers of rubbish, so that the stink came up in waves from the ground and hung on the hot air. The few trees were decorated with paper that had blown out of the bins, and the land around was so barren and dry that it increased the sense of dreariness and squalor. The men avoided Angela’s eye, paid their fee and jumped back in the car. The women sat in the passenger seats and stared.

  She used to hate the smell. Now she didn’t notice. The fact that she’d stopped noticing it bothered her for a while; she thought she might smell bad after work and not realise. But she and Nathan led the same life here as everyone else, going to parties and hangis and tangis and to the pub in town, and no one had ever given her any trouble (or told her she stank). But the stares of the holiday women — Angela minded them. They took no notice of Nathan. A Maori rubbishman. Poor Nathan, they assumed he was where he belonged.

  What they saw: she was nineteen, with blonde hair and blue eyes. She wore a filthy sleeveless reflector jacket over shorts and a T-shirt, and heavy boots with short thick socks. She had crude blue tattoos on her forearms, a bracelet tattooed on her wrist. Her hands were dry and filthy, her fingernails broken. No make up. Her skin was streaked with dust. Her eyes were bloodshot and one of them was blackened and swollen nearly shut. Her co-worker, and, since he was the one she was seen with in the settlement, the probable deliverer of the black eye, worked nearby looking hungover and shame-faced, casting miserable looks her way and hoiking into the bins. A fine pair they were.

  The morning dragged on. The cars drove up in a whirl of dust, unloaded their bags and drove away. Nathan worked without talking. Angela could tell he felt bad about what he’d done, but there was something secretive in his expression that worried her.

  A couple arrived in an SUV. She was holding a map. He got out and went round to get out the rubbish.

  Angela took the bags. ‘You off home?’

  ‘Back to Auckland.’

  ‘I used to live in Auckland.’

  ‘Really.’ He was backing away, with a prissy little smile. The woman stared.

  ‘Yeah, bugger off then,’ Angela said under her breath. They drove away.

  ‘Go and get us some lunch,’ she told Nathan. He slunk off. She had always been able to tell him what to do. He might break out and lose his temper, but he loved her and was afraid she would leave. She had that power over him.

  But lately Nathan had been spending a lot of time in the forest with Huru. Angela had asked him about it but he’d only worked himself into a state and told her to mind her own business. Huru had it in for her. He whispered in Nathan’s ear, spooked him. Nathan was nervous and susceptible; he believed in ghosts and spirits and tapu. As far as Angela was concerned Huru was just a low-life and a criminal, but he came on like a black magic priest, like a tohunga. And she had one specific worry: that Huru would get Nathan hooked on all the drugs he was said to deal in.

  Nathan came back with the lunch. He thought for a moment. ‘Huru says …’

  She took the food and said coaxingly, ‘Nathan, you shouldn’t go out there. They’re bad. Stick with your own.’ She meant the other side of his family who lived around the bay. They were respectable; they took diligent care of their marae. They all had jobs.

  He gave her a sour look. He said, ‘You think I want to spend the rest of my life in a dump?’

  Angela’s great-grandfather was Dutch. He was from Indonesia, where he’d been a rich landowner and a specialist in tropical horticulture. Her grandmother was born here and became a schoolteacher. Her mother, Maria, grew up in Auckland and went to university, but before she’d finished her degree she met Angela’s father, who was doing a degree in fine arts. He’d come out from Germany in his early twenties and decided he wanted to stay here and be a painter. Maria got pregnant and dropped out of university. She worked in a bookshop. At some stage she and her friends started experimenting with drugs, and by the time Angela was about seven, Maria was an addict.

  They lived in a flat in Grafton. Angela’s father stayed home and painted and Maria went to the bookshop. She was fired one Christmas for being stoned at work and falling off her chair. She got addicted to speed, and soon she was paranoid all the time. Angela’s father tried to get her to stop. He also threatened to leave, taking Angela with him.

  One weekend Angela’s father drove out to Piha with a friend, intending to take photographs for his work. They went for a swim at low tide. The surf was dangerously rough, and a wave picked him up and dumped him on his head on the sea bottom, injuring the vertebrae in his neck. He wasn’t able to get out of the water and he drowned.

  Maria began to lose control. One day she arrived at school at lunchtime, very agitated. She insisted Angela must go home with her. A little scene developed. Summoning the teacher, she pointed at the sky and confided in a hoarse whisper, ‘See that helicopter? It’s been following me all day.’ That exchange set the teachers thinking, and Angela was taken away from her while she went into an expensive rehabilitation programme that Angela’s grandmother paid for. Angela lived with her grandmother until Maria came out.

  Some time later Maria found herself a boyfriend. He got a job in a law firm in Australia, and she and Angela went too, supposedly to follow him. They never did catch up with him. They lived in Sydney until Maria answered an advertisement for a job in a hotel at Ayers Rock.

  They flew in over the great rock, the land around it dry and red, like, Angela imagined, the surface of Mars. She remembered the sense of isolation, after flying over the immense desert, and the heat that struck them as soon as they walked down the steps of the plane. At Ayers Rock there was a tiny settlement: four linked hotels, a camping ground, a small shopping centre and a few houses for the staff who worked in the hotels.

  Angela thought she would see some Aborigines but she soon discovered they were kept out of sight. There was a tourist show, where they had a didgeridoo and talked about the rock, Uluru, and its spiritual significance to the local people, but the brown guide and the brown man who played the didgeridoo were Maori from Otara. Pamphlets in the hotels told guests they were paying a tax to protect the ‘fragile community’ of indigenous people. It made them sound as if they were creatures, exotic animals. The workers in the hotels regarded the Aborigines with contempt. They wouldn’t work, they said. They were too drunk. When they did appear they usually were drunk, poor things. But you hardly saw them. Maria said New Zealand was a much healthier scene, as far as race relations went.

  Maria tried to keep away from temptation. She worked on the reception desk at one of the hotels. She had a fling with the guide from Otara, but he was working his way through all the women in the place, and she got sick of that. Then she met Travis, who drove the bus that took tourists to and from the airport and out into the national park.

  They had a small house in the residential area. It looked like a bunker, with a low curving roof, round windows and a concrete back porch. Angela could never get used to the stillness and qu
iet. In those few little roads nothing moved, no cars went past, and all around the vast desert stretched away into the silence. At sunset Uluru was lit up with blazing red light, its sides striped with soft, rippling black shadows, and when night came the sky was filled with big bright stars. Angela was supposed to be doing correspondence school but she spent a lot of time outside, exploring the red paths that ran across the hot, dry landscape. She was in a daze most of the time. Out in the national park there were lizards, dingoes, spiders, snakes. The heat was ferocious. She missed her school at home, her friends. She was lonely, had a sense of unreality. She stood outside the bunker in the vast, black, silent night, dreaming about home. She would have done anything to get away from her mother, and Travis.

  Maria stayed clean, but it was hard. She was a gentle, nervous person. Travis started to be irritable and to push her around. When they’d finished their shifts he swaggered over to the house and behaved as if he owned it. He had a deep harsh voice and a square jaw; he lifted weights and boasted about his strength; he was relentless, charmless. At least Angela thought so. She urged her mother to stand up to him, but Maria would pace and tremble and often she would turn on Angela. ‘You’re just like your father,’ she’d say. ‘You’ve got a will of iron.’ She looked at her daughter coldly, as if she was just another oppressor. Or she would throw things and scream, ‘Why doesn’t everybody leave me alone?’

  After these scenes Angela would go outside and push a yard broom up and down the length of the porch, shifting the red dust, counting the steps to herself, ten steps forward, ten steps back. She remembered it as a strange, compelling ritual: the broom, the red dust, ten steps forward, ten steps back. She would keep it up for a long time, until everything merged and nothing existed but red earth, silence, heat shimmer, shadows on the red rock.

  Maria started taking sips of Travis’s beers. He egged her on. She moved to drinking wine, and then spirits. It wasn’t long before she was sacked and they flew back to Sydney. She worked in the Ascot Hotel in King’s Cross, and when she was fired from there she started working in a brothel. (She insisted she was a ‘receptionist’.) After that fell through, they went back to Auckland.