Sole Survivor. Derek Hansen

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СКАЧАТЬ go home and slip back into his routine. At least until morning. He picked up the two pieces of snapper and turned down the hurricane lamp.

      Another day was drawing to a close, a day in which he’d had to confront Japanese poachers and the navy, a day in which Bernie had died and cleared the way for the woman to claim her inheritance. His world was changing, but at least he still survived.

Four

      Rosie Trethewey was not happy. When she’d left for work that morning, summer had been in full cry. The sun had beaten down from a cloudless blue sky, and for once, though only briefly, she was glad the judge had taken away her driving license. But the walk up Shelley Beach Road to the bus stop had soon tested her antiperspirant and found it wanting. Her cotton dress had darkened beneath her arms and clung to her back. Then she’d cursed the judge and the smug policemen who’d picked on her and booked her for speeding. Even the judge had expressed surprise that her Volkswagen could go as fast as the police had claimed it had. But that was Rosie. She only had two speeds, flat out and stop.

      The afternoon had brought clouds, low and threatening, and sent temperatures plummeting. She’d shivered in windowless offices while the air-conditioning thermostats struggled to figure out what was happening and failed. She’d spent the day talking to groups of women, trying to divine their innermost thoughts and attitudes toward toilet cleaners and bathroom disinfectants. Up until then Rosie had thought that skid marks were something immature men in fast cars left on roads. She’d learned differently and wished she hadn’t. But the job of a market researcher was to research markets, and there was a market for toilet cleaners, just as there was for most other things. She had no control over what products she was given to investigate. Nevertheless, it had been an unedifying day and was no way to spend a life.

      “You’ll have to find something else to do,” Norma insisted whenever she moaned about it. Norma was her friend and meant well but, Christ on a motorbike, what was there left for her to do?

      The rain had held off until the bus deposited her at the top of Shelley Beach Road, then the heavens had opened. Typical. The only certain thing about the weather in Auckland was that it would change. Rosie began to run but quickly realized the futility of it. She was going to get soaked no matter what she did. She walked head-on into the wind and driving rain as it howled in off the harbor. The thin cotton stuck fast to her body like a second layer of skin, defining her figure in intimate detail. Rosie didn’t care a damn. There was no one dumb enough to be out in the rain to see her, and even if there had been, she was in no mood to care. She was more concerned with the cold and her hates. Walking briskly helped fend off the chill from the wet and wind, but there was nothing she could do about her hates. She hated the judge who wouldn’t let her drive her car, and she hated the police. It was their fault she was cold and wet. She hated buses. She hated her job. She hated her flat. She hated her father, her ex-husband, stupid women who had nothing better to do than waffle on endlessly about toilet cleaners and skid marks as if they were making some worthwhile contribution to the sum total of human knowledge, and she hated dresses that rode up and bunched at the crotch.

      “You waste too much energy on negative thoughts,” Norma kept telling her, but Norma was younger, better looking and had a boyfriend who was loaded. It was easy for Norma to give advice. Nature had given her everything except depth.

      Her flatmate hadn’t closed their letterbox properly the day before, and all the mail was saturated. She cursed the office wally who told her to keep the windows of her VW open a half inch to let air circulate. Now rain circulated. Too bad. She stepped off the driveway onto the path that wound through the overgrown garden to the once-grand two-story home that had been converted to flats. Leaves tipped water over her as she brushed past unpruned bushes. The downspouts were blocked, causing the gutters to overflow and a sheet of water to cascade off the roof right in front of the steps leading to the front door. She groaned aloud. There was the whole front of the house, but of course the gutters had chosen to overflow by the front door. She’d complained to the landlord.

      “Plumber’s coming to fix it next week,” she’d been told, but next week never arrived and neither did the plumber. She hated the landlord, cheap old bastard, and she hated the real estate agent who’d signed her up to a two-year lease. She opened the door to her flat and paused, wondering how to circumnavigate her beloved kelim rugs that lay scattered across the dark-stained timber floors. Then she thought of her flatmate, who’d simply barge in regardless, and gave up. She’d long given up protecting her things against flatmates and considered herself lucky if nothing was stolen when they moved out.

      She closed the door behind her, switched on the light because the flat was gloomy even on a bright day, and began to strip off her wet clothes. She thought of leaving them in puddles on the floor as her flatmate would, but thought better of it. It was smarter to leave one big puddle to wipe up than half a dozen smaller ones. She slipped out of her clothes. Wet, cold and naked, she didn’t feel a bit beautiful, but she had the sort of figure that turned men on, particularly the one watching from the window of the house next door. She groaned at the indignity, gathered up her bundle of wet clothes and strode into the bathroom. She didn’t even bother giving her voyeuristic neighbor the finger as she normally did. It bothered her that the man never seemed to blink.

      One good thing about the flat was that they never ran out of hot water, not even when her flatmate took his usual half-hour shower. She always flatted with men and still harbored the hope that one day she’d find one who was clever with his hands. In a practical way. But she was always the one who had to change washers on leaky taps, hang curtains and fix doorknobs. Yet the men were better than the women she’d shared flats with in her younger days, who spent forever putting on makeup and no time at all doing housework. She’d begun to relax and let the steaming bathwater do its soothing work when she noticed her towel missing. How many times had she warned her flatmate not to use her towel? But he had. Again. And once again he’d left her towel in his bedroom. She gritted her teeth and clenched her fists. Perhaps the bastard was working in partnership with the voyeur next door, because she’d have to run the gauntlet once more. Had she left the light on? Of course she had. She hated her flatmate. He had to go. Enough was enough. She lay back in the bath and tried to relax. Perhaps the bloke next door had finally gone blind through self-abuse. That was a thought that comforted her and brought a glimmer of a smile, but only briefly. There was no escaping the reality. She was thirty-four years old, trapped in a grubby bathroom in a grubby flat by a grubby little man next door. What, she wondered, was she doing with her life? The sound of a key turning in the lock on the front door dragged her away from her reveries. Her flatmate had come home.

      “Hi!”

      She heard him call out and drop his valise. She’d grown tired of telling him to put the bloody thing away, so now it lived just inside the front door. She heard a clump, a step, another clump. He was taking off his shoes. He’d be halfway across the kelims, probably dumping his shoes on her indigo blue Kazak, which he thought didn’t show the dirt.

      “Where are you?”

      “In the bath, you bastard, waiting for you to come home and replace the towel you nicked this morning.”

      “Sorry. Just get out of these things.” She heard his belt buckle scrape on the polished floor. Trousers down. His bedroom-door handle rattled. Coat hung. “Shit!” Slipped taking off socks. It was all so familiar and predictable they might as well have been married instead of just flatmates. Rosie never slept with flatmates, because that created too many complications; she preferred to think of them as no more than rent-sharers. She heard him open her bedroom door, open a cupboard and close it.

      “Here he comes,” she said softly, slipping as deeply into the bath as she could, wishing she’d been more liberal with water and soap. But it was the old story. Too little, too late, СКАЧАТЬ