As Rose watched, the front door opened and a slim woman in tight cut jeans, casual fitted shirt and long brown boots emerged. She tossed her oversized leather bag into the back of a silver SUV that sparkled and shimmered from the recent rain.
Rose stared. She couldn’t help it. It should have been Mrs Harris opening the door. Mrs Harris wearing a red floral apron overdress with a cloud of wiry salt and pepper hair, her eyes darting back and forth behind the thick lens of her glasses, watching the children go to school and the men catching the bus to work. The old lady had never missed a trick as she swept and washed her driveway to within an inch of its life.
There’d been kindness too, Rose remembered with a smile, and a black and white tabby cat she’d doted on. But Mrs Harris was long gone now. Reduced to a ghostly presence in the minds of a few people. She belonged to a time before gentrification. When many of the houses had paint peeling off and the kids ran free with no shoes. Before the pavements were resurfaced, the cafes blossomed and proliferated, before the money moved in, packed in the back of BMWs, Audis, Mercedes and SUVs. Before the tide of renovation overran the suburb.
Rose put her head down and kept on walking. It wouldn’t do to be caught staring and casual conversation was out of the question, given her mood today. That she was back where she was born, was an act of fate—the heavy hand that falls without warning. Today was her wedding anniversary but it wasn’t a day to celebrate, not anymore. Jeremy was dead. Wind shear they said, had taken the helicopter and slammed it like a Tonka toy into an oil platform in the middle of the North Sea. It had been a fine day, clear, nothing to worry about, no warning signs, another routine flight. Except this one ended up in the sea with everyone dead.
After the accident there had been nothing left to do but come full circle. She’d packed her life of fifteen years into cardboard boxes and with her two bewildered children left Aberdeen and retreated to Auckland. Back to her mother, her brothers, nieces and nephews. Back to her old life, except it didn’t exist anymore. It was gone. Changed. Different.
Rose increased her pace. Past what used to be the Bushers's old place. Two elderly spinster sisters, stern and wraithlike. Never so much as a smile or a welcoming nod. She shook her head at the soft-top Audi squashed into the narrow driveway, almost grazing a downpipe. Wondered how many times they had connected. Tried to imagine what the sisters would have thought.
She dug her hands deeper into the pockets of her jacket, squeezed them into tight little knots, made a conscious effort to relax. Breathe deeply, slowly. It didn’t help. She shook her head in an attempt to bring herself back into the real world, lifted her chin and straightened her spine. Turning around she strode back up the hill onto the main road, past the vegetable shop with its overflowing buckets of flowers, the bakery filled with baskets of French bread, the retro store selling vinyl records and into an overcrowded cafe. It was 11.00 am on a Sunday morning. To celebrate her dead husband and what would have been nineteen years of marriage, she ordered ‘The Works’ for breakfast with a double shot espresso. Barring divine intervention this was as exciting as her day was going to get.
* The weather hadn’t improved. A couple of hours of sunshine in the middle of the day and then back to driving rain. Alex, Marion and Jerry crowded into Alex’s office. The room was tired and cold, the building ageing. Built in the sixties, fast and ugly, all concrete and straight lines. A new police station, light and airy, filled with comfortable welcoming spaces, was a drawing on an architect’s computer. Marion put on the lights and a fan heater, pulled the blinds closed to shut out the rain. Marion the homemaker. Bringing comfort, even in a big impersonal sixties box.
Jerry shrugged off his jacket, slumped into a chair. He was a big man, made the office seem small, overcrowded. The hint of a tattoo visible above his sock. Alex had asked him about it once. ‘Whanau,’ he had said. ‘Mother’s side. You know what it’s like.’
Alex hadn’t. There was no Maori in his family. His roots were back in old Europe, his mother’s from generations of farmers who had lived in the countryside of Calabria, before the war had sent them spiralling across the world in search of a safe place to call home. His father’s family had been forced to flee as well, but that was well over a hundred and fifty years ago when the English had persecuted the Scots, driving them to scour the globe for a place to live in freedom.
‘You were right, Marion,’ Jerry said, ‘no night clubs. Edwina Biggs was working. Got to be wrong some of the time, eh? But give us another day, there’s bound to be
