All Saints: Love and Intrigue in the Stunning New Zealand Wilderness (The New Zealand Soccer Referee Series Book 1) (12 page)

He raved with enthusiasm as
only Jack Saint could, walking around the entire vehicle and admiring the
colour, the shape and the smart leather interior. “This is radical!” he gushed,
fingering the BMW logo on the rear. He opened the boot and closed it again.
“Must’ve cost you a fortune!”

I swallowed and smiled. “I fell in love with it.”

“Where’d you get it?” Jack’s words filled me with
misgiving and I whispered Hemi’s name in a muffled squeak which the cavernous
parking garage picked up and echoed around my head.

“Ah yeah.” Jack didn’t sound surprised. “He
supplies lots of the cars for All Saints and their minivan for games. You need
to be a bit careful but he generally flies on the right side of the law.”

“Generally?” The foreboding in my voice alerted
him to my discomfort and he closed the rear passenger door and put a comforting
arm around my shoulder.

“Want me to check it out?”

He responded to my nod by reaching for his cell
phone one-handed and making a hushed call, leaning against the wall staring at
my front bumper. His low voice echoed as a steady rumble and my heart clenched,
not wanting the vehicle to prove stolen or written off in some hideous fatal accident
and glued together in a dodgy chop shop. I opened the boot and busied myself
making checks I should have done in Hemi’s presence, sighing with relief at the
brand new spare tyre, nestled under the rear rug. I poked around and found a
crow bar, jack and tool bag in a panel over the rear wheel arch.

“All good.” Jack made me jump as he appeared
behind me, his face smiling with approval. “I asked a mate at Mangere to check
it out and it’s fine. Nothing wrong at all. Congratulations.” He pressed his
lips to my forehead and lingered over the kiss, disappointed when I pulled
away.

“I’ll drive,” I said, dodging past him and closing
the boot. “You can buy me dinner.”

Jack griped about having already bought dinner and
I slapped his leg and laughed at him as we left the parking garage. My
downstairs neighbour waited for me to exit and headed off down the ramp as I
watched him in my rear-view mirror. “I bet he nicks my space.” I hovered in the
small roadway and Jack screwed his head round to watch the tail lights
disappear into the dim car park and the latticed roll door close with a series
of metallic clicks and clunks.

“Don’t you rent it?” Jack asked, watching my face
flush with dread. I nodded and he watched me for a second. “Trouble?”

I indicated left and merged with the steady
traffic, explaining my dilemma. “I haven’t been down there since I got rid of
the old car, so didn’t realise he’d been using my space. He got rather upset
when I wouldn’t move out of it earlier and I kind of threatened him.”

“You what?” Jack’s merry laughter destroyed the
last vestiges of my confidence.

“Yeah, thanks for that!” I spat, heading downtown
and deliberately aiming for the most expensive restaurants on Quay Street as
revenge.

“I just can’t imagine it,” he mused, watching me
sideways through narrowed eyes.

“It wasn’t my finest hour,” I grumbled, pressing
too hard on the accelerator and scaring him enough to make him face forward.

Jack’s idea of dinner out ended up as fish and
chips on the beach. We sat side by side in a patch of sand as the sun removed
its light by degrees and darkness shrouded us in simplicity. “You have the
rest,” I said, wiping my greasy fingers on a tissue from my pocket. “I’m
stuffed.”

“Me too.” Jack crumpled the wrapper and balled it
next to him, fixing his eyes on the water as it sent white waves onto the
Mission Bay sand. “Have you settled in East Tamaki?” he asked. “Don’t you miss
Devonport and the sea being so close?”

“Of course I do. Moving from a beautiful house
near the beach to an apartment block wasn’t in the grand plan for my life. It
was pure necessity.”

“Because of the debts you mentioned?”

“Yeah. They didn’t die with Pete; just became
repayable with immediate effect and I didn’t have the money.”

“What kind of debts were they?” he asked and I saw
the flicker of a cop’s interest.

I sighed and listed them one at a time, crossing
the seventy-thousand-dollar mark with a memory of the sick feeling the number
caused. “Online gambling attributed some of it but he’d done other, really odd
things with cash loans that were never accounted for. He’d got into a mess and
selling up and modifying my lifestyle seemed the only quick way out.”

“Until now.”

Jack’s words stilled me and I realised how
incongruous the opulent car must appear. “Yeah. I had a year left on the last
of the loans and they agreed to let me pay monthly. I’ve lived like a monk and
cleared it early.” The lie tripped off my tongue like an Olympic diver.

“Weren’t there penalties for that?” Jack asked,
his gaze intense.

I hid my cringe as much as possible. “Worth it
just to have them off my back. Can we not talk about my private finances
anymore?” My voice sounded pleading and needy.

“Ok.” Jack put his arm around me and pulled me
close. I felt the comfort of his strong arm muscles and the hardness of his
ribs as I nestled in. But I’d seen something else in his eyes; something really
worrying. He’d watched me with the eyes of a cop, one who could spot a lie at
fifty paces and wanted to chase it down like a hungry lion. He stopped because
I asked him but it hadn’t left his sphere of thought and hung there whenever he
caught my eye. I couldn’t tell Jack about Terry’s gift because of the dirty way
I’d earned it, threatening him with his son’s indiscretions. Nor was he aware
of Peter Saint’s sexual preferences.

The thing in my cousin’s eyes looked like
something different. The suspicion ran deeper than me finishing a loan or
coming into money and as the evening wore on and we spent more time together, I
realised he thought I’d done something criminal; something which might attach
to him and his career. Neither of us raised it as we dumped our rubbish in a
public bin and spread white sand all over the carpets of my new SUV. But it
hung over us like a mantle.

My brain felt rattled by the time I crept under the
roll door into the parking garage and the sentence roiled round and round in my
thoughts. “What the hell does he think I’ve done?”

I put the
handbrake on and stared at my neighbour’s car, nestled between a pillar and the
vehicle next to him.

“I thought you said you
threatened him,” Jack said, watching my face as an embarrassing blush crept
into my cheeks.

“Well, it was obviously really
effective and terrified him.” I didn’t hold back on the barb in my tone.

“I’ll go see him. Where does he
live?” Jack wrestled with the door handle and hefted himself out.

“Ground floor,” I sighed. “It’s
messed up because his wife has 12a, which would be mine if I had a partner but
their other space is number 2 near the exit.”

“If there was a 2a, wouldn’t they
have both?”

“There isn’t a 2a.” I glanced
behind me at the empty bay where his car should be. “The ground floor flats
have a second space outside in the car park. The landlord thinks it’s easier
for them to walk outside. He leased the mother the park next to me on the
understanding I didn’t need it.” I chewed my lip. “I guess if I complain he’ll
intervene and revoke the second space, but getting hold of him through the land
agent is impossible.”

“Take his space for now,” Jack
said, pointing to the empty number 2. “Reverse in and then you can drive
straight out.”

“I haven’t reversed it yet!” I
squeaked. “I’ll ding it.”

Jack snorted out a laugh. “It’s
got so many bloody sensors; it could probably park itself! Get on with it,
woman!” He strolled off towards the lifts, ignoring the button in favour of the
stairs. He was right about the reversing sensors. The automated BMW voice told
me everything I needed to know and then repeated it at least eleven times in
case I was either hard of hearing or suffered from short-term memory loss. The
big SUV slid into the ample space under the guidance of the smooth Australian
male voice and I left the gear stick in reverse, just to hear him say, “Half a
metre of clearance to the rear,” just one more time.

I brushed sand off the mats from
the foot well into the open space in front of the car, waiting for Jack to
return. I gulped when he strode out of the lift with my neighbour, who sported
a child on his shoulders. “This is Ahmed,” Jack said, introducing us like
strangers. He pointed to the man’s shoulders. “And this is Liliane.”

I watched through eyes filled
with wariness as the man’s face remained blank. Jack turned to me. “Liliane
can’t walk. She’s got Cerebral Palsy. Ahmed’s wife explained the problem. They
need to park the cars together so that in the morning, Ahmed can carry Liliane
downstairs and then help his wife with the younger kids. He takes Liliane to
school, but he needs to help his wife load in the other children or they run
around down here and it’s usually busy by the time they leave.”

I looked at the man’s blank face
and felt my heart squeeze in my chest. I taught primary school children and he
was trying to keep his own safe. “I’m so sorry,” I gushed, noticing how the
little girl’s legs hung at odd angles on her father’s chest and she clung to a
clump of his hair as though it was a natural riding position. I looked to Jack
for a solution and watched him in cop-mode, negotiating using his hands.
“Ursula can have this space, and you take hers?” he said, pointing to my car
and then to the man’s battered station wagon.

Ahmed nodded, a huge up and down
action which almost pitched the child off his shoulders. “Ee!” he said with
enthusiasm. “Ee.”

I pointed over at the locked
cabinets above the parking space and mimed the turning of a key. “I’ve got
stuff in there,” I said, directing my concern to Jack. “I’ll need to get it
out.”

Jack jabbed his finger at the
cabinet above my vehicle and Ahmed shook his head and wagged his finger. “La
sha,” he said and shrugged, forcing the girl to use both hands and adopt
another clump of the tufty black hair.

“He’s got nothing in there,” Jack
confirmed. He pointed towards the cabinet over number 12 and the man nodded
again with vigor. Rushing across, he unlocked the vehicle, dumping the little
girl into the passenger seat and running around to the driver’s side. He jammed
a key from his pocket into the ignition and dropped the car forward so Jack and
I could scoot behind. I used the key from my fob to open the heavy doors and
together we unloaded the cupboard.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” I said to
Jack, watching him struggle to use his broken wrist. “I’ll do it. I meant to
clear this stuff out months ago but kept putting it off.”

Ahmed ferried items to the bottom
of the lift and the men held the door open using one of the stacker boxes while
we pushed the rest over the corrugated metal surface. When the cupboard was
empty, Ahmed dropped his car back into place, reattached his daughter to his
shoulders and smiled as I handed over the key. He swapped it for the one
matching the cupboard behind my vehicle and we parted as friends, despite my
need to repeat my apology another eighty times.

“He doesn’t speak English,” Jack
said under his breath and I nodded.

“I still shouldn’t have been so
mean.” I looked at him with curiosity. “What language does he speak?”

“Arabic.” Jack didn’t miss a
beat. “He brought his family over from Syria.”

I groaned and rolled my eyes.
Teina Fox had lit a fire in my belly which seemed determined to erupt from my
mouth. I contemplated his hold on my soul and wished I could believe it was all
bad.

On the third floor, Jack jammed
the lift doors again and pushed items out with his foot while I hauled them
over to the front door. I unlocked the apartment while he removed the stacker
box and let the lift go about its business. “What is it?” Jack asked and I
shrugged.

“Pete’s,” I said, my voice
reflecting my remembered exhaustion of the weeks after his death and the
hurried exit from our shared home. “I got rid of most things I couldn’t sell
but these boxes contain random things I didn’t have time to look through. I’ll
give most of it to Terry and Margaret to deal with.”

“Don’t you want to look through
it first?” Jack nudged a dusty box with his toe, a policeman’s curiosity in his
eyes.

“Not really.” Aware I sounded far
too dismissive, I added a smile. “I’ve got work in the morning and I’m tired.
Thanks for dinner.”

“Hey. Thanks for the company.” Jack
wrapped me in his arms and I fought the tug on my heart strings which promised
how easy it would be to fall into his bed and pick up the fragile threads of
our teenage connection. I yearned for companionship and solidarity and Jack
offered all those things. Then I thought of Lacey and how easily my childhood
crush replaced me without a minute’s argument and the feeling passed. I avoided
his lips and closed myself into my bedroom, falling asleep as soon as my head
hit the pillow.

“Is Mark Lambie still missing?” I
asked Jack the next morning as I shoved toast into my mouth and applied mascara
at the same time. He looked up at me from his position on the lounge floor
amidst the detritus from Pete’s life and shrugged.

“Haven’t heard anything. Guess
so.”

“I wonder where he’s gone,” I
mused, shoving the lid on my mascara and ramming it back into the cutlery
drawer. The compact mirror snapped shut in my fingers after a final examination
of my makeup and I pushed it into my handbag. “He was just a bit drunk when we
dropped him off.”

“We?” Sharp as a knife was our
Jack and I swallowed and hesitated a moment too long.

“A guy from the club gave us a
ride to Mark’s place and then dropped me home. He seemed nice enough but neither
of us wanted to be puked on so leaving Mark on the doormat was a mutual
decision.”

“What was his name?” Jack’s hair
stuck up on end and a line of dust created a black smudge on his forehead. He
hadn’t shaved and still wore yesterday’s clothes.

“Bloody hell, Jack!” I exclaimed.
“Twenty questions! Check with your mates; I told them everything. How’d you
expect me to remember some stranger a week later?”

I pointed at the mess on my
lounge floor. “I don’t want all that stuff out when I get home. I never want to
see Pete’s stuff again; do you understand?” I couldn’t reign in my vehemence
and knew that Jack’s perception would see right through my protestations.
“Please put it back in the boxes,” I asked.

He sloped off to the bathroom,
leaving me to clear up the kitchen after my foray and I walked through to the
lounge to peer over the mess. There were notebooks and odd bits of clothing
scattered in a large arc around Jack’s absent body and my eyes came to rest on
a laptop next to the sofa.

“Ooh!” I swooped down and seized
it, hefting it into my arms. I’d never found the charger to it but a home
computer would be awesome. Pete’s old Apple Mac wouldn’t keep its charge
anymore .I turned it bottom upwards and checked the manufacturer’s logo,
realising with a skip of pleasure it looked the same as the one in my class.
“I’ll charge the laptop at work,” I called down the hallway towards the closed
bathroom door.

“What?” Jack replied and I
ignored him, leaving the apartment before my wily cousin could put his finger
on my sore spot through his investigation of Pete’s possessions. Admitting I’d
been duped into marrying a closet homosexual wasn’t a source of shame in
itself, but having Jack know I’d considered pregnancy by him acceptable,
increased my bloom of embarrassment to fever pitch as I entered the parking
garage. Nor did I want further questions about Teina Fox, which would end up
with an admission of our night of unbridled passion and the fact I still
thought of him almost constantly; hankering for more of the same.

The cornflower blue BMW lit my
face with instant effect. Excitement bubbled at the realisation I wouldn’t have
to wait by the bus stop in driving rain or sit for hours while it crawled a
circuitous route through the city taking us all home. The perfectly engineered
hunk of blue metal would cut my journey time into a third and overnight, I’d
become my own boss again.

The sunny day fit my wonderful
mood and I buzzed down the motorway towards school, windows down and the radio
blaring like a teenager. When a severe looking man in a Jeep cut me up on the
turn towards Takapuna, I used Helen’s tactic and waved. He looked
uncomfortable, his olive face flushing a deep red and then to my amusement,
waggled his fingers back at me.

I plugged the laptop into my
charger in the corner of the classroom and left it there, teaching the children
with my usual brand of enthusiasm and backed up by Helen’s bad cop routine. My
first chance to open it arrived at morning tea time when Vanessa called an
emergency meeting with the management team and kicked everyone else out of the
staffroom.

“What’s that about?” Helen asked,
retreating to the classroom with her coffee and sandwich. “She threw us out!”

“No idea,” I mused. “Probably
money, it usually is.”

Helen grunted and went outside,
sitting on the bench under my window surrounded by adoring children. I listened
to the tenderness in her voice and saw her feeding her sandwich to the
hungriest of the class like a mother sparrow feeding torn off meat to baby
birds.

When curiosity dictated I should
fire it up, the laptop behaved as though closed mid-task only the day before
and not abandoned for half a year. The screen opened onto a chat room page with
a thumbnail picture of a saxophone at the top. The name of the profile owner was
‘Musician’, with a header photo depicting a landscape scene of a Devonport
park. I’d been to it with Pete heaps of times in the days when we walked
together and communicated like married adults. There were over four thousand
notifications pending in a box in the corner and a speech bubble demanding
attention for over seventy missed conversation prompts.

I opened up the private message
box and flicked through, assuming most of the profile names were fake, although
a few looked genuine. ‘
I missed you tonight, baby
,’ one remarked, the
date of the message set four years earlier. My breakfast rolled in my stomach
at the thought of who might have typed the message or why he missed my dead
husband. I closed the lid of the machine as Helen brought the class back
indoors like a string of baby chicks bouncing behind her.

The laptop pulled at me the whole
day, luring me over during lunch time and causing me to miss an important
announcement in the staffroom.

“Vanessa’s bloody leaving!” Helen
raged afterwards, hissing under her breath. “She said if the ministry doesn’t
give a shit, why should she?”

I commiserated and waited until
she went outside before scrolling back through message after message, sorting
out the indecent from the blatantly lewd with a calm which surprised me. I
should’ve felt worse, glimpsing this private view into Pete’s secret world and
hearing the voices of his many and varied sexual partners through the typed
text. Yet it affected me less than I’d believed. Some of the messages were
graphic and included photographs and after the horror of the first few, I
couldn’t look, getting the gist and closing down those boxes in rapid
succession.

Unused to social media and
technologically naïve, it never occurred to me that my actions would draw
online attention, or that the other members in the conversations would receive
a notification when their message was read. I hadn’t banked on the flurry of
response or the sudden influx of notifications which heralded a barrage of
questions.

‘Hey, baby, where’ve you
been?’

‘Big boy! We need to meet up
xoxo’

‘I’ve missed you so much!’

‘I heard you were dead.’

Seeing the messages pop up in the
browser, I read the first line and resisted clicking on them, not interested in
the rest of their dialogue. I worked through the remainder, reading them
quickly and then right clicking the mouse to mark them unread, hoping nobody
would notice. My heart pounded and I cursed my mistake. The tiny picture of the
saxophone remained greyed out, but the messages kept coming. Looking at the
name, ‘Musician’ as Pete’s profile made me sad, reminding me of his gentle
guitar strumming during better times.

One conversation caught my
attention because the first line said, ‘
Don’t do it
.’ It tugged on my
curiosity and drove me forward, working out how to open the whole conversation
without marking the message as read. My heart gave an unexpected jolt in my
chest as I recognised a different kind of relationship in play. This person
spoke to my husband without the dirty sexual references and their conversation
seemed at times, like an agony of revelation. When I read my own name on the
screen, I knew I’d have to read it all.

The conversation began five years
previously, during the early months of our sham marriage. I swallowed and
picked at the ridged scab which made a poor job of keeping my heart safe,
hoping I could find some inner catharsis in truth. I should’ve known better.

‘I need to tell Ursula the
truth. This isn’t fair on her.’

‘Don’t you dare! Keep her
happy, give her a kid and nobody needs to know.’

‘But it’s killing me. Don’t
you care?’

‘No. You know how the world
feels about people like us. Do you honestly think the lads on a Saturday will
get naked in the changing room once they know? They’ll be too scared to bend
down for the soap. Don’t do it.’

‘Life’s not like that anymore.
The lads will be fine. I’ve got taste too. I don’t automatically fancy every
dude I see.’

‘Don’t do it!’

‘I can’t live a lie anymore.
It’s not fair on Ursula. She doesn’t deserve this.’

‘Don’t. I’m telling you.
Don’t.’

I felt sick to my stomach. Pete
wanted to tell me and this confidante convinced him not to. I would remain
ignorant for a further two and a half years after that sentence was typed,
believing myself ugly and working hard to slim down and create a more appealing
bed fellow for a man who just wasn’t interested in women. I revolted him and
the realisation made the fragile love I’d fostered for him turn to ash in my
mouth. The other party to the conversation typed under the name ‘Plus One’ and
I hated him for denying me the truth, a bubbling, broiling emotion which
fostered an ache in my temples.

I slammed the laptop lid and left
it charging under my desk, teaching my babies mathematics, full words in
phonetics and reading an extended story as the heavy clocked ticked on the wall
above the door. But it drew me like a sickness, filling me with the need to
know more. At every opportunity I slunk back to the chat room, making sure I
showed up as ‘offline’ each time, so I could go back through the four-year
conversation from the start.

‘How do you live the lie? How
does your wife not know?’
Pete asked.

‘I can’t let her. She has no
idea.’

‘But Ursula wants a baby. I
should just tell her and let her find someone else to get pregnant with. I
could support her and a kid financially. I wouldn’t mind.’

‘No. Father your own child.’

‘I CAN’T!’

The sentence pained me as I read
it, remembering my husband’s stellar efforts on our wedding night. Alcohol made
him sappy and I wondered if he took some other mind bending drug as he’d
flipped me over and taken me from behind, his roughness a surprise after a
courtship of gallantry and chastity. Sore and disappointed, it felt all wrong
and I’d hoped things would improve. I shook my head at my own blindness back
then.

‘Pretend she’s someone else.’

I stared in disbelief at the
words, the cruelty leaving an arrow trace through my heart. I put my hand up to
my mouth and bit down on the inside of my fingers, no longer able to read the
coldness in the other person’s advice. It explained the method behind the only
other time Pete made love to me, not that it could be called that. Fumbled and
brutal after the only time Peter Saint received a red card on the pitch, I
never ever asked for his clemency again. He’d balanced on his elbows above me
with his eyes misted by rage, grinding for ages until I cried with relief at
being allowed off the bed and into the safety of the bathroom. I realised then
that a child wouldn’t fix our marriage and stopped asking. Figuring I’d made a
terrible error of judgement, I buried myself in my work, keeping up a great
pretence for family and friends and heading towards my thirties with a broken
spirit.

Somehow despite my horror, Pete’s
secret conversation brought me comfort with its clarifying flare of hindsight.
The problem was him, not me. I could go on. He couldn’t. I thought of Teina’s
gentle ministrations and my lips quirked at the memory of pleasures I hadn’t
known possible before him. I used the feelings he created in the pit of my
stomach to overwrite the nastiness of sex with Pete and the misery of my
marriage, planting Teina’s loving as a garden of flowers in my mind to cover up
the barren, empty ground. I’d slept with a referee and not just any. I’d danced
on Peter Saint’s grave using the man who dealt him a red card with a strong,
outstretched arm and a fixed smile on his face. What’s more; I’d enjoyed it.