All Saints: Love and Intrigue in the Stunning New Zealand Wilderness (The New Zealand Soccer Referee Series Book 1) (15 page)

I sat outside
and waited while Jack traipsed upstairs to my father’s apartment alone. When
he’d walked around to the driver’s side and tried to make me accompany him, I
locked the doors. He licked my window out of spite and I waited until he went
out of sight before getting out and shining the glass with a tissue from my
pocket.

“There you are!” The male voice
made me jump and I tippled forwards, connecting with the side of my car. Brian
Montana loomed behind me, his soft, Polynesian skin like caramel in the late
sunshine. I smiled with relief.

“Hey, coach. How ya doin’?” I
stuck out my hand and he shook it in his giant paw, leaning in to press his
nose to mine in a hongi. He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, opening
them long enough to read my soul like an open book.

“Good, number nine,” he said,
referring to me as always. “Been tryin’ to call you.”

“Oh.” I thought about the phone
in my glove box, turned off to avoid my father’s many calls. He’d enjoyed an
orgasm without dying so he could quit calling me every time he got a sniffle.
“It’s not working.” Almost the truth; it couldn’t work unless I switched it on.

“I need you tomorrow,” he said,
fixing brown eyes on mine and watching me hold my breath.

“I can’t,” I began, but he raised
his hand.

“No excuses, number nine. My
right wing has gaps and you’re it.”

“I’m not playing this year!” My
voice hiked up a notch. “We had a conversation at Christmas and you agreed.”

“Only to shut you up.” Brian
snorted. “Do as you’re told. Game’s at nine. Be there an hour early to run
through some drills.”

“But I haven’t trained!” I hated
the whine I heard in my tone and Brian grabbed me in a bear hug, enfolding my
face and torso into his giant chest.

“You look all right to me,” his
voice rumbled. “Be there. We need ya.”

He let me go and I wobbled on my
feet from the temporary suffocation. “I don’t know where my soccer boots are.”

His laugh echoed in the car park,
bouncing off the other vehicles like a pin ball. “Crap!” he snorted. “Yeah, ya
do. See you tomorrow.” He turned and set off for the apartment block, waving
over his shoulder. “Gonna raak up yer dad now.”

“Good luck with that!” I watched
Brian skid to a halt and stare back at me, a confused look on his face. Fearing
he might return for an explanation, I bounced into my car and locked the doors,
hiding behind the tinted glass like a fugitive.

An hour later, I sat with my legs
crossed, busting for the toilet as Jack sauntered through the front doors with
a grin on his lips. “Haha,” he sniggered as I deactivated the central locking.
“You got called up for The Priestesses.”

“Shut yer face!” I snapped,
gunning the engine. “I need a wee and it’s your fault.”

“Could’ve come in.” He fixed his
seat belt in place and halted the irritating warning alarm from the dashboard.
“Nice to catch up with Brian.”

“I didn’t think they’d talk to
you,” I grumbled and jumped at Jack’s peel of laughter.

“Is that why you agreed to drive
me? You’re so transparent, Ula! Your dad behaved like a gentleman, actually.”
He glanced at me sideways when I didn’t reply, eager to be back on my good
side. “Sorry. The time flew, especially after Brian arrived.”

“Did you get to ask him about his
little house guest.” I couldn’t keep the bile out of my voice.

“Didn’t need to say much,” Jack
replied, looking at me sideways. “You didn’t know they were married, did you?”

The BMW possessed incredible
brakes and the stopping distance proved beyond my wildest dreams. The emergency
stop I pulled would have sent Jack through the windscreen if he wasn’t belted
in. He swore up a blue streak in my vehicle and I opened the windows after I’d
pulled off the main road and parked in an affluent Auckland suburb. “Your
language is vile,” I commented, looking in the rear-view mirror at my white
complexion and frightened brown eyes, focussing on getting my heart rate to
slow. I’d almost been rear-ended and it scared me.

“You left tyre marks!” Jack
squeaked, his eyes terrified.

“Because of what you said!” I
gritted my teeth and balled my fists, willing the prickling tears not to betray
me. “They can’t be married.”

Jack rolled his eyes. “Sorry,
sorry. Ula, that was an awful way to find out. I thought you knew and just
wanted to cause trouble.”

“Get out.” I pressed the button
on the dash and the doors unlocked. “Get out, Jack.”

“No.” He clung to his seat belt
as though I might rip it off him and a red mist descended over my vision. He
believed I’d be spiteful enough to set the cops on my father just for fun.

“Get. Out.” I separated the words
and felt my heart pounding blood through my ears. My breath caught in my chest
and rage consumed me. When Jack refused to budge after being thumped twice, I
fixed my palm over the centre of the steering wheel and pushed.

In addition to great brakes, the
BMW owned a super-sized horn. It blared out into the suburb and echoed off
buildings like a claxon. Other drivers turned to stare and a woman walking her
dog stopped on the pavement across the road. Jack tried to move my hand but his
broken wrist caught the gear stick as he raised the cast and he hissed in pain.
“Get out!” I screamed like a maniac and fear lit his eyes in the realisation I
meant it.

The horn continued without pause,
attracting the attention of every human eye in the street and with a look of
betrayal, Jack climbed out of my car.

I left him standing on the
pavement clutching his broken wrist in his other hand with a look of disbelief
on his face. Clumping my foot on the gas, I forced my way into the stream of
traffic, letting the tears streak down my face in the privacy of my vehicle. My
hands shook and I drove the wrong way along a one-way street by accident before
arriving home and sitting in the parking garage in my car. I howled then like a
baby, wailing into the empty space and leaving my dignity on the seat. I missed
my mother and knew she’d be appalled by May-Ling and their mutually convenient
union.

My father’s cruelty cut me to the
quick and when I’d cried myself into a state of sullen anger, I grabbed my
phone from the glove box and turned it on. Sixty-four messages and thirty
missed calls flashed on the screen and I emptied the box without reading or
listening to any of them. Then I blocked Dad’s number and resisted selecting
the option to receive a text if he tried to contact me. His reign over my life
ended there, in a dirty parking garage under an apartment block inhabited by
people who were down on their luck. He’d put me there and he’d have no part in
watching me clamber out.

Jack
didn’t come home and I wasn’t bothered. I’d put the chain across the front door
anyway and planned to ignore him. I dwelled on my behaviour far too much over
the cooking sherry and made myself maudlin and depressed. Sobbing some more, I
watched myself cry in the bathroom mirror, which was silly but entertaining. I
couldn’t make it look attractive like an actress’ gentle tears because I
screwed my face up too much and my nose bulged.

Jack’s betrayal seemed almost
worse than Dad’s. I thought he knew me but he didn’t. Or maybe he did and I
didn’t like what his assumption revealed. My reaction told him I knew nothing
about my new stepmother but it scored deep gashes in my soul that he could
believe I’d set him up by taking him to see Jordan and saying nothing. I washed
my face with cold water, poured the cooking sherry down the sink when I spotted
flies in the bottom and went to bed with Pete’s laptop. It’s not like anything
he said from the grave could destroy my mood much more.

I deduced the other person in the
most interesting set of conversations must be someone familiar. Whoever it was
knew me.

‘
She’s a sweet chick. Just
have babies with her and it will be ok. That’s what I did.’

‘Yeah, she’s lovely. I fell on
my feet with her. It was a great idea.
’

At first I wondered about my
father but his atrocious spelling would have outed him within the first
sentence. Who else took part in the planning and organisation of my fake
marriage? I considered all of them and drew a blank. My husband and his friend
talked about soccer with an expert’s eye which narrowed out more people. I
glossed over Pete’s father as the writer. I’d seen how he spoke to Pete and the
written conversation contained too much affection and the kind of advice
delivered by someone who cared. It couldn’t be the same man who slapped me in
public. I felt the writer to be male and his affinity with the gay community
ruled out even more candidates, including Aunty Margaret. I seemed no nearer to
solving his identity after two hours of drunken reading and alternate sobbing
than when I started.

But I knew Pete in death more
than I ever had in life. He cared about me in a way I hadn’t realised and it
affected me. It brought healing to know I wasn’t his stooge and he spoke about
his anger towards me in ways which made sense. I’d been his public saviour and
his private jailer. I gave him a veneer of respectability whilst removing his
freedom.

‘
I look at her sometimes and
wish she knew. I think she’d understand. We could come to an arrangement where
I got her pregnant and we lived together as friends. I like her. She’s cute and
funny. We just want different things.
’ 

I dwelled on whether I would have
remained satisfied with such a half-life. At work, I saw women every day who
put everything into their only child and kept nothing back. When the teenage
stage hit and their love fell on deaf ears, they shattered like unfired
pottery.

I skimmed the conversation which
took place over four years, covering the attack on my husband in an Auckland
toilet and my subsequent entry into his double life. I gained nothing new from
the exchange and let the messages scroll past my tired eyes until the end when
it finished with a message sent to Pete the day he died. It remained greyed out
and I hovered over it, not wanting to change it from ‘unread’ to ‘read’.

‘
Don’t do anything stupid
,’
it said.

My heart quailed at the timing of
the message, sent as my husband’s body flew through his windscreen and sent
fragments of glass into his handsome face. The suicide note sneaked to the
front of my mind again and left me reeling. But the online message seemed out
of place and strange, as though another discussion had crept into the mix, left
over from a phone conversation or something said face to face which jarred with
the usual harmless banter of the chat room. It related to nothing spoke of
previously.

Thoughts of Pete’s death rolled
my stomach and I turned my brain by an act of will towards Teina, savouring his
smile and the way he’d loved me, expunging the damage from my marriage of
convenience and the lack of confidence it wrought in my personality.

I craved Teina then; in my mouth,
my body and most of all in my head. I used the laptop to search for residential
addresses listed under
T. Fox
and lawyers with his name as partner or
associate. My fingers moved over the keyboard, desperate to find him and bring
him running. Nothing. Nothing relevant, anyway. There were two hundred
addresses in New Zealand inhabited by a
Fox
and twelve of them
attributed to
T. Fox,
but none of those lived in Auckland. I found one
lawyer by the name of Fox but unless he worked as a woman during the week, it
wasn’t him.

Laying back against my pillows in
the empty bed, I stretched my finger towards the power button and acknowledged
my readiness for sleep. Then it happened. The screen made a peculiar noise and
an icon flashed in the top right corner. I sat up straight and peered at it,
using the mouse to click out of the online address book. I closed out of the
nonsensical spreadsheet I’d also glanced over, not understanding the numbers
next to team listings, but having toyed with it being something to do with the
gambling scam. With everything else closed or minimised, it left only Pete’s
conversation with the stranger and I stared in horror at the flashing box on
the screen where a new message sat waiting.

‘Pete?’

I held my breath and scrolled
around the screen, looking for the box at the top where I always checked I
hadn’t changed anything. Panic sped up my pulse as I tried to work out what I’d
done wrong. “Think! Think!” I urged myself. “Pete never saw the last message
and it was a different colour; grey. It was grey. I didn’t change it. I clicked
nothing!” I stared at the screen, where the final unread message looked the
same colour as the blue ones above. In my clicking around with addresses and
searches, I’d somehow marked it as ‘read’ and the chat room sent a notification
to the sender.

“I kept it showing as offline!” I
shrieked, but the laptop screen flickered without concern for my blunder. The
drop-down-box on the right showed a thumbnail of the saxophone image and the
word, ‘online’.

‘Who is this?’

I heard the indignation hidden
within those three small words and it dawned on me that Pete’s friend knew his
real identity. He hadn’t called him, ‘Musician’, but ‘Pete.’ If they knew my
husband, they also knew whoever read the six-month-old message wasn’t him.