Starlight Peninsula

‘SHE IS A MASTER WITH MYSTERY, VERY CONTEMPORARY AND ASTUTE … HER LANGUAGE IS RELAXED, SPARE AND PERFECT.’

– JANE CAMPION,
THE GUARDIAN

Eloise Hay lives on the Starlight Peninsula. Every weekday she travels into the city to work at Q TV Studio. One night she receives a phone call that will change her life forever.

Thrown into the turmoil of a sudden marriage break-up, Eloise begins to perceive that a layer of the world has been hidden from her. Seeking answers, she revisits a traumatic episode from her past, and in doing so encounters an odd-eyed policewoman, a charismatic obstetrician, a German psychotherapist, and a flamboyant internet pirate wanted by the United States Government. Each of these characters will reveal something about the life of Eloise Hay, answering questions that she hasn’t, until now, had the courage to ask.

Tracing the lines that run through our society, from the interior life of one lonely young woman to the top tier of influence in the country, Charlotte Grimshaw’s powerful novel demonstrates how little separates us and how close we really are: rich and poor, famous and hidden, virtuous and criminal.

It was summer when everything changed. On hot stunned weekend mornings, Eloise Hay woke alone, left the house and walked clear across the Auckland isthmus, through green parks, over volcanic cones, in and out of suburban malls, past waterfront cafés and rows of rickety wooden houses, and gardens backed by corrugated-iron fences, spending whole days roaming into sunstruck corners of the sprawling city, the streets buffeted by warm wind, or silent under hot black cloud, or bathed in white light under an enamel sky. The bumpy asphalt sent up waves of heat retained from weeks of summer, the green shoulders of Rangitoto Island appeared and disappeared on the horizon.

From the edge of the crater on Mt Hobson she saw cloud shadows cross crazily fast and a plane slip over the edge of the earth, and walking
down the mountain track she had the sensation her head was not descending at the same rate as her body; it was lifting off, about to fly into the sky. She walked all day, sometimes not reaching home until the low sun was setting the windows along the peninsula on fire.

She said to her psychotherapist, ‘You know those mad people who never stop walking? Driving, you see them in one suburb then another.’

Dr Klaudia Dvorak was German. She had blonde hair, blue eyes and was very tall. Her special research interest was the study of phobias, but she also ran a private clinic in Herne Bay, for the mildly mad. She listened to Eloise, who said:

‘Weekdays I go to work, but in the weekend I wake up with one fixed idea: Sean is lost and I have to find him. So I walk. Saturdays, Sundays, that’s all I do. If I found him I’d probably punch him. But I can’t stop myself. It makes me feel as if …’

‘Yes?’

‘As if I’m an animal and this is instinct, and it’s beyond my control.’

They were silent, listening: cicadas sawed in the shimmering hot air, a lawnmower started up. An elderly woman crossed the grass in front of the French doors, carrying a pot plant.

‘So. Klaudia. Do you think that’s all we are? Just animals?’

Eloise Hay lived on the Starlight Peninsula. She caught the bus home from work in the evening, getting off on the main road and walking through a series of side streets to the land on the edge of the estuary. This land formed a strip between the sections and the shore, and she walked to her house, which was sixth in the row, passing the back gardens of her neighbours.

The suburb, close to the inner city, had been shabby but was now becoming fashionable, and all the houses but one were either brand-new, built on the site of demolished rentals, or were freshly, expensively renovated. The house next to hers on the main-road side was the exception. It was a disreputable rental, not yet sold off by the landlord to a private owner despite the high land value, a big, dingy stucco house,
two storeyed, with an unkempt garden and no permanent residents Eloise could make out, just a steady stream of people who came and went day and night. They didn’t bother Eloise except when they played loud music in the evening, but that didn’t happen very often. A one-eyed cat often lay on the concrete balcony at the front, and sometimes a tattooed girl sunbathed on the lawn.

Eloise walked home, carrying a bag of shopping. Hot wind combed the grass, washing blew on lines, there were diamonds of light on water shirred by the breeze that smacked down and spread like a hand pressed on the surface. Here the estuary narrowed to a creek as it wound inland, and on the other side of it lay the dog park. In the distance you could see the city buildings, to the east and west the row of houses, and out in the estuary where it opened into the sea the tide was rising, water meeting sky in a haze of shifting light.

When she passed her neighbours’ sections she kept her eyes forward, not looking at the lawns and decks and open ranch sliders. There were children playing, voices inside the houses, sprinklers throwing spirals of water over flowerbeds.

A child screamed. Eloise saw a small girl lying on the path, her tricycle tipped sideways, one wheel slowly spinning. From her sprawled position, cheek flat on the asphalt, her foot still on one up-ended pedal, the kid looked at her, motionless.

‘Are you all right?’ Eloise said.

But a woman in a yellow dress, a phone held in the crook of her neck, crossed the yard, swiftly and casually righted the tricycle, pulled the child up by one arm, slapped her not too hard on the bum and set her pedalling along the path again. She said intently into the phone, ‘No, he would say that. He
would
.’

Eloise walked away, hearing the slow squeak squeak of the tricycle wheels.

At the next-door house the neighbour was hanging sheets on a
clothesline. She had a full sleeve of tattoos on one arm and a series of coloured patterns inked on her neck, red and yellow stars and diamonds. Eloise waited for the usual glare. The girl paused with a peg in her hand and scowled and Eloise felt heat rise in her face. Well, same to you. The anger was unexpected.

She turned away and headed along to her property, which had an old gate that wasn’t attached to anything, no fence between her and the neighbours on the other side from the tattooed girl’s house. She looked up at the sky and her eyes burned — burned and stung. This weight dragging at her; it was the feeling she started to have at the end of every week. Because tomorrow was Friday.

A noise had stopped. Silence. Then it started again. An oily sound: snick snick. Someone clipping a hedge. A man appeared from behind a tree and stopped with the clippers held loosely in front of him. She had met him, once, out on the street when he’d introduced himself and said his name was Nick or Ned or Neil. Their eyes met, and because of feeling angry and because it was Friday tomorrow and she could barely face the thought of the weekend, she didn’t greet him and turn away without paying attention as she normally would. Instead she stared at him, hard, and he stared back.

‘So, picture it. This massive storm. Night time, pitch dark. Great booms of thunder. The flashes lit up the sky in a place where there were no clouds. And what I realised is this. The sky at night is blue. Bright blue. It’s just that you normally can’t see it because it’s
dark
.’

The make-up girl gave a fondly sarcastic smile, a little roll of the eyes. She was dabbing pancake on Ed Miles, the Minister of Justice, who was about to be interviewed about Andrew Newgate.

Scott Roysmith went on, ‘Great blue patches in the night sky. In the
blackness
.’

‘Amazing,’ the politician said.

Scott leaned on the door frame for a moment, blinked and said to Eloise, ‘Anyway. See you in ten.’ He went off along the corridor.

The make-up girl stepped back, gave a critical look, angled in again with her sponge. ‘His wonder of the world mood. It’s a Friday thing.’

‘Isn’t he always in that mood?’ Ed Miles tipped back his head and glared at the make-up girl who was thin and quite sexy, although her teeth sloped inward like a shark’s. The politician looked tired, dark circles under his eyes despite the pancake, also as if he’d like to put his hand on her narrow waist.

‘Scott Roysmith. He doesn’t smile, he
beams
. And that is why we love him.’ She turned his swivel chair around for him, definitely flirting. ‘Done.’

Eloise walked behind as Ed Miles was led to the green room, where he sat in front of the tray of snacks, scowling down at his phone, tapping the screen with clumsy fingers. There were beads of sweat on his nose. The green room was perhaps the least soothing place in the building, with its harsh light and dry air, the litter of paper cups and tissues, the slangy girl and boy assistants slouching through, the atmosphere of behind-the-scenes cynicism and cool and anti-glamour.

‘Can we get you anything?’ the assistant was asking.

The politician ignored her and looked at Eloise. He had a stillness about him that was unsettling.

He said, ‘What’s your name again?’

‘Eloise Hay.’

‘That’s right.’ His eyes were so pale it was hard to tell if they were green or blue.

She didn’t say, What’s right?

‘You work with Roysmith.’

The way he was staring unnerved her.

Eloise got out of there. She and Scott didn’t work here; they’d called in to the news side of the building so Scott could have a casual word in passing with Ed Miles. They’d made a documentary about Andrew Newgate, next they were going to film a piece about the internet
millionaire, Kurt Hartmann. Ed Miles had refused compensation for Newgate; no doubt he would refuse to comment about Hartmann.

She walked tentatively, taking care not to brush against the walls, hesitating before pushing the metal handle of the heavy swing door. The make-up girl, Naheed, tip-toed past. It was busy. Mariel Hartfield was preparing to read the news, and Naheed and others were starting to go after her. In this part of the complex, known as Q Wing, Mariel Hartfield would arrive and move about the corridors, and rustling respectfully behind her with their iPhones and tablets would follow various functionaries, her assistant, the waspish Selena, and sometimes her co-presenter Jack Anthony, elbowing his way through the crush.

At the exit door an ironic little pantomime took place between Jack Anthony and Ian the cameraman: ‘After you.’

‘No, after you.’

‘Christ, all right then. When are they going to …?’

And Jack Anthony swept through the door saying, ‘Cheers, mate. One for the team.’

Jack’s eyes now rested on Eloise, who was standing outside the staff cafeteria. He was variously described as ‘handsome’, ‘gorgeous’, ‘incredibly handsome’. The boy and girl assistants sometimes reached for alternatives: ‘awesome’, ‘hot’. He was tall and telegenic with a fleshy face and thick hair swept back off his forehead. Eloise saw his bland symmetry as a mask (those rubbery jowls) behind which might lurk, she speculated, something odd and possibly unpleasant, a powerful misogyny say, or a hidden liking for cruelty. It was whispered he was religious. She’d overheard him being unfashionably lenient about Fox News, also making approving noises about the American use of drones for extra-judicial killings (shrugging off the odd accidental frying of forty innocent villagers). But you couldn’t judge him on those pronouncements, because you could never tell whether he was serious.

He threw the odd quiet tantrum (he became cutting, sarcastic)
when people messed things up. Mariel Hartfield, according to her media profile, ‘maintained serenity through meditation and yoga’, but Eloise had seen her turn on Jack as if she were about to smack him in the mouth. When Jack got sarcastic, Mariel faced him down, the light went out of her eyes and she spoke very quietly. Their working relationship was supposed to be warm and easy-going, and that was how it came across during news broadcasts. But Eloise knew Mariel didn’t like Jack, and Jack was wary of Mariel — the way her eyes could turn to ice. Only Eloise had noticed; everyone else just believed the hype and bullshit put out by the network.

Eloise prided herself on being observant.

Mariel Hartfield, who was popular, guarded her privacy jealously, but a version of her life could be found in the pages of gossip magazines. She was featured in the current edition of the
Woman’s Weekly
, photographed by the pool at her ‘beautiful, architecturally designed haven’, where she lived with her partner, ‘hunky journalist, Hamish Dark’.

Eloise, along with everyone else, kept up with Mariel’s life while waiting in the supermarket queue. (But Eloise wasn’t everyone. She was an insider. And she was observant.)

This month, Mariel and Hamish were ‘talking weddings’ (he pressed her to marry, she valued her independence). This made a change from ‘thinking about baby number three’ or ‘discussing a renovation’. Currently, Hamish was installing a large tropical fish tank in their family home. Other documented activities included having arguments (frowning and gesticulating in public), being targeted by a troubled stalker, and shopping with their children ‘bubbly daughter Maxie’ and ‘sporty, curly-haired William’.

The couple’s romance began in Sydney, the magazine had revealed, where Mariel was a reporter at Channel Nine and Hamish was working for
The Sydney Morning Herald
. As soon as he met Mariel, he knew
she was The One, and wooed her with daily bunches of red roses. ‘The house looked like a florist’s shop,’ Mariel laughingly told the
Weekly
in its spread, the pages of which were coloured a garish pink.

Hamish Dark, a successful writer and prizewinning journalist ‘both in New Zealand and Australia and with wider interests elsewhere’, was a doting father to their children. What had first attracted Hamish to Mariel was her awesome beauty, specifically her amazing eyes.

And after that he was just blown away by her incredible mind.

Evading Jack Anthony, who was staring, Eloise walked out the door and crossed the forecourt to the opposite building: Z Wing. She took the stairs to Scott’s office, where they were scheduled to discuss upcoming interviews.
Roysmith
was a weekly show of supposedly hard-hitting current affairs, although they were forced by the network to cover a lot of human interest and fluff.

Scott was on the phone. She stood at his office window with its long view down the harbour. A ferry moved out from the wharf, the churning wake spreading behind it in a long white V. On the street a tall man with black hair and a thin, hawkish face walked past a mirror-fronted building and was reflected, through some trick of refraction, upside down. She watched the slanting, bubbled figure, legs scissoring in the air.

‘Christ,’ Scott said. ‘It’s outrageous.’

Watching the upside-down man, she signalled, Want a coffee? He nodded.

Eloise went to open a cupboard and hesitated, eyeing the metal handle unhappily.

‘I don’t believe this. I hear you, Terry. It’s actually malicious. All the more reason for us to … Yep, yep. Be in touch.’

He hung up, started pacing. ‘That was Terry.’

They’d spent a lot of time on Andrew Newgate, the convicted
murderer whose cause had been taken up by businessman Terry Carstone. After years of public campaigning and an appeal to the Privy Council, Newgate had been granted a retrial and acquitted. Now he was looking for compensation.

Scott said, ‘You know the new rumour doing the rounds — that Andrew caused his parents’ death when he was eleven, mind,
eleven
years old. Ridiculous. Well, now there’s another one: that Andrew’s being investigated for the murder of a girl who lived about twenty ks away from him when he was a teenager. It’s tabloid stuff.’

Eloise looked out and away. The ferry moving towards Rangitoto, the sun blazing through the tinted glass, and Scott’s reflection, furred with golden light, standing in the blue space out there, pacing on the air.

‘Terry’s livid. He’s looking at legal action.’

‘Again? He’s the king of defamation suits.’

‘The rumour about the parents, Terry says it’s based on a misunderstanding. Andrew was quoted years ago as saying he wasn’t in the car when it crashed, and then someone found out he
was
in the car, and that he’d been hospitalised with a head injury. And there was no explanation for the crash, blah, blah, straight road, good weather, broad daylight, sober driver, car just veers off into a ditch, so of course they start saying Andrew was a child psychopath and grabbed the wheel. Started killing young. Terry says Andrew never said he wasn’t in the car, that he was misquoted and it’s all gone from there. It’s malicious. It’s all to wreck his compensation claim.’

Scott picked up a long wooden ruler and hooked it behind the cupboard handle, flicking the door open.

‘Thanks,’ Eloise said. She took out two coffee mugs.

Scott rummaged in the mess on his desk. ‘I’ve lost my glasses. I must have left them at Q. What do you think of Ed Miles at close quarters?’

‘He watches. In silence. It’s disconcerting.’

‘His “quiet menace” act. It’s not an act. I wouldn’t like to be the PM
with Miles breathing down my neck. Anyway, re Newgate. Terry has concerns. He wants boundaries. He’s been so burned. So … let down.’

Eloise thought about Carstone, Newgate’s champion, the ‘campaigner for justice’. The ‘ball of energy’, with his roguish winks, his anecdotes of times when he’d ‘singlehandedly’ exposed injustice and conducted whole court cases, and stayed up all night writing submissions and negotiating, this (he continually implied) without the help of any lawyer. He was ‘battle-hardened’, ‘a bit of a rebel’, ‘fearless’ — it all gained greater accuracy when surrounded by inverted commas.

‘Did he mention money again?’

‘Terry? No! Terry’s not in it for the money. And what a brain. What a
mind
. The way he powers through the evidence, he’s got it all stored in his head. Ask him about any aspect of the case, he’ll come right out with it. He’s amazing. The energy of the guy …’

Eloise picked up the ruler and tried to prise open a drawer with it. She put the coffee cups down and said, ‘Actually, let’s go out for  coffee.’

‘Good idea. Let’s go out. Let’s get out of this death trap. Our side of the building’s the worst apparently. Selena came into my room with her hair standing on end. She said there was this huge click. And then a silver flare came off her stapler.’

‘Everyone’s on edge.’

‘Jack said there was a sort of St Elmo’s fire in the lift yesterday. People freaked. What are they doing about it, is what I want to know. People can’t work, they can’t focus. They don’t dare touch anything. They’re developing learned helplessness, like abused children …’

‘You all right?’ he asked five minutes later.

‘Fine,’ Eloise said.

They were on the back stairs, having decided against the lifts. In the foyer a group had gathered to discuss the state of the building. For a week now, staff in Z and Q wings had been terrorised by a strange
new hazard: static electric shocks. Every door handle and metal object had become a potential source of fright and pain. The working theory, tentatively put about by management, was that it had to do with renovations in the building next door. Some issue with wiring, with the electrics. Technicians moved about the building, gathered in groups, frowning and discussing.

Scott now said, ‘Thee and I are planning … a bit ambitious but the kids will …’

Eloise listened to him talk about his life: his clever photographer wife Theadora (he called her Thee) and the children, his daughters Sarah and Sophie and the third afterthought child, little Iris. He said things like, ‘When you have children, it’s like being in love all the time. Surrounded by love.’

He doesn’t smile, he beams
. Eloise smiled faintly. She thought about her own domestic scene: the wind combing the grass over the peninsula, the white sky filling the window of the upstairs bedroom, the melancholy cries of gulls over the dog park. The Saturdays. Even worse, the Sundays.

He said, ‘You and Sean got a nice weekend planned?’

Her whole body tingled. ‘A few things. Nothing special.’

Later, on her way out, Eloise called in to Q Wing looking for Scott’s lost glasses. She inspected herself in the harsh light of the mirrored room. People passed in the corridor; there was a general rush, someone speaking urgently and angrily about a delay. There was a line of dresses and jackets hanging on a rail; she tried a few against herself, too frilly, too shiny, not her style.

Should she change everything about herself?

The connecting door to the next room was slightly open and she heard a cough, voices.

Through the crack in the door, Eloise looked at Mariel and Jack
Anthony facing each other. Mariel leaned forward and rested her forehead on his shoulder. He stood for a moment, then took her by both arms and pushed her back and looked at her. Neither said anything.

Eloise raised her fingers to the door handle. There was a painful snap and she whipped her hand away, stumbling against a chair. They both turned. Jack Anthony walked across and closed the door, and Eloise hurried out of the room.