The Name on the Door is Not Mine Read online

  ‘Cheri.’ She is speaking into his ear—he can feel her hair against his cheek. ‘Réveille-toi. Wake, darling.’

  She shakes him gently. He can hear sirens now. ‘Something is happening.’

  ‘Some-sing?’ he murmurs, imitating her.

  They are on the eighth floor and their room is in darkness, but light comes in from outside. Naked, they go to the window.

  There is a fire in the next-door hotel, the San Franciscan. It seems to be on the floor exactly opposite theirs, and the one above. Elevators are not working and fire has cut access by the stairs, trapping those in the two top floors who have not already escaped. Corridors are filling with smoke. People are shouting down into the street, some unfurling useless ropes of knotted sheets. In a room directly opposite a man, very calm, very orderly, goes to the window and looks down, goes to the door and looks out into the smoke-filled corridor, picks up the phone and speaks, sorts things in his room, returns to the window and looks down where two ladder trucks have arrived.

  The ladders ascend. Soon rows of dark huddled figures are climbing out, helped by firefighters. Some people have to be encouraged, almost forced, but the line keeps moving. There is less noise now as they clamber down the eight or nine floors to the street. Other firefighters wearing masks are up there with hoses. Some appear to have the job of breaking every window on the two top floors. Panes, smashed out, crash down to a street now full of police cars, fire trucks, ambulances, and a small late-night crowd held back behind a police line. There are shouts of encouragement, cheers, flashlights.

  He stands behind her at the window and feels her begin to push back against him, moving from side to side. He looks down. She is leaning forward, legs apart, arms forward, propping against the sill. The vaguely diffused light from the night city gleams on the perfect white curve of her buttocks. She turns her head to look at him. She is like some lovely animal. ‘Do it, mon vieux,’ she says. He thinks of Miró—the beasts as a mirror of man.

  He tries, spreading his feet wide, bending at the knees, but his legs are too long. He can’t quite get in under, and up.

  On the floor there are two books of the San Francisco telephone directory. She moves them into place and stands on them. ‘Now,’ she says. ‘Do it.’

  He does. Flames are licking out through the smashed window of what was the orderly man’s room. He sees fire through the wild aureole of her hair. The smell of smoke has begun to reach into their room. Shouts come up from the street, where the whirling lights of the fire trucks spiral round and round. Glass continues to crash down. Men dressed as for a space-walk can be seen moving from room to room, in and out of patches of light.

  Someone still left on the top floor yells for help, and the spacemen turn and look at one another and lumber off in the direction of the cry.

  ‘Harder,’ she says. ‘Harder!’

  He drives up into her with more force, grunting, thighs slapping upward against buttocks and the back of her legs. She is lifted with the force of each thrust.

  ‘Harder,’ she says.

  NEXT MORNING THEY HAD room-service bring them an early breakfast. He had the television on without the sound, looking at images of the fire next door, when she said, ‘Mon cher, today you must confirm.’

  ‘Confirm?’

  ‘The purchase, darling. The Miró.’

  ‘Ze pur-chase, duh-leeeng.’

  She cuffed his head—and he was himself aware that imitating (and exaggerating) her accent was less amusing each time it was repeated. ‘I’m serious,’ she said. ‘You must sign the paper. Put down a deposit.’

  He rolled over and looked at her. ‘I can’t buy the Miró.’

  ‘Why not? You like it. You want it.’

  ‘I don’t have the money.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Well, let’s say I have it but I need it.’ He saw her expression and decided to make it clear. ‘I mustn’t accumulate … things. That’s all. I’m on the road, honey.’

  ‘You could make a profit.’

  ‘If I sold. But would I? I don’t know the market, the dealers … Look, I’ve thought about it, carefully. The Miró’s lovely. But not for me. Not this time.’ In case there should be doubt he added, ‘That’s final, Catherine. It has to be.’

  It was as if she had been shot out of the bed by the release of a spring. Naked, her face set hard in an expression he had not seen before, she fumbled to put on her bra. ‘So it was all a lie.’

  ‘What was?’

  She didn’t reply—she was too angry—and he asked again: ‘What was a lie?’

  ‘All this.’ She waved a hand at the bed that was like a battlefield. ‘All this fucking me …’

  Silence, until he said, in a voice that sounded strained and weak, ‘You mean you fucked me so I would …’

  She was not listening. She had found her underpants. Now she dragged her skirt over them. The face was still hard, but there were tears. ‘You are not a man of honour.’

  ‘A man of … Jesus! Did you think I was the baker? Did you fuck me for a cake?’

  Silence. She had dragged her shirt on and was tucking it in, roughly so there were creases and lumps. She went to the mirror to look at her tears and touch them with her finger.

  ‘What do you get for making a sale, Catherine? A commission? Ten per cent?’

  No answer.

  ‘Is that what you’re worth? Ten per cent of four seven five zero? Four hundred and seventy-five bucks? For three days of heavy sex? What’s that? One five eight a night? Is that how I’m supposed …’

  That was off the top of his head. He would check later on a pad and be surprised to find his heat-of-the-moment arithmetic was good.

  He got out of bed, his movements expressing indignation, displaying it. In his travel bag he found his chequebook. He went to the table and wrote her the cheque—held it out to her. ‘Take it.’

  She was standing looking down at it. He did not think of it as the payment of a debt—did not really expect that she would accept it. It was a way of making clear to her …

  She took it, read the figures, folded it, and tucked it into her pocketbook.

  HE HAD A WINDOW SEAT . Down there the arid landscape of Southern California rolled and lifted away towards the mountains, with here and there startling green patches where irrigation water had been pumped in from the north. Through the windows on the opposite side he caught the broad glare of afternoon sunlight striking off the ocean. They had just begun the long descent into Los Angeles.

  His tray table was down and there was a postcard lying on it. He had addressed it, and written ‘Dear Greg’.

  Greg was the brother who had sent a card saying all was well, life was boring, the government was going to fall, and ‘tell me about sex in America!’

  He remembered now what she’d said when he asked, ‘What was it like with the baker?’

  The baker, she said, was nice. But he was—not old, but not a young man either, and they had done it standing up in the back of the shop. When it was over he had slumped to the floor and removed his tall white baker’s hat. She had never seen him without it. He was bald, and there were beads of sweat shining on his brow.

  ‘He was very nice,’ she said. ‘Very sympathique, that baker. But I would never let him do it to me again. I was afraid I might kill him.’

  In small neat spider-letters he wrote on the card, ‘Have just spent three beautiful nights with a lovely French mercenary. Won’t see her again. Thought I was after (your phrase) sex in America. Feel now as if I’m in love. Can you explain that, little brother?’

  Anxiety

  I’D HAD A SUCCESSFUL trip to several South American countries and was boarding a Lan Air flight back to Auckland from Santiago, flying Economy as I always do, but reflecting that if my company, Preston Products, went on like this, bringing in new overseas orders, I would soon be able to think about an upgrade to Business. The time hadn’t arrived when we would be instructed to switch our electronic g
adgets to flight mode, or off, and I was catching up with a few messages. There were several old ones from Mahinarangi Marsden, signed Lucy Matariki, the name she’d recently taken. I regretted the change. Maori words very often have several meanings, sometimes quite distinct, and Mahinarangi could mean (or in my free translation I might read it as) ‘gift of the sky’. But equally I could see it as ‘maker of songs’—and among her many talents that’s what she was. I liked both versions, and the sense that I did not have to choose: she could be both.

  But I had to admire the cleverness of her reasons. Matariki, she had explained, was that little star cluster, the Pleiades, and its appearance in the night sky of mid-June marked the beginning of the Maori new year—the shortest day, the exact equivalent of St Lucy’s Day in the northern hemisphere. It was the dark point after which (though the days might sometimes get colder) everything would slowly improve—days would get longer, nights shorter. ‘If winter comes can spring be far behind’ was what it meant. So the new name, Lucy Matariki, was combining her Maori and her Pakeha heritages. But she cast a slightly grim light—or darkness—over this change when she told me there was always, in her mind and in her life, a doubt about whether the light would really return. So I would rather have been able to think of her as the gift of the sky and maker of songs than as our Maori St Lucy, the blind girl (as she was in the northern hemisphere mythology) representing mid-winter’s day.

  Mahina (as everyone still called her) had been our most useful IT person—very eccentric, often unsettling in the office, with great swings between what I, in my layman’s shorthand, called her manic and depressive phases. She once told me she had been officially designated as ‘somewhat bi-polar’—and we had both laughed at that word ‘somewhat’. There were times when I had to warn her to ease off, quieten down, even take a day or two off work, because she was unsettling the staff. I sometimes grumbled and even thought of being rid of her. But she was a constant source of entertainment. And finally, and I suppose most importantly from an employer’s point of view, her work was always good. She could do things with computers which none of the rest of us in our little company was capable of. She was our mad, indispensable Mahina.

  She was a frightful sentimentalist, so full of the milk of human kindness, and the honey as well, I had to protest and tease her about it. But I was careful too, aware that she was precarious. I treated her gently and with respect. In fact I’m afraid I rather prided myself on being ‘good with her’, able to handle her, manage her, get the best out of her—and though there was an element of delusion in this, it can’t have been entirely wrong or I’m sure she would not have stayed with us as long as she did.

  I believe I was the employer who lasted (who endured her, others would have said) longest. In the end she left, not to go to a rival firm offering more money for the same work, but to an organisation that helped people with (as they were described) ‘mental issues’—people like Mahina herself who’d had a period of hospitalisation and treatment and were out in the community again. They were such lovely people she said, hearts of gold every one; and she insisted on taking me to their office to meet them. It struck me as a scene out of Dickens. Just a normal office, but in which the jolly ones were jollier and noisier, the glum ones glummer and more withdrawn—normality, you could call it, but with a very broad brush. And it was clear they all loved Mahina, and she was happy there.

  But the emails between us continued after she left, sometimes brief and infrequent, others (at least from her end) copious. Why did I keep it up—or allow her to? It was in part an addiction I suppose, because her messages could be very clever and original, and she got something out of me that no one else could. It was also a feeling of friendship and responsibility. So though I saw her seldom now, I thought I could have told anyone who wanted to know—a doctor, for example—pretty exactly how her inner landscape was looking from one day to the next.

  Lately that landscape had been dark. She’d told me she was full of fears which had caused her to move some of the furniture in her bedroom against a door that opened on to a deck overlooking the garden. She said, too, that she suspected someone might be trying to poison her so she was being careful about what she ate.

  I suggested she might want to report to the psychiatric ward that had treated her before, to receive some therapy and drugs. But she wouldn’t do that. She said the rooms there were bugged and the bugs were bugged in turn by beings from outer space—she sent it like that, in italics. She told me these things in a way that made it clear they were jokes. But I knew by now there was a part of her mind that believed them—that’s why she was scared. It was a question of which part of the brain was in charge at any one moment. If I’d known people she trusted out of her past I might have alerted them. I knew she’d been married and divorced, but to whom, and what their relations were now, I had no idea.

  She told me she was hearing voices too; and that one she called the Bad Voice was sinister, and sometimes threatening. This was where I persuaded myself I’d been useful. I adopted the calm, reasonable, unsurprised tone of the practical man. ‘Use my name, Mahina,’ I told her. ‘Tell the Bad Voice that Peter Preston says it should go away’—my italic matching hers.

  That had been my last message, sent in fact from Medellín in Colombia, once the murder capital of the world and still a dangerous city, where my focus had been on staying close to our small party, taking care not to be robbed, or kidnapped for ransom, and where the trauma hospital had a sign in Spanish which meant, ‘We never close’. Paranoia seemed hardly possible in Medellín: any threat or danger might be real, and every fear reasonable. That, I suppose, might have been part of the reason for my taking Mahina’s anxieties less seriously than I would have at home: I was in a state of anxiety myself.

  But at this moment, waiting to taxi out for take-off at Santiago, there was nothing new from her. I skimmed other messages, then turned my attention to my fellow travellers and recognised the anxiety of a woman across the aisle from me. She might have been trying for some minutes to catch my eye. Could I just stand up, she asked me, and see if there were two engines on the wing on our side or just one. I stood up and could see only one. I thought probably there was a second, out of sight forward of and below the window—though there are plenty of these wide-bodied jetliners now that have only one on each wing. But since I could see she was anxious, and that it was important to her, I confirmed there were two out there on our side. ‘And no doubt two on the other,’ I joked.

  ‘Oh yes, thank you,’ she said. ‘I’m such a bad traveller.’ She was very handsome, of indeterminate age, plus or minus forty, a real-estate agent in California, she told me, formerly married to a man from Transylvania—‘And please,’ she added, ‘don’t make the usual joke.’

  I assured her I wouldn’t, though it’s probable that only a hesitation about how to frame it (‘Madame Nosferatu, I presume?’ or perhaps ‘Countess Dracula?’) had prevented me.

  ‘It’s like names,’ I said. ‘You can’t make a joke about a person’s name that they haven’t heard before a dozen times.’

  I foresaw a lot of chatter as we crossed the vast unbroken reaches of the South Pacific, and took out the book, a thick thriller, behind which I planned a protective retreat.

  My attention however was now drawn to a woman in late middle age who was telling a steward of uncommon Latin American good looks that she was somewhat breathless and would he bring her a glass of water so she could take her pills? He was back in a moment, leaning over her, attentive, producing such an effect that I felt it must be a game he liked playing, inducing in an older woman the illusion that he might be the devoted son she didn’t have—or even the young lover, the man of her secret dreams. She was breathless now indeed, with the thrill of it. He exercised a practised, and even cynical, talent, full of charm and subtlety, while her husband sat stone-faced beside her, ignoring the pantomime which he had no doubt seen before, but seldom, I’m sure, played by such an artist.

 
But it went on just too long. Now she was truly agitated, and complained of a pain in her chest. The steward’s smile faded, he seemed to drift away from her, and a moment later was back with his senior, a commanding female who bent over asking questions I couldn’t hear, which the traveller, though still panting delicately, dismissed. She was fine, quite recovered. It had been just a momentary thing …

  But it was too late. The mention of chest pain had been a mistake. Combined with breathlessness, and pills, it could not be ignored.

  ‘She’s quite all right,’ her husband said, gruff, frowning, displeased. ‘She gets angina—that’s all. I assure you, there’s nothing wrong with my wife.’

  But already the call had gone over the intercom for a doctor—and soon two appeared, an Australian woman and a younger New Zealand man. They bent over the now unhappy centre of attention, one taking her pulse, the other questioning. After a few minutes they moved away, nearer to my seat, to talk out of earshot. I pretended to be absorbed in my book.

  The Australian didn’t believe there was anything seriously wrong. The New Zealander wasn’t so sure. Probably not; but did they want to be responsible if they were five thousand miles out over the ocean, with nowhere for a landing, and the old girl’s heart …

  So it went back and forth, and in the end they agreed they should play safe.

  They returned to her and explained that in the interests of her health and the welfare of all they’d decided she should have tests. There were very good hospitals in Santiago that would check her over and she would soon be on her way again.

  This was no part of the poor woman’s plan and she protested. She was soon in tears, insisting she was quite well, pleading. The senior cabin staff, then the captain, finally two security guards were brought in to reason with her. When she flatly refused to budge she was told her luggage had already been removed from the hold. A wheelchair was brought and she was taken weeping away, followed by her husband, whose rage was silent but unmistakeable. He was white with it.