Demons Read online

  ‘Know what we’re doing?’ I repeated.

  ‘Yes. Your friendship - your relationship, if you want to put it like that . . .’

  ‘What about it?’ I asked, not answering directly and probably sounding very impolite, but I really was getting quite jumpy.

  ‘Well, don’t you think it might be a little premature?’

  ‘Premature?’ I said, starting to sound like an echo.

  ‘You’re both still at high school.’

  ‘Our last year,’ I said. ‘I’m seventeen and Chris is eighteen.’

  ‘I know how old he is,’ his father said. ‘I accept

  you’re both mature and you think you know what

  you’re doing. The truth is though you’re both still

  rather young in other ways. If I may say so, too young.’ He laughed nervously. Maybe he was as wound up as I was.

  ‘You know that Chris . . . you both . . . have so much future ahead of you. So much at stake. So much to lose if you aren’t . . . aren’t careful.’

  This was going a bit far. If he wanted to discuss sex he’d better talk to his son. But I was wrong. He didn’t have sex on his mind.

  ‘It’s important to protect your futures,’ he said, ‘and not let relationships get in the way of making good decisions about the years ahead. Christopher . . .’

  ‘Wants to travel.’

  ‘Yes, and he’s set his mind on further study as well.’

  ‘He’s told me. He’s going to do a classics degree first.’

  Mr Stuart smiled. ‘That’s been his ambition since he was quite little,’ he said.

  ‘I’m cool about that,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sure you are. Look Andrea, I’ll speak plainly.’

  ‘I wish you would,’ I said. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but.’

  ‘I know. I’m not the world’s most effective communicator,’ he said, ‘not when it comes to matters of the . . . the heart but I’ve always expected that Chris will go to university, do well, go on to higher study hopefully. To succeed.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘All of which takes considerable time and commitment. Intense friendships can often get in the

  way, become conflicting commitments. The way I see

  it there’s plenty of time for that later on, isn’t there?

  For commitment I mean. Afterwards. Don’t you think?’

  I took a deep breath. ‘Do you think I’m a distraction to Chris?’ I asked aware that I was speaking louder than before, getting angry even. ‘Are you saying we should cool it, stop seeing each other so that he can work harder? Are you saying that I’m bad for him?’

  He stood up quickly. ‘I’m simply thinking about Christopher and his future.’

  ‘What about my future?’ I asked, standing up as well. I was taller than him. ‘Didn’t you think I might be going to uni too? That Chris might be a distraction for me?’

  ‘Then you understand what I’m trying to say.’

  ‘No I don’t understand. We like -’ I didn’t used the word love, it seemed an emotion Chris’s father might find too hard to understand in the present circumstances - ‘each other a lot. We get on. We have things in common.’

  I heard Chris coming down the stairs and found myself backing out of the room into the hallway where I could see him, shiny and clean with his familiar goofy grin on his face.

  ‘You look fab. . .’ he began.

  ‘Tell him what you’ve told me,’ I said to his father.

  ‘Have I missed something?’ Chris said.

  ‘Ask him,’ I said. ‘He’s just ruined your birthday for us.’

  ‘Christopher knows my thoughts on the subject,’ his father said. ‘Just think on it, that’s all I’m saying.’

  And he put on his coat and went out the door.

  United we stand

  I parked the car in a metered space beside the river. It was lucky we found one empty so close. The winter’s night was cold although not as bitter as some other nights had been. The wind was blowing from the east instead of the cold Antarctic south. Ironically, as I sat shivering in the car, I remembered that earlier in the day there had even been a hopeful feel of spring in the air.

  Lots of other people were about while the restaurants along the riverbank, spotted as we’d driven past, were buzzing.

  ‘I’m sorry about all that,’ said Chris.

  We’d hardly spoken a word as I drove into town.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ I said eventually. ‘Or was it? He said you knew what he was talking about.’

  ‘I never took him too seriously,’ said Chris. ‘I thought he was just being over conscientious. But I guess it’s more than that. Maybe it’s a deep-seated, thwarted ambition. Everyone’s got a demon of one sort or another on their shoulder. I know Dad wanted to go to uni himself but his father died when he was young and he had to leave school to start work. He did his planning qualifications at night school. It wasn’t what he wanted but it was the best he could do. When Mum left he gave up any plans he had to do more study. Had to look after me on his own.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I’d known Chris’ mum had left them years ago and that Chris, like me, was an only child. I hadn’t known the details or what the impact had been on Chris’ father.

  ‘I don’t talk about it much,’ said Chris.

  ‘He wants to fulfill himself through you?’ I said.

  ‘Maybe. But I’ll do what I want to do, for me not for Dad.’

  ‘And us being together, is that what you want?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be here otherwise.’

  ‘But what about later?’ I asked. ‘What if I don’t end up going to uni? We could drift apart, still be different, but different from each other as well as everybody else.’

  ‘It won’t make any difference. We won’t let it.’

  ‘We are young,’ I said. ‘Your Dad was right about that. What if all this is too soon? What if . . .’

  I didn’t finish my sentence. I had been going to say, what if we had gone too far, too fast? What if we’d abandoned things that weren’t ready to be left behind?

  To tell the truth I didn’t really know myself what I meant by that. Even though I felt reassured by what Chris said I also felt a gripping, gnawing sadness deep within, like the wrench of a period on its way.

  At the same time I also wanted to move ahead.

  ‘I was going to tell you that you looked fabulous in that dress,’ Chris said.

  ‘You’re the second person to say that.’

  ‘Really? Who was the first?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘Are you still hungry?’

  ‘Starving.’

  ‘Let’s go and eat then,’ I said.

  Food for thought

  The South Bank was a block away from where I’d parked the car, hidden behind a bend in the river. When we walked round the bend the first thing we saw was a knot of people on the footpath, spilling onto the road. They were making a lot of noise, chanting something and I saw that several were holding placards.

  Uh-oh, I thought. The scene was familiar. It was

  like one of the many photos in Mum and Dad’s protest albums. A demo. But what was it about and why was it going on outside our restaurant?

  ‘What’s it about?’ said Chris.

  ‘Beats me,’ I replied. ‘But we’ll soon find out.’

  The protestors were blocking the entrance to the restaurant. Diners like us, also dressed in their going-out best, were not being allowed to step inside. They were getting as angrily vocal as the protestors.

  ‘We’ve bloody well booked!’ a man said, a solidly built guy who looked extremely unhappy and unlikely to retreat without a fight.

  ‘Sorry,’ said one of the protestors, ‘but we’re asking people to support us by boycotting the restaurant.’

  The ranks of the protestors closed up even more tightly.

  ‘You’re telling us not asking. Get out of the way!’

  ‘What’s i
t about?’ Chris asked the big guy. He looked down at us, saw how we were dressed and said. ‘Bloody idiots,’ referring, I assumed, to the protestors and not to us. ‘Read their signs. It’s all a load of crap.’

  We hadn’t read the placards yet.

  DON’T EAT ON SACRED GROUND.

  THIS PLACE IS TAPU.

  BONES BEFORE BREAD.

  ‘But what does it mean?’ Chris asked again. I shrugged, instinctively slipping my bone pendant into the front of my dress. I was starting to feel even colder.

  Chris’s question was overheard by one of the protest leaders, a tall, lanky man wearing a thick jersey and beanie. I thought I glimpsed a small silver

  cross in a fold of his jersey but I couldn’t be sure.

  ‘They’ve been replacing one of the old floors in preparation for extending the restaurant,’ he said loudly above the swell of sound. ‘Found the remains of an old Maori burial ground. Refuse to close the restaurant while it’s being investigated.’

  Chris turned to me. ‘What’re we going to do? You’ve booked you said. It’s not fair we can’t get in.’

  Everything was conspiring against us tonight. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

  But the big guy had overheard Chris and it seemed to inflame him even more.

  ‘You’re right there mate! Well, I’ve just about had enough of this. I know what I’m going to fucking well do!’

  He made a random swing at the man who had spoken to Chris, missing him but causing him to sway back on his feet so that he almost toppled over. The rest of the protestors swelled towards the big guy, pushing him away. At the same time his supporters surged forward. If we hadn’t been standing on the edge of the crowd it would have been like being caught in a riptide. It was getting nasty and out of hand, fast. I saw someone with a cell phone start to make a call. They didn’t need to. The police arrived at that very moment, no doubt already alerted by the restaurant owners.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said again.

  We slipped away as the police broke up the potential fight. There was a Pizza2Go nearby so we went there instead. We’d both lost our appetites for more fancy fare.

  Players in a scene

  ‘At least we raised the dress status of Pizza2Go,’ said

  Chris.

  We were back at his place much earlier than we’d expected. Chris’s father was still out, at a Council planning hearing said Chris. ‘Those meetings can go on forever.’

  ‘I’m sorry about how it turned out,’ I said. ‘Your birthday in worse ruins than the Tower of the Winds.’

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘I’m a great fan of ruins.’

  ‘Another time perhaps,’ I said, finding it hard to smile.

  ‘But somewhere else,’ said Chris. ‘Not the South Bank. On reflection I don’t fancy the idea of having a meal in a cemetery.’

  ‘Me neither,’ I said.

  ‘How could they do that, just carry on as if it was nothing?’ said Chris. ‘Imagine if someone you knew had been buried there and other people were dropping bits of food onto them.’

  ‘I know. I agree.’

  ‘Are you happy?’ he asked me out of the blue.

  ‘Yes. I think I am,’ I said. ‘Despite everything. Are you?’

  ‘Yep,’ he said.

  I went off into a bit of a dream.

  I thought about Becs, the way she had looked at me wearing her dress. Then the way she looked whenever she talked about Ms Shapiro. I had thought it was because she despised lesbians but tonight, reflecting on what she had said (or, rather, hadn’t said) it occurred to me that it might have been more anger than aversion. Anger because the opposite of aversion was true and she didn’t want it to be that way, wasn’t ready yet to admit who she truly was.

  I thought about masks. They complicated life.

  We had our own names and unique personalities but inside us dwelt multiple possibilities. We could call ourselves other names, pretend to be who we wanted to be, who we weren’t, who people thought we were, who people wanted us to be. It was called acting and we were all actors, some part of every day. I couldn’t be positive about who the true Becs was but I was pretty sure it wasn’t the Becs I had first met.

  Chris, on the other hand, I felt more confident about. He was Chris, the guy I’d fallen for, had shared pizzas and birthdays with. He was Christopher, his father’s son, who carried his father’s dreams (or his demons) on his shoulders, whether he chose to or not. He was also Chris, a rational and irreligious ancient Greek.

  I was Andrea McNamara but had been, at different times, a pretend Catholic priest, a potential youth group leader, an inventor named Andronicus, nicknamed Andy. A girl as well as a boy, an androgynous, ambiguous being.

  And that night, for the first time, both Chris and I put on entirely different masks and played new, exciting and previously unexplored roles.

  STRANGE MEETING

  ‘Was it good?’ I ask, once we’ve ordered out food. ‘Being away for all that time? Doing what you wanted to do?’

  I deliberately put the emphasis on ‘you’ and ‘wanted’.

  ‘Yeah, it was great. Really great.’

  ‘So tell me about it. Tell me about the graffiti. Did you write what you said you would?’

  ‘You remembered that! Out of everything else.’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten anything.’

  ‘I did. In ancient Greek of course so it wasn’t immediately obvious that it was modern me.’

  ‘Then you were falsifying history,’ I say. ‘You’re a fraud.’

  He glances at the table top, around at the other diners, at the pigeons cooing in the guttering, at the carved heads above the drainpipes. Anywhere but directly at me. ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Did you think I would have forgotten?’ I ask.

  ‘Course not,’ he says. He shakes his head, his hair flying. For an instant I have the impression he’s about to begin snarling like the MGM lion in old movies but he simply says, rather meaninglessly, ‘Hey, but anyway, it’s great bumping into you like this.’

  ‘Like the fates twisting their whatevers?’

  ‘I guess. Do you remember their names.’

  I shake my head. ‘You’ve got me there.’

  ‘Klotho, Lachesis, Atropos.’

  ‘When you say that,’ I ask, ‘do you see them in English or in Greek letters.’

  ‘Greek,’ Chris confesses.

  ‘Smart arse.’

  ‘At least I’m keeping that part real. I can’t help it.’

  ‘What? Being a smart arse?’

  He just shrugs. ‘It’s a small world. Fancy meeting you today.’

  ‘This is a small place in a small world,’ I say. ‘The odds of meeting someone you know, or once knew, are high.’

  ‘Still . . .’

  Still. Yes, I know what he means. I didn’t expect to meet him either.

  Sipping coffee across a table, waiting for the salad to arrive, we both become shy and uncertain, as

  it was at the beginning. As it was at the beginning until I became Chloe and he became Daphnis and we, like them, finally began our dance around the meaning of Love, learning its complex and ambiguous language written in an unfamiliar script.

  Daphnis and Chloe

  Chris’s room, above the garage. I’d been up there before. Occasionally, and lately more often, we’d kissed and carried on a bit, nothing too serious, too irretrievable.

  How far is too far? I think that might have been another one of Father Wright’s youth group questions from long ago. I don’t remember that very much discussion resulted from it. Everyone felt far too embarrassed.

  The room was linked to the main house by a narrow corridor above the driveway. Going from the house to his room we stopped on this airy bridge and Chris said, before we kissed, ‘The Bridge of Sighs in Venice. Imagine.’

  To be honest I didn’t know what he was talking about. But did it matter? No.

  ‘More like the eye of a needle,’
I said, equally cryptically. ‘But they’re only for camels. Come on.’

  A book rested, closed, on the low table beside his bed. I picked it up. Daphnis and Chloe. A translation.

  ‘It’s an ancient Greek novel,’ Chris said.

  ‘Should I be surprised, O Classics Geek?’

  ‘Don’t mock. I’ll always be one. You’ll have to put up with it.’

  ‘I wasn’t mocking,’ I said. ‘Honestly. What’s the book about?’

  ‘Two teenagers, like us.’

  Chris started to describe the plot. Sometimes, at

  times like those, I could hardly believe he was for real. I wished I hadn’t asked.

  ‘They’ve been abandoned by their parents and brought up by slaves to look after sheep and goats. They meet and fall in love, but . . .’

  ‘But what?’

  Chris took the book from me. His hand was warm on my hand. It shook slightly. My heart was shaking, too, but who could tell?

  ‘They’re so innocent, they don’t know what to do about it, being in love, so this old guy called Philetas passes on some advice, the advice he’s already been given by the god Pan.’

  ‘He’s not a pervert, this old guy, is he? Sounds like one.’

  Chris read from the book. ‘There’s no cure for love: not in drinking, not in eating, not in singing songs. Not unless you kiss and embrace and lie together with naked bodies.’

  He stopped, looking up from the page.

  A challenge? An invitation? Telling me the plot was his plot. But the truth was I didn’t need either a challenge or an invitation. I didn’t care any more about the deliberateness of it all. All I knew is that I wanted what he was describing. We’d missed out on the main course but there was still the promise of a delicious dessert.

  How do you know that what your conscience is saying to you isn’t the voice of the devil? Was the devil a demon sitting on my shoulder? What was, what were, my demons?

  How far was too far?

  If there was going to be guilt, we were both guilty.

  ‘We’ve kissed,’ I said.

  ‘And embraced,’ he said.

  ‘Dim the lights,’ I said.

  Naked bodies are often cold bodies. I discovered this as we stripped off in Chris’s room above the garage. Maybe it was the cold of uncertainty, of nervousness, of fear, of all these things. Or maybe it was simply caused by the fresh easterly breeze that slid between the ill-fitting wooden window frames and laid cold fingers on our skin.