Twenty-Four Hours Read online

  “…’tis too horrible!

  The weariest and most loathed worldly life

  That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment

  Can lay on nature is a paradise

  To what we fear of death.”

  “Home sweet home,” said Leona a little wearily, interrupting his thoughts.

  “Well, almost!” said Ursa. “Turn right into Moncrieff Street. Here!” she added, though Ellis had already recognised Moncrieff Street, one of the oldest roads in the city. These days it was part of the grid of one-way streets around the city centre.

  Fastened across the window of a darkened shop, Ellis saw a white sheet with words painted on it. Party! Land-of-Smiles! said the blue letters, rough but clear. Ursa groaned.

  “Did you see that?” she said to Leona. “Can’t I go out for an evening without …”

  But now they were skirting the Moncrieff Road cemetery, an historic landmark. Tall, and sometimes broken, gravestones rose, like pale admonishing fingers from beyond a low, stone wall. Someone had sprayed the words Anarchy rules, OK? on the stones – possibly one of the three children in baggy clothes briefly seen as they darted up a path and into the darkness under old trees.

  “The glue gang!” Ursa said, in the absent-minded voice of someone checking off landmarks as she returned to familiar territory. “Is Terry Stamp still hanging out with Jason these days?” She asked this question without seeming to expect any answer. “Three blocks down and turn to the left,” she added, speaking directly to Ellis this time. “It’s a skinny little street – Garden Lane – so don’t drive too fast and miss it.”

  High in the city air, a bright sign flashed on and off. A blonde woman was beckoning with a jerking arm, swinging one bare leg out and back, out and back. Her scarlet mouth widened in a smile then shrank back into a pursed, electric kiss. Ellis drove towards this spasmodic beauty. Beneath her jittering leg was a lighted doorway through which people were either coming or going. And then they were past her, cruising between two lines of largely darkened shop windows. It’s Never Too Late For Breakfast, said a flashing sign. The Southern Grenadier, proclaimed another sign – old, square lettering across the front of a grimy hotel.

  “There! Turn there!” said Ursa pointing.

  Ellis turned the car yet again, this time into a narrow street crowded with houses that were not only old but visibly disintegrating. The lingering twilight, which had seemed so pure out on the plains, had taken on a smeared and grubby quality. On either side he saw rusting roofs, broken fences, and gateposts guarded by long grasses.

  “And now to the left again. It’s really a right-of-way for pedestrians … but people don’t mind if you drive along it. Take it easy, though!”

  Everything around them was so shabby that Ellis felt conscious of the shine on his mother’s car, reflecting light from the street lamps. A long, low building shaped like the letter ‘E’ with its middle stroke missing, seemed to advance wearily through the twilight. Coloured letters flashed in the air above it. A stream of scarlet, electric arrows leaped like frightened fish, arching over and emphasising the blue and green letters below. THE AND-OF- MILES, announced the sign. There was no gate and no fence. LAND-OF-SMILES MOTEL a second dingy sign elaborated at the gate in letters rather more reliable than the electric ones.

  “Home, sweet home.” It was Ursa who spoke this time. “Look, thanks for bringing us back, and sorry about the complications. Like a cup of coffee, after all that?”

  Ellis hesitated. In the silence he heard rackety music beating in from somewhere.

  “Do come!” said Leona. “It sounds as if we’ve got a houseful already, but we can find a peaceful place somewhere.”

  “The gang’s here!” said Ursa gloomily. “As always!”

  Ellis almost said that he’d better be getting home – indeed, he’d been thinking of home with pleasure – and yet, within a breath, the words he was shaping in the back of his mouth twisted on his tongue and came out saying something that surprised him much more than they surprised anyone else.

  “Great! OK to leave the car here?” After all, in spite of everything that had happened, it was still early. Not even half-past eight, yet.

  “Safer than some places,” Ursa said, smiling and sketching the sign of the cross in the air with her finger.

  8.25 pm – Friday

  Following Ursa and Leona in at the front door, Ellis was immediately aware that the Land-of-Smiles Motel, though it was no longer used as a motel, was haunted by its past. He was confronted by a small counter, across the front of which narrow ledges and sagging, rusting wires had once supported brochures and flyers advertising city tours. A phone stood on the end of the counter, a phone book beside it, and the wall beside the phone was scribbled and scratched with a swarm of numbers, some of them boxed in so that they could be easily found again. Leaning against a wall beyond the counter was the sort of backpack used for carrying a small child, an unexpectedly innocent object in such weary surroundings.

  Behind the counter was a door, and it was from behind this door that music was forcing its way out. And now Ellis could also hear voices shouting, not because they were angry, but because the music was so very loud that people had to shout to make themselves heard.

  “Why did we bother to leave home?” asked Leona.

  “I wanted style,” said Ursa. “I deserve it.”

  She opened the door, and strode into the gale of sound. Leona turned, smiling and gesturing at Ellis.

  “Come on,” she shouted.

  The room into which she led him must once have been a dining room. Tables piled on top of one another took up almost a quarter of it. But three tables at least were still in use, pushed end to end to make one long, lopsided table, around which people were sitting, yelling over the music. Ellis, dazed by the sound, glimpsed, between the feet of about a dozen dancers, a roaring tape deck.

  Looking over Leona’s shoulder, past the sweep of her shining hair, Ellis saw one particular face, mouth working as its owner made some inaudible announcement. This face was tattooed on the chin and cheeks with Maori designs (though the face seemed European – pakeha – in every other way). But another face – the one turned towards the tattoos – had its own insignia. It glittered. Ears, nostrils and eyebrows glinted with rings. The gesturing hands, also covered in rings, seemed more like metallic robot hands than those of an ordinary man.

  “Hello, folks!” yelled Ursa. “Here we are again.”

  There was a ragged, derisive chorus – derisive but also affectionate, Ellis thought. A few hands shot up; a few faces lifted and grinned. But neither shouting nor music abated. Only the glittering man seemed really aware of them, and he shook his head while wagging a ringed forefinger from side to side as if he were cancelling Ursa’s words out of existence. The man on his right and the girl on his left both reached for cans of beer, as if suddenly remembering that it was their duty to drink everything within reach.

  Ursa took Ellis’s arm, her thin, strong fingers tightening just above his elbow. She pulled him across the room towards yet another door, then through it into a big kitchen. The door closed behind them. The music, though it could not be shut out, was at least held at bay.

  Even the kitchen was already occupied. Just inside the door a grey-haired man leaned back in a carved throne of a chair – a chair so tall and wide that it dwarfed him, making the rest of the room seem slightly out of proportion, like a doll’s-house kitchen, carefully made but still not quite right. The man had a book open on his knee though Ellis doubted if he could possibly be reading it. It was a prop of some kind … a way of pointing out that he, the apparent reader, had a mind that reached beyond the mindless confusion around him.

  “Monty, this is Ellis,” Leona said. “Ellis, this is Lewis Montgomery … a sort of guardian of ours from way back.”

  “They’re more like my guardians these days,” Monty said, and smiled with a sweetness that seemed, simulanteously, to be a form of profound bitterness. “You tur
ned out to be a sound investment, Ursie.”

  “Don’t you forget it, either,” said Ursa.

  “She should be in bed,” Leona cried, bending over beside the chair. “Lewis, you promised.”

  And when she straightened, Ellis saw she was holding a small child of less than a year, not much more than a baby. “She shouldn’t be crawling around at this time of night!” Leona was looking far more concerned than she had been over anything Christo or Jackie had said or done … far more concerned than she had been at having to leave the Kilmers’ party so unexpectedly. Monty smiled again, rather patronisingly this time.

  “She was crying in her cot,” he said. “The Orono Indians never leave children crying.”

  “You and the Orono Indians!” said Leona, sounding amused but irritated. The child stared at Ellis with huge, dark eyes, hair sticking up in tufts like a fringe of white silk.

  “They have a highly successful community,” Monty said with a kind of fluting smugness. “No crime! No broken families.”

  “She’s OK, that’s the main thing,” said Ursa, ignoring Monty and smiling at the baby. “Hey, Ellis – see that blue tin over there? Bring it down and open it.”

  “Do you live here?” Ellis said, half-turning to Leona. He was horrified to hear how shocked he sounded. Ursa laughed.

  “If you can call it living,” she said. “It’s humble – but, hey! – it’s home.”

  Pulling down the blue tin as he had been directed, Ellis opened it and found it full of homemade shortbread. Ursa reached over and took a piece. Holding it between her teeth, she opened the refrigerator and located a packet of coffee from the freezer compartment.

  “Help yourself!” she mumbled, her mouth full of shortbread as she began measuring coffee into a coffee pot with a plunger.

  Somewhere to his left, a door opened. Turning, Ellis looked for a moment into a narrow, dark yard filled with rubbish bags, and along a line of identical windows, marking what seemed to be a series of rooms, apparently attached in some way to the kitchen. Then the door closed, the view disappeared and, lowering his gaze a little, Ellis found himself confronting a sharp-faced child of about twelve, wearing not one, but two drifting black shawls draped over striped pyjamas. Her fair hair was held in two ragged bunches which stuck out sideways over her ears, and her hands were clasped across something like a bleeding heart, apparently forcing its way out of her chest. There was, however, no distress in her watchful expression. She looked like a familiar spirit coming out of the shadows.

  9.30 pm – Friday

  “Hi, Foxie,” said Ursa. “Ellis, this is my sister, Fox. Fox, this is Ellis … Ellis …” She looked at him uncertainly. “Ellis Someone,” she said at last. “He rescued me from the party and drove me home.”

  Fox stood looking from one to the other of them like a judge in court, coming to a secret conclusion. Someone crashed against the door of the dining room while voices roared with what sounded like applause. Monty sighed and leaned back in his big chair. He picked up his book again, assuming it like a disguise. Ellis wondered if he carried it around with him all the time, automatically opening it during moments of crisis. Beside him, Leona cuddled the baby. Ellis could not remember seeing anything more beautiful, and unexpectedly sexy, than her tenderness. When they left the room, the child looking back at them across her shoulder, he stared after her as if she were a vanishing light.

  “I thought you wanted to go,” Fox was saying to Ursa, rather accusingly. “You said you’d really enjoy a good yuppie barbecue.”

  “It was great,” said Ursa. “I was just so turned on by it all. Yup! Yup! Yup! There I was with a good-looking guy – well, OK, he’s as thick as old custard but he’s a bit of a stud for all that – long eye-lashes, great hair-cut and a beauty-spot, as well. Anyhow, there I was, eating wonderful steak and salad, and drinking red wine – good red wine, not just cheap stuff from a cask. And then, guess who turned up and ruined everything?”

  Fox looked sideways at Ellis.

  “Him?” she said, puzzled but smiling, and seeming to know already that Ellis could not possibly ruin anything for anyone.

  “Just think of the most embarrassing big-mouth we know …” said Ursa, holding up an instructional finger.

  Fox’s face suddenly flared into life. She grinned from ear to ear. “Jackie?” she cried, then clapped one hand across her mouth, as if some terrible oath had slipped through her unguarded lips.

  “Jackie!” Ursa nodded her head. “Bloody Jackie. He’d exploited Ellis here into giving him a lift (I don’t know how) and – oh, man – he was perfectly prepared to make trouble. So there it was! I’d hit the big time and, suddenly there was my …” she stopped and pulled a face “… well, not my past … a bit of another sort of present, really … another dimension … swilling down the red wine as if it was water, just to prove he isn’t weighed down by good taste.”

  “He tells you he isn’t,” said Fox.

  “There’s no need for him to go to so much trouble to prove it over and over again,” Ursa replied.

  What is this place? Ellis was thinking. “What is this place?” he now said aloud. The most personal thing in the kitchen was a calendar, featuring various celebrities and their dogs, pinned to the wall beside the door. Ellis had seen it in other houses, looking far more natural than it possibly could in this room, for the pictures suggested family life and affectionate pet ownership, and nothing he had seen so far in the Land-of-Smiles matched up. This kitchen was a public space in which one might make a cup of tea, or eat fish and chips, before rushing on to the next thing. The formica worktops, though a little smeary, were clean, but the top of the stove was crowded with pots which looked as if they had lived there for years and had nowhere else to go. The windows and windowsills and the edges of the kitchen shelves looked grubby, not with any really noticeable dirt, but because a particular sort of carelessness had been laid down on them for year after year … an established, stratified neglect.

  Whoa! Ellis ordered himself, closing his eyes, annoyed by his own dismay. Now was the time to say a polite goodbye and make for home. But wouldn’t that goodbye be rather like walking out before the end of the film? And, besides, he wanted to see Leona just once more.

  “Starting a fight is all Jackie’s good for,” Fox was saying scornfully. “At present!” she added mysteriously, smirking at Ellis who could now see that her hands were clasped, not over a bleeding heart, but over a ball of red glass which glowed between her thin fingers. Holding it out stiffly in front of her, she peered into its crimson depths along the twin barrels of her own arms. Her eyes crossed slightly as she stared at it, apparently reading a message hidden from everyone else. Ellis saw the ball reflected in her eyes, rather as if the pupils had turned to drops of blood. “It’s going to change,” she chanted. “The glass shows all!”

  And immediately Ursa seemed to change – to change her opinion, at least.

  “Oh, Jackie’s good for a lot more than starting fights,” she cried. “I’m not saying he isn’t a deadbeat, because he is. But he’s not stupid. Those clever parents of his just don’t catch on to his sort of cleverness. It’s an inside cleverness. And, anyhow, he doesn’t start fights. He just drives other people to start them.”

  “You slag him off all the time, so I can, too,” Fox replied.

  “No, you can’t!” said Ursa. “I’m the only one who is allowed to take a crack at Jack!”

  “And you’ll win out,” said Fox, deliberately making her voice weird. “It’s wri-i-itten in the gla-a-ass! A finger of fire is setting it down.”

  Ursa laughed.

  “Yeah! Yeah! The glass tells all,” she said, nodding and sounding as if she were responding to a ritual line. “You’re the magician of the family.”

  And then she caught Ellis’s eye and looked a little surprised to find he was still there.

  “Sorry!” she said. “You’re being neglected.”

  “What is this place?” Ellis asked.

 
“Home!” Ursa answered. “You brought me home.”

  “It used to be a motel,” said Fox. “Monty … our guardian, Monty …”

  “He’s met Monty,” Ursa put in, and they all looked towards Monty, who vaguely waved his book at them, though he did not look up. “Monty bought it a few years ago and he takes on paying guests …”

  “They don’t pay,” Fox objected.

  “Well! OK! They just doss down for the duration,” said Ursa. “Most of them rip us off, but they do it in a golden-hearted way. And some of them do pay, Foxie. Be fair!” She grinned at Ellis. “At least none of them have beaten us up so far.”

  “I like to think of this place as a refuge,” said Monty to Ellis.

  “… and they eat our stuff,” added Fox, settling herself at the table, placing the glass ball in front of her, and cupping her hands around it as if it were giving off warmth. “They just help themselves from the fridge.”

  “And to other people’s computers,” said Ursa. “Monty used to work for the Department of Social Welfare. But then he retired …”

  “He was struck off,’ said Fox with a long, dark smile, curiously echoed in her blue eyes. “He had sex with a girl who was only fifteen,” she cried with something like relish.

  Behind them, Monty sighed. “Don’t mind my feelings,” he said wearily. “I loved her … I loved her … but nobody ever mentions that.”

  “She was fifteen going on thirty-seven, poor kid,” Ursa said. “And poor Monty, too.” She ruffled his hair, but he pushed her hand away. “Now, let that lot sink in for …” she looked at her watch “… seven and a half minutes, and then ask another question. More coffee?”