Rangitoto Island from Milford beach Roger Morton
Thrill Kill by Joselyn Morton
The ocean was on Melissa’s doorstep. She often wandered down to the water’s edge. The regularity of the wild blue waves stopped her thinking. She admired their devotion to the wind, the moon and the tide. The pounding waves soothed her, then hypnotised her. It suited her better than meditating.
The rest of the city of Auckland was no day at the beach. In other suburbs the old wooden villas had their backs to the sun and sat in their own shadows. They were freezing in winter and hot as ovens in summer.
Melissa was planning her fortieth birthday party. This birthday was a watershed. The dividing line between youth and old age. She had to decide between sexy elegance at Toto’s, smart trash at the Verona or the instinctive hands of Antonio at the Colosseum. Perhaps she should go for motherly martyrdom - book caterers and have it at home.Unlike her, most of her old friends were bordering on broke. They would probably prefer a hundred-dollar note in an envelope with a card saying, ‘have a drink on me’. Maybe that wasn’t a bad idea.
Apart from her kids’ birthdays, this was the first party Melissa had ever planned. Her parents had organised her wedding. By the time her twenty first rolled round, she was pregnant and had no intention of flaunting the fact, or the fat. The other birthdays had flicked by uncelebrated. Wedding anniversaries had stopped before they got to double figures
Dave’s strength had been in the gene pool department. They had three kids - bang, bang, bang. His weakness lay in the ‘saying no’ department and when Melissa found him shagging the office secretary on one of her rare visits to town, she suggested that he didn’t bother coming home. To her amazement, he agreed. Suddenly her life changed out of all recognition.
If Sally hadn’t started screaming in the car that day like she’d been dropped in the blender feet first, the rest would not have happened. Melissa had stopped the car to feed her before she realised she had unwittingly parked outside Dave’s office. Impulsively she decided to pop in.
So she caught her young husband in flagrante delicto. She remembered ‘delictum’ from sixth form Latin. She had thought then that it sounded like a delicious icecream that you wanted to lick down to the cone. But it came from ‘delinquere’ to do wrong.
For one hate-filled second she wished her husband in Hades hell. She wanted to hit the secretary with something hard - a spade, a hammer, but her arms were filled with Sally. Sally had stopped screaming and was now sucking. Like father, like daughter thought Melissa in a detached fashion, which was to signify her thinking for the next fifteen years.
As for telling him ‘not to bother coming home’ she had no idea where that thought came from. It popped into her mouth, by-passing her brain and bingo, she was a solo-mum with three kids.
The following five years passed in a haze of sleepless nights and messy breakfasts. Sometime during that nightmare Melissa had a brainwave that became a small business empire. One of Melissa’s few skills was knitting. That and playing the piano. She stopped teaching music when she realised that there were women all over New Zealand who could knit her designs.
Once she had bought her first computer, Melissa knew she was onto a winner. She set up a core team of knitters from Kaitaia to Te Anau. She found embroiderers in half-empty convents and Dutch communities. She hired two computer experts and a live-in housekeeper. She flew to New York regularly and her designs were snapped up. The orders poured in. She even had the occasional fling.
In the time it takes to yell coitus interruptus, Dave and the secretary had moved to Sydney. The three kids were veteran fliers before they were toilet trained. Dave wasn’t short of cash and such was his guilt that he was generous with his monthly child support payments.
Melissa hadn’t set out to get rich. Keeping three tiny kids from cannibalising each other took all her energy. She was in a marathon of motherhood with no beginning, end or middle. She was knackered to the back teeth, worse than a disposable Pyramid labourer - trapped in a tunnel of broken nails, unshaven legs, forgotten, suppurating rubbish and floors covered in lego and playdough.
Suddenly she was in overdrive. She could do nothing wrong. Her women could knit faster than the speed of light. Her wool suppliers couldn’t keep up. She had vaguely heard the words ‘go for the top’. So she did. Zambesi loved her designs and the rest of the expensive boutique cartel fell into line.
Like everything else in Melissa’s life, the whole knitting thing snowballed. She was putting the kids on a plane to Sydney when she had the overwhelming desire to take a trip to the States. With the ingenuity of a novice, she had her first American order within two days of flying into New York.
Faced with the complexities of American officialdom, she contacted a cousin of her mother’s. He was happy to unravel the red tape so that Melissa’s expensive line of knitwear could be imported. Until all the paperwork was in place, Melissa would arrive with her suitcase discreetly padded with her gossamer creations.
She’d deliberately gone for the top end of the market. Delicate one and two ply woollens in dusky, tea-rose tones transported the buyers into a time of forgotten spidery, cobweb stitches and complex whimsical patterns. They loved her collection of long, wispy, hand-beaded scarves and jerseys whose fronts were a myriad of beads and sequins that caught the light and bounced it back in dazzling shimmers of glamour. Luckily, she hadn’t gone for zany, heavy sweaters with hot, wild colours that were too big to fit in her case.
Eventually she realised Dave had done her a back-handed favour, releasing her from wedded bondage. He had also permanently released her from trust. No matter how fond she was of her latest lover, she always held back. She couldn’t go all the way. The whole emotional gauntlet.
For a while she dabbled in excessive alcohol, seeing that as the doorway to oblivion where true love lived. But one pain-filled hang-over too many, decided her that she and alcohol had foxtrotted their final fling together. So even if she couldn’t bury herself in the love of a good man, she had the kids and she had buyers in Paris, Amsterdam, London and New York.
She thought things might work out with Joseph, her New York lover - mainly because he made her laugh. He was trying to make it as a screenwriter. The Fifth Avenue apartment he lived in was the size of a walk-in wardrobe. He clung fanatically to the kudos of this prestigious address and paid the rent by writing reviews.
Melissa accompanied him to Openings whenever she was in town. Then he’d take her home and screw her silly. In this comedy of manners, every inch of floor space had stacks of video tapes propping up scripts ready to topple. Joseph manoeuvred his home life with great skill.
Waving aside life rules of personal hygiene, Melissa never tested the dubious qualities of his ancient shower. It was above the toilet and she could see some agile athleticism would be required to hit the spot. Washing one’s oxter (A word acquired after visiting Edinburgh.) required the complexity of mastering the lotus position while in a state of perpetual grace. Feeling dirty and smelly in Joseph’s company became normal.
When she mentioned to him that she knew a Kiwi cameraman working on Costner’s next film, Joseph badgered her till she agreed to give him Joseph’s latest script to read. It was the definitive cowboy movie that only a good Jewish boy from the Bronx could write.
Bad move. Joseph had spent three years researching Wyat Earpe. On her next trip to the City of Dreams, where angels never tread but wait on tables instead, she passed on the script. Months later, when she read in Variety that Kostner’s next film was to be a cowboy movie, she rang Joseph to congratulate him on the good news. Sadly he never returned her calls and slowly the penny dropped that Joseph had been left out of the loop. She tried to contact her cameraman friend but he was somewhere in Africa. Two weeks later she flew into New York and hung around the Russian Tearooms and the New York Deli but Joseph eluded her efforts to track him down and she accepted she’d been dumped for an imagined duplicity.
Paris was her favourite city. Claudia, her eldest, was studying there. Lunchtime, they would stroll to La Palette. Melissa applauded the hedonistic French for defying their heads of business and hanging onto their leisurely two-hour lunch. Their waiter made waiting tables an art-form. Contrary to Kiwi folk-lore he was neither arrogant nor rude. Just sexy.
Afternoons, she drifted round the Left Bank. Sometimes she found herself on the Pont Neuf, her hand caressing the cold, rounded surface of the Art Nouveau metalwork. Even the glassed-in tourist boats didn’t dispel the magic as they glided past on their wide bottoms.
Paris was everyone’s dream of a city in love with itself. A fast taxi ride to Charles De Gaulle airport and Melissa was back home on the wave-washed sands of Auckland.
Jade was as different from Melissa as two creatures of the same species could be. Jade didn’t like anything about herself except her name. Hard and green and precious. No, not hard. Staunch. Jade was bred to be staunch like a fine racehorse is bred for speed, stamina and intelligent responses. Jade had ‘staunch’ ingrained and embedded into her psyche.
Unlike Melissa’s childhood on the beach side of Takapuna, Jade grew up in the narrow strip of street that is Port Chalmers. A few miles separate the neglected port from the intellectual buzz of the university town of Dunedin. Yet they might have been separated by an iron curtain.
Port Chalmers lies on the dark side of the hill, the houses struggling to fit into the thin space allowed them between the cliff and the shore. Across the blue sea lies the Otago Peninsula. It sparkles like an unattainable fairyland. No whores or tarts or useless scary drunks on that sun-lit side.
Jade’s father was a seaman in the true sense of the word semen. She never met him. He was just passing through in a rush of fluid when he encountered her Mum in the dark, wet patch outside the pub. Early on Jade discovered that it wasn’t wise to get on her mum’s nerves, to get her goat. By the time Jade had learnt to walk, the barriers between pain and pleasure had blurred.
The last time her Mum belted her, Jade was twelve. She was in the phone box ringing a mate. Her Mum was too flabby and fat to fit in, she simply reached in, grabbed the phone and started smashing Jade round the face with it. Jade wore her blue woollen sweater for the next week before she was able to take it off, past her blue swollen face.
While her face was healing, Jade broke into an empty student flat. When the students got back from their term break, they eventually sussed out that no one actually knew who Jade was. They then twigged that she didn’t have any money for food or rent and they booted her out. No one knew she was only twelve. She looked older.
That weekend, she persuaded Billy, another kid who hung around the Octagon, to hitchhike with her to Christchurch. They survived there for eighteen months in a turgid cocktail of shoplifting, stealing, glue sniffing and swapping sexual favours. Violence was all around but they watched out for each other. One night, in the pool hall, Billy got stabbed for looking at someone the wrong way. He died in Jade’s arms.
The joker who stabbed him laughed and said, “shit, that’s my best thrill kill yet.” He roared off on his bike with his mates and the noise of their engines exploded inside Jade’s head until she thought it would bust open like a rotten tomato spilling its rancid bile in a pile of poisonous pus.
That night as Jade lay shivering in a doorway, those two words, ‘thrill kill’ sang in her head above the noise of the heavy traffic and she couldn’t blot or bang them out.
From then on, Jade was dead inside her head and she waited for the other bits to die too. She began to do deliberately mean things. Not for a laugh. She did them because she could.
By the time she was fifteen, she was as tall as most blokes and as strong. She didn’t give a shit about anything. The only emotion she recognised was pain and it was as familiar as the memory of someone she might have once known. Or been. She swallowed everything she could to blank out the thoughts inside her head. She would drink and sniff anything to make the voices shut up.
A few months later some wild Skinhead bitches gave her a ride to Auckland. They stopped at a takeaway joint before they got to the centre of the city. Unnoticed, Jade picked up their change and took off. Clutching her hamburger, she crept into an empty building site. When she woke next morning, she was stiff and shivering with cold even though the space around her was already flooded with bright daylight.
A builder had dropped and lost a chisel and it lay between the timber and the pile of discarded tarpaulin where Jade had slept. Yellow innocent sunlight was reflected in its shiny blade. She picked it up and started carving her name into a piece of timber. The chisel slipped and sliced the back of her thumb and blood gushed out.
“Shit that’s sharp.” Jade slipped it into the pocket of the old leather jacket she had removed from Billy before they took his body away. The chisel was solid and comforting. By the end of the morning it felt familiar. Like a friend. Soon her fingers had memorised the shape and length of its handle and the sharpness of its blade.
As she wandered along the main street in Kingsland, she recognised a familiar strong smell that indicated a baker who still sold food whose names she knew - sausage rolls, meat pies. If she was lucky, they might even have a bin of yesterday’s left-overs.
Melissa didn’t notice Jade until Jade was almost on top of her. She had lunched with a friend who had a furniture shop in the High Street. He fancied himself as a psychic and for her birthday he was plotting her astrological chart.
After lunch Melissa stopped to buy baguettes and a bag of croissants from the specialist bread shop. That was part of the reason she didn’t anticipate what happened next. Her arms were filled with loaves of bread. They blurred her peripheral vision. As Jade dug the sharp chisel into Melissa’s side, sliding it up between her ribs and nicking her heart in a gush of warm blood, Melissa thought she had had a heart attack (and so she had. And so she had.).
She saw the chisel slicing for her again and she looked into the green depths of the hard cold eyes of her attacker. Melissa began to slowly slip towards the ground. Still clutching her loaves, thinking what a ridiculous way to die. Only the fish and wine were missing.
She tried to lift her hand with its long, elegant fingers that could almost span two octaves. It seemed so white. Translucent. Already it was the colour of the paper that she fed into her printer. Her hand wasn’t getting closer, she was wafting further away. It was hard to believe she was still a part of herself, she was imploding like Alice and finding it impossible to stay centred in her being.
She saw the tumble of roses in her garden, old-fashioned, perfumed blooms that released their fragrance if you brushed against them. She could see her two daughters, Jessie and Sally laughing as they took their togs off the line. She focused on them with total absorption. The boundaries of her intensity radiated in a path of escalating influence. She fought the normal assimilation that would reduce her energy.
Incongruously she remembered some flip New York anti-feminist jibe, something about ‘how can you trust someone who bleeds every month but never dies.’ It was not appropriate.
The girl who had attacked her looked so strong, like a warrior princess you couldn’t kill with an axe. Melissa reasoned there had to be a mistake and whispered to the young woman, “please help me”.
Jade’s being was infused with the power that was coursing through her. The pure pleasure of the sensation, a thrill like an electric shock halted her for a second. She heard the woman that she had staked and shafted with the chisel ask her something.
Remembering Billy, she bent down and knelt in the sticky blood. Clumsily, she cradled the woman in her arms and as she did so, she broke off the end of one of the loaves and bit into its crunchy crust. Her world-weary, young mouth welcomed the soft, white insides. The smell of the fresh bread was intoxicating. Her stomach rumbled with pleasure. She sniffed appreciatively. The woman smelt good too.
Ends
