Twenty-Four Hours

“Don’t look so furtive!” muttered Jackie. “Chill out, man!” He improvised a dance step. “Just stroll on in and say, ‘Hey folks! Your lucky day! Here we are! Now the fun begins!’”

“I don’t look furtive,” said Ellis indignantly. “And I know this crowd, which I reckon you don’t. The Kilmers are friends of ours – friends of my parents, that is! They’ve got one of those apartments in the old library, but this is their real home. I’ve visited them twenty million times before.” He looked sideways at Jackie, half-expecting to see capitulation of some kind, or even respect (because, after all, the Kilmers were rich). But in the clear, early twilight, Jackie’s expression was that of a child seeing a vision of wonder. Then he flung an arm across Ellis’s shoulder.

“Hey, Ellis!” he cried softly. “Has anyone told you how beautiful you are? A car! Naturally curly hair! And rich friends! The lot! I love you! I love you! And, hey, isn’t that sunshine? Let’s enjoy ourselves.”

6.30 pm – Friday

Ellis stepped on to the wide, grassy terrace that led down from the veranda of the Kilmer’s house to the garden below, a familiar enchantment immediately taking hold of him. For there it all was: women in summer dresses, laughing and talking, leaning sexily into the intrusive wind; men in shorts hoisting long glasses of pale-gold lager. Elegant music came towards them in gusts and then retreated. Ellis recognised it as the theme tune of a television commercial in which an expensive car moved with grace and power through a bare, sculptural landscape. Farmers on horses (along with their dogs) watched the car go by with admiration and envy, and a beautiful woman studied it with voluptuous attention, licking her full, red lips.

Jackie seemed to react to the gusts of music, too. He came to a standstill and Ellis saw him grimace.

“Vivaldi!” he exclaimed, half-turning towards Ellis. “Poor bugger! Mind you, those musical jokers wrote a lot of stuff for parties, didn’t they?” Ellis found he had assumed yet again that, in spite of his unexpected accent, Jackie was a man without culture. “I mean, it’s so beautiful,” Jackie added. “But, by now, whenever I hear it going Tah dah dah dah da-da dah, I want to laugh. It’s become its own sort of joke. And it wasn’t meant to be funny, was it?”

“Ellis!” called an astonished voice. “Who is it?” hissed Jackie.

“Meg Kilmer! Hostess. Lives here,” Ellis muttered, grinning studiously at his mother’s friend and feeling suddenly treacherous. Why – why – had Jackie been so desperate to come here? There must have been other parties he could have gatecrashed – parties that were much more his sort of thing. Ellis wondered if he had unwittingly helped an enemy insinuate himself. For he was with Jackie, whose coat had one elbow burned out of it, who was barefoot, who was laughing at the idea of Vivaldi being played as background music, but who was also, at that very moment, turning to greet the hostess with a wide smile.

“Ellis … lovely to see you,” Meg cried, seeming only slightly surprised that he should be there at all.

“Just passing!” Ellis said, smiling too – the sort of frank, boyish smile a friend of one’s mother could trust – an actor’s smile. “Didn’t know you were having a party. Sorry!” He was relieved to find just how easily deception came to him. Though, after all, he hadn’t known: he was speaking the truth.

“Well, we did invite Kit and Dave,” said Meg Kilmer, referring to Ellis’s parents, “but Kit said she was having a few friends round tonight. Of course, she may have felt shy. People think it’s a bit strange celebrating a separation.”

“Well, I think the Robsons are looking in,” said Ellis, his voice hesitant, wondering if he had really heard Meg say what she appeared to have said. His voice seemed to come and go in his own ears. “But Jackie and I – oh, this is my friend, Jackie Cattle, by the way. And Jackie, this is Meg Kilmer who lives here – well, we’ve been cruising around …”

“Ellis shot home from school last night,” interrupted Jackie, speaking rather more easily than Ellis himself. “He’s getting himself reacquainted with this part of the world.”

Ellis saw Meg exchange a worldly glance with Jackie at the expense of a younger man.

“Well, lovely to see you,” said Meg warmly. “Go down to the lower lawn by the barbecue. There’s masses to eat and drink.” In spite of his ease and open smile, she was suddenly studying Jackie rather more intently. Ellis saw her expression change slightly – as if something was disturbing her. He felt she was aware of something rather more anarchic than either Jackie’s bare feet or battered coat. And Jackie, too, seemed to recognise her doubt.

“I don’t want to push in,” he said, smiling with old-world courtesy.

“Oh, you’re welcome,” Meg said, relaxing a little. “We always overdo things, so there’s plenty.” Someone called her name. She turned, laughed, and retreated, then looked over her shoulder, pointing vaguely into the crowd.

“Christo’s somewhere around,” she called. “Be nice to him! He’s so grumpy these days.”

Jackie and Ellis moved across the upper lawn between groups of chattering guests, nearly all protecting piled cardboard plates and glasses of wine from the wind, then down three wide, stone steps to a lower lawn. In spite of the big, brick barbecue, it was much less crowded, perhaps because the shade of tall lime trees imparted an early twilight to this part of the garden.

“So you don’t want to push in,” muttered Ellis as they walked towards two long tables covered with bottles and plates. “You know, you’re a real bull artist!”

“It’s my gift,” Jackie replied, “and we ought to use our talents. The Bible says so.”

“You do what the Bible says?” Ellis asked, leaning back from Jackie and studying him with exaggerated scepticism.

“When it’s in my interests,” Jackie replied, his own smile vanishing.

Alan Kilmer came to meet them with a bottle of wine and what was left of a jug of beer balanced on a tray. He was wearing a striped apron and a cook’s hat with the word Chef printed on it in flowing letters.

“I suppose you drink all the beer you can get these days, young Ellis,” he cried in the voice of a surrogate father keen to show how understanding he could be.

“I’m driving …” Ellis said, and had a vision of the curls and the clean, open face that had flickered briefly across the looking-glass panel in the city street.

“Oh, one won’t hurt you,” Alan said, “though you’re right to be careful. I only wish Christo was careful … But you’re a big boy now. Take it! Food and plates over there by the barbie. I imagine you’ve heard our news? Meg and I are separating. After all, Sophie’s left home – she’s over in Sydney doing very well, and of course Christo’s grown up.”

“Gosh, I didn’t know …” began Ellis.

“It’s time,” said Alan, a touch of mysticism creeping into his voice. “Meg and I both feel these rites of passage deserve celebration.” His voice became friendly and fatherly again. “Now, just help yourselves.”

“We haven’t come to eat …” Ellis began guiltily.

“We’re starving,” declared Jackie, interrupting before Ellis could reject the offers of food and drink, or ask for Kilmer family news.

“Well, cram in all you can,” said Alan cheerfully. “We always cater for too many people. The steak’s from our own beast … but it’ll be dog tucker by tomorrow. Strike while the sausage is hot, eh?”

Together, Jackie and Ellis made their way to the table by the barbecue. Plates of steak and sausages sat beside huge wooden bowls of salad, the meat drying a little, the lettuce leaves starting to wilt around the edges. Jackie piled a plate with salad and sliced tomatoes, as well as a fillet of salmon, glittering in a wrap of tin foil.

“Have some steak,” said Ellis. It seemed the least they could do was eat the food most likely to be left over.

“I’m vegetarian – all but,” said Jackie.

“You?” cried Ellis incredulously.

“I said, ‘All but’!” Jackie replied, snapping a piece of garlic bread from its parent loaf. “I’m not above stocking up when it’s free, and probably going to be thrown out, anyway. That’s another of my virtues … I don’t waste anything. Let’s move before the Killers close in again and begin telling you about the civilised way they’re managing their separation.”

“Kilmers!” Ellis corrected him, not quite wanting to expose old friends to alien derision, and slightly irritated because Jackie seemed more at home with the gossip than he was. “Are they really separating?” He could not imagine Meg and Alan apart from one another.

“They say they are,” said Jackie. “And they’re pretending it’s all good, clean fun. But my sources, of which I have one, say they really want to kill each other, and they’re waiting till after Christmas to fight about who gets how much. New Year’s the traditional time for murder, isn’t it?”

“Do you know the Kilmers?” asked Ellis.

“Never met them until five minutes ago,” said Jackie.

Ellis came to a sudden stop. “Just level with me – what are we doing here?” he asked. “Why have we crashed this particular party?”

“Well, to tell you the truth I want to make trouble,” said Jackie. “I didn’t mention it before in case you got all shy, but …” He tilted his head back and drank the whole glass of beer at what seemed to be a single swallow. “Don’t you do that!” he added. “Remember, you’re driving.”

“What sort of trouble?” asked Ellis dubiously.

“I’m still choosing,” said Jackie in a pious voice. Then his gaze sharpened and he stared past Ellis with an expression of such deep appreciation that Ellis turned too. And there he saw his childhood nemesis, the Kilmer boy, Christo, talking to a lanky young woman wearing jeans, a sleeveless blue top and round, wire-rimmed glasses.

6.55 pm – Friday

Ellis and Christo had never got on together, though both sets of parents had tried hard to encourage them into some sort of friendship. In normal circumstances Ellis would have gone a long way to avoid talking to Christo. But Jackie was drifting so casually in his and the girl’s direction that nobody watching him would have guessed how purposeful that drifting was. Only Ellis knew – and suddenly knew for certain – that Jackie had forced his way into this party with the single intention of breaking in on that particular conversation. Ellis had no choice but to follow him, though with increasing alarm.

The couple had been chatting together cheerfully enough, or so it seemed to Ellis. Now, Christo, looking across the girl’s shoulder, met Ellis’s eyes and then, almost instantaneously, saw Jackie. Though Jackie was still pretending he had not yet seen Christo, Ellis felt the impact of Christo’s furious glance as if a dagger had been thrust towards them. Even from where he stood he could see Christo’s fair skin turn red as a wild blush of fury spread across it. A small mole, rather like an eighteenth-century beauty-spot, stood out darkly on Christo’s cheekbone as he grasped the girl’s upper arm.

Christo’s grasp must have been severe, for she started, glanced at him, then turned in order to see what he was looking at. For a moment she was as amazed as Jackie could ever have wished her to be. Behind her wire-rimmed spectacles, under the shadow of her lashes, her eyes were a light, startling blue. Her first surprise gave way to instant anger.

“What are you doing here?” she shouted.

Jackie looked directly at her for the first time. His expression showed nothing but startled innocence.

“Oh, wow!” he exclaimed. “You! What a coincidence! Hey, it’s a small world, isn’t it? Stunted really.”

“What are you doing here?” she repeated so forcefully that Ellis stepped back in alarm.

“Weird, eh?” Jackie went on. “Must be the morphic field! Or what’s that other thing? Chaos theory or something. See, I met up with Ellis – my old friend Ellis – you know, I’m always talking about Ellis – and he suggested …”

“You’re such a liar!” exclaimed the girl.

Jackie laughed. “Ellis,” he said. “This is Ursa Hammond. And you know Chris, don’t you?”

“Christo!” Christo corrected him. He had always hated it when people called him ‘Chris’.

“Oh! Sorry!” said Jackie, returning the hostility with his wide, innocent smile. “Hey, your parents know how to celebrate failure in style. Great party.”

People always said how handsome Christo was. Even though Ellis had detested him for a long time, and so much so that he thought of him as essentially disfigured, he was fair-minded enough to admit they were right.

“What are you doing here?” Christo was demanding, suddenly as furious as his companion, though Ellis understood there was a great difference between their two angers.

“Doing here?” repeated Jackie, frowning. “Big question. But what are any of us doing here, if it comes to that? I reckon it’s pretty random myself. What’s that word you were going on about the other day?” he asked, turning to Ursa. “Not telepathy, but like telepathy. It was to do with design or something … that things keep happening because of what’s meant to happen.”

“Teleology,” said Ursa. Ellis thought he could hear her first anger laced with some other mood as Jackie ran on and on, shaking his head in wonder. She was recognising something in Jackie and was unwillingly entertained by it. “Leave it alone, Jackie! Bug off!” she muttered.

“Nobody wants you here,” said Christo, provoked exactly as Jackie intended him to be provoked. He turned to Ellis. “Why the hell are you hanging out with this shit?”

Ellis looked directly at Christo for the first time.

Many years ago, before Ellis could swim properly, Christo and his sister, Sophie, had pushed him into a deep pool down among the willows, and had watched him gasping and choking, struggling and sinking, with chilly interest, pushing him under again and again with their bare feet, only pulling him out at what might have been his very last minute. They had then threatened him with terrible pain if he told either his parents or theirs. They also told him that they had drowned kittens and puppies in that very pool. Ellis found that he still hated Christo, with hatred as fresh and tender as if it had just been born in him. Watching Jackie dance around Christo, as he himself had never been able to do, filled him with hot pleasure.

“I just dropped in to say ‘Hi’” he said, his voice as innocent as Jackie’s. “And then your mum invited us to stay.” He sensed Jackie turn to him as if they were practised crosstalk comedians putting on a show they had rehearsed over and over again.

“Your mum clapped eyes on us and knew we were the right stuff,” Jackie said to Christo, but then he began filling his beer glass from the bottle of red wine. Ellis watched the level rise with incredulity. “She invited us to eat and drink all we could.”

“Well, I’m inviting you to get out,” said Christo. “I suppose Ellis can stay if he wants to,” he said, emphasising Ellis’s name with casual contempt. “But not you! Get out before I sling you out.”

The girl made a sudden sharp move and Jackie, holding the mug of red wine in front of him, gave an odd, gasping laugh.

“You and whose army, mate?” he asked smiling down into the wine. “You and whose army?” He looked up, and Ellis found Jackie had suddenly become alarming, though all he had done was to widen his eyes a little and fasten them intently on Christo.

Christo, who had stepped forward confidently, hesitated.

“Oh, no!” cried Ursa Hammond sharply. She glanced first at Jackie’s bare feet and then at Ellis. “You’ve got a car? You must have.”

“Back in the drive,” Ellis admitted.

“Just go and stand beside it and wait for me,” she said. “My sister’s here too. I’ll find her and we’ll be with you in a moment. You go with him,” she added, looking briefly at Jackie.

“Jesus! You don’t have to go,” exclaimed Christo, sounding desperate. “For God’s sake, Ursie … you’re a guest. Invited! Do you think I can’t cope with this deadbeat? I can easily manage him. I’ve done it a thousand times.”

“Managed me?” said Jackie vaguely. He bunched his right-hand fingers together, and tapped them against the centre of his forehead, frowning. “Was that at school? Wish I could remember! Brain damage, maybe.”

A few, nearby party-goers, catching on to an interesting argument, were watching curiously. Ellis gave them a placating smile, trying to suggest it was all good fun.

Jackie now drank half the mug of wine without a moment’s hesitation. He smiled and wiped his hand across his mouth. “A superior little wine,” he said. “A lovely voluptuous grape!”

“Christo, I’m sorry,” Ursa was saying as she moved away “But just look around you. Everyone’s being so civilised … and it’s nearly Christmas. What’ll your parents think if you suddenly have a punch-up at their party?”

“They’ll blame me,” said Christo. “They’re a couple of selfish shits, and they always blame me.”

“Oh no! They’ll blame me,” said Ursa. “They might even blame Leo! No, thanks!”

And she began to hurry towards the steps that led to the upper lawn. Forgetting Jackie, Christo set off after her, almost leaping beside her, apparently trying to argue her into staying. Ellis had never seen Christo so desperate – so vulnerable – before.

“I hate that bastard,” said Jackie cheerfully. He drank the rest of the red wine as if it were orange juice. “He’s suffering though, isn’t he? Good!”

“Be fair: his parents, his party!” said Ellis lightly, doing his best to sound like a disinterested watcher making a point. “What’s-her-name – Ursa – is she your girl or something?”

“She’s something,” said Jackie. “Not a girlfriend! Not as such! But she’s not going to be his, either.”

“So what’s the story, since you’re writing the plot?” asked Ellis.

“Ursie’s gone to find her sister. You race over and curtsey to the hostess. Do you think she’ll mind me walking out with a few nutritious scraps and a bottle of wine?”

Ellis looked around. He saw meat cooling beside the barbecue, and other bottles of wine half-empty and already looking abandoned. Jackie, sighing deeply and shaking his head like a man being forced to violate his own better judgement, poured one half-bottle of wine into another.

“Red and white makes pink,” he said. “I love bad taste. Love it!” Then he jammed a cork into the neck of the bottle and slid it into one of his deep pockets.

“Innocent grapes died so we could have this wine,” he went on. “They were crushed, mashed to pulp. Anyhow, when I was a kid I had to eat everything put in front of me.”

Ellis set off, crossing first one lawn, then climbing the stone steps on to the other, Jackie bounding beside him. They went back round the house, past the garage and waited, side by side, in the soft darkness under the chestnut trees.

“What’s it all about, anyway?” asked Ellis.

But Jackie did not answer. It was too dim in the shadow of the chestnuts to make out his precise expression, but somehow Ellis believed it would be both sinister and sad. At some time in the past, he suddenly knew for certain, Jackie had also suffered at the unkind, confident hands of Christo Kilmer.

“I can’t stand him, either,” he said.

“No one can,” said Jackie. “It’s starting to drive him round the bend. But, hey – that’s the right place for him. He’ll meet himself coming the other way.”

They waited, while the sound of voices rose from beyond the brick angles of the house, and the smell of the barbecue settled insistently around them. One voice suddenly sounded closer than the others. Ellis looked sideways down the drive towards the house. Quite unprepared for what was about to happen to him, he was overwhelmed by a vision.

Passing through the moving patches of light that shifted uneasily in the curving drive was a girl he knew he was seeing for the first time in his life. All the same, it now seemed to Ellis that for months – maybe even years – he had been expecting to see this very girl, moving from darkness into light and then back into darkness again, as she came towards him, her hair flaring, then fading, brightening sharply, before growing shadowy once again. She was wearing a very short skirt. Her legs were exquisite. They swept her towards him, and she spoke as she came, but not to Ellis.

“Oh, Jackie! Ursie says you’re ruining things for us.”

“Gee, she’s bright!” said Jackie. “It must be all that law she studies.”

“She’s not keen on Christo, if that’s what you’re afraid of,” the girl said. “She just wanted to go to a big party.” Her voice was soft, a little plaintive perhaps, but also amused.

“But life’s a continual big party back in the Land-of-Smiles!” said Jackie, talking, Ellis supposed, the sort of nonsense well-understood between friends. He and Simon had once had a private nonsense language which excluded everyone else. Come to think of it, that private language was one of the things Ellis missed most – now that Simon was dead.

“It’s nothing but parties in the Land-of-Smiles,” Jackie persisted.

“Not big parties like this one,” the girl replied. “Our parties are all scruffy and disgusting.”

“No such thing as a scruffy undertaker,” said Jackie, indulging once again in the language of private reference. He turned suddenly. “Ellis, this is Leo Hammond. Leona! Leona the Lion! Leo, this is Ellis. OK?”

Then Ursa was coming down the drive towards them, almost jogging, with Christo still skirmishing around her, arguing and gesticulating on one side, then leaping to the other, as if hearing his arguments with a different ear, might make her change her mind. When he saw Ellis and Jackie watching him, he grabbed Ursa’s arm, forcing her to stop. Then they kissed – or perhaps he kissed her. It was hard to be sure.

“Bor-ing!” said Jackie, yawning. But for all that, he suddenly sounded, not angry, exactly, but certainly petulant.

7.30 pm – Friday

Ursa climbed into the passenger seat beside Ellis and sat there in silence. Jackie opened the back door and slid in to recline gracefully along most of the back seat. Leona followed him. It was Ellis’s car, but he felt as if he did not exist for any of them except as a sort of driving ghost. All space in the car was taken over by the argument between Jackie and the angular Ursa, even though, in the beginning, the argument was conducted in silence.

“Shift over!” Leona said. “You’re such a pain, Jackie.”

“Home, James!” Jackie called triumphantly, pointing across Ellis’s shoulder.

Ellis started the car, wishing that Leona, rather than Ursa, were sitting beside him. Before he could stop himself, he was imagining light shifting on her rounded knees, outlining them in the darkness that lurked below the glovebox of his mother’s car.

“You know,” said Ursa, half-turning to glare at Jackie, “I was having a really nice time. Not wonderful! Not thrilling! Just nice! Instead of sitting around with a lot of screwed-up no-hopers, I was in a beautiful place with a beautiful garden, and I was enjoying talking to Christo and drinking champagne.”

“Some champagne!” said Jackie scornfully. “Made right here in New Zealand.”

“It did well in a competition in France,” said Ursa. “It came first – or almost first.”

“Second, say,” Jackie suggested. “Or third!”

“Don’t sit in the back, cuddling the bottle. You look disgusting,” said Ursa. “And don’t try to make out you’ve got taste of any kind,” she added. “You’d cuddle up to cat’s piss as long as it was free.”

“You bet I would,” Jackie agreed. “Cat’s piss has a delicate, crisp acidity, shot through with suggestions of grubby earthiness, the flavour of gooseberries mixed with a tang of acetone. It has a chunky chewiness to it which …”