I was home. I’d written a long email to Sa’afia. She was married now. She’d sent me photos of the wedding. She looked beautiful, of course. There’d been a lot of absurdly handsome men and pretty women with parasols, wooden verandahs painted white, intensely green greenery, and tropical flowers. It looked like a good party.

I’d complimented her on her dress, and made a show of saying something nice about Paul, and then turned to safer subjects. There was something oddly haphazard about the way the houses were spaced, for example. Was that because they were built on communal land?

That gave Sa’afia something to write about, and so we talked. I wanted to ask her if she missed me, if she loved me, and if she wanted to come back, and I wanted to tell her I wanted her. If she said she wanted me, then I’d do what it took to have us together again. That was all I wanted to say, and I couldn’t say it. If she felt anything similar she couldn’t say it either.

So writing the emails hurt, at least at my end, and they said nothing of the things that mattered. I got back emails that didn’t tell me how she was. But they were all I could expect.

Te Waka Huia Choir

I put on Crowded House’s Together Alone, just the last, title track, with the Samoan log drummers and the Te Waka Huia Choir. The end, where the Samoan drummers and the Maori singers take over the track, still makes my hair lift at the back of my neck. Then I played it again, and swallowed a tumbler of whiskey.

Then I played it again, and poured more whiskey. But I wasn’t sure that I even wanted to get drunk, so I put the tumbler down again.

I was tempted to throw the tumblr at the wall. But the gesture only lasts a second, and then I’d have to face the fact that I liked the tumblr, I hated cleaning whiskey – or anything liquid – off rough surfaces, not to mention pulling tiny glass splinters out of my feet. 

Then I said, “Ah, the fuck.” It was after ten. And someone had just knocked at my door. 

By now I had more clients. There was Merick, who’d defrauded the company he worked with for a little over ten thousand dollars, which he’d blown on gambling. He was lucky, in a way, that he’d only worked for a kitchen products business. If he’d been able to get his hands on millions he’d have given it all to the on-line gaming companies just as surely and just as fast. 

There was Tyree, who’d shot his father, non-fatally. I hadn’t talked to him yet. 

There was Mo, who’d broken into a drug store in the early hours of the morning. He was so small he could fit between two of the roof panels, which hardly had to bend to admit him. He was so stupid that he didn’t know about movement sensors. He was so luckless that he found five dollars and seventy cents in the manager’s drawer, but didn’t find the safe. Not that he’d have been able to move it or open it. And so thoughtless that he’d stolen the manager’s half bottle of Irish whisky. If he’d left that alone, the manager probably wouldn’t have bothered to press charges. I could keep Mo out of jail, I expected. There was a girl who liked him, inexplicably enough, and he liked to be told what to do. 

There was Effa, who turned tricks and wasn’t in trouble until she’d got her fourteen year old sister to work for her. Now she was in major trouble. At the time I still didn’t know just how much. I’d had one interview with her, and she’d spent a lot of it hitting her own head. That was alarming, but she was on worse trouble than that. Well, I’d find out. Someone put a bullet through the side of the Bedford, while I was driving it, because of Effa’s trouble.

But that happened much later.

I’d slowly built up a client list of thirty-five, so I was now as overworked as everybody else. There was no way I could see my clients once a week, or even once a fortnight, once I’d handled the ones who needed intensive help.

So I went through my client list. I sorted them into people I’d have to work with a lot. Then people I could see for an hour a week. Then people I could see fortnightly, and a few souls who were out of trouble and doing well, and I could reduce them to one appearance a month.

I arranged them into piles. At last I held Ana’s file, and weighed it in my hand. It was a thick, heavy file, but it hadn’t put on much weight lately. She’d stopped generating paperwork. If I put her onto monthly reporting, I’d only see her twice more before her probation was up.

I sat there with the file, feeling angry at Ana, and myself, and Sa’afia and, obscurely, at Minnie Mouse. “Fuck,” I said at last, “Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck.” Ana’s file landed on the monthly pile, span and came to rest.  

Fortunately there were no crises at work. My clients turned up, went on training courses, and while no-one actually got a job, nobody did anything too obviously calculated to prevent themselves from being hired. Or got caught doing any new crimes.

Ana called me a couple of days after Sa’afia had gone. I’d dreaded that call, because I’d feared that she’d be cheerful, or suggest that other sexual and romantic possibilities were available to me. I wasn’t in the mood to hear anything of the kind.

I’d never lost the suspicion that Ana was at least partly responsible for Sa’afia’s sudden departure. Neither of them had ever explained what had happened on the night of the mysterious blow-job. Sa’afia had started that night happy, and finished it angry with me. But if Ana had had anything to do with that, it was Sa’afia who had brought her into my bed. So …

And that was all I ever learned. Nothing about it made sense. 

Ana kept herself on the right side of somber and sympathetic. I was grateful to her for that. But I wanted no consolation that she could give me.