A Smatter of Minutes

By FRANCISKA SOARES

Are we all subject to the violence and secrets of our mind, forever marked by them?

Haunted by the memory of her parent's gory murders, Abigail Moore's life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt. She is sent off to her loving grandmother who is fashioned from the same clay as she is. Gramme Kathlee

• Language: English
• Publisher: CORNEST PUBLICATIONS
• Release date: May 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781991165435

FRANCISKA SOARES

Franciska Soares writes hauntingly poignant literary fiction featuring enigmatic histories, forgotten communities and spirited, unbowed women. The product of a strict Roman Catholic upbringing, she claims the characters who populate her books often give her a bit of a fright. That's because Franciska is a conformist and hates confrontation. In fact, her friends and family claim she's a Miss Goody-two-shoes and she doesn't mind that portrayal one bit as it rings true. Her characters on the other hand love to challenge the status quo and are not averse to pushing the boundaries, sexual or ethical. They are dimensional and flawed and that's what makes them human, memorable, Franciska alleges.When she isn't reading or writing poetry and fiction (the iambic pace of her prose oftentimes resounds like a drumbeat), Franciska is probably walking the picturesque Frankton Arm in Queenstown meditating on her writing and the snow-capped Remarkables that tower over Lake Wakatipu, container gardening, or watching edgy black comedy on Netflix.

Book preview

Prologue

The year in which a prime minister was assassinated in her mother’s country and only hours after the historical Te Hiko Ki Waitangi march ended in her father’s country someone took a claw hammer to Abigail’s parents and her life was never the same.

‘My dad’s a snowman . . .’ said Abigail

‘It’s still summer, Abigail,’ her preschool teacher said gently. Not now please, he thought, not with my nob still tripping on beer fumes. I am not caffeinated enough . . .

Abigail was always one of his more ebullient students. Snapping jet eyes abounding in wonderment. Not because she wanted answers, but because there was wondering to be done. Only, this morning she resembled a raggedy doll that had been left out in a squall. Her desperate nod was more of a guess than an endorsement. ‘Yeah, I know … w… w. And he’s m … m … melting …’

‘Oh?’

‘Someone must have magicked him into a s… sn… snow … man.’ The words like paintball-splats. Her chest heaved as if she’d run a marathon. Tears cut rivulets down her smeared cheeks, mixing with bubbles of snot. ‘He couldn’t start the car ‘cause his brain’s super melted. I tried to tidy him up … ppp …’ Abigail held up her blankie. ‘I think it was a coon sage …’ Her chin jerked with each catch of her breath sending the black curls that wreathed her face adrift.

Sweet juniper, that’s blood! A sharp, stab of anxiety rode up and down the teacher’s spine as his mind fought for clarity.

Abigail’s crumpled pyjamas—She’s still in her pyjamas—spilt around her gumboots caked with old dirt.

She was a cherubic young thing, full-blown rosy cheeks, a pouting mouth, adorable in every one of her incarnations: Dungarees or jeans and T-shirt her whitebread attire, tuille and frills for ballet practice, PE gear muddied and played-in after break. But jammies . . . now that’s a first— And a blankie mightily chewed up at the seams. Held strangled in her fat white-knuckled fist, it was covered in— more blood?

A person could bleed to death in five to eight minutes. The teacher knew that. He had been an ambulance officer.

In another life . . . when he had Gwyneth, whom he’d loved and lost.

He had to wrench himself away from the braided flow of those thoughts, mental pictures of Gwyneth and Robert together. But he couldn’t help thinking: Abigail’s so similar to her half-brother Robert, who was almost a generation removed—mid to late twenties? —to Abigail’s four, the teacher guessed. The man was built the way someone’s built when they lift, not for beef or bulk, but for strength. The teacher had seen him at the pub last night. Handsome bloke, damn him! He had inherited a surfeit of the family’s good-looking genes. But it was the generational rowdy genes that had been in evidence after the bastard had had a snoot-full. Robert, the teacher knew, had just two settings. Silently broody when sober and noisily hot-headed drunk. So not a people magnet. What on earth did his Gwyneth see in him? And what was he doing in Christchurch? Robert, he knew had left Christchurch a few years ago, to put almost five hundred kilometres between himself and his new stepmother Celine, Abigail’s mother, to live closer to his own mother in Queenstown. On another island, New Zealand’s South Island.

The preschool teacher hauled himself back to the moment. Time was ticking, thick and acrid. Someone was bleeding to death somewhere . . .

If he called the police—the police, an ambulance . . . I have to get to a phone! —they would take at least ten minutes to respond, nine minutes more than he would have cared for. And what if it were a false alarm? What if Abigail had just had an accident?

To his knee-jerk question, when he’d found her huddled in the corner of his classroom: ‘Are you hurt?’ she’d signalled a tearful, No. Yet there was too much blood. It was everywhere. On her face, her clothes, her blankie, her old mud-encrusted gumboots but most of all on her hands which were covered with the sticky stuff. He could smell it. It was not strawberry jam. There was no mistaking its metallic, ferrous flavour. Vile! It overrode the sweetly pungent tang from coated paper for the craft project he had planned; and the carrot cake—which had the scent of spring. Coby’s mum had baked it for their morning tea.

Everything dissolved into a strong feeling of foreboding.

‘I tried to clean them up,’ Abigail said, before driving her head into her teacher’s shoulder.

Wait a minute! Had she said them? Who else was melting . . . bleeding? Abigail sure had a way with words, his precocious little student.

He could get there before the police, it was only a couple of blocks away, where Abigail lived with her dad Edward Moore and her mum Celine. Darn! He slapped a palm down on his desk. He realized he did not have his car, he had cycled to work, that morning. A nauseous, nowhere feeling, a choked variant of desperation, gurgled the length and breadth of his wasted brain. It was remarkable how his state of mind had evolved so speedily over the last few minutes, though the world around him felt soused and moved with a maddening slowness.

It was five to nine.

And one, two?— minutes since he’d walked in on the frightened toddler, huddled on a floor cushion in the corner of his colourful, banner-strewn classroom. She was sitting among the storybooks, a mini library of sorts, where he held story-time. It was her favourite place, one she was allowed to retreat to when she had completed her assignments ahead of the rest of the class, which she often did.

She must have trudged the two blocks, he marvelled. That would’ve taken her at least ten minutes. In a pea-souper of a morning. Bloody hell! It was lucky she’d made it safely.

Abigail, he knew, was usually dropped off by her dad Edward or Kenneth, her other half-brother. Robert’s younger brother, who like his father and Robert, was a towering figure of a man. Kenneth spent a lot of time at his dad’s, the home of his childhood, even though he shared a decent apartment in the CBD with some mates from the Ilam School of Fine Arts he attended. Kenneth was often a topic of conversation at the pub. He was the darling of Christchurch’s social scene, a mondain, always surrounded by attractive women.

Abigail is quite different from him, the teacher thought, especially just then. She was red and sweaty giving lie to the chilliness outside from which she’d just arrived in her fleece Bugs Bunny pyjamas.

The teacher glanced at the Scooby Doo clock above his desk. In his extreme agitation, the hands appeared illogically placed. He had to focus.

Two minutes to nine

An un-February sun browsed here and there with hard, sharp light, suddenly ambitious in its dwindling trajectory across the late summer sky. The pandemonium of his classroom with twenty-odd four-year-olds arriving after the long Waitangi-Day weekend now vying for his chopped-up attention had begun. They reminded him of a heap of bingo balls champing at the bit in a draw tank.

And then his mind finally coughed up a decision.

One minute to nine.

He thanked his three-personed God that there were no parents around to contend with, as he beelined from the room to his mate’s next door. The classroom door moaned its usual high-pitched C8 harmonica protest before banging shut after him.

‘Hey pal, can you hold the fort? I won’t be long.’

‘Sure thing,’ said his buddy, another male teacher from the other side of the corridor, as he came around his desk with a coffee cup in his hand. ‘Hey, what’s with Abigail?’ The little girl had twirled one bloodied hand around her teacher’s fingers. Her other hand clutched her blankie. She was lost in concentration as if she could not recall who this other person was. ‘Jammies for crying out loud . . . looks as though she’s had a go at the jam bottle, too! And what’s that pong?’ At some point, Abigail had released her bladder.

‘No time to explain!’ he shouted and scooted past the door his pal was holding open, regarding him with a puzzled frown, one eyebrow notched up, mouth frozen in an almost snarky half-smile. But the teacher had swooped the traumatized toddler into his arms and was already thundering down the empty corridor, tubular and resounding, like the belly of a whale. As his thoughts pulled in every direction for answers the throttled-up flutter high up in his chest presaged misadventure. He couldn’t help but think they were guaranteed some wedge of unsolicited, even unpleasant, ballyhoo for his actions that Tuesday. That the next few minutes would impinge on the rest of the girl’s life.

The principal’s receptionist glanced up at the teacher from her brand-new Electric Smith-Corona typewriter. ‘You all right?’ she asked, her mouth vivid as strawberry jam, her brow crumpling in dainty origami pleats. Her arm reached out to the telephone index book with its A-Z slider. She was always protective of those phone numbers . . .

Motes quivered in the bands of light from a high window and formed a halo around her face. Her ample roving breasts gloriously captained inside her miser-tight red shirt did not sidetrack him today.

‘Ah! Can you make me a cup of hot Milo, honey?’ he breathed as he fished the receiver off its cradle and dialled 111 with one bloody shaky finger.

One minute past nine.

A piano thumped a few classrooms away and trembled the floorboards. Chord. Chord. Chord. ChordChord. How his morning splintered into further chaos with that one call. He was typically inured to chaos. But this was a wacky kind of Sturm und Drang. Straight out of the movies.

The day slanted.

‘Can you hear me?’ Abigail’s teacher said to the woman who bore no resemblance to the entrancing forty-ish mother who normally caught every man’s eye at parent-teacher meetings. The Indian beauty with straight long hair like the arching arm of an exquisite piece of furniture polished to a shine, had disappeared in a deluge of blood and flesh, and her huge sloe-black eyes were almost swollen shut. One of her arms had collapsed across her forehead and was badly mangled.

So much blood!

Light seeping through the slats of the Venetian blinds glanced around the room, warping at the edges like a TV dream sequence. A sleep apnea machine lay discarded—a flaccid, corrugated white snake—on the other side of the bed.

A pair of paramedics pushed into the room. Accompanied by a suggestion of disinfectant. And some semblance of reality.

Celine nodded her head up and down— ‘Yes’.

‘Do you know who attacked you?’ the teacher asked.

Another nod, ‘Yes’. After half a beat.

There was a loud bass drum where his heart used to be. ‘Did Robert do this to you?’

‘Yes,’ Celine nodded again, wordlessly, all eloquence rerouted from her tongue to her eyes, as one of the paramedics inserted a needle in her arm to dispatch the drugs that would immobilize her so a breathing tube could be slid down her throat and into her trachea.

The shrieks of police sirens rolled towards them in a tidal wave.

It seemed like a lifetime since he’d found Abigail. But it had been just eight minutes.

CHAPTER ONE

‘I called the cops,’ said quick-thinking toddler who saved his grandmother’s life

By Dianne Blake • Published January 5, 2003

‘Mom-mom’s sick,’ Jimmy Shuker told the dispatcher when she asked him what was wrong. Jimmy dialled 111 on Monday, Jan 4, an easy enough thing to do for most but not for a three-year-old. When he saw that his grandmother Lydia Shuker had fallen and was unresponsive, he did what his mum had told him to do just four days ago: ‘If you don’t hear my heartbeat or somebody falls or anything, you have to dial 111 . . . and just tell them you need help.’

Jimmy stayed on the phone with the call dispatcher until help arrived. He opened the door for the police.

‘He did good,’ his father told reporters.

His mother treated him to as many Memphis Meltdown Rocky Roads as he wanted later that day as a reward.

‘Wah! Wah!’ spat twenty-four-year-old Abigail Moore as she threw the newspaper onto the coffee table between them, spearing the fingers of both her hands in and out of her cowl of black curls. That exclamation, freighted with innuendo, was as oppressive as the films of heat that shimmered golden and fiery and stifled them, Abigail and her flatmate, Trinidad Belafonte, Trini.

She glanced at the article though Trini had guessed straight off it would be one of those modern-day Sir Galahad news stories her best friend was so obsessed with. Stories that furthered my personal destiny as a failure as Abigail every so often said. Her friend’s nocturnal eyes were glazed over with that far-away look again; the one Abigail always got before she slipped into the cacotopia of memories. Cradling them, indulging in them, examining them once again, vesting them with meaning and consequence.

There’s room for only one on the pedestal of self-condemnation, Trini thought, but she ran to Abigail on the couch and hugged her, deciding to draw a line under what could erupt into potential crisis and say no more. Silence—there’s a slew of comfort in silence.

Trini knew, after five years living with Abigail in the apartment they shared on Auckland’s North Shore, that this article would send the easy-going, smart, furiously creative woman she was holding in her arms, into an engulfing depression for a month of Sundays when she’d be doing well if she was up earlier than noon. The situation was a grenade with its pin pulled. Trini hated to see her friend careen down that slippery sentimental slope once again, reduced to a sail the wind had bailed out of, knocking around in a hideaway of things pretended and downright irrational.

‘Why do you torture yourself?’ said Trini, quirking her dusky-brown eyes in worry. Her voice was guarded, fretting the compressed drama she knew was imminent. Aby is such a tangle of contradictions, she thought. Reserved in a crowd, chatty at home, she vouchsafed her public persona, pre-empting her audience, manipulating them into sidestepping their powers of observation about her, so she could cloak that which was private, that which was her. Often insecure she was plagued by doubt which she’d once described during their heart-to-hearts as: ‘You know, it’s kind of a swift, unsettling vanishing of something I fancied was pretty much there for the taking.’

Despite everything, she stood pat on her principles and promises. ‘They are such big words my gramme always said—principles, promises. Important words.’ A fantast, but also impatiently intelligent, Abigail, Aby, had fairy-tale standards.

The sun was blazing feverishly, clinging onto hours stolen from night. It smothered the room with summer. The ceiling fan, throttled up to its highest setting, shivered with an unaccustomed ferocity as it sliced through the hot nimbus, succeeding only in recycling it. Trini could hear the neighbourhood kids splashing around in the pool outside washing off the cares of another day.

They were in their skimpiest shorts and tank tops, Trini and Abigail, unwinding after the hard yakka of a nine-to-five. Trini in her characteristic Sukhasana posture, ankles tucked under her thighs, was perched on the Indian Mandala round floor cushion, white and green with elephant motifs, and Abigail, bone-thin with a profusion of glossy onyx hair, was sunk into the folds of their pride and joy: Their emerald 100,000 Martindale rub count fabric sectional which had cost the earth. A fragrant effusion of pumpkin pie hung thick in the air—cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. That was from dessert. After a dinner of oven-baked meatball pitas with tzatziki and marinated kale. Finger-licking food. One of the perks of living with a wannabe chef who sets a good table, Trini thought. The kale was to die for, it had melted in her mouth, savoury, buttery. Possibly one more idea from her Dictaphone. Abigail’s Dictaphone went with her everywhere. ‘To record recipe ideas that occur to me out of nowhere,’ she’d said.

Fourteen years, give or take, between age damaged and age eighteen, of growing up far from the scene of her bogeys—in her mother’s hometown, Sannid, India, more than 12,000 kilometres away—had done nothing to disburden Abigail of the belief she’d failed her parents that day, the day they had been murdered, the day that played itself out in her nightmares, her ‘coon sage’ head trips . . .

‘Shh . . . shh,’ said Trini, still hugging Abigail. Her voice, normally possessed of the bouncy inflexion of a tossed pebble rippling across a pond was troubled. Abigail could taste failure, sour, the taste of bile in her craw and oh so familiar. ‘Camina!’ she spoke to the loser that lived in her head, ‘You’re such a Milquetoast!’

Abigail had been telling herself that ever since the day of the fog almost two decades ago. That’s how she’d navigated her life, rationalized it. By indulging in the regret of the watershed episode when she’d failed for the very first time, the first of many . . .

Both her parents died that day. She had failed to be a hero for them. There was a newly installed phone at their home in Christchurch. But she had not used it.

The headlines the next day said it all . . .

CHAPTER TWO

‘H e took a claw-hammer to their brains.’ That’s a fitting newspaper heading, Sergeant Gary Simms thought to himself as he surveyed the carnage. This was something he secretly did at every crime scene: conjure up headlines that Deathwatch Beetles, as he chose to call all journalists, could use. He was at the Moore house and there was blood everywhere. As vivid and red as the flowers on the Pohutukawa trees, New Zealand’s native Christmas trees he grew up with up in Maraetai the easternmost suburb of greater Auckland in the North Island. The two-hundred-year-old magnificent Pohutukawa would be in blossom at this time of the year, he thought, their flowers dyed red in the blood of Māori mythical hero Tāwhaki who had fallen to his death from the sky . . .

‘To Hygieia!’ Gary raised his glass of warm lemon water to the mythical goddess of health and downed what the Romans had believed was an elixir. That was how he remembered starting the fateful day of the Moore double-murders.

‘Ahh!’ he’d said feeling the mellow liquid course around in him. He could sense it clearing out the overnight debris in his plumbing. Gary was careful to be as quiet as the sun, which gave the impression it was hiding out that dawn, as he squeezed into his jogging attire. His wife was still asleep.

A heavy mist had moved over the face of the early hours like a water creature. Visibility was reduced to a mere couple of metres. But the self-conscious Gary quite relished the anonymity it provided, and how he could hack his legs into it, like King Kong. The spring bluebells and daffodils which had been sprinkled about the green grass as far as the eye could see had disappeared, anyway. So had the cherry blossoms. It was as if Nature was taking a respite from all that volcanic brilliance for a few more weeks when autumn would return colour to the park.

As he jogged downstream beside the meandering river on the Hagley Park track, in Christchurch, his thoughts homed in on the fourteen-year-old girl who had disappeared in broad daylight while riding her horse on a beach less than six months ago. It was on his mind because his childhood buddy who completed Police Training College with him and chose to stay put on the North Island was one of the team on the case which was threatening to go cold. They’d hit yet another dead-end, his mate said in the chat they had last afternoon, which had been so schematized, hovering as it did around this investigation. It revealed the clear-cut ordering of their relationship now. There’s no getting away from crime-speak between police buddies, thought Gary and shook his head to clear it.

Nothing about the day suggested how it held within it the seeds of its own aberration, how it would play out, how the powerhouse police officer would meet with his own Waterloo . . .

A few hours later Gary was at the wheel of the Holden Commodore, cruising, his blue-uniformed wrist canted over the steering wheel. The window was rolled up as the air-conditioner went full blast.

‘Did you know that smog is a portmanteau word?’ said Detective Ross Rawiri, his partner of five years, his deep sonorous voice in singular contrast with the exiguity of the rest of him: Sucked-in cheeks, multiple squint lines radiating from the corner of his blue eyes which were as watery as the liquored bed of a freshly opened mussel, sandpaper skin, thin reedy frame.

‘Huh?’

‘It is a pair of words blended into one . . . fog and smoke. Chortle is another— chuckle and snort,’ he said and then proceeded to snap his bone fingers to the beat of Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean on his phone. Billie Jean is not my love/She’s just a girl who claims that I am the one . . . he sang jutting his head when, with a static burst, a woman’s voice on their two-way radio told them to make their way to the Moore house.

If money talks, as it’s expected to, then the granite-hewn Edward Moore without question made a good deal of noise. An intimidating figure who by some machination of voice and presence made every other man feel smaller, he was known to the Christchurch police. As an accountant, he was utterly cast against type. With his big sausage hands, he had the appearance of someone who drove trucks for a living, but had taken a wrong turn and swerved into Life in the Fastlane of Commerce. He owned several rental properties in Christchurch and only a year ago had notified the police of vandalism in one of them. Gary was on duty when he’d stopped by to sign a written complaint against Jack Hope, the suspect—a tenant who’d been evicted for being behind on his rent.

‘Wish?’’ Edward had said in the American accent he’d picked up during his decade-long sojourn in Los Angeles. ‘That slacker Jack wished for me to wait another month!’ He barked with derision and his hardee-har-har laugh reverberated the length and breadth of the police station attracting the attention of the ‘visitors’ as well as the staff, some of whom, the cops in particular, tut-tutted and cut their eyes at each other. ‘Wish in one hand and pee in the other, and see which one fills up first!’ he said and slapped the desk he was towering above, rattling the phone receiver off its cradle. The boisterousness vanished as speedily as the crack of a whizzing supersonic bullet. Affecting a shamefaced smile he returned the receiver to its cradle and rearranged some other things which had got temporarily airborne.

A couple of months later he was back again to report a home invasion and several missing electronics. Investigations revealed that the intruder had cut a screen to gain entry. ‘People that want by the yard but try by the inch,’ he’d said as he beetled his shaggy salt and pepper brows, ‘should be kicked by the foot.’

He was referring to the thief, of course, but could more easily have meant his eldest son Robert who resembled his old man in many ways physically. The pair of them filled a room—tough, large men with mountain shoulders, legible biceps and the possible constitutions of oxen. But the resemblance stopped there. Robert, gangrel icy blue eyes and not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, had had several minor skirmishes with the law before moving to Queenstown soon after his father’s second marriage to that gorgeous Indian chick, Celine Moore. Tanned perfection, the woman was, Gary had often thought.

‘Makes one realize how vulnerable we are to predators,’ Celine had said with a shiver when Gary visited the scene of the robbery. She’d told him their motion