Sanctuary Read online

  WINNER OF THE NZ POST CHILDREN’S BOOK AWARDS, THIS COMPELLING NOVEL EXPLORES TRUTH AND LIES, GUILT, GRIEF AND LOVE.

  ‘So where does the truth lie?’ said Jeremiah. ‘Huh, truth lies. Truth lies,’ I said, giving up before I started, knowing I could never explain.

  Months after her life has been brought to a standstill, Catriona Stuart is embarking on a painful search for the truth. The truth about her boyfriend, Jeremiah, and his dangerous brother Simeon. The truth about her mother, about her past, and most of all about herself and her secret and why her world fell apart.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Kate De Goldi

  Follow Penguin Random House

  For Bruce, love always

  Prologue

  Miriam Wilkie suggested I write this. Frankly, I couldn’t see the point.

  ‘What’s the point?’ I said.

  ‘It can be a way of working things out, a way of understanding,’ she said.

  ‘Isn’t that why I’m coming to you?’

  ‘Well.’ Her face got a patient look. ‘Your school reports say that Creative Writing is your top subject. I thought writing about this might be a useful—’ she searched for a word, ‘a tool, if you like. Especially for you.’

  Full marks for effort, Miriam. Very thorough research.

  ‘I’m no Katherine Mansfield,’ I said.

  But she’s persistent, Miriam. And clever.

  ‘Any thoughts of a career in writing?’ she asked, lightly. She’s very adept at questioning in a light tone. ‘How would you describe your relationship with your mother?’ she asked, ever-so-lightly, at our second session. Whammo. How indeed, Miriam?

  ‘Actually,’ I said, in a silly burst of confidence, ‘I was planning to be a detective, but I don’t suppose they’ll want me now.’

  She laughed. Oh, she’s stunning when she laughs, Miriam Wilkie, such perfect white teeth and full lips. Those patrician cheeks crease upwards and her eyes disappear into slits. Irresistible, almost. I have to work hard not to laugh myself. Yes, she’s a real pleasure to look at Ms Miriam Wilkie, MD, Dip. Psych, bobbed blonde hair, great body, clothes straight from Zambesi.

  This is one stylish broad, Simeon would say, looking her up and down in that insolent way.

  ‘So why did you want to be a detective?’ she said. I noticed she said did. She took a pessimistic view of my future, too.

  ‘I’m interested in truth,’ I said coolly.

  She surprised me that day. ‘Truth,’ she mused, looking at her nails. ‘But where does truth lie?’

  It gave me quite a turn, as Nan would say. These were almost Jeremiah’s exact words to me that terrible night as we sat, despairing, in The Bus, the noise behind us becoming more and more frantic.

  ‘So where does the truth lie?’ said Jeremiah.

  ‘Huh, truth lies,’ I said, giving up before I started, knowing I could never explain. ‘Truth lies.’

  There was only a moment after that, a long moment and a chasm of unsaid things between us. And then it all blew. The end came.

  ‘Detectives don’t have a monopoly on truth,’ said Miriam, later.

  ‘They probe and probe,’ I said, tricked into being passionate. ‘They analyse, they’re rational, they follow lines of causation backwards to their source.’ I closed my mouth firmly, to stop any more coming out.

  ‘So do psychologists, if it comes to that,’ said Miriam, smiling. ‘And so do writers, in their way.’

  I stared at her.

  ‘Try writing about it,’ she said again.

  So I did.

  Chapter One

  ‘Just as a matter of interest,’ Miriam asked me, ‘what would you begin with?’

  I thought back to last summer.

  ‘Meeting Jeremiah, I suppose,’ I said. ‘Or the job.’

  I thought of Brighton and the long, glorious rides to work, the infinite stretches of road, the warm nor’west mornings, everything still, freeze-framed, before gates opened and car doors slammed, before anyone opened their mouth and spilled words, before the day broke out. I remembered myself, ears pinned back, pumping hard, slicing through the thick quiet, pure happiness settling over me.

  ‘Getting my bike,’ I said.

  I had my first holiday job. Through a friend of a friend my mother had heard of a council job at Brighton, caretaking along the beach front and in the playground.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, chewing the skin round her nails. ‘How will you get there? It’s miles.’

  ‘Buses,’ I said. ‘There’ll be buses. Or I’ll walk. Good for my health.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘It’s miles.’

  But Brighton, at the height of summer — oily bodies in the dunes, hot, hot sand. The surf was rough, but it would be invigorating. There would be noise and endless, anonymous company. I wanted this job badly.

  ‘I suppose I could take you,’ Stella was saying, ‘but I can’t pick you up. How do you get home?’

  ‘I can walk,’ I said. ‘Honestly, it’s light for ever at this time of the year.’

  ‘Look,’ she said, taking out a cigarette, searching round for her matches. ‘You are not walking that far at any time. Do you want to be raped and murdered?’

  ‘Bloody hell, Stella.’

  ‘Don’t bloody hell me.’

  This was a fairly representative sample of our conversations around this time, snapping and whining and cursing.

  ‘What about a new bike?’ I said. We both pretended not to think of my last bike, my ten-speed, destroyed in the fire.

  ‘Money,’ said Stella. We both pretended not to think of Freddy, my stepfather, who regularly offered Stella money, which she regularly refused.

  ‘Stella—’ I began in a neutral voice, but she cut me off.

  ‘Don’t say it, Cat, just don’t start on it again. I’m not taking money from Freddy and that’s that.’ She drew on her cigarette, stared at me, daring me to argue.

  ‘Stella,’ I said, ‘I can’t bear to hang round here all holidays.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, trying to give me a hug. We both pretended not to think about our boxy house, our diminished life.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, pushing her off, ‘we’ll borrow the money off Toni and I’ll pay her back with my pay. Yes? Yes?’

  Stella lit a fresh cigarette from her old one. ‘Brilliant,’ she said through pursed lips. ‘Brilliant!’ She smiled brightly at me, cheerful with relief. ‘Ring Toni now.’ She drew back heavily, sagging in her chair.

  I went to the phone.

  ‘Good thinking, Cat-woman,’ Stella muttered, staring off through the haze of smoke.

  At 5.30 every morning before she left for work, Stella stuck her clock radio round my door, but I never heard a thing until the jazz programme woke me at seven.

  I lay in the narrow bed, listening to the music and the silence just beyond it. Once our house had been four times as large and humming: Stella singing loudly and running water for her bath, Freddy shaving, doing his Freddie Mercury routine, the phone ringing, the washing machine gyrating, and Tiggie running everywhere singing her own tuneless version of ‘Do Your Ears Hang Low?’ It drove me crazy at the time, but now, two years on, I still couldn’t get used to the eternal quiet.

  I crawled out of bed and read Stella’s note.

  Mate, she wrote, we need coffee!!! Do we
have any more cash??? (I took it for cigs.) I’ve got a session with Graeme then Dix and I going for a drink. Don’t worry about tea for me. Have a good day, mate. Kisses, Stella.

  I made my standard breakfast (baked beans on rye toast, Milo), and mentally reviewed the day: work, supermarket, bank, home, bath. Then what? Stella would be late and she would bring Dix home for the night. Bad news. I couldn’t abide Dix, Stella’s latest; he was Australian and said mate every second word (and so did Stella now). He was tall and lean, with a thick curling moustache and droopy brown eyes and a very matey manner.

  ‘So, what do you think?’ Stella asked me expectantly, the morning after her first night with Dix. I was eating breakfast and Stella was having her first coffee and cigarette.

  I never made any bones with Stella about her men any more. ‘Awful,’ I said. ‘Thick as two short planks. Repulsive moustache. Neanderthal eyebrows. Obviously works out. Strictly short term, but probably not worth the effort. Two out of ten.’ I shook my head sorrowfully at her.

  ‘God you’re a bitch sometimes, Catriona.’

  ‘Well, you asked me,’ I said, scraping my breakfast plate and rinsing it. I felt the old longing for Freddy, smart, funny, loving Freddy. ‘God, Stella,’ I said, mad with her. ‘Sometimes I wonder how you ever had the good luck to land Freddy.’

  ‘Jesus!’ she said, squinting at me. ‘Will you ever shut up about Freddy? Face it, Cat. Face reality. It’s over with Freddy and that’s the cold truth. If you’re so bloody hung up on him, go and live with him, go on! I’m sure you’d both be very happy together!’

  She didn’t mean it of course. We raged like this periodic ally; at times we moved around each other like deadly combatants, a wasteland of pure venom between us. But Stella would be lost without me, I knew. Who would organise her, run the house, keep an eye on her money? Who would listen to her maunderings, tuck her in bed when she was sad?

  And me? I was attached to her by some invisible umbilical cord which tugged and nagged at me, filling me to the brim with love and fury.

  I kept my new bike in the shed at the bottom of our section; sheds seemed safer than houses now. I had two padlocks and a combination chain lock with a five-digit code. I locked the wheels to the bike frame and the frame to the shed. Then I locked the shed.

  ‘You better watch it, Cato,’ Stella said to me, ‘you’re getting paranoid. This is Shirley. You know, Christchurch.’

  ‘You can’t be too careful,’ I said, only half joking. ‘Apart from the car and the house, this is the only thing of any value that we own.’ And, actually, the bank owned most of the car and the house.

  ‘If they’re going to take it, they’re going to take it,’ said Stella, shrugging.

  ‘Yeah, but why make it easy for them?’ I said.

  ‘Them. Them. Who are we talking about anyway?’

  ‘One of your old boyfriends, possibly,’ I said. Unfair, really. She’d once gone out with a burglar, though she didn’t know it at the time.

  But on Christmas Day I opened my present from her and found a magic-wand keyring, a small plexiglass cylinder with pink and purple glitter stars and half-moon slivers floating inside.

  ‘Should ward off any evil intentions,’ said Stella, grinning. ‘Only cost $7.95, too.’

  ‘Good mother,’ I said. (I’d imposed a $10 ceiling on Christmas presents.)

  I swung the wand now as I walked to the shed. The bike was six weeks old but I still got a thrill when I unlocked the door and pulled it out into the morning light.

  ‘Hello my beauty,’ I said, glad no one could hear me. I checked it over every night for marks, and cleaned and polished it on Saturdays.

  Stella sat in the sun on the tiny verandah and watched me. ‘There’s something sad about this, Cat. It’s a Saturday in summer, you’re seventeen, you’re attractive and talented — according to your teachers — and you’re lurking round at home, polishing your best friend, a bike, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Shut up, Stella,’ I said. ‘A bike is a steady and faithful companion.’

  ‘Why don’t you go out? Where are your friends? Why don’t you invite them over?’

  ‘I don’t like my friends any more,’ I said. ‘And since I’m an east-side girl now, they probably don’t like me either.’

  She opened her mouth to speak but I cut her off.

  ‘The truth is, Stella,’ I stared at her, expressionless, winding her up, ‘the truth is, bikes are restful, they’re obliging, they’re tireless. Bikes don’t answer back.’

  ‘Don’t be weird,’ she said. ‘It’s not normal to spend so much time by yourself. Friends are good for you — people to talk to, people to have fun with. You need to have fun.’

  ‘Stella.’

  ‘When I was your age I was never home. Polly and I spent all our spare time—’

  ‘Stella,’ I said. ‘When you were my age you were three months pregnant and married to Jim.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, thinking, thinking. ‘At least I wasn’t in love with my bloody bike.’

  ‘Stella,’ I said, determined to have the last word. I held my bike out at arm’s length, admiring its pristine condition. ‘This way lies freedom.’

  Too true. Every morning I rode down the short, steep incline of our drive, out onto the road, and I pedalled for eight kilometres without thinking. Something went on in my head, I suppose, but the point was it didn’t bother me. For the first time in two years I stopped fighting off the catalogue of disasters which had comprised our recent life, the list of Problems which fought to preoccupy me wherever I was, whatever I was doing.

  But not when I rode my shiny white, streamlined, light-weight, fifteen-speed, McIntosh racer. Later, when I told Jeremiah about this, he said it was adrenalin, or endorphins maybe, the rush that runners get when they’ve achieved a certain distance, reached a certain speed. But I know that what I loved on those summer mornings and afternoons was the gathering of momentum, the rhythmic, fluid rotation of my feet on the pedals, the exhilaration of cutting through the air. I was practically winged, soaring.

  I plotted a route on the map which took me around the river, through Dallington and Avondale to the estuary and then in to New Brighton and down to the beach. I saw canoeists and kayakers training on the river, old men fishing, people waiting stolidly for buses. The suburbs and streets and parks were all new to me, dingy and bare after the lush, well-groomed gentility of the north-west suburbs. This was an older, poorer side of town, damp and worn out.

  ‘I’ve ridden past streets you’ve never heard of,’ I told Stella.

  Niven, Edna, Sharlick, Woolley, I chanted quietly to myself as I sped past. Edwins, Bathhurst, Stour, Brooker. It took twenty-five minutes to reach the beach and the little hut where the council Parks and Reserves workers hung out, and at first this seemed a big effort. I had to lie down on a bench to recover. But after a while the ride was too short; I wanted the magnificent, mindless, flying feeling to go on longer.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Stella asked when she found me studying the map.

  ‘I’m plotting a longer route to work,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s fantastic exercise, Stella. I’m getting tough inner thighs. You should try it.’

  ‘You know I hate exercise,’ she said, lolling extravagantly in her chair.

  True. Stella’s idea of exercise was putting out the milk bottles.

  ‘I think I’ll go via QEII,’ I said, pleased at the length of Marshland and Travis roads. ‘Get it up to fifty minutes.’

  ‘Why don’t you stop off at QEII and have a swim on the way?’ said Stella.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I can do that at the beach when I arrive. Quick dip before work to freshen up.’

  ‘Actually, Catriona,’ she said, ‘I was joking.’ She picked at her nails. ‘C’mon Cat, all this exercise, it’s not normal.’

  ‘Not to you, Stella.’

  ‘It’s not! Fifty minutes, it’s nuts, it’s triathlete bullshit, it’s not normal
.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, sick of her. ‘Would you stop telling me I’m not normal. I like biking. You like lying in bed, I like biking. It’s great. It’s … it’s a relief.’ I looked hard at her. ‘It helps me,’ I said, delivering the ace.

  She was silent for a while, chewing away. ‘You don’t think you’re anorexic, do you?’ she said, having a last try.

  ‘God, Stella!’ I laughed. ‘That’s gotta be the pot calling the kettle black.’ She lived on coffee, cigarettes and nervous energy. ‘Go away. I’m having fun. You told me to have fun. Well, now I am.’

  It took only forty minutes via Travis Road and Marine Parade, so I extended the route to include Prestons Road and Burwood Road, past the pine forest and the pretty, old Presbyterian church and the riding school and the swamp with the billboard advertising future on-site housing developments. I made fifty-five minutes, but I was getting faster all the time, so soon the time was pegged back to forty-five. After the Christmas break I started going down Mairehau Road, past the sawmill to Parklands. This was about the most north I could go without actually heading out of town and up the coast, but even so Stella was frothing.

  ‘Cat bikes to work by way of Kaikoura, for God’s sake,’ she told my grandmother and aunt. I told them the actual route.

  ‘Good on you, darling,’ said Nan, who uniformly approved of everything I did.

  ‘Exercise,’ said Toni, ‘is very good for stress.’ She was very astute.

  By the end of the second week in January I had hit my optimum time: sixty minutes, if I took the side streets of Parklands and went through North Beach to Marine Parade. If I left home at 7.30 I arrived at work in plenty of time to have a swim and cool down.

  Funny — I’ve often thought — that I never took a southern route to work, say down to Ferrymead and up the Dyers Pass Road to the Port Hills, just for a change. But I became devoted to my north-eastern navigation: the endless market gardens with their onion and potato smells, the long roads bordered by poplars, the strange surreal quality of Parklands, the ramshackle, sea-sprayed houses of North Beach and the whiff of the sand dunes and ice-plant and pine needles down the final stretch of Marine Parade.