Anticipation Read Online Free Page B

new pine, her skirting cloned, her polished kauri boards transplanted from Remuera. She still looks her age. Her walls could, as Maggie might say, tell many stories. Happily, though, she has the sense to keep them to herself.
    It was when we opened up the verandahs, ripped out the dormitories, that the house began to shine. The glint of the harbour in her big sash windows again, the soft skitter of cloud and wave lighting dusty dados and mildewed ceilings (just as it is playing, right now, on my crisp paintwork, grey-white and silky beige, a perfect, newly opened mushroom). The offence of aluminium joinery and plywood partitions consigned, piece by piece, to a skip beside the boatshed, awaiting the tide.
    As everything on the island must. Last week, for instance, I knew, before Sally arrived, exactly how long she would stay. My guests must adhere to the harbour’s timetable. Leave me, at the appointed hour, to my mangroves and herons, the sweep of seaand mud. My quiet grey house. The returning creep of my pale arachnid ghosts.
    But of course, when the jetty is finished, all that will change.
    This morning, when the builders came up for coffee, I expressed my fears.
    ‘Ah,’ said sapper Jake. He’d put his T-shirt back on to come into the house, but I could still see a tattooed band below each sleeve, blue braces holding up his biceps. ‘You want one of those new invisible jetties. They’re all the rage.’
    I smiled. ‘But could I afford one?’
    ‘Yeah! They’re easy to build, eh. No extra charge. We’ll have it done for you tomorrow.’
    Through the afternoon, the visible jetty progresses less quickly. Not that Jake and Pete aren’t working hard — but they’ll have to knock off soon. The September sun is already heading west, making for the Waitakeres and, beyond them, open water. Sharpening the day as it goes, honing light and crushing shadows. While in another hemisphere, those same rays, worn and waterlogged, are clambering up Wimbledon Hill, over Tooting Broadway, the Lüneberg Heath, revolving into a soft-edged autumn morning.
    Except, of course, that it’s we who are moving, time and tide, cold-shouldering our way in and out of darkness. What comes around will go around.
    I watch my jetty grow and think about William Biggs.
    I wish I could remember my days with him. What did we do? What did he say? What pacific fairy tales did he whisper, whisky-breathed , into my ear?
    As it is, I have only Maggie’s word for it that such a time occurred at all.
    And yet I think I hear an echo of him in my thick-watered silences, just as his pattern replicates in the soft centres of my bones.
    Here we are, in a room in 1969, alone with the scent of disuse and the sun shining pink through the curtains. What does William see when he looks at me? A soft-skulled seed. Germ cells slippery with proclivity, reddening with need. And yet he feeds me.
    Someone’s got to do it.
    Brave Will. He never lets tasks slide. Every day, he rises with the first bell of his alarm, performs a thorough gentleman’s toilette, arrives at the printing presses coolly and on time. It’s no wonder he can’t sleep. He’s kept up his guard so long his spine has fused. My osseous grandfather, a rock in unmaternal Harding seas.
    Of course, he tells me nothing. Perhaps, as we doze side by side on the candlewick, I inhale the dust of his dreams. Or perhaps it was already there, in the nucleus of my first cell. A frosting on my chromosomes, waiting to be raised.
    Catching us on the bed like this, guilty Sarah predicts my doom. She should know by now to save her breath. Accidents can’t scare William Biggs. He’s a fan of disempowerment.
    William leaves for his shift at five. Roger comes by at six, picks up me and my nappy bucket, and heads home for a busy evening. No after-hours prospecting for him now. His figures are down. I hate to think what they’re saying at the office.
    After an hour alone with Sarah, I’m usually feeling fractious. Like