Jake's Long Shadow Read Online Free

against failure, a fight against mediocrity, a war against getting nowhere in life. You must strive to gain a learned mind.
    I found a boy who responded, a highly intelligent, tough-spirited kid who wanted out from the Pine Block identity he inherited. Who wanted, more than anything, to remove himself a million miles from the world of his father. Now look at him: Mark Heke, LLB, the nameplate reads on his office door in Wellington. From one side of the courtroom to the other.)
    Beth took a time to reciprocate Charlie’s subtle overtures. For true to her low self-esteem, she refused to believe she was worthy of what she described as a high-up Maori society man. But in reality he was low on the social scale compared to the wider, non-Maori world; he took no money risks, owned no business, his only risk was pushing his radical ideas to a head office that ignored him. I’m just a low-salaried welfare officer with a degree in political history and a diploma in social work. My background is totally working-class . I’d like to think I’ve progressed, if not spectacularly. And Beth came to see herself in better terms.
    That first time for Beth, dining in a restaurant, he started out teasing but then had to reassure her that the other diners were not looking at her. For she had stressed out. She experienced wine for the first time and it seemed odd that a fellow human living in the same town should never have done these things before. When they went to bed, however, it was his turn to be the floundering novice, for he’d not had too many relationships, and certainly not any like with Beth. Such passion, such uninhibited hunger. (My turn to be frightened — well, threatened if truth be known. For I had never struck a woman who knew so clearly what she wanted from the act. I thought it was rebound behaviour at first. Till the next time, and the next.Then I realised she was a highly sexed woman, quite at home with this aspect of herself. That it was up to me to learn from her.)
    To his regret, even with ten wonderful years, he was still uncomfortable with sex, of unrestrained sexuality. He was well aware that this side of him frustrated Beth, but he was unable to disassociate his sexual lust from disrespect to his ideal of Woman. (I hardly even think about sex, which I know is unusual for a male, but that’s how I was made.) Still, their love for each other had flourished, and he did not think for a moment that Beth would find her sexual satisfaction elsewhere, and nor would he think of asking her such a question.
    His sexual diffidence was probably his absolute belief that a woman held everything together: the marriage, children’s well-being, the home. She held the fragile pieces that were men and male together, when otherwise men were at war with each other, with themselves, and the age-old confoundment with the female condition. The act of sex was much too raw for a man with an idealised notion of women.
    Life without Beth was unimaginable, and he wondered how she might have turned out if they hadn’t met. The thought she might have even got back with Jake made him laugh in waking hours. If she chose that then they deserved each other.
    In Charlie’s dreams, however, and disturbingly too often for comfort, it was the opposite. He dreamed them together, making sex
and
love in front of his eyes and Jake taunting his sexual lack of interest. Even up here, on his beloved tribal mountain, a memory of one of those dreams would have Charlie ask uncomfortable questions of himself. Not that a Beth-with-Jake dream came to mind this Saturday afternoon. Just the cold registering and reminding a man how quickly impenetrable fog could form, making the descent potentially dangerous. He was anyway peckish, he had cream buns, three (three, Charlie?), back in the land cruiser.
    As he came down the slope, he saw another vehicle, heard it stop suddenly and doors slam. Then the sound of barking dogs — hunters.