The Road from Midnight Read online

  2

  Our affair started with the lunch, the red Jockeys and the remnants of coke coursing through our veins and it seemed like a match which could last, as far as Jim was concerned. We did our best to keep the affair quiet at work, but journalists are adept at reading body language and sniffing out secrets in seconds. Before long we were officially a couple. Jim would go out of his way to surprise me with meetings in obscure motels and hotels. He once arranged with one of his contacts to offer me a brilliant story and play up the drama by insisting on a secret meeting at a motel one hour north of Auckland.

  I was running late and arrived panicking at a seedy motel with “Seaview” in its name, fully expecting my supposed contact would have fled. I never saw the sea or the view because when I knocked with trepidation on the door I was met with a naked Jim, complete with that nose wrinkling smile and something else which was anything but wrinkly.

  “Have I got a story for you?” he laughed as he pulled me into the room and set about removing my clothes.

  Only then did I notice all the chocolate.

  “Jim, why does this room look like the Easter Bunny just hopped by. What’s with all the chocolate?”

  “You’ll see,” he said pushing me on to the bed. He grabbed a Mars bar, unwrapped it and did things with it I’m pretty sure the manufacturer never intended.

  “Jim, you naughty bugger.”

  Next he sprinkled Flake bar all over my stomach and breasts and slowly licked each piece off.

  We finished all of the chocolate after several concentrated hours of lovemaking, pausing occasionally for fortifying red wine and dope smoking.

  Two weeks later I arrived at Jim’s house to find a table and two chairs set up in the garden with his specialty, a beef fillet in the oven and a menu which detailed the night’s events:

  Entrée — Sex while listening to Lou Reed.

  Main — Beef.

  Dessert — Sex while listening to Frankie Goes to Hollywood (her choice not mine, but it seems to get her in the mood so who am I to complain.)

  Brandy — In bed with a joint.

  Jim was extraordinary in bed. Just as he was a terrier determined to get his story at work, in bed he was determined that I should end the night safely tucked up with the memory of multiple orgasms. There was no such thing as a quickie for Jim, every encounter was an event which started with me and ended with me, preferably having both released a hefty amount of orgasmic energy. He said he’d never felt so “sexually enriched” with a woman and embarked on such a journey of sexual gratification that at times I thought I’d drown in it. He was better than good, he was superb. And for the 19-year-old me, he was a sexual gift I enjoyed immensely at the time not realising until years later how extremely fortunate I was.

  After an exhausting first few months Jim asked me to move into his character-filled villa in Ponsonby. I loved his house and the way it made me feel with his vast collection of vinyl records, a kitchen so warm and cosy that anyone who came into it felt immediately at home and every wall covered in books. His home was everything I dreamed of owning one day but I refused to move in, preferring to keep my independence and if I was honest (which I was only to Daisy) I always felt I would never match the intensity of his feelings towards me. I sometimes felt trapped and controlled by him but I gave in because he was the older man who knew so much more and I generally did what he told me to do.

  “Don’t get that wine, it’s crap,” he would instruct at the liquor store. “Don’t play that album it’s pop shit,” he’d groan if I put a record on the stereo. “Do you have to leave your clothes all over the floor, Jane?” he would moan every morning. I just got used to doing what I was told.

  I was also addicted to his ability to teach me every trick of the trade he had ever learned and let me into his well worn red contact book whenever I needed it. I was being trained by the best and some days that was all I needed.

  One day I realised my period was late. I was only 20, I was on the pill, and we never took any chances. I could not be pregnant.

  Daisy tried to make me feel better.

  “At least you have a man who loves you, who would do anything for you. I think he’d make a great father,” she cooed.

  “Daisy, I’m not having a baby, I’m too young and my career is too important to me,” I snapped at her.

  “I know but it would be really cute with your eyes and his hair,” she gurgled letting her maternal instincts run riot.

  And unfortunately she had good company.

  “Oh my darling I can’t believe it, this is the most amazing gift. Come here you gorgeous thing. Just think, you and baby at home, me at work. What a dream!” Jim gurgled.

  “Don’t get too carried away, I haven’t even done a test yet. And I’m sure it’s just some hormonal imbalance or something because this isn’t in my plans, I’m only 20. I can’t understand, I’ve never missed a pill, ever,” I said trying to avoid the soft gooey look which had claimed his face.

  “Well, let’s see. Whatever happens we’ll work it out, darling, trust me,” he murmured as he took me into his arms and nuzzled into my neck.

  I could think of nothing worse than being pregnant. I disliked babies intensely, had never held one in my life and often wondered why they couldn’t be born walking, like many other, less intelligent life forms.

  What I did in those next few weeks was unforgivable and only Daisy knew. A trip to the doctor confirmed the worst and I knew if I told Jim, I would end up having the baby. While he was the most loving man ever, he had a power over me I found difficult to explain or to stand up against. I had to lie, and I had to get rid of the baby.

  I got Daisy to buy a pregnancy kit from the chemist and use it. I then showed Jim her negative results and rolled him a conciliatory joint as he gazed out of the kitchen window and into the distance, giving in to the melancholy of his lost fatherhood. I then swiftly arranged a visit to my parents in the South Island for a week, telling him my mother wasn’t well. Jim had never met my parents, and understood that I kept him from them for a reason.

  They were very traditional rural folk and they could no more understand my life in the big city than imagine me living on Mars. The thought that I might be seeing an older man, and one who looked like Jim, would totally do their heads in. So he was not at all suspicious.

  And then I booked myself in for an abortion. Daisy delivered me to the clinic and sat in the waiting room until it was over. I tried not to listen to the sound of my baby leaving me. The suck and squelch, the dull pull on my uterus and then the dragging pain.

  Daisy took me home to her flat and put me to bed while I cried my eyes out, surprised at the sense of loss which had overcome me.

  It seemed that I did have a maternal instinct in there somewhere, and I swore I would never, ever do that to myself again. I intended to hide out at Daisy’s all week, never leaving the house, so scared was I that one of Jim’s many seedy contacts would see me and report back.

  I needn’t have bothered. One of his contacts just happened to be the doctor who performed my abortion, and, it turned out, many prostitutes’ abortions. Jim was heading into the clinic to talk to him about a hooker recently found floating in the harbour with half a 20-week foetus’s arm in her uterus, when he saw me leave by the side door. He turned up at Daisy’s house that afternoon.

  “I will never forgive you for this,” he said, his black eyes glaring at me. “You had no right to make this decision yourself, that was my child.” He turned away and I realised he was crying.

  “I’m sorry. I just knew you wouldn’t let me and I’m so young. I really couldn’t have gone through with it and you know how important my career is to me.”

  “Your fucking career. That’s all you care about isn’t it? Sometimes I think that’s the only reason you’re with me because you’re learning stuff off me you’d never learn otherwise. Why don’t you just be honest with me, Jane? You’re using me — you’ve never loved me,” he was shouting now, eyes bla
zing, fists clenched, tears streaming down his long drawn face, no longer worried if I saw his naked grief.

  “That’s just not true, Jim, I do love you, I do. Please forgive me, please, darling, please. I’ll never do it again. It was exasperatingly painful, you have no idea what they do to you. They actually vacuum the baby out, it was disgusting, I could never go through with it again. I just couldn’t.”

  It was the first fight Jim and I ever had, but it would not be the last.

  “I think you mean excruciatingly painful, not exasperatingly,” he corrected me after a long silence.

  “You don’t think he left a baby’s arm inside me as well do you?” I ventured, hoping to lighten the mood.

  “Jesus, Jane, I’m not ready to laugh about this, I’m really fucked off,” he replied, but I knew I was through the worst.

  “Jane, tell me you love me and you’ll never lie to me again,” he whispered that night as he snuggled into my back before we drifted off to sleep.

  Three months later it came.

  “Jane, will you marry me?” he asked on bended knee in his kitchen shortly after we had downed a bottle of champagne. He had cooked lamb rack and we had snorted a line to celebrate our two-year anniversary.

  I ran.

  3

  I wasn’t one of those women who dream of white lace and tiered wedding cakes.

  I can’t believe how close I got to being tied down to a man who was moments away from booking shared plots in the local cemetery and getting me to change my surname to “Craig”.

  I’m writing this in the blue room. I still marvel at how gorgeous this place is and how I have nothing to do every day except take a walk, write a few words in this journal and end the day chatting as we get ready to go out. And every day I thank the Lord, Jesus Christ, Mohammad and Mary Magdalene that I didn’t marry Jim. My actions saved me from a life where nothing would have happened to me except that I might have been promoted to the police round at the paper and spent my life letting Jim shove Mars bars up me, smoking joints and listening to the Velvet Underground. But I also look back and wonder if sacrificing my naked ambition to that life, might have kept him away from hurting me, all those years later.

  “Daisy, I’ve got to leave him, it’s just too much, he fucking asked me to marry him last night!” I muttered down the phone.

  I was at work and phoning Daisy in Australia where she had recently managed to score a great job as deputy editor of Heal Yourself Well.

  Unlike me, Daisy preferred a quieter brand of journalism. We had met on our journalism course when I took an immediate liking to her after she put up her hand on day one and asked our old school, alcoholic, chain smoking, rough as guts tutor if he would mind if she hung an amethyst crystal at the window to send positive energy into the room via the sun. From that day on he treated her like a moron, and I had found someone who was delightfully refreshing, enormously entertaining and possessed more strength and chutzpah then any woman I’ve ever met.

  We made a strange looking pair around campus. I was tall and skinny and dressed almost entirely in black and op shop retro clothes while Daisy has always been short and dumpy and clothed in diaphanous layers of muslin, representing as many colours of the rainbow as she could manage. Eventually Daisy moved into my one bedroom flat after the boy I had been going out with since sixth form, Marco Wilson, moved out, breaking my heart and taking all the pieces with him to his studies in Italy.

  So I let Daisy use the sun porch as her bedroom, charged her bugger all rent but made good use of her natural tendency to look after me complete with whole grains, mystic crystals and health-giving meditations. I never had to worry about cleaning up, cooking or feeding the cat, who was slowly being encouraged to be a vegetarian. By this time we were working at the Auckland Daily together, until Daisy lost two stone by sleeping with a rose quartz tucked under her pillow every night and eating nothing but papaya and porridge for six months and her interest in alternative healing took over. Daisy’s articles researching the healing properties of oats had even earned her a Media Peace Award. We were never sure what significance the healing properties of oats had in creating world peace but Daisy was very grateful that alternative medicine journalism was finally being taken seriously.

  Now she was living and working in Sydney for the biggest publishing company there, Poole Publishing. Which was a great relief because it meant she started dressing a little more professionally. The day she turned up at my house wearing those Indian cotton MC Hammer style pants which are tight at the ankles and hang down so low the crotch is at the knees, like she was wearing a jumper upside down, was a bad day indeed. I took Daisy aside and suggested that now she was playing big time at an international publishing house she might want to get some smart suits and things.

  “Can I still wear my jewellery do you think? I can’t live without it, and I’m not going to stop putting henna in my hair,” she said, striking a determined, red-haired gangly pose.

  I looked at Daisy with her arsenal of crystals dangling from wrists, her neck, her ears and even, I noticed, her ankle. Then there were the various piercings and the hair. Oh well she was working for Heal Yourself Well, I’m sure they expected a little alternative style at Poole Publishing.

  She went to work every day in a building which housed 54 magazines, of which hers was admittedly a small title but she was living her dream.

  “Oh Jane you don’t really mean it,” soothed Daisy. “You don’t know how lucky you are to have Jim. I’d give my right arm, well actually my right everything to have a man who loves you as much as he does.”

  Daisy had been single for three years, ever since she broke off her relationship with the local Yoga teacher who was delivering fresh papaya and a lesson on tantric sex, not only to her, but also to three other women in the neighbourhood.

  “Daisy it’s too much and you know it is. He’s controlling me and I’m only 21. I have my whole life and most importantly my career ahead of me and he wants me to settle down, have his babies, smoke joints and roll around in bed all night,” I moaned. “And if he corrects my use of the English language one more time I’ll tie his dick in knots.”

  “Thousands of women, no, millions of women would be happy to be in your position. Stop acting like a spoilt brat. You know that without Jim you wouldn’t be the ace reporter you are and your vocabulary is definitely more accurate thanks to him. Just take a deep breath, think about it and consider your options. Especially the option called ‘great bloody sex.’”

  “Daisy stop it.”

  “What?”

  “Being so sensible.”

  “That’s why you love me.”

  “No it’s not,” I hung up. Jim was making his way across the newsroom to say hello for the first of his 20 visits for the day. I’d counted. He couldn’t leave me the hell alone.

  The next day, after Jim had taken me out to dinner and surprised me with a diamond ring “not an engagement ring, just a diamond to say how much I love you” I rang Daisy again and insisted she find me a job in Australia.

  “You’re not a magazine journalist Jane, you’re news, and hard news at that.”

  “I don’t care, get me anything you can find. I need to get out, and if you loved me you’d do this for me. The only way I can leave Jim is if I have a job I can’t refuse and I put the entire Tasman Sea between us.”

  And that’s how I started in celebrity journalism. Daisy was in the cafeteria at lunch and happened to tell the woman next to her that her aura was a bit yellow and they got talking over Daisy’s chamomile tea and tofu sandwich and the other woman’s coffee and sausage roll and the deal was done.

  The woman with the sausage role was Nelly Jones, the deputy editor of Fabulous Day, who desperately needed a news editor. Someone who could sniff out the stories and beat the competition, Woman’s Week. The magazine was snapping at their heels and getting a few too many exclusive stories so the pressure was on. Within moments Daisy had painted me as a cross between Jana Wendt and B
arbara Walters, only the newspaper version.

  I flew over for an interview and to this day I have no idea why they took a risk on me. For a start I was a Kiwi with an admittedly impressive scrapbook of stories but I was also woefully unsophisticated and naïve.

  When Nelly took me out to lunch she hailed a taxi at the side of the road and hopped in while it was still moving down busy George Street. One block down the road she realised I wasn’t in the cab, as I was still standing there on the side of the road, unused to this big city habit of sliding into cabs. I was waiting for it to stop.

  “Hey, Jane, come on, move your arse!” she screamed. I ran as well as I could in my new high heels, purchased two hours before our meeting in a vain attempt to make me look professional and sophisticated.

  Then at lunch at the very posh Bistro 9 at Darling Harbour I ordered salmon and was asked whether I wanted it served medium or rare.

  “Um, no sorry I ordered the salmon and chips, not a steak,” I responded pleasantly. I had just alerted my waiter to the fact that I was a Kiwi. When we say “chips” the Aussies hear “chups”. And when we say “six” they hear “sux”. Which isn’t a bad as when they say “six” and we hear “sex”.

  “Yes, I know, madame, our chef cooks the salmon rare or medium. Which would you prefer?” minced the waiter looking down his nose having rightly assumed I was a visitor from Hicksville.

  “I think you’d like it medium,” said Nelly, helpfully.

  “Okay then, cheers,” I answered.

  “Fuck me, Nelly, this is all a bit new,” I laughed after the waiter left.

  “You’re going to love it,” said Nelly and I knew from that moment that we would get on like a house on fire. I spent the rest of the lunch entertaining her with the extreme lengths I had gone to in order to get some of my stories, like hiding in a policeman’s wardrobe with my tape recorder while he seduced a defence witness involved in a drug trial he had worked on and I could tell she was impressed.