OPINION
The shouts woke me up. Anger is not something often associated with life in postcode 1011. As the most expensive suburb in New Zealand, it’s also the quietest, all the grand homes and architectural marvels filled with the rich doing what the rich do best – nothing, just dozing. I do my part by sleeping day and night. In the few hours I’m awake, the noisiest sound I ever make is flipping the pages of a book. I had gone to sleep one humid evening last week reading a book I had taken from the free library in 1011, a charming little box with a glass door. Strange to think someone in New Zealand’s most expensive suburb had previously owned and now donated The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia contract killer.
The shouts got louder. I thought maybe I should investigate and wondered about breaking my rule of summer and getting out of bed before midday. But that seemed a bit drastic. Summer is made for sleep; I sleep like a log in the other seasons, but in summer I sleep like a forest. I wondered whether The Ice Man might give me bad dreams. It’s a relentless telling of the many and varied ways the New Jersey hitman killed people – sometimes for a contract, just as often as a kind of leisure activity. He felt nothing when he killed. There was a deadness, too, to the telling of his killings. I never dreamed anything after reading The Ice Man. He had killed my dreams.
The shouts really started getting out of control. I broke my golden rule and flung open the curtains. It was one of those summer mornings in Auckland when the heat has already risen out of the earth and baked the pavements, made concrete walls warm to the touch. Half a moon was dangling in the sky. A haze surrounded it, like smoke; the moon looked like it was burning. I could see three men. It’s always men doing the arguing. Women barely feature in The Ice Man. It’s a world of men killing men. The hitman supposed that in total he killed more than 200 men. He prided himself on a moral code: he never killed women or children, and he reserved a special hatred for sex offenders.
The shouts were coming from all three of the men. They were across the street on the pavement. It was a strange tableau: they were all wearing dark T-shirts and dark board shorts, like they were in uniform – a uniform of summer violence. I recognised one of them. He lives across the street. He has shouting form. The only other time I have heard anger in postcode 1011 was when I saw him shouting at a Samoan security guard checking on the house next door. It was a really bad look and I hoped the guard would smash his face in. The Mafia hitman would have just shot him dead.
