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in, and the dog park was hidden, but she was close enough to the stucco house to catch sight of a person in one of the upstairs rooms. The figure moved past a window, appeared at another, and disappeared. Eloise waited, but there was no further sign of life.
    Down in the kitchen she turned on the TV and watched a clip of Minister Anita O’Keefe being interviewed on the introduction of her families package, involving tax credits, a baby bonus, and legislationgoverning liable parent arrangements. The minister fielded questions smoothly. Brushing off a final enquiry, on a certain magazine’s insinuations about the paternity of her unborn child, she managed to seem both steely and poised. She would not comment, of course.
    Of course. Eloise stooped, and rested her cheek on the cold bench top. Outside the air whirled and collapsed in on itself, the sky fallen onto the lawn. A seagull landed, edging along the deck rail on its red feet, and Eloise opened the glass door and threw it a crust. Screams as more gulls bombed down onto the deck, scrapping over the bread.
    Prime Minister Jack Dance appeared in the studio endorsing O’Keefe’s package, before moving on to his core message: Opposition leader Bradley Kirk was so unpopular he’d lost control of his caucus, so busy dealing with internal wrangling and ‘chaos among his members’, he was unable to lead his own party.
    ‘It’s bedlam on the Opposition side, I’m afraid,’ said Dance, whose public nickname was Satan.
    The news crossed live to Wellington and a shot of the Beehive. There was a barber’s chair set up on the sunny forecourt outside Parliament, and Richie Carter, the youngest member of the Opposition shadow cabinet, stood beside it, two girls in matching T-shirts holding his arms. Carter’s smile was forced. A jokey spiel from reporter Chad Going: Carter had been volunteered by his leader, Bradley Kirk, to have his head shaved as a fundraiser for Cancer Research. Kirk himself would do the shaving, and now appeared wielding a hedge trimmer. A laborious joke. Eloise sipped her tea as Kirk roguishly posed for the cameras. Then he took up a hairdresser’s razor and started shaving off the young man’s hair.
    Oh how hilarious. Carter began to look smaller as his hair came off, his pale scalp showing, his reddened ears sticking out.
    The camera panned back and there was a shot of the crowd, among them Anita O’Keefe and a junior woman MP, who was filming the proceedings on an iPhone, and laughing.
    Eloise went on thinking about it in the shower. It was for a cause. You shaved your head to raise money, in solidarity with those who lost their hair through chemotherapy. But who gets shaved against their will? Prisoners, collaborators, traitors. The subjugated.
    Opposition leader Bradley Kirk was famously a nice guy, his niceness one of the reasons why his leadership was being questioned. You wouldn’t pick him as a bully.
    The older man humiliates the younger, while a beautiful woman watches. Sean would dismiss it as a lame stunt, ‘desperate stuff from Labour’, because Sean votes National, because his family funds the National Party. Scott Roysmith will call it a selfless act of charity. What would Arthur have called it?
    Atavistic, was the word she was looking for. Arthur would have said, What’s Carter done to piss Bradley Kirk off? And maybe, Who’s screwing who here? Arthur noticed details, things she missed. He would have seen something ancient and primitive and savage in it, something sexual.
     
    The sun was rising, hot behind the fog. She walked around the outside of the stucco house. It was closed up, windows locked and the doors sealed with tape. So how could she have seen someone upstairs?
    She set off, worried about running into Nick, walked towards Ponsonby, headed in the direction of Newmarket, then the waterfront. There was a thin covering of cloud over the sun but it soon burned off and the sea glittered, chemical blue. It was beautiful, but