Remember Me, page 18
‘Hm.’ I imagined Nathan pushing his glasses up his nose, blinking. ‘I don’t think this is about money. I reckon they’re jealous.’
‘I’m quite sure they aren’t. I’m the family black sheep.’
‘They’d never admit it. The thing is, you all moan about Grandpa, all three of you, and Grandma’s just as bad. You’ve all got this theme that he had more time for his patients than he did for you. But you all kind of worship him too. You want his approval.’
‘We do not!’
‘’Course you do. And now you’re the prodigal daughter. Fatted calf, rejoicing. You can bet your socks they’re jealous.’
I rather liked this theory.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll take that.’
I came very close to asking his advice about the beanie in the cupboard, the contents of the box marked HER. Perhaps he’d have some new perspective on those as well.
‘Funny thing …’ I began. And then I stopped.
‘Funny thing?’ he prompted.
‘Gone clear out of my mind. Sorry. Middle-aged brain.’
Some things are better left unsaid. Or even unthought.
TWENTY-THREE
We were still recovering from the twins’ visit when, a few days later, a southerly storm swept up the east coast, coming straight from the Antarctic. Ira’s stock turned their backs to the horizontal rain, pressing against the fences in huddles of misery. The weather people—MetService—were forecasting snow on high ground.
That night, I drew all the curtains and made myself and Dad two hot-water bottles each. Gusts battered the wooden structure of the house; the wallpaper seemed to breathe and stir. The windows rattled.
I was rattling too, as I lurched in and out of sleep. Leah was dripping wet, water streaming out of her hair. She mentioned Eddie’s name, and Ira’s, and even Todd’s. She talked about the three hunters in their truck, but I couldn’t hear her properly because of the pounding of gunfire on the roof. None of it made any sense.
She held up a bar of Cadbury’s. ‘Got a craving,’ she said.
‘Craving for what?’
‘This should keep me going all the way to Biddulph’s.’
That was when I saw the blackberry smudges across her jaw, her nose, around both eyes. She looked as though someone had taken a baseball bat to her face.
‘What happened, Leah?’ I asked. ‘Who did that to you?’
A door slammed somewhere in the house, making my own eyes snap open. Pitch-blackness. Dad was crying continuously, as an animal will cry, with falsetto moans. ‘Helen? Helen!’
It was the third night in a row, and I was beginning to fray at the edges. For the hundredth time I imagined him safe in a centrally heated room at St Patrick’s, with pressure pad alarms and night staff on call. I had to drag myself out from under the duvet, fumbling for warm clothes.
He stood in the icy corridor, a lamenting ghost in a hell of his own.
‘Oh dear, Dad,’ I said wearily. ‘Nightmares again?’
I took his arm and coaxed him to lie down in the snug. I’d taken to keeping a pillow and soft blankets ready on the sofa for just this purpose.
‘She’s still up there,’ he told me, as I spread the blankets over him.
‘Helen?’
‘Helen? No! Helen’s buried in a cemetery in Leeds. Leah’s up there.’ His face crumpled, as though he’d only just heard the news. ‘It’s so awful. She’s covered in snow. She’ll be so cold.’
‘I think that was what you said when they called off the search. D’you remember, Dad? But it was a long, long time ago. She won’t be feeling the cold anymore.’
What a stupid thing for me to say. It had him in tears. I fetched a box of tissues, gave him a squeeze on the shoulder—almost a hug. I made a show of messing about with the stove, clattering the poker, blowing embers into life. The next time I checked, his eyes were closed.
I looked through the bookcase for something comforting, chose All Creatures Great and Small, and curled up in the armchair near the stove. But I couldn’t read. Not a word.
She’s covered in snow. She’ll be so cold.
Something was creeping through my mind, spreading a monstrous darkness. You’re just tired, I told myself. This means nothing. After all, she is still up there. And what’s left of her—if anything—probably will be covered in snow. That’s all he means. That’s all he means.
Nathan said something similar once, about our puppy. Patsy. She brought us such joy, but one day she slipped her collar and ran under the wheels of a bus. My little chap was about nine. He sat and wailed, his shoulders sagging like an old man’s. Patsy will be lonely without us! We can’t put her in the ground! She’ll be cold.
I wished Nathan were here with me now. I sent him a Facebook message—Hi, how’s life in Jakarta today?—and was cheered when a reply jumped onto my phone with a chirpy ting: a photo of him, in a classroom with his students. I was comforted to think of my son living his life, far away from this looking-glass world. He couldn’t begin to put himself in my shoes: middle-aged, awake in the darkest hours of the night, watching my father die in super-slow motion.
Another message came through.
What u doing awake FFS? It must be about 4 am!!
Grandpa’s getting worse. He woke me up again.
Sorry. Poor Grandpa ☹
When I lose my marbles, I’ll move in with you and your third wife!
No you won’t. I’ll stick you in a home
Charming!
So what’s he doing? How does he wake you up?
He wanders around all night, talking rubbish and wailing Like Lady Macbeth?
Exactly like her
Bloody hands!
Alzheimer’s is a bugger. Not for the faint-hearted.
Out damned spot! Lady M had a dog called Spot, did you know?
I felt lighter after this silly conversation. Once we’d signed off, I closed my eyes. I never noticed the wind dropping, the rain passing on, the darkness paling. I woke to find myself still in the armchair with James Herriot open on my lap, Gyp and Gloria in a snuffling pile on the sofa. Dad must have taken himself back to bed.
I made myself coffee, toast and marmalade before tiptoeing out onto the porch to be greeted by a slap-in-the-face of icy air. The night’s storm had left beauty in its wake: the first snow. Just a dusting on the uplands, catching the glitter of dawn. For a moment I stood, enchanted—but then I was swearing and leaping down the porch steps, because I’d spotted Dad out there: barefoot, wearing nothing but his striped pyjamas while driving his spade into a heavily frosted vegetable patch.
‘Hey!’ I cried, galloping across to him. ‘What on earth d’you think you’re doing?’
He watched me mutely, rubbing his nose with the back of his wrist. His hands and feet had turned a bruised, purplish blue. The same disturbing colour rimmed his lips, while the rest of his face was a bloodless white. He could have played the drowned corpse in a horror film, except that he was shivering violently.
‘You’ll catch your death!’ I scolded, taking the spade out of his hand.
‘Hope so.’
I bribed him with promises of toast and coffee as I ushered him inside. He sat and teeth-chattered by the stove while I piled rugs and hot-water bottles all over him. I noticed that his toenails badly needed cutting, so I fetched a pair of nail scissors and clipped them. Never in my whole life had I touched my father’s feet. I thought he’d be embarrassed, but he just twiddled his toes, as though pleased I was taking care of him.
‘I can’t feel them at all,’ he said, smiling. ‘Have they dropped off?’
‘You’re asking to die of hypothermia!’
‘Interesting phenomenon, hypothermia. D’you know how it works?’
While I rubbed life into his frozen extremities, he delivered a lecture on the physiology of extreme cold. He must have accessed the right file in his memory bank because knowledge came tumbling out. He told me what temperature a human body would normally be, what temperature it might be at each stage of hypothermia, and what physical effect all of this would have. He described finding a climber who was sliding into the final stages.
‘We followed a trail of clothes,’ he said, his blue eyes wide with bemused wonder. ‘Her gloves, her hat, jacket, even her socks … she was tearing them off, you see, and discarding them. It’s sometimes called paradoxical undressing, and it certainly is paradoxical, in sub-zero temperatures. She thought she was hot! Quite often, in the final stages, people find a nook or cranny and crawl in there to die. A burrowing instinct.’
‘Had she done that?’
‘Not yet. We found her just in time—just in time: we nearly lost her while we were carrying her down to the helicopter. But she wasn’t unhappy. In fact, I’d describe her as euphoric. She kept asking us to leave her in peace, let her go to sleep.’
‘I’d be petrified.’
‘You might not. People who’ve suffered hypothermia sometimes talk about feeling a kind of bliss.’ He stared thoughtfully at his numb toes. ‘Of all the ways to go, it’s not the worst one.’
I remembered Dave Perry all those years ago, trying to reassure Raewyn. She’d probably just fall asleep.
‘Not my first choice,’ I said.
‘We don’t all get to choose.’
•
That afternoon, I was in the butcher’s shop when Todd Tillerson walked past the window, spotted me and waved. As I stepped out into the pale sunshine, he was waiting.
‘In mufti today?’ I asked, glancing at his jeans and padded jacket.
‘It’s Saturday.’ He peered at me. ‘For Christ’s sake, Emily Kirkland—no offence, but you look bloody awful.’
‘Bit tired,’ I admitted. ‘Weird, weird night.’
‘You need coffee.’
I’d left Dad with Raewyn, who’d dropped in to deliver the parish newsletter, took one look at me—yawning, my hair unbrushed—and told me to take a break. She and Dad would be putting pea hay down in the garden. Shoo! she insisted, when I hesitated. Go!
‘How’s Dr Kirkland doing?’ asked Todd, as we headed up the sunny side of the street.
People asked me that question all the time, and my answer was generally a lie. ‘Pretty well,’ I’d say, or, ‘We’re getting there’—which is surely one of the most meaningless platitudes in the English language. Getting where, for God’s sake? We certainly weren’t getting anywhere good.
Todd was different. He knew.
‘I lie in bed at night,’ I said, ‘and I listen to him crying.’
‘Why’s he crying?’
‘He’s lost. Sometimes he says things … He calls for his sister.’
‘I didn’t know he had a sister. Is she in Yorkshire?’
He looked quite shaken when I told him the story of Helen’s short life.
‘You never know what people have lived through, do you?’ he said.
Forty Degrees was packed, so we chose a table out on the pavement. It was slightly too cold for comfort. The Ruahines dominated the horizon, bright shards of ice with blue-bruise shadows.
‘I heard a rumour,’ said Todd, after Chouma brought our coffee. ‘The media are going to rehash Leah’s disappearance.’
I sighed. ‘Yup. We’ll be back in the news. A town haunted by grief. Raewyn still hopes to find out what happened to her. Ira thinks it’s going to be too painful.’
‘He might have a point.’
A farmer stopped to ask about subdividing his land. Todd was polite, gave him five minutes of free advice. Life for a small-town lawyer, I supposed. Same as for the doctor. Nowhere to hide.
Once we were alone again, he squinted up at the sky. It was high and pure, with a fine patina of silver.
‘Great day for flying. Want to come?’
‘Today? Now?’
‘Why not?’
‘Oh! So, so tempting.’
I hadn’t been up in a light aircraft since I bought a birthday flight for Nathan and a friend. I went too, and loved it even more than the boys did.
‘We’ll be back before you know it,’ cajoled Todd. ‘C’mon, who wouldn’t want to be up there, on this glorious day?’
•
Raewyn answered our house phone. After assuring me that all was well, she handed it over to Dad.
‘Flying!’ he exclaimed. ‘How marvellous.’
‘I’ll be back by three. Got sausages for dinner. Plenty for Raewyn too, if she’d like to stay?’
‘Right you are.’
I heard Raewyn’s voice in the background.
‘She says to tell Todd to fly over the garden,’ said Dad. ‘We’ll look out for you.’
•
The sign proclaimed that this was Tawanui Aeroclub—Learn to Fly, with an illustration of a tiny biplane looping the loop around the words. There wasn’t much to it: just a paddock, a clubhouse, a hangar and a windsock. Several aircraft were parked on the grass, and a couple of middle-aged guys stood with arms folded, chatting affably. Tawanui people spent a lot of time doing that.
Todd walked around his Cessna, checking things, and then we were off, no messing about. Moments after we’d clambered into the tiny cockpit, the propeller began to turn.
I’d forgotten just how much racket a light aircraft makes when taking off, or how ridiculously unstable it feels when the wheels first leave the ground. We yawed, bucked, juddered—and then I found myself grinning as we banked sharply and began to gain height, flying over the town, up into the silvery emptiness. Soon we were following the glinting twists of the Arapito stream as it wound across farmland, gullies filled with scrub, skeins of native bush.
Todd’s voice crackled into my earphones. ‘See your dad?’
I was staring through the scratched perspex. It took me several seconds to work out that those toy buildings ahead, tucked neatly into the folds of the land, were the place where I grew up. The landscape of my childhood was laid out: our house, the front paddock, the school bus shelter. A lone figure in the garden, white-haired. A flash of sunlight on his spade.
‘There he is!’ I yelled, but the engine was so loud that I couldn’t hear my own voice.
The figure began to wave both arms in wide sweeps; Todd waggled our wings in reply. The shadow of the Cessna darted across the roof of the house just as I glimpsed Raewyn on the porch. When I craned my neck to look back, Dad was still waving and waving. He looked so small.
Seconds later we’d swept over Ira’s cabin, across the Arapito ravine—and there was Biddulph Road. I hadn’t appreciated how close to our place it passed, as the Cessna flies. We followed the meandering track through the foothills, though at times it was smothered by native bush. I spotted several places where it crossed mountain streams. And then, abruptly, it ended.
‘Was this where they found Leah’s car?’ I asked, and Todd nodded.
Such a godforsaken spot. There was often a small parking area at the start of hiking trails; sometimes a picnic table, a trail map, perhaps a long-drop toilet. As a teenager I’d spent many a happy hour in picnic spots like that. My mates and I called it ‘camping’, but it wasn’t half so wholesome as the word suggests. We’d pile into cars, hoon out there and party—which involved drinking and smoking whatever we could get our hands on, dancing on the table. I lost my virginity in one of those car parks. Lots of people did.
But Biddulph Road simply ended, and the bush began—an all-encompassing wave, drowning any sign of human life. As we gained height, I was reminded of the TV footage from the search for Leah. I couldn’t see any hint of a trail beneath the peaks and troughs of that ocean, the misted shadows and glowing patches of sunlight. Beautiful, yes, but unspeakably lonely.
High on the tree line, Todd pointed to a tiny structure. It looked as though it had grown there, like a mushroom. Biddulph’s bivvy. Beyond it stretched the uplands, tussock grasslands frosted with snow. We traced Leah’s route along a rocky knife-edge. It would be so easy to slip, wouldn’t it? In rain and cloud, with gusts of wind that might lift a person off her feet.
Finally we turned west and droned over still more trackless wilderness, ridge after featureless ridge, clothed in dense rainforest. Neither of us spoke for a long time. I was feeling overwhelmed at the thought of being lost in that crumpled expanse. The sun was distorted, a white star on the horizon.
Todd’s voice sounded harsh through the headset. ‘Beyond forty degrees south, there is no law.’
‘Beyond fifty,’ I added, ‘there is no God.’
I saw him smile. Then he began a long turn, and we headed back to humanity.
TWENTY-FOUR
A creak. A click—the bolt on the bathroom door. It had sounded exactly the same for forty years.
Not again, I thought miserably. Not again, please: make it stop. I felt as though I’d been run over by a ten-tonne truck. I was tired of being calm and jolly in the face of this implacable disintegration.
It was so cold out there, and my bed was so warm. Temperatures had dropped dramatically since that first fall of snow on the mountains. I’d shopped for sheepskin slippers, a possum-wool bobble cap and fingerless gloves. As I let Gloria and Gyp out onto the frosty lawn in the mornings, my breath turned into the pale puff of a ghost. Carmen’s room had an open fire. I’d taken to lighting it first thing, thinking longingly of radiators and central heating.
The bathroom door again. I heard Dad roaming all over the house, and then his voice. ‘God forgive me. God forgive me.’
As I padded wearily down the corridor, I swear I felt frost rising through the floorboards. A lamp was on in the snug, the fire still glowing from the evening before. Dad was facing away from me, leaning forwards in the armchair with his hand on Gloria’s head.
‘Forgive me.’ He sounded slurred, the drunk uncle at a family wedding. ‘Forgive me. I’ll never forgive myself.’
I was about to make my presence known when he said something else. Something much worse.
‘I … I …’ His voice broke. He gave several heaving, dry sobs before forcing out the words. ‘I killed her.’
