The Deck, page 15
Later, Maria knocked tentatively at her door. Her granddaughter was seated on her bed, tapping at her phone. The room had been stripped bare of its posters and photos. A suitcase stood packed in the middle of the floor.
‘Everything okay?’ said Maria.
‘’Course not,’ said Zoe. ‘I mean they’re mad, aren’t they? My friend Rakaia says they’ve gone mad.’
‘Convinced, I suppose,’ said Maria, seating herself on the edge of the bed. Still the gingham duvet cover with the horses. Still the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the bedhead.
‘No,’ said Zoe. ‘Quite definitely mad. Certifiable. You don’t believe all that stuff about the volcano, do you? The dinosaur people?’
‘It does sound a bit unlikely,’ said Maria.
‘And you haven’t met Ezra,’ said Zoe. ‘He’s the creepiest dude in the world.’
Suddenly she flung her arms around Maria, clinging.
‘Please don’t let them take me,’ she whispered into her grandmother’s neck. ‘I want to stay here. Please don’t make me go.’ She trembled, her whole body one frantic vibration.
So now they are here in the bay, as dawn breaks and the birds cry Help! Help!
Yesterday was the hasty escape, the note scribbled and left on the pillow, Zoe’s suitcase loaded stealthily into the boot of her car, the two of them driving away down long empty roads past the shining acres of moonlit lakes, the lurking fear of detection, sirens and police lights in the rear-view mirror. They never materialised. Maria had tossed her phone into some roadside scrub, while Zoe’s phone had been safeguarded for weeks, location disabled, private network installed. The entire family had been safely concealed behind a thorny thicket of encryption. Her parents were taking no chances.
They swooped unimpeded from the high country down through the pass onto the plain, following a winding road that evolved gradually into arrival in this place, the most remote place Maria could think of where they could hide out until her daughter and her husband and the creepiest man in the world had gone off to meet the future.
There had been a moment, an hour or so into the drive, when she glanced across at Zoe, curled up on the passenger seat, phone in hand, flicking through songs by bands Maria has never heard of, but they were good songs with great instrumentals and interesting lyrics. Zoe had downloaded heaps in readiness for the long journey to the source of the new era. Music filled the car. Her granddaughter had great taste. She played drums, she said, in a band with Rakaia and some other dudes. They’ve been writing their own stuff, people seemed to like it, there was a competition coming up. They’d been practising. Her face, reflected in the glow of the screen, was serene.
Maria drove through the dark knowing that Sophie would leave exactly as planned, regardless of Zoe’s absence, regardless of the criticism of friends, regardless of reason and argument. She and Jason would be on that plane. Her daughter had had that look that Maria learned long ago meant there would be no compromise and no retreat. She would leave as planned, and she will never ever speak to her mother again.
Fair enough, thinks Maria now as the dawn breaks over the bay and the birds waken. She lies on her tangled bed, twisting her hair. I’ve never been the perfect mother. Too caught up in my work, not to mention a lifetime of ridiculous relationships.
But as she had driven with Zoe through the dark land, she had felt herself filled with a novel sense of purpose. She could make up for previous failings. She could do something good and self-sacrificing. She could save her granddaughter from a dubious fate. She could sell up her place in the city. She could move south and care for her until her parents recovered their senses. Sweeping around a curve in the road she had felt heroic. She was like the sort of older woman who would once have been played by Frances McDormand. Someone the promos called ‘feisty’.
But now, lying in the pre-dawn, she is not so sure.
What the hell, she thinks, twisting her hair in a knot, have I done?
Her sister does nothing later that day to reinforce her confidence.
‘You realise you’ve kidnapped a minor?’ she says when Maria finally confesses to the escape.
They are walking to the waterfall. The sun had beaten down all morning from a flawless sky. Too hot for the deck, too hot for the beach where the sand burned bare feet. The waterfall, Philippa said. It would be cool in the bush. They could swim.
Three women, a girl and a dog set off up the valley. Zoe and Ani walked ahead, Raffi waddling beside them making pleased little detours into the undergrowth.
Maria and Philippa dawdled behind as Maria made a swift impromptu edit on the storyline. She cut swathes of dialogue and distracting backstory and tightened the narrative arc to just a story of a very necessary rescue, featuring her daughter and son-in-law as deluded individuals in thrall to a madman, and herself as a reluctant but determined heroine.
Her sister is not convinced.
‘Kidnapping’s a really serious crime,’ she says. ‘Fourteen years maximum.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ says Maria. As if that fact were irrelevant.
‘And what’s worse, you’ve made me an accessory!’ says Philippa. ‘You’ve made all of us accessories to a serious crime. You’ve always been so bloody inconsiderate.’
‘It’s just for a few days,’ says Maria. ‘I think your reputation will be fairly safe. All right?’
Philippa sighs. ‘I suppose …’ she says.
It really is too hot for argument.
The track veers off into the bush and green leaf arches overhead. The creek runs alongside, lower than it used to be at this time of year but still sufficient to cool the air. They can breathe more easily here. They follow one another along a narrow track, talking of this and that.
‘That white flower. What’s it called? I can never remember the names of plants, can you? They just don’t …’
‘My sandal’s falling to bits …’
‘Nice to see Baz again. He’s looking …’
‘Hey, Raffi! Get out of that …’
Raffi has been renewed by the cool and the shade and a new path. He rolls in the stinking ecstasy of a dead possum.
‘Raffi, that’s disgusting …’
The waggy optimism of a walk with a dog.
The track winds at a gentle incline uphill over tree roots and stones. Spiders have spun their webs across its width, long sticky threads that catch on their faces and snap one by one, so it’s as if they ascend by breaking one barrier, then another.
The creek tumbles downhill beside them around boulders worn smooth since they emerged as molten bubbles from the vent. There’s birdsong and all those trees in all their variations of green and kōtukutuku dangling long strips of red-gold bark like streamers and houhere raining down upon them, covering their path in white lace. And then the track flattens and emerges into a clearing.
Knee-high grass and bracken and ahead a wall of basalt over which the creek tumbles in a narrow plume of white, down through rock and fern to a pool deep enough for swimming. Around its edge lie flat-topped rocks, water smoothed, where they might sit or stretch full length in the sun or in the dappled shade of a single ancient tree that reaches over the water, bent and bowed. In spring it would be golden, brash and bright. Birds would flock and feast. But now, in late summer, its flowers have fallen and what the tree offers is a tracery of grey-green leaf, the subtlety of light and shadow.
They take off their sandals, dangle their feet in the cool water. Dragonflies of brilliant emerald hover, hunting the meniscus and the air is alive with the buzz of other species in the tall grass and the rush of water over stone.
Maria stands and drags off her shirt. A black bikini on a body that is lean and tanned, the skin still smooth and puckered only at the belly where a ragged line marks the place where she was cut open to reveal a baby, tucked like a little bean in the bloody pod. She lifts her arms and, without checking, though she really should, executes a neat duck dive, then rises, flicking her long grey mane into a flurry of icy droplets and yelling, ‘Ooh ooh, mercy me that’s cold. I’d forgotten how it’s always bloody freezing here!’ Then she’s under again and striking out for the far bank in a rapid crawl, kicking furiously.
Ani follows, and her body too bears its marks. The white-line curves from armpit to breastbone where she has been stitched and mended. She clasps her arms over an empty pocket and goes in bit by bit, to the ankles, to the knees, to the groin, before surrendering with a happy sigh, falling backwards and spreading her arms. A perfect starfish, looking up at the azure blue of the sky.
When Philippa first suggested a walk, Ani had been reluctant. She had been caught before by one of Philippa’s little walks, slogging up some hill to look at a view they could have seen just as well from the comfort of a car on a road. It was all a bit earnest, she thought privately, this enthusiasm for sweat and effort, healthy mind in healthy body.
But this wash of cold water, this breathing air …
She can feel the scar tighten across her chest where the soft mound of her breast had once been. She had been offered reconstruction of course, but she had declined. Partly it was because she could not bear the thought of staying a single day longer than necessary within the confines of a hospital. Not after all those days sitting in a La-Z-Boy chair with a needle in her arm delivering reprieve and a nurse enquiring from time to time if she’s okay and she says, ‘Yes thank you’ because she must be polite, even as the cocktail floods her body.
But the other reason she declined was because she did not see the point. Her breast was gone. Her breast with all its ducts and lobes and ligaments, all its history and purpose. It seemed important to see that each morning in the bathroom mirror and acknowledge its absence.
The long scar meant something, just as the little scar under her chin meant something. The little scar where a swing at the park had hit her when she was four. It knocked her over and she needed two stitches. She remembers her dad gathering her up and carrying her, bleeding copiously, to the car. Except he wasn’t her dad and her mum wasn’t her mum. They had picked her from a newspaper, choosing not the baby of good parentage who will become available in July, nor the fair-skinned baby, but her.
When she sees the scar she remembers that complicated fact, and her blood sticking to the green and brown pattern on a man’s jersey.
She floats on her back on the water’s surface, arms spread. It is without doubt a Perfect Moment. She collects them: moments that are not remarkable for any reason — not some moment of intense emotional connection, meeting a long-lost friend, achieving a long-held goal, surviving some great horror — but perfect just the same. A moment where everything seems to stop for a second and there is nothing but beauty and stillness and she’ll remember it for ever. She drifts in the stillness and from somewhere behind her up on the bank she hears him laugh, a kind, gentle amusement. ‘Yes! It is in the fact a Perfect Moment! It is a cracker!’
Philippa goes in last, cautious over the stones, the pale skin of her freckled gingery inheritance puckered where the sun has nipped too close, and beneath the navel the four horizontal marks where the scalpel so delicately, so precisely, entered and pruned away the empty sac of her defective womb. The tufts of hair at her crevices look sun-worn too, faded from red to white. She dithers on the bank, arms clasped over her breasts, saying, ‘I wish I could swim! I wish I could swim properly! It’s because of that time I nearly drowned in the school baths and I’ve never learned.’
Maria lies on her back paddling lazily. ‘No, it’s not,’ she says. ‘It’s because you wouldn’t try. You were always such a wuss. You never learned to swim, like you never rode your bike with no hands.’
It’s too soon yet to engage. Philippa ignores her and concentrates on feeling her way into deeper water. The bottom of the pool is covered in a smooth layer of tiny stones that glint in the sunlight. The others swim from side to side, splashing extravagantly on passing and laughing, while she looks down into the depths and suppresses the knowledge of the eel. They caught one here, she and her brother and sister. They threaded a dead hedgehog onto some binder twine and dangled it in the water and a huge eel emerged from the shadows under the bank. Bigger by far than any eels they’d ever seen before. Its huge head rose up and then it undulated towards their bait, opened its jaws wide exposing rows of needle teeth, and dragged the lot, hedgehog and twine, from their hands.
Maria tried to hang on but Philippa cried ‘Let go, let go!’ For the eel could have taken her little sister. It could have dragged her under like the princess who was seized by a dragon and taken down to a castle beneath a lake from which she could never return.
She remembers that blunt grey head, the strength of that slimy muscled thing on the other end of their flimsy lure, and despite years of listening to accounts of the most appalling injuries human beings can inflict upon one another, it retains its special horror.
That eel will have gone by now. She was huge, a big old female, full grown, maybe seventy or eighty years old when they tried to drag her out onto the bank with their cruel bait. She will have made her way long since back down the creek she had first entered as a tiny silvery thread. She will have headed downstream, drawn by some mysterious alignment of moon and stars and the scent of the sea to cross the beach and enter the open ocean.
She will have headed out into dark waters, swimming thousands of kilometres north to the tropical sea where she had first burst into this thing called life. She will have risen to the surface when she reached that place, and all those eggs will have streamed from her dying body, as it begins again. That silvery thread, the sweep south to this creek, the long life by the waterfall. How could they have planned to beat her to death on the bank with their silly sticks and stones?
Philippa inches into the pool, not mentioning the eel, not wanting to supply further proof that she is a wuss. The chilly waters lap at her shoulders. When she looks down, her legs have become shortened and bent by refraction and her hands look like little white fish. But finally she’s under and executing a clumsy dogpaddle across the pond to the place where they can clamber out, pass through the curtain onto the narrow ledge at the foot of the waterfall, where it is possible to turn and see the world blurred and flicking rainbows.
They dive and splash and swim back and forth and say this is gorgeous and Maria says, ‘Bimmi used to bring us here, remember, Plip? She was a great believer in the virtues of cold water, that it was good for our constitutions, better than any bath. Silly old bat, such a puritan.’
‘But it is, isn’t it?’ says Philippa. ‘Better than any bath.’
Zoe had sat for a few moments on the bank with Raffi, watching the old ladies splash and squeal. It was all a bit embarrassing really.
‘Come in!’ they called. ‘It’s lovely! It’s refreshing.’
‘I’m okay,’ she said, getting up. ‘I might walk a bit further up the track.’
‘But aren’t you hot?’ they said, their hair slicked down on their old heads like so many seals looking up.
‘No, I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel like a swim.’
‘Well, don’t go too far,’ they said. ‘Stay within earshot. We’ll call when we’re ready to head back. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ she said, setting off across the clearing and into the trees. Her phone was in her pocket.
In the clearing, the old ladies stretch on the rocks to dry, then they swim again, they drink the clear water falling from above, they lie on the rocks, and after a while Zoe returns without having to be called (there was no signal whatever and the track had become steep and blocked by storm-damaged trees). The old ladies have looked up and seen a little cloud the shape of a rabbit sailing in over the lip of the waterfall. The air has become noticeably cooler. It is time to head back.
No one knows what time it is exactly, the hour, minute, second. Time is just one thing happening after another, the speeding arrow that flies from past to present to future. It is just one sensation then another. Hot. Cold. Wet. Dry. It’s just a track through trees, downhill alongside a creek. It is the air cooling as the bank of fog that has hovered on the horizon for days begins to roll towards the land.
They cross the ford on the road where they stop and pick watercress and fennel and monkey musk because it is beautiful, and they return with leaves in their arms and tangled hair, and as they enter the house it is to find the others gathered.
Tom looks up and says, ‘Good, you’re back. Sun’s over the yardarm. How about a drink?’ And time comes bustling back, tick tock, neatly carved into base twelve. Twenty-four hours, sixty minutes, sixty seconds. Or determined by the sun, by that yardarm.
Tom is happy. He has been solving a problem. He has spent the day with Baz, making something work properly again and the thought of that gives him immense satisfaction.
On the first day before everyone arrived, he had walked up the hill to check on the water tank. It was part of the routine. An inspection of facilities to guarantee that they could supply the needs of the little group of humans about to gather in his house. There must be water for the kitchen sink and bathroom showers and lavatories. Sufficient to flush away their waste, their flaking skin, their shit and piss. Down it will go on the cascade, around U-bends and pipes to the septic tank in the scrub below the house. And there it will plop and bubble as the seething multitudes get to work, the billions of bacteria of several species, the microscopic worms and tiny creatures no more than a single cell who have always had the planet under their complete control.
When Tom came up the hill that first day following the old farm track, it was to find the tank half empty, the feeder pipe from the spring kicked aside and the ooze emptying into a muddy wallow. The air smelled rancid, sweaty like old socks, like the most pungent of cheeses, a dense cloying stink.
Deer tracks were everywhere, and pig root, the work of the feral descendants of that old bat Bimmi’s stock. When she felt herself approaching death she had opened all the gates on what was left of her farm, releasing her chickens and a deer, a hind she had kept as a pet and its fawn, and her little kunekune Enid, together with her latest litter of plump spotted piglets. They had wandered off into the bush-clad valley where they set to breeding exuberantly, incestuously or with the renegades who arrived, drawn by an instinct for survival in a parched land. They produced a mighty progeny, feral and intractable. And in this hot season they ventured down to former pastures in their search for water. They wallowed. They left their heady stink.
