After Z-Hour
Author: Elizabeth Knox
Date: 1987-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Literary
Description: Stranded by a South Island storm, six people usurp the stillness of an old house. As they tell the fragments of their story, a seventh voice responds: a young New Zealand serviceman who died in 1920, soon after his return from France. As the storm deepens, the hauntings of the mind and the hauntings of the house become one. First published on Armistice Day 1987, After Z-Hour won the PEN Award for Best First Book of Prose.
Publisher: Victoria University Press
Rights: © Elizabeth Knox 1987

CONTENTS

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Author

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Foreword to the Second Edition

Part One

Jill

Basil

Jill

Kelfie

Basil

Jill

Kelfie

Basil

Jill

Kelfie

Mark

Jill

Part Two

Jill

Kelfie

Basil

Mark

Jill

Basil

Mark

Kelfie

Mark

Kelfie

Mark

Basil

Mark

Basil

Jill

Kelfie

Mark

Part Three

Jill

Kelfie

Basil

Kelfie

Jill

Kelfie

Elizabeth Knox is one of New Zealand’s leading writers. She is the author of eight previous novels, including The Vintner’s Luck (1999 Deutz Medal for Fiction, 2001 Tasmania Pacific Region Prize) and its sequel The Angel’s Cut, and most recently Wake (2013), a trilogy of autobiographical essays, The High Jump, and a collection of personal essays, The Love School. The second part of her Dreamhunter Duet, Dreamquake, won an American Library Association Michael L. Printz Honor Award for Young Adult Literature in 2008. Her third novel for young adults, Mortal Fire, won the 2014 NZ Post Book Award for Young Adult Fiction.

Elizabeth Knox was made an Arts Foundation Laureate in 2000 and an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) in 2002, and was awarded the 2014 Michael King Writer’s Fellowship. She lives in Wellington.

ALSO BY ELIZABETH KNOX

Treasure (1992)

Glamour and the Sea (1996)

The Vintner’s Luck (1998)

The High Jump: A New Zealand Childhood (2000)
(Pomare (1994), Paremata (1989), Tawa (1998))

Black Oxen (2001)

Billie’s Kiss (2002)

Daylight (2003)

The Love School: Personal Essays (2008)

The Angel’s Cut (2009)

Wake (2013)

for young adults

Dreamhunter (2005)

Dreamquake (2007)

Mortal Fire (2013)

elizabethknox.com

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Victoria University of Wellington

Private Bag Wellington
vup.victoria.ac.nz

Copyright © Elizabeth Knox 1987

First published 1987

Second edition 2014

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publishers.

National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Knox, Elizabeth (Elizabeth Fiona), 1959-

After Z-hour / Elizabeth Knox.

Second edition.

ISBN 978-0-864-73923-0

I. Title.

NZ823.2—dc 23

First publication of this book was supported
by the New Zealand Literary Fund

ISBN 978-0-864-73923-0 (print)

ISBN 978-1-776-56002-8 (EPUB)

ISBN 978-1-776-56003-5 (Kindle)

Cover photo: Laurence Aberhart, Murchison, Tasman,

13 December 2010 (reproduced courtesy of the artist)

Cover design: Keely O’Shannessy

Author photo: Robert Cross (1987)

Ebook production 2014 by meBooks

To my mother and father

Acknowledgements

Quotations from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra are taken from the Penguin Classics edition, 1961, translated by R.J. Hollingdale.

Foreword to the Second Edition

After Z-Hour is a ghost story in which one character declares, ‘We we all ghosts’, and in which time and space, period and place, are interpenetrating. It’s a book about memory and trauma set in a haunted house during a storm. And a book where everyone longs for home, and no one gets to go there.

I have a letter from my grandmother to my great uncle Jack (John James Knox) dated 8 July 1918. She is writing to give him the news of the birth of his second child, a daughter, Kathleen. She reports how his wife Rose—Grandma’s sister
—is getting along, and the baby, and Jack’s son, also Jack. ‘He would have you in fits of laughter, if you say where’s daddy gone, he says to the war to fight the Germans, he speaks so plainly for his age, God bless him. He says God bless daddy!’

Grandma’s letter came back with Jack’s belongings, so his family knew he had got it and its happy news. Jack’s belongings had been packed up and sent after him when he was wounded, and in time found their way back to the household at 12 Hospital Road, Newtown. But Jack did not. John James Knox was one of a handful of New Zealanders among 123 who died when the hospital ship Warilda, carrying wounded from Le Havre, was torpedoed and sank on the 3rd of August 1918.

I’ve been on Vimeo and looked at the schools of fish herded this way and that through the halls and companionways and across the decks of ‘one of the best diving wrecks in the channel’. The schools of fish are more expressive of the family’s thoughts about Jack than the marble of the Wellington Provincial War Memorial—the way they drift away, change shape, and return.

My grandmother married Jack’s brother Joe after the war—so that Jack’s son and daughter were my father’s cousins twice over. That double-strength blood bond kept drowned Jack Knox very present in the family; present as a blank loss, not a ‘sacrifice’.

I have written in my essay ‘On Being Picked Up’ (collected in The Love School) about the moment when it first occurred to me what all this might mean. I was eleven and waiting with my father in Wellington Hospital’s Casualty ward after having fallen out of a tree.

It was a very busy day: a public holiday, ANZAC Day. Just down the hall a little girl who had swallowed some household poison was having her stomach pumped—a noise I’ve never heard on a hospital drama soundtrack. We knew what her problem was because an old man came along and leaned on the doorframe and said, ‘That poor wee girl.’ He had a bloodstained bandage wrapped around his head—my first blood in Casualty. He wore a suit that was shiny with wear. He was thin, with wrist bones like ping-pong balls. He told us that he’d been drinking and had fallen over in the street, hitting his head on the curb. Just below the bandage, by one ear, he had a scar, a long depression filled with smooth, snowy skin. It was an old shrapnel scar.

The old man started to talk to Dad about Passchendaele and life on the Salient in 1917. And I listened. Then Dad said a few things about his father, who had been there too. A nurse came by and tried to move the old guy and Dad said, ‘He’s all right, don’t bother him’, and she went away again.

And I was picked up. Because I had been in pain and wasn’t any more. Because I was hearing a story about horror and loss, the storyteller’s horror and loss, with a backing of these awful stomach-pump noises, and the sight of blood, a recent injury standing in for an old one—and because my father was talking about his father, whom he never talked about—I was picked up. Inspired. A subject had got hold of me until I had it out with it, in my first published book, After Z-Hour.

When my son, Jack, was in Year 11 at Wellington College he came in from a very long Anzac Day assembly, crawled up the last flight of stairs, and flopped at my feet. He didn’t complain of being bored, or even outraged. Instead he was filled with gloom and disgust. He said he just felt the whole thing was meant to prepare him and others to go and be killed in some war, if there was ever another big one. The speeches were all about how the soldiers were heroes who made a sacrifice. He complained to a friend afterwards about how the speakers didn’t seem to be able to tell the difference between the reasons soldiers died in World War I, and why they died in World War II. And his friend said Jack was dishonouring the dead. ‘I say their deaths were pointless and I’m dishonouring them? But aren’t I honouring them if it’s the truth? That war didn’t do anyone any good, and now its just being used as an exercise in building school spirit.’

Jack was right. Even more so now, when Anzac Day is, year by year, becoming less a focus for national mourning than national pride—and, too often, a nation-building exercise. But Lest We Forget: for all the good and meaningful stories we’ve inherited, and the friendships formed and horizons expanded for that generation of combatants, it would have been a better, wiser, kinder fate for all those young men to have stayed at home.

Rereading After Z-Hour for the first time in over 25 years, I noticed how it is now set in two historical periods: 1916 to 1920, and the mid-1980s. So, along with the World War 1 story, there are also apparitions from that second bygone age. There’s the National Weather Bureau, tobacco-drying kilns in Riwaka, the Ministry of Works, street preachers railing against the evils of cash machines, and people as likely to drink sherry at home as wine. Plus student flatmates called Andrea, Sue and Mike, rather than Jacob, Dylan and Lily, and the idea of young people able to study things not vocationally, but for the sake of of learning.

This is a young writer’s novel, filled with intensity and evidence. And I’m particularly proud of the prescience of its youngest character, the Machiavellian Kelfie, who imagined pretty clearly the world we find ourselves in now.

For this new edition, I took the opportunity to make a few changes, mostly the vaunting dyslexic madness of the opening page and a half. Those paragraphs are now neatly combed and set in order. (Bill Manhire and Fergus Barrowman, faithful people, thought I was stretching out into my experimental style!) Also, throughout the novel, many semicolons have gone the way of all semicolons, and become a full stop and a new sentence. What I retained that still make me nervous are the pronoun-less opening passages of the first Mark chapter. My plan at the time was to have a ghost coming back to life by coalescing in the cloud of his life’s great and small moments, and his memories of the material. So—straw mattresses in a tent at the Trentham camp, the wet decks of a troopship, fallen snow feathering barbed wire. For a few paragraphs there is no distinct point of view at the centre of the memories. And then a ‘we’ appears. Mark is ‘we’ even as he comes back without his friends.

Elizabeth Knox

August 2014

Part One

Jill

When the storm broke I had just passed the summit of the Hill. The road dipped down, narrowed, and cut into the side of the Hill. I’d been driving with my windows open and the sound of my tyres hissing on tarseal dampened by earlier showers seemed a thin shell between my car and a great expectant silence. Dusk was thickening and the pasture had gone a dull khaki, as though it lay under the red-tinged shadow of smoke, rather than cloud. The air was dense and still.

For months I had felt I was in flight, but in that moment before the storm’s first salvo I had the sensation of being overtaken, and overwhelmed, by pursuers as swift, lethal and nebulous as a swarm of bees. One minute my wheels were rolling and the white strokes of the median strip falling behind me like marked-off seconds, the next I was engulfed in a pause; the air went as solid as a caught breath, and a smell like a hot-plate—a clean, metallic tang—filled my head.

In that pause I understood that, though I’d been running, I hadn’t got away—from my husband’s house, the farm, the tidy, collected time following disaster; from the sounds longing would conjure, of a chair creaking in a empty room, as if someone was stirring and was getting up to come through to ask a question, or fix a snack, or switch on the TV; from the sensation longing would conjure, of a person stepping out of my way as I entered a room, as if my presence displaced possibilities in passing from room to room—because every room was empty. I’d performed all the ceremonies of getting away. I’d packed my bags, and left a few final instructions for the neighbour who was to mind the farm. I’d taken leave of my cat, Shackleton, held him as I stood by the window of my tidy kitchen, my nose buried in his fur and its scent of dry earth and decaying leaves. My sister had said, ‘Come and stay and take stock.’ So here I was, in flight, partway between the farm, where there was nothing left for me to do, and my sister’s house, where I’d be expected to show some sign that I was ‘putting it all behind me’, not in my good own time, but at the convenience of those who had undertaken to look after me.

Then time stopped, and I wasn’t in flight, I was falling. Falling under the utmost power of gravity, but with freefall’s illusion of weightless suspension in space. In that pause I hung suspended, it seemed, between negative and positive time, the seconds around the silence counting, minus one, zero, one—

And then the storm broke. An immense, vital entity touched a finger to the Hill’s summit, and the road ahead was obliterated by light. Thunder tumbled over my car like a rockfall. There was a sudden downpour of heavy rain, and, as my car rounded a left-hand curve, I saw the way ahead blocked by a mass of yellow earth. I braked, my car slithering, rear end fish-tailing. Its right flank gently kissed the crash barrier, then it slewed around and struck the slip at an angle. The front wheels reared up over the heaped earth, its undercarriage ground across rubble, the steering wheel jerked out of my hands—then the drive wheels hit the tacky clay, sank in and stuck. My car came to an abrupt stop, and its engine stalled.

For a moment the only sounds were my own gasping breath, the engine’s metal ticking cool, and the whispered commentary of the rain. Then I began pounding on the horn, as though the slip was a herd of sheep blocking the road. After several seconds the noise began to scare me, so I stopped—just sat and cried; bawled as I hadn’t done for years, hitting the dashboard, competing with a storm, stalled on an empty road.

When my tears had subsided to a few hiccupping sobs, I decided to try the engine. It started. I put the car into reverse and lurched backwards. The wheels slipped and spun in the mud. It wouldn’t budge. I switched off the engine, got out, and was within a few moments nearly wet through.

Since there was nothing else to do—and I had to be doing something—I started back up the slope. Perhaps I might spot the lights of another car. A membrane of silt, flowing from a flooded ditch made the surface of the tarseal slippery. My hair hung in dripping strands against the cold flesh of my cheeks, and water trickled down my neck under my jersey. A wind was coming up, mixing with the rain, striking my body at one angle, then another, in brief, freezing gusts.

I stopped at the corner and peered along the road. The thick stand of beech trees I’d just passed through was only a smudge on the grey-on-grey silhouette of the ridge. Back down the slope my car, a bright yellow Toyota, which I had always considered highly visible, was, through the rain, only a slightly sunny blur. Any vehicle coming down the road would run into it. I should have left its lights on.

I began to hurry back. Water pouring down the slope washed around my ankles, and I stumbled as I walked. My skin was so cold it felt burned. As I hurried I noticed that the slip had scooped a cavern out of the bank, and above the gouge a crumbling overhang of mud and boulders threatened my car. I was so busy looking at this that I wasn’t watching my feet. I slipped and fell, jarring my knees and grazing my palms on the road’s gritty surface. I got up, and watched blood spring up in stinging stitches, and then form webs on my wet hands. I picked my way gingerly back to the car, got in and wound up the windows to inhibit the sound of the rain and sight of the threatening slip. I turned on the lights and the heat. My clothes became clammy as I warmed. The windows fogged over, sealing me off behind misted glass from the sight of the rain clawing my skewed car.

My stepdaughter Nicky’s funeral had been held in a crematorium chapel, a room panelled in pine and hung with mustard-coloured curtains. A Presbyterian minister in a purple suit read the service, saying that we must all think fondly of her: ‘I didn’t know Nichola well, but I’m told she was a good girl and well loved—’

I had come out onto the porch of the farmhouse to find her trying to crease the crown of my old straw sunhat. ‘I’m playing rodeos,’ she told me. And I knew she was copying a TV movie we’d seen, about women rodeo riders. She set the hat on her head and straddled the rail of the porch, incongruous in her peacock-blue bikini with her little pot-belly. I laughed and went inside. Shortly after that she found a rope, and walked out over the field to her pet bobby calf. She slipped the noose over his head and tried to make him come to her. Then, to look the part I guess, she tied the rope around her waist. The calf, for some reason, bolted—dragging Nicky out of the paddock and along the driveway.

Well loved. Lying in an undersized coffin, in a room full of stinking daffodils, skinned, with a little dent in her temple and beige make-up covering the brown and yellow bruises that had formed around her eyes after death, from all that blood in her broken skull.

The intimate funeral was Nicky’s Grandma’s idea. She wanted none of those ‘old speeches’. None of those glorious speeches that, by the beauty and conviction of their language, ask not to be questioned: ‘He will change our vile bodies, to be like unto His glorious body, through that power by which He subdues all things to Himself—’ Instead, there was the coffin, lying on a trolley of laminated wood, like a tea-trolley. There was organ music, undistinguished. It was a sketch of a funeral, not a funeral. The service was a medley of sermon and prayer, and promises impossible to believe: ‘She has gone to heaven, and lives on in our memories. Remembered by those qualities she possessed which we loved, perhaps gentleness, perhaps that she was a good daughter—’

A good daughter whom I remember coming to sit before me on a stool at the breakfast bar, dropping her school bag on the floor. Watching me slyly and turning her tale, guided by the expression on my face: ‘We said Lucy was stealing and Mrs Parry said we were racist. But Lucy was stealing. Mrs Parry told us off, then she said, “Nicola Morgan, you needn’t glare at me like that!” and I said, “But we are telling the truth.” Then I got sent to Mr Bailey, and he held me by the nose.’

The minister came to the point. ‘We commit her body to be cremated, doing so with reverence; as in life, this body was the temple of her spirit—’

I remember her picking up the frozen puddles that formed in the hollows in the drive. Carrying them indoors so that I could look at the stones and dust in the ice, and the light through the ice. Her fingers red, then white, holding the heavy sheets up by the kitchen window over the sink.

Outside the crematorium the cousins stood holding those flowers that didn’t follow the coffin into the furnace. Sally’s two-year-old grizzled, uncomfortable in his stiff, dark blue coat. My husband’s family were weeping, and shaking the minister’s hand—some perhaps automatically because they were polite people, and some perhaps relieved that he didn’t say anything they didn’t expect.

I walked over to my sister and took her hand. We stood by a roaring air-conditioning vent. Overhead the sky was pale green; a still, autumn sky stained by the smoke from house fires.

A loud tapping on the driver’s window startled me. My car was full of clouded light—the headlights of another vehicle, shining in the back window. Through the fogged glass beside me I distinguished a shadow and a pink fist. I rolled the window down. A woman in a green anorak leaned through and smiled at me. She said, ‘If you start it up, Ellen and I will give you a push.’ Then, noticing the mud and water on my clothes, my grazed hands and pale face, she touched my shoulder. ‘Are you OK? Can you drive if we push?’

‘I can. I’m very grateful,’ I said, collecting my wits. She stared at me in concern, then reaching in front of me, she took the chamois off the dashboard and handed it to me. ‘Wipe the windscreen, then we’ll all be able to see what we’re doing.’

I took the cloth and began clearing the windscreen. She and the other woman, who had been standing behind her, moved around in front of my car, picking their way carefully across the clay. I started the engine. The first woman waved, then both bent and began to push. My car shot backwards out of the mud, nearly running into the campervan parked behind me.

The woman came back to the window. ‘You look in a pretty bad way. Would you mind if I got in and drove your car after our camper? We’ll go back a little way and see if there’s somewhere we can park, then you can come in the camper and change your clothes if you like.’

I opened the door for her, and wriggled across to the passenger’s seat. She waited for the camper to perform a laborious seven-point turn, then drove after it back up the hill.

She was tall, with broad brown hands and bitten fingernails. Her face was thin and angular, skin pitted with purplish, flushed acne scars. Her nose was straight, her brows thick and dark, and her hair brown and cropped short. She looked to be somewhere in her late twenties—my age.

The camper pulled off the road on the wide verge of a sweeping curve. We parked behind it and waited for Ellen to open the camper’s side door, then dashed through the rain and into the van.

Ellen fetched some clothes out from the base of one of the beds. ‘These’ll be not a bad fit, you look about my size.’

‘I’m sorry about the mess.’ I was dripping muddy water on the camper floor.

‘Did you try to free yourself?’

‘Yes, and I fell over.’

Ellen looked past me. ‘Will you make some coffee, Hannah?’ Then, to me, ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

A few minutes later we were sitting on divans at a small fold-down table. I introduced myself properly and, as the coffee revived me, I told them how I came to run into the slip.

Ellen was English, she had a cultured London accent and an air of poise. She was extraordinarily good-looking, pale, clear-skinned, and black-eyed. Her straight, ash-blond hair was cut in a short bob. She had the kind of beauty that should have made her awesome, and yet she wasn’t; rather she gave the impression that she didn’t think of herself as especially beautiful. Her manner was bright, breezy and flippant. Hannah, on the other hand, was a serious person. As we talked she kept taking a particular tone which wished me to realise the trouble I’d been in, as if I was some careless child that had to be made to appreciate danger in order to be more cautious in future. Hannah’s self-confidence bordered on smugness. But I was tired, and my irritation was probably exaggerated.

‘Are you up to driving, Jill?’

‘I suppose so.’ I was reluctant.

‘Well, I could always drive your car and you could ride with Ellen. You’ve had a pretty nasty shock.’

‘OK, yes.’

Hannah looked at Ellen. ‘I guess we’d better go back to Pohara.’

Ellen heaved a sigh. Then she and I got into the cab, and Hannah stepped out into the rain and stalked off towards my car.

‘Does she think I’m inept?’ I asked Ellen.

‘Oh dear,’ Ellen said, and laughed. ‘She can be a bit of a know-it-all. You know—opinions on everything, especially how she’d have handled any situation where someone else got into difficulties. I have to occasionally remind her that everyone else isn’t locked up in dark attics. That we do read newspapers and books, and can think and act for ourselves. Also, because she’s terribly fit she supposes everyone else is puny.’ She laughed again. ‘Listen to me bitching.’ She drove a little way in silence, then went on, amused and unrepentant, ‘You should see her brother, he’s even worse! Always charging up hills to show how fit he is, and leaping out of the way in small places. Always underfoot trying not to be underfoot. But of course men can be chronic—you know, busting their guts to show how competent they are.’

‘Yeah, I know the type,’ I said.

Basil

My last ride had taken me only to the foot of the Hill. The driver was an Electricity Department man on his way up to the dam. He’d dropped me at the head of the road that served both as a route for logging trucks and a way up to the Cobb Valley. He let me out of his ute and we chatted for a bit. He kept squinting at the clouds out over the sea. ‘Don’t like the look of that,’ he said. ‘I hope you get another lift soon.’

I thought of him now, an unknown number of miles away on a greasy road. It was still clear when I said goodbye to him and started walking. I’d been able to see right down the valley, over the slopes of native and exotic forest, to the farmland near the river. The river, under a grey sky and in a green land, was turquoise—a colour all of its own—cold and whitened by snowmelt. It was the same river which had flowed in a deep gorge below the last town; there it was grey, full of hidden currents, its surface dimpled and muscular. The river ran close around two hills that shouldered out of the divided range. One was the hill on which I stood; the other, a bare-topped mountain across from me. To the northeast the valley broadened out, farms spread out on its floor, cropping barley, kale, tobacco and hops. Cattle grazed in a few flat paddocks and sheep were scattered over the hill’s steep, eroding slopes. Far below me a red tractor ran silently up and down a field. Further away—but the sound carried to me—a truck rolled over a cattle-stop. A silver, corrugated-iron hangar shone beside a rusty tobacco-drying kiln, a fluorescent orange windsock flaming against the yellow pasture.

As I walked a gusty wind came up, pushing flurries of shadow along the surface of the river below. Clouds moved across the sea and over the plain, condensing in the valley into a mist as thick and grey as smoke from a forest fire. Then it started to rain. I put on my PVC coat and draped a large sheet of clear plastic over my head and the top of the pack. Two cars and a logging truck passed me as I walked. None stopped.

I plodded along with my head down for over an hour. Then, for a short while, the rain eased off. And that’s when I saw the house. First I glimpsed its large, steeply pitched roof and three pointed dormers, then as I turned a corner it came fully into view, uphill, surrounded by bare and yellow-leaved trees, itself and its gardens standing starkly against a black stand of pines. It couldn’t be a farmhouse, because there didn’t seem to be any farmland around it, but perhaps there were paddocks beyond the pines on the crest of the hill. I plodded on up the road, looking for a driveway. There was no driveway, only a set of bricked steps cut into the bank, and a track winding away under some old macrocarpas.

I left the road and clambered up the steps and onto the track, climbing, bent under the weight of my pack.

I emerged from the macrocarpas. The path ran on through a field and into the trees surrounding the house, which was built on a wooded knoll. The path, worn white through the grass, passed through a strange gateway before entering the wood. The gateway stood by itself, with no fence flanking it. It was made of two tall, curved, tapering, grey-white posts, crossed at their tops. I walked towards this edifice, becoming more and more mystified the closer I came. It wasn’t till I reached it that I realised the posts were the jawbones of a baleen whale, ends buried in the ground, tips crossed to form a giant bone arch. I touched the surface of one. The bone was rough, and warmer than wood, its pallor dimmed by the dust caught in its pits and grooves. I passed through the gateway and went on up the hill and into the trees.

Most people wanting to make a path up a steep hill would have settled for a zigzag, but whoever was responsible for the design of these grounds wanted a straight way running up to the lawn. To do this a short tunnel had been cut into the hill. I stopped at the entrance and peered in. It was still intact—I could see the white arc of light at its far end, and light glimmering on water running down the stairway inside. Its walls were lined with brick and clotted with moss. I ran my fingertips across the wall and found a metal rail, and, holding on to it, I climbed the steps. The air inside was damp and chill, smelling heavily of wet earth.

I found myself on an overgrown lawn which sloped gently up to the house. It was tall—two storeys with a third of six dormers, rising out of the steep roof, three facing me, and three at the back. The veranda, which ran around two sides of the house, was decorated with wooden fretwork, as were the architraves of the arched second-storey windows. French doors opened from a first floor room onto a balcony; all the other windows were smaller. The doors appeared to be a later addition to the house, an afterthought, a concession to light. The house’s timber was painted white, its roofing faded red corrugated iron. Both roof and walls looked as though they had been painted some time within the last fifteen years—the paint was dingy, but not decaying. The house was deserted, its lower windows boarded up and its upper as black as only the windows of deserted buildings are. No, these were blacker, and some seemed to give on to a blackness as absolute as that in a house gutted by fire.

Behind the house the sun stood in a white sky like a paler pressure-mark in pale flesh. Beyond the house’s bulk there was a grove of bare birches. Some of the trees were dead, others still bore a few limp yellow leaves on their hard branches. The wind had dropped. The air was cool and still. There was mist congealing in the hill’s folded gullies. The pines looked black and close.

I stood on the wet, clinging grass and stared, taken up by the sight: trees, mist, the tall white house.

I went up onto the veranda. The weather closed in again as soon as I was in shelter, until the rain was as bad as it had been at its worst. In the porch the air seemed to be gradually compressed, as though someone was lowering a plunger over the house. The sound of the rain settled on my eardrums, a firm, steady pressure.

I began to unpack. I put my large waterproof torch up on the windowsill beside me, unrolled my sleeping bag and my sheet of closed-cell foam. My clothes and bag were damp, and the wood of the porch had a slightly sweaty surface. The greyness of the weather and approaching dusk made me feel depressed and lonely. Although I wasn’t particularly hungry I ate a few handfuls of nuts and raisins, then lay down with my arms behind my head, looking up at the veranda’s ceiling, white-painted tongue-in-groove, coated with a layer of sticky black dust. Once I was still the sound of the rain nestled into my ears again. I closed my eyes, my body gratefully at rest.

After a time as I lay there I came to feel that, from no particular direction, I was being watched. It was as though while I was making observations of my surroundings—aware of the shape of the porch, my distance from the boarded-up door, the rain falling close by—these surroundings were mirroring my consciousness of them in a reciprocal awareness of me. I didn’t analyse this sensation, or trouble myself to make excuses like: ‘I’m tired and cold and overwrought.’ I just lay quietly, warmed by the feeling that I was being looked over. It was a pleasant, secure sensation, as if I stood at the border of myself, neither inside my body and cut off, nor outside and exposed.

I began to doze, my body relaxed, my thoughts drifting idly from one thing to another—running over the surface of a stream of impressions. A recollection surfaced suddenly, appeared as if it had been hooked and fished up.

I was eleven, a boy walking home slowly, drained by a day of swimming and sunning himself—dizzy from too much sun—but warm and spent to the core of his body. I was on a straight, stony road. The sun backlit the trees and made a mass of slender criss-crossed shadows in the grass. Not the blue shadows of morning and noon, but the reddish ones of evening. Clouds of midges, silvery in the sunlight and black in the shade, were dipping and swimming in the air over the road. The sun was dazzling bright, colouring the dry grass on the hill beside me, not brownish-white, as it was all day, but velvety yellow. The air was warm and still. It was late summer, the leaves on the trees were old, but the season was seemingly endless, each day unchanged, the dust thick, the river water warm, the sky adamantly clear and blue. Forever, week after week.

As I walked, I looked about. I noticed that the grass on the crest of the hill beside me was behaving strangely, agitated as if by the wind (though no wind was blowing) or as if an army of small animals was creeping among its stalks, moving in a line all the way along the ridge. I watched, fascinated, but the movement made no progress. Without deliberating, I charged up the slope to investigate and, at the top, ran into a fresh, strong wind. It was a wind out of autumn, and it carried the scent of cold water. Below me was what should have been an empty, flat-bottomed gully. But there was a house, a small wood-and-stone house, surrounded by a fence-enclosed garden. It looked quite innocent and ordinary—only out of place. A strong breeze was blowing in the gully, but everywhere else the air was still.

I ran home and told my parents. They decided I’d had too much sun and sent me to bed.

After that, for years, I had a kind of battle of wills with the strange house. It wasn’t only on still days that it appeared, bringing its own wind. It could be there at any time, but not predictably and not often. I used to try to creep up on it, supposing that if I climbed to the top of the hill with my eyes closed it might be there. Other times I’d nonchalantly stroll along the road, then suddenly veer off and rush up the hill. Once I camped on the ridge for four days. Another time, hoping to obtain proof, I carried a camera with me for months—every day taking a walk along the road to the river. I never photographed the house; I saw it perhaps nine times in five years. As far as I was concerned the house was picking on me. There was no reason it should be there, and no reason why I should be the only one to see it.

Eventually I learned not to talk about it, and my family overlooked my occupation of walking, whenever I could, the road to the river. At least my parents had the sensitivity not to send me to a doctor. I knew I wasn’t crazy; it was something far too obscure to be crazy about. After all, what could it possibly mean? What could it mean to me? As for trying to investigate the house—that was predictably disappointing. The second time it appeared I was so gratefully surprised that I just sat and stared, wondering whether it would vanish while I was watching. Somehow that seemed as unlikely as that I should see my mother without her false teeth. The house seemed to have the same sense of delicacy. On that occasion it vanished when, after many hours of watching, I fell asleep. On its third appearance I was so angry I decided to run down the hill, rip up the flowerbeds and abuse the occupants. I charged down the slope, but when I reached level ground I became sick and dizzy and fainted on my face in the grass.

Nothing I did made any difference. The house came and went as it pleased, without noticing or needing me. If there had been some connection with my life, or family history, some mystery I alone could solve, or if I had had the disposition to be haunted and saw apparitions at other times, in other places, I might have made some sense of it all. But, as it was, the house was maddening and irrelevant. For years I was a misfit, believing myself to be special, because I possessed privileged information. But what did I learn from the house after all those years? About it? About myself?

Nothing. My apparition, my great secret, was trivial and incongruous.

Later my parents moved and I went to university. I never had cause to look for the house again. I preferred not to think about it. It didn’t bear any relationship to anyone else’s experience, or to my own ordinary experience. It got so as I scarcely ever thought of it—and yet I’d just relived the moment of my discovery of the house-which-had-no-intentions-for-me, with its smoking chimney and empty windows.

I opened my eyes, feeling the something that had been holding me carefully put me down. I lay still, full of suspicion and resentment—then I became angry.

‘Oh no you don’t!’ I yelled, then leapt up and began stuffing my belongings back into my pack. I slung the pack over one shoulder and ran away across the grass. At the tunnel I stopped, remembering my flashlight, and turning around I peered back at the house. The metal casing glimmered on the sill of the boarded-up window, its light a flaw in the portrait of a dusky, deserted building. I turned again and kept running, charged through the tunnel and trees, sprinted over the drenched field in a straight course towards the macrocarpas and the track down to the road. And, because I hadn’t followed the path back through the bone gateway, I had difficulty finding the entrance to the track and had to slow down and pace along the treeline till I located it.

Cold and breathing heavily, I reached the road and began to walk along it again, through a world in isolation: the dark, wet hillside under a faintly lit, overcast sky.

Jill

‘Hey!’ I warned. ‘It’s a hitchhiker. He looks drowned, poor thing.’

‘Oh poor thing,’ Ellen echoed drily. She did, however, stop.

The guy, who had been walking steadily, his eyes fixed on the ground, looked up as our headlights struck him. He came over to the window of the camper and said, ‘Woe! Misery! Can I come in?’ He was a powerfully built man with dark hair and eyes, but his voice was strangely boyish. He sounded American.

Ellen wound down her window. ‘There isn’t enough room in here. But you can let yourself in the back.’ She passed him the key. He disappeared, we heard the side door slam, then his face appeared, grinning at us through the window connecting the cab to the camper.

‘Good God,’ Ellen muttered, eyeing him in the rear vision mirror. I had to agree with her; he did look slightly maniacal. He ambled off down the other end of the camper to peer through the back window at Hannah in my car.

We continued slowly downhill.

Ellen said, ‘Wasn’t he going in the opposite direction?’

‘Probably just pleased to be saved from death by exposure.’

Ellen leaned forward, peering. ‘Do you see—’ she began, then braked suddenly. The campervan slid to a stop. The guy in the back took a tumble, and Hannah barely missed running into us.

Wearing black, scarcely visible in the dark, another man had been walking in the centre of the road. He had looked up, and thrown his huge white hands up before his face. Now he stood, dazzled, his eyes shaded.

Ellen jerked the handbrake. ‘Men in distress, they’re thick on the ground,’ she complained; then, leaning out the window, she yelled, ‘Are you crazy?’

He came over. He was very tall, thin, and pale. He stooped to look in at us. ‘My car is buried back there.’ He pointed. There were streaks of clay through his clothes, clay seeping out in the rain.

Ellen looked at me. ‘Take him around, and bang on the door. The other guy will let you in.’

I got out and took the man’s arm. He looked down at me passively from his great height, and followed. The backpacker opened the door. He was pretending to straighten his nose. He stopped miming and stared at the other man, who was obviously in shock.

I shoved the backpacker out of the way and encouraged the other man to sit by pushing him in the stomach so that he folded at the hips.

We began to move again. The backpacker pulled his sleeping bag out of his pack and draped it around the other man’s shoulders.

‘I’m all right.’

‘You said your car was buried?’

‘Yes. A slip pushed my car off the road and buried it.’

‘With you inside?’ the backpacker asked. He sounded enthusiastic.

The man’s eyes moved slowly to his questioner’s face, then he smiled slowly. ‘I kicked out the back window and squeezed through.’

The campervan stopped again, abruptly. I was sitting next to the newcomer, and we fell over on the bunk. The backpacker sprawled on the floor. ‘Come on!’ he said as he picked himself up.

He and I got out and were joined by Hannah and Ellen.

A landslide, much larger than the one that had stopped my car, had carried away the road for perhaps sixty feet. Earth was still crumbling from the lip of the gouge. By the headlights of our vehicles we could see the roof, boot and back wheels of a car buried in the slip below where the road had run.

‘Let’s get out of here!’ Hannah said, and ran back to my car. We reversed, until we found a wider stretch of road with trees, rather than pasture, above us. Hannah had apparently reasoned that the bank would be stable where it was held together by the roots of large trees.

We crowded into the back of the camper. Five people and a wet pack made an uncomfortable crush. Nor were we parked on level ground, since the safest parking place was unfortunately sloped.

‘How much gas have we got left?’ Hannah asked Ellen.

‘Perhaps enough to heat soup, but I’ll have to hold the pot on the stove.’

Hannah nodded then turned to the man in black. ‘You were lucky not to be buried.’

‘He probably knows that,’ Ellen said.

‘Don’t get mad at me, Ellen. It’s not my fault we’re stuck.’

Ellen turned back to the stove, bristling, and said nothing. The hitchhiker sat, looking from face to face with wide eyes, like a child. Hannah met his stare with a look of distaste, then smirked. ‘Do you have any suggestions?’ she asked, as though addressing a simpleton.

‘Wait out the rain,’ I said. ‘What else can we do? I’ll go back to my car to make more room.’

‘Both you and this guy have had nasty shocks—I’m not planning to turf either of you out.’

‘Are you planning to turf me out?’ the hitchhiker laughed.

‘You could go and sit up front. Free up a bed for this guy.’

Ellen looked over her shoulder, her expression set. ‘After he has had some soup.’

I decided that I would much rather have Hannah disapprove of me than raise Ellen’s ire.

The hitchhiker relaxed. He seemed a cheerful, blithe person. It might have been charming, but the grin and big-doggish happiness were irritating in these circumstances. I’ve noticed that, when disaster strikes, people often become cooperative, considerate and polite. But if it’s just a matter of inconvenience and discomfort they often start lashing out at one another.

A round of introductions would help. ‘I’m Jill,’ I said. ‘I ran into a slip—Hannah and Ellen rescued me.’

‘There’s two slips?’ said the hitchhiker.

‘Afraid so. I’m Ellen. And this is Hannah.’

The tall man pushed back his wet hair. ‘Simon Wrathall.’

I tried to remember where I’d heard his name. ‘I’ve heard of you, haven’t I?’

‘You’ve probably seen my illustrations.’

I remembered. Simon Wrathall was a well-known book illustrator. He’d won awards and had exhibitions. His work was a bit grim, but very good.

‘My name’s Basil. Basil Hanley.’

‘And you’re American.’

Basil went red. ‘I’m Canadian—I don’t sound anything like an American.’

‘Sorry.’

‘American, huh!’ He subsided into muttering.

‘How long have you been down here?’

‘Since October. I was fruit-picking.’

‘I must have passed you on the road earlier and not noticed,’ I said, guiltily. ‘I usually pick people up.’

He frowned slightly. ‘I guess you must have.’

I watched him, changing my mind about my first impression. He wasn’t stupid—I’d mistaken animation for mindlessness.

Ellen shook soup mix into the steaming water. I got up to look for cups. The soup, chicken noodle, was salty and tasted artificial, but it was hot. Basil was glowing with contentment—I supposed he must have been cold and miserable on the road by himself. Simon looked unhappy, probably thinking about his car.

Outside the rain continued. The windows of the camper fogged up. Ellen turned on the radio. The reception in the hills, far from any transmitter, was faint and full of static. We held the transistor so it wouldn’t slide off the sloped table, our heads bent towards it, straining to make sense of the broken voice. It told us of flooding, power cuts, and fears that certain rivers would burst their banks. No assurances from the National Weather Office that the rain would ease off anytime soon. Hannah said, ‘I suppose we wait it out then.’

‘I’ll go sit in the cab,’ I volunteered. I didn’t think I would be cheering company for any of these people.

Hannah gave Basil a sharp look and he jumped. ‘No, I’ll go sit in the cab, lady.’

‘I don’t know that Jill is a lady,’ Hannah said.

Basil’s good-natured expression was giving way to one of hurt. I was angry at Hannah for her heavy-handed policing of everybody’s behaviour—but it was her camper, after all.

Basil got up to go, then turned around at the door. ‘There’s a house up above the road here you know—’

‘Why didn’t you say so earlier!’ Hannah stood up, her head thrust forward and face red. ‘We can go and get some help and shelter for Jill and Simon.’

Basil bit his lip and shrugged. ‘It’s deserted.’

Hannah wasn’t going to let it go. She must have felt she was in danger of losing face. ‘Well, I wouldn’t have just assumed it would be no use to us. We might be more comfortable up there, if we can get inside. Is it habitable?’

‘Yeah, without a doubt.’ Basil said. ‘Great place, ideal place to take shelter. Fancy not thinking of it before—silly me.’

‘It’s OK, Basil,’ I said. His voice had gone vague and cool and he was clearly very annoyed.

Hannah looked at me as though I was guilty of some sort of insubordination. I ignored her. ‘Is it far from the road?’

‘About five minutes’ walk.’

‘Do you think we could get inside?’

‘I’m sure we could.’

I studied his expression. It was quiet and patient, but I felt it disguised some other emotion. He wasn’t stiff-backed, the sort of stance many men would take when being taken to task by a woman. His face was pale, his brown eyes level and serious. I felt as though he were waiting for someone to ask a particular question, one he would have to answer with the truth, not a commonplace.

I think Hannah thought he was either being defensively casual, or had capitulated, and didn’t care which. She had made her decision. She began to stuff some blankets into a bag. Basil waited, watching me. I felt stupid and slow.

‘Can you walk up the hill?’ Hannah asked Simon.

‘Yes.’

‘Take our food, Ellen.’

Ellen saluted, then began rummaging in the safe.

I said, ‘Could I have my keys, Hannah? I’ll get the rug out of my car.’

She tossed me my keys. Basil stepped aside and I went out.

The rug was in the back seat. I unzipped my nylon parka and tucked the rug inside it. I took my torch and a paperback I found in the glove compartment: Peter Straub’s Shadowlands, which I had been reading weeks before and forgot about when Dan tried to kill himself.

After the funeral Dan would start drinking every night when he got home. He’d down glass after glass of cheap dry sherry, and would follow me around the house, his face slack and glossy with sweat, saying hateful things. I gave up arguing with him, numbed and ashamed by the things he said, half believing him when he told me I was useless, a burden to him, when he said he thought I hated him. For, although I understood that what he said was not true, nor what he really believed himself, somehow the abuse sapped my self-esteem, making me believe I was too weak to save him, or even to decide to leave him.

Over months I watched the character of a stranger eclipsing my husband’s, his loved face becoming sour and ill-meaning. And, to me, phrases of anger and disappointment which once would have been impossible to voice became natural and ready answers. Many nights I lay awake waiting for him to come home. Unable to sleep because he wasn’t in, worrying that he might have had an accident; knowing that if he had an accident and was killed, then it would all be over, my decision made for me. Many nights I lay listening and thinking: ‘I don’t care if I lie awake forever, this time don’t come home.’

Every week I would say to myself, ‘I’ll give up trying,’ but it was never explained to me exactly what one did when one ‘gave up’. Every morning he would be there, getting up late, eating breakfast in silence, unhurried, defying my uneasiness and misery. And we wouldn’t meet each other’s eyes—sometimes weeks passed when we wouldn’t look at each other.

Nicky was not my daughter. How could I share his sorrow? he said. How could I know how he felt? How lost, old, infirm, confused? Before Nicky died, he told me, life wasn’t real. It was all only an illusion. All happiness was an illusion. And it was easy for me, I didn’t have to keep working, going out into the world, meeting people—my life was simple.

Simple. Simple for the stepmother who couldn’t own her own grief.

I spent one weekend at my sister’s, trying to recover enough strength to decide what to do. We talked about how terrible it was that I should be forced to hate my husband when I wanted to help him. Mary told me to write out the phone numbers of counsellors or the address of Alcoholics Anonymous, leave them on the breakfast bar and get out. It was sound advice.

I drove home. Dan had been so sure that I wouldn’t return. He swore that Friday that he knew I was going for good. The house was quiet and dark. In the lounge the TV poured a flickering radiance over the walls and furniture. Its faint, tinny voice followed me down the hall. Dan was in the bedroom. On the bed beside him was a bottle of red vermouth, a packet of Panadol and a tin of rat poison. The room smelled of wormwood.

I didn’t touch him, but stood at the foot of the bed, staring. His face was dusky red and slick with sweat, his breath ragged. I wandered out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, filled the kettle, switched on an element and stood at the stove with my arms folded. Reflected in the black window, my face was young and serene.

Before the kettle had boiled I found I had wandered back into the bedroom, and was standing again at the foot of the bed. Dan looked much the same. I walked into the hall, picked up the receiver and dialled my sister’s number. Roger answered.

‘Could I speak to Mary?’

‘Sure Jill.’ His hand covered the receiver, but I heard him say, ‘It’s Jill again. Don’t be so long this time, I’m tired.’

Mary’s voice: ‘Are you OK? Get home all right?’

‘Dan’s tried to kill himself.’

‘Oh God! Where is he?’

‘He’s on the bed.’

A long pause, then: ‘Have you called an ambulance?’

‘No. Should I?’

‘Of course you should! I’ll do it—just hang on.’ Mary hung up. The kettle was whistling, I took it off.

Half an hour later an ambulance arrived. I heard them crunching up the gravel path and went to unchain the door. I told them where Dan was and they hurried past. I had put the door on the chain when I came in—Dan hadn’t chained it, he had obviously overlooked it, or left it open for me, believing I would come home.

‘Will you come with us, Mrs Morgan?’ one of the men asked. I picked up my bag from the hall table, left the lights on and followed them. At the hospital they gave me a tranquilliser and I tried helpfully to answer questions. A doctor told me Dan probably had liver damage, more from the handful of Panadol he’d taken than the poison, or the months of heavy drinking. She said Dan was lucky to be alive.

A nurse decided that someone should escort me home, and asked me Mary’s number. I told her, ‘I don’t remember.’ I said, ‘Everything seems to have left me.’

The others were waiting for me on the road. I slipped Shadowlands into my parka pocket and followed them. Basil led us up some bricked steps under the trees.

Kelfie

I found the camper and the car, then left the road when I saw a weak light wandering over the walls of the old house.

I’d been on the property once before. It was summer, and I’d walked in the orchards behind the house, through the ragged grass where wasps buzzed and burrowed in windfall apples. I took pictures: of the weed-choked beds of the kitchen garden, the pump by the kitchen door, the slimy curve of the brick pathway, the sagging line of a picket fence sunk in hollyhocks, and the green-shaded heat-traps of rose-trellis tunnels. Romantic stuff. I never photographed the gateway; it was too special.

The house itself was teasingly possessed of personality and intent. I remember turning my back on it in the late afternoon, taking pleasure in my own strength, denying myself a mystery—enjoying denying myself. I was in one of those moods where, if you happen to be shopping and you see something you’ve been looking for for years, you have the strength to walk out of the shop—though you kick yourself later on. The house was haunted, but it wasn’t going anywhere. It offered me an unusual adventure, but I was more interested in the ease of power I felt in turning my back and walking away.

This night was different. It was wet and there were people up there, people who travelled in flash campervans and Pollyanna-cheerful yellow Toyotas. I followed them, full of curiosity and a sort of malicious amusement.

They were standing in the porch. Nearest to me, on the steps, just out of the rain, was a very tall man with a wet sleeping bag draped over his shoulders. The others were crowded around a window, trying to remove the boards. One, a big, husky woman, was saying, ‘If we can get one away we can use it to lever the others.’ She was tugging at the lowest plank.

‘Can I have a go?’ He had a Canadian accent.

‘Well that’s a little better than “Here, let me do that, lil lady”,’ the elegant blonde said, doing the square-jawed hero of some B-grade Western.

The Canadian repeated the question, his voice unconsciously becoming softer and higher pitched. She shrugged and sauntered out of the way. He began struggling with the window. Both he and she were the sort of people who didn’t know how best to use their strength—they expended a lot of energy without exerting a great deal of force.

‘Try another one,’ the big woman advised, wiping the sweat off her forehead.

‘It’s hard to get a grip; this board’s practically flush with the sill.’

‘Try kicking it,’ a third woman, small, curly-haired and blond, suggested.

‘I’d break the window.’

‘Do we have to get inside?’

‘No, but it might be more comfortable.’

The Canadian let go; he’d given up. ‘With tools I could do it easy.’

‘There’s a crowbar in our toolkit.’

‘I’m not going back down there.’

(You certainly are not, not while I’m standing here.)

The small woman turned to the man on the steps. ‘Do you think you could do it, Simon?’

He walked over, forgetting the sleeping bag so that it slipped from his shoulders. ‘Probably,’ he said dopily, as though he’d been asleep. He put his fingers on the edges of the board, pressed hard and pulled away. The plank creaked, nails straining a fraction out of the wood. Then he slipped the tips of his long fingers behind the board and ripped it off the window.

‘Great. Now you can do the rest.’ The big woman sounded almost resentful.

Simon put down the first plank and continued to tear the others away, then, once there was a space large enough to climb through, he hauled open the sash window.

While this was going on the Canadian had sidled slowly out of the others’ sight, down towards the far end of the veranda. He lifted something out of the dark niche of a window and strolled back to the group. He was holding a flashlight.

‘Do you want to go first, Hannah?’

The big woman ducked her head inside, then swung her leg over the sill and vanished. The others followed.

I went to the window and listened to them shuffling around inside. I watched their shadows, in the beams of the flashlights, swoop, flare and cross one another. The light faded from the window as they moved into another room. I put my bike helmet down and climbed in after them.

The air indoors, full of disturbed dust, ran burning into my chest—it was like filling my lungs with poison gas. I didn’t cough, and the sensation passed.

From the next room I heard a click and creak, then, ‘There’s wood in here!’

‘And no spiders as far as I can see.’

‘That’s because there aren’t any flies. Contrary to ancient belief they aren’t spontaneously generated—puff! Fly appears.’

‘With a white head and white front leg, and going, “Help me!” in a thin, wavering voice.’

Laughter, rustling sounds. A strong upper-middle-class English accent: ‘What a gorgeous ottoman! It shouldn’t have been left to moulder.’

‘Shall I make a fire?’

‘I’ll do it—the wood will be wonderfully dry.’

‘Hey Simon, it’s a pity you didn’t know about this place when you were doing that Bradbury book.’

‘Be sparing with the wood, Ellen, it has to last.’

‘What are you working on now, Simon?’

‘A Gavin Paton. About taniwha—disinherited taniwha. It’s rather sad. And conservationist.’

‘What do yours look like?’

‘What are they supposed to look like?’ The Canadian again.

‘Mine are thin, with flat heads and wide mouths.’

At this point I stepped into the doorway and said: ‘Housebreakers.’

Basil

I had been listening to the conversation Jill and Wrathall were having, while rummaging in my pack for a paraffin fire starter. Hannah was hovering over Ellen, who was laying the fire. Wrathall was holding my torch so that I could see what I was doing. Hannah and Jill were also holding flashlights.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a figure appear in the doorway, a blur of red and black with a white face. It spoke. Jill screamed and dropped her torch. The ray of Hannah’s swung up to the ceiling as she lifted it over her head as a club. Wrathall turned his beam on the figure.

The long eyes closed into slits. He didn’t take his hands out of his pockets to shade his face. He laughed. ‘What are you expecting? A monster?’

Hannah lowered her torch, growled, ‘Arsehole.’

He sauntered into the room. A slender, long-legged young man wearing a leather jacket, and fatigue pants tucked into walking boots and thick woollen socks. His hair, though wet, was too thick to cling to his skull, and short, except for an off-centre fringe that arched over, rather than fell against, his brow. The skin of his face was smooth and pale, his eyebrows arching, nose short and turned up over a wide, full-lipped mouth. He picked up Jill’s torch and handed it to her, self-possessed, graceful, arrogant.

For no apparent reason I felt that I had to get this person’s attention, and quickly. I yelled, ‘You may well say!’

He stared at me. ‘What an excitable person,’ he said, as though to an unseen audience. ‘I may well say what?’

‘You know—sepulchral tones, talk of monsters, meaningful laughter.’

He laughed again, a dry, frail, awkward laugh—not the sort of sound one would expect him to make. It was a very pretty laugh, conveying not just amusement, but also some other, alien sentiment. ‘Did I disturb you?’ he asked.

I humphed. He was still staring at me with an expression of delight when Wrathall said, ‘You are—badly behaved.’ The young man looked at him and blinked; he had been grinning at me, now the wide grin closed into a smile. ‘I’m sorry.’ Graceful, self-possessed, humble.

‘Do you know the owners of this place?’ Hannah asked. ‘Because you’re acting kind of proprietorial.’

The young man shook his head. Wrathall had ceased to look dreamy and detached, startled out of it. He was awake now and watchful.

‘Where did you spring from?’ Ellen asked the stranger.

‘My bike’s parked between your cars. I drove across one slip—with difficulty—but I wasn’t counting on the road being gone further on. What made you all decide to come up here?’

‘I saw the house when it was still light,’ I said.

‘And investigated,’ he said playfully. Not asking—telling me. Jill glanced in my direction, almost as though she could sense it was a significant remark and was waiting for a reaction. I didn’t answer. If I told him I’d been up there before, then they would want to know why I’d come back down to walk on the road in the rain. Still the little bastard persisted, saying, ‘What did you think?’ Looking around himself, appraising the room. I remained silent; he turned back to me, points of light appearing in his eyes. ‘It’s haunted of course,’ he said.

I was at once shocked and curiously relieved. It was horrible to hear someone say what I was thinking, but to know that someone else thought the place was haunted was like being absolved of an enormous responsibility. I babbled, ‘When I was here before, something picked me up and looked me over, sort of—’

The lights in his eyes flickered. ‘I was only kidding. Of course it isn’t haunted. Haunted? Yeah sure, by a giant frog who goes up and down the staircase every night, and is really the Marquess of an old Scottish family, who, cursed with immortality, shrank into a frog-creature over three hundred years—’

Jill said, ‘I thought I was the only person in the world to have seen that movie.’ I had the impression she was trying to take everyone’s attention off my embarrassed confusion.

‘You must watch a lot of old horror movies,’ the newcomer said. ‘Do you remember its name?’

Jill shook her head.

‘The Maze.’

‘There’ll be a test afterwards,’ I said, then, ‘My name is Basil, in case you’re interested.’ I continued to rummage in my pack, found a fire starter and passed it to Ellen.

In a few moments the fire was lit. The light grew, first from the single streaming flame wrapping the paraffin cube, then the dry wood caught. The warmth was wonderful.

Ellen said, ‘We’ll know soon if the chimney’s blocked.’ But the smoke continued to rise and disappear.

The young man came over and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Sorry. You gave me a fright, which I suppose I deserve, since I was trying to spook you. Do you really think the house is haunted?’ His expression was open and earnest.

The others were listening and I didn’t want to look a fool again, so I played down what I felt. ‘It did occur to me that it might be. I do believe in ghosts.’

He nodded. ‘OK. I’ll keep my eyes open.’

Hannah touched his arm with the back of her hand. ‘Will you help me shift the couch closer to the fire—ah, what’s your name?’

‘Kelfie.’ He helped her carry the ottoman over to the hearth.

Wrathall was still glaring at Kelfie, who ignored him, with studied composure. It was an amusing picture—Wrathall looked so formidable and fierce. Jill saw I was looking from one to the other and smiled at me in a conspiratorial fashion. Then she poked Wrathall lightly in the ribs. He looked surprised, then abashed. The bad-tempered expression diminished to one only slightly irascible.

Jill

I dreamt I was lying in a pit full of snow and icy mud. The woollen glove on my right hand was frozen fast to a wound in my throat. Every time I drew breath there was a sharp, terrible pain. My lungs were burning, my eyes swollen and streaming, my mouth foul with the rusty flavour of blood and some other throat-scalding taste. My legs were tangled in wire. The warmth was bleeding out of my body.

A flare floated in the sky above me, trailing smoke and droplets of fire, the sky around it light grainy grey.

A crackle of gunfire. The white radiance declining slowly. Silence. Buried alive in snow.

Strange shapes had entered my space and peace. I felt a touch on my cheek and the ice there crack into a stinging web of fire. Someone was busy cutting the wire around my legs. I was mesmerised by the two gold stars above the seam of his shoulder. I tried to speak, hearing words, hollow and garbled, like a snagged tape. His face turned to me, pale and furious, tears on his cheeks. I heard him clearly: ‘Because—you stupid ass—I’ve been reading your letters for months!’

Someone was shaking me. I blinked blearily at her. ‘You’ll wake everyone.’ It was Ellen. I sat up.

Basil was sprawled on the floor, his head flung back, mouth open. Hannah was sitting curled up, her head rested on the seat of the ottoman—Ellen and I had been sharing it, our legs entwined. Simon lay on his stomach, the sleeping bag rolled up under his head, his clothes still steaming in the fire’s heat. Kelfie, with inexplicable confidence and familiarity, was asleep with his head partly pillowed on Basil’s midriff—the two of them as relaxed as if this was a customary position.

‘I had a nightmare.’ My voice sounded as thick as treacle.

‘I gathered that.’

‘I was a man—’

‘Oh God! That is a nightmare!’ She grinned at me mischievously.

I shivered and stretched out my hands to the fire.

‘The room’s warming up really well,’ she said.

‘I was lying in a pit—’ The nightmare seemed to still have hold of me; I felt cold and sluggish. The room was dark, blurred, as though filled with water.

‘“This narrow place, this dark pit in which I now am lying, of what bird is it the talon?”’ Ellen quoted. ‘Was it a really bad nightmare?’

I nodded. She curled her feet up under her and tilted her head onto her hand, burying her slender fingers in her hair. ‘I don’t sleep very well, because I have nightmares,’ she said.

‘I don’t usually have nightmares. Even when I’m upset. I only have those anxiety dreams—of trying to make tea for thirty people and not being able to find thirty cups.’

‘I’ve been having some success with lucid dreaming,’ she said. ‘You should try it.’

‘What is it?’

‘When you dream lucidly, you tell yourself you are dreaming, then take control of the dream and rearrange it.’

‘How?’

‘Well—I have one dream where a man chases me through the corridors of a school. It’s after school and no one’s around.’ Ellen’s face became intent and serious. ‘It used to be a terrible dream, till I took control of it. Now, the most I’ve been able to do is make this staircase appear—he pursues me up it, but it gets narrower and narrower as it climbs. Till finally it is so narrow he can’t go any further—I’m smaller than him, so I can go on till I have to stop, crammed into a little space, but safely out of his reach.’

‘I think you’d better keep working on that one, Ellen. Try to get hold of an elephant gun next time.’

She smiled. ‘Trauma,’ she said.

‘I gathered that.’

She brushed some lint off her jersey, not meeting my eyes, suddenly shy.

‘How long have you been travelling?’ I asked her.

‘I haven’t been at home for three years.’ She did some mental calculations, then nodded. ‘Yes, that’s right. When I finished my degree I took a holiday in the Greek Islands. Met some people there and travelled—Turkey, Egypt and so on. Then my brother joined me and we went through Kashmir and India, then over to Malaysia, Indonesia and down to Australia. When Jon and I were camping on a beach in Queensland Hannah came along and started bossing and running our fire—we had it too close to the trees—’ She broke off, remembering. ‘It was a lousy swimming beach, there was a rip, and stingers, but the sand was beautiful, soft and creamy white. Anyway—Jon and I trailed around after Hannah, then we all had a big fight and he pissed off back home. I’ve been with Hannah ever since.’

‘How long’s that?’

‘About eight months. Hannah had been in Australia for a while. She’d picked grapes, gone alligator hunting, then opal-digging. She has quite a bit of money put by.’

‘How about you?’

‘I have a little trust fund, and I’ve managed to support myself—mainly by living off other people.’ She burst out laughing at what she’d said. Simon shuddered, but didn’t wake. Hannah lifted her head and regarded us with bleary eyes.

Ellen got up and, stepping over Kelfie, moved closer to the fire. ‘You can have my end of the sofa Han, I’m not sleepy.’

I followed Ellen. Hannah frowned at me. ‘You don’t have to get up. Lie down and rest.’

‘Stop being so solicitous, I’m getting up to stretch my legs,’ I snapped.

She shook her head, an exaggerated gesture of exasperation, and lay down on the ottoman. Ellen settled on the brass firebox, stretched out her legs and folded her arms. We were both quiet for several minutes, Ellen watching Hannah as though waiting for her to go back to sleep. Before long Hannah was still, her breathing becoming regular again.

I said, ‘It’s strange, how deeply asleep they are.’ As soon as I’d voiced this thought I realised it was a peculiar thing to say—to think. I looked at Kelfie. In his pale throat the veins ran green beneath the skin. A pulse was leaping at the base of his neck, his face was slightly flushed, his mouth dark, its shape blurred, lips full of blood, as though they had been kissed.

Short, nearly transparent flames flickered in the fireplace. As the fire shrank slowly the light faded. When the last little flames had drawn back into the coals they lay tinkling like breaking wires. I picked up the fire tongs and fished out an ember. A shadow moved within its radiance, like some imprisoned creature struggling to be free. As it cooled a thin velvet of ash formed over its surface. I blew on it, the velvet shredded, the shadow was obliterated, and heat touched my face. I put two more logs in the fireplace; they smoked for a moment, then caught. Around the room shadows clambered back up the walls away from the firelight.

‘I suppose I won’t start feeling tired till around midnight,’ Ellen said quietly. ‘Hannah and I weren’t up till ten this morning; I’m surprised she’s able to sleep.’

‘It’s the dark, and the sound of the rain. And it’s weird not to have something to do, like ironing, or letter writing, or the paper to read, or TV to watch.’

‘That’s right. Because I haven’t got something to occupy me I feel as though I’m visiting, or at a party—you know—waiting to be entertained.’

I said, ‘Know any good stories?’

And Ellen said, ‘Can you still remember your dream?’

After a few short minutes it seemed to have retreated from me. I concentrated and felt a lethargic peace steal over me. ‘I was lying in a pit, and I was hurt, I couldn’t move.’ I touched my throat. At the touch a cloud of feelings coalesced inside me: helplessness, despair—familiar feelings—but also hunger. Intense, terrifying, black-hole hunger.

‘What’s wrong, Jill? What’s wrong with her, Ellen?’ someone demanded in an angry penetrating voice. An arm—Ellen’s, I recognised her scent—clasped my shoulders. ‘She had a nightmare.’ Ellen was staring at me, her expression tense and confused. I realised I must have cried out.

Kelfie was crouching before me, not touching me. Yet I could feel his presence as strongly as I could feel Ellen’s. A physical presence not like that of a man, or a woman, but unobtrusive, soothing, inhuman, like a cat.

‘Sorry, Jill, I shouldn’t have got you to think about it.’

‘But it wasn’t about Nicky or Dan,’ I said, trying to explain how strange it was that this dream should disturb me when it seemed in no way connected with my life. They didn’t remark on this, either leaving me to calm down or waiting for me to elaborate.

Kelfie said, ‘I’m sorry for scaring you before.’ His expression was contrite and childlike. He put his thumbnail in his mouth and gnawed on it, looking from Ellen to me in consternation.

‘That’s right!’ Ellen said fiercely.

He sat back on his heels, his eyes slightly unfocused, face attentive, as though he were listening to something, then in a quiet, deliberate tone he said, ‘I had been listening to you. You were all so vivid it was like you were setting the scene for my entry. I couldn’t resist it.’

‘You were eavesdropping. That’s a nasty habit. And perhaps you ought to learn to curb your passion for the dramatic.’

‘I was entertaining myself—so what?’

‘So you’re obviously a compulsive—something. Having Basil on about the house being haunted, for Christ’s sake!’

He shrugged.

Ellen looked back at me and squeezed my hands. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes, I’m all right. About the dream, what I was trying to say is that I don’t have nightmares. And this nightmare wasn’t even about anything personal to me. Also, in the dream I wasn’t actually frightened or distressed, it only started to seem frightening after I woke up.’

‘But you’re better now?’

‘Yes, but when you asked me what it was about I felt I was beginning to dream again—not the same dream, but its sequel.’

Kelfie was smiling crookedly and grinding his teeth under the smile. He looked sceptical.

‘Well?’ I demanded.

‘Nothing.’

His expression was maddening, that peculiarly male expression of prejudiced doubt.

‘Are you getting enough sleep?’

‘No.’

‘Why’s that?’ Doctor Lamb paused, his pen’s silver rod lifting from the paper. He was the Morgan family doctor; he’d delivered Dan, and thought highly of the family—he said so at our wedding.

‘Dan’s drinking too much.’

‘How much, do you know?’

‘No, I really don’t have any idea. But he’s getting drunk, and he’s secretive about it.’

‘Do you drink with him?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘I saw Dan last Thursday. He seemed fine—is he missing work, appointments?’

‘No.’

‘Does he get violent when he drinks?’

‘No, he just abuses me.’

‘You argue?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘You need to get more sleep, Jill.’ He put the card down and began to write a prescription. ‘I’m going to prescribe some tablets. Take one in the evenings—these aren’t something you can’t drink with, so you needn’t worry about alcohol. I’ll have a word to Dan next time he’s in.’ He ripped the prescription off the pad and extended it to me. I took it, tried to decipher the scrawl. When I looked up the doctor was staring at me, slightly irritated. I folded the paper and stood up. He stood too, as if we were attached to the same mechanism and my standing necessitated his. ‘You’ll have to expect quite a long period of adjustment. Both of you.’

In my head something was surfacing, something huge emerging from tremendous depths, the water boiling and raising itself in a smooth hump, as it did in the pool at Pupu over the source of the cold spring.

‘I know that,’ I said, ‘I’m trying.’

‘Be patient with Dan.’ And there it was, implicitly: ‘She was not your daughter.’ Not the daughter of the young, griping, ‘artistic’ second wife.

‘Do you think I’m being hysterical? Pity one of the other blokes isn’t awake so you can roll your eyes at each other.’

‘What?’

I caught Ellen’s eye. ‘Offended innocence.’ Pointing at Kelfie.

‘I believe Jill anyway,’ she said.

‘What a forceful ally you have, Jill. Exactly what do you believe, Ellen?’

‘I believe she’s right in what she thinks.’

‘Oh, a carte blanche Jill, you’re lucky.’

Hannah, who was lying facing the back of the ottoman, rolled over. ‘What’s going on?’

‘An argument.’

She sat up, rubbing her hands through her hair. ‘Did you bring the coffee up, Ellen?’

‘Yes, you could ask Basil for a billy and put it outside to collect rainwater. Under that stream running off the veranda roof.’

Hannah leaned over Basil. ‘Should I wake him?’

‘Go on. He might be having a horrible nightmare,’ Ellen said and glowered at Kelfie

Kelfie turned his eyes away from us. He said, ‘You don’t know what I’m thinking.’

Hannah shook Basil. He came awake abruptly, confused and disoriented.

‘I just want to borrow a billy, to collect some water for coffee.’ He made to get up, and Hannah patted his shoulder. ‘Stay put. I’ll get it. Just thought I should say before I went in your pack. ‘ She began searching it. Basil sat yawning, then shook himself vigorously, like a wet dog. ‘No wonder I’m cold, you’re all being a fire screen,’ he complained.

Kelfie moved further away from us. Basil shuffled over into the space.

‘Voilà!’ Hannah left the room swinging a billy.

‘Did you have any nightmares, Basil?’ Kelfie asked, ingenuous.

‘No, but hell am I tired. I need coffee.’

‘Why not sleep?’

‘It’s anti-social, Snouf. Wrathall looks like he’s out for the duration.’

Kelfie frowned and asked what a Snouf was.

‘Don’t know. Sounds like Tove Jansson. Suits you anyhow.’

Basil seemed to have chosen to refer to Simon by his surname and call Kelfie pet names—maybe it was something to do with their relative ages. Simon was in his early thirties, Basil was in his mid twenties and Kelfie in his late teens. ‘Was I growling, or whimpering, or something?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘Kelfie’s just being a dick. Jill was trying to explain this weird dream she had, and he thinks she’s exagerating, or something.’

‘They’re waiting to see whose side you come down on,’ Kelfie said coolly.

Basil looked anxious and uncomfortable, like a child between two quarrelling parents. ‘Well I don’t know anything. Except I suppose you were being difficult,’ he said to Kelfie, then flushed meeting Kelfie’s remote, superior stare.

Kelfie

I was my father’s child, or so I was told. This pleased me greatly, since I admired him so much.

The three of us kids used to compete for his attention. Meredith had it easy; she was boisterous, vivid, quick and overflowing with unshakeable self-esteem. She looked like him too: long-boned, but not clumsy, black-haired, blue-eyed, pale. Meredith wasn’t interested in the things that interested Dad, and made no attempts to pretend to be. She pursued obsessions, cultivated her talents and became an expert on any subject that captured her interest. Successively: Ancient Egypt, sharks, Plains Indian religions and the history of Marvel comics. When she was twelve and in her final year at the Montessori school, she started her own comic strip, which the local suburban paper ran.

Owen was the clod of the family—as Meredith would incessantly remind him. He too was quick and clever and self-controlled, not brilliant like Mere, but a born leader with hordes of friends who hung on his every word.

My parents, Jenny and Gareth Kelsey, had married at twenty-one, just after they had got their degrees from Auckland, his in Maths and Physics, hers in Music. They fell into good jobs and good money and started a family, deciding to raise their children ‘the right way’.

I was born in Auckland, but removed to Los Angeles when Gareth was snapped up by IBM. It would have been 1973. For three years he was one of their super-programmers, then he burned out.

I look back and picture Dad—Gareth—lying like a cat on the lawn in the sun. This was his idea of playing with the kids when he didn’t feel like exerting himself. We’d dance around him and he’d occasionally make a grab at our legs—the game kept us in a state of terrified suspense; we’d creep towards him and rush away again shrieking when the smile twitched on his face, or we caught sight of the gleam of a partly opened eye.

And I remember the day he decided to trim the ‘hedge’—a line of thick conifers on the edge of our property. He didn’t have a chainsaw and seemed not to want to use one. Our Los Angeles neighbours thought we were crazy. Gareth was up in the trees stamping on a half-sawn branch; we were all on the ground helping by hauling on a rope he had tied around the limb, me at the front, valiantly contributing my few ergs.

Gareth was so strong. His body smelt clean and charged, an ozone scent, like the drenched air after a thunderstorm.

Some of our dinner table ‘discussions’ would get out of hand. He didn’t want Meredith to be enthusiastic about anything without ‘regarding the alternatives’. He was always prodding her back from what interested her, afraid I think of the intensity of her involvement with her obsessions. ‘I’m an iconoclast,’ he said to her one day when she was in tears, as if he thought this was an adequate explanation for his never just letting her be fired up.

My father the idol-breaker.

I never knew exactly why I was consigned to him—Jenny did that; whenever I was stubborn, tactless, or selfish, I was ‘your son, Gareth’. And he petted me, over-compensating I expect, because she neglected me. That is to say, she fed me, clothed me, watched my health—but that was duty, ordinary kindness and decency—not love.

One day, when I was nearly five, Gareth came looking for me, wearing an intent look. I was lying on my stomach in front of the TV, watching the Indianapolis 500. He knelt down next to me and watched the cars whiz around the track, then asked, ‘Can I turn it down for a moment, Keith?’

‘Sure.’

He put some paper down in front of me and said, ‘I’ve got a puzzle for you. Say you have to tell a machine to change one number, whenever it occurs in thousands of numbers, to another.’ He wrote a seven and a three. ‘Wherever there is a three it has to become a seven, and wherever there’s a seven it has to become a three. The trick is that you have to tell the machine to do it in the shortest way possible, using as few words as possible. And because we don’t know whether the numbers we want changed are sevens or threes we call them x. The machine is pretty stupid, so you have to tell it to do everything.’

‘Even to find the sevens and threes first?’

‘That’s right.’ He tapped the paper. ‘How would you do it?’

It seemed obvious to me—he was tricking me, writing out the seven and three when the important number was ten. ‘First you tell the machine that x is seven or three.’ I wrote, x is 7. x is 3. ‘Then you tell the machine to find x.’ I wrote, Find x. ‘Then you tell it to change x to ten minus x.’ Change x to 10-x. ‘Because ten minus three is seven and ten minus seven is three.’

‘Aren’t you even going to ask if that’s right?’

‘It is right, unless I don’t get what you want me to do.’

‘You do understand, you are absolutely right. There’s another way to do it, but it’s slower. That is the best way, that’s “arithmetic logic”, Keith.’ He stretched out beside me and leaned his head on his fist. I imitated him, adopting exactly the same pose.

Jenny came in. ‘Mime session?’

‘I’m going to build Keith a computer,’ my father announced.

I pulled a face. ‘You said you were going to build me a kite.’

He pulled me to him and hugged me. ‘I’ll build you a kite too.’

Everything started to fall to pieces when I was six. Gareth couldn’t sleep. He’d roam around the house at night, or come home very late, or go out very late. He started sitting in the dark wearing dark glasses. ‘Stoned all the time,’ was Meredith’s verdict.

‘You know what I hate most about him now?’ she asked Owen one day when we were all hiding in Owen’s bedroom, and an was argument raging downstairs.

‘The fights?’ Owen was shaking and pale, flinching each time the voices soared.

‘No, the way he keeps cornering me to talk about things like what a good father he’d like to be, and how brilliant he was, and how good his nerves were once—’ Her face contorted, fighting tears.

Owen had the hiccups; he’d been so tense at dinner that he’d swallowed air.

‘The other night he hit Jenny! I know he hit her because I heard it—’ Meredith began rocking back and forth; her face relaxed, and the tears came.

‘Maybe they’ll give him his job back,’ Owen said.

‘Are you kidding! He gets shaky every time he has to add up the chequebook.’

‘He might get over it.’

‘Even if he did, they wouldn’t take him back when he stuffed up and made them lose all that money. And the insurance people said no.’

Owen started to cry too. ‘Mummy can look after us.’

‘He’s making her sick!’ Meredith was enraged. ‘I just want her to leave. To take us and go.’

I felt my body jerk as though someone had pounded me hard in the back. My hands and feet started to go numb; the numbness travelled up my body. ‘Mere—’

She was sobbing too much now to answer me.

‘I can’t feel my hands and feet.’

She rolled across the bed and put her arms around me. I felt I was made of sand, disintegrating gradually in the wind. ‘I’m disappearing,’ I whispered.

Mere sniffed loudly and said, ‘No you’re not, silly.’ She lifted me and propped me up against the pillows at the end of the bed. ‘See, here are your hands, with all the fingers.’ She lifted them.

Downstairs a door slammed. Owen and Meredith exchanged glances. A moment later the bedroom door opened and Jenny came in. The skin around her eyes was red and tight; she too was shaking. ‘We’re leaving,’ she said.

Owen began to wail, his mouth wide open. Jenny sat beside him on the bed and drew him onto her lap. ‘Barbara’s offered to let us come and stay up at Olympia with her.’ She turned to me. ‘You can stay with your father if you want to, Keith.’

‘I don’t want to leave Gareth.’

She looked away, squeezed Mere and Owen tighter. ‘OK. That’s settled then.’

I never knew whether she told him she really was going to leave. He wasn’t around the house very often, and when he was he wasn’t talking to any of us. Meredith and Owen made no protest about my being left behind. They understood that their silence on the subject was a condition of their being rescued from a painful situation by the mother who loved them.

Jenny had the removal van come around one Saturday morning when Gareth had disappeared somewhere. She had the men take quite a lot of the furniture, crockery, cutlery and bedding. Meredith and Owen climbed up and down the stairs carrying their books, toys and clothes in boxes. Mere had secretly arranged for a friend of hers to come over to say goodbye. The friend had turned up, ‘just dropping in’, and Jenny made her a milkshake and let her stay. The friend trailed Mere up and down the stairs, her face tragic.

We had chocolate-chip ice cream for lunch, then Jenny sent me upstairs for a bath. Half an hour later she came up, towelled me dry, dressed me and combed my hair. Then carried me downstairs, sat me on the footstool in front of the TV and put the remote control into my hand.

Meredith and Owen were standing at the front door. Jenny picked up her coat and keys and, pushing them out before her, closed the door. I heard the car doors slam, the engine start, covered by the deeper throb of the truck engine, and both vehicles pull out of the driveway and fade down the street.

I had recently started at the Montessori school. Once the others had gone, Gareth drove me there in the mornings and a housekeeper picked me up in the afternoons. The school was supposed to give me the resources to pursue my own interests, and help when I needed it—but all I was interested in was the swing in the playground.

I sat, swung and listened. Listened to the other children, shrieking and diving about, to bits of paper dragged over the pavement by the wind, the sea sound of three eucalypts at the end of the field, the murmur of traffic and always, from the sky, the echoing roar of jets. Swinging, listening, I would feel myself diffuse over the landscape, first into the nearest objects, the plastic seat and steel chains of the swing, then the frame of the swing, the pink pavement of the playground, the fence, the road, the buildings in my sight, the buildings I knew lay beyond my sight, the city, ringed with hills, the hills, the desert beyond, the continent, sea, continents, islands, changing elements, unseen places, people, plants and animals—the whole breathing, blue globe of earth and air rolling in icy space.

Sometimes it was difficult to concentrate myself back into my own body. I felt drugged and sleepy.

I became unable to make decisions, about what I wanted to eat—so asked always to be served the same meal to save myself the trouble. I began to have favourite clothes, wanting them to be ready to wear at the times I felt I should be wearing them. Nor could I go to sleep unless everything in my room was arranged in a particular pattern. I knew if something was out of place. The comb had to be in the upturned hairbrush, the middle window open on the middle notch, the wardrobe door closed, my eiderdown in three folds draped evenly over the end of my bed, and the keyboard console completely aligned with the screen. My whole life had to be regular and dependable—at least, it had to look as though it was.

I must have seemed sluggish and sleepy most of the time, unresponsive, uninterested in what people were saying to me. I felt like a field over which the sun travelled and clouds passed, rain fell and winds blew, bringing forth grass and flowers, inhabited by small animals, crossed by larger animals. Everything happened to me, I did nothing.

Half a year after my mother left, Gareth took me home to my grandparents. We landed at Auckland and stayed the night in a city hotel. The following morning we flew into Nelson, my grandparents’ home town.

They were waiting at the airport. My grandmother, a neat little woman with smooth greying black hair wound in a bun at the back of her head; my grandfather very tall and thin, with sallow skin, sparse grey hair and large, slightly pointed ears. My grandmother picked me up. Her flesh was soft under her angora suit, the scent she was wearing sweet, the cheek she laid against mine soft and flaccid. I stared at my grandfather over her shoulder and he winked at me.

After lunch they took me up to the cathedral. My grandmother finally relinquished my hand, and they let me run ahead of them up the red-carpeted aisle. Gareth called me back when I slipped under the ropes and began to climb the altar steps, mesmerised by the large plain cross that seemed to fall towards me when I came close beneath it. I rambled off into one of the side galleries and stood under some large, dirty flags: a worn New Zealand flag and three regimental flags; blue, red and white, bearing insignia and trimmed with tarnishing gold braid.

The three adults were standing against the dark wood of the organ loft. My grandmother was holding Gareth’s hand. She was crying, her lips pressed tightly together. He was crying too, looking around the empty church, his eyes bright, not wanting to be seen weeping by strangers. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Grandfather pulled a handkerchief out of his jacket pocket and held it out; Gareth waved it away and covered his eyes for a moment with his arm, took several deep breaths, nodded at something Grandmother said and squeezed her hand. His face, when he turned to look at me, is caught in my mind still—skin pale and opaque, like sculpted wax, eyes and nostrils red-rimmed, a grey shadow under his mouth and two long streaks of shadow from his jaws up his cheeks. The look in his eyes: guilt, desperation, despair.

We walked back down the hill. I collected acorn cups and winged seed pods from the sycamores. We stood at the foot of the steps and my grandfather went to get the car—he didn’t want Grandmother crossing the busy road.

While we stood there, gazing down the long hazy street that led away from the hill, something happened, something important: a freak gust of wind found a collection of dead matchsticks and swept them around on the pavement with a strangely melodious sound. For a moment I forgot everything I knew. I had lived to hear that sound, and the world existed to produce that sound at the moment I was listening.

My grandparents’ house overlooked the shallow glassy harbour, on the long winding road out of the city. While the adults talked I walked around the house. It was eccentric, with high ceilings, heavy doors, asymmetrical rooms and corner fireplaces. From the kitchen door a covered walkway ran to a shed, my grandfather’s study. I peered through the glassed door at the books lining the walls, the cluttered desk, old black-keyed typewriter, and what looked like a collection of stones with the shapes of ferns and shellfish moulded into their surfaces.

I went back to retrieve a half-eaten apple I had left on the table in the hall. The adults were talking about me so I listened.

‘He does seem a little quiet, but he’s off playing at the moment.’ My grandmother’s voice.

‘Into everything too, most likely,’ said my grandfather.

‘So? He seems all right at the moment, but he’s been unapproachable for months. I’m afraid he’s becoming autistic. He sits around doing nothing for hours, seldom talks, and flies into rages when things aren’t exactly the way he wants them to be—’

‘Losing his mother probably gave him an awful shock.’

‘Yes. That’s right. He needs a stable home and I can’t give it to him right now.’

Stillness, the incisive ‘clink’ of a teacup being replaced in a saucer. Then, ‘When we have taken Keith off your hands what will you do?’

‘Go back to the States and try to get a decent job. And I’ll keep in touch with Jenny, try to persuade her to come back.’ Gareth’s voice lifted again. ‘But I’m angry with her, not for leaving me, but for just pissing off without taking Keith—the poor kid.’

‘We’ll do our best to take care of him, Gareth, till you’re back on your feet,’ my grandfather said, evenly.

‘Thank you.’

‘How long will you be staying, dear?’

‘Not long—I’ve got a possible job to look into. I just wanted to bring Keith home.’

‘You ought to stay till he adjusts—we’re strangers to him.’

‘I doubt he’d even notice.’ Bitterly.

I’d sucked the flesh of the apple arid. I walked into the room and put the apple on my chair. They looked at me uncomfortably. I settled on the floor next to a bowl of chocolate biscuits and ate one.

‘Keith?’ My father called. I didn’t look at him.

‘Keith?’

The ground I was sitting on was lifting itself, a swelling mountain carrying me up into thin air and perpetual light.

‘Keith? See, he isn’t even listening.’

‘Keith, dear?’ My grandmother tried; she got down on the floor beside me. ‘Keith?’ I looked at her.

‘Do you want another biscuit, dear?’

I licked my fingers, retrieved the apple and bit into it. She drew back, her face worried.

‘See.’ My father sounded spiteful—and triumphant.

The following afternoon they drove him to the airport. It was raining and cold; the little planes came and went. There was delay; Grandfather was worried that I might he hungry and bought me a bag of chips. I cut the corner of my mouth on one. It stung. I sat between my grandmother and father, testing the cut every so often with the tip of my tongue.

When it was finally time for my father to go he picked me up, kissed me on the mouth, then thrust me into my grandmother’s arms and hurried away.

Back at the house at the bay, my grandmother put me down in front of my grandfather’s armchair and busied herself in the kitchen. Grandfather kept looking over his paper at me and clearing his throat. Then he got up to lay a fire, describing to me what he was doing, and different methods to get a good fire going.

At sunset, the whole sky shone gold, as though the sun had melted.

Once the meat and vegetables were on, my grandmother came into the lounge and stood wiping her hands back and forth across her floral apron, looking at me.

‘What are we going to do with him, Hugh?’

‘Send him to a decent school.’

‘Oh you don’t think it’s the fault of that Montesorri place, do you?’

‘Who knows.’

‘How do we get him to talk? He doesn’t seem to hear anything we say.’

My grandfather cleared his throat again and fixed me with his gaze. I looked away out the window, then suddenly recalled clearly Meredith reading to me out of a comic, the second-to-last issue of Killraven, a Marvel classic: Look at it out there in the sunsets and dawns. You see it, you have seen it before—

‘I can hear you,’ I told them.

‘Can you indeed?’ My grandfather covered his surprise with sharpness.

‘Yes.’

‘And are we going to be able to get on, young man?’

I nodded, struggling to tell them something. ‘Jenny said I could stay with my father. I wanted to stay with her and Mere and Owen too. I have a dream where I’m walking and I’m very tired, but he won’t pick me up.’

My grandmother gasped and snatched me to her. She squeezed me, sobbing.

‘I want to go home,’ I said. My world began to shrink, to become a child’s world again. Beautiful thoughts, bright shapes scattered. Strength and certainty bled out of me.

‘We’ll take care of you Keith.’ My grandfather took my fist into his hand.

‘I want to go home.’

My father worked for a number of years in Venezuela, though my grandparents were pretty hazy about what it was he was doing. We never wrote to each other—I wasn’t able to write to him right after he left me, so we never formed a habit of exchanging even the barest details about our lives. I wouldn’t have known what to say to him anyway. I had been happy and held, loved unconditionally, then suddenly put aside. My grandparents gave me a good home, and loved me, but they could never restore my confidence in myself.

At five I never wondered whether I could hold my world together; I never dreamed I couldn’t. I had an innocent, untried sense of my own power. The world made sense, it was secure, promising. A feeling of reassurance always followed anything that hurt or unsettled me.

When I recovered from the initial shock of my mother and father’s abandonment, I began to work to put my world back together, feeling always that, firstly by my quietness and politeness, and later by my friendliness and hard work at school, I was constantly remaking myself, cementing myself together with the love and approval of others. As a child I had no aims. Yet by the time I was nine I was an adult—and like an adult I had begun to invent aims in order to give my life a sensation of forward impetus. It was artificial, this idea of a goal to be attained; now I understood that I was there as a child, living in that faith which was a part of me. Yet, though I might know this, still I would carry on under the same compulsion, trying to find a way of looking at life that would reveal a pattern of order rising miraculously out of incidence.

Gareth made a short visit when I was eleven. I was so worked up about it that I made myself ill and spent the whole of his visit in bed, too shy to talk to him.

Four years later, when I was fifteen, he invited me to his house in Mexico, to stay for six weeks—or as long as I wanted. He had a new life, a wife, another child, and a good job (working for a bad man). He didn’t expect anything so fairytale-like as to successfully absorb me into his family. But he did expect to be able to make amends, and make friends.

I stood by the window, the wooden shutters screening the daylight, closed over a view of the beach and a deadly heat, like a shield over the heart of a reactor. He came in behind me. ‘Aren’t you going to make your bed, Keith? You’ve been spoiled.’

‘I’m going to make it. Then I’m going to pack.’

He moved closer to me, asked, ‘Why’s that?’ Cautiously concerned.

‘I don’t feel like staying.’ A weak protest, it made me feel weak.

‘OK.’

‘I can’t stand it here anymore.’ I swung around. After staring into the light through the slats, the room was black, banded with green—I could barely see through the after-image of the shuttered window. Beyond the green bands my father in his white suit was a pale blur, a spectre. ‘I can’t stand you anymore.’ I felt frightened by what I had said, as we do when we express strong emotions to people we feel strongly about—but he didn’t care about me, so what difference would anything I said make?

Hating the silence after my words, and feeling desperate, I began to tell him what I had been thinking about before he came into the room. ‘A few months ago I was sitting in a cinema watching Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. Almost every woman in the audience was weeping, and I thought to myself, ‘Yes—this is what it’s all about: betrayal, alienation, abandonment—only the film was about a mother and daughter, not a father and son. You know, you’ll never have any idea of the damage you’ve done me, or the good. I can’t even distinguish one from the other anymore.’

‘Keith, I had reasons for doing what I did. You shouldn’t resent me—’

‘Yes, you had reasons. It made sense to you, but it’ll never make sense to me.’

‘It shouldn’t have to make sense.’

‘It has always had to. But I can’t make it make sense. I’ve learnt that, when it’s most important, I can’t do anything for myself.’

‘That’s not true Keith.’

‘How the fuck would you know what is or isn’t true about me?’ I yelled. Then I took a deep breath. ‘I get that you think you can say all sorts of vague and gnomic things from the mysterious advantage of your age and experience.’

He spread his hands helplessly. ‘I’m not trying to patronise you. But you should try to understand.’

‘I do understand. I understand that I couldn’t make any difference. What else do I need to understand?’

‘That I couldn’t either,’ he answered calmly, almost smugly. ‘Perhaps when you’re older you’ll learn a little more compassion.’

‘My compassion’s worn out, I felt so sorry for myself for years.’

‘You still do.’

‘I’m missing the self-confidence and faith other people seem to have. Other people’s faith is inside them—mine’s like a fortified embassy I put into other things and people.’

‘I’m sorry, Keith.’ He looked hangdog.

I said, I thought very evenly, ‘Why didn’t you love me?’

‘I did love you. We both did. But it was an impossible situation. You are old enough now to be able to understand that.’ His tone compelled me to say I understood, even if I didn’t.

‘You hurt me. How about you understanding that?’

‘You were a tyrant!’

I could see him clearly now. His fists were clenched, his flushed face wore an expression of righteous anger. My mind tinned, focusing like a lens, like a burning-glass.

‘All children are tyrants.’

‘You wanted things to be the way they couldn’t be. How do you think I liked being regarded as some sort of deity? It’s a hell of a thing to have to live up to.’

‘You could have at least been a father,’ I said calmly, cheaply. I felt I was gaining the upper hand.

He pushed the hair back from his forehead, the gold ring on his little finger gleaming amid the black strands. He looked perplexed.

‘You’re feeling guilty,’ I heard myself say, matter-of-factly, as though reporting the results of an experiment. My disillusionment and despair were receding, my anger turning into malice. I cast around in my mind, as someone in a struggle might fumble for a weapon. ‘Don’t think I don’t remember how you came into my room one night with a gun,’ I said, for the first time in my life really confronting the scene in the dark bedroom of the Los Angeles house.

He sank down on the edge of the bed, stricken. He put his head in his hands.

He had forgotten or was sure I’d forgotten.

‘I suppose you were thinking of doing away with me and yourself,’ I said. ‘That’s a big responsibility, Dad.’ I waited, but he didn’t say anything. I went on, ‘You know, I wasn’t scared, and I wasn’t thinking, “Don’t do it.” I trusted you.’

‘Don’t you see? I had to send you away or I would have hurt you. I was crazy, Keith.’

‘I trusted you,’ I repeated softly. He shuddered and looked up, responding to something in my voice. I pulled open the shutters and sunlight spotlit his face. His tan, bloodless, ageing face. Squinting into the light, he looked like the frightened prisoner in a spy movie.

I said, ‘You want my forgiveness and friendship, but you won’t get it. You don’t really need it—you are doing very well here, with your family, book-keeping for that crook.’

‘You pass judgement like you think you’re some kind of god.’

‘An idol? Yeah, and you didn’t break me—oh, you needn’t look at me like that, I said it that way because I’ve just discovered it’s true. You didn’t. Here I am.’

A gust of hot wind blew in through the open window, sudden and powerful, as if from some fiery explosion. I began to feel tired and sick. ‘You know, I’m doing fine for friends and supporters—I’ve got a whole fan-club.’ There came into my mind then, and made me smile, my instructor’s joking words before my first parachute jump: ‘You won’t have to worry if it doesn’t open Kelfie, the clouds would catch you if you fell.’ The memory of his remark picked me up and carried me through the moment, despite my tiredness. I said, ‘I don’t need you.’ I pushed off the windowsill where I’d been leaning and strolled over to the dresser, pulled open the top drawer and started packing. I couldn’t feel my body, my head seemed to be drifting atop a column of smoke. Surprisingly, although I couldn’t feel them, my hands were still working adeptly.

My father sat watching me. ‘You can come back any time, Keith.’ He sounded exhausted. ‘You’re always welcome.’

The waves drift in, red in the evening, to the harbour wall. The water in the lee of Rabbit Island is as smooth and bright as a sheet of brass. My grandmother crosses the road to where I stand, my back to the traffic and face to the sea. She takes the card out of my hand, reads it, says: ‘Keith, he could come back any time.’

But where could either of us come back to? The house belongs to someone else.

The coffee didn’t revive Basil for long. As soon as he put down the mug he was yawning again. It was my turn with one of the cups; the billy was half full and still simmering in the fireplace on its platform of logs. I shook some instant coffee into the mug and Hannah lifted the billy from the flames, her hand protected by her wet woollen hat.

Ellen was telling Hannah about Jill’s nightmare, or rather giving her an account of my ‘scepticism’. Hannah, who may have been sceptical herself, was nodding sympathetically. Jill looked self-conscious. I sat, smiling at them all, knowing Ellen thought I was feigning nonchalance to hide hostility. Sure—if they were prepared to be angry with me, then I was allowed to be indifferent to their interests. Their low opinion would sanction my bad behaviour.

Basil was dozing, his eyes closed, eyelashes still fluttering slightly. Soon he would be asleep, cast down like a stone to test the depth of a mineshaft.

‘Simon missed out on coffee,’ Hannah said.

‘The sleep will do him good.’

The women looked at me in puzzlement, wondering whether this was concern, or an attempt at conversation. I wanted Wrathall to stay asleep—he might spoil everything. I suspected he had too much self-centred gravity in his character to be helpful in this situation. This experiment.

I wanted to learn something, and felt that this might be my only opportunity in an age of noise, distractions, proscribed imagination and inattention, an age where as an intelligent, educated person I was only sufficiently powerful. This—house, storm, closed road—was my element. Out in the world I was at ease. But here I was alive, surrounded by a warm crowd of ideas and possibilities, knowing that even to surrender myself to the circumstances would not endanger me—I couldn’t be endangered, not just because I have a strong will and, inside myself, a great hinterland of anger from which strength flows like an endless army, but because here I was whatever could endanger me. It was all like me. All mine.

I put the coffee cup back on the hearth and lay down. Hannah was feeding strips of bark into the fire, squinting at the crackling sparks. Jill and Ellen were both watching me, as if through one-way glass, watching so intently they had forgotten they could be seen. Like in a movie, when the drug is taking effect and the unsuspecting victim notices the look of intent on the villain’s face.

Jill asked, ‘What did you say, Kelfie?’

‘Did I say something?’ My voice was husky and words slightly slurred. They were all a picture now. Before my eyes the room and figures by the fire seemed artificial, arranged like a diorama display in a museum—an illusion encased in glass, a carefully assembled illustration of another time, a vanished place.

Basil

I couldn’t remember getting up and opening the door, but found myself on the other side of it, looking down at the light shining underneath. Behind me was the hall, a dingy space filled with chill, musty air. The long window at the top of the first flight of stairs, rain rippling over its surface, cast a grey glimmering radiance down into the hall. My eyes strained to make out two upright shadows at the foot of the staircase—newel posts, thick carved blocks of wood.

I crossed the hall, through a patch of moving light like a reflection thrown on a wall of gently agitated, moonlit water, and climbed the stairs. I stopped on the landing and leaned towards the window, which drew the warmth from my cheeks and mouth. Through the rain I saw the vague shapes of trees thrashing about in the wind, featureless cloud, and a flooded lawn reflecting the sky’s pallor. My hands, mottled with shadow, seemed to be corroding.

Below, beneath the parlour door, the firelight shone, as startling and singular as a furnace in a dingy mill.

I stopped on the first floor before a door that, open a crack, gave on to a room that was quiet—not as empty rooms are quiet, but hushed—like an occupied room where the occupant is contriving to stay very still. At the end of the narrow hallway was a round window, which cast a circular patch of light on the floor. As I watched, the light began to change, tints growing gradually within the circle, till the boards were tinged with transparent splashes of colour, like sunlight through stained glass, or a watercolour of a bouquet of flowers. I moved towards the window and the colour faded, as the first flash of an explosion will fade, or a searchlight sweep away. Through that window too was only a view of a drenched overgrown garden, and soft rain striking the glass.

I began to wonder what I was doing, wandering around the hallways of this house. The question didn’t appear to me to be a matter of great urgency or interest, yet I wasn’t just idly ‘wondering’. Instead I was having immense difficulty focusing what would be, in ordinary circumstances, confusion, suspicion and fear. I felt wrapped in several layers of cotton wool. It was almost the same sensation of apathy I had as a kid, doped up in hospital after an accident on my bike. Now, though my physical senses were fully awake, and I was able to take in my surroundings, I felt indifferent to what was happening. I knew it was strange that no one had noticed me get up and leave, and it was certainly strange that I was standing thinking about it instead of taking to my heels, as I had when first disturbed by this house.

It had been stupid of me to come back here, bringing the others. I wondered what had made me do it. Spite? Curiosity? Fatalism?

Another narrow corridor led away to my left, lined with windows letting in the cloudlight, or rainlight. At the end of this corridor was a dusty full-length mirror. It had to be a mirror, because I could see a figure at the passage end, standing in an oblong of light, like a door opened on rain—not the cold storm beyond the window, and icy raindrops like hailstones—but a thick, summer drizzle. I began to walk towards the mirror. Surely the figure was me, my hair still wet. I went five paces along the passage, and then I knew—I wasn’t really walking at all, I wasn’t really there at all. I was still lying safely by the fire downstairs, dreaming that I was here.

Sometimes when I discover I’m dreaming I panic. I’m rarely inclined to just let go and enjoy myself. I feel obliged to do something to put in order the terrible territory in my head—this other country in which I live too. And yet, with the discovery, I always lose all confidence in my own abilities. Everything begins to appear as though seen through the wrong end of a telescope, my arms and legs feel elongated and weak, and my nerves become gossamer—bearing slow, weak signals—like that position check signal from the old liner, Queen Mary, that bounced back to earth off some distant body in space, and was picked up by a radio operator on the QE2 decades after it was sent.

I tried to concentrate on bringing my warm, irresponsible body up the stairs, but that was like trying to suck up a string of spaghetti into an already full mouth. I wasn’t being fetched, or waking up—I was still walking towards the barred doorway, dusty mirror, myself.

When I was eighteen and in my first year at university I lived in a dorm. My room was in an old building with a high ceiling. It was a narrow room, with only enough space for a wardrobe, single bed, desk and chair, plus a little left over to get around in (not enough to stretch out my legs if I was sitting on the bed or chair). Accustomed to my comfortable, spacious family home I hated this room and used to fantasise that I’d build some machine that would let the room create its own gravity. The ceiling and walls would become floor too, and I would be able to distribute my furniture over the whole room, with an effect something like that in 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the astronaut is jogging around a track which is the inside surface of a loop.

My room was next to one of the downstairs telephones, which I got into the bad habit of answering, being so lonely in my first semester. I’d even get out of bed on the off chance it would be for me.

The room was also next to the car park, where apart from people staggering in drunk at all hours on Friday and Saturday, girls in silly, clacky heels, or the inevitable short guy in wooden-soled cowboy boots, there were congregations of cats, fighting and screwing till the snow came.

I got on all right, struggling at first with the work high school hadn’t really prepared me for. I studied History, and loved English Lit—doing ‘critical analysis’ of a text, my head set in a vice over a single page, self-consciously imitating the language of literary criticism and nodding rapturously at the revelations in history lectures (so this is why the world is as it is?). I was absurdly grateful to the people behind the podiums—of whom the fashionably cynical would say, ‘Oh, he made that witty remark last year too,’ or the old cliché, ‘Those who can’t—teach.’

And there was a girl who used to sit opposite blond, good-looking, unimaginative Scott in the café, and tell him how she felt about the university. Chain-smoking menthol cigarettes and mashing butt after butt, talking always through smoke that curled wrathfully out of her mouth and nostrils into her hair. ‘You know what it’s like for me?’ she’d say, the smoke parting in a wake around her face. ‘When I’m listening to my lecturers, under their words I hear, “This is not your world”.’ Then she’d look down, apologetic, expecting to be misunderstood. ‘You won’t find any Indians comfortably studying concert piano, because their ancestors aren’t hovering over the keys. I study philosophy, but none of my people ever sat rationalising the world by candlelight, above narrow streets stinking of cooked cabbage.’ Scott would watch her like she was some wild animal which would soon exhaust itself and become tractable. ‘My people were cooking the cabbages,’ she’d say.

I got on all right with the students in the dorm and in my classes. I was always friendly and disarming, and was generally liked. My trouble was that I didn’t like people. I didn’t dislike them, but they seldom moved or warmed me. As individuals they were of no great consequence to me, which is why I remembered that girl, Audrey. She too seemed to be looking for something, as I was looking, friendly, open, willing to be satisfied with a face, a voice, a friend, yet not finding one who’d satisfy me. She was looking for herself—trying to make up, to invent, her own face in a glass that refused to reflect her, a world that declined to remember her.

But I remember Audrey, with her shoulders rounded and hands stretching her coat pockets, after being told off by handsome Scott for being too ‘angry’; explaining to me, the only witness she had after Scott stalked off, ‘I’m comfortably angry. If I wasn’t angry I’d be insane. So I’m comfortably angry.’

‘Audrey, I can’t feel the way you feel,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘But I won’t insult you by saying I wish you didn’t feel that way.’

‘I wish I didn’t.’

‘But you just said you were comfortable.’

‘I was being heroic. I don’t have any choice. I’m sane, I’m brave, therefore I am angry. P dot Q implies R. I’ll be angry till I die. Or defeated, or insane.’

It was very strange for me, the odd-man-out, not getting into liquor, drugs, video games, food-fights, sex, ice hockey, or even gossip; the only person I admired distant and uncompromising: she a heroine fighting inside a cloud, me a clown trying to reassure myself by being entertaining.

When winter came and created considerable spaces between each house in the town and building on the campus, and an old woman died of hypothermia on her way across the supermarket car park, my world became intolerable. I began to feel oppressed—like a soldier waiting for the sound of the artillery. One morning I was sitting at the back of a theatre, listening to a lecture on T.S. Eliot. I stretched, throwing my arms up over my head. Looking upwards at my hands against the fluorescent light above me, I could see the bones within the rose flesh of my fingertips. And suddenly I was afraid that I was going to die.

I stopped in the last patch of cloudlight. The faintly illuminated figure on the mirror’s grimy surface wore my clumsy, distressed face, and at the same time was still a silhouette against a mist of rain, clothes and hair dripping skin-warmed water.

And then I knew I was going to die. I saw the fate of my body: first the green gowns of the pathologist and his assistant, and my naked, smashed corpse on a stainless steel table; then daylight shining on a brass crucifix in an old country church; outside the window a graveyard full of marble urns, beckoning angels and briar roses—steep hills rising suddenly from the flat valley floor.

And then just death. An aftermath of the great event. My body, any human body. Blood still, veins collapsing, skin glistening, still elastic, but cold. Or on TV, 1972, the cholera epidemic: two glassy-eyed children holding hands on a white cloth-covered table—a doctor pulled at the flesh of one’s stomach and it settled slowly back into place like stretched bread dough. Dead, the flesh that yields at last, ceases to recover—white pressure prints flooding with blood. Stiffening, full bowels swelling, belly grey-green and tight, eyes drying and crusty.

The tramp’s body found riddled with hydatid cysts in a city house. Aunt Beryl two weeks dead in her bath, her fat floating on the water. Myself a mummy in the upper hall of an empty house. In a furnace, fat in flames alight. Wrapped in black polythene in the seeping earth. Corroded by quicklime, lathed in mud. The corpse from the Egyptian tomb, plastered with earth and wheat seeds and sprouting vegetable hair on contact with the moist air.

Like watching a splatter movie, like being a child in bed listening to its parents fight, I had already seen and heard too much. I must fetch myself. I must get up and fetch myself.

Jill

‘It would have to be Wahine-storm weather for them not to start clearing the slip off in the morning,’ Hannah said.

‘Or even before that?’ I asked hopefully.

‘Maybe. What’s the time now, Ellen?’

‘Eleven-twenty.’

The room was quiet. All the men were asleep. I studied Kelfie, trying to think of a way to bring him up. Perhaps abruptly was best: ‘The kid is bloody weird, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, I suppose he is,’ Ellen agreed.

Hannah shook her head. ‘He’s just a self-centred little prick.’

After Basil had settled down again, Kelfie had sat with the cup of steaming coffee, smiling at me. Then he turned to watch Basil, remaining quite still until, after several minutes, in his eyes the depth of focus changed, just like in Shackleton’s eyes when the bird he is stalking flutters away before he has sprung. Kelfie seemed to uncoil, his eyelids drooped slightly, and I almost expected him to turn his head and give his shoulder a distracted, cursory lick. Instead he glanced at us again, drained the coffee and turned to the fire, musing. After a while his face began to alter. Not a muscle moved—it remained expressionless, but under its young, unmarked surface, another face was being shaped, as if something were cooling and hardening under his smooth skin, until his face was no longer that of an intelligent, eloquent teenager, but something older and eminently forceful. Then he sighed, brushed the little flakes of bark off the carpet beside him and lay down, singing or saying something under his breath.

‘What is it, Kelfie?’

He looked at me sleepily. ‘Did I say something?’ He blinked slowly several times and closed his eyes.

‘No, he isn’t just self-centred,’ I told Ellen and Hannah.

‘I agree he’s not only that, he’s a little crazy too,’ Ellen said.

‘Well that’s decided then.’

‘I’ve known a few crazy people in my time, Jill, and the most noticeable thing about them is they are always crazier than one thinks. Their delusions and illogic can really warp one’s sense of reality.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with my sense of reality,’ Hannah protested.

‘Maybe you’re immune.’

‘Look. He’s just a kid.’

‘You mean, how much can he know anyway?’

‘Yeah. He doesn’t worry me. Kids usually aren’t very assertive, and he’s no exception. He’s just an arrogant smartarse, not tough.’

‘Sorry, Hannah, I think you’re wrong. He’s got a lot of self-control—I’d call that toughness.’

‘But he’s not civilised with it,’ Ellen complained.

‘Uncivilised and controlled, oh God!’ It sounded ominous. ‘You know, I’m beginning to think he did believe me about the dream. You believed me, Ellen, but mostly out of kindness I think.’

‘I believed you partly because he didn’t. But I still can’t see how a dream can be “unnatural”.’

‘Yeah, I know. But Kelfie did believe me, and he understood what I was trying to say.’

‘What do you mean?’ Hannah asked, and at the same time Ellen said, ‘Implying what?’

‘Implying that what he said to Basil—’ I began, when suddenly, as if at the mention of his name, Basil, who had appeared to be fast asleep, leapt up and reeled to the hall door. He wrenched it open, and vanished into the darkness.

We sat gaping, then Ellen and Hannah got up. Hannah’s legs were trembling and Ellen was white. ‘What the fuck?’ Hannah said, then she reached down and hauled me to my feet. I was shaking too.

Through the doorway we could hear the sound of a heavy body blundering up some stairs. He was whimpering.

Hannah’s hand was clammy; I felt cold, the blood draining from my skin back to my vital organs. Kelfie came up beside us. ‘Shall we go and see what’s happening?’ he said calmly, then strolled out the door. After a second’s hesitation we rushed out after him, catching up with him at the first turn of the stairs.

Somewhere above us Basil started shrieking. Kelfie faltered and put out a hand, which found and curled around the banister.

Hannah reached Basil first. He was sitting with his back to the wall in an upstairs corridor, his knees drawn up and face covered, no longer screaming, but moaning softly like a child in a fever. Ellen and Hannah crouched on either side of him. Hannah put her hand gently on his hair.

Kelfie stopped, surveying the scene, for all the world like a teacher entering an unruly classroom. He wore the expression that had infuriated me before, a mixture of sarcasm, superiority and disbelief. His hands were even on his hips. Then his face softened, he put out his hand towards Basil and as he did so a light seemed to come up under his skin. His expression passed through gentleness into pity—radiant, outpouring compassion; too much for this occasion, too much for any occasion, except the liberation of life prisoners, or the resurrection of the dead. He said, ‘It’s all right, Basil. There’s no need to be afraid,’ his voice full of calm authority.

Then he fell. Something invisible seized him by the hair at the back of his head, jerked him backwards, and flung him to the floor. He crashed onto the boards, the light in his skin went out, and he curled up as people do when they are on the ground being kicked.

For some reason I couldn’t explain I threw myself over him, as if he were a child I had to protect. I imposed my body between him and his invisible assailant. The rational part of my mind was expecting to have to cope with epileptic convulsions, or some such ordinary thing. His muscles were all locked, but he wasn’t convulsed. I sensed the body beneath mine was alert, only slightly troubled, and violently alive.

Ellen asked, ‘Is he having a fit?’

Hannah was saying over and over, ‘Basil? Are you all right?’

‘Ellen, help me get Kelfie up, I think he’s fainted.’

We wrestled Kelfie into a sitting position and tried to force his head down between his knees.

Basil took his face out of his hands and stared at Hannah. They peered into each other’s eyes, re-establishing themselves by this contact. She asked again, ‘Are you all right, Basil?’

‘I’m a box of birds. Vultures in a coffin.’ His voice was thin and peevish.

Kelfie

In the mirror at the end of the hall I had seen myself flare up with phosphorescent fire. As I put out my hand to Basil, for a second’s fantasy, I felt I was strong enough to intercede with the silence lying about us. Then my reflection blurred, the face dissolving into a pallid smear among those other clear, flashlit faces. I faded; the scene was a film snagging, frames jumping like, when very stoned, I have the sensation of standing on a station platform as a lit train flashes past, and being dizzied and dazzled by a world revealed and concealed, second by second, light by light.

I fell away until the others were a chiaroscuro Christmas postage-stamp far off down a long black gallery. Then for a second there was nothing—the gaping roar of a departed universe—and suddenly, a long trench with sloped sides, a near-white, watered-down sky, and something muddy picking itself up, with a sucking sound, out of the mud. Something speaking, saying, ‘Miracle worker, bring me back to life!’ Behind this were other voices, faint, amused, exasperated. I felt pins and needles in my hands and feet, heard sound swooping in on me like a loud radio in a fast travelling car and, as my vision cleared, caught sight of a dusty wooden floor. I was propped up against the wall in the corridor.

My nose began to bleed, a trickle of blood from both nostrils which spattered, steaming, onto the floor. I pinched my nose and lifted my head. Blood gushed down my throat and I gagged, spat—Ellen and Jill jumped back. One of them told me not to move, said it would soon stop, but it was bleeding violently with no sign of stopping.

I was helped to my feet and they started to half carry me back downstairs. The warm bodies flanking mine seemed ulterior and unimportant, rather than reassuring, just two human props prompting my own body to walk me away somewhere safe. But I walked away carrying what attacked me and was still attacking me as I retreated, falling back from a voice—strained, babbling—full of desperate grief and reckless energy, past all consoling, cajoling or hushing. It was trying to say everything at once: prayers, pleas, terrors, injuries, ideas—an impelled speaker, sound pursued by silence. The voice burrowed back and forth through my thoughts like a ricocheting bullet, till I was mentally scrabbling to retrieve and mend the torn scraps of my own thoughts and identity—as if I had been tied to a chair for fifteen hours with lights in my face and the torturers talking. It went on until I felt that I was still a child, battered by the bigger feelings of bigger people, and that all my subsequent life had been an illusion. Everything was taking flight while I weakly tried to decide what I must seize hold of. How could I repossess myself? A star thrown into space. How would I know myself if I did?

Before me was a misted window. On this small image I concentrated—putting out a hand, clearing a circle on the glass and looking out.

Mark

The pitching ship, its every deck packed. Sleeping on deck in the tropics. No longer on parade, out of the eyes of civilians, tired of the itchy wool. Poorly equipped, but wasn’t to know. Not put off by the casualty lists. Led on by patriotic verses, to take the place of brothers who were slain. Scared the war could end without a share in the glory, and privileges like medals and mouthfuls of slang and song.

It wasn’t odd for seventeen-year-olds to enlist. Not enough to be done on the farm. Schooling over and the world shelved, all those books about great deeds and distant places. Only Emma and the shepherds at home with four horses and eighty miles to a city.

Befriended. Andy, with his shoe shop in Ashburton. Alan, laughing at the children in Menil-la-Tour, coming clacking over the cobbles in hand-carved pattens. And when the column paused on the road, walking over to the stone wall to listen to a cuckoo calling clear and dark amid the blue shadows of a beech wood.

The chateaux shut up behind their high stone walls, their fountains silent and walks abandoned by mademoiselles in striped silks, carrying frilled parasols.

The front thundering far away over the wheat fields.

Aid stations, jangling ambulances, ragged columns of wounded.

Nightfall in the trenches, the long graves with road names. At home in small timber, sandbag and earth caverns.

First things first: the friendliness, most important to be good to each other. Anzac: no nonsense and suffering in silence. The day after the night we took the machine gun post, congratulations came down the line to the Tommies beside us. The silent exchange of guilty and bitter glances, our ‘no nonsense’ all to their credit.

Death all around and the smell of death. Figures in the mud between their trenches and ours, hanging heavy in the wire. Swelling up and then falling in on themselves, flesh folding around the ribs like wet, shrinking leather. Bodies resurfacing, blown out of quicklime graves.

Noise, whining shells, raining dirt and hot metal, hour after hour. Crouching under fire holding our hats, because the major was a muddler whom we couldn’t understand. ‘I say, the fire’s pretty hot.’ (Oh yes, pass that vital message down the line.)

‘Can you spare some men?’ All hands to pass on the stretchers. Alan’s leg smashed, his grey face wet and shining. Home for sure, for him.

Morning, mud, the puddles mucus-green, charred signpost trees, white sky and pustular sun. No landscapes in the Kiwi and Koala cartoons, just ourselves—game buggers —invaded by strange energy on the orders, ‘Fix bayonets! Rapid fire!’ We were soldiers, but not an army (no drill in these cramped conditions, Major).

Over the top: They proved their steel and earned the name of heroes / In their baptismal fire … Wind of bullets, shells bursting, slithering scampering advance over a stinking half acre.

Used to play soldier out in the home paddock, lying face down among the thistles. Emma in the gun’s sights, walking sedately in her white apron, seeking out the eggs of the ranging hens. It was a carved wooden gun, nuggeted black and filthy to hold.

One night at the foot of a hill with a wooded crest—living, un-smashed land—Andy said, ‘There’s nothing on this hillside but us and them.’ It wasn’t true. The Major said, ‘Dig in.’ Gunfire coming. Over the ridge two Germans were talking; ‘Jabbering,’ Andy said, but they were talking about a saddler in Konigsburg.

Alan, a one-legged man, drowned in cold salt water and burning oil, when his hospital ship was torpedoed on its way home. Rose never believed it, left the light on for her straying soldier, burning through the clustering trees, the windbreak around her father’s house. Come home.

‘D’ya need a hand, cobber?’ Cold hands fumbling with the helmet’s strap. Blue fog drifting through the trees. There, under one tree, in the crook of its roots, a white speck. Do you see it? A white flaw in a portrait of a bare, dark wood. A star, a flower, a tiny white winter violet, promising the scent of icy rivers and fresh faraway gardens. For that it is worth standing up out of the mud in a wind of bullets.

Alan, his grey face glossy, his cheeks slack, screaming, ‘God help me! Help me, help me—’ But I am not God.

Aber Gott und ich sind tod. Yet I was safe. Here. Home.

When they wheeled me out onto the grass at Oatlands the sun came out from behind the clouds and warmed my body, healing it by immersion in a balm of brightness. No lover, mother, or nurse has a touch like the sun. I had no more blisters, blindness or breathlessness. Green came walking over the lawn, his arm in a sling. He said, ‘It swelled up, all nasty with pus. They removed a two-inch piece of shrapnel. It’s on the mend.’ Then, ‘Now tell me, Thornton, did you hear what happened to Given?’

(The hour has come, the hour which freezes me, which asks and asks and asks.)

They would hand out paper headed Chaplain’s Office, New Zealand Expeditionary Forces. I’d take three sheets and think of Captain Green and Lieutenant Given, a table between them in the dugout, reading. Given’s face intent and serious, Green viciously scribbling out with a dark, greasy pencil, envy bounding out from behind his duty. And I’d wonder: ‘What can I write that will be read and won’t provoke him? I don’t want him to come along tomorrow evening and say “Kitchener wants” me to stand sentry duty for the third night in a row, or worse still, go out with the wiring party. What can I write that won’t worry Emma? Shall I say that after all this, the world will be better, because everyone will try harder? It’s true, but I’m still anxious about these deep furrows and strange seeds.’

(What happened was that a bullet caught him across the face, broke his nose and tore out his eyes.)

When the blisters were gone they told me to write a letter, gave me a page with the hospital letterhead. I picked up the book beside my bed and leafed through it. Taking these words from the text I wrote: ‘All the visions and consolations of my youth are dead. We know little and are bad learners: so we have to lie. Ice is around me, my hand is burned with ice. Weariness has at last to lie down and sleep, even on the snow.’

August 1916

Dear Emma,

My Dear, this country is beautiful. So quiet, full of leafy woods lying in little valleys, roads flanked by stone walls and small shrines surrounded by trees. The roads are all straight, often lined with elms and poplars. The closer one gets to the front the fewer women and children there are to be seen, eventually only old men working the fields within the sound of the guns.

A while back Alan and I interviewed some men offloaded from a Red Cross train at Le Havre. They were waiting patiently, a few smoking, scarcely moving, conserving their strength. There were we, so full of vim, thinking we’d be able to make a difference as soon as we went up the line, and there were they, having seen action, a good deal wiser than we! Puffing out our chests we swaggered over to ask questions, as was our right. They were Canadians, not little chaps like the Tommies, but tall and slow-spoken. ‘Well, what is it like?’ we wanted to know. ‘Not bad,’ one fellow said, then let us inspect a German helmet he had as a souvenir. Talking to these cheerful men I became sure: We are not going to lose this war. The chap with the helmet told us we could finish it for them.

I have even seen some Russians; they made tea for us at the bivouac on the way up. They are really very friendly and hearty. I can’t think what they are doing behind our lines.

I hope you are not still angry at me for volunteering. It was a matter of self-preservation, because, if I hadn’t, I would have been ashamed. And without my self-respect I would have no power to act. Being ‘heroic’ is really the simplest option …

September 1916

… When Andy and I were on sentry duty last night, nestled down behind the parapet, the Lieutenant brought us the remainder of a tin of peaches. Wonderful! The officers have a mess cart which carries all sorts of goodies, including wine—while we have to make do with boiled beef, biscuits and the inevitable plum and apple jam. Though sometimes we live out of our haversacks, often we are cooked for: potatoes, boiled beef, onions et cetera—with occasionally something savoury scrounged. For a while it was asparagus, which grows wild over much of the countryside. However, that’s now all gone to seed.

By the time this letter reaches you it will be winter here. There is no sense of exchange, or continuity, or even of contact in our letters. I write to you in far-away future time. A fellow from Suffolk was telling me it takes for one of his letters to reach his wife. The letters between them are like a conversation.

Recently we were up near an old chateau. I spent the night lying on the stone floor of an ancient barn, looking up at some coloured flares and the moon floating in a streak of cloud, ruins against the dark sky, fallen masonry, and the twisted ironwork of some ornamental gates.

The next morning the countryside looked so strange, we could see a merry little wood just beyond where the strafing was, the field directly before it a mess of jumbled earth. In the distance the guns were lazily thumping away.

Emma, I don’t think you should keep going on about how I was all fired up, as though that is bad in itself, or bad in me. Certainly the war is a ‘common concern’, but that doesn’t mean I need not have gone. Firstly, it is unfair to quote at me the pompous things I used to say when I fancied myself the next Keats. Secondly, because they are common property, our feelings will always be used to fuel the fires of common concern. In some cases the most we can ever hope for is to choose which particular blaze we are to be thrown into! Maybe it was wrong I was fired up, but I hope to be just as combustible at seventy as I was at seventeen …

October 1916

… It is quiet here now; we are standing by sitting on our packs where we have stopped. Some aeroplanes just droned over and I watched little black clouds flowering among them—Archie shells.

Later: They are strafing now. Doug and I had been sent off with a whole collection of rattling canteens to a well on the hillside. Then it started, our guns hammering their infantry, the barrage gaining strength, the guns setting each other off like a pack of howling dogs.

The noise of a battery is terrible. When it first sounds it tears you in half. It is unbearable, it shakes the brains out of your head.

We could see the land below: cloven trees and dry trenches, clouds of dust where the shells were falling, aeroplane shadows crossing no-man’s-land, and one blimp gliding over it all, like a small whale.

We filled up and hurried back down. Now they are answering our fire. Crumping. Not at all an apt word …

November 1916

… I wish I knew what we were expected to do next. It has been a bad week. The weather is becoming wintry. It has been pouring with rain and we have been, half the time, hip-deep in mud. It’s a bloody nuisance being expected to pump out the trench for days while water slowly drains back into it. Then it rains again.

Doug was killed yesterday during a strafe. A shell landed in the trench, buried itself in the mud, spinning and hissing, and exploded. One killed, one seriously wounded, four slightly wounded. I picked myself up, scattering a few fragments of shrapnel—my coat is scorched where they fell …

July 1917

… it doesn’t matter what I think or what I do. I still haven’t learned, and maybe will never learn, to separate what I love and have hope for, from what I cannot afford to love or have hope for. I don’t see how I can be expected to go on saying, on one hand, ‘I can’t countenance this,’ and on the other, ‘but I can’t help it.’ One half of my heart in a sermon, and the other in the drill.

I have been on burial detail for part of the week. It’s not too bad—lashings of quicklime. Funny thing is that, after a while, bodies become quite boring and routine. Not horrible, just unpleasant. Death is the same. Someone dies to whom you talked over mess, and it is difficult to make it mean anything. A slightly sad change of circumstances, that’s all …

November 1917

… November. The sleet has given way to frost and freezing mist, and through it all a little shrunken sun.

Sorry I can’t write properly, it is very cold and my fingers are fat, puce-coloured sausages. But the post goes and this goes with it.

I got your letter of 24.8.17. I can understand you feeling that it is ridiculous that I am here and in danger, that I could die and you might not know about it for months. Perhaps it wouldn’t seem so ridiculous if you were surrounded by streets full of neighbours with sons, brothers, husbands and fathers over here with everyone around you as anxious as you are, your anxiety would seem less important. Yet since you seldom see anyone, but the Michaelsons and the Harpers, who can’t quite feel as you do, you cannot accept my being over here as the sad necessity it is.

And still Emma, I’ll tell you this: right now my being here seems silly and useless to me. I keep thinking back to the old chap in Christchurch telling me, ‘It’s young men like you who are going to save the Empire.’ The boy who heard that was all aglow with self-importance, thinking he could make a difference. Because we come to the world fresh we foolishly suppose that with our new lives new possibilities are born. It isn’t true. The short range of possibilities is already worked out. We can change nothing, we can expect nothing. However long it takes the world will teach us our places, by preaching itself against ourselves …

December 1917

… I think I’m growing up. I wish this page were cleaner and fresher when it reaches you. I wish I could be sure it will reach you. This word, and this. Of course they must censor them.

I hope I haven’t been too much of a bother to you since mother died. I suppose I was a typical younger brother and played on your forbearance. You are my family, the farm is my family too. If I came home tomorrow I’d let you be Ralph instead of Peterkin. D’Artagnan died in the Low Countries, but I’d rather come home. I long to see the trees in full flood and the wind whitely streaking the hillside.

Winter in the trenches, what a prospect. Andy consoles me by saying he hopes it will be our last. It will certainly be the last for some of us.

With best wishes,

I remain,

Your affectionate brother,

Mark

The third night. First the mud froze, the wreckage of earth, trees, men, and machines hardened, the field healing itself under a glittering skin, a cosmetic frost. Four of us peered over the parapet, Alf and Bill holding reels of wire, Calvin and me with pliers. Everything was quiet, the crescent moon behind the clouds.

Calvin scrambled over the top and we followed, heading towards the crumbling abandoned trench a quarter of a mile ahead of our lines. It was hard going. The ground was a mass of shell holes, lying edge to edge. From time to time one of us would slip into a hole and have to be hauled out by the others.

‘It’s a damn shame the way the Captain always shoves you in it, Mark,’ Alf said.

‘Never mind.’

‘Well, you’re no shirker.’

‘I love a good wiring-party.’ I touched his arm.

Calvin stopped and looked anxiously around. ‘I think it’s a bit further over to our left.’

‘I reckon you’re right.’

We squelched along a little way, then Alf exclaimed, ‘Here it is!’ He jumped in. ‘Righto Bill, give me a hand—’

Side by side they began to lay a double strand entanglement. Calvin went ahead of them; I kept low, duck-walking along the edge of the trench.

‘Blast, this handle’s sticky with ice!’

‘Frost doth as actively burn as fire—’

‘Shut up, Mark!’

I could see only shadows, a haze of breath, the vague gleam of the wire.

‘Hang on—I think I smell gas.’ We stopped, snuffling the air, then simultaneously unclipped our masks and pulled them on. Once my head was muffled I became nervous and impatient to get this stunt over with.

Alf and Bill were shambling over a heap of earth where the trench wall had collapsed, emerging into what faint light there was, two giant spiders spinning out wire web. Ahead of them Calvin came to the beginning of what remained of the trench, paused, then jumped down into it. Something exploded. A golden wall billowed out at me, flinging me back into our entanglement, the pressure of the blow centred at the base of my throat.

My gas mask was damaged; I couldn’t breathe. I tore it off—smelling cordite, blood and mustard gas. There was a wound in my throat, at the junction of my collar bones. When I began to choke it welled blood. I covered it with my hand …

When I came to I felt nauseous, my eyes were streaming and my face itched. It had begun to snow. Droplets of vapour had frozen on the wire. It was glazed with ice, silvered and beautiful. I couldn’t lift my head to look around, and there was not a sound from Alf, Bill and Calvin.

Not a sound. At home it seldom snowed. I couldn’t get used to this dumb show of drifting flakes. Rain says, ‘this, this, this, this …’ Snow says nothing.

The rough blanket against my chin felt just as it did when my father wrapped me up warm from the night air, propped sleepily upright between him and Uncle Euan, coming back up the Hill. I would drop off, then be jolted awake again, trying to listen to their conversation, but lulled by their big, comfortable voices. Now again I was slipping, with small lurching falls, down into sleep, while the sounds around me surged and retreated like the wash and backwash of waves.

I smelt the tang of tea, which I craved to taste. Opened my eyes and discovered it, Given’s hand gripping the dimpled tin mug—it was him, his square fingers and heavy gold wedding ring. Over the sound of voices, conversation and orders, was the familiar thumping of the dawn barrage—and earth sifting slowly down over us.

Given saw I was awake and leaned over me, so that the dust from the dugout roof fell on his back, not in my open eyes.

‘Sir?’

‘It’s better you don’t talk, Thornton. We didn’t get back smartly enough to send you straight off, but you’ll be off when the shelling stops.’

There was blood in my mouth. I made a face. He smiled at me, sadly and tenderly. Then he turned his head and looked at the candle on the table beside us. ‘Your friends McCauley and Palmer volunteered to look for you. They came to me and told me they were volunteering, less to account for their absence than because they wanted a third man.’ He met my eyes. ‘I’m telling you this because you asked why we came out to find you. Your first words weren’t “Hello” or “Thank God” or “How about a drink?” but, “Why did you come out?”’ He looked down at his palms, as if reading a message written there. ‘You can’t have been so surprised to see McCauley or Palmer, so I expect you meant me.’ He laughed. ‘God, they looked comic! “Volunteering”—then eyeing me as though I was some horse they were expecting to run well in a race.’

The dugout was cold and misty. The candle had a halo. Given was turned towards its light, a muscle rippling in his cheek. ‘I used to notice how frustrated you got when they passed around the letter cards. Of course it’s awful for all the men: Circle the appropriate message: I’m well—I’m wounded—I took off my boot this morning and left my toes inside it.’ He laughed bitterly—closing his eyes tightly for a moment, as people do to ward off tears. And I remembered he had been weeping as he cut the wire around my legs. ‘I always hated to take the crayon to your letters, Thornton. Green’s a better butcher than I am.’ He cleared his throat. ‘He sent you out I suppose?’

‘Ssss.’

He took this for a ‘yes’ and nodded, then, remembering his tea, picked up the cup and drained it. Seeing my rapacious expression he explained, ‘You shouldn’t drink anything, I’m told. I expect you think you should?’

The ground shuddered and he leant over me again. His face was very close to mine, dark, a two-day growth of whiskers on his jaw and long top lip, his eyes red-rimmed, glistening, but their whites clear. His breath smelt of sweet tea and tobacco. Even through my fug of exhaustion I could feel him, his strength warming the air between us. It wasn’t the same as feeling his brief steadying touch on my shoulder just before we went over the parapet. In this proximity, not contact, there was an onslaught of sensation—the blood in his body was faith in life itself.

My wide-eyed stare must have worried him, because he drew back. Sitting straight in his chair, the candle behind his head. A Lieutenant keeping company with a wounded private.

England, Oatlands …

Reduced to the sibilance of silence inside an ear. Voiceless. (Hear me with your eyes.) Eyeless. (My voice a medicine even for the blind.)

England, Oatlands, home.

Sitting one morning after the war with Andy McCauley. He was on his way back to Ashburton and the shoe shop. His sister Janet had been in Wellington to meet him when the Zealandic docked. It was late February 1919.

The door closed behind Janet and Emma. We could hear them cross the hallway, talking cheerfully. Andy turned back to me, lifted the teacup and saucer off the tray and balanced them on his broad knee. He was regarding me with a shy sober look, not about to say, ‘Well you look better.’

I looked worse. The room was warm, windows closed on the sickroom, and a late summer fire, burning sadly and sootily in the grate.

Andy said, ‘Colonel Evans had his say before we disembarked. He told us to remember that we weren’t the heroes—“the heroes lie in France”.’

Emma’s laugh sounded faintly from the first landing. She and Janet would be standing in the stained sunlight by the long window’s pink, yellow and pale blue glass.

‘What do you think of that, Mark?’

‘I suppose we are lucky. I remember how much I just wanted to get back here.’

Andy was becoming accustomed to my whisper. He didn’t shuffle or flinch; the teacup stayed steady on his knee.

‘You haven’t changed your tune. You know, I was always waiting for you to get angry. Fed up with the weather, or the food, or that old woman, Miller—especially as he’d have us parading all the time we were out of the line. Or with Green—the bastard.’

I smiled.

He shook his head. ‘As uncomplaining as ever.’

‘You complain Andy, you’re stronger than me.’

A footfall above on the sprung board in the first floor parlour. The lamp trembled on its iron chain.

‘I suppose we are lucky,’ he said, sipping his tea.

‘At least we’re here to wonder about it.’

‘There’s that. Did you get all your belongings?’

‘Yes, they all turned up at Oatlands.’

‘So you still have your journal. You know you should publish it, Mark.’

I shook my head.

He looked away. ‘Do you still have the book by that German bloke?’

The book had been a talking point. I’d picked it up in a dingy, cluttered bookshop in London before we went over to reinforce the Canterbury Infantry, just after we’d finished training at Sling. My odd reading matter went everywhere with me—Alan used to call it my bible.

‘I’ve still got it.’

Another door closed overhead. Soon Emma would take Janet out to her garden at the back, first letting her guest catch sight of the flowerbeds through the round window in the hall.

‘Everything is so different here.’ Andy’s voice was bleak. I looked back at him. He seemed shrunken, staring out at the trees. We sat, he lost and confused, faced with the prospect of the shoe shop, civilian life, quiet nights. Something frightening him, something he missed, something he’d lost. After death, home must be a strange place. I was full of feelings too big to say in a whisper. Not a fretful invalid, but a weak man settling back into a cloud of strong anger.

How did I endure it? How did I recover from such wounds? The cicadas applauding in the grass. The women coming downstairs, talking quietly about how the world would now be better—or perhaps how war took away what was theirs and, if they were lucky, gave them back strangers. How did my soul arise from these graves? Successive sleepless nights, a single bird by my window piping hopefully into the greyness of dusk.

Andy was looking at me—a breathless invalid—enviously. The expression vanished quickly, but he knew I’d seen it, and looked down at his boots.

‘You’ll settle in Andy,’ I said, dismissing him.

‘What about you?’

‘I’ll improve.’ Yes, something invulnerable, unburiable, is within me, something that rends rocks.

Jill

Ellen and I draped Kelfie’s arms over our shoulders and half-carried him downstairs. Basil and Hannah walked ahead of us, hand in hand, like children. Nobody spoke.

The parlour door was closed, the hall dark. Hannah turned the handle, pushed, put her shoulder to it, shoved—

—then stepped away as the handle twisted out of her grip.

‘What are you doing out there?’ Simon’s muffled voice from the far side of the door.

‘Never mind. Let us in.’

‘It’s jammed.’

‘Why did you shut it?

‘I didn’t, I just woke up and discovered you were gone. What are you doing?’

Ellen and I lowered the limp, bloodstained Kelfie to the floor. Hannah’s torch shone back at us out of the dark wood of the door. Basil kicked it.

‘If you are going to do that, let me get out of the way first,’ Simon said acidly from within.

‘I don’t trust you,’ Basil announced irrationally, then glanced at Kelfie. ‘I don’t trust anybody.’

‘Why would I lock the door?’

‘Exactly, why would you?’ Basil’s voice was strained.

‘Why did you all sneak out while I was asleep?’

‘We didn’t sneak—we rushed,’ Hannah said, and handed me her torch. ‘Get out of the way, Wrathall, I’m going to break down the door.’

Silence, then from further away, ‘Go ahead.’

Basil and Hannah rammed the door several times in tandem, then Hannah stopped, rubbing her shoulder. ‘It’s not as easy as it looks on TV.’ Basil stopped a moment later, laying his hands flat against the panels and smiling weirdly.

From the floor a voice said, ‘He locked it so he could iggry off and bury the body.’

I shone the torch into Kelfie’s face. He appeared to be unconscious; his mouth, nose and chin were caked with dried blood; showing between parted lips, his teeth were blood-streaked also. The skin of his cheeks and forehead was wet, tight and pale, and his slightly opened eyes looked the colour of gas flames, an intense, transparent blue.

I remembered something I had heard when walking through Wellington with my friend Louise, four weeks before Nicky’s death, when I was up there organising my first exhibition. We were crossing Manners Mall, through the dawdling crowd, the break-dancers spinning on a body-polished square of linoleum, the Hari Krishnas bobbing and chanting, their cymbals clashing, the whole night falling into a rhythm against which the voice of two street preachers swung and struck drunkenly. One of the preachers was talking about how the advent of cash machines heralded Armageddon—pointing to a painted ark on his sad little diagram, carrying not a staff, but a ruler, and mimicking the old time weather-men: Here a deep depression, there a cold front. While the other man, who looked like a figure from an age-darkened oil painting, bearing a grand and frenzied witness, thundered: ‘—even failing this, even if by doing this we discover the terrible, ancient and intelligent strength of the shadowy cloud—even destroyed, we will have once thrown off, along with our ignorance of evil, also the illusion we are alone. Once we put ourselves aside we will discover we are not only ourselves, or images of each other—’

‘What is he going on about?’ Simon demanded, directly behind the door again.

‘God knows—but he’s not conscious,’ Hannah said.

‘Who? God?’ Basil cackled hysterically. ‘I should have known it. The kid has one of those faces—a road leading innocently away between trees, to the end of the world.’

I touched his arm. ‘Please don’t blather, Basil.’

‘Why the fuck did I come here?’ he moaned. ‘And what the hell does iggry mean?’

Kelfie started to sing, ‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.’

‘Terrific,’ Ellen muttered.

‘What should I do?’ Simon asked us.

‘I don’t know.’ Hannah was nearly weeping with anger and frustration.

Kelfie groaned, then began: ‘I do not like this one so well, all he does is yell, yell, yell. I will not have this one about, when he comes in, I put him out.’

Ellen and I exchanged glances. Basil closed his eyes and pressed his forehead to the door.

‘Some are sad. And some are glad. And some are very, very bad. Why are they sad and glad and bad?—’ Kelfie recited clearly.

‘He’s quoting, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish,’ I told them, ‘I used to read it to my daughter.’

Calmly, serenely, Kelfie intoned: ‘Today is gone. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one—’

Basil swooped on him and shook him violently. Kelfie’s head jerked back and forth, then he stiffened, opened his eyes and caught Basil’s arms in a hard grip, scowling. ‘Don’t shake me.’

‘Don’t … say … Doctor … Seuss!’ Basil thumped Kelfie firmly into the wall at each word, then released his hold.

I realised I had said ‘my daughter’.

Trevor drove us to the doctor in Puhoi. I had Nicky wrapped up in the tartan rug that used to cover our old couch. I first saw her lying under that rug, when she was four, with the mumps. She was slightly delirious, pointing at the red squares in the pattern, saying, ‘Fire engines are this colour.’ She was dead before I moved her. As she passed into something deeper than unconsciousness, I watched her face soften and change.

Tiredness lay like a cobweb over my face. I stared passively at Kelfie as he got to his feet, unaware of the blood, his face composed.

‘I know what’s going on,’ Basil said in an odd, bragging way.

‘I wouldn’t admit it if I were you,’ Kelfie laughed. ‘Don’t admit you understand. Don’t take that step. It’s a step into a swamp. Any grounds other than the grounds of indifference are a swamp.’

I was overcome. I felt myself spiral up out of my body. Down a shaft through the storm I saw six little figures standing in confusion on either side of a jammed door. I covered my face with my hands. Someone, possibly Ellen, placed an arm around my shoulders.

Outdoors the birds began twittering warning calls, as if there were a cat in the garden.

Part Two

Jill

Six days after the funeral, at three-thirty in the afternoon, I found myself waiting at the lounge window looking out to where the road swung towards our drive and away again. Nicky’s classmate Jason was biking past. He looked my way and his bike faltered, front wheel wobbling—then he waved. I waved back and he went on, his nylon jacket puffed out by wind, his thin legs pedalling.

The bus came, an old cream-and-red bus with a fluorescent yellow, black-lettered ‘SCHOOL’ sign on its front. It stopped at the intersection by the crowd of letterboxes. After a moment it pulled away, and I saw the children in a haze of dust, turning two different directions towards their homes—the younger Smalls, Sharon and Barry, walking my way, Liz Rewi and Karl Schwartz turning down the other road, walking apart, heads down, like strangers (two years before they’d have climbed over the fence and would be playing their way slowly over the fields, chasing and cuffing each other—now, at eleven, they felt awkward even talking).

Between the two pairs of children, where the bus had been, where the dust was settling, was a space. A child-shaped space. Like the afterimage of a light, the portion of a scene a shocked optic nerve fails to render—not a shadow, but a flaw in sight.

I backed away from the window, hitting my legs on the edge of the coffee table. A minute later I stood at the back of the house, shaking, my hands covering my ears so I couldn’t hope to hear her come in. So I wouldn’t be listening.

For months I would leave the house every afternoon before three. Maybe I’d stop five miles away on the road by the Tata inlet and sit on the smooth, sun-warmed concrete of the drainage pipe, watching the wind ruffle the shallow water and the sun set in the four poplars behind the boat-builder’s yard.

In later autumn I’d sit in the garden outside the aviary in town, among the beds of bare, pruned rose bushes, looking down at the colourful crazy-paved walkway, and listening to the finches twittering; the sound of the birds and the sound of the cage, thin bars plucked by their claws as they fluttered from perch to perch.

In winter I’d walk along the steep beach at Tata, plodding over the large-grained, yielding sand. After sunset, when everything went blue-grey and black, and the wind set the air like ice, and struck down the smoke rising from the chimneys of the houses in the lea of the hill at the beach’s near end. I’d walk beside waves curling to collapse abruptly over trapped air that burst out in loud concussions and foam. And the wind would drive me into myself, then the noise would drive me out of myself.

At five I’d go home to finish making dinner and find Dan there, the TV on and a flagon of sherry open on the kitchen counter. And, because in the summer drosophila would fly into the open bottle and drown, at first I’d re-cap it out of habit, then later as a suggestion, and still later as a gesture of defiance. Of course he would open it again when he fetched his next drink.

The sound of a screw cap grating on the lip of a glass bottle is still the nearest way into nightmare for me.

Huddled around the flashlight, faces underlit, they were arguing about what to do. Hannah and Ellen looked irritated, Basil hangdog. Kelfie pulled the end of his white teeshirt out of his trousers, spat on it and wiped the blood from his face, leaving only a dark streak at one corner of his mouth.

‘—maybe we could get out a second storey window onto the veranda roof,’ Ellen was saying.

‘Yeah, then someone could get a crowbar—’ Hannah grinned at me encouragingly and drew me into their circle. ‘You OK now, Jill?’

‘Better.’

‘Climbing out onto the roof in this weather probably isn’t a very good idea—it could be slippery or rotten,’ Kelfie said.

‘Don’t bother to say what it’s like!’ Basil said, angrily.

‘I was just pointing out the drawbacks in the plan,’ Kelfie answered, defensive.

‘No you’re not. You want to make it like that! The roof is “slippery or rotten” is it? Like your other remark about this house being “haunted”?’

Ellen and Hannah regarded Basil with confusion. Kelfie was still and thoughtful. Basil glared at him and added, ‘He knows what I mean.’

‘No I don’t. Stop getting upset; it’s all going to be all right. Tomorrow morning there’ll be guys from the MOW clearing the road with earthmoving machines and putting down amber flashing lights and orange witches hats.’

‘Is that what’s going to happen?’

Kelfie gave Basil a long look, then frowned and shrugged.

‘Well I want to spend the rest of the night by our fire,’ Hannah said. ‘Let’s stop arguing and solve this problem.’

Basil muttered, ‘He’s one of those people who can make things happen by suggesting they might.’ He didn’t sound hysterical, but tired, resigned and sure of himself. Only I heard his remark; the others had returned to the closed door.

Hannah raised her voice. ‘Wrathall?’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you want to go down the hill and get the crowbar?’

‘You mean “will I?”’

‘Will you then?’ Hannah said, then added, ‘The keys to the camper are in my jacket, the toolbox is under the water cylinder.’

‘What am I to do with the crowbar?’

‘Open the door. Or prise some boards off another downstairs window.’ We stood, listening to the thoughtful silence. Then Wrathall asked, ‘What time is it?’

‘Twelve-fifty.’

‘What time is dawn?’

‘Why? You a vampire or something?’ Kelfie asked.

Ignoring this, Wrathall said, ‘I was wondering when the landslide would be discovered.’

‘Soon, I guess. Maybe they’ve already found your car and are looking for you.’

‘Perhaps I should go and have a look.’

‘You shouldn’t wander around in the wet, Simon,’ I told him.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll just go down to see if there are any lights. I’ll fetch the crowbar. Can I wear your parka, Hanley?’

‘If you like.’ Basil sounded morose; he even shrugged and turned away from the door as if Wrathall could see him.

‘Perhaps we ought to explore downstairs first, in case there’s another way out,’ Kelfie told us, then raised his voice. ‘Hang on a minute, Wrathall. Before you go anywhere some of us should take a quick shufty around the lower floor—I mean a look—for another way out.’

Ellen said to Kelfie, ‘What’s with the quaint words?’

He ignored her.

Wrathall said, ‘Go ahead.’

Hannah gave me her flashlight and asked Basil to sit with me. He squatted down beside me, his underlit face at once eerie, sullen and closed off.

First they went into the room off the far side of the entrance hall; by the light of Ellen’s torch we saw them standing in a large space, empty but for an iron lamp with a cluster of tulip-shaped, frosted-glass lampshades suspended from the ceiling by a thick iron chain. And, under the fuzzy dust carpeting the floor, here and there, the gleam of broken glass. The torchlight stopped on the ceiling, as they stood trying to read the indecipherable words scrawled there in a soot of candle smoke.

‘Vandals?’ Ellen speculated.

‘It doesn’t say anything.’ Kelfie sounded surprised.

Hannah left the room and Kelfie and Ellen followed her. They all set off down a hallway on the far side of the stairs. We listened to their voices and muffled footsteps moving away. The dusty air breathing out the double doors of the dark room seemed warm; it carried a faint scent that brought vividly to my mind a picture of sunlight on the fresh, folded clothes in my sewing-room at home. I got up to close the doors. When I grasped the handles to pull them shut it was like submerging my arms up to the elbows in lukewarm water.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked Basil as I went back to sit by him.

He shook his head, face turned away.

‘What happened?’

He glanced at me. ‘I had a bad dream.’

‘You too?’

He didn’t answer. After a moment I said, ‘They’ll be back soon,’ inviting him to speak, to have his say before the others returned. To talk only to me—or to me and Wrathall, if Wrathall was listening. Basil gave a resigned sigh, as if confiding in me was pointless or against his better judgement. He said, ‘It was like I was both walking around upstairs and asleep by the fire at the same time. I imagined I was going to die.’

‘Were you sleepwalking when you ran out of the room?’

‘I think so, because in my dream I walked slowly upstairs. But the passageway in my dream looked exactly the same when I woke up—except, in my dream, the mirror at the end of the passage looked like an open door with rain falling outside.’

‘That’s spooky, but it still doesn’t explain why you’re behaving as if your dream, and the jammed door, are part of some subterfuge of Kelfie’s.’

Basil scowled at me. ‘Kelfie knows.’

‘Knows what?’

‘He knows the house is haunted.’

I thought about Kelfie’s attitude to my nightmare—not, I now believed, scepticism, but an eagerness to hear about the dream if he could do so without having me think about it too seriously. He wanted to know about my dream, but didn’t want me to know about it. I said, ‘OK, he’s behaving oddly—but a haunted house? Really, Basil? I don’t believe in ghosts.’

He dropped his gaze and glowered at the floor. ‘Why not?’

‘Why do you want ghosts to exist?’

‘I never wanted them to exist! I don’t want them to exist now! Do you think I thought to myself, at some stage, “Gee! Wouldn’t it be great if ghosts existed and started picking on me.”’ He was angry at me for coaxing the cause of his distress from him, then not believing what he had to say.

I was angry at him for his persistent mithering superstition. Why the hell should I accept the possible existence of the spirits of dead strangers?

I remembered the only ‘ghost story’ I was ever told by someone whose good sense I had confidence in. A friend had told me that her grandmother often nagged her mother about not pegging the washing firmly enough on the line—they lived in a windy suburb and the sheets would occasionally end up in a snarled heap against the garden fence. When her grandmother died, several days after the tangi, when her mother was hanging out the washing, my friend looked out the window to see her mother, a shadow behind bed sheets, pegging them; and following her along the line a pair of old brown hands touching the top of every peg. I said to Basil, ‘Sometimes, perhaps, when someone close dies, we can conjure up a vision of them doing something familiar and reassuring—but it’s memory, not evidence of anything surviving death.’

‘Stop talking down to me. I think this house is haunted and is having a weird effect on all of us, but I can’t discuss it with you because you refuse to even consider the possibility of a haunting—even for argument’s sake!’

‘For argument’s sake I should believe in life after death? Like Heaven and its happy angels?’ I yelled at him. ‘So—there are ghosts? Where are my ghosts then?’ I punched the floor and a sudden pain shot up my arm.

Basil looked confused and frightened. ‘I didn’t mean—’

I growled at him, hunched over, nursing my aching arm. He sat, very still, beside me. After a moment I said, ‘Have you ever lost someone you loved?’

He remained still, with a tense immobility compounded of emotion and repression. For a moment, watching his blank face, I saw myself in him. Finally he said, ‘Yes—but that was his business,’ then reached up to touch his own ears, as though disturbed by a very low or high-pitched sound. All I could hear was the rain. I wondered how many people walked around concealing the injuries of grief. And how long it would be before it wasn’t the most important thing in my life. I realised I was crying.

Basil timidly touched my shoulder. It didn’t help. Although we place great faith in our warmth, touching someone who is suffering is not ‘big magic’, is really no better than saying ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘It’s all right’, or any of the other ineffectual reassurances we are moved to say mainly to comfort ourselves.

The wavering light of Hannah’s torch preceded them back back along the hallway on the near side of the stairs. Ellen saw I was crying and descended on me—hugging me and looking enquiringly, but not accusingly, at Basil.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, rocking me.

‘No—it’s—not.’

‘OK, it isn’t then,’ she conceded cheerfully.

I wiped my eyes, smearing tears into the hair at my temples, explaining, ‘It’s just—everything.’

Hannah nodded, her thoughts on ‘everything’ obviously in accord with mine.

Kelfie stood watching us with no sign of curiosity or concern, then stepping around us he tapped on the door. ‘Wrathall?’

There was no answer. Kelfie called several times then turned to us.

‘It’s been quiet in there for some time,’ I said, prompted by his look, which seemed to accuse us of having emotional crises while Wrathall was spirited away. But Kelfie wasn’t accusing us, he was looking through us. Disturbed, I said to Basil, ‘Simon probably heard what you were saying and took off.’

‘What were you saying, Basil?’ Hannah asked.

‘He didn’t upset me really. I’m just worn out.’

‘I did upset her. I was talking about ghosts.’

‘This is all very well and good—’ Kelfie interrupted impatiently ‘—but it doesn’t explain why Wrathall didn’t wait. He knew we expected him to, and I hardly think he would’ve been scared off by your profound metaphysical discourse—’

Basil got up, looming over Kelfie. ‘Why don’t you shut up?’

Kelfie’s already white face became whiter, as though flushed with light. As though not blood but luminescent ichor was pumped into his skin. ‘I don’t understand you at all,’ he said to Basil, softly and tonelessly, ‘but I’m not going to stay around to be—bullied,’ the final word coming out doubtful and confused. He put his palm against Basil’s chest and pushed. Basil braced himself to stay put—yet was, nevertheless, shoved backwards. Kelfie walked away, back down the hallway they had only just emerged from. In his wake the air held the slight but distinct scent of the first drops of rain on hot stone.

Kelfie

I went on till the voices faded. There was no light. The rooms I passed through were cold and airless. As a gust of wind hit the nearside of the house, sluicing rain off the veranda, the whole building creaked like a ship at sea.

As I came back through the halls, the rooms, without the women and without the torch, the darkness made me expect something different. The flashlight had seemed, as it pointed them out, to create the dust, the boarded-up windows, and, on the ceiling, the paint cracked into an inverted, bleached forest floor of curling leaf-litter. We expected what the torch showed us, what our eyes strained to see.

Returning, I stopped at each door, hoping to find the rooms within lit, furnished, inhabited; to find some ordinary, comfortable pursuit of my own to resume, as if I were at home (there is always plenty to do at home; tea on the table, the book recently put down to be taken up again). But the doors gave on to darkness, chill and empty.

In the kitchen at the back of the house I heard again the busy sound of the rain. Here Hannah’s exploring torch had shown us a large room, occupied at one end by two cement tubs, a copper and range. On the floor in one corner were the mummified corpses of four opossums. At the other end of the room, near the door, the walls were black with mildew. Below this was a section of smashed, rotted flooring.

The torch’s light, pointing into the hole, had revealed a rippling film of water running under that corner of the house. Now, without a light, as I stood at the edge of the hole, I could still see the water, its ripples side-lit by the radiance of the rain outside. The skirting board at the bottom of the porch was broken. There was a way out of the house through the kitchen floor—a quiet, secret way I would never have found had I not left the others and wandered back here without a light to mislead me.

Past the walls of the house the rain was noisily crowding out space and silence. The house itself was listening, stiffly still, its back turned.

‘All right,’ I whispered to the house, ‘if you insist.’

I lowered myself to crawl beneath the floor a few feet—smelling water, fungus and, behind me, the warmer, drier spaces of the rest of the basement. I emerged in a patch of mint in the open air.

—you yourself will always be the worst enemy you can encounter; you yourself lie in wait for yourself in caves and forests—

My anger at Basil had been brief, but murderous; out of all proportion to anything he said, anything I felt about him or about myself. It was the anger of a patience long since at an end—vicious, tyrannous, and foreign. Maybe Meredith, with her Psych degree, scholarships and trimmed interests would be able to explain it. She did pretty well—after the two months we spent together the year before, during the summer in Wellington—at trying to defeat my troubles by detailing them.

‘Our problem is with anger, Keith.’

‘I thought my problem was with provocation.’

‘No. Seriously.’ She looked serious, concerned, intent—her legs folded, wrists rested on her bent knees. She looked like Jenny used to years ago, doing yoga. ‘Much as I hate to say it, it’s family temperament. Dad was more than just ratty—he was quite paranoid sometimes, thinking people were keeping things from him, and secretly making fun of him.’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Oh come on,’ she said impatiently, ‘of course you remember.’ Her voice cracked when she lowered it. If she spoke up it came out clear and even—but with confidences or persuasion it always broke and roughened. ‘Me, I have a short fuse, but only about certain things. For instance, I can’t stand people being weak—it’s like I start smelling their blood under their skin and want to bite them. I find weakness disturbing.’

‘You’ll be a terrific psychologist then.’

‘I didn’t study it to practise—I only wanted to find out how people think.’

‘To crack the code of human behaviour, eh?’

‘Sounds as though you find it impossible to imagine that someone else might have thought of some idea, or system of ideas, that could help you understand yourself.’

‘That’s not what I mean. I’d just hate you to form some view of me that you’d think was accurate because it’s based on established ideas.’

‘They’re helpful ideas.’ She leant forward. ‘I’ve been studying you and I’ve come to a few conclusions.’

‘How comfortable for you.’

‘I think you’re scornful of psychoanalysis, because you’re worried it might force you to see some of your difficulties in unheroic terms.’

‘Where the fuck do you get heroic from? It’s not a value of mine. And I don’t have difficulties—just because I’m not composed or insipid.’

‘You should see yourself, Keith. And you think you don’t have a problem with anger?’

‘Just because I show it, doesn’t mean it’s a problem. Am I obliged to hide what I think and feel?’

‘No one will listen to you if you’re so aggressive. I’ve had to learn that myself.’ She touched her chest and nodded sagely.

‘You mean you learned to pretend to be uncertain and weak.’

‘No, just more reasonable and less hostile.’

‘People don’t listen anyway, Mere. They hear one word in every five and from that reconstruct not what you said, but what they think you meant to say.’

‘What a terrific assumption to bring into every encounter with others.’

‘It’s true.’

‘No, it just sounded good—you’re addicted to strong statements.’

‘I feel strongly.’

‘Do you really? Or is that just a value—feeling strongly, not being insipid? It seems to me that you miss out on a lot of what others offer you because you’re so busy insisting on yourself.’

‘If that’s true, then I’m just like that.’

‘No one’s like that innately, you’re only like that because of your problem with anger.’

I stared at her blankly, already deep in confidences with her, regretting it and feeling threatened. ‘Of course I’m angry. I was abandoned, Mere.’

‘You feel abandoned—so hard done by that you don’t think you owe anyone anything. You don’t even try to get over it.’

‘Get over what, exactly? It’s not like I even know the extent of the damage, I’ve forgotten so much.’ (But bits and pieces of remembered misery would keep turning up, like the remains of a body partly digested by a glacier; trapped, vanished, broken-up, moved down miles and years, to be discovered later, horrifying and incomplete.)

‘When we were talking about how you argued with Gareth in Mazatlan and, before that, with Mum, you said—and I remember it exactly—“I want to punish everyone whose existence accuses me of failing to be loved.” And I thought, Wow! How strange, momentous and complicated he is—’

‘Don’t tell me what I said—’

‘You didn’t fail to be loved! That’s crazy!’ She was shouting because I’d got up to leave the room.

I stopped. ‘Do you think I’m overstating what I feel?’

‘It all happened a long time ago, Keith. And all that happened was that your parents, who were just people after all, not super-beings, were unable to supply the love you needed.’

(All that happened was that everything retreated, till nothing was touching me anymore. So that now, lonely or afraid, I would conjure: I am everything that touches me—drawing close the light, the air—I am everything that touches what touches me. Still far away, exiled; a small, cold, wordless body with no colossal ideas.)

‘It’s over ten years!’ Mere protested, watching my face.

‘Yes. But I was a kid. And I grew up feeling like an orphan and a refugee. Or a competent cripple—competent because no one ever noticed. As for my anger, I’m not just angry about my own life, I’m angry when I see all my friends’ dissatisfaction, and the way they keep blaming it on themselves, wanting to be thinner, to get better grades, a better job, more money—all vying for favours from a greedy, wasteful world. Of course I’m angry—outrage is a sane response to a lot of what goes on.’

‘All that extrapolated out of Mum and Dad leaving you?’

‘Yeah. I have fewer illusions than you. I’ve never been able to mistake society for a mother. My mother left me. How was I supposed to trust any subsequent assurances that I’d have a place, and be cared for?’

‘The world isn’t that bad.’

I watched her, thinking. ‘Sure. We all come here, merely alive, curious, trusting. We learn to speak, switch on the TV, go to school—and are invaded by demons, diseases and ghosts.’

She said, ‘I suppose you think you’re universalising your problem. But your problem is not being able to forgive your parents’ human failings. Period.’

‘They’ve never done anything to deserve being forgiven.’

‘They’ve suffered.’

‘Good.’

‘I suppose you believe in revenge, too?’

—powerless against that which has been done, the will is an angry spectator of all things past. The will cannot will backwards; that it cannot break time and time’s desires—that is the will’s most lonely affliction. It is sullenly wrathful that time does not run backwards. ‘That which was’ is the stone it cannot roll away—

I stood among the macrocarpas just above our vehicles, watching Wrathall walk away up the road carrying Jill’s crowbar.

I followed him, waiting at each corner for him to vanish around the next. He trudged on, head lowered and arms held clear of his sides, like High Noon’s gunman hero; the only light about his body a strip of pale skin at the back of his neck, and his large fists.

At the slip there were no warning lights, no MOW vehicles and rescue services. The waste of clay glistened around the smudged shape of Wrathall’s car.

He clambered down to it, sinking at every step like a man struggling through fresh snow. On reaching it he first wedged the crowbar under the hood of the boot then, thinking better of it, clambered around to the half-buried driver’s door. Several blows with the end of the crowbar shattered the window, though it was well braced with mud. Wrathall removed his car keys and returned to the boot. Then he stood for nearly a minute, unmoving, the keys dangling in his hand.

I jumped over the rim of the slip and slunk down towards him, placing my feet across the ridges of the clay and sinking in only a few inches at each step. Before I reached him he finally stirred to unlock the boot, then lifted the hood slowly.

I heard the sound of water splattering on plastic. Wrathall paused another moment, wiping his wet hands superfluously back and forth across the sides of Basil’s wet jacket, then he reached inside and took out a spade. He laid it down on the ground at his feet, stooped under the hood and lifted out a limp bundle swathed in black polythene.

It had to be a body.

Holding the bundle cradled in both arms he tried to bend down to pick up the spade, hooking his fingers through the handle, but it slipped and fell onto the clay. Then he heaved the body over one shoulder and picked up the spade with his free arm, straightening, his head over at an angle and shoulder raised to balance its burden. He really needed his other arm to steady the corpse if he intended carrying it anywhere over that slick, broken slope.

‘I’ll take the spade for you.’

Wrathall spun about and stared at me through a curtain of the twisted strands of his dripping hair. The rain continued to tap on the black plastic, drumming fingertips pointing out what it held.

‘What do you want?’ he got out through gritted teeth.

‘I was offering to aid and abet you—I asked you if I could carry the spade.’

Hostile, confused, he glared at me, his eyes oily dark, his skin smooth and as lustrous as the near-liquid wax at the top of a lit candle.

As my attention contracted, from the many things preoccupying me to the one thing before me, Wrathall’s countenance emerged—from the night, from the moment, from his irrelevance and strangeness to me—into my life; savage, keen and unforgettable. I realised he was enraged because he couldn’t make sense of the situation. What worried him most was not that he’d been discovered trying to dispose of a corpse, but that he couldn’t understand why I was offering to help him.

The offer didn’t make any sense. When I saw what he produced from the boot of his car I should have turned around and run back to the house to tell the others. Without a doubt this was the stupidest thing I had ever done. As bizarre, thoughtless and self-forgetting as Peter Pan standing on the rock in Mermaid’s Lagoon saying, as the tide encroached, ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure!’

Yet, in a way, I had known what to expect. It was as though I’d willed what I imagined to be true to run quietly on into the truth; two people and a corpse in half-a-mile of black, rainy wilderness, in a world in which bloody secrets could be kept, a limitless world, without law—my world. I felt invulnerable, amused and happy. I began to say, ‘I asked if—’ when Wrathall dropped the body, and lunged at me.

He knocked me to the ground, landing with a knee across my legs and an arm pressing into my throat. The clay was soft; I sank into it and water welled up around my neck and shoulders.

When I caught my breath and my vision cleared, I looked up at his head and shoulders above me, silhouetted against the clouds. Cold drops of water from his hair dribbled on my face. A stone was jabbing into my left shoulder. When I tried to move in order to relieve the pain, Wrathall applied more pressure to my throat.

I grabbed the arm choking me. My fingers didn’t meet around his wrist; with his fist clenched the tendons and muscles in his forearm were as hard as wood. I saw clearly a vision of him dragging my body down over the jumbled clay by the ankles, towards the bush. I thought of police, newspapers, and courts of law. I thought of my grandmother, of Meredith, and of my father, who must always belong to me—of my friends and flatmates, who were expecting me to arrive at the bach we’d rented for the Easter break.

There were flashes in the sky—I was sinking in the mud. It gnawed at my body as if it wanted to suck the flesh from my bones.

Tucking my chin under his arm, I released my grip and relaxed completely. Unresisted, his arm drove my head back into the mud, so that water entered my ears. My windpipe was sealed—

—then the pressure slackened, the ringing red fog dissipated. I breathed out and in and out. Then very slowly I lifted my hands, placed one between his arm and my throat, the other into the curl of his now opened, downturned hand. My touch slid across his palm, into the crevasses between his fingers; linking my fingers with his I pushed his arm back and sat up.

Wrathall moved away from me, squatted back on his heels, and withdrawing his hand from mine he hid both his hands behind him. Then he moaned softly, like a big dog when it is sleeping and you poke it with your toe.

As with each passing moment I became more aware of his violence and immense physical power, I became more at ease. He made me feel safe. In extremes of danger I have often felt safe—in storms, among mean, uncivilised people, with strong emotions—mesmerised, absorbed, engaged, safe. I reached out and touched his neck with my knuckles just under his ear, and said, ‘I’ll help you,’ hoarsely.

He studied my face. ‘If you insist.’ He didn’t move, but continued to stare at me. Then he smiled faintly. ‘You’re a mess.’

My throat was aching. I rasped, ‘You’ve got good nerves, Wrathall.’

‘And you’ve got clay in your hair.’

‘It’ll come out in the rain.’

‘All come out in the wash, eh?’

‘You’re a bit crazy.’

‘Not really.’ He smiled again, that little—and I now noticed—sad and apologetic smile.

His gaze was unnerving. I wanted to direct it away from me. I said, ‘We’d better bury this body.’

He regarded the black-wrapped shape. ‘I was wondering whether I should do anything to make it harder to identify. I don’t think I could ever be very efficient at getting rid of the evidence. I nearly decided to just leave it.’

‘It?’ I said.

He didn’t respond.

‘Leave it and get caught?’

He nodded. ‘Yes. But then I realised that I just couldn’t bear everyone talking about me.’

I stood, picking up the spade. ‘Come on, let’s find a good place.’

We struggled and slithered to the edge of the wet morass. He had more difficulty than I did. Already a very heavy man, the extra weight he bore caused him to sink to his knees at every step, and lift his feet free with loud sucking sounds. It was just as well we were both wearing boots—shoes would have been pulled from our feet.

At the end of the slip he stopped and tried to knock some of the mud off his legs by striking his heels on the ground.

‘I’m cold. We’d better hurry,’ I said.

He took Basil’s torch out of his parka pocket and handed it to me. ‘If we go straight downhill we won’t get lost.’

‘Where do you think they’ll cut the new road?’

‘Above the old one, hopefully.’ He pushed me ahead of him down the slope.

The bush was noisy with rain striking leaves and the ticking sounds of seepage. I had to keep turning around to give him light by which he could see to free himself, or his bundle, from the branches that caught at them. We moved slowly through the thick undergrowth, over fallen logs and bare roots. Thin rivulets of silt ran into the bush for perhaps forty metres below the slip.

I picked the place: a terrace covered only in ferns. ‘If we can dig out a few of these with their roots intact then maybe we can cover over the ground again.’

He threw the body down and knelt to untie the rope holding the polythene in place. ‘It won’t last as long if it’s not wrapped in plastic. I’m going to take off its clothes and—’ He looked up at me, and didn’t finish the sentence. The knots yielded to his tugging. He unravelled the ropes and plastic.

‘I knew it wasn’t a woman,’ I said.

The body was dressed in light blue denim, jeans and shirt. The clothes were dry and looked comfortable; it seemed a shame when drops from the foliage and Wrathall’s hair dappled the fabric with dark blue stains. He had deep red hair—alive—like the coat of a ginger cat I once saw lying killed on the roadside; glowing, meteoric, a fallen star still hot from the skies.

I muttered, ‘Redheads ought to be protected by law.’

Wrathall stood up and said softly, ‘We’re all protected by law.’ He took the torch and spade from me. ‘You go back now.’

‘OK. But listen. This is what happened. You came down the hill to the camper, then found the keys had dropped from your pocket, so you slowly retraced your steps to the house, on the off-chance of finding them. They were lying in the grass near the topside of the tunnel. After you’d fetched the crowbar you trudged along the road to look for the warning lights. You’re sorry you took so long.’

‘How did I get so dirty?’

‘There’s plenty of water to rinse the clay out, Wrathall.’

‘This might take longer than your excuse covers me for.’

‘They’re hardly going to think you’re burying a body. Just get on with it. You’d better hurry up, he’ll be harder to undress when his clothes are wet.’

‘Later you are going to tell me how you knew. I had forgotten all about this till you mentioned burying bodies.’

I couldn’t make any sense of this remark. I stared at him, but he had begun to pull off the corpse’s shoes, so I left him and scrambled back up the hill. When had I mentioned burying bodies? If he was going to have crazy ideas I preferred him not to have them about me.

Breathless, I reached the road. The rain had diminished to a fine drizzle. Thick, puffy fingers of mist were reaching up from the valley. All the clouds seemed lit from within.

Three years before, sitting on the balustrade of the terrace at the house in Mazatlan, I listened to Maxine Baird, a friend of Gareth’s second wife, saying, ‘My trouble is that I can never believe that I only get one take. When things get rough I always feel like I’m in a self-directed movie, and that if I do a bad take, I can always make another. Someone gets hurt and I think, “Hell, that isn’t the best I can do, can’t I have another shot at that?”,’ laughing and peering thoughtfully at the last half inch of tequila in her glass. And when Gareth glanced at me I bristled, swearing that no one would ever get a another take out of me.

Take Two: I see Wrathall haul a body out of the boot of his car, pelt back up the hill, and climb through the window, yelling, ‘You are not going to believe this, but Simon Wrathall is disposing of a corpse!’

Nietzsche called it ‘the spirit of revenge’, that hatred of not being able to reverse the clocks and alter actions. But sadly life isn’t a series of takes, and we aren’t able to do over those things we do badly, or that make no sense.

Basil

Jill had said: my ghosts.

My gaolers, my jurors, and the sound of rain on water coming to crouch in my ears at any moment, unbidden, whispering—

I recognised Kelfie because I remembered Russell: someone who could make things happen by suggesting they might. I recalled Russell’s habit of speaking for me, convincingly, and his playing me close, or at a distance, like a kite on a string. It was as though my ghost had appeared wearing a different body. Kelfie reminded me of Russell; when he spoke there was that same suggestion that—perhaps—some meaning in what he said was exclusive to me, and that only I could understand him. And he’d glance at me before speaking, his look not communicating anything, just noting my presence, like that of a critic in the front row of a full theatre.

Kelfie was like Russell, and Russell had frightened me. But why was I afraid of him? Was it his weakness or his absolutism that scared me? Or was it that, even alive, Russell had haunted me?

He was a set snare.

We were all on our own ground, our prep school dormitory, catching up with one another after the holidays, putting away books and comics, tacking up new posters in the carefully mapped-out personal spaces on the walls behind our beds.

The windows were open, the sound of a motor mower, the smell of freshly cut grass and blue petrol fumes drifting in.

My friend Ian was inspecting my new camera while I was idly making resolutions about not sitting next to him in science, and not even trying to tell anyone about the Vanishing House, and writing my parents (vets in a small town in Saskatchewan) a decent letter once a week.

Then Neil Roop came in with Russell, a tall, lightly freckled boy with fine brown hair, who carried himself with the constrained grace of an adolescent body trying to accommodate a growth spurt and still remain poised.

Neil brought Russell over, introduced us all—we said ‘hi’ and kept on unpacking. Russell started to put his stuff away, then went over to one of the windows and leaned out. He put one knee on the sill, and asked over his shoulder, ‘Can you get out any of these?’ Added, ‘Basil?’

I looked at him, and he changed before my eyes. His face had a kind of blankness that even small babies’ faces never have, that I had seen before only in the face of one ten-year-old in a crowd of intellectually handicapped children who came to watch a choir I was in. Yet even as I registered his lack of expression something happened within him that changed his face. As if an unknown element filling his body became suddenly denser and heavier.

Russell was unable to laugh at himself, and hated making missteps. If, despite his caution, someone managed to show him up, he always looked as though he would like to kill that person—like Dewalle, the math teacher who called him ‘grandiose’. That was what he was: David’s Napoleon—with hair streaming and sword upraised—Crossing the Alps; grandiose like all imaginative adolescents trying prematurely to impose a ‘meaning’ on everyday existence.

Once we sat among the pepper trees on the steep bank above the swimming pool. It was early autumn, the pool had been closed for two weeks and was already no longer bright, inviting summer blue, but brownish-green. Russell picked up a pebble and cast it over the fence and into the pool. He was thinking—his thoughts quietly rising in an ascending spiral of excitement—his eyes feverish, and the skin around his mouth pale, as mine tends to go just before I throw up.

‘My brother shot himself, you know.’

‘Jesus! How awful—’ I was thrown into confusion by this sudden revelation, and by his casual tone.

Confusion wasn’t the reaction he intended me to have. ‘No, it wasn’t awful. He had style. He stole a crucible from his school, melted down a silver star sign his girlfriend had given him and made a silver bullet, put it in Dad’s .22 and shot himself. He didn’t die straight off, but bled to death through a little hole in his head. You see, the bullet was so hard that its nose didn’t flatten at all and, relatively speaking, it didn’t do much damage—’ He picked up a handful of earth, tossed it as though weighing it, then threw it into the pool, making a volley of small splashes. ‘Paul had style,’ he concluded.

I sat in stupefied silence for a while, then asked, ‘Did he think he was a werewolf?’

Russell favoured me with a look of contempt. ‘Don’t be so stupid, Basil.’

I tried again: ‘He must have been pretty determined, to go to all that trouble—like that guy they were talking about on the News who made holes in his own head with a power drill.’

This wasn’t the right thing to say either. Russell sighed wearily, got up dusting his hands on his trousers, and walked away.

He had a deck of tarot cards he kept wrapped in black silk in a cane box. The card for Strength was a woman in a floral gown, an infinity symbol over her head. Showing me the tarot he discarded her quickly; threw away the joyous, serene, the perpetually renewed.

We looked for ourselves in the pictures.

Lightning striking: two figures plunging from a burning tower. ‘That means a broken home, Basil.’

Ten goblets strung on a rainbow, a man, woman and child dancing beneath them. ‘That looks good,’ I ventured.

‘Reversed,’ he said in satisfaction.

Sitting bolt upright in bed, her face hidden in her hands, the woman had just woken from a nightmare. Nine swords like prison bars were suspended above her head, the after-image of her evil dream.

‘This is more like me—’ I said, with a sudden and sad recognition: a white-haired man with a lamp. The Hermit.

‘And this,’ he said, ‘is me.’ A black-cloaked man with a sword, walking away. ‘Or perhaps?’ A man standing grief-stricken before three overturned cups.

Everything had to be larger than life. Relaxation, comfortable physical tiredness, laziness, frightened him. When we were sprawled in front of the TV he’d pretend to watch, watching us, perched on his seat. If he had started gasping like a beached fish I wouldn’t have been surprised. He was out of his element in the everyday.

It was a weird, heady relationship, one that none of us was able to handle, between the stage where boys run around in packs, or have one or two friends they go everywhere with—sharing what they do, rather than what they think—and the more sedate friendships of later adolescence, when each individual has enough confidence to begin offering opinions, advice, support. At a time when we really needed to be able to relax back into safe and acceptable ways of behaving, we all ended up surrendering to Russell’s compulsion to set himself and his circle apart from what he’d call ‘ordinary life’.

If he had been just unusually intelligent and serious he might have been defused by shyness, or fear of ridicule, as many original people are. But because he seemed so confident, because he showed no sign of timidity, everything he said, and almost everything he did, went unchallenged by his peers.

And he could make the world seem the way he saw it. Not only was everything he said about himself wholly believable, but he was able to persuade you to see yourself the way he saw you (and other people, and the world), steering all conversations and determining all moods.

He was my best friend; but, except for a few hours, I think I existed to him only as an audience.

The few hours were on a train travelling back to the school from his parents’ home—a slow 200-kilometre journey through grain fields, orchards and small towns. It was two days after the start of term. Russell had postponed the journey by taking me out for a walk the evening before we were to return, and we stayed out all night and most of the next day, wandering out of town and into the fields, along endless fence lines and drainage ditches. On the train there were only a few people going our way—a couple of young women asleep in their seats at the other end of the carriage, and one seasoned traveller who looked interesting, but ignored us, staying stretched out in his seat with his feet, in leather-soled German walking boots, sticking out into the aisle.

Though it was late autumn the sun went down slowly, blotting out the views of houses and trees in golden light. Light crept around the edges of all the solid objects, wasting broad trees into spindly black shadows. When the sun vanished the air cooled, became slowly less tortured, until, after half an hour, the atmosphere was like clear blue glass, in which every detail of the landscape was set, undistorted, in deepening shades of blue to the horizon.

We had been talking about Russell’s parents, who I liked, who were friendly and affectionate but vague and a little withdrawn. And I was privately thinking that their distance was less likely to be responsible for the way Russell was, than a product of the way he was; that they had learned how to reserve something of themselves from their own son. Or perhaps what I saw was all that was left of them after Russell’s brother had died. Whichever it was, they seemed immune to him.

Russell went on to talk about his last home in central BC, heaping one skilfully drawn picture on top of another in the way he always did, like he was rummaging through a portfolio in search of one particular painting, the one he thought would prove to everyone he was an artist, not a dabbler.

‘There’s a long, potholed tarseal road between the towns at either end of Kamloops Lake. All along it in the fields are these pillars of soft rock, left on the cleared land where topsoil and clay have washed away. The locals call them “hoodoos”, and they do look spooky, especially driving at night, through rain; like tall men looming up on either side of the road.

‘Dad, Paul and I used to have this yearly tradition of going up into the hills to look at the Walsingham apple trees in bloom. Walsingham was a small English settlement founded around the turn of the century. They cleared land up in the hills in the middle of the forest and built a long wooden aqueduct to carry water from far up the Thomson River. As soon as World War One broke out all the men went back to Europe to fight. Most of them were killed and Walsingham disintegrated. Now there’s nothing left but a mile-long line of crumbling wood—the aqueduct—a few chimneys, and the apple trees.

‘They look beautiful in spring, and odd, surrounded by pines. Lots of people used to go up to look at them in bloom, but as far as I know no one ever bothered to harvest the apples.’

‘It sounds as if you miss it.’

‘Not really,’ he said with quiet gravity. ‘I don’t miss anything.’ He paused a moment, considering his own statement. ‘Everything I’ve seen, everywhere I’ve been—even me talking to you now—is just part of a parade of impressions. I don’t have to do anything about any of it, I don’t even have to miss it.’

I waited for him to clarify.

‘I try not to want things back, and to not want things to happen.’

‘Why?’

‘It wouldn’t do me any good. My mother has a friend who does a lot of work for various causes. She fights for the preservation of this and that, and she fights to change things. But at the same time she’s so depressed it’s like she’s always saying goodbye. Just like in the movies; one of those women standing crying on the station platform as the troop train pulls away. I’d hate to be like that—so I don’t hang on, and I don’t hope. You know—sometimes I feel I’m dead already—’

This admission distressed and confused me. I said, ‘Look Russell, when I start getting depressed about what might happen to me—whether I’ll get blown off the face of the earth along with everyone else, or I’ll develop a brain tumour, or get axed by a marauding lunatic—I always cheer myself up by imagining this house I’d like to build one day. It’s a lot like my Auntie Pat’s house on Vancouver Island, an A-frame, with a loft above the living room that looks out over the garden. I imagine myself standing in the loft of my house. It’s warm under the roof. I can see the garden. Along the windowsill is a row of withered apples. Everything smells of old yellow apples. I’m not sick, or lonely, or bored. And you know what? I really believe it will come true for me someday.’

He stared at me, for the first time perhaps really listening. For once my suggestion about myself won out over his. ‘Maybe that is what will happen to you,’ he conceded, ‘but I still know what will happen to me.’

Outside it was dark, and by the carriage lights I saw our reflections on the windows. We could have been anywhere, in a gliding corridor of light, outside of time, with no destination.

‘I’m going to tell you something I had decided never to tell anyone,’ I said, ‘just to show you that we can’t know anything. Because I think that if there is even one fact that doesn’t fit into the accepted pattern, then we ought not be so sure of ourselves. I also think it’s good not to be sure.’

I told him about the Vanishing House, speaking at first with difficulty, trying to be exact, then as my revelation turned into a confession, talking excitedly. When I’d finished he said, ‘Hey really? That’s neat!’ Turning away from me, grinning, avoiding my eyes: polite, deferential—and hostile. He didn’t believe me; he wasn’t pretending to believe my story just to humour me, but rather because believing me fitted in with the way he saw himself. He, Russell the extremist, the original spirit, couldn’t scoff.

That was the first of my friendships which ended with the telling of my story. I resented him resenting me. I was too immature and self-righteous to forgive his falling below my estimation of him.

I remember him coming into the dorm that hot dark afternoon four days later. Sensing his presence, and staring fixedly at the pages of my book.

He spent five minutes tidying his locker, banging things about angrily, in an effort, I thought, to disturb my concen-tration and provoke a reaction. I ignored him and he left. (I wonder what he looked like when he walked out the door.)

After several minutes, when I’d returned to reading, Ian came in and asked, ‘What’s Russ up to?’

‘How should I know?’

‘He was climbing the pool gates.’

I looked up at him. Then out the tall windows came a flash of lightning and a thunderclap directly overhead. There was a moment of stark light in which everything slowed down. I could feel my heart quietly pulsing, feel myself falling back into the room, part of a world flattened out into two dimensions for a moment beneath that light.

The moment passed. Ian was at my shoulder, whispering, ‘Amazing … amazing …’

Outside the air thickened with rain.

I stood—racked by that feeling of disquiet I used to get when my bus or train had arrived and I wanted to check the bag I’d already checked several times to make sure I had everything I might need. Then, without thinking about what I was doing, I left the dormitory and ran over the fields through the rain.

I couldn’t remember climbing the fence. But eight years later I could still hear the rain on the water—crouching in my ears, whispering. In the wet and airless dusk I saw the cracked grey pavement around the pool, chipped tiles of the changing house, small piles of sodden dead leaves pressed up against the fence, the pool’s green water assaulted by the rain, surface punched, penetrated by forceful, forcefully swallowed drops. And a figure in the water, white shirt transparent, slowly turning like a ship’s wheel.

I lost my bearings. My moral compass spinning.

How could there be two such people? Was I looking for Russell? Threading my way through the world like an unfolding crowd; people moving away right and left, to be noticed, but not focused on, like the smiling chorus line before the camera, finally revealing the Star.

Though we all walk through the streets anticipating reunions with old friends, meetings with would-be lovers, or acquaintances whose phone numbers we’ve forgotten when we are planning a party—what makes any of us search crowds for the faces of those people who we injured, who injured us, who are not lost, but dead? Is it that we know we will meet them again?

Mark

Between the Advanced Aid Station and the Casualty Clearing Station our ambulance was run off the road by an explosion, the freight-train long-range shell we listened to, and our minds rushed out to meet, coming down. We got out and sat on the grass among some young birches. My arm was hot, swollen by three hard boils caused by scratching at lice and not extracting them carefully, so that I’d left their heads buried in my skin.

I lay on my back, patches of leaf-shadow stirring on my face, and remembered the dappled canvas of our tent at Featherston. My thoughts, like caged pigeons released before a race, fluttered forth and wheeled together towards home.

With reveille at 3:30 we went to sleep in the last of the evening light, looking up at the shadows on the canvas. The tent was pitched among hundreds of others on commandeered farmland, beside the farmer’s stand of young birches. We were roughing it on our last night in New Zealand, our old straw beds burned and striped palliasses returned.

Reveille, exercises, kitbags packed, breakfast; and then we were on the train at 5:30, pulling out of Featherston, the camp we had marched into seven weeks before. (Thirty miles over the Rimutaka road, on a fine day in February, hot in the sun, cool in the hill’s shade, the road glimmering and water running between the moss and ferns on the bank beside us. The clean pungency of the bush—growth, decay, cold water—surrounding us.)

We settled down as the train slipped out of sight of the hut and canvas camp. My four tent mates and I were carrying our group photograph—the first of those we sent back to our families—Doug Triste, Alan Thomas, Les Norman, Bill Ford and Mark Thornton, together beside their tent at Trentham. (The second was a shot of the eight of us mates in front of our hut at Sling: Doug, Alan, Les, Bill, Andy McCauley, John Price, John Palmer and me.)

Les, who could sleep under any circumstances, dozed; his head rested on the rattling window. I was too excited to sleep. We scrambled for sandwiches and tea at Kaitoke, then were back on the train, passing the camp at Trentham and fresh recruits at an earlier stage of training—parading, and lying belly-down out on the shooting range.

From Wellington Station we marched to the wharf and our transport, the Pakeha. Stowed our kits in the spaces allotted each company below decks—close quarters—and I thought of Pip in Moby-Dick listening to the sharks’ fins brush by the hull.

Our NCO, MacLean, checked the rolls while we stood to attention beside our bunks (‘pretend you have sixpences clamped tight between the cheeks of your arses. Right?!’). Standing behind Mac was one of our new officers, a young veteran returned wounded from Gallipoli, a square-shouldered, wiry, dark-haired man.

We bolted dinner, and assembled on the wharf for our march through town.

The draft halted at Waterloo Quay, and our wives, sweethearts, parents, brothers, sisters and children all broke over us—everyone was looking around for familiar faces. I felt taller, proud and changed, as I searched the crowd for Emma and my aunt Olive with whom she was staying while in Wellington. I was craning, peering through the crowd, but she seemed to come up under my arm, smaller than I remembered—my ‘big’ sister, the real head of the house since my mother’s death, suddenly small, delicate, and feminine. We set off again with the band playing. Emma clasped my arm, her little hands in lilac gloves strange on the rough khaki of my tunic. She was clinging to me because she was afraid of the crowd. She kept turning her head this way and that, smiling nervously at my friends as we exchanged introductions.

The aunt I’d never met couldn’t get at me. Emma pointed her out, a short, feverish woman waving a handkerchief.

We wheeled into Lambton Quay, the marching soldiers conferring form on the mass of well-wishers, who were dragged along in the band’s, the soldiers’, magnetic wake.

Emma was shouting at me, urgently, something about taking care and how I was all she had. But I wasn’t able to pay attention, couldn’t regret leaving her, or fear for her, or understand she might be lonely or afraid. I had got ahead of myself, having already taken leave of the old life the day I told her I was going into Nelson to get measured for a new suit, then marched straight into the recruiting office and lied about my age.

The cabbage trees in the grounds of the Government Buildings were in bloom early, an auspice of a long, hot summer. Flags were flying below the square tower of Government House, and the sun shone brightly on the tramlines intersecting the wide elbow of Brandon’s Corner. At that time I wasn’t aware of the city’s newness—but it was what I dreamed of later, longing to come home whole to that quickly sketched and set down port, with its few stone and many wooden buildings, against the backdrop of the Tinakori hill, on whose grassy crest cattle grazed among the stumps of the forest burnt off sixty years before.

I let go of my sister on the wharf. My hands became busy accepting the gifts showered on us from every side. As we climbed the gangplank the crowd cheered, whistled, shouted, wept behind the gates. The ship listed slightly with all the men crowded at the starboard rail. I saw Emma among the waving hands, handkerchiefs, hats. She was standing still, gripping the bars of the gate in her lilac-gloved fingers. She didn’t weep, moved only when she was jostled by the swaying throng.

I began to be embarrassed by her and looked around to see whether anyone else had noticed my sister’s strange behaviour. The dark-haired lieutenant was extracting himself from his group of relatives by the gate. He reached up to unclasp his wife’s hands from his neck, just as Mother used to unclasp the black basalt necklace she wore to church. He saw Emma, a small woman wearing a tragic expression, buffeted by the crowd, and followed her gaze up to me. I flushed and turned away, waving vaguely at the crowd in general.

When the gangplank was up and we were casting off, the gates were opened and the crowd rushed to the ship’s side. Everyone renewed shouts, hand kissing, stunned by blasts of the ship’s horn. The deck shuddered. Green water appeared between the ship and wharf, widening. Emma was shouting—inaudibly—‘Come home!’ as though she expected me to leap from the ship and swim back to the wharf. A few enthusiastically thrown hats fell upturned among flowers drifting on the water between us.

Slowly the cheering crowd receded. Something in ourselves adjusted, as we became no longer the point of focus of pitched emotion, the centre of a domestic universe—but a group of friends and strangers on an iron island, moving away.

The hills to the east of the harbour showed in clear outlines, like cut-out shapes on a plain of blue; there was no distinction between the consistency of colour in water and air. A turn in the harbour hid the city.

We paraded through town at Hobart, but weren’t let loose. By Sydney Andy and the two Johns had undertaken to get Alan and me drunk. Alan’s wasn’t a drinking family, and I didn’t have the heart to tell Andy I’d been drunk before—besides, if they were paying I didn’t mind repeating the experience. Consequently I don’t have a very clear recollection of my night on Sydney town. Most of it was spent in a pub alternately egging on and mediating between two arguing men. One, a fat fellow in a chequered suit, insisted that we should conduct ourselves with more decorum as representatives of the fighting forces of King and Country. The other, who wore a battered, stained boater, said we should have the free run of every port we passed through.

Strangely, when the pub closed it was the man in the chequered suit who bought us a bottle of whisky and regaled us with a maudlin, but probably well-meant, speech about how he’d like to see us make the best of everything—poor darlin’s (a brogue overwhelming his Aussie twang)—and shook our hands as though asking forgiveness for a mortal insult. While we tried to tell him that we had it better now than ever before, so there was no question at all of us merely making the best of it.

We were on our way to the top-side of life.

Australian booze is stronger than New Zealand booze. We walked down to the waterfront (there was an awful lot of it) and turned towards the Pakeha’s berth (we hoped), Price cheerfully telling us how he had no sense of direction, not to mention a middle-ear problem that meant we young blokes would probably have to carry him. Alan was sick; Andy said to get that (the whisky) into him. I was trying to work out where my middle ear was (listening in the centre of my skull).

The ground was lurching about worse than the ship in the Karori rip. I was telling Palmer how I once went for a walk with my cousin and a couple of bottles of cider along the banks of the Takaka River and the shore kept jumping up and hitting me.

The wind was cold and black, coming off the steel ships’ sides as off a crowd of icebergs. I drank some of the whisky and fixed the fifth dent in the crown of my hat. We ran into a night watchman who shone a light in our faces and said we couldn’t go around the docks. Price argued with him that we wouldn’t be able to find the ship if we didn’t. Andy offered him a drink, but he showed us out the gates all the same.

After that all I remember is Andy trying to coax me up the gangplank when it was just getting light, and looking down at the water—luminous grey, hard, an overturned mirror.

I was drunk on parade. Not hungover, still happily drunk—and hungry, my stomach eating itself.

A number of men were missing; about twelve from our company, including John Price. John had made corporal just before we left Featherston, so Mac was concerned, displeased, determined to find him as soon as possible.

‘Who was with Corporal Price last night?’ he roared at the entire assembled company. Lance-Corporal Jardine glanced at Alan and me. The officer standing behind Mac was watching Alan doubtfully. Alan, I’d noticed earlier, was white and swayed slightly where he stood.

‘We was with him—we were, that is,’ I said.

‘Permission to speak, Sir!’ Andy’s voice further along the row. Mac stepped up for a consultation with him. At this point the anxious officer decided to do something about Alan. He came over to us. I think this was too much for Alan, who passed out. Teasdale and I moved to catch him. Teasdale, who was sober, succeeded; I found myself on my face on the deck.

Mac bawled, ‘What’s up over there!’ then, coming closer, said, ‘Oh, sorry, Sir.’

‘Take him down to the PMO, Private.’

‘On your feet, Thornton!’ Mac yelled. I got up slowly. Everything was swooping about and the day had divided into a couple of silver nails driving into my eyeballs.

‘Are you drunk, Thornton?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, Sir!’

‘Yes, Sir.’ I fixed my eyes on the crown of Mac’s hat. The officer said, ‘It’s all right Sergeant. Private—?’

‘Sir?’

‘Go on sick call today—but don’t ever come on parade drunk again.’

I took myself off.

John Price was discovered asleep in a park by a couple of Tasmanian sergeants in search of their own missing men. He didn’t lose his stripe, but the Lieutenant persuaded him that it was a good idea to take the pledge.

It rained heavily at the same time every night in the tropics. Most of the men couldn’t be bothered picking up and rushing into shelter in the early hours of the morning, so settled below decks. Still, some of us slept better in the open, despite being interrupted and sometimes soaked.

The convoy, five troop ships and two cruisers flanking them, moved lightless over a flat sea. Ahead of us was the Monowai, which in heavy seas always went down into a trough sideways, kicking up her stem like a testy mare. The smoke from her funnels streamed over us, and large flakes of smut spattered greasily hot on the page before me.

Alan cursed and sat up, startling me. I had thought he was fast asleep. He said, ‘This rubbish isn’t fresh air. Five degrees to port and we wouldn’t have this problem.’

‘Five degrees to port and we’d be off course.’

He peered at me, his hair ruffled and face still slack from sleep. ‘What are you doing?’

I shut the book.

‘Writing poetry?’

‘Trying to.’

He leaned forward, the blanket rucked up under his arms. ‘Read me it.’

‘It’s not finished.’

‘Well, what you’ve written. Please?’

I became self-conscious. Alan had read English for a year at the University before joining up. Unlike the Johns, Doug, Les, Bill and Andy, he knew the great poets.

‘Read me one of your finished ones, then, one you think is good.’

I opened the book, turned the pages, searched. ‘None of them are good.’

Alan smiled. ‘Then one you like.’

‘All right then.’ I paused dramatically, then read:

And now Alan Tom gets a show—

(By the way, he’s growing a mo.

It’s his sole joy and pride,
about fifteen a side.

He’s plucky to give it a go.)

Alan smoothed at the faint smear on his top lip. ‘It’s not that bad—’

‘It’s not bad? Thank you, and I thought limericks weren’t my forte—like moustaches aren’t yours.’

He ignored this. ‘Surely you’ve got some serious poems you like. Even I’ve been known to write a little serious poetry.’

‘To Rose?’

‘Mostly.’

‘My serious poetry is very serious, and a bit dull probably. But you did ask.’

I read:

For the remote chance of resurrection,

To be drawn from the forge fire-hard,

I have gone into the smelter.

To complete myself in deed, I will melt into history.

How will it ring in the armies’ alloy,
this metal my father mined?

How will the plough tempered to cut dull flesh

Be keen to cut quick?

The sea shushed at the ship’s side and the sky, moonlight diffused through cloud, gleamed an even, soft silver from horizon to horizon.

Alan nodded. ‘All that, and the possibility of being killed.’

‘Yes, but I think the quality of our death defines our life. I know that dying gallantly must be better than falling over, blue-lipped, in the street.’

‘Oh Christ yes!’ Alan agreed emphatically. Then we both turned our faces upward as large tepid raindrops fell about us. We threw off our blankets, and snatched them up—at one with the frantic movements of a number of figures strewing the deck. We ran under the foot-wide shelter of the overhanging upper berth, and the rain came down with sudden, suffocating force, leaping to wet our legs up to the knees.

‘And it is better than not knowing,’ Alan said, as though no action had broken our conversation. Like the ducks I startled once crossing the Wainui Inlet— three of which flew in a wide arc, two more of which set out later, flying straight for the spit, all meeting simultaneously—Alan’s thought and mine flew wide before the rain, and met again, defying disruption.

Sea, ships, horizon had all disappeared in the welter. The floating coal of a cigarette glowed in a dark doorway near us.

‘Not knowing how it would be, how I’d behave under fire,’ Alan added.

I drew my blanket up around my shoulders, out of the reach of the rebounding rain. ‘That’s what my poem’s about. Not knowing, and wondering—’

wondering luxuriously what I’m never able to know, at my face blankness blackness ashes airlessness. Dispossessed from the beginning. You young prick you could have had your eighty years and never seen the world’s end

I felt now something strangely like the cold current which ran through my body when I submerged my hands in a hill stream in winter. As if part of my body was in a different element. In yesterday. Or in tomorrow. Our ship was near the Equator. Our arms were aching from our inoculations, and our sleep had been broken by the rain. But we were excited and full of vitality, at nineteen and seventeen discussing our deaths—our graduation into the great arena.

Then Alan said, ‘My blanket’s getting awfully wet. Make for that doorway, Mark.’

I made a skating run and Alan followed. It wasn’t a cabin door, but a hatchway. I got about a foot inside and was caught by someone’s arm. ‘Look out for the ladder!’

Alan slammed into me and we teetered, catching hold of the door, the rails, each other, crammed into a little space.

‘Why don’t you watch where you’re going?’

‘Look, mate, we just wanted to get out of the rain,’ I said, surly because my arm had been jostled and was throbbing.

‘This ladder leads to the officers’ cabins. If you let go of me, I’ll climb further down out of your way.’

I let go of him at once and he felt his way downwards. When the match flared up he was sitting halfway down. He looked up and offered us the packet of cigarettes. We reached out and he dropped the match as it burnt his fingers. By the light of a second match we watched him light two cigarettes in his mouth. He passed them to us, saying, ‘There’s supposed to be a pilot light at the bottom, but Treetop Freed broke it with his head the other day.’

‘We got the wrong door, Sir.’

‘Don’t say “door” in front of the crew, will you. Bad sense of direction, eh? Like your friend Corporal Price?’

Alan started coughing, ashamed at the recollection. I laughed. ‘He did take the pledge, Sir. He had one of those cards, so he filled it out and posted it back to his minister.’

‘Good for him.’

‘Sir—?’ Alan paused, between eagerness and shyness.

‘Hmmm?’

‘You used to bowl for Christ’s College, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, nineteen hundred and eight, and nine. Is it your school?’

‘Yes, Sir, I left in ’13.’

‘What’s your name, Private?’

‘Thomas, Sir.’

‘Are you Gilbert Thomas’s brother?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Mounted Rifles, wasn’t he? Wounded at Chunuk Bair.’

‘He died in Alexandria six weeks ago of wounds, I’m afraid to say.’

There was silence a second and the little red light of the cigarette descended, trembling. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know. Was he married?’

‘No, Sir.’

The Lieutenant drew on the cigarette and his face appeared—under-lit, red points of light in his eyes—then disappeared again.

‘What was it like, Sir, Chunuk Bair?’

‘Bad.’ Sensing our dissatisfaction with this reply he added, ‘But since I was there with friends—well—I didn’t mind so much.’

‘I think it’s marvellous to be part of a great movement in history!’ I blurted out.

‘Embarking on a noble errand, to bring freedom to the oppressed and degradation to the tyrant?’ said the Lieutenant, sounding like a newspaper editorial.

‘Well—to do our bit!’ I answered, defensive.

‘I expect you’re right, Private.’

I sat in silence, feeling disquieted and resentful. In our short exchange I felt I had come up against not just the voice of experience resisting my uninformed ideas, knowing cynicism against young idealism, but something elusive, diffident, yielding. He didn’t argue with me; he mocked me, then left me with something he considered to be an illusion.

Alan said, ‘Can I ask, Sir—if you don’t mind—you’re our temporary OC, but who’s going to be our OC in the field?’

‘The word is that Captain Green will be taking charge of the company at Tel-el-Kebir. He’s been in the hospital at Alexandria. That is if we don’t go through Cape Town, in which case he’ll join us at Sling.’

‘Ah.’ Alan probably wanted to ask what this Captain Green was like, but didn’t dare.

‘You must lose an hour’s sleep every night, waiting for the deck to dry off,’ the Lieutenant observed.

‘But the hold’s so stuffy, Sir—I don’t like it, and Mark can’t abide it, he lives in the high country.’

‘That’s right—I’m a stalwart farmer and I don’t play cricket!’ What began as an echo of the newspaper’s ‘stalwart farmers, the backbone of our fighting forces’ had ended up as a tetchy outburst.

But the Lieutenant laughed and was still giving an occasional chuckle a minute later.

Alan was as still and quiet as if someone had just clubbed him into unconsciousness. Finally he said, ‘Mark!’ reproachfully.

He was right, and I decided I had better apologise. ‘Pardon me, Sir.’

‘That’s all right, Private.’ He got up, struck another match to light his way down the ladder, and left us.

When the warm wind had swept most of the rain from the deck we went back to lie on the damp wood, and slept.

Just before sunrise I rolled over and opened my eyes. There were no clouds, and therefore no sense of the curve of the sky, no zenith, and for the eye, no ascent outwards—just a blank, pale, tropical blueness, bleaching whiter as the sun came up.

Half an hour till reveille. The Monowai had dematerialised in the radiant path of sun on sea. I went to the rail and leaned over, heat covering my face, reflected from the water. Spreading the fingers of one hand I stared at it, a shadow against burning white light, brightness lapping around its edges, obliterating its singular, human shape.

Andy was lying on his bunk, his jaw wrapped loosely in two socks tied together top and bottom. He’d had the last of three rotten teeth pulled by the dentist the day before.

Alan and I came and leaned over him, Alan waving the paper to and fro. ‘We’d like you to hear the last of our article for the shipboard magazine. We’re landing soon and it has to go to press.’

Andy moaned.

‘We’d like to know your opinion.’

‘Why all of a sudden?’ he said indistinctly. ‘You’re both so sure of yourselves when it comes to putting pen to paper.’

‘Oh come on!’

He wriggled into a sitting position and folded his arms across his stomach. ‘All right, I’m listening.’

Alan cleared his throat, assumed a declamatory pose and read: ‘There we have it; a selection of the best from the poetry competition. Many more were submitted, for the most part, like these, concerned with the ever more distant aspect of home. Bittersweet retrospect! Yet we are soldiers and our minds must turn to what the future offers.

‘“What lies before us?” we ask ourselves with trepidation, then eagerly, with courage, contemplating the horoscope of fate. Asking which: Life that dies? Or dies not but endures pain?

‘No, brothers, we cannot see. We are still nestling in visions of the past. The glass is merciful. For we dwell neither in grief nor longing, our spirits are alive in us, in the present. We are risen from our dead selves. Need more be said?

‘Here, in the full, top half of the world, there are great things to be seen and done. The voyaging vessels of our lives will soon be brimful, and we will become as clear glasses looking both before and behind.’

Andy made a thoughtful noise, pursing his swollen lips. ‘“Brimful vessels” is a bit odd, isn’t it? I mean, if they are “overflowing cups” that’s all right. But you wrote “voyaging”—’

‘That’s because they were cups and ships at the same time,’ Alan said impatiently.

‘In which case, if they’re “brimful” ships, they’re sunken ships.’

‘Oh blast!’

I said, ‘We’ll change it then. Let’s take out “voyaging” and mean only “vessels” as in “cups”. Sinking ships are a bit inauspicious.’

And that’s what we did. We struck out ‘voyaging’ so ‘vessels’ meant only ‘cups’. It went to press. Our souvenir magazine for the men to send home.

But they were overturned cups. The torpedo cutting through the Channel’s calm waters in July of 1917 fulfilled the black magic of our clumsy grammar, reinserting the word ‘voyaging’, and sinking the vessel.

Another ambulance arrived and we got up from under the birches.

One man, who had been kneeling as if praying to a tree, wrapped his hands around its trunk and refused to move. He wouldn’t look at the men coaxing him, he just kept shaking his head, as if bothered by flies. He kept saying, over and over, ‘It’s settled on me,’ and I thought he meant some insect he imagined was plaguing him.

Thinking about it later, I realised he meant the long-range shell, which had long since burst, knocking our ambulance off the road. He was still waiting for it to explode; some explosion within him had deafened him to the sound of its bursting.

They prised his hands from the tree and thrust him in the ambulance, stiff and screaming. At the Casualty Clearing Station they took him away.

The doctor lanced my boils and the filthy chat heads poured out with the pus. I was feverish for a week and the boils were lanced several times.

When I moved on to the convalescent camp my scars grew over with tight, purplish white skin. I had another week eating cream in my oatmeal, then was pronounced fit.

On a hot August day I hitched a ride back up the line with a group of sappers. They were driving a limber loaded with duckboards plastered with the hard scabs of last winter’s mud. We overtook one Tommy troop singing an ‘adjusted’ hymn, and were passed by messengers on bicycles, military police on horses, and a number of ambulances.

I recognised the Lieutenant at a distance, walking alone, head down, away from our line. He looked as he did when relaxed and off duty: reserved, set aside in his own rare air. As we passed I said, ‘Lieutenant?’

He looked up, his face not vague with thought, but empty and fatigued.

I waved to him and he stood still on the road staring after the limber as it rattled on. He stayed standing against the vista of shattered trees, a long avenue of ruined columns, and with distance turned into another phantom among spectral men, horses, vehicles—all moving through the dust.

A yellowish-skinned man in a blue dressing gown, head a white dome of bandages, slumped in a wicker chair, who said, ‘That isn’t Mark Thornton’s voice.’

I husked, ‘The wound,’ and had to pick up his hand—bones and tendons rolling in weak, shrunken muscles under loose dry skin—touching it to the scar on my throat so he could feel what he couldn’t see.

Jill

After Kelfie ran off we settled down to wait for Wrathall’s return. Ellen and I sat by ourselves at the foot of the stairs, and she coaxed out of me the cause of my distress. I tried, inarticulately, to explain about Dan and Nicky. I told her how I was on my way to my sister Mary, the only person I could expect to help me, whose help, since we’d leaned on each other on and off for over twenty years, I didn’t have to deserve, yet whose help I knew I wouldn’t get, because Mary was happy and in control of her life, and because she believed it was within anyone’s capabilities to be content, or at least resigned. After all, she and Roger were content, pleased with themselves—sometimes I thought almost defensively so, as though they resented being reminded of other kinds of lives, as though they considered that any other lifestyle was an implicit criticism of their own.

I told Ellen, ‘Mary thinks I’m being inconsistent, because I can’t make up my mind whether to stay with Dan or leave him.’

‘Obviously you don’t know yet.’

‘I might never be sure. She thinks my inability to make a decision, to know what I want, is one of my “inconsist-encies”—as though we’re supposed to have personalities like egg custard, smooth all the way through.’

Ellen sniffed contemptuously, then took one of my hands between her warm palms and shifted closer to me.

After a moment I said, ‘I don’t think it’s possible to be happy.’

‘Weren’t you happy before your daughter died?’

‘No, not really—now I’m sorry I wasn’t. I don’t understand why I wasn’t.’

‘These days perhaps we’d have to know a lot less than we do to be happy.’

‘Sometimes I get superstitious and imagine that, just because I’m never content, things get worse, just so that I’ll be able to see how lucky I was when I thought they were bad. I imagined something along those lines when my car got stuck in the slip.’

‘Sounds like you think the universe is spiteful—which it isn’t.’

She let go of my hand to rap her knuckles on the wooden floor.

We both laughed.

‘Hello?’ Hannah called from the middle of the staircase, where she was perched with Basil.

‘Can we come down?’ Basil asked.

‘If you like.’

He scrambled noisily downstairs and deposited himself beside us. Hannah followed him more sedately. ‘Perhaps we ought to look for Kelfie,’ she suggested.

‘He’ll be sulking somewhere in the dark, don’t worry about him,’ Ellen said, ‘He’s probably eavesdropping right now.’

‘Well it’s my fault he left, and I don’t want anything to happen—’ Basil trailed off unhappily as if something had just occurred to him.

‘He can look after himself.’

Hannah turned on the torch for a moment and I realised how closely huddled we were. ‘Look. We must feel besieged,’ I said.

‘We’re all sitting inside the light as if it’s created invisible walls,’ said Ellen.

‘It reminds me of a game we used to play at school,’ said Hannah. ‘We’d make pretend houses by picking daisies and laying them in lines on the grass, to show where the walls were, and religiously observe the rules about not walking or looking through our neighbour’s walls. But that didn’t stop the bigger boys playing ball from charging through our living rooms all the same.’

‘You know what it reminds me of? The circle of light?’

They looked at me expectantly.

‘When I was a kid I took piano lessons—between five and six in the afternoon. In winter Dad would come to fetch me and we’d walk home over a paddock. It probably took about five minutes, but it seemed to go on forever. The paddock was completely flat and had trees at either end that hid the houselights. Walking, all we could see was a small torchlit space, cropped turf and sheep turds—nothing else. It was like our light created our whole world, our only world—’

‘That’s like my idea of Hell,’ Basil said. ‘The field never comes to an end. Or you’re on a train which goes into a tunnel and, after a while, you look up from your paper and think, “This has been going on a bit long.” But it keeps on going forever—with just your own face staring at you out of the glass for company.’

‘Basil!’ Ellen and Hannah scolded together.

Behind us came the sound of a latch clicking, firelight shone into the hall, and over us loomed the shadow of the shape in the open doorway. We sat gaping.

‘I tried it, and it opened,’ Wrathall said.

Ellen and Hannah glanced at one another. We stood up and he stepped back into the room.

The fire was low, coals draped in filmy flame.

Hannah faced Wrathall and squared her shoulders. ‘Why did you do that?’

‘What?’

‘Lock the door.’

‘Why would I do that?’ His face tilted down towards hers, unbraced and mild.

‘I don’t know. I was asking you. What the hell are you up to?’

‘The door jammed and opened of its own accord.’ His hair was wet, Basil’s parka slick with rain. He had put the crowbar down in the middle of the floor. I watched Ellen walk past him and pick it up. She rested it in the crook of her arms, like an Apache warrior cradling a rifle, facing Wrathall’s turned back. Hannah, although aware of this, never moved her eyes from his.

Basil, who had gone obliviously and single-mindedly towards the fire, had discovered something among the blankets and strewn contents of the pack. He bent and put his hand down into a shadow. It growled.

‘He’s here!’ he exclaimed.

‘Yes. He’s here.’ Wrathall turned away from Hannah, slowly and deliberately. Noting Ellen standing behind him with the crowbar, his face registered amused surprise. He went over to Kelfie and knelt down.

Basil opened the firebox and took out another couple of logs. Their bark caught quickly and the room brightened.

Kelfie’s hair was damp, rumpled, dull, and there was clay under his fingernails. Wrathall tapped him on the face. Kelfie muttered something, but didn’t wake. Wrathall unzipped Kelfie’s jacket and pushed the collar back, then withdrew his hand to his own mouth, biting his thumb. He flashed a look at me—an alarmed, guilty look. I saw that Kelfie’s throat was bruised. The sight of it gave me such a shock of fear that I felt my insteps become cold with sweat.

Wrathall hauled Kelfie into a sitting position and shook him. And, just as he had earlier, when Basil banged him against the wall, Kelfie stiffened and seized the arms shaking him. ‘Get out!’ he commanded.

Wrathall didn’t release him, and Kelfie, realising who was holding him, said, ‘Oh. I meant to just thaw then go out and come in the other way—’ Then he saw me and closed his mouth.

Hannah descended on us. ‘How did you get in here?’

‘Through the floor.’

‘I’m serious. I’m sick of all this sneakiness—’ she pointed at Wrathall ‘—like him opening the door, just like that!’ Snapping her fingers.

‘Out through the floor, in through the window,’ Kelfie said, watching her out of wide eyes.

Throughout this, Wrathall continued to grip Kelfie’s arms, staring at him, as if recording every change in his face and voice. Kelfie finally looked back at him. ‘You can let go of me now.’

Wrathall smiled. ‘Can I?’ he said, and let go. He stood up to face Hannah again. ‘Stop giving me trouble. I’m not lying to you, I didn’t interfere with the door. There is something—unusual—going on here. But I’m not interested in it.’

‘Not interested?’ Kelfie echoed, incredulous.

‘Don’t threaten me,’ Hannah said to Wrathall.

‘I’m not threatening you. I’m not even angry.’

Kelfie jumped up next to Wrathall. ‘No, he’s not angry. Leave him alone.’

‘Or what? You two are up to something.’

‘We aren’t up to anything. Together,’ Kelfie amended quietly.

‘They’re up to something independently.’ Basil nodded.

‘Why were you gone so long?’ Hannah was intent on interrogating Wrathall.

‘I dropped the keys on the way down. It took me ages to find them—’

‘Hours?’

‘Yes. To find the keys and check for people at the slip. There were none.’

‘Hours?’

‘Yes, hours. Do you think I liked being out there in the rain?’

‘You were supposed to wait till we’d checked the rest of the house.’

‘Was I? I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’

I watched them all, feeling somewhat detached. Then at some point I decided—gliding out of turbulent cloud into calm, clear air—that since I was stuck with these people I should stop resisting them. I said, with great clarity and as if pronouncing law, ‘We should stop keeping secrets.’

Only Kelfie seemed to hear this. ‘Which of my secrets should I tell? Or should I tell someone else’s?’

Wrathall’s attention swerved also; he glared at Kelfie.

‘Why don’t we all sit down?’ I tried the firm voice I used when Nicky was afraid and upset.

‘Yes, Hannah.’ Ellen touched Hannah’s back, then putting down the crowbar she seated herself on the ottoman. Kelfie returned to his nest in the blankets. Basil smiled at me and sat on the firebox. I sat next to Ellen. Which left Hannah bristling at Wrathall, who was looking over his shoulder at Kelfie.

I consulted my watch: ‘Four forty-five.’

This information caused an oddly ordinary shift in atmosphere. Ellen got up again, saying, ‘I’d better take out my lenses.’ She began rummaging in her coat. ‘My eyelids feel as though they’re lined with sand.’ Kneeling with a small case before her, she stretched her eye at the corner, blinked, and the first contact lens made a small flashing fall into her palm. She repeated the process with the other eye, licked both lenses and put them away. Peering around the room, her eyes wide, she looked vague and vulnerable. Hannah met her short-sighted gaze and seemed to rethink. She sat down. Wrathall stepped back, leaned against the mantelpiece and said, ‘I didn’t interfere with the door, I had no reason to.’

‘Neither did—’ Kelfie began, but Hannah cut him short: ‘We know you didn’t, you were with us when it jammed.’

Kelfie turned away, his shoulders quivering. He was laughing.

‘I believe Wrathall,’ Basil told Hannah. ‘Something unusual is going on.’

Despite myself I sighed.

Basil put his elbows on his knees and leant forward looking at the linked fingers of his hands. ‘Jill knows what I’m thinking, and since she thinks we shouldn’t keep secrets I’m going to tell you all a story in a moment, when I compose myself.’

‘What about?’

‘Ghosts, I guess.’

‘I know a story about ghosts, a true one,’ Kelfie said.

‘I suppose it happened to a friend of yours?’ Hannah asked, sounding relatively tolerant. She seemed able to be suspicious and hostile to only one person at a time. At the moment it was Wrathall.

‘It happened to a friend of a friend of my father.’ He sat on his heels and straightened his back, as tense and poised as a crouching cat. ‘But ghosts exist. Everything happens at once, so we are all ghosts.’

‘Peter Straub said that’s the terrible truth at the heart of every ghost story, we are all ghosts.’

Basil looked bleak. ‘Do you mean that you think you are dead already?’ he asked Kelfie, who became very still. It was the stillness of a slack tide, a turning tide. After a moment he said casually, ‘No. I don’t exist, I was left holding the lazy-switch in an empty house. I have to recreate myself every day.’

‘So you don’t suppose you’re dead because you’re going to die?’

‘Of course I’ll die sooner or later, but that’s irrelevant. I’m not particularly interested in death, Basil—I don’t think it means much unless all of us die, and that possibility rather defeats the imagination, doesn’t it? I don’t mean we are ghosts because we’re doomed to die, I mean that we are always what we will be—what we are. Everything happens at once.’ He paused and gave us all a slow, bright smile. ‘Yet although everything happens at once, I can’t change what is happening. For instance, although I wish Princep wouldn’t shoot the Archduke at Sarajevo, I can’t stop him, because the world upon which my mind and imagination works is the world in which Ferdinand is killed.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Never mind. I’m warming up to tell this story. If it sounds stupid you’ll feel better about telling yours.’

‘I wonder.’

Kelfie took off his wet jacket and pushed it closer to the hearth, then lay back on the sleeping bag and blankets with his hands behind his head.

‘I was in Mazatlan in Mexico a couple of years ago, visiting my father. His wife had an old friend who was a roving journalist—a bit washed up—a good writer, but with too many scruples and a tendency to get involved in what she was writing about. Her name was Maxine Baird. She sold most of her work to this trendy-lefty alternative lifestyle magazine called, originally, The People’s Voice.

‘Maxine had been drifting around Central America for about five years, and about a year before I met her she had been living in this small Marxist-Leninist republic. There she’d made friends with an Australian photographer, Francis Taylor. From the way she talked about him I gathered she liked him a lot. Francis was, according to her, good-looking, biddable and promiscuous—really popular in the big community of Gringo dropouts who hung out in the capital.

‘He worked for Geo and had been sent to photograph the mating “dance” of these rare little yellow birds who live in the jungle of the mountains. For two weeks of every year these birds can be seen perching on branches hitting each other around the head with leafy twigs held in their beaks. What they are doing is coating twigs for their nests with scent from glands in their cheeks—all part of pair-bonding. The local Indians say they are duelling.

‘Anyway, Francis travelled around the jungle in search of these WimWims—that’s their name—laden down with photographic gear and escorted by a short, bandy-legged, half-Indian guide. For some reason this guide kept trying to get Frank to try all the native hallucinogenic plants. Frank became cautious only after something the guide shared with him for lunch reacted with a local liquor and he ended up crawling back to the Plaza Hotel seeing everything in a pretty, monochromatic blue.

‘Francis kept trying to convince his guide that he wasn’t very interested in experimenting with drugs, and his guide kept insisting that he must, because Francis was a sorcerer.’

‘Someone’s been reading too much Castaneda.’

‘Can I finish this story?’

‘Go on.’

‘Maxine and Frank used to have these late night talks in their rooms at the hotel. She told him about her marriage, how she met her husband when she was studying literature and he was studying law, when she was wearing white lipstick, minis and knee-length boots and he had long hair and headbands. He gave her a political education—now he was a partner in a prestigious Los Angeles law firm, and she was having trouble with her passport every time she went back to America.

‘Frank told Maxine that he supposed he was a sorcerer. Though it was true he sometimes abused his persuasive power (like when he told an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, drinking in the hotel’s bar, that he’d read an inside scoop on how the Russian Embassy in the capital was using some sort of gas to make everyone in the Presidential Palace—the government that is—behave just a little crazy); though it was true he told stories (“defensive storytelling” he called it, because the official was being officious and he preferred to be treated in a more personal way by everyone) he was also a sorcerer. He had always been able to see pieces of his own future, like a road illuminated, here and there, along its length, but with pitfalls of darkness between each light.

‘He volunteered this information straight, then started to make jokes about how he was his own ancestor. His grandmother had a portrait of his great-great-great-grandfather, and the face in the age-darkened oil painting was his own: Francis Taylor, bom 1960, died 1834.

‘Which brings me to the ghost part of the ghost story. The reason why Francis’s lie about the “Russian experiment” was so nasty was because quite a few people in the government were crazy. Six months before Francis had arrived in the country, the Minister of Indian Affairs, a loyal member of the Frente Democratico y Revolucionario, had gone berserk. Time magazine said, more or less, it was because they were all unscrupulous, bloody-minded people, unfit to look after the interests of the people of this once democratic nation. The older members of government said it was the stress of working seventeen hours a day, seven days a week to rebuild a country over the graveyard the previous regime had made of the place. While some of the younger government members, friends of the guy who went berserk, said it was possession, hauntings and generally evil forces at work.

‘There was said to be a room in the palace where some creepy, inexplicable things had happened. Although there had been an exorcism there were still some “ghosts” wandering around. One apparition that received a lot of attention appeared to be a skinny, pock-marked man, dressed in the costume of an eighteenth-century Scots clergyman.

‘One night, a month after Francis arrived in the country, he invited Maxine to his room for a drink and told her he had met the ghost. Its name was Cyril Humphrey. The Reverend Humphrey came from Stromness in the Orkney Isles. He had died in 1779 when poisoned by his housekeeper (the local laird had cut his stipend and he had been forced to reduce her wages).

‘Francis was really excited—Maxine told us he was always more disturbing and distracting when he was excited about something than when he was lounging around trying to be seductive. He became all incoherent and elated and just kept repeating that everything happens at once.’

Kelfie paused, staring at Basil.

‘What’s wrong?’ Hannah asked in exasperation.

‘Basil’s touching his ear like he’s listening to instructions from a hidden microphone.’

‘Never mind my ear, just go on with your story.’

‘Well—you see Francis didn’t know all his own future; there weren’t enough patches of lamplight on the road. The next thing anyone knew he had locked himself in his room at the hotel, closed the blinds, and wasn’t answering the phone or door. Unfortunately for the government he had rich friends in Sydney who were used to him calling regularly. When they became worried they got onto Foreign Affairs Oz and before long Department underlings were talking to people. Eventually a government official coaxed Francis out of bed, got him to shower and change and arranged an interview with a Red Cross type who could certify that Francis Taylor, Australian citizen, was being neither drugged, brainwashed, nor tortured or “disappeared” by the revolutionary government.

‘Frank and his guide then went into the jungle to photograph initiation rites up at the pyramids in the heart of the old Taoscal empire. When he returned to the capital Frank told Maxine what had happened to him that drove him to hide himself. She thought he’d gone crazy, that he’d been trying too many drugs. Maybe he had.

‘He told her that one night he had followed Cyril Humphrey along the packed earth path by Democracy Wall—the outside of a wall encircling the palace, where people used to write opinions, slogans and rumours (rumour-mongering being the national sport)—when the apparition suddenly vanished. He kept on walking—then it happened: instead of the hard, dusty road, wet shingle was slipped under his feet, and he stood looking in wonder at his sneakers against smooth, gleaming, water-worn stones, and lifted his head into a cold, salty, peaty wind. He was standing on a stony beach, it was drizzling, a fine chill mist, but the sun was shining through a gap between the horizon and the clouds, under-lighting them. The sea and small strip of clear sky were sulphur-yellow. Behind him were lichen-covered boulders and a rising hillside clad in tough brown bracken. Further along the beach a group of seals lounged on the rocks and rolled in kelp in the waves; watching him curiously and fearlessly. And on the headland opposite him was a stone fortress.

‘Francis backed away, and the drizzle, stony shoreline, lapping waves, all disappeared. It was as though he’d had his head submerged and now had lifted his face from the water. The sounds of traffic, tree-frogs, cicadas, filled his ears. His hair and clothes were sprinkled with droplets of rain, and four damp footprints—his own backward steps—lay before him on the dust of the road.

‘Shortly after telling Maxine this story, Francis went back to Sydney. The following year he returned to the republic on his own time and then he vanished.

‘Maxine said that although he had always seemed sweet to her, his habit of trying to jump into bed with all sorts of people might have got him into trouble. He may have had his throat cut and been dumped in the river, or have gone off into the jungle with only the Indian guide and been shot by Contras. She also said that Francis had made too many jokes about his ability to go anywhere. That he’d talk and act rationally among groups of people, but one to one, in late night conversations with her, he’d start speculating about what he’d do in the Napoleonic Wars, or how he might end up living by picking whelks off the rocks in the Orkneys. And he’d always say, laughing, or sadly, and sometimes anxiously: “I’m not mad.”

‘But if he wasn’t mad, then what was he, this handsome, young, educated Westerner, with charm, and options for action, who eventually found a quiet dark lonely stony road leading him away—if only in his head?’

Throughout his narrative Kelfie’s voice had changed continually; from thoughtful and distant, to animated and flippant—ending in a tone of both quiet wonder and insistent firmness. His voice and what he said made me feel strange. His story was at once too odd to be believable, but too detailed not to be. I said, ‘You don’t expect us to believe that’s a true story?’

‘It was told to me as a true story. I don’t know if it is. But maybe this is the answer.’ Kelfie raised his slight hands against the firelight. ‘We are all strung on time. Francis Taylor was strung on time, but he was a magician’s bangle, one of those shining steel hoops a magician slips, whole, off a taut wire.’

Hannah said, ‘If you ask me, that woman told you a tall story.’

‘We understand what’s meant by book-jacket blurb magic: “This story is sheer magic”—“enchanted”—“a spellbinder”. A good story, even a good tall story, should change your mind, and by changing your mind it should change the world—because the world is what our brains make of it.’

‘My brain makes something quite different of it than yours, I’ll bet.’

‘But you don’t know what I think, Hannah. All I did was tell someone else’s story.’

Basil said, defiantly, ‘I believe it! Why not? Stranger things have happened.’

‘Yes, Basil?’ Kelfie smiled at him. ‘Tell us now what stranger things have happened to you.’

Basil

While Russell didn’t care whether my story was true or not, Audrey, my friend Scott’s girlfriend—whom I loved, who gave me so much of herself, trustfully, understanding that I honoured everything she felt, but not understanding that I loved her—Audrey was frightened of me. Indulgently laughed at by her parents, emotionally blackmailed by her lover, she was haunted by the phantom of her happy, active, guiltless self—the woman she might have been, given half the chance. Audrey didn’t count on real ghosts, intractable mysteries like my Vanishing House. Her sanity, her sense of justice drew her to me. Sometimes I could see her thinking, ‘At least Basil’s sane.’ When I turned out not to be sane, by her reckoning, she stopped trusting me. She didn’t stop speaking to me, but never really said anything anymore.

It was only by an effort of will that I was able to watch the others as I told my story. Those five people, all strangers, about whom I should have had no strong feelings. Ellen kept her eyes turned my way (she looked myopic, dreamy, defenceless), Hannah was patient and attentive, Jill frowning, and both Wrathall and Kelfie just listened, their faces unreadable.

When I had finished, a log cracked in the fireplace and coals tumbled through the grate, light, exhausted, sounding like small scraps of metal. I felt as I had briefly the last two times I made the confession—the luxury of trust, of something having left me that never should have been a part of me.

I waited, to be humoured, laughed at; I waited for the attempts to persuade me out of my delusive memories, or even for the distance of polite scepticism. Then Kelfie said, ‘I wonder why—’ his voice full of the soft ferocity of desire, regarding me as though I were a puzzle: the high, closed gates of a mansion, a fascinating photograph captioned in a foreign language, an extinguished screen. As though he were about to get up and walk through me, to stand on the crest of that hill, fifteen years and thousands of miles removed.

‘What am I supposed to think?’ Jill asked.

‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ Ellen told her, some struggle going on between them that we could only watch, as from shore watching a lifeguard and panicking swimmer.

‘It means what you make of it!’ Kelfie was unduly brutal.

‘Basil’s house was never alive—it didn’t get up, eat breakfast and go to school!’ Jill said.

Kelfie considered this, then flushed. ‘That’s true! It was just something Basil saw’—briefly denying a thing I knew he believed was significant. But pity for Jill checked him only momentarily. In a series of broken, breathless phrases he said, ‘Even if someone did die—suffocated—and hard hands went into their body and shut around their spine—’

‘Shut up!’ Ellen said, savagely.

‘Jill, someone died for me too,’ I said, ‘but my Vanishing House still existed. It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t have to. Hauntings are a problem like—like a lobster pot—you can get in but not out.’

‘If you’re a lobster,’ Wrathall said drolly.

‘Ghosts aren’t an effect with a cause—they don’t have to mean anything!’ I was back-pedalling gradually, watching Jill’s troubled, infuriated face.

‘It meant what it was, and you never knew what it was,’ Kelfie said, composed again, calmly taking my story away from me. He looked at Jill. ‘Don’t take it so personally,’ he said.

Ellen jumped up, red and swearing, moving towards him, but Wrathall caught her and pushed her back into her seat.

Hannah had risen to her feet, her face dismal, to protect her friend. But Ellen, after attempting to rise several times against the strength of the hand gripping her shoulder, had become quiet. Wrathall watched both women, his face sleepy, neutral, unmoved. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. Just don’t touch him.’ Releasing Ellen, unhurried, unworried, he turned to Hannah, saying respectfully, ‘I haven’t hurt her.’

‘Don’t!’

‘Stop threatening each other. I can speak for myself,’ Jill protested. She was crying again.

‘There’s no point in talking to someone like him!’ Ellen gestured at Kelfie.

‘I’m crying because I’m angry,’ Jill told Kelfie. ‘I always cry when I’m angry.’

‘Basil’s house isn’t your child,’ Kelfie said calmly.

I recognised this as a correct guess. Her child, her daughter, the one she had read Dr Seuss to.

Jill fought to make herself clear. ‘It’s just intellectual to you. I failed to protect my daughter. But you’re a kid still, so you wouldn’t understand anything like that.’

‘You have no idea what I do or don’t understand,’ he said, then added, ‘At least she didn’t survive to hate you for failing.’ He sounded considered and purposeful, as though he intended with one awful sentence to put us all away from him.

Jill dropped her face into her hands. Ellen cradled her, staring at Kelfie, incredulous.

He watched them, his expression bland and empty. His cruelty wasn’t a lack of sympathy, but a deliberate withholding or perversion of sympathy. Because it was there, I could sense it, an empathic faculty that went along with his uncanny instincts, his imagination, his ability to manufacture moods. Wilfully withheld empathy; a tremendous, frozen presence, like a looming cliff of snow.

‘Why do you do that?’ I asked.

‘Do what?’

‘Say things like that?’

‘What do you want me to say? Aren’t you relieved that I believed you?’

‘That isn’t what I meant. I’m not interested in you being “on my side”. You were talking about Jill’s daughter, not someone’s theory about ghosts.’

‘I’m sure Jill can’t really resent being reminded that nothing’s dependable. None of us can protect, or keep, or ask anything. Ghosts don’t mean anything. Your house denied you; it disappeared. Everything characteristically leaves us.’ His expression was banal, his voice impassive and remote. And still a contained force behind his words, voice, face.

‘You mean you notice departures, but not arrivals. Life has both, you know. There is “a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together”,’ I quoted.

‘No, I mean it is the character of all things to leave us.’

‘I’m tired,’ Jill murmured, ‘I’m so tired.’

‘You men!’ Ellen growled, glaring from Kelfie, to Wrathall, to myself. ‘Basil, what are you trying to prove? That you’re an authority on hauntings? So you can say this place—this bare, harmless house—is haunted? Do you think we should all leave? Well leave then! Get out!’

‘Ellen,’ Wrathall began, but she rounded on him: ‘Don’t take that tone of voice with me! All right, you’ve had a rough time of it tonight—what with your accident—but Jill’s been suffering for months, and between Basil and his fucking ghosts, and Kelfie being a pig—’ She was screaming now, a high, furious sound.

Wrathall moved towards her. He was obviously someone used to intimidating the anger out of others. But when his menacing figure failed to achieve the predicted effect, he looked momentarily confused and afraid, then said, ‘You stupid woman, hasn’t it ever occurred to you—?’

‘What?’ she snarled.

Next to her Jill had stopped crying and was looking alarmed.

‘All I care about,’ Ellen went on, ‘is that Jill isn’t subjected to insensitivity, insults and crazy behaviour!’

‘I didn’t mean to upset anyone,’ I protested.

‘Well then, why did you persist with your ghosts?’

Without emphasis Wrathall said, ‘Why don’t you shut up.’

‘No, you—’ Ellen yelled, then seemed to lose the power of speech. She pushed Jill roughly aside, as if completely forgetting the cause of her protectiveness. She snatched up the crowbar, which had been lying at her feet, and ran at Wrathall. He wrenched the bar from her hand, shoved her backwards and raised it over his head.

As I moved forward I saw, blurred, Hannah’s horrified, astonished face on the other side of the struggling figures. Terribly slowly we converged on them. There was a hissing pause; Ellen lifted her arms before her face, our hands flew out, the muscles shifted in Wrathall’s wrist and the reflected firelight began to stream from tip to base of the bar as it descended.

Then a voice, Kelfie’s, said, ‘Go on, kill her. What’s one more or less?’

Wrathall froze and Hannah snatched the bar from his hand. We were all still, panting, looking at Kelfie—on his feet between us and the fire. In the same incisive, unimpassioned voice he added, ‘I mean it.’

Mark

Dear Emma,

We have arrived in Sling. We came down by train from Liverpool to Salisbury. Sling in summer is set in hot, bare, almost entirely flat country, and is covered by an uninteresting, milky blue sky. It consists of a vast collection of huts, parade grounds, shooting ranges and so on. And, in our opinion, poorly equipped kitchens and mess halls.

As soon as we got here there were rumours that the company was to be reorganised. Our CO, Captain Green, had arrived from Egypt and appeared officiating at a kit inspection on our first night. I don’t mind saying, Emma, he’s an odd chap, a Christchurcher, but very English-sounding. We are all impressed by his DCM. I am told he got it fighting off a Turkish raid at Quinn’s. The planned reorganisation turned out to be the acquisition of an English lieutenant, Wilson by name. It appears he lost his place in the Durhams when he was sent back here wounded. We think he would have preferred to return to them; we also feel he’s been put in to keep an eye on us. Fortunately Given is still officer of our platoon.

It looks like Andy McCauley is going to make corporal so will be shifted out of our section. He’s really smug.

We are all quietly pleased that things haven’t cooled down on the front since the push in July, and we ought to be over there by September to have a go. There was some unpleasantness in connection with this on our second evening here. We were in the mess hall, eating something unpromising and watery, when an English captain staggered in drunk, and started yelling that there were dangerous doings over in ‘the ditch’ and how we would be there soon and ‘before you know it half of you will be dead’. Several of us got up to tell him off, then fortunately some Tommy NCOs arrived and showed him out. Double-barrelled nitwit! As if we have no idea of what we are in for—we have seen the casualty lists.

I write this at 8:00 pm in our hut. It is still light and the last of the aeroplanes are buzzing back to a nearby airfield. They look fragile and beautiful, yet strangely frightening. Especially if, when one is walking, they fly right overhead and their shadows cross one, that momentary coolness in their shade is so unlike a cloud’s or a bird’s shadow.

We have two days in London coming up. Alan has an invitation to the home of some of his mother’s people, and has asked me to go with him. We gather that various outings have been organised, including a concert at a cathedral, which Alan with his love of choirs is happily anticipating. Thinking to be clever he has just told me the name of the cantata in German (awake, cries to us the voice). I tell him about Jakob, and that I know a little German.

Poor old Jakob, I wonder where he is now. I always think of the time Father sent me down from the tops with him, after that early snowfall during the muster when I was eleven. We had a lamb across the horse’s withers in front of the saddle, and he showed me how to warm my hands by burying them in its oily fleece.

About the farm. Do not let Joe Harper bully you. I think we need to lease another 300 acres. If Clifford is talking of joining up I don’t see how you can persuade him not to. If he resolves to go, then write to Uncle Euan and ask him to come back, I am sure he would if you asked.

Offer MacVey another shilling a month if that’s what it takes to make him stay, give Baines the push, he will always be a drunk. And let Paku’s family have his quarters. As for Aunt Olive and her ‘clerk’s position in the civil service’—do you really want to live in Wellington? There should always be a Thornton at Patriarch (though I know you think it should be me). If Euan comes then maybe you can go and stay with Olive, if he thinks it’s a good idea.

And Emma, you don’t need to submit to being lonely. Invite Edith up to stay. After all, you know how she feels about Gordon MacVey, and proximity is everything I’m told.

I will send you a more interesting letter after my leave. This one I’ll post in London. Did you get the Magazine? Did you like Alan’s and my literary efforts? Critical comment please—though not too critical.

Stay cheerful,

Your affectionate brother,

Mark

P.S. I have started to attend services again. What would Mother say if she knew?

There were nearly tears, but no tears; there was the flood of conversation, catching up, Alan’s aunt’s voice shedding its reserve and scaling heights of reminiscence about ‘Dear Lily’ at her house in the Garden City.

Alan’s mother had painted and sent her sister a watercolour of her flower-filled garden and her two sons on the lawn, blue shadows on their fair hair and the baby’s white smock. It was hung up over the mantelpiece of the Chelsea house.

Alan’s uncle came home from the bank, took off his hat and solemnly shook hands with his wife’s nephew and her nephew’s ‘mate’. (Alan said, ‘This is my mate, Mark,’ and the Uncle blinked and turned to me in ponderous bafflement, proffering his hand.)

‘Do you have relatives here?’

(Aunt Eva was saying to Alan, ‘You must send your mother all the news from home—’)

‘No, I’m afraid not, my mother’s family were Irish, and my father was born in New Zealand.’

‘That must be unusual.’

‘Grandfather went over to run a government sheep station in 1849.’

‘Goodness, you’re an authentic colonial then?’ He offered me some tobacco. ‘Do you smoke a pipe?’

‘No, thank you.’

The aunt scowled at her husband. Unperturbed he went on tamping tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. ‘Did you meet my nephew in the army?’

‘Yes, at the training camp back home. He came along and made me think he was doing me a favour giving me the cot near the door of the tent.’

Alan heard this and laughed. ‘I learned that trick in Boys’ Brigade.’

I shrugged. ‘Boys’ Brigade—he could have been an officer if he hadn’t enlisted underage.’

The aunt’s face creased anxiously. ‘Oh Alan! You should have waited. Your poor mother, especially after Gilbert.’

‘I enlisted because of Gilbert, Aunt,’ Alan said coolly, then recovered. ‘Our platoon commander was at school with him—he was on the Peninsula too.’

‘He’s a New Zealander?’

‘Almost all our officers are New Zealanders—’ Alan refrained from adding ‘thank God’. ‘Lieutenant Given and our Captain are both Anzacs.’

‘The Lieutenant favours Alan—’ I teased.

‘We’re organising a cricket match at camp.’

‘Given’s a damn good bowler,’ I said, before Alan could, and noticed the aunt’s face stiffen at my mild expletive.

‘Mark rags me about cricket. He didn’t go to school, so he has no interest in team sports.’

‘No schooling?’ The uncle peered at me from under his grey brows.

‘My mother gave lessons to my sister and me, and to some of the stockmen’s children. I was going to attend Nelson College, but my father died. I envy Alan, the friends, the fun, the libraries—all that.’

The uncle touched my sleeve. ‘Do you fancy a stroll in the garden?’

I nodded.

‘Alan, I’m borrowing your friend to keep me company while I smoke my pipe.’

We went out the front door and around the side of the house, through blooming rose bushes, all reds, pinks and mauves. In the garden an elderly nurse was seated on a white-painted ironwork chair under a sycamore, watching the family’s youngest child, a girl of five or six, playing near a large fishpond.

The uncle lit his pipe, drawing vigorously. We stood, saying little, listening to the birds. Then his wife came to a window and called him in. I went over to the fishpond. Large, broad-backed goldfish with bulging eyes and a filmy drapery of fins and tails rose up under the weeds, lustrous, mouthing wonder.

The child said, ‘Good afternoon.’ She was kneeling on a flagstone, agitating the water with a twig. ‘I saw you come up the path,’ she announced. ‘Are you my cousin?’

‘No. I’m his friend, Mark.’

‘I’m Kitty. You were wearing funny hats.’

‘Slouch hats.’

‘Have you come to tea? I’ve had my tea.’

‘We are going to a concert with your sister when she comes home.’

‘She works in a hospital. My brother’s in hospital. He’s wounded, in balloon.’

‘Did he fly a balloon?’

She studied me as though I was an imbecile. ‘He’s in hospital in balloon,’ she reiterated.

‘Boulogne.’

She dropped the twig and stood. Her wet hands left greenish blotches on her starched white pinafore. ‘Your voice is funny, like the post boy’s.’

‘It’s my accent. Your cousin and I are New Zealanders.’

‘Aunt Lily’s in New Zealand. She sent me a shawl.’

‘Mark!’ Alan came striding through the garden, the leaf lights pouring over his face and his eyes clearing from hazel to green ringed with black. He swept up the child. ‘Hello Kitty, old girl! I’m your cousin, Alan Thomas,’ sounding self-important, gracious and affectionate all at once. ‘Thornton, don’t tell me you’re shy of children too?’

The girl put her hand up to her mouth and leant her head against his—her face: pink, happy, flattered; and his: quick, dark and mocking, presenting a picture that paint or film would fail to record.

‘Kitty and I were having a conversation.’

‘Well, Cousin Emily’s here, so you can come in and manage a conversation with her as the next step in your conquest of the female sex.’

Kitty was clinging to his neck now and rejoicing. ‘You’re bigger than my brother!’

‘Everything is bigger in New Zealand, the sheep are as big as cows, and the cows as big as horses—’ he began, as he walked away with her.

Emily had changed her uniform and smoothed her hair. She welcomed me, her voice educated and genteel and her hands red and roughened by lysol, hot water and hard work.

Dinner was soup, salad, and fish poached in cream and white wine. Nothing out of the ordinary for Alan—but the sliced, raw vegetables were extraordinary and slightly alarming to me.

Kitty used our departure to the concert as an excuse to come down and hang all over Alan, while pretending to inspect her sister’s outfit. We finally got away from the house and rode on top of an omnibus through a warm, humming London evening.

A fine meal, a child, a cathedral, a cantata, all in one day. The tide began to ebb at Victoria Station the following morning. There, we were just another couple of lonely colonials with no one to see us off, no one who cared enough to brave the crowds, clamour and grief.

I didn’t speak at any length to another child for years, not until the day before I climbed the highest peak on the Hill.

I had just finished reading a letter from Andy, which said that John Palmer, setting off on holiday, travelling by ferry, had been startled by the loud blast of the ship’s whistle. Andy wrote, ‘It sent him off again.’ And I imagined John crouched, clutching the rail and shaking his head at concerned fellow passengers—like the shell-shocked soldier beneath the birches on the way to the Casualty Clearing Station.

Then Beth Harper disturbed my thoughts by placing a book in my hands. ‘Mr Thornton, Emma says you’ll read it to me.’

Along the other end of the veranda Emma was standing by the table, turning the teapot and eyeing her invalid brother. Joe and Maggie Harper, Gordon and Edie MacVey were talking amiably, while Jack Harper, Joe’s youngest brother, two years my junior and a whaler at the Tory Channel Station, stared at my sister’s profile, his gaze open, intent and easily interpreted.

‘Will you?’ Beth asked.

‘If you don’t mind my whispery voice.’

‘No, I don’t mind.’

‘This book hasn’t any pictures.’

‘I don’t like pictures, they never make people look like it says they do. And all the princesses have gold hair, and all the witches have black hair.’ Her own hair was dark.

‘I see, but wouldn’t you rather be a witch and do magic?’

‘No, they get made to do horrible things like dance to their death in hot iron shoes!’

‘I remember. That’s “The Little Goose-girl”, isn’t it?’

She looked surprised. ‘Yes.’ Then she opened the book at the first page and waited for me to begin.

‘“The land of the Blue Flower was not called by that name until—”’

‘Young King Amor was raised by a wise man in a mountain paradise, then sent down to heal his nation. “When you go down the mountain you will see things which are not beautiful, and those which are unclean …”

‘The tall young king stood holding his lantern above his head and gazing at the madman with deep thought in his eyes. “There is no time for hatred in the world,” he said. “There is no time.” “But the earth is full of magic,” Amor said to the Ancient One> “Most men know nothing of it, and so come to misery. The first law of the earth’s magic is this one. If you fill your mind with a beautiful thought—”’

—Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme—

‘“—there will be no room for an ugly one.”’

Beth retrieved the book. ‘Thank you, Mr Thornton.’ She thought for a while. ‘Do you think it is better living up high on the Hill—like the Ancient One’s castle on the mountain crag?’

‘Do you mean healthier?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I haven’t been down the hill yet.’

‘I’ve had enough downhill to last me a lifetime. I’d like to get higher up—maybe tomorrow I’ll climb the peak.’

‘Flint Peak, Daddy calls it.’

‘The outcrops look like flint, but they aren’t, they’re marble.’

‘I’ve been up there—you can see down both sides at once, for miles and miles. What’s flint?’

‘A hard, grey, flaky silica rock. They have a lot of it in England and France.’

‘Were you in the trenches in France?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was it like?’

‘Bad—’

She cocked her head and studied me mournfully.

I laughed.’ But since I was there with friends, it was all right.’

That evening with Alan in the Cathedral, the oldest building either of us had ever been into, I was introduced to the music of Bach. The chorus opening and marching away, making a broad causeway through time and space, through the many moments where ice cracks and buds break, to the moment when, traditionally, the ‘dwellers in dust’ awake. I sat back, cold and sweating beneath my shirt, licking my lips.

When the soprano was singing Alan gripped my arm and pointed. The Lieutenant was a music lover too. That dreamy, withdrawn look, still unfamiliar, seemed appropriate then, as it never did later.

There was an old woman beside him in the gallery, her hand closed over his on the stone rail.

‘She looks like a duchess,’ Alan said. Straight-backed, stately, her hair piled in a crown of stiff curls, wearing a gown of maroon lace and a pearl choker.

She noticed the two soldiers gawking at her. Her deeply recessed, hooded eyes turned our way. And I thought of brown and black wings erupting from tussock, from the carcass of a rabbit, eyes a clean brown-gold and radiant with anger.

And I remember how, during the ten minutes rest after fifty minutes’ march, on our way up to Switch Line in late summer 1916, after each section had stacked its rifles in cones and collapsed on the roadside, Alan jumped up on a stone wall, his legs planted wide, to survey the land: ‘Those hills are the chorus of Wachet auf.’ Gold grass foaming, fields rising and falling, poppies, cornflowers and veins of cool woodland.

Another time, during winter on the Lys, we came back from a working party, wet through, to our billet in a barn; its bare wood icy, the roofs of all the farm buildings thatched in snow, the hedges and roads black, the orchard brittle and rimed white. Alan opened the barn door and the fog of his breath thinned perceptibly. Inside: hearth light, hurricane lamps and braziers made of Benzine tins and fired by whale oil. As Alan unwrapped he whistled the principal melody of the chorale: ‘Zion hears the watchmen singing—’

I have all but forgotten those woven tunes: the sound of the years getting up out of the dust, the mud, out of a storm of ice and ashes—and dancing. A sound like the words I found in a book stowed in the threepenny bin at a shop on Charing Cross Road: Truly I have gone my way through a hundred souls and through a hundred cradles and birth pangs. I have taken many departures, I know the heart-breaking last hours. A sound that could make hard praying hands form in my chest and stomach—Wachet auf, ruft uns die stimme—cornflowers and poppies and a cuckoo calling unseen in the woods behind the line on the Somme. Goldfish in their shining veils of flesh, drifting up out of green darkness. Or age-spotted hands folded serenely on a white apron. Or, behind a fan encrusted with jet, powdered skin, pursed lips and gold hawk eyes. Or Alan surging through the shoals of sunlight, through the sharp scent of pinks and the ashy tang of cineraria, in a summer garden.

Alan, whom I’d promised, once we were home, to climb with up the highest peak on the Hill.

Lys, even after Goose Alley, was just the beginning; five months before Messines, eight before Bellevue, eleven before Oatlands. Twenty-seven months until I climbed the peak alone.

Kelfie

They had departed, quietly and hurriedly packing their belongings and leaving by the forced window; Ellen and Jill walking off with their arms about each other’s waists, Hannah carrying all their gear and Basil—bringing up the rear—pausing a moment at the door and looking back at me, his face smudged and pale in the weak light.

The fire made a ribbons-in-wind sound as cold air pushed down the flue. I took the last piece of wood from the fire box and put it into the flames, then sat back, hugging my knees.

Wrathall came back into the room, and when I looked up at him, said, ‘You didn’t expect me to go with them? I would hardly have done that.’ He sat beside me and began absently brushing his fingers back and forth through the chips of bark on the bald carpet. ‘I can’t think what came over me,’ he said softly.

I stared at his hand and it became still. He said, ‘You look strange—extinguished.’

The house enfolded me, patient, mute, abiding.

‘Perhaps now you’ll tell me how you knew about Vic’s body.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘I heard you through the jammed door, you said I’d gone off to bury the body. Not even “a body”, but “the body”.’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘You mightn’t remember saying it, but you must remember knowing about it.’

I looked at him. ‘How can I remember knowing what I know now?’

‘Why did you follow me out of the house? Why did you offer to help me?’

‘No particular reason.’

‘Aren’t you even going to ask why I did it?’

‘No.’

‘But you involved yourself.’

‘If I let you tell me about it, it’ll just seem worse. I shouldn’t have helped you, it was a crazy thing to do. I believe there is such a thing as justified killing, but I can’t pretend I decided your murder was justified. You probably killed him because you lost your temper—that terrible temper I’ve glimpsed twice now.’

‘OK. You helped me conceal an unjustified killing, so what does that make you?’

‘Legally, an accessory after the fact. Crazy anyway.’ I hugged my knees tighter and stared at the fire. ‘Perhaps I did it because I was impressed by the fact that I was only able to find a way out of the house after it was discovered you were gone, and when I was on my own. As if I was being invited to follow you and find you out. But I didn’t expect you to have a body in the boot of your car, and perhaps, because it threw me, I offered to help you as a way of taking control of the situation. Exorcising my shock. Not appearing at a disadvantage. Also, practically, you would have seen me if I’d tried to run, and maybe you could’ve stopped me getting back to the house and telling the others. Anyway, I just didn’t want to feel out of control, I had to act to accommodate the whole thing.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Or perhaps I did it to really put myself beyond the pale. To cross over into a lawless place. Maybe, to me, that shape wrapped in black plastic was a dark beacon burning before me in a wilderness of light. I’ve never been able to step into the screen and partake of the murderer’s singularity. I’ve never tried to alter the poison I’ve watched while munching Jaffas at the movies, blinkered by EXIT signs, always showing me a way out of the darkness.’

He laughed (tension, fury, confusion). ‘You just gave me several possible explanations for your behaviour as a way of taking control of the situation again. Of everything you’ve just said, that’s the only thing I find believable.’

‘All you should be interested in is whether or not I’m going to keep your secret. I will keep it. If you want to confess, to explain, do it to someone else.’ I leaned towards him and my shadow settled, violet-tinged black, over his face. He looked thwarted, unhappy and ill. ‘What can your explanation be but the brick in that joke disguised as two jokes—the one where, in the first part, a guy builds a house, and has bricks left over and, after asking for suggestions about what to do with them builds a garage, and then a barbecue, till he has one brick left, which someone suggests he throw up in the air. So he throws it up in the air. That’s the punchline. And everyone goes, “That’s not funny.” In the second part of the joke—which it’s best to tell much later on in the joke-swapping session—a man and woman are on a plane and he has a cigar and she has a poodle, and he hates poodles and she hates cigars so they agree to throw both out of a plane. The joke ends: “And when the plane lands there’s the little poodle huddled on one of the wings, and what do you think it has in its mouth?” And of course the answer is: “The brick.”

‘That joke used to intrigue me when I was a kid, not because it was funny, but because it broke a fundamental narrative rule. Like if, after reading Wuthering Heights, sometime later reading Lord Jim you were to find a character called Heathcliff turning up in the story.’

Wrathall raised a hand to silence me. ‘So you’re saying you don’t want to hear my explanation because you’re reading a different book.’

‘Yes. It’s the wrong punchline for this joke.’

‘I just thought you deserved to be told so you could judge for yourself whether you did something wrong in helping me. All your “motives” for not wanting to know about my murder make my explanation a bigger deal than it is.’

‘Well, that ought to satisfy your vanity.’

‘Be careful,’ he said, and got up. ‘You can’t always expect to get on top of things.’

‘I couldn’t always.’

‘You want me to leave you alone in this house,’ he said—not asking, telling me.

I nodded.

‘Why? What will happen to you if I do?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what is happening to me.’

He stood looking down at me with an aloof and speculative gaze, then said, ‘Goodbye, Kelfie.’ And left the house.

Mark

Alan’s efforts to educate me were hampered by our lack of music. He was without his collection of records, packed carefully away in a cupboard under the gramophone in his family’s Bealey Avenue house. In their relative imperviousness to time and change they were as full of a potential to taunt and accuse as were the shelves of books in my bedroom at home—Keats, Kipling, Dickens, Dumas …

Alan could only tell me about music; asserting: ‘Bach had an inexhaustible fund of melody’; impressing: ‘When I listen to Collegium aureum with my eyes closed I imagine a glowing, geometric web’; enthusing: ‘Tristan und Isolde, Chopin’s Preludes, Beethoven.’

I believe I felt the same about taking him up the highest peak and showing him the long falls of land down to Canaan and the Riwaka Valley; cloud shadows flowing, swelling and shrinking, over all. Like one of Bach’s melodies, which always defied Alan’s descriptions, Messines, Oatlands, and my homecoming braided together in my mind—the theft of belief, then health, then hope. I could never explain how thoughts of one time always led to thoughts of the others—Messines, Oatlands, my homecoming—three yielding worlds of faith I fell through, away from ambition, vitality and peace.

How could I explain?

Human speech is a single instrument, guessing and uncertain, like that first bird, precursor of the dawn chorus, that would start up at the window of my downstairs sick-bedroom, when there was no light left in the fire, nor sound in the house. The human mind is, however, an orchestra, and, dissonant or harmonious, my mind might play those three themes together: Messines, Oatlands, my homecoming.

For ten days in the Base hospital in Boulogne my wound was dressed every day, the old gauze removed and new gauze packed into the gouged flesh. My face, throat and hands were a stiff mass of gas blisters. When my wound was dressed this scabby mask of lymph would crack, like a crust on lava, overflowing.

I bobbed in and out of delirium. It was as if I had ventured out beyond the breakers on one of the Bay’s steep beaches and was alternately lifted by the big waves to look out to sea, or sunk in a trough with a wall of green water looming above me.

When the wound was sufficiently healed, I crossed the Channel on a hospital ship, and was taken by train and ambulance to Oatlands—the hospital for medical cases attached to the 1st NZ Base Hospital at Walton-on-Thames.

I lay in the gas ward, a hollow needle piercing my back, attached to a rubber tube draining the fluid from my lungs.

Each patient may as well have been alone, in a dreadful privacy of struggling, minute by minute, for breath. Air-hungry—in the night, or in an orange world under our eyelids, or watching the window’s square napkins of white sky and rain dribbling in thin rivulets from sill to sill.

On our first day at Deville Wood I had felt we were invincible and invulnerable. I had within me, throughout my first engagement, a tightly coiled helix of fury and power. The thunder of battle bore me up, made my hair prickle and my saliva turn thick, salty and cold.

The one German I came face to face with I bayoneted, savagely and joyfully, hating his fear and fumbling hesitation. Able to feel, forever afterwards, the shock of the blade striking a rib, glancing off and tearing through the taut fibre of flesh—like a spade pushed through grassroots.

No man in my section received anything more than a minor flesh wound. We came out of battle wet, exhausted and unfeeling, but confident that we had proven to ourselves we had no hidden flaws of cowardice or unmanliness.

We returned to the billets we had recently vacated, and I realised we had more room because there were fewer of us. Only then did I feel a twinge of discomfort at our survivors’ haphazard luck—but even this I took as a lesson that I must develop a larger, more accommodating philosophy of the fortunes of war.

My quest for ‘myself as hero’ ended suddenly when Doug was killed by a shell, on a work party early in our winter on the Lys. A casualty of daily trench life, Doug’s death was brutal and unremarkable. He went neither in a raid nor battle, but shoring up the waterlogged walls of a trench, shovel in hand.

Heroism and courage in battle were, I discovered, less attributes than accidents, or ideas like masks created to conceal from us the hideous shapelessness of life in war.

I climbed the stairs like Essex mounting the scaffold. Emma beside me, talking, her voice shy and warm, sharing my homecoming, the fulfilment of all those longing letters. She too had dreamed I came quietly in out of the summer wind or winter drizzle—perhaps carrying the packages she had expected me to collect for her in the summer of 1915, the errands in Nelson, where I had said I was going to be fitted for a suit—her lying, runaway brother.

I stopped on the landing. ‘I think I’ll go up on my own, Emma, if you don’t mind.’

Her hand folded over mine, pressing it onto the banister, the hard, confident wood, oiled by palms and lamplight, by years of people coming down for breakfast and going up to bed.

During my childhood it was in the conditions of Patriarch’s lease that we provide shelter for travellers crossing the Hill. These strangers had been an endless source of excitement to me. Arriving in the evening by cart, horseback, or coach—unhitching, watering their horses and standing with my father, Euan, or Larry Clifford (the third partner of the early years), talking about the weather, the state of the road, passing on news, or messages from friends in Collingwood, Nelson or Motueka.

They would have supper, and stop over in the rooms down the hallway to the right of the stairs. And I’d be up early to inspect them: travellers, going somewhere, down the hill, descending into the world’s great business of visits, marriages, burials, missions, changes of residence and occupation.

They would breakfast, hitch-up or saddle the horses. The ladies would thrust pins through their hats and coiled hair. They would all take a drink from the dipper chained to the pump, then set off.

And I would chase their vehicles back to the road, dreaming of being asked along for the ride.

After winter we went up the line to Messines.

Deafened by the unremitting barrage—a pauseless roar, not the thudding I first heard thirty miles from Goose Alley, like God knocking on the outside of the sky, asking to be let back into the world. We were unable to hear the mines go up, but the earth opposite us swelled and burst like a bubble in boiling porridge. Twenty feet to my left Captain Green jumped over the parapet waving his swagger stick, and we followed, the earth crumbling and quaking beneath us.

Rain on the windows, rasping breath, fluid draining ‘plink plink’ into the metal basin under the bed. At night the same sounds, and in addition the hiss and comforting smell of a kerosene heater.

At times someone might be wheeled away to the bed near the door of the ward, surrounded by screens. Once I watched as a sister and nurse took a lamp behind the screens and performed, in a magic lantern show, the washing of the body and the stripping of the bed.

Sometimes the ward disappeared and I was alone with my body, an ailing engine that required all my concentration, all my will, to keep going.

And one day, when the ward was awash with a weak liquor of light off the snow, I woke drifting, without pain or effort, my face two feet from the ceiling. Spinning slowly to hang like a kite, I looked down at a long, thin shape under the white sheets and blue blankets, his blond hair full of scurf and darkened by oil, his face raw red and glistening yellow, his eyes lashless and swollen shut.

‘My poor body,’ I thought, and was instantly plunged back into its pressure and pain.

I turned left at the top of the stairs, walking softly and cautiously, like a thief, a housebreaker. The bedroom, bed, shelves of books, desk, papers, inkstand, pictures, wardrobe, the plush red chair with its lumpy seat all said, ‘Well? Where is he? What have you done with him?’ This room was the home of a healthy hill-country farmer, scarcely out of boyhood, with sound lungs and a strong voice—whom I had mislaid.

We fled into the continuous, howling roar. The sound arched over us—earth and all its earthquakes. The hill had gone, the horizon had transformed into a miasma of dust, as if the world were evaporating. (Minutes before it happened Mac had said, ‘They are going to blow mines under those hills. That is our signal—’ I had no idea what he meant.)

We ran into the fog of dust and falling debris. Our orders were to occupy the crater. Before I reached its lip I turned to check on Alan, who had been running directly behind me—in time to see him knocked over by a shell, twisted and tumbling backward like a man caught in a hard tackle.

Before I was able to move, he was up. He started to run towards me, his white face eager and intent, but instead of coming forward, he veered left and stamped in a small circle, out of control. Then I saw that his left leg below the knee had been torn away and was hanging by skin and the remnants of his shredded gaiters, the booted foot bouncing and dragging behind him as he ran, lopsided, the bare bone of the stump piercing the dirt and leaving several small, blood-filled impressions. He flailed his arms, trying to keep his balance, galvanised by the barrage and still endeavouring to run.

When he toppled I ran to him; he grabbed my arm and again flexed his legs to get them under him. Then he saw his injury, looked astonished, then aggrieved, pointed, and glanced at me for confirmation. I believe he felt no pain at first, but realised his leg was gone so lay down and began to sob.

I tore open the flap in my tunic where my field-dressing was. The hot shrapnel had partially cauterised the wound, but sooner or later it would begin bleeding heavily, so needed dressing.

As I bent over the wound, Alan sat up. Without thinking, only wanting to place the bandage where it would do the most good, I took his leg by the ankle and moved it to one side. He began screaming in horror and tried to push me away. We struggled for a moment. Eventually I placed a knee against his chest, pushed him over and knelt on him. Picking up the all-but-severed leg I saw it was, as I had thought, attached only by a flap of skin. I had unhooked the gaiters to get at the wound, and now the leg dangled, a useless impediment to my bandaging. So I tore it off.

After my first month at Oatlands the nurses sat me up and had me write a letter to my sister. The tight red skin of my hands, full of fluid, appalled me—remembering Emma and her—my—fairness intact.

(I was a stealthy whisper of a walk through dry grass, over the throbbing insect-riddled flanks of the hills, under a flattening sun—deathly, a whisper of sticky breath from sick lungs.)

My first letter was four sentences copied from the book beside my bed: ‘All the visions and consolations of my youth are dead. We know little and are bad learners; so we have to lie. Ice is around me, my hand is burned with ice. Weariness has at last to lie down and sleep, even on the snow.’

My second letter, a week later, was written as I looked out over the white grounds, river, bare willows like sienna smoke. (I was fever, high summer in an envelope of ice.)

‘Dear Emma,’ I wrote, ‘I ask you to imagine yourself here with me, coming in quietly by all these ill, unknowing men and tired nurses. Picture me looking out of a rectangular window: eight squares of glass in two vertical rows, a two-foot-deep balcony, a rail of iron spikes and sleet falling from clouds heavier than our winter clouds ever are. Unlike the airy white mist that gathers over the Hill when it rains, this is a deep, cold, unbreathable greyness, like a stone lid. European winter, even at the edge of spring, is immense. Picture me underneath it, a speck of dark earth in a drift of snow.’

The division stayed weeks after the battle, consolidating the line. And gradually, in dribs and drabs, the lightly wounded were returned to us. In time new drafts replenished the battalions into their old shapes, with the raw, untested men—no longer volunteers, but conscripts, without our fleecy illusions.

For a week after the battle I struggled with myself, as if I were a boat rolling in the surf which must be drawn safely up the beach, beyond the tide. In Alan—confident, communicative and charming—I had lost a bridge to those around me. He was my best friend, and without him I had to start everything over again with the world.

Later I began to remember his look of accusation and betrayal. His wet grey face and faded eyes were an image cooling and constricting my innards—not unlike the visceral prayer Bach’s music induced in me.

When someone would come to sit beside me on the fire-step, or shake me awake for a duty, I would start, my heart reaching—as a flame stretches towards fuel—for my vanished friend. I’d know it wouldn’t be him beside me, so I’d stubbornly refuse to look into the face of whoever it was.

We were shelled intermittently throughout those weeks. One morning a near miss exploded on the other side of the parapet, sending a fountain of shrapnel up into the air and shredding the sandbags above our heads. Full of grief for Alan and fear for myself, I decided to tell their infantry that their artillery was hopeless.

I clambered up onto the parapet, straightened, and began to shout, ‘You missed us! See—’

Behind me, over the hiss of settling earth, men were yelling, ‘ Get down, you stupid bugger!’

‘Mark, for Christ’s sake!’ Andy screamed.

I kept on shouting and waving, while in the kernel of my mind a rapt little voice was saying, ‘This is easier, easier—’ my head clearing and eyes focusing on the wasteland before me. I was at last standing straight, in the open, my head above ground, and able to look further than a few feet before me.

I saw several square-helmeted heads peering out over the top of a nest of sandbags clustered around a machine gun, and a number of dirty, pale faces partway above the lip of the trench some thirty yards distant.

Behind me someone commanded, ‘Come down from there now, Thornton—or I’ll shoot you myself!’

My ankles were seized and I was hauled back into the trench. Price, Andy and the Lieutenant had hold of me, and were all furious. I ignored their anger. I resented them for so brutally concluding my brief moment of power and peace. I shook them off and told them to leave me alone. My voice, barbed, high and strained, surprised me. John and Andy backed off, but the Lieutenant, who I’d shoved away from me, stepped up to me again and placed his hands on my shoulders. ‘You didn’t need to keep on,’ he said. ‘We all heard you—there was no need to turn it into an election speech.’ Exasperated laughter behind his words.

It was this that restored my equilibrium. I apologised.

‘All right.’ He struck my neck softly with his cupped hand, then turned and walked away.

Andy said, ‘You’re not meant to push officers around you know, Mark.’

‘Sorry, Corporal.’

‘Don’t “Corporal” me, Mark, for God’s sake.’

After this incident I stopped expecting to see Alan at every turn. A month later we heard his hospital ship had been torpedoed and he had drowned, trapped below decks with nearly a hundred others.

The year passed. Tiredness, strange faces, more deaths came between us. I began to outdistance Alan’s memory, growing older than him, losing our shared enthusiasms.

Spring came and, under the trees, crocuses thrust fleshy yellow spears out of the wet earth. The lawns blushed green. Everything slowly stiffened, swelled and flowered. Lung cases were the last allowed out, and were finally wheeled onto the lawns swathed in rugs.

At this time I received a letter from Andy, the first I had from him. Awkward, each word carefully considered—and behind it all himself: fatherly, anxious, telling me that the Lieutenant had been wounded in the Ancre Valley.

‘Dear Mark,’ he wrote, ‘I hope this letter finds you feeling well. I am in fairly good nick myself, though in low spirits. They are keeping us very busy now, so things are not as bad as they have been at other times. However, the thought of another winter here makes us all very gloomy. I am beginning to wonder why any of this should be our job.

‘I am writing to tell you that the Lieutenant was wounded in April, in the Ancre valley. I am afraid his eyes are out. I know you will feel this badly, as I do, maybe even worse. We all feel it, him being one of the bravest, most decent men any of us have known—sharp tongue and all. He was always so steady, even when things were very bad. He had a soft spot for you, Mark—’ Here several lines were obliterated by a scribble of maroon-shaded pencil. The letter resumed, ‘Shortly before it happened he asked John P. and me if we had heard anything from you and I was sorry to say we had not—’

He went on to talk about John Palmer, the last of our group other than himself, and about the food (of course), and how good it was to be out of the three-years-deadlocked line at last—ending on a cautious, but conscientiously upward note.

When I opened the kitchen door Edith and Emma looked up from the meat they were dressing, their faces full; healthy, happy, ready.

‘Edith, would you and Gordon like to use my old bedroom as a sitting room?’

Edith looked at Emma, whose face exhibited the first tremors of anxiety. Fine lines, like the prints of thumbnails, appeared at either corner of her downturned mouth.

‘I imagine Emma was keeping it as it was as some sort of talisman, but now that I’m back, there’s no need,’ I said.

‘Emma?’ Edith prompted.

‘Where will you sleep?’ Emma asked me.

‘I thought I’d take mother’s room downstairs, it’s better for my purposes.’

‘If that’s what you want, Mark.’ She glanced at Edith. ‘That arrangement would mean more privacy for Edith and Gordon.’

I went back upstairs and began to sort through my books, most of which I tied into bundles and stored in the attic, gradually undoing young Mark Thornton’s craving, demanding, accusing room.

Kelfie

I was fourteen when I began to see ghosts. Telling my grandmother about this was difficult, because of our StoryGame.

The StoryGame began, spontaneously, when I was eleven. One day in my third month at Intermediate, on a dull early May afternoon, I spent my last period sitting with my classmates, facing front, our desks all separated on a grid, listening to the teacher, a thin man who smelt of tobacco. He was pacing at the head of the class, turning a stick of chalk in his fingers, telling us how he had lowered his expectations of us. He wasn’t talking to me. It was maths, my best subject.

A friend of mine, sitting at the front of the class, was flushed with anger—I could see the backs of his calves growing pink. The silence in the room was not that of attention, but of indignation and dissent.

The linoleum floor had recently been polished and was striped whitely by reflected fluorescent lights. The whole room seemed arid and inhospitable.

Outside it was going to rain. Seagulls were coming to settle on the spine of the opposite roof, squabbling and fluttering in the darkness like bright flags, calling out ‘Rain!’, their cries neatly broken in the middle.

It was cold. There was nothing near me. Nothing engaging had happened all day and there wasn’t anything I particularly felt like doing at home.

Eventually the bell rang and I caught the bus back around the harbour in the rain. I found my grandmother in the kitchen, washing dust off the infrequently used chip-cutter, which Grandad bought her one Christmas (he had a secret fascination with kitchen equipment). She hadn’t yet cut the chips so I offered to peel the potatoes.

‘Either change out of your uniform or put on an apron first, dear.’

I put on an apron—which earned me an amused sidelong look—and sat up on the bench over the sink to get to work peeling.

After a pause of scrubbing and scraping I said, ‘I’ll tell you what happened to me today.’

She made a vague, encouraging noise.

‘In the last hour we had maths with Mr Findley. Have I told you about him? He’s thin. Everything about him is a little yellow, except his teeth, which are really white.

‘He’s always impatient with us, and the only reason he likes teaching maths is, I think, because it can go below zero into negative numbers—which is like going into the underworld, he says.

‘Today he got bored and suggested we play a game, but not a maths game. He told us to clear all the desks out of the centre of the room and to stand in a circle. We all figured we were going to play “murder” like we did a couple of weeks ago in music. But then he took Terry and went with him into the middle of the circle, and stood so that Terry was facing me and Mr Findley had his back to me.

‘Findley said, “This is an imaginative exercise. I want you all to be quiet.” To Terry he said, “Look at the window behind me—or out the window—it doesn’t matter which—”

‘“For how long?” Terry asked.

‘“A few minutes.”

‘So Terry stares out over my shoulder. I know I’m not allowed to turn around. I can feel the room getting colder as it gets stormier outside, and hear the sound of gulls coming to settle on the roof of the classroom across the quad.

‘After a time Findley tells Terry to close his eyes. Terry closes his lids and I can see his eyelashes—brown with gold tips—quivering.

‘“Can you still see the window?” Findley asks.

‘“Yes, its shape, green on black,” says Terry.

‘“Now, Terry, watch the empty shape of the window on the inside of your eyelids,” says Findley, “then imagine you see a figure silhouetted against the green light. The figure climbs through the empty frame, then steps to one side of the windows, out of sight.”

‘Terry starts shivering. Findley steps away from him saying, “You are alone in the room with it—it is crossing the dark room to you.”

‘Terry’s pretty nervous now. “Where are you going?” he asks.

‘“I’m not here.” Mr Findley takes another step backward, saying, “It’ll go away when you open your eyes, but if you open them before it touches you, then you’ll find you’re still in the dark room.”

‘Terry is obviously feeling really freaked out. He says, “I’m going to open my eyes.”

‘“You don’t need my permission,” says Findley, really angry.

‘So Terry opens his eyes, looks at Findley and says, “So what?” Then suddenly grabs his own arm and jumps sideways looking shit-scared! And Findley shouts, “It touched you! You’re in the dark room, you will always be there now!”

‘Then Terry just ran, pushing through us. But he didn’t seem to be able to see where he was going and he crashed into a desk and cut open his head. I went to tell the ladies in the office to ring an ambulance.’

My grandmother had stopped wiping the chipper and was frowning at me in concern and confusion.

‘When I was halfway down the stairs Findley leaned over the banister and called, “Kelsey!”

‘So I stopped.

‘“Kelsey,” he threatens me, “don’t you dare tell.”

‘I yell, “I’m going to tell, because you’re a witch or something!”

‘Then I know I’ve done the wrong thing, because his face goes tight and his eyes bulge. I notice that the top steps on the stairs are going all blurry. Then they slowly begin disappearing, step by step, like they’re being painted out by a brush dipped in invisible paint. I look down, but the bottom of the stairwell is full of rippling black water.

‘Gradually the disappearing steps force me to go towards the water, and Mr Findley is leaning over the banister with his face bright and hazy, like the sun through a cloud.

‘The steps go on vanishing, on a slow, soundless drumbeat. Till finally I’m on the last step, beside the black water.

‘Then the step disappeared and I fell in—’

My grandmother waited.

‘And that,’ I concluded, ‘is why I didn’t come home today.’

Several days later Grandma told me a story in return, and we began a regular exchange of tales, staged usually in the kitchen, sometimes to the detriment of Grandma’s cooking—particularly when it was her turn to tell the tale. Sometimes we were the stories’ protagonists, sometimes it was our friends, or imaginary friends, or invented people we didn’t even pretend to know. Occasionally we would, for weeks, in alternate sessions, pursue the fortunes of a group of characters—until, either bored or striving for effect, I killed them off.

When my grandfather was away, which he often was, working on the collections at the Museum in Wellington, Grandma and I would tell each other stories over dinner, and even late into the night on Fridays and Saturdays. And when Grandad was at home he would emerge from his study and come looking for us in the kitchen, to find us apparently standing watching the pot lids jump, turning to him as he intruded: dumb, disorientated and—in my case—resentful.

For Grandma and me the StoryGame was a project, entertainment, a private world (a world in which we were rulers). It changed me, made me comfortable with shadows, reflections, distortions, inversions, half-truths, with timelessness and contracted time, with dramatic postures and extreme emotions. It gave me a certain skill in the effective use of language, and a fearlessness about suspending my ego—because at will all my being could be called on for the performance of a story, the creation of lives that had nothing to do with the life of Keith Kelsey.

It was this last effect of the StoryGame that contributed most to my ‘seeing ghosts’, because I was in the habit of relinquishing myself to muse, mindless and quiet like a radio receiver open for signals. And eventually the signals came.

My first three ghosts happened under similar circumstances.

First.

It was night. I was in bed and near sleep. I turned away from the wall towards the room and, for some reason, opened my eyes and caught sight of something that it took me several minutes to make any sense of: a human silhouette right beside my bed and next to my face. It was a form more dense than a shadow, darker than a shape cut from black velvet, as airy and deep as a mirror in a dark empty room.

I blinked, stared, struggled to focus—but it was no trick of the light.

I panicked and struck out. It was no hallucination, no ‘air drawn dagger’—I struck out and my blow was resisted, with a firm pressure, like that felt when two magnets repel each other. My hands, feeling no substance, only force, slid off the shape. And then it vanished.

My second ghost, several weeks later, was less alarming. Again I was in bed and near sleep. There was nothing in my mind. I found myself lying on my back with my eyes open, looking at a figure at the end of my bed. It was not actually standing at the end of my bed—my sense of perspective told me it was further away than the end wall of my room, in ‘long shot’, standing as if on a rise in some space beyond the room.

It was thin and elongated, like an El Greco figure. Its skin was apparently made of dead leaves, rough, patchy and grey-brown. Though it was night and the objects in my room were barely visible in black and dark grey tones, the ghost was standing in dull daylight—a coloured figure in a black and white picture.

We stared at each other. I wasn’t afraid, or moved, or even interested—the responsive faculty of my mind was in suspension. I just watched, not analysing, or speculating, or even reacting, till it disappeared.

I saw my third apparition at night also, and at the edge of sleep. It was a small volume of radiant blackness, about half a metre long and thirty centimetres across. It was the same ridged, lumpy shape as a yam, and had two ‘eyes’, blurry grey patches, one in its middle and the other near its base. It occurred to me that this thing was a baby. It seemed to tell me, ‘I’m a baby.’ This idea amazed and delighted me, and, as soon as I registered these feelings, the apparition disappeared.

After this I told my grandmother. ‘I see ghosts,’ I said. Then miserably, ‘This isn’t a story, it’s true—I’ve started to see ghosts.’

She looked expectantly at me.

‘I won’t say anything more about it, because you’ll think I’m telling a tale.’

I said no more then, and she didn’t ask any questions. But several months later she asked me whether I still saw ghosts.

‘Yes—the other day, when you were sewing up that split in my jeans—’

‘Yes?’

‘And I was in my room, combing my hair, and I suddenly said, “What are you doing there?”—I wasn’t talking to the cat.’

‘I thought you must be. You sounded amused.’

‘I was pleased. This lovely wheel of light had just rolled up behind my shoulder and was taking a look at me in the mirror. When I asked it what it was doing it rolled away through the wall.’ I looked at her in challenge, and, when she didn’t say anything, told her, ‘They come and rubberneck at me now, it’s like the word has got round I can see them. A few weeks ago I saw one which was really surprised that I could see it—’

‘How did you know it was surprised?’

‘I felt what it felt—I felt its surprise—it was like it had seen a ghost, sort of.’ I frowned at her severely and, when she still didn’t respond, burst out, ‘All right! I’m going crazy then, but I’m not lying!’

‘I know you’re not, dear.’

Relieved, I was only able to stare at her sulkily and suspiciously.

She sighed and shrugged, her brows tilting upward above the bridge of her nose, her face at once pained and resigned. ‘I used to see what I called “ghosts” once too, when I was young. I suppose you could say you’d got it off me, but don’t blame me.’

‘I wouldn’t. I don’t mind—except it’s crazy and useless and—I mean, I saw a floating black yam with eyes and it was a baby! It’s all so immensely weird that I can’t hope to understand it.’

‘Yes, I know. That’s why I didn’t say anything when you first mentioned it—because I was having a hard time believing that I once saw “ghosts”. It is hard to remember and believe it when it stops happening, because there is no way of anchoring the experiences in ordinary life.’ She mused, ‘It is almost like it wasn’t something that happened to me. It was so irrelevant, and impersonal.’

‘You mean you were in a selfless mood when you saw them. I’ve thought about this. Ghost-seeing seems to happen during a sort of mindless state. It’s natural for me to see ghosts and know nothing about what they mean, since I’m not able to think about it when it’s happening, because if I did think about it, it wouldn’t be happening.’

‘Yes. That’s what it was like.’

‘And I got it from you.’

‘It’s not a hereditary disease, Keith, so don’t sound so accusing.’

‘But it is hereditary.’

She smiled. ‘Maybe. I’ve told you about my father, how he was an ardent, born-again atheist, not raised as an atheist, like you or me or your father. Well, he didn’t believe in God, gods, spirits, life after death. You name it, he denounced it. But once, when he was a little tipsy, when I was having a conversation with him, testing the water, so to speak, wondering whether I could confess to him that I “saw ghosts”, he said to me, “I don’t believe in ghosts—even if I do see them.”’ She laughed.

‘You didn’t tell him then?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Did you grow out of seeing them?’

She became solemn and shook her head. ‘No. I had a bad experience—I never saw them after that. I never wanted to. Later I suppose I got out of whatever habit of mind it was that allowed me to see them.’

‘What was the bad experience?’

‘I won’t tell you. I don’t want to frighten you.’ She took my arm. ‘Don’t ever get frightened, Keith. If you are picked on by things worldly or otherworldly, just resist—’

‘But it isn’t an “other world”, or the “other side”. I think “ghosts” are people in another time, asleep or daydreaming. Often, just as I think, “It’s a ghost!” I know they are thinking the same thing. Somewhere, sometime, I am an apparition—and God knows how I appear to people in that time. What kind of vegetable I resemble.’

‘Yes—but that’s not all, there are other things that happen which don’t fit your theory.’

‘Great. I can hardly wait,’ I said, apprehensive.

A few weeks later, on a very windy night during one of Grandfather’s visits to the capital, I woke my grandmother. I went into her bedroom and sat on the bed, tense, staring at the shapes that, with increasing noise, bustle and clarity, were flowing through the room.

‘I know they are there,’ she prompted, watching me, propped up on several pillows, her arms folded across her breasts, her eyes large and alight. ‘What do you see?’

Shivering, I told her: ‘They are semi-transparent, greyish and bony. They aren’t walking, they are being, kind of, washed through the room. At first I only heard them—like a sound-mirage from some faraway crowd. I can’t hear what they’re saying. They’re getting easier to see. It is like they are the shadows of people cast sometimes on a close-by surface and sometimes on something further away. They keep swelling and shrinking, and at the same time they are all running that way—’ I gestured across the room from left to right. ‘This room is full of people.’ I was trembling. ‘I’m so tired,’ I said, becoming, in a short space of time, so exhausted I was close to hysterical collapse.

My grandmother turned on the light and folded her bedspread over me. She picked up a book from her nightstand and began reading to me in a loud, cheerful voice. I recall jumping when she began, as if at an abrupt sound, then falling quickly and deeply asleep.

A week after this incident—the night of the ‘spirit migration’—Grandma brought me a print of the Australian painter Pro Hart’s The Release of Souls from Trafalgar. She gave it to me saying, ‘That’s what you saw the other night, isn’t it?’ In the picture a swarm of spectral shapes rose like smoke from the listing ships.

‘Yes, it was a lot like this.’

‘Do you still think it was “another time”?’

‘Perhaps. A terrible other time.’

Mark

On the same day that I was visited at Oatlands by Captain Green, I finally tried to write to Emma about Bellevue Spur. The newspapers at home had judged the assault a costly but brave failure. Like the abandoned Peninsula campaign, our people were told, Bellevue was not for nothing. Our mettle had been once again tested by stress.

Emma wanted to know what I thought. She wrote, ‘—the tally of dead and wounded was so high, surely it was an ill-advised attack?’

My attempts to explain Bellevue to my sister set in motion the process of remembering. When I began the letter I believed I could give a clear account of my experience of the attack, but I myself censored out the nightmare, dread and delirium; writing and remembering, and withholding memories.

Oatlands, July 5 1918

Dear Emma,

You ask me about the assault on Bellevue Spur in October of last year—yes, the ‘tally’ was high: two thousand and seven hundred men dead or wounded. Well, now that I am in England and less at the mercy of censors, I can tell you.

We all knew the attack would not go well. Ours was only a late attempt before the allied armies settled down to be shelled all winter. Perhaps we may have imagined that we—the Invincible Division—would succeed where others had failed. We might have believed that, if it was not for what we could see for ourselves.

I was running messages on the eleventh for Captain Green. The Dinks were laying cable in the forward areas, but, as usual, runners and carrier pigeons were out in force. While I awaited a reply to Green’s message, I spoke to an orderly at the Regimental Aid Post at Waterloo Farm. He told me that hundreds of wounded men from the East Lancashire Battalion had been discovered by the reconnoitring Rifle Brigade, left behind in No-Man’s-Land when their attack failed and the line withdrew five miles. He said, ‘We’re treating some in the shell holes where they fell, preparations for the attack just won’t let us get them back to the dressing stations. Some of them will still be out there tomorrow, when the attack begins.’…

(I ran back to my company—in reserve behind the Otagos—carrying a message that reiterated plans of coordinating our efforts in a leap-frog fashion with the other companies, and some remarks on what the barrage could be expected to do.

On the way I saw several guns caught in the mud, one surrounded by men piling wedge after wedge beneath its wheels, rocking it back and forth in an effort to free it. A little further along, the gunners were unloading shells from a tilting, half-submerged limber—setting off carrying them up the line, one at a time. Half-a-mile on another gun was being hauled out of the mud by twenty Maori Pioneers, several more of whom were trying to free the team of panicked, plunging mules.)

… The guns did not perform as hoped. Some never went into position, others, although in position, sank back into the mud after a few rounds, so their shells fell in the wrong range …

(The captains and lieutenants were standing under a sagging canvas awning outside the dugout. Green was holding a map clear of the drips falling from the rim of his helmet. He was saying, ‘Effective artillery support can’t be relied on in these conditions. The men will have to be twice as tenacious as usual.’ He glanced at me. I saluted and handed him the message. He scanned it, passed it to Captain Crawley and said, ‘That’s all, Thornton, return to your platoon.’)

… We walked to the jump-off point through rain and in complete darkness, falling into holes and hauling each other out. As we walked the enemy shelled us steadily. Most of the shells, even those that fell near us, buried themselves so deep at impact that, rather than scatter shrapnel, they showered us with mud …

(‘The barrage hasn’t touched the wire. Sergeant Travis had some men up there last night.’

‘I don’t want to know.’

Andy put his hand into his tunic and took out a letter. ‘Will you carry this?’

I took it from him.

‘Odds are—’ he said, and grimaced.)

… At the jump-off line we sat and waited, chewing on dry rations. Very Lights were going up continually from the ridges …

(Their radiance stuttering weirdly through the drifting bands of rain.)

… I wrote you a letter, Emma, and gave it to Corporal Price. It was the only letter I’d ever written directly before an engagement, but for once I couldn’t imagine myself emerging from the battle …

(‘I feel different from the other times,’ I said. Andy scrutinised my face. ‘You look different too.’)

… At Zero Hour (5:25 am) our artillery opened up and the first wave set off. After a time our barrage began to fall among us, instead of moving in a curtain before the advance …

(Calmly I listened to the shells whistling, and the sodden explosions—mud flexing and taking flight—realising these shells were our own.

Green appeared above us, striding along the line, his face mottled. He stopped opposite me and paced back and forth in a great rage. Although short-shooting was the cause of his fury, he seemed oblivious to any danger to himself. The Lieutenant came up beside him, equally exposed and unconcerned for himself—not infuriated, but gloomy and withdrawn. A strong wind picked up and the drizzle changed to a heavy rain.)

… Some officers ordered their men to fall back behind the curtain of shellfire, others told theirs to advance. Only some men received the orders; some retired, others went forward into the wire, the machine guns.

We met one of the wounded Otagos on his way back. He told us his officer had sent him with a message: ‘Men are dropping steadily, but our progress is satisfactory.’ …

(‘When did he tell you that?’

‘An hour back.’

‘And what about now?’

‘Now, I think, the ranks’ll be getting pretty thin up there, so you blokes had better hurry along.’)

… Emma, we knew Battalion HQ might make its decisions based on his report, which would be five hours old by the time it reached them. News after Z-Hour is always confused, conflicting and fragmentary—or just too late.

Towards noon I found myself alone in a shell hole with John Price. We had come up to the wire, thickets of it, yards deep, with only one visible gap in all the stretch we could see, apart from the huge beckoning gap of the Gravenstafel road …

(I heard Mac’s order from a shell hole several yards ahead and began to scramble up, but John seized hold of one of my legs. ‘There’s no need for us to get all congested, lad.’

‘Is that Blue Line past the wire, John? We’ll never get there!’

‘Then don’t be in such a hurry not to get there.’

We watched as Mac and a few others reached the gap and began to inch through. Machine gun fire sent mud up in fountains around them. One by one their bodies jerked into stillness.

‘Well—’ John said, morosely, then turned to me and kissed me on the cheek. ‘See how I do before you follow me, eh Mark?’ He clambered over the rim of the hole and was instantly blown back on top of me by a nearby explosion. He lay, with blood leaking from his ears and nose and the whites of his open eyes suffused red.)

… Most of our officers were killed or injured. Remnants of the Division lay scattered, hiding in shell holes. We had little clean water, no food. We lay low all day …

(I saw some men charge the gap where the road ran. Caught in the crossfire their bodies didn’t fall but, dead, were held a moment in the air by the vitality of bullets.

Later, John began to have convulsions, his legs kicking and arms drumming on the ground. I threw myself over him, listening to his grunts, and the breath hissing through his locked teeth. A warm stink rose from his body and he became limp. I put my hand to his mouth and felt a moist flutter of breath. I pressed my water bottle to his lips. Perhaps a little seeped past his thick tongue, but most of it ran out the sides of his mouth.

Rain was leaching the heat out of my body. My rifle was clogged with mud. A little sun in the centre of my chest kept burning coolly and steadily, like a light beneath the sea.

When I checked John some fifteen minutes later, I discovered he was dead.)

… I had to try the wire myself, Emma, but I didn’t get very far before something slammed into my helmet and I found myself suspended upside down in a shell hole, one foot entangled. There were two Otago men in the hole; one was nursing a broken forearm, the other had lost an ear. Their names were Patterson and Jones. I remember after they set me on my feet, I took out my journal and wrote another letter to you. I gave it to one of them, I can’t recall now which one—

The following day the Jaegers in the fortresses let us pick up our dead and wounded and walk off the field …

(A voice invaded my fever and thirst saying something about stretcher-bearers. I opened my eyes. Above me the sky swooped and bobbed like a kite before the wind catches it and carries it upward.

I slithered up to the rim of the hole and surveyed the land. Either side of the wire stretcher-bearers were at work. Men were getting up out of shell holes to walk off the field. There were six stumbling soldiers for each available stretcher. I watched their faraway figures, sinking to the thigh at every step.

I drew back and looked at the two Otagos, who peered at me out of muddied white faces, unable to say anything intelligible.

A gust of sunlight swept across the land. By it I saw the fortifications on the ridge, row after row of ferroconcrete pillboxes, and the whole hillside swathed in wire. Impossible.)

… Patterson, Jones and I floundered back the way we’d come. I gave them a shoulder each, being by far the fittest man. It took us hours to move a quarter of a mile …

(Again we entered a wilderness of rain and hail. I had lost my helmet and every drop sent a shock of cold through my skull. My lower legs and forearms were numb as though severed by sheets of ice at knee and elbow.

Patterson’s mud-caked head lolled on my shoulder. Once I fell sideways, dragged down by his weight as he collapsed. Jones and I crouched over his body, a heap of man-shaped mud.

‘You take his other arm—’ We hauled him up. He stared at us with the hopeless, uninterested gaze of a sick animal, said thickly, ‘The stupid bugger—built it on the edge of the marsh—where the water was lying not two feet underground—’

‘What?’

‘The—cowshed—’ He shook us off, whirling around to search for something in the curdling grey clouds—the shape or shadow of a sinking cowshed. Then he fell again, and again we wrestled him up and walked him on.

It cleared a little. We found a track with other men shuffling along it, and the stretcher-bearers, their faces white with effort, wading step by lurching step. We had gone nearly a mile.

Then I was walking by myself—Patterson and Jones had disappeared—jostled by a man at whom I peered trying to recognise the drooping body and languid face. He looked through me, then at me, croaked, ‘Mark!’

‘Andy.’

We staggered on. He was smirking at me, his free hand fumbling up my arm to grip my shoulder. His other arm encircled the back of a smaller, wiry man with blood clotted in his thick hair and leaking in watery rivulets down his neck. I pulled away from Andy and, moving around the other side of the Lieutenant, I tucked my arm under his.

‘We didn’t get to the wire,’ Andy said. ‘I found him in a shell hole on the way out, unconscious and half underwater. So I pulled him out and stayed there all night. I got him to walk this morning.’

The Lieutenant lifted his head and looked at me, then at Andy. ‘McCauley—this is Mark Thornton.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

He stared at me and nodded slowly. ‘I knew—’

‘Just a wee bit further, Sir,’ Andy coaxed.

‘—I knew the attack would fail.’ He waited for me to make some connection, then looked at Andy. ‘Because Thornton didn’t get—radiant.’

Andy nodded assent.)

… A body of men appeared out of the haze, moving vigorously through the mire, coming among us like warmth and strength themselves—the Maori Pioneers. Some relieved the stretcher-bearers, others hoisted into their arms the frailer of the walking wounded …

(He stopped before us and spread his arms. ‘Can I take this fella off you?’ Andy and I stepped aside and the Maori caught Given and lifted him, cradled like a child, then turned his broad back on us and moved quickly away.)

… Andy and I spent that night under a tarpaulin among the stretcher-cases in rows around Waterloo farm, wrapped in a blanket each, eating damp bread and sipping tepid tea …

(Rain was levelling everything. It was a recommendation to keep away. Cooling a world where men did not belong out-of-doors, swarming over the broken heaps of minuscule hills, over smashed veins of drainage systems and deep marsh water welling up.

My eyes fixed on the cracks of yellow lamplight around the sackcloth-covered entries of the dugouts—like rents in a wasteland backdrop of night, water, and algid, smothering mud—a torn scenery through which I could look into a world of yellow fire.

Two thousand and seven hundred men. A defeat. Impossible. Inevitable.)

… And, as you know, the Canadians finally took Bellevue Ridge—then lost it again four months later.

Green came walking across the lawn of Oatlands, his arm in a sling. I was astonished to see him here among the nurses, neat uniforms, hospital blues, and warm red dressing gowns, in the thick sunlight of a safe English summer.

He stopped above me and his smile compressed as I turned the pages of my letter to Emma face down on my knees.

‘Hello, Thornton.’

‘Sir.’

We shook hands. I looked at his lame arm.

‘I got this at Bapaume. It swelled up, all nasty with pus—but it’s on the mend now. How are you faring?’

‘Much improved. I’m to be transferred to Hornchurch next week.’

‘What luck.’

I studied his face—as though I was looking into the eyes of a young child, and it would cost me nothing of myself to do so. He flushed and looked away. I wondered why he was visiting me, what his purpose was.

‘Now tell me, Thornton, did you hear what happened to Given?’ he asked briskly, as though he was making an official enquiry.

‘Sergeant McCauley wrote to me about it.’

‘Such a shame.’ He spoke with more composure than might Gordon MacVey over a ewe found dead at lambing time. ‘I’ve known Given for some time, he was a junior at Christ’s College in my last year, and he was my solicitor before the war.’

‘Really? I didn’t know that.’

‘He has some relatives here, I believe, including his grandmother—a Lady Jocelyn. So he’ll be well taken care of for the time being.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Balmerlawn.’

‘Did you write to his wife?’

He cleared his throat and turned his gaze upward.

‘Yes, both Major Miller and I wrote.’ I watched his face, his throat flexing as he swallowed. Out of his power, yet in his presence, at last permitting myself to acknowledge how much I hated him.

I had disliked him from the beginning, and I suppose he sensed my dislike.

Shortly after we arrived at Sling, MacLean told us our new CO was making a kit inspection. The platoon threw itself into spit-and-polishing. At the appointed hour we lined up by our bunks, staring up and out into the middle distance, like statues lining a road.

As he came along the ranks with Mac and the Lieutenant, Green asked the occasional question and made the occasional remark. His voice was sharp, cool, narrow—a utilitarian blade of a voice. When opposite me he turned to address some comment to Given and, curious, my gaze moved down to his face. He was turning back to scrutinise me, as though I were a picture, fixed and lifeless. He was not expecting to be looked at. Of course meeting an officer’s eyes while at attention is always irregular and insolent—I expected him to be displeased, and should have turned my eyes up again instantly and submitted to the disapproval. But I was arrested by his face and forgot he could see me as, for a long moment, I searched curiously for what it was that was not right about his appearance. It wasn’t an ugly face, even with its arched lower lip pressing the top lip into a perpetual sneer. No, there was something troubling and unforgettable about that face.

Too late I recalled proper conduct and looked up into the air above his head. Too late, because I believe he knew I had seen right into his deficiency—that oddity in his eyes—that entity which was the soul inside his body: something small, insensitive and envious, like a wary, trespassing animal peering out the window of a house.

I saw all this without formulating it. All I knew was he was odd and deficient somehow, and that he suspected I had seen this. However, he didn’t say anything about my insolence, but went on along the row.

Green turned out to be a careful, level-headed officer, who tried to assuage problems created for the company by the inept Major Miller. But he never cared for any of us, and he was always hard on me. Because of him some of my letters arrived home so censored that their sense was in tatters, like a voice over a bad telephone connection, remote and broken. And, of course, before very long in France I was writing to stay sane, redeeming what I saw by saying it, and sending myself home with my words.

Though I have no evidence, I believe there were confrontations between Green and the Lieutenant about his treatment of me. Sometimes, when they were together in my presence, I could feel Given warning Green.

One night after Alan’s death, when I was sitting on the fire-step next to the sleeping Palmer, writing by moonlight on a small folded scrap of paper, Andy came and sat with me and I read him a poem, whispering its end:

… A voice says:

‘You know this place,

You have been here before many times,

Walking freely in and out again.

You know this circle,

This treadmill highway of flints and ashes,

These no-colour low skies,

This territory of despair.

Your own old footprints, crumbling at the edges,

Set and lifeless, lead you on.

Lead you out. For as always,

You will leave here.’

I say:

‘This time I stay.’

Then flare up at the laughter,

Like flame against a wall.

This poem is for you—

I walked out of the moment of your death,

A two-tongued liar singing:

I want to live …

I will never leave you.

‘Ah now, that’s sad,’ said Andy, plainly.

‘I suppose I’m ashamed of wanting to recover. It seems indecent,’ I explained.

‘But I want you to recover, Mark. And I hope you want me to. Perhaps we should just practise having hopes for each other, if we can’t manage to have them for ourselves.’

I stared at him. ‘Andy—’ I said tenderly—and, at that moment, the Captain came into sight, apparently materialising out of the revetted wall of the trench. He stopped in front of us as we stood and saluted. Andy, who was habitually self-possessed, said, ‘Everything’s very quiet, Sir, I just spoke to the sentries.’

‘Would you find Sergeant MacLean for me, Corporal.’

Andy set off along the trench. John Palmer remained insensible. Sleeping, he had the same immobility that I once thought distinguished dead creatures from living ones (recalling how I knew even from the window of my room that my favourite dog was not merely asleep, but more still yet, like a tent with its ridge-pole removed, somehow collapsed and containing nothing). That was before I came to know that soldiers in the line slept as though visiting with death.

Green stayed standing by me. I knew he had been listening to us before he appeared, and I could feel the contempt coming off him like cold off a slab of ice.

Before long Andy returned with Mac, and both the Sergeant and Captain disappeared into the dugout.

It wasn’t until after Bellevue that Green began to assign me more than my fair share of arduous and dangerous duties. The Lieutenant was in the Base Hospital recovering from his head wound, and Green had a free hand.

Later, I heard someone describe the winter of 1917 to 1918 as our ‘quiet’ winter in Polygon Wood. The line was deadlocked and it was the coldest winter yet. We continued to die. I made up strength in burial parties, and wiring parties. I helped the Sappers mend forward trenches. I stood sentry duty successive nights.

The Lieutenant returned after six weeks. He had changed. He was visibly depressed and detached (I don’t think this was new, just that he now took no pains to hide it). He didn’t seem to notice what Green was doing to me, and I didn’t call it to his attention. A week later I went missing one night in No-Man’s-Land, and Andy and John persuaded him to join them in looking for survivors of our wiring party. He came to find me. And, when he kept watch over me in the dugout—waiting for the end of the ‘morning hate’, when I could be taken out of the line—he said something that let me know he was on to Green (‘Green’s a better butcher than I am—he sent you out, I suppose?’), allowing me to believe Andy and John had informed him of Green’s persecution, which wasn’t the case.

I hated Green. And now he stood before me, waiting in silence, as I remembered. Perhaps he was waiting for me to show some sign of gratitude for his visit, some kind of politeness that would let him imagine I had never known he had persecuted me—or that I’d forgotten it, or forgiven him.

I was outraged. I decided I would not let him imagine I’d forgotten, or was afraid to accuse him. Instead I would walk across the barriers of his power, and confront him.

‘Why have you come to see me, Captain?’ I asked.

He looked surprised. ‘There are several of my men at Walton, and since Oatlands is right next door—’ he said, as though this was self-evident.

‘A gesture of kindness. I see.’

He cleared his throat and began, ‘I must say, Thornton—’

I interrupted him. ‘You should understand my surprise, Sir, since I’m not exactly accustomed to gestures of kindness from you—’

‘Now look here, Private—’ he began, indignant and inarticulate. And since I didn’t have the voice to talk over him I waited for the protests to peter out. Then I crossed all the grounds of pretence between us—because I was weak, voiceless, young, powerless, and it was my only chance. I said, ‘You want me to forgive you for trying to have me killed. Well I won’t. Yes, I know, and I know why, and I won’t ever forgive you.’

He stared at me in shock, then mustered himself for another show of indignation.

‘Don’t pretend. I believe you understand me completely. Your actions were considered and deliberate.’

He watched me in silence a moment, then said, coolly, ‘Are you planning to bring charges of misconduct, Private?’

‘No. It’s enough for me to be able to tell you I recognise you.’ I smiled. ‘I’m glad you came here.’

There was no colour in his face. Against his bloodless skin his hazel eyes had turned an intense shade of green. He said, the emotion in his voice as dazzling as a suddenly and rarely drawn sword, ‘How right you are. I detest you, Thornton. I detest your insolence, arrogance and superiority. Moreover, I can see through you. Others might hold you in a high regard—but I know your “courage” and “cleverness” are a fraud. Men like you, with your fake high-mindedness, lead others into all sorts of follies and delusions. You and your postures of heroism and tragedy—all sick and fake. You say you recognise me, well I know you for what you are. I was never taken in.’

Then he walked away.

Two months later, in October, I visited the Lieutenant at Balmerlawn.

The establishment was one of those English stately homes converted into a hospital for officers, and nominally run by the ladies of the estate. The lady of this estate was a god-daughter of the hawk-eyed Lady Jocelyn, Given’s grandmother.

A VAD ushered me through the quiet, carpeted hallways, and into a marble-floored conservatory. Here, among the cool sappy scent of the exotic flowers and ferns, and in the paled sunshine, the summer—all seasons—seemed checked and distant.

The Lieutenant was sitting in a wicker chair, turned away from one of the walls of glass. I wouldn’t have known him. His head and face above the cheekbones were swathed, a white dome of bandages. He was thin, his skin dry and slack, and he sat supine and fatigued, the unconscious confidence of good health gone from his body.

I thanked the nurse and went towards him. When I came close I saw he had picked several leaves off the basil plant beside him in a blue china pot. He lifted the crushed leaves in a cupped hand to his face, breathing in the colour green.

I waited till he sensed someone near and turned to me. ‘Who is it?’

‘It’s me, Lieutenant, Mark Thornton.’

He remained still, listening, the bandaged face uplifted, then said, ‘That isn’t Mark Thornton’s voice,’ like a doubtful Hamlet faced with the lying ghost. On the arm of the chair his hand uncurled and the crushed leaves speckled the floor. I crouched down before him, picked up the basil-scented hand and brought his fingertips up to touch the scar on my throat. ‘The wound—remember?’

He felt the raised knot of scar tissue, said, in a detached way, ‘Yes, of course it’s you,’ and took his hand away. Then he smiled slightly (or at least I thought it was a smile). ‘Your voice a medicine even for the blind,’ he said, and, when I didn’t answer, ‘That’s a quotation from your German philosopher; don’t you recognise it? I read the book before I sent it on to you at Walton.’

‘And my journal?’

‘Your illicit journal? No, I didn’t read that—I wasn’t game enough to decipher your handwriting. But if you mean did I send it on to you, yes, I did.’

‘You liked Nietzsche?’

‘Not always. Though some of it’s impressively poetic. But I had to negotiate my way around your underlinings. I kept wondering whether they would make you always read the book the way you first read it—or rack your brains trying to remember why this underlined bit was once more memorable and special to you than that.’

‘Yes, but—’ and I misquoted, ‘“My soul has been taught to say ‘today’ as well as ‘once’ and ‘formerly’, and to dance its dance over every Here and There”. So—I will remember how I felt.’

‘How convenient,’ he said, smiling.

Watching him, the words went on in my head, surging defiantly: I gave you the right to say No like the storm and to say Yes as the open sky says Yes, silent as light you stand, and you pass through denying storms—

The Lieutenant broke into this soundless invocation, asking, ‘Do you have any news of the platoon?’

‘Andy—Sergeant McCauley—was wounded at Le Quesnoy. A bullet in the thigh. He sent me a letter from Brokenhurst. Apparently the wound is very clean and straightforward, and he thinks he should be back at the front by the end of the year.’

‘So, who does that leave?’

‘Of the original C Company?’

‘Yes.’

‘John Palmer, Jardine, Armitage.’

He shook his head.

‘Sergeant Teasdale’s at Hornchurch now; he’s going home too.’

He sat; still, inexpressive, inaccessible.

‘Captain Green visited me two months back.’

‘Did he?’

I was about to say, ‘He came to see how I had received the news of your injury,’ but caught myself in time. Instead I said, ‘After I was wounded, when I was in the dugout, before I became very ill—’

‘Yes?’

‘You said, about Green, “I suppose he sent you out.”’

His hands came together and held each other. ‘Yes?’ he said again.

‘I imagine Andy and John told you what he had been doing?’

He averted his head a little, as though he had been looking at me and now would not meet my eyes, a superfluous habitual gesture of desired privacy.

‘Didn’t they tell you?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘No—I knew. I’d noticed.’

‘But you didn’t stop him.’

One hand went up and pressed his lips, as though he felt ill. All his face was now hidden. Past the hand he said, ‘No, I didn’t care.’

I stood up and walked away from him, to stand staring out through the squares of glass at the shrubbery, the sloped green lawn, and the willows on the riverbank.

‘Later I cared,’ he said, quietly.

I turned back to him, but stayed where I was.

‘Do you remember the day you saw me coming out of the line? You were on your way back from the Convalescent Camp.’ He paused listening, his blind head lifted. I didn’t answer him, but he went on, ‘I was running away. Just as I nearly deserted at home, when I returned from the Peninsula. Of course I realised that would be the end of Margaret and me—but I was afraid enough to do it. Then I got my commission, so I sailed.’ He stopped speaking, his face turned to where he last heard me, where I still stood, turning my hat in my hands.

‘Thornton!’ he called, as though he thought I’d gone and wasn’t expecting an answer.

‘I’m here.’

‘I had forgotten about you. And there you were all of a sudden, with the Sappers on the back of that limber, waving at me. I wondered what would become of you, so I had to go back to find out.’

‘Now you know.’

‘I don’t, I can’t see you.’ His mouth twitched up at the corners—an expression I had always thought signalled ironic amusement, but which I now found impossible to interpret.

‘I got so tired of all the new faces, each draft, getting younger and younger. After Bellevue there were only seven men left from C Company on the Pakeha. It felt immoral to be in one piece—’ He touched the bandage. ‘When I got this I thought: “That takes care of that.”’ He put out his hand. ‘Mark?’

I crossed the room again and gave him my hand. He gripped it hard. The curve of his lips formed deep lines in the dry skin flanking his mouth. Then his grip relaxed and he said, cheerfully, artificially, ‘So, from Hornchurch you’re off home?’

I felt myself sinking into something with as incomprehensible an appetite as the mud of Flanders. ‘Yes, Sir,’ I answered.

‘Good for you. Take care, Thornton. It was good of you to visit.’ He shook my hand.

At the door I looked back once at his slump-shouldered figure, in the blue hospital dressing gown, sharp elbows rested on the chair’s arms, hands hanging loose on thin wrists.

Infinitely diminished.

In the corridor I steadied myself against the wall. A young sister stopped beside me, her face exhausted, haunted, calm, and asked, ‘Are you all right?’

I nodded and walked on.

I would be no trouble. I would go home and do useful things.

What were we thinking, Alan and I, on the way over, when we wrote that article for the shipboard magazine, asking, apprehensively, romantically, about our possible deaths? ‘We are risen from our dead selves, need more be said?’ No more need. No, not need, not necessity. There is not necessarily peace or foreknowledge, grace or dignity or meaning. Death? Oh, is that all? Not confusion, despair, paralysis, pain, cold, disease, fear, loneliness, helplessness, uncertainty, noise, disfigurement, deafness, blindness, suffocation and insanity.

Had Alan drifted up from his dead self, like a bright bubble rising through dark water to the light?

Basil

Colour was coming back into the landscape, filling its shapes behind a film of shadow. At the foot of the hill, Hannah called out to Ellen and Jill. They stopped, two slump-shouldered figures in the half-light, against the white side of the camper. Hannah caught up, searched Jill’s pockets, found her car keys and threw them to me. I fumbled the catch and they skidded across the road. By the time I had retrieved the keys and taken shelter in the car, Jill, Hannah and Ellen had disappeared inside the camper and its lights were switched on—sanity and salvation for them in the yellow electric radiance, their lives secured like those of deep-sea divers rushed into decompression chambers after rising too rapidly from the depths.

The car’s glove compartment was open, revealing the usual clutter of cleaning cloths, tissues, sunglasses, a comb, a packet of life-savers and three pamphlets from the Alcohol and Drug Dependency Centre. I shoved everything back inside, shut the compartment and slumped in the seat with my knees against the dash. In this wedged position I stared upward out the windscreen at the bank covered in moss and wet ferns drooping like lax hands.

I drowsily tried to reshape the night’s events, beginning like a child proposing a new game (‘Say I’m a robber and you’re a policeman’— ‘Say I’m America and you’re Russia’).

Say I went up to a deserted house to take shelter from a storm, and something in me allowed this house to identify me as a person with some experience of the supernatural. Say I didn’t run away, but stood still and opened my eyes wider to see whatever Great Mystery was trying to reveal itself to me (like when, self-important and confident of my own cleverness, I was initiated into the mystery of those coloured cards on the wall of my first classroom: Aa Bb Cc … ). Say I stood then, in the path of the mystery rolling towards me, as She, Ayesha, stood before the column of fire in the caverns of Kor—

The whole bank blanched as a gust of wind turned the ferns palm upwards. The car shuddered. In the camper the lights were switched off.

There is a film technique that shows a figure’s movement through space as a series of overlapping, diaphanous after-images pursuing the solid body. As though people are threads burrowing through space—not here, now and complete, but trailed by shed selves.

Five weeks earlier these streaming selves of mine had caught me up and run, one by one, into me.

I was staying in the youth hostel at Okarito. There we cooked over the open fire and, at night, lit the room with candles. We got up when we felt like it, and washed in rainwater, crouching on wet planks by the tap of the tank. We went at low tide to wade out in the smoky-blue surf and pull mussels off the rocks for dinner. We drank gin around the fire on the beach, stumbling home in the dark over the heaped driftwood, stones and shelves of sand—back to the hostel to lie in bed watching the firelight on the smoke-stained planks of the high ceiling, teasing the mobile made of driftwood, shells, bones and shadow, while outside the sea gnawed the beach, and, sometimes, an awesome ominous thunder sounded as some freakish tide shifted boulders beneath the water.

I had lost my watch at some point along the 13k I hitched between Highway Six and the sea, but after three days I stopped trying to guess the time. Towards evening the thickly settled heat was diluted slowly by draughts of wind hissing through the screen of the one open window. Perhaps a small bird would perch, twittering, among the bruised flames of the flax flowers outside, and the sky would slowly turn glossy gold.

On my third evening I had a meal of mussels warmed in butter and lemon juice, then went for a walk. I was forced to turn back two thirds of the way up the path to the Trig—the light was fading and I didn’t have a torch to see myself back down the winding steps. Around me the beech forest was moist, silent, lightless. I stopped where the track crossed the spine of a hill to look at the sea—smooth, grey-green and smeared with silver near the horizon.

Wind plucked at the back of my shirt. It was all quiet, empty and kind. I had everything. I had enough.

I caught up with myself.

I didn’t want to move, but could imagine myself several hours ahead trying to feel my way down the twisting bush track in complete darkness. So in my imagination I sent myself cautiously forward, out of my moment of completeness, knowing that, in another day, I would have to hike out along the blond dust road through the forests and marshes. Knowing that I must be getting along—the leaves of the syringa near the hostel were like limp strips of green leather, and heat had crushed the colour out to the tips of its rods of blossom. My itinerary—Greymouth, Westport, Nelson, Motueka, Takaka, Totaranui—was like a shopping list of places I must acquire in the few remaining weeks of fine weather. So I went on, beating darkness down the path.

Yet, for a moment it seemed that all my contradictory past experiences had huddled into me, reconciled. I was briefly neither ghost nor haunted house. I had been admitted into myself, and the gatekeeper was the otherworldly twilight of a foreign land.

Now, trapped by slips, exhausted and afraid, I began to suspect that the events of my life, my shed selves, had not merely caught me up—peacefully, because of three quiet days of timeless living—but had overtaken me, and that my failures, a woman’s cocked shoulder and averted head, a drowned body, and a houseless valley, were all waiting for me somewhere further along the way.

Pursued by these vague, fatalistic feelings I dozed off, imagining myself warmed in one of those sticky, opaque spider’s nests to be found on the branches of gorse bushes—curled up, clotted in spider-silk.

I dreamed I was standing before the scene of a postcard my friend Neil had sent me from Dawson: the beginning of the Dempster Highway, a slow-curving, bulldozer-raised path of asphalt and gravel, defying erosion by scoria and snow, heading north thousands of kilometres across the tundra into the Arctic Circle, like Alaska’s Haul Road, servicing the pipeline. Tourists occasionally ventured along it in summer to photograph signs like ‘LAST PETROL STOP FOR 800 KILOMETRES’ and ‘CARIBOU CROSSING’, discovering what the wilderness was all about by recording what the Yukon Road Authority had to say about it.

As I stood looking at this immense, empty, useless landscape, behind me came the click and hiss of a soft-drink bottle being opened. I turned and there, by a service station drink dispenser, was Kelfie, saluting me with the bottle topped by a curl of grainy vapour.

I was pleased to see him. There was something I had meant to ask him, although I couldn’t remember what it was. I knew I had to detain him till I remembered.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

‘I’m going up the road.’

‘Soon?’

‘Yes.’

Behind the service station was a flat, wet, green country—very like Taranaki. Several Friesian cows turned their dark eyes and wet-whiskered muzzles towards us, their breath steaming—rich and warm, not like the vapour at the neck of the Coke bottle. I looked back at the snow-scoured landscape. ‘But there’s nothing out there.’

‘That’s what they’d have us think. And it seems reasonable—I mean, look at it—’

Highway, patchy tundra, mountains—a window into a cold, white other world where explorers might sleep in hammocks hung on rock faces, like babies in delivery by storks. ‘There’s nothing out there,’ I repeated.

‘But back there,’ he pointed behind him, ‘are one hundred and fifty-three thousand missing. The cemetery is still open, waiting for their bones to be disgorged. Out there,’ he pointed ahead, ‘the ground is too hard to bury bones. They couldn’t grow pasture over the battlefield like Mum putting on sticking-plaster: “There, all better, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”’

‘That isn’t a battlefield—it’s Taranaki farmland.’

‘There were battles in Taranaki. The bones were hidden. That cemetery is still open too.’

I heard the sound of a door opening and cold air engulfed us. I woke up.

Wrathall had climbed into the seat beside me. He slammed the door and sat staring out the windscreen at the early morning gloom. In the light from the window his face and throat were veiled by the shadows of raindrops, like a drapery of grey lace.

I was surprised at his audacity, turning up when we had quite obviously left the house to escape him. Feeling sleep-dopey and unsure about confronting him I settled for a cross between confrontation and mockery of confrontation. ‘Shoo, shoo—’ I said, waving a hand at him.

‘It isn’t your car you’re asserting territorial rights over. It’s Jill’s and Jill likes me and is concerned about my wellbeing.’

‘She may have been, but after your performance with the crowbar, I doubt it.’

His hands rubbed the arch of the steering wheel. ‘Yes, I suppose she’s disappointed.’

‘Quite.’

He looked at me. ‘I’m not going to go away.’

‘Obviously.’

‘And what about Ellen’s “performance with the crowbar”?’

‘That was different.’

The car smelled of wet wool and oilskin—like the inside of a city bus after five on an evening in late autumn.

‘Less than a week ago I was strolling along the beach at Totaranui with my feet in the warm surf,’ I said, probably in the same tone as someone might quote the end of Paradise Lost, about Adam and Eve, ‘with wandering steps and slow’ taking ‘their solitary way’ to the exit of Eden.

Wrathall smiled at this mournful remark and I eyed him suspiciously, wondering if, and why, he was now trying to put me at ease. ‘Where’s Kelfie?’ I asked.

‘I tied him in a knot and put him in the fireplace.’

‘Seriously.’

‘Where indeed.’

‘Is he still up at the house?’

‘He was when I left. He threw me out.’

‘How achieved of him.’

‘Very achieved. It was a private spell.’

‘What?’

‘He’s a witch.’

‘You’re warped.’

He laughed. His hands caressed the curve of the wheel again. ‘Think about it—the symptoms: nightmares, sleepiness, hallucinations, sleepwalking, jammed doors, inexplicable paranoia and jumpiness—’

‘Oh right. And I suppose he made you attack Ellen?’

‘No, that was me, I lost my temper. I used to think I didn’t have one.’ He became very still. ‘I keep imagining that nothing I do will matter, since nothing feels real and immediate anymore. Like a sad fantasy, everything is remote and irrevocable—’ He trailed off, eyes unfocused—an expression similar, but not identical, to one I had seen several times on Kelfie’s face.

‘Wrathall?’

He blinked at me, then said, ‘But the other stuff—that wasn’t me.’ He was like an old person dropping off to sleep mid-sentence, dozing for a moment, then waking up and resuming what they were saying. He turned sideways in the seat to face me, and the look of sullen impassivity, his usual expression, left his face. He gave a slow, bright smile. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said with gentle resolution. He savoured this a moment, then went on, ‘Do you remember Kelfie saying I locked the door so I could go off and bury the body?’

I nodded. ‘Though he said “iggry off”. “Iggry” is a funny old word.’

‘It is. And that is what I did. I didn’t lock the door—but I did go off to bury a body.’

I made a sound between a croak and a gasp, meaning I didn’t want to be told anymore.

‘I wasn’t crossing the Hill, I was looking for a place to bury Vic—I must say this, Basil, so don’t glaze over. I’m going to tell the police too.’

He took several deep breaths. ‘Vic was my lover. That was his idea, which might sound stupid, but you know how it is when someone feels strongly about you. You’re flattered and get caught up in their feelings. Only, he was always so unhappy, wanting someone to rescue him from everything.

‘He made me feel tired and weak and anxious—so I tried to break it off, but he got into emotional blackmail, suicide attempts, and doing bizarre things like calmly standing at my mirror cutting off all his hair, or filling up the sink with water and then putting his camera in it—he was a professional photographer—’

He was shaking now and struggling to control a stammer. Then, quite suddenly, he overcame his emotion and continued in a calm, almost conversational tone: ‘You know, I always believed myself to be different—sane, and trustworthy. I’ve had a good life, I get on with people; I expected to be able to cope with Vic, but he made me feel like a failure. And crazy. He was always telling our acquaintances how happy he was, and they were all applauding me for being so good for him. But it wasn’t true.’

He paused a long moment and the rain came into the pause murmuring like a prayer.

‘He turned me into this role. This fake, reactive, miserable person. The day before yesterday he rang up and said he had to talk to me right away—and I said I was in a meeting. But he turned up with bandaged wrists—such a cliché!

‘I don’t remember that we argued. I must have made him some coffee because there were a couple of empty cups sitting on the sideboard when I came to, sort of, and there was my cat with all the fur along her spine standing up in a ridge, sniffing his body—

‘I’m not saying I’m insane, but I must have gone—gone off. Anyway, it happened again when I tried to choke Kelfie—because he said I did, but I didn’t really believe him till I saw the bruises on his throat—’

‘What?’ I demanded, my voice high and tight. I had had enough. And at that moment I made the only clear decision I was capable of making: I wasn’t just going to go back to Saskatchewan to touch home-plate with my folks—I was going home.

‘Kelfie followed me. He offered to help me bury Vic’s body. I tried to hurt him. But he wasn’t afraid of me. For a while he just—took over—being rational and commanding. But he lost his nerve when he saw the body. I sent him away. I was going to do a Mr Asia and cut off Vic’s head and hands to bury them separately. It was a stupid idea, and horrible, but I had decided I didn’t want to get caught. I was sorry he was dead and horrified that I’d killed him, but I didn’t want it to ruin my life. Can you imagine that? How could I have thought I hadn’t already ruined my life?

‘In the end I didn’t do it, because when I took the bandages off his wrists—supposing that would make it easier—there were no slashes, only the old scars, and I was so disgusted with the whole thing—with his manipulations, with my craziness, and Kelfie’s monstrosity—that I just left Vic lying in the bush.’

He fell silent and watched me, waiting for a reaction, a verdict.

I began to laugh nervously.

‘I wanted to tell him … Don’t get hysterical, Basil.’

I continued to laugh. Everything was shaking and shimmering.

‘I wanted to tell Kelfie why I did it. In a way I imagined, superstitiously, that he’d be able to tell me what happened when I was blanked out in my living room—as if he was standing there watching. Can’t you just see him doing that? Being there? I didn’t want to confess to anyone. I just wanted to make him tell me the privileged information I thought he must have. I mean, why else did he say I’d gone off to bury the body, then turn up to help me?

‘But you know what he told me? My confession was the “wrong punchline for this joke”.’ Wrathall glared broodingly out the window. Then after a moment said, ‘If you don’t stop laughing I’ll hit you.’

This made me worse. It was like an earth tremor. I couldn’t reach the source of the laugh to stop it.

‘Look, have some respect—it’s my life that’s ruined.’ Then, as an afterthought. ‘And Vic’s.’ He waited another moment then said, ‘Basil, I’m only practising on you for when I tell the police. Telling you isn’t the same as telling Kelfie.’ I continued to giggle, and the muscles in his face stiffened. Edgy, but still in control, he said, ‘You know what I think? I think that house is haunted.’

I stopped laughing and stared at him.

‘Ellen tried to brain me with the crowbar, and I don’t think that’s at all the sort of thing she’s inclined to do.’

He paused, and in the pause the door beside me opened and Hannah squatted down on the road so her face was level with mine. She disregarded Wrathall and said to me, ‘I’m going to fetch that idiot kid, do you want to come with me?’ Then, without waiting for a reply, she picked up my flashlight from the dashboard and shoved it into my chest. ‘You’ll need this, it’ll still be dark inside the house.’ She stood up, thrust her hands into her coat pockets and waited. I exchanged looks with Wrathall then got out of the car and followed her. Behind us he turned on the headlights.

‘Bastard,’ Hannah muttered.

It was true that the headlights seemed less light to see by than suggestion of the hidden assassin about to use an automobile as a deadly weapon.

‘He can’t just pretend he isn’t there, oh no.’ She strode ahead of me up the track. I caught her up halfway across the field, taking long steps over the grass which was now lying in large white curls, flattened by the rain.

‘Hannah—’

‘I know. We all discussed it and we’ve decided that the house is haunted,’ she said, abruptly. ‘As for the kid, he is, if not “possessed”, at least “occupied”. Or so Jill reckons.’ She caught my elbow. ‘Basil, are you incapable of walking in a straight line?’ She hauled me along beside her. ‘Jill’s hang-up about the haunting was the idea that her first “ghost” could be completely irrelevant—because her daughter died a year ago—’

‘I know.’

‘Fair enough, eh? And I didn’t really believe in ghosts, but when it comes down to it it’s only science says they don’t exist—and science has also given us so-called multicultural IQ tests, and left brain/right brain theories.’

Mark

I sat for an hour on the Hill’s highest peak, recovering from the climb. My perch was one of the smooth marble outcrops which break through the Hill’s flesh like bones. I gazed down at grey jumbled stones with turf lapping up around them, as if stretched and clinging where the stone tore through into air. My eyes followed the wet seam of a stream, which levelled out into a swampy valley of flax. I watched Gordon work the new dog, half-a-mile down, its black, tan and white body streaking towards the sheep, then stopping to crouch low in the tussock (belated, the whistle floated up to me). The dog crept forward slowly, ears twitching and eyes intent ahead. While Maire, Gordon’s roan mare, grazed and furtively practised her old trick of lowering one leg down the abrupt shelf in the sloped ground she was standing beside so that her haunch would drop and her rider would be spilled off her back. But Gordon was used to this ploy and kicked her away from the edge of the shelf. The dog was silent.

I looked at the far side of the hill that hid the homestead, the pines my father and Euan planted when they were still living on Finnin flat in a pug clay hut. And I saw what cannot be seen from anywhere else on the Hill: the summit plateau of smaller hills, then the steep tumult of slopes, ridges, valleys and the dry thread of road looping downwards to the Upper Takaka Valley, Canaan; and the sea, which, seen between the hills, seemed to climb again towards its horizon, the only straight line in sight.

At the end of the hour a membrane of high grey cloud had covered most of the sky—its blueness filtered through lavender. The air was thin and difficult. I felt at peace and, in the high sparse atmosphere, increased inside my skin.

This was the world I had wanted to explain to Alan, showing him, telling him. This was what I had longed to run back to, out of the war zone, invisibly past the Redcaps, their revolvers and their law. This I wanted to share with him, when it was all over, and we stood together on the crest of Flint Peak. This I carried around inside me like folded wings. Except he died. Except I failed to carry and keep it.

The lavender sky thickened to blue-grey and began to settle. My hands cupping my crooked knees were the colour of old ivory; gold not of sun, but sickness. Yet, as I contemplated the scene, all that beauty, tidal and inevitable, came back into me again, until I felt I was taking it in with more than my own eyes. The space and height they had never known and were now looking at with me: Alan, Doug, Les, Bill; John Price—even John Palmer, alive and in hospital in Wellington, with his prickling scalp the tic under one eye—even the Lieutenant who might still catch the wind between his thin fingers and listen to Gordon’s changing, liquid whistle.

They were with me. They would taste all my meals and be warmed by all my suns, and all my work would be their work also.

I stood to accommodate something unfolding within me, full of calm, rebellious joy. I wasn’t ill, I was a fountain.

I would go back down to the house, take out my abandoned journal and write not, ‘And when my eye flees from the present to the past it discovers the same thing; fragments and limbs and dreadful chances, but no men,’ but, ‘Speak no further, convalescent, but go out to where the world awaits you like a garden.’

Under the still, heavy sky the stones gave off the scent warm fabric has, one sensed at the back of the palate. It began to rain; large drops splashed onto the warm rock and the air filled with the odour of steam and ozone. I set off back down towards the track beside the wet crease where flax grew, the riding track that followed the little valley, then veered around the pine-covered hill, ending at the fence of Emma’s flower garden.

Gordon on Maire, the dog following at a respectful distance, were disappearing around the home hill. From behind another ridge a hawk beat upwards through the rain, set its wings at a slant to the hillside and slid away down the air. The summit was empty.

By the time I reached the riding track I was wet through. It was pouring, the wind gusting this way and that, and the flax clapping. The bare earth of the track shivered white, and the hills were hidden in the folds of a phantom curtain. As I forged on, engulfed in a great sibilance of falling water, I began to feel a persistent sensation: I was not the last person on the summit hurrying to shelter. If I stopped and waited, someone would appear out of the rain on the path behind me.

I broke into a run, for as far as I was able, jogging then walking along the flooded path. There was no wind on the home side of the hill. I was very cold. Water dribbled down my cheeks and met beneath my jaw like a freezing chin strap. There seemed to be a heavy band around my head, as if I was wearing my helmet.

Then the white palings of the fence were beside me. The gate was open, the kitchen door open also, and Emma was standing before it on the porch. She ran out to me, head down, arms hugging a thick cardigan close around her.

She ushered me inside. ‘I only just missed you, where have you been?’ She didn’t wait for an answer, but ran out the hall door, calling back to me, ‘Come through to the fire—I’ll get a towel.’

I stood, dripping and shivering, in the quiet kitchen. Then, behind me, the cool silver light changed and a voice said, ‘Mark—’ I turned and saw, standing in the doorway against the rain, a body outlined by the streaming icy glow—a stranger in whose face eyes glimmered, quick, like water—saying my name once more in a strange, terrible, mesmeric voice. I turned my head involuntarily as Emma came in with the towel, and when I looked again an instant later the doorway was empty.

Emma unceremoniously threw the towel over my head and began scrubbing at my hair. I fended her off, took the towel myself and headed for my room.

I didn’t lay a fire. Instead I sat down in mother’s wing-chair, hauled off my boots and peeled off my wet socks. Then just rested, hugging my knees to my chest, trembling, filled with confusion and unease. My day had suddenly tilted and tipped me off. I understood nothing. Some time later Emma knocked and came in. ‘Mark, you’ll catch your death!’ she scolded. She came closer, and when I didn’t speak or look at her she decided that scolding was pointless. ‘Edie!’ she called, ‘come here!’

Gordon and Edith both answered her call and they all got me undressed, into bed, and then lit a fire. Emma was tucking the blankets in, flipping the mattress angrily. I freed one arm and took her wrist—simultaneously feeling the chill dryness of the sheets, the ache in my hips and knees, my head hot and ripening and that I was falling fast and far, bound to the rim of a great wheel, turning on its downwards swing.

‘I’m not ill,’ I told her, ‘I saw a ghost.’

Basil

With the fire out and the damp finally finding its way into the house, the room was like the space inside a mouth, breath held, warm and wet.

I could hear Hannah walking on the floor above as I went from room to room, finding them empty, then back to the room where the rumpled wet leather jacket lay by the hearth. Kelfie was nowhere to be seen, and the house frightened me more than ever. It was the world on the far side of the mirror; the one you can see looking past your own reflected face, where the titles on the spines of books are unreadable ciphers, and faces in familiar photographs, paintings, posters, are distorted and sinister.

I was striking the failing torch against my palm, trying to shake strength into the light, when I heard his voice saying my name, tranquil, and close at hand. I shone the torch around the room. It was empty. I went back towards the door in the hall, then heard the voice again, behind me, saying, ‘Basil?’ placidly. I concluded he must be in the outer room—the one with the forced window, and hurried through, only to hear, as I reached its doorway, his voice directly beside me, speaking out of the air.

‘Where are you?’ I called, spinning in circles, the flashlight swooping around walls, ceiling, floor.

On my third revolution, there he was, standing beside the extinguished fire, his hair and clothes shedding water.

‘Here I am,’ he announced serenely.

I dropped the flashlight.

He picked it up and passed it to me, despite my distrust and withdrawal, trespassing into my space. He held out the torch, saying, not impatiently but with amused challenge, ‘Take it.’

I took it and we stood, face to face, watching each other. He smiled, fierce and cheerful, full of fearless ease, impropriety and joy.

At that moment the house shuddered. I wondered whether it was the wind (though it had died down considerably) or an earth tremor. It was unnerving, but Kelfie seemed not to have felt it. He held my gaze.

After a minute I asked, ‘I suppose you know what you just did?’

He laughed disarmingly. ‘I didn’t do anything.’

‘Where were you?’

‘Here.’

I went to the door and shouted for Hannah.

Kelfie was laughing softly and excitedly behind me—his frail, pretty, unforgettable laugh. (And I thought of an experiment I did in grade-school science, ‘floating’ a paperclip on the surface of a beaker full of water, the teacher saying, ‘This shows us the force of the water’s surface tension.’ The twisted wire, not buoyant, suspended by nothing, precarious and improbable.)

When Hannah came in, Kelfie’s energy had already begun to dissipate. He looked tired.

She touched my arm as she went by, whether to congratulate or reassure me I couldn’t tell. She reclaimed Kelfie. ‘There you are. Good.’ Putting an arm around his shoulders she marched him towards the open window. I picked up his jacket and followed them, out into the misty dull-coloured morning—the sun up, but behind cloud.

Hannah was conducting Kelfie down the sloped lawn to the bricked tunnel. I saw him dig in his heels and say, ‘No, wait for Basil.’ I caught up and draped the jacket around him, holding the corners of its collar so that he was detained. He was really more interested in turning back to the house than in waiting for me. He was entranced. I shook him by the collar and he looked up at me. By daylight his eyes weren’t black or brown, as I had supposed. As I watched the light drew a ring of colour in one eye—dark blue.

‘I want to know,’ he said, his voice languid and slurred, as though he were drugged.

Hannah and I turned him again and impelled him downhill.

‘Leave me alone.’

‘No way. You’ve got mild exposure, I’d say, and we’re going to take care of you,’ Hannah said.

‘Don’t patronise me.’

‘That’s matronise.’

‘Look, Kelfie, you came back, you called my name.’

‘It was a mistake. You came into the house—’

We had slowed down to feel our way down the steps of the tunnel, our breathing and voices magnified and flat.

‘I heard you in the house and all my thoughts turned,’ Kelfie said, his voice still husky, but urgent, ‘like a school of fish turning before a faint pressure wave, a presence in the water,’ his mind jumping from low to high gear.

‘Come on kid, honey, you’re sick,’ Hannah coaxed.

We led him out on to the field. Halfway across it he said, ‘You had better go back through the jawbone gateway, or else you’ll stay in this world.’

‘It’s the same world, stupid,’ Hannah said, ‘I’d know it anywhere.’ To me she said, ‘How can someone have exposure and a fever at the same time? It’s plain greedy if you ask me.’

‘I’ll tell you something. Listen,’ Kelfie said, with expanding excitement.

‘God, it’s like being cornered by a talkative drunk trying to tell you his life story.’

‘When I was a kid—’

‘You still are.’

‘—I found a narrow, crescent-shaped gully, in the middle of some low hills, cut by a stream which emerged from the ground, ran for a little way in the open air, then went underground again. I used to spend a lot of time there. I made mud idols and put them in the branches of trees. I made shrines. When the land was sold for a subdivision some guys in bulldozers scraped the top off a hill and pushed all the earth into the gully, filling it up. They never climbed down to look at the tarata, hawthorn, mahoe, and the shallow brown stream. I always wanted to go back there—and it took me a long time to realise I could. Not only am I walking among the trees now, through sunspots on the stream, also I’m buried, still immersed and still unearthing myself.’

Hannah looked anxiously at me and said, ‘I guess some of us were in a bad way before the storm.’

‘Not me,’ I protested, thinking she was asking whether my behaviour over the past hours had been due to previously accumulated stress. ‘Only that last night was a bit of a blast from the past. This guy reminds me of someone I once knew—who was good at alternating charm and alienation.’

‘Fuck off,’ Kelfie muttered.

‘Frenetic little bastard,’ I said, under my breath.

‘I’m not, you know. I had a father—a pet, performing father, one of a kind—’

I nodded at Hannah. ‘I see what you mean.’

‘He died, he was thrown by his horse. No, actually he tried to shoot me, but killed himself instead. Except that isn’t true either.’

We reached the road, half-carrying Kelfie, both winded by the effort of hauling him down the hill. I held him up against the side of the camper while Hannah banged on the door. Then she opened it and stuck her head inside. ‘Hey! Where are they?’

‘Wrathall’s not in the car, either.’

‘They must have gone to the slip.’ Hannah hustled Kelfie into the camper, and despite her curiosity started to remove his wet clothes and scrub his hair with a towel.

He passively permitted himself to be half undressed and swaddled in a rug.

‘OK, lie down, troublemaker. Boy I’d hate to be a parent of yours.’

‘I don’t have any,’ he said sleepily. ‘I’m an orphan, an exile and an amnesiac.’

‘Ah huh.’

He looked past Hannah at me, his eyes half-closed and failing to focus properly. ‘I learned that when you were sitting in the hallway upstairs, whimpering. I had these buds of strength and certainty uncurling in me, like ferns. I told you it would be all right. I meant that it would all be all right always. But then this voice said—like—Cry! What shall I cry? All flesh is grass and the goodliness thereof is as of the flower of the field. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, which is OK—but the voice also said we are in exile forever and we are all already dead.’

‘I wonder if he knows he’s raving.’ Hannah was staring at him with the still absorption of speculation.

He closed his eyes.

‘I don’t think he’s feverish, more like hysterical.’

‘I want to find the others. Do you think it’s all right to leave him?’

‘I’ll stay, at least till I’m satisfied he’s not going to—’

‘—cark it.’ Hannah jerked the blanket up under Kelfie’s chin, then headed for the door. ‘Probably the MOW have put in an appearance.’ She waved and left.

I leaned over Kelfie. ‘Are you asleep?’

His eyes opened a little, slitted and dark. ‘You came to find me,’ he said.

‘We did.’

He smiled. His face was softened by tiredness, and radiantly pale. And, because he looked dreamy and defenceless, I told him, ‘You remind me of someone I knew, someone who died.’

‘I’m not really anyone who died,’ he replied, nonsensically.

I went on, caught up in some kind of confession or exorcism. ‘I never thought I’d meet anyone even a bit like him. I thought he was original. Yet, at the same time I had a morbid fear that he would, sort of, turn up again, because in a way I was responsible for his death.’

He watched me. I had his attention now.

‘Do you know anything about Tarot cards?’ I asked, then blushed.

‘I have a Waite pack. I read them. I mean, it’s something my flat does.’

I gave a silly laugh, then asked the question I had been unable to remember in my dream. ‘What card would you say might represent you?’

The awareness in his expression sharpened, although his face didn’t move. ‘Right now? Well, I guess I’m the Four of Swords: Repose, rest after battle, sanctuary, convalescence. Isn’t that a disorienting question to ask someone you think is hysterical?’

‘You’re not hysterical now. And you haven’t really answered my question.’

‘You know the answer.’

Again I felt an irrational start of superstitious fear. ‘The Five of Cups? The Five of Swords?’

He freed one hand from the rug and traced a horizontal figure eight above his head. ‘I’m the male Querant, of course. I’m the Magician.’

Jill

I was walking along an interminable straight street which I knew was in Auckland, looking for an address in the two-thousands. Unfortunately the house numbers counted up one side of the street and down the other, and since I couldn’t recall whether the address was an odd or even number I couldn’t even be sure I was heading in the right direction.

I was carrying a suitcase which I was supposed to deliver at the address. I had been told it contained some undeveloped films shot by Frances Taylor in the late eighteenth century. Even, I was told, thirty-six shots in Kodachrome 64 of the storming of the Bastille.

Eventually, very tired, I sat down on the white cement path and opened the case—a fraction at first, fearing to damage the film, then wider—to find not a collection of small black plastic canisters, but a single book, largish, with a worn, stained, red cloth cover.

Knocking and voices interrupted my dream. I woke lying at a tilt on a bunk in the sloped camper. Ellen and Wrathall were at the open door.

‘—waiting for a bulldozer to clear the slip, but if we want to cross over they’ll help us to get in touch with anyone who might be missing us. I thought Jill might like to—’

‘I’m up,’ I interrupted them.

‘Jill, Wrathall says there are road workers and cops at the small slip. You must send a message to your sister—I guess it’ll be a while before the road is clear.’

‘Have they found your car, Simon?’

‘The first thing they asked when I went along there was what I knew about it. They’re short of manpower because there’s a bridge out further north.’

‘Has the storm been declared a disaster?’ I asked, sounding impressed and excited despite myself.

‘Yes. Wrathall, is this seasonal or what?’ Ellen was trying to match up the two lines of Velcro on her parka and getting them hopelessly crooked in her haste.

‘No, this is unusual. There are slips on the Hill every winter, but nothing like this—the Civil Defence are out, apparently.’

‘Oh, a bona fide disaster!’ Ellen sounded as though she thought the status of the storm had vindicated her whole experience of being trapped on a closed road, as though all our difficulties had been sanctioned by the ‘State of Emergency’. ‘I got snowed in with a school party in 1976, in the Lake District, but that was boring, except when we had to slaughter a sheep.’

Wrathall turned away from the door. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Hannah will guess where we are, I suppose?’

‘Yes, no problem.’

The collection of vehicles, flashing amber and red lights across a gulf of misty air, was at once alarming and comforting. Road workers wearing yellow PVC rain gear were producing picks and shovels from the back of a truck, preparing to clear one lane so that our vehicles could escape. There was only a strip of roadside clear at the edge of the downhill bank—the frayed, muddy hem of the slip was marked by the tyres of a bike: where Kelfie had crossed. He had driven onto the stretch of closed road after the slip and landslide.

As we approached, a dark-haired woman in a hard hat put down her radio and waved to us. All the workers stopped what they were doing and waited for us to cross. And, for a moment, where there had been the cough of static, and voices answering voices on radios, there was only the sound of foliage dripping, stones rattling in a small stream, and a bird calling out in alarm in the bush above.

Then the hillside above creaked hugely and, with a loud tearing sound, a large mass of trees and earth began to slide towards us, at first intact, like a ship on a slipway, then cracking, crumbling and churning downwards like a collapsing wave.

We ran back along the quaking road, pursued by a sodden, thumping rumble.

I was probably well clear before I was able to stop running, and when I did I saw I had outrun both Ellen and Wrathall. Wrathall was already walking cautiously back towards the edge of the landslide, while Ellen was standing with her arms wrapped around her head, watching him.

On the far side of the subsidence there was confusion. There seemed to be fewer vehicles than before, and their relative positions had altered. A black-and-white patrol car was pointed nose-down over the edge of the slip, and the officers to whom it belonged were shouting at a group of road workers who, with no thought for their own safety, were clambering across the raw clay beneath the suspended car.

Ellen joined me, her face white. ‘Someone got swept away, I think.’

Wrathall disappeared over our side of the slip. We listened to the shouting and the sound of settling earth.

‘Do you think we should help?’ Ellen asked.

‘I’m afraid.’

‘This hill doesn’t like us.’

‘It wants me to stay on the other side of it.’ (Giving warnings—like the rainbow in the film Kagemusha. On the Canaan side of the hill, where it seemed I was being told I belonged, was the farm, my husband’s house.)

I began walking back towards the slip, deciding to cross over before anything else occurred to prevent me. No longer tired, afraid or angry—just fed up.

Ellen sighed fearfully and followed me.

The three road workers and Wrathall reappeared climbing the far side of the slip, helping along a very muddy, shaken man.

Ellen and I left the road and picked our way carefully down to the wet trough of the landslide. I glanced up at the long raw tear above us and remembered a similar view from the window of a Railways bus on my first trip down the West Coast, peering up the mountainside from the crook of the road, at a broad path of boulders, a mile-long torrent of stones, snagged by the occasional old beech tree, starved of rain, grey and tattered.

The slip gave me the same sensation. We were caught between the thighs of a sleeping giant. Or we were air, about to be turned under the earth falling in the wake of a great, invisible plough. Our mountains were poised to break over our farms and cities, washing them all away in a slow green-white swell.

Kelfie

Some of the road workers had come up the hill in a battered dark green bus, appropriated from the Railways depot at Motueka. It took us back downhill, the six of us, and the engineer who had been swept away in the second landslide.

Basil laid me down on the bus’s back seat, wrapped in a cocoon of blankets. He sat beside me, wedging me in, and cupped his warm hand against my cheek and jaw.

Throughout our orderly and anti-climactic rescue I refused to come to. I knew what was happening, but was interested in none of it. I stayed submerged, listening.

Nothing the ghost had said could help me. His story contained no arcane knowledge, no secret remedy or salving spell. He thought his shadow was the man-sized mouth of a bottomless pit. He thought he had been cheated, coming to the world and expecting it to reflect his love, his longing for a place and purpose. He showed me his catalogue of terrors, and to me they seemed purely personal, and measurable because complete.

Ours is the nightmare none can own, of time closing in our collective faces. It’s the script that has the tough guy say, ‘You’re history’. All history. Not subject, finally, to any science of the past. We have our lives, and may have our gestures of defiance, but what are we to do?

We may take a drive up the coast at Anniversary Weekend, and cool our wine in the rock pools of Pukerua Bay, then zoom around the backroads all night with the windows down. We may find ourselves at dawn, watching the tribe of wildcats in their nests of grass above the tip, all sitting still, eyes closed and faces turned to the sun, ignoring us as though we don’t exist; absorbed and self-sufficient. We and the cats are all there to see the men arrived to burn a truckload of last season’s unsold high fashion from the shops in town, colourful, unworn clothes, destroyed so next year’s styles will sell for the right price.

We may assert ourselves by walking out on a prejudiced lecturer into the six o’clock Thursday night darkness, all stopping at the jutting elbow of the Student Union balcony to argue about what pub to go to. While, down in the city, in the layers of little worlds in high-rise offices, we can see the tired cleaners—women, Polynesian, middle-aged, with their kids doing the cooking at home (if they’re lucky) while they perform the nightly drudgery for white bread and butter, two kilos of mince, cigarettes, and a new pair of sneakers for one of the kids. Drugged by tiredness, pushing their industrial Telluses under the bright, grilling lights. While, over all, the Westpac sign smoulders like Blake’s sick rose.

We may have sat in front of the TV in our living room at the flat—Sue squatting on the floor pinning a shirt pattern to silky purple cloth, Michael with his fingers linked behind his head, buried in his hair, so it wouldn’t dry flat at the back, Andrea writing out a fair copy of a final essay from its third draft (her favourite course, but she didn’t hand it in, so failed)—all listening to one of President Reagan’s hero speeches. Listening to him lying in a resolute manner, with all the proper pauses between his weighty clauses, about how America is making the world safe (for capitalism, starvation and war)—unable to answer back.

We may feel dishonoured by the things we have no choice but to tolerate, like the decisions of the world’s owners: faraway, lying, mean, monied, loveless—who can change everything here, in our world, the world outside the television: my hand, the cup in my hand, the taste of the coffee, every object in the room, the grass in the garden, the colour of the clouds—so great is their power. They are the walls of the room, its doors and windows; they are all its mirrors. What we think we are, and think we want, they show to us. We are commodities and consumers; our work in the credit column, our needs in the debit. But it’s their ledger, and all of us are born into perpetual debt. Our lives are postponed, we’re told ‘all in good time’ (whenever good time is). We are to work, and secure security, while all around us so many things signal, with increasing urgency: ‘Death will surely come.’ Noun, verb, adverb, intransitive verb.

Until, one night I’m woken by the sound of a jet engine, magnified, echoing off the cloud cover. The sound is a premonition that both beckons and warns: Come here and keep your distance. I throw off the covers, and go to my window. In the moment before the wind comes the whole city hunkers up and fills the window; all its intersections open, doors locked, cranes poised, with all its businesses, hotels, houses, streets—and, at its heart, the Carillon; floodlit, glowing and melting, slick like ice cream. Then the city erodes from a freckle of fire, like a film jammed in a projector. My room falls end over end, intact—my body and the furniture caught for a moment in a thickening resin of compressed air, about to be shredded and dissolved in fire. But, the instant they appear, I tear the flames away from my body like rags and, displacing myself through time, sit up in bed with the jet’s roar fading, tree shadows like smoke against the window, and my own face—by the green glow of the clock’s digits—reflected in the glass, unfocused and defenseless.

Death will surely come.

Yet the sitcoms tell us that by application, personality (and good looks if female) we can all succeed (and no longer have to cut the bits off the onions and potatoes where the rats have chewed them). And the ads tell us that if we drink the right coffee we’ll become successful professionals or happy labourers.

It has been said that too much knowledge engenders faithlessness. Yes. I have heard the voices at the sidelines of protest marches: ‘Dumb Cunts, Wankers, Bloody Queers, Bull Dyke Bitches, dreeeeeeeamers!’ I have heard the reports on radio, and TV. I’ve read newspapers and supercilious magazine articles: ‘—cultural manifestations of public feeling are not very hard to read, but people are a lot more complicated than the things they produce to represent them. No film, book, play or game ever tells how seriously we take even our own ideas. It is possible that many of these works merely indicate how the public believes it ought to feel, or are part of the eschatological tendencies of any age—’ The proponents of ‘reason’, suggesting their reasons.

While society sits getting senile playing Patience with money. While meaning yields and yields as if we are all falling through the clouds, fumbling for the ripcord. Till we know there is no faith, none to have or keep. So we don’t get on with our lives because there is a monster waiting for us, around the next corner. And we can’t know what we want, because we don’t dare want. We are smothered by huge, nebulous enemies: expedience, indifference, waste. Injured and incomplete.

That was what I wanted to say. I’m not hungry, uncomfortable or ill. I’m not imprisoned, crippled or homeless. But it is night already, and our house did fall down.

I opened my eyes briefly and saw the raindrops trembling on the glass. The bus was moving. A bar of sunlight slowly scanned my body. Above, the hills swung into sight, dark, but for one ridge veiled in a golden gauze of mist.

The others were near me, talking with the lazy gaiety of people who have been in danger and now are safe. It was out of their hands, and they had only to sit in the bus and wait to arrive. Their voices, despite everything, still full of colour and energy.

Mark

I woke in the night struggling to draw breath, the fire still burning brightly in a vacuum—laughing as I lay gasping, unable to call out. There was no sign of dawn. It may still have been before midnight. Perhaps Emma was still awake.

I fumbled for the small brass bell on the dresser, and as I moved hands seemed to catch at me from behind and pull me back onto the pillow; a cruel, powerful grip on my neck and shoulders.

My own hands were numb at the end of my arms. For all my effort to breathe, only small scraps of air teased the top of my lungs. I struggled silently, my body becoming rigid, tangled and interred in the sheets. Red curtains closed around the chamber of my sight—their own colour cancelled with the light.

Though the room was gone I could still hear the fire—a wet log burning, hissing sap, fluttering tiny concussions of flame—ravenously singing through my insensibility.

Air set stiff in my throat, my mouth, like an inflexible mask over my face.

Far away and muffled my world went on ringing, like a bell beneath the ground.

Part Three

Jill

When the power failed I was reading. It was late evening and I had switched the television on for company, its volume turned down so low I could barely hear the murmur of accented voices. I was rereading one of the Georgette Heyer books I’d enjoyed so much in my teens—a well-worn copy from the rental section of the local library. The house seemed circled in a ring of silence, there was no wind, and only a light drizzle, glittering on the windowpane through a gap in the curtains. The trees were still, the road empty, and my nearest neighbours a kilometre away.

Then, for no apparent reason, the lights flickered and failed and the picture on the TV screen shrank and was shut out by a valve of darkness.

I found some candles in the pantry and fastened two to saucers in pools of their own melted wax. Back in the lounge I placed the candles at either end of the coffee table and, sitting cross-legged on the sheepskin rug, I continued to read.

After half an hour the warmth had begun to leak out of the room—my small capsule of comfort punctured and deflating. I’d reached a point in the novel where its story couldn’t take me in and contain me. The cold, quiet, and darkness seemed to suck both the heat out of my body and the patience out of my mind. I laid the book face down on the floor, looked around the room for something with which to occupy myself, and settled on cleaning out the two document drawers in the sideboard. I slid them out and sat back on the rug, sorting through their contents: old letters, guarantees, raffle tickets from raffles long since drawn, receipts for paid bills, empty chequebooks, bank statements, instruction booklets for cassette players, juice-makers and calculators, stationery, packets of shoelaces, hat-elastic, and many crumpled sheets of paper, miscellaneous notes, all of which I carefully unfolded and read.

In doing so I found a story of Nicky’s—written on a sheet of paper torn from a school exercise book, covered in close printing on either side. It was entitled Going to Heaven.

Mandy waited nervously at Limbo for them to decide whether she should go to heaven or hell. She could still remember how that ladys car had shot around the corner in the wrong lane but not what happened next. ‘I suppose there was a crash’ she thought. ‘I wonder if the ladys here.’ She looked up from the book she was pretending to read the room was dark outside. The block printing on the electric lights which stood on the platform said LIMBO. ‘Modern station’ she thought ‘but heaven and hell arnt modern the station master said.’

She walked out to the place where the line to hell went a few feet along the ground then shot into a dark smelly tunnel. The one to heaven went up into the sky bordered by stars to show the way and disappeared into a dark raincloud.

The clock on the shelf inside the station said ten oclock and the timetable said the trains would leave at midnight. Mandy had been told all about the trains by the station master. The devil drove the hell bound one and the boiler had blood in it instead of water and two black cats sat on top of the train and white ones on the heaven bound one. ‘Of course’ thought Mandy ‘thats unfair. Why do the black ones have to be the ones that ride the hell bound train. Black cats are just as nice as white cats. But of course these arnt just cats. There arnt cats that are eva all good or all bad.’ There were cats at Limbo too just nice normal cats a grey and white striped one that belonged to the stationmaster and a ginger one that stayed around to get fed by the angle who drove the heaven bound train. There was a dog too.

Mandy couldn’t see any signs of life anywhere. Minutes ticked by like hours. ‘I wish there was someone else here’ she thought—

Shackleton came in, chirruping, and trotted towards me, his feet sinking into the lambswool rug, clean lances of candle flame reflected in his eyes. I put out my hand, cupped, and he tilted his head into it. His fur was coarse and cold with rainwater. I continued to read.

She didnt know how the time past but it did. Then with a toot both trains arrived. The hell bound one was black and scary. Its joints were not oiled but smeared with blood and it squeaked all the same. The carriages stunk of dead things and it wasnt lighted. The heaven bound one was the colour of the night sky with lighted windows and a rather nice smell hung about it.

The moment the trains came people who Mandy hadnt seen before started rushing around doing things. Some laughing some crying. Some shouting instructions and some just watching like Mandy. Plus one eating. The ginger cat—

I rummaged through the drawers looking for the remainder of the story. It wasn’t in either. I got up and continued to search through all the shelves and drawers in the lounge, dining room, kitchen, bedrooms—even going so far as shaking pieces of paper out from between the leaves of books.

As I went into each of the dark rooms I touched, forgetfully, all the light switches, so when the power came back on every bulb in the house lit up and the television flowered sound and image—the twelve-fifteen closedown, ‘Hine E Hine’. Shackleton, sitting between the paled candles, cocked one ear back in disapproval, startled by the sudden brightness.

If the story had been intact I would have read it through a few times, missing Nicky, probably cried a little, then put it away in my bag so that I could make copies of it next time I went to the library—not so much to have something I could read to remember her by, but because even a child should have her small achievements secured against ruin.

Without its end, the story gained dimensions of meaning which, finished, it would never have had. A narrative left in Limbo, whose setting was Limbo, an after-death story by a dead child. A story which, like the railroad to Heaven, vanished into a dark cloud.

After my first visit to Dan at Hanmer Springs in May, his mother and I had lunch at one of the local restaurants. She organised me into the meal, selected a table by the window, and told me what I should order. She had already sampled the menu, having visited Dan twice before.

While Dora fussed over me, demonstrating her propriety, efficiency and concern, I sat staring out the window at the white wooden frontage of the sanatorium. Dan had looked unwell, yet assured me he was better. He wasn’t telling the truth, but was being dishonest in a polite way as if his obvious evasiveness should not upset me. He seemed more distant than when he was drunk and abusive. Though I could, at a stretch, imagine him well and whole again, I was having great difficulty visualising how he and I could ever live together comfortably or productively—as a childless couple—which we had never been.

Dora was saying, ‘You look thinner, dear. You should take better care of yourself.’ She tapped the table by my plate, telling me to turn my attention to the food, then asked, anxiously and persuasively, ‘Hasn’t Dan improved? Don’t you think he looks better?’

I was incredulous. ‘You’re forgetting that I haven’t seen him since March.’

‘Of course. I’m sorry.’ She was embarrassed and taken aback, but not distressed.

I dropped the fork back onto my plate. It lay, handle wedged into a sculpted dab of browned mashed potato. ‘Last time I saw Dan he was half-dead, for Christ’s sake.’ I glared out at the swimming sun and shadows under the grove of trees along the centre of the square. ‘Don’t you know that he wouldn’t let me visit till today—’

‘I’m sure he had his reasons.’

I looked back at Dora. Her lowered eyelids, beneath the arched, hollow brow bones of old age, made her face seem contemptuous and secretive.

I retrieved the fork and wiped its handle on my serviette. ‘Dora, can’t you see how changed he is?’

‘Nicola’s death.’ She glanced up, her eyes filling, and picked up her napkin to dab at the reddening end of her nose.

To her it was always only Nicky’s death, never his drinking, that changed Dan. Yet there had been times when I couldn’t bear to look at him, afraid to see how he had altered. Those times, when he was drinking, but before he was drunk, and he might be making what, in content, was ordinary conversation, except his voice would have that particular tone—bravado and aggression—and I would not look at him, afraid the strange shadows had come down over his face. How could I explain to his mother, his champion, that when eight months after he started drinking heavily he shaved off the beard he’d worn for the past two years, his face, beneath it, had changed so dramatically that it was as though something had been substituted for my husband—an adult changeling.

I caught her gaze. ‘I wish you would tell me whether he still blames me.’

‘Blames you, Jill?’

‘He said to me, more than once, that he blamed me for Nicky’s death. That if I—’

‘I’m sure he didn’t mean it.’ She attempted to catch and curtail my anger.

‘He mightn’t have meant to say it, but I believe he thinks it’s my fault. Sometimes I feel it is my fault. He said, “If you had been watching the child more closely when it happened.” Well, when it happened I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to see how I could change my hairstyle with styling gel. I never told Dan that, because I felt so bad about it—Nicky was in trouble and I was experimenting with hairstyles. But I don’t suppose it would have made any difference if I was watching TV or vacuuming the floor.’

‘Jill—’ she began, firmly.

‘He said to me, “I suppose you were shut up in your studio, painting.”’

‘He’d probably been drinking, dear. He’s had a nervous breakdown, you know that. You can’t blame him.’

‘I do blame him. I blame him for what he chose to say. Since I’ve begun to get over the—battle fatigue—I’ve got furious remembering things he said.’

‘He’s ill, dear!’ Dora chided. The ‘dear’ pure reflex. She added, ‘I think your bitterness is a little unbecoming.’ She lapsed into an angry silence and began searching for a handkerchief in her bag.

‘It’s the way I feel. But I know the Morgans think my feelings can wait their turn and only enter at the appropriate moment in a “becoming” fashion—no, you listen to me—’

With a sound of indignation she had got up to leave. I caught her by the hem of her jacket.

‘I don’t have to listen to you insult my family—’

‘Your family? Anyone would think I was an alien in your country, a bloody refugee behind the wire with my bowl held out! My marriage into your family has taken six years of my life.’

She was turning this way and that to escape my grip—as discreetly as possible. I raised my voice. ‘Sit down, Dora, please.’ A scene entailing vehemence was one thing, volume was quite another. She sat down.

But when I had her attention I realised there was very little I really wanted to say to her. Her furious, reproachful gaze made me feel awkward and uncivilised. I turned my eyes down to my uneaten food, then, for good measure, shut them.

‘When Nicky died I felt destroyed. I’d failed her; she’d called out and I wasn’t there. Dan felt the same. But he started to drink—that was how he dealt with it, while I had to behave. Suddenly, as far as your family was concerned, she wasn’t my daughter, she was Julie’s daughter and I was some latecomer childminder. Everyone seemed to start mourning Julie all over again.

‘But Nicky was a huge part of every day for me—more for me than for Dan. After she died I’d do things like sometimes set her place at the table by mistake—Dan saw this once and was furious with me, as though I’d done it to hurt him. Taking care of her had become so natural to me that I couldn’t reprogramme myself—I missed doing her washing and making her bed—’

I opened my eyes. There were the two plates, the cutlery, the crumpled serviettes, the carnation and bristol fairy in a cut-glass vase on the red cloth. Dora had gone.

She was sitting in her car. Of course I didn’t join her or speak to her, but went back to the Toyota and sat staring out the windscreen, reading over and over, without taking in its message, the bumper-sticker of the car parked in front of me.

Then Dora tapped on the driver’s window and, when I wound it down, asked stiffly, ‘How much was the bill?’ She opened her purse.

‘How decent of you,’ I said, coldly.

‘Let’s not mention it,’ she answered, impervious.

Swearing, I wound the window up, started the engine, reversed out of the park and sped away. I left her, standing at the kerb, holding out her money.

A week after the power failure, on the first day of July, I drove over the Hill to Motueka; along the road beside the river to Motupiko and on to Highway Six; through the Buller Gorge to the Inangahua Junction; down Highway Sixty-Nine to Reefton; through the Lewis Pass to Hanmer.

But first.

I stopped my car at the edge of the new road cut above the stand of macrocarpa, and pulled on my gumboots to walk through the thick hair-like hanks of long grass, hidden from the early sun striking the hillside slantwise, frost still at its roots. I walked up the hill, informally, avoiding the whalebone gateway, but unable to avoid the wet open throat of the brick tunnel. I emerged on the overgrown lawn—a lawn only in that it was apparent this grass had never been pasture—and walked around the deadfall of apple branches, to confront the house in full daylight, with its barred lower and black upper windows, listing side veranda and scaly roof-paint, looking exactly as I had remembered it last; glancing back over my shoulder through the dark, from the tunnel’s mouth, blinkered by tiredness and fear, all my resilience gone and my mind completely pliable—seeing the house, huge, solid, as full of integrity as a great personage, Wrathall was standing on the porch like an unfriendly owner seeing trespassers off his property.

It had neither changed nor relented. On a sunny winter morning it still said: ‘I am here, alone and unlooked on in all weather. A house cast away from all communities.’

And I felt, standing there, that I might suddenly be witness to some fantastic vision—as though the house, trees, hill before me might rip like a rotten rag, opening on a scene of catastrophe, like Bruegel’s Triumph of Death: wheels, instruments of torture and execution, fire, an army of skeletons, a poisonous sky, and a man hiding in the trunk of a hollow tree, naked, a spear in his back.

I clenched my fists and looked up at the still trees, the sun daubing their blackness with deep green. There were birds in the trees—magpies—and eyes in the birds. I was afraid. Yet I had been afraid before, often for no good reason—walking down a strange street or entering an unfamiliar building, anxious about appointments, not knowing how long it would take me to get where I was going, having never been there before.

I climbed the first three steps to the veranda, then I saw the motorbike helmet sitting in the corner of the top step, new and in perfect condition. Kelfie’s helmet.

He was in a bad way when Hannah and Basil guided him across the slip. He lay shivering on the back seat of the bus that took us downhill. Stayed quiet and withdrawn as we waited, eating mince on toast and drinking tea at the Motueka Community Hall. I assumed he went home, and, like me, retrieved his vehicle when the new road was cut. But he hadn’t returned to the house to collect his helmet.

I looked up from the helmet at the barred door, the black gap in the boarded window. A gust of wind swept some fallen leaves along the veranda—hard, dry leaves, skipping, making a sound identical to that of the padded, nailed feet of a dog sprinting along a cement pavement. A magpie set up its whetting, metallic call.

I turned and went away down the hill, knowing I was being spoken to—words of leaves, wind, birdcalls—in some common, inadequate tongue, by something mysterious, while all the time it, and I, went on thinking in our own mismatched languages, unable to make ourselves understood.

Kelfie

I was lying on the couch propped up by cushions, a lamp looking over my shoulder at the books and papers, taking notes, struggling to make my laziness and lack of interest yield: writing nonsense. It was midyear, three days beyond the deadline for a final essay, with exams looming in the following week—and an eviction notice pinned to the cork tiles above the kitchen sink.

It was blowing hard outside. That day the wind had broken a branch off the willow beside the steps. It had rattled the windows, sucked the doors shut, and seemed to twitch the ground sideways under every step I took. Beneath the wind I could still hear the low background roar of night traffic.

As I read, tiring, the light on the pages began to yellow and dim. I put my head back and closed my eyes, no ideas in my mind, just images from what I had read: Dorothy Wordsworth planting her gardens at Dove Cottage with daisies, primroses and celandines (and, in undertone, backwash of the wash of waves, images of another garden: a rail fence, white paint flaking and filmed with mildew smothered in violet convolvulus—and the wet brick path to the back door). I recollected fragmented details of my reading: Wordsworth’s sister’s frequent indispositions, her two-week toothaches. And the pageant of the poor she met wandering the roads, turned out by Europe’s wars, shortages of food, work, and care. And the parades of funerals, topping up the high ground inside the churchyard walls. (Then—backwash of the wash of another wave—a churchyard choked with yellow grass under steep stony hills.)

I had translated the past from books into a past where I might find myself at any moment, wandering onto a wet road, into a cold March wind in old England, to watch Wordsworth’s sister in her cap and shawl and buttoned-up boots stopping to give a small copper coin to a one-armed sailor miles from the sea. Dreaming, drained and very nearly asleep, it seemed to me that the history recorded on the printed page was curling back to reveal all the past—in tattered layers like the posters plastered on billboards around town, advertising plays, gigs, public meetings and protest marches going back to last spring.

The door handle creaked as Andrea came in quietly from work, the five to midnight shift at Databank. She didn’t remove her coat, but sat down in front of our one-bar heater with her purple fingertips held out to its heat. ‘How’s it going?’ she asked.

‘It’s not going.’

‘What happens if you don’t finish it?’

‘I’ll fail the course, and set back by six months the agenda of my life.’

She laughed. ‘You’ll finish it, you’ll follow through—you always do, since you think that if you stop asserting yourself you’ll disappear in a puff of smoke.’

‘That’s not fair.’

She began pushing my papers aside with her feet, examining the titles of the books surrounding me. Mostly they were what she could expect to find: an anthology of Romantic poetry, a critical collection, Blake to Byron, Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal—

‘What’s this?’ she asked, ‘Robin Hyde’s Passport to Hell, John A. Lee’s Civilian into Soldier,’ bending over to pick it up,’ Thus Spake Zarathustra. And Robert Westall’s Watch House—that’s predictable at least. Are all these relevant?’

‘I keep getting side-tracked.’

She laughed again. ‘So it’s the essay that’s distracting you.’

‘I’m going to have to ask for another extension.’

‘I’ll leave you to it then—achiever—intentions and distractions.’ She gave me a sympathetic hug and retired to her room.

I returned to my attempt to produce another essay; another leap through a flaming hoop.

In the morning, before my pleading appointment with my lecturer, I went to visit my grandfather at the Museum. For the past two weeks he had been staying at my aunt’s house in Eastbourne and commuting to the Museum to help out with preparations for the upcoming shift.

Several of the Museum’s natural history departments were transferring their laboratories and collections from the old building on Mount Cook to ‘temporary’ accommodation in a made-over commercial building on Taranaki Street. (The word ‘temporary’, used to describe any measures to relieve the pressure on space in the old building, was euphemistic, since, according to the sceptics, any plans for a new museum and art gallery would probably take twenty years from proposal to realisation.) Grandfather was overseeing the repacking and labelling of some of the specimens, and indexing the volumes of information he had gathered during his twenty years in the institution.

I met one of the taxidermists in the galleries. He knew me, so let me in the back to walk around the long way—through corridors stinking of formalin, floor polish, carbolic and dried bird, past the shadowy shapes of the waka, stacked in steel frames behind a billowing sheet of clear plastic, across the courtyard lined with metal crates containing large fish and dolphins preserved in gallons of formalin, where a blue whale’s jawbone had been hung from the ceiling for a year-long process of draining off its oil—stinking saltily in the open air. I went through hallways lined with cabinets full of bird’s eggs nestled in cotton wool, shells, stacks of paper pressing dried leaves and flowers; past shelves with soap-stone carvings, painted fans, dark, tapering fire-hardened spears, spiny sea eggs, and boxes of brittle stars that tinkled when touched, like porcelain ornaments. From the display department drifted the smells of polyurethane, paint and hot glue. Through their door I caught a glimpse of a fibreglass shark, lying on a bench—it was familiar, usually seen frozen, wheeling in the dark space beneath the ramp in the marine life gallery.

Grandfather wasn’t to be found in his usual haunt, a room crowded with floor-to-ceiling cabinets containing mollusc specimens. Nor was his successor, ‘young’ Howard (forty-three at his last birthday), tucked into his usual place against the only clear corner by the outside wall of the room.

Two contract workers were sitting at one of the workbenches, with a radio turned on and up, playing the current number one for probably the fourth time that morning. The young women were busy transferring tiny sea-snail shells from the boxes they had been stored in some fifty years before into thin glass bottles, which they then laid in shallow trays lined with waste cotton. They didn’t have any idea where Grandfather had got to, so I went back to Howard’s corner to wait.

Howard’s desk was covered in stacks of detailed Indian ink diagrams of bisected snail shells and snails’ digestive tracts—beautiful and faithful representations of a hidden world. It was a fraction of Howard’s fifteen-year project, a monograph on New Zealand land snails; worthwhile work, which would perhaps be printed in ten years’ time, in sharp black print on glossy paper, and would stand on the shelves of natural science libraries all around the world. Studying the drawings I could almost hear the slow spring—the drop-by-drop equations of human knowledge wearing down the stone sum of human time. Taxonomy, that rare thing, work that when it is done well, need never be done again; also, arguably, work that need never be done. The public didn’t need it, not the public at that moment wandering around the galleries above; they would never bring their kids to it, on wet Sundays, to gape. And yet the drawings were lovely—careful maps of hidden facts one person in ten thousand might want to know.

Howard came in, dressed as usual in shorts and sandals, a Swanndri and a white labcoat, his long hair tied back in a ponytail. He sat down behind the microscope and smiled at me. He seemed to not quite fit the desk, his elbows stuck out at odd angles and, sitting, he stooped, as he never did standing.

‘Hugh is on his way over, he’s talking to Marion at the moment.’

‘How’s it going?’

‘The shift? Neither Hugh nor I like the donkey work, the housekeeping, relabelling and so on.’

‘I meant your monograph.’

‘It’s getting there. I’ll have to find time for another field trip up north soon. Perhaps put out a paper on the clearing of predators from the new reserves. Marion is working at some papers on her scavenging sea-snails. Fascinating stuff.’

‘Yeah? Like?’

He peered at me, trying to assess whether or not I was genuinely interested in Marion’s papers, concluded I might be and began, ‘As you may know, deep-sea animals often live longer than related species in shallow water—because the intense cold of the deep oceans slows their metabolisms.’

‘I remember talking about this, before, something about the build-up of mercury and other toxins in Orange Roughy?’

‘How typical of you to remember something suggesting a commercial conspiracy of silence.’

I laughed. ‘Go on, tell me about the sea-snails then.’

‘Not really snails, mollusc limpets actually. In the case of these limpets it is possible that, despite living in the cold deep ocean, they have comparatively short lives, because of competition for the same food sources.’ He was becoming enthusiastic now, and his round eyes under his greying eyebrows had brightened—he looked a little like a Friday night evangelist. ‘It’s possible that these limpets grow and reach sexual maturity quite quickly—that a whole population can actually decide to achieve sexual maturity earlier, depending on the amount of competition for their food resources.’

‘What are they competing with?’

‘I’m not sure that “competing” is the right word, really. Other limpets and some bivalves, like shipworms, eat the same material—but the bivalves, by tunnelling into the wood, increase the surface area on which the limpets can feed. When biologists start talking about “competition” or “natural selection by competition” they aren’t being strictly accurate.’

I thought about this for a moment, then asked, rhetorically, ‘Is that because “competition” is a human idea—the animals live in the same place, eat the same things, and it seems to us that they’re competing, when really they co-exist?’

‘In an interdependent ecological system. Right.’

I’d caught his enthusiasm, but not about the ‘deciding’ sea-snail populations. ‘So the language you and I are trying to describe things in has got values that make us see things, and say things, inaccurately.’

‘That’s right. Despite what we think, there are no distinct, independent, dominant, or competing species, including ourselves. Interesting isn’t it?’

‘It’s only do or die for people because we think it is, really it’s do and die.’

Howard was grinning at me. ‘Have I made your day?’

‘Sure, I love discovering the ways we deceive ourselves. It makes some problems seem less intractable, as if they could be solved by just discovering that we think about things in the wrong way. If you think about it—competition is capitalism, and notions of “more” or “less” instead of “enough”. I can’t come to grips with the true significance of limpets and shipworms eating the same food sources because my culture has tied a knot in my thoughts. It’s good to realise that.’

‘But aren’t you getting into iffy territory, Keith, using nature to make social criticism?’

Grandfather came into the room. ‘There he is,’ he said to himself, much in the same way as he might announce, on finding his mislaid glasses, ‘There they are.’

I lowered my voice and said to Howard, ‘I wasn’t using nature, I was using the way we think about it. I wasn’t saying we were like the limpets and shipworms, I meant we are them, sort of—we’re all here together, and the world isn’t what we try to think it is: a collection of oppositions.’

Howard shook his head and said to Grandfather, ‘He’s being oracular again, Hugh. I’d watch him if I were you. You might lose him to the Young Socialists, or the Charismatic Christians.’

Grandfather, looming and frowning, said to me, ‘What do you want, Keith?’ Then, ‘Have you had lunch?’

‘That’s a great idea—feed me.’ I slid off the desk and took his arm. ‘I came to see you,’ I cajoled, then, in one sentence, listed all my problems: ‘We’re being evicted, I’m trying to write an essay and I can’t, and I have an appointment with this lecturer who hates me, to ask for an extension.’

Grandfather bought me lunch. We sat in the cafeteria. I had the impression he was trying to keep me clear of his colleagues.

‘All right, what’s this about being evicted?’

‘We got the letter on Tuesday, six weeks’ notice. The property has been sold and we didn’t even know it was on the market.’

‘What will you do?’

‘Get another flat, together if possible.’

‘Do you think you’ll be able to find one within six weeks?’

‘Maybe not. Anyway, I’m letting the others look—I’m thinking of making a trip down south.’

‘But don’t you have exams next week?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you afford a break? Won’t you need the money for bond, and rent?’

‘I can go into overdraft, it’s no problem. Anyway, you and Grandma can be my safety net, as usual.’

He regarded me dubiously. I turned his wrist over and looked at his watch. ‘I have an appointment at four o’clock with Professor Armitage. I always seem to antagonise him, I don’t know why. I need another extension on my essay.’

‘Keith,’ he scolded.

‘What?’

‘I wouldn’t like to think you were developing bad work habits.’

‘I’ve shown no sign of it so far, have I? Anyway, this family and their bloody reverence for tertiary education—the fat fruit with a hollow heart. I mean, all I’ve learnt so far is how to mimic a certain way of writing—’

‘You should have stuck with your science degree.’

‘What? And get good research skills? There’s nothing I want to research, nothing I feel I need to know—’ I broke off, my mind banking like a gull scaling a buttress of wind. Remembering—no, not remembering, but knowing—the lines of one of his poems. Seeing the page before me, reading the words as they formed under his moving hand:

What do I need to know?

In a universe with laws

To govern the physical

And metaphysical

Making a closed fist of possibility.

There is no room

To dispute these facts

Thus I progress

From hope to hopelessness

Wanting only that

Which is impossible

You

To forget that you are dead.

Grandfather was saying, impatiently, ‘By now you should have some idea of what you want to do.’

I shrugged. ‘Get some job, make money, go overseas for a bit.’

‘Yes, all well and good, but where do you see yourself in ten years?’

I thought carefully. There are certain things you can’t say to the people who’ve paid your way, fed you, fretted over you, got you to the doctor when you were ill, carefully selected the right gifts for Christmas and birthdays, paid the bills you couldn’t quite afford. You can’t say, ‘In ten years I see myself as a speck of ash on a vast coal cocooned in ice and shrouded in smoke.’ Nor, ‘I see myself standing, holding a gun, under a black flag.’ No, you can’t say that sort of thing.

‘I’ll figure it out,’ I said. ‘It’s all under control.’ (Sure—some career in complicity, some job, some house, some bank account. No. There’s nothing I want. I don’t want anything.)

‘You’ve got to give it some thought,’ Grandfather said, then pushed the remainder of his quiche across the table to me.

The hinged gates of the day swung this way and that, drafting my thoughts, so there were fewer paths to follow hour by hour.

The interview with Armitage was satisfactory. It didn’t dispel my comfortable contempt for the man, not because he refused to grant my request for a further extension (I would probably have been disappointed if he had) but because he was the same familiar someone easy to hate: stern, concerned, conscientiously fair, telling me he couldn’t offer me more time than he was prepared to offer anyone else in difficulties, saying, ‘Of course you see my point—’ in his reasonable, world-explaining voice, a Kiwi cured of his accent, speaking received English in the way the recipient of a miracle parades a clean, healed body. ‘You can’t expect additional privileges to those of any other student. I don’t believe your case really warrants that.’ While I sat with my back to the bookcases concealing the door, happy he was being so self-consciously egalitarian, knowing he was enjoying putting me in my place (everyone else’s place), yet still willing him to do something for me he wouldn’t consider doing for anyone else.

‘Put the essay in my pigeonhole tomorrow,’ he instructed, and I left his office warmed by a sense of my own superiority. Now I could fail out of pique. The university (which I decided, tidily, he represented) didn’t want me—no one would bend the regulations to keep me interested and present.

Yet, even as I thought all this, I knew it was childish and paltry—I was stalking off full of hot wires of anger and defiance, thinking vaguely of heroic scenes like the Glowworm ramming the Admiral Hipper, and other such nonsense. As if dropping out of university was some kind of gallant gesture (about all that was available to me).

I walked back down into the city through the five-o’clock twilight. It was one of those evenings where no one seems to have any patience, when pedestrians dodge through the traffic, heedless of danger, and cars nose slowly through crowds on crossings before the ‘Wait’ sign has reappeared, and a minute waiting at a busy intersection would be long enough to witness an accident or near accident.

Manners Mall was full of people, and a mood of hysterical excitement. Various groups were competing for attention, attempting to snag the two opposing currents of traffic. First a three-guitar, two-amplifier group of buskers, who had staked out for themselves a large sound-claim—one which took in the young man behind the Greenpeace display table, who was speaking with fierce animation to a friend. It must have been a friend, because, although the volume of the buskers’ music meant even antagonists would have had to put their heads together to hear each other, this was obviously a conference between friends. The young man, despite his wild expression, had his hands behind his head, elbows crooked, as though miming prostrate submission while still standing up. I passed them, caught the voice—East London accent—very earnest, his soul dancing like a flame on the tip of his tongue.

Street and shop lights were glowing out of the pavement. It was filmed with water which caught ghostly reflections of buildings and people and the low, plump coverlet of cloud—so that all of us were walking on an imperfect mirror of fallen rain as if across a sheet of glass spanning a long fall into a second soft sky.

I went home and sat on my bed, surrounded by books and papers, knowing I wouldn’t do any work. I felt defeated, because it was frightening to overcome wanting, even wanting something as unimportant as academic success. Being cast out of yet another desire, however ordinary it was, made me feel homeless and incapable. I didn’t want to go out and join Mike and Sue in front of the TV, since the first thing they’d say would be, ‘Have you finished it yet?’ To which I’d have to reply, ‘No, and I’m not going to, either. It isn’t really a big deal, not in itself—’ Knowing the same thing had happened, was happening to them, that, generally, we weren’t dispossessed of things, of people, but of desire. Somehow it seemed impossible to want anything enough, or for long enough.

I left the door open so I could hear my flatmates, and the TV voices. I sat, semi-exiled in the bell-jar of brightness created by the bedside lamp, idly reading the titles from a photocopy of the key to British Books in Print: Confidence in God and Time, Correct Ideas Don’t Fall, Labour Policy in the United States, The Joy of Mourners, Zero is Not Nothing. A collection of cryptic messages, reminding me of the books the Sunday school kids at my primary school used to recite, demonstrating their virtue or acumen—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers—as if knowing the names were enough.

I fell asleep before Sue and Mike switched off the TV and went to bed, while the house was still reassuringly awake.

Again. I was running along a muddy track, through drapes of wet air that seemed a lighter element than that from which I had emerged, as though I had just fought my way free from mud and was now gliding, warm, washed, through unresisting air.

Beside the track the last of the flax bushes, wind in their leaves, clapped encouragement. I ran, intact, untroubled, strong. The track, hill, pine forest surrounding me, a thin, unfinished image, as if the landscape showed only the yellow and cyan composite of a printed colour photograph—fused in a faded, deadly green—without the final magenta and black plates that complete the world on paper in a colour reproduction. Something substantial was missing, and my awareness of an unknown wrongness kept trying to beat me back at every step, like a strong wind, warning.

Before me on the slick path was a thin hurrying figure, someone who must be pursued and apprehended.

I woke to a touch, two fingers pressed into the palm of my hand, and the odour of Nina Ricci’s L’Air du Temps. Andrea sat down beside me. My papers slid and rustled. Light rain gleamed on her hair like a beaded veil.

Out in the lounge her current lover was muttering something about the cold—announcing, ‘I’m going to run a hot bath, OK?’

‘Sure, go ahead. Take your time,’ Andrea called back, without shifting her gaze from my face. ‘Were you having a bad dream, Kelfie?’

‘A strange dream.’

‘You were grinding your teeth and muttering. Your door was open and the light was on. I thought you must still be in a death grapple with the essay. Did the essay win?’

‘I’ve given up. I’m going south tomorrow if I can get my bike on the ferry.’

‘Did anything I said last night help you make up your mind?’

‘I think I had sort of made up my mind before I even began trying to write it.’

‘Well, at least you know your mind’s made up. Not like me and my last, the one for Drama. Remember? I wrote it, rewrote it, polished it, typed it up—then didn’t hand it in. I carried it around for weeks, past the deadline, even past the period of grace.’

‘Do you know why you did that?’

‘Yes, but I couldn’t explain it to you.’

‘Try.’

‘I suppose you think you already know,’ she said.

‘Ah huh.’

‘Figures.’ She fell quiet again. As she considered, the pipes began howling, their usual sound when a bath was being run. We both glanced automatically at my clock to check that the ‘no baths after one o’clock’ rule wasn’t being infringed. The pause lengthened as we attended to the racket the plumbing was making, both mentally mapping the positions of the other presences in the house; Sue and Mike awake now, in their beds, Sandy just shutting off the taps and lying back in the tub, we two alone, together in the restored silence.

Andrea said, ‘You know how you read kids’ books, Kelfie?’

‘Yeah. I missed reading all the good young adults’ fiction when I was a young adult—too busy impressing people by conspicuously sitting around reading Prometheus Unbound or Notes from the Underground.’

‘We reckon we can tell how depressed or pressured you’re feeling by how many new books are lying around the house. For instance, if you go out shopping on Friday night and come home with three bought books and four from the library, that means you’re stressed and depressed.’

‘I did that last Friday.’

‘Exactly. Two days before the deadline for an essay and a week before exams.’

‘Pretty telling, eh?’

‘I read every one of those books you bring into the house. And do you know what I love about them? Those kids, the heroes and heroines of the stories, they solve their problems. They pay the price, but they get something precious in return. And they save the world—or their worlds. Especially in the fantasy books. There’s always something they must find to help them, something which does exist and which they are able to find. Or there’s something they have to destroy, some one enemy to defeat, or curse to raise, or misunderstanding to clear up.’

‘But it’s never easy, and it always changes them.’

‘Yes. But they grow, and are wiser or more courageous for their experiences, more certain who they really are, where they really belong.’

‘Except sometimes, like when Susan is abandoned by the Wild Hunt at the end of The Moon of Gomrath.’

Andrea nodded. ‘But when things like that happen in kids’ stories they are more shattering than Winston Smith breaking down in Room 101, or Anna Karenina throwing herself under the train.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘because when the heroes and heroines of kids’ stories put out their hands to the universe, they almost always have their hands clasped.’

Andrea got up and turned the lamp to sidelight her face as she stood before my mirror. She took my comb and began combing the crystal beads of rain into her hair. As she did so she said, ‘Like you, I was a good student and what I did was generally praised—’

‘Exalted,’ I said, about myself, not her. ‘Often I was much better than good.’ Stubborn egotism asserted itself, because at that moment, having decided to quit, my academic track-record seemed very precious; the safest, neatest portion of my public identity.

‘You mean you, not me. “Exalted”!’ She laughed, then went on. ‘Well—it wasn’t enough. Being good wasn’t enough. And working the late shift at Databank for eighteen dollars an hour isn’t enough either. I don’t want to be able to just look after myself—save myself—’

‘You want to be able to save the world.’

She replaced my comb on top of the dresser, and turned back to me, the light shining in her face. ‘But I can’t want that.’

‘Why not? Saving the world is what needs doing.’

‘Except I can’t do it. Oh, I subscribe to the right papers and periodicals, give money to the right people, stand in pickets, write letters, read the recommended books, but I’m still as much immersed as the next person in the thing I want to save the world from.’ She blinked and rubbed her hand over her face. I returned the light to its original position, so that it illuminated me and my cluttered bed.

‘I feel completely superfluous most of the time,’ she complained, more peevish than unhappy—the problem perhaps too vast to register accurately as tragedy. ‘You don’t seem to have this problem, Kelfie. Not that you aren’t dissatisfied, obviously you must be, to be dropping out—’

‘That’s nothing!’ I said, angrily.

‘I’m not making fun of you. What I mean is that you manage to impress everyone who knows you with this air of autonomy.’

I was unable to overcome my urge to revise this remark. ‘It’s not autonomy, it’s irresistibility.’

Her hand went up to her throat. ‘See?’ she said, distressed.

‘What?’ I demanded, sensing she was about to have one of her characteristic outbreaks of concern for my sanity. I tried to deflect her. ‘What is “See?” supposed to mean?’

‘Kelfie, I care about you, but you scare me. You’re unsafe.’

‘How am I “unsafe”?’ My tone was intended to make her feel she was being dramatic and stupid. But she stood up in the path of my derision, saying calmly, ‘You’re unsafe like a bad road in bad weather, too, and changeable, and downright crazy.’

‘How can you say that?’ What she said hurt and kept hurting worse, working its way in. ‘We’ve lived together for two years, you’re my friend—’ Rage under shallow indignation. Then the rage broke out and I found myself kneeling on the bed senselessly tossing handfuls of books and papers on to the floor—furious because she was afraid of me, when I had so often encouraged her to fear me, more furious because she was afraid for me, which was insulting and demeaning and impossible to deal with. ‘Fuck you!’ I shouted, and hurled the last sheaf of papers at her feet, where it skidded into a neat, white half-circle, which she stepped across coming towards me.

I threw myself down and curled up, my body numb and my mind an arena of slowed time and expanded space, in which I seemed to float, trying to negotiate with my temper and hide a desire to punish her, because it was wrong to want to hurt my friends.

I felt the bed shift as she knelt on it and leaned over me. ‘Are you crying?’ she asked, curiously.

‘No.’

‘I didn’t mean it to sound as bad as it did, Kelfie.’

‘When we leave this flat, I’m not going to live with you.’

‘Who’s “you”? Me? Us? Or everyone?’

‘Everyone. I’m not going to live with anyone.’

She put her hand on my shoulder. I uncurled, relaxed and lay back with my hands behind my head.

She frowned at me. I had recovered too quickly and she had decided the outburst was faked.

‘How can you treat me as though you think I’m crazy, when you’re supposed to be my friend?’ I asked, accusing.

She sighed. ‘You are crazy. You think you’re something you’re not.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘I’m not sure—perhaps just not subject to the same rules as everyone else. That alone is enough to make you crazy.’

Her next remark was interrupted as we heard, out in the still night, the sound of oystercatchers crying somewhere above the harbour. I sat up. ‘It sounds as though there’s a wilderness, not a city, out there, and we can walk down through the bush to Pipitea and dig for pipis.’

‘Dreamer,’ she said, placated, and turned to go.

‘Hey, Andrea, chuck me my cards, they’re on the third shelf.’

She picked up the silk-wrapped pack and tossed it to me.

‘I want to see whether I should go south tomorrow.’

‘I thought you’d already decided you would.’

‘I want the cards to confirm my decision. And for the bookings to be clear, the sailing on time, and the Strait calm—everything informing me, “Of course you’re doing the right thing.”’

Her silence, as she stayed standing in the doorway, insinuated another ‘See?’

‘Andrea?’

‘Yes?’

‘Remember when I was caught on the road by the big slips last April? While you and the others were waiting for me at my the bach?’

‘Yes.’

‘That guy, Simon Wrathall, who used to do that weird comic strip for Enclave, who killed his lover—he was up on the Hill that night, when the landslides closed the road.’

‘And?’

I shuffled and cut the pack. ‘And nothing. Just he was there, I met him—he had the body in the boot of his car.’ I looked down, laying out the first three cards, in succession: The Magician, The Chariot, The Ace of Swords. Andrea turned away and I said softly, after her retreating back, ‘I am what I think I am.’

Wrathall wrote me a letter. He wrote that he wouldn’t have thought to try to make contact, but that he had seen me on TV.

—I saw you on television, briefly, among a crowd leaving a meeting—a light wind catching your coat, the intermittent mist of your breath blurring your face, and your arrogant, intimate stare at the camera—which may have been merely pointing your way and focused elsewhere. There you were, staring through the possibility that the camera wasn’t focused on you, through the likelihood that the seconds of video in which you appeared would be edited out of the broadcast, through all chances and uncertainties, into actuality. Yourself the subject, the only subject of the scene throughout the seconds of your appearance. So much so that the camera, as if of its own volition (as though it were not a camera, but my eyes), moved to follow you as you walked, coat blowing, breath smoking, across the wet street—not far away, already somewhere else in time and space, five hours on from taping to broadcast, but—coat blowing and breath smoking—immediate, close, realised.

Then the camera remembered its purpose and swung abruptly back to catch the SIP (Slightly Important Person) as he emerged from the meeting. I ask myself—Wrathall wrote—is it only my imagination, or are you able to make extraordinary, but ostensibly accidental, things happen—like the cameraman forgetting the reason for his camera being there? Who was it you wanted to be seen by!

Though I have never agreed with that ‘No man is an island’ business (we are all islands, but formed of coral and founded on the summit of a single submerged mountain) I knew that Wrathall was adrift, mad. Still, he was sane enough to understand that I briefly believed, while helping him, that my pity and complicity had cancelled the murder, that, because I helped him, there had been no murder. To understand that I had carelessly crossed over into insanity, and that I too had discovered that really there are no borders: sense and nonsense, sanity, madness, grace, monstrosity and moral peril were all one vast, unbroken country on which no boundaries have ever been drawn.

He wrote: So here I am in jail, functioning, but very far away from myself, unable to recognise myself anymore. I’m not really interested in living and still I keep on eating, sleeping and exercising—a man whose body is a world in which he is defeated, polluted by pains and needs, enduring, not fit for anything else.

I burned the letter, rolled it into a tube which I lit at one end, watching the blue and orange iris of flame moving towards me, eating the rings of words. His thoughts were too terrible to confront; a badlands to be crossed backwards and after dark.

I am not a fake, but a fledgling. It is true that sometimes I find myself full of unearthly vitality, the nerves in my body a web of fire, my mind a sail filling with a storm of light. Then I know there is nothing I cannot reach or touch. And I can discharge this tormenting energy by—say—turning the camera. But if I do somehow contrive to discharge the power, I feel terrified, lonely and unclean, and poisonous to everything around me. I want to be stopped, caught and earthed. For this reason I could sometimes be seen standing at a window of my Grans’ place, probably looking like an unhappy puppy, watching my grandmother out in the rain, rearranging the rockery above the retaining wall, her face pink, her thin grey hair flattened against her skull, the nylon parka wet and translucent over her thick old jersey with holes at its elbows. Shifting stones; strong as women are who have lugged around kids, shopping and baskets of wet clothes. Till finally I go out to persuade her to come back into the warmth. Wanting her to come and take this terror out of me by just being there, moving around the house, talking, breathing. Shyly trying to tease her, nag her, coax her indoors, knowing I’m setting myself up against her own near-fanatical will to defeat forever—now, today—the disorder in the garden.

Then again, there was Basil: who arrested me momentarily in the course my venomous energy was to carry me, that night on the Hill, by suddenly imposing himself, the moment I made my entry—fussy, raucous, shouting: ‘You may well say!’

I had tried, in a letter to Meredith, to explain what happened to me that night. In trying to make sense of the story, I gave reasons for my actions; but not the right ones, or the only ones. I tried to ‘mean’ something—responding to the irresistible human instinct for meaning—and immediately found myself standing in a ring of salt, summoning demons.

I set my alarm for seven and lay in bed listening to the wide-open sound of a windless, midwinter night. After a sleepless hour I got up again, tore my essay notes into strips and twisted the ends of the strips together to make a fat, cheerleader pom-pom of paper streamers.

Then, before I fell asleep I saw—as if through the wrong end of a telescope, framed and far away—Mark Thornton on Flint Peak, holding out his hand to the universe.

Basil

‘There’s no point staying now the weather’s packing in,’ said the Australian.

His girlfriend nodded.

‘And there’s nothing left to see. We’ve done it all, haven’t we?’

I sat at the periphery of the hostel group—listening to the Australian jock holding forth to his girlfriend, a Japanese couple, another Canadian from Ottawa, and two bright-eyed beginners from Brisbane, on the first leg of their journey out, north and east.

‘We came here first to look up some relatives,’ one of the beginners excused herself. ‘It’s better to arrive in the States in summer, even if it means spending some time in a New Zealand winter.’

‘Jesus! This isn’t what I’d call winter, it’s just a little wet,’ said the guy from Ottawa.

It was early July, a week before I was to fly out of Auckland, and I was with a group of hostel guests, waiting out some foul weather in a hotel bar in a small town in the far north. At four in the afternoon the lounge bar, a shabby room lined with water-filled radiators, carpeted red and purple, and graced by wood-veneer formica tables and vinyl-covered chairs usually to be found in classrooms, was near empty. Past the bar we could look through to the public bar and at the back of the barmaid who, after serving our drinks, turned away to carry on a conversation with the men there, three of whom were clustered around a radio and the racing page of the paper. Beyond them, a group of younger men played a casual game of pool. These men and the barmaid would stop to watch us from time to time, curious and mildly territorial.

I wasn’t taking part in the conversation, and had only been included in the general conviviality because the hostel’s entire population had migrated to the pub. It wasn’t that the group was in any way exclusive—the conversation was being conducted slowly and clearly for the benefit of the two Japanese, who were leaning forward over their Cokes, faces still with attention as they listened, and then smiling and animated as they acknowledged they understood.

I was slouched in my seat, overhearing the talk but not attending to it, watching the figures of the pool players silhouetted against the hotel windows and the grey afternoon light. The light, the rain, and the imminence of my departure recalled me to the earlier occasion on which I had been—as now—waiting out the weather.

Throughout the afternoon of Easter Saturday we waited—Hannah, Ellen, Wrathall, Kelfie, Jill and I—in Motueka Community Hall. The Civil Defence had set themselves up there, but were nearly all out, the only signs of their occupation some trestle tables covered in maps, rulers, papers, pens. There were four matrons nursing a single tea urn, there was a silent telephone and radio telephone, and clay-slip bootprints tracking the floorboards.

After making our phone calls we sat for several hours in the hall’s fuggy air. Jill told me her brother-in-law was picking her up and offered me a lift to Nelson. The Motueka matrons fed us, wrapped Kelfie in a warmer blanket and plied us with endless cups of tea.

Jill, Kelfie and I sat lined up along a wall, in plastic bucket chairs which we never thought to move closer together. Ellen and Hannah sat on the floor, snuggled up to each other. Wrathall; after making his call, went and stood at the hall’s only open door, in the lea of the building where the rain couldn’t blow, inside. For half an hour his figure, leaning in the entrance way, head nearly touching the wire cage around the porch lamp, was just another part of my general impression of the dreary place—the stacked chairs and benches; the dry, smeared footprints on the floor; the sour, dusty smell like gymnasium locker-rooms; the sick whir of the electric clock on the wall above the kitchen service hatch, which, last night in the storm, had suddenly begun to run backwards, much to the annoyance of the Motueka matrons, who had found an alarm clock and installed it in the hatchway. It faced out into the hall, ticking in a fussy argumentative way, its hands gesturing insistently in the opposite direction to those of the disturbed clock above—clock-wise and clock-zany.

Wrathall waited, motionless, and I didn’t really consider why he was waiting, attentive, like a sentry, someone who hadn’t finished being upright and active (which was odd, since we were all so exhausted). Then there was the sound of tyres on sodden gravel and he moved out of the doorway, going down to meet the police climbing out of their white car with its urgent blue lights.

And I felt my face go long and loose with shock, because I had forgotten, and all the horrors I had discarded poured back into my consciousness—as though my thoughts, like some early Antarctic explorers, had dumped goods and livestock to unburden themselves along a difficult route to safety, then found their flight, following a crazy compass, had described a circle and returned them to their abandoned possessions and the frozen carcasses. My mind came back to the things it jettisoned to survive.

Along from me Kelfie got to his feet, dropping the blanket, and watched as Wrathall stood talking to the officers. His face, usually animated or impassive, wore an expression it seldom assumed. At that moment of atypical unselfconsciousness it settled into a cold watchfulness, which made him look ancient, inhuman and heartless.

We watched Wrathall get into the back of the police car. One of the officers clambered in beside him, closing the door. They departed. Kelfie retrieved his blanket, wrapped up again and sat down.

‘Any idea what that was about?’ Hannah asked him.

He shook his head.

Some time later two traffic officers and a Ministry of Works engineer arrived. A short discussion ensued between the officers, engineer, Hannah, Ellen, Jill and Kelfie about when they would be able to retrieve their vehicles. During the discussion Jill’s brother-in-law came in and stood to one side rattling his car keys suggestively and looking irritable and martyred.

When everything was settled I collected my pack. Jill and I spent a minute saying goodbye to Ellen and Hannah, and we left.

In the car Jill’s brother-in-law asked her, ‘How long were you caught up there?’

‘About sixteen hours, I think.’

‘That would be right,’ I confirmed.

‘Have you eaten? Are your clothes dry?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mary will have dinner on when we get home.’ He looked at me in the rear-view mirror. ‘Have you got somewhere to go?’

‘If you could just drop me at the Youth Hostel, that would be fine.’

He nodded. They were silent throughout the remainder of the drive.

When we stopped outside the hostel, and I had eased myself and my pack out of the back seat and closed the door, Jill wound down her window and held out her hand to me. ‘I hope the rest of your trip is safe and pleasant, Basil.’

I took her hand. ‘Thanks. Look—I’m sorry about everything.’

She shook her head, squeezing my hand. ‘You’ve got nothing to apologise for. I didn’t agree with you about what was happening, but now I think you weren’t far wrong, after all.’

‘Well that’s—’ I was about to say ‘gratifying’ but she freed her hand from mine and gave me a contrite, quelling smile. I shut my mouth, smiled back and waved as the car pulled away.

‘It feels amazing to be finally on our way. Five weeks in the Shaky Isles, a week in Rarotonga, then on to LA. We’ll buy a van when we get there. That, and our Superlite tent, ought to save us heaps for accommodation—’

The romance of travel. Not my reason for travelling.

As an older teen I’d spent several summers with my great-aunt Pat in her lovely A-frame house on Vancouver Island, painting, mending and gardening. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that, when she died, she left the house to me.

My dream house—and I sold it to get the money to travel. My family assumed I did so because travelling was more important to me. Yet what I chose to do wasn’t a matter of priorities, a ranking of desires. Although I didn’t think about it till much later, in leaving home I was leaving a life where things had rejected or eluded me—love, friendship, sense.

I wanted to go somewhere where I couldn’t read the papers or books, where I couldn’t understand the language, where my ignorance of the language would be an excuse for my failure to find sense in what people said or did. I wanted somewhere I could never expect to meet those who, for me, were vanished or estranged. Somewhere appropriately alien. Somewhere else. A human wilderness.

And, in a certain, curtailed way I found what I wanted in Asia. I could even cope with the beggars, because they never expected me to say either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to them. I was happy just wandering around, a nobody of whom nothing was expected—until the day I encountered another impossibility.

It was something comparatively trivial. I had been walking around Kuala Lumpur all day, almost the only white in streets full of Malay, Chinese and Indian. I had just left a bank where, while standing in a queue, I had seen a leper beg a cigarette. Someone kindly put one into his bandaged hand and I watched as, while he waited to cross the road, the bandage on the diseased hand caught fire and burned, the flames wrapping his stubby fingers as he stared obliviously about at the traffic, unable to feel the fire. I had watched that. And taken in the sight of police carrying machine guns, and a whole family of Indians (a mother and four children) begging at the gates of the Monkey Park.

Somehow all this was OK—it didn’t distress me. But when I stopped to drop an orange rind into one of the big open drains, looking down I saw a scruffy little kitten who had fallen and was caught on a ledge just above the water, about ten feet down. It looked up at me, desperately hopeful and, opening its clean, pink mouth, it meowed at me—silently, its cry covered by the noise of the traffic. It crouched, staring up at me, pressed against the wet cement wall, its eyes so bright there seemed to be a light sealed in behind them. I couldn’t reach it to rescue it—and if I had rescued it I would have had to let it go, to be just one more scavenging cat roaming the streets. That’s what it was, a scavenging stray who had fallen into a drain and was now looking up at me silently asking. Another impossibility, another proof of my uselessness.

For me, inheriting the house had been a sign: my dream of my future come true. It meant I would survive, and I wanted to survive. But I didn’t want to want. To want to be useful, to understand and be understood.

Our society so insists that life must be turned to use, that we are obliged to transform all our troubles into lessons—learning experiences, therefore somehow tolerable. Over a period of years I had compelled Russell’s suicide to make sense by accepting it as a handy warning against his brand of extremity and disaffection. By the same token my unrequited love for Audrey universalised itself into one-of-those-experiences-that-help-one-sympathise-with-others. I once told an acquaintance of mine, also unhappily in love, ‘Yes, I know it hurts,’ without realising that I had made my own unhappiness just another part of that semaphore of suffering by which we signal to each other over great distances of difference.

Then there was my Vanishing House. It, I was forced to decide, was something I was unable or forbidden to know—the universe saying ‘No’ to all my enquiries and outrage. I grazed the edge of some wonderful discovery, feeling that I was about to be admitted to a truth, whether maddening, liberating, or deadly. There was a moment of recognition, then recognition receded. Ideas moved off like a crowd waved away from around the body of a dead stranger (or like, when I would visit our neighbour’s horses after dark, and stand on the lower rail of the gate, whistling, they would walk, unhurried, thudding, to stop where they could see me—the child they refused to greet properly, knowing I had nothing to offer—and I still couldn’t see them).

The lesson I was forced to draw from my Vanishing House was that all experiences that graze the edge of great secrets are, by nature, unseizable. They come apart when grasped. Like log cabins, which all the historic conservationists at home have found impossible to preserve in their original state. A true log cabin has its walls caulked with moss, keeping the heat in and the wind out. Moss decays wood; therefore a real log cabin must be absorbed back into the land, being as much organic as artefact. What makes log cabins authentic also makes them impermanent. And so—a Vanishing House must vanish.

The public bar was now crowded, and a group of women had come into the lounge bar and taken the table furthest from us. The Australian jock was getting up with some of our glasses and heading towards the bar, singing, to the tune of ‘Amazing Grace’: ‘A few beers, a bit of a yarn, a few beers, a bit of a yarn—’

I sat, a chill sweat on my face, neck and hands, remembering how, minutes before the earth tremor caused by the second big slip, I had heard Kelfie’s voice calling me, though he wasn’t in the room; and how, seconds later, he was in the room, with rain still running on his face—laughing at me.

I have a fantasy where I’m driving down a straight stretch of road in the cold desert of central BC, some years from today, and I see him under a signpost on the roadside, standing astride a pack blazoned with a large New Zealand flag, his thumb out. It’s overcast and there are no other cars on the road.

I slow right down so he can see who is driving. I’ve slowed down and I’m pulling over and he’s surprised and smiling—that same surprised smile he first gave me when I yelled at him after he walked into the room accusing us of breaking and entering. A smile that says, despite its surprise, ‘Of course,’ and, ‘All this has been given to me.’

But I don’t stop. At the last moment I accelerate, wheels churning the roadside gravel, leaving him alone and genuinely surprised.

Sometimes, though, this fantasy gets away from me. I slow down and, coming closer, I see he’s older, and the flag on his pack is black. His hair is long and is blowing around and over his face like shadows of smoke. He looks tired and grateful, and has been expecting me.

Kelfie

Like many young people I suppose I am afraid of the very old—perhaps feeling threatened by my own prospective confusion, decrepitude and (it seems) indignity. When I entered the dayroom of the Resthaven Home for the Elderly its occupants at first appeared to me to be a collection of bodies—not people—poised on the verge of death. They were disturbing, all sitting, waiting—like a crowd at a bus station or ferry terminal—for tea, or sleep, or the TV to be switched on. My initial response was to try to mentally put them at a distance; their frailty, quiet and timidity made me feel clumsy, dangerous and loud.

The nurse who accompanied me was saying, ‘Her hearing is really remarkably good. And she’s a mine of information about the area, if you can get her going. Of course, if you do get her talking it can be hard to stop her.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘It’s about eleven now, lunch is at noon, and the residents always take a lie-down after lunch, so you have an hour.’

She stopped before an old woman, slumped in a chair by the wide, deep dayroom windows. ‘You have a visitor, Mrs Harper.’

‘I’ll bring you a chair,’ she said to me.

‘The floor will be fine, thanks.’

Looming proprietorially over the old woman, she raised her voice. ‘Are you all right, dear? I’ll come and take you to the bathroom before lunch.’ She glanced at me, seeking some sign of complicity or understanding, then, seeming satisfied, she went away.

Emma Harper was shrunken and humpbacked, her body shapeless and limbs thin. Her eyes, seen through her thick lenses, were round and gave her face the look of an aged baby, alert and vulnerable. They were faded blue, one perpetually leaking tears, both lashless and surrounded by delicate, puffy, pinkish-white skin. She stared at me, her lined, cushiony face neutral.

‘Mrs Harper? My name is Keith Kelsey.’

Her waiting look changed to bafflement. She peered after the nurse, probably more willing to question her, than me, about my identity.

I decided to fall back on my amorphous, irrelevant, invented credentials. ‘I’m a history student. I’d like to talk to you about your brother, Mark Thornton.’ I unfolded my wad of notes. ‘Private Mark Thornton of the Canterbury Regiment?’

‘Mark is dead.’ Her expression was apologetic and defensive, suggesting she imagined I was some creditor of her brother’s—some official out to settle his affairs.

‘I talked to your son, Euan, in Nelson. I explained to him that I’m studying the letters of World War One soldiers. He told me that your brother kept a journal, and that you have it. Diaries of enlisted men are fairly unusual, since they had to be kept illegally. I’d very much like to look at it, if I could.’

Continuing on her own train of thought, she said, ‘He was just twenty-one.’

I waited, then decided she expected some response and was about to express my sympathy, but she added, ‘That was in 1920.’

‘Yes, I read his death certificate—’ (Cause of Death: Heart Failure. Weakening of the respiratory system by Gas Pneumonia.) ‘—and his war record.’

‘Did Euan tell you that Duncan was twenty-one when he died, too?’

This had some significant symmetry I was expected to appreciate. I asked, ‘Who was Duncan?’

‘Euan’s brother. Our eldest. He died in Africa during the second war.’

I nodded. ‘I saw Mark’s stone in the churchyard at Canaan.’ (Macrocarpas, magpies, uncut grass. Grave decorations: smashed glass domes containing porcelain flowers and foliage, all white, as though bred for centuries in the underworld. The headstone was a garlanded marble needle. The whole scene was like the Sutton painting, Norwester in a Cemetery.)

‘Jack and I picked that stone: I loathe those war graves.’

(Oblong bronze plaque: cross, fern, and fatal years.)

‘Have you seen the farm?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I have. Your son says he’s leased it for a pine plantation.’

‘Not the house and the home paddocks.’ She leaned forward and touched her chest with her bird’s-foot fingers. ‘Everything from the old wood to Jack’s gateway is still mine.’

How long is it since anyone’s lived there?’

‘I haven’t lived there for a long time—since Jack died—1970.’

‘It’s been empty that long?’

‘Oh no. My granddaughter Joanna Roberts and her husband David kept goats there for several years. They went to Australia, took the children out of school, packed all their belongings into twenty-four tea chests, and moved over to Australia!’ This was obviously a momentous step, one Joanna’s grandmother had not approved.

I steered her back onto the subject. ‘How long has the house been empty?’

Again that neutral look. Was she was working it out? ‘It has been six or seven years since anyone has lived there.’

‘Why didn’t you sell it? I’m sorry—you’ll think I’m a real estate agent, going on about the house—really it’s just curiosity.’

She didn’t seem able to follow this, and ignored my question. Instead, she tapped me on the shoulder with a hard fingertip. ‘Will you ask Christine to fetch the journal from my locker. There’s a photograph you might like to look at.’

The nurse who escorted me had worn a name tag—Christine. I went in search of her. Through a screen door I saw her standing on the lawn overlooking the estuary, smoking a cigarette. I opened the door; she turned, dragged deeply, then threw the cigarette down on the wet grass and came over.

Christine carried the journal—a thick book with a worn, stained, red cloth cover—back to Emma Harper, who was asleep.

I told Christine not to wake her.

‘Are you sure? She mightn’t stir again before lunch.’

‘There’s always another day.’

Christine shifted a pot plant off the small table near Mrs Harper and replaced it with the journal. Then left us alone.

For several minutes I watched the old woman doze, the rigid, curled quotation marks of her hands rested in her lap.

The wind was picking up outside, pressing on the large pane of glass, tossing the yellow lichen-covered branches of the dead pear orchard, parting the brown reeds on the estuary to reveal flashes of their cherry-red roots, and whitening the thin film of water over the sand. Beyond the estuary Mount Burnett stood black and unmoved, with cloud suspended over its summit like sea foam above a rock.

The window shuddered and flexed inward.

I picked up the journal. Its spine was broken in several places and its pages coming away from dusty, yellow glue; the pages were brittle and brown at the edges—scorched by time. Though I opened it slowly and stealthily, its leaves crackled. The old woman continued to sleep, her chin on her chest.

Each page was dense with words in unparagraphed, space-saving blocks. The sheer volume of writing was intimidating, but I found a poem and paused to read:

From here
it takes too long for any word
to get to you:

so I shall write
this to last—
neither dated nor staid
narrative.

If I come home
you will read it.

If I do not come home
you will read it.

It has rained for five days
like the long rain
that curtains Canaan’s hills
and
indistinct from each other
in little light and much mud
the men have burrowed
into the earth.

This place is a gross imitation of home
here farmers fight
and forget how to speak
instead of meeting at
the Rat Trap
for an after-work drink
and lazy talk.

Like home
the hills are pitted with holes
but these ones burst
afresh every day.

At home, I knew where to walk
to avoid the pits
even at dark—
but yesterday
as I trudged between dugouts
a hand crept out from the duckboards
to trip me.

At home the holes do not have hands
to wave you down while walking home to tea.

And no

I cannot send this.

You know that there is death in war
and you have heard
the din
that rocked the hand
that wrote unsteady letters
to you.

But as I cherish you

I cannot describe a dead man’s hand
wedged, black and branchlike,
between the rotting boards.

Beneath this I read:

Dec. 1, 1917. The last post brought three letters and already I’ve mislaid one—Gordon’s account of the lambing. I do not want to lose this, but think the Capt. suspects I have a journal illegally. I wonder if anyone will ever know what is not said by the officers and is omitted from our letters—like the Lancs, left out on Bellevue Spur. If I wrote about it, it would read like a testimony, not a eulogy. I cannot overcome what I know by putting it on paper. Yesterday I found a firm footing in the mud by stepping on a dead man’s head, but slipped when his scalp tore away from his skull. Mother used to complain ‘Be respectful!’ when I stepped on the graves in the churchyard. But who can support the burden of being respectful now? In a million years some geologist will halve a rock and marvel at the deep sediment of death, four years’ worth, a thousand years thick. (I wonder where I lost that letter? The old man I saw on the way in, fleeing down the Menin road with his clock, copper pans, and brass firedogs in a hand cart, has more than any of us.)

The poem and this entry were close to the end of the volume. I turned the pages. Mark Thornton had made only six more entries. There were long intervals between them, and one was undated.

July 1918 Hornchurch. Letter to Euan June 12. Letter to Emma June 18. Letter to Andy June 14. to Andy June 21. to Emma June 25. to John June 30. to Emma (Bellevue) July 5.

Gifts.

Emma—Silver-backed brush and mirror.

Great European Art.

Edith—Silk, Columbo.

Euan—Diaries and Letters of Captain R.F. Scott.

Gordon—?

Olive—Silk?

10.18. Andy wounded near Le Quesnoy, a bullet in the thigh, sent to Brockenhurst.

Visited the Lt. at Balmerlawn. Why say it to myself when I am unable to say it to him?

S.S. Marama. Nov. 13, 1918. Today a school of about 50 killer whale. Glossy black and white in the blue water. Playing, strong and unconcerned. It is hard to imagine atrocities in the middle of the ocean. These animals were lovely, transcendent and reassuring. Our recovery is of no consequence to them.

News that the War is finished came over the wireless yesterday. Our way of life secured for good, missing its limbs and strapped into a chair. They decided to stop it, and Andy and John will get home after all.

Jan. 1919. Discharge delays. Standing about for hours and not a band, not a flag, not a cheer. Emma had to buzz around with red tape at every turn. She says everyone wants their soldiers out of uniform as soon as possible, so we can all put the whole thing behind us. She couldn’t conceal her shock when she saw me, and I resent her for it. She says the influenza has been terrible, particularly in the cities, where the police were having to break into houses where whole families were afflicted, and that in Auckland there were rows of coffins in one of the city’s parks, awaiting burial. This is all new to people here. Aunt Olive lowered her voice in horror to say, ‘We think it’s some kind of plague—the bodies go black!’ I did not mention the lung cases, or the stories I heard about phosgene gas casualties. Olive gave me some BAXTER’S LUNG PRESERVER which makes many positive promises, and tastes appalling.

Feb. 15, 1919. It is as if I have been asked to wake up and go about my business after a bad dream in an interval of sleep. I will not write any more, there really isn’t any point.

The final entry, written in a different hand, read:

What did you expect from me, darling? They would not let me follow you.

Shortly after your funeral Andy McCauley wrote to me to express his sympathies. He said also that Lieutenant Given had died in hospital in England.

I had a terrible dream, a very real dream. In it I was standing on a lawn near a slow green river. A thin man in glasses with round black lenses was sitting beneath a tree at the top of the slope down to the water’s edge. He suddenly began to weep and got up to run, stumbling, down the lawn, then fell and crawled face first, like a lizard, into the water to drown.

I do not believe you were used up by the war. Nor do I believe all your pain, and all your friends’ pain, and mine, can be used up by death. When you were sick you said your shadow was the man-sized mouth of an abyss. All this is true—the wounds, losses and abysses, but it is also true that you would never have known how terrible life could be if you had not left home. And, had you not left, you would be able to see what I see now, and that is our neighbours—Margaret, Beth and Jack Harper, and old Mrs Walsh—coming into the garden for a visit. They are crossing your ‘minted sun-spots’—the gold coins of light under the apple trees. The window is closed between me and them and the silence is vivid. I know you are beside me and I love you, Mark.

Jack is waving. I will go out to them.

Jill

Over the Hill to Motueka; along the road beside the river to Motupiko, and on to Highway Six; through the Buller Gorge to the Inangahua function; down Highway Sixty-Nine to Reefton; through the Lewis Pass to Hanmer.

The moment came when I stopped and Dan walked ahead of me along the road. Then my thoughts came down their coiling paths like buzzards, or like abacus beads clicked into an equation—hundreds, tens, ones—a colour composition of a sum. And I saw the nearest, simplest fact, that what was happening was really happening, was not a story I was telling or being told.

The European plantings at Hanmer suggest a ‘location’, a scene from a film. (Birches in Sweden, a walk in the brittle woods.) Dan and I spoke as though we were scripted, a see-sawing dialogue of recriminations, strained loyalties, fear and power. We looked like a picture: the sallow-faced, red-haired man and his small blond wife. The trunks of the birches were black and white, spindly, slanted, confusing. There were yellow leaves on the trees and brown leaves on the path, veiling mud, tyre tracks, footprints.

The bare woods of Bergman, and I had been obedient to the script. I couldn’t remember what I had just said; but, like the woods, it was imported, insubstantial, seemed dead.

Dan had said, ‘Don’t be like that. I understand it’s difficult for you.’

And I thought, ‘I could run through this wood. That Tawa forest through which as kids Mary and I used to hunt each other with supplejack spears was treacherous to run through; a confusion of green light, shadow, stones, fungus, rotten logs and tree roots hidden by ferns. But I could run through this forest with my eyes closed, because it isn’t really here.’ Then I thought, ‘I’m not really here.’

And, at this, my ideas came like kites to a carcass, down the turning stair of a turret of heated air.

Dan looked back, enquiring, because I’d stopped and, in the script, his turning was the required response.

Then I remembered that I had said, ‘I wasn’t there, I couldn’t save her.’ And he had said, ‘Don’t be like that. I understand it’s difficult for you.’

I thought, ‘You make me feel like a murderer.’ Then thought these words again, several times, exactly the same—like an affirmation for Self-Transformation.

Some time ago I said something similar to Mary, in reporting a remark of Dan’s—I think what he said about how I was probably engrossed in my studio when Nicky was killed. Mary, colouring up, said, ‘How can you let him? I wouldn’t let anyone say something like that to me!’ But it isn’t a matter of ‘letting’; suddenly you are in the middle of it, the quake has struck and your house has fallen down. He didn’t even need to say such things to me, my mind was full of acrimony against myself, as though my lack of happiness before disaster struck had been a failure of commitment, yet another symptom of my mediocrity.

The easel had been fixed at a comfortable working height for Nicky, for some three months before the accident. There were scabs forming at the tops of my tubes of oil paint. My friend, Louise, the gallery owner, said when I married, about Nicky—not mentioning Dan—‘She’s sweet, but be careful, Jill, that she doesn’t make you shorten your stride.’ And added, ‘Children,’ like the final diagnosis of a dire illness.

Now I know I would walk with a chain between my ankles, shortening my step forever, to have her walking beside me. Because, though it is true that to care for her, teach her, include her, I had to slow myself down, it is also true that ambling is the fundamental pace of life. It is rising and retiring with the sun, retrenchment in winter, growth in spring, the elliptical return to memories of childhood which comes before the closure of death in age, and it is the lives of young men and women under occupation by children. It hurt me to choose that, though I didn’t choose it forever. But I chose it, and it was taken from me.

I watched Dan’s sad, impatient face, thinking, ‘You make me feel like a murderer.’ Not saying it, because saying things had become completely unsatisfactory. Then I realised I had been considering how safe it would be to bolt away through the woods, because that was what I was planning to do.

Dan said, ‘Jill?’ and I spun around and ran off the path and away through the slender, piebald tree trunks.

But, leaping down a slope, my foot found a patch of permanent shadow and a skin of unthawed frost, and I slipped, coming down clumsily on one hip in the spongy leaf-litter. Dan caught up with me, dropped onto his knees beside me and put his arms around me, saying, ‘I’m sorry, Jill. Please forgive me. I love you.’

In the script the couple are walking in the winter forest. The woman says, in a tone which suggests she has said it several times before and that, with each vocalisation; the enormity of meaning in the sentence has increased Gs exponentially in the heavy world of her heart, ‘I wasn’t there. I couldn’t save her.’

To which the man replies, fielding his own pain, ‘Don’t be like that. I understand it’s difficult for you.’

Whereupon she stops, like a clockwork toy whose walking mechanism has suddenly seized up. And, after going several paces, immersed in himself, the man stops too, and turns, looks at her, waiting.

Suddenly she runs from him, stumbling through the wood, but slips on a patch of fortuitous frost and falls—so he can catch her, saying, ‘I love you.’ Just in the nick of time.

The mourning-manual says: ‘These are the stages of grief.’ Take note, mark down the intervals of grief’s remission, for it is a curable disease. You will pay off your loss, purchasing peace on time. Paying off days, months, against the debt of your mourning—rather like a mortgage, only it doesn’t take so long.

She says (her buried voice), ‘Fairy ball gowns,’ pulling the gold and cream petals from their clasp of green sepals and touching the tip of the flower’s funnel to her tongue to taste the nectar.

Begin again. But begin where?

And yet I am changing; infected with rage, as if by a werewolf’s bite.

Kelfie

Certificate of Vaccination. Driver’s Licence. Motor Vehicle Registration. Accident Report. Passport. Visa. Work Permit. Lease. Title Deed. Deed of Sale. Receipt. Cheque. Bill. File. Letter. Postcard. Dispatch. Diary. Journal. A Report on the Storm Damage to the Hill Section of Highway Sixty. Certificate of Attainment. Degree. I.D. Casebook. War Record. Prescription. Police File. Autopsy. Lawyer’s Brief.

Documents, monuments, manuscripts.

News after Z-Hour.

Dreams, diseases, memories, ghosts.

‘Hello, Mr Harper? It’s Keith Kelsey—the history student—’

‘Yes?’

‘I’d like to say how sorry I was to hear about your mother’s death.’

‘Yes—it was quite sudden, she was very old, but her health was good and we’d been told she could expect another few years. Did you see her? Was she any help?’

‘I saw her briefly. I was short of time, unfortunately.’

‘Did she say much about my uncle?’

‘She said he used to gather pukeko eggs and make his family strongly flavoured, greenish omelettes. She said he always had chilblains from walking around barefoot on the frost.’

‘It’s funny what they remember.’

‘Yes.’

‘And did she have the journal?’

‘Yes. Do you have it now?’

‘Did you see it? Because it wasn’t among her things at Rest-haven.’

‘Really? I saw it, but she was reluctant to let me study it. She only got it out to show me a snapshot—’

‘She was always a bit close-lipped about her life before she married. I think she didn’t like to remind anyone that she had such a stretch of life before then. She was twenty-eight and my father only twenty-one when they married, not that such age differences were unusual in the years following the war.’

‘No.’

‘It’s strange about the journal though—are you sure that’s what you saw?’

‘It was Mark Thornton’s journal.’

‘My sisters and I did the sorting out together, maybe one of them has it. I’ll ask.’

‘What’ll happen to the house now?’

‘I gather she told you she was hanging on to it? Stubborn old soul. Now the whole farm can go for the pine plantation. The house will be demolished—it’ll probably have to be dynamited, since it’s so out of the way—after my daughters and nephews have taken all the salvageable turned-wood and stained-glass.

‘It’s an interesting house.’

‘Yes, a great old landmark. It used to be a sort of wayside inn when the route over the Hill was really a journey. The present road—or rather where it was before the big slips in April—was cut in the thirties. Yes, the house was a landmark in its day. Patriarch, the Summit Station. An uncle of mine ran the other big hill station, Rotherburn—half of it went to the quarry, and the other half to the Crown.’

‘So much for history.’

‘That’s the way things go.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘I’ll let you know if I hear anything more about the journal. I have a contact number.’

‘That would be good. Thanks for all your help.’

‘Good luck with the project.’

‘Yeah, thanks. Goodbye.’

Soon there will be no one left to say that it was what it was. No more resurrected casualties veering away from memories of despair. The old people with soft, blotched, folded bodies, sitting bonelessly, bored, in chairs in then children’s living rooms and hospital day rooms are, too, the broken shells and lost greywacke tools in middens hidden by marram and bracken—they, too, are the stumps of our razed forests.

It was a snapshot, not a portrait. Portraits were often touched up so that the subject’s skin would have the same matt patina as today’s Vogue black-and-whites—the flesh of a firm, faintly downy summer fruit. Portraits really made those soldiers look fresh-faced. (Unless, of course, they were. One of my friends contends that our skin problems are a result of preservatives in our food. He believes we ingest all our indispositions, and, ultimately, our failures. I think he even believes that chemical devils produce ideas like the distinction between ‘strategic’ and ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons, and institutions like the concentration camps in Honduras.)

A snapshot. Showing Mark Thornton leaning on the river wall beside one of the old cannon on the banks of the Thames. His hat perched on the top of a pyramid of cannonballs. One thumb hooked in his belt and his ankles crossed. His hair, coarse and blond, brushed back from a sharp widow’s peak. He is laughing affectionately at the photographer, his squinting, half-moon eyes pale and clear.

‘I want to get you all in.’

‘I am all in. I’m footsore and parched, I need a beer.’

‘This isn’t the same as my camera, it takes getting used to. All right, I have you. Why don’t you lean on the gun!’

‘I want the picture to be of me and the gun, not of me in front of the gun.’

‘If you insist. But if you ask me it spoils the composition—the gun looks wonderful, you look superfluous.’

‘Take the picture.’

‘Stop glowering.’

‘For God’s sake Alan, take the picture—before I turn to dust and blow away!’

‘Go on—I’d be famous if I caught that in a photograph. Ah! Now that’s better! That’s what I call a smile.’