Kate wouldn’t send a message, or leave any letters, but she would leave something. Every evening for weeks she’d been knitting. She was making hats for her granddaughters, who were all in their teens or early twenties, and were lively, go-getting girls. The hats were smart multicoloured beanies. Kate was sure they’d suit the girls. She had three finished, with cards pinned to them—to Kirsten, from Grandma; to Bridget, from Grandma; to Tessa, from Grandma.
That would have to be enough.
The day after they sent their first communication, everyone but Kate was a little on edge.
Oscar complained that if people staggered their breakfasts he’d still be doing the dishes when it was time for lunch. Theresa and Bub had an overemphatic discussion about how best to rig a rope ladder down the bluff on the shoreline track so they could pick up flotsam and not have to wait for another easterly gale. (Bub had already tried to row to the cove, and hadn’t counted on the outgoing tide. His dinghy had drifted towards the No-Go without his noticing. He felt faint, couldn’t manage the oars, and had just enough wit left to roll out of the boat into the water, and swim to shore. The dinghy had yet to turn up again—if it ever did.)
After lunch Jacob stormed out and removed the hoe from William’s hands and asked him what part of ‘you have to take it easy’ did he not understand? Dan articulated what they were all thinking: ‘We can’t expect to hear anything back until its dark.’ He sounded dubious, as if he longed to be contradicted.
Oscar went to feed the cats.
Bub and Belle retired to Sam’s bach to cook themselves dinner and share a bottle of wine. They hauled Sam’s pretty pink Formica table out into the front yard and sat where they could watch the sun setting behind the hills.
Night fell. After dinner Oscar cycled off and spent half an hour throwing stones at the streetlights along the seafront, managing to crack only one casing. He rode back and came in complaining to everyone that there was too much light. How were they supposed to see anything out there, anyway?
William and Theresa were in the atrium with the lights off and the doors open onto the terrace. ‘We’re keeping an eye out,’ Theresa said.
‘And?’
‘The officials are still deliberating, obviously,’ Theresa said. ‘It’ll take them time to work out how to answer. It’s actually harder for them to talk to us than it is for us to talk to them.’
‘Stop making excuses!’ Oscar said, and crashed off upstairs.
‘Go to bed,’ Theresa said to William. ‘You look exhausted.’
‘Yes—come to bed,’ said Sam.
At this William met Theresa’s eyes, and cool venom seemed to shoot through her. The look was regretful, and complicit. It told Theresa that William was conscious he was being kind to Sam, kind because she deserved kindness and he felt some species of loyalty to her, and it turned out that her duplicity wasn’t duplicity after all, and didn’t even call for his forgiveness—but that he didn’t want her any more.
A few weeks back Theresa would have shrugged and privately congratulated Sam on her escape. She might have said to Sam that William was pretty, but no prize. Now she felt terribly sorry for Sam, not so much because, when she discovered it, Sam would be wounded even by this gentle letting-down—but because William was a loss. A real loss. The realisation came thundering in on Theresa. What a man he was. How difficult, questionable, and overbearing; and how different, distinct, honest even.
For a moment Theresa felt that her bristling scalp might actually lever the top off her head. This riot of feeling was so out of the blue, so off the scale (she began explaining herself to herself like some police spokesperson sticking to safe sound-bite language in a television interview). The feeling was inappropriate, and disproportionate. And then she thought ‘What if this isn’t me—this enthusiasm? What if it’s the monster?’ Theresa took a mental step back, to take a good hard look at her feelings, and promised herself that, in future, she’d do a better job of policing them.
Bub and Belle sat on in the dark, gazing out to sea. At 2am they finally went indoors, lit some candles, and went to bed.
Dan shuffled out onto the terrace to join Theresa and, at around three, when she checked her watch, he was asleep, his chin silvered by stubble (he had always shaved before), and his mouth bracketed by deep grooves. Theresa got a rug and draped it over him. Shortly before dawn all the tui started singing—earlier than the other birds. The Nokia ring tui came and perched in the bouquet of the jacaranda above the graves.
One grave was covered in petunias that were just coming into bloom; the others were still fresh and dark. The tui began its upbeat little song. Dan went and fetched the shotgun. ‘I’m going to shut that fucking bird up for once and all,’ he said.
‘Oh no, don’t,’ Theresa said, pleading rather than firm, and that stopped him.
‘We’ve been waiting all night,’ he said, agonised.
‘We have to be patient.’
His back was to the light and Theresa couldn’t read his face. He said, ‘Look, it’s good that you’re so staunch. And I know that you, more than anyone else here, can imagine how the authorities are going to go about handling something like this. But don’t you think they’re being extra harsh?’ He took a deep breath and went on. ‘Either things don’t work the way I think they do, or—well, like, in the Wahine disaster, they always talk about how people broke the police cordon to jump into the waves and haul the lifeboats out of the surf at Eastbourne beach. Ordinary people, with stacks of blankets, and thermoses full of soup. Everyone soaking wet and cold, and doing their best. Wahine wasn’t that long ago. We aren’t that different. New Zealand isn’t that different. How come this disaster has been taken out of the hands of the ordinary people who just turn up to help?’
‘There are the bottles.’
‘That’s mostly Oscar’s mum and dad and some bloke who can’t bear to think we don’t know what bloggers are saying about us.’
‘Okay, then we’re the ordinary people.’
‘But where’s everyone else?’
‘It’s possible the guys monitoring the satellites can see things we can’t, and it will take them some time to figure out what information might help us, and what might be too discouraging.’
‘You think? But couldn’t they just say, “Hi, we got your messages; more later”?’
‘Yes,’ Theresa said, passionately. ‘Yes, they should. They should move mountains to talk to us.’
Dan fiddled with the gun, breaking it open and fingering the flat ends of the shells in its chambers. ‘If they’re this cold, how can I know they’re looking after Fay and the kids?’
‘Of course they are. And it isn’t coldness, Dan. It’s over-cautiousness, officiousness, paranoia. Something along those lines.’
‘My family lives one week to the next. We always thank God when the money comes in—my wages and the Working For Families. But lately we’ve even had to go to the food bank.’
‘There’d be a huge scandal if your family wasn’t being given all the support they need.’
‘I think people are good,’ Dan said, resolute. ‘But it’s the government and the army and the rest of them I’m worried about—and only because they haven’t answered us.’
‘They’ll have their reasons.’
Dan closed the gun with a metallic snap and flung it over his shoulder. ‘And I’m scared,’ he said, abruptly.
Theresa pressed her lips tightly together, and nodded.
‘I’m tired of being scared.’
Theresa didn’t answer, and after another moment, Dan started off down the steps saying he’d see if he couldn’t bag something fresh. He paused on the driveway and, without turning back, asked, ‘So you reckon they’ll look after my kids?’
‘Of course,’ Theresa said, rushing to reassure him—and not listening properly.
Dan returned with two fat rabbits. He
was jubilant. He skinned them and had a lively consultation with Jacob about how they should be cooked.
Everyone had watched all night, or made the attempt. They were all too tired to last till dinner so the rabbit casserole was lunch.
They all thanked Dan, but after lunch was cleared away William found him sitting in the atrium, in gloom of a deep degree. But everyone was gloomy, William thought. Even Oscar was swearing at his game and slapping the controller on his leg.
Bub turned up and grumped about how he and Belle hadn’t been invited to share the casserole, and Theresa said, quietly, but acidly, that Bub couldn’t expect to have it both ways—to be left alone, and included.
Before dawn the following day Dan got ammunition from the manager’s office. He filled his pockets with shells and then collected the shotgun from where he’d left it, clean and broken down, on a sheet of oily newspaper in the atrium. He had to pick his way through a field of towels laid on the floor. Belle was so low on feed for her birds that she was having to find things to eke it out. She’d washed the salt from all the supermarket’s packets of roasted macadamias, and then spread the nuts on towels to dry.
Dan put his gun back together. Then he wrote a note and left it on the dining table. I reckon I can get a couple more bunnies, it read. When Belle comes to get the nuts ask her and Bub to lunch. They missed out last time.
Dan headed up to the arboretum. He spotted a rabbit cleaning its whiskers in the first rays of sun. He took aim, and squeezed the trigger. The rabbit jumped, then tumbled limply in the grass. Dozens of other rabbits became visible as they scattered across the field.
When Dan picked the rabbit up it was still alive, panting little puffs of steam. He quickly broke its neck, draped it over his shoulder, and stepped back into the trees. He’d wait for the other rabbits to reappear.
A few minutes later the sunlight reached him, and a breeze trailed its scarves across his face.
Behind him, deeper in the trees, something made a soft, hollow thud. He looked and, in the dark depths of the exotic forest, he saw brightness, a patch of light as blue as the sky. Dan set his the gun over his other shoulder and walked into the arboretum.
*
The first gunshot woke Theresa. She immediately hauled herself out of bed, put on trackpants and a T-shirt, and ran downstairs. There she found Dan’s note. Well—she thought—he’d got it half right. A note was good, but if he’d said something the night before she’d have been able to ignore the gunfire and go back to sleep. Perhaps he had said something and she’d missed it. After all, no one else got up to investigate. Theresa imagined the other survivors, either in the know or exhausted by alarms, turning over and pressing pillows to their ears.
Theresa took herself back to bed, climbing back into her own warmth. A short while later she heard the second shot and slipped into sleep thinking of a rabbit stew with plenty of rabbit in it.
Bub and Belle appeared at breakfast. Bub sat down and accepted a cup of coffee. He said he wanted Oscar or Sam to help him make a rope ladder they could lower into the cove where the bottles collected. ‘It’ll be a fiddly job. Sam’s patient, and Oscar’s a fiddler. The hard part’s going to be rigging the ladder down the bank—finding something to attach it to.’
Belle poured her rinsed macadamias from the towels into a pillowcase. She shook it, and the nuts made an oily rattle. She said she was going to mix them in with the kakapo’s normal feed and see if they’d go for it.
Theresa asked Warren if he’d go look for Dan. ‘He should be back by now. He’ll have gone up towards the reserve, or maybe on to Cotley’s orchard. I’m going to check there.’
‘There are rabbits on people’s lawns,’ Bub said. ‘He could just as easily have taken a walk through town.’
‘The shots I heard came from behind the spa.’
‘Can I have a gun?’ Warren said.
‘What for? Rabbits?’ Bub said.
William, who was nursing a cup of tea (he wasn’t allowed coffee anymore) said, ‘There’s no danger out there. Or nothing you can shoot at. The thing about an invisible monster is that you can’t even close your door on it. You wouldn’t know whether it was outside or shut in with you’
Theresa looked around to see who was listening. Oscar was on his daily bike ride. Kate was in the kitchen and out of earshot. The vulnerable people at least were spared William’s bad attitude. She said to him, ‘You’ve got no grasp of the concept of morale, have you?’
‘We’ve got to stay positive,’ Warren said, a little mechanically. ‘Or, as Jacob would say, just chill.’
William weighed this up. ‘I’m pretty sure Jacob tells us to chill because he’s worried about our hearts. And I’m not forgetting for a second that the Wake is working on some weapon only I can use, either against myself or you people. Some customised delusion. By all means think positively. But it won’t save you.’
Theresa turned away from William in disgust and, ahead of time, thanked Warren for helping her see to it that Dan was all right.
Warren found Dan spreadeagled on the billowing silver fabric of a still partly-inflated balloon. The ground around the balloon was scuffed up as if Dan had scrabbled through the pine needles looking for something.
The balloon’s payload, a plastic canister, was open and empty. The bags of pellets—kakapo feed—had been ripped out of the canister and cast around the clearing, again as if a desperate search had at some point turned to the fury of disappointment. Dan’s heels were under his backside. The gun lay across his legs. Blood and brains had splattered the bole of the tree, and more blood haloed Dan’s head, its surface sometimes sleek and sometimes dull as the wind stirred the balloon and made the skin forming on the blood bunch into fine wrinkles. Warren took a good long look. Then he hurried, slithering and stumbling, in the direction of the spa.
Theresa and Jacob carried a roll of masking tape and a number of plastic rubbish sacks into the arboretum. They went over the site carefully before they moved Dan. They too looked for whatever Dan had been so desperately seeking—but found nothing more than the balloon, canister, and packets of feed.
Jacob slipped a bag over Dan’s head and another over his legs, then Theresa fastened the join with tape. She wound another length of tape around the wrapped body from head to foot. They rolled the bundled body off the balloon and across the turf till it was well out of the way. Then they gathered up the smeared fabric of the balloon and put it to one side, before once again searching the container and the ground all around it.
There really wasn’t anything else; no packet of papers, or DVD, or flash drive—no word from the world outside.
Theresa and Jacob carried the news back, but not the body. They’d bring Dan in after they’d talked to everyone.
Before they went indoors they stood for a moment by the jacaranda tree and looked at the graves. Theresa’s hand sought Jacob’s. ‘I don’t want to see another one,’ she said.
Jacob knew she meant she didn’t want to bury Dan here. The group of long mounds were already an accusation—a very personal failure for both the nurse and the police officer.
‘If the newest grave is here, out in the open, they can see it.’ He meant that the people monitoring the satellites could register another death.
‘They don’t care.’
‘There must have been other balloons,’ Jacob said. But he didn’t believe it. It would have been easy to put the same message with every balloon—so why didn’t they?
‘Come on. It’s time to tell everyone,’ Theresa said. ‘We’ll need help with the body, and the kakapo feed.’
Part Eight
Sam never had much to say for herself, and Bub was often comfortably quiet, so Oscar didn’t mind too much that they had been at work for over an hour without a word beyond the most practical exchanges.
Sam was holding a block of wood over the top of a metal stake, while Bub hammered it
gradually into the path of the shoreline track, twenty metres above the cove where the bottles collected. Bub was using a sledgehammer, but holding it close to its head and scarcely doing more than letting it drop onto the piece of two-by-four.
Oscar didn’t have a job of his own. On the day they’d buried Dan he had helped Bub make the rope ladder. He was now sitting on its coiled length, waiting. He was thinking about his grandmother, and something she’d once told him. ‘As a girl I was in and out of hospital with tuberculosis of the bone,’ she’d said, and had lifted her trouser leg to show Oscar the rumpled scar on her shin. ‘I couldn’t gad about like my classmates. But I learned to be a most patient person, and it has stood me in stead.’
Oscar wondered whether, when he got out of Kahukura, in whatever kind of life he’d contrive afterwards, he’d be ‘a most patient person’.
He could feel the hammer blows through the soles of his feet. But there was another sound—a labouring engine—that filled the silence between each blow.
‘Bub!’ he said. ‘Stop for a second.’
Bub paused. They listened to an engine shift gears and recommence roaring.
Bub pushed past Oscar and hurried to the bend from which the town was visible. Sam and Oscar joined him.
There was a dust cloud above the clearing in front of the closely woven galvanised steel of the predator-proof fence. The digger they’d used to make the mass graves was at work, charging forward a short distance then backing off again, cab tilting as the whole machine rose on the heels of its tread. The sound of the engine ricocheted around the hills.
‘Who is that?’ Oscar said. ‘I can’t tell from here. And what are they doing?’