Authors: Chris Else
Gith
Chris Else
Chris Else has written five previous novels and two collections
of short stories. He has worked as a bookseller, publisher's
representative and publishing consultant and has taught both
creative and technical writing. With his wife, Barbara, he runs
TFS, a literary agency and manuscript assessment service.
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
ISBN 978 186979219 0
Version 1.0
National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Else, Chris, 1942-
Gith / Chris Else
ISBN: 978 186979219 0
Version 1.0
I. Title.
NZ823.2—dc 22
A VINTAGE BOOK
published by
Random House New Zealand
18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland, New Zealand
Random House International
Random House
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London, SW1V 2SA
United Kingdom
Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway
North Sydney 2060, Australia
Random House South Africa Pty Ltd
Isle of Houghton
Corner Boundary Road and Carse O'Gowrie
Houghton 2198, South Africa
Random House Publishers India Private Ltd
301 World Trade Tower, Hotel Intercontinental Grand Complex
Barakhamba Lane, New Delhi 110 001, India
First published 2008
© 2008 Chris Else
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Random House New Zealand uses non chlorine-bleached papers from sustainably
managed plantation forests.
Text design: Kate Barraclough
Cover photograph and design: Matthew Trbuhovic, Third Eye Design
Thanks to Winton Amies for providing the petrol bowsers in the cover photograph
Printed in Australia by Griffin Press
The assistance of Creative New Zealand is gratefully
acknowedged by the publisher.
For Barbara
My thanks to Barbara Else and Harriet Allan for comments
on earlier drafts of this book, to my editor Rachel Scott, and
to Creative New Zealand for a project development grant that
enabled me to write it.
Also by Chris Else
Black Earth White Bones
Kit Wallace has spent his whole life running away. Through luck and
lack of purpose he has finally washed up in the Pacific nation of Ventiak.
Here, on the top floor of the Royal Albert Hotel, he avoids his past
by drinking whisky and writing poetry he fully intends no one should
ever read. Yet, despite himself, he has been drawn into the lives of the
people around him. When he is invited to join a scam in the phosphate
industry, which will defraud the Ventiakans of millions of dollars, he
is torn between disbelief, self-serving cynicism and a loyalty that takes
him by surprise. His life begins to unravel and he is forced into action.
Meanwhile, in the upland forest, the Rage is beginning: a periodic
rampage of millions of ants that will sweep over the island, carrying
all before it.
In this, his fifth novel, Chris Else has created an utterly convincing
Polynesian setting with its own brilliantly realised language, culture,
flora and fauna. His humour and wisdom are at once merciless and
forgiving as he uses language to explore man's — and woman's — deepseated
need to be both an individual and to belong.
On River Road
'Fantastic. You know, everyone together.' Ward looked at him, eyes shining.
Tears of emotion nearly. That's what Ward liked most of all, wasn't it?
Everyone together. Like a family.
In the trendy satellite town of Durry, four couples live in the support
and trust of their joint friendship. They've stuck by one another through
young love and marriage break-up, hard times and rising affluence.
Each knows the others inside out. But now the teenage daughter of one
of them has been killed in a hit and run. Cracks begin to appear in their
relationships. Can the centre hold?
On River Road
explores this network of friends, wives, husbands and
lovers. With insight and compassion, Chris Else takes us through the
aftermath of the accident and reveals our own deep need for human
comfort and reassurance, even in the midst of seeming plenty.
THE FORECOURT WAS full — six or seven vehicles to
serve at once. I was in the shop, stuck behind the till, so Gith
had to deal with them on her own, running round like a
mad thing, pumping the gas and washing the windscreens.
I couldn't have seen what was going on out there even if I'd
wanted to, because we had a big poster for the Annual Show
in the window and, from where I was, it hid two of the pumps.
Monty Praguer's blue ute was at number seven, with his pig
dog Sam in the tray, tied to the frame. Mavis Blake's gold
Mazda was at eight. I didn't see the others, except for the red
Commodore. I remember the young woman getting out of
it. She was wearing glasses and a blue shirt with the sleeves
rolled up. Her brown hair was cut to about halfway down her
neck. She reached into the rear seat and dragged out a pack. I
figured she was a hitch-hiker.
'Bloody madhouse,' Monty said, taking his turn in the
queue. 'Like flies round a shit heap.'
I looked at the bloke behind him, a city type with a grin on
his face like he thought it was funny.
'Might be the end of the world,' I said.
Monty laughed.
I took his credit card and swiped it.
'My motor's losing power,' he said. 'Can you get that girl of
yours to take a look at it?'
'Sure,' I said. 'Drop it by whenever.'
Gith was just outside the window, waving a couple of
twenties at me to show somebody had paid her cash.
'She did a bloody good job last time.' Monty punched in
his PIN number.
There were five in the queue now. Outside another car had
drawn up, a blue-grey wagon. It had a dog in the back seat,
a golden labrador with its head through the window. Sam
was standing up, going crazy barking at it. The girl with the
glasses had gone.
As far as I know that was the last time anyone innocent
saw her alive.
***
WAS THAT THE way it was? I guess you can never be sure. I
mean, in one way it was no big deal. Just a Monday afternoon
in early January, a warm day and a swag of people travelling
north for the holidays. Maybe there was something about the
girl that got to me. I guess she looked a bit like Gith: tallish,
skinny, with brown wavy hair. Or maybe I knew, somewhere
deep down, that things weren't right. Not that I thought much
about it at the time. It didn't really strike home until a couple
of weeks later when Hemi Williams, the local cop, dropped
by with the photograph.
Gith was in the workshop and I'd just finished serving a
customer. Hemi was on foot, which was not like him. Given
how big he was, he didn't do much walking.
'Gidday,' I said. 'How's it going?'
'Good, bro. Good.' He looked a bit nervous. I reckon it was
because he had a feeling about how things were. The same
way I did, maybe.
'Afternoon stroll?' I asked him.
'Nah. Missing person. I've been doing the street in case
anyone spotted her.' He handed me the picture. It was
coloured but kind of bleached out. I picked her by her hair
and the glasses.
'Yeah,' I said, remembering. 'Who is she?'
'Name's Anneke Hesse. She's Austrian. Checked out of a
backpackers' in Wellington on the eighth, told a couple of
others she was heading for Turangi. Don't know if she ever
made it. Her folks got worried when they hadn't heard from
her.'
I looked at the photo again. The girl wasn't what you'd call
pretty, but it was hard to tell with the blur. She had a nice
smile. I got a sinking feeling.
'She was here,' I said. 'Not sure but it could've been the
eighth.' I tried to picture it. 'She got out of a car. A red
Commodore.'
'What happened then?' Hemi asked.
I shrugged. 'Dunno.' I looked at him.
He nodded, gave a sigh. 'Yeah, bro.'
Because this wasn't the first time. About eighteen months
before, another young woman had gone missing on our stretch
of highway. That one was a Kiwi girl called Mattie Barnes,
who was last seen getting into a white station wagon — a
Laser or a Corolla — about five k north of Katawai. She'd
vanished into thin air. The cops had rounded up bloody near
every white wagon in the North Island but they still didn't
seem to have a clue what had happened to her. They'd posted
a 50K reward for any information. Nada so far.
'Monty was there,' I said. 'And Mavis Blake, too. We were
busy as hell.' I was feeling bad because I hadn't seen more.
Hemi nodded.
'Do you want to show this to Gith?'
'Sure.'
We had a look in the workshop but she wasn't there.
'Not to worry,' he said.
'I'll ask her later.'
'Thanks.'
***
PEOPLE DON'T ALWAYS see Gith the right way. Some,
like Monty and Hemi, just treat her normal. A lot of others,
though, just don't get it and think she's an idiot. In the early
days I tried to tell them but it made no difference to the ones
who didn't want to see, so I shut up in the end. Gith's got
brain damage and she can't talk right. Broca's aphasia, they
call it. But it doesn't make her a fool. Before the accident
she was one of the smartest people I knew, even though she
was only fifteen, and afterwards I figured — I could just tell
— that all those smarts were still in there somewhere.
Gith is my niece, the daughter of my ex-wife Michelle's
sister, Sophie. Sophie and Gith's father, James, were killed in
a car crash. Nobody knows what happened but it was nighttime
and they'd been travelling for six hours and it seems
like James was driving way too fast and maybe fell asleep.
They were going through a little place called Matatiku when
the car swerved off the road and hit a power pole. It spun
and flipped and crashed through a chain-link fence into a
kids' playground, where it took out a jungle gym. Gith lived
through it, but only just. She had a broken pelvis and injuries
to her insides. The worst thing was that, in all the tangle, some
sort of metal rod punched a hole in the side of her head the
size of a fifty-cent coin. She was out to it for three months
and then there was a long, long time trying to get her right
again. She did pretty well, but she didn't make it all the way.
She can get what people say and she can read, sort of, but she
makes a real shambles of speaking or writing. Nobody seems
to know why that is, even the doctors, but they reckon part
of the reason is to do with a bit of the brain they call Broca's
Area. It got pretty mashed up in her case. For a while they
thought that maybe she would be okay. She couldn't speak
at all at first, but bit by bit, over a couple of years, the words
started to come back. She's still not right, though, and now it
seems she's never going to get much better than she is. In the
beginning she found it hard but in the end, in a weird kind of
way, I think she got used to it.
I didn't get to talk to her about Anneke Hesse until after
we finished work.
I was doing the cooking that night, like I do most nights.
Gith likes cooking and she's good at it but her brain tends
to get into a sort of loop where she can only think about one
kind of meal. So, if you leave it to her, it'll be bacon and eggs
or cauliflower cheese three times a day. Even if you stand next
to her and try to keep her mind on doing something different,
she'll jump track to her first idea soon as your back's turned.
I generally find it's easier to do it myself and leave her to her
music and her magazines or the motor manuals.
After we'd cleaned up the workshop and had our showers,
I went out into the garden to dig some spuds and pull a few
greens for tea. When I came in again she was lying on her back
on the sofa with her head on one arm and her feet hanging
over the other. She was listening to music, something tinkly
and classical. I don't go for that stuff much but I've got to
say it has some good tunes sometimes and this one sounded
pretty okay. She didn't hear me come in and for a while I just
stood there, in the living-room doorway, looking at her and
listening. She looked great lying there with her eyes closed,
long and slim, her skin creamy, just a flush of red in her cheeks.
Her hair was wavy, thick and shining, except for the scrappy
patch over where they'd stuck the metal plate in her skull. I
felt lucky to have her in my life.
After a while something told her I was there. She opened
her eyes and turned her head and smiled. She has a great
smile. It's kind of lopsided because of the accident, but she
always smiles with her eyes as well and it makes you feel real
welcome.
'Hi, sweetheart,' I said.
She sat up, swung her feet to the floor. I went and sat beside
her, put my arm around her. She snuggled into me and leant
her head on my shoulder.
'You okay?' I asked.
'Gith,' she said. That pretty much stands for 'yes' in her talk,
although in the early days it was the only word she could say.
It's how she got her name. Michelle always thought it was
bad to call her that, a sort of piss-take, and maybe she was
right. I think I started doing it to try to get Gith to listen to
herself, to make her angry and force her into saying something
different. It worked, kind of, and the name stuck. In the end
I think it came to mean that I thought she was okay the way
she was, and she felt happy about that.
'What do you want for tea?' I asked. 'Sausages all right?'
'Gith,' she said.
I fried some sausages and boiled the spuds and cabbage
from the garden. Over dinner I asked her about that Monday.
Had she seen the hitch-hiker with the glasses?
'Gith.' She gave the move she does to help with yes, a little
downward flap of her hand.
'Did you see where she went?'
She frowned, trying to get the word out. 'Goth. Invan.'
Then, after thinking for a bit, she made with her hands like
she was driving.
'She got in a car?'
'Narg.' Which is no, usually. 'Van.'
'A van?'
'Gith.' She was going to say more but then she gave up. She
went and got the sketch pad and pen from the dresser, bent
over it, her shoulders all tensed up. Her drawing is pretty crap
except when it comes to cars; then she's more or less up to the
mark. This time she produced a fair picture of a flat-fronted
van with a sliding door in the side.
'What colour?' I asked. 'White?' They usually are.
'Gith.'
'I didn't see it,' I said.
That pissed her off and she went stab, stab, stab with the
pen, putting spots like black tadpoles all over the side of the
van.
'Sure,' I told her. 'I'm blind. I know.'
She grinned. And then another thought struck her. She
leant over the pad and slowly, like she was carving them in
with a knife, she started to make a row of marks like a straggle
of burnt-out matches. I knew what she was trying to do. She
had the van's registration number somewhere in that head of
hers — or at least she thought she did. Any second now she
was going to be seriously pissed off with herself because she
couldn't get it out.
I reached out and put my hand over hers, stopped her
writing.
'It's okay,' I said. 'Leave that. I've got another question.
What sort of van was it?'
'Mithibith.'
'Mitsubishi?'
'Gith.'
'Did you know the driver?'
She thought for a second. 'Mebby.' She gave a so-so move,
wagging her head and shifting both hands back and forth like
she was rubbing a soccer ball.
'A local?'
'Mebby.'
'But you'd seen him before?'
'Gith.'
'You know his name?'
'Narg.'
A thought struck me. 'It was a bloke, right?'
'Gith.'
'And he came inside to pay.'
'Narg.'
'No?'
'Cath,' she said. 'Pay. Forty.' She tapped her chest.
'Ah, he was the bloke that gave you the cash.'
'Gith.'
The sale had been on pump number five, one of the two I
couldn't see because of the poster. The driver, whoever he was,
hadn't come inside. He'd just gone off with Anneke Hesse.
I went over to the phone and called Hemi, told him what
Gith had said. She was watching me and I knew I was going
to have to tell her what was going on. I didn't want to. I figured
it could upset her. It did.
She does this weird thing when something really gets to
her. Her eyes roll up so that all you can see are the whites, and
her head goes around in a circle like her neck's too weak to
hold it up. She used to do it all the time in the early days. The
doctors said it was some kind of avoiding thing or overload in
the circuits somewhere. Now it hardly ever happens. It has to
be a real big upset. The thought of Anneke Hesse coming to
harm at the hands of the joker in the white van got her close.
I could see her eyes starting to go so I went and knelt by
her chair, put my arms around her. Her body was tense and
her head gave a shake.
'It's okay, sweetheart,' I said. 'It's okay.' It wasn't, though.
I knew what she was feeling because she made me feel it
myself.
'Listen,' I said. 'Why don't we go up to the farm — soon?
We've got to see Ma about your outfit for the show. Right?'
I felt her relax a bit.
'Maybe we could go tomorrow. Shut up shop a bit early.' I
had been planning to take her at the weekend. The problem
with weekdays was that she didn't like to be driving after dark.
It's the one thing about the accident, along with not riding in
the back seat, that affects her when it comes to cars.
'Would you like that?' I asked.
'Gith,' she said, and laid her cheek against the top of my
head.
'Your turn to do the dishes.'
'Parg!' She twisted upright and jabbed me in the ribs with
her elbow. It hurt.
'It bloody well is,' I told her.
'Worg. Nar, nar, nar, nar, nar.' Tapping me on the chest
with her finger. Meaning I hadn't done any work today. Then
she made little yapping moves with her fingers.
