Settlers' Creek (16 page)

When Box was satisfied he took a new flannel, wet it under the tap and wiped the remaining foam from Mark’s face.

Box carried the bowl back over to the bench. He turned on the tap and by trial and error made the water less hot. He rinsed out the bowl, refilled it and carried it back. Working together now, Box and Liz began to wash their son’s body. She chose a new flannel and wiped out from the red lips of the scar bisecting his torso. Box started from the shoulders. The room’s bright lights cast shadows under the curve of the boy’s chest and along the ridges at
the back of his arms. Box saw how, in the last few years, Mark had gone from being tall and skinny to solid and muscular, and he was still growing. Had been.

When they’d washed his shoulders and both sides of his chest and down along the almost hairless concave of his stomach, Liz moved to the bottom of the table. She folded up the sheet high onto his thighs. The blood had pooled in Mark’s feet and in his calves. They were mottled as though he’d been beaten. Box saw how the little toes on each of Mark’s feet hooked in. That was something he’d inherited from Liz. Like hers, the rest of his toes were long and his arch was high. Liz began to wash his feet and legs. Twice, Box saw Liz pause and look away from the bruising before getting back to work.

When she reached the top of his thighs she carefully folded back the edge of the sheet so that it still covered his hips.

‘I can do that if you want,’ he said.

‘Thanks.’

Somewhere around the age of eleven Mark had become self-conscious around his mother. The boy hated being caught naked, changed in front of her at the beach under a towel. Box and Liz had joked about it, even teased Mark. Certainly Liz was no prude. She didn’t bother to close doors if she was fresh from the shower or getting dressed. She would lie in the bath and carry on long conversations with Heather or Box. But right from his first year at intermediate, Mark had shied away from seeing her naked. Box and Liz had speculated at the time that the boy’s attitude was caused by a mixture of rumbling hormones and Mark’s mates. Box had once overheard one of the boys refer to Liz as a fox.
He’d teased Liz that if she ever got sick of him she’d have no trouble hooking up with a younger man.

But now it was Liz who looked away as Box folded up the sheet. He used the flannel to wash around the twin outcrops of Mark’s pelvis. He wiped the top of his inner thighs, carefully moving around the dark sack of the boy’s scrotum. And then he cleaned the penis, which was shrivelled and small. When he was done he laid the sheet back in place.

‘Okay, finished.’

They’d brought a sports bag containing a neat pile of Mark’s clothes. Liz carefully lifted out the clothes and placed them on the bench. His shoes were at the bottom of the bag. They looked ridiculously large in her hands — a pair of shoes lost by a circus clown. Liz moved over to the sink and rested both hands on the edge of the benchtop and breathed deeply. For a moment Box thought that she might throw up.

‘You’re doing great.’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘You sure?’

‘Come on. Let’s keep going.’

Box picked up Mark’s jeans from the top of the pile. They were the same ones he’d been wearing when he left the house on Saturday. The police had held them for a day, presumably to check them for signs of something more sinister than suicide. When they found nothing, an officer had delivered them back to to the house, along with the rest of Mark’s clothes, his cellphone and his wallet. Since then Liz had washed the jeans by hand, three times. She’d stood over the sink in the windowless laundry space and blankly scrubbed them until the water had cooled and the ends of her fingers were shrivelled stubs.

Box edged the jeans up over the boy’s feet. He took one leg and Liz the other. They had the jeans up beyond his knees when Box stopped.

‘Christ.’

‘What?’

‘We’ve forgotten to put on his underpants.’

The pair of blue boxers were sitting on top of the pile.

And before he could control it a smile spread across Box’s face. And then they were both laughing. Somewhere in the laughter Liz started crying again. They were holding each other and he was laughing and she was laughing and crying, gulping down air like a drowning woman. Somehow all at the same time.

Box wasn’t sure how much time had passed but he became aware that the funeral director had poked his head inside the door. ‘Is everything all right?’

Box nodded. ‘We’re fine.’

‘It’s just harder dressing him than we thought,’ said Liz.

‘Can I help? I’ve had a lot of experience.’

‘No, thank you,’ said Liz. ‘We’ll manage.’

When the man had gone again, Liz smiled ruefully up at Box. ‘I can’t believe that we forgot to put on his grunds,’ she said.

‘Yeah. Mind you, I did the same thing when I was dressing myself yesterday.’

She smiled through the tears. ‘Help me get these off again.’

The jeans slipped off, Box took responsiblity for lifting the sheet and pulling the underwear up over the buttocks and the hips. And then the jeans again. Together, they put on Mark’s almost-new shirt. It was a pale autumnal gold with a small logo of a dancing horse on the breast pocket.
First one sleeve. And then the shirt under the body as Box tilted the shoulders up. The other arm slipped in. Everything could be straightened and buttoned.

‘Shirt in or out?’ asked Box, already knowing the answer to a silly question.

She smiled back at him.

The shirt stayed out.

Box hadn’t smoked a cigarette in fifteen years. He’d quit when he was thirty-three, but it had been a stumbling marathon. He’d come close to lighting up again in those months when the business was going under. One day about a year ago he’d found himself in a dairy asking for a packet of Camels. He actually had them in his hand but had put them back on the counter and walked out before he could change his mind. And again on the day when their house on the hill had been sold at mortgagee auction for a hundred and fifty thousand below the bank’s valuation; standing at the back of the smug crowd listening to the auctioneer trying to wring an extra few thousand dollars out of the vultures who’d come to pick over his life, right then he would have killed for a drag. But he’d always resisted.

Now he stood out on the front veranda and rolled the stiff pluckings of tobacco out onto the small white
rectangle of paper in his hand. His fingers remembered.

It was a cold evening and the hovering city smog gave the air a chemical smell and a taste that a born and bred local could roll around in his mouth and comment on like a wine lover talking about a bad merlot.

Even before Box scraped the match along the side of the box, the smell of the tobacco dragged him back through the years to Whitecliffs. Dee hadn’t allowed smoking inside the house. In the evenings Pop would go out onto the veranda, on the north side if it was windy or raining, but when the nights were anywhere near fine he would walk out onto the big sloping lawn at the side of the house. He would stand on the edge of the orchard, close in to the flaky-barked pear and the apple trees, and puff away. His grandfather often smoked during the day as he worked on the land, but those cigarettes always seemed casual and without significance. Pop’s last cigarette of the day was a real ritual.

Box would sometimes stand in the window of his bedroom and watch Pop on the far side of the lawn carefully rolling the tobacco. He would lift it to his mouth, moving his tongue slowly and carefully along the edge of the paper. Then he would produce a flame with a flick of his wrist. He would eke out the cigarette in his hand even if the weather was cold. On still evenings the old man’s smoke drifted into the trees, then rose slowly into the higher air. Sometimes Pop would inspect the branches closest to him as he smoked, occasionally breaking off a leaf and moving it around between finger and thumb. Or he would sweep the ground in absent-minded movements with the sole of his boot as though weighing up the quality of the earth that he uncovered.

Box finished rolling up the tobacco and lit the cigarette.
He paused, then took a drag. He felt the smoke hit his lungs like a long warm hug from an old girlfriend — too bloody nice for your own good. He held the smoke down for a moment before blowing it out over the three stunted roses that they’d inherited with the house.

People had been coming and going all day. Mostly they were Tipene’s relatives; strangers to him, but Liz knew a few of them from the old days — from the three years she was with Tipene. Other people had come to the house as well. Jill, their neighbour from up on Taylor’s, had nervously arrived with a plate layered thick with pikelets, jam and cream on the top. And a bowl of cooked chicken nibbles as well. A couple whose son had been at intermediate with Mark had turned up on the doorstep just after lunch. The boys had done athletics together and had been tight for a while before going to different high schools. Keith and Trudy had both been as edgy and embarrassed as an ex-nun on her wedding night. But at least they’d made the effort. The less brave sent cards and flowers. The courier bloke didn’t even bother knocking any more. He just carried in the sixty-dollar arrangements — lilies and chrysanthemums and even orchids, nestling in soft beds of baby’s breath — and searched for a clear surface to put them on. They’d long ago run out of vases and jars. Luckily these days most of the flowers seemed to come in cardboard vases, their stems already soaking in a plastic bag of water.

A late-model SUV was pulling up outside the house, a red Nissan twin-cab with a flat-bed. In the fading light, Box didn’t recognise the man who got out until he was at the gate. It was Tipene. He came up the concrete path and stopped at the bottom of the steps.

‘Can I have a chat?’

‘Sure.’

Tipene came up onto the veranda and they shook hands. They both surveyed the dry lawn and the street and the paint-chipped houses.

‘Do you want a cigarette?’ asked Box.

‘Cheers, no. I gave up years ago.’

‘Yeah, so did I.’

Tipene smiled. ‘How’s your day been?’

‘Crap.’

Tipene twisted his face into a fleeting expression of sympathy. ‘Right, stupid question.’

Box puffed on his cigarette and turned his head to blow the smoke away. Christ, it wouldn’t hurt to be civil to the bloke. After all, he was making an effort. ‘Liz says you’re in tourism.’

‘Pacific Encounter, up at Kaipuna. We take people out to see the dolphins. There’s also a fishing charter part of the business. When we first started up I used to drive the boats, but now I’m in management.’

‘Stay with any job long enough and you end up behind a desk.’

‘These days I wouldn’t know a dolphin if I tripped over one.’

Box had to admit that there was an easiness about Tipene that he liked. He spoke like a man with little to prove. Box had met enough people to know how rare that was. For the second time that day he found himself stealing glances at Tipene’s face, looking for traces of Mark, fascinated despite himself.

‘How’s the tourism business these days?’ Box asked.

‘It’s definitely died off compared to what it was two
years ago. Numbers are down. It’s the whole international recession. People overseas are putting off holidays, sitting on the money they’ve got. But we haven’t had to lay anyone off yet, so things aren’t as bad as the bloody media would have you think. Lizzy says you’re a builder?’

Lizzy. Nobody called her Lizzy. Only her mum, before the mad old chook died. ‘Yeah. The bottom’s fallen right out of it, though. It’ll pick up again but right now there’s hardly any new houses going up.’

Box thought about telling Tipene the whole sorry saga of Saxton Construction. It was tempting to talk up what a success he’d been before pure bad timing had sucker-punched him and cut him off at the knees. But even as he thought about it Box knew how it would sound. He would come across as either boasting or whingeing — probably both. Box looked out over the patchy yellow lawn and the veranda with paint coming off the rail in flakes. He wished that Tipene had been talking to him a couple of years ago, out on the deck of the old house, with views up the coast and out over the city The fact was that Box was embarrassed by all this: the chocked-up cars on the neighbours’ lawn; the graffiti scrawled over the concrete-block fence; the deep grunting bark of the permanently chained-up German shepherd further down the road. In the fading light all of it seemed grey and squalid. Even in daylight it was pretty depressing.

Box and Tipene talked for a while, mostly about the economic downturn, and then, for the first time, Tipene looked slightly uncomfortable. ‘Lizzy says that you’ve got an idea where you want Mark to be buried?’

‘He’s being buried at Regent’s Bay. It’s over on the peninsula.’

Tipene nodded. He paused and seemed to be thinking. ‘I’ve got something I’d like to put to you, if you’re willing to listen.’

‘There’s no harm in listening.’

‘We think that Mark should be buried at Kaipuna.’

Box had been standing with one foot up on the lower rail of the balustrade. He took his foot off and straightened up. ‘Why?’

‘We think it’s important that he be buried with his ancestors at the local urupa — the cemetery close to our marae.’

Box was already shaking his head. ‘Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but that’s not going to happen. Mark’s going to be buried at the church in Regent’s Bay.’

‘Can we at least discuss it?’

‘I am discussing it, but frankly I can’t see what there is to talk about.’

‘Why being buried at Kaipuna is important to us, for a start.’

‘Who’s us?’

‘His whanau.’

‘Mark’s family is me and Liz and his sister.’

‘I’m not arguing that, but you have to accept that Mark was also Maori, tangata whenua. Through me, he was part of a hapu and an iwi — a tribe.’

‘I know what iwi means. Look, Mark hadn’t seen you or any of your family since he was two years old. He didn’t speak Maori.’

‘That doesn’t really matter.’

‘No, hang on, let me finish.’

‘Okay, go ahead.’

‘He didn’t speak any Maori and he didn’t do anything Maori. I think he went to a marae once, when he was about twelve, on a school trip. His only comment was that he didn’t like sleeping on the floor. So how exactly was Mark Maori?’

‘Through his ancestry. Mark can trace his ancestors back to the first canoes to come to these islands. He has a spiritual connection to Kaipuna. That’s why he should be buried there.’

‘I don’t understand how anyone can have a profound connection to somewhere he’s never even been.’

‘That’s because you’re looking at things in a Pakeha way.’

‘That’s pretty condescending.’

‘But it’s true. He was born at the Kaipuna hospital. His placenta is buried near the marae.’

‘Look, I’m sorry, this is the end of this conversation. His name was Mark Saxton and Liz and I raised him right from when he was a little kid. It’s our decision where he’s buried. That’s not a Pakeha way of seeing things, that’s just right.’

‘We don’t see it that way.’

‘Mark’s being buried at Regent’s Bay.’ The injustice of what he was hearing was making Box angry. ‘Come on — fuck. He wouldn’t have recognised you or any of your relatives if he’d passed you in the street. He’s being buried where his family wants, his real family. The people who raised him, the people he loved.’

Tipene was shaking his head. ‘I can see there’s no point in talking to you about this anymore.’

‘You’re right there.’

‘We’d like to call a meeting. Everyone will get a chance
to say their piece and then at the end we can decide on what to do.’

‘No, no meeting. There’s no point. I’m not going to change my mind.’

Tipene searched Box’s face. ‘No. You’re not.’ He turned and went back down the steps. Box watched as he got into his SUV and drove away without once looking back.