Settlers' Creek (19 page)

All down the left-hand side of the highway north of town were souvenir places and takeaways and motels — concrete-block, neon-lit units built to net the people who hadn’t bothered turning off into the main street. Most of the shops were dark at this time on a Wednesday night. Box drove with one hand on the wheel, the other mitt clamped around a cold bottle, until he found a fish and chip shop that was still open and pulled up outside on the gravel.

He put his empty bottle down on a table by the door and went inside. The sign said the place didn’t close until nine on weeknights, eleven on Friday and Saturday. He was the only person there. He ordered a scoop of chips and what the handwritten blackboard called a monstaburger. It turned out to be two thick patties of beef, beetroot, lettuce, fried egg and enough processed cheese to clog the arteries of a horse.

Box carried the warm white package out to the ute and ate sitting behind the wheel. He swallowed without tasting, just telling himself that he was getting the energy he knew he needed.

When he was finished, his stomach felt bloated from the greasy food. He wound down the window and sucked in the cold night air, pulling it down deep into his lungs. Within seconds the sandflies began to swarm in through the open window. Box pushed the door open with his foot and walked over and stuffed the white paper parcel into a rubbish bin that was already full. On the other side of the road a freight train began to pass on hidden tracks. Shipping containers faded by salt and sun flicked by in the light from the shops. When the last container had gone by
he could still hear the roar. The sandflies had found him again by the time he realised that what he was hearing was the sound of unseen waves on the shingle beach.

Box got back into his ute and drove up the highway. Once the shops stopped the motels began. Every second place had a sign out the front. Box drove past a couple, then chose one at random. He imagined that they’d all be pretty much the same. Sure enough, the motel turned out to be your standard semi-circle of concrete-block rooms with ranchsliders, wooden picnic benches out the front. Behind the units there was only dark farmland.

When Box slid back the door to reception a buzzer went off inside the building, somewhere behind the bead curtain. A television was playing back there and canned laughter ebbed and flowed.

A man came out. He had dark hair and pale brown eyes, though his skin was almost as light as Box’s. ‘Gidday.’

‘I’m after a room for one night.’

‘This time of year you can take your pick. I’ll give you number eight.’ He turned and lifted a key off a hook on the wall behind him. ‘Where you heading?’

‘North.’

The man grinned. ‘Yeah. We get a lot of that. Or south.’

‘Yeah.’

‘If you don’t mind me saying, you do look knackered. Long drive?’

‘Yeah.’

The man handed over the keys and Box saw that there were two crude stars tattooed onto the knuckles of his right hand — the type of homemade thing done with a needle and ink from a ballpoint pen.

‘Eight is about halfway up on your right. You can park
your car down the side. I’ll get your milk.’

He went back through the clatter of beads and almost immediately returned with a small blue and white carton of milk. Box paid for the room with his credit card.

‘Cheers,’ said the guy when the transaction went through.

Box drove the twenty metres to unit eight. As he slipped the key into the door he looked up towards reception. The guy was standing on the step outside watching him. When he saw Box looking he turned and went back inside.

The unit was even more basic than Box had expected. It made the place he’d stayed in down south look like the Hilton. The walls badly needed a fresh paint job. There was a double bed and a cramped kitchenette, a small bathroom with a shower that needed scrubbing.

Box went out to the ute and double-checked that the toolbox was padlocked. Then he brought in his pack and the remaining beers. He sat on the bed and tore another bottle free from the cardboard, ripped off the top and took a long drink. He drank until he’d finished the bottle, then opened another.

He’d left a note for Liz. Pathetic. Pathetic and inadequate. Those words didn’t start to sum up that scrawled note of less than a dozen words. Cowardly — that was getting closer to the point. But he knew it was the best he could do at the time. There would have been no point in talking to her about what he was planning: the immovable object and the unstoppable force. It had been best for him just to get on with what he had to do.

Box had his cellphone in his pocket, though he’d switched it off before he had left the city and hadn’t turned it back on since. Now he sat on the bed and held his thumb down on the button that brought the thing back to blinking
beeping vibrating life. There were eight new messages. Five of them were texts and he read them one by one: four from Liz and one from a policeman, asking him to call as soon as possible.

It was the same policeman who’d talked to them at the station that afternoon. There’d been a police lawyer with them as well. The same useless tosser who’d explain that no law had been broken. Apparently no one owned a body, so it couldn’t be stolen. In civil disputes like this one, especially involving Maori, the police recommended mediation. If that failed then a case could be made to the arbitration court.

‘How long could that take?’ Box had asked.

‘Up to six months before the case is heard, but obviously longer before a decision is reached.’

Now, Box dialled and listened to the long message that Liz had left. Eventually the machine ran out of space and her words were cut off, mid-sentence. He turned off the phone again and slipped it back into the pocket of his jeans. While he’d been listening he’d finished the beer in his hands; hadn’t really noticed he was still drinking it but the bottle was empty. That could only mean one thing — time for another.

He took off his shoes, lay back with his head and shoulders propped up on two pillows and stared at the ceiling. At some time in the past the roof had leaked. There were dark stains on the plaster. Box imagined shapes — like a darker, more sinister version of the games that kids played with clouds.

A gin trap.

A grinning mouth.

The flayed end of a thick rope.

It was funny what you could see when you really looked.

There were four empty green bottles sitting on the table next to the bed. ‘And if one green bottle should accidentally fall,’ said Box and his voice sounded croaky. He’d exhausted all the possibilities with the shapes on the ceiling, knew them all. His mind swung around like a weathervane to the dream about his mother he’d had that morning.

It was a dream, but it was also a memory. Box wasn’t sure if that had been the very last time he’d seen his mother. There may have been a reunion after that, and later other departure gates. If that really was the last time then he’d only been four years old.

His parents had travelled all the time and Box and Paul went along with them. It was the sixties and he guessed that you would’ve called them hippies, though they didn’t live in a commune or anything like that. Their father, Dave, was Pop and Dee’s son, their only child. On her passport their mother’s name was Meryl Jane Redwood, but she insisted that her name was Sky.

They travelled backwards and forwards between Asia — Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines, even Afghanistan — and Australia and New Zealand. Every few months they’d be away again. In between trips they camped out in motels or lived in yet another house that really belonged to someone else. Maybe they weren’t hippies, maybe they were really modern gypsies.

Box didn’t remember much. He’d been too young. What memories he did have mostly came second hand from Paul. They used to talk about it when they were older and growing up with Pop and Dee in the bay.

‘Do you remember the monkeys in the park in Bangkok?’
Paul would sometimes ask.

‘One took Mum’s bag and she was really annoyed,’ Box would say, not because he really remembered but because they’d talked about it so many times before.

‘And Dad wouldn’t stop laughing,’ Paul always added. ‘And then the policemen came with their funny hats and we ran away.’

‘Bangkok was really hot.’

There were lots of stories like that, hand-me-down memories that were first Paul’s and then became Box’s as well. There’d been a poisonous snake in a cage at one of the places they lived for a while, maybe in Australia, because Paul thought he remembered being woken in that place by cockatoos in the trees — animals seemed to feature in a lot of the stories.

‘We weren’t allowed to look right in at the snake because Mum said that it would spit in our eyes and make us go blind.’ That was what Paul had told him.

At another place, his parents had held one of their throbbing parties where people lay all over the furniture and others danced wildly. Some guy had jumped off the diving board into the pool.

‘Even though there was no water in it,’ Box would intone.

‘Right,’ said Paul. ‘Everyone just stood around the edge of the empty pool and laughed and laughed.’

‘Was he hurt?’ Box had asked the first time he heard that story.

Paul had frowned. ‘I think he probably was, but just a broken arm or leg or something. Mum and Dad thought it was really funny, though.’

His mother had died suddenly. She was alone, on a flight into London, only half an hour from landing at Heathrow.
She was buried somewhere in London that he’d never visited. Those were still all the facts that Box knew.

A week later his father had turned up at Dee and Pop’s house in the bay. All the adults sat in the kitchen while the two boys played with preserving jar lids in the hallway. Apparently, they stacked them into shiny towers. According to Paul there was some yelling: Pop and their father. Then their father had stormed into the hall. He said goodbye quickly and drove away. Box didn’t remember that either. It was the last time Box or Paul had seen him.

You grew up with stuff, weird stuff sometimes, but without anything else to compare it with it seemed perfectly normal. When they were kids that’s just how family life was: full of planes and airports and motels; looking after yourself while your parents slept; strangers who came and went at odd hours. They mostly ate food bought from street stalls or from the dairy. More often than not his father would fish out some cash from the latest hiding place and Paul and Box would go out and buy the food themselves. Mostly they played outside. The motels sometimes had swimming pools and they would hang out there while keeping an eye out for the police.

One thing Box did actually remember was being told to act as if he was sick coming through customs. He did a good job, apparently, because his father bought him a huge pink bouquet of candyfloss as a reward. Afterwards, he really did feel sick and threw up in the back of a taxi.

A heavy-handed knocking came from the door. Box sat up straight on the bed.

‘Mr Saxton. I’d like to talk.’

He swung himself off the bed and stood, his head swirling for a moment before settling to a dull throb. He went to the window and pulled back the curtain. Standing by the door was a solidly built Maori guy in a blue and black checked bush shirt. His face was lit from above by the single naked bulb over the door. Some time in the last hour a thin veil of rain had started to drift down from the overcast sky. There was a red Holden parked a few metres behind him. Another man was sitting in the passenger seat. Box couldn’t see his face but could tell that he was also big, even bigger, filling the front seat. Big Holden and big Maori.

‘Mr Saxton?’

‘Hang on.’

He went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face and dried himself with a towel. Then he opened the door.

‘How can I help you?’ Even as he said the words Box thought he sounded like he worked in a shoe shop.

‘Do you mind if I come in? It’s raining.’

‘I’d prefer if you didn’t.’

A shrug. ‘Whatever. Tipene wants to know what you’re doing up here.’

‘It’s a free country.’

‘I guess. Seriously, though.’

‘Actually, I thought I might go out and see if I could spot some dolphins. Maybe do a tour of the caves. What would you recommend?’