Settlers' Creek (2 page)

With the shift in the wind, Box Saxton raised himself from where he was kneeling on the half-finished roof of the school classroom and looked south down the long water of the harbour. The sky over his head was still clear, a leached autumnal blue, but to the south bruised storm clouds were roiling up behind the hills. They hadn’t been there the last time Box had looked. The green wall of bush at the back of the school had begun to stir and rustle. The branches of the five-fingers leaned away, snapping back at the end of each gust. The tall beech and rimu trees rattled their leaves. Box watched as the half-dozen yachts moored in the small bay shuddered under the unexpected slap of the southerly and swung their noses around. White-caps started to kick up on the harbour. The waves grew until they began rising and then folding into themselves in a foaming tumble, resurrected a moment later by the thrust of the wind against the tide pushing up the harbour from the open ocean.

Box’s nostrils flared. He sniffed at the tang of salt spray, wind-driven on the newly chill air to where he stood. He shivered and pulled his battered and stained cap lower on his head. Half an hour ago he’d been sweating up here in the sun but now he was cold in just a T-shirt and shorts. He took a nail from his tool-belt, knelt and with three precise blows drove it through the steel and into the timber framing. He repeated the process until he reached the edge of the sheet. He stood.

Bays Primary sat on a series of level steps in the land on the eastern side of the harbour. The playing fields were on the lowest level and then the admin block and the classrooms were staggered up the hill right the way to the bushline. The new classroom where Box was standing was being built hard against the back fence of the school’s land. From there, all the way up to the ridge, the hillside was too steep for anything except reserve. From where Box stood he could see the twenty or so scattered houses of the people who lived in the small bay.

Last night, lying on top of the bed in his motel room, a can of beer in his hand, he had watched the TV weather forecast. It had come on after the late news. He’d already made his nightly call to Liz. Mostly he’d listened to her — that was the way it went these days — him sitting on the edge of the bed staring blankly at the bare concrete-block wall half a metre in front of his face, listening. Occasionally he’d chip in, trying to be upbeat, but he understood that during these calls it was mostly his role to support Liz. She was the one still up in the city, looking after the kids, with a full-time job of her own; trying to keep on top of it all. Last night there had been the usual litany of worries: Mark (who’d gone out again without telling her where
he was going or when he’d be back); the water cylinder in the kitchen was leaking and the property management company had promised to send over a plumber but that was days ago and no one had turned up; Heather, who’d recently almost given up on her schoolwork in favour of her friends and, what was even more worrying, boys (at fifteen mostly just talking about them, thank God); and, of course, there was the perennial problem of money to discuss. They could talk about
that
for hours.

When Box had put down the phone his right ear ached where the receiver had pressed in hard against the gristle. He’d finished one beer while he talked to Liz. He opened another and lay on the bed watching the screen between the frame of his outstretched feet. He didn’t care what was on. The television provided him with white noise — sound and flickering pictures with no real meaning. Last night was Saturday and the motel was on a main road. The bass thump of boy racers’ car stereos and the roar of their modified exhausts had penetrated the heavy walls, reaching him even over the sound of the television. He’d turned up the volume.

Some reality show had finished and another one started. And then that finished as well. The late news came on and then the weather. For the first time that evening Box had shifted his mind into gear and paid attention.

Now he stood on the roof of the classroom in the rapidly chilling air and looked at his watch. It was 11.15. The TV weatherman had predicted that a southerly storm would arrive late morning. Box had been hoping that the forecast had been wrong, at least the timing anyway, and that they’d be able to get in most of a full day’s work. Didn’t look like it, though. Here she was like an ancient steam
train pulling into the station, right on time — loud and gusty and cold as iron. Box had grown up with southerly storms but they never failed to impress him. They brewed up in the Southern Ocean not far from Antarctica and then when they were good and ready they set off, raging and thundering their way northward. This was the first place they made landfall. Box liked to fancy that he could almost smell the icebergs and the penguin shit on the wind.

The temperature was dropping by the minute. Screw that, by the second. Box’s tanned forearms goosebumped into life, the tangle of pale hairs that grew there separating and rising.

The new classroom was supposed to be finished in ten days, all set for the first day of the second term. That’s why they were working on a Sunday. The timber framing was up but the roofing iron had only started to go on late yesterday afternoon. Mitch wasn’t going to be happy about them losing the best part of another day, not when they were already way behind. Even in the short time that Box had looked away the clouds had advanced towards him, spilling over the hills in a muddy tsunami. He slipped his hammer into his tool-belt and walked easily across the slope of the roof to the ladder and climbed down to get his bush shirt from the ute.

Taylor, and of course Grant, were beginning to pack up. Predictable. He should have guessed that, as far as Taylor was concerned, even a whiff of bad weather was a good enough excuse to down tools. Those two would be halfway to the pub before the rain even looked like starting. And more than likely they’d still tell Mitch that they’d worked until five. They’d been grumbling and bitching about having to be here on a Sunday anyway.

The truth was Box didn’t have much time for either of them. The recession, the global downturn, the international credit crisis — whatever it was — had hit the building industry like a steamroller. Box knew that better than most. He watched Taylor and Grant packing up. When a lot of chippies were out of work these two were grumbling about having to work on a Sunday; actually moaning about having a steady job, about being paid overtime. They didn’t even know when they had a good thing going on. Thanks to Mitch and his government contacts, these two clowns had a steady stream of work laid out like a red carpet right up to the end of the year.

If this had been his crew Box would have made them put in a last burst before the storm hit. They should be trying to get the roof on, or most of it anyway. But Taylor was the site foreman. These days Box was just a hammer for hire. He was no more in charge here than the newest apprentice. He shook his head and carried on towards his ute.

When Box came back, pulling on his bush shirt, Taylor was up on the concrete foundation stacking the sawhorses. His red ear protectors were around his neck.

‘Mate, we’re off. You coming?’

‘There’s probably an hour before it rains,’ said Box.

Taylor shrugged. ‘We’re heading over to a pub in town.’

‘If we all got stuck in to the roof we could maybe get most of it nailed down.’

Taylor looked across at the clouds and shook his head. He had brown curly hair speckled with sawdust and short muscular legs. He was still in his twenties but already had a beer gut the size of a party balloon smuggled up under his paint-splattered sweatshirt.

‘Nah. There’s not enough time.’

‘With the roof on we could start packing the insulation into the walls. The gib boys could be in tomorrow.’

‘It’s going to piss down pretty soon.’

‘We’re already going to be pushing it to be finished before the twenty-ninth.’

‘We’ll be right.’

Box’s experience didn’t mean anything here. In fact he knew that it actually worked against him. Taylor didn’t like him being around. Defensive prick. He was one of those men who was always looking for the criticism or the putdown, always looking for a chance to show how much he knew. Or to ram it home to Box exactly who was in charge.

‘How do you figure that?’ said Box.

‘Look, we’re off. You coming or what?’

Box didn’t bother hiding his disgust. He shook his head. ‘I’ll finish up what I can here. That’s what I’m being paid for.’

‘Suit yourself.’ And Taylor gave a smirk that made Box want to rub the useless prick’s face into the scattered wood shavings.

Instead, he turned stiffly away and walked over to the ladder. He climbed back on to the roof where the new wind, cold as a thrown bucketful of ice-water, washed over his face. There was no point in arguing with Taylor. Box couldn’t be bothered with that shit anyway — the building-site politics and storm-in-a-teacup power struggles. He was done with that. He did his work and kept to himself. That was the plan — earn enough money to keep the wolf from breaking down the door back home and then get back to Liz and the kids.

Box got to work nailing down the roof but he couldn’t
help keeping half an eye on the other two. He saw Grant load his tools into the back of Taylor’s big red Nissan. The SUV was almost brand-new, bought on the tick, Box was sure. Grant was loping around behind Taylor like a dopey Labrador pup, grinning and excited at the prospect of the pub. When they were packed up, Box half expected Taylor to whistle the kid up into the passenger seat. Before pulling away, Taylor spun the back wheel on a hard smear of gravel left over from the concreting. Box watched the SUV drive down the winding road to the water, then turn right onto the only road up to the top of the harbour.

‘Useless prick,’ said Box and drove another nail home with two hard whacks of the hammer. Taylor was lazy. He was forever slacking off, unless Mitch was looking over his shoulder the whole time. And, even worse, he was sloppy; always trying to cut corners. He didn’t have the mindset or the experience to be a good builder. Mitch had only been in the game seven or eight years, and most of that time had been spent throwing together kitset homes that could be put up by a retarded monkey with a nail gun. And yet to hear Taylor tell it you’d think he had done it all. According to him he was a master bloody builder.

Box told himself to let it go. He sucked cold air down through his nose into his lungs and released it slowly through his mouth. He tried to empty his mind, to relax the big muscles across the top of his shoulders. Liz used to teach yoga, had been right into it for years, and she was always trying to get him to breathe. She reckoned he carried too much tension in his body, whatever that meant.

He shouldn’t let Taylor get to him. Box reminded himself that the bloke’s biggest problem was that he was young. At twenty-four Taylor was exactly half his age.

Box got back to work nailing down the roof, one eye on the approaching clouds.

He’d been wrong. It was only forty minutes later when the sun was blotted out and day turned to a hazy twilight. The clouds that had rolled in were dark and swollen and low. The wind had picked up to the point where it would have been stupid for Box to keep working on the roof. He was almost at the end of the sheet he was nailing down when the first fat drop of rain pinged into the metal next to his hand. Another drop hit the back of his sock. And then his shoulder. And then one scored a bull’s-eye on his bare neck, just above the collar of his bush shirt — exploding cold as a pinprick — and almost instantly it was raining full-on. For a moment, Box could smell the rain on the sun-warmed earth but then the deluge washed all scent from the air. The sound of the individual drops on the steel turned into a single rattling rolling kettledrum bash. It was, he thought, as if someone had spun open a valve in the clouds.

Bent over against the rain, Box made it across the slippery roof. Water was already flowing along the bottom of the corrugations and waterfalling away into the air to land four metres below on the churned-up and baked earth of the building site. He forced himself to go slowly down the ladder. The very last thing he needed was to fall and to break his leg. Liz would love that. Although the regular ACC cheque would be welcome.

When he got safely to the ground he ducked under the shelter of the only-one-third-there roof. Box shook his arms and brushed the drops of water off his bush shirt where they
clung swollen and round and silvered by the dim light. The legs of his paint-and plaster-splattered work shorts were soaked through. The rain was close to deafening. The noise was not only coming from the roof, he could hear it hitting the exposed part of the concrete foundation and drumming off the tarsealed playing area in front of the classrooms. Box watched as a pile of dirty yellow sawdust turned lumpen as porridge. The earth of the site, which minutes before had been hard and brittle after a run of dry autumn days, quickly gave up trying to drain away the water and began to suck it down. Soon it had turned to a grey squelch that stretched right around the new foundations.