Settlers' Creek (3 page)

There was no point in Box waiting for a break in the rain. This wasn’t a spring shower. The storm would last for the rest of the day. That’s what they’d predicted on the telly, anyway, and now, looking at the sky, Box believed it. He systematically packed his tools from his belt into his heavy toolbox. When he was finished he fastened the lid. He paused for a moment, then made a hunched dash for it, boots sinking into the mud. The building site was ringed by security fencing. Box dragged the gate shut behind him and used the heavy chain and the padlock to secure it. By the time he’d locked the gate, run to his ute and put the tools into the large metal box built onto the wooden deck behind the cab, fumbled the key into the door and climbed in, he wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing that was dry.

Box slammed the ute’s door shut and sat in the cab, listening to his breathing competing with the heavy sound of the rain on the metal above his head. There was a time when he might have found sitting here saturated with his clothes moulding themselves to his body actually funny. But right now all he felt was irritated, pissed off. He gave
the steering wheel a thump with the palm of his hand.

Jesus, but he was unfit. Turning forty-nine at the end of July was no excuse. He needed to get back into the jogging, maybe do a little sparring. Liz hated him boxing but he’d always enjoyed it and it was a hell of a workout. Box was tall and broad shouldered and had always been fit. He had only a hint of a gut but was self-conscious about that, even around Liz. Not vain. Box just didn’t like the idea of losing it physically. He’d known too many guys who were overweight wrecks before they were fifty.

He pulled off his cap and shook the water onto the floor of the passenger side. The cap was once navy-blue with the All Black silver fern logo stitched into the front, but the white stitching had come away and the blue had sun-faded down into a watercolourist’s summer sky. He ran his hand over his scalp and felt the rasp of a week’s worth of stubble against his palm.

As a kid he’d had long red hair but in his mid-twenties he’d realised that keeping a full head of hair was a lost cause. Liz did all his haircuts outside with a pair of clippers set permanently to one. Sometimes he simply stood in the shower and shaved his head right along with his face. He joked that over the years he’d saved a fortune in shampoo. In summer he wore a cap for most of the daylight hours, even indoors. In winter he pulled on a beanie — like hair, but warmer and a better fit. That was another line he trotted out. There had been blokes he’d worked with for months who were surprised when they saw him for the first time with nothing on his head. People assumed that you had hair unless they saw evidence to the contrary.

The ute was parked on the asphalt next to the school library and the painted lines of a four-square court next to
it blurred under the thin sheen of water that had built up. If anything the rain was coming down harder now. Box reached over to the passenger seat and lifted up a plastic lunchbox. He opened it and took out a ham and cheese sandwich and a boiled egg. He’d prepared the lunch that morning in the motel room where there was a portable gas stove set up next to the sink. The egg still held a faint residual heat that he could feel against the skin of his hand. It wouldn’t do him any good to turn on the engine. The heater in the ute was buggered. It had died at the end of last winter and, at the time, Box didn’t have the cash to get it fixed. He still didn’t. Besides, a three-hundred dollar repair job would mean that the heater was worth more than all the other parts of the ute put together.

His cellphone began to ring. Box started and had to juggle to keep hold of the egg. He swore. He’d forgotten that the phone was sitting down between the seats. He never carried it on him when he was on a site. He didn’t like to be interrupted while he was working. A cellphone in his back pocket, ready to go off any second, always put him in two places. He picked up the phone and pushed a button.

‘Yeah, hello?’

‘Box. You okay? You sound pissed off.’

It was Mitch calling from up north, but it was hard to hear him over the rain on the roof of the cab.

‘Nah, I’m fine, Mitch.’

‘How’s it going down there?’

‘It’s all over. Rained out.’

‘What?’

Louder this time. ‘We’re rained out. That southerly came in.’

‘Did you get the roof finished?’

‘No. It’s only about half done.’

‘Fuck!’ Box heard that loud enough. ‘This weather’s all I need. I thought April was supposed to be settled.’

‘TV forecast said that it should blow through tonight. Tomorrow afternoon is supposed to be fine.’

‘I can’t afford any more delays.’

‘Hope those kids don’t mind working in a classroom with no walls.’

‘Don’t even joke about it.’ Mitch sighed loudly enough to be heard over the rain’s din. ‘I’m going to need you boys over on the George Street site. There’s plenty to do there.’

‘Sure. I can drive over soon as I drop by the motel and get some dry clothes. But Taylor and Grant have already left.’

‘Where?’

‘Not sure.’

‘Useless prick. I’ve already tried Taylor’s cell. It’s switched off.’

‘You hired him.’

‘Yeah, thanks for reminding me. Okay, look, you swing by the motel. If Taylor’s there, tell him and Grant to get over to George Street. And tell Taylor to turn his fucking phone back on.’

‘Can I quote you on that?’

‘You can say what you like, Box, as long as he bloody does it.’

Mitch hung up.

Box finished what was left of his lunch and then turned on the ute’s engine and pulled out of the school grounds.

At the bottom of the hill, he switched on his headlights although it was only just past noon. The road that ran around this side of the harbour wove in and out of a series of small bays and headlands. As he passed, he saw the huddles of houses set among the trees. Other, more expensive, places were built right up on the steep ridges. Box imagined the owners sitting up there at night and looking out over the black water to the lights of the city. But not today: the harbour was blotted out by low cloud and rain.

The ute’s wipers were struggling to keep up with the amount of water hitting the windscreen. The worn blades had only two speeds — on and off. On was a kind of spastic twitch that made it three-quarters of the way through its arc before bolting convulsively back to the right. Then there was an unnaturally long pause as it readied itself for the next effort. Most of the time Box saw the world ahead as soft-edged and intangible. He drove leaning forward, nosing into the downpour. The ute had just scraped through its last warrant of fitness test by the skin of its teeth.

The road ahead was black and slick. In several places the gutters were blocked by dams of sodden autumn leaves and streams flowed across the road in front of him, water spraying up as he drove through. On his right the waves pounded and sprayed up over low concrete walls that had been built to stop the harbour from gnawing at the edges of the road.

The phone went again. Keeping his eyes on the road, Box reached into the passenger seat and fumbled the cell up to his ear. ‘Yeah, it’s still raining down here, Mitch.’

‘Box.’

It wasn’t Mitch ringing back. It was Liz. Something was wrong. He could hear it in her voice even above the noise of
the rain and the engine. She said his name so that the word was an empty hole.

‘Liz?’

Nothing now.

‘Liz? It’s me. Can you hear me?’

She almost moaned his name.

‘I’m here. What’s the matter?’

‘It’s Mark.’

‘What’s he done this time?’

‘There’s been an accident.

‘What’s happened?’

‘Box.’ Her voice was shaking.

‘Just tell me. Christ.’

The rain is streaming down. The wipers are going across, revealing for a moment the narrow road and the snaking white line. The spray from a broken wave blows across the dark road, hitting the side of the ute.

‘He’s dead. Mark’s dead. Box.’

Box lowers the phone. It drops from his hand into his lap, still making noises. He can hear Liz saying his name.

He’s driving around a pointed headland where the road has been cut into the rock and the gouged and broken face of the cliff rises up sheer from the road without so much as a footpath. There’s nowhere to pull over. He drives on until he finds a place at the top of a shingle beach where there’s angle parking for the cars belonging to the summer people who came here to picnic and swim. Box swings the ute in and turns off the engine. In front of him the waves are biting down into the beach, one after
another after another, endlessly. The harbour beyond the waves is lost in cloud and sheets of rain. The waves are dark brown, choked with seaweed and driftwood and silt from the floor of the harbour. With the engine off, he can hear them, the waves, their rumble mixing with the drumming rain on the roof of the cab and the wind’s howl; all of it melting into a roar in his ears.

He fumbles up the phone again. ‘Liz. Liz. I’m here.’

She’s sobbing. It has obviously taken everything Liz has to get out the few words he’s already heard. He waits and listens to the sounds of the storm and to the sound of his wife’s tears.

Everything has become crisp and clear and timeless. Box remembers that it was like this when his grandfather died. The doctor had come into the waiting room of the hospital and told him that Pop was dead. Box couldn’t remember the doctor’s name, he might not ever have known it, but now, sitting in the ute, he closes his eyes and he can still see the man’s large dark eyes and the pale scar on the brown skin of his face just below his left eye. There had been flowers in the waiting room, orange and white daises in a green vase on the windowsill.

A car crash. It must have been a car crash. That’s what Liz is going to tell him.

He opens his eyes and sees that there’s a raft moored about forty or fifty metres out from the beach. It bucks in the swell and white-caps break over it. Box can hear the rain and the cymbal crash of the waves and the occasional grind of shingle and stones. Fee fi fo fum. Forchristsake, what made him think of that?

After a long time he senses Liz trying to pull herself together enough to talk.

‘Box. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s okay. I’m still here. Tell me.’

‘Last night.’ She pauses and then starts again. ‘Last night Mark didn’t come home. I called his cellphone, it must have been half a dozen times, but it kept on going to voicemail. He didn’t come home all night.’

‘You should’ve called me.’

‘What for? What could you have done down there?’

It was a fair point. Still stung, though. ‘Okay.’

‘I thought that he was just crashing at someone’s flat, that he’d be back soon enough. He’s done it before, hasn’t he, Box?’

‘Sure.’

‘And then this morning two policemen knocked on the front door. As soon as I saw them standing there I knew.’

‘What time was that?’

‘Early, about nine.’

It was after noon now. ‘Nine? Why didn’t you call me straight away?’

Her voice went up a pitch. ‘I’ve been calling all morning, Box.’

He doesn’t say a word and she keeps on talking. He hears the words
hill
and
tree
and then she says
the rope from the garage
. His body sags in the seat as her words thump hard into him. He can feel them landing like individual blows. And then at last, finally, thankfully, she has finished.

‘I’ll be home as soon as I can — five or six hours.’

‘Don’t drive, Box. Please.’

‘I’ll be all right.’

‘You shouldn’t be driving.’

‘Jesus, Liz.’

‘Box, no, listen. I need to know that you’re not going to
have an accident. I need to know that you’re safe. Do you understand?’

‘I’ll be all right.’

‘Take the plane. Please, Box.’

She is almost begging him. He hates to hear that. Not from Liz.

‘Okay.’

‘You’ll probably be back even faster.’

‘Okay.’

‘Promise.’

‘I’ll go straight to the airport.’

‘Thank you. I love you.’

‘I’ll be home soon.’

‘Okay.’