Settlers' Creek (4 page)

‘Liz …’

But she has hung up.

Box looks at the screen of his phone. Ten missed calls. He sits in the cold cab of the ute, facing the harbour, with the water curtaining the glass in front of his face. He shivers suddenly, his whole body spasming like a big dog clearing water from its coat. His clothes are sodden and his clammy shorts cling to the top of his thighs. Even the T-shirt beneath his bush shirt is wet. He grips the steering wheel, squeezing it until his knuckles are bloodless hills. There’s water all around. More like being in a submarine than on land. He has parked side-on to the wind. A particularly violent gust shoulder-barges its way up the harbour. It hits the ancient ute squarely in the passenger door and the whole vehicle rocks up on its suspension. Box sits inside the cab and feels his world shudder and shift.

Box was driving on instinct, his mind a shell-shocked and burnt-out tumble of white noise and useless garbled connections.

The ute followed the road in and out of the bays, through the foaming gushing creeks caused by the leaf-blocked gutters, through the gusts of blown salt spray, under the overhang of the storm’s black clouds until, eventually, Box found himself at the head of the harbour. Five minutes later, a road sign was pointing him onto the southern motorway.

He sat at the intersection in the rattling belly of the ute and waited for the lights to change. The airport was a good half-hour away. Box wasn’t going back to the motel. His clothes, the suitcase and the rest of his stuff didn’t matter. He just had to get to the airport. Get back up north to the city. Get back to his family. He caught himself and dragged his mind backwards like a needle over a vinyl album, then replayed his last thought. He had to get back to
what was left
of his family — to Liz and Heather.

The light had turned green; God knows when. Box
hadn’t noticed, maybe hadn’t cared enough to move. He didn’t know himself which one it was. The driver of a blue Peugeot nosed up behind him gave a long blast on the horn. Box looked in his rear-view mirror and saw a guy in a dark suit with spiky blond hair. Box also caught a glimpse of his own face. His eyes were small and stony. The skin was pulled tight. There was another loud blast from the Peugeot. Box deliberately waited. And then rolled the ute forward through the intersection, just as the lights turned red again. The Peugeot didn’t make it.

He was grateful that there weren’t many cars on the motorway. People had been warned that the storm was coming. Anyone with any choice in the matter would be hunkered down at home, keeping warm and dry. Box steered the ute down the right-hand lane. The windscreen wipers twitched backwards and forwards. Box stared blankly ahead. He barely registered when he passed a green station wagon on his left and then, a couple of minutes later, another car. The ute had started to vibrate. The whole body of the thing was making a noise like a hive of irritated mechanical bees. He could feel the vibrations coming from the engine, through the chassis, up the steering column and into his arms. The rattling hum grew louder and louder until even Box’s scrambled brain had to pay attention. He glanced down at the speedo and saw that the needle was jammed up close to a hundred and twenty. A bad idea. Visibility was crap. The tread on at least two of his tyres was worn almost smooth. He took his foot off the accelerator. At a hundred the vibrations eased and then, at eighty-five, they stopped altogether.

Mark is dead! A thought made up of three small words.

The truth of it hit Box as though he had just been told
for the first time. But now the words were being shouted directly into his ear, piped into his brain. Box started to shake again. This time the shaking wasn’t coming from the ute but from somewhere deep inside his body. It rode over him in waves. His hands on the steering wheel shook, his teeth actually chattered. He’d thought that only happened in movies and books. The sound made him think of the battery-operated teeth he’d had as a boy. They’d clicked their way over the floor, white teeth, red gums, up and down, all by themselves. They’d been a birthday present from his older brother, Paul.

Box was approaching a billboard that had been erected next to the motorway. The advertisement showed a life-sized picture of a smiling family. They were standing in a brightly lit kitchen, drinking from steaming mugs. Even in the rain, the image seemed warm and inviting, a scene that Box could have gratefully stepped into. He couldn’t tell what the billboard was selling, instant coffee or soup in a cup, perhaps. Although it could be anything, right? It could be electricity, or bloody light bulbs or life insurance, anything. But something about that picture — the buttery light, the warm kitchen, the beautiful dark-haired woman, the young boy who must’ve been about twelve — something about it, brought the enormity of what had happened down over Box like a stinking sack being suddenly pulled over his head as he slept in his own bed.

A hundred metres past the billboard, Box just managed to guide the ute over onto the wide grass verge. He sat behind the wheel, staring straight ahead, paralysed in the face of what had happened to his son. He was scared shitless. There was no air and everything was black. And then he started to yell in open-mouthed rage, pounding the steering
wheel with his palms, shouting and ranting and screaming, deep and primitive. The noise reverberated inside the cab, echoing off the cracked seats and the sun-crazed plastic on the dash, and off the cold glass. When he couldn’t bear to be inside that cage any more, he banged open the door and almost fell out into the storm. If anything, the rain and the wind were stronger than before. Box ranted, marching backwards and forwards, up and down the verge, with the long grass flagellating his legs and the rain driving down on him. He was waving his arms, swearing and screaming at the clouds, the hills, the back of the billboard, the world. He stopped pacing only long enough to kick the ute’s tyres, the doors. He put his heavy work boots into bodywork and it felt good. A deep belly-laugh of thunder rumbled over the hills and Box cursed the low sky.

The people in the cars that went by on the motorway turned their heads and craned their necks to get a better view of the show.

The woman sitting behind the Air New Zealand counter saw Box coming and her mouth tightened. Frankly, he didn’t blame her. Dodgy as all hell, that’s how he must look. His clothes were so wet that even his grunds were saturated. Somewhere between the billboard and the airport, the shaking had turned into a sustained tremble, something he put down to a mixture of the cold and shock. If he looked half as bad as he felt, then Susan — at three metres he could read the woman’s name badge — probably had him pinned as a druggy or a terrorist. Or both.

To her credit, she turned on the professional smile. Her
teeth flashed at him as he arrived at the counter. She was about thirty-five with brown eyes but dyed blonde hair.

‘Good afternoon. Can I help you, sir?’

He explained where he needed to go. His voice was ragged and unreliable.

‘Okay. Let me just have a look here. Just one seat?’

‘Yes.’

She looked down at her computer screen and the keyboard beneath her long shiny fingernails made clicking insect noises. ‘The next flight leaves at 4.30. That’s about three hours. There are some seats available.’

‘I need something sooner.’

‘Are you all right, sir?’

‘I need to get back. What about one of the other airlines?’

She wasn’t smiling now. ‘Let me check.’

Box stood in front of the desk, trying to keep the trembling under control, dripping on the red and green carpet.

‘No, I’m sorry. NZ306 is the next flight. Would you like me to book you a seat?’

Box thought about simply walking back out to the car park, jumping in the ute and beginning the drive north. But even if he hadn’t promised Liz not to drive he had to admit that she was right. He shouldn’t be on the road. The trip to the airport had proved that.

‘Sir?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Shall I book you on that flight?’

‘Yes, please.’

Not sure if there was enough cash in the cheque account, he paid for the seat with his credit card. The woman printed out his receipt and a boarding pass and handed it to him. He could see her trying to work him out.

‘You can check your bags in over there.’

‘I don’t have any bags.’

‘Any carry-on luggage?’

‘No.’

She hesitated and then said in a different voice. ‘Do you have any dry clothes?’

Box shook his head and she frowned. ‘You can’t sit around for three hours soaking wet. You’re shaking. There’s a souvenir shop over there. You could at least buy a new T-shirt and some shorts.’

‘Thanks.’

She smiled a genuine smile. ‘You’re welcome.’

Box turned and moved in the direction that she had pointed. He could feel her questioning eyes on him as he walked.

Ten minutes later, Box was sitting in the airport cafeteria wearing a navy-blue university sweatshirt and a pair of blue and white board shorts with ‘Billabong’ scrawled down the side. Underneath the sweatshirt he had on a T-shirt with a tongue-poking, round-eyed tiki printed on the front. The only things he was wearing from earlier were his cap, the woollen work socks and the muddy boots; everything else he’d owned for five minutes.

He had stood in the fitting cubicle, shaking and ham-fisted while he slowly stripped off his wet clothes. They had fought, clinging to him like drowning men. His fingers were nothing to do with the rest of him; unwieldy meat. In the end he had just yanked desperately at his T-shirt, hearing the rip but not caring. In the full-length mirror he saw himself standing naked under the fluorescent lights.
His skin was pinched and raw-looking, Gladwrap-tight over his muscles, his penis had become a shrunken stub. His balls had contracted up into his body, the only part of him with enough sense to seek warmth. Box struggled, dragging on the clothes he had selected from the racks. He didn’t care what he looked like. He’d just picked up the first things that fitted him that weren’t stupidly expensive. Even so, they weren’t cheap either. All on the credit card, of course.

‘How’s it going in there? Everything fine?’ The female assistant, in a high, nasal voice.

‘Fine,’ he had mumbled.

Now he was sitting in the corner of the cafeteria. His wet clothes were in a plastic bag at his feet. From the ceiling above him a heating vent was blasting out air, the warm current moving across his bare head and soaking down into his shoulders. It took a long while before a spark of real warmth moved into his core. From there it radiated up to his shoulders and down into his arms and later to his legs. Last of all were his feet. The bouts of shivering had spaced out to the point where they were almost gone.

On a tray in front of him was a large cup of black coffee and a ham sandwich. The sandwich was still trapped in its hard triangle of plastic. Box took three paper sachets of white sugar from a bowl, ripped the top off each in turn and poured the sugar into the coffee. Sweet black coffee was a habit he’d picked up years ago on building sites where, more often than not, there was no fridge to keep milk fresh. He sipped the coffee and stared at a soundless flat-screen television mounted on the wall. A promotional video for New Zealand was playing on an endless loop. A smiling ponytailed blonde on a skifield
melted into a couple sitting in the hot pools in Rotorua. A Maori meeting house and a group of tattooed brown people performing a haka for the tourists. Later, Asians in a jetboat held up their hands and silently screamed with delight as the boat skipped like a skimmed pebble down a river between high canyon walls.

There were still three hours until his flight. More than enough time to sit here and go quietly out of his head. He needed to think about something other than Mark, about what had happened, what had gone wrong, about what Liz and Heather were doing right now. Box got up stiffly and went to the counter again. He bought a newspaper from the same young woman who had served him earlier, and then came back to his table.

Box tried to read. He’d start into a story and then his eyes would slip off the edge of words as though they were greased. It had never really registered before how full the newspaper was of life’s failures and tragedies. On the front page was a story about a man who’d beaten his wife to death and then gone bush. Their two children were found by the neighbours, huddled in a garden shed. Another family of four had all been killed when their Mitsubishi Mirage drove into the side of a logging truck. A promising young league player had drowned in a surfing accident. His body had not yet been recovered.

Christ, thought Box, all this, and I’ve only got to page three.

His hands had started to shake again, sending ripples across the open newspaper. He folded it and laid it down on the table, then looked around the cafeteria and the high open expanse of the terminal beyond. There weren’t many people around, mostly just those who worked here.
Through the glass walls he could see the empty runway, wet and wind-lashed and dim. The cafeteria sold beer. Box had noticed the green and brown bottles lined up near the bottom of the fridge when he bought his coffee. He went back to the counter and bought a green bottle of Steinlager Pure. Even through his muddy brain-fug Box registered the mark-up — almost twice what he would pay in a bottle store. He coughed up, though, used his Visa again.