Some Here Among Us (6 page)

‘Ichor,’ said Panos.

‘
Ichor?
’ said FitzGerald. ‘God, I’d forgotten that. Ichor. OK. That’s it. Let’s go and see Morgan.’

They drove on. A Maori farmer with a pair of round spectacles was ploughing a dusty field beside the road. His glasses flashed in the sun. There was a barn with a round roof behind him.
The big baboon by the light of the moon was combing his auburn hair
, sang Rod from the back seat. It was late December – midsummer in the South Pacific. That same day, on an Apollo mission halfway to the moon, the first photograph of the planet Earth was taken by a man far out in space. This was not known to those in the car. The last radio station had gone out of range two days before. Joe Cocker was singing ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ as the signal faded. They drove on north looking at the signposts – Raukokore, Gisborne, Opotiki, Tikitiki, Cape Runaway. At the next settlement they went to the pub and had a drink. Rosie slipped upstairs and took a shower in an upstairs room, without management noticing, and then descended the stairs grandly, her hair in a towel like a turban. Then they went to the post office and got directions to the Tawhai property. Sunset was reddening the sky when they crossed an old wooden bridge out of town, the planks rumbling beneath them. The red in the sky was reflected on the river and beneath the reflection you could see brown boulders on the bed as they headed into the dusk to find Morgan Tawhai.

5

‘Trouser creases,’ said Rod Orr. ‘I mean why have sharp edges on the front of trousers?
Why?
’

‘No,’ said Race flatly. ‘No moral dimension. There has to be a moral dimension.’

They were talking about the blind spots of the age again. FitzGerald was still at the wheel. Dusk had fallen. They were driving along a narrow coastal plain; sand was blowing across the road in the headlights.

‘How do you mean “moral”?’ said Dinah.

‘It has to make people think: “How could they
do
that?”’

‘Such as?’ said Dinah.

‘I don’t know,’ said Race. ‘Child chimney-sweeps. Slavery. Ducking-stools. What do we do now like that?’

‘Oh, God,’ said Rosie in the front seat. ‘War. Dental caries. Eating animals.’

‘Trouser creases,’ said Rod Orr.

The car made a muffled lurch and stopped. They had gone off the road.

‘OK,’ said FitzGerald to forestall other comment. ‘OK. OK. OK.’

They got out and stood in the dark. The road, as far as could be seen, ran in a straight line across the narrow plain but where they were was a slight dog-leg before a low concrete bridge that crossed a creek. In the blowing sand, FitzGerald had missed the dog-leg and gone straight ahead. Both front wheels of the Chev were in a sandy depression. Water was beginning to ooze around the tyres.

‘OK,’ said FitzGerald, again. ‘OK.’

‘Will you please stop saying OK,’ said Rosie. She gave a husky, pleasant, somewhat heartless laugh. ‘If there’s one thing that this isn’t—’ she said.

‘OK,’ said FitzGerald. He looked at her with a glint. Rosie got back in the car, this time in the back seat.

‘This has nothing to do with me,’ she said. ‘Let me know when we’re ready to leave.’

‘It does have
something
to do with you,’ said FitzGerald. ‘But stay there. You’ll be useful there. You can be ballast.’

‘Oh, good,’ said Rosie. ‘Rod! Come and be ballast with me.’

‘I’d better not,’ said Rod. He looked anxious. Race and Panos were already collecting branches and stones to put under the front tyres.

‘No, go on, Roddy,’ said FitzGerald. ‘It’s a good idea. We’ll need the weight.’

Rod sat in the back of the car with Rosie. Dinah reappeared out of the dark. She was carrying some white dog-roses she had found growing beside the road.

‘Roses,’ said Dinah. ‘There must have been a house here once.’

There was not a light – not a star, not a candle – to be seen in any direction, along the coast, inland, or out to sea. The night wind was warm. It blew through the scrub making a caressing sound.

‘Imagine
living
here,’ said Rosie, looking out the window.

Something white lifted and fell in the distance. It was a wave breaking out at sea, quiet as the sheet floated by a bed-maker.

Race, Panos and Fitzgerald went to work packing stones and branches under the front tyres. Dinah sat in the driver’s seat. Then she put the car in reverse and revved the engine while the three heaved at the front bumper. In the back seat Rosie was telling Rob about a party she had been to that winter in Repulse Bay. After a while, an hour or so, the Chev came back on the road and they drove on. This time Race stood outside on the running-board on the passenger’s side to see the way ahead. Sand was still blowing across the road in the headlights. Riding outside, holding onto the top of the window frame with one hand, Race began to feel wild exhilaration. The sky had cleared and inland hills stood up like pyramids against the stars.

‘Whyever did they get rid of running-boards?’ Race yelled in the window.

‘Blind spot,’ said FitzGerald.

‘No. No moral dimension,’ said Rosie.

The headlights shone on the flanks of a sandy hill. The sand looked like treasure in the moving beam. The road went up the side of the hill and came round onto the face of a cliff. FitzGerald slowed down. The Chev took up the whole of the narrow cliff road. Looking down, Race saw his sandshoes on the running-board and, far below, the suds of ocean. Up ahead a beam of light swept around the sky, once, with alacrity. Then, after a long delay, it came round again. Then the road sloped down and they came to another coastal plain, and the road came to an end.

‘We’re here,’ said FitzGerald. He stopped the car on the verge.

It was very quiet. About a hundred yards in from the road was a house in a stand of trees.

‘Jesus,’ said FitzGerald. ‘It’s the back of beyond.’

They got out of the car.

‘We can’t possibly go in,’ said Rosie, looking at the house. ‘It must be past midnight.’

‘We don’t have to go in,’ said FitzGerald. ‘We can sleep right here.’

It was midsummer night. The wind had dropped. Stars were out in their thousands.
Ruru!
an owl called loudly, quite nearby. FitzGerald and the others took their bedding, sleeping bags and pillows, out of the boot and laid the bags on the grass right there in front of the car. The grass was a strange variety, growing straight out of the sand. Race shucked off his shoes and trod on the ground experimentally. He felt the sand, cold and silken, below the blades. He went on some way into the grassy dunes, and then stopped and looked back at the car, and the distant house, and the rumpled night-land of hills and bush.

The owl called again, quite loud. After a pause, another answered in the middle distance.

And then, finally, another –
ruru!
– far, far away, like a sound formed by the midnight stars themselves.

The Chev was of pre-war manufacture: from a distance it looked like an old upturned bathtub. Race couldn’t see the little humps of his friends any more. They had gone straight to sleep – it was as if they had disappeared into earth. He went further on, down into valleys of cold sand, and up again on the ridges. Ahead of him was a grove of trees, and in the distance a vague pallor – the sea, still out of sight. Race set off to the grove and reached it and stepped in, and then he saw that it was not a grove but a single great tree, like a house, with a star shining here and there through the joists. Standing in the house Race then, for a full minute, felt a kind of happiness, as if he had achieved something solid, true – but what was it? Just to be there, at that hour, awake? He walked out of the tree shade and saw that the sea was now in view. There was one more dark clump of trees across the dunes, just before the beach.

‘I’ll go as far as that,’ he thought, ‘then I’ll go back.’

He went on over the dunes. The trees he was heading for suddenly looked lonely, a last outpost at the end of the world. Yet beyond them the whole sea was now brimming as though it knew that it was midsummer night as well, and was bringing in the dawn early, the waves making a kind of sizzling sound like bolts of cloth being unrolled from the horizon. But then, just before he reached the trees, Race stopped. His heart began to pound. There were people on the beach! Four or five men were in the shallows, coming forward, then idling there, silhouetted against the hollow waves.

At the same time as he saw these figures Race believed, in point of fact, there was no one there at all. It was late – he had gone too far from the car – he was in total solitude.

Quickly, guilty almost on account of his ontological alarm, Race turned and went back fast over the shadowy dunes, back to the Chev, the old upturned bathtub, and he got into his sleeping bag and laid his head down and almost immediately went to sleep behind the back bumper, on the grass, under the stars in their thousands.

‘
My mother
,’ said a voice, ‘
is going to kill you
.’

6

Race’s first thought was that something was on fire. Then he realised that the sun was burning the back of his head. He opened his eyes and looked straight across the road. Morgan was leaning on a five-barred gate looking back at him. The sky was deep blue. The sun must have been up for hours. Cicadas sounded like gunfire. Morgan put his finger to his lips. The others, this meant, were still asleep.

But just then they all began to wake as well, like birds coming in to land at the same time.

‘Oh, oh, oh . . .’ said someone.

‘
Ahhh
.’ Someone else made a comfortable sigh.

‘My mother,’ said Morgan in a clear voice, ‘is going to kill you.’

‘Really?’ said Rosie, with a tone of keen interest. ‘Will she
really
? Why is she going to kill us?’

‘She will kill you,’ said Morgan, ‘for sleeping here at the gate instead of coming up to the house.’

‘We couldn’t possibly come up to the house,’ said FitzGerald. ‘It was one in the morning.’

‘Two,’ said Rosie, yawning and stretching her long brown arms and twirling her hands experimentally.

‘That just makes it worse,’ said Morgan. ‘Every rule of Maori hospitality you’ve broken.’

Despite his tone, he was amazed. Visitors – for him! It had never happened before. His father told him to invite people to the farm, but he never had. He thought of asking Adam and Candy but decided against it. ‘It’s too far,’ he said. ‘No one will come.’ He had gone down to the gate at six that morning just to see whose car it was parked on their doorstep – itself a rare sight – without thinking it would be anyone he knew. Nor had he recognised the first sleepers from what he could see – a tousled male head, a bare female shoulder. Then he saw Race asleep behind the car. For a moment, Morgan imagined Adam and Candy might be there as well, but he looked at all the sleepers again, one by one, and he knew they weren’t. He watched them for a while, wondering what had brought them there. He looked at Race. Where
was
he, Morgan thought, just then? Race was undoubtedly present there, in the sun, on the kikuyu grass by the car – what an old crate, Morgan thought, how did that get all the way up here? – but where did he, Race, imagine he was at that moment? A thousand miles, half a lifetime, away?

Then Race opened his eyes and looked across the narrow road. Morgan put his finger to his lips. But the other sleepers began to stir as well, one after the other.

‘Every single rule in her book,’ said Morgan.

A brown colt had come pacing up behind Morgan and put its head over his shoulder as he spoke. Morgan hoisted the great head and swung it away.

‘Back
off
,’ he said.

It backed off and nodded its head three times, then began to crop the grass. ‘You’d better come up and face the music,’ said Morgan. They all got up and got dressed and, leaving their stuff on the ground or on the fence posts or draped over the car doors, which they left open, they crossed the road and through the gate into the big paddock. The colt pretended to take fright and galloped joyously in a great arc around the fence-line. The sun was burning down. Even in the middle of the paddock the cicadas sounded like a war zone. As they came near the house, two or three dogs stood up from the kennels under a row of pines and began to bark, throats lifted, plumes of their tails waving slowly. A woman came out on the veranda and stood watching them approach. Magpies, the Australian magpies, were bugling in the morning glare.

‘There’s my mother,’ said Morgan. ‘Every single rule in her book . . . These are friends of mine,’ he called.

‘Friends of yours!’ said Morgan’s mother, coming down a step or two. ‘Oh, my heavens. You didn’t sleep on the roadside?’

‘We couldn’t possibly have come in,’ said Rosie. There was a musical quality to her laugh. ‘It was at least two in the morning.’

‘Morgan! Your friends should have known to come in!’

Mrs Tawhai looked formidable. There were stern lines on her face and an aureole of iron-grey hair around her head.