The Colour (48 page)

And Pao Yi, who had been afraid to abandon himself to her, who, until now had held on to his separate and private self, now called to her to kill him, to let him pass to oblivion through desire, and she acquiesced, and he felt come into him an animal rage to mate without ceasing, like the wild stags on Long Hill in the springtime, and in a torrent of language he cursed her as a demon, as a reptile who had tempted him away from all that had been precious to him and now he was lost in her, lost in darkness, and all that remained to him was the horror of his own dying.

When Pao Yi woke, the candle had gone out.

He could taste blood on his mouth.

He had no notion of day or night or any passing of the hours. His body felt impossibly heavy, as though the floor of the cave were pulling him down.

He sat up at last and saw, from the remnants of the firelight outside the cave entrance, that Harriet was awake. She was lying beside him and staring at the ceiling and she reached out and touched his shoulder and then she pointed upwards and her long arm almost touched the roof of the cave and in a voice which sounded melancholy and quiet, she said: ‘There is gold.'

Pao Yi was shivering. He pulled a blanket round himself and lay down again and tried to pull Harriet to him, to warm him and she held him for a moment or two, but then she said again: ‘Pao Yi. This cave is made of gold.'

He understood the words. He looked up and saw what she had seen and his gaze wandered there, but he refused to marvel.

In his own language he said that, when the winter ended, when the snow was all gone, when the river fell, when the way to the sea was open once more, then would be the time to consider whether the cave was made of gold. But until then, they shouldn't concern themselves with it, just as he had never concerned himself with the golden nugget that he'd buried under the seventeenth onion.

Pao Yi doubted whether Harriet could understand any of what he was saying, but he kept on talking and she lay beside him and listened and he told her that all the while it was becoming clearer and clearer to him that the yellow light he'd seen in opium reveries and which he'd thought had been made by the candle-flame, had been a golden light. But now it had to remain as a light and nothing more because he knew – he, the fisherman Chen Pao Yi from Heron Lake in Guangdong Province in south-east China knew as surely as he knew his own name – that the day on which they decided to steal that light would be the day on which they would have to part.

V

After this, they returned to the shack and made their bed again close to the fire. Pao Yi walled up the entrance to the cave. He put the opium pipe away on the high shelf, next to his ancestor chart.

The weather taunted them with its wild variety. The winds of June and July came funnelling down the makeshift chimney, blowing smoke into their faces, tearing at the sacking on the door. The snow melted and the smooth tops of the cabbages emerged like a line of old men's heads, not dead, not quite; only patiently waiting under a shroud.

Hail pelted the roof, like falling shingle. Violet and orange rainbows shone an ethereal light into the room. The river roared one day and was almost silent the next. Rain seeped into the thatch and began dripping on to the floor. Then they heard the trees sighing and clicking and knew that the rain had turned to ice.

Now, the cold began to torment them. They went outside only to relieve themselves or to claw vegetables out of the ground or to bring in firewood or fish from the nets. They wondered if they would die here. They knew that the fire kept them alive. They longed for furs or sheepskins, but had neither, only their arms to wrap around each other.

After their night in the cave, their passion calmed, as though they had crammed into one night the experience of a year, and what they settled into now was something which resembled an affectionate marriage, one without prudery or secrets or shame. Together, they fussed over the fire, prepared their soup, tried to comfort each other when one of them was ill or in pain, taught each other songs, told stories, suffered boredom and sadness and joy, made love slowly and tenderly and tried, above all, to keep the cold at bay.

They began listening for the thaw.

When the thaw came, they knew that the spring wouldn't be far behind.

VI

One morning, Pao Yi was walking down to the river to see what fish had been caught in his net, when he heard a familiar sound in his mind, one which hadn't surfaced for a long time; it was the sound of Paak Mei's laughter.

Pao Yi pressed his rabbit-fur hat more firmly on to his head. He strode on and took off his shoes and waded into the water. He thought, to his relief, that the laughter was fading, but then when Pao Yi's hands came into contact with the fishing net, he found that the familiar feel of it transported him back to Heron Lake so vividly, it was almost as though he had arrived there. And when he looked around, all he could see was devastation.

His house, once brightly painted, appeared faded and neglected and there was no smoke coming from its chimney. The door was closed and the hinges looked rusty and the dark heads of dead sunflowers knocked against the window frame.

Pao Yi's boat was resting in the water some way from the quayside, but its red hull had turned a dull greenish-brown, and sitting in the boat was a thin, dejected figure Pao Yi was appalled to recognise as his son, Paak Shui. He tried to call to Paak Shui and Paak Shui looked up for a moment, just as though he
had
heard a voice calling to him, but then the boy resumed his former posture and remained there without moving.

It was at that moment that Pao Yi understood that he'd been wrong about the sound he had just heard: Paak Mei wasn't laughing, she was weeping. She was weeping for the shame of being abandoned, for the shame of being promised riches and instead losing what little she had, for the shame of being betrayed by her husband with a white woman.

The morning was almost warm, with a pale sun sparkling on the water, but Pao Yi was frozen. If Harriet had been watching, as she sometimes watched him when he went to check his net, she would have seen him put out a hand and clutch at the tree to which the net was attached and lean towards the tree, as though he were faint or dizzy, and then stay like that without moving.

But Harriet wasn't watching. She was trying to count the days that had passed since the night in the cave and to work out whether it had been on that night or on some subsequent night or morning that the baby she now knew she was carrying had been conceived. She knew it made no difference to the fact of the pregnancy, yet she wanted it to have happened then, so that whenever she looked at the child, far into her future when she would be alone again, she would be able to remember the wildness of that night and her beautiful reverie of being a bird, a bird with a heart almost stopped by desire, and the crying and calling of her lover to this bird across the darkness of continents.

So absorbing was Harriet's memory of this that she was startled when she heard the door open and she saw Pao Yi returning with a basket of fish. She saw him set down the basket and she was about to get up, to go to him and tell him her secret, which was the secret of the child, when he turned suddenly and went out again. And when he came back, a moment or two later, he carried a pickaxe in his hand. And he walked by her, not looking at her, but only at the mouth of the cave, and then he knelt down and began taking out the stones from the doorway.

She said his name: ‘Pao Yi.' She tried to frame a question.

She saw that he was weeping. So she went and knelt down beside him, with her skirts on the dusty earth, and she asked him if the time had arrived to take out the gold, and he nodded and kept on with his task of moving the heavy stones and his tears ran down his cheeks and began to dampen the top of his shirt.

She wanted him to try to talk to her, to tell her what he was going to do, but she saw that he couldn't say anything. She reached up and tried to stop his hands from bringing away the stones, but he wouldn't be deflected from his task, and so Harriet understood.

She saw that the only thing to do was to help him.

They worked side by side without speaking. Pao Yi kept clawing at the rocks with the pick and Harriet tugged them away. Inch by inch, the cave was revealed to them again, their opium cave, and they felt the chill of it and remembered its darkness and its mystery.

They stopped and rested a moment and then began lighting candles and they took the candles into the cave and crouched there, staring up, seeing the veins of gold running over the ceiling and down into the walls.

It was in this moment's pause, before they began to tear out the colour from the cave, that Harriet considered telling Pao Yi about the child – his child – so that he would take this knowledge away with him when he returned to Heron Lake and hold it for ever in his mind. But she kept silent.

Now the pickaxe began smashing into the veins of gold. The sound of iron on precious metal seemed to echo all through the mountain. But the rock was more porous and brittle than Pao Yi and Harriet had imagined, yielded more easily to its breaking, so that it became possible to tear flakes and chunks of it away with their bare hands, and pieces of it split of their own accord and fell in showers all around them and into their hair, and their faces became coated with a black and shiny dust.

Their hands were bruised and their fingers began to bleed and, in the flickering candlelight, Harriet picked up a bright shard and saw the staining and mingling of the two colours, red blood upon a vein of gold, and she felt the unearthly wonder of this and its human sorrow.

She gazed at her lover, at his face turned away from her, at his back, his strong legs, his arms still resolutely wielding the pickaxe, and at the stones and dust that kept falling on to him. She wanted to cry out to him to stop, wanted to beg him to wall up the cave once more, to return with her to their shelter, to press her hand to his mouth, to enfold him, to pretend that no thaw had come and that they could live like this, on the edge of this mountainside, together for ever.

She knew that these thoughts were futile.

She thought that she should begin to sort through the jagged lumps of fallen rock, before so much had come down around them that they would scarcely be able to move. So she took up the pieces streaked with gold and laid the rest aside. She was wearing her old clothes that day, her skirt and petticoat, her chemise and shawl. She took off her shawl to use as a pannier. She crawled backwards and forwards to and from the cave, tugging the shawl, bringing the gold out from the flickering darkness into the white light of this new spring day.

She spread out the pieces and stared at them. She took up a single jagged stone and brushed the dust aside from the vein which threaded it. She tried to guess what Pao Yi would buy with this one golden vein. She could not imagine. She knew almost nothing about his life. But from far away, she could now see his son, Paak Shui, come running towards him and, behind the boy, was his wife, Paak Mei. Paak Mei was unable to run, but she came shuffling as fast as she could towards her husband and she held out her arms to him. And Harriet could hear a melodic sound, like bubbling water, and she knew it was the laughter of Paak Mei, echoing round a wide bowl of hills.

Houses of Wood

I

The names of the miners who had died in the Kokatahi fresh were now posted on a list in the warden's office at Hokitika. The list proclaimed itself to be ‘a complete and true record of all bodies recovered at Kokatahi and at Kaniere'.

Harriet stood and stared at the list.

Knowing where Joseph's claim had been, she'd presumed that his name would be here. She couldn't see how, working at the river's edge, he could have escaped being swept away. She had sometimes wondered how long he had survived and whether the hopes he'd had of her gold would have made him struggle and fight against the pull of the river. Perhaps he had fought very hard – in the way that he always fought with destiny, with a selfish desperation – only to be hurled to his death against a boulder?

But now, his name wasn't on the list.

Harriet walked away from the warden's office and went down to the beach and sat among the driftwood and looked out on the sea, which was a fine blue that day. But all she could see was the one and only thing she would now remember about this ocean: she saw the ship that had taken Pao Yi away.

She tried not to think of it.

She had the puzzle of Joseph to solve. If Joseph wasn't dead, then she had to find him. She had to give him a share of her gold and tell him that she could no longer live with him as his wife.

Hokitika town was still busy. Men were still arriving and departing. The hotel was building on more rooms. The Bank of New Zealand had a new, much larger sign and other, smaller, private banks had come clustering into tilting shanties, to proclaim their ‘advantageous offers for the meanest find of gold dust'.

Harriet had hidden her gold, wrapped in a shawl, in the wardrobe of her room at the Hokitika hotel. She walked out into the spring sunlight, with one hand resting gently on her belly. She wandered the wharves and alleyways, searching the faces that she passed. She'd been told that survivors of the fresh had been billeted for a while among the families of Hokitika, so she began to ask about, to see whether anyone could remember Joseph Blackstone. The widow, Ernestine Boyd, wasn't among those she talked to.

People shook their heads. ‘No,' they said. ‘We'd remember that name. Black Stone. Wouldn't we? Perhaps he was taken by the flood?'

‘His name isn't on the warden's list.'

‘Ah,' they said, ‘but then there are names missing from the list, the ones whose bodies haven't been found. The people who vanished.'