Wake (14 page)

‘It's okay. You've been crying over people too.'

Belle looked into his face, her blue eyes red and spoiled. ‘Not that much,' she said. ‘But the things the people did makes it hard to see them as people. It's as if their deaths—the manner of their dying—stopped them
being
people, at the end, anyway. The corpses don't make me sad, only scared. I mean, so far. I expect that'll change.'

‘Yes,' Bub said. He took her hand and together they edged back along the fence to the gate.

Theresa gave Belle a hug, then Belle locked the outer gate, closed the inner, and they went back through the reserve.

After a while Belle said, ‘The kaka are smart. The No-Go won't get them all. They'll work it out.'

‘I'm sure you're right,' Bub said, kindly. And who knew, she might be.

‘The No-Go isn't symmetrical,' Theresa said. ‘It bulges to take in the reserve.'

‘You mean it's formed so that it doesn't cut across the reserve?' said Bub. ‘As if it recognises the kakapo are important?'

Theresa frowned. ‘Or as if whoever made it couldn't climb the fence, or unlock the gate, and had to go around the outside.'

Bub gazed at Theresa, trying to make her acknowledge what she'd just said. Theresa—who kept telling them to put off thinking about what everything meant. She held his gaze, but didn't say anything. Finally Bub asked her if she was listening to herself. ‘You said “whoever made it”. You said “
who
ever”, not “whatever”.'

The first person they buried was Adele Haines. Jacob and Bub dug a grave for her under the big jacaranda on the lawn below the spa's terrace. The tree was in bud, but not blossom—though spring was well underway, and the kowhai by then had as much bruised gold pooled under them as bright gold above.

They started to dig in one place, but worked too close to the jacaranda and found their spades confounded by its root system. They began again, further out, but were only able to go three-and-a-half feet down until they hit thick clay. They kept apologising to Curtis.

Curtis sat on the lawn by his wife's body. Adele was tightly swaddled in two sheets. He'd finally had to cover her hair. In a week it would be her sixtieth birthday, and he had promised their children he'd have her home for the big day. The kids had been planning something, and he was charged only to deliver her. They all had Adele's habit of treating him like a vague creature, an artist, the guy who always burns the soup. They'd said, ‘All you have to do, Dad, is get Mum home by the sixteenth.'

When the grave was finished, Jacob and Bub lowered Adele into it, and climbed out again. Jacob had a Bible and offered to read.

Curtis said, ‘Adele wasn't religious, but she always had a strong sense of occasion.'

Jacob commenced, but after a moment Curtis stopped him. He put his hand over the page. He couldn't speak.

‘Is it the wrong thing?' Jacob said, distressed. ‘Is there a passage you'd prefer, Mr Haines?'

Curtis was finally able to say that the 23rd Psalm was never wrong—but what Bible was that?

Jacob showed the cover. It was
The Good News Bible
.

‘Adele would have wanted the King James.'

Jacob looked confused, but then William started up. ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want, he maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still waters, he restoreth of my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His Names sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil. For
Thou
art with me . . .' word perfect, even to its emphasised ‘thou'. Grand, personal, universal.

Once William finished, Jacob sang
Abide With Me
. He was used to singing, and good at it. He kept his composure, but almost everyone was in tears. All the women except Kate were crying. And all the men except William—that cold, or cauterised, man. Curtis wept for Adele, and they wept for his loss—but their grief was also anticipatory.

Oscar began to cry so hard he was hiccupping. Belle hurried to embrace him and everyone tried to rein themselves in.

Curtis asked for a shovel. He wanted to bury his wife himself, or at least to make a start. Bub handed Curtis his shovel. Curtis filled it with wet clumpy soil and dropped it onto Adele's shrouded form. And, at every shovelful, Curtis said his wife's name. He spoke over the sound of the falling clods. ‘Adele,' he murmured. ‘Adele. Adele.' He wanted to make her another promise, but couldn't imagine what she'd want for him now. And then he realised that what she'd most want him to do was to hold each of their children for her once again—their grown-up children, and their grandchildren. He had to find his way back to them, and give them the news.

Curtis could no longer feel the handle of the shovel. He was walking away through the air. He was going to go away, and find his family, and renew that old, warm pact.

Jacob took the shovel from him. Sam put a hand under his elbow and helped him sit down on the damp ground.

And then the dogs began to howl. Warren covered his ears. Bub and Jacob kept filling in the grave. Belle said, ‘I'll go and see to those animals,' and went off towards the pool, the spa's only fenced area, where Bub had put the dogs he'd taken into protective custody.

Sam stepped away from Curtis, raised her hands from her sides, and, face upturned, began to spin slowly like a child enraptured by an early snowfall.

‘Sam?' William said, in his hard, incisive way. ‘Why are you doing that?'

‘It's the wind,' Sam said.

There was scarcely a breeze, and still Sam went on turning in her private whirlwind, seduced by something none of the rest of them could see, or hear, or feel.

Four days after the catastrophe, no one had come to their aid, or communicated in any way. The No-Go appeared to have thickened. The survivors could still see the rough flanks of Pepin Island across the mouth of Tasman Bay, but its base was blurry, as if some giant had dipped a finger in clear oil and carefully wiped along the join of land and sea. The whole horizon was smudged and streaky and, at night, no lights showed across the bay at Glenduan.

No one was coming, so they got on with what they had to do.

Theresa, Bub, and William broke into a succession of garages, looking for cans of spray-paint, collecting only pale colours. They painted a message on the school field, the town's largest open area.

‘We can always revise it,' Theresa said. ‘If we do find more survivors.'

‘Only if we mow the grass,' said Bub, rattling his can. He stooped and began the long line of the first numeral. Bub wrote
14 survivors
and then a list of their names, plus
one unidentified man
.

Bub, Theresa, Dan, and William moved all the bodies from the section of Haven Road between the pharmacy and supermarket, and both buildings. They moved the bodies slumped in wrecked cars, and lying broken on the lawn around the old bank building, and sprawled on scorched footpaths. They took them to the school hall and laid them out under sheets.

While that was happening, Warren, Holly, Jacob, and Belle shifted the supermarket's meat from the fresh section to the big chest freezers. They filled the Captiva's boot with cans of beans and bags of rice. They stockpiled as if they meant to winter over—although the others were only moving bodies out of sight for later, for their rescuers to deal with in due course.

All those who foraged, or moved bodies, had moments of insight. They kept seeing what they had to do. Yet no one said, ‘Let's sit down together and talk it over,' even on the day when the wobbly wheel on a trolley caused Jacob to spill his load of lotions and antiseptics onto the oil-soaked surface of the road. He and Belle were picking it all up when she said, ‘You know there's a digger up by the reserve. There was going to be a ground-breaking ceremony for the Visitors' Centre. We could use that digger to move the wrecks off the road and use cars instead of these blasted trolleys.'

‘That's a good idea,' Jacob said—and thought, ‘A digger. Yes. We'll need one of those.'

It turned out that Dan could operate a digger, and that Belle had a pretty good idea where the man who drove it would have been shortly before noon on the deadly day. She and Theresa went to the Smokehouse Café and searched the pockets of the men from the construction crew. They fumbled one-handed, faces pressed into the crooks of their arms, to shield them from the stink. And even then the subject wasn't broached.

But the next day, when they were all having breakfast, Oscar shifted to a seat beside Theresa and said in a low voice, ‘I'd like to bury Evan, that guy from my school. Can you help me?'

Warren overheard. He said he wanted to lay Aunt Winnie to rest too. ‘I'm sure she'd like to be under her flowering cherry tree.'

Before Theresa was able to respond, Kate said, ‘And I'd feel much happier if I could think that my fellow residents at Mary Whitaker weren't just lying about like so much lumber.'

Sam looked up. ‘I went and put some blankets over the poor people on the road. But that isn't good enough. It isn't right.'

Theresa held up her hands. ‘I promise we'll make a start today. Certainly we must with your aunt, Warren, and Oscar's schoolmate. But I think perhaps me, William, Bub, and Jacob should sit down and talk about how to tackle the old people's home.'

‘Why William?' said Warren. ‘I get that Jacob is kind of health and safety, and Bub's got more muscle than the rest of us, but it's Dan who knows how to drive the digger.'

Dan said, ‘I'm happy to be told what to do.'

‘Well, yeah, so am I,' said Warren. ‘I only want to know why William.'

William said, ‘Bub, Theresa, and I have already moved bodies to the school hall. We've even checked to see where the buried cables are on the playing field.'

‘Whoa,' said Theresa to William. Then to Warren, ‘Don't worry about him. He keeps getting ahead of himself.'

Bub was looking grim. His eyes settled on Belle. He said, as if it was only her he had to convince, ‘Just let us work out all the details. Okay?'

‘That's right,' Theresa said. ‘We're not going to rush into anything. I'm asking these guys to help me nut out the details. If that's okay.'

‘Sure,' Belle said. ‘That's fine.'

‘For now,' Warren added.

At the end of their meeting Theresa said, ‘We are going to have to get everyone together at some point and present this as a plan.'

‘It is shaping up as a plan, isn't it,' Bub said. He sounded gloomy.

William said. ‘We should wait and see how we go with the rest home, before committing ourselves to anything further.'

‘The rest home is a huge job,' Bub said.

‘Sam and Kate actually knew those people. We have to do it.' Theresa tapped her pen on her teeth. ‘If we discover we can't cope, and have to stop, then we'll be dealing with flies and rats and disease instead. We're between the devil and the deep blue sea.'

‘Only if no one comes,' said Jacob.

Bub said, ‘We have to make a start. We're
living
here. And if Mary Whitaker proves too hard—well, we just have to toughen up. People do. I know this.'

Theresa said, ‘You were in Afghanistan, right?'

‘I dug drains and helped build a school, but there was tough stuff, and we got shot at.' He went on, ‘My only rule when it comes to burials is that whoever handles bodies doesn't prepare food. Kate and Holly are already doing the cooking so it makes sense to say that's their job. And Oscar can give them a hand.'

‘Okay. That's good,' said Jacob.

‘So you agree that we have to start?'

‘I keep hoping we'll be rescued.'

Theresa closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘Being rescued—that's Plan A. Plan B is we take care of ourselves as best we can.'

Warren and Jacob were seeing to Mrs Kreutzer's burial, and Bub had insisted on handling his friend George by himself—probably because he wanted to spare anyone else a sight that had so horrified him. So Theresa dispatched William and Dan to find the digger, and set off herself with Oscar to his friend Evan's house. She told the boy just to point her to the right place. He did, and she wrapped the teenager's body in his own duvet, before calling Oscar in to help her carry the wrapped body out into the back garden.

Theresa hadn't done any spadework since she was about fifteen, when she would help her father dig over the garden before putting in potatoes. Oscar told her he'd once helped dig a hangi. Later, after he'd managed to scratch another foot down into her two-foot-deep hole, he admitted that, with the hangi, his whole class had taken turns digging. Then he looked at the shrouded shape, and his legs folded, and he sat down hard on the pile of earth by the hole. ‘I'm sorry, Evan,' he said. ‘I forgot you were there too. I'm sorry I'm so shit at this.'

‘Look,' said Theresa, ‘how about I send you back to the spa and you get Jacob to help me finish?'

It was then that William turned up. He was pale with excitement. ‘You know that loud bang I told you about? The one we all heard when you and Bub and Belle were off in the Reserve? I know what made it now. You've got to see this.'

Oscar got to his feet.

William said, ‘Not you buddy. This is pretty horrible.'

Theresa had another of her contained, icy thoughts. She thought it was interesting the way they were onto
grades
of horrible now.

It took Theresa a few moments to see that the black spray was blood, dried and oxidised, spread widely, in a fine coating on the driveway, the blades of grass, the stove-in steel roof, and the buckled door of a garage on Bypass Road.

The body was dressed in a neoprene coverall, and was wearing boots with hard-ridged soles. The metal on the parachute harness was still bright. The blood had erupted laterally, sprayed out in blades—there were distinct stripes of it on the roof behind the body. The tough fabric of the suit had split rather than torn, and the shattered flesh
inside
the suit was split too, as deeply fissured as a pumpkin dropped on a concrete path. A pumpkin in a bag—because the suit still contained the sectioned flesh.