Wake (16 page)

Curtis cast the empty seedling trays into the hedge of oleanders. William helped him up, then looked at the grave and remarked that the earth was settling already. Then, ‘Where will you go if you're not staying with us?'

‘I thought I'd take a room at the bed and breakfast. I couldn't go to a private house. Even if it was empty the bedrooms would all seem to belong to somebody. Someone dead—or out there.' He gestured at the world lost behind the rain.

‘Doesn't it seem strange to you—staying beside Warren's aunty's grave and not your wife's?'

‘I've lost my sense of things being strange.'

‘That's just grief, Curtis.'

‘Yes. But, William, you're only saying that to reassure yourself. To reassure yourself
about
yourself.'

William said, ‘Yes,' very quietly, and Curtis moved to pat his arm, before remembering the mud on his hands. He patted the air instead, and said, ‘You're afraid of losing your mind.'

‘I always have been. Or at least from the moment it occurred to me, at six or so, that my mother's ways were mad ones.'

‘Then at least you've had a lifetime of policing your thoughts. That should help you. You can keep a close eye on everyone else. And stay a step back from them.'

‘Meanwhile, you're a mile off.'

‘It isn't a mile. It's scarcely three minutes by car.'

‘Close enough for daily visits.'

Curtis shook his head. ‘Please don't visit. I won't feel so alone if I actually am. I explained this to Theresa.'

‘And she passed it on. But, Curtis—I don't think we
are
alone.'

Curtis thought that William might well be right, but he couldn't bring himself to care. He could see William's fear, and his courage—but what he saw was drained of significance. Adele was in the ground. The rain was tamping down the disturbed earth with its gentle fingers, and rinsing blots of mud from the furry leaves of the petunia plants. But Adele was here too, beside him, alive to him—much more alive than he was to himself. He said, ‘I must go. The Volvo's packed. I thought I should eat a first supper in my new place, even if it's only a can of soup.' He wiped a hand on his pants and offered it to William, who took it. ‘I can't help you,' Curtis said. ‘But please—you help Theresa. Look to her. And look after her.'

Theresa, Bub, William and Jacob paused in Mary Whitaker's carpark to put on protective clothing. Jacob had gloves and three hazard masks from the garden centre, plus two surgical masks from the pharmacy. He had a bottle of eucalyptus oil they could dab on the cloth beneath their nostrils. He was uncapping the oil when Sam broke away from the group and hurried inside. Jacob raised his voice. ‘Wait, Sam! You're going to want some protection.' She didn't hear him. There was too much noise. Daniel was bringing the digger up the driveway. It came clanking and grinding, and left a white striated track on the paving stones.

William ran after Sam, fastening his mask as he did so.

Theresa and Bub waited till Jacob had dripped eucalyptus oil on the bits of gauze that would rest just below their noses.

The digger had reached the carpark. Daniel turned its engine off and got out. He said that he should inspect the lawn and check for buried cables, sewers, and stormwater drains.

Theresa gave him a thumbs-up and led the others into the building.

William caught up with Sam in time to see her upend a large pan into the kitchen bin. William was about to say that if they were cleaning, the stovetop seemed a very strange place to start. Then he saw what it was she was getting rid of—human nipples, burned at their edges and adhered to sticky oil. Sam bashed the pan on the rim of the bin. Her foot slipped off the pedal. The flap clanged shut, and a scrap fell out onto the floor with a stiff little filliping noise. Sam dropped the pan. The front of her shirt was blotted red. She had torn her stitches.

William went to her, and moved her gently aside. He put on his rubber gloves, let his eyes go out of focus, and felt for the thing. He picked it up and put it in the bin, then pulled out the full bag and tied its top. He opened the back door, found a dumpster, and stuffed the bag into it.

When he came back Sam was rinsing the pan under the hot tap—and scrubbing it with an already blackened pot scrubber.

William removed both from her hands. He led her outside and told her to sit down for a minute. Then he joined the others.

They were frozen at the door to the dayroom. Bub held a bloodstained pair of scissors, contemplating them rather than the figures sprawled in the armchairs, and on the floor.

Theresa stooped and righted a fallen walking frame.

Jacob said, ‘It's hard to know where to start.' Then he removed the scissors from Bub's grip.

‘We should identify everyone,' Theresa said. ‘That's a logical first step. Where's Sam? She knows who all these people are.'

‘She's popped her stitches.'

Jacob said he'd have a look, and followed William out onto the porch. He lifted Sam's bandage, frowned, and asked if she could give them half an hour to identify the residents in the dayroom. ‘So we can make a start,' he said. ‘Then you and I can go back to the spa, and I'll fix you up.'

Sam nodded.

Jacob produced another mask—already sprinkled with oil. He fixed it over Sam's mouth and nose.

William put his lips to Jacob's ear and whispered, ‘Sam told us that
she
did it. Remember?'

Jacob took Sam's hands. ‘Sam—what makes you think it was you who hurt the old people, and not someone else? If you were unconscious, like you said, couldn't someone else have hurt both you and them?'

Sam shook her head.

Jacob said, ‘If you don't remember, how do you know it was you?' He showed Sam the scissors. ‘Did you have these in your hand?'

Theresa appeared in the middle of this interrogation and asked whether Sam was up to the job. ‘I'm not going to sanction the burial of anyone we haven't identified.'

‘I'll come,' Sam said.

Jacob supported her under her elbow while they walked into the dayroom. Sam baulked and leaned on him. She began to cry. Jacob patted her back and murmured in her ear. He said that this was something she could do for her old people. It would help their families. They'd get these poor souls cleaned up, then hold a service and do everything properly. He turned to the others. ‘My pockets are contaminated with that bloody oil. Have you got a clean tissue?'

Theresa took off her gloves and fished about till she'd found a handkerchief. She wiped Sam's eyes.

‘When you're ready, sweetie,' Jacob said.

‘I can look now.'

Jacob put an arm around her shoulder and led her to the first lounger. They stopped short of the black mat of dried blood. Everyone peered expectantly at Sam, while Sam studied the swollen and discoloured face. After a moment, ‘This is Snow,' she said. ‘Mr Abbot.'

They had begun.

On the second day they were working up at Mary Whitaker, Sam got something nasty on her shirt. Theresa drove back to the spa to fetch a change of clothes. On the desk in Sam's room Theresa noticed a collection of pages covered in a laborious scrawl. It seemed Sam was making notes. Theresa glanced at the pages, and was taken by their dogged attention to detail. Sam's writing was ungrammatical and had poor spelling, but it went on, grimly, page after page.

Theresa stood with Sam's fresh shirt in her hands, reading Sam's account of that first day and night.
We went to my bach. We all had a banana. William said no lights. In the morning he fixed my bandage. . . .

Theresa couldn't imagine why Sam would feel the need to write notes. Theresa's own writing in her little police issue notebook made sense. Sam's didn't. Sam just didn't strike Theresa as someone with any instinct to put pen to paper in order to sort her thinking or soothe her nerves.

Theresa got to the last page to find that Sam had left off her account after the third night. There was only one further sheet of paper. It contained a kind of list:

Oscar Brice is
15
. His mum and dad work in Nelson. Warren Crootser
smokes dope
all the time. Jacob F? is nice. He is an
Islander.
Kate is Mrs Mcneal from Mary Whitaker.
She knows me
. Holly is Kates daughter. She has
glasses
. Belle works with the kakapo. She is the one with
curly blond hair
. Bub Lanagan is a fisherman.
Maori
. He is a good person. William Minute is not a good person. He is
American
. Theresa Grey is a
police officer
. She lives in Nelson. She is very
pretty with red hair
. Dan Hail lives in Christchurch and has a wife and kids. He is
bald
. Lily Kay runs races. She has been on TV and is
thin
. Curtis Hanes is
about sixty
. He is gone to live at the bed and breakfast. There is another man who is
black
and does not speak English. He is not with us. I have not seen him.

I like Jacob and Bub and Bell and Kate and Oscar. I liked Curtis but he is gone. I have not decided about Holly and Dan and Lily and Theresa. I do not like Warren and William.

Thats everything. Its 2 hard.

Theresa didn't know what to make of this. Why the underlining? Why
those
words—words that provided the briefest possible description of each of Sam's fellow survivors?

Part Three

W
hen they had finished dealing with Mary Whitaker, Theresa called a meeting, and put it to the others—what they should do. They had a vote, and Theresa got her majority.

After that, for nearly three weeks, they went from house to house collecting bodies for burial.

There were two teams, and they followed a planned procedure. On each there were those who wore gloves and overalls, touched bodies, turned them over, and looked through their clothes for any identification. On one team Bub, William, and Sam did the job, and on the other it was Theresa, Jacob, and Warren. They were the ones who spread the shrouds—bed sheets lined with slit garbage bags—and moved bodies, rolling them off their damp shadows, the darkened ground.

The others didn't have to handle the dead, but cleaned up—mindful of the flies. Belle was the cleaner on Bub's team, and Lily on Theresa's. The cleaners also had the job of taking photos, of the bodies, and of objects that might help identify them later. They'd sort through letters tucked behind the phone, or bills fastened by magnets to fridge doors. They'd write down the names they found: the name on a power bill, or on a summons to jury duty, or names spelled out in candy-coloured letters glued to a child's bedroom door.

On their second week Lily announced that she had to get back to her training. There was a world championship in March of the following year, and she
had
to hope she'd be free by then. Thereafter the others would sometimes see her running a street away from where they had parked their rank vehicles, wherever they were plying their buckets and Spray 'n Wipe, their sheets, their binder twine and ziplock bags. They'd glimpse Lily only as movement; a blur of coloured smoke.

Though Lily stayed away, Curtis began to appear, sometimes waiting outside a house while a team finished up, sometimes standing at the edge of the mass graves. He didn't offer to help, only filmed what they were doing, panning from the ute to the grave, then away to the settlement of Kahukura, pretty in the pink evening light.

Theresa challenged him once. ‘I hope you realise that what you're filming is going to be pretty upsetting for these people's families.'

He lowered his camera. ‘I'm not filming the bodies, I'm filming you. Tight shots of Sam's hands, and yours. And Bub's bearing. How he handles himself at the edge of the pit, and keeps a leaking sheet away from his legs. I'm making a memorial of
your
bodies. Your capable graces.'

‘I thought you said you didn't want to record any of this.'

‘I'm doing it for posterity. It turns out that posterity won't leave me alone. My sense of it has always been so solid. It was never on a cloud above me, or gathered worshipfully at my feet. I've always had it by the hand, and gazed into its eyes.'

‘I see. You won't give us a hand, because your hands are all tied up grasping at posterity.'

Curtis seemed unmoved. ‘I'm filming for my usual imagined audience, people who know and understand me already, and who'll be interested in what I'll have to show them.'

‘Wrong-headed Theresa and her misled crew?'

Curtis just shook his head and raised his camera between them.

*

After a time the survivors were so used to what they were doing that they scarcely reacted to anything they found. They didn't shed tears or shut their eyes, but they never stopped being shocked by these illustrations to grotesque stories. The greater their puzzlement, the more a cold forensic need to know would kick in, as if, by unravelling the events at 16 Bowen Grove, or 71 Haven Road, it would be possible to come to some understanding.

Theresa in particular kept thinking that if only she could keep her cool, she could make a pact with the parade of horrible facts. If her gaze remained unflinching and her head clear then the catastrophe might explain itself—for these corpses were its piecemeal speech, and perhaps it was possible to piece everything together and understand what it all meant.

While the teams were moving from house to house, car to car, street to street, Dan was busy using the digger to make graves. He was forced to dig at widely separate locations, for there was a shortage of flat, open, and unsealed land in Kahukura. He dug one long trench in the lawn at Mary Whitaker, and another in the little park behind the public restrooms; another was in an empty lot, two more on the school's playing field.

They gave up their wariness after only a few days on their grisly job. Bub stopped carrying his jack handle. Theresa holstered her gun, and then took it off altogether. It turned out that Bub and William had managed to gather all the dogs, and there was only one occasion when Theresa's team went into a house and was startled by a trapped and maddened cat. After all, houses had cat doors. The cats were often to be found still at home, sitting in a favourite chair with their feet tucked under them, too distraught to curl up and sleep, too hungry and exhausted to prowl about—and waiting patiently for something to change for the better.

So—there were the cats, but apart from that the houses were quiet. If the front door was locked the team would assume the house was empty. Since the power was on, any alarms would be armed and they didn't want to have to deal with that. Those houses were left undisturbed. There were one or two places where the smell of death was accompanied by a scent of scorched metal, and they would find some overworked heater, though it had been a sunny spring morning. All these things provided signs if not of life then of things still happening—a heater creaking as its thermostat switched it on again in the cold breeze from a newly opened door; a refrigerator shivering into its cooling cycle; a cat jumping off a chair and running under a couch to cower while someone coaxed it, making kissing noises through their mask, and beckoning with gloved fingers.

Bub traipsed back and forth through the house, opening cabinets. Belle told him to mind his feet, she'd just cleaned there. Bub said, ‘We've got more bodies than heads,' and started looking behind the cushions on the couch.

Belle watched this for a time, wondering at it. What was he seeing that she couldn't? The house was tidy, pristinely clean, its furnishings colour-coordinated, haphazard only in one square metre—the crowded corkboard in the kitchen. There was a place for everything, and—Belle suddenly understood—that was why Bub was searching for something tucked out of sight, at the last minute, as if at the sound of a knock on the door of the kind of dinner guest who arrives too early.

Bub was checking behind the curtains now, moving them with his elbows. His hands were gloved, but the gloves were spotted with gore. He said, ‘I'll look in the bedrooms again,' and set off upstairs.

In the living room, William was picking up teeth. He gathered them in the palm of one gloved hand and tipped them into the shroud, where they made a small pile that nestled up against the neck of the body.

Belle stepped up to take a photograph of the smashed face. She put her camera down and wrote the woman's name and address, and the names of her two children—Ashley and Oliver—on a sheet of paper, using an indelible marking pen. She opened one of the ziplock bags they'd salvaged from the supermarket, and slipped the paper inside. She gave the bag to William, who fastened it to Robyn Clark's shirt with a safety pin.

Belle stepped back and got Robyn Clark framed again, making sure the woman's ID was visible. She took another photo.

Upstairs the small unfussy amount of noise Bub was making stopped altogether. There was a short, contemplative silence, then, ‘Okay. I've got it.'

Sam carried the woman's smaller child into the living room and laid it on her lap, feet touching her knees and head resting on her belly. William and Sam carefully closed the sheet and fastened it with pink binder twine.

Sam and William picked up the bundle and carried it out to the ute. Bub followed with the body of the older child—one part bundled in a sheet, the other in a knotted pillowslip.

Belle finished wiping down the kitchen and used a box cutter to remove the patch of sticky, darkened carpet. She pushed the stiff square of hacked-off carpet into a rubbish bag, twisted the bag's top, tied it, and set it down by the gate as they were leaving. They would come back later for rubbish, which they were burying separately. Belle retrieved her bucket and rags and cleaning products, closed the front door and took a photo of the house, with the letterbox clearly visible in the foreground. In the evenings, she and Warren would load the data from their cameras onto two separate computers. Each file of images had a name. A name like
Haven Road, numbers 31–77
.

Lily flashed across a distant intersection. Bub looked up and stumbled. One of the bundles he was carrying came apart in his hands and dropped with sodden thumps onto the road. William, without comment, fetched another sheet and spread it on the ground. He and Bub got down on their knees to gather up what had fallen. They filled the sheet and lifted it into the tray of the ute. The tray was full so they drove off to the latest grave—an empty swimming pool at the Bayside Motel.

Theresa's team was there already, unloading. Theresa drew Bub and William aside, away from the margin of the blue-painted grave. She removed her goggles and pulled down her scarf. ‘We got to the last house on Orchard Road,' she said. ‘How about you?'

‘There were only two houses on Stanislaw's Close with bodies in them.' William indicated the ute's burden. ‘Plus a few in the street.'

Theresa pulled her hand-drawn map from her pocket and they bent over it together. Sam and Belle joined them. After a moment William said, ‘That leaves the daycare centre you found on day four.'

It was one of those private early childhood education centres, which is why Theresa hadn't been aware of its existence, as she had the Area School's. When she found it she had hurried through its rooms and seen only scattered toys, and no bodies. But there were a couple of dead adults lying in the backyard.

‘Let us take care of it,' William said. He turned around and signalled to Jacob, who left off what he was doing and came over. ‘Can you and Warren help me and Bub with the bodies Theresa found in the daycare centre?'

‘Let's not ask Warren. He's been stoned for days. It's his way of coping.'

‘You mean he's not?' Theresa said.

‘Not really.'

William said, ‘Three of us will be enough.'

Sam began wiping her eyes with her gory gloves.

‘Don't do that,' William told her. She didn't seem to hear him, so he gently pinned her arms and held her still.

‘I'm not crying,' Sam said, though she was. She had been a steady, stalwart, tireless worker. She'd sometimes needed to be reminded what she was about, but she hadn't shirked or cracked—till now. ‘Have we finished?' she asked.

‘We have,' Theresa said.

‘Go home to the spa,' said Bub to Belle. ‘Have a nice relaxing bath.'

Belle gave a cracked laugh. ‘
Home
.'

The daycare centre was in a quiet cul-de-sac and looked like any other house, but with sturdier fences and, in its front yard, a wealth of brilliant plastic playground equipment.

William went in first, Bub and Jacob following. William opened the front door, immediately flinched from the smell, and stepped onto Jacob's foot.

There was always something new, some further subtle initiation into the job they had set out to do. William took a whiff of the air indoors, and despite the Vicks VapoRub coating his top lip he discovered something that seemed to fly to the centre of his skull and roost there—evil, soft, silent, usurping.

The smell of decay was thin and different, sweeter, as if what was spoiled was more vegetable than meat.

They retreated, tearing off their masks. Jacob draped himself over the plastic slide and hid his face in the crook of one elbow. Bub retched a few times, then kicked the playground bark chips over the patch of watery vomit. William hung on the fence and sucked in cold air scented with the gingery perfume of a flowering magnolia.

Someone was standing across the road watching them.

‘Look,' William said. He didn't turn to the others—didn't dare take his eyes off the figure in black clothes. ‘Hey, Bub,' he said. ‘It's him, your firefighter.'

Bub wiped his mouth and came over. ‘Where the hell has he been hiding?' It was four weeks since the man had helped Bub put out the fire on Haven Road.

The man crossed the street. He stopped at the gate, pushed it, then, when it didn't yield, he looked at the childproof catch and—after a moment where it seemed he was working it out—he lifted the catch's sprung plunger, pushed the gate open, and came in. He took in the sheets laid out ready on the ground. Then he looked into each of their faces. His expression was compassionate. It made William feel feeble, then grateful—then very suspicious.

The man went up the steps and into the building.

They followed him, and found him standing in a quiet, stinking room. He looked puzzled.

The room was redolent of decay, but there were no bodies visible. The floor of the main room was littered with books and blocks and scattered Duplo, and flat cars, trucks, trains, cakes, cows, and every other category of thing from spilled wooden puzzles.

William leaned through the kitchen hatchway. He saw that the floor was covered in pots, pans, broken crockery.

The man opened the door to the nursery. More sweet bad air billowed out. The tangle of bedding and mattresses appeared unsullied. The room was silent. The building's windows and doors had been closed and the flies hadn't got in.

For a moment or two they stood, exchanging looks. And then the stranger stooped, hooked his finger into the catch of a cupboard and pulled it open.

The children had been tidied away, like their toys. Everywhere, what belonged in cupboards was on the floor, and what didn't belong was stuffed into cupboards, and into the big pot drawers in the kitchen, into the pantry, and behind the sliding doors where puzzles were normally shelved.