Wake (31 page)

‘I'm sorry,' Sam said, without turning around.

‘No, you're not.'

She looked over her shoulder. Her face was clenched and anxious. ‘I have to stay calm,' she said. ‘Everyone has to stay calm.' She returned her gaze to the books, eased one out, and put it on the arm of the couch.

‘I'm not sure that's what you want,' William said. ‘There's transcendence and “transcendence”. Try the skinny one in the middle of the shelf below.'

She looked at the spine.
Gilead.
‘I haven't heard of it.'

William hated people who'd say they hadn't heard of something, in that sceptical way as if the state of their knowledge was the state of knowledge itself. He said, ‘Sam? Why do you think the man told
you
?'

‘I don't know. Perhaps he cracks periodically.' She pulled out another book, then put it back again.

‘You'd probably be better off with poetry,' William said. ‘Fiction is all people and connections and, at its best, it teaches us how to live. But since you're saying we won't live, then try poetry. Poetry's all arias and no recitatives.'

‘I don't know what you mean.'

‘Arias are the big, dramatic, self-actualising soliloquies in operas. Recitative does plot, pretty much, or dialogue. You know—the Barber of Seville measuring his marriage bed.'

Sam gazed at William, her expression admiring. ‘I wish I'd met someone like you a long time ago. But I kept having to come back to Kahukura.' She took William's suggested book and sat down holding it to her heart, as if making promises to it.

‘Didn't you have a choice?'

‘No. I've spent my whole adult life here. I've spent my life with my foot in the door, keeping it open, waiting for something to come along.'

‘And this came.'

‘And this came.' Sam echoed him.

‘Okay. But what is “this”? Could you please be a bit more specific?'

‘What's the point?' Sam said.

‘No,' William said. ‘I guess you'd rather nurse another secret and feel special. You obviously like feeling special.'

Sam leapt to her feet and took several steps towards him. The book she was treating with such tenderness had become her weapon. William raised an arm to ward off her blow. But then it was as though she was pulled up short. As if something above her tightened the strings that held her upright, so that she stiffened and stood very erect. Her hands fell to her sides. She dropped the book. For a moment she was blank and motionless, then she grew radiant. Her eyes widened, her lips parted, and she flushed.

There was nothing in the room with them. Nothing William could hear or see. But Sam was in the grip of something. Something godlike was there with her, caressing her.

William took hold of her, but she didn't feel his touch or turn her eyes. His rational brain began to make suggestions for things that could explain some of her behaviour. Cerebral lesions. Frontal lobe seizures. He considered all this, but he knew it was something else. It was the ‘wind' that she had always liked to dance with. The wind that had come when the Nokia ring tui first made itself heard, and at Adele Haines's funeral, a wind intangible to everyone but Sam. It was there—
something
was there—and it and she were in communion.

*

When the Wake came, Sam felt, very remotely, William shaking her. His words were unintelligible, but his voice was as expressive as the Reserve's kaka, who would come every spring to squabble over the new growth on the kowhai at her gate. The monster was making a meal of their agitation. It spun faster, drilled harder, sang louder. It licked and sucked and savoured. It oscillated out from Sam to take William too, and coax him. Its voracious song and dance was making a kind of silence and stillness. Sam stopped breathing to listen to that, to what she had never heard, the perfect silence of that place she went whenever she wasn't here.

Shortly before noon, when Sam and William were still out, and Theresa was pacing the terrace and peering down the hill, the man in black came into view, framed by the spa's gateposts. He was carrying someone. He walked up the drive and Theresa hurried out to meet him. It was Lily he had in his arms, her body inert but not quite floppy. Theresa instantly recognised the not-quite floppiness as rigor mortis. She knew that Lily was dead, but when she reached the man for a time everything Theresa did was a denial of what she knew. She called Lily's name and tried to take her from him, which was impossible—Lily wasn't entirely in the man's force field but, because of it, Theresa couldn't slip her hands under Lily to lift her away. Jacob arrived and tried too, but retreated wiping his hands on his thighs as if he'd touched something nasty.

The man laid Lily on the driveway. Only then were they were able to get at her. Jacob checked her and then got up shaking his head, probably for the benefit of everyone else—Holly in the vegetable bed, and the others who had come out onto the terrace.

Dan stormed down the drive, shotgun in hand.

The man got up and backed off.

Bub intercepted Dan and wrenched the gun from his grip.

Theresa said to the man, ‘Just wait.' She put up a palm and patted the air. ‘Wait.' She wondered whether what she imagined was a universal gesture would turn out to be merely terrestrial. ‘Where did you find her?'

‘At the farthest point of the shoreline track,' said the man. ‘I didn't see her collapse. She has been wearing herself out. That was her weakness.'

Theresa was surprised by the compressed coherence of his answer. Sam had told Belle that the man spoke English, but Theresa hadn't imagined his English would be so good.

‘Why didn't you do something to help her?' Jacob asked.

‘She wasn't warm,' said the man.

‘Is that how it works?' Jacob said. ‘For you to help her did she need to be alive? I thought—since you healed Sam—'

The man looked immensely surprised. ‘What do you mean?'

‘You healed Sam,' Jacob said, and touched his own chest. ‘During the Madness Sam cut off her nipple. She had nothing here but a healing wound.'

‘I didn't look under Sam's clothes.'

‘Why are you lying?' Theresa was in despair. ‘Why would you finally come to face us, then lie? Why would you run away from William only two days ago, but come now? It doesn't make any sense!'

Belle arrived with a sheet to cover Lily. Jacob helped Belle roll Lily onto the sheet, and they folded its sides over her body, neatly and expertly.

For some time the sky had been lowering, and the temperature falling. Now there was a scattering of fat drops that fell,
pock, pock
, on Lily's shroud. Then the air thickened with rain so hard that it activated the man's force field, until he stood in a halo of clear air from which the drops rebounded like sparks. ‘The Wake changed Sam,' the man said. ‘I'm sorry.'

Theresa was about to ask what he meant by ‘the wake', but then Bub said, bemused, ‘You're sorry Sam's fixed?'

‘I'm sorry she's broken,' the man said.

‘I get it that we shouldn't be surprised when we don't understand you,' Theresa said, ‘given that you're some kind of alien. But what I'm asking myself is, should
you
be confused by us?'

‘No,' the man said. ‘But my experience doesn't encompass Sam's experiences. She knows that the Wake is there. No one ever knows. And you say she was mad. Only those who are present when the Wake arrives go extravagantly mad. And, mad or not, no one present when it arrives has ever survived. How did she survive? That's something I need to know. I kept Sam captive because I wanted her to explain. But before she was able to tell me, the Wake came, and made her hollow.'

‘Huh?' said Bub. ‘What do you mean, the wake?'

‘You're sounding like a near miss in Google Translate,' Belle said. ‘What is it you're talking about when you use that word?'

The man said, ‘I told Sam. She would explain if she was able to. But the Wake changed her. She still functioned, only poorly. And she was afraid of me, as if we had not just spent several hours in rational talk.'

‘Um,' piped up Oscar from nearby, ‘there are two of her.'

‘Oh—yes,' Jacob said, ‘apparently there are two Sams. We don't know whether she's pretending, or has a pathology. There's a sweet, stupid Sam, and a smart, experimental one. The pathology is known as Dissociative Identity Disorder. There is some debate about whether it's a genuine mental illness, or some kind of extravagant self-dramatisation.'

‘It isn't something I've encountered before,' the man said. Then, ‘Tell Sam I need to talk to her.'

Bub ventured near, and poked his finger into the man's blurred casing of rebounding rain. ‘Buddy, we want to talk to
you
. But all you do is go on about some wake.'

‘Sam knows what you want to know,' the man said. ‘Ask her.'

‘She might not remember,' Theresa said.

The man frowned. ‘You are saying that there is one Sam
under
the other. And that one of them is prepared to know things and understand them, while the other is a refusing Sam who turns up any time she feels fear or unhappiness?'

‘Man,' said Bub, admiring, ‘you just put the nut in a nutshell.'

‘The Sam who is prepared to know will tell you, if she isn't broken,' the man said.

‘We'll ask her,' Theresa promised.

The alien turned his back on them and walked away. Bub said, ‘Hey!' He raised the gun he'd taken off Dan. He sighted down the barrel at the retreating figure.

Theresa was positive Bub meant only to relieve his feelings by taking aim, but then the barrel jumped and she was deafened by the sound of the shot—Bub had let off both barrels simultaneously. She closed her eyes and clapped her hands over her ears and had actually to force herself to open her eyes again and look.

The man was much further down the drive. He'd been knocked over and had skidded off, and was now moving gingerly, not because he was injured, but because his force field wouldn't at first let any part of him resume contact with the ground. He was patient, and was soon upright. He paused a second to regard them, then continued on his way.

They were all frozen in place. Theresa was opening and closing her mouth to make her eardrums stop squeaking. Bub looked sheepish. The people who'd stayed on the terrace drifted down to stand around the insubstantial shape in the wet shroud. Holly sat down beside Lily—unmindful of the puddles. She put a hand on the shroud and gave Lily a kind of consoling pat.

‘Let's take her inside,' Jacob said. He helped Holly up and moved her gently to one side so that he could lift Lily. Bub came to offer assistance, and Jacob scowled at him.

Bub apologised. ‘Sorry. My trigger finger got angry.'

‘We did this,' Holly said, staring at the shroud. ‘We let her down.'

‘Her running looked positive,' Theresa said. ‘She wanted to stay in shape. There was a race she'd entered—in March, I think. She hoped to be out in time to compete in it.'

‘We can't look after one another,' Holly said.

‘We just have to try harder,' said Theresa.

‘We treated Lily like an adult and let her run herself into the ground,' Holly said. ‘We left Curtis alone, and he died of our neglect. We have meetings and take votes and talk things over and give one another space, but we can't manage the big decisions. We can't take responsibility. Someone needs to do that—take responsibility.'

‘Yes. You're right. But all we can do is try harder,' Theresa said. ‘I promise I will.'

Everyone went indoors with Lily, except Bub, who stayed out on the terrace and watched the gate expectantly, waiting for William and Sam.

Sam opened her eyes. Her pupils kept altering as her gaze wandered around the room. William picked up her hand and put it against his cheek. The hand was softer and less densely muscled than he remembered. Sam had the hands and arms of someone who did manual labour, finer than Bub's, but stronger than Jacob's.

She tried to sit up. William helped her, but kept his arms around her. She let out a small sigh and leaned on him, her soft head tucked under his chin. Her hair smelled of Pears soap. ‘I didn't go away,' she said. She turned her face into his open shirt and pressed her lips against his collarbone. They were plump and hot, dry and scabbed. ‘You're warm,' she said.

William sighed, and folded her in his arms. They rested, listening to the rain on the steel roof. William stroked Sam's back and watched the runnels of grey light on her face. She was completely relaxed, and present. She kept her eyes on his.

‘What am I going to do with you?' he said.

‘I think there's very little that can be done with me. I think I'm a single-use thing.' She looked at the scattered rolls of aluminium foil. ‘We have to rig our lights and send messages.' She met his eyes. ‘When a plane goes down with enough warning, people switch on their phones and call their loved ones. All of you will have someone you want to say goodbye to.'

‘I don't,' said William.

‘Me neither—no one I can, anyway.'

When they were walking, hand in hand, up the driveway, Sam noticed the open grave beside Adele Haines's flower-covered mound. She stopped and said, ‘Is that for me?' Then, ‘I hope that's for me. A precautionary grave.'

‘Who does that? Isn't it always the other way around—people have every reason to believe someone is dead and they don't have a funeral till they find the body?'

‘I don't think I have a normal attitude to those things,' Sam said. ‘Because of my sister.'

‘Your twin sister?'

‘Yes. Because of her body.'

‘Being lost?'

‘Because her body is never beside mine.'

‘Yes, lost,' William thought. He said, ‘That grave is for Curtis. He died. It was blood-poisoning.'