After Z-Hour Read online

  A good daughter whom I remember coming to sit before me on a stool at the breakfast bar, dropping her school bag on the floor. Watching me slyly and turning her tale, guided by the expression on my face: ‘We said Lucy was stealing and Mrs Parry said we were racist. But Lucy was stealing. Mrs Parry told us off, then she said, “Nicola Morgan, you needn’t glare at me like that!” and I said, “But we are telling the truth.” Then I got sent to Mr Bailey, and he held me by the nose.’

  The minister came to the point. ‘We commit her body to be cremated, doing so with reverence; as in life, this body was the temple of her spirit—’

  I remember her picking up the frozen puddles that formed in the hollows in the drive. Carrying them indoors so that I could look at the stones and dust in the ice, and the light through the ice. Her fingers red, then white, holding the heavy sheets up by the kitchen window over the sink.

  Outside the crematorium the cousins stood holding those flowers that didn’t follow the coffin into the furnace. Sally’s two-year-old grizzled, uncomfortable in his stiff, dark blue coat. My husband’s family were weeping, and shaking the minister’s hand—some perhaps automatically because they were polite people, and some perhaps relieved that he didn’t say anything they didn’t expect.

  I walked over to my sister and took her hand. We stood by a roaring air-conditioning vent. Overhead the sky was pale green; a still, autumn sky stained by the smoke from house fires.

  A loud tapping on the driver’s window startled me. My car was full of clouded light—the headlights of another vehicle, shining in the back window. Through the fogged glass beside me I distinguished a shadow and a pink fist. I rolled the window down. A woman in a green anorak leaned through and smiled at me. She said, ‘If you start it up, Ellen and I will give you a push.’ Then, noticing the mud and water on my clothes, my grazed hands and pale face, she touched my shoulder. ‘Are you OK? Can you drive if we push?’

  ‘I can. I’m very grateful,’ I said, collecting my wits. She stared at me in concern, then reaching in front of me, she took the chamois off the dashboard and handed it to me. ‘Wipe the windscreen, then we’ll all be able to see what we’re doing.’

  I took the cloth and began clearing the windscreen. She and the other woman, who had been standing behind her, moved around in front of my car, picking their way carefully across the clay. I started the engine. The first woman waved, then both bent and began to push. My car shot backwards out of the mud, nearly running into the campervan parked behind me.

  The woman came back to the window. ‘You look in a pretty bad way. Would you mind if I got in and drove your car after our camper? We’ll go back a little way and see if there’s somewhere we can park, then you can come in the camper and change your clothes if you like.’

  I opened the door for her, and wriggled across to the passenger’s seat. She waited for the camper to perform a laborious seven-point turn, then drove after it back up the hill.

  She was tall, with broad brown hands and bitten fingernails. Her face was thin and angular, skin pitted with purplish, flushed acne scars. Her nose was straight, her brows thick and dark, and her hair brown and cropped short. She looked to be somewhere in her late twenties—my age.

  The camper pulled off the road on the wide verge of a sweeping curve. We parked behind it and waited for Ellen to open the camper’s side door, then dashed through the rain and into the van.

  Ellen fetched some clothes out from the base of one of the beds. ‘These’ll be not a bad fit, you look about my size.’

  ‘I’m sorry about the mess.’ I was dripping muddy water on the camper floor.

  ‘Did you try to free yourself?’

  ‘Yes, and I fell over.’

  Ellen looked past me. ‘Will you make some coffee, Hannah?’ Then, to me, ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

  A few minutes later we were sitting on divans at a small fold-down table. I introduced myself properly and, as the coffee revived me, I told them how I came to run into the slip.

  Ellen was English, she had a cultured London accent and an air of poise. She was extraordinarily good-looking, pale, clear-skinned, and black-eyed. Her straight, ash-blond hair was cut in a short bob. She had the kind of beauty that should have made her awesome, and yet she wasn’t; rather she gave the impression that she didn’t think of herself as especially beautiful. Her manner was bright, breezy and flippant. Hannah, on the other hand, was a serious person. As we talked she kept taking a particular tone which wished me to realise the trouble I’d been in, as if I was some careless child that had to be made to appreciate danger in order to be more cautious in future. Hannah’s self-confidence bordered on smugness. But I was tired, and my irritation was probably exaggerated.

  ‘Are you up to driving, Jill?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ I was reluctant.

  ‘Well, I could always drive your car and you could ride with Ellen. You’ve had a pretty nasty shock.’

  ‘OK, yes.’

  Hannah looked at Ellen. ‘I guess we’d better go back to Pohara.’

  Ellen heaved a sigh. Then she and I got into the cab, and Hannah stepped out into the rain and stalked off towards my car.

  ‘Does she think I’m inept?’ I asked Ellen.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Ellen said, and laughed. ‘She can be a bit of a know-it-all. You know—opinions on everything, especially how she’d have handled any situation where someone else got into difficulties. I have to occasionally remind her that everyone else isn’t locked up in dark attics. That we do read newspapers and books, and can think and act for ourselves. Also, because she’s terribly fit she supposes everyone else is puny.’ She laughed again. ‘Listen to me bitching.’ She drove a little way in silence, then went on, amused and unrepentant, ‘You should see her brother, he’s even worse! Always charging up hills to show how fit he is, and leaping out of the way in small places. Always underfoot trying not to be underfoot. But of course men can be chronic—you know, busting their guts to show how competent they are.’

  ‘Yeah, I know the type,’ I said.

  Basil

  My last ride had taken me only to the foot of the Hill. The driver was an Electricity Department man on his way up to the dam. He’d dropped me at the head of the road that served both as a route for logging trucks and a way up to the Cobb Valley. He let me out of his ute and we chatted for a bit. He kept squinting at the clouds out over the sea. ‘Don’t like the look of that,’ he said. ‘I hope you get another lift soon.’

  I thought of him now, an unknown number of miles away on a greasy road. It was still clear when I said goodbye to him and started walking. I’d been able to see right down the valley, over the slopes of native and exotic forest, to the farmland near the river. The river, under a grey sky and in a green land, was turquoise—a colour all of its own—cold and whitened by snowmelt. It was the same river which had flowed in a deep gorge below the last town; there it was grey, full of hidden currents, its surface dimpled and muscular. The river ran close around two hills that shouldered out of the divided range. One was the hill on which I stood; the other, a bare-topped mountain across from me. To the northeast the valley broadened out, farms spread out on its floor, cropping barley, kale, tobacco and hops. Cattle grazed in a few flat paddocks and sheep were scattered over the hill’s steep, eroding slopes. Far below me a red tractor ran silently up and down a field. Further away—but the sound carried to me—a truck rolled over a cattle-stop. A silver, corrugated-iron hangar shone beside a rusty tobacco-drying kiln, a fluorescent orange windsock flaming against the yellow pasture.

  As I walked a gusty wind came up, pushing flurries of shadow along the surface of the river below. Clouds moved across the sea and over the plain, condensing in the valley into a mist as thick and grey as smoke from a forest fire. Then it started to rain. I put on my PVC coat and draped a large sheet of clear plastic over my head and the top of the pack. Two cars and a logging truck passed me as I walked. None stopped.

  I plodded along with my head dow
n for over an hour. Then, for a short while, the rain eased off. And that’s when I saw the house. First I glimpsed its large, steeply pitched roof and three pointed dormers, then as I turned a corner it came fully into view, uphill, surrounded by bare and yellow-leaved trees, itself and its gardens standing starkly against a black stand of pines. It couldn’t be a farmhouse, because there didn’t seem to be any farmland around it, but perhaps there were paddocks beyond the pines on the crest of the hill. I plodded on up the road, looking for a driveway. There was no driveway, only a set of bricked steps cut into the bank, and a track winding away under some old macrocarpas.

  I left the road and clambered up the steps and onto the track, climbing, bent under the weight of my pack.

  I emerged from the macrocarpas. The path ran on through a field and into the trees surrounding the house, which was built on a wooded knoll. The path, worn white through the grass, passed through a strange gateway before entering the wood. The gateway stood by itself, with no fence flanking it. It was made of two tall, curved, tapering, grey-white posts, crossed at their tops. I walked towards this edifice, becoming more and more mystified the closer I came. It wasn’t till I reached it that I realised the posts were the jawbones of a baleen whale, ends buried in the ground, tips crossed to form a giant bone arch. I touched the surface of one. The bone was rough, and warmer than wood, its pallor dimmed by the dust caught in its pits and grooves. I passed through the gateway and went on up the hill and into the trees.

  Most people wanting to make a path up a steep hill would have settled for a zigzag, but whoever was responsible for the design of these grounds wanted a straight way running up to the lawn. To do this a short tunnel had been cut into the hill. I stopped at the entrance and peered in. It was still intact—I could see the white arc of light at its far end, and light glimmering on water running down the stairway inside. Its walls were lined with brick and clotted with moss. I ran my fingertips across the wall and found a metal rail, and, holding on to it, I climbed the steps. The air inside was damp and chill, smelling heavily of wet earth.

  I found myself on an overgrown lawn which sloped gently up to the house. It was tall—two storeys with a third of six dormers, rising out of the steep roof, three facing me, and three at the back. The veranda, which ran around two sides of the house, was decorated with wooden fretwork, as were the architraves of the arched second-storey windows. French doors opened from a first floor room onto a balcony; all the other windows were smaller. The doors appeared to be a later addition to the house, an afterthought, a concession to light. The house’s timber was painted white, its roofing faded red corrugated iron. Both roof and walls looked as though they had been painted some time within the last fifteen years—the paint was dingy, but not decaying. The house was deserted, its lower windows boarded up and its upper as black as only the windows of deserted buildings are. No, these were blacker, and some seemed to give on to a blackness as absolute as that in a house gutted by fire.

  Behind the house the sun stood in a white sky like a paler pressure-mark in pale flesh. Beyond the house’s bulk there was a grove of bare birches. Some of the trees were dead, others still bore a few limp yellow leaves on their hard branches. The wind had dropped. The air was cool and still. There was mist congealing in the hill’s folded gullies. The pines looked black and close.

  I stood on the wet, clinging grass and stared, taken up by the sight: trees, mist, the tall white house.

  I went up onto the veranda. The weather closed in again as soon as I was in shelter, until the rain was as bad as it had been at its worst. In the porch the air seemed to be gradually compressed, as though someone was lowering a plunger over the house. The sound of the rain settled on my eardrums, a firm, steady pressure.

  I began to unpack. I put my large waterproof torch up on the windowsill beside me, unrolled my sleeping bag and my sheet of closed-cell foam. My clothes and bag were damp, and the wood of the porch had a slightly sweaty surface. The greyness of the weather and approaching dusk made me feel depressed and lonely. Although I wasn’t particularly hungry I ate a few handfuls of nuts and raisins, then lay down with my arms behind my head, looking up at the veranda’s ceiling, white-painted tongue-in-groove, coated with a layer of sticky black dust. Once I was still the sound of the rain nestled into my ears again. I closed my eyes, my body gratefully at rest.

  After a time as I lay there I came to feel that, from no particular direction, I was being watched. It was as though while I was making observations of my surroundings—aware of the shape of the porch, my distance from the boarded-up door, the rain falling close by—these surroundings were mirroring my consciousness of them in a reciprocal awareness of me. I didn’t analyse this sensation, or trouble myself to make excuses like: ‘I’m tired and cold and overwrought.’ I just lay quietly, warmed by the feeling that I was being looked over. It was a pleasant, secure sensation, as if I stood at the border of myself, neither inside my body and cut off, nor outside and exposed.

  I began to doze, my body relaxed, my thoughts drifting idly from one thing to another—running over the surface of a stream of impressions. A recollection surfaced suddenly, appeared as if it had been hooked and fished up.

  I was eleven, a boy walking home slowly, drained by a day of swimming and sunning himself—dizzy from too much sun—but warm and spent to the core of his body. I was on a straight, stony road. The sun backlit the trees and made a mass of slender criss-crossed shadows in the grass. Not the blue shadows of morning and noon, but the reddish ones of evening. Clouds of midges, silvery in the sunlight and black in the shade, were dipping and swimming in the air over the road. The sun was dazzling bright, colouring the dry grass on the hill beside me, not brownish-white, as it was all day, but velvety yellow. The air was warm and still. It was late summer, the leaves on the trees were old, but the season was seemingly endless, each day unchanged, the dust thick, the river water warm, the sky adamantly clear and blue. Forever, week after week.

  As I walked, I looked about. I noticed that the grass on the crest of the hill beside me was behaving strangely, agitated as if by the wind (though no wind was blowing) or as if an army of small animals was creeping among its stalks, moving in a line all the way along the ridge. I watched, fascinated, but the movement made no progress. Without deliberating, I charged up the slope to investigate and, at the top, ran into a fresh, strong wind. It was a wind out of autumn, and it carried the scent of cold water. Below me was what should have been an empty, flat-bottomed gully. But there was a house, a small wood-and-stone house, surrounded by a fence-enclosed garden. It looked quite innocent and ordinary—only out of place. A strong breeze was blowing in the gully, but everywhere else the air was still.

  I ran home and told my parents. They decided I’d had too much sun and sent me to bed.

  After that, for years, I had a kind of battle of wills with the strange house. It wasn’t only on still days that it appeared, bringing its own wind. It could be there at any time, but not predictably and not often. I used to try to creep up on it, supposing that if I climbed to the top of the hill with my eyes closed it might be there. Other times I’d nonchalantly stroll along the road, then suddenly veer off and rush up the hill. Once I camped on the ridge for four days. Another time, hoping to obtain proof, I carried a camera with me for months—every day taking a walk along the road to the river. I never photographed the house; I saw it perhaps nine times in five years. As far as I was concerned the house was picking on me. There was no reason it should be there, and no reason why I should be the only one to see it.

  Eventually I learned not to talk about it, and my family overlooked my occupation of walking, whenever I could, the road to the river. At least my parents had the sensitivity not to send me to a doctor. I knew I wasn’t crazy; it was something far too obscure to be crazy about. After all, what could it possibly mean? What could it mean to me? As for trying to investigate the house—that was predictably disappointing. The second time it appeared I was so grateful
ly surprised that I just sat and stared, wondering whether it would vanish while I was watching. Somehow that seemed as unlikely as that I should see my mother without her false teeth. The house seemed to have the same sense of delicacy. On that occasion it vanished when, after many hours of watching, I fell asleep. On its third appearance I was so angry I decided to run down the hill, rip up the flowerbeds and abuse the occupants. I charged down the slope, but when I reached level ground I became sick and dizzy and fainted on my face in the grass.

  Nothing I did made any difference. The house came and went as it pleased, without noticing or needing me. If there had been some connection with my life, or family history, some mystery I alone could solve, or if I had had the disposition to be haunted and saw apparitions at other times, in other places, I might have made some sense of it all. But, as it was, the house was maddening and irrelevant. For years I was a misfit, believing myself to be special, because I possessed privileged information. But what did I learn from the house after all those years? About it? About myself?

  Nothing. My apparition, my great secret, was trivial and incongruous.

  Later my parents moved and I went to university. I never had cause to look for the house again. I preferred not to think about it. It didn’t bear any relationship to anyone else’s experience, or to my own ordinary experience. It got so as I scarcely ever thought of it—and yet I’d just relived the moment of my discovery of the house-which-had-no-intentions-for-me, with its smoking chimney and empty windows.